Partiya Yekîtiya Demokrat, Democratic Union Party). The PYD is the leading Kurdish force in a large part of northern Syria where it has strong influence in three enclaves, or ’cantons’, of Kurdish-majority areas. In November 2013 it declared in these cantons the transitional administration of ’Rojava’ (Western Kurdistan).\n\nThe stated goal of the Rojava project is to build a liberated, democratic society with equal rights for women in which different ethnic and religious groups can live together. The ideological inspiration for this project is the thought of the Turkish Kurdish PKK and its leader Abdullah Öcalan.\n\nIn the early to mid nineties the PKK led a fierce guerrilla-war against the Turkish state and it remains a significant force in itself and through its influence over other organizations. Initially, the PKK followed a ’marxist-leninist’ ideology. However, the movement underwent deep ideological changes, especially after Öcalan’s capture in 1999. The PYD denies any organizational links with the PKK but it was set up by Syrian PKK-members and claims to follow the same ideology as the current PKK.\n\nThis article examines this ideology and its changes in several key aspects. The first two parts discuss the early strategic orientation of the PKK and its similarity to other national liberation movements of the time. Part three discusses the idea of ’creating a new man’, an idea that became central to the PKK’s conception of the future society they struggled for. This idea was a distinctive characteristic of the PKK. It is not unusual for activists in this movement to describe their political convictions as ’the ideology of Öcalan’ and part four discusses the role of Abdullah Öcalan as the leader and ideologue of the movement. Part five discusses another distinguishing characteristic of the PKK: the role that it sees for women and women’s liberation in social change. Part six and seven deal with the changing ideas of the PKK about the future society: its vision of a ’democratic civilization and its changing conception of ’socialism’.\n\nThe goal is not to provide a history of the PKK but parts of its history will be discussed to situate its ideological evolution. The focus is on the movement’s ’official’ ideology as written down in statements of Öcalan and documents of the PKK. How this ideology is translated into actual politics on the ground and how grass-roots activists interpret it are questions that are beyond the reach of the article. The influence of Abdullah Öcalan in the PKK can hardly be overestimated. As one former member put it; ’the PKK is in a certain sense identical with its founder, Abdullah Öcalan’. [1]\n\nBecause of his dominant role as both the leader and ideologue of the movement, the article will give extensive attention to statements and writings of Öcalan himself.\n\n** 1. Roots of the PKK\n\nThe current Kurdish liberation movement in Turkey has its roots in the radicalization of the sixties. After a coup by ’progressive Kemalist’ army officers in 1960, a new Turkish constitution was introduced that promised the right to work, a minimum wage, the right to strike as well as freedom to organize. In this atmosphere, trade-unionists and progressive intellectuals organized the ’Workers Party of Turkey’ (Turkiye Isci Partisi, TIP), a party that in 1965 won three per cent of the vote and 15 seats in the parliament. The TIP was a reformist party that re-introduced socialist ideas that had been made taboo and even outlawed by the Kemalist state.\n\nThe TIP condemned the militant actions of radical-left youth activists and had only shallow roots among the working class. However, the TIP did have relatively strong support among Turkey’s Kurds. The Kurdish provinces of Turkey have always been the poorest part of the country, partly the result of racist state policies that discriminated against the Kurds. Speaking Kurdish was a crime, use of the letters x, q and w – which exist in the Kurdish alphabet but not in the Turkish – could be prosecuted, publications that simply mentioned the word ’Kurd’ were banned and the Kemalist state tried to assimilate the Kurdish minority into the Turkish majority. In the late sixties, a number of Kurdish members of the TIP started to discuss the specific problems of the Kurdish population in the country. Out of these discussions grew the Revolutionary Eastern Cultural Hearts (Devrimci Doğu Kültür Ocakları, DDKO). The word ’Eastern’ was an euphemism to avoid state-repression since any discussion of even the existence of Kurds was banned.\n\nSimultaneously, Turkey saw the growth of a new, militant Left. In 1965 the Federation of the Revolutionary Youth of Turkey (Turkiye Devrimci Genclik Federasayno or Dev-Genc) was formed. Dev-Genc members organized university occupations, protested against the presence of US-troops, organized solidarity with workers’ protests and fought fascists on campus and in the streets. Parts of the workers movement also radicalized and 1967 the Confederation of Revolutionary Trade Unions of Turkey (Türkiye Devrimci İşçi Sendikaları Konfederasyonu, DİSK) was formed as a left alternative to the established trade union federation. Workers also organized wildcat strikes and factory occupations, peasants occupied land. Out of this ferment and radicalization the first armed groups grew in the early seventies. Inspired by the Cuban revolution and Maoism, these groups saw Turkey as a ’neo-colony’ of the US and considered themselves to be fighting for a ’national-democratic’ revolution that would break the grip of imperialism on the country, bring true national independence and open the way for a second, socialist stage of the revolution.\n\nAbdullah Öcalan began his political life in these radical-left circles. Born in 1949 as a son of a poor peasant family, Öcalan grew up in a very religious and conservative environment. In 1966, he went to Ankara to attend a vocational school that trained students to work in the state’s land registry offices. In 1969, he graduated and found work, first in Diyarbakir and after a year in Istanbul. Shortly before graduating, Öcalan had become interested in politics and started to visit political meetings. Öcalan joined the DDKO and protests of the radical youth. In 1971 the army staged a new coup, now to stamp out the radical movement. The TIP was banned and the DDKO closed down as many activists fled the country. In 1972 Öcalan, who by that time had begun to study political science in Ankara, was arrested during a protest in solidarity with Turkish leftists who had been in killed in a firefight with the police. Öcalan was sentenced to seven months and found himself in the military prison Mamak in the company of Dev-Genc leaders and other experienced radicals. His arrest radicalized him further and the political discussions he witnessed in jail made a strong impression on him. He decided to dedicate himself fully to radical politics. After his release from jail, the coup regime had successfully repressed many of the radical groups.\n\nÖcalan didn’t feel at home in any of the existing groups, either Kurdish or Turkish. The Turkish radical-left, more or less under the influence of Kemalist nationalism and the theory of a revolution by stages, tended to neglect the oppression of the Kurds or even denied this was an issue. Such groups reasoned that since Turkey itself was an oppressed nation, the Turkish state was incapable of imperialist policies like national oppression of the Kurds. If they did recognize there was oppression of Kurds specifically, many Turkish leftists saw this as an issue that could be dealt with only after a national-democratic revolution that would liberate Turkey from imperialism. In 1975 the traditional Kurdish nationalist movement suffered a heavy blow with the defeat of the guerrilla-war in Iraq led by Mullah Mustafa Barzani (father of the current president of the Iraqi Kurdish region, Massoud Barzani). Barzani had allied with the US, Israel and Iran against the Iraqi state but was abandoned by his allies after Baghdad made concessions to Tehran.\n\nÖcalan drew the conclusion that the Turkish Left could not be the champion of the Kurds and neither could this be traditional nationalists like Barzani who looked for support abroad. The Kurds would have to fight for themselves, as Kurds. Öcalan started to build his own group that adopted the notion of pioneering Turkish sociologist İsmail Beşikçi that ’Kurdistan’ was an international colony, occupied by Turkey, Iran, Syria and Iraq. From 1975 on, Öcalan’s group started to agitate under the name Kurdish Revolutionaries (Soresgeren Kurdistan, SK). Its core members often resembled Öcalan: young Kurds from a poor, rural background that had radicalized as students. This was a very different layer than that of the wealthy family of Barzani or the urban students that played an important role in the Turkish Left. The SK was not exclusively Kurdish but also included a number of Turkish leftists who saw the liberation of Kurdistan as a precondition to revolution in Turkey.\n\nUnlike other Left groups, the SK decided not to spend resources on publications, instead recruiting people through intense one-on-one discussions. Its recruitment focused on poor, often illiterate Kurds, often from a rural background who had moved to the cities to look for work. Another characteristic of the SK was its willingness to use violence against groups like the fascist Grey Wolves. This brought the SK a certain respect and attraction to radical youth which helped make up for the lack of a well-known leader or financial means. This militancy appealed to many Kurds who had recognized that the Turkish state would not allow the Kurds to free themselves through non-violent means and who, after the defeat of the traditional nationalism of Barzani, were looking for an alternative.\n\nFormer PKK central committee Mehmet Can Yüce later explained his radicalization: ’You’re a colonized nation and you seek your rights. You can bring out magazines and set up associations and enter parliament – in short, you can operate within the limits that the state has set, but the trouble is that the state outlaws the use of the word ’Kurd’, they won’t let refer to a place called Kurdistan. Saying these words is a crime, splittism, ample cause to get you arrested, tortured, kept in jail for years on end. So, what is keeping this nation under repression? Force. The army, the police, the gendarmerie, the counter-guerillas, the far-right Nationalist Action Party. In such a country, where the machinery of repression is so organized and entrenched, you’re left with one route, and that’s to use force to answer with force’. [2]\n\nA few years later, the SK had won modest support in several of the bigger cities of the Kurdish regions. In 1977, the group was reorganized as the Kurdish Workers Party (Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan, PKK) and adopted a manifesto. This manifesto, ’The Road of the Kurdish Revolution’ strongly resembles statements of other ’marxist-leninist’ national-liberation movements of the time. In 1977 its first party program, which largely summarizes the ideas in the manifesto, was drafted.\n\nThese documents declare that the immediate goal of the PKK is a ’national-democratic’ revolution that will lead to an ’independent and democratic Kurdistan’. Any other option than the creation of an independent Kurdish nation-state is vehemently rejected; the original program called for exposing ’capitulationist attitudes that do not aim for smashing the colonial yoke of the Turkish Republic and suggest things like “regional autonomy”, “autonomy” et cetera’, since such proposals are; ’in essence a compromise with colonialism’. The program calls for a ’determined struggle’ against such ideas. [3]\n\nThe revolution will take the form of a prolonged armed struggle or ’people’s war’, based on the peasantry. The leadership of the revolution has to be ’the working class’, led by the PKK. The power of the ’feudal’ leaders of Kurdish society needed to be broken since these are the representatives of colonialism. The peasantry and the urban petty bourgeois are the two main allies of the working class. There is no Kurdish ’national bourgeoisie’ because colonialism did not allow such a class to develop. International allies of the revolution are ’socialist countries’, working class parties of capitalist countries and ’the liberation movements of oppressed peoples of the world’. Its enemies are the Turkish state, its ’native feudal-collaborators’, and ’the imperialist powers behind them’. After the ’national-democratic’ revolution, the struggle will, ’without interruption’, proceed in a socialist revolution. This manifesto, and the party symbol, a red flag with the hammer-and-sickle, would be in place until the fifth party-congress in 1995.\n\nThe documents are obviously heavily influenced by Maoist ideas but do not adopt the designation of the Soviet-Union as ’social-imperialist’. The ruling parties of the Soviet-Union and China are both criticized as implementing ’revisionist’ policies. Overall the ’really existing socialist countries’ are considered allies of the Kurdish revolution, but none of their governing parties is accepted as an ideological lodestar. PKK-ideologue Mehmet Can Yüce later mocked Turkish left-wing groups that were looking for a ’Mecca’ in Moscow, Tirana or Peking.\n\nThe PKK was not the only Kurdish leftist group to adopt such a framework at the time, nor was it the only one to declare armed struggle a necessity. In fact, several other Kurdish groups at the time, like the Vanguard Workers Party of Kurdistan (PPKK—Partiya Pêşenga Karkerên Kurdistan) and Socialist Party of Turkish Kurdistan (TKSP, known as Özgürlük Yolu, Freedom Path) had more support at the time and made similar declarations.\n\nOne minor difference from other groups at the time was the highly charged language of the PKK’s funding documents; liberating Kurdistan was called a ’holy’ task and ’our Movement...would deem leading our people with ideological, organizational and political means to be a sacred and historical task’ and ’having a life distant from the Kurdistan Revolution would be no different from a bestial lifestyle’. [4]\n\n** 2. People’s War\n\nA more important difference was that the small group of mainly youth that made up the early PKK actually made organizing armed struggle an immediate task, while the other groups declared that armed struggle would only follow after a phase of building political support for it. Talking about the leaders of the other Kurdish Left groups in the late seventies, people who had often criticized the PKK and their leader for their lack of ideological finesse and political experience, Öcalan declared in 1996; ’I had a principle for myself: Why did I dare to initiate and believe in this war? Because the greatest harlot is one who does not fight. My word at the very beginning was this; I moulded myself to believe this. All of these men in the Kurdish groupings which claimed to undertake the national cause are dishonest. Why? Because, I said, they prostitute themselves more than a prostitute. I said I will not be like them; I will fight for loftier aims.’ [5]\n\nThe PKK’s willingness and ability to use violence appealed to many oppressed Kurds. It was during the following war that the PKK built itself. Revenge became an important theme in the self-conception of the PKK throughout the eighties and the nineties as the war grew more intense and the state tried to terrorize the Kurds into submission. One 1985 brochure even declared the PKK to be a ’revolutionary revenge organization’ and stated; ’Pseudo-socialist sermons will not save us any better than the religious sermons that they have come to replace. Violence...will in Kurdistan not only be the midwife assisting in the delivery [of a new society] but it will create everything anew. Revolutionary violence has to play this role, and it will, we say, assume the form of revolutionary revenge’. [6]\n\nThe class composition of the PKK was different from that of the other groups. In the words of Kurdistan expert Martin van Bruinessen; the PKK was ’the only organization whose members were drawn almost exclusively from the lowest social classes – the uprooted, half-educated village and small-town youth who knew what it felt like to be oppressed, and who wanted action, not ideological sophistication’. [7] ’[T]ribal elites are represented in various other parties but not in the PKK. Rather, this party represents the most marginal sections of Kurdish society.’ [8]\n\nThe PKK first began to move against the traditional Kurdish elite, aghas — the ’feudal’ landlords that with the aid of their supporters controlled whole villages and often closely cooperated with the Turkish state. The PKK fought on the side of rebelling peasants and lost dozens of members in clashes with the militia of landlords. The guiding principle in choosing its targets was for the PKK however not social antagonism, but the politics of the aghas: whether they opposed the national movement or not. At the same time, various Turkish leftist and Kurdish groups fought among themselves; ’the PKK was initially relatively insignificant among [rival organizations] and only became known because it was the most violent’. [9] During fighting between different radical groups, dozens were killed. The PKK was both initiator and victim of such violence.\n\nWhen in 1980 the army staged yet another coup, the PKK had become the strongest Kurdish party in Turkey. After the coup, tens of thousands were arrested. The Turkish Left, that in the previous years had again grown to a significant force, was largely unable to withstand the repression. At the end of 1983, there were still 40.000 political prisoners that were routinely brutally tortured. Among the prisoners were thousands of PKK-supporters and members. Many of them continued the struggle inside the prisons, undertaking ’deathfasts’ that claimed the lives of leading members or committing suicide in protest. The dead became important martyr-figures for the movement and their sacrifices reinforced the reputation of PKK-members as unyielding revolutionaries.\n\nÖcalan himself escaped the repression; shortly before the coup, he had gone to Syria and from there he went to Lebanon. In Lebanon, he made contact with the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) and later other Palestinian groups like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Fatah. Abu Laila, a leader of the DFLP, later said of Öcalan; ’We had met other Turkish Kurds and they didn’t seem to be very reliable. This man seemed to be serious. He didn’t want [military or financial] assistance...he only wanted to send volunteers...to be trained for the future’. ’These people turned out to be really serious, real fighters, real soldiers. It was clear he [Öcalan] had some popular base in Kurdistan.’ [10] The Palestinians provided valuable military and organizational training to the Kurds, but the PKK members received their ideological training separate from the other groups. The PKK joined the Palestinians in the fight against the Israeli army when it invaded Lebanon in 1982.\n\nA few years later, the PKK launched its people’s war. Öcalan had established contact with the Syrian regime and was allowed to base himself in Damascus. The PKK opened a training camp in a Syrian controlled part of Lebanon. In 1982, the PKK reached an agreement with the major Kurdish rebel group in Iraq, Barzani’s KDP, that allowed them to set up camps near the Turkish border. The PKK started small-scale armed actions in Turkish Kurdistan and agitation among the rural communities in the border-area. Its first large action took place in 1984 when it attacked several army barracks and temporarily took control of some villages. PKK-fighters distributed statements declaring their goal was ’the struggle of our people for national independence, a democratic society, freedom and unity, under the leadership of the PKK, against imperialism, Turkish colonial fascism and its local lackeys’. At the same time, the PKK appealed to ’revolutionaries and the working people from Turkey’; ’every blow of the HRK [the armed wing of the PKK] against colonial fascism is a blow against fascism in Turkey’. [11] However, cooperation between the PKK and the Turkish radical-left was very difficult. The military coup had decimated the Turkish Left and the PKK tried to dominate any alliance, reasoning that the Turkish Left had proven to be incapable of leading a revolution. In turn this drove away potential allies.\n\nThe PKK’s theory of revolution at the time was heavily influenced by the Maoist conception of protracted people’s war. In this strategy, the armed struggle is the primary means to seize power. The armed struggle is based in the rural countryside and the majority of the fighters are recruited from the peasantry. The struggle is led by the party that supposedly represents ’proletarian’ leadership and is supposed to keep socialism as a goal, although the strategy first aims at a ’national-democratic’ stage. The people’s war starts with small guerrilla attacks and proceeds through different stages of escalating warfare, from a ’strategic defense’, in which the rebels are limited to small scale hit-and-run attacks, to a second stage, during which the government forces are pushed on the defensive while the party expands its political influence. In the final stage, the guerrilla has gathered enough forces and weapons to move to conventional warfare and engage the enemy in decisive battles. Until the mid-nineties, Öcalan and the PKK referenced this strategic framework with an independent Kurdistan as its goal.\n\nTwo elements that distinguish the early PKK from like minded movements were its evaluation of the history of the Communist International and of the relation between the party and the guerrilla-army. Already in its early documents, the PKK severely criticized the Soviet-Union of the early twenties and the Comintern for its critical support to Kemalism. In early 1920 Mustafa Suphi, founder of the Turkish Communist Party TKP, and a dozen of his comrades were murdered by right-wing nationalists. The massacre happened with at least tacit approval of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk but that did not stop the signing of the Treaty of Brotherhood between the Grand National Assembly of Turkey under the leadership of Atatürk, and the Soviet-Union on 16 March 1921. PKK statements criticized the early TKP and the Comintern not only for having illusions in the democratic potential of Kemalism but also accused the Comintern of ignorance of the local situation and the Soviet leadership of prioritizing the national security of the Soviet-Union over internationalist and anti-imperialist principles. Such a critical view of the early Soviet-Union was not shared by many ’marxist-leninist’ parties that tended to regard Soviet statements as holy writ.\n\nLater, after the implosion of the Soviet-Union, the PKK would attempt to formulate a more exhaustive critique of the Soviet ’model’ but this remained rather superficial: it blamed the defects in democracy on faulty decisions of the leadership and the prioritizing of state-interests over those of its citizens but did not explain why such errors could become policy for decade after decade.\n\nAnother element that set the PKK apart was that it was a ’guerrilla-party’. Instead of following the Maoist model that dictates a clear distinction between the army and the party that leads it (Mao: ’our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party’), the two organizations were mixed. In the PKK, fighters were expected to completely give up their previous life and dedicate themselves exclusively to their life as a guerrilla. Cadres who did not have any military responsibilities were also expected to be prepared to join the guerrillas in their mountain bases at any time. According to PKK-leader Duran Kalkan ’this was not only of military value, but more important was its ideological and moral meaning’. [12] Referring to the party’s 1986 congress, Kalkan describes this meaning as follows; ’Such a guerrilla makes ideologically a complete break with the ruling order, he breaks in a certain degree with the hierarchical system of the State and of power. That is why at the third Congress there was a serious ideological renewal in the conception of really existing socialism; the really-existing socialist line of individual and familial, petit-bourgeois equal rights and freedom was superseded. Such a measure has consequences inside society as well where it calls forth changes that bring closer freedom and equality. It destroys individual family-life.’\n\n** 3. Creating the ’new man’\n\nKalkan touches upon the most distinctive element of PKK-thought of the eighties and nineties; its ambition to create a ’New Man’, characterized by a certain personality. The theme of the ’personality’ of the Kurds appeared already in Öcalan’s texts in the early eighties and remains a prominent part of it. According to Öcalan there is a metaphysical ’Kurdish mentality’, a certain ’composition of the Kurdish psyche’. Öcalan still claims ’many of the qualities and characteristics attributed to the Kurds and their society today can already be seen in the Neolithic communities of the cis-Caucasus mountain ranges — the area we call Kurdistan’. [13] However, the Kurds have been alienated from their ’true’ identity by the attempts of the Turkish state to assimilate the Kurds and by the traditional social structures, what Öcalan calls ’feudalism’.\n\nThrough criticism and self-criticism and hard work, PKK-members were expected to remake themselves, to free themselves of their views and attitudes that they had learned in their ’old life’ and remould themselves into ’new men’. The goal, as described in the party journal Serxwebûn: ’The new man does not drink, does not gamble, never thinks of his own personal pleasure or comfort, and there is nothing feminine about him, those who [in the past] indulged in such activities will, sharp as knife, cut out all these habits as soon as he or she is among new men. The new man’s philosophy and morality, the way he sits and stands, his style, ego, attitude and reactions [tepki] are his and his alone. The basis of all these things is his love for the revolution, freedom, country, and socialism, a love that is as solid as a rock. Applying scientific socialism to the reality of our country creates the new man’. [14]\n\nIn a 1983 text, ’On Organization’, Öcalan discussed the role of the political organization, citing Marx, Engels, Lenin, Giap and Che Guevera. Like other texts by the PKK and Öcalan at the time, most of it is very similar to the rest of the Kurdish and Turkish radical left but; ’the substantial and distinctive part of the argument in this work is concerned with the “reorganization of the whole society”. Rather than structuring a ‘Marxist-Leninist party of the working class’, an overall reorganization is proposed because Kurdish society has been the victim of a “deliberate disorganizing program from top to bottom implemented by the Turkish colonialists”’. [15] Re-organizing Kurdish society ’from top to bottom’ would require building a new Kurdish identity and person-hood.\n\nGradually, notions like ’humanization’, ’socialization’ and ’liberated personality’ replaced marxist notions of classes and class-struggle. When in Öcalan’s recent writing names of classes still appear, they function as synonyms for political opponents (feudal for Kurdish clan-leaders, petty-bourgeois for non-PKK Kurdish groups) whose determining characteristic is often their ’distorted’ or ’sick’ personalities. Time and time again, Öcalan attacks the ’diseased’ personalities of people who disagree with him.\n\nThe PKK’s 1995 congress marked an ideological renovation. The theme of building the ’new man’ was officially incorporated into party-ideology and the new program defined the goal as ’a personality that, with great foresight, great understanding, with great effort and determination, seeks to conquer every obstacle and turn the negative into the positive; a personality whose strong willpower fascinates under all circumstances and who for the struggle for development of humanity, without seeking personal benefits, even gives his life’. [16] ’Socialization of people’ was now declared to be essential to socialism. [17]\n\nThe creation of the new man played a central role in the critique the PKK tried to formulate of ’really-existing socialism’ after its collapse and of the new vision of socialism it tried to elaborate. The PKK did not regret the collapse of the Soviet bloc; ’we mourn the collapsed not so much, because we rather experience the relieve from a burden’, Öcalan stated in 1992. [18] The 1995 program defined ’really existing socialism’ as the ’lowest and most brutal stage of socialism’, and explains its defects as such; ’in the ideological aspect a descend into dogmatism, vulgar materialism, and great-Russian chauvinism; in the political aspect the creation of an extreme centralism, the freezing of democratic class struggle and raising the interests of the state to be only decisive factor; in the social aspect the restriction of the free and democratic life of society and the individual; in the economic aspect the dominance of the state sector and not overcoming a consumption society that emulates foreign countries; finally in the military aspect the prioritizing of the army and weaponry over all other fields’. The way the PKK thought these failings could be avoided by a new socialism was by building the new man.\n\nIn the mid-nineties, the PKK emphasized its differences with really existing socialism as it tried to formulate its own distinctive ideology. In 1993, Öcalan claimed that the PKK, when it discussed ’scientific socialism’ did not refer to marxism but to its own peculiar ideology of a ’socialism’ that supposedly ’exceeds the interests of states, the nation and classes’. [19] Symbolically, the 1995 congress removed the hammer and sickle from the party flag; ’the hammer and sickle in really existing socialism only involved the class of workers and peasants, and is with this also an expression of really existing socialism. The new conception of socialism is about the whole of humanity’. [20] The claim to be fighting for ’the whole of humanity’ remains a frequent trope in PKK and PYD statements.\n\nThe PKK’s alternative to the collapsed Soviet-model was a socialism of the new man: creating this new personality was the goal of socialism and the only guarantee that even after a revolution, society won’t regress into capitalism or fascism. This ’socialism’ was not a way of organizing society into ’an association of free human beings which works with common means of production’, as Marx put, it but the creation of certain personalities. This is why, in a text from this period by Mehmet Can Yüce, which is otherwise rigidly ’marxist-leninist’, he can also talk about ’the socialism that has been realized in the party’, [21] just like the 1995 program does. [22] Yüce writes; ’If socialism does not dominate in the personality of the individual and in the relations inside the organization, it can not arise in society, respectively in the social system’. [23]\n\nThe idea of people ’remoulding’ their personalities to become revolutionaries is not unique to the PKK. In the maoist Communist Party of the Philippines it was a recurring theme that to become truly proletarian revolutionaries, members had to ’remould’ themselves to lose so-called ’petty-bourgeois’ habits. But the PKK went much further: people were not only expected to become good party-members but to change their whole personality. The idea of creating a new man brings to mind Che Guevara’s writing about socialism and human personality or the Soviet discourse about the socialist new man. The crucial difference is that the PKK claimed to be creating this new man already before revolution, and that through sheer determination and hard work, the socialist ’superman’ would be created in the bases of the PKK.\n\nIt was not only socialism as a social-economic system that was gradually pushed aside by this socialism of the new man. Something similar happened in PKK statements about Kurdish self-determination. In the second half of the eighties, the PKK would mention less and less the goal of a ’independent and united Kurdistan’, instead talking about a ’Free Kurdistan’, a formulation that leaves more ambiguity about the political goal.\n\nTerms like ’freedom’ and ’independence’ were used more and more to talk about individual, ’spiritual’ goals, referring to this new personality, instead of to statehood. This theme became especially strong in Öcalan’s statement before the court in 1999, partly published as ’Declaration on the Democratic Solution of the Kurdish Question’ and in the prison writings. In these texts, Öcalan claimed that already before his imprisonment he used terms like ’freedom’ and ’self-determination’ mainly to refer to individuals, and not peoples. He even claimed that the PKK was never secessionist, a statement that contradicts the vehement insistence from 1978 that anything less than an independent Kurdistan (specified to be under occupation from Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria) would be betrayal. Despite the other ideological renovations, the 1995 program insisted that an independent Kurdish state was the final goal of the movement.\n\nÖcalan would after 1993, when the PKK made a cease-fire offer to the Turkish state, start to talk about a political settlement to the conflict and declared a break-up of the Turkish state was not a precondition to such a settlement. But this didn’t exclude the possibility that an independent (and ’socialist’) Kurdish state would remain the final goal, one that could possible be fought for with other means than armed struggle. This is certainly how many PKK-members and supporters read these declarations. When shortly before his capture Öcalan was declaring that a ’democratic alternative’ could be achieved on the basis of Turkish recognition of the Kurdish identity, a federated parliament and within the existing borders of Turkey, he was contradicting the PKK’s official program. When in 1999 Öcalan in his defense speech emphatically denied the goal of a Kurdish state, even in the long run, thousands of PKK-supporters left in disillusionment. [24]\n\n** 4. Serok Apo\n\nIn the eighties, Öcalan consolidated his control over the movement. After a power struggle in the early eighties, which ended with the death or flight of his rivals, ’Apo’, a diminutive of Abdullah and meaning ’uncle’ in Kurdish, consolidated his control over the organization. Officially the chair of the party, Serok Apo (leader Apo) became not only a political leader but also the military commander, the movements’ ’philosopher’ and a prophet-like figure. ’One person represents the new upright posture, practically the resurrection of a nation. My role is indeed that of a prophet, speaking to an enslaved, mercilessly oppressed people’, Öcalan declared in 1992; ’we have to fight for our freedom ourselves. I symbolize this fight’. [25] The ideological publications of the PKK consist almost completely of texts by Öcalan. Only a few other prominent figures of the party published books and those are often memoirs. At party meetings, Öcalan would deliver speeches, without notes, that lasted for hours and were then transcribed and published as books, even telephone conversations were recorded to be ’studied’. In PKK jargon, Ocalan’s statements are known as ’analyses’ (çözümlemeler).\n\nIn the PKK, all members where expected to be completely dedicated to the party and in turn this came to mean complete dedication to Abdullah Öcalan. Öcalan himself was referred to as Őnderlik (leadership), ’guide’ and even ’Sun’. In a sympathetic account of her time in the PKK-guerrilla, German internationalist Anja Flach wrote; ’the status of the party-leadership [meaning Öcalan] is an institution, he doesn’t so much represent the party, as he is the party’. [26] An author who experienced Öcalan as leader in this period later wrote; ’Öcalan was not willing to share his authority. He demanded absolute submission to his person from the people in his surrounding and unrelentingly pushed this through.’ [27]\n\nOpposition to Öcalan and his decisions was impossible and the PKK would pay a heavy price for this as its fortunes on the battleground declined. In the late eighties and early nineties, the Turkish army was gaining more experience in fighting against guerrillas, using sophisticated equipment like Israeli supplied night-vision goggles and US combat helicopters. In addition, the Turkish state viciously targeted civilian supporters of the PKK and of Kurdish rights in general. Between 1984 and 1999 up to 40.000 people were killed. According to the Turkish army, they lost almost 6500 soldiers until 2008 and killed 32.000 PKK-members but those figures are not credible. According to the PKK, their losses were much smaller but the total number of casualties of the conflict must be much higher.\n\nBoth sides, but overwhelmingly the Turkish state, targeted civilians suspected of aiding the enemy. Jandarma İstihbarat ve Terörle Mücadele (JİTEM), a branch of the Turkish gendarmerie that officially did not even exist, was according to the Turkish Human Rights association IHD involved in 5.000 unsolved killings of journalists, intellectuals, human rights and political activists, and responsible for 1.500 ’disappearances’. Turkish intelligence services also cooperated with right-wing and islamist militia that made thousands of casualties, most of them civilians. In the late eighties, the Turkish army started to forcibly remove Kurdish villagers to separate the guerrillas from civilian supporters. Estimations of the number of people displaced vary from 275.000 to 2 million. With much of its civilian support removed in this way, and under increasingly heavy attack, the PKK started to suffer military setbacks in the mid-nineties.\n\nBut Öcalan refused to listen to warnings from field-commanders and insisted they should go on the offensive. A 1994 statement claimed ’the struggle which the PKK carries out has left the stage of strategic defense [... ]. It is inevitable that we escalate our struggle in response to Turkey’s declaration of all-out war.’ Setbacks were not blamed on the faulty instructions from ’the leadership’ but on the failure of commanders to correctly carry them out. Flach described ’criticism and self-criticism’ sessions she witnessed in this period; ’failures were seen primarily in the personalities of the commanders and the fighters. Structures from the old life [before the guerrilla] are still lived, feudal or petty-bourgeois attitudes and views are not superseded and exactly this is seen as the most important obstacle to implementing the ideas of the party’. [28] But the validity of these ideas themselves was not put into question.\n\nThe PKK’s idea of creating a ’New Man’ was a powerful means of control as the ideal incorporated unquestioning obedience — and criticism of the ’leadership’ was seen as proof of failing to achieve this goal. Öcalan was more than a distinguished or even indispensable leader, he himself, his person, was built up to be indispensable to the liberation of the Kurdish people. As a critical observer noted his role; ’he alone “is” the key to liberation – as opposed to just possessing it’. [29] This also explains why even after his capture Öcalan remained the leader of the movement.\n\nIn 1998 Turkey threatened Syria with war if it continued to shelter the PKK leader. The Syrian regime ordered Öcalan to leave and in October 1998 he left the country. For 130 days Öcalan went from country to country looking for asylum. He intensified his calls for a political settlement and declared the PKK would accept a ’democratic republic’; a united Turkey that would guarantee freedom of speech for the Kurds and recognize the presence of a Kurdish minority. Öcalan said the PKK was ready to lay down arms of those conditions were met. In February 1999 Öcalan was captured by Turkish agents.\n\n** 5. A revolution of women\n\nAlready in its first program, the PKK called for full equality of men and women in all social and political aspects, but this was little more than one clichéd demand among others, just below introducing the eight hour workday, if possible. The same program declared the national oppression of the Kurds to be the ’main contradiction’ that the party should fight against. In 1987, the party organized the ’Union of Patriotic Women of Kurdistan’ (Yekitiya Jinen Welaparezen Kurdistan, YJWK). Like the women’s organizations of many other marxist-leninist parties, its original intention was facilitating the participation of women in the party, but it was also to provide a space to deal with specific women’s issues.\n\nThe PKK’s distinctive practice of women’s liberation was developed in the second half of the nineties, when the active participation of women in the Kurdish movement, both as politicians and as fighters, increased. [30] But, like on any other issue in the PKK, the ideological guide on the issue of women’s liberation is Öcalan. Starting in the eighties, ’Öcalan’s “analyses” increasingly criticized traditional patriarchal family structures, women’s secondary status within the family, and the gender roles that associated women with namus [the control over women’s sexuality] and assigned men the duty to protect it.’ [31]\n\nToday, it is in the field of women’s liberation and gender equality that the PKK movement takes its most radical positions. One of the aspects that sets the struggle of the PKK apart from other Kurdish rebellions is the large participation of women in all levels of the movement. In a way, the category of ’women’ has replaced that of ’the international proletariat’ in the PKK ideology: today it is women as such who are assumed to be the vanguard of the struggle. The movement declared that its goal is not just the liberation of Kurdish women but of women worldwide.\n\nThe PKK’s ideas on women’s liberation are heavily influenced by the myth of a prehistoric matriarchal past during the neolithic, ’when the woman was a creating godess’ (Öcalan). [32] With the rise of class society, the oppression of women began. These notions are clearly taken from Friedrich Engels’ ’The origin of the family, private property and the state’.\n\nThe patriarchal family structure and inequality between men and women, according to Öcalan and the PKK, serve the interests of the oppressive Turkish state and the ’feudal’ Kurdish leaders that cooperate with it. This state and its puppets play a crucial role in perpetuating these inequalities by enforcing tribal traditions that block the development of Kurdish women and of society as a whole, thus controlling the Kurdish people. The traditional family oppresses women by blocking them from social life, and the family is protected through namus, surveillance of women’s bodies, behaviors, and sexualities by men. [33] Öcalan: ’Since sexual motives are fundamental instincts, the problems thus created lead to profound political perversions. To resolve the sexual motives is to realize the greatest revolution. There is no one among us who has not yet realized this. Everyone succumbs. Kurdish society expresses an individual type and a social reality, which succumbs, more than any other society in the world, to instincts of hunger and sexuality. [...] Around these sexual motives are formed a certain namus, a certain understanding of morality, and no brave fellows have the power to overcome this. […] In this bottleneck, our individual has lost once again, even before it reached the age of twenty.’ [34]\n\nBreaking the bonds that oppressed women would not only enable them to play an active role in the liberation movement, thereby strengthening it. Öcalan also assumed that women, as the victims of both national and gender oppression, are more receptacle to radical ideas, more willing to challenge tradition and the status-quo; ’Today, during the Palestinian uprising, it is almost entirely women, children, and the youth with stones who carry out the revolution. There are lessons to take from this. [...] When women, who make up half of the society, take to the streets, it is impossible to control them [...]. In this respect, especially for improving the urban movement, we must take action in this next stage. […] Certainly, all women are furious. All of them are hungry and impoverished. It is possible to make them into rebels by using all kinds of methods.’ [35]\n\nThe liberation of women was and is seen as part of the liberation of the Kurdish people, but there has been a shift in how this relationship is conceived. In her article ’From Kawa the Blacksmith to Ishtar the Goddess: Gender Constructions in Ideological-Political Discourses of the Kurdish Movement in post-1980 Turkey’, Handan Çağlayan summarizes this change as one of talking about women, an instrumental view of seeing women as a resource for the revolution, to one of talking to women as actors in their own liberation. This shift took place in the second half of the nineties.\n\nIn the early nineties, the participation of women inside the PKK, including in its guerrilla units, increased dramatically. In these years, large protests broke out among the Kurdish population, the Serhildan, also sometimes known as the Kurdish intifada, that were fueled by a new sense of Kurdish identity and strength that had been made possible by the armed struggle. These protests involved layers of the population that were not in direct contact with the PKK guerrilla’s units in the mountains but nevertheless sympathized with them. Especially the Newroz (Kurdish New Year) celebrations of 1990, 1991, and 1992 were important as they turned into confrontations with Turkish security forces. Women participated massively in these protests, confronting security forces in the streets.\n\nThe protests were repressed but in their aftermath, the Kurdish movement became a truly popular mass movement, involving student organizations, cultural associations, publications, women’s groups and other initiatives. The PKK was the hegemonic force in this movement but at the same time struggled to integrate the many new recruits that often came from very different social backgrounds than the old guard. Dozens of these often young, educated volunteers were executed by PKK commanders who mistrusted them or felt that their power was being challenged.\n\nBut the influx of new members did change the party. As the participation of women in the guerrilla increased, the movement was forced to confront persisting sexist ideas and practices. Women refused to have their roles in the movement limited to that of providing support, instead choosing to fight as part of the guerrilla.\n\nThe party soon discovered the emotional appeal of images of young female fighters that had abandoned their homes and old lives to fight for the Kurdish cause. Martyred women became emotionally powerful symbols of the movement and still are, as the recent example of Arin [Mirkan] and other female fighters killed in the defense of Kobani show. The martyrs of the movement include women who set themselves on fire in protest or killed themselves in suicide attacks on the enemy, tactics that were adopted in the nineties. Distressingly, it were disproportionately women that scarified themselves in suicide attacks, in a region that has had a tradition of women choosing suicide to escape their unhappy situation. [36]\n\nThe new role of women led to changes in the ideology and organization of the PKK. In the guerrilla, independent women’s units were formed and later an independent women’s army – a practice that was also adopted by the Syrian Kurdish movement when it organized the YPJ (Yekîneyên Parastina Jinê, Women’s Protection Units). The motivation is that in this way women are freed from the sexist practices of male comrades and at the same time forced to break with traditional notions of female obedience and servility and instead assume leadership roles. The same principle was applied in the political organizations. In 1994 the Free Women’s Movement of Kurdistan, later renamed as Free Women’s Union of Kurdistan (YAJLK), was formed. After Öcalan’s capture, the organization was dissolved and later reformed as the Party of Free Women (PJA). In all mixed PKK-organs a mandatory gender quota exists. The leaderships have to include at least 40 per cent women, executive posts are double functions of one man and one woman. The PYD for example has two chairs: Salim Muslim and Asya Abdullah, who stayed in Kobani during the siege.\n\nHandan Çağlayan describes one change in Öcalan’s texts on women as such; ’in the 1980s, Öcalan spoke to militant men about how they should treat women, that is, he spoke with men about women; in the 1990s, however, he spoke with women militants about men, and drew attention to the significance of this’. [37] Öcalan in 1999: ’Man at hand was analyzed, and it was seen that man is the main problem. [...] For me, the Man Question is now prior to the Woman Question. Does being man equals being in power? I ask men: If you have power, then why can’t you show this in the most elementary problem of war? He proves his manhood by domination over women, in sexual domination. This is a dominion of crude power; I found it foul, and I shattered it.’\n\nAgain, the PKK’s idea of creating a new man, and a new woman, proves to be a powerful ideological tool. An important difference between the PKK’s theory of women’s oppression and liberation and that of Friedrich Engels is their neglect of social-economic factors. Engels argued that with the rise of social classes came a division of labor that relegated women’s labor, and hence their social status, to a secondary position. In the PKK, the emphasis is instead (again) on issues like ’mentality’ and ’personality’; women’s oppression is supposedly rooted in patriarchal attitudes that are transferred from generation and that are internalized by women. To liberate themselves, women need to unlearn these attitudes just as much as men, and this way men and women are created anew.\n\nThe PKK discourse on women’s liberation sees the category of women as superseding political differences. As the PJA stated; ’The women’s liberation ideology is an alternative for all previous world-views, whether right-wing or left-wing. It is also a result of the critique of these ideologies. Because all previous ideologies as they were classified as either capitalist or socialist in the last centuries, have a masculine shape. Meaning, they have been shaped by patriarchy that since 5000 years has institutionalized itself in all fields of life’. [38]\n\nThe PKK’s thinking is strongly essentialist. Women and nature are often equated, and following this, ’woman’ is identified with motherhood. Women are assumed to have certain characteristics as women, such as empathy, an abhorrence of violence and a closeness to nature. These qualities need to be taught to men so that patriarchal society can be overcome.\n\nThese ideas put a heavy burden on women. On the one hand, the traditional family is criticized as a space in which patriarchal attitudes oppress women and as an institution through which the Turkish state and feudal rulers dominate the Kurdish people. On the other hand, the family is seen as the cradle from which a new Kurdish society should be born since the family plays such an important role in socializing people, in ’creating personalities’, and this is at the center of the PKK’s vision of liberation. Thus it is women, as mothers and educators, who are given a primary responsibility in deciding the outcome of the struggle.\n\nWomen are considered to be in the vanguard of the liberation struggle but to be able to play this role, they first have to liberate themselves from what is called their ’slave mentality’. Setbacks for the movement become then the responsibility of women who have failed to play their role. Liberation and the ’top to the bottom’ reorganization of Kurdish society that the PKK set itself as a goal are now considered to be impossible if women are not liberated and in fact, it is women who should play a pioneering role in this social transformation.\n\n** 6. Democratic Civilization\n\nThe PKK started to develop its own peculiar ideology in the late eighties and in the mid-nineties a number of ideological inventions had become part of the official policy. After his capture however Öcalan would accelerate the PKK’s ideological metamorphosis. In the hands of the Turkish state, Öcalan started to make statements from jail through his lawyers. He praised his prison conditions and called on the PKK to hold on to the cease-fire it had declared the previous September and declared that negotiations with the Turkish state would continue – through him personally.\n\nÖcalan’s subsequent statements before the court came as a shock. Öcalan drastically reinterpreted the history and the ideology of the PKK. In court, Öcalan expressed regret over the death of Turkish soldiers and when the court asked if it would be correct to transcribe his words as an apology, he did not disagree. Öcalan did not mention the suffering of the Kurds but did find time to praise Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish republic, and referred to the cooperation of Kurds and Turks in the independence war in the early twenties. He claimed that if only Ataturk’s ideas had been faithfully followed, there would have been no ’Kurdish question’.\n\nIt was not only history that was revised by Öcalan. He insisted that the goal of an independent Kurdish state was impossible, even in the long term, and that this was not even desirable. Even the ideas of Kurdish autonomy or a federative parliament, which Öcalan had suggested shortly before his capture, went out of the window. The ’democratic solution’ that Öcalan instead proposed in his defense plea published as ’Declaration on the Democratic Settlement of the Kurdish Settlement’ was that Turkey would recognize the existence of the Kurds and respect basic democratic rights like freedom of speech and the use of the Kurdish language. This would supposedly suffice to make Turkey into a democratic society that could transcend the conflict; ’I wish to emphasize that it [meaning ’democracy’] transcends tension and conflict with a wonderful balance. That it has ideal governments which, thanks to the suitability of democratic state institutions for such a purpose, can offer a solution without allowing different kinds of politics and the forces behind these to come into conflict’. [39]\n\nAn ideologeme that recurs since the ’Declaration on the Democratic Settlement’ is that of ’democratic civilization’, which the PKK now declares to be its goal. In this text, Öcalan explained he took the term from a 1964 book by US sociologist Leslie Lipson: a study of the development of the parliamentary system in western societies. In his recent prison writings, the term takes center-place, now without being credited. What exactly this ’democratic civilization’ is for Öcalan remains unclear.\n\nBut it is clear Öcalan, at the latest beginning with the ’Declaration on the Democratic Settlement’, became an admirer of western parliamentary democracy. In it he repeatedly refers to it as a model for Turkey. The statement contained long quotes from Lipson describing the political system of Switzerland which Öcalan used as an example of how in a single country, different social-cultural groups can live together. According to Öcalan, this could be an example for Turkish-Kurdish co-existence in a single state. Later, Öcalan became an enthusiastic supporter of Turkey joining the European Union, hoping this would force Turkey to introduce democratic reforms that would bring closer the ’democratic republic’.\n\nThe democracy Öcalan praises is often equated with the parliamentary, capitalist states of the West: he claims that in European countries a ’determined democracy’ developed and that this led to the ’supremacy of the west’, ’Western civilization can, in this sense, be termed democratic civilization’. [40] What Turkey and the Kurds needed was ’Western-style problem solving’. [41] And in 2011; ’In principle, the western democratic system – which has been established through immense sacrifices – contains everything needed for solving social problems’. ’Europe, its [referring to ’democracy’] birthplace has by and large left nationalism behind in view of the wars of the twentieth century and established a political system adhering to democratic standards. This democratic system has already shown its advantages over other systems – including real socialism – and is now the only acceptable system worldwide’.\n\nIn his court statements, Öcalan presented the most intensive phase of the war as a mishap; ’Turkey failed to have a democratic system due to a lack of conviction, serious efforts and a true understanding of democracy (as opposed to demagoguery)’ and this led to the outbreak of armed resistance. [42] But, Öcalan stated, the PKK’s armed struggle in the nineties was wrong; ’In Turkey in the nineties, together [for Kurds and Turks] there were positive developments in human rights. After this the uprising was wrong. There was a way of solving the problem’. [43] Here Öcalan was talking about the period in which he, as absolute leader of the movement, had ordered the PKK to go on the offensive and branded cadres who wanted to shift attention away from the armed aspect of the struggle as traitors.\n\nAfter the capture of Öcalan, the PKK-presidium declared that he is ’our leader but he is captured. His directions are no longer binding’. For an underground movement, this was a common sense statement to make but the PKK quickly made a u-turn; in July an enlarged meeting of the central committee adopted Öcalan’s defense plea as the new party manifesto or ’Second Manifesto’. In their book ’PKK. Perspektiven des kurdischen Freiheitkampfes: Zwischen Selbsbestimmung, EU und Islam’, Nikolaus Brauns and Brigitte Kiechle write; ’Öcalan’s authority was so great, that the PKK presidium, whether it liked it or not, had to take this step if it didn’t want to lose its influence over the party or even be branded as traitors.’ [44] Captured or not, Öcalan remained the önderlik.\n\nÖcalan’s new orientation, now made party policy, was unacceptable even for many previously loyal followers of Apo. Thousands left the movement. [45] A small number of PKK-leaders unsuccessfully opposed the new orientation and the end of the armed struggle that was officially adopted at the PKK’s seventh congress of February 2000. Leading figures like like Meral Kidir, general secretary of DHP (Revolutionary Peoples Party), an off-shoot of the PKK, and Mehmet Can Yüce criticized the new orientation from the jails were they were held by the Turkish state. A DHP statement responded by declaring; ’Liquidation and provocations, which were all smashed until today, cannot succeed. The fate of provocations and liquidation which is imposed will be the same.’ After the seventh party-congress, Serxwebun threatened the dissidents with the ’most severe punishment’ under ’conditions of war’. The dissidents were unable to formulate any other alternative except a continuation of the failed people’s war strategy and were quickly sidelined. As a sign of goodwill, Öcalan ordered the PKK guerrillas to withdraw from Turkish territory. Many of them were killed as the Turkish army attacked the retreating fighters.\n\nIn the period 1999 — 2005, the PKK was in shock, grappling with Öcalan’s capture and trying to re-organize without the Serok and in accordance with his new instructions.\n\nSince the Second Manifesto, even though he is depended on his jailers for information about the outside world, Öcalan continues to make authoritative ideological statements. In these statements, Öcalan often returns to the mythical past. Öcalan claims the PKK’s struggle is only the latest Kurdish rebellion against centralized state-power. In a remarkable example of ’auto-orientalism’, the Kurds are presented as a people without history that since Sumerian times (4th millennium BCE) have rebelled against state-power, all the while remaining ’at essence’ the same. The ’original sin’ that caused their oppression was the formation of the state as such, against which the Kurds tried to preserve their ’natural’ free culture. Öcalan describes his goal as a ’renaissance’ of the idealized society that during the Neolithic supposedly existed in what is now Kurdistan. In a kind of Aufhebung, the positive aspects of this mythic past – a central role for women in society, a ’pure’ Kurdish identity, social egalitarianism – are to return in a modern form and become a guiding example for the entire regime.\n\nThis renaissance is supposed to be realized in three intertwined projects: democratic republic, democratic autonomy and democratic confederalism. [46] The ’democratic republic’ entails a reform of the Turkish state. Similar to the kind of statements Öcalan was making in the years before his arrest, the call is for Turkey to recognize the existence of minorities, especially Kurds, among its population and to dissociate citizenship from the Turkish ethnicity. This theme is prominent in Öcalan’s defenses for the court.\n\nDemocratic autonomy is a concept borrowed from Murray Bookchin (1921 – 2006), a US libertarian socialist and theoretician. After a brief period as a Stalinist in his teenage years, Bookchin joined the Trotskyist movement in the late thirties and became a member of the Socialist Workers Party. Like many trotskysists, Bookchin had expected the Second World War to end with a wave of social revolutions, led by the working class, in which trotskyists would play important roles. When this did not happen, and the trotskyist movement remained small and isolated, Bookchin started to reconsider his ideas. Bookchin gave up on Marxism, which in his eyes had made a fundamental mistake in seeing the working class as the revolutionary subject, but remained anti-capitalist.\n\nIt was clear for him that capitalism was a destructive system that had to be abolished. Its weak point, Bookchin reasoned, was not the contradiction capital-labor, but the contradiction capital-ecology. Capital, endlessly accumulating, destroys the environment. The struggle to save the eco-system takes on an anti-capitalist character and can unite everybody who see their lives threatened by the deterioration of the natural environment and who rebel against their alienation from it.\n\nTo construct an ecologically sustainable society, Bookchin suggested, cities would need to be de-centralized and scaled back to allow people to use renewable energy, grow food locally and cut expenditures of energy on transport. These smaller cities would be governed by assemblies of their populations who would democratically make decisions. Bookchin is often called an anarchist but he did not reject participation in elections and the existing political structures the way many anarchists do. Instead, he favored the combination of social movements and cooperatives that would pre-figure the future society with participation in local city-councils to gain vested, legal political power.\n\nThis is the strategy the Kurdish movement now seems to be applying with some success in eastern Turkey. In cities and villages where the legal Kurdish party HDP has won enough support in the councils, state-resources are used to facilitate councils and neighborhood associations that are set up by the population in cooperation with various movements and NGO’s. In this way, the movement hopes to build ’democratic autonomy’, the power to locally make decisions in assemblies and councils, while ’evading’ the central, Turkish-chauvinist state. Öcalan and the PKK see this as a way of making citizens actors in exercising self-government. Through strengthening local executive councils and associations of different ethnic, religious, cultural identities and women, pressure is built on the Turkish state to enforce its reform into a democratic republic.\n\nA Kurdish activist explained the strategy as follows; ’When we speak of democratic autonomy, we can’t wait till the laws have changed. We have to make the transformation ourselves, in practical deeds. […] In ten years we will build democratic autonomy and make all the decisions that have to do with city planning and its implementation. […] So we’re slowly building our own institutions, to develop resistance. […] Turkey has no choice but Democratic Autonomy – the current system is senseless. History overturns everything that is senseless. The state will be forced to realize this and change.’ [47]\n\nThe ’old’ PKK of course already built civil organizations of various kinds but the crucial difference is that now these structures, although they are inspired by it, are supposedly autonomous from the party. The PKK, which reverted to its old name after a few name changes in the early 00’s, today states its function is not to be the organizational leadership, but to be the ideological inspiration, a center from which Öcalan’s thought is spread through other structures.\n\nThe PKK suggests to build structures of democratic autonomy across the borders of the existing nation-states. These structures would then federate from the bottom-up, in a system of ’democratic confederalism’. Bookchin: ’a network of administrative councils whose members or delegates are elected from popular face-to-face democratic assemblies in the various villages, towns, and even neighborhoods of large cities’. [48] Öcalan describes the system as ’a pyramid-like model of organization. Here it is the communities who talk, debate and make decisions. From the base to the top the elected delegates would form a kind of loose co-ordinating body. They will be the elected representatives of the people for one year’. [49]\n\nThis strategy also implies a fundamental shift in the PKK’s use of violence. In the old strategy, the armed struggle was essential to defeat the existing state and capture power. Today, the PKK policy towards violence is designated as ’legitimate self-defense’. Violent actions initiated by PKK-fighters are often retaliation for Turkish violence against the PKK and/or civilian supporters of Kurdish rights and serve to maintain a kind of balance of forces, to show the Turkish state that such repression comes with a price and to prove the PKK still has considerable military potential. The only legitimate violence, the PKK now claims, is this kind of defensive violence.\n\nIn addition to Bookchin, Öcalan names two other authors as influences, French historian of the longue durée Fernand Braudel and world system theorist Immanuel Wallerstein. Öcalan borrows from them the idea that the development of human society can be seen as moving through various world-eras. The stalinist interpretation of historical materialism is still clearly visible in Öcalan’s recent texts. The familiar list of ’primitive communism – slavery – feudalism – capitalism – socialism’ has been reworked but the idea that history necessarily moves through a progressive sequence of stages is still there. The Sumerian neolithic has replaced primitive communism and the era of ’democratic civilization’, which the world is supposedly moving into, replaces socialism.\n\nIn this new civilization, political differences will be superseded: ’the political process of the present however make it clear that the world-views of both the right and the left need to undergo a fundamental evolutionary transformation, at the end of which they will come together in what I call the system of democratic civilization. This approach has already begun to show its qualities in the solution of conflicts, building of international institutions and the rebuilding of the international order according to democratic principles’. [50]\n\nThe prison writings show a strongly idealist bend in taking ’culture’ and ’civilization’ as the explanation for social-economic and political developments. Öcalan agrees with right-wing US political scientist Samuel Phillips Huntington there is a clash of civilizations between ’east’ and ’west’. [51]\n\n** 7. Whatever happened to socialism?\n\nRather surprising for somebody who once claimed to be a marxist, there is very little mention of the deep social-economic inequality between the west and east of Turkey or proposals for improving the economic position of the Kurdish population in Öcalan’s recent writings. The themes of class-struggle and class formation, dealt with in clichés in the old documents, have largely disappeared, except as empty labels for Kurdish collaborators and opponents of the PKK as ’feudalists’ or ’petty-bourgeoisie’. A discussion of Kurdistan as a (neo-)colony or victim of exploitation is absent in a book subtitled ’The PKK and the Kurdish Question in the 21st Century’. A few times, the possibility of government development in eastern Turkey is mentioned but no more.\n\nFor Öcalan, socialism and workers’ struggles are of secondary importance compared to questions of religious and ethnic identity and democratic freedoms. This assessment seems to be shared by many of his followers. When a group of German leftists visited North Kurdistan to see the system of democratic autonomy ’in practice’, a topic like land reform was not even discussed. Almost echoing the old Maoist principle that attention should be focused on the ’main contradiction’ (the national one), one youth activist declared; ’socialism and the anti-capitalist struggle are important components of our ideology. But at this moment our oppression as Kurds is our main problem’. [52]\n\nThe PKK’s socialism became more abstract as it moved from the stalinist idea that socialism means a party-state that owns the means of production to the creation of a new man. What remained consistent during this evolution was the assumption that it is the party that establishes socialism. The working class and its self-emancipation were not issues in the old ideology, even though the PKK paid lip-service to being to a party of the working class.\n\nWhereas in Marxism, the working class is the actor that through its self-emancipation can create socialism, the PKK had a rather distrustful attitude towards the working class and did not see the self-emancipation of the working class as the way to socialism. Many workers in Kurdistan were employed by the state and lived in the cities. [53] The PKK, whose members predominately had a rural background, looked with mistrust at the city population that in their eyes was privileged and too closely associated with the institutions of the Turkish state. In a book based on conversations at the PKK’s party school, a cadre named Heval Zilan put it like this in the mid-nineties; ’The proletariat that has grown here is a proletariat in the service of the enemy. It is not a strong power. It does not play a role important enough to be able to be the vanguard. That does not mean that one does not have to take up proletarian struggle in Kurdistan. It also does not mean that no proletarian ideology should emerge. [..] We know that over 70 per cent of the Kurdish population are peasants, naturally under feudal conditions’. [54]\n\nIn the early nineties, Öcalan stated that there were no pronounced class divisions in Kurdish society. [55] The real dividing line was between ’collaborators’ and ’patriots’, not between capitalists and working people. Recently, Öcalan insisted the conditions for class-struggle have (still) not developed in Kurdish society. [56] Such a viewpoint seems to contradict the first manifesto and program that declared the revolution should be led by the working class. But by this was meant that it should be under leadership of the PKK, since it is this party that supposedly carried socialist consciousness and impeded it to the people. Heval Zilan put this view like this; ’Firstly, the army [meaning the PKK guerrilla] is the protector of all the created values. Secondly, it is the carrier of socialist consciousness, which she also passes on through to society. Thirdly it is the army that turns the labor carried out in Kurdistan into value and creates the corresponding consciousness. Fourthly, the army is the basis of the socialist society.’ [57] Since there was, according to the PKK, hardly a proletariat in Kurdistan nor class-struggle, it was the party that needed to create socialism.\n\nIt is not surprising that as the PKK changed from claiming to be the vanguard to being an ideological center, the emphasis on ’socialism’, whether as a social-economic system or as the name for a society of the New Man, also became less pronounced. The project of ’democratic autonomy’ is based on different identities and the struggle for the free expression of these ideas. ’Worker’ is just one identity among others. Today, Öcalan believes that recognition of democratic rights for all these different identities would bring about the new ’democratic civilization’. He believes the twentieth century saw ’the disappearance of the material foundations of class division’, because of ’technological progress’. But the possibility of a society without class divisions remains unfulfilled because of the state; ’the state governs the social structure’ and it is the state that ’continues class divisions’. [58] Any discussion of capital is absent. Öcalan does not distinguish between social-economic exploitation that leads to class-divisions and the extra-economic oppression of certain identities. Instead, these are all described as forms of oppression. Perhaps this echoes the reduction of the ’old’ PKK of class-position to the political position one had towards the party.\n\nThe continuing oppression of certain identities, like the Kurdish one in Turkey, are blamed by Öcalan on state-policies that are lagging behind the development of the new civilization, a development that however is unavoidable because of technological progress. [59] The task then is to pressure the state to allow the realization of the democratic potential that already exists. This in turn would enable in the long term the creation of of some kind of socialism and the realization of the old dream of the disappearance of the state as such.\n\nThe social-economic vision of the new PKK in the medium-term is an economy based on cooperatives. These would contribute to the ’democratization’ of society. PYD co-chair Asya Abdullah discussed the economic ideas for Rojava in February 2014;\n\n\n
\n\n----\n\n** Bibliography\n\n\nAkkaya, Ahmet Hamdi and Joost Jongerden, ’Reassembling the political: the PKK and the project of radical democracy’ , European Journal of Turkish Studies (2012). Online at [http://ejts.revues.org/4615].]]\n\nÇağlayan, Handan, ‘From Kawa the Blacksmith to Ishtar the Goddess: Gender Constructions in Ideological-Political Discourses of the Kurdish Movement in post-1980 Turkey’, European Journal of Turkish Studies 14 (2012). Online at [http://ejts.revues.org/4657].\n\nBrauns, Nikolas and Brigitte Kiechle, PKK. Perspektiven des kurdischen Freiheitkampfes: Zwischen Selbsbestimmung, EU und Islam, Stuttgart 2010.\n\nBruinessen, Martin van, ’Between guerrilla war and political murder: the Workers’ Party of Kurdistan’, Middle East Report (1988) 153 (July – August), 40–42+44–46+50\n\nBruinessen, Martin van, ’The nature and uses of violence in the Kurdish conflict’, Paper presented at the international colloquium “Ethnic Construction and Political Violence”, organized by the Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, Cortona, July 2–3, 1999.\n\nÇelik, Selahattin, Den Berg Ararat versetzen. Die politischen, militärischen, őkonomischen und gesellschaftlichen Dimensionen des aktuellen Kurdischen aufstands, Köln 2002.\n\nFlach, Anja, Jiyaneke din – ein anderes Leben, Hamburg 2011.\n\nGrojean, Olivier, ’The production of the new man with in the PKK’, European Journal of Turkish Studies (2012). Online at [http://ejts.revues.org/4925].\n\nMarcus, Aliza, Blood and Belief. The PKK and the Kurdish fight for independence, New York 2007.\n\nÖcalan, Abdullah, The declaration of Democratic Confederalism, 2005 online at [http://www.kurdmedia.com/article.aspx?id=10174].\n\nÖcalan, Abdullah, Declaration on the Democratic Solution of the Kurdish Question, London 1999.\n\nÖcalan, Abdullah, The third domain. Reconstructing liberation. Extracts from the submissions to the ECHR, London 2003.\n\nÖcalan, Abdullah, Prison Writings. The PKK and the Kurdish question in the 21stcentury, London 2011.\n\nÖcalan, Abdullah, Der 1. Mai, der Sozialismus un die sich entwickelende Lősung innerhalb der PKK, Hamburg, n.d.\n\nÖzcan, Ali Kemal, Turkey’s Kurds. A theoretical analysis of the PKK and Abdullah Öcalan, New York 2006.\n\nPKK, Programm, Köln 1984.\n\nPKK, Programm, Utrecht 1995.\n\nSchmidinger, Thomas, Krieg und Revolution in Syrisch-Kurdistan. Analysen und Stimmen aus Rojava, Vienna 2014.\n\nTATORT Kurdistan, Democratic Autonomy in North Kurdistan. The council movement, gender liberation, and ecology – in practice, Hamburg 2013\n\n[Unknown author], Licht am Horizont. Annäherungen an die PKK, n.p. 1996\n\nYüce, Mehmet, Can, Gedanken űber die Nationale Befreiung und den Sozialismus, Hamburg, n.d.\n\n \n\n[1] Selahattin Çelik, Den Berg Ararat versetzen. Die politischen, militärischen, őkonomischen und gesellschaftlichen Dimensionen des aktuellen Kurdischen aufstands, Köln 2002, p. 37.\n\n[2] Quoted in Christopher de Bellaigue, Rebel Land: Among Turkey’s Forgotten Peoples, London 2009.\n\n[3] PKK, Programm, Köln 1984, p. 45, 49.\n\n[4] Ali Kemal Özcan, Turkey’s Kurds. A theoretical analysis of the PKK and Abdullah Öcalan, New York 2006, p. 86.\n\n[5] Özcan, Turkey’s Kurds, p. 89.\n\n[6] Martin van Bruinessen, ’Between guerrilla war and political murder: the Workers’ Party of Kurdistan’, Middle East Report (1988) 153 (July – August), 40–42+44–46+50, there p. 46, 50.\n\n[7] Bruinessen, ’Between guerrilla war and political murder’, p 40, 41.\n\n[8] Ibidem, p. 42\n\n[9] Martin van Bruinessen, ’The nature and uses of violence in the Kurdish conflict’, Paper presented at the international colloquium “Ethnic Construction and Political Violence”, organized by the Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, Cortona, July 2–3, 1999, p. 10.\n\n[10] Aliza Marcus, Blood and Belief. The PKK and the Kurdish fight for independence, New York 2007, p .55\n\n[11] Nikolas Brauns and Brigitte Kiechle, PKK. Perspektiven des kurdischen Freiheitkampfes: Zwischen Selbsbestimmung, EU und Islam, Stuttgart 2010, p. 55.\n\n[12] Brauns & Kiechle, PKK, 57.\n\n[13] Abdullah Öcalan, Prison Writings. The PKK and the Kurdish question in the 21st century, London 2011. p. 21.\n\np. 42.\n\n[14] Olivier Grojean, ’The production of the new man within the PKK’, European Journal of Turkish Studies (2012). Online at [http://ejts.revues.org/4925] p. 4.\n\n[15] Özcan, Turkey’s Kurds, p. 91.\n\n[16] Brauns & Kiechle, PKK, p. 84.\n\n[17] PKK, Programm, Utrecht 1995. No page numbers.\n\n[18] Brauns & Kiechle, PKK, p. 76.\n\n[19] Ibidem, p. 77.\n\n[20] Ibidem, p. 77.\n\n[21] Yüce, Gedanken, p. 79. Emphasis added.\n\n[22] PKK, Programm, Utrecht 1995. No page numbers.\n\n[23] Yüce, Gedanken, p. 79.\n\n[24] Marcus, Blood and belief, p. 291.\n\n[25] Brauns & Kiechle, PKK, p. 66.\n\n[26] Anja Flach, Jiyaneke din – ein anderes Leben, Hamburg 2011. p. 19.\n\n[27] Çelik, Den Berg Ararat versetzen, p. 47.\n\n[28] Flach, Jiyaneke din, p. 20.\n\n[29] Grojean, ’The production of the new man within the PKK’. p. 9.\n\n[30] Handan Çağlayan, ’From Kawa the Blacksmith to Ishtar the Goddess: Gender Constructions in Ideological-Political Discourses of the Kurdish Movement in post-1980 Turkey’, European Journal of Turkish Studies 14 (2012). Online at [http://ejts.revues.org/4657] p. 2.\n\n[31] Çağlayan, ’From Kawa the Blacksmith to Ishtar the Goddess’, p. 8.\n\n[32] Abdullah Öcalan, ’Jineolojî als Wissenschaft der Frau’, Einleitende Worte der Herausgeberin, oline at [http://www.kurdistan-report.de/index.php/archiv/2014/172/110-jineoloji-als-wissenschaft-der-frau].\n\n[33] Çağlayan, ’From Kawa the Blacksmith to Ishtar the Goddess’, p. 2.\n\n[34] Çağlayan, ’From Kawa the Blacksmith to Ishtar the Goddess’, p. 9.\n\n[35] Ibidem, p. 10.\n\n[36] Marcus, Blood and belief, p. 244.\n\n[37] Çağlayan, ’From Kawa the Blacksmith to Ishtar the Goddess’. p. 13.\n\n[38] Brauns & Kiechle, PKK, p. 247.\n\n[39] Abdullah Öcalan, Declaration on the Democratic Solution of the Kurdish Question, London 1999. p. 71.\n\n[40] Öcalan, Declaration on the Democratic Solution, p. 59.\n\n[41] Ibidem, p. 19.\n\n[42] Öcalan, Declaration on the Democratic Solution, p. 17.\n\n[43] Marcus, Blood and Belief, p. 248.\n\n[44] Brauns & Kiechle, PKK, p. 94.\n\n[45] Marcus, Blood and Belief, p. 291.\n\n[46] Ahmet Hamdi Akkaya and Joost Jongerden, ’Reassembling the political: the PKK and the project of radical democracy’ , European Journal of Turkish Studies (2012). Online at [http://ejts.revues.org/4615]. p. 6.\n\n[47] TATORT Kurdistan, Democratic Autonomy in North Kurdistan. The council movement, gender liberation, and ecology – in practice, Hamburg 2013. p. 53.\n\n[48] Hamdi Akkaya & Jongerden, ’Reassembling the political’, p. 6.\n\n[49] Abdullah Öcalan, The declaration of Democratic Confederalism, 2005 online at [http://www.kurdmedia.com/article.aspx?id=10174].\n\n[50] Öcalan, Prison Writings, 139.\n\n[51] Idem, p. 40.\n\n[52] TATORT Kurdistan, Democratic Autonomy, p. 98.\n\n[53] Çelik, Den Berg Ararat versetzen, p. 223 — 224.\n\n[54] [Unknown author], Licht am Horizont. Annäherungen an die PKK, n.p. 1996 online at [http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/isku/hintergrund/Licht/IV-1-3.htm].\n\n[55] Brauns & Kiechle, PKK, p. 82.\n\n[56] Öcalan, Prison Writings, p. 50.\n\n[57] [Unknown author], Licht am Horizont, online at [http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/isku/hintergrund/Licht/IV-1-4.htm].\n\n[58] Abdullah Öcalan, The third domain. Reconstructing liberation. Extracts from the submissions to the ECHR, London 2003, p. 52, 53\n\n[59] Öcalan, The third domain, .p. 54, 56.\n\n[60] Thomas Schmidinger, Krieg und Revolution in Syrisch-Kurdistan. Analysen und Stimmen aus Rojava, Vienna 2014. p. 222, 223.\n\n[61] Öcalan, Prison Writings, p. 60.\n\n[62] Ibidem, p. 52.\n\n[63] Çağlayan, ’From Kawa the Blacksmith to Ishtar the Goddess’, p.13.\n\n\n\n"}}},{"rowIdx":195,"cells":{"text":{"kind":"string","value":"#title The New-Old PKK\n#subtitle “democratic confederalism”, “women’s liberation ideology”, “Kurdish freedom”, “paradigm-shift”\n#author Alex de Jong\n#LISTtitle The New-Old PKK – “democratic confederalism”, “women’s liberation ideology”, “Kurdish freedom”, “paradigm-shift”\n#SORTauthors Alex de Jong\n#SORTtopics Rojava, kurds, kurdistan, Murray Bookchin, democracy\n#date 8 March 2016\n#source [[https://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article37467][www.europe-solidaire.org]]\n#lang en\n\n\n***** The PKK has continued to struggle for justice in Kurdistan. But its democratic transformation leaves much to be desired.\n\nBefore the late 2014 battle for Kobanê, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) was an almost forgotten force in the West. But with the Syrian-Kurdish Democratic Union Party’s (PYD) — a sister organization to the PKK — heroic struggle against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, it was clear that the party and its imprisoned founder, Abdullah Öcalan, could not be ignored. And not just in left circles.\n\nThe last time the PKK attracted widespread interest was during the 1990s when it fought a brutal war with the Turkish state for Kurdish self-determination. At that time, the PKK’s ideological references were thoroughly Marxist-Leninist. Support for the organization on the Left was strongest among groups that placed their emphasis on national liberation struggles in the Third World.\n\nLibertarian socialist and anti-Stalinist currents were more skeptical. They pointed to the party’s nationalist orientation and its antidemocratic character, demonstrated by Öcalan’s lethal purges. PKK violence against civilians — like the families of pro-government militia members or government-employed teachers — was also a major point of contention.\n\nBut times have changed — and so, apparently, has the PKK.\n\n*** From Lenin to Bookchin\n\nAmong admirers of the “new PKK” — particularly anarchists and libertarian socialists — there is a common narrative of the PKK’s transformation. The PKK was a Stalinist party leading a guerrilla war in the 1980s and ’90s, and while it enjoyed genuine support among the oppressed Kurdish minority in Turkey who saw it as their champion, its goal of national self-determination was insufficient for winning liberation.\n\nWhat’s more, the PKK was flawed in ways that prevented it from becoming a genuinely emancipatory force: it was vanguardist, had an authoritarian structure, and equated the conquest of state power with liberation. Hamstrung by such defects, the PKK’s struggle stagnated in the late nineties, before Öcalan’s ultimate arrest by Turkish authorities in 1999.\n\nBut once in prison, the narrative continues, Öcalan was forced to confront the failures of Marxism, Leninism, and the original PKK project. He started to read widely beyond the Marxist-Leninist canon, fundamentally rethought his vision of liberation, and formulated a drastically new worldview to overcome his party’s shortcomings.\n\nThe name most commonly cited as a decisive influence on Öcalan in this endeavor is Murray Bookchin [1], a libertarian socialist living in the United States. Bookchin had been a Marxist, but he eventually developed his own theory of social change that identified the tension between capital accumulation — with its imperative for eternal growth — and the environment as the central capitalist contradiction. According to Bookchin, the struggle to save the ecosystem has an inherently anticapitalist dynamic and can unite the world’s exploited and alienated.\n\nBookchin’s post-capitalist vision was a radically downsized society, organized around autonomous, ecologically sustainable municipalities. These municipalities — called communes — would replace large cities, which he believed to be a threat to the environment and a hindrance to direct democracy.\n\nTo bring about this society, Bookchin favored a combination of political action and prefigurative organizing — the creation in the here and now of structures such as cooperatives and democratic associations that could foreshadow a better society. Political action and these experiments would, Bookchin argued, begin to empower ordinary people in their communities.\n\nIt was compelling enough to win over Öcalan, who, in the popular narrative, made a balance sheet of the PKK’s failures and decided to reorient his goals to a similar kind of libertarian socialism called “democratic confederalism.”\n\nÖcalan’s lawyers then shared his ideas with the PKK, who embraced it and radically reformed the organization’s theory and practice. Today — the story concludes — the PKK is the ideological center of a much wider liberation struggle, a kind of think tank dedicated to spreading Öcalan’s libertarian-socialist vision throughout the larger Kurdish movement. Armed seizure of the state has been replaced as a goal with a focus on building prefigurative structures in civil society.\n\n*** Back to the Future\n\nThis tale — of an imprisoned revolutionary who makes a sober assessment of past experiences and is unafraid to make real changes while remaining true to the goal of human emancipation — has a certain romantic appeal. The PKK’s supposed move from a dogmatic “Marxism-Leninism” to libertarian socialism also resonates with the wider view that twentieth-century socialism failed because of misplaced trust in the state and the party.\n\nHowever, there is another possible interpretation of the PKK’s evolution — one that stresses continuities rather than ruptures. In this view, today’s “democratic confederalism,” while certainly a departure from the “old” PKK, isn’t the break it has been made out to be.\n\nConsider the PKK’s conception of women’s liberation — a central element in the PKK’s current vision of social change. Concern for women’s liberation is often associated with Öcalan’s “libertarian-socialist turn” but it actually precedes it.\n\nWomen’s struggles came to the forefront in the 1990s as the PKK expanded from being a guerrilla to a mass movement. The PKK’s expansion increased its influence in a wide range of social and cultural organizations and as a result more women joined. Already in the nineties, one third of the PKK’s guerrillas were women.\n\nIn 1994, the Free Women’s Movement of Kurdistan (later renamed the Free Women’s Union of Kurdistan, YAJLK) was established and the PKK also began forming women-only units — partly because many male guerrillas refused to take orders from female commanders. Others hoped that women-only units would help break up internalized notions of female obedience and servility. Today, a mandatory gender quota is in place in gender-mixed PKK groups; 40 percent of leadership must be women while executive posts are split between one man and one woman.\n\nWomen in the PKK credit Öcalan with these policies. As one female activist put it,\n\n“[W]e were very far from our own history and were always subjected to repression. That is why the movement needed a leader. We were buried and cemented in, and did not get through. Chair Apo [Öcalan’s nickname] was the only one who broke through. He was the flower that broke through the asphalt. He gave us hope ... [C]hair Apo showed us our personal freedom as women.”\n\nÖcalan’s concept [2] of women’s liberation is shaped by myths of a Neolithic matriarchal past that was purportedly displaced by the rise of class society and the formation of the first states. According to Öcalan, this oppression is rooted in patriarchal attitudes, transferred from generation to generation, and internalized by women. He argues that these views are transmitted through the family — especially through notions of male honor and control over women’s bodies — and that liberation means unlearning them.\n\nÖcalan’s ideas about Kurdish national liberation overlap with those on women’s liberation and also feature a return to an idealized, ancient past. In this Neolithic past, women were not only free but the Kurds as a whole were an egalitarian, freedom-loving people. With the rise of states and organized religion the Kurds became alienated from their own proper identity, and what Öcalan calls “the Kurdish mentality” was distorted. Today’s problems are all traced back to this original fall from grace.\n\nThe PKK in the 1990s also often referenced Kurdish history, as when Öcalan claimed that defending their “thousands of years old fatherland” was the highest honor and duty of all Kurds. The PKK back then was strongly nationalist. Öcalan claimed that a “conception of humanity” not founded on patriotism was a “rotten crime.”\n\nMore recently Öcalan has criticized ahistorical notions of nations and states and he has declared that they are social constructs. However, what has remained constant is the idea that the PKK’s struggle is one for the expression of an “authentic Kurdish identity.” Where before this goal was framed in terms of national self-determination and state-building, today it is presented as a renaissance of a utopian Neolithic past.\n\nDespite the changing discourse, Öcalan still insists on the existence of a transhistorical Kurdish identity. In 2011 he wrote, “many of the qualities and characteristics attributed to the Kurds and their society today can already be seen in the Neolithic communities of the cis-Caucasus mountain ranges — the area we call Kurdistan.”\n\nÖcalan’s essentialist view of identities — whether he is talking about Kurds or women — has passed through his “turn” with little change. For the PKK, “women” are the social subject that stands at the center of emancipation, playing a similar role to the proletariat in classical Marxism — the universally oppressed subject whose emancipation entails universal emancipation. According to Öcalan the “role which once was allotted to the working class, today falls to women.”\n\nBut the category of women itself is never interrogated. According to Öcalan, women are biologically more compassionate and empathic than men and have more “emotional intelligence.” Womanhood is associated with motherhood — women “possess life itself” and thus are supposedly closer to nature than men.\n\nThis leads to seeing women as a homogeneous category with a singular ideology corresponding to its liberation struggle. The PKK’s women’s party — Party of Free Women (PJA) — declared that “the women’s liberation ideology is an alternative for all previous world-views, whether right-wing or left-wing.”\n\nThe arrest of Öcalan in 1999 [3] inaugurated a period of turmoil for the PKK. Many supporters and members of the PKK were shocked by the statements Öcalan made after his capture. In court, he declared:\n\n“I want to continue my life committed to two promises; I want to serve the full realization of democracy, peace and fraternity. I believe that the intentions of the [Turkish] state are similar. In addition I want to see that the PKK stops the armed struggle and I want to dedicate myself to this goal. I want a PKK that is not against the state and which assumes a legal status.”\n\nÖcalan denied that the PKK wanted to break up Turkey and insisted that Kurds would be able to live in freedom inside a reformed Turkish republic. He blamed the war on the “triumvirate of Agas, Sheiks, and Asirets” — pre-modern forces that had supposedly divided the Kurds and the Turkish state — instead of on the national oppression of the Kurds.\n\nÖcalan’s statements in the Turkish courtroom contradicted the program and founding documents of the PKK. In the past, the PKK denounced the push for Kurdish autonomy, rather than independence, as a betrayal.\n\nBut beginning in the early nineties, Öcalan talked increasingly about “a free Kurdistan,” and suggested that Kurdish autonomy inside Turkey on the basis of “full equality,” rather than a Kurdish nation-state, was possible.\n\n“Freedom” came to mean the cultivation of the “true Kurdish identity” and the ability to express this identity. After his capture, Öcalan made this change in the goal of the PKK explicit in a way he had not done before. He declared: “the Kurdish question can be considered in essence a question of freedom of speech and culture.” Thousands left the movement in disappointment and those who refused to follow the new line were attacked as traitors and enemy agents.\n\nWhile in prison Öcalan reworked the idea of “Kurdish freedom” to mean the goal of “democratic confederalism.” Borrowing from Bookchin, Öcalan now says he rejects the idea of taking over or overthrowing the state to achieve his goal and argues that emancipatory movements should avoid seeking state power and focus on achieving liberation through civil society — not smashing the state, but making it superfluous in the process. Once people realize that they “don’t need the state,” it will slowly wither away.\n\nÖcalan certainly changed his stated views after his capture, but there was not such a clean break as the popular narrative suggests. Already before his capture, Öcalan had started to abandon concepts associated with the Marxist-Leninist PKK. In the 1980s, the PKK declared that its goal was an “independent, socialist Kurdistan,” basing its conception of socialism loosely on the examples of the Soviet Union and China. But the party redefined its vision of socialism over the course of the next decade.\n\nAlready in 1993, Öcalan claimed that the PKK, when it discussed “scientific socialism,” did not refer to Marxism but to its own peculiar socialism that “exceeds the interests of states, the nation, and classes.” The PKK’s new socialism wasn’t even a socioeconomic system; instead it was the name for the creation of a “new man” — selfless, courageous, and patriotic — created through struggle.\n\nSocial and economic emancipation, already overshadowed by national liberation, thus faded further into the background. In his current writings, Öcalan rarely discusses social and economic issues, declaring that “questions of an alternative economic, class, and social structure are not particularly meaningful.” His vision of a socialist society is limited to a robust welfare state with work, health care, and education for everybody.\n\nIn a 1996 interview, Öcalan named Germany as an example of his kind of socialism.\n\n*** No Savior From on High\n\nThe PKK did not jettison its old program or embrace its new goals and self-conception through a collective process of deliberation. Instead, party leaders simply carried out the directives of Öcalan.\n\nIn the 1980s, Öcalan became the undisputed leader of the PKK. The PKK had congresses where its program was decided but Öcalan stood above such mechanisms. He built an organization in which cadres rose to leadership positions by demonstrating their loyalty to him.\n\nIn the PKK, following Öcalan became synonymous with dedication to the cause of Kurdish liberation. Those who refused to accept this were purged. Other party leaders owed their legitimacy to Öcalan’s approval, and without it they would have lost their position. Even in prison his power remains undiluted.\n\nJust like its sister organizations in Syria, Iran, and Iraq, the PKK is a member of the Group of Communities in Kurdistan (KCK). Inside the KCK, the PKK is responsible for the “ideological front,” its task defined as being “responsible for implementing the ideology and philosophy of the chairperson”; “every KCK-member should take the ideological and ethical values of the PKK as their basis.”\n\nThe Kurdish struggle has attracted attention for good reason, and the dedication of its militants in the worst of conditions should not be in doubt. But the much-lauded transformation of the PKK leaves much to be desired. It’s not the clear example of a transition from authoritarian Leninism to libertarian socialism it is often made out to be.\n\nBefore and after Öcalan’s capture — before and after what the PKK calls the “paradigm-shift” — one essential element of the party remained unchanged: Öcalan is “the leadership” (önderlik). But liberation cannot come from following the twists and turns of a single leader; liberation needs a collective struggle on the back on mass organizations that foreshadow the radical democracy we wish to see in the world.\n\nAlex de Jong\n\n*** P.S.\n\nJacobin. 3.18.16: [[https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/03/pkk-ocalan-kurdistan-isis-murray-bookchin/][www.jacobinmag.com]]\n\nAlex de Jong is editor of the socialist journal Grenzeloos and an activist in the Netherlands.\n\n\n[1] [[http://www.versobooks.com/authors/1876-murray-bookchin][www.versobooks.com]]\n\n[2] [[http://ocalan-books.com/english/liberating-life-womans-revolution.html][ocalan-books.com]]\n\n[3] [[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/daily/feb99/ocalanturkey18.htm][www.washingtonpost.com]]\n\n\n\n"}}},{"rowIdx":196,"cells":{"text":{"kind":"string","value":"#title For the Love of God\n#subtitle a continuation of “Golem in the Catacombs”\n#author Alex Gorrion\n#SORTtopics religion, christianity, apparatus, power, review, The Anvil Review\n#date December 28, 2014\n#source The Anvil Review\n#lang en\n\n\n\nWhen living beings are separated from their own expressions, gestures, tools, and traditions, they are reduced to golem, mere bodies, and every influence that these things, once a part of their being and now expropriated by the category of “apparatus”, exercise over them is now read as a form of corruption or control. This postmodern trope of the fragility of liberty—all influence is coercion; therefore liberty is a utopian concept—derives from the unconscious assumption that every factor external to a golem has in fact been designed to mold it and guide it through the apparatuses where its miserable life plays out.\n\nThe defeated communards of 1871 who had taken refuge in the Paris catacombs suffered a particularly gruesome fate. The victorious Versailles troops, who had received tacit support—in a stirring example of elite internationalism—from Bismarck's Prussians, dynamited the catacomb tunnels where the refugees huddled, killing thousands. We can only wonder how many survived the initial blast, the earth itself falling in on their heads (the World Turned Upside Down falling back into place?), and wandered the catacombs, emptied of their utopia, in search of some subsistence.\n\nLater, the Sacré Cœur was built on the butte of Montmarte, the proletarian neighborhood where the insurrection began and where one of the key battles took place in the suppression of the Commune. The extravagant penance, now a major tourist attraction, prevents us from returning to the site of our loss. Long before the science of urban architecture as social control, the Church knew construction as an act of war designed to finish off a defeated enemy, for le Sacre Couer was one of the last of a long lineage. The famous monastery at Mont-Saint-Michel was built atop the most important gathering place of the Gallic druids; unwitting lines of tourists pay it homage today with cameras in hand. Throughout South America, the oldest churches are to be found atop the waka of the Aymara or the sacred sites of other colonized peoples.\n\nIn literature, another kind of Church was built atop an earlier revolutionary defeat. Victor Hugo's monumental Les Miserables is set against the June Rebellion of 1832 (though it must also be read as a fruit of Hugo's troubled relationship with the revolution of 1848). And although Hugo, a leftist, is sympathetic with the revolutionaries, his is above all a tale of redemption. Marius and Cosette may marry and find happiness and security (in the tale's ethical grammar the latter is implicitly proffered as a precondition for the former) with Marius's upper-class family (and, in the original novel, Jean Valjean's factory money), their youthful flirtation with insurrection overlooked. A questioned God smiles on them, revealing in the end His indubitable munificence, with the Happy Ending serving as proof of transformative forgiveness. In an earlier age, kings and tsars had to exercise general pardons—the Jubilee—to appear godlike. This new God need only save one soul—like the lottery winner or the pop star that rises alone out of crowds of miserable millions—to redeem Himself for the spectating masses.\n\nLes Miserables' long run tells a sort of story about the rise and fall of modernity. The original novel sets the archetypes into play. Love conquers all and heroes find happy endings. Hugo, after all, needed to tack into a new wind after the massacres of '48. He was part of a generation of writers who flirted with revolutionary ideas, only to abandon them when they were put into practice and used as weapons against the old order by “the wretched of the earth.” A republican who tended towards pacifism, Hugo spoke out vehemently for the cause of equality and fraternity and even consorted with anarchists, yet he also helped to suppress the 1848 insurrection in Paris. Later, old Victor was not as active as many of his colleagues who would lend their pens to justify the repression of proles and pétroleuses after the Paris Commune. He nonetheless found the utility in a tactful separation between art and life, and class-climbing lovers would provide the perfect protagonists for the modern storyline.\n\nLes Miserables the musical struck the perfect note for a new generation of sell-out artists and failed revolutionaries, remassified and forced to consume their own defeat. The most poignant song in Schönberg and Boublil's musical, opening in Paris and London before becoming a Broadway hit, is “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables.” In the lines,\n
\nHere they talked of revolution.\n
\nHere it was they lit the flame.\n
\nHere they sang about tomorrow\n
\nAnd tomorrow never came.\n
\n[...]\n
\nOh my friends, my friends, don't ask me\n
\nWhat your sacrifice was for\n
\nEmpty chairs at empty tables\n
\nWhere my friends will sing no more\n
\none can almost imagine a recent university graduate, newly thrust into the real world, surveying in his mind the halls in the Sorbonne where the students debated, or the meeting room in Chicago where SDS had their 1969 congress that would lead to the creation of an armed vanguard, back before the hammer fell.\n\nIt is the song of one who has participated in something transcendental, something real for the first time in his life, only to lose it because the community it was born in has been swept away, the other communards either shot down (as in 1832) or robbed by the Spectacle and the prisons (as were the Weathermen and their less mediatic contemporaries). The singer knows not how to find his way back and, re-enslaved by a cruel purgatory, can only blame the foolishness of his braver comrades for having tried to storm heaven.\n\nFinally, the Hollywood remake with Russell Crowe and Hugh Jackman proving—at times painfully—that today's actors can still sing and dance, closes the cycle. Passing through the crass cultural cannibalism of the last years, with which every narrative that ever enjoyed an ounce of success is retailored for the silver screen in a desperate bid to continue producing without creating anything original, Les Miserables' love story—at a time when the romantic narrative must arm itself with witty cynicism or worldly nuance to rise above its festering limitations—comes off as antiquated and trite. It must hide behind a grandiose production and the outsider antics of Sascha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter because it is simply too weak to carry the plot, though in the original musical it is clearly identified as the principal narrative thread, all of Hugo's other subplots and digressions abandoned without hesitation.\n\nThe excitement of the insurrection is far more moving than the romance, and here we find another important theme. Of necessity the Spectacle presents us with increasingly numerous renditions of revolution, from Fight Club to Robin Hood. To serve as operations of recuperation, some of these revolutions defeat themselves through extremism, providing a cautionary moral tale against putting ideals into practice. Others attack one aspect of power, say the banks, while reinforcing another, like patriarchy, and yet others succeed by piercing the conspiracy, revealing the truth, and allowing the peaceful masses or the good institutions to make everything right, leaving the actual transformation to play out off camera. How is the rebellion of 1832 recuperated?\n\nThis question is difficult to answer, just as today's spectators might have a hard time placing the story's defeated revolution in the genealogy of their current liberty. The same problem crops up in other films about freedom. William Wallace fights against an evil king—the bad kind of authority—and the voiceover in the final scenes assures us that the Scots eventually won their freedom, a fact that their recent opportunity to vote on independence can only confirm. In one of Mel Gibson's remakes of Braveheart, Patriot—the one set during the American Revolution—the relation between the heroic struggle portrayed and the audience's consequent lack of need to struggle is even more obvious. But what about an attempted political revolution in 19th century constitutional France? On the one hand, the dissidents' decision to take up arms is an admirable flaw, when they really all should have just married well and joined high society. On the other hand, their rebellion is presented as an idealistic spirit—most purely embodied by Gavroche, the fearless child—that we are meant to believe eventually triumphed, though it can be carried on just as easily by the final scene's marching masses as by armed insurgents.\n\nWhat makes up for the story's ambiguity with regards to revolution is the parallel plot of redemption. The State is redeemed in Javert's mercy, the Church is redeemed in Bishop Myriel, and the bourgeoisie are redeemed as the guarantors of Marius and Cosette's eventual happiness (suggesting a curious window on the American Founding Fathers' replacement of Locke's “property” with “the pursuit of happiness”).\n\nDo you hear the people sing\n
\nLost in the valley of the night?\n
\nIt is the music of a people\n
\nWho are climbing to the light.\n\nFor the wretched of the earth\n
\nThere is a flame that never dies.\n
\nEven the darkest night will end\n
\nAnd the sun will rise.\n\nThey will live again in freedom\n
\nIn the garden of the Lord.\n
\nThey will walk behind the plough-share,\n
\nThey will put away the sword.\n
\nThe chain will be broken\n
\nAnd all men will have their reward.\n\nWill you join in our crusade?\n
\nWho will be strong and stand with me?\n
\nSomewhere beyond the barricade\n
\nIs there a world you long to see?\n
\nDo you hear the people sing?\n
\nSay, do you hear the distant drums?\n
\nIt is the future that they bring\n
\nWhen tomorrow comes!\n\nThe Christian moral—wait, pray, and all will be well—comes through in the final song. And the presence of that moral in the three generations of the telling, at the adolescence, decadence, and twilight of modernity, suggests a continuity that is both obvious and inadmissible.\n\nI don't know how the tale was received by its original audience, but by the third telling, the love that holds up the contradictions in the narrative structure of Les Miserables is not the cupidic escapism of its young paramours, but the love of God that provides transcendental weight to the promise of redemption, overwhelming the failed, forgotten revolution's promises of transcendence.\n\nWe can argue, and with good reason, that during the Enlightenment science replaced Christianity as the religion of the State. We should not, however, forget Christianity's paradoxical persistence. It is a key force in nationalist movements from Ukraine to Venezuela, and an important tool for turning exploited populations against revolution, winning obedience to state authorities, extending capitalist property relations around the world. In South America and Africa in particular, Christian missionaries serve in many ways as advance scouts for logging and mining companies. And Christianity's close cousin, Islam, is effectively building states throughout Africa and Asia in places where European colonialism failed to do so.\n\nAnarchists in this century do not talk as much about religion as an animating force for the apparatuses of control, and if we do, we tend to understand it as a force in the lives of people who have not progressed as far in their civilizational development, whether the backwater under the microscope is South Carolina or Kenya.\n\nWe might speak of two distinct figures that represent the exploited during the Christian and then the scientific phases of capitalist accumulation; the zombie who is enchanted and set to work and the golem who is constructed by its master, made of broken material, simple dust. Christianity simply robs people's souls to turn them into workers, confounding its slaves or holding them captive to metaphysical blackmail, while scientific power gives the masters an architectural control over the environment and reproduction of their subjects, not merely enslaving them but creating them out of whole cloth.\n\nBut this progression of distinct phases owes too much to the fundamental eschatology that Christianity and Western science share. In practice, the two modalities of power operate simultaneously. In a platonic world where body and spirit have been alienated, in a Christian world where the body has been shamed and the spirit captivated, in a capitalist world where the body has been enslaved and the spirit has been banished, and in a scientific world where the body has been mechanized and the spirit disproved, the apparatuses of control lack an animus.\n\nThey (by which I suppose I mean the conduits of apparatuses that exist to evaluate other apparatuses) can measure the power that flows between the conduits and captives of a given apparatus, binding and differentiating them. But they are also aware of the limits of a captive's identification with their apparatus, a certain melancholy among conduits that acts like friction, decreasing their conductivity and even halting production. And they have seen cases of a grim nihilism that arises from time to time, causing captives to act like barbarians and handle their apparatus with brute violence and against its design, or one that spreads more invisibly to conduit and captive alike, causing them to blur and desert their roles.\n\nEven in a well designed apparatus, the flow of power is not enough to motivate the conduits or bind the captives to their role. The threat of punishment is also a necessary element, but too honest to be left in the open for long without delivering diminishing returns and augmenting risks. The people need to be animated through an affective allegiance with an entity that cannot disappoint them by changing the terms of the contract, as any institution of power will eventually do when it capitalizes on whatever trust has been deposited in it. That entity is their own longing, the first glimpse of transcendence, the very substance the State has always worked to control or destroy.\n\nIf in its first millennium the Church aimed to keep the spirit out of the commoners' grasp, effectively creating a less spiritual world by enclosing it in Latin scripture and in the Holy See and stamping out one of the most frequent heresies—that the Holy Ghost spoke to everyone who listened—now it is one of several institutions whose purpose is to divert the miserable and the wretched from a nihilistic confrontation with a dead, scientific society by dangling in front of them a new spirituality, controlled as the old one was but not so tightly, for the new permissible spirit is accessible, on sale, and adaptable to consumer demand.\n\nWhile traveling recently in South America, I got to see this aggressive marketing firsthand. The evangelists are at the forefront, but is it overly paranoid to assume that one pope was recalled and another was elected to jumpstart a new Catholic evangelism in South America? From one country to the next, billboards announced mega-revivals by visiting evangelists from the US, each eager to expand their fief. And the growth of evangelism goes hand in hand with popular support for snitching, mining, policing, the eradication of indigenous cultures, and development in general. I also came face to face with a revived Christianity's effectiveness at dealing with potentially destabilizing mental illness and subversive cynicism, when I got to know two truck drivers. The first was batshit crazy, and the second was a jaded ex-revolutionary who had been imprisoned during the dictatorship and evidently was not impressed by what the socialists had accomplished in power (a disenchantment that for some people leads to radicalization, but that has driven entire, forgotten generations into the arms of God).\n\nThe first driver told about a girl in Brazil who was dead for a week and then got resuscitated. While dead, St. Peter took her to visit heaven and hell so she could tell everyone about it. In hell she came across the Pope, hung upside down for being a Catholic, and Celia Cruz for her lascivious lyrics. She also spied Michael Jackson.\n\n“For molesting children?” I asked.\n
\n“For dancing backwards, contrary to the spirit of God,” the driver told me with a straight face. He went on to explain that the King of Pop was surrounded by moonwalking demons, tormenting him to eternity for his linear perverseness.\n
\nLike I said, batshit crazy, the kind of person who would undermine any rational discourse of social control, if the Church hadn't given them a ready made set of fantasies and bugaboos to fixate on.\n\nI thought I would like the second truck driver more, because I learned early on that he had been a political prisoner. During the first hours of our shared drive, we spoke about the dictatorship, the current government, and the struggle by indigenous people in the region. Then the sun set, he turned off the radio, looked over at me, and asked if I believed in God. The following hours were Hell, as he aggressively tried to convince me that people were evil, and that quinoa was God's way of letting the natives know about Jesus, since the Bible didn't arrive until much later.\n\nWhen he stopped to help a stranded driver replace a spare tire, I told him, “See, you're a good person!”\n\n“I am not good!” he shrieked, tears forming in his eyes.\n\nA slow learner, I finally decided it was a mistake to try to have a reasonable conversation with him. I will never know what happened to that truck driver in prison, why he hated himself, and to what extent the corruption of his socialist former comrades affected him, but it seemed clear that Christianity mediated it for him. Love of God as hatred of self and hatred of society, but also as an opportunity to do good in a safe, non-projectual way that requires no emotional risk, since the end is already written. Without that, I doubt he would have been able to function as a productive member of society.\n\nWho can doubt that Christianity today is both innovative and on the cutting edge of social control, when they consider the great currency that Christianity has among the mad and insane? While the pills that are meant to regulate the emotional unreliability of the golem remain imperfect, the opiate of religion succeeds in redeeming millions of depressives and psychotics, casualties of capitalism who would otherwise turn to a destabilizing lunacy, as socially useful subjects. After all, good Christians may play out their paranoid persecution fantasies while faithfully serving as snitches, taxpayers, workers, and soldiers. Faith can be the release for their madness, a belief in human evil as the non-heretical expression of a manichean nihilism, and they never need to see the inside of an asylum.\n\nThe simultaneity of a Christian modality of power with the modality of scientific social control is also evident in the affective allegiance that can only exist for the subjects of a totalitarian state. Even in this age of scientific rationalism, people can experience a transformative rapture when they surrender themselves to the absolute power of a bureaucratic institution.\n\nIn the abstract this hypothesis, or any other that could ascribe such passion to a bureaucracy, seems doubtful. But imagine what it was like for the arrestees of the Greenscare, locked up in the dungeons of the State, their entire future in the hands of the FBI. When they broke and agreed to become snitches, did they feel the warm rush of clemency, like the kiss of the papal ring? Giving themselves over to the advances of the long-shunned State, did they suddenly find themselves in the presence of God, as Winston Smith finally found Big Brother?\n\nWith the invention of the golem, spiritual matters should have been put to rest. The living world has been utterly destroyed, ground to dust, and our new bodies—our new selves—are made from that dust, constructed in arrangements that suit the needs of power and set to play in a Garden of Eden that is really just one big factory. How could cyborgs dream? Yet dream we do, and become depressed, and sometimes go off the deep end and paint the canvass of our misery with a red more real than acrylic tones can simulate (guns will be blamed, though fortunately in the last few years the disarmed nations have increasingly belied this allegation with enthusiastic uses of knives and automobiles).\n\nI know very little about the old Buddhist states, but I can imagine that if they had grown to install a world system metaphysically organized atop the opposite pole in a similar mind/matter dichotomy, with a capitalism that measured accumulations of peace and duty rather than trade and production, eventually the body—that misleading shadow of the false physical world—would reassert itself and require more archaic institutions of state authority to coddle and distract its longings, always in a sphere that did not intersect with matters of the spirit.\n\nSo it is today. The golem still dream and cry—but if they are fabricated beings made of the dust of the old world, perhaps Democritus went awry in looking for the atom in the too-small-to-see, for if even dust contains dreamings the atom must be the universe itself—and they must be given something great and out of reach to love and to fear. The subjects of state power are no longer living beings, and there is a cathedral built atop each of our past defeats. To pay homage we are told we must walk in through the doors. On arrival we're not sure it's what we were looking for but we mouth along with the rite to assuage our doubts, just as the last grandiose song in a bad musical tries to divert our dissatisfaction.\n\nBut the body cannot walk to the spirit any more than the spirit can wish itself a body.\n\nWork continues, disappointments stack up, hairs go grey and bellies flab, the tables and chairs where we sat in our passionate debates empty out, the street that was a bonfire is an apparatus again and the memory no longer seems worthy of passing on because of the inarticulate confusion it provokes in us. Yet the sense of something greater, immediate and unreachable, something that gives us courage, that could wrap us in the strongest of embraces and protect us through death or defeat, mocks us from all directions.\n"}}},{"rowIdx":197,"cells":{"text":{"kind":"string","value":"#title Golem in the Catacombs\n#author Alex Gorrion\n#SORTtopics technology, alienation, social-isolation, apparatus, class, power, review, The Anvil Review\n#date January 12, 2014\n#source The Anvil Review\n#lang en\n\n\n“The harmony of the seasons mocks me. I spend hours watching the sky, the lake, the enormous sea. This world. I feel that if I could understand it I might then begin to understand the creatures who inhabit it. But I do not understand it. I find the world always odd, but odder still, I suppose, is the fact that I find it so, for what are the eternal verities by which I measure these temporal aberrations?”\n\nJohn Banville, Birchwood\n\nIt's getting colder here. People shuffle by in hats and scarves. Fur-lined hoods appear in improbable quantities. Licensed vendors, unpacked in pleasant arrays, marshalled forth by the city in its brave quest to claim a new pedestrian shopping zone, are the first and only line of battle against the cold. They rub mittens and hunch puffy jackets against it, smile as only ascendant shopkeepers can, and roast chestnuts, slice baked goods, fetch glittery necklaces from crowded displays, and conquer what would have been a winterbarren street.\n\nI used to be a partisan of winter, back when the seasons still promised an untamed difference. Now I too huddle against it, my fire gone, protected by an old leather jacket I found, waiting in just the right size, in a freestore near here. My friends made jokes about it, a throwback to the '80s, evidently. When their jokes continued from time to time, I gathered they were actually made uncomfortable by my wearing of the jacket and its extinguished aesthetic.\n\nThe commodity demands its homage, even from those who must steal it. And my friends, anticapitalists to a one, go about in those sporty jackets made from materials far more polysyllabic than leather. Again the old question. Is it better to blend in, or to signal our defiance of the national religion? For myself, I just can't turn down a jacket that still works, and my brain won't accept that the dull brown thing actually draws attention from the citizens sunk in layers of equally mundane garb, hiding away from temperatures that still have not passed freezing.\n\nThey are a frigid people, with few defenses against even a lackluster winter. Nonetheless, this year there are fewer gloves in evidence. More people are keeping their fingers free to tap on little screens, their faces awash in blue glow, as they scuttle blindly down the streets.\n\nThe new device is finally triumphing in this economically holdout nation. Could anyone ever have doubted it? What sorts of homogenization is something so flimsy as “culture” able to hold back? This is the difference between a hula hoop and an iPhone. One is a product that may catch on or not. The other is an army that must be quartered.\n\nThe entire citizenry has revealed their vapidity. They are mere bodies stripped of all their limbs and plugged into a vast matrix of domination, perpetually vacated to serve as conduit for the flux of power. Lost creatures who fumble around in smug devices looking for love or distraction. They are children who have never learned to read maps or ask for directions, children whose intimate haunts that were never trusted to paper have now been thoroughly mapped by the devices they carry with them. The impoverished oral culture that remains has been forced through this new apparatus. There is no more face-to-face communication; all of it is legible now to the authorities.\n\nThe cellphone that shares my room sometimes like an evil stranger heralds the arrival of a new message with a cheerful arrangement of beeps. After a time I pick it up, already imagining the number of the one person I wish most to hear from. But there are only five digits on the screen. An automatic message from the phone company, wishing me a happy birthday—did I put down this day, of all days, as my birthday?—and offering me a present, a free gift, which I only have to claim by logging on to their website. I unplug the broken thing and, batteryless, it dies. Every device should be equally crippled. I turn back to the article I am writing.\n\nIn a parallel universe where justice reigns, all those cretins who claimed the internet would bring us closer together and Twitter would make the revolution are being lined up against the wall in an old park and shot. Not out of vindictiveness or vengeance. The purpose of the executions is educational.\n\n“Don't worry,” each of the condemned is told as blindfolds are affixed. “It's all okay: we'll update your Facebook.”\n\nBut parallel lines never intersect, and as ours progresses, the parks and squares empty out. Only wraiths pass by, absent to themselves, linked in a psychic death pact to another wraith staring somewhere at the same glowing screen. Only a few are still resentfully here, temporarily anchored by domesticated dogs for whom no application yet exists to take on walks. But even the housepets appear more neurotic as they pull against a leash that connects only to dead weight. They stare frantically at nothing, like inmates too long interned.\n\nI think of a resolution to make on New Years. From now on, whenever I encounter a cyborg, I will speak only to the device, the brain, and ignore the flesh-head that still pretends to be in charge. Someone should start killing cyborgs, smashing the devices and liberating the golem they hold in thrall.\n\nA year ago a wave of graffiti appeared in a park near my house. It was the first sign of life to have appeared there in some time. The occasion, I gathered, was the premature death of a member of a circle of young people who sometimes gathered on the stairs. “Alex,” the inked etchings inscribed, “We will remember you.” “Alex, brother, we won't forget.” “Alex, you were my first love.” The wall stood almost always alone. The kids I associated with it appeared less and less often. Had I only dreamt them? The graffiti, as such, seemed like its own tribe. When the wall was washed clean, the writing appeared again, as if by magic. Now there is nothing there. I wonder if I am the only one who remembers that unknown boy. What has become of his friends?\n\nAnd what superb instinct leads us to scratch away at the indelible façade of our world right at that moment when one of us snuffs out their meaningless life? As if the excess of agony standing like stale water that no apparatus yet designed can wash away pushes us Borf-like to attempt the impermissible, the inscription of our experiences in the metallic flanks of our prison. In moments like these it seems that everyone is aware that amnesia is included in the bylaws of Order; and therefore, to not forget, we must break the law. The only walls we are allowed to transform are on Facebook, mapping for the enemy.\n\nToday, true grieving demands we resort to graffiti. In a time not far off—already arrived in some parts—it will demand terrorism.\n\nSuch a tragedy that suicide loses its enchantment with age. Precisely as we have nothing left to lose, we lose the resolve to go out with dignity in that ultimate, irrecuperable subversion. As though we were genetically programmed to weaken just in those years when we can claim empirical proof that, no, things will not get better, it seems the onset of a hormonal listlessness, the liquification of a certain moral fiber running through our core, enlists us to plod along with the whole of our society, look away or grimace as we might, but ever onwards, in furtherance of whatever harebrained course the species has set.\n\nThe political consequences of this resulting lack of elderly suicide bombers are immense. Social stability may lay thanks for its prosperity on the doorstep of that biological cowardice with which failures cling to failure and rebels, at their very best, cling to those same gestures that have long since let them down.\n\nEven the engineers of each new apparatus are feeling lonely. How many start-up geeks marketing the latest Twitter spin-off or networking app sincerely believe that their invention might bring people closer? Convince a prisoner that freedom is made of walls, and they will build new cells all on their own. The guards have put down their guns but they can't hand out bricks fast enough. The general population scouts out the new galleries and wings. Is this what we've been looking for?\n\nWe often tell of Baron Hausmann of Paris, the rightwing architect who redesigned the city in time for the Commune, widening avenues and intersections, enclosing common spaces, to take the defensive advantage away from a population in revolt and allow an invading army easy access, changing the very terrain to favor a new kind of war.\n\nWe should speak more of Ildefons Cerdà, the utopian socialist architect who redesigned Barcelona in the 1860s. He sought to use architecture to bring about social justice and defuse class conflict by bringing rich and poor together in harmony. The modifications he left behind were nearly the same as those that had been imposed on Paris.\n\nThis is not new, but it is getting more common. Nowadays, hip CEOs debate whether technology will overcome alienation and powerlessness or whether it is increasingly totalitarian. One pole in this debate labors all the faster to develop new technologies, hoping to find the one that will really save us, and the other promotes conscious capitalism and donates profits to NGOs.\n\nThose who do not take sides in the social war and commit themselves to a path of negation maintain an affective allegiance to power, and the only way for them to reconcile this allegiance with whatever residual feelings of being human still trouble them in their new cyborg physiology is to decorate these allegiances, to pour even more affective attention into the “improvement” of the rites of power. The fact that what we are seeing is not an initiative of the traditional ruling class is evident in the selection of rites for decoration. Elections, military parades, leader cults, and similar processes are not the objects of adoration. In fact, the enthusiastic campaigns of civic improvement have tended to destabilize, delegitimize, or eclipse the rites that have traditionally been predominant in the sanctification of power. Neither have the initiatives come from the upper strata of the owning class; on the contrary, the most influential production to result in the decoration and intensification of the affective allegiances that tie people to power has been initiated by individuals from the computer-literate section of what would be defined as the working class, who in their astronomic ascent have founded companies that upset the preexisting capitalist hierarchy and now rank among the largest.\n\nA large part of what economists might see as growth in the last few decades is an exponential explosion in the frenetically doomed activity of alienated people constructing new apparatuses to mediate alienation, with the unintended but inevitable consequence of spreading it to new heights and moments of life.\n\nState planners and capitalists, while not the initiators of what has become an October 12, a Columbus-moment, in the field of social control, have responded in perfect form; the former by pursuing an aggressive institutional advance into the network of new and momentarily underregulated apparatuses that have been formed, and by integrating new technics into a revamped Cold War security apparatus; the latter by handing out bricks on low-interest loan, making sure that the supply never runs low and that no good deed goes unexploited.\n\nYet one has the feeling that they are not merely profiting off a plebeian circus, that even the most powerful engineers are now moved by a quest to mediate alienation. As a historical rule, up until now it seems clear that no matter how universal alienation has been, the exercise of power acted as a drug to allow a certain class of people to find fulfillment in the midst of misery. This affective marker of the ruling class as distinct holders of power is what made Foucault's theory of the immanence and diffusion of power an overstated argument and, if our present musings have set their teeth to marrow and not air, an argument that was ahead of its time.\n\nIncreasingly, a new measure of class (post-defeat class, as ladder and not as warfare) is how fully one can organize their lives in the space of the new virtual apparatuses.\n\nCould it be that the charm of winning the class war has worn out? A power-holder must hold it against someone. Once the class war is won is the moment our prison guard realizes that he too is in a prison. He is no longer a heroic protagonist wielding his power against the savage masses, but a conduit through which power moves to maintain the good order of the apparatus. The emergency is past. Power no longer needs his creativity and dedication as protagonist to triumph. Put another way, power has risen out of the class of protagonists who heroically generated and organized it so as to organize itself at a higher level. Today, affective dedication and creativity are required of all those desolate souls who must inhabit a prison, regardless of their level of relative privilege.\n\nThe forerunner of this dynamic, now repeated at a greater intensity, is the patriarchal system of bribery that allowed any expendable proletarian or peasant man to play at being tyrant, and taste a small dose of the drug that made misery enjoyable.\n\nGames of power-against played out at a continental scale color the early history of the State. Power-as-drug constituted an affective wage that roped people in to building State power. However, power-fiending protagonists do not always make decisions in the interests of stability or accumulation. The new apparatuses, organized on a logic of power-as-flux, mark a tighter arrangement whereby people are conduits of power and they pay to be played. They dedicate their affective energies to the improvement of their prison, independent of any wages, because to not do so would be spiritual suicide. While capitalism has always relied on unwaged labor, until now that labor has been provided by patriarchy or colonialism. In the Wikipedia age, the voluntary character of unwaged production is largely different.\n\nThe new apparatuses of social networking also begin to quantify informal power (the very informal power that has always held primary importance, even and especially in the institutions of formal power, which could not work without it) in “likes”, “friends”, and “followers”. But this version of informal power is not the kind created by protagonists, it is the kind produced by a mill wheel set spinning by a hundred chained bodies each chasing after their own loneliness.\n\nThere are some who attempt to pirate power at the level of property, using unregulated spaces in the new apparatuses to steal and share the digital commodities that make up such a large part of the global economy. But alienation extends so far beyond property, they can only hope to be privateers. The free circulation of the product they have liberated brings no benefit to the major concentrations of capital, whose spokespersons tell of tremendous economic losses. Surely, such crimes will not go unpunished, and in the future, prevented, as the State cannot abide unregulated space. But at a level much more dear to the world-machine than that of paltry capital accumulation, these would-be pirates are doing important work, thus they are allowed a certain license (though it is a license the most powerful nations will not recognize, just as the privateers were legally commissioned criminals in a polyarchic global system).\n\nThe service they render is to maintain and even expand the project of social control. They are the next chapter in the dilemma of the workers who occupy their factory and keep on producing. To name a common example, they have liberated music—what could be more beautiful? But this is not a pirate cassette, taped off the radio and shared among friends on a boombox in the park. This is a digital file that will be added to an inhumanly extensive library, linked in to the web for the collection of metadata, and fed directly into the ears of the golem, who will continue to slide like oil over the surface of the muted landscape, blind and limbless, doing whatever it takes to avoid wondering how they got there.\n\nSuch music is the pinnacle of our civilization. What beautiful sounds we invent, to play while the ship sinks, the weight of its spite bringing the whole sea down with it.\n\nA gust of tepid wind blows past me. I have finished my circle and found nothing to keep me. An alcoholic sits on a bench, howling at the empty streets. Young people drift by, ears plugged to the world, bobbing their heads to unheard tunes. A dog barks. A motorcycle idles. When someone passes close enough, I hear a faint, electric rendition of song.\n\n
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\n\n\n\n"}}},{"rowIdx":198,"cells":{"text":{"kind":"string","value":"#title Has the insurrection come yet? My arm is getting tired...\n#subtitle A Cartography of The Coming Insurrection, Tiqqun, and their Party\n#author Alex Gorrion\n#SORTtopics tiqqun, invisible committee, imaginary party, crypto-authoritarianism, review, The Anvil Review\n#date August 2010\n#source The Anvil Review\n#lang en\n\n\n“I didn't come to praise Caesar, but to bury him.”\n\n
\n\nThe Emperor is missing some clothes\n\nI want to critique The Coming Insurrection and some of the writings of Tiqqun not because I dislike these texts but on the contrary because I like them, because I find them interesting, and because they have become so popular. I focus on the weaknesses because I find their strengths to be self-evident and through this review I hope to encourage more people to read them, but in a critical way. The aura of fashion that has surrounded them encourages one to swallow these texts wholesale and uncritically, so that they become digested as a style rather than as an analysis.\n\nThe “Chicago Branch” of the Imaginary Party, for example, put out a translation of “Theses on the Imaginary Party” which is dotted with sentences so botched that the translators themselves probably did not understand them, as they are absolutely ungrammatical. (For example, in thesis 3: “It follows identically for the social war of which the combats can remain at their paroxysm perfectly silent and, so to speak, colorless.” And in thesis 17: “One does not insult a mode of unveiling like a fortress, even if one can usefully lead to the other.”) Despite this incomprehension, the Party members in Chicago found something so exciting in it that they “chose to reformat this text to give momentum to its North American circulation, and give it the aesthetic backing it deserves. And because we really like Tiqqun.”\n\n
\n\nHow is it to be said?\n\nWhile “Theses on the Imaginary Party” could probably be burnt to ashes without any great loss, the other translations I worked with were all poetic, and the texts thought-provoking. Theory of Bloom and The Coming Insurrection deserve to join the great works of philosophy of their respective centuries. But then, as they might agree, philosophy has often been nothing more than the justification of a certain ordering of things.\n\nWhile the Invisible Committee's writings are a sincere strike against a certain arrangement of lies, there are a number of operations they perform in how they communicate that exacerbate other of their weaknesses, and lead to a certain problematic ordering of revolution.\n\nFirst of all, they communicate through resonance, rather than through argument. This is to say, they present a description of reality as self-evident, confident that some readers will immediately identify with their words, seeing in them possibilities they find attractive, or an apt description of their own experience they might not have been able to formulate for themselves.\n\n“In our time of utter decadence, the only thing imposing about temples is the dismal truth that they are already in ruins.” [TCI, p.112]\n\nThis “truth” will ring true to some readers, thus any concrete proposition logically based on this truth will seem valid, but to other people, with other experiences, the temples—the institutions that manufacture power and meaning—may justifiably seem robust. This latter group are not presented with any convincing arguments, any evidence, to change their perception or question their experience. If the text does not resonate with them, it simply moves on without them.\n\nThe advantage of resonance is that it communicates, more than an idea, a certainty, an inspired strength, that reasoned argument cannot; and it bypasses the discourses of the Spectacle, the distracting alibis that don't deserve to be taken seriously and argued with. Presenting reasoned arguments against the flows of Capital could be like sitting down to a debate with a Creationist or global warming denier; it gives them legitimacy.\n\nThe disadvantage is its high potential for demagoguery. It creates an in-group and an out-group, based on who is predisposed to receive those words. Rightwing radio jockeys also use resonance, although with the crucial difference that they can rely on a mass fabrication of experiences to ensure a greater amount of resonance. The TV news is full of crime stories, so when they talk about fear of crime, their message will resonate with many in the audience who have a virtual experience of crime. Because the Invisible Committee cannot rely on the discourses of the Spectacle, the fact that their words resonate with so many people means they're on to something.\n\nHowever, on top of resonance they add a second problematic method of communication: the frequent use of untrue truisms. For example: “this same lack of discipline figures so prominently among the recognized military virtues of resistance fighters.” [TCI, p.111]. Actually, one finds in the biographies of many if not most resistance fighters a strict personal and group discipline, which only some do not share. But the Invisible Committee simply does not engage with facts on this factual level. And the resonance-blinded reader will be predisposed to breeze through these errors.\n\nAnother example: “Nothing can explain the systematic lack of remorse among criminals, if not the mute sentiment of participating in a grandiose work of devastation.” [Theses, thesis 20]. Actually, a great many criminals are remorseful, even when they distinctly should not be, and this reality tells us as much if not more about the functioning of power than the putative silence of the remorseless ones, into whose closed mouths the Invisible Committee is comfortable inserting entire soliloquies.\n\nThirdly is the element of totalization. Like their Situationist predecessors, the Invisible Committee is proposing a theory by which to understand the totality of domination, struggle, identity, and existence. Their theory is a very sound one, an interesting one, and an inspiring one, but it would be reductionist to understand it as the only one with any validity. Yet this, it seems, is what they do, confusing the finger with the moon like the fool in the old zen parable.\n\nWe can read, for example, statements like:\n\n“That's the reason for the well planned and public constitution of a lumpen-proletariat in all the nations where late capitalism reigns: the lumpens are there to dissuade Bloom from abandoning his essential detachment by the abrupt but frightening threat of hunger.” [Bloom, p.100].\n\nReally? The existence of an entire class can be reduced to their utility in frightening others? And when were the lumpen-proletariat ever not publicly constituted, and what were the reasons for their constitution before the advent of Bloom, and why did these reasons fully disappear with Bloom? At what point did society change so thoroughly that one theory could disappear and another appear, having fully subsumed all the mechanisms of the former?\n\nA fourth hallmark of the manifestos of the Imaginary Party is non-falsifiability. They go beyond offering poetic, inspiring, or useful descriptions of reality to argue scientific causality and propose (semi)concrete actions. It often happens something like this:\n\n“Organizations are obstacles to organizing ourselves.\n\n“In truth, there is no gap between what we are, what we do, and what we are becoming. “Organizations—political or labor, fascist or anarchist—always begin by separating, practically, these aspects of existence.” [TCI, p.15]\n\nThe first two sentences contain interesting points. They do not need to be absolutely true in order to be useful. However, the writers go on to assert a causal connection between those two points; in other words by always enforcing this existential gap, organizations make themselves obstacles. Now they have moved from a poetic or suggestive logic to a scientific one, at the same time as they make a non-falsifiable statement about the origin of organizations. This assertion cannot be true in any empirical sense, it can only be true if you accept the insistence of its truth. You must accept their specific redefinition of a common word and the writers need not take any risks by clarifying which actual groups constitute organizations, by this new definition, and which do not.\n\n“Organization” is now reserved as an ideological weapon to be used against those whose organizing one does not like.\n\nGenerally, and again like the Situationists, the Invisible Committee are careful not to make any falsifiable statements while offering up their total theory, even while they use a scientific or causal logic. And the few times they do let slip an assertion that can be factually checked, it falls flat on its face. For example:\n\n“It is a rarely disputed fact: we know from experience that the violence of explosions grows in proportion to excessive confinement.” [Bloom, p.113].\n\nThis is another fact that is not a fact. Confinement often leads to greater passivity, to depression and unresponsiveness. This can be factually confirmed in a prison, at the zoo, in densely populated cities, during the Holocaust. Violent explosions are sometimes related to confinement, but the relationship is hardly so simple to justify such a facile correlation.\n\n
\n\nThe Second Coming Insurrection\n\nFrom its very title, the millenarian character of The Coming Insurrection becomes apparent.\n\n“Everyone agrees. It's about to explode. [TCI p.9]\n\n“Whether [the collapse] comes sooner or later, the point is to prepare for it.” [TCI p.9]\n\n“Everyone agrees that things can only get worse. “The future has no future.”” [TCI p.23]\n\nThe same imminence can be found in other texts of theirs. “We know at present that the denouement is close.” [Theses, No. 15]\n\n“commodity society” has reached “its final age.” [Bloom, p.97].\n\nThe insurrection is coming. One can almost hear it panting out those very words in the exuberance of these writings. As we've seen, there is no need to argue this certainty. In the style of Appel (the earlier book by this crew), it is presented simply as “an evident.”\n\nWhat is accomplished by this operation? Those with whom these texts resonate, which is to say, those who are predisposed to agree with them, will be inspired by the poetic language, the beautiful descriptions of their own isolated experiences, and empowered by the projection of strength, certainty, and confidence. For everyone else, the text will have no effect. Thus, the Invisible Committee's chosen form of communication creates a strong divide between believer and gentile which is at its core thoroughly unstrategic, not because there is anything wrong with resonance over argument, but because the specific message the IC is spreading speaks of an impending civil war in which we will have to choose sides, yet the way they spread it forgoes the necessity of intervention, of influencing how others perceive that choice and what choice they make.\n\nOur attention is directed towards the certainty of this insurrection's arrival and away from what we might do to aid it. If we are predisposed, we will “break ranks.” If not, we won't. And that's not even worrisome, because we are presented (again) with a revolution that unfolds from an internal “dialectic”. If Blooms and the negative acts of desertion they are capable of are simply produced by the contradictions within the Spectacle, within the “empire of positivity”, then we are once again saddled with a mechanistic view of struggle.\n\nThe contradiction between dialectics and human agency is especially pronounced in Theory of Bloom. Tiqqun “is not the revolution that must be waited for, much less the revolution that we can prepare: but the revolution that is taking place according to its own invisible pulsations, in a temporality operating internally within history.” [Bloom, p.102]. Here we are presented with a revolution wholly unaffected by our choices, plans, preparations, and strategies. A revolution we need not even be conscious of, and that is, in fact, largely inscrutable, according to the assurances of the Invisible Committee. This absence of strategy undergoes a curious shift towards an exaltation of agency, with such passages acting as intermediary: “Because [Bloom's] strategy is to produce disaster, and around himself to produce silence.” [Bloom, p.115]. Since Bloom is a phenomenon and a condition produced by the Spectacle, the emptiness on the other side of alienated individuality, any strategy that is ascribed to him is a function of his characteristics rather than a choice of his desires. He is just another machine, but one that “produces” disaster.\n\nOnly at the rousing end of the text does Bloom gain his agency, and we suddenly hear about the “duty to make decisions” [Bloom, p.122].\n\nThis is neither incoherence nor creative paradox. An attentive reading of Tiqqun reveals that there is a run-of-the-mill Bloom and a becoming-conscious Bloom who is more equal than the others, just as, in a few paragraphs, we will infer the existence of an Inner Party and an Outer Party.\n\nFor now, Bloom is overwhelmingly an object, and his “fate is either to make his escape from nihilism or perish.” [Bloom, p.104]. Those who learn from history probably hear a little warning bell go off with this phrase. Didn't some prophet of the past promise us a similar insurmountable contradiction that arose from the imperatives of the system itself? Hasn't there already been an argument between those who saw revolution as something for us to make now and those who saw it as an inexorable product of history?\n\nWe simply have to ask ourselves: what if the insurrection doesn't come? What if we're just getting jerked around, and capitalism finds a way out, secures itself a future existence, as it has every time so far? Will our participation in this civil war, the morale we need to be insurgents, be staked on the “fact” that the catastrophe is here? The communists drowned themselves in a hundred year defeat by gambling that capitalism contained a contradiction it could not overcome. Is the grand carousel of history, well past the point of tragedy, looking to serve up a little farce?\n\n
\n\nDidn't you hear? The event got defeated\n\nA major problem with The Coming Insurrection is that it basically dresses up a tried and defeated strategy in new clothes, the strategy of a good part of the European autonomous struggles of past decades. Perhaps this is why it was way more popular in the US than in France: because its suggestions aren't all that groundbreaking, except here, where there never was an autonomous movement. Knowledge is often created by struggle. Could it be that some academics (Agamben) were inspired by the new theoretical directions implicit in the ongoing social struggles of the '70s and '80s, gradually worked that inspiration into their theoretical production over the years, and then twenty years later some intellectuals, disenchanted with the failings of present struggles and cut off from stories of past struggles, read the new theory, which was just a digestion of the old struggles, and thought they had discovered something original (beef jerky)?\n\nI wouldn't even call that a hypothesis, but still one wonders how else European radicals could repackage the strategy of revolution through the networking of autonomous spaces as though it were a new idea.\n\nTheir analysis of the world is brilliant and moving. Their suggestions for what to do generally fall flat. They have replaced the term “autonomous space” with the old favorite, “commune” (neologism: it's a great way to lose the same fight twice); they keep the emphasis on learning skills of self-sufficiency; they throw in a nice take on pacifism; they resolve the question around the General Assembly by calling for its abolition and clarifying the assembly as a place for talk rather than decision, which is a great point but hardly constitutes a correction to the autonomous strategy, since there were already strong segments of this practice who felt the same way. They've beefed up the importance of sabotage and the economic blockade, and they've thrown in a partially original call for invisibility.\n\nThey fail to answer or even ask what in my mind is the most important question regarding the defeat of this strategy: how to build the communes and the material basis for self-sufficiency—thus creating something to lose—while continuing to act like you have nothing to lose, which is to say, without falling into a defensive posture that facilitates recuperation or at the very least stagnation, seeking some uneasy truce with the dominant order. What they offer instead is a confidence that they will never sell out, which mirrors the confidence of the autonomen in the '70s, although the IC has found more poetic language for it.\n\nThanks to the Tarnac 9 arrests, the most famous part of the book, though it only receives a few pages, is where they cosmetically alter the old autonomous strategy by adding emphasis to the idea of sabotaging the commodity flows. “The interruption of the flow of commodities [...] liberate potentialities for self-organization unthinkable in other circumstances.” [TCI, p.119]. Elsewhere: “In order for something to rise up in the midst of the metropolis and open up other possibilities, the first act must be to interupt its perpetuum mobile.” [TCI, p.61]. Yet the examples they mention, in Thailand or in France, seem to indicate that this interruption is in fact a result of self-organization rather than a prerequisite. Strong movements with real popular support already existed, and were able to knock out infrastructure with a large part of society sympathizing with the inconvenience rather than becoming hostile towards the troublemakers. On the other hand, the countrywide train sabotage for which the Tarnac 9 were arrested did not seem to liberate any potentialities, and the massive blackout in Barcelona of 2007 was experienced more as a wasted potential than a liberated potential.\n\nOf course I can't abide any Marxist-Leninist “accumulation of forces” argument and I won't suggest that these tactics are only appropriate or worthwhile once a mass movement has gained full popular approval and the petitions to prove it. The experience of the Argentine piqueteros shows that the increasing use of sabotage can be a useful tool in building up the potentials of self-organization and social presence over time. The point is simply that The Coming Insurrection exaggerates the effect of the blockade. Its greatest potential, evidently, comes not as an event but as a process. The authors also fail to make a useful point culled from the Greek experience: once a struggle becomes strong enough to precipitate a rupture, perhaps the principal infrastrucutral network to be sabotaged is the television.\n\nThe Invisible Committee does an equally good job of missing out on important lessons to be learned from the major social rebellions in Oaxaca (2006) and Kabylia (2001), though they make a really good point about how the communes can arise from the social movements, when talking about the French students' struggle on page 121 of The Coming Insurrection.\n\nWhere did the rebellions in Oaxaca and Kabylia come from, and why did they fail? Important questions. The IC passes the buck. They include a critique of organizations, but it's not nearly nuanced enough. The Oaxaca rebellion was largely co-opted by elements within the APPO—not the general assembly itself but its steering committee—but it was provoked largely by the teachers' unions. In their brief mention of Kabylia, the writers diss the “interminable” assemblies, but fail to mention that some of these assemblies were a continuation of indigenous forms of self-organization and an important vehicle for the rebellion itself. Some of these forms of organization recuperated themselves, while others are still resisting the recuperation. The Coming Insurrection is trying to dissect a fly with a butter knife, and justifying it with a witchhunt logic: if it gets smashed, it was no good.\n\n
\n\nAbout as invisible as that elephant sitting over there in the corner\n\nThe Invisible Committee's most characteristic modification of the autonomous strategy is the call for invisibility, to avoid recognition. “Flee visibility [...] to be visible is to be exposed, that is to say above all, vulnerable” [TCI, pp.112-113]. “[W]e see appearing among Blooms not only a certain taste for anonymity, but at the same time a certain defiance towards visibility” [Bloom, p.111]. “From now on, to be perceived means to be defeated” [How?, p.11].\n\nI'll get the awkwardness out of the way, do the brutish, inappropriate thing, and say right off the bat that this is an odd argument, seeing as how the presumed authors of the text, once the state's spotlight was turned on them, fled directly into the media spotlight, which has always been recognized as an at least partially effective way for people to save themselves from the executioners of the justice system. In the terrain of democracy, unlike the terrain of guerrilla warfare, people tend to be safest in plain view. As much as the Spectacle needs to be abolished, media attention that protagonizes rebels, though it is a poisoned apple, can build sympathy and provide protection from repression, and this is no more a contradiction than the fact that, while fighting to destroy capitalism, we often have to get jobs and buy commodities; while fighting to destroy the state, we use state infrastructure. After all, we're not vegans or anything, and we understand that the total boycott isn't even possible. I also argue, and I'm not sure whether the Invisible Committee understands this, that although our theories may be unified and streamlined, the system we're fighting against never is. There are contradictions among institutions of power that we can exploit.\n\nOne could counter that the arrestees only utilized a media campaign, with big protests, dignified academics writing in to the major newspapers and all that, only after they were already in the spotlight. The obvious answer is that going to the hills, dressing normal, and trying to avoid recognition didn't work very well then, because it was relatively easy for the state to find them and slap on whatever ill-fitting label was in its own political interests at the moment, in that case, anarcho-autonome or terrorist.\n\nThe War on Terrorism succeeds as a repressive operation precisely when its victims cannot be recognized. Because recognition is not only to accept someone's predicate assigned on the basis of an assemblage of social constructs, in this case, “terrorist.” It can also mean to assign someone a predicate based on a conflicting assemblage of social constructs (“good citizen,” “neighbor,” “human being,” “social activist,” “freedom fighter,” “conscientious objector,”), an approach which creates a strategic conflict that can neutralize the initial operation (exposing certain individuals and groups to greater repression by not allowing them to be recognized outside of the category imposed by the state) but one that also recuperates the recognizant defiance by maintaining it within the assemblages proffered by the system—in other words, a draw, a going back to square one. An honestly, fighting a campaign of repression to a draw is not all bad. But there is a third possibility for recognition: assigning someone predicates that are fluid and non-categorical.\n\nIn “How is it to be done?” the Party members talk about predicates in a way that could be optimistically construed as only referring to socially imposed categories: “it takes many assemblages to turn a female being into “a woman”, or a black-skinned man into “a Black”.” [How?, p.9], although phrases like “Let be the gap between the subject and its predicates” and “A “white horse” is not “a horse”.” [How”, p.9] suggest that indeed they are attempting to cut much deeper.\n\nElsewhere, they leave no room for doubt.\n\n“As for the statement “a rose is a flower,” it allows me to erase myself opportunely from behind the classification operation that I am carrying out. It would thus be more suitable to say \"I class the rose as among the flowers,\" which is a standard formulation in Slavic languages.” [Metaphysics]\n\nThis structural argument is interesting as a passing, philosophical consideration, but it is theoretically useless and factually flawed. I can say with certainty that their assertion regarding the grammar of the Slavic languages is wholly untrue in Russian and Ukrainian. I'm waiting to hear back from some friends regarding Polish, Bulgarian, and Croat, and I'll announce my error if my prediction proves untrue but the IC's track record with facts leaves me with little doubt that they're imagining things again.\n\nWhile we're at it, I want to point out that the structuralist hypothesis that language defines possibilities for thought, which is the assumption on which the IC is basing their point about predicates (they say the “to be” verb of Indo-European languages allows for a peculiar confusion between subject and predicate), has been soundly disputed. Research has shown that there is a weak effect—for example speakers of languages in which all nouns are gendered (“el tiroteo,” “die Tür,”) are more likely to assign feminine or masculine adjectives to inanimate objects based on the noun's gender, when asked to personify those nouns in a survey, though not necessarily in everyday speech (i.e. the German speakers will personify “the door” with feminine adjectives). There is, however, no strong determination of language on thought. English and Spanish speakers do not have a profounder sense of time than German or Russian speakers because English and Spanish grammars contain far more tenses, just as English and Spanish speakers do not have a more primitive grasp of the interactional relationship between different bodies and objects just because German and Russian grammar contain far more developed cases. The human brain is everywhere the same in its range of differences, and language is something we constantly recreate as needed—given the necessity, children will create a brand new language for themselves in a generation. Faced with a restrictive grammar, we have a whole array of other linguistic cues to communicate all the nuance we need. Anarchy is the fundamental reality of linguistics as with all other spheres; every language has its black market amply provisioned with whatever needed meaning one cannot get through the more structured spaces of the tongue.\n\nThe very assemblage of meanings, of cultural assumptions and conversations suppressed or already had, that form the backdrop to every conversation, allow us to surpass the confusions or limitations of grammar at any moment. A society that reifies scientific categories may be confused by the sentence, “a rose is a flower,” just as they may believe when they are told a tomato is a fruit and not a vegetable (dastardly lie). But a society in which people talk about the relationship between language and the world, people with a humbly metaphysical appreciation of the act of naming would not be confused. They will still say “a rose is a flower” rather than “I classify the rose as a flower,” because the former is more streamlined, and a linguistic rule of thumb is that more frequently used formulations tend to be shortened.\n\nAnother example. Two paragraphs back, I hesitated before writing the phrase “feminine or masculine adjectives”. I thought about writing “adjectives considered to be feminine or masculine” but decided that was too bulky to put in the middle of an already long sentence. And it was unnecessary. The former phrase and the latter phrase mean the exact same thing, as long as the readers have already engaged with the idea that femininity and masculinity are always social constructs and matters of assigned value.\n\nSuspending language, which does not exist without the assignment of predicates, can be vital in moments of meditation, hallucination, and ecstasy. But as a program or ideological argument the suggestion is the absurd fantasy of a totalitarianism of ideas, a hyper-intellectuality that has gotten so lost in its own cerebral cortex it has not heard that its mother has been calling it down to dinner for the last three days.\n\nTo talk of becoming anonymous or existing only in presence, avoiding recognition, on a practical level, means very little if this is not simply a strategy of boycotting the media and not adopting any identity category other than member of the Imaginary Party. The thing about “opaque zones” [How?, p.11] is that they are only opaque to the state, its media, its academy. Within these zones there is a great deal of recognition, of differentiation, and a flourishing of predicates. If the banlieue or Kabylia seem opaque to the Invisible Committee, this is only because they stand outside and above them.\n\nThe fact of the matter is, invisibility is only an option for the state agents spying on us, and the guerrilla who is willing to sacrifice her life to an existence of clandestinity. For the rest of us, it's a question of appearance and disappearance: constantly learning to appear in the lives of others, and disappear from the traps, the enclosures of meaning, the Spectacle creates around us.\n\nHere's another thing about invisibility: the more you hide, the hipper you get. Case in point, Vice Magazine seeking out the Invisible Committee in Tarnac.\n\n
\n\nWhat is, er, sorry, how is the human strike?\n\nWhile The Coming Insurrection may be excused for the weakness of its practical suggestions, since the greater emphasis goes to their analysis of the present reality, Tiqqun has given us a text specifically intended to address this question: “How is it to be done?” They start by making a haughty distinction between theirs and Lenin's pamphlet of a similar name, provoking some interesting thoughts by outlining the difference between focusing on what to do and how to do it, though in the body of the text the difference proves to be basically meaningless, as their suggestions just as easily constitute a what as a how. The exception is in their discussion of recognition, which, as I already argued, is nothing to write home about.\n\nOn page 14 they offer a concrete suggestion that is equal parts what and how and advises, quite like The Coming Insurrection, a succinct reemployment of the autonomous strategy, “an expansionary constellation of squats[...] linked by an intense circulation of bodies”, without any idea on how to improve this practice. The fact that the autonomous strategy was defeated, though significant, should not in any way obscure all the possibilities it creates and capacities it develops. In fact, throughout France and Spain in particular, many people are still working at this expansionary constellation, tweaking it, maintaining it, giving it consistency, trying to push it in new directions, coming together in periodic encounters to share ideas and emotions. Curiously, at least some of the partisans of the Imaginary Party denounce these efforts as not whatever enough. Are they calling shots from the bleachers, or do they have anything to share from their own experiences of taking to the field?\n\n“How is it to be done?” answers its eponymous question primarily through the suggestion of the “human strike,” giving the example of the Italian feminists who refused to be mothers, who refused to dedicate their care to the reproduction of capitalism. I'm confused by how this suggestion conflicts with the calls for invisibility and against recognition, because it seems that a human strike requires, above all, consistency, as we learn over time how to liberate care and create new relationships, but consistency, which is on some levels the creation of new rituals, would seem to allow for what the IC refer to as visibility, an opportunity for the Spectacle to recuperate these efforts by assigning new labels and dispatching new commodities.\n\nThe human strike is a building up of force that will most certainly be noticed as we withdraw our affective energies from the economy, and replace commodity relations with a mutual caring for one another. Even if the police agencies of the state somehow fail to notice all the new communes—not the easy communes of the riot but the persevering ones that build up new capacities through consistency—Revlon will certainly notify them when cosmetics sales start to plummet.\n\nYet the Invisible Committee admonishes us that: “Our appearance as a force must be reserved for the right moment” [TCI, p.114] Wait for the right moment?? These people seem to be re-ordering all the Marxist fallacies and trying to make them hip again. What gives?\n\nAnd how are we to remain invisible (for now) while carrying out a human strike, when the Italian feminists got recuperated and the Tarnac 9 couldn't even pull it off? They've let us know what to do, but the Party leaders just can't pinpoint how we're actually supposed to do it.\n\nPrecarias a la Deriva of Madrid give a more meaningful explanation of the human strike (see “A Very Careful Strike”), but they also seem wedded to the great communist defeats. Their analysis of care and feminine labor is brilliant, but they do just as the Marxists in adopting capitalist logics in their challenges of capitalist relations, in this case by seeing care in instrumental terms, as another form of production. What I want to know is, how can we liberate something we insist on viewing in mechanical terms? After all, care can only be plugged into capitalism in the first place when it ceases to be nurturing and comes to be reproductive.\n\nIt's hard to say how the Invisible Committee view care because they're so far removed from care's gritty details. The statement, “We are not depressed; we're on strike” [TCI, p.34], can only be true if this strike comes with its own picket line to hold back those who would cross into the recuperation of pharmaceuticals, its own support committee so that the misery of being out of work, affectively, becomes a joyful poverty. In the movement from absenteeism to the unlimited general strike, what we need is an expansive body of experience and experimentation to mobilize our boredom, reify our resentment, wear our open wounds with pride and heal them with abandon, and help one another make our bodies whole again. The IC call for this experimentation, but hell, so did the feminists of the '70s, and even the activists of the anti-globalization era. All we get that's new is a rhetoric that protects us from seeming like those who failed before us.\n\n
\n\nWhatever, dude\n\nFor the Invisible Committee, in the insurrection they prophesy, the real one, their insurrection, we are all “whatever singularities,” without predicates, an emptiness brimming with possibilities. It's a beautiful dream, and I, for one, believe in fighting for dreams. But there is a certain ownership they exercise over their insurrection, a certain power of exclusion the Invisible Committee have vis a vis the Imaginary Party, that could make this dream nothing more than a maneuver identical to the one by which the communists suppressed difference by demanding adherence to the unified identity of the Working Class. There are no women, there are no blacks, there are only members of the Imaginary Party.\n\nSomething curious, of an understated significance, takes place within the pages of the English-language edition of The Coming Insurrection. On page 83, just a page after the French authors extol agricultural experimentation in Cuba and the artistry of auto mechanics in Africa as evidence of the fertility of catastrophe, they allow themselves to get excited by the Common Ground Clinic in New Orleans, as a fruit of the catastrophe that was Hurricane Katrina. This is no doubt embarrassing for Party members in the US, as Common Ground is an example of “activism” and thus part of the Spectacle, the Party of Order, and not of the Imaginary Party. So, the translators insert a footnote to explain away the mistake and denounce the Clinic. They say its founder, Malik Rahim, used it for a Congressional campaign (they need not consider what Rahim's relationship was to the Clinic during his campaign, nor the attitude of those who keep the Clinic running to political campaigns), and they point out that “one of the main spokesmen for the project, Brandon Darby, was an FBI informant” (ignoring that FBI informants have also cropped up in the most insurrectionary of projects in this country—let's not forget what else Darby himself participated in).\n\nThe translators stumble blindly into a great irony that they themselves have dug, abyss-like, in their very path. They try to minimize the IC's error of praising Common Ground with an easy truth: “A certain distance leads to a certain obscurity.”\n\nI want to repeat that one: “A certain distance leads to a certain obscurity.” This little turn of phrase, like a sewing needle, pops the overinflated balloon of a good part of what the Invisible Committee says, of what the Imaginary Party itself stands for.\n\nFirst of all, isn't obscurity exactly what they were going for? Or is there a functional difference between obscurity and opacity? And if this is true, one might not be so brash in predicting that in the Arabic or Imazigh translation of The Coming Insurrection or Tiqqun texts, the translators would embarrassingly note that Kabylia isn't such a good example because that struggle was full of recuperators, but the authors could hardly have known that because of the distances involved; in the Spanish translation of these texts the translators would embarrassingly note that experimental Cuban agriculture isn't such a good example because so much of it was funded or at least permitted by the state, and Oaxaca isn't such a good example either because the initial strikes were actually organized by the teachers' unions.\n\nOnce you penetrate their opacity, it seems, all the little chapters of the Imaginary Party blow away in a puff of smoke.\n\nCould it be that the Imaginary Party is, after all, imaginary? There can be little doubt, when one reads their assertion about “Japanese children, whom one might justly consider the most intense avant-garde of the Imaginary Party” [Theses, thesis 18].\n\nMost whatevers aren't good enough for them. Only what is farthest away is valued. They sling denunciations of activists, of leftists, of anarchists, of other ways of doing things, and their only suggestions are exotic. The analysis in the first parts of The Coming Insurrection brilliantly show how the civil war is all around us, but when talking about how it is to be fought, all they can do is make struggle even more distant, by creating a pressure, a higher standard, to fight effectively by being unrecognizable, by being anonymous, by being spontaneous, higher standards that only exotic examples can meet because they are unknown to the authors.\n\nThe whatever is just an ignorance of details.\n\nAnd the ignorance is above all a philosopher's preference for easy answers, an ideologue's refusal to engage with complexity. In the theorizing of the Invisible Committee, there is a certain streamlining of resistance. Beneath the poetry exists an economy of thought that demands the excision of all but the most sleek movements towards insurrection. Everything that is not judged to be perfect on the plane of ideas is denounced as recuperation.\n\n“RULE No. 2: You can never free yourself from an apparatus by getting engaged within its minor part.” [Metaphysics]. There is a logic to this. The identities, the subjectivities, they refer to can certainly be viewed as a “minor part” of the apparatus, and certainly creating counter-subjectivities cannot in and of itself destroy that apparatus and may often bind you to it more tightly, but the idea that only the most economic of motions in a struggle should be preserved ignores the messy reality of how people begin to desert and to fight, and it misses the opportunity for strength that is presented by an attitude of picking fights with the apparatus everywhere, in its most minor and major parts. Engaging with gender by redefining what it means to be a woman or a trannie or a man in this world is just moving around the prison bars. Attacking advertising that defines these roles for us (and realistically, such an attack would come out of a process in which we are also reading and writing and talking about gender identities) can be a step towards the insurrectionary, towards the war against domination in all its forms.\n\nI, for one, do not see insurrection in the efforts of a Party that is increasingly warlike, precise, and correct, but in the messy, inefficient, contradictory ecology of resistance that already exists. A thousand forms of collaboration are contrary to the spirit of insurrection, true, but no person embodies this spirit wholly. On some key levels what's important is to sympathize with it. We may and must critique and challenge the many compromises with existing reality, absolutely, but abandon them, never. Let the others fight the revolution from temple to temple. I'll stay here in the swamp.\n\n
\n\nThe Incompleteness of the Totality\n\nThe Invisible Committee presents us with a totalizing theory. In the very introduction of The Coming Insurrection, they tell us, “Everyone agrees.” In Theory of Bloom they assert that, “it's how every being is the way they are [...] it is precisely what gives consistency and possibility to each being. Bloom is the Stimmung in which and by which we understand each other at the present time” [Bloom, pp.22-24]. Bloom “experiences an ontological finiteness and separation common to all men.” [Bloom, p.105].\n\nIn fact, the affirmation of these truths is the necessary signifier for the creation of a new identity, a new milieu. It's also the recreation of a working class, a universal identity that has room for everyone. But it's a poor fit. There simply is no clean, unproblematic answer to the question of identity. Its very nature is as a question that will never be solved. True becoming can have no end point.\n\nThe totality is not a collection of identities (which could then be opposed by singularities) but a set of rules, often contradictory but arranged by mostly shared loyalties and similar visions of a common project, generated and imposed by numerous institutions, to define identities and regulate people's movement between them.\n\nSo two people who call themselves “activists” (or mothers or militants) may have entirely distinct relations to the totality. One may indeed be a becoming, a whatever, as she asks herself questions about how to strike out from where she stands and lets herself feel doubts about both the ground she stands on and the weapons she has picked up; while the other may indeed be a recuperator, satisfied with activism as a reproducible practice, eager for the paths of promotion laid out within it.\n\nThe Invisible Committee presents us with an Imaginary Party that is homogeneous not in any implied sameness but in its characteristic rejection of any internal differentiation. But I wonder how well this totalization encompasses all those who do not see themselves in Bloom, or who see aspects of themselves that the IC does not acknowledge, and seems to dismiss (I'm talking now about, among other things, race, gender, sexuality, as particularities). We can read an astute analysis of apparatuses that control us by mobilizing comfort [Metaphysics], but there is a subtextual hostility towards the discussion of the discomfort that is mobilized only against certain people. In fact, this sort of differentiation seems to contradict the poetic simplicity of Bloom theory and the idea of the Imaginary Party. They will take the effort to construct a theory of the Young Girl as a “model citizen” for consumer society but insist that this “is obviously not a gendered concept” [YoungGirl, iii] despite how odd it is to look at models of citizenship and commodity consumption without looking at gender.\n\nCat calls, degrading looks, insulting comments, men who follow you, every time you go out the door alone: the fact that certain people who are not cis male presenting as heterosexual will never be allowed to be comfortable in public space, when walking down the street, reveals a number of critical dynamics that any theory would be short-sighted to ignore. First of all, while the private sphere may indeed be socialized, because it holds a measure of security (though for some this may be a contractual security, such as that won through marriage) that the public sphere never will, we have to assert a continuing difference between the public and private spheres, one that necessarily precedes the Spectacle and links today's apparatuses to classical Patriarchy. This is a link I have never seen the Invisible Committee acknowledge. Rather everything is new, freshly discovered and named (by them). Their favorite phrase is, “From now on...”\n\nSecondly, through this gendered mobilization of discomfort in public space, or the racial segregation of neighborhoods, we see how people who are generally alienated exercise power over the bodies that pass through the space around them, the actual structure of which they are powerless to change. Much of the antisocial violence in public space, violence which is romanticized in several Tiqqun texts, is not so much a rebellion as an autonomous attempt to impose hierarchies in miniature. It may well be that the majority of casualties in this global civil war are the bodies that have fallen in the civil war being fought within the ranks of the Imaginary Party.\n\nAnother example: “The thread of historical transmission has been broken. Even the revolutionary tradition.” [How?, p.11]. This has not been my experience. Although I grew up ahistorically, Bloomlike, another lost child of the 'burbs, I have since lived in places with historical continuities of struggle. I have been a recipient of historical transmission and it has been something qualitatively different, unlike anything I knew growing up, and it made me infinitely stronger. One can also see that places with history, with revolutionary tradition (e.g. Greece, Kabylia, Oaxaca) are generally stronger in their struggles.\n\nOn a specific point, this thesis about the end of history directly contradicts many indigenous struggles for freedom. A major element of some of these struggles is that the genocide has not been completed, that there is an unbroken 500 year history of resistance, which at times has been stamped out to the point of darkness, but never fully extinguished. The argument that historical transmission has been broken and recognition is counterrevolutionary means that these indigenous struggles are wrong in asserting that they are still fighting colonialism, that there is something liberating in recognizing themselves as members of this or that nation (not nation-state, eurocentric readers), that through centuries of genocide they have survived (though no one is saying they survived unaltered, which is the strawman the academics usually opt for).\n\nIn considering these struggles, one cannot simply dismiss them or sweep them without direct comment into the ranks of the Imaginary Party. One must either give them solidarity, or agree with the post-modernist academics who are reclassifying them in accordance with continuing colonization, or choose some third option that I have never seen elaborated.\n\nThrough their Bloom theory, the Invisible Committee make another of the same mistakes as Marx. Dialectical reasoning and their implicit assumption of a unilineal history make them look to the populations most advanced in capitalist development as the site of future revolutions. Scientific Marx predicted Britain and Germany, unscientific Bakunin predicted Russia, Italy, and Spain. Enough said. The IC, in their turn, predict that the Bloom figure, the total death of subjectivity, contains within it the necessary annihilation of the Spectacle. But it seems true that—generally, not totally—where Bloom is least present, rebellions and social ruptures are most common. They refrain from admitting it, but the most bloomified figure is the middle class white, who has no history and no identity left but an array of false privileges, which is to say an absence of certain blackmails that are, for everyone else, universal.\n\nI spit on the politics of anyone who says middle class whites cannot be revolutionary, are not exploited and abused, and do not have their own truckload of reasons to hate and destroy the system, but someone who says they have the same experiences as everyone else, just as someone saying that everyone within one of these identity categories (“all women know that...”) have the same experience, is speaking not from their body but from the narrative of the Spectacle.\n\n
\n\nThe Dictatorship of the Fashionable\n\nIn the days of “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” the Communists could play at vanguard by organizing a Party that would manipulate and dominate general assemblies, communes, soviets, and any other gathering point of what was a largely aboveground and solidaristic movement.\n\nIn the '60s and '70s, an aboveground Party could only be reformist, so one could only be a vanguardist by encouraging a hierarchy of tactics, whereby the most illegal, risky, and spectacular actions were understood to be the most important. That way, a minuscule group, whether the Weather Underground or the Red Brigades, could form guerrilla cells to carry out the heavy actions that would ensure that everyone else in the struggle would give them their due attention and read their lengthy communiques. The mass movement is replaced by the media, and the vanguard constitutes itself as such not through organizational relationships but through attention that places it symbolically at the cutting edge of what had been a diverse and multi-directional movement.\n\nAs the Spectacle degenerates from a reality based on news to one based on fashion, I wonder if nowadays, a postmodern vanguard could form itself only by being fashionable, by turning their Party into a fad and their analysis into a style. It's interesting that the IC give us such a perfect explanation of hipsters [Bloom, p.55] when, at least in the US, many of their most avid partisans have come from the hipster wing of the anarchist movement. And what are hipsters but an elite in an age when integration is produced above all through consumption? And for the anti-capitalist palette, consumption need not require a large budget for shopping. In this economy of trivia, sophistication is enough.\n\nI don't want be alarmist, and certainly a vanguard based on la mode could never be as dangerous as one based on the cheka, but either way, turning a text like The Coming Insurrection that has good parts and bad parts into a cult classic, and tolerating for a moment a resurrection of the idea of the Party is nothing other than a good way to defeat ourselves, which I suppose is the role that communists have played in anti-capitalist struggles for over a century, so it should be no surprise that they're coming back now.\n\nThe putsch that ushered in the October Revolution was led by anarchist sailors from Kronstadt and left SRs. It was largely orchestrated by the Leninists, whom the anarchists trusted in part because Lenin's populist rhetoric was largely borrowed from the anarchists. They thought he was one of them.\n\nAgain, I believe that the danger this time around is minuscule, and the IC-as-thought have helped rejuvenate theorizing as a collective activity among US anarchists to an extent that far outweighs their disastrous effect, -as-style, on the plethora of hyperbolic communiques that announced various broken windows and occupied buildings with a mood of poetic rapture.\n\nAnd on the other hand, the IC shouldn't be taken too seriously. After all, let's cut the crap: they're basically CrimethInc. with a better vocabulary. Replace “deserting” with “dropping out” and there's no denying it. They blatantly lack the humility that at times has allowed CrimethInc. to be such a positive thing; furthermore, they carry out a couple operations that would make me hesitate before starting a commune with them, much less a milieu or a Party. As I mentioned earlier, this Party is not just an ironic linguistic device but a group that has its inner circle and its mechanisms for exclusion.\n\nIt works like this: if you disagree with them, you're out. “One would have to be a militant element of the planetary-petty-bourgeoisie, a citizen really, not to see that society no longer exists.” [How?, p.3]. They never define society, mind you, though I would guess they know, they're so well read after all, that it is a central element of the praxis of other anti-capitalists that society in fact does exist, beneath all the chains and IV tubes of Biopower, and that this is a good thing. But I guess their ideological competitors are nothing but representatives of the petty bourgeoisie (say, haven't we heard that one before?).\n\nI predict the Party leaders might chide me for missing the irony of their words, but with such ideological absolutism, though they may not hand out membership cards they have still fallen for their own joke.\n\nCurious thing: sometimes the Imaginary Party is an unconscious umbrella that includes everyone who chafes at their forced assimilation, and at other times it is a conscious group employing a singular strategy. “The Imaginary Party is the particular form that contradiction assumes in the historic period where Domination imposes itself as dictatorship of visibility and of dictatorship as visibility, in a word as Spectacle.” [Theses, thesis 1]; “In this sense, the Imaginary Party is the political party, or more exactly the party of the political, because it is the sole one which can designate in this society the metaphysical labor of an absolute hostility” [Theses, thesis 7]; “Therefore the Imaginary Party is known in the Spectacle as the party of chaos, crisis, and disaster.” [Theses, thesis 14]; “every Bloom, as a Bloom, is an agent of the Imaginary Party” [Bloom, p.114].\n\nAnd now see how quickly this undifferentiated mass signs on to a common wisdom or a shared program, or becomes a Party with “conscious fractions” [Theses, thesis 27]. “[T]hose of the Imaginary Party work to hasten the advent of this by any means[...] They are besides freer to choose what will be the theatre of their operations and act at the point where the smallest forces can cause the greatest losses.” [Theses, thesis 15]; “The Imaginary Party can count upon this constant: that a handful of partisans suffices to immobilize all the “Party of Order”.” [Theses, thesis 21]; “the assumption of Bloom mean[s] [...] to enter into contact with other agents of the Invisible Committee – through Tiqqun for example – and silently coordinate a truly elegant act of sabotage.” [Bloom, p.134]; “we can only desert the situation inwardly, by reclaiming our fundamental non-belonging to the biopolitical fabric with a participation on a more intimate and thus unattributable level, in the strategic community of the Invisible Committee” [Bloom, pp.135-136]. “Tiqqun is the only possible outlook for revolution.” [Bloom, p.102].\n\nThere are moments when one needs to argue against an idea, and moments when one need only present it clearly. Here it is: the Imaginary Party. We are told we all belong to it, insofar as we are alienated. It is the Party of our class. And it is a Party that has its partisans and conscious fractions, who will say we are the enemy if we disagree with them, or even, perhaps, use different words. The Imaginary Party: take it or leave it.\n\nI thank the Invisible Committee for their writings, and I wish them the best of luck. If my words sting too sharp, I want them to know I consider them comrades, and I have participated in solidarity events for the Tarnac 9 (though the money went to others of the French anarcho-autonome who were arrested for bombing police cars and have gotten far less attention than the 9). When there are barricades in the streets or people in prison, we will always be on the same side. But I think it should be clear: when it comes to the Imaginary Party, I hope to be the first to be purged.\n\n
\n\nWorks Cited\n\nTCI = The Coming Insurrection, Semiotext edition\n\nBloom = Theory of Bloom, anonymous 2010 edition\n\nTheses = “Theses on the Imaginary Party”, Chicago Branch edition\n\nHow? = “How is it to be done?” Inoperative Committee 2008 edition\n\nMetaphysics = “A Critical Metaphysics Could Come About as a Science of Apparatuses”, online version from the tiqqunista site.\n\nYoungGirl = Raw Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, online version from the tiqqunista site.\n\n\n\n"}}},{"rowIdx":199,"cells":{"text":{"kind":"string","value":"#title Science Revisited\n#subtitle A response to John Jacobi's “The Revolutionary Importance of Science”\n#author Alex Gorrion\n#SORTtopics science, rationalism, the Enlightenment, patriarchy, colonialism\n#date 2018\n#source anarchistnews.org\n#lang en\n\n\n\nThe same old dogmatism\n\nA response to John Jacobi's “The Revolutionary Importance of Science”\n\n
\n\nSometime after I published “Science,” which is a critique of an institutional complex fundamental to Western civilization, its worldview, its practices and its mythology, John Jacobi published a refutation on The Wildernist.\n\nThough his article contains a number of interesting points, it also demonstrates the same underlying racism, dogmatism, and ignorance as to its own argumentative structures that I was trying to critique in the first place.\n\n*** Defining Science\n\nAs is mentioned at the very beginning of “Science”, that text is not a stand-alone article but the continuation of a previous work. In fact, both are part of a series of texts that endeavor to construct a mythological narrative of power and institutionality from an anarchist sensibility. The article was meant to sketch some criticisms principally at the mythical level, tracing certain conventions of Western thought and showing relations between supposedly neutral scientific practices and the operation of various power structures in our society.\n\nJacobi seems to evince a belief that all things can be measured with the same yardstick. As far as discourse goes, I gather that the only valid format he recognizes is that of objective assertions. This was, ironically, one of my principal criticisms of “Science,” and one he never responds to: that it is impossible to only talk about things on the level of facts, and what's more that objective or empirical affirmations are not the only valid kind of knowledge or communication, because there is no learning without cultural framing, nor communication without mythical context. Mythography is not intended to convince, refute, prove, or disprove; rather, it gives us a story—that we take or leave—within which we integrate our experiences, observations, beliefs, hypotheses, and knowledges. It is a part of every epistemological, pedagogical, or intellectual project. And from an anarchist or even an intellectual standpoint, the most dangerous myth for freedom of thought is the one that claims not to be a myth. In today's world, this is principally the mythology of the scientific institutional complex.\n\nSince mythography, unsurprisingly, does not sit well with Jacobi, I will respond in the present text on the level of factual and textual critique.\n\nThroughout, Jacobi commits what might seem like a trifling misquotation, saying I am critiquing “science” rather than “Science.” It is a well known literary convention to capitalize a commonplace noun when we wish to refer to a specific phenomenon, especially where it concerns a centralized or official manifestation of said commonplace. In fact, I am referring to a power structure with its attendant mythologies when I critique Science. Multiple times I also specify, “Western science,” again making it clear that I am talking about a specific historical phenomenon. However, it serves Jacobi's argument to pretend that I am lashing out against any possible use of the word “science.”\n\n
\nWho should own the means of production? The state, the cantons, the capitalists? What about private property? Who should own the factories and land?\n\nIn principle we protect private property. However, the property of the people is the property of the people and is protected by it. We have only a short while ago founded a council for trade and economy that will draw up rules for trade and economic relations and establish economic relationship abroad.\n\nBut again on the issue of the means of production: are there any forms of cooperatives or alternative forms of production in Rojava?\n\nWe encourage people to try such things. For example in Kobani there is a women’s cooperation in which around one hundred women work. Clothes are produced and sold there’. [60]\n\n\n\nÖcalan’s ideas for an alternative future society can be described as social-democratic: ’In my eyes, justice demands that creative work is enumerated according to its contribution to the entire product. Renumeration of creative work, which contributes to the productivity of the society, has to be in proportion to other creative activities. Provision of employment to everybody will be a general public task. Everybody will be able to participate in the health care system, education, sports and arts according to their capabilities and needs’. [61]\n\n** 8. Potent vagueness\n\nIn a 2011, Öcalan stated ’Marxist governments failed nonetheless because they attempted to implement a kind of government called “the dictatorship of the proletariat”. This model of governance was the result of abstract and theoretical reasoning and could be interpreted in virtually any way. Our experience of real socialism shows that extreme class formation and state power structures were able to form under this proletarian model. The countries that applied this model in fact developed the most authoritarian and totalitarian structures in history. In the end, this kind of government devoured its own children. The societies concerned panicked and sought to rescue and protect themselves from this monster by turning to the embrace of capitalism and its class structures’. [62]\n\nThis quote is characteristic of Öcalan’s texts. The confusing language is typical of much of his texts; ’a model’ that could be ’be interpreted in virtually any way’ but can still be implemented? The analysis of the collapse of ’real socialism’ echoes liberal idealist ideas that the soviet-bloc collapsed because of its ’totalitarianism’ — a historical and materialist discussion of this development is absent. It is clear from Öcalan’s texts that he sees the Soviet ideology as synonymous with ’marxism’ and is not familiar with the Marxist currents that developed outside of it or the Marxist criticisms of it.\n\nÖcalan’s writings are repetitive and long-winded, something that cannot be blamed only on the confines he is subjected to in prison. Öcalan’s texts are immediately recognizable by their meandering style. The juxtaposition of musings on the meaning of ’humanity’ and ’freedom’, with remnants of the old jargon can be quite bewildering. Terms familiar from Marxism are used in ways that imply that for Öcalan their meaning is very different: the ’Second Manifesto’ talks about ’feudal nomads’, the prison writings declare the ’feudal’ Kurdish leaders to be a ’comprador petty-bourgeoisie’. Terms are left undefined and vague. ’Democracy’ for example has become both the goal and method for solving social problems and the defining characteristic of a new civilization. But in hundreds of pages, Öcalan does not offer a sustained explanation of what the word means to him. In brief, it is often unclear what Öcalan is trying to say.\n\nThe ideology of the PKK has undergone major shifts since its foundation in the late seventies. From its original Marxism-Leninism, that saw the conquest of state-power as liberation, there was a shift to conceiving of ’freedom’ and ’independence’ in personal terms. From a Stalinist conception of socialism as state-ownership of the means of production, there was a shift to seeing socialism as the creation of a new man. From a ’united and independent Kurdistan’ and the formation of a new nation-state, there was a shift to a ’free Kurdistan’ which in one way or another could possibly exist inside the borders of the Turkish state. From seeing women as resource for the revolutionary struggle, there was a shift to seeing women as such as central actors in the movement.\n\nThe PKK was not only a political and military leadership, it would reorganize the new society. It would built not only social relations that would reflect the desired society but even create the new personalities that would characterize the future society. This principle of prefiguration, of building in the present elements that will reflect the future society, is still present in the movement. Today, it is not only personalities but also the political structures of the future society that the PKK hopes to built in the present by organizing structures that supposedly carry the kernel of the new society. It is also clearly visible in its approach towards women’s liberation when it demands that women and men ’unlearn’ the attitudes that supposedly perpetuate patriarchy. ’We want to build a new society. Let’s realize this new society, equality, freedom, esteem, and love among ourselves first’, Öcalan, 2000. [63]\n\nOne constant throughout the PKK’s evolution is the centrality of Serok Apo and his statements. When German activists went to North Kurdistan to ’see for themselves’ how democratic autonomy is implemented, they were repeatedly told that activists were ’following instructions’ of Öcalan, defenders of Kobani claim ’the thought of Apo’ was what enabled them to defeat of IS, his picture is prominently displayed on t-shirts and banners. PYD representatives describe their ideology as ’the ideology of Öcalan’, Kurdish women’s activists say that they have learned everything they know about feminism from Öcalan. The continuation of ideological and political, if not anymore directly organizational, leadership by a single individual is at odds with the claims of self-emancipation of democratic autonomy. The PKK is an confounding case of a movement that supposedly has embraced a vision of ’bottom-up democracy’ on instructions ’from above’.\n\nIn the ’old’ PKK, gaps in the theory, subjects that were not dealt with or left unclear, were filled with a stock of received ideas from ’Marxist-Leninist’ theories. The writings of Mehmet Can Yüce, one of the movement’s more prominent ideologues from that time, could almost be written by an ideologue of another party from a similar current — as long as they they do not deal with the few topics on which the PKK had developed its own views like the history of the Comintern. The PKK programs and statements from the late seventies and eighties are in many ways interchangeable with those of other Marxist-Leninist national-liberation movements. Now that the PKK defines itself as ’neither Marxist nor anti-Marxist’, this stock of ideas has fallen away and there is less to fill the gaps.\n\nThe resulting vagueness and incompleteness has its useful sides. The liberal ’conflict monitoring’ NGO International Crisis Group for example has suggested that what they call the ’unbearable vagueness’ of the goal of democratic autonomy is a tactic to make it harder for the Turkish state to ban Kurdish groups for propagating ’separatism’ but this underestimates the changes the PKK and the movement under its hegemony have gone through (it also does not take into account that the Turkish state has no problem banning Kurdish organizations under flimsy pretexts). But the vagueness does make the project open for very wide interpretations. Because of this vagueness, the PKK’s political project can appeal to the sympathy from broad layers. From liberals to anarchists, people can recognize their own desires in it.\n\nEven more then when he was the leader of the movement in a direct sense, and in contact with his followers on a daily sense, Öcalan has become a prophet-like figure. And, like with the statements of other prophets, his words are open to interpretation. Activists on the ground have considerable space to maneuver, and to interpret his directives in ways that suit their circumstances. The incompleteness of the new ideology and the relative vagueness of Öcalan’s texts make it possible to adapt it pragmatically to the local situation, while activists can still claim fidelity to ’the ideology of Öcalan’.\n\nDecisive for the evolution of the movement is how activists interpret and shape this ideology. The less centralized approach towards building social organizations opens the possibility for a more open and progressive praxis than was possible in the ’old’ PKK. The Kurdish movement has not only maintained itself against the Turkish state but also won concessions from it. A few decades ago, the Turkish state denied there existed something like a ’Kurdish minority’, today it is forced to take the Kurdish movement into account as a political force. This was made possible by immense sacrifices of Kurdish fighters, guerrilla’s and activists. It is them who will decide the future of the movement.\n\nAlex de Jong\n\n
\n\n----\n\n** Bibliography\n\n
\nHere they talked of revolution.\n
\nHere it was they lit the flame.\n
\nHere they sang about tomorrow\n
\nAnd tomorrow never came.\n
\n[...]\n
\nOh my friends, my friends, don't ask me\n
\nWhat your sacrifice was for\n
\nEmpty chairs at empty tables\n
\nWhere my friends will sing no more\n
\none can almost imagine a recent university graduate, newly thrust into the real world, surveying in his mind the halls in the Sorbonne where the students debated, or the meeting room in Chicago where SDS had their 1969 congress that would lead to the creation of an armed vanguard, back before the hammer fell.\n\nIt is the song of one who has participated in something transcendental, something real for the first time in his life, only to lose it because the community it was born in has been swept away, the other communards either shot down (as in 1832) or robbed by the Spectacle and the prisons (as were the Weathermen and their less mediatic contemporaries). The singer knows not how to find his way back and, re-enslaved by a cruel purgatory, can only blame the foolishness of his braver comrades for having tried to storm heaven.\n\nFinally, the Hollywood remake with Russell Crowe and Hugh Jackman proving—at times painfully—that today's actors can still sing and dance, closes the cycle. Passing through the crass cultural cannibalism of the last years, with which every narrative that ever enjoyed an ounce of success is retailored for the silver screen in a desperate bid to continue producing without creating anything original, Les Miserables' love story—at a time when the romantic narrative must arm itself with witty cynicism or worldly nuance to rise above its festering limitations—comes off as antiquated and trite. It must hide behind a grandiose production and the outsider antics of Sascha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter because it is simply too weak to carry the plot, though in the original musical it is clearly identified as the principal narrative thread, all of Hugo's other subplots and digressions abandoned without hesitation.\n\nThe excitement of the insurrection is far more moving than the romance, and here we find another important theme. Of necessity the Spectacle presents us with increasingly numerous renditions of revolution, from Fight Club to Robin Hood. To serve as operations of recuperation, some of these revolutions defeat themselves through extremism, providing a cautionary moral tale against putting ideals into practice. Others attack one aspect of power, say the banks, while reinforcing another, like patriarchy, and yet others succeed by piercing the conspiracy, revealing the truth, and allowing the peaceful masses or the good institutions to make everything right, leaving the actual transformation to play out off camera. How is the rebellion of 1832 recuperated?\n\nThis question is difficult to answer, just as today's spectators might have a hard time placing the story's defeated revolution in the genealogy of their current liberty. The same problem crops up in other films about freedom. William Wallace fights against an evil king—the bad kind of authority—and the voiceover in the final scenes assures us that the Scots eventually won their freedom, a fact that their recent opportunity to vote on independence can only confirm. In one of Mel Gibson's remakes of Braveheart, Patriot—the one set during the American Revolution—the relation between the heroic struggle portrayed and the audience's consequent lack of need to struggle is even more obvious. But what about an attempted political revolution in 19th century constitutional France? On the one hand, the dissidents' decision to take up arms is an admirable flaw, when they really all should have just married well and joined high society. On the other hand, their rebellion is presented as an idealistic spirit—most purely embodied by Gavroche, the fearless child—that we are meant to believe eventually triumphed, though it can be carried on just as easily by the final scene's marching masses as by armed insurgents.\n\nWhat makes up for the story's ambiguity with regards to revolution is the parallel plot of redemption. The State is redeemed in Javert's mercy, the Church is redeemed in Bishop Myriel, and the bourgeoisie are redeemed as the guarantors of Marius and Cosette's eventual happiness (suggesting a curious window on the American Founding Fathers' replacement of Locke's “property” with “the pursuit of happiness”).\n\nDo you hear the people sing\n
\nLost in the valley of the night?\n
\nIt is the music of a people\n
\nWho are climbing to the light.\n\nFor the wretched of the earth\n
\nThere is a flame that never dies.\n
\nEven the darkest night will end\n
\nAnd the sun will rise.\n\nThey will live again in freedom\n
\nIn the garden of the Lord.\n
\nThey will walk behind the plough-share,\n
\nThey will put away the sword.\n
\nThe chain will be broken\n
\nAnd all men will have their reward.\n\nWill you join in our crusade?\n
\nWho will be strong and stand with me?\n
\nSomewhere beyond the barricade\n
\nIs there a world you long to see?\n
\nDo you hear the people sing?\n
\nSay, do you hear the distant drums?\n
\nIt is the future that they bring\n
\nWhen tomorrow comes!\n\nThe Christian moral—wait, pray, and all will be well—comes through in the final song. And the presence of that moral in the three generations of the telling, at the adolescence, decadence, and twilight of modernity, suggests a continuity that is both obvious and inadmissible.\n\nI don't know how the tale was received by its original audience, but by the third telling, the love that holds up the contradictions in the narrative structure of Les Miserables is not the cupidic escapism of its young paramours, but the love of God that provides transcendental weight to the promise of redemption, overwhelming the failed, forgotten revolution's promises of transcendence.\n\nWe can argue, and with good reason, that during the Enlightenment science replaced Christianity as the religion of the State. We should not, however, forget Christianity's paradoxical persistence. It is a key force in nationalist movements from Ukraine to Venezuela, and an important tool for turning exploited populations against revolution, winning obedience to state authorities, extending capitalist property relations around the world. In South America and Africa in particular, Christian missionaries serve in many ways as advance scouts for logging and mining companies. And Christianity's close cousin, Islam, is effectively building states throughout Africa and Asia in places where European colonialism failed to do so.\n\nAnarchists in this century do not talk as much about religion as an animating force for the apparatuses of control, and if we do, we tend to understand it as a force in the lives of people who have not progressed as far in their civilizational development, whether the backwater under the microscope is South Carolina or Kenya.\n\nWe might speak of two distinct figures that represent the exploited during the Christian and then the scientific phases of capitalist accumulation; the zombie who is enchanted and set to work and the golem who is constructed by its master, made of broken material, simple dust. Christianity simply robs people's souls to turn them into workers, confounding its slaves or holding them captive to metaphysical blackmail, while scientific power gives the masters an architectural control over the environment and reproduction of their subjects, not merely enslaving them but creating them out of whole cloth.\n\nBut this progression of distinct phases owes too much to the fundamental eschatology that Christianity and Western science share. In practice, the two modalities of power operate simultaneously. In a platonic world where body and spirit have been alienated, in a Christian world where the body has been shamed and the spirit captivated, in a capitalist world where the body has been enslaved and the spirit has been banished, and in a scientific world where the body has been mechanized and the spirit disproved, the apparatuses of control lack an animus.\n\nThey (by which I suppose I mean the conduits of apparatuses that exist to evaluate other apparatuses) can measure the power that flows between the conduits and captives of a given apparatus, binding and differentiating them. But they are also aware of the limits of a captive's identification with their apparatus, a certain melancholy among conduits that acts like friction, decreasing their conductivity and even halting production. And they have seen cases of a grim nihilism that arises from time to time, causing captives to act like barbarians and handle their apparatus with brute violence and against its design, or one that spreads more invisibly to conduit and captive alike, causing them to blur and desert their roles.\n\nEven in a well designed apparatus, the flow of power is not enough to motivate the conduits or bind the captives to their role. The threat of punishment is also a necessary element, but too honest to be left in the open for long without delivering diminishing returns and augmenting risks. The people need to be animated through an affective allegiance with an entity that cannot disappoint them by changing the terms of the contract, as any institution of power will eventually do when it capitalizes on whatever trust has been deposited in it. That entity is their own longing, the first glimpse of transcendence, the very substance the State has always worked to control or destroy.\n\nIf in its first millennium the Church aimed to keep the spirit out of the commoners' grasp, effectively creating a less spiritual world by enclosing it in Latin scripture and in the Holy See and stamping out one of the most frequent heresies—that the Holy Ghost spoke to everyone who listened—now it is one of several institutions whose purpose is to divert the miserable and the wretched from a nihilistic confrontation with a dead, scientific society by dangling in front of them a new spirituality, controlled as the old one was but not so tightly, for the new permissible spirit is accessible, on sale, and adaptable to consumer demand.\n\nWhile traveling recently in South America, I got to see this aggressive marketing firsthand. The evangelists are at the forefront, but is it overly paranoid to assume that one pope was recalled and another was elected to jumpstart a new Catholic evangelism in South America? From one country to the next, billboards announced mega-revivals by visiting evangelists from the US, each eager to expand their fief. And the growth of evangelism goes hand in hand with popular support for snitching, mining, policing, the eradication of indigenous cultures, and development in general. I also came face to face with a revived Christianity's effectiveness at dealing with potentially destabilizing mental illness and subversive cynicism, when I got to know two truck drivers. The first was batshit crazy, and the second was a jaded ex-revolutionary who had been imprisoned during the dictatorship and evidently was not impressed by what the socialists had accomplished in power (a disenchantment that for some people leads to radicalization, but that has driven entire, forgotten generations into the arms of God).\n\nThe first driver told about a girl in Brazil who was dead for a week and then got resuscitated. While dead, St. Peter took her to visit heaven and hell so she could tell everyone about it. In hell she came across the Pope, hung upside down for being a Catholic, and Celia Cruz for her lascivious lyrics. She also spied Michael Jackson.\n\n“For molesting children?” I asked.\n
\n“For dancing backwards, contrary to the spirit of God,” the driver told me with a straight face. He went on to explain that the King of Pop was surrounded by moonwalking demons, tormenting him to eternity for his linear perverseness.\n
\nLike I said, batshit crazy, the kind of person who would undermine any rational discourse of social control, if the Church hadn't given them a ready made set of fantasies and bugaboos to fixate on.\n\nI thought I would like the second truck driver more, because I learned early on that he had been a political prisoner. During the first hours of our shared drive, we spoke about the dictatorship, the current government, and the struggle by indigenous people in the region. Then the sun set, he turned off the radio, looked over at me, and asked if I believed in God. The following hours were Hell, as he aggressively tried to convince me that people were evil, and that quinoa was God's way of letting the natives know about Jesus, since the Bible didn't arrive until much later.\n\nWhen he stopped to help a stranded driver replace a spare tire, I told him, “See, you're a good person!”\n\n“I am not good!” he shrieked, tears forming in his eyes.\n\nA slow learner, I finally decided it was a mistake to try to have a reasonable conversation with him. I will never know what happened to that truck driver in prison, why he hated himself, and to what extent the corruption of his socialist former comrades affected him, but it seemed clear that Christianity mediated it for him. Love of God as hatred of self and hatred of society, but also as an opportunity to do good in a safe, non-projectual way that requires no emotional risk, since the end is already written. Without that, I doubt he would have been able to function as a productive member of society.\n\nWho can doubt that Christianity today is both innovative and on the cutting edge of social control, when they consider the great currency that Christianity has among the mad and insane? While the pills that are meant to regulate the emotional unreliability of the golem remain imperfect, the opiate of religion succeeds in redeeming millions of depressives and psychotics, casualties of capitalism who would otherwise turn to a destabilizing lunacy, as socially useful subjects. After all, good Christians may play out their paranoid persecution fantasies while faithfully serving as snitches, taxpayers, workers, and soldiers. Faith can be the release for their madness, a belief in human evil as the non-heretical expression of a manichean nihilism, and they never need to see the inside of an asylum.\n\nThe simultaneity of a Christian modality of power with the modality of scientific social control is also evident in the affective allegiance that can only exist for the subjects of a totalitarian state. Even in this age of scientific rationalism, people can experience a transformative rapture when they surrender themselves to the absolute power of a bureaucratic institution.\n\nIn the abstract this hypothesis, or any other that could ascribe such passion to a bureaucracy, seems doubtful. But imagine what it was like for the arrestees of the Greenscare, locked up in the dungeons of the State, their entire future in the hands of the FBI. When they broke and agreed to become snitches, did they feel the warm rush of clemency, like the kiss of the papal ring? Giving themselves over to the advances of the long-shunned State, did they suddenly find themselves in the presence of God, as Winston Smith finally found Big Brother?\n\nWith the invention of the golem, spiritual matters should have been put to rest. The living world has been utterly destroyed, ground to dust, and our new bodies—our new selves—are made from that dust, constructed in arrangements that suit the needs of power and set to play in a Garden of Eden that is really just one big factory. How could cyborgs dream? Yet dream we do, and become depressed, and sometimes go off the deep end and paint the canvass of our misery with a red more real than acrylic tones can simulate (guns will be blamed, though fortunately in the last few years the disarmed nations have increasingly belied this allegation with enthusiastic uses of knives and automobiles).\n\nI know very little about the old Buddhist states, but I can imagine that if they had grown to install a world system metaphysically organized atop the opposite pole in a similar mind/matter dichotomy, with a capitalism that measured accumulations of peace and duty rather than trade and production, eventually the body—that misleading shadow of the false physical world—would reassert itself and require more archaic institutions of state authority to coddle and distract its longings, always in a sphere that did not intersect with matters of the spirit.\n\nSo it is today. The golem still dream and cry—but if they are fabricated beings made of the dust of the old world, perhaps Democritus went awry in looking for the atom in the too-small-to-see, for if even dust contains dreamings the atom must be the universe itself—and they must be given something great and out of reach to love and to fear. The subjects of state power are no longer living beings, and there is a cathedral built atop each of our past defeats. To pay homage we are told we must walk in through the doors. On arrival we're not sure it's what we were looking for but we mouth along with the rite to assuage our doubts, just as the last grandiose song in a bad musical tries to divert our dissatisfaction.\n\nBut the body cannot walk to the spirit any more than the spirit can wish itself a body.\n\nWork continues, disappointments stack up, hairs go grey and bellies flab, the tables and chairs where we sat in our passionate debates empty out, the street that was a bonfire is an apparatus again and the memory no longer seems worthy of passing on because of the inarticulate confusion it provokes in us. Yet the sense of something greater, immediate and unreachable, something that gives us courage, that could wrap us in the strongest of embraces and protect us through death or defeat, mocks us from all directions.\n"}}},{"rowIdx":197,"cells":{"text":{"kind":"string","value":"#title Golem in the Catacombs\n#author Alex Gorrion\n#SORTtopics technology, alienation, social-isolation, apparatus, class, power, review, The Anvil Review\n#date January 12, 2014\n#source The Anvil Review\n#lang en\n\n\n“The harmony of the seasons mocks me. I spend hours watching the sky, the lake, the enormous sea. This world. I feel that if I could understand it I might then begin to understand the creatures who inhabit it. But I do not understand it. I find the world always odd, but odder still, I suppose, is the fact that I find it so, for what are the eternal verities by which I measure these temporal aberrations?”\n\nJohn Banville, Birchwood\n\nIt's getting colder here. People shuffle by in hats and scarves. Fur-lined hoods appear in improbable quantities. Licensed vendors, unpacked in pleasant arrays, marshalled forth by the city in its brave quest to claim a new pedestrian shopping zone, are the first and only line of battle against the cold. They rub mittens and hunch puffy jackets against it, smile as only ascendant shopkeepers can, and roast chestnuts, slice baked goods, fetch glittery necklaces from crowded displays, and conquer what would have been a winterbarren street.\n\nI used to be a partisan of winter, back when the seasons still promised an untamed difference. Now I too huddle against it, my fire gone, protected by an old leather jacket I found, waiting in just the right size, in a freestore near here. My friends made jokes about it, a throwback to the '80s, evidently. When their jokes continued from time to time, I gathered they were actually made uncomfortable by my wearing of the jacket and its extinguished aesthetic.\n\nThe commodity demands its homage, even from those who must steal it. And my friends, anticapitalists to a one, go about in those sporty jackets made from materials far more polysyllabic than leather. Again the old question. Is it better to blend in, or to signal our defiance of the national religion? For myself, I just can't turn down a jacket that still works, and my brain won't accept that the dull brown thing actually draws attention from the citizens sunk in layers of equally mundane garb, hiding away from temperatures that still have not passed freezing.\n\nThey are a frigid people, with few defenses against even a lackluster winter. Nonetheless, this year there are fewer gloves in evidence. More people are keeping their fingers free to tap on little screens, their faces awash in blue glow, as they scuttle blindly down the streets.\n\nThe new device is finally triumphing in this economically holdout nation. Could anyone ever have doubted it? What sorts of homogenization is something so flimsy as “culture” able to hold back? This is the difference between a hula hoop and an iPhone. One is a product that may catch on or not. The other is an army that must be quartered.\n\nThe entire citizenry has revealed their vapidity. They are mere bodies stripped of all their limbs and plugged into a vast matrix of domination, perpetually vacated to serve as conduit for the flux of power. Lost creatures who fumble around in smug devices looking for love or distraction. They are children who have never learned to read maps or ask for directions, children whose intimate haunts that were never trusted to paper have now been thoroughly mapped by the devices they carry with them. The impoverished oral culture that remains has been forced through this new apparatus. There is no more face-to-face communication; all of it is legible now to the authorities.\n\nThe cellphone that shares my room sometimes like an evil stranger heralds the arrival of a new message with a cheerful arrangement of beeps. After a time I pick it up, already imagining the number of the one person I wish most to hear from. But there are only five digits on the screen. An automatic message from the phone company, wishing me a happy birthday—did I put down this day, of all days, as my birthday?—and offering me a present, a free gift, which I only have to claim by logging on to their website. I unplug the broken thing and, batteryless, it dies. Every device should be equally crippled. I turn back to the article I am writing.\n\nIn a parallel universe where justice reigns, all those cretins who claimed the internet would bring us closer together and Twitter would make the revolution are being lined up against the wall in an old park and shot. Not out of vindictiveness or vengeance. The purpose of the executions is educational.\n\n“Don't worry,” each of the condemned is told as blindfolds are affixed. “It's all okay: we'll update your Facebook.”\n\nBut parallel lines never intersect, and as ours progresses, the parks and squares empty out. Only wraiths pass by, absent to themselves, linked in a psychic death pact to another wraith staring somewhere at the same glowing screen. Only a few are still resentfully here, temporarily anchored by domesticated dogs for whom no application yet exists to take on walks. But even the housepets appear more neurotic as they pull against a leash that connects only to dead weight. They stare frantically at nothing, like inmates too long interned.\n\nI think of a resolution to make on New Years. From now on, whenever I encounter a cyborg, I will speak only to the device, the brain, and ignore the flesh-head that still pretends to be in charge. Someone should start killing cyborgs, smashing the devices and liberating the golem they hold in thrall.\n\nA year ago a wave of graffiti appeared in a park near my house. It was the first sign of life to have appeared there in some time. The occasion, I gathered, was the premature death of a member of a circle of young people who sometimes gathered on the stairs. “Alex,” the inked etchings inscribed, “We will remember you.” “Alex, brother, we won't forget.” “Alex, you were my first love.” The wall stood almost always alone. The kids I associated with it appeared less and less often. Had I only dreamt them? The graffiti, as such, seemed like its own tribe. When the wall was washed clean, the writing appeared again, as if by magic. Now there is nothing there. I wonder if I am the only one who remembers that unknown boy. What has become of his friends?\n\nAnd what superb instinct leads us to scratch away at the indelible façade of our world right at that moment when one of us snuffs out their meaningless life? As if the excess of agony standing like stale water that no apparatus yet designed can wash away pushes us Borf-like to attempt the impermissible, the inscription of our experiences in the metallic flanks of our prison. In moments like these it seems that everyone is aware that amnesia is included in the bylaws of Order; and therefore, to not forget, we must break the law. The only walls we are allowed to transform are on Facebook, mapping for the enemy.\n\nToday, true grieving demands we resort to graffiti. In a time not far off—already arrived in some parts—it will demand terrorism.\n\nSuch a tragedy that suicide loses its enchantment with age. Precisely as we have nothing left to lose, we lose the resolve to go out with dignity in that ultimate, irrecuperable subversion. As though we were genetically programmed to weaken just in those years when we can claim empirical proof that, no, things will not get better, it seems the onset of a hormonal listlessness, the liquification of a certain moral fiber running through our core, enlists us to plod along with the whole of our society, look away or grimace as we might, but ever onwards, in furtherance of whatever harebrained course the species has set.\n\nThe political consequences of this resulting lack of elderly suicide bombers are immense. Social stability may lay thanks for its prosperity on the doorstep of that biological cowardice with which failures cling to failure and rebels, at their very best, cling to those same gestures that have long since let them down.\n\nEven the engineers of each new apparatus are feeling lonely. How many start-up geeks marketing the latest Twitter spin-off or networking app sincerely believe that their invention might bring people closer? Convince a prisoner that freedom is made of walls, and they will build new cells all on their own. The guards have put down their guns but they can't hand out bricks fast enough. The general population scouts out the new galleries and wings. Is this what we've been looking for?\n\nWe often tell of Baron Hausmann of Paris, the rightwing architect who redesigned the city in time for the Commune, widening avenues and intersections, enclosing common spaces, to take the defensive advantage away from a population in revolt and allow an invading army easy access, changing the very terrain to favor a new kind of war.\n\nWe should speak more of Ildefons Cerdà, the utopian socialist architect who redesigned Barcelona in the 1860s. He sought to use architecture to bring about social justice and defuse class conflict by bringing rich and poor together in harmony. The modifications he left behind were nearly the same as those that had been imposed on Paris.\n\nThis is not new, but it is getting more common. Nowadays, hip CEOs debate whether technology will overcome alienation and powerlessness or whether it is increasingly totalitarian. One pole in this debate labors all the faster to develop new technologies, hoping to find the one that will really save us, and the other promotes conscious capitalism and donates profits to NGOs.\n\nThose who do not take sides in the social war and commit themselves to a path of negation maintain an affective allegiance to power, and the only way for them to reconcile this allegiance with whatever residual feelings of being human still trouble them in their new cyborg physiology is to decorate these allegiances, to pour even more affective attention into the “improvement” of the rites of power. The fact that what we are seeing is not an initiative of the traditional ruling class is evident in the selection of rites for decoration. Elections, military parades, leader cults, and similar processes are not the objects of adoration. In fact, the enthusiastic campaigns of civic improvement have tended to destabilize, delegitimize, or eclipse the rites that have traditionally been predominant in the sanctification of power. Neither have the initiatives come from the upper strata of the owning class; on the contrary, the most influential production to result in the decoration and intensification of the affective allegiances that tie people to power has been initiated by individuals from the computer-literate section of what would be defined as the working class, who in their astronomic ascent have founded companies that upset the preexisting capitalist hierarchy and now rank among the largest.\n\nA large part of what economists might see as growth in the last few decades is an exponential explosion in the frenetically doomed activity of alienated people constructing new apparatuses to mediate alienation, with the unintended but inevitable consequence of spreading it to new heights and moments of life.\n\nState planners and capitalists, while not the initiators of what has become an October 12, a Columbus-moment, in the field of social control, have responded in perfect form; the former by pursuing an aggressive institutional advance into the network of new and momentarily underregulated apparatuses that have been formed, and by integrating new technics into a revamped Cold War security apparatus; the latter by handing out bricks on low-interest loan, making sure that the supply never runs low and that no good deed goes unexploited.\n\nYet one has the feeling that they are not merely profiting off a plebeian circus, that even the most powerful engineers are now moved by a quest to mediate alienation. As a historical rule, up until now it seems clear that no matter how universal alienation has been, the exercise of power acted as a drug to allow a certain class of people to find fulfillment in the midst of misery. This affective marker of the ruling class as distinct holders of power is what made Foucault's theory of the immanence and diffusion of power an overstated argument and, if our present musings have set their teeth to marrow and not air, an argument that was ahead of its time.\n\nIncreasingly, a new measure of class (post-defeat class, as ladder and not as warfare) is how fully one can organize their lives in the space of the new virtual apparatuses.\n\nCould it be that the charm of winning the class war has worn out? A power-holder must hold it against someone. Once the class war is won is the moment our prison guard realizes that he too is in a prison. He is no longer a heroic protagonist wielding his power against the savage masses, but a conduit through which power moves to maintain the good order of the apparatus. The emergency is past. Power no longer needs his creativity and dedication as protagonist to triumph. Put another way, power has risen out of the class of protagonists who heroically generated and organized it so as to organize itself at a higher level. Today, affective dedication and creativity are required of all those desolate souls who must inhabit a prison, regardless of their level of relative privilege.\n\nThe forerunner of this dynamic, now repeated at a greater intensity, is the patriarchal system of bribery that allowed any expendable proletarian or peasant man to play at being tyrant, and taste a small dose of the drug that made misery enjoyable.\n\nGames of power-against played out at a continental scale color the early history of the State. Power-as-drug constituted an affective wage that roped people in to building State power. However, power-fiending protagonists do not always make decisions in the interests of stability or accumulation. The new apparatuses, organized on a logic of power-as-flux, mark a tighter arrangement whereby people are conduits of power and they pay to be played. They dedicate their affective energies to the improvement of their prison, independent of any wages, because to not do so would be spiritual suicide. While capitalism has always relied on unwaged labor, until now that labor has been provided by patriarchy or colonialism. In the Wikipedia age, the voluntary character of unwaged production is largely different.\n\nThe new apparatuses of social networking also begin to quantify informal power (the very informal power that has always held primary importance, even and especially in the institutions of formal power, which could not work without it) in “likes”, “friends”, and “followers”. But this version of informal power is not the kind created by protagonists, it is the kind produced by a mill wheel set spinning by a hundred chained bodies each chasing after their own loneliness.\n\nThere are some who attempt to pirate power at the level of property, using unregulated spaces in the new apparatuses to steal and share the digital commodities that make up such a large part of the global economy. But alienation extends so far beyond property, they can only hope to be privateers. The free circulation of the product they have liberated brings no benefit to the major concentrations of capital, whose spokespersons tell of tremendous economic losses. Surely, such crimes will not go unpunished, and in the future, prevented, as the State cannot abide unregulated space. But at a level much more dear to the world-machine than that of paltry capital accumulation, these would-be pirates are doing important work, thus they are allowed a certain license (though it is a license the most powerful nations will not recognize, just as the privateers were legally commissioned criminals in a polyarchic global system).\n\nThe service they render is to maintain and even expand the project of social control. They are the next chapter in the dilemma of the workers who occupy their factory and keep on producing. To name a common example, they have liberated music—what could be more beautiful? But this is not a pirate cassette, taped off the radio and shared among friends on a boombox in the park. This is a digital file that will be added to an inhumanly extensive library, linked in to the web for the collection of metadata, and fed directly into the ears of the golem, who will continue to slide like oil over the surface of the muted landscape, blind and limbless, doing whatever it takes to avoid wondering how they got there.\n\nSuch music is the pinnacle of our civilization. What beautiful sounds we invent, to play while the ship sinks, the weight of its spite bringing the whole sea down with it.\n\nA gust of tepid wind blows past me. I have finished my circle and found nothing to keep me. An alcoholic sits on a bench, howling at the empty streets. Young people drift by, ears plugged to the world, bobbing their heads to unheard tunes. A dog barks. A motorcycle idles. When someone passes close enough, I hear a faint, electric rendition of song.\n\n
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\n\n\n\n"}}},{"rowIdx":198,"cells":{"text":{"kind":"string","value":"#title Has the insurrection come yet? My arm is getting tired...\n#subtitle A Cartography of The Coming Insurrection, Tiqqun, and their Party\n#author Alex Gorrion\n#SORTtopics tiqqun, invisible committee, imaginary party, crypto-authoritarianism, review, The Anvil Review\n#date August 2010\n#source The Anvil Review\n#lang en\n\n\n“I didn't come to praise Caesar, but to bury him.”\n\n
\n\nThe Emperor is missing some clothes\n\nI want to critique The Coming Insurrection and some of the writings of Tiqqun not because I dislike these texts but on the contrary because I like them, because I find them interesting, and because they have become so popular. I focus on the weaknesses because I find their strengths to be self-evident and through this review I hope to encourage more people to read them, but in a critical way. The aura of fashion that has surrounded them encourages one to swallow these texts wholesale and uncritically, so that they become digested as a style rather than as an analysis.\n\nThe “Chicago Branch” of the Imaginary Party, for example, put out a translation of “Theses on the Imaginary Party” which is dotted with sentences so botched that the translators themselves probably did not understand them, as they are absolutely ungrammatical. (For example, in thesis 3: “It follows identically for the social war of which the combats can remain at their paroxysm perfectly silent and, so to speak, colorless.” And in thesis 17: “One does not insult a mode of unveiling like a fortress, even if one can usefully lead to the other.”) Despite this incomprehension, the Party members in Chicago found something so exciting in it that they “chose to reformat this text to give momentum to its North American circulation, and give it the aesthetic backing it deserves. And because we really like Tiqqun.”\n\n
\n\nHow is it to be said?\n\nWhile “Theses on the Imaginary Party” could probably be burnt to ashes without any great loss, the other translations I worked with were all poetic, and the texts thought-provoking. Theory of Bloom and The Coming Insurrection deserve to join the great works of philosophy of their respective centuries. But then, as they might agree, philosophy has often been nothing more than the justification of a certain ordering of things.\n\nWhile the Invisible Committee's writings are a sincere strike against a certain arrangement of lies, there are a number of operations they perform in how they communicate that exacerbate other of their weaknesses, and lead to a certain problematic ordering of revolution.\n\nFirst of all, they communicate through resonance, rather than through argument. This is to say, they present a description of reality as self-evident, confident that some readers will immediately identify with their words, seeing in them possibilities they find attractive, or an apt description of their own experience they might not have been able to formulate for themselves.\n\n“In our time of utter decadence, the only thing imposing about temples is the dismal truth that they are already in ruins.” [TCI, p.112]\n\nThis “truth” will ring true to some readers, thus any concrete proposition logically based on this truth will seem valid, but to other people, with other experiences, the temples—the institutions that manufacture power and meaning—may justifiably seem robust. This latter group are not presented with any convincing arguments, any evidence, to change their perception or question their experience. If the text does not resonate with them, it simply moves on without them.\n\nThe advantage of resonance is that it communicates, more than an idea, a certainty, an inspired strength, that reasoned argument cannot; and it bypasses the discourses of the Spectacle, the distracting alibis that don't deserve to be taken seriously and argued with. Presenting reasoned arguments against the flows of Capital could be like sitting down to a debate with a Creationist or global warming denier; it gives them legitimacy.\n\nThe disadvantage is its high potential for demagoguery. It creates an in-group and an out-group, based on who is predisposed to receive those words. Rightwing radio jockeys also use resonance, although with the crucial difference that they can rely on a mass fabrication of experiences to ensure a greater amount of resonance. The TV news is full of crime stories, so when they talk about fear of crime, their message will resonate with many in the audience who have a virtual experience of crime. Because the Invisible Committee cannot rely on the discourses of the Spectacle, the fact that their words resonate with so many people means they're on to something.\n\nHowever, on top of resonance they add a second problematic method of communication: the frequent use of untrue truisms. For example: “this same lack of discipline figures so prominently among the recognized military virtues of resistance fighters.” [TCI, p.111]. Actually, one finds in the biographies of many if not most resistance fighters a strict personal and group discipline, which only some do not share. But the Invisible Committee simply does not engage with facts on this factual level. And the resonance-blinded reader will be predisposed to breeze through these errors.\n\nAnother example: “Nothing can explain the systematic lack of remorse among criminals, if not the mute sentiment of participating in a grandiose work of devastation.” [Theses, thesis 20]. Actually, a great many criminals are remorseful, even when they distinctly should not be, and this reality tells us as much if not more about the functioning of power than the putative silence of the remorseless ones, into whose closed mouths the Invisible Committee is comfortable inserting entire soliloquies.\n\nThirdly is the element of totalization. Like their Situationist predecessors, the Invisible Committee is proposing a theory by which to understand the totality of domination, struggle, identity, and existence. Their theory is a very sound one, an interesting one, and an inspiring one, but it would be reductionist to understand it as the only one with any validity. Yet this, it seems, is what they do, confusing the finger with the moon like the fool in the old zen parable.\n\nWe can read, for example, statements like:\n\n“That's the reason for the well planned and public constitution of a lumpen-proletariat in all the nations where late capitalism reigns: the lumpens are there to dissuade Bloom from abandoning his essential detachment by the abrupt but frightening threat of hunger.” [Bloom, p.100].\n\nReally? The existence of an entire class can be reduced to their utility in frightening others? And when were the lumpen-proletariat ever not publicly constituted, and what were the reasons for their constitution before the advent of Bloom, and why did these reasons fully disappear with Bloom? At what point did society change so thoroughly that one theory could disappear and another appear, having fully subsumed all the mechanisms of the former?\n\nA fourth hallmark of the manifestos of the Imaginary Party is non-falsifiability. They go beyond offering poetic, inspiring, or useful descriptions of reality to argue scientific causality and propose (semi)concrete actions. It often happens something like this:\n\n“Organizations are obstacles to organizing ourselves.\n\n“In truth, there is no gap between what we are, what we do, and what we are becoming. “Organizations—political or labor, fascist or anarchist—always begin by separating, practically, these aspects of existence.” [TCI, p.15]\n\nThe first two sentences contain interesting points. They do not need to be absolutely true in order to be useful. However, the writers go on to assert a causal connection between those two points; in other words by always enforcing this existential gap, organizations make themselves obstacles. Now they have moved from a poetic or suggestive logic to a scientific one, at the same time as they make a non-falsifiable statement about the origin of organizations. This assertion cannot be true in any empirical sense, it can only be true if you accept the insistence of its truth. You must accept their specific redefinition of a common word and the writers need not take any risks by clarifying which actual groups constitute organizations, by this new definition, and which do not.\n\n“Organization” is now reserved as an ideological weapon to be used against those whose organizing one does not like.\n\nGenerally, and again like the Situationists, the Invisible Committee are careful not to make any falsifiable statements while offering up their total theory, even while they use a scientific or causal logic. And the few times they do let slip an assertion that can be factually checked, it falls flat on its face. For example:\n\n“It is a rarely disputed fact: we know from experience that the violence of explosions grows in proportion to excessive confinement.” [Bloom, p.113].\n\nThis is another fact that is not a fact. Confinement often leads to greater passivity, to depression and unresponsiveness. This can be factually confirmed in a prison, at the zoo, in densely populated cities, during the Holocaust. Violent explosions are sometimes related to confinement, but the relationship is hardly so simple to justify such a facile correlation.\n\n
\n\nThe Second Coming Insurrection\n\nFrom its very title, the millenarian character of The Coming Insurrection becomes apparent.\n\n“Everyone agrees. It's about to explode. [TCI p.9]\n\n“Whether [the collapse] comes sooner or later, the point is to prepare for it.” [TCI p.9]\n\n“Everyone agrees that things can only get worse. “The future has no future.”” [TCI p.23]\n\nThe same imminence can be found in other texts of theirs. “We know at present that the denouement is close.” [Theses, No. 15]\n\n“commodity society” has reached “its final age.” [Bloom, p.97].\n\nThe insurrection is coming. One can almost hear it panting out those very words in the exuberance of these writings. As we've seen, there is no need to argue this certainty. In the style of Appel (the earlier book by this crew), it is presented simply as “an evident.”\n\nWhat is accomplished by this operation? Those with whom these texts resonate, which is to say, those who are predisposed to agree with them, will be inspired by the poetic language, the beautiful descriptions of their own isolated experiences, and empowered by the projection of strength, certainty, and confidence. For everyone else, the text will have no effect. Thus, the Invisible Committee's chosen form of communication creates a strong divide between believer and gentile which is at its core thoroughly unstrategic, not because there is anything wrong with resonance over argument, but because the specific message the IC is spreading speaks of an impending civil war in which we will have to choose sides, yet the way they spread it forgoes the necessity of intervention, of influencing how others perceive that choice and what choice they make.\n\nOur attention is directed towards the certainty of this insurrection's arrival and away from what we might do to aid it. If we are predisposed, we will “break ranks.” If not, we won't. And that's not even worrisome, because we are presented (again) with a revolution that unfolds from an internal “dialectic”. If Blooms and the negative acts of desertion they are capable of are simply produced by the contradictions within the Spectacle, within the “empire of positivity”, then we are once again saddled with a mechanistic view of struggle.\n\nThe contradiction between dialectics and human agency is especially pronounced in Theory of Bloom. Tiqqun “is not the revolution that must be waited for, much less the revolution that we can prepare: but the revolution that is taking place according to its own invisible pulsations, in a temporality operating internally within history.” [Bloom, p.102]. Here we are presented with a revolution wholly unaffected by our choices, plans, preparations, and strategies. A revolution we need not even be conscious of, and that is, in fact, largely inscrutable, according to the assurances of the Invisible Committee. This absence of strategy undergoes a curious shift towards an exaltation of agency, with such passages acting as intermediary: “Because [Bloom's] strategy is to produce disaster, and around himself to produce silence.” [Bloom, p.115]. Since Bloom is a phenomenon and a condition produced by the Spectacle, the emptiness on the other side of alienated individuality, any strategy that is ascribed to him is a function of his characteristics rather than a choice of his desires. He is just another machine, but one that “produces” disaster.\n\nOnly at the rousing end of the text does Bloom gain his agency, and we suddenly hear about the “duty to make decisions” [Bloom, p.122].\n\nThis is neither incoherence nor creative paradox. An attentive reading of Tiqqun reveals that there is a run-of-the-mill Bloom and a becoming-conscious Bloom who is more equal than the others, just as, in a few paragraphs, we will infer the existence of an Inner Party and an Outer Party.\n\nFor now, Bloom is overwhelmingly an object, and his “fate is either to make his escape from nihilism or perish.” [Bloom, p.104]. Those who learn from history probably hear a little warning bell go off with this phrase. Didn't some prophet of the past promise us a similar insurmountable contradiction that arose from the imperatives of the system itself? Hasn't there already been an argument between those who saw revolution as something for us to make now and those who saw it as an inexorable product of history?\n\nWe simply have to ask ourselves: what if the insurrection doesn't come? What if we're just getting jerked around, and capitalism finds a way out, secures itself a future existence, as it has every time so far? Will our participation in this civil war, the morale we need to be insurgents, be staked on the “fact” that the catastrophe is here? The communists drowned themselves in a hundred year defeat by gambling that capitalism contained a contradiction it could not overcome. Is the grand carousel of history, well past the point of tragedy, looking to serve up a little farce?\n\n
\n\nDidn't you hear? The event got defeated\n\nA major problem with The Coming Insurrection is that it basically dresses up a tried and defeated strategy in new clothes, the strategy of a good part of the European autonomous struggles of past decades. Perhaps this is why it was way more popular in the US than in France: because its suggestions aren't all that groundbreaking, except here, where there never was an autonomous movement. Knowledge is often created by struggle. Could it be that some academics (Agamben) were inspired by the new theoretical directions implicit in the ongoing social struggles of the '70s and '80s, gradually worked that inspiration into their theoretical production over the years, and then twenty years later some intellectuals, disenchanted with the failings of present struggles and cut off from stories of past struggles, read the new theory, which was just a digestion of the old struggles, and thought they had discovered something original (beef jerky)?\n\nI wouldn't even call that a hypothesis, but still one wonders how else European radicals could repackage the strategy of revolution through the networking of autonomous spaces as though it were a new idea.\n\nTheir analysis of the world is brilliant and moving. Their suggestions for what to do generally fall flat. They have replaced the term “autonomous space” with the old favorite, “commune” (neologism: it's a great way to lose the same fight twice); they keep the emphasis on learning skills of self-sufficiency; they throw in a nice take on pacifism; they resolve the question around the General Assembly by calling for its abolition and clarifying the assembly as a place for talk rather than decision, which is a great point but hardly constitutes a correction to the autonomous strategy, since there were already strong segments of this practice who felt the same way. They've beefed up the importance of sabotage and the economic blockade, and they've thrown in a partially original call for invisibility.\n\nThey fail to answer or even ask what in my mind is the most important question regarding the defeat of this strategy: how to build the communes and the material basis for self-sufficiency—thus creating something to lose—while continuing to act like you have nothing to lose, which is to say, without falling into a defensive posture that facilitates recuperation or at the very least stagnation, seeking some uneasy truce with the dominant order. What they offer instead is a confidence that they will never sell out, which mirrors the confidence of the autonomen in the '70s, although the IC has found more poetic language for it.\n\nThanks to the Tarnac 9 arrests, the most famous part of the book, though it only receives a few pages, is where they cosmetically alter the old autonomous strategy by adding emphasis to the idea of sabotaging the commodity flows. “The interruption of the flow of commodities [...] liberate potentialities for self-organization unthinkable in other circumstances.” [TCI, p.119]. Elsewhere: “In order for something to rise up in the midst of the metropolis and open up other possibilities, the first act must be to interupt its perpetuum mobile.” [TCI, p.61]. Yet the examples they mention, in Thailand or in France, seem to indicate that this interruption is in fact a result of self-organization rather than a prerequisite. Strong movements with real popular support already existed, and were able to knock out infrastructure with a large part of society sympathizing with the inconvenience rather than becoming hostile towards the troublemakers. On the other hand, the countrywide train sabotage for which the Tarnac 9 were arrested did not seem to liberate any potentialities, and the massive blackout in Barcelona of 2007 was experienced more as a wasted potential than a liberated potential.\n\nOf course I can't abide any Marxist-Leninist “accumulation of forces” argument and I won't suggest that these tactics are only appropriate or worthwhile once a mass movement has gained full popular approval and the petitions to prove it. The experience of the Argentine piqueteros shows that the increasing use of sabotage can be a useful tool in building up the potentials of self-organization and social presence over time. The point is simply that The Coming Insurrection exaggerates the effect of the blockade. Its greatest potential, evidently, comes not as an event but as a process. The authors also fail to make a useful point culled from the Greek experience: once a struggle becomes strong enough to precipitate a rupture, perhaps the principal infrastrucutral network to be sabotaged is the television.\n\nThe Invisible Committee does an equally good job of missing out on important lessons to be learned from the major social rebellions in Oaxaca (2006) and Kabylia (2001), though they make a really good point about how the communes can arise from the social movements, when talking about the French students' struggle on page 121 of The Coming Insurrection.\n\nWhere did the rebellions in Oaxaca and Kabylia come from, and why did they fail? Important questions. The IC passes the buck. They include a critique of organizations, but it's not nearly nuanced enough. The Oaxaca rebellion was largely co-opted by elements within the APPO—not the general assembly itself but its steering committee—but it was provoked largely by the teachers' unions. In their brief mention of Kabylia, the writers diss the “interminable” assemblies, but fail to mention that some of these assemblies were a continuation of indigenous forms of self-organization and an important vehicle for the rebellion itself. Some of these forms of organization recuperated themselves, while others are still resisting the recuperation. The Coming Insurrection is trying to dissect a fly with a butter knife, and justifying it with a witchhunt logic: if it gets smashed, it was no good.\n\n
\n\nAbout as invisible as that elephant sitting over there in the corner\n\nThe Invisible Committee's most characteristic modification of the autonomous strategy is the call for invisibility, to avoid recognition. “Flee visibility [...] to be visible is to be exposed, that is to say above all, vulnerable” [TCI, pp.112-113]. “[W]e see appearing among Blooms not only a certain taste for anonymity, but at the same time a certain defiance towards visibility” [Bloom, p.111]. “From now on, to be perceived means to be defeated” [How?, p.11].\n\nI'll get the awkwardness out of the way, do the brutish, inappropriate thing, and say right off the bat that this is an odd argument, seeing as how the presumed authors of the text, once the state's spotlight was turned on them, fled directly into the media spotlight, which has always been recognized as an at least partially effective way for people to save themselves from the executioners of the justice system. In the terrain of democracy, unlike the terrain of guerrilla warfare, people tend to be safest in plain view. As much as the Spectacle needs to be abolished, media attention that protagonizes rebels, though it is a poisoned apple, can build sympathy and provide protection from repression, and this is no more a contradiction than the fact that, while fighting to destroy capitalism, we often have to get jobs and buy commodities; while fighting to destroy the state, we use state infrastructure. After all, we're not vegans or anything, and we understand that the total boycott isn't even possible. I also argue, and I'm not sure whether the Invisible Committee understands this, that although our theories may be unified and streamlined, the system we're fighting against never is. There are contradictions among institutions of power that we can exploit.\n\nOne could counter that the arrestees only utilized a media campaign, with big protests, dignified academics writing in to the major newspapers and all that, only after they were already in the spotlight. The obvious answer is that going to the hills, dressing normal, and trying to avoid recognition didn't work very well then, because it was relatively easy for the state to find them and slap on whatever ill-fitting label was in its own political interests at the moment, in that case, anarcho-autonome or terrorist.\n\nThe War on Terrorism succeeds as a repressive operation precisely when its victims cannot be recognized. Because recognition is not only to accept someone's predicate assigned on the basis of an assemblage of social constructs, in this case, “terrorist.” It can also mean to assign someone a predicate based on a conflicting assemblage of social constructs (“good citizen,” “neighbor,” “human being,” “social activist,” “freedom fighter,” “conscientious objector,”), an approach which creates a strategic conflict that can neutralize the initial operation (exposing certain individuals and groups to greater repression by not allowing them to be recognized outside of the category imposed by the state) but one that also recuperates the recognizant defiance by maintaining it within the assemblages proffered by the system—in other words, a draw, a going back to square one. An honestly, fighting a campaign of repression to a draw is not all bad. But there is a third possibility for recognition: assigning someone predicates that are fluid and non-categorical.\n\nIn “How is it to be done?” the Party members talk about predicates in a way that could be optimistically construed as only referring to socially imposed categories: “it takes many assemblages to turn a female being into “a woman”, or a black-skinned man into “a Black”.” [How?, p.9], although phrases like “Let be the gap between the subject and its predicates” and “A “white horse” is not “a horse”.” [How”, p.9] suggest that indeed they are attempting to cut much deeper.\n\nElsewhere, they leave no room for doubt.\n\n“As for the statement “a rose is a flower,” it allows me to erase myself opportunely from behind the classification operation that I am carrying out. It would thus be more suitable to say \"I class the rose as among the flowers,\" which is a standard formulation in Slavic languages.” [Metaphysics]\n\nThis structural argument is interesting as a passing, philosophical consideration, but it is theoretically useless and factually flawed. I can say with certainty that their assertion regarding the grammar of the Slavic languages is wholly untrue in Russian and Ukrainian. I'm waiting to hear back from some friends regarding Polish, Bulgarian, and Croat, and I'll announce my error if my prediction proves untrue but the IC's track record with facts leaves me with little doubt that they're imagining things again.\n\nWhile we're at it, I want to point out that the structuralist hypothesis that language defines possibilities for thought, which is the assumption on which the IC is basing their point about predicates (they say the “to be” verb of Indo-European languages allows for a peculiar confusion between subject and predicate), has been soundly disputed. Research has shown that there is a weak effect—for example speakers of languages in which all nouns are gendered (“el tiroteo,” “die Tür,”) are more likely to assign feminine or masculine adjectives to inanimate objects based on the noun's gender, when asked to personify those nouns in a survey, though not necessarily in everyday speech (i.e. the German speakers will personify “the door” with feminine adjectives). There is, however, no strong determination of language on thought. English and Spanish speakers do not have a profounder sense of time than German or Russian speakers because English and Spanish grammars contain far more tenses, just as English and Spanish speakers do not have a more primitive grasp of the interactional relationship between different bodies and objects just because German and Russian grammar contain far more developed cases. The human brain is everywhere the same in its range of differences, and language is something we constantly recreate as needed—given the necessity, children will create a brand new language for themselves in a generation. Faced with a restrictive grammar, we have a whole array of other linguistic cues to communicate all the nuance we need. Anarchy is the fundamental reality of linguistics as with all other spheres; every language has its black market amply provisioned with whatever needed meaning one cannot get through the more structured spaces of the tongue.\n\nThe very assemblage of meanings, of cultural assumptions and conversations suppressed or already had, that form the backdrop to every conversation, allow us to surpass the confusions or limitations of grammar at any moment. A society that reifies scientific categories may be confused by the sentence, “a rose is a flower,” just as they may believe when they are told a tomato is a fruit and not a vegetable (dastardly lie). But a society in which people talk about the relationship between language and the world, people with a humbly metaphysical appreciation of the act of naming would not be confused. They will still say “a rose is a flower” rather than “I classify the rose as a flower,” because the former is more streamlined, and a linguistic rule of thumb is that more frequently used formulations tend to be shortened.\n\nAnother example. Two paragraphs back, I hesitated before writing the phrase “feminine or masculine adjectives”. I thought about writing “adjectives considered to be feminine or masculine” but decided that was too bulky to put in the middle of an already long sentence. And it was unnecessary. The former phrase and the latter phrase mean the exact same thing, as long as the readers have already engaged with the idea that femininity and masculinity are always social constructs and matters of assigned value.\n\nSuspending language, which does not exist without the assignment of predicates, can be vital in moments of meditation, hallucination, and ecstasy. But as a program or ideological argument the suggestion is the absurd fantasy of a totalitarianism of ideas, a hyper-intellectuality that has gotten so lost in its own cerebral cortex it has not heard that its mother has been calling it down to dinner for the last three days.\n\nTo talk of becoming anonymous or existing only in presence, avoiding recognition, on a practical level, means very little if this is not simply a strategy of boycotting the media and not adopting any identity category other than member of the Imaginary Party. The thing about “opaque zones” [How?, p.11] is that they are only opaque to the state, its media, its academy. Within these zones there is a great deal of recognition, of differentiation, and a flourishing of predicates. If the banlieue or Kabylia seem opaque to the Invisible Committee, this is only because they stand outside and above them.\n\nThe fact of the matter is, invisibility is only an option for the state agents spying on us, and the guerrilla who is willing to sacrifice her life to an existence of clandestinity. For the rest of us, it's a question of appearance and disappearance: constantly learning to appear in the lives of others, and disappear from the traps, the enclosures of meaning, the Spectacle creates around us.\n\nHere's another thing about invisibility: the more you hide, the hipper you get. Case in point, Vice Magazine seeking out the Invisible Committee in Tarnac.\n\n
\n\nWhat is, er, sorry, how is the human strike?\n\nWhile The Coming Insurrection may be excused for the weakness of its practical suggestions, since the greater emphasis goes to their analysis of the present reality, Tiqqun has given us a text specifically intended to address this question: “How is it to be done?” They start by making a haughty distinction between theirs and Lenin's pamphlet of a similar name, provoking some interesting thoughts by outlining the difference between focusing on what to do and how to do it, though in the body of the text the difference proves to be basically meaningless, as their suggestions just as easily constitute a what as a how. The exception is in their discussion of recognition, which, as I already argued, is nothing to write home about.\n\nOn page 14 they offer a concrete suggestion that is equal parts what and how and advises, quite like The Coming Insurrection, a succinct reemployment of the autonomous strategy, “an expansionary constellation of squats[...] linked by an intense circulation of bodies”, without any idea on how to improve this practice. The fact that the autonomous strategy was defeated, though significant, should not in any way obscure all the possibilities it creates and capacities it develops. In fact, throughout France and Spain in particular, many people are still working at this expansionary constellation, tweaking it, maintaining it, giving it consistency, trying to push it in new directions, coming together in periodic encounters to share ideas and emotions. Curiously, at least some of the partisans of the Imaginary Party denounce these efforts as not whatever enough. Are they calling shots from the bleachers, or do they have anything to share from their own experiences of taking to the field?\n\n“How is it to be done?” answers its eponymous question primarily through the suggestion of the “human strike,” giving the example of the Italian feminists who refused to be mothers, who refused to dedicate their care to the reproduction of capitalism. I'm confused by how this suggestion conflicts with the calls for invisibility and against recognition, because it seems that a human strike requires, above all, consistency, as we learn over time how to liberate care and create new relationships, but consistency, which is on some levels the creation of new rituals, would seem to allow for what the IC refer to as visibility, an opportunity for the Spectacle to recuperate these efforts by assigning new labels and dispatching new commodities.\n\nThe human strike is a building up of force that will most certainly be noticed as we withdraw our affective energies from the economy, and replace commodity relations with a mutual caring for one another. Even if the police agencies of the state somehow fail to notice all the new communes—not the easy communes of the riot but the persevering ones that build up new capacities through consistency—Revlon will certainly notify them when cosmetics sales start to plummet.\n\nYet the Invisible Committee admonishes us that: “Our appearance as a force must be reserved for the right moment” [TCI, p.114] Wait for the right moment?? These people seem to be re-ordering all the Marxist fallacies and trying to make them hip again. What gives?\n\nAnd how are we to remain invisible (for now) while carrying out a human strike, when the Italian feminists got recuperated and the Tarnac 9 couldn't even pull it off? They've let us know what to do, but the Party leaders just can't pinpoint how we're actually supposed to do it.\n\nPrecarias a la Deriva of Madrid give a more meaningful explanation of the human strike (see “A Very Careful Strike”), but they also seem wedded to the great communist defeats. Their analysis of care and feminine labor is brilliant, but they do just as the Marxists in adopting capitalist logics in their challenges of capitalist relations, in this case by seeing care in instrumental terms, as another form of production. What I want to know is, how can we liberate something we insist on viewing in mechanical terms? After all, care can only be plugged into capitalism in the first place when it ceases to be nurturing and comes to be reproductive.\n\nIt's hard to say how the Invisible Committee view care because they're so far removed from care's gritty details. The statement, “We are not depressed; we're on strike” [TCI, p.34], can only be true if this strike comes with its own picket line to hold back those who would cross into the recuperation of pharmaceuticals, its own support committee so that the misery of being out of work, affectively, becomes a joyful poverty. In the movement from absenteeism to the unlimited general strike, what we need is an expansive body of experience and experimentation to mobilize our boredom, reify our resentment, wear our open wounds with pride and heal them with abandon, and help one another make our bodies whole again. The IC call for this experimentation, but hell, so did the feminists of the '70s, and even the activists of the anti-globalization era. All we get that's new is a rhetoric that protects us from seeming like those who failed before us.\n\n
\n\nWhatever, dude\n\nFor the Invisible Committee, in the insurrection they prophesy, the real one, their insurrection, we are all “whatever singularities,” without predicates, an emptiness brimming with possibilities. It's a beautiful dream, and I, for one, believe in fighting for dreams. But there is a certain ownership they exercise over their insurrection, a certain power of exclusion the Invisible Committee have vis a vis the Imaginary Party, that could make this dream nothing more than a maneuver identical to the one by which the communists suppressed difference by demanding adherence to the unified identity of the Working Class. There are no women, there are no blacks, there are only members of the Imaginary Party.\n\nSomething curious, of an understated significance, takes place within the pages of the English-language edition of The Coming Insurrection. On page 83, just a page after the French authors extol agricultural experimentation in Cuba and the artistry of auto mechanics in Africa as evidence of the fertility of catastrophe, they allow themselves to get excited by the Common Ground Clinic in New Orleans, as a fruit of the catastrophe that was Hurricane Katrina. This is no doubt embarrassing for Party members in the US, as Common Ground is an example of “activism” and thus part of the Spectacle, the Party of Order, and not of the Imaginary Party. So, the translators insert a footnote to explain away the mistake and denounce the Clinic. They say its founder, Malik Rahim, used it for a Congressional campaign (they need not consider what Rahim's relationship was to the Clinic during his campaign, nor the attitude of those who keep the Clinic running to political campaigns), and they point out that “one of the main spokesmen for the project, Brandon Darby, was an FBI informant” (ignoring that FBI informants have also cropped up in the most insurrectionary of projects in this country—let's not forget what else Darby himself participated in).\n\nThe translators stumble blindly into a great irony that they themselves have dug, abyss-like, in their very path. They try to minimize the IC's error of praising Common Ground with an easy truth: “A certain distance leads to a certain obscurity.”\n\nI want to repeat that one: “A certain distance leads to a certain obscurity.” This little turn of phrase, like a sewing needle, pops the overinflated balloon of a good part of what the Invisible Committee says, of what the Imaginary Party itself stands for.\n\nFirst of all, isn't obscurity exactly what they were going for? Or is there a functional difference between obscurity and opacity? And if this is true, one might not be so brash in predicting that in the Arabic or Imazigh translation of The Coming Insurrection or Tiqqun texts, the translators would embarrassingly note that Kabylia isn't such a good example because that struggle was full of recuperators, but the authors could hardly have known that because of the distances involved; in the Spanish translation of these texts the translators would embarrassingly note that experimental Cuban agriculture isn't such a good example because so much of it was funded or at least permitted by the state, and Oaxaca isn't such a good example either because the initial strikes were actually organized by the teachers' unions.\n\nOnce you penetrate their opacity, it seems, all the little chapters of the Imaginary Party blow away in a puff of smoke.\n\nCould it be that the Imaginary Party is, after all, imaginary? There can be little doubt, when one reads their assertion about “Japanese children, whom one might justly consider the most intense avant-garde of the Imaginary Party” [Theses, thesis 18].\n\nMost whatevers aren't good enough for them. Only what is farthest away is valued. They sling denunciations of activists, of leftists, of anarchists, of other ways of doing things, and their only suggestions are exotic. The analysis in the first parts of The Coming Insurrection brilliantly show how the civil war is all around us, but when talking about how it is to be fought, all they can do is make struggle even more distant, by creating a pressure, a higher standard, to fight effectively by being unrecognizable, by being anonymous, by being spontaneous, higher standards that only exotic examples can meet because they are unknown to the authors.\n\nThe whatever is just an ignorance of details.\n\nAnd the ignorance is above all a philosopher's preference for easy answers, an ideologue's refusal to engage with complexity. In the theorizing of the Invisible Committee, there is a certain streamlining of resistance. Beneath the poetry exists an economy of thought that demands the excision of all but the most sleek movements towards insurrection. Everything that is not judged to be perfect on the plane of ideas is denounced as recuperation.\n\n“RULE No. 2: You can never free yourself from an apparatus by getting engaged within its minor part.” [Metaphysics]. There is a logic to this. The identities, the subjectivities, they refer to can certainly be viewed as a “minor part” of the apparatus, and certainly creating counter-subjectivities cannot in and of itself destroy that apparatus and may often bind you to it more tightly, but the idea that only the most economic of motions in a struggle should be preserved ignores the messy reality of how people begin to desert and to fight, and it misses the opportunity for strength that is presented by an attitude of picking fights with the apparatus everywhere, in its most minor and major parts. Engaging with gender by redefining what it means to be a woman or a trannie or a man in this world is just moving around the prison bars. Attacking advertising that defines these roles for us (and realistically, such an attack would come out of a process in which we are also reading and writing and talking about gender identities) can be a step towards the insurrectionary, towards the war against domination in all its forms.\n\nI, for one, do not see insurrection in the efforts of a Party that is increasingly warlike, precise, and correct, but in the messy, inefficient, contradictory ecology of resistance that already exists. A thousand forms of collaboration are contrary to the spirit of insurrection, true, but no person embodies this spirit wholly. On some key levels what's important is to sympathize with it. We may and must critique and challenge the many compromises with existing reality, absolutely, but abandon them, never. Let the others fight the revolution from temple to temple. I'll stay here in the swamp.\n\n
\n\nThe Incompleteness of the Totality\n\nThe Invisible Committee presents us with a totalizing theory. In the very introduction of The Coming Insurrection, they tell us, “Everyone agrees.” In Theory of Bloom they assert that, “it's how every being is the way they are [...] it is precisely what gives consistency and possibility to each being. Bloom is the Stimmung in which and by which we understand each other at the present time” [Bloom, pp.22-24]. Bloom “experiences an ontological finiteness and separation common to all men.” [Bloom, p.105].\n\nIn fact, the affirmation of these truths is the necessary signifier for the creation of a new identity, a new milieu. It's also the recreation of a working class, a universal identity that has room for everyone. But it's a poor fit. There simply is no clean, unproblematic answer to the question of identity. Its very nature is as a question that will never be solved. True becoming can have no end point.\n\nThe totality is not a collection of identities (which could then be opposed by singularities) but a set of rules, often contradictory but arranged by mostly shared loyalties and similar visions of a common project, generated and imposed by numerous institutions, to define identities and regulate people's movement between them.\n\nSo two people who call themselves “activists” (or mothers or militants) may have entirely distinct relations to the totality. One may indeed be a becoming, a whatever, as she asks herself questions about how to strike out from where she stands and lets herself feel doubts about both the ground she stands on and the weapons she has picked up; while the other may indeed be a recuperator, satisfied with activism as a reproducible practice, eager for the paths of promotion laid out within it.\n\nThe Invisible Committee presents us with an Imaginary Party that is homogeneous not in any implied sameness but in its characteristic rejection of any internal differentiation. But I wonder how well this totalization encompasses all those who do not see themselves in Bloom, or who see aspects of themselves that the IC does not acknowledge, and seems to dismiss (I'm talking now about, among other things, race, gender, sexuality, as particularities). We can read an astute analysis of apparatuses that control us by mobilizing comfort [Metaphysics], but there is a subtextual hostility towards the discussion of the discomfort that is mobilized only against certain people. In fact, this sort of differentiation seems to contradict the poetic simplicity of Bloom theory and the idea of the Imaginary Party. They will take the effort to construct a theory of the Young Girl as a “model citizen” for consumer society but insist that this “is obviously not a gendered concept” [YoungGirl, iii] despite how odd it is to look at models of citizenship and commodity consumption without looking at gender.\n\nCat calls, degrading looks, insulting comments, men who follow you, every time you go out the door alone: the fact that certain people who are not cis male presenting as heterosexual will never be allowed to be comfortable in public space, when walking down the street, reveals a number of critical dynamics that any theory would be short-sighted to ignore. First of all, while the private sphere may indeed be socialized, because it holds a measure of security (though for some this may be a contractual security, such as that won through marriage) that the public sphere never will, we have to assert a continuing difference between the public and private spheres, one that necessarily precedes the Spectacle and links today's apparatuses to classical Patriarchy. This is a link I have never seen the Invisible Committee acknowledge. Rather everything is new, freshly discovered and named (by them). Their favorite phrase is, “From now on...”\n\nSecondly, through this gendered mobilization of discomfort in public space, or the racial segregation of neighborhoods, we see how people who are generally alienated exercise power over the bodies that pass through the space around them, the actual structure of which they are powerless to change. Much of the antisocial violence in public space, violence which is romanticized in several Tiqqun texts, is not so much a rebellion as an autonomous attempt to impose hierarchies in miniature. It may well be that the majority of casualties in this global civil war are the bodies that have fallen in the civil war being fought within the ranks of the Imaginary Party.\n\nAnother example: “The thread of historical transmission has been broken. Even the revolutionary tradition.” [How?, p.11]. This has not been my experience. Although I grew up ahistorically, Bloomlike, another lost child of the 'burbs, I have since lived in places with historical continuities of struggle. I have been a recipient of historical transmission and it has been something qualitatively different, unlike anything I knew growing up, and it made me infinitely stronger. One can also see that places with history, with revolutionary tradition (e.g. Greece, Kabylia, Oaxaca) are generally stronger in their struggles.\n\nOn a specific point, this thesis about the end of history directly contradicts many indigenous struggles for freedom. A major element of some of these struggles is that the genocide has not been completed, that there is an unbroken 500 year history of resistance, which at times has been stamped out to the point of darkness, but never fully extinguished. The argument that historical transmission has been broken and recognition is counterrevolutionary means that these indigenous struggles are wrong in asserting that they are still fighting colonialism, that there is something liberating in recognizing themselves as members of this or that nation (not nation-state, eurocentric readers), that through centuries of genocide they have survived (though no one is saying they survived unaltered, which is the strawman the academics usually opt for).\n\nIn considering these struggles, one cannot simply dismiss them or sweep them without direct comment into the ranks of the Imaginary Party. One must either give them solidarity, or agree with the post-modernist academics who are reclassifying them in accordance with continuing colonization, or choose some third option that I have never seen elaborated.\n\nThrough their Bloom theory, the Invisible Committee make another of the same mistakes as Marx. Dialectical reasoning and their implicit assumption of a unilineal history make them look to the populations most advanced in capitalist development as the site of future revolutions. Scientific Marx predicted Britain and Germany, unscientific Bakunin predicted Russia, Italy, and Spain. Enough said. The IC, in their turn, predict that the Bloom figure, the total death of subjectivity, contains within it the necessary annihilation of the Spectacle. But it seems true that—generally, not totally—where Bloom is least present, rebellions and social ruptures are most common. They refrain from admitting it, but the most bloomified figure is the middle class white, who has no history and no identity left but an array of false privileges, which is to say an absence of certain blackmails that are, for everyone else, universal.\n\nI spit on the politics of anyone who says middle class whites cannot be revolutionary, are not exploited and abused, and do not have their own truckload of reasons to hate and destroy the system, but someone who says they have the same experiences as everyone else, just as someone saying that everyone within one of these identity categories (“all women know that...”) have the same experience, is speaking not from their body but from the narrative of the Spectacle.\n\n
\n\nThe Dictatorship of the Fashionable\n\nIn the days of “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” the Communists could play at vanguard by organizing a Party that would manipulate and dominate general assemblies, communes, soviets, and any other gathering point of what was a largely aboveground and solidaristic movement.\n\nIn the '60s and '70s, an aboveground Party could only be reformist, so one could only be a vanguardist by encouraging a hierarchy of tactics, whereby the most illegal, risky, and spectacular actions were understood to be the most important. That way, a minuscule group, whether the Weather Underground or the Red Brigades, could form guerrilla cells to carry out the heavy actions that would ensure that everyone else in the struggle would give them their due attention and read their lengthy communiques. The mass movement is replaced by the media, and the vanguard constitutes itself as such not through organizational relationships but through attention that places it symbolically at the cutting edge of what had been a diverse and multi-directional movement.\n\nAs the Spectacle degenerates from a reality based on news to one based on fashion, I wonder if nowadays, a postmodern vanguard could form itself only by being fashionable, by turning their Party into a fad and their analysis into a style. It's interesting that the IC give us such a perfect explanation of hipsters [Bloom, p.55] when, at least in the US, many of their most avid partisans have come from the hipster wing of the anarchist movement. And what are hipsters but an elite in an age when integration is produced above all through consumption? And for the anti-capitalist palette, consumption need not require a large budget for shopping. In this economy of trivia, sophistication is enough.\n\nI don't want be alarmist, and certainly a vanguard based on la mode could never be as dangerous as one based on the cheka, but either way, turning a text like The Coming Insurrection that has good parts and bad parts into a cult classic, and tolerating for a moment a resurrection of the idea of the Party is nothing other than a good way to defeat ourselves, which I suppose is the role that communists have played in anti-capitalist struggles for over a century, so it should be no surprise that they're coming back now.\n\nThe putsch that ushered in the October Revolution was led by anarchist sailors from Kronstadt and left SRs. It was largely orchestrated by the Leninists, whom the anarchists trusted in part because Lenin's populist rhetoric was largely borrowed from the anarchists. They thought he was one of them.\n\nAgain, I believe that the danger this time around is minuscule, and the IC-as-thought have helped rejuvenate theorizing as a collective activity among US anarchists to an extent that far outweighs their disastrous effect, -as-style, on the plethora of hyperbolic communiques that announced various broken windows and occupied buildings with a mood of poetic rapture.\n\nAnd on the other hand, the IC shouldn't be taken too seriously. After all, let's cut the crap: they're basically CrimethInc. with a better vocabulary. Replace “deserting” with “dropping out” and there's no denying it. They blatantly lack the humility that at times has allowed CrimethInc. to be such a positive thing; furthermore, they carry out a couple operations that would make me hesitate before starting a commune with them, much less a milieu or a Party. As I mentioned earlier, this Party is not just an ironic linguistic device but a group that has its inner circle and its mechanisms for exclusion.\n\nIt works like this: if you disagree with them, you're out. “One would have to be a militant element of the planetary-petty-bourgeoisie, a citizen really, not to see that society no longer exists.” [How?, p.3]. They never define society, mind you, though I would guess they know, they're so well read after all, that it is a central element of the praxis of other anti-capitalists that society in fact does exist, beneath all the chains and IV tubes of Biopower, and that this is a good thing. But I guess their ideological competitors are nothing but representatives of the petty bourgeoisie (say, haven't we heard that one before?).\n\nI predict the Party leaders might chide me for missing the irony of their words, but with such ideological absolutism, though they may not hand out membership cards they have still fallen for their own joke.\n\nCurious thing: sometimes the Imaginary Party is an unconscious umbrella that includes everyone who chafes at their forced assimilation, and at other times it is a conscious group employing a singular strategy. “The Imaginary Party is the particular form that contradiction assumes in the historic period where Domination imposes itself as dictatorship of visibility and of dictatorship as visibility, in a word as Spectacle.” [Theses, thesis 1]; “In this sense, the Imaginary Party is the political party, or more exactly the party of the political, because it is the sole one which can designate in this society the metaphysical labor of an absolute hostility” [Theses, thesis 7]; “Therefore the Imaginary Party is known in the Spectacle as the party of chaos, crisis, and disaster.” [Theses, thesis 14]; “every Bloom, as a Bloom, is an agent of the Imaginary Party” [Bloom, p.114].\n\nAnd now see how quickly this undifferentiated mass signs on to a common wisdom or a shared program, or becomes a Party with “conscious fractions” [Theses, thesis 27]. “[T]hose of the Imaginary Party work to hasten the advent of this by any means[...] They are besides freer to choose what will be the theatre of their operations and act at the point where the smallest forces can cause the greatest losses.” [Theses, thesis 15]; “The Imaginary Party can count upon this constant: that a handful of partisans suffices to immobilize all the “Party of Order”.” [Theses, thesis 21]; “the assumption of Bloom mean[s] [...] to enter into contact with other agents of the Invisible Committee – through Tiqqun for example – and silently coordinate a truly elegant act of sabotage.” [Bloom, p.134]; “we can only desert the situation inwardly, by reclaiming our fundamental non-belonging to the biopolitical fabric with a participation on a more intimate and thus unattributable level, in the strategic community of the Invisible Committee” [Bloom, pp.135-136]. “Tiqqun is the only possible outlook for revolution.” [Bloom, p.102].\n\nThere are moments when one needs to argue against an idea, and moments when one need only present it clearly. Here it is: the Imaginary Party. We are told we all belong to it, insofar as we are alienated. It is the Party of our class. And it is a Party that has its partisans and conscious fractions, who will say we are the enemy if we disagree with them, or even, perhaps, use different words. The Imaginary Party: take it or leave it.\n\nI thank the Invisible Committee for their writings, and I wish them the best of luck. If my words sting too sharp, I want them to know I consider them comrades, and I have participated in solidarity events for the Tarnac 9 (though the money went to others of the French anarcho-autonome who were arrested for bombing police cars and have gotten far less attention than the 9). When there are barricades in the streets or people in prison, we will always be on the same side. But I think it should be clear: when it comes to the Imaginary Party, I hope to be the first to be purged.\n\n
\n\nWorks Cited\n\nTCI = The Coming Insurrection, Semiotext edition\n\nBloom = Theory of Bloom, anonymous 2010 edition\n\nTheses = “Theses on the Imaginary Party”, Chicago Branch edition\n\nHow? = “How is it to be done?” Inoperative Committee 2008 edition\n\nMetaphysics = “A Critical Metaphysics Could Come About as a Science of Apparatuses”, online version from the tiqqunista site.\n\nYoungGirl = Raw Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, online version from the tiqqunista site.\n\n\n\n"}}},{"rowIdx":199,"cells":{"text":{"kind":"string","value":"#title Science Revisited\n#subtitle A response to John Jacobi's “The Revolutionary Importance of Science”\n#author Alex Gorrion\n#SORTtopics science, rationalism, the Enlightenment, patriarchy, colonialism\n#date 2018\n#source anarchistnews.org\n#lang en\n\n\n\nThe same old dogmatism\n\nA response to John Jacobi's “The Revolutionary Importance of Science”\n\n
\n\nSometime after I published “Science,” which is a critique of an institutional complex fundamental to Western civilization, its worldview, its practices and its mythology, John Jacobi published a refutation on The Wildernist.\n\nThough his article contains a number of interesting points, it also demonstrates the same underlying racism, dogmatism, and ignorance as to its own argumentative structures that I was trying to critique in the first place.\n\n*** Defining Science\n\nAs is mentioned at the very beginning of “Science”, that text is not a stand-alone article but the continuation of a previous work. In fact, both are part of a series of texts that endeavor to construct a mythological narrative of power and institutionality from an anarchist sensibility. The article was meant to sketch some criticisms principally at the mythical level, tracing certain conventions of Western thought and showing relations between supposedly neutral scientific practices and the operation of various power structures in our society.\n\nJacobi seems to evince a belief that all things can be measured with the same yardstick. As far as discourse goes, I gather that the only valid format he recognizes is that of objective assertions. This was, ironically, one of my principal criticisms of “Science,” and one he never responds to: that it is impossible to only talk about things on the level of facts, and what's more that objective or empirical affirmations are not the only valid kind of knowledge or communication, because there is no learning without cultural framing, nor communication without mythical context. Mythography is not intended to convince, refute, prove, or disprove; rather, it gives us a story—that we take or leave—within which we integrate our experiences, observations, beliefs, hypotheses, and knowledges. It is a part of every epistemological, pedagogical, or intellectual project. And from an anarchist or even an intellectual standpoint, the most dangerous myth for freedom of thought is the one that claims not to be a myth. In today's world, this is principally the mythology of the scientific institutional complex.\n\nSince mythography, unsurprisingly, does not sit well with Jacobi, I will respond in the present text on the level of factual and textual critique.\n\nThroughout, Jacobi commits what might seem like a trifling misquotation, saying I am critiquing “science” rather than “Science.” It is a well known literary convention to capitalize a commonplace noun when we wish to refer to a specific phenomenon, especially where it concerns a centralized or official manifestation of said commonplace. In fact, I am referring to a power structure with its attendant mythologies when I critique Science. Multiple times I also specify, “Western science,” again making it clear that I am talking about a specific historical phenomenon. However, it serves Jacobi's argument to pretend that I am lashing out against any possible use of the word “science.”\n\n
\n“Gorrion’s article suffers from a lack of a working definition of science and so predictably falls into this trap. One can, however, discern at least three targets in his piece. The first is scientific thought: the epistemology of science, the notion of objectivity, etc. The second target is the technocratic organization of modern communities of scientists. And the third is the notion of scientific progress.”\n\n\nIn light of the above quote, I can thank him for providing an effectively concise summary of my arguments and demonstrating why my admittedly broad definition of Science works. Ideas, how we think, how we attain and pass on knowledge, do not occur in a vacuum. I suppose it is decidedly unmystical of me to assert that such things require people, they require communities of minds. This brings us to “the technocratic organization of modern communities of scientists.” When you have such organizations that determine how scientists are trained, what regulations they have to follow, what their internal structures for resolving disputes are, and what their funding and employment opportunities are, as well as interfacing with other institutions of power, you have, beyond any doubt, a formal network of communities capable of producing its own epistemology and its own mythical self-history (the notion of progress, the third target Jacobi identifies). These three targets not only converge to provide an effective working definition of “Science,” in fact it would be naïve to criticize one of them without at least recognizing the interrelated existence of the other two.\n\nYes, Jacobi, institutional communities have their own epistemologies and their own mythical histories. No big surprises there.\n\nAs communities, they also have dissident members, and any of their members are capable of achieving a critical view of the whole, even if this view is disincentivized. Criticizing science as a whole, as defined above, is not “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” any more than criticizing the police as an institutional complex is unwarranted because many cops themselves are also critical of police brutality. If I had intended my original article to be a more complete and factually detailed article, I would have certainly gone into the tensions between the social sciences and the “hard,” “pure,” or “natural” sciences. Without a doubt, many thinkers from the first camp have greatly influenced my own critiques and do not themselves cleave to objectivity as a knowledge framework, rationalism as a mythology, nor the belief that empirical and quantitative processes are the only ways to achieve valid knowledge. Nonetheless, their status as real scientists is constantly put in doubt, and one reflection of the scientific mythology is the fact that ideological hegemony is clearly on the side of the “natural” scientists, even though, for one, they are professionally incapable of understanding the meaning, the framing, the cultural conditioning, and the application of the knowledge they produce, and secondly, their use of the qualifiers “hard,” “pure,” and (the one they uncritically inherited from Christianity) “natural” reveals how fully and unconsciously they—taken as a whole, and with the inevitable exceptions—buy into their own mythology.\n\nI predicted defensive responses like Jacobi's in the epilogue of my original article.\n\n
\n“We predict that many believers in Science, especially the academically initiated, will reject this critique as uselessly broad, if they do not dismiss it outright. This is worth analyzing. First of all, someone in a position of power, someone with an accredited brain, a priest with a position in the hierarchy, need not respond to a non-professional writer, a layperson, unless the critique begins to be so widely distributed it constitutes a threat. [Jacobi himself admits that he was going to ignore the article until he saw that many of his friends were reading it...]\n\n
\nSecondly, and more substantially, we have noticed a certain pattern. The academically trained will always insist that the scientific community is highly self-critical, yet at the same time they always (as far as we have seen) reject criticisms that come from outside of academia as “overgeneralized” or unfounded. We would argue that this is a structurally systematic response. An institution with hegemonic aspirations, or one that has already achieved dominance, must never allow itself to be fit into a globalizing theory” [formulated by its opponents.]\n\n\n*** Objectives\n\nThe above serves to justify the target of my critique. Scientific epistemology and technocratic organizations, studies in peer-reviewed journals and pop science; these are not “radically different” phenomena constituting a target of critique so “broad” as to be “meaningless”, as Jacobi claims. They are all structurally related. If Jacobi wishes to continue denying the validity of my definition, which was already mapped out in the first essay, he would have to explain how a community with a technocratic organization does not have its own epistemology, or how it is that smoothing is not an integral part of the knowledge production of scientific communities, or how it is that such a massive amount of funding and the systematic production of jobs does not shape the entire scientific community to be an industrial complex fully integrated into the capitalist economy. Needless to say, he is incapable of making any such arguments, because all of these are naïve positions. On the other hand, fine-tuning the definition is clearly possible, and I'm open to suggestions.\n\nBefore continuing to other arguments, I think I should dispute one blatant mischaracterization that Jacobi makes (would he appreciate the irony if I labeled it as “hysterical,” or is he not as versed in the history of scientific thought as he claims?). No doubt trying to excite the passions of his readers, Jacobi writes that my article arrives at the “wildly audacious conclusion that we should dispose of science wholesale.” Every institution produces its police, and here Jacobi resorts to rhetoric that we anarchists have long been familiar with. Don't listen to these wild, savage types: they want to destroy everything! On the contrary, even Jacobi is able to recognize that at various points in my text, I validate the empirical method and the work of various scientists. In other words, he either wasn't paying attention to his own arguments or was consciously lying in order to delegitimize my positions, the majority of which he ignores.\n\nTo clarify: I think empirical knowledge and as such the empirical method are both very useful. However, the empirical method is limited, and empirical knowledge is by no means the only form of knowledge. For this reason and others, objectivity as a framework for understanding knowledge (knowledge is either true or false, knowledge can be unbiased, there is an absolute frame of reference for the universe, perception can be illusory or it can be disciplined, quantified, and mechanized in order to validate objective truths, subjectivity is an obstacle to objective knowledge, and the organization or history of knowledge does not necessarily affect its content) is not only a cultural artifact that reproduces a specific value system connected to specific social hierarchies, it also flattens and falsifies the world we live in.\n\nThe primary objective of my original article is to develop a systemic critique of a technocratic institutional complex that is inseparable from power and oppression in our society. Within this critique there is certainly room to champion a subversive folk science alongside non-empirical practices of resistance and learning. Perhaps the only thing that I seek to “dispose of wholesale” is the idea that scientists and scientific institutions are neutral, that they are not a fundamental part of how power and oppression exist in our society, and that they are not currently integral to power and oppression. Rather than address this argument, Jacobi goes on tangents.\n\n*** Of Velvet Gloves and Firing Squads\n\nWe've spoken of definitions, of objectives, now let's speak about manners. I am certainly not the ideal writer to call Jacobi to task for his arrogant and insulting tone, though I would say there is a very real difference between the tone born of superiority, used by the defender of what is already hegemonic, and the tone born of anger, used by those who are marginalized and delegitimized by the institutions of power and their discourses.\n\nMore useful to my argument would be a brief look at who deserves the velvet glove treatment, and who gets the discursive firing squad. There are very few producers of discourse who are polite and considerate with everyone. Nearly every social conversation sets certain boundaries of civility that implicitly signal who is a legitimate interlocutor and who is a thoughtless savage to be silenced or excluded. I have no problem admitting which way I fire my shots. I try to be respectful towards those who put themselves on the line, who theorize as just another action within a struggle against authority, even if I strongly disagree with them (and I admit, I'm not always successful). On the other hand, I don't really care if I insult careerists, those who are paid to think, and those who have some influential employment with an institution of power. Honestly, I have trouble viewing them as people. I'm not saying it's justifiable, I'm just trying to make the rules I operate by explicit, to acknowledge and explain my own double standards.\n\nThe unwritten rules in normalized discourse, rules which Jacobi evidently follows, are nearly the opposite. Professionals merit respect and attention, whereas others, especially angry others, can be insulted or dismissed. This “self-regulating conspiracy” among professionals makes sense: within a vast complex of interrelated institutions, you never know who might control purse strings or future employment opportunities that interest you (those who find this explanation insulting might consider that it uses the exact same cynicism with which game theorists explain customs and organization among the savage tribes). But because these are the institutions that produce the dominant discourses and practices in our society, their norms become everyone's norms. I don't assume Jacobi is a professional with any possibility of financial gain for his writings, nonetheless he has learned well that David Hume (involved in the slave trade) deserves respect and consideration, whereas some anarchist publishing on the internet can be scornfully disregarded.\n\nThe effects of this value hierarchy, imposed across society, should not be underestimated.\n\n*** Racism and Colonialism\n\nA brief aside: is Hume's complicity in genocide and enslavement reason to dismiss his ideas? No. But is it a coincidence that Hume and most of the other great men of Science were racists, elitists, and exploiters whom their underclass contemporaries would have been perfectly justified in murdering? Also, no. A third question, then, which I'll leave unanswered: if we reject ethical relativism and identify at every moment with the struggle for freedom and well-being, is it wrong for us to declare the great men of Science our enemies, giving fair consideration to but also contextualizing their ideas?\n\nThe debates that Hume intervened in are beyond a doubt interesting, but they reflect their participants' social position as nobles, enslavers, mass murderers, and rapists. And they were not the only ones having interesting debates. Social rebels, poor women, kidnapped Africans, disenfranchised peasants, religious heretics, and armed natives were also having debates, though they were much less likely to be committed to paper. In part, that's because they faced the reality of repression and often had to operate in secret, because dominant society denied them the resources necessary to publish and keep good records, and also because dominant society went out of its way to eliminate their oral histories, their memories, their very identities. The preservation of one set of debates and the invisibility of the other is neither a coincidence nor a natural result of neutral factors, but another reflection of the war waged by rulers and their scientists against everyone else. It's true, some historians who consider themselves social scientists have started to recognize and recover these other conversations, but I don't think that anyone can deny, with evidence, that the conversations of the great men of Science took place on top of and against those other conversations, and that the history of knowledge presented by the dominant strains of social science as well as nearly all the “pure” scientists directly and aggressively silence the “wretched of the earth”.\n\n(Another brief aside: Jacobi is apt to cite the rules of logic, not understanding, it seems, that such rules are a Western cultural artifact (more later on the value of contradictions). One could easily say that now, by pointing out Hume's complicity in the slave trade, I am engaging in the logical fallacy of an ad hominem, even though I have stated that Hume's conduct does not invalidate his ideas. But ideas are historically rooted, and they are never impersonal. The separation of ideas and actions, what's more, is fundamental to the subtle oppressions of Western democracy. Anarchists, on the other hand, coincide with many non-Western cultures in favoring the idea of coherence, that in reality it counts for a lot if someone is able to put their own ideas in practice, and what the results of that practice are. Furthermore, I don't think it's a coincidence that the foremost proponents of the view that we should evaluate ideas without also considering those who promote them enriched themselves off of genocide, slavery, and the destruction of the planet. Is it unfair, at this juncture, to declare: Ecce homo?)\n\nTo return to my principal line of argument, I was describing the antagonism between the official and the unofficial histories of ideas. It is true that those who demand that we take sides are carrying an ideological stick capable of beating down free debate. But it is also true that there is no such thing as neutrality, and that in a conflict between those with more and less power, such as is the case with colonialism or patriarchy, claims to neutrality amount to support for the powerful.\n\nHaving made that caveat, allow me to suggest that in considering how colonialism, slavery, and genocide since the Enlightenment have always made use of science and scientists, when considering the possibility of inherent racism in the scientific institutional complex, we cannot be neutral, though we can map out third and fourth positions.\n\nJacobi, however, dismisses criticisms of scientific racism. Despite the lengthy criticisms I made of racism in the original article, with multiple examples, Jacobi only deigns to respond with a single sentence, without referring to a single example, after affirming, “we shouldn’t take Gorrion seriously.” To wit: “For one thing, he says that there is “implicit racism” in the “empiricist mythology,” even though he stated earlier that he does not reject empiricism, only science.” Does he not understand that the terms A: “empiricism” and B: “empiricist mythology” are not equal? Evidently not. If someone says that B is implicitly racist, and they approve of A, therefore they don't have a problem with racism, they are supposing that A and B are equal. Well, empiricism is a method, the empiricist mythology is an entire worldview. Jacobi clearly has a very weak grasp of the very language he uses to communicate his supposed truths. It also becomes clear that he does not give any importance to the criticisms of racism, given that he uses another cheap bait-and-switch to weasel his way out of the argument.\n\nNor is it surprising that addressing racism is not a priority for Jacobi, given that he makes a couple racist quips of his own. They are, however, well masked: I presume Jacobi is college-educated, and what does a college degree serve for if not to hide racism in more subtle language? So, we need to dedicate a little space to unpacking his comments.\n\nIn section V of his response, he jokes: “According to Gorrion, Buddhists invented quantum mechanics “well over a thousand years” before modern science. I just wonder where they got the lasers for the double-slit experiment” (referring to the experiment that demonstrated that photons act as both waves and particles and that their position, until it can be definitively measured, exists as a probability wave rather than having an exact location).\n\nWhat's most obvious is that Jacobi is once again distorting my argument. I never said Buddhists invented quantum mechanics. What I said was: “well over a thousand years earlier, Daoists and Buddhists were already promoting a worldview that clashed with Cartesian geometry but was largely compatible with the discoveries of quantum physics.” Embedded in my sentence is the fact that the discoveries of quantum physics are posterior to the development of the Buddhist or Taoist worldviews. The relevant argument is that they had developed a worldview in which quantum- or relativity-inspired ideas regarding the nature of energy or the shape and age of the universe could have made a lot of sense, and would not have clashed with as many fundamental dogmas. In rationalist, dualist Western society a hundred years ago, the idea that matter and energy are interchangeable, that space-time is curved, or that a particle does not exist in any one place but within a probability wave would have sounded like absolute nonsense, and even today it strikes (Western) people as a contradiction that is difficult to grasp.\n\nNow let's look at how these subsequent discoveries and theories have unfolded. For hundreds of years, the Western intellectual elite have instructed their subject populations—which through force of arms came to encompass the entire world—with certain beliefs, many of which promote materialist, Cartesian, and/or neo-Platonic ideas about the world (for the record, I know that to the proponents of those ideas, they are not synonymous and in some ways they are mutually contradictory, but from an outside perspective, especially one critical of fundamental dogmas in Western civilization, there is far more similarity than difference between them; there is, for example, a wider range of opinion in the worldviews of an anarcho-primitivist and an anarcho-syndicalist, but in general they don't reject being lumped into the same basket, as long as the pertinent critiques are being leveled at beliefs they both hold in common).\n\nAuthoritarian, institutional, and genocidal forces instructed us all—sometimes through subtle value hierarchies and other times through compulsory education—that humans are the superior species (and that Western man is the most human of all humans), that the world exists for our consumption, that everything is either matter or energy, that nature functions mechanically, and so on. As pertains to Cartesian and Newtonian ideas, we are indoctrinated in the meta-epistemological framework of objectivity with its idea of an absolute reference, and its prejudice towards analyzing discrete objects within a neutral space (although clearly Newton opened the way for an understanding of fields through his concept of gravity, as every theory opens the space for possible refutations, expansions, or evolutions). There is also the Platonic/Catholic/Cartesian opposition between matter and mind, which is still present at the rationalist extreme in which spirit is abolished and all that is left is one half of the pair, dead matter, rather than a synthesis of the two as exists in many other worldviews.\n\nFor hundreds of years, we have been taught these things, and in the process, and with complicity by scientists and scientific institutions, other cultures have been belittled, ridiculed, and exterminated. Some of these cultures have believed that all life is interconnected, that there is no knowledge without a knower, that one person's truth is different from another's, that the space between two objects is a living field rather than a neutral, static non-entity, or that things are better understood through their relations than as separate entities. Some have believed that the universe is better characterized by principles of continuous transformation and interrelation rather than by the machine-metaphors favored by Western scientists (who, as I mentioned earlier, often do not realize that they are using metaphors).\n\nThen, at a certain juncture, scientists in a few fields began to say that, in fact, there is no absolute reference point for the universe, that measurement and observation affect what is measured and observed, that velocity and position depend on perspective, that something can be both a wave and a particle, that something can potentially be in two places at once, that two separate particles can be “entangled” or connected in non-local space such that one exhibits simultaneous changes in response to a change experienced by the other particle; they began to appreciate fields, systems, and relationships, and questioned the discrete bodies that were the subject of analysis in earlier ages.\n\nIt is true that this shift represents a great intellectual courage and versatility, which is something that a few scientists have, but that does not characterize scientific paradigms as a whole in their “normal” periods (see the discussion of Kuhn, below). It is also true that through scientific flattening, these developments are primarily presented as technical matters with limited philosophical bearing, that do not change the fundamental features of society's mentality. They are intentionally presented to the public as things that only people with advanced degrees can understand. They reach us only as equations or the occasional anecdote about photons and black holes.\n\n(E=mc² is a great example: rather than giving us a mythical phrase about the nature of the world like those frequently used to convey Darwin to the masses, e.g. “survival of the fittest,” we are given a ready-made metaphor for the mystically inscrutable intelligence of scientists, an ergot of technical genius beyond the comprehension of the masses: behold—the equation! This is highly significant given that E=mc² as a phrase would have been delivered to us as “matter is energy,” “the universe is made of energy,” or “anything in the universe can be transformed into anything else,” statements that reaffirm Buddhist, hippy, or even alchemist worldviews. Of course, no respectable scientist would vulgarize Einstein thusly, though they had no problems vulgarizing Darwin into a capitalist worldview or Newton into a mechanistic one.)\n\nIn contrast, every law and principle of classical physics and the neo-Platonic worldview that preceded the paradigm shift is inscribed in countless metaphors, language conventions, discursive customs, and myths, mass-produced even today.\n\nIn other words, the technical adjustments that allow Science to be right with God, so to speak, that allow Science to correct earlier errors and improve its productive capacity, vastly increasing the power of the State in the process, are produced in a way that they have no hope of correcting the impact that earlier scientific theories had and continue to have on our society's worldview.\n\nThe machine-metaphor and other fundamental dogmas are preserved.\n\nLet us for a moment imagine that a stateless Daoist or heretical Buddhist society of runaways from the Han slaver state, existing in the mountains of Southeast Asia, had advanced technically and was able to develop ever better scientific instruments. At a certain point, they also could have developed complex forms of geometry and physics, eventually explaining the very phenomena that Newton did so convincingly. However—and this is what many “hard” scientists or rationalists like Jacobi have such a hard time understanding—though the hypothetical Daoists used the exact same equations as Newton, the packaging, the application, and the institutional interfaces would have been completely different. And those differences would have affected how the society understood and thus interacted with the world it lived in, the applications of the technologies produced with the new knowledge, and also the course of future discovery. The First Law of Thermodynamics, we can imagine, would have been conceptualized and phrased in a different way, one that might not have proved a conceptual obstacle to the eventual evolution of the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics (which probably wouldn't have been named “mechanics”). And those theories, when they arose, would probably not have seemed so bizarre, but rather a confirmation of the things that people already suspected about the universe.\n\nI understand that many physicists don't want to have any social responsibilities, they just want to study subatomic particles and black holes. It's an admirable curiosity, but it's also hopelessly naïve. To them, maybe their most important achievement is General Relativity or Maxwell's equations, but to many other people, it's nuclear weapons. Can you begin to understand how these are not separate realities? How even though the so-called Laws of Nature would hypothetically exist independently of human societies and the things that our power structures are doing to us and to the planet, in practice they are not independent at all?\n\nIn sum, the precious equations might have remained intact, but the fates of millions of people and other species would have been completely different. Can we really countenance a belief system in which that is irrelevant, in which the applications of a theory are not understood to be part of the theory, in which the consequences of our actions are constantly made invisible?\n\nWe have been dancing around the topic of colonialism for some time, unpacking what is wrong with Jacobi's flippancy and his textual distortions. Now let's get to the grain. What he is doing is ridiculing the notion that non-Europeans might have had a better—and healthier—cultural understanding of the universe, and the only arbitrary evidence he gives—arbitrary because it was a total non sequitur to my argument—is that they had not developed the technologies deployed by those ingenious Europeans.\n\nNo doubt he is rolling his eyes at this characterization, but the fact of the matter is that the only references he makes to non-European cultures in what is supposedly a response to an article that makes a great many accusations of racism is to ridicule and belittle the knowledge base of non-Europeans.\n\nThis is a basic tenet of colonialism: until they learn how to be like us, they are illegitimate.\n\nHis other main reference to non-European knowledge systems, regarding acupuncture, shows that this attitude constitutes a pattern. Jacobi claims there are no studies showing the effectiveness of acupuncture, and he cites three articles to that effect. One of these articles, “Do certain countries produce only positive results?” is borderline racist: it highlights how studies in countries like Japan and China produce more favorable test results for acupuncture than studies in Western countries. Rather than presenting this in a comparative way, it posits the West as the norm and characterizes the other countries as “abnormal”. In conclusion, the article recommends skepticism towards data coming from those countries. The implication is that Japanese and Chinese scientists aren't real scientists, because they are beholden to their mystical traditions and haven't broken free like Western scientists. A more Orientalist view would be harder to find.\n\nOn examination, it turns out that the Asian countries cited range from showing 99% to 89% effectiveness in acupuncture trials. Granted, 99% (for China) seems worrisomely high, but how about Japan's 89%? The white control country this article cites, a Western nation of rational white men and proper scientists, is the UK. But in the UK, 75% of studies show that acupuncture is effective, and the difference between 89% and 75% is large, but so is the difference between 89% and 99%. It hardly seems large enough to lump a bunch of Asian countries together and suggest that all their scientists are too mystical and Asian to be trusted. But then, when has Science ever needed a justification for racism? Historically, it has been the principal manufacturer of justifications for racism.\n\nAlso, incidentally, together with Jacobi's tolerance of racism, we also find his tolerance for hypocrisy and sloppy research. He clamors: “I must demand to see these “scientific studies” that support acupuncture as a valid form of treatment”. Well, my dear Jacobi, you need go no further than the article you referenced in your own text, which states that 75% of the acupuncture studies from the comfortingly white UK (since evidently you won't trust the titular studies from Asian countries) show that it is an effective treatment. Oops!\n\nNonetheless, I will readily admit that I had an inaccurate view of how widespread the studies were that give credence to acupuncture, and Jacobi's article forced me to investigate further. Jacobi, it turns out, represents the majority position (in white-dominant countries), but not, however, the scientific consensus. The UK's National Health Service recommends acupuncture for a few conditions like chronic headaches, malaises that standard Western medicine has a poor track record in treating, beyond the effectiveness of, ahem, aspirin. (Recent studies suggest that the rationalist geometry of cityscapes actually increases oxygen levels in our brains and can lead to headaches).\n\nThe most thorough review of scientific studies that I could find concludes that the evidence is mixed regarding the effectiveness of acupuncture [https://nccih.nih.gov/health/acupuncture/introduction#hed3]. The evidence is that it is effective for short-term relief of lower back pain when combined with other therapies; it is effective for treating osteoarthritis but there is contradictory data as to whether it is more effective than simulated acupuncture; it is effective for treating migraines and tension-based headaches.\n\nThe primary conclusion of the review is that it is difficult to evaluate acupuncture using double-blind studies and other rigorously empirical methods. This is a significant point I will return to later.\n\nFor now, I want to focus on the fact that Jacobi and many other proponents of Western science—the strong majority, according to my unscientific internet survey—overstate their case, misrepresent the scientific record, and cover up the positive evidence for the weak or mild therapeutic effectiveness of acupuncture. Jacobi, the articles he cites, and many other articles in peer-reviewed journals or on ideological, pro-Science websites, are totally dismissive of acupuncture, even though the bulk of studies demonstrate that it has at least some effectiveness.\n\nIt is no coincidence that acupuncture—a non-Western technique—receives such vicious treatment from the proponents of Science, whereas far more doubtful techniques, like chemotherapy or early AIDS medication, are treated as imperfect but legitimate. Jacobi is polite, as are his references: they only express the positive side of the racist double standard. Other examples are less circumspect. According to the website, sciencebasedmedicine.org, “Acupuncture is a pre-scientific assumption.”\n\n
\nProponents often cite acupuncture’s ancient heritage as a virtue, but it is more of a vice. Acupuncture was developed in a pre-scientific culture, before anything significant was understood about biology, the normal functioning of the human body or disease pathology. The healing practices of the time were part of what is called philosophy-based medicine, to be distinguished from modern science-based medicine. Philosophy-based systems began with a set of ideas about health and illness and based their treatments on those ideas. The underlying assumptions and the practices derived from them were never subjected to controlled observation or anything that can reasonably be called a scientific process.”\n\n\nThere's a whole lot wrong with this paragraph, steeped as it is in the coded assumption that a culture is ignorant until it is colonized by the West. It also demonstrates a total ignorance of the history and the current cultural limitations of Western medicine. Western medicine operates within surgery- and drug-based constraints because it evolved directly from a surgery- and drug-based practice that at the time, 500-1000 years ago, was one of the worst healthcare practices in the entire world, rightly ridiculed by Arabic contemporaries, for example. But the idea that ancient heritage is a vice does not hold up across cultures. On the whole, ancient cultures embody a great deal of accumulated experience and observation. Chinese, Ayurvedic, and traditional European medicine, for example, were founded by generations of observation and experimentation, and the writers for sciencebasedmedicine.org are speaking from a racially tinged ignorance when they claim otherwise. No, it wasn't “controlled” experimentation, but controlled experimentation is also a flawed system that frequently produces faulty data and willfully ignores the connection between a person's health and their environment.\n\nIn medieval Europe, there was also a very thuggish practice of medicine based on the humors, bleeding, and liberal use of the scalpel. This was the practice of medicine that evolved into the supposedly superior Western medicine of today. The “modern” preference for a negative, symptomatic view of health and the emphasis on surgery and drugs is a cultural-historical artifact from those thuggish times. Science-based medicine, in the West, is philosophy-based medicine. The pretensions to superiority evinced by proponents of Western medicine would be hilarious if they didn't have so much power. It's worth noting that its original proponents and the institutions they created were directly responsible for the bloody repression of folk medicine through witch hunts, criminalization, demonization, and later the urbane ridicule of the scientists of the Enlightenment. We have little remaining evidence as to the healing practices of the lower and rural classes of European society, but we know that first it was the Church and then the scientists who identified these primarily women healers as a threat. There is also a good bit of evidence to suggest that they had effective practices for abortion and contraception. And one of the most successful drugs that Western medicine falsely claims credit for—aspirin—is a testament to their wisdom. Aspirin is the industrial version of willow bark, a common remedy among the medieval healers who were repressed by the surgeons, the priests, and the scientists. It is not a coincidence that aspirin works; rather, it is evidence of the accumulated experience and observation passed on by the downtrodden.\n\nNeither is it a coincidence that pharmaceutical companies are stealing, patenting, and industrializing the herbal remedies of indigenous societies across the world, nor that the society those companies come from continues to propagate the idea that “pre-scientific” societies are ignorant about the world they live in. All of these facts are functions of the racist colonialism that Science is an integral part of.\n\nMuch has been written about the use of science to support racism, genocide, colonialism, and other atrocities. Today's scientists might refer to the most embarrassing episodes (like racial skull measurements) as “pseudo-science,” but this is pure revisionism. The culprits were recognized scientists in their day, and besides, scientific racism went well beyond phrenology and Social Darwinism to include nearly every surveyor, geographer, anthropologist, and doctor for decades if not centuries.\n\nAn acquaintance of mine who is a progressive biologist has been ranting about the “unfair” treatment being given to yet another biologist who has been protested and no-platformed while making the rounds claiming a genetic basis for the supposed intellectual superiority of white people. It's not a 19th century idea: there is still a great deal of money going to support scientists making the same tired arguments, ideologically pre-determined. The acquaintance, who voted for Obama and is certain he isn't racist, claims the man should be given a fair hearing since he went and carried out a study. Just out of curiosity, where are all the scientists getting invited to universities and receiving lucrative book deals who claim that black people are superior?\n\nMost relevant to this article is the question: to what extent has this racism continued or been atoned for? Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz provides a clue [An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States]. Scientific archives, museums, laboratories, and universities across North America are filled with corpses and artifacts stolen from Native burial grounds. The conquerors' scientists systematically refuse to give them back. This is one strong example of continuing complicity with genocide.\n\nAre there others? Insofar as colonialism continues today, as neo-colonialism, through the exploitation of occupied territories and contamination of the land, air, and water primarily of people of color, maybe the problem is that scientific complicity with thinly veiled racism and colonialism is so common as to be ubiquitous. There isn't a single mine, oil well, or commercial timber plantation in the world that doesn't have scientists working on it in some capacity, either on site or away in some laboratory making calculations, directing explorations, improving techniques, engineering more profitable tree species. And then there's the biologists who expropriate indigenous medicinal plants for the benefit of the pharmaceutical companies, and the anthropologists who aid military occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq or state-building missions in Somalia. All of these millions of scientists have decided that they prefer getting paid to engaging in a critical examination of their lives and the effects of their actions. Yet to Jacobi, somehow, all of this is incidental to the pure nature of Science, not even worthy of a response.\n\n*** Leave the critiquing to the experts\n\nI would argue that anyone with a brain and a heart would not trust in an internal affairs bureau to effectively rein in the murderous power of the police, much less to do what really needs to be done: abolish them. It is no surprise, however, that just as institutions always seek to appropriate the power that regulates and disciplines them, institutional complexes and society-wide religions do not recognize the critiques of external authorities.\n\nIt is therefore no surprise that Jacobi asks us to leave the problems of science to scientists themselves, even though—as I argued at length in the original essay—those problems are primarily suffered by everyone else: lower class people, women, trans people, people of color, people in countries victimized by the weapons industry, the targets of policing technologies, anyone who eats industrial food or has to be subjected to medical procedures to fix a health problem, all non-human species, the entire planet... But no, let's trust the people who get paid to make all the technologies that are fucking us over, the doctors who drug us, the sociologists who study us.\n\nTo wit:\n\n
\nGorrion might be surprised to learn that a good deal of scientists and philosophers of science strongly agree with many of his critiques of scientific thought. In fact, all the limitations he writes about have been pointed out with much more convincing argumentation by widely recognized philosophers of science.\n\n\nI suppose Jacobi can be forgiven for not recognizing any of Thomas Kuhn's ideas behind my own—he was an influence, but I never cited him directly. However, I don't think he missed my explicit reference to Stephen Jay Gould (Jacobi also cites Gould), nor my references to self-regulating processes of critique within scientific communities themselves. In other words, Jacobi is aware that I already know about such critiques made by scientists and philosophers of science, but he just sees another cheap opportunity to be paternalistic, and he takes it.\n\nThen he does something curious, though equally reminiscent of a fratboy intellect. He spends 750 words attempting to show off, quoting David Hume, Thomas Kuhn, and Karl Popper, evidently thinking he's just gone over the heads of his audience, or at least bored them long enough to carry out a skeezy, back-alley word fight bait-and-switch.\n\nJacobi's brief history demonstrates that, lo and behold, scientists themselves debate about the nature of knowledge. At no point did I claim the contrary; I explicitly mentioned these debates, though I did not give them what would have been their due space if my goal had been to write an article about the history of conflicts in scientific epistemology (another characteristic of institutional self-defense: the institutional players always have to be the protagonists. Just put yourself in the shoes of that poor cop for a moment, and think of how scared he felt before he pulled the trigger!).\n\nHis summarization of Hume makes me think that Jacobi simply didn't understand the sorts of discursive shaping that I am talking about. His poor use of language suggests that he is either a habitual manipulator or he simply has a stunted verbal intelligence masked by a large vocabulary.\n\nSo let's try to explain this one again: All worldviews are cultural artifacts related to the reproduction of power in society, either antagonistic to it, supportive of it, or some combination of the two. Given their relationship with the exercise of power, worldviews also constitute worldshapers, though in the original article I reserved that term for Science, since the scientific worldview directs the exercise of power in our world far more than any antagonistic worldview.\n\nWhat does Hume have to say? Actually, nothing of relevance to the critiques I was making. Causing a big splash on the debates of the powerful white men of his day, Hume argued that knowledge must be based on sense-experience (dealing Plato a blow), but that sense-experience can be flawed. Hume isn't talking about the organization and deployment of knowledge. He's still dealing with knowledge at the level of whether it's true or false, and where it comes from. As such, Hume doesn't even come close. Of course, it's not up to Hume to respond to something that I wrote 250 years after he died. The fact that Jacobi wheels him out of the morgue, however, shows that he either doesn't understand or he's choosing not to.\n\nJacobi's references to Thomas Kuhn, on the contrary, are relevant to the present debate, though he presents Kuhn's observations in a way reminiscent of PR damage control. To recap, Kuhn revealed that scientific knowledge exists as a consensus within a paradigm, that the consensus remains stable over time, even as specific elements of the paradigm are disputed or disproved, and then in “revolutionary” moments the entire paradigm shifts and new interrelated theories are accepted. It's hard to give a more tame summary of a dynamic that has some pretty extreme implications. Nonetheless, Jacobi softens the blow even more by citing Imre Lakatos' work on “research programs”, translating the problem into a more technical matter and justifying the pragmatism of holding on to a flawed theory until a better theory comes along.\n\n(In justifying the conservatism of research programs and the way they allow ideologies to signal areas for further study, thus conditioning results, Jacobi claims that “infrastructural determinism” is the best predictor of many cultural shifts, such as the change from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies; what's more, “one is justified in looking at a society and assuming, before getting any empirical evidence, that the infrastructure is the primary reason the society is the way it is.” That's embarrassing for him because actually, such determinism is on the ropes. Lots of new research shows that the switch between agriculture and gathering is a political choice, that infrastructure generally relates to social choices; and there are even many cases in which a society has drastically changed its infrastructure without changing its superstructure. The deterministic framework oversimplifies, ignoring how porous the boundary is. It is favored because it is mechanistic and adheres to rationalist belief structures. But then, when you're ideologically motivated to go out and look for evidence, you'll probably be able to find evidence, no matter how accurate your theory is.)\n\nIn fact, Kuhn's revelations are a little more disturbing than that, and Kuhn, ever polite, doesn't hit hard against any of his colleagues and he doesn't talk about the many ways in which people's lives can be ruined by this little matter of paradigms. What Kuhn actually reveals is that scientific communities will systematically suppress contrary evidence, functioning in a conservative, dogmatic way, until reaching a tipping point at which time the entire paradigm must be discarded and a new conservative order must be developed. This is not a pragmatic necessity, nor is it the reflection of a culture that truly believes in questioning everything and fostering open debates. It is (though Kuhn does not go this far) the reflection of a religion of power that will run roughshod over dissenting scientists and people caught up on the wrong side theory, whether that's queer or trans people who are pathologized and medicated, institutionalized, or lobotomized, or Africans who are scientifically determined to be inferior.\n\nA recent example that demonstrates what happens even to privileged, accredited scientists when they contradict the dominant paradigm: a number of archaeologists and paleontologists in San Diego investigated a site of mastodon bones that suggested that tool-using hominids may have been in North America 130,000 years ago, which would upend the dominant Clovis and Beringian hypotheses regarding hominid expansion into the Americas. They told how many scientists refused to work on theirs or similar sites because it would be “professional suicide,” how they were advised by colleagues to “Keep it under wraps. No one will believe you.” Two decades went by and their findings weren't published. Finally, when a new team of scientists did publish, they were viciously attacked by much of the rest of the scientific community. “It was like getting lined up and shot with machine guns,” is how one archaeologist involved with the study described the reactions of his peers.\n\nThe reactions of the scientific community to van der Lummel's paradigm-threatening research on the experience of consciousness after medical death was even more insulting. I'll get into that area later on.\n\nExamples like these show that Jacobi has given us a misleadingly watered-down summary of the dynamics Kuhn was talking about. But Kuhn's concept of the paradigm shift is only one small part of what I am talking about. To be as concise as possible, the main problem is twofold: the inextricable relationship between knowledge and power; and the continuity of certain practices of power and forms of knowledge within Western civilization, reproduced and intensified by the scientific institutional complex, that is currently destroying the world.\n\nNone of the scientists or philosophers of science that Jacobi trots out speak to this problem. I don't believe, as he suggests, that I am saying anything new. I could have cited a great many people, but in the end it's a question of form: some of us believe that ideas don't have owners and that everyone should feel comfortable expressing themselves in their own words. (There is an intrinsic elitism of the citation artifact in scientific discourse, though without a doubt it is highly practical for research and investigation.)\n\nJacobi has proved that he is good at citing famous people. So why, then, does he cite people who aren't making the arguments I'm making? Why does he not cite anyone who talks about the violence, the destruction, the oppression that scientists and their institutions are complicit in?\n\nThis is where we get to the bait-and-switch. Jacobi, after proving how smart he is and how ignorant I am, delivers what he supposes is a coup de grace.\n\n“[E]ven though each of the above-mentioned issues present profound problems to scientific reasoning, every one of the thinkers who articulated the problems continued to espouse the scientific worldview.”\n\nIn other words, he deliberately misdirects the reader, assuring us that the problem is well under control because scientists are already policing themselves, by quoting a number of people who are not making the criticisms I am making, nor talking about the problems I am talking about. Why, then, quote these paragons of self-critique? Because they serve as a parable of reconciliation: they revealed problems but they never abandoned the Church, they never lost their faith. He assures the readers, falsely, that they made the same criticisms I do, but they had much better arguments, clearly they were more intelligent, and the ultimate symbol of their intelligence is their loyalty to the scientific worldview.\n\nJacobi has not yet addressed a single criticism of that worldview, only underlined tensions that exist within it. And he has shown that he is willing to use various forms of marginalization, insult, and misrepresentation in order to protect that worldview.\n\n*** Scientific Smoothing\n\nTrue to form, Jacobi misrepresents my criticism of how Newtonian physics are used to prop up a rationalist worldview. I never say that Newtonian physics is pop science; in fact, I say that it is dishonest of scientists to chalk systematic simplifications up to pop science. Nonetheless, Jacobi has no qualms twisting my words.\n\nTo clarify, we should distinguish between scientific smoothing and pop science. Both of these phenomena are structurally integral parts of Science, but they function differently. As I stated in the original article, scientists often respond to criticisms of mythical (worldview-promoting) usages of science that whatever is not a sound theory or a quantifiable, technical assertion can be blamed on “pop science” propagated either by journalists and authors or by scientists reaching beyond their field of expertise. However, the problem goes well beyond pop science. We can call the process “scientific smoothing”.\n\nSmoothing is a feature of any knowledge system too complex for any one person to know or communicate (i.e. any human culture), but scientific smoothing happens in a specific way, which Jacobi avoids. Because the body of scientific knowledge is way too vast for any one scientist to be familiar with even a tenth of one percent of it, the institutional complex as a whole relies on simplified digests (sometimes these summaries are produced by specialists, sometimes by non-specialists such as journalists and educators) to communicate scientific knowledge to laypersons and also to scientists who are specialists in other fields. This is a structural part of the body of scientific knowledge and of the technocratic organization of scientific communities. It is neither an error nor a marginal occurrence. For this reason, critiquing the worldviews that are propagated by smoothing is not a case of critiquing “various stereotypes about science” as Jacobi claims.\n\nDemanding that we exclude considerations of scientific smoothing when we evaluate the transmission of scientific knowledge, that we only pay attention to specialists publishing in peer-reviewed journals, is unrealistic, because smoothing is a structural part of the transmission of scientific knowledge. There is no communication across scientific institutions, nor communication between scientific and governmental or corporate institutions, without scientific smoothing. Pop science is the profit-motivated production of watered-down or lazily researched scientific claims for a consumer audience. It is instrumental for winning funding, building careers, and cementing the influence of scientific institutions, but it is not as integral to communication between institutions as smoothing.\n\nIronically, one of the articles he cites as evidence complains about how scientists who specialize in one branch can spread completely baseless ideas in areas they do not study. “Just because you’re a world expert in one branch of science doesn’t qualify you in any other discipline [...] this is a particularly bad habit among physicists.” The problem is, they are only called on it if the ideas they are spreading go against central dogmas.\n\nThe myths or falsehoods (please note that I am not using these terms as synonyms) that are contained in every paradigm does not mean that every idea is equally valid or equally unverifiable (Jacobi has already tried strawmanning me as a relativist, without any textual evidence). But the way the scientific paradigm works does mean that the uncorroborated myths that support central dogmas, most of which are inherited from Christianity and neo-Platonism, will not be challenged, or at least not marginalized and ridiculed. On the other hand, ideas that break with those dogmas (and at least some of these will be the very ideas needed to radically alter the paradigm or found a new one, in other words, the truths of the future) will be ridiculed and their authors will be marginalized and dismissed as crackpots. What's more, given the continuity of power institutions, and given the specifics of the scientific smoothing process, the myths that carry over from one paradigm to the next change much less than the technical explanations and theories that are considered valid. In other words, the “broad picture” provided by smoothing contains a great deal of Cartesian and neo-Platonic myth, even though the technical experts in any given field do not uphold the specific manifestations of those myths in their area of expertise.\n\nSomehow, Jacobi doesn't find a problem with this.\n\nAnd as far as outright pop science is concerned, there are a few features that are worth underscoring.\n\n *Pop science tends to be especially overt and proactive in inculcating Western mythology (for example, the common myth that evolution is a process that went from single-celled organisms to multi-cellular organisms to vertebrates to mammals to primates to humans: this is a mythical reframing of evolution that is repeated again and again, useful, even though it is factually incorrect, because it is progressive and anthropocentric).\n\n *Scientists' knowledge outside their own field of specialization tends to also be rooted in pop science. This is a problem, given that scientists' opinions have more legitimacy, even when those opinions are not the product of an empirical study, due to the ideological role that science plays within the power hierarchies of our society. Scientists talking in their social circles, through social media, on television, or with journalists, are the principal legitimizers of pop science. Rarely in their interactions with society do they restrict their commentary to the results of their studies. On the contrary, like anyone else with privilege, they use positions of power to push their own interests and worldview. A dramatic example of this would be how scientists who are not specialists in virology or immunology have been instrumental in supporting HIV/AIDS denialism. Jacobi would point out that their conduct is unscientific. There is, however, a wealth of more mundane examples of scientists carrying out the same kind of manipulations to shape our understanding of what is natural in areas as diverse as family structure, sexuality, economics, politics, and so forth. Though they are advancing non-empirical positions, they are not called to task so long as they do not support conspiracy theories that violate the scientific consensus.\n\n *There is a great deal of funding for pop science. On an individual and an institutional level, scientists are complicit in accepting this funding and the consequences it has for knowledge production. Scientific studies on diet might take the cake. There is a great consumer demand, produced and facilitated by the media, for diet science. The vast majority of diet studies use small samples or have other design flaws that make them useless or severely limited for the production of empirical knowledge. Nonetheless, straight-to-market studies about what people should or should not eat constitute a major industry and a cash cow for individual scientists and scientific institutions. It's curious. Such institutions take part in punishing doctors who prescribe salt water as a cancer treatment, but they look the other way when it comes to the constant, large-scale production of “bad science” that also can have negative effects on people's health (including claims about whether coffee, red wine, avocados, and so forth increase or decrease cancer risks). The common factor that accompanies punitive action by the scientific community is not the accuracy of the empirical knowledge being spread or how much harm it might cause, but pure, mercenary economic interests. Diet science is a big business, and so are the officially validated cancer treatments.\n\nLet's look at one example in which pop science and scientific smoothing coincide with the systemic complicity of scientists themselves. This is just a random article I came across the other day; one could find similar examples every week. Near the top of their page, a CNN headline ran: “Addiction could stem from ancient retrovirus, study suggests” The first sentence: “An ancient retrovirus that predates modern humans may explain why people suffer from addiction, scientists have said.” [https://edition.cnn.com/2018/09/25/health/retrovirus-addiction-study-intl/index.html]\n\nIt turns out, the study says nothing of the sort. Rather, it links a gene originally introduced by a retrovirus to 34% of drug-users in Glasgow and 14% of drug-users in Greece (in both cases 2 or 3 times higher than the presence of that gene in the general population). In other words, the study suggests that a particular gene may be related to addiction in a small minority of cases. Contrary to how the media present the study, it does not offer any evidence that suggests that this gene is the original cause of addiction, nor that it is related to the overwhelming majority of addictions. It also does not tell us about people who have the gene but never develop any kind of addiction.\n\nOne thing that the study does suggest, that the media do not pick up on, is that social factors may play a huge role in encouraging addiction. After all, there is quite a large difference between the 34% rate in Glasgow and the 14% rate in Greece, as there is a great difference in wealth and access to social services between Scotland and Greece (the greater the poverty, the less this one gene explains cases of addiction). Of course, this study was not designed to study social causes of addiction, and as such it is incapable of providing concrete evidence of such causes, but the huge discrepancies in results at the very least suggest social causes as another factor. The fact that the media entirely ignore this line of inquiry gives us an idea of how likely scientists are to get funding to explore such possibilities, rather than looking for exclusively genetic explanations of drug use.\n\nEven though CNN has shown a penchant for fact-checking since Trump got into office, and the article shows a Trumpian level of inaccuracy, their science editor was neither fired nor reprimanded for grossly misrepresenting the study. In fact, the article is par for the course as far as science reporting goes. Nor, as far as I can tell, did the researchers complain to CNN about their sloppy and misleading reporting. On the contrary, I would wager they were happy their article got picked up. Such things build careers.\n\nWhy is this important, and not just nit-picking? For one, it shows how low the bar is, and how scientists are complicit. Would they complain if a media outlet reported that a new study potentially validated vaccine skepticism? You bet your ass they would. But they don't complain when the misrepresentations reinforce dominant power relations and fundamental worldviews. The article provides yet another example of the ubiquitous ways in which scientists and the institutions necessary for spreading scientific information build a rationalist mythology. In this case, we have the mechanistic idea that genes function as on and off switches that determine human behaviors. The study itself contradicts this view, as does most research into genes. What we actually get is evidence that genes are one of multiple factors that influence human behavior. Yet when scientists communicate to the media they frequently use the bodies-as-machines metaphor and present it as objective fact.\n\nThe machine metaphor has implications across the social terrain, relating again and again to the war waged by capitalism and patriarchy against bodies, with the systematic support of scientific institutions. The deterministic (and false) vision of addiction has played a historically important role in colonialism. Alcohol, opium, and other drugs were and in some cases continue to be key weapons used by colonizers against colonized peoples. Neo-colonial states then blame addiction on their victims. Native Americans, for example, suffer alcoholism in disproportionate numbers not because of social factors, scientists argue, but because they have inferior genes. Admitting that all the evidence suggests that addiction is not deterministically caused by genes, but by a host of factors, many of them social, robs (neo)colonialism of one of its key weapons. It's hard to argue that scientists are not complicit in this process, given that the discourse at play is scientific in its entirety. But the apologists of Western science have no shame in claiming objectivity and neutrality with respect to systems of domination.\n\nA century of education that genes constitute programming is no coincidence, nor was it ever a discovery. It was a religious inference, an ideological imposition. All biologists discovered was a biochemical mechanism in the interior of every living cell, without fully understanding the relation between that mechanism, biological traits, and lived experiences. What they did was rush ahead to conclusions that their ideology dictated; otherwise, we never would have heard the word “programming”. How long did this ideology delay the recent discovery that lived experiences can actually change which genes get activated and passed on?\n\n*** The history of ideas\n\nMathematical equations may be beyond cultural framing, but nothing else about science is. The meaning assigned to those equations, their applications in society, the technology they require, the technology they enable, what had to be sacrificed so that the technology mathematical advances rest on could be developed, what questions were asked, what questions weren't asked, and so on. Western science responds to a certain history and cultural heritage that informs everything it does.\n\nMathematical equations by themselves are next to meaningless. They have not operational value until they are converted into code that can act on machines, and all machines are culturally and socially inscribed. Any other use of mathematics requires its interface with language, which is the polar opposite of math. Language is by necessity subjective, ambiguous, contradictory, and constantly changing.\n\nMany mathematicians say that math is also a language. This is only because they have never studied languages and have no idea what they're actually saying. Physicists and mathematicians have as much right to define language as linguists have to define wave functions or imaginary numbers.\n\nAnd while we're on the topic of definitional overreach, I need to go on a random but important tangent: the contention by the scientifically minded that tomatoes are a fruit. Tomatoes are not a goddamn fruit. The implication that they are fruits and not vegetables stems from an arrogant and preposterous attempt by biologists to appropriate the word “fruit” many centuries after this word came into the common parlance. They made an inaccurate definition, and rather than correcting themselves, they tried turning something everybody knew was a vegetable into a fruit. Hey jerkoffs: what's the scientific definition of vegetable? Oh wait, there is none. Because the whole world doesn't belong to you. “Fruit” and “vegetable” are culinary terms, you assholes, not botanical terms. When you say “fruit”, you're misusing the word. You actually mean the ovary of angiosperm plants. Get it fucking straight.\n\nIn the interest of fairness, we the laity can give back to the scientists a term we have been misusing: the learning curve. For the record, now that I have everyone's attention, a “steep learning curve” means something is very easy to learn, or that it evinces a threshold of effort or time spent learning, before which it is difficult to learn and after which it is easy to learn, as in, until you study the subject for twenty hours you don't really get it, but after that you advance quickly. (Hint: the curve is plotted on a graph. The X access is achievement, the Y axis is time or effort.) Something that is difficult to learn would have a low learning curve. Get it right. To be fair, though, a true linguophile would never use a metaphor that made reference to something they didn't understand, nor would they use a complex term as a simple synonym for “difficult” just to make themselves seem more intelligent.\n\nBut let's get back on topic, shall we? Languages have a far greater expressive capacity than mathematics due exactly to the linguistic conventions that make them incapable of pinning down an objective network of meaning. Rightly so are they incapable, because “objective meaning” is an oxymoron. Meaning can never be objective.\n\nMany rationalists today do not know that dozens of the greatest scientific minds and philosophers of the Enlightenment tried to create objective languages that would not change in translation, that would have the exact same meaning to people from any country and any time period, and that could describe and categorize anything in the world in precise, indisputable, and unchanging terms. Every single attempt was a total failure, most of them humorously so, as documented by Arika Okrent in In the Land of Invented Languages.\n\nAn objective language is impossible. Meaning is necessarily subjective, a relationship that people collectively have with a concept only in reference to a historical and fluctuating pool of experiences and other concepts that never manifests as a precise consensus because every node in the network, every individual, has a different perspective of the whole and a different kind of access to a different mix of the resources in the common pool. One of the implications of this reality is that definitions are always posterior and extraneous to concepts, never more than a convenient fiction.\n\nOn a simpler level, objective language is impossible because such a large part of language is naming and categorization, which too is subjective.\n\nCategorization is also an indispensable part of the sciences. Sincerity would have us recognize that the bulk of Science is a cultural exercise. And the word “cultural” stems from a synonym for “knowledge,” because human groups are different precisely according to the different knowledges they pass down and enact. But the priests of empiricism are capable of recognizing only one kind of knowledge. And they are so insulated from their origins in massive technocratic structures that they regularly dismiss philosophy, having forgotten that the men who created the disciplines they follow were philosophers every one. Today, they are still fine-tuning this philosophy, they merely pretend it is the only valid knowledge form in existence.\n\nIn fact, scientific philosophy is a direct descendant of Christianity. Early scientists inherited their penchant for encylopaedism that was so vital to their work of the 17th-19th centuries, and still present as a bedrock structure today, directly from the Christian monks, whose dogma also had them believe that knowledge was bounded, finite.\n\nThe French Revolution gave rise to the most definitive break between Church and Science, a contrast to the model of respectable continuity practiced in the UK. But even in their exuberance the French rationalists betrayed an attachment to the exact same forms and apparatuses as the Church. In fact, they systematically seized churches and rebaptized them “Churches of Rationality” or “Churches of Science,” while they spoke of empiricism as the new religion.\n\nCovering up this connection is something like an institutional origin story. And the thing is, it shouldn't be that embarrassing. All ideas have histories. All knowledge systems are culturally inflected. It is only embarrassing to Science because of its absolutist and religious pretensions, and above all its projection of a monopoly on all knowledge.\n\n*** Falsehood and Myth\n\nWhen I was growing up, we were still taught in school that animals didn't have feelings, they weren't intelligent, they were just unthinking machines of instinct. At the time, there were already decades of scientific studies disputing this view, but as usual, anything that challenges the myth of human superiority takes a much longer time to filter down to the masses. This erroneous idea about non-human animals was created in the first place by scientists out of whole cloth. Non-human animals in pre-Enlightenment Europe and even moreso in stateless societies across the globe had personhood. They were often respected, seen as thinking and feeling, even as possessors of wisdom that humans could gain through respectful observation. The scientists who promoted the contrary view were also promoting the view that all living things were machines to be modified and exploited as needed, and they were also basing their new empirical model on cruel, unfeeling practices of vivisection, torturous and generally fatal experimentation on live animals (often including humans from the lower classes and from other races).\n\nTrue to patriarchal form, scientists were also the ones to make the claim that female orgasms didn't exist, that women weren't intelligent, that women who sought clitorial stimulation rather than penetration were pathological, and so forth. In the 16th century, two Italian scientists, Renaldo Columbus and Fallopius, fought over which of them had discovered the clitoris, as detailed in Elizabeth Hall's, I Have Devoted My Life to the Clitoris.\n\nIt was scientists who claimed and continue to claim, despite ever more evidence to the contrary, that IQ is inherited, and thus any social inequalities are justified. These and similar claims of biological determinism are often related to the assertion, explicit in the 19th and 20th centuries, nowadays increasingly implicit, that people of color are inferior.\n\nThese are not just chance byproducts of imperfect paradigms. There is no coincidence in who is targeted by these “unscientific” fallacies that were promoted by the scientific establishment itself. They always went against those who have been oppressed by the very social hierarchies that scientists serve. And in every case, they were blatantly absurd beliefs, far more ridiculous than the idea that after we die our invisible spirits go to live in the sky with some dude with a beard, because that assertion at least is non-falsifiable. Scientists were believing, and trying to force everyone else to believe, things that any observant twelve-year-old could see were false. Time and again throughout history, scientists have been at the vanguard of the mouth-breathers.\n\nIn the examples I've given, scientific mythology and falsehood coincided, though as I've pointed out before, mythology and falsehood are not the same thing. What's most dangerous in the long run is not the falsehood, but the mythology, because Science's baseline mythology is patriarchal, colonialist, white supremacist, elitist, authoritarian, anthropocentric, and ecocidal. It's unhealthy. It's damaging. If something can be proven false, in the long run, scientists will reject it. It might take them a hundred years, they might be the last ones to clue in, but eventually, they will discard a demonstrably falsifiable belief, all the while congratulating themselves on how intelligent they are and never giving credit to the people who figured it out long before them. But the way that they promote false beliefs and the way they correct such beliefs still reinforce their base mythology.\n\nHere's an example: when settlers arrived in the western part of North America, supported and encouraged not only by the government but also by the geographic societies of the day, they slaughtered, enslaved, or evicted the original inhabitants. As soon as the stolen territories were fully integrated into the United States, there came to be large holdings of public lands and with them, the scientific management of those lands. A part of that, from the beginning, was fire suppression. This wasn't “pop science” or “pseudo-science,” on the contrary it reflected the efforts and the consensus of the finest scientists of the day. It took these overwhelmingly white scientists working at the behest of colonialism more than a hundred years to figure out that they were totally full of shit, that the observant, respectful, spiritual, non-scientific native inhabitants had worked out a much better system of forestry. Finally, in the second decade of the 21st century, when climate change is causing forest fires to reach new magnitudes, the Forest Service and related scientific and public agencies have started allowing native peoples like the Karuk to play a small role in shaping forestry practices. Today's scientists pat themselves on the back for recognizing that the Karuk had it right, but the dominant power relations do not change in any way. Karuk and other indigenous methods are only validated once scientific studies grant them legitimacy. There is still a monopoly on who can grant legitimacy to knowledge systems. And the ones handing out validations are the same ones responsible for dispossessing successive generations from their lands and their traditional practices, for helping to wipe out millions of acres of healthy forests, and for causing the extinction of countless species. Who atones for all that? What kind of structural changes will we see in response? None.\n\nIf the scientists and institutions involved were sincerely owning up to their errors, they would resign their positions, throw themselves at the feet of the Karuk, and seek to learn from a demonstrably superior knowledge system. They would also do everything in their power to get indigenous peoples their land back so they could re-institute their traditional practices. Of course we didn't see any of that. All we see are condescending displays of recognition coming from those who have no legitimacy beyond naked force. And progressives like Jacobi will sometimes go so far as to condescend that in his view, “primitive” peoples were truly scientific, else who could they have discovered so many useful things? But the demonstrably superior knowledge systems of the Karuk and many other indigenous peoples are not at all “scientific,” nor do they need that label to attain legitimacy. They tend to be experiential, spiritual, communal, and ecocentric, not institutional, empiricist, objectivist, anthropocentric, and capitalist.\n\nAnother example: scientists are skewed towards monogamy [https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/love-sex/monogamy-flawed-concept-science-sex-one-person-relationships-university-michigan-a7645271.html]. Researchers who study relationships and family structures tend to favor monogamous structures in a way that affects their research results, even as they naturalize certain relationship forms. Again, we see scientists represent more conservative interests in society that back up dominant forms. Time and time again, it has been social struggles that have advanced knowledge, especially where gender, race, and the environment are concerned. Scientists typically come in later to make the necessary modifications when the dominant paradigm is already in tatters.\n\nThen there was the amaaaaaazing study about honesty from the University of East Anglia, which compared the responses of subjects from different countries to a situation in which they flipped coin a number of times, and got a small money reward if it came up heads; the trick was that researchers didn't see the coin and relied on the test subject to report the result of the toss. In other words, they could lie and get more money, and researchers could tell who was lying more frequently based on statistical probability. The conclusion of the study, and one of the most frequently used headlines, was: “The British are the most honest,” as opposed to “The British are the least clever,” “The British are the most blindly obedient to arbitrary authority,” or “The British are the least likely to take advantage of resources that could be used to enrich their communities.” Incidentally, the study was carried out in... you guessed it! Great Britain! As far as honesty goes, well, the study didn't actually put Britain at the top of the list, it only came first in one of the two tests. And people from only fifteen countries were tested. A similar study that compared “honesty” rates to corruption indexes only tested people from 23 countries, but that didn't stop the Telegraph from reporting, “Britain has most honest citizens in the world.” Speaking of honesty, though, that second study actually gave the top spot not to the UK, but to Lithuania. The paper reported that “British students were found to be the most honest, along with those from Sweden, Germany, Lithuania and Italy. At the other end of the scale were those from Tanzania, Morocco, China and Vietnam.” This racially tinged list is made more so by the fact that European country Poland was left off the worst five as reported in the study. [https://www.uea.ac.uk/about/-/study-finds-honesty-varies-significantly-between-countries] [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/12189003/Britain-has-most-honest-citizens-in-the-world...-because-politicians-are-less-corrupt.html]\n\nNever mind that media used these studies in nationalist, racist, and dishonest ways, and the researchers would have to have been idiots not to predict that result; never mind that their construction of honesty was embarrassingly simplistic and moralistic, hence, subjective; never mind that the amount of money given out was worth a lot more in the countries that were reported as “dishonest” and that most of the people in the wealthier, “honest” countries didn't have a need a couple bucks. These studies responded to a need that was not empirical, but political and racial.\n\nSome more mundane examples of scientific mythology concern inaccurate concepts that Western scientists uncritically inherited from ancient Greek philosophy. To wit, elements and atoms don't actually exist. More specifically, the substances we call “elements” have turned out not to be so elementary, and “atoms,” the fundamental blocks of matter theorized by the Greeks, fundamental in the sense that they could not be cut or divided, which is the very meaning of the word “atom,” likewise do not exist. They weren't discovered, they were sought out, projected onto the available evidence.\n\nNonetheless, we are left with the pernicious myth that the Greek grandfathers of Western civilization, the putative ancestors and originators of our most cherished institutions and beliefs, were sooooooooooooooooooooo smart. A belief in their smartness, an identification with them in the construction of this subtle “we” that shows up so much in Western discourse, is a key plank of white supremacy shared by both the Left and the Right. I have one example that I found, ironically enough, in a sophomoric article mocking hippies for making poetic, philosophical and not terribly rigorous use of the discoveries of quantum physics [http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/14/science/far-out-man-but-is-it-quantum-physics.html]. After explaining to readers that quantum physics doesn't mean that your thoughts can alter reality, the author concludes: “In other words, reality is out of our control. It's all atoms and the void, as Democritus said so long ago”. (Note that this article falsely claims that the Parapsychological Association, easy to dismiss as quacks, were “expelled” from the American Association for the Advancement of Science; in fact that never happened, and they are still affiliated. So much for a scrupulous commitment to fact.)\n\nSo let me see if I got this straight. The Chinese are pre-modern and non-scientific, not just two thousand years ago but still today, whereas Democritus is worthy of consideration. Atoms and the void don't exist, not as Democritus envisioned him, but he gets credit. On the other hand, people do have energy coursing through them, every body has an electrical field, yet we're told that acupuncture is pre-scientific, even when the majority of empirical studies demonstrate otherwise... If the same standard were applied to the Chinese as to the Greeks, wouldn't they have been given credit for discovering electrical fields? Is there another criterion here I'm missing that explains this double standard, besides blatant cultural supremacism?\n\n*** Placebos and consciousness\n\nAs mentioned earlier, it is very difficult to effectively evaluate acupuncture with the kind of double-blind studies that empiricists prefer. This is because acupuncture, just like other forms of body therapy, require a good deal of skill. They are not comprised of tasks that can be mechanized, just as giving a patient a pill or radiation therapy. A double-blind study means that a method can be rated against a placebo in a way that neither the patient nor the healthcare practitioner know which is the real treatment and which is the placebo. An acupuncturist, however, knows when they are properly performing acupuncture on a patient. Amazingly, in much of the scientific literature, this counts as a mark against acupuncture. In other words, “controlled” studies are incapable of properly evaluating acupuncture, and rather than understanding this as a limitation of the method of study, yet another piece of evidence that empirical knowledge is not the only valid kind of knowledge, the bulk of scientists interpret this as a failing of acupuncture. Pretty clearly, they feel threatened by a form of healing that threatens their knowledge paradigm on multiple fronts. This can be read as yet another front in Science's war on healers, a war that in earlier centuries was carried out with torture and mass murder against primarily women practitioners of traditional forms of healing, and that today is waged with derision, marginalization, and occasionally the criminalization of alternative therapies. (I can already hear Jacobi preparing his counterargument, ignoring all my critiques to claim I am defending quack doctors who prey on desperate people and make a bundle giving out Vitamin C tablets to people with advanced stages of cancer.)\n\nThis is another example of the mechanization of practices, in which any knowledge or practices that don't fit through the social machine are forcibly discarded. It's also worth noting that many of those who have worked in so-called controlled experiments know that they are a joke, or at the very least, not as controlled as the scientific establishment pretends. I worked in the role of guinea pig, and I and my fellow test subjects regularly worked the system, lying to get accepted to the study, reporting symptoms of conditions we already had to get free medical care, not reporting symptoms if we knew it would allow us to continue in the study for longer and make more money. The researchers treated us like ignorant machines, passive and knowledgeless subjects, when in reality we were generally smarter than they were, getting the system to work for us when we were meant to suffer happily in pretty extreme precarity (enough precarity that we'd be willing to work by taking experimental drugs, without which the entire medical industry would fail). The truth of the matter is we had our own interests, our own strategies, completely illegible to those who thought they were in control. We also saw how often researchers fudged or omitted results that were unexpected or undesirable. So yeah, priests of science, keep talking about control. The underclasses you assume to be ignorant are just laughing and waiting for our day.\n\nThere's another important point easily lost within all this discussion of the need to distinguish effective treatments from the placebo effect, which is the concept of the placebo itself. Within dominant scientific practices, the placebo effect is practically a code word for a meaningless error, a “nuisance variable” according to one dissenting view [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2582657/]. It means the therapeutic effect that patients report when taking a fake treatment. Researchers rate their experimental treatments against non-treatment and against a placebo to find out its real effect. The insinuation is that the placebo effect is not real, which is a rather arbitrary, subjective distinction given that it has real results. To be more precise, the placebo effect represents the power of the mind to heal the body, how the feeling of being cared for, of receiving attention, and expecting to get better actually heals people. This is a concept that Science is unprepared to deal with, especially considering that the mind, according to the dominant paradigm, doesn't exist. It's supposed to just be the illusion produced by chemical and therefore wholly material processes in the brain. If the mind is an illusion, it cannot possibly act as a force, a factor, or a cause of anything, much less a healing of the body.\n\nAn advocate of this view might dodge the bullet by saying that receiving a placebo triggers endorphins or whatever other chemical that provide temporary relief. This is a sloppy argument typical of one who hasn't studied language or logical structures. If the placebo is chemically incapable of triggering such a chemical reaction on its own, then it is only the expectation the patient feels on receiving the placebo that could trigger the chemicals that supposedly relieves their suffering. Consciousness here still acts as an operational factor. And this explanation still leaves out cases when people experience a permanent resolution and not a temporary abatement of their condition.\n\nThe placebo effect is especially embarrassing to the scientific establishment if we consider that its margin of effectiveness is greater than the margin of effectiveness of many commercial medications. In other words, if the no-treatment baseline is zero, and the placebo effect in a drug trial runs at 30% (of patients who report the decrease of symptoms after receiving the placebo), many drugs only rate an effectiveness of 40-45% (in other words, only ten to fifteen points on top of the thirty points of the placebo). This is especially significant when we consider that the placebo effect is so strong among people who have received absolutely no training to use their mind to heal their body, and when the “care” they receive when getting the placebo is the minimal, cold contact of a doctor looking them over and a nurse handing them a pill and a plastic cup of water. What if respectful, positive, experience-based forms of traditional healing were recovered, people were encouraged and trained to take part in their own healing, and the professionals were caring, sympathetic, and attentive individuals who favored hands-on methods instead of arrogant, cold, hostile experts in lab suits? Coupled with lifestyle- and cause-based rather than symptom- and disease-based healing, people's health would improve drastically.\n\nBut the medical establishment has no interest in breaking with its authoritarian, torture-complicit, colonial, racist, and patriarchal history. They are interested in minimizing doctor-patient interactions and preserving the patient as a passive and ignorant recipient of treatment. (I can assure you that it is an accurate generalization that still today, doctors who work in the prison system are torturers, and we also have to add the medical workers in mental hospitals, in animal testing laboratories, all those who work in hospitals near the border and are complicit with the deportation machine...) And these dynamics long precede the financial incentives of big pharma.\n\nWhen I participated in a listening project regarding health care, it was astounding how many people, especially women, had had atrocious experiences with the medical establishment, which in many cases were not only humiliating but also dangerous for their health, with many doctors systematically and ignorantly insisting that they knew their patients' bodies and problems better after a cursory examination than the patients themselves.\n\nThe question of the placebo, and the broader issue of the demonstrable power of the mind in healing, points to a major crack in the current scientific paradigm. I would agree with Jacobi, referring to Kuhn and others, that a single piece of evidence doesn't justify discarding a theory. However, the evidence has been amassing for a long time now that the current scientific paradigm explaining the mind, consciousness, and the relationship of mind and body through genes and neural structures is simply inadequate, if not completely wrong. Additionally, we now have a large body of historical research showing how the scientific paradigm governing the mind-body relation was never evidence-based, but from the very beginning was a philosophical imposition stemming from the prejudices and mythical frameworks of Enlightenment era thinkers looking for an absolute theory of knowledge. These thinkers, who also gave us the idea that empirical knowledge is the only valid form of knowledge, based their arguments not on experimentation but on armchair speculation.\n\nI would disagree with Jacobi that one theory should not be discarded until we have a better one to take its place, which I would ascribe more to an insecurity with humility and uncertainty, since such attitudes undermine the institutional separation between experts and laypeople. But if anyone who holds this preference nonetheless wants to overcome the conservative nature of paradigms, and insists that science has a revolutionary importance, then they would do well to be more forthcoming in acknowledging a theory that is clearly insufficient, underlining a viewpoint that is ready for an update rather than obstinately defending it and viciously attacking anyone who points to its cracks, as does Jacobi and so many like him.\n\nOne of Jacobi's tactics is to use a total non sequitur on quantum physics and mock all the spiritualists who use what we might generously call a poetic understanding of quantum physics to support dissident ideas about consciousness. Jacobi expresses his suspicion that I hold the same views, but he is unable to make any textual reference, because, well, I actually don't hold those views. (Has anyone else noticed how little importance Jacobi gives to evidence while championing empiricism?) I would say, however, that those quacks are being more honest thinkers than the stuffy traditionalists who continue defending a paradigm that holds no water. At least they are looking for new answers in a realm where it should be obvious that new answers are needed.\n\nTo name one area of study that is breaking the paradigm, we have the research into consciousness after death, focusing on evidence of consciousness among people who experience medical death, and who show no brain activity, and are then resuscitated. The groundbreaking study in this field was conducted by Dutch cardiologist Pim van der Lommel, who interviewed hundreds of patients over twenty-five years, recording their experiences while they were in full cardiac arrest or total comas with no brain activity. Van der Lommel observed a great deal of similarity in patients who reported “near death experiences” including having access to falsifiable sensory experiences at times when there was no blood flow to their brains, as well as a strong quantifiable difference in psycho-social experiences in the years after their resuscitation, comparing those who had had a near death experience with those who had experienced medical death without such an experience. His study was published in the peer-reviewed medical journal, The Lancet, and predictably, many scientists subsequently mocked him, dismissed him as a quack, and tried to drag his name through the mud. Curiously, they did not publish their refutations in peer-reviewed journals, which some might qualify as rather unscientific of them.\n\nVan der Lummel makes an easy target. Not only does he have a funny Dutch name (and anyone who doesn't think this actually makes a difference is naïve), but in the book he published after the study, he wanders into a number of New Agey explanations for how consciousness might actually work given the inadequacy of the biocentric or neural/mechanical model. And yes, he makes recourse to quantum physics. But this is only after he uses decidedly scientific methods to statistically refute all the other mainstream explanations for consciousness events among people who are medically dead or in full comas. In any case, his New Agey hypotheses are independent of and therefore do not discredit his peer-reviewed research on consciousness after death. This research doesn't tell us what is actually going on with people who lose blood flow to their brains but keep on thinking, feeling, and receiving sensory information, but it most certainly puts another crack in the mechanistic theory of the brain as producer of consciousness. And what's more, his research results have been independently reproduced at NYU [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/mind-works-after-death-consciousness-sam-parnia-nyu-langone-a8007101.html]. (While studies of executed rats suggest their might be a sudden spike in brain activity after medical death, when even all brain stem reflexes have stopped, therefore possibly resuscitating mechanistic theories, this doesn't explain long-lasting consciousness among coma patients. There's also the troublesome fact, backed up by the NYU study, that not only can people consistently hear when they're being pronounced dead, they also often have access to falsifiable visual information about the emergency room and personnel, whether or not their eyes are closed or able to focus and respond to light.)\n\nWhen you consider that plants can hear, smell, and see, as well as experience fear [http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170109-plants-can-see-hear-and-smell-and-respond], and that slime mold, which has no nervous system whatsoever, is capable of learning, well, maybe it's time to recognize that Western notions of other life forms are basically without merit, whereas many indigenous knowledge systems that treat all other life forms—not just animals—as our brothers and sisters, as intelligent beings with personhood, are more accurate. Wouldn't that be embarrassing for all the scientists standing atop centuries of presumed superiority?\n\nBut you know what? Fuck them. The sheer damage wrought by the application of their paradigm on the natural world has been devastating enough to prove that it's wrong.\n\n*** The planet\n\nWho dares to say that Western science has not been involved in the destruction of the planet? Who is shameless and dishonest enough to deny that scientific advancement is inseparable from industrial advancement, and together these two forces are destroying the place that gives us life, killing hundreds of millions of people, billions of other life forms, brutalizing the earth, and causing thousands upon thousands of extinctions every year?\n\nMost scientists make their living working in some way for this ecocidal system. If they can get funding to study salmon populations, they'll study salmon populations. If the funding is in fracking and horizontal drilling, that's what they'll do instead. It's no mystery where most of the research dollars are, and how the majority of scientists are busy making the system stronger, more devastating. The small minority whose funding opportunities allow them to be more idealistic are also a part of the problem. They continue to support the institutional mythology regarding solutions to the problem of ecocide.\n\nWhere are the scientists who make it clear that alternative energies have no chance of reducing emissions within a capitalist energy market?\n\nWhere are the scientists who release reports stating that the Paris Agreement is not enough according to accepted climate models?\n\nWhere are the scientists who object to the new geological term, “anthropocene,” pointing out that it is capitalism and not all humanity that has caused the problem, and that there have been many carbon neutral, non-ecocidal societies we might learn from?\n\nWhere are the scientists who openly refer to the energy companies as mass murderers?\n\nWhere are the scientists getting arrested for direct actions against the industrial decimation of the planet, for pipeline blockades, for assassinating the executives of the companies most responsible for pollution?\n\nWhere are the scientists speaking up in support of Greenscare and Standing Rock prisoners?\n\nNowhere to be found. Because all the scientists who find it economically convenient to deal with questions of climate change and ecocide are sitting obediently right next to those who are most responsible for the problem, meekly submitting reports to the media, giving their support to ineffective government treaties and green capitalist pseudo-solutions even though empirically speaking these cannot possibly stop the ecocide.\n\nThe common factor of every false solution, every framing of the ongoing destruction of the planet, is that the scientific, technological, industrial system of capitalism afforded the ultimate consideration and made an absolute priority. Any social response to climate change, habitat loss, and mass extinctions must first posit the untouchability, the immortal preservation, of this system. Only then can it begin to address the question of ameliorating ecological harm. Scientists are fully complicit in the framing that has us first save capitalism, and then see if it's also possible to save the planet.\n\nHow are we supposed to believe that an institutional complex that systematically produces people who hate the planet, who hate other life forms, who think of themselves superior, are going to save the planet? Constantly we are told to trust in the priests, and to think of anyone who loves the earth as backward “mystics”. Jacobi is shameless enough to equate those who fault Science for its role in the devastation with climate denialists who refute the scientific consensus.\n\nAs one final example of ecocide in which scientific institutions undeniably played an irreplaceable role, we have the so-called Green Revolution, the forcible industrialization, mechanization, and chemicalization of agriculture throughout the Global South. The scientific practices that underpin monocrop agriculture, machine-planting and harvesting, factory-based meat production and processing, global transportation, and chemical fertilizers and pesticides entail a fatal ignorance of biological processes, ecosystems, and ecological limits and they have destroyed the world's soil, created dead zones throughout the ocean, poisoned our environment, and condemned billions to a precarious dependence on the market and millions to outright starvation. These practices, developed, promoted, and defended by scientists and scientific institutions, are directly involved in the forcible suppression of numerous ecocentric, sustainable, traditional practices of sustenance, while they themselves constitute the most inefficient form of food production in world history. I am referring to inefficiency, stupidity, and abusiveness on multiple levels, but those who are mentally inhibited by rationalism and have trouble appreciating things that are not numbers-based need only the readily available calculations of fuel calories spent versus food calories produced.\n\nAs just the latest in a cascading series of disasters produced by the idiocy of scientific agriculture, we have the first empirically demonstrated factor related to the catastrophic die-offs of bee populations worldwide. Glyphosate, Monsanto's Roundup, supposedly doesn't affect animals, except when agricultural workers are exposed to large quantities, in which case they tend to die quickly. But officially:\n\n *Glyphosate only affects plants and bacteria.\n\n *All animals depend for their survival on healthy bacteria populations in their digestive tract.\n\nTell these two facts to any nine-year-old, and they would probably see that glyphosate presents a danger to animals as well.\n\nLo and behold, the scientists in their shiny white labcoats have come to save us. In September 2018, 48 years after scientists identified glyphosate as an effective herbicide and 44 years after it hit the market, scientists at the University of Austin reported that when honeybees visit fields that have been sprayed with Roundup, they suffer die-offs of their intestinal flora that make them significantly more vulnerable to a number of contagious diseases, creating the conditions for the simultaneous deaths of most members of a hive. [https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180924174506.htm]\n\nIt took them 48 years to look into a problem that any pre-adolescent with only the most basic information on biology would identify as a potential danger in five minutes. Yet another example of the mind-blowing stupidity of scientists when they're not getting paid to think about something. A danger to the world and a boon to capitalism and states: general stupidity, applied brilliance, coupled with immense power. They'll solve the problems placed in front of them, avoid any overarching structural critiques, and delegitimize any affirmations or perspectives from outside the system.\n\n*** Revolutionary Science?\n\nJacobi titles his critique “the revolutionary importance of science,” but throughout his text he offers very little to clarify what these revolutionary qualities are. He comes the closest in the following paragraph, and it's telling that he actually says nothing positive about Science, he just falls back on an old strawman scare tactic, assuring readers that there is only one alternative to Science and it is horrifying. (Sounds familiar, right? Hey Jacobi, ever worked for the Democrats on a “Get Out the Vote” campaign?)\n\n
\nFor one thing, even if this approach has some real problems, the alternatives are even worse. Mysticism, religion, and various forms of obscurantism have been the primary tools of the powerful seeking to justify their power. Science—logic, reason, empirical evidence—has been the tool that has cut off the legs of those beasts. Science is what allows us to demystify power relations and the world around us so that we can properly respond. Otherwise, we are left making decisions that do not, for example, acknowledge evolutionary processes, economic trends, sociological tendencies, and human nature. This is as absurd as making decisions without acknowledging the laws of gravity. Worse, we are left not believing in the laws of gravity because a monarch or tradition or “divine revelation” has told us so.\n\n\nWell, no, actually, you're a couple hundred years late with this claim. Today Science is the primary tool by which the powerful justify their power, and while scientists do love cutting legs off beasts, it would be a better metaphor to claim that Science has built the powerful a freaking jetpack to zip around in. Also, did anyone notice how he threw “human nature” in there? Another favorite trope of the status quo and a part of Enlightenment mythology that many scientists have clung to.\n\nJust as he can't appreciate a global critique of the institutional complex he feels compelled to defend, he cannot offer a vision about what is liberating about science, beyond calling up some 19th century bogeyman regarding the oppression of mysticism, much the same bogeyman his forebears used to justify the slaughter of witches and the genocide of indigenous societies in order to usher in the reign of their own rationalism, in which women and people of color were scientifically inferior, animals didn't have feelings, and the world was a collection of dead elements that existed for our benefit.\n\nIn conclusion, Jacobi is akin to a liberal when it comes to Science. He is either unable or he refuses to appreciate a systemic critique. Any link between Science and capitalism is simply a question of corruption that needs to be cured with more and better science. This is a naïve, baseless view. Jacobi is completely unable of describing what science would look like—how even new scientists would be trained—without the countless institutional and cultural connections with multiple interlinked systems of domination and exploitation. Perhaps the divisionist prejudice that sits at the heart of Science is playing one final trick on him: he thinks that society is a collection of elements, and revolution is just a question of picking and choosing which institutions we like and which we don't, rather than a drawn out convulsion in which everything is fundamentally transformed. How are we supposed to make fundamental transformations without fundamental critiques? We aren't. Which is exactly why every institution of power rejects fundamental critiques and demands either conservative loyalty or the kind of liberal critiques like Jacobi's that lead at best to piecemeal reform.\n\nThe only positive scraps Jacobi offers regarding Science have to do with climate change. We have to believe in scientists because those who don't believe in them are the climate denialists. Another dishonest, totally disrespectful strawman. Today, most people trust scientists regarding climate change, and that is part of the problem. Because they have also been trusting the solutions validated by scientific institutions, which as already discussed are false solutions. Today, trust in scientists regarding climate change means first and foremost passivity: people leave the experts in charge, and trust that they'll come up with some technological solution that doesn't require everyone to change how they live and relate to the planet.\n\nFor the umpteenth time, I am not against empirical knowledge, and I think it is good that there are networks of people taking measurements and proving that CO2 is increasing and the planet is heating up. But just as they are not at the forefront of the struggle, they are also not an indispensable element at the level of knowledge. Anyone who pays attention to their bioregion and is more than 20 years old has been a witness to climate change. We don't need fancy equipment to see and feel the change. Science as an institutional complex convinces people to disconnect from their own experiences and trust in apparatuses over which they have no control. This kind of disconnection is part and parcel of the alienated, exploited relationship we have with the Earth that allows us to damage it so.\n\nRecently, I was watching a video of a Flat-earther trying to prove his theory. The most compelling thing he said out of all the harebrained bits of evidence went along the lines of, “We're just supposed to believe the world is round because they tell us it is?” How tragic, to find the scientific spirit, in the best possible sense of the word, so poorly equipped. Everyone who goes to public school gets a few basic years of scientific education, and somehow, in those years, the average student doesn't receive the observational tools they would need to prove for themselves that the Earth is round.\n\nI have no doubt that most scientists would heartily prefer that scientific education in elementary and high schools be vastly improved. Yet hardly any of them move a finger to accomplish this. How many people with a PhD, much less a PhD in a “hard” science, go back to teach in a public school? Probably something close to 0%. Overwhelmingly, they follow the money. How can one not give them their share of the blame for ensuring that scientific knowledge is enclosed, specialized, monopolized by a tiny group of people and therefore made an instrument of hierarchical power, rather than generalized, communalized, shared, and therefore made an instrument of the common people?\n\nIn my vision an anti-authoritarian revolution, empirical tools and methods would be put at everyone's disposal, but rationalist spirituality would be thoroughly subverted, indigenous, ecocentric spiritualities would be allowed to thrive again, and revolutionaries everywhere would shout at the top of their lungs, making it a common faith, “the earth does not belong to us, we belong to the earth.”\n\nThis means thoroughly destroying the anthropocentric, technophilic fallacy that sits at the heart of Science and that is also shared by many Western anti-capitalist movements. Kropotkin and Marx both saw Nature as a limitation to overcome, and they correctly understood Science as the weapon to defeat it. None of their predictions regarding abundance produced by technology have come true.\n\nIf there ever were an anti-capitalist revolution that still clung to the values of Science, those beliefs would resuscitate authority as surely as the State did in the failed anti-capitalist revolutions of the 20th century.\n\nConsider this quote from “a Situationist journal in 1969. [It] directly addresses the seizure of science from capitalism and the state by the people, and its recuperation for their own utopian goals.\n\n
\nHumanity will enter into space to make the universe the playground of the last revolt: that which will go against the limitations imposed by nature. Once the walls have been smashed that now separate people from science, the conquest of space will no longer be an economic or military ‘promotional’ gimmick, but the blossoming of human freedoms and fulfillments, attained by a race of gods. We will not enter into space as employees of an astronautic administration or as ‘volunteers’ of a state project, but as masters without slaves reviewing their domains: the entire universe pillaged for the workers’ councils. ”\n\n\n[Quoted in Stevphen Shukaitis, “Space is the (non)place: Martians, Marxists, and the outer space of the radical imagination” Sociological Review 57 Suppl (2009).]\n\nNote all the colonial elements present in this supposedly revolutionary view: the conquest of a territory once again presented as empty and therefore waiting for our improvements, the suspicious proposition of masters without slaves, the pillaging of natural resources, ascendancy as a superior race, and of course nature as nothing more than a limitation. The view shares much in common with current day cyborgs of the transhumanist movement who have no pretensions of being anti-capitalist as they promise to “free us, as a species, from the confines of biology.”[https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/designing-bodies-future/index.html]\n\nIt is the abandonment of this nature-hating, body-despising imperative which is at the very center of Science as a mythological system and institutional complex that would truly be revolutionary.\n"}}}],"truncated":false,"partial":false},"paginationData":{"pageIndex":1,"numItemsPerPage":100,"numTotalItems":7770,"offset":100,"length":100}},"jwt":"eyJhbGciOiJFZERTQSJ9.eyJyZWFkIjp0cnVlLCJwZXJtaXNzaW9ucyI6eyJyZXBvLmNvbnRlbnQucmVhZCI6dHJ1ZX0sImlhdCI6MTc2MjE3MTE0OCwic3ViIjoiL2RhdGFzZXRzL2FsbHVyYS1vcmcvdGhlLWFuYXJjaGlzdC1saWJyYXJ5IiwiZXhwIjoxNzYyMTc0NzQ4LCJpc3MiOiJodHRwczovL2h1Z2dpbmdmYWNlLmNvIn0._yJMRL-J2ALQEtEetV98hwAji7jD92ngbTav2bgx9XyOTp9R657-GuYnCl29kyYKKsTa9s56_-7wMiddKJJmAQ","displayUrls":true,"sqlConsoleEnabled":true},"discussionsStats":{"closed":1,"open":0,"total":1},"fullWidth":true,"hasGatedAccess":true,"hasFullAccess":true,"isEmbedded":false,"savedQueries":{"community":[],"user":[]}}">
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#title The Spectator of Democracy
#author Against Sleep and Nightmare
#SORTtopics communist, democracy
#date Early-Mid 90's
#source Retrieved on 17 March 2017 from http://www.redtexts.org/html/asn_spectator.html
#lang en
#pubdate 2017-03-17T19:33:07
#notes Originally published in Against Sleep and Nightmare 5 in the mid-1990s and available online at http://www.againstsleepandnightmare.net/ASAN/ASAN5/democrcy.html
*** ...And Democracy Continues Its March
<quote>
"Fetters and headsmen were the coarse instruments which tyranny formerly employed; but the civilization of our age has perfected despotism itself, though it seemed to have nothing to learn." - de Tocqueville, <em>Democracy in America</em> (pg.97)
</quote>
America really is entering a period of greater democracy. Bill Clinton's election campaign has never stopped. Polls are still being taken about his latest struggles. From the New Hampshire primary to the health care reform campaign, TV has tried to draw us into his endless fights with other mighty bureaucrats - from George Bush to Robert Dole to Saddam Hussein. Even more, we are expected to cheer Clinton in fights against us. "How well do you think that Clinton succeeded in communicating the need for sacrifice to the American people."
The 1992 elections had the biggest turnout of a presidential election in twenty years. From elections to polls to talk-radio to the "internet," never has the average citizen had so many chances for a voice in their government. But this hasn't helped the hapless citizen. The average, passive voter probably is poorer and has less control over his or her life than ever before.
To understand how people lose this game, we have to look at how the game is really played.
In pro basketball, fouling is part of the game. Some teams play with a little more finesse, other use a little more brute strength. The honest fan doesn't look down on the player who fouls, only the player who gets caught. So the player is allowed to do anything - except to question the real rules of the game. If Kurt Rambus (a "physical player" from a few years back) said at a press conference "Yes, I intend to foul people, that's my job," he could be expelled from the league.
American Democracy works the same way. If we play the game, we can question everything except the real rules of the game. But here the game is something that dominates our lives.
The game today is exchange. It dominates our daily lives when we must exchange our time at work for our survival. It dominates the world system when the electronic world market allocates all resources by exchange.
Poll takers constantly ask about OJ Simpson's murder trial, the best way to make America more productive or how to keep children off drugs. But answering these sorts of questions only makes people think more in terms of life continuing exactly as it is now. The pollsters' slave questions talk only about how this society should best be run. They assume that everyone will live in nuclear family, go to work, work really hard for low pay, come home and look at a TV star on the moving screen.
*** The Illusion
We attack democracy as such, we don't want "real democracy" instead of "fake democracy." Today's system of vacuum-packed choices is the flip-side of the market perfecting itself. The progress of exchange, of capital, is also the creation of capital's own model of thinking.
All forms of democratic ideology appeal to a model of human behavior that implies each person is wholly separate social agent who only affects others in fixed, definable ways. Perfect democracy - constant polling, an almost permanent election campaign - merely weighs each impulse in the market place of ideas.
Democracy is the language of "common sense" in a world where capitalism controls people's senses. It defends the right, for example, for a man to shout cat-calls at a woman because that man's actions are simply "free speech" not connected to any social action.
Today's democracy never has to attack its true enemies but only phantasms within itself. It is only the exchange of one sort of rhetoric for another. So all rhetoric of this sort is empty because is only used to shout at another. Most voters vote for the candidate they think will win instead of the candidate they agree with. This is logical. Why should they care? Everyone knows that things will remain about the same no matter what they do. So why not support a winner instead of a loser? No one cares that politicians lie. They care if the politician gets caught lying. This proves the politician is weak and so a loser.
If you make a choice passively, someone could just as well act on your choice without you having to do anything. Of course presidential elections are only held every four years but if Clinton responds to each month's polls, the government truly hears the passive "voice of the people."
"Would you like me to shoot you now or wait till I get home?" Elmer Fudd to Daffy Duck. "Should the federal government cut services or raise taxes?" Bill Clinton to the working class.
Of course all the choices the media serves up to us have hidden clauses that change their apparent meaning. The federal government reduces its entire budget. Then the local puppets frame the choice of cuts for local voters. These voters then get to support one austerity measure or another.
But this is because the marketplace of ideas works against us. But is this because this market is unfair? No! Even a fair marketplace of ideas simply decides the best direction for capital. Our disadvantage in talk-show dialogues is the same as our disadvantage compared to employers or banks.
*** Why Democracy Now?
<quote>
"We must learn to make the process of governing as entertaining as we have learned to make [electoral] politics entertaining." - Max Frankel, Editor, The New York Times.
</quote>
The game of letting the ruled participate in their own exploitation not new. The present subtle switch from George Bush's upper-class style to Bill Clinton's democratic style is a counter-part to the rise of the mega-capitalists. The eighties ended with stock market crashes that heralded the end of junk bonds as a strategy for total capital to expand. The economy could no longer be artificially expanded by the easy-money financial manipulations of Michael Milken, George Bush, Paul Volker and Company.
Instead of artificially expanding, it is now sucking all resources into it's empty center. The faction of capitalists at the very top are the billionaires - financiers like Adnan Khoshaggi, entrepreneurs like Bill Gates and a host of invisible characters. This small group had their wealth and power tremendously increased by the expansion of financial manipulations and electronic world markets. Currency and "derivative" speculation had expanded until today they involve trillions of dollars changing hands on a weekly basis. This game uses and expands the power of this ultra-rich class.
As today's crisis system moves to marshal every possible force in its defense, uses our choices about how best to be exploited against us. This system is the dictatorship of the commodity, the world market and of the billionaires. But simultaneously it is the rule of democracy. Once all action and every person can be translated into empty choices, those choices can be exchanged with each other like dollars or spectacular images.
If people are given a free choice about how to sell themselves to the world market, then the system in total will run much more smoothly. When commentator say "let the public decide the best health plan" they mean let people find a plan that gives the insurance companies the highest premiums that workers can pay and still survive on. Managers will give people free-reign to decide which way to sell themselves to the market.
Democracy became the dominant ideology right after "tight-money"/slow growth became the main economic policy. Tight money reigned in financial speculation and began the present system of reorganization-terror. It goaded lower-level capitalists to produce more without spending more. This caused corporations to attack both workers and the previously ignored level of middle-management.
The financial capitalists' power depends on the expansion of an abstract chunk of money. So democracy is an ideal strategy. The financial capitalist don't care whether they invest in defense contracting, prisons, computers to track drug-offenders, or for-profit hospitals.
Thus the ruling party switched from the party of corruption - the republicans under Bush, to the party of participation - the Democrats under Clinton. But naturally democracy implies many more switches after this.
*** Historical Democracy
As capitalism has developed, democracy was held back by local authoritarians and by the capitalist's fear that the idea of democracy would make people ungovernable.
Now that capital has perfected democratic participation, all previous forms of capitalism can be seen as instances of democracy. It is thus not surprising that democratic think-tanks are able to give good advice to dictatorships like Pinochet's Chile. It is not surprising that Hitler came to power through the democratic operations of the Wiemar republic. (There was some cheating but we already know cheating is part of any game.)
Democracy is now the ideal dialogue of capital. Participation in this process is speaking the language of the market whether it is participatory, authoritarian or technical. The methods of military "psy-war" propaganda are the methods of the modern democratic political campaign are the methods of modern government are the methods of leftists discussing ways to improve the system. The enemy is isolated, personalized and attacked using claims that are most likely to get automatic reactions from the isolated spectator.
Every apparent rebellion that failed, every useless exercise of freedom, reappears in the accounting of capital. The system of the Soviet Union was identical to the system of war-time production in our "free-market" system. Thus the final end of the Soviet Union has given the extended insurance system a quantitative measure of state-capitalism versus private enterprise.
The more people relate on the level of "pure democracy," the more they relate on the level of abstract, formal equality. And the more they have an incentive to solve the system's problems. Everyone becomes a bureaucrat versus everyone else. Everyone is equal as long as they each play the same role. We are all equal as consumers, voters, TV watchers, or citizens. That is, we can all be exchanged in our functions.
To write a letter to a congressman is to enter into a huge system of data-creation that ultimately makes people less powerful. The ultimate passivity of a permitted, experimentally controlled role makes it predictable.
The stock market, the media consultants, the political think-tanks, the pollsters, the market researchers, and the big charities constitute an immense electronic memory bank and simulation of all the permitted choices that "consumers," "the public," the spectators, the passive make. The election industry speculates about each way that each given choice is framed and then creates strategies for extracting maximum profits from each citizen's choice.
With this automation of control, democratic regimes are now the most cost effective. This is part of today's intensification of democracy. Once ideology sees formal democracy in all acts of government, cost accounting demands that redundant local tyrants be removed. Even in backward areas like Haiti or Somalia, capital moves to replace local butchery with the "accidental" mass murders of democracy.
*** Decisions?
Revolutionaries oppose every version of democratic ideology. On one hand, after a revolution there won't be a need to fixate on the process of reaching each decision. For example, one person could decide a day's delivery schedule in a communal warehouse without oppressing the other workers. Other workers might prefer to spend their time walking on the beach than double checking each decision. The dispatcher would have no coercive power over the other participants in the warehouse. Deciding the schedule would not give her entrenched privilege that she could accumulate and exchanged for other things. For their own enjoyment, the worker might want to collectively decide the menu of a communal kitchen even it was a less efficient use of time.
A scheme for managing society will by itself create a new society. Highly democratic, highly authoritarian and mixed schemes are now used to administer capitalism. The basic quality of capitalism is that the average person has little or no control over their daily life. Wage labor dominates society. You must exchange your life to buy back your survival. Whether people under capitalism make the decisions about which records they buy, which inmates serve long sentences, what color the street lights are, etc., is irrelevant.
The community that escapes capitalism will involve people directly controlling the way they live. This is the individual and collective refusal of work, commodity production, and exploitation. This will involve much collective decision making and much individual decision making. The transformation cannot be reduced to a set way of making decisions or a fixed plan of action.
<strong>Not believing in democracy means not automatically knowing how to proceed if people have a profound disagreements. So be it.</strong>
*** Anti-democratic Communism
Communists do not say that without capitalism we can guarantee that humans will create a human community. It says that with capitalism, humans cannot create a human community. It sees that any movement for a true community will oppose capitalist social order and social relationships all along the way. The motivating force will not come with a communist blue-print. It will come from living of proletarians creating a new social relation.
The spirit of collective power, of a community of masters, is exactly the opposite of the democratic spirit. Democracy drowns the individual in the choices of the majority. It presumes that the individual choice is always hostile to the power of the masses. Thus democratic ideology creates the paranoia that everything contrary to its current formalism of process is the same as Stalinist dictatorship.
The spirit of proletarian struggle can be seen when a group of partisans fan-out to defend a city. Each wing has the power to act alone in attacking capitalist forces. Each wing is just as willing to give in to the authority of the other proletarians when they indicate they know the terrain better.
The formal decision making process will depend on the situation. Unanimity, a majority vote, or minority action will be used depending on the terrain of the battle. It is not a matter of fixed rights but of people supporting each other.
Those who are taking back their lives must be strong and alive, not fair and democratic. When a mass of comrades satisfy their desires by looting a supermarket, they have acted directly on their collective wills. But it is ridiculous to say this action was fairer than them collectively voting for a congresswoman/man or voting to raise their taxes to pay for more police. They violated "process" by not polling everyone beforehand. It's not a matter of whether looters could ever have the right number of people together to "have permission" to act. Proletarians should always act as actively allied creators of a new order, not as passively equal citizens.
Virtually all of the past two hundred years' lurches towards the potlatch, towards communism, have begun undemocratically. The rioters of LA did not require the formal permission of a decision-making body before creating their explosion. The insurrection that started the Spanish Civil War in 1936 began with a spontaneous reaction of workers to Francisco Franco's military coup. The wildcat general strike in May of 68 in Paris began with a spontaneous rejection of the entire society that was fueled by street fighting.
These same insurrections have tended to end when the fetish of democracy reasserted itself. May 68 reached its limits with union officials still controlling the gates of the striking factories.
These elected representatives of the workers separated the movement until everything cooled down. (Again there was certainly a lot of cheating in the French CGT's "union democracy" but this wouldn't have changed the final result. See "How To 'Go Beyond The SI' In Ten Simple Steps," this issue) In Spain 36, democratically elected anarchist union leaders controlled the tendency to communalize all society. They were able to convince the most militant workers that it would be undemocratic to impose socialism without the approval of the passive majority.
The dispossessed should not be fair but be alive and strong. To be anti-democratic is to reject the fetish of democracy, to not give any voting process an inherently superior position over the total process of living. Proletarians, those who have nothing to lose from the destruction of this society and know it, must become anti-democratic to achieve their ends.
Workers must seize control of their workplace or their neighborhood. Not to manage them in the same way as before but to have as much power as possible. Even if at a certain point a group of proletarians use votes to decide the path taken, they cannot allow democratic blessings to justify their actions any more than they can allow reformism, unionism, or pacifism to mystify their actions. The number in favor of a decision will be only one factor among many influencing those who refuse the democratic fetish.
*** Minorities Confronting Democracy
The passive of today accept democracy more than ever. This weakness may be partially offset by the tremendous willingness of the system's propagandists to rely on raw democracy to accomplish its goals. Freedom of choice is no longer only given as a concession but is pushed constantly as a weapon.
At the point when revolutionaries realize that they have nothing to lose from the destruction of this society, they may realize the mirage of it's democracy. The LA riots were the most undemocratic action imaginable - absolutely no permission was ever asked by those who looted, either from authorities or from unions or from workers councils. Still there was no conscious critique of democracy in that short time in LA.
So we can imagine many more insurrections, like Paris 68, where masses with many democratic and other bourgeois illusions act in a practically communist manner. Here, if the word "democracy" is used by people to describe reconquering their own lives, self-conscious communists wouldn't mindlessly attack it. Rather, an anti-democratic minority would spell-out the practical actions that are necessary to achieve a new society and show how little formal democracy has to do with them. In those conditions, an anti-democratic minority is in a good position to fight the mystifications that have served as breaks on the earlier movements.
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#title Against the Hallmark Nickel Project (Philippines)
#subtitle Information about destructive mining project in Mati, Davao, Philippines
#SORTauthors Anonymous
#SORTtopics Philippines, indigenous
#date October 28, 2009
#lang en
#pubdate 2020-04-28T15:10:49
From anarchists in Philippines involved in resistance:
<quote>
Autonomous resistance against eco-destruction and social turmoil carried out by capital needs to develop unbounded and analyzed upon creating a revolutionary plight in reclaiming direct control towards freedom — liberatory space and unconstrained desire and capacity beyond the bondages of imagination to put into action — without compromise. The struggle against domination, the enemy — state, capital and religion acquiring and exploiting the earth landscape as extractable resources manifests the ever-growing contagious outbreak of various oppositional elements and social conventions concealed within the legal framework and morality of lobbying, servitude and pacifism until natural life is mechanically being reduced and controlled into the hands of conservation experts, scientists and sustainable management schemes as a means of reaction to such atrocious events. Ideological dogma, reformism and centralized administrative structures often becomes the product of deeds and academic indoctrination consequently suppressing the burning rage of defiance and revolt against the social order and ecological havoc maintained by the ruling forces. Such logic is inflicting coercion over other life forms — a totalitarian mindset taking place within the driving stages and development of social experimentation and control.
</quote>
The Hallmark Nickel Project is one of the 23 priority mining projects that are part of the Philippines government’s 2004 Minerals Action Plan. Spearheaded by President Arroyo, the plan aims to revitalize the Philippine mining industry and encourage foreign investment as a driver for national development. Hallmark demonstrates the complexity of international mining projects and the challenges in ensuring sufficiently high social and environmental standards are met by international mining companies and their joint venture partners.
The Hallmark project comprises seven exploration permits covering an area of approximately 13,500 hectares-more than 100 times the size of London’s Hyde Park — in Davao Oriental Province, south-eastern Mindanao. The permits were granted to seven Philippine companies, collectively represented by Asiaticus Management Corporation (AMCOR). On 21 March 2001 AMCOR signed a memorandum of understanding with BHP Billiton and in 2002 the 2 companies entered into a joint venture and shareholders agreement to form the Hallmark project. Approval for the mining permits was given by the
government in 2004 and 2005.
BHP Billiton’s capital costs for the project are US$ 1.5–3.0 billion, making it a sizeable share of its stainless steel materials portfolio, under which nickel mining and production falls. The joint venture agreement is a 60:40 percent equity split between AMCOR and BHP Billiton respectively.
BHP Billiton and the Philippine government estimate the project’s nickel resource to be around 150 million metric tonnes. In 2007, the government estimated its gross value at around US $22.7 billion. The government also estimates that it will receive approximately US$10 million in excise tax and US$70 million in income tax per year.
BHP Billiton plans to develop a nickel processing plant and operate a mine for around 30 years. It says the plant will use the high-pressure acid-leach method, or hydrometallurgical technology, and is expected to have an annual capacity of 35–50,000 metric tonnes of nickel- the equivalent at least three times the weight of Eiffel tower- for export to countries such as China, Japan and Australia.
The project is currently in the exploration phase with mine production anticipated to begin around 2014/15. However the Hallmark project has permits for exploration only and not production, so must now secure Philippine government approval before the mine can actually developed.
*** Macambol
Macambol is a coastal community on a narrow strip of land between two protected areas of rare natural beauty : the Hamiguitan range and Pujada Bay. The mining permits for the Hallmark project fall within the boundaries of Macambol and adjacent Cabuaya local government areas under Mati City in Davao Oriental Province. About 5,000 people live in Macambol, approximately 25 percent of whom are indigenous Mandaya people. Most of the people depend on the natural environment for survival, making a living by fishing and farming mango, coconut and root crops. Average family incomes are low, at around php 5000–8000 per quarter. 1 pound or less a day.
*** BHP Billiton
BHP Billiton is the world’s largest mining company, engaged in the exploration and development of a wide range of metals and minerals, including aluminium, coal, copper, manganese, iron ore, uranium, nickel, silver, and titanium. BHP Billiton 2007/08 figures show that the company is the largest producer of metallurgical coal, the third largest producer of nickel and the sixth largest producer of aluminium. BHP Billiton also have substantial interests in oil, gas, liquefied natural gas and diamonds.
The company was formed in 2001 by the merger of two mining companies, Australia’s BHP and UK’s Billiton. BHP Billiton is a dual-listed company but is run as a single entity, with one board of directors and management. Its head office is in London and Melbourne. BHP Billiton has primary listings on the London Stock Exchange and the Australian Stock Exchange, and secondary listings in Johannesburg and New York.
BHP Billiton had other interests in the Philippines aside from Hallmark Nickel project. It has ore-supply agreements, through its Philippine subsidiary Queensland Nickel Inc. to purchase nickel for its Yabulu refinery in Australia, from various mines and companies in the Philippines.
*** Who is AMCOR?
Very little is known about Asiaticus Management Corporation, BHP Billiton joint venture partner in the Hallmark project. Minimal information on the AMCOR website reveals that the company was organized in 1996 to provide management, investment and technical advice for mining entities and companies with mineral claims. It facilitates partnership or joint ventures between local and foreign mining entities and companies and markets mineral ore.
The people behind AMCOR, such as company president Pedro O. Tan, vice president and corporate secretary Lauriano A. Barrios, and former chairman Arthur L. Villaraza are well connected and have close links with the current government, Villaraza, and his Villaraza Cruz Marcelo and Angangco law firm was the private legal counsel of President Arroyo until 2005.
*** BHP Billiton and AMCOR Dispute
During 2007, details of a rift between BHP Billiton and AMCOR appeared in the media. While the exact nature of the dispute is unclear, the relationship between the two companies has seriously deteriorated over the past year and they are currently locked in a legal battle. This dispute has had a major impact on the community in Macambol, creating uncertainty surrounding which company will be operating the project if it goes ahead.
Little information about the status of the dispute has been made available to the community and the actions of both companies have contributed to tensions within Macambol. Many believe that each company is using divisive and manipulative tactics to demonstrate they have community backing and that the other does not. According to press reports and company information, the dispute centres on the proposed start date for the Hallmark project. AMCOR would like to begin nickel production immediately and allege that BHP Billiton had failed to meet the obligations of their agreement. Ruben Tan, AMCOR’s vice-president, has said his company was promised that BHP Billiton would begin mine production five years after signing the joint venture agreement. According to a company official, AMCOR “must earn money now” and so would like to begin exporting unprocessed nickel laterite ore to take advantage of the high nickel price. BHP Billiton maintain the timeline for exploration, feasibility studies and building the processing plant mean a start date of around 2014/15.
The dispute has become ever more public and murky over recent months ;according to an unknown source quoted in the media, a “wheeler and dealer” with close links to the Arroyo administration has tried to extort 200million pesos more from BHP Billiton than detailed in their exploration contract.
On 25 July 2007 AMCOR attempted to rescind the joint venture agreement with BHP Billiton, and according to AMCOR officials interviewed by Cafod, is filing a case against BHP Billiton for fraud at the Makati regional trial court in Manila. A series of legal actions led to a court injunction against BHP Billiton in May 2008 barring it from “using, occupying, exploring, developing, and exercising acts of ownership of mining right over the Pujada properties.
The parties are undergoing an international arbitration process in Singapore, to prevent AMCOR from rescinding its joint venture. At the time of writing, they had yet to reach agreement, although a preliminary judgment from the tribunal was in BHP Billiton’s favour. Some recent media reports confirm BHP Billiton’s commitment to the Hallmark project, hinting that the parties may be close to reaching a compromise agreement.
*** The Mining Act of 1995
Under the Mining Act, all public and private lands are open to mining operations. It states “all mineral resources in public or private lands, including timber or forestlands shall be open to mineral agreements or financial or technical assistance agreement applications.” This provision has led to critics’ contention that the law has virtually opened up the entire country to mining operations. The latter includes old growth forests, national parks, bird sanctuaries, and marine reserves among others. But upon the consent of the government or other concerned parties, areas barred from mining operations can still be mined. This area includes military reservations, areas covered by small scale mining and ancestral
lands.
The Mining Act allowed three major kinds of mining rights that would govern access to mineral resources and for which an interested investor may apply. These are Exploration Permit (EP), the mineral agreement and the Financial or Technical Assistance Agreement (FTAA).
An exploration permit grants the right to explore a specified area for a period of two years. If a mineral deposit is found and has potential commercial viability, the permit holder has the right to enter into any type of mineral agreement or financial or technical agreement with the government.
A mineral agreement grants the contractor the right to conduct mining operation within a specified contract area for a 25 years, renewable for another 25 years. There are three modes of mineral agreements: The Mineral Production Sharing Agreement (MPSA), the co-production agreement and the joint venture agreement. The three modes differ in the extent to which the government is involved in the mining operation. In the MPSA, the government merely grants the right to the mineral resources whereas the contractor provides the financing, technology, management and personnel for the implementation of the agreement. In a co-production agreement, the government contributes other resources in addition to the rights. A joint venture agreement requires the government and the contractor to organize a joint venture company in which both parties has equity shares. In all three cases, the mining contractor should be either a Filipino citizen or a corporation having at least 60% Filipino equity.
For large-scale mining operations, the government may opt to enter into a Financial or Technical Assistance Agreement (FTAA) with either financial or technical assistance for the large-scale exploration, development and utilization of mineral resources. As this provides foreign mining companies to have full equity and control of mining projects throughout the country, it has become the focus of opposition against the law. For the minimum investment of $50 million (or its equivalent in peso for a Filipino corporation), the mining firm is granted 81,000 hectares of land for mineral exploitation for a period of 25 years per contract, renewable for a maximum of another 25 years.
Indigenous communities and non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) have questioned the legality of the FTAA provision. According to them, the act and its implementing Rules and Regulations allow foreign companies not only both financial or technical assistance agreement with foreign owned-corporations, it is an agreement for mere assistance, which is either technical or financial. They assert that the Constitution does not allow foreign corporations to actually control, manage or engage in full mining operations. They interpret the Constitutional provision on financial or technical assistance agreements as in itself restrictive of the participation of foreign-owned corporations in exploiting the country’s mineral resources.
Aside from the generous contract terms above, the law also provides auxiliary rights that will ensure that the mining rights are exercised unhampered. These auxiliary rights include the right to enter private lands, the right to build necessary infrastructure on private lands as well as water and timber rights within the mining area as necessitated by the mining operations.
Furthermore, the law provides a host of fiscal incentives that will guarantee returned investments and profitability to the mining contractor. These includes a 100 percent repatriation of investment in dollars, a 100% remittance of earnings in dollars, freedom from expropriation, and double acceleration of depreciation costs, among others. Additionally, the collection of government’s share in the financial or technical assistance agreement, consisting of corporate income tax, excise tax, and other duties and fees, shall commence only after the mining operator has fully recovered its pre-operating expenses. When the mining contractor starts commercial production, a revenue sharing scheme begins wherein the government will receive 60% of the net profit from the operation while the contractor receives 40%. However, all corporate taxes, excise taxes, duties and fees, payable by the corporation will be counted against the
government’s 60 percent share.
As of December 1996, 100 FTAA applications and 1,454 MPSA applications have been filed before the Department of Environmental and Natural Resources- Mines and Geosciences Bureau (DENR-MGB). Of the FTAA applications, 99 were filed by foreign-owned mining corporations and only one was filed by Filipino mining company Benguet Corp. which is nonetheless partly foreign-owned. It is also interesting to note that of these FTAA applications, 52 were filed before the approval of the Mining Act, while 14 were submitted before the Implementing Rules and Regulations of the Act were finalized on August 15, 1995. The total areas of the application cover approximately 12.2 million hectares of the land area of the Philippines. If all FTAA applications and MPSAs were approved, 40.65 percent of the country’s total land area will be covered by mining claims.
The DENR-MGB,however, quickly points out that not all applications will be approved and that the grant of 81,000 hectares for mineral exploration is subject to a progressive reduction or relinquishment where the mining contractor returns to the government areas that low mineral potential. The DENR-MGB stresses that the law allows a contractor a maximum of only 5,000 hectares for actual mining and commercial production that will commence after the sixth year of the contract period. NGO’s and indigenous communities points out that while relinquishment does significantly reduce the land area open to mining activities, 5,000 hectares is still a huge land area, especially in a country were landlessness remains perennial problems.
Indigenous people and environmental groups also raise concern over the potential environmental effects of more large-scale mining activities should these be allowed to commence. With the 1996 Marcopper mining disaster in Marinduque and the ravages of open pit mining in Benguet as the examples of the potential impact, these groups believe that mining operations of the FTAA scale could wreck havoc on the country’s environment.
Another key feature of the Mining Act pertains to the issue of ancestral lands of indigenous communities. The Act deems ancestral land as closed to mining operations without the prior consent of the indigenous cultural community concerned. The Act defines prior consent as referring to “prior, informed consent” obtained, as far as practicable, in accordance with the customary laws of the indigenous peoples concerned. The law also requires that consent endeavour to be informed through public notices or public consultations wherein the contractor fully discloses the details of the operation. The process of arriving at an inform consent should be free from fraud, external influence and manipulations”. The DENR-MGB has trumpeted as significant this requirement of prior informed consent. The provision, according to the agency, strengthens government’s cognizance of indigenous peoples’ rights to their land and their desire for a more active involvement in decision-making processes.
Indigenous peoples and their advocates, however, are critical. While they concede that the provisions gives indigenous peoples the wherewithal to approved or reject a mining application in their communities, they also ask whether, in conditions of deprivation and in the absence of genuine development alternatives, they are being given any option at all.
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#title Against the Party of Insurrection
#subtitle A Look at Appelism in the U.S.
#author Anonymous
#LISTtitle Against the Party of Insurrection: A Look at Appelism in the U.S.
#date 10-09-2023
#topics tiqqun, appelism
#source Retrieved On 10-11-2023 from https://scenes.noblogs.org/post/2023/10/09/against-the-party-of-insurrection-a-look-at-appelism-in-the-u-s/
#lang en
#authors Anonymous
#notes Original <strong>PDF: [[https://scenes.noblogs.org/files/2023/10/appelism-us-print-1.pdf][Print version]] | [[https://scenes.noblogs.org/files/2023/10/appelism-us-read-1.pdf][Read version]]</strong>
Appelism is an informal strain of authoritarian communism that has been gaining traction on this continent over the past decade or so. Taking up elements of both the revolutionary party structure and insurrectionary anarchism, this tendency rebrands authoritarian communism as something that looks like informal networks but acts like a party.
Appelists generally do not present themselves as appelists. The term “appelist” refers to <em>The Call</em> (<em>L’Appel</em> in the original French) by the Invisible Committee, written by some of the same authors as the 1999 journal Tiqqun. This is why “appelists” are sometimes also called “tiqqunists.” Both are terms popularized by anarchists to counteract appelists’ claims that they do not have an ideology or established political network.
Appelists’ dishonesty around this is part of a larger strategy of trying to cease being visible as a distinct group or milieu (which they term “opacity”). They then seek to invisibly coordinate various aspects of everyday life towards a form of communism, with an emphasis on building and controlling infrastructure. This is accompanied by a push to intervene decisively in moments of social conflict such that those situations escalate, struggles gain territory, and people are drawn into their infrastructure. Appelists will typically identify themselves as partisans, autonomists, or communists, if at all, though in North America it is more common for them to also selectively call themselves anarchists.
The most well-known expressions of appelism come from France and are the work of the Invisible Committee, especially <em>The Coming Insurrection</em> (2007) and <em>To Our Friends</em> (2014).
In the United States, the major proponents of appelism are the publisher Ill Will Editions, the Inhabit program, and social media accounts like Vitalist International. In addition to putting forward their American version of appelism, these projects also translate and republish analysis from Lundi Matin, the main appelist platform in France.
From afar, the “party of insurrection”[1] can look confusingly like the ideas and activities of many anarchists, because they take certain key concepts from insurrectionary anarchism, such as autonomy and informal organizing. Distinctions typically emerge when we attempt to broach certain principles, or when their perspectives on social position and practices around power and vanguardism become significant in the course of on-the-ground struggles. Appelists cultivate this kind of confusion because being honest about their ideas is not conducive to their strategy, which requires them to change their perspectives and principles depending on who they’re talking to. Clear positions hamper recruitment, as they appeal to fewer people.
Rather than being a similar vision with a different path of struggle, the goals and methods of appelists are actually incompatible with anarchist objectives and undermine non-hierarchical self-organization. Hence this piece, in which we try to identify the methods that damage anti-authoritarian struggle and attempt to encourage a culture of honesty and internal critique that can help us better understand what we are each struggling for, as well as who we choose to struggle alongside and how.
Throughout most of this text we’ll be articulating our ideas about appelism in relation to appelist theory in order to demonstrate how our observations about the milieu are substantiated by and inherent in the ideology itself. In reality, though, most people in the appelist milieu are not theorists, and leaning on the theory to express what’s wrong with appelism doesn’t really do justice to the ugliness of the appelist behavior that we’ve encountered in real life. For better or worse, a lot of our deepest issues with the tendency come from personal experience, and are only verifiable insofar as they’re part of the accumulated experiences of a variety of anarchists who’ve encountered appelists over the years across this continent.
In addition to the specific projects we can identify with this tendency, there are a number of people in the U.S. who have been inspired by appelist strategies and are trying to implement them in their networks. Since none of these individuals call themselves appelists, and often deny that such a tendency even exists, it is messy to speak of “appelists,” at least in the same way that we would talk about “anarchists,” since anarchists self-identify as such. In part because of this ambiguity, we think it is more useful to focus on understanding the dynamics and methods of appelism, and critiquing the projects dedicated to advancing appelist strategies, than to try to identify conclusively who is or is not an appelist. There are many people who are around the appelist world because they are committed to the same larger struggles or because of social proximity, rather than ideological commitment to appelism. Our discussion of appelism in this text is meant not to alienate those people, but to offer some context and frameworks to help them make their own informed decisions and avoid being manipulated.
Many of the problems we’ll be discussing in this text are absolutely not unique to appelism. Informal hierarchies, terrible analysis, abysmal race politics, misogyny, abuse, tokenism and instrumentalizing other people’s struggles also crop up in most U.S. anarchist scenes; we’ve all encountered it. What differentiates appelism, and what we hope to show in the course of this writing, is that the issues we’ll highlight are ones that are incentivized and justified by the ideas themselves, rather than being in contradiction with them—they are longstanding and consistent in appelist writing and organizing. Confronting these ideas and their proponents need not come at the expense of confronting hierarchical behavior and influences stemming from other directions, but instead should sharpen our capacity for critique at large and help us root ourselves in our shared principles more deeply.
*** THE PROGRAM: TERRITORY & POWER
Inhabit’s “little orange book” is the most concise presentation of appelist strategy in the U.S., so we’ll start there. Inhabit offers a program that consists of a few simple steps, beginning with the following: 1) “find each other,” and 2) create autonomous infrastructure, or “hubs” (usually rural land projects or other spaces where they are “building the commune”). In this process of mass “exiting” and of gradually “subtract[ing] territory from the economy,” we ultimately reach steps 8 and 9, in which infrastructure is “destituted” and we “become ungovernable” because we have built enough autonomy to make the government and economy superfluous. When these eventually disappear, the communes and infrastructure set up by appelists will have replaced it: “seize power without governing.”
Creating autonomous infrastructure has been critically important for many radical movements across the world and throughout history, from conflictual squats to self-organized social centers in Europe to liberated land in Latin America. However, the proposals that Inhabit puts forth for autonomy have several significant problems:
- It’s not specified who we are finding when we find each other. This allows for any number of alliances, including problematic ones, such as with politicians or people who lean towards right-wing libertarianism. It is also very difficult, despite Inhabit’s detailed attention to imagery of struggles and proposals for the future, to clearly understand who and what the “we” of Inhabit is actually against.
- Settlers in the U.S. or Canada buying land and starting a land project, or starting businesses in gentrifying neighborhoods, typically doesn’t constitute a liberatory project, but rather replicates settlement as a key aspect of how our enemies—settler colonial states like the U.S. and Canada—function. Inhabit skips over this problem completely and does not discuss settler colonialism.
- Indigenous-led struggles are cited as inspirational examples, but there is no mention of race or gender, nor of colonization, as ethical or even strategic concerns en route to destitution. To completely omit discussion of race in a struggle based in the United States—or anywhere, for that matter—amounts to a variation of colorblind racism. Breezing right past any discussion of gender roles in the “commune” is yet another cost of Inhabit’s unrelenting emphasis on what we have in common. “The commune” is turned into a mythic superior entity into which individuals, with all their messy differences and varying experiences of systemic oppression, are asked to melt for the common good.
- The concept of “destitution,” in which partisans “starve” the economy by not participating in it, assumes that capitalism and the state power behind it will wither away if enough people exit from their grasp. This idea is just hopelessly historically inaccurate, and it would seem to encourage our struggles to be less conflictual, when in reality conflict is integral to any battle against the state.
The simplicity of this program is a marketing strategy, designed to appeal to as many people as possible, and it’s from this approach that many problems emerge. Who we organize and live with, who we align ourselves with, our complicity with capitalism and other forms of oppression, the need for risk-taking and violence, the relationship between our personal desires and our responsibilities to others—these are all complex questions that we are constantly navigating as we move through this world towards anarchy. No little orange pamphlet advertising a nice-sounding “life in common” and glossing over the harsh realities of racism, gender, and settler colonialism can provide the answers.
We have often observed appelists drawing false equivalencies between their land projects and Indigenous attempts to defend and/or reclaim ancestral territory and traditional lifeways. This is counter-productive to the success of the latter projects. As the authors of “Another Word for Settle” write, this kind of “‘back to the land’ politics […] at worst set[s] the stage for the development of twisted settler claims to Indigenous land,” claims that “will shatter the relationships we should seek with anti-colonial Indigenous allies, and risk strengthening settler reactionary tendencies that we should be fighting.”[2]
The directive to accumulate property pops up again in the equally programmatic anonymous text “How to Start a Fire,” which does not instruct the reader on arson but does offer the laughably tone-deaf advice to “organize to purchase housing as soon as possible” and to “rent space. Better yet, buy buildings, get property.” Much of their description of building something in common while not “obsessing over the morality or ‘internal dynamics’ of such ventures” could easily describe any type of collectivity—a homeowner’s association, for example. The moments in their writing when they elaborate on what their vision of territorial autonomy might actually look like—for example, their focus on starting businesses as part of their revolutionary project — demonstrate that their utopia is painfully bland, carefully managed, and (based on our experience) very likely built on family money.[3]
*** THE PERSPECTIVES: COMPOSING THE PARTY
Appelism is not the only radical tendency that proposes authoritarian approaches to struggle, just one that can be harder for anarchists to clock. Appelism draws from certain communist and other leftist[4] traditions in significant ways, but dresses old ideas up in hot new language and aesthetics so they seem cutting edge and can sneak in unnoticed.
Anarchist theorists abroad have suggested that, more specifically, appelism is a descendent of Blanquism. This ideology is an authoritarian communist strain of insurrectionalism based on Louis Auguste Blanqui’s idea that revolution should be carried out by a relatively small vanguard of highly organized conspirators in a secretive party structure, positioned to lead insurgents through a unified strategy.
The authors of “Blanqui or the Statist Insurrection” write: “[Blanqui’s] conception of insurrection as the result of a strategic movement and not as a social event led him to conclude that the end justified any means. For him, it was not the method that counted, but the result, that is, the effective conquest of political power” (26).
Furthermore: “If the insurrection is defeated despite the courage and enthusiasm of those who take part in it, it is because ‘organization is missing. Without organization, there is no possibility of success.’ This seems obvious, but how does one obtain this organization, this coordination, this agreement between the insurgents? Through the horizontal, pre-emptive and widespread diffusion of an awareness, of understanding, of an intelligence of the necessities of the moment (anarchist hypothesis), or through the vertical establishment of a single [militaristic] command that demands the obedience of all, who are kept in ignorance until the necessary moment (authoritarian hypothesis)?” (23). This authoritarian theory of insurrection is expanded with the influence of the Italian communists of Autonomia during the ‘70s, with their emphasis on lyrical style and forming networks of autonomous spaces, as well as the Situationists, with their self-appointed position of the intellectual avant-garde.
Appelism also takes up the more traditional communist idea that the international working class is the main character of anti-capitalist struggle, but repackages the idea as the “imaginary party” of insurgents against capital. When reimagined as informal, individuals across the world don’t have to get a membership card to be in the party, and in fact they rarely consent (or are asked) to be included in the appelist strategy. This is very different from an anarchist framework of internationalism in that it effectively subsumes diverse struggles, creating the image that everyone is contributing to a grand plan that has already been set in motion by others, instead of recognizing those struggles on their own terms.
Along with other varieties of authoritarian communism and the broader Left, appelism calls on us to unify under some banner (imaginary or otherwise) under which individual dissension or internal conflict is viewed as divisive or counterproductive to the vaguely articulated common goal. In appelist discourse, this manifests largely around the idea of “composition” and the vague shared goals of an international “imaginary party.” That is, their politics rely on a rebranded version of up-down realignment, in which left-right distinctions among the proletariat are less important than our common fight against the “elite.” Composition is their theory of how these different interests, from good citizens to those they deem “Black proletarians,” can unify into a “historical force.”
Composition attempts to steer different sectors of a struggle or movement in the same direction (towards the appelist vision of victory), by fabricating (and enforcing) consensus on aims and means and suppressing contradictory or dissenting voices. Often presented as a framework for embracing diverse approaches while fighting for a common goal, composition aims to draw disparate elements into a unified strategy, masking fundamental disagreements “as crucial as the relationship to legality and to institutions (parties, unions, media, etc.), the use of violence and the open door to negotiation.”[5]
The text “The Strategy of Composition,” published by Ill Will in early 2023, creates a false dilemma by depicting autonomy and decentralization as resulting in “non-relation (tolerant separation),” whereas composition, “if we wish to restore a horizon of victory,[...] inevitably means accepting compromises.” Composition lays the groundwork for plain old authoritarian power. When one group’s autonomy gets in the way of the dominant group’s compromises, the unruly actors must be brought into line, or risk the movement’s “decomposition.” This framework acts as a way of pacifying uncontrollable situations, uplifting the classic “common front” to make conflicts and contradictions disappear without needing to resort to evoking “the masses”—a phrase that is out of fashion—to do so.
It is useful to distinguish the Imaginary Party, which is what they seek to create through composition, from the appelists who are actually in the know and who create the strategies they try to impose on broader movements. Composition emphasizes the removed, bird’s-eye perspective of the expert (the composer, if you will) who oversees where everyone fits, and so is well-positioned to impose their strategy onto groups and individuals that are in actuality fighting for their own reasons and in their own way. An anarchist approach, on the other hand, involves not tolerant separation, but rather coordination and free association between self-organized autonomous networks that may have differing strategies and tactics.
Appelist authors often construct their arguments around a “we” that does not refer only to themselves, but also presumes to speak for the feelings and experiences of a broader “we” that also includes the reader. They tell us how “we” feel, and the reader is swept along into the author’s conclusions, which they are led to feel they reached on their own terms. If the reader feels some resistance or hesitancy, they are forced to bail completely and take up a position on the outside of this romantic collectivity, outside of this “historical force,” which is not such an easy thing to do. This actually draws you, the reader, into their party (or force, commune, etc).
The theory of “opacity,” which holds that their party and its networks should not be visible to the outside, is used to justify appelists’ unwillingness to acknowledge the existence of appelism outside their inner circles. This is a distortion of anarchist conceptions of informality and security culture in order to make it difficult to identify and challenge hierarchical structures and authoritarian ambitions.
*** PERSPECTIVES ON RACE AND SOCIAL POSITION: EXTRACTION & ERASURE
<em>The Coming Insurrection’s</em> title is an homage to <em>The Coming Community</em> (1990), an influential work by Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who was connected to the editors of Tiqqun. In this book, Agamben argues that the greatest threat to the state is a community that’s been formed out of individuals who have broken with the particular identities that are imposed on us, a community that simply enjoys its being-in-common without “predicates” or conditions of belonging. [6]
Agamben and Tiqqun (correctly) argue that identities like race, gender, and nationality are imposed on us for the purpose of social control. It’s important to fight the ways in which the state compels us to identify with socially constructed identities as though they are essential parts of our individual personalities. The authors take an incorrect turn when this leads them to “reject all identity” (<em>The Coming Community</em>, 67). While we also strive to end socially constructed identities, this is not possible when the institutional powers that created and uphold them are still intact. Refusing to consider how our respective social positions might cause us, inadvertently or otherwise, to replicate aspects of structural domination that we’re purportedly fighting against doesn’t help us overcome them at all.
Appelists’ attitudes around identities like race and gender vary widely. Many appelists and theorists adjacent to them do not ignore race at all and are in fact very vocal on the subject of its importance—but in a way that uses the racialized populations they’re discussing for their own purposes.[7] There’s also the case of Inhabit, which avoids considering race and gender but insists on a class-based framework, as we’ll discuss in more detail later in this section.
Ill Will Editions, the U.S.-based website and set of social media accounts, publishes essays by a wide variety of authors that highlight this diverse and sometimes contradictory set of viewpoints on race and social position. A common thread we can observe across many of these essays and in Ill Will’s social media posts, though, is a tendency to romanticize other peoples’ struggles and project their own political framework onto them. There also often appears to be a desire to transcend race, along the lines of Agamben’s approach (described above), despite the reality of its continued existence as a major shaping force in the United States.
This romanticization and projection is evident in commentaries on the activities of subcultures that the author is clearly not part of (for example, the essay that Ill Will published about sideshows). These often treat the participants like heroic innovators developing the newest tactics for the coming insurrection. These commentaries are presumptuous and feel a lot like anthropological studies. Where the appelists project an identity (the partisan[8]) onto anonymous lawbreakers, anarchists can learn from other rebels without needing to label them or make their actions legible within our own strategy.
The desire to minimize the importance of racial difference across struggles can be found in the tendency of a number of appelist authors to subsume race to class in an argument for unity. This is evident in Inhabit’s “Kenosha, I Do Mind Dying,” published by Ill Will in 2021. The author attempts throughout the piece to bring the 2020 riots for Black lives back to class struggle, subsuming the importance of race to that of class over and over again, but we get to the crux of it in the essay’s discussion of Kyle Rittenhouse and the author’s notion of “fratricide.”
<quote>
“There is a terrifying anger that we all possess, a capacity for violence that’s funneled through both ‘legitimate’ channels like the cops and military and illicit channels like gangs and militias. It’s no coincidence that the other side of that capacity for force is the fraternal principle on which all of these organizations are founded. The desire for a sense of belonging and community are, at the core, the real driver of this violence: people will kill to belong. [....] Kyle Rittenhouse represents the funneling of suburban despair through the vile fiction of cultural war.
Exaggerating cultural differences as political—or even ethnic—is advantageous for the elites, because if America were to come to grips with the ruin they have wrought, those hundreds of millions of guns might find new targets. They would prefer we commit fratricide because a left-right civil war is far easier to manage than the possibility that we might leave their terminal civilization, and take our labor with us.”
</quote>
Here the author ignores certain key structural dynamics, seemingly in order to argue for some kind of unity with people on the right who are from a similar class position. In the first paragraph, the author discusses the police’s executions of Black people as well as Rittenhouse’s murder of BLM protesters as though they are the same thing as gang violence among the poorest and most racially oppressed populations in the country. All these examples of violence, the author implies, are simply motivated by a desire for “belonging and community.” This requires ignoring the completely different circumstances at play, for example that police (and police violence) exist to protect the state’s control over its population, and, like the Rittenhouse murders, to maintain a regime of racial as well as economic subordination.
At the end of the day, it’s implied, we are all brothers, and our left-right civil war is something we should overcome so we can collectively let capitalism crumble. This essay articulates a vision of left-right unity that is often echoed in appelist media; for example, some Vitalist International person casually sported a gadsden flag in a very strange solidarity video addressed to those fighting in Hong Kong. VI also [[https://web.archive.org/web/20230813164252/https://twitter.com/VitalistInt/status/1341114366129790979][tweeted]] the following about a protest organized by Patriot Prayer at the Oregon State Capitol in the weeks before January 6th, 2021: “as protesters skirmish with police to build an autonomous zone at the capitol, the polarization could pivot from left-right to top-bottom [...] Can “patriots” escape identity politics and build common cause with other exploited people?”
It’s interesting to note the use of the term “identity politics” here. This might as well be a quote from Patriot Prayer leader Joey Gibson, who, in 2018, when pressed to clarify his relationship to white nationalists, said “I would say the same thing to them that I would say to any Black nationalist or Mexican nationalists [sic] group, we have to drop the identity of politics and focus on what is on the inside.” Is VI, like Gibson, arguing that white nationalism is simply another flavor of identity politics? There are obviously salient anarchist critiques to be made of certain leftist engagements with questions of identity, but if you can’t tell the difference between white nationalism and leftist identity politics, you are missing some pretty important details about how race and power work in America.
Perhaps VI has genuinely been confused by Gibson’s claims that Patriot Prayer is merely a group that advocates for “peace and love,” “freedom,” and Jesus, but the links between Patriot Prayer and more explicitly fascist groups are hardly a secret. Long before the 2020 rally at the Oregon State Capitol, antifascists had extensively documented how Patriot Prayer welcomed white supremacists and neo-Nazis into its ranks. What’s more, the apparent desire of appelists to graft their own ideas onto every instance of social conflict (e.g. describing the Oregon State Capitol riot as “an autonomous zone at the capital”) leads to some disturbing elisions of the actual dynamics on the ground. Far from being anti-state rebels, Gibson and his Patriot Prayer group are rather frequent collaborators with local police departments. They are known for passing intelligence about antifascists to the Portland police and for physically handing antifascists over to riot cops at Patriot Prayer rallies. That “patriots” and police have also clashed on several occasions doesn’t change that their project is simply to defend a different (more fascist) vision of the state, rather than to challenge state power. In the bloody history of the 20th century, fascist groups have often fought the police in the streets. That has never made them our friends.
Elsewhere, appelists have made appeals to sentiments that are, if not far-right, at the very least hallmarks of American patriotism. Ill Will’s “The Next Eclipse” writes that “America—while flawed and incompletely realized—was inseparable from an inspiring vision of human progress.” In 2012, Woodbine collective members found it appropriate to bring American flags to a protest following the murder of Trayvon Martin. Woodbine also dipped its toes into third positionism with their text “Nomos of the Earth” (2014), employing the theories of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt as its central reference without any caveats.
While capitalism certainly benefits from racial and cultural divisions within the economically oppressed classes, the idea that racism <em>only</em> exists as a tool of capitalism is a mostly outdated and offensive one these days. Returning to “Kenosha, I Do Mind Dying,” the author of this piece avoids talking about class in the style of traditional communism, instead using the phrase “the elites,” but ultimately the idea they’re presenting is an old one. The refusal of those of us fighting against all oppression and for total liberation to see people like Rittenhouse as “brothers” is not just a historical mistake that has hurt the chances of a potentially unified working class. We shouldn’t sympathize with racists on principle, but even if we are only thinking strategically, racist vigilantes have always been integral to the maintenance of this country that we are trying to destroy.
Appelism has some very strong populist undercurrents; as we have seen, its obsession with speaking to “regular” people means that it often adopts the language of liberalism, patriotism, or the reactionary right. Meanwhile, almost anything or anyone can be part of the Imaginary Party. This leads to uncritical support for a range of populist movements, while glossing over their reactionary elements.
Consider, for example, another text from Woodbine, which discusses the Maidan movement in Ukraine in 2014:
<quote>
“In its particular grey urban camo and ice-hued tonality, Maidan is but the most recent elaboration of what we have been witnessing and participating in over the past years, as it plays out in different languages, different places[...] Faced with this incredible sequence of uprisings, to ask “who are the insurgents?” —”is it the workers, no, they are the middle class, the poor, wait where are the poor? The white, the black, no wait where are the black people? Where are the women?”— is to miss the point entirely, to treat a situation as an object to be judged, to treat living beings as a mass of subjects.[...]
What is unfolding around the world today—what you see in the eyes of the young man just back from Maidan, in the grinning through the gas that filed Taksim night after night, in the soccer clubs defending Cairo, you or me at Zuccotti at 4am, the kid we met there on the way to defend the park, who saw it on Reddit and just had to go, in these women giving a new meaning to cocktail party—this is absolutely singular. Hence historical. Hence common.”
- 1882 Woodbine, “The Anthropocene,” <em>Short Circuit: A Counterlogistics Reader</em>, 2015.
</quote>
Both Maidan and Occupy were complicated and often contradictory moments of social upheaval. To a greater or lesser extent, each movement contained both liberatory and reactionary interventions and influences. We can be inspired by fierce resistance of Maidan protestors to massive state violence, or by the new possibilities for self-organization and attack elaborated in some corners of the U.S. Occupy movement, but it would be irresponsible not to also examine the reactionary elements present in both movements. Neo-nazi participation in the Maidan movement, or the tendency of Occupy’s nebulous anti-elitist rhetoric to attract [[https://libcom.org/article/right-hand-occupy-wall-street-libertarians-nazis-fact-and-fiction-right-wing-involvement][reactionary and far-right elements]], should not only be troubling, but should also motivate us to articulate and act on anarchist visions of freedom that have no space for these enemies.
Unfortunately, appelists rarely seem interested in this kind of critical participation in social struggle. For them this is “to miss the point entirely.” The same populist impulse to subsume everything and everyone into their commons, their whatever singularity, or their party, leads not only to an erasure of social position, but also to a disregard for meaningful political differences. There is nothing in common between those of us who want to destroy racial capitalism and class society in their entirety, and the fascists who would rather see us dead.
Another example of the unsatisfactory ways in which appelists and many of their communist associates relate to social position in the U.S. is the notion of “the Party of George Floyd—the composition that announced itself in the 2020 uprising” that the organization Spirit of May 28 recently tried to popularize. The organization, which has since disbanded, used the name of a Black man who was assassinated by the police as the trademark of their Party, branding the uprising that followed as an example of their own preexisting political framework rather than trying to understand the movement for Black lives and against police on its own terms. The organization’s writings suggest that its members expect poor and Black populations to offer a new “revolutionary opening” in the United States, an expectation that is fated to cause even more racially charged resentment and disappointment.[9]
*** THE PRAXIS: BETWEEN RECUPERATION AND AUTHORITARIANISM
Appelists are often involved in the same struggles or scenes as anarchists, but their practices are incompatible with anarchism. It is not our goal to label everyone who might be influenced by their ideas as an appelist, but rather to critique those who act like undercover politicians, operating according to the age-old authoritarian logic that the ends justify the means. We refer here to those who will tell you what they think you want to hear, then move right along or get really vague when discussion begins to touch too much on anarchist ideas, making their departure from anarchist principles hard for many people to notice at first. Based on our experience, behind closed doors appelists mostly despise and look down on anarchists as naïve, [10] and refer to working with them as one of their many “unholy alliances.”
Anarchism is central to the appelist mythos. Appelism presents itself as the logical evolution of anarchism, which they paint as a youthful stepping-stone to their more mature strategic conclusions. The story goes something like this—we tried anarchism, until it became clear that it doesn’t “work,” i.e. doesn’t lead us to the version of victory that appelists embrace. This narrative attracts people, often from academic and activist backgrounds, who are willing to make compromises to get results. In “How to Start a Fire,” the authors state that after four whole years of “building force” together, they had learned that “the political identities offered to us—anarchist, environmentalist, Marxist, socialist—were constructed for a historical moment which has passed. They have not, for decades, equipped themselves with the means to actually fight. We leave behind the baggage that has left us weak and burdened but still hold onto what has given us strength.”
Appelists, sometimes explicitly and sometimes more subtly, often reduce anarchism to just one more burdensome “identity” that can only lead to “impotence”[11] and “purism,” an obstacle to effective strategy. These theoretical gymnastics are necessary in order to do away with the ethics that are fundamental to anarchist perspectives. Without the “baggage” of an “identity,” they are free to talk to the mass media, act as protest marshals (Atlanta), spearhead the gentrification of Ridgewood, NY, with a yuppie coffee shop,[12] funnel combative struggles into negotiations with the state, organize hierarchically, or run for city council like Ill Will author Nicholas Smaligo. Anarchists have also been known to do some of these things, which is why this text is not just about appelism, but also about developing more honest and coherent practices as anarchists. There is a big difference between holding strong to the conditions of possibility for autonomy and waving anarchism as a “flag of identity in the market of revolutionary processes.”[13]
In reality, the only valuable insights scattered throughout appelist writings are vampirized from the anarchist tradition: informal organization, autonomy, emphasis on the logistics and infrastructures of domination, etc. In the first section, we discussed how the appelist focus on building infrastructure, while initially something that would seem similar to our own goals, in reality tends to reinforce existing racial and colonial relationships to land and place that are fundamental to the continued functioning of the state. In addition, the appelist approach tends to depart from the horizontalism of anarchist practices like mutual aid. While mutual aid projects aim to share resources as part of building trusting relationships in the course of a shared struggle, appelists tend to concentrate material resources and access to them in the hands of a single individual or group. This positions them as gatekeepers of material resources to ensure their own dominant position in key moments of social struggles.
Appelists also seek out power and control through identifying leaders and those in positions of power in liberal nonprofits and legalist organizations and organizing invisibly with them, i.e. among leaders (a method that is justified by the theory of composition). By restricting these liaisons to spaces where they hold social, political, and decision-making power, appelists use these spaces of apparent horizontal encounter to validate their program and amplify their power while delegitimizing any decision-making spaces where they don’t have power.
The quest for power also means that a lot of their practices are driven by optics, a desire to present the struggle as legitimate and/or spectacular to the media and “the public.” This is in part because the strategy of composition involves recruiting large numbers of people, but to us it also suggests that their desire for power makes them overly willing to compromise on certain principles. This concern with optics and public legitimacy often leads them to significantly depart from the project of building autonomy from society’s instruments of domination (which include the media and the spectacularization of struggle).
In France, the incompatibility between the anarchist pursuit of autonomy and the appelist desire for power and legitimacy came to a head at a critical moment in the struggle to defend the territory known as the ZAD of Notre-Dame-des-Landes (“zone to defend”). In this case, appelists went behind the backs of other ZAD land defenders, pushed for a deal with the state to legally acquire the land, and did the cops’ work for them by taking down the zone’s defenses themselves as a gesture of good faith to pave the road for negotiations (and just happening, at the same time, to clear the road for the police to raid the territory, which they did in the following days). What will it look like in the U.S., now that appelists, brandishing the outcome of the ZAD as a “victory,”[14] are becoming known presences in some important popular struggles?
As we’ve discussed in this section, appelist ideas are implemented through a variety of authoritarian behaviors and covertly hierarchical social arrangements that shield them from criticism and obscure the ideological basis on which they operate.[15] The idea of “opacity” typically plays out as a fetishization of normativity and respectability, resulting in spaces where social norms like misogyny and abuse can continue unchecked. These behaviors are not unique to appelists, but rather are reproduced by manipulators and managers of all stripes. The specific nature of appelist authoritarianism, though, which is outwardly subtle but explicitly developed, makes them particularly effective at sneaking these behaviors and arrangements into anti-authoritarian spaces.
The relative lack of (recent) anarchist analysis in the US has left a vacuum that appelists have rushed in to fill. We think it’s important for us to not republish or distribute appelist writing (unless doing so with the intention of critically analyzing it), or contribute to their projects, in the interest of not giving them any further legitimacy or enabling them to continue recruiting from anarchist spaces. Often, people who we have spoken to who distribute or read appelist texts seem to value the theory but not necessarily endorse the practices stemming from it. We would encourage people to look carefully at the conclusions the authors are drawing from their analyses of current situations and the practical implications of these conclusions. You don’t need a sleek website to publish writing, and anarchists need to develop our own infrastructures for printing and distribution.
*** INSTEAD...
Anarchist ideas can’t be put into practice through an easy program, but that’s part of what’s important about anarchy. Anarchy is more like a series of questions that we carry through our everyday lives as well as in our struggles against authority and oppression—this is often called “projectuality,” as opposed to “strategy,” since strategy is a term that is often invoked to indicate a need to sacrifice the means to the ends and manipulate other people’s actions.
<quote>
“The key difference between an influential, insurrectionary minority and a vanguard or a populist group is that the former values its principles and its horizontal relations with society and tries to spread its principles and models without owning them, whereas a vanguard tries to control them—whether through force, charisma, or hiding its true objectives—while a populist group offers easy solutions and caters to the prejudices of the masses in fear of being isolated.[...] The influential minority works through resonance, not through control. It assumes risks to create inspiring models and new possibilities, and to criticize convenient lies. It enjoys no intrinsic superiority and falling back on the assumption of such will lead to its isolation and irrelevance. If its creations or criticisms do not inspire people, it will have no influence. Its purpose is not to win followers, but to create social gifts that other people can freely use.” - <em>
The Rose of Fire Has Returned: The Struggle for the Streets of Barcelona</em>, 2012
</quote>
Approaching our projects through this lens is much harder, but it gives us the tools to think critically and act for ourselves. Individuals and collectives empowering themselves in this way is crucial to the ultimate success of the anarchist project, which depends on people’s capacity for nuance and critical thinking. It allows a more accurate assessment of the world around us and what we are doing in it, which is more effective than glossing over certain realities to make the world less confusing and to find more convenient courses of action.
A few questions we could ask ourselves, while keeping in mind our opposition to authority in all forms, include:
- How do we imagine the potential impact of our projects? How is this particular project that I’m undertaking moving towards anarchy, insurrection, and collective liberation?
- How can we develop practices of care, relationships, and collectives that find strength in our differences, rather than striving for commonality through false homogeneity?
- What projects and relationships can we build that will undermine racial and subcultural divides between different insurgent groups, while taking into account the racial and other oppressive dynamics that still exist?
- What does it look like to aim beyond moments of insurrection, to when the question shifts from defending the barricades to supplying them? How does preparing for that shift influence our approach in the present?
The “Imaginary Party” structure of the appelists means that those on the bottom, who support the leaders in what they do, aren’t actually entrusted with the full strategy. While those leaders might project a charisma and sense of organization that attracts respect, many in their milieu will also come up against a lot of the same frustrations that are present in traditional left organizing spaces: hierarchy, lack of agency, alienating normalcy, sexual violence, and other oppressions. In the same way that anarchists often attempt to intervene in leftist recruitment efforts by communicating criticisms to the base and demonstrating an alternative through our own projects, we can do the same with regard to those inducted into the Imaginary Party. While we encourage rejecting authoritarian practices and the shot-callers of the appelist milieu, we leave it open to readers to decide how they want to relate to the rest of their networks.
By identifying the principles that are fundamental to an anarchist ethic and collaborating with others on that basis, we can make our struggles inhospitable to those with authoritarian ambitions, whether appelist, tankie, or DSA liberals.
*** FURTHER READING
“[[https://mtlcounterinfo.org/another-word-for-settle-a-response-to-rattachements-and-inhabit/][Another Word for Settle: A Response to ‘Rattachements’ and ‘Inhabit]],’” mtlcounterinfo.org, 2021 (for how appelist strategy is an extension of settler colonialism)
“Decisions, Compositions, Negotiations,” trans. Ungrateful Hyenas, in [[https://ungratefulhyenas.noblogs.org/post/2023/02/21/decomposition-for-insurrection-without-vanguards/][<em>Decomposition: For Insurrection Without Vanguards</em>]], 2023 (for a closer look at the logic and practice of composition)
[[https://scenes.noblogs.org/post/2023/07/02/breaking-ranks-subverting-the-hierarchy-and-manipulation-behind-earth-uprisings/][<em>Breaking Ranks: Subverting the Hierarchy and Manipulation Behind Earth Uprisings</em>]], 2023 (for further discussion of manipulative and vanguardist practices, the spectacularization of the struggle, and the use of radicals as shock-troops)
“Blanqui or the Statist Insurrection,” trans. Ungrateful Hyenas, in [[https://ungratefulhyenas.noblogs.org/post/2023/02/21/decomposition-for-insurrection-without-vanguards/][<em>Decomposition: For Insurrection Without Vanguards</em>]], 2023 (for tracing the perspective of authoritarian insurrectionalism to its source)
[1] The phrase “party of insurrection” is used in Proposition 14 of Comité d’occupation de la Sorbonne en exil (2006), Les mouvements sont faits pour mourir (2007), “The Kazakh Insurrection” (Ill Will Editions, 2022), “Civil War, Dialectics, and the Possibility of Revolution” (Spirit of May 28, 2023), and “On Destituent Power” (Tronti, Ill Will Editions, 2022).
[2] “Territorial autonomy, if seen as a strategy for the destruction of capitalism and the state, includes the long term work of developing zones where cops cannot go, where the means to sustain and reproduce those who live there can be found, where a large group of committed and connected people of all ages has the means and the need to defend that territory, over generations. We can look to where this work has already been done for hundreds of years to see examples: Wet’suwet’en territory, Elsipogtog, Barriere Lake, Six Nations, Tyendinaga, Kahnawá:ke, and Kanehsatà:ke. This work has by and large not been done for hundreds of years by non-Indigenous communities – we are starting from zero, and thus even if prioritizing our own territorial autonomy seemed ethical, it would not be likely to be strategic because settler communities in a settler society have much less structural conflict with the colonial system. It does not make us weaker to prioritize the fight for the territorial autonomy of communities of which we are not a part. It makes us stronger, if by doing so we build relationships that contribute to revolutionary contexts in which the goals of settler revolutionary networks converge with those of anti-colonial Indigenous groups” (“Another Word for Settle: A Response to ‘Rapprochements’ and ‘Inhabit,’” 2021).
[3] From The Coming Insurrection (2007): “There is no reason that the interminable subsidies that numerous relatives are compelled to offload onto their proletarianized progeny can’t become a form of patronage in favor of social subversion.” From “The Next Eclipse” (2018): “A craft brewery or ice cream company that builds its own local production network can be a partisan project”. From “How to Start a Fire” (2017): “Get property. Pirate radio. Build stoves. Learn to cook. Learn Languages. Get arms. Open street carts and businesses. Occupy buildings. Set up cafes. Diners. Restaurants. Pizza shops. Book stores. (…) The family lake house is repurposed to sleep a hundred for a summer strategy meeting. Slowly, something is growing.”
[4] The term “leftist” comes out of the parliamentary division (in European and other countries) between right and left among elected political representatives. Leftism in the U.S. context similarly is embedded in the mechanisms and perspectives of a radical wing of a political tendency that includes such representatives. As such, leftism often involves big-tent approaches to organizing, as well as a tendency towards wanting to manage and control struggles, which usually end up being in conflict with anarchism’s more liberatory principles. We reject the inclusion of anarchism within the left in order to clearly distinguish ourselves from those kinds of compromised and managerial tendencies.
[5] “Decisions, Compositions, Negotiations” (trans. Ungrateful Hyenas, 2023).
[6] “What the State cannot tolerate in any way…is that the singularities form a community without affirming an identity, that humans co-belong without any representable condition of belonging” (The Coming Community, 86).
[7] See for example Shemon Salam’s work, discussed in footnote 9.
[8] Partisan: “of or pertaining to a party or faction”.
[9] Co-founder Shemon Salam recently released a public tantrum qua essay, “Lost in the American Wasteland,” published by the anti-state communist journal Endnotes, disavowing the Black radical tradition for not having done the revolution for him yet. See also the SM28 piece (written by Shemon and others) “Akron, Jayland Walker, and the Class War,” in which the authors tour Akron after a Black man was shot and then complain about why more people didn’t riot afterwards.
[10] As an interviewee for SM28 said, “I think anarchism is in complete disarray today and should be abandoned. (…) anarchism is irredeemably liberal.”
[11] A quote from “‘Against’ Anarchism: A Contribution to the Debate on Identities” (2018), published on Lundi Matin, the main appelist platform in France whose content Ill Will regularly translates and republishes. It theorizes: “Calling yourself an anarchist or any other revolutionary identity doesn’t help us in any way, it doesn’t increase our revolutionary potential and it doesn’t help us organize ourselves. What’s more, it isolates us and makes us an easy target for repression. Ideological identities are a pillar on which the enemy relies, and it’s up to us to abandon them.”
[12] Just a few abhorrent things the authors have seen appelists do in North America.
[13] “‘Against’ Anarchism: A Contribution to the Debate on Identities.”
[14] “The Strategy of Composition” (Hugh Farrell, 2023). We don’t want to contribute to appelists’ inflated ideas of the influence that their theories have had in struggles such as Stop Cop City, whose dynamics on the ground exceed and evade capture by the intelligentsia of composition. We also don’t want to only cite what they say about themselves, as it gives an exaggerated sense of what they are doing. For example, Spirit of May 28 holds delusions of grandeur about the George Floyd uprising: “No other political tendency was able to find its footing in the struggle or had much of interest to say about it. In the past, we aimed to build spaces of encounter between different tendencies. But today it is clear that our party stands alone” (“Among Friends: Reflections After the George Floyd Uprising,” 2021).
[15] Some of these behaviors are summed up very well in an interview titled “Conflict in Movement” on The Final Straw Radio.
|
#title Letter to Freedom about the Carmaux strike
#author Agnes Henry
#SORTtopics Freedom Press, strike, syndicalism, France, letter
#source Retrieved on 10<sup>th</sup> September 2021 from [[https://forgottenanarchism.wordpress.com/2015/09/01/letter-to-freedom-about-the-carmaux-strike-agnes-henry/][forgottenanarchism.wordpress.com]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2021-09-10T14:13:35
Dear Comrades,
The Carmaux Strike, as a strike, is, as all the world knows, at an end. Reséguier, the employer, has succeeded in securing the services of the men he required, and has rejected 330, to whom he objects and are still unemployed.
On the other hand, he has not succeeded in crushing their Union, which was his object in forcing the strike, while it (the strike) has been the means of calling forth an enthusiastic manifestation of solidarity on the part of all the Socialists of France. That in itself is a gain in the development of Socialism, but that is not all. Where the politicians have failed, the non-political revolutionary Socialists have come not merely, as we trust, to the rescue of the Carmaux glass-blowers, but to effect a far grander, because more far-reaching purpose.
The French trade unions are composed of real Revolutionary Socialists and they would not support a mere co-operative glassworks. They are opposed to political influence and dictation, and they have learned the futility, for Socialist ends, of merely co-operative concerns. They have, however, set themselves the arduous task of erecting a Workingmen’s Glassworks, which is to belong to the whole body of French Socialist workmen, under the direction of a committee of 45 members of various unions, and the profits of which are to go to the benefit of the Socialist propaganda on purely economic lines.
Never yet has such a Communistic effort, on so large a scale, been attempted in the Socialist movement. Such an example, too, when once successfully carried out, will certainly be followed, and will strike a death-blow at all political Socialism.
There are two methods adopted for collecting the necessary capital: by the sale of tickets at 2d. each (which give the right to all who buy them to attend all meetings and all entertainment free, which may be held on behalf of the factory), and by lottery subscriptions of articles to be drawn for on 30<sup>th</sup> June next at Paris, or of money towards such articles.
The tickets at 2d. are sent post free in packets of 50. Could not our propagandists speak and collect in their meetings towards buying the tickets and gve entertainments to which the said tickets would give admission? In short, could not our English comrades immediately start a movement of assistance and, at the same time, of propaganda? I trust they will do so, and do it speedily.
Fraternally yours,
A. Henry.
|
#title Barricades in Barcelona
#subtitle The CNT from the victory of July 1936 to the necessary defeat of May 1937
#author Agustin Guillamón
#SORTtopics Barcelona, Spanish Revolution, CNT, history, barricades, anarcho-syndicalism
#date 2006
#source Retrieved on 2020-07-19 from [[https://libcom.org/history/barricades-barcelona-cnt-victory-july-1936-necessary-defeat-may-1937-agust%C3%ADn-guillam%C3%B3n][libcom.org]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2020-07-19T09:03:42
** <strong>Dedications</strong>
<em>To Pascual Guillamón, wounded and disabled in the confrontations of July 19 in Barcelona; shot by the fascists when they occupied Tarrasa.</em>
To my grandfather Eliseo, and his numerous brothers: emigrants, cenetistas, anonymous fighters and exiles; always proletarians conscious of being proletarians.
To my father, who at the age of twelve lost a war.
In memoriam.
** <strong>INTRODUCTION</strong>
This is a book about the barricades erected by the workers of Barcelona in July 1936 and May 1937, only ten months apart. It is a study of the reasons why they were built, as well as their similarities and differences. It attempts to explain the “offensive” character of the workers insurrection of July, and the “defensive” character of the May insurrection. How did the practically unarmed workers manage to defeat the rebellious army and the fascists in July? And how was it possible that, in May, a proletariat armed to the teeth could be politically defeated after having demonstrated its military superiority in the streets? Why were the barricades of July still standing in October 1936, while the barricades built in May were immediately dismantled?
The myth of the barricades, which appeared in Barcelona on numerous occasions during the 19<sup>th</sup> century, in the general strike of 1902, during the Tragic Week of 1909 and the general strike of 1917, was not propagated in vain. As history teaches us, barricades are structures for defensive purposes, and almost always presage the defeat of the workers at the hands of the army or the police. In July 1936 the first victory of the proletariat over the army took place at the Brecha de San Pablo, against some soldiers entrenched behind the barricades. This book considers the barricades as one instrument, among others, of the irrevocable decision of the proletariat to confront the class enemy; not as a myth that chains it to the past. It contemplates the barricades <em>as a class frontier</em>, with the proletariat on one side, and the enemy on the other. Today’s class frontiers would include on the enemy side those who deny the existence of the proletariat, confuse the Stalinist dictatorships with communism, propose the conquest of the state instead of its destruction, or proclaim that capitalism is eternal.
In the epilogue, the committees that arose during the Spanish revolutionary events of 1936 are considered in the context of the international experience of the Russian soviets and the German councils, in order to recognize them <em>as a form of revolutionary organization of the working class</em>.
July 1936 was a victorious insurrection; but was the insurrection of May 1937 a victory or a defeat? This book aspires to understand why, and above all <em>how</em>, some of the revolutionary leaders of July 1936 became the most disastrous and influential counterrevolutionaries of May 1937. To put it another way, it attempts to explain the history of the workers movement and to discard the ridiculous comic strips of supermen and traitors, as well as the bourgeois or Stalinist biased arbitrary interpretations that are characteristic of university academic studies.
The book also tries to respond to the questions posed by the French surrealist poet Benjamin Péret, who was in Barcelona between August 1936 and April 1937: “<em>What is the nature of the revolution of July 19, 1936: bourgeois, anti-fascist, proletarian? Was there a situation of dual power on July 20, 1936? If so, to whose benefit did it evolve? What forces presided over its liquidation? Have the workers seized control of the apparatus of production? Has the nationalization of production led to or created the material basis for a form of state capitalism? Did the working class organizations (parties, trade unions, etc.) attempt to organize a workers power? Where and under what conditions? Why was bourgeois power not liquidated? Why did the Spanish revolution end up in disaster?”</em>
The task of the poet is to ask the questions, the job of the historian is to try to answer them, and the privilege of the reader is to judge whether the responses given are correct and convincing.
Agustín Guillamón
<br>
Barcelona, December 2006
* Part 1 — The Victorious Insurrection of July 1936
<quote>
<em>Vivere militare est.</em> (To live is to fight.)
<br>
Seneca, <em>Epistulae Morales</em>
</quote>0
** <strong>TO ARMS, TO ARMS!</strong>
At sixteen hundred hours on the sixteenth, the army rose up in revolt in Melilla. The President of the Government, Casares Quiroga, when asked by some journalists about what he was going to do about the uprising, responded with a little joke: “They have arisen? Good. I am going to bed.” On July 18, 1936 the military rebellion had spread to all of Morocco, the Canary Islands and Seville.
The military garrison of Barcelona had approximately six thousand men, against almost two thousand assault guards and two hundred “<em>mossos d’esquadra”</em> [a special defense corps of the Generalitat]. The civil guards, whose loyalties were uncertain, had about three thousand men. The CNT-FAI had about twenty thousand militants organized in neighborhood defense committees, ready to take up arms. The CNT agreed, in the liaison commission that included representatives of the CNT, the Generalitat and loyal military officers, to confront the rebels with only one thousand armed militants. However, the CNT’s negotiations with Escofet, the police commissioner, and with España, the regional minister for the Government, were unproductive. On the night of July 17 the <em>cenetista</em> [member of the CNT] Juan Yagüe, Secretary of the Maritime Transport Trade Union, organized the assault on the weapons lockers of the ships docked at the port, obtaining about 150 rifles; these were to be added to the guns taken on the 18<sup>th</sup> from the gun shops, security guards and night watchmen of the city. This small arsenal, stored at the Transport Workers Trade Union headquarters on the Ramblas, led to a confrontation with the police commissioner, who demanded that the weapons be handed over to him. There was some risk of an armed confrontation with the assault guards, and the CNT militants themselves hurled abuse at those who were, in their opinion, much too conciliatory: Durruti and García Oliver. The incident was defused with the surrender to Guarner, Escofet’s second in command, of some old inoperative rifles, which prevented a break between the republicans and the anarchists on the eve of the military coup.
Starting at three in the morning on July 19<sup>th</sup>, a growing crowd demanded arms from the Government Chancellory, at the Plaza Palacio. <em>There were no arms for the people, because the Government of the Generalitat was more afraid of a workers revolution than it was of the military revolt against the Republic.</em> Juan García Oliver, from the balcony of the Chancellory, ordered the CNT militants to keep in touch with the defense committees of their respective neighborhoods, or to advance on the barracks of San Andrés to await an opportunity to seize the arms stored there. A little later, when the uprising was announced in Barcelona, the militants began fraternizing with the assault guards at San Andrés when the latter, equipped with every variety of small arms, surrendered their guns to the civilian volunteers who asked for them. At the same time, the Deputy Director of the Aviation Services, Servando Meana,[1] a CNT sympathizer, who was acting as a liaison between the Prat Airfield and José María España, delivered the arms stored in the Government Buildings to the anarchosyndicalists[2] on his own responsibility and at his own risk, without the knowledge of his superiors. The <em>cenetistas</em> of the Chemical Workers Trade Union began to manufacture hand grenades.
** <strong>THE SIRENS OF THE FACTORIES OF PUEBLO NUEVO SOUND THE CALL TO BATTLE</strong>
<em>At four-fifteen on the morning of July 19, 1936, the troops of the Bruc barracks, in Pedralbes</em>, marched into the streets, heading for April 14 Avenue (now known as Diagonal) towards the center of the city. The workers, posted in the vicinity of the barracks, had orders to sound the alarm but not to engage the soldiers until they came very close to the city center. The previously-determined tactic of the Confederal Defense Committee foresaw that it would be easier to fight the troops in the streets than if they remained entrenched in their barracks.
<em>The Jupiter football field</em> on Lope de Vega Street was used as a staging area from which to initiate the workers insurrection against the military uprising, due to the fact that the homes of the majority of the anarchist members of the “Nosotros” group were located in the vicinity, as well as the large numbers of CNT militants who also lived in that neighborhood. The Defense Committee of <em>Pueblo Nuevo</em> had requisitioned two trucks from a nearby textile factory, which were then parked near the Jupiter football field, and which were probably used as clandestine arsenals by the anarchists. Gregorio Jover lived at number 276 Pujades Street. Throughout the night of the 18<sup>th</sup> to the 19<sup>th</sup> of July, the whole second floor of that building was converted into the meeting place of the members of the “Nosotros” group, awaiting the news of the rebels taking to the streets. Jover was joined by: Juan García Oliver, who lived nearby, at number 72 of Espronceda Street, almost at the corner of Llull; Buenaventura Durruti, who lived less than a kilometer away, in the Clot neighborhood; Antonio Ortiz, born in the La Plata neighborhood of Pueblo Nuevo, at the intersection of Independencia and Wad Ras Streets (now Badajoz/Doctor Trueta); Francisco Ascaso, who also lived nearby on San Juan de Malta Street; Ricardo Sanz, also a resident of Pueblo Nuevo; Aurelio Fernández and “the Valencian” José Pérez Ibáñez. From Jover’s window one could see the fence of the Jupiter football field, next to which the two trucks were parked. At five in the morning a message arrived informing Jover and his comrades that the troops had begun to leave the barracks. Lope de Vega, Espronceda, Llull and Pujades Streets, which bordered on the Jupiter football field, were full of armed CNT militants. About twenty or so of the most experienced militants, tempered in a thousand street battles, boarded the trucks. Antonio Ortiz and Ricardo Sanz manned a machine gun behind the cab of the leading truck. The sirens of the textile factories of Pueblo Nuevo began to sound, proclaiming the general strike and the revolutionary insurrection, and could be heard in nearby neighborhoods and at the port. This was the agreed-upon signal for the call to battle. And this time the alarm of the sirens literally meant that arms must be taken up for defense against the enemy: “to arms”. The two trucks, flying the black and red flag, followed by a column of armed men singing “Sons of the People” and “To the Barricades”, encouraged by the neighbors crowding the balconies, marched down Pujades Street to the Rambla of Pueblo Nuevo, to walk up to Pedro IV Street, and from there to the <em>Construction Trade Union</em> offices on Mercaders Street, and then to the <em>Metal Workers and Transport Trade Union</em> headquarters on the Ramblas. Never before had the verses of these songs conveyed such meaning: “although we expect pain and death against the enemy, duty calls us, the most precious good is liberty, it must be defended with faith and with valor”; “with our bodies we shall subdue the fascist hyena, and the entire people with the anarchists will make liberty triumph”.
The “Nosotros” group, now transformed into a Revolutionary Defense Committee, directed the workers insurrection in Barcelona against the military uprising from one of these trucks parked on the <em>Plaza del Teatro</em>. By commanding the Ramblas the revolutionaries prevented the link-up of the rebels who were proceeding from the Plaza de Cataluña and Atarazanas-Capitanía, at the same time that it allowed for the rapid dispatch, by way of the side streets and alleys of the Chino and Ribera neighborhoods, of reinforcements to help the combatants at the Brecha de San Pablo and Icaria Avenue. It was necessary to prevent the troops who had left their barracks in the outer parts of the city from reaching the center of the city and linking up with Capitanía-Atarazanas, or seizing the nerve centers of the telephone, telegraph, postal and radio transmitter installations.
The invaluable collaboration of the artillery sergeants Valeriano Gordo and Martín Terrer from the Atarazanas barracks,[3] who opened the door that faced on Santa Madrona Street, allowed the entry of the armed anarchist groups and the arrest of almost the entire officer corps who were conducted under arrest through that same door to Santa Madrona Street. But a burst of machine gun fire from the nearby building housing the Officers’ Quarters permitted the escape of Lieutenant Colubí, who then took command of the resistance. The heavy barred doors of the wide plazas that connected the old medieval Atarazanas with the building of the Maestranza (now demolished), which faced directly on the Ramblas, where the offices of the Artillery Brigade and the quarters of some officers, made it possible for the soldiers who were entrenched there to resist the attack. The rebels regained control of the barracks, but the anarchists had seized four machine guns, several hundred rifles and several crates of ammunition. The crossfire that was set up between the office buildings and that part of the Atarazanas barracks that faced the Rambla de Santa Mónica, to which was added the fire from the machine guns installed at the base of the Columbus monument, made their position impregnable. Since the militants from the Metal Workers and Transport Trade Unions had left for Barceloneta, the anarchosyndicalist forces that remained in the Plaza del Teatro decided to postpone the assault in order to transfer their forces to the Brecha de San Pablo, with the arms taken from Atarazanas, leaving the sector under the Ramblas, with the buildings of the Military Offices and the Maestranza of Atarazanas surrounded by a group under the command of Durruti, with an artillery piece managed by Sergeant Gordo.
** <strong>THE REBEL MILITARY FORCES OCCUPY THE PLAZA DE ESPAÑA AND THE PLAZA DE LA UNIVERSIDAD</strong>
At about four-fifteen in the morning three squadrons belonging to the Cavalry Regiment of Montesa began to make their way on foot from the barracks on Tarragona Street. <em>The first squadron</em>, after an initial exchange of fire with assault guards that lasted about twenty minutes, occupied <em>the Plaza de España</em>, with a machine gun unit, and then began fraternizing with the assault guards from the barracks located at the intersection of the Gran Vía-Paralelo, next to the Hotel Olímpico (today the Catalonia Plaza Hotel). The assault guards and the cavalry squadron reached a curious non-aggression pact, and over the course of the morning reinforcements, which were not molested, left the barracks of the assault guards for Cinco de Oros and Barceloneta, at the same time that these assault guards were allowing the rebels to hold the vantage point of the Plaza de España, and later allowed the passage of a company of sappers from the engineers barracks of Lepanto, which proceeded along the Paralelo until it arrived at Atarazanas and the Military Office Building.
On Cruz Cubierta Street, <em>in front of the Hostafrancs Municipal Building, the defense committee erected a barricade that blocked the road.</em> The rebel troops had two artillery pieces, located next to the fountain in the center of the Plaza de España, which had been brought in trucks from the barracks at the Docks. The military fired an artillery salvo at the barricade at Hostafrancs, but aimed too high, and the shells exploded in a small barricade on the side street of <em>Riego</em>, killing eight people and wounding eleven. It was a Danteesque scene, with arms, legs and chunks of human flesh hanging from the trees, lampposts and trolley cables. The decapitated head of a woman was found seventy meters from her torso. The rebels controlled the Plaza de España until three in the afternoon.
<em>The second squadron</em>, with a machine gun unit, which was joined by a group of rightists, was engaged in battle on Valencia Street, but gained their objective, which was to dominate the Plaza de <em>la Universidad</em> and to occupy the university building, in whose towers they placed machine guns. They checked the identification papers of all the pedestrians, detaining those who were members of the CNT or the parties of the left, among whom was Angel Pestaña. In the courtyard of the University they exchanged fire with an armed group from the POUM. Over the course of the morning the rebels were forced to withdraw to the University Building, pursued by a group of assault guards at whom they had been shooting, and the members of the POUM who had occupied the <em>Seminary</em>, from which they swept the University gardens with gunfire. Completely surrounded, and after losing a large number of their men to desertion, the rebels surrendered at two-thirty in the afternoon to a detachment of the civil guard, and came out into the street behind the shield of the civilian prisoners they had captured.
** <strong>THE REBELS WIN A BATTLE: THE ENGINEERS BESIEGE THE ASSAULT GUARDS</strong>
<em>From the Lepanto engineers’ barracks</em>, located on the Gran Vía, on the outskirts of Barcelona, in Hospitalet de Llobregat (at what is now the Plaza Cerdá, on the site where they are building the “Judicial Center”), a company of sappers had emerged at about four-thirty and headed towards the Plaza de España, where they fraternized with the cavalry squadron, which dominated the vicinity with machine guns and light artillery, and with the assault guards posted there, even though the latter had displayed on the door of their barracks the proclamation of the declaration of a state of war. Given the calm situation that prevailed there, they were ordered to proceed to the Military Offices (the current Military Building, across from the Columbus monument). They marched down the Paralelo, and <em>Vilá y Vilá</em> Street, until they reached the <em>Baleares dock</em>, where they were confronted by a company of assault guards that had arrived from Barceloneta, which was defeated[4] because it was caught in the crossfire from Atarazanas and the sappers. After leaving a small group in Atarazanas the majority took up positions in the Military Office Building in order to defend it. The rebels had achieved their first victory and <em>Escofet lost control of the Paralelo</em>. The rebels consolidated their hold on the medieval shipyards, the <em>Aduana</em> and the electric power plant of <em>the three smokestacks</em>, and therefore controlled the plaza around the Columbus monument and the lower part of the Paralelo. In order to break their hold and to isolate the rebels at the Plaza de España from those at Atarazanas, the workers of the Woodworkers Trade Union and the Defense Committee of Pueblo Seco rapidly constructed an enormous barricade at the Brecha de San Pablo, between <em>El Molino</em> and the <em>Chicago Bar</em>.
** <strong>THE PEOPLE DEFEAT THE ARMY ON THE PARALELO</strong>
<em>The third squadron</em> which had left the cavalry barracks on Tarragona Street was ordered to consolidate rebel control of the Paralelo, with the objective of linking up their barracks with the Capitanía. Now, however, when they reached the vicinity of the <em>Brecha de San Pablo</em>, they were incapable of getting past a monumental barricade built of cobblestones and sandbags, which formed a double rectangle across half the avenue, because an intense hail of gunfire prevented them from proceeding. The soldiers were only able to occupy the <em>headquarters of the Woodworkers Trade Union</em> of the CNT on Rosal Street and the barricade in front of the building, abandoned by the CNT militants when, in accordance with the Mola Plan,[5] the rebel soldiers advanced <em>behind a human shield of women and children from the neighborhood</em>. Then the soldiers installed three machine guns, one in front of <em>La Tranquilidad Bar</em> (69 Paralelo, next to the Victoria theater), another on the roof of the building next to El Molino, and the third on the barricade of the Brecha de San Pablo, which were employed to full effect. It was now eight in the morning. It took the third squadron two hours to take the barricade, which was defended by the defense committee of <em>Pueblo Seco</em> and militants of the woodworkers trade union. But the workers continued to harass the troops from the other side of the Brecha, from the terraces of nearby buildings and from all the adjoining side streets and alleys. At eleven in the morning the third squadron had successfully achieved full control of the entirety of the Brecha, after five hours of combat. However, the attempt made by the troops located at the Plaza de España to reinforce their comrades at the Brecha was thwarted when they reached the <em>Avenida Theater</em> (at 182 Paralelo) and were subjected to gunfire from the walls of the fairground enclosure that faced the Paralelo, and from Tamarit. The cenetistas decided to mount a counterattack against the Brecha, indirectly from Conde del Asalto (now Nou de la Rambla) and other points, without success. The local residents built barricades on the side streets of the Paralelo next to <em>Poeta Cabanyes</em> and <em>Tapioles</em>. About a dozen assault guards, who had been ordered to go there by the officer of the Assault Guards who was fighting on the side of the rebel military forces, decided to join the popular forces. Shortly thereafter, the CNT reinforcements that came from the Plaza del Teatro, after storming the Hotel Falcón, from which they had been subjected to sniper fire, then proceeded from the Ramblas by way of San Pablo Street, and after securing the neutrality of the barracks of the customs police and after freeing the prisoners at <em>the women’s prison of Santa Amalia</em>, they arrived at the Ronda de San Pablo by way of <em>Flores Street</em>, under a hail of gunfire from the rebel troops. Ortiz, along with a small group of men who had brought the machine guns seized at Atarazanas, managed to cross to the other side of the Ronda, and rapidly constructed a small barricade that gave them some shelter from the bullets of the three enemy machine guns installed in the Brecha. The anarchists climbed onto the rooftops, and placed their machine guns on the roof of the <em>Chicago Bar</em> (the same building that is today the office of the Caixa de Catalunya) which provided covering fire for the mass frontal assault on the Brecha, directed simultaneously from Flores Street, from both ends of <em>Aldana</em> Street, from <em>Tapias</em> Street and from the <em>café Pay-Pay</em> on San Pablo Street, located across from <em>the Romanesque church of Sant Pau del Camp</em>, which they had entered by way of the back door.[6] The captain who commanded the troops next to the machine gun in the middle of the Brecha was felled by shots fired by Francisco Ascaso, who had gone on ahead of the other attackers and taken up an advantageous position, while the others advanced without any cover, in the open. A lieutenant tried to take command of the unit from his fallen captain, in order to continue to resist, but he was shot by a corporal from among his own troops. This was the beginning of the end of the battle. Between eleven and noon the third squadron was defeated, and the Brecha de San Pablo was recovered by the workers. While Francisco Ascaso was jumping for joy and waving his rifle over his head, García Oliver was shouting over and over, “Look what we did to the army!” In this crucial district of the city the anarchists, among whom were Francisco Ascaso, Juan García Oliver, Antonio Ortiz, Gregorio Jover and Ricardo Sanz,[7] had defeated the army after more than six hours of battle. A small number of soldiers continued to put up some resistance, after having taken refuge within El Molino, where, after running out of ammunition, they finally surrendered at about two in the afternoon.
** <strong>THE INFANTRY ARRIVES AT THE PLAZA DE LA UNIVERSIDAD AND THE ESCOLAPIOS DE SAN ANTONIO</strong>
The infantry regiment of Badajoz (from the Pedralbes barracks) had been ordered to go to the Capitanía by General Llano from the general staff, and that is where it went, but with the intention of placing itself under the orders of General Goded, who had flown from Palma de Mallorca to Barcelona to assume command over the military uprising. Once it reached the Gran Vía, the company under the command of Captain López Belda continued to march down Urgell Street towards the Paralelo, where they came under fire, and from there they went to Atarazanas, and the Columbus and Capitanía monument, where they reinforced the remaining troops at this location. <em>López Belda and the sappers were the only rebel troops that reached their proposed objectives, which in their case was to reinforce Atarazanas and the Capitanía.</em>
The rest of the column, under the command of Major López Amor, proceeded down the Gran Vía towards the Plaza de Cataluña, and exchanged fire with the squadron of the Montesa regiment, which had already occupied the Plaza de la Universidad. Once this error was discovered, a company went down by the Ronda de San Antonio, in the direction of Capitanía, but once it reached the vicinity of the Market of San Antonio, it was attacked by the defense committees, which would not allow it to reinforce the troops fighting in the Brecha, so the company had to take refuge in <em>Los Escolapios</em>, where they surrendered one hour later, after putting up stiff resistance.
** <strong>THE BATTLE AT THE PLAZA CATALUÑA</strong>
After leaving a small garrison behind in the University, the rest of the troops, under the orders of López Amor, entered the <em>Plaza de Cataluña</em> by way of Pelayo and the Ronda Universidad, where they were surrounded by a curious and apprehensive crowd, shouting “Viva la Republica”, whose members did not know if these were loyal or rebel troops. After an exchange of fire between the rebel troops and the assault guards, white handkerchiefs appeared, the shooting stopped, and assault guards and soldiers embraced and fraternized. The crowd of armed civilians arrived and broke up the troop formation by mixing with the soldiers. The confusion, the cunning tactics of some, the indecision of the assault guards, the mistrust of the workers, and the excessive physical proximity created an incredible and dangerous disorder. The Plaza was occupied by units of the Assault Guards and by numerous militant armed workers on the side of the Ramblas, the Telefónica and the Puerta del Ángel. Major López Amor gave the order to check the identification papers of the civilians, most of whom were cenetistas, but faced with the impossibility of arresting all of them he decided to evict them from the Plaza, and installed machine guns at the four corners of the Plaza: on the roof of the Maison Dorée (at the corner of Rivadeneira, on part of the site that is now occupied by Sfera), on the roof of the Cataluña Theater (approximately the site of the current Habitat), at the Hotel Colón (now Banesto) and at the Casino Militar (today absorbed by El Corte Inglés), and he placed two light 7.5 cm artillery pieces in the center of the Plaza Cataluña. López Amor then went to <em>the Telefónica</em> with the intention of occupying it and controlling communications. The initial collaboration of the Assault Guards, obtained by the treason of their commanding officer, Lieutenant Llop, was transformed, after a very uncomfortable period of about ten minutes, into open opposition. López Amor ordered the two artillery pieces situated in the center of the Plaza to open fire on the Telefónica. After three volleys communications were almost totally cut off. Gunfire erupted both within and outside of the building. During the confusion a group of Assault Guards captured López Amor in front of the Casino Militar. The companies of the Assault Guards, together with the armed workers, barricaded themselves in Fontanella, the upper floors of the Telefónica, the Puerta del Ángel and the Ramblas. Pelayo, Vergara and Ronda Universidad Streets had already been secured by militant workers, thus isolating the army troops, who finally had no other recourse than to take refuge in the <em>Hotel Colón</em>, the Maison Dorée, the Casino Militar and the lower floors of the Telefónica, from which points they resisted the attacks of the workers and the Assault Guards. The center of the Plaza was a no-man’s land. The troops had been prevented from making their way along the Ramblas towards Atarazanas and Capitanía, or by way of Fontanella and Puerta del Ángel to the Police Station at Vía Layetana or the Palace of the Generalitat. The equipment of the Telefónica and the nearby radio transmitters had also been prevented from falling into the hands of the rebels. The Telephone workers cut off communications of the Capitanía with the rebel barracks. The popular forces quickly stormed the Casino Militar and the Maison Dorée, thanks to the combined efforts of the Assault Guards and the workers, who had secured their positions by using the tunnels of the subway. The resistance of the rebels, who now only controlled the shelled Hotel Colón and the lower floors of the Telefónica, came to an end at four in the afternoon, when they surrendered to the late but decisive attack of the civil guards, supported by the Assault Guards and the enthusiasm of the people, who did not trust the civil guards. An enormous crowd filled the openings of the nearby streets, the subway entrances and the adjacent alleys. White flags appeared in the Hotel Colón and then the popular fury swept away all in its path. The cannon that Lecha had brought from Claris thundered once again. Durruti and Obregón (who died in the attack), in a massive assault from the Ramblas by the anarchist militants, charging right in the open without cover, retook the lower floors of the Telefónica. At the same time, civil guards and workers, Josep Rovira of the POUM in the forefront, entered the Hotel Colón and took the officers prisoner. The Plaza was littered with corpses. Here, too, the army had been defeated.
** <strong>THE REBELS TAKE REFUGE IN THE CARMELITE MONASTERY</strong>
From the <em>Gerona Barracks</em>, or from the Santiago Cavalry barracks, at the corner of Lepanto and Travesera de Gracia Streets, near the Hospital of San Pablo, around five in the morning three squadrons of about fifty men each proceeded on foot, with machine guns installed on cars. Their objective was to take control of the <em>Cinco de Oros</em> (today the Plaza Juan Carlos I), at the corner of the Paseo de Gracia and Diagonal Street, in order to proceed from there to Plaza Urquinaona and the Arco del Triunfo. They were subjected to minor harassment during their entire passage through Lepanto, Industria, and Córcega Streets, as well as the Paseo de San Juan (then known as García Hernández). At the Cinco de Oros, however, they found several companies of assault guards awaiting them, with a squadron of cavalry and a machine gun unit, accompanied by a crowd of militant workers, positioned on rooftops and balconies, in trees and doorways, armed with automatic weapons and hand grenades. Unexpectedly for the rebels, who had advanced without taking the precaution of sending out any scouts, a steady barrage of fire swept the leading ranks of the troops, causing a large number of casualties among both soldiers and officers. Colonel Lacasa, who commanded the regiment from Santiago, took refuge with the surviving officers and some soldiers in <em>the Carmelite Monastery</em>, situated on the Diagonal at the corner of Lauria Street, where, with the active assistance of the monks, they barricaded themselves in impregnable positions thanks to the machine guns installed on the lower floors and on the roof.[8] The detachment of civil guards that had been sent to fight them joined them instead. The Colonel stationed advance outposts in the vicinity of the monastery at the corners of Córcega/Santa Tecla Streets, Claris/Diagonal Streets and Menéndez Pelayo (now Torrent de l’Olla)/Lauria Streets, which, after suffering many casualties, were forced to withdraw before nightfall. That night, the rebels entrenched in the monastery agreed to surrender to the civil guards at dawn on the following day.
A short distance away, at the corner of <em>Balmes and Diagonal Streets</em>, a half hour after the beginning of the battle at Cinco de Oros, four trucks coming from the San Andrés Artillery Depot, transporting about fifty artillery gunners to the Plaza de Cataluña, were ambushed, stopped and destroyed by the fusillades of fire from workers and Assault Guards. Rifles and artillery pieces were seized by the workers.
** <strong>AT BARCELONETA: MOBILE BARRICADES AGAINST ARTILLERY</strong>
The Mountain Artillery Regiment, at the <em>barracks of the Docks on Icaria Avenue</em>, was the principal focal point of the plot of the military uprising. Two trucks had managed to leave the barracks, each with artillery pieces, and both successfully arrived at their destiny at the Plaza de España. One of these guns, installed at the center of the square, announced with its roar that the artillery had come to the streets. At six a column was organized, under the command of Major Fernández Unzué, whose objective was first to take the Palace of the Government and then the Palace of the Generalitat. In October 1934, this same Major, at the command of just one battery of artillery, only needed to fire once on the Palace of the Generalitat and immediately saw the white flag that put an end to the Catalanist rebellion of Companys. An airplane had bombed the barracks before the trucks left, causing some casualties and a certain degree of demoralization. Nonetheless, the three batteries drove into the streets, without waiting for the arrival of the two companies of the nearby Alcántara Infantry Regiment, which were supposed to provide cover for them. That artillery batteries must be protected by infantry was a fundamental in the military manuals, since the artillery pieces had to advance slowly through the middle of the street, in the open, dragged by animals; but the officers were convinced that the “mob” would run away once they heard the first salvo of cannon fire. Meanwhile, in <em>Barceloneta</em>, the celebration of the local residents and the longshoremen was transformed into a unanimous outcry demanding arms. Enrique Gómez García, the commanding officer of the Barceloneta barracks of the Assault Guards, faced with an imminent confrontation, decided to distribute weapons to those who handed over to him, as a guarantee that they would return the weapons, their trade union or political party membership cards. The first battery, commanded by Captain López Varela, managed to proceed without incident until he came to the bridge of San Carlos (which no longer exists), which crossed Icaria Avenue and the railroad tracks, when he unexpectedly encountered gunfire from a group of Assault Guards, along with workers who had been armed by the Assault Guard barracks, posted in the environs of the Plaza de Toros of Barceloneta (which no longer exists), the bridge itself, on the boxcars and walls of the rail yards, and on the nearest balconies and rooftops. They were rapidly joined by a crowd of militant workers from Pueblo Nuevo, Barceloneta and from the Transport and Metal Workers Trade Unions of the Ramblas. The three batteries found themselves squeezed between two sides, and each prevented the others from advancing. López Varela managed to set up the machine guns and the four cannons of his battery, and opened fire, without pausing in his advance towards Barceloneta. After two hours of fighting on the defensive, the two batteries of the rearguard, immobilized and constantly harassed by well-entrenched attackers, managed to withdraw to their barracks with numerous casualties, in a chaotic retreat, marked by the terrified stampede of the animals that were transporting some munitions that had exploded when they were hit by gunfire. At the entrance to the barracks they suffered fourteen casualties, caused by the machine guns of two airplanes, which shortly afterwards bombed the barracks themselves with little effect. The battery of López Varela, which was now incapable of retreating, could not pass the intersection of Icaria Avenue and the Paseo Nacional, which was blocked by an enormous barricade that was six feet high, which the longshoremen had built with the usual cobblestones and the not so common sandbags full of carob beans, along with pieces of wood and <em>five hundred tons of spooled paper</em> unloaded in a half hour by electric forklifts from the ship, “Ciudad de Barcelona”, moored at the nearby “moll de les garrofes”, the usual location for the unloading of carob beans from the sailboats that transported them from the coastal towns of Castellón and Tarragona. The battery was then subjected to attack by mortar fire from the roof of the Government building, as well as by a steady barrage of fire from rifles and machine guns coming from the Escuela Náutica and the Depósito Franco. The soldiers fired their cannons at the barricades and the crowds, producing terrible damage to both; but the barricades were rebuilt and the crowds returned to intensify their determined attack. The position of the rebels became untenable. At ten they received the order to retreat, but this retreat turned into a hellish ordeal, because as the soldiers attempted to withdraw, the spools of paper, now transformed into <em>mobile barricades</em>, were pushed forward by unarmed workers, while other workers well protected behind the spools threw hand grenades and maintained a steady rate of rifle fire. The final assault was made against about thirty men, barricaded behind their artillery pieces and dead animals, fighting elbow to elbow. López Varela, wounded, was taken to the Gobernación, and the rest of the officers were taken prisoner, while the soldiers fraternized with the people. Several cannons and various small arms were taken: and it was only ten-thirty in the morning.
The Docks barracks was besieged, with a barricade built a hundred meters from the main gate. The infantry from the Alcántara regiment was easily repulsed twice, although some soldiers managed to sneak into the barracks, without at all altering the desperate situation of the besieged, who, around eight in the evening, surrendered to several officers of the Assault Guards, who took charge of the prisoners. That night the barracks was taken over by the defense committees of Barceloneta and Pueblo Nuevo, without meeting any resistance.
** <strong>AT THE PLAZA URQUINAONA: THE REBELS FAIL TO OCCUPY THE RADIO STATION</strong>
Next to the <em>Parque de la Ciudadela</em> there were two barracks: that of the Intendencia, loyal to the republic, so loyal in fact that it was entrusted with the mission of separating and keeping watch over two thirds of the civil guard units, which at the orders of Colonel Escobar had left Layetana to seize control of the Plaza de Cataluña, and the barracks of the Alcántara infantry regiment, whose officers were divided between those who sympathized with and those who were opposed to the military uprising, which maintained a curious neutrality and a typical “soldier’s caution” that caused the troops to set off quite late, after nine in the morning, at the order of General Fernández Burriel. One company was ordered to come to the relief of the besieged artillery barracks at the Docks; their mission was thwarted by the opposition of an armed crowd that made them return promptly to their barracks. The second company was ordered to occupy the broadcast studios of Radio Barcelona at Number 12 Caspe Street. Coming under fire in the Urquinaona Plaza, the soldiers made a desperate attempt to make their way down Lauria Street towards Caspe, but after an hour of heavy fighting the company was practically destroyed, and only a small group managed to take shelter in the Hotel Ritz, where they surrendered after being subjected to artillery fire.
** <strong>AT DIPUTACIÓN STREET: TRUCKS ARE DRIVEN AGAINST THE ARTILLERY</strong>
<em>The barracks of the Seventh Light Artillery regiment and the Parque de Artillería</em> were two buildings located at the end of <em>San Andrés del Palomar Street</em>. The rebels organized a joint defense of the two buildings, relying on the collaboration of civilian elements, most of whom were monarchists who had reacted unfavorably to the speech made to them by Captain Reinlen, who concluded his speech with final cries of “Viva España” and “Viva la Republica”. <em>Approximately thirty thousand rifles</em> were stored at the Parque de Artillería. After the first departure of the four trucks, which as we have seen were destroyed at the intersection of Diagonal/Balmes, a second convoy was organized, whose orders were to support the infantry of the Badajoz regiment (which had taken refuge in various buildings on the Plaza de Cataluña, without being able to proceed any farther). This second convoy consisted of one battery (four cannons). It arrived at Bruc Street, near Diputación Street, at seven in the morning, after a long trip of six kilometers almost without incident. At the intersection of Bruc and Diputación they were ambushed by a group of Assault Guards and armed workers. The outbreak of gunfire raised the alarm among the nearby Assault Guard units that were guarding the Police Station at Vía Layetana, and was also heard by those who had been dispatched from Cinco de Oros to the Plaza de Cataluña, as well as by the popular forces that were besieging the Hotel Colón and the Telefónica. The battery advanced down <em>Diputación Street</em> towards Claris Street, but when it attempted to turn down this street and cross the Gran Vía, it was subjected to steady rifle and machine gun fire, which caused numerous casualties among the troops and the draft animals. Once they set up their cannons and machine guns in <em>the square formed by Diputación, Claris, and Lauria Streets and the Gran Vía</em>, they opened fire on the crowds that never ceased to regroup and counterattack. The seventy soldiers who manned the battery were confronted by much more numerous attackers, well concealed on rooftops, in windows and on balconies, whose resolve never flagged despite the artillery fire. The reinforcements that came to the aid of the popular forces were composed of two companies of Assault Guards, since a third company had refused to fight and returned to the comfort of its barracks on the Plaza de España, and by hundreds of workers who were constantly joining the battle. The situation of the rebel battery became increasingly more difficult. After two hours of fighting, however, a shocking number of fatalities had been caused by the rebel artillery. The cannons were defended by a screen of machine guns, which made them inaccessible to every charge. The Assault Guards became discouraged, and thought that they lacked the means necessary to confront the artillery. The original and very risky tactic utilized by a group of CNT militants to successfully carry out the final attack consisted in boarding the flatbeds of three trucks, and after <em>driving them at full speed towards the screen of machine guns</em>, leaping from the vehicles throwing hand grenades. This unexpected tactic led to the disruption of the defensive screen of the machine guns and their seizure by the workers, who fired them at the artillery battery. At eleven in the morning the battle was over. While the rebel officers surrendered to the Assault Guards, the anarchosyndicalists immediately seized the machine guns and one cannon, which they dragged by hand towards the Plaza de Cataluña.
** <strong>THE CAPITANÍA IS SUBJECTED TO ARTILLERY FIRE AND STORMED BY THE PEOPLE: GODED IS TAKEN PRISONER</strong>
At the <em>Capitanía building</em>, on the Paseo de Colón, where the commanding officers of the Cataluña Division were located, the generals and staff officers gave the appearance of acting in an <em>Opera Buffa</em>. No one obeyed the orders of General Llano de la Encomienda, the supreme commander of the Division, who remained loyal to the Republic, but no one dared either to depose him and take command. The rebel General Fernández Burriel allowed Llano to continue to issue orders and take telephone calls in his office. The whole atmosphere was redolent of accusations of weakness, barracks boastfulness and invocations of honor. When <em>General Goded</em>, after declaring a state of war in Mallorca and easily dominating the island, came to Barcelona at about twelve-thirty in one of several seaplanes to take control of the uprising in Cataluña, he could not understand why Llano de Encomienda remained at large and why the General Staff had not yet centralized the command over the operations of the rebels. Goded’s journey from the <em>Naval Air Station</em> to Capitanía was surrounded by the sounds of intense exchanges of gunfire and the distant roar of artillery. After a series of curses and mutual threats of death exchanged with General Llano, Goded confronted the military situation of the moment. He made a futile phone call to <em>General Aranguren of the Civil Guard</em>, in an attempt to give him orders. Aranguren, who was at the Palacio de Gobernación, accompanied and discreetly kept under observation by España, Pérez Farrás and Guarner, refused to join the rebels. Goded ordered the infantry of the Alcántara regiment to make another attempt to relieve the artillery troops at the Docks. He could not understand why the latter had been left without infantry protection. Faced with the demoralization produced among the rebels by the constant bombardment and strafing by the republican airplanes, Goded ordered, through a go-between, the seaplanes which had escorted him to Barcelona to bomb the airport at El Prat. But when his messenger came to the Navy Air Station with his written orders, the seaplanes had already left for their base at Mahón, after confronting the manifest hostility of the naval personnel and the Air Station staff. It was two-thirty and the defeat of the rebels already appeared to be a forgone conclusion. Goded then tried to summon reinforcements from Mallorca, Zaragoza, Mataró and Girona. He could not get a telephone connection with Mataró or Girona, nor could he send a messenger, because the armored car’s tires had been punctured by bullets. Zaragoza and Palma were too far away to offer any effective support. Nor could the infantry of the Alcántara regiment secure its objectives, since it was easily repulsed in its second attempt to approach the barracks of the Docks, and the soldiers who managed to sneak into the barracks were not numerous enough to raise the siege.
A heterogeneous crowd, formed of militant workers brandishing rifles and wearing helmets and cartridge belts taken from the enemy, and Assault Guards with their dress coats unbuttoned, or in their shirts, dragged the cannons taken at Diputación-Claris, proceeding via Layetana Street with the intention of assaulting the Division. The <em>longshoreman Manuel Lecha</em>, a former artilleryman,[9] installed the guns in the Plaza Antonio López in order to get a direct line of sight to fire on the Capitanía building, while the batteries taken on Icaria Avenue were firing on an indirect line from Barceloneta. It was five in the afternoon. Goded, seeing these arrangements, telephoned España, the Chancellor of the Gobernación, in order to boastfully demand his surrender, receiving in response the offer of a half hour to surrender, with the guarantee that his life would be spared, and once this half hour had expired the artillery would open fire. At five-thirty the artillery salvos began. Forty salvos and a barrage of rifle fire that was getting closer and closer allowed no doubts to be entertained about the imminence of the final assault. A white flag appeared and both sides observed a ceasefire, but when a loyal officer approached the building to accept its surrender, the machine guns of Capitanía opened fire. The battle resumed and when the doors of the building were about to be forced a white flag once again appeared, but now the attackers did not cease firing, and finally broke down the doors and entered in force into the Capitanía. It was now six in the evening. <em>Major Pérez Farrás</em>,[10] risking his own life, managed to protect General Goded from certain lynching, which was the fate of various officers in civilian clothing, and brought him to the Palacio de la Generalitat, where he was convinced by Companys to broadcast over the radio transmitter that was installed there an order to cease fire: “Fate has been unkind to me and I have been taken prisoner. Therefore, if you want to avoid a bloodbath, the soldiers who will join me may do so free of any responsibility.” It was seven in the evening. The message was recorded and broadcast by the <em>radio transmitters</em> every half hour, with a significant propaganda impact all over Spain.
** <strong>THE FRUIT IS RIPE FOR THE PICKING</strong>
The popular victory was so overwhelming that some buildings fell by themselves, without any violence at all, as ripe fruit falls from the tree. The warden of the <em>Modelo Prison</em> opened the doors of the prisoners’ cells, anticipating the inevitable riot and assault on the prison. At Number 26 Mercaders Street the Construction Workers Trade Union as well as the Regional Committee of the CNT and the Local Trade Union Federation had their headquarters. Right behind these buildings was the Barcelona Employers Federation headquarters, a building that is now Number 34 Vía Layetana. In the adjacent building, currently Number 32, was the Casa Cambó. Both buildings were occupied by the cenetistas, without any resistance, since they had been completely abandoned, with the furniture and the archives left behind. Both buildings together were known as the “<em>Casa CNT-FAI”</em> and served right up until the end of the war as the headquarters of the CNT and FAI Regional Committees, the Mujeres Libres, and, among many other groups, the Committee of Investigation and Information of the CNT-FAI, directed by Manuel Escorza, who, from the attic of the Casa Cambó, made extensive use, over the following months, of the information contained in the archives captured from the Employers Association and the Lliga.
** <strong>SAN ANDRÉS: THE BARCELONA PROLETARIAT SEIZES THIRTY THOUSAND RIFLES</strong>
The small force that guarded the barracks and artillery depot of <em>San Andrés</em>, most of which was composed of right wing and monarchist peasants, saw how the crowds that were attacking the barracks kept growing larger. During the afternoon the republican air force strafed and bombed the barracks and the Maestranza, taking care not to blow up the arsenal, causing some casualties, both among the soldiers as well as among their attackers. The planes repeated their attacks three or four more times, killing and wounding several more soldiers, causing an enormous demoralization to spread among the defenders, which was further magnified by news of the disaster that had overtaken the military rebellion in Barcelona. By nightfall the defenders, both military as well as civilian, were gradually abandoning the barracks, and attempting to escape. Without any resistance the confederal defense committees of San Andrés, Horta, Santa Coloma, San Adrián and Pueblo Nuevo stormed the barracks and the Maestranza, before dawn, seizing the entire arsenal stored there. There were thirty thousand rifles. <em>The Barcelona proletariat was now armed.</em> The Assault Guards, sent by Escofet to prevent this from happening, refused to engage in an armed conflict with the workers.
The barricades built in front of the barracks to prevent the escape of the besieged rebels, now prevented the entrance of the Assault Guards. It was now too late to impose bourgeois order: the situation was distinctly revolutionary. If these Assault Guards had opened fire on the people they would have been immediately transformed into suicidal rebels.
In reality, <em>as of six in the evening, with the final capture of the Plaza de Cataluña and the surrender of Goded at the Capitanía, the uprising could be considered to have been defeated</em>. All that remained was a cleanup operation to finish off the last holdouts. The various barracks, now with hardly any troops, were totally demoralized, and further discouraged by constant desertions, they surrendered or were stormed over the course of the evening and night. Such was the case, for example, at the barracks of Bruc, in Pedralbes, held by a small squad of rebels. In the evening a plane dropped leaflets, explaining that the soldiers were discharged and the rebel officers deposed, which provoked the desertion of almost all the soldiers. The few remaining officers decided to surrender the barracks to the Civil Guard, although it was only shortly thereafter stormed by the cenetista workers without meeting any resistance. They renamed it the “Bakunin” barracks.
** <strong>JULY 20: THE FINAL ASSAULT ON THE CARMELITES AND THE ATARAZANAS BARRACKS</strong>
On the 20<sup>th</sup> only two rebel strongholds remained: the monastery of the Carmelites and the core positions of Atarazanas and the Military Offices.
Since dawn an enormous crowd had joined the siege of the monastery of the Carmelites, impatiently breaking through the cordon of Assault Guards. The besieged had already announced their surrender on the previous night, without, however, ceasing to shoot at any of the besiegers who tried to approach the monastery. The active complicity of the monks with the rebels, to whom they had given refuge, medical aid and food, was interpreted by the masses surrounding the monastery in such a way that they imagined that the monks had also manned the machine guns, which had caused so many casualties. Towards noon Colonel Escobar arrived on the scene, in the command of a company of the Civil Guard, who negotiated with the rebels for their immediate surrender. The gates were opened and from the outside one could see the officers, mixing fraternally with the hated monks. An enraged mob, breaking through the cordon of Assault Guards and Civil Guards, invaded the monastery, killing the monks and officers with clubs and knives or shooting them point-blank, and did not even spare the corpses of their enemies. The body of Colonel Lacasa was <em>decapitated</em>, that of Captain Domingo was <em>decapitated, mutilated and impaled</em> on a pole and the body of Major Rebolledo was <em>castrated</em>.[11] Anonymous militiamen dispersed an impromptu march that celebrated the victory by displaying the impaled head of the Colonel. The cut-up remains of Captain Domingo were brought in a taxi to the zoo to be fed to the beasts.[12]
At the end of the Ramblas, in front of the Columbus monument, on the left was the building containing the <em>Military Offices</em>, and on the right, just in front, the <em>Atarazanas barracks</em>, divided into two zones, separated by broad plazas divided by walls and barred doors: the Maestranza (a building that once faced on the Rambla de Santa Mónica, which no longer exists), whose defenders were still holding out, and the old medieval shipyards, which had already been conquered. The Palacio de Dependencias (the current Gobierno Militar, where Salvador Puig Antich was tried in 1973), housed all the auxiliary services of the Division: Judge Advocates, auditors, accountants, prosecutors, mobilization center, etc. <em>The crossfire between the buildings of the Dependencias, the Columbus monument and Atarazanas, made them impregnable.</em> Guns commanded a wide expanse from the balcony of Atarazanas, which opened up on the Rambla, and caused many fatalities among the attackers. The siege had begun on the 19<sup>th</sup>. At dawn on the 20<sup>th</sup>, when the uprising had been defeated in the entire city, all available forces were deployed on the Rambla de Santa Mónica in expectation of the final assault. A 7.5 cm gun, under the command of Sergeant Gordo, maintained a steady barrage on the old masonry of Atarazanas, at the same time that the truck that had left from Pueblo Nuevo, with a machine gun installed on the back of the vehicle, protected with mattresses, approached from the other side of Atarazanas, maintaining a steady fire from the machine gun. The situation became untenable for the besieged: some one hundred fifty men, one hundred ten in the Dependencias and about forty in Atarazanas. Two more cannons and two mortars installed on the pier joined the siege. Airplanes continuously bombed and strafed the rebel positions. From nearby terraces men threw hand grenades. After they ran out of ammunition the soldiers in the Dependencias Militares decided to surrender, and, after negotiating with the Gobernación concerning guarantees of safety for the departure of the officers’ relatives who were in the building, flew the white flag shortly after noon, allowing the entrance of the Assault Guards. The anarchists who besieged the last redoubt of the rebels, in Atarazanas, rejected the intervention of the Civil Guard and the militants of the POUM in the final assault. The CNT Defense Committee, including all the members of the “Nosotros” group, was present at Atarazanas, and decided to storm it. The anarchist attackers approached the barracks, some taking cover by running from tree to tree, others taking cover “behind the rolling newspaper spools”.[13] In an imprudent advance Francisco Ascaso was killed by a shot in the head. Shortly afterwards the soldiers in Atarazanas surrendered, flying the white flag, at the sight of which the libertarians climbed over the walls and entered amidst a storm of gunfire directed at the officers, while they fraternized with the common soldiers. It was a little before one in the afternoon.
** <strong>THE MILITARY BALANCE SHEET: FROM THE FASCIST UPRISING TO THE WORKERS INSURRECTION</strong>
The main barracks were on the outskirts of the city and their predictable strategy,[14] confirmed by the documents of the conspirators in the uprising, which had fallen into the hands of Major Felip Díaz Sandino, consisted in converging in the center of the city to occupy the government buildings, especially the Palacio de la Generalitat and that of the Gobernación, the communications centers such as the Telephone, Post Office and Telegraph facilities, and the radio transmitters and to make contact with the Division headquarters (the Capitanía building).
The forces loyal to the Government of the Generalitat had a bicephalous leadership, divided between the <em>Police Station on Vía Layetana</em>,[15] under the direction of Captain Escofet and Major Alberto Arrando, who exercised provisional command over the Assault Guards, and where Companys had taken refuge; while in the <em>Palacio de Gobernación</em> the chancellor José María España directed operations, who had ordered the mobilization of two-thirds of the Civil Guard forces behind the Palace since eleven in the morning of the 19<sup>th</sup>.
The plan of the <em>confederal Defense Committee</em>, drafted by García Oliver, consisted in keeping activities in the vicinity of the barracks under observation, and allowing the rebel troops to leave the barracks without engaging them in battle, because it would be easier to defeat them in the streets. The close personal relations between the leaders of the CNT and various republican officials, especially from Atarazanas and the El Prat airfield, proved to be of decisive importance on July 19<sup>th</sup>,[16] with the seizure of the important arsenal at the Atarazanas barracks and the weapons stored at the Gobernación, together with the continuous air bombardments of the barracks held by the rebels. The collaboration of the CNT with the air force had already materialized several days before the rebel uprising, in the form of intrepid reconnaissance flights over Barcelona carried out by various members of the “Nosotros” group in planes piloted by the officers Ponce de León and Meana, with the knowledge of Díaz Sandino, commander of the air force at Prat.[17]
The arrogance and ineptitude of the rebel officers, who were convinced that “the mob” would run away in fear once they heard the first salvo of cannon fire, or once they saw the soldiers marching down the street in martial order, led to the ambushes that they suffered at Cinco de Oros, Balmes-Diagonal and at Icaria Avenue, where they were taken by surprise and massacred while advancing slowly down the middle of the street, with mules dragging their artillery pieces, without any scouts sent out ahead, or any protection from infantry. <em>The rebels were sure that the uprising would be a military cakewalk, as was the case on October 6, 1934.</em> But on July 19 the rebels did not have to confront four overweening Catalanists, led by an incompetent governor like the fascist Dencás, or an anti-CNT police chief like Badía, who was also hostile to Companys because of a dispute over women,[18] but the industrial proletariat of Barcelona, organized in defense committees in each working class neighborhood and in the groups of militants of the various trade unions of the CNT. That is, by those non-professional proletarian combatants who, over the course of the struggle itself, would be called and would call themselves, after the evening of July 19, and as they took up arms: <em>the workers militias, the militiamen</em>.
With the exception of Cinco de Oros, the initiative in the confrontations with the rebels was always seized by the proletariat: on the Paralelo, in Pueblo Nuevo, in Barceloneta, in San Andrés. The Assault Guards (1,960 men in all)[19] were incited to fight and resist by the courage and fearlessness of the workers, whom they overwhelmingly supported. On numerous occasions the Assault Guards hesitated, as they did at Diputación Street in their confrontation with the artillery unit, or even collaborated with the rebels, as they did at the Plaza de España, or were decimated and annihilated by the rebels, as happened to a company at the port of Baleares. The commanders of the Civil Guard, General Aranguren and Colonel Brotons, were “semi-prisoners” in the Palacio de Gobernación, closely guarded by José María España, Vicente Guarner (Escofet’s second-in-command) and Enrique Pérez Farrás. The Civil Guards were a non-factor during the events, up until the moment when Colonel Escobar received the order from General Aranguren to seize the University and the Hotel Colón. Escofet, the police commissioner, had ordered Aranguren by telephone, in the name of President Companys, to bring the Civil Guards into the conflict, in an attempt to dampen the proletarian combativeness and to break the dubious neutrality and wait-and-see attitude of the Civil Guard. But the mistrust, both on the part of the workers as well as the Government of the Generalitat, towards the Civil Guards was never dispelled. The troops of the Civil Guards had already received orders to concentrate in just two barracks on the night of July 18, those of Ausias March and Consejo de Ciento, in order to keep them under observation and to prevent any of them from going over to the side of the rebels, as took place with the detachment sent to the monastery of the Carmelites under the command of Major Recas. Both barracks were constantly under surveillance by groups of CNT militants and squads of the Assault Guards. And during their slow advance up Layetana, when they tried to get from the Palacio de Gobernación to the Plaza de Cataluña, the remaining two-thirds were separated by loyal soldiers from the Intendencia, and watched very closely by groups of armed workers. The intervention of the Civil Guard was therefore not decisive in Barcelona, and in any case its initial neutrality was more important, as was the prevention of any attempts on the part of its members to join the ranks of the rebel troops. The polemic concerning whether the military uprising was defeated by the units of the Assault Guards and the Civil Guards, “controlled” by the Government of the Generalitat, or by the CNT, is clearly an <em>a posteriori</em> political distortion, and is historically false, because both Guard forces were undermined by the enemy. <em>The contagious and unstoppable popular and revolutionary climate, which prevailed in Barcelona on July 19, compelled the forces of public order to do their duty, and they ended up later fraternally participating in the common struggle against fascism.</em>
It was the Barcelona proletariat, understood as the population of recent immigrants in the marginal and marginalized neighborhoods of “cheap housing” and the shantytowns of La Torrassa, Collblanc, Can Tunis, Santa Coloma, Somorrostro, and San Andrés, and the industrial workers (especially the textile workers, but also those employed in the metal industry, the port, the gas and electric utilities, construction, transport, chemicals and wood, etc.), paid badly and treated worse, subject to humiliating factory rules, draconian working conditions, generalized piecework and wages that did not cover the most basic necessities; with extremely harsh living conditions, insecure and miserable, in the neighborhoods of Sants, Pueblo Nuevo, Pueblo Seco, Clot, San Andrés and Barceloneta, or the numerous unemployed workers[20] of the various working class neighborhoods of Barcelona, Hospitalet and Badalona, who took the initiative, organized in each neighborhood into CNT defense committees.[21] The decisive impact that the victory of the insurrection in Barcelona would have had on all of Cataluña had also attracted to the city, already on the night of July 18, a group of miners from Alto Llobregat and numerous militants from Tarrasa.
The CNT in Barcelona during the 1930s created a world of deeply rooted and necessary social, family, neighborhood and immigrant relations, which took the form of a strong sense of neighborhood association, of an all-embracing kind, from trade union and culture to mutual aid, self-defense and solidarity against the abuses of the employers and the police. In a city with an extraordinarily high percentage of recent immigrants[22] since 1914, a word-of-mouth effect prevailed, in which the most experienced emigrant conveyed information about jobs and housing to his family or friends from the “village”, which led to a largely-unstudied phenomenon whereby people from the same rural towns came to live in the same urban neighborhoods, or even on certain streets.[23] The enormous strength of the CNT in the working class neighborhoods had been able to take root and flourish precisely by means of that patient and modest work of organizing, trade unionism, educating, “proletarianizing” and defending that massive population of migrant labor power that came from the rural world. Barcelona was an industrial city with huge social inequalities and profound class distinctions, with marked differences that were manifested both with regard to clothing and food, as well as in the well defined geographical class boundaries between the elegant bourgeois neighborhoods (around the Paseo de Gracia and the Derecha del Ensanche), with luxurious buildings where modernism flourished; and the working class neighborhoods, without infrastructure or public services, unhealthy, lacking urban amenities, subjected to the service of industry, in which the workers housing was nothing more than warehouses, next to the factories, for cheap and abundant labor power, which the rising unemployment of the 1930s plunged into misery and marginalization, concentrating the population of the old town at Bengali levels of density, and everywhere erasing the differences between proletarians and lumpen, who shared an identical situation of struggle for mere survival. Furthermore, the city’s recent social history, with confrontations like the general strike at La Canadiense (1919), and the outright class war of the years of pistolerismo (1917–1923) which concluded with the victory of the employers during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, showed that Barcelona society was not based on an authoritarian model of submission of the proletariat to the dictatorship of the local bourgeoisie, which did not hesitate to resort to state terrorism, or brutal repression by means of the army, to preserve its authority.
From the very first moment that the rebel troops began to leave their barracks, at around four-fifteen in the morning, until the afternoon of July 19, it was these defense committees (in which the anarchist affinity groups and the libertarian cultural centers had been integrated) and the cenetista militants, concentrated in the offices of the various trade unions of the CNT, especially the woodworkers, on Rosal Street, the Transport and Metal Workers, on the Rambla de Santa Mónica, and the Construction Workers, at Number 26 Mercaders Street, near the Casa Cambó, which led the armed struggle. At about nine in the morning an unstoppable revolutionary contagion began to spread, massive and mimetic, curious and bold, which by the afternoon had become a mass phenomenon, which filled the streets with an immense crowd that wanted to participate at any price in the battle of Barcelona against fascism, anxious not to miss the opportunity of intervening so that the people’s victory would be assured. The radio never ceased to encourage the struggle with its stirring reports. Requisitioned cars, on which the initials CNT-FAI or UHP had been emblazoned, full of armed militiamen, assured effective communication between barricades, the sites where battles were taking place and the trade union locals, driving at high speed down the side streets, which were totally controlled by the workers. The workers at the Telephone company, who had already cut off the communications of the Capitanía with the rebel barracks, installed telephones at some of the strategic barricades.
At the Brecha de San Pablo, at the intersection of the Paralelo with San Pablo Street, the Ronda de San Pablo and Rosal Street, next to El Molino, the armed proletariat, without help from anyone, defeated the army. But this victory would not have been possible without that immense crowd of people who harassed the rebels at every corner, from every balcony, from every doorway, from the terraces and rooftops, who watched the movements of the troops, built barricades, offered food and drink, or medical aid, information and shelter to the combatant workers, and who anxiously waited for someone to fall wounded in order to pick up their much-sought after rifle or pistol, in order to carry on with the battle.
Around nine in the morning a squadron coming from the Plaza de la Universidad proceeded down the Ronda de San Antonio[24] towards the Brecha de San Pablo. But already at the Ronda de San Pablo, in front of the Mercado de San Antonio, the rebels were attacked from all sides by a bold crowd, and they had to take refuge in the monastery of Los Escolapios de San Antonio, where, after an hour-long siege, their ammunition exhausted, they had no other choice but to surrender.
At eleven in the morning, the troops who had occupied the Plaza de España attempted to go to the aid of the rebels who were fighting in the Brecha de San Pablo, because after five hours of combat they needed ammunition and provisions, but not only could they not advance beyond Avenida Cine, but they were attacked by the crowds and had to retreat. After several hours of resistance they were forced to abandon a square that they could no longer control, fleeing in haste to the barracks they had left, and leaving behind their two artillery pieces that they had set up in the middle of the square, because the increasing and fearless attacks of the defense committees of Sants, Hostafrancs, La Torrassa, La Bordeta and Collblanc had taken the fairgrounds area and all the streets that led to the Plaza de España, transforming it into a massive trap without any possible defense, once the masses of the workers had secured Tarragona Street, the only street that remained open by which the soldiers could return to their barracks. At three in the afternoon the Plaza de España was in the hands of the people; it was an eerie plaza, strewn with corpses and dismembered animals.
Thanks to the fact that the rebel troops who were fighting in the Brecha remained totally isolated, without being able to obtain any help at all, between eleven and noon the final assault on the machine guns installed in the center of the Paralelo Avenue took place, which we described above. Between noon and two in the afternoon a small group waited for the last soldiers, who had taken refuge inside El Molino, to finally use up what remained of their ammunition. Meanwhile, the immense crowds that had seized the entire Paralelo, from the Plaza de España to Atarazanas, and from the Brecha to Los Escolapios, set off, victorious, enthusiastic, and with better weapons, towards those places where fighting was still taking place, anxious not to miss out on the glory of participating in the final victory over fascism, or towards the barracks of San Andrés, where it would soon be possible to obtain a much-desired rifle.
These same masses, armed or not, but filled with the revolutionary fever, we find in the Plaza de Cataluña, harassing the rebel troops until they caused them to break formation, and finally forcing them to take refuge in the Hotel Colón, without being able to successfully fulfill their mission to seize the nearby broadcasting station of Radio Barcelona, at Number 12 Caspe, or Radio Asociación, at Number 8 Rambla de los Estudios. This was the same crowd, curious, exalted and bold to the point of recklessness, that, at the intersection of Diputación and Lauria, stopped and paralyzed the artillery forces that had been dispatched to aid the rebels who were isolated and besieged in the Plaza de Cataluña, despite the fact that they were close enough to hear the rattle of the machine gun at the Hotel Colón. This was the same crowd that broke and dispersed the rebels in the Plaza de Urquinaona. This crowd, which did not observe any ideological tendencies, or parties, fraternized in the street fighting with Assault Guards and Civil Guards, causing them to relax their discipline. They were the same crowds that assaulted the barracks of San Andrés, seizing thirty thousand rifles, and which by their mere presence, exultant and festive, paralyzed the Assault Guards who were sent to prevent them from doing so. And it was this enraged and impatient crowd that on the 20<sup>th</sup> mercilessly executed monks and officers who had continued to resist, provoking a useless spilling of the people’s blood, and who displayed some of the corpses as lessons.
** <strong>ARMED VICTORY AND POLITICAL CAPITULATION</strong>
Counting the casualties on both sides the total was about four hundred fifty dead (mostly cenetistas) and thousands of wounded. <em>In thirty-two hours the people of Barcelona had defeated the army.</em> Almost all the churches and monasteries, some already on the morning of the 19<sup>th</sup>, were burned under controlled conditions or had coffins burned at their doors, with the notable exceptions of the Cathedral and the Church of the Holy Family, seized by the “mossos d’esquadra” and the libertarians, respectively. The Barcelona proletariat was armed with the thirty thousand rifles of San Andrés. Escofet resigned from his position as Police Chief at the end of July, because he could no longer guarantee public order. The Assault Guards and Civil Guards were, from a military point of view, undoubtedly more efficient and disciplined than the defense committees and the various groups of armed workers; but without the participation of the crowds in the street battles, these companies of Civil Guards or Assault Guards, politically conservative or fascist, would have passed with their weapons and supplies over to the side of the rebel troops: they were neither the winners nor the losers in this battle. The military and fascist uprising, which had counted on the complicity of the Church, failed almost everywhere in Spain, creating, as a reaction, <em>a revolutionary situation</em>. The defeat of the army by the proletariat in the “red zone” had completely destroyed the state monopoly on violence, leading to the blossoming of a myriad of local powers, directly associated with the local exercise of violence. <em>Violence and power were intimately related.</em> On the other hand, in Barcelona, the so-called “forces of public order”, those Assault Guards and the Civil Guards, which had been so undecided about which side to take, and which ended up fraternizing with the armed people, had been assigned to their barracks by the Government of the Generalitat, awaiting the opportune moment to deploy them in support of the counterrevolution. This generalized revolutionary situation was what caused the emergence, without the directives of any organization, or any directive centers of any kind, in every place in Spain where the fascist uprising had been defeated: committees; the arming of the proletariat; barricades and control patrols; popular militias; confiscated cars and trucks with the confederal initials painted on their sides, filled with men waving rifles over their heads, racing loudly up and down the streets; the disappearance of hats and ties; the burning of the churches; passes issued by the defense committees; looting of the houses of the bourgeoisie; revolutionary committees on a regional or local scale in Málaga, Barcelona, Aragón, Valencia, Gijón, Madrid, Santander, Sama de Langreo, Lérida, Castellón, Cartagena, Alicante, Almería, among the most well-known; persecution, imprisonment or murder “in situ” of fascists, rebel officers, employers and priests; confiscation of factories, barracks and buildings of all kinds; workers control committees and a long <em>etcetera</em> in which the exercise of violence WAS ITSELF the manifestation of the new workers power. In the weeks following July 19 in Barcelona a revolutionary situation arose, new and unprecedented, festive and savage, in which the execution of the fascist, of the boss or the priest, WAS the revolution. Violence and power were identical. Rather than dual power, there was an <em>atomization</em> of power. The revolutionary torrent dragged everything along with its furious, redemptive and inexorable ecstasy. Although the state institutions remained, the CNT-FAI decided it was necessary to <em>FIRST</em> crush fascism where it had triumphed, and accepted the creation alongside the Generalitat, whose existence was not questioned, of a Central Committee of Antifascist Militias of Cataluña (CCMA),[25] which was to be an extended version of the collaboration of the military liaison committee in which the Generalitat, the loyal military officers, the confederal Defense Committee and the other republican and working class parties and organizations participated during the street fighting.
Also on the 20<sup>th</sup>, Companys, as president of the Generalitat, which still existed, summoned the leaders of the various organizations to the Palace, including the anarchists. A debate was held at a plenum of militants, meeting at the <em>Casa CNT-FAI</em>, to determine whether they should respond to the invitation of the president of the Generalitat, and after a brief analysis of the situation in the streets, it was decided to send the Liaison Committee to the Generalitat to meet with Companys. The members of the delegation attended the meeting[26] armed, tired and filthy from battle: Buenaventura Durruti, Juan García Oliver,[27] “Abad de Santillán”, José Asens and Aurelio Fernández.[28] Meeting with the delegates of the various political and trade union organizations on <em>the patio of the oranges</em>, including Andreu Nin, Joan Comorera, Josep Coll, and Josep Rovira, they discussed their experiences in the events, excitedly passing from one group to another, until Companys appeared, accompanied by Pérez Farrás. The various groups combined into one, all next to one another and in a line, in respectful silence. Companys looked at all of them, one by one, satisfied, serene and smiling. Fixing his gaze on the CNT delegation he greeted them with these words: “You have won. Today you are the masters of the city and of Cataluña, because only you have defeated the fascist officers, and I hope that you will not be angry with me for reminding you that you did not lack the help of the Assault Guards and the ‘mossos d’esquadra’.” He continued, in a meditative tone: “But the truth is that although you were harshly persecuted right up until yesterday, today you have defeated the military and the fascists.” After greeting all of those present, standing, formed in a circle around him, as the masters of the street, he asked, “And now what shall we do?” Looking at the cenetistas, he told them: “Something must be done to deal with this new situation!” He continued, warning them that, although we had conquered in Barcelona, the struggle was not over, “we do not know when and how it will turn out in the rest of Spain”, then he called attention to his position and the role that he could play in his office: “for my part, I represent the Generalitat, a real but diffuse state of opinion and international recognition. They are mistaken who consider all of this as something useless”, and concluded by claiming that if it was necessary to form a new government of the Generalitat, “I am at your disposal if you want to speak to me”. García Oliver responded: “You can remain as President. We are not at all interested in the presidency or the government”, as if he had understood that Companys was resigning his position. After this first meeting,[29] informal and stressful, of the various delegates, standing all around Companys, the latter invited them to enter one of the Palace’s parlors, where they were comfortably seated, to coordinate the unity and the collaboration of all the antifascist forces, by way of the formation of a committee of militias, <em>that would control disorder in the streets and organize the militia columns</em> that had to be sent to Zaragoza.
The Enlarged Regional Committee of the CNT, informed by the CNT delegation of the interview at the Palace, agreed after brief deliberation to tell Companys by telephone that the CNT accepted on principle the constitution of a Central Committee of Antifascist Militias (CCMA), pending the <em>definitive</em> resolution that would be adopted at the Plenum of Local and District Committees, which was to convene on the 21<sup>st</sup>. That same night Companys ordered that the official bulletin of the Generalitat should print a decree mandating the creation of these civilian militias.
On Tuesday, July 21,[30] at the Casa CNT-FAI, the proposal of Companys that the CNT should participate in a CCMA was submitted for the formal approval of a Regional Plenum of Local and District Trade Unions, convoked by the Committee of the Regional Confederation of Labor of Cataluña. After the introductory report by Marianet, José Xena, representing the District of Baix Llobregat, proposed the withdrawal of the CNT delegates from the CCMA and that the organization should proceed with the revolution to establish libertarian communism. Juan García Oliver then spoke and characterized the debate and the decision that had to be made as a choice between an “absurd” anarchist dictatorship or collaboration[31] with the other antifascist forces in the Central Committee of Militias to continue the struggle against fascism. In this manner García Oliver, deliberately or not,[32] rendered the confused and ambiguous option of “going for broke” unviable to the Plenum. As opposed to the prospect of an intransigent “anarchist dictatorship”, the defense offered by Federica Montseny[33] of the acratic principles against all dictatorship seemed more logical, balanced and reasonable, supported by the arguments of Abad de Santillán concerning the danger of isolation and foreign intervention. Yet another position arose, defended by <em>Manuel Escorza</em>, who proposed the use of the government of the Generalitat as an instrument for socialization and collectivization, while waiting to dispose of it when it ceased to be useful to the CNT.[34] The plenum proved to be favorable to the idea of the CNT collaborating with the other antifascist forces in the Central Committee of Militias, with the one negative vote of the District Committee of Baix Llobregat. Most of those who attended the Plenum, including Durruti and Ortiz, remained silent, because they thought, as did so many others, that the revolution must be postponed until the capture of Zaragoza and the defeat of fascism. So, without further debate or philosophical considerations, it was decided to consolidate and institutionalize the Liaison Committee between the CNT and the Generalitat that existed prior to July 19, which was now transformed, expanded and further elaborated in the CCMA that, by embodying the antifascist unity of all the parties and trade unions, was to be responsible for imposing order on the rearguard and organizing and supplying the militias that had to go Aragón to fight the fascists.
At the first meeting of the Central Committee of Militias, held on the night of the 21<sup>st</sup>, the CNT representatives[35] clearly displayed for the republicans and Catalanists their power and independent character, having published a public proclamation that gave the Central Committee many more responsibilities and duties, both with regard to military matters and public safety, than were initially conceded by the Decree of the Generalitat. It was not an idle boast that caused Aurelio Fernández, in response to a question that had arisen at this first session of the CCMA about who defeated the army, to answer that it was “<em>the same people as always: the dregs of society”</em>, that is, the unemployed, the recent immigrants and the marginal and impoverished population living in the “cheap housing” of La Torrassa, Can Tunis, Somorrostro, Santa Coloma and San Andrés, and the abused industrial proletariat that, in extremely harsh living conditions, devastated by massive unemployment, worked long hours, went to work hungry, or worked temporary jobs for piecework rates, piled up in the working class neighborhoods of Pueblo Nuevo, Sants, Barceloneta, Chino, Hostafrancs or Pueblo Seco, who rented or subleased small shacks, houses or apartments that they had to share with others because of the unaffordable rents.
Meanwhile, Companys had authorized <em>Martín Barrera, the Minister of Labor</em>, to make a radio announcement of the regulations concerning the reduction of the working day, wage increases, rent reductions and new labor laws which had to first be agreed to by the representatives of the employers associations, such as the Employers Federation, the Chambers of Industry and of Real Estate, etc., to whom he explained the necessity of channeling the revolutionary impulse of the masses, as the director of the potash mines of Suria had in fact already done, who preferred to suffer financial losses instead of going back to the mine and being taken hostage by the miners. During the course of the meeting various representatives of the employers received phone calls warning them not to return to their homes, because patrols of armed men were looking for them. The meeting ended when it became clear that the businessmen who were present no longer represented anyone. The radio announcement was broadcast anyway, several days later, in an attempt to provide a safe framework for popular enthusiasm and demands.
On Thursday, July 23, at the Casa CNT-FAI, the question of the entry of the anarchosyndicalists into the CCMA and the significant opposition to this policy on the part of the militants, was submitted to debate at a Joint Plenum of the CNT and FAI,[36] that is, a Plenum of leading militants.[37] During the evening of that same day, the members of the “Nosotros” group met at the house of Gregorio Jover to analyze the situation,[38] and to bid farewell[39] to Buenaventura Durruti prior to his departure on the following day with a Column of militiamen, who left the next morning from Cinco de Oros, and to Antonio Ortiz, who embarked with another Column on a train on the evening of the 24<sup>th</sup>.[40]
At nine-thirty on the morning of the 24<sup>th</sup>, Durruti, in the name of the CCMA, delivered a radio address in which he warned the cenetistas of the imperious necessity of remaining vigilant against any counterrevolutionary attempts and not to abandon what they had conquered in Barcelona.[41] Durruti seemed to be aware of the danger of leaving the rearguard unsecured, with a class enemy that had not yet been eliminated. Everything had to be postponed until after the capture of Zaragoza.
On Sunday, July 26, at the Casa CNT-FAI, the question of the CNT’s collaboration in the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias, in which the representatives of the CNT were already participating,[42] was once again submitted for the formal approval of a Regional Plenum of Local and District Federations of Trade Unions, convoked by the Committee of the Regional Confederation of Labor of Cataluña. The result was that the decisions made by the Expanded Regional Committee to collaborate with the Government of the Generalitat and the other parties, which already constituted an irreversible reality, were <em>ratified again</em> by another Regional Plenum of Trade Unions. It was a policy of <em>fait accompli</em>, in which the Plenum of the 26<sup>th</sup> performed the role of a simple rubber stamp for decisions that had already been made. Although we have no record of the debates that took place, the final accord left no room for doubts concerning the serious opposition that arose against the acceptance of the collaborationist position of the superior committees of the CNT-FAI—all we know is that there was fierce opposition. The resolution on the analysis of the current revolutionary situation concluded with a statement that support for the position was “<em>absolutely unanimous”</em>. Curiously, the position that was approved at this Plenum was defined as the “same position”, that is, the one that the CNT delegation had already provisionally accepted when it met with Companys, the same one that was approved by the Regional Plenum of the 21<sup>st</sup>, and the same one that was approved at the Joint CNT-FAI Plenum on the 23<sup>rd</sup>. What position?: “<em>the fascist rebels are the only enemies of the people”</em>, and therefore neither the bourgeois government of the Generalitat nor the republicans were enemies that had to be attacked, but allies. The renunciation of revolution was <em>already</em> absolute: “<em>No one should go any further.</em> No one must break ranks.” An appeal was made regarding the moral obligation to accept the decisions of the majority[43] and a profession of faith in the antifascist cause was pronounced: “Every day, against fascism, <em>only against the fascism that rules half of Spain</em>.” The final communiqué of the Regional Plenum concluded with an unequivocal and indisputable order to accept and obey the CCMA: “there is a COMMITTEE OF ANTIFASCIST MILITIAS AND A SUBORDINATE BODY CALLED THE SUPPLY COMMISSION. It is everyone’s duty to comply with their directives, and regularly follow the procedures of all their orders.”
On July 28 the Local Federation of Trade Unions of Barcelona proclaimed <em>the end of the general strike</em>.
** <strong>COMMITTEES EVERYWHERE; COORDINATION NOWHERE</strong>
Violence and power go hand in hand. Once the state’s monopoly on violence was destroyed, because the army was defeated in the streets and the proletariat had taken up arms, a revolutionary situation opened up that imposed its violence, its power and its order. The power of an armed working class.
The <em>revolutionary committees</em>—defense, factory, neighborhood or town, workers control committees, supply committees, etc.—formed <em>the embryo</em> of the organs of power of the working class. They initiated a methodical expropriation of the property of the bourgeoisie, implemented industrial and agricultural collectivization, organized the popular militias that stabilized the military fronts during the first few days, organized control patrols and rearguard militias that imposed the “new revolutionary order” by means of the violent repression of the Church, the employers, fascists and former pistoleros and yellow trade unionists, since counterrevolutionary snipers operated continuously for a whole week in the city. <em>But these committees were incapable of coordinating their efforts and creating a centralized working class power.</em> The initiatives and activities of the revolutionary committees frequently overlapped with and were duplicated by those carried out by the leaders of the various traditional organizations of the workers movement, including the CNT and the FAI, or a POUM that was still making demands for higher wages and minor reforms which had already been surpassed by the events.
A revolutionary situation existed on the streets and in the factories, and there were some potential organs of power of the proletariat: <em>the committees</em>, which no organization was capable or desirous of coordinating, strengthening and transforming into authentic organs of power. The spontaneity of the masses had its limitations; their political and trade union organizations were even more limited. Neither possessed a prepared, precise and realistic program that could be applied in that revolutionary situation. Indeed, <em>the anarchist leaders not only did not know what to do with power, they did not even know what it was</em>. Against the fascist threat, which had triumphed in half of Spain, they imposed the slogan of <em>antifascist unity</em>, of the sacred union with the democratic and republican bourgeoisie. Rather than a situation of dual power shared between the Generalitat and the Central Committee, there was a duplication of powers. Furthermore, the superior committees of the CNT, in mid-August, had already decided to disband the CCMA as soon as the conditions permitted and the spontaneity in the streets subsided sufficiently. In the meantime, however, ever since July 19, the committees that had spontaneously emerged everywhere pragmatically imposed the new political, social and economic reality that had arisen from the victory of the workers insurrection over the army, and in Cataluña <em>these committees, in factories and residential areas, exercised all power</em>.
** <strong>SEVENTY YEARS LATER: CONCLUSIONS AND REFLECTIONS</strong>
<em>The state is the organization of the monopoly of violence at the service of the ruling social class.</em> The capitalist state is one of the most important instruments of the rule of the bourgeois class over the proletariat, that is, the apparatus of repression that assures the capitalist social relations of production. The first task of a proletarian revolution is the total destruction of this capitalist state, and the consolidation of a workers power. <em>Without the intention and practical action (on the part of a revolutionary organization) to destroy the capitalist state one cannot speak of a proletarian revolution.</em> Perhaps one could speak of a revolutionary movement, a revolutionary situation, or a “popular revolution”, or of <em>antifascist unity</em>, a war against fascism, or a fantasy “dictatorship of the proletariat without the destruction of the capitalist state”, the discovery of the “brilliant” analyses of the POUM, etc., but not of a proletarian revolution. Ideological ambiguity was congenital to the libertarian movement. And this ambiguity was made into a virtue by the antifascist CNT bureaucrats and by the clever bourgeois politicians, who knew how to channel the muddy waters of anarchist incoherence into their mills. No attempt was ever made at any time to destroy the bourgeois state apparatus.
<em>In Barcelona, the CCMA was the product of the working class and anarchist victory of July 19, but it was also the product of the refusal of the anarchosyndicalists to destroy the state.</em> The CCMA, the outcome of a deal between Companys and the libertarians, but also accepted by the “Marxists” (the POUM and the Stalinists), was <em>an organization of class collaboration</em>, by means of which the Government of the Generalitat regained control over those functions it had lost because the anarchists had conquered them in the streets: basically the police, public order and the military. The CCMA was never, and never claimed to be, an organ of workers power, and therefore there was never a situation of dual power that pitted the CCMA against the Government of the Generalitat. It is true that, among the anarchists, there were diverse conceptions concerning the revolutionary situation that had arisen in Cataluña after the events of July 19–20, 1936: the first conception, and the one that was by far the dominant one, was the one propounded by Abad de Santillán and Federica Montseny, which called for absolute and sincere <em>collaboration</em> with the other political forces (including the bourgeois ones) in an antifascist unity that they believed was indispensable in order to win the war, and implied “loyal” collaboration with the Government of the Generalitat as the lesser evil so as to prosecute the “revolution” and the war at the same time. The second conception, advocated by García Oliver, theoretically consisted in “<em>going for broke”</em>, that is, it entailed the establishment of an “anarchist dictatorship”, in which a vanguard of enlightened leaders replaces the proletariat, taking power in its name, but in practice meant governmental collaboration, in the naïve belief that the “black and red” color of the Ministers could change the nature of the government in which they participated. The third conception, pragmatically proposed by Manuel Escorza, consisted in using the Government of the Generalitat to legalize the “revolutionary conquests”, controlling the Ministries of Defense and Public Order, and relying on the indisputable dominance of the CNT in the streets in order to attempt to “<em>crystallize the revolutionary situation”</em>, in the expectation that these measures would lead to more favorable conditions for the definitive revolutionary victory, while at the same time consolidating the real power of a libertarian organization parallel to the CNT-FAI, autonomous and independent, based on the Committee of Investigation and the CNT Defense Committees, an organization that would be capable of coordinating and centralizing all the anarchosyndicalist positions in the Government of the Generalitat, and which later made possible the workers insurrection of May 1937 against the provocations of Companys and the Stalinists. All of these positions rapidly evolved towards <em>the same tactic of integration of the workers movement in the program of antifascist unity</em> with the POUM, the Stalinists and the bourgeoisie, <em>with the exclusive goal of winning the war against the fascists</em>. This in turn caused a distinction to emerge among the anarchosyndicalist between the “redskins” and the “woodpeckers” or collaborationists, which was entirely different from the previous divisions between FAIstas and Trentistas. The critique directed by the “redskins” at the collaborationists, which was at first purely verbal and moralistic, evolved towards a pessimism that led the majority to passivity or a flight forward, which caused them to see no other solution besides abandoning all militancy or enlisting in the military forces to win the war against fascism, even if this army was, after the summer of 1937, the Popular Army, that is, the bourgeois army of the Republic, once the militarization of the Militias had been implemented. The most coherent opposition to collaborationism that emerged among the libertarians was the opposition that took shape in The Friends of Durruti Group, which after January 1938 was practically defunct, because it had succumbed to the combined attacks of Stalinist repression and the opposition of the “government” cenetistas.
There was no party, trade union or vanguard group that called for the destruction of the bourgeois state and the revolutionary path of strengthening, <em>coordinating and centralizing the organs of power that had arisen in July 1936: the workers committees</em>. After July 20 the Barcelona proletariat exercised a kind of dictatorship “from below” in the streets and the factories, unrelated and indifferent to “its” political and trade union organizations which not only respected the state apparatus of the bourgeoisie instead of destroying it but actually reinforced it. In the absence of a revolutionary party capable of formulating the battle for the program of the proletarian revolution,[44] the war against the fascist enemy imposed the ideology of antifascist unity and war on behalf of the program of the democratic bourgeoisie. <em>The war was not conceived as a class war, but as an antifascist war between the state of the fascist bourgeoisie and the state of the democratic bourgeoisie.</em> And this choice between two bourgeois options (democratic and fascist) <em>ALREADY presupposes the defeat of the revolutionary alternative</em>. For the revolutionary workers movement antifascism was the worst consequence of fascism. The ideology of antifascist unity was the worst enemy of the revolution, and the best ally of the bourgeoisie. The necessities of this war, between two bourgeois options, stifled any revolutionary alternative and suppressed the methods of the class struggle that made possible the victory of the working class insurrection of July 19. It was necessary to renounce the revolutionary conquests in favor of winning the war against the fascists: “we renounce everything except victory.”[45]
The alternatives that were thus posed were false: it was not about winning the war first and then carrying out the revolution (the Stalinist proposal), or even of fighting the war and carrying out the revolution at the same time (the POUM and libertarian thesis), but of abandoning the methods and the goals of the proletariat. The Popular Militias of July 21–25 were authentic proletarian Militias; the Militias of October 1936, militarized or not, were <em>already</em> an army of workers in a war directed by the bourgeoisie (whether fascist or republican) in the service of the bourgeoisie (whether democratic or fascist).
The “social revolution” and the expropriation of the factories initiated by the anarchosyndicalist rank and file were in conflict with the Popular Frontism of the anarchist and POUMist leaders. There are even people who speak of <em>a social “revolution” without the seizure of state power</em>, and even of a divorce between the socioeconomic and political aspects of the revolution.[46] In any event, the Popular Frontism of the anarchist leaders, and the ideology of antifascist unity, prevailed over any revolutionary consideration of destroying the state, which was always rejected as utopian and unrealistic, and which never went further than fantasy declarations of good intentions on the part of the most verbally radical elements, like García Oliver.
The CCMA was never an organ of workers power. A situation of DUAL POWER never existed. In any case there was a DUPLICATION OF POWERS between the CCMA and certain Ministries of the Generalitat, and above all a <em>complementary</em> labor on the part of both against the revolutionary committees.
The vacuum of state or centralized power led to <em>an initial fragmentation and atomization of power</em> that was resolved in September 1936 with the entry of the working class organizations into the Government of the Generalitat (and later in that of the Republic). Neither the anarchists, nor the CCMA, in which they were dominant, nor the POUM, ever attempted to remove the republican bourgeoisie from power, or destroy the state apparatus, which always remained in the hands of Companys. The definitive armed defeat of the proletariat, which took place in May 1937, was the only possible outcome of the decision made by the working class organizations in July 1937 to renounce the <em>absolute and total</em> seizure of a power that the proletariat already exercised in the streets and the factories. <em>May 1937 had already begun in July 1936</em>.
[1] Information drawn from the “Declaración manuscrita de Servando Meana Miranda, capitán arma de Aviación”.
[2] Abad de Santillán brought a hundred pistols to the Construction Trade Union. See: Diego Abad de Santillán, <em>Por qué perdimos la Guerra</em> [1939], Plaza Janés, Esplugues de Llobregat, 1977, p. 76.
[3] Sergeant Manzana, despite the fact that his name is erroneously cited in many books as a leading figure in the revolutionary events of July 19, could not participate in the struggle because he was being held prisoner in the barracks brig, and was not liberated until the evening of the 20<sup>th</sup>. See: Marquez and Gallardo, <em>Ortiz, General sin dios ni amo</em>, Hacer, Barcelona, 1999, p. 101.
[4] At six in the morning a company of assault guards from Barceloneta received orders to proceed to the Paralelo, but after unexpectedly running into a company of sappers in front of the Atarazanas they suffered numerous casualties, among others Captain Francisco Arrando, their commanding officer (the brother of Alberto Arrando, Chief of Staff of Security and Assault Guards). The company was pinned down for thirty hours in the warehouses along the Baleares Dock, until the Atarazanas barracks surrendered.
[5] The Plan of General Mola, the organizer of the military revolt against the republican government, ordered the use of terror by the rebels as the only effective means to confront massive popular resistance. It expressly contemplated employing threats against the children and wives of the resistance, as well as mass shootings. From the very start the minority of rebel military personnel and fascists needed to impose their rule with terror over a much more numerous enemy, by way of a war of extermination that had already been practiced in the colonial war in Morocco.
[6] Because the entire breadth of San Pablo Street was swept by machine gun fire from the machine guns situated in the center of the Paralelo and on the roof of the building next to El Molino.
[7] And also many anonymous CNT militants, among others, Quico Sabaté, a militant from the Woodworkers Trade Union, who also participated in the assault on the Atarazanas barracks on the 20<sup>th</sup>, and who was a famous guerrilla fighter during the Franco regime.
[8] It appears that Colonel Lacasa had already, during the previous night, prepared to use the monastery as a hospital-fortress, and had also installed machine guns on the roof of the Casa de Les Punxes, across the street from the monastery.
[9] The incredible exploits of “El Artillero” were summarized in a brief account published in <em>Solidaridad Obrera</em> (July 27, 1936), in which we are told how he had conquered two cannons in the battle fought against the light artillery at Diputación-Lauria, how he then forced the surrender of the rebels who had taken refuge in the nearby Ritz, after firing three salvos; from there he went to the Plaza de Santa Ana (today an unnamed square, at the end of the Puerta del Ángel, at the intersection with Cucurella-Arcs) where he fired several volleys of indirect shellfire at the Hotel Colón until the rebels inside it surrendered. Then he took his cannons down Layetana Street in order to fire thirty-eight volleys at the Capitanía. From there he went to Diagonal, in order to end the evening in the Sants neighborhood, firing on Galileo Street at a church, until its defenders surrendered.
[10] He was chief of the “mossos d’esquadra” in October 1934. His death sentence was commuted and he was amnestied and then joined the military reserve. On July 19, without assuming any official responsibility, he effectively participated as an organizer of the street battles. Appointed by Companys to be secretary of the proposed Committee of Civilian Militias, he became the military advisor of the Durruti Column.
[11] Lacruz, p. 50; Romero, p. 525.
[12] José María Fontana, <em>Los catalanes en la Guerra de España</em>, Acervo, Barcelona, 1977.
[13] Juan García Oliver, <em>El eco de los pasos</em>, Ruedo Ibérico, Barcelona-Paris, 1978, p. 189.
[14] Felipe Díaz Sandino went to the airport at Logroño to investigate the preparations being made for a military coup promoted by Captain del Val, coming from Madrid. Once he confirmed the existence of a conspiracy he informed Generals Núñez de Prado and Casares Quiroga. Faced with the passivity of his superiors he decided to purge the right wing elements under his command and accumulated a stock of bombs and machine gun ammunition at the airport of El Prat, at the same time remaining in close contact with the Generalitat and the CNT.
[15] Two fast cars, with full gas tanks, were parked in the courtyard of the police station, prepared for the flight of Companys, Escofet and their families, who were to be taken to the port at Maresme, where a ship was waiting to take them to France.
[16] Juan García Oliver, “Ce que fut le 19 de juillet”, <em>Le Libertaire</em>, (August 18, 1938).
[17] Ricardo Sanz, “Francisco Ascaso Morio”, mimeographed text.
[18] Enric Ucelay-Da Cal, “El ‘complot’ nacionalista contra Companys. Novembre-Desembre del 36’, in <em>La Guerra civil a Catalunya (1936–1939), Vol. 3</em>, Edicions 62, Barcelona, 2004, pp. 205–214.
[19] This was a police unit, with little real military training, most of whose members were older men with wives and children.
[20] The defense committees of the CNT during the 1930s had recruited into their ranks numerous unemployed workers with a dual objective: one of solidarity, because they paid them a wage, and the other, tactical, to prevent them from becoming strikebreakers. This recruitment was always palliative and assigned on a rotating basis, both for reasons of solidarity and in order to prevent any professionalization and to ensure that the largest possible number of militants should pass through the defense committees, which in case of emergency could rely on an ample number of trained, combat-ready members. See Chris Ealham, <em>Class, Culture and Conflict in Barcelona, 1898–1937</em>, Routledge, London, 2005.
[21] In Barcelona the defense committees constituted an authentic clandestine military structure, already formed in 1931 and powerfully reinforced in 1935. See “Ponencia presentada a la Federación Local de Grupos Anarquistas de Barcelona. Comité Local de Preparación Revolucionaria”, Barcelona, January 1935. The groups that signed this document were The Indomables, Nervio, Nosotros, Tierra Libre and Germen.
[22] Between 1900 and 1930 Barcelona’s population doubled, increasing from half a million to one million inhabitants. The opening of Layetana, the construction of the Ensanche, and the public works on the subway and the International Exposition of 1929 required a vast supply of cheap labor, which during the 1930s went to swell the bloated ranks of the unemployed.
[23] Such as, for example, the torrential emigration from “the ravine of hunger” (a mountainous district in the provinces of Castellón and Teruel) to Pueblo Nuevo between 1910 and 1930, and from Murcia to La Torrassa, during the 1930s.
[24] There is a well-known photograph of the barricade built on Tigre Street, at the corner of the Ronda de San Antonio, taken by Agusti Centelles.
[25] José del Barrio, in his mimeographed memoirs, claims that he was responsible, as secretary of the UGT, for suggesting to García Oliver the idea of forming the CCMA on the afternoon of the 20<sup>th</sup>, before his interview with Companys, and that therefore García Oliver appropriated the idea and conveyed it to Companys. Regardless of who originated this idea, the idea of forming a CCMA that would resolve the burning issues of creating militias to confront the fascist army in Aragón, and Control Patrols that would replace the sequestered forces of public order, was something that was imposed by the existing revolutionary situation. It is not necessary to seek the copyright: only with hindsight can we debate the circumstances that led to the creation of the CCMA, in the form it assumed; on the 20<sup>th</sup>, however, it seemed to everyone involved to be obvious, necessary and inevitable, just as it was everywhere else in Spain where the military uprising was defeated by the workers insurrection.
[26] For a reliable version of this famous interview, which is very different from the all-too-imaginative version offered by García Oliver, see: Josep Coll and Josep Pané, <em>Josep Rovira. Una vida al servei de Catalunya i del socialisme</em>, Ariel, Barcelona, 1978, pp. 85–87.
[27] Juan García Oliver himself, in 1950, also provided a different, “more complete and believable” version, of his famous account (published in July 1937) of his interview with Companys: “The military-fascist uprising had taken place exactly as we had predicted. Companys […] took refuge in the Barcelona Police Station, where he arrived at seven in the morning on the 19<sup>th</sup> of July, as he was terrified by the consequences of what he expected to happen, because he assumed that, with all the soldiers of the Barcelona regiments joining the uprising, they would easily sweep away all resistance. However, the forces of the CNT-FAI, almost alone, faced the rebels for those two memorable days and, after a bitter and bloody struggle […] we defeated all the regiments […]. For all these reasons, Companys, facing the representatives of the CNT-FAI, was overwhelmed and confused. Confused, because, in his consciousness he only thought about the weight of the great responsibility that they bore towards us and the Spanish people for not having heeded all our predictions […]. Overwhelmed, because despite the fact that they did not fulfill the commitments they made with us, the CNT-FAI in Barcelona and in Cataluña had defeated the rebels […]. This is why, when he addressed us, Companys told us: ‘Now I know that you have many reasons to complain and to express your dissatisfaction with me. I have fought against you for a long time and I was incapable of really appreciating your true worth. It is never too late, however, to sincerely make amends, and the way I shall do so, which you will now see, has the value of a confession: if I had appreciated you at your true worth, it is possible that we would not be facing the situation we are now facing; but there is no other remedy, now, you alone have defeated the rebel officers, and logically you should govern. If that is what you think, then I am quite pleased to surrender to you the Presidency of the Generalitat and, if you think I can be of any use in another position, you need only tell me what post I should occupy. BUT DUE TO THE FACT THAT WE STILL DO NOT KNOW EXACTLY WHO HAS EMERGED VICTORIOUS IN THE OTHER PARTS OF SPAIN, AND IF YOU BELIEVE THAT FROM THE PRESIDENCY OF THE GENERALITAT I CAN STILL BE OF SERVICE BY ACTING AS THE LEGAL REPRESENTATIVE OF CATALUÑA, LET ME KNOW, SO THAT FROM THIS OFFICE, AND ALWAYS WITH YOUR CONSENT, WE SHALL CONTINUE THE STRUGGLE UNTIL IT IS CLEAR WHO HAS WON.’ For our part, and this is what the CNT-FAI thought, we understand that Companys should still remain at the head of the Generalitat, precisely because we have not filled the streets and fought specifically for the social revolution, but to defend ourselves from the fascist military coup.” [From García Oliver’s responses to Bolloten’s inquiries.]
[28] Aurelio Fernández replaced Francisco Ascaso on the liaison committee, whose other members were Durruti, Oliver, Santillán and Asens.
[29] Information derived from the version provided by Coll and Pané, <em>op. cit.</em>, pp. 85–87.
[30] “On July 21, 1936, a Regional Plenum of Local Federations and District Committees, convoked by the Regional Committee of Cataluña, was held in Barcelona. At this meeting, the situation was analyzed and it was unanimously determined not to speak about libertarian communism as long as we had not yet conquered that part of Spain that was in the hands of the rebels. The Plenum therefore decided not to proceed to enact totalitarian measures […] it decided in favor of collaboration, and agreed to form, with only one vote in opposition, that of Bajo Llobregat, together with all the Parties and Organizations, the Committee of Antifascist Militias. The CNT and the FAI so order their representatives by resolution of this Plenum.” Quoted from <em>Informe de la delegación de la CNT al Congreso Extraordinario de la AIT y resoluciones del mismo</em>, p. 96.
[31] See Juan García Oliver, “El Comité central de Milcias Antifascistas de Cataluña”, in <em>De julio a julio. Un año de lucha</em>, Tierra y Libertad, Barcelona, 1937. García Oliver wrote this article one year after the events in question, and it is very much influenced by the political context following May 1937.
[32] “Finally, my informant claims that at the assembly or plenum of the 21<sup>st</sup>, García Oliver proposed the question of anarchist dictatorship or libertarian communism and that it was not supported by the assembly. I say that if he did so, he did so without conviction, as he was convinced that an anarchist dictatorship could only lead to disaster. He posed this dramatic dilemma in order to create more support for his collaborationist choice [….] García Oliver confirms this air of comedy by arrogantly writing the following: ‘the CNT and the FAI decided upon collaboration and democracy, renouncing revolutionary totalitarianism, which would have led to the strangling of the revolution by the confederal or anarchist dictatorship’.” See José Peirats, “Mise au point sur de notes”, <em>Noir et Rouge</em>, No. 38, June 1967.
[33] The previously cited testimonies of José del Barrio, Juan García Oliver himself, in 1950, and José Peirats, are corroborated by that of Federica Montseny: “Nobody even ever imagined, not even García Oliver, who was the most Bolshevik of all, the idea of seizing revolutionary power. It was only later, when we saw the extent of the movement and of the popular initiatives that we began to discuss whether we could or should go for broke.” (Abel Paz, <em>Durruti: El proletariado en armas</em>, Bruguera, Barcelona, 1978, pp. 381–382.) [English language edition: Abel Paz, <em>Durruti: The People Armed</em>, Black Rose Books, Montreal, 1996.]
[34] Letter from García Oliver to Abel Paz. See Abel Paz, <em>Durruti en la Revolución española</em>, FAL, Madrid, 1996, pp. 504–505. [English language edition: Abel Paz, <em>Durruti in the Spanish Revolution</em>, tr. Chuck Morse, AK Press, San Francisco, 2006. Available online at: [[http://libcom.org/library/durruti-spanish-revolution][libcom.org]].]
[35] The anarchosyndicalist representatives were Josep Asens, Buenaventura Durruti and Juan García Oliver for the CNT, and Aurelio Fernández and Diego Abad de Santillán for the FAI. Durruti was later replaced by Marcos Alcón.
[36] “Just how far can we proceed with an experiment in libertarian communism in Cataluña, without having ended the war and with the dangers posed by foreign intervention? This dilemma was posed to the anarchists militants and the representatives of the trade unions on July 23, at a Plenum of the two organizations […] it was decided to preserve the antifascist bloc, and to issue the directive to the entire region: we must not proclaim libertarian communism. Seek to maintain hegemony in the committees of the antifascist militias and postpone any totalitarian attempt to realize our ideas.” Quoted from <em>El anarquismo en España. Informe del Comité Peninsular de la Federación Anarquista Ibérica al Movimiento Libertario Internacional</em>, n.d. [1938?], p. 2.
<br>
Another document confirms the testimony of the one just quoted above: “At a Plenum attended by both the anarchist and the confederal organizations it was agreed, due to the urgent circumstances that prevailed at that time, to accept collaboration and to participate directly in the state institutions of political and economic administration.” Quoted from the FAI pamphlet, <em>Informe que este Comité de Relaciones de Grupos Anarquistas de Cataluña presenta a los camaradas de la Región</em>, n.d. [March 1937?].
[37] Because of the urgency of making decisions on these matters, after July 19 the horizontal and federative machinery of the CNT collapsed and with it any practice of direct democracy also fell by the wayside. The usual practice was to adopt the important decisions that had to be made at meetings of leaders, members of the Regional Committee, the Local Federation of Barcelona, the Peninsular Committee of the FAI, and all those who had positions of responsibility in the CCMA, the Council of the Economy or the Investigation Committee, the Control Patrols, etc. These decisions made by the leading militants and office holders would then be submitted at a later time to Plenums for ratification, thus “formally” preserving the appearances of the traditional modus operandi of the CNT.
[38] García Oliver reiterated his proposal to take power by taking advantage of the concentration of militiamen who were supposed to depart for the front.
[39] García Oliver, <em>El eco…</em>, pp. 190–191. Gallardo and Márquez, <em>Ortiz</em>, pp. 109–110.
[40] Antonio Ortiz, “La segunda Columna sale de Barcelona”.
[41] “You have a duty now. Come to a rally at the Paseo de Gracia at ten in the morning. A warning, workers of Barcelona, all of you and especially those of the CNT. The positions that have been conquered in Barcelona must not be abandoned. The capital must not be abandoned. You must remain on permanent guard, eyes open, in case you have to respond to any possible events. Workers of the CNT, all as one man we must go the aid of the comrades of Aragón.”
[42] See the PROCLAMATION signed by the Committee of the CRTC, which we reprint in its entirety in the Appendix. An article appeared in <em>Solidaridad Obrera</em> (July 27, 1936) which stressed that “the confederal position, in relation to the revolutionary situation, will continue to be the same one maintained up until now”, as if it was necessary to overcome significant resistance to what was already approved at the Plenum of the 21<sup>st</sup>.
[43] The horizontal and federative organizational machinery of the CNT, which rapidly broke down and became a mere formal ratification of the debates and resolutions already adopted by the superior committees, was not conducive to the emergence of “tendencies” capable of defending their minority positions within the organization.
[44] That is: destruction of the capitalist state (whether fascist or republican); extension and centralization of the committees as organs of workers power; socialization of the economy; proletarian control over the war effort; and dictatorship of the proletariat.
[45] Propaganda slogan coined by Ilya Ehrenburg, which <em>Solidaridad Obrera</em> under the editorship of Toryho falsely attributed to Durruti. See Ilya Ehrenburg, <em>Corresponsal en la Guerra civil española</em>, Júcar, Gijón, 1979, p. 24.
[46] Santos Juliá, “De la división orgánica al gobierno de unidad nacional”, in <em>Socialismo y guerra civil. Anales de historia de la Fundación Pablo Iglesias, Vol. 2</em> (1987), pp. 227–245.
<br>
* Part 2 — The CNT-FAI in the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias of Cataluña[47]
<quote>
“<em>All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place.”</em>
George Orwell, <em>1984</em>
</quote>
<quote>
“<em>Obsequium amicos, veritas odium parit.”</em> <em>(Compliance raises friends, and truth breeds hate.)</em>
Terence, <em>Andria</em>
</quote>
** <strong>POWER IS IN THE STREETS</strong>
<em>The real power of decision and execution was in the streets, it was the power of the proletariat in arms, and it was exercised by the local committees, the defense committees and the workers control committees</em>, spontaneously expropriating factories, workshops, buildings and land; organizing, arming and transporting to the front the groups of volunteer militiamen that had previously been recruited; burning churches or converting them into schools or warehouses; forming patrols to <em>spread the social war</em>; manning the <em>barricades</em>, which were now class frontiers, and which controlled all traffic and manifested the power of the committees; resuming production at the factories, without employers or managers, or converting them to military production; requisitioning cars and trucks, or food for the supply committee; taking bourgeoisie, fascists and priests “for a ride”; replacing the obsolete republican municipal governments, and imposing in each locality their absolute authority in all domains, paying no attention to any orders from the Generalitat, or the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias (CCMA).
On the night of the 19<sup>th</sup> there was no other real power besides that of “the federation of the barricades”, and this power had no other immediate goal besides the defeat of the rebels. The army and the police, either dissolved or confined to their barracks, disappeared from the streets after July 20. They were replaced by Popular Militias composed of armed workers, who fraternized with the discharged soldiers and civil and assault guards, many of them in civilian clothing, in one victorious mass, which transformed them into the vanguard of the revolutionary insurrection.
In Barcelona, during the following week, while the CCMA was still only a provisional power, <em>neighborhood committees</em>[48], as the expression of the power acquired by the defense committees, coordinated their activities in an authentic urban federation that, in the streets and the factories, exercised all power, in every domain, in the absence of any effective exercise of power by the municipal governments, the national government, or the Generalitat. The dozens of barricades erected in Barcelona were still manned in October, controlling vehicular traffic and checking for identification papers and the requisite passes, issued by the various committees, as a means of consolidating, defending and controlling the new revolutionary situation, and above all as a symbol of the new power of the committees.
** <strong>THE CONTRADICTIONS OF GARCÍA OLIVER AND STATE ANARCHISM</strong>
In order to understand the obvious and numerous contradictions of García Oliver, and the dense smokescreen that his memoirs cast over the events of this period, it is necessary to explain his conception of the adaptability of abstract ideological principles to the pressing needs of more immediate political tactics, as well as his conception of the nature of leadership in the confederal organization.
How do we interpret the fact that García Oliver, in <em>El eco de los pasos</em>, in his account of the regional plenums of the 21<sup>st</sup> and the 26<sup>th</sup> of July, claims he said that the CCMA was a lid[49] on the revolution, while on August 3, only a week later, he considered the CCMA to be the best guarantee of the progress of the revolution?[50] How can we resolve the permanent contradiction of García Oliver, between what he did and what he says he did? Did he really propose, at the Regional Plenum of July 21, that the CNT should seize power?
In order to understand the García Oliver of July 1936 we must compare his attitude and his activities of that period with his attitude and activities during the electoral campaign of February 1936. During this electoral campaign, the anarchosyndicalist leaders never explicitly told the workers to vote. They claimed that, regardless of the outcome of the elections, a few months later an armed confrontation was inevitable; if, however, the workers were to vote for the Popular Front, besides obtaining the release of thousands of prisoners, the circumstances of the armed confrontation would also be more favorable for them, since they would benefit from republican legality and republican control of the state apparatus. Therefore, what the CNT-FAI did was much more than to renounce their traditional appeal for abstention from voting in the elections, as García Oliver himself unequivocally explained: “WE ADVISED THE WORKING CLASS TO DO WHATEVER THEY THOUGHT BEST WITH RESPECT TO VOTING, BUT WE DID TELL THEM THAT, IF THEY DID NOT VOTE FOR THE LEFT, ON THE DAY AFTER THE ELECTIONS THEY WOULD HAVE TO CONFRONT THE FASCIST RIGHTISTS WITH ARMS IN HAND. WHILE IF THEY VOTED FOR THE LEFT, BEFORE SIX MONTHS HAD PASSED AFTER THE VICTORY OF THE LEFT WE WOULD HAVE TO CONTRONT THE FASCIST RIGHTISTS WITH ARMS IN HAND. Naturally, the working class of Spain, which had for many years been advised by the CNT not to vote, interpreted our propaganda in exactly the way we wanted them to, that is, that they should vote, since it would always be better to confront the fascist rightists if they were to revolt after being defeated in the elections and ousted from the Government.”[51]
We note the curious and contorted argument of García Oliver, <em>who, without himself renouncing the abstentionist principle, INDIRECTLY advised the militants and sympathizers to abide by the tactic that was most beneficial for the CNT’s organization by voting</em>. This is the same parallelism that we have to apply in order to grasp García Oliver’s speech at the Plenum of July 21: <em>without himself renouncing “going for broke”, he encouraged the militants to draw the conclusion of how absurd and ridiculous it would be, at that time, to impose an “anarchist dictatorship”</em>.[52]
In short, García Oliver was capable of making a speech that was <em>formally</em> consistent with the sacrosanct acratic principles, but simultaneously induced the militant rank and file to choose the tactic that he considered most appropriate at the time, however inconsistent it was with respect to those ideological principles.[53]
This pernicious and baroque way of exercising leadership and “leading the masses” allowed him to indulge months later in a kind of “victimism”, by which he attributed the catastrophic choice of collaborationism <em>exclusively</em> to the CNT rank and file. Forty years later, with the historians unable to consult the minutes of the Plenums of the 21<sup>st</sup> and the 26<sup>th</sup> of July, which have conveniently disappeared, who would deny the claim of the author of <em>El eco de los pasos</em> that he proposed “going for broke”, or even that later he unwillingly assumed leadership of the CCMA, or that he would later resist being appointed as anarchist Minister of Justice under Largo Caballero, or that, very much against his will, but for the benefit of the confederal organization, he performed the necessary role of “fire chief” during the Events of May 1937, and then later was the frustrated candidate for Chancellor of the Government of the Generalitat, and then a long <em>etcetera</em> of contradictory sellouts, each one more surrealistic than the last.
In any event, no one is what he says he is, but <em>what he really does</em>, and what the others say he is. And this also applies to García Oliver. Juan García Oliver was an anarchosyndicalist leader who, from his position as the effective president of the CCMA, <em>suffocated the revolution of the committees</em>, when the revolutionary initiatives of these committees superseded the directives of the confederal organization. The collaborationism of the CNT, however, did not just consist of the entry of a few of its leaders into the government; <em>it was the entire organization that was implicated in the various levels of the state apparatus</em>. And this fact was more important than the more than dubious position of the individual García Oliver in favor of an ambiguous “going for broke”. The CNT lacked a program and a tactic that would have prepared it for the seizure of power; and that is why its leaders did nothing but improvise, and sought to collaborate with the other antifascist forces and the government of the Generalitat, despite the “provisional setback” this implied for their anti-state prejudices, which led to the hybrid CCMA. In fact, if the CNT had such a program and such a tactic it would not have been an anarchist trade union, but a Marxist party. The anarchosyndicalist organization and ideology foundered on the rocks of the openly revolutionary situation that arose following the insurrectional victory of July 1936.
And here we return to our analysis of García Oliver’s idea of leadership in the CNT. Not all the militants were equal, nor did their opinions, or proposals, carry the same weight; one only needed to pay heed and give consideration to the speeches of those who, before they mounted the podium, had risked their lives and their liberty for the organization, rather than those who had limited their intervention to talk. Those who had become leaders did so by means of their dedication and courage. This leadership of “the man of action” and, on a secondary level, of the “intellectuals”,8 was an integral aspect of the CNT, although this was not enunciated in its regulations and statutes.
The theoretical horizontal and egalitarian structure of the CNT rapidly disappeared, if it had actually ever prevailed at the highest decision-making levels. The superior committees provided a screen for the upper echelons of the leadership, which debated and decided everything <em>secretly</em>, in its own environment of friends and acquaintances. The great trade union Plenums on a national and regional scale, only served to <em>ratify</em> the resolutions already made by the superior committees, and to make them <em>public</em>.
The CNT functioned in a pyramidal and quasi-Leninist manner, in which a small vanguard debated and decided everything, and this was only made worse by the fact that it was impossible for <em>tendencies</em> to form within the organization that were capable of organizing with their own programs and leaderships against the majority, since the CNT was formally a <em>unitary and horizontal</em> trade union organization.
** <strong>THE FIRST DAYS OF THE CCMA</strong>
The first informal meeting of the CCMA took place during the evening of the 20<sup>th</sup>, for informational and preparatory purposes, once the CNT delegation had obtained the provisional consent of the Joint Regional Committee. Representing the government of the Generalitat and the ERC were Josep Tarradellas, Artemi Aguadé and Jaume Miravitlles; for the Unió Socialista, Comorera; for the UGT, Vidiella: Peypoch for Acció Catalana; Gorkin for the POUM; and Buenaventura Durruti, Juan García Oliver and Aurelio Fernández represented the CNT-FAI.
Tarradellas proposed the exclusion of Estat Català, as he considered it to be a right wing organization, since its leader Dencás was a fascist who had taken refuge in Italy. García Oliver proposed a representational scheme for participation in the CCMA: three posts for the CNT, three for the UGT, and three for the ERC; two for the FAI, and one for each of the following organizations: Acció Catalana, POUM, the socialists, and the Rabassaires. On that same night the decree concerning the formation of Citizen Militias was sent to be printed in the Official Bulletin of the Generalitat, which was published on the following day. In this decree, Lluís Prunés was named Minister of Defense by Companys, and Pérez Farrás was appointed chief of the militias. The militias were an institution that assumed the responsibility for Defense, without any participation from the national government, which lacked any presence in the government of the Generalitat.[54]
On July 21 at eleven in the morning, at the Naval School, the first official meeting of the CCMA took place, where García Oliver, ignoring the published decree and the delegates named by the Generalitat, submitted for debate and approval his project for the constitution of a Central Committee of Antifascist Militias that would impose <em>a new “revolutionary order”</em>. The CNT had renounced any intention of seizing power, but it was not ready to become a simple bit player in the Generalitat and thus renounce its armed victory in the streets, which the rank and file militants would never have tolerated. After a debate in which Artemi Aguadé argued against Juan García Oliver’s idea of the concept of “revolutionary order”, the CCMA was officially founded. The leadership of the CCMA was exercised <em>de facto</em> by García Oliver. The delegates at the meeting[55] approved the following text, which was published as a <em>Decree</em>:
<quote>
“The Committee of Antifascist Militias of Cataluña having been constituted, this institution, in accordance with the Decree published by the government of the Generalitat of Cataluña in today’s Official Bulletin, has approved the following resolutions, with which all citizens must comply:
“1. Revolutionary order is established, which all the organizations represented on the Committee are pledged to uphold.
“2. For control and security, the Committee has appointed the necessary squads for the purpose of ensuring rigorous compliance with its orders. Towards this end, the squads will bear the corresponding credentials that will identify their personnel.
“3. These squads will be the only ones accredited by the Committee. Any other persons or groups that act outside the purview of these squads will be considered to be rebels and will suffer the punishments that the Committee considers appropriate.
“4. The night squads will be especially strict with regard to those who disrupt the revolutionary order.
“5. Between one and five in the morning traffic will be restricted to the following elements: a) all those with credentials proving that they are members of any of the organizations that constitute the Committee of Militias; b) those persons who are accompanied by any of the above elements who will vouch for their moral character; c) Those who can prove that they had to leave their homes for reasons of <em>force majeure</em>.
“6. For the purpose of recruiting elements for the Antifascist Militias, the organizations that constitute the Committee are authorized to open corresponding recruitment and training facilities. The conditions regarding this recruitment will be set forth in detail in internal regulations.
“7. The Committee hopes that, given the need to construct a revolutionary order to confront the fascist groups, it will not have to resort to disciplinary measures in order to enforce obedience.
“The Committee.”[56]
</quote>
The decree forming the CCMA was therefore nothing extraordinary, and was primarily oriented towards measures to ensure public order. The term, “revolutionary order” does not allow us to seriously speak of anything like dual power, as some historians have. Nor did the contemporary press emphasize the constitution of the CCMA as anything extraordinary, nor did it at any time view the CCMA as a revolutionary government that was a <em>rival</em> of the Generalitat. The Generalitat, for its part, continued to lead a phantom existence, assuming responsibility for the secondary tasks that the CCMA delegated to it, and its authority was practically limited to publishing the Official Bulletin.
In Barcelona, <em>the defense committees, having been transformed into revolutionary neighborhood committees</em>, in the absence of any directives from any organization and without any other coordination than was required by the revolutionary initiatives of each moment, organized the hospitals, overwhelmed by an avalanche of wounded, organized popular kitchens, requisitioned cars, trucks, weapons, factories and buildings, searched private homes and arrested suspects, and created a network of supply committees in each neighborhood, which were coordinated in a Supply Committee for the entire city, in which the Food Supply Trade Union played a significant role. The revolutionary contagion affected all social sectors and all organizations that were sincerely sympathetic to the new revolutionary situation. This constituted the only real power of the CCMA, which appeared to the people in arms as the antifascist institution that must <em>conduct the war and impose the new revolutionary order</em>.
We have already seen how a Plenum of Local and District Committees had on July 21 renounced the seizure of power, understood as a dictatorship of the anarchist leaders rather than as the imposition, coordination and extension of the power that the revolutionary committees were already exercising in the streets. On the 23<sup>rd</sup> a secret joint plenum of the superior committees of the CNT and the FAI closed ranks around the decision made to collaborate in the CCMA, and to prepare to overcome the resistance of the militants at the upcoming Plenum on the 26<sup>th</sup>. On that same day García Oliver broadcast a speech directed at the workers of Zaragoza, calling upon them to go into the streets and let themselves be killed by the fascists.[57] At a bar across from the Pino church, the Unified Socialist Party (PSUC) was formed, as a merger of four small socialist and Stalinist groups.
We have also seen how, on the 24<sup>th</sup>, the first two anarchist columns departed for the front under the command of Durruti and Ortiz. Durruti broadcast a speech over the radio in which he warned his listeners of the need to be vigilant against a possible counterrevolutionary coup. <em>The revolutionary situation in Barcelona had to be consolidated, in order to “go for broke” after the capture of Zaragoza.</em>
On July 25 Companys appeared at the Naval School to accuse the members of the CCMA of being ineffective in assuring public order, in the face of the indifference of García Oliver who dismissed him in a threatening manner.
<em>On the 26<sup>th</sup> of July, the definitive collaboration of the CNT-FAI in the CCMA was ratified</em> that morning at the Regional Plenum, a decision that had already been approved by the superior committees of the CNT-FAI in their debate on the 23<sup>rd</sup> and at the previous Regional Plenum held on the 21<sup>st</sup>.
The Plenum of the 26<sup>th</sup> <em>unanimously</em> confirmed that the CNT would maintain the <em>same position</em> approved already on the 21<sup>st</sup> of July to participate in this new institution of class collaboration known as the CCMA. This same plenum of the 26<sup>th</sup> created a Supply Commission, dependent on the CCMA, to which the various supply committees that had emerged all over the city were ordered to submit,[58] and at the same time ordered a partial termination of the general strike. The summary of the main resolutions approved at this Plenum was published in the form of a <em>Decree</em>,[59] in order to ensure that they were understood and observed. The CCMA met on the evening of the 26<sup>th</sup> to create a flow chart and schematic of various departments: War, Militias of Barcelona, Regional Militias, Supply Commission, Propaganda, Authorizations and Permits, Control Patrols, Military Hospitals, Transport and Subsidies.
García Oliver was in charge of the Department of War. Abad de Santillán was responsible for supplying the militias, assisted by Miret and Pons. Aurelio Fernández was named chief of the Department of Investigation, or, which amounts to the same thing, the real chief of the revolutionary police, with the assistance of José Asens and Tomás Fábregas (Acció Catalana), who led the Control Patrols. Marcos Alcón (who replaced Durruti) was responsible for the Transport section, with the assistance of Durán Rosell (who replaced Antonio López Raimundo, who was killed on the front at Huesca), from the UGT. Josep Miret (Unió Socialista, later to merge with the PSUC) and Joan Pons (ERC) were in charge of the Department of Regional Militias. Miravitlles (ERC) was made leader of the Department of Propaganda and Torrents (Unió de Rabassaires) was appointed head of the Supply Commission. Rafael Vidiella (replacing José del Barrio, the delegate of the Carlos Marx Column) was also appointed to the Department of Investigation, which was led by Aurelio Fernández. Joan Pons Garlandí (ERC) was named to head the Department of Authorizations and Permits (passports). Artemi Aguadé (ERC) led the War Hospitals department. Josep Tarradellas was appointed to head the decisive department of the Economy and War Industries. The brothers Guarner, Díaz Sandino and Pérez Farrás were named as military advisors. Lluís Prunés, Minister of Defense of the Generalitat, soon resigned from his ostensible but scarcely effective position (which was not recognized) as president of the CCMA.
The dominance of García Oliver and his clashes with the government of the Generalitat were constant features of the CCMA until its dissolution, although they diminished in intensity, importance and interest with each passing week, both because of the fact that García Oliver lost the support of the Regional Committee, and because of the ineffectiveness of the CCMA and the very early secret decision of the CNT to dissolve it. The most serious confrontation was undoubtedly García Oliver’s veto of the Casanovas government, proposed by Companys on July 31, 1936, in which two PSUC Ministers were admitted: Joan Comorera and Rafael Vidiella, and one from the Unió de Rabassaires: Josep Calvet. García Oliver’s ultimatum, which included a threat to overthrow the Generalitat, because he saw the new government as an attack against the existence of the CCMA, ended with Companys relenting and modifying the composition of the government (now with only republicans) just a few days after having published the decree of its constitution.
The position of the superior committees[60] of the CNT-FAI was incoherent, unsustainable and contradictory. Their ideological principles prevented them from entering the Government of the Generalitat, but they did not want that government to pose a threat to the CCMA, either, and thus sought to keep the government subject to an institution that was not, and did not want to be, a revolutionary government that was an alternative to the Generalitat. The CCMA did not hold all power in its hands, nor did it want to leave all power in the hands of anyone else. The anarchosyndicalist leaders wanted to <em>consolidate the existing revolutionary situation</em>. If this has been called dual power it is only because there was no understanding of the fact that dual power entails a ferocious and merciless struggle, carried out between <em>two opposed poles</em>, to destroy the rival power.[61] In the case of Cataluña it was more appropriate to speak of a <em>duplication</em> and <em>complementarity</em> of powers divided among various ministries of the government and the CCMA, which occasionally proved to be problematic, ineffective and irritating for everyone involved. García Oliver’s threat against the formation of the Casanovas government had no other purpose than to preserve this duplication of powers. The anarchosyndicalist participation in the tasks of the government by way of the CCMA was unsatisfactory. But no one dared to propose to the armed masses of libertarian militants that the anarchosyndicalists should directly enter the government. When reality clashes with principles, it is the latter that usually have to give way.
In the meantime, the CCMA created the Council of the Unified New School (July 27, 1936), the Commission of War Industries (August 7, 1936), the Control Patrols (August 11, 1936) and the Council of the Economy (August 11, 1936). There was a tendency underway towards an <em>exclusively military specialization of the CCMA</em>. In reality what was taking place was <em>a process of integration of all the revolutionary initiatives into the government machinery</em>. All these mixed commissions had a high degree of autonomy and independent power of decision, besides counting on a notable working class presence, even at the presidency and the leadership levels, but they were always organically embedded in the various departments of the government of the Generalitat, which was beginning to acquire prestige, presence and portions of power, to the permanent detriment of the CCMA and the revolutionary committees. The most notable case was that of the Commission of War Industries, in which Tarradellas was able to form a team of professional technicians, such as Colonel Jiménez de la Beraza, the Head of the Air Force Miguel Ramírez and the Artillery Captain Luís Arizón, who, together with highly skilled workers, such as the metal worker Eugenio Vallejo,[62] a pioneer in creating an incipient war industry after July 20, who brought the collaboration and enthusiasm of the various trade unions and committees, and successfully created a war industry from absolutely nothing, which attained significant production levels in only a few months.
** <strong>THE COUNCIL OF THE ECONOMY</strong>
The purpose of the Council of the Economy was to “provide a suitable structure for and normalize the functioning of the Catalan economy”, as the Decree of the Generalitat that ratified its creation stated on August 11, 1936. It was an institution of class collaboration between the different antifascist forces that composed the CCMA, in a revolutionary situation dominated by the political and military hegemony of the CNT, and its goal was to channel, control, regulate and neutralize, or minimize as much as possible, the methodical expropriation of the bourgeoisie that the proletariat was carrying out. It was the point of departure for the counterrevolution to recover the functions lost by the state apparatus, first transforming the expropriations into collectivizations, which were nothing more than appropriations of the enterprises by their workers, reflecting a kind of “trade union capitalism”,[63] and finally established rigid control over the Catalan economy, which was planned, centralized and directed by the Generalitat. In this manner a parallel evolution was underway, of a legislative character, but also one that imposed effective control over the enterprises by the Generalitat which, starting with the Plan of Socialist Transformation (August 17, 1936), concluded with the Decree on Collectivizations and Workers Control (October 24, 1936), which imposed an inspector appointed by the Generalitat on the collectivized enterprises. The explanation of the Collectivization Decree, and its public introduction and imposition on the working class that took place during the Conference on the New Economy on December 5–6 of 1936, although presented as a kind of working class assembly with decision-making powers, nothing could have been further from the truth.
The much-mythologized self-management of the collectives never went beyond a <em>capitalism of trade union management and state planning</em>, against which the industrial workers of Barcelona fought in the spring of 1937, in favor of the alternative of <em>socialization</em>.
** <strong>THE CONTROL PATROLS</strong>
Already during the weeks prior to the military uprising the Nosotros group had organized some requisition patrols, which had been reconnoitering the churches to prepare for their plundering, in order to obtain money, precious metals and artworks with which weapons could be bought from foreign countries.[64]
These requisition patrols went into action on July 19 and engaged in frenetic activity during the first few weeks. The atomization of power, the confinement of the forces of public order to their barracks, and the absence of control and coordination on the part of the CCMA, caused Barcelona to experience a wave of looting and terror, as a natural continuation of the street battles against the military uprising. It was a kind of <em>extension of the social war</em> in which priests, bourgeoisie and rightists were enemies to be hunted down and killed by patrols of armed men, subject to no authority, who defended themselves from attacks from snipers for a whole week. On July 28 the CNT-FAI published a serious warning that all disturbers of the public order who took justice into their own hands would be shot. And some outstanding militants were in fact shot,[65] along with various criminals and opportunists. In order to quell this social disorder the CCMA created the Control Patrols, conceived as a revolutionary police force, on August 11.
The Control Patrols lasted much longer than the CCMA, as they were not dissolved until early June 1937, shortly after the events known as “the May Days” of 1937.
They were formed into eleven sections, distributed throughout all the neighborhoods of Barcelona. At first they had a total of seven hundred men, plus eleven commanding officers, one for each section. They wore uniforms composed of a leather jacket with zipper, corduroy pants, militia cap and a black and red bandana, they carried identification cards, and they were armed. Some of them came from the requisition patrols and others from the defense committees, although many of the latter proved to be reluctant to act as “police” for ideological reasons, which allowed new, unreliable elements to enter the Control Patrols. Furthermore, only half the members of the Patrols were members of the CNT, or the FAI; the other half were members of the other organizations that formed the CCMA: POUM, ERC and PSUC, for the most part.
The Control Patrols were under the authority of the Committee of Investigation of the CCMA, led by Aurelio Fernández (FAI) and Salvador González (PSUC), who replaced Vidiella. The central office of the Committee of Investigation was at Number 617 Gran Vía, where the two delegates of the Patrols, José Asens (FAI) and Tomás Fábregas (Acció Catalana) were based. The Patrolmen’s wages, ten pesetas a day, were paid by the government of the Generalitat. Although all the sections made arrests, and some of those arrested were interrogated at the old Casa Cambó, the central prison was located in the former convent of the Nuns of San Elías. The warden of the prison was Silvio Torrents “Arias” (FAI), the delegate of the central office of the Control Patrols. A tribunal was constituted at San Elías, created by the Control Patrols themselves, without the formal consent of any organization, whose mission was to judge the detainees as quickly as possible. This tribunal was composed of the Patrol members Riera, the brothers Arias, Aubí and Bonet, of the FAI; África de las Heras and Salvador González of the PSUC; Coll from the ERC and Barceló from the POUM. The operations of this tribunal were totally independent of the CCMA, any other organization and the Generalitat. It was <em>led</em> by Aurelio Fernández, Manuel Escorza, Vicente Gil (“Portela”), Dionisio Eroles and José Asens. The detainees were interrogated summarily, without any judicial safeguards of any kind.
The Control Patrols included, at the time of their founding, the following sections: the First, or Casco Viejo, at Number 31 Ancha Street, under delegate Miguel Lastre; the Second, at the intersection of Aragón and Muntaner Streets (Number 182 Aragón Street). The Third, covering Barceloneta and the Estación del Norte. The Fourth included the working class neighborhoods of Poble Sec and Can Tunis. The Fifth, the working class neighborhoods of Sants and Hostafrancs, its headquarters located at the Orfeó de Sants on Galileo Street—its delegate was “Mario” (FAI); the Sixth, the upper class districts of Bonanova and Pedralbes, with its headquarters on Muntaner Street; The Seventh, the Gracia and San Gervasio neighborhoods, with its headquarters on Balmes Street; the Eighth, the working class neighborhood of El Clot—its delegate was Oliver (FAI); the Ninth, the working class neighborhood of San Andrés and its delegate went by the name of Pérez (FAI); the Tenth, Horta; the Eleventh, with its headquarters at the Ateneo Colón, at Number 166 Pedro VI Street, in the working class neighborhood of Pueblo Nuevo—its delegate was Antonio López (FAI), and it shared its headquarters with the Patrols of San Adrián. The patrolmen had no other restrictions on their jurisdiction that were clearly expressed other than to respect the rights of the freemasons and the consulates.[66]
Aurelio Fernández had effective control of the borders. He competed with Pons (ERC) with regard to the issuing and control of passports and travel permits. Aurelio assigned Vicente Gil (“Portela”) to supervise control over the airfields and ports.
Aurelio Fernández worked very closely with Manuel Escorza, the real decision-maker who directed, coordinated and informed the other CNT “police” officials: José Asens, the delegate of the Control Patrols, and Dionisio Eroles, the Secretary of the Council of Workers and Soldiers, an institution created to purge the military and police of elements whose loyalty was in doubt.
Manuel Escorza del Val was the director of the Services of Investigation and Information of the CNT-FAI, that is, an institution that was not under the authority of the CCMA, but of the regional committees of the CNT and the FAI, in other words, it was a libertarian institution that, in accordance with the proposal made by Escorza at the Plenum of July 21, constituted an attempt to create an autonomous and independent armed force that would be capable of “giving the boot” someday to the government of the Generalitat. The central investigation patrol, which was under its authority, made San Elías, which was already the central prison for all the Control Patrols, into a fortress, a power center, a general barracks and the headquarters of the tribunal of the Patrols.
This Investigation Service of the CNT-FAI carried out missions involving information gathering and espionage, even in France, where Minué, Escorza’s brother-in-law, established an efficient information gathering network.
Manuel Escorza del Val, with his office on the top floor of the former Casa Cambó, had confiscated the archives of the employers association (Fomento del Trabajo) and the chamber of commerce (the Lliga), which provided him with many names, dates, relations and addresses, with which he carried out an efficient labor of repression against rightists, priests and individuals dissatisfied with the “new revolutionary order”. It was Escorza, for example, who revealed the scandal and the conspiracy of the plot of Casanovas against Companys, in November 1936.
Salvador González established at the Hotel Colón and the Círculo Ecuestre a prison and a network of repression under the control of the PSUC, similar to that of Escorza, with the help of Olaso, Rodríguez Sala, África de las Heras and Sala. Soler Arumí, of the ERC, set up his own repressive apparatus at the Centro Federal at the Paseo de Gracia.
These repressive institutions had no connection or fealty to the Generalitat or the CCMA, or even to their own organizations. This autonomy of the repressive forces, which allowed them to act with total independence, without having to justify their activities to anyone, degenerated, among the cenetistas as well as the PSUC, POUM and the ERC, into abuses and unnecessary and unjustifiable arbitrary actions. The practice of taking priests, bourgeois, and rightists “for a ride” became a regular occurrence, especially along the roads in Arrabassada, el Morrot, Can Tunis, Somorrostro, Vallvidriera and Tibidabo; and later at the cemetery of Moncada. The shakedowns and payoffs in the form of money, gold or jewels in exchange for allowing arrested persons to avoid imprisonment and trial,[67] whether they were priests or rightists, was absolutely odious, corrupt and reprehensible. We must differentiate between the police and repressive duties carried out against those who opposed the “new revolutionary order”, typical of any regime, from the corruption that was practiced on behalf of the patrol members and their leaders, which only grew worse as the impression that the republican side might lose the war began to make headway.
During the first two months of their existence the Patrols generated a climate of social anxiety and insecurity due to their arbitrary actions and their multiplicity of allegiances, since there were the patrols of the CCMA, those of each organization and each neighborhood (or town), factory or barricade. Looking back on this period, those who have focused on the intestine struggle among the antifascists, that is, the struggle of the PSUC and the ERC against the CNT, attributed the repression of the first months <em>solely</em> to the anarchists, overlooking the repression carried out by the ERC and the PSUC, which, after May, established in Barcelona the ubiquitous terror of the Military Investigation Service (SIM).[68]
The Control Patrols constituted the failed attempt on the part of the CCMA to corral the prevailing public disorder. Not only did they constitute an undesirable political police of the CCMA, but they also acted <em>in parallel</em> with the patrols of the political police of each organization; and <em>in competition</em> with the armed patrols of the militiamen of the defense committees, who were answerable to no other authority other than their own neighborhood, factory or village committees, and who continued to man the barricades months after July, and who at their own initiative and risk carried out requisitions, confiscations and “took people for rides”, which allowed them to finance their own activities and even to buy arms from foreign countries.[69] These were the autonomous militiamen or patrolmen, from every organization or from no organization, who were not subject to the orders of the CCMA’s Control Patrols, and who might or might not bring their detainees or plundered booty to San Elías, and who often executed their own justice directly in accordance with their own understanding. In these conditions, no one could clearly differentiate, much less control, or direct, the limits between the necessary <em>class terror</em>, the ambiguous “<em>new revolutionary order”</em> of the CCMA, and mere <em>crime</em>, with the consequent discredit that fell upon anyone who wanted to push forward the “revolutionary conquests” and extend the social war. Once again we find ourselves faced with the <em>atomization of power</em> that prevailed in the summer of 1936: patrols of the CCMA; patrols of the CNT-FAI, of the POUM, the PSUC, and the ERC; patrols of every defense committee, every town, every factory, every neighborhood, and even every barricade; all autonomous and self-financing, acting in parallel, without being answerable to any central authority or outside the control of the authorities to which they were supposed to be subject.
** <strong>THE MILITARY FAILURE OF THE CCMA AND ITS STRUGGLE AGAINST THE COMMITTEES</strong>
With the formation of all these Commissions and Councils (of the Economy, of Supplies) the CCMA was gradually transformed into an institution that <em>specialized exclusively in matters of Defense and Public Safety</em>, and therefore became more and more estranged from any pretense to constitute a revolutionary government that would be capable of replacing the government of the Generalitat. This refusal to become a revolutionary government, however, led irremediably to the CCMA’s failure in its attempts to constitute an institution for the direction and centralization of the war against fascism, due to the political incapacity of this institution to become the sole organizing and leading force of the new army. The improvised militias were formed without a single directive institution. <em>Instead of mobilizing a unitary proletarian army, the militia columns were formed under the aegis of the various parties and trade unions, with the concomitant problems of coordination, homogenization and centralization.</em> The Stalinists and the government of the Generalitat easily used this structure to consolidate the counterrevolutionary advance a few months later. But if the leaders of the CNT had renounced an anarchist dictatorship, how were they going to impose an anarchist army? Furthermore, the absence of a revolutionary theory, program and perspectives led the anarchist leaders, left behind by the revolutionary initiatives of the rank and file committees, to engage in constant improvisation which, combined with their optimistic view that the war would only last for a few weeks, prevented the superior committees of the CNT from understanding the future significance of their erroneous decisions. The CCMA therefore also renounced the main reason for its creation: to create volunteer workers militias, supply them and direct the war. The chronic shortage of weapons and ammunition, which were not distributed to the fronts and the columns that needed them, but wherever the leaders of the parties decided, depending on their ideological affinities, was used by each militia to discredit its rivals. The slogan, “go for broke after capturing Zaragoza”, was turned against its proponents, for if Zaragoza was not taken there would be no anarchist coup attempt; that is, the anarchist militias must not be given arms. The inability to impose a unitary command structure on the militias led to serious deficiencies with regard to their organization and operations, since there was not the least coordination and planning of military operations even among the various militias on the same front.
<em>The CCMA therefore failed with regard to the military question as well.</em> The only function that it performed adequately, and which was the function that all of its components, with the exception of the POUM and the anarchists, explicitly wanted it to perform, was that of defending and <em>strengthening the government of the Generalitat</em>; this was in any case its principal objective after the first week of September, when the CCMA voted to dissolve itself. The Generalitat, as well as the Stalinists and ERC, would deftly capitalize on the opportunity offered by the constant errors of the CCMA. On October 24 the Decree militarizing the militias established the foundations for the bourgeois army of the Republic. The only thing the militiamen could do was to <em>resist</em> the inevitable militarization, which was already implemented by March of 1937.
Meanwhile, the revolutionary situation in the streets was indifferent to the collaborationist directives imposed by the anarchosyndicalist leaders. The <em>atomized power</em> of the various Local Committees extended throughout all of Cataluña, with various degrees of power and autonomy, and which in some locations reached the level of making an absolute break with republican legality and the kind of equilibrium that prevailed at the time in Barcelona between the Generalitat and the CCMA. Thus, in Lérida, the CNT, POUM and UGT did away with the city government and constituted a Popular Committee that excluded the republican forces in order to constitute <em>a power based only on the working class organizations</em>. Not only Josep Rodés (POUM), who assumed the position of police commissioner, but also Joaquín Vila (UGT), who was appointed as the delegate to the Generalitat, usurped these positions to enhance the power of the Popular Committee of Lérida; and to these were added the position assumed by Francisco Tomás (FAI) as the head of the newly-created Committee of Popular Information. These local revolutionary committees constituted authentic city-states, or committee-governments,[70] imposing fines and collecting taxes, recruiting militiamen for the front, forming control patrols to impose their authority, carrying out public works financed by revolutionary tax measures to solve the problem of massive unemployment, imposing a new rationalist educational model, confiscating food, etc. These local committees replaced the municipal governments, depriving the Generalitat of the least influence in their towns. Throughout Cataluña, without any directives from the CNT, a methodical expropriation of the factories and properties of the bourgeoisie, the churches and monasteries was carried out, at the same time that, in Barcelona, the CCMA was sharing out among the various organizations the barracks, printing presses, newspapers and some buildings and hotels. <em>The committees complied with the directives of the CCMA if they did not conflict with the interests of the revolution, but mounted enormous resistance when they were thought to be the product of a compromise with the bourgeoisie and the government of the Generalitat.</em> At the same time, however, the CCMA had to rely on these local committees if it wanted its directives to be observed. The internal conflict within the leadership of the CNT-FAI, between those who supported and those who were opposed to collaboration, was also manifested in the problematic relations between the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias and the local revolutionary institutions. The government of the Generalitat restricted itself to providing a legal sanction for the social and economic reality of the collectivizations and “revolutionary conquests”, as the only way it could hope to acquire the prestige and the acceptance that it lacked. The CCMA could barely govern, or give any orders at all, outside of the city of Barcelona, without the acquiescence and collaboration of the local committees or trade unions. <em>The weakness of the latter was rooted in the impossibility of their consolidation as an authentic alternative power on the scale of all of Cataluña</em>, without the coordinating and centralizating support of a working class organization, much less against the opposition of all the existing organizations.
<em>The CCMA and the Generalitat coincided in their policy of supporting the restoration of the powers of the old municipal governments against the usurpation of their powers by the local revolutionary committees</em>, and this mission was performed with great effectiveness by the Department of Regional Militias, led by Josep Miret and Joan Pons. This Department stripped the local committees of the responsibility for the recruitment and organization of the militiamen, which the committees had spontaneously exercised during the first few weeks, and transferred this responsibility to the regional commissions, based on the new territorial division of Cataluña. This regional structure facilitated the subjugation of the various local committees, which had to send delegations to the regional offices, far from the pressure of their local revolutionary conditions.
Thus, not only was the CCMA not a revolutionary government that coordinated the activities of the local committees; it saw the latter as signifying a diminution of its authority. And the anarchist leaders not only helped to consolidate the power of the Generalitat, but were also quite pleased with the weakening of the local committees. That is why they allowed Miret of the PSUC and Pons of the ERC to undermine the power of the local committees in Cataluña. This was another serious error on the part of the leaders of the CNT, because the weakening of the local committees undermined the real basis of the CNT’s power outside the city of Barcelona.
In Barcelona, the defense committees, upon which the real power of the CCMA was based, existed in almost all the neighborhoods and in some confiscated buildings, among which were the Hotel Número 1 at the Plaza de España, the Escolapios at the Ronda de San Pablo, the Estación de Francia, the Estación del Norte, and the defense committees of Barceloneta, Pueblo Nuevo, San Andrés and Gaudí Avenue, among others.
** <strong>THE MINUTES OF THE MEETINGS OF THE CCMA AND THE DEBATE CONCERNING ITS DISSOLUTION</strong>
According to the account of Joan Pons Garlandí, as related in his memoires, two stages of the CCMA’s history can be distinguished, which coincided with the period when its offices were located at the Naval School, next to the Gobernación, at the Plaza Palacio, and the period after their transfer[71] at the end of July to the Capitanía at the Paseo Colón. During the first stage no minutes were recorded, or at least none have been located to date. In the second stage, Miravitlles was responsible for drafting them, until he appointed a secretary for the purpose. They exist, but in an incomplete form.[72]
The nocturnal meetings of the CCMA were usually held on every other day, very late at night, so that the majority of the members could attend, who were busy during the rest of the day with the responsibilities of their various positions. They tended to be somewhat chaotic and disorganized. Problems were resolved as they came up, in an improvised manner. Some members, such as García Oliver, Rovira and Vidiella, exhibited from the beginning their oratorical gifts, with very long, vacuous and boring speeches that interested no one, which is why they were not even recorded in the minutes of the meetings. All the members of the CCMA attended its meetings heavily armed and ostentatiously displayed their enormous pistols. The threats made by Durruti against Miravitlles, reminding him of his authorship of an article in which he proclaimed the equivalence of <em>FAIstas</em> and <em>Fascistas</em>, and García Oliver’s insulting treatment of Companys, caused the first meetings to generate a certain climate of tension, which was definitively dispelled when the offices of the CCMA were moved to the Capitanía.
The meetings of the CCMA were often attended by people who were not members of the CCMA, such as technicians, reporters or advisors. Resolutions were usually unanimously approved. Dissenting views were recorded in the minutes, until, at the meeting of September 6, it was decided to record only the final resolution.
Ever since the end of July 1936, David Antona, the Interim Secretary of the National Committee of the CNT in Madrid, had been receiving offers from the Giral government to collaborate with the republican government and the other antifascist forces, offers that were debated at the National Plenum of Regional Committees held in Madrid on July 28.[73] At this meeting the representatives of the Catalan Regional Committee became enmeshed in a debate regarding whether the CNT should or should not seize power. Once the option of establishing libertarian communism was rejected, on the basis of the argument that the CNT was a minority grouping outside of Cataluña, the debate focused on the ways and means of the CNT’s collaboration with government bodies.
During the entire month of August the anarchist “notables” were split over the dilemma of whether they should put an end to the CCMA, without entering the government of the Generalitat, or maintain it. There were two basic approaches: the first consisted in creating technical commissions in the various Councils (Ministries of the Generalitat) as a formula for <em>controlling without participating in the government</em>: this approach was exemplified in the commission of war industries or the Council of the Economy;[74] the second was to do the same thing but within the revolutionary institutions, formally based on legal powers, but upholding <em>a revolutionary power that would provide them with a real position of power</em>: this was exemplified in the Control Patrols, the defense committees and the Committee of Investigation of the CCMA, coordinated and directed by Manuel Escorza from the Committee of Information and Investigation of the CNT-FAI, which was answerable only to the Regional Committee of the CNT and the Peninsular Committee of the FAI.
On August 3[75], in a resolution signed by Jaime Miravitlles as secretary of the CCMA, various agreements of a minor nature were approved, such as the confiscation of the Elizalde and Anet factories; the creation of an ammunition dump at Lérida, with subsidiary storage depots at Caspe and Monzón; a salute to the Durruti column “for its discipline and organizational acumen”; the approval of a motion to inform in writing the Local Federation of Trade Unions of all decisions of a general nature made by the CCMA; the dispatch of a delegate to oversee the manufacture of bombs at Reus; the selection of loyal officers from a list presented by UMRE; the appointment of Jiménez de la Beraza and the brothers Guarner as technical specialists on the General Staff of the Militias; etc.
Already, <em>on August 17</em>, while a Plenum of Local and Regional Committees of the CNT was being held, <em>the decision to dissolve the CCMA was made</em>, although this was not yet made public to the confederal militants.[76] The explanation that was given for the resolutions adopted at this Plenum, in the Report of the delegation of the CNT to the Extraordinary Congress of the AIT, leaves no room for doubt: “It was considered that, in order to avoid the duplication of powers represented by the CCMA and the Government of the Generalitat, the former had to disappear and the Council of the Generalitat of Cataluña had to be formed, carrying out some more positive activities without the hindrance of a clash of powers and to put an end to the pretext that the democracies will not help us ‘because the anarchists are in charge’.”[77] The goal of this maneuver was, in short, to replace the CCMA with a system of technical commissions, attached to the Ministries, and to limit the authority of the CCMA to military questions. This resolution was ratified on August 21 at a Regional Plenum of anarchist groups.[78]
Finally, <em>at the end of August</em>, a <em>secret</em> Plenum of the Libertarian Movement of Cataluña was held. García Oliver, tired of the endless debates, shouted to the delegates, “Either we collaborate, or else we impose a dictatorship: You decide!”[79] The Plenum had to decide whether or not to accept the invitation, which arose from numerous conversations between Companys and Marianet, to the CNT to participate in the “Council” of the Generalitat. The Plenum finally <em>decided in favor of the entry of the CNT-FAI into the government of the Generalitat</em>.[80]
On <em>August 31</em>,[81] at 11:30 p.m., a plenary session of the CCMA was held, attended by the majority of the members and delegates. García Matas reported on the situation of the republican forces in Mallorca. He warned the delegates that the enemy possessed six fighter squadrons that posed a threat not only to the Baleares but also to Barcelona and Valencia. He thought that the enemy was preparing for a major offensive in Mallorca. Jiménez de la Beraza, whose argument was then supported by Marcos Alcón, insisted on the necessity of finishing off the assault on Huesca in order to shift the scarce war materiel that was available to operations at Mallorca. Vidiella emphasized the international importance of the Mallorca campaign.
At the next Plenary of the CCMA, held on <em>September 2</em>,[82] Aguadé reported on the fate of the hospital ship, “Marqués de Comillas”, filling in the gaps in the information provided at the previous meeting, concerning the damage inflicted on the ship by a bombing attack. Miret proposed, and his proposal was approved, to order Captain Bayo to evacuate the military personnel and remove all war materiel from the ship, which was henceforth to be just a hospital.
Miret reported on <em>the events at Lérida</em>, concerning the theft of provisions, weapons and munitions. A long and bitter debate ensued in which Aurelio Fernández, Gironella (POUM), Abad de Santillán, Artemi Aguadé, Marcos Alcón, Torrents, Fábregas, Vidiella, Asens, and others participated. It was decided that the theft was the result of shortages everywhere, both in Lérida as well as in Barcelona, and that the irregularities that were being denounced had already been abolished due to the new measures implemented by the War, Supply and Health Commissions. It was announced that some of the weapons that had been stolen had already been recovered. And it was resolved that the Commission of War, reinforced with representatives from all the organizations that were members of the CCMA, accompanied by a strong contingent of armed militiamen, should scour all the towns of Cataluña in order to collect all the arms and munitions they could find. With regard to the composition of the Committee of Militias of the city of Lérida,[83] it was resolved that it would be required to allow the entry of representatives of the ERC. At the suggestion of the comrades from Lérida, the CCMA resolved that the Commission of War should relocate to that city, which was a strategic point on the Aragón front, for the purpose of resolving the serious problems that continued to accumulate, with regard to troop movements and the provision of arms and other war materiel.
José Asens proposed, and his proposal was approved, to abolish all the special seals of the Militias, and sections of the Central Committee, in order to prevent abuses, and that there should only be one official seal of the CCMA.
Marcos Alcón reported on the problems posed for the Transport Commission by the need to constantly requisition cars and trucks, exposing the abuses of the various organizations and public bodies, which possessed an excessive number of vehicles. It was resolved to grant full powers to the Transport Commission to requisition all the individually owned vehicles in Barcelona and all the trucks that it should need, as well as to deprive the organizations, groups and public bodies of all their excess vehicles.
Asens reported that there was an insufficient number of patrolmen to attend to the volume of services that had to be performed. He thought that all the units of the Militias, including those of the Capitanía, should send contingents for the Control Patrols, which were also supposed to act in coordination with the Investigation Patrols. Aguadé thought that the Patrols had to be motorized, and that it was necessary to carry out a purge of the elements that formed the Sections. It was resolved to increase the number of Patrolmen, the precise number to be established by the Commission, and <em>that the Investigation Patrols should be integrated with the Patrol Sections</em>, and also that the personnel of the Sections should be purged.
Asens also proposed the need to carry out an investigation in Caspe concerning the activity of Antonio Ortiz,[84] which was opposed by Aurelio Fernández because he thought that it was improper to attend to matters that were not the result of the conduct of the CCMA.
A proposal of Miret and Fernández was approved, which mandated that, at the next meeting, a project should be undertaken to regulate investigatory proceedings, and that the latter may not be authorized with any other seal than that of the CCMA.
A proposal made by Lluís Prunés was approved to require that all the special taxes, subscriptions, donations and receipts from festivals to raise money for the militias should be controlled by the CCMA.
All the resolutions were unanimously approved, and the session ended at three in the morning on September 3.
On <em>September 3</em> a National Plenum of Regional Federations was held in Madrid to debate Largo Caballero’s offer to name Antonio Moreno as confederal Minister, an appointment that had been “provisionally” accepted by Moreno and by Interim National Secretary David Antona. The National Committee, basing its deliberations on the resolutions of the recent Plenum held in Cataluña, where the participation of the CNT in the “Council” of the Generalitat was approved, declared its support for participation in the government of Largo Caballero. The delegates, however, rejected this proposal. After lengthy debate a compromise was reached, consisting in the CNT’s support for the new government and the formation in each Ministry of an auxiliary commission composed of representatives of the CNT. At a press conference held on September 4, the formation of the first[85] government of the socialist Largo Caballero was announced, without any CNT representation. On September 8, Largo Caballero rejected the CNT’s proposal concerning auxiliary commissions, but remained open to the offer of a Ministry to the CNT.[86]
At 11:45 p.m. on <em>September 4</em>,[87] the CCMA met again, with the attendance of most of the delegates. Giménez de la Beraza reported on the war materiel available for the various fronts. He emphasized the lack of small arms ammunition and the advisability of proceeding to requisition all the supplies of such ammunition throughout Cataluña, and also recommended that gunpowder be manufactured, which would take two months, with all the problems that such a timetable entailed. He mentioned the negotiations being carried out in foreign countries and the positions of the various governments “with respect to our struggle against fascism”.
Aurelio Fernández explained that the Section of Investigation was “proceeding to requisition arms and ammunition, which some organizations had already handed over”, adding that “we have to find and collect all we need”.
Guarner reported that the conquest of Huesca “will require one million bullets”.
García Oliver reported that the retreat from Mallorca had been carried out “without the knowledge of the Committee”, and that it was the result of a powerful bombardment by the enemy and the interference of the Madrid government, “which had ordered the withdrawal without informing Cataluña”.
Prunés informed the delegates that Captain Bayo “had been ordered by the Committee of the ship ‘Jaime I’, in the name of the Squadron Committee and the Government of the Republic, to abandon Mallorca with all the men and materiel, in order to proceed to Málaga, and that he was given two hours to decide and forty eight hours to leave”.
González revealed that some of the militiamen who had returned from Mallorca said that there was a heavy bombardment and that Bayo ordered them to throw equipment into the sea. An order was issued for Bayo to present himself immediately and that various militiamen who were willing to provide testimony should also present themselves before the CCMA.
Aurelio Fernández called attention to the receipt of several messages by the CNT from outstanding comrades in Zaida, requesting that an investigation be carried out concerning the events at Belchite “after the withdrawal of the Ortiz Column”. Santillán said that these reports and the documentation provided did not support “any specific accusation”, but that he was in favor of pursuing the investigation. García Oliver stated that the withdrawal from Belchite was due “to the lack of artillery”. He appointed a commission to carry out the investigation.
A proposal to transfer the gasoline stored at Can Tunis to another location to prevent its destruction by bombing was approved.
Miret (PSUC) and Aguadé (ERC) referred to various border patrols that were organized on the initiative of various individuals and groups, without any effective control on the part of the CCMA. Aurelio Fernández expressed his view “that the border patrols are the responsibility of the Investigation Section and that everything that is currently taking place is a result of organizational deficiencies”; in order to remedy the situation, it was resolved that the Investigation Section should improve its organization of the border patrols, and that the CCMA should exercise strict control and unified direction over these patrols. Likewise, it was resolved to withdraw authorization for the establishment of a hospital that some self-styled Alpine Militias had organized on their own account in Barcelona, without the authorization of the Health Committee.[88]
The session took a Copernican turn with the appearance of Captain Bayo in the royal chambers of the Capitanía, where the CCMA was meeting. García Oliver asked him why he had ignored the CCMA, with regard to both his decision to embark for Mallorca and then to return. Bayo responded that he sailed for Mallorca after having been requested to do so by a large group of militiamen who had presented themselves to him at the Airfield, and with the consent of the Government Minister, España; and that he returned in obedience to an appeal by the government of the Generalitat, which is why he had not been able to come before the Committee. García Oliver insisted that he had an obligation to obtain the consent of the CCMA, “which holds the power of decision over all matters pertaining to the war”, because if he had done so it would at least have prevented the bad effect that the retrreat from Mallorca had produced with respect to public opinion.
Bayo continued to proffer explanations, relating to the situation of the troops and the way the landing was conducted. He praised the morale and bravery of the troops under his command, “who were ready to fight wherever I sent them”. He pointed out that he had loaded all the materiel he could and that supplies and equipment were only destroyed or thrown into the sea to prevent the enemy from seizing them. He read the order, signed by the committee of the “Jaime I” and by the Squadron Committee, requiring him to withdraw in the name of the Government of the Republic. He accepted the order to withdraw, to save the lives of the militiamen, since the enemy air forces were bombing them with one hundred kilogram bombs. He denied having received any motorcycles, trucks or artillery, and said that if they had been sent they were probably at Mahón.
Marcos Alcón explained the manner in which these expeditions were conducted, without authorization of the CCMA, and that the latter was faced with so many <em>faits accompli</em>, and that the defeat at Mallorca was due to a lack of organization. Vidiella asked for the opinion of the military advisors. Giménez de la Beraza claimed that Bayo’s action was “militarily a defeat, politically a disaster, all because he acted on his own account without consulting the CCMA, and that the political aspect is much more serious than the military aspect”. As for the equipment, he said that throwing the heavy equipment into the sea was justifiable, but not the light arms.
Then a group of militiamen appeared in the royal chamber, arriving from the failed expedition to Mallorca, militants of the ERC, the CNT and the UGT, who provided their reports, confirming the information submitted by Bayo.
After Bayo’s report on the fascist air forces in Mallorca, García Oliver notified the delegates of the agreement between Santillán and Sandino and the Madrid government to send five thousand men to the Central front.
It was resolved that the four thousand militiamen who had returned from Mallorca should depart on Monday: two thousand for the Madrid front and two thousand for the Aragón front, and that one thousand national guards (the new name for the civil guards) should also leave for Madrid, and that the garrison at Mahón should return to their base with the “City of Barcelona”. All these resolutions were unanimously approved. The session ended at 1:45 p.m. on the 5<sup>th</sup> of September, after a marathon meeting of fourteen hours, in which it had become apparent that <em>the CCMA was incapable of controlling and directing the military operations based in Cataluña</em>.
The Mallorca expedition had been carried out behind the back of the CCMA, organized by Captain Bayo, with the assistance of Companys, and with the support of the UGT (Comorera) and the Maritime Transport Trade Union of the CNT. It failed as a result of a lack of organization of the operations and the sudden order to withdraw issued by the central government. The lack of war materiel for the Aragón front was exacerbated by the loss of equipment and supplies at Mallorca, and the disaster was magnified by the <em>discrediting of the CCMA</em>, which was not only incapable of directing <em>all</em> military operations, but was even incapable of being aware of their existence.
The next meeting was called to order on <em>September 6</em>[89] at midnight, and was attended by the majority of the delegates to the CCMA. Over the course of the meeting various questions were asked, among which were: the request of the Syndicalist Party, led by Ángel Pestaña, to be admitted to the CCMA; a proposal concerning the advisability of an immediate attack on Jaca; the appointment of Llorenç Perramon as Recording Secretary, without the right to vote, and that the minutes of the meetings should only consist of the resolutions approved, without an account of the debates.
The minutes of <em>September 8</em>[90] record the replacement of Josep Rovira (the delegate of the Lenin Column of the POUM) by Julián Gorkin. Various resolutions regarding subsidies, the prohibition of collecting money on the street, closer surveillance over the correct use of the food subsidies granted by the CCMA, the clearing of lines of people in front of the Capitanía, and increasing the number of members of the Control Patrols to one thousand six hundred were approved, along with other minor issues.
On <em>September 10</em> the minutes record the ratification of the <em>resolution to dissolve</em>[91] <em>the CCMA</em> and the recommendation that at the next meeting the respective criteria with regard to the form and proportional representation for the posts each organization will occupy in the Council of Defense of the Generalitat should be determined. <em>The resolution to dissolve the CCMA was kept secret.</em>
It was also resolved that the dead should be buried at the front and that the bodies should not be shipped home. It was once again insisted that only the Control Patrols and the Investigation Patrols were empowered to authorize and carry out searches, and that anyone who did so on his own account should be punished. Three delegates, from the CNT, the UGT and the POUM, were appointed to carry out weekly inspections of subsidies, donations, and festivals for raising money for the militias.
All of the above resolutions were unanimously approved.
On <em>September 12</em>[92] a resolution was approved, with the abstention of the representatives of the UGT and the POUM, that mandated that the current government of the Generalitat should be replaced by a Council of Defense of the Generalitat of Cataluña, with representatives of all the organizations that composed the CCMA, “which would at the same time be dissolved”.
On <em>September 14</em>[93] García Oliver publicized the CNT’s resolution concerning the constitution of the Council of Defense of the Generalitat, replacing the current government of the Generalitat, within the framework of a new political conception of the Spanish state, conceived as a “Confederation of Free Nations, starting with Cataluña”.
Gorkin, in the name of the POUM, stated that the new Council of the Generalitat must be composed of representatives of all the organizations that composed the current CCMA and that “the program of this Council must be of a socialist kind, or one involving socialization”.
Vidiella, for the UGT, agreed with the first point expressed by Gorkin with regard to the representatives on the Council, as well as with the name of “the Council of the Generalitat”, and also thought that its jurisdiction must be extended over all of Cataluña, and that it must embrace all the factions, and that this Council must be the only authority empowered to carry out confiscations, or to proceed with the collectivization or socialization of the country. Vidiella therefore advanced the idea of a <em>strong government</em>, vested with full authority.
Miravitlles, for the ERC and the Generalitat, said that this new government (he dared to violate the acratic taboo concerning calling something that was really a government by the name of “council”) must include all social classes and that as for a program, it must be whatever is necessary to defeat fascism.
Santillán, for the FAI, expressed his view that it was necessary to establish points of convergence that would unite all the factions, as had been the case up until this time, and that the principal goal must be to destroy fascism in all of Spain.
Torrents informed the delegates that it was the view of the Unió de Rabassaires that it was necessary to form a <em>strong government</em>, with the same representatives as the current CCMA: “a single power that would prosecute the war against fascism and establish order in the new economy”.
García Oliver said that everyone was in agreement on the need to transform the country in every respect, establishing a new juridical, political and economic order; and as for a program, “there is already a Council of the Economy responsible for carrying out the economic transformation”.
Gorkin (very meticulously) said that “antifascism is not a program”, which is why it was necessary to specify in what manner the dominant privileges had to be destroyed. Gorkin thought that it was necessary to specify just what economic policies had to be enforced in the rearguard, and to define the purpose of the struggle of the combatants at the front, which was to create a better society. He proposed that alongside each Minister of the new government, as was already the case in the Council of the Economy, there should be a Council composed of representatives of all the organizations.
Miravitlles explained that the time to establish a concrete program, whether communist or anarchosyndicalist, would arrive if the war was won, but in the meantime it was necessary to create a government capable of winning the war against fascism.
Alcón (CNT) maintained “that the government must conduct the war against fascism and the economic transformation must be carried out by the working class organizations in the streets; and that it is useless to oppose this because the organizations will go on with their work regardless of our resolutions”. It was the mission of the government to direct the war, but it must not legislate with regard to economic matters, because this is the job of the workers, operating through the Council of the Economy. He finished his speech by claiming: “the war must be fought by the Government, Collectivization must be carried out by the Council of the Economy.”
Miret, of the PSUC, said that it was indispensable to formulate a concrete program that would assure the unity of all the factions.
Gorkin declared that the formulation of a program did not require that each faction renounce its ideals, but that all the points of convergence and the necessary directives for the defeat of fascism should be established. He did not agree with the proposal that spoke of social classes, but of organizations that represent the classes and that the latter must not reorganize but transform the social and economic foundations of the country, which “is to say, carry out the social revolution”.
Vidiella said that only a strong government would be respected by foreign countries and that socialization in the countryside would entail a confrontation with the peasantry.
García Oliver expressed his view that the revolutionary transformation must affect all the juridical, economic and political aspects of the country, and that each region must proceed in accordance with its own characteristics, since the policies that are appropriate for Cataluña would not be appropriate for Andalucía. He thought that a mere Council must not do anything but prepare the policies that would have to be implemented once the war was over.
And he emphasized that to create this Council all that was necessary was for the CCMA to tell the President of the Generalitat that it wanted it to be formed, so that the Generalitat would proceed to its immediate creation.
Vidiella agreed that it would be the President who would form the Council.
Gorkin and Miret both made proposals. Miret’s was approved, which was as follows:
<quote>
“The representatives of all the organizations that compose the CCMA should petition the President of the Generalitat of Cataluña, proposing the convocation of a meeting of delegates of all the organizations represented in the CCMA to discuss the organic constitution of a Council of Defense of the Generalitat and of the program that the latter must implement”.
</quote>
Pons (ERC) referred to the name of the Regional Defense Council, suggested by the CNT, and expressed his view that the word, “Regional”, must be deleted. Alcón expressed his opinion that the word must be maintained, and that a National Council of Defense must be formed in Madrid. Miravitlles seconded the proposal to eliminate the word, “Regional”. García Oliver prudently resolved the dispute, proposing that the first act of the Council would be to give itself a name. Vidiella, for his part, proposed to delete the word, “Defense” and designate it as simply the “Council of the Generalitat of Cataluña”. After the semantic debate the session ended at two-thirty on the morning of September 15.
No one opposed the dissolution of the CCMA. No one, except the anarchists, allowed themselves to be deceived regarding the fact that this entailed the formation of a new government of the Generalitat, whether it was called a “council” or not. The debate on the program of the new government that would supersede the CCMA, revolved around the concepts of “socialization”, proposed by the POUM, or “antifascist”, advocated by the ERC and the PSUC. The CNT-FAI maintained its characteristic ambiguity: the economy was the task of the Council of the Economy, while the war was the job of what they called the Council of Defense of the Generalitat. García Oliver, Marcos Alcón, Aurelio Fernández and José Asens actually thought that the program of the “Council” was of no importance. It was the price that had to be paid to avoid isolation. What was of importance for them was the fact that the CNT would continue to control the various Ministries, by way of technical commissions, like those attached to the Council of the Economy or the commission of war industries, while a good part of the military and police apparatus would be in the hands of the CNT-FAI. This indefiniteness, ambiguity and incoherence led them irremediably to <em>support the program of antifascist unity</em>, that is, of that antifascism that proposed the constitution of a strong government capable of “imposing order” on the economy and winning the war.
On the <em>15<sup>th</sup> of September</em> a National Plenum of Regional Committees was held in <em>Madrid</em>, at which it was resolved to approve the intervention of the CNT in the military, economic and political leadership of republican Spain, with the proposal of the formation of a National Council of Defense. This was, in short, a proposal that the CNT should collaborate with the government of the Republic, by means of this Council that was to be composed of five delegates of the CNT, five from the UGT and four republicans. This National Council was conceived as the unified summit of the various regional Councils. It was a federalist conception, so dear to the CNT, in which the economy was to be socialized and the army unified under a unitary command structure and a commissariat of war. Although it persisted in the old trick of not calling things by their names, the CNT’s proposal pointed towards the reconstruction of a strong and centralized state.[94]
On <em>September 16</em>[95] a report concerning the case of Captain Bayo was presented, an order was issued to remove the bales of cotton from the barricades,[96] the Control Patrols were authorized to issue a special Section identity card, in addition to the one already possessed by each patrol, and it was agreed to await the return of Tarradellas in order to dispatch a commission from the CCMA to Madrid.
On <em>September 18</em>[97] it was agreed to organize coastal defense with militiamen from the local committees, that a commission of information and censorship should be appointed that would be composed of representatives of every organization that was part of the CCMA, to create a new ID card for the members of the Patrols, and that “a commission composed of the comrades García Oliver, Miravitlles, Vidiella and Gorkin should meet with the President of the Government of the Generalitat tomorrow and that the latter should make an appointment to receive them”.
On <em>September 19</em> a commission of the CCMA, composed of García Oliver, Miravitlles, Vidiella and Gorkin met with Companys in order to deliver the proposal drafted by Miret concerning the formation of the Council of the Generalitat, that is, of the new Government of the Generalitat that would include anarchosyndicalist Ministers, once the great semantic dilemma about calling the Council of the Generalitat what it always really was, the Government of the Generalitat, was finally resolved. On that same day[98] Vidiella, Aurelio Fernández and Miravitlles were named as members of the commission that was to travel to Madrid to “negotiate with the government of the Republic as a consequence of the result of the journey of the comrade Minister Tarradellas”.[99]
On <em>September 20</em>[100], in the royal reception hall of the Capitanía, at 6:00 p.m., a special session of the CCMA convened that was attended by García Oliver, Fábregas, Alcón, Vidiella, Miravitlles, Fernández, Torrents and Gorkin, along with invitees such as Sesé for the UGT, Escorza for the FAI and Calvet for the Unió de Rabassaires, to initiate discussions with the Moroccan delegates Mohammed El Ohazzari and Omar Abd-el-Jalil, the representatives of the Moroccan Action Committee, who had arrived in Barcelona in early September for the purpose of obtaining support for Moroccan independence. At this meeting the support of the CCMA for the Moroccan delegation was solemnly formalized, and it was promised that the CCMA would try to get the Government of the Republic to declare the independence of the Spanish Protectorate in Morocco.[101] The session, which was conducted in a formal manner, ended at 6:15 p.m.
A photograph exists (“Història Gráfica del Moviment Obrer a Catalunya”, Diputació de Barcelona, 1989), taken after the signing of the agreement by the Moroccan Action Committeeand the CCMA, in which one can recognize, among others (from left to right), Marcello Argila Pazzaglia, the two Morrocan delegates, Juan García Oliver, Julián Gómez García (“Gorkin”), Manuel Estrada Manchón, Rafael Vidiella, Mariano Rodríguez Vázquez (“Marianet”), Manuel Escorza del Val (with crutches) and Aurelio Fernández Sánchez.
On <em>September 21</em>[102] it was resolved to add Gorkin to the commission that was to be dispatched to Madrid and that Guarner and Miret should appoint an officer to command the coastal defenses.
At the meeting of <em>September 22</em>[103], the CCMA decided to “prohibit the entry into Cataluña of the families from Madrid and the provinces who are constantly arriving in Barcelona, and that they should be returned to their places of origin”. This resolution was transmitted to the Ministry of the Government and to the railroad workers Committees of Barcelona, Lérida, Tortosa, Mora de Ebro, Valencia and Madrid for its effective implementation.[104]
On <em>September 25</em>[105] the CCMA voted to broadcast a message to the cruiser “Libertad” which, according to the press, was transporting the mortal remains of the heroic militiawoman Lidia Odena, informing the ship’s captain of the resolution of the CCMA according to which the comrades killed at the front were to be buried at the front, and that they could not be shipped back to the rearguard without the express permission of the CCMA, and that if the ship had already left port, that upon its arrival in Barcelona the burial should be carried out without any public demonstration.
This was the last act of the CCMA that we can identify. As soon as September 18, its resolutions were very brief and drafted in a telegraphic style, although according to García Oliver the CCMA held two more meetings, on the 27<sup>th</sup> and the 28<sup>th</sup>,[106] before its last session when it officially disbanded, which took place on October 1, 1936.
** <strong>THE BALANCE SHEET OF THE CCMA AND THE NEW GOVERNMENT OF THE GENERALITAT</strong>
On <em>September 26</em> the new government of the Generalitat was constituted, with Tarradellas as Prime Minister, in which <em>three CNT-FAI Ministers</em> participated: Joan Porqueras Fábregas as Minister of the Economy, Antonio García Birlán as Minister of Health and Social Welfare and Josep Joan Doménach as Minister of Provisions.[107]
The resolution to dissolve the CCMA was not made public until the end of the Regional Plenum of Trade Unions, which was held from September 25 to 27, and which had to formally approve this dissolution, which was presented as the consequence of the entry of the cenetistas into the government, since, in the words of García Oliver himself: “<em>today the Generalitat represents all of us”</em>.
<em>Solidaridad Obrera</em>, in its September 27<sup>th</sup> issue, insisted on claiming that a new institution called the “Council of the Generalitat” had been created, rather than a new government; after September 29, however, it accepted the new reality and explained the reasons why the CNT entered the new government of the Generalitat at the same time that it announced the dissolution of the CCMA. Curiously, the dissolution of the CCMA was presented as an inevitable consequence of the formation of the Government of the Generalitat, when in reality it was only when, between the end of August and the first days of September, that it was decided to dissolve the CCMA, when anyone began to discuss the entry of the CNT into the government.
On <em>September 28</em> another National Plenum of Regional Federations was held in Madrid, where the national secretary <em>Horacio Prieto</em> attacked the proposed National Defense Council for its lack of realism. He set forth his arguments in favor of pure and simple participation in the government of Largo Caballero. He insisted that things should be called by their real names and that the CNT should dispense with its ideological prejudices. He did not, however, obtain the support of the delegates to the Plenum, who merely voted in favor of a manifesto that acknowledged the need for antifascist unity.[108]
On the evening of <em>October 1<sup>st</sup></em>, the last, purely ceremonial, session of the CCMA was convened. García Oliver delivered a concluding speech in which he called for the unity of all the parties and organizations. After proclaiming that he had been a staunch defender of the CCMA, but that now he would be a passionate defender of the new Council of the Generalitat, he responded to a query of Miravitlles by asserting that as a Catalanist he could only celebrate the decision of the CNT to enter the government of the Generalitat.
The Official Bulletin of the Generalitat published on October 3 contained the decree, signed on <em>October 1</em>, in which <em>Juan García Oliver was appointed general secretary of the Department of Defense</em>, a new position expressly created for him. In this same issue of the Bulletin the <em>Decree Proclaiming the Dissolution of the CCMA</em> was also published:
“The CCMA, created by the decree of July 21, has understood that, having fulfilled the mission that it certainly performed so appropriately during the first days of the military uprising, it must now dissolve. Therefore, in accordance with the Executive Council, it is hereby Decreed: Article 1. The CCMA, created by the Decree of July 21, is dissolved. Article 2. By decree and in accordance with the orders pertaining thereto, as required, the present Decree will be fulfilled. Barcelona, October 1, 1936. The Prime Minister, Josep Tarradellas.”
In the Official Bulletin published on October 4, by decree signed <em>on October 3, Aurelio Fernández was appointed general secretary of the Committee for Internal Security</em>. For the CNT, this signified the preservation of its grasp on the key positions of Public Order and the Militias.
The new government of the Generalitat proposed to strengthen the economy on the basis of a program initiated by the Council of the Economy and to reinforce the war effort by way of <em>compulsory mobilization</em> and the establishment of <em>discipline and a unitary command structure</em>.
The presence of all the antifascist organizations in the government of the Generalitat implied a major step forward towards the reestablishment of republican legality and the rehabilitation of all state functions. This implied the termination of all those revolutionary committees that, in every locality, exercised sovereign and <em>total power</em>, from the collection of taxes and maintenance of control patrols to the financing of public works to address the problem of unemployment.
The Decree of <em>October 9</em>, complemented by the one issued on October 12, declared <em>the dissolution of all the local committees</em> that were formed on July 19, which were to be replaced by the new municipal authorities. Despite the resistance of many local committees, and despite the delay of several months before the new municipal government bodies could be created, this was a death-blow from which the committees would not recover. <em>The resistance</em> of the CNT militants, who ignored the directives of the superior committees and the orders of the government of the Generalitat, <em>endangered the antifascist pact</em>. The anarchosyndicalist leaders were caught between the Scylla of the CNT militants, reluctant to obey its directives, and the Charybdis of the charge leveled by the other antifascist forces that it was necessary to comply, and enforce compliance with the decrees of the government, and bring “the uncontrollables” into line.
This was the <em>real balance sheet</em> bequeathed by the CCMA in its nine weeks of existence: <em>the transition from a situation where local revolutionary committees exercised all power in the streets and the factories, to their dissolution for the exclusive benefit of the complete reestablishment of the power of the Generalitat</em>. Likewise, <em>the decrees signed on October 24</em>[109] concerning the militarization of the militias effective as of November 1 and the promulgation of the Collectivization decree, completed the disastrous balance sheet of the CCMA, that is, <em>the transition from working class Militias composed of revolutionary volunteers to a bourgeois army</em> of the classical type, subject to the monarchical code of military justice, commanded by the Generalitat; and <em>the transition from expropriations and workers control of the factories to a centralized economy controlled and directed by the Generalitat</em>.
The delay in the application of the decrees, provoked by the mute but determined resistance of the confederal militants, who were still armed, caused the government of the Generalitat to make the disarmament of the rearguard its number one priority, initiating a propaganda campaign against the so-called “uncontrollables”, which was conflated with the secondary objective expressed in the constantly repeated slogan: “arms to the front”.
The powerful <em>resistance</em> of the anarchosyndicalist rank and file <em>to the militarization</em> of the militias, <em>to the control of the economy and the collectivized enterprises</em> by the Generalitat, <em>to the disarming of the rearguard</em> and <em>to the dissolution of the local committees</em>, resulted in a delay of several months before the decrees of the Generalitat on these matters could really be enforced. This resistance crystallized <em>in the spring of 1937</em> in a major outburst of disenchantment, which was intensified by discontent with the progress of the war, inflation and the shortages of food and clothing, and led to the consolidation of <em>a generalized critique on the part of the CNT rank and file militants of the participation of the superior committees of the CNT-FAI in the government, and the antifascist and collaborationist policy of their leaders</em>, who were accused of forfeiting “the revolutionary conquests of July 19”.
** <strong>STATE ANARCHISM JUSTIFIED BY THE IDEOLOGY OF ANTIFASCIST UNITY</strong>
This was the incubator that gave birth to the Events of May 1937, which once again saw Barcelona littered with barricades. This discontent explains the emergence and the power of the Friends of Durruti Group, which in May proposed the necessity of imposing a Revolutionary Junta to replace the Generalitat. After May, the Group was able to express this confederal discontent in an analysis in which it claimed that in July 1936 <em>there was no revolution</em> and that the CCMA was an institution of <em>class collaboration</em>, and elaborated a program that concluded that <em>revolutions are totalitarian or they are defeated</em>. What distinguished the Friends of Durruti from so many other enraged groups of cenetistas and anarchists[110] was precisely the fact that the former proposed <em>a program</em>, whereas the others issued appeals to certain abstract and ineffective principles, which were shared by the superior committees they were criticizing.
<em>Only then</em>, after the May Days of 1937, did the anarchosyndicalist leaders elaborate their justifications and distortions concerning what had taken place. Some began to understand, too late, the impact of their errors and improvisations.
It was therefore necessary to find justifications for so many mistakes, and to elaborate a response that would allow the anarchosyndicalist leaders to refuse to assume responsibility for those mistakes. The delegation of the CNT to the Congress of the AIT,[111] in December 1937, had to provide the first answer, under the impact of the constant insults and accusations of ineptitude and abandonment of the ideological principles of anarchosyndicalism that they were subjected to by the majority of the delegates to the international congress.
“Political power fell into our hands without our wanting it [….] The CCMA, the institution for the coordination of the combat forces at the front, was created. Our Libertarian Movement accepted this Committee, but first we had to resolve the main problem in our Revolution: antifascist collaboration or anarchist dictatorship. We accepted collaboration. Why? [….] the circumstances made us think it advisable to collaborate with the other antifascist sectors.”[112]
In fact, the Spanish delegation needed the help of a prestigious intellectual to defend themselves from the attacks of the international, with a report that exuded a certain intellectual stature. This <em>secret report</em> so pleased the Spanish anarchosyndicalist leaders that they decided to publish it in a propaganda pamphlet, translated into Spanish, despite the inconsistency entailed in publishing a text that had been declared “secret”.[113]
In this pamphlet,[114] Helmut Rüdiger fully justified the pragmatic actions of the CNT as being due to the <em>particularities</em> of Spain, averring that it was a working class movement without intellectuals, or any theoretical preparation or political experience, due to its permanent state of clandestinity; and that it was characteristic of extremism, based on a simplification of social relations and an unlimited optimism, to think that all that was necessary was to proclaim libertarian communism in order to transform man into an angelic being.
Rüdiger’s entire argument can be summarized as <em>an assimilation and application to the anarchist movement of the ideology of antifascist unity</em>. According to Rüdiger, July 19 was a victory for the CNT because, for the first time ever, it was able to unite the entire population behind it. The CNT would be victorious when it would once again be able to rally the entire people behind it. That is, antifascist unity justified everything, explained everything and permitted everything. All the pragmatic actions of the leaders of the CNT, the abandonment of the anti-state theories, the abandonment of principles, the collaborationism with bourgeois parties and the government, the militarization of the Militias, the anarchist Ministers, the war economy, everything, absolutely everything, was justified by this ideology of <strong>ANTIFASCIST UNITY</strong>. Helmut helped the anarchist leaders to justify their errors, their incapacity and their constant improvisations: <strong>one could, and must, renounce libertarian communism, and the revolution, in favor of antifascist unity</strong>.
Now the anarchosyndicalist leaders were enabled to rewrite their contemporary history. Now García Oliver was enabled to appear as a sacrificial victim of the rejection on the part of the confederal organization of his proposal to “go for broke”.
This made it possible to claim that, “what began on July 19 was not yet the definitive social revolution, but only the first step of that revolution, the beginning of the antifascist struggle”. Helmut crafted a veritable anthology of catchphrases for the supporters of collaborationism: “This was the first time in the history of revolutions that a victorious revolutionary organization renounced its own dictatorship.”
What Helmut did not say was that this ideology of antifascist unity presupposed the acceptance of the methods and goals of the program of the democratic bourgeoisie.
The advocates of State anarchism and those who supported the proletarian revolution were, and are, incompatible. The absence of an ideological and organizational break within the libertarian movement could only lead, first to the suppression, and later to the assimilation of the critical sectors with the worst aberrations of State anarchism. Without such a break a process of clarification and delimitation between the positions of the various factions could not take place. Ambiguity and confusionism comprised the <em>other</em> defeat of the libertarian movement, which was pregnant with consequences for its future.
[47] Three very interesting theses, unfortunately unpublished, have been written about the CCMA:
<br>
Josep Eduard Adsuar Torra, <em>Catalunya: Juliol-Octubre 1936. Una dualitat de poder?</em>, (2 Vols.), Doctoral Dissertation, Department of Contemporary History, University of Barcelona, 1979.
<br>
Enric Mompo, <em>El Comité Central de Milicias Antifascistas de Catalunya y la situación de doble poder en los primeros meses de la guerra civil española</em>, Doctoral Thesis read on June 8, 1994, Department of Contemporary History, University of Barcelona.
<br>
Josep Antoni Pozo Gonzalez, <em>El poder revolucionari a Catalunya Durant els mesos de juliol a octubre de 1936. Crisi i recomposició de l’Estat</em>, Doctoral Thesis defended on June 21, 2002, Department of Modern and Contemporary History, Autonomous University of Barcelona.
[48] The <em>Constancia</em> group, at a meeting of anarchist groups and defense committees, proposed “that our representatives in the government should withdraw and that the neighborhood committees should elect a Central Committee.” See “Segunda sesión del pleno local de Grupos Anarquistas de Barcelona […] con asistencia de los grupos de Defensa confederal y Juventudes libertarias”, Barcelona, April 24, 1937. The proposal, although far too late, shows that these neighborhood committees were still active in April 1937.
[49] Juan García Oliver, <em>El eco de los pasos</em>, Ruedo Ibérico, Barcelona-Paris, 1978, p. 185.
[50] <em>Ibid</em>., p. 188.
[51] Responses of García Oliver to a questionnaire from Bolloten (1950).
[52] In reality, this term, “anarchist dictatorship”, was probably not used by García Oliver, but by Federica Montseny, as a suitable summary of his long speech at the Plenum of July 21.
[53] According to Peirats, “during the first days of the movement, García Oliver and a few other militants half-heartedly proposed the idea of establishing libertarian communism in Cataluña. I think that this idea was proposed without real conviction. García Oliver was convinced that libertarian communism was impossible in Cataluña”. See the interview with José Peirats in <em>Colección de Historia Oral: El movimiento libertario en España (1). José Peirats</em>.
[54] Durruti, García Oliver and Aurelio Fernández were the prototypical men of action. Federica Montseny, Abad de Santillán and Pedro Herrera were the prototypical anarchist intellectuals.
[55] It was therefore by no means a revolutionary government, but an institution of class collaboration, created to fight against fascism under extraordinary circumstances, which required the government of the Generalitat to assume responsibilities for Defense that were not ordinarily within its jurisdiction.
[56] Juan García Oliver, Buenaventura Durruti and José Asens for the Regional Committee of the CNT; Aurelio Fernández and Diego Abad de Santillán for the FAI; Artemi Aguadé, Jaume Miravitlles and Joan Pons for the Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya; Tomás Fábregas for Acció Catalana; Josep Torrens for the Unió de Rabassaires; Josep Rovira for the POUM; Josep Miret for the Unió Socialista; José del Barrio, Salvador González and Antonio López Raimundo for the UGT; and the envoys of the government of the Generalitat, Lluís Prunés, Pérez Farrás and Vicens Guarner.
[57] All those who attended the meeting signed the above decree, except for the three delegates sent by the Generalitat.
[58] García Oliver said exactly this in his speech: “Militants of the CNT and the FAI, you have to make them kill you.” See <em>El eco…</em>, p. 196.
[59] Instead of coordinating these supply committees, created by the revolutionary committees <em>from below</em>, the control of their operations was transferred to the CCMA, to be exercised <em>from above</em>.
[60] The text of this DECREE is reproduced in the Appendix.
[61] The Regional Committee of the CNT, the Peninsular and Regional Committees of the FAI, the Regional Committee of the Libertarian Youth, the Local Federation of the CNT, the Local Federation of Anarchist Groups, the CNT-FAI Committee of Investigation, and all the representatives of the regional and local federations, and those who had responsible positions in the CCMA (and later in the government).
[62] We need only recall the intervening stage between the February Revolution and the October Revolution in Russia in 1917. Only a profound lack of knowledge of what really happened in Cataluña enabled some historians to make an unfortunate historical comparison between the Russian case and the Catalan case, and made it possible for them to speak erroneously of dual power shared by the CCMA and the Generalitat.
[63] On July 20 he was authorized by Durruti to create a war industry. Vallejo initiated a coordination network among the metallurgical and chemical industry trade unions, together with the miners of Sallent, and supervised the transformation of civilian industrial production to an industry for production of military goods. The collaboration of the cenetista Vallejo with Tarradellas proved to be effective in the medium term, but implied the submission of the initial revolutionary direction to the government of the Generalitat.
[64] These enterprises also paid taxes to the CNT-FAI; Comorera abolished these taxes in February 1937.
[65] Miquel Mir, <em>Entre el roig i el negre</em>, Edicions 62, Barcelona, 2006.
[66] See Peirats, p. 175.
[67] Interview with Miquel Mir in <em>Quadern</em>, supplement to the Catalan edition of <em>El País</em> (July 27, 2006).
[68] Bishop Irurita was liberated by high-level officials at San Elías in exchange for jewels. When the patrol staff discovered the identity of the liberated prisoner several days later they were very upset. See <em>Quadern</em>, Catalan supplement of <em>El País</em> (July 27, 2006).
[69] See Agustín Guillamón, “La NKVD y el SIM en Barcelona. Algunos informes de Gerö sobre la Guerra de España”, <em>Balance</em>, No. 22 (November 2001).
[70] “It would be advantageous for us to acquire weapons, small arms but of high quality, which are most necessary for the defense of the revolution. The Defense Committee complains about the late delivery of war materiel to Barcelona and explains the situation as follows: There are many neighborhood groups that, independently, supply themselves with all they need from foreign countries, more cheaply and more quickly.” Quoted from “Reunión de comités, celebrada el día 6 de octubre de 1936”.
[71] This expression is used by Munis in <em>Jalones de derrota, promesa de victoria</em>.
[72] See Jaime Balius, “En el Nuevo local del CCMA”, <em>Solidaridad Obrera</em> (August 23, 1936).
[73] I have been able to consult the following records for minutes of the CCMA: August 3 and 31; and September 2–4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18–21, 23 and 25 of 1936.
[74] “Informe de la delegación de la CNT al Congreso Extraordinario de la AIT y resolución del mismo”, December 1937, p. 96.
[75] Concerning the Council of the Economy one may consult the book by Ignasi Cendra, <em>El Consell d’Economia de Catalunya (1936–1939)</em>, Publicacions Abadia Montserrat, 2006.
[76] Govern de la Generalitat de Catalunya. Comité de Milícies Antifeixistes: “Acords presos en la reunió del CC de les MA en el dia 3 d’agost del 1936.”
[77] Pozo, <em>op. cit.</em>, p. 236.
[78] “Informe de la delegación de la CNT…”, p. 97.
[79] Pozo, <em>op. cit.</em>, p. 237.
[80] César M. Lorenzo [César Martínez was the son of Horacio Martínez Prieto]: <em>Los anarquistas españoles y el poder</em>, Ruedo Ibérico, Paris, 1969, p. 98.
[81] César M. Lorenzo, <em>op. cit.</em>, pp. 99–100.
[82] Comité Central de les Milícies Antifeixistes de Catalunya: “Resum de la reunió del dia 31 d’agost del 1936.”
[83] Comité Central de les Milícies Antifeixistes de Catalunya: “Resum de la reunió del dia 3 de setembre del 1936.”
[84] This Committee had originally been composed solely of working class representatives of the POUM, the UGT and the CNT-FAI.
[85] Antonio Ortiz was the delegate of the Columna Ortiz (also known as the Sur-Ebro Column).
[86] It replaced the government headed by the republican Giral.
[87] César M. Lorenzo, <em>op. cit.</em>, pp. 180–181.
[88] Comité Central de les Milícies Antifeixistes de Catalunya: “Resum de la reunió del dia 4 de setembre del 1936.”
[89] This issue was one aspect of a struggle between the interests of the Generalitat, defended here by the PSUC and the ERC, and those of the CNT-FAI, concerning the control of the borders, and more specifically the frontier pass at Puigcerdà, which was completely dominated by Antonio Martín, the anarchist leader of La Cerdaña. The attack of the PSUC-ERC concerning the border question was answered by the CNT with an attack on the financing of the hospital of the Alpine Militias, which comprised the embryo of a Catalanist army.
[90] Comité Central de les Milícies Antifeixistes de Catalunya: “Acords presos en la reunió del dia 6 de setembre del 1936.”
[91] Comité Central de les Milícies Antifeixistes de Catalunya: “Acords presos en la reunió del dia 8 de setembre del 1936.”
[92] Comité Central de les Milícies Antifeixistes de Catalunya: “Acords presos en la reunió del dia 10 de setembre del 1936.” The word, “ratification” suggests that a proposal to dissolve the CCMA was made at a previous meeting, a proposal we cannot locate among the previous minutes, although it may refer to certain conversations that took place outside of the CCMA, as Joan Pons Garlandí suggests in his memoires.
[93] Comité Central de les Milícies Antifeixistes de Catalunya: “Acords presos en la reunió del dia 12 de setembre del 1936.”
[94] Comité Central de les Milícies Antifeixistes de Catalunya: “Resum de la reunió del dia 14 de setembre del 1936.”
[95] Lorenzo, <em>op. cit.</em>, pp. 182–184.
[96] Comité Central de les Milícies Antifeixistes de Catalunya: “Resum de la reunió del dia 16 de setembre del 1936.”
[97] There were still barricades on the streets almost two months after July 19. The order to remove the cotton bales was issued due to the shortage of raw materials in the textile industry.
[98] Comité Central de les Milícies Antifeixistes de Catalunya: “Resum de la reunió del dia 18 de setembre del 1936.”
[99] Comité Central de les Milícies Antifeixistes de Catalunya: “Resum de la reunió del dia 19 de setembre del 1936.”
[100] Tarradellas had gone to Madrid to obtain financial and technical assistance to create a military industry in Cataluña. As Tarradellas said: “one of the reasons for my trip—as you must already know—was, besides accompanying the forces of the Civil Guards to place them at the disposal of the military commander in Madrid, to request that the Central Government transfer as soon as possible to Cataluña the Toledo arms and ammunition factory. Accompanied by Colonel Giménez de Abraza, the director of the Oviedo arms factory, and Air Force Colonel Ramírez Cartagena, one of the commanders of the Barcelona air force when the uprising began, accompanied then by these two republican officers, faithful to their oath to defend the Republic, I had several interviews with Sr. Largo Caballero and his advisors. You have no idea of how I felt, I had to return to Barcelona without having obtained the transfer of the Toledo arms and ammunition factory to Cataluña.” Quoted from “Letter from Tarradellas to Bolloten dated March 24, 1971”, published in its entirety in <em>Balance</em>, Issue No. 6 of the archival series (1998).
[101] Comité Central de les Milícies Antifeixistes de Catalunya: “Resum de la reunió del dia 20 de setembre del 1936.”
[102] See Abel Paz, <em>La cuestión de Marruecos y la República española</em>, Fundación Anselmo Lorenzo, Madrid, 2000.
[103] Comité Central de les Milícies Antifeixistes de Catalunya: “Resum de la reunió del dia 21 de setembre del 1936.”
[104] Comité Central de les Milícies Antifeixistes de Catalunya: “Resum de la reunió del dia 23 de setembre del 1936.”
[105] This lack of solidarity expressed by the CCMA for the refugees from Madrid could not have been more despicable and shameful.
[106] Comité Central de les Milícies Antifeixistes de Catalunya: “Resum de la reunió del dia 25 de setembre del 1936.”
[107] García Oliver, <em>El eco…</em>, pp. 281–284.
[108] The first two had been members of the former Council of the Economy of the Generalitat.
[109] Lorenzo, <em>op. cit.</em>, p. 185.
[110] Published in the Official Bulletin of the Generalitat on October 28, 1936.
[111] See “Segunda sesión del pleno local de Grupos Anarquistas de Barcelona […] con asistencia de los grupos de Defensa confederal y Juventudes libertarias”, Barcelona, April 24, 1937.
[112] The delegation was composed of José Xena, David Antona, Horacio Martínez Prieto and Mariano Rodríguez Vázquez.
[113] “Informe de la delegación de la CNT al Congreso Extraordinario de la AIT y resolución del mismo”, December 1937, pp. 75–76.
[114] Rüdiger’s argument in favor of the necessity of subordinating all the activity, all theory and all the principles of the CNT to antifascist unity, as the only way to guarantee victory in the war, OBVIOUSLY implied the necessity of keeping this report SECRET. If the Russian and Spanish Stalinists were to find out about the blind determination of the CNT to submit to antifascist unity, <em>at any price</em>, then the CNT would run the risk of becoming a puppet in the hands of its political rivals. The National Committee of the CNT, however, did not hesitate to PUBLISH this SECRET report: there was nothing new about the incompetence, naiveté and political immaturity of the CNT leaders. Furthermore, by publishing this pamphlet in 1938, Rüdiger’s secret report could only have scandalized those few simple souls who, in 1938, still believed in the revolutionary nature of the CNT.
[115] Helmut Rüdiger, <em>El anarcosindicalismo en la Revolución Española</em>, CNT, Barcelona, 1938.
* Part 3 — The Death and Funeral of Durruti
<quote>
“<em>Cui prodest scelus is fecit.”</em> <em>(Whoever benefits from the crime is the one who committed it.)</em>
Seneca, <em>Medea</em>
</quote>
<quote>
“<em>We anarchists can go to jail, or die the way Obregón, Ascaso, Sabater, Buenaventura Durruti and Peiró died, whose lives are worthy of a Plutarch. We can die in exile, in the concentration camps, in the maquis, or in a hospice, but to accept the position of government minister, this is inconceivable.”</em>
Jaime Balius, “For the Record”, <em>Solidaridad Obrera</em>, September 2, 1971.
</quote>
** <strong>FROM NOVEMBER 4 TO NOVEMBER 22, 1936</strong>
On November 4, many people were eagerly waiting to listen to a surprise speech by Durruti that was to be broadcast by Radio CNT-FAI from Barcelona to all of Spain. On that same day the press reported on the accession of four anarchist Ministers to the Madrid government: Federica Montseny, Juan García Oliver, Juan López and Joan Peiró. The Durruti Column had not captured Zaragoza. The difficulties with regard to the supply of arms comprised the main problem at the front. Durruti had tried everything in his power to obtain weapons. He even sent a detachment of militiamen in early September on a punitive expedition to Sabadell, in order to force them to deliver the arms that had been stored there in anticipation of forming a Sabadell Column that had not yet been organized. Furthermore, on October 24 the Generalitat had approved the Decree militarizing the Militias, which re-imposed the old Code of Military Justice, effective as of November 1. Both the friends as well as the enemies of Durruti eagerly awaited his speech.
Even before the speech started, people gathered in the vicinity of the speakers that had been installed in the trees of Las Ramblas, which usually broadcast revolutionary songs, news and music. Wherever there was a radio in Barcelona, people were impatiently waiting for the announcement: “Durruti Speaks”.
The Militarization Decree had been passionately discussed in the Durruti Column, which had voted not to comply with it, because it could not improve the combat conditions of the volunteer militiamen of July 19, nor could it resolve the chronic shortage of weapons and ammunition. Durruti signed, in the name of the Committee of War, a text[115] rejecting the militarization demanded by the “Council”[116] of the Generalitat, significantly datelined from the Osera Front on the same day (November 1) that the hated Military Code was supposed to become effective. The Column denied the need for barracks discipline, to which it opposed the superiority of revolutionary discipline: “<em>Militiamen, yes; soldiers, never.”</em>
Durruti, as the delegate of the Column, sought to evoke the indignation and protests of the militiamen of the Aragón front against the clearly counterrevolutionary course that was emerging behind the lines. The broadcast of Durruti’s speech[117] began at 9:30 p.m.:
<quote>
“<em>Workers of Cataluña! I am speaking to the Catalan people, to the generous people that four months ago defeated the soldiers who tried to crush them beneath their boots. I send you salutations from your brothers and comrades fighting on the front in Aragón, who are only kilometers from Zaragoza, within sight of the towers of Pilarica.</em>
“<em>Despite the threat that is closing in on Madrid, we must always remember that the people have risen, and nothing in the world can make them retreat. We shall resist on the front of Aragón, against the Aragonese fascist hordes, and we call upon our brothers in Madrid to resist, because the militiamen of Cataluña will know how to do their duty, just as they did when they went into the streets of Barcelona to crush fascism. The workers organizations must not forget their imperative duty at the present time. At the front, as in the trenches, there is only one thought, one goal. Our gaze is fixed, we look forward, with the sole purpose of crushing fascism.</em>
“<em>We ask the Catalan people to stop the intrigues and bickering. You must rise to the occasion: stop quarreling and think of the war. The people of Catalonia have the duty to support those fighting on the front. We have to mobilize everyone, but don’t think that it will always be the same people. If Catalan workers have assumed the responsibility of going to the front, it’s now time to demand sacrifices from those who remain in the cities. We have to effectively mobilize all the workers in the rearguard because those of us who are at the front need to know that we can count on the men behind us.</em>
“<em>To the organizations: stop your rows and stop tripping things up! Those of us who are fighting on the front ask for sincerity, above all from the CNT and FAI. We ask the leaders to be genuine. It is not enough for them to send encouraging letters to us at the front, and to send clothing, food, rifles and ammunition. It is also necessary for them to face the facts, and plan for the future. This war has all the aggravating factors of modern warfare and is proving to be very costly for Catalonia. The leadership has to realize that we’ll need to start organizing the Catalan economy, and imposing rules on the economic order, if this lasts much longer. I do not feel like writing any more letters so that the comrades or the son of a militiaman can have one more crust of bread or pint of milk, while there are Ministers who do not have to pay to eat and have no limits on their expenditures. We call upon the CNT-FAI to tell them that if they as an organization control the economy of Catalonia, then they must organize it as it should be organized. No one should think of wage increases or reduced working hours now. It’s the duty of all workers, especially the workers of the CNT, to make sacrifices, to work as much as necessary.</em>
“<em>Of course we’re fighting for something greater and the militiamen will prove it. They blush when they read about fund drives to raise money for them in the press, when they see those posters asking you to make a donation. The fascist planes drop newspapers on us that publish lists of donations for their soldiers, and they are neither more nor less than what you give. That is why we have to tell you that we are not beggars and therefore we do not accept charity in any form. Fascism represents and is in effect social inequality, and if you do not want those of us who are fighting to confuse those of you in the rearguard with our enemies, then do your duty. We are waging war now to crush the enemy at the front, but is this the only enemy? No. Anyone among us who is opposed to the revolutionary conquests is also an enemy, and we must crush them as well.</em>
“<em>If you want to neutralize the threat, you must form a granite front. Politics is the art of obstructionism, the art of living [like parasites], and this must be replaced with the art of labor. The time has come to invite the trade union organizations and the political parties to put an end to this business once and for all. In the rearguard we need capable administrators. The men at the front want responsibility and guarantees behind us. And we demand that the organizations look after our women and children.</em>
“<em>They’re mistaken if they think that the militarization decree will scare us and impose an iron disciple on us. You are mistaken, Ministers, with your militarization decree. Since you have so much to say about iron discipline, then I say to you, come to the front with me. At the front we do not accept any discipline, because we are conscious of doing our duty. And you will see our order and our organization. Then we shall return to Barcelona and we shall ask you about your discipline, your order, and your control, which does not exist.</em>
“<em>Remain calm. There’s no chaos or indiscipline at the front. We’re all responsible and cherish your trust. Sleep peacefully. But remember that we’ve left Catalonia and its economy in your hands. Take responsibility for yourselves, discipline yourselves. Let’s not provoke, with our incompetence, after this war, another civil war among ourselves.</em>
“<em>Anyone who thinks that his party is strong enough to impose its policy is wrong. Against the fascists we must marshal one force, one organization, with a unified discipline.</em>
“<em>The fascist tyrants will never cross our lines. That is our slogan at the front. To them we say: ‘You will not pass!’ To you: ‘They will not pass!’”</em>
</quote>
Hours after having listened to Durruti’s radio address, people were still discussing what he had said with his usual energy and integrity. His words resonated with force and emotion in the Barcelona night, embodying the genuine thought of the working class. It was a cry of alarm that reminded the workers of their condition as revolutionary militants. Durruti did not recognize any gods, nor did he see the working class as gods. He took it for granted that the militiamen who were fighting fascism at the front were not going to allow anyone to rob them of the revolutionary and emancipatory content of their struggle: they were not fighting for the Republic or bourgeois democracy, but for the triumph of the social revolution and the emancipation of the proletariat.
His entire address did not contain even one demagogic or rhetorical phrase. His words were a spur to the great and the small of the earth. For the workers and the CNT leaders comfortably settled into responsible positions, for the ordinary citizens and for the Ministers of the Generalitat or the glamorous anarchist Ministers. A diatribe against the bureaucratic deviations of the revolutionary situation that arose on July 19, and a condemnation of government policy, with or without CNT leaders to provide a façade. In the rearguard there was an unfortunate confusion between duty and charity, administration and command, function and bureaucracy, responsibility and discipline, agreement and decree, and example and orders and commands. The threat to “<em>return to Barcelona”</em> caused the resurgence of terror among the political representatives of the bourgeoisie, although it was already too late to remedy the inexcusable and naïve error of July, when the revolution was postponed “<em>until after Zaragoza is captured”</em>, as a result of theoretical shortcomings and a lack of perspective on the part of the libertarian movement. But these threats against the ruling powers were not in vain: his words, directed at his class brothers, possessed all the value of a revolutionary testament. A testament, rather than a proclamation, because his fate was already sealed, a fate that his posthumous deification transformed into an enigma.
The immediate consequence of the radio address, was the convocation by Companys on the following day, November 5, at 11:00 p.m., of an extraordinary meeting[118] in the Palace of the Generalitat of all the Ministers and representatives of all the political and trade union organizations, in order to discuss the growing resistance to compliance with the Decree militarizing the militias, as well as to the Decree proclaiming the dissolution of the revolutionary committees and their replacement by Popular Front municipal government bodies. Durruti was the cause and the target of the debate, although everyone avoided mentioning his name. Companys proclaimed the necessity of putting an end to “<em>the uncontrollables”</em>, who, outside of all political and trade union organizations, “<em>were ruining everything and compromising all of us”</em>. Comorera (PSUC) stated that the UGT had expelled from its ranks those who did not comply with the decrees, and invited the other organizations to do the same. Marianet, secretary of the CNT, after boasting of the sacrifices made by the anarchists with their renunciation of their own ideological principles, complained of the lack of tact demonstrated by the attempt to immediately enforce the Code of Military Justice, and assured those present that after the decree ordering the dissolution of the committees, and thanks to the efforts of the CNT, there were fewer and fewer uncontrollables, and that this was not so much a matter of groups that had to be expelled as resistance that had to be overcome, without provoking revolts, and of individuals who must be convinced. Nin (POUM), Herrera (FAI) and Fábregas (CNT) praised the efforts carried out by all the organizations to stabilize the situation after July 19, and to reinforce the power of the current Council of the Generalitat. Nin mediated the dispute between Sandino, Minister of Defense, and Marianet, concerning the causes of the resistance to the Militarization Decree, saying that “<em>everyone basically agreed”</em> and that there was a certain amount of fear among the masses “<em>about losing what they had gained”</em>, but that “<em>the working class agrees that a real army must be created”</em>. Nin saw the solution of the current disagreements in the creation of a Commissariat of War in which all the political and trade union organizations would be represented. Comorera, much more intransigent than Companys and Tarradellas, claimed that the fundamental problem resided in the Generalitat’s lack of authority: “<em>groups of uncontrollables are still doing whatever they want”</em>, not only with regard to the question of militarization and the conduct of the war or the issue of a unitary command structure, but also with regard to the dissolution of the committees and the formation of municipal governing bodies, as well with respect to the collection of arms in the rearguard and recruitment, which augured disaster. Comorera even said that this lack of authority extended to the collectivizations, “<em>which are still being carried out capriciously, without observing the Decree that regulates them”</em>. Companys accepted the possibility of modifying the Military Code and creating a Commissariat of War. Comorera and Andreu (ERC) insisted that it was necessary to comply with and to enforce compliance with the decrees. The meeting concluded with a joint appeal to the Catalonian people to exercise discipline in complying with all the decrees of the Generalitat, and to all the organizations to make a commitment to declare their support for all the government’s decisions in their press.[119] No one at this meeting opposed militarization: the problem for the politicians and bureaucrats was merely how to make the people obey the government’s decrees.
On November 6 the Council of Ministers of the Republic, including the four anarchist Ministers, voted unanimously to evacuate the Government from Madrid, which was besieged by fascist troops. The scorn for this decision on the part of the Local Federation of the CNT of Madrid was reflected in the publication of a belligerent manifesto that declared: “<em>Madrid, free of Government Ministers, will be the tomb of fascism. Onward, militiamen! Long live Madrid without a government! Long live the Social Revolution!”</em> On the 15<sup>th</sup> of November elements of the Durruti Column were already fighting in Madrid under the command of Durruti, who had resisted leaving Aragón, and who was finally convinced by Marianet and Federica. On November 19, a stray bullet, <em>or perhaps not so stray</em>,[120] struck him while he was at the Madrid front, where he died the next day. On Sunday, November 22, in Barcelona, an endless, chaotic and disorganized funeral procession[121] advanced slowly through the streets, while the two bands that were unable to harmonize their music only contributed to the augmentation of the confusion. The cavalry and motorized troops who were supposed to lead the procession were prevented from doing so by the enormous crowds. The cars that bore the funeral wreaths had to be driven in reverse. The members of the cavalry escort attempted to make their way forward separately. The musicians who had been dispersed in the crowd tried to regroup amidst a confused mass of people bearing antifascist placards and waving red flags, red and black banners, and the striped flags of the republic. The procession was led by numerous politicians and bureaucrats, although the limelight was monopolized by Companys, the president of the Generalitat, Antonov-Ovseenko, the Soviet consul, and Juan García Oliver, the anarchist Minister of Justice of the Republic, who addressed the crowd from in front of the Columbus Monument in order to display his oratorical gifts before the multitude. García Oliver rehearsed the same arguments of sincere friendship and fraternity among antifascists that he would later use in May 1937 to help to smash the barricades of the workers insurrection against Stalinism. The Soviet consul initiated the tradition of ideological manipulation of Durruti by depicting him as a champion of military discipline and unitary command. Companys delivered the most dastardly insult when he said that Durruti “<em>had been shot in the back as all cowards die … or as those die who are murdered by cowards”</em>. All three of them coincided in their praise for antifascist unity above all else. Durruti’s funeral bier was already a tribune for the counterrevolution. Three orators, excellent representatives of the bourgeois government, of Stalinism and the CNT bureaucracy, disputed among themselves for the popularity of the man who was yesterday’s dangerous uncontrollable but today’s embalmed hero. When the coffin, eight hours after the beginning of the spectacle, now without its official cortege, but still accompanied by a curious crowd, arrived at the cemetery of Montjuic, it could not be buried until the next day because hundreds of wreaths blocked the way to the site of the grave, which was too small, and a heavy downpour prevented it from being enlarged.
We may never find out how Durruti really died, since there are seven or eight different and contradictory versions; but it is most interesting to ask why he died fifteen days after having delivered his radio address. Durruti’s radio broadcast was perceived as a dangerous threat, which encountered an immediate response in the convening of the extraordinary meeting of the Council of the Generalitat, especially in the brutality of Comorera’s speech, which could hardly be moderated by cenetistas and POUMistas, who ultimately swore to devote themselves to the common task of complying with and enforcing compliance with all the decrees. The sacred antifascist union between working class bureaucrats, Stalinists and bourgeois politicians could not tolerate uncontrollables of the stature of Durruti: this is why his death was such an urgent and necessary matter. By opposing the militarization of the militias, Durruti personified the revolutionary opposition and resistance to the dissolution of the committees, the direction of the war by the bourgeoisie and state control of the enterprises expropriated in July. Durruti died because he had become a dangerous obstacle for the ongoing counterrevolution.
And for this very same reason Durruti had to die twice. One year later, at the commemoration of the one-year anniversary of his death, the all-powerful propaganda machine of Negrín’s Stalinist government worked at full capacity to attribute the authorship of a slogan to Durruti, invented originally by Ilya Ehrenburg,[122] and later given the support of the bureaucracy of the superior committees of the CNT-FAI, in which he was made to say the opposite of what he always said and thought: “<em>We renounce everything, except victory.”</em> That is, Durruti renounced the revolution. We do not even possess a complete and reliable version of his speech broadcast over the radio on November 4, 1936, because the anarchist press of the period revised and censored Durruti’s live speech for publication.
Once he was dead, Durruti could become a God. And even a Lieutenant Colonel[123] in the Popular Army.
[116] Buenaventura Durruti, “Al Consejo de la Generalidad de Cataluña”, Frente de Osera, November 1, 1936. See Appendix.
[117] “Council” was the word used to avoid using the word “Government”, which was taboo for the anarchists.
[118] The speech is reconstructed from various fragments published in <em>Solidaridad Obrera</em> and <em>Acracia</em>.
[119] “Acta de la reunió celebrada sota la presidencia de S.E. el president de la Generalitat pels conseller i representants dels partits i sindicats que tenen representació en el Consell, els dies 5 i 6 de novembre de 1936.”
[120] Marianet replaced the old and experienced anarchist Liberto Callejas with the young bureaucrat Jacinto Toryho as editor in chief of <em>Solidaridad Obrera</em>, which then published a censored version of Durruti’s speech.
[121] A stray bullet was also blamed for the death, in April 1937, of Antonio Martín, the anarchist leader from Puigcerdà. The memoires of Pons Garlandí disclose that his death was actually the result of a premeditated assassination, orchestrated by high level officials of the ERC in the Generalitat’s police force, who had contracted the services of two snipers, one of whom was known as “penja robes”, well known in La Cerdaña for his marksmanship. Posted in the bell tower, with the bridge that leads to Bellver in their sights, they had no other objective than to assassinate Antonio Martín.
[122] Concerning Durruti’s funeral, see <em>Solidaridad Obrera</em> (November 24, 1936) and the books by H. E. Kaminski, <em>Los de Barcelona</em> [1937], Ed. Cotal, Barcelona, 1977 [a partial English translation can be found online—in October 2013—at: [[http://misterscruffles.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/kaminski.pd][misterscruffles.files.wordpress.com]]f] and by Mary Low and Juan Breá, <em>Red Spanish Notebook: The First Six Months of the Revolution and Civil War</em> [1937], City Lights Books, San Francisco, 1979.
[123] Ilya Ehrenburg, <em>Corresponsal en la Guerra civil española</em>, Júcar, Madrid, 1970, p. 24.
[124] In April 1938 Negrín posthumously awarded this military rank to Durruti.
* Part 4 — The Friends of Durruti Group in the insurrection of May 1937 and its program
<quote>
“<em>The function of history would therefore be showing that the laws deceive, that the kings play a part, that power deludes and that historians lie.”</em>
Michel Foucault, <em>The Genealogy of Racism</em>
</quote>
** <strong>INTRODUCTION</strong>
The Friends of Durruti Group was an anarchist organization, founded in March 1937. Its members were militiamen from the Durruti Column who were opposed to militarization, and anarchists who were critical of the entry of the CNT into the republican government and the Generalitat.
The historical and political importance of the Friends of Durruti resided in its intention, which arose in 1937 within the ranks of the libertarian movement itself, to create a revolutionary Junta that would put and end to the abandonment of revolutionary principles and collaborationism with the capitalist state; so that the CNT would defend and intensify the “conquests” of July 1936, instead of gradually surrendering them to the bourgeoisie. The Group never actually proposed, however, to become, during the May Days of 1937, an authentic revolutionary alternative to the collaborationist leadership of the CNT-FAI, which had various Ministers in the government of the Republic and in that of the Generalitat.
** <strong>THE FRIENDS OF DURRUTI GROUP FROM ITS FOUNDING TO THE MAY EVENTS</strong>
In October 1936 the decree militarizing the Popular Militias provoked major discontent among the anarchist militants of the Durruti Column on the Aragón Front.[124] After long and passionate discussions, in March 1937 several hundred volunteer militiamen, stationed in the Gelsa sector, decided to abandon the front and return to the rearguard.[125] An agreement was reached to the effect that the relief of the militiamen opposed to militarization would be sent within fifteen days. They abandoned the front, <em>taking their weapons with them</em>.
Once they arrived in Barcelona, together with other anarchists (defenders of the continuity and intensification of the July revolution, and opposed to confederal collaboration in the government), the militiamen from Gelsa decided to form an anarchist organization that was separate from the FAI, the CNT and the Libertarian Youth, an organization whose mission would be to channel the acratic movement into the revolutionary path. The Group was formally constituted in March 1937, after a long period of incubation that lasted several months, beginning in October 1936. The directive Committee chose the name of “Group of the Friends of Durruti”, a name that was in part testimony to the fact that most of its members were former militiamen of the Durruti Column, but, as Balius astutely pointed out, it was not chosen as a reference of any kind to Durruti’s views, but rather as a result of the popular cult that had grown up around his memory.[126]
The central headquarters of the Group was located on Las Ramblas, at the corner of Hospital Street. The group experienced a rapid and notable increase in its membership. Just before May 1937, the Group had distributed between four and five thousand membership cards. In order to qualify for membership, one had to be a CNT militant. The Group’s growth was the result of the discontent of a wide sector of the anarchist militants with the CNT’s betrayal of its principles. Another factor in its favor was the struggle that was underway against the implementation of the Collectivization Decree, which was being effected by means of budgetary decrees prepared by Tarradellas at S’Agaró, and by means of which the government of the Generalitat sought to control and direct the operations of all the Catalonian enterprises, subjecting them to a rigid state economic plan.[127] The Catalan economy was in fact being transformed into a kind of collectivist (or trade union) capitalism of state planning, in which the government of the Generalitat exercised financial control over each and every one of the enterprises, and possessed the additional power of appointing an Inspector from the Generalitat, who acted on behalf of the government and directed the enterprise. From January to July 1937, in Barcelona, the industrial workers had attended numerous assemblies in the factories, which were often menaced by large contingents of police just outside the meeting halls, where the question of the conflict between <em>socialization and collectivization</em>[128] was posed with greater or lesser clarity and effectiveness, together with the extremely serious problem presented by the decline in purchasing power of wages and the difficulties in obtaining food and meeting other basic needs. Collectivization implied that the ownership of the small and medium-sized enterprises and workshops had passed from their former owners to the workers in each enterprise, disconnected from and unsupportive of the wage workers in other, less productive enterprises, or enterprises that faced greater difficulties. This is therefore a form of collective ownership, on the part of the workers in each enterprise, although subject to the iron grip of state control, since the general direction of the economy was planned by the government of the Generalitat, which not only exercised financial control and therefore the power to starve out insubordinate enterprises, but also held effective managerial powers due to the Inspector, who in fact became the director and new boss, appointed by the government. In reality, <em>collectivization had therefore become a kind of collective capitalism, under trade union management, with state planning and direction</em>. Socialization, however, means the organization of the workers in Industrial Federations or Trade Unions, which are supposed to reorganize and rationalize production in an entire industrial sector, directed and planned by the trade unions, in which gains are supposed to accrue to the benefit of all of society, and not just the workers of each enterprise.[129] The totality of all these Federations of Industry, rather than the bourgeois government of the Generalitat, should therefore be responsible for the direction and planning of the economy in all of Cataluña. Besides an ideological struggle, which it certainly was, it was above all a struggle for the mere survival of the worker-managed industries, for if Companys and Comorera had the power to tax the enterprises and establish the standards for their working conditions, as well as prevent access to credit or raw materials, they had in their hands the real control of any enterprise, by way of the Inspector they imposed, and with the generalization of this situation a kind of state capitalism was established, directed by the Generalitat.
This struggle was ideologically concretized in the slogan disseminated by the Group of the Friends of Durruti, in April and May of 1937, “All power to the trade unions”. Recall that the May Days were provoked precisely by the refusal of the workers to accept an Inspector appointed by the Generalitat at the Telephone Company.
The Group engaged in frenzied activity. From its formal constitution on March 17, up until May 3, the Group organized various public meetings (at the Teatro Poliorama on April 18 and at the Teatro Goya on May 2), distributed various manifestoes and pamphlets, disrupted Federica Montseny’s speech at the rally at the Monumental on April 11, and plastered the walls of Barcelona with posters explaining their program. Two of this program’s points are particularly noteworthy:
1. <em>All power to the working class.</em>
2. Democratic institutions of workers, peasants and combatants, as an expression of this working class power, which they called the <em>Revolutionary Junta</em>.
They also called for <em>the trade unions to assume full economic and political direction of the country</em>. When they spoke of trade unions they were referring to the confederal trade unions, excluding the Stalinized UGT. In fact, some of the members of the Group had abandoned their positions as UGT militants in order to join the CNT, and therefore to become eligible for membership in the Friends of Durruti Group.
In reality, although the working class origins of the members of the Group made all of them eligible to be members of the CNT, most of them were militants of the FAI, which is why it could very well be said that the Group of the Friends of Durruti was a group of anarchists who, from acratic doctrinal purism, but above all because they reflected the ongoing struggle for the socialization of the enterprises and against the militarization of the confederal militias, opposed the collaborationist and statist policy of the leadership of the CNT, and the FAI itself.
They were a dominant force in the food supply trade union, with branches throughout Catalonia, as well as in the mining districts of Sallent, Suria, Fígols and Cardona, in the vicinity of Alto Llobregat. They also had influence in other trade unions, in which they were a minority faction. Some of the Group’s members were also members of the Control Patrols. They never formed a fraction or a sub-group within the Patrol Controls, however, or ever attempted to infiltrate the Patrols.
We cannot characterize the Group as an affinity group, or even as a conscious and organized vanguard that was methodically carrying out a plan to present itself as an alternative to the FAI. It was, both from the numerical as well as organizational and ideological point of view, much more than a more or less informally constituted affinity group (which would usually have a maximum of between twelve and twenty members) formed on the basis of certain shared ideological views and common discontent. And although it would be even less correct to view it as just another branch of the Libertarian Movement (ML), such as the CNT, FAI and the Libertarian Youth, it could be compared to the Mujeres Libres of that time: an organization with its own goals, not completely demarcated by any of the three great organized branches of the ML. It was a large organization of militants (five thousand members before May) that instinctively felt the imperative need to confront the pusillanimous policies of the CNT and the constantly advancing counterrevolutionary process. Its most outstanding spokespersons were Jaime Balius and Pablo Ruiz. On Sunday, April 18, the Group held a public meeting in the Teatro Poliorama, where they intended to publicize their existence and present their program. Jaime Balius, Pablo Ruiz (the delegate of the Gelsa Group of the Durruti Column), Francisco Pellicer (from the Food Supply Trade Union) and Francisco Carreño (a member of the War Committee of the Durruti Column) spoke at this meeting. The event was a major success and the ideas expressed by the speakers were loudly applauded by the crowd. On the first Sunday in May (the 2<sup>nd</sup>), the Group held another informational rally in the Teatro Goya, which filled the theater to overflowing and provoked great enthusiasm in the audience. A documentary film entitled, “July Nineteenth” was shown, in which the most emotional incidents of the revolutionary days of July 1936 were depicted. Pablo Ruiz, Jaime Balius, Liberto Callejas and Francisco Carreño spoke at this meeting. During the course of the meeting the audience was warned that an attack by the reactionaries against the workers was imminent. The superior Committees of the FAI and the CNT immediately attempted to discredit the Friends of Durruti Group, whom they slandered as Marxists.
The program set forth by The Friends of Durruti, prior to May 1937, was characterized by its emphasis on the management of the economy by the trade unions, the critique of all the parties and their state collaborationism, as well as a strict return to acratic doctrinal purity. The Friends of Durruti explained their program in the poster with which they covered the walls of Barcelona at the end of April 1937. These posters now advocated, before the insurrection took place, the need to <em>replace the bourgeois government of the Generalitat of Catalonia with a Revolutionary Junta</em>. The posters read as follows:
<quote>
“From the Group of the Friends of Durruti. To the working class:
1. The immediate constitution of a Revolutionary Junta formed of workers from the city and the countryside and combatants.
2. The family wage. Rationing card. Direction of the economy and control over distribution by the trade unions.
3. Liquidation of the counterrevolution.
4. Creation of a revolutionary army.
5. Absolute control of public order by the working class.
6. Firm opposition to any armistice.
7. A proletarian justice system.
8. Abolition of prisoner exchanges.
Attention, workers: our group is opposed to the advancing counterrevolution. The decrees on public order, sponsored by Aiguadé, will not be implemented. We demand that Maroto and the other imprisoned comrades be released.
All power to the working class.
<br>
All economic power to the trade unions.
<br>
Against the Generalitat, the Revolutionary Junta.”
</quote>
The poster of April 1937 foreshadowed and explained the leaflet distributed during the May Days, along with many of the other themes and concerns addressed by Balius in the articles published in <em>Solidaridad Obrera</em>, <em>La Noche</em> and <em>Ideas</em> (on revolutionary justice, prisoner exchanges, the need for the rearguard to live for the war, etc.). And this was the first time that the Group advocated the necessity of <em>a Revolutionary Junta to replace the bourgeois government of the Generalitat</em>. This Revolutionary Junta was defined as a revolutionary government formed by all the workers, peasants and militiamen <em>who had fought in the streets during the revolutionary days of July 1936</em> (and this excluded the PSUC, founded on July 23, and the ERC).
The most important point, however, was the combined expression of the three concluding slogans. The replacement of the bourgeois government of the Generalitat by a Revolutionary Junta appears alongside the slogan of “<em>All power to the working class”</em> and “<em>All economic power to the trade unions”</em>.
The political program expressed in this text, which was distributed immediately before the May Days, was undoubtedly the most advanced and lucid of all the programs of all the proletarian groups of the time, and made the Group the revolutionary vanguard of the Spanish proletariat at this critical and decisive moment. And that is just how the Group was viewed at the time by the POUM and the Bolshevik-Leninist Section of Spain.
** <strong>THE MAY EVENTS</strong>[130]
There was no demonstration in Barcelona on <em>May Day</em>, which fell on a Saturday. The Generalitat had declared the day a working day, for increasing war production, although the real reason was fear of a confrontation between the different workers organizations, due to the growing tension in various towns and districts in Catalonia. On that same Saturday, the Council of the Generalitat met to deliberate on the disturbing situation of public order in Catalonia. This Council expressed its approval of the efficacy displayed during the last few weeks by the Ministries of Interior and Defense, to whom it agreed to grant a vote of confidence to resolve those questions concerning public order that still needed to be addressed.
The President of the Generalitat, on Monday, May 3, was conveniently absent due to a trip to Benicarló for a meeting with Largo Caballero, which allowed him to disavow responsibility for the first incidents. In any event, the political decision of Companys, with his absolute refusal to dismiss Artemi Aguadé and Rodríguez Salas, as the CNT demanded earlier that same day, was one of the most important trip-wires that led to the armed confrontations of the following days. On that same day, a large contingent of miners from the Alto Llobregat mining basin were present in Barcelona, who were interested in the agreements the government had to make concerning the export of potash,[131] and who subsequently took an active part in the defense of the barricades.
On <em>Monday, May 3, 1937</em>, at around 2:45 p.m., three trucks carrying heavily armed assault guards pulled up in front of the headquarters of the Telephone company in the Plaza de Cataluña. They were commanded by Rodríguez Salas, a militant of the UGT and a dedicated Stalinist, who was the publicly appointed chief of the Commissariat of Public Order. The building containing the Telephone company had been confiscated and controlled by the CNT since July 19. The questions of the surveillance of telephone communications, control over the borders, and the control patrols were the bones of contention that had provoked various incidents since January pitting the republican government of the Generalitat against the confederal masses. It was an inevitable confrontation between the republican state apparatus, which claimed absolute dominion over all the responsibilities that “pertained” to it, and the defense of the “conquests” of July 19 on the part of the cenetistas. Rodríguez Salas attempted to take control of the Telephone building. The CNT militants on the lower floors, taken by surprise, allowed themselves to be disarmed; on the upper floors, however, serious resistance was organized, thanks to a strategically placed machine gun. The news spread quickly. Barricades were immediately erected throughout the city. It is not possible to speak of a spontaneous reaction on the part of the Barcelona working class, because the general strike, the armed confrontations with the police forces and the barricades <em>were the fruit of the initiative taken by the Committee of Investigation of the CNT-FAI and the defense committees</em>, which rapidly encountered support thanks to the existence of an enormous amount of generalized discontent, the increasing economic hardships occasioned by the rising cost of living, long queues and rationing, as well as the tension among the rank and file base of the confederal militants between collaborationists and revolutionaries. <em>The street battles were initiated and carried out by the neighborhood defense committees</em> (and only partially and secondarily by some elements of the control patrols). The fact that there was no directive from the superior committees of the CNT, whose members were acting as Ministers in Valencia, or from any other organization, to mobilize and build barricades throughout the city, does not mean that these actions were purely spontaneous, but rather that they were the result of the directives issued by the defense committees.[132] Manuel Escorza had spoken at the assembly of the CNT-FAI on July 21, 1936, advocating a third way, as opposed to García Oliver’s half-hearted advocacy of the “go for broke” strategy and the overwhelming majority position of Abad de Santillán and Federica Montseny in favor of loyal collaboration with the government of the Generalitat. Escorza advocated the use of the government of the Generalitat as a tool to socialize the economy, and that it then be disposed of when it ceases to be useful to the CNT. Escorza was the highest ranking official of the <em>Investigation Services of the CNT-FAI</em>, which had since July 1936 been executing all kinds of repressive tasks, as well as espionage and intelligence. These Services had preserved <em>their own separate organizational structure</em>, autonomous and independent of both the government of the Generalitat as well as, during its brief existence, the CCMA. It was directly responsible to the superior committees of the CNT-FAI (the Regional Committees of the CNT and the FAI), while at the same time it <em>exercised a coordinating role</em> for the neighborhood defense committees and the CNT militants who were members of the public institutions of the Commissariat of Public Order and the Control Patrols: José Asens, Dionisio Eroles, Aurelio Fernández, “Portela”, etc. In April 1937, Pedro Herrera, the “conseller” (Minister) of Health under the second Tarradellas government,[133] and Manuel Escorza, were the CNT officials who negotiated with Lluis Companys (the President of the Generalitat) to resolve the serious government crisis of early March 1937, due to the resignation of the “conseller” of Defense, the cenetista Isgleas.[134] Companys decided to abandon the tactic employed by Tarradellas, who could not imagine a government of the Generalitat that was not a government of antifascist unity, and in which the CNT did not participate, in order to adopt the tactic advocated by Comorera, secretary of the PSUC, that consisted in using force to impose <em>a “strong” government</em>, one that would no longer tolerate a CNT incapable of keeping its own militants, whom he referred to as “uncontrollables”, in line. Companys was determined to break with a an increasingly more problematic policy of compromises with the CNT and thought that the time had come, thanks to the support of the PSUC and the Soviets, to impose by force the authority and the decrees of a government of the Generalitat that, as the facts had demonstrated, was not even strong enough to refrain from making deals with the CNT. The fruitless discussions held by Companys with Escorza and Herrera,[135] which failed to arrive at any kind of political solution in two months of talks, and despite the ephemeral new government of April 16,[136] led directly to the armed confrontations of May 1937 in Barcelona, when Companys, without conferring with Tarradellas (not to mention Escorza and Herrera) issued the order to Artemi Aguadé, “conseller” of the Interior, to occupy the Telephone building, which was then executed by Rodríguez Salas,[137] Commissar of Public Order, at approximately 2:45 p.m. on May 3, 1937. The general strike order was not the product of a “spontaneous class instinct”. <em>The order to seize the Telephone building was the brutal response to the CNT demands</em>[138] <em>and an expression of contempt for the negotiations</em>[139]<em></em> <em>carried out during the month of April by Manuel Escorza and Pedro Herrera, representing the CNT, directly with Companys, who had expressly excluded Tarradellas</em>. Escorza[140] had the motive and the ability to respond immediately to the provocation staged by Companys from his position in the Committee of Investigation of the CNT-FAI, an autonomous organization that coordinated the defense committees and the CNT members who held positions of authority in the various departments of public order. This was most likely the trigger of the armed confrontations of the May Events, and created a favorable terrain for the activities of the Friends of Durruti. They were able to immediately adapt to what was required by the circumstances. While the workers were fighting with arms in hand, the Group attempted to lead them and give them a revolutionary goal. Its limitations soon became apparent, however. It criticized the leaders of the CNT, whom it called traitors, in its Manifesto of May 8, but it was unable to counteract the CNT’s directives to abandon the barricades. Nor did it propose to act outside of the framework of the confederal organization and its directives, which immediately sought to stop the insurrection that was started by the defense committees, when the great ones, such as García Oliver, Federica Montseny and Abad de Santillán, tried to put out the fire. The Friends of Durruti was incapable of realizing its proposal to form a Revolutionary Junta. Its members knew that its critiques of the anarchosyndicalist leadership were not enough to displace it from its ruling position in the CNT organization. Furthermore, the Group’s members were mostly young and inexperienced and lacked prestige among the confederal masses. Its ideas had not deeply permeated the rank and file militants.
While the Group was floundering in this situation of impotence it received a note from the Executive Committee of the POUM, requesting that an authorized deputation of the Group meet with the Executive Committee. This meeting was attended by Jaime Balius, Pablo Ruiz, Eleuterio Roig and Martín. At 7:00 p.m. on May 4, they met with Gorkin, Nin and Andrade at the Principal Palace on the Ramblas. Together they assessed the situation, and reached the unanimous conclusion that, given the opposition of the leadership circles of the CNT and the FAI to the revolutionary movement, the movement was condemned to failure.[141] They agreed that it was necessary to carry out an orderly retreat of the combatants and that the latter should keep their weapons. That the withdrawal should be carried out before the positions have to be abandoned as a result of the actions of the enemy forces. That it was necessary to obtain guarantees that the combatants at the barricades would not be targets of repression. On the evening of the next day, the highest-level anarchosyndicalist leaders and officials again spoke on the radio, calling for an end to the fighting. And now the rank and file militants at the barricades no longer mocked the “firemen” of the CNT-FAI, or the kisses that García Oliver gave the assault guards.
On <em>Wednesday, May 5</em>, the Friends of Durruti distributed the well-known leaflet at the barricades that made them famous, whose text reads as follows:
<quote>
“CNT-FAI. ‘The Friends of Durruti’ Group.
WORKERS! A Revolutionary Junta. Shoot those responsible. Disarm all armed government forces. Socialization of the economy. Dissolution of all the political Parties that have attacked the working class. We shall not surrender the streets. The revolution above all else. We salute our comrades of the POUM who have fraternized with us in the streets. LONG LIVE THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION! DOWN WITH THE COUNTERREVOLUTION!”
</quote>
This leaflet was printed during the night of May 5<sup>th</sup> by workers forced to do so at gunpoint, in a print shop in the Barrio Chino. The improvisation and lack of infrastructure of the Group were evident. The text was drafted after the meeting with the Executive of the POUM, held at 7:00 p.m. on the previous day, when the Group and the POUM had already agreed on a position of defensive retreat, without abandoning any weapons, and with the demand that guarantees be secured against repression. The leaflet, approved by the POUM, and published in issue number 235 (May 6) of <em>La Batalla</em>, was not backed up by a plan of action, and was nothing but a declaration of intentions and an appeal to the spontaneity of the confederal masses to persevere in their actions against the advances of the counterrevolution. In reality, everything depended on the decision of the CNT leadership. It was absurd and illogical to think that the confederal masses, despite their initial reticence, and despite their criticisms, would not follow the leaders of July 19. Only if the leadership of the CNT was supplanted by another revolutionary leadership would it be possible, although even then it would be very difficult, for the masses to follow the directives and the action plan of a new leadership. Neither the Group, however, nor the POUM attempted to dislodge the confederal leadership, nor had either prepared any kind of plan of action. Both, in practice, encouraged a tailist policy with respect to the decisions of the CNT leadership. The Executive Committee of the POUM rejected the proposal of Josep Rebull[142] to seize the Generalitat and any buildings that might still put up any resistance in the city center, <em>arguing that this was not a military question, but a political one</em>. The confrontations were restricted to the center of the city.
On May 5 there was a meeting between the Local Committee of Barcelona of the POUM and the Friends of Durruti, which the POUMistas characterized as a failure, because:
<quote>
“They [the Friends of Durruti] did not want to directly intervene within the confederal structure to replace the leadership, they only wanted to have an influence on the movement without assuming any other kind of responsibility.”
</quote>
In the leaflet distributed on May 5, The Friends of Durruti proposed a joint POUM-CNT-FAI action. As an immediate objective, to lead the revolution, they advocated the formation of a Revolutionary Junta. BUT THIS COULD NEVER BE CARRIED OUT IN PRACTICE. They were people of the barricades, rather than organizers. The proposal for joint CNT-FAI-POUM action did not go beyond a salute to the militants of other organizations, who were fighting shoulder to shoulder with them at the barricades. This proposal never proceeded from the text of the leaflet to a concrete pact. They did practically nothing to unseat the CNT leadership and deprive it of control over the confederal masses, who had repeatedly ignored the CNT’s orders to abandon the struggle in the streets.
The Friends of Durruti were the most active fighters on the barricades and completely dominated the Plaza Maciá (now the <em>Plaza Real</em>), with all the side streets blocked by barricades, and the entire length of <em>Hospital Street</em>. At <em>the intersection of Las Ramblas and</em> <em>Hospital Street</em>, under an enormous portrait of Durruti draped over the façade of the building where the Group had its headquarters, <em>a barricade was built where they established their center of operations</em>. Their absolute control over Hospital Street connected with the headquarters of the Confederal Defense Committee (the central barracks of the defense committees) at <em>Los Escolapios</em>[143] on the Ronda San Pablo, and from there with the <em>Brecha de San Pablo</em>, secured by forty militiamen from the Rojinegra Column, who, under the command of the Durrutista Máximo Franco had “dropped in on Barcelona” for purposes of “observation and intelligence”, after both the Rojinegra Column as well as the Lenin Column, commanded by Rovira, had returned to the front after yielding to pressure exerted by Abad de Santillán and Molina, that is, by the cenetistas who were giving orders from the Department of Defense of the Generalitat, in the absence of Isgleas.
The POUM totally dominated the <em>Plaza del Teatro</em> with several barricades that defended an extensive perimeter around the headquarters of the Local Committee (in the Principal Palace) and the <em>Hotel Falcón</em>, which had been transformed into a fortress.
The bloodiest and most decisive battles took place on <em>May 4<sup>th</sup> and 5<sup>th</sup></em>. The working class neighborhoods were under CNT-FAI control from the very first moment of the insurrection. In the heart of Pueblo Nuevo, for example, barricades were erected systematically to control the incoming and outgoing traffic on the Mataró highway, yet all was quiet in this area, and in those neighborhoods where fighting was necessary the battles were rapidly decided in favor of the defense committees, as was the case in <em>Sants</em>, where the defense committee, installed in the Hotel Olímpic on the Plaza de España, attacked the neighboring barracks of the Assault Guard (which housed 600 men) at the <em>Plaza de España</em>, and then, as a preventive measure, attacked the barracks of the National Guard (the former Civil Guard) at <em>Casarramona</em>[144] (now the headquarters of Caixa-Fórum), held by a squad of 80 men, since the rest of the garrison, which had a total of 400 National Guards, had departed with orders to seize the radio station on Las Ramblas. As soon as they reached the vicinity of <em>Los Escolapios</em> they were defeated and took flight. In <em>Pueblo Seco</em>, the defense committee fired artillery salvos at the <em>Cine América</em> (No. 121 Paralelo), where about sixty of these National Guards had sought refuge during the course of their attempt to get back to their barracks.
The bloodiest battle was fought <em>in the center of the city, and often involved confrontations between adjacent barricades</em> erected by the POUM, CNT, PSUC, ERC and the Generalitat, to defend their respective headquarters and local offices.
The Plaza de Sant Jaume, where the Palacio de la Generalitat and the offices of the City Government were located, was defended by barricades manned by the <em>mossos d’esquadra</em>. The members of the POUM erected a barricade at the intersection of Las Ramblas and Fiveller Street (now Ferran/Fernando), from which they fired on the barricade of the Generalitat. The PSUC built a barricade at the intersection of <em>Llibreteria Street and the Plaza del Angel</em> (at that time, Dostoievski), right in front of the building containing the headquarters of the UGT federation of water, gas and electric power trade unions, located on the Vía Layetana (then known as Durruti). The resulting ability to open fire from two sides at once allowed them to dominate this sector of the Vía Durruti, and also blockaded the gates of No. 2, Plaza del Angel, where Berneri and Barbieri resided, who were kidnapped and murdered by a UGT patrol. There were also battles on Vía Durruti between the Commissariat of Public Order and the Casa CNT-FAI, which was defended by tanks. The combat in the Post Office building was fought floor by floor.
On the Paseo de Gracia gunfire was exchanged between the <em>Casal Carlos Marx</em> of the PSUC and the nearby local headquarters of the CNT’s <em>Woodworkers Trade Union</em>; there was also a battle at the <em>Cinco de Oros</em>, between the barricade erected in front of the POUM headquarters, on the Paseo de Gracia, and the barricade of the nearby Assault Guard barracks. Also on the Paseo de Gracia, the German anarchosyndicalists had built another barricade in front of the former German consulate, protected by a machine gun that raked the entire Paseo de Gracia.
On the Gran Vía, between Balmes and the Paseo de Gracia, there was a battle that pitted Assault Guards and special troops of the Estat Català, who had occupied the café <em>Oro del Rhin</em> and erected a barricade on the Rambla de Cataluña, against the cenetistas of the <em>Food Supply Trade Union</em> and the <em>headquarters of the Control Patrols</em>; meanwhile, from the <em>Hotel Colón</em>, which shared a courtyard with the building housing the <em>CNT’s Graphic Arts Workers Trade Union</em>, whose members were preparing to assault the hotel, shots were fired on the <em>Telephone Building</em>. On the upper part of Las Ramblas the headquarters of the Executive Committee of the POUM, endangered by gunfire from a platoon of Assault Guards who had constructed a fortified position in the adjacent <em>Café Moka</em>, was defended from the astronomical observatories of the <em>Poliorama</em>,[145] a building located on the other side of Las Ramblas, from which gunfire was directed at the entrance of the Café Moka. There was also a fierce battle at the <em>Parque de la Ciudadela</em>, around the <em>Parliament</em> building, Azaña’s residence (the president of the Republic), the <em>Mercado del Born</em> and at the <em>Estación de Francia</em>, which was controlled by the cenetistas, but which was finally captured by the troops from the nearby Palacio de Gobernación. There were also battles between the <em>Carlos Marx Barracks</em> (PSUC) and the nearby <em>Espartaco Barracks</em> (CNT), formerly known as the Docks Barracks.
The patrols of the various factions searched and disarmed[146] individuals and groups from other factions on the streets of Ensanche. Numerous incidents, brawls and armed clashes were taking place everywhere, but especially in <em>the triangle formed by the Hotel Colón</em> (the headquarters of the PSUC), <em>the Palacio de la Generalitat and the Commissariat of Public Order</em>, on the Vía Durruti. This counterrevolutionary bastion in the center of the city, composed of narrow and twisting alleys, easily blocked by small barricades, <em>and still disputed</em>, should have yielded to the resolute assault of the Barcelona workers, as Josep Rebull insistently demonstrated to the Executive Committee of the POUM with a map of Barcelona. But the radio broadcasts of the speeches of the anarchist Ministers and other dignitaries had a powerful demobilizing effect. Although at first <em>some people actually fired their guns at their radios when they heard García Oliver say that he had to kiss the dead police</em>,[147] because they were antifascist brothers, the demoralizing effect of such broadcasts on the barricades soon became apparent,[148] which witnessed a slow but steady desertion by the anarchist militants. Manuel Escorza and Aurelio Fernández immediately obeyed their superiors, with the excuse that it was “obvious” that the insurrection had been the “spontaneous” response to the provocation implied by the occupation of the Telephone Building at the order of the Generalitat.
At the Generalitat the top echelon leaders of the CNT, “protected” by the artillery of Montjuic that were aimed at the Palacio,[149] the Stalinists and the Catalanist bourgeoisie <em>did the only thing they could do: they formed another government, the same government with different names</em>. The leaders of the POUM met with the Regional Committee of the CNT to appeal for caution! Among the barricades various Committees for the Defense of the Revolution arose, but they did not succeed in forming a Revolutionary Junta.[150]
Balius, the most outstanding theoretician of the Friends of Durruti Group, crippled due to progressive encephalitis, and spastic hemiplegia that affected the left side of his body, which made him unable to move his left leg and caused stiffness and trembling in his left arm, leaning on his crutches, <em>read a proclamation from the barricade of Las Ramblas/Hospital in which he called for the revolutionary solidarity</em> of the European proletariat, and especially the French proletariat, with the struggle of the Spanish proletariat. It was a powerful revolutionary image that captured the moment, as beautiful as it was unavailing.
Distributing leaflets at the barricades was not easy, and was often met with suspicion on the part of many militants, and even with physical force. On the evening of May 5, the Bolshevik-Leninists Carlini and Quesada[151] held an informal meeting with Balius, without any other purposes or perspectives than to continue the struggle on the barricades. Jaume Balius also met with Josep Rebull,[152] the secretary of cell 72 of the POUM, which, due to the small numerical importance of both organizations, had no practical result. The Friends of Durruti rejected Josep Rebull’s proposal to issue a joint Manifesto.
On <em>Thursday, May 6</em>, the militants of the CNT, as a demonstration of their sincere desire to bring peace to the city, evacuated the Telephone Building, where the conflict began, which was immediately occupied by the forces of the police, who guaranteed that the UGT militants would be able to keep their jobs, in order to resume telephone service. Faced with the protests of the anarchist leaders, the Generalitat responded that “it was a <em>fait accompli</em>”, and the confederal leaders chose not to publicize this new bourgeois “betrayal”, in order not to fuel the fires of discontent. The vernacular term for this was that they were acting as firemen, that is, putting out fires and/or conflicts. The abandonment of the barricades by the cenetistas was now generalized. Little gunfire was heard.
When the news was reported that a contingent of troops was on its way from Valencia to pacify Barcelona, Balius proposed the formation of a confederal column that should depart from Barcelona and intercept them. Once this column was formed in Barcelona, it would be joined by other fighters along the road, and it would also have the support of not a few militiamen from the Aragón Front: it could go all the way to Valencia and then assault heaven…! Commissions were formed to consult with the militants in the trade unions and the streets, but the proposal found no echo whatsoever. It was absolutely unrealistic.
On <em>Friday, May 7, starting at 7:00 p.m.</em>, the troops from Valencia marched down the Diagonal and the Paseo de Gracia. A few days later only the barricades of the PSUC were still standing, which it wanted to preserve as monuments commemorating its victory.
<em>On Saturday, May 8, order once again reigned in Barcelona.</em> The corpses of Camilo Berneri, Alfredo Martínez, and many other persons who had been tortured and executed by the Stalinists, began to turn up. The superior committees of the CNT-FAI demanded the expulsion of the Friends of Durruti, although no trade union assembly would ratify this decision.
The confederal masses, disoriented by the appeals of their leaders—the same ones they had on July 19!—finally chose to abandon the struggle, despite the fact that at first they had laughed at the appeals from the CNT leadership for calm and to abandon the struggle so as to preserve antifascist unity.
The Manifesto distributed on May 8 by the Friends of Durruti Group, in which the Group presented their evaluation of the results of the May Days, was printed at the printing press of <em>La Batalla</em>. The Group, denounced by the CNT as an organization of provocateurs, had no publishing facilities of its own. A militiaman of the POUM, Paradell, a leader of the retail workers trade union, when he found out that the Group needed access to a press, told Josep Rebull, the editor in chief of the POUM newspaper, and the latter, fulfilling the most elementary duty of revolutionary solidarity, without consulting any superior ranks of the party, offered to print the Manifesto for the Friends of Durruti.
In this Manifesto The Friends of Durruti Group related the seizure of the Telephone Building to previous provocations. They identified the provocateurs of the May Events as the Esquerra Republicana, the PSUC, and the armed forces of the Generalitat. The Friends of Durruti proclaimed the revolutionary nature of July 1936 (and not just its nature as opposition to the fascist uprising) and of May 1937 (they would not be content with just another change of government):
<quote>
“Our Group, which has been in the streets, on the barricades, defending the conquests of the proletariat, advocates the complete victory of the social revolution. We cannot accept the fiction, and the counterrevolutionary reality, of the formation of a new government with the same parties, but with different representatives.”
</quote>
In opposition to the back room deals that the Group qualified as deceits, The Friends of Durruti offered their revolutionary program, already set forth in the leaflet issued on May 5:
<quote>
“Our Group demands the immediate formation of a revolutionary junta, the shooting of those who are responsible, the disarmament of the armed forces, the socialization of the economy and the dissolution of all the political parties that have attacked the working class.” The Friends of Durruti Group did not hesitate to claim that the workers won the battle on the military field, and therefore that they had to put an end once and for all to a Generalitat that meant nothing. The Group accused the leaders and superior committees of the CNT, who had paralyzed a victorious workers insurrection, of “betrayal”: “The Generalitat represents nothing. Its continued existence reinforces the counterrevolution. The workers won the battle. It is inconceivable that the committees of the CNT have acted with such timidity that they would order a ‘cease-fire’ and that they would even order a return to work when we were on the verge of total victory. They did not take into account the real source of the aggression, they did not pay attention to the real meaning of the events of the past few days. Such conduct must be defined as a betrayal of the revolution, conduct that no one, for any reason, must every commit or sponsor. And we cannot even find the words to describe the nefarious work done by <em>Solidaridad Obrera</em> and the most well-known militants of the CNT.”
</quote>
The term “betrayal” was used again when the Group commented on the expulsion order issued by the Regional Committees of the CNT against The Friends of Durruti Group, as well as in its discussion of the encroachment by the central government of Valencia on the security and defense powers of Catalonia (not those exercised by the Generalitat, but those controlled by the CNT): “This is betrayal on a vast scale. The two essential guarantees of the working class, security and defense, are offered on a platter to our enemies.” The Manifesto concluded with a brief auto-critique with regard to certain ineffective tactics employed during the May Days, and with an optimistic perspective on the future, which the immediate wave of repression that began on May 28 demonstrated to be vain and illogical. May 1937 did not end in a draw; it was a severe defeat of the proletariat.
Despite the pervasive mythology of the Events of May 1937, the one thing that is clear is that it was <em>a very chaotic and confused situation, characterized by the eagerness to negotiate of all the parties implicated in the conflict</em>. May 1937 was at no time an offensive and resolute workers insurrection, but merely a defensive struggle without any precise objectives, although it formed part of the ongoing struggle of socializaton against collectivization, and the struggle in defense of “the conquests” of July. The detonator of the conflict was the assault on the Telephone Building by the security forces of the Generalitat. And this action took place within the framework of the logic pursued by the government of Companys to slowly take over all the powers that the “anomalous” situation brought about by the workers insurrection of July 19 had momentarily deprived it of. The recent successes it enjoyed in Cerdaña cleared the way for a decisive showdown in Barcelona and all of Catalonia. It was obvious that Companys felt that he had the support of Comorera (PSUC) and Ovseenko (the Soviet Consul), with whom he had collaborated very closely and effectively since December, when the POUM was expelled from the government of the Generalitat. The policy of the Stalinists coincided with the objectives of Companys: the weakening and annihilation of the revolutionary forces, that is, of the POUM and the CNT, were Soviet goals, which could only be achieved by way of the strengthening of the bourgeois government of the Generalitat. The long open crisis of the government of the Generalitat, after the refusal of the CNT to consent to the transfer of the Carlos Marx Division (of the PSUC) to the Madrid Front, and after the Decree of March 4 ordering the dissolution of the Control Patrols and the disarmament of the rearguard, led to its inevitable violent culmination, after various episodes involving armed confrontations in Vilanesa, La Fatarella, Cullera (Valencia), Bellver, the funeral of Cortada, etc., in the assault on the Telephone Building and the bloody events of May in Barcelona. The stupid blindness, the unbreakable loyalty to antifascist unity, the high degree of collaboration with the republican government on the part of the principal anarchosyndicalist leaders (from Peiró to Federica Montseny, from Abad de Santillán to García Oliver, from Marianet to Valerio Mas) were not irrelevant factors, nor did they pass unnoticed by the government of the Generalitat and the Soviet agents. Their idiotic sanctity could always be counted on, as was abundantly displayed during the May Days. But Companys did not expect the rapid and decisive armed response of Escorza, from the defense committees, and then he was infuriated by the refusal of the Valencia government to order Díaz Sandino (who was the commander of the Republican air force) to bomb the barracks and buildings controlled by the CNT. Companys ended up forfeiting all the powers of the Generalitat with regard to Defense and Public Order, which had never been very extensive in the first place.
As for the activities of the Friends of Durruti during the May Events, there is certainly no justification to engage in a deceptive mythification of their participation in the barricades and of its leaflet, since the Friends of Durruti at no time called for the replacement of the confederal leadership, and limited its efforts to harsh critiques of its leaders and their policy of “betrayal” of the revolution. Perhaps they could not have done any more than that, given their small numbers and the slight influence they had on the cenetista masses. But we should emphasize their participation in the street battles, and their control of various barricades on Las Ramblas, especially the one in front of their social center, and their interventions in the struggles in Sants, La Torrassa and Sallent. We must, of course, acknowledge their attempts to provide leadership and minimal political demands, in the leaflet distributed on May 5. The distribution of this leaflet was not easy, and cost the lives of several of the Group’s members, but its distribution on the barricades could count on the sympathy and the support of many CNT militants. Among the noteworthy actions that took place during the May Days, we must not forget the appeal issued by Balius from the barricade on the corner of Las Ramblas and Hospital Street, for the active solidarity of all the workers of Europe with the Spanish revolution. The Friends of Durruti, once the group received news of the formation of a column of Assault Guards that was to be sent from Valencia to crush the rebellion, reacted with a call to form an anarchist column to intercept it. This idea never amounted to anything more than a vain proposal, which no longer found any echo whatsoever among the cenetista militants, who began to abandon the barricades. Meanwhile, Ricardo Sanz, the delegate of the militiamen of the Durruti Column, who had returned from the Madrid Front while awaiting transfer to the Aragón Front, remained inactive in the barracks of the Docks on Icaria Avenue, totally uninvolved with the street battles, as if he was unaware of them or they were taking place on the planet Mars.[153]
We must finally note, from a political point of view, the agreement made with the POUM to issue an appeal to the workers that, before they abandon the barricades, they should request guarantees that there would be no subsequent reprisals; and above all that the best guarantee was to keep their weapons, which they must never surrender. A defeated workers insurrection might not abandon its arms, but it cannot expect that repression would not be directed against the insurrectionaries, which is just what took place after June 16.
It is certainly true, however, that, once the fighting was over, the May barricades proved to be a nuisance for everyone: the troops that had arrived from Valencia tore up the membership cards of the cenetistas and forced peaceful passersby to tear down the barricades, at the same time that the Regional Committee of the CNT was calling for the rapid dismantling of the barricades as a sign of a return to normal. Within a few days only the barricades of the PSUC remained, which the PSUC wanted to preserve as a monument to and sign of its victory. The total casualties amounted to five hundred dead and several thousand wounded.
From a theoretical point of view, the role of The Friends of Durruti Group was much more significant after the May Days, when they began publishing their bulletin, which was given the name of the newspaper published by Marat during the French Revolution: <em>The Friend of the People</em>.
** <strong>AFTER MAY</strong>
The leadership of the CNT proposed the expulsion of the members of the Friends of Durruti Group, but could not convince any trade union assembly to ratify this proposal. A large part of the confederal militants sympathized with the revolutionary opposition embodied by the Group. This does not mean that they either took part in the actions of or held the same views as the Friends of Durruti, but they did understand and respect the Group’s positions, and even supported its criticisms of the CNT leadership.
The confederal leadership deliberately used and abused the accusation of “Marxists”, the most serious insult imaginable among anarchists, which it launched on repeated occasions against the Group, and specifically against Balius. Balius and the Group, of course, defended themselves from this quite underserved “insult”, and not without reason. There was nothing in the theoretical propositions of the Group, much less in <em>The Friend of the People</em>, or in the Group’s various manifestoes and leaflets, that would allow one to call the Group Marxist. The Group comprised merely an opposition to the collaborationist policy of the confederal leadership, from within the organization and on the basis of the anarchosyndicalist ideology.
The first issue of <em>The Friend of the People</em> was legally published on May 19, with a large number of censored galley proofs. The front page, in black and red and in full sized format, was emblazoned with a sketch showing the smiling Durruti carrying a red and black flag. This first issue was not dated; the editorial offices of the paper were located at Number 1, Rambla de las Flores, on the first floor. The newspaper was published as the voice of The Friends of Durruti Group. It listed Balius as editor in chief, and Eleuterio Roig, Pablo Ruiz and Domingo Paniagua as editors. The most interesting article, signed by Balius, was entitled, “For the Record. We Are Not Agents Provocateurs” [“Por los fueros de la verdad. No somos agentes provocadores”], in which Balius complains about the insults and attacks originating from among the confederal ranks themselves. He referred to the leaflet and the manifesto issued in May, which he said he would not republish in order to avoid its certain and inevitable censorship. He directly attacked <em>Solidaridad Obrera</em> for its hostility towards The Friends of Durruti, and denied the slander spread by the CNT leadership: “we are not agents provocateurs.” To avoid censorship, starting with the second issue, <em>The Friend of the People</em> was published clandestinely. The fifth issue is one of the most interesting editions of <em>The Friend of the People</em>. Its cover page features an article entitled: “A Revolutionary Theory.” This editorial alone would be enough to assure the political and historical importance of The Friends of Durruti, not only in the history of the civil war, but in the history of acratic ideology as well. In this article, The Friends of Durruti attribute the advance of the counterrevolution and the failure of the CNT, after the latter’s undeniable and absolute victory of July 1936, to one reason alone: the <em>absence of a REVOLUTIONARY PROGRAM</em>. And this was also the cause of the defeat of May 1937. The conclusion of this development is set forth with great clarity:
<quote>
“The descending trajectory [of the revolution] must be attributed exclusively to the absence of a concrete program and immediate efforts to implement such a program, and this is why we have fallen into the nets of the counterrevolutionary sectors at the very moment when the circumstances had become genuinely favorable for the crowning act of the aspirations of the proletariat. And because the awakening of July was not allowed to develop freely, in a genuinely class sense, we have made possible a petty bourgeois rule that could have by no means ever emerged if among the confederal and anarchist milieus a unanimous resolve had prevailed to install the proletariat in control of the country. […] succumbing to the foolish notion that a revolution of a social type could share its economic and social nerve centers with enemy elements. […] In May the same conflict was again posed. Once again, the wind was blowing in favor of the revolution. But the same individuals who in July were frightened by the danger of foreign intervention, during the May Days once again fell prey to that same lack of vision that would culminate in the fateful “cease fire” order that was later transformed, despite the declaration of a truce, into an insistent disarmament and a merciless repression of the working class. […] So that, by depriving ourselves of a program, i.e., libertarian communism, we have entirely surrendered to our enemies who possessed and still possess a program and various directives […] to the petty bourgeois parties that we should have crushed in July and in May. We think that any other sector, were it to have an absolute majority such as we possess, would have become the absolute arbiter of the situation. In the previous issue of our bulletin we published a program. We feel the need for a revolutionary Junta, the economic predominance of the Trade Unions and the free construction of Municipal bodies. Our Group has sought to provide a guide, out of fear that, should circumstances similar to those of July and May re-emerge, the same things would happen. And victory depends on the existence of a program that must be supported, without hesitation, with guns. […]”
“Revolutions that do not have theories do not get anywhere. The positions outlined by ‘The Friends of Durruti’ may be subjected to revision by major social disturbances, but they are rooted in two essential points that cannot be circumvented. A program and guns.”
</quote>
This text is fundamental; it marks a milestone in the development of anarchist thought. The theoretical concepts set forth in this text, which had previously been only vaguely outlined, are now expressed with a blinding clarity. And these theoretical achievements would later be repeated and argued in the pamphlet by Balius, “Towards a New Revolution”. But this is where they appeared for the first time. And no one can deny their novelty and their significance for anarchist thought. The Friends of Durruti Group had accepted old theoretical concepts, formulated after a painful historical experience, which over the course of a civil war and a revolutionary process had starkly revealed the contradictions and the necessities of the class struggle. Is it possible to seriously believe and present documentation to the effect that this development in the political thought of the Friends of Durruti was due to the influence of a group outside the anarchist movement, whether Trotksyists or POUMistas? It is undeniable that this development was due exclusively to the Friends of Durruti Group itself, which in its analysis of the political and historical situation had reached the conclusion of the necessity, which is unavoidable in a revolution, of establishing a program and a government that would impose the dictatorship of the proletariat against the bourgeois enemies of the revolution.
The sixth issue of <em>The Friend of the People</em> was datelined Barcelona, August 12, 1937. The lead editorial was entitled, “The Need for a Revolutionary Junta”, which, following up on the editorial in the previous issue concerning the need for a revolutionary theory, claimed that what was needed in July 1936 was a <em>Revolutionary Junta</em>:
<quote>
“Concerning the July movement, we have come to the conclusion that the enemies of the revolution must be crushed without mercy. This has been one of the main errors we have made that we are now paying for many times over. This defensive mission will be the responsibility of the Revolutionary Junta, which will have to be unyielding with enemy sectors. […]
“The importance of the constitution of the Revolutionary Junta is immense. This is not just another idea. It is the result of a series of failures and disasters. And it is the categorical rectification of the course that has been followed up until the present.
“In July an antifascist committee was formed that did not measure up to the importance of that sublime moment. How could the embryonic organ arisen from the barricades function with friends and enemies of the revolution side by side? Due to its composition, the antifascist committee was not the exponent of the July struggle. […] we advocate that only the workers from the city and the countryside, and combatants who, at the decisive moments of the battle have proven to be the champions of the social revolution, should participate in the Revolutionary Junta. […]
“‘The Friends of Durruti’ Group, which has formulated an exact critique of the May events, feels, from this very moment, the need to constitute a Revolutionary Junta, as we conceive it, and we believe it is indispensable for the defense of the revolution […].”
</quote>
The development of the political thought of The Friends of Durruti was already quite noteworthy. After the recognition of the necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the next question that was posed was, who exercises the dictatorship? The answer is a Revolutionary Junta, which is then defined as the vanguard of the revolutionaries who fought on July 19. As for the role of this Junta, we cannot believe that it would be any different than that attributed by the Marxists to the revolutionary party.
Munis, however, in the second issue of <em>La Voz Leninista</em>, criticized the sixth issue of <em>The Friend of the People</em> because he discerned in its claims a regression with respect to the same formulations made by The Friends of Durruti Group during, and immediately after, the May events.[154]
The eleventh issue of <em>The Friend of the People</em> was dated Saturday, November 20, 1937, which was the anniversary of the death of Durruti, and was almost entirely devoted to commemorating the popular anarchist hero. Among all the articles in this issue, mostly devoted to a more or less accurate commentary on the figure of Durruti, one article stands out, entitled, “Comments on Durruti”, in which the author engages in a polemical denunciation of <em>Solidaridad Obrera</em> with regard to the question of Durruti’s ideology and intentions. According to the anonymous author, <em>Soli</em> [<em>Solidaridad Obrera</em>] claimed that Durruti was prepared to renounce all revolutionary principles to win the war. The author of the article in <em>The Friend of the People</em> viewed such a claim as an outrage and as the worst possible insult against the memory of Durruti. The Group’s view of Durruti’s ideology was entirely contrary to that offered by <em>Soli</em>:
<quote>
“Durruti never renounced the revolution. If he did say that everything except victory must be renounced, he was referring to the fact that we must be prepared for the greatest sacrifices, even of life itself, rather than submit to fascism.
“In the mouth of Durruti, however, the concept of victory does not imply the least separation of the war and the revolution. […] We do not believe, and of this we are convinced, that Durruti would have advocated that the class, which achieved total victory at the cost of such great sacrifices, would be the same class that is constantly making concessions and compromises for the benefit of the enemy class. […]
“Durruti wanted to win the war, but he always kept an eye on the rearguard. […]
“Buenaventura Durruti never renounced the revolution. The Friends of Durruti will never renounce it either.”
</quote>
The twelfth issue of <em>The Friend of the People</em>, dated February 1, 1938, was the last issue of the bulletin of The Friends of Durruti Group.
** <strong>THE BALIUS PAMPHLET: “TOWARDS A NEW REVOLUTION”</strong>
The pamphlet, “Towards a New Revolution”[155] was published clandestinely in January 1938, although Balius began writing it around November 1937. It is the most elaborate of the texts of The Friends of Durruti Group, and therefore deserves a separate commentary.
The most important theoretical contributions of the pamphlet were already set forth in the editorials of <em>The Friend of the People</em> in issues 5, 6 and 7, that is, in the issues published between July 20 and August 31.
The pamphlet consists of 31 pages, and is divided into eight chapters. In the first chapter a brief historical introduction is presented, in which Balius offers a grotesque depiction of the period extending from the dictatorship of Prima de Rivera until October 1934. In the second chapter the events leading to the revolutionary insurrection of July 19 are analyzed.
Some of his claims are quite striking, and are no less true for being presented in such a blunt manner:
<quote>
“The people looked for weapons. They got them. They obtained them by their own efforts. Nobody gave them to them. Neither the government of the Republic nor the Generalitat gave them a single rifle.”
</quote>
We must call attention to the profound analysis of the revolution of July 19, 1936 carried out by The Friends of Durruti Group:
<quote>
“The immense majority of the working class population was on the side of the CNT. The majority organization in Cataluña was the CNT. What happened that caused the CNT not to carry out its revolution, which was the revolution of the people, that of the majority of the proletariat?
“What happened was what had to happen. The CNT was without a revolutionary theory. We did not have a correct program. We did not know where we were going. A lot of poetry, but in the final accounting, we did not know what to do with those enormous masses of workers, we did not know how to give flexibility to that popular surge that poured forth in our organizations and because we did not know what to do we surrendered the revolution on a platter to the bourgeoisie and the Marxists, who played the same old masquerade, and what is much worse, we gave them the respite they needed to rebuild their forces and implement a victorious plan. No one knew how to realize the full potential of the CNT. No one wanted to follow through with the revolution with all its consequences.”
</quote>
Thus, the revolution of July failed, according to The Friends of Durruti Group, because <em>the CNT lacked a revolutionary theory and a revolutionary program</em>. Many reasons, and diverse and various explanations have been offered from within the anarchist movement concerning the nature of the July revolution; some hypotheses are more or less convincing, but neither Vernon Richards, nor Semprún-Maura, nor Abad de Santillán, nor García Oliver, nor Berneri, have been as clear and as definitive, nor have they analyzed the nature of the July revolution with the same profundity, as The Friends of Durruti Group did in the paragraph we just quoted.
This is only the tip of the iceberg, however, because The Friends of Durruti, who were not brilliant theoreticians, or good organizers, but essentially people of the barricades, who defended their theoretical positions on the basis of their reflections on their experiences, without any other compass than their class instinct, were capable, in the text that we shall consider next, of one of the best contemporary analyses of the Spanish revolution. An analysis that deserves close consideration, and one that we must not label as anarchist or Marxist, because it is the analysis of men who did not play with words, but with lives, and first of all with their own: “When an organization has spent its entire existence calling for revolution, it has the obligation to carry that revolution out precisely when the opportunity to do so is presented. And in July this opportunity arose. The CNT had to step up and assume the leadership of the country, delivering a solid kick to everything archaic, everything ancient, and in this way we would have won the war and we would have won the revolution.”
<quote>
“But we proceeded in a manner contrary to this. The CNT collaborated with the bourgeoisie in the offices of the state at the very moment when the state was falling apart everywhere. It reinforced Companys and his entourage. A breath of fresh air was given to an anemic and cowed bourgeoisie.
“One of the causes that led most directly to the strangulation of the revolution and the displacement of the CNT is that fact that it acted like a minority faction despite the fact that we had the majority in the streets. […]
“We furthermore assert that revolutions are totalitarian no matter what anyone says. What happens is that various aspects of the revolution gradually continue to develop but with the guarantee that the class that represents the new order of things is the one that holds the greatest responsibility. And when things are done halfway, what happens is just what we are commenting on, the disaster of July.
“In July a committee of antifascist militias was constituted. It was not a class organization. It contained representatives of bourgeois and counterrevolutionary fractions. It seemed that this committee had arisen in opposition to the Generalitat. But it was a scene in a comedy.”
</quote>
First of all, we must call attention to the Group’s definition of the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias as an <em>institution of class collaboration</em>, rather than the embryonic stage of a working class power. The critique of the confederal collaborationism in saving and rebuilding the state is combined with the tautology that the only duty of a revolutionary organization is to carry out the revolution.
So far, all the assertions of The Friends of Durruti are anarchist orthodoxy. As a direct consequence of these assertions, however, or perhaps it would be more correct to say, as a consequence of the contradictions of the CNT, that had become bogged down in a project as foreign to anarchism as the salvation and reconstruction of a decomposing capitalist state, we come to a notable theoretical breakthrough on the part of The Friends of Durruti: <em>revolutions are totalitarian</em>.
Totalitarian means, above all, “total”, although in this context we cannot exclude the second accepted meaning of authoritarian. If this claim is in contradiction with the libertarian spirit, then we would have to assert that an anarchist revolution is an irresolvable contradiction. The anarchists in Spain in 1936 experienced something like this.
The pamphlet by Balius, in the next chapter, addressed the revolutionary insurrection of May. The reasoning of The Friends of Durruti Group was as clear and as radical as it was precise: the cause of the May Events can be found in the July insurrection, <em>because the revolution was not carried out in July</em>.
“The social revolution in Cataluña could have been a reality. […] But events took a different turn. The revolution did not take place in Cataluña. The petty bourgeoisie, who during the July events had kept in the background, once they noticed that the proletariat was once again being victimized by a handful of sophistical leaders, prepared for battle.” “<em>The revolution did not take place in July 1936.”</em> This assertion on the part of The Friends of Durruti Group (as well as their assertion concerning the necessarily totalitarian nature of all revolutions) could not be more clear and emphatic. All the historians, however, including those who glorify The Friends of Durruti as superheroes and replace the cult of personality of Lenin or Durruti with that of Balius, disregard this declaration that is fundamental and crucial in understanding the rise, the reason for existence and the struggle of the Group.
The Group’s analysis of Stalinism, and the decisive role played by Stalinism as a spearhead of the counterrevolution, was not only astute, but was deeply rooted as well in the description of the social layers that provided their base of support. We must point out, however, that the word “Stalinism” was never used, but rather the terms, “socialism” or “Marxism”, with the evident meaning that we today give, from a historical and ideological point of view, to the word, “Stalinism”.
“Socialism in Cataluña has been disastrous. Its ranks have been filled with people who are against the revolution. They have assumed leadership of the counterrevolution. They have given life to a UGT that has been taken over by the GEPCI. The Marxist leaders have sung the praises of the counterrevolution. And they have made the united front a creature of their own, first eliminating the POUM, and then they tried to repeat this feat with the CNT.
“The maneuvers of the petty bourgeoisie allied with the socialist-communists, resulted in the events of May.”
According to The Friends of Durruti Group the May Events were a planned provocation, whose purpose was to create a climate of indecisiveness, which would make it possible to deliver a decisive blow against the working class, in order to definitively bring an end to a potentially revolutionary situation:
<quote>
“… the counterrevolution sought to bring the working classes into the streets without a solid plan so they could be crushed. Their goals were in part achieved due to the stupidity of a handful of leaders who issued the order to cease fire and who accused The Friends of Durruti of being agents provocateurs when the street battles were being won and the enemy was being eliminated.”
</quote>
The accusation directed against the anarchist leaders (although no names are mentioned, we cannot help but think of García Oliver, Abad de Santillán and Federica Montseny) was not meant to be an insult, but constituted an adequate description of their activity during the May Days.
The Friends of Durruti thought that the counterrevolution had attained its chief objective, which was the control of public order by the Valencia Government. The description and assessment of the workers response to the Stalinist provocation, that is, the May Events, carried out by The Friends of Durruti, is very interesting: a) It was a spontaneous reaction; b) There was no revolutionary leadership; c) The workers had achieved, in a few hours, an overwhelming military victory. Only a few buildings in the center of the city continued to resist, and they could have been easily taken; d) The defeat of the insurrection was not a military defeat, but a political defeat.
“Within a few hours the struggle was decided in favor of the proletariat of the CNT, which as in July defended its prerogatives with arms in hand. We conquered the streets. They were ours. There was no human power that could dislodge us. The working class neighborhoods immediately fell into our power. And our enemies who were gradually surrounded and bottled up in one part of the city—the downtown area—would soon have been conquered had the committees of the CNT not defected.” Next, Balius justified the actions undertaken by The Friends of Durruti during the bloody week of May 1937: The Friends of Durruti, in a situation of indecision and generalized disorientation among the ranks of the working class, distributed a leaflet and a manifesto, for the purpose of giving a revolutionary direction and goals to the events. Subsequently, the main concern of the Group, faced with the incredible position of the confederal leadership that sought peace and brotherhood, was that the barricades not be abandoned without conditions and guarantees.
According to Balius, in May there was still time to save the revolution, and The Friends of Durruti were the only people who were capable of rising to the challenge of the circumstances. The blindness of the CNT-FAI to the repression that would be inflicted with impunity against the revolutionary workers, had already been foreseen by The Friends of Durruti. The chapter of the pamphlet devoted to collaborationism and the class struggle is of great interest. Collaboration in the tasks of the government of the bourgeois state was the main accusation leveled by the Group against the CNT. The critique of The Friends of Durruti Group was even more radical than that of Berneri, because the latter criticized the participation of the CNT in the Government, while the Group criticized the collaboration of the CNT with the capitalist state. Nor was this just a matter of two verbal expressions with only a slight difference in emphasis; this involves an entire political conception distinct from the one that Berneri had in mind. As we read in the pamphlet:
<quote>
“We do not have to collaborate with capitalism, not from outside the bourgeois state or from within its governmental departments. Our role as producers is to be found in the trade unions, strengthening the only bonds that must continue to exist after a revolution led by the workers. […] And one cannot preserve a state alongside the trade unions—much less reinforce it with our own forces. The struggle against capital continues. A bourgeoisie exists in our own land that is complicit with the international bourgeoisie. The problem is the same as it was years ago.”
</quote>
The Friends of Durruti claimed that the collaborationists were the allies of the bourgeoisie, which amounts to saying that the anarchist Ministers, as well as all those who advocated collaborationism, <em>were allies of the bourgeoisie</em>:
<quote>
“The collaborationists are allies of the bourgeoisie. The individuals who advocate this kind of complicity do not care about the class struggle nor do they have the least respect for the trade unions.
“At no time must we accept the consolidation of the power of our enemy.
“The enemy must be attacked. […] Between exploiters and exploited there cannot be the least contact. Only in the struggle will it be decided which side is victorious. Either the workers or the bourgeoisie. But by no means both at the same time.”
</quote>
The Group, however, never took the next, decisive step, which could be none other than to break with an organization of a collaborationist nature, which had proven its inability to curtail and put an end to this policy of alliance with the bourgeoisie. The Group never proposed a break with the CNT, nor did it ever denounce this organization as an organization of capitalism. It did not draw all the conclusions of the ideological premises it set forth. It was easier to accuse a handful of individuals, a few leaders who advocated a policy of collaboration with the bourgeoisie, than it was to arrive at the brutal and painful conclusion that <em>the CNT, which during the twenties and thirties had been the best organizer of the revolutionary proletariat in Spain, had become, over the course of the war, by way of its unconditional support for the policy of ANTIFASCIST UNITY, an organization of collaboration with and submission to the bourgeoisie</em>. It was not the anarchist Ministers who were responsible for the CNT’s deviation from its principles; <em>it was the CNT that produced such Ministers</em>.
The trade unions of the CNT had by 1938 ceased to be working class organizations oriented towards the class struggle; they had been transformed into bureaucratic organizations in the service of the state, by means of the institutions that were responsible for the increase of and conversion to war production, at the same time that labor was being militarized. The trade unions now played an important and irreplaceable economic role.
The Group, however, thought that the trade unions were still organizations of the class struggle. Not even the Catalan UGT, Stalinist to the core, and the mere tool of the PSUC, the party of the counterrevolution, was viewed by the Group as an institution of the bourgeoisie.
After May 1937 the various Trade Unions and Federations of Industry <em>underwent a change of function and nature</em>, having become regulatory, coordinating and centralizing institutions for production, conveniently “inspected” by technical commissions. They had ceased to be class trade unions, defenders of the demands of the workers, in order to become “<em>a new type of boss”</em>[156] that organized the economy in obedience to the directives issued by the government of the Generalitat (or, beginning in 1938, by the Republic). We have already seen[157] how the collectivizations had been transformed from the workers expropriations of July 1936 into a capitalism of trade union management and state planning, legalized by the Collectivization Decree, in October 1936, and further authorized by the decrees of S’Agaró in January 1937. In the spring of 1937 a revolutionary struggle by the workers for socialization as opposed to collectivization of the economy was underway.
Beginning in June 1937, the Industrial Trade Unions, having lost their functions as representatives of the demands of the workers and once every revolutionary attempt had been defeated,[158] became alienated from the workers, and their nature underwent a transformation, as they became <em>institutions of economic management, as well as control and monitoring of labor productivity</em>.
In this context, the revolutionary socialization promoted by the workers in the Trade Unions or Federations of Industry in the spring of 1937,[159] was in fact converted, after the defeat of May, into a determined drive for economic and managerial centralization, <em>coordinated from these same Industrial Unions</em>, and subject to state planning, which in addition led to advocacy of the need, from an exclusively productivity-based perspective, of CNT-UGT unity. Managerial unity, presented demagogically as the culmination of “working class unity”.
The Industrial Unions, which prior to May 1937 were the revolutionary instruments of the workers for socializing the economy, had been transformed, after the defeat of the May insurrection, into the instruments of the counterrevolution to enforce the militarization of the economy and labor. <em>The Group was incapable of analyzing this transformation.</em>
It was therefore impossible for The Friends of Durruti to take the decisive step. <em>If they were incapable of recognizing the real nature (in 1938) of the trade unions as an apparatus of the capitalist state, they could not propose a break with a CNT that had exchanged its working class and trade union character for that of a bureaucratic institution of the state.</em> To the contrary, the trade unions played a key role in the Group’s theoretical arguments; its accusations were directed against individuals, not against organizations. The Group did not recognize the <em>illness</em> or its causes, but only a few of its symptoms. The pamphlet proceeds with an explanation of the positions and the program of The Friends of Durruti Group. The principles and characteristic political positions, of a tactical character, were enumerated in a partial, confused and imprecise way, compared to previous formulations, which was perhaps the result of the fact that the pamphlet was written in haste and under pressure, or else due to the insignificant support they encountered at the time.
The program was succinctly outlined on the basis of the experience of July, which The Friends of Durruti depicted very expressively as a triumphant insurrection, which only lacked a theory and revolutionary goals: “No one knew what road to follow. We lacked a theory. We had spent years revolving around abstractions. The leaders at the time asked themselves, what do we do now? And they allowed the revolution to slip away. During culminating moments like those we must not hesitate. But we have to know where we are going. And this is the vacuum we want to fill, since we understand that what took place in July and in May cannot be repeated.”
“In our program we introduce a slight variation within the anarchist tradition. The constitution of a Revolutionary Junta.”
The Revolutionary Junta was defined by the Group as a vanguard formed to repress the enemies of the revolution:
<quote>
“The revolution, as we understand it, needs institutions that watch over it and that will repress, in an integral sense, those enemy sectors that current circumstances have demonstrated are not resigned to their own disappearance.
“Perhaps there are anarchist comrades who feel certain ideological scruples, but the lesson we have so harshly learned is sufficient to convince us that we cannot beat around the bush. If we want to prevent the next revolution from being an exact replica of what has just occurred, we must proceed with the utmost energy in dealing with those who do not identify themselves with the working class.”
</quote>
Next, The Friends of Durruti set forth their revolutionary program, which can be briefly summarized by three major points: 1. The constitution of a Revolutionary Junta, or Council of National Defense, whose mission would consist of the conduct of the war, control of public order, international affairs and revolutionary propaganda; 2. All economic power to the trade unions—this implied the creation of an authentic trade union capitalism; 3. The Free Municipality, as the basic cell of territorial organization, halfway between a decentralized state and the typical anarchist federal conception. The pamphlet concludes with a final section, which has the same title as the pamphlet, in which a lapidary and realistic assessment is offered: “the revolution no longer exists.” After a long series of assumptions and questions about the immediate future, in which the force of the counterrevolution is verified, a voluntaristic, and perhaps rhetorical appeal is made on behalf of a future revolution capable of satisfying the hopes of humanity and the anarchist ideal. The victory of the counterrevolution in the republican zone, however, and the victory of the fascists in the war were already inevitable, as Balius acknowledged in his 1978 Introduction (entitled “Forty Years Ago”) to the English language edition of “Towards a New Revolution” (published under the title, “Towards a Fresh Revolution”).
** <strong>CONCLUSIONS</strong>
The Friends of Durruti Group was, both with regard to its numerical strength as well as its goals, much more than just an affinity group, and was more like a sector of the libertarian movement, similar to the “Mujeres Libres”. It never attempted to propose a revolutionary alternative to the CNT-FAI. It only opposed the bureaucratic leadership of anarchosyndicalism, and was content to call for new leaders. It was not influenced, either in whole or in part, by the Trotskyists, or by the POUM. Its ideology and its slogans were typically confederal; at no time could it be said to have displayed a Marxist ideology. In any event, it certainly displayed a great deal of interest in the example of Marat, and one might be able to speak of a powerful attraction for the assembly movement of the Paris Sections, for the <em>sans-culottes</em> and the <em>enrages</em>, as well as for the revolutionary government of Robespierre and Saint-Just, which were studied by Kropotkin in his History of the French Revolution. It never referred to, and was perhaps unaware of, the anarchist Platform, with which it nonetheless possessed certain features in common.
Its goal was simply to confront the contradictions of the CNT, to provide the CNT with ideological coherence, and to rescue it from the rule of individuals and superior committees staffed by officials in order to return it to its roots in the class struggle. Its <em>raison d’être</em> was to engage in criticism of and opposition to the CNT’s policy of constant concessions, and of course to the COLLABORATION of the anarchosyndicalists in the central government and the government of the Generalitat. The Group was opposed to the abandonment of revolutionary objectives and of the fundamental and characteristic ideological principles of anarchism, which had been disregarded by the leaders of the CNT-FAI in the name of antifascist unity and the need to adapt to circumstances. Without a revolutionary theory there is no revolution. If principles are only cast aside at the first obstacle imposed by reality, perhaps it would be better if we admitted that we have no principles. The highest leaders of Spanish anarchosyndicalism thought they were clever negotiators, but they were manipulated like puppets. They renounced everything, in exchange for nothing. They were just so many opportunists without any opportunities. The insurrection of July 19 did not encounter a revolutionary vanguard capable of imposing the power of the proletariat, destroying the capitalist state and undertaking an authentic working class revolution. The CNT had no plan for what to do once the military uprising was defeated. The victory of July plunged the anarchosyndicalist leaders into dismay and confusion. They had been <em>left behind</em> by the revolutionary impetus of the masses. And since they did not know what to do they accepted the proposal of Companys to constitute, together with the other parties, an Antifascist Front government. And they posed <em>the false THEORETICAL dilemma of anarchist dictatorship or antifascist unity and collaboration with the state</em> to win the war, because in PRACTICE they did not know what to do with power, at a time when their failure to seize it left it in the hands of the bourgeoisie. <em>The Spanish “revolution” was the tomb of anarchism as an organization and as a revolutionary theory of the proletariat.</em> This is the origin and the reason for existence of The Friends of Durruti Group, which could not, however, nor did it know how to, save the anarchosyndicalist ideology from its death throes.
The limitations of the Group were very clear. And so, too, are its historical limitations. At no time did it ever propose a break with the CNT. Only an absolute lack of acquaintance with the confederal organizational mechanics[160] could lead one to believe that a project of criticism or an attempt to foment a schism would not inevitably lead to expulsion, which in the case of The Friends of Durruti was prevented by the sympathy for the Group expressed by the confederal rank and file militants, although at the price of an iron ostracism, and almost complete isolation.
The Group’s maximum objective was the critique of the leaders of the CNT, and to put an end to the policy of confederal participation in the government. Not only did the Group want to preserve the “conquests” of July, but it also sought to continue and intensify a revolutionary process that it considered to be insufficient and neutralized. Its organization and the means at its disposal, however, were even more limited. Its members were people of the barricades, they were not good organizers, and were even worse theoreticians, although they had some good journalists. In May they put all their faith in the spontaneity of the masses. They did not effectively counteract the official CNT propaganda. They were incapable of providing leadership and coordination for the defense committees that had unleashed the insurrection of May. They did not make use of, or attempt to organize, the militants who were members of the Control Patrols. They issued no orders to Máximo Franco, a member of The Friends of Durruti Group, and the delegate of the Rojinegra Division of the CNT, who on May 4, 1937, wanted “to drop in on Barcelona” with his division but, except for himself and about forty militiamen on an “observation mission”, returned to the front (as did the POUM column, led by Rovira) as a result of initiatives undertaken by Molina. The high points of the Group’s activity were: <em>the poster distributed at the end of April 1937</em>, in which it proposed the overthrow of the Generalitat and its replacement by a Revolutionary Junta; its domination of <em>several barricades on Las Ramblas</em>, during the May Events; the reading of the appeal for solidarity with the Spanish revolution, directed at all the workers of Europe; the distribution at the barricades of the famous leaflet of May 5; and the summary of the events set forth in the Manifesto of May 8. The Group was unable, however, to implement any of its slogans: a Revolutionary Junta was never formed. The Group called for the formation of a column that would set out to confront the troops coming from Valencia; but it soon abandoned the idea in consideration of the scanty support it generated. After the May Events the Group began publishing <em>The Friend of the People</em>, despite its repudiation by the CNT and the FAI. In June 1937, although the Group had not been outlawed like the POUM, it suffered from the political persecution aimed at the CNT militants as a whole. Its bulletin was published clandestinely after the second issue (May 26), and its editor in chief Jaime Balius was arrested and imprisoned on several occasions. Other members of the Group were dismissed from their positions, such as Bruno Lladó, a councilman in the Sabadell municipal government; or Santana Calero, who underwent an inquisitorial persecution within the Libertarian Youth. Most of its members experienced attempts to expel them from the CNT, which was advocated by the FAI. Nonetheless, they carried on with their clandestine publication and distribution of the Group’s press and leaflets until February 1938. The Group’s most outstanding tactical proposals may be summarized in the following slogans: the economy run by the trade unions, federation of municipalities, army of militias, revolutionary program, replacement of the Generalitat by a revolutionary junta, and unity of action between the CNT-FAI-POUM. The Friends of Durruti Group was therefore a <em>failed attempt</em>, one that had arisen from within the libertarian movement, to constitute a Revolutionary Junta that would deliver all power to the trade unions. It proved to be incapable, not only of realizing its slogans in practice, but even of effectively propagating its ideas and providing practical orientations for the way to fight for them. Maybe the terrified bourgeoisie and the disguised priests saw them as a group of wild brutes, but among its members it included such journalists as Balius and Calleja, military commanders such as Pablo Ruiz, Francisco Carreño and Máximo Franco, and municipal councilors like Bruno Lladó, and trade unionists like Francisco Pellicer, and the leading member of the Libertarian Youth, Juan Santana Calero. Its remote origins should be sought among the libertarians who shared the revolutionary experience of the insurrection of Alto Llobregat in January 1932, in the FAI affinity group “Renacer” between 1934 and 1936. Its more immediate origins are to be found in the opposition to the militarization of the militias (especially in the Gelsa sector), and in the defense of the revolutionary conquests and the critique of cenetista collaboration, expressed in articles published in <em>Solidaridad Obrera</em> (from July until early October), and in <em>Ideas</em> and <em>La Noche</em> (from January to May 1937), especially by Balius. Its means of struggle were the leaflet, the poster, the bulletin and the barricade; but it never proposed schism or a break as a weapon of struggle, nor did it denounce the counterrevolutionary role of the CNT, nor did it even, during the May Days, make a serious effort to confront the confederal leaders to attempt to counteract the effect of the defeatist directives of the CNT-FAI. <em>The Friends of Durruti had elaborated an alternative program to that of the CNT-FAI, but did not provide an alternative leadership</em>, which left them defenseless against the measures taken to expel them.
The historical importance of The Friends of Durruti Group is undeniable, however. And its importance resides precisely in its character as an internal opposition to the collaborationist orientation of the libertarian movement. The political importance of its emergence was immediately recognized by Andreu Nin, who devoted a eulogistic and hopeful article to the Group, because it opened up the possibility of a revolutionary orientation of the cenetista masses who could oppose the treasonous and collaborationist policy of the CNT. This explains the interest in trying to influence The Friends of Durruti Group that was displayed by the Trotskyists as well as the POUM; an influence that they never managed to assert.
The principal theoretical contributions of the Group to anarchist thought can be summarized in these points:
1. <em>A revolutionary program.</em>
2. Replace the capitalist state with a <em>Revolutionary Junta</em>, which would have to be prepared to defend the revolution from the inevitable attacks of the counterrevolutionaries. Guns will be used to defend the revolutionary program.
Both points were recapitulated by the Group itself in its slogan: “<em>A program and guns.”</em>
Its traditional anarchist apoliticism caused the CNT to lack a theory of revolution. <em>Without a revolutionary theory there is no revolution</em>, and not seizing power means leaving it in the hands of the capitalist state. For the Group, the CCMA was an institution of class collaboration, and had no other purpose than to consolidate and fortify the bourgeois state, which the CCMA did not want to destroy and was incapable of destroying. Hence the advocacy by The Friends of Durruti Group of the necessity of forming <em>a Revolutionary Junta, capable of coordinating, centralizing and fortifying the power of the multitude of workers, local, defense, enterprise, militia committees, etc., that were the only holders of power between July 19 and September 26</em>. A power that was fragmented into multiple committees, which locally held all power, but because they did not federate, centralize and consolidate their operations among themselves, they were detoured, weakened and transformed by the CCMA into Popular Front municipal administrations, managing committees of trade union-run enterprises and battalions in a republican army. Without the complete destruction of the capitalist state, the revolutionary days of July 1936 were incapable of taking the step to a new structure of working class power. The degeneration and final fiasco of the revolutionary process were inevitable. The confrontation between the reformist anarchism of the CNT-FAI, however, and the revolutionary anarchism of The Friends of Durruti Group was not clear, precise and starkly outlined enough to provoke a split that would clarify the opposed positions of both sides. The accusation of “<em>betrayal”</em> hurled by the Group at the CNT-FAI in May, which was later withdrawn, did not explain anything either, nor did it amount to anything besides a deserved insult, but did not allow for the slightest progress. Thus, despite the fact that the political thought expressed by The Friends of Durruti Group was an attempt to understand the reality of the Spanish war and revolution from the perspective of anarchosyndicalist ideology, one of the main reasons why it was rejected by the confederal militants was its authoritarian and “Marxist” character.
<em>These anarchosyndicalist militants, however, proved to be incapable of controlling their leaders</em>, who made all the important decisions in secret discussions among “dignitaries”, which were then formally ratified and publicized at the official Plenums. The war rendered the horizontal and democratic organizational methods of the CNT, which were too slow and ineffective, obsolete, and <em>the leaders issued orders to the militants by way of memoranda</em>. Furthermore, the urgency of the decision making process and the privileged information to which they had access, due to their positions and responsibilities, made them indispensable. This is why their resignations or accusations of betrayal of principles were always ineffective. The widespread opposition of the anarchosyndicalist masses to the collaborationism of their leaders, documented and displayed at a myriad of meetings and local plenums, found no outlet, because it was expressed in the name of the same principles that their leaders professed. The <em>strength</em> of The Friends of Durruti, and the Group’s positive achievements with respect to this massive but “silent” opposition, resided in the fact that the Group had its own <em>program</em> to oppose to the confederal bureaucracy; its <em>weakness</em> derived from the fact that it was incapable of also opposing a leadership, a group of leaders that would be capable of opposing the aristocracy of “the men of action” or “the intellectuals”,[161] who proved to be the only leaders possible.
We can conclude that <em>The Friends of Durruti found themselves in a dead end</em>. They could not accept the collaborationism of the leading cadres of the CNT and the advancing counterrevolution; but if they theorized the experiences of the Spanish “revolution”, that is, the need for a Revolutionary Junta that would overthrow the bourgeois republican government of the Generalitat of Cataluña, and violently repress the agents of the counterrevolution, then they were labeled as Marxists and authoritarians and therefore forfeited any chance of proselytizing among the confederal rank and file. <em>We must ask ourselves whether the dead end of The Friends of Durruti was nothing but the reflection of the theoretical incapacity of Spanish anarchosyndicalism to confront the problems posed by the war and the “revolution”.</em>
In Barcelona it was, and still is possible to hear words of hatred and contempt directed against Durruti and “his friends”, in the mouths of the class enemies; among working class milieus, however, people have always spoken respectfully of a mythologized Durruti, of the enormous demonstration of the proletariat at his funeral procession, of the indomitable revolt of the Durrutistas, of the anarchist and revolutionary achievements of July 19. During the long night of Francoism, anonymous hands wrote the names of Durruti and Ascaso on their nameless tombstones. It is not the historian’s job to respect myths; but it is his job to derive the important lessons of the class struggle. We need only retain two images. In the first, we see a submissive, persuasive and garrulous Companys, who on July 20 offered the anarchist leaders positions in an Antifascist Front government, because they had defeated the fascist military, and power was in the streets. In the second we see a Companys cornered, with the gloves off, who on May 4 was pleading with the government of the Republic to dispatch an air force squadron to bomb[162] the barracks and the strongholds of the CNT, and all the other targets indicated by the military chief of the PSUC, José del Barrio.[163] Between these two images roll the film of the “revolution” and the war. May 1937 was contained in embryo in July 1936. <em>The Group had understood that revolutions are totalitarian (that is, total and authoritarian) or else they are defeated: this was its great merit.</em>[164] And it is on this basis that they must be rejected or accepted, if it is understood that some revolutionaries who are taking the factories and properties from their legal owners, cannot do so peacefully and politely, begging and saying, “please”. There is nothing more authoritarian and violent than stripping the bourgeoisie of its possessions, nothing is more authoritarian and violent than to defeat the army in the streets and seize weapons from the barracks, nothing is more authoritarian and violent than to burn churches and monasteries to put an end to the social and political power and influence of the Church of 1936. This should be obvious. The Friends of Durruti had understood that a revolution, besides being authoritarian and violent, must be TOTAL: one cannot make political agreements with the bourgeoisie and govern alongside it, it was necessary to destroy the capitalist state, abolish the Generalitat and exercise power from a Revolutionary Junta, constituted exclusively by the working class forces that had fought in the streets on July 19, 1936. <em>Revolutions are totalitarian or they are defeated</em>; this was the essential theoretical achievement of the Group.
The Friends of Durruti Group has been ignored and mythologized for a long time, and maybe the time has come to understand it in its historical context. In order to do so, however, we have to avoid transforming the history of The Friends of Durruti into a “situationist” comic strip of superheroes, because not only did its members not have the makings of heroes, but they also had their own theoretical and organizational limitations, since they could not, nor did they ever even attempt to become a “revolutionary alternative” to the CNT-FAI, from which they not only never split, but to which they always remained attached organizationally even in the face of attempts to expel them on the part of the superior committees.[165]
The Friends of Durruti Group became disturbing mirror for the CNT because they reflected a monstrous image, which many people did not want and still do not want to see: <em>it was and is better to just break the mirror</em>.
The fundamental question, the question that is taboo for the libertarian movement and the topic that so many books, militants and historians have been unable to elucidate, because they do not understand it, is why the revolutionaries of yesterday were transformed after a few months into Ministers, “firemen”, and counterrevolutionaries…. Why did the anarchist leaders and/or the libertarian movement renounce the revolution in July 1936 and in May 1937? The answer given by The Friends of Durruti themselves—“the BETRAYAL of the leaders”—was nothing but an insult that explained nothing. From the very first moment the libertarian movement, lacking a program or revolutionary theory, supported antifascist unity. It sought to unite with socialists, Stalinists, POUMistas, republicans and Catalanists to defeat fascism. During the thirties antifascism was the worst poison and the greatest victory of fascism. The sacred union of all antifascists to defeat fascism and defend democracy implied for the libertarian movement the renunciation of its own principles, its own revolutionary program, the revolutionary conquests, everything … that is, the famous slogan falsely attributed to Durruti: “we renounce everything except victory”, to submit to the program and interests of the democratic bourgeoisie. <em>It was this program of antifascist unity, of complete and loyal collaboration with all the antifascist forces, that led the CNT-FAI, rapidly and unconsciously, to government collaboration with the sole objective of winning the war against fascism.</em> It was this adherence to the antifascist program (that is, the defense of capitalist democracy) which explains why and how the same revolutionary leaders of yesterday became, a few months later, Ministers, “firemen”, bureaucrats and counterrevolutionaries. <em>It was the CNT that produced Ministers</em>, and these Ministers betrayed nothing and no one; they restricted their efforts to faithfully exercising their functions to the best of their abilities.
The difference between the insurrections of July 1936 and May 1937 resides in the fact that the revolutionaries in July were without arms, but had a precise political objective: the defeat of the military uprising and of fascism; while in May, despite the fact that they possessed more arms than they did in July, they were politically disarmed. The working class masses began an insurrection against Stalinism and the bourgeois government of the Generalitat, <em>despite</em> their organizations and <em>without</em> their leaders, but they were incapable of waging war to the end <em>without</em> their organizations and <em>against</em> their leaders. In May 1937, as in July 1936, there was no revolutionary party, which the proletariat had failed to create during the thirties. Neither the POUM nor the CNT-FAI were, nor could they have been, that revolutionary vanguard; to the contrary, they were the major obstacles to its emergence. The incompetence of the anarchosyndicalist leaders and the absence of any revolutionary theory left no other horizon than that of antifascist unity and the democratic program of the republican bourgeoisie. <em>The methods and the goals of the proletariat had already disappeared from the stage.</em> The CCMA not only failed to reinforce the power of the revolutionary committees, but it collaborated with the Generalitat to weaken and abolish them.
<em>The barricades erected in July 1936 were still standing months later; while the barricades erected in May 1937 disappeared immediately</em>, except for the few that the PSUC wanted to leave standing as a testimonial to its power and its victory.
May 1937, from this perspective, although it was undoubtedly the consequence of the increasing discontent in the face of rising prices, the shortages of food and other provisions, the struggle within the enterprises for socialization of the economy and workers control, the escalation of the attempts by the Generalitat to disarm the rearguard and seize control of public order, etc., etc., was above all t<em>he necessary armed defeat of the proletariat</em>, which was required by the counterrevolution in order to put a definitive end to all revolutionary threats to bourgeois and republican institutions.
In 1938, the revolutionaries were dead, in jail or in hiding. The prisons contained fifteen thousand antifascist prisoners. Hunger, bombing and Stalinist repression were the masters and lords of Barcelona. The militias and labor had been militarized. Order now reigned throughout all of Spain, both in the Francoist part as well as in the Republican part. The revolution was not crushed by Franco in January 1939; the Republic had already finished it off many months earlier.
[125] See Agustín Guillamón, “Habla Durruti”, in <em>La Barcelona Rebelde</em>, Octaedro, 2003. See also the interview with Pablo Ruiz in <em>La Noche</em>, No. 3545 (March 24, 1937).
[126] “Not only do they refuse militarization, but they will not abide by the requests of either Committee [the Regional Committees of the CNT and the FAI] and instead cast down their weapons and abandon the front. […] seeing that it was not possible to harmonize the differences of opinion that existed in the Durruti Column […] since there was so much tension that it was feared that the dispute would degenerate into a bloody clash […] the majority of the comrades of the Gelsa group have abandoned the front against all regulations and in conflict with the agreements undertaken by both the specific and the confederal organizations.” FAI, <em>Informe que este Comité de Relaciones de Grupos Anarquistas de Cataluña presenta a los camaradas de la Región</em>, March 1937(?).
[127] This chapter provides new information, and revises and corrects the account in a previous work, published in English: Agustín Guillamón, <em>The Friends of Durruti Group</em>, AK Press, San Francisco, 1996. The latter book is a translation of the contents of issue number 3 of <em>Balance</em>.
[128] <em>L’Obra normative de la Generalitat de Catalunya. El Pla Tarradellas</em>, Edició del Comissariat de Propaganda de la Generalitat de Catalunya, Barcelona, 1937.
[129] Anna Monjó, “L’economia entre revolució i guerra”, in <em>Història, Política, societat i cultura del Països Catalans (Vol. 9), De la gran esperança a la gran ensulsiada 1930–1939</em>, Enciclopèdia Catalana, Barcelona, 1999.
[130] Trade Union of the Iron and Steel Industry of Barcelona, CNT-FAI, <em>Colectivación? Nacionalización? No: Socialización</em>, Imp. Primero de Mayo, Barcelona, 1937.
[131] We shall not present a complete account of the May Days, but only of those aspects that involve the Friends of Durruti Group; in any case, the reader may consult the Appendix for more information.
[132] Crónica del Departament de Presidencia del 3 de maig de 1937.
[133] As Gorkin states: “In reality the movement was totally spontaneous. Of course, this spontaneity was quite relative, and must be explained by the fact that <em>Defense Committees</em> have existed since July 19, scattered everywhere, in Barcelona and Cataluña, which were primarily organized by rank and file elements of the CNT and the FAI. For a while these Committees were mostly inactive, but it can be said that on May 3 they were the ones who mobilized the working class. They were the action groups of the movement. We know that no general strike order had been issued by any of the trade union federations.” See Julián Gorkin, “Réunion du sous-secrétariat international du POUM—14 mai 1937”.
[134] The second Tarradellas government was in office from December 16, 1936 to April 3, 1937.
[135] Isgleas resigned because of the proposal that the Carlos Marx Division, controlled by the PSUC, should be transferred from the Aragón Front to the Madrid Front, and not, as some historians claim, due to yet another in a series of disarmament decrees promulgated for the rearguard that nobody took seriously. Isgleas was opposed to the weakening of the Aragón Front, and demanded that, in any event, the men of the Marx Division should be replaced by two thousand men from the police forces in the rearguard. This was intended as a countermeasure in response to the attempts on the part of Companys to disarm and control the rearguard.
[136] “Actas de las reuniones de Companys con Herrera y Escorza del 11 y 13 de abril de 1937”.
[137] In this government (in office from April 16 to May 4), the CNT Ministers were Isgleas (Defense), Capdevila (Public Services) and Aurelio Fernández (Health and Welfare).
[138] According to the memoires of Joan Pons Garlandí, before May, in a meeting of the Committee of Internal Security, in the office of the Commissar of Public Order Rodríguez Salas, in the Palacio de Gobernación on Plaza Palacio, Artemi Aguadé persuaded Aurelio Fernández, who had put his pistol to the head of Rodríguez Salas, not to shoot. This anecdote reflects the great tension that existed between the CNT leaders and the appointees of the ERC who had positions of authority in the police forces.
[139] Herrera and Escorza advocated the formation of Inspection Commissions in all the Ministries of the Generalitat, which would allow them to control what was done and what was planned in all the departments of the government, especially in those directed by the PSUC, as a safeguard to avoid future conflicts between the different antifascist organizations. It would be modeled on the Council of the Economy and the Commission of War Industries, which had proven so effective, according to Escorza and Herrera.
[140] Josep Tarradellas, “La crisi política prèvia als Fets de Maig. 26 dies de desgovern a la Generalitat”.
[141] Escorza was born in Barcelona in 1912, the son of a CNT militant in the Woodworkers Trade Union. He suffered from polio as a child, which left him permanently paralyzed. Of very short stature as a result of the atrophy of his legs, he used enormous lifts in his shoes that, in addition to his crutches, gave him a pathetic appearance and extremely limited his mobility. Of an extremely sour and severe disposition, he was very well educated and willful and would not allow anyone to help him move about. He was a militant in the Libertarian Youth and became a member of the Peninsular Committee of the FAI. At the beginning of the civil war he addressed an assembly of the CNT-FAI on July 20, 1936, advocating a third way, as opposed to García Oliver’s half-hearted advocacy of the “go for broke” strategy and the overwhelming majority position of Abad de Santillán and Federica Montseny in favor of loyal collaboration with the government of the Generalitat. Escorza advocated the use of the government of the Generalitat as a tool to socialize the economy, and then dispose of it when it ceases to be useful to the CNT. Escorza was the highest ranking official of the <em>Investigation Services of the CNT-FAI</em>, which had since July 1936 been executing all kinds of repressive tasks, as well as espionage and intelligence. The Committee of Investigation was organized in two sections: Minué was in charge of foreign espionage and Escorza himself was in charge of internal intelligence. Repression was directed not just at rebel organizations and individuals, but also against CNT militants. Escorza was responsible for the execution of José Gardeñas, of the construction federation, and Fernández, president of the Food Supply Workers Trade Union, at the order of the confederal organization, with the knowledge and consent of Federica Montseny and Abad de Santillán. García Oliver stated that Escorza’s intelligence and espionage work were excellent. His police work, intelligence activities and repressive measures relating to fifth columnists, as well as fascist elements and priests, and their activities, as well as those relating to the so-called “uncontrollables” within the antifascist camp itself, including those who were members of the CNT, conferred upon Escorza a sinister reputation that, combined with his handicap and his arresting appearance, transformed him into a figure of revulsion and horror, feared for his power over life and death of others, radiating a mythical aura that was half contempt and half terror, led him to be known as (in the words of García Oliver) “a cripple in body and in soul”. It cannot be denied, however, that he was extraordinarily effective (and this was acknowledged by García Oliver himself) with respect to his responsibilities in the matter of espionage, intelligence and repression, which he always carried out strictly under orders from the confederal organization. During the summer of 1936 he made outstanding contributions to the conversations between the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias of Cataluña (CCMAC) and the Moroccan Action Committee (CAM), whose representatives proposed that the government of the Republic grant independence to Morocco as a means to undermine the effectiveness of the Moroccan troops that had been recruited by Franco’s army. On October 22, 1936, Manuel Escorza and Dionisio Eroles, in the name of the Regional Committee of the CNT, and Pedro Herrera, for the FAI, signed the unity pact between the CNT-FAI and the PSUC and the UGT, which was explained to and submitted for the approval of a mass meeting held in the Monumental Plaza de Toros, at which Antonio Sesé, Federica Montseny, Joan Comorera y Vázquez, as well as the Soviet consul in Barcelona, Antonov Ovseenko, spoke.
[142] See W. Solano, “La Juventud Comunista Ibérica (POUM) en las jornadas de mayo de 1937 en Barcelona”, in <em>Los sucesos de mayo de 1937. Una revolución en la República</em>, Fundación Nin y Fundación Seguí, Pandora Libros, Barcelona, 1999, pp. 158–160.
[143] Agustín Guillamón, “Josep Rebull de 1937 a 1939. La crítica interna a la política del CE del POUM sobre la Guerra de España”, <em>Balance</em>, Issues 19 and 20 (May and October 2000).
[144] “Pedro” (Gerö), in his reports to Moscow, identified Los Escolapios as the controlling center of the insurrection of May 1937. See Agustín Guillamón, “La NKVD y el SIM en Barcelona. Algunos informes de Gerö sobre la Guerra de España”, <em>Balance</em>, no. 22 (November 2001).
[145] Juan Gimínez Arenas, <em>De la Unión a Banat</em>, Fundación Anselmo Lorenzo, Madrid, 1996, p. 59.
[146] This is where the British author George Orwell was stationed.
[147] The nephew of Francisco Ferrer Guardia was murdered by a PSUC patrol at one of these checkpoints, because he resisted being disarmed.
[148] These are his exact words: “I declare that the guards who have died today, are like my own brothers: I bow down before them and kiss them.” (“declaro que los guardias que hoy han muerto, para mí son hermanos: me inclino ante ellos y los beso”). See <em>El eco…</em>, p. 427.
[149] Testimony of Albert Masó March (a POUM militant), from correspondence with the author.
[150] According to the account of Abad de Santillán, <em>Por qué perdimos la guerra</em>, Plaza y Janés, Barcelona, 1977, p. 211.
[151] The Local Committee of Barcelona [of the POUM], “Informe de la actuación del Comité local durante los días de mayo que éste presenta a discussion de células de Barcelona”, mimeographed text.
[152] Correspondence between the author and José Quesada Suárez.
[153[ Correspondence and interview of the author with Josep Rebull Cabré. See also Agustín Guillamón, “Josep Rebull de 1937 a 1939: la crítica interna a la política del Comité ejecutivo del POUM durante la Revolución española”, <em>Balance. Cuadernos de historia</em>, nos. 19 and 20 (2000).
[153] Ricardo Sanz, <em>El sindicalismo y la política. Los “solidarios” y “nosotros”</em>, Edición del autor, Toulouse, 1966, p. 306. The barracks of the Docks (renamed “Espartaco”) was attacked by the Stalinists from the nearby Carlos Marx Barracks, but the troops under the command of Ricardo Sanz limited their activities to passive defense, without going into the streets. At this same barracks, militiamen from the Tierra y Libertad Column, who had participated in the street battles, obeyed the orders issued by the Regional Committee of the CNT on the evening of May 5 to halt all offensive operations. Only a group of Italians (who had brought four tanks to defend the Casa CNT-FAI on May 4 and on May 5 had delivered six armored cars to the Gran Vía to defend the headquarters of the Control Patrols and the Food Supply Workers Trade Union) continued to fight at the barricade erected on Icaria Avenue.
[154] Munis, in the second issue of <em>La Voz Leninista</em> (August 23, 1937) subjected the concept of the “revolutionary junta” that was elaborated in the sixth issue of <em>The Friend of the People</em> (August 12, 1937) to critique. For Munis, The Friends of Durruti were suffering from a progressive theoretical deterioration, and a diminishing practical capacity to exercise influence in the CNT, which led them to abandon certain theoretical positions that the experience of May had allowed them to encompass. Munis claimed that in May 1937 The Friends of Durruti had simultaneously launched the slogans of “revolutionary junta” and “all power to the proletariat”; while in the sixth issue, dated August 12, of <em>The Friend of the People</em>, the slogan of “revolutionary junta” was proposed as an alternative to the “failure of all state forms”. According to Munis this implied a theoretical regression insofar as it reflected the assimilation by The Friends of Durruti of the experiences of May, which distanced them from the Marxist concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and once again dragged them into the ambiguity of the statist-anarchist theory.
[155] Republished by Etcétera (Apartado 1363) and Ateneu Enciclopèdic Popular (Apartado 22212) [both 08080 Barcelona] in 1997, although accompanied by an inadequate preface containing erroneous information. [For an English language translation of this text, including the 1978 Introduction by Balius, see The Friends of Durruti, <em>Towards a Fresh Revolution</em>, Zabalaza Books, Johannesburg, n.d.; available online in October 2013 at: [[http://zabalazabooks.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/towards_a_fresh_revolution_fod.pdf][zabalazabooks.files.wordpress.com]].]
[156] Anna Monjó, <em>Militants</em>, Laertes, Barcelona, 2003, pp. 465–471.
[157] At the beginning of this chapter.
[158] Most revolutionaries were in prison or in hiding. Those who had not yet suffered the impact of repression fled to the front to find refuge. The few who wanted to continue the fight for socialization in the factories encountered indifference or suspicion, or else were reduced to impotence by the new bureaucrats, who obtained the support of the flood of new members after July 19, 1936.
[159] In the city of Barcelona the 24 <em>Sindicatos Únicos</em> were organized into 12 Industrial Unions. The FAI underwent a development similar to the one that affected the CNT: after July 1937, it was organized territorially into Groups, which replaced the traditional affinity groups. This reorganization of both the CNT as well as the FAI, was a consequence of the defeat of the revolutionaries in May 1937, and implied the transformation of the class trade unions (<em>sindicatos únicos</em>) into institutions of economic management and for enforcing the militarization of labor (industrial unions); and this was paralleled by the transformation of the FAI into an antifascist political party.
[160] The horizontal and federative functioning of the CNT did not permit its militants to organize dissident poles in organized tendencies, with their own leaders and programs distinct from those of the superior committees.
[161] García Oliver, Ascaso and Durruti were the prototypical “men of action”. Federica Montseny and Abad de Santillán were prototypical “intellectuals”.
[162] According to the testimony of Jaime Antón Aguadé i Cortès, written and dated before witnesses in Mexico City on August 9, 1946: “During the May Days the government of the Generalitat requested that the government of Spain send airplanes to bomb the CNT strongholds and this request was denied. Companys then asked what he was supposed to do to get the situation under control and he was told that there was no other solution besides surrendering jurisdiction over Public Order in Cataluña to the central government, and Companys surrendered it.” These statements are confirmed by the teletypes exchanged between Companys and the government of Valencia, in the fragment that confirms the request by Companys to bomb Barcelona: “The President of the Generalitat, communicates to the subsecretary of the Council, that the rebels have brought artillery into the streets. It is requested that orders be conveyed to Sandino to place himself at the disposal of the Government of the Generalitat.”
[163] Teletype from José del Barrio: “To Comrade Vidiella. Order from Comrade del Barrio. Say the following: ‘Situation Barcelona very serious. Must work to prepare air force and bomb when we advise, the Escolapios, Plaza de Toros Monumental, the Campos Sagrado rail depot, the Barracks at San Andrés, Pueblo Nuevo and the Hotel del Reloy at number 1 Plaza de España. The mission of the air arm is absolutely necessary by tomorrow morning (it is now already seven)’.” See Appendix.
[164] “Revolutions are totalitarian no matter what anyone says. […] In July a committee of antifascist militias was formed. It was not a class institution. Bourgeois and counterrevolutionary fractions were represented in it. It might seem that this committee arose to confront the Generalitat. But it was a scene in a comedy. […] Neighborhood defense committees, municipal committees, supply committees were created. Sixteen months have passed. What remains? Of the spirit of July, a memory. Of the institutions of July, a past. But the whole nest of politicians and petty bourgeois are still standing. In the Plaza de la República of the Catalonian capital there is still that crowd of elements that only intend to live on the backs of the working class.” From the pamphlet of The Friends of Durruti Group, “Towards a New Revolution”, written by Balius.
[165] These superior committees at the highest levels of the organization were reduced to a handful of bureaucrats, who, after May 1937, were profoundly hostile to one another due to personal grudges, pitting the National Committee of the CNT, the Regional Committee of Cataluña, the Peninsular Committee of the FAI and the Executive Committee of the Libertarian Movement against each other. At the end of the war, after obscure vacillations and miserable reversals of position on the part of the various factions, the opposition between the bureaucrats, who were totally indifferent to the rank and file militants who were preoccupied with hunger and bombs, had been reduced to the confrontation between the Negrinistas of the National Committee, controlled by Marianet and Horacio Prieto, and the Anti-Negrinistas García Oliver, Isgleas, Esgleas, Peiró, Montseny and the Nervio Group: Abad de Santillán, Pedro Herrera, Rafael Nevado, Fidel Miró and Germinal de Souza. Others, such as Joaquín Ascaso and Antonio Ortiz, condemned to hell by slander, fought to survive.
* Part 5 — Epilogue
<quote>
“<em>The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing.”</em>
Karl Marx, Letter to Schweitzer (February 13, 1865)
</quote>
** <strong>THE COMMITTEES OF 1936</strong>
In July 1936, what was lacking was a revolutionary theory. Without theory there is no revolution. After seventy years of anti-state preaching, the Spanish anarchist movement, without understanding the real nature of power and the state, had come to a <em>historical crossroads</em> where it had to decide whether to advance by the revolutionary road, or collaborate with the bourgeois government of the Generalitat (and the Republic) in order to defeat fascism. The ambiguous option of “going for broke” proposed by Juan García Oliver was conceived as a <em>coup d’état</em>, in which the anarchosyndicalist leaders would impose an “anarchist dictatorship” that was contrary to their ideological principles. The high level leaders of the CNT-FAI, left behind by the rank and file militants, felt dizzy before their incapacity to manage the victory of the workers insurrection. And they chose to collaborate. The revolutionary situation as it existed in July, characterized by <em>power that was fragmented</em> into hundreds of committees, was throttled by that <em>institution of class collaboration</em> known as the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias (CCMA).
There was no revolutionary vanguard capable of inspiring the further development of the revolution of the committees. No working class organization, neither the CNT-FAI, nor the POUM, proposed in July <em>the revolutionary road of reinforcing, intensifying, extending, coordinating and centralizing the revolutionary committees</em> that, in the streets of Barcelona and in many municipalities of Catalonia, already exercised <em>all power</em>. And the committees by themselves were not able to do so, either, because they would have had to resolutely confront their own leaders and organizations.
In only two months this CCMA, with a predominant representation of the CNT-FAI, successfully weakened the multitude of revolutionary committees which had arisen everywhere, and reconstructed the state apparatus, which the CNT-FAI reinforced by accepting various official positions, first in the Catalonian government, and then a month later in the government of the Republic. The first decrees of the government of the Generalitat, reinforced with <em>anarchist Ministers</em>, ordered the militarization of the Militias and, naturally, the dissolution of the committees that nonetheless resisted their effective forced disappearance for several more months. May 1937 was therefore the necessary armed defeat of the proletariat required by the counterrevolution in order to finish off the least trace of the revolutionary threat.
<em>The revolutionary committees</em> that had arisen in July 1936 <em>were</em> incomplete and imperfect institutions, <em>incapable of transforming themselves into authentic institutions of working class power</em>. They differed from workers councils (which had arisen as institutions of workers power in the proletarian revolutions of Germany and Russia) in the following respects: 1. They were not institutions that were democratically elected by mass assemblies of rank and file workers and therefore independent of the trade union bureaucracies and the parties; 2. They were not unitary institutions of the working class, and were furthermore incapable of coordinating among themselves, in such a way as to create superior institutions that would centralize the power of the workers.
After the victory of the revolutionary insurrection of July 19 two choices were possible: the revolutionary option consisted in reinforcing, intensifying, coordinating and centralizing the revolutionary committees as institutions of workers power, <strong>TRANSFORMING THEM INTO WORKERS COUNCILS</strong>; the popular front or reformist option consisted in the integration of the workers movement into the state apparatus of the republican bourgeoisie and therefore in the weakening, isolation and final <em>dissolution</em> of the committees.
The government of Largo Caballero, despite its working class appearances, was based on the old state apparatus of the bourgeoisie and its purpose was to absorb all the revolutionary institutions and structures in order to gradually neutralize them until, once the bourgeois fraction of the government felt strong enough, they could be openly crushed.
The trade unions, by their very nature, were not institutions of workers power. The committees were not <em>yet</em> such institutions of workers power. The committees were not councils and therefore proved to be incapable of coordinating among themselves, and of creating superior institutions capable of centralizing, unifying and creating a working class power that would confront the capitalist state. The irreplaceable and necessary mission of a revolutionary vanguard or party would have been precisely to impel the transformation of the committees into workers councils.
The POUM and the CNT-FAI failed as revolutionary vanguards, and the committees were incapable of becoming (by their own efforts) councils. <em>This was the principal limitation and determining cause of the rapid degeneration of the revolutionary situation that existed in July 1936, which made possible the sudden recovery of the bourgeois state apparatus.</em>
We must therefore make the distinction, as Josep Rebull did in the spring of 1937,[166] with precision, rigor and clarity, between committees,[167] workers councils and trade unions. They were <em>distinct</em> working class institutions with <em>different</em> functions.
The trade unions, during a revolutionary period, were supposed to be the economic institutions in control of production and distribution, that is, technical and administrative institutions. But they could not be, nor could they fulfill, functions of political representation or institutions of working class power. The Councils are precisely those institutions of workers power that, due to their democratic election in assemblies, are independent of the trade union bureaucracies and the parties. The strengthening of the councils means that they will assume leadership functions in every locality, accelerating the decomposition of the capitalist system. They are therefore <em>incompatible with the capitalist state</em>, and their defense is irreconcilable with the parties that participate in the governments of the bourgeoisie.
The seizure of power is based on <em>the armed struggle and the destruction of the capitalist state</em>, which is replaced with a government of Workers Councils.
The function of a revolutionary vanguard is not to be a substitute for the working class in those functions that only pertain to the class itself: seizing power, exercise of the dictatorship of the proletariat, control of the economy and the militias, conduct of the war, centralization of workers power and class unity, etc. The function of this organization, in a revolutionary situation, is necessarily that of impelling the creation of the institutions of working class power, so that they can exercise their functions of workers power, and thus establish a dictatorship of the proletariat, incompatible with the capitalist state, and therefore without any political collaboration of any kind with the bourgeoisie.
** <strong>Insurrections, rebellions and revolutions</strong>
If we define <em>revolution</em>, in the 20<sup>th</sup> century, as the violent confrontation with the state for the final goal (whether it is achieved or not) of the <em>seizure of state power</em>, carried out by political forces that are opposed, not only to the current regime, but to the existing social order, and the <em>proletarian revolution as the attempt to destroy the capitalist state apparatus</em>, we are differentiating the proletarian revolution from the popular revolutions and the latter from other political forms of changing the government, such as coups d’état, fascist and Stalinist counterrevolutions (as in the twenties and thirties), social revolts, riots and protests, the fall of totalitarian regimes (the fascist regimes during the forties, or the Stalinist ones at the end of the eighties and beginning of the nineties), colonial wars of independence (especially those of the fifties and sixties) and civil wars.
Insurrections, revolts or revolutions are almost always violent, but this violence by itself lacks significance. All the insurrections of the past show us that, although they were violent, this violence has always been overcome by the subsequent counterrevolution, which has massacred, imprisoned or deported its enemies on a mass scale, especially after the fighting has ended, when it had already obtained military victory: the hatred and carnage born from the fear of the owning classes of the proletarian threat. If the revolution resides in the revolutionaries, then they must be exterminated in order to carry on with the peaceful exploitation of the “good citizens”. If the spirit of vengeance has played a certain role in working class insurrections, it has always been paid back with interest by the reaction. We need only consider the Kuomintang in 1926 or Francoist Spain (1939–1975). Working class insurrections have for their part been less bloody and ferocious than the anti-feudal peasant revolts, because the latter were the product of desperation. The destruction of property, or murders, which have taken place in some insurrections have generally been the spontaneous result of backwardness and desperation on the part of a lumpen sector that cannot escape from its poverty, or abolish oppression. Rebellions, revolts or insurrections, no matter how violent or socially radical they may be, cannot be defined as revolutionary if they are limited to attacking the local administrators of capitalism, and leave the capitalist economic and social system standing. Revolutions are always struggles for state power and lead to the attempt (whether or not it is successful) to seize state power by a group, a coalition or a class. The starting point of a proletarian revolution is the destruction of the bourgeois state. Therefore, in order to understand just what a revolution or an insurrection is, how it develops and what it seeks, we need to understand the nature of the state, and especially the nature of the capitalist state.
** <strong>What is the state?</strong>
It is not the state, or political power, that creates the classes; it is the existence of a society that is divided into classes that creates the state, in order to defend all the privileges of the ruling class. We could find a thousand different definitions of the state. They can basically be reduced to just two, however. One, which is very broad, and that improperly speaks of the state as already existing in the first civilizations, with the development of major agricultural surpluses, of Mesopotamia and Egypt, and then Greece and Rome, we shall not use, as it is inadequate for the study of the capitalist society in which we live. This definition, in any event, requires that the state be defined according to the prevailing mode of production: the slave state, the feudal state, the capitalist state. The other definition, which is more specific, is the one that utilizes the current concept of the state, or the capitalist state, or the modern state, as an absolute sovereign power or as the sole power in each country, which is the one we shall use.
** <strong>What is the capitalist state?</strong>
The modern, or capitalist, state, is a recent historical form of the political organization of society, which arose about five hundred years ago in a handful of countries, with the end of feudalism and the first manifestations of the system of capitalist production. The emergence of the (capitalist) state presupposed the disappearance of the feudal forms of political organization. The concept of the (modern) state is therefore quite recent and arises with the historical emergence of the system of capitalist production. It is the form of political organization that is proper for capitalism.
In feudal society sovereignty was understood as a hierarchical relation that mediated a plurality of powers. The power of the King was based on the loyalty of the other seigniorial powers and these royal powers were furthermore alienable, that is, they could be sold or granted to the nobility: the administration of justice, the recruitment of the army, the collection of taxes, the bishoprics, etc., could be sold to the highest bidder or were awarded in a complex network of favors and privileges. Sovereignty resided in a plurality of powers, which could be subordinated to one another or compete among themselves.
In capitalist society, the state transforms sovereignty into a monopoly: the state is the sole political power in a country. The (modern or capitalist) state possesses the monopoly of political power, and as a result also lays claim to the monopoly on violence. Any challenge to the monopoly on violence is considered to be a crime and an attack on capitalist law and order, and is therefore persecuted, punished and annihilated. In feudal society, social relations were based on personal dependence and privileges. In capitalist society, social relations can only exist between juridically free and equal individuals. This juridical freedom and equality (not freedom and equality with regard to property) is indispensable for the formation and existence of a proletariat that provides the cheap labor for the new manufacturers. The worker must be free, and he also must be free of all property, in order to be available and prepared to rent himself for a wage to the owner of the factory, a business or to the state itself. He must be free and lacking any bond to the land that he farms, any reserves for survival, and any property, in order to be driven by hunger, pauperization and misery to the new industrial concentrations where he can sell the only commodity that he possesses: his strength and his intelligence, that is, his labor power and ability to work.
These new social relations, particular to capitalism, correspond with a new political organization, unlike the feudal organization: a state that monopolizes all political relations. In capitalism all individuals are theoretically (juridically) free and equal and no one is any longer subject to any kind of political dependence on the old form of feudal lords or the new owner of the factory. All political relations are monopolized by the state.
In pre-capitalist modes of production the relations of production were also relations of domination. The slave was the property of his master, the serf was bound to the land that he worked or he was directly bound to a lord. This dependence has disappeared in capitalism. The (modern) state is therefore the product of the capitalist relations of production. The (current) state is the specific form of organization of political power in capitalist societies. There is a radical separation between the economic, the social and the political spheres.
The (modern) state monopolizes power, violence and the political relations between individuals in the societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails. In the capitalist system of production capital is not just money, or factories, or machines; capital is also, and <em>above all</em>, a social relation of production, and precisely that social relation of production that exists between proletarians, sellers of their labor power for a wage, and the capitalists, buyers of the commodity known as “labor power”.
The (capitalist) state has only recently emerged, about five hundred years ago, and it will disappear along with the capitalist relations of production. The (capitalist) state is thus not eternal; it has a very recent origin and will also come to an end. The political theory of the modern state was born in England in the 17<sup>th</sup> century, anticipating or justifying that historical process known as the Industrial Revolution, with Hobbes (and Locke). Hobbes is not just the first theoretician, from the chronological point of view, but his works already express the present-day problematic of the (modern) state. From Plato to Machiavelli, pre-state political theory was characterized by its definition of political power and the community as something NATURAL, and by its identification of the civil community with the political community. After Hobbes, state political theory is characterized by its definition of the state as an ARTIFICIAL entity, its separation of the concepts of civil community (civil society) and political community (the state) and by its addressing the question of the reproduction of political power.
The (capitalist) state arises from a contradiction, which was its origin and its reason for existence, between the theoretical defense of the common or general good, and the practical defense of the interests of a minority. The manifest contradiction between the illusion of defending the general interest and the real defense of the interests of the bourgeois class. The reason for existence of the (current) state is nothing but to guarantee the reproduction of the social relations of capitalist production.
The (capitalist) state, however, reified in its institutions, is the mask of society, conveying the appearance of an external force that is motivated by a higher rationality that embodies a “just” order for which it performs the role of a neutral arbiter. This fetishization of the (modern) state ALLOWS the capitalist social relations of production to appear to be mere economic relations, rather than relations based on coercion, at the same time that it also VEILS the oppressive character of state institutions. In the market, worker and employer have the appearance of free individuals, who engage in a “purely” economic exchange: the worker sells his labor power in exchange for a wage. In this free, “exclusively” economic exchange, all coercion has been obscured, and the (capitalist) state has not intervened at all: it is not there, it has (apparently) disappeared.
The necessary split between the public and the private is a necessary precondition of the capitalist relations of production, because only thus can they APPEAR to be free agreements between juridically free and equal individuals, in which violence, monopolized by the (capitalist) state, has disappeared from the stage. All of this leads to a CONTRADICTION between the state AS FETISH, which must conceal its monopoly of violence, permanently exercised against the proletariat in order to guarantee the capitalist relations of production, that is, of the exploitation of the proletariat by capital, and the state AS THE ORGANIZER OF SOCIAL CONSENSUS and legality, which conducts free elections, tolerates democratic rights of freedom of expression, assembly, press and association; allows trade unions and legislates labor reforms like health coverage, pensions, the eight hour day, unemployment insurance, etc.
** <strong>Essence and functions of the capitalist state</strong>
It is the existence of a society divided into classes that creates the state, in order to defend all the privileges of the ruling class. In crisis situations the capitalist state immediately reveals that it is first of all a <em>capitalist</em> state, rather than a state of the nation, the people, or its citizens, or a “welfare state”. The coercive component of the state, linked to class rule, is the <em>FUNDAMENTAL ESSENCE</em> of the state, which becomes transparent when social consensus and state legitimacy are sacrificed on the altar of subjecting the proletariat to the exploitation of capital. Proletarian revolts and insurrections always reveal the class nature of the state and its essential repressive function.
The capitalist state arises from this contradictory relation between its repressive essence and its apparent function as an arbiter. It attempts to conceal its repressive role, fulfilled as a guarantee of the rule of the bourgeois class by way of the monopoly on violence, at the same time that it seeks to appear to be the organizer of the consensus of civil society, which in turn legitimizes the (modern) state as a neutral arbiter. By this means the state also reinforces its ideological monopoly and obtains a more complete and disguised domination over civil society.
<em>The fundamental institutions of the state are the standing army and the bureaucracy.</em> The tasks of the army are defense of the territorial frontiers against other states, imperialist conquests, to extend markets and obtain control over raw materials, and above all to serve as the ultimate safeguard of the established order against working class subversion. The task of the bureaucracy is to administer all those functions that the bourgeoisie delegates to the state: education, police, public health, prisons, mail, railroads, highways…. The civil servant of the (capitalist) state, from the schoolteacher to the college professor, from the policeman to the cabinet minister, from the truck driver to the doctor all performed, or still perform, necessary functions for the normal operations of the affairs of the bourgeoisie; where they are detrimental to the latter, they are privatized, as has recently been taking place with regard to jails, police and the army in some countries.
The (modern) state is the ORGANIZATION of the political rule over, and the permanent coercion and economic exploitation of the proletariat by capital. The (capitalist) state is therefore not a machine or a tool that can be used for opposite purposes: yesterday to exploit the proletariat, tomorrow to emancipate the proletariat and suppress the bourgeoisie. It is not a machine that can be conquered, nor can it be manipulated according to the whims of the machine operator. <em>The proletariat cannot conquer the state</em>, because the state is the political organization of capital: <em>it must destroy the state</em>. If a victorious insurrection of the proletariat limits itself to conquering the state, and then reinforcing and rebuilding it, then we can speak of a coup d’état or a revolution, or even of a proletarian revolution (as in October 1917 in Russia), but in any event it is a revolution that has left standing the foundations of a rapid and powerful counterrevolution, which will soon lead to another form of managing capitalism, as was the case with Stalinism in Russia.
The proletariat must destroy the state because the state is the political organization of the economic exploitation of wage labor. The destruction of the state is a condition <em>sine qua non</em> of the beginning of a communist society. The capitalist state cannot really be destroyed, however, unless the proletariat immediately destroys the economic, social and historical preconditions for the existence of wage labor and the law of value on a world scale.
** <strong>What replaces the state?</strong>
What replaces the state? The administration of things in communism. The proletarian revolution, however, is not a question of parties or organization. What determines the possibility for communism is a high degree of development of the productive forces and the extension of wage labor and the proletarian condition. Organizational problems cannot be posed outside of those who are being organized and the problems that crop up at any particular moment. There are no rules, or magic formulas, or guarantees against bureaucratization and the counterrevolution.[168] Bureaucrats tend to be experts at organization, outside of society. <em>The historical experience of the international proletariat points to the Russian Soviets, the German “</em><em><strong>rater</strong></em><em>” and the Spanish Committees, that is, the organization of the proletariat in workers councils, as the revolutionary form of organization of the working class.</em>
We are therefore not speaking of one or another particular organizational form of committee or council, but of the councilist organization of society. The councils do not represent the workers, they are the organized proletariat. The council is a class institution and an institution for struggle. It is not a political body, it is the organization of society in new relations of production, and therefore it is not democratic, nor is it dictatorial, it is beyond politics, and avoids the separation between the public and the private that is characteristic of capitalism. Soviets, <em>rater</em> and committees failed in the past, but they existed, demonstrating the capacity of the proletariat for directing and managing factories, cities and countries; but also showing their limits and their limitations, which we must understand and correct. They have always appeared whenever the revolutionary proletariat rose up against capitalist barbarism. They were the working class response to the vacuum left by the bourgeoisie, rather than the result of a radicalization of the struggle. The councilist ideology contemplates the councils as a goal and not just as a moment of the struggle in the transition to communism. The councilists replace the “party” concept of the Leninists with the “council” concept. Both ideologies are sterile. <em>The councils will only be what the proletariat makes them in the struggle to destroy the state and construct communism.</em>
* Part 6 — Bibliography of basic works utilized in this text
<biblio>
Abad de Santillán, Diego, <em>La revolución y la guerra en España</em>, Nervio, Barcelona, 1937.
“Actes del Comité Central de Milícies Antifeixistes de Catalunya.”
Adsuar Torra, Josep Eduard, <em>Catalunya: Juliol-Octubre 1936. Una dualitat de poder?</em> (2 Vols.), Tesina de Llicenciatura, Departament Història Contemporània, Universitat de Barcelona, 1979.
Bernecker, W., <em>Colectividades y revolución social</em>, Crítica, Barcelona, 1982.
Bolloten, Burnett, <em>La Guerra Civil española</em>, Alianza, Madrid, 1989. [In English: Bolloten, Burnett, <em>The Spanish Revolution: The Left and the Struggle for Power during the Civil War</em>, Revised and Expanded Edition, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1979. Originally published in 1961 under the title, <em>The Grand Camouflage</em>.]
Diaz Sandino, Felipe, <em>De la conspiración a la revolución</em>, mimeographed text.
Escofet, Federico, <em>De una derrota a una victoria: 5 de octubre de 1934 – 19 de Julio de 1936</em>, Argos Vergara, Barcelona, 1984.
García, Piotrowski, Rosés (eds.), <em>Barcelona, mayo 1937</em>, Alikornio, Barcelona, 2006.
García Oliver, Juan, <em>El eco de los pasos</em>, Ruedo Ibérico, Barcelona, 1978.
Guillamón, Agustín, “Los Amigos de Durruti 1937–1939”, <em>Balance</em> (1994). [English translation: Guillamón, Agustín, <em>The Friends of Durruti Group: 1937–1938</em>, tr. Paul Sharkey, AK Press, San Francisco, 2001.]
Lacruz, Francisco, <em>El alzamiento, la revolución y el terror en Barcelona</em>, Librería Arysel, Barcelona, 1943.
Lorenzo, César, <em>Los anarquistas españoles y el poder</em>, Ruedo Ibérico, Paris, 1972.
Llauge, Félix, <em>El terror staliniano en la España republicana</em>, Aura, Barcelona, 1974.
Mompó, Enric, <em>El Comité Central de Milicias Antifascistas de Catalunya y la situación de doble poder en los primeros meses de la guerra civil española</em>, Tesis doctoral leída el 8 de junio de 1994, Departamento de Historia Contemporánea, Universidad de Barcelona.
Munis, G., <em>Jalones de derrota, promesa de victoria. Crítica y teoría de la revolución española (1930–1939)</em>, Muñoz Moya, Brenes, 2003.
Paz, Abel, <em>Durruti en la Revolución española</em>, Fundación Anselmo Lorenzo, Madrid, 1996. [English translation: <em>Paz, Abel, Durruti in the Spanish Revolution</em>, tr. Chuck Morse, AK Press, San Francisco, 2006.]
Peirats, José, <em>La CNT en la revolución española</em>, Ruedo Ibérico, Paris, 1971. [English translation: <em>The CNT in the Spanish Revolution</em>, Vol. 1, tr. Paul Sharkey and Chris Ealham, PM Press, Oakland, 2011; Vols. 2 and 3, PM Press, Oakland, 2012.]
Pons i Garlandí, Joan, “Memorias”, text in Spanish, mimeographed.
Pozo González, Josep Antoni, <em>El poder revolucionari a Catalunya Durant els mesos de juliol a octubre de 1936. Crisi i recomposició de l’Estat</em>, Tesi doctoral defensada el 21 de juny de 2002, Departament Historia Moderna i Contemporània, Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona.
Romero, Luis, <em>Tres días de Julio</em>, Ariel, Barcelona, 1976 (a novel).
[Souchy, Agustín], <em>Los sucesos de Barcelona</em>, Ed. Ebro, August 1937.
Tarradellas, Josep, “La crisi prèvia als Fets de Maig. 26 dies de desgovern de la Generalitat”. (Report).
Translated in September-October 2013 from the Spanish text:
Agustín Guillamón, <em>Barricadas en Barcelona: La CNT de la victoria de Julio de 1936 a la necesaria derrota de Mayo de 1937</em>, Ediciones Espartaco Internacional, Barcelona, 2006.
</biblio>
<br>
[166] See Agustín Guillamón, “Josep Rebull de 1937 a 1939”, <em>Balance</em>, issues number 19 and 20 (2000).
[167] The committees were bureaucratic rather than democratic institutions, in which the delegates were not democratically elected by the working class rank and file in mass assemblies, but were appointed by the trade union or political bureaucracies. This implies, on the one hand, a separation between the committees and the rank and file workers, and on the other hand, their dependence on the bureaucracy. This was the reason for their inability to coordinate among themselves and to create centralized and unitary class institutions; coordination was carried out by the various trade unions and parties, and the problematic of unity and centralization (with regard to military, economic, productive, supply issues, etc.) became a kind of jigsaw puzzle of multifarious discussion circles, on all scales and in every field, involving the various antifascist organizations, both working class and bourgeois and Stalinist.
[168] The Paris Commune of 1871 transformed all public offices into elected and revocable positions, paid the average wage of the workers.
<br>
|
#title From Defense Cadres to Popular Militias
#author Agustin Guillamón
#SORTtopics CNT, community self-defense, confederal militias, Spanish Revolution, anarcho-syndicalism
#date 2009
#source Retrieved on 26<sup>th</sup> September 2020 from https://libcom.org/history/defense-cadres-popular-militias-august%C3%ADn-guillam%C3%B3n
#lang en
#pubdate 2020-09-26T16:27:58
#notes Translated from the Spanish original in October 2013.
<em>The defense cadres were formed shortly after the proclamation of the Republic, and were a continuation of the armed defense groups of the years of <strong>pistolerismo</strong>.</em>
*** <strong>From Shapiro’s report to the Presentation of October 1934</strong>
A confidential report distributed to a limited number of people, written by Alexander Shapiro, the secretary of the AIT, during his stay in Spain in 1932–1933, outlined the nature and function of the Defense Committees, organized exclusively for instances of insurrectionary combat, such as the clashes of January 1933, which Shapiro had witnessed first-hand. This report by Shapiro concerning the Defense Committees was written at the same time that a full-scale polemic was underway between FAIstas and Treintistas regarding the question of whether or not there was any chance to implement the tactic of immediate, permanent insurrection at the level of the localities. Shapiro’s report, which benefited from the invaluable support of Eusebio Carbó, described the defense cadres that existed in 1933 as follows: “These Defense Committees, which have already existed for some time, were exclusively concerned with preparing the weapons that would be necessary in case of insurrection, organizing the combat groups in various popular neighborhoods, organizing the resistance of the soldiers in the barracks, etc.”
Already during the course of the Asturian insurrection, the National Committee of Defense Committees (CNCD) confirmed, in a conference presentation, the failure of the insurrectionary tactic, popularly known as “revolutionary gymnastics”, to which it attributed the CNT’s lack of preparedness to intervene, at the national level, in the insurrection of October 1934. The time had arrived to discard this tactic because it had proven how absurd and dangerous local insurrections were when they took place at an inopportune moment and without serious previous preparation, since it left the libertarians subject to state repression without achieving either a popular extension throughout the country or the support of other organizations, which would be necessary in order to successfully confront the military and repressive apparatus of the state. The worst thing about it, however, was the fact that the repression had dismantled the clandestine military apparatus of the CNT, after the insurrections that took place in January and December 1933. In October 1934, when the conditions were ripe for a revolutionary proletarian insurrection on a national scale, the anarchosyndicalists were totally exhausted, disorganized and disarmed, with thousands of their militants in prison.
The determination to work to reinforce the Defense Committees, overcome their defects and correct their shortcomings, and especially to take advantage of the state repression as a spur to intensify the struggle, inspired the presentation of the CNCD in October 1934. The old tactic was abandoned in favor of serious and methodical revolutionary preparation: “There is no revolution without preparation; and the more intensive and intelligent this preparation is, the more effective it will be when it is put into operation. We must put an end to the prejudice in favor of improvisation and enthusiastic inspiration as the only practicable forms in times of difficulties. This error, which consists of trusting the creative instinct of the masses, has cost us dearly. The indispensable means of war for fighting against a state with experience, a large military budget and superior offensive and defensive capabilities, will not be obtained as if by spontaneous generation.”
The CNCD considered “that we have to recognize the great importance that the Defense Committees have for the CNT and the libertarian revolution, and devote ourselves to the uninterrupted study of their structures in order to improve them and provide them with the economic and moral and technical means that will confer upon them the greatest efficacy with regard to obtaining the desired goal as quickly and as efficiently as possible”.
The clandestine military apparatus of the Defense Committees must always be subject to the orders and the necessities of the CNT: “the Defense Committees will be an organic modality attached to the CNT.” The presentation structured the Defense Committees on the basis of “volunteer militants”, just as participation in the specific organizations, that is, the FAI and the Libertarian Youth, was considered to be voluntary. But it was never forgotten that the Defense Committees were the clandestine military organizations of the CNT, financed by the trade unions, which “shall establish a dues quota that will be delivered to them [the Defense Committees] on a monthly basis via the confederal Committees of each locality or county district”.
The presentation of the CNCD, delivered in October 1934, argued that the group or cadre of basic defense must be relatively small in order to facilitate its secrecy and flexibility, as well as to ensure a profound knowledge of the character, understanding and skills of each militant. It must be composed of a secretary, whose basic task was to maintain links with other groups from the same neighborhood, and to form new groups. A second militant must be responsible for identifying and recording the name, residence, ideology, distinguishing features, and habits of, and the nature of the threat posed by, enemies living in the area assigned to the group.
The ‘nature of the threat posed’ refers to the beliefs or ideologies of those persons identified as enemies: “military officers, police, priests, government officials, bourgeois and Marxist politicians, <em>pistoleros</em>, fascists, etc.” A third militant must study the buildings and compounds that are hostile to the workers movement, their vulnerability and their importance. This involves the drafting of floor plans and the elaboration of statistics concerning the men, equipment and armaments located in “barracks, police stations, prisons, churches and monasteries, political and employers’ centers, fortified buildings, etc.”. A fourth militant of the group must investigate strategic points and tactics, that is, “bridges, underground tunnels, sewers, cellars, houses with rooftop terraces, or back doors or doors that provide access to side streets or courtyards that could provide avenues of escape or refuge”. It was decided that a fifth militant of the group should be dedicated to studying the public services: “lighting, water, garages, trolley cars, subway, highways and their susceptibility to sabotage or confiscation”. A sixth militant would be responsible for locating and studying how to assault places where arms, money and supplies for the revolution could be obtained: “armories, buildings with their own security guards, banks, savings and loan institutions, warehouses containing clothing, food, etc.”
It was thought that this figure of six militants was the ideal number to form a defense group or cadre, without failing to take into consideration the possibility that, in certain cases, another member could be added in order to carry out “special supplementary” tasks. The Presentation recommended that the quantity of cadres should be subordinated to their quality, and that the militants must be men who can be characterized as “discreet and active”.
The defense groups, then, after October 1934, were characterized by the reduced size of their basic unit, six militants, each of whom was responsible for quite specific tasks. The secretary of the group maintained links with the other groups in the same neighborhood. They were groups for information gathering and combat that must perform “the role of a just revolutionary vanguard” that “will directly inspire the people”, that is, at the moment of the insurrection they must be capable of mobilizing more numerous secondary groups, and these, in turn, must try to mobilize the entire population.
The defense group was the basic cell of the clandestine military structure of the CNT. In each neighborhood a neighborhood defense committee was to be formed, which would coordinate all these defense cadres, and would receive a monthly report from each of the secretaries of the groups. The secretary-delegate of the neighborhood defense committee would then draft a summary report that he was to deliver to the District Committee, and the latter would in turn transmit it to the Local Defense Committee “and the latter would forward it to the Regional and then the National Defense Committees, respectively”.
This organizational schema, suitable for major cities, was simplified in the towns and villages, where the different groups were coordinated directly in the local committees. The Presentation even provided a detailed account of how and where “defense groups or defense cadres are formed, seeking the human elements in the Trade Unions and distributing them throughout the neighborhoods of the industrial cities, assigning to each group an operational territory designated on the map of the city, an area that it may not leave without express authorization”.
The degree of detail and precision that went into the formation of these Defense Committees is notorious. The Presentation recommended that the groups should be formed of men from the same trade union, or professional category, “not for the purpose of maintaining relations with or remaining dependent on their Trade Unions, since they are at the exclusive disposal of the Defense Committees for the purpose of carrying out the missions that the Defense Committees resolve to undertake”, but because this “method has the virtue of transforming these militants, grouped within the Defense Committees, into guardians of principle within the Trade Unions and in order to keep an eye on the internal and public actions of the Trade Unions”.
The Presentation of the CNCD also set forth a detailed description of the Defense Committees on a regional and national scale, including those sectors of workers, such as railroad workers, trolley conductors, telephone and telegraph workers, postal workers, and, in short, all those who due to the characteristics of their profession or organization are active on a national scale, emphasizing the importance of communications in a revolutionary insurrection. A special department was dedicated to the labor of infiltration, propaganda and winning sympathizers in the barracks. After considering the need to constantly discuss and perfect the insurrectionary plans and tactics of the Defense Committees at a local, regional and national level, and formalizing the connection with the FAI, the Presentation concluded with an appeal to the members of the CNT to consider the importance of consolidating, extending and perfecting a clandestine military apparatus of the CNT, “to confront the military and police leviathan of the state and the fascist or Marxist militias”.
The defense cadres were mostly trade union members. After July 19–20 some of these trade union cadres formed centuries of the Popular Militias, which immediately departed to fight against fascism on the Aragón front. This is why, within the various confederal columns, one spoke of the century of the metal workers, or the century of the woodworkers, or of the construction workers, formed of militants from the same trade union.
The Defense Committees had two essential functions:
1. Acquisition, maintenance, storage and training in the use of weapons. The authority of the Defense Committees was based on their character as armed organizations. Their power was the power of the workers in arms.
2. Logistical responsibilities in the fullest sense of the term, from the provision of supplies and managing popular kitchens to the creation and operation of hospitals, schools, social centers … or even, during the first days after the popular victory, recruiting militiamen and supplying the columns that were departing for the front.
The old defense cadres were formed shortly after the proclamation of the Republic, and could be considered as the continuation, reorganization and extension of the armed defense groups of the period of <em>pistolerismo</em> (1919–1923).
During the thirties the unemployed were enrolled in the defense cadres for rotating terms in order to exercise solidarity by providing them with an income, to prevent them from becoming strikebreakers and to spread the knowledge of the use of arms to the maximum number of militants. For these same reasons, and to prevent their “professionalization”, there were no full-time, permanent paid positions in the defense cadres. Throughout the entire republican phase there were armed pickets and trade union defense groups that defended demonstrations and strikes or promoted local insurrections.
The Presentation of the CNCD of October 1934 called for a new organization and orientation for the defense cadres, which tacitly accepted Alexander Shapiro’s criticisms directed at insurrectional “gymnastics” and the criticisms of the internal CNT opposition, as reflected in the Manifesto of the Thirty.
*** <strong>The Local Committee for Revolutionary Preparedness</strong>
In Catalonia, the practical implementation of this new structure of the Defense Committees was the theme of a presentation organized by the anarchist groups The Indomitables, Nervio, Nosotros, Tierra Libre and Germen, at the Plenum of the Federation of Anarchist Groups of Barcelona, which met in January 1935. This presentation inaugurated the founding, in Barcelona, of the Local Committee for Revolutionary Preparedness.
The preamble to the presentation characterized the historical moment as “a period of immense revolutionary perspectives due above all to the manifest incapacity of capitalism and the state to provide any equitable solutions to the economic, social and moral problems that are now overwhelmingly posed”. The international political breakdown after the end of the Great War was highlighted: “More than fifteen years of constant efforts on the part of the leaders of economic life and just as many attempts of a manifold variety on the part of the state, not to forget the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat, have not produced a minimum of tolerable equilibrium for the broad masses, but have only aggravated the general unrest and have led us to the verge of physiological ruin and the threshold of another military hecatomb.” Against the background of a truly horrifying historical panorama—the rise of fascism in Italy, Nazism in Germany, Stalinism in the Soviet Union and economic depression with massive permanent unemployment in the United States and Europe—the presentation offered the hope of the revolutionary proletariat: “In the universal collapse of ideas, parties, and systems, all that remains standing is the revolutionary proletariat with its program of reorganization of the foundations of labor, of the economic and social reality and solidarity.” The optimism of the authors of the presentation saw the workers movement in Spain as strong enough and capable “of unleashing the final battle against the old edifice of capitalist morality, economy and politics”.
One may detect in the presenters’ definition of the revolution a profound critique of the puerile tactics, abandoned in October 1934, of revolutionary gymnastics and improvisation: “The social revolution cannot be understood as an audacious coup, along the lines of the Jacobin coups d’état, but will rather be the consequence and the result of the unfolding of an inevitable civil war whose duration cannot be predicted”. Not only did the presentation provide a surprisingly clear anticipation of the Civil War, which was eighteen months away, and its immense cruelty, but it also insisted on the need to prepare for it now, by organizing the new structure of the defense cadres: “If the modern day coup d’état requires technical and insurrectionary preparation, men and specialists who are perfectly trained for the task at hand, a civil war will be all the more dependent on a combat apparatus that cannot be improvised on the basis of mere enthusiasm, but must be structured and articulated with as much foresight and as many men as possible.”
The presentation noted the abundance of available manpower, but also its lack of organization “for a sustained struggle against enemy forces”. It was therefore necessary to accelerate their training. “This is the purpose served by the present structure of the Local Committee for revolutionary preparedness that we are currently proposing.” This committee would be composed of four members: two would be appointed by the Local Federation of the CNT, and the other two by the Local Federation of Anarchist Groups. These four persons would in addition organize an auxiliary commission. The principal mission of this Local Committee for Revolutionary Preparedness was “to study the ways and means of struggle, the tactics that should be employed and the deployment of the organic insurrectionary forces”. There was a clear difference between the old combat cadres, from prior to October 1934, and the new defense cadres: “Just as the Defense Committees up until now have been above all street fighting groups, they must from now on be institutions capable of studying the realities of modern warfare.”
Revolutionary preparation for a long Civil War demanded that new challenges be confronted, which were unthinkable in the context of the old tactics of the street fighting groups: “Since it is not possible to obtain in advance the stockpiles of arms required for prolonged warfare, the Preparedness Committee must study a way to transform industries in certain strategic zones […] into industries producing war materiel for the revolution.”
The Regional Committees of the CNT must be the coordinating bodies for these Local Committees for Revolutionary Preparedness. The latter should meet at special Plenums for the exchange of information, initiatives and experiences. The regional delegates were then supposed to hold meetings on a national level.
This Preparedness Committee must never itself seize the revolutionary initiative, “which must always lie with the confederal and specific organizations, since it is the latter which must fix the opportune moment and assume the direction of the movement”. Its financing must be the responsibility of the trade unions of the CNT and the anarchist groups, without “establishing in advance any fixed compulsory contribution”. As for the “formation of combat cadres, in the cities the insurrectionary groups were to be formed on the basis of neighborhoods, in an unlimited number of nuclei, but the affinity groups that want to maintain their current membership will also be accepted as components of the insurrectionary groups, but they will be subject to the control of the preparedness committee”.
Both the presentation of the CNCD in October 1934 as well as that of the anarchist groups of Barcelona, in January 1935, insisted on a new structure for the defense cadres, discarding their former status as mere street fighting groups in order to transform them into defense cadres for a rigorous revolutionary preparation, addressing problems of information, armaments, tactics and investigation prior to the outbreak of a long civil war. From the street fighting groups of the period prior to 1934, the step had been taken to the cadres of information and combat.
*** <strong>July 1936: the Revolutionary Committees and the militias</strong>
On July 19–20, 1936, in the midst of the fighting in the streets of Barcelona, when the rebel military units had been defeated, the members of the Defense Committees began to call themselves and were known as “the militiamen”. Without any formal transition, the defense cadres had become Popular Militias. The basic structure of the defense cadres had been designed in order to respond to the need to extend and expand them by means of the incorporation of secondary cadres. All that was necessary was to make room in them for the tens of thousands of working class volunteers who joined the struggle against fascism, and extend their territories to Aragón. The confederal militias became the vanguard of all the armed units that were looking for fascist enemies to attack. They were the armed organization of the revolutionary proletariat. They were imitated by the other working class organizations, and even by those of bourgeois origin. Because of the absence of a unitary proletarian army, as many militias arose as there were parties and other organizations.
These defense cadres underwent a dual transformation. As the Popular Militias, which established the front lines during the first few days on the Aragón front, they introduced the collectivization of the land to the liberated Aragonese villages; and as the Revolutionary Committees, they imposed a “new revolutionary order” in every neighborhood of Barcelona and every town in Catalonia. Because of the common origin of these institutions in the defense cadres the confederal militias and the Revolutionary Committees would always be united and interrelated.
After the victory over the fascist and military uprising in Catalonia, the Defense Committees of each neighborhood (or town) formed Revolutionary Neighborhood (or municipal) Committees, assuming a wide array of names. These Revolutionary Neighborhood Committees, in the city of Barcelona, were almost exclusively composed of CNT members. The municipal Revolutionary Committees in other locations, however, were often formed by the incorporation of all the working class and anti-fascist organizations, imitating the composition of the Central Committee of Anti-Fascist Militias (CCMA).
These Revolutionary Committees exercised, in every neighborhood or municipality, especially during the nine weeks after July 19, the following functions:
1. They confiscated buildings in order to install Committee headquarters, warehouses for provisions, social centers or rationalist schools. They confiscated and operated hospitals and newspapers.
2. Armed searches of certain houses in order to requisition food, money and objects of value.
3. Armed searches of certain houses to arrest snipers, priests, rightists and fifth columnists. (We should recall that the “<em>paqueo</em>” of the snipers in the city of Barcelona lasted an entire week).
4. They set up recruiting centers in every neighborhood for the Militias, which they armed, financed, supplied and paid (up until the end of August) with their own means, and each neighborhood maintained even after May 1937 a very close and constant relationship with their militiamen at the front, welcoming them when they came home on leave.
5. In addition to the storage of weapons at the headquarters of the Defense Committee, there was always a store or a warehouse where the neighborhood supply committee was installed, which was stocked with the proceeds of requisitions of food carried out in the rural areas by way of armed coercion, exchange or purchase with vouchers.
6. Imposition and collection of the revolutionary tax in every neighborhood or municipality.
The supply committee established a popular kitchen, which at first was free, but after a few months, faced with scarcities and the high cost of food products, it was necessary to introduce a system of coupons subsidized by the Revolutionary Committee of the neighborhood or the municipality. At the headquarters of the Defense Committee there was always a room devoted to the storage of arms and sometimes a small lock-up in which detainees could be temporarily held.
The Revolutionary Committees exercised important and quite varied administrative tasks, extending from the issuance of vouchers, food coupons, travel permits, and safe-conduct passes, the formation of cooperatives, the celebration of weddings, and the supply and maintenance of hospitals, to the confiscation of food, furniture and buildings, the financing of rationalist schools and social centers managed by the Libertarian Youth, payments to the militiamen and their families, etc.
The coordination of the Revolutionary Neighborhood Committees was carried out at the meetings of the Regional Committee, attended by the secretaries of each Neighborhood Defense Committee. There was also a permanent Confederal Defense Committee with its headquarters at the Casa CNT-FAI.
With respect to all matters relating to the confiscation of large quantities of money and valuable objects, and in relation to all those tasks involving arrests, information and investigation that surpassed the means of the Revolutionary Neighborhood Committees, they were referred to the Investigation Service of the CNT-FAI, directed by Manuel Escorza from the Casa CNT-FAI.
Thus, in the city of Barcelona, the Neighborhood Defense Committees were subordinated to the following superior Committees:
1. With respect to the recruitment of militiamen (in July and August) and the supply of the popular militias (up until mid-September) they answered to the CCMA.
2. With respect to the supply of food and other basic needs they were responsible to the Central Supply Committee.
3. With respect to organization and resolution of problems, they were subordinated to the Regional Committee of the CNT, which issued orders and directives for them to follow. This reflects the famous dependence on the trade unions and the negation of the autonomy of the defense cadres, resolved at the Presentation of 1934.
4. They were coordinated and shared experiences in a Defense Committee of Barcelona, which was nothing but the organizational level above the district committees. This institution was hardly operational.
5. With regard to questions of information, investigation, persecution of fifth columnists and other armed “police” work, they were responsible to the Investigation Service of the CNT-FAI.
The defense cadres, organized territorially in zones that were very carefully delineated with respect to the zones of other groups, composed of six members each, with very precise tasks of intelligence, espionage and investigation, were the primary clandestine armed organization of the CNT. These primary cadres were to be joined during the course of the insurrection by secondary groups of trade union militants, the affinity groups of the FAI, the members of the social centers, etc. After July 19, the tasks relating to intelligence, espionage directed against the enemy, and investigation of the forces and leadership of the class enemy, were coordinated by the Investigation and Intelligence Services of the CNT-FAI, while the other tasks were coordinated in meetings of the secretary-delegates of each neighborhood committee held with the Regional Committee at the Casa CNT-FAI.
*** <strong>Against militarization</strong>
The real achievement of the CCMA, in its nine weeks of existence, was to facilitate the transition from a network of Local Revolutionary Committees, which exercised all power in the streets and the factories, to its dissolution for the exclusive benefit of the full reestablishment of the power of the Generalitat. The Decrees signed on October 24 ordering the militarization of the Militias as of November 1, and the Collectivization Decree, rounded out the disastrous balance sheet of the CCMA, that is, the transition from a network of working class Militias composed of revolutionary volunteers to a bourgeois army of the classical type, subject to the monarchical code of military justice, directed by the Generalitat; and the transition from the workers expropriations and workers control in the factories to a centralized economy, controlled and directed by the Generalitat.
The Decree ordering the militarization of the Popular Militias aroused a great deal of discontent among the anarchist militiamen of the Durutti Column, stationed at the Aragón Front. After long and bitter debates, in March 1937, several hundred volunteer militiamen, posted in the Gelsa sector, resolved to abandon the front and return to the rearguard. It was agreed that the replacement of the militiamen opposed to militarization would be carried out over a period of fifteen days. They abandoned the front, taking their weapons with them. When they arrived in Barcelona, together with other anarchists (defenders of the continuity and intensification of the July revolution, and opponents of confederal collaborationism with the government), the militiamen of Gelsa (Zaragoza) decided to constitute an anarchist organization, distinct from the FAI, the CNT and the Libertarian Youth, whose mission would be to guide the acratic movement by the revolutionary path. The new Group was formally constituted in March 1937, after a long period of incubation that lasted for several months beginning in October 1936. The directive Junta chose to call the organization “The Friends of Durruti Group”, a name that was chosen partly with reference to the common origin of the former militiamen of the Durruti Column, and which, as Balius pointed out, was not adopted with reference to the ideas of Durruti, but rather in the light the popular mythology that had grown up around his name.
This revolutionary opposition to the militarization of the Popular Militias was also manifested, to a greater or lesser degree, in all the confederal columns. Especially outstanding, due to its importance outside of Catalonia, was the case of Maroto, condemned to death for his refusal to militarize the column that he commanded, a penalty that would not be carried out but which nonetheless kept him in jail. Another important case was that of the Iron Column, which on various occasions had voted to “descend upon Valencia” in order to drive the revolution forward and confront the counterrevolutionary elements in the rearguard.
In February 1937 an assembly of confederal columns was held which addressed the question of militarization. The threats to withhold arms, food and reinforcements from the columns that did not accept militarization, together with the assurance that the militiamen would be incorporated into other units that were already militarized, had a powerful effect. To many it seemed better to accept militarization and to flexibly adapt their columns to the new situation. In the end, the ideology of anti-fascist unity and the collaboration of the CNT-FAI in government operations, in defense of the republican state, triumphed over the resistance to militarization, which was finally accepted even by the recalcitrant Iron Column.
*** <strong>The Defense Committees in May 1937</strong>
On Monday, May 3, 1937, at around 2:45 in the afternoon, Rodríguez Salas, a UGT militant and devout Stalinist, the chief of the Commissariat of Public Order, attempted to seize the Telephone building in Barcelona. The CNT militants organized fierce resistance thanks to a strategically placed machine gun. The news spread rapidly. Barricades were immediately erected throughout the city. One must not speak of a spontaneous reaction on the part of the Barcelona working class, because the general strike, the armed confrontations with the police forces and the barricades were the outcome of the initiative taken by the Investigation Committee of the CNT-FAI and the Defense Committees, which was rapidly supported thanks to the existence of enormous generalized discontent, the increasing economic hardships occasioned by the rising cost of living, long queues and rationing, as well the tension that existed among the rank and file militants that pitted collaborationists against revolutionaries. The street battles were initiated by and directed from the Neighborhood Defense Committees (and only partially and secondarily by certain elements in the control patrols). The fact that there was no order from the superior Committees of the CNT, whose members were busy acting as Ministers in Valencia, or from any other organization, to build barricades throughout the city, does not mean that the movement was purely spontaneous, but that it was a result of directives issued by the Defense Committees.
In April 1937, Pedro Herrera, the “conseller” (Minister) of Health in the second government of Tarradellas, and Manuel Escorza, were the CNT officials who were carrying out negotiations with Lluis Companys (president of the Generalitat) to resolve the government crisis that had reached a high point at the beginning of March 1937 due to the resignation of the “conseller” of Defense, the CNT’s Francisco Isgleas. Companys decided to abandon the tactic of Tarrradellas, who could not imagine a government of the Generalitat that was not a government of anti-fascist unity, one in which the CNT did not participate, in order to adopt the tactic advocated by Joan Comorera, the secretary of the PSUC, which consisted in imposing by force a “strong” government that would no longer tolerate a CNT that was incapable of keeping its own militants in line, whom he referred to as “uncontrollables”. Companys was determined to break with his policy of agreements with the CNT, which had become increasingly more problematic, and he believed that the time had come, thanks to the support of the PSUC and the Soviets, to impose by force the authority and decisions of a government of the Generalitat that, as the real situation had demonstrated, was not yet strong enough to cease to negotiate with the CNT. The failure of the discussions held by Companys with Escorza and Herrera, which had not brought about any kind of political solution during two months of conversations and despite the short-lived new government of April 16, led directly to the armed confrontations of May 1937 in Barcelona, when Companys, without notifying Tarradellas (or, of course, Escorza and Herrera) issued the order to Artemi Aguadé, “conseller” of the Interior, to occupy the Telephone building, and the mission was carried out by Rodríguez Sals.
The seizure of the Telephone building was the brutal response to the CNT demands and a gesture of contempt for the negotiations carried out during the month of April by Manuel Escorza and Pedro Herrera, as representatives of the CNT, directly with Companys, who had expressly excluded Tarradellas from these meetings. Escorza had the motive and the ability to respond immediately to the provocation of Companys from his position in the Investigation Committee of the CNT-FAI, an autonomous organization that coordinated the Defense Committees and the CNT members who held official positions in the departments of public order. This was the real trigger of the armed confrontations of the May Days.
The members of The Friends of Durruti Group were the most active combatants on the barricades, and completely dominated the Plaza Maciá (now the Plaza Real), with all the side streets blocked by barricades, and Hospital Street along its entire length. At the intersection of Las Ramblas and Hospital Street, under an enormous portrait of Durruti draped over the façade of a building in which the Group had its headquarters, a barricade was erected where the Group’s center of operations was established. The Group’s absolute control over Hospital Street provided access to the headquarters of the Confederal Defense Committee (the central barracks of the Defense Committees), at Los Escolapios on the Ronda San Pablo, and from there to the Brecha de San Pablo, which had been secured by about forty militiamen from the Rojinegra [Red and Black] Column, who, under the command of the Durrutista Máximo Franco had “dropped in on Barcelona” for purposes of “observation and intelligence”, after both the Rojinegra Column as well as the Lenin Column (of the POUM), commanded by Rovira, had yielded to pressure to return to the front, pressure that came from Abad de Santillán and Molina, that is, from the CNT officials who were giving orders from the Department of Defense of the Generalitat in the absence of Isgleas.
The confederal masses, disoriented by the appeals issued by their leaders to leave the barricades—the same leaders they had on July 19!—finally chose to abandon the struggle, although at first they had scoffed at the appeals from the CNT leaders for concord in order to preserve anti-fascist unity.
*** <strong>The final dissolution of the Defense Committees</strong>
The Revolutionary Neighborhood Committees of Barcelona, which had arisen during the days of July 19–20, 1936, lasted until at least June 7, 1937, when the restored forces of public order of the Generalitat dissolved them and occupied the various headquarters of the Control Patrols, as well as some headquarters of the Defense Committees, such as the Defense Committee of the neighborhood of Les Corts. Despite the Decree mandating the disbanding of all the armed groups, most of them resisted until September 1937, when the buildings they occupied were systematically assaulted and dissolved, one by one. The last to be occupied, and the most important and strongest, was the headquarters of the Defense Committee of Central Barcelona, located in Los Escolapios de San Antonio, which was taken by assault on September 21, 1937 by Stalinists and the forces of public order, which used, in addition to armored vehicles, an entire arsenal of machine guns and hand grenades. The resistance of Los Escolapios, however, did not yield to the force of arms, but to the evacuation orders issued by the Regional Committee.
From then on the Defense Committees disguised themselves under the name of Sections of Coordination and Information of the CNT, and were exclusively devoted to clandestine tasks of intelligence and information, as they were prior to July 19; but now (1938) in a decidedly counterrevolutionary situation.
<br>
*** <em>Bibliography</em>
<biblio>
Marcos Alcón, “Recordando el 19 de Julio de 1936. Intuición de la militancia anónima”, <em>Espoir</em>, July 20, 1975.
AIT, “Rapport sur l’activité de la CNT d’Espagne (16 décembre 1932–26 février 1933)”. A report written by A. Shapiro, with the assistance of E. Carbó. Introduction and notes by Frank Mintz. Fondation Pierre Besnard (2005).
Sara Berenguer, Correspondence with A. Guillamón (2009).
Sara Berenguer, <em>Entre el sol y la tormenta</em>, Seuba ediciones, Calella, 1988.
Comité Nacional de los Comités de defensa, <em>Ponencia sobre la constitución de los Comités de Defensa</em>, October 11, 1934.
Chris Ealham, <em>La lucha por Barcelona. Clase, cultura y conflicto 1898–1937</em>, Alianza Editorial, Madrid, 2005.
François Godicheau, <em>La Guerre d’Espagne. République et révolution en Catalogne (1936–1939)</em>, Odile Jacob, Paris, 2004.
Grupos anarquistas Indomables, Nervio, Nosotros, Tierra Libre y Germen. Comité Local de Preparación Revolucionaria, <em>Ponencia, presentada a la Federación Local de Grupos Anarquista de Barcelona</em>, January 1935.
Agustín Guillamón, <em>Barricadas en Barcelona</em>, Ediciones Espartaco Internacional, Barcelona, 2007.
</biblio>
|
#title From the Russian Revolution of 1917 to Stalinist Totalitarianism
#author Agustin Guillamón
#SORTtopics Russian Revolution, anti-Bolshevism, anti-state, anti-authoritarianism, Stalinism, Leninism, USSR, history, state capitalism, state socialism
#date 2006
#source https://libcom.org/history/russian-revolution-1917-stalinist-totalitarianism-agust%C3%ADn-guillam%C3%B3n
#lang en
#pubdate 2020-07-16T19:49:29
#notes [Bibliography, which consists of Spanish language books, is omitted from this translation—Translator’s Note] <br> [Text is not dated; the most recent publication date in the Spanish-language bibliography at the end of the text is 2006] Translated from the Spanish.
** <strong>Introduction</strong>
The Russian Revolution is the most important historical event of the 20th century, and for some historians it is even accounted as one of the great events of human history. Its influence on international relations, political ideologies and word history from 1917 to 1991 is indisputable.
Trotsky, in the preface of his <em>History of the Russian Revolution</em>, claimed that “[t]he most indubitable feature of a revolution is the direct interference of the masses in historical events” and the acceleration, over brief periods of time, of the pace of economic, social and political change, in addition to the emergence of radically opposed political poles, and the shift of the social support of the masses towards parties of an increasingly extremist type.
The Russian Revolution must not be understood as a mere coup d’état, reduced to the storming of the Winter Palace, but as a historical process that began with Bloody Sunday and the revolutionary events of 1905, and underwent an uninterrupted period of development until the mid-1920s.
** <strong>The Three Conceptions of the Russian Revolution before 1917</strong>
The Russian Social Democracy, split since 1903 between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks over organizational issues, displayed three distinct analyses of the nature of the revolutionary process that began in 1905: Plekhanov’s analysis (Menshevik), Lenin’s (Bolshevik) and Trotsky’s.
For Plekhanov, the revolution could only be bourgeois. The state would cease to be led by the feudal nobility and would pass into the hands of the bourgeoisie. Once the bourgeoisie was securely in power, the workers will follow the democratic and parliamentarian road, in order to <em>gradually</em> obtain a larger and larger share of power, until they finally establish socialism in a uncertain and distant future.
Lenin admitted the bourgeois character of the revolution, but denied that it would have to be led by the bourgeoisie, which in Russia was too weak to confront the nobility. He proposed the <em>workers and peasants alliance</em> as the only means that could possibly create a revolutionary power, one that would carry out a profound agrarian reform without, however, abolishing the capitalist structures. With the development and consolidation of capitalism in backward Russia, the proletariat would increase in numbers and would become so strong that the time would come when it would take power and begin to build socialism.
Trotsky’s position, which is distinct from both the Bolshevik and Menshevik positions, asserted that the workers were already capable of taking power, and diverged from Lenin’s position in that he thought that the absence of the objective conditions for first stages of the construction of socialism would be compensated for by the <em>permanent</em> character of the revolution, which would make it possible to skip the intermediate stages, which the Marxist theoreticians considered to be necessary, in order to pass directly from the bourgeois revolution to the socialist revolution.
Lenin advocated Trotsky’s position in the so-called <em>April Theses</em> (1917), in opposition to the immense majority of the Bolsheviks, who argued for the exclusively bourgeois character of the February Revolution.
** <strong>From 1905 to the First World War</strong>
The Russo-Japanese War was a military and economic disaster of enormous proportions, and unleashed a wave of popular protest that became the first stage of the Russian revolutionary process. On January 3, 1905, the strike at the Putilov works in Saint Petersburg began. On Sunday, January 9 (“Bloody Sunday”), Czarist troops fired into a peaceful and defenseless crowd, led by Father Gapon, that was attempting to deliver a petition to the Czar, leaving hundreds dead and thousands wounded. The strike spread throughout the entire country over a period of two months. In June, the sailors of the battleship Potemkin mutinied in Odessa; in October the naval crews at Kronstadt revolted; and in November the uprising on eleven ships at the naval base of Sebastopol. In Saint Petersburg the first Soviets emerged, for a very brief period. The Czarist government responded with brutal repression and, when it was confronted by the threat of a general strike, the promise made by Nicholas II to convoke the Duma.
In June 1906 the first Duma (Russian parliament) met, with a Kadet majority (KD, the Constitutional Democratic Party), with the intention of establishing an authentic parliamentary regime, which they sought to bring about by means of an indispensable agrarian reform, which would lead to the emergence of a peasant middle class (the kulaks). The new prime minister Pyotr Stolypin spearheaded a whole battery of reforms whose purpose was to create greater concentration in landownership at the peasant level, favoring the rise and expansion of an agricultural proletariat, which would in turn increase the influence of the socialist parties in the second Duma (February to June, 1907).
The revolutionary movement, which had begun in 1905, shifted from the cities to the peasant villages, a shift characterized by constant social agitation, which led the regime to implement regressive reforms of the electoral system, so that the third Duma (1907-1912), of an autocratic composition and disposition, was known as the Duma of “nobles, priests and lackeys”. During this period the Czar’s Court was suffering from the presence of the so-called “messenger of God”, the Siberian peasant Rasputin, who exercised a disastrous influence on the Czarina and discredited Czarism, even among its most loyal supporters.
Stolypin was assassinated in 1911, and he was succeeded by a series of ineffective Prime Ministers, who faced a docile assembly in the fourth Duma, hardly inclined to support reforms and incapable of making any concessions to the agitations among the workers in 1912. The Balkan Wars seemed to offer an opportunity to distract the attention of the masses, but the results could not have been worse, as the Russians lost all their influence in the region. Czarist reformism, utterly spineless, had met with an overwhelming failure.
** <strong>The Disasters of the War</strong>
Russia was not prepared for the war of attrition it faced after the first few months of the war (1914). The Czarist army lacked modern weapons, adequate means of transport, efficient commanding officers, appropriate tactics, a logistical network, etc.; it could only count on an immense mass of soldiers, who were treated as cheap cannon fodder by an incompetent officer corps staffed by the corrupt nobility.
“The one thing the Russian generals did with a flourish was to drag human meat out of the country. Beef and pork are handled with incomparably more economy. Grey staff non-entities … would stop up all cracks with new mobilisations, and comfort themselves and the Allies with columns of figures when columns of fighters were wanted. About fifteen million men were mobilised, and they brimmed the depots, barracks, points of transit, crowded, stamped, stepped on each other’s feet, getting harsh and cursing. If these human masses were an imaginary magnitude for the front, for the rear they were a very real factor of destruction. About five and a half million were counted as killed, wounded and captured. The number of deserters kept growing” (Leon Trotsky, <em>The History of the Russian Revolution</em>, Volume One, Sphere Books Ltd, London, 1967, pp. 35-36).
After the initial success of the Russian offensive in Galicia (1914) that forced the Austrians to retreat to the Carpathians, the technical deficiencies of the Russian army, the mediocrity of its officers, the discontent and mistrust of the peasant-soldiers and bureaucratic chaos provoked the collapse of the front, which allowed the Germans to occupy the provinces of Poland and Lithuania (1915).
The Brusilov offensive in Bukovina and Galicia came to an end amidst terrible losses in dead and wounded, and led to the appearance of the first symptoms of generalized discontent in the Czarist army (1916). The Russian soldiers lacked not only weapons, but boots as well, which were indispensable in the harsh Russian climate. Supplies became scarce and some troops were starving. In this context, military discipline had to collapse. There were thousands of deserters. Divisions only existed on paper; in reality there was nothing but an amorphous, disorganized, underfed and poorly equipped, sick, undisciplined and badly led crowd. The despotism of the officer corps made life for the troops intolerable as a result of its cruelty and corruption. Some officers even sold the wood and barbed wire necessary for constructing trenches.
In October 1916, the war’s cost for Russia was one million eight hundred thousand dead, two million prisoners of war and one million missing. The war caused the outbreak of economic chaos and enormous popular discontent, provoked by the war’s excessive duration and the scarcity of food and basic consumer goods. Famine devastated the population and strikes became generalized. The government’s response to these problems, sending the strikers to the front, only spread the popular discontent among the troops, bringing the revolutionary workers of the cities to the military to spread their protest among the soldiers, who in their vast majority had been recruited from the loyal and submissive peasants. The revolutionary ideas of the workers rapidly took root among these peasant-soldiers. Soviets of workers, soldiers and peasants were being formed, and in the army nobody talked about anything else besides peace and the division of the landed estates. Mutinies became increasingly more frequent.
** <strong>The February Revolution</strong>
The shortage of bread and of all kinds of supplies, the long lines and cold weather, triggered the first protests in Petrograd. The shortage of raw materials for industry led to the dismissal of many thousands of workers. Since most of the young men had been mobilized for the war, women now comprised 40% of the industrial workers. On International Women’s Day, February 23 (March 8, in the Western Calendar), the protests began. Women from the Vyborg district, having met in an assembly, voted to go on strike. The playful demonstrations of the morning became massive and uproarious by the afternoon, having been joined by metal workers. The slogans, “Peace, Bread and Freedom!” and “Down with the Czar” were shouted. In confrontations with the police the Cossacks displayed a certain amount of indecision, not being accustomed to engaging in the repression of urban crowds.
The left, including the Bolsheviks (who enjoyed the support of the majority of the workers in Vyborg), had advised against going on strike and instead recommended the workers should wait. They were caught by surprise by the power of the movement. On the next day, one hundred fifty thousand workers demonstrated in the streets, and the Cossacks, the most loyal troops of the Czarist regime, began to be overwhelmed by the masses of the crowds and in some places refused to shoot, or only fired above the heads of the crowds. The city was paralyzed. On Znamenskaya Square there was a confrontation between the Cossacks, defending the threatened crowds, and the mounted police, which ended with the flight of the police. This meant that the Czarist state not only lacked the troops to repress the insurrection, but that its troops were even <em>against it</em>. The Baltic Squadron rebelled and the sailors of Kronstadt shot hundreds of their officers.
The strike, begun by the workers on February 23, had by the 24th become a general strike and then gave way to the insurrection of the 25th. The Czar only responded with more repression. The city was an armed camp. On Sunday the 26th, in the early afternoon, a massacre took place at the Znamenskaya Square, where more than 50 people were killed by a detachment of fresh recruits of the Volynsky Regiment. After this massacre furious crowds stormed courts, police stations and prisons, freeing the prisoners. The masses obtained the support of the troops from several army barracks, who then confronted the police. The leftist parties, Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries and Bolsheviks, especially, assumed leading roles in the movement and, together with the rebel regiments, took control of the entire city. The generalized mutiny of the military garrison of the 27th transformed the riots and the insurrection of the previous days into a revolution. On the 28th the red flag was waving over the prison-fortress of Saints Peter and Paul, the “Russian Bastille”. The police were hunted down and lynched in the streets. On this same day (the 28th), in the left wing of the Tauride Palace the Petrograd Soviet was created, while in the right wing the Duma met, and the two rival power centers were already apparent, located in the same building.
The Czar, meeting with his advisors, attempted to introduce government reforms to nip the revolution in the bud. But the Czar acted very slowly, and inopportunely, while the revolution acted with great speed. The bourgeoisie, the generals and a large part of the nobility advised the Czar to abdicate in favor of his son or his brother. But when the Czar agreed to do so, it was already too late. The masses demanded a republic. In February 1917 a situation arose that became known as “<em>dual power</em>”. Together with the bourgeois state, and opposed to it, the workers councils, or Soviets, arose as a potential alternative government of the working class. On March 1 <em>Order Number of the Petrograd Soviet</em> was published, which guaranteed immunity for rebel soldiers, on condition that the latter recognize only the authority of the Soviet. Nicholas II abdicated on the following day. Negotiations between the Soviet and the Duma led to the formation of a Provisional Government, in which Prince Lvov held the position of Prime Minister. When the name of Lvov was announced to the crowds, one soldier expressed his surprise: “All we have done is exchange a Czar for a Prince?” (Figes, p. 385).
** <strong>The Provisional Government</strong>
The power in the streets, the real power, was held by the Soviets, but they had no intention at all of doing away with the government and assuming all power. Thus arose what Trotsky called “the paradox of February”, that is, that a revolution which had won in the streets gave way to a government formed in the salons. The Pact between the Petrograd Soviet and the Duma led to a republican Provisional Government, with a Kadet majority and some representatives of the Right Social Revolutionaries, such as Kerenski. The social composition of the new government had been changed from the nobility to the liberal bourgeoisie.
The Soviets freed the political prisoners and organized supply. The Czarist police force was dissolved, trade unions were legalized, regiments that supported the Soviets were formed, etc., without waiting for any decrees to do so. The Government was limited to ratifying the decisions made by the Soviets, which were not decreed directly by the Government power because the latter was dominated by a Menshevik and Right Social Revolutionary majority that “completely ruled out the possibility of demanding a power that the working class was not yet capable of exercising” (Broué, p. 114), in accordance with the previously-established analyses of these parties with regard to the Russian revolutionary process.
The Bolsheviks, led at the time by Kamenev and Stalin, supported these dogmas. In <em>Pravda</em> a radical shift took place when, in mid-March, Stalin took control of the editorial committee of the newspaper, and the latter began to publish numerous articles in favor of the idea of continuing the war: “The Bolsheviks henceforth adopted the theory of the Mensheviks according to which it was necessary for the Russian revolutionaries to continue the war in order to defend their recent democratic conquests against German imperialism” (Broué, p. 115). At the Party Conference of April 1, the Bolsheviks approved Stalin’s proposal to “support the Provisional Government”, as well as the possibility of a merger of the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks (Carr, Vol. 1, pp. 92-93).
These political positions were in opposition to the popular will, which demanded the immediate end of the war and its hardships. The declarations of the Foreign Minister Milyukov with respect to the military commitments to the allies and the continuation of the war until final victory, provoked angry demonstrations, which led to a government crisis that ended with Milyukov’s resignation and the formation of a coalition government made up of Kadets, Right SRs and Mensheviks, with the latter two parties forming an overwhelming majority. Kerensky was named as Minister of War.
The new government was viewed with approval by the allies, who understood the relation of forces in Russia and wanted a strong government, one that could keep Russia in the war.
** <strong>The <em>April Theses</em></strong>
Lenin, enraged by what he considered to be the suicidal and catastrophic policy of the Bolshevik Party, wrote the so-called “Letters from Afar” while he was in Zurich in March, in which he elaborated the Bolshevik program for the next stage of the revolution: transform the imperialist war into a civil war; <em>no support for the Provisional Government</em>; clear differentiation from the Mensheviks; expropriation of the landed estates; arming the workers to form a workers militia and immediate preparations for the proletarian revolution; <em>all state power must pass to the Soviets</em>.
The Bolsheviks in Russia, who did not accept the novel positions of the exile Lenin, only published the first of the four letters. Lenin and the other exiled Russian revolutionaries in Switzerland sought by every possible means to return to Russia immediately. Since the Allies denied them visas, they consented to return to Russia via Germany and German-held territory. The German authorities thought that the Russian revolutionaries would help create a chaotic situation that would hasten the defeat of Russia. Lenin and his comrades travelled across Germany in a “sealed” train car. Later, the enemies of Lenin and the Bolsheviks used this episode to accuse them of being Germany spies.
Lenin arrived in Russia on April 3, 1917, at the Finland Station in Petrograd. His positions, which became known as <em>The April Theses</em>, were misunderstood and rejected by the majority of the Bolshevik leadership. On April 7 they were published in a brief historical article (“The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution”) in which he tacitly embraced Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. He claimed that it was impossible to end the war without first defeating capitalism, which is why it was necessary to advance “… from the first stage of the revolution—which, owing to the insufficient class-consciousness and organisation of the proletariat, placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie—to its <em>second stage</em>, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants”.
He also claimed that the Bolsheviks would win over the masses by way of “a patient … explanation of” their policies: “As long as we are in the minority we carry on the work of criticising and exposing errors and at the same time we preach the necessity of transferring the entire state power to the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies, so that the people may overcome their mistakes by experience.” The Bolsheviks’ mission, he pointed out, was to stimulate the initiative of the masses. From this initiative the experiences would have to arise that would give the Bolsheviks the majority in the Soviets: then the moment would come when the Soviets can seize power and begin the construction of socialism.
Lenin’s theses unexpectedly led to a violent upheaval within the Bolshevik Party. <em>Pravda</em> was obliged to publish a note in which Kamenev warned that, “these theses only represent the individual opinion of Lenin”. Lenin won the support of the working class cadres in his confrontation with the party leadership. He gradually won over some supporters, such as Zinoviev and Bukharin, and triggered the direct opposition of others, such as Kamenev.
On April 24 an Extraordinary Conference of the Bolshevik Party was convened, presided over by Kamenev. The latter, together with Rikov and other leaders, defended the positions that Lenin had himself advocated in 1906. Kamenev asserted that “it is premature to state that bourgeois democracy has exhausted all its possibilities”. Lenin responded by saying that such ideas were old formulas that the old Bolsheviks “senselessly <em>learned by rote</em> instead of <em>studying</em> the specific features of the new and living reality”, and concluded by reminding Kamenev of Goethe’s famous saying: “Theory, my friend, is grey, but green is the eternal tree of life” [The last two quotations are excerpts from Lenin’s “Letters on Tactics”, published as a pamphlet in April 1917. See: http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/x01.htm#bkV24E020. Translator’s Note]. Although he emerged as the victor with regard to the basic political theses, his victory was not total, because, of the nine members of the Bolshevik executive committee, four opposed his theses.
Trotsky had returned to Russia on May 5, and was immediately invited to join the party leadership. The 6th Congress of the Bolshevik Party began on July 26, without Lenin, who had gone into hiding, and also without Trotsky, who had been arrested during the “July events”. The Congress witnessed the merger of various small organizations with the Bolshevik Party, which now counted one hundred seventy thousand militants, forty thousand of whom were in Petrograd. The leadership that was elected at the Congress proved to be a faithful reflection of the relation of forces: of the twenty-one members of the executive committee, sixteen belonged to the old guard Bolshevik fraction. Lenin, Zinoviev and Trotsky won the most votes. The victory of <em>The April Theses</em> was now total. The road to insurrection was now cleared of all internal obstacles in the party (Broué, pp. 116-126) [This and all subsequent citations from Broué appear to relate to the French edition of his book, <em>Le Parti Bolchévique: Histoire du P.C. de l’U.R.S.S.</em>, Editions de Minuit, 1971—Translator’s Note].
** <strong>From July to October</strong>
Dual power rapidly unraveled towards social confrontation, characterized by the choice between continuing the war, as the bourgeoisie and the nobility advocated, or immediate peace, demanded by the popular classes. Lenin had pointed out in May that “the country was a thousand times more leftist than the Mensheviks and a hundred times more leftist than the Bolsheviks”. Soldiers, workers and peasants were increasingly more radicalized against the war, because they suffered its direct consequences. The Provisional Government, however, decided to continue the war regardless of the cost.
Pressure from the allies and the “civic patriotism” of the Provisional Government caused the latter to launch an offensive, under the command of Brusilov, which ended in a military catastrophe and mass desertions. The order to transfer the Petrograd garrison to the front led to an uprising of the soldiers that was joined by the workers. The popular demonstrations of July 3 and 4 culminated in the occupation of Petrograd by the masses, who demanded the resignation of the Provisional Government. The demonstrators took to the streets calling for the overthrow of the Government, all power to the Soviets, the nationalization of the land and industry, workers control, and bread and peace. The Kadets availed themselves of the opportunity presented by the crisis to resign from the Government, and Kerensky assumed the presidency of a Government that was now composed solely of Mensheviks and Right SRs.
The Bolsheviks, after a propaganda campaign against the Government, in which they called for all power to the Soviets, thought that an insurrection would be premature, although the main cities were already wracked by uprisings, especially the capital, Petrograd. The Bolsheviks were not only incapable of stopping the insurrectional movement but were, at first, shouted down by the masses, until they finally joined them. After ten days of demonstrations the insurrection came to an end without a clear victor. The Bolshevik appeal to return to work was now heeded.
The Provisional Government accused the Bolsheviks of being responsible for the July incidents, and accused Lenin of being a German spy, revealing the history of the sealed train car. Some neutral regiments passed into the Government camp and many workers, Mensheviks and SRs, were confused by these calumnies. At this point, which was so favorable to the Government, the repression against the Bolsheviks was initiated. Their press was banned, their local offices were attacked, Trotsky and Kamenev were arrested, Lenin went into exile in Finland and the most high profile Bolshevik cadres went into hiding.
The most important phenomenon, however, took place in the rural areas. The peasants had not only ceased to believe in the promises of reform of the socialists in the successive Provisional Governments, but, also influenced by the appeal of the Bolsheviks to direct action and the occupation of the land, <em>engaged in a generalized occupation of landed estates throughout the entire country</em>. The Kadets reassumed their posts in the Government and demanded, in a kind of ultimatum, harsh measures against the spread of disorder. Kerensky, however, proved to be incapable of establishing social order and military discipline. The repression carried out by the Cossacks against the peasants caused the latter to irremediably move closer to the Bolsheviks, who proclaimed the slogan, “Peace, Bread and Land”.
In August, Kerensky convoked a National Conference, attended by political, social, economic and cultural forces from the whole country, for the purpose of achieving “an armistice between capital and labor” (Broué, p. 128). The Bolsheviks boycotted the Conference, which was a complete failure: all that was left was the military coup d’état.
The bourgeoisie, the nobility, the allies and the General Staff promoted a coup d’etat, which was to be led by General Kornilov, who had until then enjoyed the full confidence of Kerensky. Kornilov, at the command of Cossack troops, moved towards Petrograd on August 25. Kerensky stripped Kornilov of his command, although he continued to hold confused negotiations with him, while Kadets and Mensheviks abandoned the Government. Kerensky, a caricature of a new Czar, went to the front in order to try to avoid facing the real problems.
Meanwhile, in a Petrograd abandoned by the Provisional Government, the Soviets organized the defense against Kornilov. The sailors of Kronstadt freed the Bolshevik prisoners, Trotsky among others, and the party emerged from clandestinity. Its cadres and militants immediately won an overwhelming majority in the military garrison and in the factories. Trotsky was once again elected to the presidency of the Petrograd Soviet and formed the Revolutionary Military Committee, an organ of the Soviet that merged its troops with the recently created Red Guard, composed of groups of armed workers.
Kornilov and his Cossacks could not even get near Petrograd. The railroad workers refused to allow the trains carrying Kornilov’s troops to proceed, or else they diverted them to other destinations. The soldiers themselves mutinied as soon as they became aware of the nature of their mission. On September 3, Kornilov called off his coup d’état and surrendered to the Government. <em>The coup attempt had turned the situation to the advantage of the Bolsheviks</em>. The soldiers assemblies arrested and sometimes executed officers suspected of sympathizing with Kornilov’s coup attempt, and approved of resolutions in favor of Soviet power and peace. On August 31 the Petrograd Soviet demanded that all power should pass to the Soviets, and on September 9 it condemned the idea of a coalition with the bourgeoisie.
On September 13 Lenin sent two letters to the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party in which he maintained that the preconditions for the seizure of power had sufficiently matured. But the majority of the Central Committee, led by Zinoviev and Kamenev, was still opposed to staging the final proletarian insurrection. They thought that conditions were still as immature as they were in July. Trotsky supported the insurrection if it was carried out to coincide with the Soviet Congress, which was scheduled to meet at the end of October. Lenin only obtained the support of the young Smilga, president of the Finland Soviet. On October 10 Lenin, wearing a disguise composed of a wig and a hat, and having shaved his goatee, returned to Petrograd from exile in Finland, <em>in order to drag the Central Committee</em>, by ten votes against two (Zinoviev and Kamenev), <em>to a resolution in favor of insurrection,</em> so that preparations were immediately undertaken (Broué, pp. 126-134; Figes, pp. 456-507).
** <strong>The October Revolution</strong>
The February Revolution had overthrown the Czar and established democratic freedoms and a bourgeois republic. But the Russian revolutionary process <em>did not stop halfway and drove towards its conclusion</em>, in order to overthrow the power of the bourgeoisie and to establish the workers power of the Soviets.
The preparations for the insurrection were never a secret to anybody. Kamenev and Zinoviev openly denounced them in the press. The Revolutionary Military Committee, responsible for the insurrection in Petrograd, organized the entire operation.
Furthermore, the October insurrection was not actually carried out in obedience to a decision made by the Bolshevik Party Central Committee, but as a refusal of the Soviet to comply with the order issued by the Kerensky Government to send two-thirds of the Petrograd garrison to the front. The bourgeois Government attempted, once again, to disperse the revolutionary troops of Petrograd and replace them with counterrevolutionary battalions. The October events took place only a few weeks after Kornilov’s coup attempt, in opposition to the new attempt to crush the revolution, forcing the proletariat to take insurrectional measures to defend it. The forces of the Revolutionary Military Committee were not numerous, but they were absolutely decisive: the Red Guard, the sailors of the Baltic Fleet, the city’s garrison and the workers militias. Some thirty thousand men actively participated in the insurrection. The revolt of the working class neighborhoods, which remained peaceful, was not necessary; nor was it necessary to assault the military barracks, because they had already been won over to the revolution before the insurrection.
The date of the insurrection was fixed for the night of the 24th, because <em>on October 25 the Soviet Congress was scheduled to meet</em>. On the evening of the 24th all the members of the officer corps who did not recognize the authority of the Revolutionary Military Committee were arrested, and the police stations, printing plants, bridges, and public buildings were occupied, patrols and checkpoints were set up on the most important streets, and the state bank, the railroad stations, the telegraph offices, and the telephone exchange and electric power plants were seized. In just thirteen hours Petrograd was in the hands of the revolutionary soldiers and workers under the orders of the Soviet. At ten in the morning on the 25th the Government only held power in its own headquarters, the Winter Palace, which had been under siege for several days. Just after sunset on the 25th, the cruiser Aurora fired a salvo that marked the beginning of the assault on the Winter Palace. Lenin wanted to announce the fall of Kerensky’s Government to the assembly of the Soviet Congress. The troops defending the Palace resisted until they were given the chance to escape. Finally, <em>the Winter Palace surrendered during the early morning hours of the 26th of October</em>, after a joint assault staged by sailors, soldiers and workers. The Provisional Government, which had met in a session to organize resistance in the capital, was arrested; Kerensky, however, escaped in a requisitioned car to the American Embassy.
Between October 28 and November 2 the workers insurrection was also victorious in Moscow, and after two or three weeks it had spread to practically all of Russia. On that same morning of October 26, the Second Soviet Congress, with a large Bolshevik majority, elected a revolutionary government, composed in its majority by Bolsheviks and Left SRs, and approved the first decrees of the new government. Lenin was elected president of the Council of Peoples Commissars.
<em>Peace was declared</em>, and an immediate ceasefire was promulgated on all fronts. Trotsky, who had been named Commissar of Foreign Affairs, assumed responsibility for beginning peace negotiations with Germany. On December 2 an armistice was signed and on March 4, 1918, a peace treaty, called the Brest-Litovsk Treaty after the town where the negotiations were held, was signed, triggering a bitter polemic between those who wanted to sign the peace treaty at any price, as a means of defending the new Soviet state, and those who advocated spreading the revolutionary war to Europe; this conflict threatened to split the Bolshevik Party.
A decree was passed legalizing the confiscation of the landed estates and the <em>transfer of the land to the peasant Soviets, workers control in industry</em> and the nationalization of the banks. The rights of national minorities were recognized, including the right to self-determination and the freedom to secede from Russia.
The new Soviet government, which was not recognized by the Allies, still faced the radical opposition of all of the rest of the political spectrum, from the extreme Czarist right to the Mensheviks. The outbreak of civil war only a few months later, with the intervention of foreign powers, was inevitable.
** <strong>The Bolshevik Regime</strong>
The Bolsheviks were politically isolated and faced serious problems. The Mensheviks still thought that the seizure of power by a workers party was madness, since the famous “objective conditions” prevented the process from going beyond the tasks of a bourgeois revolution: according to them, what was needed now was to develop democratic liberties. The Right Social Revolutionaries oscillated between demanding that the Bolsheviks commit political suicide, that is, that Lenin and Trotsky be expelled from Russia, and calling for armed confrontation. The Left SRs confronted the Bolsheviks over the question of whether or not to dissolve the Constituent Assembly.
In the Constituent Assembly, elected by universal suffrage, the Bolsheviks were a minority. The Left SRs were underrepresented, because the Social Revolutionary Party had named its candidates before the announcement of the split by the left, which had majority support in the military bases and the countryside.
Faced with the refusal of the Constituent Assembly to approve the “Declaration of Rights of the Working and Exploited People” (approved by the Third Soviet Congress), the Bolsheviks abandoned the Assembly, and then a detachment of Red Guards entered the meeting hall and pronounced the Assembly closed. That was the end of parliamentary democracy in Russia. A dangerous situation ensued, characterized by the mixture and confusion of the state bureaucratic apparatus and the cadres of the Bolshevik Party.
** <strong>The Civil War and War Communism (1918-1921)</strong>
The civil war began with the revolt, in May 1918, of the Czechoslovakian Legion, composed of some fifty thousand soldiers under French commanders. These units proceeded westward, and soon reached the Volga. The success of this operation led the Allies to intervene, for the purpose of crushing the revolution and restoring the Czarist regime.
In June, Anglo-French troops landed at Murmansk and Archangel. In August, the Allies landed one hundred thousand men in Vladivostok, on the pretext of helping the Czechoslovakian Legion. In the South, the Czarist general Denikin formed an army of volunteers with British supplies and materiel: this was the origin of the White Guard. In September, Trotsky, the creator of the Red Army, obtained the first Soviet success with the defeat of the Czechs and the reconquest of Kazan. In 1919 the French seized Odessa, the Ukraine and Crimea; the English took over the oil wells of the Caucasus and the Don Basin. Russian soil was also occupied by American, Polish, German and Serbian troops. The situation was desperate. Clemenceau’s plan to encircle the Bolsheviks was fulfilled. But dissensions among the Allies and the political incapacity of the generals of the White Guard, who were incapable of making any concessions of autonomy to the national minorities (a question that was of interest to the Cossacks) or of land to the peasants, in order to obtain their support, allowed the Red Army to resist for the thirty months the civil war lasted. Finally, the revolutionary wave that shook Europe and the military successes of the Reds led to the signing of another armistice. The civil war had left the country in ruins. Private trade had disappeared (Broué, pp. 163-170).
The measures known by the name of “war communism” were therefore the results of the necessities imposed by the war. In order to feed the besieged cities and the army, harvests were requisitioned. The poor peasants were organized against the Kulaks. There was no government revenue, since the administrative apparatus had disappeared. The uncontrolled printing of paper money triggered inflation. Famine and epidemics devastated the cities, which were the heart of the revolution. Wages were paid in kind. The industrial workers were sent to the battlefronts. The terror of the political police (the Cheka) made its inevitable appearance: nothing would ever be the same.
Industrial production plunged. The production of iron and steel was minimal. Almost three-quarters of the railroad lines were unusable. Land under cultivation was reduced by one-fourth. The Kulaks killed their livestock and concealed their harvests in order to prevent their requisition.
It was in this context that the <em>Kronstadt revolt</em> took place, at a naval base close to Petrograd with a proud Soviet and Bolshevik tradition. In March 1921, Trotsky assumed command over the suppression of the uprising of the sailors of Kronstadt, who, during the revolution of 1917, had been “the pride and glory of the revolution”, in Trotsky’s own words. It was also during that month that the 10th Congress of the Bolshevik Party banned fractions and tendencies in the Bolshevik Party, and when Lenin proposed the “New Economic Policy” (NEP). During that same period, no less than fifty separate peasant revolts were underway. The most important revolt was that of the <em>Ukrainian anarchist Makhno, who controlled the entire Ukraine</em>. The Party decided to change its economic policy, but the armed repression of broad, undoubtedly revolutionary sectors of the population constituted a counterrevolutionary turning point for the Soviet revolution. It was hardly surprising that Kronstadt had been crushed for defending the slogan, “Soviets without Bolsheviks” (Brinton, pp. 137-144; Mett, pp. 39-116).
** <strong>The NEP (1921-1927)</strong>
The so-called NEP entailed the implementation of a series of extraordinary economic measures, motivated by the catastrophic consequences of the war, and laid the foundations for <strong>Russian State Capitalism</strong>. In order to increase productivity it was decided to stimulate private entrepreneurial initiative, prohibited in 1917, and to permit profit making in small-scale agricultural and commercial enterprises. The forced requisitions were eliminated, and much of the land was handed over to the Kulaks, thus creating a domestic free market. At the same time, the state created large state farms, the Sovkhoz, and agricultural cooperatives, the Kolkhoz. Enterprises employing fewer than twenty workers were privatized, and the liberalization of wage policies and production quotas were authorized for private enterprises. The presence of foreign technicians was authorized. A tax “in kind” was established and foreign investments, under state control, were authorized. The state system was directed by the Supreme Soviet of the Economy. The NEP created a certain degree of stability and allowed production to rise to pre-war levels. But in the process, <strong>the Soviets were eviscerated and the revolution died</strong>. The NEP came to an end in 1927, with the announcement of the first five year plan, which placed economic priority on heavy industry to the detriment of consumption goods.
** <strong>The Triumph of the Stalinist Bureaucracy</strong>
As a result of the disasters, impoverishment and devastation caused by the civil war, the isolation of the Russian Revolution following the failure of the international revolution, the deaths of numerous Bolshevik militants, economic chaos, a famine that caused millions of deaths, and generalized misery, but above all thanks to the identification of the Party with the State, a bureaucracy arose which secured its position with the victory of the political counterrevolution and the costly and poorly managed industrialization imposed by the victorious State Capitalism.
In 1922 Lenin had warned of the dangers of this statist trend. The bureaucracy had rendered the Soviets, the trade unions, and the party cells and committees meaningless, and subjected them to the state apparatus and its counterrevolutionary directives.
As of 1923, Stalin embodied this new bureaucracy of the Party-State that led a brutal political counterrevolution. The basic prediction of the Bolsheviks in 1917 was that, in view of Russia’s economic backwardness, a victorious workers revolution could only survive with the international extension of a revolution that would have to be worldwide, and that the first concrete step towards this revolution would take place in Germany. Otherwise, the Russian Revolution would be defeated.
In 1924 the bureaucracy adopted the theory of “socialism in one country” and the cult of personality devoted to the mummified Lenin, as the two foundations on which the new Stalinist ideology would be erected. The Russian bureaucracy, now having cast off its disguise, appeared to be ready to definitively crush all opposition.
Stalinism grotesquely deformed the concept of the meaning of socialism, deprived the Soviets of all content, abolished the least trace of workers democracy, and imposed a personal dictatorship over the party, and that of the party over the country, thus constructing a totalitarian regime. The bureaucracy needed to annihilate all the cadres of the Bolshevik leadership who had carried out the October Revolution, since the concealment of its own counterrevolutionary nature was one of the characteristics of Stalinism.
Thus, there were numerous purges throughout the 1930s, which condemned hundreds of thousands of dissidents, real or imagined, regardless of their ideologies, to death and disgrace, among whom figured the Bolsheviks themselves, and especially their most important leaders. Trotsky was assassinated in August 1940 in Mexico, where he lived in exile, by Ramón Mercader, a Spanish Stalinist agent who carried out Stalin’s orders. In the Spanish civil war the Stalinists led the counterrevolution in the republican camp, physically and politically eliminating anarchists, POUMists and dissidents. In August 1939 the Hitler-Stalin Pact was signed preparatory to the invasion of Poland. At the end of the Second World War, the Red Army occupied half of Europe, establishing totalitarian regimes, satellites of the Soviet Union, which rapidly collapsed after the fall of the Berlin Wall in October 1989. These Stalinist regimes experienced various workers and popular insurrections, such as the revolts in Berlin in 1947, Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. The fall of the Berlin Wall, in October 1989, was the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union and of all the Stalinist states.
** <strong>The International Characteristics of Stalinism</strong>
The characteristics of the Stalinist counterrevolution were:
• Constant, ubiquitous and almost omnipotent police terror;
<br>
• Indispensable falsification of its own nature, and of the nature of its enemies, especially of the revolutionaries;
<br>
• Exploitation of the workers by means of State Capitalism, led by the Party-State, which militarized labor.
The Stalinists were never a reformist sector of the workers movement, but were always the party of counterrevolution and of the ferocious repression of the revolutionary movement. No collaboration was every possible with Stalinism, only a relentless struggle. Stalinism, always and everywhere, has led and directed the counterrevolutionary forces, deriving its power from the idea of national unity, the practice of a policy of law and order, its struggle to establish a strong government, <strong>an economic policy based on nationalization</strong>, the infiltration of the militants of the Stalinist party into the state apparatus, and especially disguising its reactionary nature in the midst of the workers movement (Munis, pp. 158-290).
** <strong>Conclusions</strong>
The greatness of Red October resides in the fact that it was the first proletarian revolution in history, the first time that the proletariat seized power, overthrowing the government of the bourgeoisie. The communist revolution can only be a world revolution, and it failed in Russia when the revolutionary proletariat was defeated in Germany and the Soviet revolution remained isolated.
This isolation, combined with the catastrophes of the civil war, economic chaos, poverty and famine, magnified the terrible mistakes of the Bolsheviks, among which the identification of the Party with the State stands out, which led to the inevitable triumph of the Stalinist counterrevolution, carried out from the very ranks of the Bolshevik Party that had inspired the Soviet Revolution of October 1917. <strong>The Stalinist counterrevolution was therefore of a political character, it destroyed all political and ideological opposition, it harshly repressed proletarian groups and movements that were undoubtedly revolutionary, and persecuted to the extent of physical extermination those who expressed the least dissidence, whether within or outside of the Bolshevik Party</strong>. In Russia, the revolutionary process that had begun in 1905, obtained its first success with the democratic revolution of February 1917, which overthrew the Czar and established a democratic republic, but did not stop halfway and continued to the end with the insurrection of October 1917 in Petrograd, in which the Soviets seized power, replacing the bourgeoisie of the state apparatus.
The Stalinist counterrevolution was therefore of a political character, and was embodied in the monopoly of power held by the Bolshevik Party, in the form of nationalization and state economic concentration (<strong>State Capitalism</strong>) and in the transformation of the Bolshevik Party into a Party-State.
Far from being a mere coup d’état, as the ruling class would have us believe, the October revolution is the highest point yet reached by humanity in its entire history. For the first time <em>the working class had the courage and the ability to seize power, wrenching it from the grip of the exploiters and <strong>beginning</strong> the world proletarian revolution</em>.
Even though the revolution would soon be defeated in Berlin, Munich, Budapest and Turin, even though the Russian and the world proletariat had to pay a terrible price for <strong>its defeat</strong>—the horror of the counterrevolution, another world war, <strong>and all the barbarism suffered under the Stalinist states</strong>—the bourgeoisie is still unable to erase the memory and the lessons of this <strong>formidable</strong> event.
** <strong>Epilogue: The Communist Left Against Stalinism and Leninist Ideology</strong>
The worst legacy of Stalinism has been its perverse utilization of the Marxist-Leninist ideology as the orthodox continuation of “Marxism”, which is thus undermined and discredited as a theory of the proletarian revolution. Leninism used a Marxist language to justify totalitarian regimes, which had nothing to do with Marx’s analyses, which he produced between 1844 and 1883, concerning capitalism and the exploitation of the proletariat. Lenin himself, in his ideas and analyses on the party, nationalism, the Russian Revolution, etc., clashed head-on other Marxist theoreticians, such as Luxemburg, Bordiga, Gorter and Pannekoek, who were among the first to denounce the worst aberrations of Leninism.
The Leninist concept of the party considers that the working class is incapable of attaining a degree of consciousness that goes beyond shortsighted trade unionist and reformist ideas. The party must inoculate the working class, from the outside, with socialist and revolutionary consciousness. This idea, as Pannekoek demonstrates in his book, <em>Lenin as Philosopher</em>, is foreign to Marx, who clearly proclaimed that, “the emancipation of the workers will be the task of the workers themselves”.
The (bourgeois) right of national self-determination, proclaimed by Lenin, introduces nationalist ideology as a fundamental goal of the proletariat in the struggle for its emancipation. As Rosa Luxemburg stated in her debate with Lenin, the ideology of national liberation of the oppressed peoples is a bourgeois ideology, absolutely foreign to the class struggle and the emancipation of the proletariat…. The tactics employed by the Bolsheviks in Russia could not be applied to the situation in Western Europe of the time, where the communist parties advocated antiparliamentary and anti-trade union tactics, and were dogmatically condemned by Lenin. See the “Open Letter to Comrade Lenin”, written by Gorter in response to Lenin’s pamphlet, <em>Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder</em>.
There is, then, an entire Marxist corpus, which denounces not only the totalitarian barbarism of the Stalinist and Fascist regimes, but also some of the worst theoretical aberrations of Leninism: this corpus is the inalienable inheritance that has been bequeathed to us by the various fractions of the communist left.
Neither Leninist ideology nor Stalinist totalitarianism are Marxist. By Marxism we mean the critique of the political economy of capital, carried out by Marx in the mid-19th century, his method of research, and the theoretical elaboration of the historical experiences of the proletariat (<em>The Communist Manifesto, Capital, The 18th Brumaire</em>, etc.), continued by Engels, Luxemburg and the communist left (Russian, Italian and German-Dutch). This communist left was composed of tiny fractions that, in harsh conditions of isolation and physical and political persecution, criticized, utilizing the Marxist method, and in the practice of the class struggle, the distortions of the Third International, and Stalinist and Fascist totalitarianism.
The <strong>Marxist</strong> critique of the Stalinist regimes, the result of the theoretical analysis and the struggle of these left communist fractions within the Communist International itself, which defined with greater or lesser clarity these regimes as <strong>State Capitalist</strong>, can be found in the bibliography listed below.
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#title The CNT defense committees in Barcelona 1933–1938
#LISTtitle CNT defense committees in Barcelona 1933–1938, The
#subtitle An interview with Agustín Guillamón
#SORTtitle CNT defense committees in Barcelona 1933–1938
#author Agustin Guillamón
#SORTtopics CNT, Spanish Revolution, Barcelona, interview, anarcho-syndicalism, community self-defense, General Defense Committee
#date July 20, 2011
#source https://libcom.org/library/cnt-defense-committees-barcelona-1933-1938-interview-agust%C3%ADn-guillam%C3%B3n
#lang en
#pubdate 2020-07-16T19:55:39
#notes <em>Translated from the Spanish original in January 2013. Interview was conducted in July 2011.</em>
On the occasion of the 75<sup>th</sup> anniversary of the Spanish Revolution, our friend and collaborator Agustín Guillamón was interviewed by the editors of the website alasbarricadas.org about his latest book, <em>Los Comités de Defensa de la CNT en Barcelona (1933–1938)</em>.
*** <strong><em>Alasbarricadas—An obligatory question: What were the Defense Committees?</em></strong>
The defense committees were the clandestine military organizations of the CNT, financed by the trade unions, and their activities were subordinated to the latter.
In October 1934, the old tactic of action groups was abandoned in favor of serious and methodical revolutionary preparation. The CNCD said, “There can be no revolution without preparation. We have to put an end to the prejudice in favor of improvisation. This error, involving confidence in the creative instinct of the masses, has caused us to pay a heavy price. We cannot obtain by means of a process of spontaneous generation the indispensable means necessary for waging war on a State that has experience, heavy weaponry, and a greater capacity for offensive and defensive combat”.
The basic defense group should not have too many members, in order to facilitate its clandestine operations and its flexibility, and must have a profound understanding of the character, knowledge and abilities of each militant. It should be composed of six militants, each of whom is responsible for a specific function:
1. Secretary: Contact with the other cadres, formation of new groups, drafting reports;
2. Personal Investigator: Ascertain the danger posed by enemies;
3. Building Investigator: Draft blueprints and provide statistical reports;
4. Researcher for determining strategic points and tactics for street fighting;
5. Researcher for Public Services;
6. Investigator to determine where to obtain arms, money and supplies.
It was thought that this number of six militants was the ideal figure for a defense group or team, with the proviso that, in certain cases, one more member could be added for “relief” purposes. Absolute secrecy was mandatory. These groups were the basic core groups of a revolutionary army, capable of mobilizing more numerous secondary groups, and these, in turn, were to mobilize the entire population.
The defense group was the basic cell of this clandestine military structure of the CNT, composed of six militants. Its responsibilities were very precisely demarcated within each neighborhood. In each neighborhood a district Defense Committee was formed, which coordinated all these defense cadres, and which received a monthly report from the Secretary of each Defense Committee. The Secretary-Delegate of the district drafted a summary report that he delivered to the District Committee; and the latter, in turn, passed it on to the Local Defense Committee “and the latter passed it on to the Regional and National Defense Committees, respectively”.
The report of the CNCD also included a detailed plan for the organization of the Defense Committees on a regional and national scale, which also embraced all those sectors of the working class, such as railroad workers, trolley conductors, telephone and telegraph operators, postal employees and, in short, all those sectors that, due to the special character of their trades or organizations, were national in scope, with special emphasis on the importance of communications in a revolutionary insurrection. A special section was devoted to the task of infiltration of, propaganda among and the enrollment of sympathizers in the military barracks.
The Defense Committees had two essential functions:
1. Acquisition, maintenance, storage and training in the use of weapons;
2. Logistics in the broadest meaning of the term, from assuring the basic needs of the population and running soup kitchens to the establishment and maintenance of hospitals, schools, cultural centers … and even, during the early stages of the revolution, the recruitment of militias and the provisioning of the columns leaving for the front.
The first Defense cadres were formed shortly after the proclamation of the Republic, and could be considered to be the continuation, reorganization and extension of the armed action and self-defense groups of the years of <em>pistolerismo</em> (1917–1923).
*** <strong><em>ALB—How were the action groups transformed into defense cadres?</em></strong>
In January 1935, the anarchist groups, <em>Indomables, Nervio, Nosotros, Tierra Libre</em> and <em>Germen</em>, at a Plenum of the Federation of Anarchist Groups of Barcelona, formed the Local Committee for Revolutionary Preparedness.
The Plenum, confronted by some truly discouraging historical developments—the rise of fascism in Italy, Nazism in Germany, Stalinism in the Soviet Union, and the economic depression accompanied by mass long-term unemployment in the United States and Europe—drafted a Report that opposed these developments with the hope of the revolutionary proletariat. It said: “Amidst the generalized collapse of ideals, parties, and systems, only the revolutionary proletariat remains standing with its program of the reorganization of the foundations of labor and economic and social reality, and solidarity”.
The Report contained a profound critique of the puerile tactics of revolutionary gymnastics and improvisation that had been abandoned in October 1934. It said: “The social revolution cannot be interpreted as a single bold attack, in the style of the coup d’états of Jacobinism, but will instead be the consequence and result of the process of an inevitable civil war whose duration cannot be foreseen”.
Revolutionary preparation for a long civil war required that the comrades confront new challenges that were unthinkable in the framework of the old tactics of the armed groups. The Report said: “In view of the fact that it is not possible to possess in advance the stockpiles of weapons necessary for sustained combat, the Preparedness Committee must undertake a study of how to convert industries in certain strategic zones […] into industries that are capable of providing war materiel for the revolution”. This was the origin of the Commission of War Industries, formed on August 7, 1936, which created a powerful military industry from scratch thanks to the efforts of the workers, coordinated by the CNT’s Eugenio Vallejo Isla, a metal worker, Manuel Martí Pallarés, of the Chemical Workers Union, and Mariano Martín Izquierdo; the responsibility for this achievement was subsequently claimed by bourgeois politicians (Josep Tarradellas), and while it is true that they did contribute to its success, it was “primarily due to the workers in the factories, and to the technicians, whose responsible delegates were granted managerial authority by the CNT from the beginning of the war”.
From the action groups and gunmen who practiced a revolutionary gymnastics prior to 1934, the CNT had passed to the creation of information and combat cadres that were viewed as the basic cells of a revolutionary army.
*** <strong><em>ALB—One question that many people will ask, is if the anarchists could have seized power.</em></strong>
During the first six months of 1936 the group <em>Nosotros</em> engaged in bitter disputes with the other groups of the FAI in Catalonia regarding two fundamental concepts, at a time when it was known for certain that the military was making preparations for a bloody coup d’état. These two concepts were the “seizure of power” and the “revolutionary army”. The pragmatism of the <em>Nosotros</em> group, which was more concerned with insurrectional techniques than with taboos, clashed head-on with the ideological prejudices of the other groups in the FAI, that is, with the rejection of what the latter referred to as “anarchist dictatorship”, and with their deeply ingrained anti-militarism, which left everything to the creative spontaneity of the workers.
This harsh attack against the “anarcho-Bolshevik practices” of the <em>Nosotros</em> group was comprehensively set forth in the journal <em>Más Lejos</em>, edited by Eusebio C. Carbó, whose contributors included Jaime Balius and Mariano Viñuales. <em>Más Lejos</em> published the responses to a survey that it had featured in its first issue of April 1936, which consisted of two questions about electoral abstention, and a third question about the seizure of power, which was framed in the following manner: “Can anarchists, under any circumstances, and OVERCOMING ALL SCRUPLES, accept the seizure of power, in any form, as a means of accelerating the pace of their progress towards the realization of Anarchy?”
Almost all those who participated in the survey responded to this question in the negative. But none of the responses offered a practical alternative to accompany this general rejection of the seizure of power. Anarchist theory and practice seemed to be divorced from one another, on the very eve of the military coup d’état.
At the Plenum of the Barcelona Anarchist Groups, which met in June 1936, García Oliver proposed that the organization of defense cadres, coordinated in neighborhood defense committees in the city of Barcelona, was the model that should be followed, and that they should be extended to cover all of Spain, and that this structure should be coordinated on a national and regional level, in order to form a revolutionary army of the proletariat. This army should be complemented with the creation of guerrilla units of one hundred men each. Many militants opposed García Oliver’s proposals, and put their trust instead in the spontaneity of the workers rather than in a disciplined revolutionary organization. The anti-militarist convictions of many affinity groups led to an almost unanimous rejection of the theses of the <em>Nosotros</em> group, and especially the theses defended by García Oliver.
*** <strong><em>ALB—How were these Defense Committees transformed into Popular Militias and revolutionary neighborhood committees?</em></strong>
On July 16, the army revolt began in Melilla. By the 18<sup>th</sup>, the military revolt had spread to all of Morocco, the Canary Islands and Seville.
The military garrison of Barcelona had about six thousand men, as opposed to almost two thousand in the Assault Guards and the two hundred members of the Catalan Autonomous Police. The Civil Guards, concerning whom no one was sure just which side they would join, had about three thousand men. The CNT-FAI had about twenty thousand militants, organized in District Defense Committees, who were ready to take up arms. It agreed, in the liaison committee formed by the CNT with the Generalitat and the loyal military officers, to confront the coup with only one thousand armed militants.
On July 19 and 20 of 1936, in the midst of the fighting in the streets of Barcelona, when the rebel military officers were defeated, the members of the defense committees began to refer to themselves, and were referred to by others, as “the militiamen”. Without any transitional period whatsoever, the defense cadres became Popular Militias. The original structure of the defense cadres had foreseen their extension and growth, by way of the incorporation of secondary cadres. All that had to be done was to find a place within them for the thousands of worker-volunteers, who were joining the fight against fascism, and to send them to Aragon. The confederal militias were transformed into the vanguard of all the armed units that were sent to fight the fascist enemy. They comprised the armed organization of the revolutionary proletariat. They were imitated by the other columns, including those of bourgeois origin. Due to the absence of a single proletarian army, the various parties and organizations created their own party and trade union militias, without any central command and with only the most tenuous coordination.
These defense cadres underwent a dual TRANSFORMATION. On the one hand, they were transformed into the Popular Militias, which from the very first days of the war defined the Aragon front, and inaugurated the collectivization of the land in the liberated Aragonese villages; on the other hand, they were transformed into the revolutionary committees that, in every neighborhood in Barcelona, and in every town in Catalonia, imposed a “new revolutionary order”. Their common origin in the defense cadres caused the confederal militias and the revolutionary committees to maintain very close relations with one another.
The revolutionary committees performed, in every neighborhood or locality, especially in the nine weeks after July 19, the following functions:
1. They confiscated buildings for committee offices, storage of supplies, cultural centers and rationalist schools. They seized and administered hospitals and newspapers;
2. They conducted searches of private homes to requisition weapons, food, money and objects of value;
3. Inspection of suspicious buildings by armed squads, in order to arrest “cops”, snipers, priests, reactionaries and fifth columnists. (Recall that the mopping-up operations conducted against snipers lasted an entire week in the city of Barcelona);
4. They set up recruiting centers in every neighborhood for the Militias, which they armed, financed, supplied and paid (until mid-September) with their own means, and even after May 1937, each neighborhood maintained an intimate and continuous relation with its militiamen on the front, and welcomed them when they came home on leave;
5. They stored arms in the headquarters of the defense committee, which also played the role of a local store or warehouse, in which the provisions committee of the district was also housed, which supplied the neighborhood with food that was requisitioned in the rural areas by means of armed coercion, exchange, or purchase with vouchers;
6. Imposition and collection of the revolutionary tax in every neighborhood or locality.
The revolutionary committees performed an important and quite multifarious administrative role, which extended from the issuance of vouchers, food coupons, and travel passes, marriage ceremonies, supply and administration of hospitals, to the confiscation of food, furniture and buildings, financing rationalist schools and cultural centers managed by the Libertarian Youth, paying the militiamen or their families, etc.
The District Revolutionary Committees were coordinated from the headquarters of the Regional Committee, to which the secretaries of every neighborhood defense committee reported. There was also a permanent Confederal Defense Committee, located in the CNT-FAI headquarters.
For matters related to the confiscation of large quantities of money and very valuable objects, and all those other tasks involving arrests, information or investigation that, due to their importance, surpassed the jurisdiction or abilities of the neighborhood revolutionary committees, the latter submitted the matters in question to the Investigation Service of the CNT-FAI, under the direction of Escorza at the CNT-FAI headquarters.
*** <strong><em>ALB—Was there a power vacuum? Were the neighborhood committees formed from the Defense Committees? And what about the provisions committees?</em></strong>
The real power of decision and execution was in the streets; it was the power of the armed proletariat, and the local committees of defense and of workers control exercised this power, spontaneously expropriating factories, workshops, buildings and property; organizing, arming and transporting to the front the groups of volunteer militiamen that they had previously recruited; burning churches or converting them into schools or warehouses; forming patrols to extend the social war; manning the barricades, which were now class frontiers, that controlled traffic and manifested the power of the committees; running the factories, without owners or managers, or converting them for military production; requisitioning cars and trucks, or food for the provisions committee; taking bourgeoisie, fascists and priests “for a ride”; replacing the superannuated republican municipal authorities, imposing in every locality their absolute authority in all domains, without waiting for orders from the Generalitat, or from the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias (the CCMA). The revolutionary situation was characterized by an atomization of power.
On the night of the 19<sup>th</sup> the only real power was “the federation of the barricades”, and the only immediate objective was the defeat of the rebels. The army and the police, which had either been dissolved or confined to their barracks, disappeared from the streets after July 20. They had been replaced by Popular Militias composed of armed workers, who fraternized with discharged soldiers and Civil Guards who had disposed of their uniforms, in one victorious mass of people, which transformed them into the vanguard of the revolutionary insurrection.
In Barcelona, the defense committees, now transformed into revolutionary neighborhood committees, in the absence of any directives from any organization and without any other coordination than the revolutionary initiatives required by everyday needs, organized the hospitals, overflowing with an avalanche of wounded, set up soup kitchens, requisitioned cars, trucks, weapons, factories and buildings, searched private homes, arrested suspicious persons and created a network of provisioning committees in every neighborhood, which were coordinated in a Central Provisioning Committee in the city, in which the Food Workers Trade Union played an important role. The revolutionary contagion affected all social sectors and all organizations, which sincerely chose to lend their support to the new revolutionary situation. This was the only real power of the CCMA, which appeared to the people in arms as the antifascist institution that must fight the war and impose the new revolutionary order.
On July 21, a Local and Regional Plenum renounced the seizure of power, understood as the dictatorship of the anarchist leaders, rather than as the imposition, coordination and extension of the power that the revolutionary committees were already exercising in the streets. On the 23<sup>rd</sup> a full Plenum, held in secret, of the superior committees of the CNT and the FIA closed ranks with regard to their decision to collaborate in the CCMA, and to prepare for the Plenum on the 26<sup>th</sup> to overcome the resistance of the militants.
On the 24<sup>th</sup> the first two anarchist columns had departed for the front, under the command of Durruti and Ortiz. Durruti delivered a speech over the radio in which he warned of the need to remain vigilant in the face of a possible counterrevolutionary putsch. The revolutionary situation in Barcelona must be consolidated, in order “to go for everything” after taking Zaragoza.
On July 25 Companys went to the Naval Academy and accused the members of the CCMA of having been inefficient with regard to maintaining public order, and was greeted with indifference by García Oliver who menacingly dismissed him.
On the morning of July 26, the Regional Plenum ratified the definitive collaboration of the CNT-FAI in the CCMA, as consented to by the superior committees of the CNT-FAI in their debate on the 23<sup>rd</sup> and at the previous Regional Plenum held on the 21<sup>st</sup>.
The Plenum of the 26<sup>th</sup> unanimously confirmed that the CNT would observe the decision, approved on the 21<sup>st</sup>, to participate in this new institution of class collaboration called the CCMA. At the same Plenum, on the 26<sup>th</sup>, a Provisions Committee was created, dependent on the CCMA, to which all the various provisions committees that had arisen at different locations would be subject, and at the same time ordered a partial cessation of the general strike. The summary statement of the principle agreements reached at this Plenum was drafted in the form of a Public Proclamation, so that it should be disseminated and accepted by the population.
The CC for Provisions was a fundamental institution, which ensured an indispensable requirement for those worker-volunteers who had abandoned their ordinary jobs in order to go to fight against fascism in Aragon: so as to assure, in their absence, the feeding of their families who would no longer be able to rely on a weekly paycheck.
*** <strong><em>ALB—What were the Control Patrols?</em></strong>
On August 11, 1936, the control patrols were created as a revolutionary police force dependent on the Central Committee of the Antifascist Militias (CCMA).
Only about half of the members of the patrols were members of the CNT or the FAI; the others were members of the other organizations that were part of the CCMA: the POUM, the ERC (Esquerra Republicana de Cataluña), and the PSUC, for the most part. Only four of the eleven district delegates were CNT members: those representing Pueblo Nuevo, Sants, San Andrés (Armonía) and Clot; four were from the ERC, three from the PSUC and none from the POUM.
The Control Patrols were under the control of the Investigation Committee of the CCMA, presided over by Aurelio Fernández (FAI) and Salvador González (PSUC), who replaced Vidiella. Its central headquarters was established at 617 Gran Vía, under the direction of two delegates of the Patrols, <em>i.e.</em>, José Asens (FAI) and Tomás Fábregas (Acció Catalana). Their pay, ten pesetas per day, was provided by the government of the Generalitat. Although all the district patrols carried out arrests, and some of the detained were interrogated at the old Casa Cambó, the central prison was located at the former convent of the order of St. Clare in San Elías.
*** <strong><em>ALB—What were the overall achievements of the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias?</em></strong>
On September 26 a government of the Generalitat was formed with the participation of anarchist ministers. On October 1 the dissolution of the CCMA was officially proclaimed.
The decree of October 9, supplemented by the one published on October 12, declared the dissolution of all the local committees that were formed on July 19, and that they would be replaced by the new local government institutions. Despite the resistance offered by many local committees to this order, and despite the delay of several months that preceded the complete establishment of the new local government institutions, this was a deathblow from which they never recovered. The resistance of the CNT militants, who disregarded the directives of their superior committees and the order of the Generalitat, posed a threat to the antifascist pact. The anarchosyndicalist leaders were caught between their militants, who were reluctant to obey them, and the accusation directed at them by the other antifascist forces, who said it was necessary to obey and to enforce compliance with the decrees of the government, and to make the “incontrolados” see the light.
This was the real final balance sheet of the achievements of the CCMA after its nine weeks of existence: the transition from revolutionary local committees, which exercised total power in the streets and the factories, to their dissolution to the exclusive benefit of the full reestablishment of the power of the Generalitat. Furthermore, the decrees signed on October 24 on the militarization of the Militias as of November 1 and the promulgation of the Collectivization decree completed the disastrous balance sheet of the CCMA, that is, the transition from volunteer revolutionary workers Militias to a bourgeois army of the classical type, subject to the monarchist code of military justice, under the command of the Generalitat; the transition from the expropriations and workers control of the factories to a centralized economy, controlled and administered by the Generalitat.
The delay in implementing the decrees, as a result of the low-profile yet still intransigent resistance of the confederal militants, who were still armed, caused the government of the Generalitat to emphasize as its primary objective the disarming of the rearguard, and it unleashed a propaganda campaign against the so-called “incontrolados”, which dovetailed with the second objective contained in the constantly-repeated slogan: “arms to the front”.
The powerful resistance of the anarchosyndicalist rank and file to the militarization of the militias, the Generalitat’s control over the economy and the collectivized enterprises, the disarmament of the rearguard and the dissolution of the local committees, resulted in a delay of several months in the complete fulfillment of the decrees of the government of the Generalitat with regard to these issues. This resistance would culminate, in the spring of 1937, in major unrest, which was exacerbated by discontent with the progress of the war, inflation, and the shortage of primary necessities, which then crystallized in a general critique on the part of the CNT rank and file militants of the participation of the superior committees of the CNT-FAI in the government, and the antifascist and collaborationist policies of their leaders, whom they accused of forfeiting “the revolutionary conquests of July 19”.
In October of 1936 the decree concerning the militarization of the Popular Militias produced a great deal of unrest among the anarchist militiamen of the Durruti Column, on the Aragon Front. After long and acrimonious debates, in March 1937, several hundred volunteer militiamen, posted in the Gelsa sector, decided to abandon the front and return to the rearguard. An agreement was reached which stipulated that the replacements for the militiamen who were opposed to militarization would arrive over a period of fifteen days. They abandoned the front, bringing their guns with them.
Having arrived in Barcelona, together with other anarchists (defenders of the continuation and intensification of the July revolution, and opponents of the CNT’s collaboration with the government), the militiamen from Gelsa decided to form an anarchist organization that was distinct from the FAI, the CNT and the Libertarian Youth, whose mission would be to bring the libertarian movement back to the revolutionary path. Thus, a new group was formally constituted in March 1937, after a long period of preparation that lasted several months, beginning in October 1936. Its executive committee decided to assume the name, “Friends of Durruti”, which was largely due to the fact that many of its members were former militiamen of the Durruti Column, and as Balius correctly pointed out, it was by no means a reference to Durruti’s political positions, but rather to the popular myth that had grown up around him.
This revolutionary opposition to the militarization of the Popular Militias was also manifested, to one degree or another, in all the confederal columns, but was most pronounced in the Iron Column, which decided on various occasions to “descend on Valencia” in order to drive the revolution forward and confront the counterrevolutionary elements in the rearguard.
In February 1937 an assembly of confederal columns was held that addressed the question of militarization. The threats to withhold arms, food, and reinforcements from the columns that did not comply with the militarization decree, together with the certainty that the militiamen would be integrated into other units that were already militarized, were very effective. For many of the delegates, it seemed that it would be better to accept militarization, and to flexibly adapt to it in each column. Finally, the ideology of antifascist unity and CNT-FAI collaboration in government administration, in defense of the republican State, won out over the resistance to militarization, which was finally accepted even by the recalcitrant Iron Column.
*** <strong><em>ALB—Did the defense committees clash with the superior committees?</em></strong>
During late November and early December 1936, the CNT debated the role that should be played by the defense committees in Barcelona.
The debates were framed within a strictly trade union-based perspective, which was not at all sympathetic with regard to the important role performed by the defense committees and the provisioning committees at the neighborhood level. It was held that their functions, once the stage of the revolutionary insurrection had come to an end and the next stage had begun, were of an exceptional and provisional character and that in any event they must be assumed now by the trade unions.
In November/December 1936, the defense committees were a thorn in the side of the governmentalist policies of the CNT superior committees; therefore, the latter proclaimed that the defense committees must accept a subordinate role and submit to the authority of the trade unions, as mere armed, but somewhat annoying and superfluous, appendages of the latter.
The debates were focused on the degree of autonomy to be enjoyed by the neighborhood defense committees with respect to the trade unions. Proposals spanned the spectrum from allowing the Local Defense Committees to be totally independent and to be completely separate entities, recognizing them as THE MILITIA OF THE CNT, to their full and absolute subordination to the dictates of the Local Federation of Trade Unions, which were not only to debate relevant issues and decide what action should be taken, but would also have custodianship over arms, and jurisdiction over the members and finances of the Defense Committees.
The fundamental issue, according to the Regional Committee, was the generalized refusal to obey the disarmament orders: “the neighborhoods are our own worst enemies”. In October 1936, the entry of the CNT into the government of the Generalitat led to the creation of a Committee for Internal Security, which resulted in a situation of dual power of command over the forces of public order, between the CNT and the government of the Generalitat. The Control Patrols were losing their autonomy and their decision making capabilities, while the Commissariat of Public Order, controlled by the PSUC and the ERC, was increasing its coercive powers, recommissioning the units of the Assault Guards and the Republican National Guards (the former Civil Guards). At the end of January 1937 the militiamen of the PSUC-UGT abandoned the Control Patrols, and were replaced by elements from the CNT, the ERC and the POUM. The final elimination of the Control Patrols, which would be absorbed into a new, unified Security Corps by the decree of March 4, 1937, implied the CNT’s loss of hegemony in the police functions and repressive tasks of the rearguard.
In the fragile political and armed equilibrium that prevailed in the spring of 1937 in the Barcelona rearguard, the growth of and increasing threat posed by the repressive forces of the bourgeoisie, which were tending to monopolize the means of violence, gave a new impetus to the reorganization and preparedness of the neighborhood defense committees for a confrontation that now appeared to be inevitable.
*** <strong><em>ALB—Why did the committees lose control over provisioning? What was the “war for bread”?</em></strong>
On December 20, 1936, Joan Comorera (PSUC), the Minister of Provisions, delivered an important speech, in Catalan, at the Gran Price ballroom in Barcelona.
Comorera argued in favor of a strong government, with full powers, capable of enforcing decrees that would no longer be just so many scraps of paper, as was the case under the first government of Tarradellas, in which Nin represented the POUM. He called for a strong government, capable of carrying out an efficient military policy that would centralize all forces at the front.
Comorera blamed the defense committees for the shortages and high prices of food, rather than the hoarding and speculation of the shopkeepers. His speech justified and served as an explanation for the slogan that had appeared on placards and posters in women’s demonstrations that took place in late 1936 and early 1937—“more bread and fewer committees”—demonstrations that were promoted and manipulated by the PSUC. It was clear that there would be a confrontation between the two opposed provisions policies, that of the PSUC and that of the Food Workers Trade Union of the CNT. The Food Workers Trade Union, through the thirteen provisions warehouses in the various districts of the city that were under the control of the revolutionary neighborhood committees (or, more accurately, of the district defense committees), delivered free food to the people’s kitchens, which fed the unemployed and their families, and also served the needs of the refugees who, in April 1937, already numbered 220,000 in Barcelona. It was a network of provisioning that rivaled the retail shops, which only responded to the law of supply and demand; the revolutionary institutions attempted, above all, to prevent the prices of necessities from rising too high, which rendered many products inaccessible for the workers and, of course, for the unemployed and the refugees. The black market was the biggest business arena for the shopkeepers, who made excellent profits thanks to the hunger of the majority of the population. Comorera’s war for bread waged against the district provisioning committees had no other objective than that of stripping the defense committees of every shred of power, even at the cost of depriving Barcelona of food and other basic necessities.
Comorera ended his speech with an appeal to all the organizations to assume responsibility for the sake of iron unity in the antifascist struggle. In order to understand Comorera’s speech we must note the strategy, formulated by Gerö, of implementing a SELECTIVE policy against the anarchist movement, which consisted in integrating its leaders into the State apparatus, while at the same time carrying out an implacable repression against the revolutionary sectors, that were shamefully referred to as “incontrolados”, gangsters, murderers, agents provocateurs and irresponsible elements; and whom Comorera very clearly identified with the defense committees.
The provisions warehouses of the neighborhood committees determined what, how, what quantities and what price would be charged by the shopkeepers, once the “revolutionary” needs of the neighborhood were satisfied, that is, the needs of the invalids, children, unemployed, peoples’ kitchens, etc. Comorera advocated the elimination of these revolutionary neighborhood committees, which were to be replaced by the free market. He knew, furthermore, that the former implied the latter, and that, unless the defense committees were suppressed, the free market would be a chimera.
The rational, adequate and planned provisioning of Barcelona and Catalonia, would have required the adoption of the proposals made by Joan P. Fábregas, the Minister of the Economy and member of the CNT, between October and December of 1936, in his fruitless battles in the Council of the Generalitat, to secure the monopoly of foreign trade, which were opposed by the other political factions represented on the Council. Meanwhile, on the Paris grain market, ten or twelve private Catalan wholesalers competed with each other, driving the prices of grains every higher. But the monopoly of foreign trade, which was not even a revolutionary measure, but only one that was appropriate for a situation of wartime emergency, violated the philosophy of the free market advocated by Comorera.
There was a connection between the bread lines in Barcelona and the irrational competition of the wholesalers in the Paris grain market. This Barcelona-Paris nexus would have been severed by a monopoly in foreign trade. With Comorera’s free market policy this nexus was consolidated. In addition, the PSUC encouraged the speculation of the shopkeepers, who got rich on the hunger of the workers.
*** <strong><em>ALB—How and for what purposes did the Defense Committees reorganize?</em></strong>
On Sunday, April 11, at a rally in La Monumental arena, there were many placards demanding the release of Maroto and numerous other antifascist prisoners, most of whom were members of the CNT. Federica Montseny was greeted with boos and catcalls. The shouts in favor of freedom for the prisoners got louder and louder, and were constantly repeated. The superior committees held the Friends of Durruti responsible for this disruption of the rally. Federica, who was very upset, threatened not to hold any more meetings in Barcelona.
Gracia’s Grupo 12 presented a written proposal:
“On Monday, April 12, 1937, a session of the local plenum of the Anarchist Groups of Barcelona was held at the CNT-FAI headquarters, attended also by the confederal Defense groups and the Libertarian Youth.
“The Plenum, in consideration, after ample discussion, of the results of nine months of ministerial policies, and in recognition of the impossibility of winning the armed struggle on the fronts against fascism without subordinating all particular, economic, political and social interests to the supreme goal of the winning the war; and in consideration of the fact that only with the total socialization of industry, trade and agriculture, is the crushing of fascism possible; and whereas every form of government is by its very essence reactionary and therefore contrary to every social revolution; it is resolved:
1. That all the persons who currently occupy positions in the antifascist governmental apparatus must resign;
2. That an antifascist revolutionary Committee should be formed for the coordination of the armed struggle against fascism;
3. Industry, trade and agriculture must be immediately socialized;
4. A producer’s card must be introduced. The general mobilization of all men capable of bearing arms and of working must be implemented for the front and for the rearguard;
5. And finally, to impress upon one and all an unyielding revolutionary discipline, as a guarantee that the interests of the social revolution cannot be flouted with impunity.”
This meeting had escaped the control of the bureaucrats. The Defense Committees of Barcelona, or, which amounts to the same thing, the delegations of the revolutionary neighborhood committees, as well as the Libertarian Youth, participated in this Plenum, and undoubtedly contributed to the radical tone of the resolutions.
The FAI of Barcelona, together with the sections of the revolutionary neighborhood defense committees and the Libertarian Youth, despite the indignation and the hysterical opposition of certain bureaucrats, resolved to put an end to collaborationism, and demanded that the anarchist ministers of the government of the Generalitat must resign and that a revolutionary Committee must be formed to conduct the war against fascism. This was a decisive step towards the revolutionary insurrection that would break out on May 3.
This Plenum also testified to the existence of an ideological divide, not so much between the CNT and the FAI, as between revolutionaries and collaborationists, which indicated the existence of an organizational split within the libertarian movement in Barcelona, which was manifested in the growing opposition and the unbridgeable gap with regard to goals that had opened up between the defense sections of the neighborhood committees and the Libertarian Youth, on the one side, and the superior committees, on the other.
This radicalization was the product of an increasingly unsustainable situation in the streets. On April 14, a women’s demonstration, which on this occasion was not manipulated by the PSUC, departed from La Torrassa for the various markets in Collblanc, Sants and Hostafrancs, to protest against the high price of bread and other food products. The demonstration appealed to the Revolutionary Committee at the Plaza de España to intervene on their behalf, but the Committee told them that the issue was not within its jurisdiction. The demonstrations and protests spread to almost all the markets of the city. On the following days there were disturbances and demonstrations at various markets, although not as intense as the demonstrations of April 14. Some shops and bakeries were plundered. The hungry people of the working class neighborhoods of Barcelona had filled the streets to express their anger and to demand solutions.
*** <strong><em>ALB—What role did the Defense Committees play in May 1937?</em></strong>
On Monday, May 3, 1937, at about 2:45 p.m., three trucks full of heavily armed Assault Guards stopped in front of the Telephone Company’s main building located on the Plaza de Cataluña. They were under the command of Eusebio Rodríguez Salas, a UGT militant and hardcore Stalinist, who was also an officer in the Commissariat of Public Order. The Telephone Company building had been under the control of the CNT since July 19. The monitoring of telephone communications, surveillance over the borders and the control patrols were the main bones of contention, which had since January provoked various incidents between the republican government of the Generalitat and the confederal masses. It was an inevitable struggle between the republican State apparatus, which claimed absolute authority over all domains in “its jurisdiction”, and the defense of the “conquests” of July 19 by the CNT. Rodríguez Salas attempted to seize control of the Telephone building. The CNT militants on the lower floors, taken by surprise, allowed themselves to be disarmed; but on the upper floors, the militants fought back with determination, thanks to a strategically placed machine gun. The news of the attack spread rapidly. Barricades appeared immediately throughout the city. This must not be understood as a spontaneous reaction of the working class of Barcelona, because the general strike, the armed confrontations with the police and the barricades were the result of the initiative taken by the defense committees, whose directives were rapidly followed thanks to the existence of an enormous degree of generalized discontent, the increasing economic hardships of everyday life caused by the high cost of living, the bread lines and rationing, as well as the tension that divided the revolutionary rank and file of the CNT between collaborationists and revolutionaries. The street battles were directed and executed by the neighborhood defense committees (and only to a lesser extent by certain units of the control patrols). The fact that there were no orders from the superior committees of the CNT, whose members were government ministers in Valencia and Barcelona, or from any other organization, to mobilize and construct barricades throughout the city, does not mean that the barricades were purely spontaneous, but rather that they were the result of the directives issued by the defense committees.
Regardless of the importance of the roles played by certain leaders prior to May, all of them were rapidly left behind and surpassed. The neighborhood committees unleashed and played the leading role in the insurrection of May 3–7 of 1937 in Barcelona. And it is not possible to confuse the neighborhood defense committees with an ambiguous and imprecise “spontaneity of the masses”, as is maintained by mainstream historiography.
This is how Nin, the political secretary of the POUM, described the May Days on May 19, 1937:
<quote>
“The May Days in Barcelona brought about a revival of certain institutions which, during the last few months, have played a certain role in the Catalan capital and in other important municipalities: the Defense Committees. These are institutions of a primarily technical-military type, formed by the trade unions of the CNT. It was these institutions that really led the struggle, and which constituted, in each neighborhood, the center of attraction and organization of the revolutionary workers.”
</quote>
The Friends of Durruti did not start the insurrection, but its members were the most active combatants on the barricades, and distributed a leaflet demanding the replacement of the Government of the Generalitat by a Revolutionary Committee.
The confederal workers, disoriented by the appeals of their leaders—the same ones they had on July 19!—chose, in the end, to give up the struggle, although at first they had laughed at the calls of the CNT leadership for peace and for the end of the fighting, in the interests of antifascist unity.
*** <strong><em>ALB—How were the Defense Committees dissolved?</em></strong>
The military power of the defense committees in the city of Barcelona was still intact, despite the fact that the May Events were a terrible political defeat for the revolutionaries, which would become evident on June 16, 1937 with the arrest of the Executive Committee of the POUM and the banning of that party.
From that time on, a selective repression was also directed against the CNT, and a judicial offensive was opened up on several fronts:
1. Against the local revolutionary committees created on July 19 and 20;
2. Against all those who had participated in the rebellion of May 1937;
3. Against thought crimes, reading the clandestine press, defeatism or bearing arms without authorization;
4. Against certain well known officials of the CNT, such as Aurelio Fernández, Barriobero, Eroles, Devesa, etc.
At the end of May 1937, however, the defense committees were still strong enough to organize some armed units under the direction of the district defense committees.
The revolutionary neighborhood committees in Barcelona that had arisen on July 19–20 survived until at least June 7, when the recently-restored forces of public order of the Generalitat dissolved and occupied the various headquarters of the Control Patrols, and also some of the headquarters of the defense committees, such as that of the neighborhood of Les Corts. Despite the decree ordering the disbanding of all armed groups, most resisted until September 1937, when they were systematically dissolved and the buildings they occupied were attacked, one by one. The last building occupied by a defense committee, and the strongest and most important, was the headquarters of the Central defense committee, located at the former monastery of St. Anthony, which was attacked on September 21, 1937 by the forces of public order, which utilized an entire arsenal of machine guns, tanks and hand grenades. The monastery’s defenders did not yield, however, to force of arms, but to the evacuation order delivered by the Regional Committee.
From then on, the defense committees disguised themselves under the name of CNT coordination and information Sections, devoted exclusively to clandestine investigative and informational tasks, of the kind that was carried out prior to July 19; but now (1938) they had to operate in a distinctly counterrevolutionary situation.
They were still combative enough and strong enough, however, to publish a clandestine bulletin, <em>Alerta!</em>, seven issues of which were distributed between October and December 1937. The first issue was published on October 23, 1937. The constant preoccupations of this bulletin were: solidarity with “revolutionary prisoners”, demanding their release and denouncing the administration of and abuses that took place at the Modelo prison; the critique of the collaborationism and politicization of the FAI; and the denunciation of the disastrous military policies of the Negrín-Prieto government and the Stalinist domination of the army and the State. It expressed its support for the Libertarian Youth and the Friends of Durruti. An unforgettable characteristic of the publication were its constant calls to “revolution” and the demand that all the members of the superior committees must resign their government positions: “The Revolution cannot be carried out FROM WITHIN THE STATE, but only AGAINST THE STATE”. Its last issue, dated December 4, 1937, denounced the Stalinist Chekas and the brutal persecution of the CNT members in Cerdaña.
In 1938, the revolutionaries were either dead, in jail or living in conditions of absolute secrecy. It was not Franco’s dictatorship, but Negrín’s republic that put an end to the Revolution.
|
#title The Friends of Durruti Group: 1937–1939
#LISTtitle Friends of Durruti Group, The: 1937–1939
#author Agustin Guillamón
#SORTtopics Friends of Durruti, Spanish Civil War, history, Spanish Revolution
#date 1996
#source http://www.spunk.org/library/places/spain/sp001780/index.html
#lang en
#notes Translated by Paul Sharkey
#cover g-f-george-fontenis-the-revolutionary-message-of-t-2.jpg
#pubdate 2020-07-14T11:33:23
** <strong>Preface to the English-language Edition</strong>
Agustin Guillamón’s monograph on the Friends of Durruti Group affords readers of English the most comprehensive and thorough exploration and account of the history and ideas of that group. Few groups if any have suffered from such widespread misunderstanding, exaggeration and interested misrepresentation. Guillamón has brought new evidence to light and disposes effectively of some of the most enduring misrepresentations.
Liberals, Stalinists, marxists and libertarians have vied with one another in their condemnation and misrepresentation of the group and its message. Italian Stalinists accounted association with the group grounds enough upon which to execute political opponents. On May 29, 1937, the Italian Communist Party paper <em>Il Grido del Popolo</em> carried an item which referred to Camillo Berneri as “one of the leaders of the ‘Friends of Durruti’ Group, which (…) provoked the bloody insurrection against the Popular Front Government in Catalonia [and] was given his just desserts during that revolt at the hands of the Democratic Revolution, whose legitimate right of self-defense no antifascist can deny.” There is no evidence at all to connect Berneri with the Friends of Durruti. On behalf of the “Errico Malatesta” group, Domenico Ludovici, an Italian anarchist, retorted that “The unfortunate comrade Berneri was not a member of the ‘Friends of Durruti’ Group, not that there would be anything wrong in that and it would never excuse the cowardly murder of which he was the victim. No doubt the democratic ‘journalist’ from <em>Il Grido del Popolo</em> must be a co-religionist of the perpetrators of the barbarous act hence the concern to represent the ‘Friends of Durruti’ as the provocateurs of the bloodshed, which everybody, the whole world, save <em>ll Grido del Popolo,</em> knows were of ‘democratic’ derivation.”[1] Curious that the Italian anarchists of the Ascaso Column, whose scrupulous commitment to principle over pragmatism frequently set them at odds with their Spanish colleagues, seem to have found little if anything to criticize in the performance of the Friends of Durruti. Even with the benefit of ten years of hindsight, Ernesto Bonomini could speak approvingly of the group.[2]
As to the allegation that the Friends of Durruti had instigated the fighting in Barcelona in May, they rebutted that when it came from <em>Las Noticias.</em> “They must think us real idiots, because, had the groups they named [the Friends of Durruti and the Libertarian Youth] been the instigators of the revolt, no way would we have surrendered the streets.”[3]
If the Friends of Durruti certainly did not instigate the events of May 1937, they equally certainly were among the few with a ready response to them. They had been alive to the encroachments of the revived Catalan State and bourgeoisie for quite some time and had been yearning for a return to the uncomplicated radical confrontations that had brought such promise with the victory over the fascists in July 1936.[4] Such a feeling was a rather diffuse presence in many sectors of the libertarian movement in Catalonia. The dalliance of the organizations’ higher committees with politicians and their pursuit of a unified and disciplined policy as an aid to them in their dealings with the latter had led to certain unwelcome changes in the everyday practices of those organizations. By January 1937 <em>Ideas</em> was issuing reminders of the proprieties of trade union federalism with the capitalized warning: <strong>“The so-called higher committees ought to be bound by the accords of the trade union organization. The unions dispose and the committees see to it that the dispositions are implemented. That is what federalism is, whatever else is done is dictatorship and that cannot be tolerated for one minute more.”</strong>[5] That same month the Libertarian Youth paper <em>Ruta</em> was pointedly reminding its readers that “All we can expect of self-sufficing minorities seeking to set themselves up as infallible guides is dictatorship and oppression.”[6]
There seem to have been three major preoccupations among those uneasy with the stagnation and ebbing of the revolution: 1. the attempt to relegate the revolution to second place behind the war effort; 2. the erosion of accountability of the higher committees; 3. the suspicion that some compromise resolution brokered by outside powers was being hatched.[7] Many reckoned that their very own leaders had been seduced and corrupted by association with politicians.
The Friends of Durruti shared and addressed all of these concerns. Alone among all the dissidents in the libertarian camp, they sought to devise a coherent set of alternatives. But the enforcement of discipline and the strength of sentimental attachment to organizations hobbled their efforts and reduced their audience. The mixture of discipline and sentiment is clearly seen in the letter which two members of the Friends of Durruti published in the pages of <em>Solidaridad Obrera</em> on May 29, 1937. Following a threat by the regional committees of the CNT and FAI and by the CNT’s Local Federation in Barcelona to expel all members of the Friends who failed to publicly disassociate themselves from the Group, Joaquin Aubi and Rosa Muñoz resigned from it, albeit specifying that “I continue to regard the comrades belonging to the ‘Friends of Durruti’ as comrades: but I say again what I have always said at plenums in Barcelona: ‘The CNT has been my womb and the CNT will be my tomb.’”
That dictum in fact could serve as an epitaph for the Friends of Durruti as a whole. It does not appear that the committees’ decision to proceed with expulsions was ever activated, and that in itself seems to confirm the degree of rank and file support for the Friends, as does the CNT national plenum of regionals’ endorsement of Catalonia’s intention to “expel from the Organization the <em>leading lights</em> of the ‘Friends of Durruti’ Group and to take whatever steps are necessary to ensure that no split ensues as a consequence of this.”[8]
Again the Friends had to remind their “superiors” of the norms of the organization. No one ever joined the CNT, the Confederation. All CNT members belonged to local unions and federations and sovereignty resided in these. <strong>“We can only be expelled from the confederal organization by the assemblies of the unions. Local and comarcal plenums are not empowered to expel any comrade. We invite the committees to raise the matter of the ‘Friends of Durruti’ in the assemblies, which is where the organization’s sovereignty resides.”</strong>[9]
A similar concern with constitutional procedure can be seen in the Friends’ reaction to the news that the arch-Treintista Angel Pestaña, leader of the Syndicalist Party, had been readmitted into the CNT fold. “We cannot understand how Pestaña had been admitted without having been required to wind up his Syndicalist Party, a precondition stipulated on other occasions when there was talk of his possibly rejoining.”[10]
Preoccupied as it was with preserving the CNT-FAI’s clout within the Republican coalition, the leadership of that conglomerate was ever alert to infiltration and to abuse of its initials. And prompt to see threats of both in the Friends. There were dark hints of “marxism”, due to certain common ground in the declarations of the minuscule Bolshevik-Leninist contingent and of the Friends, as well as the Friends’ non-sectarian acknowledgment of how the POUM had acquitted itself during the street-fighting in May. Here again, misrepresentation has been rife. Balius was moved to challenge his detractors to substantiate the charges of “marxist” leveled or whispered against him.[11] Guillamón deals definitively with the allegations of POUM and Trotskyist connections, laying those allegations to rest. Less easily disposed of is the mythology surrounding what the Friends themselves recognized was a “slight innovation,” the Revolutionary Junta.
The first thing that needs to be said is that Junta in Spanish does not have the same pejorative connotation as it does in English. Each CNT union was run by a Junta. In Mexico, the Mexican Liberal Party of the brothers Magón was run by a Junta. So the word itself carries no suggestion of authoritarianism.
The next point to be made plain is that the Friends were agitating for a Junta, not reporting the formation of one. Had they actually formed one and admitted the POUM into it alongside themselves, then the charges of “anarcho-Bolshevism” sometimes leveled against them, might stand up on the basis of that substitutionism. But no Junta was ever formed, in spite of what José Peirats among others claims.[12]
One of the most invidious representations, or <em>mis</em>representations regarding the Friends has been the decision by César M. Lorenzo to incorporate into the footnotes of his book <em>Los anarquistas españoles y el poder</em> (Paris, 1972) of a reference to a <em>Manifiesto de Unión Communista</em> purporting to speak for the ‘Friends of Durruti’, the POUM and certain elements of the Libertarian Youth. On the face of it, this clinches the case for the Friends’ having associated, indeed amalgamated themselves with marxist elements in a self-appointed vanguard union. But it is nothing of the sort. Lorenzo states that the manifesto was “distributed at the beginning of the month of June,” without specifying where.[13] In fact, the text he cites comes from a leaflet distributed <em>in Paris</em> at the Velodrome d’Hiver on June 16, 1937 by militants of the tiny French Union Communiste organization by way of a retort to Garcia Oliver and Federica Montseny, to contrast their official CNT-FAI line with the revolutionism displayed by the three named groups in May 1937. Whether Lorenzo’s failure to make this clear is due to an oversight or to its serving his purposes in representing the Friends as an anarcho-Bolshevik formation is unclear, but the misrepresentation has been taken up uncritically by others and contributed to the shadow of ignorance hanging over the group and its ideas.[14]
Union Communiste stole a march on anarchist sympathizers with the Friends (such as Andre Prudhommeaux) by publishing translations of articles from <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em> in its own paper, <em>L’Internationale</em> in December 1937. Union Communiste somewhat overstates the case, however, when it added the comment that: “What the Friends of Durruti cannot say within the narrow confines of an editorial in a clandestine publication is that this revolutionary theory is the handiwork of a vanguard. The necessity of revolutionary theory implies the necessity of an organized vanguard, thrown up by the struggle, which debates and devises the elements of the revolution’s program. The necessity, therefore, of a “party”, or, since this word party has been overused to mean treacherous organizations, of a banding together of the most clear-sighted, most active, most committed workers.” And their prediction that “… the Friends of Durruti will assuredly continue this trend which brought them into association with the left-wing elements of the POUM and which may lead them to the constitution of the revolutionary party that the Spanish proletariat lacked in the battles of recent years”, was well wide of the mark, as Guillamón makes plain.[15]
That there were certain questions raised but not quite clarified in the pages of <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em> and in the Group’s fuller manifesto <em>Towards of Fresh Revolution</em> cannot be denied. The Friends were making an honest effort to articulate in an anarchist idiom what they thought might provide a way out of the impasse of their much-abused generosity towards other antifascists and a second wind to the revolution which had been so denatured by collaboration under the umbrella of antifascism. One recurrent phrase is their claim that revolutionaries had to quemar una etapa (step things up a notch). They sought to re-found antifascism by asserting the hegemony of the working class libertarian element, ensuring that due recompense was received for effort expended. They sought to reinvigorate the trade unions which had become, if not moribund, then at least less vibrant, by reclaiming their autonomy and reasserting the protagonism lost to collaboration.[16]
More recently, a rather absurd reading of the facts surrounding the Friends of Durruti and the character of Jaime Balius has emerged from the pens of a duo of Spanish academic historians, Enric Ucelay da Cal and Susana Tavera. Starting from the laudable intention of tracing the group dynamics within libertarian circles in Catalonia and with special reference to the ensconcement of Jacinto Toryho as editor of <em>Solidaridad Obrera</em> and as the spokesman for the “official line” of the CNT-FAI in Catalonia, the authors concoct a Machiavellian tale of Balius’s frustrated journalistic ambition festering into cynical exploitation of the misgivings and resentments of dissenting libertarians. Guillamón rightly dismisses the article in question as “nonsense,” “outrageous” and “derogatory” and it would be a pity if the authors’ academic distinction were to breathe life into what is unquestionably a very shabby and shoddy piece of historical research, all the more aggravating for the pair’s self-congratulation. Their concoction offers the reader a description of the launching of the Friends of Durruti in March 1937 as “an attempt to inject significant political content into personal frustration, singling out as the enemy the counter-revolution and the Stalinists and, to a lesser extent, those responsible for his [Balius’s] displacement within the CNT.”[17]
<br>
Agustin Guillamón is to be congratulated for having undertaken his research in a spirit of scientific inquiry. He deals comprehensively with the usual fictions and offers us a scrupulously accurate account of the<em>Ideas</em>and objectives of what remains the most fascinating and most articulate of the dissenting groups within the greater family of Spanish libertarianism in the crucial year of 1937.
<br>
**
[1] Writing in <em>Ideas</em> (Bajo Llobregat) No 24, June 17, 1937, p. 4.
[2] Ernesto Bonomini wrote an eyewitness account of the May events in Barcelona for <em>Volonta</em> No 11, May 1, 1947.
[3] <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em> No 4, June 22, 1937, p. 3, “El asalto a la Telefónica”.
[4] Spanish anarchism was more comfortable with radical contrasts than with the blurred edges created by, say, the antifascist umbrella, or, earlier, republican ralliement. “We Spanish anarcho-syndicalists were faithful to the dialectical principle to the very end. Liberal or reformist government we made an especial target of our spleen, out of a secret feeling of competition. We would rather unemployment lines than unemployment benefit. Given a choice between enslavement to bosses and cooperativism, we preferred the former. And emphatically rejected the latter.” — José Peirats <em>Examen criticoconstructivo del Movimiento Libertario Español</em> (Editores Mexicanos Unidos, Mexico DF, 1967) p. 42.
[5] <em>Ideas</em> No 4, January 21, 1937, p. 4.
[6] <em>Ruta</em> (Barcelona) No 13, January 7, 1937, p. 6, “Centralismo.”
[7] Boldly displayed on the front page of <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em> No 2, May 26, 1937, was this item: <strong>“We are against any armistice</strong>. The blood shed by Spanish workers is an impregnable bulwark upon which the intrigues sponsored by home-grown politicians and capitalist diplomats around the world will founder. Victory or death. There is no other solution.” Similar defiance of suspected intrigues designed to bring about a diplomatic resolution of the war and taking things out of the hands of Spanish workers featured in <em>Ideas, Ruta</em> and other papers also.
[8] José Peirats <em>La CNT en la revolución española</em> (Ed. Madre Tierra, Madrid, 1988, Vol. 11, p. 220) citing a CNT National Committee resume of the accords reached at a national plenum of regionals meeting on May 23, 1937.
[9] <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em> No 2, 26 May 1937, p. 3. The Friends pointedly added:
<br>
<strong>“Whenever, in contravention of every confederal precept, someone goes over the heads of assemblies and militants and sets himself up as a general, making mistake after mistake, he has no option, assuming he has any shred of dignity left, but to set down. Garcia Oliver fits that bill!”</strong>
[10] <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em> No 8, September 21, 1937, p. 2. “The admission of Pestana sets the seal upon the bourgeois democratic mentality in a broad swathe of confederal circles. Watch out, comrades.”
[11] <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em> No 4, June 22, 1937, p. 3, “En defensa propia: Necesito una aclaración.” “I am aghast at countless instances of my being labeled a marxist, because I am 100 percent a revolutionary.” This comment suggests that Balius regarded marxists as being something short of 100 percent revolutionaries, although the Friends were generous enough to recognize that the POUM had acquitted itself well in the street-fighting in Barcelona in May 1937. This rejection of marxism would have applied not to the marxian analysis of capitalist economics, but to the marxist recipe for changing society, not to the <em>descriptive</em> but to the <em>prescriptive</em> element.
[12] José Peirats <em>La CNT en la revolución española</em> Vol 11, p. 147. Peirats reproduces a text which opens “A Revolutionary Junta has been formed [emphasis added] in Barcelona.” César M. Lorenzo reproduces this text given by Peirats. But the Peirats text is not a quotation but a mistaken paraphrase.
[13] César M. Lorenzo <em>Los anarquistas espanoles y el poder</em> (Ruedo Iberico, Paris, 1972) p. 219, n. 32.
[14] The full text of the leaflet from which Lorenzo quotes can be found in Henri Chaze <em>Chronique de la revolution espagnole: Union Communiste (1933–1939)</em> (Paris, Cahiers Spartacus, 1979) pp. 114–115. Juan Gómez Casas <em>Anarchist Organization: The History of the FAI</em> (Black Rose Books, Montreal-Buffalo, 1986, p. 210) uncritically reproduces Lorenzo’s curious footnote as if it were a Friends of Durruti text.
[15] Henri Chaze, op. cit. p. 82 (from <em>L’lnternationale</em> No 33, December 18, 1937.
[16] Exasperation with their republican “allies” was widespread by the summer of 1937 and before. There were even embarrassed arguments about the ingenuousness of anarchists. “Let us make very plain the principle that we owe no loyalty to him who is disloyal with us: that we owe no respect to him who secretly betrays us, that we have no duty of tolerance to anyone disposed to coerce us just as soon as he is strong enough to do so and get away with it, that principle cannot oblige us to respect the freedom of him whose principle is to take away our freedom” (Beobachter, in <em>Ideas</em> No 29, August 6, 1937).
[17] Susana Tavera and Enric Ucelay Da Cal “Grupos de afinidad, disciplina bélica y periodismo libertario 1936–1938” in <em>Historia Contemporanea,</em> 9, (Servicio Ed. Universidad del Pais Vasco, 1993) pp. 184.
<br>
** <strong>1. Introduction and Chronology</strong>
The Friends of Durruti were an anarchist affinity group founded in March 1937. Its members were militians with the Durruti Column opposed to militarization and/or anarchists critical of the CNT’s entry into the Republican government and the Generalidad government.
The historical and political importance of the Friends of Durruti Group lies in <strong>its attempt,</strong> emanating from within the ranks of the libertarian movement itself (in 1937) <strong>to constitute a revolutionary vanguard</strong> that would put paid to departures from revolutionary principles and to collaboration with the capitalist State: leaving the CNT to defend and press home the “gains” of July 1936, instead of surrendering them little by little to the bourgeoisie.
This edition of <em>Balance</em> examines the process whereby the Friends of Durruti emerged, their ideological characteristics and the evolution of their political thinking, their dealings with the Trotskyists, and the reasons behind the failure of their fight to recover anarcho-syndicalism’s doctrinal purity and salvage the Spanish revolution of 1936.
There follows a chronology which, though selective rather than exhaustive, contains heretofore unpublished information. This chronology is intended to afford familiarity with the essential historical events, so that the arguments spelled out in this study may be more readily and strictly comprehensible.[18]
*** CHRONOLOGY
July 17–21, 1936: Servicemen and fascists rebel against the government of the Republic. Where the workers offer armed resistance, the rebels fail, securing victory only where there are attempts at conciliation or no armed confrontation. Civil war erupts.
July 21, 1936: Establishment in Catalonia of the Central Anti-Fascist Militias Committee (CAMC). No workers’ organization takes power.
August 19–25, 1936: Trial of the Sixteen in Moscow. Zinoviev, Kamenev and Smirnov executed. Radek placed under arrest.
September 26, 1936: Three anarchists — Doménech, Fábregas and Garcia Birlan — join the Generalidad government in Catalonia.
October 2, 1936: the CAMC is wound up.
October 12, 1936: A Generalidad decree dissolves the (revolutionary) Local Committees. These are shortly to be replaced by new, Popular Front-style town councils.
October 27, 1936: A Generalidad decree orders militarization of the People’s Militias.
November 4, 1936: Four anarchist ministers — Garcia Oliver, Frederica Montseny, Joan Peiró and Juan López — join the Republic’s government.
November 5, 1936: Durruti makes a radio broadcast from the Madrid front, in which he opposes the decree issued by the Generalidad militarizing the militias, and calls for greater commitment and sacrifice from the rearguard if the war is to be won.
November 6, 1936: The Republic’s government (along with the four new anarcho-syndicalist ministers) flees Madrid for the safety of Valencia. The populace of Madrid’s response is the cry of “Long live Madrid without government!”
November 7, 1936: the International Brigades intervene on the Madrid front.
November 9, 1936: Formation of the Madrid Defense Junta.
November 20, 1936: Durruti loses his life on the Madrid front.
December 6, 1936: In <em>Solidaridad Obrera,</em> Balius publishes an article entitled “Durruti’s Testament” in which he states: “Durruti bluntly asserted that we anarchists require that the Revolution be totalitarian in character.”
December 16, 1936: the POUM is excluded from the Generalidad government.
December 21, 1936: Stalin offers advice to Largo Caballero.
December 29, 1936: Publication of issue No. 1 of <em>Ideas.</em>
January 26, 1937: Balius appointed director of <em>La Noche.</em>
February 5–8, 1937: Plenary assembly of the confederal and anarchist militias meeting in Valencia to consider the militarization issue.
March 4, 1937: the newspaper <em>La Noche</em> carries an announcement introducing the aims, characteristics and membership conditions of the Friends of Durruti Group.
March 4, 1937: the Generalidad issues a decree winding up the Control Patrols. In <em><em>La Batalla</em> ,</em> Nin passes favorable and hopeful comment on an article by Balius carried in the March 2<sup>nd</sup> edition of <em>La Noche.</em>
March 11, 1937: <em>Ideas</em> calls for the dismissal of Aiguadé.
March 17, 1937: the Friends of Durruti Group is formally established. Balius is appointed vice-secretary. Ruiz and Carreño are on its steering committee.
March 21, 1937: the Iron Column meets in assembly to vote on militarization or disbandment: it agrees to militarization.
Late March-early April 1937: A flyer bearing the endorsement of the Friends of Durruti Group is issued.
April 8, 1937: In <em>Ideas,</em> Balius has an article published entitled “Let’s make revolution,” in which he says: “if [Companys] had a larger contingent of armed forces at his disposal, he would have the working class back in the capitalist harness.”
April 14, 1937: the Friends of Durruti issue a manifesto opposing the commemoration of the anniversary of the proclamation of the Republic.
(Sunday) April 18, 1937: The Friends of Durruti hold a rally in the Poliorama Theater. Chaired by Romero, it hears contributions from Francisco Pellicer, Pablo Ruiz, Jaime Balius, Francisco Carreño and V. Pérez Combina.
April 25, 1937: the UGT leader Roldán Cortada is murdered in Molins del Llobregat.
April 27 and 28, 1937: Armed conflict between anarchists and Generalidad forces in Bellver de Cerdaña. Antonio Martin, the anarchist mayor of Puigcerdá, is shot dead.
Late April 1937: A poster from the Group is pinned up on trees and walls throughout the city of Barcelona. In it, the Friends of Durruti set out their program: “All power to the working class. All economic power to the unions. Instead of the Generalidad, the Revolutionary Junta.”
(Saturday) May 1, 1937: An ordinary working day, for the Generalidad has banned commemoration of the First of May, in an effort to avert disturbances and confrontations. The Generalidad government meets in session, congratulating its Commissar for Public Order on the successes achieved. A panel is made up of Tarradellas (Prime Councilor), Rodriguez Salas (Commissar for Public Order) and Artemi Aiguadé (Councilor for Internal Security): it promptly holds a meeting behind closed doors to tackle urgent business relating to public order and security. The Bolshevik-Leninist Section issues a leaflet.
(Sunday) May 2, 1937: Friends of Durruti rally in the Goya Theater, at which the film “19 de julio” is screened to comments from Balius: there are speeches by Liberto Callejas and Francisco Carreño as well. CNT militants interrupt a telephone conversation between Companys and Azana.
(Monday) May 3, 1937: A little before 3:00 P.M. three truckloads of Guards commanded by Rodriguez Salas attempt to seize the Telephone Exchange, on the orders of Artemi Aiguadé. Armed resistance from the CNT workers on the upper floors thwarts this. Within a few hours, a host of armed bands has been formed and the first barricades erected. The mobilization resolves into two sides: one made up of the CNT and the POUM, the other of the Generalidad, the PSUC, the ERC and Estat Català. Businesses close down. The train service stops at 7:00 P.M. At that hour, in the Casa CNT-FAI in the Via Durruti, the CNI Regional Committee and the POUM Executive Committee meet. The maximum demand is that Rodriguez Salas and Artemi Aiguadé resign. Companys doggedly opposes this.
(Tuesday) May 4, 1937: Gun-battles throughout the night. Many barricades and violent clashes throughout the city. In the Sants barrio 400 Guards are stripped of their weapons. Companys asks the Valencia government for aircraft to bomb the CNT’s premises and barracks.[19] The CNT-controlled artillery on Montjuich and Tibidabo is trained on the Generalidad Palace.[20] Abad de Santillán, Isgleas and Molina manage to halt in Lerida, “en route to Barcelona,” the divisions despatched by the CNT’s Máximo Franco (a Friends of Durruti member) and the POUM’s José Rovira. At 7:00 P.M. in the Principal Palace in the Ramblas, which has been commandeered by the POUM, Jaime Balius, Pablo Ruiz, Eleuterio Roig and Martin, representing the Friends of Durruti, meet Gorkin, Nin and Andrade, representing the POUM’s Executive Committee. Following an analysis of the situation, and in view of the stance adopted by the CNT, they come to an agreement to suggest an orderly armed withdrawal of combatants from the barricades. At 9:00 P.M. the Generalidad radio station issues an appeal from the leaders of the various organizations (Garcia Oliver representing the CNT) for an end to fighting. The POUM Executive Committee releases a manifesto. The Bolshevik-Leninist Section issues a handbill. On the night of May 4–5, the Friends of Durruti Group drafts and prints up a handbill.
(Wednesday) May 5, 1937: A handbill is distributed by the Friends of Durruti. Over the radio, the CNT disowns the Friends of Durruti Group. Fighting is now confined to the city center: the rest of the city being in the hands of the confederal Defense Committees. At 1:00 P.M. the UGT leader Sesé, a recently appointed Generalidad councilor perishes in gunfire emanating from the premises of the CNT’s Entertainments Union. At 3:00 P.M. the Generalidad transmitter issues a fresh appeal for calm from the leaders of the various organizations (Federica Montseny for the CNT). A brother of Ascaso is killed. Berneri and Barbieri are arrested by Guards and UGT militants from the Water Union. Their corpses show up later.
(Thursday) May 6, 1937: <em>La Batalla</em> reprints the Friends of Durruti handbill. In the same edition, <em>La Batalla</em> appeals for workers to back down. <em>Solidaridad Obrera</em> disowns the Friends of Durruti handbill .
(Friday) May 7, 1937: <em>La Batalla</em> reiterates its appeal, making it conditional upon withdrawal of the security forces and retention of weapons. Transport services are restored and a degree of normality returns. Assault Guards sent by the Valencia government reach Barcelona around 9:00 P.M. Companys surrenders control of public order. The Control Patrols place themselves at the disposal of the special delegate in charge of public order sent down by the Republican government.
(Saturday) May 8, 1937: Barricades are dismantled, except for the PSUC barricades, which persist into June. The Friends of Durruti distribute a manifesto reviewing the events of May. In that manifesto there is talk of “treachery” by the CNT leadership.
(Sunday) May 9, 1937: <em>Solidaridad Obrera</em> dismisses the manifesto as demagoguery and the Group’s members as provocateurs.
May 17, 1937: Negrin takes over from Largo Caballero as premier. The UGT Regional Committee for Catalonia demands that all POUM militants be expelled from its ranks and presses the CNT to mete out the same treatment to the Friends of Durruti.
May 19, 1937: Issue No. 1 of <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em> appears.
May 22, 1937: A plenary session of the CNT’s Local and Comarcal Federations hears a proposal that the Friends of Durruti be expelled. A session of the Sabadell city council agrees that councilor Bruno Lladó Roca (also the Generalidad’s comarcal delegate for Economy) be stood down for having displayed a Friends of Durruti poster in his office.
May 26, 1937: Issue No. 2 of <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em> appears, having evaded the censor. Balius is jailed a few days later as the director of a clandestine publication, following a complaint from the PSUC.
May 28, 1937: <em>La Batalla</em> is shut down as is the POUM’s radio station. The Friends of Durruti’s social premises in the Ramblas are shut down.
June 6, 1937: The Control Patrols are disbanded.
June 12, 1937: <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em> No. 3.
June 16, 1937: The members of the POUM Executive Committee are rounded up. The POUM is proscribed and its militants persecuted.
June 22, 1937: <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em> No. 4.
June 22–24, 1937: Andrés Nin is kidnapped and murdered by the Soviet secret police.
June 26, 1937: Showing solidarity with the POUM militants persecuted by the Stalinists and the Republic’s police, the Bolshevik-Leninist Section calls for concerted action by the Section, the left of the POUM and the Friends of Durruti.
July 2, 1937: A handbill from the Bolshevik-Leninist Section of Spain (on behalf of the Fourth International) expresses solidarity with the POUM militants persecuted by the Stalinists.
July 20, 1937: <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em> No. 5.
August 10, 1937: The Council of Aragon is forcibly disbanded by the government.
August 12, 1937: <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em> No. 6.
August 31, 1937: <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em> No. 7.
September 21, 1937: <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em> No. 8.
October 20, 1937: <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em> No. 9.
November 8, 1937: <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em> No. 10.
November 20, 1937: <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em> No. 11.
January 1938: <em>Towards a Fresh Revolution</em> pamphlet drafted by Balius and published by the Friends of Durruti.
February 1, 1938: <em>El Amigo del Pueble</em> No. 12.
July to September 1939: <em>L’Espagne Nouvelle</em> Nos. 7 to 9.
**
[18] The most important studies of the Friends of Durruti Group are: Francisco Manuel Aranda: “Les amis de Durruti” in <em>Cahiers Leon Trotsky</em> No. 10 (1982); Jordi Arquer: Història de la fundació i actuació de la “Agrupación Amigos de Durruti” Unpublished; Georges Fontenis: Le message révolutionnaire des “Amis de Durruti” (Editions L, Paris, 1983); Frank Mintz and Manuel Peciña: Los Amigos de Durruti, los trotsquistas y los sucesos de mayo (Campo Abierto, Madrid, 1978); Paul Sharkey: The Friends of Durruti: A Chronology (Editorial Crisol, Tokyo, May 1984)
[19] According to an affidavit by Jaume Anton Aiguadér, nephew of Artemi Aiguadér, signed in the presence of witnesses in Mexico City on August 9, 1946: “At the time of the May events, the Generalidad government asked for aircraft from Spain in order to bomb the CNT buildings and the latter refused the request.” This statement is borne out by the teletype messages exchanged between Companys and the central government. In those messages, on Tuesday, May 4, 1937, the Generalidad President informed the cabinet under-secretary that the rebels had brought artillery out on to the streets, and he asked that Lieutenant-Colonel Felipe Diaz Sandino, commander of the Prat de Lllobregat military air base, be instructed to place himself at the disposal of the Generalidad government: “Generalidad President informs cabinet under-secretary that rebels have brought cannons on to streets. Asks that Sandino be ordered place himself disposal of Generalidad government.” [Documentation on deposit in the Hoover Institution.]
[20] According to the testimony of Diego Abad de Santillán.
** <strong>2. Towards July 19</strong>
In the elections of February 16, 1936, which the Popular Front won by a narrow margin, the anarchists mounted only token propaganda on behalf of their abstentionist principles and watchwords. According to their revolutionary analysis of the situation, the anarcho-syndicalist leadership took the view that confrontation with the military and with the fascists was inevitable, no matter how the elections might turn out.[21] So they set about making serious preparations for an imminent revolutionary insurrection.
The “Nosotros” group, made up of Francisco Ascaso, Buenaventura Durruti, Juan Garcia Oliver, Aurelio Fernandez, Ricardo Sanz, Gregorio Jover, Antonio Ortiz and Antonio Martinez “Valencia,” set itself up as a Central Revolutionary Defense Committee. Members of the “Nosotros” group were men of action, who wielded undeniable working class sway over the CNT masses. In the early morning of July 19, 1936, these men climbed into lorries full of armed militants and slowly toured the working class Pueblo Nuevo district en route to the city center. They put into effect the libertarian practice of teaching by example. The factory sirens issued a summons to workers’ insurrection. What few weapons were available to them had been obtained in October 1934, gathered up from the streets where they had been dumped by the Catalanists, or amassed in the weeks leading up to July 19<sup>th</sup> in raids on armories, police, military depots, ships’ arsenals, etc. There were a lot more militants than weapons, and for every combatant downed there was another three to squabble over his rifle or handgun. But the bulk of the weaponry had been captured in the course of street-fighting. The revolt of the soldiery and the fascists became an insurrectionary uprising when the people, following the storming of the San Andres barracks, seized some 35,000 rifles. The workers had successfully armed themselves. It was this that lay behind the resignation of Escofet, the Generalidad Commissar for Public Order. It was important for the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC) and for the Generalidad government that the army revolt be crushed: but this arming of the people was an augury of a horrible disaster, more to be feared than a fascist victory.[22]
<quote>
Thanks to its militants’ class instinct, the CNT not only managed to defeat the army revolt but ensured the success of a proletarian uprising. But when something more than class instinct was required, when implementation of revolutionary theory was required, everything went to pot. <strong>No Revolutionary Theory, No Revolution.</strong> And the very protagonists of the success of the workers’ uprising were startled to find the revolution slipping from their grasp.
</quote>
We are not about to rehearse the deeds, nor the tactical acumen which made the success of the popular uprising in Barcelona feasible. Here all that concerns us is to emphasize that the “Nosotros” group (abetted by other FAI affinity groups) acted as a revolutionary vanguard astute enough to steer the confederal masses towards a victorious uprising. We are also concerned to underline the inability of that group, and of all the labor leaders and organizations, anarchist or otherwise, to consolidate the revolution, when power was within their grasp and was there for the taking, because one may be armed with a rifle but disarmed in political terms. How are we to account for, how are we to understand the undisputed leaders of the CNT trotting along to a rendezvous with Companys in the Generalidad Palace? How could they have heeded a man who <strong>in the early morning</strong> of July 19<sup>th</sup> refused the CNT weapons, and who had so often harassed and incarcerated them? How come there was still a government in the Generalidad? Why did they not march up to the Generalidad and do away with the bourgeoisie’s government? How come they did not proclaim libertarian communism?[23]
The unaccustomed speed of events, the rapidly shifting situations, features of any revolutionary era, took but a few months to turn rebels into ministers, revolutionaries into advocates of “softly, softly,” Stalinists into butchers, Catalanists into supplicants before the central government, anarchists into loyal allies and staunch bulwarks of the State, POUMists into victims of a brutal and hitherto inconceivable political repression, socialists into hostages to Stalinism and the Friends of Durruti into mavericks and provocateurs.
Again we stress that we have no intention of rehearsing events here, because there are already books available from a number of writers and a variety of political outlooks, and to these we would refer anyone who is keen to learn, explore or review the concrete historical facts.[24] Our concern here is with discovering, explaining and unveiling the mechanism by which anarchists were turned into ministers, anti-militarists into soldiery, enemies of the State into collaborators with the State and genuine revolutionaries tried and tested in a thousand battles into unwitting stalwarts of counterrevolution.
Our real preoccupation is with explaining the phenomenon which plunged so many revolutionary militants into confusion and the paradox of believing that they were defending the revolution when in reality they were acing as the vanguard of counterrevolution. And to that end, we must first set out the theoretical points[25] which afford us an insight into and which reveal the nature of the historical process initiated (in Catalonia especially) in July 1936:
<quote>
1. Without destruction of the State, there is no revolution. The Central Anti-fascist Militias Committee of Catalonia (CAMC)[26] was not an organ of dual power, but an agency for military mobilization of the workers, for sacred union with the bourgeoisie, in short, an agency of class collaboration.
2. Arming of the people is meaningless. The nature of military warfare is determined by the nature of the class directing it. An army fighting in defense of a bourgeois State, even should it be antifascist, is an army in the service of capitalism.
3. War between a fascist State and an antifascist State is not a revolutionary class war. The proletariat’s intervention on one side is an indication that it has already been defeated. Insuperable technical and professional inferiority on the part of the popular or militia-based army was implicit in military struggle on a military front.
4. War on the military fronts implied abandonment of the class terrain. Abandonment of the class struggle signified defeat for the revolutionary process.
5. In the Spain of August 1936, revolution was no more and there was scope only for war: A nonrevolutionary military war.
6. The collectivizations and socializations in the economy count for nothing when State power is in the hands of the bourgeoisie.
</quote>
Secondly, attention needs to be drawn to the Gordian knot which loomed as a dilemma in the week following July 19: either the capitalist State would be swept away, and the proletariat would step the class struggle up a gear with the introduction of libertarian communism and the launching of a revolutionary war, or the capitalist State would be allowed to rebuild its apparatus of rule.
Thirdly, there is room to ask why the revolutionary option was not exercised. And the answer is very simple: there was no revolutionary vanguard capable of steering the revolution.
In a logical, stringent, precise and telling way, these theses on the Spanish revolutionary and counterrevolutionary process account for and shed light upon many individual and collective performances, which otherwise strike us as absurd, inexplicable or stubbornly wrong-headed — for instance — the summoning of the CNT leaders to a meeting with Companys in the Generalidad Palace on July 21; a CNT-plenum’s acceptance of collaboration with the Generalidad government; the formation and winding-up of the CAMC: the entry of CNT militants into the Generalidad government, the militarization of the militias: the entry into the Republican government of anarcho-syndicalist ministers: the immediate endorsement by these new “anarchist ministers” of the government’s flight from Madrid: the cooperation of anarcho-syndicalist leaders in the putting down of the workers’ uprising in May 1937: the CNT-UGT unity compact of 1938: collaboration with the Negrin government, etc.
**
[21] See Garcia Oliver’s answers (which date from the first half of 1950) to a questionnaire from Burnett Bolloten [on deposit with the Hoover Institution]: “With regard to the February elections, the CNT-FAI adopted the following line, which was peddled throughout Spain at rallies as well as in writing. <strong>The forthcoming elections are going to be decisive for the Spanish people. If the working class votes for the left, the latter will take power, but we will have to confront an uprising by the military and the right aimed at seizing power. If the working class does not vote for the left, that would spell a lawful success for fascism. We for our part advise the working class to do as it pleases with regard to voting, but we say to it, that if it does not vote for the left, before six month will have elapsed from the later’s victory, we shall have to resist the fascist right with weapons in hand.</strong> Naturally, Spain’s working class, which had for many years been advised by the CNT not to vote, placed upon our propaganda the construction we wanted, which is to say, that it should vote, in that it would always be better to stand up to the fascist right, if they revolted, once defeated and out of government. The left won in the February 1936 elections. Companys became the government in Catalonia and the left became the government of Spain. We had honored our commitments, <strong>but they honored none of theirs, in that they issued not one weapon, nor did they take any preemptive action against the fascist military plot.”</strong>
[22] See the exchange between Companys and Escofet in the wake of the crushing of the fascists’ rebellion: “Mr President” — I said to him — “I bring you official word that the rebellion has been completely defeated [ ... ]”
<br>
“Good, Escofet, very good” — the President replied — “But the situation is chaotic. Uncontrolled armed riffraff have invaded the streets and are committing all sorts of outrages. And anyway, the CNT, heavily armed, is master of the city. What can we do against them?”
<br>
“For the time being, we have all been swept along, including the CNT leaders themselves. The only solution, Mr President, is to contain the situation politically, without letting any of our respective authorities go by the board. If you, for your part, can succeed in that, I undertake to take charge of Barcelona whenever you order me so to do or when circumstances permit.” [Federico Escofet: <em>De una derrota a una victoria : 6 de octubre de 1934–19 de julio de 1936</em> (Ed. Argos-Vergara, Barcelona, 1984, p. 352)]
[23] Garcia Oliver addresses many of these questions directly or indirectly in his account of the interview with Companys: “The military-fascist uprising had come just as we had predicted. Companys retreated into the Police Headquarters in Barcelona, where I saw him at, it must have been, seven in the morning on July 19, terrified of the consequences of what he could see coming, in that he anticipated that, once all of the troop regiments in Barcelona had revolted, they would easily sweep aside all resistance. However, almost single-handedly, the CNT-FAI forces held out for those two memorable days, and after an epic and bitter struggle [...] we defeated all the regiments [...] For all these reasons, Companys was bewildered and shocked to find the CNT-FAI’s representatives before him. Bewildered because all he could think about was the heavy responsibility he had with regard to us and the Spanish people because of his failure to heed all our forecasts. [...] Shocked, because although they had not honored the commitments they had given us, the CNT-FAI in Barcelona and in Catalonia had beaten the rebels [...] So, when he sent for us, Companys told us: “I know that you have lots of grounds for complaint and annoyance where I am concerned. I have opposed you greatly and failed to appreciate you for what you are. However, it is never too late for an honest apology and mine, which I am now going to offer you, is tantamount to a confession: had I appreciated your worth, maybe the circumstances now would be different; but it is too late for that now, and you alone have defeated the rebel military and in all logic you ought to govern. If that is your view, I gladly surrender the Generalidad Presidency to you, and, if you think that I can be of any assistance elsewhere, you need only tell me the place I should take up. <strong>But if, since we do not yet know for sure who has had the victory elsewhere in Spain, you believe that I may still be of service in acting as Catalonia’s lawful representative from the Generalidad presidency, say so, and from there, and always with your agreement, we shall carry on this fight until it becomes clear who are the winners.”</strong> For our part, and this was the CNT-FAI’s view, we held that Companys should stay on as head of the Generalidad, precisely because we had not taken to the streets to fight specifically for the social revolution, but rather to defend ourselves against the fascist mutiny.” [From Garcia Oliver’s 1950 answers to Bolloten’s questionnaire, on deposit at the Hoover Institution.]
<br>
Garcia Oliver’s testimony deserves to be set alongside that of Federica Montseny: “In no one’s wildest imaginings, not even those of Garcia Oliver, the most Bolshevik of us all, did the idea of taking revolutionary power arise. It was later, when the scale of the upheaval and the people’s initiatives became plain, that there began to be debate about whether or not we should go for broke.” [Abel Paz: <em>Durruti: El proletariado en armas</em> (Bruguera, Barcelona, 1978, pp. 381–382)]
[24] Among the most interesting of these are the anarchist Abel Paz (<em>Durruti: El proletariado en armas</em>), the Civil Guard Francisco Lacruz (<em>El alzamiento, la revolución y el terror en Barcelona</em>), the book, cited above, by Escofet, the Generalidad’s commissar for public order, and the memoirs of Abad de Santillán and Garcia Oliver. As for standard texts, we simply cannot fail to mention Burnett Bolloten <em>La Guerra civil española: Revolución y contrarrevolución</em> (Alianza Editorial, Madrid, 1989) and Pierre Broue <em>Staline et la revolution. Le cas espagnol</em> (Fayard, Paris, 1993).
[25] And which are of course the expression of a given <em>political viewpoint</em>, which may or may not be shared, but which we set out plainly here for what it is, without pretending to or invoking any nonexistent, hackneyed <strong>academic objectivity.</strong>
[26] And the People’s Executive Committee in Valencia or the Defense Committee in Madrid.
** <strong>3. From July to May: Uncontrollables or Revolutionaries?</strong>
The gestation of May 1937 began one week after the revolutionary events of July 1936.
In Catalonia, the revolutionary uprising of the working masses had successfully defeated the military, thrown the State’s administrative and repressive machinery into disarray and removed the bourgeois class from its leadership functions. Not only had the military rising against the Republic been frustrated, but the capitalist State itself had succumbed. The Catalan working class seized weapons from the barracks it had stormed, ensured that the repressive agencies fraternized with the people in arms and introduced a new, revolutionary order[27]: it organized and directed production inside firms, which were either collectivized or socialized: and set up People’s Militias, which set off for Aragon.
Power was in the streets. The people was armed. But no proletarian organization assumed power. The working class retained its trade union and political organizations, without creating new organs of (unified) workers’ power. And that is not all. In order to keep afloat the spectral, discredited and impotent bourgeois Generalidad government, which was melting like a sugar-cube, the so-called Central Antifascist Militias Committee (CAMC) was established. <strong>At no time</strong> was the CAMC ever the embryo of a new workers’ power: it was, rather, a class collaboration agency,[28] a provisional government that helped to restore the power of the bourgeois, republican Generalidad. The CAMC supplanted the Generalidad government in those functions — relative to the army, public order and production — which there was no one else capable of performing, following the disintegration of bourgeois institutions. President Company’s power was merely nominal, but it was also the potential power of the capitalist State, which anarchists not merely allowed to subsist but actually helped to survive and resurrect itself, allowing it to “legalize,” post facto, the revolutionary gains made during the events in July. Without looking for it, the CAMC acquired all of the accoutrements of a government. But instead of centralizing the revolutionary power of the committees — local committees, defense committees, workers’ committees, peasants’ committees and committees of every sort — it became the chief impediment to their unification and reinforcement. The CAMC was a life-jacket tossed to a Generalidad awash in a sea of local revolutionary committees, isolated from one another, which in Catalonia wielded the only real power between July 19 and September 26.[29]
<strong>At no point was there a dual power situation in existence.</strong> This notion is <em>crucial</em> to any understanding of the Spanish revolution and civil war. The CAMC was a class collaborationist agency. It was not the germ of workers’ power <strong>at loggerheads</strong> with the power of the capitalist State. And this was obvious to all the main political leaders,[30] whether or not participants in the CAMC. For this reason, the dissolution of the CAMC was not a traumatic event, nor unduly important: it was just one of many steps in the process of reconstructing the State power, dismantled and battered after the July events. The formation of the new Generalidad government, with the CNT and the POUM being incorporated into it, was the logical sequel to the work carried out by the various parties and trade unions within the CAMC.
This counterrevolutionary process, this process of reconstruction of capitalist State power necessarily spawned a number of contradictions, and naturally was camouflaged or covered up by the CNT’s leading cadres with the familiar “circumstancialist” arguments invoking antifascist unity, the need to win the war, the CNT’s being a minority elsewhere in Spain, the dangers of scandalizing the western democracies, etc. Or even the most naive argument — that they were <em>turning away</em> from an “anarchist dictatorship.”
For the CNT, the chief contradiction in this unstoppable reconquest of all of the capitalist State’s proper functions, lay in the fact that this was feasible only at the cost of an equally continuous and irreversible loss of the “gains” which the masses had won in July.
Between December 1936 and May 1937, we witness a tug of war and a growing tension between constant concessions by the CNT, marginalization of the POUM, the Generalidad’s insatiable pressure to recover all of its functions, and the overbearing pressures from the Soviets and their infiltration into the State apparatuses, in Catalonia and in the central government alike.
It was for that reason that the Control Patrols, and everything having to do with public order, border control and communications, were in the eye of the hurricane. For revolutionary militants, labeled “uncontrollables” in the terminology of their adversaries, retention of control over public order, the borders and communications and, of course, the existence of the Control Patrols were the basic threshold marking the point of no return in the unceasing concessions by the CNT leadership.
The revolutionary insurrection of July 1936 had been based on the district or local Defense Committees set up and trained many months in advance.[31] In the wake of the July events, the Control Patrols were afforded “legal” recognition as a revolutionary police answerable to the CAMC.
But the Control Patrols did not account for the whole of the insurrectionist movement. There were also all these district or local Defense Committees and other groups and militants. Furthermore, we need to underline the radically different natures of the Control Patrols and the Defense Committees. The Control Patrols were an organization created by the CAMC, to which they owed their organization, orders and manpower. The Defense Committees were a CNT insurgent agency, in existence from well before July 1936. The Control Patrols were the <em>institutionalization</em> of the success of the workers’ uprising; the Defense Committees, converted into Revolutionary Committees, which led a vegetative existence between July 1936 and May 1937, represented the <em>insurrectionist movement</em>.[32] Hence the attacks by all political forces, including the CNT-FAI and POUM, upon the so-called “uncontrollables.”
This derogatory label fitted comfortably with facile highlighting of outrages and abuses by a few delinquents. But the charge also targeted the CNT and the measure of its “control” over its own membership. Indeed, in the newspapers — not excepting the confederal press, the vast majority of which supposed collaborationism — the term “uncontrollable” was used as a synonym for criminal. This implication was unremarkable in the bourgeois or Stalinist press, because they regarded revolutionaries as criminals. The serious paradox was when the CNT or the POUM used the idea of “uncontrollable” to excuse abandonment of their own ideological principles.
In every revolutionary process, there arise groups or individuals who utilize force of arms for their own advantage. But this minority can quickly and easily be subdued by a consolidated workers’ power, as the Russian case demonstrates. In the Catalan case, it is apparent that the attack on the “uncontrollables” is almost always an attack upon proletarian justice (alien to bourgeois legality) and on revolutionaries, which is to say, on those refusing to let go of the gains secured by the proletariat in the July uprising, or indeed, keen to take them “further.”[33]
Let us caution the reader that this approach presupposes a very particular political option[34] that examines and accounts for the events, ideologies and contradictions of the Spanish revolution of 1936–1939 in terms of the consequence of the non-existence of a revolutionary party.
Naturally, the term “uncontrollable” was not, and even today, is not employed as an innocent, neutral term. It is absolutely a derogatory, class term, through which the bourgeoisie was trying to discredit and defame revolutionaries. It is no accident that in May 1937 the Friends of Durruti were obliged to hear themselves insulted as uncontrollables as well as agents provocateurs and mavericks, even by the FAI itself. Their only offense was to have attempted to present revolutionary goals to the proletariat fighting on the barricades.
In every historical narrative, there is always an option in favor of a particular political assumption. Very rarely is it explicit, and it is virtually always denied and hidden, in favor of a supposed “objectivity” which is both sublimated and nonexistent.[35]
One final observation: May 1937 signaled the final defeat of the revolutionary process launched in July 1936. But it was not the end of the process of counterrevolution, nor the end of CNT collaborationism, which would culminate in the conclusion of the CNT-UGT pact in March-April 1938 and in entry into the Negrin government.
**
[27] See Balius’s arguments: “the establishment of committees of workers, peasants, militians and sailors was an instantaneous reaction to the destruction of the capitalist machinery of coercion. There was not a single factory, working class district, village, militias battalion or vessel where a committee was not set up. The committee was the ultimate authority, whose ordinances and agreements had to be abided by. Its justice, revolutionary justice, to the exclusion of every other (...) the only law was the imperious requirements of the revolution. Most of the committees were democratically elected by the workers, militians, sailors and peasants, regardless of denomination, thereby representing proletarian democracy, superseding a treacherous bourgeois parliamentary democracy. In short, there was but one power in the workplace: labor and the workers.
<br>
Generally, expropriation of the bourgeoisie and landowners was carried out as the committees were established (...) there was a similar transfer of powers with regard to arms. (...) Militias were set up (...) Control patrols were founded to see to the maintenance of the nascent, new revolutionary order (...)
<br>
The Spanish proletariat’s answer (...) was highly categorical and intelligent. The reaction had been crushed on the streets and expropriated economically, and the proletariat set itself up as the country’s arbiter (...)”
<br>
(Jaime Balius “Recordando julio de 1936” in <em>Le Combat syndicaliste</em> of April 1, 1971) [This article by Balius lifts whole sentences, word for word, from pages 292–294 of G. Munis’s book <em>Jalones de derrota, promesa de victoria</em> (Zero, Bilbao, 1977)]
[28] See, for instance, the sharp and radical alternative posited by Garcia Oliver: “Between social revolution and the Militias’ Committee, the Organization plumped for the Militias Committee.” (Juan Garcia Oliver <em>El eco de los pasos</em> Ruedo Ibérico, Paris-Barcelona, 1978, p. 188)
[29] Munis contends that after the July events all that remained was the governing power of the committees: “If the situation in the weeks following July 19 is to be characterized more precisely, it has to be defined as power diffused into the hands of the proletariat and the peasants. These were fully cognizant of their local power, although they lacked appreciation of the need to coordinate their power across the country. For its part, during those first weeks, the bourgeois Government lacked the capacity and will to combat the nascent workers’ power. There can be no talk of duality until later, when the Popular Front government came to, realized that it had survived, marshaled around itself whatever armed forces it could muster and set about contesting power with the committees of the proletariat and peasants.” (G. Munis “Significado histórico del 19 de julio” in <em>Contra la corriente</em> No. 6, Mexico, August 1943.)
<br>
We shall not here enter into analysis of the dual power thesis advanced by Munis for the period following July 19, 1936, which is to say, for the period between early October 1936 and May 1937. The difference between the position of the Italian Fraction and Munis’s position resides in the fact that the Bordiguists reckoned that, in the absence of utter destruction of the capitalist State, there can be no talk of revolution, whereas Munis took the line that the bourgeois State had been momentarily eclipsed. We simply point out the discrepancy and shall delve no further into the issue. What we are concerned to indicate here is the role played by the CAMC as a class collaborationist agency.
[30] This has been explicitly stated by, among others, figures as prominent and simultaneously so politically divergent as Garcia Oliver, Nin, Tarradellas, Azaña and Balius himself. See especially Nin’s article “El problema de los órganos de poder en la revolución espanola,” published in French in <em>Juillet. Rvue internationale du POUM</em> No. 1, Barcelona-Paris, June 1937.
[31] See Juan Garcia Oliver <em>El movimiento libertario en España</em> (2) Colección de Historia Oral. Fundación Salvador Segui, Madrid, undated.
[32] See the detailed description offered by Abel Paz: <em>Viaje al pasado (1936–1939)</em> (Ed. del Autor, Barcelona, 1995, pp. 63–64):
<br>
The Defense Committees which, with the army coup attempt, had turned into Revolutionary Committees, once the Central Antifascist Militias Committee of Catalonia had been launched, had ignored the latter’s authority and their activities had led to a local orchestration, based in the Casa CNT-FAI itself, making these committees a power within the power of the CNT-FAI higher committees; but they were a real power, greater even than the power of the higher committees. Each district committee had its own defense groups at its disposal. Groups comprised an indeterminate membership that could oscillate between six and ten. Every one of these comrades had a rifle and even a pistol kept permanently in his care. The Clot district, where I operated, boasted 15 defense groups, which, at a conservative estimate, meant around a hundred rifles. But to this strength must be added the factory groups, with their roots in the Clot district; these too had their own defense groups with their own weapons, up to and including machine-guns. Finally, the Libertarian Youth groups and anarchist groups also had to be included. This motley assortment was the material with which our district’s Defense Committee had to work.
[33] See, for instance, Garcia Oliver’s threatening and contemptuous snubbing of Companys when the latter called at the CACM headquarters on July 25<sup>th</sup> to register a protest at the civil disorder and the activities of uncontrollables, in Juan Garcia Oliver <em>El Eco de los Pasos</em> op. cit. pp. 193–194.
[34] As spelled out in the thesis on the nature of the revolution and the Spanish civil war set out in Chapter 2 of this edition (No. 3) of <em>Balance</em>. See also No. 1 of <em>Balance</em>, which examines the theses of the Italian Fraction (Bordiguists) on the Spanish civil war.
[35] See the defamatory remarks about the Catalan anarchist movement and the allegations made against Jaime Balius or Antonio Martin, who are depicted as savage ogres by H. Raguer, J.M. Solé and J. Villarroya, who espouse a “neutrality” which is bourgeois, sanctimonious and Catalanist. See, for instance, the utterly extravagant accusations, dissevered from the context of a revolutionary situation proper, leveled at Balius on pages 256–258 of the book by the Benedictine friar H. Raguer <em>Divendres de passió</em> . <em>Vida i mort de Carrasco i Formiguera</em> (Pub. Abadia Montserrat, Barcelona, 1984) and on pages 67 and 68 of <em>La repressió a la reraguarda de Catalunya (1936–1939)</em> (Pub. Abadia Montserrat, Barcelona, 1989) by J.M. Solé Sabate and J. Villarroya Font. Also worth mentioning is a little volume offering a Catalanist version of the anarchist government of Cerdañia, which involved complete anarchist control of the border with France, and of the bloody incidents in Belver, (a direct precedent of the May Events in Barcelona), following which the Generalidad government managed to capture absolute control in that border region. See J. Pons i Porta and J.M. Solé i Sabate <em>Anarquia i Republica a la Cerdanya (1936–1939) El “Cojo de Málaga” i els fets de Bellver</em> (Pub. Abadia Montserrat, Barcelona, 1991). It has to be stressed that all of these books have been published by the publishing house of the Montserrat Monastery, which of course suggests plain ideological servility, which we refuse to accept as valid in any “objective” evaluation of Jaime Balius and Antonio Martin, much less their constant delirium, defamation and prejudices with regard to the libertarian movement.
<br>
See too the nonsense and outrageous remarks about Balius, and the derogatory remarks about the libertarian movement, uttered from a pedantic, academic perspective, incapable of comprehending the meaning in the 1930s of an action group, a trade union, a workers’ athenaeum or a general strike, in the article “Grupos de afinidad, disciplina belica y periodismo libertario, 1936–1938” by Susana Tavera and Enric Ucelay da Cal, in <em>História Contemporánea</em> No. 9, (Servicio Ed. Universidad del Pais Vasco, 1993)
<br>
By contrast, well worth reading are Josep Eduard Adsuar’s interesting and illuminating articles on the libertarian movement. See, for example, “El Comitè Central de Milicies Antifeixistes” in <em>L’Avenç</em> No. 14 (March 1979), “La fascinación del poder: Diego Abad de Santillán en el ojo del huracán” in <em>Anthropos</em> No. 138 (November 1992). Very interesting too are articles by Anna Monjo and Carme Vega in the review <em>Historia Oral</em> No. 3, (1990): “Clase obrera y guerra civil” and “Socialización y Hechos de Mayo,” and, of course, <em>Els treballadors i la guerre civil. Historia d’una indústria catalana colectivitzada</em> by Anna Monjo and Carme Vega ((Empuries, Barcelona, 1986)
<br>
** <strong>4. Origins of the Friends of Durruti; The Opposition to Militarization and Balius’s Journalistic Career</strong>
The Friends of Durruti Group was formally launched on March 17, 1937, although its origins can be traced back to October 1936. The Group was the confluence of two main currents: the opposition on the part of anarchist militians from the Durruti Column (and the Iron Column[36]) to militarization of the people’s militias, and the opposition to governmentalism, best articulated in the writings of Jaime Balius (though not Jaime Balius only) in <em>Solidaridad Obrera</em> between July and November 1936, in <em>Ideas</em>, between December 1936 and April 1937, and in <em>La Noche</em> between March and May 1937.
Both currents, the “militia” current repudiating militarization of the people’s militias, as represented by Pablo Ruiz, and the “journalistic” critique of the CNT-FAI’s collaboration with the government, as spearheaded by Jaime Balius, opposed the CNT’s circumstantialist ideology (which provided the alibi for the jettisoning of anarchism’s quintessential and fundamental characteristics) as embodied, to varying degrees, by Federica Montseny, Garcia Oliver, Abad de Santillán or Juan Peiro, among others.
Repudiation of militarization of the People’s Militias caused grave unease in several anarchist militia units, and was articulated at the plenum of confederal and anarchist columns held in Valencia from February 5 to 8, 1937.[37] Pablo Ruiz attended as delegate from the Durruti Column’s militians of the Gelsa sector who were resistant to militarization, and Francisco Pellicer[38] was present to represent the militians of The Iron Column. The Gelsa sector even witnessed a defiant refusal to comply with the orders received from the CNT and FAI Regional Committees that militarization be accepted. The acrimony between those Durruti Column militians who agreed to the militarization and those who rejected it caused serious problems, leading in the end to the formation of a commission from the Column, headed by Manzana, which raised the problem with the Regional Committee. The upshot of these discussions was the decision that all militians be given a fortnight to choose one of two courses of action: accept the militarization imposed by the Republican government, or quit the front.[39]
Balius’s journalistic trajectory between July 1936 and the end of the war is very telling. His political stance of advocacy of permanent revolution remained virtually unchanged whereas his professional and personal standing underwent rapid change with the incoming tide of counterrevolution.
Between July and early November 1936, Balius, who, with no help other than his friend Gilabert, saw to it that <em>Solidaridad Obrera</em> hit the streets on July 20,[40] published numerous articles in that paper, the chief organ of the CNT. Some were purely informative[41] in character, as was appropriate for journalistic reportage: but many of them, and without doubt the most interesting among them, were expressions of political opinion. These articles, which filled a regular column in <em>Solidaridad Obrera,</em> [42] occasionally appeared on the cover by way of editorial comment by the paper.[43] And there is every likelihood that Balius was the writer of several editorials (in September-October 1936), published without byline[44] as expressions of the <em>Solidaridad Obrera</em> policy line. But whatever the extent of his involvement in the drafting of these editorials, it can be affirmed beyond doubt of any sort that Balius, through the pages of the CNT’s organ in Catalonia, in September and October 1936, during Liberto Callejas’s time as managing editor, played a very prominent ideological role as molder and shaper of the political stance of the CNT’s main daily newspaper. Ever present in his articles was insistence upon defense of the revolutionary gains of July and the need to press these home to which end he urged tough, decisive repressive measures or, as Balius liked to call them, invoking the French Revolution, “public safety” measures against the counterrevolutionary threat from the bourgeoisie.[45]
At the beginning of November 1936, Liberto Callejas was stood down as managing editor of <em>Solidaridad Obrera</em>. Jacinto Toryho was appointed in his place.[46] Bear in mind that at the beginning of November Durruti had gone to the Madrid front and four confederal ministers had joined the Republican government. Toryho’s appointment was in response to the need for the director of <em>Solidaridad Obrera</em> to be an adamant champion of the CNT’s circumstantialist and collaborationist policy. By the end of December, Toryho had managed to get rid of Liberto Callejas’s old editorial team of Jaime Balius, Mingo, Alejandro Gilabert, Pintado, Galipienzo, Borras, Gamón,[47] etc., who were against the official CNT policy, and their place was taken by contributions from prominent anarcho-syndicalist leaders such as Peiró, Montseny and Abad de Santillán, faithful friends of Toryho, such as Leandro Blanco (erstwhile editor of a monarchist newspaper) and the prestigious bylines of “progressives” like Cánovas Cervantes and Zamacois.[48]
One of the last articles Balius published in <em>Solidaridad Obrera</em> (on December 6, 1936) under the title “Durruti’s testament,” is deserving of a detailed mention. The article is a commentary upon the radio broadcast made by Durruti from Madrid on November 5,[49] only days before he died: written in what might have appealed to many anarchists a provocative manner, this article gives us an inkling of what was to become one of the basic ideological pillars of the future Friends of Durruti Group, namely, the <em>totalitarian</em> character of any proletarian revolution:
<quote>
Durruti bluntly stated that we anarchists require that the revolution be of a totalitarian nature. And that the comrades standing up to fascism so doggedly on the fields of battle are not prepared to let anyone tamper with the revolutionary and liberating import of this present hour.
(...) Durruti’s testament lives on. It lingers with even greater force than on the night he harangued us. We shall see to it that his last wishes are made a reality.
</quote>
December 29, 1936 saw the appearance of the first issue of <em>Ideas</em> the mouthpiece of the CNT federation in the Bajo Llobregat comarca. Balius had an article published in virtually every edition of <em>Ideas</em>. His articles insistently denounced the advance of the counterrevolution.[50] Outstanding among them was the attack upon the President of the Generalidad, Luis Companys, which was carried in <em>Ideas</em> No. 15 of April 8, 1937, under the title “Let’s make revolution.”[51]
<em>Ideas</em> was a direct antecedent of <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em>. Although not every contributor to <em>Ideas</em>[52] was a member of the Friends of Durruti, we can state that, along with <em>Acracia</em> in Lerida,[53] <em>Ideas</em>was the most outstanding mouthpiece of the anarchist revolutionary current prior to May.
Balius was appointed director of <em>La Noche</em> on January 26, 1937 by the Local Federation of Unions. <em>La Noche</em> was an evening daily, run by a cooperative of workers, most of whom belonged to the CNT, although it was not part of the <em>organizational</em> press of the CNT.
It was in La Noche of March 2, 1937 that the first report came of the aims and membership conditions of a new anarchist grouping which had taken the name of the “Friends of Durruti Group.”[54] Between early March and the May events, La Noche, while it never became the Group’s official mouthpiece, became, thanks to its not being an organizational paper, the paper in which the Friends of Durruti were able to give free expression to their criticisms of the official policy of the CNT.
Without doubt the most outstanding articles are those from Balius, but we cannot fail to mention those above the signature of Mingo, on the subject of the Municipality and trade union management of the economy, because these represent a very significant factor in the political theory of the Friends of Durruti.
In the March 2, 1937 edition, Balius published an article entitled “Careful, workers, Not a single step backwards,” which had the merit of catching the eye of Nin, who, in the March 4<sup>th</sup> edition of <em>La Batalla</em> , gave a glowing welcome to the views set out by Balius, and also to the launching of the Friends of Durruti Group announced in the same edition, on account of the chances that it might give a revolutionary fillip to the CNT masses, whom the anarchist leaders were leading down the path of the crassest and most short-sighted reformism.
In that article, Balius railed against the view, increasingly widespread in some anarchist circles, that, if the war was to be won, the revolution had to be abjured. And he bluntly cited an article signed by the prominent <em>treintista</em> militant Juan Peiró. After noting the onslaught of counterrevolution, which was now demanding that the Control Patrols be disbanded, he placed the blame for this upon the ongoing policy of appeasement pursued by the CNT. The article called for an amendment of this policy, for only if the revolution made headway in the rearguard could the war be won on the battle-fronts. The article’s title, “Not a single step backwards!” was therefore a very telling one.
On March 6, 1937, Balius had an article in <em>La Noche</em>entitled “Counter-revolutionary Postures. Neutral positions are damaging,” in which he catalogued the features of the new security force set up by the Generalidad government, identifying it as a bourgeois corps in the service of the capitalist State and inimical to the most elementary interests of the workers.
March 8, 1937 saw the publication in <em>La Noche</em> of one of those articles so typical of Balius’s style, where, through an astute admixture of news and opinion, he recorded the spectacle of trains crammed with residents of Barcelona off into the countryside in search of foodstuffs. By means of a description of the folk thronging the carriages, Balius lashed out at the new approach being adopted in the provision of supplies, an approach introduced by the Stalinist leader, Comorera.
In its March 11, 1937 edition, <em>La Noche</em> carried an article paying tribute to the figure of Durruti. Balius recalled the address given by Durruti over the radio from the Madrid front just days before he died, an address in which he had deplored the failures of the rearguard to take the war to its heart. The solution, as Durruti saw it, lay in waging war properly, enrolling the bourgeois into fortification battalions and placing all workers on a war footing. According to Balius, Durruti’s death had been followed by a funeral fit for a king, but no one had taken his reasoning to heart. As a result, the journalist concluded, the argument was beginning to be heard that the civil war was a war of independence and not the class war that Durruti had called for. Balius closed the article by asserting that Durruti was more relevant than ever, and that there could be no loyalty to his memory that did not include subscription to his ideas.
The following day, March 12, Balius had a piece in <em>La Noche</em> entitled “Comments by Largo Caballero: Counter-revolution on the march,” in which he was critical of statements by the UGT leader, describing them as counterrevolutionary, in that they confirmed an intention to revert to the situation which had obtained prior to July 19, with the collectivizations and socializations of firms being dismantled just as soon as the war was won.
In <em>La Noche</em> of March 13, 1937, Balius had an article entitled “We must wage war. Our future requires it,” calling for a war economy and criticizing the Generalidad’s economic policy.
Balius’s article, “Fascist barbarism. We must use the mailed fist” (in <em>La Noche</em> of March 16, 1937) referred to the air raids on Barcelona, attacked the exchanges of refugees through the embassies and called for the stamping out of the fifth column. He even recommended that neighborhood watch committees be set up. The writer’s conclusion was that an immediate purge of the rearguard was imperative and a necessary prerequisite for success in the war:
<quote>
No purge has been made of the rearguard. (...) Fascists are still at large in huge numbers. (...) Our enemies must be rounded up and eliminated (...) Anyone attempting to dampen the fires of popular justice is an enemy of the Revolution. Let us act with the utmost vigor. Heedless of our soft hearts, let us show the mailed fist.
</quote>
The March 18<sup>th</sup> edition of <em>La Noche</em> carried an insertion reporting the formal launching of the Friends of Durruti. Félix Martin(ez) was listed as the group’s secretary and Jaime Balius as vice-secretary. José Paniagua, Antonio Puig, Francisco Carreño, Pablo Ruiz, Antonio Romero, Serafin Sobias and Eduardo Cervera were listed as members of the steering committee.
On Tuesday, March 23, 1937, Balius had a piece published in <em>La Noche</em> under the title “Time to be specific: Catalonia’s role in the Spanish Revolution,” wherein he championed the Catalan proletariat’s role as the driving force of a thorough-going social revolution, which was not, as in Madrid and other regions in Spain, hobbled by the immediate needs of the war.
In the March 24<sup>th</sup> edition, the paper carried a lengthy interview with Pablo Ruiz, a member of the Group and spokesman for the Gelsa militias opposed to militarization of the columns. We are offered a short but intriguing biographical sketch of Pablo Ruiz, thanks to which we know that he was a member of the Figols revolutionary committee back on January 8, 1933, that he fought at the head of forty men in Las Rondas and the Paralelo in the July events, that he had a hand in the siege and final assault upon the Atarazanas barracks, alongside Durruti and Ascaso, and that he had set off for the Aragon front in the Durruti Column, and had been on active service there in the Gelsa sector ever since. After a paean to the virtues and advantages of the anarchist peasant collectivizations in Aragon, the interviewer asks his views on militarization. His answer was considered, prudent and nuanced: but at the same time quite coherent and radical, as if to underline the incompatibility between anarchist<em>Ideas</em>and the war’s being directed by the bourgeoisie and the Republican State:
<quote>
to reorganization of the Army, we have no objection, for it ought to be remembered that we were the first to call for a single, common command (...) in the care of delegates from the various columns by way of ensuring homogeneity in the performance of them all. Let restructuring proceed, but let the people’s Army not be in thrall to the Generalidad, nor to the Central Government. It must be under the Confederation’s control.”
</quote>
In the interview, Pablo Ruiz alludes to the constant retreat from the revolutionary gains of July and to the inception of the Friends of Durruti:
<quote>
When we left for the front we left it to our comrades to ensure that the Revolution would march on to victory, in the anarchist sense. But, in the elaboration of that Revolution, a role has been assigned to the bourgeois parties which had no feeling for the revolution, in that their task was to champion the interests of the petite bourgeoisie and of the UGT which had a very tiny following in Catalonia compared to ours. (...) By entering into a compact with them, we have lost hegemony over the Revolution and have found ourselves required to compromise day after day, with the result that the Revolution has been disfigured as the initial revolutionary gains have been whittled away.
Out of this has arisen the formation of the “Friends of Durruti,” in that this new organization has as its primary object the preservation, intact, of the postulates of the CNT-FAI.
</quote>
Pablo Ruiz concluded the interview by setting out his own view of how the revolution might be set back on the right track: 1. Propaganda should be carried out within the CNT, without recourse to violence. 2. There should be pressure for trade union (CNT) direction of the economy. 3. The political parties should be pushed aside. 4. No alliance and no compromise with the forces harboring the counterrevolution, that is, the PSUC and the UGT:
<quote>
The direction of the economy and of society ought to be vested in the trade union organization [the CNT], with no place for the political parties, on the basis that these do not meet the criteria to be regarded as renovative. None of which implies imposition through force, but rather through propaganda within CNT ranks. [...] And I am opposed to involving the political parties, being convinced that that would entail loss of the revolution, which has to be prosecuted by every means short of compromise with groups that not only have no feeling for the revolution but are also in the minority.
</quote>
Balius published (in the March 27, 1937 edition <em>La Noche</em>) an article entitled “The revolution has its requirements. All power to the unions,” in which he dealt with the protracted crisis in the Generalidad government. His view of the trade unions as organs of the revolution is very interesting. He classified the Generalidad government crisis as the product of the tensions characterizing a situation of dual power: the Generalidad made laws and passed decrees, but the unions paid no heed to the Generalidad’s decisions. In Balius’s view, for the revolution to move forward and consolidate, power had to pass to the working class, and this was encapsulated in the slogan: ‘All power to the unions.’
Balius also penned an intriguing article entitled “A historical moment. A categorical dilemma” (<em>La Noche</em> April 5, 1937), in which he probed the significance of the crisis in the Generalidad government. As far as Balius was concerned, the Generalidad was a relic from the past, one that was incongruent with the new revolutionary needs:
<quote>
The Generalidad government is a hang-over from the past, from a petit-bourgeois system that involves all sorts of incongruencies, vacillation and hypocrisy.
</quote>
Thus, according to Balius, there could be only one resolution of the Generalidad government crisis. A change of government personnel would achieve nothing. And Balius even made a veiled <strong>appeal for the CNT to replace the Generalidad with the power of the workers, and sweep the counterrevolutionary parties out of existence:</strong>
<quote>
We are not pessimists, but we honestly believe that we have not been equal to the challenge.
The dilemma cannot be sidestepped. The future of the proletariat requires heroic decisions. If there are some organizations attempting to strangle the revolution, we must be ready to shoulder the responsibility of a moment in history which, by reason of its very grandeur, presupposes a series of measures and decisions that are not out of tune with the present hour.
<strong>With the Revolution, or lined up against it.</strong> There can be no middle ground.
</quote>
In <em>La Noche</em> of April 7<sup>th</sup>, Balius had an article entitled “In this grave hour. The sovereign will resides in the people,” in which he reiterated the viewpoint he had spelled out in his April 5<sup>th</sup> article and repeated his attacks on Companys.
Also in <em>La Noche</em>, there were several articles by Mingo,[55] remarkable for their vehemence, sounding the alarm about the advance of the counterrevolution, eulogizing anarchism’s revolutionary spirit (which was held to be incompatible with governmental collaborationism, which had to be ended forthwith), attacking the UGT, the PSUC, Comorera and Companys over their constant defamation of the Confederation, agreeing that there was an overriding need (as spelled out by Balius) to do away with the Generalidad, and echoing the growing malaise among the people. But the most interesting of these articles was the one given over to the municipalities, because his thinking (merely outlined here) was to be spelled out in full in the program set out by the Friends of Durruti in <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em> after May. In that article,[56] Mingo stated:
<quote>
The municipality is the authentic revolutionary government.
</quote>
According to Mingo, ever since July 19, 1936, the Generalidad government had been redundant. The only policy now was economic policy, and that was the province of the trade unions. So, according to Mingo, the municipality, run by the workers, with economic policy supervised by the workers, could and should have stepped into the shoes of the State.
In the April 14, 1937 edition of the daily <em>La Noche</em>, Balius had an article, “A historic date: April 14,” marking the anniversary of the proclamation of the Republic, in which he underlined the petit-bourgeois character of the day when the Republic was proclaimed, attacked Catalanism, whether right-wing or left-wing, Macià or Cambó, in that both had forsworn their nationalism in the face of threats from the Catalan proletariat.
Without the slightest doubt, these articles of Balius’s, (and of other members of the Friends of Durruti), touching upon such a wide variety of topics, generally political opinion, but also with a news content, were the mortar binding together a critical current of opposition to the CNT’s collaborationist policy. Balius was not the sole critic, but he was one of the most outstanding and of course the one most consistent, coherent and radical. Balius’s merit resides in his having secured the backing of a sizable group of militians opposed to the militarization of the Militias. The conjunction of these militians, led by Pablo Ruiz, with other anarcho-syndicalists opposed to the CNT’s collaborationist policy found its political views articulated in theoretical terms in Balius’s articles and criticisms. Those views were to crystallize in the program set out on the poster dating from late April 1937 and would be spelled out in greater detail in <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em> newspaper, published after the May Events.
So, to sum up: although the Friends of Durruti Grouping was formally launched on March 17, 1937, its origins can be traced to the deep-seated malaise created in militians’ ranks by the Generalidad decree on militarization of the People’s Militias, which is to say, to late October 1936, when Durruti was still alive. Then again, Balius had come to prominence as early as 1935 as a journalist and anarchist ideologue, known for his interesting theoretical contributions on nationalism, his savage criticisms of the Catalan bourgeoisie’s political activities, his attacks on Macià and Companys, his expose of the Catalanist fascism embodied in Dencas and Badia, as well as his analysis of the events of October 1934 in Catalonia from a CNT perspective. Nor was collaboration between Jaime Balius and Pablo Ruiz anything new, since they had jointly written a pamphlet[57] and had both belonged to the same anarchist affinity group, “Renacer” — that being the name of the publishing house which had issued Balius’s pamphlets prior to July 1936.[58] In addition to Jaime Balius and Pablo Ruiz, the “Renacer” group included Francisco Pellicer (who would be the Iron Column’s delegate during the civil war) and Bruno Lladó (who was a Sabadell city councilor during the war and the Generalidad Department of Economy’s comarcal delegate).[59]
**
[36] On the Iron Column, see Abel Paz’s splendid study <em>Crònica de la Columna de Ferro</em> (Hacer, Barcelona, 1984). As early as September and October 1936, the Iron Column had figured in sensational incidents concerned with cleansing the rearguard (Valencia city), traveling there from the front lines in order to demand the disarmament and disbanding of armed corps in the service of the State and the despatching of their members to front-line service. Repudiation of militarization of the militias was debated inside the Iron Column as it was in every other confederal column. In the end, the Column’s assembly gave its approval to militarization, since it would otherwise be denied weapons, pay and provisions. Then again, in the event of its being disbanded, there was a danger that the militians might enlist into other, already militarized units.
[37] Frank Mintz <em>La autogestión en la España revolucionaria</em> (La Piqueta, Madrid, 1977) pp. 295–308. Also Abel Paz, op. cit. pp. 275–294. And Paul Sharkey <em>The Friends of Durruti: A Chronology</em> (Editorial Crisol, Tokyo, May 1984).
[38] Jaime Balius, Pablo Ruiz and Francisco Pellicer were the leading organizers behind the meeting held by the Friends of Durruti in the Poliorama Theater on Sunday, April 19, 1937.
[39] See Jaime Balius’s interview with Pablo Ruiz in the newspaper <em>La Noche</em> No. 3545 (March 24, 1937): and <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em> No. 5 (July 21, 1937): and Paul Sharkey, op. cit.
[40] “Ponencia que a la Asamblea del Sindicato presenta la sección de periodistas para que sea tomada en consideración y elevada al Pleno y pueda servir de controversia al informe que presente el director interino de <em>Solidaridad Obrera</em>,” dated Barcelona, February 21 and 22, 1937, on behalf of the Asamblea de la Sección de Periodistas. [Document on deposit with the Archivo Histórico Municipal de Barcelona (AHMB).]
[41] See some of the new articles carried by <em>Solidaridad Obrera</em>, like “La ciudad de Barcelona” (August 18, 1936), “En el nuevo local del Comite de Milicias Antifascistas” (August 23, 1936), “Ha caido en el cumplimiento de su deber” (October 3, 1936), “Los galeotos de la retaguardia” (October 4, 1936), “Solidaridad con los caidos...” (October 9, 1936) or “Los pájaros de la revolución” (October 16, 1936).
<br>
See also, in the September and October 1936 editions of <em>Solidaridad Obrera</em>, articles similar to those of Balius, under the bylines of Mingo, Floreal Ocaña, Gilabert, etc.
[42] Balius’s regular column was headlined “Como en la guerra,” and, on occasion, the articles were not credited. Endériz, among others, also had a regular column.
[43] See some of the articles above Balius’s byline carried on the cover, like “No podemos olvidar. 6 de octubre” (October 6, 1936), “la revolución no ha de frenarse. El léxico de la prensa burguesa es de un sabor contrarevolucionario” (October 15, 1936), “Como en la guerra. En los frentes de combate no han de faltar prendas que son indispensables para sobrellevar la campaña de invierno” (October 16, 1936).
[44] We must not omit to highlight (whether or not it was written by Balius) the editorial carried anonymously by <em>Solidaridad Obrera</em> (October 11, 1936) under the headline “Ha de constituirse el Consejo Nacional de Defensa,” because of the way in which it was taken up later in <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em>, as one of the most original points in the Friends of Durruti’s revolutionary program, to wit, the formation of a Revolutionary Junta or National Defense Council.
[45] See some of these articles of a political nature, in addition to those named above: “Ha de imponerse un tributo de guerra” (September 8, 1936), “Once de septiembre” (September 11, 1936), “Como en la guerra. Es de inmediata necesidad el racionamiento del consumo” (September 16, 1936), “Han triunfado las tacticas revolucionarias” (September 23, 1936), “Como en la guerra. La justicia ha de ser inflexible” (October 11, 1936), “Seamos conscientes. Por una moral revolucionaria” (October 18, 1936), “Problemas fundamentales de la revolución. La descentralización es la garantia que ha de recabar la clase trabajadora en defensa de la prerrogativas que se debaten en las lineas de fuego” (October 24, 1936), “Como en la guerra. Los agiotistas tienen pena de la vida” [an uncredited article which can be put down to Balius] (October 31, 1936), “Como en la guerra. La justicia ha de ser fulminante e intachable” [attributable to Balius] (November 1, 1936), “Como en la guerra. Se ha de establecer un control riguroso de la población” (November 3, 1936), “La cuestión catalana” (December 2, 1936), “El testamento de Durruti” (December 6, 1936) and “La revolución de julio ha de cellal el paso a los arribislas” (December 17, 1936).
[46] See the “Ponencia...” on deposit with the AHMB.
[47] See the “Ponencia...” on deposit with the AHMB.
[48] See Balius’s remarks on the replacement of Liberto Callejas by Jacinto Toryho as managing editor of <em>Solidaridad Obrera</em>, the CNT’s leading daily newspaper: “And I who served as editor [of <em>Soli</em>] alongside Alejandro Gilabert, Fontaura and others, ought to make it clear that a distinction has to be made between <em>Soli</em> under Liberto Callejas’s management and the <em>Soli</em> run by Jacinto Toryho. As long as Callejas was director the CNT’s July gains were at all times defended, and anarchist principles praised and propagated. But once Jacinto Toryho was imposed as director of <em>Solidaridad Obrera</em>, by the counterrevolutionaries ensconced in the committees, that is, by the cabal which has no goal other than to dispose of the authentic CNT, then not only was militarization championed, as F. Montseny implies, [but there was] something else. Day after day one could read in <em>Soli</em> about comrade Prieto and comrade Negrin. Let us come out with it all: men of dubious repute, like Canovas Cervantes and Leandro Blanco, former editor of <em>El Debate</em>, joined the editorial team at <em>Soli</em>. Life at <em>Soli</em> became impossible. I quit.” (Jaime Balius “Por los fueros de la verdad,” in <em>Le Combat Syndicaliste</em> of September 2, 1971.)
<br>
See also “Ponencia ...”
[49] Radio broadcast reprinted in <em>Solidaridad Obrera</em> (November 6,1936). That edition of <em>Soli</em> attributed the following words to Durruti: “If this militarization decreed by the Generalidad is intended to frighten us and force iron discipline upon us, they have made a mistake, and we invite those who devised the Decree to go to the front ... and then we will be able to make comparisons with the morale and discipline of the rearguard. Rest easy. On the front, there is no chaos, no indiscipline.”
[50] Balius’s most outstanding articles carried in<em>Ideas</em>are as follows: “La pequera burguesia es impotente para reconstruir España destruida por el fascismo” (No. 1, December 29, 1936), “La Revolución ha de seguir avanzando” (No. 3, January 14, 1937), “El fracaso de la democracia burguesa” (No. 4, January 21, 1937), “La Revolución exige un supremo esfuerzo” (No. 7, February 11, 1937), “Despues del 19 de julio” (No. 14, April 1, 1937) and “Hagamos la revolución” (No. 15, April 8, 1937).
<br>
No. 11 of <em>Ideas</em>(March 11, 1937) carries an unsigned article entitled “¡Destitución inmediata de Aiguadé!,” denouncing the counterrevolutionary activities of the Generalidad’s councilor for Security, two months ahead of the May events, over his theft of twelve tanks from the CNT through the use of forged documents, and over his systematic recruitment of monarchist and fascist personnel into the Generalidad’s Security Corps.
[51] Balius states: “It is intolerable that an individual without the slightest support in the workplace should attempt to lay claim to the Power which belongs to the working people alone. That of itself is enough to tell us that, had he a sizable body of men at his disposal, that same politician would once again place the working class in the capitalist harness. [...] For those guilty of the Revolution’s failure to sweep aside the enemies of the working class, we have to look to the workers’ ranks, to those who, for want of decisiveness in the early stages have allowed the counterrevolutionary forces to grow to such dimensions that it will be an expensive business to put them in their place.”
[52] Issue No. l of<em>Ideas</em>carries the following list of the editors of and contributors to the “mouthpiece of the Bajo Llobregat Libertarian Movement”: Liberto Callejas (former director of <em>Solidaridad Obrera</em>), Evelio G. Fontaura, Floreal Ocaña, José Abella and Ginés Alonso, as editors. And Senén Félix as administrator. As contributors: Jaime Balius, Nieves Núñez, Elias Garcia, Severino Campos, José Peirats (director of <em>Acracia</em> in Lerida and future historian of the Spanish anarchist movement), Fraterno Alba, Dr. Amparo Poch, Ricardo Riccetti, Ramón Calopa, Luzbel Ruiz, Vicente Marcet, Manuel Viñuales, Antonio Ocaña, Tomás and Benjamin Cano Ruiz, Francisco Carreño (a member of the Durruti Column, its delegate to Moscow and a future leading militant of the Friends of Durruti), Antollio Vidal, Felipe Alaiz (a prominent anarchist theorist), Acracio Progreso, Manuel Pérez, José Alberola and Miguel Giménez. The cartoonists included Joaquin Cadena and E. Badia and Bonet.
[53] For <em>Acracia</em> of Lerida and its director, Peirats, it is interesting to consult the latter’s memoirs, especially for the stark description of the tremendous disappointment which the CNT-FAI’s collaboration with the government created in lots of anarchist militants. See José Peirats Valls “Memorias,” in <em>Suplementos Anthropos</em>No. 18, Barcelona, January 1990.
<br>
In addition to<em>Ideas</em>in Hospilalet and <em>Acracia</em> in Lerida, the following were prominent anarcho-syndicalist opposition newspapers critical of the CNT’s collaborationism: <em>Ciudad y Campo</em> in Tortosa and <em>Nosotros</em> in Valencia. Mention should also be made of <em>Ruta</em> and <em>Esfuerzo</em>, organs of the Libertarian Youth of Catalonia.
[54] The notice in <em>La Noche</em> (March 2, 1937) states:
<br>
“At the instigation of a number of comrades of the anarchist Buenaventura Durruti who knew how to end his life with those same yearnings for liberation that marked his whole personal trajectory, it has been adjudged appropriate that a group should be launched to keep alive the memory of the man who, by dint of his integrity and courage, was the very symbol of the revolutionary era begun in mid-July. We invite all comrades who cherished Durruti while he was alive and who, after that giant’s death, have cherished the memory of that great warrior, to join the “Friends of Durruti.”
<br>
The “Friends of Durruti” is not just another club. Our intention is that the Spanish Revolution should be filled with our Durruti’s revolutionary spirit. The Friends of Durruti remain faithful to the last words uttered by our comrade in the very heart of Barcelona in denunciation of the work of the counterrevolution, tracing, with a manly hand, the route that we must take.
<br>
To enroll in our association, you must be a CNT member and furnish evidence of a record of struggle and of love for<em>Ideas</em>and for the revolution. For the time being, applications are being received at Rambla de Cataluña, 15, principal, (CNT Journalists’ branch) between five and seven in the evening. —
<br>
The steering commission —
[55] Articles in <em>La Noche</em> bearing Mingo’s signature are “Nuestra labor. La Revolución ha de seguir avallzando” (April 2, 1937), “Al pueblo se le ha de hablar claro”(April 8, 1937), “La Revolución exige una labor depuradora” (April 9, 1937) and “Una labor revolucionaria. La revalorización de los Municipios” (April 13, 1937).
[56] Mingo: “Una labor revolucionaria. La revalorización de los Municipios,” in <em>La Noche</em> (April 13, 1937).
[57] The pamphlet [which we have not been able to consult] jointly credited to Jaime Balius and Pablo Ruiz is entitled <em>Figols, 8 de enero, 8 de diciembre, y Octubre</em> and was published by Editorial Renacer.
[58] Although undated, these pamphlets by Balius came after October 1934 and before July 1936, and in order of publication they were: Jaime Balius <em>De Jaca a Octubre</em> Editorial Renacer, [Barcelona] undated; Jaime Balius <em>Octubre catalan</em> Editorial Renacer,[Barcelona] undated; and, Jaime Balius <em>El nacionalisrno y el proletariado</em> Editorial Renacer, [Barcelona] undated.
[59] As Balius stated in his letter of June 1, 1978 to Paul Sharkey: “I belonged to the FAI’s Renacer group along with comrades Pablo Ruiz, Francisco Pellicer, since deceased and Bruno Lladó, likewise deceased.” [Letter made available by Paul Sharkey, whom we thank for this information.]
<br>
** <strong>5. The Friends of Durruti Group from its Inception up to the May Events</strong>
In October 1936, the order militarizing the People’s Militias provoked great discontent among the anarchist militians of the Durruti Column on the Aragon front. Following protracted and bitter arguments, in February 1937 around thirty out of the 1,000 volunteer militians based in the Gelsa sector decided to quit the front and return to the rearguard.[60] The agreement was that militians opposed to militarization would be relieved over a fortnight. These then left the front, taking their weapons with them.
Back in Barcelona, along with other anarchists (advocates of prosecuting and pursuing the July revolution, and opposed to the CNT’s collaboration with the government), the militians from Gelsa decided to form an affinity group, like the many other affinity groups[61] in existence in anarcho-syndicalist circles. And so, the Group was formally launched in March 1937,[62] following a lengthy period of incubation that had lasted for several months, beginning in October 1936. The Steering Committee made the decision to adopt the name “Friends of Durruti Group,” the name being, in part, an invocation of their common origins as former militians in the Durruti Column, and, as Balius was correct in saying, there was no reference intended to Durruti’s thinking, but rather to his heroic death and mythic status in the eyes of the populace.
The Group’s central headquarters was located in the Ramblas, at the junction with the Calle Hospital. The membership of the Group grew remarkably quickly. Somewhere between four thousand and five thousand Group membership cards were issued. One of the essential requirements for Group membership was CNT membership. The growth of the Group was a consequence of anarchist unease with the CNT’s policy of compromise.
The Group was frenetically active and dynamic. Between its formal launch on March 17 and May 3, the Group mounted a number of rallies (in the Poliorama Theater on April 19 and the Goya Theater on May 2), issued several manifestoes and handbills and covered the walls of Barcelona with posters setting out its program.[63] Two points stood out in that program: 1. All power to the working class; and, 2. Democratic workers’, peasants’ and combatants’ organs as the expression of this workers’ power,[64] which was encapsulated in the term Revolutionary Junta.
They also called for the trade unions to take over the economic and political governance of the country completely. And when they talked about trade unions, they meant the CNT unions, not the UGT unions. In fact, some of the members of the Group had quit the UGT in order to affiliate straight away to the CNT, thereby fulfilling the essential prerequisite for membership of the Friends of Durruti.
In reality, although the working class provenance of the Group’s members ensured that they were CNT members, most were members of the FAI, on which basis it can be stated that the Friends of Durruti Group was a group of anarchists which took a stand on purist anarchist doctrine and opposed the collaborationist State-centered policy of the leadership of the CNT and of the FAI proper.
They had the upper hand inside the Foodstuffs Union, which had ramifications all over Catalonia, as well as in the mining areas of Sallent, Suria, Figols, and Cardona, in the Upper Llobregat comarca. They were influential in other unions too, where they were in the minority. Some members belonged to the Control Patrols. But at no time did they constitute a fraction or group, nor did they attempt to infiltrate the Patrols.
We cannot characterize the Group as a comprehensively conscious, organized group that would undertake methodical activity. It was one of many more or less informal anarchist groups formed around certain characteristic affinities. Nor were they good propagandists or theorists, but instead a group of proletarians alive to an <strong>instinctive</strong> need to confront the CNT’s policy of appeasement and the accelerating process of counterrevolution.
Without question, their most outstanding spokesmen were Jaime Balius and Pablo Ruiz. From March 1937 to May 1937, the Libertarian Youth of Catalonia[65] also set out in their wall newspaper[66] demands similar to those of the Friends of Durruti.
On April 14, 1937, the Group issued a Manifesto[67] in which it set its face against the bourgeois commemoration of the anniversary of the proclamation of the Republic, on the grounds that it was merely a pretext for reinforcing bourgeois institutions and the counterrevolution. Instead of commemoration of the Republic and in opposition to the Generalidad and Luis Companys, which were the cutting edge of bourgeois counterrevolution, the Friends of Durruti proposed commemoration of July 19<sup>th</sup> and exhorted the CNT and the FAI to come up with a revolutionary escape route from the dead-end street of the Generalidad government’s crisis. That crisis started on March 4<sup>th</sup> with a decree ordering dissolution of the Control Patrols: the CNT’s failure to comply implied the exclusion of CNT personnel from the Generalidad government.
The Manifesto catalogued a host of trespasses against revolutionaries, from the most celebrated case of Maroto, which even drew indignant comment from the docile <em>Solidaridad Obrera</em>, through to lesser known cases, such as the incidents in Olesa de Montserrat. In fact, the Manifesto reiterated the program points which had been incubating since early March in articles by Balius, Mingo and others in <em>La Noche</em>. And these were summed up in the opening paragraph of the Manifesto:
<quote>
The capitalist State, which suffered a formidable setback in the memorable events of July, is still extant, thanks to the counterrevolutionary endeavor of the petit-bourgeoisie [...]
The Generalidad crisis is categorical evidence that we have to build a new world, wholly dispensing with statist formulas.
It is high time that the legion of petit-bourgeois, shopkeepers and guards was ruthlessly swept aside. There can be no compromise with counterrevolution. [...]
This is a time of life or death for the working class. [...] Let us not hesitate.
The CNT and the FAI, being the organizations that reflect the people’s concerns, must come up with a revolutionary way out of the dead-end street [...] We have the organs that must supplant a State in ruins. The Trade Unions and Municipalities must take charge of economic and social life [...]”
</quote>
On Sunday April 18, 1937, the Group held a rally in the Poliorama Theater, by way of bringing its existence and its program to the attention of the public.[68] Jaime Balius, Pablo Ruiz (delegate from the Gelsa Group), Francisco Pellicer (a delegate from the Iron Column) and Francisco Carreño (a member of the Durruti Column’s War Committee) all spoke. The meeting was a great success and the<em>Ideas</em>set out by the speakers were roundly applauded.
On the first Sunday in May 1937 (May 2) the Group held a further introductory rally at the Goya Theater: the theater was filled to overflowing and the rally moved those attending to delirious enthusiasm. A documentary film entitled “Nineteenth of July” was screened, reliving the most emotive passages from the revolutionary events of July 19, 1936. The speakers were De Pablo [Could this be Pablo Ruiz?], Jaime Balius, Liberto Callejas and Francisco Carreño. The meeting heard a prediction that an attack upon the workers by the reactionaries was now imminent.
The leadership committees of the CNT and the FAI did not pay undue heed to this new opposition emanating from within the libertarian movement, despite the scathing criticisms directed at themselves. In anarchist circles it was not unusual for groups to bubble to the surface, enjoying a meteoric rise, only to vanish into nothing as quickly as they had arisen.
The program spelled out by the Friends of Durruti <strong>prior to May 1937</strong> was characterized by its emphasis upon trade union management of the economy, upon criticism of all the parties and their statist collaborationism, as well as a certain reversion to anarchist doctrinal purity.
The Friends of Durruti set out their program in the poster with which they covered the walls of Barcelona towards the end of April 1937. Those posters which, even then, <strong>ahead of the events of May,</strong> argued the need to <strong>replace</strong> the bourgeois Generalidad government of Catalonia with a Revolutionary Junta, stated as follows:[69]
<quote>
Friends of Durruti Group. To the working class:
1. Immediate establishment of a Revolutionary Junta made up of workers of city and countryside and of combatants.
<br>
2. Family wage. Ration cards. Trade union direction of the economy and supervision of distribution.
<br>
3. Liquidation of the counterrevolution.
<br>
4. Creation of a revolutionary army.
<br>
5. Absolute working class control of public order.
<br>
6. Steadfast opposition to any armistice.
<br>
7. Proletarian justice.
<br>
8. Abolition of personnel changes.
Attention, workers: our group is opposed to the continued advance of the counterrevolution. The public order decrees sponsored by Aiguadé are not to be heeded. We insist upon the release of Maroto and other comrades detained.
All power to the working class. All economic power to the unions.
Rather than the Generalidad, a Revolutionary Junta!
</quote>
The April 1937 poster foreshadowed and explains the leaflet issued during the events in May and incorporates many of the themes and concerns dealt with by Balius in the articles he published in <em>Solidaridad Obrera, La Noche</em> and <em>Ideas</em> (especially revolutionary justice, prisoner exchanges, the need for the rearguard to take the war to heart, etc.). For the first time the need was posited for a Revolutionary Junta to supplant the bourgeois Generalidad government. This Revolutionary Junta[70] was defined as a revolutionary government comprised of workers, peasants and militians.
Most significant of all is the consolidated message of the last three slogans. Replacement of the bourgeois Generalidad government by a Revolutionary Junta appears alongside the watchwords “All power to the working class” and “All economic power to the unions.”[71]
The political program implicit in this poster immediately before the events of May is undoubtedly the most advanced and lucid offered by any of the existing proletarian groups, and makes of the Friends of Durruti Group a <strong>revolutionary vanguard of the proletariat</strong> of Spain at this critical and crucial juncture as the POUM and the Bolshevik-Leninist Section of Spain were to acknowledge.[72]
**
[60] We can find a detailed description of the Gelsa militians and their opposition to militarization, which was closely connected with the launch of the Friends of Durruti, in the interview with Pablo Ruiz in <em>La Noche</em> Año XIV, No. 3545, of March 24, 1937.
<br>
See also the claims made by Balius himself: “The Friends of Durruti Group has its origins in the opposition to militarization. It was the Gelsa Militians Group that relocated en masse to Barcelona. At the head of the Gelsa Group was comrade Eduardo Cervero. So, in the Catalan rearguard, there was a considerable number of comrades from the Aragon front around, sharing the opinion that there was no way that the libertarian spirit of the militias could be abjured. Lest we embark upon an interminable list of comrades who moved to the Catalan capital with arms and baggage, allow me to recall, with great affection, Progreso Ródenas, Pablo Ruiz, Marcelino Benedicto and others. It was agreed that a group should be set up in Barcelona, and it was determined that it would be under the aegis of the symbol of Buenaventura Durruti. Other members of the Durruti Group included comrades Alejandro Gilabert, Francisco Carreño, Máximo Franco, the delegate from the Rojinegra Division, Ponzán, Santana Calero, and lots of others.” (Jaime Balius “Por los fueros de la verdad” in <em>Le Combat syndicaliste</em> of September 2, 1971).
<br>
With regard to the number of militians from the Gelsa Group who, having repudiated militarization, decided to quit the front, taking their weapons with them, Pablo Ruiz is a lot more statistically precise, and probably a lot nearer the mark. “[After taking part in the storming of the Atarazanas barracks], I joined the Durruti Column, and I led the 4<sup>th</sup> Gelsa Group, comprising over a thousand militians (...) whenever the Popular Army was foisted upon us from within (...) I resigned and rejoined the rearguard along with three decades of comrades. On that basis and at the instigation of comrade Balius, we founded the Friends of Durruti Group (...)” [Pablo Ruiz “Elogio póstumo de Jaime Balius” in <em>Le Combat Syndicaliste/Solidaridad Obrera</em> of January 22, 1981]
[61] The FAI was organized as a federation of affinity groups. During the civil war, prominence was achieved by affinity groups like “Nosotros” (which had previously gone under the name “Los Solidarios”), “Nervio,” “A,” “Z, “ “Los de Ayer y Los de Hoy,” “Faro,” etc.
[62] The newspaper <em>La Noche</em> on March 2, 1937 (page 6) carried the first report on the foundation of the Group, which was formally launched on March 17, 1937, according to this notice in the March 18,1937 edition of <em>La Noche</em>:
<br>
The ‘Friends of Durruti’ Group has been launched. A steering committee appointed. The meeting to launch the ‘Friends of Durruti’ was held last night.
<br>
The social premises — located on the first floor of 1, Ramblas de las Flores — were packed with people. Proceedings got underway on the stroke of ten o’clock. A panel was appointed to oversee the discussions. Several comrades from the front and from the rearguard took part in the discussion. Every one of the comrades who spoke reaffirmed his absolute support for the postulates of the CNT and FAI. There was broad discussion of the revolutionary course followed since July 19 and it was palpable that all of the assembled comrades wish the Revolution to press ahead. Certain counterrevolutionary maneuvers were lashed severely. [...]
<br>
In a disembodied way, our Durruti presided over the launch of the group. It was notable that there was no hint of idolatry, but rather a desire to carry out the wishes of our ill-fated comrade.
<br>
Next, the steering committee was appointed, along with a working party to draft the intentions by which the new group is to be informed. [...] The steering committee is made up as follows: secretary, Felix Martinez: vice-secretary, Jaime Balius: treasurer, José Paniagua: book-keeper, Antonio Puig Garreta: committee members, Francisco Carreño, Pablo Ruiz, Antonio Romero, Serafin Sobias, Eduardo Cervero. The working part comprises: Pablo Ruiz, J. Marin, Jaime Balius, Francisco Carreño and José Esplugas.
<br>
Before the proceedings were wound up, the gathering agreed by acclamation that a telegram should be sent to the CNT National Committee, demanding the release of comrade Maroto and of the comrades incarcerated in Valencia.
[63] Let us attempt to catalog all of the manifestoes, handbills, notices and posters signed by the Friends of Durruti Group, insofar as we know them. We shall not indicate place of publication because that is the city of Barcelona throughout. Virtually all of these documents can be found in the Archivo Historico Municipal de Barcelona (AHMB):
<br>
1. “Al pueblo trabajador” [<em>Manifesto</em> issued late March 1937. Double-sided handbill.]
<br>
2. “Al pueblo trabajador” [<em>Manifesto</em> opposing the commemoration of the anniversary of April 14.]
<br>
3. “¡Trabahadiers! Acudid el próximo dimingo, dia 18, al MITIN que la Agrupación <strong>Los Amigos de Durruti</strong> celebralá en el Teatro Poliorama” [<em>Notice</em> advertising the rally on April 18, 1937.]
<br>
4. “Agrupación de Los Amigos de Durruti. A la clase trabajadora.” [<em>Poster</em> pasted on walls and trees. Late April 1937.]. “ACTO organizado por la Agrupación <strong>Los Amigos de Durruti.</strong>
<br>
5. Domingo, 2 de mayo a las 10 de la mañana, en el TEATRO GOYA.” [<em>Notice</em> of the May 2, 1937 rally.].
<br>
6. “CNT-FAI. Agrupación ‘Los Amigos de Durruti’. ¡TRABAJADORES!” [<em>Handbill</em> distributed on the barricades on May 5, 1937.]
<br>
7. “CNT-FAI. Agrupacion ‘Los Amigos de Durruti’. Trabajadores.” [<em>Manifesto</em> distributed on May 8, 1937.]
<br>
8. “Trabajadores. Miércoles dia 19. Aparecerá el <strong>‘Los Amigos de Durruti’.</strong> “ [Notice of the appearance of the first issue of <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em>, scheduled for May 19, 1937.]
<br>
There are also some notices of lectures by Francisco Pellicer, sponsored by the CNT Foodstuffs Union, which we have not included.
[64] See Juan Andrade “CNT-POUM” in <em>La Batalla</em> of May 1, 1937. Reprinted in Juan Andrade <em>La revolución espanola dia a dia</em> (Ed. Nueva Era, Barcelona, 1979, p. 248.) The extract in which Andrade refers to the Friends of Durruti is this one:
<br>
For instance, the ‘Friends of Durruti’ have framed their program points in posters in every street in Barcelona. We are absolutely in agreement with the watchwords that the ‘Friends of Durruti’ have issued with regard to the current situation. This is a program we accept, and on the basis of which we are ready to come to whatever agreements they may put to us. There are two items in those watchwords which are also fundamental for us. All Power to the working class and democratic organs of the workers, peasants and combatants, as the expression of proletarian Power.
[65] <em>Ruta</em>, the mouthpiece of the Libertarian Youth of Catalonia, had been radically opposed to the CNT’s collaborationism since November 1936. Between March 1937 and late May 1937, it carried articles by Santana Calero (a member of the Libertarian Youth of Malaga), who was also a prominent contributor to <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em> and a member of the Friends of Durruti. Issue No. 25 of <em>Ruta</em>, dated April 1, 1937, carried an article from the Friends of Durruti Group, entitled “Por el concepto anarquista de la revolución,” in which the same arguments are set out as in the late March handbill/manifesto: that the CNT-FAI had failed to impose itself on July 19 and agreed to collaborate as a minority player and afforded full scope to the petit-bourgeoisie: that the war and the revolution had to be one: “the war and the revolution are two aspects that cannot be dissevered. The War is the defense of the revolution”: that the unions should have the direction of the economy: that the army and public order should be under workers’ control: that arms had to be in the hands of workers only, by way of a guarantee of the revolution: that the petite bourgeoisie should man the fortifications battalions: that the rearguard should take the war to heart: that work should be compulsory and unionization obligatory, etc.
[66] This was <em>Esfuerzo: Periódico mural de las Juventudes Libertarias de Cataluña.</em> A weekly publication, comprising of one poster-sized page for posting on walls, it came out between the second week of March and the second week of May. Completely anonymous, it was made up, not of articles, but of watchwords, short manifestoes and appeals. It was a highly original wall newspaper. The following “articles” stand out: “El dilema: Fascismo o Revolución social” (in No. 1, second week of March 1937), “Consignas de la Juventud Revolucionaria” (No. 2, third week of March), “El Orden Público tiene su garantia en las Patrullas de Control...” (No. 3, fourth week of March), “Los ‘affaires’ por la substracción de 11 tanques. La provocación de Orden Publico en Reus, por Rodriguez Salas ...” and “A los ochos meses de revolución” (No. 4, first week of April 1937). The last issue of this wall newspaper, No. 9, is dated the second week of May 1937. Although the Friends of Durruti Group is never mentioned by name, its watchwords, vision and ideological content were very similar to those articulated and championed by the Friends of Durruti.
[67] ‘Friends of Durruti’ Group “Al pueblo trabajador” Barcelona [April 14, 1937]
[68] This meeting to introduce the Group was reported in detail by Rosalio Negrete and Hugo Oehler in a report written and date-lined in Barcelona the same day. That report was first published in <em>Fourth International</em> Volume 2, No. 12, (1937). See <em>Revolutionary History</em> Volume 1, No. 2, (1988), London, pp. 34–35.
<br>
The meeting had been called by means of handbills announcing that Francisco Pellicer would speak on the problelm of subsistence, Pablo Ruiz on the revolutionary army, Jaime Balius on the war and the revolution, Francisco Carreño on trade union unity and political collaboration, and V. Perez Combina on public order and the present time.
<br>
The following notice was carried in the daily newspaper <em>La Noche</em> (19 April 1937) about the progress of the meeting:
<br>
Yesterday morning, in the Poliorama Theatre, a meeting was held by the Friends of Durruti Group. There was a considerable attendance and the meeting was chaired by comrade Romero, who, after a few short remarks outlining the meaning of the meeting, called upon Francisco Pellicer, who opened with a recollection of Durruti.
<br>
Next, attention turned to the problem of subsistence, and he stated that it was impossible to eat on current rates of pay [...] Pablo Ruiz spoke on the revolutionary army [...] Then Jaime Balius read some jottings [...] in which he reviewed the initial fighting against fascism on July 19 [...] He stated that the Revolution should go hand in hand with the war and that both have to be won. [...] Francisco Carreño spoke last on the topic ‘trade union unity and political collaboration’ [...] He, like the rest of the speakers, was very warmly applauded.
[69] <em>Acta de la sessió consistorial del 22-5-1937 del Ajuntamente de Sabadell,</em> Archivo Histórico de Sabadell. On page 399 of the book of minutes No. 16, the poster from the Friends of Durruti, issued in April 1937, is reproduced in full. This poster, which council member Bruno Lladó (who was also the comarcal delegate of the Generalidad’s department of economy [headed by Diego Abad de Santillán]) had put up in his office on Sunday, May 2<sup>nd</sup>, joined the book of evidence against him when the councilor was accused of inciting rebellion against the Generalidad government in the course of the events of May in Barcelona.
<br>
The text of this poster, according to the minutes of the May 22, 1937 sitting of Sabadell Council was reprinted in Andreu Castells: <em>Sabadell, informe de l’oposició. Annex per a la história de Sabadell (Vol. V) Guerra i revolucio (1936–1939)</em> (Ed. Riutort, Sabadell, 1982, p. 22.8)
[70] The definition of the Revolutionary Junta offered by the Friends of Durruti was not always the same, as we shall see anon. But the significance of the watchwords in the April poster eluded no one. Establishment of a Revolutionary Junta implied not only the winding up of the bourgeois Generalidad government, but the introduction of dictatorship of the proletariat: “all power to the working class” and “all economic power to the unions.” In an interview granted to <em>Lutte Ouvriere</em> in 1939, Munis took the line that the terms “revolutionary junta” and “soviets,” as used by the Friends of Durruti, were synonymous.
[71] Balius was very conscious of the importance of the watchwords set out in the April 1937 poster. “May 1 1937 is the Spanish Kronstadt. In Catalonia, uprising was feasible only by virtue of the CNT’s might. And just as, in Russia, the sailors and workers of Kronstadt arose to a cry of “All power to the soviets,” so the Friends of Durruti Group called for “All power to the unions,” and we did so publicly in the many posters stuck up all over the city of Barcelona and in the manifesto we issued and managed to print up while the battle raged.” (Jaime Balius “Por los fueros de la verdad” in <em>Le combat Syndicaliste</em> of September 2, 1971)
<br>
See also Munis’s comments in <em>La Voz Leninista</em> No. 2 of August 23, 1937.
[72] Juan Andrade “CNT-POUM” in <em>La Batalla</em> of May 1, 1937. See also G. Munis “La Junta Revolucionaria y los ‘Amigos de Durruti”’ in <em>La Voz Leninista</em> No. 2, of August 23, 1937.
** <strong>6. The May Events</strong> [73]
On Saturday, May 1, 1937, there was no May Day demonstration in Barcelona. The Generalidad had announced that this was a day to be worked for the sake of war production, although the real reason was fear of a confrontation between the different labor organizations following heightened tension in several comarcas and localities around Catalonia. That Saturday too the Generalidad council met to look into the worrying public order situation in Catalonia. The council endorsed the effectiveness displayed over the previous few weeks by its councilors for internal security and defense, agreeing to pass a vote of confidence in their ability to resolve <strong>outstanding</strong>[74] public order business.
As the council meeting concluded, there was a meeting of a panel made up of the councilors for defense[75] and internal security and the premier, for the purpose of looking into public order issues.[76] It seems hard to believe that the initiative to seize the Telephone Exchange could have been a personal decision by the councilor for security, Artemi Aiguadé. It is more likely that the decision would have been made by the panel which met after the council meeting on May 1<sup>st</sup>,[77] or resulted from the incident on Sunday May 2<sup>nd</sup>, when a telephone conversation between Companys and Azaña (who happened to be in Barcelona) was crassly interrupted by CNT militants. Of course, if the operation failed, the security councilor would carry the full political responsibility. By a stroke of luck, on Monday May 3<sup>rd</sup>, Companys happened to be on a visit to Benicarló for a meeting with Largo Caballero, conveniently enabling him to dissociate himself from the initial incidents. Be that as it may, Companys’ political action, with his blinkered, incomprehensible refusal to dismiss Artemio Aiguadé and Rodriguez Salas,[78] as the CNT had insisted right from May 3<sup>rd</sup>, was one of the most significant triggers of the armed clashes in the ensuing days.
On Monday May 3, 1937, three truck loads of heavily armed Assault Guards, drew up outside the Telephone Exchange in the Plaza de Cataluña. They were led by Rodriguez Salas, UGT militant and dyed-in-the-wool Stalinist, the officer commanding the public order commissariat in Barcelona. Ever since July 19, the Exchange had been commandeered by the CNT. The sore point was control of telephone links, border controls and the control patrols: since January, the Generalidad republican government and the masses of the CNT had clashed several times over these. It was an inevitable struggle between the republican state apparatus, which was insisting upon complete recovery of all of “its” proper prerogatives, and the CNT membership’s defense of the “gains” of July 19, 1936.
Rodriguez Salas attempted to take control of the Telephone Exchange. The CNT militants on the lower floors, caught by surprise, let themselves be disarmed: but on the upper floors dogged resistance was organized, thanks to a machine-gun strategically positioned on the top floor. The news spread like wildfire. Barricades were thrown up immediately all over the city. We can speak of a spontaneous backlash from the Barcelona working class, if we regard as such the initiative shown by the middle ranking cadres of the CNT,[79] as well as the fact that there already existed significant militant organization among the CNT rank and file, in the shape of the district defense committees and the control patrols.[80] Similarly, we can speak of a spontaneous backlash, if we bear it in mind that at no time did an order go out from the CNT leadership, or from the leadership of any other party, before mobilization occurred and barricades were thrown up all around the city.
Nor had anyone issued the call for a general strike, which was the product of class instinct. This was ground ripe for the action that offered itself to the Friends of Durruti. They managed to attend immediately to what the circumstances required. Whilst the workers fought with weapons in hand, they strove to lead them and provide them with a revolutionary objective. But they soon discovered their limitations. They criticized the CNT’s leaders, whom they labeled traitors in their May 8 Manifesto, but they were unable to overrule the order to quit the barricades. Nor did they consider supplanting the CNT leadership. They did nothing to see to it that their slogan about establishing a Revolutionary Junta was implemented. They knew that their criticisms of the anarcho-syndicalist leadership would not be enough to wrest control of the CNT organization from it.
On the other hand, the Group was newborn, lacking experience and lacking in prestige with the CNT masses. Its<em>Ideas</em>had not managed to permeate the rank and file membership thoroughly.
Wallowing in this situation of powerlessness, they received a note from the POUM Executive Committee, requesting an authorized delegation from the Group to meet them.[81] Jaime Balius, Pablo Ruiz, Eleuterio Roig and Martin were selected.[82] At 7:00 P.M. on May 4 they met in the Principal Palace in the Ramblas with Gorkin, Nin and Andrade.[83] Jointly, they scrutinized the situation, and reached the <strong>unanimous</strong> conclusion that, in view of the CNT[84] and FAI leaderships’ opposition to a revolutionary uprising, it was doomed to failure.[85] It was agreed that an orderly withdrawal of the combatants was required, and that the latter should hold on to their weapons.[86] And that this withdrawal should take place once the opposing forces had abandoned their positions. And that assurances were needed that there would be no crack-down on the fighters on the barricades. The next day, the top leaders and officers of the CNT made a further radio broadcast, calling for the fighting to cease. By now the grassroots militants had stopped joking about the “firefighters” of the CNT-FAI and about the Guards kissing Garcia Oliver.
On Wednesday May 5, the Friends of Durruti distributed around the barricades the celebrated handbill that made them famous: it read as follows:
<quote>
CNT-FAI. “Friends of Durruti” Group: Workers! A Revolutionary Junta. Shoot the culprits. Disarm the armed corps. Socialize the economy. Disband the political parties which have turned on the working class. We must not surrender the streets. The revolution before all else. We salute our comrades from the POUM who fraternized with us on the streets. Long live the Social Revolution! Down with the counterrevolution!
</quote>
This handbill was printed at gun-point on the night of May 4–5, 1937, in a print shop in the Barrio Chino.[87] The improvisation and the Group’s lack of infrastructure were obvious. The text had been drafted after that meeting with the POUM Executive Committee at 7:00 P.M. on May 4, by which time the Group and the POUM had agreed upon a defensive withdrawal with no surrender of weapons, and insisting upon assurances that there would be no repression. The handbill, endorsed by the POUM, and reprinted in issue No. 235 of <em>La Batalla</em> (on May 6) was not backed by any plan of action and was merely a statement of intent and an appeal to the CNT masses’ spontaneity to press ahead with their activities against the encroachments of the counterrevolution. In point of fact, everything hinged upon the decision that the CNT leadership would make. It was absurd and laughable to believe that the CNT masses, in spite of their initial inhibitions, or criticisms, would not follow the leaders of July 19. Only if the CNT leadership were to be supplanted by a revolutionary leadership was there any chance, albeit very slim chance, of the masses’ abiding by the revolutionary watchwords and plan of action of a new leadership. But neither the Group nor the POUM made any attempt to unseat the CNT leadership: nor had they drawn up any plan of action. In practice, both pursued a policy of compliance with the CNT leadership’s decisions. The POUM’s Executive Committee rejected José Rebull’s plan to capture the Generalidad and the buildings still holding out in the city center, on the grounds that this was a political matter, not a military one.[88]
Also on May 5 there was a meeting between the POUM Local Committee in Barcelona and the Friends of Durruti — a meeting which the POUMists described as negative,[89] because:
<quote>
They [The Friends of Durruti] are unwilling to work directly upon CNT ranks to unseat the leadership, wishing only to influence the movement, with no more responsibility than that.
</quote>
In the handbill they issued on May 5, the Friends of Durruti suggested concerned action with the POUM. As their immediate objective and to direct the revolution, they proposed that a Revolutionary Junta be established. <strong>But once that watchword had gone out, they did nothing to put it into effect.</strong> They were barricade fighters, rather than organizers. The suggestion of concerted CNT-FAI-POUM action was nothing more than a salute to the militants from other organizations who had fought alongside them on the barricades. The printed word of the handbill never progressed as far as a hard and fast agreement. They did virtually nothing to unseat the CNT leadership and wrest away control of the CNT masses which repeatedly turned a deaf ear to orders to quit the fighting in the streets. They failed to exploit, organize or issue specific instructions to those Group members who were members of the Control Patrols. They issued no orders to Máximo Franco, a Group member and delegate of the Rojinegra Column, which, along with the POUM division commanded by Rovira, had left the front line in order to intervene in the fighting in Barcelona. Both Josep Rovira and Máximo Franco were persuaded to return to the front by Isgleas, Abad de Santillán and Molina — that is, by the CNT personnel who gave the orders in the Generalidad’s Defense Department. The Friends of Durruti trusted entirely to the creativity and instincts of the masses. There was not even the merest hint of coordination between the various members of the Group: instead everyone did as he pleased, wherever he thought he must or wherever seemed best to him. They failed to counter the action of the CNT leaders who toured the barricades to argue with and persuade the grassroots militants to quit the barricades.
And the CNT masses, bewildered by the appeals from their leaders (the very same leaders as on July 19!) eventually chose to give up the fight, even though, to begin with, they defied the CNT leadership’s appeals for concord and for the fighting to cease for the sake of antifascist unity. On Tuesday May 6<sup>th</sup>, as a gesture of good will and to restore peace to the city, the militants of the CNT withdrew from the Telephone Exchange building where the fighting had begun: it was immediately occupied by the security forces and UGT members took up the work stations. When anarchist leaders protested, the Generalidad’s response was that “it was a matter of a <em>fait accompli</em>” and the CNT leaders chose not to broadcast this further “treachery,” lest it inflame passions.
The Friends of Durruti Group was at no time a serious impediment to the CNT’s policy of antifascist unity. At most they were an opposition critical of the CNT and FAI leaderships, and above all, an irksome and unwelcome reminder that the policy of collaboration with the machinery of the State was a betrayal of anarcho-syndicalist principles and ideology.
Distribution of the handbill around the barricades was no easy undertaking, risking the suspicions of many militants and even braving physical[90] retaliation.
We know of one meeting between Balius and Josep Rebull, the secretary of the POUM’s Cell 72, during the May events. A meeting which, given the numerical slightness of both organizations, had no practical effect. The Friends of Durruti declined Josep Rebull’s suggestion that they issue a joint Manifesto.[91]
The Manifesto which the Group distributed on May 8<sup>th</sup>,[92] in which they reviewed the May events, was printed on the presses of <em>La Batalla</em> . The Group, having been denounced by the CNT as a band of provocateurs, had no presses on which to print it. A POUM militian by the name of Paradell, a leader of the Shop assistants’ union, upon discovering the problem facing the Friends of Durruti Group, raised the matter with Josep Rebull, the administrator of the POUM newspaper, and the latter, honoring his basic duty of revolutionary solidarity, and without consultation with any higher party authority, offered the use of his presses to the Friends of Durruti Group.[93]
In the Manifesto, the Friends of Durruti linked the seizure of the Telephone Exchange with earlier provocations. They named the Esquerra Republicana, the PSUC, and the Generalidad’s armed agencies as responsible for having triggered the May events. The Friends of Durruti asserted the revolutionary character of July 1936 (and argued that it was not just opposition to a fascist uprising) and of May 1937 (which was not simply aimed at a change of government):
<quote>
Our Group which was on the street, on the barricades, defending the proletariat’s gains, calls for the total triumph of the social revolution. We cannot countenance the fiction, and the counterrevolutionary fact, whereby a new government is formed with the same parties, but with different representatives.
</quote>
The Friends of Durruti countered the parliamentary compromises which they labeled as deceit with their revolutionary program, as set out in that handbill distributed on May 5<sup>th</sup>:
<quote>
Our Group demands the immediate establishment of a revolutionary junta, the shooting of the guilty ones, the disarming of the armed corps, the socialization of the economy and the disbanding of all the political parties which turned on the working class.
</quote>
The Friends of Durruti Group had no hesitation in arguing that the battle had been won by the workers and, that being so, they had to do away once and for all with a Generalidad that signified nothing. The Group leveled a charge of <strong>treason</strong> against the CNT’s committees and leaders who had brought the victorious workers’ uprising to a standstill:
<quote>
The Generalidad stands for nothing. Its continued existence bolsters the counterrevolution. We workers have carried the day. It defies belief that the CNT’s committees should have acted with such timidity that they ventured to order a ‘cease-fire’ and indeed forced a return to work when we stood on the very threshold of total victory. No account was taken of the provenance of the attack no heed paid to the true meaning of the present events. Such conduct has to be described as treason to the revolution which no one ought to commit or encourage in the name of anything. And we know how to categorize the noxious work carried out by <em>Solidaridad Obrera</em> and the CNT’s most prominent militants.”
</quote>
The description “treason” was repeated in a reference to the CNT Regional Committee’s disavowal of the Friends of Durruti, and to the transfer of responsibilities for security and defense (not those under Generalidad control, but the ones under CNT control) to the central government in Valencia:
<quote>
The treason is on a monumental scale. The two essential guarantees of the working class, security and defense, are offered to our enemies on a platter.
</quote>
The Manifesto closed with a short self-criticism of some tactical shortcomings during the May events, and an optimistic look to the future — one which the immediate tide of repression unleashed on May 28 would show to be vain and insubstantial. May 1937 did not end in stalemate, but was a heavy defeat for the proletariat.
For all of the mythology surrounding the events of May 1937, the fact is that it represented a very chaotic, confused[94] situation, characterized by every one of the sides involved in the fighting developing an enthusiasm for negotiations. May 1937 was not at all a revolutionary insurrection, but began as a defense of “trade union ownership” established in July 1936. What triggered the fighting was the storming of the Telephone Exchange by Generalidad security troops. And that move was part and parcel of the Companys’s government’s ongoing intent to recover, bit by bit, the powers which the “irregular” situation of a workers’ uprising in July 19 had <strong>momentarily</strong> had wrested from it. The recent successes scored in Puigcerdá and throughout the Cerdaña paved the way for a definitive move in Barcelona and right across Catalonia. It is obvious that Companys felt that he had the backing of Comorera (PSUC) and Antonov-Ovseenko (the Soviet consul) with whom he had worked very closely and to great effect since December, when the POUM had been dropped from the Generalidad government. Stalinist policy coincided with Companys’s aims: the undermining and side-lining of revolutionary forces, that is, of the POUM and the CNT, were Soviet aims that could only be encompassed if the bourgeois Generalidad government could be strengthened. The protracted crisis opened up in the Generalidad government following the CNT’s refusal to accept the March 4, 1937 decree disbanding the Control Patrols, was resolved with violence (after several instances of armed skirmishing in Vilanesa, La Fatarella, Cullera (Valencia), Bellver, and at Roldan Cortada’s funeral, etc.) in the attack upon the Telephone Exchange and in the bloody events of May in Barcelona. Stultifying shortsightedness, unshakable fidelity to antifascist unity and the extent of the main anarcho-syndicalist leaders’ (from Peiró to Federica Montseny, from Abad de Santillán to Garcia Oliver, from Marianet to Valerio Mas) collaboration with the republican government, were not negligible factors, nor had the Generalidad government and Soviet agents overlooked them. They could also count upon an asinine saintliness, as was amply demonstrated during the May events.
As far as the actions of the Friends of Durruti Group during the May events are concerned, a misleading mythologization of its role on the barricades and its handbill[95] would also be out of place. As we have stated already, the Friends of Durruti did not, at any time, intend to unseat the CNT leadership, but contented themselves to the utterance of scathing criticisms of its leaders and their policy of treason towards the revolution. Maybe they were unable to do anything else, given their numbers and the slightness of their influence upon the CNT’s mass following. But we should single out their involvement in the street-fighting,[96] their ascendancy on several barricades on the Ramblas, especially ones opposite their headquarters,[97] and their involvement in the fighting in Sants, La Torrassa and Sallent. Naturally, their attempts to offer a lead and some minimal political demands in the handbill of May 5, 1937 deserve to be emphasized. Distribution of that handbill was no easy undertaking and cost several Group members their lives. In the distribution of it around the barricades, they could depend upon help from CNT militants. Among the activities during the May events worth mentioning, we should not forget the call, issued by Balius from a barricade located at the junction of the Ramblas and the Calle Hospital, for all of Europe’s workers to show solidarity with the Spanish revolution.[98] Upon receiving reports that a Column of Assault Guards was on its way from Valencia to put down the revolt, the Friends of Durruti responded by trying to marshal an anarchist column to head it off. But this never got beyond the planning stages, in that it was not taken up by the CNT militants who set about abandoning their barricades.
Finally, we ought to single out, from a political point or view, the agreement reached with the POUM that an appeal should be issued to the workers that they should seek, before quitting the barricades, assurances that there would be no retaliation: and above all pointing out that retention of arms — which ought never to be surrendered — constituted the best guarantee of all.
From a theoretical angle, the Friends of Durruti’s role was much more outstanding after the May events when they set about publishing their newspaper, which borrowed its name from the paper published by Marat during the French Revolution: <em>The People’s Friend.</em>
**
[73] Information about the May events has been taken from the following sources:
<br>
J. Arquer <em>Les Jornades de maig</em> Unpublished manuscript deposited with the AHN in Madrid Burnett Bolloten <em>La Guerra civil española: Revolución y contrarrevolución</em> (Alianza Editorial, Madrid, 1989, pp. 659–704) [English language readers should see Burnett Bolloten, <em>The Spanish Revolution</em>, Chapel Hill, 1979]
<br>
Luis Companys “This is a carbon copy of notes made by President ... and of teletyped conversations between various political figures during the fighting in Barcelona, May 3–7, 1937” [Deposited with the Hoover Institution]
<br>
Manuel Cruells <em>Mayo sangriento. Barcelona 1937</em> (Ed. Juventud, Barcelona, 1970)
<br>
Francisco Lacruz <em>El alzamiento, la revolución y el terror en Barcelona</em> (Libreria Arysel, Barcelona, 1943)
<br>
Frank Mintz and Manuel Peciña <em>Los Amigos de Durruti, los trotsquistas y los sucesos de mayo</em> (Campo Abierto, Madrid, 1978)
<br>
Andres Nin “El problema de los órganos de poder en la revolución española.” Published in French in No. 1 of <em>Juillet. Revue internationale du POUM</em> in June 1937. Available in a Spanish translation in <em>Balance</em> No. 2 (March 1994)
<br>
Hugo Oehler <em>Barricades in Barcelona</em> (1937). Reprinted in <em>Revolutionary History</em> No. 2, (1988) pp. 22–29
<br>
George Orwell “Yo fui tesligo en Barcelona” in <em>Boletin de información sobre el proceso politico contra el POUM</em> No. 5, Barcelona, December 15, 1937
<br>
[Agustin Souchy] <em>Los sucesos en Barcelona, Relación documental de las trágicas jornadas de la 1a de semana Mayo de 1937</em> (Ediciones Españolas Ebro, no place indicated, 3<sup>rd</sup> edition August 1937)
<br>
Pavel and Clara Thalmann <em>Combats pur la liberté. Moscou, Madrid, Paris</em> (Spartacus, Paris, 1983)
<br>
Various <em>Los sucesos de mayo de 1937. ona revolución en la Republica</em> (Fundació Andreu Nin, Barcelona 1988)
<br>
Various <em>Sucesos de mayo (1937) Cuadernos de la guerra civil</em> No. 1, (Fundación Salvador Segui, Madrid, 1987)
[74] Jordi Arquer <em>Les jornades de maig</em> Unpublished manuscript text deposited with the AHN in Madrid.
[75] The Councilor for defense was CNT member Francisco Isgleas, a faithful friend and supporter of Garcia Oliver, who, during the May events, played a very prominently “neutral” role, preventing CNT and POUM troops from taking a hand in the fighting. Miguel Caminal offers testimony from Rafael Vidiella, according to whom Companys ordered Artemi Aiguadé to take the Telephone Exchange, and this in the presence of several councilors and the CNT’s Domenech, who merely pointed out the possible consequences of such a move. [In Miguel Caminal <em>Joan Comorera</em> Vol. II, p. 120]
[76] See Arquer, op. cit. and a report in <em>Solidaridad Obrera</em> of May 2, 1937 of the Generalidad council’s having met on Saturday May 1.
[77] Yet Arquer (op. cit.) appears to believe that Aiguadé was acting off his own bat, without the knowledge of the panel. Be that as it may, it seems obvious that the Generalidad government had washed its hands of Tarradellas’s policy of compromise and collaboration and opted instead for the direct confrontation (as advocated by Companys) which had worked so well in Bellver de Cerdaña.
[78] See the observations of Manuel Cruells (<em>Mayo sangriento. Barcelona 1937</em> Ed. Juventud, Barcelona 1970, pp. 55–56) on this point. Cruells was a journalist with the <em>Diari de Barcelona</em> at the time. As for the influence of Stalinists over Aiguadé or Rodriguez Salas, whether there was any or not strikes us as irrelevant given that collaboration that was obtained between Companys, Comorera and the Soviet consul in Barcelona. This view is also expressed by Agustin Souchy in <em>Los sucesos de Barcelona. Relación</em> ... op. cit. p. 13.
[79] Shortly after news broke of the armed clash inside the Telephone Exchange building: “In order to ensure that this incident would not lead to wider clashes, the Chief of Service at the Public Order Commissariat, Eroles, the general secretary of the ‘Control Patrols,’ Asens and Diaz, representing the Defense Committee, traveled to the Telephone Exchange to get the attackers to withdraw.
<br>
Rodriguez Salas consulted by telephone with Aiguadé, the Councilor for Internal Security, on whose orders he had acted, and the latter instructed him that under no circumstances was he to withdraw, but should hold the positions he had captured....
<br>
Along with some other anarchists, Valerio Mas showed up at the office of [...] Tarradellas, asking him to order the Assault Guards trying to occupy the Telephone Exchange to withdraw [...] Tarradellas, and later [...] Arlemio Aiguadé, on whom they also called, feigned surprise and claimed that they had not issued any instructions to the effect that the Telephone Exchange should be occupied.
<br>
-This is Rodriguez Salas acting on his own account — Aiguadé told them. — And I promise you that [...] I will issue the requisite “orders for peace to be restored.”
<br>
[From Francisco Lacruz <em>El Alzamiento, la revolución y el terror en Barcelona</em> (Libreria Arysel, Barcelona, 1943)]
<br>
Francisco Lacruz’s information was probably lifted from the pamphlet published anonymously by Agustin Souchy in 1937 which stated: “To ensure that this incident would not lead to wider clashes, the police chief Eroles, the Control Patrols’ general secretary Asens, and comrade Diaz, representing the Defense Committee, journeyed to the Telephone Exchange [...] Valerio Mas, along with some other comrades, spoke to the premier, Tarradellas and the councilor of the Interior, Aiguadé, to urge them to pull out the troops. [...] Tarradellas [...] and Aiguadé assured them that they knew nothing of what had happened at the Telephone Exchange. It was discovered later that Aiguadé himself had signed the order for it to be occupied.” [<em>Los sucesos de Barcelona. Relación</em>... op. cit. p. 12]
[80] See the claims of Julián Gorkin in “Reúnion du sous-secretariat international du POUM — 14 mai 1937”: “In point of fact the movement was entirely spontaneous. Of course, that very relative spontaneity ought to be explained: since July 19<sup>th</sup>, <em>Defense Committees,</em> organized primarily by rank and file CNT and FAI personnel, had been formed pretty well everywhere in Barcelona and across Catalonia. For a time, these Committees were scarcely active, yet it can be said that it was they which mobilized the working class on May 3. They were the action groups behind the movement. We know that no general strike instructions went out from either of the two trade union associations.”
[81] Jordi Arquer <em>Història de la fundació i actuació de la ‘Agrupació Amigos de Durruti’</em> Unpublished manuscript [Deposited with the Hoover Institution]
[82] Ibid.
[83] Jordi Arquer, op. cit. There can be no question but that Nin took an interest in the Friends of Durruti right from their launch, since as early as March 4, 1937, in <em>La Batalla</em> , Nin published an article fulsome in its praises for the<em>Ideas</em>mooted by Jaime Balius in an article printed in <em>La Noche</em> of March 2, 1937, in which he warned of the dangers of the counterrevolution’s steady progress in Catalonia.
[84] On May 3<sup>rd</sup>, the CNT Regional Committee and the POUM’s Executive Committee met in the Casa CNT-FAI for talks about the situation. After lengthy and detailed analysis of the prospects for action on the part of the POUMists, Valerio Mas, on behalf of the CNT Regional Committee, thanked Nin, Andrade and Solano for a pleasant evening, reiterating several times that the debate and discussion had been highly interesting, and that they should do it again some time. But no agreement was reached or made. The shortsightedness and political ineptitude of the CNT personnel defied belief: they thought that it was enough that they should have bared their teeth, that the barricades had to come down now, because the Stalinists and Republicans, having tested the strength of the CNT, would not dare go beyond that. On making his way back to the Ramblas, and dodging the barricades, Andrade could not help repeating over and over to himself: “A pleasant evening! A pleasant evening!” [Oral evidence taken from Wilebaldo Solano, Barcelona June 16, 1994]
<br>
On the meeting between a POUM delegation made up of Nin, Andrade, Gorkin, Bonet and Solano and the CNT Regional Committee, and, more especially, with its secretary, Valerio Mas, see Wilebaldo Solano “La Juventud Comunista Iberica (POUM) en las jornadas de mayo de 1937 en Barcelona” in <em>Ls sucesos de mayo de 1937, Una revolución en la Republica</em> (Fundación Nin y Fundación Segui, Pandola Libros, Barcelona, 1988, pp. 158–160)
[85] Jordi Arquer, op. cit. See also Wilebaldo Solano, op. cit.
[86] Jordi Arquer, op. cit. See also <em>La Batalla</em> editorials in Nos. 235 (May 6, 1937) 236 (May 7, 1937) and 237 (May 8, 1937)
[87] According to the Thalmanns’ account. See Note 1 above.
[88] Wilebaldo Solano, op. cit. p. 164
[89] The Barcelona Local Committee (of the POUM) “Informe de la actuación del Comité local durante los dias de mayo que ésta presenta a discusión de las celulas de Barcelona,” Archivo Histórico Naciónal de Madrid.
[90] According to Balius’s own claims in his correspondence with Burnett Bolloten, distributing the handbill on the barricades cost several Group members their lives.
<br>
For the printing and distribution of the handbill, see Pavel and Clara Thalmann <em>Combats pour la liberte. Moscou, Madrid, Paris</em> (Spartacus, Paris, 1983, pp. 189–191)
[91] Josep Rebull’s answer No. 7 to a questionnaire put to him by Agustin Guillamón (Banyuls-sur-mer, December 16, 1985):
<br>
Question: Did Cell 72 attempt to establish contacts with other groups with an eye to creating a revolutionary front, that is to say, with the Friends of Durruti, the Libertarian Youth, Balius, Munis, or other segments of the POUM?
<br>
Josep Rebull: The only contact with the ‘Friends of Durruti’ came during the May events, but the numerical slightness of that group, which had no links with the rank and file, and the modest representativity of Cell 72 did not produce a practical agreement, such as we wished to suggest, that we issue a manifesto to the struggling workers.
[92] Balius slated in 1971: “on account of the ‘cease-fire’ order issued by the CNT’s ministers, we issued a manifesto describing the committees responsible for that order as ‘traitors and cowards.’ That manifesto was distributed throughout the Catalan capital by the members of the Group and by the Libertarian Youth [Jaime Balius “Por los fueros de la verdad” in <em>Le Combat syndicaliste</em> of September 2, 1971]
[93] Jordi Arquer, op. cit.
[94] See Juan Andrade <em>Notas sobre la guerra civil (Actuación del POUM)</em> (Ediciones Libertarias, Madrid, 1986, pp. 117–125)
[95] Because they puncture all the mythology, Andrade’s comments upon the Friends of Durruti are extremely interesting: “[...] we made contact with the ‘Friends of Durruti’, a group of which it has to be said that they did not amount to much, being a lightweight circle which had no intention of doing anything more than act as an opposition within the FAI, and was in no way disposed to engage in concerted action with ‘authoritarian marxists’ like us. I am making this point because an attempt has since been made to depict the ‘Friends of Durruti’ as a mightily representative organization, articulating the revolutionary consciousness of the CNT-FAI. In reality, they counted for nothing organizationally and were a monument of confusion in ideological terms: they had no very precise idea of what they wanted and what they loved was ultra-revolutionary talk with no political impact, provided always that they involved no commitment to action and did not breach FAI discipline. We did all that we could, in spite of everything, to come to some agreement on the situation, but I believe we only managed to jointly sign one of two manifestoes urging resistance, because they would not countenance anything more. Later the group vanished completely and found no public expression.” [in Juan Andrade, op. cit. 12]
<br>
In any event, Andrade’s claims are, to say the least, contradictory, since one is forced to wonder why the POUM bothered to have talks with the Friends of Durruti if they amounted to nothing and were nobodies. Then again, we have already pointed to the interest which Nin displayed in Balius’s stance and in the birth of the Friends of Durruti, from as early as March 1937. Similarly, there is no question but that Andrade of l986 contradicts the Andrade of 1937 who wrote the article “CNT-POUM” carried by <em>La Batalla</em> on May 1, 1936: see Chapter 5, note 5.
[96] As Balius himself was at pains to make clear, the Friends of Durruti were alone [only the Group and the Bolshevik-Leninist Section issued leaflets with revolutionary watchwords] in welcoming the street-fighting and they attempted to provide the spontaneous struggle of the workers during the events of May 1937 with a lead and revolutionary purpose: “In <em>Espoir,</em> Floreal Castillo states that Camillo Berneri was the leader of the opposition in May. This is wrong. Camillo Berneri published <em>La Lutte de Classes</em> [actually, it was the Italian language paper <em>Guerra di classe</em>,] but played no active role. It was the men from the Friends of Durruti who turned up the heat. It was the miners of Sallent who erected the barricade on the Ramblas at the junction with the Calle Hospital, beside our beloved Group’s headquarters.” [Jaime Balius “Por los fueros de la verdad” in <em>Le Combat syndicaliste</em> of September 2, 1971]
<br>
Balius’s testimony is corroborated by Jaume Miravithes: “The city — so far as I know — is occupied throughout by FAI personnel, especially by groups from the Friends of Durruti, and by relatively large numbers from the POUM.” [Jaume Miravithes <em>Episodis de la guerra civil espanyola. Notes del meus arxius (2)</em> (Pórtic, Barcelona, 1972, p. 144)]
[97] As Balius says in his article “Por los fueros de la verdad,” cited earlier, the barricade was built by miners from Sallent.
[98] See Pablo Ruiz “Elogio póstumo de Balius” in <em>Le Combat syndicaliste/Solidaridad Obrera</em> of January 9, 1981.
** <strong>7. After May</strong>
The CNT leadership moved that members of the Friends of Durruti Group be expelled, but it never could get that measure ratified by any assembly of unions.[99] The CNT membership sympathized with the revolutionary opposition embodied in the Group. Not that this means that they subscribed either to the activities or the thinking of Friends of Durruti, but they did understand their stance and respected, indeed supported, their criticisms of the CNT leadership.[100]
The CNT leadership deliberately used and abused the allegation “marxist,” which was the worst conceivable term of abuse among anarchists and one that was repeatedly used against the Group and more specifically against Balius. There is nothing in the Group’s theoretical tenets, much less in the columns of <em>El Amigo del Pueblo,</em> or in their various manifestoes and handbills to merit the description “marxist” being applied to the Group. They were simply an opposition to the CNT leadership’s collaborationist policy, making their stand within the organization and upon anarcho-syndicalist ideology. The first issue of <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em> was published lawfully on May 19,[101] many of its galley proofs erased by the censors. The red and black broad sheet cover page carried a drawing showing a smiling Durruti holding the red and black flag aloft. Number 1 bore no date. The editorial and administrative offices were listed as No. 1, first floor, Rambla de las Flores. The paper proclaimed itself the mouthpiece of the Friends of Durruti. Balius was listed as editor-in-chief, and Eleuterio Roig, Pablo Ruiz and Domingo Paniagua as editors. The most intriguing article which bore Balius’s signature was entitled “For the record. We are not agents provocateurs,” in which Balius deplored the insults and aspersions emanating from the CNT’s own ranks. He mentioned the handbill and the manifesto issued in May, claiming that he had not reprinted these because they would assuredly and inevitably have been censored. He directly attacked <em>Solidaridad Obrera</em>[102] for its venomous attitude towards the Friends of Durruti and refuted the slurs emanating from the CNT leadership: “We are not agents provocateurs.”
No. 2, which displays no censored passages, had a print run of fifteen thousand copies.[103] The colored cover page showed a drawing commemorating Ascaso’s death in the attack upon the Atarazanas barracks. This issue was date-lined Barcelona, Wednesday May 26, 1937. The cover bore the following notice:
<quote>
The squalid treatment which the censors have meted out to us requires us to give it the slip. The impertinence of erasing our most insignificant remarks is a shame and a disgrace. We cannot, nor will we put up with it. Slaves, no!
</quote>
Consequently, this edition was not presented for censorship and was published clandestinely.[104] Prominent in this issue was the denunciation of the watchwords issued by the UGT, the Stalinist-controlled union which had expelled the POUMists from its ranks and asked that the CNT treat the Friends of Durruti likewise. It carried no article with Balius’s byline. However, two articles stand out, not so much on account of any intrinsic worth but rather on account of the mentality they mirror. One of them, signed by “Fulmen” drew parallels between the French Revolution of 1793 and the Spanish revolution in 1937, between Marat and Balius and between the Jabobins and the <strong>durrutistas.</strong> Another, uncredited article denounced a series of leading Catalanist personalities living in Paris on retainers from the Generalidad. A comparison was also made in a populist, demagogic way, between the salaries received by Companys and other politicians and the pay of militians and the difficulties of raising funds to keep the war going. Both these articles are interesting, in that they indicate a workerist, demagogic outlook, which seems to have tied in very well with the day-to-day economic straits and discomforts of the common people, and which was not commonly found in the rest of the newspapers of the time. This, we may say, was a characteristic feature of <em>El Amigo del Pueblo.</em> This edition’s editorial comment, which was carried on the back cover under the title “The Negrin government,” bemoaned the formation of a counter-revolutionary government under Communist Party sponsorship as a result of the May events, the short-term objective of it being to disarm the working class and form a bourgeois army. The editorial categorized the resolution of the crisis in the Valencia government as a clear example of colonial intervention [Russian intervention, it was implied]. Balius was jailed and refused bail (around mid-June) over this editorial, although he was never brought to trial, since the Tribunal charged with hearing the case ordered him released. A fortnight after that release, (around mid-October) he was jailed again (at the start of November) for two months, under a preventive detention order, and handed over to Commissioner Burillo.[105] Thus he was incarcerated for some nine months in all and only escaped a third period behind bars because he fled Barcelona to avoid it.
Issue No. 3 bore the date June 12, 1937, claimed to have been published in Barcelona and was now entirely without color. This issue seemed a lot more pugnacious, and the articles had a lot more bite to them. There were denunciations of the murder of several anarchist militants, encroachments against the Control Patrols which it was intended to outlaw, and the text of their May handbill was quoted and its content explained. It was announced as imminent events crucial to the future of the revolution, which was in immediate danger.[106] There was an uncredited article, ascribable to Fulmen, on the French Revolution: news of the military successes of the anarchist Cipriano Mera on the Madrid front: some poems by Eleuterio Roig: an article by Santana Calero in which he averred that imitating Durruti meant not appeasement, but rather, advocacy of the latter’s ideological positions on the necessity of winning the war if they were to be free: Durruti’s radio broadcast from the Madrid front was reprinted: there was a demagogic article on the Aragon front and the rearguard: a scathing denunciation of the latest statements by Peiró regarding the introduction of a republic like the one in existence prior to July 19 : and above all, most interestingly of all, an article entitled “Apropos of the May Events” in which the Friends of Durruti retracted the description “traitors” used in their Manifesto of May 8<sup>th</sup> about the CNT’s leading committees, and simultaneously asked that the description “agents provocateurs” used about the Friends of Durruti by the CNT be retracted too.
In issue No. 4, dated June 22, 1937, there was a report of Balius’s having been detained without bail. Prominently displayed on the cover was the Group’s schedule of demands (already re-vamped several times since it had first appeared in the manifesto issued in late March 1937), which proposed draconian measures like compulsory unionization, purges of the rearguard, rationing, arming of the proletariat, disbanding of the agencies of repression, etc.... aimed at defending a revolution menaced by the reaction, and winning the war against the fascists:
<quote>
We, ‘irresponsible agents provocateurs,’ call for: trade union direction of economic and social life. The free municipality.
The army and public order to be overseen by the working class.
Dissolution of the Armed Corps. Retention of the Defense Committees and Defense Councilorships.
Arms must be in the possession of the proletariat. Rifles are the ultimate guarantee of the revolution’s gains. No one but the working class may have access to them. Abolition of ranks. Fortifications battalions to be made up of the Proletariat’s enemies.
Compulsory unionization. Employment bureaus. An end to references in securing employment. Ration cards. Obligatory labor. The rearguard must live for the war.
Socialization of all the means of production and exchange. A fight to the death against fascism and its accomplices. Purging of the rearguard. Establishment of neighborhood committees.
Immediate introduction of the family wage, with no bureaucratic exceptions. The war and the revolution must touch us all equally. Suspension of the bourgeois Parliament. Suspension of passports.
Mobilization against the counterrevolution.
Absolute non-compliance with the coercive measures of the State, such as enforcement of censorship, disarming of the workers, State confiscation of radio stations, etc.
Resolute opposition to Municipalization of the means of production until such time as the working class enjoys absolute mastery of the country.
Reversion to our organizations’ revolutionary tenor in full.
Utter opposition to governmental collaboration, it being utterly counter-productive in the emancipation of the proletariat.
War to the death against speculators, bureaucrats and those behind the rise in the cost of living. On a war footing against any armistice.
</quote>
On page 2, the following announcement or reminder appeared: “Revolutionary Program of the Friends of Durruti Group:
<quote>
A revolutionary junta.
Economic power to the unions. Free municipalities.
We want to step up a gear. We are anarchists.”
</quote>
In addition, there was the customary poem from Eleuterio Roig, the usual article by Fulmen on the French Revolution, and a piece by Santana Calero urging the Libertarian youth and the FAI to get to work in the trade unions and reaffirming the need to win the war and prosecute the revolution simultaneously. Of course, outstanding was a memorable article by Jaime Balius entitled “In self-defense. I require an explanation.” In this article, Balius defended himself against the charge that he was a marxist, a charge leveled at him by the CNT leaders and CNT press as the most wounding insult of all.
In issue No. 5 of <em>El Amigo del Pueblo,</em> dated July 20, 1937, and printed in a smaller format, the same address is given for the paper’s administration and editorial offices as in the very first issue, even though the Group’s offices had been shut down by the police and the newspaper was being printed clandestinely. This was part of a ploy to throw police inquiries off the scent. They thought that <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em> was probably being printed in France by then, in Perpignan or in Montpellier, with the help of French anarchists, although in fact it was still being published in Barcelona. Starting with this edition, and in all succeeding issues of <em>El Amigo del Pueblo,</em> all articles were unsigned, except for the occasional one published under an alias. At no time did Balius allow his imprisonment to interfere with his contributing to editorials, sometimes even writing articles from prison.
Issue No. 5 is one of the most interesting of the <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em> series. Page one carries an editorial entitled “A revolutionary theory.” <strong>That article alone would be enough to highlight the political and historical importance of the Friends of Durruti,</strong> not just in relation to the history of the civil war, but in anarchist ideology. In the editorial, the Friends of Durruti ascribed the progress of the counterrevolution and the failure of the CNT, following its incontrovertible, absolute triumph in July 1936, to one single factor: lack of a revolutionary program. And this had also been behind the defeat in May 1937. The conclusion to which they had come is spelled out with tremendous clarity:
<quote>
the downward spiral [of the revolution] must be attributed exclusively to the absence of a specific program and short-term achievements, and to the fact that, on this score, we have fallen into the snares of counterrevolutionary sectors just when circumstances were plainly taking a favorable turn as far as meeting the proletariat’s aspirations was concerned. And by failing to give free rein to July’s awakening along plainly class lines, we have rendered possible petit bourgeois rule which could never ever have come about, had a unanimous determination to place the proletariat in the driving seat in this country prevailed.
[...] making the blunder of thinking that a revolution of the social type could share its economic and social dynamics with enemy sectors. [...]
In May the problem was posed anew. Once again the talk was of supremacy in the direction of the revolution. But the very same persons who, in July, took fright at the danger of foreign intervention, come the events of May, displayed a lack of vision which culminated in that baleful ‘cease-fire’ which, later, despite a truce’s having been agreed, translated as an ongoing disarmament and ruthless repression of the working class. [...]
So that, by denying ourselves a program, which is to say, libertarian communism, we surrender ourselves entirely to our adversaries, who did and still do have a program and guidelines [...] to the petit-bourgeois parties which ought to have been stamped out in July and in May. In our view, any other sector, had it enjoyed an absolute majority such as we possessed, would have set itself up as absolute master of the situation.
In the preceding edition of our newspaper we spelled out a program. We are alive to the necessity for a revolutionary junta, for the unions to have control of the economy and for the Municipalities to organize freely. Our Group has sought to trace a path, for fear lest circumstances similar to July and May, might see us perform the same way. And success lies in the existence of a program which must be unwaveringly backed by rifles [...]
Revolutions without theory fail to make progress. We of the ‘Friends of Durruti’ have outlined our thinking, which may be amended as appropriate in great social upheavals, but which hinges upon two essential points which cannot be avoided. A program, and rifles.
</quote>
This is a crucial text, for it <strong>represents a landmark in the evolution of anarchist thinking.</strong> The theoretical notions set out here, previously sketched only in a very confused way, are now spelled out with dazzling clarity. And these theoretical acquisitions were later to be reiterated and thought through in Balius’s pamphlet <em>Hacia una nueva revolución.</em> But here they appear for the first time. And no one can fail to appreciate the novelty and significance of them in the context of anarchist thought. The Friends of Durruti had picked up old theoretical concepts, at which they had arrived at the end of a painful historical experience, over a civil war and revolutionary process, which had starkly exposed the contradictions and demands of the class struggle. Are we to believe, then, that this evolution in the political thinking of the Friends of Durruti can seriously and verifiably be ascribed to the influence of some outside group, say, Trotskyists or POUMists? It is beyond dispute that <strong>this is an evolution</strong> attributable to the Friends of Durruti Group exclusively. In their analysis of the political and historical situation, they had come to the conclusion that, in a revolution, there was an ineluctable requirement that a Revolutionary Junta be established. Naturally, the Friends of Durruti shunned the characteristic terminology of marxism,[107] and employed a different idiom, characteristic of anarchist ideology: and that idiom in which they frame the notion of “dictatorship of the proletariat,” is further proof that we are dealing here with evolution internal to the Group, rather than its being colonized or captivated by some outside group. Social and historical realities are stubborn enough and tough enough to ensure that the elements of revolutionary theory can germinate in a revolutionary group which simply keeps its eyes open and its mind alert.
In the same edition of the paper, there was an analysis of events since May, which included a denunciation of the incarceration and trial of POUM militants by the Stalinists, and the destruction of the collectives. Pointed contrasts were drawn between the ease in which the middle classes, the Stalinists’ spawning ground, lived, and the persecution of revolutionary workers. There was also Fulmen’s usual piece on the French Revolution, outlining an interesting contrast between the French revolutionary process and the Spanish. Finally, there was an outstanding long article denouncing abortive attempts on the part of the CNT’s leading committees to have the Friends of Durruti expelled.
Issue No. 6 of <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em> is dated Barcelona, August 12, 1937. The editorial is headed “Necessity of a Revolutionary Junta” reiterating the previous edition’s editorial about the need for a revolutionary junta and arguing that a revolutionary junta ought to have been set up in July 1936:
<quote>
From the July movement we must conclude that the revolution’s enemies must be ruthlessly crushed. This was one of the chief mistakes for which we are now paying with interest. This defensive mission will fall to the revolutionary Junta which must show the enemy no mercy. [...]
The establishment of a revolutionary Junta is of capital importance. It is not a matter of yet another abstraction. It is the outcome of a series of failures and disasters. And is the categorical amendment of the trajectory followed hitherto.
In July an antifascist committee was set up which was not equal to the implications of that sublime hour. How could the embryo thrown up by the barricades have developed, incorporating as it did the friends and foes of the revolution alike? The antifascist committee, with that make-up, was scarcely the embodiment of the fighting in July.[108]
[...] we advocate that the only participants in the revolutionary Junta should be the workers of city and countryside and the combatants who have shown themselves, at every crucial juncture in the conflict, to be the champions of social revolution. [...]
the ‘Friends of Durruti Group’ which knew enough to work out a precise critique of the May events is even now sensible of the need to establish a revolutionary Junta, along the lines we have in mind, and we regard it as indispensable for the defense of the revolution [...]
</quote>
The evolution of the Friends of Durruti’s political thinking was by now unstoppable. After the necessity of a dictatorship of the proletariat had been acknowledged, the next issue to arise was: And who is to exercise that dictatorship of the proletariat? The answer was: the revolutionary Junta, promptly defined as the vanguard of revolutionaries. And its role? We cannot believe that it can be anything other than the one which marxists ascribe to the revolutionary party.
However, in No. 2 of <em>La Voz Leninista,</em> Munis was critical of issue No 6 of <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em> because he regarded its contents as a retreat from the same formulas devised by the Friends of Durruti Group during, and in the immediate aftermath of the May events.
Issue No. 6 also carried a report on the trial mounted against the POUM and on the murder of Nin, for which the government in place was held to be accountable: in addition to the customary article on the French Revolution, there were some others of lesser interest. On the back page there was a printer’s stamp reading “Imp. Libertaria-Perpignan.” There is every likelihood that this was a false trail laid for the police, for <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em> was still being printed in Barcelona.[109]
Issue No. 7 of the newspaper was datelined Barcelona, September 31,[110] and there were several articles which stood out: on the repression unleashed in Aragon by the Stalinists in the wake of the dissolution of the Council of Aragon and the break-up of the anarchist collectives: rebutting the false allegations about the Friends of Durruti peddled by Agustin Souchy in an anonymous pamphlet published by Ediciones Ebro: opposing the re-introduction of freedom of religion: protesting at the unreasonable increase in basic living costs, etc. There was also an outstanding note of humor, very indicative of the times, which went as follows:
<quote>
We move the immediate expulsion from our Organization of persons by the name of Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, Sébastien Faure, Errico Malatesta and Ricardo Mella.
By way of compensating for these expulsions, we move that a tribute be paid to the ‘interventionists,’ on account of their having successfully defeated the counterrevolutionary peril.
Our ‘orthodoxy renders us incompatible with those who furnish ideological and material sustenance to ‘uncontrollables,’ while it also fills us with admiration for the glorious ‘infallibility’ of the great interpreters of ‘circumstance.’
</quote>
The editorial analyzed the import of the May events, which the Friends of Durruti held to be an insurrection intended to remedy the mistakes made since July. It railed against the fence sitting by certain prominent anarchist militants whose resistance of “totalitarian temptations” amounted to nothing more than an abdication of the introduction of libertarian communism. Repeatedly, it was argued that anarchists had to learn the lessons of experience:
<quote>
Totalitarian solutions have been shunned. An official seal has been set upon the decision to refrain from establishing libertarian communism! The line which anarchism is to take — according to the declarations from comrades in positions of responsibility — is that no antifascist denomination should seek selfish advantage [...] Neither dictatorships nor democracies! it is argued. Where are we headed? Without a program of our own, we are in danger of remaining an appendage of bourgeois democracy and risk becoming the victims of any sector that operates with audacity. [...]
Our present hour should be read exclusively in the light of past experience. If we persist in shutting our eyes to reality, which still stinks of the battlefield, the jails and the overall onslaught of the counterrevolution, we will be brutally driven out of the Peninsula.
We may yet salvage the revolution. [...] Experience is a very hard taskmaster and from it we must deduce that we have to assert ourselves with the force of firepower and that we must annihilate those forces which are enemies of the working class and the revolution.
Let us bear in mind the lessons of experience. Therein lies our salvation.
</quote>
There was no plea for a <em>deus ex machina:</em> the Friends of Durruti were anarchists who had learned the lessons of the harshest firsthand experience. What novelties they introduced to anarchist theory may well have been old marxist postulates, themselves merely elementary lessons from the class struggle. But anyone who bandies about labels and regards that as having settled the matter is ill-advised. If the firsthand experience of the proletariat in the class struggle is not enough to remedy errors and if history has nothing to teach us from past struggles, we are left with an affirmation of the primacy of dogma and belief and a denial that there is any validity in experience and history.
The editorial in issue No. 8 of <em>El Amigo del Pueblo,</em> datelined Barcelona September 21, 1937, labored the need for a program if the revolution was to have any prospect of success. As with the<em>Ideas</em>set out previously, it had nothing new to contribute. The remainder of the articles, which were fairly interesting, dealt with a variety of topics: food supplies, opposition to nationalist commemoration of the feast of September 11, the Aragon front, Angel Pestaña’s return to the CNT fold.
In issue No. 9, dated October 20, 1937 carried an interesting manifesto, rehearsing the history of their origins and revolutionary action, as well as a programmatic inventory of the Group’s political standpoints; this proved very controversial and was much commented upon, so much so that issue No. 10, dated November 8, 1937, carried an editorial defending it. The same edition greeted the appearance of <em>Alerta,</em> described as an ideologically kindred newspaper. There was unmistakable venom towards Comorera, who was savagely criticized for his policy as the man in charge of supplies, and for having dismissed the fighters of July 19 as “tribesmen.” There was a report that Balius had been jailed again “following a period at liberty that has lasted barely fifteen or twenty days”[111]: he was convicted as the editor of <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em> which was condemned as a clandestine newspaper in that it had refused to present itself for censorship since issue No. 2. The most interesting articles were entitled “We must speak plainly” and “An historic juncture.” In humorous tones, it rebutted the usual charges hurled by the CNT at members of the Group who were labeled as “uncontrollables, provocateurs and counterrevolutionaries.” After defending the Group’s members and rehearsing their revolutionary and combat credentials, the article very tellingly declined to level any charges against the CNT and the FAI, on the grounds that “that would poison the waters of the spring from which we all must drink.” Plain in this article is the Friends of Durruti’s tremendously limited vision of their own fight. They confined themselves to gentle carping about the “wayward” leaders of the CNT and counted their avoidance of expulsion from the unions as their ultimate achievement. Their view was that, sooner or later, the two divergent strands of anarcho-syndicalism would have to come together, for, otherwise, they could not avoid being crushed by Stalinist dictatorship. It was plain from this article that the Group was drifting further and further from the radicalized stances it had struck in May. The second article deserving of comment, “An historic juncture,” analyzed the unfavorable course of the war, as signaled by the fascists’ uninterrupted victorious advance and their foreign backing. The Friends of Durruti wondered why whole provinces like Malaga or the North had been surrendered without their stores, industries or foodstuffs — which provided booty for the enemy — having been destroyed. The Group noted that the war on the Aragon front had been lost because of the central government’s withholding of arms, because those arms would have gone to the CNT. The war effort was beset by treachery, because the officer class had not been purged, and because there was no fighting moral in the rearguard, and because bourgeois politicians had no thought for anything other than amassing a tidy fortune abroad. The Friends of Durruti called upon workers to win the war, and this call boiled down to the following ten points:
<br>
1. Establishment of a Revolutionary Junta.
1. All economic power to the unions.
1. Socialization of production and consumption.
1. Introduction of the producer’s cart.
1. <strong>Mobilization of the entire population.</strong>
1. <strong>Purging of the rearguard.</strong>
1. Workers’ control of the army.
1. The family wage. Abolition of all privileges.
1. Free municipality. Public order to be placed in workers’ hands.
1. Rationing of consumption across the board.
This, though, was merely a list of demands. There was no hint as to how they might be achieved, nor of the tactics to be employed in order to campaign for them. So it was merely the exposition of a theoretical program for winning the war, a program beyond the Group’s actual powers to implement, one which it in any case was not proposing seriously, but only as a propaganda or lobbying ploy. But direction of the war, or control of the army, or socialization of the economy, or control of public order could scarcely be mere demands: because power is not sued for, but seized. Consequently, we may claim that the Group was, at this point, far removed from playing any real part. It seemed to have run out of steam: and was becoming a mere shadow of its former self. The program, the demands, which may have been valid prior to May, were now a sad caricature and testified to the Group’s utter powerlessness in a situation which had become thoroughly counterrevolutionary.
Issue No. 11 of <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em> was dated November 20, 1937, the anniversary of Durruti’s death and was almost entirely given over to commemorating that popular anarchist hero. Among the articles commenting with more or less success upon the person of Durruti, the most outstanding was undoubtedly the one entitled “Commenting on Durruti,” in which <em>Solidaridad Obrera</em> was taken to task over Durruti’s ideology and intentions. According to the author of the piece, Soli was arguing that Durruti had been ready to abjure every revolutionary principle for the sake of success in the war. The writer in <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em> saw this contention as wrong-headed and the worst possible insult that could have been offered to Durruti’s memory. The version of Durruti’s ideology[112] offered by the Group was the very opposite of the one proffered by <em>Soli</em> :
<quote>
Durruti at no time abjured the revolution. While he did say that we had to abjure everything save victory, what he meant was that we had to be ready to face the greatest privation, and to lose our very lives, rather than let fascism defeat us.
But in Durruti’s mouth, the notion of victory does not imply the slightest dissociation of the war and the revolution. [...] We do not believe — and of this we are certain — that Durruti was arguing that the class which had won everything at the cost of the greatest sacrifices should be the one to give ground constantly and compromise to the advantage of the adversary class. [...]
Durruti was keen to win the war, but he had his sights on the rearguard. [...] Buenaventura Durruti never forswore the revolution. Nor do we, the Friends of Durruti, forswear it.
</quote>
No. 12 of <em>El Amigo del Pueblo,</em> dated February 1, 1938, carried a prominent editorial: “All power to the unions,” expounding upon that particular point in the Group’s program. There were various items on the battle for Teruel, urban transport and Montjuic prison, speculation in the food sector and the corruption obtaining on the borders.
No. 12 was probably the last issue of <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em> . However, Jordi Arquer, in his short history of the Friends of Durruti argues that a total of 15 issues saw publication; and Balius, in his letter of June 10, 1946 to Burnett Bolloten, says that it published right to the end of 1938. Our supposition is based upon Balius’s claim in the foreword to the English edition of that pamphlet, <em>Towards a Fresh Revolution</em> that the Group’s final gathering took place after publication of that pamphlet. Given that No. 12 of <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em> mentions the recent publication of <em>Towards ...</em> we may conclude that following publication of the pamphlet in January 1938, and of No. 12 of the Group’s press mouthpiece on February 1, 1938, the Group held its final meeting and to all intents carried out no further activity for the remainder of the war. This supposition is in any case borne out by the swingeingly effective repression that made life impossible for any revolutionary group. In January 1938, Fosco fled to France to escape arrest. February 13, 1938 saw the capture of the Bolshevik-Leninist Section by police, along with the arrest of the printer Baldomero Palau, from whose printshop <em>La Voz Leninista</em> and <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em> was published. On April 19 the underground committee of POUM (José Rovira, Jordi Arquer, Oltra Picó, José Rodés, Maria Teresa Garcia Banús, Juan Farré Gassó, Wilebaldo Solano, etc.) was arrested.
Later, in the 1960s, a second series of <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em> was published, apparently funded by an inheritance which had come Balius’s way. This second series, four issues of which we have examined, contains nothing of interest. Balius’s name appears nowhere and Pablo Ruiz is listed as the editor-in-chief. The most remarkable feature of it was that every edition contained a poster for members in the interior, inside Spain itself, to paste up on walls by way of clandestine propaganda.
**
[99] In his article “Por los fueros de la verdad,” Balius has this to say: “Later came the ukase from the higher committees ordering our expulsion, but this was rejected by the rank and file in the trade union assemblies and at a plenum of FAI groups held in the Casa CNT-FAI.”
[100] The welcome and widespread sympathy won by the Friends of Durruti from the CNT membership are evident, not just in the powerlessness of the CNT committees and leadership to secure their expulsion, but also in the discontent and deliberation which led, following the May events, to the emergence of a conspiratorial structure within the libertarian organizations, which threw up documents entitled “Aportación a un proyecto de organización conspirativa” and “Informe respecto a la preparación de un golpe de Estado,” as published in the anthology <em>Sucesos de mayo (1937)</em> Cuadernos de la guerra civil No. 1, (Fundación Salvador Segui, Madrid, 1987)
[101] Issue No. 1 of <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em> bears no date. The Group had distributed a notice announcing that <em>El Amigo del Pueblo,</em> the mouthpiece of the Friends of Durruti, would be appearing, on Wednesday May 19. Tavera and Ucelay mistakenly give the date of May 11, 1937, probably taken from the Manifesto reproduced on the second page of the first issue of <em>El Amigo del Pueblo.</em> Paul Sharkey gives the much more likely date of May 20. Then again, given the weekly periodicity which it was intended the paper should have, and that issue No. 2 of <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em> was published on May 26, 1937, there can be no doubt of the date on which No. 1 appeared.
[102] <em>Solidaridad Obrera</em> was under the management of Jacinto Toryho, who was appointed editor-in-chief of the CNT’s main newspaper on account of his resolute defense of CNT collaborationism and discipline. He was profoundly at loggerheads with Balius, who had always been highly critical of anarcho-syndicalist collaborationism. Regarding Toryho and his enmity and friction with Balius, see the interesting study made in an otherwise deplorable article by Susana Tavera and Enric Ucelay da Cal, cited earlier: as well as Jordi Sabater’s book <em>Anarquisme i catalanisme. La CNT i el fet naciónal catalá durant la Guerra Civil</em> (Edicións 62, Barcelona, 1986, pp. 109–110)
[103] As stated by Balius in his letter to Burnett Bolloten from Cuernavaca, June 24, 1946.
[104] Ibid.
[105] Jordi Arquer <em>Història ...</em> op. cit. Colonel Burillo had been involved in the arrest of Nin and the rest of the POUM leadership.
[106] In fact, on June 16, four days after the date on which No. 3 of <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em> came out, the POUM was outlawed and its militants and leaders arrested and/or murdered, in an operation, unprecedented in Spain, overseen by the CPU and Spanish Stalinists.
[107] We need not, we feel, go into the differences between revolutionary marxism and Stalinism. Anyone interested in this matter can refer to issue No. l of <em>Balance.</em>
[108] So, the Friends of Durruti did not regard the Antifascist Militias’ Committee (CAMC) as dual power in embryo, but rather as a class collaboration agency. This was the same conclusion to which Nin, Azaña, Tarradellas, the Bordiguists, etc. had come and flies in the face of the academic, historiographical thesis presenting the CAMC as embryonic workers’ power in contradistinction to the Generalidad.
[109] In the indictment drawn up in February-March 1938 against the militants of the Bolshevik-Leninist Section, there is reference to a search carried out at the print works of one of those indicted, the printer Baldomero Palau. The search carried out at the print works in Barcelona’s Calle Salmeron uncovered a masthead for <em>La Voz Leninista,</em> used in the printing of No. 3, dated February 15, 1938. The document also mentions the discovery of two mastheads from the newspaper <em>El Amigo del Pueblo.</em> This was No. 12 of <em>El Amigo del Pueblo,</em> published in Barcelona on February 1, 1938.
<br>
Moreover, in Circular No. 4 from the Regional Labor Confederation (CNT) of Catalonia [held at the International Institute for Social history in Amsterdam], there is a reproduction of a circular issued by the Friends of Durruti (date unknown, but we imagine from August 1937) to all CNT unions in Catalonia, requesting financial assistance in the purchase of a copying machine because “it is becoming increasingly harder to get out <em>El Amigo del Pueblo.</em> Printers fight shy of agreeing to typeset and print it, on account of its clandestine status and for fear of the authorities. The day will come when we will no longer be able to get it out, because of this problem.”
[110] This was doubtless a printing error. The date should be August 31, 1937, since No. 8 is dated September 21 and there are only 30 days in September.
[111] As he himself tells us, Balius had been jailed in May 1937: “I was held on the first gallery of the Model Prison. This was in May 1937, after the May events.” [ Jaime Balius “No es hora de confusionismos” in <em>Le Combat Syndicaliste</em> of April 14, 1971]. However, the first report of Balius having been jailed appeared in issue No. 4 of <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em> dated June 22, 1937. Given that issue No. 3 of the Friends of Durruti’s mouthpiece was dated June 12, 1937, the likelihood is that Balius’s incarceration coincided with the mass arrests of POUM militants, launched on June 16 when the POUM was declared outside the law.
[112] At no time do we enter into an examination of Durruti as a person, nor of his political ideology. We merely mention the claims of his contemporaries. It is not out of place to recall that Balius held that the Friends of Durruti Group, despite the name, had no ideological links with Durruti. Then again, Durruti was primarily an activist and was never a theorist, nor did he ever claim to be. We should point out also that <em>Soli</em> did not reprint Durruti’s broadcast speeches verbatim and unabridged.
<br>
** <strong>8. Balius’ Pamphlet: <em>Towards a Fresh Revolution</em></strong>
The pamphlet <em>Hacia una nueva revolución,</em> of which fifty thousand copies were printed,[113] even though it was published clandestinely, fleshed out a program which had until then been rather vague. Balius set to work on the drafting of it sometime around November 1937,[114] and it was published by the Friends of Durruti Group in January 1938.[115] Without doubt, it is the Friends of Durruti’s most extensive text and for this reason deserves a separate comment.
The pamphlet’s most significant theoretical contributions had been set out before in editorials in issues Nos. 5, 6, and 7 of <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em>, which is to say, between July 20 and August 31, 1937.
So, the pamphlet has no great theoretical novelties to offer. The great novelty of it resides in any case in the adoption by an anarchists group of concepts which marxism had systematized as the most elementary idiom of the revolutionary theory of the proletariat. On that score the vocabulary used by Balius differs from that used by the marxist classics. But as we shall see, it is not too hard to recognize a familiar idea even when it is called by different names.
The pamphlet comprised 31 pages,[116] divided into eight chapters. The first chapter offered a short historical introduction, in which Balius offered an overview of the period between the Primo de Rivera dictatorship and October 1934. In the second chapter, the events leading up to the revolutionary uprising in July 1936 were examined. A number of claims stand out, being startling, though none the less true for that:
<quote>
The people had to go and look for weapons. They took them by right of conquest. Gained them by their own exertions. They were given nothing: not by the Government of the Republic, not by the Generalidad — not one rifle.
</quote>
The Friends of Durruti’s searching analaysis of the revolution of July 19, 1936 is worth highlighting:
<quote>
The vast majority of the working population stood by the CNT. Inside Catalonia, the CNT was the majority organization. What happened, that the CNT did not make its revolution, the people’s revolution, the revolution of the majority of the proletariat?
What happened was what had to happen. The CNT was utterly devoid of revolutionary theory. We did not have a concrete program. We had no idea where we were going. We had lyricism aplenty: but when all is said and done, we did not know what to do with our masses of workers or how to give substance to the popular effusion which erupted inside our organizations. By not knowing what to do, we handed the revolution on a platter to the bourgeoisie and the marxists who support the farce of yesteryear. What is worse, we allowed the bourgeoisie a breathing space: to return, to re-form and to behave as would a conqueror.
The CNT did not know how to live up to its role. It did not want to push ahead with the revolution with all of its consequences.
</quote>
So, according to the Friends of Durruti, the July revolution failed because the CNT lacked a revolutionary theory and a revolutionary program. From anarchist quarters, lots of reasons have been advanced for this and several different explanations offered of the character of the July revolution: some of these arguments are pretty attractive, but neither Vernon Richards, Semprun Maura, Abad de Santillán, Garcia Oliver, nor Berneri were as plain and clear-cut, nor did they probe the nature of the July revolution as deeply as the Friends of Durruti did in the extract just cited.
Nevertheless, this is only a sampler, because the Friends of Durruti, who were not brilliant theorists nor gifted organizers, but essentially barricade fighters who argued their theoretical case from deliberation upon first hand experiences, with no more than their class instinct to guide them, arrived, in the text which we shall being looking at anon, at one of the finest contemporary analyses of the Spanish <strong>revolution.</strong> An analysis that deserves to be considered, and which we ought not to tag as anarchist or marxist, because it is an analysis from men who did not dice with words but with lives and primarily with their very own lives:
<quote>
When an organization’s whole existence has been spent preaching revolution, it has an obligation to act whenever a favorable set of circumstances arises. And in July the occasion did present itself. The CNT ought to have leapt into the driver’s seat in the country, delivering a severe coup de grace to all that is outmoded and archaic. In this way, we would have won the war and saved the revolution.
But it did the opposite. It collaborated with the bourgeoisie in the affairs of the state, precisely when the State was crumbling away on all sides. It bolstered up Companys and company. It breathed a lungful of oxygen into an anemic, terror-stricken bourgeoisie. One of the most direct reasons why the revolution has been asphyxiated and the CNT displaced, is that it behaved like a minority group, even though it had a majority in the streets. [...]
On the other hand, we would assert that revolutions are totalitarian, no matter who says otherwise. What happens is that the various aspects of revolution are progressively dealt with, but with the proviso that the class which represents the new order of things is the one with the most responsibility. And when things are done by halves, we have what presently concerns us, the disaster of July.
In July a committee of Antifascist Militias was set up. It was not a class organ. Bourgeois and counterrevolutionary factions had their representatives on it. It looked as if this Committee had been set up as a counterbalance to the Generalidad. But it was all a sham.
</quote>
First of all, we ought to underline the definition of the Central Antifascist Militias Committee as a class collaborationist agency and not as the germ of embryonic worker power. On this score, there is total agreement with Nin in the articles he wrote after the May events. And of course the Friends of Durruti were unaware of that article.
To the truism that a revolutionary organization’s sole obligation is to make revolution was added a critique of the CNT’s cooperation in the rescue and reconstruction of the State.
Thus far, the arguments of the Friends of Durruti were orthodoxly anarchist. But as a direct result of these arguments, or perhaps it would be better to say, as a result of the contradictions within the CNT which was embroiled in such an unlikely anarchist endeavor as rescuing and rebuilding a crumbling capitalist State, we come to a remarkable theoretical advance by the Friends of Durruti: <strong>revolutions are totalitarian.</strong> If such a self-evident truth was at odds with the libertarian mentality, then it has to be said that an anarchist revolution is a contradiction defying resolution. Something of the sort was experienced by the anarchists of Spain in 1936.
In its next section, Balius’s pamphlet dealt with the revolutionary uprising in May 1937. The Friends of Durruti’s reasoning was as plain and radical as could be: the roots of the May events went back to July <strong>because of the failure to make the revolution in July.</strong>
<quote>
Social revolution could have been a fact in Catalonia. [...] But the events took a different turn. The revolution was not made in Catalonia. Realizing that once again the proletariat was saddled with a leadership of quibblers, the petit bourgeoisie, which had gone into hiding in its back-rooms in July, hastened to join the battle.
</quote>
Their analysis of Stalinism and of the crucial role it played as a springboard for counterrevolution was not only perceptive but probed further into a profile of the social strata which had afforded it support. It ought to be pointed out, though, that the term “Stalinism” was never used: instead the preferred terms were “socialism” or “marxist” though these carried the meaning with which we today invest the term “Stalinism” from all historical and ideological angles:
<quote>
In Catalonia, socialism has been a pitiful creature. Its ranks have been swollen by members opposed to revolution. They have captained the counterrevolution. It has spawned a UGT which has been turned into an appendage of the GEPCI. Marxist leaders have sung the praises of counterrevolution. They have sculpted slogans about the issue of a united front while first eliminating the POUM,[118] then trying to repeat the exercise with the CNT.
The maneuvers of the petit bourgeoisie, in alliance with the socialists and communists, culminated in the events of May.
</quote>
According to the Friends of Durruti, the May events represented a deliberate provocation designed to create a climate of indecision preparatory to dealing the working class a decisive blow, in order to put paid once and for all to a potentially revolutionary situation:
<quote>
The counterrevolution wanted the working class on the streets in a disorganized manner so that they might be crushed. They partially attained their objectives: thanks to the stupidity of some leaders who gave the cease-fire order and dubbed the ‘Friends of Durruti’ agents provocateurs just when the streets had been won and the enemy eliminated.”
</quote>
The accusation leveled against the anarchist leaders (and although no names are given, we cannot help thinking of Garcia Oliver and Federica Montseny) is not intended as an insult but is a fair assessment of their performance during the May days.
The Friends of Durruti’s belief was that the counterrevolution had achieved its chief aim — Valencia government control of public order.
The Friends of Durruti’s description and assessment of the workers’ backlash against the Stalinist provocation, that is, the May event, is extremely interesting:
<quote>
a) It was a spontaneous backlash.
b) There was no revolutionary leadership.
c) Within a few hours, the workers had scored a resounding military victory. Only a few buildings in the city center were holding out and these could have been taken with ease.
d) The Uprising had been defeated, not militarily, but politically.
At the end of a few hours, the tide had turned in the favor of the proletarians enrolled in the CNT who, as they held in July, defended their rights with guns in hand. We took the streets. They were ours. There was no power on earth that could have wrested them from us. Working class areas fell to us quickly. Then the enemy’s territory was eaten away, little by little, to a redoubt in a section of the residential district — the city center which would have fallen soon, but for the defection of the CNT committees.
</quote>
Next, Balius justified the Friends of Durruti’s actions during the bloody week of May 1937: the Friends of Durruti, in a context of indecision and widespread disorientation in the workers’ ranks, issued a leaflet and a manifesto, in the intention of affording events a revolutionary lead and purpose. Later the Group’s primary concern in the face of the CNT leadership’s incredible policy of appeasement and fraternization was that the barricades should not come down unconditionally or without assurances.
According to Balius, in May there had still been time to salvage the revolution,[119] and the Friends of Durruti had been alone in showing themselves equal to the circumstances. The CNT-FAI’s blinkered attitude to the repression that would needlessly batten upon the revolutionary workers had already been foretold by the Friends of Durruti.
The next chapter in the pamphlet tackles the subject of Spain’s independence. The entire chapter is replete with wrong-headed notions which are short-sighted or better suited to the petit bourgeoisie. A cheap and vacuous nationalism is championed with limp, simplistic references to international politics. So we shall pass over this chapter, saying only that the Friends of Durruti subscribed to bourgeois, simplistic and/or backward-looking ideas with regard to nationalism.[120]
The chapter given over to collaborationism and class struggle is, by contrast, greatly interesting. Collaboration in the government business of the bourgeois State was the big accusation which the Group leveled at the CNT. The Friends of Durruti’s criticism was even more radical than that of Berneri, because Berneri was critical of <strong>CNT participation in the Government,</strong> whereas the Group was critical of <strong>the CNT’s collaboration with the capitalist State.</strong> It was not just a matter of two slightly divergent formulations, but rather of a quite different political outlook underpinning it. To return to the pamphlet:
<quote>
There must be no collaboration with capitalism, whether outside the bourgeois state or from within government itself. As producers, our place is in the unions, reinforcing the only bodies that ought to survive a revolution headed by the workers. [...] And the State cannot be retained in the face of the Unions — let alone bolstered up by our own forces. The fight against capitalism goes on. Inside our own territory, there is still a bourgeoisie connected to the international bourgeoisie. The problem is now what it has been for years.
</quote>
The Friends of Durruti ventured to suggest that the collaborationists were allied with the bourgeoisie, which was tantamount to saying that the anarchist ministers and all who advocated collaborationism <strong>were allied with the bourgeoisie.</strong>
<quote>
The collaborationists are allies of the bourgeoisie. Individuals who advocate such relations have no feeling for the class struggle, nor have they the slightest regard for the unions. Never must we accept the consolidation of our enemy’s positions. The enemy must be beaten. [...] There can be absolutely no common ground between exploiters and exploited. Which shall prevail, only battle can decide. Bourgeois or workers. Certainly not both of them at once.
</quote>
However, the Group at no time took the next definitive step, the inevitable break with <strong>a collaborationist type organization</strong> which had demonstrated its <strong>inability to call off and finish with this policy of alliance with the bourgeoisie.</strong> The Group never proposed a break with the CNT, and the denunciation of that organization as one of capitalism’s organizations. The ideological premises set out were not explored in all that they entailed. It was easier to point the accusing finger at a few individuals, a few leaders who advocated a policy of collaboration with the bourgeoisie than to arrive at the stark and dismal conclusion that the CNT was an organization for collaborating with the bourgeoisie, by virtue of its very nature as a trade union. <strong>It was not the anarchist ministers who were leading the CNT away from its principles, but rather the CNT that was churning out ministers.</strong> But the Group reckoned that the trade unions were class struggle organizations. Even the Catalan UGT, Stalinist through and through and nothing more than an instrument of the PSUC, the party of counterrevolution, was not regarded as an organ of the bourgeoisie. So it was impossible for the Friends of Durruti to take that crucial step. If they could not acknowledge the true nature of the unions[121] as capitalist State machinery, they could not contemplate breaking with the CNT either. Very much the opposite; the unions were a fundamental factor in the Group’s theoretical argument. <strong>Its charges were leveled at individuals, not at organizations.</strong> There was no acknowledgment of the <strong>disease,</strong> nor of its causes: only a few of the symptoms were recognized.[122]
The pamphlet continues with an exposition of the positions and program of the Friends of Durruti. Perhaps because they were hastily drafted, or because of the poor reception awaiting them at that point, the main and most typical tactical political positions, were set out in a more incomplete, confused and vague form than in previous expositions. Those points were as follows: 1. Workers’ direction of the war through a workers’ revolutionary army. 2. Rejection of class collaboration, meaning that the unions were to be strengthened. 3. Socialization of the economy. 4. Anticlericalism. 5. Socialization of distribution, through eradication of bureaucracy and universal rationing of all consumer products. 6. Equal pay. 7. Popular courts. 8. Equality between countryside and town, and defense of the agrarian collectivizations. 9. Worker control of public order.
The central basis of the program was the July experience, which the Friends of Durruti very tellingly depicted as a successful uprising, which had been found wanting in revolutionary theory and revolutionary objectives:
<quote>
They had no idea which course of action to pursue. There was no theory. Year after year we had spent speculating around abstractions. What is to be done? the leaders were asking themselves then. And they allowed the revolution to be lost. Such exalted moments leave no time for hesitancy. Rather, one has to know where one is going. This is precisely the vacuum we seek to fill, since we feel that what happened in July and May must never happen again.
We are introducing a slight variation in anarchism into our program. The establishment of a Revolutionary Junta.
</quote>
The revolutionary Junta was described by the Group as a vanguard established for the purpose of repressing the revolution’s enemies:
<quote>
As we see it, the revolution needs organisms to oversee it and to repress, in an organized sense, hostile sectors. As current events have shown, such sectors do not accept oblivion unless they are crushed.
There may be anarchist comrades who feel certain ideological misgivings, but the lesson of experience is enough to induce us to stop pussy-footing.
Unless we want a repetition of what is happening with the present revolution, we must proceed with the utmost energy against those who are not identified with the working class.
</quote>
After this preamble, the Friends of Durruti set out their revolutionary program, which boiled down to three major points: 1. Establishment of a <strong>Revolutionary Junta</strong> or National Defense Council, the task of which would be to oversee the war, control public order and handle international affairs and revolutionary propaganda. 2. <strong>All economic power to the unions</strong>: this meant the formation of an outright trade union capitalism. 3. <strong>Free Municipality</strong> as the basic cell of territorial organization, the intersection between State decentralization and the quintessentially anarchist federal approach.
The pamphlet closed with a final section bearing the same title as the whole pamphlet: there was a realistic, categorical statement: “the revolution no longer exists.” After a long string of speculations and questions about the immediate prospect, acknowledging the strength of the counterrevolution, a timid, utopian, well-meaning and perhaps rhetorical summons was issued to a future anarchist revolution capable of satisfying human aspirations and the anarchist ideal. However, the counterrevolution’s success in the republican zone and the fascists’ victory in the war were by then inevitable, as Balius conceded in his 1978 foreword (“Forty Years Ago”) to an English-language edition of <em>Hacia una nueva revolución (Towards a Fresh Revolution).</em>
**
[113] According to Arquer, op. cit., although the figure seems to us a bit inflated, if not incredible.
[114] On page 16 of the pamphlet <em>Hacia una nueva revolución</em> it is stated: “Sixteen months have past. What remains? Of the spirit or July, only a memory. Of the organisms of July, a yesterday.” From which our deduction is that the pamphlet was drafted around November 1937, which is to say, sixteen months after July 1936.
[115] In his 1978 introduction to the English-language edition of the pamphlet, <em>Towards a Fresh Revolution</em>, he says that it was published [he says “written” when he ought to have said “published”] in mid-1938: and he also explains the background to its publication:
<br>
“I shall now proceed with a short introduction to our pamphlet: <em>Hacia una nueva revolución.</em> First of all, when was it written? Around mid-1938. [...] Such was the tragic hour when we of the Friends of Durruti, at the Group’s last session, after prolonged examination of the disaster into which the counterrevolution had plunged us, and regardless of the scale of the disaster, refused to accept the finality of such defeat. The infamous policy pursued by Largo Caballero, whose government contained several anarchist militants, had eroded the revolutionary morale of the rearguard: and the Negrin government, the government of defeat and capitulation, gave the defeat hecatomb proportions. For this reason we decided to publish <em>Hacia una nueva revolución</em> which was, as we said, a message of hope and a determination to renew the fight against an international capitalism which had mobilized its gendarmes of the 1930s (in other words, its blackshirts and its brownshirts) to put down the Spanish working class at whose head marched the anarchists and the revolutionary rank and file of the CNT.
<br>
See the Friends of Durruti Group <em>Towards a Fresh Revolution</em> (New Anarchist Library (2) Translated by Paul Sharkey. Sanday, Orkney 1978).
<br>
However, in spite of what Balius claims in no. 12 of <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em> there was a reference to the pamphlet, <em>recently published</em> by the Group and entitled <em>Towards a Fresh Revolution</em>. Since issue No. 12 of the Friends of Durruti’s mouthpiece is dated February 1, 1938, it can be stated that the pamphlet appeared in January 1938.
[116] We have consulted the pamphlet in the original, which differs slightly from the reprint by Etcétera, which is only 28 pages in length, although the text is full and complete.
[117] Published in No. 2 of <em>Balance</em> serie de estudios e investigaciones, Barcelona, 1994.
[118] Note the distinction drawn by the Friends of Durruti between the “marxist” leaders (marxist meaning Stalinist counterrevolutionaries) and the exclusion of the POUM (POUMists as revolutionaries different from the Stalinists) from the united front.
[119] In 1971 Balius reiterated this view: “And I want to finish with the uprising of May 1937. The mistakes made could still have been set right. Again we had mastery of the streets. Two front-line divisions made for Barcelona, but the ‘cease-fire’ and the pressures and arguments brought to bear upon the commanders of the two divisions [the CNT’s Rojinegra division commanded by Maximo Franco (a Group member) and the POUM division under Josep Rovira: they were stopped thanks to the overtures by the CNT member Molina and the Defense councilor, the CNT’s Isgleas prevented them from reaching the Catalan capital. The counterrevolution’s day had come. The hesitancy in May did for the 20<sup>th</sup> century’s proletarian epic.
<br>
Had we been able to call upon a capable revolutionary leadership, we would have made and consolidated a revolution that might have set an example for the world and would have put paid once and for all to the shabby Muscovite bogey” (Jaime Balius “Recordando julio de 1936” in <em>Le Combat syndicaliste</em> of April 1, 1971).
[120] And yet Balius had (in 1935?) published through the Editorial Renacer a pamphlet entitled <em>El nacionalismo y el proletariado</em> in which he set out, from an anarchist and workerist angle, very intriguing<em>Ideas</em>on the matter of nationalism.
[121] See Benjamin Peret and G. Munis <em>Los sindicatos contra la revolución</em> (FOR, Apartado 5355, Barcelona, 1992). See also the appeal issued by the Bolshevik-Leninist Section of Spain on June 26, 1937 (ten days after the outlawing of the POUM) to the POUM left:
<br>
Instead of using a United Front to marshal the revolutionary anarchist masses against their anarcho-reformist leaders, your leadership blindly followed the CNT. This fact was most plainly demonstrated during the May events, when the POUM ordered a retreat before any concrete objective, such as the disarming of the security forces, had been achieved. During the events, the POUM was merely an appendage of the anarcho-reformist leadership.
<br>
The reverse side of this policy of support for the CNT bureaucracy has been the abandonment of the committees of workers, peasants and combatants which had sprung up spontaneously. So you are cut off from the masses. Your leaders concocted new theories under which the unions, those aged bureaucratic machines, could take power. You had done nothing to halt the dissolution of the local committees, while you were expelling our comrades for carrying out propaganda on the committees’ behalf. But during the May events you swiftly turned to the defense committees. This eleventh hour stance was of course utterly inadequate, for it is not enough to issue a hasty call for “committees”: they have to be organized in practical terms. But in fact, right after the May events your platonic solicitude for the committees ceased completely.
<br>
(Bolshevik-Leninist Section of Spain — (on behalf of the Fourth International) “El viejo POUM ha muerto: viva el POUM de la IV Internaciónal,” Barcelona June 26, 1937)
[122] In 1939 Eduardo Maurico came up with a very similar critique of the Friends of Durruti’s program:
<br>
For such groups [groups such as the Friends of Durruti] the root of all evil had been the abandonment of ‘principles’ by the leadership. A reversion to ‘wholesome principles’, a return to ‘purity’, ‘a fresh start’ — that in its entirety was the program and the rallying cry of these factions. Now, starting afresh is an utter impossibility. There is more likely to be a reenactment of history. There can be no return to the situation prior to July 19: but the same mistakes can be made in similar circumstances. The biggest mistake that these factions today can make is to fail to draw all of the lessons evident in the Spanish Revolution, all in the name of ‘purity of principles.’ That initial mistake would induce them sooner or later to make the same mistakes and compromises which today they are against. And the primary consequence of the Spanish Revolution is that the compromises by the Garcia Olivers and the Cipriano Meras were not due to the abandonment of the CNT’s traditional ‘apoliticism,’ but were down to that ‘apoliticism’ itself, that is, to the lack of <strong>a revolutionary theory, in the absence of which revolution is impossible.</strong> (Lenin)
<br>
[O. Emem “Situación revoluciónaria. El poder. El partido.” in ¡Experience españole. Faits et documents No. 2, Paris, August 1939]
<br>
** <strong>9. Balius’s Thoughts from Exile in 1939</strong>
An exiled Balius had two articles printed in the French anarchist review <em>L’Espagne nouvelle</em>. The first of these marked the third anniversary of July 19, 1936. The second, published in September 1939, by which time France and England had formally declared war on Germany, was devoted to May 1937. Both articles were the result of long, considered reflection by Balius, who signed both articles in his capacity as “secretary of the Friends of Durruti.”
Both these articles stand out on account of the precision of the language used and of their central focus upon the fundamental issues raised by the Spanish revolution. Thus, they offer us with the utmost clarity of Balius’s thinking on the question of power, the indispensable function of a revolutionary leadership and the need to destroy the State and introduce a new structure in its place (in earlier writings, this was described as a revolutionary junta) capable of repressing counterrevolutionary forces.
In the article entitled “July 1936: import and possibilities” he contradicted those who argued that the July events were simply the result of the struggle against the rising by the military and the fascists, which is to say that “without the army rebellion there would have been no armed popular movement.” Instead, Balius claimed that this outlook was in keeping with Popular Front-ism, the result of the subordination of the working class to the republican bourgeoisie, itself the chief reason why the proletariat had been defeated. Balius recalled how the republican bourgeoisie had refused the workers the arms with which to confront the fascist rebellion:
<quote>
In Barcelona itself, we had to suffer the Transport Union to be stormed by Generalidad goons who, only hours before the crucial battle, were still eager to take away the rifles which we had seized from aboard the Manuel Arnús, and which were intended for use against the fascists.
</quote>
According to Balius, the victory over the military had only been achieved in those places where the workers, weapons at the ready, and with no sort of deals with the petit bourgeoisie, had taken on the fascists. Wheresoever the workers — as in Zaragoza — had hesitated or made deals, the victory had gone to the fascists.
The most important issued raised in July 1936, according to Balius, was not the army’s success in a few areas in Spain. The most important issue had arisen inside the republican zone: who took power and who directed the war? To which question there could be only two answers: the republican bourgeoisie, or the proletariat:
<quote>
But the most important issue arose in our zone. It was a matter of determining who had won. Was it the workers? In which case the governance of the country fell to us. But ... the petit bourgeoisie as well? That was the mistake.
</quote>
Balius argued that the working class ought to have taken power regardless in July 1936. Which would have represented the only guarantee and only chance of victory in the war:
<quote>
“The CNT and the FAI which were the soul of the movement in Catalonia could have afforded the July events their proper color. Who could have stopped them? Instead of which, we allowed the Communist Party (PSUC) to rally the opportunists, the bourgeois right, etc., ... on the terrain of the counterrevolution.
In such times, it is up to one organization to take the lead. Only one could have: <strong>ours</strong>.
[...] Had the workers known how to act as masters in antifascist Spain, the war would have been won, and the revolution would not have had to endure so many deviations right from the start. We could have had the victory. But what we managed to gain with four handguns, we lost when we had whole arsenals full of arms. For those culpable for the defeat, we have to look past Stalinism’s hired assassins, past the thieves like Prieto, past scum like Negrin and past the usual reformists: <strong>we bore the guilt</strong> for not having it in us to do away with all this riffraff [...] But, while we are all jointly to blame, there are those who bear a particularly heavy burden of responsibility. Namely, the leaders of the CNT-FAI, whose reformist approach in July and whose counterrevolutionary intervention in May 1937 especially barred the way to the working class and dealt the revolution a mortal blow.
</quote>
Such was Balius’s summing-up of the thousand doubts and objections which the anarcho-syndicalist leaders had faced in July 1936, regarding the minority status of the anarchist presence outside of Catalonia, the need to maintain antifascist unity and the repeated compromises which the war forced upon the revolution. Balius claimed that the anarchists’ victory in Catalonia could have presaged the quick crushing of the fascist uprising all across Spain, <strong>had the proletariat taken power. According to Balius, that was the mistake made in July 1936: power had not been taken</strong>. And out of that mistake came the rapid degeneration of the revolution, and its difficulties. That mistake left the door open for the growth of the counterrevolution, of which Stalinism was the chief architect. But Balius reckoned the blame lay, not with the Stalinists and the republican bourgeoisie, but rather with those anarchist leaders who had preferred antifascist unity — which is to say, collaboration with the bourgeoisie, the State and capitalist institutions — over proletarian revolution.
In his article on the events of May 1937, published in September 1939, and entitled “May 1937: a historical date for the proletariat,” Balius described the two years following May 1937 as the simple aftermath of those revolutionary events. According to Balius, May 1937 was not a protest, but rather a consciously revolutionary uprising of the Catalan proletariat, which <strong>succeeded militarily and failed politically</strong>.
The failure was down to treachery by the anarchist leaders. Again we find the charge of treason leveled by the Friends of Durruti during the events of May 1937, only to be retracted later in <em>El Amigo del Pueblo:</em>
<quote>
But the treason of the reformist wing of the CNT-FAI manifested itself here.
Repeating the dereliction shown in the July events, again they sided with the bourgeois democrats. They issued the cease-fire order. The proletariat was reluctant to abide by that call and in a raging fury, ignoring the orders from its faint-hearted leaders, it carried on defending its positions.
And this is how Balius depicted the role played by the Friends of Durruti in May 1937:
We, the Friends of Durruti, who fought in the front lines, sought to ward off the disaster which would have been the people’s constant fare, had they laid down their arms. We issued the call for the fighting to be resumed and that the fighting should not cease without certain conditions first having been met. Unfortunately, the spirit of attack had already been broken and the fighting was halted without its revolutionary objectives having been achieved.
</quote>
Balius very vividly underlined the paradox of the proletariat’s having succeeded militarily but failed politically:
<quote>
This was the first time in the entire history of social struggles that the victors surrendered to the vanquished. And without even the slightest assurance that the vanguard of the proletariat would not be touched, dismantling of the barricades began: the city of Barcelona returned to its appearance of normality, as if nothing had happened.
</quote>
In Balius’s analysis, the May events appeared as a crossroads: either the revolution was forsworn once and for all, or power was taken. And he explained away the anarchists’ constant retreat since July as the fruits of the damnable Popular Front-ist policy of alliance with the republican bourgeoisie. And also as a consequence of the divorce existing within the CNT between a counterrevolutionary leadership and a revolutionary rank and file. May 1937 was a failure <strong>because the workers failed to come up with a revolutionary leadership</strong>:
<quote>
“The proletariat was at a fatal crossroads. There were only two courses to choose between: either bend the knee before the counterrevolution or prepare to impose one’s own power, to wit, <strong>proletarian power.</strong>
The drama of the Spanish working class is characterized by the most absolute divorce existing between the grassroots and the leadership. The leadership was always counterrevolutionary. By contrast, the Spanish workers [...] have always stood head and shoulders above their leaders when it comes to perceiving events and to interpretation of them. Had those heroic workers found a revolutionary leadership, they would have written one of the most important pages in their history while the whole world looked on.”
According to Balius, in May 1937, the Catalan proletariat <strong>had urged the CNT to take power</strong>:
For the essence of the May Events, one must look to the proletariat’s unshakable determination to place a workers’ leadership in charge of the armed struggle, the economy, and the entire existence of the country. Which is to say (for any anarchist not afraid of the words) that the proletariat was fighting for <strong>the taking of power</strong> which would have come to pass through the destruction of the old bourgeois instruments and the erection in their place, of a new structure based upon the committees that surfaced in July, only to be promptly suppressed by the reaction and the reformists.”
</quote>
In these two articles, Balius had broached the fundamental point of the revolution and Spanish civil war, without which what happened remains incomprehensible: the issue of power. And he indicated too the organs which were to have embodied that power, and above all recognized the need to dismantle the capitalist State apparatus in order to erect a proletarian replacement in its place. Moreover, Balius pointed to the absence of a revolutionary leadership as having been the root cause of the Spanish revolution’s failure.
After a reading of these two articles, it has to be acknowledged that the evolution of Balius’s political thinking, rooted in analysis of the wealth of experience garnered during the civil war, had led him to confront issues taboo in the anarchist ideology: 1. the need for the proletariat to take power. 2. the ineluctability of the destruction of the capitalist State apparatus to clear the way for a proletarian replacement. 3. the indispensable role of a revolutionary leadership.
What we have just said does not exclude the fact that there were other facets to Balius’s thinking, secondary facets, maybe, not at issue in these articles and which are in keeping with the traditional anarcho-syndicalist ideology: 1. trade union direction of the economy. 2. committees as the organs of proletarian power. 3. municipalization of the administration, etc.
There cannot be any doubt that Balius, operating on the basis of the ideology of Spanish anarcho-syndicalism, had made tremendous efforts to digest the brutal experiences of civil war and the Spanish revolution. The merit of the Group lies precisely in that effort to comprehend reality and assimilate the first-hand experiences of the Spanish proletariat. Life was easier as an anarchist minister than as an anarchist revolutionary. It was easier to forswear ideology as such, that is, to renounce principles “temporarily” in the moment of truth, in order to revert to them once defeat and the passage of history had rendered contradictions irrelevant. It was easier to call for antifascist unity and a share in the governance of a capitalist State, and to embrace militarization in order to defer to a war directed by the republican bourgeoisie: than to confront those contradictions and assert that the CNT should have taken power, that the war was winnable only if the proletariat was in the driving seat, that the capitalist State had to be destroyed, and above all that the proletariat had to erect power structures of its own, use force to crush the counterrevolution and that all of this was impracticable in the absence of a revolutionary leadership. <strong>Whether or not these conclusions were anarchist mattered a lot to those who never paused to question whether it was anarchist to prop up the capitalist State</strong>. Between 1936 and 1939, the anarcho-syndicalist ideology was repeatedly put to the severest tests, with regards to its capability, coherence and validity. Balius’s thinking, and that of the Friends of Durruti Group was the only worthwhile attempt by a Spanish anarchist group to resolve the contradictions and dereliction of principle which characterized the CNT and the FAI. If the theoretical endeavors of Balius and the Group led them to embrace conclusions that can be described as alien to anarcho-syndicalism, maybe it would be necessary to recognize anarchism’s inadequacy as a revolutionary theory of the proletariat. Balius and the Group never took that step, and at all times regarded themselves as anarchists, although they stuck by their criticisms of the CNT’s collaboration in the State.
We will not venture to describe such a stance as either coherent or contradictory. The Stalinist repression that battened upon revolutionaries following the May events did not target the Group as such, in that it was never outlawed, but targeted all CNT militants in general. Doubtless that helped preclude further theoretical clarification and an organizational rupture, which we, in any case, do not believe would have come to pass.
However, we concede that our analysis is overly political, subtle, inconvenient and problematical: it is much more convenient, whimsical, academic and suited to the anecdotes and caricatures on offer to fall back upon the <em>deus ex machina</em> of entryism and Trotskyist influences upon Balius and the Friends of Durruti.
** <strong>10. The Friends of Durruti’s Relations with the Trotskyists [123]</strong>
It requires only a cursory perusal of <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em> or Balius’s statements to establish that the Friends of Durruti were never marxists, nor influenced at all by the Trotskyists or the Bolshevik Leninist Section. But there is a school of historians determined to maintain the opposite and hence the necessity for this chapter.
For a start, we have to demolish one massive red herring: the so-called “Communist Union Manifesto” supposedly jointly endorsed by the Friends of Durruti, the POUM and the Libertarian Youth: but which, in point of fact, never existed. Its existence is just a fantasy of the historian’s trade. Like Peter Pan’s shadow, the “Communist Union Manifesto” acquired a life of its own and refuses to be tied to its master’s slippers.
The misconstrued document in question was a “Manifesto” from Union Communiste, a French Trotskyist group which distributed it in Paris in June 1937 at a rally organized by French anarchists in the Vel d’Hiver in Paris, a rally with the participation of Federica Montseny and Garcia Oliver.[124] The initial peddler of this mistake, which was subsequently repeated by many others, was César M. Lorenzo.
As for the matter of Moulin’s* sway over the Friends of Durruti, we are forced to conclude that this is an utterly unwarranted historiographical invention. From the Thalmanns’ book it emerges that it was more a question of Moulin’s having been swayed by the Friends of Durruti.[125] But even if this were not the case, the influence of Moulin within the Group’s ideology, as set out in its leaflets, manifestoes and above all in the columns of <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em>, does not warrant any claim that it amounted to anything of significance, if indeed it existed.
At all times the Group articulated an anarcho-syndicalist ideology, although it also voiced radical criticism of the CNT and FAI leadership. But it is a huge leap from that to claiming that the Group espoused marxist positions. In any case, we have no problem agreeing that analysis of the reality and of the uprisings in July and May led the Friends of Durruti to espouse two fundamental notions which can scarcely be described as essentially marxist — though they are that, too — so much as the most elementary idioms of any proletariat-driven revolutionary uprising.[126] Those two notions are, to borrow the Durruti-ists expressions, are as follows:
<quote>
1. That one must impose a <strong>revolutionary program</strong>, libertarian communism, <strong>which must be defended by force of arms</strong>. The CNT, which had a majority on the streets, ought to have introduced libertarian communism and then should have defended it with force. In other words, which is to say, switching now to the marxist terminology: the dictatorship of the proletariat ought to have been installed.
2. There is a need for the <strong>establishment of a Revolutionary Junta</strong>, made up of revolutionaries who have taken part in the proletarian uprising, <strong>to exercise power and use violence to repress the non-proletarian factions</strong>, in order to preclude the latter’s taking power, or embarking upon a counterrevolutionary process to defeat and crush the proletariat. That this Revolutionary Junta, as the Friends of Durruti call it, while others call it the vanguard or the revolutionary party, can shock only those who are shocked by words rather than by the defeat of the proletariat.
</quote>
So, it seems obvious that there was an evolution within anarchist thought processes, leading the Friends of Durruti Group to embrace two notions fundamental to every proletarian revolutionary process and which have, of course, long since been incorporated into the elements of revolutionary marxism. But it is a very different thing to argue that the Friends of Durruti were influenced from without by Trotskyists and turned, overnight, into marxists. Such a contention has validity only as an insult in the propaganda deployed by the CNT against the Friends of Durruti.
That the Friends of Durruti were not in any way <strong>beholden</strong> to Spanish Trotskyists is transparent from several documents, which we shall now analyze:
a. On a number-of occasions, Balius’s own statements roundly denied that the Friends of Durruti had been influenced in any way by the POUM or the Trotskyists,[127] and maintained that he still considered himself an anarchist militant, although, naturally, one very critical of the CNT’s governmental and ministerial collaboration:[128]
<quote>
Anarchists may go to jail and perish as Obregón, Ascaso, Sabater, Buenaventura and Peiró have, whose lives are worthy of the praises of a Plutarch. We may die in exile, in concentration camps, in the maquis or in the death-ward, but assume ministerial positions? That is unthinkable.
b. The appeal issued by the Bolshevik-Leninist Section of Spain on June 26, 1937 (ten days after the POUM was outlawed) to the POUM’s left:
Although you do not see eye to eye with us upon every question and indeed are against our entry, you nonetheless did not have any right to reject collaboration with genuinely revolutionary groups. On the contrary: you have a duty to invite the ‘Friends of Durruti’, as well as ourselves, to seek some common accord on the requisite practical steps which may afford an escape from this situation and pave the way for new struggles that will lead us on to victory.
</quote>
This invitation, issued by the Trotskyist group to the left of the POUM, to summon a meeting between the outlawed and persecuted POUM, the Friends of Durruti and the Bolshevik-Leninist Section of Spain, that is, between the three revolutionary groups in existence after the May events, indicates that the Friends of Durruti were deemed to be <strong>an independent group</strong> organizationally and ideologically, on a par with the POUM or the Bolshevik-Leninist Section of Spain:
c. This was the reaction to No. 2 of <em>La Voz Leninista</em>[129] to rejection of the invitations the Trotskyists has issued to hold a meeting between the POUM[130] left, the Friends of Durruti and the Bolshevik-Leninist Section and endorse a common manifesto:
<quote>
The ‘Friends of Durruti’ and the POUM’s left wing have rejected a specific proposition. Following the dissolution of the POUM and the arrest of its militants, the Bolshevik-Leninist Section of Spain sent a letter to the ‘Friends of Durruti’, to the party’s Madrid branch committee and to the left fraction in Barcelona, proposing that we jointly sign a manifesto demanding the immediate release of those arrested, the restoration of premises, uncensored freedom for the worker press, the disarming of the Assault Guards, legalization of the Control Patrols under the direction of workers’ committees and a proposal for a CNT-FAI-POUM united front to press for these points.
In the same letter, whose contents we may not reveal because of the police, our Committee arranged a rendezvous for discussion of any items upon which there might be differences of opinion. None of those invited showed up for the meeting nor has any thus far replied to our message. Unofficially, we have discovered that the POUM leftists did not think the time was right for a break with their E.[xecutive] C.[ommittee] and the ‘Friends of Durruti’ see little advantage to their aims in alliance with the Bolshevik-Leninists.
In reality, the occasion could not have been better suited for the POUM’s left wing and anarchism’s leftist wing to demonstrate their capabilities as leaders and their resolution in difficult times.
Regrettably, they have chosen to support their respective organizations’ inertia rather than appear to be active alongside Trotskyists. We cannot disguise the fact that we regard this as reminiscent of the universal terror of Trotskyism.
</quote>
This text, which we reproduce in its entirety, is a sufficiently clear indication to us that whereas there were strenuous efforts made on the part of the Trotskyist group led by Munis to bring influence to bear on the Friends of Durruti and on the POUM’s left, that influence never amounted to anything more than a failed effort.
d. E. Wolf’s report to Trotsky, dated July 6, 1937, states as follows [translated from the French original]:[131]
<quote>
A tactical switch is required at this point. In the past we focused almost exclusively on the POUM. The anarchist revolutionary workers were unduly neglected, with the exception of the Friends of Durruti. But the latter are rather few in number and it will be impossible to achieve any collaboration with them. We even invited them, along with the left fraction of the POUM, to take part in a meeting to discuss joint action. Neither the POUMists nor the Friends would agree to the meeting. Not just because we appeared too weak to them, but because they are still under the influence of the monstrous campaign against Trotskyism. Assuredly they say to themselves: ‘Why should we run such a risk and provide our enemies with further ammunition about our being “Trotskyists”?’
</quote>
e. Munis’s report to Trotsky, dated August 17, 1939,[132] which appears to contradict our claims regarding the Trotskyists’ influence over the Group, has this to say:
<quote>
In the socialist and anarchist sectors, there is considerable scope for our work. The chief leader of the ‘Friends of Durruti’, ostensibly influenced by us, is espousing an outlook with quite pronouncedly marxist features. At our direct instigation, and on behalf of the ‘Friends of Durruti’, an initial bulletin was drafted, the text of which is still in our possession, in which the need to overhaul all anarchist theories is posited. [...] But we have lost ground in this regard, because of our being materially powerless to afford effective economic assistance to the ‘Friends of Durruti’ It is not our aim to encourage movement in our direction through financial means alone, but rather to utilize the latter to bring Bolshevik ideas to the workers who follow said current (...) we entertain no wild expectations, but economic resources will quickly secure us a preponderant influence that would bring the ‘Friends of Durruti’, partly at any rate, into the Fourth International.
</quote>
Munis’s painstaking report talks throughout about the prospects of influencing the Friends of Durruti ideologically and even of drawing them into the Fourth International: but that very same prospect, which <strong>existed in August 1939</strong>, is confirmation that it had come to nothing in 1937.
f. In the interview published by <em>La Lutte ouvrière,</em> in its editions dated February 24 and March 3, 1939, Munis took this line with regard to the Friends of Durruti:
<quote>
This circle of revolutionary workers [the Friends of Durruti] represented a beginning of anarchism’s evolving in the direction of marxism. They had been driven to replace the theory of libertarian communism with that of the ‘revolutionary junta’ (soviet) as the embodiment of proletarian power, democratically elected by the workers. To begin with, especially after the May events, during which the Friends of Durruti lined up with the Bolshevik-Leninists in the front line of the barricades, this group’s influence made deep inroads into the (CNT) trade union center and into the ‘political’ group which directed it, the FAI. The panicking bureaucrats tried to take steps against the Friends of Durruti leaders, accusing them of being ‘marxists’ and ‘politicals.’ The CNT and FAI leadership passed a resolution to expel. But the Unions steadfastly refused to implement that resolution.
Unfortunately, the leaders of the Friends of Durruti have failed to capitalize upon the potential force at their disposal. In the face of charges that they are ‘marxist politicals’, they retreated without a fight.
[Question] Are there actual indications of the workers’ turning away from the anarchist outlook and moving towards the notion of conscious proletarian power?
The anarchist leaders’ collaboration with the bourgeoisie and the overall experience of the revolution and the war opened most anarchist workers’ eyes to the fact that a proletarian power was vital for the protection of the revolution and of proletarian gains. Agreement between the Bolshevik vanguard and individual workers was readily achieved. But the organizational expression of that agreement failed to crystallize, partly on account of the absence of a strong Bolshevik nucleus, partly due to the absence of political clear-sightedness in the Friends of Durruti.
But I have had occasion to talk with old anarchist militants, some of them quite influential. All of them openly express the same notion: ‘I can no longer stand by the ideas I supported before the war. Let me proclaim my agreement with dictatorship of the proletariat, which cannot be a party dictatorship as in the USSR, but rather that of a class. In the organs of proletarian power, all of the working class’s organizations may come together and collaborate.
</quote>
This intriguing and impassioned interview with Munis in <em>La Lutte ouvrière</em> merely bears out what we have been saying about the Friends of Durruti. In the first place, that they were not marxists, and secondly, that the emergence of the Friends of Durruti as a theoretical anarchist dissidence was due to the insufferable contradictions which the hard reality of war and revolution created within a Spanish anarchist movement characterized by its mammoth organizational strength and absolute theoretical vacuousness.
Let us, therefore, rehearse the historical context of dealings between the Friends of Durruti and the Bolshevik-Leninist Section of Spain. There had been contacts prior to May 1937, through the person of Moulin. It cannot <strong>strictly</strong> be claimed that Moulin exercised any ideological influence of any sort over Balius and the Group. During the May events there was no collaboration between them either. They merely encountered one another on the streets and both groups issued leaflets with watchwords calling for the fight to be continued.[133] But neither of them was strong enough to unseat the CNT leadership.
After May 1937, neither the POUM’s left[134] (Josep Rebull) nor the Friends of Durruti[135] (Jaime Balius) agreed to attend a meeting summoned by the Trotskyists for the purpose of working out concerted action, as noted in <em>No. 2</em> of <em>La Voz Leninista</em> and in Wolf’s report to Trotsky, dated July 6, 1937.
Only in French exile and from 1939 on was there any mention of possible Trotskyist <strong>influence</strong> over the Friends of Durruti, influence which, in fact, failed to prosper, as confirmed in Munis’s extremely optimistic letter to Trotsky on April 27, 1940.[136]
Consequentially, no group wielded discernible influence over the Friends of Durruti. This contention, which we have attempted to demonstrate, is, we believe, how the historical record stands at present. But it is equally certain that the insults tossed around by the CNT did not fall on deaf ears, and that in the eyes of the majority of CNT militants the Friends of Durruti as a group was “suspected” of marxism, and that Friends of Durruti militants were always described as being authoritarian and/or ‘marxist” in outlook. Take, for instance the claims made by Peirats who was, let it not be forgotten, chief editor of <em>Acracia</em> and one of the listed contributors to <em>Ideas</em>. Peirats was a CNT militant highly critical of collaboration with the State and was actively and prominently involved in the CNT opposition to the CNT leadership cadres’ acceptance of ministerial portfolios. By November 1937, he was persuaded that the revolution had been lost and opted, despite his anti-militarist convictions, to go to the front “to seek death,” by way of a sort of suicide arrangement, on account of the CNT’s contradictions. However Peirats was not a sympathizer with the Friends of Durruti and in an oral[137] interview in 1976 he had this to say:
<quote>
Question: Were you aware of the creation and intentions of the ‘Friends of Durruti’ group? Were you in touch with them?
Peirats: This was a group that emerged at the time of the May events. In fact its origins, I believe, can be traced back to the autumn of 1936, when the campaign for militarization started. There were lots of comrades at that time unwilling to militarize and they quit the fronts.
Question: Prior to Durruti’s death?
Peirats: Yes, before Durruti’s death, but especially afterwards, there were lots of comrades who refused to be militarized. The Durruti Column was still a Militias unit, not yet the 26<sup>th</sup> Division. Quite a few defied instructions and returned to the rearguard, creating a certain climate there. These were the ones that fought during the May events in Barcelona, and although there were other fighters as well, it was they who bore the brunt of the attack. When things ended in such a disgraceful compromise, there was a few who hoisted the rebel flag again, formed the “Friends of Durruti” group, brought out the newspaper <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em> and kept in touch. But they had little impact, for some of them were not genuinely anarchists: they were merely revolutionaries and this created a certain malaise. They were not widely welcomed, even in quarters that we might term refractory towards the Organization’s watchwords. I am merely articulating my feelings here. As I knew the individuals concerned, I never had any real sympathy with the ‘Friends of Durruti’, because I found its leanings very authoritarian. Talk along the lines of “We are going to impose this, and whoever does not ... we will shoot him” struck me as rather Bolshevistic. And for that reason I was not a follower of theirs. I did attend some meetings, but always for discussions with them. The attitudes displayed by some of them ensured that many of us held back from helping them. And they achieved nothing. They themselves devalued their own work. The real work of opposition, therefore, carried on outside of them [...] In the end, around about October 1937, I felt so weary, because of the creeping counterrevolution everywhere, and I struck a heroic or suicidal pose, saying to myself: “Let death come if it will, but I am off to the front.” Off I went as a volunteer, and from then on I took no further interest in the rearguard.
</quote>
Peirats’s testimony offers us the key to anarcho-syndicalist rationale and psychology. The Friends of Durruti, according to Peirats, were authoritarians and Bolshevistic, and that was reason enough to have no truck with them and even to go to the extreme of embracing militarism and espousing a suicidal, passive attitude to the progress of the bourgeois counterrevolution. Peirats, who, while in exile, took upon himself the CNT’s commission to write an official history[138] of the CNT during the civil war, could not accept that there is nothing more authoritarian than a successful revolution. But this was a very hard lesson for anarchists to take on board.
Does all of the above mean that the Trotskyists had no contacts with Rebull or with the Friends of Durruti? No.
In any case the POUM left (Rebull) and the Friends of Durruti (Balius) had a meeting during the May events, but the numerical slightness of both organizations and the refusal by the Friends of Durruti to issue a joint manifesto with Cell 72 ensured that these contacts failed to produce anything practical.[139]
After the May events, the Group was disowned by the CNT leadership, and although its members were in the end not expelled from the CNT, insofar as the Friends of Durruti always retained a measure of support in the unions’ assemblies, they were denied the use of the CNT presses. It was on account of this that the Friends of Durruti Group turned to Rebull, the administrative director of <em>La Batalla</em> and Ediciones Marxistas. Rebull, without even bothering to consult the POUM leadership, and honoring the most elementary — though no less risky — duty of solidarity, granted the Group access to the POUM’s presses so that they could print the Manifesto which the Friends of Durruti distributed in Barcelona on May 8. [140]
Might this perhaps mean that Rebull had an influence over the Friends of Durruti? <strong>Absolutely not</strong>. Did Moulin’s involvement in the Group’s interminable discussions mean that Trotskyists had influence with the Group? <strong>Again no</strong>.
There is no denying that there was ongoing contact between militants of the Bolshevik-Leninist Section of Spain and the Friends of Durruti and that several militants of the Group were recipients of the clandestine press produced by the Trotskyists.[141]
However these contacts were not confined to a simple swapping of the underground press produced by each group. The various organizations outlawed in June 1937 kept in touch and shared assets and intelligence in order to stand up to the repression and carry on the fight from their common clandestine circumstances or simply showed solidarity with fellow revolutionaries. Such as in the ongoing campaign calling for solidarity with those indicted in the show trial against the POUM. Or else the intelligence that Captain Narwitsch was a police spy — intelligence passed on to the Trotskyists by militants from the POUM. There was also the underground publication by the same printer Baldomero Palau of issue No. 3 of <em>La Voz Leninista</em> and several issues of <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em> on presses located in the Calle Salmerón.[142]
Although the Trotskyists and the Durruti-ists were not in touch prior to May 1937: and although they mounted no joint action despite the contacts that were established during the May events and in the ensuing weeks: from June onwards after the proscription of the POUM, the Bolshevik-Leninist Section and the Friends of Durruti’s newspaper there was a period of solidarity and cooperation between the various underground organizations and indeed of personal friendships between their militants.[143]
So we may conclude that although various groups were in touch with the Friends of Durruti we cannot strictly speak of any significant decisive outside influence upon the Friends of Durruti: <strong>Contacts? yes,</strong> but <strong>influence? No.</strong>
We have already dealt at length with the existence of contacts between Trotskyists, POUMists, Group members and anarchist militants. Contacts that consisted not just of discussion and political debate, exchange and distribution of newspapers but which also culminated in memorable high-risk acts of solidarity in the face of counterrevolutionary and Stalinist repression. A solidarity that was closer to the camaraderie[144] among activists than the ideological or organizational type of proselytizing influence imagined by historians. Or to put it in such a way that it may be comprehensible even to the most fatuous, pompous, lying, conceited sanctimonious hypocrite from the closed and illustrious guild of academic historians — help was tendered to a comrade from a different organization simply because he had shown that he “had balls” and not because of any abstract indeterminate degree of ideological influence in play.
However, there may be those who cannot grasp the meaning of the word solidarity between revolutionaries.
**
[123] There were two rival Trotskyist groups in existence in Spain during the civil war: the Bolshevik-Leninist Section led by Munis and the “Le Soviet” group led by “Fosco.” We make no references here to “Le Soviet” because it had no dealings with the Friends of Durruti. For this reason we use the term Trotskyist as a synonym for militants of the Bolshevik-Leninist Section.
[124] For the “Communist Union Manifesto” as an historiographical error see: Agustin Guillamón “El Manifiesto de Unión Commuistda: un repetido error en la historiografia sobre la guerra civil” in <em>La História i el Joves historiadors catalans</em>, Pónencies i Comunicacions de les Primeres Jornades de Joves Historiadors Calalans, celeblades els dies 4, 5 i 6 d’octubre de 1984 (Edicións La Magrana Barcelona 1986) and Paul Sharkey <em>The Friends of Durruti. A Chronology</em> (Editorial Crisol, Tokyo May 1984)
[125] On this point we are in agreement with Paul Sharkey.
[126] See Munis’s article in No. 2 of <em>La Voz Leninista</em> (August 23, 1937) entitled “La Junta revolucionaria y los ‘Amigos de Durruti’,” wherein Munis analyses the concept of revolutionary junta championed by the Group in No. 6 of <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em> (August 12, 1937).
[127] In his letter to Bolloten written from Cuernavaca and dated June 20, 1946 Balius stated:
<br>
The alleged influence of the POUM or the Trotskyists upon us is untrue. You will appreciate that the Group of us CNT comrades who headed the Group knew perfectly well what we wanted. We were not newcomers to the revolutionary lists. Consequently, all of the claims that have been tossed around are utterly unfounded.
<br>
By my reckoning what I have said should be enough. You may describe the Friends of Durruti Group as an attempt by a group of CNT militants to rescue it from the morass in which it found itself and at the same time to salvage the Spanish revolution which had been menaced from the outset by counterrevolutionary forces which the CNT in its <strong>naiveté</strong> had failed to eliminate. Especially in Catalonia, where no one could have challenged our supremacy.
<br>
In a letter from Hyéres (France) to Paul Sharkey, on September 7, 1974, Balius himself stressed the independence of the Group, confirming the complete absence of contacts between the Friends of Durruti and the Trotskyists and the POUM, <strong>prior to May 1937</strong>: “We had no contact with the POUM, nor with the Trotskyists, but there was some mixing on the streets, with rifles in hand.”
[128] Jaime Balius “Por los fueros de la verdad” in <em>Le Combat syndicaliste</em> of September 2, 1971.
[129] <em>La Voz Leninista</em> No. 2, Barcelona, August 23, 1937.
[130] In Barcelona the POUM’s left was represented by Cell 72, and more specifically by its secretary Josep Rebull, the administrator of <em>La Batalla</em> and the Editorial Marxista. Josep Rebull had drafted a counter-proposition in anticipation of the convening of the POUM’s second congress, at which he delivered a radical critique of the political policy pursued by the POUM Executive Committee.
[131] Reprinted with the permission of The Houghton Library (Harvard University).
[132] Reprinted with the permission of The Houghton Library (Harvard University).
[133] The leaflet from the Bolshevik-Leninist Section distributed on May 4, 1937 (reconstituted from the facsimile published in <em>Lutte ouvriere</em> No. 48, of June 10, 1937) reads:
<br>
Long live the revolutionary offensive! No compromises. Disarm the GNR [Republican National Guard] and the reactionary Assault Guards. This is a crucial juncture. It will be too late next time. General Strike in every industry not working for the war effort until such time as the reactionary government steps down. Proletarian power alone can guarantee military victory. Complete arming of the working class. Long live the CNT-FAI-POUM unity of action! Long live the Revolutionary Front of the Proletariat. Revolutionary Defense Committees in the workshops, factories, barricades, etc....”
[134] Munis offered a very lively criticism of the ambiguity and indecision of the so-called POUM left in Barcelona, in the form of Cell 72, which, at the beginning of 1938, would dwindle to its secretary Josep Rebull and no one else: see Grandizo Munis “Carta a un obrero poumista. Ia Bandera de la IV Internaciónal es la única bandera de la revolución proletaria” in <em>La Voz Leninista</em> No. 3, of February 5, 1938.
[135] In <em>La Voz Leninista</em> No. 2 (23 August 1937), Munis made a critique of the notion of the “revolutionary junta” set out in No. 6 of <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em> (August 12, 1937). In Munis’s view, the Friends of Durruti suffered from a progressive theoretical decline and a practical inability to influence the CNT, which led them to abandon some positions which the May experience had enabled them to occupy. Munis noted that in May 1937 the Friends of Durruti had issued the call for a “revolutionary junta” alongside “all power to the proletariat”: whereas in No. 6 of <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em> (August 12, 1937) the slogan “revolutionary junta” was invoked as an alternative to the “failure of all Statist forms.” According to Munis, this represented a theoretical retreat from the Friends of Durruti’s assimilation of the May experiences, taking them further away from the marxist notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and drawing them back into the ambiguities of the anarchist theory of the State.
[136] Reproduced in Pierre Broué <em>Léon Trotsky. La revolución española (1930–1940)</em> Vol. II, pp. 405409.
[137] José Peirats <em>El movimiento libertarion en España (1) José Peirats</em> Colección de Histórid Oral, Fundación Salvador Segui, Madrid, undated.
[138] José Peirats <em>La CNT en la revolución española</em> three volumes. (Ruedo Ibérico, Paris, 1971). In this, the official history of the CNT, Peirats hardly mentions the Friends of Durruti.
[139] Unpublished interview given to Agustin Guillamón by Josep Rebull, as cited previously.
[140] Jordi Arquer <em>História de la fundació</em> ... op. cit.
[141] In the affidavit taken from Manuel Fernandez (“Munis”) by a magistrate and used as part of the book of evidence in the Espionage and High Treason Tribunal of Catalonia versus the militants of the Bolshevik-Leninist Section of Spain, we read: “Questioned as to which anarchist groups the Bolshevik-Leninist Section, of which the deponent [“Munis”] was the general secretary, was in cahoots with, he states: That they were in cahoots with no one, since, had he been, it would have been with persons who had stopped being anarchists in order to join the Bolshevik-Leninist Section, adding that they used to send the clandestine press they published to some persons who belonged to the ‘Friends of Durruti’, as well as to UGT and CNT personnel too.”
[142] As is recorded in the report of the search of Baldomero Palau’s printworks, a report taken by the magistrate drafting the indictment against the Trotskyist militants: “In Barcelona, at 8.30 A.M. on the fourteenth of February nineteen hundred and thirty eight, officers [...] acting on instructions from above, and carrying a search warrant [...] arrived at No. 241, Calle Salmerón, a printworks, in order to effect a scrupulous search, in that it appeared that it was being used for the printing of clandestine publications, in some of which the lawfully constituted government was being attacked.
<br>
Once there and in the presence of the Manager of the presses, namely <strong>Baldomero Palau Millan</strong>, who lives on the premises in the Calle de Cera [...] they proceeded to carry out the order, the upshot being that three printer’s “mastheads” were found: these, when copies were taken from them turned out as follows: one was the mast-head from <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em>, having in the right hand margin, boxed, writing which stated ‘The Public Entertainments clash, which has been resolved happily, was a provocation by Comorera. While our comrades fight at the front, this wretch is busily torpedoing the rearguard. The unity of these workers has frustrated his designs” [text taken from No. 12 of <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em> of February 1, 1938]: another, from <em>La Voz Leninista</em> and a third from <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em>: all of which were seized by the duty officers for transmission to their Superiors.”
[143] See G, Munis’s letter of October 2, 1948 from Paris:
<br>
During the May events, the B-L Section contacted the Friends of Durruti, but nothing was coordinated, for practical reasons and also — I imagine although I cannot be certain — because the Friends of Durruti thought they might lose popularity in the CNT if the leadership of the latter were to accuse them of allying themselves with marxists. After the May events there was more friendliness and interaction between the two groups. The influence of both inside the CNT grew considerably. Generally speaking, it was members of the latter who were most involved in distributing <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em> and <em>La Voz Leninista</em>.”
[144] Munis and Balius, who had never met before May 1937, subsequently struck up a comradely relationship, based on mutual appreciation and respect, ideologically and personally. This friendship flourished in exile in Mexico, since Balius lived in Munis’s home for a time, according to Arquer.
<br>
** <strong>11. Conclusions and Concluding Note</strong>
The Friends of Durruti Group was an affinity group, like many another existing in anarcho-syndicalist quarters. It was not influenced to any extent by the Trotskyists, nor by the POUM. Its ideology and watchwords were quintessentially in the CNT idiom: it cannot be said that they displayed a marxist ideology at any time. In any event, they displayed great interest in the example of Marat during the French Revolution, and it may be feasible to speak of their having been powerfully attracted by the assemblyist movement of the Parisian sections, by the sans-culottes, the Enrages and the revolutionary government of Robespierre and Saint-Just.
Their objective was nothing less than to tackle the CNT’s contradictions, afford it an ideological coherence and wrest it from the control of its personalities and responsible committees in order to return it to its class struggle roots. The Group had been set up to criticize and oppose the CNT’s policy of concession after concession,[145] and of course the <strong>collaboration</strong> of anarcho-syndicalists in the central and Generalidad governments. They were against the abandonment of revolutionary objectives and of anarchism’s fundamental and quintessential ideological principles, which the CNT-FAI leaders had thrown over in favor of antifascist unity and the need to adapt to circumstances. Without revolutionary theory there is no revolution. If principles were good for nothing other than to be discarded at the first hurdle erected by reality, it might be better to acknowledge that we have no principles. The top leaders of Spanish anarcho-syndicalism imagined themselves skillful negotiators, but they were manipulated like so many puppets.[146] They forswore everything and in return got ... nothing. These were opportunists without opportunity. The uprising of July 19 had no revolutionary party capable of taking power and making revolution. The CNT had never considered what was to be done once the army mutineers had been defeated. The July victory plunged the anarcho-syndicalist leaders into bewilderment and confusion. They had been overtaken by the masses’ revolutionary dynamism. And, not knowing what to do next, they agreed to Companys’s suggestion that they set up a Popular Front government in conjunction with the other parties. And they posited a phony dilemma between <strong>anarchist dictatorship</strong> or <strong>antifascist unity and collaboration with the State</strong> for the purposes of winning the war. They had no idea what to do with power, when the failure to take it resulted in its falling into the bourgeoisie’s hands. The Spanish revolution was the tomb of anarchism as a revolutionary theory of the proletariat. Such was the origin and motivation behind the Friends of Durruti Group.
However, the Group’s boundaries were very plain and well-defined. As were its limitations, too. At no time did they contemplate a break with the CNT. Only utter ignorance of the organizational mechanics of the CNT could lead us to imagine that it was possible to carry out critical or schismatic activity that would not lead to expulsion. In the case of the Friends of Durruti, expulsion was averted thanks to the sympathies they enjoyed among the CNT rank and file membership, albeit at the cost of severe ostracism and near absolute isolation.
The ultimate aim of the Group was to criticize the CNT leaders and to end the policy of CNT participation in government. They sought not only to preserve the “gains” of July but to prosecute and pursue the process of revolution. But their means and their organization were still extremely limited. They were barricade-fighters, not good organizers and indeed were worse theorists, although they did have some good journalists. In May they trusted entirely to the masses’ spontaneity. They failed to counter official CNT propaganda. They neither used nor organized militants who were members of the Control Patrols. They issued no instructions to Máximo Franco, a Friends of Durruti member, a delegate of the CNT’s Rojinegra Division, which attempted to “go down to Barcelona” on May 4, 1937, only to return to the front (as did the POUM column led by Rovira) following overtures made to it by Molina.[147] The high point of their activities was the poster distributed in late April 1937, in which the overthrow of the Generalidad government and its replacement by a Revolutionary Junta was urged: control of several barricades in the Ramblas during the May events: the reading of a call, addressed to all Europe’s workers,[148] for solidarity with the Spanish revolution: distribution around the barricades of the famous May 5<sup>th</sup> handbill: and the assessment of the May days in the manifesto of May 8<sup>th</sup>. But they were unable to put these slogans into practice. They suggested the formation of a column to go out and head off troops coming from Valencia: but they soon abandoned the idea in view of the cool reception received by the proposal. After the May events they began publication of <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em>, although they had been disowned by the CNT and the FAI. In June 1937, although they had not been outlawed as the POUM had, they suffered the political persecution that hit the rest of the CNT’s membership. Their mouthpiece <em>El Amigo del Pueblo</em> was published clandestinely from issue No. 2 (May 26) onwards, and its managing editor Jaime Balius endured a series of jail terms. Other Friends of Durruti members lost their posts or their influence, like Bruno Lladó, a councilor on Sabadell city council. Most of the Durruti-ists had to endure FAI-sponsored attempts[149] to have them expelled from the CNT. In spite of all of which they carried on issuing their newspaper clandestinely and in mid-1938 they issued the pamphlet <em>Hacia una nueva revolución</em>, by which time the counterrevolution’s success had proved final and overwhelming and the republicans had already lost the war.
Their chief tactical proposals were summed up in the following slogans: trade union management of the economy, federation of municipalities, militia-based army, revolutionary program, replacement of the Generalidad by a Revolutionary Junta, concerted CNT-FAI-POUM action.
If we had to sum up the historical and political significance of the Friends of Durruti, we should say that it was the failed attempt, originating from within the bosom of the libertarian movement, to establish a revolutionary vanguard that would put paid to the CNT-FAI’s collaborationism and defend and develop the revolutionary “gains” of July.
The attempt was a failure because they showed themselves incapable, not just of putting their slogans into practice, but even of effectively disseminating their ideas and offering practical guide-lines for campaigning on behalf of them. The Group was constituted as an FAI affinity group. Perhaps the terror-stricken bourgeoisie and the disguised priest regarded them as savage beasts, but their numbers included journalists like Balius and Callejas, militia column commanders like Pablo Ruiz, Francisco Pellicer and Máximo Franco and councilors like Bruno Lladó. For their distant origins we have to go back to the libertarians who shared the revolutionary experience of the Upper Llobregat insurrection in January 1932 and to the FAI’s “Renacer” affinity group between 1934 and 1936. Their more immediate roots lay in the opposition to militarization of the militias (especially in the Gelsa sector and within the Iron Column) and in the defense of revolutionary gains and criticism of the CNT’s collaborationism as set out in articles published in <em>Solidaridad Obrera</em> (between July and early October 1936), in <em>Ideas</em>and <em>La Noche</em> (between January and May 1937), by Balius in particular. Their campaign weapons were the handbill, the poster, the newspaper and the barricade: but a split or rupture was never contemplated as a weapon, any more than exposure of the CNT’s counterrevolutionary role, or, during the May events at any rate, confronting the CNT leaders in an effort to counter the CNT-FAI’s defeatist counsels.
Yet the historical significance of the Friends of Durruti cannot be denied. And it resides precisely in their status as an internal opposition to the libertarian movement’s collaborationist policy. The political importance of their emergence was immediately detected by Nin, who devoted an approving, hopeful article to them,[150] on the grounds that they held out the prospect of the CNT masses’ espousing a revolutionary line and opposing the CNT’s policy of appeasement and collaboration.
Hence the interest which the POUM and Trotskyists[151] displayed in bringing the Friends of Durruti under their influence — something in which they never succeeded.
The main theoretical contributions of the Group to anarchist thinking can be summed up as these:
<quote>
1. The need for a revolutionary program.
2. Replacement of the capitalist State by a Revolutionary Junta, which must stand by to defend the revolution from the inevitable attacks of counterrevolutionaries.
</quote>
Anarchists’ traditional apoliticism meant that the CNT lacked a theory of revolution. In the absence of a theory, there is no revolution, and the failure to assume power meant that it was left in the hands of the capitalist State. In the estimation of the Friends of Durruti Group, the CAMC (Central Antifascist Militias Committee) was a class collaborationist agency, and served no purpose other than to prop up and reinforce the bourgeois State which it neither could nor wished to destroy. Hence the Friends’ advocacy of the need to set up a Revolutionary Junta, capable of coordinating, centralizing and reinforcing the power of the countless workers’, local, defense, factory, militians’ etc. committees, which alone held power between July 19 and September 26. This power was diffused through numerous committees, which held all power locally, but by failing to federate, centralize and reinforce one another, were channeled, whittled down and converted by the CAMC into Popular Front councils, into the management boards of unionized firms and the battalions of the Republican army. Without utter destruction of the capitalist State, the revolutionary events of July 1936 could not have opened the way to a new structure of workers’ power. The decline and ultimate demise of the revolutionary process was inevitable. However, the tension between the CNT-FAI’s reformist anarchism and the Friends of Durruti’s revolutionary anarchism was not plain and stark enough to provoke a split which would have clarified the contrasting stances of them both.
So, although the political thinking set out by the Friends of Durruti was an attempt to accommodate the reality of the war and revolution in Spain within anarcho-syndicalist ideology, one of the primary grounds on which it was rejected by the CNT membership was its authoritarian, “marxist” or “Bolshevistic” flavor. From which we may conclude that the Friends of Durruti were trapped in a <em>cul de sac</em>. They could not embrace the collaborationism of the CNT’s leadership cadres and the progress of the counterrevolution: but when they theorized about the experiences of the Spanish revolution, that is, concluded that there was a need for a Revolutionary Junta to overthrow the bourgeois republican government of the Generalidad of Catalonia and use force to repress the agents of the counterrevolution, they were dubbed marxists and authoritarians,[152] and thereby lost any chance they might have had of making recruits from among the CNT rank and file. We have to wonder if the Friends of Durruti’s dilemma was not merely a reflection of Spanish anarcho-syndicalism’s theoretical inability to face up to the problems posed by the war and the revolution.
We cannot wind up this study without a concluding note expressing our political repugnance and our repudiation, in our capacity as readers of history, of those who, hiding behind their alleged academic objectivity,[153] dare to defame, judge, condemn, insult and hold up to ridicule persons and organizations from the workers’ movement — all from a <strong>bourgeois</strong> standpoint, which they of course consider to be scientific and impartial, although they may have utilized no methodology other than misrepresentation of the facts and the most asinine nonsense.
There may be those who take the line that the criticisms articulated here of the Friends of Durruti’s and the CNT’s political stances have, on occasion, been very harsh: we shall be satisfied if they are also regarded as rigorous and class-based, and our response will be that the repression that the defeat of the proletariat brought in its wake was <strong>even harsher.</strong>
Balius was not the crippled, bloodthirsty ogre as which the terror of the bourgeois and the cleric depicted him in 1937: or as he is represented today by the “comic books” from the Catalanist publishing house of the Benedictines of Montserrat, and/or the unwarranted hogwash from quite a few academic historians. Balius was a modest, intelligent, honest person, a <strong>coherent and intransigent</strong> and extremely commonsensical revolutionary. But even if Balius had been — as he was not — the demon as which the terrified clergy and bourgeoisie imagined him, that would not have altered our assessment of the Friends of Durruti one iota. Precisely because we have acknowledged, analyzed and repeatedly emphasized in this work the limitations of the band of revolutionaries known as the <strong>Friends of Durruti Group</strong>, we cannot close without paying tribute to the memory of a working class organization which embodied <strong>the proletariat’s class consciousness</strong> and which strove, at a given point, and with a full complement of limitations and shortcomings, to fill the role of a revolutionary vanguard.
In Barcelona it was and still is possible to overhear expressions of hatred and contempt relating to Durruti and “his friends” coming from the lips of the class enemy: however, in working class circles, the mythic Durruti, the huge proletarian demonstration at his funeral, the indomitable rebelliousness of the Durruti-ists, and the revolutionary anarchist feats of July 19 have always been spoken of with respect. During the long night of Francoism, anonymous hands scrawled the names on the unmarked graves of Durruti and Ascaso. It is not the task of the historian to respect myth: but it is the task of the historian to confront defamation, misrepresentation and insult when they pass themselves off as historical narrative.
And although we tackle that thankless task, we prefer to draw the lessons that matter to the class struggle. It should be enough to bear two pictures in mind. In the first, we see a humble, persuasive, loquacious Companys on July 21 , offering to make room for anarchist leaders in an Antifascist Front government, on the grounds that they had routed the military fascists and power was in the streets. In the second, we see a brazen, cornered Companys beseeching the Republican government on May 4 to order the air force to bomb the CNT’s premises. The film of the revolution and the war is running between these two pictures.
May 1937 was incubated in July 1936. The Friends of Durruti Group had realized that revolutions are totalitarian or are defeated: therein lies its great merit.
**
[145] According to Arquer [letter to Bolloten dated 16 July 1971, deposited with the Hoover Institution] the Friends of Durruti were a passing eruption which at one point articulated the deepest feelings of the CNT membership in Catalonia, and, had the anarchists succeeded that tendency might well have consolidated itself and grown, but once defeated, they lost all influence and their leaders came within an ace of expulsion.
[146] The degree of familiarity and day to day friendly relations between Federica Montseny and the Russian ambassador, Rosenberg, defies belief, and the assistance and fillip which Abad de Santillán attempted to afford a discredited Companys likewise defies imagination. The sublime saintliness of the anarchist leaders accounts for the ease with which they were manipulated. By way of an example of what we are saying, see Frederica Montseny’s own declarations (in Agusti Pons <em>Converses amb Frederica Montseny: Frederica Montseny, sindicalisme i acrácia</em> [Laia, Barcelona, 1977, pp. 169–170]):
<br>
Before setting off for Russia, having been recalled, Ambassador Rosenberg who had become my friend — called to see me [...] [I] was staying at the Metropol, which was the seat of the Russian embassy. I was to be one of the last government figures to arrive in Valencia, when the government, in view of the military situation, resolved to move there from Madrid. Neither the Ministry of Health nor myself, who held that portfolio, could find anywhere to settle in. Everywhere was occupied. Until, eventually, the Russians very kindly turned over to me one of the floors of the hotel which had been turned into their embassy. Many a time I found a bouquet of red carnations in my room. But the flowers were only an excuse for rummaging around the whole room.
<br>
But the following excerpt from Frederica Montseny’s letter, dated Toulouse May 31, 1950, to Burnett Bolloten, strikes us as even more revealing:
<br>
Rosenberg very kindly offered me two rooms in the Hotel Metropol [in December 1936, in Valencia] which was occupied by the Soviet Embassy and its personnel. I reckon that his intention must have been to keep me continually under his influence. I accepted, after consultation with Vazquez, who had just been appointed secretary of our National Committee, and I moved into the Metropol. I ate in the Hotel dining room, mingling with the Russian officials, and, very often, in the Ambassador’s personal quarters. Virtually every night, he would invite me in for coffee. There I met Marty, Gallo, Kleber, Blucher, Tito [?] and Gorev, whom I had met before in Madrid. And very often I saw, or my secretary who was nosier or less discreet than me, saw Alvarez del Vayo, Garcia Oliver and López coming and going from Rosenberg’s quarters. Occasionally, Mariano R. Vázquez was invited along with me, passing many a long hour in lazy conversation, drinking cup after cup of coffee or tea.
<br>
See also the testimony of Abad de Santillán, from the FAI’s Peninsular Committee: “We were none too pleased with the power for which the Militias Committee stood and could impose. There was a government, there was the Generalidad and we would have liked the thousands of problems and gripes and demands brought to us every day to have been heard and resolved by the lawful government, which was not recognized by the broad masses. During some casual get together, we invited President Companys to attend so that people might get used to regarding him as a friend of ours, whom they could trust.” [Diego Abad de Santillán <em>Alfonso XIII, la II Republica, Francisco Franco</em> (Juúcar, Madrid, 1979, p. 349)]
[147] Letter from Balius to Burnett Bolloten, dated Cuernavaca July 13, 1946.
[148] According to Pablo Ruiz’s claims in “Elogio póstumo de Jaime Balius,” in <em>Le Combat syndicaliste/Solidaridad Obrera</em> of January 9, 1981.
[149] See the articles in which the FAI moved that the Friends of Durruti be expelled, in <em>Boletin de información y orientación orgánica del Comite peninsular de la Federación Anarquista Iberica</em>, like “La desautorización de la entidad ‘Amigos de Durruti”’ in No. 1, Barcelona, May 20, 1937, and “La sanción publica a los inteurantes de la agrupación Los Amigos de Durruti” in No. 3, June 6, 1937.
[150] Andres Nin “Ante el peligro contrarrevoluciónario ha llegado la hora de actuar” in <em>La Batalla</em> of March 4, 1937.
[151] See Munis’s article on the Friends of Durruti in <em>La Voz Leninista</em> No. 2, August 23, 1937, entitled “La junta revoluciónaria y los ‘Amigos de Durruti.’”
[152] The description ‘authoritarian,’ a term of abuse among libertarians, was not, however, a product of CNT propaganda, since one of the most significant of the Group’s theoretical advances was its assertion of the authoritarian, or totalitarian character of any revolution. This is an assertion which the Friends of Durruti reiterated on several occasions. It was first made in an article which Balius published on December 6, 1936, under the title “El testamento de Durruti,” and was placed in Durruti’s mouth in the course of his harangue from the Madrid front on November 5, 1936: and the last mention was in the 1978 introduction to the English language edition of the pamphlet <em>Towards a Fresh Revolution</em>, which reads thus:
<br>
In that booklet back in 1938, we said that all revolutions are totalitarian.
[153] Spanish historiography on the civil war has turned from being <strong>militant history</strong> written by protagonists and eyewitnesses of the civil war, with all of the dangers implicit in that, but also the irreplaceable passion of someone who does not gamble with words because previously he gambled with his very life, into <strong>inane academic history</strong> written by ninnies and characterized by nonsense, incomprehension and indeed contempt for the militants and organizations of the workers’ movement. Still, there are a few honorable exceptions — among them the lines of inquiry opened up by Vilanova, Monjo and Vega, which we might describe as an <strong>academic history</strong> that fulfills its function, and requires the addition of no further qualifying term.
|
#title Theses on the Spanish Civil War and the revolutionary situation created on July 19, 1936
#author Agustin Guillamón
#SORTtopics Spanish Civil War, Spanish Revolution
#date June 2001
#source Retrieved on 2020-07-19 from [[https://libcom.org/library/theses-spanish-civil-war-revolutionary-situation-created-july-19-1936-balance-agust%C3%ADn-gu][libcom.org]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2020-07-19T09:48:16
#notes Translated from the Spanish original in November 2013. Spanish original published in: <em>BALANCE.</em> <em>Cuadernos de historia del movimiento obrero</em>, Cuaderno No. 21, Barcelona, June 2001 (2<sup>nd</sup> edition).
<quote>
<em>“The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing.”</em>
<br>
— Karl Marx, Letter to Schweitzer (February 13, 1865)
</quote>
<quote>
<em>“All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place.”</em>
<br>
—
George Orwell, <em>1984</em>
</quote>
<quote>
<em>“The function of history would therefore be showing that the laws deceive, that the kings play a part, that power deludes and that historians lie.”</em>
<br>
—
Michel Foucault, <em>The Genealogy of Racism</em>
</quote>
<quote>
<em>“It is ‘no longer a question of judging the past in the name of a truth that only we can possess in the present, but of risking the destruction of the subject who seeks knowledge in ... the will to knowledge’.”</em>
<br>
—
Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”
</quote>
<quote>
<em>“The spectacle, as the present social organization of the paralysis of history and memory, of the abandonment of history built on the foundation of historical time, is the false consciousness of time.”</em>
<br>
—
Guy Debord, <em>Society of the Spectacle</em>
</quote>
<quote>
<em>“Historical memory is a battlefield of the class struggle.”</em>
<br>
—
<em>Combate por la historia.</em> <em>Manifiesto</em> (July 8, 1999)
</quote>
** Preface
Hundreds of books have been written about the Spanish War and its historiography batters our minds with an accumulation of clone-books, which cite each other and repeat one after another the same errors or identical ideological interpretations, depending on the political tendency, without exhibiting even the least trace of critical spirit, when they do not restrict their ambitions to self-justification or castrate themselves in the Francoist moral, “that should never happen again”.
The manipulation of the facts, when they are not simply concealed, the theoretical confusionism in analyzing what took place and the errors accumulated by historiography and the compilers are on such a scale and magnitude that refuting them would require the (useless) work of an entire lifetime.
Let us take one of the most outstanding examples: the question of the existence of a situation of dual power in Catalonia, involving the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias and the government of the Generalitat. This question regarding the existence of a SITUATION OF DUAL POWER IS UNDOUBTEDLY FUNDAMENTAL for any analysis of the Spanish War. It is generally accepted so dogmatically that any doubts concerning the existence of a situation of dual power might appear to be foolishness. Nonetheless, those who participated in these great events, with ideologies as different as those of Tarradellas, Nin, Montseny, García Oliver, Azaña, etc., deny the existence of such a situation of dual power.
The theses we set forth below are the products of the study, published in various issues of <em>BALANCE</em>, of the diverse interpretations offered by the revolutionary minorities that intervened in the Spanish War concerning the historical facts and the prevailing ideologies of the period, 1936–1939. We exclude, because it is of no interest to us, the bourgeois view; nor are we interested in confronting the interpretations that issue from counterrevolutionary and/or Stalinist camp. The theses we elaborate here constitute an attempt to arrive at a theoretical synthesis concerning the Spanish War and the revolutionary situation that arose in July 1936, from the perspective of the revolutionary proletariat that was defended by the revolutionary minorities that existed at the time: Bordiguists, Bolshevik-Leninists, Josep Rebull and The Friends of Durruti.
Augustín Guillamón
<br>
On behalf of <em>BALANCE</em>
** <strong>Thesis no. 1.</strong>
From July 17 to 19, 1936, there was a military uprising against the government of the Republic, an uprising that was supported by the Church, the majority of the Army, fascists, bourgeoisie, landlords … whose preparation had been tolerated by the republican government, which had won the elections in February 1936 thanks to the Popular Front coalition. The military, the fascists and the parliamentary REPUBLICAN democratic and the monarchist parties, parties of the left and of the right, pursued the policy that was most advantageous for the Spanish bourgeoisie, and for its preparations for a bloody coup d’état. The military uprising was defeated in the major cities and provoked, as a reaction (in the republican zone), a revolutionary movement, which emerged victorious from its armed insurrection against the army. The Defense Cadres and Committees of the CNT-FAI, which had been prepared since 1931, played a preponderant role in this insurrectionary victory. The loss of Zaragoza was due, among other reasons, to the lack of preparation and resolve on the part of a secret leadership, which was operating from a hidden refuge, and engaged in constant negotiation with the republican authorities and the “undecided” military elements, instead of organizing and leading the workers insurrection on the basis of the Defense Cadres.
The fact that the revolutionary movement of July 19, 1936 emerged as a reaction to a military uprising does not mean that it would not have taken place without the military uprising. In fact, since October 1934, and throughout the entire electoral campaign of February 1936, both the CNT and the POUM thought that a confrontation with the fascist forces was inevitable, concerning whose plans for a coup d’état they were aware, and against which they were conscientiously preparing for an armed confrontation, although they never rejected maintaining ties and collaborating with the republican parties or the government of the Generalitat.
In any event, the defeat of the military uprising cannot be attributed to the leadership of any political or trade union organization, but to the clandestine military organization of the confederal defense cadres, to the neighborhood defense committees, and to the “federation of the barricades” in Barcelona; and to the local committees in the various Catalonian towns.
** <strong>Thesis no. 2.</strong>
This victorious armed insurrection of the proletariat, in the republican zone, neutralized the coercive apparatus and therefore the capacity for repression of the capitalist state. This insurrection also led to a series of “revolutionary conquests” of a social and economic type. The republican state broke up into a multitude of local or sectoral powers, and many of its functions were “usurped” by the working class organizations. THERE WAS A VACUUM OF STATE POWER. Having lost its capacity for coercion, the republican state witnessed the emergence of autonomous regional powers, totally independent of the central government, which in turn (such as the government of the Generalitat in Catalonia) saw how its authority collapsed; and how the various revolutionary, local, sectoral, neighborhood, factory, defense, supply, trade union and party committees and popular and rearguard militias performed those functions that the government was incapable of exercising, because of the loss of its repressive apparatus and the general arming of the working class organizations. In many places, the revolutionary committees, which Munis theorized as government-committees, exercised all power on a local level, but there was no coordination or centralization of these local committees: there was A VACUUM OF CENTRAL OR STATE POWER. NEITHER THE REPUBLICAN STATE NOR THE AUTONOMOUS REGIONAL GOVERNMENTS (Generalitat) EXERCISED CENTRAL POWER; but neither did the local committees.
** <strong>Thesis no. 3.</strong>
The revolutionary committees—defense, factory, neighborhood, workers control, local, supply, etc.—comprised the embryo of the organs of working class power. They initiated a methodical expropriation of the property of the bourgeoisie, undertaking industrial and agricultural collectivization, organizing the popular militias that stabilized the fronts during the first days of the war, and organized control patrols and rearguard militias that imposed the new revolutionary order through the violent repression of the Church, employers, fascists and yellow trade unionists and their <em>pistoleros</em>. But these committees were unable to coordinate among themselves and create a centralized working class power. The initiatives and activities of the revolutionary committees bypassed the leaders of the various traditional organizations of the workers movement, including the CNT and the FAI. There was a revolution in the streets and the factories, and some POTENTIAL organs of the power of the revolutionary proletariat: THE COMMITTEES, which no party, organization or vanguard was able or wanted to COORDINATE, REINFORCE AND TRANSFORM INTO AUTHENTIC ORGANS OF WORKING CLASS POWER.
The majority of the leadership of the CNT opted for collaboration with the bourgeois state in order to win the war against fascism. García Oliver’s slogan of July 21, “go for broke”, was nothing but a Leninist proposal for the CNT bureaucracy to seize power; a proposal, furthermore, that Oliver himself knew would be rendered unviable and absurd when, at the CNT plenum, he posed the false alternative of “anarchist dictatorship” or antifascist collaboration. García Oliver’s spurious “extremist” proposal, Abad de Santillán’s warning about isolation and foreign intervention, and Durruti’s suggestion that they wait until Zaragoza was taken, led the plenum to vote for “provisional” antifascist collaboration. <strong>The revolutionary alternative of destroying the republican state and transforming the committees into organs of working class power and the militias into a proletarian army was never proposed.</strong>
One cannot speak of a situation of dual power, involving the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias (CCMA) and the government of the Generalitat, at any time during the existence of the former, because there was never a pole of centralized workers power at any time; we can, however, speak of an opportunity, already forfeited during the first few weeks after July 19, to establish a situation of dual power between the revolutionary committees and the CCMA. Some trade union, local and neighborhood committees expressed from the very beginning their mistrust and fear of the CCMA, because they foresaw the counterrevolutionary role that it would play.
Many of those who played their parts in the events, along with the historians, speak of a situation of dual power between the CCMA and the government of the Generalitat. It is a profound error, however, to believe that the CCMA was anything other than what it really was: a pact between the workers organizations and the bourgeois organizations and state institutions, an institution of class collaboration, a Popular Front government in which representatives of the government of the Generalitat, the bourgeois republican parties, the Stalinists, the POUM and the CNT participated.
The leaders of the CNT based their power on the “proximity” of the revolutionary committees, if only because the majority of their members were also members of the CNT, but at the same time they mistrusted the committees because they did not fit into their organizational and doctrinal plans, and also because, as a bureaucracy, they felt threatened by their activities, which they were unable to direct.
The CCMA in Catalonia was unlike the other similar institutions that arose in other regions of Spain, insofar as it was dominated by the CNT, and due to the fact that the CNT owed its power to the revolutionary committees, in which the majority of the elements were members of the CNT.
It was in Catalonia where the latter were most widespread and most enduring. In other institutions similar to the CCMA that had arisen in other parts of Spain, the impact, profundity, scope and duration of the committees was much less and/or they only lasted for a few days or weeks.
The revolutionary committees constituted the self-organization of the working class in a revolutionary situation, as was as the embryo of the organs of power of the Spanish revolutionary proletariat. But we must understand their weaknesses, and above all their inability to coordinate among themselves for the purpose of centralizing proletarian power in a workers state. There was no revolutionary party or workers vanguard capable of transforming these committees into workers councils, characterized by the democratic election of their delegates in assemblies, revocable at any time, and capable of coordinating their activities on a regional and national level, up to the formation of a State of Workers, Militia and Peasants Councils. The CNT and FAI ISSUED NO DIRECTIVES TO THEIR MILITANTS until July 28, when they threatened to shoot any “uncontrollables” who continued to expropriate the bourgeoisie and persisted in taking fascists, bourgeois, priests and former members of the yellow trade unions (the <em>pistoleros</em> of the employers) “for a ride”. In July 1936, the workers knew what to do without orders from their leaders, and proceeded to expropriate the bourgeoisie and suppress some of the institutions of rule of the capitalist state (army, Church, police), in such a manner that they went beyond not only the state structures, but also their own political and trade union organizations; but they were incapable of acting against their leaders, they respected the state apparatus and its officials, and in May 1937 they grudgingly accepted, but accepted nonetheless, capitulation to the class enemy.
Furthermore, these revolutionary committees, although they were potentially the organs of workers power, were hamstrung by the overwhelming influence of the ideology of antifascist unity and many of them were rapidly transformed into antifascist committees, composed of workers and bourgeoisie, in the service of the program of the petty bourgeoisie. The entry of the anarchist ministers in the Madrid government, and of anarchists and POUMistas in the government of the Generalitat, made it possible, in October 1936, without the least armed resistance, to dissolve the local committees and replace them with the antifascist municipal councils. The defense and factory committees, along with a few local committees, resisted, but could only postpone, their final dissolution.
** <strong>Thesis no. 4.</strong>
The overwhelming predominance of the anarchist movement in Spain cannot be explained by racial or psychological causes or reasons of character. Nor can it be explained by certain backward economic traits, such as the survival of “feudal relations” in the Andalusian countryside, or the predominance of small industry in Catalonia. And much less by the mythical evangelical influence of Fanelli in 1868, and his “indelible” legacy.
The evident difference between the Spanish and the international workers movements, with regard to the contrasting predominance of the anarchists in the Spanish workers movement and of the social democrats in the rest of Europe, is fundamentally due to the fact that it was possible to engage in the parliamentary, democratic and reformist struggle to obtain substantial reforms in the standard of living and the political representation of the working class in the rest of Europe. From 1919 to 1923, the Spanish employers created and financed a trade union of <em>pistoleros</em> (the Free Trade Union), which, with the help of the police and the government, proceeded to physically eliminate the working class leaders and militants. This unequal battle concluded with the establishment of the military dictatorship of Primo de Rivera and the outlawing of the CNT.
The parliamentary road, or the possibility of achieving social reforms, was not opened up in Spain until the proclamation of the Second Republic in 1931. During the thirties the extremely robust anarchist tradition, the recent unstable experiences of Spanish parliamentarism, and especially the extreme sluggishness and timidity that characterized social and political reform, were factors that made the anarchist movement very powerful and caused it to continue to enjoy the support of most workers. The committees that spontaneously arose everywhere in July 1936, were imperfect and incomplete organs of workers power. They were unlike the workers councils due to the fact that the delegates were not democratically elected by the workers in general assemblies in the factories, to whom they would have to be responsible for their policies. The committees were dependent on the trade union or political bureaucracies that had appointed them. This dependency hindered the coordination of the committees among themselves, the possibility of creating higher decision-making institutions, characterized by class unity, and the exercise of workers power in the economy or the militias. The committees were therefore transformed into the subordinate institutions of trade unions or parties, and the creation of powerful unified institutions of workers power was rendered impossible. Thus, instead of a revolutionary army of the working class, a centralized expression of workers power, a federation of militias arose in which each party or trade union competed to create its own army, more or less coordinated on the front with the other workers organizations. Instead of a socialized economy, directed by a Government of the Workers Councils, there was collectivization that unfolded within the framework of a kind of trade union capitalism, when it was not managed or coordinated by the bourgeois government of the Generalitat, at the service of the program of the petty bourgeoisie.
The entry of the trade unions and parties in the autonomous government of the Generalitat, and in the republican central government of Valencia, also meant the dissolution of the committees, and the end to the danger that they might be able to transform themselves into workers councils.
** <strong>Thesis no. 5.</strong>
Without the destruction of the capitalist state one cannot speak of a proletarian revolution. One may speak of a <strong>revolutionary situation</strong>, a revolutionary movement, a victorious insurrection, the “partial” and/or “temporary” disappearance of the functions of the bourgeois state, political chaos, the loss of real authority on the part of the republican administration, a VACUUM OF CENTRALIZED POWER or an atomization of power, but not of a proletarian revolution.
The REVOLUTIONARY SITUATION of July 1936 never led to a proposal to establish a working class power in opposition to the republican state: therefore, there was no proletarian revolution. In the absence of revolution the revolutionary situation rapidly evolved in the direction of the consolidation of the republican state, the weakening of the revolutionary forces and the definitive victory of the counterrevolution after the May Days of 1937, with the outlawing and political persecution of the POUM in June 1937, as well as with the driving underground of the Bolshevik-Leninist Section of Spain (SBLE) and The Friends of Durruti Group.
For the same reasons, one cannot speak of a situation of DUAL POWER, since there was no pole of workers power that proposed to destroy the capitalist state: it would be more proper to speak, in the Catalonian case, of a duplication of powers between the Generalitat and the CCMA. The CCMA was an institution of CLASS COLLABORATION, which acted as shock absorber and mediator between the myriad of revolutionary committees and the broken down apparatus of the capitalist state. But the CCMA was above all the only instrument of the antifascist front that was CAPABLE of sterilizing, channeling, truncating and subduing the popular revolutionary initiatives that were undertaken by the revolutionary committees, BY MEANS OF their integration in ambiguous institutions (subordinated to the CCMA), which were characterized by their SUBMISSION to the antifascist program and the government of the Generalitat. This process was exemplified in institutions like the Central Committee for Supply, the Rearguard Militias, the Control Patrols, the Revolutionary Tribunals, the Committee of Investigation, the Workers Control Committees, the Councils of Workers and Soldiers, etc., which were created to REPLACE, DESTROY OR CHANGE THE CLASS NATURE of the popular and working class initiatives of a revolutionary character; after a transitional period of two or three months, during which time they functioned as institutions subordinated to the CCMA, they were integrated into the structure of the government of the Generalitat, and were later dissolved or replaced by institutions of the republican state apparatus. The anarchists, however, thought they were clever enough and powerful enough to manipulate the state as a technical instrument in their service of their plans. On August 11 the CNT and the POUM joined the Council of the Economy of the Generalitat, whose purpose was the coordination and planning of the Catalonian economy.
The participation of the CNT (and also the POUM and FAI) in the bourgeois institutions, with its corresponding offer of public responsibilities, together with a massive influx of new trade union members, and the departure to the front of the best militants, the most experienced in the social struggle and the most theoretically advanced, favored a rapid process of bureaucratization in the CNT.
The revolutionary militants found themselves isolated in the assemblies and condemned to a permanent minority status they could not overcome. The fundamental principles of anarchosyndicalism collapsed and gave way to an opportunism disguised by the ideology of antifascist unity (“renounce the revolution to win the war”) and the pragmatism of loyal and faithful collaboration with the parties and the government of the republican bourgeoisie, with the exclusive goal of enforcing the program of the bourgeoisie. THE TRADE UNION BUREAUCRACY OF THE CNT DEMONSTRATED ITS COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY NATURE IN MAY 1937. The struggle against fascism was the alibi that permitted the renunciation of the destruction of the republican bourgeois state, defended by the counterrevolutionary forces of the PSUC and the ERC. The confrontation between the revolutionary proletariat and the CNT bureaucracy, which was now in the counterrevolutionary camp, was inevitable. The CNT-UGT pact of March 1938 established a de facto state capitalism similar to that which prevailed in the Soviet Union.
** <strong>Thesis no. 6.</strong>
No revolutionary organization existed that was capable of proposing the destruction of the capitalist state: therefore one cannot speak of a situation of dual power. This does not mean that there were not organized revolutionary nuclei, nor do we have to doubt the (subjective) “revolutionary will” of POUMistas or anarchists. It means that the class struggle in Spain, during the 1930s, had not generated a revolutionary movement that was capable of proposing the program of the proletarian revolution (and the social dictatorship of the proletariat) and its ANTAGONISM to the existence of the capitalist state. BECAUSE THIS ATOMIZED POWER, incapable of centralizing itself and coordinating itself in a WORKERS POWER, confronted the republican state power, usurped the functions of the capitalist state, which were taken from the republican authorities against their will, but most of all, DUE TO THE FACT THAT IT DID NOT HAVE THE NECESSARY ABILITY TO COORDINATE ITS ACTIVITIES AND TO THE FACT THAT NO WORKING CLASS ORGANIZATION TOOK THE INITIATIVE TO DO SO, a few weeks after the victorious insurrection, the situation of the VACUUM OF CENTRAL POWER caused all the working class organizations to put themselves at the service of this same republican state. The revolutionary potential of the proletarian committees was transformed into the submissiveness of the antifascist committees, or else they were replaced, at the local level, by the new popular front municipal councils beginning in October 1936.
THERE WAS NO WORKERS POWER THAT WAS ANTAGONISTIC TOWARDS THE CAPITALIST STATE. THE STRUGGLE FOR A WORKERS STATE THAT WAS INCOMPATIBLE WITH THE EXISTENCE OF THE CAPITALIST STATE NEVER TOOK PLACE. There was never a situation of dual power, because there was never a struggle for workers power, nor was there even a pole of attraction for the formation of such a workers power. In any event (in Catalonia, and only for two or three months), one must speak of a REVOLUTIONARY SITUATION polarized between two antagonistic alternatives: the revolutionary committees, WHICH WERE NEITHER COORDINATED AMONG THEMSELVES NOR CENTRALIZED, AND WERE UNAWARE OF THEIR OWN ROLE; and the CCMA, AN INSTITUTION OF CLASS COLLABORATION formed of representatives of the government of the Generalitat, the antifascist republican and workers organizations, and the extreme left of the Popular Front—the CNT-FAI and the POUM. This antagonism between the committees and the CCMA cannot be defined as a situation of dual power, insofar as there was never a workers power, not even an attempt to coordinate and centralize these committees in order to form a pole of attraction for such a workers power. The CNT and the POUM, instead of reinforcing these revolutionary committees as organs of a new workers power, felt left behind and threatened by the “incontrolados”, so much so that not only did they not issue any directives to coordinate the committees, but their very first directives and measures consisted precisely in threats and denunciations directed against the “incontrolados”. These threats, regardless of whether or not there were any acts of vandalism, were to bear fruit in the summary shooting, in obedience to these directives “against the ‘incontolados’” issued by the superior committees of the CNT, of José Gardeñas of the Construction Trade Union and Fernández, president of the Food Supply Trade Union. Months later, once the counterrevolution had already been underway for some time, it would be the Stalinists and republicans who would bestow this undeserved moniker of “incontrolados” upon the POUM and the CNT, for the purpose of physically and politically eliminating them.
<strong>The predominant school of historiography not only fails to view this revolutionary situation as one posing two antagonistic alternatives, the revolutionary committees or the CCMA; it speaks of a situation of dual power between the CCMA and the government of the Generalitat!</strong>
** <strong>Thesis no. 7.</strong>
The capitalist state was not destroyed and continued to perform (even if in a “diminished”, “nominal” or “partial” capacity) its functions. Furthermore, the state’s repressive apparatus—the Civil Guard, the Assault Guard and the carabineros—was not dissolved, but confined to their barracks to wait for better times, which were to come a few months later. The economic internationalization of capitalism in the wake of the First World War signaled the end of the epoch of bourgeois revolutions and the beginning of the epoch of proletarian revolutions. In the absence of a revolutionary vanguard, one that would be capable of proposing the antagonism between the proletariat and the capitalist state and positing the dictatorship of the proletariat, any revolutionary movement, regardless of its proletarian composition, was destined to fail. Given the inability of the workers organizations to seize power, or, more accurately, to coordinate and centralize the local powers of the various revolutionary committees on a regional and national scale, in order to constitute a workers pseudo-state, the only way left was that of collaboration with the other bourgeois political organizations and with the CAPITALIST STATE, which could have no other goal than the restoration and reinforcement of the republican state. The bases of the counterrevolution were solid enough to facilitate a rapid recovery of the capitalist state, which soon recouped all its functions and, after the “inevitable and necessary” bloody defeat of the proletariat in May 1937, decapitated any revolutionary threat that the workers movement posed, by way of a double policy of repression of the “permanent ‘incontrolados’” (revolutionaries), and the social-democratization and integration of the working class organizations into the apparatus of the capitalist state, via the cooptation of the trade union and political bureaucracies and their incorporation into the bureaucracy of the state.
** <strong>Thesis no. 8.</strong>
The CNT and POUM were the extreme left of the Popular Front. Actually, neither of these organizations was part of the Popular Front; both, however, made a decisive contribution to its success in the elections of February 1936. After July 19, 1936, both organizations were left behind by the events. In the midst of the revolutionary euphoria they were incapable of issuing any directives until July 28—“to warn the ‘incontrolados’”! On July 20 a planned radio broadcast announcing a “progressive” labor agreement signed by the Minister of Labor of the Companys government and the Catalonian employers, which granted the 40-hour week, a 15% wage increase and a reduction of rents by 50%, was cancelled, because several of the eminent employers who had signed the agreement had received warnings not to return to their homes because patrols of armed men were waiting for them. The revolution proceeded by fits and starts, and the stage of economic demands had been surpassed. The revolutionary committees had spontaneously proceeded to carry out the expropriation of the bourgeois class. Collectivization was not undertaken because the employers, technicians and directors had fled and it was necessary to pay the weekly wages of the workers (as some of the protagonists and historians have claimed), but because the revolutionary committees were carrying out a methodical expropriation of the bourgeoisie. The leaders of the workers organizations (CNT and POUM) PROVISIONALLY replaced the state with regard to those functions that the latter had lost, and created institutions of class collaboration in cooperation with reformist and counterrevolutionary workers organizations (PSOE, PSUC, PCE) and bourgeois organizations (ERC, Estat Catalá, Izquierda Republicana) with the goal (conscious or not) of restoring all its functions to the capitalist state and thus helped to fill the VACUUM OF STATE POWER created by the victory of the workers insurrection.
The CCMA could have exercised all the functions of a provisional “revolutionary” government, because the local revolutionary committees, which were trying to coordinate and centralize their activities, turned to the CCMA for help, directives, solutions, orientations, etc.; but the CCMA never performed any other function than that of a LIAISON COMMITTEE for these local revolutionary committees in their dealings with the Generalitat. Furthermore, these local revolutionary committees, in accordance with the policy and the collaborationist nature of the CCMA, were rapidly transformed into antifascist committees, and thus lost their revolutionary and proletarian origin and potentials.
** <strong>Thesis no. 9.</strong>
The CCMA was the product of both the victory of the insurrection of July 19–20 and the political defeat of July 21. For the first time in history, a militarily victorious workers insurrection was defeated politically on the very next day after its triumph due to its political incapacity and its refusal to seize power. The CCMA was never an organization of workers power or of dual power, but an organization of class collaboration. And this is just what Munis, Nin, Molins, Tarradellas, Companys, Azaña, Peiró, García Oliver, Montseny, Abad de Santillán, etc., have already said, and it was the product of its own nature as an institution of antifascist unity and class collaboration, formed by the diverse workers, reformist, Stalinist and republican organizations. And there was no revolutionary organization that was capable of opposing the CCMA, capable of creating an institution of coordination and centralization of the local committees, that is, an organ of WORKERS POWER opposed to the government of the Generalitat, to the Popular Front-style government known as the CCMA, and to the central government of the Republic.
Paradoxically, <em>a posteriori</em>, the dissolution of the CCMA was characterized, by many of those who have revealed the CCMA’s nature as an institution of class collaboration, as the end of a stage of “dual power”. The advance of the counterrevolution and the loss of revolutionary impulse on the part of the masses seems to be reflected in the weakness of the theoretical analyses of the revolutionaries.
The real power of the CCMA has always been greatly exaggerated. After its first month of existence this power was already reduced, with the creation of other institutions like the Council of the Economy, the Control Patrols, the Supply Committee, etc., to that of just one more CNT institution of technical collaboration with the government institutions, an institution of antifascist collaboration in the command of the militias, thus losing (if it every really possessed it) its capability of exercising “government” functions. Furthermore, the military expedition to Mallorca, staged by the Generalitat in mid-August 1936, in collaboration with the CNT Maritime Transport Trade Union, without the involvement or even the knowledge of the CCMA, constituted irrefutable proof that the CCMA did not even have full control of command over the militias.
Once the CNT decided that antifascist collaboration was necessary and inevitable, the pressure imposed by the government apparatus (both the central government and the autonomous regional governments), among which the refusal to deliver arms (or currency to buy them) to the confederal militias particularly stands out, caused the anarchosyndicalist leaders to accept the necessity of dissolving the CCMA, the revolutionary committees and the Militias, and with them all revolutionary possibilities, in order to participate in the government apparatus (central and autonomous regions) like any other “antifascist” organization.
At the beginning of September 1936 the CNT proposed the dissolution of the CCMA; this proposal was approved by the other antifascist forces, which, over the course of the last meetings of the CCMA, had approved the formation of a new government of the Generalitat with representatives from all the antifascist organizations that formed the CCMA. The only other things that were discussed were the name and the program this government would adopt. A “verbal” concession was made to the principles of the CNT by calling the new government “the Council of the Generalitat”, and its program would be the one that had already been established by the existing “Council of the Economy”.
** <strong>Thesis no. 10.</strong>
A war in defense of a democratic state, for the victory of the latter against a fascist state, could not be a revolutionary civil war; it was a war between two fractions of the bourgeoisie—the fascist and the republican fractions—in which the proletariat had ALREADY been defeated. This was not because the July insurrection was militarily suppressed in the republican zone (as it had been in the fascist zone), but because the nature of the war AT THE SERVICE OF A DEMOCRATIC BOURGEOIS STATE had transformed the class nature of the revolutionary insurrection of July. The methods, goals and class program of the proletariat had been replaced by the methods, goals and program of the bourgeoisie. That is, when the proletariat fights with the methods and for the program of the bourgeoisie, even if it does so in favor of the democratic fraction and against the fascist fraction, HAS ALREADY BEEN DEFEATED. The proletariat is revolutionary or it is nothing. The proletariat either fights with its own class methods (strike, insurrection, international solidarity, revolutionary militias, destruction of the state, etc.) and for its own program (suppression of wage labor, dissolution of the army and police, abolition of international borders, the dictatorship of the proletariat organized in workers councils, etc.), or it collaborates with the bourgeoisie, renouncing its class methods and program, and then it has ALREADY been defeated.
** <strong>Thesis no. 11.</strong>
The collectivizations meant nothing, and were incapable of further development in the future, if the capitalist state was not destroyed. In fact, the collectivizations ended up serving the imperative needs of a war economy. The situation rapidly evolved, assuming a wide variety of forms between the expropriation of the factories from the bourgeoisie in July 1936 and the militarization of industry and labor, which largely characterized the situation in 1938. It was, and still is, impossible to separate the political revolution from the social and economic revolution. Revolutions are always TOTALITARIAN, in both meanings of the word: total and authoritarian. THERE IS NOTHING MORE AUTHORITARIAN THAN A REVOLUTION: expropriating a factory from its owners, or a rural estate from its owner, will always be an authoritarian imposition. And it can only take place when the repressive forces of the bourgeoisie, the army and the police, have been defeated by a revolutionary army that imposes the new revolutionary legal system IN AN AUTHORITARIAN MANNER. Anarchosyndicalism and the POUM, due to the theoretical incapacity of the former and the numerical weakness, verbalism and lack of audacity of the latter, never posed the question of power, which they abandoned to the hands of the professional politicians of the republican bourgeoisie and the socialists: Azaña, Giral, Prieto, Largo Caballero, Companys, Tarradellas, Negrín … or they shared it with them, when their participation was necessary to thwart the development of a revolutionary alternative.
On the economic terrain, the historiographic myth that can be encompassed by the generic concept of “COLLECTIVIZATION” underwent (in Catalonia) four stages:
1. The expropriation by the workers (July to September 1936);
2. The adaptation of the confiscated enterprises to the Collectivizations Decree (October to December 1936);
3. The attempt by the Generalitat to direct the economy and control the collectives, in confrontation with the attempt to socialize the economy spearheaded by the radical sector of the CNT militants (January to May 1937);
4. The gradual state intervention and centralization (on the part of the central government) imposed a war economy and the MILITARIZATION of labor (June 1937 to January 1939).
** <strong>Thesis no. 12.</strong>
The antifascist ideology, the sacred union of all the antifascist working class and bourgeois parties, justified the abandonment of class frontiers in favor of the practice of class collaboration. Antifascism was the extension of the electoral Popular Front policy of February 1936, in a situation of war, after a victorious working class insurrection. The need for antifascist unity in order to win the war against fascism ALREADY implied the defeat of the revolutionary alternative. Failure to recognize this, and to devote oneself to making attempts to differentiate, as Trotsky did, a rejected Popular Frontism from a “temporary” antifascism, necessary until fascism had been defeated, meant to objectively fall into the nets of antifascist unity, to the same degree and for identical reasons as the POUM and the CNT. THE POPULAR FRONT (after the purging of the most right-wing parties after July 19) AND THE ANTIFASCIST FRONT WERE NOT SO DIFFERENT, AND AS THE WAR PROGRESSED THEY TENDED TO MERGE. In fact, it was the CNT and the FAI, after May 1937 and the fall of the Largo Caballero government, which led the movement to form an ANTIFASCIST POPULAR FRONT, as a means of exerting pressure to once again obtain libertarian representation in the republican government. This actually led to an accelerated process of social-democratization of all the workers organizations that rapidly obtained a majority position in all of them, thus bringing about the absolute marginalization of the revolutionary minorities, which were totally residual, powerless and very confused, which facilitated the rise and seizure of state power by the Stalinists, with their reactionary, but very clear and resolute, program of strengthening the republican state.
** <strong>Thesis no. 13.</strong>
The so-called “revolutionary conquests” were simultaneously the culmination of the insurrectionary victory of the workers organizations and the political defeat of the proletarian revolution.
The CCMA was the product of the victory of the workers insurrection, but it was also the product of the inability of the workers organizations, especially the CNT, as it was the most powerful force, to destroy the capitalist state. These social, economic, political, cultural, and quotidian “conquests” responded perfectly to the anarchosyndicalist ideology of apoliticism “<em>tout court</em>”, which was not interested in the “seizure of power”, but with carrying out the social revolution by destroying the army, abolishing the Church and taking over management of the factories. To many anarchosyndicalist workers, the question of whether to “go for broke” or not was absurd; they already had everything they were interested in: a gun, control of the factory, control over public order, the municipal council….! Why seize power? Why replace the republican state with “another”, workers, state?
WITHOUT REVOLUTIONARY THEORY THERE IS NO REVOLUTION. Very quickly the anti-militarists became militarists, and soon thereafter staunch advocates of an efficient professional bourgeois army. It did not take long for the anti-statists to become the best support for the reconstruction of the capitalist state, and the government of the Republic had four anarchist ministers among its ranks. Anarchist ministers! Nor was this the greatest contradiction in which the Spanish anarchist movement would become enmeshed. Faced with a lack of alternatives and directives from the CNT, the expropriated enterprises were transformed into collectives, which were nothing but the establishment of a kind of trade union capitalism—powerfully centralized and coordinated by the government of the Generalitat—which degenerated within a few months into the militarization of the enterprises and labor.
** <strong>Thesis no. 14.</strong>
The revolutionary committees—of defense, labor, enterprise, locality, supply, neighborhood, rearguard militias, etc.—were the potential organs of workers power, which often exercised the only real power, on a local or sectoral level, in July 1936. But they were rapidly transformed into antifascist committees or trade union committees for enterprise management, or else underwent a prolonged period of dormancy (like the confederal defense committees) or were transformed into state institutions, like the Control Patrols, which were nothing but control exercised by the (revolutionary or radical) “incontrolados” and the defense committees, neighborhood committees and rearguard militias (although they were at the same time the new organization that supplanted government control over public order). The ambiguous and ambivalent nature of the Control Patrols, the collectives, the Militias, the defense committees, and ultimately the whole “Revolution of July 19”, was the direct consequence of the ambiguity and ambivalent nature of the organizations of the extreme left of the Popular Front themselves (the CNT and POUM), which were not only incapable of seizing power and championing the historical program of emancipation of the proletariat against the counterrevolutionary forces, but also opted for class collaboration with the bourgeois parties and the capitalist state with the goal of defeating fascism. They were ambiguous because the CCMA was the product of the insurrectionary PROLETARIAN victory of July 19, but also of the political fiasco of July 21, WHEN CLASS COLLABORATION WAS ACCEPTED.
** <strong>Thesis no. 15.</strong>
On July 21, 1936 the CNT opted for collaboration with the other antifascist forces, without issuing any political directives concerning either the seizure of power, the economic organization of the enterprises, the coordination of the revolutionary committees or that of the different economic and industrial sectors. On August 11, 1936, at the request of the CNT, the Council of the Economy of the Generalitat assumed the responsibility for coordinating and reorganizing the Catalonian economy.
The provisional character of the enterprise expropriations, which were implemented in the heat of the moment of the insurrectionary victory of July, in a situation of a power vacuum, caused them to be oriented towards the sole objective of guaranteeing the everyday functioning of the enterprises. Only in a few economic sectors (food, health and sanitation, education), to a limited extent, and in some isolated enterprises, was there an attempt to carry out a process of socialization in which the trade union acted as both initiator and organizer. The Collectivizations Decree of October 1936 legalized a fait accompli, that is, the confiscation of the enterprises by the workers, but only for the evident purpose of centralizing the Catalonian economy through the Council of the Economy of the Generalitat, eliminating the organs of workers power from the enterprises, and nipping in the bud the socializing experiments of certain sectors and enterprises.
Collectivization in the Catalonian economy underwent four stages:
1. The expropriation of the enterprises. The revolutionary committees, which the counterrevolutionaries called “incontrolados”, once the military uprising had been defeated, proceeded to expropriate the bourgeoisie, and to take priests, bourgeois, <em>caciques</em> and former members of the employers’ <em>pistoleros</em> trade union “for a ride”. Not only was there a total absence of political or economic directives from the superior committees of the CNT and the CCMA, but the latter also threatened to shoot the “incontrolados”. They faced a fait accompli, however: the factories had been confiscated. The CNT, faced with its own inability and lack of will to coordinate and manage the Catalonian economy, proposed to the Generalitat the creation of a Council of the Economy: it handed over to the petty bourgeois government of the Generalitat the management and coordination of the Catalonian economy!
2. Adaptation to the Collectivizations Decree. In October 1936, together with the dissolution of the CCMA, the entry of the POUM and the CNT into the government of the Generalitat, the Decree on the militarization of the Popular Militias, the dissolution of the local committees—which were replaced by Popular Front Municipal Councils—and a long <em>etcetera</em> of counterrevolutionary measures of lesser importance, the Collectivizations Decree was approved with the indispensable support of the CNT. What it actually did was establish a trade union capitalism in the enterprises, with major state intervention and centralization on the part of the government of the Generalitat, and this was called COLLECTIVIZATION. The former bourgeoisie, the private owners, had been replaced by management by the trade union delegates of each enterprise, organized in Workers Control Committees (which were often the result of a pact between manual, technical and administrative workers and even some of the former owners), whose activities were completely mediated by and subject to the tutelage of the inspectors appointed by the Generalitat, which nonetheless considered the enterprise to be the property of the trade union.
3. COLLECTIVIZATION versus SOCIALIZATION (December 1936-May 1937). On the one hand, the government of the Generalitat, relying on its social base that consisted of the petty bourgeois sectors—administrative, technical, former business owners, members of the liberal professions and even workers professing a right wing ideology, often members of the UGT—initiated an offensive to expand its control over the enterprises, based on the Collectivizations Decree and the implementation of a series of financial decrees, approved by Tarradellas at S’Agaró in January 1937. At the same time the radical sector of the CNT militants was attempting to SOCIALIZE production, which implied increasing the power of the Trade Union Industrial Federations in the enterprises.
SOCIALIZATION, for this radical sector of the CNT, meant the direction of the Catalonian economy by the Trade Unions (of the CNT) and a break with the dynamic of trade union capitalism, and the establishment of an equitable distribution of wealth that would put an end to the scandalous differences between workers in rich and poor collectivized industries, and between the former and the unemployed. Such a form of direction over A SOCIALIZED Catalonian ECONOMY required in turn the creation of the necessary organs within the CNT, that is, the replacement of the <em>Sindicatos Únicos</em> (which were appropriate for directing a strike, but not for managing the enterprises) by Industrial Trade Unions (better adapted for managing the various economic sectors), which was implemented in the first months of 1937. The SOCIALIZATION of the Catalonian economy meant the direction of the economy (and of the war) by the CNT, and this in turn required the abolition of the government of the Generalitat.
The counterrevolutionary offensive of the Generalitat to expand its control, extending it to every enterprise, therefore clashed head-on with the socialization program of the radical sector of the CNT. A struggle was waged, one enterprise at a time, in which the assemblies that were supposed to vote for socialization were subjected to a wide variety of forms of pressure and manipulation, from the most despicable political intrigues to the use of the police. In this bitter struggle, unfolding in one enterprise at a time, a struggle that the superior committees of the CNT never wanted to centralize, because to do so would have implied breaking with the antifascist unity pact, an increasingly more obvious and “painful” division emerged among the trade union militants, between the collaborationist sector and the radical sector of the CNT. During the course of this campaign to socialize the Catalonian economy, the radical militants of the CNT attempted to compete with the collaborationist militants in an attempt to obtain the support of the majority of the trade union members. The radical militants, however, were almost always in the minority in the factory assemblies, due to the flood of opportunists who joined the CNT in the wake of July 19 and attrition caused by the revolution itself among the ranks of the revolutionaries, many of whom joined the Militias or had been promoted to positions of responsibility.
A major role in the opposition to the militarization of the Popular Militias (decreed in October 1936) was played by the fourth company of the Gelsa unit of the Durruti Column, which, after narrowly avoiding an armed confrontation with other forces of the Column, which supported the militarization decree, decided to abandon the front (in February 1937) and return to Barcelona, taking their weapons with them.
These militiamen, together with other radical CNT militants who were involved in the ongoing struggle for socialization in the enterprises, founded The Friends of Durruti Group in March 1937, which soon attracted between four and five thousand members and constituted, in Catalonia, a revolutionary alternative to the (collaborationist) superior committees of the CNT-FAI.
4. From June 1937 until the end of the war, the radical sector of the CNT, the Trotskyists and the POUM were subjected to persecution, driven into hiding, and physically annihilated.
During this same period, the CNT (its revolutionary minority having been amputated) continued to collaborate faithfully with a Stalinist state that imposed the militarization of labor and of life, the most draconian rationing and a war economy. STATE ANARCHISM consolidated its collaborationism with the republican bourgeoisie, embraced its program of victory over fascism, repressed any revolutionary threats within its ranks and assumed the tasks that are natural to any bureaucracy that aspires to integrate itself into the state apparatus.
** <strong>Thesis no. 16.</strong>
May 1937 marked the armed defeat of the most advanced sector of the revolutionary proletariat that was required by the counterrevolution so it could proceed to implement its counteroffensive. The causes of May were rooted in the rising cost of living, the scarcity of basic goods, the resistance to the dissolution of the control patrols and the militarization of the militias, and the constant struggle being waged by the workers in the collectivized enterprises to preserve their control over production in the face of the growing interventionism of the Generalitat, facilitated by the implementation of the S’Agaró Decrees. It was not by chance that the May events began at a collectivized enterprise, the Telephone company, with the armed opposition mounted by the rank and file CNT workers against its seizure by the Generalitat’s forces of repression. The rapid extension of the struggle throughout the entire city of Barcelona was the work of the defense committees and the neighborhood committees, linked by telephone, which acted independently of the superior committees of the CNT.
On the one side of the barricades were the forces of public order, the Stalinists of the PSUC, and the Catalanist Pyrenees Militias under the command of the government of the Generalitat. On the other side of the barricades were the workers of the CNT. Only the anarchists of The Friends of Durruti Group and the Trotskyists of the Bolshevik-Leninist Section of Spain attempted to provide any revolutionary objectives to the struggle of the barricades.
The CNT militants as a whole, however, were incapable of, and did not know how to act in opposition to the COLLABORATIONIST directives issued by the leaders and the superior committees of the CNT. Some actually fired their guns at radios that were broadcasting the conciliatory speeches of García Oliver and Federica Montseny, but in the end they complied with their directives.
The Friends of Durruti Group referred to the activity of these leaders and superior committees as an “enormous betrayal”.
After May 1937 the attempts ON THE PART OF THE SUPERIOR COMMITTEES OF THE BUREAUCRATIZED CNT to expel The Friends of Durruti Group from the CNT failed, as no trade union assembly would ratify this proposal.
A split that could have clarified the contradictory and irreconcilable positions within the CNT never took place, however.
Subsequent historiography underestimated, or ignored, the important role played by the Group, and the CNT bureaucracy even succeeded in recuperating for its own benefit “the true revolutionary prestige” of a Group that it had persecuted and attempted to expel from its ranks. Ambiguity always favors the counterrevolution. AND TODAY WE CAN SEE, WITHOUT ANYBODY BEING SCANDALIZED, HOW THE CNT AND THE FAI CLAIM THE “LEGACY” OF THE REVOLUTIONARY PRESTIGE OF THE FRIENDS OF DURRUTI GROUP. Bureaucracies and capitalism are capable of recuperating anything, even what they slandered and persecuted for constituting a revolutionary alternative, antagonistic to the bureaucracy and capitalism.
** <strong>Thesis no. 17.</strong>
The characteristics of the Stalinist counterrevolution were and are:
a. Incessant, ubiquitous and omnipotent police terrorism;
b. The indispensable misrepresentation of its own nature, and the nature of its enemies, especially the revolutionaries;
c. Exploitation of the workers by a form of state capitalism, directed by the Party-State.
The Negrín-Stalin government transformed the initial class collaboration of the CCMA, and the ideology of antifascist unity, into NATIONAL UNITY and orderly government; it converted the reformist impotence against the revolution of the socialists, Catalanists and anarchosyndicalist bureaucracy into a complete counterrevolutionary program, which abolished the least vestige of workers democracy, and transformed the bourgeois democracy into the police dictatorship of the GPU and the SIM.
The Stalinists have never been a reformist sector of the workers movement. No collaboration of any kind is or ever has been possible with Stalinism, only unremitting war. Stalinism, always and everywhere, leads and guides the counterrevolutionary forces, finds its power in the idea of national unity, in the practice of a policy of law and order, in its struggle to establish a strong government, in the penetration of the militants of the Stalinist party into the state apparatus, and above all by disguising their reactionary nature within the workers movement.
** <strong>Thesis no. 18.</strong>
It is necessary to set forth a chronology, because a defense committee was not the same thing in 1931 as a defense committee in July 1936, nor was the latter the same thing as a defense committee was one week later, when it might have been transformed into an antifascist committee, nor in January 1937 when the defense committees had gone into hibernation, nor in May 1937 when their existence rose to the surface with the “spontaneous” organization of the insurrection, nor in December 1937 when they could be said to have disappeared. Similarly, a self-managed enterprise in July 1936 could have come under the financial control of the government of the Generalitat in 1937, and the same enterprise might have been militarized in 1938.
The Popular Militias, voluntary, popular and of a revolutionary character, after several months (between October 1936 and May 1937) of discussions about whether or not to accept militarization, became regiments or divisions of a regular army, and the militiamen were turned into soldiers.
THIS CHRONOLOGY MAY BE CATEGORIZED (for Catalonia) in four stages:
1. The revolutionary stage (July 19, 1936 to September 26, 1936);
2. The advance of the counterrevolution (September 26, 1936 to June 16, 1937);
3. The repression of the revolutionary movement (June 16, 1937 to April 1938);
4. The disappearance of the revolutionary movement (April 1938 to the end of the war).
** <strong>Thesis no. 19.</strong>
July 19, 1936 to September 26, 1936:
The “revolutionary” stage or the stage of the victory of the insurrection and the revolutionary movement. VACUUM OF (CENTRALIZED) STATE POWER. ATOMIZATION OF POWER and confusion of powers. Local revolutionary committees and revolutionary defense committees, neighborhood committees, supply committees, workers control committees, popular militias, workers and soldiers councils, rearguard militias. The bourgeois state was “partially broken down” but preserved its legal authority, and did not fail to legalize and proclaim the revolutionary conquests that had taken place. Above all, however, it impeded and hindered the capacity for coordination and centralization of the revolutionary committees, which held all power at the local level. The CCMA acted as an institution of class collaboration, as an intermediary between the real local powers of the committees and the legal power of the Generalitat. The CCMA’s Juridical Office imposed a popular justice extraneous to the existing laws (and supported spontaneous popular justice). A very theoretical and historical-analytical error that is very widespread among both the participants in the CCMA and subsequent historians consists in positing a situation of dual power between the CCMA and the government of the Generalitat, which is in this version said to have disappeared with the dissolution of the CCMA.
We maintain that the CCMA did not create a situation of dual power with respect to the Generalitat and that at no time did the CCMA imply any more than a duplication of powers previously exercised by the Generalitat, which was necessary in order to reestablish the authority of the latter.
** <strong>Thesis no. 20.</strong>
September 26, 1936 to June 16, 1937:
The advance of the counterrevolution. Retreat of the revolutionary movement and offensive by the Generalitat to reconquer all its functions (even assuming some of the powers of the Valencia Government). Dissolution of the CCMA, entry of the POUM and the CNT into the government of the Generalitat. DECREE DISSOLVING THE REVOLUTIONARY COMMITTEES AND FORMING POPULAR FRONT MUNICIPAL COUNCILS. Nin, the Minister of Justice, abolished the Juridical Office. The CNT and the POUM facilitated the dissolution of the revolutionary committees and their replacement by Popular Front municipal councils. Nin and Tarradellas went to Lérida to compel the local committee there, controlled by the POUM, to submit to the decree. The Decree ordering the militarization of the Popular Militias was proclaimed. In mid-December the Stalinists expelled Nin from the Government and established an alliance between the ERC and the PSUC to reduce the power of the CNT and to abolish the “revolutionary conquests” of July, which were only temporary concessions and transfers of state functions. May 1937 signified the final defeat of the revolutionary movement. The PSUC and the ERC led the counterrevolution, but the POUM and the CNT were OBJECTIVELY indispensable collaborators when the revolutionary movement was still strong enough to constitute a workers power.
** <strong>Thesis no. 21.</strong>
June 16, 1937 to April 1938:
Dissolution of the Control Patrols. Outlawing and repression of the POUM and the revolutionary movement. The CNT was divided into a critical sector that was repressed (or removed from its positions and deprived of its functions in the organization) and a governmental sector that integrated itself into the state apparatus. Stalinist repression of the revolutionary movement. In July 1937 the FAI renounced its organization by affinity groups and adopted a territorial form of organization instead. The affinity groups based on shared ideological conceptions had permitted the emergence of The Friends of Durruti Group (between four and five thousand members) as a revolutionary opposition to the collaborationism of the FAI. The FAI’s new territorial form of organization, of a pyramidal and hierarchical character, granted the superior committees absolute control over the organization, and also converted the FAI into an efficient political party, capable of assuming positions in all the administrative levels of the state apparatus. The Council of Aragón was abolished in August 1937. The Aragón collectives were dissolved by the military expedition of the division under the command by the Stalinist Lister. In September Los Escolapios, the headquarters of the confederal Defense Committee, was taken by assault, without any other response on the part of the ruling bureaucracy of the CNT than the order to surrender.
** <strong>Thesis no. 22.</strong>
April 1938 to January 1939:
Disappearance of the revolutionary movement. The militants who had not been assassinated or imprisoned tried to carry on their work in strictly clandestine conditions, joined the army or went into hiding. All the revolutionary publications either disappeared or acquired a purely apologetic character. The CNT-UGT unity pact. The FAI and the CNT campaigned for the creation of an ANTIFASCIST POPULAR FRONT as a pressure tactic to obtain the readmission of libertarian representatives to the republican government. War economy, Stakhanovism and the militarization of labor and of everyday life. The Negrín government attempted to establish a dictatorial Stalinist state.
** <strong>Thesis no. 23. </strong>
<strong>The errors of the POUM:</strong>
1. The POUM never posed the question of working class power, not in July 1936 and not at any time during the revolutionary stage of July, August and September 1936.
2. The POUM accepted the liquidation of the committees, which were the potential organs of workers power. That is, the leadership of the POUM called for the suppression of the revolutionary committees instead of working for their extension, democratization and coordination. It never proposed a struggle for the destruction of the capitalist organs of power, or for the destruction of the capitalist state. The committees, although incomplete and defective, were the potential organs of workers power. The task of a revolutionary party (the POUM was never a revolutionary party) would have been to reinforce, democratize and coordinate these committees in such a way as to transform them into workers councils, elected by general assemblies and revocable at any time, capable of constituting a government of workers councils.
3. The POUM was incapable of making the fundamental distinction between the Party and the Popular Front, and followed the latter road, which led to government collaboration.
4. The leadership of the POUM was always following behind the CNT-FAI, whose leaders it considered to be revolutionaries, instead of engaging in a powerful, consistent and objective polemic against the series of false positions assumed by the CNT-FAI.
5. The leadership of the POUM never really understood the relation between war and revolution, insofar as it made a distinction between the two. The slogan, “War or Revolution” is false in and of itself.
6. The POUM, almost as rapidly as the other groups, sacrificed the revolution to what seemed to be the interests of the “war” (government collaboration, an indecisive policy with regard to the question of the Army, etc.) instead of clearly demonstrating that the war did not merit the sacrifices of the working class except to the extent that it was an integral part of the revolutionary process, that is, insofar as it was subordinated to the decisive question of power. It did nothing to establish the foundations of the organs of a new power (revolutionary workers Front), not even in those locations where the party’s influence was preponderant. The POUM leadership allowed members of the party, the commanders of the Lenin division, to sabotage all political activity oriented towards the militiamen, thus helping the plans of the counterrevolution instead of favoring agitation for workers democracy in the mass organizations.
7. The leadership of the POUM shared certain obsolete ideas concerning nationalism and regional autonomy with the Catalonian petty bourgeoisie.
8. The POUM never engaged in any critique of the collectivization of industry as a new form of “trade union capitalism”.
9. Nin dissolved the FOUS under the erroneous trade union slogan of “CNT-UGT”, instead of issuing the directive, “Neither CNT nor UGT: one central trade union”.
10. The capitulation of May:
a. the leadership had no independent, clear line;
b. it took no independent initiative of its own;
c. it tried to provide a cover for the treason of the anarchist leaders;
d. it learned nothing: it even claimed that May was a workers victory.
Many of these errors of the Executive Committee of the POUM were personally attributable to Nin, whether or not he was supported by the other members of the Executive Committee of the POUM, who sometimes opposed Nin’s personal decisions, or were not even consulted. On the other hand, we must not forget that the policy of the Executive Committee of the POUM, which was largely determined by Nin, was considered by a broad critical sector of the party as a catastrophic policy for the revolution, and moreover as an abandonment of the founding principles of the POUM:
1. Nin’s entry, as a representative of the POUM, in the Council of the Economy signified the recognition of the government of the Generalitat’s authority over and prerogatives for planning of the Catalonian economy.
2. The merger of the FOUS into the UGT instead of the CNT.
3. Nin’s acceptance of the position of Minister of Justice (which Andrade also referred to as a mistake) in the government of the Generalitat (which he held from September 26 to December 13, 1936, when he was forced out as a result of pressure from the Stalinists), because it strengthened the government of the Generalitat, laid the ground-works for the dissolution of the local committees and constituted a practical rejection of the calls for a workers government.
4. Nin’s first job as Minister of Justice was to accompany Tarradellas, the Prime Minister of the government of the Generalitat (“<em>conseller en cap</em>”), to Lérida, which was at the time governed by a Committee dominated by the CNT and the POUM, to REESTABLISH THE AUTHORITY OF THE CATALONIAN GOVERNMENT in that city.
5. Nin asserted that the dictatorship of the proletariat existed in Catalonia and also (in contradiction with this first assertion) that it was possible for the working class to take power peacefully.
6. On October 9, 1936, the government of the Generalitat—WE MUST NOT FORGET THAT this was made possible thanks to the participation of the POUM and the CNT, WITHOUT WHOSE INVOLVEMENT AND HELP THE GOVERNMENT OF THE GENERALITAT WOULD HAVE BEEN POWERLESS—was able to decree the dissolution of the local committees, OF A REVOLUTIONARY OR POTENTIALLY REVOLUTIONARY NATURE, which were to be replaced by Popular Front Municipal Councils; on October 13 a decree drafted and signed by Nin himself nullified the revolutionary work of Barriobero (and of the cenetistas) in the justice tribunals; on October 24 the decree ordering the militarization of the Popular Militias and the decree regarding public order were approved by a Junta of Internal Security. NIN WAS THE MINISTER OF JUSTICE OF THE GOVERNMENT OF THE GENERALITAT THAT TOOK THESE COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY MEASURES.
7. In January 1937 Nin wrote to the Executive Committee of the PSOE proposing the participation of the POUM in the unification conferences being held between the PSOE and the PCE. Only a few days later the Stalinist repression of the POUMistas began in Madrid.
8. In May 1937 he issued an order by telephone to disband the column formed in Gracia by militants of the POUM and the CNT for the purpose of seizing the center of the city held by counterrevolutionaries.
9. In May 1937 he rejected the plan to seize power elaborated by Josep Rebull … because power was not a military question, but a political one.
10. Nin thought that May 1937 was a workers victory!
** <strong>Thesis no. 24.</strong>
<strong>Critique of the positions of <em>Bilan</em>:</strong>
<em>Bilan</em> was the French-language journal of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left (Bordiguists), best known during the thirties as the Prometeo Group (<em>Prometeo</em> was the Italian-language journal of the Fraction). <em>Bilan</em> has been sanctified by various left organizations as the <em>nec plus ultra</em> of the revolutionary positions of the 1930s. <em>Bilan</em> denied, in a brilliant and flawless analysis (with which we agree), that a proletarian revolution had triumphed in Spain in 1936. <em>Bilan</em> also claimed, however, that, due to the lack of a (Bordiguist) class party, there was not even a possibility for a REVOLUTIONARY SITUATION (we think this is a serious error, with important consequences). According to <em>Bilan</em> the proletariat was immersed in an antifascist war, that is, it was enrolled in an imperialist war between a democratic bourgeoisie and a fascist bourgeoisie. In this situation, the only appropriate positions were desertion and boycott, or to wait for better times, when the (Bordiguist) party would enter the stage of history from the wings where it had been biding its time.
The analyses of <em>Bilan</em> have the virtue of decisively highlighting the weaknesses of and dangers that threatened the revolutionary situation after the triumph of the workers insurrection of July 1936, but they are incapable of formulating a revolutionary alternative. In any event the revolutionary defeatism of abandoning the Spanish proletariat into the hands of its reformist or counterrevolutionary organizations, as proposed IN PRACTICE by <em>Bilan</em>, was certainly not a revolutionary alternative. The incoherence of <em>Bilan</em> is made evident by its analysis of the May Days of 1937. It turns out that the “revolution” of July 19, which one week later ceased to be a revolution, because its class goals had been turned into war goals, now reappears like the Phoenix of history, like a ghost that had been hiding in some unknown location. And now it turns out that in May 1937 the workers were once again “revolutionary”, and defended the revolution from the barricades. Was it not the case, however, that, according to <em>Bilan</em>, a revolution had not taken place? Here, <em>Bilan</em> gets all tangled up. On July 19 (according to <em>Bilan</em>) there was a revolution, but one week later, there was no longer a revolution, because there was no (Bordiguist) party; in May 1937 there was another revolutionary week. But how do we characterize the situation between July 26, 1936 and May 3, 1937? We are not told anything about this. The revolution is considered to be an intermittent river [“Guadiana”: a river in Spain that runs on the surface, then underground, then reappears on the surface—Translator’s note] that emerges onto the historical stage when <em>Bilan</em> wants to explain certain events that it neither understands, nor is capable of explaining. The revolution is viewed as a series of week-long explosions, separated by ten months of inexplicable and unexplained limbo. And these revolutionary explosions, May 1937 as well as July 1936, are so inconsistent with the theses of <em>Bilan</em> concerning the non-existence of a revolutionary situation, that we are led to affirm its absolute lack of understanding of the characteristics and nature of a proletarian revolutionary process.
On the one hand, <em>Bilan</em> acknowledges the class character of the struggles of July and May, but on the other hand not only denies their revolutionary character, but even denies the existence of a revolutionary situation. This viewpoint can only be explained by the distance of an absolutely isolated Parisian group, which placed a higher priority on its analyses than on the study of the Spanish reality. There is not even one word in <em>Bilan</em> about the real nature of the committees, or on the struggle of the Barcelona proletariat for socialization and against collectivization, or on the debates and confrontations within the Militia Columns concerning the militarization of the Militias, or a serious critique of the positions of The Friends of Durruti Group, for the simple reason that they are practically totally unaware of the existence and the significance of all these matters. It was easy to justify this ignorance by denying the existence of a revolutionary situation. <em>Bilan</em>’s analysis fails because in its view the absence of a revolutionary (Bordiguist) party necessarily implies the absence of a revolutionary situation.
On July 19, 1936, throughout all of Spain, but especially in Catalonia, there was a victorious workers insurrection. This insurrection, which was dominated by its libertarian element, faced the competition of other political forces, such as the POUM and the republicans, and of some units of the forces of public order, like the Assault Guards and the Civil Guards, which remained loyal to the government of the Generalitat and the Republic. But it is certainly true that the result of this insurrection, thanks to the assault on the barracks of San Andrés, meant the arming of the Barcelona proletariat, and by extension the proletariat of all of Catalonia. The indisputable hegemonic power that resulted from this revolutionary insurrection was anarchist. The rest of the working class forces, the Generalitat and the overwhelmed forces of public order were, in Catalonia, in an absolutely minority position.
The product of this revolutionary insurrection was the Central Committee of Antifascist Militias (the CCMA). The CCMA, however, was simultaneously the product of this victory and also of the refusal of the anarchists to seize power. The CCMA was not an organ of workers power to confront the power of the republican bourgeoisie, that is, the Generalitat, but an institution of collaboration of the anarchists with the other political forces, both the working class forces as well as those of the bourgeoisie: it was therefore an institution of class collaboration. In practice, the CCMA performed the functions of public order, and recruiting and training antifascist militias, which the government of the Generalitat was incapable of performing. The CCMA acted as a kind of Ministry of the Interior and Ministry of War OF THE GENERALITAT. Regardless of how much autonomy and independence it had, it was still a Ministry of the Generalitat.
Neither the CCMA, nor the CNT-FAI, nor the POUM issued any directives (except the order to end the general strike), or gave any orientation, or proclaimed any orders, until July 28, when the CNT and the CCMA issued a communiqué and decree, respectively, which coincided in threatening “incontrolados” who were acting without the authorization of the CCMA with harsh repression. The insurrection of July 19 spread the expropriation of the bourgeoisie and the process of collectivization to the majority of Catalonian enterprises, WITHOUT ANY DIRECTIVE FROM THE WORKERS ORGANIZATIONS, AND WITHOUT ANY ORDER OR RULING FROM THE CCMA.
We must, however, clearly and precisely identify the characteristics of this revolutionary situation: rather than dual power (which did not exist because the CCMA was not created to oppose the Generalitat, but to serve it) we must speak of a vacuum of centralized power. The power of the autonomous government of the Generalitat had fragmented into hundreds of committees that held all power at the local and enterprise level, most of which were in the hands of the working class.
These committees, however, incomplete and deficient, were not coordinated among themselves, and were not reinforced as organs of workers power. The CNT-FAI were neither capable nor desirous of giving these committees any coordination, WHICH WAS ESSENTIAL for the triumph of the revolution. The organizational structure of the CNT, articulated in <em>Sindicatos Únicos</em>, its weakness resulting from its recent period of clandestine activity and the <em>treintista</em> split, but above all its glaring theoretical shortcomings, rendered the CNT incapable of coordinating these committees, which held all power in their hands at the local and enterprise levels. Even the organization of economic life in Catalonia, and the indispensable coordination of the various economic sectors, was left in the hands of the government of the Generalitat, for which purpose the Council of the Economy was created on August 11, 1936. An unstable and transitory revolutionary situation prevailed, which had defeated the fascist bourgeoisie and overwhelmed the republican bourgeoisie, but one that had also escaped the control of the workers organizations themselves, which were incapable of organizing and defending the “revolutionary conquests” of July and of decisively tipping the scales in favor of the final triumph of the revolution, by seizing power, installing the dictatorship of the proletariat and destroying the apparatus of the republican state, simply because anarchosyndicalist theory and organization proved to be alien and foreign to the organization of the revolutionary proletariat. For the spontaneity of the masses has its limits. The inability of the CNT Trade Unions to stabilize and further motivate the revolution was acknowledged by the participants themselves. The CNT, as a trade union organization, was inadequate and incapable of performing the tasks that would have corresponded with the mission of a revolutionary vanguard or party, and the same thing was true of the other organizations of the working class. This is why the revolutionary situation, instead of moving in the direction of a full-blown revolution, was rapidly transformed into a counterrevolutionary situation that favored a rapid consolidation of the structures of the bourgeois state.
Not taking power in July meant leaving it in the hands of the bourgeoisie, and sharing it with the bourgeoisie within the CCMA meant “helping” the bourgeoisie to recover and fill the power vacuum that had been produced by the July insurrection. Furthermore, the collectivization process was not viable nor did it have any meaning at all if the capitalist state remained intact. And this is all the more true if we take into account the fact that the anarchists compensated for the shortcomings of the government of the Generalitat so that it could take over planning of the Catalonian economy, which it was itself incapable of coordinating.
The government of the Generalitat took into its hands, beginning in August 1936, nothing more or less than economic planning, financing of enterprises, the possibility of controlling every enterprise through an inspector appointed by the Generalitat, and the power to enact laws concerning the collectivizations. This was the foundation of the rapid recovery of political power by the Generalitat. If we add to the foregoing the fact that the Civil Guards and Assault Guards had not been dissolved, but only confined to their barracks in the rearguard, far from the front, we may safely conclude that the counterrevolution in Catalonia had some very solid foundations, which explain the rapid restoration of all the prerogatives of the capitalist state.
There is, however, an important difference between claiming that the insurrection of July 1936 was not a revolution, or even that it did not entail a revolutionary situation (as <em>Bilan</em>, the ICC and Robert Camoin, among others, assert) and claiming that the revolutionary situation of July came to naught due to a series of insufficiencies, incapacities and errors on the part of the existing workers organizations. In July 1936 there was a revolutionary situation that imposed the hegemony of the working class and its revolutionary threat on the republican bourgeoisie for ten months, despite the fact that there was no CENTRALIZATION OF POWER of the workers, because that power had been fragmented into hundreds of local committees, enterprise committees, the committees of various workers organizations, and the militias of various parties, in control patrols, etc.
In July 1936 the working class masses knew how to go into action without leaders, without directives from their trade union and political organizations; in May 1937, however, these same masses were incapable of acting in opposition to their leaders, and against the directives of their trade union and political organizations.
May 1937 did not fall out of the clouds, it was the result of the rising cost of living and the shortages of staple foods and basic goods, of the resistance to the dissolution of the control patrols and the militarization of the militias, but above all it was due to the working class offensive/resistance in the enterprises, one by one, totally isolated, in an attempt to consolidate and exercise control over the process of socializing the Catalonian economy, in confrontation with the liquidation of the “conquests of July”. The “normalization” offensive of the Generalitat, which sought to implement the S’Agaró decrees, signed by Tarradellas in January 1937, implied the elimination of the “revolutionary conquests” and absolute control over the Catalonian economy by the government of the Generalitat.
The lessons that should be learned from this are evidently the need to totally destroy the capitalist state, to dissolve its forces of repression, and to establish the social dictatorship of the proletariat, which the anarchists organized in The Friends of Durruti Group identified with the formation of a Revolutionary Junta, composed of all those organizations that had participated in the revolutionary battles of July 1936.
May 1937 was the consequence of the errors committed in July 1936. There was no revolutionary party in Spain, but there was a profound and powerful REVOLUTIONARY ACTIVITY of the working class which suppressed the fascist coup, outside the control of the workers organizations that existed in July 1936, and which in May 1937 confronted Stalinism, although it finally failed because it was incapable of confronting its own trade union and political organizations (the CNT and POUM), when the latter were defending both the bourgeois state and the program of the counterrevolution. The fact that the revolutionary movement that existed in Spain between July 1936 and May 1937 failed, and was turned aside from its class goals toward antifascist goals, does not obviate the existence of this revolutionary situation. No proletarian revolution has won yet, and the failure of the Commune and the success of Stalinism is no refutation of the revolutionary character of the Commune and October.
It is obvious that, without the seizure of power and establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Spanish collectivization process could not but fail, and that all the collectivizing experiences would be conditioned and distorted by this absence of the seizure of centralized power; but it is no less obvious that the expropriation of the bourgeoisie, entailed by the collectivization process, with all of its limitations, was the fruit of the proletarian revolutionary movement of July. The fundamental lesson of the “Spanish Revolution” (or more precisely of the Spanish revolutionary situation) is the ineluctable need for a vanguard that would defend the revolutionary program of the proletariat, the two first steps of which are the total destruction of the capitalist state and the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat, organized in workers councils, which would unify and centralize power. But to assert on the basis of these considerations that without a party there is no revolution, or even a revolutionary situation (as <em>Bilan</em>, the ICC and Robert Camoin claim) reflects the lack of understanding of the fact that not the party, but the proletariat, makes the revolution, although a proletarian revolution will inevitably fail if there is no vanguard capable of defending the revolutionary program of the proletariat (as The Friends of Durruti and the Bolshevik-Leninist Section of Spain unsuccessfully attempted to do). <em>Bilan</em> put the cart in front of the horse. The analyses of those who assert their claim “to be the party” never cease to be tragicomic; they do not know how to see the revolutionary situation that is unfolding right under their noses. The analyses of <em>Bilan</em> are very valuable with regard to its denunciations of the weaknesses and errors of the Spanish revolutionary process; but they are unfortunate and pathetic when its analysis leads it to the absurdity of denying the revolutionary and proletarian nature of the historical process experienced by the Spanish working class between July 1936 and May 1937. <em>Bilan</em>’s denial of the existence of a revolutionary situation is the product of its Leninist, totalitarian and substitutionist concept of the party: if there is no party there is not even the chance for a revolutionary situation to arise, regardless of the revolutionary activity of the proletariat. The consequences of this denial of the existence of a revolutionary situation in Catalonia in 1936–1937 led <em>Bilan</em> to advocate (solely on the theoretical plane) reactionary political positions such as breaking up the military fronts, fraternization with the Francoist troops, cutting off weapons to the republican troops, etc. It is not at all surprising that <em>Bilan</em>, or more precisely the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left, underwent a split as a result of open debate over the nature and characteristics of the Spanish Revolution.
To summarize: it is true that without a revolutionary party or vanguard, a proletarian revolution will fail; and this is the lesson of the Spanish example and the magnificent analysis of <em>Bilan</em>. But it is not true that a proletarian revolutionary situation cannot arise if a revolutionary party does not exist. And this claim is the one that led <em>Bilan</em> to make a false analysis of the situation created on July 19, 1936 in Catalonia, and also explains its failure to understand the events that led the proletariat to engage in a second revolutionary insurrection in May 1937.
** <strong>Thesis no. 25.</strong>
There are a number of shared revolutionary political positions that allow us to distinguish, in 1936–1939 in Spain, revolutionary from reformist, bourgeois or counterrevolutionary groups. These positions, which are in addition class frontiers, are based on the defense, not just theoretical but above all active and political, of the following points:
A. Advocate the necessity of the destruction of the capitalist state;
B. Opposition to political collaboration with bourgeois organizations and parties;
C. Advocate the establishment of a social dictatorship of the proletariat;
D. Opposition to the militarization of the Popular Militias;
E. Defense of the future organs of workers power, which are usually identified with the committees;
F. Deny the validity of or any future at all for the collectivizations without the political conquest of power by the working class.
These common denominators that identified, during the Spanish War, the revolutionary as opposed to the non-revolutionary groups, are shared, with greater or lesser emphasis on one point or another, and with varying degrees of theoretical clarity, by Balius and The Friends of Durruti Group, Josep Rebull and Cell 72 of the POUM, Munis and the Bolshevik-Leninist Section of Spain, Fosco and the Bolshevik-Leninist Group “Le Soviet”, as well as the (Bordiguist) militants of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left, which split as a result of its internal debate concerning the nature of the Spanish Revolution and War.
The theoretical and practical differences between these different revolutionary groups are important, and were the outcome of the weaknesses of the revolutionary movement of that time. A rigorous study of these groups, unimpaired by ideological prejudices, which restrict inquiry to labeling and/or embalming them as anarchist, Trotskyist, Bordiguist or Marxist, as well as a critique of their errors and the deficiencies of their positions is rendered imperative due to the lack of knowledge concerning these issues, because there is no movement with a future that has no knowledge of its past, and this is all the more true of a revolutionary movement.
** <strong>Thesis no. 26.</strong>
The Civil War was not a fratricidal war, as the propaganda of the Francoist dictatorship taught us for forty years and was we have been told by the formal democracy of the post-Franco period for the last fifty years, but a <strong>war of extermination</strong> of “the reds” by the fascists. In the so-called nationalist zone, from July to August 1936, the rebel military implemented, in their lightning advance from Andalusia and Estremadura, a war of extermination of the enemy, of an arbitrary and class nature and utilizing colonialist methods, for the purpose of sowing terror in a hostile rearguard and imposing political cleansing, directed against neutral elements as well as potential enemies. The goal was to destroy the social base of the workers movement and the left wing parties.
This extermination plan, carefully planned before the uprising, and justified by the need to ensure the victory of a colonial army that confronted the vast majority of the population of the country, was extended not only throughout the three years of warfare, but was legalized and institutionalized in the new Francoist state.
** <strong>Thesis no. 27.</strong>
The war did not end on April 1, 1939; it was the beginning of the Victory. A Victory whose first priority was to destroy the vanquished and quench the thirst for vengeance of the victors by assuring them total impunity. After a period of mass executions, imprisonment and torture of hundreds of thousands of persons, a regime of terror was imposed in which all of Spain became one vast prison. <strong>The Francoist state was a genocidal state</strong>, if we define genocide as the condition of systematic criminalization of a group, or as systematic extermination of a social group for religious, ethnic or political reasons. The essence of the Francoist state throughout its entire existence, and despite its unquestionable evolution over the course of the years, was the persecution, repression and extermination of the “reds”, a concept that was particularly applied to the organizations of the workers movement, but also to the militants of all the leftist, republican or liberal parties, as well as anyone who engaged in the mere defense of the most basic democratic rights and freedoms, and of course the national demands of the Basque and Catalonian people against whom an implacable cultural and linguistic genocide was waged.
** <strong>Thesis no. 28.</strong>
The war of extermination waged against the reds by the nationalist bloc and the Francoist genocidal state were not denounced as such during the Transition to democracy.
The post-Francoist heirs granted an amnesty to the political prisoners of Francoism for a handful of crimes that were only crimes because they had been legislated as such by the genocidal Francoist state.
The pact between Francoism and anti-Francoism also imposed another amnesty: an <strong>amnesia</strong> regarding the past. The first attempts to expose the notorious genocidal acts and to locate and identify the remains of those shot or disappeared in mass graves were interrupted by the attempted coup d’état of February 23, 1981. The future of the democracy, social and political stability and economic progress of the country seemed to be dependent on the forgetting of history and of the Francoist genocide as well as on the renunciation of any attempt to identify the bodies of those who were murdered and buried in mass graves, and even the mere memory of the location of these graves. The <strong>fear</strong> of the vanquished was prolonged in the form of the fear of the children of the vanquished, which continued to prevail in this curious “vigilant and endangered” democracy. Everything was nicely wrapped up.
** <strong>Thesis no. 29.</strong>
Genocide and crimes against humanity, however, are not subject to any statue of limitations. The Francoist genocide cannot be forgotten. It is no longer a matter of prosecuting individuals, but of the right to know the whole truth about what happened and also, of course, of the right to unhindered access to archival materials. It is a matter of vindicating the memory of those who were disappeared, assassinated, shot and thrown into mass graves, the exiles and all those fighters for liberty or for utopia who suffered imprisonment or forced labor without having committed any other crime than being reds, that is, members of the collective of the defeated in the war, whom the Francoist state sought to exterminate. A state that was based on the alliance of the military, reactionary bourgeoisie, big landowners, Falangists and the Catholic Church. It is also about destroying or transforming those places, monuments or plaques that commemorate fascist crimes and war crimes. Especially the “Wall of those who Died for God and Spain”, built by enslaved prisoners of war. And it is above all about recovering historical memory and uncovering <strong>concepts</strong> that have been hidden under the flood of fascist and clerical propaganda:
1. The Spanish civil war <strong>was not a fratricidal war</strong>, between brothers: <strong>it was a war of extermination</strong> against the “reds”;
2. Academic debates about whether the Franco dictatorship was a <strong>fascist or an authoritarian</strong> regime are of little importance; in any event <strong>it was a genocidal state</strong>, based on nothing but the victory of the military, the clergy and the fascists in a war against the people and the working class;
3. It is true that the Catholic Church suffered from religious persecution in the republican zone during the first ten months of the war that produced a total of seven thousand martyrs (who have now been <strong>beatified</strong>); but it is no less true that it was an active and terrible <strong>accomplice</strong>, necessary and indispensable at the beginning of the war, in its character as a war of extermination and in the subsequent genocide of the defeated by the Francoist state. It was a martyr for ten months and executioner for forty years.
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#title God’s Unruly Friends
#subtitle Dervish Groups In The Islamic Later Middle Period 1200–1550
#author Ahmet Karamustafa
#SORTtopics islam, history, proto-anarchism
#date 1994
#source Retrieved on 18<sup>th</sup> May 2021 from [[http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=15C2D37AEA362626C33BAE531A71D1D6][libgen.rs]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2021-05-18T10:27:51
** Acknowledgments
I first met the deviant dervishes in earnest when I read Vahidi’s <em>Menakib-i Hvoca-i Cihan ve Netice-i Can</em> in 1983. During the following three years, I tried to trace the history of these enigmatic figures and incorporated the initial results of my research into my doctoral dissertation in the form of one long chapter. While I continued to gather information on the dervishes after this point, it was only in the summer of 1991 that I returned to them with renewed interest. The present work is largely the outcome of my efforts during the past two years to understand and explain dervish piety.
I have accrued many debts in the process of working on this project. The Library of the School of Oriental and African Studies, the Library of the Institute of Ismaili Studies, the British Library (all in London), the Library of the Institute of Islamic Studies (Montreal), Süleymaniye Kutüphanesi (Istanbul), and Istanbul Üniversitesi Kütüphanesi gave me easy access to their collections, for which I am grateful. The Institute of Islamic Studies of McGill University and the Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages and Literatures of Washington University in St. Louis gave me unfailing institutional support, the former in the form of academic guidance and financial assistance throughout my graduate studies and the latter by providing me with ideal working conditions in an admirable atmosphere of collegiality for the past six years. I feel privileged to be associated with these fine institutions.
Many colleagues and friends have contributed to this book. It is a pleasure to thank them here for their interest, time, and invaluable criticism and simultaneously to absolve them of any responsibility for the final outcome. Gerhard Böwering of Yale University, J. T. P. De Bruijn of the University of Leiden, Jamal Elias of Amherst College, Carl W. Ernst of the University of North Carolina, Gary Leiser, Michel M. Mazzaou10f the University of Utah, James W. Morris of Oberlin College, and Azim Nanjf the University of Florida have all read and commented upon different versions of the manuscript in its entirety. My colleagues and friends at Washington University, Engin D. Akarh, Cornell H. Fleischer (now at the University of Chicago), and Peter Heath, in addition to exercising their customary critical acumen on the manuscript, offered me constant support and encouragement. Beata Grant, also of Washington University, saved me from many an infelicity of expression by smoothing my style.
To Hermann Landolt of McGill University, my teacher and friend, I owe a special debt of gratitude. He was involved in the project from its inception and guided it to maturation for over a decade in his inimitable style. His unflagging support has been a safe haven for a fledgling scholar.
Finally, I am happy to acknowledge my incalculable debt to Fatemeh Keshavarz of Washington University, my wife, friend, and colleague. She has been the mainstay of this research project and more over the past several years, and it is to her that this book is lovingly dedicated.
** Usage
Arabic and Persian titles, technical terms, and personal names have been transliterated according to the Library of Congress transliteration systems for these languages, while the transliteration of names and terms in Ottoman Turkish follows, with some deviations, the system proposed by Eleazar Birnbaum, “The Transliteration of Ottoman Turkish for Library and General Purposes: Ottoman Turkish Transliteration Scheme,” <em>Journal of the American Oriental Society</em> 87 (1967): 122–56. The choice of transliteration system was guided by context (thus, <em>tekbir</em> rather than <em>takbir</em> in transliterating from Ottoman Turkish), though the transliteration of certain often-used words (Qalandar, <em>zawiyah, hadith)</em> has been rendered uniform throughout the manuscript in order not to confuse the reader.
Dates are given in both the Islamic lunar and Common Era years, separated by a slash. I have used the conversion tables supplied by F. R. Unat, <em>Hicri Tarihleri Miladi Tarihe Çevirme Kllavuzu</em> (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Yayinlari, 1984). Islamic solar dates, primarily used in Persian publications, are represented by the addition of the letters “sh” (for <em>shamsi)</em> to the date.
Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
** Chapter One. Introduction
In the mid-sixth/twelfth century, a peculiar-looking ascetic visited the palace of the Ghaznavid ruler Mu’izz al-Dawlah Khusraw Shah (r. 547-55/1152-60) in Ghazna in eastern Afghanistan to ask for alms. He had bare feet and was dressed in a black goat’s skin. On his head he wore a cap of the same material, ornamented with horns. In his hand he carried a club adorned with rings, pierced ankle-bones, and small round bells. Khusraw Shah responded favorably to the ascetic’s request and received his blessings. [1]
More than a century and a half later, ascetics of very similar appearance are recorded to have gathered around Barak Baba (d. 707/ 1307–8) in Asia Minor and Iran. Barak Baba arrived in Syria in the year 706/1306 at the head of a group of about one hundred dervishes, naked except for a red cloth wrapped around his waist. He wore a reddish turban on his head with a buffalo horn attached on either side. His hair and his moustache were long, while his beard was clean-shaven. He carried with him a long pipe or horn <em>(nafir),</em> as well as a dervish bowl. He did not accumulate any wealth. His disciples were of similar appearance, carrying long clubs, tambourines and drums, bells, and painted ankle-bones, with molar teeth attached to strings suspended from their necks. Wherever they went, the disciples played and Barak Baba danced like a bear and sang like a monkey. It is reported that Barak Baba had control over wild animals, as he demonstrated by scaring a ferocious tiger and riding a wild ostrich on two different occasions. Apparently, he exercised similar control over his disciples, whom he forced to perform the prescribed religious practices on pain of forty blows of the bastinado. Nonetheless, his dervishes were renowned for their antinomian ways, which included failure to observe the ritual fast and consumption of legally objectionable foods and drugs. The Mamluk sources also accuse them of belief in metempsychosis and denial of the existence of the hereafter, while to Barak himself is imputed an excessive love of ‘Al, which he supposedly viewed as the sole religious obligation. [2]
A century after Barak Baba’s visit to Syria, on 25 May 1404, the Spanish traveler Ruy Gonzales de Clavijo passed through a place called Delilarkent (“city of madmen,” present-day Delibaba) in the vicinity of Erzurum in eastern Anatolia. He reported that the whole village was inhabited by dervishes:
<quote>
These Dervishes shave their beards and their heads and go almost naked. They pass through the street, whether in the cold or in the heat, eating as they go, and all the clothing they wear is bits of rag of the torn stuff that they can pick up. As they walk along night and day with their tambourines they chant hymns. Over the gate of their hermitage is seen a banner of black woollen tassels with a moon-shaped ornament above; below this are arranged in a row the horns of deer and goats and rams, and further it is their custom to carry about with them these horns as trophies when they walk through the streets; and all the houses of the Dervishes have these horns set over them for a sign.[3]
</quote>
The lone ascetic dressed in goat’s skin in Afghanistan, the tumultuous crowd of mendicant disciples around Barak Baba in Syria, and the naked dervishes of Delibaba in Asia Minor represent a kind of renunciation that emerged and spread in Islamdom during the Later Middle Period (ca. 600-900/1200-1500).[4] This new movement differed from previous versions of Islamic renunciation in significant ways. On one hand, the new renouncers elevated the ascetic principles of mendicancy, itinerancy, celibacy, and self-mortification to unprecedented heights through a radical interpretation of the doctrine of poverty. On the other hand, they welded asceticism with striking forms of social deviance in such a way as to render deviant behavior the ultimate measure of true renunciation. In their zeal to reject society and to refuse to participate in its reproduction in any fashion, the new renouncers embraced such anarchist and antinomian practices as nudity or improper clothing, shaving all bodily and facial hair, and use of hallucinogens and intoxicants as the only real methods of renunciation. The avoidance of gainful employment, family life, and indeed all forms of social association was not sufficient. Withdrawal from society had to be accompanied by active rejection and destruction of established social custom. More than anything else, it was in their deliberate and blatant social deviance that the new renouncers differed from their previous counterparts in Islamic history.
The new renunciatory movement was not homogeneous. Its various manifestations forged the features of poverty, mendicancy, itinerancy, celibacy, self-mortification, and other forms of social deviance into distinct combinations with varying degrees of emphasis on the eremitic and cenobitic options. The solitary mendicant, the wandering group of disciples, and the partially settled dervish community of the reports presented above reflect these different manifestations of the new dervish piety. Uncompromising eremiticism based on radical poverty, usually characteristic of the initial phase of the renunciation movement, was everywhere followed by a cenobitic reaction. While mendicancy and itinerancy remained the norm, the attraction of community life dampened the anchoritic zeal inherited from the ascetic virtuos10f the previous generations. The original ascetic mandate was further attenuated when renouncers began to practice mendicancy and itinerancy on a part-time, mostly seasonal, basis. Wandering and begging in a state of extreme poverty most of the year, these renouncers returned to their hospices the rest of the year, where they enjoyed the relative comfort of settled life. Despite such diversity, however, social deviance always remained constant.
Although the new renunciatory piety was already in evidence during the sixth/twelfth century, its first clear manifestations in the form of identifiable social collectivities emerged around the turn of the seventh/thirteenth century. They took the form of two widespread movements: the Qalandariyah, which first flourished in Syria and Egypt under the leadership of ethnically Iranian leaders, most notably Jamal al-Din Savi (d. ca. 630/1232-33), and the Haydariyah, which took shape in Iran as a result of the activities of its eponymous founder Qutb al-Din Haydar (d. ca. 618/1221-22). Both movements rapidly spread from their respective places of origin to India and to Asia Minor.
Already before the end of the seventh/thirteenth century, other dervish groups similar to the mendicant Qalandars and Haydaris began to appear in different regions of Islamdom. The followers of Barak Baba in newly conquered Asia Minor and western Iran were the earliest and most prominent representatives of this wave of locally contained religious renunciation. During the following two centuries, many more groups appeared alongside the still effective Qalandars and Haydaris, notably Abdals of Rum, Jamis, Bektsis, and Shams-i Tabrizis in Asia Minor and Madaris and Jalalis in Muslim India.
The definitive establishment of the great regional empires of the Ottomans, Safavids, Üzbeks, and Mughals during the tenth/sixteenth century led to tighter organization of the deviant dervish groups. The loose social collectivity of the Later Middle Period was either transformed into a new Sufi order or assimilated into an older one. In Ottoman Asia Minor and the Balkans, the Bektasye emerged as a major new order that carried the legacy of the earlier Qalandars, Haydaris, and Abdals of Rum, while in India Qalandars infiltrated the socially respectable Suf10rders <em>(tariqahs),</em> which led to the emergence of suborders like the Chishtiyah-Qalandariyah. Similar processes must have been operative in the formation of the Khaksar in Iran, which probably came into being through a merger of different movements such as the Haydariyah and Jalaliyah. Not all of the earlier dervish groups survived into this later period; some simply disappeared altogether, as evidenced by the case of the Jamis in the Ottoman Empire.
*** Historiography
The deviant dervish groups that constituted the new renunciatory movement have received varying degrees of scholarly attention. [5] The Qalandars have been the subject of several studies, while the Haydaris, Abdals of Rum, and the others remain largely unexplored.[6] Even in the case of the Qalandars, however, scholars have, as a rule, restricted the scope of their research to a specific region and period and have not attempted to trace the history of the group in Islamdom as a whole.
At present, there exists no comprehensive study of new renunciation.[7] The phenomenon is not even acknowledged as a distinct phase in the historical development of Islamic modes of piety. This lack of analytical depth and focus is patently visible in the inability of previous scholarship to produce a satisfactory explanation for the emergence and enduring appeal of deviant renunciation. Indeed, the reasons for the formation, spread, and flourishing of new movements of renunciation during the Later Middle Period have remained obscure. This is hardly surprising. Dervish piety has not normally been viewed as the manifestation of a new mode of religiosity. Instead, it has been subsumed under the larger and seemingly permanent category of “popular religion.” The operative assumption here has been that there was a watertight separation in premodern Islamic history between high, normative, and official religion of the cultural elite on the one hand and low, antinomian, and popular religion of the illiterate masses on the other hand. Dervish religiosity has generally been viewed as one, and only one, feature of the sphere of popular religion. Conceived as a static mixture of ill-defined beliefs and practices, however, popular religion is immune to historical change. The illiterate common people of the premodern periods are thought to have clung tenaciously to their ancient religious lore and ritual behavior, resisting the manipulative pressures of the “literate” religious tradition. Submerged in the sea of unchanging popular religious practice, socially deviant renunciation is thus stripped of its historical specificity and rendered impervious to historical explanation.
The relegation of anarchist dervishes to the sphere of popular religion and low culture has deep historical roots. The cultural elite of medieval Islamdom consistently identified the dervishes as the riffraff of society and readily decried them as impostors and ignoramuses. Within the decade of their appearance in the Arab Middle East, the Qalandars and the Haydaris, for instance, were portrayed as shameless charlatans by ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Jawbari in a book that he wrote between 619/1222 and 629/1232 to unveil the tricks perpetrated by numerous classes of beggars and swindlers of the underworld. [8] A few decades later, the eminent scholar Nasir-al-Din Tusi (d. 672/ 1274) did not hesitate to take an actively hostile attitude toward the dervish “rabble.” In 658/1259-60, a group of Qalandars presented themselves in Harran, Syria, to the Mongol ruler Hulegu (r. 654-63/ 1256–65). When the ruler wanted to know who these people were, Nasir al Din’s comment, “[They are] the excess of this world,” prompted Hülegü to order the summary execution of all the Qalandars.[9] The puritanic Muhammad al-Khatib, who wrote a whole trea- tise to denounce the irreligious practices of Qalandars in 683/ 1284–85, emphatically commended the non-Muslim Mongols for their harsh treatment of the Qalandars. [10] In a similar vein, such prominent Sufis as Ibrahim Gilani (d. 700/1301), the preceptor of the better-known Safi al-Din Ardabili (d. 735/1334), and the Chishti Muhammad Gisü’daraz (d. 826/1422) warned their followers against mixing with the Qalandars.[11]
Clear condemnation of mendicant dervishes remained a consistent feature of elite intellectual life throughout the Later Middle Period. Vahidi (fl. first half of the tenth/sixteenth century), the outspoken Ottoman Sufi critic of deviant renunciation, for instance, was vehement in his rejection of the dervishes as shameless hypocrites and impostors who traded in the religious sensibilities of the naturally ignorant and credulous common people. Vahidi denounced them as false Sufis, utterly lacking in any sincere religious sentiments, and as such definitely worse than infidels:
<quote>
Even the infidel comes to the fold of the faithful, but not the heretic dervish; the infidel has receptivity but not him.
He is out of the sphere of hope while the infidel is in the circle of fear of God, by God, the infidel is far superior to him.[12]
</quote>
Vahidi’s contemporary Latifi (d. 990/1582), the biographer of poets, harbored the same sentiments toward deviant dervishes, whom he decried as partners of the devil.[13] Interestingly, much the same approach toward the scandalous dervishes and their audience is found in the European counterparts of these cultured Ottoman gentlemen. The particular set of assumptions that governed elite views of new renunciation is fully displayed in the following colorful account of the Qalandars by Giovan Antonio Menavino, a well-informed and keen European observer of the Ottoman society of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries:
Dressed in sheepskins, the <em>torlaks</em> [read Qalandars] are otherwise naked, with no headgear.[14] Their scalps are always clean-shaven and well rubbed with oil as a precaution against the cold. They burn their temples with an old rag so that their faces will not be damaged by sweat. Illiterate and unable to do anything manly, they live like beasts, surviving on alms only. For this reason, they are to be found around taverns and public kitchens in cities. If, while roaming the countryside, they come across a well-dressed person, they try to make him one of their own, stripping him naked. Like Gypies in Europe, they practice chiromancy, especially for women who then provide them with bread, eggs, cheese, and other foods in return for their services. Amongst them there is usually an old man whom they revere and worship like God. When they enter a town, they gather around the best house of the town and listen in great humility to the words of this old man, who, after a spell of ecstasy, foretells the descent of a great evil upon the town. His disciples then implore him to fend off the disaster through his good services. The old man accepts the plea of his followers, though not without an initial show of reluctance, and prays to God, asking him to spare the town the imminent danger awaiting it. This time-honored trick earns them considerable sums of alms from ignorant and credulous people. The <em>torlaks ...</em> chew hashish and sleep on the ground; they also openly practice sodomy like savage beasts. [15]
This passage transports us to the strange yet familiar landscape of “popular religion.” Menavino’s detailed tableau of the Qalandars is drawn against a dark and somewhat hellish landscape that is peopled with ignorant and credulous masses and the equally ignorant and thoroughly fraudulent group of false saints that the masses venerate. If they are not total idiots, the impostor saints exploit the religious sensitivities of the simple folk and extract material benefits from them. This inversion of the flow of blessings and compassion from saintly figures to the common people is accompanied by a thorough distancing of the popular scene through the addition of features that render the landscape strange and almost bestial. In all this, Menavino is closely followed by his later counterparts, whose general attitude to the dervishes is epitomized by the following sentences of E. W. Lane, the scholarly observer of early nineteenth-century Egyptian society:
<quote>
That fancies such as these [that is, believing in <em>jinns</em>]should exist in the minds of a people so ignorant as those who are the subject of these pages cannot reasonably excite our surprise. But the Egyptians pay superstitious reverence not to imaginary beings alone: they extend it to certain individuals of their own species; and often to those who are justly the least entitled to such respect .... Most of the reputed saints of Egypt are either lunatics, or idiots, or impostors. [16]
</quote>
To the “enlightened” cultural elite of both medieval Islamdom and Christendom, then, the antinomian dervish was the symbol par excellence of the religion of the vulgar. It is remarkable that this specific set of assumptions and the particular view of religion and human culture of which it is symptomatic have been operative since the Middle Ages and that they still inform the historiographical discourse within which research on the history of the Islamic region is conducted. In a ground-breaking article that returned the issue of popular religion to the agenda of historical research, Mehmed Fuad Köprülü (d. 1966) wrote about the deviant dervishes in the following terms:
If we consider that these men were in general recruited from the lower classes and were incapable of [comprehending] some very subtle mystical observations and experiences, it becomes quite obvious that their undigested “pantheistic” beliefs would naturally lead to beliefs such as incarnation and metempsychosis and, in the final analysis, to “antinomianism.” ... As a general principle, beliefs that could only be digested by people who possess a [high degree] of philosophical capacity and who are susceptible to mystical experience always lead to consequences of this sort among people of feeble intellect.[17]
Closer to our own day, Fazlur Rahman (d. 1989) was even more vehement than Köprülü in his denunciation of popular religion. Referring to the seventh/thirteenth and eighth/fourteenth centuries, he wrote:
<quote>
This phenomenon of popular religion very radically changed the aspect of Sufism even if it did not entirely displace its very ideal. For practical purposes Islamic society underwent a metempsychosis. Instead of being a method of moral self-discipline and elevation and genuine spiritual enlightenment, Sufism was now transformed into veritable spiritual jugglery through auto-hypnotic transports and visions just as at the level of doctrine it was being transmuted into a half-delirious theosophy.... This, combined with the spiritual demagogy of many Sufi Shaykhs, opened the way for all kinds of aberrations, not the least of which was charlatanism. Illbalanced <em>majdhubs</em> ..., parasitic mendicants, exploiting dervishes proclaimed Muhammad’s Faith in the heyday of Sufism. Islam was at the mercy of spiritual delinquents. [18]
</quote>
It is small wonder that scholars have not taken any substantial interest in the culture of the “feeble-minded” masses and in the practices of “parasitic ... spiritual delinquents.” Significantly, Köprülü himself never published his monograph on the Qalandars, although he repeatedly announced its forthcoming appearance in several of his publications. Since the “vulgar” was nothing but a repository for distorted and contaminated versions of the subtle and pure beliefs of “high” religion, it simply made better sense to tap the original sources directly and consign “low” religion to where it belonged, in “the bosom of the vulgar.”
There are serious problems with this “two-tiered” model of religion. The assumption of an unbridgeable separation between high, normative and low, antinomian religion serves to obscure rather than clarify the true nature of the deviant dervish groups and the process of their emergence in the aftermath of the Mongol invasions. While it may conceivably serve a heuristic purpose in other contexts, in the case of the dervish groups of the Later Middle Period the creation of a catch-all category of popular or low religion only confounds the researcher. Such a move strips this particular mode of dervish religiosity of its specific features and renders it immune to analysis by suggesting that it is essentially indistinct from the “popular” versions of other religious trends such as millenarianism and messianism. These mentally and sociologically distinct religious attitudes are thus reduced to the presumed common denominator of “popularity. “[19]
The detailed historical examination of deviant dervish groups undertaken in the present work, however, yields results that seriously challenge the application of the two-tiered model of religion in the study of new renunciation. Such close scrutiny reveals that the movements in question formed a distinct religious phenomenon that differed radically from other purportedly popular religious phenomena such as millenarianism, messianism, and saint veneration. Dervish piety stood apart from all other modes of Islamic religiosity through its relentless emphasis on shocking social behavior and its open contempt for social conformity. More significantly, it was not restricted in either social origin or appeal to “lower” social strata. It is not easy to determine the social composition of the dervish groups, but, contrary to the received view that the rank and file of the movements in question must have been composed of the illiterate and the ignorant, there is certainly sufficient evidence to establish that these movements frequently recruited from the middle and high social strata. The socially deviant way of renunciation was attractive enough to produce converts from several social strata of medieval Islamic society. Most telling in this connection is the fact that the cultural elite that consisted of the literati in the widest sense of the term lost some of its members, either temporarily or permanently, to the dervish cause. To judge by the presence of poets, scholars, and writers of a certain proficiency among their numbers, the anarchist dervishes were not always the illiterate crowd their detractors reported them to be. Instead, socially deviant renunciation exercised a strong attraction on the hearts and minds of many Muslim intellectuals.
Furthermore, dervish religiosity was, naturally, a distinct religious phenomenon that developed in a historically specific social and cultural context. Surely, its sudden appearance and rapid spread during the seventh/thirteenth and eighth/fourteenth centuries require an explanation. It is a measure of the methodological poverty of the two-tiered model of religion that it not only fails to generate such an explanatory analysis but even obscures the obvious need for one by denying popular religion a historical dimension. The vulgar, it is understood, is timeless. Reliance on a dichotomous view of Islamic religion thus opens the way for the preponderance of externalistic explanations such as “survival of non-Islamic beliefs and practices under Islamic cover.” Indeed, the ascendancy of popular religious practice during the Middle Periods is usually, if at all, explained through recourse to the time-honored “survival” theory. In this view, popular Islam took shape in the Near East during the Early Middle Period through large-scale conversions of the masses of unlettered peoples to Islam. As a result of this expansive process of conversion, “Islam, originally the religion of a political and urban elite, became the religion and social identity of most Middle Eastern peoples.” [20] Outside the Near East, the process continued into the Later Middle Period through the conversion of nomadic Turks in Central Asia (as well as in Iran and Asia Minor), Hindus of low caste in India, and Berbers and black peoples of Africa. The halfhearted and in most cases merely nominal Islamization of these masses barely in touch with high literate traditions, the argument runs, led to the introduction of non-Islamic, especially shamanistic and animistic, beliefs and practices into Islam. The ensuing revitalization of”popular culture,” when coupled by the concomitant attenuation of Islamic high culture in the aftermath of the destructive wave of Mongol conquests, made possible the emergence and speedy diffusion of saint veneration in general and deviant mystic movements in particular in the heartlands of Islam. [21]
Applied to socially deviant renunciation, the theory of non-Islamic survivals would suggest that the emergence of new renunciation in medieval Islamdom should be understood in terms of the continuation of “primitive” non-Islamic belief patterns in imperfectly Islamized cultural environments. However, it is misleading to see deviant renunciation solely as a survival of pre-Islamic beliefs and practices. That there was a substantial degree of continuity between pre-Islamic and Islamic religious belief and practice in all the relevant cultural spheres is itself not in dispute here. Many components of dervish piety, especially in costume and paraphernalia such as the dervish staff or ankle bones and molar teeth, may well have had their origins in pre-Islamic or contemporary non-Islamic contexts.[22] Yet their reconfiguration into a visibly Islamic mode of religiosity occurred as a result of social dynamics internal to Islamic societies. Neither “survivals” nor “traces,” these originally extraneous beliefs and practices became the building blocks of a new Islamic synthesis. Therefore, the explanation for the emergence and entrenchment of this mode of Islamic piety should be located within, rather than without, Islamic societies.
** Chapter Two. Renunciation Through Social Deviance
Dervish piety can be described as “renunciation of society through outrageous social deviance.” This mode of religiosity was predicated upon complete and active rejection of society that was expressed through blatantly deviant social behavior. To the anarchist dervish, religious salvation was incompatible with a life led within the orders of society, since social life inevitably distanced humanity from God. Salvation could be found only in active, open, and total rejection of human culture, and the deviant dervish did not withdraw into the wild nature to lead a life of seclusion but created for himself a “social wilderness” at the heart of society where his fiercely antisocial activity functioned as a sobering critique of society’s failure to reach God. Cautious not to become part of the “master narrative,” the dervish carefully carved out his own space on the margins of that narrative, where he inscribed his boisterous commentary in a most conspicuous fashion.
It would, therefore, be correct to describe new renunciation as a movement based on rejection of society. The dervishes defined themselves through calculated defiance of the social order and proceeded to construct an intensely antiestablishment protest movement. They did not aim to replace the existing social order by a rival one, nor did they seek to reform society; they simply negated all cultural norms and structures. The negative, reactive nature of renunciation manifested itself in the form of blatant social deviance, which became the hallmark of dervish piety. In order to implement their anarchist agenda, the dervishes adopted numerous deviant practices. These can be subsumed under the two general categories of asceticism and antinomianism.
*** Asceticism
Social deviance was manifested primarily in the form of an intense and permanent asceticism that was flaunted by the dervishes in their attempt to secure salvation through active renunciation of human social institutions. Their ascetic practices, which without exception all negated basic institutions of Islamic societies of the Middle Period, can be identified as poverty, mendicancy, itinerancy, celibacy, and self-inflicted pain.
Voluntary rejection of all property was perhaps the most prominent feature of dervish piety. It is well known that the very term <em>darvish</em> means “poor” or “indigent” in Persian (Arabic equivalent, <em>faqir).</em> [23]The ascetic dervishes lived in absolute indigence, and their possessions were reduced to the bare minimum. The characteristic accoutrements of each dervish group included one or more of the following items: woolen or felt garment or animal hide, distinctive cap, begging bowl, pouch, spoon, club, belt, bell, hatchet, lamp or candle, razor, needle, flint stone, and musical instruments (commonly tambourine, drum, and pipe). The founding masters themselves appear to have practiced absolute poverty by rejecting even these minimal possessions. Jamal al-Din Savi, Qutb al-Din Haydar, and Otman Baba are all known, for instance, to have worn no clothing at all for long periods during their dervish careers.[24] Actualized in practice, voluntary poverty was also a well-articulated part of dervish ideology. The Qalandars, who had an elaborate discourse of poverty, rested their case on the example of the Prophet Muhammad, who, they argued, chose poverty over the two worlds.[25] The Abdals of Rum, for their part, professed to be following in the footsteps of the Prophet Adam, who was almost completely naked and free of possessions when he was expelled from Paradise.[26]
The rule against owning property was accompanied by the injunction against gainful employment. The ascetic dervishes openly refused to participate in the economic reproduction of society. This is most conspicuous in the lives of the founding masters: Jamal al-Din Savi, Qutb al-Din Haydar, and Otman Baba all turned to nature for their sustenance and carefully avoided even physical contact with the property of others. They categorically rejected all kinds of alms. In Otman Baba, who consistently likened property, especially money, to feces and reacted violently to any offer of alms, this unwillingness to accept alms went so far as to become an almost psychological repulsion.
For the majority of ascetic dervishes, however, the disdain for gainful employment meant continuous dependence on the generosity of others, especially for food. Begging and alms-taking, at times fairly regulated, became the rule. Due to lack of information, it is not possible to trace the evolution of the attitude of different groups toward mendicancy, yet it appears that if they had qualms about accepting gifts and donations to begin with, at least some Qalandars and Abdals gradually discarded them. This relaxation of originally more stringent standards was most visible in the appearance of Qalandari and Abdal hospices, veritable institutions dependent upon carefully managed economic surplus and subject to political control. Even in such cases, however, belief in the efficacy and necessity of begging was never abandoned, and compromise solutions were found, such as living on the revenue of the hospice during winter months and begging for the rest of the year, as in the lodge of Seyyid Gazi in northwest Asia Minor.
Homeless wandering was another trait shared by all ascetic dervish groups. Voluntary poverty and mendicancy easily led to renunciation of settled life. This was the case even when itinerancy did not play a major role in the careers of exemplary ascetics themselves. Although he developed a penchant for traveling before his conversion to extreme asceticism, Jamal al-Din later came to prefer seclusion in cemeteries over wandering. Similarly, Qutb al-Din Haydar seems to have spent all his adult life in the small town of Zavah in northeast Iran. Nevertheless, their examples did not prevent their followers from adopting a life of itinerancy. In the case of the Abdals, by contrast, the master himself, Otman Baba, was a homeless wanderer. In all cases, itinerancy, like begging, functioned both as the ultimate proof of and the best control over absolute poverty. The truly poor ones, except the formidable masters who survived either in the wilderness (like Qutb al-Din) or in “cities of the dead” (like Jamal al-Din), could not lead settled lives without compromising the principle of poverty. Unavoidably dependent upon the generosity of others, yet wary against reliance on any single source of sustenance for any length of time, the voluntary poor naturally turned to homeless wandering as the only consistent solution.
It is beyond doubt that conversion to any one of the dervish paths entailed the rejection of marriage and the acceptance of celibacy. The importance given to the renunciation of all sexual reproduction is most pronounced in the case of the Qalandars and Haydaris. Both Jamal al-Din and Qutb al-Din clearly viewed all sexual activity as a grave threat to a life of complete devotion to the sacred. According to some reports, the former owed his conversion to the Qalandari path at least partially to his endeavor to remain chaste in accordance, it would seem, with the example of the Qur’anic Yusuf. [27] For his part, Qutb al-Din must have been equally wary of his sexual powers, if, as seems likely, his followers’ practice of suspending iron rings from their genitals was fashioned after the example of their master. In Qutb al-Din Haydar’s case, it may well be that his habit of immersing himself for long periods in cold water was, among other things, also a method of dampening the sexual instinct.[28] Even though similar feats are not recorded for the commonality of ascetic dervishes, celibacy as a corollary of absolute poverty clearly remained the rule among them.
Bodily mortification was a continuous feature of the life of an ascetic dervish. At the very least, all dervishes voluntarily subjected themselves to constant exposure by rejecting the comforts of settled life such as regular diet, shelter, and clothing. This basic condition of helplessness was exacerbated by additional mortifying practices such as shaving all bodily hair, wearing iron chains, rings, collars, bracelets, and anklets, and self-laceration. In all likelihood, these acts of self-denial were perceived by the dervishes not as self-inflicted pain but as the natural result as well as the confirmation of voluntary death before actual biological death. Complete devotion to the Divine entailed utter disregard for worldly existence, both physically and mentally. Active courting of physical death was a common component of dervish piety.
Several other ascetic practicessilence, seclusion, sleep-deprivation, and abstinence from foodare attested in the sources for the careers of the ascetic virtuosi who came to be venerated as founding fathers by their followers, yet it is impossible to know to what extent these additional methods of self-discipline continued to be used by the dervish groups. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, one can only surmise that they were never completely abandoned.
Defined as rejection of property, gainful employment, social station, sexual reproduction, and bodily health, dervish asceticism seriously conflicted with the established social life of medieval Islamdom. Asceticism in itself was not, however, tantamount to social deviance. Practiced only by a negligible minority, the option of severe ascetic flight from society could be easily tolerated and even condoned by most Muslims, including the cultural elite. After all, asceticism had become a highly visible and much cherished component of Sufi piety several centuries before the Later Middle Period. [29] Moderate and permanent asceticism was prescribed for all Sufis, while intense forms were used as temporary measures of spiritual discipline on the Sufi path. Even severe asceticism on a continuous basis could be accommodated through recourse to the doctrine of divine attraction <em>(jadhbah),</em> whereby the Sufi was thought to be drawn out of society toward God without regard for the social consequences of such attraction. The divinely pulled ones <em>(majdhubs)</em> could practice extreme forms of asceticism through the grace and will of God, even if this meant operating in shady areas of the religious law <em>(shari’ah).</em>[30]
Dervish piety, however, had as its core an uncompromising rejection of society. For the anarchist dervish, asceticism was only a tool, albeit indispensable, in the struggle to shatter the shackles that social life placed on true religiosity. The religious perils of human interaction could not be avoided through an ascetic flight from society. The dervish did not abandon his social station in order to lead the life of a recluse. Only an active nihilism targeted directly at human society could sever him from his social past and lead him to the proximity of salvation. His religious struggle had a chance to succeed only if he combined his asceticism with anarchist practices that allowed him to test his spiritual stamina in action. Thus, the other face of dervish piety was an uncompromising antinomianism.
*** Antinomianism
Deviant dervishes were thoroughly antinomian in appearance and behavior. They violated all social norms with equal ease and indifference and deliberately embraced a variety of unconventional and socially liminal practices. Perhaps the most potent antinomian feature of new renunciation, certainly the most often cited and criticized, was open disregard for prescribed Islamic ritual practices. The extent to which different groups at different times neglected to fulfill their ritual obligations is impossible to ascertain. Nevertheless, there is little reason to question the accuracy of the reports contained in many sources, hostile and friendly, to the effect that deviant dervishes neither prayed nor fasted. In this context, silence on this issue in sympathetic texts is particularly telling. In Jamal al-Din’s sacred biography, for instance, there are only two casual references to ritual prayer, while the hagiography of Otman Baba fares only slightly better in this respect. [31] For its part, the report that Barak Baba’s disciples were required to perform prescribed religious practices on pain of forty blows of the bastinado itself reveals the difficulty of enforcing these practices on the dervishes.[32] Moreover, it appears that at least some groups replaced ritual prayer in particular with utterance of simple formulaic expressions. Such was the case with the Qalandars and Abdals of Rum, among whom the utterance of the formula “God is the Greatest” <em>(takbir)</em> clearly had a ritual function and may have come to replace the daily ritual prayer.[33] The dervishes’ disregard for daily prayer and fasting presumably also carried over to the religious duties of legal charity and pilgrimage. The former was not binding on the propertyless dervishes, while the lack of reports on anarchist dervishes wandering toward Mecca suggests that the ritual pilgrimage was not on the agenda of renunciation.
In addition to eschewing ritual obligations, the dervishes further contravened the <em>shari’ah,</em> in spirit if not always in letter, by adopting patently scandalous and antisocial practices. Foremost among these, on account of its conspicuous nature, was the cultivation of a bizarre general appearance. The coiffure, apparel, and paraphernalia of the dervishes were all shockingly strange. In a social setting where external appearance functioned as an unfailing marker of social identity, the refusal to adopt socially and legally sanctioned patterns of costume and their deliberate replacement by outrageous dress codes clearly signified protest and rejection of social convention.
In dress, the dervishes set themselves off from all social types in a variety of ways. Some went completely naked, while others wore only a simple loincloth. Still other dervishes adopted the time-honored garment of social withdrawal, the woolen or felt cloak, though blue, the Sufi color, was avoided in favor of black or white. The Qalandars of Jamal al-Din’s times wore plain woolen sacks and thus were known as Jawlaqs or Jawlaqis. The Abdals of Rum, in an innovative antisocial move, donned animal hides as their sole garment. The dervishes also registered their protest in headgear, either by not wearing any or by designing distinctive hats. Most dervishes seem to have gone barefoot. [34]
The most radical measure in coiffure was the fourfold shave called the “four blows” <em>(chahar zarb):</em> shaving off the hair, beard, moustache, and eyebrows. The fourfold shave was the distinctive mark of the Qalandars and was also adopted by the Abdals of Rum, Bektasis, and Shams-i Tabrizis and Jalalis. For their part, the Haydaris and Jamis shaved their beards but let their moustaches grow long. Both of these practices were clear departures from the example of the Prophet Muhammad <em>(sunnah),</em> which enjoined the wearing of beards and moustaches.[35] They also contravened established social custom in medieval Islamic societies, in which the loss of hair symbolized loss of honor and social status.[36] In a typical renunciatory move, the dervishes adopted the socially reprehensible practice of the “clean shave” and thus charged it with a new, positive meaning.[37]
The equipment of the dervishes was also peculiar. Apart from the standard begging bowl and the dervish club, they also possessed outlandish paraphernalia. The Haydaris had a predilection for iron rings, collars, bracelets, belts, anklets, and chains. The Abdals of Rum carried distinctive hatchets, leather pouches, large wooden spoons, and ankle-bones. While the ideological and practical significance of some of these accoutrements can be reasonably reconstructed (iron equipment, for instance, clearly stood for strict control over the <em>nafs</em> or animal soul), the meaning of others (like ankle-bones) remains obscure.
Besides the careful cultivation of a scandalous external appearance, the dervishes violated social and legal norms by adopting legally suspicious and unconventional practices. Perhaps the most conspicuous was the use of intoxicants and hallucinogens. The use of cannabis leaves is clearly documented in the case of all three dervish groups. The very “discovery” of the use of hashish as a hallucinogen was attributed to both Qutb al-Din Haydar and Jamal al-Din Savi, while there are repeated reports that demonstrate the significance of hashish for both the Qalandars and Abdals of Rum.[38] Although it is quite possible that consumption ofcannabis leaves had assumed the proportions of ritual among the dervishes, this presumption cannot be substantiated due to lack of detailed information on this subject. [39] That open recourse to hallucinogens and intoxicants (reports suggest that at least some dervishes such as the Jamis and Shams-i Tabrizis also consumed alcohol) was sufficient to place the dervish groups beyond the pale of social respectability, however, cannot be doubted.[40]
In a similar vein, ascetic renouncers also offended social sensibilities through their conspicuous elevation of music and dance to the status of ritual practice. Though largely domesticated by Sufism, the use of music and dance in religious contexts remained, in legal terms, a suspicious practice in Islamic societies in the Early Middle Period.[41] As was their custom, the dervishes did not hesitate to indulge in radical behavior in this regard as well. They apparently carried tambourines, drums, and horns at all times and incorporated singing and dancing in ceremonies conducted in public. The Abdals of Rum and Jamis in particular were notorious for their large-scale gatherings in which music and dance occupied a prominent place, though the same practice is also recorded for the Qalandars and Haydaris.
Another antisocial dervish practice, particularly inscrutable from a modern perspective, was self-laceration and self-cauterization. The Abdals of Rum displayed excessive zeal in carving names and figures on their bodies, a practice not recorded for the other dervish groups. This may presumably be explained by the fervent Shi’ism of the Abdals. Whatever the religious and psychological motives behind such behavior, it manifestly deviated from established religious custom in Ottoman Anatolia and the Balkans and increased the distance between Abdal piety and social convention.
On a different front, the detractors of the Qalandars and Abdals of Rum in particular accused them of reprehensible forms of sexual libertinism, especially sodomy and zoophilism. While such trite accusations should be taken with a grain of salt, they cannot be discarded altogether. Rejection of marriage, or even of the female sex, does not entail complete abstinence from sexual activity. Celibacy, in this context, meant primarily the refusal to participate in the sexual reproduction of society and did not exclude unproductive forms of sexual activity. It is likely, therefore, that antisocial ways of sexual gratification came to be included in the deliberately rejectionist repertoire of some dervishes. The existence of a distinct group of youths known as <em>koçeks</em> (from Persian <em>kuchak,</em> “youngster”) among the Abdals is certainly suggestive in this regard. [42]
The penchant of the dervishes for distancing themselves from the established social and religious order is also visible in their adoption of controversial and extremist beliefs and doctrines. The strategy of the dervishes here was to apply radical interpretations to central religious, in particular mystical, concepts such as passing away of the self (<em>fana’</em>)<em>,</em> poverty (<em>faqr</em>)<em>,</em> theophany (<em>tajalli</em>)<em>,</em> and sainthood (ua<em>layah</em>)<em>.</em> Indeed, the very antinomianism of their practices was viewed by the anarchist dervishes themselves as the natural result of the “correct” interpretation of these concepts. Thus, deviant renunciation was often justified by passing away of the self, which was expressed in the language of death. The dervish was one who voluntarily chose death and “died before dying.” The alleged <em>hadith</em> (saying of the Prophet Muhammad) <em>mutu qabla an tamutu,</em> “die before you die,” supplied the prophetic sanction for this attitude.[43] Technically, the dervish considered himself to have the status of a dead person. He often demonstrated the utter seriousness of this conviction physically by dwelling in cemeteries.[44] The implication, significantly, was that he was not bound by social and legal norms. The latter applied to “legal persons” of clear social standing. The dervish, having shattered the confines of society, had no social persona: he functioned in a territory that was above and beyond society.
Similar renunciatory interpretations of the concepts of poverty, theophany, and sainthood always yielded the same rejectionist conclusion. Poverty literally meant absolute poverty. Theophany implied the presence of God in all his Creation, and thus the meaninglessness of legal prescriptions and proscriptions. Sainthood meant the existence of saints, the dervishes themselves, who were exempt from social and legal regulations. The underlying message was always the same: the dervish had to implement an absolute break with his social past and to devote his future solely to God by means of radical renunciation.
It is, therefore, not surprising that the anarchist dervishes adopted “heretic” views with ease, probably in order to strengthen their rejectionist agenda. Such was the case with the fervent Shrism of the Abdals of Rum and Jalalis, which the dervishes displayed ostenta- tiously in the heavily Sunni cultural areas they inhabited. Also remarkable in this context was the belief, common especially among the dervishes who practiced the fourfold shave, that the human face reflected divine beauty. This was clearly a continuation of the well-attested Sufi practice of “looking at beardless boys,” a “dangerous” practice much criticized by Sufis themselves. [45] At the same time, the adoration of the human face may also reflect the influence of Hurufiyah, a new religious movement that came into being toward the end of the eighth/fourteenth century in Iran and Asia Minor, since according to Hurufi tenets the human face was the locus par excellence of the continuous theophany of the Divine in human beings.[46]
In summary, the severely ascetic and cheerfully antinomian practices of the dervishes assume their real meaning only when viewed in their proper context: rejection of society. The synthesis of the ascetic principles of poverty, mendicancy, itinerancy, celibacy, and bodily mortification with the antinomian features of disregard for religious duties, outrageous external appearance, adoption of legally suspicious and unconventional practices, and appropriation of extremist beliefs resulted in the emergence of a new mode of religiosity along the axis of renunciation. The basis of this new renunciatory piety was open and deliberate rejection of the social order. The dervishes negated the existing social structure in all its dimensions. This negation was most conspicuous in the conflict between the adamantly individualistic dervish piety and the normative legal system constructed by religious scholars and accepted, albeit with serious qualifications, by the Sufis. Dead to society, the dervishes were also impervious to legal sanctions. They cheerfully proceeded to replace the prescriptive and proscriptive injunctions of the <em>shari’ah</em> by another code of behavior, in which deliberate eschewal of the religious law played a key role. Thus, they abandoned observation of the ritual and other legal obligations almost completely and freely violated socially sensitive legal proscriptions and prescriptions.[47]
The dervishes did not, however, stop at negation of society pure and simple. The life of a hermit in the wilderness, for instance, equally built on rejection of society, failed to appeal to them. Anchoritism was never a serious option. Instead, the dervishes had to test the salvational efficacy of their renunciatory spirituality through action within the world. Rejection of society functioned as an effective mode of piety only when it was conspicuously and continuously targeted at society. For the individual dervish, this meant radical conversion to and permanent preservation of the option of renunciation through blatant social deviance.
** Chapter Three. Renunciation, Deviant Individualism, and Sufism
The purpose of this chapter is to provide a broad context for the study of renunciation in Islam and to locate points of articulation between the mode of dervish piety displayed by world-denying dervish groups of the Later Middle Period on the one hand and previous or contemporary modes of Islamic religiosity on the other. The argument throughout is that renunciatory dervish piety emerged from within Sufism as a new synthesis of two of its most powerful subcurrents: asceticism and anarchist individualism.
*** Renunciation
A pivotal conflict in the development of Islamic religiosity during the first two centuries of Islam was the confrontation between world-embracing and world-rejecting attitudes. [48] A powerful tendency to reject the world, inherent in the conception of a supramundane God and the postulate of an “other” world, was everywhere opposed by an equally strong tendency to embrace the world by rendering salvation conditional on morally correct behavior in society. Significantly, the sources of the Islamic religionthe Qur’an and the “example of the Prophet Muhammad” <em>(sunnah)lent</em> themselves to both this-worldly and other-worldly constructions. The Qur’an supplied Muslims with many unequivocally renunciatory verses that called believers to eschew this world and to turn their gaze firmly toward the other world.[49] Other Qur’anic verses, equally numerous and clear in meaning, plunged the believers into the quagmire of mundane affairs, leaving no doubt that other-worldly salvation was contingent upon acceptable performance in the social arena. [50] The <em>sunnah,</em> a fluid reality throughout this period, was subject to the same ambiguity. If it was possible to activate the essentially renunciatory core of the <em>sunnah</em> to challenge world-embracing Muslims, it remained equally possible to respond by carefully grooming the image of the Prophet Muhammad to endorse a world-embracing mode of religiosity.[51] The result was a deep structural tension within the religion that set adrift conflicting attitudes toward the world, any one of which could, nevertheless, be Islamically legitimized on the basis of clear Qur’anic verses and sound <em>hadith-reports.</em>
Although it is difficult to ascertain the relative weight of affirmative and renunciatory approaches to the world in early Islamic history, there is little doubt that world-embracing tendencies gained a major impetus with the establishment of an international Islamic empire in the the Near East. The conquests that laid the foundation for this empire, insofar as they reflected the religious duty of securing the supremacy of Islam in the world <em>(jihdd),</em> were themselves concrete proof that most Muslims had accepted such military action as legitimate salvational activity on earth.[52] The activism inherent in the doctrine of <em>jihad</em> rapidly crystallized into clearly articulated thisworldly political agendas, a process that eventually culminated in the hegemony of political activism on the level of political ideology. Even though quietism was also prominently represented in the form of the Murji’i movement, it stopped short of denying the world, motivated as it was by an “anti-sectarian emphasis on the community at large.”[53] The concern with the unity and worldly supremacy of the community assured the ascendancy of world-embracing ideas in the realm of politics.
A similar process was at work in the domain of economic activity. The accumulation of enormous economic power in Muslim hands, in itself a sign of this-worldly orientation, greatly facilitated the entrenchment of economic attitudes favorable to the world. This is most clearly visible in the key role that merchant capital played in the emergence and unfolding of High Caliphal Islamic society.[54] Gradually, and not without considerable opposition, a world-embracing economic ethnic became normative.
Political and economic affirmation of the world, however, had to be legitimized in religious terms. Here the most impressive achieve- ment of Muslims who viewed human society as the true arena of salvational activity was the development of a formidable legal apparatus, the <em>shariah,</em> designed to facilitate salvation by the regulation of social life within a soteriological normative framework. Perhaps the clearest indicator of world-affirmation in the <em>shari’ah</em> was the development of the doctrine of “consensus” <em>(ijma’</em>)<em>.</em> This doctrine expressed the binding nature of the consensus of the community of believers (<em>ummah</em>)<em>;</em> it embodied in effect the recognition of the community as the sole legitimate religious authority within the Sunni sphere. Expressed somewhat differently, the doctrine of <em>ijmd’</em> acknowledged the community as the only proper receptacle, bearer, and dispenser of the Qur’an and the <em>sunnah,</em> the sole point of contact, albeit indirect, with God. [55] The identification of the community of believers as the third source of legal authority after the Qur’an and the <em>sunnah</em> necessitated a consistent emphasis on the communal as opposed to the private in religious life. In practice, this emphasis meant the primacy of public ritual and religiously sanctioned norms (the <em>shari’ah</em>)over private religiosity and morality. In all areas of the sacred in society, the exoteric (<em>zahir</em>)was privileged over the esoteric (<em>batin</em>)<em>;</em> aspects of private piety that were not susceptible to public scrutiny automatically became suspect as being potentially anticommunal. Not only could the private disrupt communal homogeneity by opening the door to blameworthy innovation (<em>bid’ah sayyi’ah</em>)and antinomianism, but it would in the long run also violate the primacy of the community through its propensity to generate claims of personal proximity to God. In the eyes of the “people of the community,” therefore, the community’s need to safeguard the core of religion overrode the equally urgent need to develop modes of piety that could satisfy the demands of the individual believer for a direct relationship with God.[56]
No matter how efficacious, however, the community-oriented argument that rested on the solid bed of <em>ijma’</em> and drew strength from the political and economic achievements of the Muslim community could not dampen, let alone extinguish, the salvational anxieties of believing individuals. The latter could be placated only by a mode of piety that placed individual conscience at its heart. Thus, simultaneously with, and no doubt primarily in reaction to, the rising tide of this-worldliness in the Muslim community, ascetic tendencies of world renunciation <em>(zuhd)</em> rose to the surface. Renunciation was a pious religious attitude that foregrounded the effort of the individual Muslim to establish a private rapport with God. The critique of renouncers was built on the God-humanity axis of religiosity and took the human individual, after God himself, to be the single most important variable in the religious equation. This critique went right to the heart of every pious Muslim believer. No one could deny that Islam, as a religion, had individual conscience at its core. In the final analysis, the helpless and weak believer had to face the absolute Master alone.
The motive force of renunciation was originally the fear of God, or deep anxiety for one’s fate in the afterlife. Its dominant characteristic was strong aversion to the world, which was viewed as a barrier to godly piety and eternal salvation. Such a negative valuation of the world led to the adoption of characteristically ascetic principles such as celibacy, solitude, excessive fasting, vegetarianism, poverty, rejection of economic activity, indifference to public opinion, and even withdrawing to cemeteries for ascetic exercises. [57] “Wool-wearing” renouncers everywhere personified the troubled religious consciences of pious Muslim individuals.
The conflict between world-affirmers and renouncers reached a culmination during the first half of the third/ninth century. While the former were busy putting the finishing touches to their community-based legal system (witness the activity of al-Shafi’i, 150-205/ 767–820), the latter took renunciation to its height with the doctrine of “complete reliance on God” <em>(tawakkul).</em> The privileging of the doctrine of reliance, which first surfaced in the thought of Shaqiq Balkhi (d. 194/809-10) and remained prevalent until the mid-third/ ninth century, involved a subtle yet extremely significant shift of emphasis from negative rejection of the world to positive and exclusive orientation toward God. Fear of God and concern for the afterlife were replaced by complete surrender to God’s will. Some features of the ascetic period, such as continence, began to disappear in the <em>“tawakkul</em> era,” though rejection of gainful employment remained as the central practical manifestation of true <em>tawakkul.</em>[58]Significantly, it was in this period that probing legal treatises on the question of gainful employment, such as the <em>Kitab al-kasb</em> of Muhammad al-Shaybani (d. 189/804), were written, largely “to overcome deepseated religious prejudices against making money, convictions made popular by mendicant ascetics.”[59] It is also likely that many of the well-known antiascetic <em>hadith</em> were put into circulation at this time in response to the trenchant critique of worldly involvement contained in the striking ascetic feats of prominent renouncers. [60] In addition, the detractors seem to have utilized the similarities between the ascetics and Christian monks to their own benefit in their polemic.[61] In spite of all the strong criticism against it, the ascetic option clearly continued to captivate especially the cultural elite, as evidenced by the emergence at this time of <em>zuhdiyat,</em> a poetic genre defined by the theme of asceticism.[62] The rift between the two approaches had reached alarming levels.
It was at this juncture that Sufism emerged as a new mode of piety that bridged the abyss between individualist renunciatory piety and community-oriented legalist world-affirmation. It did so by means of a creative synthesis, which represented, to all indications, a powerful reinterpretation of the doctrine of unity <em>(tawhid).</em> The “this world/ other world” dichotomy of the early asceticism was first gradually displaced by the antithesis “God/all other than God,” which then led to a positive evaluation of the latter through the application of the doctrine of unity. Whatever God created, in particular this world, had to be accepted. This was an extremely productive maneuver that, with one stroke, neutralized ascetic devaluation of the world and brought God into the reach of the individual. As a creation of God, the world was essentially divested of its negative features and became the legitimate arena of salvational activity. Life in society was now seen not as an evil snare that had to be shunned at all cost but as a challenge, admittedly formidable but not insurmountable, on the path that led humanity to God. In some sense, this world too, like the other world, was infused with the Divine, which rendered God accessible to the individual living in society. The theoretical elaboration of this view took several centuries and reached its zenith in the thought of Ibn al-‘Arabi (d. 638/1240) only after the fertilization of Sufi theorizing by the philosophical tradition. The flower was, however, already present in the seed that gave birth to it, and the impact of the creative synthesis of the classical phase of Sufism was felt in all aspects of Islamic culture from mid-third/ninth century onward. “Inner-worldly mysticism” became a real force within Islam.[63]
The positive evaluation of worldly existence dealt a heavy blow to asceticism as an independent mode of piety, as evidenced by a new contempt for practical <em>tawakkul.</em> Sufis, themselves mostly gainfully employed, generally disapproved of rejection of economic activity. [64] Other principles of asceticism, such as seclusion <em>(khalwah, ‘uzlah),</em> abstinence (ju’), and silence <em>(samt),</em> were transformed into mere techniques of spiritual discipline.[65]
Slowly, but surely, Sufism and mainstream religiosity blended. The coalescence of Sufism with Sunni communalism was not the work of Sufi propagandists alone, but came about as the result of an alliance. On one hand, Sufis recognized the need to smooth the rough edges of their erstwhile individualistic piety, a task which they took very seriously, to judge by the number and prominence of communalistic Sufi manuals produced during the fourth/tenth and fifth/eleventh centuries. On the other hand, “the people of the <em>sunnah</em> and the community,” represented most prominently by Shafi’is and Hanbalis in Iraq, came to realize the rich potential of Sufism to absorb the threat posed by the uncompromisingly individualistic piety of other-worldly asceticism. In this context, it is likely that the capacity inherent in Sufism to preempt the Shi’10ption due to the affinity between the two modes of piety was not lost on the communalists. The result was a powerful coalition of forces that was to preserve its efficacy even when transported outside its land of origin, Iraq, to another region of Islamdom that played a key role in the development of Islamic piety, Khorasan.
The conflict between world-affirmers and renouncers came to a head in Khorasan roughly one century later than in Iraq, in the mid-fourth/tenth century. Here the renouncers wielded tremendous social and religious power. The Karramiyah, as the ascetic movement in Khorasan and eastern Iran was known, appeared to have the upper hand throughout this region. The movement was well organized and in time developed a distinctive institution, the hospice <em>(khanqah),</em> that later spread within Islamdom under a transformed Sufi affiliation.[66] The antisocial tendencies of the Karramiyah, epitomized in aversion to gainful employment, were countered locally by the this-worldly practices of the Malamatiyah, also an indigenous movement. The Malamatiyah had as its basis the belief that piety and godly devotion should not be reduced to a single vocation out of many in social life but should instead infuse its every aspect. Such thorough suffusion of human life in this world with pure religiosity was possible only through concealment of one’s inner spiritual states, for their manifes- tation would ineluctably lead the individual to claim the prerogatives of a religious specialist and would therefore result in the establishment of separate religious tracks in social life, which was anathema. This clear affirmation of communal life translated, on the level of the individual, to the rule to earn one’s own livelihood: the Malamatis, who probably had organic links with artisans and urban “youngmanliness” <em>(futuwwah)</em> organizations, had no tolerance for the parasitic social existence of the Karramis. [67]
The nature of the confrontation between the other-worldly Karramis and inner-worldly Malamatis was transformed by the introduction and gradual ascendancy of Iraqi Sufism in Khorasan during the fourth/tenth and fifth/eleventh centuries. Through the efficacy of its powerful synthesis of individualist and communalist tendencies, Sufism disenfranchised both the Karramiyah and Malamatiyah by sapping them of their spiritual thrust and absorbing their institutional features. From the former, it adopted the institution of the <em>khanqah;</em> from the latter, it inherited the <em>futuwwah</em> lore and practices. In the process, the Karramiyah, also vehemently opposed by mainstream Sunnis, was gradually relegated to an obscure role as a historical sect in heresiographies, while the Malamatiyah was transformed into a subcurrent in the rich sea of Sufism. The social and spiritual supremacy of Sufism had been firmly established.[68]
*** Deviant Individualism
Antisocial dervish piety had its historical roots primarily in the ascetic tradition as domesticated within Sufism. In addition to asceticism, however, dervish renouncers drew upon another mode of piety also available within Sufism: uncompromising and often fiercely unconventional individualism.
In Weberian terms, “inner-worldly mysticism” is closely connected with its typological counterpart, “contemplative flight from the world.” Sufism, which demonstrated its this-worldly credentials by appropriating and naturalizing asceticism, was still subject to the antisocial pull of the option of other-worldly contemplation. The domestication of this trend was an extremely difficult, almost impossible proposition. Individualist gnosis was inherent at the very core of Sufism. Insofar as the highest levels of Sufi experience, passing away from the self <em>(fana’ ‘an al-nafs)</em> and passing away in God <em>(fana’ fi</em> <em>allah),</em> meant the annihilation of the self as a social entity, the temptation to slip into unbridled antisocial individualism was very real. This tendency was kept at bay largely through sober emphasis on <em>baqa’,</em> the idea that the “reconstituted self” of the mystic should “subsist” in society. [69] Nevertheless, the fault line along the axis that separated Sufi this-worldly tendencies from other-worldly ones remained forever active. Sufis felt obliged to acknowledge the superiority of divine attraction <em>(jadhbah)</em> over active self-exertion, “striding along the path” <em>(suluk).</em> It is true that a qualified spiritual guide had to have experience of both divine attraction and striding, since neither one alone could produce a well-rounded master.[70] Yet Sufis consistently <em>rankedjadhbah</em> the highest on the level of private mystical experience.[71] Contemplative flight from the world continued to inform Sufism.
The history of the other-worldly individualist strain within Sufism, at once complex and obscure, cannot be given here. Such a history would have, on one hand, to deal extensively with concepts like <em>ibahah</em> (antinomianism), <em>hulul</em> (incarnation), and <em>ittihad</em> (union) and, on the other hand, to display sensitivity to social consequences of central Sufi beliefs and practices.[72] However, one particular manifestation of uncompromising individualism that is pertinent to dervish piety demands attention here: the mode of religiosity that was denoted by terms deriving from the word <em>qalandar</em> even before the appearance of the Qalandars as a distinct group of renouncing dervishes under the formative influence of Jamal al-Din Savi.[73]
There is considerable evidence that Qalandariyah was in existence as a religious attitude well before the seventh/thirteenth century. Such evidence can be grouped into two separate categories, one that deals with the Qalandar-topos in Persian literature and another that focuses on the Qalandari trend as reflected in Sufi theoretical treatises.
*** <em>Qalandars in Persian Literature</em>
The early history of the Qalandar as a type in Persian literature is unclear.[74] If the attribution of a quatrain in which the word <em>qalandar</em> is used to Baba Tahir-i ‘Uryan (d. first half of the fifth/eleventh century) is well grounded (though this remains to be established), then it might be possible to argue that the literary Qalandar had already appeared in Persian literature by the end of the fourth/tenth century. [75] Two quatrains said to have been uttered by Abu Sa’id-i Abu al-Khayr (357-440/967-1049) would seem to complement these verses of Baba Tahir; the attribution, however, is no less problematic in this case.[76]
Somewhat later is the short <em>Risalah-i Qalandar’namah</em> of ‘Abd Allah Ansari (d. 481/1088-89). This treatise, again of uncertain attribution, records a conversation of the young Ansari with a Qalandari master. Its central theme is the necessity of abandoning the world, preferably through mendicancy, constant traveling, and frequenting graveyards. All of these ideals are relevant to Qalandariyah; particularly striking in this connection is Jamal al-Din’s predilection for graveyards.[77]
For the following century, however, literary evidence is at once more extensive and of a more determinate nature. Ahmad Ghazali (d. 520/1126), ‘Ayn al-Quzat Hamadani (d. 525/11 30–31), Sana’i (d. 545/1150-51), and Khaqani (d. 595/1198-99) all wrote what were later classified as <em>Qalandariyat</em> in some manuscripts, that is, poems on wine-drinking, gambling, profane love, and rejection of religion. The Qalandar type, whose characteristics in this early stage of Persian Sufi poetry remain to be determined, is almost fully developed in the works of these sixth/twelfth-century poets and writers; the word <em>qalandar</em> itself occurs on many an occasion in their works.[78] Nevertheless, it was during a later phase of Persian Sufi poetry, beginning with ‘Attar (d. after 618/1221-22) continuing through ‘Iraqi (d. 688/ 1289) and Sa’di (d. 691/1291-92), and culminating with Hafiz (d. 792/1389-90), that the Qalandar type developed into a true literary topos. As a complex of tightly knit images, this topos is interwoven with other themes in individual poems, normally <em>ghazals,</em> though one also comes across independent verse compositions devoted solely to the Qalandar image, as in the short <em>Qalandar’namah</em> in fifty-six couplets by Amir Husayni (d. 718/1318-19).[79]
The main feature of the literary Qalandar was deliberate and open disregard for social convention in the cause of “true” religious love. This social anarchism was expressed in the imagery of the Qalandartopos: visiting the <em>kharabat</em> (tavern, gambling house, brothel), winedrinking, gambling, and irreligion. Further elaboration of the topos clearly requires a thorough internal analysis of the relevant texts.[80] In any event, the literary evidence does not reflect any phenomenon that could be called a Qalandari movement. There is no clear mention of wandering groups of Qalandars in our texts; the Qalandar in poetry at this stage, inasmuch as the word denotes persons rather than attitudes, is normally an isolated, lonely individual. [81] There is, however, some external evidence that makes it possible to correlate this literary Qalandar with his actual counterparts.
*** <em>Qalandars in Sufi Theoretical Literature</em>
Since the intellectual roots of the Qalandar tradition in Persian poetry are buried in darkness, it has become customary to turn to Sufi theoretical literature in search of the real meaning of the Qalandari attitude. The most significant reference point in this respect is the following account by Abu Hafs ‘Umar al-Suhrawardi (d. 632/1234) from the ninth chapter of his <em>‘Awarifal-ma’arif,</em> where Qalandars are discussed alongside other groups which do not belong to Sufiyah but are only affiliated with it:
<quote>
The term Qalandariyah denotes people who are governed by the intoxication [engendered by] the tranquillity of their hearts to the point of destroying customs and throwing off the bonds of social intercourse, traveling [as they are] in the fields of the tranquillity of their hearts. They observe the ritual prayer and fasting only insofar as these are obligatory and do not hesitate to indulge in those pleasures of the world that are permitted by the Law; nay, they content themselves with keeping within the bounds of what is permissible and do not go in search of the truths of legal obligation. All the same, they persist in rejecting hoarding and accumulation [of wealth] and the desire to have more. They do not observe the rites of the ascetic, the abstemious, and the devout and confine themselves to, and are content with, the tranquillity of their hearts with God. Nor do they have an eye for any desire to increase what they already possess of this tranquillity of the heart. The difference between the Malamati and the Qalandar is that the former strives to conceal his acts of devotion while the latter strives to destroy custom.... The Qalandar is not bound by external appearance and is not concerned with what others may or may not know of his state. He is attached to nothing but the tranquillity of his heart, which is his sole property.[82]
</quote>
Al-Suhrawardi’s account is significant for a number of reasons. First, it is very noticeable that there is in this report, reproduced almost word for word by many later writers such as al-Maqrizi and Jami, [83] nothing that would suggest a familiarity with the more or less institutionalized Qalandariyah that was already taking shape under the leadership of Jamal al-Din Savi in Damascus and Damiettain al-Suhrawardi’s lifetime. It is highly unlikely, for instance, that anyone who was informed about Jamal al-Din’s activities could make the remark that Qalandars “do not observe the rites of the ascetic, the abstemious, and the devout.” Moreover, al-Suhrawardi makes no reference to <em>chahar zarb</em> or to characteristic Qalandari apparel. It appears, therefore, that when he finished writing the <em>‘Awarif alma’arif</em> (the <em>terminus ad quem</em> for the composition of this work is 624/1227), al-Suhrawardi knew nothing of the nascent Qalandari movement in Damascus.[84]
Second, it is clear that during al-Suhrawardi’s lifetime it was possible to talk of a distinct religious attitude identified as Qalandariyah.[85] Indeed, al-Suhrawardi’s description of this attitude is strongly reminiscent of the Qalandar-topos in Persian poetry. Particularly striking in this regard is the deliberate anticonventionalism of both the literary Qalandar and al-Suhrawardi’s “real” Qalandars. In addition, al-Suhrawardi’s insistence on the Qalandari fascination with the tranquillity of the heart and, perhaps more significantly, his observation that the Qalandars have a minimalist understanding of the religious law increase the likelihood of this convergence. The passage in the <em>‘Awarifal-ma’arifon</em> the Qalandariyah suggests therefore that the Qalandar-topos in pre-thirteenth-century Persian poetry was not just a poetic convention but also reflected a religious attitude that was represented in society by real Qalandars.
Third, it is significant that al-Suhrawardi makes a distinction between Qalandariyah and Sufiyah. The validity of this distinction is rather dubious. The basis of al-Suhrawardi’s argument seems to have been that since the Qalandar did not have any goal other than asserting his state of inner contentment at all costs, he did not strictly speaking partake in any mystical quest. Such a definition, however, can equally be used to describe many Sufis, especially of the passive <em>majdhub</em> type. It is likely al-Suhrawardi was disturbed by the fact that the Qalandar did not hesitate to transgress the boundaries of what was socially permissible and, worse, had only minimal respect for the law. It is, therefore, possible to see in al-Suhrawardi’s distinction between Qalandariyah and Sufiyah the somewhat tendentious at- tempt of a socially conscious, highly this-worldly Sufi master to dissociate the former, a clearly antisocial current within Sufism, from the latter, an overwhelmingly “inner-worldly,” socially respectable mode of piety.
As a fourth and final point, it is remarkable that al-Suhrawardi discusses the Qalandars along with the Malamatiyah, possibly an originally non-Sufi religious movement. He argues that the Qalandar clearly differed from the Malamati in certain respects. The Malamati’s main concern was to hide his inner state from others for fear that an ostentatious display of piety would lead to overindulgence in the self and ultimately to self-complacency, thus distancing the believer from God. It was because of his painstaking endeavor to conceal the true nature of his religiosity that he sought to incur public blame by deliberately transgressing the limits of social and legal acceptability. There were, however, limits to such transgression, since the overwhelming concern of the Malamati was to blend into society in an effort to construct a veil of anonymity around himself. Most significant in this regard was the Malamati refusal to adopt distinctive attire, paraphernalia, and rites and practices. Similarly, the Malamati took care to earn his own livelihood and looked with contempt on those Sufis who survived only on alms and charity. Thus, while he could be, in extreme cases, as socially deviant as the Qalandar, the Malamati functioned within a “performance paradigm,” where the nature and meaning of religious belief and practice as performed by individual believers were conditioned by other believers’ perception of them. The Qalandar, however, claimed to have transcended this paradigm altogether. He too was concerned exclusively with his own inner state, yet he rejected the basic premise of the Malamati in his refusal to acknowledge the importance of any audience other than God, the auditor par excellence. From this standpoint, the social and legal transgression of the Qalandar was only an incidental outcome of his primary endeavor, the attainment and preservation of the tranquillity of his heart with respect to God. Insofar as it distracted the Qalandar from achieving this goal, social attachment of all kinds was perceived as an obstacle and simply discarded.
*** <em>The Qalandariyah and Dervish Piety before Jamal Al-Din</em>
What was the historical relation between the pre-thirteenth-century Qalandar and the new renunciation of the Later Middle Period? The most obvious connection is, of course, the use of the name Qalandar to designate the followers of Jamal al-Din. It is not known how or exactly when the name came to be given to these dervishes. Certainly, they referred to themselves as Qalandars by the time Khatib Farisi wrote his sacred biography of the master in the mid-eighth/ fourteenth century, but it is impossible to tell if this practice dates back to the lifetime of Jamal al-Din or if it was a later accretion. Whatever the truth about its timing, the application of the name Qalandar to the Jawlaqs is significant in that it indicates the existence of more than nominal continuity between the Qalandari trend before Jamal al-Din and the later Qalandariyah. Even if the first generation ofJamal al-Din type Qalandars did not deliberately attempt to realize the older Qalandari ideal in practice, there can be little doubt that in the long run this ideal came to inform the activity of the later Qalandariyah. Otherwise, it would be rather difficult to account for the appearance of the somewhat this-worldly Qalandars described by Sir Paul Rycaut, the mid-eleventh/seventeenth-century observer of Ottoman society:
<quote>
[The Qalandars] consume their time in eating and drinking; and to maintain this gluttony they will sell the stones of their girdles, their Ear-rings and Bracelets. When they come to the house of any rich man or person of Quality, they accommodate themselves to their humor, giving all the Family pleasant words, and chearful expressions to perswade them to a liberal and free entertainment. The tavern by them is accounted holy as the Mosch, and they believe they serve God as much with debauchery, or liberal use of his Creatures (as they call it) as others with severity and Mortification. [86]
</quote>
The degree to which such observations by both external and internal observers of Islamic societies reflected reality is naturally open to question. Such reservations notwithstanding, it is clear that the anarchist individualism of the Qalandari trend before Jamal al-Din was perpetuated in the activities of anarchist dervish groups, especially through their emphasis on flagrant social deviance.
Renunciatory modes of piety had deep and firm roots in the historical development of Islamic religion. Powerful currents of other-worldly asceticism as an alternative way of life were present during the first three centuries of Islam in the Fertile Crescent and throughout the third/ninth, fourth/tenth, and fifth/eleventh centuries in and around Iran. Such trends were eventually absorbed and domesticated, though not completely nullified, by “inner-worldly” Sufism. As a mystic mode of piety, however, Sufism also contained within itself strong tendencies toward contemplative flight from the world. As a result, it was the source of continual outbursts of anarchist individualism. The most prominent, and for our purposes the most pertinent, of such manifestations of individualism was the Qalandari trend that developed primarily within the Persian cultural sphere. It was as a powerful revitalization and combination of this trend with the powerful currents of other-worldly asceticism that dervish piety developed in the Fertile Crescent and Iran toward the end of the Early Middle Period and surfaced at the beginning of the seventh/ thirteenth century.
** Chapter Four. Ascetic Virtuosi
The emergence of new renunciation is most clearly visible in the careers of individual ascetics who played key roles in the formation of movements of socially deviant renunciation. The exemplary piety of ascetic virtuosi everywhere served as a catalyst for the construction of social collectivities that translated the ideals forged by the master renouncers into salvational social action on a large scale. It is therefore appropriate to open this reconstruction of the history of the new renunciation with a series of biographical portrayals of the most prominent dervish masters.
*** Jamal Al-Din Savi: The Master of the Qalandars
The Qalandars emerged as a new and distinct group of dervishes in Damascus and Damietta during the early decades of the seventh/ thirteenth century. The formation of the Qalandari path was concomitant with and centered around the activity of its master, Jamal al-Din Savi (Savaji in some sources). His personal example played a decisive role in the emergence of the Qalandars, who preserved their separate identity through adherence to practices advocated by Jamal al-Din or by his immediate circle of followers. The most characteristic of these practices, shaving the hair, beard, moustache, and eyebrows (sometimes eyelashes as well), which came to be known later as “four blows” <em>(chahar zarb),</em> certainly originated with Jamal al-Din himself. Fortunately, it is possible to reconstruct the contours of his life and personality. In 748/1347-48, Khatib Farisi (born 697/1297-98) of Shiraz, a fifty-one-year old disciple of the Qalandari master Muhammad Bukhara’i in Damascus, completed a biography of Jamal al-Din in Persian verse. [87] Written about a century after the death of the grand master, his hagiography reflects, at the very least, the message of Jamal al-Din as it was understood by a particular group of Qalandars in that city in the mid-eighth/fourteenth century.
The central concern of Khatib Farisi is Jamal al-Din’s conversion from the Sufi to the Qalandari path. At the beginning of the work, Jamal al-Din is carefully presented as a very well-respected, though young, Sufi master. The author renders Jamal al-Din a contemporary and a cherished companion of Bayazid Bastami and contends that ‘Uthman Rimi, unanimously depicted in other sources as the early Sufi master of Jamal al-Din, was in fact his disciple.[88] Entrusted to Jamal al-Din’s care by Bayazid Bastami, ‘Uthman Rumi finds him delivering sermons on the Qur’an and <em>hadith,</em> from a gold pulpit richly studded with jewels, to a large group of followers in a <em>khanqah</em> in Iraq. His views on <em>tasawwuf appear</em> to have been mainstream. In a lengthy section that reproduces material from Najam al-Din Razi Dayah’s (d. 654/1256) <em>Mirsad al-‘ibad min al-mabda’ ila al-ma’ad,</em> for instance, Jamal al-Din elaborates on the real meanings of the terms “macrocosmos” and “microcosmos” in a totally predictable, conservative manner.[89] In the limited information that his biographer provides on this phase of Jamal al-Din’s career, it is possible to detect a special emphasis on the concept of detachment in his outlook.
Soon after ‘Uthman Rumi joins him, Jamal al-Din delivers an extended speech on the merits of traveling and, practicing what he has preached, begins to roam the land in the company of forty of his dervishes, including ‘Uthman Rimi. These journeys, which last until the moment when he spots Jalal Darguzini in the mausoleum of Zaynab (the daughter of the fifth Shi’i leader Zayn al-‘Abidin) in the Bab al-Saghir cemetery of Damascus, prepare him for his conversion to the Qalandari path. Darguzini, who is completely naked except for a few leaves covering his private parts, eats nothing but weeds, and remains silent and motionless in one place, makes a deep impression on Jamal al-Din. He prays to God that he may be relieved of both worlds and that all the obstacles on his path may be cleared away. By divine intervention, all the hair on his head and body falls off. This is a sign that Jamal al-Din’s prayer is accepted and that he is now “dead before his death.” Thenceforth, Jamal al-Din becomes a Qalandar, with the same outward appearance and habits as Jalal Darguzini, whose bodily hair also disappears at Jamal al-Din’s intervention. Jamal al-Din later verbalizes and justifies this experience with the <em>hadith</em> “die before you die” <em>(mutu qabla an tamutu):</em> a Qalandar is one who frees himself from the two worlds through self-imposed death <em>(mawt-i iradi)</em> with the purpose of attaining continuous proximity to the Divine. [90] The peculiarly Qalandari habits of going naked with only leaves to cover the loins, removing all bodily hair, and sitting motionless and speechless on graves without any sleep or food except wild weeds are all viewed as direct consequences of this “premortem” death.[91] The Qalandar looks and, so to speak, acts like a dead person. Thus, the Qalandari practice of uttering four <em>takbirs,</em> a deliberate reference to the funeral prayer, functions as a constant reminder of the Qalandar’s real state: “dead to both worlds.” In brief, the Qalandar rejects society altogether and severs himself from both the rights and duties of social life. He spurns all kinds of social intercourse like gainful employment, marriage, and even friendship and devotes himself solely to God in complete seclusion.
Khatib Farisi portrays the rest ofJamal al-Din’s career as a struggle to remain a recluse. Curiously, perhaps the most serious challenge to Jamal al-Din in this respect is the emergence of a community of Qalandars around him based on his personal example. Initially consisting of Jamal al-Din and three disciples (Jala Darguzini, Muhammad Balkhi, and Abu Bakr Isfahani, but not ‘Uthman Rumi, who nonetheless acknowledges Jamal al-Din’s greatness), the core group is soon surrounded by a much larger circle of converts to the way of Qalandars. Recruitment of new members is not sought actively. The credit, or more properly blame, for propagating the example of Jamal al-Din falls not on the master himself, but on his core disciples, especially Abu Bakr Isfahani.[92] At first, Jamal al-Din reluctantly acknowledges the necessity of leadership and to a certain extent even adapts his extreme eremiticism to collective life. For instance, he allows his disciples to eat food offerings brought by pious believers, though he himself refrains from touching the food of others. His institution of donning uncomfortable, heavy woolen garments <em>(jawlaq)</em> also appears to have been a concession in the direction of accepting increased contact with human society. In the long term, however, Jamal al-Din’s firm commitment to remain detached from the two worlds weighs heavier than his sense of responsibility toward his followers as their master. Delegating his authority to his foremost disciple, he leaves Damascus in order to remain faithful to his erstwhile solitary mission and travels to Damietta, Egypt. In Damietta, he proves his holiness through a beardproducing miracle and spends six peaceful years there, refusing to accept any followers, including the magistrate of the town. [93] Upon his death, he is buried in the same town.
Khatib Farisi’s account indicates clearly that the Qalandars of Damascus cherished Jamal al-Din’s world-rejecting eremiticism as a vibrant ideal roughly three generations after his activity in that city. The disciple/biographer recasts this ideal in the form of a spirited defense of “poverty” <em>(faqr).</em> The narrative proper itself starts with a section entitled “On the Merits of Poverty” <em>(dar sifat-i fazilat-i faqr),</em> and the same theme punctuates the whole text. The central messages delivered in this context are that the Prophet Muhammad, the best of all creatures and the master of the two worlds, himself chose absolute poverty and that Jamal al-Din is the king of poverty.[94] Although Khatib Farisi does not give specific information on the Qalandari movement of his own time, all the signs indicate that his fellow dervishes not only upheld but also honored this ideal of poverty ascribed to Jamal al-Din.
It is possible to reconstitute the historical core of Jamal al-Din’s life on the basis of numerous accounts in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish sources. Jamal al-Din was born toward the end of the sixth/twelfth century, probably in the Iranian town of Savah, situated just southwest of present-day Tehran. Although next to nothing is known of his youth, there is some evidence that he may have studied to become a religious scholar. According to an oral tradition kept alive in the Chishti circles of Delhi during the eighth/fourteenth century, for instance, Jamal al-Din was known as the “walking library,” since he issued legal opinions without consulting any books.[95] Since this tradition was transmitted by a compiler who was himself a Qalandar with scholarly pretensions, its reliability is questionable.[96] It may nevertheless contain a kernel of truth since Jamal al-Din is reported in Mamluk sources to have studied the Qur’an as well as religious sciences and to have written at least a partial Qur’anic exegesis.[97] As a young man, he traveled to Damascus to continue his studies, where he became affiliated with the hospice of ‘Uthman Rumi located at the foot of the Qasiyun mountain to the northwest of the city. [98] ‘Uthman Rumi was almost certainly the father of Sharaf al-Din Muhammad Rumi, the director of the Rumiyah hospice at Qasiyun, who died in 684/1285. We know next to nothing about the father, who, according to one contemporary source, was celebrated for his strict conformity to the <em>sunnah.</em>[99] The son is described in his brief obituary notice as “incredibly generous and modest, much given to <em>sama’.”</em>[100]
Jamal al-Din’s involvement with respectable Sufism as evidenced by his allegiance to ‘Uthman Rimi led to a dramatic conversion to extreme asceticism through his encounter with the remarkable young ascetic Jalal Darguzini.[101] Darguzini, an epitome of detachment and solitude, wrought a deep transformation in Jamal al-Din’s religiosity. Overcome by an ascetic mood, Jamal al-Din shaved his face and head and began to spend his time sitting motionless on graves with his face turned in the direction of Mecca, the <em>qiblah,</em> speechless and with grass as his only food.[102] Another tradition of reports would have it that Jamal al-Din’s turn to ascetic practices was facilitated by his scrupulous endeavor, in a way reminiscent of one part of the Qur’anic story of Yusuf (the Qur’an, 12:21–35), to preserve his chastity. According to this tradition, which provides an alternative explanation for Jamal al-Din’s practice of shaving his beard and eyebrows, Jamal al-Din was constantly harassed by a certain woman, who had fallen in love with him on account of the beauty of his face and figure. Although initially unsuccessful in her attempts to seduce Jamal al-Din, the woman finally managed to trick him into entering her house. Jamal al-Din had no escape and, in a final effort to save himself, shaved his beard and eyebrows with a razor that he happened to have. The woman, taken aback and disgusted, rebuked him severely and had him thrown out of her house. Having thus overcome temptation through shaving, Jamal al-Din thereafter made it his habit to keep his face clean-shaven at all times.[103] Whatever its truth content, this “fantastic” explanation for the origin of Jamal al-Din’s practice of shaving can safely be rejected as being a generic feature of hagiography.[104]
The story of the rest of Jamal al-Din’s career is in conformity with information found in his sacred biography. His solitude disturbed by the growing number of followers, Jamal al-Din decided to leave the group and travel to a place where he was totally unknown. Delegating his authority to his foremost disciple, Muhammad al-Balkhi, he left Damascus and spent the last years of his life in carefully preserved social isolation in a cemetery in Damietta, where a hospice <em>(zawiyah)</em> was later built around his tomb. [105]
Jamal al-Din was first and foremost an uncompromising renouncer. He was stringent in his rejection of this world, as evidenced by his penchant for residing in cemeteries, in both Damascus and Damietta, as well as by the extreme care he took to dissociate himself from all established patterns of social life through such practices as shaving his head and all facial hair, donning woolen sacks, and refusing to work for sustenance. Presumably, he was also celibate. Though not totally averse to having disciples and not oblivious of their needs, he shunned all kinds of attention and preferred to lead the life of a complete recluse. It is not possible to determine the nature of his attitude toward the religious law. While there is no sign that he deliberately eschewed prescribed religious observances or clearly violated legal prohibitions, reports on his life leave the impression that conformity to the <em>shari’ah</em> was not a major issue in his career. The unmistakable message of his personal example was world-rejecting eremiticism, and the power and attraction of the ascetic mode of piety this message embodied was instrumental in the formation of the Qalandari path.
*** Qutb Al-Din Haydar: The Master of the Haydaris
The Haydari dervish, with his distinct penchant for iron collars, bracelets, belts, anklets, and rings suspended from his ears and his genitals, became a familiar sight in many parts of Islamdom from the beginning of the seventh/thirteenth century onward. The eponymous master of this most peculiar group of mendicant dervishes was a certain Qutb al-Din Haydar. Although the historical life of this key ascetic figure is clouded in legend, his religious predilections are still evident in the reports of his miraculous feats.
Qutb al-Din Haydar lived in and around the town Zavah in Khorasan, present-day Turbat-i Haydariyah in northeast Iran.[106] Unlike his followers, he was not much taken with the itinerant life and spent his life in solitude on a mountain near Zavah.[107] His tomb still stands today in that location.[108] The long career of this figure spanned the entire sixth/twelfth century and came to an end around 617/1200, when Zavah was destroyed by the Mongols. [109] He was apparently of royal Turkish descent and might have had a particular appeal among Turkish speakers.[110] Beyond these externalities, few facts of Qutb al-Din’s biography can be ascertained.[111] He probably went through a Sufi phase early in life. In some sources he is portrayed as a one-time disciple of either Shaykh Luqman, who was active in the town of Sarakhs close to Zavah, or the famous Turkish Sufi Ahmed Yesevi (d. 562/ 1166) of Turkistan.[112] It is not possible to confirm the existence of such allegiances. His association with Ahmed Yesevi, reported only in late sources and conspicuously absent from the Yesevi tradition itself, is doubtful, especially if one keeps in mind the <em>shari’ah</em> bound nature of Yesevi’s mysticism, in which there would be little room for the world-denying asceticism of Qutb al-Din Haydar. That Qutb al-Din indeed had some Sufi connections, however, is suggested by a report that he was close to Shah-i Sanjan (d. 597/ 1200–1201 or 599/1202-3), a disciple of Qutb al-Din Mawdud-i Chishti (d. 527/1132-33), who may have composed a quatrain <em>(ruba’i)</em> for Qutb al-Din.[113] In this same vein, some claim that Ibrahim Ishaq ‘Attar Kadkani, the father of the celebrated poet Farid al-Din ‘Attar, was a follower of Qutb al-Din and that Farid al-Din ‘Attar himself, who had received the blessing of Qutb al-Din Haydar as a child, dedicated one of his first works, <em>Haydarnamah,</em> to the ascetic master. While the celebrated poet was indeed born in Kadkan, a town not far from Zavah, it is not possible to confirm the details of this claim, especially since such a <em>Haydarnamah</em> is not extant.[114]
The religious profile of the Haydari master can be drawn in broad strokes. It is clear that he abandoned civilized life in favor of a solitary existence in the wilderness. An account of his conversion to asceticism is found in the <em>Khayr al-majalis</em> (comp. after 754/1353), where the compiler Hamid Qalandar records a story about Haydar that he heard from Shaykh Nasir al-Din Mahmud Chiragh-i Dihli (d. 757/1356). While still a young boy, Haydar ascended a mountain in a trance and failed to return. After many years, he was finally spotted one day by a traveler, clothed in a dress made of leaves and busy milking a female gazelle. Informed of his son’s survival by the traveler, Haydar’s father searched for him on the mountain without success. In despair, he asked Shaykh Luqman for his help. Indeed, when Luqman himself came to the foot of the mountain, Haydar appeared of his own accord to see the shaykh. When the shaykh advised him to go to the city and spend his time inviting people to the path of God, Haydar declared that it was no longer possible for him to abandon the wilderness, but he agreed to see his parents every day if they came and settled at the foot of the mountain. The place where Haydar’s parents settled later grew into the village of Zavah. [115]
Qutb al-Din Haydar’s merger with nature was then remarkably complete. He apparently used only leaves to cover his body and relied solely on nature for his sustenance. It is, therefore, not strange to see his name associated with the discovery of the intoxicating effects of cannabis leaves.[116] Even more than his uncompromising withdrawal from human culture and his discovery of hashish, however, Qutb alDin’s fame and influence on others rested on his dramatic attempts to control his animal soul <em>(nafs).</em> The miraculous feats most celebrated by posterity were his immersion in ice water during winter and entering fire in the summer.[117] He was also well known for handling molten iron “like mere wax” in order to fashion collars and bracelets.[118] Combined with the well-attested Haydari habit of wearing iron rings around the genitals, which in all likelihood derived from Qutb al-Din’s own example, these miracle stories suggest that a significant portion of Qutb al-Din’s extreme asceticism was occasioned by his attempt to tame his sexuality. Continence in particular and austere self-denial in general, conspicuously represented by heavy iron equipment, was the special legacy of Qutb al-Din Haydar to his followers.
*** Otman Baba: The Master of the Abdals of Rum
Unlike Jamal al-Din Savi and Qutb al-Din Haydar, the founding fathers of the Qalandars and the Haydaris, Otman Baba cannot be considered the founder of the Abdils of Rum. This group had a checkered history that can be traced back to the seventh/thirteenth century. It was only during the second half of the ninth/fifteenth century, however, that the Abdals of Rum emerged as a distinct dervish band with peculiar beliefs and practices. Otman Baba was without doubt the key player in the Abdal drama of this period.
Otman Baba is known basically through his hagiography, which was written by one of his followers called Kücük Abdal in 888/1483, five years after his master’s death.[119] According to this work, Otman Baba’s real name was Hüsam Sah He apparently came to Asia Minor from Khorasan during or soon after Temür’s (r. 771-807/1370-1405) campaign into that peninsula, although even his close disciples did not know his true origins. A complete ascetic and ecstatic practicing the <em>chahar zarb,</em> he mostly wandered about the mountains and high plateaus of northwest Asia Minor and the Balkans, accompanied by a few hundred dervishes. The date of his death is given as 883/ 1478–79; as he is said to have been born in 780/1378-79, he must have lived to be a centenarian. [120]
Otman Baba’s religious views were most intriguing. In keeping with a well-attested Sufi tradition, he believed that sainthood <em>(walayah)</em> was simultaneously the inner dimension and the guarantor of prophecy <em>(nubuwah).</em>[121] As Otman Baba expressed it, sainthood was the “shepherd” of prophecy. Since sainthood served to perpetuate and confirm the validity of prophecy, its denial amounted to a declaration of unbelief.[122] Otman Baba apparently rested these views on a peculiar interpretation of the famous Qur’anic verse of the primordial covenant (7:172). God extracted the future humanity from the loins of Adam and asked them, “Am I not your Lord?” Those who answered in the affirmative, Otman Baba asserted, were the believers and the true unitarians, those who answered negatively were the unbelievers, and those who did not respond at all were the saints, presumably because they were so secure in their relationship to God that they had no need of a covenant.[123]
After the termination of the cycle of prophecy in the figure of Muhammad, the cycle of sainthood was initiated by his son-in-law and cousin ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib. The saintly institution was thereafter preserved by a network of saints. Otman Baba divided saints into the two broad categories of “insane” <em>(divanah)</em> and “licit” <em>(mashru’</em>)<em>,</em> according to whether the elements dominant in their nature were fire and air or water and earth. While both of these two kinds were acceptable, the “insane” saints were clearly superior to those bound by the <em>shari’ah.</em> The excesses of the former, the divinely attracted (<em>majdhub</em>)saints, were legally permitted to them.[124]
Otman Baba also insisted that the true saints were hidden from humanity and cited the reputed extra-Qur’anic divine saying “My friends are under My tents [or My cloak]; no one knows them except Me” as confirmation of this view.[125] Consequently, he was extremely critical of all Sufi masters who claimed exclusive rights to the instruction and guidance of novices. He alleged that the hidden agenda of the “people of hospices,” as he called the Sufi masters, was nothing more than the accumulation of worldly goods. He himself was completely averse to owning property and consistently rejected gifts of any kind, especially money, which he likened to feces. Absolute poverty was the only social condition conducive to religious salvation. [126]
Otman Baba’s own religious agenda seems to have been twofold. On one hand, much of his saintly activity was directed toward open and radical criticism of “people of hospices.” In general, he did not venerate any saint of his time or of the past, with the exception of Sultan Süca’ and Haci Bektas.[127] It is ironic, therefore, that Bektais in particular were treated with contempt by Otman Baba. Long sections of Otman Baba’s sacred biography are devoted to vehement criticism of a certain Mü’min Dervis and the latter’s master Bayezid Baba, both “hospice saints” who apparently were Bektasis or at least held Haci Bektas in high esteem. More specifically, on one occasion in Istanbul, Otman Baba intimidated the Bektasi master Mahmud Çelebi to such an extent that the latter ended up seeking refuge from him in a nearby Edhemi hospice.[128]
On the other hand, Otman Baba put into practice in his own career a vision of the doctrine of the unity of being whereby he thought God to be manifest in everything and particularly in every human being. In keeping with this view, he claimed to be in reality identical with Muhammad, ‘Isa, and Musa (at times also Adam) or even with the Deity himself. In the same vein, he drank used bath water and declared that there were no impure objects, since all things equally reflected God.[129] Presumably, this immanentist view formed the basis of his own claim to sainthood, though it is not clear if he actually considered himself to be one of the hidden saints or, indeed, the “Pole” of the universe.
Otman Baba cultivated a special relationship with the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II (2d r. 855-86/1451-81). He predicted Mehmed II’s rise to power while the latter was still a prince and later warned the sultan against his unsuccessful campaign to capture Belgrade. His aim in his dealings with the sultan was the demonstration of his superiority, and, still according to his biographer Küçük Abdal, Mehmed II actually admitted that the “real” sultan was Otman Baba.[130]
The most prominent feature of Otman Baba’s renunciation was its social activism. In contradistinction to Jamal al-Din Savi, who tar- geted the religious consciences of Muslim individuals as his audience by confining himself to cemeteries, and in even greater contrast to Qutb al-Din Haydar, who attempted to avoid human audiences altogether by disappearing into the wilderness, Otman Baba aimed his rejectionist agenda against institutions, primarily Sufi operations, but also those of the political and non-Sufi religious elites.
** Chapter Five. Dervish Groups in Full Bloom, 1200–1500
The exemplary piety of the ascetic virtuosi was perpetuated and spread throughout Islamdom through the activities of socially deviant dervish groups that transformed the renunciatory ideals of the masters into principles of religiously meaningful social action on a mass scale. Qalandars, Haydaris, and Abdals of Rum attempted to preserve and reproduce the peculiar modes of religiosity developed by or best represented in the lives of Jamal al-Din Savi, Qutb al-Din Haydar, and Otman Baba, respectively. The study of the history of these movements of renunciation is fraught with difficulties. The relevant historical evidence is widely scattered in various sources, somewhat thin, and at times imprecise. This should not be surprising. On one hand, the dervishes themselves were not likely to “document” their way of life in writing, since rejection of this-worldly learning was a logical item on their agenda. This did not prevent them from producing written testimonies of deviant renunciation, especially in the form of hagiographies of the ascetic masters. These accounts were apparently targeted for internal consumption within the dervish groups and did not have wider circulation. On the other hand, the fact that the dervishes negated society through flagrant social deviation ensured that they normally attracted the attention only of their detractors, who had reason to misrepresent the message of deviant renunciation. The dervishes were ignored by the rest of the cultural elite, except insofar as their actions fleetingly came within the ambit of scholarly and literary agendas of historians, biographers, religious reformers, and litterateurs.
Thus, while only short accounts on key figures of renunciation were incorporated into biographical literature and dervish groups were mentioned only in passing in historical chronicles and large literary compositions, self-appointed critics of deviant asceticism, such as Muhammad al-Khatib and Vahidi, provided longer and independent treatments of the subject. When combined with the internal accounts of the deviant dervishes themselves, all this material, fragmented and biased as it may be, allows us to reconstruct the contours of the movements of deviant renunciation in the Later Middle Period.
*** The Arab Middle East
Damascus, the most prominent city of Syria, was the earliest center of new asceticism in Islamdom. After Jamal al-Din Savi left the city to travel to Damietta, the leadership of the nascent community of Qalandars was assumed first by Jalal al-Din al-Darguzini, then by Muhammad al-Balkhi, the two foremost disciples of the master. The group was exiled from the city by al-Malik al-Kamil of Egypt when he captured Damascus and became its ruler in 635/1238. This was apparently a short-lived exile for the Qalandars. They must have returned to the city soon thereafter, since al-Malik al-Zahir (r. 65876/1260-77) is known to have revered Muhammad al-Balkhi, the leader of the Qalandars in Damascus during his reign. Muhammad al-Balkhi stipulated the wearing of heavy <em>jawlaqs</em> for the Qalandars and, presumably during the rule of al-Zahir, built a hospice for his dervishes at the expense of the public treasury. During a visit to Damascus, al-Zahir bestowed a gift of one thousand silver coins <em>(dirhams)</em> and several rugs to the Qalandars, who hosted the sultan in their hospice. In spite of al-Balkhi’s refusal to accept al-Zahir’s invitation to Egypt, al-Zahir also arranged for the delivery of a yearly stipend of thirty sacks of wheat and a daily allowance of ten <em>dirhams</em> to the Qalandars. [131]
The Qalandars were not the only deviant dervishes in Damascus during al-Balkhi’s time. The Haydaris entered the city in 655/1257. They wore loose robes open in the front <em>(farajiyah),</em> and tall hats <em>(tartur);</em> they shaved their beards while they let their moustaches grow. This practice was reportedly after the example of their shaykh Haydar, whose beard was shaven by his captors when he was a prisoner in the hands of the Isma’ilis. A hospice was constructed for them in the ‘Awniyah quarter. [132]
In the same decade as the arrival of Haydaris in Damascus, a group of Qalandars were sighted in Harran, northeast of Aleppo. They presented themselves in 658/1259-60 to the Mongol Hülegü, who was accompanied by the renowned scholar Nasir al-Din Tusi (d. 672/ 1274). Hülegü wanted to know who these people were. Nasir al-Din’s concise and unequivocal answer, “[They are] the excess of this world,” was sufficient for the Qalandars to be executed at Hülegü’s orders.[133]
Hasan al-Jawalaqi al-Qalandari, who earlier founded a hospice for Qalandars in Cairo, traveled to Damascus with Sultan Kitbugha (r. 694-96/1295-97) in 695/1295-96. Kitbugha there visited the Qalandars in the mountain of al-Mizzah, while Hasan organized a very large gathering <em>(waqt)</em> of dervishes in the hospice of al-Hariri, thanks to a gift of one thousand gold coins <em>(dinar)</em> that he received from Kitbugha.[134] Hasan did not return to Egypt, but stayed in Damascus, where he died in 722/1322.[135] During the time of Khatib Farisi (ca. 740-50/1340-50), there was still a sizable group of Qalandars in Damascus headed by Muhammad Bukhara’i. The original hospice of the Qalandars continued to function and was in existence during the early sixteenth century.[136]
The Qalandars spread to other cities in the Arab Near East soon after their emergence in Damascus. In the Egyptian town of Damietta, there was a band of Qalandars in the hospice of Jamal al-Din, headed by a certain al-Shaykh Fath al-Takruri at the time of Ibn Battutah’s visit to that town in 725/1325.[137] Another Qalandari hospice in Egypt was in Cairo. The founder of this institution was Hasan alJawalaqi al-Qalandari. Hasan learned the ways of Qalandars from Iranian shaykhs <em>(fuqara’ al-‘ajam)</em> and settled in Cairo shortly before or during the reign of Kitbugha. He soon became a celebrity, grew rich, and founded a <em>zawiyah</em> outside Bab al-Mansur in the direction of “tombs and graveyards.” This hospice became a center for Qalandars in Cairo, where there were always large numbers of Qalandars under the guidance of a master. Almost half a century later, in 761/ 1359–60, al-Malik al-Nasir al-Hasan (2d r. 755-62/1354-61) issued a decree in which he forbade the Qalandars to shave and to dress in the manner of Iranians and magi <em>(al-majus wa-al-a’ajim).</em> It was delivered in person to the master of the Qalandars in Cairo, whose blessings, however, the sultan did not neglect to solicit. [138]
In Jerusalem, an old church known as Dayr al-Akhmar in the middle of the Mamila cemetery was converted into a Qalandari hospice toward the end of the eighth/fourteenth century by a Shaykh Ibrahim al-Qalandari. Ibrahim won the admiration of a woman named Tonsuq bint ‘Abd Allah al-Muzaffariyah, who had a mausoleum <em>(qubbah)</em> built for him next to the hospice in 794/1391-92. The hospice was inhabited by a group of Qalandars. It collapsed in 893/ 1487–88 and was still in ruins during the early tenth/sixteenth century.[139]
Evidence of a different kind pointing to the prominence of Qalandars in the Fertile Crescent during the first half of the seventh/ thirteenth century is provided by ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Jawbari, who attributes the origin of the “reprehensible innovation” <em>(bid’ah)</em> of shaving off the beard to them and informs his readers that these dervishes neither fast nor pray.[140] Al-Jawbari also reports on Haydaris. These dervishes shaved their beards and were accustomed to handling red-hot iron. They pierced their genitals in order to suspend iron rings on them. They were, as al-Jawbari would have it, mere impostors, and not one of them could live a single day without consuming hashish.[141] The puritan Ibn Taymiyah (d. 728/1328) also found occasion to condemn the Qalandars. He denounced them as unbelievers who shaved their beards, neglected to pray and fast, and violated Qur’anic prohibitions. They believed that the Prophet Muhammad had given some grapes to their master “Qalandar,” who spoke in Persian.[142] In addition, Taqi al-Din ibn al-Maghrib 10f Baghdad (d. 684/1285-86) composed a short Qalandari poem.[143] The image of the Qalandar in this composition is that of a dissolute hedonist who secures a living through fraudulent practices. His head is shaven, and, if not simply naked, he wears either a felt cloak <em>(dalq/dalaq)</em> or a shirt of lamb’s wool.[144] He consumes marijuana juice <em>(bang)</em> and does not touch wine because of its cost. He begs in Persian. A disciple of Qutb al-Din Haydar is reported to have visited the <em>khanqah</em> of Abu Hafs ‘Umar al-Suhrawardi (d. 632/1234) in Baghdad.[145] Qalandars also appear in the <em>Thousand and One Nights</em> in the form of three one-eyed dervishes with shaven heads, which is a clear sign of their reputation in the Arab lands.[146]
The formation of the Qalandariyah occurred, then, in the predom- inantly Arab regions of the Fertile Crescent and in Egypt during the first half of the seventh/thirteenth century. Ethnically, however, the leadersand one suspects the rank and fileof the movement at this stage were not Arabs but mostly Iranians. The overwhelmingly Iranian nature of the group is demonstrated in the first instance by the names of the Qalandars attested in the sources. Jamal al-Din and his first “disciple” Jalal were themselves Iranians, from Savah and Darguzin, respectively. His other major disciples were also from Iran and Asia Minor, though different names are given for them in our sources (Muhammad Balkhi, Muhammad Kurdi, Shams Kurdi, Abu Bakr Isfahani, Abu Bakr Niksari). In the Syrian and Egyptian cultural spheres, the Qalandariyah appears to have continued throughout the seventh-eighth/thirteenth-fourteenth centuries mostly as an Iranian group. Hasan al-Jawalaqi, possibly an Arab recruit, is reported to have learned the ways of Qalandars from Iranian masters. Later, the Qalandars were forbidden to shave and dress in the manner of Iranians. Further evidence supplied by the poet Taqi al-Din ibn alMaghribi and Ibn Taymiyah suggests that the Qalandars normally spoke Persian. Indeed, Jamal al-Din’s biography was written in Persian by the Shirazi Khatib Farisi under the direction of the Iranian leader of the Damascus Qalandars, Muhammad Bukhara’i. It is likely, therefore, that among Arabic speakers the Qalandariyah and possibly also the Haydariyah, on which we have fewer details, were viewed as foreign, predominantly Iranian, phenomena.
Significantly, there were in the Arab Near East indigenous dervish movements that approximated socially deviant renunciation. The most prominent of these in Syria, Iraq, and Egypt was the Rifa’iyah. Inspired by the activity of their eponymous master Ahmad al-Rifa’i (d. 578/1183), the Rifa’i dervishes challenged established modes of piety through practices such as walking on fire, eating snakes, and piercing the body with swords or long and sharp iron rods. The cultivation of thaumaturgical practices was clearly a productive move that led to the rapid spread of Rifa’iyah throughout the region and beyond in a short time and produced related localized versions like the Haririyah, the path of Abu al-Hasan ‘Ali al-Hariri (d. 645/124748), in Damascus and the Badawiyah, the path of Ahmad al-Badawi (d. 675/1276), in Tanta, Egypt. [147] The spread of this complex movement in the region was concomitant with the development of renunciatory dervish piety in the same area, and to judge by a number of common practices (Haydaris, like Rifa’is, danced on fire and Rifa’is, like Haydaris, wore iron collars), there was a certain degree of interaction among these different dervish groups. Although the early history of the Rifa’iyah and its presumed offshoots has not been studied in detail, it is clear that in the long run these movements distinguished themselves through emphasis on thaumaturgy rather than antinomian rejection of society. Unlike deviant renouncers, the Rifa’is seem to have deviated from social convention only during miracle-working seances; at other times they were “normal” members of society who functioned within the web of everyday social relations. This impressionistic view, however, obviously needs to be tested through close scrutiny of the historical evidence. [148]
*** Iran
Both Qalandars and Haydaris were active in Iran from the beginning of the seventh/thirteenth century, though the relevant evidence is rather scanty, possibly due to the paucity of source materials on Iran for this period.[149]
The anonymous biography of the Persian poet Fakhr al-Din ‘Iraqi (d. 688/1289) includes some information on the Qalandars. When ‘Iraqi was about seventeen years of age (ca. 627/1229-30, about a decade after the destruction of his hometown Hamadan by Mongols in 618/1221), a group of Qalandars appeared in Hamadan. ‘Iraqi soon became enamored of a youth who belonged to this group. Unable to separate from his beloved, he followed the Qalandars to Isfahan, where he shaved his beard and became one of them on their wanderings. Together they traveled as far as Delhi and Multan in India and visited, presumably among other shaykhs, Baha’ al-Din Zakariya’, who is said to have welcomed them. After some further adventures during which ‘Iraqi lost track of all but one of his companions because of a storm, the young poet decided to become a disciple of Baha’ al-Din and settled in Multan.[150]
On a different note, Shams Tabrizi, one of the many famous contemporaries of ‘Iraqi, is said to have brought about the death of a reckless Qalandar who refused to make room for him during <em>sama</em> in a gathering that took place in ‘Iraq-i ‘Ajam.[151] Abu al-Fadl al-Hasan al-‘Uqbari heard a story about the origins of hashish from a Qalandari shaykh called Ja’far ibn Muhammad al-Shirazi while he was in Tustar in 658/1260. [152]
Somewhat later, we hear that a group of Qalandars gathered around Babi Ya’qubiyan, the master of Hasan (or Ishan) Mengli who exercised some influence on the Ilkhanid ruler Ahmad Tegüder (680-83/1282-84).[153] Evidently, at around the same time, there were Qalandars in Shirvan and Gilan. Shaykh Ibrahim Gilani (d. 700/ 1301), the master of the more famous Safi al-Din Ardab1 (d. 735/ 1334), warned his followers against them. More concretely, certain Qalandars attempted to kill Zahid Gilani while he was in Shirvan. Indeed, the would-be assassins were later punished at the orders of the Turkish governor of the region; the ears and noses of many were chopped off, while one was summarily executed.[154]
The presence of Qalandars is recorded in the southwest Iranian town of Shar-i Zur, situated halfway between Mawsil and Hamadan, before the end of the seventh/thirteenth century. Shaykh Qazi Zahir al-Din Muhammad, a disciple of the well-known Sufi Awhad al-Din Kirmani (d. 635/1237-38), retired to a mosque in a village close to Shar-i Zur in order to spend the night. After nightfall, about ten Jawlaqs came into the mosque and locked the door behind them. Thinking that they were aloneZahir al-Din held his breath and carefully hidthey first had something to eat, then prepared and consumed a hempdrink and performed a <em>sama’.</em> Following this, they engaged in other activities that Zahir al-Din did not deem fit to describe. The fearful Qazi fled as soon as the Jawlaqs fell asleep.[155]
During the seventh/thirteenth century, the Haydaris were also active in Iran. It is most likely that there was a nascent community of dervishes around Qutb al-Din Haydar during his lifetime. The names of two direct disciples of Qutb al-Din Haydar, Abu Khalid and Hajji Mubarak, are recorded in the sources.[156] The reports of al-Qazwini, Ibn Battutah, and Amir Hasan Sijzi establish that there was a group of followers in Zavah within about half a century of Qutb al-Din’s death, and the sources of the early seventh/thirteenth century are already familiar with the sight of a typical Haydari dervish, wearing iron collars, rings, and bracelets. Ibn Battutah, who visited Zavah sometime between 732/1331-32 and 734/1333-34, comments that the Haydari dervishes who wear iron rings on both their ears and genitals as well as collars and bracelets are the followers of Qutb alDin Haydar.[157] The presence of Haydaris in the area around Zavah is attested by the appearance of a Haydari dervish in a short work that the Persian poet Pur-i Baha (d. 685/1286-87) composed in 667/1269. This dervish lived in a village of the district of Khvaf immediately southeast of Zavah. He had a shaven chin, wore a ring on his penis, and had in his company a young, beardless boy. [158] The ethnic origins of these early followers are obscure, though Qutb al-Din’s possible Turkishness seems to have had its effect on Haydari recruitment, if al-Qazwini’s observations reflect a more general trend. Qutb al-Din’s popularity does not seem to have been restricted to a particular social group, since he is said to have been cherished equally by slaves and by rulers.[159]
Although it is more difficult to trace Qalandars and Haydaris in Iran throughout the following two centuries when the region was politically divided among Muzaffarids, Jalayirids, Timurids, Karakoyunlus, and Akkoyunlus, this does not indicate their total disappearance from Iran. The <em>zawiyah</em> of Qutb al-Din Haydar apparently continued to be an active Haydari center. A certain Baba Resul is reported to have joined the “order” and spent months and years at this <em>zawiyah</em> during Temür’s time (r. 771-807/1370-1405).[160] Other evidence points to the existence of Haydaris in Tabriz during the time of Karakoyunlu Kara Yusuf (r. 791-823/1389-1420, with a long interregnum due to the Timurid invasion) and his son Iskender (r. 823-41/1420-38). Ibn al-Karbala’i and Nur Allah Shushtari, the principal sources on the subject, do not give any description of these Haydaris. There is the tantalizing possibility that these reports might be on an altogether new Haydari movement under the leadership of a certain Qutb al-Din Haydar Tuni, quite distinct from any preceding Haydari groups.[161] The same ambiguity, though to a lesser extent, also persists in a letter that Akkoyunlu Uzun Hasan (r. 857-82/ 1453–78) wrote to Sehzade Bayezid (who acceded to the Ottoman throne in 886/1481 as Bayezid II) after his victory of 872/1467 over Karakoyunlu Cihansah and his subsequent capture of Tabriz. Uzun Hasan’s statement that he suppressed heretic groups such as Qalandaris and Haydaris is devoid of detail and leaves one in doubt as to the identity of these Haydaris.[162]
The Qalandars too continued to exist in this period. A certain Zangi-i ‘Ajam-i Qalandari (d. 806/1403-4), for example, possessed a lodge in Kirman and may have had a group of followers in this city.[163] In the Timurid domains in eastern Iran, a single Qalandar with his beard shaven and dressed in a single piece of felt without a shirt or underwear is reported in the ninth/fifteenth century. [164] At the end of the same century, Sultan Husayn Baykara (r. 875-912/1470-1506) wrote a letter to the magistrate of Khvaf and Bakharz, ordering him to put an end to the innovation <em>(bid’ah)</em> of the fourfold shave <em>(chahar zarb)</em> that had become popular among some young people and the Qalandars.[165] In addition, Jami (817-98/1414-92) includes a discussion of Qalandars in his <em>Nafahat al-uns.</em>[166]There are continued reports on Qalandars in Iran well into the Safavid period.[167]
*** India
In comparison with Iran, attestations of Qalandars and Haydaris in Muslim India of the seventh-eighth/thirteenth-fourteenth centuries are at once more numerous and more informative. The appearance of Qalandars in India is associated with the figures of Shaykh ‘Usman Marandi (better known as La’l Shahbaz Qalandar), Shah Khizr Rumi, and Bu ‘Ali Qalandar of Panipat. ‘Usman Marandi (d. 673/1274) was a prominent disciple of Baha’ al-Din Zakariya’ who came to be known as “Ruby” (La’l) because of his habit of dressing in red, while the additional title “Royal Falcon” (Shahbaz) was conferred upon him by his shaykh. Several poetic compositions are attributed to him. Upon his death, he was buried in his native Sihvan in Sind, where his tomb grew to be a famous pilgrimage center.[168] Of Shah Khizr Rumi, it is only possible to assert that he was in Delhi during the lifetime of the Chisti master Qutb al-Din Bakhtiyar Kaki (d. 633/ 1235) and had some affiliation with this shaykh. He apparently met his death in his native Asia Minor.[169] Bu ‘A110f Panipat probably lived somewhat later than either La’l Shahbaz or Shah Khizr, if one accepts as genuine the report of the date of his death as 724/ 1324. He is alleged to have been in contact with shaykhs Qutb al-Din Bakhtiyar and Nizam al-Din Awliya’ (d. 726/1325), though these should be viewed as later legends built around B ‘Ali, since Qutb al-Din lived much earlier than Bu ‘Ali, and the Chisti sources of the period about Nizam al-Din do not contain any references to the shaykh of Panipat. He established a <em>khanqah</em> in his native Panipat, which later became a pilgrimage center for Qalandars and related groups.[170]
Other than these well-known figures, the presence of anonymous Qalandars in Muslim India of the seventh/thirteenth century is at- tested by several anecdotes found in Sufi literature as well as in historical chronicles. The <em>khanqahs</em> of the Suhrawardi Baha’ al-Din Zakariya’ (d. 666/1267-68) in Multan and of the Chishti Farid al-Din Ganj-i Shakar (d. 664/1265) in Ajodhan were at times visited by Qalandars who, traveling alone or in groups, did not refrain from engaging in provocative, if not outright hostile, behavior toward settled Sufis. [171] Somewhat later, a certain Qalandar known as Sultan Darvish and his companions seem to have enjoyed the patronage of Tughril, the rebel governor of Bengal, who gave the Qalandars three <em>mans</em> of gold from which to fashion their distinctive metal paraphernalia. These Qalandars were executed along with other followers of Tughril by Sultan Balban (r. 664-86/1266-87) upon his suppression of the revolt in 677-78/1279.[172] Around the turn of the seventh/thirteenth century and in the following decades, Qalandars frequented the <em>khanqahs</em> of the Chishti masters Nizam al-Din Awliya’ and Nasir al-Din Chiragh-i Dihli in Delhi.[173] Groups of Qalandars wandering in the countryside as well as in cities continued to be a familiar sight in eighth/fourteenth-century Muslim India, to judge, for instance, by frequent warnings of Shaykh Muhammad Gisu’daraz against association with Qalandars.[174]
The spread of Haydaris into India is also well attested. During the reign of Jalal al-Din Firuz ‘Shah (689-95/1290-96), there was a prominent Haydari shaykh by the name of Abu Bakr Tusi Haydari in Delhi. One of his dervishes called Bahri was involved in the murder of Sidi Muwallih in the presence of the sultan. Abu Bakr had a <em>khanqah</em> on the bank of the Jamnah river and is said to have enjoyed the company of many established Sufi shaykhs as well as respected scholars.[175] Ibn Battutah came across Haydaris in India on two occasions. The first was in the vicinity of Amroha in northern India, where Ibn Battutah and his company spent a night with a group of Haydari dervishes headed by a black shaykh. Having built a fire with some wood that the company of Ibn Battutah procured for them, the Haydaris danced on the burning wood until the fire died out. The famous traveler was amazed to see that a shirt that he had given to their leader before he started to dance on the fire was returned to him intact; the fire had left no traces on the fabric. Ibn Battutah met another group of Haydaris at Ghogah in Malabar, also headed by a shaykh.[176]
It appears that the example of the Qalandars and the Haydaris was instrumental in the formation of at least two separate indigenous deviant dervish groups in India during the ninth/fifteenth century: Madaris and Jalalis. The Madari movement crystallized around the activities of Badi’ al-Din Qutb al-Madar (d. ca. 844/1440), one of the most celebrated saintly figures of Muslim India. His dervishes were mendicants who refused all clothing and rubbed their naked bodies with ashes. They had long matted hair, wound iron chains around their heads and necks, wore black turbans, and carried black banners. They were notorious for their open rejection of religious observances as well as for their excessive consumption of hemp. The Madaris spread to all regions of northern India from Sind to Bengal, as well as to Kashmir and Nepal. [177] The Jallis, for their part, professed allegiance to the renowned saint of Uch in Sind, Jalal al-Din Husayn al-Bukhari, known as Makhdum-i Jahaniyan Jahangasht (707-85/ 1308–84). They closely resembled the Madaris in appearance, but distinguished themselves by practicing the <em>chahar zarb</em> (shaving the head, beard, moustache, and eyebrows). In spite of the documented Sunnism of Makhdum-i Jahaniyan, this particular group of his followers were fervent Shi’is, who also adopted strange practices such as eating snakes and scorpions.[178] The history of the particularly Indian movements of the Madaris and the Jalalis is obscure, and the nature of the interaction among all the socially deviant renouncers of Muslim India, not to say anything about their Hindu counterparts, is extremely difficult to establish. It is clear, however, that by the end of the ninth/fifteenth century, rejection of society through blatant social deviance had become a prominent religious option in Indian societies.
*** Asia Minor
As in other regions of the Islamic world, the Qalandars and the Haydaris found their way into Asia Minor within decades of their emergence around the beginning of the seventh/thirteenth century. There may have been Qalandars in Antalya and even Constantinople already during Jamal al-Din’s lifetime.[179] More definite is the presence of a disciple of Jamal al-Din by the name of Abu Bakr Niksari in Konya a few decades later. Niksari was alive and well known in that city at the time of the death ofJalal al-Din Rumi (672/1273). One of the seven bulls in the funerary procession of Rumi was later sent to the hospice <em>(langar)</em> of “the divine gnostic Shaykh Abu Bakr Jawlaqi Niksari” as a present. [180] Rumi himself was familiar with the Qalandars and on one occasion told his barber that he was envious of them because they had no beard at all.[181] The famous Sufi poet also knew and conversed with Hajji Mubarak Haydari, a direct disciple of Qutb al-Din Haydar, who lived in Konya and greatly venerated Rumi.[182]
Outside Konya, the Qalandars were probably present in many other spots in Asia Minor. The famous Haci Bektas (possibly d. 669/ 1270–7 ), for instance, is said to have welcomed a group of Qalandars from Khorasan to his dwelling in Sulucakarahöyük, Kirsehir.[183] The <em>Fustat al-‘adalah fi qava’id al-saltanah</em> of Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Khatib, a work of heresiography that contains the earliest known account of the emergence of the Qalandars, was written in 683/ 1284–85 for a local audience in Kastamonu, which suggests general familiarity with the Qalandars in that area.
As in Iran, there is little sign of Qalandar and Haydari presence in the peninsula during the eighth-ninth/fourteenth-fifteenth centuries. It is quite clear, however, that the path of deviant renunciation left its imprint on the development of Sufi modes of piety in the Turkish cultural sphere. The key players in this process all felt the attraction of dervish piety, and many completely succumbed to its pull. Some prominent representatives of this latter option were Barak Baba, Kaygusuz Abdal, and Sultan Süca’.
Barak Baba was a native of Tokat in central Anatolia. His father was a military commander and his paternal uncle a famous clerk. He became a devoted disciple of the warrior saint Sari Saltuk, who gave him the name Barak, “hairy dog,” when the disciple eagerly swallowed a morsel Sari Saltuk had expectorated.[184] Toward the end of the seventh/thirteenth century, Barak Baba traveled to Iran, where he gained the trust of the Ilkhanid Ghazan Khan and of his successor, Muhammad Khudabandah Öljeytö. In 706/1306 he and his dervishes traveled to Syria and Egypt, apparently on some mission on behalf of Oljeytü. After a colorful entry into Damascus, Barak Baba moved to Jerusalem but failed to enter Egypt. On his return to Iran, he was killed on an expedition to Gilan in 707/1307-8. His bones were carried to Sultaniyah, where a hospice was constructed for his followers by the Mongol ruler. When the Mevlevi master Ulu ‘Arif Çelebi visited the hospice in 716/1316, a certain Hayran Emirci was the master of the Baraki dervishes.[185] Barak Baba was an ecstatic figure, with a most peculiar appearance. [186] He had a predilection for dancing, singing, and uttering enigmatic sayings. Some of his ecstatic expressions are preserved in a learned Persian commentary written by a certain Qutb al-‘Alavi in 756/1355.[187] While these utterances are practically opaque for presentday readers, the mere existence of al-‘Alavi’s ingenious and sophisticated work suggests that Barak Baba’s influence on posterity was not inconsiderable. Also significant in this connection is the chain of initiation that runs from Barak Baba through Taptuk Emre to the famous Turkish Sufi poet Yunus Emre (possibly d. 720/1320-21).[188]
Kaygusuz Abdal lived in the second half of the eighth/fourteenth and the first quarter of the following century. He was a disciple of Abdal Musa, himself a rather merry figure with a clear liking for food, who carried a club and addressed his dervishes as Abdals. Abdal Musa’s followers donned animal hides, were equipped with dervish bowls, and practiced blood-shedding during Muharram.[189] Kaygusuz Abdal himself normally wore a felt cloak without sleeves or collar (kepenek), practiced the fourfold shave <em>(chahar zarb),</em> and carried a horn. He consumed hashish freely and, like his master, had a predilection for food.[190] His writings are colorful elaborations upon a twofold central theme: each human individual forms a microcosmos and, conversely, the cosmos is the meganthropos.[191]
Sultan Süca’ was a contemporary of Kaygusuz Abdal. Already a master Abdal during the reign of the Ottoman Bayezid I (r. 791-805/ 1389–1403), he continued to be active throughout the first half of the ninth/fiteenth century and had dealings with celebrated Sufis such as Haci Bayram (d. 833/1429-30) and Ümmi Kemal as well as the Hurufi poet Nesimi (d. ca. 820/1417-18). He reportedly met Temür (Tamerlane) during the latter’s Anatolian campaign (804-5/1402) and refused to accept any gifts from him.[192] Sultan Süca’ shaved his hair, eyebrows, eyelashes, and beard, wore no garments, and traveled in the company of two to three hundred Abdals in the summertime, while he spent the winters in a cave. He apparently caught the eye of the Ottoman Murad II (r. 824-55/1421-51), who is known to have built a mosque in Süca”s name in Edirne.[193]
The movements of deviant renunciation that crystallized around the figures of Barak Baba, Kaygusuz Abdal, and Sultan Süca’ formed the basic stock from which the more readily identifiable and distinct Abdals of Rum at the turn of the sixteenth century came into being under the formative influence of their master, Otman Baba.
** Chapter Six. Dervish Groups in the Ottoman Empire 1450–1550
The general survey of the spread and proliferation of movements of socially deviant renunciation in the Arab Middle East, Iran, India, and Asia Minor presented in the preceding chapter makes it possible to narrow the field of investigation by concentrating on dervish groups active in a specific cultural zone during a more limited period. The Ottoman cultural sphere of the late ninth/fifteenth and early tenth/sixteenth centuries is well suited for this purpose. An exceptionally high number of dervish groups were in operation in Asia Minor and the Balkans during this time. Apart from the ubiquitous Qalandars and Haydaris, more specifically Ottoman bands such as the Abdals of Rum, Bektasis, Jamis, and Shams-i Tabrizis roamed the empire. More significantly, these groups are clearly, though not always extensively, documented in the sources. Consequently, it is possible to construct a panoramic view of the movements of deviant renunciation in Ottoman Southeast Europe and Anatolia during the “classical age” of this colossal empire. [194]
*** Qalandars
The earliest genuinely descriptive account of the Qalandars in the Ottoman empire was supplied by the Cantacuzene Theodoros Spandounes (Spandugino in Italian), the first European to describe the dervish groups in the Ottoman Empire. In his Turkish history composed between 1510 and 1519, there is the following passage on Qalandars, whom Spandugino called the “torlacchi” <em>(torlak,</em> “beardless, handsome youth”):
<quote>
the torlacchi ... are of the greatest numbers. The founder [of this religion] was one who confessed that Jesus Christ was divine in nature and was burned alive. The torlacchi are naked and wear the hide of either sheep or some other [animal] on their shoulders. In addition, the great majority of them wear felt [cloaks] without any kind of garment and are thus afflicted with horrible colds in excessively cold weather. For this reason, they cauterize their temples. They shave their beards and moustaches and are men of a most evil nature. They are not to be found in convents like monks, but are thieves, rascals, and assassins.... They carry on their heads a felt cap that has wings and they demand alms with great importunity from Christians, Jews, and Turks. Each of them carries a mirror with a long handle that he holds toward all people and says, “Look in and consider how before long you will be different from what you are now; so become modest and pious, think the better of [your] soul.” Having spoken in this manner, he gives [the listener] an apple or an orange, which obliges one to give him one asper as alms in return. They ride donkeys during the day while they beg in the name of God, and at night they couple with these [same donkeys] like women. [195]
</quote>
Menavino (the first Italian print of his work dates back to 1548) also referred to Qalandars as <em>torlaks.</em> He confirmed Spandugino’s description of the dervishes’ appearance and repeated the accusation of reprehensible sexual practices. In addition, he noted that the Qalandars appealed especially to women and claimed that these dervishes devised crafty tricks to extract alms from the populace.[196]
The details found in the descriptions of Spandugino and Menavino are matched on the Ottoman side by an exceptional source from the early tenth/sixteenth century, Vahidi’s <em>Menakib-i Hvoca-i Cihan ve Netice-i Can</em> (comp. 929/1522). According to Vahidi, Qalandars had clean-shaven faces. They were naked except for loose woolen golden or black mantles. They wore conical caps made of hair. Carrying drums, tambourines, and banners, they chanted prayers and sang melodious tunes with joy and fervor. They asserted that they had attained the state of <em>baqa’</em> in the world <em>of fana’.</em> In fact, they believed themselves to be the “cream of God’s creation”: the whole of creation existed only for their sake. Contentment and complete resignation, they argued, were the chief attributes of a Qalandar, who was thus free from the need to earn a livelihood and lived solely on charity. The Qalandar could come face to face with the Divine Truth without the need of veils or curtains, a fact symbolized by the clean-shaven face. On account of his frequent encounters with the Divine, the Qalandar often found himself inspired to ecstatic dance. Similarly, his unwillingness to settle in one place was the manifestation of his realization, imparted to him through his contact with the Divine, that one should not get attached to this evanescent world. Instead, one should constantly be on the move in search of one’s origins, a quest common to all created beings. Vahidi designated Hamadan as the place of origin of Qalandars. [197]
The revelatory accounts of Spandugino, Menavino, and Vahidi are enriched by supplementary information gathered from Ottoman sources. There was a <em>zawiyah</em> known as Kalenderhane (“the house of Qalandars”) in Istanbul during the reign of Mehmed II.[198] Several decades later, a tax-register <em>(tahrir)</em> dated 929/1522-23 records another <em>kalenderhane</em> in Larende, in the province of Karaman.[199] These reports, when coupled with other less certain notices of <em>kalenderhanes</em> in Birgi, Bursa, Erzincan, and Konya, suggest that such hospices were not uncommon.[200] The presence of the Qalandars themselves is noted in Ottoman literary sources. They were definitely present in Istanbul and elsewhere in the empire soon after the conquest of the city, since Mevlana Esrefzade Muhyiddin Mehmed, a very prominent religious scholar, gave up scholarship in order to join a group of Qalandars; the Mevlana apparently ended his days traveling around the empire with the group.[201] In a similar vein, an anecdote concerning the Halveti Seyh Sünbül Efendi (d. 936/1529-30) includes the story of a young man who confesses to having desired to run away with some Qalandars in his search for knowledge and wisdom.[202] The Qalandars were present in Edirne in 949/1542, when they joined the crowds who welcomed Sultan Süleyman to the city.[203]
*** Haydaris
As in the case of the Qalandars, Spandugino and Menavino gave detailed descriptions of the Haydaris. Spandugino described a group of dervishes whom he called Calendieri, though it is clear that he really had Haydaris in mind. These dervishes had long beards and long hair. They covered themselves with sacks, coarse felt, or sheepskins. Bearing iron rings on their ears, necks, wrists, and genitals, they were, according to Spandugino, more virtuous and worthy of respect than others of their kind. [204] Menavino, who also called Haydaris Calenders, supplied greater detail. According to him, the members of this group were for the most part celibates who had their own little churches called <em>tekkes.</em> On the doors of these <em>tekkes</em> appeared the phrase <em>caedanormac dilresin cuscuince alchachecciur,</em> which Menavino translated as “he who wants to enter our religion should live as we do and preserve his chastity.”[205] Dressed in short sleeveless coats made of wool and horse-hair and ordinarily with shaven heads, these dervishes wore felt hats like those of Greek priests, around which they hung strings of horse-hair about one hand in length. They wore large iron earrings, collars, and bracelets as well as iron and silver rings of unequal size and weight on their genitals in order to keep themselves from engaging in sexual intercourse. They wandered around reciting poems of “Nerzimi” (Nesimi), whom they took to be the first hero of their religion. The poems were pleasantly rhymed; in the opinion of Menavino, who claimed to have read some of them, they reflected Christian influences.[206]
More extensive than the accounts of Spandugino and Menavino is Vahidi’s detailed description.[207] As described by Vahidi, the Haydaris kept their faces clean-shaven, except for moustaches that drooped down like leeches over the chin, only to turn back upward to the ears; the parts of the moustaches above the lips were twisted inward like prawns. Single locks of twisted hair covered their foreheads (the hair was presumably shaven). They wore iron rings around the neck, waist, wrists, ankles, and genitals as well as tin earrings. Iron bells were suspended on their sides. They were clothed in felt cloaks, with twelve-gored conical caps on their heads. Carrying drums of various sizes, tambourines, and banners, they chanted prayers and praises to God.
According to Vahidi, the Haydaris believed that the human face was a mirror that reflected the Prophetic Spirit. The face of a Haydari in particular, they argued, was like the sun that illuminated the universe and should, therefore, be kept free of dust; hence the shaving of the beard. By contrast, they did not touch the moustache at all, after the example of ‘Ali, who, according to the Haydaris, never shaved or trimmed his moustache. Locks of twisted hair symbolized resistance to the animal soul. Similarly, rings in general signified repression of the animal soul. In particular, earrings symbolized ignoring unworthy speech; collars, total subjugation to ‘Ali; girdles, freedom from debasement; bracelets, refraining from touching that which is illicit; and anklets, avoiding sinful paths. Iron bells served to keep the group together and also to convey secret messages to those who were capable of receiving them. Legally prescribed ritual practices were superfluous for the Haydaris, since they were blessed with God’s grace and guaranteed enry to Paradise. Therefore, they threw aside not only religious observances (for they neither prayed nor fasted) but also rules of social conduct: they did not earn their living themselves, traveled constantly, and openly sought the company of young boys.
It is remarkable that the descriptive accounts of Spandugino, Menavino, and Vahidi are in almost complete agreement on points of detail. There is some uncertainty only concerning the Haydari headgear. Could they really have been wearing conical hats with twelve gores just like the nomadic Turkish supporters of the Shi’i Safavid rulers known as “Red Heads” <em>(kizilbas),</em> as Vahidi has it? The fact that the crimson caps of the <em>kizilbas</em> are said to have been first fashioned for them by Shaykh Haydar (864-93/1460-88) and are therefore known as the “cap of Haydar <em>”(taj-i Haydari)</em> does not make it any easier to answer this question. [208] Although there is evidence that the Haydaris used to wear some kind of tall cap even before the time of Shaykh Haydar (see the account of al-Nu’aymi above in chapter 5), Menavino said that the Haydaris wore a different headgear altogether. In the absence of more information, one can only speculate that the Haydaris exchanged their former twelve-gored conical caps for hats of the type depicted by Menavino some time after Vahidi composed his work, most likely because they were eager to distance themselves from the <em>kiztlba;,</em> who were persecuted in the Ottoman Empire.[209]
The descriptions given above are complemented by evidence of a different kind on the presence of Haydaris in the Ottoman domains during the tenth/sixteenth century. Menavino, as noted, referred to Haydari hospices; indeed, it is certain that at least three Haydari hospices existed in the Ottoman Empire in this period. One of these is recorded in the tax-register <em>(tahrir)</em> of Karaman dated 929/1522-23, and another in a list of pious foundations of Erzincan dated 937/ 1530. [210] The other lodge in Istanbul is attested by an imperial edict to the judge of Istanbul dated 992/1584, in which the judge was requested to inspect the Haydari hospice in order to determine if its inhabitants maintained practices that were in violation of the religious law. From the contents of this document, it appears that the Haydari <em>zawiyah,</em> reportedly founded for Haydari dervishes by Mehmed II, was earlier ordered closed by imperial decree in accordance with the complaints of some citizens who denounced its inhabitants as heretics in contact with Safavid Iran. The dervishes in turn registered a petition in which they dismissed the accusations as fabrications of a few individuals who wanted to take over the <em>zawiyah</em> in order to construct a new building on its site and substantiated their charge with testimonies of the co-inhabitants of their quarter. It was this confusing affair that the sultan asked the judge of Istanbul to investigate in his order of 992/1584.[211]
There are other traces of Haydari activity in the Ottoman Empire. The dervish who attempted to assassinate Bayezid II on the road to Manastir in 897/1492 is described as a Haydari in the contemporary chronicle of Oruç ibn ‘Adil.[212] Fakiri’s <em>Ta’rifat</em> (comp. 941/1534-35), though less informative in this case than it usually is, does include three verses on the Haydaris.[213] In addition, at least one passage in the chronicle of Küçük Nisanci (d. 979/1571) no doubt refers to the Haydaris.[214] More informative and colorful is a passage in the <em>Mesa’irüs-su’ara</em> of ‘Asik Çelebi (d. 979/1572) contained in the chapter on Hayali Beg. From ‘Asik Çelebi’s description, it is clear that Hayali Beg’s master Baba ‘Ali Mest was a Haydari. He wore earrings, a collar around his neck, chains on his body as well as a “dragonheaded” hook under his belt, and a sack <em>(cavlak)</em> for clothing.[215] Hayali Bey himself did not remain a Haydari for very long, though some lesser-known poets seem to have spent their lives as wandering Haydaris, as suggested by the examples of Hayderi and Mesrebi.[216]
*** Abdals of Rum
Extensive descriptive accounts provided by Vahidi, Menavino, and Nicolas de Nicolay leave no doubt that in the Ottoman Empire of the early and mid-tenth/sixteenth century there was a particular group of dervishes distinguished from other similar groups by their distinctive apparel and paraphernalia (hatchet, club, leather pouch, spoon with ankle-bone), peculiar customs (self-cauterization, tattoos), and special allegiance to the hospice of Seyyid Battal Gazi in Eskisehir, commonly called Abdals or Isiks. [217]
The physical appearance of the Abdals as described by Vahidi is quite striking.[218] They were completely naked except for a felt garment <em>(tennure),</em> secured with a woolen belt. Their heads and faces were shaven and their feet bare. They carried “Ebu Müslimi” hatchets on one shoulder and “Süca’i” clubs on the other.[219] Each Abdal possessed two leather pouches <em>(cur’adans),</em> presumably attached to the belt, one filled with flint and the other with hashish. They carried large yellow spoons, ankle-bones, and dervish bowls. Their bodies and their temples featured burned spots. A picture of ‘Al’s sword was drawn or his name was written on their chests; also prominent were pictures of snakes on their upper arms. They carried lamps and played tambourines, drums, and horns, at the same time screaming. They were normally intoxicated on hashish <em>(kan hayran).</em>
According to Vahidi, Abdals maintained that the Prophet Adam was their model for many of their practices. When he was expelled from Paradise, Abdals explained, Adam was completely naked except for a fig-leaf that he used to cover his private parts and had to survive on “green leaves” only. Similarly, Abdals wandered around naked except for a <em>tennure</em> symbolizing Adam’s fig-leaf and consumed hashish (“green leaves”) in considerable quantities. Their nudity was a symbol of “tearing the garment of the body” and the nothingness of this world. Hashish was a means to find respite from the unreal phenomena of time and space and to attain the hidden treasure of reality. Abdals held that the hair, the beard, and the moustache were contingent things that should be shaven in order to render brilliant the “mirror of the face.” They were very fond of food (a long list of dishes is provided). The meals were followed by hashish-taking and musical sessions (<em>sama’</em>)<em>.</em> They normally slept on the ground and were awakened with the sound of a horn, a symbol of the trumpet of the archangel Israfil: thus every morning awakening was likened to resurrection. Abdals were free from all prescribed religious observances since they were not really in this world at all. Their true guide was ‘Ali and, as indicated by the Ebu Müslimi hatchet, they were the enemies of ‘Ali’s enemies. They also highly cherished Hasan, Hüseyn, and the twelve <em>imams.</em> Their <em>ka’be,</em> however, was the hospice of Seyyid Gazi, as represented by the distinctive lamps they carried.
Menavino’s long account of the Abdals, reproduced here in its entirety, is equally detailed and informative:
<quote>
The Dervisi are men of good humor. They have as clothing sheepskins dried in the sun which they suspend from their shoulders [in such a way as to] cover their private parts, one in the front and one in the back. The rest of their bodies are totally naked and devoid of all bodily hair. They have in their hands clubs, no less big than long, thick and full of nodes. On their heads are white conical hats, one hand in height. Their ears are pierced, where they wear earrings of precious stones and jasper. They live in various places in Turkey where travelers are fed and accommodated. In summertime they do not eat in their dwellings but live on alms that they ask for with the words <em>sciaimer daneschine [sah-i merdan</em> ‘<em>askina],</em> that is, demanding alms for the love of that brave man called ‘Ali, the son-in-law of Muhammad.... In Anatolia they have the tomb of another called Scidibattal [Seyyid Battal/Seydi Battal] who they say was responsible for the greatest part of the conquest of Turkey. There they have a house wherein live more than five hundred of them and where, once a year, they hold in joy and exultation a general meeting that lasts seven days, in which more than eight thousand participate. Their chief is called Assambaba [A’zam Baba?], which means the father of fathers. Among them are found many learned youths who wear white garments reaching down to their knees. When they arrive [at the <em>tekke</em> of Seydi Battal], one of their numbers narrates a story that contains [an account of] miraculous things seen during the course of travels through [different] regions, which they then write down along with the name of the author and present it to the chief. On Fridays, which is their Sunday, they prepare a good meal and eat it on the grass in an open field that is not far from their dwelling. Assambaba ... sits among them, surrounded by the learned ones dressed in white. After the meal, the chief rises to his feet and the rest do likewise. They say a prayer to God and then all cry out in a loud voice <em>Alacabu Eilege [Allah kabul eyleye],</em> that is, may God accept this our prayer. Also among them are certain youths called <em>cuccegler [köçekler],</em> who carry in certain hand-trays a pulverized herb called <em>asseral [esrar],</em> which, when eaten, makes one merry just as if one had drunk wine. First the chief then all the others in order take this into their hands and eat, and this done, read of the book of the new story. They then move to a place closer to their dwelling where they prepare a great fire of more than one hundred loads of wood. Taking each other’s hands, they turn round [the fire], singing praises of their order, in the same way as our peasants are accustomed to by their festivities, men and women in a round dance. When the dance ends, they take out knives and with the sharp point draw pictures of branches, leaves, flowers, and wounded hearts on the arms, breasts, or thighs, just as if they were engraving on wood. They engrave these in the name of those with whom they are enamored. Afterward, they approach the fire and place hot embers on the wounds, which they then cover with old cotton [rags] wetted with urine that they have prepared; the wounds heal by the time the cotton [rags] fall off on their own. In the evening, having received the permission of their chief, they form a squadron, like soldiers in arms, and return to their dwelling with banners and tambourines [in hand], asking for alms on their way. In Constantinople they are not viewed with much tolerance since one of them once attempted to kill the Great Turk with a sword that he carried under [his cloak]. All the same, they give them alms since these latter care for travelers in their own dwelling. [220]
</quote>
Nicolas de Nicolay, although he largely paraphrased Menavino, also made some additions and alterations. According to him, the Abdals, whom he called <em>deruis,</em> were bare-headed and carried small hatchets instead of clubs under their girdles. Nicolas noted that the herb that they ate was called <em>matslach (maslik)</em> and the wounds that they inflicted upon themselves were cured by means of a certain herb. He mistakenly identified the sultan upon whose life an attempt was made by a dervish as Mehmed II and, in addition, accused the Abdals of robbery, sodomy, and other similar vices.[221]
The combined testimony of Vahidi and Menavino allows us to identify as Abdals the “derwissler” described in some detail in the much earlier account of Konstantin Mihailovic, who served as a Janissary from 1455 to 1463 C.E.:
<quote>
[The derwissler] have such a custom among them: they go about naked and barefoot, and they wear only deerskins, or the skins of some other beasts. Some also have skirts made of felt according to their custom. And they gird themselves with chains in crisscross fashion. They go about bare-headed. And they sheathe their <em>instrumentum,</em> alias penis, in iron. They burn themselves on the arms with fire and cut themselves with razors. In what they walk about, so do they sleep. They do not drink wine, nor do they have any <em>kvas.</em> They beg for dinner. And what is left after dinner they give back to distribute to the poor as charity. They do likewise at supper. They never have anything of their own, but walk about the cities like lunatics.... And also at vespers they dance, going around [in a circle]. Having placed a hand on each other’s shoulder, nodding their heads and hopping with their feet they cry in a great voice, <em>Lay lacha ylla lach</em> which means in our language “God by God and God of Gods.” So vehemently do they dance and cry out that they are to be heard from afar just as if dogs were barking-one low and the other high. This dance of theirs is called the <em>samach,</em> and they hold it to be some sort of sacred thing and great piety. And they whirl about so violently that water flows from them, and they froth at the mouth like mad dogs. They overexert themselves so much that one falls here and another there. Then having recovered from this insane overexertion, each goes to his den. [222]
</quote>
Evidence on the Ottoman side is by no means restricted to Vahidi’s <em>Menaklb.</em> References scattered in the works of such Ottoman writers as ‘Asikpasazade (d. after 889/1484), Fakiri, Küçük Nisanci, and Mustafa ‘Ali (d. 1008/1600) suggest that the Abdals of Rum were a well-known and distinct dervish type.[223] More significantly, there were quite a few poets in the tenth/sixteenth century who were Abdals, if only for a certain period of their lives, or at least Abdals in character <em>(Abdal-mesreb).</em> Hasan Rumi, Seher Abdal, Siri, Muhyiddin Abdal and Feyzi Hasan Baba, all minor poets who survive only in name with at most a few poems to their credit, were probably Abdals.[224] ‘Asker10f Edirne, Kelami, Yetimi, Yemini, and Sems10f Seferihisar, better-known poets, were definitely Abdals. ‘Askeri, for instance, lived as an Abdal, frequenting the hospice of Seyyid Gazi as well as the tomb of the tenth Ithna ‘Ashari <em>imam</em> al-‘Askari (d. 254/ 868 in Samarra’)-hence his pen name-until he became the owner of considerable properties through a brief marriage.[225] Kelami appears to have been the follower of a certain HÜseyn Dede of the Abdals’ hospice in Karbala’, this being the only evidence for the existence of such a center of Abdal activity in that place. [226] Yetim10f Germiyan is expressly said to have lived at the Seyyid Gazi hospice itself.[227] Yemini, who composed in 925/1519 a long work in verse on the life and miracles of ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib entitled “The Book of the Virtues of ‘All, the Leader of the Faithful” <em>(Faziletname-i emrü’l-mü’minin ‘Ali),</em> was a disciple of the Abdal master Akyazlli Sultan, the preeminent disciple of Otman Baba.[228] Sems10f Seferihisar, the author of the work entitled “Ten Birds” <em>(Deh murg),</em> which brought him to the notice of Sultan Selim I (r. 918-26/1512-20), also seems to have been an Abdal and indeed was known as Isik Semsi. The chapter of the <em>Deh murg</em> devoted to the speech of the vulture (the “Abdal of the birds” in the poem) contains an accurate description of a typical Abdal that is in remarkable agreement with the reports of Vahidi and Menavino.[229]
Perhaps the most significant poet of all is the famous Hayreti (d. 941/1535) of Vardar Yenicesi, who not only referred to the Abdals of Asia Minor on numerous occasions in his poetry but also described and praised them in separate poems composed for this purpose.[230] Although these poems do not really add to our knowledge of the Abdals, they do serve to confirm it in many respects, especially since they were composed, for once, by a poet who openly declares his admiration for this much-criticized group of dervishes. Thus, Hayreti’s testimony establishes beyond doubt that the Abdals were fervent Twelver Shi’is, that they did indeed inflict wounds upon their bodies, and that they were very fond of consuming hashish and wine.[231] They did claim to have completely subdued the animal soul and to have attained the state of “death before death.”[232]
On a different note is the testimony of a certain ‘AbdÜlvehhab known as Vehhab-i Ümmi, said to have been a disciple of the Halveti Yigitçibasi Ahmed (d. 910/1504). In two poems which he composed in denunciation of the Abdals, Vehhab-i Ümmi provides us with an image that, apart from its negative tone, is very similar to that of Hayreti.[233]
More detailed information on the Abdals of Seyyid Gazi Ocagi itself, however, is to be found in the entry on ‘Isreti (d. 974/156667), himself not an Abdal, in the biographical dictionary of ‘Asik Çelebi. Upon being appointed the judge of Eskisehir through the influence of his benefactor, Sehzade Bayezid (d. 969/1562), shortly after the Ottoman campaign to Iran of 960-62/1553-55, ‘Isreti went on an inspection tour to the Seyyid Gazi hospice and reported his observations to Sultan Süleyman himself. [234] ‘Ireti’s report was presumably similar in content to ‘Asik Çelebi’s own description of the Abdals, colorful as usual:
<quote>
<em>The tekke</em> of Seydi Gazi in the province of Anatolia supported vice and immorality. [It was full of] vagabonds who had broken ties with their parents [and] run-aways who had become Isiks in search of a place in a hospice, singing in harmony like musical instruments, with faces that are free from the adornment of belief which is the beard, and their dark destinies [written on their foreheads] concealed by the clean-shaving of their eyebrows. Saying that their prayers had already been performed and their shrouds already sewn and fastened, they only uttered four <em>tekbtrs</em> at the times of the five daily prayers and did not take ablutions or await the prayer-call or heed the prayer-leader. They were a few gluttonous asses who survived on the alms-giving of sultans and charity of good people. Hoisting a different flag than that of Sultanöñü, they would raid the surrounding areas and would sound the horn of ridicule whenever they saw regiments of military commanders with banners and drumbeat. If the people of villages and cities were to heed the precedents [that the Abdals set], they would, like Deccal, follow their backs [that is, do everything in inverse order], would strip the maidens that they run into and would have them dress in their own manner. The student who fell out with his teacher, the provincial cavalry member [<em>sipahi</em>]who broke with his master [aga], and the beardless [youth] who got angry at his father would [all] cry out “Where is the Seyyid Gazi hospice?”; go there, take off their clothes, [be put in charge of] boiling cauldrons; and the Isiks would make them dance to their tunes, pretending that this is [what is intended by] mystical musical audition [<em>semd’</em>]and pleasure. For years on end, they remained the enemies of the religion and the religious and the haters of knowledge and the learned. According to their beliefs, they would not be true to the Truth if they did not show hostility to the people of the Law and would not be worthy of becoming a <em>mufred</em>[235] if they did not humiliate the judges.[236]
</quote>
Additional information about the tomb and hospice (<em>tekke</em>) <em>of</em> Seyyid Gazi itself in the tenth/sixteenth century is provided by archival documentation and, much later in mid-eleventh/seventeenth century, the travel accounts of Evliya Çelebi. [237] Significantly, it appears that the <em>tekke,</em> in its organization and social-economic activities, was no different from institutions of larger, well-established orders such as the Mevleviye and Halvetiye. Mosque, hostel, hospice, refectory, and center of pilgrimage in one, the <em>tekke,</em> which housed around two hundred servants and dervishes according to a document dated 935/1528-29, apparently never ceased to receive financial support from the central government.[238] The disciplinary measures adopted in various efforts to curb heretic practices never seem to have led to the total disruption of the activities of the <em>tekke.</em> Süleyman’s response to the above-mentioned report of ‘Ireti, for example, was to order the expulsion of recalcitrant heretics and the foundation of a <em>madrasah</em> on <em>tekke</em> grounds.[239] All the same, the establishment continued to function, if on a diminished scale, throughout the tenth/sixteenth and the first half of the following century.[240] The most significant development by this latter date, other than the decline of the <em>tekke</em> in economic terms, which was most likely connected more with downward trends in the overall agricultural economy than with disciplinary measures of the government against the foundation,[241] was the transformation of the longtime center of Abdal activity into a Bektasi center. When Evliya Çelebi visited the foundation around 1058/1648, he was entertained in a thoroughly Bektasi institution. In the absence of sufficient evidence, it is not possible to trace the different stages of this curious transformation, which, however, adequately reflects the final fate of the Abdals: gradual submersion in the growing and stronger network of the officially accepted Bektasiye.[242]
Although they are difficult to trace, it would appear that the same fate befell other Abdal centers as well. Other than the <em>tekke</em> in Karbala’, mention should be made, in the first instance, of two <em>tekkes</em> situated very near to Seyyid Gazi: that of ‘Uryan Baba in the village of Yazidere and that of Sultan Süca’ in the village of Aslanbey. Very little is known about the former, a modest construction consisting of a single room attached to ‘Uryan Baba’s tomb that appears to have been constructed at around the same time as the <em>tekkes</em> of Seyyid Gazi and Sultan Süca’ at the beginning of the tenth/sixteenth century.[243] Significantly, the name of the “master of the [present] master” of the Abdals in Vahidi’s <em>Menakib</em> is given as ‘Uryan Baba.[244] The other <em>tekke</em> in question was built in 921/1515-16 in the name of Sultan Süca’.[245] Although the activity of Abdals was concentrated around their main center in Seyyid Gazi, it was by no means restricted to midwestern Asia Minor. Indeed, Otman Baba, the patron saint of the group, whose historical personality is reasonably clear, appears to have spent the greater part of his life in the Balkans. His <em>zawiyah,</em> which can be traced back to the time of Süleyman (r. 926-74/1520-66) though probably built earlier, still stands today close to Uzuncaova between Haskovo and Harmanli in Bulgaria. [246]
Otman Baba had a number of disciples, at least some of whom seem to have followed his advice toward the end of his life that his dervishes should found <em>tekkes</em> and begin to lead settled lives. The most famous of such disciples was Akyazih Sultan, who, according to the testimony of his own follower Yemini (the above-mentioned poet), became the leader of Abdils in the year 901/1495-96 and still held that post when Yemini wrote his <em>Faziletname</em> in 925/1519.[247] The <em>tekke</em> of Akyazlll Sultan, still partially standing today north of Varna in Bulgaria, was evidently an impressive building. In or even before the eleventh/seventeenth century, it became one of the largest Bektasi centers in the Balkans.[248] Another disciple of Otman Baba was Koyun Baba, who apparently established a <em>zawiyah</em> in Osmancik, Amasya. He is mentioned in the hagiography of Otman Baba as Ank. obin and is thought to have died in 873/1468-69.[249] It is certain that close scrutiny of the sources will unearth many more members of the group.[250]
Abdals of Rum, Qalandars, and Haydaris were not the only groups of deviant renouncers in Ottoman lands at the turn of the tenth/ sixteenth century. There were several others, of which the Jami group is the easiest to trace in the sources.
*** Jamis
The earliest report on Jamis is found in the work of Spandugino, who said that the Jamis (“Diuami”) had the same outward appearance as Haydaris, except that they did not wear iron rings on their genitals. They asked for alms from anyone and chanted psalms.[251] Compared to this nondescript account, Vahidi’s description is much more colorful. Jamis had very long hair reaching down to the knees, matted and twisted like snakes. Their beards were clean-shaven, while their moustaches were left untouched. They were dressed in felt and wore earrings of Damascene iron on their right ears, iron rings on their wrists, and belts studded with bells on their waists. They wandered about barefoot. Vahidi assures his readers that Jamis were very proficient in music. Endowed with very pleasant and moving voices, they chanted prayers and eulogies to God to the accompaniment of tambourines and drums. They also consumed large quantities of wine.
Jamis maintained, still following Vahidi’s testimony, that long, matted hair symbolized the unbroken Jami tradition that enabled the dervishes to attain to the presence of (their eponymous leader) Ahmad of Jam in the hereafter. At the same time, long hair was also a sign of their spiritual descent from ‘Ali. Alternatively, if twisted locks of hair were taken to stand for wicks, the heart for an oil-container, and the body for a lamp, then the heads of the Jamis could be said to be afire with flames of love. Indeed, Jamis believed that they, especially their faces burning with the fire of love, were the source of light for the whole of creation. For this reason, they argued that the beard, which was like a cloud that stained the sun, should be shaved. The moustache, however, had to be grown, since the people of Paradise wear moustaches. Their earrings reminded Jamis not to listen to the words of anyone but ‘Ali. Iron bracelets demonstrated that Jamis do not have anything to do with the devil. Iron belts served as the anchor of the ship of existence (that is, the body), while bells were for musical harmony. They were indeed highly skilled in the art of music; their David-like voices were God-given gifts. Finally, Jamis had no worries concerning their livelihood, as God provided them their sustenance at all times. [252]
Equally detailed and informative is Menavino’s account on Jamis, reproduced here in full:
<quote>
The religion of Giomailer [Jams] is not far removed from this world. Mostly men of imposing stature, they generally love to travel through different lands like Barbary, Persia, India, and Turkey in order to see and understand the ways of the world. The majority of them are excellent artisans. They can give accounts of [the customs of] all the places that they have traveled to and are able to give answers about everything; they also keep written accounts of their travels. They are for the most part sons of noblemen, not less rich in goods than in nobility and are all perfectly literate, since they begin their studies at an early age. Their dresses, devoid of stitches and more often brown and purple in color, are worn wrapped around the shoulders. They wear belts of no mean beauty, entirely embroidered in gold and silk, at the ends of which are suspended bells of silver mixed with other metals that give out a very pleasant sound from far and near alike; each of them carries five or six of these bells, not only on their belts but also on their knees. Over their shoulders are hides, of some animal like lion, leopard, tiger, or panther, the legs of which are tied in the front. They have silver earrings on their ears and long hair reaching down onto the shoulders, like our women, and in order to make it longer, they have various tricks, using turpentine and varnish to attach another kind of hair (of which camlet is made) to their own, so that from a distance their hair appears to be of marvelous beauty and length. They spend more time for this than for their own vocation. They generally carry a book in their hands, written in Persian and containing amorous songs and sonnets composed in rhyme according to their custom. They do not wear anything on their heads, and on their feet are shoes made of ropes. When there is a group of them, the bells produce very pleasant sounds that give the listener great pleasure. If by chance they run into a youth in the street, they give him such a beautiful concert, taking him into their midst, that people gather round to listen, and while they sing, one in tenor and others in other voices, one of them sounds a bell in unison, and at the end all of them sound the bells of their girdles and knees altogether. They visit all artisans alike, and these latter give them one asper each. It is they who frequently incite a passionate love for themselves in women and young men. They wander about anywhere they please. The Mohammedans call them “men of the religion of love” and regard them as nonobservants, which is true. [253]
</quote>
In comparison to the lively accounts of Vahidi and Menavino, the latter repeated with few changes by Nicolas de Nicolay, the reports in other sources fade in importance.[254] Cumulatively, however, the relevant evidence is certainly sufficient to demonstrate that the Jamis were well known to the Ottoman populace of the first half of the tenth/sixteenth century as a distinct religious group. While the profile of the Jami movement during this period is thus clearly established, its historical origins remain obscure. The life and religious personality of the person whom the Jamis claimed as their spiritual leader, Shihab al-Din Abu Nasr Ahmad ibn Abi al-Hasan al-Namaqi al-Jami, known as Zhandah’Pil (441-536/1049-1141) has been studied in some detail. [255] From his prose works of certain attribution, it appears that Ahmad of Jam was a devout Sunni, eager to base Sufism, much like al-Kalabadhi (d. 380/990 or 384/994) and al-Qushayri (d. 465/1072), firmly on the Qur’an, the <em>sunnah,</em> and the <em>shari’ah.</em> A collection of Persian poems that circulates under his name, however, would make him out to be an ecstatic Sufi who harbored almost pantheistic views and is, therefore, of doubtful attribution.[256] Ahmad had a group of followers during his lifetime, though their fate after the death of the master is obscure. Ahmad’s descendants, however, continued to be revered as eminent religious personalities through the end of the ninth/fifteenth century.[257] It is thus quite difficult to explain when and how the later Jami dervishes in the Ottoman Empire have come into existence. One could only speculate that the same tendencies that led to the attribution of highly ecstatic poetry to Ahmad were also at work in the emergence of a group of distinctly antinomian dervishes who adopted him as their spiritual leader.
*** Shams-I Tabrizis
Vahidi, the incomparable observer of the Ottoman dervish scene at the beginning of the tenth/sixteenth century, included in his <em>Menakib</em> a brief description of the Shams-i Tabrizis, a group of dervishes otherwise unattested under this name.[258] The heads and faces of Shams-i Tabrizis were clean-shaven. They wore felt caps with flat tops, dressed in black and white felt cloaks, and were barefoot. They would frequently become intoxicated on wine, play drums and tambourines, and dance and chant prayers to God. They claimed to have achieved union with the Beloved and stated that the “sword of attainment” had shaved their hair. Itinerants and mendicants, they believed that they functioned as mirrors in which everyone could see his/her true self. They thus illuminated the world like the sun.
Shams of Tabriz (d. 645/1247), who was the spiritual mentor of Jalal al-Din Rimi (d. 672/1273), is not known to have started a spiritual path in his own name. He was, however, particularly revered by certain dervishes of the Mevleviye, the Sufi order that evolved around Rumi’s exemplary religious activity and took its name from Rumi’s sobriquet “Mawlana” (“our master”). The Mevleviye is commonly thought to have been inextricably associated with Ottoman high culture and thus <em>shari’rah-bound,</em> presumably because of the existence of good relations between the Ottoman court and major Mevlevi masters in late Ottoman history. In reality, the order harbored, from its inception, two conflicting modes of spirituality. The first was a socially conformist approach that tried to direct Rumi’s ecstatic piety into legally acceptable channels. The conformists were known collectively as the “arm of Veled” after Rumi’s son, Sultan Veled (d. 712/1312), who was rightly seen as the originator of this mode of piety. The second approach, however, took shape around the refusal to exercise any kind of control over ecstatic spiritual experience and was associated with the name of Shams of Tabriz. The social deviants were therefore known as “the arm of Shams.” The Shams-i Tabrizis of Vahidi were none other than the followers of Shams within the Mevleviye.
The arm of Shams had been in evidence since the early phases of the Mevlevl Order. Ulu ‘Arif Celebi (d. 720/1320), the grandson of Rumi and master of the path, openly consumed wine, eschewed social and religious convention, and maintained good relations with socially deviant dervishes, among them the followers of Barak Baba. The overvaluation of uncontrolled ecstasy seems to have peaked during the first half of the tenth/sixteenth century (when Vahidi wrote his account of Shams-i Tabrizis) around the figures of Yusuf Sineçak (d. 953/1546), Divane Mehmed Çelebi (died second half of the century), and the latter’s disciple Sahidi (d. 957/1550). These “Shamsians,” especially Divane Mehmed, were notorious for their open violation of and disregard for the <em>shar’ah.</em> They shaved their heads and faces, donned special caps with flat tops, consumed wine, and were generally noted for their flagrant unconventional social behavior. The chasm between them and the socially respectable Mevlevis must have been quite deep, since Vahidi treated them as two distinct groups, including separate descriptions of the Shams-i Tabrizis and Mevlevis, whom he praised for their compliance with the <em>shari’ah</em> and the <em>sunnah.</em> [259] The spiritual duality remained a characteristic of the order beyond the tenth/sixteenth century, and the Mevleviye continued to harbor the “Shamsian” trend until modern times.[260]
*** Bektasis
The Bektasis are well known to students of Ottoman history as a major Sufi order in Ottoman lands. The order took shape during the tenth/sixteenth century and exerted tremendous influence on all levels of Ottoman life during the next two centuries. [261] It is not generally known, however, that at the beginning of the tenth/sixteenth century, when Vahidi wrote his <em>Menakib</em> (completed in 929/1522), the Bektasis, far from being a Sufi order, were but one, and not even the largest, of the many distinct groups of socially deviant dervishes operating within Ottoman borders.
Vahidi’s account on the Bektasis is the earliest attestation of this group.[262] According to his description, the heads and faces of Bektasis were clean-shaven. They wore twelve-gored conical caps of white felt, two hands wide and two hands high. These caps were split in the front and in the back and ornamented with a button made of “Seyyid Gazi stone” (meerschaum?) at the top, with long woolen tassels reaching down to their shoulders. On four sides of the fold of the cap were written (I) “There is no God but God,” (2) “Muhammad is His messenger,” (3) “‘Ali Mürteza,” and (4) “Hasan and Hüseyn.” The dervishes were dressed in short, simple felt cloaks and tunics. They carried drums and tambourines as well as banners and chanted hymns and prayers. Bektasis, as reported by Vahidi, kept their faces and heads clean-shaven after the example of Haci Bektas, their spiritual leader, who, they believed, had lost all the hair on his head and face as a result of forty years of ascetic exercises on top of a tree. They also wore their caps as symbols of their submission to Haci Bektas. In a similar vein, the writings on the caps were intended as means of glorifying the Prophet, ‘Ali, Hasan, and Hüseyn. The button on the cap stood for the human head, since the Bektasis are in reality “beheaded dead people” <em>(ser-bÜnde mÜrde):</em> they had died before death. Indeed, Bektasis claimed to be none other than the hidden saints themselves.
Later Bektasi dervishes of the end of the tenth/sixteenth century and beyond were substantially different in both belief and practice from the Bektasis of the early tenth/sixteenth century as described by Vahidi.[263] These differences came about through a complicated process. During the tenth/sixteenth century, the Ottoman state, for various reasons, exerted increasing pressure upon socially deviant dervish groups. As a result, the Qalandars, Haydaris, Abdals of Rum, Jamis, and Shams-i Tabrizis lost vigor and ceased to exist as independent social collectivities, while the Bektasi dervish group was transformed into a full-fledged Sufi order that continued to uphold the legacy of deviant renunciation. The reason for the success of the Bektasis was their firm connection with the Ottoman military system: the Janissaries, by long-standing tradition, paid allegiance to Haci Bektas, the patron saint of the Bektasi group. [264] Armed with this advantage, the Bektasi allegiance became the privileged ideological discourse of renunciation and was actively adopted during the course of the tenth/sixteenth century by the other dervish groups, with the exception of the “Shamsians” who had a safe refuge in their parent organization, the Mevleviye. The “classical” Bektasi Order of the later Ottoman periods thus arose as a fusion of the beliefs and practices of the earlier Qalandars, Haydaris, and Abdals of Rum as well as the original Bektasis described by Vahidi.[265]
** Chapter Seven. Renunciation in the Later Middle Period
Movements of deviant renunciation took shape under particular social and cultural circumstances. The Qalandariyah and the Haydariyah first flourished in the Arab Middle East and Iran in the seventh-eighth/thirteenth-fourteenth centuries, simultaneously spreading to Muslim India in the east and Anatolia in the west. The Abdals of Rum, by contrast, attained their apogee in the second half of the ninth/fifteenth and the first half of the tenth/sixteenth centuries. They were, moreover, on the whole restricted to Ottoman lands in Anatolia and the Balkans. Significantly, the rise to prominence of this particularly Ottoman group was accompanied by a revivification of the older movements of the Qalandariyah and the Haydariyah in the same period and same geographical area.
The Qalandars, Haydaris, and Abdals of Rum were, however, only the most prominent in spread and duration, so far as this is reflected in historical sources, of the ascetic dervish groups of the Later Middle Period. There were many others. The followers of Barak Baba emerged as a separate dervish band in Asia Minor and western Iran shortly after the formation of the Qalandariyah and the Haydariyah during the seventh/thirteenth century. Later, while the Abdals of Rum were active in Ottoman lands, other dervish groupsthe Jamis, Shams-i Tabrizis, and early Bektasis and the Jalalis and Madaris made their presence felt in Asia Minor and in India, respectively.
What the Arab Middle East and Muslim India in the seventh-eighth/thirteenth-fourteenth century had in common with Ottoman Anatolia in the late ninth/fifteenth century was the presence of societal conditions that allowed the firm and decisive incorporation of institutional Sufism into the social fabric of everyday life. In the Fertile Crescent, the spread of institutional Sufism, already set in motion by the Selçukids, was clearly associated with the devoted patronage of the ruling Ayyubid elite, who were responsible for the construction of numerous hospices as well as the establishment of pious endowments of all sizes for the Sufis. The policies of the Ayyubids, continued by their successors the Bahri Mamluks, were paralleled by those of the ruling classes of the Sultanate of Delhi in India, where the Chishti, Suhrawardi, and Qadir10rders rapidly became ineradicably implanted in Indian Muslim culture. However, in Asia Minor, and to a certain extent in Iran, the spread of the Suf10rders <em>(tariqahs)</em> was delayed considerably owing to a social upheaval of the first order-the Mongol invasions, which were followed by unprecedented social and cultural instability as well as political fragmentation. When, after the first quarter of the ninth/fifteenth century, a remarkable degree of political and cultural unity was achieved under the Timurids in Khorasan and Transoxania as well as the Ottomans in Anatolia and the Balkans, the <em>tariqahs</em> rapidly asserted themselves in the form of the Naqshbandiyah in the case of the Timurids and initially the looser Bayramiye and later the Halvetiye and Zeyniye in that of the Ottomans, to mention only the most important.
The antinomian rejection of society represented by deviant dervish groups developed concomitantly with, and primarily in reaction to, the organized Sufism of the socially respectable <em>tariqahs.</em> The former trod in the footsteps of the latter and inevitably surfaced in places where institutional Sufism had taken root. Before reviewing the complicated relationship between organized Sufism and socially deviant renunciation, however, a typological account of the institutionalization of Sufism will be useful.
*** Institutional Sufism
Sufism, as noted earlier, developed primarily in Iraq as a brilliant synthesis of world-affirming and world-denying tendencies within Islam during the third-fourth/ninth-tenth centuries. It quickly and successfully domesticated the powerful renunciative movement active in that region by absorbing asceticism and transforming it into a step in a larger process of spiritual purification. Partly on account of this success and partly owing to the attractive power of its socially tame individualism, Sufi piety began to appeal to ever greater numbers of the “people of the community,” in particular the religious scholars. At first tenuous, this nascent alliance between Sufism and the thoroughly populist piety of the religious scholars (<em>‘ulama’</em>)demonstrated its social efficacy when it completely absorbed or neutralized Malamati and Karrami trends in Khorasan, culturally the second most developed region of Islamdom after Iraq during the fourth-fifth/ tenth-eleventh centuries.
During late High Caliphal times and the first century of the Early Middle Period (fourth-fifth/tenth-eleventh centuries), Sufism was thus poised to become a major building block of the new international Islamic social order that was taking shape after the collapse of the ‘Abbasid Empire. [266] The inner-worldly mystical outlook of Sufism, with its distinctive conceptual framework now largely in place, was about to step into the social arena to transform society along channels that conformed to this new worldview. The social mission of Sufism, which was, in broad terms, to infuse all levels of social life with Sufi ideas and practices, was accomplished through the progressive unfolding of two closely related processes, the rise of the <em>tariqah</em> and the development of popular cults around the friends of God, the <em>awliya’.</em>
During the course of the Early Middle Period, Sufi ideas and practices were subjected to a far-reaching process of organization and regularization that led, at the end of the period, to the emergence and spread of a new social institution, the <em>tariqah.</em> The evolution of this socially most significant phase of Sufism, hitherto studied only in its barest outlines, followed different timetables in different regions of Islamdom, which consisted of many distinct political and cultural components.[267] The contours of the <em>tariqah</em> were the same everywhere, however, and can be described along diachronic and synchronic axes.
The central feature of the <em>tariqah</em> on the diachronic level was the establishment of a <em>silsilah,</em> the temporal propagation of a master’s teaching in the form of a continuous chain of authorities. The <em>silsilah</em> is best visualized as a spiritual chain of intermediaries. It served simultaneously to perpetuate the example of a particular Sufi master and to create a single spiritual family of adherents around his “path.” When they were later extended backward in time from the founding masters to the Prophet Muhammad through members of his family or the first caliph, Abu Bakr (d. 13/634), <em>silsilahs</em> also provided religious legitimacy to the Sufi paths by linking them directly to the <em>sunnah.</em> [268]
The elevation of the religious example of a historical figure to the seat of transgenerational authority was by no means peculiar to Sufism. The rise of a class of intermediaries between God and the community in the form of a set of pious forefathers was a feature shared by all areas of religious learning in the Early Middle Period. This mediationist mode of religiosity, always kept alive by the Shi’i tradition, was behind not only the development and consolidation of the four Sunni legal schools but also the concomitant phenomenon of imitation <em>(taqlid)</em> of pious forefathers, which crystallized at the end of this period in the form of clearly articulated intellectual positions. It was a sign of the increasingly communal nature of the mission of Sufism that it too participated vigorously in the creation of the mediating <em>religiosi.</em> The Sufi masters now stepped out of their restricted social enclaves to embrace the Muslim community at large, and their spiritual and physical presence became evident in the form of great numbers of tomb-complexes that punctuated the landscape of Islamdom with ever increasing frequency.
The creation of mediating hierarchies on the diachronic level was accompanied by the construction of mediating structures on the synchronic level, reflected in the gradual replacement of the looser teacher-pupil relationship of “classical” Sufism by one of director and disciple. The process involved four elements.
1. Physical concentration of directors and disciples within the confines of a single residential quarter, the Sufi lodge or hospice <em>(khanqah, zawiyah, tekke, dargah).</em>
2. Careful delineation of a group identity through the development of distinct rites and practices for the core members of the <em>tariqah.</em> The most significant of these included (a) the initiation ceremony, which marked entry into the group through specific rites such as investiture with the woolen habit and cutting of the hair; (b) the stipulation of distinct spiritual disciplines and techniques such as the mystical prayer <em>(dhikr),</em> mystical audition sometimes accompanied by ritual dance <em>(sama’</em>)<em>,</em> and regulated seclusion <em>(khalwah);</em> (c) the specification of special apparel and paraphernalia; and (d) the adoption of a series of injunctions that regulated all other aspects of disciples’ lives such as moral etiquette and economic behavior.
3. Articulation of a distinct spiritual path to be traversed by all disciples and to be enforced on them by the master.
4. Propagation of the master’s teaching from the center toward the community in the form of rippling group identities. When fully realized, this hierarchy of groups included the grades of director <em>(shaykh, pir, murshid),</em> subordinate leader <em>(khallfah, muqaddam),</em> disciple <em>(murrd),</em> associate or lay affiliate, and sympathizer. The core of the <em>tariqah</em> was thus surrounded by social factions on several levels. [269]
The formation of institutional Sufism was not completed with the full-fledged development of the tariqah. Sufism grew deeper institutional roots in society with the evolution of popular cults around the <em>awliya’</em> or friends of God. Although the cult of the <em>awliya’,</em> defined as “an ideological and ritual complex,” should analytically be distinguished from the <em>tariqah</em> as “a form of religious association,” the ideational and practical overlap between the two phenomena is remarkable.[270] From the perspective of the present study, the significant point is that the cult of the <em>awliya’</em> proved to be fertile ground for the propagation, admittedly in transmuted fashion, of Sufi ideas and practices. The entire ideological component of the <em>awliya’</em> cultsainthood <em>(walayah)</em> and many of its ritual aspects such as the communal <em>dhikr</em> and/or <em>sama’was</em> adapted from Sufism. Other constituent elements, most notably the <em>ziyarah</em> (visitation of tombs and related holy sites), have their origins outside Sufism proper.
The complicated history of the <em>awliya’</em> cult remains to be written.[271] It is clear, however, that its widespread dissemination occurred concomitantly with the formation of the Suf10rders during the sixth-seventh/twelfth-thirteenth centuries. Whatever the exact nature of the relationship between these two processes, there is no doubt hat they were closely intertwined. Sufism supplied the theoretical underpinning of the <em>awliya’</em> cult, while the cult ensured the entrenchment of the orders in all social strata. The <em>tariqah</em> and the saint cult came to function as two sides of the same coin.
Although the evolution of the Suf10rders and of the popular saint cults around them took place along different routes in different regions of Islamdom, the major characteristics of this process remained the same everywhere. The legal institution of the charitable endowment <em>(waqf)</em> was the most prominent instrument in the creation of Sufi social agencies. The wealthy upper classes, especially the political elites, endowed numerous facilities for the use of Sufis. In Syria, Iraq, and Egypt, the Ayyubids and the Bahri Mamluks were committed to the idea of the “royal hospice” <em>(khanqah),</em> grandiose establishments totally controlled by the state that were normally used to house foreign Sufis, though these were counterbalanced from the beginning, and superseded from the end of the ninth/fifteenth century, by modest personal lodges <em>(zawiyas)</em> of the <em>tariqah</em> Sufis. [272] In India, the political elites successfully extended their patronage to the Suhrawardiyah and, over time, even to the Chishtiyah, an order in which any form of contact with the state was strongly discouraged.[273] In Asia Minor, the Ottomans, ever respectful of the Sufis, began to support the older Mevleviye and the nascent Halvetiye and Zeyniye extensively during the late ninth/fifteenth and early tenth/sixteenth centuries.[274] Patronage by political elites was, however, only the most prominent sign of the spread of Sufi piety throughout Islamic societies of the Early Middle Period. Sufism gradually became a respectable, and even desirable, vocation among the cultural elites as a whole and emerged as an integral, perhaps the key, component of Islamic high culture. Having secured more than a firm foothold in upper urban society and its culture, it rapidly permeated all social and cultural strata, adapting to lower urban and rural culture with remarkable ease. Sufi piety thus emerged as a “mainstay of the international social order.”[275]
*** Deviant Renunciation as a Protest Against Institutional Sufism
The growth of institutional Sufism produced a strong reaction from within its own ranks to the increasing this-worldliness of the <em>tariqah</em> and the saint cult, which exhibited a considerable degree of accommodation with the ruling political and cultural elites. Growing institutionalization entailed the establishment and preservation of close ties with the wealthy and power-holding classes of society. Such worldly connections intensified the communal tendency within Sufism at the expense of its individualist core and increased the tension between its world-embracing and world-denying aspects. Ascetic renunciation, absorbed and domesticated by Sufism, now resurfaced along the fault line created by this tension as a radical critique of coopted Sufi religiosity. In this process, it joined forces with anarchist individualism, a latent but potent current within Sufism.
World-renouncing dervish groups were radical protest movements directed against medieval Islamic society at large but, more specifically, against the kindred but socially respectable institution of the <em>tariqah.</em> [276]The tension between the dervish group and the Sufi <em>tariqah</em> is well documented in the sources. The founder of the Qalandariyah himself, Jamal al-Din Savi, was reacting against his own erstwhile Sufi training, which he apparently had received under his mainstream master ‘Uthman Rumi, when he broke away to embark on a distinctively ascetic saintly career. The story of his conversion to the path of renunciation leaves no doubt that he decisively rejected not only his Sufi past but, by all indications, a successful future as a Sufi master. And, as some reports suggest, he may have been denounced in the process by ‘Uthman Rumi. The same may have been true of Qutb al-Din Haydar’s relationship with the Sufi master Luqman-i Parandah. The hostile and aggressive behavior of some later Qalandars against reputed shaykhs of established Sufi <em>tariqahs</em> such as the Suhrawardi Baha’ al-Din Zakariya and the Chishti Farid al-Din Ganji Shakar; their assassination attempts against the latter, Nasir al-Din Chiragh-i Dihli, and Ibrahim Gilani; and the openly contemptuous attitude of the Abdal Otman Baba against all Sufi shaykhs demonstrate the explosive nature of the tension between ascetic renunciation and institutional Sufism. The reverse side of the coin was, of course, the summary and often angry dismissal of renouncers by many mainstream Sufis such as ‘Uthman Rumi, Ibrahim Gilani, and Muhammad Gisu’daraz, not to mention the Ottoman Vahidi, who produced a book-length denunciation of deviant dervishes.
It is not enough to characterize the conflict between Sufi piety and dervish religiosity as simple mutual hostility, however. It would be more accurate to compare this relationship to the complex bond between “socially conformist” parents and their “rebellious” offspring. Thus, although the dervishes vociferously rejected the main features of institutional Sufism, in the final analysis they could not help but retain essentially Sufi beliefs and practices. The <em>tariqah</em> determined the general pattern and shape of its shadow counterpart, the dervish group. The latter was a mirror image, in its negation, of the former. Thus, the general structure of the loose dervish group, complete with eponymous master, actual leader, distinctive apparel, and paraphernalia as well as peculiar practices, reflected the structure of the <em>tariqah.</em> Just as members of Suf10rders traced their spiritual lineage back to founding masters, the dervishes too harkened back to exemplary figures like Jamal al-Din, Qutb al-Din, and Otman Baba. As in the case of Haydaris, Jamis, Shams-i Tabrizis, and Jalalis, they were at times even known by the name of their founding fathers. Similarly, all major dervish groups were headed by elders experienced in the path of renunciation, so that the director-disciple relationship that was so central to the orders was reproduced in some fashion in dervish communities. Nor were the dervishes averse to constructing a socially visible group identity for themselves by means of distinctive clothing as well as the adoption of peculiar accoutrements. They even utilized, though naturally only after radical remodeling, timehonored Suf10ptions like the woolen habit, the dervish headgear <em>(taj),</em> and the staff. Here their penchant to cultivate and preserve separate group affiliations clearly paralleled Sufi predilection for paying allegiance to distinct orders. Finally, although we are not well informed on dervish rites and rituals, it is likely that here too their practices mirrored, if only by contrast, those of the <em>tariqahs.</em>
In the realm of ideas, the parentage of Sufism is equally obvious. The dervishes appropriated Sufi conceptual complexes like <em>faqr</em> (poverty), <em>fana’</em> (passing away of the self), and <em>walayah</em> (sainthood), but applied extremist and radical interpretations to them. Indeed, the essential traits of dervish piety, asceticism, rejection of society, and uncompromising individualism can all be traced back, in theory if not always in practice, to such radical reinterpretations. The early Qalandars and probably the Haydaris, for instance, apparently worked the concept of poverty to its logical conclusions. The later Abdals, for their part, were engrossed in their own understanding of <em>walayah,</em> which in their eyes gave them license to reject the claims of Sufis to be the friends of God. Like many Sufis, most dervishes seem to have possessed the certainty of being infused with God’s grace and provided typically Sufi explanations for this privilege.
The parent-offspring analogy can be pressed even further if we turn our attention to the question of recruitment to the path of renunciation. Close scrutiny of the biographies of prominent dervishes reveals a typical pattern: a male adult member of the cultural elite (the same social stratum from which Sufism normally recruited), with a bright future in front of him if still young or a fairly distinguished career behind him if middle-aged or elderly, rejects his cultural status and becomes a dervish. A clear case in point is that of Jamal al-Din Savi. The degree of learning that he displayed as a young man prior to his conversion, heavily emphasized in his sacred biography, is also attested by the fact that he was called “the walking library” as well as by his recorded attempt to compose at least a partial exegesis of the Qur’an. The cases of the celebrated Persian poet Fakhr al-Din ‘Iraqi, who joined the Qalandars as an impeccably educated young man of about seventeen years of age; the writer and poet Hamid Qalandar (d. after 754/1353), who became a Qalandar in adolescence; the Ottoman Mevlana Esrefzade Muhyiddin Mehmed (fl. during the reign of Mehmed II), who gave up a life of religious scholarship in order to join a group of Qalandars; and the Ottoman poet Hayali Beg (fl. first half of the tenth/sixteenth century) all conform to this pattern. Further instances of such, especially youthful, conversion from the elite to the dervish way of life are found in the biographies of the proto-Abdals Barak Baba, whose father was a military commander and uncle a famous clerk; Kaygusuz Abdal (d. the first quarter of the ninth/fifteenth century), who was the son of a local ruler; Qutb al-Din Haydar, said to be the son of a Turkish sultan; the Qalandar Khatib Farisi (d. after 748/1347-48), who converted to the Qalandari path as a young man in search of wisdom and spiritual enlightenment; and the poet Hayreti, who chose the Abdal path in his youth.
Our evidence suggests, therefore, that the architects and key personalities of dervish piety were mostly young dissenters from the elite. To judge by the examples enumerated, the precondition for becoming a dervish would appear to have been access, or guaranteed entry, to high culture. The direct connection between high culture and dervish piety is demonstrated both by the elite social background of prominent dervishes and by the presence of proficient poets and writers among them. In a similar vein, the veneration extended to dervishes by many a political ruler should be seen as further proof of the close ties between ascetic renunciation and elite culture. The examples of the Mamluks al-Malik al-Zahir and Kitbugha, who highly revered the Qalandari leaders Muhammad al-Balkhi and Hasan al-Jawalaqi, respectively; the Khalji Firuz’Shah II in India, who freely associated with Abu Bakr Tusi Haydari, and Tughril, the rebel governor of Bengal, who extended gifts to an anonymous Qalandar and his companions; and the Ottoman Murad II, who had a mosque built in Anatolia in the name of Sultan Süca’, demonstrate that deviant dervishes exercised a degree of influence, probably owing to shared cultural origin, on power-holding classes. Deviant renunciation, it appears, took shape through the formative activities of dissenters from the cultural and political elite. In a very real sense, the dervishes were the offspring of socially respectable Sufis. [277]
At this point, it should no longer be surprising that youths seem to have been exceptionally responsive to the dervish calling or that the dervishes themselves apparently took a special interest in adolescents and young men. The story of Jamal al-Din’s conversion as a young man under the influence of a most peculiar boy called Jalal al-Din Darguzini sets the tone in this regard. Thereafter, the Qalandars were frequently accused of attempting to entice children into adopting their own way of life, as attested, for instance, by the invective of the Chishti Muhammad Gisu’daraz against them. Practically all of the examples of conversion to the dervish path enumerated above provide testimony to the validity of this claim. The irresistible pull of renunciation over young males is also recorded in the verses of Sa’di:
<quote>
Where there’s a son who sits among the Qalandars
<br>
Tell the father he may wash his hands of any good for him;
<br>
Grieve not for his destruction, ruin:
<br>
Better that one disowned should die before his father![278]
</quote>
Much later, in Ottoman Anatolia, there were considerable numbers of learned youths as well as adolescents who specialized in serving hashish among the Abdals, while the Jamis, themselves mostly young men of distinguished descent, paid special attention to men of the same age.
The new renunciation was, therefore, the offspring, in all senses of the word, of institutional Sufism. The two modes of piety were too intimately related to exist in continuous mutual antagonism. If the this-worldly orders were at times ready, out of not only political expediency but genuine attraction and sympathy, to accommodate their disturbingly antisocial counterparts within their own ranks, the deviant dervishes for their part, having manifested a considerable degree of institutionalization from their very first days, were not always reluctant to be invested with a certain degree of social recognition. It may have been a combination of these two factors that lay behind the emergence of not only suborders such as the Chishtiyah-Qalandariyah in India but also antinomian orders such as the Bekta-Siye in the Ottoman Empire. The accommodation of dervish piety by institutional Sufism was already signaled by the tolerant attitude of prominent orders’ shaykhs such as Baha’ al-Din Zakariya’, Farid al-Din Ganj-i Shakar, and Nasir al-Din Chiragh-i Dihli toward the Qalandars, including even those who were downright hostile to them. In this connection, the fascination of celebrated Sufi poets with Qalandari themes, as attested by the numerous examples of <em>Qalandariyat</em> in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish Sufi poetry, adequately demonstrates the attractive power that deviant rejection of society exercised on the hearts and minds of the Sufis. In spite of the verses of Sa’di, Sufi parents could not totally disown their offspring. For their part, the latter could hardly resist the inexorable pull of institutionalization that operated within Sufism in particular and within Islamic societies in general. There were strong social pressures to conform to the formidable demand coming from political powers anxious to provide religious legitimacy to their sovereignty by safeguarding the <em>shari’ah.</em> This was definitely the case in the Ottoman Empire, where the dervish groups must have felt the necessity to acquire sufficient respectability to avoid severe persecution by the state. Presumably, this problem was particularly acute for the Abdals, who openly professed Shi’i beliefs, probably as a result of their attempt to negate the dominant Sufi-Sunni alliance within the empire. It is plausible, therefore, that they should, whether deliberately or in the course of time, have joined the ranks of the Bektasis, who were given official approval owing to their unbreachable connections with the backbone of the Ottoman army, the Janissaries. Other dervish groups, notably the Qalandars and Haydaris, followed suit. The definitive establishment of the great regional empires of the Ottomans, Safavids, Üzbeks, and Mughals during the tenth/sixteenth century led, therefore, to the return of the rebellious, if not prodigal, son to the household.
The Later Middle Period witnessed the spread and entrenchment of the new Islamic social institutions of the <em>tariqah</em> and the <em>madrasah.</em> These institutions themselves were the products of momentous social transformations that occurred in Islamdom in the Early Middle Period. From the perspective of this study, the most significant overall feature of this latter phase of Islamic history was the decisive triumph of this-worldly religiosity in the form of a powerful SunniSufi alliance. The decisive triumph of the communal tendency within Sufism as manifested in the establishment of the <em>tariqahs</em> signaled the attenuation of its other-worldly dimensions. This forceful turn toward this-worldly piety generated a strong other-worldly reaction within Sufism by reactivating its latent renunciatory potentials. The ascetic and anarchist individualist trends gained renewed vigor and broke into the open as socially distinct movements of deviant renunciation. The institutional Sufism of the <em>tariqahs</em> thus directly engendered and in the long run determined the nature and shape of the dervish group. The latter mirrored, in its very negation and if only in mockery, practically all aspects of the former. The relationship between the <em>tariqah</em> and the dervish group was, nevertheless, not exclusively one of mutual antagonism. The institutionalization of Sufism did not mean the complete devaluation of the Sufi respect and admiration for the option of contemplative flight from the world, and many prominent Sufis looked upon the dervishes with sympathy and fascination. For their part, the dervishes could never completely sever the umbilical cord that connected them to Sufism. The volatile bond between the two related modes of piety thus remained operative in spite of the confrontational nature of the relationship between them.
** Chapter Eight. Conclusion
Intriguing in dress, behavior, and mode of piety, yet socially and legally marginal, the mendicant dervishes of Islamdom in the Later Middle Period have remained enigmatic figures for modern students of Islamic history. Little scholarly interest has been directed to them; by and large scholars have fallen victim to the temptation to view them through the distorting prism of “popular religion,” an allinclusive and ill-defined concept used to explain away religious phenomena resistant to the smooth application of simplistic models of Islamic religiosity. As a result of such neglect and carelessness, dervish piety has been obsured beyond recognition and generally ignored in favor of research into “mainstream” religious phenomena.
The history of the new renunciation as reconstructed here demonstrates clearly that what may from a distance appear to have been a confused and amorphous dervish movement in fact consisted of a set of clearly differentiated religious collectivities that maintained their distinct identities over time and space. In spite of a considerable degree of fluidity in appellation, the Qalandars, Haydaris, Abdals of Rum, and others were essentially separate dervish groups. The uncontrolled ecstasy of the Abdals of Rum diverged considerably from the learned gaiety of the Jamis, while both of these groups stood quite apart from the fierce asceticism of the Haydaris and the early Qalandars. The acknowledgment of the existence of noticeably demarcated currents of dervish piety does not, of course, imply that the lines of differentiation among different groups remained unchanged throughout the Later Middle Period and over a vast geographical area of extreme cultural diversity. The suggestion is not that there was an unbridgeable separation among the groups that prevented interaction, interpenetration, or merger. In fact, it is highly likely, though impossible to document, that dervish bands heavily influenced each other. Rather, the argument is that there were, in any given temporally and spatially specific cultural sphere, several socially and ideally distinct types of dervish piety. Outsiders to dervish piety, Muslim and non-Muslim, frequently confused these types, yet the same cannot be said for the dervishes themselves, who appear to have been highly conscious of their own distinctive group identities.
The defining characteristic of dervish piety was socially deviant renunciation. Briefly, the adoption of the radically ascetic practices of poverty, mendicancy, itinerancy, celibacy, and self-inflicted pain can be understood properly only in the context of the dervishes’ rejection of society, the basic institutions of which they regarded as unsuitable and unconducive to other-worldly salvation. Thus salvation lay in active and socially conspicuous renunciation of society through uncompromisingly antisocial practices.
Renunciation was not particular to the Islamic Later Middle Period. High Caliphal times, usually and rightly portrayed as an intensely this-worldly phase of Islamic history, also generated powerful movements of other-worldly renunciation, which remained active through the Early Middle Period. The early ascetic movement of the first two Islamic centuries in the Fertile Crescent was followed by Karramiyah that spread chiefly in eastern Iran. In the long run, both of these movements were neutralized by the Sufi mode of piety, mainly because of its successful synthesis of other-worldly and this-worldly tendencies. Neutralization, however, did not entail destruction, and the legacy of asceticism remained potent within Sufism. In addition, Sufism itself carried the seeds of another, if related, kind of renunciationanarchist individualism. The temptation for Sufis to cross the threshold between inner-worldly mystical activity and contemplative flight always remained close to the surface.
During the Early Middle Period, Sufism and Sunnism, now in close if not untroubled alliance, became the major constituents of the new Islamic social order that emerged after the disintegration of the universalist ‘Abbasid dispensation. The this-worldly potential of Sufism was actualized in full force and speed with the emergence of the Sufi <em>tarnqah</em> and the Sufi-colored institution of the cult of <em>awliya’</em> throughout Islamdom. The entrenchment of Sufism in society in the form of ubiquitous social institutions refranchised the dormant otherworldly trends of renunciation and anarchist individualism within Sufism. While anarchist individualism surfaced early in the form of the literary and idealized Qalandar-topos, other-worldly trends soon won the day by harnessing anarchism and asceticism to the cause of renunciation. Deviant renunciation thus reclaimed its place on the agenda of Islamic religiosity as the active negation of institutional Sufism.
The relationship between institutional Sufism and dervish movements was a familial one. The latter emerged from the bosom of the former as rebel progeny who reflected, if negatively, the parent <em>tariqahs.</em> The dervish groups closely resembled the Suf10rders in ideology and organization, if only in conscious mockery. The bond that held the two broad social collectivities together was, so to speak, organic so that their respective historical trajectories remained permanently intertwined. Where and whenever the <em>tarqahs</em> entrenched themselves in the fabric of Islamic society, the otherworldly dervishes inevitably followed suit. Moreover, the relationship between Sufi and dervish piety was multidimensional. On both sides, antagonism was accompanied by respect, at times even admiration. In particular, the Sufis, in true this-worldly fashion, proved themselves to be sufficiently resilient to accommodate their rebellious brothers in their midst even beyond the ninth/fifteenth century during the period of the great regional empires.
Perhaps the most specific question that has arisen in the course of this study is one that can be dubbed the “ethnic connection.” Thus, it is noteworthy that the movements of new renunciation arose primarily in the Iranian, Turkish, and Indian cultural spheres and that, conversely, there were no “indigenous” major dervish movements within predominantly Arab regions. Even the Qalandariyah, although it took shape in the Fertile Crescent, remained a non-Arab, chiefly Iranian mode of piety, at least throughout the seventh-eighth/ thirteenth-fourteenth centuries, and much the same can be said of the Haydariyah during that period. Later, similar groups were active among non-Arab populations of the Ottoman Empire and northern India. It appears, therefore, that the new renunciation did not resonate with prevalent modes of religiosity in the Arab cultural spheres of Islamdom. In spite of similarities on the surface, the popular Arab Sufi movements of the Rifa’iyah, the Badawiyah, and, in the Maghrib, the ‘Isawah did not uphold the basic principles of deviant renunciation. These appear, rather, to have been regular <em>tariqahs</em> that did not practice asceticism and antinomianism on a permanent basis and were not radical protest movements directed against Islamic society at large. The reasons behind such divergent development of piety within different cultural spheres must remain unexplored in this study. It is possible, of course, that closer scrutiny of the Arab scene in the Later Middle Period will modify and refine the picture drawn here.
A second question is whether the same forces that generated the movements of deviant renunciation from within institutional Sufism were not also at work in other aspects of Islamic religiosity during the same period. More specifically, it seems legitimate to inquire if the ascendancy of the <em>madrasah,</em> like that of the <em>tariqah,</em> did not produce a reaction among the <em>‘ulama’</em> against the increasing, or at the very least potential, this-worldliness of <em>madrasah-piety.</em> From this vantage-point, it is tempting to see just such a reaction in the lifelong religious activity of Ibn Taymiyah (d. 728/1328) and much later in the religious legacy of his Ottoman counterpart, Mehmed Birgivi (d. 981/1573). Both figures clashed all too frequently with socially respected and politically well-placed <em>‘ulamad</em> precisely over issues that can be seen as measures of the degree of <em>‘ulama’-co-optation</em> with society (namely, popular religion, especially the cult of <em>awliya’</em>)and <em>‘ulama’</em> willingness to exercise “extreme” flexibility on politically and socially sensitive issues. [279] The suggestion here is that there may be a connection between puritanical reformism as an intellectual current on the one hand and the thorough dominance of this-worldly piety among religious scholars on the other hand. This point clearly needs to be developed further and tested independently. In this connection, the idea of searching for critical reactions among the religious scholars to the entrenchment of the <em>madrasah</em> in Islamic society is certainly worthy of serious consideration.
A third and methodologically the most interesting question has to do with the social and economic factors behind the emergence and spread of the movements of new renunciation. On a general level, it is possible to associate ascetic world-rejection in premodern societies with urban as opposed to rural society. Renunciatory ideals were clearly the products of urban civilization.[280] The more meaningful question, however, is whether one can go beyond such a simple correlation to assert the existence of a close connection between social prominence of religious ideals based on the concept of poverty on the one hand and the ascendancy of commercial capital within urban economies on the other. A strong argument along these lines has been elaborated for European history for the period between 1000 and 1300. [281] Since the relative strength of merchant capital within the economies of Islamic societies especially during the High Caliphal and Early Middle Periods is a generally accepted feature of Islamic economic history, it seems possible to see the same connection between “voluntary poverty” and the “profit economy” operative throughout Islamic history as well. Once again, however, this must remain at best a tentative suggestion at this point.
Finally, the temporal correspondence between the rise of the mendicant orders, especially the Franciscans and Dominicans, in Europe and that of the dervish groups, in particular the Qalandars and Haydaris, in Islamdom makes one wonder if there was any connection between these two parallel developments. The question is highly intriguing, yet the absence of a critical mass of scholarly work on the economic history of Islamdom during the period in question makes it difficult if not impossible to answer. Recent work in world history suggests, however, that the possibility of unearthing such connections, at least on the economic level, between different cultural spheres is a real one and should be borne in mind in future research directed to this issue.[282]
Given that so many Muslim individuals actually converted to the dervish way of life during the Later Middle Period, the modern historian of religion has the responsibility to approach this phenomenon with genuine concern and respect. The temptation to explain dervish piety away as being peculiar to “less capable” members of Islamic society should be resisted. If nothing else, this study demonstrates clearly that such basic respect for the human subjects of historical study inevitably opens up new and fruitful avenues of research.
The attempt to retrace the historical trajectory of the dervish groups has led us through all major cultural spheres of Islamdom in the Later Middle Period. The true nature and significance of the Qalandars and the Haydaris as well as of the culturally more specific groups like the Abdals of Rum, Jamis, Madaris, and Jalalis emerged only after such a broad cross-cultural investigation. Notwithstanding the crucial role of culturally and regionally restricted case studies, it should now be obvious that there is a distinct need to adopt holistic inclusive perspectives in the study of the history of premodern Islamic religion.
In a similar vein, the results of a close scrutiny of dervish piety contain a strong warning against the scholarly tendency to avoid what are generally assumed to be “marginal” religious phenomena. This inquiry into “marginal” dervish groups leads to a new understanding of the place of renunciatory trends in the history of Islamic religion in general and within Sufism in particular. Moreover, it casts new light on Sufism itself, which can now be viewed as the successful development of a this-worldly mystical piety within Islam. Nothing, it appears, is marginal in the history of religions.
** Abbreviations
|+ +|
| Abdal | Küçük Abdal. <em>Velayetname-i Sultan Otman Baba.</em> Ms. Adnan Ötüken Il Halk Kütüphanesi (Ankara), no. 495, dated 1316/1899. Copyist Hasan Tebrizi. |
| Aflaki | Shams al-Din Ahmad al-‘Arifi al-Aflaki. <em>Manaqib al-‘arifin.</em> Edited by Tahsin Yazici. |
| ‘Asik | ‘Asik Çelebi. <em>Mesa’irü-su’ara or Tezkere of’Asik Çelebi.</em> Edited by G. H. Meredith-Owens. |
| Ayverdi | Ekrem Hakki Ayverdi. <em>Osmanli Mimarisinin Ilk Devri.</em> |
| Barani | Ziya’ al-Din Barani. <em>Tarikh-i Firuz’Shahi.</em> Edited by Saiyid Ahmad Khan. |
| Battutah | Ibn Battutah. <em>Voyages d’lbn Batoutah [Tuhfat al-nuzzar fi ghara’ib al-amsar wa ‘aja’ib al-asfar].</em> Edited by C. Defrémery and B. R. Sanguinetti. |
| Dhahabi | Shams al-Din Abu ‘Abd Allah Muhammad ibn ‘Uthman alDimashqi al-Dhahabi. <em>Ta’rikh al-islim,</em> Part 63 (years 621–30). Edited by Bashshar ‘Awir Ma’ruf, Shu’ayb al-Arna’ut, and Salih Mahdi ‘Abbas. |
| Digby | Simon Digby. “Qalandars and Related Groups: Elements of Social Deviance in the Religious Life of the Delhi Sultanate of the 13<sup>th</sup> and 14<sup>th</sup> Centuries.” In <em>Islam in South Asia,</em> vol. I, <em>South Asia,</em> edited by Yohanan Friedmann, 60–108. |
| Dihkhudi | ‘All Akbar Dihkhuda. <em>Lughatnamah.</em>
| <em>EI</em> | <em>The Encyclopaedia of Islam,</em> new edition. |
| <em>EIR</em> | <em>Encyclopaedia Iranica.</em> |
| Ergun 1 | Sadeddin Nüzhet Ergun. <em>Bektasi Edebiyati Antolojisi: Bektasi Saivleri ve Nefesleri.</em> |
| Ergun 2 | Sadeddin Nüzhet Ergun. <em>Türk Sairleri.</em> |
| Evliya Evliya Çelebi. | <em>Evliyj Çelebi Seyahatnamesi.</em> Edited by Ahmed Cevdet and Necib ‘Asim. |
| Farisi Khatib Farisi. | <em>Manaqib-i Jamal al-Din Savi.</em> Edited by Tahsin Yazici. A later edition: <em>Qalandarnamah-i Khatib Farisi ya Sirat-i Jamal al-Din Savaji.</em> Edited by Hamid Zarrinkub. |
| Gölpinarh | Abdülbaki Gölpinarli. <em>Mevlanadan Sonra Mevlevflik.</em> |
| Gramlich | Richard Gramlich. <em>Die SchÜtischen Derwischorden Persiens.</em> |
| Hodgson | Marshall G. S. Hodgson. <em>The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization.</em> |
| Jawbar | ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Dimashqi al-Jawbari. <em>Kitab al-mukhtarfi kashf al-asrar wa-hatk al-astar.</em> Ms. Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi (Istanbul), Karaçelebizade 253, dated 717/1317-18. |
| Karbala’i | Ibn Karbala’i, Hafiz Husayn Karbala’i Tabrizi. <em>Rawzat al-jinan va jannat al-janan.</em> Edited by Ja’far Sultan al-Qurr’i. |
| Khatib | Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Khatib. <em>Fustat al-‘adalah fi qava’id al-saltanah.</em> Edited by Osman Turan, “Selçuk Turkiyesi din tarihine dair bir kaynak: Fustat ul-‘adale fi kava’id is-saltana,” 553–64 (Persian text). In <em>60. Dogum Yili MÜnasebetiyle Fuad Köprülu Armagam,</em> 531–64. |
| Kinalizade | Kinalizade Hasan Çelebi. <em>TezkiretÜ’s-su’ara.</em> Edited by Ibrahim Kutluk. |
| Köprülü 1 | Mehmed Fuad Köprülü. “Anadolu’da Islamiyet: Türk istilasindan soñra Anadolu tarih-i dinisine bir nazar ve bu tarihiñ menba’lari.” <em>Darü’l-fünün Edebiyat Fakültesi Mecmcu’asl</em> 2 (1922–23): 281–311, 385–420, 457–86. |
| Köprülü 2 | Mehmed Fuad Köpriulu. <em>Turk Halkedebiyatt Ansiklopedisi.</em>
| Latifi | ‘Abdüllatif Çelebi Latifi. <em>Tezkire.</em> |
| Meier | Fritz Meier. <em>Abu Sa’id-i Abu l-Hayr (357-440/967-1049): Wirklichkeit und Legende.</em> |
| Menavino | Giovan Antonio Genovese da Vultri Menavino. <em>Trattato de costumi et vita de Turchi.</em> German translation: <em>Turckische Historien: von der Turcken Ankunffi, Regierung, Königen und Kaisesrn, Kriegen, Schlachten, Victorien und Sigen, wider Christen und Heiden ...</em> Translated by Heinrich MÜller. |
| Nicolas | Nicolas de Nicolay Daulphinoys, Seigneur d’Arfeuille. <em>Les navigations, peregrinations et voyages, faicts en la Turquie, par Nicolas de Nicolay..</em> . <em>.</em> English translation: <em>The Nauigations, Peregrinations and Voyages, Made into Turkie by Nicholas Nicholay Daulphinois.</em> ... Translated by T. Washington the Younger. |
| Nianci | Ramazanzade Nisanci Mehmed, known as Küçük Nisanci. <em>Tarihi Nisanci Mehmed Pasa.</em> |
| Nizami | Khaliq Ahmad Nizami. <em>Some Aspects of Religion and Politics in India during the Thirteenth Century.</em> |
| Nu’aymi | ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Nu’aymi. <em>Al-daris fi ta’rikh al-madaris.</em> Edited by Ja’far al-Hasani. |
| Ocak | Ahmet Yasar Ocak. <em>Osmanli Imparatorlugunda Marjinal Sufilik: Kalenderiler (XIV-X VII. Yüzyillar).</em> |
| Pouzet | Louis Pouzet. <em>Damas au VIIe/XIIIe siècle: Vie et structures religieuses d’une metropole islamique.</em> |
| Qalandar | Hamid Qalandar. <em>Khayr al-majdlis: MalfÜzat-i Hazrat-i Shaykh Nasir al-Din Mahmud, Chirdgh-i Dihli.</em> Edited by Khaliq Ahmad Nizami. |
| Qazwini | Zakariya’ Muhammad al-Qazwini. <em>Athar al-bilad wa-akhbar al’ibdd.</em> |
| Ritter | Helmut Ritter. <em>Das Meer der Seele: Mensch, Welt und Gott in den Geschichten des Fariduddin ‘Attar.</em> |
| Rizvi | Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi. <em>A History of Sufism in India.</em> Vol. i, <em>Early Sufism and Its History in India to 1600 A.D.</em> |
| Rosenthal | Franz Rosenthal. <em>The Herb: Hashish versus Medieval Muslim Society.</em> |
| <em>SA</em> | <em>Studia Islamica.</em> |
| Safadi | Salah al-Din Khalil ibn Aybak al-Safadi. <em>al- Wfi bi-al-wafayat.</em> Vol. 5. Edited by Sven Dedering. |
| Storey | Charles Ambrose Storey. <em>Persian Literature: A Bio-bibliographical Survey.</em> Vol. I, pt. 2, <em>Biography.</em> |
| Suhrawardi | Shihab al-Din Abu Hafs ‘Umar al-Suhrawardi. <em>‘Auwrifal-ma’arif</em> German translation: <em>Die Gaben der Entkenntnisse des ‘Umar asSuhrawardl</em> (<em>‘Awarifal-ma’arif).</em> Translated by Richard Gramlich. |
| <em>TA</em> | <em>Turk Ansiklopedisi.</em> |
| Trimingham | J. Spencer Trimingham. <em>The Sufi Orders in Islam.</em> |
| Vahidi | Vahidi. <em>Menaklb-i Hvoca-i Cihan ve Netlce-i Can.</em> In Ahmet T. Karamustafa, <em>VMhidl’s Menaklb-i Hvoca-i Cihan ve Netice-i Can: Critical Edition and Analysis,</em> 88–293. |
| Yemini | Yemini. <em>Fazletname-i emTrÜ’l-mÜ’minin ‘All.</em> Edited by Ahmed Hlizr. |
| Zarrinkub | ‘Abd al-Husayn Zarrinkub. “Ahl-i malamat va rah-i Qalandar.” <em>Majallah-i Danishkadah-i Adabiyat va ‘Ulum-i Insani</em> (Tehran) 22 (1354sh/1975): 61–100. |
[1] Muhammad ibn Mansur Mubarak’Shah, known as Fakhr-i Mudabbir, <em>Adab al-harb va al-shajdaah,</em> ed. Ahmad Suhayli Khvansari, 446–47; Meier, sI , n. 250.
[2] Hamid Algar, “Baraq Baba,” in <em>EIR</em>, 3:754–55. Barak Baba is discussed in chapter 5 below.
[3] Ruy Gonzales de Clavijo, <em>Clavijo: Embassy to Temerlane 1403–1406,</em> trans. Guy Le Strange, 139–40.
[4] The periodization of Islamic history follows Hodgson, especially 1:96. Hodgson’s scheme in C.E. dates is as follows: Late Sisani and Primitive Caliphal Periods, ca. (485)-692; High Caliphal Period, ca. 692–945; Earlier Middle Islamic Period, ca. 945–1258; Later Middle Islamic Period, ca. 1258–1503; Period of Gunpowder Empires, ca. 1503–1789; Moder Technical Age, ca. 1789-present.
[5] This section has been adopted with extensive changes from Ahmet T. Karamustafa, “The Antinomian Dervish as Model Saint,” in <em>Modes de transmission de la culture religieuse en Islam,</em> ed. Hassan Elboudrari, 241–60.
[6] Notable studies on the Qalandars are Mahammad Tagi Ahmad, “Who Is a Qalandar?” <em>Journal of Indian History</em> 33 (1955): 155–70; Digby; Abdülbaki G61pinarh, “Kalenderiye,” in <em>TA,</em> 21:157–61; Meier, 494–516; Ahmet Yasar Ocak, “Kalenderiler ve Bektasllik,” in <em>Dogumunun 100. ylrnda Atatürk’e Armagan,</em> 297–308; idem, “Quelques remarques sur le role des derviches kalenderis dans les mouvements populaires et les activit6s anarchiques aux XVC et XVI’ siecles dans l’empire Ottoman,” <em>Osmanlt Arastirmalari</em> 3 (1982): 69–80; Ocak; Tahsin Yazici, “Kalandar” and “Kalandariyya,” in <em>El,</em> 4:472–74; and Zarrinkfb, esp. 78–92 (also on Haydaris), reprinted in idem, <em>Justuju dar tasavvuf-i Iran,</em> esp. 359–75. The Haydaris and Abdils of Rim are discussed in passing on many occasions in the larger works of Mehmed Fuad Köprülü and Abdülbaki Gélpinarli cited later in this work and in the works of Ocak cited above (Ocak relies largely on Köprülü and Golpinarll).
[7] Ocak is the most comprehensive existing study. Ocak prefaces his study with a long coverage of renunciatory trends (which he collectively labels “Kalenderilik”) in Islamic history up to the eighth/fourteenth century and maintains a broad definition of renunciation throughout the book. He does not, however, identify new renunciation as a distinct phase in the history of Islamic religiosity and, further, limits his focus to the Ottoman Empire. Ocak’s study came to my attention after the completion of the present monograph.
[8] Jawbari, fols. 17b- 8a. Al-Jawbari’s account of Qalandars and Haydaris is paraphrased in chapter 5 below.
[9] See chapter 5, note 3, for full documentation.
[10] Khatib, 531–64 (Persian text on 553–64); praise for the Mongols is on 53b.
[11] See chapter 5, notes 24 and 44, respectively.
[12] Vahidi, fols. 52a-52b.
[13] Latifi, i io (biography of the poet Temennayi).
[14] On the word <em>torlak,</em> “beardless, handsome youth,” see Gerard Clauson, <em>An Etymological Dictionary of Pre-Thirteenth-Century Turkish,</em> 546, col. Ü; and Ettore Rossi, “ ‘Torlak’ kelimesine dair,” <em>Turk Dili Arastirmalan Ytlllgl-Belleten</em> (1955): 9–10.
[15] Menavino, 79–82; German translation, 36b-37b. Menavino spent some years in Istanbul during the reigns of the Ottoman sultans Bayezld II (r. 886–9 8/ 1481–1512) and Selim I (r. 918-26/1512-20).
[16] Edward William Lane, <em>Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians,</em> 234. Lane resided in Cairo from 1825 to 1828 and 1833 to 1835.
[17] K6prüliu , 299–300 (the last sentence is from n. I on 300). Cf. English translation: <em>Islam in Anatolia after the Turkish Invasion (Prolegomena),</em> trans. and ed. Gary Leiser, 12–13 and n. 41 (70).
[18] Fazlur Rahman, <em>Islam,</em> 153.
[19] For a critical discussion on the “two-tiered model of religion,” see Peter Brown, <em>The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity,</em> 12–22. A comprehensive review of the use of the concept of popular religion in religious studies is found in Catherine Bell, “Religion and Chinese Culture: Toward an Assessment of’Popular Religion,’ “ <em>History of Religions</em> 29 (1989): 35–57. Ernest Gellner, “Flux and Reflux in the Faith of Men,” in <em>Muslim Society,</em> 1–85, is an interesting attempt to remedy the pychologistic bias of the two-tiered model of religion as found in the thought of David Hume through a merger with the sociological models of Ibn Khaldun, though Gellner’s own explanatory model is, curiously, also ahistorical. For a classical treatment of Islamic religiosity on the basis of the two-tiered model (“polytheistic needs within monotheism”), see Ignaz Goldziher, “Veneration of Saints in Islam,” in <em>Muslim Studies,</em> ed. S. M. Stern, trans. C. R. Barber and S. M. Stern, 2:255–341. A recent reevaluation of the two-tiered model of culture in the medieval Islamic context is Boaz Shoshan, “High Culture and Popular Culture in Medieval Islam,” <em>SA</em> 73 (1991): 67–107.
[20] Ira M. Lapidus, <em>A History of Islamic Societies,</em> 162.
[21] It is symptomatic of the thoroughly ahistorical conception of popular religion that the argument as presented here is less a summary of well-developed views on the subject in secondary literature, which are not in evidence, than a fresh construction from clues and implicit assumptions found in scholarly accounts of a general nature. See, for example, Rahman, <em>Islam,</em> 153–56.
[22] On the question of survival and influence, especially in regard to Central Asian shamanism and South Asian Hindu and Buddhist asceticism, see, for instance, Mehmed Fuad Koprulu, <em>Influence du chamanisme turco-mongol sur les ordres mystiques musulmans;</em> Emel Esin, “‘Eren’: Les <em>dervTs</em> heterodoxes turcs d’Asie centrale et le peintre surnomme ‘Siyah-Kalam,’ “ <em>Turcica</em> 17 (1985): 7–41; and Digby, 66. The following description of the Saivite Kapalika ascetics, so similar in appearance to deviant dervishes, nicely demonstrates why the theory of survival or influence can be so tempting: “They wander about with a skull begging bowl, their bodies smeared with ashes, wearing bone or skull ornaments and loincloths of animal skin, with their hair matted in matted locks. They sometimes carry a special club ... consisting of a skull mounted on a stick” (David N. Lorenzen, “Saivism: Kapalikas,” in <em>The Encyclopedia of Religion,</em> 13:19). Similarity in physical appearance, however, does not entail similarity in belief and practice: a closer look at Kapilikas reveals the difficulties of comparing them to Muslim dervishes; see David N. Lorenzen, <em>The Kdpalikas and Kalamukhas: Two Lost Saivite Sects.</em>
[23] Dihkhuda, s.v. “Darvish.” Duncan Black Macdonald, “Darwish,” in <em>El,</em> 2:164–65, is devoid of interest. On the Arabic term <em>faqtr,</em> see Khaliq Ahmad Nizami, “Fakir,” in <em>El,</em> 2:757–78.
[24] All three ascetic virtuosi mentioned here are discussed in detail with references in chapter 4 below, where information utilized in the present discussion is properly documented.
[25] The sacred biography ofJamal al-Din Sivi, composed in 748/1347-48 by a Qalandar, is explicit on this point; see Firisi; exact page references to the topic of poverty in this work are given in chapter 4, note 8.
[26] Vahidi, fol. 43a.
[27] Chapter 12 of the Qur’an is devoted to Yussuf. Incidentally, it is impossible to tell ifJamal al-Din’s continence was accompanied by misogyny, as was the case in early Christian asceticism in Egypt; see Peter Brown, <em>The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity,</em> 241–58.
[28] Cf. Giles Constable, <em>Attitudes toward Self-Inflicted Suffering in the Middle Ages</em>, II.
[29] The domestication of asceticism by Sufism during the High Caliphal Period (ca. 692–945 C.E.) is discussed below in chapter 3.
[30] Richard Gramlich, “Madjdhub,” in <em>El,</em> 5:1029; Michael W. Dols, Majnun: <em>The Madman in Medieval Islamic Society,</em> ed. Diana E. Immisch, 388–410.
[31] Farisi, Yazlci’s edition, 33, line 3 (amal al-Din and Jalal Darguzini), and 71, line 17 (Muhammad Balkhi); Zarrinkub’s edition, verses 708 and 1389, respectively; Abdal, several references to ritual prayer, for instance fol. 54a.
[32] Algar, “Baraq Baba,” 754.
[33] The Qalandari author Khatib Firisi ends each section of the <em>Manaqib</em> with the refrain “come let us abandon this world / [and] utter a <em>takbfr</em> in the fashion of Qalandars” <em>(bi-ya ta dast az in ‘alam bi-shiu’m / qalandarvar takbiff bi-giu’m).</em> The Abdals, for their part, “uttered four <em>takbfrs</em> at the times of the five daily prayers and did not take ablutions or await the prayer-call or heed the prayer leader” (‘Asik, fol. 175a). Although <em>takbir</em> figures prominently in all Islamic rituals, the reference here is clearly to the fourfold <em>takblr</em> of the funeral prayer that is performed standing up, with no prostrations.
[34] On the dress codes endorsed by the <em>sunnah,</em> see, for instance, Muhammad al-Bukhari, <em>Sahih,</em> Arabic-English bilingual ed. by Muhammad Muhsin Khan, 7:454–551 (Book 72: The Book of Dress). On Islamic costume in general, see Yedida K. Stillman, Norman A. Stillman, and T. Majda, “Libis,” in <em>El,</em> 5:732–53. Discussions on proper apparel appear in major Sufi manuals; see, for instance, ‘Ali ibn ‘Uthman al-Jullabl al-Hujwiri, <em>The Kashfal-Mahjfub: The Oldest Persian Treatise on Sufism by al-Hujwirn,</em> trans. Reynold A. Nicholson, 45–57; also Suhrawardi, 318–24 (chapter 44); German translation, 306-II. On Sufi headgear, see John Brown, <em>The Darvisches or Oriental Spiritualism,</em> ed. H. A. Rose, 57–62; and Theodor Menzel, “Beitrage zur Kenntnis der Derwisch-tag,” in <em>Festschrift Georg Jacob,</em> ed. Theodor Menzel, 174–99. For an attempt to trace the origins of Sufi and dervish costume, see Geo Widengren, “Harlekintracht und Monchskutte, Clownhut und Derwischmütze,” <em>Orientalia Suecana</em> 2 (1953): 41- 11.
[35] See, for instance, al-Bukhari, <em>SahTh,</em> 7:514 and 517 (Book 72, reports 63 and 65, respectively).
[36] See M. C. Lyons, “A Note on the <em>Maqdma</em> Form,” <em>Pembroke Papers I</em> (1990): 117, for references to instances of shaving the beard as “a disgrace inflicted on drugged opponents by the man of wiles” in medieval Arabic popular literature <em>(Sirat Hamzah, Srrat Baybars,</em> and <em>Sirat Dhat al-Himmah)</em> as well as in the <em>Maqdmah</em> of Saymarah of Badi al-Zaman al-Hamadhani (d. 398/1008). Cf. Widengren, “Harlekintracht,” 51, n. 3.
[37] On shaving in Sufism, see Gramlich, i:88, and the references quoted there. Although the dervishes seem to have left behind a short composition of about seventy-five verses in Persian called <em>Tarashnamah,</em> there is no agreement among scholars on its authorship: E. E. Bertels, “Le Taras-nama: Un poeme didactique des dervishes Jaldli,” <em>Comptes Rendus de l’Academie des Sciences des I’URSS</em> (1926): 35–38, as reported by Gramlich (bibliography), apparently attributes it to the Jalali dervishes, while Glpinarll, 140, thinks that the work was composed by the Shams-i Tabrizi poet $ahidi (d. 957/1550). The <em>Tarashnamah,</em> which survives in many manuscripts (see, for instance, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi [Istanbul], Ms. Haci Mahmud 3843/3, fols. 7a-9b), does not reveal anything new on the practice of shaving.
[38] The discovery of the “elevating” effects of cannabis leaves by Qutb alDin is reported by ‘Imad al-Din Abu al-Fadl al-Hasan al-‘Uqbari (possibly d. 690/1291), <em>Kitdb al-sawanih al-adabiyah fi al-mada’ih al-qinnabiyah,</em> reproduced in Rosenthal, 51–53. Muhammad ibn Bahadur al-Zarkashi, <em>Zahr al-‘arish fi ahkam (or tahrfm) al-hashish,</em> text in Rosenthal, 177, has a shorter report to the same effect, where Jamal al-Din is also mentioned as Ahmad al-Sawaji al-Qalandari.
[39] The most explicit description of the consumption of hashish in a ritual setting by dervishes is found in Menavino’s account on Abdals of Rim, Menavino, 76–79; see chapter 6 for a complete translation of this account into English.
[40] On the legal prohibition of wine, see Arent Jan Wensinck, “Khamr, I. Juridical Aspects,” in <em>El,</em> 4:994–97. The legal and social implications oTthe use of hallucinogens is discussed in Rosenthal.
[41] Jean-Louis Michon, “Sacred Music and Dance in Islam,” in <em>Islamic Spirituality: Manifestations,</em> ed. Seyyid Hossein Nasr, 469–505; Jean During, <em>Musique et extase: L’Audition mystique dans la tradition soufie;</em> Marijan Mole, “La danse extatique en Islam,” in <em>Les danses sacrees,</em> 145–280; Fritz Meier, “Der Derwischtanz: Versuch eines Uberblicks,” <em>Asiatische Studien</em> 1–4 (1954): 107–36.
[42] On sodomy and homosexuality in Islamic history, see “Liwat,” in <em>El,</em> 5:776–79 (written by the editors).
[43] On <em>mutu qabla an tamutu,</em> see ‘Ali Akbar Dihkhuda, <em>Kitab-i amsal va hikam,</em> 4:1753; Badi? al-Zaman Furuzanfar, <em>Ahaddth-i Masnavf,</em> 116, no. 353; and Ritter, 583.
[44] The biography ofJamal al-Din, as reported in various sources, contains ample demonstration of this predilection for graveyards. In particular, his hagiography has one whole section on this subject, entitled “Dalil guftan-i Sayyid dar b5b-i ankih dar guristan nishastan[ra] martabah chist”: see Farisi, Yazici’s edition, 82, line i, to 85, line 5; Zarrinkub’s edition, verses 1609–68. The location of later Qalandar centers in Cairo and Jerusalem within or in the vicinity of cemeteries was no doubt a legacy ofJamal al-Din. Practicing retreats in cemeteries was not, of course, particular to Qalandars: Ibn al-‘Arabi (d. 638/ 1240), for instance, a contemporary ofJamil al-Din, is known to have followed this practice; see Michel Chodkiewicz, <em>Le sceau des saints: Prophetie et saintete dans la doctrine d’Ibn Arabi,</em> 16.
[45] On “looking at beardless boys,” <em>nazar ila al-murd</em> in Arabic and <em>shahidbazi</em> in Persian, see Ritter, 459–77. A clear condemnation of the practice by a Sufi is in al-Jullabi, <em>Kashf al-Ma.hjib,</em> 416–17; for a non-Sufi counterpart, see ‘Abd alRahman ibn ‘Ali ibn al-Jawzi, <em>Talbis Iblis,</em> 264–78. Cf. Peter Lamborn Wilson, <em>Scandal: Essays in Islamic Heresy,</em> 93–121.
[46] Alessandro Bausani, “Hurufiyya,” in <em>El,</em> 3:600–601; and Abdülbaki Golpinarh, <em>Hurufilik Metinleri Katalogu.</em>
[47] The way of renunciation naturally remained as an option that could be adopted for reasons other than the achievement of spiritual enlightenment. As Digby observes, for instance, “the garb and personal appearance of a Qalandar might be adopted by an educated man as a matter of choice, one might almost say affectation” (Digby, 71). To the example of Malik Sa’d al-Din Mantiqi that Digby adduces in this context, one might add that of Mawlana Mir Jamal, a renowned logician and mathematician: the story of his entertaining confrontation with the Naqshbandi master Khvajah ‘Ubayd Allah Ahrar (806-96/1403-90) is narrated by Fakhr al-Din ‘Ali ibn Husayn Va’iz Kashifi, <em>Rashahat ‘ayn al-hayat,</em> ed. ‘All Asghar Mucniyan, 2:643–45.
[48] The source of inspiration here is Max Weber, “Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions,” in <em>From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology,</em> trans. and ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, 323–59. See Said Amir Ajomand, <em>The Shadow ofGod and the Hidden Imam: Religion, Political Order, and Societal Change in Shi’ite Iran from the Beginning to 1890, 1</em>6–18, for illuminating observations on Weber’s discussion.
[49] The Qur’an, 10:7–8 and 24; 11:15–16; 13:26; 14:3; 16:107; 18:45–46; 20:131; 27:60; 29:64; 40:39; 42:34; 57:20. These verses emphasize the superiority of life in the hereafter over life in this world, which is described as temporary amusement and play.
[50] The relevant verses would be too numerous to list here. A concise and clear exposition of the this-worldly nature of the Qur’anic message appears in Fazlur Rahman, <em>Major Themes of the Qur’n,</em> 37–64.
[51] Leah Kinberg, “Compromise of Commerce: A Study of Early Traditions concerning Poverty and Wealth,” <em>Der Islam</em> 66 (1989): 193–212, nicely demonstrates the pliability of the <em>sunnah.</em>
[52] Emile Tyan, “Djihad,” in <em>El,</em> 2:538–40.
[53] Michael Cook, <em>Early Muslim Dogma: A Source-Critical Study,</em> 43. Wilferd Madelung, “Murdji’a,” in <em>El,</em> 7:605, rightly points out, however, that political quietism was not a necessary component of the Murji’i movement and that many Murji’is were politically active.
[54] Mahmood Ibrahim, <em>Merchant Capital and Islam;</em> Maxime Rodinson, <em>Islam and Capitalism,</em> trans. Brian Pearce; Shelomo Dov Goitein, “The Rise of the Near-Eastern Bourgeoisie in Early Islamic Times,” <em>Journal of World History</em> 3 (1956): 583–604. The significance of merchant capital for religious scholarship is demonstrated in HayyimJ. Cohen, “The Economic Background and the Secular Occupations of Muslim Jurisprudents and Traditionists in the Classical Period of Islam (until the Middle of the Eleventh Century),” <em>Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient</em> 13 (1970): 16–61. The role of commerce in the formation of Islamic cities is studied in Hughes Kennedy, “From <em>Polis</em> to <em>Medina:</em> Urban Change in Late Antique and Early Islamic Syria,” <em>Past & Present 1</em>06 (1985): 3–27.
[55] Muhammad Hashim Kamali, <em>Principles of Islamic Jurisprudence,</em> 168–96; George F. Hourani, “The Basis of Authority of Consensus in Sunnite Islam,” <em>SA</em> 16 (1962): 13–40, reprinted in <em>Reason and Tradition in Islamic Ethics,</em> 190–226; M. Bernand, “Idjma’,” in <em>El,</em> 3:1 023–26; Wael B. Hallaq, “On the Authoritativeness of Sunni Consensus,” <em>International Journal of Middle East Studies</em> 18 (1986): 427–54. On authority in Sunni Islam, also see Hamid Dabashi, <em>Authority in Islam: From the Rise of Muhammad to the Establishment of the Umayyads,</em> 71–93; and the relevant chapters in George Makdisi, Dominique Sourdel, and Janine SourdelThomine, eds., <em>La notion d’autorite au Moyen Age: Islam, Byzance, Occident.</em>
[56] It is possible to argue that Hanbalism was the epitome of the attitude that privileged the community: see George Makdisi, “Hanbalite Islam,” in <em>Studies on Islam,</em> ed. Merlin L. Swartz, 216–74, esp. 251–64.
[57] For detailed discussion of early Islamic asceticism, see Ignaz Goldziher, “Asceticism and Sufism,” in <em>Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law,</em> trans. Andras Hamori and Ruth Hamori, 116–34; Tor Andrae, <em>In the Garden of Myrtles: Studies in Early Islamic Mysticism,</em> trans. Birgitta Sharpe, 33–71; Arthur John Arberry, <em>Sufism: An Account of the Mystics of Islam,</em> 31–44; and Leah Kinberg, “What Is Meant by <em>Zuhd?” SA</em> 61 (1985): 27–44.
[58] On the transition to the <em>tawakkul</em> era, see Benedikt Reinert, <em>Die Lehre vom</em> tawakkul <em>in der klassischen Sufik.</em>
[59] Goitein, “Rise of the Near-Eastern Bourgeoisie,” 586–87.
[60] Kinberg, “Compromise of Commerce,” argues that “renunciation of worldly goods was always the main current in Islam, and [that] traditions [that is, <em>hadith]</em> favoring property and wealth arose only as a concession to the rising economic power of the bourgeoisie” (195).
[61] Goldziher, “Asceticism and Sufism,” 130–31. Julian Baldick’s recent survey, <em>Mystical Islam: An Introduction to Sufism,</em> demonstrates that the concern with external influences, which has a long history, continues to remain on the agenda.
[62] Andras Hamori, “Ascetic Poetry <em>(Zuhdiyyat),”</em> in <em>The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature: ‘Abbasid Belles-Lettres,</em> ed. Julia Ashtiany et al., 265–74.
[63] For the expression “inner-worldly mysticism,” see Weber, “Religious Rejections,” 325–26.
[64] Discussions on the subject of gainful employment and the relative merits of poverty and wealth appear in all major Sufi manuals under various headings. For a good example of the this-worldly trend noted here, see al-Jullabi, <em>KashfalMahjub,</em> 19–29 and 58–61.
[65] See, for instance, the discussion on seclusion in Hermann Landolt, “Khalwa,” in <em>El,</em> 4:990–91.
[66] Jacqueline Chabbi, “Khankah,” in <em>El,</em> 4:1025–26.
[67] On Malamatiyah, see Hamid Algar, Frederick deJong, and Colin Imber, “Malamatiyya,” in <em>EI,</em> 6:223–28; and Sara Sviri, “Hakim Tirmidhi and the <em>Malamati</em> Movement in Early Sufism,” in <em>Classical Persian Sufism: From Its Origins to Rumi</em>, ed. Leonard Lewisohn, 583–613. On Karramiyah, see Clifford Edmund Bosworth, “Karramiyya,” in El, 4:667–69; and Wilferd Madelung, Religious Trends in Early Islamic Iran, 39–53. The most comprehensive treatment of fituwwah, with copious references, is Franz Taeschner, Zunfie und Bruderschaften im Islam: Texte zur Geschichte der Futuwwa.
[68] For comparative treatment of Malamatiyah, Karramiyah, and “Iraqi” Sufism, see Jacqueline Chabbi, “Remarques sur le d6veloppement historique des mouvements asc6tiques et mystiques au Khurasan,” <em>SA</em> 46 (1977): 5–72; and idem, “Reflexions sur le soufisme iranien <em>primitif,“Journal Asiatique</em> 266 (1978): 37-55- Cf. Richard W. Bulliet, <em>The Patricians of Nishapur: A Study in Medieval Islamic Social History,</em> 41–46.
[69] This is clearly a “sociological” interpretation of the concept, which, however, was not absent from Sufi understanding of <em>baqa’.</em> For the standard experiential interpretations, see Gerhard Böwering, “Baqa’ and Fana’,” in <em>EIR,</em> 3:722–24.
[70] Suhrawardi, 84–86; German translation, 93–94 (chapter io, 16–20).
[71] “With regard to personal progress, ... the word of the Prophet holds good: ‘One single attraction by God is equivalent to the activity of men and djinn’ “ (Gramlich, “Madjdhub, 5:1 29).
[72] Carl W. Ernst, <em>Words of Ecstasy in Sufism,</em> is an admirable attempt in this direction that approaches the subject through the prism of <em>shathiyat</em> (ecstatic expressions).
[73] The origin and meaning of the word <em>qalandar</em> remains undetermined to this day. The most often cited, and indeed so far the only plausible, suggested derivation is that of the lexicographers Muhammad Husayn ibn Khalafal-Tabrizi and ‘Abd al-Rashid al-Tattavl, who consider the word to be a variation of the Persian <em>kalandar,</em> “coarse stick; uncouth, uncultivated man.” AI-Tabrizi regards the transformation of the initial kf into <em>qdf</em> <em>as</em> an arabization <em>(Burhan-i qati’, ed.</em> Muhammad Mu’in, 3:1540 and 1680); al-Tattavi attributes it to the “passage of time and change of tongue” <em>(Farhang-i Rashfdl,</em> ed. Zuilfiqar ‘Ali and ‘Azlz alRahman, 2:164). Cf. Murtaza Sarraf, “Ayin-i qalandari,” <em>Armaghtin</em> 52-dawrahi si-yu nuhum-(1349sh/1970): 705–15 and 53-dawrah-i chihilum (1350sh/ 1971): 15–21. In Arabic, the word <em>qalandar,</em> also found in the metathesized form <em>qarandal</em> in the seventh/thirteenth and eighth/fourteenth century sources, never seems to have meant more than “mendicant dervish,” which would speak against the possibility of an Arabic origin, and an Arabic etymology is in itself quite unlikely for linguistic reasons; see Mu’in’s note in al-Tabrizi, <em>Burhan-i qati’,</em> 3:1 540; Meier, 500–501, nn. 183–87; and Yazici, “Kalandar,” 472–73. The possibility of an Indian origin cannot be altogether ruled out, however, even if a plausible Indian etymology is yet to be put forward. For a Sanskrit etymology that is not altogether intelligible to me, see Sadeddin Kocaturk, “Dar barah-i firqah-i qalandariyah va qalandar’nimah-i Khatib-i Farisi, ma’na-yi kalimah-i qalandar,” <em>Dogu Dilleri</em> (Ankara Universitesi Dil ve Tarih-Cografya Fakültesi Dogu Dil ve Edebiyatlari Arastlrmalari Enstitüsi) 2 (1971): 89. The word survives in present-day Turkish as <em>kalender</em> and in Persian and Urdu as <em>qalandar,</em> or more often as <em>qalandaranah,</em> referring to carefree, simple, bohemian, or unconventional persons or behavior. In northern India, the word <em>qalandar</em> usually denotes a beggar or more frequently a monkey or bear player; see Digby, 65; Aziz Ahmad, <em>An Intellectual History of Islam in India,</em> 45; and Annemarie Schim- mel, <em>Islam in the Indian Subcontinent,</em> 34–35,n. 71 (relying on Digby). In Pakistan, the word <em>qalandar</em> is largely interchangeable with <em>malang,</em> another term used to refer to antinomian dervishes (I owe this information toJamal Elias).
[74] For a general overview, see J. T. P. De Bruijn, “The <em>Qalandariyydt</em> in Persian Mystical Poetry, from Sanai Onwards,” in <em>The Legacy of Mediaeval Persian Sufism,</em> ed. Leonard Lewisohn, 75–86.
[75] “I am that wanderer whose name is Qalandar; / I have neither home nor goods nor kitchen. / When day comes I wander round the world; / when night falls I lay my head on a brick” (Baba Tahir ‘Uryan Hamadani, <em>Divdn-i Baba Tahir’Uryan Hamaddni,</em> ed. Manuchihr Adamiyat, 8). Cf. Mujtabi Minuvi, “Az khaza’in-i Turkiyah,” <em>Majallah-i Ddnishkadah-i AdabTlyt</em> (Tehran) 4 (1335sh/1956): 57. The English translation is by Digby, 61.
[76] Abu Sa’id-i Abu al-Khayr, <em>Sukhanan-i manzum-i Aba Sa’Td-i Abu alKhayr,</em> ed. Sa’id Nafisi, 41 and 58, nos. 281 and 397, respectively.
[77] ‘Abd Allih Ansari Haravi, <em>Risalah-i Qalandar’namah,</em> in <em>Rasa’il-i jami’-i ‘arif-i qarn-i chahdrum-i hijrf Khvajah ‘Abd Alldh Ansari,</em> ed. Vahid Dastgirdi, 92–99. Cf. Meier, <em>495;</em> and De Bruijn, <em>“Qalandariyyat,”</em> 78, on the question of authorship. Also cf. characterization of the <em>Qalandar’ndmah</em> in Yazici, “Kalandariyya,” 4:473: “a system of thought advocating inner contentment, the unimportance of learning, the avoidance of all display and contempt for the transient world and everything in it.”
[78] For a list and analysis of <em>QalandarTyat,</em> see Helmut Ritter, “Philologika XV: Fariduddin ‘Attar III. 7. Der Diwan,” <em>Oriens</em> 12 (1959): I-88; Ritter, index, s.v. <em>“Qalandarlyat”;</em> also De Bruijn, <em>“Qalandariyydt”;</em> and Johann Christoph Birgel, “The Pious Rogue: A Study in the Meaning of <em>Qalandar</em> and <em>Rend</em> in the Poetry of Muhammad Iqbal,” <em>Edebiyat</em> 4 (1979): 43–49.
[79] On Amir Husayni, see Zabih Allah Safa, <em>arikh-i AdabTyat dar Iran, 3,</em> Ü:751–63 (with ample references); and N. Mayil Haravi, <em>Sharh-i hal va iasar-i Amir Husaynr Ghuri Haravi, mutavafai 718.</em> For the text of the <em>Qalandar’namah,</em> see Sadeddin Kocaturk, “Iran’da Islamiyetten sonraki yizyillarda fikir aklmlarina toplu bir bakil ve ‘kalenderiye tarikati’ ile ilgili bir risale,” <em>Ankara Universitesi Dil ve Tarih-Cografya Fakiltesi Dergisi</em> 28 (1970): 227–29. Both Meier and Haravi rely on fourteen verses only, as these appear in Riza Quli Khan Hidayat, <em>Majma’ alfiusaha,</em> 2:15. All of these fourteen couplets are to be found in the full text. Kocaturk relies on mss. in London and Tehran and reports the existence of two further copies in Ayasofya (now in Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi), Istanbul, without citing their call numbers, which are given as 1914 and 2032 by Golpinarh in several of his works (for instance, <em>ioo Soruda Turkiye’de Mezhepler ve Tarikatler,</em> 259). A fifth copy in Paris is reported by Ahmad Munzavi, <em>Fihrist-i nuskhaha-yi khatti-i Farsi,</em> 4:3049, no. 32937. It could be added here that the “Shihab-i Millah va Din” whom Amir Husayni mentions in verse 54 was most likely Shihib alDin Abui Hafs ‘Umar al-Suhrawardi, to whom Husayni was connected through his own master Baha’ al-Din Zakariya’ Multini. Since Amir Husayni’s composition is the only independent long poem on the Qalandar-topos, it is useful to summarize the major themes here: indifference to both this world and the hereafter; acceptance of one’s sins, and denunciation of one’s acts of devotion; wandering; Qalandars as the repository of the secret of the creation and adorned with God’s grace, the “cream” of creation; mirth and merrymaking, dance and ecstasy, wine-drinking, looking at beardless boys; freedom from hypocrisy, fraud, deception; dependence on love to the point of disregarding reason; the only way to God being that of the Qalandars. It is worth noting here that the Ottoman Vahidi had access to Husayni’s work and incorporated many of his verses in approximate Turkish translation into his <em>Menaklb,</em> though his debt to Husayni did not extend to a total reliance upon his text (Vah.idi, 54, n. 40).
[80] Professor J. T. P. De Bruijn is currently preparing an extensive study of the <em>Qalandariyat</em> in early Persian poetry (oral correspondence, May 1992).
[81] Digby, 62 (n. 4) writes: “The growth and diffusion of groups of wandering Qalandars is attested by an anecdote in ‘At.tr’s celebrated poem, the <em>Mantiq al-tayr,</em> which was composed not later than 573/1177. An Arab, coming to ‘Ajam (Iran and adjacent Persian-speaking areas), was amazed by the unfamiliar customs of the land. On his road he fell in with a band of shaven Qalandars, a people he had never seen before. He joined them, shaved his hair, and participated in various obscurely described but probably orgiastic experiences with them; but was maltreated, assaulted and robbed by them before he returned to his own land. The anecdote appears to indicate that groups of wandering Qalandars were a spectacle in Khurasan in the third quarter of the twelfth century; but had not then reached the Arab Middle East. They were also by that time characterized by wild and antinomian behavior similar to that found in the thirteenth-century anecdotes discussed in this paper, and had adopted the practice of shaving their eyebrows and facial hair.”
In the text of Farid al-Din Muhammad ‘Attar Nish5buri’s <em>Mantiq al-tayr</em> (ed. Sayyid Sadiq Gawharln, 191–92), however, there is no sign that the Qalandars had shaved their heads, eyebrows, or facial hair or that the Arab for his part shaved his own hair when he joined them (the expression <em>‘ur-sar,</em> “bareheaded,” in line 3437 seems rather to refer to lack of headgear). The claim that the Arab “participated in ... probably orgiastic experiences” with the Qalandars is equally baseless. The only possible evidence for this interpretation is the expression <em>gum shud mardlyash,</em> “he lost his manhood,” in line 3435, which does, however, have other more innocuous connotations (for instance, loss of honor). The Qalandars did not maltreat, assault, and rob the Arab; instead, he lost money to one of them in straightforward gambling: <em>burd az-u dar yak nadab,</em> “[the Qalandar] won from him in one bet.” In support of the interpretation adopted here, see Ritter, 381, where the passage in question is summarized in German.
[82] Suhrawardi, 66; German translation, 85 (9:23); an earlier German translation of the passage is supplied by Ritter, “Philologika XV,” 14–16. English translations are found in various secondary studies (for instance, Trimingham, 267).
[83] Ahmad ibn ‘All al-Maqrizl, <em>al-Mawa~iz wa-al-i’tibar bi-dhikr al-khitat waal-thar,</em> 4:301; ‘Abd al-Rahman ibn Ahmad Jami, <em>Nafahat al-uns min hazardt alquds,</em> ed. Mahdi Tawhidi’Pur, 14–15. For other sources that quote from <em>‘Auwrif al-ma’arif,</em> see Koprilfi I, 298, n. 3.
[84] For the date of <em>‘Awarifal-ma’arifs</em> composition, see Gramlich’s introduction to his German translation of the work, 14–15. It is, of course, possible that the name Qalandar was not yet attached to members of Jamal al-Din’s circle at this early stage.
[85] Meier, 51 2, thinks that al-Suhrawardi must have been describing an earlier stage of the Qalandari movement.
[86] Paul Rycaut, <em>The History of the Present State of the Ottoman Empire,</em> 260.
[87] Farisi. In citing this work in the following discussion, page and line references refer to Yazlcl’s and verse numbers to Zarrinkub’s editions, respectively; thus 6.5/82 is page 6, line 5, in Yazici’s text and verse 82 in Zarrinküb’s. The title of the work is not given in the text. The author’s pen-name, Khatib Firisi, appears on 6.5/82, 55.1 4/1068, 89.1/1746, and 90.3/1768. He gives the name of his <em>pir</em> on 5.2/58. That he was born in 697/1297-98 can be deduced from his statement at the end of the work that he was fifty-one years of age when he completed his composition, 90.3/1768.
[88] Khatib Farisi gives Jamil al-Din’s dates as 382/992-93 to 463/1070-71. As Bayazid is known to have died in the 260s/870s at the latest, more than a century before the alleged birth date ofJamal al-Din, Farisi clearly did not have a knack for historical accuracy. On Biyazid, see Helmut Ritter, “Abi Yazid alBistami,” in <em>El,</em> 1:162–63; and Gerhard B6wering, “Bestami, Bayazid,” in <em>EIR,</em> 4:183–86.
[89] Farisi, 18.4/319-25.21/468; the parallels in the <em>Mirsad</em> are documented by Zarrinkub in his notes to the text on 121–25. Naturally, it is impossible to reconstruct the origins of this use of common materials by Najm al-Din Razi and Khatib Firisi, though it is likely that the latter (or Jamil al-Din himself) simply borrowed from the former.
[90] See chapter 2, no. 21, for references on this <em>hadith.</em>
[91] All of the practices mentioned receive extended treatment in Jamal al-Din’s sacred biography. On dwelling in cemeteries, see especially 82-84/ 1609–1668, the section entitled <em>dalil gufian-i Sayyid dar bab-i ankih dar guristan nishastan[ra] martaba chist</em> (in both Damascus and Damietta Jamal al-Din resides only in cemeteries); on nakedness, 31.5-7/567-69, 32.10-14/593-97, 42.6/796; on silence, 33.2/607, 41.9/778, 42.6/796, 46.3/875, 80.2-3/1565-66, 80. 16/1579, and 84 (whole page)/1646-63; on abstinence from food, 33.5-6/610-11 (eating weeds about once a week), 36.7-15/672-80 (rejection of”cooked”/other people’s food), 37.20, 41.9/778, 42.5/795, 47.20-21/910-11; on keeping vigils, 41.9/778, 42.6/796; on the significance of hair, 32.5/588, especially the section called <em>dar hikmat va maw’izah va tahsin:</em> 46.7/879 to 47.16/907.
[92] Abu Bakr Isfahani’s miraculous deeds in Damascus are narrated on 47. 18/ 908–53.15/1026.
[93] The beard-producing miracle is also recorded as follows in Battutah, 1:61–63. Some time after Jamal al-Din comes to Damietta and settles in its cemetery, he has a brief encounter with the magistrate <em>(qd41)</em> of the town, a certain Ibn al-‘Amid, who loses no time in reproving Jamal al-Din for his innovation of shaving the beard. For his part, Jamal al-Din declares the magistrate to be an ignoramus since, riding a mule in the cemetery, Ibn al-‘Amid is apparently unaware that the dead deserve as much respect as the living. When Ibn al-‘Amid retorts that shaving the beard is a graver offense, Jamil al-Din answers, “Is this what you mean?” and, letting out a loud cry, produces a mighty black beard. At a second cry, this beard turns white and at a third disappears completely. After this miracle, Ibn al-‘Amid becomes a faithful follower ofJamal al-Din and has a hospice <em>(zawiyah)</em> built in his name, where Jamal al-Din is buried upon his death.
[94] The introductory section “On the Merits of Poverty” <em>(dar sifat-i fazglat-i faqr)</em> is on 6.7/85-8.11/126. For the emphasis on Muhammad’s choice of poverty, see 3.2-4/17-19 and 6. 2–7. I /89-105; onJamal al-Din as the king of poverty, see io. 18/172 and 11.13-15/190-92.
[95] Qalandar, 130–32 <em>(majlis</em> 37). This work, which records the “oral discourses” <em>(malfizat)</em> of the Chishti master Nas r al-Din Chiragh-i Dihli (d. 757/ 1356), was composed after 754/1353; see Digby, 96, nn. Ü and 112. The anecdote that contains the epithet “walking library” may have been a stock item in Chishti lore, since it also appears, with no mention ofJamal al-Din’s name, in a shorter version in the conversations of Nasir al-Din’s master, Nizam al-Din Awliya’ (d. 725/1325); see Amir Hasan Sijzi, <em>Fava’id al-fu’ad,</em> 3; English translation: <em>Nizam ad-Din Awliya: Moralsfor the Heart,</em> trans. Bruce B. Lawrence, 84.
[96] For the story of Hamid Qalandar’s conversion to the path of Qalandars as a child as well as his own testimony of the value that he placed on his Qalandar allegiance, see Qalandar, 6; also Digby, 71–72. A recent discussion of the place of the <em>Khayr al-majalis</em> in Chishti <em>malfizat</em> literature appears in Carl W. Ernst, <em>Eternal Garden: Mysticism, History, and Politics at a South Asian Sufi Center,</em> 68–71, where the question of Hamid’s scholarship is also addressed.
[97] Shams al-Din Muhammad al-Jazari recorded in his history that he saw several fascicles of a Qur’anic <em>tafsTr</em> in Jamal al-Din’s own handwriting; see Dhahabi, 398 (al-Dhahabi died in 748/1348 or 752/1352-53); relying on al-Dhahabi, Safadi, 293 (al-Safadi died in 764/1363); Nu’aymi, 2:210–12 (al-Nu’aymi died in 927/1520-21). For Shams al-Din, Muhammad al-Jazari, see Carl Brockelmann, <em>Geschichte der Arabischen Litteratur,</em> Suppl. 2:33 and 45; cf. A. S. Bazmee Ansari, “Al-Djazari,” in <em>El,</em> 2:522–23.
[98] Dhahabi, 397; Safadi, 292; Khatib (written in 683/1284-85), sIb.
[99] Khatib, 51b.
[100] The quotation is from Shams al-Din Abu ‘Abd Allah Muhammad ibn ‘Uthman al-Dimashqi al-Dhahabi, <em>al-‘Ibar fi khabar man ghabar,</em> ed. Abu Hajir Muhammad al-Sa’id ibn Bisyuni Zaghlul, 3:357. See also Ibn al-Kathir, ‘Imad al-Din Ism~ail ibn ‘Umar (ca. 700-774/1300-1373), <em>al-Bidayah wa-al-nihayah,</em> 13:307; Nu’aymi, 2:197; and Ibn al-‘Imad, ‘Abd al-Hayy ibn Ahmad, <em>Shadharat al-dhahabftakhbar man dhahab</em> (up to 1080/1670), 5:3 89.
[101] Khatib reports the young ascetic’s name as Garfibad. Qalandar, 131, alone among the sources, attributesJamal al-Din’s conversion to an encounter he had with a group known as “iron-wearers.” Though rather weak, this piece of evidence serves to direct attention to the fact that iron-wearing Haydaris could indeed have exercised influence on Jamal al-Din’s turn to asceticism.
[102] Farisi, 30-34/546-629. Dhahabi, 397; Safadi, 292; and Nu’aymi, 2:210–12 also mention an ‘Uthman Kuhi al-Farisi along with Jalal Darguzini in this story.
[103] Battutah, 1:61–63; Ebu’l-Hayr Rimi, <em>Saltukndme,</em> ed. Fahir iz, 363b-69a; Muhammad Qasim Hindui’Shah Astarabadi, known as Firishtah, <em>Gulshan-i Ibrahimi,</em> usually called <em>arÜkh-i Firishtah,</em> 2:407–8; Qasim Ghani, <em>Bahs dar asar va ajkar va ahvil-i Hafiz,</em> 2:442–43.
[104] Significantly, this anecdote is not mentioned in Jamal al-Din’s sacred biography, <em>Manaqib,</em> written by one of his later followers. The fact that the sources do not agree on the timing and place of the anecdote is further reason to suspect its authenticity. Moreover, the same motif is found in other hagiographical material: essentially the same story, without the episode of shaving and with a different ending, is reported about a certain Shaqran ibn ‘Ubayd Allah in one early seventh/thirteenth-century Arabic source and two early ninth/fifteenthcentury ones; see Christopher Schurman Taylor, “The Cult of the Saints in Late Medieval Egypt,” 158–59.
[105] The presence of a hospice of Qalandars in Damietta is reported in Battutah, 1:61. Apart from the sources mentioned in the above discussion, there are some other, more oblique, references toJamil al-Din in the sources. If a brief note in Hamd Allih Mustawfi Qazvini, <em>The 7arikh-i GuzTdah</em> (730/1329-30), ed. Edward G. Browne, 1:790, indeed refers to Jamil al-Din Sivi and not to some other shaykh called Jamal al-Din, then the date of his death was 4 Shawwal 65 r/ 27 November 1253. In addition, in his <em>Zahr al-‘arsh fi ahkam (or tahrim) alhashish,</em> Muhammad ibn Bahidur al-Zarkashi (d. 794/1392) mentions Ahmad <em>[sic]</em> al-Sawaji al-Qalandari, along with Shaykh Haydar, as the “discoverer” of hashish; see chapter 2, n. 16.
[106] On the town Zivah, see Dihkhudi, s.v. “Zavah.”
[107] Only Mu’in al-Din Muhammad Zamaji Isfizari, <em>Rawzat al-jannat f awsif madinah Harat</em> (written 897/1491-92), ed. S. M. Kizim Imam, 229, writes that Haydar traveled from country to country; other sources are silent on this issue.
[108] Ludwig Adamec, ed., <em>Historical Gazetteer of Iran,</em> vol. 2, <em>Meshed and Northeastern Iran,</em> 653–55.
[109] The following sources cite 617 or 618/1220-22 as Qutb al-Din’s death date and also report that he was a centenarian at his death: al-‘Uqbari (possibly d. 690/1291), <em>Kitcb al-sawanih,</em> in Rosenthal, 51–53; Qazwini, 382–83; Hamd Allah Mustawfi, <em>7Trfkh-i Guzfdah,</em> 792–93; idem, <em>The Geographical Part of the Nuzhat-al-Qulub Composed by Hamd-Allah Mustawf10f Qazwin in 740 (1340),</em> ed. Guy Le Strange, 151–54; Giyas al-Din ibn Humim al-Din Khvandamir, <em>Tarikh-i habib al-siyar f akhbar al-bashar,</em> ed. by Jalil al-Din Humü, 3:332; Karbala’i 1:444. Dawlat’Shih ibn ‘Ali’ al-Dawlah Bakhti’Shih al-Ghizi al-Samarqandi, <em>Tadhkirat al-shu’ara’,</em> ed. Edward G. Browne, 192, however, claims that Qutb alDin died in 597/1200-1201 or 602/1205-6, while Fasih al-Din Ahmad ibn Muhammad, known as Fasih al-Khvafi, <em>Mujmal-i Fasiht (up</em> to 845/1441-42), ed. Mahmud Farrukh, 2:288, has him die in 613/1216-17. Zivah was burned down and its inhabitants massacred by the Mongols in 617/1220; see ‘Ali’ al-Din ‘Ata Malik Juvayni, <em>The History of the World-Conqueror</em> [ <em>Tarikh-i Jahan’gusha],</em> trans. John Andrew Boyle, 1:144.
[110] Fasih al-Khvifi, <em>Mujmal-i Fasihf,</em> 2:288, cites Qutb al-Din’s full name as Qutb al-Din ibn Timir ibn Abi Bakr ibn Sultan’Shah ibn Sultan KhIn al-Siluri. Dawlat’Shah, <em>Tadhkirat al-shu’arad,</em> 192, claims that Haydar was a descendant of the sultans of Turkistan through his father, Shihvar. In his extended translation into Chagatay ofJimi’s <em>Nafahdt al-uns,</em> ‘Ali Sir Nevil also reports that Qutb alDin Haydar was the son of a sultan of Turkistan; see <em>Nesdyimü’l-mahabbe min jemayimi’l-fütivve</em> (comp. 901/1495-96), ed. Kemal Eraslan, 383–84. Karbala’i, 1:444, repeats the report about Qutb al-Din Haydar’s Turkish descent. Isfizari, <em>Rawzdt al-jannat,</em> 216, notes that he saw the genealogy of Qutb al-Din Haydar recorded in the <em>Nasabndmah</em> of Qizi Shams al-Din Muhammad-i Zizan; this work, however, is not extant; see the editor’s note in the <em>Rawzat al-jannat</em>, 217,n. 4. The possibility that Qutb al-Din Haydar had special appeal among Turks is raised by the testimony of the famous cosmographer and geographer Zakariy’ al-Qazwini who saw (roughly half a century after Qutb al-Din’s death, presumably in Zivah) Turkish slaves of extreme beauty, barefooted and dressed in felt; he was told that these were Haydar’s followers (Qazwini, 382–83).
[111] Later sources on Qutb al-Din Haydar derive their information from the earlier ones cited above without in any way adding to them; see, for instance, Ahmad Amin Rizi, <em>Haft iqlim,</em> ed. Javid Fazil, 2:188; Zayn al-‘Abidin Shirvini, <em>Bustan al-siyahah</em>, ed. Sayyid ‘Abd Allah Mustawfi, 219; and Ma’sum ‘Ali’Shah ibn Rahmat ‘Ali Ni’mat Allahi al-Shirazi, <em>Tardaiq al-haqa’iq</em>, ed. Muhammad Ja’far Mahjuib, 2:642. Still other sources confuse Qutb al-Din Haydar with a certain Sultan Mir Haydar Tuni, also known as Qutb al-Din, who lived in Tabriz and died there in 830/1426-27; see, for instance, Nur Allah ibn Sayyid Sharif Husayni Mar’ashi Shushtari, <em>Majalis al-mu’minin</em>, 36 and 267; and Dihkhuda, s.v. “Qutb al-Din Tuni” and “Haydar, Qutb al-Din.” Other sources that confuse the two Qutb al-Dins are noted in Husayn Mir Ja’fari, “Haydari va Ni’mati,” Ayandah 9 (1362sh/1983): 742–45 (earlier English version: “The Haydari-Ni’mati Conflicts in Iran,” <em>Iranian Studies</em> 12 [1979]: 61–142). The most reliable account on Tuni appears to be that of Karbal’i, 1:467–68. The Dlvan-i Qutb al-Din Haydar reported in Ibn Yusuf Shirazi, <em>Fihrist-i Kitabkhanah-i Madrasah-i ‘Ali-i Sipahsalar</em>, entry 564, to be in the Library of Madrasah-i Sipahsalar would appear to belong to Qutb al-Din Haydar luni; see Sacid Nafisi, <em>Justujü dar ahval va iasar-i Farid al-Dmn ‘Attar Nishaburn</em>, mim/dal-mim/ha, where, however, Nafisi confuses the two Qutb al-Dins.
[112] Qalandar, 174–76, makes Qutb al-Din Haydar a disciple of Shaykh Luqman, while Nev’i, <em>Nesayimü-l-mahabbe,</em> 383–84; Karbala’i, 1:597; and <em>Vilayetname: Manaklb-i Hacl Bektaj-i Vell,</em> ed. Abdülbaki G61pinarh, 9-I , portray him as a follower of Ahmed Yesevi. For references on Shaykh Luqman, see Meier, 411–12. A concise account on Yesevi is Mehmed Fuad K6prilü, “Ahmed Yesevi,” in <em>Islam Ansiklopedisi,</em> I:210–15. This article contains improvements over K6prüli’s earlier study on Yesevi, <em>Turk Edebiyattnda Ilk Mutasavvflar.</em> The view that Qutb al-Din Haydar was a disciple of Jamal al-Din Savi (see, for instance, Trimingham, 39; and Digby, 82) is unfounded and should be rejected.
[113] Khvandamir, <em>Tarikh-i habib al-siyar,</em> 2:332. The <em>ruba’</em> in question reads as follows: “rindi didam nishastah bar khushk-i zamin / nah kufr u nah islam u nah dunya u nah din / nah haqq nah haqiqat nah tariqat nah yaqin / andar du jahan ki ra buvad zahrah-i in.” This same <em>ruba’i,</em> with few changes, is attributed to Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (d. 606/1209) in Karbala’i, 1:444; he is said to have composed it for Baba Faraj (on whom see Dihkhuda, s.v. “Baba Faraj”). On the same page, al-Qurrai notes that the quatrain also appears in some collections attributed to Khayyam (d. 526/1131); see, for instance, ‘Umar ibn Ibrahim Nishaburi, known as Khayyam, <em>Taranaha-yi Khayydm,</em> ed Sadiq Hidayat, 102, no. 104. In this connection, it is worth noting that Shah-i Sanjan was sufficiently close to Qutb al-Din Haydar both in time and in space to make the attribution of the above quatrain to him a real possibility. On Shah-i Sanjan, see Dihkhuda, s.v., “Shah-i Sanjan,” and the list of references cited therein. To this list one should add Qalandar, 174–76, where, significantly, it is reported that both Haydar-i Zavah and Shah-i Sanjan were among the followers of Shaykh Luqman.
[114] Dawlat’Shah, <em>Tadhkirat al-shu’arad,</em> 192. It is not known if ‘Attar really composed a <em>Haydarnmah</em> at all. Ritter, 139, writes, “Dass ‘Attar ein <em>Haidarnama</em> verfasst hat, steht durch sein selbsterzeugnis im <em>Lisan al-gaib</em> fest,” yet in his later article “‘Attar,” in <em>El,</em> 1:754, he includes <em>Lisan al-ghayb</em> among a group of apocryphal works that came to be attributed to ‘Attar but were certainly not composed by him. Benedikt Reinert, “‘Attar, Farid-al-Din,” in <em>EIR,</em> 3:25, agrees with this last judgment without touching on the <em>Haydarnmmah.</em> Nafisi, <em>Justuju,</em> 97 and IIo, n. 16, merely notes that the earliest source to attribute a <em>Haydarnamah</em> to ‘Attar is Dawlat’Shah’s <em>Tadhkirat al-shu’ara’,</em> that Katib Qelebi also mentions a <em>Haydarndmah</em> (see Mustafa ibn ‘Abdullah, known as K5tib (elebi, <em>Kashf al-</em> <em>zunun</em>, ed. Serefettin Yaltkaya and Kilisli Rifat Bilge, 1:694, where the name of the author is not given), and that no such <em>Haydarnmmah</em> has come to light. Badi al-Zaman Furiuznfar, <em>Sharh-i ahliul va tahlil-i dsar-i Shaykh Farid al-Din Muhammad ‘Attar Nishdburi</em>, 31 and 76, notes that Dawlat’Shah’s entry on ‘Attar is not trustworthy on the whole and rules out the possibility that ‘Attar could have written a <em>Haydarnamah</em>. Safa, <em>Tarikh-i Adabiyat dar Iran</em>, 1:861–62, who relies only on Nafisi, has nothing new to say on the topic. Cf. Munzavi, <em>Fihrist-i nuskhaha-yi khatti-i Farsi</em>, 4:2777, no. 29315.
[115] Qalandar, 176.
[116] Al-‘Uqbari, <em>Kitab al-sawdanih,</em> as reported in Rosenthal, 51–53. It is here recorded, on the authority of a certain Shaykh Ja’far ibn Muhammad al-Shirazi whom al-‘Uqbari met in Tustar in 658/1260, that the use of hashish as an intoxicant was first “discovered” by Shaykh Haydar while he led the life of a recluse in a small <em>zawiyah</em> situated on a mountain between Nishipur and Zavah in Khorasan. This account of the discovery of hashish is repeated in summary in the <em>Zahr al-‘arish fi ahkam (or tahrim) al-hashish</em> of Muhammad ibn Bahadur alZarkashi, 170, with the additional information that the discovery took place around the year 550/ 1155–56.
[117] Qazwini, 382.
[118] Sijzi, <em>Favadid al-fu’ad,</em> 12; English version: <em>Moralsfor the Heart,</em> 101–2, also 360. The Persian edition reads “Haydar’zidah” instead of “Haydar-i Zavah.” The same reading appears in the editions of Hamd Allah Mustawfi, <em>Tanrkh-i Guzidah;</em> and Khvindamir, <em>Tarikh-i habfb al-siyar,</em> 3:332, while the editor of Qalandar, 176, opts for the reading “Haydar-i Zaviyah.” All these are here corrected to “Haydar-i Zavah.” Cf. Digby, 105, n. 76.
[119] <em>Velayetname-i Otman Baba</em> survives in two manuscripts: (i) Abdal; (2) Ms. Adnan Otuken il Halk Kütüphanesi (Ankara), no. 495 (dated 1316/1899, copyist Hasan Tebrizi). For a summary of its contents, see Hüseyin Fehmi, “Otman Baba ve Vilayetnamesi,” <em>Turk Yurdu</em> 5 (1927): 239–44 (Fehmi uses ms. i, which he incorrectly dates to 1073/1663); and Ahmet Yasar Ocak, <em>Bektaji Menaklbnamelerinde Islam Oncesi Inanf Motifleri,</em> 16–17 (Ocak uses ms. 2). A selection from the work (ms. i, fols. iob-isa) appears in Fahir iz, <em>Eski Turk Edebiyatlnda Nesir: XIV. Yizylldan XIX. Yuzyil Ortasmna Kadar Yazmalardan Sefilmij Metinler,</em> 330–36. The date of composition appears in Abdal, fol. 129a.
[120] Otman Baba’s name is discussed in Abdil on fol. 21b and his arrival and early activities in Anatolia on fols. 9b-üb; the dates of his birth and death are recorded on fols. 122b-123b. The date of his death also appears in Yemini, 83. Also see Ocak, 99–102 (relying on ms. i).
[121] On Sufi views of the relationship between sainthood and prophecy, see Hermann Landolt, “Waliyah,” in <em>The Encyclopedia of Religion,</em> 15:316–23, esp. 321–22; and Bernd Radtke, “The Concept of <em>Wilaya</em> in Early Sufism,” in <em>Classical Persian Sufism: From Its Origins to Rumi,</em> ed. Leonard Lewisohn, 483–96; also Chodkiewicz, <em>Le sceau des saints.</em>
[122] Abdal, fols. 5b-6b.
[123] Ibid., fol. 32b. The relevant portion ofQur’an 7:172, adopted with slight changes from Abdullah Yusuf Ali’s translation, <em>The Meaning of the Glorious Qur’an</em> (London: Nadim and Co., 1975), 227–28, reads: “When your Lord drew forth from the children of Adam, from their loins, their descendants, and made them testify concerning themselves (saying): ‘Am I not your Lord?’ they said: ‘Yes, we testify.’ “ Creative interpretation of this verse was a feature of Sufi thought from its earliest phases; see Gerhard Bowering, <em>The Mystical Vision of Existence in Classical Islam: The Qur’anic Hermeneutics of the Safi Sahl At-Tustari (d. 283/896),</em> 153–57.
[124] Abdal, fols. 8a and sob.
[125] Ibid., fol. 6b. On this <em>hadith qudst, awliyad’ tahta qibabl (qabaj’</em>) <em>la ya’rifuhum ghayrn,</em> see Furuzanfar, <em>Ahadlth-i Masnavl,</em> 52, no. 13 ; and Nur al-Din ‘Abd alRahman Isfarayini, <em>Kashifal-asrar,</em> ed. Hermann Landolt, 104, n. 144.
[126] Abdal, fols. 6b, 23a-b (on the “people of hospices”), 20a, 21b, 54b, 57b (on rejection of gifts).
[127] For references on Sultan uüca’ and Haci Bektas, see chapter 5, n. 62, and chapter 6, n. 71, respectively.
[128] Haci Bektas and Sultan Süca’ are mentioned in Abdal, fol. 7b. On Bayezid Baba and Mü’min Dervis, see fol. 28b ff; on Mahmud (elebi, fols. 112b-113a.
[129] Ibid., fols. 11b and 32b.
[130] Ibid., fols. 10b and 19b-21b.
[131] Dhahabi, 398; idem, <em>al-‘lbar fi khabar man ghabar,</em> ed. Salah al-Din Munajjid, 5:1 41–42; Safadi, 293.
[132] Ibn al-Kathir, <em>al-Biddyah wa-al-nihayah,</em> 13:196; Nu’aymi, 2:212. <em>Vilayetname,</em> 9–11, also refers to a period of captivity in Qutb al-Din Haydar’s life. According to this work, Qutb al-Din was held a prisoner by the “unbelievers of Badakhshan” (in present-day northeast Afghanistan), presumably the Isma’ilis, and was saved from captivity by Haci Bektas.
[133] Ibn al-Fuft ‘Abd al-Razzaq ibn Ahmad, <em>al-Hawadith al-jami’ah</em> (Baghdad, 1351/1932), 342, as quoted in Michel M. Mazzaoui, <em>The Origins of the Safawids: S&‘ism, Safism and the Gulat,</em> 43, n. 3; also Meier, 500. A somewhat different version of the same story is found in ‘Ubayd-i Zakani, <em>Hajvyadt va hazlTyat,</em> 39; see also Edward Granville Browne, <em>A Literary History of Persia,</em> 3:251; and George Morrison, Julian Baldick, and Shafü Kadkani, <em>History of Persian Literature from the Beginning of the Islamic Period to the Present Day,</em> 66.
[134] On al-Hariri, see note 17 below.
[135] Ibn al-Kathir, <em>al-Bidayah,</em> 1:344; al-Maqrizi, <em>al-Mawa’iz,</em> 4:301–2.
[136] Nu’aymi, 2:209–10. On Qalandars and Haydaris in Damascus, see also Pouzet, 228–29.
[137] Battutah, 1:61. Takrur was the name given in particular to present-day Mauritania and Mali, though it was also used more generally to denote the Saharan region stretching from the Nile to the Atlantic; see Chouki El Hamel, “Fath ash-Shakur: Hommes de lettres, disciples et enseignement dans le Takrur du XVI<sup>e</sup> au Tebut du XIX<sup>e</sup> siecle,” 74–75.
[138] Al-Maqrizi, <em>al-Mawa’iz,</em> 4:301–2.
[139] Mujir al-Din al-‘Ulaymi al-Hanbali, <em>al-Uns al-jal’l bi-ta’rikh al-quds wa-alkhalll,</em> 2:413–14. <em>See also</em> Huda Lutfi, <em>Al-Quds al-Mamlikiyya: A History ofMamluk Jerusalem Based on the Haram Documents,</em> 115 (Zawiyat al-Shaykh Ibrahim).
[140] Jawbari, fol. 18a, lines 4–6. On al-Jawbari, see Brockelmann, <em>Geschichte der Arabischen Litteratur,</em> 1:655 (497) and Suppl. I:910. A description of the contents of the work appears in Clifford Edmund Bosworth, <em>The Mediaeval Islamic Underworld: The Banu Sdsan in Arabic Society and Literature,</em> 1:106–18. I follow Brockelmann in giving al-Jawbari’s personal name as ‘Abd al-Rahman; the Süleymaniye manuscript records it as ‘Abd al-Rahim.
[141] Jawbari, fol. 17a. This manuscript copy reads “Rifa’iyah” instead of “Haydariyah” (followed by Bosworth, <em>The Mediaeval Islamic Underworld,</em> 113), yet the French translation of <em>Kashf al-asrar,</em> based on more copies, gives the name “Haydariyah”: <em>Le voile arrache: L’autre visage de l’lslam,</em> trans. Rene R. Khawam, 83.
[142] Taqi al-Din Ahmad ibn Taymiyah, <em>Majmu’at al-rasd’il wa-al-masd’il,</em> 1:33 and 64–65. Cf. Muhammad Umar Memon, <em>Ibn Taimiya’s Struggle against Popular Religion, with an Annotated Translation of His</em> Kitab iqtida’ ass-irat al-mustaqim mukhalafat ashab al-jahim, 61–62 and 65–66.
[143] Muhammad ibn Shakir al-Kutubi, <em>Fawat al-wafayat,</em> vol. 3, ed. Ihsan ‘Abbas, 36–37; and Meier, 505–6, where the poem is given in German translation.
[144] I read <em>julnak/jalnak/jilnak,</em> not <em>jilink</em> (Persian <em>jiling,</em> “a kind of silken stuff”) as Meier does, and take this word to be an arabization of the Turkish <em>goülek,</em> “shirt.” The reading <em>jilink</em> does not make much sense in this context. The text reads: “nalbisu ‘iwada hadha al-kattan julnak min <em>suf</em> al-khirfan aw dalaq aw nusbihu ‘uryan.”
[145] Va’iz Kashifi, <em>Rashahat ‘ayn al-hayat,</em> 2:460–61.
[146] Kitab alflaylah wa-laylah, ed. Muhsin Mahdi, 137; English translation: The Arabian Nights, trans. Husain Haddawy, 76 (“The Story of the Porter and the Three Ladies”). To the literary evidence documented above, one could also add Abi Hafs ‘Umar al-Suhrawardi’s (d. 632/1234) discussion on Qalandars in his celebrated Sufi manual ‘Awarif al-ma’arif (Suhrawardi, 66), discussed in chapter 3 above. The Qalandars survived in Egypt well into the tenth/sixteenth century; see, for instance, Michael M. Winter, Society and Religion in Early Ottoman Egypt: Studies in the Writings of’Abd al-Wahhab al-Sha’rani, 121, n. 52.
[147] For a list of references on al-Harri, see Meier, 507, n. 226. See also K6prilü I, 301 (continuation of n. 2 from 300); Louis Massignon, “Haririyya,” in <em>El,</em> 3:222; Pouzet, 220–21; Aflaki, 2:640–41 (4/32), 2:677–78 (4/79); and Jawbari, fols. 18a-Igb. On other related dervish movements in Damascus, notably the <em>muwallahun,</em> see Pouzet, 222–26. On Ahmad al-Badawi, see K. Vollers and E. Littmann, “Ahmad al-Badawl,” in <em>El,</em> 1:280–81. The most important compilation on his life is ‘Abd al-Samad Zayn al-Din, <em>al-Jawahir al-sanlyah fi alkaramat al-ahmadlyah,</em> repeatedly printed; two modern studies on him are Sa’id ‘Abd al-Fattah ‘Ashur, <em>al-Sayyid Ahmad al-Badawi: Shaykh wa tariqatuh;</em> and ‘Abd al-Halim Mahmid, <em>al-Sayyid Ahmad al-Badawl.</em> For a study of his cult in contemporary Egypt, see Edward B. Reeves, <em>The Hidden Government: Ritual, Clientalism, and Legitimation in Northern Egypt.</em> Cf. Alfred Le Chatelier, <em>Les confriries musulmanes du Hedjaz,</em> 161–82.
[148] On Ahmad al-Rifa’i, see D. S. Margoliouth, “Al-Rifa’i,” in <em>The Encyclopedia of Islam,</em> first edition, 6:1156–57; the standard source on his life is Taqi alDin ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Wasiti, <em>Tirycq al-muhibbin fi tabaqat khirqat al-mashayikh al-‘ariftn.</em> That Rifa’is wore iron collars is attested in Ibn Taymiyah, <em>Majmu’at alrasd’il,</em> 1:131–154. On Rifa’iyah in Damascus during the seventh/thirteenth century, see Pouzet, 227; on Rifa’iyah in general, see Trimingham, 37–40.
[149] In this connection, it is possible to speculate that the initial Mongol intolerance forced the Qalandars to emigrate to other Islamic lands and generally discouraged them from entering Mongol territory. Muhammad al-Khatib, for instance, writes, naturally with a good deal of exaggeration occasioned by his extreme hostility toward “heretics” <em>(zanddiqah):</em> “if it were not for the might of Mongol armies, practically all regions of the world would have been filled with these bands of irreligion” (Khatib, 53b). More telling is the execution of a group of Qalandars at the orders of Hülegü in Harrin in 658/1259-60; see chapter i.
[150] Fakhr al-Din Ibrahim Hamadani ‘Iraqi, <em>Kulliyat-i d’vdn-i Shaykh Fakhr alDin Ibrahim Hamaddnf mutakhallas bi”Iradq,</em> ed. M. Darvish, “Muqaddimah-i jami’-i divan,” 21–23.
[151] Aflaki, 2:631 (4/28).
[152] Rosenthal, 51.
[153] Tavakkuli ibn Isma’il, Ibn al-Bazzaz, <em>Safvat al-safJ’</em> (Bombay, 1329/1911), 63; and Rashid al-Din Fazl Allah, <em>Geschichte der Ilhane Abaga bis Gaihatu 1265–95</em> (s’Gravenhage, 1957), 47 and 56, as cited in Hanna Sohrweide, “Der Sieg der Safaviden in Persien u. seine Rückwirkung auf die Schüten Anatoliens im 16. Jh.,” <em>Der Islam</em> 41 (1965): 103–4.
[154] Tavakkuli ibn Isma’il, Ibn al-Bazzaz, <em>Safvat al-sajf,</em> 31, as cited in Sohrweide, “Der Sieg der Safaviden in Persien,” 103; also Meier, 498, n. 165; and Jean Aubin, “Shaykh Ibrahim Zihid Gilani (1218?-1 301),” <em>Turcica</em> 21–23 (1991): 41–43. Sohrweide notes that Shaykh Safi too despised Qalandars, referring to <em>Safvat al-saja’,</em> 120, 214, and 258.
[155] Khatib, 52a-b. Awhad al-Din Kirmini himself was familiar with Qalandars; see Meier, 500, n. 179.
[156] Abu Khalid is reported in al-‘Uqbari, <em>Kitab al-sawanih,</em> as cited in Rosenthal, 51–53; and Haiji Mubarak in Aflaki, 1:215 (3/123) and 467–68 (3/437).
[157] Battutah, 3:79–80.
[158] The text of Taj al-Din ibn Bahl al-Din Jami (Pür-i Baha)‘s work entitled <em>Karndma-yi awqdf is</em> given in transliteration and German translation in Birgitt Hoffmann, “Von falschen Asketen und ‘unfrommen’ Stiftungen,” in <em>Proceedings of the First European Conference of Iranian Studies Held in Turin, September 7<sup>th</sup>-11<sup>th</sup>, 1987 by the Societas Iranologica Europaea,</em> part 2, <em>Middle and New Iranian Studies,</em> ed. Gherardo Gnoli and Antonio Panaino, 409–85 (text on 422–83). The description of the dervish and his young companion is on 444–45 (verses 130–37). Hoffmann mistakenly thinks that the beardless boy is the dervish’s son, even though Pur-i Bahl explicitly refers to the boy as the Haydari dervish’s “witness” <em>(shahid;</em> verse 133). I thank ProfessorJ. T. P de Bruijn for bringing the <em>Kanmmayi awqaf to</em> my attention.
[159] Qazwini, 382–83.
[160] “[Baba Resul] had gone to Iran along with others who were exiled from Anatolia during the campaign of Temür and had remained there. After a long period of religious education in those lands, he wanted [to join a] a Sufi order, <em>tarfkat,</em> and became an Abdil by spending many months and years at the <em>zaviyah</em> of Kutbeddin Haydar” (Halvacibasizade Mahmud H.ulvi, <em>Lemezat-i hulviye ez leme’at-i ‘ulviye,</em> Ms. Süleymaniye Kfitüphanesi, Halet Efendi 281 [undated], fol. 186b).
[161] Karbala’i, 1:467–68, where, however, Tumni is said to be a Qalandar; and Shushtari, <em>Majalis al-mu’minin,</em> 36 and 267. For two differing views on the Haydaris of Tabriz and the later Haydari-Ni’mati conflict in major cities of Iran, see Zarrinkub, 85–87; and MirJa’fari, “Haydari va Ni’mati,” 745ff
[162] Tacizade Sa’di (Celebi, <em>Müne’at,</em> ed. Necati Lugal and Adnan Erzi, 28; MirJa’fari, “Haydari va Ni’mati,” 746. The person called Ni’mat Haydari, who was responsible for bringing about the unpleasant incident that the poet Jimi had to suffer through in Baghdad on his return trip from pilgrimage in 877-78/ 1472–74, also defies further identification, though in this case it is at least clear that, like the followers of Qutb al-Din Haydar, he had an unusually long moustache; see Va’iz Kashifi, <em>Rashahat ‘ayn al-hayat</em> 1:257–58; and Koprului I, 477.
[163] Meier, 509 (based on the <em>Mazarat-i Kirmdn</em> of Mihrabi, ed. Husayn Kuhl Kirmani [Tehran, 1330], 54–60; and Fasih al-Khvifi, <em>Mujmal-i Fasihi,</em> 3:147).
[164] Jean Aubin, “Un santon quhistani de l’6poque timouride,” <em>Revue des Etudes Islamiques</em> 35 (1967): 208; Meier, 510, n. 241. Aubin is quoting, without page references, from ‘Ali b. Mahmud Abivardi Kurani’s <em>Rawzat al-salikmn,</em> a biography of the Naqshbandi ‘Ali’ al-Din Muhammad Abizhl Cd. 892/1487).
[165] ‘Abd al-Husayn Nava 51, <em>Asnad va mukatabat-i tarikhi-i Iran az Timur ta Shah Ismad’l,</em> 410–11; Meier, 505; n. 215.
[166] JImi, <em>Nafahat al-uns,</em> 14–15. It should be noted, however, that Jmi bases his discussion mainly on al-Suhrawardi’s <em>‘Awdrifal-ma’arif.</em> Further, see Najm alDin ‘Abd Allah ibn Muhammad Razi “Dayah,” <em>The Path of God’s Bondsmen from Origin to Return,</em> trans. Hamid Algar, index, s.v. “qalandar.”
[167] For the history of Qalandars in Iran during the Safavid period and beyond, see Iskandar Bag Munshi, <em>History of Shah ‘Abbas the Great,</em> trans. Roger M. Savory, I:195; Adam Olearius, <em>Vermehrte Newe Beschreibung der Muscowitischen und Persischen Reyse,</em> ed. Dieter Lohmeier, 685; Raphael Du Mans, <em>Estat de la Perse en 1660,</em> ed. Ch. Schefer, 216; Muhammad Tahir Nasrabadi, <em>Tazkirah-i NasrabadL,</em> ed. Vahid Dastgirdi, 264 (Baba Sultan Qalandar, on whom see also Meier, 509, n. 2); Ma’sum ‘Ali’Shah, <em>Tara’iq al-haqadiq,</em> 2:354, quoting from <em>Riyaz al-siyahah</em> (comp. 1237/1821-22) of Zayn al-‘Abidin ibn Iskandar Shirvani; the German translation of this passage appears in Meier, SIo. One should also consult Gramlich, 1:70–82, who attempts to trace the early history of present-day Khiksar dervishes in Iran; cf. Zarrinkub, 92ff.
[168] On La’l Shahbaz, see Barani, 67–68; Ghulim Sarvar Lahiri, <em>Khazinat alasfiya’,</em> 2:46–47; Rizvi, 306 (relying on the <em>Ma’arij al-vilayah</em> of Ghulam Mu’in al-Din ‘Abd Allah Khvashgi); Digby, 70–71, 78, l00, 102 (relying on Barani, 67–68; and <em>Tazkirah-i masha’ikh-i Sivistan,</em> ed. S. H. Rashdi [Mihran, 1974], 205); Gramlich, 1:78 (note 48, relying on Lhuiri, <em>Khazlnat al-asfiyad,</em> 2:46–47); Zarrinkib, 89; Meier, 508–9; and N. B. G. Qazi, <em>Lal Shahbaz Qalandar: ‘Uthman Marwandi,</em> where a few Persian poems attributed to La’l Shahbaz are reproduced (39–44). There is also a pamphlet entitled <em>Qalandar Lal Shahbaz</em> published by the Department of Public Relations, Government of Sind, which is not devoid of interest.
[169] See Nizami, 295; Rizvi, 304; and Digby, 63, 84–85. All three scholars rely on the <em>Akhbar al-akhyar f asrar al-abrar</em> (comp. <em>999/1590-91)</em> of ‘Abd alHaqq ibn Sayf al-Din al-Turk al-Dihlavi (d. 1052/1642-43); Rizvi also utilizes the <em>Mir’at al-asrar</em> (comp. 1065/1654) of ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Chishti, Ms. British Library, for which see Charles Rieu, <em>Catalogue of the Persian Manuscripts in the British Museum,</em> I:359b. To these, one could add the <em>Usul al-maqsud</em> of Turab ‘Ali Kakoravi (d. 1275/1858), as cited in Storey, 1035–37, no. 1378 (2).
[170] See Khaliq Ahmad Nizami, “Abu ‘All Qalandar, Saraf-al-Din Pinipati,” in <em>EIR,</em> 1:258; Rizvi, 305; and Digby, 100–102.
[171] When Baha’ al-Din refused to give alms to a group of Qalandars, they started to hurl bricks at the door of his <em>khanqah;</em> see Digby, 87; and Nizami, 295. A solitary Qalandar, angered that he was not allowed to consume his hemp- drink in peace, wanted at first to strike a certain disciple of Baba Farid by the name of Badr al-Din Ishaq with his begger’s bowl, but, at the intervention of Baba Farid himself, was content to crush his bowl against a wall; see Qalandar, 130–31; Digby, 88–89, and Nizami, 296. The same Baba Farid had another troublesome encounter with a Qalandar-like figure; see Digby, 92–93. Although Digby presents this incident as a murderous attack upon Baba Farid in keeping with the view expressed in his main source, it can certainly be interpreted as an innocuous visit by a dervishmost likely a Haydari.
[172] Barani, 91–92; Digby, 63 and 71; and Rizvi, 304. Since metal paraphernalia was the chief characteristic not of Qalandars but of Haydari dervishes, Barani’s use of the term Qalandar here is probably not accurate.
[173] Qalandar, 6, 74, 112–13, 130–31, 250, 286–87; Digby, 71–72, 94–97. Hamid Qalandar himself was a Qalandar who was “converted” at the time of Nizam al-Din Awliya’. Nasir al-Din Chiragh-i Dihli was possibly subjected to a murderous attack by a Qalandar, though the identification of his assailant as a Qalandar remains quite problematic (in spite of Digby’s opinion to the contrary).
[174] Digby, 69, 78–80. A more detailed account of Qalandars in Muslim India of the seventh-eighth/thirteenth-fourteenth centuries is found in this study by Digby. For later history of the Qalandars in India, see, other than Digby, 69–70, 77, 99, the following works cited in Storey: <em>Usul al-masqsud</em> (comp. 1225-26/ 1810-II) of Turab ‘Ali Kakoravi, Storey, 1036, no. 1378; <em>al-Rawz al-azharfi ma’asir al-Qalandar</em> of Taql’All Kakoravi (d. 1290/1873), Storey, 1046, no. 1399; <em>Bahr-i zakhkar</em> (comp. 1203/1788-89) of Wajih al-Din Ashraf, Storey, 1031–32, no. 1374; <em>Tahrmr al-anwar fi tafstr al-qalandar</em> of ‘Ali Anwar Qalandar ibn ‘Ali Akbar, Storey, 1047, no. 1400 (2).
[175] Barani, 212. On Abfi Bakr Tusi, see Bruce B. Lawrence, “Abu Bakr Tuisi Haydari, “ in EIR, 1:265. For later sources and detailed accounts of the Sidi Muwallih affair, see Digby, 91–92; Nizami, 288–90; and Rizvi, 307–9. For other reports of Haydaris in Indian-Persian Sufi literature, see references in Ahmad, Intellectual History, 45; and Nizami, 286. Nizami reports from Hamid ibn Fazl Allah Jamali’s Siyar al-AriJin (Delhi, 13 11/1893), 67, that the Haydari practice of passing a lead ring through the urethra was konwn as sikh muhr, “skewer or pin seal.” OnJamali, see Storey, 968–72.
[176] Battutah, 2:6–7, 3:439, and 4:61; see also 3:309–11.
[177] A. S. Bazmee Ansari, “Badl’ al-Din,” in <em>El,</em> I:858–59; ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Chishti, <em>Mir’at-i Madari,</em> a full-scale sacred biography written in 1064/1654, for which see Rieu, <em>Persian Manuscripts,</em> I:361a, 3:973a; and Storey, 0006; [Kaykhusraw Isfandiyar,] <em>Dabistan-i Mazahib,</em> ed. Rahim Rizazada Malik, I:1 90–91; H. A. Rose, ed., <em>A Glossary of the Tribes and Castes of the Punjab and North-West Frontier Province,</em> 3:43–44; Rizvi, 318–20; M. M. Haq, “Shah Badi’al-Din Madar and His Tariqah in Bengal,” <em>Journal of the Asiatic Society of Pakistan</em> 12 (1967): 95-üo. For Madaris in recent times, see Marc Gaborieau, <em>Minorites musulmanes dans le royaume hindou du Nepal,</em> 122–27; and Kathy Ewing, <em>“Malangs</em> of the Punjab: Intoxication or <em>Adab</em> as the Path to God?” in <em>Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place</em> of(Adab) <em>in South Asian Islam,</em> ed. Barbara Daly Metcalf, 357–71. Cf. Jamini Mohan Ghosh, <em>Sannyasi and Fakir Raiders in Bengal.</em>
[178] A. S. Bazmee Ansari, “DJalal al-Din Husayn al-Bukhari,” in <em>El,</em> 2:392; Lahuri, <em>Khazfnat al-asfiyd’,</em> 2:35–38; <em>Dabistdn-i Mazahib,</em> 1:191–92; Shirvani, <em>Bustan al-siyahah,</em> 152–53; Rizvi, 8, 277–82, and 320; Ahmad, <em>Intellectual History,</em> 44; Zarrinkub, 91–92; Battutah, 2:282; and Gramlich, 1:71–73.
[179] Ebu’l Hayr Rumi, <em>Saltukndme,</em> fols. 364b-65b, reports the presence of Qalandars in these towns during the time of Sultan ‘Ala’ al-Din Kayqubad (r. 616-34/1219-37).
[180] Aflaki, 2:596 (3/581). Abu Bakr immediately ordered the bull to be sacrificed and distributed to the needy.
[181] Ibid., 1:412 (3/355). AlsoJalal al-Din Muhammad ibn Muhammad Balkhi Rumi, known as Mawlani, <em>Masnavi-i ma’navt,</em> ed. Reynold A. Nicholson, 1:18. For other references to Qalandars in the works of Rumi, see Abdulbaki Gélpinarli, <em>Mevlana Celaleddmn: Hayati, Felsefesi, Eserleri, Eserlerinden Seameler,</em> 61–63.
[182] Aflaki, 1:215 (3/123) and 467–68 (3/437). Al-Aflaki also records an anecdote concerning Muhammad Haydari, a disciple of Hajji Mubarak, 2:773–74.
[183] <em>Vilayetname,</em> 64.
[184] On the meaning of the word <em>barak,</em> see Robert Dankoff, “Baraq and Buriq,” <em>Central Asiatic Journal</em> 15 (1971): 111. For references on San Saltuk, to whom the <em>Saltukname</em> is dedicated, see Machiel Kiel, “The Tfrbe of Sari Saltik at Badabag-Dobrudja: Brief Historical and Architectonical Notes,” <em>Giney Dogu Avrupa Araftlrmalar Dergisi</em> 6–7 (1977–78): 205–25; a short biography of this figure is given in Ahmet T. Karamustafa, “Early Sufism in Eastern Anatolia,” in <em>Classical Persian Sufism: From Its Origins to Rumi,</em> ed. Leonard Lewisohn, 193–96.
[185] Algar, “Bariq Biba,” 3:754–55. Algar supplies copious references, to which should be added Abdülbaki Golpinarll, <em>Yunus Emre: Hayatt,</em> 39–47; and Donald P Little, “Religion under the Mamlfks,” <em>Muslim World</em> 73 (1983): 175–76; both Gélpinarli and Little use additional Mamluk sources not cited by Algar.
[186] A description of Barak Baba and his dervishes is given above in chapter 1.
[187] The Persian original of Qutb al-‘Alavi’s commentary along with a complete translation into Turkish is given in Abdulbaki Golpinarll, <em>Yunus Emre ve Tasavvuf,</em> 457–72 and 255–75, respectively.
[188] On Yinus Emre, see Golpmarli, <em>Yunus Emre ve Tasavvuf,</em> where Taptuk Emre is also discussed, 41–43.
[189] This information on the dervishes ofAbdil Mus is contained in a famous poem by Kaygusuz Abdal; see Sadeddin Nüzhet Ergun, <em>Turk Sairleri,</em> 1:166; and Abdülbaki G61pinarll, <em>Kaygusuz Abdal, Hatayi, Kul Himmet,</em> 34–35. Cf. Kaygusuz Abdal, <em>Kaygusuz Abdal’in Mensur Eserleri,</em> ed. Abdurrahman Güzel, 23, which contains a slightly different version with some better readings; for instance “Alvan golifi” (a lake in Antalya, Kaygusuz Abdil’s hometown) instead of the usual “elvan gölün.” There is also a short sacred biography of Abdal Msa,, reproduced in Ergun, <em>Turk Sairleri</em>, 1:166–69, which is not very informative.
[190] See the poems of Kaygusuz in G61plnarll, <em>Kaygusuz Abdal,</em> especially nos. 6 (40–42), 7 (42–43), and 9 (46–48).
[191] A list of Kaygusuz Abdal’s works is provided in Abdurrahman Gizel, <em>Kaygusuz Abdal (Alaaddin Gaybi) Bibliyografyasi.</em> The summary of his views is based on his published prose works; see Kaygusuz Abdal, <em>Mensur Eserleri.</em>
[192] Orhan Koprulü, “Velayet-name-i Sultan Sucaeddin,” <em>Turkiyat Mecmuasl</em> 17 (1972): 177–84, where other references on Sultan uica’ can be found. To these one should add Abdil, fol. 7b. On Haci Bayram, see Fuat Bayramoglu, <em>Hact Bayram-i Veli: Yaiami, Soyu, Vakfi.</em> Ummi Kemal is discussed in William C. Hickmann, “Who Was Ummi Kemal?” <em>Bogazici Universitesi Dergisi</em> 4–5 (197677): 57–82. On Nesimi, see Kathleen R. F Burrill, <em>The Quatrains of Nesimi: Fourteenth Century Turcic Hurufi.</em>
[193] For details of the Seyb Süca’ complex, see Ayverdi, 2:420–21; also Tayyib Gökbilgin, <em>XV-XVI. Asirlarda Edirne ve Pasa Livasi: Vaklflar, Mülkler, Mukataalar,</em> 34.
[194] For previous surveys of the topic, see Ocak and Colin H. Imber, “The Wandering Dervishes,” in <em>Mashriq: Proceedings of the Eastern Mediterranean Seminar, University ofManchester, 1977–78,</em> 36–50.
[195] Theodoro Spandugino, <em>I commentari di Theodoro Spandvgino Cantacvscino Gentilhuomo Costantinopolitano, dell’origine de’ principi turchi, & de’ costumi di quella natione,</em> 193–94; contemporary French translation: <em>Petit traicte de l’origine des Turcqz par Theodore Spandouyn Cantacasin,</em> trans. Balarin de Raconis, ed. Charles Schefer, 224–28.
[196] Menavino, 79–82; German translation, 36b-37b. The relevant passage is translated in full in chapter 1 above.
[197] Vahidi, fols. 28a-3 Ib. It should be pointed out that Vahidi himself was a respectable Sufi who did not approve of the Qalandarl path.
[198] Fatih Mehmed II Vakfiyeleri, facsimile, 175–77; transliterated text, 259–60 (paragraphs 323–28). On closer scrutiny, it appears possible that this structure was a hospice for Mevlevis. In any case, the building was soon converted into a religious college (madrasah) and a mosque; see the interpretation in Ayverdi, 3:428 (entries 456–58). Also Nejat Göyünc, “Kalenderhane Camü,” Tarih Dergisi 34 (1984): 485–94; and Wolfgang Muller-Wiener, Bildlexicon zur Topographie Istanbuls: ByzantionKonstantinupolisIstanbul bis zum Beginn des 17. Jahrhunderts, 153–58.
[199] Tayyib Gokbilgin, “XVI. aslrda Karaman eyaleti ve Larende (Karaman) vaklfve müesseseleri,” <em>Vaklflar Dergisi</em> 7 (1968): 38, no. 40.
[200] For the <em>kalenderhanes</em> in Birgi and Konya, of uncertain dates, see Omer Lutfi Barkan, “Osmanll Imparatorlugunda bir iskin ve kolonizasyon metodu olarak vaklflar ve temlikler: I, istila devirlerinin kolonizat6r Turk dervialeri ve zaviyeler,” <em>Vaklflar Dergisi</em> 2 (1942): 327; and Semavi Eyice, “Klrsehir’de Karakurt (Kalender Baba) Ilicasl,” <em>Istanbul Universitesi Edebiyat Fakiltesi Tarih Enstitüsi Dergisi</em> 2 (1971): 247–48, no. 40. The <em>kalenderhdne</em> in Bursa is cited in Evliya, 2:18, and the one in Erzincan is recorded in a pious endowment <em>(waqf)</em> document dated 937/1530; see Ismet Miroglu, <em>Kemah Sancagl ve Erzincan Kazasl (1520–1566),</em> 152.
[201] Edirneli Mecdi, <em>Hada’ikü’s-saka’ik,</em> ed. Mehmed Recai under the title <em>Terceme-i sakadik-i nu’manTye,</em> 225.
[202] ‘Yusufibn Ya’kub, <em>Mendakb-i serif ve tarikatname-i piran ve mesayih-i tarfkat-i ‘aliye-i halvetiye,</em> 38–39.
[203] Celalzide Mustafa, known as Koca Nisanc, <em>Geschichte Sultan Süleyman Kanunls von 1520 bis 1557 oder Tabakat il-memalik ve derecat ül-mesalik von Celalzade MustaJa genannt Koca Nijinca,</em> ed. Petra Kappert, 348b. Qalandars continued to exist in the Ottoman Empire after the mid-tenth/sixteenth century. Later European accounts rely mostly on Menavino (this is also true for other dervish groups). Nicolas de Nicolay, who was in Istanbul in 1551 (Nicolas, 189–91; English translation, 104–5; Salomon Schweigger, in Istanbul between January 1578 and May 158 (<em>Ein newe Reyssbeschreibung auss Teutschland nach Constantinopel und Jerusalem, 1</em>95–97); and Michel Baudier de Languedoc, whose work first appeared in 1625 <em>(Histoire generale de la religion des Tvrcs,</em> 386–96), all repeat Menavino in either synoptic or extended versions. Sir Paul Rycaut <em>(History,</em> 258–60), who was in Asia Minor during the reign of Mehmed IV (0058-99/ 1648–87), apparently based his description on his own observations. Barthelemy d’Herbelot <em>(Bibliotheque Orientale,</em> 244) is general and vague on Qalandars. A century later, Mouradja d’Ohsson <em>(Tableau general de l’Empire Othoman,</em> vol. 4, pt. I, 684–85) seems to be the first to mention a certain “Youssouph Endeloussy” as the alleged founder of the Qalandars. His claim was taken over by some later authors; see, for instance, Rose’s note to Brown’s text inJohn Brown, <em>Darvisches,</em> 169–72, n. i (chapter ü of this book is a reproduction of d’Ohsson’s account of dervishes and Suf10rders); also Le Chatelier, <em>Les confrieries musulmanes du Hedjaz,</em> 253–56; and Trimingham, 268–69. On the Ottoman side, the most significant source of recent times, Harirzide Mehmed Kemaleddin, <em>Tibyan wasa’il al-haqa’iq fi bayan salasil al-tard’iq,</em> Ms. Siuleymaniye Kütiphanesi, Ibrahim Efendi 430–32 (late 13<sup>th</sup>/19<sup>th</sup> century), 3:74b-77a, devotes a few pages to Qalandariyah, where from Jimi’s <em>Nafahat al-uns,</em> Tabrizi’s <em>Burhan-i qati’,</em> Ibn Battitah’s travelogue, and al-Maqrizi’s <em>al-Mawa’iz</em> are quoted. The author himself thinks Qalandariyah to be a branch of the Mevleviye that was formed by Divane Mehmed (Celebi. For detailed information on this person, see G61pmarll, 101–22. Mehmed (elebi seems to have been not a Qalandar but a Shams-i Tabrizi; see the section on Shams-i Tabrizis below in this chapter.
[204] Spandugino, <em>Commentari,</em> 192; French translation: <em>Petit traicte,</em> 220 (read “Calenderi” in place of”Dynamies” in the French translation).
[205] It is difficult to decipher the Turkish original of this sentence. The best I can offer here is “Geda olmak dilersen 6zini alhaclk g6r” (If you want to become a beggar, you should be humble).
[206] Menavino, 75–76; German translation, 35a. Menavino’s description is reproduced almost word by word in Nicolas, 182–83; English translation, 101.
[207] Vahidi, fols. 53b-58a.
[208] On the <em>taj-i Haydari,</em> see Iskandar Bag Munshi, <em>History of Shah ‘Abbas the Great,</em> 1:31; and Abdülbaki G61pinarh, “Klzilbas,” in <em>Islam Ansiklopedisi,</em> 6:789. Also cf. Adel Allouche, “The Origins and Development of the Ottoman-Safavid Conflict (906-962/1500-1555),” 118, n. 94.
[209] Colin H. Imber, “The Persecution of the Ottoman Shi’ites according to the Muihimme Defterleri, 1565–1585,” <em>Der Islam</em> 56 (1979): 245–73.
[210] G6kbilgin, “Karaman eyaleti,” 38, n. 41, where it is reported as “vakf-i zaviye-i hayderbine der nezd-i Alacasoluk” (in Lirende), with a total income of <em>3,265 akfes;</em> and Miroglu, <em>Kemah Sancagt,</em> 152.
[211] Ahmed Refik, <em>Onuncu ‘asr-i hicrtde Istanbul hayati (961–1000),</em> 209; Suraiya Faroqhi, <em>Der Bektaschi-Orden in Anatolien (vom spaten finfzehnten Jahrhundert bis 1826),</em> 31–32. I follow Faroqhi’s dating. It should be pointed out here that the <em>haydarhane</em> in Lirende might conceivably not have been a hospice for Haydari dervishes but only named after its founder, a certain Haydar. For examples of such cases, see Hafiz Hüseyn ibn Isma’il Ayvansarayl, <em>Hadikatü’l-cevmi’,</em> I:88, 89, 94, and 95; also Mehmed Süreyyi, <em>Sicill-i ‘Osmani or Tezkire-i mesahir-i ‘Osmaniye,</em> 2:442, on “Hayder Hüseyn Aga,” who is said to have founded a hospice <em>(dergah)</em> in his name.
[212] Oruq ibn ‘Adil, <em>Tevarfh-i al-i ‘Osman,</em> ed. Franz Babinger, 138; German translation: <em>Der Fromme Sultan Bayezid: Die Geschichte seiner Herrschaft (1481–1512) nach den altosmanischen Chroniken des Oruç und des Anonymus Hanivaldanus,</em> trans. Richard F Kreutel, 59–61. Oruç writes that the assassin had the appearance of a Haydari, with earrings and an iron collar around his neck; he wore a felt coat. Later Ottoman chronicles, listed in Sohrweide, “Der Sieg der Safaviden,” 138, are vague and refer to the assassin merely as a Qalandar.
[213] “Do you, friends, know what a Haydari is? Getting intoxicated on a preparation of hashish, they roam the city and [its] markets, constantly reciting poems in couplets. Contented [to be] in the hospice of this world, some are hemp-addicts and others Abdils” (Fakiri, <em>Ta’rifat,</em> Ms. Istanbul Universitesi Kütüphanesi, TY 3051 [undated], fol. 13b).
[214] Nisanci, 234–37. The dervishes described by Küçük Nisanci wear iron rings on their ears and around their necks as well as little bells on their shoulders and chests.
[215] ‘Asik, fol. 270b. The accounts in other sources on Hayali Beg are not as informative as ‘Assik Celebi’s; see Sehi Beg, <em>Hest bihist,</em> ed. Gdinay Kut, fols. 112a-b; Latifi, 150–51; Klnahzade, 1:354–60; ‘Ahdi Ahmed Celebi, <em>Gülsen-i su’ara,</em> Ms. British Library, Add. 7876 (undated), fol. 72b; Mustafi ‘Ali, <em>Künhü’lahbar,</em> Ms. British Library, Or. 32 (undated), fol. 278b; and Riyai Mehmed, <em>Riyazü’su-ara,</em> Ms. British Library, Or. 13501 (dated 1337/1918-19, copyist Ahmed ‘Izzet), fol. 65b.
[216] For Hayderi, see Ergun 2, 1:73–76; and ‘Asik, fol. 90a. Cf. Kinalizide, 1:314, though it is not clear if Kinalizide is reporting on the same Hayder. Mesrebi, who died in 962/1554-55, is said to have been a disciple of the same Baba ‘All Mest, the master of Haylli; see Sehi, <em>Hest bihist,</em> fol. 116b; Latifi, 3 I -12; ‘Ailk, fol. 124a; and Kinalhzade, 2:903.
[217] On the Arabic term <em>abdal</em> (pl. of <em>badal,</em> literally “substitute”) as used in Sufism, see Ignaz Goldziher, “Abdal,” in <em>El,</em> 1:94–95; and Köprülü 2, 23–29. On the possible origins and meaning of the Turkish word <em>tsik</em> (“bright, gleaming; brightness, gleam”; cf. Clauson, <em>Etymological Dictionary,</em> 977, col. i), see Abdülbaki Gélpinarli, <em>Yunus Emre Divani: Metinler, Sözlük, Açilama,</em> 677–79. One could speculate that the usage of this term, at least initially, was not unrelated to the practice of <em>chahar zarb,</em> whereby “the sun that is the face” was made to “shine in all its brightness.” However, an altogether different etymology that sees the Arabic word <em>shaykh</em> at the root of the Turkish <em>tsik</em> has been proposed by Köprülü 2, 36. On Seyyid Battal Gazi, see M. Canard and I. Melikoff, “Battal,” in <em>El,</em> 1:1 102–4; and Pertev Naili Boratav, “Battal,” in <em>Islam Ansiklopedisi,</em> 1:344–51.
[218] Vahidi, fols. 41a-47a.
[219] On the significance and origins of the hatchet of Abu Muslim in the Turko-Iranian cultural sphere, see Irene Melikoff, <em>Abu Muslim, le “Porte-Hache” du Khorassan dans la tradition epique turco-iranienne.</em> The word <em>,Üca’t</em> (literally “serpent-like” or “relating to heroes, heroic”) was used most likely in honor and memory of the early Abdal master Sultan Süca’; see the section on Anatolia in chapter 5.
[220] Menavino, 76–79; German translation, 35b-36b. The assassination attempt in question was carried out against Bayezid II in the year 897/1492 by a dervish portrayed as a Haydari; see the section on Haydaris above in this chapter.
[221] Nicolas, 185–88; English translation, 102–3.
[222] Konstantin Mihailovic, <em>Memoirs of a Janissary,</em> trans. Benjamin Stolz, 69. Even though Mihailovic confuses the Abdals with the Haydaris on two occasions (the sentences “And they gird themselves with chains in criss-cross fashion” and “And they sheathe their <em>instrumentum,</em> alias penis, in iron”), his “derwissler” are clearly the Abdils.
[223] In a well-known passage, ‘Asikpasazade refers to Abdalan-i Rum in passing as one of the four groups of travelers in Asia Minor: <em>Die Altosmanische Chronik der ‘Asikpasazde,</em> ed. Friedrich Giese, 201. Fakiri, <em>Ta’rifat,</em> fol. 13a, produces the following definition for <em>tsik:</em> “An <em>tsik</em> is one who has gone astray from the [right] path; all are sodomites, hashish-addicts, and outlaws. So burned and consumed are they with the love of <em>‘Ali</em> that they have assumed eighteen different forms in this world. At their sides are hashish-containers; one would take them to be bitches of Kerbela.” In three further couplets (fol. 13b), Fakiri provides additional information on the <em>köçeks</em> (the youths mentioned in Menavino’s account quoted above): “In the resting-place that is the world, <em>kdoeks</em> are those who wait [in attendance] at the side of <em>babas.</em> Whenever [the <em>baba]</em> so wishes they go into a [special] state [an allusion to sexual intercourse] and become Abdals with such humility. They are the lamps of the hospice of time; their beds are the sheepskin [seats] of the <em>babas.”</em> Köprülü 2, 31 , gives the faulty reading “isik oldur k’olamaz hep de haric” for the first verse of the first definition; the correct reading is “isik oldur k’ola mezhebden haric.” Nisanci, 234, makes it known in two separate couplets that Abdals shave their heads and do not wear any headgear. Cf. the first couplet of Kücük Nisanci with Hayali Beg, <em>Hayali Bey Divani,</em> ed. Ali Nihat Tarlan, 446, Mukatta’at 9. Mustafa <em>‘Ali, Hulasatu’l-ahval,</em> ed. Andreas Tietze in “The Poet as Critique of Society: A 16<sup>th</sup> Century Ottoman Poem,” <em>Turcica</em> 9 (1977): 135, verses 138–39, contains two verses on <em>isiks:</em> “If you are inclined to become an <em>isik,</em> you would be afflicted with fever and sighs from head to foot; wandering about barefoot and head uncovered in summer and winter, you would yearn after hemp-drink and hashish.”
[224] On H.asan Rumi, see Latifi, 131. On Seher Abdil, see Ergun I, 1:88–95; and Abdülbaki Golpinarli, <em>Alevi-Bektasf Nefesleri,</em> 18. For Siri, see Ergun I, 1:116–25; and Golpinarh, <em>Alevi-Bektasi Nefesleri,</em> 177–78. It seems possible that Seher Abdal and Siri lived later than the tenth/sixteenth century. Muhyiddin Abdil was a disciple of Akyazili Sultan, and Feyü Hasan Baba of Otman Baba (on Akyazili, see the section on Abdils of Rum below in this chapter); see Ergun I, 1:141–55; and Gölpinarli, <em>Alevi-Bektasi Nefesleri,</em> 16.
[225] Latifi, 141–43; ‘Alsk, fol. 175a; and Kinalizade, 2:632. Cf. Ergun 2, 2:505–8.
[226] ‘Ahdi, <em>Gülsen-i su’ara,</em> fol. 149a; Ergun I, 1:81–83, quoting from ‘Ahdi. Kelami was alive and a resident of the Karbali’ hospice when ‘Ahdi wrote his entry on him, which could have been any time between 971/1563-64, the first completion of the <em>Gulsen-i su’ara,</em> and 1001/1592-93, the date of ‘Ahdi’s latest addition to his work; see Agah Sirri Levend, <em>Turk Edebiyati Tarihi,</em> vol. I, <em>Giris,</em> 270–71. Apparently, Gelibolulu Mustafa ‘Ali appointed Kelami the administrator of his pious endowment at Karbala’; see Cornell H. Fleischer, <em>Bureaucrat and Intellectual in the Ottoman Empire: The Historian Mustafa Ali (1541–1600),</em> 124, n. 38.
[227] ‘Asik, fol. 95b.
[228] Yemini. For a brief description of <em>Faziletname’s</em> contents, see Charles Rieu, <em>Catalogue of the Turkish Manuscripts in the British Museum</em> 173–74, ms. Add. 19805. On Akyazili Sultan, see this section below.
[229] Semsi is recorded in Latifi, 209–10; ‘Asik, fol. 205a; and Kinalizade, 1:521. According to Latifi, he died before the end of the reign of Sultan Selim I. For the relevant verses of the <em>Deh murg,</em> see semsi, <em>Deh murg,</em> (i) Ms. British Library, Or. 7113, fols. 130b-50b (dated 998/1589-90, copyist ‘Abdilkerim ibn Bakir ibn Ibrahim ibn Iskender ibn ‘Abdullah), fols. 140a-b; and (2) Ms. British Library, Or. 7203, (undated), fols. 12b-14b, though the two copies consulted preserve only a very corrupt text. I could not consult I. G. Kaya, “Dervis Semsi ve ‘Deh Murg,’ “ <em>Sesler</em> 19 (1983): 103–17.
[230] On Hayreti, see the introduction to the critical edition of his collection of poems <em>(divan)</em> in Hayreti, <em>Divan: Tenkidli Basim,</em> ed. Mehmed Cavusoglu and M. Ali Tanyeri, X-XVII. Most important in connection with the <em>Abdals</em> are <em>kaside</em> no. 8 (19–21), entitled “Der beyin-i seyr ü süluk-i abdal-i Hüda ve ‘ussaki bi-ser ü pa,” and <em>musammats</em> nos. 11 through 15 (91–99).
[231] See in particular <em>musammat</em> no. 13, Hayreti, <em>Divan,</em> 94–95, entitled “Der keyfiyyet-i beng ve halet-i esrar guyed,” with the refrain “Cur’adani getür abdal yine hayran olalum.”
[232] Hayretl, <em>Divan,</em> 19, verses 8 and 4, respectively. Cf. verses 6 and 7. It could be added here that Keprülü, who first drew attention to some of the Abdal poets mentioned above, was of the opinion that Hüseyn10f Rumeli, noted by Latifi, 132, was also an Abdal. The more detailed entry on this poet in ‘Asik, fol. 88a, however, proves Hüseyni to have been a mere plagiarist.
[233] The two poems in question can be found in Ergun 2, 1:234–39.
[234] See ‘Ata’ullah ibn Yahya Nev’izade, <em>Hadaikü’l-haka’ik fi tektileti’s-akadik,</em> ed. Mehmed Reca’i, 56.
[235] Vahidi, fol. 28b, 1.8, and elsewhere, consistently defines <em>müfred</em> as the disciple “who sits below the master, that is, the ‘second-in-charge.’ “ See Dihkhudi, s.v. “Mufrad” for this meaning of the word.
[236] ‘Asik, fol. 175a-b.
[237] For details as well as references to earlier studies, see the thorough study of these documents in Suraiya Faroqhi, “Seyyid Gazi Revisited: The Foundation as Seen through Sixteenth Century Documents,” <em>Turcica</em> 13 (1981): 90–122. The <em>tekke</em> is said to have been founded by Mehmed ibn ‘Ali Mibal in 917/1511; see Theodor Menzel, “Das Bektisi-Kloster Sejjid-i Ghazi,” <em>Mitteilungen des Seminars für Orientalische Sprachen</em> 28 (1925): 113; and I. Aydin Yüksel, <em>II. Bayezid-Yavuz Selim Devri</em> (continuation of Ayverdi), 317. Evliya Qelebi’s account is to be found in Evliyi, 3:13–14.
[238] Faroqhi, “Seyyid Gazi Revisited,” 94. The document in question contains the names and posts of forty-eight servants of the institution. Significantly, Faroqhi reads the document to mean that “there was no hereditary master, <em>seyh,”</em> in the establishment and, relying on two further documents (dated 937/1530 and 938/1531-32, respectively), goes on to state that the resident “dervishes had the right to elect their own <em>seyh,” (95).</em>
[239] ‘AJik, fol. 175b; Nev’izide, <em>Hada’ikü’l-haka’ik,</em> 56; Niaincl, 234–37; and Kaprulu 2, 32.
[240] Faroqhi, “Seyyid Gazi Revisited,” 101–5.
[241] Ibid., 113.
[242] Individual Abdals continued to exist during and after the eleventh/ seventeenth century. Witness, for instance, the following report of Dr. John Covel, who was in Turkey between 1670 and 1679 C.E.: “I remember two Kalenderis abord the Viner ... ; they had the caps of a wandering Dervise, but in all things else like the habit of the Kalenderi, in Mr. Rycaut, he makes them santons, but in good earnest they are meer Tomes of Bedlam. One had a horne tyed about his shoulders (like a wild goates but longer); he blew it like our sow gelders, high to low. He had a great hand jar, a terrible crab-tree truncheon, a leather kind of petticoat about his middle, naked above and beneath. It was then in May or June. He had a coarse Arnout Jamurluck. He drank wine (like a fish water) which we gave him to blow his home” U. Theodore Bent, ed., <em>Early Voyages in the Levant: 1. The Diary of Master Thomas Dallam, 1599–1600; 2. Extracts from the Diaries of Dr. John Covel, 1670–1679, 153).</em> Cf. the observations of Adam Olearius, who saw Shi’i Abdals in Iran during his travels in that country in 1637 <em>(Newe Beschreibung,</em> 684–85). One could also draw attention to the confusing testimony of Sieur du Loir in a letter that he wrote from Istanbul in 1640 <em>(Les voyage du Sieur du Loir,</em> 149–59). For a much more recent report, see Brown, <em>Darvisches,</em> 93.
[243] Menzel, “Das Bektasi-Kloster,” 120–25; Yiksel, <em>II. Bayezid-Yavuz Selim Devri,</em> 212.
[244] Vahidi, fol. 42b, line 11. ‘Uryan Baba, however, expressly pays allegiance to Otman Baba and Sultan Süca’: fol. 42b, lines 7–8.
[245] Filiz Aydin, “Seyitgazi Aslanbey koyunde ‘Seyh Sücaeddin’ külliyesi,” <em>Vakiflar Dergisi</em> 9 (1971): 201–25.
[246] For a picture of this hospice, see Semavi Eyice, “Varna ile Balqk arasinda Akyazili Sultan Tekkesi,” <em>Belleten</em> 31 (1967): 551–600, picture 20; for the location, ibid., 562. For historical attestations, see Barkan, “Turk dervisleri,” 340–41, no. 178; Ayverdi, 4:45, no. 669; Evliya, 8:766; and Sevim Ilgürel, “Hibri’nin ‘Enis’ül-müsamirin’i,” <em>Giney Dogu Avrupa Arastirmalarn Dergisi</em> 2–3 (1973–74): 146, no. 53 (reporting from Hibri’s <em>Ensui’l-müsamirfn,</em> comp. 1046/1636-37).
[247] Yemini, 83.
[248] For an architectural evaluation as well as references to primary sources, including Evliya (Celebi, see Eyice, “Akyazilh Sultan Tekkesi”; also Ayverdi, 4:16–18, pictures 7–12. A short biography of Akyazill Sultan himself appears in “Akyazilh Sultan,” <em>TA,</em> 1:395 (probably by Golpinarli). It seems certain that Kidemli Baba, whose <em>tekke</em> is still standing in Kalugerevo-Nove Zagora in Bulgaria, was also a disciple of either Otman Baba or Akyazili Sultan. It is telling in this respect that the tomb of Kidemli Baba, just like that of Akyazili Sultan, is a heptagonal structure; see Machiel Kiel, “Bulgaristan’da eski Osmanli mimarisinin bir yapiti: Kalugerevo-Nova Zagora’daki Kldemli Baba Sultan bektasi tekkesi,” <em>Belleten</em> 35 (1971): 45–60.
[249] Franz Babinger, “Koyun Baba,” in <em>El,</em> 5:283; Faroqhi, <em>Bektaschi-Orden,</em> 134, n. 3; Evliya, 2:1 80ff. A hagiography of Koyun Baba entitled <em>Manzuime-i tercime-i mendklb-i Koyun Baba</em> exists in C(orum Merkez Genel Kütiphanesi, Ms. 1217, though this work could not be consulted in time for inclusion in the present study.
[250] See, for instance, Klaus Kreiser, “Defiz Abdil-ein Derwisch unter drei Sultanen,” <em>Wiener Zeitschriftijr die Kunde des Morgenlandes</em> 76 (1986): 199–207.
[251] Spandugino, <em>Commentari,</em> 192; French translation: <em>Petit traicte,</em> 220, where one should read “Diuami” in place of”Calender.”
[252] VWahidi, fols. 66a-70a.
[253] Menavino, 72–74; German translation, 34a-b.
[254] Nicolas, 178–80; English translation, 99–100. The only significant addition of Nicolas, other than his drawing reproduced in plate 4, was to state that the apparel ofJamis was “a little cassock without sleeves ... made and fashioned untoo a deacons coate, so short, that it cometh but to aboue theyr knees.” For other, less revealing, references to Jamis, see Fakiri, <em>Ta’rTfat,</em> fol. 13b; Nisanci, 235; and Celalzade Mustafa, <em>Geschichte Sultan Sileyman Kanunis,</em> 348b.
[255] Fritz Meier, “Ahmad-i Djam,” in <em>El,</em> 1:283–84, succinctly summarizes the earlier studies on Ahmad of Jm, the most important of which are Wladimir Ivanow, “A Biography of Shaykh Ahmad-i Jam,” <em>Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society</em> (1917): 291–365; and Fritz Meier, “Zur Biographie Ahmad-i Gam’s und zur Quellenkunde von Gami’s Nafahatu’l-uns,” <em>Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenlandischen Gesellschaft</em> 97 (1943): 47–67. One should now consult the introductions to the following published works of Ahmad of Jam: <em>Miftah al-najat,</em> ed. ‘Ali Fazil; and <em>Rawzat al-muznibin va jannat al-mushtaqin,</em> ed. ‘Ali Fazil. His sacred biography is also available in print: Khvajah Sayyid al-Din Muhammad Ghaznavi, <em>Maqamat-i Zhandah’Pil,</em> ed. Hishmat Allah Mu’ayyad Sanandaji.
[256] On this collection of poems <em>(divan),</em> see Ahmad of Jim, <em>Miftah al-najat,</em> 24–29; and Ghaznavi, <em>Maqamat-i Zhandah’Pil,</em> 24–37. Fazil, the editor of <em>Mifath al-najat,</em> believes the greater part of the work to be authentic. Meier, “Ahmad-i Djam”; H. Mu’ayyad, the editor of <em>Maqamat-i Zhandah’Pil;</em> and Zarrinkub, <em>Justuju,</em> 83, however, are highly suspicious of the attribution of the whole <em>divan</em> to Ahmad. A rather ecstatic picture of Ahmad of Jam is preserved in Qalandar, 177.
[257] On Ahmad’s progeny, see Ahmad of Jam, <em>Rawzat al-muznibin,</em> 25–57; and Ghaznavi, <em>Maqamat-i Zhandah’Pil,</em> 37–38. The descendants of Ahmad have been studied by Lawrence G. Potter, “The Kart Dynasty of Herat: Religion and Politics in Medieval Iran.”
[258] Vahidi, fols. 80b-84a.
[259] Ibid., fols. 89a-94a.
[260] See Golpinarli, 204–43. Ulu ‘Arif Celebi is discussed on 65–95, Divine Mehmed Celeb10n 101–22, Yusuf Sinecak (the brother of the Abdal poet Hayreti discussed in the section on Abdals of Rim in this chapter above on 124–27), and Sahidi 132–40. A summary of Glpinarll’s account is available in Victoria Rowe Holbrook, “Diverse Tastes in the Spiritual Life: Textual Play in the Diffusion of Rumi’s Order,” in <em>The Legacy of Mediaeval Persian Sufism,</em> ed. Leonard Lewisohn, 99–120. On the Mevleviye in general, see also Tahsin Yazici, D. S. Margoliouth, and Frederick DeJong, “Mawlawiyya,” in <em>EI,</em> 6:883–88.
[261] The institutional history of the order is studied in detail in Faroqhi, <em>Der Bektashi-Orden,</em> which includes a comprehensive bibliography of modern studies. The most comprehensive study of Bektasi belief and practice is still John Kingsley Birge, <em>The Bektashi Order of Dervishes.</em> Cf. also “Bektasilik,” in <em>TA,</em> 6:34–38 (probably by A. Gölpinarli).
[262] Vahidi, fols. 74a-80b.
[263] The differences are outlined in Ahmet T. Karamustafa, <em>“Kalenders, Abdals, Hayderis:</em> The Formation of the <em>Bektasiye</em> in the Sixteenth Century,” in <em>Suleyman the Second [sic] and His Time,</em> ed. Halil Inalcik and Cemal Kafadar, 121–29.
[264] For details on Janissary-Bektisi relations, see Köprülü I, 405–8; and Ismail Hakki Uzunarsili, <em>Osmanli Devleti Teskilatindan Kapikulu Ocaklari,</em> 1:147–50. A recent evaluation is Irene Melikoff, “Un ordre des derviches colonisateurs, les Bektachis: Leur ra1e social et leurs rapports avec les premiers sultans ottomans,” in <em>Memorial Omer Lütfi Barkan, 1</em>49–57. On Hici Bektas, see Karamustafa, “Early Sufism in Eastern Anatolia,” 186–90. The earliest clear evidence for Janissary allegiance to Hiac Bektis dates back only to the time of Mehmed II (2d r. 855-86/1451-81); see Abdal, fol. 93a, where the soldier accompanying Otman Baba to Istanbul at the orders of Mehmed II declares that his headgear is modeled after that of Haci Bektas.
[265] The argument for the formation of the Bektari Order in the manner described here is presented in detail in Karamustafa, <em>“Kalenders, Abdals, Hayderis.”</em>
[266] Hodgson 2:1–151; Lapidus, <em>A History of Islamic Societies,</em> 137–224.
[267] The only independent full-scale study of the subject is still Trimingham. Cf. Hodgson, 2:201–54.
[268] Trimingham, 01–16.
[269] Ibid., 166–217.
[270] Reeves, <em>The Hidden Government,</em> 1. Cf. Hodgson, 2:217–18. Trimingham’s description of the final stage in the organizational history of Sufism-the formation of <em>ta’ifahs-has</em> the disadvantage of concealing the analytical distinction between the <em>tariqah</em> and the cult of saints; see Trimingham, 67–104.
[271] Two recent studies on the history of the saint cult in Islam are Taylor, “The Cult of the Saints”; and Vincent Cornell, “Mirrors of Prophethood: The Evolving Image of the Spiritual Master in the Western Maghrib from the Origins of Sufism to the End of the 16<sup>th</sup> Century.”
[272] On Ayyubid patronage of the Sufis, see Ramazan Sesen, <em>Salahaddin Devrinde Eyyubiler Devleti,</em> 263–66; on <em>khanqahs</em> in Mamlfk Egypt, see Leonor Fernandes, <em>The Evolution of a Sufi Institution in Mamluk Egypt: The</em> Khanqah; Cf. Pouzet, 210–13; and Donald P. Little, “The Nature of <em>Khanqahs, Ribats,</em> and <em>Zawiyas</em> under the Mamliks,” in <em>Islamic Studies Presented to Charles J. Adams,</em> ed. Wael B. Hallaq and Donald P. Little, 91–105.
[273] Ernst, <em>Eternal Garden,</em> 200–26, demonstrates how the Khuldabad Chishti shrines in the Deccan came to be associated with various political regimes from the mid-eighth/fourteenth century onward. The same process is documented for the Qidiris as well as the Chishtis in Bijapur during the late eleventh/seventeenth century in Richard M. Eaton, <em>Sufis of Bijapur 1300–1700: Social Roles of Sufis in Medieval India,</em> 203–42.
[274] Golpinarli, 153–54; Hans Joachim Kissling, “Einiges über den Zejnije-Orden im Osmanischen Reich,” <em>Der Islam</em> 39 (1964): 143–79; idem, “Aus der Geschichte des Chalvetijje-Ordens,” <em>Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenlandischen Gesellschaft</em> 103 (1953): 233–89.
[275] Hodgson, 2:220.
[276] Cf. Eaton’s study of the relationship between “landed” Sufis and <em>majdhub</em> dervishes in Bijapur of the late eleventh/seventeenth century: <em>Sufis of Bijapur,</em> 203–81.
[277] While the conclusion that conversion to dervish piety occurred primarily among male youth of the cultural elite is certainly justified, it must be admitted that the historical record on this issue is scanty. The sources naturally reported mostly on dervishes of socially prominent backgrounds. It is, however, highly unlikely that any hard evidence on the social composition of the deviant dervish groups will be forthcoming in the future. Under the circumstances, it remains to be observed here that comparative sociological observation supports the validity of the view adopted here. The Franciscan movement in Europe, for instance, provides us with a close parallel: “although they [the Franciscans] recruited members from all social groups, their chief attraction was understandably to the more affluent middle class and to the clerical intelligentsia” (Clifford H. Lawrence, <em>Medieval Monasticism: Forms of Religious Life in Western Europe in the Middle Ages,</em> 200). On a somewhat different note, compare the following works on the counterculture movement of the 1960s in the United States: Timothy Miller, <em>The Hippies and American Values;</em> Edward P. Morgan, <em>The Sixties Experience: Hard Lessons About Modern America;</em> and Peter Clecak, <em>America’s Questfor the Ideal Self: Dissent and Fulfillment in the 60s and 70s.</em>
[278] Abu ‘Abd Allah Musharrif al-Din ibn Muslih, known as Sa’di, <em>Bustan,</em> ed. Muhammad ‘All Furughi, 196. The English translation is reproduced from <em>Morals Pointed and Tales Adorned: The Bustan of Sa’di,</em> trans. G. M. Wickens, 195 (chapter 7, tale 129).
[279] On Ibn Taymiyah, see Henri Laoust, “Ibn Taymiyya,” in <em>El,</em> 3:951–55; on Birgivi, see Kaslm Kufrevi, “Birgewi,” in <em>El,</em> I:1235.
[280] Compare Richard F. Gombrich, <em>Theravada Buddhism: A Social History from Ancient Benares to Modern Colombo,</em> 49–59;and Patrick Olivelle, <em>Samnyasa Upanisads: Hindi Scriptures on Asceticism and Renunciation,</em> 29–33.
[281] Lester K. Little, <em>Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe.</em>
[282] See Janet L. Abu-Lugod, <em>Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350.</em>
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|
#title The not very ‘natural’ oppression of women
#LISTtitle not very ‘natural’ oppression of women, The
#author Aileen O’Carroll
#SORTtopics agriculture, capitalism, civilization, family, feminist, oppression, patriarchy, religion, women, Workers Solidarity, magazine
#date 1992
#source Retrieved on 10<sup>th</sup> October 2018 from http://struggle.ws/ws92/oppress36.html
#lang en
#notes From Workers Solidarity No. 35, 1992.
<em>WE ARE NOW eight years from the year 2,000. Approximately 14,000 years ago the first agricultural communities, and with them human civilisation, were founded. Humanity is 600 generations old.</em>
We hold the position of ‘most successful species’ because unlike animals we have been able to modify our environment to suit our needs. To early humans nature was a powerful and frightening force, the bringer of plagues, storms and droughts. Nowadays we control our environment to such an extent that nature is no longer a demon spirit or an instrument of the wrath of god. In much of the world nature is way down on our list of worries, it is more likely to fear us. As the capability to control the world around us has increased from the first primitive farmers to the high-technology multinationals, the way we perceive the world around us has also changed. So has the way we perceive each other.
One thing, however, that has remained constant throughout this time is that in the majority of societies half our species (women) has been held in an inferior position to the other half (men). Why is this the case? The answer to this question should explain two things. It should explain why today with all our equal rights legislation women are still second class citizens, and secondly it should indicate the mechanisms and tactics we have to use to achieve women’s liberation. If we know what the problem is, we can find a solution.
*** CIVILISATION DAWNS
Early humans were hunter/gatherers living in nomadic communities, living from hand to mouth. The discovery of agriculture lead to huge changes in the organisation of humanity. Agriculture was the point at which civilisation began. This is because there are a number of ways in which an agricultural community is different from a hunter/gatherer clan. Communities remain in the same spot. Agriculture can support more people than hunting/gathering so communities get larger. Farming leads to the development of new technology. New skills lead to a greater division of labour. Individuals specialise in certain types of work, be it tool making, leatherwork or defence.
However the key difference is that farmed land becomes a valuable resource. Land provides a surplus, that is land provides more food than is necessary for day to day survival. More importantly, land will provide this resource in the future, for the next generation. None of this is true of the herd of wild animals persued by the hunter-gatherer. The concept of ownership developed.
So civilisation began when man began to acquire wealth in the form of land, food and animals. If a rich man wants to ensure that his offspring alone inherit his wealth, he must be sure that his wife is only mating with him. Thus, he has to be in a position of control over her. He needs to portray this as part of the ‘natural order’. To accommodate this need society, through the use of religion, developed a rationale to justify the inferior position of woman.
*** GOD’S CHOSEN RULERS
Rulers have always been good at rationalising unfair practices, take for example the idea of the ‘divine right of kings’. Popular for centuries, the church and state argued that kings and queens were appointed by God. The status quo was natural and good, any opposition to it was evil and doomed to eternal hell. These days kings don’t have much power, which is why not many people rush to describe Charles and Di as God’s chosen rulers.
In much the same way, it was necessary to have women inferior to men to ensure inheritance rights. In order to keep women in this position a whole mythology of women as second class humans was developed. It was the accumulation of a surplus and the desire of a minority to monopolise it that lead to the class division of society and to the oppression of women.
Now we’ve established the motive and the cover story, but of what relevance is the status of women in early history to their status today. As capitalism evolved it built on the existing model of the family, adapting it to suit it’s own interests. Assurance of inheritance rights isn’t as necessary today, however the family provides other services which capitalism does require. Initially, when the industrial revolution first began men, women and children were drafted wholesale into the factories.
*** DEATH IS NOT ALWAYS ECONOMIC
Quickly, however, the bosses realised that this was not the most economic way to run the system. The labour force was weak and the children who were to be next generation of workers were dying in the mills and mines. The solution was was to be found in the family.
Before the rise of capitalism society was based around a system of slaves/serfs and kings or lords. The problem with slaves or serfs is that the owner must provide food, basic health care and subsistence in old age, i.e. maintain the slave at a cost for those times when he or she is not productive. A much more cost efficient way to keep a workforce is through the nuclear family. In this scenario, it is up to the family to provide itself with food, shelter, healthcare, look after the elderly and young (who will provide the next crop of workers). Within this family unit it is normally the woman who fulfils the functions of housekeeper, nurse, childminder and cook.
There are two knock-on effects of women staying at home minding the family. Firstly they are not financially independent. They do not earn any money and are dependant on income received from their partners. Because nobody gets paid for rearing a family it’s status as an occupation is at the bottom of the ladder and because women are financially dependant on their husbands it means they, in the past, have had little input into the major decisions affecting the family.
*** ISOLATION
This led to women having no input into the decisions affecting society. A woman’s place was in the home. A second effect of women’s position in the family is that they are often isolated from each other and from society in general. Unlike a paid worker they have little opportunity of meeting and sharing experiences with others in the same situation on a daily basis, and do something about it. They, on their own, have little power to change the conditions they find themselves in.
Today the family is a trap for women as much as it was for women at the beginning of the industrial revolution. Women are paid on average 2/3 of the wage that men are paid, so within any partnership it obviously makes more sense for the woman to undertake responsibility for the care of children. It is for this reason, common sense rather than sexism, that that the vast majority of part-time workers are women, juggling two jobs at the same time.
Having said that, why is it that women are among the lower paid in society? Is it necessary for capitalism to exploit women workers to this degree? The simple answer to that is sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. The only important difference between a male and female worker is that the female has the potential to get pregnant, that is the potential to want maternity leave and need creche facilities. In other words they are slightly more expensive to employ than men. So when women are asked (illegally!) at job interviews if they intend to marry, such discrimination has a material basis. An employer isn’t interested on the good of society at large but in obtaining the cheapest most reliable workforce possible.
*** DISPOSABLE WORKERS
Historically women have been encouraged to work and have been accommodated when it suited capitalism. When there was either a shortage of male labour due to war as during the 1<sup>st</sup> and 2<sup>nd</sup> World Wars or an expansion of industry as in the dawn of the industrial revolution or the 1960s. When times are tough, when recession sets in, women are encouraged back into the family.
The conclusion for most socialists is that women’s liberation can only be lastingly obtained with the overthrow of capitalism. This is not to say that reforms should not be fought for at the moment, but to recognise that some of the gains may be short-term ones which can be withdrawn.
This conclusion isn’t accepted by everyone concerned with women’s liberation, and certainly is rejected by large sections of the feminist movement. A good example of the alternative analysis can be seen in the following extract from the British Survey of Social Attitudes (a survey carried out regularly by an independent body).
*** WHO MINDS THE CHILDREN
It found that the provision of childcare was one of the impediments preventing women from working. Their conclusion was that “in the absence of changes in men’s attitudes, or working hours outside the home or in their contribution within the family it seems unlikely that even a greater availability of childcare outside the home would alter domestic arrangements greatly. Without these changes, it is conceivable that many useful forms of work flexibility — that might be offered to women such as job sharing, career breaks, special sick leave or term-time working — might reinforce rather than mitigate the formidable level of occupational segregation based on gender, to women’s longer-term disadvantage.”
The authors of the survey note that as long as responsibility for childcare rests with the women they will remain trapped in the family. They also point out that concessions to women in the world of work often result in women being pidgeon-holed into less well paid job. This already happens in regard to part-time workers who are paid a lower hourly wage than full-time workers. They point out that men have to square up to their responsibility as fathers. The key they emphasise is a change in men’s attitudes.
However what was not mentioned is that no matter how attitudes change, men are as powerless as individuals in regard to their working conditions as women are. With all the good will in the world they cannot change their employer/employee relationship, they cannot adjust their working hours to suit childcare just as women cannot. A more fundamental conclusion would be that society at the moment, capitalism, does not want to accommodate any of the problems of childcare preferring to leave it up to the individual to make their own arrangements as best as they can.
*** CONTROL OF OUR BODIES
It is for this reason that the issue of women’s ability to control their own fertility is key in obtaining women’s liberation. That is the fight for abortion rights, for freely available contraceptives, for 24 hour quality childcare.
Women will remain as second class citizens as long as they are relegated to an inferior position in the work force. They are now in that position because to the bosses they are an unstable workforce, likely to want pregnancy leave, likely to come in late if a child is sick, likely to require a creche or want to work part time. It is because men in society are seen as the breadwinners that they have slightly more secure, slightly more dependable jobs.
It’s a vicious circle, because men are in reality better paid, it makes more sense within the family to assign the role of main earner to the male and the role of carer to the female. The only way to permanently get out out of this circle is to change the system. In a society organised to make profits for a few, women loose out. In a society organised to satisfy needs, women’s fertility would no longer be a limiting factor.
*** INTO THE MAINSTREAM
Women can of course win gains at the moment. In Ireland women are no longer forced to stop working upon marriage (though lack of childcare can make it impossible to continue). Attitudes have changed considerably in the last thirty years. Most importantly, the position of women is now an issue. Whereas before it was only addressed by the few socialist or women’s groups, now it’s taken up in the mainstream media, in chat shows and newspaper articles. However, any of our new freedoms are very much dependant on the economic conditions of the day. So, while in the booming sixties American women won limited access to abortion, now in recession those rights are being pushed back inch by inch.
When the reality is weighed up equal education & job opportunities and equal pay are limited without free 24 hour nurseries and free contraception & abortion on demand. While a small minority of women can buy control of their own fertility, for the majority family and childcare is still — as it has always been — the largest problem faced by women workers. In this argument capitalism won’t concede, it must be defeated.
|
#title Why half the world’s children go to bed hungry
#author Aileen O’Carroll
#SORTtopics capitalism, Workers Solidarity, food poverty, Africa
#date 1991
#source Retrieved on 9<sup>th</sup> October 2021 from [[http://struggle.ws/ws91/famine33.html][struggle.ws]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2021-10-09T11:01:17
#notes Published in <em>Workers Solidarity</em> No. 33 — Winter 1991.
<strong>It’s hard to know how any one can consider capitalism a viable system when looking at the situation of the less developed countries. After the millions raised by Live Aid, it seems unreal that people are going hungry. A recent UN report estimates that 30 million people face starvation. Yet EC beef, butter and wine mountains rot in European warehouses, farmers are ploughing crops back into the land, in US corn belt fields of wheat are burnt.</strong>
There’s a bit of a modern myth that the problems of Africa are either there own fault (over population, wars) or beyond anyones control (drought, desertification). Though it’s true these are contributary factors, many other countries cope with these same problems without the huge loss of life suffered by Africa (for example China, even England has been through war and drought).
The reasons cited by the UN for the deaths of these people are as follows; lack of resources from the international community, poor planning and falling prices on the commodity markets (especially for cocoa and coffee). Companies selling to Africa have tightened up credit terms while external debt levels continued to increase.
*** COCOA AND COFFEE
When Africa was first colonised, land was switched from production of food to feed the local population to the production of ‘cash crops’ such as cocoa, tea, coffee and sugar. These crops were exported to colonising countries at low prices. In a similar way corn was grown in Ireland during the 1845 famine. Today coffee and cocoa is still a major export of 15 African countries as they need the cash provided to keep up with debt repayments. Cocoa prices have fallen to there lowest level in 15 years while coffee is at similarity low level.
*** DEBT
In the early 1970’s many African governments borrowed heavily. About 40% of debt is owed directly to other governments. In almost all cases this money was lent on the condition that it be used to purchase arms from the donor country or that subsides be granted to multinationals based in the donor country. In this way the third world country is made to pay twice over. 25% of the debt is owed to the IMF and the World Bank. Today Africa’s debt is estimated at 270 billion dollars. Repayments consume 30 per cent of export earnings.
*** UNITED NATIONS
It’s obvious that the governments of the U.S., China and Europe aren’t really interested in combating the crisis and these are the governments that run the UN. The last program of aid implemented by the United Nations (according to their own report) in 1986 met with little sucess. This was the plan the UN promised would revive Africa’s economies. Instead, in their own words “By the end of 1990, it had become evident that the African crisis had indeed deepened...the average African continued to get poorer and suffer a persistent fall in an already meagre living standard”. Now, five years later, they add that even if their latest plan was fully implemented (they call it ambitious) the average income per head in sub-Saharan Africa would only reach US$700 per annum in 25 years time. Rather than offering the solution the governments that make up the UN itself that are the problem.
*** THE FUTURE
So it doesn’t look as if the situation will fundamentally change. But then, why should the Western governments want things any different? Africa provides the bosses with markets for the surplus goods we produce as well as cheap labour and raw materials. Live Aid showed that workers of the West are not willing to let Africa starve (as some Greens would argue), however it also showed that while the means of production and all the resulting profits are in the hands of the bosses, individual attempts at resolving the problems will do little more than make a dent in the problem. The type of massive development that Africa requires will only come about when the resources of this world are distributed according to need and not according to profit.
|
#pubdate 2015-06-29 15:19:06 +0000
#title Soma
#subtitle an anarchist play therapy
#author G. Ogo, Drica Dejerk
#SORTauthors G. Ogo, Drica Dejerk
#LISTtitle Soma: an anarchist play therapy
#SORTtopics therapy, soma, Brazil, Wilhelm Reich, Roberto Freire, AJODA, AJODA #66, play
#date Fall-Winter 2008
#lang en
*You can learn more about a man in an hour of play, than in a year of conversation. - Plato*
Plato was not alone in thinking that, of all human activities, play can best display that which is most truthful in people. Play seems to represent human essence, evoking the child or the animal in a person, since play precedes culture and civilization, language and rationality. Some have argued that humans distinguish themselves precisely by the manner and frequency by which they play. In Homo Ludens, Dutch historian Johan Huizinga argues that our impressive ingenuity and creativity is due to play, which he defines as anything done for purposes other than sheer necessity. Play is never imposed by physical necessity or moral duty. It is never a task. It is done at leisure, during ‘free time’. Only when play is a recognized cultural function – a rite, a ceremony – is it bound up with notions of obligation and duty. Here, then, we have the main characteristic of play: that it is free, is in fact freedom. (8) [1]
This idea was also apparent to Roberto Freire, an anarchist doctor and psychoanalyst from Brazil, who, after a lifetime spent in struggle against oppressive powers, took the play postulate to heart, and created a therapeutic practice built upon it. Calling the practice Soma, Freire fashioned his therapy to differ greatly from other forms of psychotherapy. Instead of relying solely on months, or even years, of conversation to understand and treat his patients, Freire realized that understanding could be achieved more effectively through group participation in physically and emotionally challenging activities, what he called “exercises.” Soma, therefore, was created as a combination of play, response, reflection, experimentation, and challenge – everything taking place within a cohesive group setting in order to facilitate honest, independent character growth. All of this, coupled with the regular practice of capoeira angola, is integrated into Roberto Freire’s practice.
To understand Soma, it is essential to understand Roberto Freire’s story. Born in 1927 in São Paulo, he lived through and fought against two dictatorships, and felt the pervasive effects of oppression on his own body and throughout his life. Having come of age in a radical time and place, Freire became sympathetic to anarchism from an early age. Freire was many things in his life: doctor, psychoanalyst, anarchist militant, theater producer, novelist, magazine editor, reporter, and much more.
In April 1964, the Brazilian military carried out a coup d’etat - the first of a series of right-wing coups throughout Latin America. In a matter of weeks, as a result of his activism, Freire was arrested. His house was raided in the middle of the night and he was dragged from his bed in his pajamas in front of his wife and children. He was tortured for days on end: beaten, deprived of sleep, forced to read aloud subversive articles he had published. Eventually they released him, but he would be arrested again several times.
Freire attributed going blind later in his life to the torture he endured. One method in particular, dubbed “the telephone,” caused enormous internal pressure on the eye balls: it consisted of repeatedly slamming the victim’s ears at the same time. Surgeries would return his sight in one eye. By the time I met him, he always wore an eyepatch that gave him the fitting look of a pirate.
Freire recalls the years after the coup as extraordinarily difficult. Worse than the physical pain from the torture was the emotional and psychological damage inflicted by the political climate upon his community. He was forced to live underground, always on the run. He suffered through a divorce, struggled with alcoholism and feelings of immense frustration with his art and his cause.
Around 1970, he went to France for a period of decompression, and on that trip he was introduced for the first time to the works of Wilhelm Reich. The Living Theater, an American expatriate acting troupe was performing in Paris. Julian Beck, its co-director, introduced Freire to Wilhelm Reich, the dissident student of Freud who emphasized the connection between body and psyche, and who explained how the causes of emotional and psychological disturbances are to be found in authoritarian social structures.
Freire came back from the trip in France with all the major works of Reich in his possession. He returned to his private practice and for the next several years he studied Reich and other radical approaches to psychotherapy and psychiatric theories. He got together with friends from the theater – people experienced with acting training and techniques – and began to research his own radical method of therapy. This would soon coalesce into Soma.
Another of Freire’s main inspirations and influence was Thomas Hanna’s Bodies in Revolt. Hanna defends the theory that we are at the beginning of a human r/evolution. By revisiting the works of what he calls Somatic Philosophers (Kant, Kierkegaard, Marx, Cassirer, Camus, Merleau-Ponty, and Nietzsche) and of Somatic Scientists (Darwin, Lorenz, Freud, Reich, and Piaget), he sustained the idea that humans have, “through an enormous expenditure of aggressive energy” created a new environment “which no longer ignores man’s existence and needs but which positively supports them. In return, the enormous quantities of energy released by this environment are creating a new kind of human, a cultural mutant”(8).[2] If in the old environment humans spent most of our energy under the urge of primary drives (physiological needs), the new environment is producing the emergence of secondary drives – precisely the ones related to play.
Proto-mutants, says Hanna, will challenge the traditional culture until they “see the destruction of much of two or three millennia of Western culture.” The Industrial Revolution is a watershed in this process, but Freire, in line with Herbert Marcuse, stresses the phylogenetic information gathered by generations of struggle against the repression of instincts as a major force shaping the mutation.
Hanna lays down the meaning of Soma: it is the totality of what constitutes the human being. It’s the indivisible and non-hierarchical unity of the person’s body and mind, genes and environment, emotions, memories, expectations, desires, culture, social behaviors, relationships, and actions that makes up a person at every moment. It’s a holistic concept that rejects traditional dualities and dichotomies. Somatherapy, therefore, is in contrast with psychotherapies that deal only the psyche.
While other forms of psychoanalysis and therapy have incorporated forms of play into their practice, they have most often employed these games as an auxiliary tool to gain responses from children, or those patients with childlike patterns of communication and understanding. For processes geared towards grown-ups, though, none have made the act of playing such an integral part of their methodology. Roberto Freire understood that just as children may make themselves more readily available to observation and analysis when they were engrossed in play, so might adults, interacting in a playful but purposeful manner, be more available to understand themselves and their interpersonal interactions.
It makes sense that such a creation would have been developed in Brazil, a country that is not known for its rigorous intellectualism, but rather for its games and celebrations. Beyond the obvious sources of revelry, such as soccer and carnival, are the myriad of brincadeiras (games and plays) originating from within Brazil’s popular culture. One such game in particular, capoeira angola, was so powerful and rich that Roberto Freire adopted it as an essential element of his anarchist therapy. Capoeira angola is a game of resistance and liberation. Having its roots in African rituals, in Brazil it was shaped through centuries by the resistance against slavery and oppression – it wasn’t until the 1930s that capoeira ceased to be persecuted as a felony under Brazilian law.
When compared to other styles of capoeira, the angola style is commonly seen as the one which has best preserved the traditional elements of a unique Afro-Brazilian art form, because of its stronger emphasis on the rituals, the music, on longer games and closer, more intricate interactions between the players.[3] Freire decided capoeira angola was best suited for Soma because it is a more playful style, in which the practitioners maintain a more relaxed posture, doing movements closer to the ground, engaging the entire body more equally, and therefore offering a complete bioenergetic exercise that “massages” the players’ muscular armor.[4] In contrast, in other styles the movements are more rigid and predominantly in the standing position.
Capoeira angola is a rich, ritualized game in which life lessons are represented and resolved; combat between the two players aims to reenact the struggle for freedom of movement against the restrictive exertion of power from another person. The players display and improve their street smarts and cunning, as well as the ability to deal with conflicts while maintaining a light, playful spirit and positive energy. As an activity on its own, it encompasses all that Freire sought to incorporate into the practice of Soma therapy. It is a social experience, practiced in a group and played in a circle of people who, by singing and playing percussion instruments, create the energy and maintain the rhythm for the two players in the center. It is a game that incorporates aspects of theater, in which body language and expression are immanent. It enables body awareness, teaches how to keep all senses alert, exercises aggression and the ability to confront it – techniques needed in the struggle to defend oneself against repression and to affirm a free personality.
By playing capoeira angola, slaves in Brazil would not only prepare themselves to fight their oppressors by strengthening their bodies, but also, by reaffirming their vivacity, would reconnect with the life force that slavery and domination intended to crush. While playing it, their bodies and spirits were actually free, and that, in turn, provided the spiritual fortitude needed to continue resisting and fighting. Mestre Pastinha, one of the most respected teachers of this art, has said authoritatively of capoeira angola, “It’s an intrigue of slaves yearning for freedom. Its principle has no method and its end is inconceivable even for the wisest capoeirista.”[5]
In addition to the practice of capoeira angola, the methodology of Soma includes sessions conducted by a somatherapist (Freire himself or one of his students) and sessions without the presence of a somatherapist.
The sessions without the therapist, one of the unique aspects of Soma, are meant to guarantee the group’s and each person’s independence and responsibility for the therapeutic process. These sessions are mainly verbal and provide the opportunity for everyone to learn more about each other’s life and history, to discuss the collective dynamic of the group and to further develop the therapy by sharing feedback about each person’s challenges, needs, desires, and aspirations.
In contrast, the sessions conducted by the somatherapist are less verbal. They consist in the experience of exercises that Freire created and, together with capoeira angola, they represent the play aspect of the therapy. These sessions follow a specific structure and organization: Freire created more than 40 exercises that are organized in meaningful order and sequence. In the first stages of the therapy, the exercises have a more introductory nature; as the therapy unfolds, they will have stronger bioenergetic effects and will explore more deeply the participants’ behavior and character armor.
These sessions combine the exercises, which function more like playful games, with remarks by the therapist regarding the scientific, philosophical, and political basis of Soma as well as more practical observations about the collective dynamic and each person’s therapeutic process.
During the very first session (which has the purpose of gathering people to form a group), the therapist clarifies that Soma is a unique form of body psychotherapy that combines anarchist political content with breakthrough psychiatric theories and therapeutic methods, such as Bioenergetics, Gestalt Therapy and Anti-Psychiatry. S/he explains that Roberto Freire created Soma, and based it on the studies of Reich. Then, s/he gives a short explanation about Reich and how he shifted away from strictly verbal psychoanalysis by observing the physical manifestations of emotions on his patients. When Reich noticed defensive postures and tense bodies, he would suggest that his patient touch her body, or move in a certain way, and he would apply techniques to stimulate the relaxation of those tense muscles. By doing that, his patients would often feel some quite disturbing sensations, such as tremors, sharp pains, sweating, dizziness, nausea, vertigo, etc. Reich eventually came to understand that these sensations were produced by the release of bioelectrical streams - blocked until then by that rigidity of the muscles.
In the opening remarks, the therapist also gives practical instructions as a preparation for the exercise. For example, in the first session the therapist must ask the participants to wear minimal clothing – but before asking that, he would usually explain certain concepts that justify such a request: “Reich proved that, as with every form of energy, bioenergy can also be measured and exchanged between two bodies. In fact, as the body’s external membrane, the skin is the main channel through which the bioenergetic exchange occurs. Bioelectrical variations associated with different emotional states and sensations have even been measured in the skin – this is called the psychogalvanic reflex. For that reason, for most Soma exercises it is better to wear light clothing and to expose the most skin area possible to facilitate bioenergetic exchange. Usually people use shorts, swimsuits, or underwear.”[6]
These are instructions not rules, though, and each person can follow them to the limit that feels comfortable. However, part of the purpose of the exercises is to explore the barriers and inhibitions one has, and to put oneself in unusual situations for the sake of seeing her internal and external reactions, and then to perceive what feelings emerge. The goal is to learn about oneself, and the exercises were conceived to have simultaneous diagnostic and therapeutic effects. Participants are, therefore, encouraged to give themselves to the experience and to go beyond their hesitations.
Every exercise is meant to create a certain mood and to demonstrate specific elements of the therapy. In an introductory session the exercise starts with people walking around the room in a circle. Then the therapist asks for everyone to slow the pace and, as you pass by other people, actively observe and look each person’s body, up and down, from head to toe, front and back. If necessary, you should stop the person in order to take a better look at her. In this situation, some people invariably start to giggle, smile nervously, or laugh. At this moment, the therapist interrupts to bring attention to these reactions. In a playful tone, s/he might remark: “Did you notice that as soon as I asked you to stare at each other, some people began walking towards the outside of the group; some people shyly held their arms together behind their backs. How about all the giggling, the smiling, and the laughs? Most likely, these are signs of discomfort or nervousness. I want you to pay attention to this kind of reaction coming from yourself and the others. Do not censor yourself and avoid judging if a reaction is good or bad – just acknowledge it.”
The observation of this kind of reaction constitutes the most important diagnostic method of Soma. At the end of the exercise each person has the opportunity to share with others her observations about herself and others.
Soma therapy sessions consist of three distinct parts: an activity or exercise, the Reading of that activity, and the Wrap-up. During the activity participants don’t do much talking; the therapist gives instructions, lets people execute them for a short time, and then gives new instructions to move on to the next phase.
So after s/he asks people to pay attention to their reactions, s/he instructs people to continue walking in a fast pace around the room. The exercise then escalates into people intentionally bumping shoulders with one another and then with each person trying to slap other people’s butts while simultaneously trying to avoid having her own butt slapped. People usually get very excited and euphoric during this part – a striking characteristic of Soma is that it’s a fun and pleasant method of therapy.
The sessions include exercises for learning to trust our bodies, for understanding the connection between the body and emotions, for exploring our fears, our confidence, and learning how all this plays out in a social context. One exercise, for example, explores the idea of taking increasing risks and creating intimacy and trust within the group in order to achieve freedom and pleasure through cooperation and mutual support. It starts with a low-risk testing of boundaries and limits, gradually increasing both risk and trust. At the end, people form two lines, with everyone facing the same direction, touching shoulders with the other line. Everyone stretches their arms up, and one person is lifted at the front of the line and laid down on her back over people’s flat hands. The group is asked to remain silent, no noises at all, and transfer the person, in a slow but continuous movement, towards the end of the line. One by one, each person in the group experiences this conveyor belt, completely relaxed, eyes shut, arms open and collapsed to the side. Participants are not supposed to touch the head or neck of the person being passed, and the person is instructed to relax their neck, letting their head hang back, with mouth open, and jaw relaxed. At the end, the person is carefully laid on her back on the ground.
During the Reading, people often describe their fear of falling from people’s hands or how pleasant it was to have so many hands touch their backs. The Reading of the exercise follows the techniques developed by Gestalt Therapy: everyone is supposed to describe feelings, sensations, or emotions they had or the reactions they noticed in others. People are asked to avoid getting into interpretation, rationalizations, or to start making connections to unrelated experiences. They should focus on how it happened and not why. For example, people tell about being unable to relax the neck; feeling embarrassed by taking a shirt off; by staring or being stared at; feeling excited; enjoying the entire experience; or disliking being slapped on the butt, etc.
The Wrap-up is where the therapist shares her/his knowledge and insight, tying together the different elements and aspects worked during the activity and the material brought up during the Reading. S/he also makes observations and analysis of a political nature, usually arguing how our capitalist and authoritarian society creates the emotional and psychological issues that come up during the therapy.
In the Wrap-up of the introductory exercise described above, the therapist might stress how the touching and the playfulness have an ice-breaking function, and how that foments the creation of an intimate bond between the members of the group. S/he might explain that children know how to interact in this manner instinctively, but as we grow up we tend to lose that ability by becoming inhibited, serious, or simply formal—you could meet and chat with people for years without ever feeling as connected to them as you did after such interactions. Freire was inspired by a technique called Play Therapy, in which the therapist observes children playing as a way of learning about their behavior. Soma is different, because the entire group observes and gives feedback, providing for a more diverse and rich exchange of information.
The therapist might also elaborate on the relationship between body movements and emotional and psychological states: “A lack of movement can lead to depression, with the opposite also being true. For example, if we feel bad emotionally or psychologically we may have a hard time physically supporting other people.” This fact is explained by Reich’s discovery that the muscular armor and the character armor are essentially the same, which also means that behavioral and emotional patterns can be affected through action on the rigidity of the body.
According to the principle of irritability, all life forms (from unicellular organisms to animals) react in similar ways to external stimuli. In general, a pleasant or beneficial stimulus, such as a favorable temperature or chemical agent, nourishment, light, etc, causes the organism to expand, whereas a negative stimulus causes the organism to contract. This mechanism is easily demonstrated in human beings: just imagine someone being scared or startled by a nearby loud explosion – you can imagine this person would immediately contract her entire body – an involuntary spasm serving as a defense mechanism. If she were healthy, she would relax again as soon as she realizes that there’s no imminent danger. If she were not, or if there were perpetual bombardment of her senses or threats to her emotional environment, she may continue to retain her constricted, rigid posture.
To address this disturbance effectively, it is not enough to address the muscular armor. It is also necessary to deal with the social and political environment with which we are surrounded. While it’s important to regain the ability to relax the muscular armor, one must also create environments that are favorable for this emotional self-regulation. Since capitalist society will continue attempting to subjugate us, it’s also necessary to craft new forms of defense, new individual and collective strategies that do not lead to further armoring.
All of this (and more) is discussed during the Wrap-up. At the end of a year and a half – the average span of a Soma group – the lessons provided by the exercises, the Readings, the Wrap-ups and the sessions without the therapist give each person considerable knowledge about themselves and others. More than just a particular form of therapy, Soma is a rich learning experience, a skill-share, and an experiment in anarchism applied to personal dynamics – for the benefit of radicals, revolutionaries, and other free spirits.
Freire accuses psychotherapists of implicitly defending capitalist ideology by conveying a reactionary message of conformism and submission. By way of contrast, Soma is unapologetically ideological, explicitly anarchist, challenging people involved in its therapy to refuse that conformism and submission.
Freire’s great insight and contribution was to integrate radical politics and breakthrough psychiatric theories into a cohesive, coherent, and effective praxis. To develop a way for real people to experience, with their entire beings, what many philosophies have attempted to convey with words. He provided a framework, a language to address emotional and personal issues in consensus-based, non-hierarchical groups to help people supersede the unconscious barriers that determine their behavior, and change it according to the ideas and ideologies they believe or profess.
…and he did it through playing games!
[1] Huizinga, Johan H. Homo Ludens: a Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Boston: The Beacon Press. 1950.
[2] Hanna, Thoma. Bodies in Revolt: A Primer in Somatic Thinking. New York. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 1970.
[3] Frigério, Alejandro. Capoeira: de arte negra a esporte branco. Revista brasileira de ciências sociais. Rio de Janeiro,v.4, n.10. 1989
[4] As postulated by Reich, the muscular armor is the chronic rigidity in the body that prevents the full circulation of the bioenergy or orgone. Reich argued that the muscular armor and the character armor are the same, meaning that behavioral and emotional patterns can be affected through action on body rigidity and vice versa.
[5] Mestre Pastinha is said to have displayed the original phrase in Portuguese at his capoeira angola school’s front door: “Mandinga de escravo em ânsia de liberdade. Seu princípio não tem método e seu fim é inconceível ao mais sábio capoeirista.”
[6] Freire, Roberto. Soma. Uma terapia anarquista. Vol. 2. A arma é o corpo (prática da Soma e Capoeira). Rio de Janeiro. Editora Guanabara Koogan. 1991.
|
#title Maroon: Kuwasi Balagoon and the Evolution of Revolutionary New Afrikan Anarchism
#author Akinyele K. Umoja
#LISTtitle Maroon: Kuwasi Balagoon and the Evolution of Revolutionary New Afrikan Anarchism
#SORTauthors Akinyele K. Umoja
#SORTtopics history, Black anarchism, biography, Kuwasi Balagoon
#date April 2015
#source *Science & Society*, Vol. 79, No. 2, April 2015, 196–220. DOI: 10.1521/siso.2015.79.2.196
#lang en
#pubdate 2021-05-31T04:45:11
*** Abstract
Black Panther Party (BPP) and Black Liberation Army (BLA) member Kuwasi Balagoon has emerged as a heroic symbol for radical anarchists and some circles of Black radicals in the United States. He is one of the most complex figures of the Black Liberation movement. His legacy is obscured within broader Black liberation and radical circles. The evolution of his politics and his life as an open bisexual add layers of complexity to his legacy. Bala- goon’s political biography is a long road that includes his activism as a G.I. in the U.S. army in Germany, a tenant organizer in Harlem, and member of the Harlem branch of the BPP. Documenting the political life of Kuwasi Balagoon reveals his significance as a symbol of Black and radical anarchism. Recognition of Balagoon’s contribution to Black Liberation will only emerge with the advance of both anti-authoritarian politics and challenges to homophobia in African-American activist circles.
*** Introduction
ON OCTOBER 20, 1981, BLACK REVOLUTIONARIES and
their white radical allies engaged in an attempted “expropriation” of a Brinks armored truck in Rockland County, New
York. That day Rockland police apprehended three white activists
and one Black man. A manhunt ensued and on January 20, 1982
Black revolutionary Kuwasi Balagoon was apprehended in New York
City. The alliance of Black and white radicals captured were part of a
radical formation called the Revolutionary Armed Task Force (RATF)
under the leadership of the Black Liberation Army (BLA). Balagoon
was the lone anarchist among the RATF defendants; others identified themselves as Muslims, revolutionary nationalists, and Marxist-Leninists. While Balagoon was closely aligned with and respected by
his comrades in the BLA and RATF, his anarchist position set him apart ideologically (A. H., 1982).
Informants told the U.S. government investigators that his BLA and RATF comrades called Balagoon “Maroon.” The term “Maroon” originates from enslaved Africans in the western hemisphere who escaped and formed rebel communities in remote areas away from slaveholding society. Balagoon earned this nickname due to his multiple escapes from incarceration. This article will explore how Balagoon was also an ideological and social “maroon” in the context of the Black liberation movement, and examine his legacy in the contemporary struggle for self-determination and social justice.
*** <em>From Donald Weems to Kuwasi Balagoon:</em>
<br>
<em>The Development of a Revolutionary</em>
Kuwasi Balagoon chronicles his early life and political development in the collective autobiography of New York Black Panther Party defendants titled <em>Look for Me in the Whirlwind.</em> He was born Donald Weems in the majority Black community of Lakeland in Prince George’s County, Maryland on December 22, 1946. Early experiences prepared young Donald Weems to become an activist who would militantly resist white supremacy and unjust authority (Balagoon, 1971; Blunk and Levasseur, 1990, 373; Balagun, 2006).
He was also inspired by the militant movement led by Gloria Richardson in Cambridge in the Eastern Shore region of Maryland. Protests in Cambridge evolved into violence in 1963. Blacks organized sniper teams to defend nonviolent protesters from white supremacist violence. The National Guard was sent to Cambridge to quell the accelerating disturbance in June, 1963, and deployed there for a year. U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy and the Justice Department were forced to intervene and negotiate a “treaty” between Richardson and the white power structure. Nation of Islam National Spokesman Malcolm X Shabazz would mention the Cambridge movement as an example of developing “Black revolution” in his legendary speech “Message to the Grassroots.” The militancy of the Cambridge Movement inspired and impressed the teen-aged Weems (Balagoon, 1971, 87–88; Harley, 2001, 174–196; Giddings, 1994, 290–292).
Weems joined the U.S. Army after graduating from high school and was stationed in Germany after basic training. Like most Blacks
in the Army, he experienced racism and physical attacks from white officers and enlisted men. Weems believed Black soldiers were unjustly and disproportionately punished after altercations with whites. Black soldiers formed a clandestine association called “Da Legislators,” in his words, “… based on fucking up racists … because we were going to make and enforce new laws that were fair.” Donald prided himself in his ability to exact revenge on racist war soldiers. In London, he also connected with Africans and African descendants. He described the experience of socializing with African descendants from around the globe and other people of color in London as a “natural tonic,” which motivated him to ground himself in Black consciousness and culture. He stopped “processing” his hair, wore a more natural hairstyle, and also “became more committed to Black Liberation.” He was honorably discharged in 1967 after three years, serving primarily in Germany (Balagoon, 1971, 204, 224).
After his discharge and return home to Lakeland, Weems ultimately moved to New York City where his sister Dianne lived. In New York, he involved himself in rent strikes and was eventually hired as a tenant organizer for the Community Council on Housing (CCH). The principal leader and spokesman of the CCH was Harlem rent strike organizer Jesse Gray. Gray used the rhetoric of militant Black Nationalism to recruit lieutenants for his activist campaigns. He once told a Harlem audience that he needed “one hundred Black revolutionaries ready to die.” Gray exhorted:
<quote>
There is only one thing that can correct the situation and that’s guerrilla warfare…. all you Black people that have been in the armed services and know anything about guerrilla warfare should come to the aid of our people. If we must die, let us die scientifically! (Jesse Gray, quoted in Noel, 1999.)
</quote>
Like many of his generation, Weems was ready to join an uncompromising movement for Black freedom and human rights. He joined Gray in protesting the conditions in New York housing, particularly the infestation of rats in public housing. In 1967, Gray, Weems, his sister Dianne and two other tenant activists were arrested for disorderly conduct in Washington, D.C., where, unannounced and uninvited, they attended a session of Congress and brought a cage of rats to the assembly to highlight urban housing conditions. Due to the protests, the CCH lost its funding and Gray his ability to pay his organizers.
After Weems separated himself from CCH, he participated in the Central Harlem Committee for Self-Defense in solidarity with student protests at Columbia University. The Committee brought food and water to students who occupied buildings on the Columbia campus (Balagoon, 1971, 200–204; Gilbert, 2003, 9).
Weems would also associate himself with the Yoruba Temple in Harlem, organized by Nana Oserjiman Adefumi. The Detroit-born Adefumi was initiated in Cuba in the Lukumi rites of Yoruba origin. He saw the West African religious and cultural heritage as a means to cultural self-determination and people-hood for African descendants in the United States. Explaining the nationalistic aims of the Yoruba Temple, Adefumi offered, “We must Africanize everything! Our names, our hats, our clothes, our clubs, our churches … etc., etc., etc.” Many of the youth of Weems’ generation rejected their “slave” names and adopted African or Arabic names. Through his association with the Yoruba temple, Weems was renamed. He would be Donald Weems no more and adopt an Ewe day name “Kuwasi” for a male born on Sunday, and the Yoruba name “Balagoon,” meaning “warlord.” He would later say that the name Kuwasi Balagoon, “reflects what I am about and my origins” (Balagoon, 2003, 27).
*** <em>Revolutionary Nationalism: <br>Balagoon and the New York Black Panther Party</em>
While Balagoon found his cultural bearing in the Yoruba Temple, he was attracted to the Black Power politics of Revolutionary Black Nationalism. The Revolutionary Black Nationalism of the Black Power movement was a political expression that argued that Black liberation would not be possible without the overthrow of the U.S. constitutional order and capitalist economic system. Revolutionary Black Nationalism represented a confluence of ideological influences on the Black freedom movement. Significant numbers of Black militants of the 1960s Black Power movement did not see classical Marxism- Leninism as a framework they could identify with. Many were inspired by the influence of Marxism in the Chinese and Cuban Revolutions and other national liberation movements in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, but were critical of the racism of the Old Left and sought a theoretical vehicle and self-definition that gave them ideological
self-determination. A significant number of Black youth identified with the direct action of the Civil Rights movement, but were not committed to nonviolence as a way of life. Some Black radicals also identified with Black Nationalism and rejected the integration and pro- assimilationist tendencies within the Civil Rights movement. Young Black Power militants also sought a more insurgent political program than they observed from the Nation of Islam and fundamental Black Nationalists. As a new ideological development in the Black freedom movement, the Revolutionary Black Nationalism of the Black Power movement incorporated the Marxian critique of capitalism, the historic tradition of Black Nationalism and self-determination, and the direct action approach that characterized the Civil Rights movement (Cruse, 1962).[1]
In his own words, Balagoon “became a revolutionary and accepted the doctrine of nationalism as a response to the genocide practiced by the United States government …” He began to read literature such as the <em>Autobiography of Malcolm X,</em> Robert F. Williams’ book <em>Negroes with Guns,</em> and the newsletter <em>The Crusader</em>. SNCC leader and Black Power movement spokesman H. Rap Brown also inspired Balagoon. Brown was elevated to spokesman of SNCC in 1967. He became one of the most recognized voices of the Black Power movement and the rebellion of urban communities of the late 1960s. Balagoon also came to embrace the position that Black liberation would only come through “protracted guerilla warfare” (Balagoon, 1971, 270; 2003, 75).
[1] The first self-described revolutionary nationalist organization, the Revolutionary Action Movement, stated in 1963 that it was “somewhere between the Nation of Islam (Black Muslims) and SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee)” (Max Stanford in Bracey, <em>et al,</em> 1970, 508; Umoja, 2013, 224–225).
Balagoon would actualize his revolutionary nationalist politics as a member of the Black Panther Party. Originally the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, the BPP had distinguished itself in Oakland, California by its armed patrols to monitor police abuse and its armed demonstration at the California State Legislature in Sacramento on May 2, 1967. Balagoon first heard of the BPP after the October 28, 1967
shootout between BPP founder Huey Newton, one of his comrades, and the members of the Oakland Police Department. The shooting left Officer John Frey fatally wounded, and Newton and Officer Herbert Heanes injured; Newton’s companion escaped and
fled the scene. Newton became a national hero to urban Black youth after the shootout. While Newton was wounded from the exchange, the thought that a militant Black Power activist actually survived a gun battle with white police automatically propelled him to legendary heights. After he was charged with Frey’s murder, the defense of Newton and the call to “Free Huey” became a popular cause in the Black Power and left circles (Umoja, 1998, 418–419).
The BPP came to New York in the summer of 1968. An alliance between the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) attempted to create a Black Panther Party in New York in June 1966, but this grouping became dysfunctional due to internal conflict (Ahmad, 2007, 167170). The Oakland-based Black Panther Party for Self-Defense became a national organization after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in April, 1968. The organization grew from a regional organization with chapters in the California Bay Area, Los Angeles, and Seattle to a national movement with thousands of members and supporters throughout the United States. Building a chapter in New York was one of the most important events of this development. The same month as Dr. King’s assassination, national BPP Central Committee members Bobby Seale and Kathleen Cleaver came to New York and appointed 18-year-old SNCC member Joudon Ford as acting captain of defense of the BPP on the east coast. Ford was soon joined by 40-year-old David Brothers to found the New York chapter of the BPP in Brooklyn in the summer of 1968. The national leadership sent Ron Pennywell, a trusted member of its cadre, to give direction to the New York chapter. Pennywell had reached the rank of captain in the BPP ranks. Pennywell was described as “a very grass-root brother, who would always ask the cadre for suggestions” (Kempton, 1973, 43; Acoli, 1985; Balagoon, 1971, 295).
Lumumba Shakur would found the Harlem branch of the New York chapter. Shakur was the son of a Malcolm X Shabazz associate Saladin Shakur. The elder Shakur also served as a mentor and surrogate father for many members of the New York BPP chapter. Lumumba Shakur and his friend, Sekou Odinga, traveled to Oakland in 1968 to learn about the BPP. Shakur and Odinga met in prison in the early 1960s and embraced Islam and revolutionary nationalism through the teachings of Malcolm X and under the tutelage of Saladin Shakur, a member of Shabazz’s Muslim Mosque Incorporated
and the Organization of Afro-American Unity. After the assassination of Malcolm X, both young men attempted to find a revolutionary organization to replace the fledgling Organization of Afro-American Unity. They returned to meet Pennywell and Brothers in April 1968. Shakur was the section leader of Harlem and Odinga was assigned to organize the Bronx with Bilal Sunni-Ali, who had introduced them to Pennywell. The New York chapter of the BPP would grow to be among the largest, if not the largest, in the organization, with approximately 500 members (Shakur, 1971, 295; Acoli, 1995; Sunni-Ali, 2013; Ahmad, 2007, 191).
When Balagoon found out the BPP was organizing in New York, he located the organization and ultimately joined. He had affinity with the BPP’s ten-point program, which he believed was “community based.” He also identified with the organization’s appropriation of Mao Zedong’s axiom that political power “comes from the barrel of a gun” (Balagoon, 1971, 270). The assertion of the necessity of armed struggle was not the only principle the BPP borrowed from Mao. Mao and the Chinese Revolution profoundly influenced the BPP, as it did other radical movements of the 1960s. The Chinese Communist Party and its Leninist model of democratic centralism was the model of organization for the BPP. The BPP’s National Central Committee (NCC) was the highest decision-making body of the organization. The first NCC was concentrated in Oakland, with the overwhelming majority of the body composed of associates of BPP founder Huey Newton (Holder, 1990, 255). The BPP also functioned as a paramilitary organization, with Newton, as Minister of Defense, being the principal leader and with military positions <em>(e.g.,</em> Captain, Field Marshall, etc.) integrated into the organization’s chain of command. The BPP system and style of governance would become a factor in Balagoon’s attraction to anti-authoritarian politics.
Balagoon was able to engage in militant, grassroots organizing, combined with revolutionary ideology, as a member of the BPP in Harlem. In the Party he found comrades ready to participate in working with poor and oppressed Black communities around basic issues and willing to challenge the system with insurgent action. The New York City BPP engaged in grassroots organizing. In September 1968, BPP members participated in a community takeover of Lincoln Hospital. Lincoln was a “dilapidated and disinvested public hospital in the [predominately Black and Latino] South Bronx.” The BPP would
ultimately align itself with the Puerto Rican Young Lords and the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa to take over and reform the Detox Program at Lincoln Hospital (Tracy, 2010, 223). New York Panther branches were also involved in tenant organizing, and in fights for community control of the school system and of the police. BPP leaders, along with the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, Center for Constitutional Rights, and the National Lawyers Guild, filed a lawsuit calling for decentralization of the police in October, 1968 (Holder, 1990, 227). While Balagoon’s previous experience as a tenant organizer helped him become a key member of the organization, he was attracted to the military wing of the BPP.
*** <em>Repression and BPP Internal Contradictions:</em>
<br>
<em>Catalyst Towards Anti-Authoritarianism</em>
Balagoon and New York BPP member Richard Harris were arrested in February, 1969 on bank robbery charges in Newark, New Jersey. On April 2, 1969, less than one year after the founding of the New York chapter of the BPP, 21 Panther leaders and organizers (including Balagoon and Harris) were indicted, and 12 arrested on conspiracy charges in a 30-count indictment. This case became known as the case of the New York Panther 21. The charges included conspiracy to bomb the New York Botanical Gardens and police stations, and to assassinate police officers. After their arrest, most of the defendants were released on $100,000 bail. Balagoon was held without bail (NYT, 1971, 33; Kaplan, 1969; “Panther 21 Trial,” 1970).
A central charge in the indictment was the accusation that on January 17, 1969 Balagoon and Odinga planned to ambush New York police but were interrupted by other officers coming on the scene. This charge was based on testimony from a 19-year-old BPP member Joan Bird, who, defense attorneys argued, had been beaten by police to agree to elicit a statement to favor the prosecution. Bird’s mother reported arriving at the police station and hearing her daughter screaming. She was startled when she was taken to her daughter, who had visibly been beaten, with a black eye, swollen lip, and bruises on her face (English, 2011, 267–268).
Odinga escaped police and went underground on the day he was charged, after hearing of Bird’s arrest and alleged torture. He escaped arrest on April 2, when his comrades were apprehended,
fled the United States, and eventually received political asylum in Algeria. Balagoon was severed from the case of 13 of those who had been arrested originally, to face charges in NewJersey. After over two years behind bars, the 13 defendants were acquitted of all charges. It only took the jury one hour of deliberation to acquit. While this was a significant legal victory, the incarceration of key organizers and leaders of the New York BPP significantly crippled the organization’s momentum and activities. After the acquittal of most of his comrades, Balagoon pled guilty to the charge that he and an unidentified person did attempt to shoot police officers, making him the only one of the 21 original defendants to be convicted. If these charges were true, Balagoon had committed himself to participate in offensive guerilla warfare as early as 1969 (Odinga, in <em>Can’t Jail the Spirit,</em> 1990, 143; Lubash, 1981, B1; Vasquez, 1971, 37).
The BPP national leadership’s handling of the New York Panther 21 case played a significant role in the transition of Balagoon from revolutionary nationalism and democratic centralism to anti-authoritarian politics. The members of the New York BPP, including the defendants in the BPP 21 conspiracy trial, became disenchanted with the national leadership in Oakland. Division between the Oakland- based national leadership and the New York chapter increased after the purge of Geronimo Pratt by the national leadership. Pratt, a U.S. Army veteran who served as an Army Ranger in Vietnam, distinguished himself by training BPP members and other Black liberation forces in paramilitary tactics. He went underground to develop a clandestine apparatus, but was captured in Dallas, Texas on December 8, 1970. On January 23, 1971, Huey Newton, the BPP Minister of Defense, expelled Pratt from the organization for “counter-revolutionary behavior.” Newton’s expulsion of Pratt created confusion within the ranks of the organization. Many BPP rank-and-file members considered Pratt a hero and he was well respected in the New York chapter (Umoja, 1999, 138–139).
The expulsion of Pratt is connected to a series of expulsions by the national leadership of BPP members engaged in armed struggle. The initial orientation of the BPP encouraged the development of an armed underground capacity to wage guerilla warfare. Combined with the image of armed Panthers patrolling against the police, many Blacks who believed in armed confrontation with the state were attracted to the BPP. The New York BPP had developed an armed, clandestine
capacity from its inception. One police officer reported at a congressional hearing: “Members of the Panthers are not secret, with the exception of those who have been designated ‘underground.’ This group are secret revolutionaries and their identities are kept secret.” New York police and the FBI suspected the BPP in an August 2, 1968 shooting of two police officers in Brooklyn and an attempted bombing of a New York City police station on November 2, 1968 (Courtney, 1969, 4235).
Tensions also developed when the BPP national leadership sent Oakland cadres Robert Bey and Thomas Jolly to New York to assume leadership of the chapter. Years later, Balagoon publicly criticized the decision to import a new leadership group to New York, as opposed to promoting indigenous leadership from the local community. He saw this as critical to destabilizing the revolutionary vitality of the organization. Other New York BPP members shared Balagoon’s criticism of the NCC appointment of supervisory leadership over Panther activity in New York and the East Coast. Unlike Pennywell, the newly imported leadership possessed a more autocratic and hierarchal style of decision-making. In her autobiography, Assata Shakur questioned the quality of some of the West Coast leaders sent to New York. Shakur noted:
<quote>
We [New York BPP members] had a bit of a leadership problem with Robert Bey and Jolly who were both from the West Coast. Bey’s problem was that he was none too bright and that he had an aggressive, even belligerent, way of talking and dealing with people. Jolly’s problem was that he was Robert Bey’s shadow. (Shakur, 2001, 228.)
</quote>
Member of the Harlem BPP branch, along with historian Kit Holder, argued the “lack of indigenous leadership on the local level was one of the major contributing factors to the initial differences of opinions and misunderstandings” between the national leadership and the New York chapter (Holder, 1990, 258). Holder argued these factors “inhibited the growth of the Party.” One of the factors Holder identified was “cultural nationalism.”
Due to conflict with elements of the Black Arts Movement in the Bay Area and the Us Organization in Los Angeles, the California-based BPP developed an aversion to African-Americans who identified with African culture. The New York group, on the other hand, embraced
African and Arabic names <em>(e.g.,</em> Kuwasi, Afeni, Assata, Lumumba, Dhoruba, Zayd, etc.), and African clothing. Some were Muslims or influenced by African traditional religion. Holder reports that the national leadership barred New York BPP members from participating in nationalist-oriented community events or displaying the red, black, and green flag that originated in the Pan-African nationalist Universal Negro Improvement Association (a.k.a. the Garvey movement). The decision by national appointed leadership to take emphasis away from the local activism of the NY BPP around tenant issues and re-assign cadre to serve-the-people programs that were popular on the West Coast was also resented by New York cadre (ibid., 258–261).
The incarcerated members of the New York BPP conspiracy case also believed the national leadership did not provide sufficient financial support for their legal defense. Balagoon would also comment on how the national leadership selectively determined who would be released on bail. He stated: “Those who were bailed out were chosen by the leadership, regardless of the wishes of the rank-and-file or fellow prisoners of war or regardless of the relatively low bail of at least one proven comrade.” It must also be noted that the U.S. government, particularly the FBI through its Cointelpro program, worked to increase the division within the national leadership of the BPP and the New York chapter and the New York 21 defendants (Umoja, 1999, 141; Balagoon, 2003, 76).
After a series of attempts to send criticisms of the national leadership to <em>The Black Panther</em> newspaper, New York Panther 21 defendants publicly took what was interpreted as a critical position of the BPP national leadership in an open letter to the Weather Underground published on January 19, 1971. The Weather Underground was a clandestine organization of white radical anti-imperialists who initiated a campaign of armed propaganda by bombing U.S. government facilities in solidarity with the national liberation movements, particularly in Vietnam. The open letter applauded the insurgent actions of the Weather Underground and acknowledged them as part of the vanguard of the revolutionary movement in the United States. Without naming the BPP national leadership, the statement of the incarcerated New York Panthers also critiqued, “self-proclaimed ‘vanguard’ parties” who abandoned the actions of the radical underground struggle and the political prisoners (Umoja, 1998, 421–422; 1999, 138–139). Balagoon agreed with this criticism of the national leadership of the BPP.
<quote>
Under their leadership, “political consequences” (attacks) against occupation forces [police] ceased altogether. Only a fraction of the money collected for the purpose of bail went towards bail. The leaders began to live high off the hog … leaving behind so many robots [in the rank-and-file] who wouldn’t challenge policy until those in jail publicly denounced the leadership. (Balagoon, 2003, 76.)
</quote>
The differences between the national leadership and the New York BPP accelerated after the publication of the New York 21 open letter. Newton immediately expelled the New York Panther 21 on February 9, 1971. The cover of the February 13 <em>Black Panther</em> newspaper would declare NY BPP leaders and New York 21 defendants Richard Dhoruba Moore, Cetawayo Tabor, and Newton’s personal secretary Connie Matthews “Enemies of the People.” Moore and Tabor, out on bail, went underground rather than return to court proceedings. Matthews and Tabor would ultimately surface in Algeria at the BPP International section. Later that month, members of the New York BPP would hold a press conference and call for the purge of Huey Newton and BPP Chief of Staff David Hilliard and the formation of a new National Central Committee. The New York chapter officially split from the national organization (Umoja, 1999, 141–143).
Balagoon’s involvement in the New York BPP was an important part of his political development. On one hand, he was inspired to be a part of a dynamic revolutionary movement with comrades that he respected, loved, and trusted. On the other, Balagoon’s experience with the BPP national leadership left him questioning its decisionmaking and the nature of democracy in the organization. While acknowledging that state repression disrupted this revolutionary nationalist organization, Balagoon wanted to correct the internal and ideological weaknesses that compromised the fighting capacity and solidarity of the liberation movement.
Besides his disenchantment with the BPP national leadership, Balagoon’s receptivity to anti-authoritarian politics was also supported by his role in organizing fellow inmates as a Panther political prisoner. His comrade Kazembe Balagun argues that Kuwasi’s experience in prison, awaiting trial, influenced his transition to anarchism. The New York Panther 21 were incarcerated at a variety ofjails in different boroughs of New York City. Kit Holder called a series of inmate protests at each of these institutions in 1970 a “coordinated rebellion.” Balagoon,
Lumumba Shakur, and New York Panther 21 defendant Kwando Kinshasa were all incarcerated in the Queens House of Detention, where inmates organized an uprising that held seven hostages, including a captain, five correctional officers, and a Black cook hostage between October 1<sup>st</sup> and 5<sup>th</sup>, 1970. The slogan for the multi-ethnic (Black, Latino, and white) inmate takeover was, “all power to the people, free all oppressed people.” The primary demand of the inmates was for speedier trials. Instead of attempting to play a “vanguard” role in the decisionmaking, Kazembe Balagun argued, even before formally declaring his commitment to anti-authoritarian politics, Kuwasi Balagoon’s “primary concern was a consensus process for all inmates in decision-making, including access to food being brought from the outside.” He and the other incarcerated Panthers in Queens were concerned that
<quote>
the weight of the Panther leadership was too influential on the general consensus of other prisoners, Kuwasi and his comrades skipped out of general meetings in order for prisoners to “determine what was true and what was bullshit.” The Panthers also promised to go with the majority.
</quote>
The prisoners formed committees to coordinate their uprising. The inmates agreed to release the Black cook and one prison guard as a “sign of good faith.” The prisoners ultimately released the hostages and suffered physical abuse and charges from the uprising. Kazembe Balagun argues that while Kuwasi was disappointed at the outcome, he believed the power the inmate resisters felt by “holding the state at bay” was a valuable experience. As an organizer, he saw the uprising as “ ‘growing pains’ to those of us who believe oppressed people <em>will</em> rise up and seekjustice …” (Balagun, 2006; Balagoon, 1971, 32–347; NYT, 1971a, 24; “Prison Struggle 1970–1971”; Queens, 1970).
*** <em>From Black Panther Party to Black Liberation Army</em>
Balagoon’s experience in the BPP and the repression of the New York chapter also convinced him of the necessity of being involved in a clandestine fight against the state. He concluded that repression turned the BPP away from grassroots organizing the Black masses around issues that most affected their daily survival (housing, education, and police abuse) to defending the political prisoners. Balagoon stated:
<quote>
The state rounded up all the organizers pointed out to it by its agents who infiltrated the party as soon as it had been organizing in New York. It charged these people with conspiracy and demanded bails so high that the party turned away from its purpose of liberation of the Black colony to fundraising [for legal defense].
</quote>
This experience convinced him that “to survive and contribute I would have to go underground and literally fight (Balagoon, n.d.b, 75–76).” Balagoon was committed to building a Black Liberation Army and seeing his role in the Black Liberation movement as a clandestine freedom fighter.
On September 27, 1973, Balagoon would escape from New Jersey’s Rahway State Prison shortly after his conviction for armed robbery in New Jersey. Approximately eight months after his escape, Balagoon was captured attempting to assist New York BPP member and Panther 21 defendant Richard Harris escape from custody while being transported to a funeral in Newark on May 5, 1974. Balagoon and Harris were apprehended after being wounded in a gun battle with correctional and police officers. His risking being recaptured to free Harris demonstrated Balagoon’s commitment to his comrades and willingness to sacrifice for the liberation struggle (Gilbert, 2003, 9; NYS, 1985, 99–100; “Panther 21 Trial: Another Chicago”; Shakur, Mutulu, 1986).
*** <em>New Afrikan Anarchism</em>
Balagoon’s imprisonment and expulsion from and disillusionment with the BPP did not discourage his involvement or commitment to revolution. He began to explore anarchist politics during his incarceration. Balagoon received and studied literature from solidarity groups such as Anarchist Black Cross, an anti-authoritarian organization that provided material and legal support to political prisoners. Anarchism provided an analytical lens to sum up his critique of his experience in the BPP. According to Balagun, he worked to “apply the theories of Wilhelm Reich, Emma Goldman and others to the Black liberation struggle.” He began to ask critical questions about the practice of his comrades and himself in allowing the national hierarchy to weaken the resolve and fighting capacity of the BPP. He concluded:
<quote>
The cadre accepted their command regardless of what their intellect had or had not made clear to them. The true democratic process which they were willing to die for, for the sake of their children, they would not claim for themselves. (Balagoon, 2003, 76.)
</quote>
He desired a democratic process that would unleash the revolutionary potential of the masses and not make them prey to new oppressors.
<quote>
It is to say the only way to make a dictatorship of the proletariat is to elevate everyone to being proletariat and deflate all the advantages of power that translate into the wills of a few dictating to the majority…. Only an anarchist revolution has on its agenda to deal with these goals. <em>(Ibid.)</em>
</quote>
Balagoon clearly believed the true Black liberation could only be achieved through anarchism.
While incarcerated he read and identified with certain radical anarchists, particularly those men and women of action advocating insurrection of the oppressive order and the necessity and right of the oppressed to expropriate resources from their oppressors. One of his inspirations was Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta, who exhorted that revolutionary struggle “consists more of deeds than words.”
Another influence was Spanish revolutionaryJose Buenaventura Dur- ruti Dumange, who organized the anarchist guerilla movement <em>Los Justicieros</em> (The Avenging Ones). Like their name, <em>LosJusticieros</em>were thought to be involved in political assassinations in retaliation for political repression and guerilla raids on the military forces of the Spanish dictatorship. Balagoon was also motivated by the example of Italian exile Severino Di Giovanni, known for his campaign of bombing as armed propaganda in solidarity with executed anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. Durutti and Giovanni both engaged in expropriation of capitalist institutions as a mean of supporting the revolutionary movement.[2]
[2] Ashanti Alston, correspondence with author, September 7, 2013. Alston is a former Black
Liberation Army member, political prisoner, and anarchist activist. See Alston, 1998; Paz,
2007, 19–22, 87, 88, 116.
Another ideological influence on Balagoon was Russian immigrant and pioneer of American anarchism Emma Goldman. Another advocate of revolutionary armed struggle, Goldman supported the attempt by her comrade Alexander Berkman to assassinate a wealthy
industrialist, Henry Clay Frick. The methods used by Frick to suppress the Homestead (Pennsylvania) Steel strike “justified the means.” Goldman’s encouragement of “free love” also resonated with Balagoon, as he was open to sexual relationships with both men and women (Ojore Lutalo, phone interview with author, October 12, 2013).
Balagoon continued to believe the original BPP position that Black people were an internal colony of the United States, and interpreted the Black liberation struggle as a national liberation movement. Like other BLA members, he also began to identify with the New Afri- kan Independence Movement. The Provisional Government of the Republic of New Africa (PGRNA) viewed Black people as a “subjugated nation” within the USA. The PGRNA was founded in March, 1968 at a conference of 500 Black nationalists who declared their independence from the United States and demanded five states in the deep southern states (South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana) as reparations for the enslavement and racial oppression of Blacks. “New Afrika” was declared the name of the new nation and the five states as its national territory. Some New York BPP members developed a political relationship with the PGRNA from its inception. Kamau Sadiki (a.k.a. Freddie Hilton) of the Queens BPP branch remembers PGRNA member Mutulu Shakur facilitating political education sessions for him and other BPP members. Corona (in the borough of Queens) BPP branch leader Cyril Innis remembers taking the oath of allegiance to the New Afrikan nation in 1969, when PGRNA and BPP collaborated around struggles for community control of education in New York’s public schools.[3]
[3] Kamau Sadiki, discussion with author, Atlanta, Georgia, November 27, 2003; Cyril Innis, discussion with Charles E. Jones and author, Bronx, New York, June 5, 2013.
Like many of the New York BPP and BLA comrades, Balagoon began to ideologically unite with the political objective of the PGRNA for independence and adopt “New Afrikan” as their national identity. Balagoon believed that:
<quote>
We say the U.S. has no right to confine New Afrikan people to red-lined reservations and that We have a right to live on our own terms on a common land area and to govern ourselves, free of occupation forces such as the police, national guard, or G.I.s that have invaded our colonies from time to time. We have a right to control our own economy, print our own money, trade with other nations…. We have a right to control our educational institutions
and systems where our children will not be indoctrinated by aliens to suffer the destructive designs of the U.S. government.
</quote>
His position for Black self-determination was also combined with an anti-capitalist perspective. Balagoon proposed that New Afrikans would
<quote>
enter a work force where We are not excluded by design and where our wages and the wages of all workers can not be manipulated by a ruling class that controls the wealth.
</quote>
The New Afrikan Independence Movement was consistent with Balagoon’s belief in the necessity of national liberation of the colonized Black nation. He identified himself as a New Afrikan anarchist to express his national identity, aspiration for self-determination, and desire for whatever type of society he wished to inhabit.
Balagoon’s identity as a New Afrikan anarchist set him ideologically apart from Black Marxist-Leninists and revolutionary nationalists who had the objective of seizing state power from the white power structure of U.S. capitalism and imperialism. But he still desired a land for Black people to achieve self-determination and space to build a society based on anti-authoritarianism and freedom. His continued support for New Afrikan politics also distinguished him from the majority of the anarchist movement in the United States, many of whom opposed any form of nationalism.
Balagoon would share his New Afrikan anarchist viewpoint and ideologically struggle with Marxist-Leninist and revolutionary nationalist political prisoners incarcerated with him. He recruited soldiers for the BLA, as well as converts to anti-authoritarian and New Afrikan politics. In Trenton State Prison in New Jersey, his fellow New York Panther 21 defendant Sundiata Acoli and BLA members James York and Andaliwa Clark formed a political study group inside the penitentiary (IAT, 2001, 9).
Political education behind bars became a vehicle for recruitment into the BLA. Clark and Kojo Bomani were both inmates who had been politicized by Balagoon and other political prisoners after being incarcerated and recruited into the BLA.[4] Bomani was released in
1975 and arrested in December of the same year in a failed BLA expropriation of a financial institution. A BLA member captured with Bomani was Ojore Lutalo. Lutalo provides testimony concerning Balagoon’s influence on his transition from Marxism-Leninism to anti-authoritarian thinking:
[4] Clark would be killed in an attempted escape on January 19, 1976; NYS, 1985, 102.
<quote>
In 1975 I became disillusioned with Marxism and became an anarchist (thanks to Kuwasi Balagoon) due to the inactiveness and ineffectiveness of Marxism in our communities along with repressive bureaucracy that comes with Marxism. People aren’t going to commit themselves to a life-and-death strugglejust because of grand ideas someone might have floating around in their heads. I feel people will commit themselves to a struggle if they can see progress being made similar to the progress of anarchist collectives in Spain during the era of the fascist Bahamonde…. (Lutalo, 2002,132.)
</quote>
Like his teacher and comrade, Lutalo identified himself as a “New Afrikan/Anarchist Prisoner of War.”
*** <em>A New Afrikan Freedom Fighter: <br>Balagoon and the Revolutionary Armed Task Force</em>
Balagoon would again escape from Rahway State Prison in New Jersey on May 27, 1978. He would rejoin a clandestine network of BLA soldiers in alliance with white radicals in solidarity with the Black liberation movement and other national liberation struggles. This ideologically diverse network of insurgent militants was known as the Revolutionary Armed Task Force (RATF). The RATF was described as “a strategic alliance … under the leadership of the Black Liberation Army.” The BLA members in the alliance identified themselves as Muslims or revolutionary nationalists and the white radicals as anti-imperialists or communists. Balagoon appeared to be the sole anarchist in this formation. Balagoon’s BPP comrade Sekou Odinga had returned from political exile in Algeria and the People’s Republic of the Congo to be a major leader in this formation. While Balagoon was critical of Marxism and nationalism, he decided to join comrades he loved and trusted in a common front against white supremacy, capitalism, and imperialism. He and his comrades in the RATF also had political unity on the question of New Afrikan independence.
This wing of the BLA identified themselves as “New Afrikan Freedom Fighters.” Balagoon, who was considered a “free spirit,” viewed most
nationalist formations as “too rigid.” His RATF comrades, despite ideological differences or his sexual orientation, respected Balagoon due to his commitment to revolutionary struggle and his history of sacrifices on behalf of his comrades and for the liberation movement. In terms of his sexuality, comrades stated, “that’s Kuwasi’s business.” Differences over ideology and sexual orientation were tolerated and subordinated to the pragmatic unity necessary to carry out the clandestine work of armed propaganda, expropriations of resources from capitalist financial institutions, or assisting comrades in escaping from incarceration (Umoja, 1999, 154; “Sekou Odinga,” 1982).
The RATF came together in response to an increase in violent acts against Black people in the late 1970s and early 1980s, including the murders of Black children and youth in Atlanta and Black women in Boston, and shootings of Black women in Alabama. The increase in white supremacist paramilitary activity, including the Ku Klux Klan, was a related motivator for this alliance. The whites in the RATF participated in intelligence gathering on white supremacist and right-wing activity to ascertain its capability and connection with elements of the U.S. military. The RATF also engaged in “expropriations” to obtain resources to build the capacity of the Black Liberation movement to resist the white supremacist upsurge (BLA, 1998, 423–424).
The two most well-known actions of this New Afrikan Freedom Fighters’ wing of the BLA and the RATF were the escape of Assata Shakur and the attempted “Brinks expropriation” in Nyack, New York. Assata Shakur was a member of the New York BPP who was forced underground in response to the repression on the organization. She was captured on May 2, 1973 after a shootout with New Jersey state troopers and BLA members. State trooper Werner Foerster and New York BPP member Zayd Shakur were both killed in the shootout. Assata Shakur was wounded and paralyzed from the shooting. Former Black Panther 21 defendant and BLA member Sundiata Acoli was captured two days after the shootout, after escaping the scene. The FBI identified Assata Shakur as the “soul of the BLA” and hailed her capture as a significant event in “breaking the back” of the Black underground. While forensic evidence proved she did not fire a gun, and although she was paralyzed at the outset of the shooting, Assata Shakur was convicted of the murder of Foerster and Zayd Shakur and sentenced to life plus 65 years. She was considered a political prisoner by human rights organizations, in the United States and internationally.
According to the FBI, an armed team of four BLA members, including Odinga and Balagoon and two white allies, facilitated the escape of Shakur from Clinton Correctional Institution for Women in New Jersey on November 2, 1979. Prison officials stated the raid was “well planned and arranged.” Shakur’s escape was hailed and celebrated as a “liberation” by the Black Liberation movement and demonstrated the continued existence of the BLA (Umoja, 1998, 425; 1999, 148–149).
An attempt by the BLA and RATF to expropriate 1.6 million dollars from a Brinks armored truck in the New York city of Nyack resulted in a shooting exchange, resulting in the deaths of one Brink’s security guard and two police officers. Three white radicals —Judy Clark, David Gilbert, and Kathy Boudin — and one Black man — Solomon Brown — were captured in Nyack. A manhunt ensued for others who were believed to have escaped the scene or assisted in the attempt. Physical evidence, electronic surveillance, and informants led to arrests of other revolutionaries and the death of BLA member Mtayari Sundiata. The Joint Terrorist Task Force (JTTF) apprehended Balagoon in New York City at a Manhattan apartment three months later. The JTTF was organized after the escape of Assata Shakur to provide a coordinated investigation by FBI and local police. The FBI believed Balagoon was a part of the BLA team that initiated the expropriation attempt in Nyack. It was also believed that this wing of the BLA had successfully expropriated funds from financial institutions in a series of raids dating back to 1976. The funds had been utilized to support the development of an underground infrastructure, families of political prisoners, Black Liberation movement political activities and institutions, and freedom struggles on the African continent (Lubash, 1982; Putman, 1982).
*** <em>New Afrikan Anarchist Prisoner of War</em>
After his capture, Kuwasi Balagoon publically spoke to the movement for the first time since the publication of <em>Look for Me in the Whirlwind</em> 11 years earlier in 1971. Defining himself as a New Afrikan anarchist, Balagoon represented New Afrikan and anti-authoritarian politics in public statements. In captivity, he defined himself as a prisoner of war, not a criminal. Balagoon acting <em>pro se</em> (serving as his own attorney) at the Rockland County trial where he was charged with armed robbery for the Nyack expropriation and the murders of the
Brinks’ guard and two police officers. This gave him the opportunity to speak to the public about his politics and to make his intentions clear for history. In his opening statement, Balagoon declared:
<quote>
i am a prisoner of war. i reject the crap about me being a defendant, and i do not recognize the legitimacy of this court. The term defendant applies to someone involved in a criminal matter…. It is clear that i’ve been a part of the Black Liberation Movement all of my adult life and have been involved in a war against the American Imperialist, in order to free New Afrikan people from its yoke.[5]
</quote>
[5] Balagoon, n.d.a, 27–28. In the grammar of the New Afrikan Independence movement the first personal singular is not capitalized (“i”) and the first letter in first person plural is capitalized (“We”). This is the application of a principle of the New Afrikan Creed, “the community is more important than the individual.”
Balagoon wanted it acknowledged that his armed actions were politically motivated to win national liberation for New Afrikan people and to eliminate capitalism, imperialism, and ultimately authoritarian forms of government.
Once convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment, Balagoon continued to speak to New Afrikan/Black Liberation forces and anarchist gatherings through public statements. As well as his continued support for armed struggle, he advocated the building of an insurgent movement and building of autonomous communities. OnJuly 18, 1983, at a Harlem rally for imprisoned New Afrikan Freedom Fighters, Balagoon’s statement was read: “We must build a revolutionary political platform and a universal network of survival programs” (Balagoon, 2003, 73–74). In another statement directed toward anarchists, Balagoon stated:
<quote>
Where we live and work … We must organize on the ground level. The landlords must be contested through rent strikes and rather than develop strategies to pay rent, we should develop strategies to take the buildings…. Set up communes in abandoned buildings…. Turn vacant lots into gardens. When our children grow out of clothes, we should have places we can take them, clearly marked anarchist clothing exchanges…. We must learn construction and ways to take back our lives … (Balagoon, 2003, 79.)
</quote>
He also challenged anarchists to move from theory to practice. In the tradition of the insurgent anarchists of previous generations who inspired him, Balagoon argued:
<quote>
We permit people of other ideologies to define anarchy rather than bring our views to the masses and provide modes to show the contrary…. In short, by not engaging in mass organizing and delivering war to the oppressors, we become anarchists in name only. (Ibid., 78.)
</quote>
Balagoon also continued to organize and provide political education to other prisoners. He died in prison on December 13, 1986 from pneumocystis pneumonia, an AIDS-related illness.
*** <em>Legacy</em>
While Balagoon is not in mainstream discourse, his name is evoked in some Black/New Afrikan, anarchist, and queer spaces. In 2005, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM), a New Afrikan activist organization, dedicated its annual Black August celebration to Kuwasi Balagoon. That year MXGM highlighted the need for awareness of the AIDS virus in Africa and the African Diaspora. A few radical Hip Hop artists such as Dead Prez and Zayd Malik also mention Balagoon’s name. But Balagoon’s name is not commonly used, even in socially conscious Hip Hop, as much as other Black revolutionaries such as Marcus Garvey, Huey Newton, Assata Shakur, Geronimo (Pratt)ji Jaga, and Mutulu Shakur.
Anarchist collectives have re-published Balagoon’s statements. After his incarceration and self-identification as an anarchist, a Canadian anti-authoritarian collective that published the newsletter <em>Bulldozer</em>, which later became known as <em>Prison Nws Service,</em> published Balagoon’s writings. The Patterson (New Jersey) Anarchist Collective reprinted his trial statement and tributes to his life in 1994. The Quebec radical publisher Kersplebedeb issued a Collected Works of Balagoon’s trial statements, essays, poetry, as well as acknowledgements from comrades titled <em>A Soldier’s Story: Writings by a Revolutionary Nw Afrikan Anarchist.</em>
Radical queer liberation forces also embraced Balagoon’s legacy. He acknowledged his bisexual identity within a primarily hetero- normative Black liberation movement. ACT-UP, a direct action organization emerging from queer liberation forces, joined forces with anarchists and revolutionary Black/New Afrikan nationalists to commemorate Balagoon in December 2006 (Balagun, 2006). His sexual identity has become a vehicle to challenge homophobia within the broader Black liberation movement. Elements of the queer liberation
movement and their allies have criticized Black liberation forces for being silent on Balagoon’s sexuality. Balagun, in a posthumous statement honoring Kuwasi Balagoon, offered this:
<quote>
One of the silences that engulfed Kuwasi’s life was his bisexuality. The official eulogies offered by the New Afrikan People’s Organization and others omitted his sexuality or that he died of AIDS-related complications. These erasures are a reflection of the on-going internal struggle against homophobia and patriarchy within the larger society in general and the movement in particular. (<em>Ibid</em>.)
</quote>
This issue will remain so long as heteronormativity remains the dominant sexual orientation of the Black liberation movement.
Kuwasi Balagoon is remembered and saluted by revolutionary nationalists, radical anarchists, and queer liberation forces. He remains a “maroon” isolated from mainstream Black and left political dialog and memory. His legacy will only be secure with the survival and empowerment of the political tendencies he represented. Balagoon’s name will only be saved from obscurity when insurgent Black nationalists and anarchist collectives take up his charge to organize oppressed people to build a revolutionary program that challenges capitalism and institutional racism in the United States.
<right>
<strong>Akinyele K. Umoja</strong>
</right>
<verse>
<em>Department of African-American Studies</em>
<em>Georgia State University</em>
<em>PO Box 4109</em>
<em>Atlanta, GA 30302–4109</em>
<em>[[mailto:aadaku@gsu.edu][aadaku@gsu.edu]]</em>
</verse>
*** References
<biblio>
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hmad, Muhammad. 2007. <em>We Will Return in the Whirlwind: Black Radical Orga,nizations 1960–1975.</em> Chicago, Illinois: Clark Kerr Press.
A. H. 1982. “Key Suspect is Arrested in Brink’s Car Robbery.” <em>New York Times</em> (January 22). http://ezproxy.gsu.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/ 121946284?accountid=11226 Alston, Ashanti. 1998. “Propaganda of the Deed.” <em>Worker’s Solidarity</em> (October). lag. blackened.net/revolt/ws98/ws55_prop_deed.html
Balagoon, Kuwasi. 1971. Pp. 33–38 in <em>Look for Me in the Whirlwind: The Collective Autobiography of the New York 21.</em> New York: Random House.
———. 1983. “Brinks Opening Trial Statement.” <em>A Soldier’s Story.</em>
———. 1985. “Statement to New Afrikan Freedom Fighters Day.” <em>A Soldier’s Story.</em>
———. 2003. “Anarchy Can’t Fight Alone.” <em>A Soldier’s Story.</em>
Balagun, Kazembe. 2006. “Kuwasi at 60.” mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2006/ balagun311206.html
BLA. 1998. Black Liberation Army Communique, “On Strategic Alliance of Armed Military Forces of the Revolutionary Nationalist and Anti-Imperialist Movement. ” In Imari Obadele, ed., <em>America the Nation-State: The Politics of the United States from a State Building Perspective</em>. Baton Rouge, Louisiana: The Malcolm Generation.
Blunk, Tim, and Ray Levasseur, eds. 1990. <em>Hauling Up the Morning: Writings and Art by Political Prisoners and Prisoners of War</em>. Trenton, New Jersey: Red Sea Press.
Bracey, John, Elliot Rudwick, and August Meier. 1970. <em>Black Nationalism in America.</em> Indianapolis, Indiana: Bobbs-Merrill.
Can’t Jail the Spirit. 1990. <em>Can’t Jail the Spirit: Political Prisoners in the U.</em> S. Chicago, Illinois: Committee to End the Marion Lockdown.
Courtney, Thomas. 1969. Testimony of Sgt. Thomas Courtney in Hearings Before the Permanent Sub-Committee of the Committee Investigations of Government Operations United States Senate, Ninety-First Congress, First Session, Riots, Civil, and Civil Disorders, June 26 and 30, 1969, Part 20. Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.
Cruse, Harold. 1962. “Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American.” <em>Studies on the Left,</em> 2, 3. http://brotherwisedispatch.blogspot. com/2009/12/revolutionary- nationalism-and-afro.html
English, T. J. 2011. <em>The Savage City: Race, Murder, and a Generation on the Edge.</em> New York: Harper Collins.
Giddings, Paula. 1994. <em>When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America.</em> New York: Bantam.
Gilbert, David. 2003. “In Memory of Kuwasi Balagoon, New Afrikan Freedom Fighter.” In <em>A Soldier’s Story: Writings by a Revolutionary New Afrikan Anarchist.</em> Montreal, Canada: Kersplebedeb.
Harley, Sharon. 2001. “‘Chronicle of a Death Foretold’: Gloria Richardson, the Cambridge Movement, and the Radical Black Activist Tradition.” In Betty Collier- Thomas and V. P. Franklin, eds., <em>Sisters in the Struggle: African-American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement.</em> New York: New York University Press.
Holder, Kit. 1990. “The History of the Black Panther Party 1966–1971.” PhD Dissertation. University of Massachusetts.
IAT. Its About Time. 2001. “Bashir Hamed: Black Liberation Army Political Prisoner.” <em>Its About Time</em> (Special Edition), 5:4 (Fall-Winter).
Kaplan, Morris. 1969. “Bomb Plot is Laid to 21 Panthers.” <em>New York Times</em> (April 3).
Kempton, Murray. 1973. <em>The Briar Patch: The Trial of the Panther 21.</em> New York: Da Capo Press.
Lutalo, Ojore Nuru. 2002. In <em>Can’t Jail the Spirit: Political Prisoners in the U.</em> S. Chicago, Illinois: Committee to End the Marion Lockdown.
Lubash, Arnold H. 1982. “Key Suspect Is Arrested In Brink’s Car Robbery.” <em>New York Times</em> (January 22).
Noel, Peter. 1999. “By Any Means Unnecessary.” <em>The Village Voice</em> (September 2).
NYS. New York State Report of the Policy Group on Terrorism. 1985. (November.) Commission on Criminal Justice Services.
NYT. <em>New York Times.</em> 1971a. “6 Are Arraigned in 1970 Jail Riots: 2 Panthers Acquitted Last Week Among Defendants.” <em>New York Times</em> (May 19).
———. <em>New York Times.</em> 1971b. “$50,000 Bail for Weems.” <em>New York Times</em> (June 24).
“Panther 21 Trial: Another Chicago.” 1970. fk.hood.edu/Collection/ Weisberg%20 Subject%20Index%20Files/B%20Disk/Blacks%20Miscellaneous/049.pdf
Paz, Abel. 2007. <em>Durruti in the Spanish Revolution.</em> Oakland, California: AK Press.
“Prison Struggle 1970–1971.” n.d. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/ search?q=cache:IJAlc4jRwdoJ:abolitionistpaper.files.wordpress.com/ 2012/03/ fa-war-behind-walls-1970-1.pdf+queens+house+ of+detention+October+1970&c d=9&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
Putman, Eileen. 1982. “Jury Indicts Eighth Suspect in Brinks Robbery.” <em>Schenectady Gazette</em> (January 16). http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1917&dat=198 20116&id=amxGAAAAIBAJ&sjid=f-kMAAAAIBAJ&pg=2539,12813
Queens. 1970. October 1970 Queens House Of Detention Prison Riot (photo). http:// www.flickr.com/photos/nycdreamin/6735842575/
“Sekou Odinga.” 1982. “New Afrikan Prisoner of War.” <em>Arm the Spirit,</em> 14 (Fall), 1, 9.
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Shakur, Lumumba. 1971. In <em>Look for Me in the Whirlwind: The Collective Autobiography of the New York 21.</em> New York: Random House.
Shakur, Mutulu. 1986. “To Our Brother Kuwasi Balagoon.” Campaign to Free Dr. Mutulu Shakur.
Sunni-Ali, Bilal. 2013. Interview with Kalonji Changa: “Tupac, Assata, and the Revolutionary Shakur family.” tpmovement.tumblr.com/post/50587379244/shakur- family-tree
Tracy, James. 2010. “Rising Up: Poor, White, and Angry in the New Left.” In Dan Berger, ed., <em>The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism.</em> New Brunswick, NewJersey: Rutgers University Press.
Umoja, Akinyele Omowale. 1998. “Set Our Warriors Free: The Legacy of the Black Panther Party and Political Prisoners.” In Charles E. Jones, ed., <em>Black Panthers Reconsidered</em>. Baltimore, Maryland: Black Classics Press.
———. 1999. “Repression Breeds Resistance: The Black Liberation Army and the
Radical Legacy of the Black Panther Party.” <em>New Political Science,</em> 21:2 (June).
———. 2013. “From One Generation to the Next: Armed Self-Defense, Revolutionary Nationalism, and the Southern Black Freedom Movement.” <em>Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society,</em> 15:3 (Fall).
Vasquez, Juan. 1971. “One of Panther 21 Admits Helping Anti-Police Sniper.” <em>New York Times</em> (October 8).
</biblio>
|
#title Zapatista Autonomy and Stateless Participatory Democracy
#author Al Raven
#date 2023
#source Retrieved on 2023-08-16 from [[https://www.thecommoner.org.uk/zapatista-autonomy-and-stateless-participatory-democracy-part-one/][<thecommoner.org.uk/zapatista-autonomy-and-stateless-participatory-democracy-part-one>]], [[https://www.thecommoner.org.uk/zapatista-autonomy-and-stateless-participatory-democracy-part-two/][<thecommoner.org.uk/zapatista-autonomy-and-stateless-participatory-democracy-part-two>]].
#lang en
#pubdate 2023-08-16T01:32:01
#authors Al Raven
#topics Zapatistas, statelessness, Participatory Democracy, Mexico
*** Part One
<em>This essay was first written in French collaboratively with a friend and fellow student, to which I’m grateful and who accepted for me to translate it into English</em>
<quote>
‘For us autonomy is the soul and heart of our resistance in our <em>pueblos</em>; it is a new way of doing politics in construction and in development in democracy, justice and liberty.’
</quote>
~ Macario, a member of the Nueva Revolución community in the municipality of Diecisiete de Noviembre (Chiapas) (quoted in Mora 2017, 72)
**** Introduction
Since the end of the postwar boom, a range of economic and political factors have transformed Western democracies. With regard to the political system and democracy in particular, citizens’ trust in their leaders has declined, and a sense of mistrust expressed outside political institutions and parties has burgeoned (Chapdelaine 2010, 2). Some of the inherent limitations of representative democracy — including the growing gap between representatives and the represented, the over-centralisation of power, and the disempowerment of citizens — are leading to dissatisfaction with this type of political organisation and a desire to turn to new practices (Hatzfeld 2011). This is why, in recent decades, some groups have increasingly called for forms of ‘participatory’ or ‘deliberative’ democracy to remedy the limited level of participation by the public in most countries (Sintomer & Bacqué 2011, 15–16).
A subset of French political sociology — starting with scholars Pierre Bourdieu and Daniel Gaxie — has argued that one factor in the low democratic participation of dominated groups is ‘structural social inequalities in the face of politicisation’ (Blondiaux 2007, 762), i.e. their ‘social inability to enter into the categories of judgement and expression of opinions imposed by [the political order]’ (Lagroye et al. 2012, 350–351). Individuals ‘experience’ and ‘manifest’ this incompetence, ‘in particular through non-participation in “civic” activities’ (ibid, 348). However, this is ‘not an “absence of opinions,” but rather a sense of incompetence maintained by the socially authorised agents defining the language and schemas of the political’ (ibid, 351). The illegitimacy of taking part in political processes is therefore an individual feeling of incompetence that is also socially recognised.
The scientific literature lacks any consideration of whether, or to what extent, conventional attempts at participatory democracy might be limited by the very fact that they originate in the modern state framework. This framework is based in part on the differentiation between political specialists or professionals and laymen, defined by their inability to intervene according to the codes and patterns of the established political system. As Starr et al. (2011, 103) put it, the research dealing with more inclusive forms of participatory democracy generally views this kind of system as ‘a kind of advisory process to state decision making (…) The forms of “direct,” “deliberative,” and “decentralized” democracy discussed in these works are all ways of participating in the state.’ What happens in contexts where this separation is deconstructed or even abolished?
------
The Zapatista experience in the state of Chiapas in southern Mexico is an example of popular stateless self-organisation that has lasted for more than twenty-five years. Since the 1990s, and especially since 2003, this experience of democracy from below has persisted despite an unfavourable context, linked in particular to repression by the Mexican state and the violence of paramilitary organisations. Nevertheless, its radical character can be identified by its popular, peasant, and Indigenous base; its project of self-government outside the state; and its internationalist and anti-capitalist demands. The participation of lay citizens is thus a foundation of the Zapatista organisation, directly raising the question of their competence and capacity to organise and manage themselves. As they say in the Sixth Declaration of the Selva Lacandona:
<quote>
‘This method of autonomous government was not simply invented by the EZLN, but rather it comes from several centuries of indigenous resistance and from the Zapatistas’ own experience. It is the self-governance of the communities. In other words, no one from outside comes to govern, but the peoples themselves decide, among themselves, who governs and how, and, if they do not obey, they are removed. If the one who governs does not obey the people, they pursue them, they are removed from authority, and another comes in.’
</quote>
In her analysis of the democratic function from the armed uprising of January 1, 1994, to the “Other Campaign,” an initiative for citizen participation at the national level initiated in 2005, Monique Chapdelaine (2010) emphasises the singularity of the movement. Among other things, she examines the Zapatista conception of democracy. The Zapatistas adopt a radical perspective by positioning themselves against the State and advocating new methods of consultation and decision-making, including a diversity of social actors and a total decentralisation of power. According to them, power in a democratic society should be located at the base — that is, in civil society. In total opposition to the current functioning of the Mexican government, the Zapatistas engage in participatory democracy as a part of their political organisation.
According to Sabrina Melenotte (2010), applying the notion of political governance to the practice of Zapatista autonomy allows for the inclusion of new actors in the analysis, and therefore, in civil society. Governance is a system of rules and institutions that implies a reorganisation of power and government (ibid 180). It allows us to think about citizen participation and the possibility of the emergence of organised power on the margins of the state, thanks to the diversity of actors it involves in the practice of power. Consequently, the governance approach makes it possible to link contestation and political reconfigurations through the self-governance of civil society.
Self-governance is the idea that the people are capable of governing themselves outside of a state system. It can be thought of as the outcome of the practice of autonomy, which, according to Jérôme Baschet (2019, 2021), represents the most important characteristic of the Zapatista experience. It is also through this concept that the Zapatistas themselves describe their practices and their modes of political and social organisation. Their emancipation project secedes from the institutions of the state and has relocated its form of self-government to another scale that does not include the state (Baschet 2021, 2).
This approach identifies how Zapatista autonomy operates in the areas of education, health, justice, and government. Their political organisation is characterised by what the Zapatistas call ‘<em>mandar obedeciendo</em>,’ which means ‘the people rule and the government obeys’ (Baschet 2019, 356). But this does not mean that the relationship between government — broken down into community, municipality, and zone — and people is strictly horizontal. On the contrary, it works both ways: ‘[…] the government obeys, because it has to consult and do what the people ask; the government commands because it has to implement and enforce what has been decided collectively […]’ (<em>ibid</em>, 360). Zapatista autonomy thus goes beyond the oppositions traditionally put forward between representative and direct democracy, and the analysis of the exchanges that exist within and between the three levels of Zapatista organisation are essential to understanding it.
Mariana Mora (<em>Kuxlejal Politics</em>, 2017) has carried out an ethnography of cultural and political practices in the Zapatista municipality Diecisiete de Novembre, based on materials collected between 2005 and 2008 through interviews, observations, and informal conversations (<em>ibid</em>, 5). Mora performed these investigations with the informed consent and review of the Zapatista assembly. She focuses on what she calls ‘everyday politics’ which she places at the centre of what Zapatista autonomy represents as a mode of socio-political organisation (ibid, 3–4):
<quote>
‘The everyday politics of Zapatista indigenous autonomy simultaneously interacts with the state through what Pablo González (2011) terms a politics of refusal and enacts multilayered forms of engagement internal to the rebel autonomous project, including dialogue with vast webs of national and international political actors (…) From this double-pronged politics emerge particular Tseltal and Tojolabal cultural practices — concentrated in three central realms, knowledge production, ways of being, and the exercise of power — that partially unravel the colonial legacies of a racialized and gendered neoliberal Mexican state.’
</quote>
This close analysis of the Zapatista ‘way of life’ touches on the theme of legitimacy in certain respects, but only indirectly. In other words, it is a valuable source of evidence of how self-governance can be socially constructed through the direct praxis involved in making that system work in people’s everyday lives. This approach does not need to rely on a formalised, academic approach to ‘participatory democracy’ that attempts to use political science to empirically measure variables involved in it, like confidence, legitimacy, or engagement. In short, the Zapatistas do not need to rely on bureaucrats, academics, or politicians to research, vote on, and administer their democracy for themselves.
While academics have broadly analysed how the Zapatista political system works, they have not done so through a lens of citizen competence. It is therefore necessary to ask what constitutes the legitimacy of ordinary citizens in such a system. How is the political competence of the communities of Chiapas — mostly peasants and Indigenous people — constructed? What is the relationship between ‘governed’ and ‘governing,’ between ‘political specialist’ and ‘layman’ in this case?
**** The Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas
While the armed uprising of January 1, 1994, is generally identified as the beginning of the Zapatista movement as we know it today, it must be seen in the longer history of Indigenous and popular mobilisation in the country. That history goes back at least to the struggle of Emiliano Zapata during the Mexican Revolution of 1910 which aimed at restoring agricultural land to the local populations who had been managing it collectively since before Spanish colonisation. The predominantly agricultural state of Chiapas was plagued by poverty and inequality, and Indigenous people were highly marginalised and had no recognised rights. Peasant movements emerged in the 1970s in response to neoliberal immiseration, and it is out of that milieu that modern Zapatismo arose.
The EZLN (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional), the organisation that emerged as the main figure in the 1994 insurgency), was founded in 1983. It emerged from a Marxist-Leninist group in the north of the country, the FLN (Fuerzas de Liberación Nacional), and initially resorted to an isolated and clandestine guerrilla war. As Jérôme Baschet points out, ‘it is important to understand that Zapatismo was not born on 1 January 1994, and that there was a broad social movement behind and around it, with at least twenty years of struggle and experience accumulated by the Indigenous peasants of Chiapas.’ (2019, 19). The violence of the government and paramilitary organisations brought together the EZLN and Indigenous communities. The initial uprising, in which ‘for the first time in history, an indigenous army seized San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Ocosingo, Las Margaritas, and Altamirano […] with cries of “<em>Ya basta</em>!”’ (<em>ibid</em>, 33), carried the priority and central demand of the Zapatista movement: autonomy and the recognition of the rights of the Indigenous populations.
The initial phase of the uprising, from 1994 to 2003, was marked by a process of government repression, the transition from armed struggle to political struggle, and an attempt to negotiate with the Mexican authorities. The disillusionment of the Zapatistas with these negotiations led in August 2003 to the declaration of their autonomy in the seized territories, where they announced the unilateral application of the San Andrés Accords (providing for the constitutional recognition of Indigenous rights), which had not been respected by the Mexican government. They created ‘[…] five councils of good government, federating twenty-seven “autonomous Zapatista rebel municipalities” […]’ (Baschet 2021).
<quote>
‘In Oventic the EZLN announced that the five Zapatista <em>aguascalientes</em>, regions created by the EZLN in January 1996, would be changed to <em>caracoles</em> and that five corresponding <em>juntas de buen gobierno</em> would be instituted as coordinating bodies for the multiple autonomous councils in the five Zapatista areas.’ (Mora 2017, 38)
</quote>
According to Mora:
<quote>
‘The San Andrés dialogues forged dynamic conditions for creative political endeavors at the margins of the state. Shortly thereafter, the Zapatista support bases, or community members who actively support the political-military structure of the EZLN but are not part of the rebel army’s military ranks, organized self governing bodies and administrative units to implement collective decisions and initiated their own education, justice, agrarian, and healthcare projects as part of their autonomous municipalities. Sympathizers of the movement also mobilized in support of these initiatives, myself included.’ (Mora 2017, 4)
</quote>
A further expansion of autonomy was announced in August 2019 with the creation of four new autonomous municipalities and seven new ‘good government’ councils (Baschet 2021). Today, the Zapatistas have developed their own unique ideology not directly affiliated with any other, whether that be Marxism, Anarchism, or Maoism.
**** Autonomy as Participatory Democracy from Below
Today, participatory democracy refers to a wide variety of approaches in terms of formats, audiences, framing, and scale. It has its origins in criticism of representative democracy. In particular, these criticisms point to the dissociation between representatives and the represented, the excessive centralisation of power and the disempowerment of citizens, thus making ‘participatory democracy’ necessary (Hatzfeld 2011, 53). From then on, the development of participation was articulated around two distinct issues. If the aim was to make it a political tool available to leaders, it had to be able to correct and complement representation. With this in mind, governments sought to partially encourage the participation of actors traditionally excluded from the construction of public policies. But if it was to be a tool for challenging the political and social system, then participation had to be a political struggle. This last point makes it possible to understand participatory democracy as a means of producing a popular counter-power.
But, ‘[…] to think of participation only in terms of its mechanisms granted and designed according to the needs of public decision-makers is a dead end.’ (ibid, 27). Indeed, it is also possible to identify independent attempts that are taking place outside the state framework and that advocate new political practices based on participation, as the Zapatista experience of self-government shows. A self-governing political system is based on the idea of ‘[…] the capacity of all to govern themselves.’ (Baschet 2021, 11) All citizens therefore participate in policy-making and decision-making.
Self-management is a concept that is part of the tradition of the labour movement in which workers are encouraged to work autonomously for the establishment of socialism (<em>ibid</em>, 54). It is therefore a practice that aims at a radical transformation of society’s behaviours and ways of thinking: the relationship to work, consumption, and knowledge are then completely different, advocating an alternative organisational model to that of capitalism (<em>ibid</em>, 55).
The Zapatista movement is also characterised by this desire to effect a complete transformation of lifestyles. However, rather than talking about self-management, the Zapatistas use the term autonomy to characterise their modes of organisation:
<quote>
‘Under this name of autonomy — by which the Zapatistas themselves synthesise their practice — one must understand both the implementation of modalities of self-government entirely dissociated from the institutions of the Mexican state and the reinvention of forms of life rooted in the Indigenous tradition and yet unprecedented, which escape as far as possible from capitalist determinations.’ (Baschet 2019, 323)
</quote>
On the one hand, Zapatista autonomy thus represents a radical critique of the state, insofar as it rejects any form of political organisation that includes a centralisation of powers. Indeed, it implies a relocalisation of politics not only at the level of scale, with a shift from national to local, but also at the level of power hierarchies, with the state now absent (Baschet 2019). After the failure of the San Andrés Accords to recognise the rights of Indigenous peoples, autonomy appears to be a mode of organisation that can better respond to the needs of these populations (Melenotte 2010). The state is unable to do this unless it is completely transformed, reorganised, and abolished. The Zapatistas thus declared de facto autonomy for their territories in 2003 and have been self-governing ever since. More than a reflection of an inability to dialogue with the Mexican government, the declaration of autonomy is above all a form of resistance to state oppression.
<quote>
‘They are afraid that we will discover that we can govern ourselves,’ said Maestra Eloisa at the Escuelita. She thus confirms the essential principle: we, the ordinary people, are capable of governing ourselves — a ‘discovery’ that has the unfortunate consequence, for those above and for all the self-proclaimed experts in politics, of demonstrating their harmful uselessness!’ (Baschet 2019, 372)
</quote>
On the other hand, autonomy is also part of a long popular tradition of community organisation in which the collective exercise of power and consensus-building are essential: the authority of the community prevails over that of individuals (Baschet 2021). The ‘tradition’ is nevertheless undergoing transformations in power relations, through the integration of youth and women, who are usually excluded from community assemblies, as well as in the social structure and symbolic roles associated with women (Mora 2017). Women, for instance, were made an early priority in the Zapatista revolution and were fully included in autonomy arrangements.As identified by Jérôme Baschet in 2021, Zapatista autonomy is being implemented in the fields of education, health, justice and politics. It cuts across several facets of daily life, in a process of struggle for <em>lekil kuxlejal</em>, a dignified collective life associated with a specific territory (Mora 2017, 12). It represents a daily aspiration to live with dignity and is therefore expressed through everyday practices (<em>ibid</em>). The relationship to the land is essential in that it allows for the creation of a collective identity territorialised around autonomy, without the need for legal structures for its implementation (Guimont Marceau 2010). By living their ideas out in practice, the Zapatistas demonstrate how stateless participatory democracy is about much more than a change in political institutions: it is fundamentally rooted in a transformation of social relations and everyday life. It is, in a word, revolutionary.
*** Part Two
<em>This is part two of an essay on Zapatista autonomy that I wrote with a friend and fellow student, which we both wanted to translate into English. In</em> <em>part one</em><em>, we went over some of the basic history of the Zapatista rebellion, and started exploring the meaning of autonomy. In this post, we argue that their federal and non-dissociative political system, as well as their shared principle of “mandar obedeciendo”, have made a full despecialisation of politics possible.</em>
**** The political organisation of Zapatista autonomy
The Zapatista political structure is a federal system with three interacting levels: the communities; the communes (or MAREZ), which bring several communities together; and the <em>Caracoles</em>, for the coordination of communes at a regional level. Each level has assemblies and authorities elected for two or three years. The link between these two elements is essential to the functioning of autonomy. For example, decisions can only be taken in consultation with every other assembly/authority level: in fact, there are regularly multiple back-and-forths between the municipal council, the regional assembly, and the communities (Baschet 2021).
[[a-r-al-raven-zapatista-autonomy-and-stateless-part-1.png f][*MAREZ = Municipios Autónomos Rebeldes Zapatistas = Rebel Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities. Note: the frequency of rotation in the autonomous councils is not the same across the 5 regions.]]
Other elements also intervene in the functioning of autonomy, such as the Supervisory Commission of each Zone, or the <em>CCRI</em><em>,</em> i.e. the EZLN’s Clandestine Indigenous Revolutionary Committee (Baschet 2019). The decentralisation of political organisation and the involvement of ordinary people avoid certain problems inherent to the State and representation, such as the separation between the governors and the governed. The latter leads to the implementation of policies that do not necessarily meet the expectations of the citizens, but only the interests of those in power. In an autonomous system, on the other hand, everyone is able to govern themselves without the State. Therefore, members of the Zapatista community can provide a mandate to others to carry out political tasks, but that direct mandate is essential. There is no self-proclamation, no self-representation in elections, and no political specialists. Zapatista women and men are themselves involved in policymaking, which allows them to respond directly to the interests of their community.
Zapatista autonomy is thus a project of community participation that includes internal participation of citizens in the life of their community, but also external participation of the community in a broader political order (Dumoulin 2010). The Zapatistas interact with the Mexican State through a politics of refusal, and implement forms of engagement at several levels, including a dialogue with national and international political actors (Mora 2017). Here, therefore, participation is not reduced to a political tool that the government uses in the hope of renewing the legitimacy of the existing system. It aims to challenge the mode of political organisation and above all the social order that structures roles and hierarchical positions in all spheres of life, including political activity. Indeed, since the declaration of autonomy, the place of women in politics, but also in Zapatista society, has been positively transformed.
Moreover, autonomy is a constantly evolving process; it is a practice that has the capacity to adapt to social reality (Baschet 2019). It is not a system fixed by theoretical principles that must absolutely be applied to the letter. On the contrary, it is a policy situated in a concrete place, composed of concrete experiences, which must be able to adapt to the context it encounters. This conception opens up the possibility of applying autonomy worldwide (ibid).
<quote>
‘In this sense, the political logic of autonomy is the same as the desire to build a world where there is room for many worlds: not only does it start from the singularity of experiences, but it invites us to recognise that there cannot be a single way of thinking about the exit from capitalism. It therefore calls for the recognition of the multiplicity of worlds, but also for the art of listening, translation and proportionality, so that these worlds are able to coordinate, learn from each other and master their possible divergences. (Baschet 2019, 378)’
</quote>
According to the Zapatistas, in order to truly realise democracy in the radical sense of popular self-determination, power must be grounded at the grassroots level. That is, society — as opposed to the State, government, or any power-seeking parties and organisations — must be able to control and sanction those in leadership positions, as well as make them respond to popular interests (Chapdelaine 2010). This is what the movement strives to achieve through the politics of autonomy, which allows for the effective participation of all through the idea that the people are capable of organising and governing themselves.
**** The issue of political competence
From a sociological point of view, political competence is not defined as whether someone is able or unable to take part in politics, because the very idea of competence or legitimacy is socially constructed. In other words, analysing political competence implies identifying the process of social recognition of certain competences, namely whatever is considered necessary to take part in politics. We take up here the conception formulated (among others) by Bourdieu (1979, 465–466), who defines political competence as:
<quote>
‘…the greater or lesser capacity to recognise the political question as political and to treat it as such by responding to it politically, i.e. on the basis of properly political (and not ethical, for example) principles, a capacity which is inseparable from a greater or lesser feeling of being competent in the full sense of the word, i.e. socially recognised as being entitled to deal with political affairs, to give one’s opinion on them or even to change their course.’
</quote>
From this perspective, the social division of political activity is based on an unequal distribution of these socially-constructed competences, so that the degree of participation and politicisation of individuals is related to their position within the social structure. Their individual socioeconomic characteristics — in particular social class and (formal) level of education — are hence decisive in terms of their chance to acquire these competences, and thus become socially recognised as more ‘legitimate’ for formulating political opinions and intervening in the decisions or construction of public policies.
In the context not only of electoral or parliamentary politics, but also experiments of participatory democracy, proficiency in the ‘language and schemas of politics’ (Lagroye et al. 2012, 351) thus reinforces the participation of members of the middle and upper classes, whose socialisation and formal education led them to internalise the norms, rhetoric, and intellectual references of bourgeois culture. Conversely, the ‘incompetence’ of socially dominated individuals and groups — again, in terms of bourgeois norms, rather than objective inability — manifests itself through their ‘non-participation in “civic” activities’ (p. 348) within the bourgeois public sphere. This highlighting of inequalities in politicisation is therefore a possible way of explaining the low participation of workers and poor people in experiments in participatory democracy.
The particularly interesting dimension of the Zapatista experience is, in this respect, the absence of a specialisation (or professionalisation) of political activities and expertise (in the sense of technical competence). As Lascoumes (2002, 377) explains,
<quote>
‘We can consider that the future of expert practices is linked to their capacity to become more democratic, i.e. to truly open up their approach to contrasting points of view and, in particular, to organise a plural expertise that does not stop at the networks of specialists alone and knows how to make a real place for lay people.’
</quote>
However, the Zapatistas seem to emphasise the despecialisation of political tasks and public functions. According to Baschet (2019, 362–363),
<quote>
‘The Zapatista experience allows us to insist on the following points: short, non-renewable mandates that can be revoked at any time; the absence of personalization and the collegial exercise of responsibilities; control by other bodies; limited concentration of a capacity to elaborate decisions that remains largely shared with the assemblies; the ethics of the collective and the capacity to listen. Above all, however, it is necessary to insist on the effective despecialisation of political tasks which, instead of being monopolised by a specific group (political class, caste based on money, personalities with particular prestige, etc.), are the object of a circulation that is as generalised as possible: ‘We must all, in our turn, be government’ (maestro Jacobo). As has been said, this implies, among other things, abandoning the idea of linking the choice of delegates to the evaluation of a particular individual competence: assuming that elected authorities do not know more about public affairs than others is the condition — oh so difficult to accept! — of a full despecialisation of politics.’
</quote>
It is important then, as already mentioned above, not to conceive of the Zapatista mode of organisation as a form of complete or pure horizontalism. According to Baschet, the Zapatistas practise a ‘non-dissociative’ form or modality of delegation, as opposed to configurations of delegation based on a dissociation between the rulers and the ruled. This dissociation characterises, according to him, ‘political representation in the modern state,’ corresponding to ‘the methodical organisation of the effective absence of the represented’ (ibid, 362). He concludes that it is necessary to emphasise the sensitive balance represented by the Zapatista system, between ‘verticality of command’ and ‘horizontality of consensus’ (ibid, 74):
<quote>
‘It is not a question, therefore, of a real power-over that one part of the collective manages to monopolise and exercise over others, nor is it a question of perfect horizontality, which runs the risk of dissolving for lack of initiatives or the capacity to put them into practice. Rather, the observation of the Zapatista experience invites us to recognise the articulation of two principles: on the one hand, the capacity to decide resides essentially in the assemblies, at their different levels; on the other hand, those who assume, in a rotational and revocable manner, a special role of initiative and impetus, as a mediation between the collectivity and its capacity for self-government, which does not go without opening up the twofold risk of a deficiency or excess in the exercise of this role. (ibid, 361)’
</quote>
This potential risk, due to the existence of positions of authority/leadership, is however limited within Zapatista autonomy by a remarkable sense of collective responsibility: a community <em>ethos</em> of reciprocity, as documented for instance by Mora (2017) in her ethnography of the municipality Diecisiete de Noviembre. More concretely, it is a set of principles contained in the general phrase <em>mandar obedeciendo</em> (‘governing by obeying’). This general political principle, formulated at the outset of the Zapatista rebellion (Chapdelaine 2010, 41), seems to derive from older Indigenous cultural practices in the Tseltal and Tojolabal communities (Mora 2017: 191).
In its most concrete sense, <em>mandar obedeciendo</em> implies that those in authority are accountable to the people and organise what the people have decided in a general assembly: ‘the authorities are responsible for implementing those decisions reached by consensus in the assemblies, rather than taking decisions in the name of the people’ (Mora 2017, p. 191). This is similar to the longstanding principle of imperative mandate that has characterised a range of revolutionary movements or episodes since the 19<sup>th</sup> century. For instance, in the Paris Commune of 1871, not only representatives, but also people assigned to various public functions (e.g. magistrates and judges), derived their roles from such revocable mandates.
According to Chapdelaine (2010), <em>mandar obedeciendo</em> allows ‘to overcome the professionalisation of politics, which has led to a systematic separation between the governors and the governed and to the loss of meaning of the forms of government.’ (ibid, 41). As Mora brilliantly demonstrates (see chap. 5 of her book), political competence is thus constructed, in the everyday social interactions and cultural practices of the Zapatistas, as explicitly resting on non-specialisation:
<quote>
‘Of the members of the councils of good government, the Zapatistas have been able to say: “They are specialists in nothing, least of all in politics” (SDR). This non-specialisation leads to the admission that the exercise of authority is carried out from a position of non-knowledge. The members of the autonomous councils insist a lot on the initial feeling of being helpless in front of the task that falls to them (‘nobody is an expert in politics and we all have to learn’). But it is immediately emphasised that it is precisely by accepting not knowing that one can be a ‘good authority’, who tries to listen and learn from everyone, who knows how to recognise mistakes and accepts to be guided by the community in making decisions (GA1). In the Zapatista experience, entrusting the tasks of government to those who have no particular capacity to carry them out is the concrete ground from which the mandar obedeciendo can grow; and this is a solid defence against the risk of separation between governors and governed. (Mora 2017, 359)’
</quote>
It is in this sense that we can understand her assertion that the principle of <em>mandar obedeciendo</em> inverts ‘the logic of command-obedience that we find in classical Westernised political theory’ (ibid, 192). She goes further than other authors by arguing that it is also necessary to look beyond the framework of assemblies to observe ‘how mandar obedeciendo forms part of the politicisation of social life in diverse daily spheres’ (ibid, 228). In her ethnography, she describes, for example, the politicised conversations she observed within the women’s production collectives of Diecisiete de Noviembre. The <em>mandar obedeciendo</em>, in this sense, is (also) related/equivalent to a political and cultural practice that the author calls ‘Kuxlejal politics’ (ibid, 19):
<quote>
‘When I asked Mauricio what the Tseltal word for “life” is, he explained that its rough equivalent is kuxlejal, “life-existence.” Kuxlejal as a term is but a mere point of anchor granted meaning when used as part of the term for the concept of expressing living as a collective, stalel jkuxlejaltik, a way of being in the world as a people, and as part of the term for a daily aspiration to live in a dignified manner, lekil kuxlejal. The horizon of struggle for lekil kuxlejal, with its Tojolabal equivalent, sak’aniltik, as a good way of living refers not only to an individual being but to that being in relation to a communal connection to the earth, to the natural and supernatural world that envelops as well as nurtures social beings and is thus constantly honoured. Without land, without the ability to plant and harvest sufficient food, without the constant remembering of ancestors in connection to the future and as part of revering the earth, the elements that provide sustenant meaning to life dissipate.
When Zapatista community members associate the political practices of autonomy with creating a new life, they refer to lekil kuxlejal, to a life politics understood as involving these interconnected realms. Autonomy as the foundation of life politics thus is expressed in gathering fallen branches for firewood, in harvesting corn in the fields, in praying for abundant water-not too much, nor too little, just what is necessary for the corn and beans to flourish in the fields, in collecting edible leaves in the forest or picking vegetables in the backyard gardens, in taking care of the children and the elderly, in sharing memories of past events so as to produce knowledge effecting changes in the present. It is the sum of activities in such arenas that allows for the dignified reproduction of life, not only as a physical presence but as a series of cultural processes that allow for the perpetuation of kuxlejal in its collective form and as a collective force.’
</quote>
**** Conclusion
In summary, for the Zapatistas ‘democracy is something that is built from below and with everyone’ (Chapdelaine 2010, 46). Their revolutionary autonomy has allowed for the total reorganisation of politics and society in parts of Chiapas, directly involving Mexico’s indigenous populations in the construction and implementation of policies and decisions that affect them directly.
The contrast between the respective contexts of the predominantly Indigenous and rural communities of Chiapas and that of the experiments of participatory democracy in (especially more urban) spaces in Europe should not prevent us from reflecting on the issues that run through all these forms of participation. While it is clear that the Zapatista experience is not as such transferable or strictly comparable to other contexts, its radical form of democracy ‘from below’ helps identify the potential limits or obstacles of so-called “participatory democracy” in other contexts. The non-separation between politics and the rest of society, and especially between the governors and the governed, seems to be one of the main aspects that distinguishes it from most other cases.
Among the Zapatistas, the construction of competence and legitimacy to participate lies, in our opinion, in a collective will — inscribed in the struggle for self-determination of the Indigenous populations in Chiapas — to achieve a form of communal democracy based on the non-specialisation of activities and responsibilities, as well as on the defence of one’s own way of life. Baschet (2021) suggests that the core of these Zapatista forms of life lies in the three words: community, land, and territory.
----
<em>Note: this two-part article was written in the spirit of an open and ongoing discussion about the Zapatista revolution, thus the author invites any feedback or further dialogue about the claims/arguments presented here (including potential criticisms or corrections) and more generally about the Zapatista experience and what we can learn from it.</em>
|
#title Individual Action
#author Alain Gouzien
#date 1887
#source Anoymously translated on from [[https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Livre:La_R%C3%A9volution_cosmopolite_1_(2).djvu][<fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Livre:La_R%C3%A9volution_cosmopolite_1_(2).djvu>]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2025-07-29T22:24:15
#topics 19<sup>th</sup> century anarchism, European individualist anarchism, propaganda of the deed, illegalism
#notes Individual Action in <em>La Révolution Cosmopolite</em> (1887) by Alain Gouzien, a publication uniting Louise Michel, Charles Malato or Léon Ortiz, among others
Whatever some revolutionary socialists are saying, <em>individual action</em> can hasten the hour of Revolution. We thus couldn’t support it more.
One individual, tired of suffering, revolts against current social order, he tramples on respect for property by going to a capitalist’s home to remove part of the goods he stole — and this, not for himself — but for his miserable companions.
Can we truly reproach that to him ?
No, a thousands times no. Why ? — Because this revolted shows the example to the workers, because, impatient to see the triumph of equality and justice, he tries to put into practice the theories he defends.
Social restitution of the means of prodution will be the inevitable complement of this individual initiative, of this <em>propaganda by the deed</em>.
Some collectivists are very funny, they always ask for revolutionary means to expropriate capitalists and achieve the socialization of the means of production, and then cry out when a revolutionary deed happens.
You are a revolutionary in all that the word entails, or you are not : To excite a worker to hate capitalists and then find it strange that this worker eliminates a capitalist to set an example, this seems totally stupid to me.
The truth is that a quantity of ambitious people who thirst for popularity have slipped into the ranks of revolutionaries and who, with their tactics, instead of making any progress whatsoever for socialist ideas, do nothing more nor less than the game of the owning class.
We couldn’t too much warn the workers against the maneuvers of those pseudo-socialists — and we will be able to congratulate ourselves for doing an absolutely useful and necessary task.
ALAIN GOUZIEN
|
#pubdate 2011-01-20 10:23:56 +0100
#author Alain Pengam
#SORTauthors Alain Pengam
#title Anarchist-Communism
#date 1987
#lang en
#SORTtopics anarcho-communism, history
#source <[[https://web.archive.org/web/20090707222520/www.zabalaza.net/theory/txt_anok_comm_ap.htm][zabalaza.net]]> & <[[https://libcom.org/library/anarcho-communism][libcom.org]]>
#notes Published as "Anarcho-Communism", chapter 3 of <em>Non-Market Socialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries</em> (edited by Maximilien Rubel and John Crump, published by Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 60-82.
*** Introduction
Anarchist-communism has been regarded by other anarchist currents as a poor and despised relation, an ideological trophy to be exhibited according to the needs of hagiography or polemic before moving on to “serious things” (the collectivisations of Spain, anarcho-syndicalism, federalism or self-management), and as an “infantile utopia” more concerned with dogmatic abstractions than with “economic realities”. Yet, anarchist communism has been the only current within the anarchist movement that has explicitly aimed not only at ending exchange value but, among its most coherent partisans, at making this the immediate content of the revolutionary process. We are speaking here, of course, only of the current that explicitly described itself as “anarchist-communist”, whereas in fact the tendency in the nineteenth century to draw up a stateless communism “utopia” extended beyond anarchism properly so-called.
Anarchist-communism must be distinguished from collectivism, which was both a diffuse movement (see, for example, the different components of the International Working Men’s Association, the Guesdists, and so on) and a specific anarchist current. As far as the latter was concerned, it was Proudhon who supplied its theoretical features: an open opponent of communism (which, for him, was Etienne Cabet’s “communism”), he favoured instead a society in which exchange value would flourish — a society in which workers would be directly and mutually linked to each other by money and the market. The Proudhonist collectivists of the 1860’s and 1870’s (of whom Bakunin was one), who were resolute partisans of the collective ownership of the instruments of work and, unlike Proudhon, of land, maintained an essence of this commercial structure in the form of groups of producers, organised either on a territorial basis (communes) or on an enterprise basis (co-operatives, craft groupings) and linked to each other by the circulation of value. Collectivism was thus defined — and still is — as an exchange economy where the legal ownership of the instruments of production is held by a network of “collectivities” which are sorts of workers’ jointstock companies. Most contemporary anarchists (standing, as they do, for a self-managed exchange economy) are collectivists in this nineteenth-century sense of the term, even though the term has now come to have a somewhat different meaning (state ownership, i.e. “state capitalism”, rather than ownership by any collectivity).
In the 1870’s and the 1880’s the anarchist-communists, who wanted to abolish exchange value in all it’s forms, broke with the collectivists, and in so doing revived the tradition of radical communism that had existed in France in the 1840’s.
*** 1840–64
In 1843, under the Rabelaisian motto “Do what you will!”, and in opposition to Etienne Cabet, Théodore Dézamy’s <em>Code de la Communauté</em> laid the basis for the principles developed later in the nineteenth century by communist and anarchist-communist theoreticians such as Joseph Déjacque, Karl Marx, Fredrick Engels, William Morris and Peter Kropotkin. These principles involved the abolition of money and commercial exchange; the subordination of the economy to the satisfaction of the needs of the whole population; the abolition of the division of labour (including the division between the town and country and between the capital and the provinces); the progressive introduction of attractive work; and the progressive abolition of the state and of the functions of government, as a separate domain of society, following the communisation of social relations, which was to be brought about by a revolutionary government. It should be noted that Dézamy advocated the ‘community of goods’ and resolutely opposed the specifically collectivist slogan of ‘socialisation of property.’ In doing so, he anticipated the critical analysis of property which Amadeo Bordiga made more than a century later.
Besides rejecting Cabet’s utopia, because it maintained the division of labour — in particular that between town and country — and sought to organise it rigidly in the name of economic ‘efficiency,’ Dézamy also refused to insert between the capitalist mode of production and communist society a transitional period of democracy which would have pushed communism into the background. By seeking to establish a direct link between the revolutionary process and the content of communism, so that the dominant class within capitalism would be economically and socially expropriated through the immediate abolition of monetary circulation, Dézamy anticipated what was to be the source of the basic originality of anarchist-communism, in particular in its Kropotkinist form. This feature was the rejection of any ‘transition period’ that did not encompass the essence of communism: the end of the basic act of buying and selling. At about the same time, the communists around the journal <em>L’Humanitaire, Organe de la Science Sociale</em> (of which two issues appeared in Paris in 1841) advocated a program of action very close to that of Dézamy, proposing, among other things, the abolition of marriage. In addition, they made travel one of the principal characteristics of communist society, because it would bring about mixing of the races and interchange between industrial and agricultural activities. This group also identified itself with the Babouvist Sylvain Maréchal for having proclaimed ‘anti-political and anarchist ideas’. However, it was above all the house-painter Joseph Déjacque (1822–64) who, up until the foundation of anarchist communism properly so-called, expressed in a coherent way the radical communism which emerged in France from the 1840s as a critical appropriation of Fourierism, Owenism and neo-Babouvism. Déjacque’s work was an examination of the limits of the 1848 revolution and the reasons for its failure. It was developed around a rejection of two things: the state, even if ‘revolutionary,’ and collectivism of the Proudhonist type. Déjacque reformulated communism in a way that sought to be resolutely free from the dogmatism, sectarianism and statism exhibited by those such as Cabet and La Fraternité de 1845. Déjacque spoke of: “Liberty! Which has been so misused against the community and which it is true to say that certain communist schools have held cheap.”
Déjacque was a fierce opponent of all the political gangs of the period. He rejected Blanquism, which was based on a division between the ‘disciples of the great people’s Architect’ and ‘the people, or vulgar herd,’ and was equally opposed to all the variants of social republicanism, to the dictatorship of one man and to ‘the dictatorship of the little prodigies of the proletariat.’ With regard to the last of these, he wrote that: ‘a dictatorial committee composed of workers is certainly the most conceited and incompetent, and hence the most anti-revolutionary, thing that can be found...(It is better to have doubtful enemies in power than dubious friends)’. He saw ‘anarchic initiative,’ ‘reasoned will’ and ‘the autonomy of each’ as the conditions for the social revolution of the proletariat, the first expression of which had been the barricades of June 1848. In Déjacque’s view, a government resulting from an insurrection remains a reactionary fetter on the free initiative of the proletariat. Or rather, such free initiative can only arise and develop by the masses ridding themselves of the ‘authoritarian prejudices’ by means of which the state reproduces itself in its primary function of representation and delegation. Déjacque wrote that: ‘By government I understand all delegation, all power outside the people,’ for which must be substituted, in a process whereby politics is transcended, the ‘people in direct possession of their sovereignty,’ or the ‘organised commune.’ For Déjacque, the communist anarchist utopia would fulfil the function of inciting each proletarian to explore his or her own human potentialities, in addition to correcting the ignorance of the proletarians concerning ‘social science.’
However, these views on the function of the state, both in the insurrectionary period and as a mode of domination of man by man, can only be fully understood when inserted into Déjacque’s global criticism of all aspects of civilisation (in the Fourierist sense of the term). For him, ‘government, religion, property, family, all are linked, all coincide.’ The content of the social revolution was thus to be the abolition of all governments, of all religions, and of the family based on marriage, the authority of the parents and the husband, and inheritance. Also to be abolished were ‘personal property, property in land, buildings, workshops, shops, property in anything that is an instrument of work, production or consumption.’ Déjacque’s proposed abolition of property has to be understood as an attack on what is at the heart of civilisation: politics and exchange value, whose cell (in both senses) is the contract. The abolition of the state, that is to say of the political contract guaranteed by the government (legality), for which anarchy is substituted, is linked indissolubly with the abolition of commerce, that is to say of the commercial contract, which is replaced by the community of goods: ‘Commerce,... this scourge of the 19<sup>th</sup> century, has disappeared amongst humanity. There are no longer either sellers or sold.’
Déjacque’s general definition of the ‘anarchic community’ was:
<quote>
“the state of affairs where each would be free to produce and consume at will and according to their fantasy, without having to exercise or submit to any control whatsoever over anything whatever; where the balance between production and consumption would establish itself, no longer by preventive and arbitrary detention at the hands of some group or other, but by the free circulation of the faculties and needs of each.”
</quote>
Such a definition implies a criticism of Proudhonsim, that is to say of the Proudhonist version of Ricardian socialism, centred on the reward of labour power and the problem of exchange value. In his polemic with Proudhon on women’s emancipation, Déjacque urged Proudhon to push on ‘as far as the abolition of the contract, the abolition not only of the sword and of capital, but of property and authority in all their forms,’ and refuted the commercial and wages logic of the demand for a ‘fair reward’ for ‘labour’ (labour power). Déjacque asked: ‘Am I thus... right to want, as with the system of contracts, to measure out to each — according to their accidental capacity to produce — what they are entitled to?’ The answer given by Déjacque to this question is unambiguous: ‘it is not the product of his or her labour that the worker has a right to, but to the satisfaction of his or her needs, whatever may be their nature.’
The ‘direct exchange’ theorised by Proudhon corresponded to supposed ‘abolition’ of the wages system which in fact would have turned groups of producers or individual producers into the legal agents of capital accumulation. For Déjacque, on the other hand, the communal state of affairs — the phalanstery ‘without any hierarchy, without any authority’ except that of the ‘statistics book’ — corresponded to ‘natural exchange,’ i.e. to the ‘unlimited freedom of all production and consumption; the abolition of any sign of agricultural, individual, artistic or scientific property; the destruction of any individual holding of the products of work; the demonarchisation and the demonetarisation of manual and intellectual capital as well as capital in instruments, commerce and buildings.
The abolition of exchange value depends on the answer given to the central question of ‘the organisation of work’ or, in other words, on the way in which those who produce are related to their activity and to the products of that activity. We have already seen that the answer Déjacque gave to the question of the distribution of products was the community of goods. But the community had first of all to be established in the sphere of productive activities themselves. Although the disappearance of all intermediaries (parasites) would allow an increase in production, and by this means would guarantee the satisfaction of needs, the essential requirement was the emancipation of the individual producer from ‘enslaving subordination to the division of labour’ (Marx) and, primarily, from forced labour. This is why the transformation of work into ‘attractive work’ was seen by Déjacque as the condition for the existence of the community: ‘The organisation of attractive work by series would have replaced Malthusian competition and repulsive work.’ This organisation was not to be something exterior to productive activity. Déjacque’s communist anthropology was based on the liberation of needs, including the need to act on the world and nature, and made no distinction between natural-technical necessities and human ends. Although its vocabulary was borrowed from Fourier (harmony, passions, series and so on), it aimed at the community of activities more than the organised deployment of labour power: ‘The different series of workers are recruited on a voluntary basis like the men on a barricade, and are completely free to stay there as long as they want or to move on to another series or barricade.’ Déjacque’s ‘Humanisphere’ was to have no hours of work nor obligatory groupings. Work could be done in isolation or otherwise.
As to the division of labour, Déjacque proposed its abolition in a very original way. What he advocated was a reciprocal process of the integration of the aristocracy (or rather of the aristocratic intelligentsia) and the proletariat, each going beyond its own unilateral intellectual or manual development.
Although he recognised the futility of palliatives, Déjacque was perhaps exasperated by the gulf between the results of his utopian research and the content of the class struggle in the 1850s, and tried to bridge this gulf with a theory of transition. This theory aimed to facilitate the achievement of the state of community, while taking into account the existing situation. Its three bases were, first, ‘direct legislation by the people’ (‘the most democratic form of government, while awaiting its complete abolition’); second, a range of economic measures which included ‘direct exchange’ (even though Déjacque admitted that this democratised property without abolishing exploitation), the establishment of Owenite-type ‘labour bazaars,’ ‘circulation vouchers’ (labour vouchers) and a gradual attack on property; and third, a democratisation of administrative functions (revocability of public officials, who would be paid on the basis of the average price of a day’s work) and the abolition of the police and the army.
It is an undeniable fact that this programme anticipated that of the Paris Commune of 1871, at least on certain points. But this is the weak side of Déjacque where he accepts the ‘limits’ of the 1848 Revolution, against which he had exercised his critical imagination. The ‘right to work’ appeared along with the rest, and with it the logic of commerce. It should be noted that, on the question of the transition, Déjacque singularly lacked ‘realism’ since, even if the insoluble problems posed by the perspective of workers managing the process of value-capital are ignored, he proposed giving not only women, but ‘prisoners’ and the ‘insane’ the right to vote, without any age limit. But the transition was only a second best for Déjacque and he explicitly recognised it as such. There was no abandoning of utopian exploration in favour of the transition, but a tension between the two, the opposite to what was to be the case with Errico Malatesta, with whom he could be superficially compared.
The tenor of Déjacque’s utopia, its move towards breaking with all commercial and political constraints, its desire to revive the insurrectionary energy of the proletariat, and its imaginative depth (comparable to that of William Morris) enable one to see that it made a fundamental contribution to the critical element in anarchist-communism. Déjacque provided anarchist-communism during the first cycle of its history with an iconoclastic dimension, the glimmers of which are not found again until the Kropotkin of the 1880’s or until Luigi Galleani in the twentieth century.
*** The Reformulation of Communist Anarchism in the ‘International Working Men’s Association’ (IWMA)
The First International, or International Working Men’s Association, was organised in 1864 and was active for several years before splitting into acrimonious factions in the aftermath of the Paris Commune of 1871. The split that occurred in the IWMA was essentially over the details of collectivism and over the ways of arriving at a ‘classless society’ whose necessarily anti-commercial nature was never stated (except in Marx’s Capital), or rather never played any part in shaping the practice of the organisation. Bakunin himself, a left-wing Proudhonist for whom the abolition of exchange value would have been an aberration, purely and simply identified communism with a socialistic Jacobin tendency and, moreover, generally used the term ‘authoritarian communism’ as a pleonasm to describe it.
In August 1876, a pamphlet by James Guillaume entitled <em>Idées sur L’organisation Sociale</em> was published in Geneva. The importance of this text lies not in its succinct presentation of the framework of a collectivist society, but in the relation set out by Guillaume between such a society and communism. Starting out from the collective ownership of the instruments of production, that is to say from the ownership of by each ‘corporation of workers in such and such an industry’ and by each agricultural grouping, and hence from the ownership by each of these groups of their own products, Guillaume ends up at ‘communism’, or — since he does not employ this term — at the substitution of free distribution for exchange. The transition to free distribution is supposed to be organically linked to the society described by Guillaume, even though it is a society organised around the exchange of products at their value, because of the guarantee represented by the collective ownership of the means of production. The essential point here is that communism is reduced to the status of a moral norm, which it would be a good thing to move towards, and is made to appear as the natural development of a collectivist (and wage) society, with its rigid division between industrial and agricultural producers, its policy of full employment and its payment of labour power.
In making the precondition for communism a social relationship built on wage system, and by seeing this as the basis for the state becoming superfluous, Guillaume laid the foundation for the regression that was to overtake anarchist-communism and of which Malatesta was to be one of the principle representatives. According to Guillaume, the preconditions for communism were a progressive appearance of an abundance of products, which would allow calculation in terms of value to be abandoned and an improvement in the ‘moral sense’ of the workers to occur. This in turn would enable the principle of ‘free access’ to be implemented. Guillaume envisaged this train of events as being brought about by the development of commercial mechanisms, with the working class acting as their recognised agent by virtue of the introduction of collective property and the guaranteed wage. What underlay all this was the implication that the act of selling is no longer anything but a simple, technical, transitional, rationing measure.
It was precisely in opposition to this variant of Proudhonism that anarchist-communism asserted itself in what was left of the IWMA towards the end of the 1870’s. In February 1876, Savoyard François Dumartheray (1842–1931) published in Geneva a pamphlet <em>Aux Travailleurs Manuals Partisans de L’action Politique</em>, ‘corresponding to the tendencies of the section “L’Avenir”, an independent group of refugees from in particular Lyons... For the first time anarchist-communism was mentioned in a printed text.’ On March 18-19<sup>th</sup> of the same year, at a meeting organised in Lausanne by members of the IWMA and Communalists, Elisée Reclus delivered a speech in which he recognised the legitimacy of anarchist-communism. Still in 1876, a number of Italian anarchists also decided to adopt anarchist-communism, but the way they formulated this change indicated their limitations as far as the question of collectivism was concerned: ‘The Italian Federation considers the collective ownership of the product of labour as the necessary complement of the collectivist programme.’ Also, in the spring of 1877, the <em>Statuten der Deutscheienden Anarchischkommunistischen Partei</em> appeared in Berne.
The question of communism remained unsettled at the Verviers Congress of the ‘anti-authoritarian’ IWMA in September 1877, when the partisans of communism (Costa, Brousse) and the Spanish collectivists confronted each other, with Guillaume refusing to commit himself. However, the Jura Federation, which was an anarchist grouping that had been active in the French-speaking area of Switzerland throughout the 1870’s, was won over to the views of Reclus, Cafiero and Kropotkin, and integrated communism into its programme at its Congress in October 1880. At this Congress, Carlo Cafiero presented a report that was later published in <em>Le Révolté</em> under the title ‘Anarchie et Communisme’. In this report, Cafiero succinctly exposed the points of rupture with collectivism: rejection of exchange value; opposition to transferring ownership of the means of production to workers’ corporations; and elimination of payment for productive activities. Furthermore, Cafiero brought out the necessary character of communism, and hence demonstrated the impossibility of a transitional period of the type envisaged by Guillaume in his 1876 pamphlet. Cafiero argued that, on the one hand, the demand for collective ownership of the means of production and ‘the individual appropriation of the products of labour’ would cause the accumulation of capital and the division of society into classes to reappear. On the other hand, he maintained that retaining some form of payment for individual labour power would conflict with the socialised character (indivisibility of productive activities) already imprinted on production by the capitalist mode of production. As to the need for rationing products, which might occur after the revolutionary victory, nothing would prevent such rationing from being conducted ‘not according to merits, but according to needs’.
Kropotkin’s contribution in favour of communism at the 1880 Congress was the culmination of a slow evolution of his position from strict collectivism to communism, by way of an intermediate position where he saw collectivism as a simple transitional stage. Kropotkin’s theory of anarchist-communism, which was drawn up in its essentials during the 1880’s, is an elaboration of the theses presented by Cafiero in 1880 on the conditions making communism possible and on the necessity of achieving this social form, from which exchange value would disappear. Anarchist-communism is presented as a solution to crisis-ridden bourgeois society, which is torn between the under-consumption of the proletariat, under-production and socialised labour. At the same time, anarchist-communism is seen as the realisation of tendencies towards communism and the free association of individuals which are already present in the old society. In this sense, anarchist-communism is a social form, which re-establishes the principle of solidarity that exists in tribal societies.
Kropotkin’s anarchist-communism has the general characteristic of being based on the satisfaction of the needs — ‘necessities’ and ‘luxuries’ — of the individual, i.e., on the right to the ‘entire product of one’s labour’, which featured in the collectivists’ policy of full employment and the guaranteed wage. This satisfaction of needs was to be guaranteed by a number of measures: free distribution of products was to replace commodity exchange; production was to become abundant; industrial decentralisation was to be implemented; the division of labour was to be overcome; and real economies were to be realised by the reduction of working time and the elimination of waste caused by the capitalist mode of production. Kropotkin wrote: ‘a society, having recovered the possession of all riches accumulated in its midst, can liberally assure abundance to all in return for four or five hours effective manual work a day, as far as regards production.’
Yet the question arises whether the appropriation of the instruments of production by the producers, as consumers, and by consumers, as producers, referred to a new legal form of property ownership or to the abolition of property in all forms. Although the Anarchist Congress held in London in 1881 pronounced in favour of ‘the abolition of all property, including collective’, and although Kropotkin himself contrasted ‘common use’ to ‘ownership’, he still did not go beyond the collectivist perspective of the transfer of property to a new agent (i.e., for him, to society as a whole, rather than to industrial and trading commercial collectives). Hence, he wrote: ‘For association to be useful to the workers, the form of property must be changed’.
The same ambiguity is found over the related question of the abolition of the division of labour. Certainly, the description which Kropotkin gave of the content of communist society in this respect is perfectly clear: integration of manual and intellectual labour; attractive and voluntary work; and fusion of agriculture, industry and art within ‘industrial villages’. But a revolutionary strategy which puts forward the corporatist slogan of ‘The land to those who cultivate it, the factory to the workers’, presupposes maintaining the division of labour and the institution of the enterprise and can be said not to go beyond the establishment of a workers’ and peasants’ society which would still be a form of collectivism.
The organisation of the new society, in its two aspects — communist and anarchist (in view of the necessary connection between a mode of production and its political form) — was to be based on the ‘communist commune’ (rather than on the ‘free commune’ of the Communalists), federalism (decentralization and economic self-sufficiency of regions or producing areas) and neighbourhood assemblies. Kropotkin distinguished three possible methods of organisation: on a territorial basis (federation of independent communes); on a basis of social function (federation of trades); and that which he gave all his attention, and which he hoped would expand, on the basis of personal affinity. In fact, the ‘free and spontaneous grouping of individuals functioning in harmony’ seemed to him to be the essential characteristic of the particular social relationship of anarchist-communism.
But the important point lies more in the forms and content of the revolutionary process, of which all this was to be the end result. The revolution was seen as an international process, starting with a long period of insurrection, whose model Kropotkin found in the repeated peasant insurrections that had preceded the French Revolution. Such a revolutionary process would end in a phase of general expropriation, which would mark the beginning of ‘the reconstruction of society’:
<quote>
“Expropriation, such then is the problem which history has put before the people of the twentieth century: the return to Communism in all that ministers to the well-being of humanity... by taking immediate and effective possession of all that is necessary to ensure the well-being of all.”
</quote>
Immediate expropriation defined the whole logic of the revolutionary process for Kropotkin. Basically, it is here that the essence of his work lies. The real answer to the objection that can be made against him (regarding his optimistic assumptions about human nature, the abundance of products, and so on) lies in the alternatives that he posed: either the immediate communisation of social relations or the wages system in one form or another. If proof of the stark nature of these alternatives was ever required, history has provided such proof in abundance. For Kropotkin, the critique of the wages system was indissolubly linked with the critique of collectivism (Proudhonist or Guesdist). He wrote: ‘The most prominent characteristic of our present capitalism is the wage system’. Kropotkin saw the wages system as presupposing the separation of the producers from the means of production and as being based on the principle ‘to each according to their deeds’:
<quote>
“It was by proclaiming this principle that wagedom began, to end in the glaring inequalities and all the abominations of the present society; because, from the moment work done began to be appraised in currency, or in any other form of wage... the whole history of a State-aided Capitalist society was as good as written.”
</quote>
The collectivists favoured the ‘right to work’, which is ‘industrial penal servitude’. In Kropotkin’s view, their pro-worker policy sought to ‘harness to the same cart the wages system and collective ownership’, in particular through their theory of labour vouchers. Kropotkin opposed labour vouchers on the grounds that they seek to measure the exact value of labour in an economy that, being socialised, tends to eliminate all distinctions as far as contribution of each worker considered in isolation is concerned. Furthermore, the existence of labour vouchers would continue to make society ‘a commercial company based on debit and credit’. Hence he denounced labour vouchers in the following terms: ‘The idea... is old. It dates from Robert Owen. Proudhon advocated it in 1848. Today, it has become “scientific socialism”.
Kropotkin made equally stringent criticisms of the collectivists’ attitudes towards the division of labour and the State. With regard to the division of labour, he wrote: ‘Talk to them [the collectivist socialists] about the organisation of work during the Revolution, and they answer that the division of labour must be maintained.’ As for the State, it was significant that as soon as Kropotkin had come out in favour of ‘direct, immediate communist anarchism at the moment of the social revolution’, he criticised the Paris Commune as an example of a revolution where, in the absence of the communist perspective, the proletariat had become bogged down in problems of power and representation. Kropotkin believed that the Paris Commune illustrated well how the ‘revolutionary state’ acts as a substitute for communism and provides a new form of domination linked to the wages system. In contrast to this, ‘it is by revolutionary socialist acts, by abolishing individual property, that the Communes of the coming revolution will affirm and establish their independence’. Further, communism would transform the nature of the Commune itself:
<quote>
“For us, ‘Commune’ is no longer a territorial agglomeration; it is rather a generic noun, synonym of a grouping of equals which knows neither frontiers nor walls. The social commune will soon cease to be clearly-defined whole.”
</quote>
For Kropotkin, what characterises the revolutionary process is, in the first place, general expropriation, the taking possession of all ‘riches’ (means of production, products, houses and so on), with the aim of immediately improving the material situation of the whole population. He wrote: ‘with this watchword of Bread for All the Revolution will triumph’. Since Kropotkin foresaw that a revolution would in the beginning make millions of proletarians unemployed, the solution would be to take over the whole of production so as to ensure the satisfaction of food and clothing needs. First of all, the population ‘should take immediate possession of all food of the insurgent communes’, draw up an inventory, and organise a provisions service by streets and districts which would distribute food free, on the principle: ‘no stint of limit to what the community possesses in abundance, but equal sharing and dividing of those things which are scarce or apt to run short’. As for housing:
<quote>
“If the people of the Revolution expropriate the houses and proclaim free lodgings — the communalising of houses and the right of each family a decent dwelling — then the Revolution will have assumed a communistic character from the first... the expropriation of dwellings contains in germ the whole social revolution.”
</quote>
A second characteristic of Kropotkin’s vision of the revolutionary process was to integrate the countryside into the process of communisation, by making an agreement ‘with the factory workers, the necessary raw materials given them, and the means of subsistence assured to them, while they worked to supply the needs of the agricultural population’. Kropotkin regarded the integration of town and country as of fundamental importance, since it bore on the necessity to ensure the subsistence of the population and would be accomplished by the beginning of the abolition of the division of labour, starting from the industrial centres. He thought that ‘The large towns, as well as the villages, must undertake to till the soil’, in a process of improvement and extension of cultivated areas. In Kropotkin’s view, the agrarian question was thus decisive right from the beginning of the revolution. Kropotkin’s exposition of the expropriation of the land for the benefit of society (the land to belong to everyone) was not, however, free from the ambiguity we mentioned above. To make land — as with all else — a property question amounts to placing productive activity above the satisfaction of needs, to inserting a social actor between the population and the satisfaction of their needs. Property can only be private.
This inability to break definitively with collectivism in all its forms also exhibited itself over the question of the workers’ movement, which divided anarchist-communism into a number of tendencies. To say that the industrial and agricultural proletariat is the natural bearer of the revolution and communisation does not tell us under what form it is or should be so. In the theory of the revolution which we have just summarised, it is the risen people who are the real agent and not the working class organised in the enterprise (the cells of the capitalist mode of production) and seeking to assert itself as labour power, as a more ‘rational’ industrial body or social brain (manager) than the employers. Between 1880 and 1890, the anarchist-communists, with their perspective of an immanent revolution, were opposed to the official workers’ movement, which was then in the process of formation (general Social Democratisation). They were opposed not only to political (statist) struggles but also to strikes which put forward wage or other claims, or which were organised by trade unions. While they were not opposed to strikes as such, they were opposed to trade unions and the struggle for the eight-hour day. This anti-reformist tendency was accompanied by an anti-organisational tendency, and its partisans declared themselves in favour of agitation amongst the unemployed for the expropriation of foodstuffs and other articles, for the expropriatory strike and, in some cases, for ‘individual recuperation’ or acts of terrorism.
From the 1890’s, however, the anarchist-communists, and Kropotkin in particular, were to begin to integrate themselves directly into the logic of the workers’ movement (reproduction of waged labour power). In 1890, Kropotkin ‘was one of the first to declare the urgency of entering trade unions’, as a means of trying to overcome the dilemma in which, according to him, anarchist-communism risked trapping itself. Kropotkin saw this dilemma in terms of either joining with the reformist workers’ movement or sterile and sectarian withdrawal. ‘Workmen’s organisations are the real force capable of accomplishing the social revolution’, he was to declare later.
Coinciding with the birth of anarcho-syndicalism and revolutionary unionism, three tendencies emerged within anarchist-communism. First, there was the tendency represented by Kropotkin himself and <em>Les Temps Nouveaux</em> (Jean Grave). Second, there were a number of groups which were influenced by Kropotkin but which were less reserved than him towards the trade unions (for example, <em>Khleb i Volia</em> in Russia). Finally, there was the anti-syndicalist anarchist-communists, who in France were grouped around Sebastien Faure’s <em>Le Libertaire</em>. From 1905 onwards, the Russian counterparts of these anti-syndicalist anarchist-communists become partisans of economic terrorism and illegal ‘expropriations’.
Certainly, it would be an ‘illusion to seek to discover or to create a syndicalist Kropotkin’, at least in the strict sense of the term, if only because he rejected the theory of the trade union as the embryo of future society — which did not prevent him from writing a preface in 1911 for the book written by the anarcho-syndicalists Emile Pataud and Emile Pouget, <em>Syndicalism and the Co-operative Commonwealth</em> (How We Shall Bring About The Revolution). But he saw the trade-union movement as a natural milieu for agitation, which it would be possible to use in the attempt to find a solution to the reformism-sectarianism dilemma. As an alternative to the strategy of the Russian ‘illegalist’ anarchist-communists, Kropotkin envisaged the formation of independent anarchist trade unions whose aim would be to counteract the influence of the Social Democrats. He defined his strategy in one sentence in the 1904 introduction to the Italian edition of <em>Paroles d’un Révolté</em>: ‘Expropriation as the aim, and the general strike as the means to paralyse the bourgeois world in all countries at the same time.’
At the end of his life Kropotkin seems to have abandoned his previous reservations and to have gone so far as to see in syndicalism the only ‘groundwork for the reconstruction of Russian economy’. In May 1920, he declared that: ‘the syndicalist movement... will emerge as the great force in the course of the next fifty years, leading to the creation of the communist stateless society’. He was equally optimistic about the prospects facing the co-operative movement. Remarks such as these opened the way for theoretical regression that was to make anarchist-communism a simple variant of anarcho-syndicalism, based on the collective management of enterprises. Reduced to the level of caricature, ‘anarchist-communism’ even became an empty phrase like the Spanish ‘libertarian communism’ of the 1930’s, to say nothing of the contemporary use to which this latter term is put.
*** The End of Anarchist-Communism?
Kropotkin’s last contribution, not to anarchist-communism but to its transformation into an ideology, was the introduction of the mystifying concept of Russian ‘state communism’. Faced with the events of the Russian Revolution and the establishment of a capitalist state freed from the fetters of Tsarism, Kropotkin should logically have seen the new state as a form of collectivism. He should have recognised that its character was determined by the wages system, as with other varieties of collectivism that he had previously exposed. In fact, he limited himself to criticising the Bolsheviks’ methods, without drawing attention to the fact that the object towards which those methods were directed had nothing to do with communism. A good example of this is the question that he directed at Lenin in the autumn of 1920:
<quote>
“Are you so blind, so much a prisoner of your authoritarian ideas, that you do not realize that, being at the head of European Communism, you have no right to soil the ideas which you defend by shameful methods...?”
</quote>
After Kropotkin’s death, the theory of anarchist-communism survived, but was consigned to isolation by the unfolding counter-revolution from the 1920’s onwards. Unlike the Italian Left and the German-Dutch council communists (the latter above all, with their criticism of the whole workers’ movement and their analysis of the general tendency for a unification of labour, capital and the state), the partisans of anarchist-communism did not really try to discover the causes of this counter-revolution; nor did they perceive its extent. As a result, their contributions amounted to little more than a formal defence of principles, without any critical depth. Moreover, these contributions ceased rapidly. Sebastien Faure’s <em>Mon Communisme</em> appeared in 1921, Luigi Galleani’s <em>The End of Anarchism?</em> in 1925 and Alexander Berkman’s <em>What is Communist Anarchism?</em> (better known in its abridged form as the ABC of Anarchism) in 1929.
From this date on, if we exclude the minority current in the General Confederation of Labor, Revolutionary Syndicalist (CGTSR), whose positions were made clear by Gaston Britel, the critical force that anarchist-communism had represented left the anarchist movement to reappear with the dissident Bordigist Raoul Brémond (see his <em>La Communauté</em>, which was first published in 1938) and certain communist currents that arose in the 1970’s. Representative of these latter was the group that published in Paris in 1975 the pamphlet <em>Un Monde sans Argent: Le Communisme</em>.
As a practical movement, anarchist-communism came to an end in Mexico and Russia. In Mexico before the First World War, the <em>Patrido Liberal Mexicano</em> (PLM) of the brothers Enrique and Ricardo Florés Magon, supported by a movement of peasants and indigenous peoples, which aimed to expropriate the land, tried to achieve anarchist-communism. The PLM’s objective was to revive the community traditions of the ejidos — common lands — and ultimately to extend the effects of this essentially agrarian rebellion to the industrial areas. The PLM came to control the greater part of Lower California and was joined by a number of IWW ‘Wobblies’ and Italian anarchists. But it was unable to implement its project of agricultural co-operatives organised on anarchist-communist principles and was eventually defeated militarily.
The 1917 revolution in Russia gave impetus to a process that had begun before, whereby anarchist-communism was absorbed or replaced by anarcho-syndicalism. In addition to this, in certain cases anarchist-communists allowed themselves to be integrated into the Bolshevik State. It is true that a few groups refused all support, even ‘critical’, for the Bolsheviks and combated them with terrorism, but they experienced increasing isolation. For the last time in the twentieth century a social movement of some size — in particular in Petrograd where the <em>Federation of Anarchists (Communists)</em> had considerable influence before the summer of 1917, the date when the exiled syndicalists returned — consciously proposed to remove ‘government and property, prisons and barracks, money and profit’ and usher in ‘a stateless society with a natural economy’. But their programme of systematic expropriations (as opposed to workers’ control), ‘embracing houses and food, factories and farms, mines and railroads’, was limited in reality to several anarchist-communist groups after the February Revolution expropriating ‘a number of private residences in Petrograd, Moscow, and other cities’.
As for the Makhnovist insurrectionary movement, although it was in favour of communism in the long run, and although it declared that ‘all forms of the wages system must be irredeemably abolished’, it nevertheless drew up a transitional program which preserved the essential features of the commodity economy within a framework of co-operatives. Wages, comparison of products in terms of value, taxes, a ‘decentralised system of genuine people’s banks’ and direct trade between workers were all in evidence in this transitional programme.
As a conclusion, we will recall Kropotkin’s warning: ‘The Revolution must be communist or it will be drowned in blood.’
|
#title Epimetheus
#subtitle The Orphic Path to Anarchy
#author Alain Santacreu
#LISTtitle Epimetheus: The Orphic Path to Anarchy
#date January 28, 2024
#source <em>Épiméthée</em>: <em>La Voie Orphique de l’Anarchie</em> par <em>Alain Santacreu</em> (<em>Epimetheus</em>: <em>The Orphic Path to Anarchy</em> by <em>Alain Santacreu</em>) was published in “<em>Lundimatin</em>” #412, January 28, 2024. [[https://lundi.am/Epimethee][<lundi.am/Epimethee>]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2025-07-19T00:00:00
#authors Alain Santacreu
#topics anarchism, anarchy, prometheus, technology, anti-tech, greek mythology, philosophy, tékhnē, critique of marxism, critique of capitalism, Ivan Illich, Karl Marx, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Hesiod, Epimêtheús, Promētheús
#notes Translated from French to English by <em>Amayas</em>.
<quote>
“Why not call these brothers and sisters, bearers of our hope, Epimetheans?”
— Ivan Illitch
</quote>
<strong>Because the gods have always concealed man, we have never known who we are, and our nature has remained hidden: “Let man first tear himself away from that which ‘conceals’ his nature [1]”.
</strong>
<strong>How does the human species differ from other species? The answer reveals itself to us “a posteriori”: humanity alone, of all living species, has appropriated nature, inaugurating the Anthropocene. With human beings, domination over nature and the rise in productivity have developed disproportionately, destroying the biotic environment. This “pleonectic” appropriation [2] has separated man from life: by appropriating the world, he has expropriated himself from life.</strong>
*** The Extinguishing of Promethean Fire
The discovery of fire, which gave rise to homo faber, marked the beginning of the Anthropocene, the initial event that enabled the human species to transform its environment. Of course, the actual signals of anthropogenic alteration of the biosphere would not be observed until much later — as early as the Neolithic period, with the development of agriculture, and then in modern times, starting with the invention of the steam engine at the end of the 18<sup>th</sup> century, and above all the “<em>great acceleration</em>” of the second half of the 20<sup>th</sup> century, with digital technological development, population growth and exponential consumption of resources — but we can only understand what has happened to us if we grasp this inaugural technological fact of the mastery of fire. The Greek myth of Prometheus gives us an idea of this: by stealing fire from the gods of Olympus and transmitting it to mankind, Prometheus established himself as the god of technology.
Greece provided the West with its civilizational hero: with Prometheus, civilization was no longer conceived as a gift from the gods but, on the contrary, as a conquest by men in revolt against the deities. From then on, the social order was no longer situated in the continuity of the cosmic order, whose natural laws were symbolized by the gods: culture no longer derived from nature, but separated from it, superimposed on it — if not opposed to it.
But the gods can’t accept men overstepping their limits and taking their place. So Zeus puts Prometheus in chains and sends him a vulture as eternal torment, for with the theft of fire, mankind has discovered progress: the transition from raw to cooked food, the domestication of the wild forces of nature and the invention of metallurgy. To punish them for this hubris, Zeus passes on new evils from the box of Pandora, wife of Prometheus’ brother Epimetheus.
This myth, first passed down in the writings of Hesiod, was later retold in Aeschylus’ tragedy <em>Prometheus Bound</em> and in Plato’s <em>Protagoras</em>. While the main features of the story are fairly well known, one detail seems essential: Prometheus and his brother Epitheme are titans. Primordial divinities, the titans and titanides are the offspring of the love between <em>Ouranos</em> (Heaven) and <em>Gaia</em> (Earth). They formed the first pantheon of Greek divinities. They reigned during the Golden Age, until the overthrow of Cronos by his son Zeus and the establishment of the Olympian pantheon. This clarification is important to grasp the allegorical meaning of the myth, which describes the transition from matriarchal to patriarchal order.
We should remember that Prometheus’ theft of the fire is the consequence of an earlier episode in the myth, “<em>Trick at Mecone</em>”, in which Prometheus has already tried to trick Zeus (<em>mètis</em>).
As long as Cronos had reigned, understanding had been maintained between gods and men. This golden age came to an end with the advent of the Olympians. Zeus wanted to impose a divine <em>arkhḗ</em> (<em>ἀρχή</em>)<em></em> on mankind and, in order to establish a new hierarchy, asked Prometheus to distinguish between men and gods. To this end, Prometheus invents the first bloody sacrifice. He slaughters a bull, cuts it up and, using a clever ruse, divides it into two parts, one appetizingly white but containing only bare bones, the other unappetizingly enveloped by the belly but containing the animal’s edible flesh. Zeus chooses the most beautiful part, but it is not edible: burnt, it will rise to the heavens in the form of smoke. This inaugural sacrifice establishes a hierarchy between gods and men, with the rot-proof bones serving as a reminder of the gods’ immortality, and mortal men receiving the meat for sustenance. This is the distinction established by Prometheus. But Zeus decides to take revenge on mankind for Prometheus’ cunning: he hides from them the fire they once had, since it circulated freely between gods and men, and deprives them of the wheat that had previously grown in abundance.
The bull sacrifice took place at Mecone. This location remains unknown. Meconion is the sap of the poppy, a plant that grows at the edge of wheat fields; it therefore seems that the inaugural sacrifice is linked to the emergence of agriculture. The myth of Prometheus would thus correspond to the transition from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic, that is, to the dating of the entry into the Anthropocene.
Why didn’t ancient Greece build a “<em>machine technology</em>”, even though it seemed to have the skill and knowledge to do so? Having the means to create an industrial civilization, the Greeks preferred to make do with mechanical and artisanal techniques. This was not only because technical power could have disrupted the political order, but also because antagonistic mythological heroes such as Orpheus and Dionysus balanced Promethean practicality with a poetic vision of life. This agonistic spirit disappeared from civilization with the modern break-up of machine technology.
Today, with new information and communication technologies, we are witnessing a frenzied technicization of social life, a raging Prometheanism. Modern agriculture exhausts the soil and, as we must constantly produce other goods, we poison the atmosphere and the oceans, while claiming to promote hygiene as an antidote to this poisoning: the sanitized world is programmed by ecological institutions that “<em>normalize</em>” contact between humans and their own environment. For Günther Anders, in our historical era, the purpose of technology turns out to be the obsolescence of man.
Modernity has recognized itself in Prometheus. The current civilizational crisis heralds the return of the vulture, the image of this “<em>Great Refusal</em>” that hopes for a postmodernity freed from Promethean culture. Today’s crisis adheres to its etymology (<em>krisis</em>): it passes “judgment” on the faltering Promethean world. But is it still possible to extinguish the global fire that Prometheus spread?
*** Prometheus or Orpheus?
For every historical era, there is a cultural hero who embodies the spirit-principle, that is, the archetype of social togetherness. If Prometheus was the one who embodies modernity, who will be the one who embodies the spirit of postmodern times?
The will to power over nature is the <em>primum movens</em> of the Promethean mentality realized in the capitalist spirit of modernity. In <em>Eros and Civilization</em>, Marcuse presents Orpheus as the emblematic figure of the new society that will emerge from the postmodern imagination. Orpheus is a god linked to Mother Earth, his image is one of joy and freedom; his voice does not command, it sings; his gesture is one of offering and receiving: beyond historical time, this mythological figure unites man with nature. The predominance of reason, its repression of instinct and sensibility, was never total in our Promethean civilization, and art and poetry succeeded, in certain periods, in bringing the pole of reason into tension with the antagonistic pole of the imaginary.
Based on Heraclitus’ aphorism “<em>Nature likes to hide</em>” (fragment 123), Pierre Hadot has identified two existential attitudes towards nature [3]. Indeed, the idea that nature (<em>phusis</em>) likes to hide itself can elicit two types of reaction: either we seek to wrest its secrets from it, which is the Promethean attitude; or, we commune with it, which is the Orphic attitude. According to Hadot, an example of the former attitude is provided by Francis Bacon, who, in his <em>Novum Organum Scientiarum</em> (1620), suggests that it is possible to induce the laws of nature through scientific experimentation with particular natural substances and phenomena. Hadot describes this violent human intervention in nature as “<em>Promethean</em>”. But Heraclitus’ formula can provoke, on the contrary, an attitude of reverence and conciliarity towards nature. Hadot cites Goethe as an example of this approach, which he places under the sign of Orpheus. The three words of Heraclitus’ aphorism (<em>phusis krupyesthai philei</em>) can thus be used to trace the human history of the idea of nature.
According to Julien Coupat, in his commentary on Gianni Carchia’s book <em>Orphisme et Tragédie: Le Mythe Transfiguré. Précédé de Dialogue avec les Morts</em> (<em>Orfismo e Tragedia. Il Mito Trasfigurato</em>) [4], the Orphic path remains the only answer to biopolitical power in the age of the realized Anthropocene. It is from the sacrificial dimension that the process of civilizational hominization [5] begins, and Orphism is precisely a challenge to the Olympian compromise established by Promethean sacrifice. Orphism, says Coupat, is “<em>that possible fork in the road that has not been taken</em>”. He insists on the ascetic, we might say apophatic, dimension of Orphism, which he sees as an internalized Dionysian orgiasm — the Orpheus-Dionysus couple being the interface of a single thought, originating in the hunter-gatherer Paleolithic and opposing the bloody sacrifice of Olympian Prometheanism [6].
In <em>L’</em>É<em>preuve du Labyrinthe</em> (Ordeal by Labyrinth), Mircea Eliade states that “<em>bloody sacrifices, especially human ones, are attested only among farmers. Never among hunters</em>”. This is why, paradoxically, Orphic vegetarianism joins the Dionysian diasparagmos [7], this memorial ritual of the Paleolithic hunt which comes to oppose the Olympian sacrifice. The wild Dionysian thought and the mystical Orphic asceticism are the two sides of the same contestation of civilizational Prometheanism. The place of this rebellious thought is the <em>chôra</em>, that is to say the rural part outside the walls of the ramparts of the astu (<em>the city itself</em>). The <em>chôra</em> is the place which generates and where the peasant commune develops, in opposition to the one-dimensional citizenship of the city: “<em>What was profoundly political in Orphism consisted precisely in the fact of rejecting the whole of the polis</em>” [8]. City dwellers were frightened by Pan’s flute and its power to arouse the instincts. Plato, in <em>The Republic</em>, describing the ideal state, banished popular music to the harp and Apollo’s lyre: <em>only shepherds could play their syrinx, and only in the countryside</em>!
*** Epimetheus, Ivan Illich’s Black Orpheus
In the myth of Prometheus, it could be that the figure of Orpheus is concealed within that of Epimetheus, as the final chapter of Ivan Illich’s <em>Deschooling Society</em> suggests. In this chapter, entitled “<em>Renaissance of Epimethean Man</em>” [9], Illich’s exegesis reverses the conventional interpretation of the Promethean myth, as Epimetheus and Pandora become its cultural heroes.
According to Ivan Illich, the original Pandora (the “<em>dispenser of all</em>”) was the earth goddess in prehistoric, matriarchal Greece. From time immemorial, the navel of the earth, the <em>omphalos</em>, was located at Delphi (the “<em>matrix</em>”) where Gaia slept, until she was replaced, after Zeus’ victory over Cronos, by Apollo, the male solar god. In the myth, as recounted by Hesiod, Pandora was created on Zeus’ orders to take revenge on mankind for Prometheus. Hephaestus made her of clay and water, giving her the beauty of the immortal goddesses of Olympus. She was the first human woman, for throughout the Golden Age, humanity was composed entirely of men (<em>anthrôpoi</em>). Zeus offered Pandora’s hand to Epimetheus, who took her as his wife, despite Prometheus’ attempts to dissuade him. As a dowry, Zeus gave Pandora a jar containing all the evils that could befall humans. Pandora opened the jar (<em>pithos</em>) and let them escape, but she closed it again before hope (<em>elpis</em>) could escape. Henceforth, with the first woman, the utopia of the Golden Age disappeared and began, according to tradition, the Iron Age, marked by death, disease and work.
If we refer to Plato’s <em>Protagoras</em>, Prometheus’ theft of fire would have been a way of remedying “<em>Epitheme’s fault</em>”, to use Bernard Stiegler’s title [10]. As Zeus had entrusted Prometheus with the task of distributing specific qualities to all mortal races, Epimetheus wanted to take over. He distributed the qualities (<em>dunameis</em>) to each species, but when the human race arrived, he found himself bereft, having distributed everything. Faced with man’s destitution, Prometheus decided to sneak into the workshop of Hephaestus and Athena to steal the knowledge of craftsmanship and the arts; but he also had to steal a spark of his divine fire from Zeus, so that man could forge the material and immaterial tools that would replace his lack of qualities.
Thus, according to the accepted interpretation, Epimetheus would be a fool and Pandora an idiot. But the perspective is reversed by Illichian exegesis. By marrying Pandora, Epimetheus married the earth. He is the archetype of men who lavish gifts and cherish life, those who establish a convivial relationship with nature. For Illich, the “<em>fault of Epimetheus</em>”, his failure to attribute qualities to men, is a creative <em>non-act</em> that makes them discover the truth of hope and the illusion of expectations.
To explain the shift from matriarchy to patriarchy, Illich emphasizes the difference in meaning between what he calls hope and expectations: “<em>Hope, in its strong sense, means a confident faith in the goodness of nature, while expectations, in the sense in which we will use the term here, mean that we rely on results intended and projected by man</em>.” (173). Hope therefore has an Orphic and qualitative dimension, with expectations being quantitative Promethean projections (<em>hence the singular/plural antagonism of the two terms)</em>. Illich considers that the Promethean ethos has kept hope stifled throughout the Anthropocene and he asserts that the survival of the human race depends on its rediscovery as a social force (174).
Hope is the fundamental notion of Ivan Illich’s anarchist thinking. For him, only human institutions can envisage a future, but human beings have only hope. The Marxist mistake was to confuse social institutions with individuals. The idea of the future devours the present moment, the only moment of fulfillment in life. To foresee is to want to force the future; hope, on the other hand, extends the present to the unhoped-for future of anarchy.
The name Epimetheus gave rise to the word <em>epimetheia</em> in the common Greek language, which means retrospective thought. Epimetheus invents a mode of existence, not in anticipation of the future but from the vision of a previous past. In contrast to the teleological thought of Prometheus, which <em>foresees</em> a finality for human action, Epimetheus sees it afterward, and in doing so, he shows us the Anthropocene. Indeed, Prometheus cannot perceive the Anthropocene, which is the product of his own thought. To note, as Bernard Stiegler did, that “<em>at its very origin and until now, philosophy has repressed technology as an object of thought</em>,” is to admit the original Prometheanism of philosophy. The only human consciousness of the Anthropocene is the thought of Epimetheus. It is not man that modernity has killed, it is his thinker: we must resurrect Epimetheus.
*** Epimetheus’ Fault
The dominant interpretation sees Prometheus as the symbol of the Enlightenment, the hero who liberates man from obscurantism. This is Marx’s conception, in <em>The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature</em> (1841), when he proclaims: “<em>In the philosophical calendar, Prometheus ranks first among the saints and martyrs</em>”. Contrary to his predictions, however, by integrating the consumerist values of economic Prometheism, the modern industrial proletariat has lost all revolutionary perspective. This observation led Bernard Stiegler to criticize the Marxist interpretation of the myth [11]. Stiegler’s exegesis is based on Plato’s <em>Protagoras</em>, in which Epimetheus takes on a greater role than in Hesiod. According to him, Epimetheus’ fault was to reduce the human condition to technology. But this fault was a necessity, a tragic <em>fatum</em>, for without it, the human being would never have come into existence: man without qualities could only survive thanks to the technicality brought by Prometheus. Thus, according to Stiegler, the human being is a prematurely born being, essentially incomplete, who can only make up for his defect of nature by inventing culture and compensating for his native deficit by manufacturing anthropotechnics.
Traditional hermeneutics overlooks a very important aspect of the story: the fact that the two brothers, Prometheus and Epimetheus, bear names which, in ancient Greek, had very precise meanings. Prometheus means <em>he who sees ahead</em>, and Epimetheus <em>he who sees behind</em>. Prometheus and Epitheme are the two inseparable poles of myth. Stiegler points out that myth has bequeathed to the common language two “<em>technical</em>” notions derived from their own names, prometheia and epimetheia. <em>Prometheia</em>, προμήθεια, thoughtfulness, predictive thinking, foresight. <em>Epimethia</em>, επιμηθιά, retrospective thought that comes to mind afterwards, reflexive thought, as translated by Steigler: “The common Greek language roots reflexive knowledge in epimetheia, that is, in the essential technicality that is finitude” (217). For Stiegler, Epimetheus’ fault, redoubled by Prometheus’ theft, has turned man into a being-for-death, producing an anthropological technology identified with thanatology.
Promethean sacrifice gives rise to resentment, jealousy, competition and quarrelling (<em>eris</em>) between men and gods. This original eris is perpetuated in contemporary transhumanism, which envisages immortality for man: “<em>If human life, unlike that of the gods, cannot escape eris, it is because the mortal condition finds its origin and its raison d’être in the eris that pitted Prometheus against Zeus</em> [12].”
Stiegler picks up on Vernant’s analysis of the Pandora jar sequence. The hope, <em>Elpis</em>, that remains in the jar is, according to Hesiod, the anxious expectation of the scattered evils from which the soul knows it cannot escape. Yet, according to Vernant, <em>Elpis</em> includes a dimension of uncertainty, belonging neither to anticipatory nor reflective thought, and presenting itself as a paroxysmal tension between <em>prometheia</em> and <em>epimetheia</em>, an oppositional dynamism that opens onto the indeterminate and makes human finitude bearable: <em>Elpis</em> is that unthinkable state that Derrida has called “<em>différance</em>”.
In his apprehension of technical thought, Stiegler borrows another essential notion from Jean-Pierre Vernant and Marcel Detienne, that of <em>mètis</em>. The authors explain this mental category as follows: “<em>Metis is indeed a form of intelligence and thought, a mode of knowing: it implies a complex, but highly coherent, set of mental attitudes, intellectual behaviors that combine flair, sagacity, foresight, flexibility of mind, feinting, resourcefulness</em>.”
<em>Mètis</em> brings success, often achieved through fraud and deceit, disloyal cunning, perfidious lies and treachery: it is the absolute weapon of domination. In Hesiod, the goddess Metis is the first wife of Zeus. The supreme god of Olympus swallows her after she gives birth to Athena, keeping her in his belly, thus integrating <em>Metis</em> into himself. Aeschylus, in his <em>Prometheus Bound</em>, asserts that, in the conflict pitting the Titans of Cronos against the Olympians of Zeus, victory would necessarily go to “<em>whoever would win, not by force and violence, but by cunning</em>.” (Prometheus Bound v. 213–213). As for Prometheus, Hesiod and Aeschylus agree that he possesses the kind of devious intelligence, the power of deception, that the Greeks call <em>mètis</em>: isn’t he nicknamed “<em>aîolomètis</em>” (<em>who possesses dazzling mètis</em>)? But how could he defeat Zeus’ absolute <em>mètis</em>? According to Vernant and Detienne, Prometheus was mistaken: seeing a fault in Epimetheus’ sharing, his ruse to correct it backfired, Zeus being the master of the situation. Prometheus deluded himself into believing that he was stealing what he had been allowed to take, with technicality revealing itself to be the gods’ way of arresting men, a way of binding them to them indefinitely.
There would be a pre-eminence of the “<em>political function</em>”, embodied by Zeus, over the “<em>technical function</em>”, represented by Prometheus. Technology would be political, not ontological. The “<em>deinstitutionalization</em>” of state society, advocated by Illich’s epimethean anarchism, which targets the political root of Promethean evil, would be a prerequisite for the “deindustrialization” advocated by ecological degrowth.
Bernard Stiegler’s exegesis of the myth must therefore be modulated, since it was Zeus’ political will and not Epimetheus’ fault that the human condition was reduced to technology.
Of all the characters in the myth, Epitheme seems to be the only one devoid of <em>mètis</em>. According to the Promethean vision, this is enough to make him look like an idiot. But Epitheme is endowed with another kind of intelligence that Detienne and Vernant call “<em>Orphic mètis</em>” [13]. The character of <em>Mètis</em>, borrowed from Hesiod, is found in the Orphic theogony of the rhapsodes. For the Orphites, she becomes the great primordial divinity, the first generator of the universe, who, emerging from the cosmic egg, carries within her the seed of all the gods and the germ of all beings. Whereas in Hesiod, the role of this goddess was subordinate to Zeus, the sovereign male god, of whom she was merely the obscure companion, in Orphism, <em>Mètis</em> is no longer presented as feminine: she is an androgynous god, with a dual male and female nature. Her polymorphic power transcends all oppositions. In this new context, the episode of Zeus’ swallowing of <em>Metis</em> acquires a completely different significance: “<em>This time, it is no longer a question of the young sovereign god assimilating the powers of a female counterpart, in order to immobilize the course of the universe in the state instituted by his victory and his new reign; on the contrary, by identifying himself entirely with the one who preceded him, Zeus intends to return, beyond Cronos and Ouranos, to the previous primordial state</em> [14].” This reintegration will give rise to a “<em>second creation</em>” from which a new world, our own, will emerge, in which Zeus will no longer reign, but his son, the Orphic Dionysus, who will replace him because he represents the total unity of the dispersed, variegated, inconstant world; and because, “<em>alone of all the Greek divinities, he inserts this alternating balancing act, this coming and going from the one to the many, from the same to the other, from concentrated totality to dispersion</em> [15]”. Through Dionysus, men will thus be able to return to the lost unity, which is not a regression to the past but the recovery in the eternal present of the life of a golden age that the Orphites refer to the matriarchal divinity of the primordial Metis.
This <em>androgynous mètis</em> is based on a logic of contradictions and an apophatic perception of reality, which reveals its pre-Socratic origin. Indeed, Western thought has been playing between Parmenides and Heraclitus, depending on whether it followed the Eleatic or the Ionian, the inventor of being or of becoming, chose stability rather than dynamism, opted for homogeneity rather than the heterogeneity of reality.
Parmenides announces the thought of Promethean domination. It is Heraclitus whom he targets in his <em>On Nature</em> (fragment 6) when he criticizes those who think that “<em>being and non-being are both identical and non-identical</em>.” The Aristotelian logic of the excluded middle, on which Western civilization is founded, belongs to this Parmenidean lineage.
For the philosopher of Elea, men can judge things only by reason. Now, for reason, it is possible neither to think nor to express non-being. To think is always to think something. It is not possible to think nothing. To think nothing is not to think. And the same is true for saying: <em>to say nothing is to say nothing</em>. Thinking and saying must necessarily have a predicating object; and this object is being.
It is a philosophy that, rejecting the possibility of a third party between being and non-being, excludes all freedom. All homogeneous dynamics have in common a logic of identity and non-contradiction that goes back to Parmenides and that Aristotle elevated to the rank of universal <em>Organon</em>.
On the contrary, Heraclitus uses an apophatic mode of thought, a non-predicative way of thinking that allows him to think about both being and non-being. In his fragments, we find numerous epithets with alpha (α) in the privative form to qualify being and mark its difference from beings. Thus, the adjectives “immortal” (άθανάτος, <em>athánatos</em>) or “unlimited” (άπειρον, <em>ápeiron</em>) designate it by negation. In a certain way, we could say that the philosophical opposition between Parmenides and Heraclitus refers to the mythological opposition between Prometheus and Epimetheus.
In its very etymology, the word anarchy comes from an apophatic modality of language: <em>anarkhia</em> – composed of the privative prefix an, “<em>without</em>”, and <em>archè</em>. Anarchy is the absence of <em>archè</em>. Archè signifies not only the original principle of the beginning of things, but also the leader, the one who possesses authority, the principle of command. The <em>archè</em> is both the principle that begins and the one that commands. However, the principle of command, having no precedent, being at the beginning, its power proves to be transcendent, sovereign, and absolute. Through the Epimethean apophatic non-act, the human species, restored to its given being, removes itself from being and emancipates itself from all divine transcendence.
*** The Unexpected Hope of Anarchy
The history of the Anthropocene is that of generations with a Promethean spirit who invented institutions to protect them from evil but who ended up depriving them of their souls: “<em>The deprivation of souls was the price to pay to enter the historical temporality of progress</em>” [16].
Bernard Stiegler did not perceive that the “<em>fault of Epithemy</em>” resided in the impossibility of predicating the human (<em>the predicate is the property that is conferred on the subject by the copula</em>). Attributing no quality to man is an apophatic act that forbids oneself from making any judgment on the subject, an act of Husserlian phenomenological reduction. The human without a predicate is not a man without quality, he enjoys an a-subjective presence in the world, in a <em>being-there</em> freed from all reflexive thought.
By forgetting to attribute qualities to humans, Epimetheus makes them unpredicable, that is, he no longer distinguishes them from immortals. For Illich, the supposed “<em>fault of Epimetheus</em>”, his failure to attribute qualities to humans, is a creative non-act that makes them discover the truth of hope and the illusion of hopes. The impossibility of predicating the human, of attributing any quality to it, is an act that opens up the possibility of the unexpected. To make the human unpredicable is to reintroduce it into the apophatic semantic field that is that of the gods. The <em>archè</em> does not reside in the subject but in the predicate.
The two-faced character Prometheus-Epimetheus of Vernant’s exegesis, taken up by Bernard Stiegler, corresponds to the androgynous character Pandora-Epimetheus of Illichian Orphic hermeneutics. By marrying Pandora, Epimetheus incorporates the Orphic <em>metis</em>, thus becoming the antagonist of Zeus who had created her with the Olympian <em>metis</em>. The incorporation of the Orphic metis by Epimetheus annihilates the Promethean blood sacrifice, frees men from divine authority and gives them back their freedom.
The hope of the Promethean spirit is teleological. The hope of the Epithemian spirit is non-teleological. By closing the jar on hope, hope remained imprisoned in the woman’s womb, obscuring true life, without purpose, “<em>without why</em>”: life without <em>archè</em>. The teleological conception of life gave rise to the institutions of Promethean civilization. The woman’s womb contains the seed of anarchy. What was profoundly political in Orphism consisted in the radical rejection of the <em>polis</em>, the city-state founded on institutions that fabricate the consent of citizens.
The lost book of Heraclitus began with this sentence: “<em>One must follow what is common</em>.” For Heraclitus, “<em>awakened</em>” men have a single cosmos that establishes their community. The “<em>dreamed</em>” turn away from the common cosmos because the dream is singular and cannot be shared. Promethean society, in its final “<em>spectacular</em>” form, forbids men from thinking about the common, imposing on everyone a dream that each consumes individually. Escaping the Promethean spectacle requires an asceticism, an apophatic <em>praxis</em> of being in the world. Julien Coupat has emphasized the importance of the mystical asceticism of Orphism: “<em>The Orphic way is notoriously an acetic way that is not exactly that of an aesthetic of existence [...] We can call it “mystical” provided we see clearly that there is no consistent materialism other than mystical and that a saved humanity would perhaps be entirely mystical</em> [17].”
We find this ascetic dimension in Illich’s Epimethean anarchism, an asceticism on which is based the friendship (<em>philia</em>) that nourishes the quest for truth (<em>aletheia</em>): “[…] I plead for a renaissance of ascetic practices to keep our senses alive, in lands devastated by the “<em>spectacle</em>”, in the midst of overwhelming information, perpetual advice, intensive diagnosis, therapeutic management, the invasion of advisors, terminal care, and breathtaking speed [18].
In his essay “<em>Goethe’s Elective Affinities</em>” (1924–1925), Benjamin writes this sublime sentence: “<em>Only for the sake of the hopeless have we been given hope</em>.” (“Nur um der Hoffnungslosen willen ist uns die Hoffnung gegeben”).
The despair of participating in Promethean society is the only hope of breaking it. The radical opposition of the “<em>hopeless</em>” is the only revolutionary hope: the system cannot integrate the hope of despair because this despair does not stem from lesser having but from <em>anti-having</em>.
For Marx, revolutionary hopes are based on the frustration of the proletariat and the rationality of economic and social progress, but the hope of the “<em>hopeless</em>” is based on the saturation of <em>spectacular lies</em>; it is the hope of the unexpected. According to Heraclitus (fragment 18): “<em>If you do not hope for the unexpected, you will not find it. It is hard to find and inaccessible</em>” [19]. The unexpected is what truly is, the <em>aletheia</em> that has never yet been: sovereign anarchy.
; References
[1] Reiner Schürmann, <em>Le principe d’anarchie</em>, Diaphanes, 2013, p. 344.
[2] La pléonexie (du grec πλεονεξία, <em>pleonexia</em>) est le désir d’avoir plus que les autres, de vouloir posséder toujours plus. Cf. Mehdi Belhaj Kacem ; <em>Système du pléonectique</em>, Diaphanes, 2020.
[3] Cf. Pierre Hadot, <em>Le voile d’Isis. Essai sur l’histoire de l’idée de nature</em>, Paris, Gallimard, 2004.
[4] Gianni Carchia, <em>Orphisme et tragédie</em>, précédé de : Julien Coupat, <em>Dialogue avec les morts,</em> Éditions la Tempête, 2020.
[5] Cf. René Girard, <em>Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde</em>.
[6] Cf. Maria Daraki, <em>Dionysos et la déesse Terre</em>, Flammarion, 1994.
[7] Le <em>diasparagmos</em> est le sacrifice d’un animal déchiqueté et dévoré cru lors du culte dionysiaque.
[8] Julien Coupat, <em>ibid.</em>, p. 9.
[9] Ivan Illich, <em>Une société sans école</em>, « Renaissance de l’homme épiméthéen », pp. 172–188, Points/Seuil, 2015. Les chiffres entre parenthèses se réfèrent à cette édition.
[10] Bernard Stiegler, « La Faute d’Épiméthée » dans <em>La technique et le temps</em>, Fayard, 2018, pp. 215–311.
[11] Bernard Stiegler, « La Faute d’Épiméthée », <em>op.cit</em>.
[12] Jean-Pierre Vernant et Marcel Detienne, <em>La cuisine du sacrifice</em>, Gallimard, 1979, p. 57.
[13] Marcel Detienne et Jean-Pierre Vernant, « La mètis orphique et la seiche de Thétis », dans <em>Les ruses de l’intelligence</em>, Champs essais, 2018, pp. 181–235.
[14] <em>Ibid,</em> p. 184.
[15] <em>Ibid,</em> p. 186.
[16] Gianni Carchia cité par Julien Coupat, <em>op. cit,</em> p. 9.
[17] Julien Coupat, <em>op. cit</em>. p. 21.
[18] Ivan Illich, introduction à <em>La perte des sens</em>, Fayard, 2004.
[19] <em>Les Présocratiques,</em> trad. J.-P. Dumont<em></em> Gallimard, 1998, p.150.
|
#title Fundamental Anthropology for an Anarchist Gnosis
#author Alain Santacreu
#LISTtitle Fundamental Anthropology for an Anarchist Gnosis
#date 18 May 2022
#source Translated from [[https://lundi.am/Anthropologie-fondamentale-pour-une-gnose-anarchiste][lundi.am/Anthropologie-fondamentale-pour-une-gnose-anarchiste]]
#lang en
#authors Alain Santacreu
#topics anthropology, gnosticism, gnosis, anti-politics, anarchist society
#pubdate 2023-05-19
<quote>
<em>You are of this world
<br>
and I am not of this world.
<br>
— John 8:23</em>
</quote>
<strong>Man is a social animal; humanity is not innate in him: a child raised by wolves will be closer to a wolf than to a man. But the solidarity of the wolves with this child shows us that social relationships are not specifically human and that it is insufficient to define man as a social animal, since sociality is shared by other species.</strong>
Is life in society a means of emancipation for the individual or a cause of enslavement? Does it lead to an extension of individual freedom or to its diminution? These are the determining questions that an anarchist anthropology should ask itself, because, if society transmits to man the possibility of his humanity, it does so only by depriving him of an essential part of his potentiality to live as a human. What makes the humanity of the man is the object of what we could call the fundamental anthropology, science of the recognition of the principial in the human: the conscience of the life against the world.
*** 1. The Anarchist Anthropology
Anarchist anthropology is a branch of political anthropology; but, whereas the latter takes as its object all forms of social organization experienced by humanity, anarchist anthropology studies more specifically the societies that have invented forms of resistance to authoritarian institutions of the state type.
David Graeber (1961–2020) proposed this name in his essay “Pour une Anthropologie Anarchiste” *(“Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology)”* [1]. The great predecessors of anarchist anthropology are Pierre Kropotkin (1842–1921) and, more recently, Pierre Clastres (1934–1977). Among contemporary anthropologists, in addition to David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins (1930–2021), both recently deceased, we should mention Harold Barclay (1924–2017) and James C. Scott.
David Graeber argues that there is an anarchist practice of anthropology that seeks to break free from the ethnocentrism of Western political science. For him, anarchist anthropology must emancipate itself from the grand canonical narrative which, starting with the founding Rousseauist text, the “Discours sur l’Origine et les Fondements de l’Inégalité parmi les Hommes” *(“Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men”)*, traces the origin of social inequality to the Neolithic period, i.e., the invention of agriculture. This classic account claims that people at the end of the Ice Age lived in egalitarian hunter-gatherer groups. The advent of agriculture, along with private property, caused a population boom, leading to the emergence of state urbanization. According to Graeber, this account is not based on any scientific data.
“Comment Changer le Cours de l’Histoire (Ou au Moins du Passé)” *(“How to Change the Course of Human History (At Least, the Part that’s Already Happened)”* is the question that an anarchist anthropology must ask. In an article, so titled, written in collaboration with the archaeologist David Wengrow [2], Graeber takes up several ethnographic examples that show the seasonal character of social inequality among certain hunter-gatherer groups. He bases himself on a pioneering article by Marcel Mauss, who established that the Inuit had two social organizations, one patriarchal and authoritarian, during the summer hunts, the other collective and egalitarian, during the long polar night [3].
Since ethnology is called *“anthropology”* by English speakers, David Graeber has circumscribed anarchist anthropology to ethnology and its libertarian lineage.
At the end of the 19<sup>th</sup> century, just after the founding period of Godwin, Proudhon or Bakunin, the anarchist doctrine was enriched by the contribution of a generation of geographers concerned with indigenous groups and considering that the analysis of nature cannot be separated from that of its inhabitants. We find Pierre Kropotkin with Élisée Reclus (1830–1905), and Léon Metchnikoff (1838–1888) [4]. From Marshall Sahlins and Pierre Clastres to Graeber, contemporary anarchist anthropologists have always drawn their critical tools from the corpus of these so-called *“primitive”* societies, but in doing so, they have forgotten that institutions against the state also exist in the West, as in the customary law of the medieval society, the village commune, the guilds, the free cities of the XIIth century, what Kropotkine, on the other hand, had known how to emphasize in “L’Entraide, Un Facteur de l’Évolution” *(Mutual Aid, A Factor of Evolution) (1902)* and “La Science Moderne et l’Anarchie” (“Modern Science and the Anarchy) (1913)”.
*“Whether anthropology proclaims itself to be social or cultural, it always aspires to know the total man”*, wrote Lévi-Strauss [5]. We will not question here the distinction between social anthropology and cultural anthropology because it is only a difference of point of view, according to whether one considers the man as a social animal that endows itself with ethnographic customs or as a cultural animal capable of making tools. More important in our eyes is the expression total man that Lévi-Strauss takes back to Marcel Mauss and that he underlines in italics.
In his inaugural lesson to the College of France (1960) Lévi-Strauss, paying homage to Marcel Mauss, the founder of the social anthropology, declared:
<quote>
“If your last goal, one will say, is to reach certain universal forms of thought and morality (because the Essay on the gift ends by moral conclusions) why to give to the societies that you call primitive a privileged value? Should we not, by hypothesis, arrive at the same results, speaking of any society?”
</quote>
The field of anthropology is the study of man in its universality, it cannot be confined to primitive ethnography. It appears primordial for anarchist anthropology not to cut itself off from the historical approach proposed by Kropotkin because, under the pretext of rejecting all ethnocentrism, the error would be not to realize that there is a perfect correlation between the emergence of the State and the process of psychological individuation. It is only in the Western civilization that the history of the human self merges with the “political” history of the society.
*** 2. The Anti-Ternary Dynamics of Medieval Theology
As Jérôme Baschet notes in his introduction to his book “Corps et Âmes. Une Histoire de la Personne au Moyen Âge”: “The anthropology of the medieval West was built more against Paul than from him..” Let us consider the different anthropological paradigms that mark out the Western cosmovision :
<quote>
Monistic anthropology includes three types: materialist, idealist and immanentist. For materialist monism everything is matter in evolution (Marx). For the idealist monism, only the spirit is real and the matter is only illusion (Hegel). For the immanentist monism, reality is unique but bifacial, at the same time spirit and matter (Spinoza).
The dualistic anthropology, on the other hand, affirms that man is constituted of a body and a soul, radically distinct from each other (Descartes).
Finally, ternary anthropology confers on man a tripartite structure: body-soul-spirit (Paul of Tarsus) [7].
</quote>
The thirteenth century marks the epochal inflection point of the *“anthropological”* passage to modernity, with the emergence of the bourgeoisie and the centralizing monarchist state. From the 13<sup>th</sup> century onwards, Christian theology imposed the binary conception of the human person — soul and body — rejecting the Gnostic vision of primitive Christianity, still alive in Occitan Catharism, which distinguished the body * (soma)*, the soul *(psychè)* and the spirit *(pneuma or noûs)*. The Church, at the same time as the dogma of the transubstantiation of the species [8], adopted the hylemorphic anthropology of Thomistic Aristotelianism: man is composed of a soul and a body ordered to each other in a relationship of matter *(hylé)* to form *(morphê)*. The soul is the form of the body.
The ternary anthropology comes from the Gnostic traditions of Hellenism and Judaism. It can be found in the epistles of Paul of Tarsus as well as in the Enneads of Plotinus.
Until the end of the Romanesque period, that is, the articulation of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, anthropological tripartition had been a constant reference in Western Christian theology, but the *“crisis of the thirteenth century”*, as Claude Tresmontant [9] called it, was to prepare the irremediable passage towards Cartesian biopsychic anthropology.
The tripartite conception of the world and of man was transmitted simultaneously to the Roman West by the two sources of Greek philosophy and Hebrew religion. However, there is a very important distinction between these two ternary anthropologies, which few historians note: unlike the Greek ternary, where the immortal soul *(psyche)* is linked to the spirit *(pneuma)* and separated from the body *(soma)*, in the Hebrew ternary, the body *(gouf)* and the soul *(nephesh)* both belong to the plane of creation and merge in the flesh *(baschar)* — only the spirit *(rouach)* being in the realm of the Uncreate. Thus, the Greek ternary, *“soma-psychê-pneuma”*, where soul and body do not come from the same world — the soul being spiritual and the body material — can only appear *“gnostic”* in comparison with Judaism, where soul and body both belong to creation — the essential break being here between soul and spirit.
Following scholasticism, Thomas Aquinas rejected the Pauline ternary conception. The soul, defined as the *“substantial form of the body”*, in a manner quite analogous to the Hebrew ternary, is no longer conceived as an autonomous entity added to the body: *man becomes a unitary structure in which the soul-form and the body-matter are in total interdependence*. Thomasian theology announces modern anthropology, it initiates an anti-ternary dynamic which leads to think positively about the relation of the soul and the body, by insisting on the psychosomatic unity of the human person.
In the line of the Marxist or structuralist anthropologies, the anarchist ethnological glance adopts a priori a materialist monism, ideological postulate whose epistemological value remains indemonstrable. It also takes up the distinction advanced by Radcliffe-Browne’s social anthropology between the individual, perceived as an organism, and the person, defined as “a complex of social relations” with the others [10].
In this view, persons, not individuals, are the basic units of a society. This relational conception of the person, as an individuated social being, refers to Marcel Mauss’s founding article, “Une Catégorie de l’Esprit Humain: La Notion de Personne Celle de “Moi”” *(“A Category of the human mind: the notion of person”) (1938)* [11].
According to Paul, the anthropological structure of man is made up of two antithetical poles, the body and the spirit, between which a third term is inserted: the soul:
<quote>
“May the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole being, spirit, soul and body, be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.” (1 Thess. 5:23).
</quote>
We are born in the state of the old man, the one that Paul calls the animal man — psychikos anthrôpos — that *“psychic man”*, endowed with a reflexive thought, that modern paleontologists call homo sapiens sapiens *(the man who knows he is thinking)*. In a letter that Paul wrote to the Christian community of Rome, around the years 57–58, he explains that the old man must die in order for the new man to be born, the spiritual man — pneumatikos anthrôpos. If this second birth does not take place, then man condemns himself to that *“second death”* of which the Apocalypse speaks (Rev 21:8); but then, having lost his soul, he loses even his humanity. The completed man, the total man, the teleios, is the one who is born with the spirit. This is the ontic and existential project that Paul proposes to man.
What is important to us here is not so much this process of spiritual transformation *(theosis)* as the historical advent of the notion of the human person, which was erected from the erasure of the universal self and its capture by the individual self.
Paul is the heir of Hebrew anthropology. In the First Epistle to the Corinthians, the Greek term sôma *(body)* designates the whole person, like the Hebrew baschar *(flesh)*, that is to say the body-soul couple (sôma-psychê).
It is thus the spirit *(pneuma or rouach)* that the anti-ternal dynamic of Catholic theology has evacuated. In that, the semantic transformation which takes place, at the beginning of the XIIIth century, with the substitution of the word persona for homo to designate the human being, constitutes a decisive *“cultural moment”*: the disappearance of the ternary anthropology marks the end of this historical period that Kropotkine names, in his booklet The State — its historical role, *“the first Renaissance, that of the XIIth century”*.
*** 3. The Socio-Historical Dualism of Pierre Kropotkin
Martin Buber is one of the rare authors who have underlined the influence exerted on Kropotkin by the slavophile philosophers Ivan Kireïevski and Alexeï Khomiakov. According to Buber, it is by taking inspiration from their presentation of historical duality that Kropotkin would have simplified the multiple Proudhonian *“social antinomies”* by the fundamental dualism between the principle of the struggle for existence and that of mutual aid [12].
Khomiakov, in his Memoir on Universal History, thought that the history of mankind is played out between two principles that he named *“Iran”* and *“Kush”*, these geographical terms designating the places of their emergence — Iran going from the Himalayas to the Euphrates River and Kush being the biblical name of Ethiopia, the cradle of Egyptian civilization. All religious beliefs and ideologies would be divided into these two categories: *the Iranian cult of the spirit as creative freedom and the Kushite cult of matter as indefinite necessity. Human history would be the product of the antagonistic tension between these two poles. In Kushitism, Khomiakov saw the religion of necessity, of the determinism of nature, of magic; in Iranism, the religion of the spirit, of freedom and of love*. Latin Catholicism comes from Kushitism, Greek-Russian Orthodoxy from Iranism. The Western world has not received true Christianity in its essence. In the course of the ages, these two antinomic principles have been brought into contact with each other through mutual tensions or concessions.
This vision can be compared with the passage in “La Science Moderne et l’Anarchie” *(“Modern Science and Anarchy”)* where Pierre Kropotkin writes: *“Throughout the history of our civilization, two opposing tendencies have been present: the Roman tradition and the popular tradition, the imperial tradition and the federalist tradition, the authoritarian tradition and the libertarian tradition*.
In the Middle Ages, this socio-historical dualism was illustrated for two centuries by the struggle between communal institutions of mutual aid and political-religious state Caesarism. The movement of free communes, which began in the 11<sup>th</sup> century, continued until the 13<sup>th</sup> century. This “first Renaissance” has remained obscure because it is ignored by official history [14].
The libertarian revolution of the urban communes, born of the union between the village commune and the artisanal and merchant associations, was an absolute negation of the Roman centralizing spirit. The 12<sup>th</sup> century European, Kropotkin said, was *“essentially federalist. A man of free initiative, of free agreement, of desired and freely consented unions”* [15].
The movement began in Italy *(Tuscany and Lombardy)* and in the Occitanian South, where towns freed themselves from all lordly control, and spread very quickly throughout northern Europe, where the guilds were the vector of social emancipation. The independent cities, capable of fighting against the great lords, were called communes, while those that placed themselves under the protection of a lord or the king were called cities of the bourgeoisie.
On the bangs of the feudal system, the communes were real collective lordships that administered themselves autonomously, appointing their own judges and federating among themselves. In northern Italy, there was the Lombard League, in Germany the Hanseatic League. In Occitania, since the cities were not federated, and fearing that this federative role could be taken over by Catharism, the Roman Church promulgated the Albigensian Crusade, which would destroy the Occitanian civilization of the 12<sup>th</sup> and 13<sup>th</sup> centuries.
Pierre Kropotkin does not seem to have perceived this concomitance of the dualist heresies with the medieval communist. However, the *“first European Renaissance”* was also that of heretical movements that crossed Europe from one side to the other, threatening the unity of the Roman Church and the feudal system that it was trying to impose. It was with the same ferocity that the Church and the kings crushed the popular communes and the religious heresies. The invention of the Inquisition, promulgated by Gregory IX in 1231, marked the advent of the state machinery of social control. Thereafter, all totalitarianisms will use the same terrorist device. The politico-religious institution of the Inquisition led to the birth of the centralizing State.
The Cathar religion, adopting the ternary anthropology of primitive Christianity, was based on the Gnostic dualism of Marcion. It is remarkable that the movement of the communes died out at the same time as this heresy. By the time Philip VI of Valois came to power in 1328, there were no real free towns left in France; all the communes had become towns of the bourgeoisie — *“the king’s good towns”*. The last Cathar, Guilhem Bélibaste, was burned alive in 1321. This synchronization between the medieval communalist movement and what was the last expression of dualist thought in the West is not without interest in the perspective of our search for an anarchist gnosis.
*** 4. The Counter Political Theology of Michael Bakunin
In “La Science Moderne et l’Anarchie” *(“Modern Science and Anarchy”)*, Pierre Kropotkin criticizes the thinkers of the *“German School”* for whom any form of social organization is a potential state structure. In his sights, there is the geographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904), whose theses Carl Schmitt will take up again.
Friedrich Ratzel is one of the main instigators of human geography — which he calls *“anthropogeography”* [17]. In his political geography [18], he equates the variety of all socio-political organizations, from primitive tribes to modern political structures, with the social conformation of the state. According to him, the state is a living organism, a biological system whose spatial expansion is a vital necessity — hence the notion of Lebensraum *(living space)*, which was later recuperated by Nazi ideology.
Contrary to Ratzel and the *“German School”* — in which we must include the Marxist social democrats -, Kropotkin does not assimilate society to the State. Society is given by nature. Man did not create society: society is prior to man. The State is only one of the forms that society has taken in human history:
<quote>
“Man has lived in societies for thousands of years, before he knew the State [...] The most glorious periods of humanity were those in which freedoms and local life were not yet destroyed by the State, and in which the masses of men lived in communes and free federations” [19].
</quote>
This dualism between state sovereignty and free federative association between Kropotkin and Ratzel mirrors the antagonism that emerges between Carl Schmitt and Michael Bakunin.
It should be remembered that the idea of a political theology arose in Carl Schmitt’s mind from a critique directed against Michael Bakunin, author of *La Théologie Politique de Mazzini et l’Internationale* (1871). In his 1922 book, Schmitt took up the expression *“political theology”* and turned it against the one he called his absolute enemy.
In the chapter entitled “La Philosophie de l’État dans la Contre-Révolution” of his “Théologie Politique” *(“Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty”)* [20], Carl Schmitt points out that counter-revolution and anarchism share the idea of the absolutism of all government:
<quote>
“All sovereignty acts as if it were infallible, all government is absolute — a proposition that an anarchist could have taken up word for word, albeit with an entirely different aim” [21].
</quote>
This divergence of “aim” stems from their opposite conception of human nature: “Every political idea takes, in one way or another, a position on the “nature” of man and presupposes that he is either “good by nature” or “bad by nature” [22].
*To the optimistic anthropology of the anarchists is opposed the pessimistic anthropology of the conservatives.
*
While in his “Théologie Politique” *(“Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty”)* of 1923, Carl Schmitt designated the antagonism between Donoso Cortes and P.-J. Proudhon as the paradigmatic conflict of politics, in “Parlementarisme et Démocratie” *(“The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy”)* he will specify that this opposition, is valid only *“within the framework of the Western cultural traditions [...] It is only with the Russians, notably with Bakunin, that the enemy proper of all the received ideas of the European culture appears [23].”*
Thus, *Bakunin is promoted to the rank of absolute enemy* [24], because he embodies, according to Schmitt, the will to put an end to politics assimilated to the state — the State being, for Bakunin, only a theological secularization. This supposed *“depoliticization”* allows Schmitt to amalgamate anarchism with liberalism and Marxism:
<quote>
“Nothing is more modern today than the struggle against politics. American financiers, industrial technicians, Marxist socialists and anarcho-syndicalist revolutionaries join forces with the slogan that it is necessary to eliminate the non-objective domination of politics over the objectivity of economic life [25].”
</quote>
Schmitt found in Bakunin the schema of his political theology. A passage in “Fédéralisme, Socialisme, Antithéologisme” (“Federalism, Socialism, Anti-Theologism”) underlines the fact that the State and theology presuppose the intrinsically evil nature of man: *“Is it not remarkable that this similarity between theology — this science of the Church — and politics — this theory of the State -, that this meeting of two orders of thought and facts, apparently so contrary”*, in the same conviction :
<quote>
“That of the necessity of the immolation of human freedom to moralize men and to transform them — into saints, according to the one, and virtuous citizens, according to the other” [26].
</quote>
Bakunin, by inverting the anthropological axiom of theology, does not emancipate himself from the theological discourse; hence his apology of Satan, expression of his revolutionary anti-theological romanticism. This will allow Carl Schmitt to end his chapter *“La Philosophie de l’État dans la Contre-Révolution”* with this pirouette:
<quote>
“For the greatest anarchist of the nineteenth century, Bakunin, one arrives at the strange paradox that he necessarily had to become theoretically the theorist of anti-theology and, in practice, the dictator of an anti-dictatorship” [27].
</quote>
Bakunin, as Jean-Christophe Angaut [28] has very judiciously noted, considers the anthropological question, not from the ethical point of view, where Schmitt tries to confine it, but from the political point of view: *is humanity capable of freely reaching, without coercive authority — theological or state — its collective autonomy?* To this question, anarchist anthropology answers in the affirmative: man is capable of conceiving an atheological good. Whereas for Carl Schmitt, in the lineage of the *“German School”*, there can be no human society without an embryonic state, Bakunin enunciates a counter political theology that rests on the revolutionary capacities of the collective Being. Bakunin makes of the commune, the base of an atheological anarchist politics which is founded on the social capacity for self-organization.
*** 6. The Proudhonian Dialectic of Anarchist Gnosis
The Kropotkinian socio-historical dualism could be circumscribed to that between society and community. Society is a *“union of interests”* while community is a *“union of life”*, wrote Martin Buber [29]. Carl Schmitt would not admit to such a definition, as shown in one of his little-known articles, “The contrast between community and society as an example of a dualistic distinction” [30].
In this text, Schmitt takes up the opposition that Ferdinand Tönnies theorized in “Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft” between the communal and societal modes. While the community organizes itself around local customary law, society submits to centralized legal law. According to Schmitt, the dualistic relationship between society and community can only be resolved through a value judgment, by considering one term as superior to the other. Only value would allow the dualist cleavage to be overcome, since the Hegelian dialectic would have been abandoned:
<quote>
“It seems to us that it is a general trait of this epoch of German thought that ends in 1914, during the First World War, to prefer simple and dualistic antitheses to the triasic schemes of the preceding philosophy” [31].
</quote>
If he was an attentive reader of Bakunin, Carl Schmitt seems to have read Proudhon less acutely, reproaching him for his moral conception of social reality. However, Proudhon, well before Schmitt and even Bakunin, had perceived that political theology founded the power of the State:
<quote>
“It is surprising that at the bottom of our politics we always find theology”
</quote>, he declared in Confessions of a Revolutionary [32].
The friend/enemy dialectic, which defines the essence of politics for Carl Schmitt, is of a Hegelian nature *(the enemy of my enemy is my friend)* and remains fixed to the Aristotelian logic of the excluded third party. In “De la Justice dans la Révolution et dans l’Église” *(“Justice in the Revolution and in the Church: Preliminary Discourse”)*, Proudhon denounces what he considers to be Hegel’s error:
<quote>
“Not having understood that “the antinomy is not resolved but indicates an oscillation or antagonism susceptible only of equilibrium” [33].
</quote>
According to Proudhon, any synthesis of the antagonistic couple is negative of freedom. The author of the System of Economic Contradictions anticipates the epistemological rupture of quantum theory which, at the beginning of the 20<sup>th</sup> century, called into question Aristotelian logic. Jean Bancal, who was one of the best exegetes of Proudhon, understood this well, as he did not hesitate to declare:
<quote>
“The theory of the particle and the antiparticle constitutes in modern physics a confirmation of the Proudhonian theory of the antinomic organization of the world” [34].
</quote>
One should read the whole Proudhonian work in the light of this fact.
Proudhon opposes the system of transcendence, which is that of the Church, to the system of immanence, which is the doctrine of the Revolution. From the point of view of transcendence, justice is based a priori on the word of God interpreted by the priesthood, it is the *“divine right”* which has as its maxim the authority. In the vision of immanence, justice is the product of the conscience and constitutes the *“human right”* whose maxim is freedom. The secularized authority of divine right takes the form of property and capital in economics and the state in politics. On the contrary, the freedom of human right gives rise to mutuellism in economics and anarchist federalism in politics.
Proudhon can be considered the promulgator of the political meaning of the word anarchy, which appears in his first work, “Qu’est-ce que la Propriété ?” *(“What is Property ?”)* (1840). While anarchy, in its common meaning, means disorder and chaos, Proudhon issues a paradoxical idea that defines a positive form of anarchy: *“The highest perfection of society is found in the union of order and anarchy.”* Anarchy is thus, for Proudhon, both order and disorder. Such a predicate is therefore opposed to the principle of identity *(A is A)* and non-contradiction *(A is not non-A)* . And it is understandable that one cannot grasp the meaning of the term anarchy, except by what the philosopher Stéphane Lupasco has called a logic of contradictions that Proudhon had intuited with his dialectic of antinomies [35].
*** 7. The Nomos of the World and the Anomos of Life
The theology of Judeo-Christian monotheism has consecrated the oikonomia of the Western world, that device of political domination which is the nomos of the earth, according to Carl Schmitt [36]. *“God is evil”*, Proudhon asserted in his “Système des Contradictions Économiques” *(“The System of Economic Contradictions”)*, professing anti-theism — and not atheism, since to oppose it is to recognize the existence of what one is fighting.
Proudhon emphasizes the *“profound misanthropy”* [37] of divine providence, which, by setting the implacable rigor of the laws of economics, has stifled the aspiration of men to a just distribution of goods. Some passages suggest that the Christian God could be the creator of evil. In one of his Notebooks, he dares to make this Cathar-inspired statement: *“There is not one God, there are two antagonistic Gods. However, although the God of the Gospel, identical to that of the Old Testament, is the absolute contradictor of man, he remains dialectically necessary, so that man can struggle against all absolutism, both within and without himself”.* This is why Proudhon includes the absolute in a ternary anthropological system, body-soul-spirit, where the antagonistic tension is exercised between the immanence of life in man — a soul in a body — and the spirit, as an idea of God’s transcendence inherent in human psychology. This means that the true Proudhonian God, merging with Justice, will no longer have to burden the human being with the combined yokes of fear and servitude, but will have to be constantly reinvented:
<quote>
“The God we seek can no longer be as the old theology teaches; he must be quite different from what the theologians do.” [39].
</quote>
In his *“Correspondance” (letter of August 28, 1851)* , Proudhon alludes to a work he never had the leisure to write, the subject of which would have been *“humanitarian theology, the X which must replace the old Catholicism”* [40]. *What is this X, if not the foreign God of Marcion, this God of love of the medieval dualist heresies that Hobbes’ Leviathan tried to erase definitively from the memory of men?*
Marcionite gnosis does not deny the reality of the world *(acosmism)* but it refuses it and opposes it *(anticosmism)* [41]. This leads to a radical dualism based on the affirmation that the world is ontologically bad because it is not the creation of the good God but of a demiurge identified with the creator God of Genesis.
For Marcion, theodicy is resolved through the dualism that he believes he detects in Paul: the absolute antagonism between the god of the law of the world *(the demiurge)* and the god of the freedom of the spirit *(the alien god)* . Marcion’s central thesis is that Jesus Christ did not come to fulfill but to abolish the Law, revealing the ontological contradiction between the Law and the Gospel:
<quote>
“Christ made it clear that he came to annul the Law and the prophets.” [42]
</quote>
This is coupled with the belief that the Law is not the same as the prophets. To this is added the eschatological belief that the historical reality of the demiurge, the creator god, will be limited in time: Christ will bring about the decomposition of the world and its spiritual deliverance.
The gnostic vision of anarchist antitheism arises from this aporetic questioning: *why is evil omnipresent in a world created by an all-powerful, just and good God? How can this God justify the order of this world where the villains triumph, where the innocent are oppressed, where the strong exploit the weak?* To the scandal of evil, gnosis brings a very clear answer: *the God creator of this evil world and the good God who, at the end of time, will decide its destruction, cannot logically be the same person*. In that, the destruction of the nomos of this bad world participates in the advent of the anomos of the true communal life between men:
<quote>
“The passion of the destruction is at the same time a creative passion”
</quote>
, it is with these words that Bakunin concludes in 1842 his first revolutionary text, The Reaction in Germany.
Jacob Taubes, in Western Eschatology, shows that *“apocalyptic is essentially revolutionary [43].”* The apocalyptic spirit contains and unites in itself a destructive power of the figures of authority and a creative power of the figures of freedom. But it is imperative that the revolutionary spirit pursue a telos, an ideal as Proudhon would say, if it does not want to end up in a nihilistic revolution. From the socio-political point of view, the community is the carrier of the telos of the revolution. A community occurs when men cease to group themselves according to their individual interests but choose to put their life in common to live it together:
<quote>
“When men are really united by mutual links, when they experience things together and react together to this experience by their concrete life, when men have a “living center” around which they have their place, it is then that a community is formed in them” [44].
</quote>
The antiterrestrial anthropological dynamic of medieval Catholic theology manufactured the biopsychic individual of Western society by stifling the force of the revolutionary ideal. In some way, the history of our civilization can be read as a continuous alienation of the ternary anthropological structure and of the anarchist community desire. We will be able to find the revolutionary telos only by a dialectic of the included third, that is to say the setting in paroxysmal tension of the flesh of the man with the spirit of the world. Proudhon expressed in a very explicit way this *“balancing of the opposites”*:
<quote>
“The opposite terms never do anything but balance each other; the balance is not born between them of the intervention of a third term but of their reciprocal action.” (“Pornocratie, Chapitre V”) (“Pornocracy, Chap. V”). The included third party is that state of extreme tension which occurs at the point of equilibrium of any antagonistic system and opens the passage to another *“level of reality”* [45].
</quote>
One can analogously bring the Lupascian included third to the unknown God of Marcion or to Justice in Proudhon; because the *“war”* against the creator God allows to reach this state of being against the world for the sake of life which is the praxis of the anarchist gnosis.
[1] Traduction française parue en 2006 aux Éditions Lux [Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004].
[2] Cf. David Graeber et David Wengrow, « Comment changer le cours de l’histoire (ou au moins du passé) ? », Revue du Crieur, n° 11, Mediapart-La Découverte, octobre 2018, pp. 6–29.
[3] Mauss, « Essai sur les variations saisonnières des sociétés Eskimos », 1904–1905.
[4] Sur les géographes anarchistes du XIXe siècle, voir Philippe Pelletier, Géographie & anarchie. Reclus, Kropotkine, Metchnikoff, Éditions du Monde libertaire/Éditions libertaires, 2013.
[5] Anthropologie structurale, Paris, Plon, 1958, p. 389.
[6] Jérôme Baschet, Corps et âmes. Une histoire de la personne au Moyen Âge, Flammarion, 2016, p. 7.
[7] Dans le vocabulaire religieux des langues occidentales, comme le français, les termes âme et esprit sont fluctuants. Si l’on pose seulement deux termes (le corps et un principe immortel qui diffère de lui), on utilise généralement le mot âme ; mais, quand on pose trois termes (corps-âme-esprit), l’âme renvoie à la partie intermédiaire entre le corps et l’esprit, ce dernier terme correspondant alors à l’âme immortelle dans l’anthropologie dualiste.
[8] Sur le rôle de la transsubtantiation dans la généalogie de la marchandise capitaliste, voir mon article Profaner le Graal, Contrelittérature n° 2, 2020, pp. 41–59. <br> En ligne : [[http://www.contrelitterature.com/archive/2020/02/29/le-mythe-germinal-de-la-marchandise-6216285.html][contrelitterature.com/archive/2020/02/29/le-mythe-germinal-de-la-marchandise-6216285.html]]
[9] Claude Tresmontant, La métaphysique du christianisme et la crise du XIIIe siècle, Éditions du Seuil, 1964.
[10] Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, Structures et fonction dans la société primitive [1952], Paris, Minuit, 1969, p. 149.
[11] Article repris dans Sociologie et anthropologie, PUF, 1985, p. 331–362.
[12] Voir Martin Buber, Utopie et socialisme, Aubier Montaigne, 1977, p. 71.
[13] Pierre Kropotkine, La science moderne et l’anarchie, P. V. Stock & Cie, 1913, p. 227.
[14] Sur cette période, Augustin Thierry est la référence historiographique de Kropotkine.
[15] Pierre Kropotkine, La science moderne et l’anarchie, op. cit, p. 203.
[16] Pierre Kropotkine, La science moderne et l’anarchie, op. cit., p. 310.
[17] Friedrich Ratzel, Anthropogéographie, Munich, Oldenbourg, 1882 (vol. 1) et 1891 (vol. 2).
[18] Politische Geographie, Munich, Oldenbourg, 1897.
[19] Pierre Kropotkine, La science moderne et l’anarchie, op. cit., p. 170–171.
[20] Carl Schmitt, Théologie politique [1922], trad. Jean-Louis Schlegel, Paris, Gallimard, 1988.
[21] Carl Schmitt, ibid., p. 64.</em> <em>[22] Carl Schmitt, ibid., p. 65
[23] Carl Schmitt, Parlementarisme et démocratie, trad. Jean-Louis Schlegel, Paris, Seuil, p. 87.
[24] Sur l’interprétation schmitienne des grands thèmes bakouniniens, on se reportera à l’article de Jean-Christophe Angaut, « Carl Schmitt, lecteur de Bakounine », Astérion, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, 2009.</em> <em>En ligne : [[https://journals.openedition.org/asterion/1495][journals.openedition.org/asterion/1495]].
[25] Carl Schmitt, Théologie politique, op. cit., p. 73.
[26] Michel Bakounine, Fédéralisme, socialisme et antithéologisme, dans Œuvres, vol. 1, Paris, Stock, 1980, p. 166–167.
[27] Carl Schmitt, Théologie politique, op. cit., p. 74–75.
[28] Jean-Christophe Angaut, op. cit.
[29] Martin Buber, « Comment une communauté peut-elle advenir ? » [1930], dans Communauté, Éditions de l’éclat, 2018, p. 63.
[30] Cet article, hommage à Luis Legaz y Lacambra, est paru en 1960. Voir Res Publica : revue de l’Institut belge de science politique, 17, n°1, 1975, p. 99–119. [[https://ojs.ugent.be/RP/article/view/19556/16936][ojs.ugent.be/RP/article/view/19556/16936]]
[31] Voir Res Publica, op. cit, p. 107.
[32] P.-J. Proudhon, Les confession d’un révolutionnaire, Paris, Au bureau du journal La voix du peuple, 1849, p. 61.
[33] P.-J. Proudhon, De la justice dans la Révolution et dans l’Église [1848], t. 1, Fayard, 1988, p. 35.
[34] Jean Bancal, Proudhon, pluralisme et autogestion, t. 1, Aubier, 1967, p. 118.
[35] Sur le parallélisme entre Lupasco et Proudhon, voir mon intervention au Troisième Congrès Mondial de la Transdisplinarité, « Vers un anarchisme transdisciplinaire » :[[http://www.contrelitterature.com/archive/2021/04/26/proudhon-lupasco-interferences-electives-6312041.html][contrelitterature.com/archive/2021/04/26/proudhon-lupasco-interferences-electives-6312041.html]]
[36] 36. Carl Schmitt, Der Nomos der Erde im Völkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum, 1950. Édition française : Le Nomos de la Terre, Paris, PUF, 2001.
[37] Système des contradictions économiques ou philosophie de la misère, t.1, Paris. Marcel Rivière, 1923, p. 114.
[38] Voir Carnets de P.-J. Proudhon (carnet 5, 1847), Rivière, 1960, p. 159.
[39] P.-J. Proudhon, Philosophie du progrès, Rivière & Cie, Paris, 1946, p. 69.
[40] Cité dans Bernard Voyenne, Proudhon et Dieu. Le combat d’un anarchiste, Cerf, 2004, p. 69.
[41] Cette distinction est primordiale : l’anticosmisme ne doit pas être confondu avec le concept d’acosmisme de Hannah Arendt qui serait, d’après elle, le corollaire du totalitarisme moderne.
[42] Adolf von Harnack, Marcion. L’évangile du Dieu étranger, Cerf, 2003, p. 149.
[43] Jacob Taubes, Eschatologie occidentale, Éditions de l’éclat, 2009, p. 11.
[44] Martin Buber, « Comment une communauté peut-elle advenir ? » (1939) dans Communauté, Éditions de l’éclat, 2018, p. 68.
[45] Sur la notion de “niveau de réalité”, voir Basarab Nicolescu, « Le tiers caché dans les différents domaines de la connaissance », Le Tiers caché, Le bois d’Orion, 2016, p. 7–16.
|
#title Towards a Transdisciplinary Anarchism
#author Alain Santacreu
#source http://www.contrelitterature.com/apps/m/archive/2021/04/26/proudhon-lupasco-interferences-electives-6312041.html
#lang en
#pubdate 2025-07-18T00:00:00
#authors Alain Santacreu
#topics logic, transdisciplinarity, anarchy, politics, sociology, philosophy, Hegel, dialectics, Anarchism, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, mutualism, science, Economy, paradigm, Stéphane Lupasco, Basarab Nicolescu
#notes This text is a transcript of <em>Alain Santacreu’s</em> speech at the <em>Third World Congress on Transdisplinarity</em> (La Table Ronde, 14/03/2021)<em>.</em> Translated from French into English by <em>Amayas</em>.
In 1986, in the preface to what would be his last book, <em>L’homme et ses trois éthiques</em>, Stéphane Lupasco declared:
<quote>
“Up to now, my work has been at the theoretical level [...] Now it’s a question of moving on to the level of practical conditions, of solving the problems posed by the world to the human being [...]”.
</quote>
I’d like to place my speech in perspective with Stéphane Lupasco’s final petition, by suggesting, through the very title of this speech, “<em>Towards a transdisciplinary anarchism</em>”, a practical application of transdisciplinarity to the socio-political field.
I’ll try to show that anarchism as a social theory, i.e. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s non-authoritarian, mutualist socialism, can be linked to the values of transdisciplinarity, based on Stéphane Lupasco’s logic of dynamic antagonism.
First, I’d like to give an overview of this logic of contradiction, so as to be able to identify its similarities with Proudhonian dialectics.
In his philosophy, Lupasco took into account the epistemological break brought about by quantum physics in the mid-twentieth century. He inserted the contradictory into his own logic because the propositions of quantum mechanics were incomprehensible to traditional logic. The latter, since Aristotle, has been based on the principles of identity (<em>A is A</em>); non-contradiction (<em>A is not non-A</em>); and the excluded third: there is no term that is both <em>A and non-A</em> (<em>between A and non-A, any third party is excluded</em>).
For Lupasco, the contradictory thus becomes the texture of the universe. Matter and space-time are productions of the antagonistic dynamism of energy. Everything we observe, every physical, biological, social or cultural system, every phenomenon or event, is a contradictory system produced by the momentary equilibrium between two opposing energy states.
This contradictory logic is based on two antagonistic corollary processes: the first is homogenization/heterogenization, and the second is actualization/potentiation.
The first process can be characterized as follows: A system requires a balance of antagonistic energies: a homogeneous pole is opposed by an antagonistic heterogeneous pole. And the second process: a system is modified when one of the poles of energy is <em>actualized</em> (i.e. <em>manifested</em>) at the expense of the pole of antagonistic energy, which is <em>potentiated</em> (i.e. <em>awaiting manifestation</em>).
Stéphane Lupasco envisages a third case where antagonistic energies simultaneously actualize and potentiate each other. He calls this third energetic state the “<em>included third</em>” or <em>T state</em> (the letter <em>T</em> stands for “<em>third</em>”).
All of this allows Lupasco to identify three energy orientations that give rise to three materials:
1. <em>Physical matter, where the principle of homogenization predominates.</em>
1. <em>Biological matter, where heterogenization predominates.</em>
1. <em>Microphysical matter — which Lupasco equates with psychic matter — where a balance is struck between macrophysical homogenization and biological heterogenization.</em>
Let’s leave this supersonic overview of Lupascian philosophy here, and turn our attention without further ado to the word “<em>anarchy</em>”.
<em>Pierre-Joseph Proudhon</em> (1809–1865) can be considered the promulgator of the political meaning of the word <em>anarchy</em>. Anarchism, thus conceived, is the <em>non-authoritarian</em>, <em>libertarian</em> form of socialism, as opposed to Marxism, the <em>authoritarian</em>, <em>statist</em> form.
The word appears in Proudhon’s first work, <em>Qu’est-ce que la propriété?</em> (<em>What is Property?</em>) (1840). While anarchy, in its common sense, means disorder and chaos, Proudhon puts forward a paradoxical idea that defines a positive form of anarchy: “<em>The highest perfection of society</em>,” he asserts, “<em>is found in the union of order and anarchy</em>.”
According to Proudhon, anarchy is both order and disorder. Such a predicate is therefore opposed to the principles of identity (<em>A is A</em>) and non-contradiction (<em>A is not non-A</em>). And it’s easy to see why we can’t grasp the meaning of the term “<em>anarchy</em>”, except through what Lupasco has called a logic of contradictories, and which Proudhon intuited with his dialectic of antinomies.
Moreover, the word anarchy is already ambivalent in its Greek etymology <em>anarkhia</em>, which is made up of the privative prefix <em>an</em>, “<em>without</em>”, and <em>archè</em>.
Anarchy is the absence of <em>archè</em>. <em>Archè</em> signifies not only the original principle of the beginning of things, but also the ruler, the one with authority, the principle of command. Archè is both the principle that begins and the principle that commands. But since the principle of command has no precedent, being at the beginning, its power is de facto transcendent, sovereign and absolute.
Lupasco explores this theme of <em>archè</em> in <em>Chapter VIII</em> of <em>L’homme et ses trois éthiques</em>. He points out that the religious energy generated by <em>archè</em> is the foundation of all <em>homogenizing totalitarianisms</em>.
Proudhon shows that true social order (i.e., <em>positive anarchy</em>) cannot be imposed by an external <em>archè</em>, transcendent to human society. In socio-political terms, he sees that <em>negative anarchy</em>, identified with disorder and chaos, is necessary for <em>archè</em>. Negative anarchy, disorder, is linked to authority by cause and effect. Disorder is the justification for authority. In modern times, the principle of authority is represented by the state, and Proudhon uses a dialectic of contradiction, which he calls serial dialectics, to liberate the social force of political authority, so that society can recover its natural capacity for self-creation and autonomy.
Stéphane Lupasco himself dealt with the socio-political application of his philosophy in his book <em>Psychisme et Sociologie</em>, published in 1978. In it, he demonstrates that the sociological field is either homogenizing or heterogenizing. In a passage from <em>L’homme et ses trois éthiques</em>, he states that the ideology of homogenization corresponds to the actualization of Marxist state socialism, while the ideology of heterogenization corresponds to the actualization of capitalist liberalism.
Lupasco asserts that <em>heterogeneity</em> (which he describes as “<em>libertarian/libertaire</em>”) will necessarily oppose socialist homogeneity, but he seems to reduce this heterogeneity to a form of liberal individualism. He fails to note the existence of two types of socialism, which would belong to two different levels of reality (and here I’m deliberately using Basarab Nicolescu’s terminology).
In the <em>Trialogue</em>, which follows on from L’homme et ses trois éthiques, there is a very explicit exchange between Lupasco and Basarab Nicolescu. In response to Nicolescu’s question as to why Marxist societies “<em>which started out with very generous, humanist ideas [...] arrived, through their own operating mechanism, at the opposite of their own ideas</em>”, Stéphane Lupasco replies: “<em>Yes, but I’d say that these totalitarian states you’re talking about that have a Marxist option also stem from the fact that, for Marx, only macrophysical matter existed. We hadn’t yet become aware of biological heterogeneity, which is quite recent</em>.”
Well, such an answer couldn’t have applied to Proudhon!
For Proudhon was well aware of life’s antagonistic dynamism. Here’s a very explicit quote from <em>La Guerre et la Paix</em> (War and Peace), published in 1861: “[<em>In the physical, psychic, sociological universe] opposition, antagonism, antinomy burst forth everywhere [...] Antagonism, action-reaction, is the universal law of the world</em>” (La Guerre et la Paix, “Conclusion générale”).
Stéphane Lupasco, who clearly didn’t know Proudhon, was unaware that Proudhonian philosophy was based on a logic of contradiction quite similar to his own. Jean Bancal, one of Proudhon’s best exegetes, was well aware of this, declaring:
<quote>
“The theory of the particle and the antiparticle constitutes in modern physics a confirmation of the Proudhonian theory of the antinomic organization of the world”.
(Jean Bancal, Proudhon, Pluralisme et Autogestion, T. 1, Aubier, 1967, p. 118.)
</quote>
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s social critique was directed against the two actualizations of modern society identified by Lupasco: Marxist authoritarian socialism and capitalist liberalism. Now, since there are three subjects, there should be three types of society. Is a <em>T</em>-type society, a “<em>psychic</em>” society, possible? This is where I bring in Proudhon’s <em>self-managing socialism</em>.
Mutualist socialism is based on a logic of antinomies. According to Proudhon, “<em>the world, society and man are composed of irreducible elements, antithetical principles and antagonistic forces</em>” (Théorie de l’impôt/The Theory of Taxation).
In his very first work, <em>De la Célébration du Dimanche</em> (<em>The Celebration of Sunday</em>), he spelled out his social program: “<em>to find a state of social equality that is liberty in order and independence in unity</em>.” It was on the balancing of the antagonistic pairs liberty-order and independence-unity that he would base his socio-political vision.
Proudhon’s balancing of opposites corresponds to the actualization-potentiation process of Lupascian logic. Proudhon expresses this explicitly in one of his writings <em>La Pornocratie, ou Les Femmes dans les Temps Modernes</em>, Chapitre. V (<em>Pornocracy, or Women in Modern Times, Chapter V</em>):
<quote>
“Opposite terms never do anything but balance each other; equilibrium is not born between them from the intervention of a third term, but from their reciprocal action.”
</quote>
Proudhon’s critique of the Hegelian dialectic seems to me to be very similar to that of Lupasco. In <em>De la Justice dans la Révolution et dans l’Église</em> (<em>Justice in the Revolution and in the Church</em>), Proudhon writes that Hegel’s error is not to have understood that “<em>the antinomy is not resolvable, but indicates an oscillation or antagonism susceptible only to equilibrium</em>.”
Obviously, the economic world is no exception to this antinomian reality. The economy, according to Proudhon, is a series of successive couplings of contradictory elements, the principal one being the conflict between labor and capital. What Proudhon calls a series corresponds, in Lupascian terminology, to a chain of systems of systems.
The “<em>revolutionary</em>” order (as opposed to the “<em>theological</em>” order) thus emerges as an antinomic dialectic that Proudhon calls serial dialectics. This plurality of antinomic elements reveals the work of an organizing force that creates unity. Acting within the antagonistic system itself, this force brings opposing polarities to a dynamic tension that achieves what he calls pluralist unity.
This organizing force, which creates systems of systems, is akin to the Lupascian included third. At the socio-political level, the principle of Justice, which orchestrates the balancing of socio-political antagonisms, is identified with this unifying force. For Proudhon, Justice is a capacity of human consciousness, immanent to it. It innately possesses a sense of human dignity, i.e., the spontaneous recognition of others as equals in law. Through Justice, the human being possesses that faculty which Stéphane Lupasco calls “<em>consciousness of consciousness</em> and <em>knowledge of knowledge</em>”, and which is specific to psychic energy. Justice results from the incessant balancing of antinomies, and is the ethic of the society of the inclusive third.
In his critiques of social alienation (be it religious, capitalist or state-led), Proudhon always attempts to establish what he calls the “<em>autonomy of society</em>”, outside of any external authority. What he means by “<em>autonomy of society</em>” is the social form that positive anarchy takes, i.e., the possibility for society to govern and manage itself. Proudhon theorized his mutualism from the application of Justice to the economy. Proudhonian economic mutualism can be defined as the construction of a society of producers and consumers based on reciprocity and justice in exchanges. It was in <em>De la Justice dans la Révolution et dans l’Église</em> (<em>Justice in the Revolution and in the Church</em>) (1858) that Proudhon gave the ultimate definition of his concept of Justice: “Man, by virtue of the reason with which he is endowed, has the faculty of feeling his dignity in the person of his fellow man as in his own person, of asserting himself both as an individual and as a species. Justice is the product of this faculty: “<em>it is the spontaneously felt and reciprocally guaranteed respect for human dignity, in whatever person and in whatever circumstance it may be compromised, and at whatever risk its defense may expose us</em>.”
This reference to the perception of “<em>human dignity</em>” through the notion of Justice, personally reminds me of Basarab Nicolescu’s statement concerning the notion of the <em>Tiers Caché</em> (<em>The Hidden Third</em>):
<quote>
“The Hidden Third is the guardian of the irreducible mystery of the human being. It is the only possible foundation for tolerance and human dignity. Without it, all is ashes.”
(Le Tiers Caché. Considérations Méthodologiques.)
</quote>
By actualizing themselves, homogenizing state societies potentiate liberal pluralistic heterogeneity. Conversely, by actualizing itself, liberalism potentiates homogenizing state totalitarianism. But there is a double potentiation which, on the social level, seems to me to have been overlooked, since the actualization of both social totalitarianism and social liberalism potentiates both, the society of the third-included.
If we are aware of this double potentiation, we realize that, in the socio-political sphere, modernity could be read as the permanent potentiation of the society of the third-included (i.e. <em>positive anarchy</em>).
In the process that Stéphane Lupasco calls <em>la causalité par antagonisme</em> (c<em>ausality by antagonism</em>), the cause that is actualization implies a potentiation that contains within it, as potentiation, the cause of what is going to be actualized. Now, if the cause by actualization is an efficient cause, the cause by potentiation, Lupasco tells us, is a teleological cause, a final cause. This teleological cause is the awareness of what can happen. Consequently, we can say that the double potentiation of non-authoritarian autonomous social theory must be seen as the awareness of the finality of human society.
I’d like to quote again from the “<em>Trialogue</em>” and Basarab Nicolescu’s luminous remark to Stéphane Lupasco:
<quote>
“The notion of finality repels the scientific mind, because we automatically think of the old notion of finality. I think you manage to unify the notion of finality and that of freedom, because finality, after all, is the finality of systems, created by the systems themselves. Therefore, it’s not an external agent.”
</quote>
Basarab Nicolescu’s remark is very Proudhonian, for it means that the teleological cause is not transcendent, that it does not correspond to the authority of an <em>archè</em>.
By way of conclusion, I’d like to extract from the “<em>Trialogue</em>” this exchange between Basarab Nicolescu and Stéphane Lupasco:
<quote>
B. N: [...] But couldn’t we build a system of relations in which state T, experienced both individually and socially, would predominate?
S. L: It’s a new evolution, an evolution towards the sociological psyche.
I dare to equate this evolution towards <em>sociological psyche</em> with the <em>social evolution</em> towards <em>transdisciplinary anarchism</em>.
</quote>
|
#title Anarchism and Agriculture
#author Alan Albon
#date 1964
#source Retrieved on March 18, 2025 from https://libcom.org/library/anarchism-agriculture
#lang en
#pubdate 2025-03-18T20:25:18
#topics agriculture, farmers
#notes First published in Anarchy magazine
<verse>
<em>For the Father of Agriculture</em>
<em>Gave us a hard calling: he first decreed it an art</em>
<em>To work the fields, sent worries to sharpen our mortal wits</em>
<em>And would not allow his realm to grow listless from lethargy.</em>
<em>Before Jove’s time no settlers brought the land under subjection;</em>
<em>Not lawful even to divide the plain with land marks and boundaries:</em>
<em>All produce went to a common pool, and earth unprompted</em>
<em>Was free with all her fruits.</em>
—THE GEORGICS OF VIRGIL, trans. C. Day Lewis
</verse>
IF IT HAS ANY MEANING, anarchism is a concept which is accepted because it is more in line with human aspirations than an authoritarian governmental social structure, that is, a concept that will serve man’s future as a part of the ecological structure of organic life on the earth. Man must take a shorter look at what is above his head and a longer and deeper look at what is immediately beneath his feet, and I do not mean the tin of his automobile, or the concrete of his cities. The first essential for a stable civilisation is a stable, non-exploitive agriculture, an agriculture which not only nourishes a community of men, but will continue to do so indefinitely. Unless this is achieved, industrialism and its techniques will merely be illusions which, if they do not achieve the total demise of life on this planet through modern warfare, will achieve the same end by starvation.
To the anarchist who is concerned with anarchism as a viable way of life, and not as a mere act of personal rebellion, <em>Mutual</em> <em>Aid</em> by Kropotkin and <em>Soil</em> <em>and</em> <em>Civilisation</em> by Edward Hyams, make essential reading. These two men are concerned with man as part, not only of a community of men, but also of a community of the soil and plant and animal life. Living in vast cities where the shops are bulging with food, and in Europe where climatic conditions are favourable and where the soil has been stabilised by years of a comparatively workable husbandry which stands a lot of abuse without ill effects being immediately apparent, it is hard to believe that the soil community of which we are members is so precarious. The history of agriculture makes interesting reading, so does its relationship with peace, aggression and the decline and fall of civilisation. The ease with which soil fertility, the only real source of capital, is used up by the manipulation of power and the waste of war, the speed at which even civilisations with far less power than we have at our disposal, dissipated the laborious toil of man and nature, should be a salutary lesson to those who think in terms of what Edward Hyams calls a “high civilisation” without reference to a basically workable agriculture. With modern techniques the Americans produced a dust bowl in half a decade. The Romans with slave manpower took longer. Both have an exploitive attitude to our natural environment and to mankind.
The modern industrial commercial state imposes on the farming community conditions which will cause the decay of much of the land now in production. Of course the blind forces of commodity production may reverse the process, but often what is quickly done is not soonest mended. It seems to me that when considering a social organisation we have primarily to consider it in relation to agriculture. We also have to consider a world population growing more rapidly than ever before, to be fed, at the moment, on diminishing areas of land of diminishing fertility. There has to be a dramatic change in people’s attitudes, a change which could deal with both these threats to our continued existence on earth.
The anarchist is opposed to the manipulation and exploitation of man by man, he has a concept of man as belonging to one family. This must be carried further to a concept of man as part of an ecological system. A pragmatic approach, free from religious, political and commercial ideologies and from short-term sectional interests is the only one which will create a series of workable soil-communities on earth. It is as well here to define what a soil is: a soil becomes a soil when it contains sufficient organic residues to support soil micro-organisms and the larger forms of plant and animal life. The type of life it supports is controlled and modified by moisture and temperature, and, in nature, residues both plant and animal, slowly build up this organic content, known as humus. As it builds up this in turn also has an effect on the temperature and humidity.
Man as hunter and food gatherer is an integral part of this community and is also subject to the natural checks that prevent one species from dominating another. Man as a primitive agriculturalist and herds-man soon found that his activities in taking crops exhaust the soil, and moved on, allowing the vigour of the surroundings to replenish the area. In effect, organic growth is composed first of the mineral of the rock, air and water, and the energy of the sun; the larger and more complex organisms requiring a mixture of these plus humus and the enormously complicated soil population that teems beneath the sod. Therefore before man could achieve a settled habitat where he could develop, there had to be an agricultural system that replenished the organic content. Where this system failed, the civilisation became aggressive and decayed, or both. It should be noted that tillage systems exhaust soils more rapidly than pastoral systems which often do not disturb the existing ecological arrangement.
Practically the only area in the world in which the soil is self-renewing other than by a system of rational agriculture is the Nile valleys where for thousands of years the Nile has brought soil from Abyssinia and the upper reaches, and annually flooded, refertilising the land with fresh soil. This is the exception; to crop land in all other circumstances impoverishes it, more or less according to climatic conditions. So a workable system of manuring must be created so that the humus content is maintained and if possible increased.
What have been the most successful agricultural systems in the terms we have described? According to Edward Hyams, “The two tried methods of land holding which entail soil conservation and improvement are those of medium freehold combined with high farming, such as the English system of the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries; and the national land ownership with strict laws of soil management, such as the Incarial system of ancient Peru.” He goes on, “Probably the soundest farmers in Russia were the monks, and as the monasteries owned up to one third of all the land the damage done by bad soil management was reduced or at least slowed considerably.”
Hyams also states that “Agricultural slavery leads inevitably to abuse of soil: the actual labourers on the land have little or no interest in its condition, while its owners look upon it merely as a source of personal not communal wealth.” I would go further and say that wage slavery, interest and commerce accelerates abuse of the soil, perpetuates a divided community of privileged and underprivileged, divides a huge insecure industrial proletariat from the source of its life and debases values. Agriculture is too serious a matter to leave in the hands of politicians, industrialists and profiteers, and the soil heritage left from the depredation of militarism, ignorance and greed, is too precious to be squandered by the wastefulness of a consumer society. At the moment the agricultural system that provided the initial surplus value that was the basis of the industrial revolution is being refashioned to commercial needs and on the pattern of modern industrial production. It is, in Hyams’ expression, ceasing to be soil-making agriculture and is becoming a soil-consuming agriculture.
It is perhaps significant that ANARCHY will have passed its third birthday before the problem of agriculture is discussed, and yet in any society its needs must be paramount in the organisation of society. The anarchist movement has probably been too much influenced by the concepts of progress in modern industrial society, and by the Marxian idea of surplus value, most of which is being flushed down the lavatory as paper, faeces and urine.
An anarchist society would, I hope, start by asking the right questions: does it feed? Will it continue to feed? Will it sustain a vigorous and healthy society? The question: “Does it pay?” except from the ecological point of view, would be dropped from the vocabulary. Exploitation and parasitism would have to cease in relation to the soil, as with man and man. Techniques of farming would have to suit climate and situations and machines devised to help with the conservation of soils. Countries where the soil is seriously eroded would be assisted with reafforestation and irrigation and supplied with other sources of heat and power so that dung is not burnt and hillsides denuded of their cover.
In fact an anarchist programme would be to push out the frontier of viable agriculture. As I see it the type of agriculture to do all that is needed of it, would be one based on relatively small groups, where consumers and producers are closely connected and where all members of the community whether artisans or agriculturalists take a lively and vital interest in the soil that gives them life. Significantly Kropotkin puts the Fields first in his pamphlet on <em>Fields, Factories and Workshops</em>. The vast exchange of foodstuffs cannot continue without some sort of parasitism, basically the community of a soil must be maintained by an exchange of organic matter between consumers and soil.
The soil must be regarded as a community asset that no individual has the right to destroy. The pressure on the food sources of any part of the world must be recognised as a threat to the stability of the world population, and a non-commercial food policy would enable technical and physical assistance before the irrevocable steps towards total soil destruction are taken.
If history teaches us nothing else, it teaches us that progress is not an inevitable march forward: it is a history of civilisations buried in the dust of destroyed soils. Kropotkin in <em>Mutual</em> <em>Aid</em> proposes the theory of a partnership, whereas other political and social ideas think in terms of power and exploitation. The first concept is the only one with a future. There must be a partnership of artisans and peasants in groups small enough to control both their social and biological relationships so that there is a reality of values, the peasant to conserve what is necessary to conserve, the artisan to create what is necessary to create to prevent stagnation.
* * *
As in all forms of capitalist production, price and profit are the main motivation for agricultural production. There is however a recognition that such blind forces cannot be altogether the deciding factor in this important field of human activity, hence nearly every country uses some sort of support system. There are many small farmers whose hourly rate of pay probably comes to less than an employed agricultural worker’s rate, but who still prefer this life to any other; they are steadily declining in numbers. Quality, unless it has an immediate and decisive effect on profit, takes second place to quantity. Food is subject to processes which are concerned with it as a commodity and not as a means of nutrition. A life assurance firm would testify that quantity has little to do with quality.
While most of the official purveyors of agricultural knowledge are concerned with reducing costs and streamlining production, the tendency is to forget that food is primarily an essential necessity for living things. The only organisation in Britain which starts from this position is the Soil Association. Their contention that the organic content of the soil is necessary for high fertility is not now disputed. A leaflet published by the United States Department of Agriculture Soil Conservation Service (No. 328) states that owing to 20 per cent to 50 per cent loss of organic matter, land is now harder to farm. In Britain, with a long tradition of mixed farming and rotation crops, it has taken longer for the effects of such large-scale operations to have an effect. Even here in some of our best land the loss of humus in the fens has been terrific and now farmers are finding that disease and difficulties in cultivation are making crop yields decline.
In the <em>Farmer</em> <em>and</em> <em>Stockbreeder</em> (27.8.1963) a correspondent asks: “Just how far can we go with this continuous corn-growing lark? Make no mistake, the writing is on the wall this year, and the answer which it gives to most people is: Not very far.” Addressing the zoology section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science last year. Dr. F. Fraser Darling said, “The immense buffer and reservoir of the wilderness has shrunk in area and influence. Quite suddenly in these past twenty-five years and particularly since the last war, there has been a shaking of confidence. The all-conquering technological man whose mind has the same characteristics as the bulldozers employed to grow groundnuts on a prodigious scale in Tanganyika, is already out of date, although the breed is highly inventive and has in no way accepted defeat.”
As in other fields it is the minorities and so-called cranks who see the dangers produced by the scrabble for money and power. To some extent in recent years the dangers of certain agricultural practices have been brought to the notice of the general public. The danger is that a lot of harm can be done in circumstances where our knowledge is limited, and the pressure to adopt methods that reduce costs and increase profit without the proper investigation of the long-term effects is overwhelming. The organic school contend, and their experiments tend to indicate, that artificials used, even in conjunction with farmyard manure (and only 8 per cent of our crops receive an application of it) produce certain changes in the crops.
For a long time a very careful experiment has been carried out at Haughley, Suffolk, details of which can be obtained from the Soil Association, from which it can be seen that infinite pains have been taken with limited resources to rule out other variables. Here a herd of cows has consistently yielded more and in some respects better milk on less food, on an organic run part of the farm, than a similar herd of the same genetic background on the part of the farm run with the use of chemical fertilisers. The Association contends that artificials, which can be defined as a selection of highly-soluble chemicals, Nitrogen, Phosphate, Potash, that are known to have a stimulating effect on plant growth, do two things. They tend by the nature of their solubility to saturate the soil solution and exclude necessary trace elements so that the plant food is unbalanced. They accelerate the rate at which the humus in the soil is used particularly where this is the only means of fertilisation. It is also believed that they discourage soil organisms which break down organic matter and provide plant food. Eve Balfour in <em>The</em> <em>Living</em> <em>Soil</em> writes, “It is believed that the health of man, beast, plant and soil is one indivisible whole; that the health of the soil depends on maintaining its biological balance, and that starting with a truly fertile soil, the crops grown on it, the livestock fed on those crops, and the humans fed on both have a standard of health and a power of resisting disease and infection, from whatever cause, greatly in advance of anything ordinarily found in this country; such health as we have almost forgotten should be our natural state, so used have we become to subnormal physical fitness.”
Whether or not artificial fertilisers can be used without ill effects must be a subject of much more investigation; it is certain that the manufacturers will not institute an investigation in the absence of positive proof: that might put them out of business. When large vested interests scoff at the idea that their products may have a harmful effect the need for independent research is paramount. One only gets the right answers if one asks the right questions. (What has been an immense source of profit for the tobacco companies, has been a loss to the community.) What is certain is that there is a lot of disease associated with mineral disturbances in cattle and a tremendous wastage through infertility, and now we find that animals are beginning. to get nitrate poisoning. Andre Vosin, who is a farmer and a biochemist, advocates the judicious use of basic fertilisers and a system of rational grazing, and reckons that productivity of grassland can be raised well above arable levels by an ecological approach. In a recent work called Soil, Grass and Cancer he contends that the health of animals and men is linked to the mineral balance of the soil.
The criteria for a successful agriculture must be the production of a balanced diet for every human being, a healthy and vigorous humanity, and soil that is maintained and improved in fertility by the farming practice. Food must be removed from the category of a commodity. With great technological advances we tend to forget the basis of our life and the precariousness of that basis. As Sir George Stapleton said in The Land, Now and Tomorrow: “I am sure that if man looked at himself biologically, he would realise that, evolve as he may, he can never hope to be in a perfect state of equilibrium with his environment unless that environment satisfies his organism as a whole, and unless man lives in a state of equilibrium with his environment, then man himself cannot be whole, inevitably. he will be unbalanced. We have evolved, not from a chemical retort, not from a laboratory or technical process and not under the atmospheric and psychological influences of great cities, nor has homo sapiens been weaned on a diet of processed foods.”
|
#title Analytical Anarchism
#subtitle Some Conceptual Foundations
#author Alan Carter
#SORTauthors Alan Carter
#SORTtopics the State, anti-state, analysis
#date April 2000
#source *Political Theory* Volume: 28 issue: 2, page(s): 230–253 Issue published: April 1, 2000. DOI:10.1177/0090591700028002005
#lang en
#pubdate 2021-05-19T06:24:13
#centerchapter 1
#centersection 1
; ANALYTICAL ANARCHISM Some Conceptual Foundations
; <em>ALAN CARTER University of London</em>
In the 1980s, Marxist political philosophy suffered mixed fortunes. On one hand, it underwent a considerable demise in Eastern Europe as a state- promoted ideology. On the other hand, it enjoyed a profound and positive development in Western academia, principally as a result of the seminal work of G. A. Cohen,[1] whose clarifications of key Marxist concepts and explanatory claims gave birth to the fecund school of analytical Marxism. Historically, Marxist political philosophy has been subjected to incessant critiques from anarchists. However, now that Marxism has evolved into a form that can hold its own within the anglophone tradition of analytical philosophy, anarchism, which at one time was the major alternative on the revolutionary Left to Marxism, would appear to have been left well and truly behind.
But is it really the case that anarchism is incapable of enjoying a similar intellectual development? In what follows, I attempt some clarifications of concepts and explanations that show that there is more mileage in anarchist political theory than might at first be assumed. Thus, such clarifications might serve to rescue anarchist political thought and the often profound insights it contains from an otherwise premature burial by both liberal and Marxist academics.
Now, whereas many of Karl Marx’s theoretical claims were offered as a response to anarchist thinkers (for example, Max Stimer and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon),[2] some anarchists (in particular, the Russian Mikhail Alexandro- vitch Bakunin) developed their views in opposition to Marx’s. The anarchist theory that follows is a development in response to what is currently the most sophisticated version of Marxist theory—Cohen’s. And just as Cohen has developed his clarifications firmly within the tradition of analytical philosophy, the following discussion is also located within that tradition. Consequently, as Cohen has given us analytical Marxism, what follows could be regarded as an exploration into “analytical anarchism.”
*** I
First, though, how should we conceptualize “anarchism,” in the sense of a political belief system? As “anarchy” literally means “without rule” (thus signifying a situation in which no person rules over another), then a condition of pure anarchy might be thought to consist of a complete equality of political power—perfect political equality, as it were. But, many would object, if anarchists seek pure anarchy in this sense, then, quite simply, they are seeking the unattainable. In any practicable social arrangement, some people are bound to possess more power than others.
However, anarchism is not the only system of political beliefs that seems at first sight to be incoherent insofar as its adherents appear to be striving for a condition that is, arguably, unattainable; egalitarianism has been dismissed on similar grounds. If egalitarians are seeking perfect equality (which, it is often assumed, means that everyone is to be made exactly the same), then, many would object, they are seeking the unattainable. In response, John Baker has denied that egalitarians are seeking perfect equality in this sense. Rather, in his view, egalitarians merely oppose certain substantive inequalities.[3] And if “egalitarianism” is construed as the opposition to certain substantive inequalities, it is not so easy to dismiss.
Perhaps, then, “anarchism” should be interpreted in a similar way. Not all anarchists should be dismissed out of hand for attempting to bring about pure anarchy. Rather, anarchists could more profitably be viewed as those who oppose certain substantive political inequalities and not merely economic ones. Anarchists oppose certain inequalities in political power, just as egalitarians oppose certain inequalities in, especially, economic power. And the most significant political inequalities, for anarchists, are those that flow from centralized, authoritarian forms of government.
This suggests that “anarchism,” as a political belief system, might best be construed as having both a normative and an empirical component. Anarchism could be viewed as containing a normative opposition to certain substantive political inequalities, along with the empirical belief that political equality (in the sense of an absence of specific, substantive political inequalities) is inevitably undermined by state power. Given the normative component, anarchism can thus be regarded as a form of egalitarianism—political egalitarianism. However, many of those who advocate representative democracy would also regard themselves as political egalitarians. It is the second feature—namely, the empirical belief (which most of those who describe themselves as “anarchists” tend to hold) that centralized, authoritarian forms of government (including varieties of representative democracy) cannot
deliver political equality—that would distinguish anarchists from others who claim to value political equality.
Thus, given the conceptualization of “anarchism” proposed here, for an individual to be an anarchist, he or she would have to hold both the normative opposition to certain substantive political inequalities and the empirical belief that they principally derive from, are preserved by, or are embedded within, certain centralized forms of power.[4] Hence, all anarchists, on the proposed definition, oppose the state. But that should not be confused with an opposition to society. Nor should it be confused with a rejection of all the rules that a society might need—for example, moral rules. In fact, most anarchists are highly moral.[5] Consequently, when discussing anarchism, it is extremely important to realize that “without rule” does not have to signify “without rules,” nor does it have to mean a lack of structure. What is surely crucial to any version of anarchism worth its salt is that the anarchist structures it proposes be empowering to those within them and do not lead to a centralization of power or decision making. Even with those restrictions, the possibilities for anarchist social organization are clearly far greater than most opponents of anarchism realize or than is portrayed in popular stereotypes of anarchist practice.
Having offered what might appear a more attractive and fruitful way of conceptualizing anarchism—namely, as the opposition to certain substantive political inequalities, combined with the belief that the state inevitably embodies, generates, and/or preserves those inequalities—I now turn to consider the central respect in which anarchist political theory and thus anarchist political practice differ from their Marxist counterparts. This will lead us into an analysis of the crucial relationship between the political and economic inequalities that anarchists oppose.
*** II
Certain Marxists—in particular, Leninists—have been willing to adopt a vanguardist approach to revolutionary change, while Marx, himself, sanctioned a transitional form of governmental power—what he referred to as “the dictatorship of the proletariat.”[6] And insofar as this would be coercive and centralized,[7] then it would be some form of state. Anarchists have traditionally most opposed Marxists on these grounds, arguing that a revolutionary vanguard would soon turn itself into a new statelike form and further arguing that no statelike form could be relied on to engineer an effective transition to an egalitarian society.
But this anarchist objection, if it is to be at all compelling, requires a coherent theory of historical change. As Cohen has provided the clearest foundations for a Marxist theory of history, I now attempt to provide similarly clear foundations for a contrasting anarchist theory—foundations that employ conceptual and explanatory clarifications that parallel Cohen’s.
What specific conceptual tools does a cogent anarchist theory of history require, then, if it is to serve as the basis for a plausible political theory (especially one that can hold its own against recent developments in Marxist theory)? It seems likely that anarchists must, at the very least, be in possession of the concepts employed by the most sophisticated version of Marxism if they are to oppose it successfully. So let me begin my attempt at providing a few of the main components of an anarchist conceptual toolkit by appropriating some of the important concepts that Cohen has usefully clarified.
Following Marx, Cohen distinguishes between a “superstructure” of noneconomic institutions (in particular, legal and political institutions) and the structure of relations of production that comprise the “base” or “foundation,” in Marx’s terminology. For brevity’s sake, we can regard this as a distinction between a set of political relations and a set of economic relations. Cohen further distinguishes between the relations of production and the forces of production. According to Cohen, the relations of production are best construed as relations of, or relations presupposing, effective control of the productive forces. And it is the development of these forces of production that explains historical transition, on Cohen’s interpretation of Marx’s theory of history. Within the forces of production, Cohen distinguishes between the labor-power of the producing agents and the means of production (which are primarily tools and raw materials). What develops when the forces of production develop, therefore, is labor-power in the form of skill and knowledge, on one hand, and tools and machinery, on the other. For convenience, I shall refer to this as “technological development.”
But why does Cohen define the economic structure as a set of relations of, or presupposing, effective control of the productive forces, rather than as it is standardly conceived—namely, as a set of ownership rights? He does so because a common objection raised by analytical philosophers against Marx’s theory of history is that the base cannot be effectively distinguished from the superstructure because economic relations are legal relations, and legal relations are superstructural. By defining economic relations in a <em>rechtsfrei</em> manner, Cohen side-steps this objection.
However, construing economic relations as relations of, or presupposing, effective control of the productive forces gives rise to the question of how such control is enabled and preserved—a question that anyone at all sympathetic to anarchism is bound to ask. Just as Cohen argues that it is a mistake to confuse <em>rechtsfrei</em> economic relations with legal ones, an anarchist is likely to argue that it is at least as serious an error to fail to separate economic relations when construed as relations of, or presupposing, effective control from whatever the ability to exercise that control rests on. Such an ability cannot just be taken for granted. It requires power.[8] How, then, is that ability enabled and preserved? Without doubt, partly by the coating of legality it has been sprayed with—in other words, by a general acceptance of the legal standing of the economic relations. But it is also enabled and preserved coercively by agents of the state—by those actors deemed responsible for securing economic control: namely, the police and, in the last resort, military personnel. But these agents are not economic forces, economic relations, or legal or political relations, although they might be situated within political relations, just as the economic forces are situated within economic relations.
In short, Cohen distinguishes between the political and the economic, on one hand, and between relations and forces, on the other. But, an anarchist is compelled to object, the set of categories Cohen thereby employs within his theory of history is incomplete. He only employs economic forces, economic relations, and political relations. To complete the list, we would need to draw a distinction within the political sphere that parallels the one drawn within the economic. Let us therefore distinguish between both the political and the economic instances and between their respective relations and forces. This gives us four categories: political relations, economic relations, economic forces, and political forces—the latter category containing forces of defense. And as this new category—political forces—comprises the forces that empower the state, it is obviously going to figure predominantly in any cogent anarchist political theory.
So, on the basis of the discussion so far, an anarchist conceptual toolkit would need to include at least the following: on one hand, like Cohen’s, it would require instruments for distinguishing between relations of production and forces of production. Thus, it requires, at the most general level, the distinction between economic relations and economic forces. The set of economic relations, constituting the economic structure, comprises relations of, or presupposing, effective control over production and, I would also want to add, relations of, or presupposing, effective control over exchange.[9] Relations of production, specifically, are relations of, or presupposing, effective control of the productive forces. And these economic forces—the forces of production—comprise economic labor-power (that capacity that the agents of production supply) and the means of production (for example, machinery). On the other hand, venturing beyond Cohen’s limited set of distinctions, an
anarchist conceptual toolkit would require the further distinction, also at the most general level, between political relations and political forces.
But what more needs to be said concerning this additional distinction between political relations and political forces? As the ability to control effectively the economic forces rests, at least in modem societies, on both the accepted legality of the economic relations and, most important, on their
preservation by the political forces, then any such ability is, at least in part,
dependent on relations of power—in other words, political relations involving the following:
1. the power to enact laws that are then viewed as legitimate,
1. the power to enforce such laws, and
1. the power to defend the community against external aggression.
Included within the set of political relations, constituting the political structure, are these power relations, essential for enabling and preserving the relations of control over production and exchange and that are embodied in the various legal and political institutions. The political institutions, specifically, are relations of, or presupposing, effective control of the defensive forces. In the modem state, these political forces—the forces of “defense” (which are more often offensive than genuinely defensive)—are coercive in nature. And such forces of coercion can comprise political labor-power (that capacity that, for example, agents of coercion supply—in other words, the work offered by soldiers, police, and so on for payment) and means of coercion (for example, weapons, prisons, even instruments of torture).
With these various distinctions in mind, we now possess some of the conceptual apparatus necessary to reach some understanding of the role played by the modem state in historical transitions—a role that anarchist theory must be able to describe convincingly if its rejection of the vanguardist and statist approaches to revolutionary transformation advocated by Marxists is to be in the least compelling.
*** III
First, though, if an anarchist theory of historical change is to be developed in contraposition to Marx’s, what precisely is Marx’s theory? According to Cohen, Marx’s theory of history can only be presented in a coherent fashion if it is interpreted as employing functional explanations. In particular, Marx’s theory, on Cohen’s interpretation of it, claims that specific economic relations are “selected” because they are functional for the development of the forces of production. By employing functional explanations, Cohen is able to reconcile Marx’s claim that it is technological development that has explanatory primacy[10] with his seemingly contradictory claim that the economic relations significantly affect technological development.[11] Similarly, Cohen’s interpretation of Marx’s account of the relationship between the base and superstructure involves functional explanations. Specific legal and political institutions are “selected” because they stabilize the economic relations. The remarkable strength of Cohen’s account is that it manages to acknowledge both the effect of the economic relations on technological development and the effect of the structure of legal and political institutions on the economic relations while nevertheless still allowing the “selection” by the economic forces of the economic relations to enjoy explanatory primacy.
Cohen’s conceptual and explanatory clarifications thus allow the following theory of history to be stated: certain economic relations are, for a while, functional for technological development. But at a certain point in time, they become dysfunctional for further technological development (or, perhaps in the case of a transition to postcapitalism, for the optimal use of the prevailing technology). A revolution then occurs whereby the structure of legal and political institutions is transformed into one that stabilizes new economic relations that are functional for technological development beyond the present level (or, perhaps, that are functional for the optimal use of the prevailing technology). Moreover, the new structure of legal and political institutions is chosen precisely because it stabilizes the new economic relations that are functional for further technological development (or, perhaps, for the optimal use of technology).
But why should anyone suppose that the economic forces, the economic relations, and the political relations are connected in this way? Well, Cohen provides the following elaboration in support of his theory: there is a tendency for the forces of production to develop through history (what he calls “the Development Thesis”). This is due to two main, albeit controversial, factors:
a. rationality and
b. scarcity.
It is to be assumed that human beings are rational and that they face a situation of scarcity (in the sense of having to work more than they would wish). It is also assumed, and this is uncontroversial, that it is within the capability of some to develop new technologies. As it appears rational for individuals in a situation of scarcity to develop technology further, then it can be assumed
that there will be a tendency for technological development to take place. If, to develop technology further or faster, it is necessary to select economic relations (e.g., capitalist relations) that would be functional for that development, then it would appear rational for such relations to be selected. And if the legal and political institutions must change in order that the required economic relations be stabilized, then it is rational to select new and more appropriate legal and political institutions. Thus, Cohen seems to have presented a cogent, purposive elaboration of his conjunction of functional explanations.
So, according to Cohen, technological development plays the key role within the process of historical change. Put another way, on Cohen’s account, central to Marx’s theory of history is the development of the forces of production. These economic forces explain the nature of the economic relations, which in turn explain the nature of the political relations. However, earlier, we identified a fourth category—one that appears to be omitted from this Marxist theory—namely, political forces (the forces of defense or, more usually, of coercion). Obviously, such forces will be of great concern to anarchists given their hostility to the state and given that the power of state institutions is, at least in part, premised on these forces. And it is also obvious that anarchists are likely to be dismissive of any political theory that fails to pay due attention to the bases of state power. How, then, are the political forces to be fitted into a theory of historical transition that includes political relations, economic relations, and economic forces? And crucially, does the resulting theory support anarchist rather than Marxist approaches to revolution?
*** IV
Cohen, as we have noted, accords explanatory primacy to the development of the economic forces. So, it might be useful to turn our attention to how the development of the economic forces relates to the political forces.
One consequence of the development of the forces of production has been the generation of an extractable surplus that has facilitated the development of the political forces—especially coercive forces—to provide greater security. In other words, there has not just been a development of the productive forces but “defensive” development too. And this defensive development, along with the growth of nationalistic sentiments, has led to antagonistic nation-states.
Now, it is widely accepted that Marxist theory, because of its emphasis on the economic, has proved itself to be quite inadequate with regard to analyzing convincingly the phenomenon of nationalism. Cohen, for one, has come
to doubt the ability of traditional Marxism to account for this important social feature. (Other features that pose similar difficulties are ethnicity, gender relations, and religion.) We have seen that two main factors—rationality and scarcity—motivate his theory of history. To deal with phenomena such as nationalism, Cohen has, more recently, been led to specify a third important factor, which he introduces as follows:
<quote>
Marxist philosophical anthropology is one-sided. Its conception of human nature and human good overlooks the need for self-definition, than which nothing is more essentially human. And that need is part of the explanation of the peculiar strength of national and other self-identifications, which Marxists tend to undervalue.[12]
</quote>
Perhaps by taking this additional factor into account, along with (a) rationality and (b) scarcity, Marxists might be in a position to explain the features of society that otherwise appear to fall outside the ambit of historical materialism (e.g., nationalism). This third important factor can be characterized as
c. self-definition within a community.
But for Cohen to introduce this factor as an afterthought, as it were, is procedurally questionable. Cohen’s theory of history was constructed principally on the basis of factors (a) and (b). Factor (c) was not present in the formation of the theory. A later introduction into Marxist theory of this additional factor is problematic because, with this factor in operation but ignored in the theory’s presentation, we no longer know that the theory of history can still be constructed in a convincing manner.
Cohen argues that it is rational to develop technology in a situation of scarcity. If only factors (a) and (b) are in play, the Development Thesis—that the productive forces tend to develop through history—can easily be supported. When individuals are faced with a situation of scarcity, it does appear rational to develop the productive forces and increase production. But the significance of factor (c) is that different individuals identify with different groups. Individuals often define themselves in terms of exclusive communities.[13] And it is within such different groupings that rational individuals face scarcity. Now that factor (c) has been introduced, we need to know whether it is always rational for individuals who identify with different and possibly conflicting groups to develop the productive forces.
Yet it seems that it is not always rational for them to do so. For example, on one hand, one’s group might reduce undesirable toil and solve the problem of scarcity with less effort by plundering the produce of another group. On the other hand, if some external group has decided to plunder rather than produce, then an increase in one’s own production capability might make one more likely to be plundered. In a situation in which some have chosen to plunder, it might be extremely unwise to make oneself a more attractive target by increasing production. When factor (c) is in play, then, it can no longer just be assumed that it is rational to develop the productive forces. Factor (c)—self-definition within a community—therefore interferes with the construction of Cohen’s theory.
However, those who wish systematically to consume the surplus produced by others would benefit greatly from the development of political forces—in particular, forces of coercion. And forces of coercion can only be developed if the productive forces have reached a level of development that creates a surplus above mere subsistence. Once such a level has been attained and coercive forces have been developed by one grouping, it can systematically force another group to produce more and consume less than it might otherwise. The resulting surplus can then be extracted continually from the subordinate group. This could be viewed as exemplified in class-divided societies. But, in time, the individuals within such a society, through living together, might come to define themselves as members of one nation and, collectively, wish to oppress another. This would be rational, for oppressing a foreign group could reduce the need for coercion within the national community. It offers the prospect of increased wealth for all nationals as long as it can be extracted from foreigners. Exploiting foreigners also increases the overall surplus available to those in control of the political forces. As it is rational for such groupings to form and behave thus to meet scarcity, then factors (a), (b), and (c), combined together, contribute to an explanation of class-divided, imperialist nation-states. (In fact, such a process of expanding self-definition could continue further, for the peoples of oppressed nations, through living with their colonial administrators, could come to define themselves in their masters’ terms, thus giving rise to a genuine empire or, later, a commonwealth.)
Furthermore, it is rational not only to oppress another group and impose on it greater toil to reduce one’s own but also to resist the imposition of greater toil. And to resist another nation seemingly determined to impose greater toil on one’s own, it appears beneficial to develop the forces of coercion. Hence, such resistance equally seems to require the production of a surplus above subsistence requirements so that the coercive forces might be developed.
On both imperialist and defensive counts, then, it is quite understandable that within nations, some of the population have come to be expertly engaged in producing the society’s wealth, part of which goes to others who have become expertly engaged in “defense” and who, in consequence, are themselves no longer employed directly in production. It is quite understandable
that workers, fearing that their nation might be subjugated by another, should support those who are charged with their defense. And it is quite understandable that those who are in effective control of the productive forces (the dominant economic class) should support those exercising political control, when the latter choose to stabilize relations of production that simultaneously develop the productive forces and increase the private wealth of those in control of production. Moreover, it is quite understandable that those exercising political control should back economic relations that develop the productive forces that create the very surplus that is required for exercising political control.
In short, the development of the productive forces creates the surplus that is needed to finance a standing army and a police force, for weapons research and so on, and these forces of coercion are precisely what enable the state to enforce the relations of production that lead to the creation of the surplus that the state requires. Moreover, given its need for the development of such forces of coercion and given that, unlike other groups, it is not primarily engaged in production, the state could be expected to have its own interests vis-a-vis the rest of society.[14] And being in control of the instruments of coercion, the state would be in a position both to protect and to further its own interests. What is significant about all this is that any account along these lines would certainly justify anarchist suspicions about the wisdom of employing any form of state as a means for bringing about political and economic equality.
*** V
Cohen’s theory claims that economic forces select economic relations that develop or optimally employ the economic forces, and the economic relations that are selected themselves select political relations that stabilize those economic relations. Earlier, I argued that Cohen’s theory is restricted to these three principal categories because he fails to distinguish between the political relations and the political forces—the forces of defense or, in present circumstances, of coercion. On the basis of the considerations sketched out in the previous section, I now propose, in contraposition to Cohen’s theory, an alternative that employs as its principal categories not only the economic forces, economic relations, and political relations but also the political forces.
Generally, according to the alternative theory now proposed, the political relations ordinarily select economic relations that develop or optimally employ the economic forces because that facilitates the development of the
political forces, which usually empower the political relations. Moreover, the political forces stabilize the economic relations that are selected—relations that themselves support the development of the political forces by providing the surplus needed to finance it.
Put another way, in the modem era, except in special circumstances,[15] the legal and political institutions enact and implement legislation that determines a specific economic structure because that structure is functional for those institutions by encouraging the development of, or by optimally employing, the forces of production—principally productive skills and technologies—that are needed to produce the ever-growing surplus that is required for further development of the forces of defense, for it is precisely this defensive development that the power of the legal and political institutions ultimately seems to be premised on. When those individuals who, de facto, in direct control of the defensive forces are not those who are at the head of the legislative, it is normally in the interests of the former to empower the latter because the latter both confer legitimacy on the former (they might even be taken by the former to possess legitimacy!) and are responsible for managing the revenue that the state as a whole requires, including that which those in direct control of the defensive forces need for their development. In addition, it is this defensive development (usually in the form of expanding forces of coercion) that preserves the economic structure selected—an economic structure that is also functional for defensive development by providing it, through taxation, with the surplus it requires.
In short, according to the alternative theory proposed here, a structure of political relations ordinarily selects economic relations that are functional for it. And the political forces stabilize those economic relations that are simultaneously functional for the development of the political forces by producing the surplus their development requires. Here, then, is an alternative theory that employs functional explanations, like Cohen’s, but that reverses their direction. Whereas the principal direction of explanation in the Marxist theory is from the economic to the political, the alternative theory reverses the direction of explanation. In Cohen’s theory, it is technological development that has explanatory primacy; in the alternative theory, it is the structure of legal and political institutions combined with the defensive forces—in other words, the state. It seems appropriate, therefore, to label this alternative “the State-Primacy Theory.”
As a theory of history, the State-Primacy Theory can briefly be stated as follows: certain economic relations, by furthering technological development, are, for a while, simultaneously functional for both the structure of legal and political institutions, on one hand, and the political forces, on the
other. But at a certain point in time, they come to constrain any further technological development (or, perhaps in the case of motivating a transition to postcapitalism, they come to prevent the optimal use of the prevailing technology) and thus become dysfunctional. A revolution then occurs that involves the state ceasing to stabilize the current relations of production[16] and choosing, instead, to stabilize new ones that are functional for it insofar as they further, beyond the present level, the development (or, perhaps, allow the optimal use) of technology. Moreover, the new economic relations are selected precisely because they are functional for the state by furthering technological development (or, perhaps, by allowing optimal use of the already developed technology). And with new economic relations, the legal and political institutions are free to alter their form to one that appears more appropriate.[17] Like Cohen’s interpretation of Marx’s theory of history, this too is a complex of functional explanations.
As an aid to clarifying how the State-Primacy Theory differs from Cohen’s interpretation of Marx, it is possible to condense their major theoretical differences into two contrasting theses. The first, Cohen calls “the Primacy Thesis.” But because of its stress on technology and because I am about to propose an alternative primacy thesis, I shall rename it “the TechnoPrimacy Thesis.” Cohen puts this thesis as follows:
<quote>
<play>
The Techno-Primacy Thesis: The nature of a set of production relations is explained by the level of development of the productive forces embraced by it (to a far greater extent than
vice versa).[18]
</play>
</quote>
By way of contrast, consider an alternative thesis, which I shall term the <em>State-Primacy Thesis</em> and which can be stated thus:
<quote>
<play>
The State-Primacy Thesis: The nature of a set of production relations in a society is (ultimately) explained by state interests.
</play>
</quote>
Clearly, these two theses differ radically, and whereas Cohen’s interpretation rests on the Techno-Primacy Thesis, the State-Primacy Theory rests on the State-Primacy Thesis.
But is there any reason for believing that there might be some truth in the State-Primacy Thesis? Well, it can be supported by the following elaboration, which, in the process, supports the State-Primacy Theory: state actors can only continue to enjoy their positions while the state remains secure. It is, therefore, ordinarily in the interests of state actors to ensure that their nation’s economy is as productive as those of neighboring states. If their economy were weaker than a neighboring state’s, then the state would not normally be
able to fund the development of its defensive capability to the same degree as that neighboring state could and, in the long-run at least, would be unable to defend itself. To retain power, therefore, state actors have an interest in selecting and stabilizing appropriate economic relations. Hence, ordinarily, it is rational for the state to select economic relations that it regards as appropriate to developing further the productive forces beyond the level of development they have so far reached because that is in its interests. And it is because the state contains within it very powerful political forces that it possesses the power to select economic relations that satisfy its interests by increasing that very power. So, just as Cohen’s interpretation of Marx can be supported by a purposive elaboration, the State-Primacy Theory can too.
*** VI
However, if such an elaboration is to be employed, the following question immediately arises: is it the state as a structure that selects economic relations that are in its interests, or is it state actors that act in their own interests? In other words, it appears as if the State-Primacy Theory could be interpreted in one of two mutually exclusive ways. For example, we could regard the structure of legal and political institutions literally as what selects the economic relations. This would provide us with the basis for a “structuralist anarchism.” Alternatively, it could be claimed simply that political actors select an economic structure that is in their interests. This would provide the basis for a methodological individualist anarchism.[19] But it is, in fact, possible to steer a middle course. Such a view would not view collectives as entities in themselves with causal effects on their members. Nor would it reduce social explanation to the psychology of unrelated individuals. Instead, it would attempt to explain social phenomena in terms of the rational choices taken by individuals who act within certain relationships to one another. The causal influences, in this case, are recognized to be from one individual or group of individuals to another and not from a collective entity to its parts, while individuals are recognized to be related within a structure, rather than all structures simply being reduced to mere collections of individuals.[20]
My own preference is for this third approach, for it strikes me as the least problematic. And on this favored approach, when it is claimed in the State- Primacy Theory that the legal and political institutions select economic relations, that claim should be construed as “the agents acting within the structure of legal and political institutions select for stabilization one set of economic relations in preference to another.” Moreover, when it is simultaneously
claimed that the forces of defense enforce economic relations, that claim should ordinarily be construed as “those agents who live by means of their coercive labor-power use the means of coercion at their disposal to protect specific economic relations as opposed to others.”
However, this explication necessitates a further refinement. As the various state actors will occupy different positions within the state, then their choices will not all push in exactly the same direction. Furthermore, their respective decisions will be differently weighted according to their different locations within the state. Hence, what the state decides to select and enforce will be a vector of these variedly directional and weighted decisions. Such a vector will be what the “collective decision” of state actors actually signifies. In other words, we can regard “state interests” as a resultant “parallelogram of forces” resolving the numerous interests of state actors with their differing powers for promoting their interests. What enables us still to talk of “state interests” in this sense, as if they were the interests of the state conceived of as a collective entity, is that although the relevant individual interests push in slightly different directions (army personnel would prefer more state revenue allocated to them than to the police, for example), all state actors share a common interest in preserving the state. Nevertheless, although all state actors have interests pushing in that direction, there remains the possibility of fracturing within the state because of other interests taking diverging directions.
Now, the State-Primacy Theory claims that states ordinarily select economic relations that serve their interests by developing the technology that increases the surplus available to the state. As all state actors have an interest in preserving the state, does this mean that every agent of the state will necessarily be committed to selecting economic relations that are optimal for maximizing the state’s revenue? If this were the case, then at least part of the State-Primacy Theory could apparently be established a priori. Unfortunately for the theory, matters are not so simple. There is a debate within the theory of the firm that bears on this question. The debate concerns whether managers seek to maximize the profits of their companies or whether they are content with levels of profit that will be satisfactory to their shareholders— thus allowing the managers to keep their jobs. A parallel question could be raised concerning senior state actors. Are they maximizers or satisficers with respect to state revenue?
It might be thought that those nonelected state actors who are secure in their positions or who lack ambition will be content to behave as satisficers, whereas those seeking promotion will wish to impress by acting as maximizers. If such maximizers were the most successful at obtaining promotions, it might safely be assumed that they would be the ones who would come to occupy the most senior posts. Senior state actors have greater power with
respect to the execution of their decisions than juniors. In other words, the decisions of the former carry greater weight. Hence, it might be concluded that the state will act so as to maximize its revenue, and it will do so because of how the hierarchical structure of its various internal institutions determines which personality-type of state actor rises highest within them.
However, “pushy” state actors seeking promotion by adopting a maximizing stance could, alternatively, be viewed as risky appointments who were likely to “rock the boat ” This might make them less likely to attain senior positions than “dependable” and “reliable” satisficers. Moreover, maximizers who obtained senior positions within the state would only have effective power to the extent that those below them in the chain of command complied with, rather than chose to frustrate, the execution of their decisions. Thus, the likelihood that maximizers would obtain senior positions or that, having attained them, they would be able to act effectively will depend on the particular culture of the state in question. Hence, whether the state decision- vector would always select optimal or satisfactory economic relations is an open question and cannot be decided a priori. This seems to vitiate, to some degree, the immediate plausibility of the State-Primacy Theory.
There is another feature of the process affecting promotion within the structure of legal and political institutions that might be thought to undermine the plausibility of the State-Primacy Theory. Eligibility for promotion is determined not by those seeking it but by those higher up the management chain. Those who occupy senior positions, and thereby determine the criteria by which an individual’s suitability for advancement within a state institution is to be judged, will already have risen within that structure and will thus tend to value the “older” approaches that they are familiar with. Moreover, they will display personalities and adopt approaches that met the approval of an earlier generation of state actors occupying senior positions. This means that there will tend to be a conservative bias at work in filtering out those deemed appropriate for promotion. The probable result is that those who come to be senior state actors will lean strongly toward traditional perceptions of and means for securing state interests. And that suggests that they might not be too inclined to select new economic relations.
How powerful, though, are such nonelected state personnel? Consider Britain: John Dearlove and Peter Saunders describe a British “secret state” consisting of
<quote>
state institutions that are nonelected, that enjoy substantial autonomy from the control of government and Parliament (no matter what constitutional theory might assert), and that tend to be closed and secretive as to the ways in which they exercise their very substantial powers.[21]
</quote>
Within this “secret state” they list “the civil service; the nationalized industries (including the Bank of England); the judiciary; the police; the security services; and the military.”[22] And if one examines the behavior of the British civil service, never mind the other institutions of the “secret state,” it soon becomes apparent that it
<quote>
tends to serve as a powerful conservative force within the state machine. It is skeptical of the case for change; committed to continuity and ordered, steady, progress, and so is eager to contain the wilder excesses of party politicians keen to implement their manifestos with practical talk of the need to attend to “reality” and “the facts.” The civil service is organized in such a way that it is best able to exert a negative power which blocks the cry for innovation. It is keenly attuned to the maintenance of established policy (after all, it did much to establish the policy over the years), and the recruitment and socialization of senior civil servants suggests that the service is likely to be concerned to maintain the essentials of the established society and economy.[23]
</quote>
Clearly, the power of such state actors has to be taken very seriously, indeed. Thus, any cogent political theory would obviously have to take such power into account. And whereas Marxists tend to de-emphasize it because of their stress on economic factors, the State-Primacy Theory does at least assign a central place to the power of state actors, even if the conservative tendencies of such agents might be thought to diminish the plausibility of the theory as an explanation of revolutionary transformations.
All the above considerations notwithstanding, there is, nevertheless, a very powerful and overriding argument that can be deployed in support of the State-Primacy Theory. The desire to select economic relations optimal for providing the state with revenue could be expected with considerable certainty when the state finds itself in a situation of military competition with another state (precisely the situation that states usually find themselves in), for otherwise the state would simply not survive. And should the state behave irrationally by not attending to its defense requirements, it could expect its nation to be incorporated into the territory controlled by one of the more militarily successful states—in other words, one that did attend to the economic requirements of an expanding military capacity. But then, the former territory of the defeated state would have economic relations imposed on it that served the interests of the militarily successful state. Clearly, the only way for even the most conservative of states to avoid what for them would be such a disastrous outcome is for them to select those economic relations that, at that time, are most suited to technological development. Thus, by a Darwinian mechanism, the states that survive will tend to be those that the State-Primacy Theory describes. In short, there is good reason to think that the State-Primacy Theory successfully describes the behavior of existing states.
Given that I have been focusing on states and on agents acting within state institutions, one obvious question stands in need of an answer: what exactly is the state? This question could be answered intensionally or extensionally. The most famous intensional reply is that of Max Weber, who defines “the state” as “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.”[24] Probably the most famous extensional reply is Ralph Miliband’s, who identifies the state as a system of institutions that comprise “the government, the administration, the military and the police, the judicial branch, sub-central government, parliamentary assemblies,”[25] and so on. And it is precisely from within these various institutions that the differently weighted decisions coming from differently positioned agents with correspondingly different interests are taken and that form the state-decision vector—a vector that is directed ultimately toward the preservation of the state.[26]
*** VII
My aim has been to indicate how it might be possible for an analytical version of anarchism to evolve in opposition to analytical Marxism by providing the necessary conceptual groundwork for such an evolution. Central to any such project would be the development of a theory of history that supports anarchist, rather than Marxist, claims about the process of revolutionary change. By way of conclusion, having outlined the basic features of such a theory of history—the State-Primacy Theory—I indicate some of its more important implications—implications that do, indeed, support anarchism in preference to Marxism. First, though, to make these implications more apparent, I shall summarize certain key aspects of the argument so far.
According to Cohen’s Marxist “Techno-Primacy Theory,” economic forces select economic relations that select political relations. But this is to leave out a vitally important category: the political forces. They can be fitted into a coherent theory of history by reversing its direction of explanation. This provides us with the State-Primacy Theory: political relations select economic relations that develop economic forces that enable the development of the political forces—these political forces stabilizing economic relations that provide them with the surplus they require. And the State-Primacy Theory can be supported by the following purposive elaboration: to oppress another national group and meet scarcity or to resist another national group threatening to impose greater scarcity, ordinarily the actors dominant within the state will collectively decide to stabilize specific economic relations that
encourage the development of the productive forces and thus allow a surplus to be extracted that finances the development of the forces of coercion necessary for those state actors to protect or further their interests. In this alternative theory, using Marx’s terminology, the “superstructure” selects a “base” that develops the productive forces and does so for its own politically motivated reasons.
One implication of this is that the cogency of the most sophisticated Marxist theory of history—Cohen’s—which accords explanatory primacy to the productive forces over the economic relations and the superstructure, must be left in some doubt when a complex of functional explanations that accords primacy to the “superstructure” over the economic relations and the productive forces can just as easily be forwarded. In fact, it is possible to go even further in criticizing Cohen. It is not only that the State-Primacy Theory can be formulated just as clearly as Cohen’s Techno-Primacy Theory, but it is also the case that the former is conceptually superior, for it does not rely on any dubious metaphors. When Cohen develops his interpretation of Marx’s theory of history, he writes of the productive forces “selecting” specific relations of production because the latter are functional for their development. As he puts it, “Forces select structures according to their capacity to promote development.”[27] But “select” must, in this instance, be metaphorical. Forces of production, as Cohen must intend them in this passage, neither act nor have intentions. Consequently, even though he denies that he is a functionalist, Cohen leaves himself open to the charge that he is relying on the “free- floating intentions” associated with functionalism.[28] One considerable advantage of according explanatory primacy to the state is that state personnel (unlike technology, for example) do have intentions and are the sorts of entities that can make selections—thus allowing a genuinely purposive elaboration of the State-Primacy Theory.
Now, perhaps the most important political implication of Marx’s theory, including Cohen’s interpretation of it, is that if states are selected by inegalitarian economic relations to preserve them, then if there were no economic inequalities to be preserved, no state would be required. If egalitarian economic relations are attained, then the state will, to use Engels’s famous phrase, “wither away.”[29] Unfortunately, the Russian Revolution, which did most to raise the standing of Marxism on the Left, does not corroborate this theory—but not because egalitarian relations failed to appear. In fact, egalitarian economic relations did arise. Factory committees, run by the workers themselves, emerged within Russian industry. But rather than this leading to the state withering away, the Bolshevik state replaced the factory committees with inegalitarian “one-man” management.
What is especially interesting is Lenin’s justification for this. Within a year of coming to power, Lenin proclaimed, “All our efforts must be exerted to the utmost to ... bring about an economic revival, without which a real increase in our country’s defense potential is inconceivable.”[30] Ironically, then, the revolution in Russia, led by Marxists, not only contradicts Marx’s theory of history, but it also corroborates the State-Primacy Theory, for rather than the economic relations determining the form of the state, the state determined the form of economic relations that came to preponderate—and the outcome was both highly authoritarian and extremely inegalitarian. And this is not surprising, given that egalitarian economic relations controlled by the producers themselves are unlikely to be perceived by the state as guaranteeing the productivity and the surplus that it requires to retain power. The state is likely to think that workers in control of their own production will either choose to work less arduously or to consume more of their own produce, thereby offering less of a surplus to the state. In a word, egalitarian economic relations are not in the state’s interests. Hence, structures of inegalitarian political relations will only select structures of economic relations that are inegalitarian. As the Russian Revolution of 1917 clearly corroborates the State-Primacy Theory while contradicting Marxist theory, and as an implication of the State-Primacy Theory is that states will either not introduce or not retain egalitarian economic relations, then Marxist political practice would appear to be both seriously flawed and lacking in justification.
This leaves us with perhaps the major political implication of the State- Primacy Theory: given that, according to this theory, states select relations of production that are in their interests rather than egalitarian relations that are in the interests of the mass of the population, then a necessary (though not necessarily a sufficient) condition for human emancipation and equality must be the abolition of the state by the citizens themselves. This is the only practicable means by which the process perpetuating inegalitarian relationships, as identified by the State-Primacy Theory, can be terminated. In other words, the State-Primacy Theory not only exposes the utter inadequacy of Marxist revolutionary strategy, it also completely supports anarchist political practice.
In short, then, Marxists, by considering the use of state power or in advocating a revolutionary vanguard (which would eventually form a new state power) as acceptable means toward equality and freedom, advocate courses of action that, as the State-Primacy Theory reveals, would perpetuate the extensive inequalities Marxists ostensibly oppose. And they are uncritical of such courses of action because their theory overlooks the fundamental importance of the state and, especially, state power. The result of this is the
promotion of a strategy that inadvertently perpetuates unfreedom and inequality.[31] Consequently, the State-Primacy Theory indicates that anarchists are indeed correct to oppose all statist and vanguardist approaches to revolutionary change. In this respect, the State-Primacy Theory provides anarchism with the theory of historical transition it requires.[32]
So, an anarchist theory of history can be developed that offers the promise of being at least as effective as Marxist theory in explaining technological, economic, and political developments but that has the added advantage, by drawing attention to the tremendous power that the state can exert, of predicting accurately the outcome of statist and vanguardist revolutions. This is in stark contrast with Marxist theory, which, through underemphasizing the power of the state because of an unbalanced stress on the economic, has created such a dangerous pitfall for the Left. By stressing the technological and the economic, Marxists have distracted attention from the state. This proved disastrous in the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, and numerous revolutions in the Third World and will do so time and time again until Marx’s theory of history is eventually abandoned by the Left.
Once again, the flaws in Marxist theory are most clearly revealed from an anarchist perspective. And the perspective that most clearly reveals the inadequacies of analytical Marxism is that of analytical anarchism.[33]
; <em>NOTES</em>
[1] See G. A. Cohen, <em>Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense</em> (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1978).
[2] See P. Thomas, <em>Karl Marx and the Anarchists</em> (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1980).
[3] The principles of equality that, according to Baker, egalitarians generally wish to defend aie the following: first, everyone’s basic needs ought to be met. Second, everyone deserves sufficient respect for snobbery and patronizing attitudes to be unacceptable. Third, massive income differentials should not exist, and some should not be forced to spend their lives confined to unpleasant work. Undesirable tasks ought, instead, to be shared out. Fourth, power should be more equal so that those who are presently powerless have greater control over their own lives. Fifth, different treatment based on color, sex, culture, religion, or disability ought to be opposed. In Baker’s opinion, egalitarians usually wish to defend these five principles. Thus, in his view, the demand for equality is not a demand for one simple thing, such as the same income for everyone. Rather, it is a demand for a number of substantive inequalities to be removed. See John Baker, <em>Arguing for Equality</em> (London: Verso, 1987), 4–5. However, while Baker does mention inequalities in power, which includes political power, most egalitarians have tended to focus their opposition on inequalities in economic power.
[4] Moreover, it seems to me that this conception of what it is to be an “anarchist” captures all of the classical anarchist theorists, including William Godwin, Max Stimer, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, and Peter Kropotkin, as well as more recent anarchists such as Paul
Goodman, Noam Chomsky, Colin Ward, Nicholas Walter, and Murray Bookchin. Furthermore, it avoids anarchists having to offer attempted defenses of seemingly indefensible views, such as feeling compelled to advocate a society without any power relations or authority whatsoever.
[5] For one interpretation of several of the major anarchist theorists that stresses the central role of morality in their thought, see George Crowder, <em>Classical Anarchism: The Political Thought of Godwin, Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin</em> (Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1991).
[6] See, for example, Karl Marx, “Letter to Weydemeyer, 5 March 1852,” <em>Selected Writings</em>, ed. David McLellan (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1977), 341.
[7] Regarding coercion: “As long as the other classes, and in particular the capitalist class, still exist, as long as the proletariat is still struggling with it (because, with the proletariat’s conquest of governmental power its enemies and the old organization of society have not yet disappeared), it must use coercive means, hence governmental means” Karl Marx, “On Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy,” <em>Selected Writings</em>, 561. Regarding centralization, in response to Bakunin’s query concerning whether the proletariat as a whole will head the government, Marx answers with the rhetorical question: “In a trade union, for example, is the executive committee composed of the whole of the union?” Ibid., 562. For one account of Marx’s political approach, see Alan Carter, “The Real Politics of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels,” <em>Studies in Marxism</em> 6(1999): 1–30.
[8] For an appropriate conception of “power,” see Alan Carter, “A ‘Counterfactualist,’ FourDimensional Theory of Power,” <em>The Heythrop Journal</em> 33, no. 2 (April 1992): 192–203.
[9] I include within the category “economic relations” the relations of control not just over production but also over exchange because, it seems to me, the common Marxist view that exploitation in capitalist societies only occurs at the point of production and only results from an employer-employee relationship misses what is perhaps the most important kind of exploitation in the world today—namely, that of the Third World by the advanced countries. Such exploitation can take place without the First World as a whole employing the Third World and without First World firms employing Third World workers. Exploitation can take place because the First World, having a dominant position in the world market, can effectively insist on a high price for its products and a low price for what is produced elsewhere. By the First World selling its products dear and buying Third World goods cheap, the surplus-product of the Third World is transferred to the First World. This is not exploitation of employees by employers, nor is it a case of the Third World exploiting itself. It is a case of market exploitation. For a more appropriate theory of exploitation than that employed by traditional Marxists, see John Roemer, “New Directions in the Marxian Theory of Exploitation and Class,” <em>Analytical Marxism</em>, ed. John Roemer (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986). On Roemer’s theory, exploitation “can be accomplished, in principle, with or without any direct relationship between the exploiters and the exploited in the process of work” (ibid., 95), and his theory therefore allows us to comprehend the exploitation of the Third World by the First through “unequal exchange” (see ibid., 112).
[10] This claim is most famously indicated in Karl Marx, “Preface to a Critique of Political Economy,” <em>Selected Writings.</em> See especially pp. 389–90.
[11] This appears to be Marx’s view in <em>The Communist Manifesto.</em> See, for example, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “The Communist Manifesto,” in Marx, <em>Selected Writings</em>, 224.
[12] G. A. Cohen, “Restricted and Inclusive Historical Materialism,” <em>Irish Philosophical Journal</em> 1, no. 1 (1984): 25.
[13] See Frank Parkin, <em>Marxism and Class Theory: A Bourgeois Critique</em> (London: Tavistock, 1981), 44–73, for a pertinent Weberian theory of “social closure as exclusion.”
[14] On the speculative history outlined above, as states are theoretically conjectured to have originated out of exclusionary groupings formed to prey on the surplus produced by others, and
as states have continued to extract such surplus for their own requirements, then states would clearly have interests different from (indeed, have certain interests against) the other groupings within their territories.
[15] It can sometimes be rational for a Third World state to be complicit in the underdevelopment of its nation’s economy. See Alan Carter, “The Nation-State and Underdevelopment,” <em>Third World Quarterly</em> 16, no. 4 (December 1995): 595–618. And for some indication of how the theory outlined here can deal with the realities of international politics in a world of unequal states, see ibid.
[16] Note that Marx, himself, acknowledges that the state, during the period of the absolute monarchy, “helped to hasten” what he describes as “the decay of the feudal system.” See Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” <em>Selected Writings</em>, 316.
[17] The form could come, eventually, to have the appearance of being, for example, pluralist or even corporatist. Regarding the latter, for an account (drawing on the work of M. J. Smith and assuming state autonomy) of how it was functional for the British state to invite the National Farmers Union “into government” by according it “a statutory right to be consulted over agricultural policy,” thus ensuring that its relationship with the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) was a privileged one, see Robert Gamer, <em>Environmental Politics</em> (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1996), 157–60.
[18] Cohen, <em>Karl Marx’s Theory of History,</em> 134.
[19] This parallels the famous disagreement in Marxist circles between Nicos Poulantzas and Ralph Miliband. See their respective contributions in Robin Blackburn, ed., <em>Ideology in Social Science</em> (London: Fontana, 1972).
[20] See Alan Carter, “On Individualism, Collectivism and Intenelationism<em>The Heythrop Journal</em> 31, no. 1 (January 1990): 23–38.
[21] John Dearlove and Peter Saunders, <em>Introduction to British Politics: Analyzing a Capitalist Democracy</em> (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1984), 116.
[22] Ibid.
[23] Ibid., 125.
[24] Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” <em>From Max Weber,</em>; ed. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1970), 78.
[25] Ralph Miliband, <em>The State in Capitalist Society</em> (London: Quartet, 1973), 50. And as Patrick Dunleavy and Brendan O’Leary add, ‘The state is a recognizably separate institution or set of institutions, so differentiated from the rest of its society as to create identifiable public and private spheres.” Patrick Dunleavy and Brendan O’Leary, <em>Theories of the State: The Politics of Liberal Democracy</em> (London: Macmillan, 1987), 2.
[26] Given that the state comprises various institutions, then there will be conflicts of interests between them. In fact, the institutions themselves may well contain fairly severe internal fractures. Hence, the state should never be regarded as monolithic or homogeneous. This notwithstanding, all state institutions, like virtually all state actors within them, are at least united in having an interest in the preservation of the state.
[27] Cohen, <em>Karl Marx’s Theory of History,</em> 162.
[28] See Jon Elster, <em>Making Sense of Marx</em> (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 17.
[29] See Frederick Engels, <em>Anti-Duhring, Herr Eugen Diihring’s Revolution in Science</em> (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1976), 363.
[30] V. I. Lenin, <em>The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government</em> (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), 6.
[31] Moreover, as Bakunin so prophetically writes, “It is clear why the dictatorial revolutionists, who aim to overthrow the existing powers and social structures in order to erect upon their
ruins their own dictatorship, never are or will be the enemies of government, but, on the contrary, always will be the most ardent promoters of the government idea. They are the enemies only of contemporary governments, because they wish to replace them. They are the enemies of the present governmental structure, because it excludes the possibility of their dictatorship. At the same time they are the most devoted friends of governmental power. For if the revolution destroyed this power by actually freeing the masses, it would deprive this pseudo-revolutionary minority of any hope to harness the masses in order to make them the beneficiaries of their own government policy.” Michael Bakunin, <em>Bakunin on Anarchy</em>, ed. Sam Dolgoff (London: Allen & Unwin, 1973), 329.
[32] There are, of course, numerous objections that could be leveled against the State-Primacy Theory, but, it seems to me, the theory possesses the resources to deal with them. Lack of space militates against a full response to the objections that might be raised, so I shall confine myself to some brief remarks in reply to the most obvious of them. (1) The events of 1917 in Eastern Europe might corroborate the State-Primacy Theory, but those of 1989 do not. To the contrary, whereas a state-planned economy might have been thought in 1917 to provide a greater revenue to the state, by the 1980s it was clear that the Russian economy could not compete with that of the United States, and hence the former Soviet Union could not continue to compete militarily because it lacked the required revenue. It was therefore rational for the Russian state to support a move to a capitalist economy that offered the prospect of greater revenue. (2) Explanatory primacy cannot be accorded to the state because it is the instrument of capitalists who can withdraw their capital and hold the state to ransom. But, in response, capitalists can only retain or withdraw their capital on the state’s sufferance. States have nationalized private capital and have imposed currency restrictions. Moreover, capital, in the form of money, can be moved rapidly from one country to another, but what it is especially useful for acquiring cannot be. Certain productive forces that are ultimately essential for increasing capital—fields and factories—are immobile. (3) States have their policies dictated to them by global financial institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). But, in response, the behavior of such institutions is determined by states. They impose terms and conditions on weaker states that are in the interests of stronger ones, usually by increasing the surplus available to the more powerful states. See, for example, Alan Carter, “State-Primacy and Third World Debt,” <em>The Heythrop Journal</em> 38, no. 3 (July 1997): 300–14.
[33] For further arguments on the superiority of the State-Primacy Theory over Cohen’s Marxist theory, see Alan Carter, “Fettering, Development and Revolution” <em>The Heythrop Journal</em> 39, no. 2 (April 1998): 170–88. Moreover, the State-Primacy Theory also possesses the resources to ground a radical environmental political theory. See Alan Carter, ‘Towards a Green Political Theory,” <em>The Politics of Nature: Explorations in Green Political Theory</em>, ed. Andrew Dobson and Paul Lucardie (London: Routledge, 1993).
------
<em>Alan Carter is chair of the Department of Philosophy at Heythrop College, University of London. He is the author of</em> A Radical Green Political Theory <em>(London: Routledge, 1999),</em> The Philosophical Foundations of Property Rights <em>(Hemel Hempstead: Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1989), and</em> Marx: A Radical Critique <em>(Boulder, CO: Westview, 1988). His web site can be visited at http.’/Avww.heythrop.ac.uk/carthome.htm.</em>
|
#title Beyond primacy
#subtitle Marxism, anarchism and radical green political theory
#author Alan Carter
#SORTauthors Alan Carter
#SORTtopics Marxism, Green, Green Anarchism
#date 2010
#source *Environmental Politics*, Volume 19, 2010 — Issue 6. DOI: 10.1080/09644016.2010.518683
#lang en
#pubdate 2020-12-10T13:55:41
*** Abstract
The most sophisticated philosophical defence of Marx’s theory of history– G.A. Cohen’s—deploys functional explanations in a manner that accords explanatory primacy to technological development. In contrast, an anarchist theory can be developed that accords explanatory primacy to the state. It is, however, possible to develop a theory of history that accords explanatory primacy neither to the development of technology nor to the state but which nevertheless possesses the explanatory powerof both the Marxist and the anarchist theories. Such a theory can also provide the foundations for a radical environmentalist political theory.
*** Introduction
Environmentalists can be found right across the political spectrum (see Dryzek 1997). Not surprisingly, the most politically radical environmentalists have tended to adhere to some form of either eco-Marxism (for example, O’Connor 1998) or eco-anarchism (for example, Bookchin 1982). Here, I explore both Marxist and anarchist theory as a prelude to providing a glimpse of a genuine, radical environmentalist theory. I begin by outlining G.A. Cohen’s defence of Karl Marx’s theory of history. I then indicate how an anarchist theory can be developed that builds upon elements drawn from Cohen’s defence of Marx, while nevertheless standing in contraposition to Cohen’s theory. I then show how elements of both these approaches can be combined within a theory that transcends both Marxist and anarchist theories. Finally, I show how such a general theory can provide the basis for an environmentalist political theory with truly radical implications.
*** Marxism and technological primacy
In numerous places, Marx appears to subscribe to a form of technological determinism (for example, Marx 2000b, pp. 209–211, Marx, 2000k, p. 281, Marx and Engels 2000a, pp. 177–178, and, especially, Marx 2000d, p. 425), which is, perhaps, most succinctly expressed in his dictum that ‘[t]he hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist’ (Marx 2000h, pp. 219–220). In a nutshell, Marx appears to hold that the development of the forces of production—principally the technology that is employed in the production of a society’s means of subsistence, along with the labour-power that is required to operate that technology—explains the relations of production that obtain within a society, and he further appears to hold that the relations of production explain (what he calls) the ‘superstructure’ of legal and political relations that also obtain within a society.
Elsewhere, however, Marx seems to hold that competition between capitalists forces them to introduce new technologies (for example, Marx and Engels 2000b, p. 248). In which case, the relations of production that obtain within a society would appear to be what explains the development of its forces of production, and this seems, <em>prima facie</em> at least, to contradict technological determinism.
Can this seeming contradiction be avoided? G.A. Cohen has argued that it can, so long as one invokes functional explanations (Cohen 1978).[1] For the claim that the development of the forces of production possesses explanatory primacy with respect to the nature of the relations of production can be reconciled with the claim that the relations of production exert a causal influence on the development of the forces of production by arguing that the development of the forces of production in a given society ‘selects’ relations of production within that society that are functional for developing its forces of production. Here, the development of the forces of production enjoys explanatory primacy (because it is the development of the forces of production that does the ‘selecting’), while the causal influence of the relations of production on the development of the forces of production is not merely acknowledged but is actively employed within this particular form of explanation; for it is precisely because of their effect on the development of the forces of production that the latter selects those particular relations of production. And when different relations of production would be more functional for the development of the productive forces, those new relations come to be selected. Thus, on Cohen’s account, revolutionary transformations of society occur when the relations of production become, in some sense, dysfunctional for the further development of the forces of production (see Carter 1998).
Moreover, Cohen views the relationship between the relations of production and the superstructure of legal and political institutions—principally the state—also as best construed in terms of a functional explanation. On Cohen’s account, relations of production ‘select’ a superstructure of legal and political institutions that is suited to stabilising those relations of production. In short, the superstructure of legal and political institutions is ‘selected’ because it is functional for the relations of production. Thus, in a structurally similar manner to his account of the relationship between the forces and relations of production, Cohen argues that the relations of production ‘select’ a superstructure of legal and political institutions because of the latter’s effect on those relations of production. And a revolution that brings in new relations of production, because the old ones have become dysfunctional for the development of the forces of production, will involve overthrowing the prevailing superstructure of legal and political institutions, for that superstructure is especially suited to preserving the old relations of production.
Cohen’s defence of Marx’s theory of history is thus grounded on a bi-directional theoretical model. The bottom level of the model, as it were, explains the level above it, which in turn affects the level below it. To be precise, the development of the forces of production (the development of the economic forces, in other words) explains the relations of production (the economic relations), and the relations of production affect the development of the forces of production. (For example, because capitalist economic relations develop the productive forces faster than do feudal economic relations, the former came to replace the latter.) Moreover, the middle level of the model, as it were, explains the top level, which in turn affects the level below it. To be precise, the relations of production explain the superstructure of legal and political institutions (which are, clearly, political relations), and the superstructure affects the relations of production. (For example, feudal economic relations supposedly select an absolute monarchy, which is conducive to stabilising feudal economic relations; while ‘bourgeois’ economic relations supposedly select a modern representative state, which is, ostensibly, especially conducive to stabilising bourgeois economic relations.) But crucially, this is not simply a bi-directional model. It is what we might think of as a weighted one, for one direction of explanation possesses explanatory primacy: the upward direction of explanation is, as it were, primary, while the downward direction of explanation is, as it were, secondary ( Figure 1).
[[a-c-alan-carter-beyond-primacy-1.jpg f][Figure 1. Cohen’s technological-primacy model.]]
*** The theoretical dispute between Marx and Bakunin
One obvious problem with a weighted bi-directional model is that it may get the weighting the wrong way round. Perhaps what the model takes to be primary is actually secondary, and what it takes to be secondary is, in actual fact, primary. Indeed, it could be argued that this is what lies behind the opposition between Marxist and anarchist theories of the relationship between the state and the economic structure of society. For consider how Frederick Engels (1989, pp. 306–307) characterises the dispute between Marx and his major anarchist opponent, Mikhail Bakunin:
<quote>
While the great mass of the Social Democratic workers hold our view that state power is nothing more than the organization with which the ruling classes—landowners and capitalists—have provided themselves in order to protect their social privileges, Bakunin maintains that the state has created capital, that the capitalist has his capital only <em>by the grace of the state</em>. And since the state is the chief evil, the state above all must be abolished; then capital will go to hell of itself. We, on the contrary, say: abolish capital, the appropriation of all the means of production by the few, and the state will fall of itself. The difference is an essential one … [2]
</quote>
Crucially, Marx’s theoretical approach generates a significant political implication: if one correctly sorts out the economic structure of society, then political problems will disappear. For, according to Marx, political power is class power (see Marx and Engels 2000b, p. 262). Hence, political power must disappear when classes disappear. So it is not surprising that he should insist that ‘the economical subjection of the man of labour to the monopolizer of the means of labour, that is, the sources of life, lies at the bottom of servitude in all its forms, of all social misery, mental degradation, and political dependence … ’ (Marx 1974, p. 82). Thus Marx concludes that all major social and political problems will vanish once economic subjection has been removed by means of a revolution.
But it is precisely this conclusion that anarchists have traditionally rejected. In Bakunin’s view, for example, centralised, authoritarian revolutionary means will inevitably lead to a centralised, authoritarian post-revolutionary state, which is surely not implausible if the chosen revolutionary means include the creation of coercive political structures that will, on the morrow of the revolution, remain in place. Hence, as Engels acknowledges, Bakunin’s fear that authoritarian revolutionary means will produce an authoritarian, post-revolutionary outcome has significant implications for his views regarding the organisation of the International Workingmen’s Association: in short, because ‘the International … was not formed for political struggle but in order that it might at once replace the old machinery of the state when social liquidation occurs, it follows that it must come as near as possible to the Bakuninist ideal of future society’ (Engels 1989, p. 307).
Moreover, Bakunin (1973, pp. 281–282) appears to agree that his dispute with Marx is roughly as Engels depicts it:
<quote>
To support his programme for the conquest of political power, Marx has a very special theory, which is but the logical consequence of [his] whole system. He holds that the political condition of each country is always the product and the faithful expression of its economic situation; to change the former it is necessary only to transform the latter. Therein lies the whole secret of historical evolution according to Marx. He takes no account of other factors in history, such as theever-present reaction of political, juridical, and religious institutions on the economic situation. He says: ‘Poverty produces political slavery, the State.’ But hedoes not allow this expression to be turned around, to say: ‘Political slavery, the State, reproduces in its turn, and maintains poverty as a condition for its own existence; so that to destroy poverty, it is necessary to destroy the State!’ And strangely enough, Marx, who forbids his disciples to consider political slavery, the State, as a real cause of poverty, commands his disciples in the Social Democratic party to consider the conquest of political power as the absolutely necessary preliminary condition for economic emancipation.
</quote>
Bakunin is certainly unfair in caricaturing Marx as taking <em>no</em> account of political effects on the economic sphere; but this notwithstanding, it seems uncontroversial that Marx lays the greater explanatory weight on the economic, while Bakunin lays it on the political.
In summary, then, because Marx assumes that political power is premised upon inegalitarian relations of production, he concludes that political power will disappear once the appropriate relations of production are introduced. Consequently, because of Marx’s theory regarding the relationship of the state to the economic structure of society, Marx simply dismisses Bakunin’s fears regarding political centralisation within the International. Moreover, Cohen’s weighted bi-directional model is wholly consistent with the assumption shared by both Marx and Engels that political power will disappear in communism. For while inegalitarian economic relations, which manifest class conflict, seem to require a coercive state apparatus to stabilise them, non-conflictual egalitarian economic relations might be thought to lack any such requirement. Thus, it might be presumed, no coercive state will be selected by egalitarian economic relations.
*** A weakness in Marx’s theory of the state
But there are grounds for thinking that there is a fundamental flaw in Marx’s assumption that the state will necessarily vanish in a communist society. From some of his earliest writings onwards (see, especially, Marx 2000a,c), Marx locates the explanation of the state in divisions within civil society. Rights to private property split civil society into discrete persons who, in becoming economically individualised, seem to require a state above them to secure the public interest. But once the state sees to the public interest, individuals within civil society are free to pursue their own private interests, within the bounds of the law legislated and enforced by the state, without regard for other persons—thus strengthening the need for a state above them to secure the public interest. The result is a re-enforcing spiral whereby individualism and egoism at the level of civil society require a seeming community at the level of the state, which, in turn, exacerbates that individualism and egoism at the level of civil society (see ‘Thesis IV’ in Marx 2000i, p. 172; also see Marx 2000c, p. 53 and Marx 2000j, pp. 71–72).[3]
Later, Marx focuses in particular on the fact that some—the bourgeoisie—own the means of production while others—the proletariat—own only their ability to labour. Thus property rights divide society into two major classes (see Marx and Engels 2000b, pp. 246–255), who stand opposed to each other because of their conflicting interests as a result of their differential ownership. This particular fracturing of society along class lines is then taken by Marx to be the explanation of the modern representative state, which, he claims, stands in a special relation to one of those classes (see Marx and Engels 2000b, p.247)– what he terms ‘the ruling class.’ Later still, Marx devotes more attention to the complex relationship between classes and the state, and between their various sub-groupings (see Marx 2000f, 2000g), but throughout his writings there runs a common theme regarding the modern state: it arises because of fracturing at the economic level. Moreover, Marx never doubts that this entails that the removal of that fracturing by the establishment of a classless society will inevitably lead to the disappearance of the state.[4]
But that the state has arisen due to fracturing at the economic level, even if this were uncontroversially true,[5] does not allow one simply to conclude that removing those fractures entails the disappearance of the state. To see this, distinguish, on the one hand, between necessary and sufficient conditions and, on the other, between originating conditions—those conditions that are eithernecessary or sufficient for a state of affairs to arise—and perpetuating conditions—those conditions that are either necessary or sufficient for a state of affairs to continue. If fracturing within civil society is the explanation for how it is that the modern state has arisen, then fracturing within civil society may well only constitute a sufficient originating condition. But for the removal of fracturing within civil society to entail the disappearance of the state, fracturing within civil society would have to be a necessary perpetuating condition of the state. Consider a tumour: A toxin might cause a tumour to start developing, but later removal of that toxin might well lead neither to the tumour’s ceasing to grow nor to its disappearance. Similarly, the modern representative state might possibly have arisen due to fracturing within civil society. But even if this were so, the removal of that fracturing might well not lead to the state’s disappearance—just as the removal of the toxin would not suffice as a cure for the tumour it had caused. And one reason why the removal of fractures within civil society might not lead to the state’s disappearance is that once an authoritarian state had arisen, even if its rise were due to fracturing within civil society, such a state might have the power to tax those within civil society to such an extent that it could pay for a large enough police force and standing army to keep it in power even once that fracturing within civil society had been removed.
*** Anarchism and state primacy
Perhaps, then, we should not be too quick to reduce political power to economic power. And if we refrain from such a reduction, then the anarchist critique of Marxist political strategy is not so easily dismissed as Engels had presumed. And interestingly, Bakunin’s approach might be thought to be supported to some degree by a weighted bi-directional explanatory model that reverses the weighting found in Cohen’s Marxist model; for recall that Bakunin (1973, p. 282) moots the suggestion that ‘the State … maintains poverty as a condition for its own existence; so that to destroy poverty, it is necessary to destroy the State’—which certainly sounds like a functional explanation.
So, let us see how an anarchist might deploy a complex functional explanation to cast doubt on the Marxist conclusion that if revolutionaries were to ‘abolish capital, the appropriation of all the means of production by the few,’ then ‘the state will fall of itself’ (Engels 1989, p. 307). To do so, we must first isolate an additional element to those clarified by Cohen. In identifying economic forces (the forces of production), economic relations (the relations of production) and political relations (the structure of legal and political institutions), Cohen, in effect, distinguishes between forces and relations, on the one hand, and between the economic and the political, on the other. But this pair of distinctions allows a fourth category to be identified: namely, political forces.
What might constitute the political forces of a modern society? Cohen (1978, p. 32) argues that the forces of production include the means of production (that is, tools, machines, premises, raw materials, etc.) and labour-power (that is, the strength, skill, knowledge, etc. of the producing agents). If the forces of production are the principal economic forces at play within a society, then we might suspect that the principal political forces presently at play within any of today’s societies are its forces of coercion. If so, then it is not simply labour-power that industrial workers sell; rather it is economic labour-power, for military personnel and the police sell their capacity to labour, too. But it seems inappropriate to characterise the capacity to labour offered by soldiers and the police as an economic force, given that the work soldiers perform is potentially more destructive than productive. Hence, it seems that we should distinguish between economic and political labour-power. And we might therefore regard the forces of coercion as including political labour-power (that is, the strength, skill, knowledge, etc. of the coercive agents) and the means of coercion (that is, the tools, machines, premises, etc. that are deployed in order to maintain political control).[6]
How might these four elements—the economic forces (the forces of production), the economic relations (the relations of production), the political relations (the structure of legal and political institutions) and the political forces (the forces of coercion and/or defence)—be plausibly situated within a weighted, bi-directional, explanatory model? Given the need that states have to develop their military capacity in order to remain militarily competitive with other, potentially threatening, states,[7] they need to develop the productive capacity that allows the development of their military capacity. But in order to develop their productive capacity, they need economic relations that are able to drive, rather than inhibit, that development. Hence, it can be argued that the political relations (the structure of legal and political institutions) select and stabilise economic relations (the relations of production) that are conducive to developing the economic forces (the forces of production) that facilitate the development of the political forces (the forces of coercion and/or defence), because the development of the political forces empowers those political relations. In short, it can be argued that political relations select and stabilise economic relations that are functional for them ( Figure 2).
[[a-c-alan-carter-beyond-primacy-2.jpg f][Figure 2. A state-primacy model.]]
Interestingly, an anarchist model of this general type possesses no less explanatory power than Cohen’s Marxist model. For just as with the Marxist model, it claims that when economic relations fail to develop the productive forces sufficiently, they will be replaced.[8] And just as the Marxist model can explain the development of the productive forces, so, too, can this particular anarchist model. However, it might be thought that the Marxist model explains the relatively laissez-faire nature of the liberal state, while an anarchist model of this type cannot. But such an anarchist model allows one to claim that the state can choose to remain in the background when capitalist economic relations are being stabilised because, due to their seemingly voluntary, contractual nature, their stabilisation requires less overt force than previous economic relations required. So this particular anarchist model is, in fact, at no disadvantage with respect to accounting for the ostensibly liberal nature of the state in capitalist societies.[9] But unlike Cohen’s Marxist model, such an anarchist model also allows one to understand how it is that certain economically unprofitable technologies, such as nuclear power, might come to be developed. Civil nuclear power programmes are required for the development of nuclear weapons, which are functional for the state insofar as they allow it to defend itself. But the development of such unprofitable technologies appears to make little, if any, sense on the Marxist model. Indeed, once it is realised that the state, directly or indirectly, selects the development of kinds of technology that are functional for preserving the power of the state, the core Marxist assumption that capitalism will develop the technology required for a communist society becomes highly implausible (see Carter 1988, <em>passim</em>).
What is especially important, however, is that the complex functional explanation at the heart of this anarchist model does not support the Marxist conclusion that if revolutionaries were to transform the economic relations, then ‘the state will fall of itself’; for if egalitarian relations of production proved not to be functional for the state, then it would replace them with relations of production that were.[10] Thus, it is in a revolution aiming to bring in communism that this anarchist theory, which accords explanatory primacy to the state, can be tested against the Marxist theory, which instead accords explanatory primacy to the development of the productive forces, and explanatory priority to the relations of production over the structure of legal and political institutions.
Ironically, the revolution that is widely (if, perhaps, mistakenly) viewed as archetypically Marxist is the Russian Revolution that began in 1917. During the course of that revolution, the workers set up factory committees to run industry. But egalitarian economic relations did not lead to the withering away of the state, as Engels (1976, p. 363) had predicted. Instead, the factory committees were replaced by highly inegalitarian, ‘one-man’ management. And how did Lenin justify this authoritarian imposition upon the workers? As he wrote within a year of coming to power: ‘All our efforts must be exerted to the utmost to … bring about an economic revival, without which a real increase in our country’s defence potential is inconceivable’ (Lenin 1970, p. 6). In other words, perhaps fearing that workers’ control would be less productive, the Marxist state imposed inegalitarian economic relations that were functional, in offering the prospect of greater productivity, for the state’s military requirements.
This seems to provide a clear corroboration for an anarchist state-primacy theory, which claims that political relations choose economic relations that are conducive to developing the economic forces, which facilitate the development of the political forces, for the development of the political forces maintains the empowerment of those political relations. But it also seems, simultaneously, to falsify the Marxist technological-primacy theory. And such an anarchist, weighted bi-directional, explanatory model, as apparently corroborated by the Russian Revolution, would provide theoretical justification for the anarchist objection that, even if revolutionaries were to ‘abolish capital,’ it cannot simply be presumed that ‘the state will fall of itself.’
*** Transcending explanatory primacy
But is a theory that accords explanatory primacy to the state necessary for upholding this principal anarchist objection to Marxist revolutionary praxis? I shall argue that it is not. For as long as the state is able to replace egalitarian economic relations with inegalitarian ones, even if it is the case that the political relations lack overall explanatory primacy, the Marxist contention that ‘the state will fall of itself’ if revolutionaries were to abolish capital remains mistaken.
To see this, let us consider a complex of functional explanations that would support the anarchist objection, and which is also seemingly corroborated by the Russian Revolution that began in 1917, but which does not accord explanatory primacy to the state. Now, it may indeed be the case that the political relations (the structure of legal and political institutions) stabilise economic relations (the relations of production) that are conducive to developing the economic forces (the forces of production), which facilitate the development of the political forces (the forces of coercion and/or defence), because the development of the political forces is necessary for maintaining the empowerment of the political relations (as in Figure 2). But it may also be the case that the economic relations in part develop the economic forces, which facilitate the development of the political forces that empower the political relations, because, as those political relations are required to stabilise those economic relations, this is functional for the economic relations ( Figure 3). And it may also be the case that the development of the economic forces facilitates the development of the political forces, which, in turn, empowers the political relations which stabilise the economic relations, in part because that is functional for the development of the economic forces ( Figure 4). And it may also be the case that the political forces empower the political relations which stabilise the economic relations that develop the economic forces, because, with the latter’s facilitating the development of the political forces, the empowerment of the political relations is functional for the development of those political forces ( Figure 5).
[[a-c-alan-carter-beyond-primacy-3.jpg f][Figure 3. A model focusing upon the explanatory role of the economic relations.]]
[[a-c-alan-carter-beyond-primacy-4.jpg f][Figure 4. A model focusing upon the explanatory role of the economic forces.]]
[[a-c-alan-carter-beyond-primacy-5.jpg f][Figure 5. A model focusing upon the explanatory role of the political forces.]]
If all of these functional explanations are combined, then what we have, in effect, is represented by Figure 6, where each element of the model ‘acts’ or ‘behaves’ as it does because that ‘action’ or ‘behaviour’ is functional for the element in question.
[[a-c-alan-carter-beyond-primacy-6.jpg f][Figure 6. A multiplex model.]]
On this complex of functional explanations, there is no explanatory primacy; hence it is not, as it stands, a weighted explanatory model. But one could accord different weightings to each of the component functional explanations. Nevertheless, on a basic non-weighted model combining these four functional explanations, it remains the case that the state can select inegalitarian economic relations should egalitarian economic relations arise, and this seems sufficient to reject the Marxist assumption that egalitarian economic relations will inevitably lead to the withering away of the state. Indeed, were the economic relations the only element to be transformed by revolutionary action, then those relations, while having some power to transform the economic forces, would fail to obtain support from either the political relations or the political forces if it was not functional for the political relations or for the political forces to stabilise those new economic relations. But because the political relations are consistent with the prevailing political forces, which are themselves consistent with the prevailing economic forces, then the political relations would enjoy support from the political forces, which themselves would enjoy support from the economic forces. In which case, we might expect the political relations to be far more capable of replacing the transformed economic relations with ones more suited to the interests of those political relations than the economic relations would be of effecting a permanent, radical transformation of the economic forces (never mind of the whole system).
Consequently, even without the particular anarchist model discussed earlier, which accords explanatory primacy to the state, the principal anarchist objection to Marxist strategy can still be upheld. Call the new model presented here ‘a multiple functional explanatory model’ or ‘a multiplex model,’ for short.[11] A model of this kind is all that an anarchist needs to reject Marxist revolutionary praxis. Moreover, Lenin’s replacement of workers’ factory committees with ‘one-man’ management serves as seeming corroboration both for a state-primacy model and for such a multiplex model.
*** An environmentally hazardous dynamic
Now, while an anarchist state-primacy model is capable of grounding a genuinely radical, green political theory,[12] the multiplex model sketched above can equally provide such a grounding. In order for it to do so, all that is required is a particular spelling out of the current form of the political relations, the economic relations, the economic forces and the political forces. For what if the political relations actually comprise <em>pseudo-representative, quasi-democratic</em>,[13] <em>centralised, authoritarian power relations</em>? And what if the economic relations actually comprise <em>competitive, inegalitarian, exploitative production relations</em>? And what if the economic forces actually include <em>highly resource-consumptive, environmentally damaging, pollution-emitting technology</em>? And what if the political forces actually include <em>nationalistic, militaristic armed forces wielding technologically advanced, nuclear weaponry</em>?
First, authoritarian power relations of this type would tend to stabilise such production relations when they developed such environmentally damaging technology (for example, nuclear power) in order to supply their militaristic armed forces with nuclear weaponry and to generate the surplus that would fund those armed forces, because this is functional for such authoritarian power relations (given that all this would be required to preserve them in a world containing competing nuclear-armed states).
Second, such exploitative production relations would tend to develop such environmentally damaging technology in order not only to enrich those who exercise control within those relations but also to fund such militaristic armed forces and supply them with their weaponry so that they may preserve such authoritarian power relations, because this is functional for those economic relations (given that all this is necessary to stabilise them).
Third, the development of such environmentally damaging technology generates the surplus that funds such militaristic armed forces, and such technology (e.g. nuclear power) would also tend to supply them with their weaponry so that they may preserve such authoritarian power relations that empower such exploitative production relations, in part because this is functional for the development of such environmentally damaging technology.
Fourth, such militaristic armed forces, supplied with particular weaponry, would tend to empower such authoritarian power relations which stabilise such exploitative production relations that develop such environmentally damaging, pollution-emitting technology, because this is functional for those armed forces in generating the surplus that funds them and in supplying them with their particular weaponry.[14]
If all of this is put together, as in Figure 7, then what emerges is what we might label an <em>environmentally hazardous dynamic</em>.[15] Moreover, each of the four component functional explanations reveals just how difficult it would be to break free from such a dynamic, as we shall now see.
[[a-c-alan-carter-beyond-primacy-7.jpg f][Figure 7. An environmentally hazardous dynamic.]]
If one attempts merely to alter radically the economic relations (the relations of production) in a direction that is not functional for the political relations, then the political relations (the structure of legal and political institutions) can be expected to introduce or re-introduce economic relations that are more conducive to developing the economic forces (the forces of production), which facilitate the development of the political forces (the forces of coercion and/or defence), because the development of the political forces maintains the empowerment of the political relations (as in Figure 2).
But if one attempts, instead, merely to develop radically different economic forces—ones that are not functional for the economic relations—then the economic relations can be expected to introduce or re-introduce economic forces which better facilitate the development of the political forces that empower the political relations, because this is functional for those economic relations (as in Figure 3).
Alternatively, if, instead, one attempts merely to develop radically different political forces—ones that are not functional for the economic forces—then the economic forces can be expected to facilitate the introduction or re-introduction of political forces that empower the political relations which stabilise the economic relations, because that is functional for the development of those economic forces (as in Figure 4). For example, if a nation-state <em>A</em> feels threatened by the nuclear weapons possessed by another state (say, <em>B</em>), then <em>A</em> is likely to develop nuclear weapons itself if it has the civil nuclear power programme that would make their development possible.[16] Indeed, should a competitor state <em>B</em> have a civil nuclear power programme, but lack nuclear weapons at this time, state <em>B</em>‘s civil nuclear programme, because it might result in the development of nuclear weapons, would provide strong reason for state <em>A</em> to develop nuclear weapons.
Finally, if one attempts, instead, merely to alter radically the political relations in a direction that is not functional for the political forces, then the political forces can be expected to introduce or re-introduce political relations which stabilise the economic relations that develop certain economic forces, because that is functional for the development and maintenance of those political forces (as in Figure 5).
*** An environmentally benign interrelationship
Would this render all environmentally benign change impossible? No, but it does indicate that, if we are within such an environmentally hazardous dynamic, any effective solution to the environmental crisis that we face would have to be radical, indeed. For it would seem that the only way to stand a reasonable chance of preventing the functional explanatory components of the dynamic from inhibiting the requisite radical change would be to alter each and every one of them. This is because any remaining element could be expected to attempt to replace a second with one more functional for it, and that second element can be expected in turn to attempt to replace a third with one more functional for it, which can be expected in turn to attempt to replace the fourth with one more functional for that third element. And this suggests that green political theory, as surprising as this might initially seem, would need to be more radical than even traditional Marxist or traditional anarchist theory. Indeed, we might also suspect that revolutions have thus far failed not because of how radical they were, but, rather, <em>because they were not radical enough</em>.
Now, were pseudo-representative, quasi-democratic, centralised, authoritarian power relations to be replaced by a <em>decentralised, consensual, discursive</em>,[17] <em>direct participatory democracy</em>, and were competitive, inegalitarian, exploitative production relations to be replaced by <em>self-sufficient or self-reliant, cooperative, egalitarian production relations under workers’ and community control</em>, and were highly resource-consumptive, environmentally damaging, pollution-emitting technology to be replaced by <em>environmentally benign, convivial, alternative technologies</em>, and were nationalistic, militaristic armed forces to be replaced by <em>non-aggressive social control and nonviolent forms of defence</em>, then, instead of the environmentally hazardous dynamic, we may find an <em>environmentally benign interrelationship</em>[18] ( Figure 8).
[[a-c-alan-carter-beyond-primacy-8.jpg f][Figure 8. An environmentally benign interrelationship.]]
Such an interrelationship might be expected to be environmentally benign, because a participatory democracy of this kind would lack the pressing need for nationalistic, militaristic armed forces, and hence competitive, inegalitarian, exploitative production relations would not be functional for such a participatory democracy. The reason for this is that such exploitative production relations are required for highly resource-consumptive, environmentally damaging, pollution-emitting technology to be developed, and that technology is required for such militaristic armed forces to develop further. But without the need for such armed forces, neither they nor such environmentally damaging technology nor such exploitative production relations are functional for such a participatory democracy. (This is not, of course, to say that a decentralised, consensual, discursive, direct participatory democracy is sufficient for an environmentally benign social order. But it does strongly suggest that it might well be necessary for one.)
Moreover, such egalitarian production relations under workers’ and community control would have no need for pseudo-representative, quasi-democratic, centralised, authoritarian power relations, and hence highly resource-consumptive, environmentally damaging, pollution-emitting technology would not be functional for those egalitarian economic relations. Such environmentally damaging technology is required for militaristic armed forces to develop further, and those coercive forces are required to preserve such authoritarian power relations. But without any need for those authoritarian power relations, neither they nor such militaristic armed forces nor such environmentally damaging technology would be functional for self-sufficient or self-reliant, cooperative, egalitarian production relations under workers’ and community control.
Furthermore, the preservation[19] of environmentally benign, convivial, alternative technologies has no need of competitive, inegalitarian, exploitativeproduction relations. Hence, it has no need for nationalistic, militaristic armed forces or for the pseudo-representative, quasi-democratic, centralised, authoritarian power relations they preserve, which in turn stabilise such exploitative production relations. Neither such exploitative production relations nor such militaristic armed forces nor such authoritarian power relations are functional for the preservation of environmentally benign, convivial, alternative technologies.
In addition, non-aggressive social control and nonviolent forms of defence have no need for the highly resource-consumptive, environmentally damaging, pollution-emitting technology that is needed for nationalistic, militaristic armed forces; hence non-aggressive social control and nonviolent forms of defence have no need for competitive, inegalitarian, exploitative production relations to sustain and further develop such environmentally damaging technology. Consequently, non-aggressive social control and nonviolent forms of defence do not require pseudo-representative, quasi-democratic, centralised, authoritarian power relations to stabilise such exploitative production relations. Thus, neither such authoritarian power relations nor such exploitative production relations nor such environmentally damaging technology are functional for non-aggressive social control and nonviolent forms of defence.
The fundamental problem is that if we have, in fact, succeeded in identifying the core elements of any environmentally benign society, then none of them would be selected by any element, or combination of elements, within an environmentally hazardous dynamic. The multiplex model mooted here does not, of course, presume that each element of any such dynamic is inherently stable in the long run. For it would lead us to expect the economic relations to change if, in facilitating greater economic development, that would be functional for the other elements. And it would also lead us to expect the economic forces to change if, in being more productive, that would be functional for the rest of the dynamic. Further, it would lead us to expect the political forces to change if, in better empowering the political relations, that would be functional for the other elements. And it would, moreover, lead us to expect the political relations to change if that would be more conducive to stabilising certain economic relations, and was, thereby, functional for the rest of the dynamic. Tragically, because of what would be functional for the majority of the dynamic’s component elements, epochal transformations would, on this theory, be expected to consist in developments of new forces and relations that constitute new forms of authoritarian, centralised, inegalitarian and environmentally destructive societies.[20]
This means that, if a multiplex theory of this general sort were correct, and if we are presently situated within an environmentally hazardous dynamic, then we should rather expect that dynamic to accelerate than to shift into reverse. Every transformation <em>motivated within the prevailing order</em> that we would have reason to anticipate would take us in the wrong direction: namely, even further away from the environmentally benign.
*** Concluding remarks
Previously, I have argued that a radical green political theory can be grounded on a state-primacy model (see Carter 1993, pp. 40–45 and p. 56, note 16). Because economistic thinking preponderates, it is not surprising that a political theory with such a grounding should have appeared wholly implausible to some.[21] However, as should now be clear, a state-primacy theory is not, in fact, a necessary grounding for the modelling of an environmentally hazardous dynamic; for we have seen that a multiplex theory can equally ground it. Thus, because a state-primacy model is unnecessary for grounding a radical green political theory, such a theory is not dependent upon the acceptance of any such model. Consequently, an opposition to state-primacy theory is no reason for rejecting the radical green political theory sketched here. Furthermore, if one doubts that the elements of the environmentally hazardous dynamic obtain in today’s world, then one could accept a multiplex model without being committed to the radical green political theory that it might otherwise be thought to ground.
This notwithstanding, many will recognise the elements of the environmentally hazardous dynamic at play in today’s world. And while the above has merely constituted the briefest of adumbrations,[22] hopefully it will suffice to show how a truly radical, green political theory, when it is premised upon a complex of functional explanations, can be seen to transcend both Marxist and anarchist political theory. And it does so in a manner that, surprising as it might initially seem, makes it more radical than both. To be precise, Marxist theory, in focusing on inequalities of economic power, has often served to justify the maintenance of inequalities in political power, at least during the course of the revolution (see Carter 1999b; also see Carter 1994). It is this aspect of Marxist revolutionary praxis that anarchists have most opposed. But in focusing on the exercise of political power, some self-styled anarchists have failed to analyse inequalities in economic power adequately. The radical green political theory proffered here justifies a fundamental opposition to the unequal exercise of both economic and political power, for it enables one to see both economic and political equality as essential prerequisites of an environmentally benign social order.
But to sidestep several objections at once, it should be noted that I have not claimed that all existing societies display all of the features of the environmentally hazardous dynamic to the full. Nor have I claimed that wecan simply move immediately to a fully environmentally benign socialorder. Both are ideal types.[23] And the environmentally hazardous dynamic could be thought to be instantiated in different places to different degrees. If so, the key political, economic, technological and social challenge would be to move progressively from the more hazardous to the more benign.
But would such a move even be possible, never mind likely? One thing is clear: if the above argument is roughly correct, then unless the connections between the elements of the environmentally hazardous dynamic are understood, ineffectual policies and counter-productive political activities will remain preponderant, and they will only serve to distract us from the real task ahead. And it is easy to see how such policies and political activities should have become our staple diet. For those dominant within the political relations have thus far benefited from their roles, as have those working as political forces. Those dominant within the economic relations have undoubtedly benefited. And even those working as economic forces might feel that they have done better than they would otherwise have done had a competing state succeeded in conquering them. So, while it might not have been wholly irrational for societies to have developed in accord with an environmentally hazardous dynamic up until now, the times they are rapidly a-changing. And while it might still be rational for elderly people in dominant positions to conduct business as usual, and while they might be unable to step outside of the old paradigms that constrain their thinking, if we are presently located within an environmentally hazardous dynamic, given the environmental crises before us, then it would now be highly irrational for the vast majority of us to remain entrapped there. But a precondition for escape would be to understand that dynamic’s complex nature.
So, by way of conclusion, if we are entrapped within an environmentally hazardous dynamic, and if, therefore, the only genuine, sustainable alternative is the environmentally benign interrelationship, then if one is to be an effective democrat, one also needs to be a decentralist, and if one is to be an effective decentralist, one also needs to be an egalitarian. Moreover, if one is to be an effective egalitarian, one also needs to be a promoter of convivial, alternative technologies. In addition, if one is to be an effective promoter of convivial, alternative technologies, one also needs to be a pacifist. And if one is to be an effective pacifist, one also needs to be an advocate of direct, participatory, discursive democracy. In a word, if the above argument is by and large correct, then whether one is a democrat, a decentralist, an egalitarian, a promoter of alternative technology or a pacifist, one has reason to strive for all of the components of the environmentally benign interrelationship. Put another way, democracy, decentralisation, equality, alternative technology and non-violence come packaged together or not at all.
[1] For a discussion of this form of explanation, see Carter (1992).
[2] This view of the state is not peculiar to Engels, for it echoes what he and Marx hadjointly written over a quarter of a century earlier. See Marx and Engels (2000a, p. 200).
[3] The division at one level leading to the need for unity at a higher level directly mirrors Marx’s Feuerbachian analysis of religious alienation, of course.
[4] For a critical analysis of Marx’s theory of the state, see Carter (1988, ch. 5).
[5] As an explanation for the rise of the modern state, this might well be doubted. For some might argue, instead, that modern states appear, in many cases, to be more the result of (often far earlier) conquest.
[6] See Carter (2000).
[7] And, ordinarily, modern states do find themselves situated within an international structure of competing states. See Skocpol (1979, pp. 30–32).
[8] And it finds support in Michael Taylor’s contention that it was state actors who selected new economic relations in France from the fifteenth century and in Russia from the eighteenth century. Moreover, this was, argues Taylor, because of their need to obtain increased tax revenue as a result of ‘geopolitical-military competition.’ See Taylor (1989), especially, pp. 124–126 and 128–132. Also see Huntington (1968, pp. 122 and 126). Even Marx agrees that the state ‘helped to hasten’ within France ‘the decay of the feudal system.’ See Marx (2000g, p. 345).
[9] Such an anarchist model is also at no disadvantage in explaining underdevelopment in poor countries. And there is reason for thinking that it provides a superior account to that provided by the Marxist model. See Carter (1995).
[10] Clearly, the state needs subordinate classes to be kept at work in order to produce the wealth it must tax if it is to pay its personnel. See Skocpol (1979, p. 30). Hence, it can be argued that the state has its own interest in maintaining exploitative economic relations, and therefore it cannot simply be reduced to the instrument of a class. Rather, state and bourgeois interests ordinarily contingently correspond.
[11] In having four component functional explanatory elements, we might call this ‘a quadruplex model.’ However there is nothing, in principle, preventing us from adding further components, such as a functional explanation of ideology.
[12] For such an eco-anarchist theory, see Carter (1993, 1999a).
[13] For an indication of the extent to which the term ‘democracy’ has been usurped by those opposed to genuine democracy, see Arblaster (1987). Also see Graham (1986). For an indication of how undemocratic and illegitimate are contemporary societies, see Singer (1973).
[14] Note that all this is neutral with respect to the debate between explanatory collectivists and methodological individualists. On a structuralist reading of the above four functional explanations, the relations and forces would be construed as ‘making selections.’ But on a more methodological individualist reading, rational actors would be construed as engaged in the selecting. Moreover, on either approach, it is possible to tell a Darwinian story regarding which ‘selections’ survive. For one possible Darwinian mechanism, see Carter (1999a, §4.3.1.1).
[15] See Carter (1993).
[16] We would also expect two nuclear-armed states to pose such a threat to each other that they will both be compulsively driven to do what is necessary economically in order to remain militarily competitive.
[17] On discursive democracy and its appropriateness for environmentalism, see Dryzek (1990, 1992).
[18] See Carter (1993). For classic discussions of decentralisation, direct participatory democracy, convivial and alternative technologies, and non-violence, see the references in <em>ibid</em>.
[19] ‘Preservation’ rather than ‘development’ because the environmentally benign interrelationship, once in place, could be expected to constitute a relatively stationary order, not a dynamic <em>en route</em> to oblivion.
[20] Such a complex of functional explanations should therefore not be confused with structural functionalism. The latter is a theory focusing upon why societies tend to remain unchanged, while Cohen’s theory, the state-primacy theory, and the multiplex theory are each offered as an explanation of epochal change from one set of production relations to another.
[21] Though it is telling how little attention green liberal critics of the state-primacy theory have paid to the role of the military and to its highly distorting effects. Failing to examine in any detail military requirements within ostensibly ‘liberal democracies,’ whether existing or imagined, is more like simply ignoring an argument rather than answering it. See, for example, Barry (1999) and Hailwood (2004).
[22] Support for many of the claims made here, and answers to a number of possible objections to those claims, can be found in Carter (1999a, <em>passim</em>). Although the argument there rests on a state-primacy theory, many of the rebuttals of objections to such a theory constitute equally effective responses to objections to the multiplex theory sketched here.
[23] Although several pre-literate tribal peoples have displayed the features of the environmentally benign interrelationship; and they also managed to survive for a very long time compared to the short-lived, self-destructive societies of our day.
*** References
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|
#title Anarchism and a moneyless economy
#author Alan MacSimóin
#SORTauthors Alan MacSimoin
#SORTtopics moneyless society, anarcho-communism, economics
#date 2005
#source Retrieved on 17<sup>th</sup> November 2021 from [[http://anarkismo.net/article/2339][anarkismo.net]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2021-11-17T20:35:42
#notes A talk given to the Jack White branch in late 2005.
Anarchists are usually pretty good at listing the things we are against: capitalism, racism, religious sectarianism, authoritarianism and so on. We are usually pretty good at explaining how best to struggle: direct democracy and mass direct action. Where we often fall down is in explaining what we want at the end of the day, and convincing our listeners that it is a realistic alternative rather than a utopian pipe dream
Too many anarchists throw up revolutionary slogans without explaining what they mean.
To give an example: most people think the state is the country where they live, i.e. Ireland. So there isn’t much point in shouting ‘smash the state’ without first explaining what the state is and why we want to smash it. Unless we want to look like idiots!
Similarly, there is a slogan in one of the toilets at work that says ‘abolish all prisons’. Without a discussion about what is a crime, what causes crime, why we believe most of the causes can be eradicated — we sound like nutters who just want to open the doors for rapists, gangsters and murderers.
If we want to be taken seriously we have to convince people that what we say makes sense.
We often sum up our goal of a communist non-market and moneyless economy with the slogan ‘from each according to ability, to each according to need’. Tonight I will try to kick off a discussion about what this means and how it might work.
To start, I’ll reject the collectivist idea of exchange between independent workplaces and localities. That may have made sense when the productive forces were only in their lower stages of development, but now capitalism has created the conditions which makes communist economy a realistic option.
Those at workplace level who produce goods would have no say as to how those goods would be distributed or used — since if they did they would have a property right over them and that would not be socialism.
Society as a whole is immediately the owner of any product of labour supplied by each of its members, who will have no special rights over what they have produced.
Under anarchism production will be social, and thus there is no ownership by anyone of the instruments of production, including the land and fixed installations like factories, power stations or transport fleets.
Social ownership would not be based on the state (or nationalisation), or even on common ownership by the workforce in each job, but on the complete absence of any exclusive use-controlling rights over the means of production and their products; and it would involve the complete disappearance of buying and selling, of money, of wages and of all other exchange categories, including enterprises as autonomous economic units.
The administration — or whatever we choose to call the bodies we delegate to administer distribution — will allocate whatever proportion is needed for general services like health, education, housing, foreign aid, etc. and leaves the rest for daily individual consumption.
Naturally, there being no money, the goods which the administration make available for individual consumption would be available for individuals to take freely without charge.
But what happens when there is not enough to go around? That’s really the key question isn’t it? There will be conflicts and disagreements. Should we put a new roof on apartment building A or apartment building B? And if we want to do both we might need to use timber obtained by cutting down trees in an area that some people believe should be left untouched because it is important to a local ecosystem.
So disagreements will exist, the difference is that we will seek to resolve them democratically rather than through the rule of the rich.
What about “supply and demand”?
Anarchists do not ignore the facts of life, namely that at a given moment there is so much a certain thing produced and so much of is desired to be consumed or used.
Neither do we deny that different individuals have different interests and tastes.
However, this is not what is usually meant by “supply and demand.” Often in general economic debate, this formula is given a certain mythical quality which ignores the underlying realities which it reflects as well as some unwholesome implications. So, before discussing “supply and demand” in an anarchist society, it is worthwhile to make a few points about the “law of supply and demand” in general.
Firstly, as the historian E.P. Thompson argued, “supply and demand” promotes “the notion that high prices were a (painful) remedy for dearth, in drawing supplies to the afflicted region of scarcity. But what draws supply are not high prices but sufficient money in their purses to pay high prices. A characteristic phenomenon in times of dearth is that it generates unemployment and empty pursues; in purchasing necessities at inflated prices people cease to be able to buy inessentials [causing unemployment] ... Hence the number of those able to pay the inflated prices declines in the afflicted regions, and food may be exported to neighbouring, less afflicted, regions where employment is holding up and consumers still have money with which to pay. In this sequence, high prices can actually withdraw supply from the most afflicted area.”
Surely anarchist-communism would just lead to demand exceeding supply?
It’s a common objection that communism would lead to people wasting resources by taking more than they need. Kropotkin stated that “free communism ... places the product reaped or manufactured at the disposal of all, leaving to each the liberty to consume them as he pleases in his own home.” [The Place of Anarchism in the Evolution of Socialist Thought, p. 7]
But, some argue, what if an individual says they “need” a luxury eight bedroom house or a personal yacht? Simply put, workers may not “need” to produce for that ‘need’. As the British synicalist Tom Brown put it, “such things are the product of social labour....it is improbable that any greedy, selfish person would be able to kid a shipyard full of workers to build him a ship all for his own hoggish self.” [Syndicalism, p. 51]
Therefore, anarchist-communists are not blind to the fact that free access to products is based upon the actual work of real individuals — “society” provides nothing, individuals working together do. Therefore, the needs of both consumer and producer are taken into account. This means that if no factory or individual desires to produce a specific order then this order can be classed as an “unreasonable” demand — “unreasonable” in this context meaning that no one freely agrees to produce it.
There are plenty of examples today to indicate that free access will not lead to abuses. Let us take just three everyday examples, public libraries, water and pavements.
In public libraries people are free to sit and read books all day. However, few if any actually do so. Neither do people always take the maximum number of books out at a time. No, they use the library as they need to and feel no need to maximise their use of the institution. Some people never use the library, although it is free.
In the case of water supplies, it’s clear that people do not leave taps on all day because water is often supplied freely or for a fixed charge.
Similarly with pavements, we do not spend our free time walking up and down the street because it doesn’t cost us anything extra.
In all such cases we use the resource as and when we need to. Why would we not expect similar results as other resources become freely available?
In effect, the anti-free access argument makes as much sense as arguing that individuals will travel to stops beyond their destination if public transport is based on a fixed charge! And only an idiot would travel further than required in order to get “value for money.”
However, for the defenders of capitalism the world seems to be made up of such idiots. It would be interesting to send a few of these clowns to hand out Progressive Democrat or Fianna Fail leaflets in the street. Even though the leaflets are free, crowds are most unlikely to form around the person handing them out demanding as many copies of the leaflet as possible. Rather, those interested in politics or current affairs take them, the rest ignore them.
Part of the problem is that capitalist economics have invented a fictional type of person, whose wants are limitless: someone who always wants more and more of everything and so whose needs could only be satisfied if resources were limitless too. Needless to say, such an individual has never existed. In reality, our wants are not limitless — people have diverse tastes and we rarely want everything available nor do we want more of a thing than is necessary to satisfies our needs.
Anarchist-Communists also argue that we cannot judge people’s buying habits under capitalism with their actions in a free society. After all, advertising does not exist to inform us about the range of products available but rather to create needs by making people insecure about themselves.
Advertising would not need to stoop to the level of manipulation that creates false personalities for products and provide solutions for problems that the advertisers themselves create if this was not the case.
Crude it may be, but advertising is based on the creation of insecurities, preying on fears and obscuring rational thought. In an alienated society in which people are subject to hierarchical controls, feelings of insecurity and lack of control and influence are natural. It is these fears that advertising multiples — if you cannot have real freedom, then at least you can buy something new. Advertising is the key means of making people unhappy with what they have (and who they are).
It is naive to claim that advertising has no effect on the psyche of the receiver or that the market merely responds to our needs and makes no attempt to shape our thoughts. Advertising creates insecurities about everyday things (how we dress, how we look…) and so generates irrational urges to buy, urges which would not exist in a libertarian communist society.
However, there is a deeper point to be made here about consumerism. Capitalism is based on hierarchy and not liberty. This leads to a weakening of individuality and a loss of self-identity and sense of community. Both these senses are a deep human need and consumerism is often a means by which people overcome their alienation from their selves and others (religion, ideology and drugs are other means of escape). Therefore the consumption within capitalism reflects its values, not some abstract “human nature.”
This means that capitalism produces individuals who define themselves by what they have, not who they are. This leads to consumption for the sake of consumption, as people try to make themselves happy by consuming more commodities.
In other words, the well-developed individual that an anarchist society would develop would have less need to consume than the average person in a capitalist one. This is not to suggest that life will be spartan and without luxuries in an anarchist society, far from it. But what I am arguing here is that an anarchist-communist society would not have to fear rampant consumerism making demand constantly outstrip supply.
As for when investment is needed, it is clear that this will be based on the changes in demand for goods in both collectivist and communist anarchism. As Bakunin’s colleague, James Guilliame put it this way, “by means of statistics gathered from all the communes in a region, it will be possible to scientifically balance production and consumption. In line with these statistics, it will also be possible to add more help in industries where production is insufficient and reduce the number of men where there is a surplus of production.” [Bakunin on Anarchism, p. 370]. Today it makes more sense to talk about the use of bar codes to track demand.
Obviously, investment in branches of production with a high demand would be essential and this would be easily seen from collected statistics. Tom Brown states this obvious point: “Goods, as now, will be produced in greater variety, for workers like producing different kinds, and new models, of goods. Now if some goods are unpopular, they will be left on the shelves... Of other goods more popular, the shops will be emptied. Surely it is obvious that the assistant will decrease his order of the unpopular line and increase his order of the popular.” [Syndicalism, p. 55]
The abolition of money is an ancient dream, the most radical demand of every social revolution for centuries past.
400BC: Hey all you thirsty people, though you’ve got no money, come to the water. Buy corn without money and eat. Buy wine without money and milk without price. (Isaiah).
1652: There shall be no buying and selling ... If any man or family want grain or other provisions, they may go to the storehouse and fetch without money. (Gerrard Winstantley).
We must not suppose that it is therefore destined to remain a utopian dream. Today there is an entirely new element in the situation: Plenty.
All previous societies have been rationed societies, based on scarcity of food, clothing and shelter. The modern world is also a society of scarcity, but with a difference. Today’s shortages are unnecessary; today’s scarcity is artificial.
The world is haunted by a spectre — the spectre of Abundance. Only by planned waste and destruction on a colossal scale can the terrifying threat of Plenty be averted. Wine lakes, butter mountains, cars built to fall to pieces after less than 10 years, etc.
Money means rationing. It is only useful when there are shortages to be rationed. No one can buy or sell air: it’s free because there is plenty of it around. Food, clothing, shelter and entertainment should be free as air. The only excuse for money is that there is not enough wealth to go round — not a valid excuse in a world which has developed the means of production to a level capable of satisfying everyone’s needs.
If we made a list of all those occupations which would be unnecessary in a Moneyless World, jobs people now have to do which are entirely useless from a human point of view, we might begin as follows: Wages clerk, Tax assessor, Stockbroker, Insurance agent, Ticket puncher, Salesman, Accountant, Slot machine emptier, Industrial spy, Bank manager.
Of course, the itemising of those jobs which are financial does not end the catalogue of waste. All production today is carried on purely for profit. The profit motive often runs completely counter to human need. ‘Built-in obsolescence’ (planned shoddiness), the restrictive effects of the patents system, the waste of effort through duplication of activities by competing firms or nations — these are just a few of the ways in which profits cause waste.
What this amounts to is that perhaps up to ninety per cent of effort expended by human beings in the industrialised countries today is entirely pointless (an estimate by the Socialist Party of Great Britain). So it is quite ridiculous to talk about ‘how to make sure people work if they’re not paid for it’. If just ten per cent of the population worked, and the other ninety per cent stayed at home watching telly, we’d be no worse off than we are now.
But there would be no reason for them to watch telly all the time, because without the profit system work could be made enjoyable. Playing football or climbing mountains are not essentially any more enjoyable than building houses, growing food or programming computers. The only reason we think of some things as ‘leisure’ and others as ‘work’ is because we get used to doing some things because we want to and others because we have to.
In a moneyless world work would be a completely different affair. Those tasks that are unavoidably unhealthy or unpleasant, such as coalmining, would be automated or the jobs rotated so that nobody has to stay doing an unpleasant job for the rest of their life.
But not every country will go anarchist at once. Although modern mass communications and easier travel will mean that the positive experience of the revolution will be known pretty quickly in most parts of the world, there will still be unevenness in the growth of the revolutionary movement.
In the period between, say, Western Europe making a revolution and the rest of the world catching up, how will we cope?
It’s one thing to make non-exportable goods and services (like electricity, basic foodstuffs, housing, health and so on) free — but if everything is free what’s to stop capitalists like Tesco sending their trucks over here to load up with our free foodstuffs?
I would suggest that we will need a customs service (or if we want to sound more radical, a workers inspection team!) to stop abuses like that.
We would also need money to trade with non-anarchist countries, and indeed to holiday there. But this would be a very minor part of everyday economic life for the average man or woman.
And what money we may need could have an expiry date after a few years, so that it could not be traded internally and hoarded.
These are the sorts of questions we should devote more time to if we are to move from being protesters at the injustice of capitalism to being the advocates of a system that our friends and neighbours will see as a realistic possibility.
|
#title Anarchism & Elections
#subtitle Your questions answered
#author Alan MacSimoin
#SORTtopics democracy, Elections, FAQ, Red & Black Revolution, voting
#date March 2007
#source Retrieved on 15<sup>th</sup> November 2021 from [[http://www.wsm.ie/c/anarchism-elections-your-questions-answered][www.wsm.ie]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2021-11-15T11:30:37
#notes Published in <em>Red & Black Revolution</em> No. 12.
The Workers Solidarity Movement, along with anarchist organisations throughout the world, refuses to take part in parliamentary elections. Is it not downright weird, or even hypocritical, when anarchists claim to want more democracy than anyone else? Is this a rejection of democracy? Alan MacSimoin tries to answer some of the questions that arise again and again.
*** <strong>So, what’s your problem with voting?</strong>
What problem? We’ve no problem with voting. How do you think we make decisions? We discuss proposals and then register how many are in favour and how many against; or, in plain English, we vote. We do this all the time in our own anarchist organisations, in our unions, in our community groups.
*** <strong>But you won’t stand candidates for the Dail, Stormont or Westminster, you won’t even vote in any of those elections.</strong>
We anarchists want a society where the division of people into bosses and workers, rulers and ruled, is ended. So, we have no interest in choosing who will be our rulers. It’s pretty ABC, you might as well ask a teetotaller if she wants a pint of Guinness or one of Beamish.
This electoral process involves the mass of working people relying on a few representatives to enter parliament and do battle on their behalf. Our sole involvement is one of voting every few years and perhaps canvassing and supporting the party through donations or whatever.
Anarchists do not believe any real socialist / anarchist society can come about through the good actions of a few individuals. If a few can grant us freedom then a few can also take our freedom away.
Anarchism is about real participative democracy — based on delegation rather than representation with delegates being elected only to implement specific decisions. Delegates would not have the right to go against the mandate of those who elected them. Delegates would enjoy no special rights or privileges and, unlike TDs or MPs, would be subject to instant recall and dismissal if they disobey their mandate. This idea is obviously the complete opposite to the parliamentary idea. We do not seek a few leaders, good, bad or indifferent to sort out the mess that is capitalism. Indeed we argue constantly against any ideas that make it seem such elites are necessary.
*** <strong>So why do you call on people to vote in referendums such as the referendum on citizenship in 2003, the one you called the “racist referendum”, or referendums on the European Union?</strong>
There is a big difference between voting in order to make a decision and voting for someone to whom we will hand over decision-making. That’s why we threw ourselves into the referenda on children’s, divorce and abortion rights. We went out knocking on doors, putting up posters, organising public meetings, speaking on TV and radio, and leafleting our neighbourhoods. Referenda are closer to anarchist ideas of direct democracy and are, while flawed, far better than electing a politician to office once every few years.
*** <strong>Even if you don’t agree with the current system, you could use elections as a platform for your ideas.</strong>
Yes, it could certainly be argued that we could. BUT it would come at a price – and a very costly price. We would certainly get a few minutes every now and again to say our piece, we might even get the very occasional favourable mention in the newspapers. But the cost of this would be to re-inforce the clientilism and passivity which is an inherent part of the electoral system. Elections are about leaving the vast majority of people in the role of passive observer of political life rather than active participant. Anarchists want to see working class people take an active role in bringing about change in society. Participation in electoral politics has the opposite effect. The cost is too high a price to pay.
*** <strong>But wouldn’t it help to build a mass movement if we had people in parliament?</strong>
Talk about putting the cart before the horse. What mass movement has ever been built by having TDs or MPs? To get socialists elected implies that there are already a lot of voters who understand and agree with socialism, otherwise why would they vote for a socialist candidate?
Even on a local scale, look at the election of anti-hospital closure TDs like Paudge Connolly in Monaghan. He was elected because the run down of the health service was already a burning issue and thousands had taken to streets. His election was a result, not the cause. And it didn’t stop the rundown of Monaghan hospital.
The downside of his election is that it reinforced the idea that engaging in ‘real politics’ is the way to get things done. And our rulers just love that, it moves us back to passivity and dependence. We can support our ‘representative’ as opposed to putting on real pressure by means of direct action like strikes and blockades.
*** <strong>And why can’t you do both?</strong>
For starters, electioneering almost always results in the party using it gradually becoming more moderate. In order to gain votes, the party must appear “realistic” and “practical” and that means working within the system. If you use language like ‘socialism’, ‘class struggle’ and ‘revolution’, it is said you will frighten off potential voters.
It’s a lot easier to leave any mention of it out of your election leaflets rather than having to explain that it simply means a complete change, and not some gang of demented maniacs marching through streets awash with blood. And that’s just one example. You end up trying not to offend your potential electorate, rather than trying to convince them of your radically different ideas.
History is littered with examples of parties which started off from the position of combining parliamentary and extra-parliamentary politics but which became part of the system. From Marxian Social Democracy at the turn of the 19<sup>th</sup>/20<sup>th</sup> century right through to the German Green Party in the early years of this decade, we have seen example after example of radical parties starting off from the position of declaring the need for direct action and extra-parliamentary action. Indeed they often refer to their electoral involvement as the least important part of their strategy. In every single example, however, the parties involved have ended up considering the gathering of votes as more important than the message. The revolutionary slogans and policies eventually get watered down in order not to offend potential voters, the elected ‘representative’ loses touch with the real world.
And even if a political party or organisation approaches elections from a purely cynical point of view – i.e. with no illusions in the system, with no real interest in getting elected but wanting to use the tactic of standing in elections to provide them with a soapbox – and even if that political organisation manages to avoid the watering-down of its message, there is still a fundamental problem. What message is being given to the electorate – is it ‘Get involved, fight back, make a difference’ or is it ‘Get involved and support us to make a difference’? As I’ve said already, it’s impossible to be involved in the electoral process without re-inforcing passivity and clientilism.
The campaign against the bin tax in Dublin is a prime example of a campaign which became subservient to the electoral ambitions of various political parties. In several areas the development of the campaign was stunted by the fact that certain individuals who were going to be standing in the election wanted to be the principal spokesperson and organiser – ‘leader’ if you like — of the campaign in that area. So trying to combine campaigning and electoralism will inevitably lead to the campaigning becoming subservient to the electioneering.
*** <strong>But it doesn’t have to be like that, you can’t deny that the vote for Joe Higgins in Dublin West helped to beat the water charges?</strong>
Well, I can. It was mass non-payment that defeated the water charges. His own Socialist Party agrees with us on that. Getting a few individuals elected is not what scares governments. If it were, the election of anti-health cuts TDs like Jerry Cowley and Paudge Connolly would have seen hospital wards reopened and waiting lists slashed. It hasn’t, draw your own conclusion.
While we are talking about Joe, I want to say that he is held in high regard by many anarchists as an honest and selfless socialist. And I say this even though Joe’s existence makes it a bit harder for anarchists — it’s easy to point at him and say “if only we could have a government of people like Joe wouldn’t it be so much better?” And it sure would! But there’s a problem. For every Joe there’s a Tommy Sheridan... or a Pat Rabbitte.... or someone else who thinks he or she is bigger or more important than their mandate.
And even if the power and wealth doesn’t go to their heads, people may change their politics. Once elected, politicians are free to do as they please until the next election. There is no mechanism for enforcing the mandate or withdrawing support if the elected person does not hold to his/her mandate. We have to hand over our decision making to someone we have no effective control over. Society remains divided into order-givers and order-takers.
It could of course also be argued that the political system will always tolerate one or two Joe Higginses. In fact his existence as a TD serves quite a useful purpose – the establishment can point at Joe as an example which proves that their democracy works. ‘After all it can accommodate views right across the political spectrum from Michael McDowell to Joe Higgins’ might be their mantra. But have you ever thought about how the establishment might react if there were a dozen TDs like Joe Higgins? Or if there was any danger of a government being elected on a radical socialist platform? How would international capital react? How long do you think it would take multinational capital to effectively shut down the Irish economy?
As Emma Goldman pointed out, “if the anarchists were strong enough to swing the elections to the Left, they must also have been strong enough to rally the workers to a general strike.” If we’re to bring about change, if we’re to take on the might of international capital we can only do so in the context of politicisation and direct involvement of the mass of working class people. It can never happen as long as the mass of people remain passive observers or supporters.
*** <strong>Does this mean anarchists are just negative, that we should put all our energy into anti-election campaigns?</strong>
We don’t see this as an important activity at all. Our aim is not to have elections where only 10% vote, that would be meaningless in itself. In the U.S.A. only about 30% vote in most elections and it is possible that up to 50% of the population is not even registered to vote. Only someone whose brain is missing, however, would claim this meant the U.S. was more anarchist than Ireland. Not voting may just be a sign of despair (“what’s the point”). We want working people actively organising and struggling for the alternative.
What we will do is use the opportunity of a time when people are talking a little more about politics to challenge the notion that important decisions can only be made by a very few, whether they be elected politicians or unelected business tycoons; and put across our anarchist ideas.
The amount of our energy that anarchists put in to specific anti-election campaigns is tiny compared to the amount of time we spend campaigning. Since the last election in the 26-Counties, anarchists in the WSM, as well as producing 24 issues of our newspaper Workers Solidarity (distributing 6,000 copies of each issue) and 7 issues of this magazine, have been involved in huge numbers of campaigns – Shell to Sea, Justice for Terence Wheelock, anti-racism, anti bin tax, workers’ rights, trade union work….. If you look back through issues of our paper or look at our website (www.wsm.ie) you’ll get something of a flavour. So far from spending huge amounts of energy on anti-election campaigns, the vast majority of our work is aimed at encouraging the involvement of working class people in fighting for their rights, in real political interaction in other words.l
*** <strong>If more people abstained it would just lead to the right winning elections, more DUP and PD type politicians.</strong>
Possibly. However anarchists don’t just say “don’t vote”, we say “organise” as well. Apathy is something we have no interest in encouraging.
If a sizeable number of working class people refused to participate in the electoral charade but became actively involved in their trade unions, in community groups and in campaigns actively fighting for change, whichever party was in office would have to rule over a country in which a sizeable minority had rejected government as such. This would mean that the politicians would be subjected to real pressures from people who believed in their own power and acted accordingly. So anarchists call on people not to vote for governments and, instead, organise themselves and be conscious of their own collective power. This can curb the power of government in a way that millions of crosses on bits of paper never will.
*** <strong>But, even if the present set-up isn’t perfect, surely you are in favour of democratic rights?</strong>
The right to the vote is just one element in the hard won struggles of workers (and suffragettes!) over the last couple of hundred years. Democratic rights — in short the ability to organise and promote alternative ideas — were an important gain and one that is well worth defending.
Obviously it is preferable to live in a parliamentary democracy rather than a dictatorship. We don’t see any significant immigration into North Korea, Iran or Belarus, but many people are prepared to risk a lot in the hope of getting into Canada, the Netherlands or Ireland. It’s not just about the prospect of having a better standard of living, it’s also about having more liberty.
Even the most flawed democracies are forced to make concessions that dictatorships do not, such as a certain amount of free speech, less censorship, rights for women and gays, a degree of independence for trade unions, letting people come together in organisations to seek changes in the way society is run, and so on.
However we are not naive and we do realise that none of these are absolutes. What we call ‘rights’ can be taken away as well as conceded. The level of freedom we enjoy is set by how much the bosses need to give in order to keep the majority content, plus the amount that is forced from them through struggle. None of the rights we now enjoy were simply handed down as gifts by our rulers, they all had to be struggled for.
In democratic societies life is better and it easier to engage in such struggles. That’s why we are all in favour of defending the ‘democratic rights’ we now have. As Mikhail Bakunin put it “the most imperfect republic is a thousand times better that even the most enlightened monarchy.”
*** <strong>And your alternative is what?</strong>
By using direct action we can force politicians to respect the wishes of the people. For example, if a government or boss tries to limit free speech, then anarchists would try to encourage a free speech fight to break the laws in question until such time as they were revoked. In the case of environmental destruction, anarchists would support and encourage attempts at halting the damage by mass trespassing on sites, blocking the routes of developments, organising strikes and so on. If a boss refuses to introduce a shorter working day, then workers should join a union and go on strike or stop working after 7 hours.
Similarly, strikes combined with social protest would be an effective means of stopping authoritarian laws being passed. For example anti-union laws would be best fought by strike action and community boycotts. The example of the water charges in the 26 counties in the late 1990s shows the power of such direct action. The government could happily handle hours of speeches by opposition politicians but they could not ignore social protest.
As Noam Chomsky argues, “within the constraints of existing state institutions, policies will be determined by people representing centres of concentrated power in the private economy, people who, in their institutional roles, will not be swayed by moral appeals but by the costs consequent upon the decisions they make — not because they are ‘bad people,’ but because that is what the institutional roles demands.”
He continues by arguing that “those who own and manage the society want a disciplined, apathetic and submissive public that will not challenge their privilege and the orderly world in which it thrives. The ordinary citizen need not grant them this gift. Enhancing the Crisis of Democracy by organisation and political engagement is itself a threat to power, a reason to undertake it quite apart from its crucial importance in itself as an essential step towards social change.”
So, far from doing nothing, by not voting the anarchist actively encourages alternatives. As the British anarchist John Turner, General Secretary of the United Shop Assistants Union back in the 1890s argued, anarchists “have a line to work upon, to teach the people self-reliance, to urge them to take part in non-political [i.e. non-electoral] movements directly started by themselves for themselves ... as soon as people learn to rely upon themselves they will act for themselves ...
We teach the people to place their faith in themselves, we go on the lines of self-help. We teach them to form their own committees of management, to repudiate their masters, to despise the laws of the country...” In this way we encourage self-activity, self-organisation and self-help — the opposite of apathy and doing nothing.
|
#title Don’t vote: It only encourages them
#subtitle European elections
#author Alan MacSimoin
#SORTtopics Elections, EU, anti-voting, Workers Solidarity
#date 1994
#source Retrieved on 18<sup>th</sup> November 2021 from [[http://struggle.ws/ws94/ws42_europe.html][struggle.ws]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2021-11-18T19:38:23
#notes Published in <em>Workers Solidarity</em> No. 42 — Summer 1994.
<strong>THERE ARE so many parachutes in the sky we can no longer see the sun. They are dropping ‘personalities’ into the June Euro-election. All the major parties in the 26 counties have selected ‘names’ to run for them. Fianna Fáil got Olive Braiden from the Rape Crisis Centre; Labour got RTE’s Orla Guerin; Fine Gael got the Ranchers’ leader, Alan Gillis.</strong>
None had been members of these parties until literally days before their selection. Olive Braiden had previously been out canvassing for Mary Robinson (an ex-member of Labour) and Frances Fitzgerald of Fine Gael. Now she is going for the hat trick with Albert’s gang. Orla Guerin has had no known involvement in party politics. Alan Gillis was too busy pleading for rich farmers to be given yet more EC money to find time to join a party.
Yet they all ended up as party candidates. The only reason they were asked to run was that they are well known. Not because their politics are well known, not because they even have any known political commitment — but simply because their names are well known.
*** FORGET THE POLITICS... JUST GET THE IMAGE RIGHT
Braiden is supposed to give Fianna Fáil a more ‘liberal’ image in Dublin [while they run Catholic bigots like Eamonn O’Cuiv for a Galway Dáil seat]. Lane’s job is to hold on to the big farmer vote that Fine Gael has enjoyed since the 1930’s. And Guerin is helping Labour to build a new image, the ‘modern’ party that put Mary Robinson into the Phoenix Park.
Democratic Left didn’t want to be left out either. They are running Pat ‘triple mandate’ Rabbitte because their opinion polls suggested he would get a higher vote than sitting MEP Des Geraghty. With all of them it is a case of personality being a damn sight more important than policies.
All of this shows the contempt that the parties treat the voters with. There will be little time given over to discussing manifestoes or policies. There will be a lot of time given over to what are no more than personality contests. Maybe the Workers Party should try to recapture a few of their old votes by standing down Tomás McGiolla and getting Bono or Gay Byrne to run instead. Or Sinn Féin could ask one of the Wolfe Tones, and the Progressive Democrats could fly in Clint Eastwood.
Anarchists are not taking part in this charade, we are not be calling for a vote for anyone. Not this time, not ever. It is because we are democrats that we do not take part in parliamentary elections. Sounds odd? The key question is what do we mean by democracy?
*** WHO HAS THE POWER?
The right to the vote was part of the hard won struggles of workers (and suffragettes!) over the last couple of hundred years. Obviously it is preferable to live in a parliamentary democracy rather than a dictatorship. Even the most flawed democracies are forced to concede rights that dictatorships do not, such as relative independence for trade unions, the right to limited demonstrations, a certain amount of free speech, etc.
However the real purpose of parliament is not to ensure the country is run according to the wishes of all the people, cherishing all their views equally. Parliament instead provides a democratic facade beyond which the real business of managing capitalism goes on.
A seemingly endless series of business scandals, from BCCI to Goodman, gives us some idea how the realdecisions are made in the boardrooms rather than the debating chambers. In the unlikely event of a government getting elected which goes “too far” in the eyes of the bosses they are quick to use any means necessary to remove it.
The best known example of this is perhaps the removal of the democratically elected Allende government in Chile in 1970. They had attempted to bring in a limited package of reforms and nationalise some of the larger American industries. The result was a military coup backed by the CIA in 1973.
*** WHO WANTS A BOSS?
Anarchists do not believe the sort of change we want can come about through the good actions of a few individuals. We have always argued that the liberation of the working class can only be achieved through the action of the working class.
This idea is obviously the complete opposite to the parliamentary idea. We do not seek a few leaders, good, bad or indifferent to sort out the mess that is capitalism. Indeed we argue constantly against any ideas that make it seem such elites are necessary. Voting for rulers (whether you do so “critically” or any other way) is supporting the idea that society should be divided into rulers and ruled. We want to end that division just as much as we want to end the division into bosses and workers.
The alternative we support is anarchism, where society is organised to benefit the many and not just the profiteering few. It is an alternative where anyone effected by a decision will be able to have a say in making that decision. Power will come from the bottom up. A system of workplace and community councils, federated nationally and eventually internationally, will ensure that this is done in an organised, efficient and truly democratic way.
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#title Private Property
#subtitle Thinking about Anarchism
#author Alan MacSimóin
#SORTauthors Alan MacSimoin
#SORTtopics property, Workers Solidarity
#date 1996
#source Retrieved on 11<sup>th</sup> December 2021 from [[http://struggle.ws/ws/priv49.html][struggle.ws]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2021-12-11T13:12:58
#notes Published in <em>Workers Solidarity</em> No. 49 — Autumn 1996.
“Abolish private property” has been a slogan used by anarchists since the dawn of the industrial age. It’s a pity they couldn’t have found a better way of wording it. Anarchist views have become so misrepresented by defenders of the existing order that some people think it means that we would take away their house, their car, or even their TV.
It’s nothing like that. It has nothing to do with the personal possessions that we all should be able to have. When that slogan was first used ‘private property’ referred only to private ownership of productive property.
It was — and still is — about denying anyone a ‘right’ to own factories, big farms and the means of distributing products, such as railways, airlines and road haulage fleets.
Anarchists are opposed to such private ownership because we are opposed to exploiting people. There are those, usually of the ruling class, who will deny that there is exploitation in the Ireland of the 1990s. All that stuff belongs to the bad old days ...or does it?
In the distant past things were a lot more obvious. A peasant had to work two or three days a week on the landlord’s estate but got no payment for it. It was as clear as day that part of the fruit of that peasant’s labour had been stolen by the lord.
Now workers are paid for all the hours they put in. Some may be underpaid by current standards, but they don’t have to give their boss a set number of hours without pay. So how can anyone claim they are being exploited in the sense of having to work for nothing so that some parasite can benefit?
Under the present economic system — capitalism — goods are produced in order to be sold. Most of us do not have products to sell. We do, however, have something else to sell.
We have our ability to work, our labour power. Wages are the price we get for our labour power. Without labour power nothing can be produced. Even an apple on a tree has no value until it is picked, it is the labour used to pick it that gives it value. Otherwise it could not be eaten, it would just rot on the branch and be of no use to anyone.
It all seems simple and straight- forward. We work (if we are lucky enough to have a job), our work creates value,and we get paid for it. So what’s the problem? It is that our wages never add up to the full value of our work.
The difference between what we get in wages and what the product or service is sold for (after allowing for expenses) is what bosses call profit. This is their source of income. This is the basis of capitalism, a small minority living off the unpaid wages of the majority.
Anarchists are working for a future where the ownership of industry will be taken away from the bosses and instead will become the property of society as a whole. Its control and management would be vested in bodies democratically elected by the workers themselves.
The world of work would not be geared to generating profits for a class of rich idlers like Tony O’Reilly, Margaret Heffernan or Michael Smurfit. Instead decisions about what to produce, and what to invest in improvements and new processes, would be taken on the basis of what is socially useful. Production would be geared to meet people’s needs rather than to satisfy the greed of a tiny minority. That would be the end of ‘private property’.
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#title Syndicalism: Its Strengths & Weaknesses
#author Alan MacSimoin
#SORTtopics syndicalism, Red & Black Revolution, Northeastern Anarchist
#date 1995
#source Retrieved on 8<sup>th</sup> August 2021 from [[http://struggle.ws/rbr/rbr1_synd.html][struggle.ws]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2021-08-08T13:07:13
#notes This article first appeared in <em>Red & Black Revolution</em> No 1. Re-published in <em>The Northeastern Anarchist</em> Issue #8, Fall/Winter 2003.
<strong>SYNDICALISM is the largest organised tendency in the libertarian movement today. It has built large workers’ unions, led major struggles, been the popular expression of anarchism in many countries. To understand the anarchist-communist view of syndicalism we have to look at its roots, its core beliefs and its record.</strong>
In the 1860s the modern socialist movement was beginning to take shape. The International Working Mens’ Association, better known as the First International, was becoming a pole of attraction for militant workers. As the movement grew, points of agreement and of disagreement between the Marxists and the Anarchists about what socialism meant and how to achieve it were becoming clear. This led to the Marxists using less than democratic means to expel the anarchists.
In 1871 the Paris Commune came into being when the workers of Paris seized their city. When they were finally defeated seven thousand Communards were dead or about to be executed. A reign of terror against the Left swept Europe. The anarchists were driven underground in country after country. This did not auger well for a rapid growth of the movement. In response to the terror of the bosses, their shooting down of strikers and protesting peasants and their suppression of the anarchist movement a minority launched an armed campaign, known as <em>propaganda by deed</em>, and killed several kings, queens, aristocrats and senior politicians.
Though very understandable, this drove a further wedge between the bulk of the working class and the movement. Clandestine work became the norm in many countries. Mass work became increasingly difficult. The image of the madman with a bomb under his arm was born. The movement was making no significant gains.
By the turn of the century many anarchists were convinced that a new approach was needed. They called for a return to open and public militant activity among workers. The strategy they developed was syndicalism.
*** THE BASIC IDEA
Its basic ideas revolve around organising all workers into the <em>one big union</em>, keeping control in the hands of the rank & file, and opposing all attempts to create a bureaucracy of unaccountable full-time officials. Unlike other unions their belief is that the union can be used not only to win reforms from the bosses but also to overthrow the capitalist system. They hold that most workers are not revolutionaries because the structure of their unions is such that it takes the initiative away from the rank & file. Their alternative is to organise all workers into the <em>one big union</em> in preparation for a revolutionary general strike.
They established their own international organisation with the founding of the International Workers Association in Berlin in 1922. Present at that conference were the Argentine Workers Regional Organisation FORA representing 200,000 members, the Industrial Workers of the World in Chile representing 20,000, the Union for Syndicalist Propaganda in Denmark with 600, the Free Workers Union of Germany FAUD with 120,000, National Workers Secretariat of the Netherlands representing 22,500, the Italian Syndicalist Union with 500,000, the General Confederation of Workers in Portugal with 150,000, the Swedish Workers Central Organisation SAC with 32,000, the Committee for the Defence of Revolutionary Syndicalism in France [a breakaway from the CGT] with 100,000, the Federation du Battiment from Paris representing 32,000. The Spanish CNT was unable to send delegates due to the fierce class struggle being waged in their country under the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. They did, however, join the following year.
During the 1920s the IWA expanded. More unions and propaganda groups entered into dialogue with the IWA secretariat. They were from Mexico, Uruguay, Bulgaria, Poland, Japan, Australia, South Africa, Paraguay and North Africa.
Syndicalist unions outside the IWA also existed in many countries such as the Brazilian Workers Regional Organisation and the Industrial Workers of the World in the USA (which soon spread to Canada, Sweden, Australia, South Africa, and Britain[1] ). The influence of its methods, if not necessarily of its anarchist origins, was even seen in Ireland where the ITGWU throughout its existence, until it merged into SIPTU a few years ago, carried the letters OBU on its badge. This OBU refers to the IWW slogan of One Big Union. And let us not forget that both Connolly and Larkin were influenced by the IWW. Connolly was an organiser for their building workers union in New York state and Larkin delivered the oration at Joe Hill’s funeral.
*** DECLINE
The success of the Bolsheviks did great harm to the workers movement outside Russia. Many were impressed by what was happening in Russia, Communist Parties sprang up almost everywhere. The Bolshevik model appeared successful. Many sought to copy it. This was before the reality of the Soviet dictatorship became widely known.
Nevertheless the syndicalist movement still held on to most of its support. The real danger was the rise of fascism. With the rule of Mussolini, the Italian USI, the largest syndicalist union in the world, was driven underground and then out of existence. The German FAUD, Portuguese CGT, Dutch NSV, French CDSR and many more in Eastern Europe and Latin America were not able to survive the fascism and military dictatorships of the 1930s and 40s.[2]
It was at the same time that the Spanish revolution unfolded, which was to represent both the highest and lowest points of syndicalism[3]. More about this below.
The Polish syndicalist union with 130,000 workers, the ZZZ, was on the verge of applying for membership of the IWA when it was crushed by the Nazi invasion. But, as with syndicalists elsewhere, they did not go down without a fight. The Polish ZZZ along with the Polish Syndicalist Association took up arms against the nazis and in 1944 even managed to publish a paper called Syndicalista. In 1938, despite their country being under the Salazar dictatorship since the 1920s, the Portuguese CGT could still claim 50,000 members in their now completely illegal and underground union. In Germany, trials for high treason were carried out against militants of the FAUD. There were mass trials of members, many of whom didn’t survive the concentration camps.
One point worthy of mention about the Spanish CNT shows the hypocrisy of the British government which called itself anti-fascist. Not only were Italian anti-fascist exiles interned on the Isle of Man but CNT members whose underground movement assisted British airmen, Jews and anti-fascists to escape through Spain to Britain were repaid at the end of the war when their names were handed over to Franco’s secret police.
*** THE RUMP
By the end of WWII, the European syndicalist movement and the IWA was almost destroyed. The CNT was now an exile organisation. In 1951 the IWA held their first post-war congress in Toulouse. This time they were a much smaller organisation than the great movement which existed at their first congress. Nevertheless they still represented something. Delegates attended, though mostly representing very small organisations, from Cuba, Argentina, Spain, Sweden, France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Denmark, Norway, Britain, Bulgaria and Portugal. A message of support was received from Uruguay.
Things were not looking good for the re-emergence of anarcho-syndicalism. In Eastern Europe the Stalinists allowed no free discussion, strikes or free trade unions. Certainly not anarchist ones! In the West massive subsidies from the US and the Catholic church went to tame unions controlled by Christian Democrats and Social Democrats. Meanwhile Russia did the same for their allies who controlled the French CGT, the Italian CGIL and others. The IWA, in its weakened state couldn’t compete for influence. In the late 1950s the Swedish SAC withdrew from the IWA. There was now not a single functioning union in its ranks.
It staggered on as a collection of small propaganda groups and exile organisations like the Spanish and Bulgarian CNTs. Some wondered would it live much longer. But suddenly in 1977 Franco died and his regime fell. The CNT blossomed. Within a matter of months its membership leaped from a few hundred activists to 150,000. [Problems later developed within the CNT and a split occurred which left us with two unions whose combined membership today probably does not reach 30,000, though this is still a significant number.] The growth of the CNT put syndicalism back on the anarchist agenda. The IWA now claims organisations which function at least partly as unions (in Italy, France and Spain) and propaganda groups in about another dozen countries.
Outside the IWA are syndicalist unions and organisations like the 16,000 strong SAC in Sweden, the OVB in the Netherlands, the Spanish CGT, the Solidarity-Unity-Democracy[4] union in the French post office, the CRT in Switzerland, and others. Some are less anarchist and more reformist than others. Say what we will about them we must recognise that syndicalism is today the largest organised current in the international anarchist movement. This means it is especially important to understand them.
*** SOME PROBLEMS
Anarchist-Communists do have criticisms of their politics, or more accurately lack of politics. Judging from their own statements, methods and propaganda the syndicalists see the biggest problem in the structure of the existing unions rather than in the ideas that tie workers to authoritarian, capitalist views of the world.
Syndicalists do not create revolutionary political organisations. They want to create industrial unions. Their strategy is apolitical, in the sense that they argue that all that’s essential to make the revolution is for workers to seize the factories and the land. After that it believes that the state and all the other institutions of the ruling class will come toppling down. They do not accept that the working class must take political power. For them all power has to be immediately abolished on day one of the revolution.
Because the syndicalist organisation is the union, it organises all workers regardless of their politics. Historically many workers have joined, not because they were anarchists, but because the syndicalist union was the most militant and got the best results. Because of this tendencies always appeared that were reformist. This raises the question of the conflict between being a trade union or a revolutionary anarchist organisation.
Syndicalists are quite correct to emphasise the centrality of organising workers in the workplace. Critics who reject syndicalism on the grounds that it cannot organise those outside the workplace are wrong. Taking the example of anarcho-syndicalism in Spain it is clear that they could and did organise throughout the entire working class as was evidenced by the Iberian Federation of Libertarian Youth, the ‘Mujeras Libres’ (Free Women), and the neighbourhood organisations.
*** SPAIN
The weakness of syndicalism is rooted in its view of why workers are tied to capitalism, and its view of what is necessary to make the revolution. Spain in 1936/7 represented the highest point in anarcho-syndicalist organisation and achievement. Because of their a-politicism they were unable to develop a programme for workers’ power, to wage a political battle against other currents in the workers’ movement (such as reformism and Stalinism). Indeed syndicalists seem to ignore other ideas more often than combating them. In Spain they were unable to give a lead to the entire class by fighting for complete workers’ power.
Instead they got sucked into support for the Popular Front government, which in turn led to their silence and complicity when the Republican state moved against the collectives and militias. The minority in the CNT, organised around the Friends of Durruti, was expelled when they issued a proclamation calling for the workers to take absolute power (ie that they should refuse to share power with the bosses or the authoritarian parties).
The CNT believed that when the workers took over the means of production and distribution this would lead to <em>“the liquidation of the bourgeois state which would die of asphyxiation</em>.” History teaches us a different lesson. In a situation of dual power it is very necessary to smash the state. No ruling class ever leaves the stage of history voluntarily.
In contrast to this the Friends of Durruti were clear that, and this is a quote from their programme ‘Towards a Fresh Revolution’, <em>“to beat Franco we need to crush the bourgeoisie and its Stalinist and Socialist allies. The capitalist state must be destroyed totally and there must be installed workers’ power depending on rank & file committees. Apolitical anarchism has failed</em>.” The political confusion of the CNT leadership was such that they attacked the idea of the workers siezing power as <em>“evil”</em> and leading to an <em>“anarchist dictatorship</em>.”
The syndicalist movement, organised in the International Workers Association and outside it, still refuses to admit the CNT was wrong to <em>postpone</em> the revolution and enter the government. They attempt to explain away this whole episode as being due to <em>“exceptional circumstances</em> “ that <em>“will not occur again</em>.”. Because they refuse to admit that a mistake of historic proportions was made, there is no reason to suppose that they would not repeat it (should they get a chance).
Despite our criticisms we should recognise that the syndicalist unions, where they still exist, are far more progressive than any other union. Not only do they create democratic unions and create an atmosphere where anarchist ideas are listened to with respect but they also organise and fight in a way that breaks down the divisions into leaders and led, doers and watchers. On its own this is very good but not good enough. The missing element is an organisation winning support for anarchist ideas and anarchist methods both within revolutionary unions and everywhere else workers are brought together. That is the task of the anarchist-communists.
[1] It was known as the Industrial Workers of Great Britain.
[2] Some, like the Italian USI and German FAU, have been refounded but exist only as relatively small propaganda groups. Sometimes they are able to take on union functions in particular localities.
[3] A good introduction to this period is Eddie Conlon’s The Spanish Civil War: Anarchism in Action.
[4] In workplace elections in Spring 1994 their vote in the post office rose from 4% to 18%, and in Telecom from 2.5% to 7.5%.
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#title The ITGWU and the Dublin Lock-out of 1913
#subtitle 75 years since (1913 — 1988)
#author Alan MacSimoin
#LISTtitle ITGWU and the Dublin Lock-out of 1913
#SORTtopics Ireland, 1910s, Workers Solidarity, trade unions, syndicalism
#date 1988
#source Retrieved on 9<sup>th</sup> October 2021 from [[http://struggle.ws/ws88_89/ws29_1913.html][struggle.ws]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2021-10-09T10:16:52
#notes Published in <em>Workers Solidarity</em> No. 29 — Autumn 1988.
<strong>THIS YEAR MARKS the 75<sup>th</sup> anniversary of the 1913 Lock-Out in Dublin. It is part of the history of our class and such history is important to us. It gives us a sense of where we are coming from, it teaches us lessons that can be put to use in other struggles, and sometimes a knowledge of the courage displayed by ordinary men and women in the past gives us heart for the fights yet to come.</strong>
In 1913 militant trade unionism had a tremendous task ahead of it. The poverty of manual workers was appalling. The death rate in Dublin, 27.6 per 1OOO, was as high as Calcutta’s, The slums were the worst of any city in either Ireland or Britain. 20,108 families were recorded as living in a single room. An Irish Times editorial commenting on a report about Dublin housing wrote that “28,000 of our fellow citizens live in dwellings which even the Corporation admits to be unfit for human habitation. Nearly a third of our population so live that from dawn to dark and from dark to dawn it is without cleanliness, privacy or self respect. Sanitary conditions ruled out ordinary standards of savage morality”
If slum figures were higher than the rest of the “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland”, wage rates were lower. Thousands worked a 70 hour week for as little as 70p. Women’s wages could be as low as 25p. Rents, however, were higher than in Britain.
Jim Larkin arrived from Liverpool in 1907 as an organiser for the British National Union of Dock Labourers. Immediately he threw himself into the work of organising the unskilled into the union, Strikes for recognition and higher wages broke out in Belfast, Newry and Cork.
Before long friction developed between the new Irish members and the British leadership of the NUDL. The union officers, and in particular the general secretary, James Sexton, became alarmed at the combative spirit of the Irish branches. Soon they were settling disputes over the heads of the members on strike, sending them back to work on the basis of weak and paltry deals arranged with employers behind the strikers’ backs. Twenty years before the NUDL had done a good job of organising labourers in Britain but its leaders had become divorced from any real control by the membership. They were now more concerned with ‘respectability’, seeing their role as mediators who worked for ‘fair play’ and industrial peace.
*** BIRTH OF A UNION
Some of the most active members, grouped around Larkin, broke away and on January 4<sup>th</sup> 1909 founded the Irish Transport Workers Union. The union, whose name was to be enlarged to ITGWU, began in humble surroundings. Its first office was a bare room in a tenement in Townsend Street, Dublin. Its assets were “a couple of chairs, a table, two empty bottles and a candle”.
Many of the founding members came from the infant socialist movement. Among their influences was syndicalism. This was the idea that all workers, regardless of trade, should be in ‘one big union’ which would use whatever methods were necessary to win in their battles with the bosses, The syndicalists held that the interests of workers and bosses were absolutely opposed and their end goal was a general strike to throw out the bosses and establish socialism. This was only one of the influences present and it was not clearly defined but it can claim much of the credit for popularising the notion of the ‘sympathetic strike’.
A man who was to play a significant role in the union was James Connolly. At the time the ITGWU was set up he was in America where, along with fellow-Irishman Patrick Quinlan, he formed a branch of the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World in Newark, New Jersey. Shortly after he became secretary of the IWW Building and Constructional Workers Industrial Union in the area. It is also worth noting that when Jim Larkin went to America in 1914 to raise funds for the impoverished ITGWU he also joined the IWW. (The IWW saw itself as a revolutionary union, a fair proportion of its founders and prominent activists were anarchists ).
*** WEXFORD LOCK OUT
By 1910 the ITGWU was claiming 3,000 members and was admitted to the Irish Trade Union Congress. It quickly established a name for itself as an aggressive defender of its members and as a union that refused to make shoddy deals over the workers’ heads. A forerunner of the 1913 lock-out took place in 1911 in Wexford when two foundries, Pierces and the Star Works, told their staffs “no workman is acceptable if a member of the ITGWU” The lock-out lasted six months, saw the importation of scabs from England and RIC (police) from Dublin, and the RIC killing of a worker called Michael Leary. The bosses caved in, though as a face saving exercise they insisted that the strikers form a different union. This was the Irish Foundry Workers Union (which was affiliated with the ITGWU and two years later dropped the pretence and became a regular branch).
Between 1911 and 1913 the union, mainly by the use of sympathetic strikes, won victories in Dublin.
These benefited not only its own growing membership, but other trades also. Through the union’s control of the carting industry (transport), engine drivers, coach makers, cabinet makers, sheet metal workers, carpenters and all the building trades got increases in pay. Among its own membership, dockers, labourers, coal and grain fillers, bottle factory workers, biscuit makers, mineral water bottlers and railway workers received pay rises. The increases varied between 15p to 50p weekly — no small sum for the times.
*** WILLIAM MARTIN MURPHY
If the workers were happy at this turn in events, the bosses certainly were not, They banded together in the Dublin Employers Federation. Their leader was William Martin Murphy, owner of the Irish Independent, Evening Herald, and Irish Catholic newspapers, the Dublin Tramways Company and holder of big interests in hotel and drapery businesses.
Murphy’s plan was to use the weapon of starvation to break the union. On September 2<sup>nd</sup> 1913 he spelled out his policy to the Dublin Chamber of Commerce — “The employer all the time managed to get his three meals a day, but the unfortunate workman and his family had no resources whatever except submission, and that was what occurred in 99 cases out of 100. The difficulty of teaching that lesson to the workmen was extraordinary.”
*** MURPHY GETS READY
During the months of July and August Murphy was preparing for a showdown, by swelling the ranks of his employees with new recruits who had to sign an undertaking that they would not join the ITGWU. He also arranged with the British authorities that in the event of a strike the tramway company “was assured of the most ample protection for their men by the forces of the Crown”.
On August 12<sup>th</sup> 1913 a notice was posted in all tramway depots saying that there would be no recognition for “Mr. Larkin or his union”. Meanwhile Larkin, in an attempt to consolidate the recent gains, had come up with a scheme for a Conciliation Board. By 18 votes to 3 the Committee of the Employers Federation agreed to his proposal. It can be argued that Larkin was naive to think that any long term arrangement could be maintained that would be beneficial to the workers. Murphy didn’t want even a short term one, vowing to “smash the Conciliation Board”.
*** THE FIGHT BEGINS
On August 21<sup>st</sup> nearly 200 men and boys in the parcels office of the Tramway Company received the following notice: — “As the directors understand that you are a member of the Irish Transport Union, whose methods are disorganising the trade and business of the city, they do not further require your services. The parcels traffic will be temporarily suspended. If you are not a member of the union when traffic is resumed your application for re-employment will be favourably considered ”
On the morning of August 26<sup>th</sup>, the first day of Horse Show week, Murphy got a shock. At ten o’clock the tram drivers took out their union badges and pinned them in their buttonholes, They then walked off their trams, leaving them stranded in the middle of the road. The strike was on. The demands were reinstatement of and parcels staff, and equality of hours and wages with the tramway workers of Belfast.
*** THE GANG OF 400
Despite Murphy being only one of a minority of three on the question of the Conciliation Board, the Dublin bosses rallied around him. Each employer deposited, in the name of the Employers Federation, a sum of money in the bank. If a depositor came to terms with the union he lost all his money. The first boss to follow Murphy was Shackleton of Lucan, followed by Jacobs and the coal merchants. Then on September 3<sup>rd</sup> 400 employers met and pledged not to employ a single person who remained loyal to the union.
They agreed to lock out all workers who refused to sign this pledge — “I hereby undertake to carry out all instructions given to me by or on behalf of my employers and further I agree to immediately resign my membership of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union (if a member) and I further undertake that I will not join or in any way support this union.” Ten days later Dublin’s big farmers joined in and issued a similar ultimatum.
*** LIES AND SLANDERS
Murphy used his newspapers to claim that the tram strike was collapsing and to attempt to split the strikers by printing all manner of lies and slanders against Larkin. The Irish Catholic of September 6<sup>th</sup>: “They are poor and have naught, but if they were rich tomorrow, debauchery would soon have them in poverty again... by folly or malice of their so-called leader, they have been placed in deplorable straits... all this to gratify the vengeful whims of an adventurer who has been battening on their credulity”. Murphy pretended that his objection was only to “Larkinism” and not to legitimate trade unionism. This lie was easily exposed by mention of the previous efforts of the tram workers to organise. In 1903 Murphy had smashed the “Dublin and District Tramways Trade Union” and victimised its leading members.
The workers of Dublin met the threat to destroy the Transport Union with a heroic resistance. All over the city thousands chose the lock-out rather than sign the notorious document. Each trade served by labourers walked out when the labourers were ordered to sign. Most tradesmen showed solidarity. Even the United Builders Labourers Trade Union, who had been in conflict with Larkin, refused to sign and marched out “to help the ITGWU boys”. The women and girls marched out from the factories once the document was produced. By September 27<sup>th</sup> there were 24,000 locked-out. Within another two weeks the number rose to about 30,000. 32 unions were involved, all sticking up for the rights of the Transport Union, and trade union principles.
The first attempt at conciliation was tried by the leaders of the British TUC, who sent a special delegation to Dublin. If they didn’t realise this was a serious battle, the employers did and told them to get lost.
*** BLOODY SUNDAY
The close co-operation between the bosses and the state forces revealed itself early in the struggle when Larkin was arrested on charges of seditious libel and conspiracy, because he had advised workers to defend themselves against assaults by the police. Out on bail, he was announced as the main speaker for a mass meeting in O’Connell Street on August 31<sup>st</sup>. The meeting was banned by the authorities in Dublin Castle. Larkin addressed a huge crowd outside Liberty Hall, burned a copy of the banning order and declared that he would speak in O’Connell Street on Sunday. The RIC ended the meeting with a violent baton charge.
All Dublin waited to see if Larkin would keep his promise. The street was packed on the day. Hundreds of police lined up on both sides. Suddenly on the balcony of Murphy’s own Imperial Hotel a bearded man appeared. The false beard was discarded, Larkin had kept his promise.
As he began to speak he was quickly arrested, Then, before the crowd had even recovered from their surprise, the RIC fell on them with a brutal baton charge. Men, women and children were felled and beaten as they lay in the street. Hundreds were admitted to hospitals that evening.
Throughout the struggle this brutality was repeated all over the city. One of the most scandalous incidents was a police attack on a block of tenements, Corporation Buildings, in the city centre. This was home to many strikers. At two o’clock on a Monday morning the police invaded. Tenants were beaten without regard to age or sex, homes were wrecked. Even a baby of a few months was left with an eye injury.
*** STRIKERS MURDERED
Police thuggery inevitably produced fatalities, James Nolan, a young union member, was beaten so badly that his skull was smashed in. John Byrne also lost his life at the hands of the RIC. A young striker Alice Brady was travelling home with her food parcel from the union office when an armed scab shot her dead, Michael Byrne, secretary of the ITGWU in Dun Laoghaire was tortured in a police cell and died shortly after release.
Pickets were attacked by police, meetings were broken up. Strikers responded with stoning of trams driven by scabs. Larkin said the workers should arm and defend themselves, This cry was translated into the formation of the Irish Citizen Army which was trained by Captain Jack White DSO, an ex-British Army officer who now fully supported the workers’ cause and later joined the ranks of the anarchist movement during the Spanish Civil War, The ICA was a workers’ militia armed with sticks and hurleys, for protection against police and blacklegs. (Later the hurleys gave way to rifles when the ICA took part in the 1916 rising).
*** SUFFER THE CHILDREN...
Then, as now, the Catholic church enjoyed a lot of influence. From the beginning it had opposed trade unionism, and had then tried to back ‘moderate’ unions against ones that fought hard for their members, In 1911 in Sligo, Dr, Clancy, the bishop, denounced Larkin as a socialist and forbade the people to attend the public meeting of the union. (Showing that clerical power is not always as strong as bishops would wish, the public meeting was one of the largest ever seen in Sligo.)
In spite of great efforts, including a food kitchen in Liberty Hall, it was obvious that the strikers’ children were suffering from Murphy’s “starvation policy “. Some good people in Britain offered to take children into their homes until the situation improved. The union, while fearing public hostility would be whipped up by religious bigots, agreed to co-operate because of the childrens’ desperate plight.
The union’s fears were real. Dr. Walsh, Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, despite assurances that the children’s religion would be safeguarded, attacked the plan. He also stated that it was unacceptable because sending children to comfortable homes with three appetising meals a day would make them discontented with their slum homes when they returned. As children were taken to the boats and trains, gangs of thugs were organised to try and prevent their departure. These were marshalled by priests and officers of the Ancient Order of Hibernians. A campaign of slander claimed that the children were being taken away so that they could be made into Protestants All this had its effect. However, many children did manage to get to Britain and Belfast.
*** A LOVE OF IRELAND... BUT NOT ITS WORKERS
Three years before the 1916 rising, the ‘national movement’ was growing fast. We know the attitude of the socialists, they were to be found in the thick of the struggle. What then was the attitude of the nationalists? Some, such as Tom Clarke, Sean Connolly and the Countess Markeivicz, took the side of the workers. But the majority refused. Arthur Griffith, the leader of Sinn Fein, refused to help because his movement was “national not sectional”. He went on the describe the food ships sent by British trade unionists as an “insult”, Even the more radical Irish Republican Brotherhood refused to involve itself in a “sectional” dispute, When, at a meeting of the Irish Volunteers in the Rotunda on November 25<sup>th</sup>, ITGWU members challenged this they were attacked with hurley sticks and thrown out. No matter how much they talked of ‘justice’, and no matter how strongly some individuals sympathised with the union, the objective of all nationalists-from Home Rulers like Murphy to radicals like the IRB — was an independent capitalist Ireland. That is why they could not support the workers in such a major battle, one that could have destroyed the unity of the nationalist movement along class lines.
Once the lock-out was general in Dublin the two sides’ strength could be clearly seen. On one side was the vast majority of the Dublin working class, on the other not only the employers of the city but the whole of the British ruling class and its state machinery. If the union was not to be ground down in a protracted war of attrition the struggle would have to be spread across the Irish sea. The ITGWU had always responded to calls for solidarity action from British unions, now when it was fighting for its very life it demanded that this action be reciprocated.
Who should be appealed to? The bureaucracy of the unions or the rank and file? The ITGWU founders’ experience of the NUDL let them know what could be expected from the bureaucrats. Would officials who had betrayed their own members behave any better towards members of another union, an Irish one at that? From the first they appealed directly to the rank and file, and met with a great response.
On September 16<sup>th</sup> railway workers in Liverpool began to black all traffic to Dublin, soon some 13,000 were locked out or on strike as far afield as Birmingham, Sheffield, Crewe and Derby. This action was totally unofficial, organised by rank and file committees who aimed towards a national stoppage in support of Dublin. Sadly the railway union leaders, in particular J.H. Thomas, managed to prevent the strike spreading, isolate the militants and secure a return to work. There was a great fighting spirit and a real willingness to take solidarity action, but the militants were too unorganised and uncoordinated to overcome the manoeuvres of Thomas and his cronies.
*** “FIERY CROSS”
The ITGWU launched a second appeal for solidarity action. Larkin spoke at meetings all over Britain, his “fiery cross” crusade. In response a second wave of unofficial action spread across Britain. In South Wales two train drivers were sacked for refusing to carry Dublin traffic. 30,000 of their fellow workers on the railways struck in support of them. Once again Thomas used all his schemes and pleadings to get the strikers back to work he ended up describing the two sacked train drivers as “a disgrace” to trade unionism!
Union officials reported great difficulty in keeping their members on the Liverpool and London docks from coming out in sympathy. There was no lack of support for the ITGWU’s struggle but the militants just did not have enough co-ordination to take on the, bureaucrats, and break their hold.
The pressure from below was such, however, that the TUC called its first ever special conference. They hoped to kill off unofficial action by seeming to be doing something themselves, All eyes turned on the TUC. Delegates to the special conference were not elected from within their unions but simply selected from the ranks of the more cautious executive committee members. The vote for sympathy action was lost by 2,280,000 to 203,000. A shameful betrayal orchestrated by timid officials afraid to step outside the bounds of ‘conciliation and arbitration’.
*** FOOD SHIPS
Nevertheless £150,000 was collected for Dublin, which was a massive amount in those times. (A debt we repaid during the 1984/85 miners strike when Ireland contributed more per head of population than any other country). The food ships sent by the British TUC helped to maintain morale and keep the wolf from the door. But they were no substitute for the strike action that would have brought the bosses to their knees.
By the end of the year there had been two meetings between the union and the employers but negotiations were broken off when the employers refused to give any guarantee against victimisation in the re-employment of workers. There were still almost daily picket line battles between strikers and armed scabs and RIC. Many union members were still being injured and arrested. After 16 year-old Alice Brady was murdered in December angry strikers caught a revolver carrying scab and beat him to death. Another was thrown into the Liffey. But it was now plain that the union was fighting a losing battle.
*** BACK TO WORK
By mid-January 1914 a drift back to work had started. A month later there were still 5,000 brave men and women sticking it out in circumstances of the direst poverty The last group to accept defeat and return to work were the magnificent women of Jacobs who held out till mid-March.
What was the significance of the defeat? Some, such as the historian Desmond Greaves, say it was not a defeat. In reality it was a crushing defeat. Victimisation happened all over the city, the union was financially broken and its membership decimated. A climate of demoralisation and despondency prevailed.
*** DOWN... BUT NOT OUT
However such defeats are not always terminal. A hard core of determined members kept the union together It was an uphill task, They were thought unrealistic and had to put up with much shrugging of shoulders and cynicism. Yet by October 1915 they were strong enough to win a dispute with the Dublin Steam Packet Company. Murphy had once again called for a lock-out but this time his employer friends refused to follow him They had won two years earlier but at a great financial cost. They were in no hurry to spend such large amounts of money again.
By 1921 the union was truly back on its feet. 120,000 workers all over the country were carrying ITGWU cards. The seemingly unstoppable tide of militant trade unionism, often called Larkinism, had been stopped and tamed but the union had survived. The potential was still there for further and greater outbreaks of class warfare.
Today we can get demoralised when we look at the wave of emigration sweeping the 32 counties, the job losses, the very low level of struggle, the feeling of almost total powerlessness and lack of confidence among our friends and work mates. It is a little like the period after 1913. Just as then, it has fallen to small numbers to keep the ideas of class struggle and solidarity alive. It is usually unexciting and undramatic — but it is vital. We are laying the foundations for the struggles of tomorrow, the struggles we hope will take us into a world that can offer a real future to us all.
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#pubdate 2010-01-12 18:43:42 +0100
#author Alan MacSimoin
#SORTauthors Alan MacSimoin
#title The Korean Anarchist Movement
#LISTtitle Korean Anarchist Movement
#lang en
#SORTtopics Asia, history, Korea, Workers’ Solidarity Movement
#source Retrieved on January 1, 2005 from [[http://www.cat.org.au][www.cat.org.au]]
In the 2,000 years of Korean history there arose movements fighting for peasants rights and for national independence. Within these movements there were tendencies that may be seen as forerunners of modern anarchism, in the same way as we might view the Diggers in the English revolution.
In 1894 Japan invaded, under the pretext of protecting Korea from China. The struggle for national independence became central to all radical political activity.
The modern anarchist movement in Korea began to take form among the exiles who fled to China after the 1919 independence struggle, and students & workers who went to Japan. This struggle, the 3.1 Movement within which anarchists were prominent, involved 2 million people; 1,500 demonstrations were held; 7,500 were killed; 16,000 wounded and more than 700 homes and 47 churches destroyed.
In the period up to the close of World War II the Korean Anarchist Federation has identified three stages.
The first stage covered the first half of the 1920s and is described by the KAF as the gestation period.
In the early years of this century as the Japanese ruling class started their imperialist drive into other Asian countries they also ruthlessly cracked down on any opposition at home. Japanese anarchists were to the forefront in anti-imperialist agitation. In 1910 Kotoku Shusui, a leading Japanese anarchist, was executed for treason. <em>The Commoners Newspaper</em> was rallying opposition to the Russia-Japan war and to the occupation of Korea. With the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, the rice riot of 1918 and the mass uprising in Korea in 1919, the Japanese ruling class was worried.
Following the bloody suppression of the 3.1 Movement and the rise in the level of class struggle In Japan itself, the Japanese bosses blamed anarchists and Koreans for the Tokyo earthquake of 1923. More than 6,000 Korean workers in Japan were hunted down with clubs and bamboo spears. All known Japanese and Korean anarchists were arrested. Park Yeol and his wife Kaneko Fumiko, Korean anarchists, veterans of the independence struggle and organisers of the Tokyo “Black Workers Society”, were sentenced to death. Many others were jailed. The charge of causing an earthquake may have been a bit embarrassing to sections of the ruling class so the sentences were commuted to life in prison. Kaneko died in jail and Park was not released until the end of WWII. Many of the Koreans jailed in what became known as “the High Treason case” went on to become leading activists in the anarchist movement in their own country.
The Korean Anarchist Federation in China was formed in April 1924. and published the “Korean Revolution Manifesto”. It was militantly anti-imperialist “we declare that the burglar politics of Japan is the enemy for our nation’s existence and that it is our proper right to overthrow the imperialist Japan by a revolutionary means”. It went on to stress the need to do more than merely exchange rulers, pointing out the difference between a political revolution and a social revolution. It had no doubts about the role of anarchists; it laid emphasis on the leading role of the anarchists in a revolutionary situation. The Federation began to produce papers like <em>Recapture</em> and <em>Justice Bulletin</em>.
By 1928 the spread of libertarian politics allowed the Korean Anarchists to organise the Eastern Anarchist Federation with comrades from China, Vietnam, Taiwan and Japan — which published a bulletin, <em>Dong-Bang</em> (The East). The “Manifesto” was adopted by the Eastern Federation as its formal programme.
The second stage which covered the years 1925–30 was dominated by the organisation of the movement. Armed with the theory of anarchist revolution set out in the “Manifesto” and practical experiences drawn from the 3.1 movement, the workers organisations in Japan and “the High Treason case” groups were organised in Seoul, Taegu, Pyongyang and other areas. By November 1929 there had been a huge growth and the Korean Anarchist Communist Federation was formed as a national organisation. As part of the anti-Japanese resistance it was a totally underground body. This should not lead anyone into thinking that it was small or lacking in widespread support.
To give some idea of how the movement had grown I want to look at how things had progressed since the early 1920s. In Kiho province the daily newspaper <em>Dong-a Ilbo</em> reported in October 1925 that ten members of the League of Black Flag had been jailed for one year each. The following year the same paper reported that five young workers were jailed for putting out a manifesto very similar in style and content to the “Korean Revolution Manifesto”. In 1929 <em>Dong-a Ilbo</em> tells of a secret society of anarchists organised by Lee Eun-Song which had one hundred members in the town of Icheon in Kwangwon province. In that year it transpired that the entire membership of the Chunju Artists Movement Society were all anarchists, such were the names and fronts used to throw the Japanese police off the scent. In response to this the death penalty was brought in for organising societies with the aim of “changing the national structure”.
In Taegu, a League of Truth and Fraternity was set up in 1925 by exiles who returned from Japan. The Revolutionists League also came into being and both were in regular contact with the Tokyo Black Youth Society. I have also come across anarchist groups in Anui, Mesan, the Changwon Black Friend League, the Jeju Island Mutual Aid group. The last mentioned used their remoteness from central government to organise co-ops of farmers and artisans, even a peasants’ band. Needless to say, the organisers quickly found they were not that remote and saw the inside of a prison cell.
In Kwanseo and Kwanbul province I have found mention of at least eight more groups. Almost all the groups around the country were involved in a mixture of producing leaflets & papers, oranising trade unions and engaging in resistance to the occupation.
By this time we know that most areas could boast of an active group. There were also organisations in Manchuria and amongst exiles in China and Japan.
The next stage was the fighting period which ran up to 1945.
Among the two million Koreans in Manchuria the KAF in Manchuria was able to sink deep roots immediately after its formation in 1929. The Federation’s main organiser, Kim Jong-Jin, drew up a plan which he put to the anti-Japanese guerillas. It covered voluntary collectives for farmers, free education up to age 18 with adult education for those older and arms training for all responsible adults. Discussions followed and eventually an anarchist plan was agreed which was described as being “according to the free federation principle based upon the spontaneous free will of man”.
The difficulty that was not really addressed was how to deal with the Stalinists who were also organising in this region and were slandering the anarchists and others as “tyrants”. The young anarchists around Yu-Rim wanted to fight ideology with ideology and demonstrate the superiority of their ideas. The older anti-Japanese guerillas around Kim Jwa-Jin (sometimes called the Korean Makhno) thought it was enough to state their support for anarchism but that they could ignore the Stalinists until national independence was won because only then would real politics come to the forefront. Not a lot different from the stages theory put forward by elements in Sinn Fein!
By August 1929 the anarchists had formed an administration in Shinmin (one of the three Manchurian provinces). Whether this was a government is still a point of contention among anarchists. Organised as the Korean People’s Association in Manchuria it declared its aim as “an independent self-governing cooperative system of the Korean people who assembled their full power to save our nation by struggling against Japan”. The structure was federal going from village meetings to district and area conferences. The general association was composed of delegates from the districts and areas.
The general association set up executive departments to deal with agriculture, education, propaganda, finance, military affairs, social health, youth and general affairs. The staff of the departments received no more than the average wage.
We would expect that the organisation would start at village level and then federate upwards. However the EAPM believed that the war situation made this impossible to apply the principle immediately. In the interim they appointed the staffs and appointed them from the top down. Organisation and propaganda teams were then sent out to agitate for support and for the creation of village assemblies and committees. In one village a rice mill capable of milling over 1 million bushels was built to allow the local co-op to break from reliance on merchants. Seemingly all these teams reported a good response and were made welcome wherever they went.
The local administration of the anti-Japanese fighters in Shimin voluntarily dissolved itself and lent its support to KAPM. As the anarchists grew in numbers and support the Stalinists and the pro-Japanese elements in Manchuria felt their own power bases threatened.
On January 20<sup>th</sup> the anarchist general Kim Jwa-Jin was assassinated while doing repair work on the rice mill I just mentioned. The killer escaped but his handler was caught and executed.
At a meeting in June in Peking of the KAFC it was decided to divert all resources outside Korea itself to Manchuria and most KAFC members moved to the anarchist zone in northern Manchuria. It should be noted that women comrades were active as agitators and arms smugglers.
From late 1930 onwards the Japanese were attacking in waves from the South and the Stalinists, supported by the USSR, from the North. In early 1931 the Stalinists sent assassination and kidnapping teams into the anarchist zone to murder leading activists. They believed that if they wiped out the KAFM the KAPM would wither and die. By the summer of 1931 many leading anarchists were dead and the war on two fronts was devastating the region. It was decided to go underground. Anarchist Shimin was no more.
There is much more to be said about activity in China and Japan as well as in Korea both in the years up to the close of the Second World War, about their attitude towards the partition of their country, and about their position today. It would take too much time to deal with it all. What should be very clear is that anarchism in Asia has a very real history. We need more information to properly assess its political development, achievements and failings. In the meantime we can draw strength from the knowledge that anarchism was, and can be again, a major force in the region.
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#title What about human nature?
#subtitle Thinking about Anarchism
#author Alan MacSimoin
#SORTtopics Human nature, Workers Solidarity
#date 1991
#source Retrieved on 9<sup>th</sup> October 2021 from [[http://struggle.ws/ws91/nature33.html][struggle.ws]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2021-10-09T10:58:59
#notes Published in <em>Workers Solidarity</em> No. 33 — Winter 1991.
<strong>A WORLD without war, famine, poverty, racism? A world where there are no bosses ordering us around and living off our work? A world where competition is replaced by co-operation and individual freedom?</strong>
Sounds nice. Who wouldn’t like to see it? But it can never happen, it runs against human nature. How many times have you heard that line? How many times have you been told that people are naturally selfish, greedy, prone to violence and short-sighted?
We are constantly being told that there will always be leaders and led, rulers and ruled. These ideas are powerful because they seem to make sense. We do live in a nasty, competitive society.
*** IT WOULD BE A MIRACLE
Capitalism is based on competition. Countries compete, companies compete. At work you are encouraged to compete for promotion (or to avoid being let go), in school you compete against other students to get the best exam results. With so much competition around it would be miraculous if people were not competitive.
The question is whether this is natural? The idea that there is some eternally flawed human nature that we can’t do much about gets lots of support from those with a stake in the existing set-up. Anarchists reject this as self serving nonsense churned out by those who are doing well out of capitalism and don’t want to see it got rid of.
*** WHO DOESN’T CARE?
Despite the odds stacked against it we can find just as many examples of caring and co-operation as we can of selfishness and competition. Solidarity strikes are an obvious one. We even saw workers in Dunnes Stores go on strike for months in support of black workers in South Africa whom they had never even met.
Look at any working class neighbourhood and you will find people caring for each other. They are organising football teams for the teenagers, summer projects for the younger children. This doesn’t make sense if greed is part of our human nature.
*** WILLIE BERMINGHAM
Greed and selfishness don’t motivate people to carry kidney donor cards or make them want to donate blood to the transfusion service. Greed did not inspire the late Willie Bermingham to start up ALONE to care for the elderly living on their own.
Selfishness does not lead people to give money to charities. It does not explain why nurses volunteer to work unpaid for Concern projects in the less developed countries.
But, we are told, there are those better suited to ruling, that inequality is natural and inevitable. Before capitalism the ruling class used the argument that God had chosen them, the ‘divine right of kings’. With capitalism came a new justification. We are told that our bosses and rulers owe their position to superior talent. They ‘merit’ their position.
*** ARE THEY BETTER THAN YOU?
We are told that with intelligence and hard work anyone can make it. The other side of the coin is that those at the bottom of society are there because of their own laziness or because they are not as bright as the likes of Haughey or Ben Dunne. Are we really expected to accept that Dan Quayle is an intellectual giant? Are we to believe that the child of a millionaire has only the same chances as the rest of us?
This is crap pushed at us to stop us questioning why the many do all the work while the few make all the important decisions and live off the fat of the land.
The true story is that we are products both of the environment we live in and of the changes we make on it. We have no control over what sort of society we are born into but we can change it.
*** CHANGING VIEWS OF ‘NATURAL’
To law-abiding parents stopping the heroin dealers was a job for the gardai. When the gardai were not moving against the Larry Dunnes and Ma Bakers those same law-abiding parents thought it quite natural to organise into the CPAD and put the pushers out of their areas — even though doing that was illegal.
To the conscripted American soldier in Vietnam blindly obeying orders from officers seemed perfectly natural. After years of slaughter and massacres, desertion and even mutiny seemed natural.
To most workers getting in to work each Monday morning and taking orders from the boss seems natural until they are forced to strike. They may even challenge the right of the boss to control their workplace by occupying it.
*** WE CAN DO IT
We have the power to change the world. The ruling class know this and try to divide us. They split us into Protestant and Catholic, gay and straight, black and white, working class and so-called middle class (white collar workers).
But again and again the system throws us together in struggle. It is in struggle that we we come to depend on each other and co-operate for a common goal. This is the first step towards building a society where selfishness is replaced by co-operation, where the dictate of the boss is replaced by freedom, where we take control of our own lives and futures.
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#title Whatever Happened to the Anarchist Workers Group?
#author Alan MacSimoin
#SORTtopics analysis, Anarchist Workers Group, 1990s, United Kingdom
#date February 2008
#source Retrieved on 17<sup>th</sup> November 2021 from [[http://anarkismo.net/article/8452][anarkismo.net]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2021-11-17T20:42:02
#notes An Educational given to Jack White branch of the WSM in February 2008
For many years the experience of the Anarchist Workers Group in Britain was used to smear ‘platformists’ as some sort of authoritarian tapeworm within the body of anarchism. It was claimed that our politics leads people out of anarchism and into Leninism.
The emergence of the Anarchist Workers Group at the start of the 1990’s was something the WSM welcomed. Most of the people involved initially came from the South London branch of the Direct Action Movement. At least one founder member of the ACF was also involved. They also had branches in the North of England with people from Manchester, Huddersfield and Liverpool.
Our welcoming of the AWG was for a number of reasons. Their experience within DAM had led them to reject Syndicalism, specifically as a rejection of DAM’s policy of seeking to build revolutionary trade unions in opposition to the TUC ones. They also accepted the basis of the Platform of the Libertarian Communists, i.e. they wanted to build an organisation that would have a high degree of theoretical and tactical unity.
On Ireland they took a firm anti-imperialist line, and took part in activity around the ‘Time To Go’ demonstrations. No other anarchist group in England had done so at the time. On a more incidental level, the AWG seemed not to be suffering from the Trot-phobia that prevents many English anarchist groups taking part in anything but their own fronts.
But after just two years AWG no longer existed. In the course of those two years they published four magazines and never grew beyond 30 members, before shrinking down to 10. The survivors changed the name of the organisation to Socialism from Below and decided they were going “beyond anarchism”. Most of them quickly dropped out of activity and a couple ended up in the ex-Trotskyist Revolutionary Communist Party.
Why did this happen and what can we learn? After all, the experience of the AWG is still thrown up as an argument against our politics.
The WSM is in a unique position to do this as not only do we have the benefit of hindsight but we also have the advantage of having all their internal documents and bulletins. In addition WSM members attended two of their national conferences. On two occasions a couple of their members came over to Ireland for discussions and one of their members was an ex-member of the WSM who visited Ireland on a regular basis.
The AWG got off to a promising start, although the first issue of Socialism from Below trod on many toes, particularly in its excellent analysis of all that was wrong with British anarchism. Alongside it, a pamphlet called In Place Of Compromise set out a strategy for anarchists in the trade unions. This represented an advance on other anarchist positions at the time which either ignored the unions (Class War), attempted to build microscopic alternative unions (DAM) or rejected any organised participation (ACF). In Place Of Compromise shared many common features with WSM policy.
The problems of the AWG fell into two major categories, political and organisational.
Throughout its short life the AWG never managed to regularly produce internal bulletins or keep the members informed of decisions made by the national committee. Bear in mind that this was in pre-internet days!
People were reluctant to act as national officers e.g. the Treasurer nearly always resigned after 6 months of half doing the job. As a result subs were never regularly collected from the members and money from sales of Socialism from Below was rarely collected. Too much was being done at the last moment, sometimes resulting in serious, if memorable, mistakes. One leaflet on abortion called for “free women on demand”.
This was a disastrous way to operate and left many members confused and demoralised. Yet no real attempts were made to sort things out. Any attempt to discuss solutions was brushed off as an organisational solution to a political problem. There was a political problem all right, the failure to treat organisation as a serious task in itself.
The political problems of the AWG came from a number of sources, some to do with the background of the members and some connected with the political climate at the time.
The AWG was aware, like ourselves, that contemporary anarchism as a set of ideas is a bit undeveloped in some areas. Its core ideas on the state, the Russian revolution and the role of a revolutionary organisation are spot on. However on imperialism, women’s oppression, racism and a host of other issues there is either little or no useful theory to guide anarchists today.
Most anarchist organisations don’t seem to mind. Within all the British groups contradictory positions are held by different people and no attempt is made to resolve this fundamental problem. Sometimes blind activism is substituted in the hope that if you are busy enough the holes will not show, which is fine until you meet up with another left organisation.
In this case you often bailed out and left it to them, this perhaps reached a high point with the anti-war campaign. The anarchists, incapable of challenging the trots about their domination of the existing campaigns, set up their own tiny alternatives. They voluntarily cut themselves off from contact with many enthusiastic anti-war campaigners.
This is a real problem, unfortunately the AWG’s solution degenerated from the comical to the dangerous. Initially a load of areas were chosen and ‘commissions’ set up to develop theory in these areas. None of these commissions completed their work as most members were on two or three of them at once. They collapsed under their own workload.
Individuals still had a strong commitment to theoretical work so it was agreed that informal groups would meet socially and discuss a particular set of ideas. As there was seldom an internal bulletin their work did not reach the organisation as a whole.
This resulted in the rapid unofficial promotion of a small group of people to what was effectively the leadership of the organisation. By June of 1990 this resulted in a National conference where (as reported by one of the WSM observers present) “almost all the motions had come from this small group and it was obvious to us that the rest of the membership could not follow a fair proportion of the arguments or realise the full effect of what was being debated”.
The AWG, because it was not afraid to face the Trots on their own ground, succeeded in winning over a few members of other left groups. These people had, however, come from a background where anarchists were presented as a group of middle class wallies without two ideas to rub together or as dropouts incapable of dealing with modern society. Within the AWG, however, there was no formal education about the anarchist tradition but a fair few articles slagging off green anarchists.
They had made the mistake of thinking that anyone who wants to join a revolutionary anarchist organisation must already be a revolutionary anarchist. If only life was that simple!
From another WSM report “At the last conference I was shocked to discover that one person who had been in the AWG for over a year knew by his own admission virtually nothing about the anarchists in the Spanish revolution. Not surprisingly many of these ex-trots came to believe that the AWG must be a radical departure from anarchism for it seemed radically different from what they had been told anarchism was”.
One thing the emergence of the AWG demonstrated was that Anarchist groups are capable of being just as sectarian and childish as the silliest of Trotskyist groups. Most anarchist groups refused to even communicate with the AWG. Members of DAM even attempted to disrupt the AWG meeting at the London Anarchist Bookfair in 1991.
There was a complete lack of serious discussion. Instead debate between the groups was restricted to nasty, if funny, cartoons and smart alekey articles along with a large measure of rumour.
This had the effect of making several members of the AWG who were anarchists into people who thought there was no hope of rescuing anarchism from this inward looking and muddle headed swamp and they were better off striking out alone. After a while the AWG gave up on seriously addressing itself to anarchists at all. After the Gulf War, when they decided that anarchists should take a side against US imperialism and then interpreted that as calling for ‘Victory to Iraq’, they claimed it was almost impossible to get any anarchists to listen to them. To us it was also clear that, in London at least, they were no longer trying.
The lessons we drew from this sorry episode were influenced by the fact that we made many of the same mistakes in our early years and nearly met the same fate between 1986 and 1989. The first lesson is to make sure that people getting involved are not just joining because we are a good organisation but also understand that our politics and methods are good because we are anarchists.
We need to constantly re-examine the anarchist tradition and educate newer members about what that tradition was and is. We should never stop discussing the basics of our politics, it can be boring for members who have been around for years but better that than leaving some members with gaps in their understanding of anarchism.
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#title An anarchist should never ask for the vote of fear
#subtitle Announcement regarding the Labor defeat in the December elections
#author Alan Moore
#LISTtitle anarchist should never ask for the vote of fear
#SORTtopics Left Electoralism, UK, labour, anti-voting, voting, fear, Corbyn
#date December 28, 2019
#source Retrieved on 22<sup>nd</sup> September 2020 from http://www.ainfos.ca/en/ainfos41179.html
#lang en
#pubdate 2020-09-22T09:01:30
#notes Translated from Spanish
There is something you do not see every day, and it is an anarchist who is against the internet and convinced that the leaders lead us to destruction, apologize for having requested the vote for Labor in the December elections.
I don’t know what I would be thinking. The drugs. Poor digestion. A virus. I’m sorry, really sorry. He should have known that the fact that an anarchist asks for the vote for a politician can only bring bad consequences. My call made dozens of anarchists cast their vote for the Labor Party, and precisely at all those polling stations, they have had the worst defeat since the Falkland War. I know, I know. I have rushed into the abyss for Labor for at least two decades, and I can only conclude that I have given them what in Andalusia is called <em>Mal Fario</em>. I have to conclude that I am an ash, a badge as there is no other to the north of Despeñaperros, which has opened the way to the worst politicians one can find in a department store such as El Corte Inglés. I have only voted twice in my life, and I have convinced myself after seeing the results, that it is better that from now on I do not leave home on an election day. Boris Johnson has won, valid Doctor Manhattan.
My vote was <em>against the conservatives</em> more than in favor of the Labor, despite its exciting program, in which so many promises were made to us every day. The sun was not rising in London, when it rises, without the Labor program increasing more and more, with interesting proposals to end climate change and the horrible English cuisine. None of that will materialize, and we will have to see how our children and grandchildren swim like famished polar bears through the waters of the Antarctic Ocean in the direction of the Great Plastic Island, eating the filthy kidney cake with jam.
If my work has meant something to you over the years, if the way in which modernity advances makes you fear for all the things that you value, then in the next elections do not vote ..., or better yet I ask that vote for the conservatives, to convey misfortune and sink into the abyss. Have your voice heard with a vote in favor of this ruthless trampling of security, dignity and dreams of all, because remember that if an anarchist votes for something, guaranteed defeat for that party!
A world we love has us. Sister Night, Looking Glass, Red Scare, Pirate Jenny ..., count on us.
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#title Fandom has toxified the world
#subtitle On superheroes, Comicsgate and Trump
#author Alan Moore
#date 26 October 2024
#source Retrieved on 28<sup>th</sup> October 2024 from [[https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/oct/26/fandom-has-toxified-the-world-watchmen-author-alan-moore-on-superheroes-comicsgate-and-trump][www.theguardian.com]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2024-10-28T15:43:40
#topics popular culture
<strong>A</strong>bout a decade ago, I ventured my opinion that the adult multitudes queueing for superhero movies were potentially an indicator of emotional arrest, which could have worrying political and social implications. Since at that time Brexit, Donald Trump and fascist populism hadn’t happened yet, my evidently crazy diatribe was largely met with outrage from the fan community, some of whom angrily demanded I be extradited to the US and made to stand trial for my crimes against superhumanity – which I felt didn’t necessarily disprove my allegations.
Ten years on, let me make my position clear: I believe that fandom is a wonderful and vital organ of contemporary culture, without which that culture ultimately stagnates, atrophies and dies. At the same time, I’m sure that fandom is sometimes a grotesque blight that poisons the society surrounding it with its mean-spirited obsessions and ridiculous, unearned sense of entitlement. Perhaps this statement still requires some breaking down.
Concerning the word “fan”, I first encountered this contraction of “fanatic” during childhood, in a television documentary on the phenomenon. All I remember is the weary spouse of a woman devoted to the late Jim Reeves, sitting in a family home that had become a mausoleum of memorabilia, and mournfully accepting that his wife had only married him because his name happened to be James Reeves. Soon after that, the word passed into common usage, although only in the milder sense of somebody quite liking something, and without the connotations of a person listening to Distant Drums on endless replay with the curtains drawn, or a cultist running wild-eyed from the treeline waving a machete. “Fan”, then, meant merely “enthusiast”, but sounded less Edwardian.
Quite liking comics, aged 14 I thus became a comics fan with my discovery of British fandom, which was then still gummy-eyed and fresh out of the egg. The first convention I attended in London, in the basement rooms of a Southampton Row hotel in 1969, was tiny and inspiring. The attenders barely totalled a three-digit number, almost all of them some few years short of legal drinking age. The comics companies, having no monetary interest in a handful of penniless teenagers, went blissfully unrepresented, and the only industry celebrity that I recall was the sublime and sweetly unassuming genius Frank Bellamy, passing Dan Dare or Garth originals around, appearing wonderstruck that anyone had heard of him. The only thing uniting the assembly was its passion for an undervalued storytelling medium and, for the record, the consensus verdict of the gathered 15-year-old cognoscenti was that costumed musclemen were the main obstacle preventing adult audiences from taking comics seriously.
Of that hardly-a-hundred schoolkids, office boys and junior librarians, the great majority were actively involved in their pursuit, publishing or contributing to a variety of – for the most part – poorly duplicated fanzines, or else going on to work professionally in the field, such as Kevin O’Neill, Steve Moore, Steve Parkhouse or Jim Baikie, all of whom were downstairs at the Waverley hotel that weekend, keen to elevate the medium that they loved, rather than passively complain about whichever title or creator had particularly let them down that month. Of course, this was the 1960s and the same amateur energy seemed to be everywhere, spawning an underground press, Arts Lab publications and a messy, marvellous array of poetry or music fanzines that were the material fabric of that era’s counterculture; flimsy pamphlets as important and innovative today as they were then, although considerably more expensive, trust me.
Soon thereafter, caught up in the rush of adolescent life, I drifted out of touch with comic books and their attendant fandom, only returning eight years later when I was commencing work as a professional in that fondly remembered field, to find it greatly altered. Bigger, more commercial, and although there were still interesting fanzines and some fine, committed people, I detected the beginnings of a tendency to fetishise a work’s creator rather than simply appreciate the work itself, as if artists and writers were themselves part of the costumed entertainment. Never having sought a pop celebrity relationship with readers, I withdrew by stages from the social side of comics, acquiring my standing as a furious, unfathomable hermit in the process. And when I looked back, after an internet and some few decades, fandom was a very different animal.
An older animal for one thing, with a median age in its late 40s, fed, presumably, by a nostalgia that its energetic predecessor was too young to suffer from. And while the vulgar comic story was originally proffered solely to the working classes, soaring retail prices had precluded any audience save the more affluent; had gentrified a previously bustling and lively cultural slum neighbourhood. This boost in fandom’s age and status possibly explains its current sense of privilege, its tendency to carp and cavil rather than contribute or create. I speak only of comics fandom here, but have gained the impression that this reflexive belligerence – most usually from middle-aged white male conservatives – is now a part of many fan communities. My 14-year-old grandson tells me older Pokémon aficionados can display the same febrile disgruntlement. Is this a case of those unwilling to outgrow childhood enthusiasms, possibly because these anchor them to happier and less complex times, who now feel they should be sole arbiters of their pursuit?
There are, of course, entirely benign fandoms, networks of cooperative individuals who quite like the same thing, can chat with others sharing the same pastime and, importantly, provide support for one another in difficult times. These healthy subcultures, however, are less likely to impact on society in the same way that the more strident and presumptuous fandoms have managed. Unnervingly rapidly, our culture has become a fan-based landscape that the rest of us are merely living in. Our entertainments may be cancelled prematurely through an adverse fan reaction, and we may endure largely misogynist crusades such as Gamergate or Comicsgate from those who think “gate” means “conspiracy”, and that Nixon’s disgrace was predicated on a plot involving water, but this is hardly the full extent to which fan attitudes have toxified the world surrounding us, most obviously in our politics.
Elections that decide the fate of millions are conducted in an atmosphere more suited to evictions on I’m a Celebrity<em></em> …, in which contestants who are insufficiently amusing are removed from office. Saleability, not substance, is the issue. Those who vote for Donald Trump or Boris Johnson seem less moved by policy or prior accomplishment than by how much they’ve enjoyed the performances on The Apprentice or Have I Got News for You. And throughout the UK, we’re now familiar with what a Stephen Yaxley-Lennon fan convention looks like.
An enthusiasm that is fertile and productive can enrich life and society, just as displacing personal frustrations into venomous tirades about your boyhood hobby can devalue them. Quite liking something is OK. You don’t need the machete or the megaphone.
Candidly, for my part, readers would have always been more than sufficient.
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#title Jerusalem
#author Alan Moore
#SORTtopics fiction, science fiction, time
#date 2016
#lang en
#pubdate 2020-09-22T07:58:13
<em>For my family, for the people of the Boroughs, and for Audrey Vernon, the best piano-accordionist our cracked lanes ever knew.</em>
<strong>Based on a “true story.”</strong>
<br>
* <strong>PRELUDE</strong>
** <strong>WORK IN PROGRESS</strong>
<strong>A</strong>lma Warren, five years old, thought that they’d probably been shopping, her, her brother Michael in his pushchair and their mum, Doreen. Perhaps they’d been to Woolworth’s. Not the one in Gold Street, bottom Woolworth’s, but top Woolworth’s, halfway along Abington Street’s shop-lit incline, with its spearmint green tiled milk-bar, with the giant dial of its weighing machine trimmed a reassuring magnet red where it stood by the wooden staircase at the building’s rear.
The stocky little girl, so solid she seemed almost die-cast, had no memory of holding back the smeary brass and glass weight of the shop’s swing doors so that Doreen could steer the pram into the velvet bustle of the main street glistening outside. She struggled to recall a landmark that she’d noticed somewhere along the much-trodden route, perhaps the lit-up sign that jutted out from Kendall’s rainwear shop on Fish Street corner, where the marching <em><strong>K</strong></em> leaned boldly forward against driving wind, cartoon umbrella open and held somehow by the letter’s handless, out-flung arm, but nothing came to mind. In fact, now that she thought about it, Alma couldn’t honestly remember anything at all about the expedition. Everything before the lamp-lit stretch of paving along which she now found herself walking, with the squeak of Michael’s pram and rhythmic clacking of their mother’s heels, everything prior to this was a mysterious fuzz.
With chin tucked in her mackintosh’s buttoned collar against dusk’s pervasive chill, Alma surveyed the twinkling slabs that steadily unwound beneath the mesmerising back and forth of her blunt, buckled shoes. It seemed to her that the most likely explanation for the blank gap in her recollection was plain absent-mindedness. Most probably she’d daydreamed through the whole dull outing, and had seen all of the usual things but paid them no attention, caught up in the lazy stream of her own thoughts, the private drift of make-believe and muddle going on between her dangling plaits, beneath her butterfly-slides, faded pink and brittle like carbolic soap. Practically every day she’d wake up from a trance, emerge from her cocoon of plans and memories to find herself a terrace or two further on than the last place she’d noticed, so the lack of any memorable details from this current shopping trip was no cause for concern.
Abington Street, she thought, was the best bet for where they’d been, and would explain why they were now making their way along the bottom edge of a deserted Market Square towards the alley next to Osborn’s, where they’d next slog up the Drapery, pushing Michael past the seaside-flavoured brick slab of the Fish Market with its high, dust-veiled windows, then down Silver Street, across the Mayorhold and into the Boroughs, home amongst the tilt and tangle of its narrow passages.
As comforting as Alma found this notion, she still had the nagging feeling there was something not quite right about her explanation. If they’d just left Woolworth’s then it couldn’t be much after five o’clock, with all of the town centre shops still open, so why weren’t there any lights on in the Market? No pale greenish glow crept from the gated mouth of the Emporium Arcade up on the slanted square’s top side, while on the western border Lipton’s window was blacked out, without its usual cheese-rind coloured warmth. Shouldn’t the market traders, for that matter, still be packing up their wares, closing their stalls down for the day, cheerfully shouting to each other as they kicked through the spoiled fruit and tissue paper, folding trestle tables up to load with hoof-beat clang and clatter into bulky, spluttering vans the shape of ambulances, tin frames echoing like gongs with each fresh armful?
But the wide expanse was vacant and its draughty incline swept away uphill to empty darkness. Rising from the gooseflesh of wet cobbles there were only listing posts dividing up the absent stalls, drenched timbers chewed like pencils at one end and jutting from square, rust-rimmed holes between the hunchback stones. One tattered awning had been left behind, too miserable for anyone to steal, the sodden flap of its sole wing slapping at intervals above the low, half-waking murmur of the wind, the sound snapped back by the high buildings framing the enclosure. Looming from its centre, black on sooty grey, the market’s iron monument poked up into the dirty wash-water of night, ornate Victorian stem rising to blossom in a scalloped capital crowned by a copper globe, much like some prehistoric monster flower, alone and petrified. Around its stepped plinth, Alma knew, were small unnoticed bursts of emerald grass, doggedly bristling from the cracks and crevices, perhaps the only living things beside her mother, brother and herself to be about the square that evening, even if she couldn’t see them.
Where were all the other mothers dragging children through the shining and inviting pools outside shop windows, home for tea? Where were the tired, unhappy-looking men slouching along their solitary paths back from the factories, with one hand in a sorry pocket of their navy trousers and the frayed strap of a shouldered kitbag in the other? Over the slate roofs that edged the square there was no pearly aura shading up into black sky, no white electric rays spilled from the Gaumont’s streamlined front, as if Northampton had been suddenly switched off, as if it were the middle of the night. But then, what were they doing in town centre when it was so late, with all the shops shut and the oblong glass eyes of their bolted doors become unfriendly, distant, staring blankly like they didn’t know you, didn’t want you there?
Trotting beside her mum, one hot hand clenched on the cool tubing of the pushchair’s handle, dragging slightly so that Doreen had to tow her, she began to worry. If things were no longer going on the way they should be, didn’t that mean anything could happen? Glancing up towards her mother’s scarf-wrapped profile, Alma could find no sign of concern in the soft, sensible blue eyes fixed on the pavement up ahead, or in the uncomplaining line that sealed the small rose mouth. If there were any reason to be frightened, if they were in danger, surely Mum would know? But what if there was something horrible, a ghost or bear or murderer, and their mother wasn’t told? What if it got them? Chewing on her lower lip, she made another effort to remember where the three of them had been before this haunted cobblestone enclosure.
In the shadows puddled at the market’s bottom flank not far in front, the heavyset child noticed with relief that there was at least one light burning in the otherwise apparently deserted murk, a rectangle of ivory brightness falling from the big front window of the paper-shop on Drum Lane’s corner, angling across the boot-worn yellowed flags outside. As if she had been listening in upon her daughter’s mounting apprehension, Alma’s mother looked down at her now and smiled, nodding towards the shop-front that was barely more than three pram-lengths before them. “The’yar. Ayr’s wun blessid place as ent shut up, ay?”
Alma nodded, pleased and reassured, while in his creaking pushchair Michael kicked against the footboard in approval, with his curly golden head that looked like Bubbles in the painting bouncing up and down. As they drew level with the newsagent’s the little girl peered through its tall clean panes into the dazzle of a stripped interior where it appeared that work was going on, carpenters labouring through the hours of darkness at their renovations, no doubt so as not to intrude on the normal trading times of the establishment. Four or five men were busy over sawhorses there on the bare, new-looking floorboards, hammering and planing under an unshaded light-bulb, and she noticed that their feet were naked in the dust and shavings piled like curls of butter. Wouldn’t they get splinters? All of them were wearing plain white gowns that reached their ankles. All of them had close-trimmed nails, had smooth skin that was radiantly clean as if they’d just come from a proper sit-down bath, still had lavender talcum crusting on damp shoulders into shapes like continents. They all looked serious and strong but not unkind, and most of them had hair that hung down to the collars of their freshly laundered robes, heads bent above robust and rasping toil.
One man amongst the labour detail stood aside from his four colleagues, watching as they worked. Alma supposed he was in charge. She noticed that, unlike those of the other men, his gown rose to a cowl so that none of his face was really visible above the nose. His hair was covered, but she somehow felt sure it was dark and shorter than that of his workmates, the neck shorn to suede below the folds of his dove-coloured hood. He was clean-shaven, like the rest of them, ruggedly handsome from those features she could see beneath the inky cowl-cast shade that filled his sockets and concealed his eyes behind a phantom burglar mask. Seeming to feel the child’s attention through the glass, the man in question turned to smile in her direction, lifting one hand casually in greeting, and with an astounded, disbelieving lurch somewhere inside her Alma understood who he must be.
The measured pram-squeak and the ringing cap-gun detonations of her mother’s heels slowed to a stop as Doreen also paused to stare through the illuminated window, in at the nocturnal labourers and their hooded foreman.
“Well, I’ll goo ter ayr ace. Look ’ere, you two, it’s the Frit Burr un ’iz angles.”
Alma thought that ‘angles’ was most likely an expression from the Boroughs meaning carpenters or joiners, but the other term was foreign to her and she frowned up questioningly into Doreen’s gently mocking gaze, as if her mum thought Alma was just being dense and should have known at her age what a ‘Frit Burr’ was.
Doreen gave a mild tut. “Ooh, yer a sample, you are. ’E’s the Frith Borh. The Third Burrer. All the times you’ve ’eard me gooin’ on abayt ’im, un yuh look ut me gone ayt.”
Alma had heard of the Third Borough, or at least it seemed she had. The words were teasingly familiar, and she knew this was a way the person that she’d understood the hooded man to be the moment that he’d waved was known, something that people called him when they wanted to avoid his other name. ‘Third Borough’, if she’d got it right, meant something like a rent-man or policeman, only much more friendly and respected, more magnificent than even the Red Earl, Earl Spencer, swinging on a pub sign she’d once seen. She looked back from her mother to the tableau of the partly reconstructed paper-shop, the figures at their earnest graft there in a flood of brilliance, the newsagent’s with its glass front like a fish tank where the men worked under water that was warm and luminous. The cowled man, the Third Borough, was still smiling out at Doreen and her children, but he wasn’t so much waving now as beckoning, inviting them to come inside.
Mum scraped the pushchair round in a tight quarter-circle on the pavement bordering the hushed, abandoned market, steering Michael and his pram into the shop’s glass entranceway, set back with grubby beige and turquoise chips in a mosaic ramp between the doorframe and the slippery street. With one plump hand still clenched upon the carriage handle and pulled in her mother’s wake, Alma hung back uncertainly, dragging her feet. She’d heard somewhere, or somehow gathered the impression that you only got an audience like this if you were dead, dead being an idea she hadn’t really taken in as yet but knew she wouldn’t like. One of the men with flowing locks, this one with hair so fair that it was white, was setting down his handsaw now and crossing to the door to hold it open for them, genial creases forming at the corners of his eyes. Sensing the girl’s reluctance, Alma’s mother turned and spoke to her encouragingly.
“Gor, you are a soppy date, ayr Alma. ’E ent gunner urcha, un ’e dun’t see people very orften. Goo on in un say ’ello or else ’e’ll think we’re rude.”
With head tipped forward and her brown roller-provided curls concealed beneath the headscarf’s charcoal check, her winter coat’s line falling from the full bust in a prow-like swoop, Doreen had something in her manner that made Alma think of pigeons and their careless calm, their paint-box mottled necks, the ruffling music of their voices. She remembered having had a dream once in which she’d been sitting with her mother in their living room down Andrew’s Road, on the west boundary of the Boroughs. In the dream Doreen was ironing while her daughter knelt there in the armchair, sucking absently upon the threadbare padding of its rear and gazing through the back-yard window out into the twilight. Over next door’s wall there loomed the disused stable with black holes like crossed-out bits in documents, where slates were missing from its roof. Through these the flickering shapes of pigeons lifted and descended, barely visible, pale twists of smoke against the darkness of the school hill rising up beyond. Mum turned to Alma from her ironing board and solemnly explained about the roosting birds.
“They’re where dead people goo.”
The child had woken before she could ask whether this meant that pigeons were all human ghosts, forms that dead people had gone into and become, or whether they somehow existed simultaneously in Heaven, where dead people go, and up amongst the rafters of the derelict barn in the neighbour’s yard at the same time. She had no idea why the dream should come to mind now as she followed Michael and her mother through the door, still patiently held open by the silver-haired and gown-draped carpenter, out of the night into the light-soaked store.
Having one entrance on the market and another round the corner in Drum Lane, the shop’s inside seemed bigger than she’d thought it would be, although Alma realised this was partly due to there not being any paper racks, cash registers or counters; any customers. Filling the room was the perfume of fresh-shaved wood, somewhere between the scents of tinned peach and tobacco, and beneath her feet the new-laid floorboards were as satisfyingly resilient as longbows, sawdust heaping in the unswept corners. Woman, girl and baby having stepped within, the white-haired workman who’d been holding back the door went to his partially cut plank, grinning at Alma and her brother with a gruff wink that included them in some unspoken and yet wonderful conspiracy, before returning to his interrupted task.
Unsure of what to make her face do in response to this, Alma attempted a half-hearted grimace that came out as neither one thing nor the other, then looked round at Michael. He was sitting up enthusiastically out of the pushchair, tugging forward on the chewed straps of his harness – the same one Alma had worn just a few years ago – made of red leather, with the flaking and much picked-at gold leaf outline of a horse’s head gradually disappearing on its front. Michael was chortling in delight, arms raised with fingers opening and closing, trying to grab onto the milky light, the air, the tingling Christmas atmosphere of that peculiar moment at the corner of the eerie midnight square, as if he wanted to take hold of it all, cram it in his mouth and eat it. His large head tipped back upon the jiggling infant body with a profile like the Fairy Soap child, blinking up at everything and gurgling with such enjoyment that his sister privately suspected he was rather shallow for a two-year-old, far too concerned with having fun to take life seriously. Behind him, out through the shop’s window there was only blackness, with the market gone and nothing but their lantern-slide reflections hanging in the dark, as if the news and magazine store was alone and falling through the emptiness of space. Above her, in the adult chatter closer to the paper shop’s high plaster ceiling, Doreen and the hooded man were talking as her mum thanked him for asking them inside and introduced him to her children.
“This wun in the pram’s ayr Michael, un that’s Alma. She’s ut school now, ent yer, up Spring Lane? You come un say ’ello t’ the Third Burrer.”
Alma looked up bashfully at the Third Borough, managing a weak “Hello”. Seen from close up he was a little older than her mother, and perhaps might have been thirty. Unlike all the other workers who were white as chapel marble, his complexion was much darker, brown from hard work in the sunshine. Or perhaps he was from somewhere hot and far away like Palestine, one of the lands she’d heard the older children sing about in the big school-hall where they went for prayers, up three stone steps from Alma’s first-year infant’s cloakroom, pegs identified by locomotives, kites and cats rather than boys’ and girls’ names. “Quinquereme of Nineveh and distant Ophir …” went the song, places and words that sounded lovely, sad, and gone now.
The Third Borough crouched to Alma’s level, still with the same kindly smile, and she could smell his skin, a bit like toast and nutmeg. She could see the cowboy hero dimple in his chin, as if someone had hit it with a dart, but she still couldn’t see his eyes beneath that band of shadow falling from the cowl’s peaked brim. When he addressed her, she could not remember later if his lips had moved, or what his voice had been like. She was sure it was a man’s voice, deep and honest, that it hadn’t sounded posh, yet neither had it sounded like the pokey fireside-corner accents of the Boroughs. It was more a wireless intonation, and she didn’t seem to hear it with her ears so much as feel it in her stomach, warm and welcome as a Sunday dinner. <em>Hello, little Alma. Do you know who I am?</em>
Alma shivered, thoughts all of a sudden filled with thunder, stars and people weeping with no clothes on. Far too shy to speak his name aloud but wanting him to know she recognised him, she tried singing the first verse of ‘All things bright and beautiful’, which always made her think of daisies, hoping that he’d get her awkward, timid little joke and not be cross. His smile grew very slightly wider and, relieved, she knew he’d understood. Still crouching, the robed figure turned his covered head to study Michael for a moment before reaching out one sun-browned hand to run its fingers through the golden bedsprings of the toddler’s hair. Her brother clapped and laughed, a pleased budgerigar squawk, and the Third Borough straightened from his stoop, resuming his full stature to continue talking with their mum.
Alma half-listened to the adult dialogue going on above her head as she gazed idly round the shop at the four labourers, still busy with their hammers, lathes and saws. Despite identical white gowns and similarly-cut fair hair the men were not alike … one had a large mole in the centre of his forehead, while another one was crew-cut, dark and a bit foreign-looking … yet they looked as though they came from the same family, were brothers or close cousins at the least. She wondered what their robes were made from. The material was plain and strong as cotton but looked soft, with ice-blue shadows hanging in its folds, so probably it cost more. These must be the aprons worn by senior carpenters or ‘angles’, Alma reasoned, and she had the muddy recollection of a word or brand name that she’d heard once which described the fabric. Was it ‘Might’, or ‘Mighty’? Something like that, anyway.
Doreen was making polite conversation with the hooded eminence and venturing at intervals the reassuring coos that Alma recognised from those times when she’d tried explaining one of her more complicated drawings to her mother, sounds which meant that Mum had no real understanding of whatever she was being told but didn’t want to give offence or seem disinterested. She must have casually enquired of the Third Borough how the work was coming on, Alma decided, and was now compelled to stand and cluck with hopefully appropriate surprise, appreciation or concern while he replied. As with much of the talk between her elders, Alma only caught the slender gist of it and wasn’t really sure most of the time if she’d caught even that. Odd phrases and occasional expressions would lodge somewhere in her mind, provide a coat-rack of precarious hooks from which she could drape tentative connecting strings, threads of conjecture and wild guesswork linking up one notion with another until Alma either had a sketchy comprehension of whatever she had eavesdropped, or had burdened herself with a convoluted and ridiculous misunderstanding that she would continue to believe for years thereafter.
In this instance, standing listening to her mother’s varyingly pitched and wordless interjections into the Third Borough’s monologue, she picked her way between the stumbling blocks of grown-up language and tried hard to make a picture of what the discussion was about, one of her crayon dioramas but inside her head, a scene that had its different bits all in one almost-sensible arrangement. She supposed her mother had asked what the men were building, and from the reply it sounded as though they were making ready something called the Porthimoth di Norhan, which were words that Alma knew she’d never heard before and yet which sounded right, as if she’d known them all her life. It was a court of some kind, wasn’t it, the Porthimoth di Norhan, where disputes would all be aired and everyone would get what they were due? Although in this case, Alma thought it sounded more like the Third Borough meant the term another way, relating to his carpentry, with ‘Porthimoth di Norhan’ as the name for an ingeniously complicated type of joint. Some words were said about it being where the rising lines converged, which Alma thought meant something similar to ‘come together’, so she could imagine that it was perhaps an octopus-armed junction such as she supposed you might get up inside a wooden church dome, bringing all the curving, varnished beams into a clever-cornered knot there at the middle. She imagined for some reason that there’d be a rough stone cross inlaid, set back into the polished rosewood at the heart of the arrangement.
Seeming to confirm the child’s interpretation, the Third Borough was now saying it was just as well there were so many oaks here at the centre to support the weight and tension. As he said this, he placed one bronzed hand on Doreen’s shoulder, which to Alma made the comment seem two-sided. Was he talking about all the oak trees studding the town’s grasslands, or paying Doreen a form of compliment, saying their mother was an oak, a timber pillar that would take the strain without complaint? Her mum seemed pleased by the remark, however, pursing her lips diffidently, tutting to deride the thought that she was worthy of such praise.
The hooded man removed his hand from Doreen’s sleeve, continuing his explanation of the labour he was overseeing which required completion by a certain time, demanding that his men work day and night to finish up their contract. There was something contradictory in this, it seemed to Alma. She was sure that the Third Borough’s business must be one of the town’s longest standing, older than the firms who had their premises in Bearward Street, with splintering gateways over which the peeling signs of former owners were still partly visible, leading to queerly-shaped mysterious yards. Some of the pubs, her dad once told her, had been here since Jacobean times, and she sensed that the building of this Porthimoth di Norhan had been going on for just as long, would still be going on a hundred years from now with the Third Borough still checking each detail of its craftsmanship to make sure that they’d got it right. Why did it sound so urgent, then, she asked herself? If there were centuries to go before the job was done, why all this talk of pressing deadlines to be met? Alma expected that the cowl-draped man just had to plan ahead more than most people did, perhaps because of his more serious long-term responsibilities.
She stood there on the tight new boards of the shop’s floor that made her think of a ship’s deck, one from the same song that she’d heard the juniors singing in their hall, a stately Spanish galleon sailing from an isthmus or the like. One hand still clasped around the push-bar of her brother’s pram, she watched the four industrious carpenters hard at their grating, thumping work and thought they seemed a bit like sailors even if their long white aprons made her think of bakers. She was barely listening to their foreman’s conversation with her mother anymore, having belatedly and with a start realised that all the workers’ saw-blades, hammer-heads and drill-bits looked like they were made from actual gold, with diamonds twinkling in their handles where the screw heads ought to be. Bemused as to why she’d not noticed this before, Alma became aware of the Third Borough and her mother only when a name she knew arose from the low mumble of their discourse.
They were talking about something they referred to as a Vernall’s Inquest, which she gathered was a kind of hearing to decide the gutters, corners, walls and edges of the world, where they all were and who they all belonged to. From what Doreen and the hooded governor were saying, it seemed this inquiry was the sole event that the assize under construction there, the Porthimoth di Norhan, was intended to contain – the only reason it was being built at all – but it was more the inquest’s title than its import that had seized the girl’s attention. Vernall was a family name, from Alma’s dad’s side. As she thought it over, Alma realised that she’d picked up quite a bit about her clan’s immediate history from overheard grownup discussions, things she knew but hadn’t previously known she knew. For instance May, Dad’s mum, Alma and Michael’s ironclad and ferocious nan, had been a Vernall before marrying Tom Warren, Alma’s grandfather who’d been already dead some years when she was born. Her other granddad had been dead as well, now that she thought about it, Doreen’s dad Joe Swan, a cheerful, barrel-chested fellow with a walrus-style moustache, dead of TB from working on the barges and known only from a bleaching oval photograph hung in the living room down Andrew’s Road, up in the gloom beneath the picture rail. She’d never known her grandfathers and so their influence was absent from her life and was unmissed. The same could not be said about her grandmothers, not their gran Clara, Doreen’s mother who they lived with, and not May, their nan, in her house at the bottom of the green behind St. Peter’s Church, upon the Boroughs’ weed-bound southwest fringe.
May Warren, formerly May Vernall, was a stout and freckled dreadnaught of a woman, rolling keg-shaped down the tiled lanes of the covered Fish Market most Saturdays, leaving a cleared path in her wake and gathering momentum with each heavy pace like an accumulating snowball of cheery malevolence, the speckled jowls in which her chin lay sunken shuddering at every step, the darting currants of the eyes pressed deep into the heaped blood-pudding of her face glittering with anticipation of whatever awful treat she’d visited the market to procure. It might be tripe, or whelks like muscle-bound and orange slugs, or chopped-up eels in lard. Alma believed her nan would probably eat anything, might be the sort of person who’d eat other people if it came to it, but then May was the deathmonger for Green Street and that general stretch. The deathmongers were women who brought people in and laid them out when they were done, so you could bet they’d seen some things all right. May had been born, so legend went, on Lambeth Walk itself, amidst the spit and sweepings of its gutters. Now she lived alone on Green Street’s corner in a gas-lit, mildewed house with doors halfway up crooked stairs that nobody could fathom, there where Tommy, who was Alma’s dad, and half her aunts and uncles had been raised. Family opinion had it that May had grown mean and ogress-like with age after a disappointed life, but family opinion also had it that there was a streak of madness in the Vernalls.
May’s dad Snowy Vernall, Alma’s great-grandfather, had gone what the family called ‘cornery’ and by the end was eating flowers, which sounded succulent and colourful to Alma, but not really wrong. Snowy had red hair as a baby, people said, but this lost all its hue during his later childhood, at around the same time Snowy’s father Ernest, Alma’s great-great-grandfather, had lost his mind and had his hair go white while he was working on St. Paul’s Cathedral as a painter and restorer down in London in the nineteenth century. Ernest had passed his madness on to Snowy and to Snowy’s sister, Thursa Vernall. Thursa was reputedly a great success on the accordion despite her lunacy, as was Alma’s dad’s pretty cousin Audrey Vernall, daughter of Snowy’s son Johnny. Audrey had been in a dance band managed by her father at the finish of the war, and was now locked up in the madhouse round the turn at Berry Wood.
The turn, the bend, the twist, the corner: there were quite a few in Alma’s family who’d gone round it. She imagined it must be a sudden angle in your thinking that you couldn’t see approaching in the way that you could see a corner of the street in front of you. It was invisible, or nearly so, possibly see-through like a greenhouse or a ghost. This corner’s lines ran a completely different way to all the others, so instead of going forward, down or sideways they went somewhere else, in a direction that you couldn’t draw or even think about, and once you’d turned this hidden corner you were lost forever. You were in a maze you couldn’t see and didn’t even know was there, and everybody would feel sorry for you when they saw you blundering about, but probably they wouldn’t want to still be friends with you the way they were before.
For saying just how many people had gone round this bend, Alma remained convinced that whatever existed past the unseen corner must be lonely, empty, and there’d always be nobody there but you. It wouldn’t be your fault, but it would still be something shameful, something her gran Clara wouldn’t like, a family embarrassment. That’s why nobody talked about the Vernalls, and that’s why Alma was almost startled now to hear her mum and the Third Borough speaking in such reverential tones about this Vernall’s Inquest he had planned, the boundary-hearing all this work was being done for. Was this branch of Alma’s relatives secretly special in some way, or was the inquest’s name just a coincidence? And if it wasn’t Alma’s family that the words referred to, then what was a Vernall?
She thought it might once have been the term for some old-fashioned trade that people used to have, which could across the years become a family’s surname. For example, Alma’s father Tommy Warren, who worked for the brewery, had once told her that a cooper, years ago, was what you called a person who made barrels, so her best friend Janet Cooper’s ancestors were very likely barrel-makers. This still didn’t tell her what a Vernall was, of course, or what the job of being one entailed. Perhaps the name had been connected to an inquest about edges because tending borderlines and corners was a Vernall’s duty? Alma wondered if amongst the corners they looked after was the bend that Ernest, Snowy, Thursa and poor Audrey Vernall had all gone around, but couldn’t work out where that thought was leading and so let it fizzle out.
For no good reason that she could determine, the name Vernall also made her think of grass and how the scruffy little meadow over Andrew’s Road near Spencer Bridge smelled when it had been mowed, of green blades pushing from the darkness underground into the sunlit world above, although how this had anything to do with boundaries and corners was beyond her. In her thoughts she saw her nan’s house at the ragged end of Green Street, weeds and even poppies growing from between bricks, rooted in the railway soot that was the Boroughs’ outdoor wallpaper, black curds that hung in drooping pleats from the burnt orange brickwork like a veil over the widowed neighbourhood. Across the street and a low dry-stone wall the green rose to the back of Peter’s Church, beside the rear gate of the Black Lion’s yard. This was the grassy slope she pictured Jesus walking on when people sang the hymn about the pleasant land, in his long dress with lights all round his head and nothing on his feet, strolling downhill from the pub gate towards the bottom of Narrow Toe Lane and Gotch’s sweetshop, on the other end of Green Street from her nan’s house. Finding herself trying to guess if Jesus had a favourite sweet she realised that her thoughts were wandering away with her and forced her restless cloud of concentration back to what her mum and the man in the white hood were discussing.
The Third Borough was concluding his account to Doreen of how things were going, reassuring Alma’s mother that working with wood had been his family’s business since time immemorial. He was telling her that though the job was long and would break many backs before its finish, all went well and would be done on time. Alma could not explain why this pronouncement filled her with such joy. It was as if nobody had to worry anymore about how things turned out because it would be all right in the end, like when your parents reassured you that the hero wasn’t going to die and would get well before the story finished.
All around her in the glimmer of the shop the carpenters bent conscientiously to their unceasing toil, shouldering planes upslope against the grain, but Alma caught them looking to see if she’d understood what welcome news this was for everyone and smiling with a quiet satisfaction when they saw she had, proud of themselves yet blushing with embarrassment at their own pride. The Porthimoth di Norhan would be built, was in a sense already good as done. She looked around at Michael sitting up alertly in his pram. Even he seemed aware that there was something special going on and eagerly locked gazes with his sister, highlights dancing in his huge blue eyes as he communicated his delight along their private wordless channel, rattling his reins excitedly. Alma could tell that even if her brother wasn’t old enough to give things names yet, he still knew in some way who the hooded foreman really was. You couldn’t meet with him and not know, even if you were a baby. Michael was by nature a contented child but at that moment looked about to burst from all the wonderment inflating him, as if he understood exactly what this grand completion meant to everybody. It occurred to her from nowhere that one day when she and Michael were both old they’d probably sit on a wall together somewhere and have a good laugh about all this.
Doreen was thanking the Third Borough now for having asked them in while at the same time she made ready to depart, checking that Michael was strapped back securely and instructing Alma to do up her mackintosh’s belt. Either the lights inside the shop were getting brighter, Alma thought, or else the darkness of the empty square outside had turned an unknown colour that was worse than black. She wasn’t looking forward to the walk home, not to the vague, muffled dread she sometimes felt in Bath Street nor the night jaws of the entrance to the alleyway, the jitty, where it ran along behind their row of terraced houses down between Spring Lane and Scarletwell Street, but she felt that it would seem ungrateful if she said so. Even if it meant a chilly trudge Alma would not have missed this for the world, although she still wished she could jump through the next twenty windswept minutes of her life to find herself already tucked in bed.
The lights inside the shop were definitely getting brighter, she decided, as she struggled to do up her mac’s all-of-a-sudden awkward belt. In front of her, or possibly above her, there were shiny rectangles of greater whiteness hanging from the air, which Alma realised must be the reflections of the windowpanes behind her as she stood beside the pushchair trying to do up her coat. Except that wasn’t right. You sometimes got a lit-up room reflected in a window, but not windowpanes reflected in the empty spaces of a room, suspended there in nothing, getting whiter and more blinding by the moment. Somewhere near, Doreen was telling her to hurry up with fastening her belt so they could leave the gentlemen to get on with their work. Alma had let go of the buckle-end and lost it down a complicated tuck she hadn’t known was there. The more she tried to extricate the belt the more she found that extra swathes of gabardine unfolded from recesses in her coat that only outfitters would understand and tangled Alma in their shoelace-coloured creases. There above or possibly in front of her the levitating panes of light blazed fiercer. Nearby mum was telling her to get a move on but the situation with her mackintosh was getting worse. Alma was wrestling on her back against endless, engulfing fabric when she noticed that the glowing oblongs floating there before her had a pair of curtains pulled across them. Patterned with grey roses, they were very like the ones in Alma’s bedroom.
<br>
That in substance was the dream that Alma Warren, who grew up to be a moderately famous artist, had one February night in 1959 when she was five years old. Within a year her brother Michael choked to death and yet somehow got better and was back from hospital unharmed, at home with them down Andrew’s Road inside a day or two, which neither he nor Alma really mentioned afterwards although it scared them at the time.
Their father Tommy Warren died in 1990, Doreen following a short while later in the sweltering summer heat of 1995. A little under ten years after that Mick Warren had an accident at work, where he was reconditioning steel drums. Rendered unconscious in a slapstick way and only woken by cold jets of water that workmates were using to sluice caustic dust out of his eyes, Mick was returned to life this second time with a variety of troubling thoughts inside his head, strange memories churned up to the surface while he’d been knocked out. Some of the things he thought that he remembered were so odd they couldn’t possibly have happened, and Mick started to become concerned that he was taking on the feared and thus unmentioned trait that simmered in the family blood, that he was going cornery.
When he’d at last worked up the nerve to tell his wife Cath of his fears she’d straight away suggested that he talk to Alma. Cathy’s family, like Mick’s, had been evicted from the grime-fields of the Boroughs, the square mile of dirt down by the railway station, when the council had the final remnants of the area cleared away during the early 1970s. Solid and sensible and yet proud of her eccentricities, Cath had those qualities that Mick recalled the Boroughs women having: the decisiveness and unshakeable faith in intuition, in their own ability to know what it was best to do in any given circumstance, no matter how peculiar.
Cathy and Alma got on like a house on fire despite or possibly because of their vast differences, with Cathy openly regarding Alma as a mad witch who lived in a rubbish tip and Alma scathing in return about her sister-in-law’s fondness for Mick Hucknall out of Simply Red. Nevertheless, the women harboured nothing but respect towards each other in their separate fields of expertise, and when Cath recommended that her husband have a word with Alma if he thought that he was going Radio Rental, Mick knew that this was because his wife believed his older sister to be an authority on having not just lost the plot but having wilfully flushed the entire script down the shitter. Furthermore, he knew that she was more than likely right. He made a date to meet with Alma for a drink the following Saturday and for no reason that he could articulate arranged to see her in the Golden Lion on Castle Street, one of the few surviving pubs out of the dozens that the Boroughs had in its day boasted, and coincidentally where he’d met Cath when she was working there, before he’d lived the dream by marrying the barmaid.
Even on a Saturday these days, he found out when he rendezvoused with Alma, the once packed establishment was all but empty. Evidently the flat-dwelling residents remaining in the gutted neighbourhood who weren’t confined to their front bedrooms by an ASBO usually preferred to head up to the sick- and spunk- and stabbing-friendly zoo of the town centre rather than endure the mortuary still of premises closer to home. His sister sat there at a corner table in her uniformly black ensemble: jeans, vest, boots and leather jacket. Black, Alma had recently explained to Mick, was the new iPod. She was nursing fizzy mineral water whilst trying to balance a round Strongbow beer-mat on its edge, watched with what looked to Mick like clinical depression by the man behind the bar. The only customer that he’d had in all night and it was a teetotal ugly bird.
Other than to her face, Mick would admit that Alma was what you’d call striking more than ugly, even at this late stage in the game. What was she, fifty-one now? Fifty? Striking, definitely, if by that you meant actually frightening. She was five-eleven, one inch shorter than her brother, but in heels was six feet two, her long uncut brown hair that greyed to dusty copper here and there hanging like safety curtains to each side of her high cheek-boned face in a style Mick had heard her once describe as ‘bombsite creeper’. Then of course there were her eyes, spooky and massive when they weren’t myopically screwed shut, with warm slate irises against which an extraterrestrial citrus yellow flared around the pupil like a full eclipse, thick lashes creaking from the weight of her mascara.
She’d had, across the years, at least her fair share of admirers but the truth was that the great majority of men found Alma to be “generally alarming” in the words of one acquaintance, or “a fucking menopausal nightmare” in the blunter phrasing of another, although even this was said in what seemed almost an admiring tone. Mick sometimes thought his sister was just the wrong side of beautiful, but it was funnier if he insisted that she looked like Lou Reed on the cover of <em>Transformer</em>, or “a solarized glam Frankenstein” as Alma had with glee reworked it, saying that she’d use it in the catalogue biography next time she had an exhibition of her paintings. Revelling in the receipt or dishing out of insults with an equal verve, Alma could more than hold her own, maintaining with deadpan sincerity that her angelically good-looking young brother had been simpering and effeminate since birth, had actually been born a girl, was even chosen as Miss Pears at one point, but then underwent a sex-change operation since their mum and dad had wanted one of each. She’d first tried this painfully earnest routine out on Mick himself when he was six and she was nine, reducing him to mortified, bewildered tears. Once when he’d told her, not entirely without accuracy, that she came across to people as a homosexual man trapped in a rough approximation of a woman’s body, she’d said “Yeah, but so do you”, then laughed until she coughed and ultimately retched, inordinately pleased as usual by her own <em>bon mot</em>.
Stopping off at the bar to wrap a fist around the pleasing icicle of his first pint he made his way over a threadbare floral-patterned carpet like a diagram of suicide towards his sister’s chosen table, unsurprisingly located in the empty lounge’s furthest angle from its door, the misanthrope’s retreat of choice. Alma looked up as he scraped back a chair to sit opposite her across the wet veneer with its sparse archipelago of beer mats. She rolled out her usual smile of greeting which he thought was probably intended to give the impression that her face lit up to see him, but since Alma’s tendency to overdo things was extended to her Grand Guignol theatre of expressions the effect was more one of religiously-themed murderess or pyromaniac, that burst of yellow arson in the centre of each eye.
“Well, if it isn’t Warry Warren. How in God’s name are you, Warry?”
Alma’s voice was smoke-cured to an ominous bass organ chord reverberating in a Gothic church, at times even a little deeper than Mick’s own. He grinned despite his current mental health concerns and felt sincerely glad to see his sister, re-establishing all their arcane connections, being with somebody comfortingly further gone than he was. Mick took out his cigarettes and lighter, placing them beside his beaded glass in preparation for the evening as he answered her.
“Just about had it, Warry, if you want the truth.”
Each of the pair had called the other ‘Warry’ since a moment during 1966 of which neither had any clear, reliable memory. Alma, thirteen, may have begun it all by using Warry as a ridiculing term when speaking to her younger brother, and he may have hurled it back at her because, as she had always privately suspected, he was far too frivolous in his essential attitude towards existence to make up an insult of his own, even a stupid one like ‘Warry’. Once the pair had taken up referring to each other in this way it would have all become an idiotic war of wills that neither could remember why they were involved in, but where neither felt that they could be the first to call the other by their given name without conceding an unthinkable defeat. This nominative tennis match had carried on, pathetically, for the remainder of their lives, long after they’d begun to find the cognomen affectionate and had forgotten utterly its half-baked origins. If asked why they both called each other Warry, Mick would usually reply that coming as they did from an insolvent background in the Boroughs, Mum and Dad had been unable to afford a nickname for each child, so that they’d had to make do with just one between them. “Not like posh kids”, as he’d sometimes add with an authentic tone of bitterness. If Alma were around she’d look up at their audience with an accusing veal-calf stare and solemnly instruct them not to laugh. “That name was all we got for Christmas one year.”
Now his sister planted the grazed leather of her elbows in the film of liquid covering their table, cupped her chin between long fingers and leaned forward through the weak-tea atmosphere inquiringly, head to one side so that the longer locks of hair dragged through the table’s wet meniscus, tips becoming sharp as sable brushes.
“Truth? Why would I want the truth? I was just making conversation, Warry. I weren’t asking for the <em>Iliad</em>.”
They both admired her callousness, and then Mick told her how he’d had the accident at work, had been knocked out and had his face burned, had been blinded for an hour or two and had been worried ever since that he was going mad. Alma looked at him pityingly then shook her disproportionately massive head and sighed.
“Oh, Warry. Everything’s about you, isn’t it? I’ve been dog rough, half blind and barking mad for years but you don’t catch me going on about it. Whereas you, you catch one face-full of corrosive chemicals for cleaning battleships, you fall to bits.”
Mick put his fag out in the ashtray’s sea-blue porthole and then lit another.
“It’s not funny, Warry. I’ve been having weird thoughts since I woke up in the yard with everybody trying to hose me down. It’s not so much the stuff that I’d got in me eyes or having banged me head, it’s when I come round. For a minute it was like I’d got no memory of being forty-nine or working down the reconditioning yard. I’d got no memory of Cathy or the lads or anything.”
He paused and sipped his lager. Alma sat across the sopping table, gazing flatly at him, paying genuine attention now she knew that he was serious. Mick carried on.
“The thing is, when I first come round I’d got it in me head that I was three and waking up in hospital, that time I had the cough-sweet when me throat swelled up.”
Alma’s defiantly unplucked brows tightened to a puzzled frown.
“That time you choked, and Doug next door drove you up Grafton Street, over the Mounts to hospital, sat in his vegetable lorry? We all thought that’s probably where you contracted brain damage, or at least I did.”
“I didn’t get brain damage.”
“Oh, come on. You must have done. Three minutes without oxygen and that’s your lot. They all said you weren’t breathing, right from Andrew’s Road to Cheyne Walk, and that has to be ten minutes in a rusty truck like Doug’s. Ten minutes without breathing and you’re talking brain death, mate.”
Mick laughed into his pint and flecked his nose with foam.
“And you’re supposed to be an intellectual, Warry? Try ten minutes without breathing sometime and I think you’ll find that it’s all-over death.”
That silenced both of them and made them think for a few moments without reaching any practical conclusions. At last, Mick resumed his narrative.
“So what I’m saying is, when I woke up in hospital when I was three, I’d no idea of how I’d got there. I’d no memory of choking or of being in Doug’s truck although he said me eyes were open all the way. This time when I woke, it was different. Like I say, just for a minute I thought I was three again and coming round in hospital, but this time I remembered where I’d been.”
“What, in the back yard with the cough-sweet, or Doug’s truck?”
“Nothing like that. No, I remembered I’d been in the ceiling. I’d been up there for about a fortnight, eating fairies. I suppose it was a sort of dream I had while I was out, although it wasn’t like a dream. It was more real, but it was more bizarre as well and it was all about the Boroughs.”
Alma was by this point trying to interrupt and asking him if he knew he’d just said that he remembered being in the ceiling eating fairies for a fortnight, or did he assume he’d only thought it? Mick ignored her, and went on to tell her his entire adventure, the recaptured memory of which had so disturbed him. By its end, Alma sat slack jawed and unspeaking, staring in amazement at her brother with those medicated panda eyes. At last she ventured her first serious comment of the night.
“That’s not a dream, mate. That’s a vision.”
Earnestly for once the pair resumed their talk, there in the gloom of the bereft pub lounge, replenishing their drinks at intervals with Alma sticking to the mineral water, her preferred drug being the half-dozen Bounty Bar-sized slabs of hashish strewn around her monstrous flat up on East Park Parade. About them as they sat the Golden Lion was steeping in the opposite of hubbub, anti-clamour dominated by the wall-clock’s mortal thud. The brightness of the bar-shine fluctuated subtly at times, as if the absences of all the missing customers were milling through the room, brown and translucent like old celluloid, occasionally overlapping with enough of their fly-specked non-bodies to occlude the light, if only imperceptibly. For hours Mick and his sister spoke about the Boroughs and about their dreams, with Alma telling Mick the one she’d had about the lit-up shop in the deserted market, where the carpenters were hammering through the night. She even told him how within the dream she’d thought about another dream she’d previously had, the one where Doreen had said pigeons were where people went when they were dead, although Alma admitted that upon awakening she’d not been sure if this were something that she’d really dreamed, or only dreamed she’d dreamed.
Eventually, when some while later they stepped out into the gusty shock of Castle Street, Alma was thrumming with excited energy and Mick was luminously pissed. Things were much better after talking to his sister and enduring her enthusiastic ranting. As they walked down Castle Street to Fitzroy Street through the ghost-neighbourhood, Alma was talking about how she planned to do a whole new run of paintings based on Mick’s near-death experience (which she’d by now convinced herself that his recovered memory really was) and her own dreams. She mocked her brother’s fears for his own sanity as just one more example of his girlishness, his terror-stricken unfamiliarity with anything resembling creative thought. “Your problem, Warry, is you have an idea and you think it’s a cerebral haemorrhage.” Listening to her spooling out impractical and transcendental picture-concepts like a hyperventilating tickertape he felt the weight lift from him, floating in a sweet and putrid lager fart to dissipate beneath the starry, vast obsidian pudding bowl of closing time, inverted and set down upon the Boroughs as though keeping flies away.
Down from the Golden Lion’s front doorway and its carious sage-green tiles they stumbled, with – across the vehicle-forsaken street upon their right – the fading 1930s Chinese puzzle of scab-textured brick that was the rear of Bath Street flats, Saint Peter’s house, breaks in the waist-high border wall allowing access to triangular stone stairways shaped like ziggurats, steps dropping from the apex to the base at either side. Past that there were the flats themselves with chiselled slots of Bauhaus shadow, double doors recessed beneath their porticos; gauze-cataracted windows, most of them unlit. Police car sirens skirled like radiophonic workshop banshees from the floodplains of St. James’s End, west of the river, and Mick thought about his recent revelation, realising that despite the uplift of his sister’s fervid, near fanatical response there was still a hard kernel of unease residing in the pit of him, albeit sunk beneath a lake of numbing amber slosh. Seeming to catch his shift of mood, Alma broke off her rapturous description of exquisite landscapes she had yet to capture and looked past him in the same direction he was looking, at the backside of the silent and benighted flats.
“Yeah. That’s the problem, isn’t it? Not ‘What if Warry’s going round the corner?’ but ‘What if he’s not?’ If what you saw means what I think it does, then that thing over there is what we’ve really got to deal with.” Alma nodded to the dark flats and by implication Bath Street, running unseen down their furthest side.
“The business that you saw when you were with the gang of dead kids, the Destructor and all that. That’s what we’re up against. That’s why I’d better make these paintings great, to change the world before it’s all completely fucked.”
Mick glanced at Alma dubiously.
“It’s too late, sis, don’t you think? Look at all this.”
He gestured drunkenly around them as they reached the bottom of the rough trapezium of hunched-up ground called Castle Hill, where it joined what was left of Fitzroy Street. This last was now a broadened driveway leading down into the shoebox stack of ’Sixties housing where the feudal corridors of Moat Street, Fort Street and the rest once stood. It terminated in a claustrophobic dead-end car park, block accommodation closing in on two sides while the black untidy hedges, representing a last desperate stand of Boroughs wilderness, spilled over on a third.
When this meagre estate had first gone up in Mick and Alma’s early teenage years the cul-de-sac had been a bruising mockery of a children’s playground with a scaled-down maze of blue brick in its centre, built apparently for feeble-minded leprechauns, and the autistic cubist’s notion of a concrete horse that grazed eternally nearby, too hard-edged and uncomfortable for any child to straddle, with its eyes an empty hole bored through its temples. Even that, more like the abstract statue of a playground than an actual place, had been less awful than this date-rape opportunity and likely dogging hotspot, with its hasty skim of tarmac spread like cheap, stale caviar across the pink pedestrian tiles beneath, the bumpy lanes and flagstone closes under that. Only the gutter margins where the strata peeled back into sunburn tatters gave away the layers of human time compressed below, ring markings on the long-felled cement tree-stump of the Boroughs. From downhill beyond the car park and the no-frills tombstones of its sheltering apartment blocks there came the mournful shunt and grumble of a goods train with its yelp and mutter rolling up the valley’s sides from the criss-cross self-harm scars of the rail tracks at its bottom.
Alma looked towards the vista Mick had indicated, tightening her thick-caked lashes into a contemptuous spaghetti western squint so that her eyes were jumping-spiders tensing for the fatal pounce.
“Of course it’s not too late, you girl. There’s no point sending you a vision if there’s nothing to be done about it, is there? And, look, I’m a genius. They said so in the <em>NME</em>. I’ll do these paintings and we’ll get this sorted. Trust me.”
And he did, implicitly. While it was obvious to a blind man that Mick’s sister was both self-infatuated and delusional, in his experience Alma also often turned out to be right. If she said that she could repair a cataclysm with some tubes of paint, Mick was inclined to put the money on his sister rather than the meteor strike or whatever it was had happened to the Boroughs. All her life she’d made perverse decisions that had worked out for her against all the odds and nobody could say their Alma hadn’t done well for a Boroughs kid. Mick had got faith in her, though not the wide-eyed faith of her devoted audience, many of whom appeared to think of her as having origins within the region of the supernatural or else the field of clandestine genetic research, a god-sent mutation who could talk to stones and raise the unborn, let alone the dead.
“I can’t believe you’re Alma Warren’s brother”, he’d had more than one fan of his sister’s paintings tell him, mostly female workmates of his wife’s whom Alma was convinced only responded to her as “a badly misjudged lesbian icon” rather than an artist. Sometimes, if they knew Mick’s background, they’d sit looking thoughtful before asking him how anyone like Alma Warren could have possibly emerged from a notorious urban soul-trap like the Boroughs. He considered this a stupid question, as if there were any other place she could have come from, Hell or Narnia or somewhere. How long was it since there’d been even a trace of the authentic working class, if its conspicuous products were today unrecognisable as dodos? What had happened to that culture? Other than those parts of it which had been tempted up into the low boughs of the middle classes or drained off into the cardboard jungle, how had it all vanished so that these days if they saw it, no one had a clue what they were looking at? Where had it gone? Why hadn’t somebody complained?
They’d turned left and were walking down the lowest edge of Castle Hill, towards the wall of Doddridge Church, heading for Chalk Lane, Marefair and the cab rank of the station at the bottom, on the end of their beloved Andrew’s Road. Alma was back to conjuring another as yet non-existent masterpiece, eyes staring fixedly into the ink-wash empty space before her as if she already saw it framed and hanging there.
“I had this idea, right, when we were talking. I could do my dream, the one about the carpenters down at the corner of the market in the middle of the night. I could do something really big, a bit like Stanley Spencer with enormous figures bent over their lathes, facing away from us. I’ll do some bits in loving detail but I’ll leave the rest unfinished with, like, dangling pencil lines. I’ll call it ‘Work in Progress’ …”
Alma trailed off, stopping in her tracks to gaze up at the eighteenth-century Nonconformist church that they were passing. Set into the toffee-coloured stonework of its upper storey was a closed pitch-painted doorway that led into empty air, clearly a loading bay of some sort, except why would anybody need one halfway up a church? It looked as if it was intended to lead to an unseen upper floor of the impoverished district, one long since demolished without trace, or possibly a planned extension yet to be constructed. She looked from the senseless angel-door to Mick and when she spoke her train-wreck voice was small and marvelling, more like that of a little girl than when she’d been one.
“That’s one of the places, Warry, isn’t it? From in your seizure or whatever?”
Alma’s brother nodded and then indicated the turfed-over wasteland up beyond another car park, on Chalk Lane approaching to their right as they resumed their walk.
“Yeah. That’s another, but that’s like an earthworks. It’s much bigger though, and older, and the puddles have unfolded, sort of, into a lagoon.”
His sister nodded slowly, taking it all in as she surveyed the tuft of land rising behind the car-crèche, its surveillance camera babysitter monitoring her charges from a litter-pocket corner. One forked tree or maybe a close-planted pair stretched up out of the mound in silhouette against the sodium lamp bleed above the nearby station. Trees were the enduring features of a landscape, its true face beneath the pantomime dame crust of leisure centre and dual carriageway, cosmetic affectations wiped away at intervals. The oak and elm defined the view across great tracks of time, were vital structural elements, constant as clouds and like the clouds mostly unnoticed.
As they reached the top of Chalk Lane, to the east past Doddridge Church on its grass hillock were the flats and houses of St. Mary’s Street where the great fire was started, and past that the traffic rush of Horsemarket, running uphill to void into the dead monoxide junction where the Mayorhold used to be. Ahead of them the crack of Chalk Lane dipped through darkness, south and down to Marefair’s headlight ribbon with the devil-decorated eaves of Peter’s Church across the way, an ibis hotel and attendant entertainment complex up towards town on the left. A neon tumour styled by Fabergé, this had been raised upon the site of the demolished Barclaycard headquarters, previously an endearing tangle of small businesses and hairline alleyways, Pike Lane, Quart Pot Lane, Doddridge Street and long before that a royal residence that governed Mercia and with it most of grunting Saxon England. There weren’t ghosts here; there were fossil seams of ghosts, one stacked upon another and compressing down to an emotive coal or oil, black and combustible.
Alma tried to imagine the whole listing quarter right from Peter’s Way to Regent Square, from Andrew’s Road to Sheep Street and Saint Sepulchre’s, a petrifying side of boar still with the jutting tower-block arrows that impaled and brought it down, still with its street lamp bristles and its alehouse crackling; tried imagining it all in context of Mick’s vision as if the distressed topography and broken skyline still plugged into something humming and impalpable, some legendary machinery long disappeared but still perhaps in working order. It was awesome and it made her need a joint. Campaigners said it wasn’t possible to get addicted to old-fashioned hashish, but to Alma’s way of thinking they just couldn’t have been trying.
They stepped out of Chalk Lane onto Black Lion Hill, a million years of gradient presided over by four hundred years of public house at the arse-end of Marefair. By the alley-mouth there’d been another paper-shop where Alma from the age of seven had bought comics for their pictures, garish flotsam shipped here from America as ballast with skyscraper-scented pages and electrifying banners: <em>Journey into Mystery</em>, <em>Forbidden Worlds</em> and <em>My Greatest Adventure</em>. Over the resurfaced lane had stood a melancholy guesthouse hanging back behind a screen of elders, with existing photos from a date still earlier showing a mill-like structure dominated by a lantern cupola that previously ruled the corner. There was a short row of faceless 1960s houses perched there now, behind the high wall overlooking the main road, with tenants hanging on until the area was one day gentrified, part of a ‘Cultural Mile’ that council wonks had blue-skied and attempted to talk up, before they sold high and bailed out for somewhere less accusing, somewhere without all the bad dreams trapped like astral rising damp in the foundations. Alma had from somewhere the impression that a local councillor had occupied one of the buildings once, but whether he still lived there she had no idea. Rounding the corner to their right, they walked down to the lights and crossed St. Andrew’s Road, continuing to the approach of Castle Station.
This was where the sex-commuters pulled in at the weekends, prostitute away-teams hot from Milton Keynes or Rugby riding in upon a Silverlink express to the well-publicised red-light zone of the Boroughs, the rich pickings of the all night truck-stop on its northwest corner, where the hump of Spencer Bridge met Crane Hill at the foot of Grafton Street, the area’s northern boundary. Walking AIDS vectors and their managers routinely filtered through the station forecourt, through the former medieval castle where Shakespeare’s <em>King John</em> commences, where reputedly they held the world’s first parliament during the thirteenth century and raised the poll tax that sparked off Wat Tyler’s uprising of 1381, where various Crusades were planned, where Becket was condemned, here at the end of the soot-blasted road where Mick and Alma had grown up, their derelict arcadia. As they descended to the hackney cabs unwinding round the station’s yard from its front entrance, Alma was reflecting on the grave enormity of what she’d promised she’d see through. She wasn’t going to have to simply do these pictures. She was going to have to do the fuck out of them.
<br>
And she did. Fourteen months later on a cold Spring Saturday in 2006 Mick had lunch with his wife and boys up at their house in Whitehills, then walked down through Kingsthorpe to the Barrack Road, coming upon the Boroughs from its northeast corner and the crater that had formerly been Regent Square. He’d passed his driving test but still preferred to go by foot, sharing his family’s antipathy to motor vehicles. Neither his sister and their parents nor all save one of their various aunts and uncles had ever possessed a car, and Mick still felt uneasy on the rare occasions that his designated driver Cathy was away, obliging him to climb behind the wheel.
Alma had called him weeks ago to say she’d finished with the paintings she’d commenced after their meeting at the Golden Lion the year before. She planned to kick the exhibition off with a small viewing that she’d set up at the playgroup where Pitt-Draffen’s dance school used to be, up on one sawn-off corner edge of Castle Hill. His sister had invited him to see the images his vision had inspired, including ‘Work in Progress’ with its midnight carpenters, a piece that she particularly wanted him to see called ‘Chain of Office’, and another work that Alma said was ‘three dimensional’ and which might only be available for viewing at this opening event.
In slacks and loafers and a plain tan sports shirt underneath a jacket he still wasn’t sure if he was going to need he strolled facing the breeze down Grafton Street, a fit and handsome forty-nine-year-old who still maintained a gleam of infant animation in his pale blue eyes, which were at least one normal colour and weren’t something out of <em>Village of the Damned</em> like Alma’s. She of course would counter that she’d kept her hair while his had made the dignified retreat into a cloud of golden fuzz high on his suntanned brow, not wholly different from the burnished, lonely ringlets of his babyhood. If he was feeling rash or lucky he might point out in riposte that he’d kept all his teeth, a literal sore point with the munchie-prone and periodontinitis-stricken Alma who would probably then glare at him, go dangerously quiet and that would be the end of that. He realised that rehearsing these encounters with his sister and stage-managing their banter that might never happen was a mark of insecurity, but in Mick’s previous experience with Alma it was always best to be prepared.
The plunge of Grafton Street gushed with a growling steel and rubber torrent, vehicle flow swollen by a rain of lunchtime drinkers, weekend shopping trips and booming penis publicizers, threatening to overspill its banks. An anaconda laminate of molten tyre that snaked across the pavement just ahead of Mick bore testament that such a breach had happened only recently, most probably during the Friday night just gone. White-water driving by some Netto Fabulous crash-dummy who bled Burberry, shooting the traffic island rapids in his hotwired kayak, home to Jimmy’s End across the river in the west, head full of <em>Grand Theft Auto San Andreas</em> and horse tranquilliser, pinprick pupils, squinting in the spindrift of oncoming headlights.
Ambling down the draughty slope beneath a panoramic sky, Mick passed the Sunlight building that was on the road’s far side, a Chinese laundry once that breathed out lonely bachelor steam, become an oily car-repair shop still, with the incongruous solar trademark of the previous establishment raised in relief from its white Art Deco façade. A little further down on the same side there stood the dismal shell of the old Labour Exchange where both Mick and Alma and the great majority of their associates had at one point or other stood amongst the shuffling and obscurely guilty abattoir processions, lining up to be inspected by a merciless nineteen-year-old with bolt-gun phrasing. Mick was grimly satisfied to note that the dour arbiter of worker’s fortunes was itself these days redundant, the indifferent prison-warder gaze its windows used to have replaced now by the look of tremulous, disoriented dread that comes with growing old in a declining neighbourhood. They never like it when it’s them, Mick thought, as he passed by St. Andrew’s Street there on his left and carried on downhill into the wind.
St. Andrew’s Street, receding now behind him, had once led to the raised bump where stood St. Andrew’s Church, long since torn down, itself built on the site of the St. Andrew’s Priory that had been there hundreds of years before and which accounted for the great preponderance of phantom Cluniac monks amongst the district’s roster of reported ghosts. At one time, Mick remembered, almost all the half-a-square-mile’s multitude of pubs – what was it, eighty-something? – were alleged to have a chanting apparition seeking absolution in the snug, or drawing painstaking illuminated pricks with gilded scrollwork on the lavvy wall. Mick wondered where the spectres had all gone in 1970 or so, when the last fag ends of the area were swept away. The Boroughs’ mortal residents were siphoned off to flats in King’s Heath like the one that his nan May had died in, or to the genetic sumps of Abington like Norman Road, where his and Alma’s gran upon their mum’s side, Clara, had dropped off the twig, both grandmas passing within weeks of their uprooting from the Boroughs where they’d buried husbands, where they’d buried kids. What struck Mick was that clearly it had never been a big priority to suitably relocate Boroughs dregs like him and Alma and their family, who, although possibly dishevelled, were at least alive. How much less effort had gone into the rehousing of the region’s wraiths, who’d all been dead, gruesomely so, for years? Did spooks from pulled-down pubs now shiver and clutch tight their glowing bed-sheets under the shop doorways of Northampton’s centre, like its other dispossessed? Did they have shelters for the bodiless as well as for the homeless; magazine street-vendor schemes for revenants, like <em>The Dead Issue</em>, maybe?
It had been along St. Andrew’s Street that he and Alma had once known a barber, forty years ago, with the unlikely name Bill Badger. They’d pretended, just between themselves, that he was one of Rupert Bear’s accomplices grown up, shaved by his own hand to appear more human, forced by circumstance to get a proper job. His shop had been an odditorium, its crowding walls filled to the ceiling with unfathomable, strangely charismatic products like Bay Rum and styptic pencils that would seal up cuts and which, during his childhood, Mick had thought might be a handy thing to carry round with you so that there was at least a chance that you could stick your head back on if you’d been guillotined. Of course, the shop was gone now, both it and the church replaced by the same blocks of flats with which the district had been steadily and surely tiled since 1921 or thereabouts. Last year there’d been a young, mentally ill Somali under armed police siege up St. Andrew’s Street, threatening to kill himself, while still more recently a cousin of Mick’s lovely and formidable wife Cathy, herself a benignant outgrowth of the town’s notorious and hydra-headed Devlin clan, had put St. Andrew’s Street into the news again by strangling his spouse. She’d been “doing his head in”, so he claimed.
The place was cursed. Only that lunchtime Mick had seen a hoarding for the local <em>Chronicle & Echo</em> that reported yet another hooker raped and beaten in the small hours of the night before and left for dead down at the base of Scarletwell Street, only saved by intervention from a resident, such incidents reported every month although occurring every week. Nothing good happened in the Boroughs anymore but once, down Grafton Street towards Crane Hill there lived a woman that Miss Starmer who had run the post office would speak of, who’d been standing on her step one morning when a passing stranger thrust a newborn child into her arms and ran away; was never seen again. The child was taken in and raised, brought up as though the woman’s own, and fought in World War One. “You can tell what a lovely family they were to bring him up”, Miss Starmer used to say, “but they were in the Boroughs. That’s the kind of families that we had in the Boroughs then.” And it was true. Even confronted by the stark reality of how the neighbourhood had ended up, as an environmental head-butt where the woman’s stunning act of altruism was today unthinkable, Mick knew that it was true. There’d been a different sort of people then that seemed another race, had different ways, a different language, and were now improbable as centaurs.
He turned left from Grafton Street and into Lower Harding Street, a long straight track that would deliver him to Alma’s exhibition on the Boroughs’ far side by the most direct route. This was where his sister’s lefty activist mate Roman Thompson lived, another bloody-minded kamikaze from the ’Sixties just like Alma was. ‘Thompson the Leveller’ she called him fondly, probably one of her know-all references, and he lived with his slinky, stroppy boyfriend here in Lower Harding Street. Roman had been a firebrand since the UCS ship-workers’ strike four decades earlier, had broken through police lines to punch out one of the leaders in a National Front march through Brick Lane and had once wreaked terrible revenge upon a unit of drunk squaddies who’d made the mistake of thinking that this wizened terrier posed less of an immediate threat alone than they, en masse and army-trained, could muster. Rome was in his early sixties now, some ten years older than Mick’s sister, but still closed his jaws upon the arse of an oppressor with undimmed ferocity. At present he was on the militant arm of the local Boroughs action group, campaigning to prevent the sale and demolition of the area’s few remaining council dwellings. Alma had consulted with her old friend once or twice while she was working on this current run of paintings, she had told her brother, who would not have been surprised if Thompson and his chap should turn up at the exhibition Mick was making for.
Over a narrow road the yard of a car salesroom had replaced the wasteland on which he and Alma had amused themselves as children, scrabbling urgently across ‘The Bricks’ as they had called their improvised apocalyptic theme-park, clambering oblivious through spaces where once men and women had their rows and sex and children. Further on were business premises formerly owned by Cleaver’s Glass, the national interest where their great-grandfather, barmy Snowy Vernall, had refused a co-director’s job back at the company’s inception, spurning millionaire life for no reason anyone could fathom and returning to his family’s slum accommodation at the end of Green Street, where some decades later he would end his days hallucinating, sat between parallel mirrors in an endless alley of reflections, eating flowers.
Beyond the factory’s southern boundary Spring Lane went trickling down to Andrew’s Road past the rear side of Spring Lane School and its unmodified caretaker’s house, on past the factory yard down near the bottom where a baffling and precarious spike of brick rose up that had a single office shed just slightly larger than the tower itself balanced on top, the overhang held up by bulky wooden struts. This made Mick think about his unearthed memories from the year before and of the pointless loft halfway up Doddridge Church, subjects that had a feathered whisper of uncertainty about them, so that he directed his attention to the hillside school itself, its fenced top edge now passing slowly on his right.
It was a sorry sight, but didn’t have the morbid overtones stirred by that inexplicable brick spar. Alma and he had both been pupils here, when all was said and done, as had their mum Doreen before them. They’d all loved the huddled red brick building that had somehow shouldered the responsibility for educating several generations in that surely unrewarding province, had all been upset when the original establishment was finally dismantled and replaced by a prefabricated substitute. The school was still a good one, though, still with some of those qualities that Mick remembered from his boyhood. Both of Mick and Cathy’s children, Jack and Joseph, had attended Spring Lane Primary and had enjoyed it, but Mick missed the steep slate roofs, the bull’s-eye windows keeping watch from underneath a sharply angled ridge, the smooth gunmetal crossing-barriers outside stone-posted gates.
Down at the bottom of the hill, beyond the schoolhouse and its playing fields there stretched the strip of grass on Andrew’s Road where Mick and Alma’s house had been, a startlingly narrow patch, barely a verge, where by one estimate upwards of one hundred and thirty people had existed, there between Spring Lane and Scarletwell Street. There was only turf now underneath which the brick stump of someone’s garden wall could still be found, and a few trees that stood in the approximate location of their former home. The size and sturdiness of these always surprised Mick, but then, when you thought about it, they’d been growing there for over thirty years now.
Puzzlingly, towards the plot of ill-kept ground’s south end, two houses from the Warren’s block still stood unharmed, knocked into one and facing onto Scarletwell Street, all alone with everything about them levelled, taken back eight hundred years to featureless green Priory pasture. Mick thought that the dwellings might have been built after all the others in the row, possibly where the filled-in space of an old yard had been, owned by some other landlord who’d resisted when all the surrounding properties had been sold out from under their inhabitants and then knocked down. He’d heard that the anomalous surviving home had at one time been used as sheltered housing, possibly by those in care of the community, but didn’t know if this was true. The solitary structure that still hulked from the grassed-over reach where he’d been born had always struck Mick as in some way indefinably uncanny, but since his experience that nebulous unease had gained a new dimension. Now, he found, the place reminded him of Doddridge Church’s pointless aerial door or else the unbelievable brick growth protruding from the factory in Spring Lane; things from the interred past that poked up inconveniently into the present, halfway houses with their portals that went nowhere, that led only into a suggestive nothing.
Lower Harding Street had turned to Crispin Street just past its juncture with Spring Lane. Up on the left ahead two hulking monoliths rose up, the tall Kray-brother forms of Beaumont Court and Claremont Court, bird-soiled and lime-streaked headstones slowly decomposing over the community that had been cleared to raise them. Easily impressed, the soon to be dispersed folk of the Boroughs had all oohed and ahhed about what they mistook for the space-age pizzazz of the twelve-storey heaps, failing to understand the high-rise blocks for what they were: two upended and piss-perfumed sarcophagi that would replace the tenant’s back-wall badinage and summer doorstep idylls with more vertical arrangements, thin-air isolation and the tension rising with each number lit up in the climbing after-curfew lift, a suicide’s-eye view of what had been done to the territory around them that was inescapable.
In what might have been taken for a moment of lucidity two or three years ago, the town belatedly deplored the squalid stack-a-prole insensitivity of the constructions and proposed to bring them down, which had made Mick’s heart soar, if only briefly, at the thought that he and Alma might outlive the monster breeze blocks that were used to smash their home ground into crack dens, knocking shops and a despairing dust that settled everywhere on people’s heartstrings. His unreasonable optimism proved short lived, and elements within the council had instead decided on the option of offloading the dual eyesores to a private housing firm for sums that Mick had heard amounted to a penny each. His sister’s activist mate Roman Thompson had made dark insinuations about backroom deals and former members of the council now ensconced upon the housing company’s board, but Mick had heard no more about this for a while and guessed that it had come to nothing. Bedford Housing had refurbished the two cheaply-purchased buildings and they now stood waiting for a promised influx of key workers, cops and nurses and the like, to be imported to the town and take up occupancy. If you had a population that were miserable and restless because they had nowhere bearable to live, then the preferred solution seemed not to be spending money on improving their condition but on hiring more police in case things should turn ugly, housing these new myrmidons in properties from which the itchy and disgruntled man-herds were already serendipitously purged.
Off from behind the reappointed and Viagra-fuelled atrocities of the two rearing giants, from the more humanly-proportioned residences spread between them and the constant rumble of the Mayorhold at their rear, Mick caught what sounded like a garbled shriek immediately followed by a door-slam, the report slurred by the distance and the dead acoustic of the concrete flat-fronts. Running or more properly careening over the bleached lawn extending round the high rise edifices came a gangling, panic-stricken figure, looking to Mick’s slightly narrowed eye to be a teenager around nineteen, brown-haired and pale-complexioned, just a few years older than Mick’s eldest son. The flailing boy was barefoot, clad in jeans that seemed intent on merging crotch and ankles, and a FCUK top that looked too large and likely borrowed, fitting the distraught young man like an Edwardian nightshirt. He was gurgling and gasping, making a repeated sound of horrified denial that came out as ‘nnung’ and taking frantic looks behind him as he ran.
Whether this clump of gibbering tumbleweed had spotted Mick and veered towards him or whether their separate trajectories had simply happened to converge he couldn’t later say. The youth’s flight from whatever frights pursued him ended in a wheezing halt some feet in front of Mick, compelling him in turn to stop dead in his tracks and take stock of this sudden and as yet inscrutable arrival. The scared boy stood doubled over with hands planted on his knees, staring with red eyes at the earth beneath his feet while trying to draw breath and whimper simultaneously with neither effort an unqualified success. Mick felt obliged to say something.
“Are you all right, mate?”
Gazing startled up at Mick as if he hadn’t realised there was anybody there until he heard a voice, the lad’s face was a bag lady of physiognomy, trying to wear all its expressions at the same time. Pasty white skin at the corners of the eyes and lips twitched and convulsed through a succession of attempts at an emotional display, embarrassment, amazement, blanked-out disassociation, each without conviction, each immediately abandoned as the trembling individual sorted frantically among his clearly ransacked wardrobe of responses. Drugs of some sort, Mick decided, and most likely something synthesized last Tuesday rather than the limited array of substances that he himself was very distantly familiar with, mostly through Alma who had tripped for England in her schoolgirl years. This wasn’t acid, though, where people burned all their evaporating sweat away into an incandescent peacock shine, nor was this like the knowing grin of magic mushrooms. This was something different. Random winds stroked the half-hearted grass, funnelled by tower-block baffles until they were lost, bewildered, disappearing in frustrated eddies, turning on themselves. The kid’s voice, when he found it, was a piping yelp that Mick seemed to recall from somewhere, just as he had similarly started to detect a nagging shadow of familiarity in the teenager’s dough-toned features with that shake of cinnamon across the nose.
“Yes. No. Fuck me. Oh, fuck me, I was up the pub. The pub’s still up there. I was in it. It’s still up there, and they’re all still there. Me mate’s still there. That’s where I’ve been all night, up in the pub. They wouldn’t let us go. Fuck me. Fuck me, mate, help us out. It was a pub. It was a pub, still up there. I was up the pub.”
All this was said with wild-eyed urgency, apparently unconscious of its tics or its obsessive repetitions, its conspicuous lack of any point. Mick found himself with nothing he could read in the by now disturbingly familiar youngster’s fractured body language or his babbling conversation. On the street’s far side a gnome-like woman in a headscarf walked along beside the Upper Cross Street maisonettes with circulation-dodging fingers hooked about the handles of her plastic shopping bag. She stared at Mick and his unasked-for company, a glowering disapproval that went without saying, so that he wished there were some convenient semaphore by which he could convey that he had simply been accosted by this raving stranger in the street. Other than pointing to his temple and then to the auburn-haired kid he could think of nothing, so he switched his gaze from the old lady back to his incomprehensible assailant with the pleading eyes. Mick tried to tease a thread of sense out from the tumbling rubble of the young man’s opening speech.
“Hang on, you’ve lost me, mate. Was this a lock-in, then, this pub they kept you at all night? Which was it, anyway? Up where?”
The boy, no more than eighteen, Mick decided, stared imploringly from out behind the glass of his own failure to communicate. He waved one skinny forearm and its baggy, flapping sleeve in the direction of the Mayorhold, up behind them. There’d been no pubs on the Mayorhold for some decades now.
“Up there. Up in the roof. I mean the pub. The roof’s a pub. The pub’s still up there, in the roof. They’re all still there. Me mate’s still there. That’s where I was all night. They wouldn’t let us go. Oh fuck me, I’ve been up the pub, the pub up in the roof. Oh, fuck, what’s happened? Something’s happened.”
Mick was startled and could feel his scalp crawl at the nape, but made an effort not to let it show. No point in getting jumpy when you’re trying to talk somebody back into their skin, although that bit about the roof had gotten to him. It was too much like the way that he’d described his recalled memories to Alma as adventures in the ceiling. Obviously, it had to be just happenstance, a space-case turn of phrase that by some fluke chimed ominously with his own childhood experience, but combined with the still-gnawing sense that he’d met with this lad before somewhere, it bothered him. Of course, it also loaned him an at least imaginary commonality with the young man, a way he could respond compassionately to the poor kid’s helpless gibberish.
“Up in the roof? Yeah, I’ve had that. Like when there’s people in the corners trying to pull you up?”
The youth looked dumbstruck, with his pink-rimmed eyes wide and his mouth hung open. All the panic and confusion fell away from him, replaced by something that was almost disbelieving awe as he stared, suddenly transfixed, at Mick.
“Yeah. Up the corners. They were reaching down.”
Mick nodded, fumbling in his jacket for the brand new pack of fags he’d picked up half an hour back on the way down Barrack Road. He peeled the cuticle of cellophane that held the packet’s plastic wrap in place down to its quick, shucked off the wrapper’s top and tugged the foil away that hid the tight-pressed and cork-Busbied ranks beneath, the crinkled see-through wrapping and unwanted silver paper crushed to an amalgam and shoved carelessly into Mick’s trouser pocket. Taking one himself he aimed the flip-top package at the grateful teenager in offer and lit up for both of them using his punch-drunk Zippo with the stutter in its flame. As they both blew writhing, translucent Gila monsters made of blue-brown vapour up into the Boroughs air the boy relaxed a little, letting Mick resume his pep-talk.
“You don’t want to let it get you down, mate. I’ve been up where you’ve been, so I know how it can be. You can’t believe it’s happened and you think you’re going mental, but you’re not, mate. You’re all right. It’s just when you come back from one of them it takes a while before this all feels real and solid like it did. Don’t worry. It comes back. Just take it easy, have a think about it all, and gradually the bits all fall back into place. It might take you a month or two, but this will all get better. Here.”
Mick pulled a clump of cigarettes out from the pack, approximately half a dozen thick, and gave them to the barefoot psychotropic casualty.
“If I were you, mate, I’d go off and find yourself a quiet place to sit down where you can sort your head out, somewhere out of doors without the ceilings and the corners and all that. I’ll tell you what, down at the other end of Scarletwell Street over there, there’s a nice bit of grass with trees for shade. They’ll be in blossom around now. Go on, mate. It’ll do you good.”
Incredulous with gratitude, the youngster stared adoringly at Mike, as if at something mythical he’d never seen before, a sphinx or Pegasus.
“Thanks, mate. Thanks. Thanks. You’re a good bloke. You’re a good bloke. I’ll do that, what you said. I’ll do it. You’re a good bloke. Thanks.”
He turned away and stumbled barefoot off across the grit and shattered headlight glass of Scarletwell Street corner, where it joined with Crispin Street and Upper Cross Street, as the former had by that point technically become. Mick watched him go, tenderly picking his way over the rough paving by the chain-link fence of Spring Lane School like a concussed flamingo, stuffing the donated cigarettes into a misplaced pocket of his low-slung pants. As he began to head off down the hill towards Mick’s recommended quiet spot, he stopped by the school gates and glanced back. Mick was surprised to see that there appeared to be tears streaming down the youngster’s cheeks. He looked towards Mick gratefully and with some difficulty worked his face into a kind of smile. He gave a helpless shrug.
“I was just up the pub.”
Resignedly, he carried on away from Mick and was soon out of sight. Mick shook his head. Fuck knew what that was all about. As he resumed his own walk along Upper Cross Street, taking tight drags on his cigarette at intervals, it struck him that he felt in some way oddly lifted by the lunatic encounter. Not just by the dubious warm glow of having lent a modest hand to somebody in need, but by the hard-to-explain reassurance that the mad boy offered. An authentic Boroughs nutcase, just like he’d run into when he was a child, when the insane were that much easier to spot and someone walking down an empty street towards you yelling angrily into the air was certain to have paranoid psychosis rather than a Bluetooth earpiece. Mick just wished he could remember where he’d met the lad before.
The stuff about him being in the roof had knocked Mick back a bit, but that had got to be coincidence, or ‘synchronicity’ as Alma had attempted to explain it to him back when she was in her twenties and still had a crush on Arthur Koestler, before finding out he’d been a wife-beating bipolar rapist, which had rather shut her up. As far as Mick could understand the concept, it defined coincidences as events that had some similarity or seemed to be connected, but which weren’t linked up in any rational way, with one causing the other for example. But the people who’d come up with the word ‘synchronicity’ still thought that there might be some kind of bond between these intriguing occurrences, something we couldn’t see or understand from our perspective and yet obvious and logical in its own terms. Mick had an image in his mind of koi carp gazing upward from the bottom of their pool to see a bunch of waggling human fingers dipping through the ceiling of their universe. The fish would think that it was several separate and unusually meaty bait-worms, could have no idea these unconnected wrigglers were all part of the same unimaginable entity. He didn’t know how this related to his meeting with the barefoot boy, or to coincidence in general, but it seemed in some way muddily appropriate. Taking a last pull on his cigarette he flicked the smouldering butt-end to the ground ahead of him, its arc like space junk burning up upon re-entry, then extinguished the crash-landed ember underneath his shoe-sole without breaking step. Still thinking foggily about coincidence and carp he looked up with a start to find he was in Bath Street.
He’d been wrong. He’d been quite wrong to think that he was over his unsettling dream, his sojourn in the ceiling. He’d been wrong to tell the freaked-out teenager that it would all get better, because actually it didn’t. It just faded to a deep held chord, a pedal-organ drone behind the normal noise of life, a thing that you forgot about and thought you’d put away forever, but it was still there. It was still here.
He looked across the street at Bath Street flats, their front and not the rear he’d seen by dark a year ago with Alma. Since he’d had no call to venture through the Boroughs since that night, he realised that this must be the first time he’d been confronted by the bad side of his vision since he blinded himself, knocked himself out and recalled it, all those months ago. The sickening punch he felt, a bunch of fives impacting in his gut and driving all the air out of him was much worse than he’d expected. Leadenly, as if toward a scaffold, Michael Warren walked across the road.
Of course, he didn’t have to cut across the flats, up the wide central avenue with lawns to either edge, concluding in the broad brick-sided stairs that would deliver Mick practically to the doorstep of his sister’s exhibition. He could turn right and walk down to Little Cross Street, which would take him by the lowest edge of the shunned living units into Castle Street, thus circumventing the whole business, except that would prove Alma’s contention that she’d always been more of a man than he was, and he wouldn’t suffer that. Besides, this was all rubbish and Mick didn’t even know for sure if all that stuff that he’d remembered really was what happened when he’d choked that time, or whether it was all a dream he’d dreamed he dreamed, a spastic rush of images that had come to him only when he lay there flat out on the tarmac of the reconditioning yard with fireballs in his eyes. Even Mick’s youngest, Joseph, had long since ceased to let bad dreams colour waking life, had learned that the two realms were separate, that night-things couldn’t get you in clear daylight when your eyes weren’t shut, and Joe had just turned twelve. Attempting an indifferent air, Mick sauntered through the central gap in the low bounding fence and up the spacious walkway, heading for the steps just sixty or so feet ahead, just twenty paces off. What was it, anyway? For fuck’s sake, it was just a block of flats, in many ways more pleasant than the others that he’d passed that day.
He’d gone a step or two before the dreadful stench of burning garbage made him flinch and snap his head back, scanning the surrounding terra cotta chimneys for a source and finding none. Alma had told him once that to smell burning was a symptom schizophrenics suffered from, adding “but then they probably set fire to things quite often, so it’s bound to be a tricky judgement call.” Strangely enough, he found himself preferring the idea of schizophrenia and its olfactory hallucinations to the worse alternative that had occurred to him. As he remembered Alma pointing out during their meeting of the previous year, it wasn’t that he might have gone insane that was the prime cause for concern, but rather the alarming possibility that he might not have done. Clenching his nostrils against the pervasive charnel reek he carried on towards the stairs that, as he neared them, turned out to have been replaced during the last few years by a more wheelchair-friendly ramp.
A clot of blackness on the gravel path ahead of him fragmented into whirring charcoal specks like the precursor to a migraine, with a looping ochre turd briefly revealed, a footprint breaking its mid-section into ridge and trough, before the cloud of blowflies regrouped and resettled. Coming this way had been a mistake. The verdant swathes to either side of him were bounded at their far rims by long walls that ran along in parallel beside the central footpath and its bordering tracks of grass. The walls, built in the same dark red brick mottle as the rest of the accommodation, were alleviated by faux-Bauhaus half-moon windows that allowed an interrupted view of the wide, empty stretches of split-level concrete, the flats’ gardens, sulking birdless there beyond. When he’d first heard of Limbo he had visualised these courtyards, somewhere dismal where the dead might spend eternity, sat on a flight of granite steps below a featureless white sky. The semi-circles had been recently adorned by fans of iron spokes that made them look like cartoon eyes, the black rails forming radii across a negative-space iris. Seen in pairs they looked like the top halves of Easter Island faces buried to their ears in soil but still alive with begging, suffocating gazes. Young trees on the verges, more contemporary additions, threw their gloss-black shadows on the stifling masks, liquid and spider-like, ink droplets blown to form runny mascara patterns by an infant’s straw.
Despite the speed with which the wave of smothering depression was upon him, Mick was not aware of its arrival, and was instantly convinced that what was now roiling like toxic fumes inside his mind had always been his point of view, his usual optimism nothing but a fraud, a flimsy tissue behind which he hid from what he knew was the inevitable truth. There was no point. There was no point and there had never been a point to all this grief and graft and grovelling, to being alive. When the heart failed or the brain died, he’d always really known inside, we just stopped thinking. Everyone knew that within their sinking, secret heart, whatever they might say. We all stopped being who we were, we just shut down and there was nowhere that we got beamed up to after that, no Heaven, Hell or reincarnation as a better person. There was only nothing after death, and nothing else but nothing, and for everyone the universe would all be gone the moment they exhaled their final breath, just as though they and it were never there. He didn’t really sometimes feel the warmth and presence of his parents still around him, he just kidded himself now and then that this was what he felt. Tom and Doreen were gone, dad from a heart attack and mum from cancer of the bowel that must have hurt so much. He wasn’t ever going to see them anymore.
Mick had by this point reached the bottom of the ramp, and the incinerator odour was now everywhere. He tried to raise a flutter of resistance to the irrefutable awareness that pressed down upon him, tried to summon all the arguments that he was sure that he’d once had against this hopeless blackness. Love. His love for Cathy and the kids. That had been one of his protective mantras, he was certain, except love just made things crueller, gave you so much more to lose. One partner dies first and the other spends their final years alone and crushed. You love your kids and watch them grow to something wonderful and then you have to leave them and not meet with them again. And all so short, seventy years or so, with him near fifty now. That’s twenty years, assuming that you’re lucky, less than half of what had already slipped by, and Mick felt certain that these final decades would flash past with grim rapidity.
Everyone went away. Everything vanished. People, places, turned to painful shadows of their former selves and then were put to sleep, just like the Boroughs had been. It was always a half-witted district anyway, even its name. The Boroughs. One place with a plural word describing it. What was that all about? Nobody even knew why it was called that, some suggesting that the name should be spelled ‘Burrows’ for its nest of streets seen from the air, for its inhabitants who bred like rabbits. What a load of bollocks. People like his grandparents may have had six or seven kids but that was only so that they had some who reached adulthood. It was always a bad sign when better-off types drew comparisons between unsightly ghetto populations and some animal or other, most especially those species that we had, reluctantly, to poison periodically. Why didn’t people keep their lame excuses to themselves?
Mick realised that he was no longer thinking about death at the same moment that he realised he had reached the ramp’s top and was stepping onto Castle Street. He stopped, astounded by the sudden on/off light-switch change within him, and gazed back at Bath Street, looking down the sunlit path between the two halves of the flats that he’d just walked along. The lawns were luscious and inviting and the saplings hissed and whispered in the lulling breeze. Mick stood dumbfounded, staring at it.
Fucking hell.
Blinking his eyes exaggeratedly as if to banish sleep, Mick turned his back upon the flats and made his way down Castle Street towards the base of Castle Hill, the rectangle of turf there on its corner, much reduced since Mick’s day, where that man and woman had once tried to drag his sister into their black car when she was seven, only letting her go when she screamed. He hoped her paintings would be good enough to do whatever she intended, because what just happened to him was a demonstration of the force that threatened to eat everything they cared about, and other than his sister and her doubtful counter-strategy Mick couldn’t think of anyone who had a plan.
Rounding the bend of Castle Hill to Fitzroy Street he saw that the small exhibition was already in full swing. His sister, in a big turquoise angora sweater leaned upon the wood frame of the open nursery door, anxiously looking out to see if he was really going to show, beaming and waving like a pastel-coloured children’s TV muppet when she spotted him. Standing with Alma was a grizzled stickman that Mick recognised as Roman Thompson, and beside him lounged a lavishly disreputable-looking feline thirty-something with a cream vest and an opened beer can, evidently Roman’s boyfriend, Dean. Sat on the step next to Mick’s sister was Benedict Perrit, the itinerant poet with the sozzled grin and tragic eyes who’d been in the same class as Alma at Spring Lane, two years above Mick’s own. There were some others there he knew, as well. He thought that the good-looking black guy with the greying hair was probably Alma’s old friend Dave Daniels, with whom she had shared her longstanding enthusiasm for science-fiction, and he saw his sister’s tough and sunburnt former 1960s co-conspirator Bert Reagan standing near an elderly yet strong-looking old woman that Mick thought might be Bert’s mother, or perhaps an aunt. There were two other women of about the same age, although these were genuine old gargoyles, hanging back on the group’s fringes, more than likely friends of the old dear stood by Bert Reagan there. He raised a hand to all of them and smiled, returning Alma’s greeting as he walked towards the exhibition’s entrance. Oh, our sis, Mick thought. Oh, Warry.
This had better be much more than good.
<br>
* <strong>Book One: THE BOROUGHS</strong>
<quote>
He [Ludwig Wittgenstein] once greeted me with the question: “Why do people say that it was natural to think that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth turned on its axis?” I replied: “I suppose, because it looked as if the sun went round the earth.” “Well,” he asked, “what would it have looked like if it had <em>looked</em> as if the earth turned on its axis?”
<strong>—Elizabeth Anscombe,</strong><br>
<em><strong>An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus</strong></em>
</quote>
<br>
** <strong>A HOST OF ANGLES</strong>
<br>
<strong>I</strong>t was the morning of October 7<sup>th</sup>, 1865. The rain and its accompanying light were foul against the squinty attic window as Ern Vernall woke to his last day of sanity.
Downstairs the latest baby wailed and he heard his wife Anne already up and shouting at their John, the two-year-old. The blankets and the bolster, both inherited from Anne’s dead parents, were a rank entanglement with Ernest’s foot snagged in a hole through the top sheet. The bedding smelled of sweat, infrequent spendings, farts, of him and of his life there in the shacks of Lambeth, and its odour rose about him like resigned and dismal music as he knuckled gum from barely-open eyes and roused himself, already bracing to receive the boulder of the world.
Feeling a pang beneath his left breast that he hoped was his digestion, he sat up and, after extricating one from the torn bedclothes, placed both naked feet upon the homemade rug beside his cot. For just a moment Ern luxuriated in the tufted scraps of knitting wool between his toes then stood up, with a groan of protest from the bedstead. Blearily he turned himself about to face the mess of charcoal army blanket and slipped counterpane below which he had until recently been snoring, and then kneeled upon the variegated bedside mat as if to say his prayers, the way he’d last done as a seven-year-old child a quarter-century ago.
He reached both hands into the darkness underneath the bed and carefully slid out a slopping jerry over the bare floorboards, setting it before him like a pauper’s font. He fumbled for his old man in the itchy vent of the grey flannel long johns, staring dully into the sienna and blood-orange pool already stewing in its chip-toothed china pot, and made an effort to recall if he’d had any dreams. As he unleashed a stair-rod rigid jet of piss at the half-full receptacle he thought that he remembered something about working as an actor, lurking backstage at a melodrama or a ghost-tale of some kind. The drama, as it now came back to him, had been about a haunted chapel, and the rogue that he was playing had to hide behind one of those portraits with the eyes cut out, such as you often found in that sort of affair. He wasn’t spying, though, but rather talking through the picture in a jokey frightening voice, to scare the fellow on the other side that he was looking at, and make him think it was a magic painting. This chap that he’d played the trick on in the dream had been so rattled that Ern found himself still chuckling at it in mid-stream as he knelt by the bed.
Now he’d thought more on it, he wasn’t sure if it was a theatrical performance that he’d dreamed about or a real prank played on a real man. He had the sense, still, that he’d been behind the scenery of a pantomime, delivering lines as the employee of a repertory company of sorts, but didn’t think now that the victim of the gag had also been an actor. A white-haired old pensioner but still young-looking in his face, he’d seemed so truly terrified by the enchanted daubing that Ern had felt sorry for him and had whispered an aside from there behind the canvas, telling the poor beggar that he sympathised, and that Ern knew this would be very hard for him. Ern had then gone on to recite the lines out of the play that he apparently had learned by heart, bloodcurdling stuff he hadn’t really understood and was unable now to bring to mind, except that part of it, he thought, was about lightning, and there was another bit concerning sums and masonry. He’d either woken at this point, or else could not now recollect the story’s end. It wasn’t like he placed a lot of stock in dreams as others did, as his dad John had done, but more that they were often smashing entertainment that cost nothing and there wasn’t much you could say that about.
Shaking the last few drops from off the end he looked down in surprise at the great head of steam that brimmed above the po, belatedly apprised of just how icy the October garret was.
Pushing the now-warmed vessel back under the bed-boards he rose to his feet and made his creaking way across the attic to an heirloom washstand by the far wall opposite the window. Bending to accommodate the sharp decline in headroom at the loft-room’s edges, Ern poured some cold water from his mam’s jug with the picture of a milkmaid on into the rusty-rimmed enamel washbowl, splashing it with cupped hands on his face, ruffling his lips and blowing like a horse at the astringent bite of it. The brisk rinse turned his mutton-chops from arid, fiery scrub to freshly-watered ringlet fronds, dripping below his jutting ears. He rubbed his face dry with a linen towel, then for a while looked on its faint reflection that gazed from the shallow puddle in the bowl. Craggy and lean with straggling wisps of pepper at the brow, he could see in its early comic lines the doleful cracks and seams of how Ern thought he might appear in later life, a scrawny tabby in a thunderstorm.
He dressed, the fraying clothes chilled so that they felt damp when first he put them on, and then climbed from the attic to the lower reaches of his mother’s house, clambering backward down pinched steps that were so steep that they required one’s hands to mount or to descend, as with a ladder or a quarry face. He tried to creep across the landing past the doorway of his mum’s room and downstairs before she heard him, but his luck was out. A cowering, curtain-twitching tenant when the rent-man called, his luck was always out.
“Ernest?”
His mum’s voice, like a grand industrial engine that had fallen into disrepair stopped Ern dead with one hand on the round knob of the top banister. He turned to face his mother through the open door that led into her bedroom with its smell of shit and rosewater more sickly than the smell of shit alone. Still in a nightgown with her thinning hair in pins, Mum stooped beside her nightstand emptying her own room’s chamber pot in a zinc bucket, after which she would go on to make the rounds of both the nippers’ room and his and Annie’s quarters, emptying theirs as well and then later depositing the whole lot in the privy at the bottom of their yard. Ernest John Vernall was a man of thirty-two, a wiry man with a fierce temper whom you wouldn’t seek as an opponent in a fight, with wife and children, with a trade where he was quietly respected, but he scuffed his boots against the varnished skirting like a boy beneath his mother’s scornful, disappointed frown.
“Are you in work today, ’cause I shall ’ave to be along the pawn shop if you’re not. That little girl won’t feed ’erself and your Anne’s like a sleeve-board. She can’t feed ’em, baby Thursa or your John.”
Ern bobbed his head and glanced away, down to the worn, flypaper-coloured carpet covering the landing from its stair-head to his attic door.
“I’ve got work all this week up at St. Paul’s but shan’t be paid ’til Friday. If there’s anything you’ve hocked I’ll get it back then, when I’ve ’ad me earnings.”
She looked to one side and shook her head dismissively, then went back to decanting the stale golden liquid noisily into her bucket. Feeling scolded, Ern hunched down the stairs into the peeling umber of the passageway, then left and through a door into the cramped fug of the living room, where Annie had a fire lit in the grate. Crouching beside the baby’s chair and trying to get her to take warmed-up cow’s milk from a bottle meant for ginger ale that they’d adapted, Annie barely raised her head as Ern entered the room behind her. Only their lad John looked up from where he sat making a pig’s ear of his porridge by the hearth, acknowledging his father’s presence without smiling.
“There’s some fried bread doing in the kitchen you can ’ave for breakfast, but I don’t know what there’ll be when you get ’ome. Come on, just take a spot o’ milk to please your mam.”
This last remark Anne had directed at their daughter, Thursa, who was still red-faced and roaring, turning with determination from the weathered rubber teat as Ern’s wife tried to steer it in between the baby’s yowling lips. It was a little after seven in the morning, so that the dark-papered cuddle of the room was mostly still in shadow, with the burnished bronze glow from its fireplace turning young John’s hair to smelted metal, gleaming on the baby’s tear-tracked cheek and painting half his wife’s drawn face with light like dripping.
Ern went through and down two steps into the narrow-shouldered kitchen, its uneven whitewashed walls crowding and spectral in the daybreak gloom, a memory of onions and boiled handkerchiefs still hanging in the bluish air, cloudy as though with soap scum. The wood-burning stove was going, with two end-cuts of a loaf frying upon its hob. Clarified fat was sizzling in a pan black as a meteor that fell out of the stars, and spat on Ernie’s fingers as he carefully retrieved the noggins with a fork. In the next room his baby daughter wearily allowed her furious weeping to trail off into accusing hiccup-breaths at sulking intervals. Finding a crack-glazed saucer that had lost its cup to accident he used it as a plate, then perched upon a stool beside the knife-scarred kitchen table while he ate, chewing upon his mouth’s right side to spare the bad teeth on its left. The taste of singed grease flooded from the sponge-pores of a brittle crust as he bit down, scalding and savoury across his tongue, bringing the phantom flavours of their last week’s fry-ups in its wake: the bubble ’n’ squeak’s cabbage tang, the pig cheek’s subtle sweetness, a crisped epitaph for Tuesday’s memorable beef sausage. When he’d swallowed the last morsel Ern was pleased to find his spittle thickened to a salty aspic where the resurrected zest of each meal still enjoyed its culinary afterlife.
Re-crossing the now subdued living room he said goodbye to everyone and told Anne he’d be back by eight that night. He knew that some blokes kissed their wives goodbye when they went off to work, but like the great majority he thought that kind of thing was soppy and so did his Anne. Fastidiously scraping a last smear of porridge from the bowl their two-year-old son John, their little carrot-top, watched stoically as Ern ducked from the fire-lit room into the dingy passageway beyond, to fish his hat and jacket down from off the wooden coat-hooks and then be about his business in the city, somewhere John had dimly heard of but had thus far never been. There was the sound of Ernie’s shouted farewell to his mum, still on her night-soil rounds upstairs, followed by the expectant pause that was his mother’s failure to reply. A short while after that Anne and the children heard the front door close, its juddering resistance when shoved into its ill-fitting jamb, and that turned out to be the last time that his family could honestly say they’d seen Ginger Vernall.
Ern walked out through Lambeth to the north, the sky above a stygian forest canopy swaying upon the million tar-black sapling stems of fume that sprang from every chimney, with the sooty blackness of the heavens only starting to dilute there at its eastern edge, above the dives of Walworth. Exiting his mother’s house in East Street he turned right down at the terrace end and into Lambeth Walk, onto the Lambeth Road and up towards St. George’s Circus. On his left he passed Hercules Road where he had heard the poet Blake lived once, a funny sort by all accounts, though obviously Ern had never read his work or for that matter anybody else’s, having failed to really get the trick of books. The rain was hammering in the buckled gutters of the street outside an uncharacteristically quiet Bedlam, where the fairy-painter Mr. Dadd had been until a year or so before, and where they’d been afraid Ern’s father John would have to go, although the old man died before it had been necessary. That was getting on ten years ago, when he’d yet to meet Anne and wasn’t long back from Crimea. Dad had gradually stopped talking, saying that their conversations were all being overheard by “them up in the eaves”. Ern had enquired if Dad meant all the pigeons, or did he still think there might be Russian spies, but John had snorted and asked Ern just where he thought that the expression ‘eavesdropping’ had come from, after which he’d say no more.
Ern passed by the rainswept asylum on the far side of the street, and speculated distantly if there might be some antic spirit bred in Bedlam, squatted over Lambeth with eyes rolling, that infused the district’s atmosphere with its own crackpot vapours and sent people mad, like Ernest’s dad or Mr. Blake, though he supposed that there was not, and that in general people’s lives would be sufficient to explain them going silly. Down St. George’s Road heading for Elephant and Castle swarmed, already, a great number of horse buses, pushcarts, coal wagons and baked potato sellers dragging stoves like hot tin chests-of-drawers piled on their trolleys, a vast multitude of figures in black hats and coats like Ern, marching with downcast eyes beneath a murderous sky. Turning his collar up he joined the shuffling throng of madhouse-fodder and went on towards St. George’s Circus where he would begin his long hike up the Blackfriars Road. He’d heard that they had train-lines running underground now, out from Paddington, and idly speculated that a thing like that might get him to St. Paul’s much quicker, but he hadn’t got the money and besides, the thought gave him the willies. Being underground like that, how would it ever be a thing that you got used to? Ern was well-known as a steeplejack who’d work on rooftops without thinking twice, sure-footed and quite unconcerned, but being underneath the ground, that was a different matter. That was only natural for the dead, and anyway, what if something should happen down there, like a fire or something? Ernest didn’t like to think about it and decided that he’d stop the way he was, as a pedestrian.
People and vehicles eddied there at the convergence of a half-a-dozen streets like suds about a drain. Making his way around the circus clockwise, dodging in between the rumbling wheels and glistening horseflesh as he crossed Waterloo Road, Ern gave a wide berth to a broadsheet vendor and the gawping, whispering gaggle he’d attracted. From the burrs of chat that Ern picked up passing this pipe-smoke shrouded mob on its periphery he gathered it was old news from America about the blackies having been set free, and all about how the American Prime Minister had been shot dead, just like they’d done to poor old Spencer Perceval, back when Ern’s dad had been a boy. As Ern recalled it, Perceval was from the little boot and shoe town of Northampton, sixty miles from London to the north, where Ern had family upon his father’s side still living, cousins and the like. His cousin Robert Vernall had passed through last June on his way down to Kent for picking hops, and had told Ernest that much of the cobbling work that he’d relied on in the Midlands had dried up because the greycoats in America, for whom Northampton had supplied the army boots, had lost their civil war. Ernest could see it was a shame for Bob, but as he understood things, it was all the greycoats as what kept the slaves, the blackies, which Ern didn’t hold with. That was wrong. They were poor people just like anybody else. He walked across the awkward corner with its little spike of waste-ground where the angle was too sharp to fit another house, then turned left and up Blackfriars Road, making across the smouldering rows of Southwark for the river and the bridge.
It took Ern some three-quarters of an hour, bowling along at a fair pace, before he came on Ludgate Street over the Thames’ far side and the approach to the West Front of the cathedral. In this time he’d thought about all sorts of things, about the slaves set free out in America, some of them branded by their masters as though cattle, he’d been told, and of black men and poor people in general. Marx the socialist and his First International had been about more than a year already, but the workers still weren’t any better off as far as anyone could tell. Perhaps things would be better now that Palmerston was dying, as it was Lord Palmerston who’d held back the reforms, but to be frank Ern wasn’t holding out much hope on that one. For a while he’d cheered himself with thoughts of Anne and how she’d let him have her on the blade-grooved kitchen table while his mam was out, sat on its edge without her drawers on and her feet around his back, so that the memory put him on the bone under his trousers and his flannels, hurrying through the downpour over Blackfriars Bridge. He’d thought about Crimea and his luck at coming home without a scratch, and then of Mother Seacole who he’d heard about when he was out there, which returned him to the matter of the blacks.
It was the children that concerned him, born as slaves on a plantation and not brought there as grown men or women, some of them being set free just now across the sea, young lads of ten or twelve who’d never known another life and would be flummoxed as for what to do. Did they brand kids as well, Ern wondered, and at what age if they did? Wishing he hadn’t thought of this and banishing the awful and unwanted picture of young John or Thursa brought beneath the glowing iron he mounted Ludgate Street with the majestic hymn-made-solid of St. Paul’s inflating as he neared it, swelling up beyond the slope’s low brow.
As often as he’d seen it, Ern had never ceased to be amazed that such a beautiful and perfect thing could ever come to be amongst the sprawl of dirty closes, inns and tapering corridors, amongst the prostitutes and the pornographers. Across the puddle-silvered slabs it rose with its two towers like hands flung up in a Hosanna to the churning heavens, grimmer than when Ern had left for work despite the way the day had lightened naturally as it wore on since then. The broad cathedral steps with raindrops dancing on them swept down in two flights calling to mind the tucks around a trailing surplice hem, where over that the six pairs of white Doric columns holding up the portico dropped down in billowed folds, unlaundered in the city’s bonfire pall. The spires that flanked the wide façade to either side, two hundred feet or more in height, had what seemed all of London’s pigeons crowded on their ledges under dripping overhangs of stonework, sheltering against the weather.
Huddling amongst the birds as if they had themselves just flown down from unfriendly skies to roost in the cathedral eaves were stone apostles, with St. Paul himself perched on the portico’s high ridge and gathering his sculpted robes up round him to prevent them trailing in the grime and wet. At the far right of the most southern tower sat a disciple, Ern had no idea which one, who had his head tipped back and seemed to watch the tower’s clock intently, waiting for his shift to finish so that he could flap off home down Cheapside through the drizzle, back to Aldgate and the East. Climbing the soaked and slippery steps with fresh spots drumming on his hat-brim, Ernest had to chuckle at the irreligious notion of the statues intermittently producing liquid marble stools, Saints’-droppings that embittered parish workers would be paid to scrape away. Taking a last peer at the boiling mass of bruised cloud overhead before he slipped between the leftmost pillars and towards the north aisle entrance, he concluded that the rain was getting worse if anything, and that today he would undoubtedly be better off indoors. Stamping his boots and shaking off his sodden jacket as he crossed the threshold into the cathedral he heard the first muffled drum-roll of approaching thunder off at the horizon’s rim, confirming his suspicion.
In comparison to the October torrent pouring down outside, St. Paul’s was warm and Ern felt briefly guilty at the thought of Anne and their two children drawn up shivering to the deficient fire back home in East Street. Ernest walked along the North Aisle under the suspicious frowns of passing clergy towards the construction and activity at its far end, only remembering to snatch his sopping bonnet off at the last minute and to carry it before him humbly in both hands. With every ringing step he felt the vistas and the hidden volumes of the stupefying edifice unfolding up above him and upon all sides, as he veered from the north aisle’s curved recesses on his left and passed between the building’s great supporting columns to the nave.
Framed by St. Paul’s huge piers there in the central transept space beneath the dome milled labourers like Ern himself, their scruffy coats and britches a dull autumn palette of dust greys and browns, shabby against the richness of the paintings hung around them, the composure of the monuments and statues. Some of them were lads Ern knew of old, which was the way he’d come by this appreciated stint of paid work in the first place, with a word put in to them as were contracted for the cleaning and restoring. Men were scrubbing with soft cloths at lavishly-carved choir-stalls bossed with grapes and roses at the far end of the quire, while in the spandrels between arches underneath the railed hoop of the Whispering Gallery above were other fellows, giving the mosaic prophets and four Gospel-makers something of a wash and brush-up. Most of the endeavour though, it seemed to Ern, was centred on the mechanism overshadowing the nearly hundred-foot-wide area immediately below the yawning dome. It was perhaps the most ingenious thing that Ern had ever seen.
Hanging from the top centre of the dome, fixed to the crowning lantern’s underside at what Ern guessed must be the strongest point of the vast structure, itself with a tonnage in the tens of thousands, was a plumb-straight central spindle more then twenty storeys high that had on one side an assemblage nearly as tall made of poles and planks, while on the other side what had to have been London’s largest sandbag hung from a gigantic crossbeam as a counterweight. The sack sagged from a hawser on the left, while to Ern’s right the heavy rope-hung framework that it balanced out was shaped like an enormous pie-slice with its narrow end towards the centre where it joined securely with the upright central axis. This impressive scaffolding contained a roughly quarter-circle wedge of flooring that could be winched up and down by pulleys at its corners, so as to reach surfaces that needed work at any level of the dome. The mast-like central pivot was hung almost to the decorative solar compass in the middle of the transept floor, with what looked like a smaller version of a horizontal mill-wheel at its bottom by which means the whole creaking arrangement could be manually rotated to attend each vaulted quadrant in its turn. The pulley-hoisted platform in the midst of its supporting struts and girders was where Ern would be employed for the remainder of the day, all being well.
A fat pearl cylinder of failing daylight coloured by the worsening storm outside dropped from the windows of the Whispering Gallery to the cathedral’s flooring down below, dust lifted by the bustling industry caught up as a suspension in its filmy shaft. The soft illumination filtering from overhead rendered the workmen with a Conté crayon warmth and grain as they bent diligently to their various enterprises. Ern stood almost mesmerised admiring this effect when to the right ahead of him, out of the south aisle and its stairs from the triforium gallery above there came a striding, rotund figure that he recognised, who called to him by name.
“Oi, Ginger. Ginger Vernall. Over here, you silly beggar.”
It was Billy Mabbutt, who Ern knew from different pubs in Kennington and Lambeth and who’d landed him this opportunity to earn a bit of money, like a good ’un. His complexion florid to the point of looking lately cooked, Bill Mabbutt was a heartening sight with his remaining sandy hair a half-mast curtain draped behind his ears around the rear of that bald cherry pate, the braces of his trousers stretched across a button-collared shirt with sleeves rolled boldly back to show his ham-hock forearms. These were pumping energetically beside him like the pistons of a locomotive as he barrelled towards Ern, weaving between the other labourers who drifted back and forth through rustling, echoing acoustics on their disparate errands. Smiling at the pleasure that he always felt on meeting Billy mingled with relief that this much-needed job had not turned out to be a false alarm, Ernest began to walk in the direction of his old acquaintance, meeting him halfway. The high lilt of Bill’s voice always surprised Ern, coming as it did from those boiled bacon features, lined with sixty years and two campaigns – in Burma and Crimea – with this last being the place the two had met. The older man, who’d been a quartermaster, had adopted what appeared to be the shot-and-shell repellent Ernie as his red-haired lucky charm.
“Gor, blow me, Ginger, you’re a sight for sore eyes. I was upstairs in the Whispering Gallery just now, looking at all the work there is to do and getting in a right commotion ’cause I swore blind as you’d not show up, but now you’ve come and made me out a liar.”
“Hello, Bill. I’ve not got ’ere too late, then?”
Mabbutt shook his head and gestured in between the hulking piers to where a gang of men were struggling as they adjusted the immense contraption there at the cathedral’s heart, dependent from its dome.
“No, you’re all right, boy. It’s the mobile gantry what’s been messing us about. All over everywhere, she was, so if you’d got ’ere sooner you’d have only been sat on your ’ands. I reckon as we’ve got ’er settled now, though, by the looks of things, so if you want to come across we’ll get you started.”
One fat and the other thin, one with a pale complexion and red hair, the other with its opposite, the two men sauntered down the nave, over the resonant and gleaming tiles, and passed between its final columns to where all the work was going on. As they drew nearer to the dangling monster that Bill had referred to as the mobile gantry, Ern revised with each fresh pace his estimate regarding the thing’s size. Close to, that twenty floors of scaffolding was more like thirty, from which he inferred that he’d be at his job two or three hundred feet above the ground, a disconcerting prospect even given Ernest’s celebrated head for heights.
Two labourers, one of whom Ernest knew was brawling Albert Pickles from up Centaur Street, were stripped down to their singlets as they pushed the cog-like mill wheel in the middle round a final notch or two, rotating the whole feat of engineering on its axis while they trudged their orbit-path round the mosaic sun at the dead centre of the transept, its rays flaring to the cardinal directions. With their efforts, the men brought about the groaning framework on the spindle’s right until it was aligned exactly with one of the eight great orange-segment sections into which the overarching bowl had been divided up. As the huge scaffold moved, so too did its enormous sandbag counterweight off to the left side of the axial pole, suspended from the crossbeam far above. Four or five navvies stood about it, walking round beside the hanging sackcloth boulder, steadying it as it wobbled with a foot or two of clearance over the church floor.
Ern noticed that the bag had sprung a leak, a small hole in the fabric of its underside with an apprentice of fourteen or so scuffing about there on his knees beside the sack, sweating and swearing as he tried to darn the rend with thread and needle. The boy was disfigured by what people called a strawberry mark staining his skin across one eye from cheek to forehead in a mongrel puppy patch, whether from birth or from a scald Ern couldn’t say. The milky, stormcloud-filtered radiance dropped down upon the youth from overhead like in Greek dramas as he grovelled at his mending, with the hourglass grains spilling across his darting fingers, falling in a thin stream on the lustrous slabs below. As Ern gazed idly on this scene, thinking inevitably of the sands of time, the picture’s lighting jumped and lurched, followed not several seconds later by a cannon fusillade of thunder. The squall’s eye was evidently drawing nearer.
Billy Mabbutt led Ern past where men were fastening the gantry’s trailing guy-ropes down to anchor it now it had been positioned properly, over to a trestle that had been set up between the statues of Lord Nelson and the late Viceroy of Ireland Lord Cornwallis, who’d surrendered in the Yankee independence war to General Washington if Ern remembered all his history right. Lord knows why they should want to give him such a grand memorial. The kit that Ern would need to make his restorations was set out upon the makeshift table where another young apprentice, this one slightly older, was already separating eggs by pouring them from one cracked china teacup to another. Workmen stood about the trestle waiting to begin their tasks and Billy loudly introduced Ern as the pair rolled up to join the crew.
“It’s all right, chaps, the decorator’s come. This ’ere is me old ’oppo Ginger Vernall. A right Rembrandt on the quiet, is Ginger.”
Ern shook hands with all the men and hoped they didn’t grudge the fact that he was the skilled labour on this job and would be getting more than they did. Probably they understood that he might not have any work like this again for months, while brawny labourers were always needed, and at any rate the money was so poor that neither party had a cause for envy. Him and Billy Mabbutt conferred briefly on the ins and outs of what he was to do, and then Ern went about transferring his required materials and tools from off the tabletop onto the quarter-cheese shaped wooden flooring slung inside the framework of the moveable arrangement.
He selected an array of squirrel brushes from the tin-full that the St. Paul’s clergy had provided and, as well, the cardboard lid off an old shoebox serving as a tray for all the cleaned-out varnish tubs containing the cathedral’s range of powder-paints. Of these, the purple and the emerald green had caught the damp and clotted into crumbly gems, but Ern didn’t expect that he would need these colours and the other pigments seemed to have been kept in a much better state. The surly youngster who’d been put in charge of separating out the eggs was finishing the last of half a dozen when Ern asked if he could have his yolks. These were unbroken in one basin while another pot held the unwanted whites, a viscous slop that looked obscenely like collected drool which would no doubt be put to other use and not go wasted. Carefully transporting his receptacle with the six yellow globs sliding around each other at its bottom, Ern set it upon the pulley-mounted platform with the brushes and the colours then fetched mixing bowls, a two-pound sack of gypsum and half-gallon cider flagon washed and filled with water. Adding glass paper and three or four clean cloths, Ern climbed onto the swaying wedge of deck beside the trappings of his craft and with a tight grip on one of its corner-ropes, he gave the signal for Bill Mabbutt’s men to winch him up.
The first jolt of his footing when it lifted had another momentary splash of silver from outside for its accompaniment, the subsequent protracted boom coming just instants later as the storm-head neared. One of the burly fellows hauling down upon his rope with a bell-ringer’s grip made some crack about God moving his furniture around upstairs at which another of the gang protested, saying the remark was disrespectful in that great Mother of Churches, although Ern had heard the saying since his boyhood and saw nothing wrong with it. There was a practicality behind the phrase that tickled him, for while within his heart of hearts Ern wasn’t altogether sure if he believed in God, he liked the notion of the Lord as someone down-to-earth who might occasionally, as did we all, have call to rearrange things so that they were better suited to His purposes. The pulleys shrieked as Ern made his ascent in measured stages, eighteen inches at a time, and when the lightning flashed again to outline everything in sudden chalk the deafening explosion in its wake was near immediate.
The broad curve of his platform’s outmost edge eclipsed more of the ground below with every squealing half-yard that it gained in height. The greater part of Ernest’s gang of workmates was already gone from sight beneath the swaying raft of planks he stood upon, with Billy Mabbutt at the group’s rear lifting up one ruddy palm in a farewell before he too was out of view. Now Ern took stock of the wood floor beneath his feet he realised that it was much larger than he’d first supposed, almost as big as a theatre stage with his small heap of jugs and pots and brushes looking lonely and inadequate there at its centre. Fully raised, he thought, and a full quadrant of the transept would be made invisible to Ern, and he to it. The heads of first Cornwallis then Lord Nelson vanished, swallowed by the elevating podium’s perimeter, and Ernest was alone. Tilting his head he gazed at Sir James Thornhill’s eight vast frescoes on the dome’s interior as he rose by instalments up into their company.
Back when he’d been a small boy in the early 1840s Ern had learned to draw a bit when he’d risked piles by sitting on a cold stone step and watching Jackie Thimbles recreate in chalk the death of Nelson at Trafalgar on the flagstones by the corner of the Kennington and Lambeth Roads, day after fascinated day. Jackie was in his sixties then, a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars who’d lost two fingertips on his left hand to gangrene and concealed the stumps beneath a pair of silver thimbles. Making now a threadbare living as a pavement artist, the old man had seemed quite glad of young Ern’s daily company, and was a mine of information about painting. He’d regale the boy with long accounts, shot through with yearning, of the marvellous new oil paints that were then available to them as had the money, bright laburnum yellows and rich mauves or violets like a copse at dusk. Jackie had taught Ern how to mix a realistic flesh tone from a range of hues you’d never think were in pink skin, and how the fingers could be useful when it came to blending, smoothly smudging a white highlight cast by burning warships down the dying admiral’s cheek or on the polished timbers of the <em>Victory</em>. Ernest had thought his mentor the most talented of men, but looking up at Thornhill’s masterpieces now he understood them to be from a realm as far above the blood and fire washed decks of Jackie Thimbles as the halls of Heaven surely were above the streets of Lambeth.
Episodes from Saint Paul’s life surrounded Ern as he rode his ramshackle elevator up amongst them, from the Damascene conversion to a vividly depicted shipwreck, with the various disciples under-lighted as though by a forge or opened treasure chest while ray-pierced cloudscapes roiled behind. The fresco that Ern planned to clean up and retouch today, over upon the echoing concavity’s southwestern side, was one that he was not familiar with from sermons. In its background was a place of warm, rough stones that might have been a gaol, with stood before this a wide-eyed and wretched man whose awe seemed to be at the very brink of terror, gazing at the haloed saints or angels who looked back with lowered eyes and small, secretive smiles.
Ern’s wooden dais climbed now past the Whispering Gallery where one could fancy that the walls still crept with century-old prayers and where the windows allowed Ern his final glimpse out over a drenched London to Southwark Cathedral’s tower in the south-east before he was moved higher, up into the dome itself. Around the lowest rim of this, on the encircling tambour just above the gallery, he was dismayed to note that a whole swathe of border detail at the bottom of each fresco had been covered over in stone-coloured paint, no doubt to easily and inexpensively mask water-damage that had been discovered during earlier renovations. Ern was muttering beneath his breath about the shameful lack of pride in one’s endeavours showing in this shoddy workmanship when blinding brilliance and tumultuous din so close they were a single thing exploded all about him and his platform dropped a sickening inch or two as startled bruisers far below lost then regained their grips upon the pulley-ropes. Ern’s heart was thudding while his suddenly precarious stand resumed its screeching progress upwards and he cautiously approached its right rear crook thinking he’d risk a peek down just to see if all was well.
As he wrapped one tight round the rope, Ern found his hands were wringing wet with perspiration, so that he supposed he must be frightened of heights after all, despite what everyone had always said. He peered down past the planking’s rough-cut ends and, though he could not see his fellow workers, was astounded to find how far up he was. The St. Paul’s clergy looked like earwigs inching over the white, distant floor and Ernest watched with some amusement as two of the clerics waddled unaware towards each other along the adjacent sides of a giant pier, colliding at the corner in a flurry of black skirts. It wasn’t the mere sight of a downed clergyman that made Ern chuckle, but his realisation that he’d known the two priests would bump into one another before they themselves did, just by virtue of his lofty vantage point. To an extent he had been able to perceive the destinies of land-bound people moving back and forth on their flat plane from the superior perspective of a third dimension up above theirs that they seldom thought about or paid attention to. Ernest imagined this was why the Romans had got on so well, seizing the tallest peaks as lookout posts and watchtowers in their conquests, their perceptions and their strategies both wonderfully advantaged by the higher ground.
His perch had by now reached the level he’d agreed with Billy Mabbutt, where it came to rest and was tied off, securely Ernest hoped, more than two hundred feet below. He was around the upper reaches of his first appointed fresco with the cloudburst’s flickering, percussive heart an almost constant presence right above him now. Once his expanse of floor space had stopped moving, Ern decided to begin his restorations with a halo-sporting figure in the picture’s upper left, angel or saint he couldn’t tell, the face of which had been somewhat discoloured by decades of censer-fume and candle smoke. He started gently with his cloths, stood there upon the platform’s brim wiping the smuts and layered dust from a visage he was surprised to find measured at least four feet from crown to chin when seen from right up next to it, the almost girlish features turned halfway towards the right and looking down demurely with the small lips pursed in that same smugly knowing smile. An angel, Ern decided, on the basis that those saints he could remember all had beards.
Ern was all on his own in what seemed the bare-boarded attic of the world, much more elaborately decorated and more spacious than the one at his mum’s house in East Street. Once he’d cleaned off as much superficial grime as he could manage from a quarter-profile near as long as he was, Ernest settled to the serious affair of mixing up a shade that would exactly match the holy being’s weathered peach complexion. Using the least mucky-looking handle of a brush that he could find he whipped the six yolks in their basin, then allowed a miserly amount of the resulting copper cream to pour into one of his mixing bowls. Another brush-handle served as a slender spoon with which Ern measured minute servings of what he believed to be the necessary colours from their varnish-tubs, wiping the brush-stem after every measure with a rag and stirring different quantities of lurid powder in his mixing bowl amongst the beaten egg.
He started with an earthy, rich Burnt Ochre, adding Naples Yellow for its touch of summer afternoon then followed this with a restrained pinch of Rose Madder. Next the bloody and translucent drizzle of rich crimson was mixed vigorously with the combination, tiny beads of yolk frosted with colour crushed into each other by the stirring squirrel hairs. He supplemented the already-satisfying mixture with his secret touch, the trick he’d learned from Jackie Thimbles, which was to employ a sprinkling of Cobalt Blue, this simulating the depleted veinal blood that circulated just below the human epidermis. If the blue and reds should prove too much Ern would offset them with a drop of white, but for the moment he was pleased with how the blending had turned out and set about preparing his light skim of gesso, shaking the blanched gypsum from its bag into a little water and then pouring his flesh tempera to colour the thin plaster once it had been mixed. Taking a useful range of brushes in his trouser pocket Ernest walked across the aerial theatre’s boards, holding his bowl containing the painstakingly assembled medium between both hands, back to the platform’s southwest point where he commenced to work on the gigantic countenance, his head tipped back as he reached upward slightly to the image on the concave wall directly over him.
Applying first a shallow coating of the fleshy-coloured gesso down the long sweep of the angel’s side-lit jaw line, Ernest waited until it was dry before he rubbed it down to a fine finish with his glass paper and then got ready to lay on a second coat. He’d barely started slapping this with hurried, practiced motions on the yard-wide face before he noticed to his consternation that the tints upon its far side, which he hadn’t touched yet, had begun to run. The storm outside had mounted to its zenith with a staggering barrage of thunders as Ern squinted up, bewildered and alarmed through an incessant lantern-Morse of lightning, at the dribbling colours moving on the angel’s flat and slightly in-bowed head and shoulders.
Squirming droplets, each a different shade, were running up and down and sideways on the inner surface of the dome round the angelic face, with their trajectories in shocking contravention of all reason’s laws. Moreover, the fast-swarming rivulets did not appear to Ern to have the glisten that they would if they’d been wet. It was instead as if dry streams of grains, infinitesimal and rushing, poured across the brushwork features following their inward curve like bright-dyed filings swimming over a weak magnet. This was an impossibility and, worse, would almost certainly be stopped out of his wages. He took an involuntary, faltering step back, and as he did so widened his appreciation if not comprehension of the frantic, trickling activity and motion going on before him.
Neutral greys and umbers from the shadows on the far right of the giant face where it was turned away were crawling on a steep diagonal towards its upper left, where they pooled to a blot of shading such as you might get to one side of a nose if whomever it might belong to looked straight at you. Radiant Chrome Yellow and Lead White bled from the halo, forming an irregular bright patch with contours roughly like the angel’s rightmost cheek if it were slightly moved so that it was illuminated. With a bleak, numb horror moving up his spine Ern realised that without its modelling disturbing the almost-flat plane on which it was described or breaking from the confines of its two-dimensional domain, the angel’s massive face was turning slowly, still within the surface of the fresco, to regard him with a gaze that was head-on. New creases of Payne’s Grey coagulated at the corners of its eyes as loaf-sized lids, formerly downcast shyly, fluttered open with small flakes of paint falling from fresh-created wrinkles into Ernest’s mouth as he stood there beneath the spectacle with jaw hung wide. His circumstances were so wholly unbelievable he didn’t even have the wits to scream but took another step back with one hand clapped tight across his gaping maw. At the far edges of the figure’s epic mouth, also migrated up and to the left now, dimpled cracks of mingled Ivory Black and crimson crinkled into being as the pale, foot-long lips parted and the painted angel spoke.
“Theis whille beye veery haerdt foure yew” it said, sounding concerned.
<em>The ‘is’ or the essential being of this coming while as, from your viewpoint, it apparently goes by will be a sudden and extreme veer in the pathway of your heart with things that you have heard concerning a fourth angle of existence causing difficulties to arise within your mortal life, that is concluded in a graveyard where the yew trees</em> <em>flourish, and this will be very hard for you.</em> Ern understood this complicated message, understood that it was somehow all squeezed down into just seven mostly unfamiliar words that had unfolded and unpacked themselves inside his thoughts, like the unwrapping of a children’s paper puzzle or a Chinese poem. Even as he struggled to absorb the content bound in this exploded sentence, the mere noise of it unravelled him. It had a fullness and dimension to its sound, compared to a whole orchestra performing in a concert hall, such as the latter might have in comparison with a tin whistle blown inside an insulated cupboard. Every note of it seemed to be spiralling away in countless fainter and more distant repetitions, the same tones at an increasingly diminished scale until these split into a myriad still smaller echoes, eddying minuscule whirlwinds made of sound that spun off into the persistent background thunderclaps and disappeared.
Now that it had completed that first startling quarter turn the table-sized face seemed almost to settle down into its new configuration. Only at its edges and around the mobile mouth and eyes were particles still creeping, dots of pigment skittering in little sand-slides round the fresco’s curvature and making small adjustments to accommodate the slight and natural movements of the figure’s head, the shift of gleam and shadow on its opening and closing lips.
In the few moments that had actually elapsed since the commencement of the episode Ernest had clutched at and as soon discarded several desperate rationalizations of his situation. It was all a dream, he thought, but then knew instantly that it was not, that he was wide awake, that those teeth on the left side of his mouth still ached, with those upon the right retaining fragments of fried bread from breakfast. He decided that it was a prank, perhaps accomplished with a Magic Lantern, but was instantly reminded that the pictures cast by such devices do not move. A Pepper’s Ghost, then, like they had at Highbury Barn so that the shade of Hamlet’s father seemed to walk upon the stage, but no, no, the effect required a sheet of angled glass and there was nothing in Ern’s working-space save Ern himself and his materials.
As each fresh explanation turned to shreds of flimsy tissue in his hands he felt the panic terror welling in him until he could take no more of it. His tightening throat choked out a sob that sounded womanly in his own ears and turning from the apparition he began to run, but as the footing shuddered under his first step the dreadful fact of where he was, alone and at great altitude, returned to him with overwhelming force. Above, the thunderstorm had clambered to its flashing, crashing peak and even if Ern could have overcome the clenched paralysis that gripped his vocal cords for long enough to scream, nobody down below would ever hear him.
He’d just jump, then, get the whole thing over with and better that, the flailing fall, the pulverising impact, better that than this, this thing, but he had hesitated far too long already, knew he couldn’t really do it, knew he was and always had been in the last analysis a coward when it came to death and pain. He shuffled back around to face the angel, hoping against hope that when he did the trick of light or hearing would have been corrected, but the mammoth physiognomy was looking straight towards him, its peripheral lines still squirming faintly and the highlights on its lids slithering quickly to change places with the eye-whites as it blinked, then blinked again. The roseate tones in which its lips had been depicted swirled and curdled as it tried what seemed intended as a reassuring smile. At this, Ern started quietly weeping in the way he’d wept when he had been a boy and there was simply nothing else save crying to be done. He sat down on the planks and sank his face into his hands as that transfixing voice again began to speak, with its unwinding depths and curlicued reverberations scurrying away to shimmering nothing.
“Justiiyes abdoveer thier straeelthe.”
<em>Just I, yes, I, just my affirming presence and my just eyes watching from above, around a veer or corner in the heavens where the doves and pigeons fly, among the hierarchies and the hierophants of this higher Hierusalem, over the straight and honest straitened trails which are the aether of the poor that I have made my great tribunal whereby do I now announce that Justice be above the Street.</em>
Ern had his stinging eyes closed and his palms pressed to his face, but found he could still see the angel anyway, not through his finger-cracks or eyelids as with a bright light but more as if the rays had swerved around these obstacles by some route Ern could not determine. His attempts to block the sight out proving useless he next clasped his hands across his ears instead, but had no more success. Rather than being muffled by the intervening pads of gristle, bone and fat, the entity’s cascading voice seemed to be circumventing these impediments to sound with crystal clarity, almost as if its source were inside Ernest’s skull. Remembering his father’s madness, Ern was coming rapidly to the conclusion that in fact this might well be the case. The talking fresco was just a delusion and Ern had gone round the bend like his old man. Or, on the other hand, he was still sane and this uncanny intervention was a real event, was genuinely taking place there in the dangling loft above St. Paul’s, there in Ern’s world, there in his life. Neither of these alternatives was bearable.
The sparkling music of each angel-word, its shivering harmonic fronds and its disintegrating arabesques, was crafted so the sounds were subdivided endlessly in ever-smaller copies of themselves, just as each branch is like its tree in miniature, each individual twig a scaled-down reproduction of its branch. A river that fragmented into streams and at last rivulets upon its delta, every syllable would trickle through a thousand fissures and capillaries into Ern’s core, into the very fabric of him, all its meaning saturating him in such a way that its least nuance could not be misheard, misunderstood or missed.
“Justice above the Street”, the vast, flat face had said, or that at least had been a part of it, and in his thoughts he found a strong and sudden visual image to accompany the phrase. In his mind’s eye he saw what was, in short, a set of scales hung up above a winding band of road, but the stark crudeness of the imagery bewildered Ern, who’d always thought he had a fair imagination for such things. These were no gleaming balances suspended in the glorious streaming sky above a rustic lane as in some Bible illustration, but the rough marks of a child or imbecile. The hanging pans and their supporting chains were no more than uneven triangles, joined near and not exactly at their apex by an oblong drawn in an unpracticed hand. Below this was a wavering and elongated rectangle that may have been a street or may as well have been a strip of curling ribbon.
With as few lines to its making as the angel’s utterance had words, the simple sketch unloaded all its diverse implications into Ern by much the same means that the being’s voice had utilised, implanting modest parcels of awareness that unwrapped themselves into a thing much bigger and more complicated. Studying the slipshod mental picture, Ernest comprehended that it was related in a mystifying way to every idle thought he’d had while on his walk to work that day, as though those notions had been foggy and inverted memories of this immediate revelation, memories that in some puzzling fashion one might have before their subject had occurred. The image in his head, he understood, had a connection to his earlier musings on the difficulties of the poor, to his consideration of the shoe-trade in Northampton and seemed even relevant to the rude, loving thoughts he’d had about his wife. It also called to mind his ponderings upon his offspring, John and little Thursa, and what would become of them, as well as his brief conjuring of Heaven as located at great height above the streets of Lambeth. Chiefly, though, Ern was reminded of the black men that he’d thought of in America, the freed slaves and his horrid visualisation of the branded children. He still wept, sat helpless there upon the filthy floorboards, but his tears were not now wholly for himself.
Having succeeded in attracting Ern’s attention, the big painting of a face proceeded to impart its lesson, there amidst the crackling wrath and rage that seemed locked in a course which circled the cathedral’s spire. From the continual and subtle shifts of its demeanour, it seemed anxious to convey instruction of profound importance on a staggering range of topics, many of them seeming to be matters of mathematics and geometry for which Ern, though illiterate, had always had a flair. The knowledge, anyway, decanted into him so that he had no choice as to whether he took it in or not.
The vision first explained, using its mangled and compacted bouillon-words, that the surrounding storm was a result of something, in this instance the angel itself, moving from one world to another. In with this Ern heard an inference that storms themselves had a geometry that was to human senses unperceivable, that bolts of lightning that might strike in different places and on different days were yet the selfsame discharge, though refracted, with reflections even scattering through time, into the past and future. The phrase by which it expressed this wisdom was “Foure lerlaytoernings maarcke iyuour entreanxsists …” <em>For lightnings mark our transits</em> …
Ernest lifted up his shining flash-lit cheeks to stare despairingly at the quartet of archangels picked out in blue and gold upon the skullcap of the dome above the frescoes. Tranquil and expressionless they offered no assistance, were no consolation, but at least weren’t moving. As he let his gaze sink back to the expanse of slowly writhing specks that was the face of his interlocutor, Ern distantly realised that this was the only area of the fresco, or of any of the frescoes, which was thus afflicted. In a sense, this made things worse because if he were mad then wouldn’t he be seeing visions bubbling everywhere and not just in one place? He wished he could pass out or even have his heart pack in and die, so this insufferable horror would be over, done with, but instead it just went on and on and on. Looking towards him patiently across the boards that cut it off at chest-height, the huge head appeared to shrug its robe-draped shoulders sympathetically, an energetic ripple of displaced mauves and burnt umbers moving through the garment’s folds and then resettling as the glimmering impossibility resumed Ern Vernall’s education, much of it related to the field of architecture.
“ … aeond thier cfhourvnegres orfflidt Heerturnowstry awre haopended.”
<em>And there at the higher convergence of the aeons that is fourfold on the dim benighted verges of our Heaven, at the ‘or’ of things, the golden-lighted hinge of possibility that in this hour when are black people freed hove off the lid of an eternal here and now of history that is already happened, has turned out, has ended happily with hope and awe or is in your awareness unresolved and open-ended, yet rejoice that Justice be above the Street, for lightnings mark our transit and the corners of Eternity are opened.</em>
This continued for two and three-quarter hours.
The lecture was expansive, introducing Ern to points of view he’d never really thought about before. He was invited to consider time with every moment of its passing in the terms of plane geometry, and had it pointed out that human beings’ grasp of space was incomplete. An emphasis was placed on corners having unseen structural significance, being located at the same points on an object whether realised in plan or elevation, constant though they be expressed in two or three or more dimensions. Next there was a discourse on topography, albeit one in which that subject was projected to a metaphysical extreme. It was made clear to him that Lambeth was adjacent to far-off Northampton if both were upon a map that should be folded in a certain way, that the locations although distant could be in a sense conceived as being in the same place.
Still on matters topographic, Ern was introduced to a new understanding of the torus, or ‘the life-belt shape’ as he inwardly called it, an inflated round pierced by a hole. It was remarked upon that both the human body with its alimentary canal and humble chimney with its central bore were variations on this basic form, and that a person might be seen as an inverted smokestack, shovelling fuel into its top end with brown clouds of solid smoke erupting from the other to disperse in either earth or sea, in anything save sky. It was this point, despite the tears still coursing down his cheeks, despite the fact that he felt he was drowning, at which Ern began to laugh. The idea of a man or woman as a chimneypot turned upside down was just so comical he couldn’t help it, with the picture that it called up of long streaming turds unfurling over London from the city’s foundry towers.
Ern laughed, and as he did so did the angel, and its every scintillating intonation was brim-full with Joy, with Joy, with Joy, with Joy, with Joy.
Bill Mabbutt noticed that the storm had finished when the nearby churches chimed for noon and he first realised that he could hear them. Setting down his mortarboard with the last scrapes of grout that he’d been using to fill in between some problematic tiles, he turned and clapped his raw-beef hands so that the men would heed him. His light tenor voice reverberated in the galleries, careening in the aisles like a lost gull as he announced a stoppage for some tea and bread.
“All right, lads, that’s your lot for ’alf an ’our. Let’s ’ave our bit o’ bup and get the kettle on.”
Remembering the decorator, Mabbutt nodded his pink, glistening head towards the scaffolding.
“We’d better wind old Ginger down, and all. I’ve seen ’im lose his rag and you can trust me that it’s not a pretty sight.”
Big Albert Pickles, lumbering across the polished checkers with his filmy, incomplete reflection swimming in the sheen beneath his boots, looked up at Bill and grinned as he took his position by one of the cage’s corner winches.
“Aye. ’E’s ginger and ’e’s barmy and ’is dad’s still in the army.”
Several of the other fellows smirked at this old ragamuffin taunt as they prepared to man the scaffolding’s remaining ropes, but Bill was having none of it. A tubby bloke who had a piping voice he may have been, but Bill had won a medal fighting the Burmese and all the men, including Albert Pickles, knew they’d best not go upsetting him.
“ ’Is dad’s passed on, Bert, so we’ll ’ave no more of that, eh? ’E’s a decent chap who’s ’ad ’ard luck and just got a new baby. Now, let’s ’aul ’im down, then all of you can ’ave your break.”
The men accepted the reproof good-naturedly, then took the strain upon their cables as Bill ventured a shout up into the glorious well above them, telling Ginger to be ready so he shouldn’t spill his pots or knock them over when the platform started to descend. There was no answer, but with the suspended planking up at such an altitude Mabbutt had not really expected his announcement to be heard. He bobbed his ruddy chin in the direction of the labourers, whence they began to let sink the broad arc of wood down from the murmuring, gilded firmament of the cathedral to the brawny back-or-forth and subdued hubbub of its thronging floor.
The pulleys overhead struck up their measured, intermittent squealing like a horde of women lowering themselves by inches into the cold waters of a public bath. Pulling a hanky from his trouser pocket, Billy Mabbutt mopped the liquid glaze of perspiration from his rosy crown and thought of Ginger Vernall as he’d been out in Crimea, battering one of his fellow squadders bloody in their barracks when this other chap made some remark about the sort of background Ginger came from. Bill felt sorry for the man, that was the truth of it, to see how proud he’d been back in the war and see him now brought low by everything. No sooner was he back from fighting Russians when old John, his dad, went potty and then died not many years thereafter. Still shook up from all of that, Bill shouldn’t wonder, Ginger had took up with his young girl then married her, and right away she’d had first one kid then another. Billy never had a lot of truck with women, being more at ease with other men, but he’d seen such a lot of fellows get through muck and musket balls only to have their legs cut out from under them by wife and family. Ginger was stuck with hungry mouths to feed and no place of his own where they could live, still at his mam’s out Lambeth and a miserable old biddy she was too, from Mabbutt’s one encounter with her.
Ninety or a hundred feet above, the underside of Ginger’s podium came closer to a rhythmical accompaniment of groaning hawsers, grunting workers and shrill pulley-wheels. Stuffing the handkerchief back where it came from Bill turned round to face the trestle table where he’d put his mortarboard so he could give it a wipe down before he had a cup of tea. The clergy of St. Paul’s had been persuaded after an unseemly bout of haggling to boil up a big tub of water over the cathedral’s stove so that the two capacious teapots made of earthenware and brought along by the contracted labour could be filled. These steamed there at the table’s far end now, alongside a collection of the dirtiest tin mugs that Bill had ever seen, another loan from the begrudging clerics. Dented and dilapidated, these had blotchier complexions than poor Strawberry Sam, Bill’s young apprentice at St. Paul’s. Shit-coloured rust was crusted at their rims, and one was gnawed through by a bum-wipe of corrosion so you could see daylight. Rubbing the last scabs of grout from off his board, Bill made a mental note to see as neither him nor Ginger got the cup that had a hole, unless they wanted hot tea pissing in their laps.
He was made gradually aware of a commencing ruction somewhere to his rear and so looked back towards the scaffold just in time to see the platform winched down below head-height, now a yard or two at most above the ground. Old Danny Riley with his beard like Mr. Darwin’s and that same gent’s monkey mouth was saying “Who’s that? Blessed Mary, now, who’s that?” over and over like the village fool, so that Bill glanced about to see if some Archbishop or important man like that had stepped out from behind a post and come amongst them. Finding no one he looked back towards the wedge of boards that skimmed now only inches from the tiling and which with another scream from its four pulleys would be landed.
Coming from the figure squatting there at the construction’s centre was a stammering “hoo-hoo-hoo” noise, only audible once all the winches were at rest, and even then you couldn’t tell if it were laughter or the sound of weeping you were hearing. Tears rolled, certainly, across the figure’s grubby cheeks, but ran into the crevices of what might have appeared a blissful smile were not the eyes filled with confusion and with pain. Upon the boards in front of it, writ by a fingertip dipped in Venetian Yellow and with wobbling characters such as a young child might attempt was the word TORUS, that Bill knew to be a term come from astrology by virtue of the fact that he himself was born in May. What Mabbutt couldn’t fathom, though, was how the word came to be written on the planks at all, when he knew full well as the man that he’d sent up there to retouch the frescoes couldn’t write his name, perhaps might copy out a letter’s shape if he were so instructed, although obviously that had not been the case alone there in the upper dome.
Billy walked leadenly as in those nightmares of pursuit towards the heaping cage of scaffolding, pushing aside the navvies stood stock still and gawping in his way. Amidst the susurrus of gasps surrounding him he heard Bert Pickles saying, “Fuck me! Fuck my arse!” and heard the clattering footfalls of the priests come running to see what the noise was all about. Someone beside the figure shipwrecked there upon his raft had started crying. From the sound, Bill thought it was young Sam.
Looking up from the scattered pots and brushes that he sat amongst and from the inexplicable bright scrawl, the person who’d come down from the high gantry’s pinnacle stared back at Mabbutt and his other workmates, and then giggled in a sobbing sort of fashion. It was not as though there was no recognition there in his expression, but more as if he had been away so long that he had come to think his former occupation and companions all a dream, and was surprised to find they were still there. Billy could feel hot tears well in his own eyes now, returning that destroyed, uncomprehending gaze. His voice twisted an octave higher than it’s normal pitch when Billy tried to speak. He couldn’t help it.
“Oh, you poor lad. Oh, my poor old mate, whatever ’as become of you?”
One thing was sure. For the remainder of his life no one would ever, when they spoke of Ernest Vernall, call him Ginger.
Billy walked his broken friend home over Blackfriars Bridge and stayed a while with Ernie’s wailing family once they’d recognised the stranger brought home early from his work. Even Ern’s mam was weeping, which Bill was surprised by, having never thought she had an ounce of pity in her, though her son’s condition would have made a stone cry. Not so much the way Ern looked now as the things he talked about – trees, pigeons, lightning, corners, chimneypots – a tumult of plain, ordinary things that he would mention in the same hushed tones with which one might discuss a mermaid. The one person not in tears amongst the household was the two-year-old, young John, who sat there staring at his transformed father with those big dark eyes whilst mother, grandmother and baby sister wept, and all that time he never made a sound.
Ernest refused to speak about what had occurred up in the storm clouds over London, save to John and Thursa some years later, when his son was ten years old and Thursa only eight. For their part, Ernest’s children never would reveal what they’d been told, not even to their mother or to John’s own offspring when he married and had kids a decade later, at the tail end of the 1880s.
On the morning after and in fact on every day that week Ern Vernall, having by that point regained at least some of his senses, made a brave attempt to take up his employment in St. Paul’s again, insisting there was nothing wrong with him. Each morning he would reach the foot of Ludgate Street and stand there for a time, unable to go any further, before turning round in his despondent tracks and making back for Lambeth. He had some work for a while, just on and off, though not in churches anymore and not at any height. Anne had two further children by him, first a girl named Appelina, then a boy that Ernest was insistent should be christened Messenger. In 1868 Ern’s wife and mother for the first time in their lives agreed on something and allowed him to be placed in Bedlam, where Thursa and John and sometimes the two younger kids would make first monthly and then yearly visits until the July of 1882 when, in his sleep and aged just forty-nine, Ern perished from a heart attack. Except his eldest children, no one ever found out what he’d meant by the word TORUS.
** <strong>ASBOS OF DESIRE</strong>
<strong>W</strong>hat Marla thought was, it had all gone wrong when the royal family had killed Diana. All of it was bad things what had happened after that. You knew they’d killed her, ’cause there was that letter what she wrote, how she’d thought, like, they’d do it with a car crash. That was proof. Diana was expecting it, what happened to her. Marla wondered if she’d had a whatsit, premonition, a prediction thing that night it happened. That bit what you always see with her and Dodie and the driver coming out the Ritz where it’s like on the hotel cameras and they go through the revolving doors. She must have known in some way, Marla thought, but it was like Diana’s destiny what couldn’t be avoided. Marla thought she must have known when she was walking towards the car.
She’d been, what, ten? Ten when they’d had the car crash. She remembered it, just being on the settee with a blanket all that Sunday crying, in her fucking mum’s house up on Maidencastle. She remembered it, but then she’d thought she could remember watching telly when she was a baby, when Prince Charles and Princess Di got married in St. Paul’s. She could remember it as clear as anything and she’d go on about it to her mates but then, like, Gemma Clark had said how that was 1981 and Marla was nineteen now, what meant she’d been born in 1987 or whatever, so she can’t have done and must have seen it on a video. Or it was, like, Edward and Sophie and she’d got mixed up, but Marla wasn’t having it. They could do all this stuff now, where they faked things? Like September the Eleventh or the Moon landing and that, or like – who was it? – Kennedy. Who was to say they’d not got married after 1987, but it was all covered up and all the pictures changed with CSI effects? Nobody didn’t know nothing for sure, and they were fucking liars if they said they did.
What made her think of Di was she’d just popped back in her flat from where she’d been up Sheep Street, that way, just popped back ’cause she’d remembered where she thought she might have left some, and when she was looking down beside the sofa she’d found all her scrapbooks with Diana in instead. There was her Jack the Ripper books and all her Di stuff, where she thought she’d lost it or she’d lent it out to somebody. Other than that, what she’d been looking for weren’t down there, but she’d jumped on what turned out to be a bit of cellophane from off a fag-pack thinking it was something else, how everybody must have done one time or other, when you see that glint down in the carpet and you think you might have dropped some, or somebody might. But there was nothing in the flat except for Jack the Ripper and Diana. If she wanted it that bad she’d have to earn it, wouldn’t she?
She had a king-size Snickers, then she made herself boil up a kettle for Pot Noodle so as she could say she’d had a healthy meal, although who would she say it to, now Keith and them had cut her out? Oh, fucking hell. She only had to think about it and it made her stomach do that sort of drop thing and she’d go right into one, start thinking about everything there was might happen and what would she do and all of that, all of the usual, and it really made her need a smoke. She sat there in her armchair with its straps all busted under the foam cushion, spooning worms and gristle in hot dishwater into her mouth and staring at the wallpaper where it was starting to peel back up in the corner, looking like a book was opening. Whatever else she did, she wasn’t going out tonight, not on the Beat, not down the Boroughs. She’d go out and get the homeward traffic later on this afternoon, but not tonight. She promised herself that. She’d sooner go without it altogether than risk that.
To give her brain something to gnaw on until she could sort things out, she thought back to when she’d last had some and it had been good. Not just this Thursday, yesterday, which was the actual last time, obviously, ’cause that was shit. Not any time before that in the last five months, when she’d been getting fuck all out of it, no matter how much she was doing, but the last time it was good. That had been January, just after Christmas when her mate Samantha, who’d worked further up the Andrew’s Road in Semilong, had come to put her hair in rows. She was still in with Keith then – both of them were in with Keith – and things were still all right.
After they’d seen to Marla’s hair, which had took ages but looked great, they done a pipe and give each other half-and-half. She weren’t a les and neither was Samantha but it gave a boost to it, it was well known. It pushed it up another level, you’d be sucking on the pipe while they kneeled down and sucked you off, then you’d change round. Down on the fucking old Jamaican flag rug what her mum had given her when she moved out, still there six inches from her toe where she was sitting now, eating her noodles. It was January, so they’d had both bars on of the fire and had their knickers off, in just their T-shirts. Marla let Samantha have first go because she’d come and done her hair, so she could hear the whistling noise like blowing down an empty biro when Samantha sucked the smoke in and when Marla got down on the floor and licked her out. It tasted like the lemon from a gin and tonic, and Franz Ferdinand were on the radio, cassette, whatever, doing ‘Walk Away’. When it was her turn next, Samantha was well off her face and gobbled at her like a dog with chips while Marla stood and took it back and it was fucking perfect, not quite how it was the first time but still magic.
What it was, when it was good, it felt like that was you, that was how you were meant to feel, that was the life that you deserved and not all this, this walking round like you’re asleep and feeling like you’re dead. Up there it was so good you thought you were on fire and could do anything, even in just a T-shirt by a two-bar fire with red spots on your legs and someone’s pubes gone down your throat. You felt like fucking Halle Berry, somebody like that. You felt like fucking God.
This wasn’t helping anything, it was just making Marla want some even worse. Putting the empty plastic pot down on the coffee table that she’d covered with some gift-wrap paper under glass after she’d seen it done on a makeover show, she picked up her Diana book instead, from where she’d placed it on the sofa with her Ripper paperbacks. A great big thing with coloured sugar-paper pages, Marla had begun collecting articles to put in it when she was ten and when Diana died. The cover had a picture that she’d done stuck over it with Pritt Stick so there were all bumps and creases in it. It was an old photo Marla had cut from a Sunday magazine, showing a place in Africa at sunset with the clouds all lit up gold, but what Marla had done was cut a face of Princess Di out from another page and glued it over where the sun was, so it looked like Di was up in Heaven lighting everything. It was so beautiful she hardly could believe, now, that she’d done it, specially not when she’d been ten, and she’d not seen anywhere else since then where anyone had come up with a picture that was half as clever an idea as hers. She’d probably been like a genius or something back then, before everybody started going on at her.
She had another look beside the sofa, just in case, and underneath as well, then sat back in the armchair, sighing, running one hand back over her head, over the rows where they were coming all to frizzy bits. That was because Samantha wasn’t round there anymore. Marla had heard she’d gone back to her parents up in Birmingham when she’d come out of hospital, so there’d been nobody to see to Marla’s rows. It wasn’t like she had the money to have them done properly, so she was letting them unravel until some time when she could afford to have them seen to. Marla knew they made her look a state and they were bad for business, but what could she do? She’d had a tooth fall out three weeks ago from all the sweets and that weren’t helping neither, but at least with that she could still practice smiling with her mouth shut.
That was bad, what happened to Samantha. She’d got in the wrong car, or been dragged in. Marla hadn’t seen her since to ask her. These two blokes had took her over Spencer Bridge to do it, round the back of Vicky Park, and left her half dead in the bushes, pair of fucking cunts. There was a girl got done like that it must be every week, but it weren’t one in four of them that got reported. Not unless it was a big event, like that last August when there was the rape gang in the BMW took women off from Doddridge Street and Horsemarket, and that girl what got dragged from near the poolroom down in Horseshoe Street then took up Marefair round the green behind St. Peter’s Church. Five rapes in ten days that had been, got on the television news and everything, everybody saying something would get done about it. That had been a good six months before what happened to Samantha. Marla sat there in her busted armchair thinking about how Samantha had got up from off the floor wiping her chin when Marla finished coming, then they’d had a little kiss, still rushing, tasting all the smoke and love-juice in each other’s mouths. Later that night they’d had another go because it was just after Christmas, but it wasn’t such a hit and neither of them had got off that second time, they’d just kept at it ’til their jaws hurt and they’d got fed up.
Thinking about it – and it was one of the only things that didn’t frighten her to think about – Marla would bet there wasn’t a room anywhere inside these flats what hadn’t had somebody fucking in it. Not a kitchen or a lavatory or anything where someone hadn’t stood there with their pants off doing something or else having something done to them. She could still sort of see her and Samantha gobbling each other down on the Jamaican flag, and if she thought about it she could picture other people too, in the same room as she was but perhaps from long ago like 1950 or whenever. What if there’d been someone like her mum, some slag who’s in her forties and when the old man’s out, bang, she’s got some tramp in off the streets and giving her one up against the wall? Marla could see them, with the woman old and fat and wobbling standing with her hands up on the wall just over Marla’s mantelpiece above the two-bar fire, her great big bum out and her skirt up, while this comical old tramp with an old trilby covering his bald patch gives it to her from the back, still with his hat on. Marla laughed and was dead tickled at how she’d imagined it in such a lot of detail when she never normally called pictures to her mind like that, or even managed any dreams. What little sleep she got was empty darkness like a big black fag burn that you fell in and climbed out of later not remembering a single thing. She was still looking at the fat lass and the tramp that she imagined, doing it against the wall above the fireplace, when the doorbell rang and made her jump.
She crept along the passageway to the front door, past where the bathroom and her messy bedroom both led off, and wondered who it was. She thought it might be Keith come back to say he’d take her on again, but then she thought it might be Keith come back to say she owed him still and smack her round the room. She was relieved and disappointed both at once when she opened the door up on its chain and it was only that bloke Thompson from up Andrew’s Street, the ferrety old queer bloke who banged on about the politics and that. He was all right, and always sounded kind when he was talking to you, never talking down at you like most of the political ones did, the black ones and the whites. He’d called round once or twice in the past year or eighteen months, just going round from door to door and getting signatures for some petition or else telling people about meetings there were going to be, to stop the high-ups selling off the council houses and all that, and Marla always said she’d go along but never did, ’cause she’d be either working or else smoking.
This time he was going on about some painting exhibition that this artist woman what he knew was doing, in the little nursery up on Castle Hill five minutes’ walk away. She wasn’t really listening much while he explained, but it was all to do with how this artist was supporting one of his political campaigns that he was doing in the Boroughs, and how she’d come from that area herself, like that meant anything. The Boroughs was a shit-heap that was full of rotten cunts like them next door who’d had the ASBO put on her, and if it weren’t that it was where they’d given her a flat and where she worked, for all she cared they could tear the whole fucking place down and then bury it. The Thompson bloke was telling her this exhibition thing was in the afternoon on the next day, the Saturday, and Marla said she’d definitely go though they both knew she wouldn’t, just so she could shut the door without offending him. Tomorrow afternoon, Marla would either be all right, in which case she’d be round here in her flat and getting out of it, or else she wouldn’t be all right, and either way she wasn’t going to want to look at paintings. They were all a fucking con and people just said they could see all deep things in them when they wanted to look clever.
Shutting her front door on the old guy, Marla was hoping that come the next afternoon she’d definitely be all right, rather than not all right, whatever that might mean. Probably nothing worse that slogging round by Grafton Street and Sheep Street like she had today, in hope of lunchtime trade. That was as bad off as she’d be, she told herself. She knew she definitely wasn’t going out down Scarletwell tonight, no matter how bad it might get, no way, so that was one alternative she didn’t have to worry over.
After she’d got rid of Thompson or he’d gone on to the next house or whatever, she went back into the living room and sat back down where she’d been sitting, but she found she couldn’t now imagine the two people fucking by the fireplace like she had before. They’d gone. She checked again beside the sofa and beneath it, then sat down again and thought about how it was all her fucking mum, Rose, was to blame for this. A little skinny white slag always chasing after niggers with her hair in dreadlocks, doing all the talk like Ali G and fucking giving it Bob Marley this, Bob Marley that. She’d even named her brown kid fucking Marla with Roberta as a middle name. Marla Roberta Stiles, and Stiles was just what Marla’s mum’s last name was, and not Marla’s dad’s. He’d been long gone and Marla didn’t blame him, not one fucking bit. No fucking woman, no cry.
All the time while Marla had been growing up, her mum had been there making fucking curry with her headphones on and bellowing to lively up yourself or one of them. Or she was sitting by the telly spliffing up from little deals of ropey weed and saying it was fucking ganja. Then there was her boyfriends, every one some fucking nigger who’d be gone in six weeks or six minutes when they found out that she’d got a kid. When Marla was fifteen she’d fucked one of them, one of Rose’s boyfriends, Carlton with the funny eye, just to get back at Rose for all the … just for everything. Just all of it. Marla still didn’t know whether her mum had ever found out about her and Carlton, but he’d been kicked out the Maidencastle house within the month and there was such an atmosphere that Marla hadn’t stuck it for much longer and fucked off herself soon as she turned sixteen. It was around then that she’d met Samantha and all Gemma Clark and them, and Keith.
Her mum had only been round once since Marla had got fixed up with the flat. She’d sat on the settee there with a skinny little spliff, Marla could see her now, and told her daughter what, in Rose’s own opinion, she was doing wrong, how she was messing up her life. “It’s all these drugs. It’s not just like a lickle bit of ’erb. You’ll end up like a slave to it.” Yeah, like you’re not a slave to cider and black cock, you fucking hypocrite. But Rose would have just said something like “At least I’m not out and selling it down Grafton Street.” You couldn’t, mum. You couldn’t fucking sell it and you couldn’t fucking give it away free, you just, you fucking couldn’t. “There’s no love in what you do.” Oh, fucking hell. You stupid fucking … what, you think there’s any in what you do? In what anybody does? It’s all just FUCKING SONGS and FUCKING BIRTHDAY CARDS, you cunt, you old cunt. DON’T YOU FUCKING TELL ME, RIGHT, don’t you fucking tell me because YOU, you’ve got NO fucking right, no fucking right. You sit there with your fucking SPLIFF, your fucking GAN-JAH, fucking smiling ’cause you’re monged and saying to chill out. YOU WHAT? You fucking WHAT? I’ll fucking chill YOU out, you old cunt. Fucking leave YOU with your face in stitches and your ribs all kicked in, see how YOU like it, you fucking, FUCKING …
There was no one there. She was all on her own. I tell you, man, you’ve seriously got to watch that. Seriously. She’d been shouting, not just in her head but out loud. It was getting a bit regular with Marla, that was, shouting. Shouting at Miss Pierce, her form teacher from Lings. Shouting at Sharon Mawsley when they were in first year, shouting at her mum, shouting at Keith. Yeah, right. As if. At least it was all people what were real and what she knew, or at least mostly. At least so far. There’d been only once, no, twice, when Marla had been shouting at the Devil, and a lot of people got that all the time. Samantha used to get that. She’d said that for her he was a red cartoon one with a pitchfork, but that’s not the way that Marla saw him.
It had been the middle of the night about three months back, after what had happened to Samantha. She’d not had a proper smoke, ’cause there’d been none about but somebody – who was it? – somebody had given her some pills, fuck knows what, just to get her through. She’d been here in the flat, the same place where she always was, sat up in bed there in the dark having a fag just so that she’d be smoking something. She was staring at her fag end, like you do, and in the dark there it looked like a little face, a little old man’s face with pink cheeks and pink mouth and two black flecks for eyes. The bits of grey and white ash were his hair and eyebrows and his beard. There were two glowing sparks up at the top, bright red so that they looked like horns, a little devil man there on her fag end and it looked like he was grinning. Where the hot coal at the end was burning through the paper from the other side to make his mouth it sort of went up at one side, and Marla had been all, like, Yeah? What are you laughing at, you ugly cunt? And he was like, Who do you think I’m laughing at? I’m laughing at you, ain’t I? Because when you die you’re going to go to hell if you’re not careful.
That had been when Marla laughed at him instead, or snorted at him anyway. Well, what the fuck is hell supposed to be, you ash-faced twat? I’ll tell you, hell for me would just be being stuck in Bath Street here forever, and he’d said, Precisely, and that really fucking freaked her out. Where had she got a word like that? When she was talking to her people in her head they talked like she did, and she’d never said “Precisely” in her life. She’d stubbed him out, she’d squashed his little burning brains out in the ashtray by the bed and then she lay there until morning with it running round her head, the thing he’d said. She didn’t understand it and she didn’t understand why she was letting it get to her like it had. For fuck’s sake, what did he know? He was just a fucking fag end.
When Marla saw him the other time, that had been just a week or two ago, when Keith had told her he was having nothing more to do with her. She’d been here afterwards, been in the bathroom sorting out her mouth, which had looked much worse than it really was. She’d felt that low, though, that she’d thought about the fag-faced little devil and the things he’d said, fucking “Precisely”, all that, and she’d thought about it so much he was in her head like a real person, like Miss Pierce or Sharon Mawsley, and like all her people in her head he had a go at her. It was like he was sitting on the edge there of her little bathtub while she stood above the basin to one side of him and swabbed her chin with Dettol. He weren’t like the little red end off a fag though, this time, even if he sort of had the same face. He was a whole person like her mum or like the shagging tramp she’d thought about. He was all sort of dressed in what was like a monk’s robes or it might have been old rags, and it was either red, or green, or both. He had the curly hair and horns and beard and eyebrows like he’d had when he was made of ashes and, as Marla saw him in her head, he was still grinning at her, laughing when the Dettol stung and made her cry again when she’d only just stopped, only just got herself together.
He was pissing himself, this old Devil, and she’d lost it. She’d completely fucking lost it and she shouted Why don’t you leave me alone? He’d just looked back at her and done a face, taking the piss like, and he’d said it back to her, the same words, in a nasty whiny voice she knew was meant to sound like hers. He’d just said Why don’t <em>you</em> leave <em>me</em> alone, and then she’d just been crying after that and when she’d stopped he’d gone. She hadn’t seen him since, and didn’t want to see him but the other people who’d had demons said they got more regular, not less. He was her nasty fag-end devil prophet and she’d even got a name for him. Ash Moses, that was what she called him. Sometimes when she got that burning smell she often had when she was in the flat, the smell she thought was just her nerves all frying up, she’d laugh and say Ash Moses was about. But that was when she’d got some and was in a good mood and it all seemed funnier.
Marla was searching down beside the couch again when she looked at the carriage-clock there on the mantel and saw that she’d been here for more than an hour and half when she’d just meant to pop in on the off chance of some little lick she might have lost. Fuck. If she didn’t get a move on she’d have no chance of the knocking-off time trade, the blokes home for the weekend from the places that they worked in Milton Keynes or London or wherever. It had better be a bigger turn out than she’d seen at dinner time up Regent Square and Sheep Street and round there, ’cause if she didn’t get some money soon she’d, well, she’d stay in. Stay in, read her Di book and her Ripper books and just put up with it, that’s what she’d do. She definitely, definitely wasn’t going out tonight, no way. No way.
She sorted out her make-up best she could but there weren’t much that she could do about her hair. She put the scrapbook and the murder paperbacks inside the bedroom chest of drawers in the clean clothes space, so that she’d remember where they were, then went out through her little kitchen and her back door, into the big concrete gardens of the flats. It wasn’t a bad day, but just the sight of all the gravel paths and shrubs and steps stretching away towards the backs of all the flats there on the far side, or towards the big brick arches near the middle avenue, it always got her down and almost always kicked off the Ash Moses smell, though not today. This was a fucking awful place. She bet there hadn’t ever been a time when everything what happened here weren’t horrible.
One of the girls round there was thirteen and for this last month she’d been the rage with the Somalis, the poor lucky little fucker. Still, that wouldn’t last. She wouldn’t last. Then there was that old spastic bloke what used to live across the middle path on the next block somewhere, mentally handicapped whatever, what had been put out in the community. Next thing, he’s met some geezer in the pub, right, bloke asks himself back, says what a nice place that the mental feller’s got and how he’ll bring some mates of his round, it’ll be a bit of company, yeah? Next thing there’s all these fuckers moving in and taking over, telling this poor cunt they’ll kill him if they’re fucked about and he’s too mental to know any different and besides they might do. Doing gear and putting girls out round there and the handicapped bloke, he’s out living on the street. This was a place, these Bath Street flats, where any rubbish, anybody that the council wanted rid of, nutters, Kosovans, Albanians all that, they could put all the shit here and just wait for it to disappear, go up in smoke like everybody round here seemed to, like Samantha and the other girls, Sue Bennett and Sue Packer and the one what had a gap between her teeth, banjo string cleaner what they called her. Kerry? Kelly? Her what had been found up round Monk’s Pond Street anyway, the blonde one with the teeth. There weren’t nobody killed yet, but some of them had been fucking close. Samantha had been close by all accounts. There weren’t no way what she was going out tonight.
There was her ASBO. That was one good reason what she had for staying home, even without the other stuff, Samantha and all that. The fucking Robertses next door, that’s who she had to blame for that. It was like, three, four months ago when Keith was seeing to it that she got more work. There’d been, what, two or three nights, five nights at the very most when she’d brought punters round the flat. Not even late, only like two o’clock or that, and fucking Wayne and Linda Roberts on their fucking doorstep every fucking time and banging on at her about the noise, giving it this about their fucking baby, all this with her punters looking on and listening while she got called every cunt under the sun and is it any wonder she’d had a go back? Five fucking times. Six times at most, and then they’d had them put the ASBO on her.
Fucking ASBOs. What that was, it was so they could keep control of places like the Boroughs without wasting any cash on extra coppers. Just stick every fucker under ASBOs and then let the fucking cameras keep an eye on things. The cameras, that was what you call it, zero fucking tolerance. If anyone shows up on film what’s breaking their conditions, then that’s it, you can just lock them up. Don’t matter if what they’ve done is a proper criminal offence or not. Marla had heard about some woman got an ASBO for sunbathing, right, in her own back yard. What the fuck was that about? Some fucking neighbour cunt, some old cunt who can’t stand to see somebody having a good time, see someone with her baps out, so they fucking, what they do, they fucking get a fucking ASBO took out on you and then they …
Fat Kenny. That was who she’d had the pills off that night when she’d seen Ash Moses the first time, the big bald kid who lived in the flats up on the Mayorhold at the back of Claremont, Beaumont Court there, what they called the Twin Towers. She’d gone round his flat and wanked him off and he’d give her the pills. It was a funny thing, how when there was some little detail what you wanted to remember, if you just stopped trying and forgot about it, it would come to you. She walked across the courtyard to the gateway at one end of the brick arches where she could see it was open and she wouldn’t need a key, because she’d lost hers or she’d put it somewhere and forgotten where. Wearing her little sexy mac what she’d not took off all the while when she was in the house, she walked up by the middle path towards the ramp and told the dog halfway along to fuck off what was laying a big cable.
Stepping off the top end of the ramp and out the little half-walled exit into Castle Street she got a sort of lift from nowhere when the sun come out just for a minute, from behind a cloud. She felt more sort of positive whatever, and she thought that was a good sign, that was like a lucky whatsit. Not charm, but the same thing. It would be all right. She’d find somebody down Horsemarket or in Marefair and then after that, who knows, perhaps things might start looking up in general. If she could get sorted out a bit then Keith might say she could come back with him or, fuck him, there might be somebody else, one of the Kosovans or that, she didn’t care. It was about half four when she walked out from the no-entry at the end of Castle Street and onto Horsemarket. Right then. Let’s see who was about.
There was a lot of traffic, but all going fast and in a hurry to get home, nobody idling along at twenty with an eye out on the curb. Across the busy road she could see the arse-end of Katherine’s Gardens, what the wrinklies round there called ‘Gardens of Rest’, around the back of College Street and that dark-looking church. There were some old girls lived in Bath Street flats, ones who’d been on the batter in the old times and were all, like, in their sixties and that. Marla couldn’t even think what it would be like to be in her thirties. These old dears said as St. Katherine’s Gardens and the top of College Street was where all of the trade got done back in the 1950s and the 1960s, back then during wartime or whenever. Up where College Street met King Street there’d been this one pub called the Criterion and just across the road another called the Mitre. That was where the girls all used to knock about, back then. They’d either do the business in the bushes round in Katherine’s Gardens, or they had this taxi company next to the Mitre what would run them and the punters back down Bath Street, wait outside the flat five minutes for the bloke to finish and then run them both back up the pub. It sounded really nice to Marla, sort of cosy and all friendly. There’d be people round to keep an eye on you.
Of course, in them days the Old Bill were different. What their plan was then, it was to keep all of the different sorts of trouble to a different pub. So all the hippies and the druggies were all off in one pub, all the bikers in another, queers and lezzers up the Wellingborough Road somewhere and all the girls down here, up the top end of College Street. By all accounts it worked quite well, then you got all new coppers coming in with new ideas who probably just wanted to be seen as doing something, and to look good in the papers. They went in and busted all these pubs and scattered everybody everywhere, so now you’d got all of the different sorts of trouble spread through nearly every pub in town. Marla supposed it was a bit like with Afghanistan, when all the terrorists whatever were all in one place until they sent the soldiers in and now they’re fucking everywhere. Fucking result. Marla thought how it must have been when Elsie Boxer and the other old girls from her flats were on the game, back in the 1960s when it was all whatsit, all Dickensian and that. It must have been like really nice.
Elsie had said there used to be a statue just along from the Criterion on the edge of Katherine’s Gardens, that was like this woman with bare tits, holding a fish, but people all the time were fucking with it, putting paint all on its tits and that, then someone broke its head off. After that they probably thought like the people round here shouldn’t have a statue so they moved it off down Delapre, Delapre Abbey where it was all posh and old, over the back of Beckett’s Park what Elsie said they used to call Cow Meadow. Marla thought that was a shame, about the statue. It was fucking typical. Something that’s sexy, yeah? Some woman, or like statue, with the tits and that, there’s always going to be some cunt, some bloke who wants to smash it up. Anything lovely, like Princess Diana or Samantha. Fucking kill it. Fucking knock its head off. That was just the way things were, and it had always been like that. Some fucking people, they’d got no respect for fucking anything.
She stood there for a minute, sizing up her prospects. Looking uphill to her left there was the Mayorhold, somewhere else that Elsie said had used to be all right, a sort of village square thing, where there was just like this junction now. That could be a good patch for trade, or had been in the past at any rate, but only after it got dark and not around this time of day. Her best bet was downhill towards the traffic lights down at the bottom, on the corner there where Gold Street and Horsemarket joined with Horseshoe Street and Marefair. She’d get any trade coming up Marefair from the station, then there was whatever business might be passing by the other way, down Horsemarket and Horseshoe Street to Peter’s Way and out of town. Plus, right, there was the ibis, where they pulled the Barclaycard place down in Marefair. People off from home in a hotel, you never knew. Shoving her hands into the pockets of her little PVC mac, she walked down the hill.
Down at the bottom Marla went over Horsemarket to the Gold Street side there where the pizza place is, then crossed Gold Street to the corner where it joined with Horseshoe Street, then stood there while she lit a fag. That was the only good thing with all these no smoking laws. You got so many women worked in offices whatever who got made to go outside for fag breaks that if you were standing smoking on a corner these days, looking dodgy, no one automatically assumed that you was on the game or none of that. She watched the crowd, the people filing to and fro over the zebra crossings, coming back from work or home to make their kids’ teas. Marla wondered what was in their heads and bet it was like really fucking boring stuff like fucking football fucking telly shit, not like all what she thought about, all fucking wonderful and all imagination and all that, like anybody else would think of gluing Princess Di down on the sun. Watching her crowd for any possibles she let herself go off onto a daydream, thinking about who she’d like to have come up to her if she could have like anybody, any man.
He wouldn’t be a big bloke, and he wouldn’t be all blokey. Not a gay, but pretty. A bit girly, how he looked not how he acted. Nice eyes. Nice eyelashes and all that and really fucking fit, wiry and like he’d be dead good at dancing and dead good in bed. Black curly hair and he’s like got this little beard … no, no, this little moustache … and he’d be GSOH like in the adverts, a good sense of humour what could make her laugh a bit ’cause she’d not had a laugh in fucking months. He’d be GSOH but not N/S. And he’d be white. No special reason, he just would be. He’d be standing here, right on this corner with her and he’d chat her up, he’d flirt a bit, he wouldn’t just ask how much for a blowjob. He’d be fluttering his eyes and making little jokes and looking at her like they both knew where all this was going, looking really dirty in a real way, not like on a DVD. Oh, fucking hell. Marla was giving herself fizzy knickers. She pulled harder on her fag and stared down at the ground. This bloke, this bloke so fucking fit you wouldn’t even charge him, right? You’d fucking pay for it. This bloke, she’d take him up her flat and on the way there he’d be kissing her, he’d kiss her on the neck and maybe he’d feel round her bum and she’d say not to but he’d just look up at her, right? He’d look up from under his eyelashes like a little boy and he’d say something really fucking funny and she’d let him just do anything, man. Anything. When they got round the flats he’d probably steer her up against her flat’s door, right there in the hallway, and he’d have his hand down on her pubes and they’d be kissing, she’d be saying no, oh fucking hell, just let me open the front door.
And then the Robertses would have her put in prison.
She heard All Saints’ clock up at the top of Gold Street strike for the three-quarter hour, quarter to five, and ground her fag out underneath her shoe. She gave the passing crowd another once-over, but there was fuck all there. Some really pretty white girl with red hair who had this fucking gorgeous baby in one of them slings goes round the front. Yeah, nice one, darling. Nice tits. Fucking good for you, yeah? Probably you don’t even deserve that baby, probably you’ll fuck her up and she’ll grow up wishing you’d never had her, that she’d died when she was little and still happy, ’cause that’s what you feel like. That’s what fucking happens. That’s what fucking happens all the time.
There was a nice old black guy on a bike, white-haired with a white beard, clocked off and going home, stopped on his bike there with one leg down, waiting for the lights, and some fifteen-year-olds with skateboards underneath their arms, but nothing what had any prospects. Marla glanced down Horseshoe Street there on her left and wondered if it might be worth a visit to the pool hall that was halfway down towards the pub, the Jolly Wanker or whatever it was called, what Elsie Boxer said had been the biker pub, the Harborough something. Harbour Lights. That was a nice name, cosy sounding, better than the fucking Jolly Wanker. There might be the odd bloke in the pool hall, maybe won a bit of money, feeling lucky.
On the other hand, she didn’t like the pool hall much. Not because it was dark or sleazy, but … oh, look, this was completely fucking mental, right, but the one time she’d been in there it was like in the afternoon? And there was hardly anybody there, and it was dark with the big lamps above the tables shining down these big blocks of just light, white light and Marla had got creeped out so she’d just, like, left. She couldn’t even say ’til later what it was had got to her, the spooky feeling what she knew she’d had before and then she realised it was like when she’d been little and had gone inside a church. She’d told Keith that, one night in bed, and he’d said she was fucking mad, said it was rocks. “It’s rocks, gal. All them rocks inside your head.” She hated churches. God and all that, all that thinking about dying, or how you were living, all that bollocks, it was fucking morbid. If she wanted the religious thing she’d think of Princess Di. Any trade waiting down the holy pool hall could fuck off, Marla decided, and she stuck her hands down in her pockets, tucked her chin in and then waited for the lights to go back green so she could cross the top of Horseshoe Street to Marefair. She’d have better luck down at the station.
Marla took it easy as she made her way down Marefair, on the far side of the street from the hotel and all the leisure place whatever. No point being in a hurry, that was all off-putting, looking like you’d mind somebody stopping you to have a word. She walked by all the fed-up looking little restaurants and all that, and when she got along towards that bit what runs down off from Marefair, Freeschool Street, she passed this couple looked like they were married, in their forties, and the fucking faces they had on them. Miserable as sin, like the whole world had fallen in, heading up Marefair out of Freeschool Street, uphill towards town centre. They weren’t holding hands or talking, looking at each other, nothing. Marla didn’t even know why she thought they were married but they had that look, walking along both staring into space like something fucking horrible just happened. She was wondering what it was, thinking about them, when she almost walked into the bloke stood in the road there at the top of Freeschool Street, just staring down it like he’d lost something, his dog or something.
He was quite a tall bloke, white bloke, getting on but in good shape with curly black hair what hadn’t gone grey yet, but that was as close to Marla’s dream-bloke as he got. No pretty lashes and no little moustache but a great big nose instead, with sad eyes where the eyebrows went up in the middle and looked stuck like that, and with a big sad smile across his face. He was dressed funny too, with this all sort of orange yellow red whatever waistcoat on over a real old-looking shirt with rolled up sleeves and one of them things, not cravat, not tie, like coloured handkerchief thing round his neck like farmers had in books. With the big nose and curly hair he had a sort of pikey look, standing and staring off down Freeschool Street after his dog or his old woman or whatever else it was he’d lost. He was no fucking painting and was older than what Marla liked, but she’d done older and she knew full well as she’d done uglier. As she stepped back from nearly running into him she looked at him and smiled and then remembered where the tooth was gone so sort of turned it to a pout, a little kiss thing with her lips pushed forward when she spoke.
“Ooh, sorry, mate. Not looking where I’m going.”
He looked round at her, with his sad eyes and brave-face-on-it smile. She realised that he’d had a drink or two, but then so much the better. When he answered he’d got this high funny voice what had a sort of twang to it. It wasn’t even high all of the time, but sometimes went down in a kind of Farmer Giles ‘Arrrr’, same as with the scarf what he had round his neck, all countrified or something, Marla didn’t know, but then it would go up in this weird laugh, this giggle, sort of nervous laugh thing. He was definitely pissed.
“Aa, that’s all right, love. You’re all right. Ah ha ha ha.”
Oh fucking hell. It was all she could do to keep from cracking up, like when she’d be getting a lecture from some teacher back up Lings and trying not to laugh, that noise you make up in your nose and cover up with coughing. This bloke was a fucking one-off. There was something really mental to him, not like dangerous or like the wombles what they put out into the community, but just like he weren’t on the same world everybody else was on, or like he might be the next Doctor Who. Whatever it was up with him he wasn’t biting, so she went for the direct approach.
“Fancy a bit of business?”
How he acted, she’d never seen anything quite like it. It weren’t like he was all shocked by what she’d said, but more like he was acting shocked and being all exaggerated, making it into a sort of funny turn. He jerked his head back on his neck and made his eyes go wide like he was startled, so his big black eyebrows lifted up. It was like he was being someone in a film what she’d not seen, or more old fashioned, like somebody from a pantomime or what you call it, music hall whatever. No. No, that weren’t it, what he was doing. It was more like films before they had the words in, when it was just music and all black and white and that. The way they made all their expressions right over the top so you’d know what they meant when they weren’t saying anything. He started wobbling his head a bit while he was doing this surprised face, just to make it look more shocked. It was like they were acting out a play at school together, or at least he thought they were, with all the different things you had to say writ out and learned beforehand. How he acted, though, it was like there were telly cameras on them, doing some new comedy. He acted as though she were in on it as well. He broke off the surprised look and his eyes went sad and kind again, all sort of sympathetic, then he turned his head away round to one side like he was looking at this audience or these cameras what she couldn’t see, and did his laugh again like this was just about the funniest fucking thing what ever happened. In a weird way, probably because it had been so long since she’d had some, Marla thought he might be right. This was all pretty fucking funny when you had it pointed out.
“Ah ha ha ha. No, no, no, you’re all right, love, thanks. No, bless your heart, you’re all right. I’m all right. Ah ha ha ha.”
The giggle at the end went really high. It sounded like it might just be he was embarrassed, but he was so fucking freaky that she couldn’t tell. She was out of her depth here. This was just, like, whoosh. She tried again, in case she’d read him wrong or something.
“Are you sure?”
He tipped his head back, showing this great whopping Adam’s apple, and then twisted it about from side to side, doing his giggle. She’d heard all the “he threw back his head and laughed” and that, but just in books. She’d not seen anybody try and do it. It looked really fucking loony.
“Ah ha ha ha. No, love, I’m all right, ta. You’re all right. I’ll have you know that I’m a published poet. Ah ha ha.”
And he was like, that said it all. That was, like, everything explained, right there. She sort of nodded at him with this fixed grin that was, Yeah, all right, mate, nice one, see you, and then Marla carried on along the Peter’s Church side, past them places made from all brown stones with criss-cross windows, Hazel-fucking-whatsit house and all of them. She looked back once and he was still there on the corner, staring down the little side-street waiting for his dog to come back up the hill, or whatever it was had run away from him. He looked up, saw her looking and he did the head thing. Even from this far away she could see that he’d done the giggle too. She turned away and walked on past St. Peter’s Church towards the station, where you could already see the people coming home, crowds of them pushing up towards town on Marefair’s far side, none of them looking at each other, or at Marla.
On her left, past its black railings and the grass all round it, Peter’s Church looked really fucking old, yeah? Really fucking Tudor or Edwardian or one of them. She looked to see if there was anybody sleeping underneath the cover of its doorway, but there wasn’t anybody there. Marla supposed the time was getting on now, five o’clock or round there, and they didn’t let you sleep in doorways over night, just in the day. At night they moved you on which, actually, was fucking stupid. She’d been by St. Peter’s yesterday round lunchtime and there’d been two fellers sleeping underneath the front bit then. Oh, no, hang on, there hadn’t been two, had there? There’d been one. That had been sort of funny, now she thought.
She’d seen two people lying in the doorway, or at least she’d seen the bottoms of their feet, where they stuck out from under all the sleeping bag and stuff. Their toes pointed together, inwards, so she’d thought that they were lying facing one another and thought no more of it. Then she’d looked again when she drew level with the gate, and there was only one pair of soles showing she could see. The other one had disappeared. She’d done a great big complicated working out inside her head, trying to figure out, like, where the other feet had gone. Perhaps, like, what it was, when she’d first seen them there’d been one pair of bare feet and this bloke had just took his shoes off, with them down beside his feet there, toe to toe. Then in between the first and second time she’s looked, he’d put them on, so she could only see one pair of feet the second time and thought someone had disappeared or was a ghost, whatever. Not that Marla thought that there was ghosts, but if there was then Peter’s Church would be like the big hangout, innit? Somewhere from their own times, all the Tudors and the Edwards, all of that lot.
Walking past its gate now, Marla couldn’t help but have a little peep in, just to see, but the space underneath the arch outside the closed black door was empty, except where they had the posters up for some other religion that was renting out the place, Greek Cypriots or Pakis, one of them. She went on, past the front of the Black Lion, where she stopped and looked towards the great big spread-out crossroads with the rush hour traffic, down there near the station. There were tons of people pouring out still, heading off up Black Lion Hill and Marefair into town, and there were all the black cabs in all different colours coming out the station entrance on this side of the West Bridge to wait there at the lights with all the vans and lorries. This was, like, well pointless. What the fuck was she down here for? She could no more walk down in that station forecourt just across the road than she could fly there.
It was Friday night. The girls would all be coming in from Bletchley, Leighton Buzzard, fucking London for all Marla knew, them and their fucking daddies, looking better than what she did ’cause they were looked after and like, looking at her, knowing what she was, how she was one of them but not even as good. That fucking look, yeah? And then there was Keith. Keith might be down there, scouting out new talent. He’d done that on Fridays sometimes and she knew she couldn’t handle that, not having Keith see she was desperate. For fuck’s sake, nobody did their business in the station anyway, not with the cameras. What the fuck had she been thinking? I mean, like, hello? Earth calling Marla. She weren’t going down there, but then she’d have nothing for tonight, but, like, she didn’t care, she still weren’t going down there. But then she’d have nothing for tonight. Oh fuck.
What she could do, she’d see Fat Kenny. He’d have nothing proper, but he just liked drugs so he’d have something. He could sort her out, then she could get through ’til tomorrow, even if she sat up all night talking to herself again. There’s worse ways she could spend the night than that. She waited for the lights to change so they were in her favour, then she tottered in between the waiting traffic and across Black Lion Hill to Marefair’s other side, where there was Chalk Lane running up to Castle Street and where she lived in Bath Street flats.
Chalk Lane always made Marla think of Jack the Ripper, at least since she’d read a bit some years back in the <em>Chronicle & Echo</em>, where some local bloke said how he thought the Ripper might have come from round there. Mallard, this bloke’s name was, both the one who’d writ the thing about it and the bloke he thought had done the killings. He’d been looking up his family tree and found this other family called Mallard what were the same name but not related and who lived down Doddridge Church, Chalk Lane, round that way. They’d had madness in the family, the dad had topped himself and one son had gone down to London, working as a slaughterer in the East End the time the murders happened. Marla had read all the theories and she didn’t reckon there was much in that one. It was just a laugh, that there was her all mad on Jack the Ripper and somebody thought he’d come from down her street.
Some of the other girls were all, like, what d’you want to read all that for, specially with the line you’re in, but Marla was, like … well, she didn’t know what she was like. She didn’t know why she was into Jack the Ripper nearly the same way that she was into Princess Di. Perhaps it was because it had all happened back in history, like with <em>Lord of the Rings</em> and that. Perhaps it didn’t feel like it had much to do with 2006 and what it was like being on the batter now. It was like an escape thing, the Victorian times, <em>Tipping the Velvet</em> and all them. It wasn’t real. That’s why she liked it. And the ins and outs of it were really, really interesting once you knew it all, how the Royal Family had ordered all them women murdered which was just the same as with Diana. Not like cutting her all up, but the same thing.
Now that she thought about it, there’d been other suspect Rippers passing through Northampton, not just this bloke Mallard from the local paper. Duke of Clarence, he’d come here and opened the old church, St. Matthews up in Kinsgley. Then there was the bent bloke, the bent poet bloke what hated women. J.K. something. J.K. Stephen. He’d died in the nuthouse up the Billing Road, the posh one where they said like Dusty Springfield, Michael Jackson and all them had been. This Stephen bloke, he was the one who wrote the poems dissing women. Had he written the Kaphoozelum one? It went, like, all hail Kaphoozelum, the harlot of Jerusalem. It had stuck with her ’cause the name was funny. Fuck, she’d rather she was called Kaphoozelum than Marla.
She walked up the entry of Chalk Lane from Black Lion Hill and thought for, like, two seconds about going round the front doors of the houses off the Chalk Lane entry to her left. Sometimes the girls she’d knew, they’d had to do that, if there weren’t no trade about or if the truckers down the Super Sausage car park showed no interest. They’d go round, like, door to door, houses they knew had single blokes in, widowers whatever, or they’d take pot luck, just knock on any door and ask if anybody wants a bit of business, just like pikeys selling pegs. Samantha once, right, she’d said how she’d knocked round Black Lion Hill, nowhere she knew, just on the off-chance, and it was that Cockie bloke, the councillor whose wife’s a councillor too. The wife was in, and everybody was all fucking outraged, saying as they’d have Samantha and all them looked into, so she’d took her shoes off and she’d legged it.
No, Marla was fucked if she’d go round Black Lion Hill. She’d wank Fat Kenny off. Perhaps he’d have an E to spare or something.
She was passing by the car park on her left there when she heard a noise, a voice or voices over its far side, what made her look up and take notice. Over the far corner, where there was a way up to that bit of grass around the back of the high wall on Andrew’s Road, what they said was where the old castle was, there were some kids just climbing up out of the car park to the grassy bit. She couldn’t see how many, ’cause the last one was just climbing up when Marla looked across, but she’d done business on the grass up there and felt a bit bad that it was where kids were playing. They were only fucking eight or something, younger than you’d think their mums and dads would let them play out in the street how things are now with fucking perverts everywhere. It would be dark inside another hour, and when she’d been in Marefair she’d thought it already looked sunsetty, up behind the station.
The last kid to climb up to the grass, the one what Marla saw, she was this little girl who’d got a dirty face but really pretty, like a little fucking elf whatever with the messy fringe and clever little eyes where she was looking back over her shoulder and across the car park straight at Marla. It was more than likely ’cause she was so far away and because Marla only saw her for a minute and had been mistaken like with the two pairs of feet in Peter’s doorway, but it looked like she was wearing a fur coat. Not coat, just that bit round the collar like a mink stole. Stole. The little kid looked like she’d got a stole on, something furry round her little shoulders, but Marla just saw her for a second and then she was gone and Marla carried on, to up by Doddridge Church. It must have been a fluffy top, Marla concluded.
Doddridge Church was all right, not so fucking miserable as all the other churches ’cause it hadn’t got a steeple, it was just this decent-looking building. Mind you, there was that door halfway up the wall what did her head in. What was that about? She’d seen doors halfway up old factories so they could make deliveries, but what would anybody need delivered in a church? Hymn books and that you could just take in through the door.
She went up Castle Street and round the top by the no-entry, how she’d gone out to Horsemarket earlier, but this time though she went the other way, up to the Mayorhold past the subway entrances and then along there by the Kingdom Life Church place, round to the flats behind the Twin Towers where Fat Kenny lived. He was at home, and had a plate of beans on toast in one hand when at last he come to see who it was at the door. He’d got his brand name sweatshirt on over his great fat belly, where it looked at least a size too small. So did his little face, a size too small for his shaved head, his big ears with the rings in one of them. He went, Oh, hello … and then sort of trailed off so she knew he’d got no idea what her name was and hardly remembered her, well thanks a fucking lot. Spend twenty minutes getting cramp over his little prick and that was all the thanks you got. But still, she smiled and sort of flirted with him, butting in when he trailed off, just to remind him who she was and what she’d done for him that time.
She asked him if he’d anything would take the edge off things, but he just shook his big bald head and said he’d only got this legal high stuff, stuff what you could order out the back of like <em>Bizarre</em> and them, and other stuff he’d grew himself. He’d got a mate of his round later. They were going to try these legal high things out. Marla said she was really desperate and if he’d give her a bit of whatever it was to see her through, then she’d see him all right, better than last time. She’d meant giving him a nosh, but he like thought about it for a minute then said that he might if it was anal and she’d said to fuck off, fuck right off and die you fat cunt. Have your fucking mate round and bum him instead, she’d sooner fucking go without. He’d done a shrug and gone back in his house to eat his beans on toast and she’d turned round and marched round by the front of the Twin Towers, up Upper Cross Street and along to Bath Street.
Fuck. She went in by the entrance in the half-fence, up the middle walkway in between the bits of grass. Fuck. Fuck, what was she going to fucking do? All fucking night with nothing, not even Ash Moses in her fag end she could talk to. Fuck. The black iron gate what she’d come out by was still open under the brick archway. She went through and down three steps into the courtyard and she got the smell, Ash Moses smell like someone burning shit, like someone burning shitty nappies, probably it was the FUCKING ROBERTSES. Fuck. Past the shrubs all fucking grey and up some steps under the little sheltered bit where the back doors ran off from. Marla saw the back of Linda cunt-face Roberts’s head when she was passing by their kitchen window, but got through her own back door and in the flat before the fucking bitch turned round and saw her too. Fuck. This was fucking shit. All fucking night. All fucking night and even the next morning, who said she was going to get some then?
The way it worked, when you were starting out with it, was that first time it felt like you were taken up, inside your body and your head, up somewhere you were meant to be where you could feel how you were meant to feel, a fucking angel or whatever, what they feel like. After that it wasn’t quite as good again, and it got worse ’til by the end, the way you’d felt before you took it that first time, well, that’s the level that you dream of getting back to now. Not feeling like a fucking angel all on fire, forget that, that’s not going to happen for you anymore, no, no, just feeling like a fucking person like you was again for just ten fucking minutes, that’s your fucking big ambition these days. Heaven, where you went the first time, that’s all shut. The ordinary world you used to be in, that’s shut too, most of the time, and you’re stuck somewhere else, somewhere that’s under all of that, like being under fucking ground.
Marla supposed that it was hell, like what she’d said when she was talking to Ash Moses. Being stuck here doing this in Bath Street, but forever.
The smell inside her flat, the smell of her all bottled up inside there, it was fucking minging coming back indoors to it like that. She knew she didn’t wash much, this last while, and always thought her clothes would do another day, but it was fucking bad in there. It was like she could hardly tell the smell of her from the Ash Moses smell, the burning shit smell. It was her and she was it. What was she going to do in here all night? Because this was where she was going to fucking be, that much was fucking certain. She was not YOU ARE NOT going out, you FUCKING TWAT. She would be staying in. All night. With fucking nothing.
She’d do like she said. She’d read her Ripper books, read her Diana book … she’d had an idea. The Diana book, the picture what she’d done there on its front, best fucking picture what she’d ever seen. That was, like, fucking art. People give money all the time for art and some of it was fucking shit, just pickled things and beds what they’d not made. Marla’s Diana picture had to be at least as good as that, had to be worth at least as much as that was. Just ’cause she was living down in Bath Street didn’t mean she couldn’t be an artist. That bloke Thompson who’d been round, the bender with the politics, he’d said that artist he knew, her was going to be on Castle Hill having her exhibition the next day, he’d said she was a woman had come from the Boroughs, fucking just like Marla. That was fucking destiny whatever, like coincidences, with him coming round putting the idea in her head like that. This was all going to happen. Fucking hell, you sometimes heard where people had give fucking thousands for some picture. Fucking millions.
Think what you could buy if you had that. She’d never have to go out anymore, never go begging round Fat Kenny’s, Keith could just fuck off. Yeah, you. You heard. Just fuck off. What are you to me, you little cunt, now I’ve got all this money? All the fucking bling-bling. I could have you fucking killed, mate. Just like that, a fucking hit man, bang and then I’ll go out on the piss with Lisa Mafia. She’ll be all like “You’re Marla, yeah, the fucking artist done that picture of Diana on the sun and all that? Fucking wicked. Fucking sorted, yeah? You fucking go, girl.” This was going to be so fucking good. She went to get the scrapbook with the picture on from where she’d left it on the coffee table and that’s when she realised she’d been fucking burgled.
What the fuck? Someone had been in, though there weren’t like nothing broken. Had she locked the back door, had she locked it when she went out? Had she needed to unlock it when she come back in? For fuck’s sake. Someone had been in while she was out. They’d been in and they’d taken not the telly, not the beatbox thing, not even took the carriage clock. No, now she looked around they hadn’t taken nothing except Marla’s scrapbook. And her Ripper books. She’d left them there as well, there on the coffee table so that she’d know where they were. Oh, fuck. Someone had been in, had her scrapbook with her picture of Diana on and the worst of it was that she’d been right. Been right about the picture. Why would someone nick it if it wasn’t valuable? Oh fucking hell, the millions that she could have got for that. Now look. Now look at her, she’s fucking crying. Fucking crying. Keith thinks she’s a cunt and Lisa Mafia thinks she’s a cunt as well. Princess Diana thinks that she’s a cunt.
Cry all you want. Cry all you want you stupid, stupid fucking cunt. Cry all you want ’cause you’re not going out.
It was a new moon like when they’re all sharp and pointed, over Scarletwell what run downhill to Andrew’s Road. That was the only place, where there were customers but where there were no cameras what could see you, although they kept saying they were going to put some there. On Marla’s left across the road there were the maisonettes what had their front round Upper Cross Street. Most of them were dark where you could see over the balconies but some with lights on, shining through all coloured curtains. On her right across the criss-cross wires that made the fence she had the grass bit at the top of Spring Lane School. Marla thought schools always looked haunted when it was at night and there weren’t kids there. She supposed it was because a school had such a lot of noise and kids all running round during the day, it made you notice more when it was dark and quiet and there weren’t nothing moving.
She went down past the school gates and carried on down by the bottom playing fields. Over the road now there were other flats, Greyfriars flats had she heard them called? They looked sort of the same as Marla’s flats, about as old, perhaps in better nick, you couldn’t really tell at night. Some of the balconies down here had rounded corners, though, and that looked sort of better than round hers. She carried on, down past where Greyfriars ended on the road’s far side and Bath Street’s bottom end curved round to join with Scarletwell. She went on past the empty playing fields, where they were fenced off at their bottom on her right and other than the traffic in the distance over Spencer Bridge all she could hear were her own footsteps on the bumpy path what had all weeds come up between its stones.
There was that little house all on its own there, little red-brick house at one end of this strip of grass by Andrew’s Road, just where it met with Scarletwell Street. It weren’t big, but looked as if it might have been two really little houses once what had been knocked together. It shit Marla up, shit her up every time she saw it and she’d no idea why. Perhaps it was because she couldn’t work it out, why it was standing there when what looked like the terrace it had been on had been pulled down years ago. It had a light on through thick curtains, so there must be someone living there. She pulled the collar of her mac tight and went clacking past the funny house and round the corner to its right, along the pavement by St. Andrew’s Road, between the road and that long strip of grass that ran towards Spring Lane, the bit where all the other houses must have used to be. Up in the sky, just here and there between the brown bits from the street lights, she could see all stars.
She knew. She knew exactly what was going to happen, in her guts she knew. There’d be a car along now, any minute. That would be the one. There wasn’t anything what she could do to stop it, nothing she could do so she was somewhere else. It was as if it had already happened, was already in the script of that bloke with the waistcoat’s comedy and there weren’t nothing she could do except just go along with it, go through the moves that she was meant to make, take one step then another up along beside the grass towards Spring Lane, then at the end turn back and walk along the other way, to Scarletwell Street, with the house all dark there on the corner and no windows lit from this side.
Walking back to Scarletwell, there were the noises from the station yards, behind the wall across St. Andrew’s Road, just shunting noises, but she could hear kids as well, kids’ voices giggling. They were coming from the big dark row of bushes on the far side of the strip of grass, that ran along the bottom there of the school playing fields to Marla’s left. It must be them what she’d seen earlier, the little girl with the fur stole from up Chalk Lane. What were they doing, all still out this late? She listened but the voices didn’t come again from up behind the hedge. She’d probably imagined them.
The little house was black against the grey sky up the hill behind it, up towards the railway station and up Peter’s Way. The car was coming down St. Andrew’s Road from up the station end towards her, moving slow, its headlights getting slowly nearer. She knew what would happen but it was like it would happen anyway. It was all set, the minute that she’d left the flat, all set in stone like with a church or something where it was already built and nobody could change it. The car stopped, pulled in across the road and stopped there at the corner on the other side of Scarletwell, across from where the house was. Marla couldn’t hear the kids now. There was nobody about.
She walked towards the car.
** <strong>ROUGH SLEEPERS</strong>
<strong>I</strong>t had been in one sense forty years since Freddy Allen left the life. One day he might go back to it, there was always that possibility. That door was always open, as it had turned out, but for the moment he was comfortable the way he was. Not happy, but amongst familiar faces and familiar circumstances in a place that he was used to. Comfortable. Somewhere that you could always get a bite to eat if you knew where to look, where you could sort of have a drink and sort of have some of the other, now and then, although the now and then of it could be a pain. But there was always billiards, up the billiard hall, and there was nothing Freddy loved more than he loved to watch a cracking game of billiards.
He could remember how he’d got out of the life, the business, the proverbial ‘Twenty-five Thousand Nights’, as he’d heard it referred to. Far as Freddy was concerned, it might have happened yesterday. He’d been under the arches down Foot Meadow, sleeping out the way he did back then, when he’d been woke up sudden. It was like he’d heard a bang that woke him up, or like he’d just remembered there was something that was happening that morning that he’d better be alert for. He’d just come awake with such a start that he’d got to his feet and he was walking out from underneath the railway arches and across the grass towards the riverside before he knew what he was doing. Halfway to the river it was like he’d woken properly enough to think, hang on, what am I jumping up like this for? He’d stopped in his tracks and turned around to look back at the arches where he saw another tramp, an old boy, had already nicked his place where he’d been kipping, on the earth below the curve of brickwork up against one wall, had even nicked the plastic carrier bag of grass that had been Freddy’s pillow. It was bloody typical. He’d walked back a few steps towards the archway so that he could see just who the bugger was, so that he’d know him later. It had taken Fred a minute before he could recognise the nasty-looking piece of work, but once he had he knew he’d never get his spot back now. There was no point in even trying. He’d been moved on, and he’d have to just get used to it.
And Freddy had got used to it, after a time or in no time at all, depending how you saw it. How things were now, it weren’t such a bad existence, whatever his friend might try and tell him who lived in the bottom corner house on Scarletwell Street. They meant well, he knew that, telling him he should move up to somewhere better, but they didn’t understand that he was comfortable the way he was. He hadn’t got the worries that he’d had when he was in the life, but Freddy didn’t think they’d understand that, given what their situation was at present. You didn’t have the same perspective, living down there, as what Freddy had got now.
Now was a Friday, May the 26<sup>th</sup>, 2006, according to the calendar behind the bar in the Black Lion where he’d called in just to see if there was anyone about. He’d just been up a bit in the twenty-fives or twenty-sixes, up round there, in the St. Peter’s Annexe where that coloured woman with the bad scar who was famous up the way worked with the prostitutes and them on drugs, and all the refugees come from the east. He liked it up that way, the people all seemed more constructive and just getting on with things, but there was never anybody there that Freddy knew and so he’d come down to this bit where he was sitting now, with Mary Jane across the table from him. Both of them were sat there with their chins propped in their hands and looking down, a bit glum, at the empty glasses on the laminated tabletop between them, wishing there was some way they could have a proper drink but knowing as they couldn’t, knowing that instead they’d have to have a proper conversation. Mary Jane lifted her always-narrowed and suspicious eyes to look at him across the empty glasses.
“So you were saying you’d been up there in the twenty-fives, then? I’ve not been up there meself, now, ’cause I’ve heard as there’s no pub up there. Is that right?”
Mary Jane had got a gruff voice like a man, though Fred had known her long enough to tell it was put on. She’d quite a light voice underneath but made it deeper so no one would think she was a push-over, though why she thought they’d think that, Freddy hadn’t got a clue. One look at Mary Jane with that face and them scabs all on her knuckles, most folk would know well enough to keep away. Besides, her opportunities to get into a scrap had all been over ages back. There wasn’t any need for her to keep on scaring people off. Freddy supposed it was the habit of a lifetime and that Mary Jane was never going to change if she’d not changed by that point.
“No, no pub. Just the St. Peter’s Annexe what they call it, where they’re looking after people. Tell the truth, I shouldn’t think you’d like it much. You know how there’s some areas where the weather’s always bad? It’s one of them. The people up there are all nice enough, some real good sorts like in the old times, but there’s never anybody that you know goes up there. Well, except the gangs of kids and that, but they get everywhere, the little buggers. I expect that everyone’s like us, stick in the muds what never leave their own bit of the Boroughs and don’t go much higher than the fourteens or fifteens.”
She listened to what Freddy had to say and then she screwed up her expression, like a face a kid had drawn upon a boxing glove, and glared at him. That was just how she was with everyone. You couldn’t take it personal with Mary Jane.
“Fifteens be fucked. I’m not even that fond of how they’ve got it here.”
She waved one scabby-knuckled hand around to indicate the pleasant little bar-room with its other bit down a short flight of steps from where they sat. There were two men stood talking to the girl behind the bar, just while she served them, and a couple in their twenties sitting chopsing in one corner, but nobody Mary Jane or Freddy knew. The Black Lion, this bit of it, was a decent little place still, but there was no arguing with Mary Jane when she was in a mood like this, and she was always in a mood like this so there was never any arguing.
“If you want my opinion, these new places are a waste of fucking time. You’re better off down in the forty-eights and forty-nines where there’s a better class of individual, with more go in them. Or if that’s not what’s to your liking, why don’t you come up the Smokers of a night, above the Mayorhold? There’s the old crowd in there still, them as would know you, so you’d not go short of company.”
Freddy just shook his head.
“It’s not my kind of place that, Mary Jane. They’re a bit rough for me, the crowd up there with Mick Malone and that lot. I’m not being funny, but I’m just more used to keeping to meself. Sometimes I go down Scarletwell to see a chum I’ve got down there, but I keep off the Mayorhold, mostly, as it is now.”
“I’m not talking about now, I’m saying in the night-time. We have a good laugh, up in the Jolly Smokers. ’Course, I’ve always got the Dragon just across the way there, if I’m feeling in the mood.”
A dirty and lascivious grin broke out across Mary Jane’s face while she was saying this, and Freddy felt relieved to have the woman from behind the bar come out and interrupt by clearing off the dirty glasses, so they wouldn’t have to follow up that line of thought. The barmaid moved that fast that she was like a blur, just whipped the glasses from their table then shot back behind the bar, not paying them the least bit of attention. That was how it was for ones like him and Mary Jane, for the rough sleepers. People hardly knew that you were there. They just looked through you.
Mary Jane, when she picked up the thread of talk again, had moved on from the subject of the Dragon and her love life, which was just as well, but in the absence of a drink to shut her up was reminiscing, still within the general subject of the Mayorhold, on the fights she’d had there.
“God, do you remember Lizzie Fawkes, how me and her went at it outside the Green Dragon in the street, right on the Mayorhold there? We had a set-to over Jean Dove what was so bad that the coppers daredn’t bust us up. I’ll say this for old Lizzie, she was tough all right. She’d got one eyelid hanging off and couldn’t talk for where I’d knocked her jaw out, but she wouldn’t let it lie. Meself, I weren’t much better, got me head split open and it turned out later that I’d broke a thumb but it was such a great fight neither of us wanted it to end. We went up to the Mayorhold the next morning and we carried on with it a while, but then she’d got a bolt hid in her hand so when she clouted me around the head I went out like a light. That was a fucking beauty, all right. Makes me want to go back down there so I can relive it. Should you like to come along now, Freddy? I can promise you, it was a fucking treat.”
There’d been a time when Freddy would have gone along with Mary Jane for fear of how she’d take it if he should refuse, but those days were long gone. She was all bark now and no bite, no harm to anyone. None of them were, not these days. It had been a long time since the coppers took an interest in any of them, Freddy, Mary Jane, old Georgie Bumble, any of that lot. Mind you, the coppers had no jurisdiction in the areas where Fred and Mary Jane spent all their time these days, and it was very, very rare you’d see a bobby round there, not one who’d got any interest in the likes of them. The only one who Freddy knew to say hello to was Joe Ball, Superintendent Ball, and he was all right. An old-fashioned copper out the olden days what had long since retired, though when you saw him he still had his uniform. He’d spend a lot of time talking to villains of the sort he’d once have locked up in the jail, including Freddy, who’d once asked Joe why he wasn’t spending his retirement somewhere nicer, somewhere like where Freddy’s pal down Scarletwell Street said that Freddy should have gone. The old Superintendent had just smiled and said he’d always liked the Boroughs. It would do him, and you sometimes got the chance to do a bit of good. That was enough for old Joe Ball. He wasn’t after anyone, not Freddy and not even Mary Jane. She’d been a holy terror but she’d had the fight go out of her when her old way of life ended abruptly after she’d been struck down by a heart attack. She’d had to reassess things after that and change her ways, so Freddy wasn’t worried now as he declined, politely, her kind invitation to revisit scenes of former glories.
“I’d as soon not, Mary Jane, if it’s the same to you. That’s more your cup of tea than mine, and I’ve got old affairs meself I should be getting back to. Tell you what, if you’ll keep old Malone and all his bloody animals away from me, I’ll break the habit of a … well, of a long while it seems to me … and I’ll perhaps come by the Smokers when I’ve been to watch me billiards tonight, how’s that?”
This seemed to please her. She stood up and stuck one callused hand out so that Fred could shake it.
“That’ll do me. You mind how you go now, Freddy, though I s’pose the worst has all already happened for the likes of us. I’ll tell you how I got on in the fight if I should see you up the Smokers. You make sure you’re there, now.”
She released his hand, then she was gone. He sat there on his own a while eyeing the barmaid. It was hopeless, Freddy knew that. He was older with his hair gone now, and though he still had what he could retain of the good looks he’d had when he was young, as far as the blonde barmaid was concerned he might as well not be there. He picked up his hat from where it rested on the seat beside him, crammed it on his bald spot and got up to leave himself. As he went through the door and onto Black Lion Hill, just from politeness and from habit he called to the barmaid, wishing her a good day, but she took no notice, as he’d known she wouldn’t. She just kept on drying glasses with her back to him, acting as if she hadn’t heard. He stepped out of the pub and turned right, up to Peter’s Church, where all the clouds were moving by so fast above that light was flickering on the old stonework as though from a monster candle.
As he passed the church he glanced in at its doorway, just to see if any young chap or young woman … they were always young ones these days, with as many girls as there were boys … was sleeping underneath the portico, but there was no one there. Sometimes, if he felt lonely or just needed human company he’d sneak in with them while they slept, which didn’t do no harm, just lying there beside them face to face and listening to them breathe, pretending he could feel their warmth. They were all drunk or too pie-eyed to know that there was anybody there, and he’d be up and gone before they were awake in any case, just on the off chance one might open up their eyes and see him. The last thing he’d want to do was frighten them. He wasn’t doing any harm, and he would never touch them or pinch nothing from them, not a one of them. He couldn’t. He weren’t like that anymore.
From Marefair, Freddy drifted up Horsemarket. As he crossed St. Mary’s Street that ran off to his left he glanced along it. You could sometimes see the sisters still up there, a proper pair of dragons who’d been widely-known and talked about when in their prime: wild, shocking and exciting. Famously, they’d once raced naked through the town, leaping and twirling, spitting, running along rooftops, all the way from here to Derngate in about ten minutes, both so dangerous and beautiful that people wept to see them. Freddy sometimes spotted them in Mary’s Street, just moping wistfully around the piles of dried-out leaves and litter drifted up against the sunken car park’s wall, drawn back here to the place where they had once commenced their memorable dance. The glitter in their eyes, you knew that if they had the chance, even at their age, they’d still do it all again. They’d do it in a minute. Blimey, that would be a sight.
Today, St. Mary’s Street was empty save a scroungey-looking dog. Freddy passed on, not for the first time he reflected, to the top of Castle Street where he turned left and headed down to where the flats were now.
It was when Mary Jane made that remark about what she got up to at the Dragon – the Green Dragon on the Mayorhold – which was where the lesbians gathered. As unwelcome as the thought of it had been, it had set Freddy off, set him off thinking about sex again. That’s why he’d eyed the barmaid down at the Black Lion. To be quite honest sex was a frustration and a nuisance now as much as anything, but once it came into his head it rattled round until he’d satisfied its nagging voice and all its wearying demands. Now that he thought about it, though, it had been much the same for him while he was in the life. It wasn’t fair of him to blame his circumstances now for all the things that made him feel fed up. He’d had a fair shake, Freddy thought, all things considered. No one was to blame but him for how he’d handled his affairs, and he could see that there was justice in the way he’d ended up. Justice above the streets.
He was just thinking that he’d not seen any of that area’s clergymen around as yet today, the brothers or whatever they preferred to call themselves, when who should there be struggling up the street towards him than one of that very lot: a stout chap looking hot under his robes and all of that lark, making hard work of an old sack what he’d got across his shoulder. Freddy had a little chuckle to himself, thinking that it was more than likely nicked church candle-sticks or the collection plates or else the lead from off the roof inside the sack, it looked that heavy.
As they neared each other, the old priest chap lifted his flushed, sweating face and noticed Freddy, giving him a big warm smile of greeting so that from the offset Freddy liked the man. He looked like that young actor off the telly who played Fancy Smith in <em>Z-Cars</em>, only older, how he’d look if he were in his fifties or his sixties, with a beard and all grey hair. Their paths met halfway down the bit between Horsemarket and the path or ramp or stairs, whatever it was called, that led into the houses there, the flats. Both of them stopped and said hello politely to each other, with this ruddy-faced old Friar Tuck chap having a great rumbling voice and something of an accent Freddy couldn’t place. It sounded a bit backwards, like a country accent could if you weren’t used to them, and Freddy thought the bloke might be from Towcester or out that way, with his thees and thys.
“It is a hot day to be out, I was this moment saying to myself. How goes the world with thee now, my fine, honest fellow?”
Freddy wondered if this chap had heard of him, his nicking all the loaves and pints of milk back in the old times, and if all this ‘honest fellow’ stuff was just a parson’s manner when he took the mickey out of someone. By and large, though, he seemed a straightforward sort and Freddy thought that he should take him at face value.
“Oh, it looks like a hot day, all right, and I suppose the world goes well enough. What of yourself? That bag of yours looks like a burden.”
Setting his rough sack down on the ground with a small groan of gratitude at the relief, the parson shook his wooly head and grinned.
“God bless thee, no … or if it is it’s not a burden I begrudge. I have been told I am to bring it to the centre. Dost thou know where that might be?”
Freddy was stumped just for a moment, thinking that one through. The only centre that he knew of was the sports and recreation centre, where they played the billiards there halfway down Horseshoe Street, where Freddy would be going later on if all were well. Deciding that must be the place that the old feller meant, Freddy proceeded to give him the right directions.
“If it’s where I’m thinking of, then you must turn right by that tree along the end there.” Freddy gestured to the end of Castle Street. “Go down that way until you reach the crossroads at the bottom. If you go straight over and you carry on downhill, it’s on your left across the road, just halfway down.”
The old boy’s face, already bright with sweat, lit up to hear this news. He must have walked a long way, Freddy thought, dragging that sack. The Holy Joe thanked Freddy thoroughly, he was that grateful to hear that the billiard hall was only down the street, then asked where Fred himself was bound. “I trust that your own journey is towards some pure and godly ending” was the way he put it. Freddy had been thinking that he’d go down in the dwellings just off Bath Street and give Patsy Clarke a poke for old times’ sake, but it weren’t right to say that to a man of God. Instead, Freddy made out that he’d been off to see an old mate, an old pensioner who’d not got any family, down at the bottom end of Scarletwell Street. This was true enough, though Freddy had originally intended to go down there after his regular rendezvous with Patsy Clarke. Ah, well. It wouldn’t hurt to have a change from the routine. He wished the stout priest well, then set off at a jaunty pace, straight past the opening of Bath Street flats and down to Little Cross Street. On the way down, Freddy paused and looked back at the clergyman. He’d lifted up his sack again and had it back across one shoulder, staggering off up Castle Street towards Horsemarket, leaving quite a trail behind him. Everybody left a trail, Freddy supposed. When he’d been in the life, that’s what the rozzers always told him when they caught him, anyway.
He could have doubled back to Bath Street flats once the old chap was gone from sight, but that would make him feel dishonest after what he’d said. No, he’d go on down Scarletwell, where they’d be glad to see him. Truth be told, they were the only ones still living down there, when it came to seeing Freddy, who would make the effort. Realising that you couldn’t get down Bristol Street without a lot of difficulty these days, Freddy went instead up Little Cross Street to where it joined Bath Street on the flats’ far side, then turned left and went on down Bath Street to its bottom as it veered round to the right and into Scarletwell Street.
He was in a sort of fog as he rolled round the corner to his right, and passed the place where Bath Row had run down to Andrew’s Road once, years back. There was just the opening to the garages, near where Fort Street and Moat Street had once been. As he passed by it, Fred peered down the tarmac slope that led to the enclosure, a rough oblong that only the closed grey garage doors looked onto. Something of an oddity for blokes of his sort, Freddy didn’t hold with premonitions and the likes of that, but there was something down there, down them garages where Bath Row’s terraces once were. Either there had been something happen there a long time back, or there was something going to happen there. Suppressing the first faint ghost of a shiver he’d felt in a long time, Freddy carried on to Scarletwell Street, crossing to its other side there at the bottom, down below Spring Lane School’s playing fields. You could still see some of the cobbles of the jitty mouth, where it had run behind the terrace down on Andrew’s Road, but it was pretty much all gone. It looked to Freddy as if the thick shrubs down at the bottom border of the field had pushed into the space where once the jitty was, with their black foliage covering its smooth grey stones. At least, Fred thought they were still grey, but almost everything down here was grey or black or white to Fred, like an old photo where its all clear and the light’s just right but there’s no colours. Freddy hadn’t seen a normal worldly colour now in forty-something years, as people who still made a living judged such things. The colour-blindness was just part of his condition. Freddy didn’t mind it much, except with flowers.
He walked down a few steps to where the house was, standing all alone there on the corner by the main road, nothing but a patch of grass behind it running off towards Spring Lane, where once had stood the terrace where a lot of them that Freddy knew had lived, Joe Swan and them. He stepped up on the doorstep and went in. The doors were never closed down there to Freddy, and he knew he’d always got an open invitation, so he just went through and down the passage to the door what led into the living room, in which the corner house’s tenant was sat at the table by one wall and browsing through a picture-album, full of seaside snaps and everything, looking up with surprise as Freddy came in unannounced, but then relaxing upon realising it was only him.
“Hello, Fred. Blimey, you give me a turn. A right old jumping Jack I’m turning into, no mistake. I thought it was the old man. Not that he’s a trouble to me, just a bloody nuisance. Every week he’s round here saying sorry this and sorry that. It’s getting on me nerves. Here, let me put the kettle on.”
Fred occupied the empty chair across the table from the photo album, and called to the kitchen while his pal went out to make a cup of tea.
“Well, he’s a rogue, old Johnny. I expect he feels he needs forgiving.”
His friend’s voice came from the kitchen, talking loud above the boiling of the kettle, one of the electric ones that’s bubbling in a minute.
“Well, I’ve told him, like I’ve told you over other matters, it’s himself he should be asking the forgiveness of. It’s no good coming round to me. I bear him no hard feelings and I’ve told him that. For me it was all a long time ago, although I know for him it must seem like just yesterday. Ah well.”
The steely-eyed septuagenarian came back out of the kitchen with a steaming mug of tea in one bony-but-steady hand, and sat down opposite to Freddy by the open photo-album, setting down the teacup on the faded tablecloth.
“I’m sorry I can’t offer you one, Freddy, but I know it’s no good even asking.”
Freddy shrugged disconsolately in agreement.
“Well, my innards in the state they are these days, it goes right through me. But I’m very grateful for the offer. How are things with you, mate, anyway? Have you had anybody call by other than old Johnny since I saw you last?”
The answer was preceded by a noisy slurp of tea.
“Well, let me see. I had them bloody kids break in here, ooh, some months ago it must have been. They were most likely trying to cut through into Spring Lane Terrace as was up the back there years ago. The little beggars. It’s like all the kids these days, they think that they can get away with anything because they know that you can’t touch them.”
Freddy thought about the last tea he’d enjoyed, not too much milk, two sugars, wait until the first flush of the boiling heat has gone off of it, then it’s right for gulping. Not a drink for sipping, tea. Just gulp it down and feel the warmth spread through your belly. Ah, those were the days. He sighed as he replied.
“I saw ’em earlier, when I was up the twenty-fives in Peter’s Annexe, where they’ve got this darky woman with a scar over her eye who’s treating all the prostitutes and them, amongst the refugees. It was that gang of little devils Phyllis Painter’s got. They’d broke in through the old Black Lion when it was opposite the cherry orchards, back round there in Doddridge’s rough area, then climbed up to the twenty-fives just like a pack of little monkeys. Honestly, you should have heard their language. Phyllis Painter called me an old bugger and her little pals all laughed.”
“Well, I expect you’ve been called worse. What’s all this about refugees, then, in the twenty-fives? Have they come from some war? That’s a bit close for comfort, that is. That’s just up the road.”
Freddy agreed, then said how it weren’t war but flooding, and how from their accents all the refugees came from the east. His old friend nodded, understanding.
“Well, we can’t make out we weren’t expecting it, though like I say, we all thought as it would be further off. The twenty-fives, eh? Well, now. There’s a thing.”
There was a pause to take another swig of tea before the subject changed.
“So tell me, Freddy, have you seen old Georgie Bumble lately? He used to call in here for a chat so I could tell him that he should move somewhere better off, and so that he could take no notice, like all you old ruffians do from time to time. It’s just I haven’t seen him for a year or more. Is he still in his office on the Mayorhold?”
Freddy had to think about it. Could it really be a year, or even years, since he’d seen Georgie? Freddy tended to lose track of time, he knew, but surely it weren’t that long since he’d looked in on the poor old blighter?
“Do you know, I really couldn’t tell you. I suppose he’s still there, though I don’t go up that way much. To be honest, it’s a dirty hole up there now, but I’ll tell you what, I’ll look in on old Georgie when I leave here and see how he’s getting on.”
Fred could have kicked himself, although not literally. Now as he’d said he’d do it, he would feel obliged to see it through, which meant he’d not be getting round to Patsy Clarke’s until much later than he’d planned, sometime around the middle of the afternoon. Oh well. She’d wait. It weren’t like she was going to run off anywhere.
Their conversation turned, as Freddy knew it would, to his own stubbornness in staying down here in the lower reaches of the Boroughs.
“Freddy, if you lot only thought better of yourselves you could move up a bit. Or if you did what my great-grand-dad did you could move up a lot. The sky’s the limit.”
“We’ve been through all this before, pal, and I know my place. They don’t want me up there. I’d only have the milk and bread away from off the doorsteps or be getting up to trouble with the women. And besides, the likes of me, I couldn’t stand with hand on heart and say I’d earned it, could I? Never earned a thing in all me life. What have I ever done to prove me worth, or where I could at least say as I’d made a difference? Nothing. If I had, if I could hold me head up with the better folk, perhaps I’d think again, but I don’t reckon as that’s very likely now. I should have had a go at acting decent back when I still had a chance, because it’s hard to see how I shall have the opportunity again.”
His host went to the kitchen for more tea, continuing their conversation in a loud voice so that Fred could hear, which wasn’t really necessary. Freddy noticed that no trail was left behind between the living room and kitchen, contrary to what the coppers had once told him. Obviously, for people like Fred’s mate that’s what one would expect, but Freddy sometimes found himself so caught up in their conversations that he would forget the one big difference that there was between them: Freddy was no longer living there in Scarletwell Street. That’s why he’d leave scruffy traces in his wake, and why they wouldn’t. Several moments passed, and then Fred’s chum came back out of the kitchen to sit down again, across the table from him.
“Freddy, you can never tell what twists and turns affairs will take, one minute to another, one day to the next. It’s like the houses that there used to be down here, with unexpected bends and doors that led off Lord knows where. But all the pokey little nooks and stairways had their purpose in the builders’ plan. I sound like Fiery Phil giving a sermon, don’t I? What I’m saying is, you never knew what’s going to turn up. There’s only one chap knows all that. If ever you get tired of your rough sleeping, Freddy, you know you can always come round here and just go straight upstairs. In the meantime, try not to be so hard upon yourself. There were far worse than you, Fred. The old man, for one. The things that you did, in the final reckoning, none of them look so bad. Everyone played their parts the way they had to, Freddy. Even if they were a crooked stair-rail, it might be that they were leading somewhere. Oh. I’ve just thought!” This was said springing up from the chair as though in startlement. “I can’t make you a tea, but we can go out back and you can look to see if there’s new sprouts since last time, so that you could have a bite to eat.”
This was more like it. Talking about past crimes always got him down, but that was nothing that a bit of grub wouldn’t put right. He followed his long-time companion through the kitchen and into the small bricked-in back yard outside, where he was pointed to the juncture of the north and west walls.
“I caught something moving from the corner of my eye when I was out here putting rubbish in the ashbox just the other night. I know what that’s a sign of, and so you might want to take a gander in between the bricks, see if there’s any roots there.”
Freddy took a close look at the spot to which he’d been directed. It was very promising. Poking up onto Freddy’s level from a crevice in the mortar was a stiff and spidery protuberance he knew to be the root bulb of a Puck’s Hat, though of what variety he couldn’t tell as yet. It wasn’t one of the dark grey kinds, he at least knew that much. From behind him came his mate’s voice, high and quivery with age but still with backbone to it.
“Can you see one? You’ve got better eyes for it than me.”
“Aye, there’s one here. It was its blossoms what you saw the other night. Hang on a minute and I’ll prise it out.”
Fred reached into the crack with grubby fingertips and pinched the bulb off at its thick white stem, where it led down into the brickwork. One of a Puck’s Hat’s peculiarities was that it had the root bulb up above, and then the individual shoots grew down into whatever spaces they could find. There was that faint squeal as he plucked it, more a tinny hum that swelled up for a moment then was gone. He fished it out so he could take a closer look at it.
Big as a person’s hand, it was a mostly white variety, with the stiff radiating outgrowths, each a different length, all sprung like spokes out from the centre. Cupping it beneath his nose he was delighted to discover that it was a type that had a scent, both delicate and sweet, one of the only things that he could really smell these days. Up close like that, he even saw its colours.
What it looked like from above was about thirteen naked women, all two inches tall with all their crowns joined up together in the vegetable’s centre, where there was a tuft of orange hair, a small bright spot to mark the middle with the tiny heads grown out of it like petals. The small females sort of overlapped, so that there were three eyes, two noses and two little mouths for every pair of faces. How it worked, around the centre orange spot there was a ring of minuscule blue eyes, like flecks of glass. Spaced out beyond these were the gooseflesh bumps that were the rings of noses, then the dark pink slits, almost too small to see, that were the mouths. The individual necks branched out, then grew into the shoulders of the next girl-shape in line, leaving a little hole between their fused-together shoulders and their fused-together ears. Again, there were three arms for each two bodies, these again arranged to form an outlying concentric ring, each slender limb dividing into tiny fingers at its tip. The women’s bodies from the neck down were the longest sections of the plant, with one per head, forming the outmost band of petals, each one bifurcated into tiny wavering legs, small dots of red fluff at their junctions forming yet another decorative circle in the exquisite symmetrical design.
He turned it over so that he could see the ring of buttocks and the cluster of transparent petals like the wings of dragonflies arranged around the pinched-off stalk there in the centre. From behind, his friend enquired again.
“I know that you can’t show it to me, but if you could let me know what sort of Puck’s Hat that it was I’d be obliged. Is it a spaceman one, a fairy one or something else?”
“It’s fairies, this one. It’s a beauty, too, a good eight incher, one side to the other. This will keep me going for a while, and you won’t have to worry about boiling a four-minute egg then finding half a day has gone. You know what these can be like when it comes to missing out a lump of time. It’s all because of how they grow.”
He took a bite. It had the texture he remembered pears as having, but its taste was wonderful, a perfumed flavour much like rosehips but with more dimension to it, waking taste buds that he hadn’t known were there before. He felt the energy, the sort of uplift that they gave you, running into him with the delicious juice. Thank heavens it had been a fairy Puck’s Hat, nice and ripe, and not the ashy-coloured spaceman ones that were all hard and bitter, and that should be left to sweeten into fairies, which were more mature. It was a lovely meal, assuming that you didn’t mind spitting a couple dozen of the hard and tasteless little eye-pips out. Given a bit of luck and if the pips should lodge in the right place you could have a whole ring of Puck’s Hats here in six months’ time, although he thought he’d best not tell his friend that.
They went back inside together, one to make another cup of tea, the other one to finish wolfing down his Puck’s Hat. They went on with chatting about this and that, and Fred was shown the photo album. Some of the old snapshots with their small black corner hinges were in colour, but Fred couldn’t tell which ones. There was a nice one of a young girl in her twenties standing on a lawn looking a bit depressed with buildings in the background like a hospital or school. They talked until the wall-clock in the hallway struck the hour for two, when Freddy thanked his host for sparing him the time and for the bite to eat, then went through the front door again, back into Scarletwell Street.
Feeling much the better for a bit of lunch, Fred fairly shot up Scarletwell Street, past the unbelievably tall flats up at the top there and towards the Mayorhold. A Puck’s Hat the size that one had been would keep Fred feeling perky and invigorated for a fortnight. With a certain swagger he ignored the crossing barrier surrounding the wide traffic junction and strode out across it, through the hurtling cars. Motors be blowed, he thought. He was too old to stand there hesitating at the curbside like a little kid, although he stepped back when Jem Perrit’s horse and cart went by towards Horsemarket, because that was leaving trails behind like Fred himself was, fading pictures of itself in different stages of its motion as it trotted heedlessly amongst the trucks and four-wheel drives. The horse and cart was part of Freddy’s world, and though collision with it could not possibly cause a fatality, there might be other complications that were best avoided. Freddy stood there in the middle of the vehicle-flow and watched the carthorse saunter off downhill towards Marefair, Jem Perrit drunk and fast asleep there at its reins, trusting his horse to get him home to Freeschool Street before he woke. Shaking his head in admiration and amusement at how long Jem Perrit’s horse had been performing that trick now, Fred carried on towards the corner where the widened sweep of Silver Street ran down to form part of the junction.
Where the Mayorhold’s major shops and stores had been, the Co-op and the butcher’s, Botterill’s newsagent’s and all of those, was one of those new car parks that had all the layers, with its concrete painted ugly yellow, or so Fred had heard. Around the place’s bottom down the Mayorhold side was a great bank of thorn-hedge, just there on the corner where poor Georgie Bumble’s office was once visible. There was a lot of overgrowth built up since Georgie’s time, and Fred would have to roll his sleeves up if he wanted to get stuck in and dig back to it. Stepping out of the busy road into the thicket with the wedding-cake tiers of the car park looming up above him Freddy started pushing all the present stuff to one side so he could get through. First there was hedgerow which you could just shove away like smoke, and then machinery, compressors and cement mixers and diggers you could squash and bend to one side as though made of coloured modelling clay. At last, after he’d dug through all of this Freddy uncovered the big open granite doorway leading into Georgie’s office, with the name of the establishment carved elegantly in the stone above the entrance: GENTLEMEN. Brushing away the smears of stale time from his coat-sleeves that he’d picked up unavoidably while rooting through the stuff, Fred wandered in over the chessboard of the cracked wet floor tiles, calling out into the smelly echo.
“Georgie? Anybody home? You’ve got a visitor.”
There were two cubicles that ran off from the main urinal area with its trickling walls and peeling V.D. warning poster that portrayed a man, a woman and those feared initials in black silhouette against what Fred remembered was a sore red background. One of the two cubicles had its door closed, the other open to reveal an overflowing bowl with turds and toilet paper on the floor. That was the way that people dreamed these sorts of places, Freddy knew. He’d dreamed of awful brimming lavatories like this himself when he’d been back there in the life, on one of his Twenty-five Thousand Nights, looking for somewhere he could have a wee and finding only horror-holes like this. It was the way that people’s dream-ideas built up like sediment across the years that made the place the mess it was, as far as Freddy was concerned. It wasn’t Georgie’s fault. From behind the closed door there came the sound of someone spitting, then that of the toilet flushing, then the rattling of the sliding lock on the zinc door as it was opened from inside.
A monk emerged, gaunt, mournful and clean-shaven with the bald patch on the top, the tonsure. From where Fred was standing he looked like one of the Clooneys or whatever they were called from up St. Andrew’s. He marched straight past Fred without acknowledging his presence and out through the public toilet’s entrance into all the tangled years and instants blocking off the opening like briars. The monk had gone, leaving still pictures of himself in black and white behind that faded into nothing within moments. Fred glanced back at the now-open cubicle the man had just vacated, to see Georgie Bumble shuffling out in the monk’s wake with an apologetic half-a-smile, trailing his own plume of self-portraits.
“Hello, Freddy. Long time no see. Sorry about all that, by the way. You caught me just when I was doing business. Well, if you can call it business. Have you seen this, what he give me? Tight-fisted old bugger.”
Georgie held his hand out, opening the stubby fingers with their chewed-down nails to show Fred a small Puck’s Hat, three inches across at most. It was nowhere near ripe yet, with the circle made from blue-grey foetus shapes that folk said looked like spacemen from another planet barely formed. The large black beads that were the eyes were an inedible and glittering ring around the central dimple, where no tuft of coloured hair as yet had grown, a bad sign when it came to judging higher plants of this type. It was how you knew if they were ready to be eaten yet. If Georgie had done that old monk a favour for a morsel this size, he’d been had more ways than one.
“You’re dead right, Georgie. It’s a titchy little thing. Still, they’re all Frenchies, that St. Andrew’s crowd, so what can you expect? If they were half as godly as they made out then they wouldn’t still be down here with all us lot, would they?”
Georgie looked down mournfully with his big watery eyes at the unappetizing delicacy in his palm. There was the plaintive dripping of a cistern, amplified by the unusual acoustics with the echo racing off in more directions or else bouncing back from greater distances than were apparent in the dank, restricted space.
“Yes. That’s a good point, Freddy. That’s a very good point. On the other hand, they’re all the trade I get these days, the monks.”
Dressed in his shiny suit with rope run through its loops to make a belt, the shabby little moocher bit a stringy gobbet from the sour grey higher vegetable and made a face. He chewed for a few moments, with his rubbery and doleful features working comically around the bitter mouthful, then spat out a hard black glassy eye big as an apple seed into the trough of the urinal. Lazily, it drifted down the foaming channel to bring up against the round white cakes of disinfectant nestling beside the drain, where it gazed up indifferently at Fred and Georgie.
“But you’re right, though. Bleeding hypocrites, they are. This is the vilest Hag’s Tit as I’ve ever tasted.” Georgie took another bite and chewed it, made another face and spat another bead of jet into the glazed white gutter. Hag’s Tit was a different name by which Puck’s Hats were sometimes known, along with Bedlam Jenny, Whispers-in-the-Wood or Devil Fingers. They were all the same thing, and however bad it tasted Freddy knew that Georgie Bumble would make sure to eat the whole affair and not waste any, just because the things were such a pick-me-up. Why that should be, Fred didn’t know. He had a notion that it was connected to the way the bulb’s shoots seemed to interfere with time, so people would miss out whole hours or days while they were dancing with the fairies or whatever they imagined they were doing. Just as lower vegetables sucked up goodness from the substance of whatever they were growing in, perhaps the Puck’s Hat also sucked up time, or at least time as people knew it? And if that were true, perhaps that was what gave rough sleepers like Freddy himself or Georgie such a boost. Perhaps to their sort, human time was like a vitamin they didn’t get enough of these days, since they left the life. Perhaps that was why they were all so bloody pale. Fred thought about these things during spare, idle moments, of which he had clearly known more than a few.
Georgie had chewed and swallowed his last bite, expectorated his last spaceman’s eyeball and was now wiping his rosebud lips, already looking livelier. Freddy was starting to feel cooped up in the twilight lavatories, and could see faint blurred images of modern cars in rows beneath tube-lighting through the V.D. poster. He decided to bring up the reason why he’d called at Georgie’s office, so he could discharge his duties and get out of there the sooner.
“Why I dropped by, Georgie, was I’d just been round to visit them on Scarletwell Street corner, and they mentioned they’d not seen you in a while and were concerned, so I said I’d pop in and make sure everything was hunky-dory.”
Georgie pursed his lips into a little smile, a twinkle in his liquid eyes as he began to feel the mild effect of the unripe Puck’s Hat that he’d ingested.
“Well now, bless the both of you for thinking after me, but I’m all right, same as I ever was. I don’t get out much anymore, because of all the traffic on the Mayorhold these days. It’s a nightmare to me now, out there, but with a bit of luck in a few hundred years or so the lot of it will be a wasteland or a bombsite. You’ll get Rose Bay Willow Herb and that come up where it’s all bollards and keep-left signs now, and then perhaps I’ll get out a bit more. It’s good of you to look in, Freddy, and send my regards to them what keeps the corner, but I’m fine. Still sucking off me monks, but other than that I’ve got no complaints.”
There didn’t seem much Fred could say to that, so he told Georgie that he’d not leave it so long next time before he paid a visit, and they both shook hands as best they could. Fred pushed his way out of the toilet’s entrance through the pliable machines and dump-trucks, through the bramble months and years with thorns made out of painful moments, out into the fuming thunder of the Mayorhold and the shadow of the multi-storey car park at his back. With the remembered reek of Georgie’s office still about him, and despite the fug of vehicle exhaust that hung above the junction, Freddy wished that he could draw a good deep breath. It got you down, seeing the way some of them muddled through these days, just sticking in their little dens or in the shadow-places where their dens once were. Still, that was Freddy’s duties finished with, so now he could keep his appointment down in Bath Street. He’d see Patsy, and put Georgie Bumble and the day as it had thus far been behind him. But you couldn’t, he reflected, could you? No one could put anything behind them, draw a line beneath it and pretend that it had gone away. No deed, no word, no thought. It was still there back down the way, still there forever. Fred considered this as he strode out into the stream of motorcars, dragging grey snapshots of his previous several seconds like a tail behind him, off to get his how’s-your-father.
On the Mayorhold’s far side, at its southwest corner, he went through the barrier and straight down Bath Street, feeling stirrings in the phantom remnants of his trousers that were brought on either by the Puck’s Hat or the thought of Patsy. As he reached the entrance to the gardens he slowed down, knowing that if he were to get back to the place where she was waiting for him, further digging was required. He glanced up the deserted avenue between the two halves of the flats, with its grass verges and brick walls with half-moon openings to either side, towards the path or steps or ramp or whatever it was at present, up there at the top. The scroungey-looking stray that he’d seen in St. Mary’s Street a little earlier that day was still around, sniffing the curbing bordering the grass. Fred steeled himself in preparation, then began to shoulder his way into all the rubbish piled up right back to the fifties. He pushed through the glory days of Mary Jane and further still, back through the blackout and the sirens, folding pre-war washing lines and cockle-sellers to one side like reeds until the sudden stench and lack of visibility told Freddy that he’d reached his destination, back in the high twenties where somebody else’s wife was waiting for him.
What the smell was, just as with the veil of smoke so you could barely see your hand before your face, all that was the Destructor, just downhill to Freddy’s right and towering up above him so he couldn’t bear to look at it. Keeping his eyes fixed straight ahead, Freddy began to walk across the patch of designated recreation area with its swings, its slide and maypole, that extended where the central avenue of Bath Street flats had been moments before, or where it would be nearly eighty years from now, depending how you saw things. This grim playground had been called ‘The Orchard’, Freddy knew, but always with a certain irony and bitterness. Off to each side of him the blocks of flats in dark red brick had disappeared, and where the border walls with half-moon holes had been were now two scatterings of terraced houses facing one another from across the intervening scrub-ground with its choking pall of smoke.
Approaching him through this, along the beaten path that ran across the middle of the hard, bare ground from Castle Street to Bath Street was the vague shape of a figure walking, pushing a perambulator. Freddy knew that when this had come closer to him through the sooty air it would turn out to be young Clara, Joe Swan’s missus, lucky bugger. Fred knew that it would be Clara because she was always here, pushing her baby carriage down between the swings and wooden roundabout, when he came to see Patsy. She was always here because she’d been here on that afternoon the first time when this happened between him and Patsy Clarke. The only time it happened, come to think of it. As she stepped from the acrid fogbank with her baby carriage, pushing it along the packed dirt path towards him, Clara Swan and Clara’s baby daughter in the pushchair left no images behind them. No one did down here. This was where everyone was still alive.
Clara was beautiful, a lovely woman in her thirties, slender as a rake and with long auburn hair that Joe Swan had once said his wife could sit on when it wasn’t wound up in a bun as it was now, topped with a small black bonnet that had artificial flowers on the band. She brought the carriage to a halt when she saw Fred and recognised her husband’s pal, dropping her chin and looking up at him from underneath her lowered brow, eyes disapproving and yet still compassionate. Fred knew that this was only partly something she put on for his and her amusement. Clara was a very upright woman and would have no nonsense or tomfoolery. Before she’d married Joe she’d worked in service, like a lot of them lived down the Boroughs had before they were let go, at Althorp House for the Red Earl or somewhere of that sort, and she’d picked up the manners and the bearing that the better-off expected of her. Not that she was snooty, but that she was fair and honest and sometimes looked down a bit on those who weren’t, though not unkindly. She knew that most people had a reason for the way they were, and when it came to it she didn’t judge.
“Why, Freddy Allen, you young rogue. What are you up to round here? No good, I’ll be bound.”
This was what Clara always said when they met here, towards the Bath Street end of the dirt path from Castle Street, upon this smoky afternoon.
“Ooh, you know me. Trying me luck as always. Who’s that in the pram you’ve got there? Is that young Doreen?”
Clara was smiling now despite herself. She liked Fred really and he knew she did beneath all that Victorian disapproval. With a bird-like nod of her head to one side she summoned Freddy over to the pram so he could take a look within, where Doreen, Joe and Clara’s year-old daughter, lay asleep, her mouth plugged by her thumb. She was a lovely little thing, and you could tell Clara was proud of her, the way she’d called him over for a look. He complimented her upon the baby, as he always did, and then they chatted for a while, as ever. Finally they reached the part where Clara said that some folk had got jobs at home that needed to be done, and that she’d wish him a good afternoon and let him get on with whatever shady business he was up to.
Freddy watched her push the pram away from him into the smoke that, naturally, was thickest over Bath Street where the tower of the Destructor stood, and then he turned and carried on along the path to Castle Street, waiting for Patsy to call out to him the way she had that first time, how she called out to him every time.
“Fred! Freddy Allen! Over here!”
Patsy stood at the entrance to the little alley that ran down by one side of the right-hand houses near the Bath Street end, and led through to the back yards of the buildings, all in a big square there to the rear of the Destructor. In so far as Fred could see her through the rolling billows, Patsy looked a treat, a curvy little blonde lass with a bit of meat on her, the way Fred liked them. She was older than what Freddy was, not that it put him off at all, and had a sort of knowing look as she stood smiling in the alley mouth. Perhaps because it was so smoky or because the further back you went the harder it was keeping it all straight, but Freddy could see a faint flicker around Patsy, where the alley would change for a second to a railed brick archway, its black iron railings passing down through Patsy’s head and torso, then change back again to the rear garden walls of houses, with their bricks a brighter orange yet far dirtier than those comprising Bath Street flats had been. He waited for his view of her to properly solidify, then walked towards her jauntily, his hands deep in his raggedy-arsed trouser pockets and his hat jammed on his head to hide his bald patch. Here in 1928 some of his other flaws had been alleviated … he’d no beer belly down here for instance … but his hair had started going during Fred’s mid-twenties, which is why he’d worn the hat since then.
When he got near enough to Patsy so that they could see each other properly he stopped and grinned at her, the way he had that first time, only now it had more meanings to it. That first time, it had just meant “I know you fancy me”, whereas it now meant something like “I know you fancy me because I’ve lived this through a thousand times and we’re both dead now, and it’s actually quite funny how the pair of us keeping coming back down here, here to this moment.” That was how it was with every part of the exchange between them, always just the same and word for word, yet with new ironies behind the phrases and the gestures that had come with their new situation. Take what he was just about to say, for one example:
“Hello, Patsy. We’ll have to stop meeting like this.”
That had been a bit of fun, first time he’d said it. Truthfully, they’d seen each other once or twice across a pub lounge or a market stall, but putting it like that and saying that they must stop meeting, as if they were having an affair already, that had been a way of joking with the subject while at least bringing the idea up into their conversation. Now, though, the remark had other connotations. Patsy beamed at him and played with one dishwater lock as she replied.
“Well, suit yourself. I’ll tell you this much though, if you sail past me one more time then you’ll have missed your chance. I shan’t be waiting here forever.”
There it was again, another double meaning that they’d both been unaware of the first time they’d said these words. Fred grinned at Patsy through the smoke.
“Why, Patsy Clarke, you ought to be ashamed. And you a married woman, with your ’til death do us part and all of that.”
She didn’t drop her smile or take her eyes from his.
“Oh, him. He’s out of town, working away. It’s getting so I can’t remember the last time I saw him.”
This had been exaggeration when she’d told Fred that originally, but it wasn’t anymore. Frank Clarke, her husband, was no longer drifting round the lower levels of the Boroughs in the way both Fred and Patsy were. He’d moved on to a better life, had Frank. Climbed up the ladder, so to speak. It was all right for him. He’d nothing troubling his conscience that was keeping him down here, whereas Fred had all sorts of things holding him back, as he’d explained down Scarletwell Street. As for Patsy, she had Fred, along with several others from those parts. She’d been a generous woman with that generous body, and her countless sticky afternoons with all their guilty pleasures were like millstones that had weighed her down, preventing her departure. Looking up at Freddy now she wiped her smile away, replacing it with a more serious expression that was almost challenging.
“I’ve not been eating right, with him not here. I’ve not had a hot meal for ages.”
This, with its unwitting irony, was possibly a reference to the Puck’s Hats, staple diet for lower Boroughs residents like Fred and Patsy. She went on.
“I was just thinking how long it had been since I’d had something warm inside me. Knowing you, you’re probably feeling peckish around now yourself. Why don’t you come through to me kitchen, just up here? We’ll see if we find anything to satisfy our cravings.”
Fred was on the bone now, good and proper. Hearing steps on the dirt path behind him he craned round his head in time to see young Phyllis Painter, all of eight years old, skip past across the recreation ground towards its Bath Street end. She glanced at him and Patsy and smirked knowingly then carried on along the pathway and was gone into the rolling sepia clouds, off to her house down Scarletwell Street, just beside the school. Fred couldn’t tell if the girl’s smile had been because she knew what him and Patsy would be getting up to, or if little Phyllis was a revenant revisiting the scene like he was, and was smiling because she knew how this was a loop that Fred and Patsy Clarke were trapped within, however willingly. Phyll Painter and her gang ran wild across the Boroughs’ length and breadth and depth and whenth. They scampered round the twenty-fives where that black woman with the golly hairdo and the nasty scar above her eye did all her work, the one they called a saint, or else her and her hooligans cut through his mate’s house up to Spring Lane Terrace in the dead of night on their adventures. They might well be scrumping Puck’s Hats all the way down here around the twenty-eights, but on the other hand Phyll Painter would be eight years old in normal living time around this year and hadn’t had her gang with her when she went skipping past just then. It was most likely Phyllis Painter as a living child, or at least as his memory of her upon that bygone afternoon, rather than as the little troublemaker she’d turned into since she got out of the life.
He turned back towards Patsy, his face pointing now the same way as his cock was. He delivered his last unintentionally slanted line … “I never say no, you know me” … before she dragged him up the alleyway, both laughing now, and through into the back yard of the third house to their right, with next to it the slaughter-yard behind the butcher’s, Mr. Bullock, his shop situated down by the Destructor. From the sound of it, some pigs were being hung and bled next door which would, as ever, cover up the noises he and Patsy made. She flung the back door open and pulled Fred into the kitchen, reaching down and tugging him along by his stiff prick through his rough pants and trousers once they’d got inside, away from prying eyes. They went through like this to the cramped-up, lightless living room, where Patsy had a coal fire burning in the fireplace. It had been a brisk March day as Fred remembered it.
He went to kiss her, knowing that she’d say his bad breath smelled like something died. It wasn’t just that some things that they’d said that afternoon turned out to have another meaning. It was all of them. At any rate, Patsy was firm about the kissing, as she had been all the other times.
“Don’t take it personal. I never can be doing with a lot of soppy stuff like that. Just get it out and stick it in, that’s what I always say.”
They were both breathing harder, or at least appearing to be doing so. Fred had known Patsy since they’d both been grey-kneed kids at Spring Lane School together. Lifting her skirts up around her waist she turned to face the fireplace, looking back at Fred across her shoulder, her face flushed. She wasn’t wearing any knickers underneath the skirt.
“Go on, Fred. Be a devil.”
Fred supposed he must be. Look at where he was. She turned her face away from him again and placed her hands flat on the wall to each side of the mirror that was hung above the mantelpiece. He could see both her face and his, both in the glass and both of them excited. Freddy fumbled with his fly-buttons a moment, then released his straining member. Spitting a grey substance out into his grubby palm he rubbed it on the gleaming, bulbous tip then pushed the length of it up Patsy’s pouting fanny, drenched already with ghost-fluids of its own. He clutched her roughly by her waist for leverage then started slamming himself into her, as forcefully as he could manage. This was just as wonderful as Fred remembered it. No more, no less. It’s just that the experience had faded with each repetition until almost all the joy was gone from it, like an old tea towel that had been wrung out time after time until the pattern on it disappeared. It was better than nothing, just. At the same moment that he always did he took his right hand off of Patsy’s hip and sucked the thumb to make it wet before he shoved it up her bumhole to the knuckle. She was shouting now, above the squealing from the yard next door.
“Oh, God. Oh, fuck me, I’m in heaven. Fuck me, Freddy. Fuck the life out of me. Oh. Oh, fuck.”
Freddy glanced down from Patsy’s straining, labouring face caught in the mirror to where his thick bristling organ … these had been the days … was glistening grey like wet sand in a seaside photo, thrusting in and out of Patsy’s slurping, fur-fringed hole. He didn’t know which sight he liked the best, not even after all these years, and so kept looking back and forth between them. He was glad that from this angle he could never see his own face in the mirror, since he knew that he’d look daffy with his hat still on, and that he’d laugh and that would put him off his stroke.
It was just then that Freddy noticed something from the corner of his eye. He couldn’t turn his head to look straight on because he hadn’t done so on that first occasion. Whatever this was, it hadn’t happened then. This was some novelty that might spice up the old routine.
He soon determined that it was the flickering effect he’d noticed back when Patsy had first greeted him, stood in the alley that kept turning to an arch with railings. It was something that would happen sometimes when you’d dug your way back to the past. It was as if the present had you on elastic and kept trying to pull you back, so that you’d see bits of it breaking in to interrupt whichever time it was you’d burrowed back to. In this instance, out the corner of his eye, Freddy could see a pretty, skinny little brown girl sitting in an armchair where the straps had busted underneath. She had her hair in ridges that had bald stripes in between, and had a shiny sort of raincoat on although she was indoors. What was the strangest thing was that she sat there staring straight at him and Patsy with a little smile and one hand resting casually down in her lap, turned inwards, so it looked as if she could not only see them, but as if she was enjoying it. The thought that they were being watched by a young girl gave Freddy a mild extra thrill, although he knew it wouldn’t bring him off too soon, before they’d got to the appointed time. Besides, a guilty feeling that related to her age offset the slight jolt of excitement that the coloured lass had given him. She looked about sixteen or seventeen, despite her rough condition, and was barely yet out of her childhood. Luckily, the next time Fred had rocked back far enough in fucking Patsy so that he could catch a glimpse out of the corner of his eye, the girl had gone and he could concentrate on doing the job properly.
Where had he seen her recently, that girl? He’d known her face from somewhere, he was sure. Had he bumped into her earlier today? No. No, he knew now where it was. It had been yesterday, round dinnertime. He’d been under the portico at Peter’s Church. There’d been a boy in there, a living one, asleep and drunk, so Freddy had crept in and got down next to him. It was a young lad, mousy-haired, with a big baggy woollen jumper and those shoes what they called bumpers on his feet, and Freddy thought the sleeper wouldn’t mind if he lay down beside him just to listen to him breathe, a sound Fred missed. He’d been there for an hour or two when he heard the high heels approaching down Marefair and past the church-front, getting closer. He’d sat up and seen her walking past, the girl he’d just seen sitting in her phantom armchair, watching him and Patsy. She weren’t looking at him as she walked along, her bare brown legs just swinging back and forth, but something told him that she might have been, and he decided he’d best leave before she looked again. That’s where he’d seen her. Yesterday, and not today.
His moment was approaching. Patsy started screaming as she had her climax.
“Yes! Oh yes! Oh, fuck, I’m dying! Fuck, I’m going to die! Oh God!”
Freddy was thinking of the brown girl with her long legs and her scandalously tiny skirt as he shot three or four cold jets of ectoplasm into Patsy. For the life of him, or at least so to speak, he was unable to remember what he had been thinking about when he’d shot his load that first time, when his juice had still been warm. He took his thumb out of her arse and slid his dripping and deflating penis out of her, reflecting as he did so that while what he squirted from his cock these days was a much cooler liquid than his seed had been, it looked about the same. He tucked the gleaming, sagging weapon back inside his pants and trousers, buttoning the fly, while Patsy pulled her skirts down and composed herself. She turned towards him from the mantelpiece and mirror. There were only one or two more lines of dialogue to be said.
“God, that was nice … although you needn’t think that you can come round every afternoon. That was a one-off opportunity. Now, come along, you’d best be getting off before the neighbours start their nosing everywhere. Most likely I’ll be seeing you round and about.”
“See you around, then, Patsy.”
That was that. Fred went out through the kitchen and the back yard, where the noise of all the slaughter from across the high brick wall had ended. Opening the back yard’s gate he stepped into the alleyway, then walked along it to the smoke-screened recreation area, the Orchard. This was where he always stepped out of his memories and into his existence in the present, standing here outside the alley-mouth and looking at the hazy children’s playground with its slide and maypole looming dimly through the churning smog. Freddy’s own maypole wasn’t as impressive now as it had been just a few minutes back, when he’d been out here last. When he looked down he noticed that his beer belly was coming back. With a resigned tut, Freddy let the scenery around him snap back to the way it was upon May 26<sup>th</sup>, 2006. There was a giddy rush of melting walls and swings, of sooty brick that foamed up out of nothing to construct the flats, then Freddy stood once more beside the gated archway, looking out across the grass and empty central avenue to where the scruffy dog that he’d seen earlier was still about. To Freddy it looked agitated, trotting back and forth, as if it hadn’t moved its bowels in quite a time.
Fred sympathised. That was, surprisingly, one of the things he missed the most, that blessed feeling of relief when all the smelly poisons and the badness in a person just fell out in a great rush and could be flushed away. What Fred had, he supposed, was like a constipation of the spirit. That’s what kept him down here and prevented him from moving on, the fact he couldn’t let it go like that and just be rid of the whole stinking lot of it. The fact that Freddy carried it around inside him, all his shit, and with each decade that went by it made him feel more sluggish and more irritable. In another century, he doubted he’d feel like himself at all.
He moved across the grass and floated up the avenue towards the ramp, passing the scabby dog, which jumped back and barked twice at him before deciding that he was no danger and resuming its uneasy trotting back and forth. Entering Castle Street up at the ramp’s top, Freddy went along towards where the no-entry joined it with Horsemarket, then turned right. He might have promised Mary Jane he’d call by at the Jolly Smokers later on, but that could wait. He’d go and watch his billiards first, along the centre down in Horseshoe Street where he’d sent that old chaplain earlier.
He glided down Horsemarket and remembered, with a pang of shame, how once before the present dual carriageway was here it had been fancy houses, owned by doctors and solicitors and all the like. The shame he felt now was occasioned by the lovely daughters that some of the gentlemen who lived down there had raised. One in particular, a doctor’s girl called Julia that Freddy had developed quite a thing for, never talking to her, only watching from a distance. He’d known that she’d never talk to him, not in a million years. That’s why he’d thought of raping her.
He burned, to think about it now, although he’d never seen it through. Just the idea that he’d considered it, had gone as far as planning how he’d wait until she’d crossed Horsemarket on her way to her job in the Drapery one morning, then would grab her as she took her customary route up by St. Katherine’s Gardens. He had even risen at the crack of dawn one day and gone up there to wait, but when he saw her he’d come to his senses and had run off, crying to himself. He’d been eighteen. That was one of the hard and heavy stools he kept inside him that he couldn’t pass, the heaviest and hardest.
He crossed over Marefair at the bottom, waiting for the lights to change from grey to grey so he could walk across with all the other people, though he didn’t need to. He went over Horseshoe Street’s continuation of the growling metal waterfall that ran down from Horsemarket, then turned right and headed for the centre and its billiard hall. As Freddy did so he passed by and partly through a tubby chap with curly white hair and a little beard, with eyes that seemed to shift continually from arrogance to furtiveness and back behind his spectacles. This was another one that Freddy recognised and had call to remember. It had been some nights ago, about four in the morning. Freddy had been swirling lazily along a pre-dawn Marefair, just enjoying the desertion when he’d heard a man’s voice calling out to him, afraid and trembling.
“Hello? Hello there? Can you hear me? Am I dead?”
Freddy had turned to find out who was interrupting his night’s wanderings and seen the little fat man, the same one he’d just this moment brushed through in broad daylight up on Gold Street corner. The bespectacled and bearded fifty-something had been standing, in the small hours, on the traffic-free deserted hump of Black Lion Hill, dressed only in his vest, his wristwatch and his underpants. He’d stood there staring anxiously at Freddy, looking lost and frightened. Fred had thought, just for a moment, that the man had only lately got out of the life and that’s why he seemed so confused, stood there amongst the lamplight and the shadows with the street and buildings curdling in and out of different centuries around him. Then, when he’d took note of how the little berk was dressed, in just his under-things, Fred knew that this was someone dreaming. The rough sleepers that you got down here were all dressed how they best remembered themselves dressing, and even the ones who’d not been dead ten minutes wouldn’t waddle round in old stained underpants. If they were in the nude or in their pants or their pyjamas then it was a safe bet they were folk still in the life, who’d stumbled accidentally on these parts in their dreams.
Fred, at the time, had took a dislike to the bloke who’d interrupted his nice solitary stroll, and thought he’d put the wind up him. You didn’t often get the chance to make a real impression on the ones still down there in the strangles of existence and, besides, the self-important little pisspot had been asking for it. Giving this consideration as he trickled down the slope of Horseshoe Street towards the billiard hall, he knew it had been mean, the prank he’d pulled upon the dreaming man that night, rushing towards the fellow in a flailing, terrifying cloud of after-images, though it still made him chuckle when he thought about it. That was life, he finally concluded. People shouldn’t just go launching into it if they can’t take a joke.
He slipped into the billiard hall unnoticed and then found his way out back and went upstairs to the top floor. From here he went upstairs again, went properly upstairs, using what types like him referred to as a crook-door which in this case, unbeknownst to the establishment’s living proprietors, was hidden in the corner of an upstairs lumber room. Just past the crook-door’s four-way hinge there was a Jacob Flight with tired old wooden steps that Fred knew, ultimately, led up to the landings. He began to mount it anyway, knowing the place he wanted would be only halfway up. He wouldn’t have to venture within shouting distance of the higher balconies, the Attics of the Breath. He wouldn’t have to feel he’d got above himself.
The Jacob Flight, a seemingly deliberately inconvenient construction somewhere in between a boxed-in staircase and a roofer’s ladder, was as awkward and exhausting to ascend as ever. All the treads were no more than three inches deep while all the risers were a good foot-and-a-half. This meant you had to climb the stairs just as you would a ladder, sort of upright on all fours, using your hands and feet. But on the other hand you were enclosed by rough white plaster walls to either side, the stairway being no more than four feet across, with just above your head a steeply sloping ceiling, also in white plaster. The ridiculous impracticality of such an angle to the stairway made it seem like something from a dream, which Fred supposed it was. Someone’s dream, somewhere, sometime. On the ledge-thin wooden steps beneath his toes and fingertips, again a dream-like detail, an old stair-carpet was fitted, brown with the dark writhing of its floral patterns faded nearly to invisibility and held in place by worn brass stair-rods. Puffing from what he assumed was spiritual exertion, Fred climbed up and on.
At last he reached the enterprise’s true top deck, the upper billiard hall, and clambered through a trapdoor up into the cluttered, dusty little office room that was to one side of the main floor with its single giant snooker table, extra wide and extra long. From all the footprints through the faintly phosphorescent moon-dust on the dirty floorboards, and the hubbub that he heard beyond in the main hall while opening the creaky office door, it sounded as though he was late. Tonight’s game had already started. Freddy tiptoed round the edges of the huge dark games room, trying to put no one off their shot, and joined the small crowd of spectators standing at the room’s top end in their allotted area, watching the professionals at play.
That was the way it worked. Those were the house rules. The rough sleepers such as Freddy were quite welcome to come there and be supporters, but not play. Quite frankly, none of them would want to, not with stakes like that. It was sufficiently nerve-wracking just to gaze between your fingers at the contest going on at the vast table over there, in the bright pillar of white light that fell from overhead. Around the baize, the builders who were taking part strode back and forth with confidence, chalking their alabaster cues and warily inspecting tricky angles, pacing up and down along the borders of the table, twenty-five feet long and twelve feet wide. Only the builders were allowed their game of snooker, or whatever the queer version that they played was called. Riff-raff like Freddy simply stood there in a quietly shuffling mob at the far end and made an effort not to gasp or groan too loudly.
There were several in the crowd of onlookers tonight that Freddy recognised. Three-fingered Tunk who’d had his stall up in the Fish Market for one, and Nobby Clark, all got up in the ‘Dirty Dick’ gear that he’d worn when he was in the bicycle parade, and holding his old placard with the Pears Soap advert on: “Ten years ago I used your soap, and since then I have used no other”. How had Nobby ever got that up the Jacob Flight, Fred wondered? He could see Jem Perrit standing at the crowd’s perimeter and looking on with relish at the snooker. Freddy thought he’d slide across and join him.
“Hello, Jem. I saw you on the Mayorhold just this dinnertime. Your Bessie was just taking you off home, and you were snoring.” Bessie was Jem’s spectral horse.
“Aa. I’d bin up the Smokers for me Puck’s ’At Punch. I ’spect it was the work as I’d bin doin’ as ’ad wore me ayt. That’s when yuh seen me on the Merruld.”
Jem spoke with the real Northampton twang, the proper Boroughs accent that you didn’t really hear no more. Wood-merchant had been how Jem made his living back when he still had a living to be made, a wiry tinker-looking chap with a hook nose, his dark and doleful shape perched up there on his horse and cart behind the reins. These days, Jem’s line of work, if not his living, was as an unusually enterprising and phantasmal junkman. Him and Bessie would roam round the county’s less substantial territories, with Jem picking up such apparition-artefacts as he should find along his way. These might be old discarded wraith-clothes, or a vivid memory of a tea-chest out of someone’s childhood, or they might be things that made no sense at all and were left over from a dream somebody had. Freddy remembered once when Jem had found a sort of curling alpine horn fashioned to look like an elongated and intricately detailed fish, but with a trunk much like an elephant’s and things that looked like glass eyes in a stripe down either side. They’d tried to play it, but its bore was stuffed with tight-packed sawdust that had funny plastic trinkets buried in it. It had no doubt joined the other curios there in the front room of the ghost of Jem’s house, halfway down the ghost of Freeschool Street. Right now, whenever that might be, because you never really knew up here, the fish-horn was most probably displayed in Jem’s front window with the phantom Grenadier’s dress jacket and the reminiscences of chairs.
The Puck’s Hat Punch that Jem had mentioned was just what it sounded like: a kind of moonshine that could be distilled out of the higher vegetables and ingested. Fred had never fancied it and had heard tales of how it had sent some ex-lifers barmy, so he left it well alone. The thought of being all in bits and barely able to hold any real identity together for the rest of your near-infinite existence sent a shudder up the spine that Fred no longer had. Jem seemed all right, though. Possibly, if Fred was in the mood, then later on when he went up the Jolly Smokers as he’d promised Mary Jane he would when leaving here, he’d give the punch a sniff, see what he thought. One glass would do no harm, and until then he could relax and watch the game.
He stood there in the shadows next to Jem and all the others, sharing in the ragged congregation’s reverent silence. Freddy squinted at the house-wide table in its shaft of brilliance and could see immediately why the spectators seemed unusually rapt this evening. The four players gathered round the table weren’t just ordinary builders, as if there could be such things as builders that were ordinary. These lads were the four top men, the Master Builders, and that meant tonight’s match was important. This was championship stuff.
As they progressed around the massive billiard tale in their bare feet and their long white smocks, the senior builders all left trails behind, though not as Freddy and his friends did. Fred and them had faint grey photos of themselves in an evaporating string they dragged behind them, while the builders left these burned-through white bits in the air where they’d been standing, blazing after-shapes like when you glimpse the sun or stare up at a light-bulb filament, then close your eyes. That was the way that ‘ordinary’ builders were, but this quartet tonight were ten times worse, especially around their heads where the effect was more pronounced. To tell the truth it hurt to look at them.
The outsized table they were playing on had just four pockets, one up in each corner. Since the table was aligned so it was parallel with the club’s walls, Fred knew the corners lined up with what might be seen, approximately, as the corners of the Boroughs. Set into the heavy varnished woodwork of the table just above each pocket was a separate symbol. These were roughly carved into the centre of the wooden discs that decorated the four corners of the table, gouged in a crude style that looked like tramp-marks, yet inlaid with gold as though it were the most adored and cherished holy manuscript. The symbol at the southwest corner was the childish outline of a castle-turret, while there was a big prick such as you might find drawn on a toilet wall up to the northwest end. A loose depiction of a skull marked the northeast, and Fred could see a wonky cross inscribed at the southeast, the corner nearest to where he and Jem were standing. Since it was a bigger table, there were lots more balls in play, and it was lucky that the builders would call out the colour of the ball that they were going for, since all of them were grey or black or white to Freddy and his friends.
If he were honest, Fred had never really understood the game the builders played, not intellectually so that he could explain the rules or anything, although he knew emotionally, down in his stomach so to speak, what it entailed. You had four players taking part at once, and each had their own corner pocket, with the idea being to knock all the balls you could in your own hole while trying to make it difficult for your opponents to pot all the ones they wanted to. Part of the thrill of watching it was all the trails the balls would leave behind them as they rolled across the baize or else collided with each other, ricocheting from the table edge in sharply pointed pentagrams of overlapped trajectory. The other, more anxiety-provoking part of the enjoyment was the way each ball had its own aura, so you knew it stood for someone, or something. It would just come to you inside your thoughts, what each ball meant, while you stood watching as they bounced and skittered round the table. Freddy focussed on the game in hand.
Most of the action seemed to be down to the east side of the table which, as luck would have it, was the side that Freddy and his fellow audience members were all standing on. The western builders, standing near the cock and castle pockets didn’t seem like they had much to do just at the moment and were leaning on their cues watching intently as their colleagues at the eastern corners fought it out between them. As Fred watched with permanently bated breath, the builder playing to the southeast pocket, with the cross on, was about to take his shot. Of the four Master Builders that were playing there tonight (and in so far as Freddy knew there were just four in that league anywhere), this one to the southeast was the most popular with all the locals, since the other three apparently came more from out of town and usually weren’t seen much hereabouts. The local favourite was a solid, powerful-looking chap who had white hair, although his face was young. His name was Mighty Mike, or so Fred thought he’d heard the fellow called. He was so famous for the way he played a game of snooker that even the lads below down in the life had heard of him, had even put a statue of him on their Guildhall’s gable roof.
He leaned across the baize now, low above his cue and squinting down its length towards what even Fred could see was a white ball. This white ball represented, Freddy understood, somebody white, somebody that Fred didn’t know who more than likely wasn’t from round here. The white-haired builder known as Mighty Mike now called out “Black into cross corner”, and then punched his cue once, hard, into the white ball, sending it at high velocity across the breadth of the tremendous table with its trail behind it like a tight-packed string of bright white pearls. It hit the west side of the table … Freddy thought that it might represent all them what left here for America after the Civil War with Cromwell … then rebounded into a collision with the black ball that the white-haired artisan had actually been aiming for, a sharp smack ringing round the dimly-lit hall as they hit. The black ball, Freddy understood with sudden clarity, was Charley George, Black Charley, and he felt a great relief that he could not explain when it shot neatly to drop into the south-eastern pocket, where the sloppy, gold-etched cross was carved into the round boss on the table’s edge.
The local hero with the chalk-white hair did that thing all the builders did whenever any of them pulled off a successful shot, throwing both fists up in the air above his head, the cue still clutched in one of them, and shouting an exultant “Yes!” before he let them drop once more down to his sides. Since both arms left their hot white trails as they ascended and descended through the space to either side of him, the end effect was that of burning pinions fanning up to form the shapes of brilliant full-spread wings. The odd thing was that all the builders did this every time one of them pulled off a successful shot, as though the nature of their game did not involve them being in a competition with each other. All of them, at all four corners of the table, threw their hands up and cried “Yes!” in jubilation as the black ball dropped into the southeast corner pocket. Now it was apparently the builder at the northeast pocket’s turn to take his shot, into the corner decorated with a skull.
This builder was a foreigner, and nowhere near so well liked by the home crowd as what Mighty Mike had been. His name was Yuri-something, Fred had heard, and in his face there was a hardness and determination that Fred thought might very well be Russian. He was dark, with shorter hair than the home favourite as he took the long walk round the table’s edge to the most favourable position, bent above his cue and sighted down it at the white ball. As with all the builders’ voices, when he spoke it had that funny echo on it that broke into little bits and shivered into ringing nothing.
“Grey into skull corner” was a fair approximation of what he’d said.
This was getting interesting. Freddy didn’t know quite who the grey ball made him think of. It was someone bald, balder than Freddy, even, and was also someone grey, grey in a moral sense, perhaps even more grey than Freddy was as well. The grim-faced Russian-looking builder took his shot. The white ball streaked with its pale comet-tail across the table to clap loudly up against another ball that Freddy couldn’t tell the colour of. Was it the grey one Yuri-something meant to hit, or something else? Whatever colour it might be, this second ball shot off towards the skull-marked corner.
Oh no, Fred thought suddenly. It came into his head just who the hurtling ball was meant to represent. It was the little brown girl with the lovely legs and the hard face who he’d seen by St. Peter’s Church the other afternoon and then again today, sat watching him and Patsy at their Bath Street assignation. She was going into the skull pocket, and Fred knew that this meant nothing good for the poor child.
A hand’s breadth from the death’s-head drop, the hurtling ball impacted with another. This one, Freddy thought, must be the grey ball that the Russian-looking player had declared to be his target. It was knocked into the pocket Yuri-something had intended, whereupon he and the other Master Builders all threw up their arms into a dazzling spread of feathered rays and shouted out in unison their “Yes!” with all its splintering, diminishing reverberations. Just as suddenly, however, all the uproar died away when everybody noticed that the ball Yuri had used to knock the grey into the hole was now itself perched at the northeast pocket’s rim. This was the ball that Freddy had associated with the brown girl he’d seen earlier. This wasn’t looking good. The grim-faced player who’d just made the shot looked down towards the ball now teetering upon the brink of the skull-pocket that he’d chosen as his own, then looked across the table and at Mighty Mike, the white-haired local champion. The Russian-looking fellow flashed a chilly little smile and then began to pointedly chalk up his cue. Fred hated him. So did the crowd. He was like Mick McManus or a wrestling villain of that nature, someone who the crowd would hiss, except of course they wouldn’t in this case, however they might feel. Nobody hissed at builders.
It was now the sturdy white-haired favourite’s turn to take his shot, but he looked worried. His opponent clearly planned to knock the threatened ball into his own skull corner pocket with his next go, unless Mighty Mike could somehow move it out of danger. It was so close to the hole, though, that the slightest touch might send it tumbling in. It was a bugger. Fred was so wound up he almost fancied he could feel his heart pound in his chest. The local hero slowly and deliberately walked round the monstrous snooker table to a spot on its far side, where he crouched down to make his fraught and crucial play. Just as he did so he looked straight across the baize and into Freddy’s eyes, so that it made him jump. The look was sober, hard and obviously intentional, so that even Jem Perrit, stood beside Fred, turned and whispered to him.
“Watch ayt, Fred. The big man’s lookin’ at yuh. What are yuh done now?”
Fred numbly shook his head and said that he’d done nothing, at which Jem had cocked his head back and regarded Fred suspiciously and cannily.
“Well, then, what are yer <em>gunner</em> do?”
When Fred did not know how to answer this, both men turned back to watch the builder take his shot. He wasn’t looking now at Freddy, with his eyes instead fixed firmly on the white ball he was lining up. Amongst the crowd of onlookers you could have heard a pin drop. This is all to do with me, Fred thought. The way he looked at me just now. This is to do with me.
“Brown in cross pocket,” said the white-haired Master Builder, although what he really said was a fair bit more complicated.
Straight away his cue shot out – a boxer’s jab – and sent the white ball slamming up the table with its after-images a stream of bursting bubbles in its wake. It whacked explosively into a ball whose grey seemed slightly warm so Freddy thought it might be red, and sent it like a rocket so it struck between the brown ball and the death-trap pocket with a noise that sounded like it hurt, so all the rough-shod audience winced at the same time. The brown ball shot into the southeast pocket at the cross-marked corner of the table like a thunderbolt, and everybody in the room, not just the robe-draped foursome that were playing, threw their arms above their heads and shouted “Yes!” all with one voice. The only difference that there was between the players and spectators was that the fanned shapes the former made when they threw up their arms were blinding white, while those the audience made were grey and looked more like the wings of pigeons. Having pulled off this spectacular accomplishment, the white-haired builder looked once more across the table and directly into Freddy’s eyes. This time he smiled before he looked away, and an exhilarating shiver ran through Fred from one end to the other.
With the possibilities for play apparently exhausted on the east side of the table, it was now the turn of the two Master Builders on the west side to pick up the game. Freddy had no idea what had just passed between him and the frost-haired player, but he felt excited anyway. He’d watch to see how the remainder of this championship event turned out and then head up the Jolly Smokers on the Mayorhold so that he could keep his word to Mary Jane. Fred grinned and looked around him at the other down-at-heel departed, who were grinning too and nudging one another as they whispered their amazement at the stunning trick shot they’d just seen performed.
This looked like it was going to turn out to be quite a night.
** <strong>X MARKS THE SPOT</strong>
<strong>O</strong>n his return, from the white cliffs he’d walked the Roman road or bumped along on carts where he should be so fortunate. He’d seen a row of hanging-trees like fishing poles set out beside a river, heavy with their catch. He’d seen a great red horse of straw on fire across a murky field, and an agreeable amount of naked teats when herlots mocked him from an inn near London. At another inn a dragon was exhibited, caught in a mud-hole where it sulked, a kind of armoured snake that had been flattened, having dreadful teeth and eyes but legs no longer than a footstool’s. He had seen a narrow river dammed by skeletons. He’d seen a parliament of rooks a hundred strong fall on and kill one of their number in amongst the nodding barley rows, and had been shown a yew that had the face of Jesus in its bark. His name was Peter but before that had been Aegburth and in France they’d called him Le Canal, which in their tongue meant channel, for the way he sweated. This was in the year of our Lord eight hundred and ten, about the Vernal Equinox.
He’d ventured half a world and back, stepped on the skirt’s edge of Byzantium and walked in the dazed wake of Charlemagne, had sought the shade of heathen domes in Spain with their insides a myriad blue stars and not a cross in sight. Now he was come again to these close and encircling horizons, to this black earth and grey sky, this rough-made land. He was returned to Mercia and to the Spelhoe hundreds, though not yet to Medeshamstede, to his meadow home there in the bogs of Peterboro, where they must by this time think him dead and would already have allowed his cell to pass on to another. He’d get back there soon enough, but in his travels he had taken on an obligation that must first be properly discharged. The content of the jute-cloth bag slung over his right shoulder, where there was a callus grown he had been bearing it so long, must be delivered unto its precise and rightful destination. These were his instructions, given to him by the friend he’d met when in another place, and it was his resolve to see them now fulfilled that led him up this dry mud path, with spear-sharp grass and weeds on every side, towards a distant bridge.
The morning’s dew was cold upon his toes, lifting the smell of wool fat from his habit’s damp and dragging hem. He went on uncomplaining up the track, amongst the busy hum and flutter, through the green stink of the chest-high vegetation that surrounded him. Ahead, the wooden crosswalk that would bring him to the settlement at Hamtun by its southern end grew slowly closer, slowly bigger, and he spurred his blistered feet, clad in their coarse rope sandals, onward with the notion that their journey was so near its finish, his ten little soldiers with their faces red and raw on this forced march, advancing by one ordered phalanx at a time, step after step, mile after mile. Beneath low cloud the day was close so that inside his robes he streamed, a salty glaze that covered all his back and belly, lukewarm ribbons trickling in the creases of his groin and spooling down the inside of each meaty thigh. A roasted-looking man basting in his own juice he slowly rolled towards the river’s edge, grey as a stone against the greens surrounding him.
Not far before the bridge there was a raised-up square of ground with the remains of a square ditch about it, all its lines and edges softened by some centuries of turf and overgrowth. The banked earth seemed a comfy bed where he might rest a while, but he denied himself this idleness. It was, thought Peter, thereabouts of five and twenty paces on each side, and looked to him as though it had once been the footings of a river fort, perhaps as long ago as Roman times when strongholds of that like were strung like pendant charms along the necklace of this River Nenn. Collected in the bottom of the trench was a variety of rubbishes all in a winding seam, such as a ram’s skull and a small split leather shoe, some pieces from a broken barrel and a cheap brooch with its clasp gone, here and there amongst the tares, the stagnant pools. Thus passed away the glories of this world, Peter observed, but doubted in his heart that the new Holy Roman Empire would, despite its aspirations, last so long as its more earthly counterpart had managed. One day, it was his opinion, there’d be gilt-worked manuscripts and princely vestments down there with the splintered staves and beaded rabbit shits, when time had worked the world down to its mulch of sameness.
Passing in between its tall oak end-posts he stepped out onto the bridge’s hanging logs, one hand clasped tight about the thick rope rail to make him steady and the other clutched as ever on the neck of his jute bag. Out on the sway and creak of the construction’s middle span he stood a moment looking off along the slow brown river to the west, where it curled round a stand of drooping willows at a bend and out of sight. What seemed like several boys were playing on the bank there at the river’s elbow, the first people that he’d sighted in two days of walking, but were too far off to hail and so he raised a hand to them instead and they waved back, encouragingly as it seemed to Peter. He went on with mygge-flies gathered in a spiteful halo at his brow that only scattered when he’d passed the far end of the bridge and was some way off from the water’s edge, upon a path that led between a scattering of homes towards the settlement’s south gate.
Dug down into the earth, each with its wattle roof heaped to a point above the cosy trench, these were submerged in dirty clouds that billowed from their chimney holes so that they seemed more built from smoke than sticks and clay. Come out into the world above from one such nest of fume was an old woman, grinning round the few teeth that were left her when she saw him, climbing painfully the three or four flat stones on hard dirt steps that led up from the covered hole. Her skin was cracked as pond-bed mud in drought, and ashen plaits that hung down to her waist recalled the sagging willows, so that she appeared to him a very river-thing, more like to live beneath the bridge itself than in her dwelling up this dusty path. The voice too, when she spoke, was thick with phlegm and had the sound of water dragging over stones. Her eyes were wicked little snail-husks, wet and glinting.
“Eyyer brung et?”
Here she nodded, twice for emphasis, towards the sack he carried slung across his shoulder. Something jumped in the pale tangles of her hair. He was perplexed and thought she knew by some means of his mission; then he thought again that she’d mistaken him for one appointed to bring something to her lowly hut, or else that she be mad. Not knowing what to make of her he merely stared and shook his head in puzzlement, at which she showed her awful toothless smile again, finding amusement here where he found none.
“What thing there is by all four corners as yet marks the middle. Eyyer brung et?”
He could make no sense of what she said, could only summon a vague picture that meant nothing to him, of a page of manuscript where all the corners had been folded in towards the centre. Peter shrugged uneasily, and thought he must seem dull.
“Good woman, I know not the thing of which you speak. I am come here across thy bridge from far away. I have not been about these parts before.”
It was the crone’s turn now to shake her head, the rank plaits swinging like a beaded Moorish curtain and her ruined grin still fixed in place.
“You are not come across my bridge, not yet. You are not even past my fort. And I know thee of old.” With this she reached one hand out like a brittle claw and slapped him hard about his rosy, glistening cheek.
He sat up.
He was resting on the banked verge of the ditch that ran around the relic river fort, the bridge’s southern end some distance off upon his left. A beetle or a spider in the grass had bitten him on one side of his face where he had dozed with it pressed to the turf, and he could feel a swollen lump beneath his finger when he raised it to inspect the source of the insistent throbbing. He was frightened for a moment when he realised he no longer held the jute cloth bag but finding it upon the slope beside him he was reassured, though still bewildered by what had occurred. He struggled to his feet, his robes all sodden down the back from the damp grass, frowning at first the fort’s remains and then the nearby bridge, until at length he laughed.
So this was Hamtun, then. This was its character, its notion of a jest with travellers who thought they had the place’s measure. In the country’s ancient heart this curious essential nature hid and made itself a secret, slyly marvellous and dangerous in its caprice as if it did not realise its frightening strength or else pretended it did not. Behind the madman glitter of its eye, behind its rotted smile, he thought, there was a knowledge it had chosen to conceal with mischiefs, frights and phantoms. At once monstrous and playful, antic even in its horrors, there was something in its nature Peter found he might admire or fear, yet all the while still chuckling in wonderment at its defiant queerness. Shaking now his curly, greying head in good-natured acknowledgement of how amusingly he had been tricked he shouldered once again his sack and made towards the bridge, his second try at it, or so it seemed to him.
This time the structure was all made of wood, a sturdy hump that curved above the muddy flow, supported by stout beams beneath rather than hung from ropes as in his dream. He could console himself, however, that there were still mygge-flies all around him in a droning cloud, and when he paused out on the middle section and looked west there were yet willows stooping at the water’s bend, although no children played beneath them. Overhead the great disc of the heavens turned, a grubby fleece that frayed to streaming rags at the horizon, and he carried on across the river with his trailing beard of gnats plumed out behind him.
At the edges of the trodden path that stretched between the bridge and the south gate there were no sunken homes, but only turnip fields to either side, with elms and birches in a fringe beyond them. These were interrupted here and there by rotted stumps so that the tree-line called to mind a ghostly likeness of his dream-hag’s smile, her knowing ridicule insinuated now within the landscape that encircled him, or at the least such was his fancy. Peter thought it better he did not indulge this inward shadow play and so turned his attentions from it, noticing instead the true substantial meadow, plain and without mystery, through which he passed. On trembling sprigs there nodded cowslips, green-gold as the cattle-slimes from which they took their name, and he heard skylarks trilling in the grasses bordering the planted crops. It was a fine day to conclude his journey, and there were no apparitions here save those that he himself had dragged along for company.
This patch of earth was where the west-east river made a sudden bend towards the south, leaving a hanging bulge of land before its proper course was once again resumed, a swelling like that on his bitten cheek. Four narrow ditches had been cut through the promontory, perhaps for irrigation, forded by stout logs that he was forced to teeter over awkwardly, one hand clutching his precious burden to his bosom with the other stretched out at the side and waving up and down to balance him, before he came to Hamtun’s southern gate. This stood a little open from the fence of tall and sturdy posts that made the settlement’s south wall, and had a single thin and gloomy-looking man who held a spear stood by it for a guard. There was perhaps but one day’s growth of beard in a grey blot about his mouth, so that he had in some ways the appearance of a threadbare and indifferent dog. He did not call a greeting, but leaned idly there against the gate and watched the monk’s approach with listless gaze, obliging Peter to announce himself.
“Hail, fellow, and good day to thee. I am a brother of the blessed Benedict whose order is at Medeshamstede near to Peterboro, not far off from here. I have gone many leagues over the sea and am now sent to Hamtun, where I bring a token …”
He was fumbling within the sack, about to take the thing inside out into daylight as an illustration, when the watchman turned his head to one side, spitting out a gob of bright green jelly in the paler straws beside the gate, then looked again at Peter, bluntly interrupting him.
“Es et un axe?”
The guard’s voice was at once flat and without real interest, spoken partly down his long beak of a nose. Peter looked up from the jute bag’s dark mouth at his interrogator, puzzled and surprised.
“An axe?”
The gateman sighed elaborately, as though one wearily explaining to an infant.
“Aye. Un axe. Un ef I let yer en, shell yer go smashen people’s eds wuth et, un fucken boys un wimmen fore yer sets us all on fire?”
Here Peter merely blinked uncomprehendingly, then noticed for the first time how the wall and nearer gatepost both had wavering tongues of soot extending raggedly from near their base to almost at the top. He looked back to the languid guardian and shook his head in vehement denial, reaching once again into his sack to bring his treasure forth, this time as reassurance.
“Oh, no. No, it’s not an axe. I am a man of God and all I seek to fetch here is – ”
The sentry, with a pained expression, closed his doleful eyes and held the palm not wrapped about his spear towards the pilgrim, waving it dismissively from side to side as he declined to view what was contained in Peter’s bundle.
“I em not minded ef et be the left leg o’ John Baptist for so long uz et’s not put about the smashen o’ men’s eds, nor that ets ragged end be lit un made a torch fer burnen. Not last month were one like thee uz ad the skull-bone of the Lord, un when I asked em ow et were so small, e sed et were the skull o’ Christ from when e were a babe. I erd uz the good folk as dwell beside Saint Peter’s Church ad depped ez cods en tar un sent em cryen ome.”
His eyes were open now to stare unblinking at the monk as though his words were no more than plain fact, requiring no response of Peter save that he pass on and leave the sentinel to his bored watch over the turnip patch.
“Then am I thankfully advised. I shall be sure to sell no relics here, whilst in the same wise making certain that I smash no heads, nor yet put anyone to rape or fire until I am past Hamtun, e’en in genuine mistake. I bid thee well.”
The guardsman pointedly stared off towards the distant elms and muttered something indistinct that ended with the words “away und melk a bull”, so Peter hung his bag once more across his callused shoulder and went on, in where the gate was open, to the hill-path that climbed from the bridge towards the settlement’s high reaches. Here he could see thatch-topped homes dug into rows beside the slanting street not very different from the witch’s burrow in his dream, though not he thought so palled with smoke. Nor did those several people that he spied who were the huts’ inhabitants appear to have a strangeness to them in the way that she had, with instead the semblance of ordinary men and maids, in cap or shawl, that pulled their children, carts and hounds behind them through the lanes, else travelled on shit-spraying mares. He was yet mindful of the sleeping vision gifted him, however, and resolved he would not judge the gentles here as common until he was safely come among and through them all. He plodded on and up along the track, skirting a sump close to its bottom where both recent rain and passing horses had conspired to make a filthy slurry there. Off to his right not very far, beyond some huts, the posts that made the settlement’s east wall climbed up the hill abreast with him towards the high ground in the north.
Beside the sunken houses further up the unmown slope were taller dwellings also, though not many, and not far inside the gated wall he passed some ground that had a pox-barn set aside where there lay ones who moaned and worse ones who did not, betwixt small fires that had been set to clean the poison humours from the air. Some of the figures were made incomplete by parts decayed or some of them perhaps hewn off in accident, and back and forth between their mats crept old wives tending them, with faces marked by ailments they had in their time survived and now were proof to. He was grateful that the wind today came from the west, but turned his face off in precaution from the pest field when he passed it by and carried on uphill, where there thronged fellow beings in their dozens such as he’d not known in a great while. The slow climb made him puff, on this close day with all its warmth held in beneath the sky’s low quilting, raising sweat upon the sweat already there, yet was he joyous to be once more in the company of men and went amongst them gladly in good spirit, marvelling as though one unaccustomed at their great diversity.
Old men whose parsnip noses almost met their jutting chins pulled sleds with cords of oak-bark piled upon them that were dark red and alive with pismires on their undersides. Peter was made to wait idly upon the corner with a cross-path, by an ale-yard that had high stone walls, until a horse-pulled cart weighed down with troughs of new-worked chalk had rumbled past and aged those in the billowing suspensions of its wake by ten years in as many instants. As at last he made his way across the side street to continue up the hill, he ventured to look down it after the departing horse and wagon. There were not a few mean dwellings at its borders and then black briar hedgerow further down, where Peter saw a mother and her flock of children picking diligently at the brambles, with their findings stuffed into a bag the woman carried. He supposed they were wool-gathering, and that it might be they were family to a woolmonger living hereabouts, so busy and so enterprising did the hill town seem to him.
Indeed, he was surprised to find it so, as he strode up the incline to a crossroads at its top. When he had been a lad named Aegburth growing up at Helpstun near to Peterboro and then later been a monk named Peter cloistered in that place itself, he had heard tell of Hamtun, but not often. It had always been there, he had the impression, though not very much there, and remarkable only in that it never was remarked upon. It was apparent there had been some Roman presence in these parts and he thought savage settlements perhaps before those times, but there was never more to Hamtun than the airy rumour of a place where no one ever went. To see it now with all its barter and its bustle one might, with good reason, ask whence it had come. It was as if, when finally the night and winter after Rome’s demise was lifted from the land, Hamtun was simply found here, thriving in its present form, come out of nothingness to occupy this prosperous vantage ever since. And still no person spoke of it.
He knew King Offa, when not building his great ditch at Mercia’s edge with Wales, had planted new towns in these territories that were doing well, though Hamtun was not one of them, and had the markings of some earlier vintage. Offa kept a Thorpe as well, a country dwelling off the town’s north end, with Hamtun as the nearest port of trade, though Peter was of the opinion Hamtun’s prominence had come before the time of Offa. He recalled his grandfather at Helpstun making mention of the place as though of some importance when it had been Offa’s predecessor Aethebald who’d reigned, and further still, back in the mists of lost antiquity there’d been a place here that men knew of, yet did not know what it was they knew. Perhaps it was as with a circle, drafted by a knob of chalk upon a string, where only the perimeter was noticed with the centre that the shape depended on not seen at all, or thought to be a hole, like through a ring-loaf. How, though, in an empty hole, was there such furious activity?
When he had lately passed through Woolwych to the east of London he had met a drover of those parts who said he’d heard of Hamtun, once he had been told that it was Peter’s destination. This man mostly knew it for the sheep flocks herded down from there, but said that one of Offa’s kin was at a manor in the settlement, which had a fine church of its own built near to it. If this were true, Peter supposed it to be in some far part of the town that he was yet to see, although it might be that the dwellings all about him were in lease to such a place, that they would likely pay some small part of their keep unto the manor through the agency of what was called a Frith Borh, who was like a tithing-man. His intuition had been well, he thought, to bring him to this spot, when all he had been given for direction were instructions in a foreign tongue he was not certain that he’d understood, urgent and vague entreaties that the object in his bag should be delivered “to the centre of your land”. He knew that Mercia surely was the heart of England and, to see the crowds at work and leisure now about him, was convinced that he had come to Mercia’s heart in turn. Yet where, he wondered, was the heart of Hamtun?
He’d by now achieved the crossroads of his path that led up from the bridge, an area where the slope was somewhat levelled out before continuing to climb straight on and to the north. He set his baggage down and looked about him here, that he might get his breath and bearings both, and wiped the drench from off his forehead with one woollen sleeve. Ahead of him, after a mostly flat expanse, the track that he was on resumed its steep ascent past huts and yards where there were mainly tanners from the smell, while at his left and down the hill that was the crossroads’ other leg were sheds with smoking forges from where came the clamour of hot metals being wrought. Upon his right, past houses that had fields of pigs and hens and goats attached there stood the open east gate of the settlement, with off beyond its timbered yawn a church of sorts, outside of Hamtun’s limit, built from wood. He smiled to greet a woman who was passing and, when she smiled back, asked if she knew about the church and if it was the one that had the manor near. He saw about her throat a pendant stone, this with a rune on that he recognised as sacred to the demon Thor, although he thought there to be no more in this than a peasant charm to ward off thunderstorms. She shook her head.
“Yer wud be thenken o’ Sunt Peter’s, dayn away there.”
Here she gestured back the way that she had come, along the crossing’s other path up by the sparking, belching forges, then looked back towards the building just beyond the eastern gates that Peter had enquired of.
“Thet one there’s All Hallows what wur only belt when my mam was a child. Ef et’s a church yer arfter we’ve Sunt Gregory’s near by Sunt Peter’s, or else the old temple ayt upon the sheep trail, not far up ahead und en the way as yer be gooen.”
Peter thanked the wife and let her pass on by, while he stood at the corner there considering if this might be the centre he was seeking, thinking that a crossroads or its like might suit the crucial item carried in his sack. He asked, below his breath that those about him did not think him lunatic, “Is this the place?” When there came no response he tried again yet louder, so that idle boys across the street from him all laughed.
“Is this the centre?”
Nothing happened. Peter was not sure by what signs he expected the location that he sought would be made known to him, if signs there were to be, only that nothing in his instinct found such signals here. With people looking at him in bemusement now he felt his cheek made redder yet, and so picked up his bundle and went on, over the crossroads in a hurry that he might avoid its rumbling carts and next straight up the hill, where did the tanners and drape-makers of the town conduct a goodly trade.
Here was a fantasy of things to be remarked on following those long legs of his pilgrimage where novelty was scarce or not at all. Beside the noisome tanning-pits he’d caught the reek of from downhill were boards set out that were all over shoes and gloves and boots and leather leggings, of more styles and hues and sizes than he’d previously thought were in the world entire. The brothy scent of them alone was an intoxication as he struggled up the gradient between the trading posts and stalls, bearing the weighted bag that bumped on his stooped-over backbone now and then. His eyes and ears alike were near to overwhelmed by all the sights and noises that there were, the chatter and the conversation. People gathered in a breathless huddle at a stand where garments were displayed, having the items that were meaner and more easily afforded set about a show-piece, black-tanned leather armour in a full dress outfit decorated by a trim of bird skulls worked with silver. Peter doubted that this suit should ever find a buyer or be worn, yet estimated from the crowd about it that it must already have repaid its workmanship in countless smaller purchases. Having this opportunity to look upon the locals whilst they were distracted so that he might not offend, he saw more plain or ugly faces in the throng than he saw fair, and was surprised to find how many of the men had wild designs of pigment dug into the skin upon their arms, where had they stripped their clothes off on this humid day and these were visible. Not only patterns were there, drawn this way on flesh, but likewise images in crude, of herlots or the saviour or else both at once, together there on the same shoulder, wearing but a single loin-cloth ’twixt the two of them. He chuckled to himself at this and went on up the path where men with dye-stained hands were selling cloth, a richer red than any he had glimpsed in Palestine.
After a time he passed beyond the market street to higher ground, though not the highest, with superior rises still in the southeast. The settlement’s east wall, that had breaks in it now and then, continued to climb up the slope beside him, not far off and to his right, while on his left side there were many lanes and passages run off downhill. While he would own that there was little aim to his meander, Peter thought perhaps that if he walked the town’s wall in this way then he would have a sense of its extent and its dimension, so that he might more exactly plot its middle being thus informed. His plan, then, was so vague and slight as hardly to be there at all, and now he felt a pressure in his bladder and a hunger in his belly both, distracting him still further from it. He was still on the same northward path that he’d been walking since he crossed the bridge, but had again reached meadows where the ground was flattened out, atop the slope that had the drapery. Here was a fleecy multitude steered into pens by silent and stem-chewing men with noisy dogs, so that he was reminded of the dame who wore the Thor-stone who had counselled him, and what she’d said of an old temple on a sheep-trail, further up along his way. Though he was still to see a church up here, he was yet certain this must be the trail of which she’d told him, as judged by its traffic.
Bleating beasts were everywhere about him as he walked now down into a gentle hollow, creatures driven here in great hordes beggaring imagination with the land made white, horizon to horizon, this in summer and not winter-time, come from the west of Mercia and Wales beyond. Now that he reckoned it, Peter had known since boyhood that the western cattle-trail was ended somewhere not far off from Helpstun or else Peterboro, in the middling hamlets of the country, though he had not thought its ending was in Hamtun. Out of here the drovers would take on the herds to other parts, along the Roman road that brought him hence from London and the high white coast, or else out past the district of Saint Neot on to Norwych and the east, delivering the mutton in this way throughout the land. Were all of England’s tangling lines met here, he wondered, tied into a knot at Hamtun by some giant midwife as it were the country’s umbilicus? Peter waded in a wool-tide, on and down the broad street pebbled with black turds, still headed north, his bag now hanging in one hand there at his side so that his aching shoulder might be rested.
When he had come almost through the great stupidity of animals, he saw up on a mound towards the right of him a kind of mean church, built from stones, that Peter hoped to be the temple that the woman had informed him of, although it seemed unused and no one was about it. Thinking to have pause there for a pissing-while and eat the cheese and bread hid with some coins in a tuck-pocket of his smock, he turned east from the foul mires of the sheep-path and went up a brief walk overhung by boughs that blossoms fell from in a pretty pepper, to the church-house as he thought it, at the slant’s top end.
Some of the flat-faced and incurious woollen-backs were grazing here in shelter of the spreading trees, where Peter set his baggage down and drew aside his habit to unleash less of a stream than he’d expected in the puddled rain that was between a beech’s knuckled roots. His water had a strong and orange look about the little that there was of it, and he supposed the greater measure of its fluids had been lost already through his gushing pores. He shook the meagre trickle’s last few droplets from his prick-end and arranged his dress, looking about for somewhere he could eat his food. At last he was decided on the green, luxuriant sod about an aged oak that he would sit and lean his back against, but a few paces from the temple’s weathered pile.
Now that he looked at this, sat rested on the sward with sack at rest alike beside him, chewing on the crust he had retrieved from its compartment in his robe, he was less certain of the low construction’s Christian provenance and was made more alert to its peculiarity. He settled back against his oaken throne and slowly worked the bread and goat-cheese to a sodden, undistinguished lump between his teeth as he considered what the lonely building was or once before had been. The old stone posts to each side of its door had winding round them graven dragon-wyrms, much longer than the poor thing he had seen caught in its muck-hole out near London. If it were indeed a home of Christian worship, Peter knew it for a Christianity more old than his and come from the traditions of three hundred years before, when the forebears of Peter’s order had been forced to seek appeasement with the followers of peasant gods by mixing in Christ’s teachings with their rude and superstitious lore, preached from the mounds where shrines to devils were once raised. The carvings snaking down the pillars were a likeness of the serpent wound about the world’s girth in the old religions where our mortal realm was held to be the middle one of three, with Hel below it and the Nordic heaven built across a bridge from it above.
Leaving the detail of the bridge aside, this was not so unlike his own faith in a life that was beyond this brief span and in some means over it, at a superior height from which the traps and snares of this world were more clearly seen and understood. Though he had never said this while about the monastery of Saint Benedict, he did not think it much a matter if it were a bridge or flight of steps that led to paradise, or by what names the personages dwelling there were known, or even if the gods were made with different histories. It was, he thought, a failing of the Christianity that was in England now that people were so taken with the truth or otherwise of writings that in other lands should be admired as only parables, and nothing held amiss. From what he knew of the Mohammedans, their bible was a book of tales meant only to illuminate and teach by an example, and was not to be confused with an historical account of things. This too was Peter’s understanding of the Christian Bible, which he had read all there was of, just as he had likewise read Bede’s history and so too, secretly, had heard a telling of the Daneland monster yarn then being talked about by all, yet when he tried to teach the Christian doctrine he would find himself confronted by a narrow-mindedness, by dull demands to know if truly all Creation was accomplished in six days.
The faith that Peter had was in the value of a radiant ideal, with this ideal embodied in the Christ, who was a figure of instruction. Faith, to his mind, was a willed asserting of the sacred. If it were made more or less than this then it was mere belief, as children will believe the goblin tale they hear for just so long as it is being told. To hold belief in a material fact was only vanity, easily shattered, where the ideal was a truth eternal in whatever form expressed. Belief, in Peter’s private view of things, counted for little. The eternal, insubstantial ideal was the thing, the light that orders like his own had shielded in the night and sought now to extend across the fallen, overshadowed world. He did not have belief in angels as substantial forms, and as ideals had no need to believe in them: he knew them. He had met with them upon his travels and had seen them, though if this were with his mortal eyes or with the ideal gaze of vision he cared not at all. He’d met with angels. He did not believe. He knew, and hoped his creed would in a hundred years from that time not be foundered in a quagmire of believers. Was this what befell the old gods, near whose temple he was squatted now to eat his bread and cheese?
His ruminations done, he brushed the crumbs from out his beard, where they would do for all the pigeons that there were about the ruin. Standing up and shouldering his bag once more, he made off down the little hill that led back to the sheep-track, with his drab rope sandals kicking through a fallen frost of blossoms from the trees that reached above. The cattle path by now was emptied saving for its carpet made with dung, and for the patterning of hoof-print everywhere upon it like a pricked pot. He went on along it but a trifling distance until he was come upon the town’s north wall and the pitch-painted timbers of its northern gate, which stood a little open as its counter-part down by the river in the south had done.
There was a different air about this quarter of the settlement that had a quality of harm and malice, and to which he thought those several severed heads set onto spikes above the gate may have contributed. With such fair hair as yet remained upon the melting skulls worn in the long style, he supposed them to be butchers come from Denmark or nearby, that looked surprised to have discovered there were butchers here in Hamtun just the same. One of the heads was blurred, that made him think his eyes were wrong, though it were only meat flies in a swarm about the remnant, hatched from out its hanging mouth.
He’d walked, then, from the settlement’s south end up to its north. It was not very far. Confronted by the barrier of posts he turned towards the west there at his left and started off downhill, to find an edge of Hamtun he had not yet seen. Descending on the valley’s side, once more towards the river as he found, he saw the glorious spread of land that stretched away towards where twirls of smoke rose up to mark a district reaching out on Hamtun’s west and to the far side of the Nenn. This was a grey and silver braid that wound through lime or yellow fields beneath the distant trees, and had a bridge across it in a wooden arch that by his reckoning would be where all the sheep came in from Wales. He saw a high wall too, not far off from the river on its nearer bank, built out of posts like the town’s wall. It mayhap was a cloister or a lord’s land, where its east wall served to mark the western limit of the town.
The thought, however slender, that there may be monks near brought to mind his monastery in the quiet fields by Peterboro, which he had not visited now in three years or more. Remembering his cell and cot at Medeshamstede brought a pang, as too did his recall of those among the brotherhood that were his friends, so that he was resolved to travel back there when his work in Hamtun here was over and his obligation was discharged. That would not be, he told himself, until the centre of the settlement was found and Peter’s jute-wrapped talisman had been delivered there. This longing to be once more in his meadow home should bring that thing no nearer, and served only to delay its quick accomplishment.
Upon the left of him there were now narrow entries running off in strings of close-together houses, twisting round their turns and out of sight to tangle in a knot that Peter now suspected was the guts of Hamtun, rank and of surprising colour, where upon his walk around its walls he had seen nothing more than Hamtun’s patterned and pigmented outer hide. He was sore tempted by an urge to venture deep amongst the labyrinth of lanes, trusting that he could find the spot he searched for by no more than instinct, yet his wiser self prevailed. He here recalled the drover he had met at Woolwych who had known of Hamtun, and another thing that man had said to him: “It is all paths and cross-tracks like a nest of rabbits. It may be that you will find it not so easy getting in, though I can tell thee that it is more hard than murder getting out again.” Peter might lose his way among the narrow lanes, and would be better first to tread the limits of the settlement as he had planned, that he should have its measure. He continued therefore down the hill until he had come almost to the wall that he had seen while at its summit, noting to himself that Hamtun did not seem a half so far from east to west as it were south to north, so that he thought its shape was like a narrow piece of bark or parchment. If there were a message writ on this, or if he yet would have the wits to make it out, these things he could not say.
The wall of posts, which ran along the near side of the river, ended by the bridge that led out from the settlement to Wales. Once underneath the wooden span the Nenn bent into this direction also, and the wall between him and the river’s edge that wound off likewise westward was replaced by great black hedges serving as fortifications. Having thus come to another one of Hamtun’s corners, Peter turned again and set off down what he now knew to be the longer walk before he’d reach its southern boundary where he’d arrived some hours ago. Up to the right of him there was the silvery quarter of the low grey sky where hid the sun, that was about to start its long fall into night. It was a while by noon as he conceived it.
Trudging south he saw there were not many houses here down on the settlement’s low flank, but only crofts, each with its humble cottage. Off and up the easy slopes ahead, thin yarns of smoke were raised and knit into a pall, so that he thought these higher pastures were more densely settled. Down towards the riverside where Peter walked, though, he could only see a single dwelling in his way that seemed built near the corner of a track, the further one of two that led up from his route and eastward, side by side with empty cattle fields between them.
He approached the nearer of lanes, to pause and peer along it. As it rose away from him it was well-walked and had an ancient look, as did the ditch beside it where a small stream gurgled, come as he supposed out of a fount or spring up near the top. He crossed the bottom of the path, bag dangling at his back, and carried on in way of the stone croft-hut by the corner where the second side-track met his road. The lowly building seemed as though deserted, all alone here on the west hem of the settlement, without the sign of any fires burned in its hearth. Across the muddy thoroughfare from this, to Peter’s right, there was a goodly mound of stone made up, with built above it out of wood a winding-shaft that had a rope and bucket hanging down. He’d had no drink since a freshwater pond he’d passed round daybreak, some leagues south of Hamtun, and so veered from his straight line towards the wellhead, whistling an air he part-recalled from somewhere as he went.
When he was come upon this it was bigger than he’d thought, high to the middle of him where the stones were built up in their ring, which was perhaps two paces over it from side to side. He turned the hand-hold on the winder so that more rope was unrolled, at which the brightly painted wooden bucket dropped away from him down its unfathomable hole. After some moments doing this there came a faint splash from below, and soon thereafter he was hauling up a cup far heavier than was the one that he’d let down. The wetted cable squeaked, and he could hear and feel the slosh against the swaying vessel’s sides as it was pulled up from the dark bore, into daylight. Tying off the rope he drew the bucket to him and looked in, thirsty and eager.
It was blood.
The shock of it was like a blow and set the world to spin, so that he knew not his own thoughts. It felt as if a very cavalry of different understandings were stampeding through him, trampling reason with their dizzy, frightful rush. It was his own blood, where his throat was cut that he’d not known. It was the blood of Hamtun come from generations of its people, poured downhill to drain into this buried reservoir. It was the blood of saints that Saint John the Divine said should be quaffed at the world’s end, when in two hundred years from now it did occur. It was the Saviour’s blood, and by this sign it was announced to Peter that the land and soil itself were Jesu’s flesh, for like the barley and the things of earth was he not cut down to grow up again? It was the heart-sap of a fearsome Mystery and richer red than holly-fruit, a marvel of such magnitude that Christians of an era not yet come should know of it, and know of him, and say that truly in God’s sight he had been favoured, that he had been shown this miracle, this vision …
It was dye.
How was he so complete a fool? He’d seen the vivid cloths that were for sale upon the street of drapers, yet had minded not from where they must have come. He’d let the bright red bucket down the well, yet thought that it was painted for a seal and not that it was stained with its unceasing use. These signs had been as plain as daylight, saving to an idiot, yet in his fervour he was blinded to them and had almost thought himself to be already sainted. He resolved he should not tell his brethren back in Medeshamstede of this shameful error, even as a jest against himself, his puffed-up folly and his vanity, lest they should know him for a prick-head.
Laughing now at how he had been tricked by Hamtun for this second time, he poured the contents of the pail back down the black and gargling throat whence they had been retrieved. Reminded of his brother Matthew back near Peterboro, who had made illuminations onto manuscripts and spoken of his craft with Peter, Peter thought it likely that the water’s colour was achieved with iron rust from out the soil. While this would not have harmed him greatly, he was still uncommon glad that he had not quaffed deep without he looked. Red ochre, after all, was not the only thing that might produce red colouring. There was, for instance, rust of Mercury, and at the Benedictine brothers’ meadow homestead he had heard of monks who’d sucked the bristles of a brush where was red pigment still, to make them wet and form them to a point. Day after day, unwittingly, the monks had done this until they were poisoned by it. It was said of one his bones were made so brittle that when he lay dying and the merest blanket was put onto him for comfort, every part of him was broken by its weight, that he was crushed and killed. If this were a true story, Peter did not know, nor did he think it likely that the water in this present well would be thus tainted, but he was yet happy that he had not put it to the test, lest his half-wit mistake had proved instead a deadly one.
Now that the startlement of the event was passed and he reflected, Peter did not judge himself so foolish as he had done. Though the holy blood as he’d supposed had turned out naught but dye in its material truth, was there not an ideal truth to be considered also, where the earthly stain was but a figure made to stand for that which was unearthly, and so without worldly form? Could not a thing have aspects more than one, in that it might be rust of iron when reckoned with the stick of reason, and yet be the very wine of Christ according to the measures of the heart? A well of dye this shade he’d never heard about before, so that it was not much less of a wonder than it were the liquid he had thought at first. Whatever may have been its source it was a sign, to be made out.
As once again he hefted up his sack, it came to him that he had been too plodding and too careful in his thoughts and in his search alike. In walking cautiously about its edge, Peter had but considered Hamtun as a shape or like a flat sketch mapped on parchment, where he now saw it was more like to a living thing that had its humours and its mortal juices, less a territory to be paced than like a stranger he had joined in conversation. Might it warm to him if he were not so rigid and constrained in his approaches to it? Headed back towards his southbound rut he thought of this and so instead decided to go east, up past the solitary dwelling by its hill-path and into the proper settlement, that maze of crouching homes above and on the right of him whose open hearths had made the grubby hanging clouds more grubby yet.
He passed the stone shed on one side as he began the climb, and when he did there came upon him the sensation that he’d heard once called “newly familiar”, as when some novel circumstance should bring the outlandish conviction that it had been lived before. It was not, he observed, merely that he had somewhere known a moment that was of a kind with this, passing a single hut alone while making up the grade and in an unaccustomed site. It was instead this instant in its finest detail that he felt he passed through not for the first time: the pale and little shadows that were on the grass thrown by a shrouded sun not far beyond its zenith, and the moss grown to the shape of a man’s hand beside the door frame of the silent croft-house; birdsong ringing out from the dark hedgerows in the west just now that was three sharp sounds and a plaintive fall; the souring pork smell that his sweat had where its vapour was escaped from in his robes; his aching feet, the unseen distant river’s perfumes and the hard knobs of the sack that jolted on his bended spine.
He shrugged the feeling from him and went by the piled up limestone of the place and up the hill. He could see nothing in the darkened cavities that were its window-holes, but so uncanny was the sense it gave him that he yet half-thought that he was overlooked. A wicked part within his mind that meant to scare him said it was the snail-eyed hag from out his dream, resided by herself there in the shadow of the silent hut and watching what he did. For all he knew this to be no more than a phantom he had conjured whereby to torment himself, he shuddered still and made good haste to put the stead far at his back. Breaking now from the eastward lane that he was climbing, Peter struck out at an angle up a lesser path to the southeast that was a mere discolouration in the thigh-deep weeds.
What had unnerved him mostly at the croft-house was the notion that his passing of it was no sole event, but only one within a line of repetitions, so that there was called unto his mind an image that was like an endless row of him, his separate selves all passing by the same forsaken nook but many times repeated, all of them within that instant made aware of one another and the queer affair of their recurrence, that the world and times about them were recurring also. It was like a ghostly sentiment he had about him, as though he were one already dead who was reviewing the adventures of his life, yet had forgot that this were naught save for a second or indeed a hundredth reading, until he should stumble on a passage that he recognised by its description of a hovel stood alone, a blackbird’s song, or else a clot of lichen like a hand. These thoughts were new to him, so that he was not yet convinced he had their full entirety. As though a blind man he groped at their edges and their strange protrusions, though he knew the whole shape was beyond his grasp.
Labouring up the slope, his path bending again towards the east, it seemed to Peter as if the peculiar notions come upon him were an air or a miasma that was risen up in this locality, with its effects become more strong as he went deeper in. It brought a colour to his mood he could not name, as it were like a shade that had been mixed from several such, from fear and also wonderment, from hopeful joy, but sadness too and a foreboding that was difficult to place or to describe. The duty represented in his jute-cloth bag seemed both at once to make his soul all jubilant take flight, and be a matter of such heaviness he should be broke and flattened quite beneath it. In these contradictions did the feeling in him seem all human feelings rolled to one, and he was filled with it so that he thought to burst. This thrilling yet uncomfortable sensation, he concluded, must be that encountered by all creatures when they act the works of God.
He’d waded through the long grass and was on another dirt path now that rose straight up the hillside in the same way that the lane up from the dyer’s well had done, but further off from it. This new track had ahead of him a sprawl of dwellings that were covered holes to either side, where dogs with matted coats were sniffing in the midst of laughing men or scolding women that trailed babies. At its top end he could see raised up the roofs of higher buildings and below a traffic made of many carts, and so presumed this place to be a kind of main square to the settlement. Not so far off uphill and on his lane’s right side where were the lower houses and their populations, Peter saw that a great fire was builded up, there on a plot of bare and blackened land. Here people came with things that were too many or too vile to burn about their homes, on sledges and in bags. He saw dull piles of cloth, plague-rags as he supposed, unloaded from their barrow with a harvest-fork. There was a midden-wagon that its driver backed with many cries and halts toward the flames, so that the dung was shovelled from it to the furnace with a greater ease by the old men who made their work about this burning-ground. The stench and haze boiled in a filthy tower up from the blaze, for there was little wind, though Peter knew that different weather would see all the dwellings clustered here lost to a stinking fog.
Thinking to skirt the worst part of this foulness he turned off his eastbound way, along a little cross-street when he came to it. There were some huts built on each side of this, yet not so many people and not fires. Some distance down the sloping path ahead of him he saw a broad thatched roof that he supposed was that of a great hall, which had the walled grounds on its rear side turned to him. The lighted region of the sky was once more to his right, that meant he was gone south again, although not far before he had another hindrance blocking him. A distance on along in his direction was a yard that had a great cloud risen up about, as had the yard where wastes were burned, yet as those billows had been black, these were all white. He saw a carriage from behind which loads of chalk were put down on a little hill within the fenced-out patch, and thought how such a cart had crossed his path up from the southern bridge that morn, its dusts and its deposits on his hair and in the creases of his garment still. It was his preference that he remain the colour he had been when first he came to Hamtun and be not turned red by dyes else smoked to black or white, so that he now stood still and took a stock of things to better know where he might turn.
He was once more about a sort of corner, with a path run up from it and to the east again off from the lane where he at present trod. To mark the joining of the tracks there was a mound like to a square that had one of its sides squeezed shorter than the rest. Around this was a trench, dug out so long before it was grassed all across it now, as with the Roman river-fort that he had seen. The tufted hillock kept a sense about it that it was of import or had once been so, although it had no buildings on and only golden clumps of piss-the-bed that were not yet gone into misty balls of seed.
While he stood gazing at the hump, Peter became aware of an alarm enacted at its lower boundary, upon the side where Peter was and so between him and the chalk-yard. Pulled up by the trackside were a horse and drag that had an ugly man sat at its reins. His face was wide with eyes set far apart, and he looked strong yet squat, as though he were compressed. Perched on the low seat of his cart he was in converse with a child, a girl of no more than a dozen years who hesitated on the turf beside the circling ditch and looked up at the fellow all uncertain. She seemed fearful of the man as if she did not know him, shaking now her head and making as though she would move away, whereat the stocky carter made a lunge and caught her fast about a plump wrist that she might not flee.
Peter had but a moment wherein to decide what he should do. If this were a dispute ’twixt a vexed father and his wilful child then he was loath to interfere in it, although he did not think that it were so, and on his travels he had seen enough of rapes that he could not in conscience turn aside and merely hope that all were well.
When he were wont to use it Peter had a voice that boomed, so that his brothers off in Medeshamstede, though they liked him, did not like him making chant with them. This was the bellow that he now employed as he called to the man who held the maiden, with it rolling like a thunder off across the fallow grass between them.
“You there! Stop a moment! Fellow, I would talk with thee!”
He struck towards the cart at a long pace and had his sack now swinging heavy in his hand down by one side of him, so that one could not look upon it without thinking what a fearsome club could be made out of it were it whirled round at any speed. He was a peaceful man, yet knew how he could seem with his thick limbs and his red face when he’d a mind to: he had not come safely half across the world and back without using that baleful semblance knowingly and to his own advantage. On the wagon now the man whose body seemed squashed-down turned his head sharply round to stare at Peter, barrelling straight for him through the sedge with a skull-smasher hanging in one ruddy fist. Releasing the young girl, the rogue was startled and looked eager to escape. Giving a cry to rouse his mare he raced her off, his transport rattling down the raised ground’s short side and away around its bend, where at the corner he glanced back in fear towards the monk, then carried on and out from sight.
The maid he had released stood at the edge of the ringed trough and watched as her tormentor made away, then turned instead to Peter who was stopped halfway towards her, bent in two and puffing loud with his exertion, holding up one hand in her direction as he thought to reassure the frightened child. She was an instant while she took the measure of her rescuer, his dripping face like beetroot and the monstrous noise his wheezing made, before she made her mind up to run off another way from the direction her attacker had just taken, scampering away downhill as though to the south road that had the lonely hut and bloody well. He saw her go while he was there recovering among the drowsing stems, and thought it not a slight that she should be afraid at her deliverer. Not all monks were as he, and though he knew the bawdy songs of rutting friars to be a falsehood in the main, he likewise had met brothers of unpleasant appetite who would contrive to make such slanders true. The child was wise to be away with her and trust to no one in these worrisome new times, so that he found in her departure no offence and was but glad that by God’s grace he’d happened here in good time to prevent a wrong.
He was in some fine humour, then, when he determined to take once again the eastward path he’d left to skirt around the waste-fire and its vapours. With his breath returned to him he started on the lane that went up by the north side of the lifted mound, and while he walked he dwelled upon what had just then occurred. Had he not come by his decision at the well that he would take a different way into the settlement, then it might be that before long the girl would have been victim of a murder and found ghastly in a hedge. Who knew, now, of the children and grandchildren she might sire, or all the changes in the circumstances of the world that might be wrought from this result? If all else he had come here for should prove but his delusion, brought by too much foreign sun, then there was this to say that he had yet worked to the purpose of the Lord. Though it were beating like to a loud drum, his heart had joy in it as he strove onward up the stony climb, his sack across his shoulder and the sweat in a cascade upon his brow.
He was remarking inwardly upon how even closer the day had become when he looked up and saw another rough-shod pilgrim coming down the way towards him, one not quite so old as Peter was, who made a comic sight where he was dressed so queer. He had a cap atop his head sat like an upturned pudding bag that had a spreading rim, and all his garments were an oddment as though cast away by others, yet what others Peter could not tell, the bits and pieces were so strange. There was a little coat and some loose britches fashioned from light cloth, while on the stranger’s feet there were small leather boots made in a way that Peter had not seen, not even at the tanners’ stalls set out near Hamtun’s eastern gate. So antic was the aspect of this sorry wayfarer, the monk could not but smile when they came closer to each other. Though the man possessed an air about him that was pale and grey, he did not have the look of one with harm in him, as did the rider of the drag that made to carry off the child some moments since. This was a poor man who mayhap had his small mischiefs but seemed good at heart, and when their paths met and they stopped both were already grinning at each other, although if this were through amity or else because each found the other one’s appearance humorous, neither could say. Peter was first to make his hellos and to speak.
“ ’Tis a hot day to be out, I was just this moment saying to myself. How goes the world with thee now, my fine, honest fellow?”
Here the other man cocked back his head and squinted up his eyes to peer at Peter, as it were he thought that Peter mocked him, but at last decided he did not and answered in a cheery manner.
“Oh, it looks like a hot day, all right, and I suppose the world goes well enough. What of yourself? That bag of yours looks like a burden.”
This was spoken with a roguish wink and nod at the jute sack that Peter had upon his shoulder, just as though it might be stolen valuables concealed within. Smiling at this, the monk put down his baggage on the rough track at their feet. He gave a great sigh of relief and shook his head.
“God bless thee, no … or if it is it’s not a burden I begrudge.”
The fellow lifted up one brow as though with interest, or as if he invited still more comment, at which Peter thought that here there might be opportunity for guidance to the place he sought. It seemed that his chance meetings thus far on this afternoon were as directed by a higher power, and so perhaps was this one also. Much emboldened after these considerations, he came out and asked the question that he’d thought none but himself might answer, gesturing towards his set-down bundle as he did.
“I have been told I am to bring it to the centre. Dost thou know where that might be?”
There was much thoughtful humming and lip-tugging brought about by Peter’s query, where his new-met comrade tipped back the outlandish cap to show a balded pate and looked up to the skies this way and that as though the place he had been asked for were somewhere aloft. At length, just when the monk thought that he should be disappointed, he was given his reply. The other man turned off from Peter and made indication down the lane that was behind him, in the way that Peter was already headed. Here the hill he’d climbed was flattened off, so that his track now led between some dug-in homes and pastures to a broader street ahead, that cut across to run downhill from north to south and was alive with distant carts and animals. A thick elm stood there at the join where met the pathways, and it was to this the monk’s attentions were now called.
“If it’s where I’m thinking of, then you must turn right by that tree along the end there.” Sniffing back some snot the man here spat, in place of punctuation, as it seemed. “Go down that way until you reach the crossroads at the bottom. If you go straight over and you carry on downhill, it’s on your left across the road, just halfway down.”
Peter was overcome with joy and was likewise amazed at the great providence of God, that his riddle had found so swiftly and so simply its solution. All that had been in the end required of him, so things turned out, was that he ask. He gazed with gratitude upon the ragged pauper who had given him deliverance, and it was then that he first truly saw what was not usual in the man. He was not merely grey or pale as Peter had upon the outset thought him, but was rather without colouring of any kind, more like an image made with charcoal than a living and warm-blooded thing. He was also not only pale, but like to cloudy water so that when the monk made closer study he discovered he could see dark blurs moving across the figure that were traffics on the downhill path that cut across behind it, as if the poor man was made so that he could be seen through, though not clearly. With a tingling that was like an icy brook that trickled down his aching backbone, Peter knew he chattered to a spectre.
He was careful that the sudden fright he felt not show upon his face, lest he affront one who until then had been kindly and most helpfully disposed. Besides, the monk was yet uncertain what the being was he had the conversation of, although he thought it not an evil thing. Perhaps it was a lost soul, neither blessed nor else condemned and so residing in another state, here in its haunts of old. He wondered if it were eternally required to wander thus, or if the spirit knew some further destination, be it heaven or a different place, and to this end he asked where it was bound.
“I trust that your own journey is toward some pure and godly ending?”
Now the ghost looked guilty first, then sly, and in the end composed. Peter made private observation that the wraith’s expressions were as easy seen through as its form. The creature hesitated somewhat as it made reply.
“I’m … well, I’m off to see a friend now, if you want the honest truth. A poor old soul it is, lives all alone on Scarletwell Street corner and without a family to visit ’em. I’ll bid you a good day now, Father, or whatever you’d prefer I call you. Good luck carrying your swag-bag to the centre, now.”
With that the apparition went by Peter and on down the hill, towards where Peter had just intervened between the knave upon his cart and the young girl. The monk stood on the spot and watched him leave, and while he did so wondered what strange chance had made it so the tattered spirit should be gone about the lonely croft-man’s shed near to the dye well, for from how he’d spoken it could be no other place. Since Peter had come here to Hamtun, nothing had occurred that was to his eye only aimless fortune. Rather, it seemed that events had been already set into their place and time, with all their joints and decorations long ordained. While he had felt, upon the corner near the well, that he but viewed again a narrative read many times before, he now thought it more like a plan on parchment that a carpenter had made. His every footstep traced the lines by which he was made part to a design he could not guess. The wandering phantom that had helped him was now some way off and made more difficult to see, so Peter lifted once again his load and hung it on his back, then went along the lane to where the elm tree was. There he turned south and headed down beside the wide street where were many horses led, towards the crossroads that lay near its low end, as he had been told.
About him in their pens that bordered on the path or else come trotting out to join its filthy downhill skid were colts and mares and foals of every kind, so that he thought this must be where the horseflesh dealers made their truck. The smell of all the dung was sweet or like a fruited mash, although it was not pleasant in its sweetness and black flies were everywhere about in whispering thunderheads. The rank air here and the increasing closeness of the day brought out salt floods upon his legs and arms and made his heart fast and his breathing hard, or such was his conclusion. Looking up, he saw the blanketing of cloud above seemed nearer and, more than this, that it was now darker. Peter hoped his quest might soon be done, so that he could the sooner find some lodgings and be indoors if it rained.
The crossroads, when he came to it, had once again the sense that it was seen before, and Peter’s head felt light now with a kind of ringing echo in his ears. For all he’d pissed or sweated, there’d not been a drop of water past his lips since dawn. He stood there on the crossing’s northwest corner, and looked up along the new street he stood on the brink of, to its east. Here he beheld a scene he recognised that was all smokes and lights, and on the instant understood where he must be. This was the far end of the street where were the forges, that he’d seen the top of on that morning when he’d just arrived and come up from the bridge. If near the place where he stood now were truly England’s centre, then how many hours ago had he been just a little walk from it? But then, had he come straight here he should not have seen the relic temple on the sheep track, nor the bloody well, nor should he have been there to save the child from harm. He stared as though made dumb along the sparking, smouldering lane and marvelled at where fate had brought him.
Peter saw there sooty men who worked in melted gold and old men, almost blinded by their years, stooped over silver filigrees. A man that seemed a dwarf stood with his straining cheeks puffed out and lips pursed tight upon the stem of a long pipe or trumpet, from the end of which there came a swelling bubble that was like one made of soap but all on fire, so Peter knew it for a ball blown in hot glass. He saw the smiling traders who had eyes more bright than all the gems kept in their purses, which they’d spill as glinting droplet-streams into an upturned, spidery palm. He saw the riches of the world fresh from their foundry and knew that, among these splendours, what he carried in his jute bag was a pearl without compare.
He turned the other way and looked instead off to the west, along a street where many of the horses from uphill behind him were now being led. Some fair way further down it on the side where Peter stood, he saw there was a mighty thatched roof risen up, and thought that this was the great hall he’d seen the back of when he was up near the smothering chalk-merchant’s yard. Across from this and on the way’s far side there was a church tower he could see above the building-tops. It might be that the thatched hall was the manor he had heard of, where a prince that was the kin to Offa lived and had a church built for him there upon his land. The good wife he had talked to up the far end of the metal-workers’ street had said there was a church here called Saint Peter’s, that he thought might be the building he saw now.
Go down until you reach the crossroads, so the ghost had said, then pass straight over, where if he continued down the place he sought should be across the street and on his left. Heart hammering still and in a failing light thrown from the rain-clouds gathering above, he went across the hectic byway haltingly, so that he might avoid its trundling wagons until he was safely on its further side. From this new vantage he gazed anxiously across the downhill road towards the east, to see if he might make out by some sign where was the centre that the pauper soul had told him of. Nothing was there saving more pasture and a fenced-out yard that from its din he thought to be a smith’s, although not even this was halfway down the tilt, as he’d been made to think the centre should be. With a sinking worry in his gut he went on down the hill, his tired eyes darting back and forth expectantly about the grounds that were across the way.
The smith’s yard, as he thought, was near the bottom, while up by the crossroads at its other end, there on the corner with the street of metal workers was a smith’s yard also. Nothing was between them and their blackened forges saving only empty and untended mede, and on his cheek now Peter felt an early rain-spot, fat and cold.
He came upon what seemed to him the middle of the sloping way, and stopped to stand upon its edge and gaze across it, to where there was only wilderness. The thudding in his chest was louder, and he knew that he had once or many times before arrived here to find nothing. He was ever in the action of arriving here and finding nothing. Naught but all the drivers and their mounts gone up and down the broad path through a rain that now was spitting heavier. Naught save the idle man who stood outside the smith’s yard, up about the corner this lane had with the gold-workers’ street. Nothing but thistles and a tree and some bare ground, where he had thought to find the soul of all his land enthroned. He did not know if it were tears or sweat or rain that poured now down his face as he inclined it hopelessly toward the gravid sky and asked again what he had asked when at the other cross-path, only now his voice was angry and was tired, as if he did not care who heard.
“Is this the centre?”
All was in that moment stopped to him. Inside his ears the echo had become what was a humming of a kind, as if the halted instant were itself reverberant and rang with all the jewels of circumstance that made for its components. Rain hung motionless or else fell only slowly, with its liquids like to countless studs of opal that were everywhere fixed on the air, and in the coats of horses each hair was a blazing filament of brass. A shine was on the very dung that made it seem the prize of all the earth, and of the fields their bounty, that the flies set there about it were raised up on wings like to the windows of fine churches. On the waste-field there across the halted treasure-slide that was the street, midst weeds become like emerald flame, a man was standing all in white and in one hand he held a polished rod made from fair wood. His hair was like to milk, as was his robe, so that he stood as if a beacon in the scene and was the source of all its light, which painted an exquisite glint on every creature’s eye. His kindly gaze met with the monk’s, and Peter knew it was the friend who had appeared to him in Palestine, who’d charged him with his task and set him on his way. His journey’s alpha was become its omega and in his hearing now there was a roar, as though the pounding of great wings, that Peter thought but his own pulse made amplified. The answer of his question was announced.
Across the stilled enchantment that was on the street, the burning figure threw aloft its arms for joy, whereupon there were bright and blinding pinions opened out to either side. Exultant it called out as in a mighty voice amid tall mountains, that the sounds of it whirled off a thousand ways all at one time. It was the foreign speech that Peter had once heard before, with words that burst as though they were puff-toadstools on his thoughts, to scatter new ideas like drifting spores.
“Iyeexieesst.”
<em>Yes! Yes! Yes, it is I! Yes, I exist! Yes, it is here in this place of excess that with a cross the centre shall be marked. Yes, it is here where is the exit of your journey, where both ye and I are come together. Yes, yes, yes, unto the very limits of existence, yes!</em>
The being now held out his rounded rod as if he pointed it at Peter. Long and pale as though made out of pine, he saw its closer end had been worked to a point, where at the tip for decoration was a blue like cornflowers. Here the monk was puzzled and knew not why he was indicated thus, then saw that it was not at him the staff was aimed, but at a place that was behind him. Now he turned, and as he did it was as though his motion made the spell undone. The rushing sound he heard was not abated, yet the world was moved again, and rain dropped swiftly all about where it had only crawled before.
Behind him, set between what was a horse-shed and the premise of yet one more smith, he saw a wall of stone that had some violets grown out from its cracks, and let in to it was a wooden gate with iron trims that was a little open. Through this Peter saw a glade with swollen graves and tomb-stones raised up from its sods, and past it was a humble building made from dun and craggy stones by which two monks stood talking to each other. He was come upon a church. The dame who wore the Thor-stone and advised him earlier had said there was another church close by that of Saint Peter, which was called Saint Gregory’s. His arm upon the left that held the sack was aching now and so he changed the weighted baggage to his right, although this did not make the aching cease. As though struck dumb he stumbled through what had become a downpour and went in the church-yard’s gate, a little way along its path. The clerics broke off with their discourse and had seen him now, whereon they came towards him, slowly first then quickly, wearing faces of concern. Peter was fallen on his knees, though it were not in grateful prayer at his deliverance but more he found he could not longer stand.
The two friars, who soon came upon him, did their best to help him up and out of the deluge, but they were young and slender men who found he was too heavy. All they could accomplish was to set him on his back for comfort, with his head propped up against the bulged-out siding of a grave. They crouched above him with their habits spread out as they thought to keep the rain from off him, though it made them seem like crows and did not shield him much. Above them Peter saw the underbelly of the brewing storm, like darkened pearls that seethed and boiled and were become a changing and fantastic swim of wrinkles.
Everything was in that moment made alight, and then a frightful thunder boomed so that the monks who nursed him cried out and became more urgent in their questions, asking him where he was from and what it was that brought him here. The lightnings came again to drench the whole sky with their flash and Peter lifted up his arm, though not the left one that was numb, and made a gesture to his bag upon the soaking grass beside him.
When they understood him they pulled wide the jute-cloth neck and took what was inside out in the wind and wet. It was the hand-span of a man and half again across in both directions, roughly hewn from brownish stone so that it was too heavy to be lifted easy in one hand. The silvering rain dripped from its angles and its corners and the priests were now made mystified, as too were they amazed.
“What is it, brother? Can you tell us where you found it?”
Peter spoke, though it was hard, and from their faces had the sound of a delirium. From how they heard it, this was one who’d travelled far across the sea and had been near a place of skulls when he had found his treasure buried there. Unearthed, it was as though an angel had appeared to tell him he must take the relic and deliver it unto the centre of his land. It seemed to them as though he said he had a moment since met with this angel yet again, who had confirmed their small church as the pilgrim’s destination. Much of what the poor man said was lost amongst the rumble of the heavens, and at last they begged that he should tell them where the land was he had been, that had this place of skulls, and where were holy tokens jutted up from out the soil.
Their voices had become a part of the almighty fluttering that filled him, as though come from far away so that he barely heard them. He was dying. He would not again see Medeshamstede, and he knew it now. Above, the rolling banks of sodden sky were a black silk of Orient that had been crushed into some fissured complication full of crease and shifting crack. He saw now what he had not seen before, that clouds were of a grotesque shape by reason that they were tucked in and had been cunningly compressed. He saw that were they but unfolded they should have a form at once more regular and yet more difficult to be encompassed by the gaze. He did not have the slightest understanding what this odd idea might mean, nor why the feeling was upon him that his years of journey had been naught except a single, briefly-taken step that was now done.
He thought that he had in the last few moments closed his eyes and yet it seemed still that he saw, perhaps mere dreams or memories of sight that were inside the flickering lids. He looked upon the worried brethren squatting over him and at the little church behind them. Just as with his new-found comprehension of the churning, pelting firmament above, so too he noticed for a first time how the corners of a building were made cleverly, that they could be unfolded in a manner whereby the inside of them was out. What he had earlier mistook for carvings over ledges on the church he saw now to be people small like unto mygge-flies, yet then knew that they were large as he but somehow far away. They waved and reached at him, the little men. It seemed to him that he had always known of them. The two monks by his side he could no longer see, although he heard them speaking with him yet, and asking him again whence he had come, his perfect sign to bring.
The last word that he said, it was Jerusalem.
** <strong>MODERN TIMES</strong>
<strong>S</strong>ir Francis Drake leaned up against a wall of printed bills outside the Palace of Varieties and let his oiled bonce settle back against the giant names in black and red. According to his pocket watch there was a good half-hour before he had to draw his face on with burnt cork for the Inebriate. He could afford to kick his boots here on the corner until then and watch the horse-carts and the bicycles and all the pretty girls go by, with possibly another Woodbine for a bit of company.
He’d been a six-year-old at school in Lambeth when the other boys called him Sir Francis Drake. That had been at the outset of his mother’s slide to poverty, when he’d been forced to wear a pair of her red stage-tights that had been cut down to look like stockings, although being pleated and bright crimson hadn’t looked like that at all, accounting for the name. In many ways, he thought, he’d got off lightly. Sydney, his big brother … or his ‘young ’un’ as they’d called big brothers at the Hanwell School for Destitutes … had been obliged to wear a blazer, previously a velvet jacket of their mother’s, which had red and black striped sleeves. Aged ten and therefore more self-conscious than his younger sibling, Sydney had been known as ‘Joseph and his coat of many colours’.
Standing at the junction of the high-street now he found that he was sniggering at the nicknames, or at least at Sydney’s, though they hadn’t seemed so funny at the time. Still grinning, he consoled himself that Francis Drake had cut a famously good-looking and heroic dash, while Joseph had been dropped down a deep hole and left to die by brothers outraged at his dress-sense. Anyway, Sir Francis Drake was better than the other names he’d had across the years, which had endured far longer. Oatsie, that was one of them, just rhyming slang from oats and barley. He put up with it, but didn’t like it much. He always thought it made him sound as though he was a yokel, and that wasn’t quite the picture of himself that he was trying to present to people.
Up the hill towards his corner came a brewer’s dray in the Phipps livery, a snorting dappled shire horse with its mop-head hooves as big as dinner plates, dragging its clinking, rattling cartload to a halt in front of him when it came to the crossing where he was. A weathered, chained-off tailboard kept its load in place: old ale-crates that had been stacked empty outside pubs come rain or shine, their damp wood dusted lime with mould, now filled again by brown and glinting cargo headed for some other hostelry, some other windswept corner of a beery cobbled yard. The cart was pulled up at the crossroads, waiting for a moving van and young lad on a bike to go across the other way, before it carried on uphill. He stood there leaning up against the posters, staring at it while it idled, and just for a laugh he thought he’d slip into his character as the Inebriate.
He screwed his eyes up, lowering the lids so he looked half asleep, and made his cake-hole into a lopsided smirk. Even without the cork this creased his face so he appeared some ten years older than his real age, which was twenty. Gurgling deep down in his throat with incoherent lust, he fixed his bleary gaze upon the brewer’s wagon and began a veering but determined drunkard’s walk in its direction, as though he were trying desperately to affect a normal swagger but with legs that barely functioned. He made three steps sideways off downhill but then recovered and took squinting aim again toward his prize, staggering off the curb and out into the mostly empty cobbled road as he approached the booze-truck standing on its far side. Reaching out his hands as if for all the chiming bottles, he slurred “I must be in Heaven”, whereupon the startled driver looked round at him once then geed the horse on, swerving her around the rear end of the moving van that hadn’t yet got quite across the street, and went on jingling up the hill as quickly as the vehicle could manage. Walking casually back across the highway to resume his place propped up against its corner wall he watched the cart go and felt half proud at his act’s success and half ashamed for the exact same reason. He was far too good at doing drunks.
Of course, the drunks were all his father, Charles, who he’d been named after and who had died from dropsy just a decade earlier, in 1899. Four gallons. That was how much liquid had been drained out of his father’s knee, and that was why the better the Inebriate went down, the guiltier he felt. He watched as the September sun fell slanting on the dirty old Northampton buildings hunched around the crossroad’s corners, turning brickwork flocked with soot to orange fire, and thought about the last time that he’d spoken to his dad. It had been in a pub, he noted without much surprise. The Three Stags, hadn’t it been, down Kennington Road? The Stags, the Horns, the Tankard, one of those at any rate. It had been round about this time of day, late afternoon or early evening, on his way back home to where he lived with Sydney and his mother along Pownall Terrace. Passing by the pub he’d had the strangest impulse he should push the swing-door open and look in.
His father had been sitting up one corner on his own, and through the two-inch crack by which he’d opened up the barroom door he’d had a rare chance to observe the man who’d sired him without being seen in turn. It was an awful sight. Charles Senior sat there in his drab upholstered nook and nursed a short glass of port wine. He’d one hand resting in his waistcoat as if to control his ragged breathing, so he’d still looked like Napoleon as mother always said, but bloated as though puffed up with a cycle-pump. He’d previously had a rather sleek, well-fed look, but had turned to an enormous, sloshing bag of water with his former handsomeness submerged and lost somewhere within it. The appearance he’d had once was smoothly oval-faced like Sydney’s, although Sydney’s father had been someone else entirely, some displaced Lord out in Africa, at least according to their mother. Even so, his brother still looked like Charles Senior much more than Charles Junior ever had, the latter favouring their mother more, with her dark curls and beautiful expressive eyes. His father’s eyes had been sunk in the risen dough that was his face that afternoon in the Three Stags, but they’d lit up with what he’d realised with a start was joy when they’d alighted on the small boy peering in towards him through the partly open doorway and the lapping tides of smoke that hung suspended in the air between them.
Even now, stood at the bottom end of what was it called, Gold Street, in the dead-end venue of Northampton, halfway through another disappointing tour with Karno’s <em>Mumming Birds</em>, even today he couldn’t quite get over just how pleased his dad had been to see him on that last occasion. Lord alone knew he’d not shown much interest in his son before then, and Charles Junior had been four years old already when he’d realised for the first time that he had a father. In the Stags that evening, though, the once-arresting vaudevillian had been all smiles and fond words, asking about Sydney and their mother, even taking his ten-year-old offspring in his arms and, for the first and last time, kissing him. Within a few weeks his old man was dying in the hospital, St. Thomas’s, where that bloody Evangelist McNeil had offered only “as ye sow, so shall ye also reap” as consolation, heartless dog-faced bastard that he was. ‘Old man’. Charles Junior chuckled ruefully and shook his head. His father had been thirty-seven, out at Tooting Cemetery in that white satin box, pale face framed by the daisies that Louise, his fancy woman, had arranged around the coffin’s edge.
Perhaps his father knew, there in the fug and mumble of the Three Stags, that he held his son for the last time. Perhaps in some way everybody had a sense before it came, as if it were already all set out, of how their end was going to be. He glanced up at a speckled cloud of birds that dipped and swung and flattened out like a grey flame against the sunset, as they flocked above the local inns and hardware shops before returning home to roost, and thought it was a pity that you couldn’t tell beforehand how your life was going to be, and never mind about your death. Things could go either way for him at present, and it was as unpredictable and random as the movements of those roosting pigeons, how events would finally fall out. Without a break of some sort he’d be spiralling around these northern towns until his dreams had all leaked out of him, had proven to be nothing but hot air from the beginning. Then there would be nothing for it but to live up to his mother’s bleak prediction, every time he’d come home with a whiff of drink upon his breath: “You’ll end up in the gutter like your father.” He knew he was standing at a crossroads in a lot more ways than one, put it like that.
There were more carts and vans about now and a few more people crossing back and forth over the intersection as the town made its way home from work to have its tea. Women with prams and men with knapsacks, loud boys playing vicious, agonizing games of knuckles with each other while they waited for the conker season to commence, all jostling along the streets that led to the four compass points and crossing over where they joined, doing a hurried trot between the coal trucks and the atolls made of horse muck and, just at that moment, a red tram with an advertisement for Adnitt’s gloves across its front. This came up from the west, along the road that he stood facing down with the inflated, sagging sun behind it, and continued on its iron rail past him on his right to hum away up Gold Street. He was living in a modern world all right, but didn’t always feel like he belonged here, in the first years of this new and daunting century. He thought most people felt as jittery and out of place as he did, and that all the optimistic new Edwardians you heard about were only in the papers. Looking round him at the passing people, from their faces and the way they dressed you wouldn’t know the Queen was dead eight years, but then when everyone was poor they tended to look much the same from one reign or one era to another. Poverty was timeless and you could depend upon it. It was never out of fashion.
And it never would be, not in England. Look at all the business with the People’s Budget as they called it, where they’d made provisions for some money to be taken from the income tax and spent upon improvements in society, but then the House of Lords had thrown it out. Somebody ought to throw them out, he thought, and fumbled in his jacket for his pack of snouts. England was going down the plughole and he didn’t reckon that this twentieth century was going to be as kindly to the country as the nineteenth had been. There were all the Germans, for a start, making their ugly noises and their ugly ships. Last year they’d bragged about how much ammonia they’d managed to produce, while now they bragged about how many bombs. Then there was India kicking up a fuss and wanting their reforms. Not that he blamed them, but he thought it was a sign there might not be so many pink bits to school atlases in years to come. The British Empire looked as if it was decaying, inconceivable as that might seem. It had most likely died, to his mind, with Victoria, and now was in the long slow process of accepting its demise and falling quietly to bits.
Thinking about the old days, watching while a junkman cursed a grocer’s lad whose bike had shot across before his horse and cart, he was reminded of the first time that he’d come here to Northampton. He’d been nine, so it had been, what, 1898? Taking the box of ten Wills’s Woodbines from his pocket, he extracted one of the remaining six and balanced it upon his lower lip while he returned the narrow packet to his coat. It was this very same theatre that he’d been appearing at, that first time more than ten years back, with Mr. Jackson’s troupe of child clog dancers, the Eight Lancashire Lads. He’d stood on this corner with his best friend from the outfit, Boysie Bristol, and they’d talked about the double act that they were going to make it big with, as the Millionaire Tramps, decked out in fake whiskers and big diamond rings. This place had been the Grand Variety Hall back then, and Gus Levaine had still been running it, but otherwise it didn’t seem so different. There they’d been, Boysie and Oatsie, cutting off from their rehearsals to waste time here on this spot and think about the fame and fortune they could see stretched out before them, much the same as he was doing still today, all these years later. Contrary to what he’d thought about his father knowing he was soon to die, it seemed more likely to him now that people just made mostly hopeless guesses at how things would work out. While he couldn’t speak for Boysie Bristol, who he’d not seen in five years, for his part he was fairly certain that whatever roles the future held in store for him, Millionaire Tramp would not be one of them. He took a box of matches from his other pocket, turning to one side and pulling his lapel up as a wind-shield while he lit his fag.
Exhaling a blue plume, the west wind he was facing caught the smoke and dragged it back across his shoulder, off up Gold Street. He was looking at a little patch of wasteland halfway down the hill across the road from him and thinking vaguely of the Eight Lancashire Lads – four of them were from outside Lancashire and one of them had been a short-haired girl, but it was true that there were eight of them – when out of nowhere he remembered. This was where they’d met the black man, the first one he’d ever really seen except for pictures in encyclopaedias.
Him and Boysie had been skulking here, debating the logistics of their double act, deciding that their diamond rings should be made out of paste until their turn had made them into actual millionaires, when down the hill he’d come upon his funny bike, over the crossroads and towards them. The chap’s skin was black as coal and not a shade of brown, with salt-and-pepper showing up already in his hair and beard so that the boys had thought he must be getting on for fifty. He was riding a peculiar contraption of a sort that neither lad had previously come across. It was a bicycle that had a two-wheeled cart fixed on the back, but what made it an oddment were its tyres, the two on the machine itself and those upon the trolley that was dragged behind it. They’d been made of rope. Fitted around the bare iron rims were lengths of the same formerly-white hawser that had been employed to tie the trailer to the bike, now ridden through so many sooty puddles that their colour wasn’t noticeably lighter than that of the cyclist himself.
The Negro, seeing that the boys were gaping at him as he came over the crossroads, smiled and pulled his bicycle-and-cart up to the curb a little past them down the hill. He did this with small wooden blocks that he had strapped beneath his shoes for brakes, taking his feet from off the pedals so that they hung down and scraped over the cobbles of the road until the wagon was brought in this manner to a halt. Its rider had looked back across his shoulder, grinning at the two boys who had been regarding him so rudely, and called out a friendly greeting to them.
“Ah hope you two youngsters ain’t bin gittin’ up tuh any trouble, now.”
The man’s voice had been marvellous, like nothing that they’d ever heard before. They’d trotted down the hill to where he was and told him they were waiting their turn to perform as clog dancers, which almost was the truth, then asked him where he’d come from. He’d be too self-conscious now, he thought, to just come out and say that to a black man, but when you’re a kiddie you just speak what’s on your mind. The fellow had black skin and had a foreign accent. It was only natural that they should ask where he was from, and naturally was how he’d taken it, without offence or anything. He’d told them he was from America.
Of course, that had set both boys off on a great stream of questions about Indians and cowboys, and if all the buildings in the cities were as tall as they’d been told. He’d laughed and said New York was “purty big”, though looking back he hadn’t seemed half so impressed about his origins as the two boys had been. He’d told them how he’d lived here in Northampton for about a year now, “down on Scarlut Well”, wherever that was, and then after some more chat had said he ought to be about his work. He’d winked at them and told them to keep out of trouble, then he’d lifted up his wood-blocks and careered away downhill, towards where the ornate grey drum of a gas-holder reared against the sky. After the man had gone, the two of them had enthused for a time about America, and then had imitated how the black bloke talked, his own impression knocking Boysie’s into a cocked hat. Then they’d gone back to all their Millionaire Tramp pipedreams, and he’d never thought about the curious encounter from that day to this.
He took a drag that was more like a sip off of his Woody and then blew the smoke out down his nose, the way that he’d seen others do and thought it looked quite stylish. There was now a fair old bunch of people heading back and forth over the crossroads, either riding or on foot, and he stood wondering what else there might have been from those times that he’d just forgot about. Not skull-faced Mrs. Jackson, wife of the Lancastrian former teacher who’d set up the company, sat suckling her baby son while overseeing the clog dancing troupe’s rehearsals. He’d remember that sight if he lived to be a hundred. Now he thought about it, there were more than likely very few things like that Negro chap, things he’d forgot about by accident, although he knew there were a multitude of things that he’d forgot about on purpose, as it were.
It wasn’t that he was ashamed of where he’d come from, but a lot of what this business was about was how things looked. He had an eye to how he wanted things to be reported if he ever managed to make something of himself. It didn’t hurt to come from a poor background: ‘rags to riches’ was a story everybody loved. The rags part of it, though, that had to be depicted in a certain way, touched up and made more picturesque with all the nasty little details painted out. Nobody would have shed a tear for Little Nell if she’d expired in childbirth or from syphilis. The public had an appetite for sadness and for sentiment, and what they saw as all the colour of the worse-off classes, but nobody liked the taste of squalor. The Inebriate went down a treat for just so long as he was hanging round a lamppost, talking to it like a pal. The skit was cut off long before he shit his trousers or went home and put his wife in the infirmary by belting her until she couldn’t walk.
That was another element that needed getting rid of if you wanted to present your tale of poverty in the right light, all of the fights and beatings. If at some uncertain point in the uncertain future he was asked to reminisce, say for some little magazine on the theatre, why, then he’d talk about <em>Mumming Birds</em>, he’d talk about <em>The Football Match</em> where he’d appeared with Harry Weldon, and he’d even talk about the Eight Lancashire Lads. The years that him and Sydney spent as the performing mascots of the Elephant Boys, though, they wouldn’t get a mention. Not a dicky bird.
A sudden gust along the west arm of the crossroads blew the cigarette smoke back into his eyes so that they watered for a second and he couldn’t see. He waited for a bit then wiped them with his cuff, hoping that all the people passing wouldn’t think that he was crying; that a girl had stood him up or anything like that.
There had been nothing else but gangs all over London back when he was growing up. You didn’t strictly have to be in one of them, and if you wanted to stay out of trouble it was better if you weren’t, but there was something to be said for being friendly with a gang and sort of on its edges. If you picked a mob to hang around who’d got a reputation that was terrible enough, then with a bit of luck the other gangs would see that you were left alone. There hadn’t been a crew in all the city or its boroughs half as frightening as the boys from Elephant and Castle, which was how come him and Sydney pallied up to them.
Him and his elder brother could both sing and dance by that age and had often done turns on the street to earn a penny when their mother’s luck was going badly, as it often was. The Elephant Boys, who’d think nothing of disfiguring or robbing adult men, had been impressed by him and Sydney, shrewdly noticing the brothers’ obvious entertainment value. They’d be called on as the gang’s performing monkeys, either as a means of bringing in some coppers when the funds were low or else to lift morale before and after some hair-raising punch-up with a rival bunch of lads, perhaps the Bricklayer’s Boys from Walworth, somebody like that. His speciality had been to jam his dainty feet into the handles on a pair of dustbin lids, then tap-dance on a metal grating just for all the deafening racket it would make. They’d called it Oatsie’s Stamp. In fact, the Elephant Boys were the first to call him Oatsie, now he thought about it.
It had been a horror. He’d be doing Oatsie’s Stamp with Sydney joining in on spoons or comb and paper, just whatever was about, and there the biggest thugs from out the gang would be, sat by the roadside, studiously sharpening their market-worker’s hooks up on the curb-stones, sometimes looking up and whistling or clapping if they thought that him and Stakey were performing well. Stakey was what they’d called his brother in those days, from steak and kidney. There they were, Stakey and Oatsie, hiding round the corner, watching while the scrap or massacre was taking place, then afterwards they’d both be called back on so he could do the victory dance with a white face at all the business he’d just seen – boys running home with one ear hanging from their head, a lad of fourteen screaming with the blood all down his legs from where a hook had caught him up the arse – and he’d be thinking about all of this while he was stamping on an iron grid, the dustbin tops wedged on his plates of meat making a noise like Judgement Day, with hot sparks shearing from the clattering metal up round his bare knees. He’d been what, seven, eight years old?
If he’d learned anything from all of that it had been that he couldn’t bear the thought of being hurt, of having something permanent done to his body or especially his face. They were the things he hoped would lift him out of all this grubbing round to make a crust. If anything should happen to them, that should be the end of it. Of him. He’d stood and watched once, sick with shame, while Sydney got a thumping from an older member of the gang who’d taken umbrage over something Syd had said. He’d known, and Sydney had assured him later, that there wasn’t anything he could have done to help, but all the same he’d felt a coward over the affair. He could have said something, at least, but then that might have meant that he was next, so he’d just stood there and watched Stakey have his cheek split open. If, unlikely as it seemed, he ever wrote a memoir, none of this would be included.
Arguments or shouting matches, those he was all right with, but a fight was something he’d try anything he could do to avoid. Some of the older entertainers that he knocked about with on the circuit reckoned things were looking bad between England and Germany and thought sooner or later there might be a war. He’d be just twenty-one next April and then he’d have the key of the door, never been twenty-one before and all of that, but he’d still be of army age if anything should start. He didn’t fancy that idea at all, and still hoped there was some way he could be safe in another country, if and when it happened. He’d been booked in for a month to play at the Folies Bergère for Karno earlier that year and he’d enjoyed it so much that he hadn’t wanted to come home. He’d seen more lovely women than he’d ever dreamed of, which was saying something with <em>his</em> dreams. He’d met Mr. Debussy, the composer, and he’d had the only real brawl of his life with the prize-fighter Ernie Stone in Stone’s hotel room after too much absinthe. Stone had won, of course, but he’d not done too bad considering and had surrendered only when the lightweight boxer hit him in the mouth so that he’d thought that he might lose his teeth. Returning to the old routines of <em>Mumming Birds</em> and touring gloomy northern towns after all that had been a disappointment, and he hoped it wouldn’t be too long before he got to go abroad again, preferably not in a tin hat as a conscript of the army. Karno had been going on about America, but then Fred Karno talked about a lot of things and only some of them would ever come to fruit. He’d keep his fingers crossed and see what happened.
Oatsie took a few more quick puffs on his fag, then dropped it on the floor and ground it out beneath a swivelling boot before he kicked it off the curb. The crossroads’ gutters brimmed with empty cigarette packs, Woodbines, Passing Clouds, and an unappetising salad of dead leaves. He had to squint about a bit before he caught sight of the trees that these had evidently fallen from, some way along the crossroads’ westward route so that he only saw the tops of them, gold in the setting sun. Now that he looked he saw that there were also saplings sprouting from a couple of the chimneys closer to him, rooted in the dirty brickwork, like the one he could see growing up above the roofline of the public house across the street, the Crow and Horseshoe. Noticing a street-sign bolted up on the far corner and made near unreadable by soot and rust, he saw the slope he stood on was called Horseshoe Street, which helped explain at least the second part of the pub’s name. And if those further trees whose tops he could just glimpse were standing in a graveyard then that might explain the first part, he supposed. He pictured chubby carrion birds all perched there screeching on their tombstones where the names had been erased by moss, and then he wished he hadn’t.
He was only twenty after all. He didn’t need to think of all that morbid business for a long time yet, although there’d been lads killed in the Boer War a good sight younger than what he was now. For that matter, there had been kids in Lambeth who’d not got to their tenth birthdays. He wished he could still believe in God the way he had that night in Oakley Street, down in the basement where he was recovering from fever, when his mother had performed the most dramatic scenes from the New Testament to keep him occupied. She’d put all of the talents from a stage career she’d only recently abandoned into the performance and had almost done too good a job, with him left hoping that he’d have a relapse in his fever so that he could die that night and meet this Jesus who he’d heard so much about. She’d been that passionate, he’d never doubted any of the stories for an instant. Mind you, that had been before him and his brother were dragged through the workhouse with her, and before she had been put in the asylum for a spell. He wasn’t quite so sure today about the heaven that he’d heard described that night, so vividly he couldn’t wait to touch it.
These days, though, he’d lowered his sights and if he thought about what might be after death at all it was in terms of how he’d be remembered, or else how he’d be forgotten. What he wanted was his name to live on after him, and not just as a character from pubs around Walworth and Lambeth, how his father had been posthumously labelled. What he wanted was to be well thought of and well spoken of when he was dead, the way that someone like Fred Karno would be. Well, perhaps that was a bit ambitious, given Karno’s stature in the business, but at least he’d like to be recalled as someone in the same division, even if he was a fair sight lower down in people’s estimation than what Fred would be. Considering the future, when there’d be more people everywhere, he could see how the Music Hall would be much bigger and much more important than it was today, and Oatsie thought there was a chance that he’d get written up somewhere as a contributor to the tradition’s early days, at least if he could manage not to get killed in a war before he’d got his break.
The ideas he was entertaining had begun to get him down. He swept his long-lashed girlish eyes across the passing throng in hope of spotting a big bust or pretty face that might distract him from his own mortality, but he was out of luck. There were some women who looked nice enough, but not what you’d call notable. As for their bosoms it was much the same tale. There was nothing that stood out, and so he drifted back to his uneasy contemplations.
What it was with death that worried him was that it made him feel like he was trapped upon a tramline that was only going to one place, that the iron rail was set already in the road in front of him, that it was all inevitable, although actually that was the thing that worried him with life as well, upon consideration. It was how life seemed sometimes like a skit that had been written out beforehand, with a punch line that was set up in advance. All you could do was try and keep up with its twists and turns while the momentum of the story dragged you through it, one scene following another. You were born, your father ran away, you sang and danced on stage to keep your family out the workhouse but they went there anyway, your brother got you a position with Fred Karno, you went off to Paris, came back home, missed out on Harry Weldon’s former star role in <em>The Football Match</em> because of laryngitis, you got stuck with <em>Mumming Birds</em> instead and ended up back in Northampton, and then some time after that, a long time hopefully, you died.
It was all the “and then and then and then” of it that scared him, one scene following another, its events determining how all the acts thereafter would unfold, just like a great long line of dominoes all falling, and it didn’t seem you could do anything to change the way they fell, the prearranged precision of it, regular as clockwork. It was as if life were some great big impersonal piece of machinery, like all the things they had in factories that would keep rolling on whatever happened. Getting born was just the same as getting your coat lining caught up in its wheels. Life pulled you in and that was that, you were enmeshed in all its circumstances, all its gears, until you reached the other end and got spat out, into a fancy box if you were lucky. There seemed very little choice in any of it. Half his life had been dictated by his family’s financial situation, and the other half dictated by his own compulsions, by his need to be adored the way his mother had adored him, by his frantic scrabble to get somewhere and to be somebody.
But that wasn’t the whole story, was it? Oatsie knew that was what everybody thought about him privately, all of his so-called pals from in the business, how they saw him as a climber, always chasing something – chasing women, chasing any scrap of work he had a sniff at, chasing fame and fortune – but he knew they’d got him wrong. Of course he wanted all those things, wanted them desperately, but so did everybody else, and it was never really the pursuit of recognition that propelled him through his life so much as the great black explosion of his background rumbling behind him. Mother starving her way into madness, father swelling up into a stinking, sloshing water-bomb, all of the pictures flickering past to a percussion made by fists on flesh and dustbin lids on gratings, hammering and clanging in the rising sparks. What kept him on the move, he knew, was not the destiny that he was chasing but the fate that he was running from. What people saw as climbing was no more than him attempting to arrest his fall.
The flow of vehicles and people at the crossroads moved like shuttles on a loom, first shunting back and forth from north to south, up and downhill in front of him, then rattling from west to east along the road that had the Crow and Horseshoe in and Gold Street. All the day’s smells mingled there upon his corner, cooked by the unseasonably sunny afternoon and now condensed with sunset to a dog-blanket that hung above the junction. Horse manure was the most prevalent among the mixed aromas, giving the perfume its base, but there were other essences stirred into the bouquet: coal dust that faintly smelled of electricity and pepper, stale beer wafted from the ale-yards and another sweet yet noxious fragrance somewhere between death and pear drops that at first he couldn’t place but finally decided that Northampton’s many tanneries, most probably, were where the odour came from. Anyway, he put all this out of his mind because just then, ascending Horseshoe Street on his side, there was something that he definitely wouldn’t turn his nose up at.
She’d never be mistaken for a classic beauty, not the type he’d witnessed on the Champs-Élysées, he could see that even at this distance, yet there seemed to be a radiance she carried with her. Strolling up the slope towards him from down near its bottom he could note a plumpness in the girl that might be more pronounced when she grew older, but which at that moment manifested in an irresistible arrangement of well-balanced and voluptuous curves. Her contours were as generous and as inviting to the eye as a lush garden, with a little of the garden or the orchard also in the sway her walk had underneath the cheap, thin fabric of a flapping summer skirt, her thick thighs tapering to sturdy calves and tiny china feet, which lazily swung back and forth below the fluttering hem as in her own good time she climbed the hill.
Her clothes were drab and mainly brown but complementary to the palette of the landscape she was sauntering through: the leaves that choked the gutters with a fire and chocolate medley and the faded sepia handbills peeling torn from the façade of an antique rival theatre, down there at the foot of Horseshoe Street. Setting the composition off, though, was the woman’s hair. Deep auburn as a bowl of polished chestnuts and like lava where they caught the early evening light her curls fell round her rose cheeks in a jiggling spill of brandy snaps. A little more than five feet tall, a pocket goddess, she burned like a lamp flame that was low yet still illuminated the smoke-cured enclosures that it passed amongst.
As this young bit of stuff came closer, he could make out that she carried something up near her left shoulder, one hand underneath it as she leaned whatever it was on the slope of her full breast, the other wrapped around the lump to hold it to her, as you would a shopping bag if both the handles had come off. Still only halfway up the steep climb to where Oatsie stood, she stopped now to adjust her grip upon the bundle, shifting it up higher in her arms before she carried on. A fluffy outcrop on the top end of the item seemed to suddenly come loose and swivel round to point straight at him, whereupon he realised that it was a baby girl.
To be more accurate, despite its size and age it was perhaps … no, not perhaps … it was most certainly the loveliest human creature he had ever seen. She seemed to be not much more than a year old, with her white-gold locks that dropped down in a shower of wedding rings and her enormous eyes the reassuring blue of police lanterns on a risky night. The infant girl was like a cygnet angel as she met his gaze unblinkingly, perched there in the embrace of the approaching woman. If he’d ever thought that his own beauty might one day lift him above the quagmire of his origins, here was a glory that they’d surely come to talk about the way they spoke of Helen. Nothing would prevent this child from growing to a diamond of her age, a face that stared out of a poster at you once and haunted you forever. She would never in her life go unappreciated or unloved and you could see it in the level, unassuming look that she already had, the inviolable confidence of a celestial orchid grown amidst the clovers and the weeds. If he knew anything, he knew the tot would end up as a bigger name than him and Karno put together. It was unavoidable.
The fact that the small girl was being carried by the shapely little woman didn’t necessarily mean they were child and mother, he reflected, looking on the bright side, although even from this far away you couldn’t help but notice a resemblance. Still, there was a chance this chickabiddy was the tiny vision’s aunt, minding the baby while its parents were at work, and that therefore she might be unattached, despite appearances. It didn’t really matter in the long run in that all he wanted was to while away ten minutes with some pleasant and flirtatious talk, not scarper off to Gretna with her, but it somehow always made him feel uncomfortable if he was chatting up a married girl.
Climbing the hill, the woman gazed towards its far side and the patch of wasteland that he’d noticed earlier, dreamily contemplating the gone-over buddleia erupting from between its tumbles of collapsed old brick, seemingly unaware of his existence. He already had the baby’s eye, however, so he thought he’d work with that and see how far he got. He dipped his chin until it touched his collar and the fat knot of his tie, then looked up at the toddler from beneath his curling ostrich lashes and the jet-black hyphens of his brows. He gave the gravely staring little beauty what he knew was his most impish grin, accompanied by a brief, bashful flutter of his eyelids. Suddenly he broke out with a clattering burst of expert tap dance on the worn buff flagstones, lasting no more than three seconds before it was over, at which juncture he stopped dead and looked away uphill, pretending to disown his terpsichorean interlude as if it hadn’t happened.
Next, at intervals, he darted shy and furtive glances back across his shoulder as though to establish whether the cherubic child was looking at him, though he knew she would be. Every time he met her look, which now seemed slightly more delighted and amused, he ducked his face away as though embarrassed and stared pointedly towards the opposite direction for a moment before letting his gaze creep, as though reluctantly, back round across his shoulder for another glimpse of her, like in a game of peek-a-boo. On the third time he did this, he saw that the pretty woman carrying the waif had been alerted by her charge’s gurglings and was looking at him too, wearing a knowing smile that seemed one of appraisal yet was at the same time somehow challenging, as if she weighed him up according to a measure he was unfamiliar with. The breeze was lifting more now as the day cooled off, smashing the dandelion clocks that grew upon the scrap-ground and then scattering their drifting cogs along the street. It shook the woman’s curls like burnished catkins as she studied him, deciding whether she approved of what she saw.
It seemed she did, although perhaps not without reservations. Only several paces from him now she called out cheerfully to Oatsie over the remaining distance.
“You’ve got an admirer.” Obviously, she meant the baby.
In a funny way her voice was like blackcurrant jam, which he was passing through a fad for at the time. Both hearteningly commonplace and fruity with suggestive undertones, its sweetness had a quality of darkly dripping plenty and, as well, the hint of a sharp bite. Her accent, though, was not the strange Northampton intonation he’d expected. If he’d not known better, he’d have sworn that she was from South London.
By then, she’d got to the corner where she stopped, a foot or so away from him. Up closer, now that he could see the woman and her baby in more detail, they were certainly no let-down. If the child had been more beautiful or perfect he’d have wept, while the adult companion, who he’d got his eye on, had a glow and warmth about her that if anything enhanced the first impression that she’d made on him from further down the hill. She looked to be about his age, and the hot summer that was drawing to its close had raised a crop of freckles on her face and arms that were like smaller versions of the specks on lilies. He became aware that he was staring at her and decided that he’d better say something.
“Well, just as long as my admirer knows that I was standing here admiring her before she was admiring me.” This wasn’t quite so obviously about the baby, necessarily, but he was happy with the ambiguity. The woman laughed and it was music, more that of a pub piano on a Friday night than of Debussy, but still music just the same. The western sky was being daubed in other colours now, in melancholy piles of gold like lost exchequers over the gas-holder, pastel smudges of pale violet and bruise mauve on its peripheries as she replied.
“Ooh, get away with yer. You’ll give ’er a big ’ed, then she’ll be spoilt and no one’ll want anything to do with ’er.” She changed her hold upon the infant here, switching its weight onto her other arm so that he now saw her left hand and the plain ring on its third finger. Oh well. He found that he quite enjoyed the bit of company, and didn’t mind much that it wouldn’t lead to anything. He changed his line of complimentary spiel so it was now directed solely at the baby and, freed from the need to make a good impression on the woman, Oatsie was surprised to find that he meant every word of it for once.
“I don’t believe it. She looks like it’d take more than flattery to spoil her, and I’d bet five bob that she’ll have people flocking round her everywhere she goes. What do you call her?”
Here the brunette turned her face towards that of the small girl in her arms, to smile fondly and proudly as she let their foreheads gently touch together. There were geese above the gasworks.
“ ’Er name’s May, like mine. May Warren. What’s yours, anyway, stood out ’ere on Vint’s Palace corner with yer pimpy eyes?”
Oatsie was so shocked that his mouth fell open. No one had described what he still thought of as his smouldering gaze in quite that way before. After an instant of stunned silence, though, he laughed with genuine admiration at the woman’s insight and her brutal honesty. What served to make the slur much funnier was that at just the moment it was said, the woman’s baby turned her head and gazed straight at him with a puzzled, sympathetic look, as if the child echoed her mother’s query, also wondering what he was doing out here on the corner with his pimpy eyes. This made him laugh longer and harder, with the woman chuckling deliciously along and finally her tiny daughter joining in as well, not wishing to appear as if she didn’t understand.
When they’d eventually stopped, he realised with a certain wonderment how good it felt after the months and years of scripted comedy to have a real, spontaneous laugh, particularly at a joke against himself. A joke that told him he was getting too big for his boots, and that the serious career concerns that were upsetting him not five minutes before were likely to be just as puffed up and inflated. It had put things in perspective. He supposed that was what laughs were for.
He nodded, with as little smugness as he could, towards his name up on the poster he was leaning on, but told her she should call him Oatsie. All his friends did, anyway, and he thought Charles would sound too stuck-up to a girl like this. When him and Sydney had been small their mother had been doing well at first, and would parade her boys along Kennington Road in outfits that she knew nobody else around there could have possibly afforded in their wildest dreams. That had made the collapse to poverty and pleated crimson tights for stockings more unbearable, of course, and ever since he’d had a fear of people thinking that he was above himself, so that they’d be less cruel if he should fall. Oatsie would do, he thought. Their two names even had a sort of harvest supper ring to them. Oatsie and May.
The woman looked at him, eyes narrowed quizzically, miniature fans of decorative wrinkles opening and closing at their corners.
“Oatsie. Oats and barley. Yer a Londoner.”
She cocked her head a little back and to one side, regarding him with what seemed like a frown of deep suspicion, so that for a minute he was worried. Had the girl got something against London? Then her face relaxed into a smile again, except that now the grin had something of a knowing, cat-like quality.
“From Lambeth. West Square, off St. George’s Road in Lambeth. Am I right?”
The baby had lost interest in Oatsie now, and entertained herself by bunching her small fists, painfully from the look of it, within the copper tangles of her mother’s hair. He felt his jaw drop open for the second time in just about as many minutes, although this time was no prelude to hilarity. Frankly, it rather put the wind up him. Who was this woman, who knew things she couldn’t know? Was she a Gypsy? Was all this a dream that he was having at the age of six, about the funny world there’d be when he was older, sleeping fitfully, his shaved head rasping on the rough cloth of a workhouse pillow? There and then he felt as if he’d let his hold on what was real slip from his fingers, and a momentary vertigo came over him so that the crossroads’ arms seemed almost to be spinning like the needle of a broken compass, chimney smoke and gilded clouds whirled into streaming mile-wide hoops, caught by the centrifugal tug of the horizon. He did not know, any longer, where he was or what was going on between him and this startling young mother. Even at a distance he’d known that she’d turn out to be lively, but the actuality of her went far beyond what he’d foreseen. She was a shocker, her and her unearthly daughter both.
Seeing the panic and confusion in his eyes she laughed again, a throaty bubbling that was shrewd and faintly lewd as well. He had a sense that she enjoyed putting a scare in people now and then, both for her own amusement and to show her power. While his respect for her was mounting by the second, the desire he’d felt when he first saw her was evaporating in direct proportion. This was someone who despite her modest stature was a bigger person than he knew himself to be. This girl, he thought, could eat him, then burp raucously and be upon her way without a second thought.
At last, though, she took pity on him. Disentangling her ringlets from the baby’s fingers while the younger May was suitably distracted by another gliding, jingling tram, she proved that she was no professional magician by explaining just how her mind-reading turn had been accomplished.
“I’m from Lambeth, just off Lambeth Walk in Regent Street, that little terrace. Vernall. That’s me maiden name. I can remember ’ow our mam and dad would take me out around there when I was a little girl. There was a pub they went to, up the London Road, and when we come ’ome we’d cut back across West Square. I see yer there a time or two. You had a brother what were older, didn’t yer?”
He was relieved, though hardly less amazed. The woman’s feat of memory, although far past his own capacity, was not untypical amongst those who’d grown up in crowded little neighbourhoods, where everyone appeared to know the names of everybody else within a two-mile radius, along with all their children’s and their parents’ names and all the mystifying quirks and threads of happenstance that linked the generations. Having never learned the trick of it himself, perhaps because he’d always hoped he wouldn’t be stuck in those places very long, he’d been thrown off his guard when it was played upon him, here in this improbable location, in this far-flung town. Unlike the woman, he could not remember any childhood meetings for the life of him.
“Yes. You’re right, I had a brother Sydney. Still have, for that matter. When were you around there, then? How old are you?”
She raised, at this point, a reproachful eyebrow at his lack of manners, asking her about her age, but finally replied.
“Old as me tongue but older than me teeth. I’m twenty, if you must know. I was born the tenth of March in 1889.”
The more she reassured him that there was a natural explanation for her knowing his childhood address, the eerier the incident of their chance meeting struck him. This surprisingly imposing woman had been born within a month of him and lived perhaps two hundred yards from him while he was growing up. Now here they both were, sixty miles and twenty years away from where they’d started out, stood at one of a hundred corners in one of a hundred towns. It made him think again about his previously held opinions as regards predestination, and if people ever really had an inkling of the path ahead of them. He could see now that it was actually two separate questions that required two different answers. Yes, he thought that probably there was a pattern in how things occurred that had been drafted out beforehand, or at least it sometimes seemed there was, but then again he also thought that if there were such a design it would be far too big and too outlandish to be read or understood, so no one could predict how all its curlicues were going to be resolved, except by accident. You might as well attempt to forecast all the shapes a purple sunset-cloud would make before it burned away, or which cart would give way to which when they met at the crossroads’ corners. It was all too complicated to make sense of it, whatever all the prophets and the tea-leaf readers might pretend. He shook his head, replying to her, muttering something inadequate about it being a small world.
The lovely baby was now squirming restlessly, and Oatsie was afraid her mother would use this excuse to take her home and end their conversation, but she asked instead what he was he was doing at the Palace of Varieties, or the Vint Palace as she seemingly insisted upon calling it. He told her how he generally did a bit of this, a bit of that, but how tonight he was appearing with Fred Karno’s <em>Mumming Birds</em> as the Inebriate. She said it sounded proper funny, and said how she’d always thought it would be nice to be someone who worked in entertainment.
“Mind you, it’s our kid, our Johnny. ’E’s the one who’s always going on about the stage. This is me youngest brother. Reckons that ’e’s gunna end up in theatre or else playin’ music in a band, but ’e’s all talk. ’E wunt ’ave lessons, wouldn’t even if we could afford ’em. Too much like ’ard work.”
He nodded in response, watching a milk cart headed back towards its depot at the bottom of the street, downhill behind her. From where he was standing it appeared about an inch high, dragged by its disconsolate and shrunken mare along the girl’s right shoulder, losing itself in the autumn forest of her hair for quite some time before it re-emerged upon her left and then slunk wearily from sight.
“Well, if your brother doesn’t want to put the hours in, he won’t get too far as a performer. Mind you, he could still make money as a manager or impresario, and then he could be as bone idle as he liked.”
She laughed at this, and said she’d pass on the advice. He took advantage of the pause to ask her why she’d called the venue the Vint Palace.
“Oh, it’s ’ad lots of names over the years. Our dad’s ’ad family in Northampton ever since I can remember, always going back and forth from here to Lambeth, so ’e’s kept up with the changes. It began as the Alhambra Music Hall, from what ’e said, and then they changed it to the Grand Variety around the time what I was born. Accordin’ to our dad there was a bad patch sometime after then, when it weren’t even a theatre for a while. For getting on five years it weren’t the same place one month to the next. It was a greengrocer’s and then it was a place where they sold bikes. It was a pub they called the Crow before that moved across the street to be the Crow and Horseshoe, and I can remember when I was a little girl ten years back and it was a coffee house. All the free-thinkers as they called ’em used to go in there, and they were some right ’Erberts, I can tell yer. Anyway, the year the Queen died, that was when they done it up and christened it the Palace of Varieties. Old Mr. Vint, he bought the place a year ago, but still ain’t ’ad the sign changed.”
Oatsie nodded, looking at the old establishment in a new light. Because he’d come here as a Lancashire Lad all those years ago and it was a variety hall then, he had assumed that it had been one ever since, that it had always been one and, in every likelihood, it always would be. The young woman’s casual listing of the purposes to which the premises had been put in the meantime made him feel uncomfortable, although he couldn’t put his finger on the reason why. Oatsie supposed it was because the world he’d been brought up in, horrible and suffocating as he’d reckoned it, at least stayed where it was from one year, often from one century, unto the next. Even this shabby corner of Northampton here, a place about as run down as the Lambeth he’d been born to, you could see most of the buildings standing round you were still housing the same businesses they’d housed a hundred years before, even if names and management were different now. That’s why the girl’s account of the hall’s changing fortunes had unsettled him, because the story was a relatively rare one still, although you heard more like it every week. What should it all be like, he wondered, if these here-today-and-gone-tomorrow fleapits came to be the rule, not the exception? If he were to come back here in, say, forty years time and found it was a place that sold, he didn’t know, electric guns or something like that, and no longer a variety hall? Perhaps by then there wouldn’t even be variety halls. Well, that was an exaggeration, obviously, but it was how May’s off-hand narrative had made him feel, uneasy with the way that things were going these days, in the modern world. He changed the subject, asking her about herself instead.
“You sound as if you know the place, gal, anyway. How long is it you’ve lived here now?”
She cast her eyes up thoughtfully at scraps of lilac cirrus on a field of deepening blue, while her astonishingly well-behaved and patient offspring sucked a gleaming thumb and stared, it seemed indifferently, at Oatsie.
“Ninety-five, I think it was, when I was six we come up ’ere, although our dad, ’e’s always goin’ back and forth, to get the work. ’E walks it, the old bugger, all the way to London and then back. Many’s the time when we’ve not seen ’im for six weeks, not ’ide nor ’air, then ’e comes waltzing in ’alf-cut with presents, little bits and bobs for everybody. No, it’s not a bad old place. This bit round ’ere’s a lot like Lambeth, ’ow the people are. Sometimes I ’ardly feel as if we’ve moved.”
Some of the narrow shops across the other side of Horseshoe Street were putting lights on now, a dim glow tinged with green around its edges that crept out between the sparse and shadowy displays in their front windows. Lowering her gaze from up among the chimneybreasts, the elder May looked proudly down now at the younger, cradled in her sturdy, tiger-lily arms.
“I think I’m ’ere for good. I ’ope I am, at any rate, and ’ope the little ’un shall be, too. They’re a straightforward lot round these parts, in the main, and there’s some real old characters. It’s where I met me chap, my Tom, and we got wed up at the Guildhall. All ’is people, they’re all local, all the Warrens, and we’ve lots of family up ’ere on the Vernall side as well. No, it’s all right, Northampton is. They do a good pork pie, and there’s some lovely parks, Victoria, Abington, and Beckett’s. That’s where I’ve just took this one, down by the river there. We saw the swans and went out on the island, didn’t we, me duck?”
This was directed at the baby, who was finally beginning to show signs of restlessness. Her mother stuck out her own lower lip and turned her brows up at a tragic angle, mimicking her daughter’s glum expression.
“I expect she’s ’ungry. Goin’ down the park I stopped at Gotcher Johnson’s for two ounce o’ rainbow drops, but I ’ad one or two as well, so they were finished up some time ago. I’d better get ’er ’ome up Fort Street for ’er tea. It’s potted meat, ’er favourite. It’s been nice to meet yer, Oatsie. ’Ope yer skit goes well.”
At that, he bade goodbye to both the Mays, and said it had been similarly nice to meet the pair of them. He shook the baby’s damp, minuscule hand and told her that he hoped to see her name on a big hoarding one day. To her mother he just said “Take care of her”, then as the woman chuckled and assured him that she would, he wondered why he’d come out with it. What a stupid thing to say, as if suggesting that she wouldn’t look after a child like that. The babe and parent waited until there was nothing coming, then they crossed the foot of Gold Street and went up the hill towards the north. He stood there on his corner and admired the woman’s bum, moving beneath her swinging skirt as she mounted the slope, with her imagined buttocks like two faces pressed together as their owners acted out a vigorous two-step. Or perhaps two wrestlers full of muscles in a crush, each one in turn gaining an inch on their opponent who immediately takes it back, deadlocked so that they merely seem to heave from side to side. He noticed at this point the baby, staring soberly across the woman’s shoulder at him as she was borne off into the distance. Feeling oddly mortified to think the child had caught him looking at her mother’s bottom he glanced rapidly away towards the plot of scrubland halfway down the hill, and when he looked back just a minute later they were gone.
He looked to see what time it was, then fished another Woody from his dwindling pack and lit it. That had been a funny conversation, now he thought about it. It had made an impact on him that was only just now starting to sink in. That woman, May, born just a few weeks after he was, raised not half a dozen streets away, and somehow they’d both met up on a corner in another town twenty years later. Who’d believe it? It was one of those occurrences that he supposed were bound to happen now and then, despite the odds, yet when they did it always felt uncanny. There was always the suggestion of a pattern in the way things worked that you could almost understand, but when you tried to pin down what the meaning or significance might be it all just fizzled out and you were left no clearer than you were before.
Perhaps the only meaning that events had was the meaning that we brought to them, but even knowing this was probably the case, it frankly wasn’t that much help. It didn’t stop us chasing after meaning, scrabbling like ferrets for it through a maze of burrows in our thoughts and sometimes getting lost down in the dark. He couldn’t help but think about the woman he’d just met, how the encounter had stirred twenty-year-old sediments up from the bed of him, and how that made him feel. The root of it, he thought, was how the similarities between his background and the woman’s had made all their differences stand out in just as sharp relief.
For one thing he was on the verge, or so he hoped, of an escape from the soot-smothered prison of his and the woman’s common origins, from poverty, obscurity and streets like this, where now the sky was cut to rich blue diamonds by the iron struts of the gas-holder. Escape from England, even, if he could. In the event of a forthcoming scrap with Germany, Sir Francis Drake hoped to be in his hammock and a thousand miles away. As for the spirited young mother, May, she didn’t have those opportunities. Without the talents he’d inherited or learned from both his entertainer parents, she had lived a life more limited in terms of both its expectations and its possibilities, and its horizons, which she did not feel compelled to cross, were that much closer than the boundaries around his own. She’d said herself she thought she’d live here in this district all her life, and that her gorgeous little daughter would as well. There were no hopes or dreams that she was chasing, Oatsie knew. In neighbourhoods like this, such things weren’t practical, were only ever burdensome and painful liabilities. That lively young girl was resigned to live and die, it would appear, within the small cage of her circumstances; didn’t even seem to know it was a cage or see its grimy bars. He thanked whatever guardian angel he might have for giving him at least the slim chance to avoid a lifelong penal sentence like the one that she existed under. Every woman, man or baby passing by him through the tannery-infused slum twilight was to all intents and purposes a convict, serving out their time in harsh conditions without any likely prospect of reprieve or pardon. Everyone was safe in lavender.
But May had seemed content, and not resigned at all. May had seemed more content than Oatsie felt himself.
He thought about it, blowing out a wavering slate-and-sepia fern of smoke through pretty, puckered lips. Some of the carriages that moved across the junction had by now fired up their lanterns, as the lapis of the skies above grew gradually more profound. Chandelier snails, they crawled uphill and sparkled in the dead-end dusk.
He saw there were two sides to being poor, to having nothing, not even ambitions. It was true that May and all the others like her didn’t have his drive, his talents or his opportunities for betterment, but then they didn’t have his doubts, his fears of failing or his nagging guilt to deal with, either. These were people, heads down, crunching through the pavement’s autumn garnish, who weren’t on the run from anything, especially the streets they’d come from, so they didn’t have to feel as if they were deserters all the time. They knew their place, the worst-off, in more ways than one. They knew exactly where they were in so far as society should be concerned, but more than that they knew their place; they knew the bricks and mortar that surrounded them so intimately that it was like love. Most of the poor souls sluicing through this crossroad’s floodgates hailed from families, he knew, that would have lived around these parts for generations, just because the distance you could travel was more limited before there had been railway trains. They trudged these byways in the knowledge that their grandparents and great-grandparents had done just the same a hundred years before, had let their troubles soak in the same pubs, then poured them out in the same churches. Every mean and lowly detail of the neighbourhood was in their blood. These knotted lanes and listing pie-shops were the sprawling body they’d emerged from. They knew all the mildewed alleys, all the rain-butts where tin waterspouts had rusted paper-thin. All of the area’s smells and blemishes were as familiar to them as their mothers’ moles, and even if her face were lined and dirty they could never go away and leave her. Even if she lost her mind, they …
Tears were standing in his eyes. He blinked them back and then took three quick puffs upon his cigarette before he wiped away the excess moisture with his fingertips, pretending that the smoke had blinded him. None of the passers-by were looking at him, anyway. He felt abruptly angry with himself for all the sloppy sentiment that he still harboured and for just how easily the waterworks came welling up. He was a man now, he was twenty though he felt like thirty sometimes, and he shouldn’t still be blubbing like a little kid. He wasn’t six. He wasn’t weeping over his cropped curls in Lambeth Workhouse and it wasn’t 1895. Although he knew he hadn’t yet completely taken in the fact, this was the twentieth century. It needed people who were bright and up-to-date and forward-looking in the way they thought, not people who got tearful dwelling on the past. If he were to make anything out of his life he’d better pull himself together, sharpish. Drawing deep upon his fag he held it in and looked around him at the slowly darkening intersection, trying to regard it from a modern, realistic viewpoint rather than a maudlin and nostalgic one.
Yes, you could come to look upon this haphazard array of weather-beaten hulks as like a mother, he could see that. At the same time, like a mother, it was not a thing that would eternally endure. Old age had ravaged it with change, and wasn’t done yet by a long chalk. Just as he’d been thinking a few moments back about how previous generations were restricted in their chances to go travelling, he understood that things should be much different in this new, enlightened age. The steam engine had altered everything, and on the streets of London now you could see motor-carriages, of which he thought there should be more in time to come. Communities of countless decades’ standing like the one around him would perhaps not seem as well-knit if the inmates stood a chance of easily and cheaply getting out, of going where the work was better without walking sixty miles like that girl’s dad had done. Even without a war to decimate its young, he doubted that the bonds connecting people to a place like this would last another hundred years. Districts like this were dying. It was no betrayal, wanting to leap out of them to somewhere safe before they finally went under. Anyone who’d seen the world, who felt that they were free to come and go just as they pleased, why would they want to be stuck in a dump, a town, a country even, that was like this? Anyone with any sense who had the means would be off like a shot, soon as they could. There wasn’t anything to keep them here, and …
Coming through the settled gloaming up the hill was an old black man, on a bicycle that had ropes fastened to its rims instead of tyres, pulling a cart with the same kind of wheels behind it, juddering like a ghost-tale skeleton across the cobbles.
Oatsie wondered, for the second time within a half an hour, if he were dreaming. It was the same man, riding the same outlandish boneshaker, as on the afternoon twelve years before when he’d stood here with Boysie Bristol, here on this same corner, saying “Yes, but if they’re millionaires why do they act like tramps?”
The Negro paused his strange contraption at the top of Horseshoe Street, there on the corner opposite to Oatsie’s, waiting for a horse-bus to go by the other way. Of course, he’d aged across the intervening years so that his hair and beard were now a shock of white, but it was without question the same man. He didn’t, upon this occasion, notice Oatsie but sat there astride his saddle waiting for the bus to pass so that he could continue up the hill. He had a faraway and faintly troubled look upon his strong, broad features and did not seem in the same expansive mood as when they’d last met, back when the old queen was still alive and it had been a different world. Even if Oatsie had still been an eager, gawping lad of eight he doubted that the black man would have noticed him, as pensive and distracted as he now appeared to be.
The omnibus having by this time rumbled past, the man lifted his feet, which still had wood blocks strapped beneath the shoes. He set them on the pedals, standing up and leaning forward as he pushed down strenuously, gradually acquiring the momentum that would take him and his trailer past the crossroads and away uphill through the descending gloom, in which he was soon lost from sight.
Watching the black chap disappear, he sucked upon his cigarette without account of how low it had burned, so that it scorched his fingertips and made him yelp as he threw the offending ember to the ground, stamping it out in angry retribution. Even as he stood there cursing, waggling his fingers so the breeze would soothe the burn, he had a sense of wonderment at what had just occurred, at the whole atmosphere of this peculiar place where it would seem that such things happened all the time. To think that in the dozen years since he’d last been here, while he’d roamed the length and breadth of England and had his Parisian adventure, all those different nights he’d spent in all those towns and cities, all that time the black man had been still here, going back and forth along the same route every day. He didn’t know why he found this so marvellous. What, had he thought that people disappeared because he didn’t happen to be looking at them?
Then again, a fellow such as that, who’d already seen the America that Oatsie longed for and despite that had decided to stay here … it might not be a marvel, but it was a puzzle, certainly. Raising his eyebrows and his shoulders at the same time in a theatrical shrug of overemphasised bewilderment aimed at nobody in particular, he took a last glance at the crossroads as it drowned in indigo then walked the few steps to the Palace of Varieties’ diminutive front door. He pushed it open and went in, where it was slightly warmer, walking past the ticket office with a nod and grunt to the uninterested portly type inside. He wondered if it would get busy, if they’d get much of a crowd tonight, but you could never tell. Things didn’t rest so much in the gods’ laps as in how many laps they could entice into the Gods.
The whitewashed storage shed that was his dressing room was down a short but complicated series of bare-boarded corridors and then across a cramped and ancient-looking yard that had a water closet running off from it and stagnant puddles, which had taken up a permanent position in the sinks of the subsiding flagstones. He’d popped in the changing room a little earlier to stow some of his props and gear, but hadn’t really had a good look round yet. Much to his surprise the uninhabitable-looking quarters had a gas mantle set halfway down one flaking wall, which he was quick to put a match to so that he could shed some light upon the subject.
He’d seen worse. There was a yellow stone sink in the corner, with its brass tap bent to one side all skew-whiff, and dribbling spinach-coloured verdigris in veins shot through the metal so it looked like putrid cheese. He found a cracked and book-sized mirror in a wooden frame hung by a bent nail from the inside of the door and stood himself before it while he groped in the inside breast pocket of his jacket for a piece of cork. With this produced he struck another match and held the stopper’s end that was already blackened in the flame so that it would be freshly charred and not too faint to see from the back row. Waving away the smoke and waiting just a mo for his impromptu stick of makeup to cool down, he gazed into the broken looking glass. Ignoring the black fissure that ran in a steep diagonal across the face of his reflection, he allowed his features to relax into the bleary bloodhound sag of the Inebriate, his sozzled and lopsided grin, with rheumy eyes that he could just about keep open.
First he crushed some of the greasy cork-ash to a dust between his fingers and began applying it beneath his jaw-line, working the black powder in around his tightly compressed mouth and up across his jowls to just below the cheekbones, where it was the shadowy grey stubble of a chap out on a binge who’d been without a wash and shave for some few days. Using the stub of cork itself he emphasised the creases underneath his tucked-in jaw until he had the onset of a double chin, then went to work around the sockets of his eyes to get the wastrel’s haggard look before progressing to the heavy, rakishly-arched brows. He daubed a drooping and fatigued moustache on his top lip where there was none, letting the ends trail down beside the corners of his mouth in straggling lines. Just about satisfied with how he had the face he wiped the charcoal from his fingers straight into his greasy hair, messing it all around on purpose so that bits of it stuck up and curls went everywhere like oily breakers on a choppy sea.
He checked his image in the fractured mirror, holding his own gaze. He thought that it was almost there. He started in on the fine detail, deepening the wrinkles at the corners of his mouth and eyes, his whole face starting to take on a greyish pallor from the liberal application of the cork. It could be eerie sometimes, sitting in a silent, empty, unfamiliar room and staring into your own eyes while you changed into someone else. It made you realise that what you thought of as yourself, your personality, the biggest part of that was only in your face.
He watched as the persona that he’d carefully constructed for himself sank out of sight. The animated gaze that he used to get women’s sympathy or to communicate his eagerness and his intelligence, all that was gone into the drunk’s befuddled squint. The careful way he held his features to convey the breezy confidence of a young fellow of today, in a young century, this was rubbed out, smudged by a sooty thumb into the slack leer of Victorian Lambeth. All the hallmarks of his cultivation and the progress he had made in bettering himself, in struggling up from the ancestral mire, were wiped away. In the divided countenance that stared back at him from the split glass, his restricted present and big future had subsided to the sucking, clutching sludge that was his past. His father and the thousand barroom-doors he’d popped his head round as a child when sent to find him. Small blood vessels ruptured in the cheeks of lushingtons, pressed on the chilly pillow of a curb. Gore rinsed from hooks in horse-troughs. All of it, still waiting there if he were to relax that cheeky, cheery smile for just an instant, just a fraction of an inch.
There was a scent of damp and dereliction draped about the room. Beneath the smeared and ground-in ash he had no colour to his face at all now in the wan, uneven light. Black hair and eyes stood out from a complexion that was silver-grey. Contained within the mirror frame, it was the fading photograph of someone trapped forever in a certain time, a certain place, in an identity that could not be escaped. The portrait of a relative or a theatre idol from a lost time when your parents had been young, frozen eternally within the pale emulsions.
He put on the outsized, wrinkled jacket that he wore as the Inebriate, and filled his green glass ‘San Diego’ bottle from the tap. Somewhere not far away, he hoped, an audience was waiting. The gas mantle hissed a dismal premonition.
** <strong>BLIND, BUT NOW I SEE</strong>
<strong>T</strong>he mark of a great man, way Henry figured it, was in the way he’d gone about things while he was still living, and the reputation that he left behind when he was gone. That’s why he weren’t surprised to find out that Bill Cody would be represented to Eternity as a roof-ornament made out of grubby stone that birds had done their business on.
When he’d glanced up and seen the face raised from the orange brickwork on the last house in the row, carved on some sort of plaque up near its roof, at first he’d took it for the Lord. There was the long hair and the beard and what he’d thought to be a halo, then he’d seen it was a cowboy hat if you was looking up from underneath the brim, and if the feller had his head tipped back. That’s when he’d cottoned on that it was Buffalo Bill.
The row of houses, what they called a terrace, had the street out front and then in back you had a lot of acres of green meadow where they held the races and what have you. There was this short little alley running from the front to back what led out on the racetrack grounds, and it was up on one of the slate rooftops overlooking this cut-through you had the face carved on the wall up there. Henry had heard how Cody’s Wild West Show had come here to these race grounds in Northampton, maybe five or ten year earlier than he’d arrived here in the town himself, which was in ninety-seven. Annie Oakley had been doing her performance, and some Indian braves was there by all accounts. He guessed one of the well-off people living in these houses must have took a shine to Cody and decided how he’d look good stuck up on they roof. Weren’t nothing wrong with that. Way Henry saw it, people could like what they wanted to, so long as it weren’t nothing bad.
That said, the carving weren’t that much like Cody, not as Henry recollected from the once or twice he’d met the man. That was a long time back, admitted, up in Marshall, Kansas, out the back room of Elvira Conely’s laundry what she had. That would have been seventy-five, seventy-six, something like that, when Henry was a handsome young man in his middle twenties, even though he said it all himself. Thing was, he hadn’t paid that much attention at the time to Buffalo Bill, since it had been Elvira he’d been mostly there to look at. All the same, he didn’t think the William Cody what he’d knowed could be mistook for Jesus Christ Our Lord, no matter how much you was looking up at him from underneath or how much he was standing with his hat tipped back. He’d been a vain man, or at least that had been Henry’s own impression, if the truth were to be told. He doubted that Elvira would have hung around with Cody if it hadn’t been important to the way how she was seen in Marshall. Coloured women couldn’t have too many well-known white friends.
Henry pushed his bicycle and cart along the cobbled alley from the racetrack, with the ropes he had around the wheel-rims crunching through the leaves what was all heaped up in the gutters. He took one last glance at Colonel Cody, where the smoke from out a nearby chimney made it look as if he’d got his hat on fire, then climbed up on the saddle with his brake-blocks on his feet and started back through all the side-streets for the big main road what went way out to Kettering, and what would take him back to the town centre of Northampton.
He’d not wanted to come up this way today, since he was planning for to ride around the villages out on the south-east side of town. There was a man he’d met, though, said there was good slate tiles in an iron-railed back yard off the racetrack where a shed was all fell in, but he’d turned out to be a fool and all the tiles were broke and weren’t worth nothing. Henry sighed, pedalling out of Hood Street and downhill towards the town, then thought that he’d do well to buck his ideas up and quit complaining. It weren’t like the day was wasted. In the east the sun was big and scarlet, hung low in a milky fog that would burn off once the September morning woke itself up properly and went about its business. He’d still got the time to strike out where he wanted and be back down Scarletwell before the evening settled in.
He didn’t need to do no pedalling, hardly, heading into town along the Kettering Road. All Henry needed do was roll downhill and touch his brake blocks on the street once in a while, so that he didn’t get up too much speed and shake his trolley what he pulled behind him all to bits upon the cobble stones. The houses and the shops with all they signs and windows flowed by on each side of him like river-drift as he went rattling down into the centre. Pretty much he had the whole road to himself, it being early like it was. A little further on there was a streetcar headed into town the same way he was going, just a couple people on its upstairs there, and coming up the hill towards him was a feller had a cart as he was pushing got all chimney brushes on. Besides that, one or two folks was around, out with they errands on the sidewalk. There was an old lady looked surprised when Henry cycled past her, and two fellers wearing caps seemed like they on they way to work stared at him hard, but he’d been round these parts too long to pay it any mind. He liked it better, though, down where he was in Scarletwell. The folks there, plenty of them, was worse off than he was so he’d got nobody looking down on him, and when they seen him riding round they’d all just shout out, “Hey, Black Charley. How’s your luck?” and that was that.
There was a little breeze now, strumming on the streetcar lines strung overhead while he went under them. He rolled round by the church there on the Grove Road corner to his right and swerved to miss some horse-shit what was lying in the street as he come in towards the square. He made another bend when he went by the Unitarian chapel on the other side, and then it was all shops and public houses and the big old leather warehouse what they had in back of Mr. Bradlaugh’s statue. Leather was important to the trade round here and always had been, but it still made Henry shake his head how otherwise the town was mostly bars and churches. Could be it was all that stitching shoes had folks so that they spent they private time in getting liquored up or praying.
Somebody was even drunk asleep in the railed-off ground that was round the block the statue stood on when he pedalled past it on the left of him. He didn’t think Mr. Charles Bradlaugh would approve of that if he was looking down from Heaven, what with him being so forthright in his views on alcohol, but then since Mr. Bradlaugh hadn’t had no faith in the Almighty it was likely that he’d not approve of Heaven neither. Bradlaugh was somebody Henry couldn’t get to grips with or make up his mind about. Man was an atheist there on the one hand, and to Henry’s mind an atheist was just another way of saying fool. Then on the other hand you had the way he was against strong drink, which Henry could admire, and how he’d stood up for the coloured folks in India when he weren’t standing up for all the poor folks here at home. He’d spoke his mind and done what he considered the right thing, Henry supposed. Bradlaugh had been a good man and the Lord would possibly forgive the atheism when all that was took into account, so Henry figured how he ought to let it go by too. The man deserved his fine white statue with its finger pointing west to Wales and the Atlantic Sea and to America beyond, while in the same sense you could say that Buffalo Bill deserved his shabby piece of stone. Just ’cause a feller said he weren’t no Christian didn’t stop him acting like one, and although he didn’t like to think it, he could see how sometimes the reverse of that was true as well.
He went on past the shop what had the Cadbury’s chocolate and the sign for Storton’s Lungwort painted on the wall up top. He’d had some trouble coughing lately and he thought it could be he should maybe try a little of that stuff, if it weren’t too expensive. Next you’d got the store what had the ladies’ things, then Mr. Brugger’s place with all the clocks and pocket-watches in its window. Up ahead of him he’d nearly caught up to the streetcar, which he saw now was the number six what went down to St. James’s End, what they called Jimmy’s End. There was a paid advertisement up on the rear of it for some enlarging spectacles, with two big round eyes underneath the business name what made it look as though the backside of the streetcar had a face. It reached the crossroads they were nearing and went straight across with its bell clanging, staring back towards him like it was surprised or scared as it went on down Abington Street there, while he turned left and coasted down York Road in the direction of the hospital, touching his wood blocks on the cobbles every now and then to slow him down.
There was another crossroads by the hospital down halfway, with the route what went on out towards Great Billing. He went over it and carried on downhill the way what he was going. On the corner of the hospital’s front yard as he went past it, near the statue of the King’s head what they had there, some young boys was laughing at his wheels with all the rope on. One of them yelled out that he should have a bath, but Henry made out like he didn’t hear and went on down to Beckett’s Park, as used to be Cow Meadow. Ignorant was what they were, brung up by ignorant folk. Paid no attention they’d move on and find some other fool thing they could laugh at. They weren’t going to string him up or shoot him, and in that case far as Henry was concerned about it, they could shout out what the heck they liked. So long as he weren’t bothered none then all they did was make they own selves look like halfwits, far as he could see.
He took a left turn at the bottom, curving round by the old yellow stone wall and into the Bedford Road just over from the park, where he touched down his wooden blocks and fetched his bicycle and cart up at the drinking fountain what was set back in a recess there. He climbed down off his saddle and he leaned the whole affair against the weather-beat old stones, with all the dandelions growed out from in between, while he stepped to the well and took a drink. It weren’t that he was thirsty, but if he was down here then he liked to take a few sips of the water, just for luck. This was the place they said Saint Thomas Becket quenched his thirst when he come through Northampton ages since, and that was good enough for Henry.
Ducking down into the alcove, Henry pressed one pale palm on the worn brass spigot, with his other cupped to catch the twisted silver stream and scoop it to his lips, an action he repeated three or four times ’til he’d got a proper mouthful. It was good, and had the taste of stone and brass and his own fingers. Henry reckoned that amounted to a saintly flavour. Wiping a wet hand on one leg of his shiny pants he straightened up and climbed back on the bicycle, stood in his seat to get the thing in motion. He sailed south-east on the Bedford Road, with first the park and all its trees across from him and then the empty fields stretched to the abbey out at Delapre. The walls and corners of Northampton fell away behind like weights from off his back, and all he had was flat grass between him and the toy villages off in the haze of the horizon. Clouds was piled like mashed potato in blue gravy, and Black Charley found that he was whistling some Sousa while he went along.
The marching music made him think of Buffalo Bill again, sounding all puffed up like it did, which led him back to thoughts of Kansas and Elvira Conely. Great Lord, that woman had some spirit in her, setting up her laundry there in Marshall way ahead of the great exodus and doing as well as she did. She’d knowed Bill Hickok too, but Hickok had been in his grave by the late eighteen-seventies when Henry and his parents got to the Midwest. From how Elvira spoke about the feller, you got the impression that Wild Bill had had a lot of good in him, and that his reputation was deserved. Mind you, in private and among her own kind, she’d admit that Britton Johnson, who she’d also knowed and who was also dead by that time, could have shot the pants off Wild Bill Hickok. It had took a bunch of twenty-five Comanche warriors to bring Britton Johnson down, you never mind about no lone drunk and no lucky shot in some saloon. Yet even little children over here, they knew of Buffalo Bill and Wild Bill Hickok but nobody ever heard of Johnson and you didn’t have to think about it long to figure why that was. Looked like a Pharaoh, how Elvira spoke of him. Looked fine without his shirt on was her exact words.
Uphill and on the left of him, across the fenced-off grass and the black spreads of woodland, Henry could about make out the rooftops of the fancy hospital they’d got up there for people who was troubled in they minds and could afford the rent. For them what couldn’t, there was what you called a workhouse in the old Saint Edmund’s parish, out the Wellingborough Road, or else the Berry Wood asylum round the turn there on the way through Duston. Leaving it behind him, Henry pedalled harder where a bridge bulged up above a river tributary, and had a tickle in his belly like he’d got no weight when he shot down the other side and on towards Great Houghton. He was thinking of Elvira still, admiring her in a more understanding and respectful fashion than the way what he’d admired her in his younger days.
’Course, she’d been only one of the outstanding gals they had in those parts round that time, but she’d been first, upping to Kansas on her own in sixty-eight, and Henry thought a lot of them good women was just following Elvira’s lead, not that it took away from what they did. There was Miss St. Pierre Ruffin helping folks with cash from her Relief Association. There was Mrs. Carter, Henry Carter’s missus, talked her husband into walking with her all the way from Tennessee, him carrying the tools and her the blankets. Thinking of it, it had mostly been the women was behind the whole migration, even when their men-folk shrugged it off and made out they was just fine where they was. Henry could see now what he hadn’t seen back then, how that was ’cause the women had the worst of it down in the South, what with the rapes and having to bring up they children with all that. Henry’s own momma had told Henry’s poppa how if he weren’t man enough to get his wife and son to some place safe and decent, then she’d just take Henry and light out for Kansas on her own. Said how she’d walk there like the Carters if needs be, although when Henry’s pa had finally relented they’d gone in a wagon same as everybody else. Considering those times made Henry’s shoulder itch the way it always did, so that he took one hand from off the handlebar to scratch it through his jacket and his shirt the best he could.
A watermill went by him on his right, ducks honking as they took up from a close-by pond where all the morning light from off it was too bright to look at. Sheridan near Marshall had been where Elvira Conely had made her home after she broke up with the soldier feller she was married to out in St. Louis. Back in them days Sheridan had been considered worse than Dodge for all its gambling and murders and loose women, but Elvira carried herself like a queen, straight-backed and tall and black as ebony. When later on she took up as the governess for rich old Mr. Bullard and his family, Bullard’s children put it all about how she was kin to royalty from Africa or some such, and Elvira never said or did a thing what could be held to contradict that. Last he’d heard she was in Illinois, and Henry hoped that she was doing fine.
He went on with the climbing sun before him and the roadside puddles flashing in his eyes. The shadows from the moving cloud-banks slipped across the shaggy fields a little at a time as though the summer was on its last legs, unshaved and staggering like a bum. Weeds in the ditches had boiled up and spilled into the road or swallowed fence-posts whole, where dying bees was stumbling in the dying honeysuckle, trying to drag the season out a little longer and not let it slip away. Upon his right he passed the narrow lane what would have took him down to Hardingstone and pedalled on along the top side of Great Houghton, where he met a couple farm carts going by the other way all loaded up with straw. The feller on the box of the first wagon looked away from Henry like he didn’t want to let on he could even see him, but the second cart was driven by a red-faced farmer what knew Henry from his previous visits to those parts and reined his horse up, grinning as he stopped to say hello.
“Why, Charley, you black bugger. Are youm come round here to steal us valuables again? Ah, it’s a wonder we’m got two sticks to us name, with all that plunder what youm ’ad already.”
Henry laughed. He liked the man, whose name was Bob, and knew as Bob liked him. The making fun of people, it was just a way they had round here of saying you was close enough to have a joke together, and so he came back in kind.
“Well, now, you know I got my eye on that gold throne o’ your’n, that big one what you sit in when you got the servants bringing in the venison and that.”
Bob roared so loud he scared his mare. Once she was settled down again, the two men asked each other how they wives and families was keeping and such things as that, then shook each other by the hand and carried on they individual ways. In Henry’s case, it wasn’t far before he made a right turn down Great Houghton’s high street, past the schoolhouse with blackberry hedges hanging over its front wall. He went along beside the village church then steered his bicycle into the purse-bag close what had the rectory, where the old lady who kept house would sometime give him things she didn’t want no more. Climbing down off his saddle, Henry thought the rectory looked grand, the way the light caught on its rough brown stones and on the ivy fanned out in a green wing up above its entranceway. The close was shaded by an oak tree so that sun fell through the leaves like burning jigsaw pieces scattered on the cobbles and the paths. Birds hopping round up in the branches didn’t act concerned or stop they singing when he lifted up the iron knocker with a lion’s head on and let it fall on the big black-painted door.
The woman, who he knew as Mrs. Bruce, answered his knock and seemed like she was pleased to see him. She asked Henry in, so long as he could leave his boots on the front step, and made him take a cup of weak tea and a plate of little sandwiches there with her in the parlour while she looked out all the bits and pieces what she’d put aside. He didn’t know why when he thought of Mrs. Bruce he thought of her as an old lady, for the truth was that she couldn’t be much older than what Henry was himself, that being near on sixty years of age. Her hair was white as snow, but so was his, and he believed it might be how she acted with him made him think of her as old, with something in her manner like to that of Henry’s mother. She was smiling while she poured him out his tea and asked him things about religion like she always did. She was a churchgoer like him, except that Mrs. Bruce was in the choir. She told him all the favourite hymns she’d got as she went back and forth about the room and gathered up the worn-out clothes there were what he could have.
“ ‘The Day Thou Gavest, Lord, Is Ended’. There’s another one I like. Did they sing hymns back where you come from, Mr. George?”
Lowering the doll-house china from his lips, Henry agreed they did.
“Yes, ma’am. We didn’t have no church, though, so my folks would sing while they was working or else round the fireside of an evening. I sure loved them songs. They used to send me off to sleep at night.”
Smoothing the doilies or whatever they was on her chair-arms, Mrs. Bruce peered at him with a sorry look upon her face.
“You poor soul. Was there one that you liked better than the others?”
Henry chuckled as he nodded, setting down his empty cup in its white saucer.
“Ma’am, for me there ain’t but one tune in the running. It was that ‘Amazing Grace’ I liked the best, I don’t know if you heard it?”
The old lady beamed, delighted.
“Ooh, yes, that’s a lovely song. ‘How sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me.’ Ooh, yes, I know that. Lovely.”
She looked up towards the picture rail a little down below the ceiling there and frowned like she was trying to think of something.
“Do you know, I think the chap who wrote it lived not far from here, unless I’ve mixed him up with someone else. John Newton, now was that his name? Or was it Newton who chopped down the apple tree and said he couldn’t tell a lie?”
After he’d let that one sink in a while and puzzled it all through he told her that to his best understanding, it had been a man named Newton who sat underneath an apple tree and figured out from that why things fell down instead of up. The feller who’d said how he couldn’t tell a lie, that was George Washington the president, and far as Henry knew it was a cherry tree what he’d cut down. She listened, nodding.
“Ah. That’s where I’d got it wrong. His people came from round here somewhere, too, that General Washington. The one who wrote ‘Amazing Grace’, that would be Mr. Newton. As I heard it told, he used to be the parson up the road at Olney, though I shouldn’t swear to it.”
Henry felt stirred up by this in a manner what surprised him. He’d been sincere when he’d said it was his favourite song, and not just trying to sweeten the old lady. He recalled the women singing it out in the fields, his momma there amongst them, and it seemed like half his life had been caught up in its refrain. He’d heard it sung since he’d been in his cradle, and he’d thought it must have been a black man’s tune from long ago, like it had always been there. Finding out about this Pastor Newton fair made Henry’s head spin, just to think how far he’d come since he first heard that song, only to wind up quite by accident upon the doorstep of the man what wrote it.
He’d never been exactly sure why him and his Selina had felt such an urge to settle in Northampton and raise children, after they’d come here on that big sheep-drive out from Wales, working their way in a grey sea of animals more vast than anything what Henry ever heard of in the land where he was born. His life had taken him all over, and he’d never thought no more than it was the Almighty’s plan, and that it weren’t for him to know the purpose of it. All the same, the feeling him and his Selina had when they’d first seen the Boroughs, what was down from Sheep Street where the two of them arrived and reached right to the place in Scarletwell Street where they’d finally make their home, when they’d seen all the little rooftops it had seemed to them as though there was just something in the place, some kind of heart under the chimney smoke. It made a certain sense to Henry now, with learning about Mr. Newton and “Amazing Grace” and all. Perhaps this was some sort of holy place, what had such holy people come from it? He felt sure he was making too much out of things as usual, like a darned fool, but the news made Henry feel excited in a way he hadn’t known since he was small, and he’d be lying if he said it didn’t.
Him and Mrs. Bruce talked over this and that there in the parlour while they finished up they tea and bread, with dust-specks twinkling in the light through the net drapes and a grandfather clock making its graveyard tick from up one corner. When they’d done she gave him the unwanted woollens what she’d sorted out and then walked with him to the front door, where he put them in the trailer box he towed behind his bicycle. He thanked her kindly for the clothes, and for the tea and conversation, and said he’d be sure to call again when he was coming through that area. They waved and wished each other well, then Henry rattled back along the high street on his rope-rimmed wheels, “Amazing Grace” sung out of tune trailing behind him through the tumbling leaves and bright rays of the afternoon.
When he’d come out the high street and was back once more upon the Bedford Road he rode on down it to the east. The sun was pretty much above him now so that he barely cast a shadow as he went along, puffing while he was pedalling and singing while he coasted. On his right as he departed from Great Houghton he could see the village cemetery with the white markers lit up bright like pillowcases, there against a blanket made from sleeping green. A little after that he passed upon the left of him the lane what would have took him up to Little Houghton, but he didn’t have no business there and so went on a distance, following the south-east bend the road made out to Brafield. There was hedgerows rearing up beside his route, sometimes so high that he was riding through they shade when he went down a hollow, holes low in the walls of bracken here and there what led most probably to dens, them made by animals or village boys or something wild like that. Blood on its snout and black dirt on its paws, whichever one it was.
The land out here was mostly farming property and pretty flat, too, so you’d think it would look more like Kansas, but that weren’t the way of it. For one thing, England was a whole lot greener and it seemed there was more flowers of different kinds, maybe because of all the gardening what folks here liked to do, even the kind as lived down Scarletwell Street with they little bricked-in yards. Another thing was how they’d had a lot of time here to get fussy and ingenious about the simplest matters, such as how they built they hay-stacks, how they lay down straw to make a roof, or how they fitted chunks of rock without cement to raise a wall would stand three hundred year. Across the whole sweep of the county he could see, there was these details, things what someone’s great-great-great-grandpappy figured out how they could do when Queen Elizabeth was on the throne or somebody like that. Bridges and wells and the canals with lock gates, where men wearing boots up round they thighs trod down the clay to mend the waterways if they was split. There was a fair amount of learning evident, even out here where you might think there weren’t a man-made thing in sight. The lonely trees he passed what looked like they was struggled up from nothing else but blind, wild nature had been planted by somebody years back for a well-considered reason, Henry knew. Maybe a windbreak to protect a crop weren’t there no more, or little hard green apples for to make the pigs they mash. A quilt of fields was spread about him, and each ragged line of it was there on purpose.
He passed through Brafield when the bell in the St. Lawrence Church struck once for one o’clock, and he was held up for some minutes just outside of there by sheep what filled the road, so that he’d got to wait while they was herded up the lane and in they field before he could go by. The man who walked along with all these bleating critters didn’t speak to Henry, not as such, but gave a kind of nod and raised the peak up of his cap a touch, to show how he appreciated Henry being patient. Henry smiled and nodded back, as though to say it weren’t no inconvenience, which was the truth. The feller had an English collie helping him control the animals, and Henry thought they was a joy to watch. He couldn’t help it, he’d been soft about them hounds since he’d first seen ’em when he got to Wales in ninety-six. That one blue eye they’d got and how they understood what you was saying had amazed him. They’d not had no dogs like that where Henry come from, which was New York and before that Kansas, and before that Tennessee. He scratched his shoulder while he stood and watched the last few sheep hauling they shitty asses out his way and through the pasture gate where they belonged, and then he carried on. There weren’t nobody living there in Brafield he could say he knowed, and he was keen besides to ride down the long road to Yardley, a much better prospect to his mind, before the day wore on.
The clouds went by above like ships would if you steered your bicycle and cart across the bed of a clear ocean and somehow you was immune from drowning. Henry had the zinging rhythm of his wheels beneath him and the regular, reassuring click of that stray spoke. The road was pretty much straight on past Denton so he didn’t have to think about his riding none and could just listen to the gossip of the trees when he went past, or to a crow some distance off, laughing at something nasty with a voice like rifle-shots.
He hadn’t liked his spell upon them ocean waves, aboard the <em>Pride of Bethlehem</em> set out from Newark, bound for Cardiff. Henry was a man in his late forties even then, and that weren’t no age to go running off to sea. It was the way things had worked out, was all. He’d stayed in Marshall with his momma and his poppa while they was alive, used up what some would say was Henry’s best years looking after them and not begrudged one day of it. After they’d gone, though, there weren’t nothing keeping him in Kansas, when he’d got no family and nobody he had feelings for. Elvira Conely, by that time she was working for the Bullards, on vacation with them half the time so Henry didn’t see her round no more. He’d drifted east in screeching, shuddering railroad cars out to the coast, and when he’d had the opportunity to work his passage on the dirty old steel-freighter what was headed out for Britain, he’d jumped at it. Hadn’t given it no second thought, though that weren’t on account of bravery so much as it was on account of him not understanding how far off this Britain place would prove to be.
He didn’t know how many actual weeks it was he’d been afloat, it may have been no more then just a couple, but it seemed like it went on forever, and at times he’d felt so sick he thought he’d die there without ever seeing land again. He’d stayed below the decks as best he could to keep the endless iron breakers out of sight, shovelling coal down in the boiler room where his white shipmates asked how come he didn’t take his shirt off like they’d done and weren’t he hot and all? And Henry had just grinned and said no sir, he weren’t too hot and he was used to places plenty warmer, although obviously that weren’t in truth the reason why he wouldn’t work in his bare chest. Somebody put the rumour round he had an extra nipple what he was ashamed of, and he’d thought it better that he let it go at that, since that had put an end to all the questions.
On the <em>Pride of Bethlehem</em> you had sheet steel, with anything from candy-bars to chapbooks and dime novels making up the ballast. By then, the United States was turning out more steel than Britain was, so that it meant as they could sell it cheaper, even with the cost of shipping it across. Besides, on the way back what they’d be bringing home was wool from Wales, so that the owners saw a handsome profit both ways on the journey. When he’d not been either hard at work or sicking up, Henry had passed his time in reading Wild West tales on the already-yellowed pages of pamphlets intended for the five-and-ten. Buffalo Bill had been the hero in a number of the stories, shooting outlaws and protecting wagon trains from renegades, when all he ever did was play the big clown in his travelling circus. William Cody. If there’d ever been a man more fit to be a stone face with just chimneys blowing hot air for companionship, then Henry didn’t know of him.
Black fields what had but lately had they stubble burned was on his right now, as he knew belonged to Grange Farm, just ahead. The white birds hopping from one scorched rut to another Henry thought was gulls, although these parts was just about as distant from the sea as you could get in England. Up ahead of him the road forked into two, where what they called Northampton Road branched off towards the village square of Denton. Denton was a nice place, but there weren’t much in the way of pickings. It was best if Henry only went there once or maybe twice a year, to make it worth his while, and he stuck on the right-hand track now so that he could skirt the village to its south and carry on for Yardley – Yardley Hastings what they called it. He was just past Denton when he cycled through a rain shower was so small that he was in one side of it and out the other without feeling more than one or two spots on his brow. The clouds above him had a couple towers of smooth grey marble floating in amongst the white now, but the sky was mostly a clear blue and Henry doubted if the downpour would amount to anything.
Way off on Henry’s left he could make out the darker patchwork of the woods round Castle Ashby. He’d been out there one time when he’d met a local feller couldn’t wait to tell him all about the place, how back in ancient London when they’d wanted two wood giants to stand outside they city gates, what was called Gog and Magog, it was Castle Ashby where they’d got the trees. The man was proud of where he lived and all its history, how a lot of folks round here was. He’d told Henry how he thought this county was a holy place, and that’s how come that London wanted trees from here. Henry weren’t sure about Northampton’s holiness, not back then and not now, not even after hearing what he had about the Reverend Newton and “Amazing Grace”. It seemed like it was someway special sure enough, though holy weren’t a word what Henry would have used. For one thing, holiness, as Henry saw it, it was a mite cleaner than what Scarletwell Street was. But on the other hand, he’d thought the feller had been right, too, in a way: if there was anything about this place was holy, then it likely was the trees.
Henry remembered when he’d first arrived with his new wife in these parts and the tree what they’d seen then, after he’d been in Britain no more than six months. When he’d come off the ship in Cardiff and decided there weren’t no way he could face another sea voyage home, he’d got himself a lodging at a place called Tiger Bay what had some coloured people living there. That hadn’t been what Henry wanted, though. That was too much like it had ended up in Kansas, with the coloured folks all in one district what was let to fall in pieces until Kansas was too much like Tennessee. Yes, he liked his own people good enough, but not when they was kept away from other folks like they was in a gosh-darned zoo. Henry had struck out for mid-Wales on foot, and it was on the way there that he’d met Selina in a place, Abergavenny, what was on the River Usk. The way they’d fell in love and then got married was that quick it made his head spin, thinking of it. That, and how they’d right away gone up to Builth Wells, for the droving. First thing Henry knowed he’d been wed to a pretty white girl half his age, lying beside her underneath a stretched out piece of canvas while the hundred thousand sheep what they was helping herd to England cried and shuffled in the night outside. They’d been upon the road for near as long as it had took the <em>Pride of Bethlehem</em> to get to Britain, but then at the end of it they’d come across what he knew now was Spencer Bridge, then up Crane Hill and Grafton Street to Sheep Street, which was where they’d seen the tree.
Henry had waded through the herd that milled about there in the wide street, meeting the head drover at the gates of what they called Saint Sepulchre’s, which was the oldest and the darnedest church he’d ever seen. The boss had given him his ticket and told Henry he should take it to a place they called the Welsh House in the market square, where Henry would be give his wages. Him and his Selina had set off up Sheep Street for the centre of the town, and it was in an open yard off on they right there that the tree was standing: a giant beech so big and old that they could only stop and marvel at it, even with the ticket for his pay burning a hole in Henry’s pants like it was doing. It was that far round, the tree, it would have taken four or five men easy to link up they hands about it, and he’d later heard how it was seven hundred year or more in age. You thought about a tree as old as that one looked, you couldn’t help but think of all what it had seen, all what had happened round it in its time. The horseback knights they used to have, and all them battles like in England’s Civil War, which had took place a powerful while before America’s. You couldn’t stand there staring like him and Selina had without you started wondering where every mark and scar had come from, whether it was from a pike or maybe from a musket ball. They’d only looked at it a while, and then they’d picked up Henry’s pay before they poked around the town and found they place in Scarletwell, what had its own amazing sights, but he believed that tree had played as big a part in Henry and Selina thinking they should settle here as any practical consideration. There was something in it made the town seem solid and deep-rooted. And there weren’t nobody hanging from it.
It was coming on for some while after two he got to Yardley. He went up the first turn on his left, called the Northampton Road just like in Denton, up into the village square, there where they had the school. It was a pretty building what had butter-colour stones and a nice archway leading to its play-yard, and he could see children through a downstairs window busy with they lessons, painting onto sheets of butcher’s paper at a long wood table. Henry’s business what he had was with the caretaker, so he pulled up his bicycle across the street from the main schoolhouse, near where this caretaker lived. It was a feller Henry had a good few years on, although he’d had the misfortune to lose nearly all his hair so he looked older than what Henry was. He answered Henry’s knock but didn’t ask him in, although he’d got a bag of things he’d saved what he brung through out on the step and said as they was Henry’s if he wanted them. There was two empty picture frames made Henry wonder what was in them once, a pair of old shoes and some pants made out of corduroy ripped down they backside so that they was near in half. He thanked the caretaker politely, putting it all in his cart alongside what he’d picked up from Great Houghton, and was just about to shake hands and be back upon his way when it occurred to him that he should ask how far it was to Olney.
“Olney? Well, you’re nearly there.”
The caretaker wiped dust from off the picture-frames onto his overall, then pointed back across the village square towards they left.
“See Little Street there? What you want to do is go down that onto the High Street where it takes you back onto the Bedford Road. Keep on it out of Yardley, and you’ll not go far before you reach a lane that drops off from the main road to your right. You get on that, what’s called the Yardley Road, it’s all downhill to Olney. I should say it’s three mile there and five mile back, considering how steep it is.”
That didn’t sound too far at all, not seeing how he’d made such good time getting out here. Henry was appreciative of the directions and said how he’d see the caretaker again ’fore Christmas while he climbed back on his bicycle. The two of them said they goodbyes and then he stood hard on his pedals and was sailing off down Little Street between the women stood outside its shops and such, dark bundles topped by bonnets, rustling across gold sidewalks through the afternoon.
He turned right onto High Street and it took him back down on the Bedford Road, just like the caretaker had said. He went out of the village past the Red Lion public house what they had near the turn there, where farm workers who was coming in already off the fields with mighty thirsts looked at him silently as he went by. That could have been his rope tyres what he had, though, and not nothing was related to his skin at all. It tickled Henry how folks here with all they clever ways of building walls and tying hedges and all that, how they all acted like rope on a feller’s wheel-rims was the most outlandish thing they ever seen. He might as well have had trained rattlesnakes instead of tyres, to hear folks going on about it. All it was, it was a trick he’d seen some other coloured fellers use in Kansas. Rope was cheaper, didn’t wear like rubber did or else get punctured, and it suited Henry fine. Weren’t any more to it than that.
Across the Bedford Road right opposite the High Street turn, the land all dropped away, and where the river tributary did too there was a waterfall. The spray what got flung up from this caught in the slanted light and made a rainbow, just a little one hung in the air, whose colours was so pale that they kept fading in and out of sight. He turned left on the main road and rode on about a quarter mile from Yardley, where he found the steep lane running down upon his right what had a sign said Olney, only saying it was steep weren’t doing it no justice. He flew down it like the wind, sending up glassy sheets of water where he couldn’t help but splash through puddles, such as on the soft ground near a third of the way down where there was ponds with gnats in a mean vapour hanging over ’em. Speed he was going at, it didn’t seem five minutes before he could see the village rooftops down the way ahead of him. He let his brake-blocks skim the dirt road, slowing down a little at a time so that he didn’t have no accidents before he’d gotten where he wanted. Back of Henry’s mind there was the thought that it was going to be an effort getting up this hill again, but he put that aside in favour of the great adventure he was shooting into like a bottle rocket, with his rope tyres sizzling in the dried-out cowpats.
Olney, when he got to it, was bigger than he’d thought it would be. Only thing he saw looked likely it might be a church spire was off down the other end of town, so that’s what Henry headed for. All of the people what he passed by on the street was staring at him, since he hadn’t come this way before and was no doubt to they mind a ferocious novelty. He kept his head down, looking at the cobbles what he pedalled over, being careful not to give offence. The streets was quiet, without much horse-traffic that afternoon as he could see, so that he was embarrassed by the noise his cart was making when it thundered on the stones in back of him. He looked up once and caught a glimpse of his reflection, racing by across the window of an ironmonger’s shop, a black man with white hair and beard upon a strange machine who passed through all the pots and pans hung on display like he was no more solid than a ghost.
When in the end he reached the church, though, it was worth it. Way down on the bottom edge of Olney, with the Great Ouse River and its lakes spread to the south it was a towering and inspiring sight. It being Friday it weren’t open, naturally, so Henry propped his bicycle against a tree and walked around the building once or twice, admiring its high windows with they old stained glass and squinting up towards that spire, what was so high he’d seen it from the village’s far end. The clock that was up on the tower there said as it was getting on for half-past three, or ‘five-and-twenny arter’ like they said on Scarletwell. He reckoned he could look around here for a while and still be home before it got too dark out and Selina started worrying.
He guessed that he was kind of disappointed there weren’t nothing on the church what told of Pastor Newton or “Amazing Grace”. It was just Henry’s foolish notion of how folks in England done things, he was sure, but he’d expected they might have a statue of the man or something, maybe standing with his quill pen in his hand. Instead, there wasn’t nothing. There weren’t even a bad likeness hung up near a chimney. Right across the street, though, Henry saw there was a graveyard. While he didn’t know if Pastor Newton had been buried here as well, he thought there was at least a chance and so he crossed the road and went into the cemetery by its top gate, off from a little path ran down beside a green. Things jumped and scuffled in the long grass near his feet, and just like in the Boroughs he weren’t sure if it was rats or rabbits, but he didn’t care much for it either way.
Excepting Henry and the village dead the churchyard seemed about deserted. It surprised him, then, when he turned round a corner in the paths what led between the headstones, right by where there was an angel what had half its nose and jaw gone like a veteran from some war, and kneeling there beside a grave to pull the weeds up from it was a stout man in his waistcoat and his shirtsleeves, got a flat cap on his silver head. He looked up, more surprised by seeing Henry than what Henry was by seeing him. He was an old man, Henry realised, older than himself and maybe close to seventy. He was still sturdy, though, with great white mutton chops to each side of a face sent red by sun. Below his cap’s brim he had small wire spectacles perched on his nose-end, what he pushed up so that he could take a better look at Henry.
“Good Lord, boy, you made me jump. I thought it was Old Nick who’d come to get me. I’ve not seen you round these parts before, now, have I? Let me get a look at yer.”
The man climbed to his feet with difficulty from the graveside, Henry offering a hand what the old feller gratefully accepted. When he was stood up he was around five and a half feet, and a little shorter than what Henry was. He’d got blue eyes what twinkled through the lenses of his spectacles when he looked Henry over, beaming like he was delighted.
“Well, now, you look like a decent chap. What’s brought you here to Olney, then, if you don’t mind me asking? Were you looking for somebody buried here?”
Henry admitted that he was.
“I come from Scarletwell Street in Northampton, sir, where mostly I am called Black Charley. I was hearing just today about a reverend what once preached here in Olney, name of Newton. It seems like he was the man what wrote ‘Amazing Grace’, which is a song as I admire. I was just looking round the church across the way there, hoping for some sign of him, when it occurred to me as he might be at rest someplace nearby. If you’re acquainted with this cemetery, sir, I’d be obliged you could direct me to his grave.”
The older feller set his lips into a pushed-out frown and shook his head.
“No, bless your heart, he’s not here. I believe the Reverend Newton is in London at St. Mary Woolnoth’s, which is where he went when he left Olney. Here, I’ll tell you what, though. As it happens, I’m churchwarden here. Dan Tite, that’s me. I was just tidying the plots to give myself something to do, but I’d be happy to come back across the church with you and let you in so you could have a look. I’ve got the key here in my waistcoat pocket.”
He produced a big black iron key and held it up so Henry could inspect it. Sure enough, it was a key. Weren’t no disputing that. Out the same pocket, the churchwarden took a clay pipe and his pouch what had tobacco in. He filled the pipe and lit it with a match while they was walking back towards the gates, so a sweet coconut and wood smell drifted out behind them through the yew trees and the tombs. Dan Tite puffed hard on its clay stem ’til he was sure the pipe was going good enough, and then resumed his talk with Henry.
“What’s that accent that you’ve got, then? Can’t say as I’ve heard its like before.”
He nodded while Dan closed the gate behind them and they started up the footpath back to Church Street. He could see the movements in the grass was rabbits now, they noses poking in and out of all the holes was dug into the green and all they ears like babies’ slippers left out in the dew.
“No, sir, I don’t expect you would have done. I come here from America just twelve or thirteen years back now. It was in Tennessee where I was born, then after that I lived in Kansas for a time. To me, it sounds like I talk pretty much the same as folks around Northampton now, although my wife and childrens, they say as I don’t.”
The old churchwarden laughed. They were just walking back across the cobbled lane towards the church, where Henry’s bike and cart was propped against a tree.
“You want to listen to ’em, then. They’re right. That voice you’ve got, that don’t sound nothing like Northampton, and to my mind it’s the better for it. They’re some blessed lazy talkers, them round there. Don’t bother with the letters on the ends of words or even most of ’em what’s in the middle, so it all comes out like mush.”
The warden took a pause here, halfway up the path towards the big church door, and pushed his glasses back where they’d slipped down again so’s he could study Henry’s bicycle and barrow what it drug behind it, leaned up on that poplar there. He looked from the machine to Henry and then back again, then he just shook his head and went on to unlock the door so they could go inside.
First thing you noticed was the chill come up off the stone floor, and how there was the slightest echo after everything. There in the room out front the church they called the vestibule, they’d got a big display of flowers and sheaves of wheat and pots of jam and such, what Henry figured as the children had brung for they Harvest Festival. It put a kind of morning smell about the air there, even though the place was cold and grey with shadows. Hung up in a frame above the spread there was a painting, and soon as he saw it Henry knew who it was of, it didn’t matter that the picture was a dark one hanging in a darker room.
Man had a head looked near to square and too big for his body, although Henry owned that could have been the painter’s fault. He’d got his parson’s robes on and a wig like what they had in eighteenth-century times, all short on top and with grey plaits of wool wound round like ram’s horns down to either side. One of his eyes looked sort of worried and yet full of what you might call cautious hope, while on the side of his face what was turned away out from the light the eye seemed flat and dead, and had the look of someone carrying a mournful weight they know they can’t put down. It might have been his parson’s collar was too tight so that the fat under his jaw was plumped out over it a little in a roll, and up above that was a mouth looked like it didn’t know to laugh or cry. John Newton, born seventeen hundred twenty-five, died eighteen hundred seven. Henry stared up at the portrait with his eyes he knowed was the same colour as piano ivories, wide and near luminous there in the gloom.
“Ah, yes, that’s him. You’ve spotted him, the Reverend Newton. Always thought meself he looked a tired old soul, a bit like a poor sheep put out to grass.”
Dan Tite was up one corner getting something out a stack of hymnals what was there while Henry stood and gazed at Newton’s murky image. The churchwarden turned and waddled back across the ringing, whispering slabs to Henry, dusting off the cover on some old book as he come.
“Here, have a look at this. This is the <em>Olney Hymns</em>, that they first printed up ’fore eighteen hundred. This is all the ones he wrote with his great friend the poet Mr. Cowper, who perhaps you’ve heard of?”
Henry confessed as he hadn’t. Though he saw no need to say it there and then, it was a fact his reading weren’t so good saving for street signs and for hymns in church what he already knowed the words to, and he’d never learned to write none for the life of him. Dan weren’t concerned, though, that he weren’t acquainted with this Cooper feller, and just went on flipping through the yellow-smelling pages ’til he’d found what he was looking for.
“Well, I suppose it doesn’t matter, except Mr. Cowper was another one from Olney and they wrote all these together, although Mr. Newton did by far the greater part. This one, the one that you like, we’re almost completely certain that it’s Newton’s work alone.”
The warden gave the book of hymns to Henry, who reached out and took it careful with both hands like it were some religious relic, which he guessed it was. The page what it was open at had got a heading took him some time to make sense from, where it didn’t say “Amazing Grace” like he’d expected. What it said instead, he finally figured out, was “Faith’s Review and Expectation”, and then under that there was some lines from out the Bible in the first book of the Chronicles, what had King David ask the Lord ‘What is mine house, that thou hast brought me hitherto?’ At last, below where it said that, there was the words all printed from “Amazing Grace”. He looked them over, kind of singing them inside his head so’s he could make ’em out more easy. He was doing fine until he got down to the last verse, which weren’t like the one he was familiar with. That one, the one he knew, said about how when we’d been here ten thousand years in the bright shining sun, singing God’s praise, we’d not have hardly started. This one in the book here didn’t sound like it expected no ten thousand years, and weren’t anticipating anything was shining or was bright.
<quote>
<em>The earth shall soon dissolve like snow,</em>
<em>The sun forbear to shine;</em>
<em>But God, who called me here below,</em>
<em>Will be forever mine.</em>
</quote>
<br>
Upon consideration, Henry thought the last verse what he knew was best, although he understood it weren’t one what the Reverend Newton writ himself. Most likely, he supposed, the one with the ten thousand years and shining sun was writ out in America, which was a country what was younger than what England was, and with a brighter view of everything. Here where the land was older and they’d seen all manner of great kingdoms come and go, this was a country where World’s End looked close by, where the ground below your feet might crumble all to dust with age, the sun above your head burn out at any minute. Henry liked the song how he’d been taught it better, with the sense it give how everything was going to be all right, but in his heart he felt the way that Mr. Newton had it here was possibly more true. He stood there for some minutes while he finished up the reading of it all, and then he give the book back to Dan Tite, mumbling how Mr. Newton was a great man, a great man.
The warden took the <em>Olney Hymns</em> off Henry and then put it back where it had been before. He looked at Henry quizzically a moment, as though he were trying to figure something out, and when he spoke it had a softer tone what was more intimate, like they was really talking about things what was important now.
“He was. He was a great man, and I think it’s very Christian you should say so.”
Henry nodded, though he weren’t sure why he did. He didn’t rightly understand how paying simple compliments was seen to be a Christian act, but didn’t want Dan Tite should think of him as an uneducated black man, so he didn’t say a word. He just stood shuffling while the warden weighed him up through them round little spectacles. Dan looked in Henry’s shifting and uncertain eyes and give kind of a sigh.
“Charley … it was Charley, wasn’t it? Well, Charley, let me ask you something. Did you hear much about Mr. Newton where you came from, of his life and that?”
Henry admitted, to his shame, that he’d not heard of Newton’s name before that afternoon, nor that he’d writ “Amazing Grace.” The churchwarden assured him as it didn’t matter, and then carried on what he was saying.
“What you have to understand with Mr. Newton is he didn’t come to his religious calling until he was nearly forty, so he’d knocked about a bit by that age, if you take my meaning.”
Henry weren’t sure that he did, but Dan Tite went on anyway.
“You see, his father was commander of a merchant ship, always at sea, and young John Newton was a lad of just eleven when he went there with him. Made a few trips with his dad, as you might say, before his dad retired. I think he wasn’t twenty yet when he got press-ganged into service on a man-o’-war, where he deserted and was flogged.”
Henry scratched at his arm and winced. He’d seen men whipped. Dan Tite went right on with his tale, its echo muttering up the corner of the vestibule like some old relative touched in they mind.
“He asked if he could be exchanged to service on another ship. It was a slave ship, sailing for Sierra Leone on the western coast of Africa. He became the trader’s servant and was treated in a brutal fashion, as you can imagine would be likely with a lad of that age. He was lucky, though, and a sea captain who had known his father came along and saved him.”
Henry understood now, why Dan Tite was telling him all this, as painful as it was. He’d been surprised when he found out it was a white man wrote “Amazing Grace”. He’d always thought only a black man could have knowed the sorrow what was in that song, but this made sense out of it. Mr. Newton had been captive on a slave boat, just like Henry’s momma and his poppa was. He’d suffered at the hands of fiends and devils, just like they’d done. That was how he’d come to write them words, about how sweet it was to have relief within the Lord from all that suffering. The churchwarden had wanted he should know how the convictions in “Amazing Grace” was come of Mr. Newton’s hard experience, that much was plain. Henry was grateful. It just give him all the more respect for the good man behind the writing. When he sung “Amazing Grace” now he could think of Pastor Newton and the trials he’d overcome. He grinned and stuck his hand out to Dan Tite.
“Sir, I’m real grateful for that information, and for letting me take up your time in telling it. It sounds like Mr. Newton had some troubles, right enough, but praise the Lord that he lived through ’em all and wrote a song that beautiful. It only makes me think the better of him, hearing what you said.”
The warden didn’t take his hand. He just held up his own, the palm turned out to Henry like it was a warning. The old man had got a look on his pink face now was real serious. He shook his head, so that his white side-whiskers flapped like sails.
“You haven’t heard it all.”
A church clock somewhere struck for half-past four, either in Yardley up ahead of him or Olney back behind him, when he’d finally walked his bicycle and wagon all the way back up the steep slope of the Yardley Road, now trudging through the puddles what he’d skimmed on his way down.
Henry was all in pieces, didn’t know what he should think. He’d walk a little then he’d stop and rub the fat part of his hand across his eyes, wiping the tears off down his cheeks so’s he could see where he was going and it weren’t all just a fog of brown and green. Up at the top there of the lane, just when the clock was striking, he climbed back onto his saddle and begun the long ride back to Scarletwell.
John Newton had become a slave-trader. That’s what Dan Tite had told him. Even when he’d just got rescued from a slaver, even when he knowed what it was like aboard they ships, he’d gone and got a vessel so as he could ply that trade himself. He’d got rich off it, he’d got rich off of slaving and then later on he’d made his big repentance and become a minister and done “Amazing Grace”. Dear Lord, dear sweet Lord on the cross it was a slaver wrote “Amazing Grace”. He had to put his wood blocks down upon the ground so’s he could wipe his eyes again.
How could that be? How could you get flogged as a boy nineteen years old, have Lord knows what done with you as a slaver’s servant, how could you go through all that, then see it done to someone else for gain? He knew now what that look had been, what he’d saw in the portrait’s eyes. John Newton was a guilty man, a man with blood and tar and feathers on his hands. John Newton was a man most likely damned.
He’d got his feelings under some control now, so he started up his bicycle and carried on, back up the Bedford Road and past the Red Lion what he’d seen before, saving that it was on his right this time. It sounded full, the public house, with all the noise was coming from it, fellers laughing, singing bits from songs what floated out across the empty fields. Upon his left, the rainbow what had been above the clattering waterfall weren’t there no more. The sun was getting low down in the west ahead of him as he went by the second Yardley bend and made for Denton with all manner of considerations turning over in his heart.
Henry could see, after he’d chewed upon it for a time, that it weren’t just a matter of how Newton could have gone from one side of the whipping-post straight to the other. Now he’d thought about it, Henry would allow that there most likely had been plenty other folks had done the same. Why, he himself knowed people what was treated bad, then took it out on others in they turn. That weren’t the thing what was exceptional about John Newton, how he’d started out no better than a slave and then took up that business for himself. That weren’t no puzzle, or at least not much of one. The thing what seized on Henry’s mind was more how Newton could have been in work so evil and then writ “Amazing Grace”. Was it all sham, them lines what had moved Henry and his people so? Was it no more than Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, ’cept for it was in a church and had fine sentiments where Cody had his redskins?
Right of him and way off to the north a spray of roosting birds was rose in black specks over the dark woods by Castle Ashby, looked like ashes blowed up from the burnt patch where a fire had been. He carried on along the Bedford Road, hunched like a crow over his handlebars. From up above he figured how he must bear a resemblance to one on them tin novelties he’d seen, them where you cranked the handle and a little feller sitting on a bicycle rode inch by inch on a straight wire with only his knees moving, going up and down there on the pedals.
Even knowing what he knowed now about Newton, Henry couldn’t see how words what was so heartfelt could have been pretence entire. Dan Tite had said how most folks figured as the song was writ about a dreadful storm what Newton and his slaving-boat had come through on a homeward journey what he made in May, seventeen hundred forty-eight. Called it his great deliverance and said it was the day God’s grace had come upon him, though it weren’t ’til near on seven years had passed afore he give up slaving. Treated his slaves decent from what the churchwarden said, though Henry didn’t rightly know how you could use a word like decent up against a word like slaves. It was about the same as saying spiders was considerate to they flies, how Henry seen it. All the same, he would concede how just because a feller weren’t converted all at once or overnight the way he said he was, that didn’t mean how his conversion couldn’t come to be sincere. Could be how by the time what Newton wrote “Amazing Grace” he was regretful of a lot of things he’d done. Could be that’s what he meant when he said how he’d been a wretch. Henry had previously supposed as how the song had meant a poor wretch just like anybody was, but he could see now how John Newton might have possibly intended for the words to have a stronger meaning, what was personal to him. A wretch like me. A fornicating, drinking, whoring, cussing, slaving wretch like me. Henry had never thought about the song like that before, had only heard the bright things what was in it and heard nothing what was savage or was painful. Previous to this day he’d never heard the shame.
He was approaching Denton now, his shadow getting longer on the track behind of him. The road was forked here, like it was upon the village’s far side, and Henry took the route most to his left so as he could pass by the place. He went on by the side path what run down to Horton and then passed the thatched humps of Grange Farm what was just slightly further on. The ploughed black ruts what filled the fields was powdered gold along they tops where the low sun’s rays touched them. All the little springs and fiddles in his back was acting up so that he felt his age now as he pedalled on for Brafield, horses watching him across the hedgerows, unconcerned.
According to Dan Tite, John Newton had give up his seafaring and slaving some years after he got married, which was in seventeen hundred fifty. Even then, it sounded as though it was illness made him mend his ways, and not conviction. Then, seventeen sixty or near to, he got ordained as a church minister at Olney where he met up with the poet feller Mr. Cooper what was spelled as Cow-per, who’d come to the village some years after he’d done. From the little what Dan Tite had said of Cowper it had seemed to Henry that the poet was a troubled man within his heart and mind, and he could see how that was maybe why John Newton had took such a shine to him. They’d writ songs for they services and prayer meetings and such, with Newton putting in the best part of the labour, writing four for every one of Cowper’s. Seems how Pastor Newton was a great one for his writing, not just with his hymns but also in his diaries and his letter-writing. The churchwarden said how if it weren’t for Newton’s writings, nobody would know a thing today about how slaving was in eighteenth-century times. Henry expected as he meant nobody white.
Newton had writ “Amazing Grace”, they reckoned, maybe late as eighteen seventy when he was forty-five or thereabouts. Some ten year after that he’d gone from Olney up to London, where he was the rector at a place they called Saint Mary Woolnoth. Here he’d give some sermons what was well regarded, then went blind afore he died when he was eighty-two. Maybe he thought as he’d atoned, but Henry didn’t know a crime was worse then selling others into slavery. Even the Lord in all his mercy had sent plagues on Egypt when the Hebrews was they slaves, and Henry weren’t sure what it took to make atonement for a sin that grievous.
He was so caught up in all his thoughts he’d gone by Brafield ’fore he knew it and was riding on due west towards the Houghtons with the red sun lowered like a firebrand, just about to set light to the trees on the horizon up ahead of him. Henry was thinking about Newton and of how peculiar it was he should go blind when in “Amazing Grace” he wrote of just the opposite. He was also turning over something else Dan Tite had said about when Newton was in London at Saint Mary Woolnoth, giving all his sermons. The old churchwarden had said how in the congregation there was Mr. William Wilberforce, who’d gone on as an abolitionist and done a lot to put an end to slavery for good. It seemed in this regard as he’d found Pastor Newton’s sermons generally inspiring. Maybe if it weren’t for Newton and his great repentance, never mind if it were genuine or not, then slavery might not have gotten overturned as early as it did, or maybe even not at all. The rights and wrongs of it went back and forth as Henry pedalled by the turns for Little Houghton on his right and then, about a mile past that, the one down to Great Houghton on his left. The sky above Northampton was like treasure in a bed of roses.
Henry knew it was the Christian thing, forgiving Mr. Newton what he’d done, but slavery weren’t just a word, out from them history books he couldn’t read. He scratched his arm and thought about what he remembered from them days. He’d been around thirteen years old, he thought, when Mr. Lincoln won the Civil War and set the slaves all free. Henry was marked up as a slave six year by then, although from that event, when he was seven, he recalled not one thing save his momma crying, saying hush. What come back most to him was how scared everybody was, the day they heard they was emancipated. It was like within they hearts they knowed it was the coloured folk would be in trouble about getting freed, and that was how it proved to be. The old plantation bosses liked to say how all the slaves was happier before they got set loose, and it was the plantation bosses and they friends made sure as that was true. The ten year Henry and his folks had spent in Tennessee before they went to Kansas, they was nothing else but rapes and beatings, hangings, killings, burnings; it made Henry sick to think of it. They was all being punished ’cause they’d been let go, that was the honest truth.
The flames was dying down upon the cloud-banks in the west and darker blues staining the heavens up behind him when he come along beside Midsummer Meadow in the way of Beckett’s Park. Cow Meadow, that was what the folks down Scarletwell still called the fields round here, though they said Medder ’stead of Meadow. Henry had been told how it was here another of the English Wars got settled. This one weren’t they Civil War, although that had its last big battle pretty close to here. This was a war they had before that what they called the Rose War, although Henry couldn’t say what it had been about or rightly when it was. He couldn’t help but think if England was America, and if you had a place where both the War of Independence and the Civil War had finished up, then there’d have been a bigger thing made out of it. Perhaps that was just more the way here, talking things down, although it had always seemed to Henry how the English liked to puff they past times up as much as anybody, and considerably more than most. It was as if the folks what writ them history books just couldn’t see Northampton somehow, like it had a veil across it or like they was horses wearing blinkers with the whole town on they blind side.
When he reached the crossroads, with the hospital upon his right and what they called the Dern Gate up ahead of him, he stopped there by the drinking fountain at Saint Thomas Becket’s well and set his bicycle against the rugged wall while he stooped down and took a drink, the way what he’d done earlier. The water didn’t seem to taste as sweet as how it had that morning, although Henry owned as his own feelings may have had an influence on that. It had a bitter tang now after it was swallowed. You could taste the metal in it.
He got on his bike again and at the crossroads he turned left, along Victoria Promenade what went down by the north side of the park there. He rode in amongst the carts and trolley cars and such, where everyone was making they way home under a sky near purple, skimming through the leaves fell in the gutters as he left the meadowlands behind him and went on through the good-natured stink beside the cattle yards. The pens what held the animals was off on Henry’s left, where now and then you heard some lowing or some bleating coming through the gloom. As he rolled by he thought about how when he’d viewed it in the daylight you could see how all the sheep, cows and what have you was all marked with dye, got little splashes of it on they backs, both red and blue. He’d never seen one branded, now he thought about it, not in all the time what he’d been over here. He let that notion settle in while he continued past the Plough Hotel, what was there at the Bridge Street crossroads on his right, and carried on towards where the gas-holder’s iron frame rose up against the grey light over Gas Street. Here he stuck out his right hand to signal he was going to turn, and then went north up Horseshoe Street, heart heavy in his chest.
It was still Pastor Newton was upsetting Henry. He weren’t certain as he could enjoy “Amazing Grace” quite the same way again, not knowing what he knowed. Why, he weren’t even sure if he could bring himself to worship in a church again, not if them churchmen could have made they money doing Lord knows what. It weren’t that Henry had been made to doubt his faith, for that could never be, but more like he had come to doubt the ministers proclaiming it. Could be that in future Henry might go back to saying prayers in sheds and barns, wherever it was quiet, the way him and his folks had back in Tennessee. When you was kneeling in a barn you knew as God was there, the same like you was in a church. The difference was that in a barn you could be sure you didn’t have a devil in the pulpit.
Henry knew as it weren’t fair to judge all reverends by the sins of one, but it was just his trust in that profession had got shook. He wasn’t even rightly sure as he could fairly judge John Newton, what with all the contradictions as there was about his story, but he felt as all the same he had a right to be real disappointed in the man. The standard by which Henry weighed such things was that of ordinary folks, and he knew neither he nor anybody as he knowed had ever sold another living person into slavery.
’Course, nobody he knowed had ever writ “Amazing Grace” or been no influence on Mr. William Wilberforce and all that neither. There was that to think of. Rattling on the cobbles as he made hard work of climbing Horseshoe Street, the arguments swung to and fro inside of him without they come to any real conclusion you might call. Up at the top there where his route crossed over Gold Street was a big old horse-bus coming out of Marefair so’s he had to put his wood blocks down upon the street and stop while it went by.
Out one side of his eye while he stood waiting there he could see this young skinny feller, idling on the corner where they had the Palace of Varieties. The man was staring hard at Henry who, seeing as he was of a downcast turn of mind, decided that this was most likely on account of Henry being black or having rope around his wheels or some fool thing like that. He made out as he didn’t notice the young feller gawping at him, and then when the horse-bus had drug itself by and on up Gold Street, Henry stood upon his pedals and continued past the crossroads and uphill, by what they called Horsemarket. Dark was settling on the Boroughs like fine soot as Henry cycled up along its eastward edge, and there was gaslights burning in some windows now. The wagons was all firing up they lanterns, so that he was glad at least his hair and beard was white, and folks would see him so he didn’t get run down.
Horsemarket seemed to him more steep than usual, got all the doctors’ houses looking cosy to his left there and across the road it was all overhung with trees grew out the gardens of Saint Katherine’s. When he got up to Mary’s Street he turned along it. Clattering and creaking he made off into the greying tangle of the real old neighbourhood, what used to be all of the town there was.
As much as Henry liked the district where he lived, he couldn’t say as he much cared to see it in the twilight. That’s when things all lost they edges and they shapes, and what you knew weren’t real by daylight seemed a lot more possible. Hobgoblins, fiends and such as that, this was the time you seen ’em, when the paint peeled off a wood gate made a shape like someone standing there, or all the shadow-patches in a clump of nettles was a big face shifting in the wind, eyes narrowing with poison. Dusk played tricks like that all over, Henry knew, though sometimes it would seem to him as if the Boroughs was built crooked specially so’s it could harbour all the gloom and haunts up in its corners: nests where poor and ragged ghosts was bred. His rope tyres juddered on the stones as he squeaked through the evening lanes, where there was ugly fairies squirming in the water butts and ghouls crouched in the guttering for all what Henry knew. The bent-backed shops and houses leaned all round him, pale against the dusk like they was spikes of limestone growed up in a cave. Sweet in the mornings, lazy in the afternoons, come dark this was another place entire.
It wasn’t on account of this was somewhere you might get attacked and robbed, like Henry knew was the opinion of the Boroughs held by folks in better parts of town. To Henry’s mind there weren’t no safer place than here, where nobody robbed nobody ’cause everybody knew they was the same, without a penny to they names. As for attacks and beatings, there weren’t no denying they went on, but it weren’t nothing like it was in Tennessee. For one thing, what you had around the Boroughs was a lot of people who was all so angry on they insides, what they liked to do was just get drunk and fight each other so as they could let it out. That weren’t a pleasant thing to watch and it was hard to sit by while young men, and women too, they just destroyed themselves like that, but it weren’t Tennessee. It weren’t one bunch of folks got all the power taking they vengeance on a lot of helpless people what got nothing. This was poor folks who weren’t going to hurt nobody ’cept they own selves, although Henry owned as they could hurt they own selves something awful.
No, it wasn’t like the Boroughs was all full of cut-throats. It weren’t that what made it kind of frightening after nightfall, it weren’t nothing near as reasonable as that. Unearthly, that was what it was after the daylight went, the daylight what was holding back another world where anything might just about be possible. Children, of course, they loved it and you’d always have big squealing gangs of ’em run up and down the dim streets in the gaslight doing hide and seek or some such. Henry didn’t doubt the little boys and girls knew that this place was haunted, just like all the growed-ups did. The thing was, children was all at a time of life when ghosts was just about as natural as was anything in they experience. Ghosts was just part of the excitement, to a child. When you was older though, was nearer to the grave yourself and you’d had time to think on life and death a little, well, then ghosts and what they signified, that was all different somehow. That, to Henry’s mind, was why no one went out much in the Boroughs after it got dark, ’cept they was drinking men or little kids, or else police. The older people got, then the more phantoms what there was around, the shades of places and of people what weren’t here no more. These lanes run back to ancient times, as Henry was aware, so that he shouldn’t be surprised if all the spooks was built up pretty thick by now, like some variety of sediment.
He cycled up Saint Mary’s Street, where the Great Fire broke out a couple hundred year ago, past Pike Street on to Doddridge Street, where he dismounted his contraption so it could be pushed across the lumpy burial ground what run downhill from Doddridge Church. He manhandled his bicycle over the weedy mounds and wet black hollows of the wasteland, wondering not for the first time why it was they called this stretch a burial ground, and not a graveyard or a cemetery. He could see how possibly it was because there weren’t no headstones or no markers, although why that should itself be so when far as he knew it was human people what was buried here, that was what puzzled him. Best he could figure it, it was to do with Mr. Doddridge who had been the minister on Castle Hill, and was what people called a Nonconformist. Henry had heard tell of Nonconformist graveyards was elsewhere in England, where they also put they mass graves for the poor folk, them as was unable to afford a proper burying or tombstone. Could be that was just what happened here. Could be he wheeled his pedal-cart right now above bones was all jumbled up from people didn’t even got they names no more. Mindful of ghosts as he was feeling in the wasting light, he muttered some apologies to any skeletons he might be disrespecting, so’s they knew as it weren’t nothing personal.
When Henry was across the rough ground and in Chalk Lane, near the houses set back from the street they called Long Gardens, he climbed back up on his saddle and rode up the slope in way of Castle Terrace and of Doddridge Church itself, on his right hand there. Passing by the chapel, noticing that funny door set halfway up its old stone wall and leading nowhere, he considered what he knew of Mr. Doddridge, which of course made him in turn consider Mr. Newton.
Mr. Philip Doddridge, now, how people round here told it, was a man in poor health who was wanting that the worse-off folks could feel they had a Christian faith what was they own. When he come here to Castle Hill and started up his ministry, it seems like he took on the English Church by saying folks should have a right to worship as they pleased, and not just how they Bishops and that wanted it. He’d come here to Northampton when he was a young man in his twenties, this was round seventeen hundred thirty, and he’d stayed just over twenty years before his health took him away. He hadn’t lived long after that, but in his time he’d changed the whole way how folks thought about religion in this country, maybe in the Christian world all over. All of it done on the little raised-up mound of dirt what Henry was now riding past. Doddridge had writ hymns, too, just not so famous as “Amazing Grace”, and in the one old drawing of the man what Henry had once seed his eyes was clear and bright and honest as a child. There weren’t no shame, there weren’t no guilt. There weren’t no anything like that, save for a kindliness and great determination.
Henry could imagine Mr. Doddridge out here strolling of an evening, taking in the same air, looking up at the same early stars, most probably wondering just the same what that fool door was doing halfway up the wall. He’d probably felt, like all men do, as he’d been living for a long time, and like all men he most likely found it hard imagining things any other way than how they was, with him alive so as he could appreciate it all. Yet here we was, with Mr. Doddridge dead more’n a hundred-fifty years, and with the church what they named after him still stood here, and still doing good for all the poor folks what there was. John Newton never got no church commemorating what he done, and William Cody only got his plaque up by the chimneypots. Henry considered this, and thought it might be that things worked out fairly after all. It was most probably better to assume as the Almighty knew what He was doing in such matters, that was Henry’s general conclusion.
He propelled himself up Castle Terrace, over where was Castle Street and Fitzroy Street and Little Cross Street knotted up together, rolling straight across and on down Bristol Street, what was his most direct route home. Ahead and on the left of him he saw what was a woman in a long skirt, walking on her own as Henry thought until he see the baby she was carrying. In the gaslight, all the curls around the child’s head was just shining like a goldmine got blowed up, so that he knowed it was May Warren and her momma, who was called May Warren also. He put down one foot to drag his block across the cobbles, slowing down as he drawed up ’longside of ’em.
“Why, Mrs. May and Missy May! You ladies been off gallivanting all around the town, I bet, you only just now coming home!”
The elder May stopped and turned round, surprised, then laughed when she seen it was Henry. Was a deep laugh, rumbling down there in what Henry would admit was sure some big old chest that girl had got.
“Black Charley! Blummin’ ’eck, you made me jump, you silly bugger. They should ’ave a law made you lot carry sparklers after it got dark. Look, May. Look who it is, come frightening your Mam. It’s Uncle Charley.”
Here the little girl, who was without a doubt a child more beautiful than any white child Henry ever saw, looked up towards him and said “Char” a couple times. He grinned down at the baby’s mother.
“It’s an angel what you got there, May. An angel what’s fell down from Heaven.”
Young May Warren shook her head, dismissive like, as if she’d heard the compliment that many times it had begun to trouble her.
“Don’t say that. Everybody always says that.”
They went on to talk a while, then Henry told May as she’d best get her small daughter home and in the warm. They all said they goodbyes, then the two Mays went off down Fort Street, where they lived next door to big May’s father, who was Snowy Vernall. Story was, as Henry had been told it, how May’s grand-pappy whose name was Ernest had his hair turn white from shock one time, and that had been enough to do the same thing for his young son. Snowy’s hair was whiter than what Henry’s was, and there were them said he was touched besides, though Henry only knowed him as man liked drinking and who’d got some talent in his hands for making drawings and the like. The momma and the baby, they went off down Fort Street, where there weren’t no proper road but only paving, and where it was generally held there’d been a fort in ancient times. The street had got a kind of dungeon look, at least to Henry’s eye. It always seemed like a dead end, no matter that you was aware it had an alley running down the back.
Henry continued on where Mr. Beery, who was what they called the lighter-man down in the Boroughs, he was just then reaching up on his long pole to light the gas-lamps what they had in Bristol Street. He called to Henry, cheery like, and Henry he called back. He hoped the children round there wouldn’t shin right up that post and blow the flame out soon as Mr. Beery was gone by, although there was most definitely a chance as that might happen. Henry pedalled past and on down Bristol Street where it run into Bath Street. He went left around the bend that took him past Bath Row and onto Scarletwell Street, where he lived. The dark was pretty thick here, on account of Mr. Beery hadn’t worked his way down this far yet. It was like all the night was trickled down the hill to make a big black puddle at the bottom. Lamps what you could see was shining through the pulled-to curtains, could be they was all glow-in-the-dark bulbs hanging off the heads of them great ugly fish what people seen, brung up by deep sea trawling boats and similar.
Henry had come out from Bath Street onto Scarletwell just opposite the alleyway what folks here called a jitty, as run down behind Scarletwell Terrace there. The big Saint Andrew’s Road was on his left side a short distance, but he got down off his bike and wheeled it up the hill the other way. The house he lived in with Selina and they children was a little way up, opposite the public house was called the Friendly Arms they had across the way. He recollected how when him and his Selina was first come from Wales, after collecting Henry’s pay up at the Welsh House in the market, how they’d come down here and took a look around. They wasn’t sure how folks round here would take to having a black feller married to a white girl, not if they was living hereabouts. Could be as there weren’t no place would accept two different colours, side by side. That was when they’d first come on Scarletwell Street and the Friendly Arms, where they’d been give a sign. Tied up outside the pub and drinking beer from out a glass was what they’d later learned was Newt Pratt’s animal. The sight had so amazed them both, unlikely as it was, that they’d determined there and then as this was someplace they could set up home. No matter how unusual they was, two races wed to live as man and wife, nobody down in Scarletwell Street would look twice at ’em, not with Newt Pratt’s astounding creature roped up getting drunk across the street like that.
He smiled to think of it, pushing his bicycle and cart on up the slope, his wood blocks slipped off from his feet and in his jacket pockets, where they always was when he weren’t wearing ’em. He reached what was a little alley run off on his right there, what would take him round directly to his own back yard. He thumbed the iron latch on his gate, then made an awful racket getting his contraption in the yard, the way he always did. Selina come out on the step, with they first daughter, Mary, who’d got white skin, hanging round her skirts. His wife weren’t tall, and she’d got all her hair brushed down so that it reached near to her knees as she stood there on they back doorstep, smiling at him with the gaslight warm behind her.
“Hello, Henry, love. Come on inside, and you can tell us all how you’ve got on.”
He kissed her cheek, then fished all of the stuff what folks had give him from inside his cart, which would be safe out in the yard there.
“Heck, I been all over. Got me some old clothing and some picture frames. I reckon if you got some water boiled up I could use a wash, though, ’fore we has our supper. Been a tiring day, all kinds of ways.”
Selina cocked her head on one side, studying him while he went by her, taking all the things what he’d collected in the house.
“You’ve been all right, though, have you? Not had any trouble, like?”
He shook his head and give her a big reassuring grin. He didn’t want to talk just yet with her about what he’d found out in Olney, with regard to Pastor Newton and “Amazing Grace”. He weren’t sure in his own mind just what his opinions on the matter was, and figured as he’d tell Selina later, when he’d had a chance to think on it some more. He took the picture frames and that through to they front room what looked out on Scarletwell, and put them with the other items what he’d got there, then went back into the living room where Mary and Selina was. They baby boy, what was called Henry after him and was black like his daddy was, he was asleep upstairs and in his crib by now, though Henry would look in on him afore they went to bed. He left Selina brewing up a pot of tea there on they dining table and went back through to they little kitchen so as he could have himself a wash.
There was still water in the copper boiler what was warmish, and he run himself some in a white enamel bowl what he set down into they deep stone sink. The sink was stood below they kitchen window, looking out on the back yard where everything was black now so’s you couldn’t see. He took his jacket off and draped it on the laundry basket what was by the door, and then commenced unbuttoning his shirt.
It was still Pastor Newton he was thinking of. The man had done tremendous good, to Henry’s mind, and had committed likewise a tremendous sin. Henry weren’t sure as he was big enough to judge a man whose vices and whose virtues was of such a size. But then, who was it would call men like that to they account, if it weren’t Henry and his kin and all them others what was treated so unfairly? All the men what was important, with they hymns and statues and they churches living after them and telling folks for years to come how good they was. It seemed to Henry as these monuments was all like Colonel Cody’s rooftop plaque what he’d seen early in the day. Just ’cause a feller was remembered well, that didn’t mean as he’d done something to deserve it. Henry wondered where the justice was in all of this. He wondered who decided in the end what was the mark of a great man, and how they knew as it weren’t just the mark of Cain? His shirt and vest was off by now, hung with his jacket on the basket down beside the kitchen door. Out in the black night, through the steam rose up from his enamel bowl and past the window panes, he seen his own reflection standing in the dark of they back yard, stripped to its waist and looking in at him.
His own mark was just there on his left shoulder, where they’d branded him when he was seven. Both his momma and his poppa had one just the same. He’d got no proper memory of the night the iron was put on him, and even after all these years he’d still got no idea the reason why they done it. Weren’t like there was nigger-rustling going on, as he could recollect.
It was a funny thing, the mark, no better than a drawing what some little child had done. There was two hills, looked like they got a bridge between ’em, else like they was pans hung on a scale for weighing gold. Down under this you’d got a scroll, or could be that it was a winding road. The lines was pale and violet, smooth like wax there on the purple flesh of Henry’s arm. He lifted up his other hand and run his fingers over the design. He waited for the wisdom and the understanding what would answer all the questions in his heart, about John Newton, about everything. He waited for the grace so he could put aside all his hard feelings, though he owned as it would truly have to be amazing.
Outside in the royal blue heaven over Doddridge Chapel, stars was coming out and night birds sang. His wife and child was in the next room, pouring out his tea. He cupped warm water with a little soap there in his palms, dashing it up into his face and eyes so everything was washed away into the grey, forgiving blur.
** <strong>ATLANTIS</strong>
<strong>F</strong>oul fanthoms five his farter lies, and office bones are cobbles made. Ah ha ha ha. Oh, bugger, let him stay down here and underwater in the warm, the sweaty linen currents drefting him away, aweigh in anchor chains and scrabble crabs and mermaids mermering to their slowmile phones, their fishbone combs, don’t make him swim up to the light just yet, not yet. Five minutes, just five minutes more because down here it isn’t any time at all, it could be nineteen fifty-eight and him a five-year-old with all his life uncoiled unspoiled before him, down here in the warm and weeds and winkles, with his thoughts bright-coloured tetras streaming in amongst the tumbled busts, the dead men’s chests, but it’s too late, already it’s too late. A mattress-spring is poking through the ocean bed-sands, up into his back, and he can feel his jellyfish-limp arms and legs trailing around him in a salty sprawl as he reluctantly floats up through dream-silts in suspension, back towards the dappled dazzle of the surface, where his mother’s got the wireless on down in the kitchen. Bugger. Bugger it.
Benedict Perrit half-opened his eyes into their first wince of the day. It wasn’t 1958. He wasn’t five. It was May 26<sup>th</sup>, 2006. He was a coughing, farting wreck of fifty-two, a piece of nineteen-hundreds royalty in exile, traipsing back and forth along the shores of an unfriendly foreign century. Ah ha ha ha. Wreck was a bit strong, actually. He was in better shape than most his age, to look at. It was more that he’d just woken up, and he’d been on the ale the night before. He’d pick up later on, he knew, but morning always came as something of a shock to Benedict. You hadn’t had a chance yet to get your defences up, this time of day. The thoughts that later on you could avoid or brush aside, they were all on you like a pack of dogs when you were just woke up and hadn’t had your breakfast yet. The cold unvarnished facts of his own life, by morning’s light, were always like a straight punch in the face: his lovely sister Alison was dead, a bike smash more than forty years ago. His dad, old Jem, was dead. Their house they’d lived in, their old street, their neighbourhood, those were all dead as well. The family he’d started for himself with Lily and the boys, he’d messed that up, that was all finished now. He was back living with his mam in Tower Street, what had been the top of Scarletwell Street, up behind the high-rise blocks. His life, in his opinion, hadn’t really worked out how he might have hoped, and yet the thought that in another thirty years it would be over horrified him. Or at least it did when he’d just woken up. Everything horrified him when he’d just woke up.
He let his demons chew on him a minute or two more, then threw them off along with the top sheet and blankets, swinging down his knobbly, hairy legs onto the bedside floor as he sat up. He ran his hands over the mountainous relief-map of his face and back into the still-black tangles of his hair. He coughed and farted, feeling vaguely disrespectful to be doing so while in the presence of his bookshelves, up against the room’s end wall. He could feel Dylan Thomas, H.E. Bates, John Clare and Thomas Hardy staring at him pointedly, waiting for him to own up and apologize. He mumbled a “beg pardon” reaching for his dressing gown, hung on a chair beside the ancient writing desk, then stood and padded barefoot out onto the landing, farting once more to assert his independence just before he closed the bedroom door and left the pastoral poets to discern the romance in his flatulence. Ah ha ha ha.
Once in the bathroom he took care of his evacuations, which, thanks to the drink the night before, were wretchedly distressing but concluded fairly quickly. Next he took his dressing gown off while he had a wash and shave, stood at the sink. The central heating, that was one thing from the modern world that he was glad of. Down in Freeschool Street where he’d grown up it had been much too cold to wash more than your face and hands each day. Perhaps you’d have a proper scrub in a zinc bath on Friday nights if you were lucky.
Benedict ran some hot water in the basin – he would grudgingly admit hot water could be seen as an improvement, too – then splashed himself all over before lathering up with his mum’s Camay, utilising his abundant pubic hair as an impromptu soap-pad. For the rinse he dragged a towel down from the rail to stand upon, so that he wouldn’t soak the bathroom carpet, leaning forward so his genitals hung down into the white enamel basin while he scooped the water up and let it pour across his chest and belly, sluicing off the suds. He used a sponge to wash away the foam beneath his arms, then gave his legs and feet a mostly-soapless rubdown before drying off upon another, larger towel. He put his dressing gown back on, then took his dad’s old shaving brush and straight-edge razor down out of the bathroom cabinet.
The bristles – hog or badger hair, he’d never known for sure – were soft and soothing, slathering the white froth on his cheek. He stared into the bathroom mirror, met his own sad gaze, then drew the open razor in a line across the throat of his reflection, some two inches from the windpipe, gurgling mortally, rolling his eyes and sticking out his long and only slightly furry tongue. Ah ha ha ha.
He shaved, washing the blade clean underneath the cold tap and depositing a scum of tiny hairs around the basin’s tide-line. It was like a tea-leaf residue, but smaller, and he wondered if the future could be seen amongst the random specks. They always used to say down in the Boroughs how if, for example, you had tea-leaves that looked like a boat it meant a sea voyage was in store, only of course it never was. Putting away the shaving kit he patted dry his face and risked a palm-full of Old Spice. He’d thought the fruity smell was girlish when he’d slapped it on the first time as a teenager, but nowadays he liked it. It smelled like the ’Sixties. Looking in the glass at his clean-shaven face he gave a suave, matinee-idol smile and jiggled his thick eyebrows up and down suggestively, a sozzled gigolo attempting to seduce his own reflection. God, who’d want to wake up next to that, next to Ben Perrit and Ben Perrit’s nose? Not him, that was for sure. If Benedict had only got his looks to go on, he presumed that he’d be sunk. It was a stroke of luck, then, that he was a published poet too, on top of all his other charms and virtues.
He went back into his bedroom to get dressed, only remembering the fart when it was too late. Bugger. He pulled on his shirt and trousers breathing through his mouth, then grabbed his waistcoat and his shoes and bolted for the landing, finishing adjusting his apparel once he was outside the room and back in a terrestrial atmosphere. He wiped his watering eyes. By Christ, that was the kind that let you know as you were still alive.
He clopped downstairs. His mam, Eileen, was in the kitchen, hovering by the gas-stove, making sure his breakfast didn’t burn. She’d have begun it, scrambled eggs on toast, when she’d first heard him stumbling to the bathroom overhead. She pulled the grill-pan out an inch or two to check the tan on the sliced white, and poked at the yolk-coloured cumulus congealing in the saucepan with her wooden spoon. She glanced up at her son with old brown eyes that were as loving as they were reproachful, tucking in her jutting little chin, pursing her lips and tutting as if after all these years she was no wiser when it came to Benedict, or what to make of him.
“Good morning, Mother. May I say that you’re particularly radiant this morning? There’s some sons, you know, who wouldn’t be so gallant. Ah ha ha.”
“Yiss, and there’s some mothers as do ’ave ’em. ’Ere, come on and ’ave yer breakfast ’fore it’s cold.” Eileen retrieved the toast, skimmed it with marge and dumped the steaming, scrambled mass upon it, seemingly in one continuous movement. She pushed back a grey strand that had worked loose from her bun as she gave Benedict the plate and cutlery.
“There y’are. Don’t get it dayn yer shirt.”
“Mother, behave! Ah ha ha ha.”
He sat down at the kitchen table and began to wolf his way into what he perceived as necessary stomach-lining. He’d got no idea why everything he said came out as if it were a punchline or a previously unknown comic catchphrase. He’d been that way as far back as anyone remembered. Perhaps it was just that life was easier to get through if you thought of it as an unusually long instalment of <em>The Clitheroe Kid</em>.
He finished breakfast, swilled down with the cup of tea his mam had meanwhile made for him. He gulped the brew … I can’t talk now, I’m drinking … keeping one bright, hedgehog-baking Gypsy eye upon the coat pegs in the passage where his hat and neckerchief were waiting, while he sat there plotting his escape. Escape, though, except into poems or fond memories, was the one thing that Benedict had never been successful with. Before he’d set his empty teacup down into its saucer and commenced his dash for freedom, Eileen shot him down.
“Shall yer be lookin’ out fer work today, then?”
This was yet another aspect of the mornings, quite apart from thinking about death the moment you woke up, that Benedict found problematic. It was two things, actually, that he was largely unsuccessful with. Escape, and finding work. Of course, the biggest stumbling block he had with finding work was that he wasn’t looking, or not very hard, at any rate. It wasn’t all the actual work that put him off, it was the job: all the procedures and the people who came with it. He just didn’t think he had the heart to introduce himself to a collection of new faces, people who knew nothing about poetry or Freeschool Street and wouldn’t have a clue what Benedict was all about. He couldn’t do it, not at his age, not to strangers, not explain himself. To be completely frank, he never had been able to explain himself at any age, to anybody, or at least he’d never managed to explain to anybody’s satisfaction. Three things, then. Escape, and finding work, and then explaining himself adequately. It was just those areas he had trouble with. Everything else, he was all right about.
“I’m always looking. You know me. The eyes that never rest. Ah ha ha ha.”
His mother tipped her head to one side while regarding him, with fondness and bone-tired incomprehension at the same time.
“Ah, well. It’s a pity that yer eyes can’t pass the trick on to yer arse, in that case. ’Ere. ’Ere’s summat fer yer dinner. I expect I’ll see yer when yer get back in, if I’m still up.”
Eileen pressed ten Benson & Hedges and a ten-pound note into his hand. He beamed at her, as if it didn’t happen every morning.
“Woman, I could kiss yer.”
“Yiss, well, you do and you’ll get this.” This was his mam’s fist, thrust upwards like a haunted Aboriginal rock outcrop. Ben laughed, pocketing the tenner and the fags, then went into the hall. He fastened his burnt-orange neckerchief across the swallowed Carlsberg bottle of his Adam’s apple, squinting at the daylight filtered through the frosted panel by the front door and deciding it looked bright enough to leave his coat behind, though not so bright that he need bother taking his straw hat. His waistcoat looked like brothel curtains as it was. He didn’t want to over-do it.
He transferred the ciggies from his trouser pocket to his canvas satchel, where he’d also got some Kleenex tissues and an orange, with a copy of <em>A</em> <em>Northamptonshire Garland</em> edited by Trevor Hold and published by Northampton Libraries. It was just something he was dipping into at the moment, just to keep his hand in. Bag across one shoulder, Benedict called goodbye to his mam, drew in a fortifying breath before the hallway mirror and then, flinging wide the front door, he launched himself valiantly once more into the fray, and the frayed world it was conducted in.
Spit-coloured clouds moved over Tower Street, formerly the upper end of Scarletwell. The street had been renamed after the high-rise, Claremont Court, that blocked out half the western sky upon his right, one of two brick stakes hammered through the district’s undead heart. On recently refurbished crab-paste brickwork were the words or possibly the single word NEWLIFE, a sideways silver logo, more a label for a mobile phone or for an everlasting battery than for a tower block, he’d have thought. Benedict winced, attempting not to look at it. For the most part, he found it comforting to still reside in the beloved neighbourhood, except for those occasions when you noticed that the loved one had been dead for thirty years and was now decomposing. Then you felt a bit like someone from an item out of <em>Fortean Times</em>, one of those lovelorn and demented widowers still plumping up the pillows for a bride who’s long since mummified. Newlife: urban regeneration that they’d had to literally spell out because of its conspicuous absence otherwise. As if just bolting up the mirror-finish letters made it so. What had been wrong with all the old life, anyway?
He checked to see the door had locked behind him, with his mam now being on her own in there, and as he did he saw the big fat druggy with the bald head, Kenny something, lumbering down Simons Walk that ran along the end of Tower Street, at the back of Claremont Court. He had grey slacks and a grey sports-top on, which from a distance looked all of a piece, like one big romper suit, as if the dealer were an outsized baby who’d exceeded the safe dose of Calpol. Benedict pretended he’d not seen him, turning left and walking briskly up towards the street’s far end, a confluence of sunken walkways tucked away behind the traffic vortex of the Mayorhold. How could anybody get that fat on drugs, unless they ate them in a fried bread sandwich? Ah ha ha ha.
Yellow leaves were plastered in a partial lino on the wet macadam at his feet as he passed the Salvation Army building, a prefabricated barracks that he didn’t think he’d ever been inside. He doubted they went in for tambourines these days, much less free cups of tea and buns. The twentieth century had been a better time to be a washout. Back then poverty had come with a brass band accompaniment and a cheek full of scone dissolving in hot Brooke Bond; kindly bosoms heaving under navy blue serge and big golden buttons. Now it came with flint-eyed teenage death-camp supervisors in the no-hiding-place glare of the Job Centre, and whatever soundtrack happened to be playing in the shopping precinct outside, usually “I’m Not In Love”. The short street ended as it met the footpath to the underpass, where a high wall reared up to bound the robot shark tank of the Mayorhold. Patterned with a bar-code stripe of ochre, tangerine and umber, it was probably intended to provide a Latin atmosphere, whereas instead it looked like an attack of vomiting restaged in Lego. Benedict stopped walking for a moment so that he could take it in, the ground where he was standing, with its full historical enormity.
For one thing, it was near here that one of his father’s favourite pubs had been, the Jolly Smokers, although this was by no means the full extent of the locale’s historic pedigree. This spot was where Northampton’s first ‘Gilhalda’ or Town Hall had stood back in the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries, at least according to historian Henry Lee. Richard the Second had declared it in his charter as the place where all the bailiffs and the mayor were situated. Bailiffs were still seen down here from time to time, though mayors less often these days. Late on in the thirteen-hundreds all the wealth and power had shifted to the east side of the town, and a new Guildhall had been raised down at the foot of Abington Street, near where Caffè Nero stood today. That was the point from which you could most likely date the area’s decline: for more than seven hundred years the Boroughs had been going steadily downhill. It was a long hill, evidently, though as he stood there regarding the emetic tile-work Benedict believed the bottom was at last in sight.
Although the first Town Hall had been located here, that wasn’t why the former town square had been named the Mayorhold, or not as Ben understood things, anyway. His theory was that this had happened later, in the 1490s, at a time when Parliament had placed Northampton under the control of an all-powerful mayor and council made up of four dozen wealthy buggers, sorry matron, wealthy burghers that they called the Forty-Eight. Benedict thought that this was when the people of the Boroughs, like the folk of nearby Leicester, had begun their grand tradition of electing a joke mayor, to take the piss out of the processes of government from which they’d been excluded. They’d hold mock elections in the square here, hence the name, and would award a literal tin-pot chain of office made from a pot lid to whoever they’d randomly appointed, often somebody half cut, half sharp, half missing from a war wound, or, in extreme cases, all of the above. Benedict had a notion that his own paternal grandfather, Bill Perrit, had been one such appointee, but that was based on no more than the old man’s nickname, which had been “the Sheriff”, and the fact that he’d sit there all day blind drunk outside the Mayorhold Mission in an old wheelbarrow that he treated like a throne. Benedict wondered briefly if he could claim office based upon being descended from the Sheriff and on living where the first Town Hall had stood? He fancied himself as a Titchbourne Claimant, as a Great Pretender, one of those who’d put more forethought into getting crowns on heads than keeping heads on shoulders. Lambert Simnel, Perkin Warbeck and Benedict Perrit. Names to conjure with. Ah ha ha ha.
He turned along the sunken footpath, with ahead of him the steps that led up to the corner where the upper end of Bath Street met the top of Horsemarket. Even from this low vantage he could see the higher storeys of both tower-blocks, Claremont Court and Beaumont Court, where they poked up above the Spanish-omelette tiling of the dyke wall hulking on his right. The towers, for Benedict, had always marked the real end of the Boroughs, that rich, thousand-year-long saga that had been concluded with these overly-emphatic double exclamation marks. Newlife. It made you want to spew. Two or three years back there’d been calls to tear the barely-habitable monsters down, acknowledgements that they should never have been put up in the first place. Benedict had briefly thought he might outlive the bullying, oppressive oblongs, but then Bedford Housing had made some deal with the Council – still four dozen of the wealthy buggers, still the Forty-Eight after five centuries – and purchased both blocks for what was reputedly a penny each. The urine-scented ugly sisters had been tarted up and then turned out, supposedly, as fit accommodation for “Key Workers” that it seemed Northampton needed, mostly siren-jockeys: nurses, firemen, policemen and the like. Newlife. New life that had been parachuted in, in order to contain the previous inhabitants when they got sick or stabbed or set themselves on fire. As things worked out, though, what the tower blocks had been filled with was a stream of human leftovers … outpatients, crack-heads, refugees … not obviously different to the people who’d been living there before.
The leftie Roman Thompson from St. Andrew’s Street had once shown him a list of Bedford Housing’s board, which had included former Labour councillor James Cockie in the roster. This might possibly explain the penny price tags. Benedict turned left before he reached the steps to Bath Street corner, taking the pedestrian tunnel under Horsemarket that was sign-posted for town centre. Here the bilious orange-brown mosaic was all round him, rising to the arched roof of the tunnel where dim sodium lights at intervals emitted their unhelpful amber glow.
Ben’s gangling, insufficiently-lit shape sloped through the queasy catacomb that seemed to rustle with the ghosts of future murders. An abandoned shopping trolley rolled towards him menacingly for perhaps a foot, but then thought better of it, creaking to a sullen standstill. Only when he passed beneath a ceiling-lamp did his heroically-proportioned features or his tired, resigned smile flare into existence, like a head-and-shoulders sketch by Boz that somebody had put a match to. The unwelcome thought of Councillor Jim Cockie, possibly in combination with these subterranean surroundings, would appear to have unlocked a previously forgotten dream in which the councillor had featured, which Ben suddenly remembered from the night before, if only as a fuzzy string of cryptic fragments.
He’d been wandering through the generic terraces of elderly red brick and railway-arch-bound wastelands that appeared to be the default setting for his dreams. Somewhere within this eerie and familiar landscape there had been a house, a teetering old Boroughs house with stairs and passageways that never quite made sense. The streets were dark. It was the middle of the night. He’d known that family or friends were waiting for him in the building’s cellar, but he’d suffered all the usual dream-frustrations finding his way in, picking his way apologetically through other people’s flats and bathrooms, navigating laundry-chutes that were part-blocked by antique wooden desks he recognised from Spring Lane School. At last he’d reached a kind of boiler-room or basement that had blood and straw and sawdust on the floor, as if the space had been used as a slaughterhouse just recently. There was an atmosphere of squalid horror, yet this was somehow connected to his childhood and was almost comforting. He’d then become aware that Councillor Jim Cockie, someone that he barely knew, was standing in the gory cellar next to him, a corpulent, bespectacled and white-haired form dressed only in his underpants, his face a mask of dread. He’d said “This place is all I dream about. Do you know the way out?” Ben had felt disinclined to help the frightened man, one of that Forty-Eight who had historically destroyed the Boroughs, and had answered only “Ah ha ha. I’m trying to get further in.” At this point, Benedict had woken from what still seemed like somebody else’s nightmare. He emerged out of the tunnel, shaking off the bad dreams with the darkness of the underpass, and puffed up the steep gradient to Silver Street.
Across the other side of the dual carriageway that Silver Street now was, there rose the five-floor municipal car park, red and mustard yellow like spilled condiments. Somewhere beneath its stale Battenberg mass, Benedict knew, were all the shops and yards that had once backed onto the Mayorhold. There’d be Botterill’s the newsagent’s, the butcher’s, Phyllis Malin’s barbershop, the green and white façade of the Co-operative Society, Built 1919, Branch Number 11. There’d be the grim public toilets on the corner that his mam and dad had for some reason known as Georgie Bumble’s Office, and there’d be the fish and chip shop and Electric Light Working Men’s Club in Bearward Street and fifty other sites of interest ground to an undifferentiated dust beneath the weight of four-by-fours and Chavercrafts now piled above. The backside of the old Fish Market stood upon his right, itself erected on the synagogue attended by the silversmiths who’d lent the street its name. He added stars of David in a glittering filigree to the imaginary landfill languishing beneath the multi-storey motor show. Ford Transit Gloria Mundi. Ah ha ha ha.
Growing from the brick wall near the Chinese restaurant where Silver Street joined Sheep Street was a solitary wildflower, mauve and flimsy like a mallow though he didn’t think it could be. From the pallid institution green of its limp stem stood gooseberry hairs, almost too fine to be distinguished by the adult eye. Whatever its variety, it was of humble, prehistoric stock, like Benedict himself. However delicate and dangling it seemed, it had pushed through the mortar of the modern world, asserted itself ineradicably in the face of a deflowered and drab MacCentury. He knew it wasn’t much of a poetic insight, not if you compared it to “The force that through the green fuse drives …”, but then these days he’d take his inspirations where he found them, like his wildflowers. Turning into Sheep Street he made for the Bear, where he intended to take up once more the burden of his daily challenge, which was trying to get hammered for a tenner.
Loud despite the relatively small number of customers that time of day, the Bear was simmering in sound from its own fruit machines: electric fairy-wand glissandos and the squelch of crazy frogs. Luminous tessellations rearranged themselves in the blurred corners of his vision, golds and reds and purples, an Arabian Nights palette. He remembered when a morning bar-room was a place of careful hush and milky light decanted through net curtains, not so much as a triumphal click out of the dominos.
The barman was a young chap half Ben’s age, a lad he vaguely recognised but whom he nonetheless addressed as “Ah ha ha. Hello, me old pal, me old beauty”, this delivered in a fair approximation of the voice associated once with now-forgotten <em>Archers</em> mainstay Walter Gabriel, neatly camouflaging, as he thought, the fact that he’d forgotten the bloke’s name.
“Hello there, Benedict. What can I get you?”
Ben looked round appraisingly at the establishment’s half-dozen other clients, motionless upon their stools like ugly novelty-set chessmen, sidelined and morose.
He cleared his throat theatrically before he spoke.
“Who’ll buy a pint of bitter for a published poet and a national treasure? Ah ha ha.”
Nobody looked up. One or two half-smiled but they were a distinct minority. Oh well. Sometimes it worked, if there was someone in who knew him, say Dave Turvey hunched up gentlemanly in one corner with his feathered hat on, looking like an autumn day in the bohemian quarter of Dodge City, somebody like that. On this particular Bad Friday morning, though, Dave’s usual seat was empty, and with great reluctance Ben dredged up the ten-pound note out of his pocket to deposit on the bar, as a down payment on the pint of John Smith’s that he one day hoped to call his own. Farewell, then, sepia Darwin. Farewell green and crimson 3D hummingbird transfixed by swirling patterns in the Hypnoscope. Farewell, my crumpled little friend of this half-hour now gone for good. I hardly knew ye. Ah ha ha.
Once served, he let himself be drawn into the plush curve of the side-seats, taking with him in one hand his filmy, frosted fistful, getting on eight quid in change balled in the other. Hello to slate-blue Eliz<sup>th</sup>. Fry and what looked like a nineteenth-century battered woman’s refuge except for the disapproving spectre of John Lennon, sneering from the left of frame. This was quite possibly a fancy-dress campaigner representing Dads For Justice. With the fiver were two pound coins and some shrapnel. Grimacing, he shook his head. It wasn’t just that Benedict missed the old money, all the farthings, half-crowns, florins, tanners, though of course he did. But what he missed more, though, was being able to refer to pre-decimal coinage without sounding like an old dear who’d confused her bus pass with her kidney donor card. He was surprisingly self-conscious on the subject of self-parody.
He swigged the first half of his pint, plunging indulgently in the olfactory swim of memory and association, cheese and pickled onions, Park Drive packs of five pink in a green pub ashtray, standing next to his old man at the Black Lion’s diseased and possibly Precambrian urinal trough with a six-year-old’s sense of privilege. The rapidly successive mouthfuls were diluted gulps of vanished fields, the high-tech recreation of fondly imagined but extinct rusticity. He put down the half-empty glass, trying to kid himself that it was still half full, and wiped almost four decades of oral tradition from his smacking lips onto his pinstripe cuff.
He lifted up the canvas satchel’s flap, where it was set on the warm cushioning beside him, and pulled out <em>A Northamptonshire Garland</em> from within. Lacking Dave Turvey and a poetry discussion with the living, Benedict thought that he might as well strike up a conversation with the dead. The cheap and chunky hardback came out of the bag with its rear cover uppermost. In an ornate gold frame against a deep red background rubbed with cobblers’ wax was Thomas Grimshaw’s 1840s portrait of John Clare. The picture never looked quite right to Benedict, especially the outsized moonrise of the brow. If not for the brown topiary of hair and whisker fringing the great oval, it might be a man’s face painted on an Easter egg. A Humpty Dumpty with his mess of yolk and shell spread on the lawns of Andrew’s Hospital, and no one there to put him back together.
Clare stood posed uncomfortably before a non-specific rural blur, a leafy lane at Helpston, Glinton, anywhere, just after sunset or conceivably just prior to dawn, one thumb hooked statesmanlike upon his coat’s lapel. He looked off to the right, turning towards the shadows with a faintly worried smile, the corners of the mouth twitched up in an uncertain greeting, with the slightest wince of apprehension already apparent in those disappointed eyes. Was that, Benedict wondered, where he’d got it from, his own characteristically amused, forlorn expression? There were similarities, he fancied, between him and his enduring lifelong hero. John Clare had a fair old beak on him, not wholly different from Ben’s own, at least to judge from Grimshaw’s portrait. There were the sad eyes, the faltering smile, even the neckerchief. If someone were only to shave Ben’s head and feed him up a bit, he could be stepping out of the dry ice fumes on <em>Stars In Their Eyes</em>, one thumb snagged in his jacket, madhouse burrs caught in his sideburns. Tonight, Matthew, I will be the peasant poet. Ah ha ha.
Beneath the owlish likeness in the cover’s lower right was pasted a discoloured slug, fired from a price-gun fifteen years ago: VOLUME1 BOOKSHOPS, £6.00. To his consternation, for a moment Benedict could not even remember quite where VOLUME1 had been located. Had that been where Waterstone’s was now? There’d been that many bookshops in Northampton once, you’d be hard pressed to get around them all within a single day; mostly become estate agents and wine-bars. In Ben’s youth, even big stores like Adnitt’s had their book departments. There’d been trays of one-and-thrupenny paperbacks in both the upper and the lower branch of Woolworth’s, and there’d been a rash of second-hand dives shading into junkshops with invariably consumptive elderly proprietors, with yellow-covered 1960s pornographic classics glimpsed through dusty glass in unlit windows. Jaundiced Aubrey Beardsley nudes enrobed with Technicolor slapped Hank Janson sluts, a bit of sauce to liven up the casserole of Dennis Wheatley, Simenon and Alistair MacLean. Those grubby, spittle-lacquered archives, where had they all gone?
He raised his glass for a commemorative sip, a sip being approximately half a gill with eight sips to the pint. Taking the pack of Bensons and a street-bought three-for-a-quid lighter from his shoulder bag he gripped one of the cigarettes between eternally-wry lips, lighting it with the stick of liquid-centred amethyst. Ben squinted through the first blue puffs of smoke across the lounge bar. This had filled up, although not with anyone he recognised. Off somewhere to his left, a burbling audial cascade of virtual coins was punctuated with stabs from a science-fiction zither. Sighing non-specifically, he opened the anthology of local poets to its John Clare section, where he hoped that “Clock-a-Clay”, written from the perspective of a ladybird, might prove an antidote to the contemporary flash and jangle that he felt so alienated from. The miniaturist imagery was certainly transporting, though disastrously he couldn’t help but read on to the poem that was reproduced immediately after, which was Clare’s asylum-penned “I Am”.
<quote>
<em>Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,</em>
<em>Into the living sea of waking dreams,</em>
<em>Where there is neither sense of life or joys,</em>
<em>But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;</em>
<em>Even the dearest that I loved the best</em>
<em>Are strange – nay, rather, stranger than the rest.</em>
</quote>
<br>
That was entirely too close to the nerve, instantly sinking Benedict’s half-decent mood, already holed below its waterline. He shoved the book back in his satchel, downing the three sips remaining in his pint and purchasing another one before he knew he’d done it. This relieved him of his small-change buffer and exposed his queen, Eliz<sup>th</sup>. Fry, precariously. Her rainy turquoise eyes stared out of the remaining note into his own, with something of his mother’s look of worried resignation when she gazed appraisingly on Ben and Ben’s unjustly punished liver.
The next thing he knew, it was mid-day. He was emerging from the narrow barroom of the Shipman’s, basically a passageway that had a pub where most people have coatpegs, into Drum Lane. Down the alley on his right he could see All Saints’ Church across the road, with on his left the waning bustle of the Market Square. Eliz<sup>th</sup>. Fry, apparently, had left him for another man, most probably a landlord. He lugubriously noted that he still had custody of several little ones, silver and copper orphans to the sum of eighty-seven pence. A bubbling protest from his long-drowned instincts for self-preservation told him he should probably invest this in a pasty. Turning right he made his way down the perpetual shadow-channel of Drum Lane, towards the bakery opposite All Saints’ in Mercer’s Row.
Ten minutes later he was swallowing the last of what he thought was more than likely lunch, tongue probing optimistically in the mysterious ditches of his mouth for any lingering mince, tenacious pastry or recalcitrant potato. Blotting his lips in what he thought might well be the manner of a nineteenth-century dandy on the serviette the snack had come with, Benedict screwed up the tissue with its gravy kiss-print, dropping it into one of the litter bins in Abington Street, which he’d by now reached and was ascending. He was roughly level with the photographic shop close to the mouth of the most recent shopping arcade, Peacock Place. This crystal palace had taken the place of Peacock Way, an open precinct leading to the Market that had cake-shops and cafés where he’d munch gloomily through teenage comfort teacakes, mooning over whichever heart-stopping Notre Dame or Derngate schoolgirl had just told Ben that she liked him as a friend. Originally, this had been the Peacock Hotel, inn or coach-house for five hundred years. People still talked about the lovely stained-glass peacock, one of the establishment’s interior decorations, which had more than likely fallen prey to salvage men during the hotel’s senseless demolition in November 1959. Up on the glasswork of the arcade’s entrance these days was a pallid stick-on imitation, stylised craft-kit product from an overpaid design team.
Passing Jessop’s, the photography equipment shop, he wondered if they still had Pete Corr’s photograph of Benedict, framed and for sale up on their wall. Corr was a local shutterbug now married, living somewhere out in Canada by all accounts, under the mock-Dutch moniker of Piet de Snapp. Formerly just plain Pete the Snap, he’d specialised in portraits of the town’s outlandish fauna: Ben’s old Spring Lane schoolmate Alma Warren, posing moodily in sunglasses and leather jacket, mutton dressed up as Olivia Newton-John; the Jovian mass and gravity of much-missed local minstrel-god Tom Hall in customary daywear, individually-engineered playschool pyjamas and a tasselled hat swiped from the Ottomans; Benedict Perrit sat in state amongst the snaking roots of the eight-hundred-year-old beech in Sheep Street, smiling ruefully. As if there were another way to smile. Ah ha ha ha.
He carried on through Abington Street’s pink, pedestrianised meander. Without curbs to bound and shape all the frenetic motion that had poured along this main drag for at least five hundred years, it seemed as if these days the street mainly attracted those who were themselves similarly unfocussed and directionless. As Benedict himself was, come to think of it. He’d no idea where he thought he was going, not with only twenty-seven pence remaining in the wake of his impulsive pasty, gone now save for the occasional flavour-haunted burp. Perhaps a long walk up the Wellingborough Road to Abington would do him good, or would at any rate not cost him anything.
Continuing uphill, pleasantly numbed against existence in a warm cocooning fog, the entrance to the Grosvenor Centre crawled past on his left. He tried to conjure the thin mouth of Wood Street, which had occupied the spot some thirty years before, but found his powers of evocation blunted by the beer. The half-forgotten terraced aperture was too feeble a spectre to prevail against the glass wall of swing doors, the sparkling covered boulevard beyond where the somnambulists somnambled, lit like ornamental crystal animals by the commercial aura-fields they passed through. Everyone looked decorative in the all-round illumination. Everyone looked brittle.
Twenty-seven pence. He wasn’t even sure that would still buy a Mars Bar, though he could still savour the self-pity. Benedict picked up his pace a little passing by top Woolworth’s, these days more precisely only Woolworth’s, hoping the increased velocity would straighten out his veer. He gave this up for lack of a result after approximately thirty seconds, lapsing to a melancholy trudge. What was the point in walking faster when he wasn’t going anywhere? More speed would only bring him to his problems quicker, and in his state might lead inadvertently to crossing the blurred line between a drunken stumble and a drunken rampage. The unbidden vision of Ben gone berserk in Marks & Spencer’s, running nude and screaming through a hail of melting-middle chocolate puddings, should have been a sobering one but only made him giggle to himself. The giggling didn’t help, he realised, with his tactic of not looking pissed. This still made only four things he was useless at, namely escape, finding a job, explaining himself adequately and not looking pissed. Four trivial deficiencies, Ben reassured himself, and as naught in the sweep of a man’s life.
He tacked against the east wind, chortling only intermittently as he traversed the wide-angle Art Deco front of the Co-op Arcade, abandoned and deserted, windows emptied of displays that stared unseeing, still stunned by the news of their redundancy. The retail parks outside the town had drained the commerce from Northampton’s centre, which had been an increasingly ugly proposition for some years now, anyway. Rather than try to stop the rot, the council had allowed the town’s main veins to atrophy and wither. Spinadisc, the long-established independent record shop that Benedict was now approaching on the street’s far side, had been closed down to make way for a rehab centre, something of that kind. Predictably, there were considerably less substance-users on the premises now that the music and ephemera were gone.
Around the public seating outside the dead jukebox of the former pop emporium, small crowds of black-clad teenagers still congregated in school holidays and at weekends. Ben thought they might be skate-goths or gangsta-romantics. Happy-stabbers or whatever. He had difficulty keeping up. Shifting his doleful gaze from the murder of hoodies flocked on Abington Street’s further edge, he looked back to the side along which he was walking. A vague drift of people flowed towards him past the still-magnificent façade of the town library, and there came a synaptic jolt, a minor judder and resettling of reality as Benedict realised that one of them was Alma Warren. Ah ha ha.
Alma. She always took him back, a walking memory-prompt of all the years they’d known each other, since they’d been together in Miss Corrier’s class at Spring Lane School when they were four. Even back then, you’d never have confused her with a girl. Or with a boy, for that matter. She was too big, too single minded, too alarming to be anything but Alma, in a gender of her own. Both of them sideshow novelties in their own ways, they’d been inseparable throughout long stretches of childhood and adolescence. Winter evenings shivering in the attic up above the barn in his dad’s wood-yard down in Freeschool Street, Ben’s telescope poking into the starlight through an absent windowpane when they were both on flying saucer watch. The tricky post-pubertal stretch when he began his poetry and she her painting, and when Alma would get furiously angry and stop speaking to him every other fortnight, over their artistic differences as she insisted, but most probably when she’d just fallen to the communists. They’d both made idiots of themselves in the same pubs, in the same stencil-duplicated arts-group magazines, but then she’d somehow managed to talk up her monomania into a prosperous career and reputation, while Ben hadn’t. Now he didn’t run into her much, nobody did, except upon occasions such as this when she came flouncing into town dressed like a biker or, if she were wearing her pretentious cloak, a fifteenth-century nun who’d been defrocked for masturbation, more rings underneath her eyes than on her ostentatiously embellished fingers.
These were currently raised up in an arterial spatter of nail gloss and gemstones, pulling the distressed fire-curtain of her hair back from the pantomime that was her face. Her kohl-ringed and apparently disdainful gaze described a measured arc across the precinct as if Alma were pretending to be a surveillance camera, dredging Abington Street’s fast-deteriorating stock of imagery in search of inspiration for some future monsterpiece. When the slow swivel of her so-unblinking-they-seemed-lidless fog lamps got to Benedict, there was an anthracite glint suddenly alight deep in the makeup-crusted sockets. Carmine lips drew taut into a smile most probably intended to look fond rather than predatory. Ah ha ha ha. Good old Alma.
Benedict went into a routine the moment that their eyes met, first adopting an expression of appalled dismay then turning sharply in his tracks to walk away down Abington Street, as if frantically pretending that he hadn’t seen her. He turned this into a circular trajectory that took him back towards her, this time doubling up with silent laughter so she’d know his terrified attempt at flight had been a gag. He wouldn’t want her thinking he was really trying to run away, not least in case she went for him and brought him down before he’d got five paces.
Their paths met outside the library portico. He stuck his hand out, but Alma surprised him with a sudden lunge, planting a bloody pucker on his cheek, spraining his neck with her brief one-armed hug. This was some affectation, he concluded, that she’d picked up from Americans with galleries who put on exhibitions. Exhibitionists. She hadn’t learned it in the Boroughs, of that Benedict was certain. In the district where they’d both grown up, affectionate displays were never physical. Or verbal, or in any way apparent to the five traditional senses. Love and friendship in the Boroughs were subliminal. He flinched back from her, wiping at his stained cheek with the back of one long-fingered hand like an embarrassed cat.
“Get off! Ah ha ha ha ha ha!”
Alma grinned, apparently pleased at just how easily she had unsettled him. She ducked her head and leaned a little forward when she spoke, as if to best facilitate their conversation, although really she was just reminding him how tall she was, the way she did with everyone. It was one of what only Alma thought of as her range of subtly intimidating mannerisms.
“Benedict, you suave Lothario. This is an unexpected treat. How’s things? Are you still writing?”
Alma’s voice wasn’t just deep brown, it was infra-brown. Ben laughed at her query on his output, at the sheer preposterousness of her even asking.
“Always, Alma. You know me. Ah ha ha. Always scribbling away.”
He’d not written a line in years. He was a published poet in the transitive and not the current sense. He wasn’t sure that he was any sort of poet in the current sense, that was his secret dread. Alma was nodding amiably now, pleased with his answer.
“Good. That’s good to hear. I was just reading ‘Clearance Area’ the other day and thinking what a smashing poem it was.”
Hum. “Clearance Area”. He’d been quite pleased with that himself. “Who can say now/ That anything was here/ Other than open land/ Used only by stray dogs/ And children breaking bottles on stones?” With a start he realised that had been almost two decades back, those writings. “Weeds, stray dogs and children/ Waited patiently/ For them to leave./ The weed beneath;/ The dog and child/ Unborn inside.” He tipped his head back, unsure how he should receive the compliment except with an uncertain smile, as if expecting her at any moment to retract her praise, expose it for the cruel post-modern joke it doubtless was. Eventually, he risked a tentative response.
“I weren’t bad, was I? Ah ha ha.”
He’d meant to say <em>It</em> weren’t bad, as a reference to the poem, but it had come out wrong. Now it sounded as though Benedict thought of himself in the past tense, which wasn’t what he’d meant at all. At least, he didn’t think that it was what he’d meant. Alma was frowning now, it seemed reproachfully.
“Ben, you were always a considerable way beyond ‘not bad’. You know you were. You’re a good writer, mate. I’m serious.”
This last was offered in reply to Benedict’s plainly embarrassed giggling. He really didn’t know what he should say. Alma was at least Z-list famous and successful, and Ben couldn’t help but feel as though in some way he were being patronised. It was as if she thought that a kind word from her could mend him, could inspire him, raise him from the dead and make him whole with just the least brush of her hem. She acted as though all his problems could be solved if he were just to write, which only showed, in Benedict’s opinion, just how shallow Alma’s understanding of his problems really was. Did she have any idea, standing there with all her money and her write-ups in <em>The Independent</em>, what it was like having only twenty-seven pence? Well, actually, of course she did. She’d come from the same background he had, so that wasn’t fair, but even so. The troubling notion of his present finances, or at least relative to Alma’s, had bobbed up from the beer sediments currently settled at the bottom of Ben’s mind, and wouldn’t bob back down again. Before he even knew that he was going to do it, he’d broken the habit of a lifetime and tapped Alma up for cash.
“ ’Ere, you ain’t got a couple o’ quid spare, ’ave yer?”
It felt wrong as soon as the words left his mouth, a terrible transgression. He immediately wished that he could take it back, but it was too late. Now it was in Alma’s hands, and she would almost certainly find some way she could make it worse. Surprised, her flue-brush lashes widened almost imperceptibly, but she recovered with a deadpan look of generalised concern.
“Of course I have. I’m fucking loaded. Here.”
She pulled a note … a note … out of her drainpipe jeans and, pointedly not looking to determine its denomination, pressed it hard into Ben’s open palm. See, this was what he’d meant, about how Alma always made things more uncomfortable, but in a manner that obliged you to be grateful to her. Since she hadn’t looked to see how much cash she was giving him, Ben felt that it would be <em>déclassé</em> for him to do otherwise, slipping the crumpled note without a glance into his trouser pocket. He was feeling genuinely guilty now. The centres of his beetling eyebrows had crept up involuntarily towards his widow’s peak as he protested her undue beneficence.
“Are you sure, Alma? Are you sure?”
She grinned, dismissing the uneasy moment.
“ ’Course I’m sure. Forget it. How are you, mate, anyway? What are you doing these days?”
Benedict was grateful for the change of subject, though it left him grasping hopelessly for something that he could legitimately claim he’d done.
“Oh, this and that. Went for an interview the other day.”
Alma looked interested, although only politely so.
“Oh yeah? How did it go?”
“I don’t know. I’ve not heard yet. When they interviewed me, I kept wanting to come out and tell them ‘I’m a published poet’, but I held it in.”
Alma was trying to nod sagely, but was also clearly trying not to laugh, with the result that neither effort was what you’d call an unqualified success.
“You did the right thing. There’s a time and place for everything.” She cocked her head on one side, narrowing her black bird-eating eyes as if she’d just remembered something.
“Listen, Ben, I’ve just thought. There’s these paintings I’ve been doing, all about the Boroughs, and I’m having a preliminary viewing of them down at Castle Hill tomorrow lunchtime, in the nursery that used to be Pitt-Draffen’s dance school. Why don’t you come down? It’d be great to see you.”
“Perhaps I will. Perhaps I will. Ah ha ha ha.” Deep in his bitter-sodden heart, he knew he almost definitely wouldn’t. To be honest he was barely listening to her, still trying to think of things he’d done, beside the interview, that he could mention. Suddenly he thought about his visits to the cyber café and perked up. Alma was widely known to never venture near the Internet, which meant, astoundingly, that here was someone who, at least in this one area, was less adapted to the present day than Benedict. He beamed at her, triumphantly.
“Do you know, I’ve been going on the Internet?” He ran one preening hand back over his dark curls, while with the other he adjusted an imaginary bow tie.
Alma was now laughing openly. By mutual consent they seemed to both be disengaging from the conversation, starting to move slowly off, him uphill, Alma down. It was as if they’d come to the predestined end of their encounter and must both now walk away, whether they’d finished talking yet or not. They had to hurry if they wanted to remain on schedule, occupying all the empty spaces in their futures they had yet to fill, all at the proper predetermined times. Still visibly amused, she called back to him over the increasing gap between them.
“You’re a twenty-first-century boy, Ben.”
Laughter tipped his head back like a well-slapped punch-bag. Several paces off, he was half turned away from her, towards the upper end of Abington Street.
“I’m a Cyberman. Ah ha ha ha.”
Their brief knot of hilarity and mutual incomprehension was unravelled into two loose, snickering ends that trailed away in opposite directions. Benedict had reached the precinct’s topmost limit and was crossing York Road at the lights before he thought to reach into his pocket and retrieve the screwed-up currency that Alma had bequeathed him. Pink and plum and violet, the note sported a blue angel from whose trumpet fell a radiating shower of notes. Worcester Cathedral was bombarded by them in a joyous cosmic ray-storm, St. Cecilia reclining in the foreground as she soaked up the UV. A twenty. Welcome to my humble pants, Sir Edward Elgar. We’ve been only fleetingly acquainted previously, and you wouldn’t remember, but can I just say that <em>The Dream of Gerontius</em> is an outstanding work of pastoral vision? Ah ha ha.
This was a gift from God. Thanks, God, and do pass on my thanks to Alma who you’ve clearly made your representative on Earth. I hope to God that … well, I hope to You that you know what you’re doing there on that one, so be warned. But still, this was fantastic. He resolved he’d take his healthy walk up Wellingborough Road to Abington Park anyway, despite the fact that he no longer needed to, having sufficient funds to dally where he wanted. Benedict could dally with a vengeance when the mood was on him, but for now he stuffed the note back in his pocket and began to whistle as he walked towards Abington Square, only relenting when he realised he was giving a rendition of the theme music from <em>Emmerdale</em>. Luckily, nobody seemed to have noticed.
This had once been the east gate of the town, the strip that Benedict was pacing now, what they’d called Edmund’s End back in the eighteen-hundreds, named after St. Edmund’s Church, which had been slightly further out along the Wellingborough Road until it was pulled down a quarter century ago. Ben liked the buildings here, on the approach to the main square itself, if one ignored the tawdry transformations of their lower storeys. Just across the road there was the gorgeous 1930s cinema, at different times the ABC or the Savoy. He’d been himself a dead shot with a flicked ice-lolly stick at matinees, although he’d never once had someone’s eye out despite all the warnings to the contrary. These days, like getting on a quarter or a third of the town’s major properties, the place was owned by a commune of Evangelicals known as the Jesus Army, who had started out as a small nest of rescued derelicts in nearby Bugbrooke and then spread like happy clappy bindweed, until you could find their rainbow-liveried buses organising tramp-grabs almost anywhere in middle England. Still, it wasn’t like Northampton and religious mania had been strangers to each other in the past. Benedict sauntered on towards Abington Square, reflecting that the last time that these parts had seen a Jesus Army it was Cromwell’s, and instead of pamphlets they’d been waving pikes. It was a kind of progress, Ben supposed.
The square looked almost handsome in the light of early afternoon, unless you’d known it in its youth and could make the painful comparison. The slipper factory had gone in favour of a Jaguar showroom called Guy Salmon. The old Irish Centre had been turned into the Urban Tiger. Benedict had never been inside the venue since the name change. He pictured the clientele as ranks of angry Tamils learning martial arts.
Charles Bradlaugh stood there dazzling white upon his plinth, directing traffic. It had never looked to Benedict as though the great teetotal atheist and equal rights campaigner was just pointing westwards, more as if he was in a saloon bar trying to start a fight. Yeah, that’s right. You. Fuck features. Who’d you think I’m pointing at? Ah ha ha ha. Ben passed the statue on his left, with on his right an uninviting new pub named the Workhouse. Ben saw what they’d done there: further up the Wellingborough Road, across from the wall-bounded space where Edmund’s Church once stood was what remained of Edmund’s Hospital, which in Victorian times had been Northampton’s workhouse. It was like putting a theme pub called the Whipping Post in a black neighbourhood, or Eichmann’s in a Jewish one. A touch insensitive.
Ben found that he was travelling at quite a pace, even against the wuthering headwind. In what seemed like only moments the abandoned hulk of Edmund’s Hospital itself loomed up on his left side, a haunted palace smothered in a creep of weeds, its smashed eyes filled with ghosts. Ghosts, and if rumours were to be believed, with failed asylum seekers, refugees who’d been denied that status and had chosen to camp out in former terminal wards rather than risk being sent home to whatever despot or electrode-happy strongman they were fleeing in the first place. Home is where the hurt is, that was very true. It struck him that the workhouse, though dilapidated, must feel blessed in its old age. It had its huddled, frightened outcasts back, could take a secret comfort from their secret fires.
There on the other side, across the wall he was now walking past, was the palpable absence of St. Edmund’s Church, an empty yawn of green with intermittent tombstones jutting, carious, discoloured, suffering from built-up birdshit plaque, the green and grassy gums beginning to recede. Upon the plus side, Benedict could make out lark song underneath the grumble of the main road’s traffic, bubbling notes erupting in a brilliant effervescence to distract cats from the fledglings hidden low down in the graveyard grass. It was a nice day. The eternal was still there, a promising suggestive bulge concealed behind the present’s threadbare drapes.
Heading on eastwards out of town along the strip of pubs and shops, he thought of Alma. At the age of seventeen she’d been a glaring giant schoolgirl up at the Girl’s Grammar, giving the impression her resentment was occasioned by the fact that she was really twenty-nine and couldn’t find a uniform that fit her. She’d been involved in an arty student magazine called <em>Androgyne</em>, providing wonky stencil illustrations for a curate’s egg of fifth-form verses. Benedict had been at the Boy’s Grammar School by that time, and despite the distance that there was between the two establishments, fraternization did occur. The two had seen each other now and then, and Alma, who’d been going through a period of lofty futurist disdain for Ben’s romanticism, had asked grudgingly if he might submit something to their alternately simpering and foul-mouthed rag.
Encouraged by this half-hearted solicitation, Benedict had written several movements of what had turned out to be an epic piece of juvenilia, only the shortest parts accepted by a clearly disappointed Alma, who dismissed the rest as being, in her critically mature opinion “fucking sentimental girly rubbish”. He was mortified to think that he could still remember the rejection, word for word, some thirty-five years later. At the time, with even less sense of proportion than he currently possessed, he’d been incensed and had resolved to patiently exact a terrible revenge. He’d take the off-cuts Alma had discarded from his poem cycle and he’d build them into a new edifice, a work to shudder the foundations of the ages. Then, when he was welcomed up to literary Olympus, he’d reveal that she had lacked the insight to appreciate his magnum opus and her reputation would be shot. She’d be a laughingstock and a pariah. That would learn her, her and all her Andy Warhol Bridget Riley migraine art. This grand endeavour would be a heartbroken hymn to conjure the departed world, the rustic landscape of John Clare, the golden-lighted lanes that Benedict was born too late to walk outside of reverie. He’d strung it out almost two years before he’d realised it was going nowhere and abandoned it. It had been called “Atlantis”.
Benedict glanced up to find that he was some way out along the Wellingborough Road from the last place he’d noticed, which had been the peeling shell of the Spread Eagle, on the corner past St. Edmund’s Hospital. Now he was getting on for Stimpson Avenue and that end, starting to think twice about his planned walk in the park, already feeling footsore. Clare, who’d hobbled eighty miles from Essex back home to Northamptonshire, would probably have laughed at him. They’d built their lyric nutters sturdier in his day. Ben thought he might wander round Abington Park some other time, contenting himself for the moment with a visit to the Crown & Cushion, a short distance further up the busy street. He’d only taken to the notion of a leafy stroll when there was nothing else to do, before he’d met with Alma, but now things were different. Now he had a business plan.
He’d not been in the Crown & Cushion for a while, although at one time, just after he’d broken up with Lily, it had been his regular dive. He supposed that his relationship with the pub’s clientele was at its best ambivalent, but then the place itself was somewhere he felt comfortable. Largely unchanged, the hostelry at least still traded under its historically appointed name, hadn’t become the Jolly Wanker or the Workhouse or the Vole & Astrolabe. Benedict could remember, with a twinge of mixed embarrassment and pride, how he’d once stormed into the bar demanding satisfaction when he’d felt his fellow drinkers weren’t taking his claim to be a published poet seriously. A poem of Ben’s had just been printed in the local <em>Chronicle & Echo</em>, and when he’d burst through the Crown & Cushion’s swing door like a piano-stopping gunfighter he’d thrown the thirty copies of the paper that he happened to be carrying into the air with a victorious cry of “There! Ah ha ha ha!” They’d naturally barred him on the spot, but that was years ago, and with a bit of luck that era’s staff and customers would all be dead or memory-impaired by now.
Even if not, traditionally the pub had always shown tremendous tolerance and even fondness for the various eccentrics passing through its portals. That was another reason why Ben liked the place, he thought as he pushed open its lounge door and stepped into the welcome gloom from the bright, squinting dazzle of the day outside. They’d had far worse than him in here. There was a story from back in the very early 1980s which insisted that the great Sir Malcolm Arnold, trumpeter and orchestral arranger of such hits as “Colonel Bogey”, had been living in the room above the Crown & Cushion’s bar, mentally ill and alcoholic, guest in some accounts, virtual prisoner in others, dragged down almost nightly for the entertainment of a drunken and abusive crowd. This was the man who’d written <em>Tam O’ Shanter</em>, that delirious accompaniment to Burns’ inebriated night-sweat, the carousing highland hero chased by a Wild Hunt of fairies through the brass and woodwind dark. This was Sir Malcolm Arnold, who Ben thought had once been the Director of the Queen’s Music, a musical equivalent to Poet Laureate, banging out tunes on the joanna for a herd of braying and pugnacious goons. Old and tormented, ambisextrous, in his early sixties then, who knew what imps and demons, djinns and tonics, might have been stampeding through his fevered skull, glistening with perspiration and tipped forward over pounding yellow ivories?
Benedict stood there just inside the door until his pupils had sufficiently dilated to locate the bar. The staff and decor, he observed, were new since his last visit. This was just as well, especially about the bar staff, since as far as Ben knew he’d done nothing to offend the decor. Some, of course, might not agree. Ah ha ha ha. Benedict stepped up to the rail and bought a pint of bitter, slapping down his twenty on the freshly wiped and moisture-beaded bar-top with a certain swagger. This was undercut, though, by his deep regret at having said goodbye to Elgar. Some of this regret was purely on Ben’s own account, but mixed with this there was a genuine concern about Sir Edward, an uneasiness at leaving the composer in the Crown & Cushion. Look at what they’d done to Malcolm Arnold.
Taking his glass to an empty table, of which there were an unseasonable number, Ben fleetingly entertained a morbid fantasy in which, as punishment for the newspaper incident, he was incarcerated here in the same way that Arnold had reputedly been held. Each night intoxicated thugs would burst into his room and herd him down to the saloon, where he’d be plied with spirits and made to recite his earnest and wept-over sonnets to a room of jeering philistines. It didn’t sound that bad, if he was honest. He’d had Friday nights like that, without even the benefit of being plied with drink. Now that he came to think about it, he’d had entire years like that. The stretch just after Lily told him he should find another billet, when he’d lived in a house broken into flats along Victoria Road, had been like <em>Tam O’ Shanter</em> playing on a loop for months. Arriving home at 3.00am without a key, demanding as a published poet that he be let in, then playing Dylan Thomas reading <em>Under Milkwood</em> at top volume on his Dansette until all the other residents were threatening to kill him. What had that been all about? Creeping downstairs to the communal kitchen one night and devouring four whole chicken dinners that the surly and abusive tattooed couple in the flat above had made for the next day, then waking up another of the building’s tenants so that he could tell them. “Ah ha ha! I’ve ate the bastards’ dinner!” Looking back, Ben realised he was lucky to have come through those dire days unlynched, and never mind unscathed.
He sipped his bitter and, taking advantage of the sunlight falling through the window that he sat beneath, removed <em>A Northamptonshire Garland</em> from his satchel and began to read. The first piece his eyes fell on was “The Angler’s Song”, a work by William Basse, seventeenth-century pastoral poet with disputed although likely origins here in the town.
<quote>
<em>As inward love breeds outward talk,</em>
<em>The hound some praise, and some the hawk,</em>
<em>Some, better pleased with private sport,</em>
<em>Use tennis, some a mistress court:</em>
<em>But these delights I neither wish,</em>
<em>Nor envy, while I freely fish.</em>
</quote>
<br>
Ben liked the poem, though he’d never really done much fishing since his first youthful attempts, which had involved the accidental hooking of another child during the back-swing when he’d cast off. He recalled the blood, the screams, and worst of all his total inability to keep from giggling inappropriately with shame during the subsequent first aid. That had been it for Benedict and fishing, pretty much, though he approved of it as an idea. Along with fauns and shepherdesses it was part of his Arcadian mythology, the angler drowsing by the stream, the riverine crawl of the afternoon, but like the shepherdesses it was something he’d had little practical experience of.
On reflection, that was probably why Ben had let “Atlantis” go unfinished all those years ago, the sense that it was inauthentic, that he had been barking up the wrong tree. When he’d started it, he’d been a schoolboy from a dark house down in Freeschool Street, deploring all the grimy factory yards the way that he thought John Clare would have done; lamenting the bucolic idyll that, in his imagination, the contemporary mean streets of the Boroughs had displaced. Only when those slate rooftops and tree-punctured chimney breasts had been themselves removed had come belated recognition that the narrow lanes were the endangered habitat he should have been commemorating. Bottle-caps, not bluebells. He’d thrown out his central metaphor, the droning, drowning hedgerows of a continent that he’d reported lost but in all truth had never really owned, and written “Clearance Area” instead. After the neighbourhood as Benedict had known it was no more, at last he’d found a voice that had been genuine and of the Boroughs. Looking back, he thought that later poem had been more about the bulldozed flats of his own disillusion than the demolition site his district had become, although perhaps the two were ultimately the same thing.
He lit a cigarette, noting that this left six still rattling loose in the depleted pack, and flipped on through the alphabetically arranged compendium, skipping past Clare this time to light on the inarguably authentic Boroughs voice of Philip Doddridge. Though the piece was called “Christ’s Message” and based on a passage from the Book of Luke it was essentially the text of Doddridge’s most celebrated hymn: “Hark the glad sound! The Saviour comes!/ The Saviour promised long!” Benedict liked the exclamation marks, which seemed to couch the second coming as a gravel-throated trailer for a movie sequel. In his heart, Ben couldn’t say that he was confident concerning Christianity … the ton-up accident that took his sister back when he’d been ten put paid to that … but he could still hear and respect the strong Boroughs inflection in Doddridge’s verses, his concern for the impoverished and wretched no doubt sharpened by his time at Castle Hill. “He comes the broken heart to bind, The bleeding soul to cure,/ And with the treasures of his grace T’ enrich the humble poor.”
He’d drink to that. Lifting his glass he noticed that its ebbing tide-line foam was at half-mast. Just four sips left. Oh well. That was enough. He’d make it last. He wouldn’t have another one in here, despite the seventeen-odd pounds he still had left. He thumbed his way on through the book until he reached the Fanes of Apethorpe: Mildmay Fane, the second Earl of Westmorland, and his descendant Julian. He’d only really settled on the pair through being taken with the names ‘Mildmay’ and ‘Apethorpe’, but soon found himself immersed in Julian’s description of the family pile, as admired by Northampton fan John Betjeman. “The moss-grey mansion of my father stands/ Park’d in an English pasturage as fair/ As any that the grass-green isle can show./ Above it rise deep-wooded lawns; below/ A brook runs riot thro’ the pleasant lands …” The brook went babbling on as he sipped dry his pint and bought another without thinking.
Suddenly it was ten minutes after three and he was half a mile away, emerging out of Lutterworth Road onto Billing Road, just down from what had once been the Boy’s Grammar School. What was he doing here? He had the vaguest memory of standing in the toilets at the Crown & Cushion, of a ghostly moment staring at his own face in the mirror bolted up above the washbasin, but for the life of him could not remember leaving the pub premises, much less the fairish walk he’d evidently taken down here from the Wellingborough Road. Perhaps he’d wanted to head back to the town centre but had chosen this admittedly more scenic route? Chosen was probably too strong a word. Ben’s path through life was governed not so much by choice as by the powerful undertow of his own whimsy, which would on occasion wash him up to unexpected beachheads like this present one.
Across the street and some way off upon his left was the red brick front of the former grammar school, set back from the main road by flat lawns and a gravel forecourt where a naked flagpole stood, no ensign showing which side the establishment was on. Benedict understood the reticence. These days, targets were what schools aimed at, not what they aspired to be. Stretching away behind the calm façade and the aloof gaze of the tall white windows there were classrooms, art rooms, physics blocks and playing fields, a spinney and a swimming pool, all trying to ignore the gallows shadow that league tables cast across them. Not that there was any cause here for immediate concern. Though relegated from a snooty grammar to a red-eared comprehensive in the middle 1970s, the place had used its dwindling aura and residual reputation as brand markers in the competition-focussed marketplace that teaching had become. Invoking the school’s previous elitist status and the ghost of poshness past would seem to have succeeded, making it a big hit with the choice-dazed well-off parent of today. Apparently, from what Ben heard, they even made a selling point of the monastic single-sex approach to education. Anyone applying for their son to be accepted had to first compose a modest essay stating why, precisely, at the most profound ideological and moral level, they believed their child would benefit from being tutored in an atmosphere of strict gender apartheid. What did they expect people to say? That what they hoped for little Giles was that at best he’d grow into somebody awkward and uncomprehending in all his relationships with women, while at worst he’d end up a gay serial murderer? Ah ha ha ha.
Benedict crossed the road and turned right, heading into town, putting the school behind him. He’d once been a pupil there and hadn’t liked it much. For one thing, having squandered his first decade on the planet in what his mam called “acting the goat”, he’d not passed his eleven-plus exams that first go-round. When all the clever kids like Alma went off to their grammars, Benedict attended Spencer School, on the now-feared Spencer estate, with all the divs and bruisers. He’d been every bit as smart as Alma and the rest, just not inclined to take things like examinations seriously. Once he’d been at Spencer for a year or two, however, his intelligence began to shine from the surrounding dross and only then had he been transferred to the grammar school.
Here he’d felt stigmatised, even among the vanishingly small minority of other working-class boys, who’d at least been bright enough to put the ticks in the right boxes when they’d been eleven. With the middle-class majority, especially the teachers, Ben had never felt he stood a chance. The other boys had in the main been nice enough, acting and talking much the same as him, but they’d still snigger if somebody stuck their hand up during class to ask the master if they could go to the lav and not the toilet. On reflection, Benedict supposed, such prejudice as he’d experienced had been relatively minimal. At least he’d not been black like David Daniels in the year above, a serene and good natured lad that Ben had mainly known through Alma, who’d shared Daniels’s fondness for American science-fiction paperbacks and comics. Ben recalled one maths teacher who’d always send the only non-white at the school into the quadrangle outside the classroom window, so that in the full view of his classmates he could clean the board erasers, pounding them together until his black skin was pale with chalk dust. It was shameful.
He remembered how unfairly the whole learning process had been handled then, with kids’ lives and careers decided by an exam that they’d sat at age eleven. Mind you, wasn’t it just this last year that Tony Blair had set out his performance targets for the under-fives? There’d be established foetal standards soon, so that you could feel pressurized and backwards if your fingers hadn’t separated fully by the third trimester. Academic stress-related pre-birth suicides would become commonplace, the depressed embryos hanging themselves with their umbilical cords, farewell notes scratched onto the placenta.
Benedict became aware of railings passing in a strobe on his left side to vanish at his back, dark conifers beyond them, and remembered he was walking past St. Andrew’s Hospital. Could that have been the reason why he’d taken this route home, as an impulsive pilgrimage to where they’d kept John Clare for more than twenty years? Perhaps he’d muddily imagined that the thought of Clare, his hero, having been more of a hopeless circus-turn than Ben himself, would somehow be uplifting?
Instead, the reverse was true. As with his earlier envy of pub-prisoner Sir Malcolm Arnold – who had also been a former grammar school boy and a former inmate of St. Andrew’s, now he thought about it – Benedict found himself visualising the extensive institution grounds beyond the rail and envying John Clare. Admittedly, St. Andrew’s hadn’t been so lush back in the 1850s when it was Northampton General Asylum, but it had still been a gentler haven, in all likelihood, for lost and bruised poetic souls than somewhere like, say, Tower Street. What Ben wouldn’t give to trade his current circumstances for those of a nineteenth-century madhouse. If somebody asked why you weren’t seeking work, you could explain that you were already employed as an archaic mental. You could wander all day through Elysian meadows, or else take a stroll downtown to sit beneath the portico of All Saints’ Church. With your expenses paid for by a literary benefactor, you’d have time to write as much verse as you liked, much of it on how badly you felt you were being treated. And when even the exertion of poetics proved too much (for surely times like that afflicted everyone, Ben thought), you could abandon your exhausting personality and be somebody else, be Queen Victoria’s dad, or Byron. Frankly, if you’d lost your mind, there were worse places to go looking for it than beneath the bushes at St. Andrew’s.
Clearly, Ben was not alone in this opinion. In the years since Clare’s day, the asylum’s tittering and weeping dayroom had become a hall of damaged fame. Misogynist and poet J.K. Stephen. Malcolm Arnold. Dusty Springfield. Lucia Joyce, a child of the more famous James, whose delicate psychology had first become apparent when she worked as chief assistant on her father’s unreadable masterpiece, <em>Finnegans Wake</em>, then titled <em>Work in Progress</em>. Joyce’s daughter had arrived here at the pricey but quite justly celebrated Billing Road retreat in the late 1940s, and had evidently liked the place so much she’d stayed for over thirty years until her death in 1982. Even mortality had not soured Lucia on Northampton. She’d requested she be buried here, at Kingsthorpe Cemetery, where she was currently at rest a few feet from the gravestone of a Mr. Finnegan. It was still strange to think that Lucia Joyce had been here all the time Ben was a pupil at the grammar school next door. He wondered idly if she’d ever met with Dusty or Sir Malcolm, picturing abruptly all three on stage as a trio, possibly for therapeutic reasons, looking melancholic, belting out “I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself”. Ah ha ha ha.
Benedict had heard that Samuel Beckett was one of Lucia Joyce’s visitors, here at St. Andrew’s and then, later, at the cemetery in Kingsthorpe. Part of Lucia’s madness had been the belief that Beckett, who’d replaced her as assistant on the <em>Work in Progress</em>, was in love with her. Disastrous as this misunderstanding must have been for all concerned, the two had evidently remained friends, at least to judge from all the visits. Ben’s good chum Dave Turvey, cricketing enthusiast companion to the late Tom Hall, had informed Benedict of Beckett’s sole entry in Wisden’s Almanac, playing against Northampton at the County Ground. Amongst the visiting team, Beckett had distinguished himself not so much upon the pitch as in his choice of entertainment afterwards. He’d spent that evening in a solitary trawl around Northampton’s churches while his colleagues had contented themselves with the other things the town was famous for, these being pubs and whores. Benedict found this conduct admirable, at least in theory, though he’d never cared for Beckett as an author much. All those long silences and haunted monologues. It was too much like life.
He was by now beyond St. Andrew’s, crossing over at the top of Cliftonville as he continued his fastidiously measured stumble, onward down the Billing Road to town. This was the route he’d take each weeknight as a schoolboy, home to Freeschool Street astride his bike, riding into the sunset as if every day had been a feature film, which, very often in Ben’s case, it had been. <em>Duck Soup</em>, usually, with Benedict as both Zeppo and Harpo, playing them, innovatively, as two sides of the same troubled personality. A drift of generally pleasant and only occasionally horrifying recollection, like a fairground ride through Toyland but with horse intestines draped at intervals, conveyed him on into the centre. Where the Billing Road concluded at the crossroads with Cheyne Walk and York Road, near the General Hospital, Ben waltzed over the zebra crossing and along Spencer Parade.
Boughs from St. Giles churchyard overhung the pavement, off-cut scraps of light and shadow rustling across the cracked slabs in a mobile stipple. Past the low wall on Ben’s right was soft grass and hard marble markers, peeling benches scored with the initials of a hundred brief relationships and then the caramel stones of the church itself, probably one of those inspected on Sam Beckett’s lone nocturnal tour. St. Giles was old, not ancient like St. Peter’s or the Holy Sepulchre, but old enough, and here as long as anybody could remember. It was clearly well-established by the time that John Speed drafted the town map for 1610, which Benedict owned a facsimile edition of, rolled up somewhere behind his bookshelves back in Tower Street. Though state-of-the-art technical drawing in its day, to modern eyes its slightly wonky isomorphic house-rows looked like the endeavour of a talented though possibly autistic child. The image of Northampton poised there at the start of the seventeenth century, a crudely drawn cross-section of a heart with extra ventricles, was nonetheless delightful. When the modern urban landscape was too much for Benedict to bear, say one day out of every five, then he’d imagine he was walking through the simple and depopulated flatland of Speed’s diagram, the vanished landmarks dark with quill pen hatch-work scribbling themselves into existence all around him. White streets bounded by ink curbs, devoid of human complication.
Benedict continued down into St. Giles Street, passing the still-open lower end of the half-destitute, half-empty Co-op Arcade, its redundant upper reaches gazing bleakly onto Abington Street which ran parallel, a short way up the gentle slope of the town’s southern flank. Some distance further on, past Fish Street’s gaping cod’s mouth, was the Wig & Pen, the disinfected and rebranded shell of what had once been called the new Black Lion, as distinct from the much older pub of that name down on Castle Hill. Back in the 1920s, the St. Giles Street Black Lion had been haven for the town’s bohemians, a reputation that the place had suffered or enjoyed till the late ’Eighties when the current renovations were afoot. Another reputation that the dive endured, according to authorities including Elliot O’Donnell, was as one of the most haunted spots in England. When Dave Turvey had been landlord here, around the time when Tom Hall, Alma Warren and indeed the greater part of Piet de Snapp’s outlandish portrait gallery had been the Black Lion’s customers, there had been footsteps on the stairs and items moved or rearranged. There had been presences and scared pets throughout Turvey’s tenure, just as there had been with all the previous proprietors. Ben wondered idly if the apparitions had been made to undergo a makeover, been themed along with the surrounding pub so that if rattling chains or mournful shrieks were heard one of the spectres would put down his ploughman’s lunch and reach inside his jacket, muttering “Sorry, guys. That’s mine. Hello? Oh, hi. Yeah. Yeah, I’m on the astral plane.” Ah ha ha ha.
Upon Ben’s right now, broad imperial steps swept up towards the soaring crystal palace that resembled a Dan Dare cathedral but was where you had to go to pay your council tax. Because of this, the place would always have the feeling of a place of execution, like the old Labour Exchange in Grafton Street, no matter how refined and stately its design. Bills and assessments and adult responsibilities. Places like this were faces of the whetstone that ground people down, that shaved a whole dimension off of them. Benedict moved on hurriedly, past the adjoining Guildhall where he wasn’t certain if the building had been lately cleaned or if its stones were simply bleached by countless flashgun fusillades from countless civic weddings. Geologic strata of confetti, matrimonial dandruff, had accumulated in the corners of its grand stone stairs.
This was the third and very possibly the final place that the town hall would find itself located, after the forgotten Mayorhold and the intermediary position at the foot of Abington Street. Ben looked up, past all the saints and regents decorating the elaborate façade, to where on his high ridge between two spires stood the town’s patron saint, rod in one hand, shield in the other, wings folded behind him. Benedict had never been entirely sure how the Archangel Michael had been made one of the saints, who, unless Ben had got it wrong, were human beings who’d aspired to sainthood through hard work and piety and pulling off some tricky miracles. Wouldn’t an archangel have an unfair advantage, what with being quite miraculous already? Anyway, archangels outranked saints in the celestial hierarchy, as any schoolchild knew. How had Northampton managed to recruit one of God’s four lieutenants as its patron saint? What possible incitements could the town have offered to perk up a posting so much lower down on the celestial scale of reimbursement?
He went on across Wood Hill and down the north side of All Saints, where John Clare once habitually sat within a recess underneath the portico, a Delphic Oracle on day release. Ben crossed before the church, continuing down Gold Street in a soar of shop fronts as if he were still sixteen and riding on his bike. Down at the bottom, while he waited at the lights to cross Horsemarket, he glanced to his left where Horseshoe Street ran down towards St. Peter’s Way and what had previously been the Gas Board yards. Local mythology suggested that it was around where the old billiard hall stood, a few yards from the corner Benedict now occupied, that some time previous to the Norman conquest there had come a pilgrim from Golgotha, from the ground where Christ supposedly was crucified, off in Jerusalem. Apparently the monk had found an ancient stone cross buried at the crucifixion site, whereon a passing angel had instructed him to take the relic “to the centre of his land”, which had presumably been England. Halfway up what was now Horseshoe Street, the angel had turned up again, confirming to the traveller that he had indeed lucked onto the right place. The cross he’d born so far was set into the stonework of St. Gregory’s Church which had been just across the road in Saxon times, the monk’s remains interred beneath it, to become itself a site of pilgrimage. They’d called it the rood in the wall. Here in this grimy offshoot of the Boroughs there resided England’s mystic centre, and it wasn’t only Benedict who thought that. It was God who thought that too. Ah ha ha ha.
The lights changed, with the luminous green man now signifying it was safe for workers in the nuclear industry to cross. He wandered over into Marefair, heading down what had for Benedict always been the town’s main street, westward in a bee-line for St. Peter’s Church. He was still thinking vaguely about angels, after the archangel perched up on the Guildhall and the one who’d shown the monk where he should plant his cross in Horseshoe Street, and Ben recalled at least one other story of seraphic intervention that involved the thoroughfare along which he was walking. At St. Peter’s Church, just up ahead, there’d been a miracle in the eleventh century when angels had directed a young peasant lad named Ivalde to retrieve the lost bones of St. Ragener, concealed beneath the flagstones in the nave, unearthed in blinding light to an accompaniment of holy water sprinkled by the holy spirit who had manifested as a bird. A crippled beggar woman witnessing the incident had risen to her feet and walked, or so the story went. It all tended to foster Ben’s distinct impression that in the Dark Ages one could barely move for angels telling you to go to Marefair.
Benedict had reached the top of Freeschool Street, running off Marefair on the left, before he realised what he’d done. It had been his excursion to the Billing Road, no doubt, that had inclined him to take his old cycle route from school back to a home here that had been demolished ages since. Blithely propelling a leak-shot canoe along his algae-smothered stream of consciousness, he’d somehow managed to blank out the previous thirty-seven years of his existence, adult feet reverting effortlessly to the trails worn in the pavement by their former, smaller selves. What was he like? Ah ha ha ha. No, seriously, what was he like? Was this the onset of damp pantalooned senility and trying to recall which was his ward? Frankly, for all that it was taking place upon a sunlit afternoon this was quite frightening, like finding that you’d sleepwalked to your dad’s grave in the middle of the night.
He stood there staring at the narrow lane, Marefair’s foot traffic bifurcating to flow round him like a stream with Benedict as its abandoned shopping trolley, utterly oblivious to all the babbling movement he was in the midst of. Freeschool Street was, mercifully, barely recognisable. Only the tiny splinters that you could identify still snagged upon the heart. The paving stones that had gone unreplaced, their moss-filled fractures subdividing to an achingly familiar delta. The surviving lower reaches of a factory wall that dribbled down as far as Gregory Street, ferns and young branches shoving past the rotted frames of what had once been windows, now not even holes. He felt a certain gratitude for the street’s bend that blocked his view of where the Perrit family once lived, the company forecourt stretching where they’d laughed and argued and peed in the sink if it was cold outside, together in that single room with the front parlour used entirely as a showcase for the family’s more presentable possessions. This, he thought, this was the real Atlantis.
Teenaged and pretentious, he’d bemoaned the loss of byres and furrows that he’d never known, that were John Clare’s to mourn. Benedict had composed laments to vanished rural England while ignoring the fecund brick wilderness he lived in, but as things turned out there was still grass, there were still flowers and meadows if you looked for them. The Boroughs, on the other hand, a unique undergrowth of people’s lives, you could search for it all you wanted, but that one particular endangered habitat was gone for good. That half-a-square-mile continent had sunk under a deluge of bad social policy. First there had been a mounting Santorini rumble of awareness that the Boroughs’ land would be more valuable without its people, then came bulldozers in a McAlpine tidal wave. A yellow foam of hard hats surged across the neighbourhood to break against the shores of Jimmy’s End and Semilong, the human debris washed up in a scum-line of old people’s flats at King’s Heath and at Abington. When the construction tide receded there’d been only high-rise barnacles, the hulks of sunken businesses and the occasional beached former resident, flopping and gasping there in some resurfaced underpass. Benedict, an antediluvian castaway, became the disappeared world’s Ancient Mariner, its Ishmael and its Plato, cataloguing deeds and creatures so fantastic as to be implausible, increasingly even to Ben himself. The bricked up entrance to the medieval tunnel system in his cellar, could that truly have been there? The horse that brought his dad home every night when Jem was passed out at the reins, could that have possibly existed? Had there been real deathmongers and cows on people’s upstairs landings and a fever cart?
Somebody narrowly avoided bumping into Benedict, apologising even though it was quite clearly Ben’s fault, stood there staring into nowhere and obstructing half the street.
“Ooh, sorry, mate. Not looking where I’m going.”
It was a young half-caste girl, what they called nowadays mixed race, a pinched but pretty thing who looked to be in her mid or late twenties. Interrupting as she was Ben’s daydream of a submerged Eden she took on an Undine gloss, at least in his imagination. The faint pallor that her skin retained despite her parentage seemed a deep-water phosphorescence, hair brushed into stripes with twigs of coral and the wet sheen on her plastic coat all adding to the submarine illusion. Frail and exotic as a sea horse, Ben recast her in the role of a Lemurian sultaness, her earrings dubloons spilled from foundered galleons. That this rock-tanned siren should be saying sorry to the weathered, ugly reef where she’d fetched up through no fault of her own made Benedict feel doubly guilty, doubly embarrassed. He replied with a high, strangled laugh, to put her at her ease.
“Aa, that’s all right, love. You’re all right. Ah ha ha ha.”
Her eyes grew slightly wider and her painted liquid lips, like two sucked pear-drops, went through some suppressed contortions. She was staring at him quizzically, a rhyme scheme and a metre in her look that Ben was unfamiliar with. What did she want? The fact that their chance meeting was occurring on the street where Ben was born, and where he found himself this afternoon through no more than a drunken accident, began now to smack dangerously of kismet. Could it be … ah ha ha ha … could it be that she recognised him, saw by some means all the poetry that he had in him? Had she glimpsed his wisdom underneath the nervousness and beer breath? Was this the predestined moment, loitering across from Marefair’s ibis hotel, caught in shafts of timeless sunshine with pale stars of ground-in bubblegum around the Dr. Martens, when he was to meet his Sheba? Tiny muscles at the corners of her mouth were working now as she prepared to speak, to say something, to ask him if he was an artist or musician of some kind, or even if he was Benedict Perrit, whom she’d heard so much about. The glistening Maybelline-drenched petals finally unstuck themselves, peeling apart.
“Fancy a bit of business?”
Oh.
Belatedly, Ben understood. They weren’t two kindred spirits pulled together inexorably by fate. She was a prostitute and he was a drunk idiot, simple as that. Now that he knew her trade he saw the drawn look that her face had and the dark around the eyes, the missing tooth, the twitchy desperation. He revised his estimate from mid/late twenties down to mid/late teens. Poor kid. He should have known when she first spoke to him, but Ben had grown up in a Boroughs that was something other than Northampton’s red light district; had to consciously remind himself that this was its main function now. He’d never used a pro himself, had never even thought about it, not through any notion of superiority but more because he’d always thought of street girls as a middle-class concern, predominantly. Why would a working-class man, other than through incapacity or unrelenting loneliness, pay to have sex with a working-class woman of the kind that he’d grown up amongst and had to some degree therefore been de-eroticised towards? Ben thought it was more probably the Hugh Grants of this world who treated adjectives like “rough” or “dirty” as arousing concepts, whereas he’d grown up in a community that generally reserved such terms for nightmare clans like the O’Rourkes or Presleys.
He felt awkward, having never previously experienced this situation, with his awkwardness yet further complicated by his lingering disappointment. For a moment there he’d been upon the brink of a romance, of an epiphany, an inspiration. No, he hadn’t really thought that she was a Lemurian sultaness, but he’d still entertained the notion that she might be someone sensitive and sympathetic, somebody who’d glimpsed the bard in him, had seen the villanelles and throwaway sestinas in his bearing. But instead, the opposite was true. She’s taken him for just another needy punter whose romantic yearnings stretched no further than a quick one off the wrist in a back entry. How could she have got him so completely wrong? He felt he had to let her know how badly she’d misread him, how absurd it was for her to have considered him of all people as a potential client. However, since he still felt sorry for the girl and didn’t want her thinking he was genuinely offended, he elected to communicate his feelings in the manner of an Ealing comedy. He’d found this was the best approach for almost any delicate or sticky social circumstances.
Benedict contorted his sponge-rubber features into an expression of Victorian moral shock, like Mr. Pickwick startled by a mudlark selling dildos, then affected an affronted shudder so vociferous that his fillings rattled, forcing him to stop. The girl by this point was beginning to look slightly frightened, so Ben thought he’d better underline that his behaviour was intended as comic exaggeration. Swivelling his head, he glanced away from her to where the television audience would be if life were actually the hidden camera prank show he’d occasionally suspected, and supplied his own canned laughter.
“Ah ha ha ha. No, no, you’re all right, love, thanks. No, bless your heart, you’re all right. I’m all right. Ah ha ha ha.”
It seemed that his performance had at least removed her certainty that Ben was a potential customer. The girl was staring at him now as if she genuinely didn’t have the first idea what Benedict might be. Apparently disoriented, forehead corrugated into an uncomprehending frown, she tried again to get his measure.
“Are you sure?”
What would it take before this woman got the message? Was he going to have a do a full routine with plank, paste-bucket and banana skin to make her understand that he was too poetic to want sex behind a rubbish skip? One thing was certain: subtlety and understatement hadn’t worked. He’d have to spell it out for her with broader gestures.
He tipped back his head in a derisive guffaw that he fancied was in the John Falstaff mode, or would have been if Falstaff had been best known as a gangly tenor.
“Ah ha ha ha. No, love, I’m all right, ta. You’re all right. I’ll have you know that I’m a published poet. Ah ha ha.”
That did the trick. From the expression on her face, the girl no longer harboured any doubts concerning what Ben Perrit was. Wearing a fixed grin she began to take her leave, keeping her wary eyes upon him as she backed away down Marefair, clearly scared to turn her back on him until she was some distance off, in case he pounced. She tottered off past Cromwell House in the direction of the railway station, pausing when she reached St. Peter’s Church to risk a glance across her shoulder back at Benedict. She evidently thought he was a psychopath, so he let out a carefree high-pitched cackle to assure her that he wasn’t, whereupon she took off past the church front, disappearing into the homecoming crowds on Black Lion Hill. His muse, his mermaid, vanished in a tail-flip and a shimmer of viridian scales.
Five things, then. Just five things that Ben was unsuccessful with. Escape, finding a job, explaining himself properly, not looking pissed, and talking to a woman if you didn’t count his mum or Alma. Lily, she’d been an exception, been the one who’d genuinely seen his spirit and his poetry. He’d always felt that he could talk to Lily, although looking back it pained him to admit that most of what he’d talked was drunken rubbish. That was largely what had finished it between the two of them. It was the drink and, if he were entirely honest, it was Ben’s insistence that the rules in his relationship with Lily be those that had suited his own parents, Jem and Eileen, thirty years before, particularly those that suited Jem. Back then Ben hadn’t really taken in that everything was changing, not just streets and neighbourhoods but people’s attitudes; what people would put up with. He’d thought that at least in his own home he could preserve a fragment of the life he’d known right here in Freeschool Street, where wives would tolerate constant inebriation in their husbands and consider themselves blessed if they’d a man who didn’t hit them. He’d pretended that the world was still that way, and he’d been stunned right to the core of him when Lily took the kids and demonstrated that it wasn’t.
Ben’s uncomfortable meeting with the prostitute had faded now to a faint, wistful pang. His gaze had drifted back to Freeschool Street, his boyhood paradise drowning in its own future with the water level rising day by day, moment by moment. He wished he could dive into the cladding of the mostly vacant office buildings and apartments, red brick droplets splashing up from where he’d pierced the surface. He’d dog-paddle down through forty years on one lungful of air. He’d swim through his dad’s woodyard gathering up whatever souvenirs he could retrieve to take back to the surface and the present day. He’d tap upon the window of the living room and tell his sister “Don’t go out tonight”. At last he’d emerge gasping, up from the meniscus of contemporary Marefair, his arms full of sunken treasure, startling the passers-by and shaking beads of history from his sopping hair.
He was beginning to feel distantly in need of food. He thought he might walk back up Horsemarket to home, perhaps visit the chippy in St. Andrew’s Street. He suddenly remembered he had slightly more than fifteen pounds left, Darwin and Eliz<sup>th</sup> Fry entangled in a crumpled ball of passion somewhere in the deep recesses of his trousers. That would be enough to get some fish and chips and also go out for a drink tonight if he should want to, though he didn’t think he would. The best thing he could do would be to get some food and then go back to Tower Street for an inexpensive evening in. That way he’d still have nearly all the money left tomorrow and he wouldn’t have to go through the humiliating pantomime of taking charity from Eileen in the morning. That was settled, then. That’s what he’d do. Preparing to vacate the spot and head off up Horsemarket, Benedict attempted to rein in his wandering attention, which was off somewhere at play amongst the gutted ruins of Gregory Street. Stranded dandelions were perched on the remains of ledges twenty-five feet up, hesitant suicides with golden hair like Chatterton …
It was eleven thirty-five. He was emerging from the Bird In Hand on Regent’s Square into the grunting, shouting dark of Friday night. Arterial spills of traffic light reflected from the paving slabs of Sheep Street, where there had apparently at some point in the evening been a shower of rain.
Girls in short skirts in gangs of four or five leaned on each other for support, a multitude of 15-denier legs all holding up one structure, turning inadvertently into components of a single giant giggling insect or a piece of mobile furniture as beautifully upholstered as it was impractical. Boys moved like chess knights with concussion, waltzing mice with Tourette’s, wandering clusters of them suddenly erupting into murderous bonhomie or well-intentioned bottlings and it wasn’t even closing time. There was no closing time. Licensing hours had been extended to infinity by government decree, ostensibly to somehow cut down on binge drinking but in fact so that disoriented visiting Americans would not be inconvenienced by funny English customs. Drunken binges hadn’t been eradicated, obviously. They’d simply had their lucid intervals removed.
Ben could remember having plaice and chips a few hours earlier and a few dimly lighted pub interior moments in between – had he been talking to someone? – but otherwise it was as if he had been newly born this instant, squatted out onto this windy street, into these gutters, wholly ignorant of how he came to be here. At least this time, Ben observed with gratitude, he wasn’t sobbing and he wasn’t naked. Underdressed, perhaps, with evening’s chill beginning now to permeate the riotous sunset of his waistcoat, striking through the insulating beery numbness to raise goose-bumps, but at least not nude. Ah ha ha ha.
A rubber-fingered fumble in his pocket reassured him that the treacherous whore Eliz<sup>th</sup> Fry at least this time had not left Benedict for some ill-mannered publican who’d simply use her, wouldn’t love or need her the way Ben did. That said, finding her immediately raised the tempting possibility of popping back into the pub to get a carry-out, a few cans, but no. No, he mustn’t. Go home, Benedict. Go home, son, if you know what’s good for you.
He turned right, shuffling up Sheep Street to the lights where it met Regent Square, the ugly cross-hatching of carriageways that centuries ago had been the north gate of the town. This was where traitors’ skulls were placed on spikes like trolls on pencils, as a decoration. This was where the heretics and witches had been burned. These days the junction at the end of Sheep Street was marked only by a nightclub painted lurid lavender from when it had been a goth hangout called Macbeth’s a year or two ago, attempting to create a gothic atmosphere upon a corner deep in severed heads and shrieking crones already. Coals to Newcastle, wolfbane to Transylvania. Ben lurched over the various crossings that were needed to convey him safely to the top of Grafton Street, which he proceeded to descend unsteadily. A short way further down blue lights were circling, sapphire flashes battering like moths on the surrounding buildings, but he was too dulled by drink to lend them any great significance.
He glanced up to the higher reaches of the car repair place just across the road, where you could see the solar logo of the Sunlight Laundry still raised in relief, even through the piss-yellow sodium light that everything was bathing in. Fixed in its place, it shone down happily upon a day of 24-hour drinking finally arrived, when it need never sink again below the yard arm. Benedict turned his attention back to the uneven paving slabs immediately in front of him, and focussed for the first time on the lone police car pulled up on the curb ahead, the source of all the dancing disco lights. There was a wreck recovery going on, with a smashed vehicle of uncertain make being winched up on its surviving rear wheels by a tow truck. Grim men in fluorescent vests were sweeping shattered windscreen fragments from the busy road, with the police car evidently flashing there behind them to alert the other motorists to what was going on. A baffling spray of random items such as children’s toys and gardening gloves were spread across the tarmac where presumably they had been flung from a burst-open boot. Plant-misters, shower caps and a single flip-flop. Standing by his car and strobe-lit by its beacon, the attending officer was staring down morosely at a melted tyre-print where the now-disintegrated automobile had apparently swerved up onto the pavement, possibly avoiding something in its path, before it crashed into the wall or lamppost or whatever it had been. At Benedict’s approach the plump young copper looked up from his contemplation of the burned-in tread mark, and to Ben’s surprise he realised that he knew him from around the neighbourhood.
“Hello, Ben. Look at all this fucking mess.” The officer, pink choirboy cheeks now red with aggravation, gestured to the pulverised glass and assorted oddments that were carpeting the street. “You should have seen it half an hour ago, before the medics pulled the poor cunt off his steering column. Worse thing is, it’s not even supposed to be my shift tonight.”
Benedict squinted at the workers sweeping up the debris. There was no blood he could see, but then perhaps the gore was all inside the mangled wreck.
“I see. A fatal accident. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, eh? Ah ha ha ha. Joy rider, was it?” Bugger. He’d not meant to laugh, not at a tragic death, nor had he meant to ask for whom the bell tolled right after delivering Donne’s admonition not to. Luckily, the copper’s mind appeared to be on other things, or else he was accustomed to and tolerant of Ben’s eccentric manner. In a way he’d have to be, with his own sherbet lemon police-issue waistcoat more flamboyant than Ben’s own.
“Joy rider? No. No, it was just some bloke in his late thirties. He was in his own car, far as we could see. A family car.” He nodded glumly to the bright, trans-generational litter, strewn across the road from the sprung-open trunk.
“He didn’t smell like he’d been drinking when they cut him free. He must have swerved to miss something and gone up on the path.” The young policeman’s downcast air briefly appeared to lift a little. “Least I wasn’t sent to tell his missus. Honestly, I fucking hate that. All the screaming and the blubbering and that’s just me. I’ll tell you, the last time I went to one of them I nearly – hang on – ”
He was interrupted by a burst of static from his radio, which he unclipped from his coat to answer.
“Yeah? Yeah, I’m still down the top of Grafton Street. They’re finishing the cleanup now, so I’ll be done here in a minute. Why?” There was a pause during which the cherubic officer stared into space expressionlessly, then he said “All right. I’ll be there soon as I get finished with the crash. Yeah. Yeah, okay.”
He reattached his radio receiver, looked at Benedict and pulled a face that signified resigned contempt for his own woeful luck.
“There’s been another tart done over down on Andrew’s Road. Somebody living down there’s took her in, but they want me to get a statement from her before she gets taken up the hospital. Why is it always me this happens to?”
Benedict was going to ask if he meant getting raped and beaten up, but then thought better of it. Leaving the embittered constable to supervise the tail-end of his clean-up duties, Ben continued downhill, curiously sobered by the whole offhand exchange. He turned along St. Andrew’s Street, thinking about the prostitute who’d been attacked, about the man who’d been alive and driving home to see his family an hour ago with no suspicion of his imminent mortality. That was the whole appalling crux of things, Ben thought, that death or horror might be waiting just ahead and nobody had any way of knowing until those last, dreadful seconds. He began to think about his sister Alison, the motorcycle accident, but that was painful and so Ben steered his attentions elsewhere. Doing so, he inadvertently arrived at a blurred memory of the young working girl who had approached Ben earlier, the one who’d had her hair in rows. He knew it wasn’t her specifically who’d been the latest girl to be assaulted at the foot of Scarletwell Street, but he also knew that in a sense it might as well have been. It would be one just like her.
How could this have happened to the Boroughs? How could it have turned into a place where somebody who could have grown up beautiful, who could have grown to be a poet’s muse, is raped and half-killed every other week? The spate of sexual abductions and attacks over a single weekend during that last August, the majority of them had happened in this district. At the time they’d thought a single ‘rape gang’ was responsible for all the crimes, but ominously it had turned out that at least one serious assault was wholly unconnected to the others. Benedict supposed that when events like that occurred with the alarming frequency that they appeared to do round here, it would be natural to assume concerted action by some gang or some conspiracy. Although a menacing idea it was more comforting than the alternative, which was that such things happened randomly and happened often.
Still disconsolately dwelling on the probably doomed girl he’d met in Marefair and the fatal accident whose aftermath he’d witnessed just five minutes back, Ben turned right into Herbert Street, deserted on the slope of midnight. Silhouetted on the Lucozade-toned darkness of the sky behind them, Claremont Court and Beaumont Court were black as Stanley Kubrick monoliths, beamed down by an unfathomable alien intelligence to spark ideas amongst the shaggy, louse-bound primitives. Ideas like “Jump”. You couldn’t even see what little there was left of Spring Lane School from this specific viewpoint how you once could, not for all the NEWLIFE standing in the way. Ben shambled down as far as Simons Walk beneath a night made tangerine and starless. Turning left along the strip of turf-edged paving that would lead him to his mam’s house he felt irritated, as he always did, by Simons Walk and its absent apostrophe. Unless there was some benefactor to the area named Simons that Ben hadn’t heard of, he assumed the street’s name was a reference to church-and-castle-building Norman knight Simon de Senlis, in which case there should be a possessive … oh, what was the point? Nobody cared. Nothing meant anything that couldn’t be turned instantly into its opposite by any competent spin-doctor or spoon-bender. History and language had become so flexible, wrenched back and forth to suit each new agenda, that it seemed as if they might just simply snap in half and leave us floundering in a sea of mad Creationist revisions and greengrocers’ punctuation.
Staggering along past Althorpe Street he could hear screams of laughter and discordant weirdo music made still more distorted by its volume, issuing from slaphead Kenny Something’s drug den down at the walk’s end. Off in the ochre gloom car engines vented jungle snarls across the darkening cement savannah. Turning into Tower Street he walked up as far as Eileen’s house, then spent five minutes giggling at himself while he attempted to unlock the front door without making any noise by trying to fit his key into the doorbell. Ah ha ha.
The house was quiet with everything switched off, his mam having already gone to bed. He passed by the closed door to the front room, still filled with heirlooms and for show rather than use, the way things used to be in Freeschool Street, and went through to the kitchen for a glass of milk before he went upstairs.
His room, the one space on the planet that he felt was his, awaited him forgivingly, prepared to take him in once more for all that he’d neglected it. There was his single bed, there was what he still laughingly referred to as his writing desk, there were the ranks of poets that he’d earlier tried to gas. He sat down on the bed’s edge to untie his shoes but left the action uncompleted, trailing off across the carpet with the unpicked laces. He was thinking of the accident in Grafton Street, which meant that he was thinking about Alison, her ton-up boyfriend trying to overtake that lorry that had no wide-load lights. He was thinking about dying, how he did each morning soon as he woke up, but now there was no hope the morbid thoughts would vanish with the day’s first drink, not when its last drink was just then expiring horribly beneath Ben’s tongue. He was alone there in his room with death, his room, his death, its inevitability, and there was nothing to defend him.
One day soon he would be dead, reduced to ashes or else feeding worms. His entertaining funny mind, his self, that would just simply stop. That wouldn’t be there anymore. Life would be going on, with all its romance and its thrills, but not for him. He would know nothing of it, like a splendid party at which he’d been made to feel he was no longer welcome. He’d have been crossed off the guest list, he’d have been erased, as if he’d never been there. All that would be left of him would be a few exaggerated anecdotes, some mildewed poems in surviving copies of small-circulation magazines, and then not even that. It would have all been wasted, and …
It hit him suddenly, the bleak epiphany, and knocked the wind out of him: thinking about death was something he habitually did as an alternative to thinking about life. Death wasn’t what the problem was. Death wasn’t asking anything of anyone, except for effortless decomposition. Death wasn’t the thing with all the expectations and the disappointments and the constant fear that anything could happen. That was life. Death, fearsome from life’s frightened point of view, was actually itself beyond all fear and hurt. Death, like a kindly mother, took the worrisome responsibilities and the decisions off your hands, kissed you goodnight and tucked you underneath the warm green counterpane. Life was the trial, the test, the thing you had to figure out what you should do with before it was over.
But then, Benedict had done that. He’d decided, rashly, back in his romantic youth, that he’d be nothing if he couldn’t be a poet. At the time, he hadn’t really thought about the lesser of those two alternatives, the possibility that he might well end up as nothing. It had never happened for him, the success he’d thought he might achieve when he was younger, and he’d gradually lost heart. He’d pretty much abandoned writing, but it was so much a part of his identity that he could not admit, not even to himself, that he had given up. He would pretend his inactivity was only a sabbatical, that he was lying fallow, gathering material, when he knew deep inside that he was only gathering dust.
He saw, as through a fog, the grave mistake he’d made. He’d been so anxious for success and validation that he’d come to think you weren’t really a writer unless you were a successful one. He knew, in this unprecedented patch of clarity, that the idea was nonsense. Look at William Blake, ignored and without recognition until years after his death, regarded as a lunatic or fool by his contemporaries. Yet Benedict felt sure that Blake, in his three-score-and-ten, had never had a moment’s doubt that he was a true artist. Ben’s own problem, looked at in this new and brutal light, was simple failure of nerve. If he had somehow found the courage to continue writing, even if each page had been rejected by each publisher it was submitted to, he’d still be able to look himself in the eye and know he was a poet. There was nothing stopping him from picking up his pen again except Earth’s easily-resisted field of gravity.
This could be the night that Ben turned it all around. All that he had to do was walk across and sit down at his writing desk and actually produce something. Who knows? It might turn out to be the piece that would secure Ben’s reputation. Or if not, if his abilities with verse seemed flat and clumsy with disuse, it might be his first faltering step back to the path he’d wandered from, into this bitter-sodden and immobilising bog. Tonight might be his chance to mend himself. The stark thought struck him that tonight might be his last chance.
If he didn’t do it now, if he came up with some excuse about it being better to approach it in the morning when his head was fresher, then it seemed quite likely that he’d never do it. He’d keep finding reasons to put all his poetry aside until it was too late and life called time on him, until he ended up as a statistic at the top of Grafton Street with an indifferent police constable complaining that Ben’s death had messed up his night off. Benedict had to do it right now, right this moment.
He got up and stumbled over to the writing desk, tripping upon his dangling laces on the way. He sat down and pulled out his notebook from a rear shelf of the bureau, pausing to ashamedly wipe thick dust from the cover with his palm before he opened it to a clean sheet. He picked the ballpoint pen that looked most viable out of the jam jar standing on the desk’s top ledge, removed its cap and poised the sticky, furry ball of indigo above the naked vellum. He sat there like that a good ten minutes, coming to the agonizing realisation that he couldn’t think of anything to say.
Six things, then, that Ben Perrit was completely useless at: escape, finding a job, explaining himself properly, not looking pissed, talking to girls and writing poetry.
No. No, that wasn’t true. That was just giving up again, maybe for good. He was determined to write something, even if it was a haiku, even if it was a line or just a phrase. He searched his cloudy memory of the uneventful day that he’d just had for inspiration and was startled by how many images and idle notions drifted back to him. The workhouse, Clare’s asylum, Malcolm Arnold and the mermaid girl, clover motifs worked artfully into the head of foam upon Ben’s dark and swirling consciousness. He thought about the aching crack of Freeschool Street and the drowned continent, the landscape that was gone. He thought about just packing all this drunken nonsense in and getting into bed.
Off in the blackness there were sirens, techno thumps, bear-baiting cheers. His right hand trembled, inches from the snow-blind, empty page.
** <strong>DO AS YOU DARN WELL PLEASEY</strong>
<strong>I</strong>nside him, underneath the white cake-icing of his hair, there were bordello churches where through one door surged the wide Atlantic and in through another came a tumbling circus funfair burst of clowns and tigers, girls with plumes and lovely lettering on the rides, a shimmering flood of sounds and images, of lightning chalk impressions dashed off by a feverish saloon caricaturist, melodrama vignettes fierce with meaning acted out beyond his eyelids’ plush pink safety curtain, all the world with all its shining marble hours, its lichen centuries and fanny-sucking moments all at once, his every waking second constantly exploded to a thousand years of incident and fanfare, an eternal conflagration of the senses where stood Snowy Vernall, wide-eyed and unflinching at the bright carnival heart of his own endless fire.
Within the much pored-over, fondly re-examined picture book that was his life, the narrative had reached a page, an instant, an absorbing incident which, even as he was experiencing it, he knew he had experienced before. When other people spoke about their rare, unsettling spells of déjà vu he’d frown and feel that he was missing something, not because he’d never known such feelings, but because he’d never known anything else. He’d not cried over cut knees as a child because he’d been almost expecting them. He hadn’t wept the day his father Ernest was brought home from where he worked with all his hair turned white. Though it had been a shocking scene, it had been one out of a favourite story, heard so many times that its power to surprise was gone. Existence was for Snowy an arcade carved from a single frozen jewel, a thrilling ghost-train wander past beloved dioramas and familiar sideshow frights, the glitter of the distant exit door’s lamps clearly visible from his first step across the threshold.
The specific episode that he was now involved in was the famous sequence that found Snowy standing on a roof high over Lambeth Walk on a loud, radiant morning in the March of 1889 while his Louisa gave birth to their first child in the gutters far below. They’d been out walking in St. James’s Park in an attempt to hurry up the big event with exercise, the baby being some days late and his wife tearful and exhausted from the weight that she’d been carrying so long. The ploy had worked too well, Louisa’s waters breaking by the lakeside with the sudden spatter startling the ducks into a momentary sculpture, a fanned blur of brown and grey and white that spiralled up to make a shape half helter-skelter, half pagoda, beaded diamond droplets paused about it in a fleeting constellation. They’d attempted to get back to East Street with a hurried hobble down the length of Millbank, over Lambeth Bridge and into Paradise Street, but they’d only got as far as Lambeth Walk before there were contractions every other step and it became clear that they wouldn’t make it. Well, of course they wouldn’t make it. The chaotic childbirth onto the South London cobbles couldn’t be avoided; was embedded in the future. Getting home to East Street without incident was not a verse in his already-carven legend. Shinning up the nearest sheer wall when the baby’s crown engaged, leaving Louisa screaming at the centre of a gathering clot of gawpers, on the other hand, that was amongst the saga’s many memorable highlights and was bound to happen. Snowy could no more prevent himself from climbing up an unseen ladder made of cracks and tiny ledges to the blue slate rooftops than he could prevent the sun from rising in the east tomorrow morning.
He stood straddling the ridge now like a chiselled Atlas with the double chimney breast behind him, balancing the huge glass globe of luminous and milky sky upon his shoulders. His black jacket with its worn sheen hung plumb-straight around him even in the March breeze, weighted by the heavy crystal doorknobs that he had in either pocket, picked up earlier that morning as requirements for a decorating job the Tuesday following. Down in the street below the dark-clad passers-by clustered into an anxious, bustling circle round his splayed and howling wife, moving in sudden and erratic bursts, like houseflies. She sprawled there upon the chilly pavement with her crimson face tipped back, staring up angry and incredulous into her husband’s eyes as he looked down at her from three storeys above, indifferent as a roosting eagle.
Even with Louisa’s features shrunken by the distance to a flake of pink confetti, Snowy thought that he could still read all the various conflicting feelings written there, with one impassioned outburst scribbled over quickly and eradicated by the next. There was incomprehension, wrath, betrayal, loathing, disbelief, and underlying these there was a love that stood and shivered at the brink of awe. She’d never leave him, not through all the ruinous whims, the terrifying rages, the unfathomable stunts and other women that he knew were waiting down the way. He knew that he would frighten her, bewilder her and hurt her feelings many, many times across the decades still to come, although he didn’t want to. It was just that certain things were going to happen and there was no getting out of them, not for Louisa, not for Snowy, not for anyone. Louisa didn’t know exactly what her husband was, though nor did he himself, but she had seen enough to know whatever he might be, he was a curiosity that didn’t happen very often in the normal human run of things, and that she’d never in her lifetime see another like him. She had married a heraldic beast, a chimera drawn from no recognisable mythology, a creature without limits that could run up walls, could draw and paint and was regarded as one of the finest craftsmen in his trade. Despite the fact that there’d be times when Snowy’s monstrous aspect made it so that she could not bear to set eyes on him, she’d never break the spell and look away.
John Vernall lifted up his head, the milk locks that had given him his nickname stirring in the third floor winds, and stared with pale grey eyes out over Lambeth, over London. Snowy’s dad had once explained to him and his young sister Thursa how by altering one’s altitude, one’s level on the upright axis of this seemingly three-planed existence, it was possible to catch a glimpse of the elusive fourth plane, the fourth axis, which was time. Or was at any rate, at least in Snowy’s understanding of their father’s Bedlam lectures, what most people saw as time from the perspective of a world impermanent and fragile, vanished into nothingness and made anew from nothing with each passing instant, all its substance disappeared into a past that was invisible from their new angle and which thus appeared no longer to be there. For the majority of people, Snowy realised, the previous hour was gone forever and the next did not exist yet. They were trapped in their thin, moving pane of Now: a filmy membrane that might fatally disintegrate at any moment, stretched between two dreadful absences. This view of life and being as frail, flimsy things that were soon ended did not match in any way with Snowy Vernall’s own, especially not from a glorious vantage like his current one, mucky nativity below and only reefs of hurtling cloud above.
His increased elevation had proportionately shrunken and reduced the landscape, squashing down the buildings so that if he were by some means to rise higher still, he knew that all the houses, churches and hotels would be eventually compressed in only two dimensions, flattened to a street map or a plan, a smouldering mosaic where the roads and lanes were cobbled silver lines binding factory-black ceramic chips in a Miltonic tableau. From the roof-ridge where he perched, soles angled inwards gripping the damp tiles, the rolling Thames was motionless, a seam of iron amongst the city’s dusty strata. He could see from here a river, not just shifting liquid in a stupefying volume. He could see the watercourse’s history bound in its form, its snaking path of least resistance through a valley made by the collapse of a great chalk fault somewhere to the south behind him, white scarps crashing in white billows a few hundred feet uphill and a few million years ago. The bulge of Waterloo, off to his north, was simply where the slide of rock and mud had stopped and hardened, mammoth-trodden to a pasture where a thousand chimneys had eventually blossomed, tarry-throated tubeworms gathering around the warm miasma of the railway station. Snowy saw the thumbprint of a giant mathematic power, untold generations caught up in the magnet-pattern of its loops and whorls.
On the loose-shoelace stream’s far side was banked the scorched metropolis, its edifices rising floor by floor into a different kind of time, the more enduring continuity of architecture, markedly distinct from the clock-governed scurry of humanity occurring on the ground. In London’s variously styled and weathered spires or bridges there were interrupted conversations with the dead, with Trinovantes, Romans, Saxons, Normans, their forgotten and obscure agendas told in stone. In celebrated landmarks Snowy heard the lonely, self-infatuated monologues of kings and queens, fraught with anxieties concerning their significance, lives squandered in pursuit of legacy, an optical illusion of the temporary world which they inhabited. The avenues and monuments he overlooked were barricades against oblivion, ornate breastwork flung up to defer a future in which both the glorious structures and the memories of those who’d founded them did not exist.
It made him laugh, although not literally. Where did they think that everything, including them, was going to go? Snowy was only twenty-six at this point in the span of him, and he supposed that there were those who’d say he hadn’t yet seen much of life, but even so he knew that life was a spectacular construction, more secure than people generally thought, and that it would be harder getting out of their existence than they probably imagined. Human beings ended up arranging their priorities without being aware of the whole story, the whole picture. Cenotaphs would turn out to be less important than the sunny days missed in their making. Things of beauty, Snowy knew, should be wrought purely for their own sake and not made into elaborate headstones stating only that somebody was once here. Not when no one was going anywhere.
Across a tugboat-hooter’s reach of river the unblinking birdman smiled at his miraculous domain, while from below Louisa’s shrieks were punctuated intermittently with snatched-breath cries of “Snowy Vernall, you’re a cunt, a little fucking cunt!” He looked out over Westminster, Victoria and Knightsbridge to the sprawl of blurring burr-green that he knew to be Hyde Park, where there was represented still another aspect of unfolding time, embodied in the shapes of trees. The planes and poplars barely moved at all in their relationship to those three axes of the world that were immediately apparent, but the record of their progress in relation to the hidden fourth was frozen in their form. The height and thickness of their boughs were to be measured not in inches but in years. Moss-stippled forks were moments of unreached decision that had been made solid, twigs were but protracted whims, and deep within some of the thick trunks Snowy knew that there were arrowheads and musket-balls concealed, fired through the bark into the past, lodged in an earlier period, an earlier ring, entombed forever in the wood-grain of eternity as all things ultimately were.
If Mr. Darwin were to be believed, then it was from the timeless dapple of the forest’s canopy that men had first descended, and it was the forest’s roots that drank men’s bodies when they died, returned their vital salts back to the prehistoric treetops in gold elevator cages made of sap. The parks, their Eden swathes of olive drab amongst the tweedy tooth of residential rows, were outposts of an emerald aeon, pools of wilderness left stranded by a swaying ocean now receded that would one day foam again across the urban beachhead, silencing its trams and barrel-organs under rustling hush. He flared his nostrils, trying to catch the scent of half a million years from now above the present’s foundry reek. With all of London’s people gone, erased by some as-yet-unborn Napoleon, Snowy imagined that the buddleia would swiftly prove itself to be the city’s most enduring conqueror. From whispering marble banks and ruptured middens perfumed bushes would burst forth with friable white tongues of flower, where Julius Agricola had raised but a few fluttering standards, and Queen Boadicea naught but flames.
The heavy brothel sweetness would lure butterflies in watercolour blizzards, parakeets escaped from zoos to eat the butterflies and jaguars to eat the parakeets. The rarities and gorgeous monsters of Kew Gardens would break loose and overrun the abdicated town to its horizons, eucalyptus pillars railing off the shattered boulevards and palaces surrendered to colossal ferns. The world would end as it began, as beatific arbour, and if any family crests or luminary busts or graven names of institutions were yet visible between the droning hives and honeysuckle, they would be by then wiped clean of any meaning. Meaning was a candlelight in everything that lurched and shifted in the circumstantial breezes of each instant, never twice the same. Significance was a phenomenon of Now that could not be contained inside an urn or monolith. It was a hurricane entirely of the present, an unending swirl of boiling change, and as he stood there gazing out towards the city’s rim, across the granite fields of time towards the calendar’s far tattered edges, Snowy Vernall was a storm-rod, crackling and exultant, at the cyclone’s dangerous and brilliant eye.
From fifty feet beneath, Louisa’s gush of alternating anguished bellows and incensed tirade came floating up to him, a commonplace but awesome human music, where the full brass notes of torment seemed now more insistent and more frequent, dominating the arrangement, drowning out the piccolo abuse, the effing and the blinding. Looking down he noticed an impromptu band convened about his wife, providing an accompaniment of soft and sympathetic strings for her, a rumbling kettle drum of disapproval for her husband straddling the roof above them as they cooed and booed the pair in strict rotation. None of them appeared to be of any more practical use to the distressed and labouring woman than Snowy himself would be, even if he were still down there on the pavement at her side. The milling bystanders were an unpractised orchestra in a continual state of tuning up, their muttered scorn and soothing ululations striving painfully to reach some sort of harmony, their wheezing discords drifting off down Paradise Street, off down Union Street to join the background cymbal-roll of Lambeth, building gradually across the ages as if to some clarion announcement, rattling hooves and drunkards’ songs and rag-and-bone men’s lilting calls combined into a swell of everlasting prelude.
Like a hurried stage-assistant, the brisk wind wound on the painted cumulus above, and from the angle of the daylight’s sudden downpour Snowy judged it to be not far off midday, the sun high overhead and climbing with increasing confidence up the last few blue steps to noon. He let his leisurely crow’s-nest attentions wander from the well-attended birth throes of his child below and out into the intestinal tangle of surrounding alleyways, where dogs and people wrapped up in their own experience went back and forth, threads of event that shuttled on the district’s loom, either unravelling from one knot of potential circumstance or else unwittingly converging on the next. Across the Lambeth Road, just visible above some low-roofed buildings to his right, a pretty, well-dressed pregnant woman was emerging from Hercules Road to cross the street between the plodding drays and weaving bicycles. A little nearer to him several boys of twelve or so were batting at each other with their caps, play-fighting as they made their way unhurriedly along the grimy seam of a rear-entry passage, cutting through between the smoking housetops and the nappy-flagged back yards from Newport Street. Snowy’s eyes narrowed, and he nodded. All the clockwork of the minute was in order.
Judging from the light and from Louisa’s escalating uproar he appeared to have another thirty minutes of just standing here, and so allowed his senses to resume once more their phosphorous evaluation of the city. London spun about him like a fairground novelty with Snowy as the ride’s attendant, standing balanced there amongst the painted thunderbolts and comets of its central pivot. Turning his head to the northeast, Snowy looked out over Lambeth, Southwark and the river to St. Paul’s, its bald white dome that of a slumbering divinity professor, all unmindful of its misbehaving charges, sinning everywhere about it as it drowsed and nodded. It was while employed restoring frescoes on the dome’s interior that Snowy’s father Ernest Vernall had been bleached by madness, near two dozen years before.
Snowy and sister Thursa went to Bethlehem Asylum when they visited their dad, which wasn’t often. Snowy didn’t like to think of it as Bedlam. Sometimes they’d take Ernest’s other children with them, Appelina and young Mess, but with their father being put away when those two were still small, they’d never really got to know him. Not that anyone, even their mother Anne, had ever known Ern Vernall through and through, but John and Thursa were still somehow close to him, particularly after he’d become insane. With little Messenger and Appelina there was never that communication, and their visits to the stranger in the madhouse only frightened them. When they’d grown older and were more robust sometimes they would accompany Snowy and Thursa, although only from a sense of duty. Snowy didn’t blame his brother or his youngest sister. The asylum was a horror, full of piss and shit and screams and laughter; men who’d been disfigured with a spoon during their dinners by the person sitting next to them. If he and Thursa hadn’t been so caught up in the rambling lectures that their father saved exclusively for them, they’d never have gone near the place themselves.
Their dad had talked to them about religion and geometry, acoustics and the true shape of the universe, about the multitude of things that he had learned while touching up the frescoes of St. Paul’s during a thunderstorm, one morning long ago in 1865. He told them what had happened to him on that day, as well as he was able, with admonishments that they should never tell their mother or another living soul about Ern Vernall’s holy vision, that had cost his mind and all the hot bronze colour in his hair. He told them he’d been by himself up on his platform a great distance over the cathedral floor, mixing his tempera and getting ready to begin his work when he’d become aware that there was now an angle in the wall. That was the way he’d said it, and his children had eventually come to understand that the expression had at least two meanings, an example of the word games and invented terms that peppered Ernest’s conversation since his mental breakdown. Firstly it meant just what it appeared to mean, that Ernest had discovered a new angle that was somehow <em>in</em> the wall and not in the relationship between its surfaces. A second, more obscure interpretation of the term related it specifically to England and its ancient past, when “Angles” were the people of a tribe that had invaded England, giving it its name, after the Romans left. This second meaning had connected to it by association a quote from Pope Gregory … “Non Angli, sed Angeli” … uttered while inspecting English prisoners in Rome, a punning play on words that led Ern’s eldest children to a gradual realisation of just what their father had encountered in the upper reaches of St. Paul’s on that eventful day.
His father’s lunatic account, even the memory of it now as Snowy stood there over Lambeth Walk and his poor wailing wife, conjured the smell of cold cathedral stone, of powder paint, of pinion feathers singed by lightning and Saint Elmo’s Fire. The marvellous thing had slipped and slid around the dome’s interior, as Ernest told the story to his offspring in the bowels of Lambeth’s infamous asylum. It had spoken to their dad in phrases more astonishing than even the extraordinary countenance that was intoning them, its voice reverberating endlessly, resounding in a type of space or at a kind of distance that their father was not able to describe. This, Snowy thought, had been the detail that had most impressed his sister Thursa, who was musically inclined and whose imagination had seized instantly on the idea of resonance and echo with an extra fold, with new heights and unfathomable depths. John Vernall, with his own red hair already turning white by his tenth birthday, had been more intrigued by Ernest’s new conception of mathematics, with its wonderful and terrifying implications.
In the street below the clutch of boys had now emerged out of their alley in a shunting, shouting shove and flooded onto Lambeth Walk. Attracted by the furiously inactive crowd around Louisa they had wandered over to stand goggling and jeering at its margins, clearly desperate for a glimpse of quim and never mind the bloody grey corpse-football that was threatening to burst out of it. The twelve-year-olds catcalled excitedly and tried to get a better view by capering this way and that behind the adult bystanders, who were all studiously pretending that they couldn’t hear the ignorant and vulgar banter.
“Gor, look at the split on that! It looks like Jack the Ripper’s done another one.”
“Gor, so ’e ’as! Right in the cunt! It must ’ave been a lucky blow!”
“You dirty, worthless little beggars. Why, what sort of parents must you have, to bring you up like this? Would they think it was brave of you to bray and swear like sons of whores, around a woman in more pain than you have ever known or ever will do? Answer me!”
This last remark, delivered in authoritative cut-glass tones, came from the well turned-out and heavily expectant woman Snowy had seen coming from Hercules Road, crossing the Lambeth Road and, by an indirect route along alleys, entering Lambeth Walk only a pace or two behind the group of rowdy lads. Strikingly pretty, with a bound-up bundle of black hair and a dark, flashing gaze, everything from her costly-looking clothing to her bearing and enunciation marked her as a gal from the theatrical professions, her arresting manner that of one who brooked no hecklers in the audience. Shuffling round to face her both bewildered and surprised, the boys seemed daunted, looking sidelong at each other as if trying to establish without speaking what gang policy might be in novel situations such as this. Their stickleback eyes darted back and forth around the nibbled edges of the moment without lighting on a resolution. From his high perspective, Snowy thought they might be Elephant Boys from up Elephant and Castle, who, between them, were quite capable of meting out a thumping or a knifing, even to a constable or sailor.
This diminutive and therefore even more conspicuously pregnant woman, though, appeared to represent a challenge against which the louts could muster no defence, or at least not without an unrecoverable loss of face. They looked aside, disowned themselves and their own presence there on Lambeth Walk, beginning to drift silently away down various side-streets, separate strands of a dispersing fog. Louisa’s saviour, actress or variety performer or whomever she might be, stood watching them depart with deadpan satisfaction, head cocked to one side and slim arms folded on the insurmountable defensive barricade of her distended belly, thrusting out before her like a backwards bustle. Reassured that the young miscreants would not be coming back, she next turned her attentions on the loose assortment of spectators gathered round the pavement birth, who’d witnessed all of the foregoing whilst stood in a shamed and ineffectual silence.
“As for you lot, why on Earth are you all standing round that poor girl if there’s none of you prepared to help her? Hasn’t anybody knocked upon a door to ask for blankets and hot water? Here, come on and let me through.”
Abashed, the gathering parted and allowed her to approach Louisa, gasping and spread-eagled there amongst the cigarette-ends and the sweepings. One of the admonished onlookers elected to take up the newcomer’s suggestion of appealing for hot water, towels and other birth accoutrements at doorsteps up and down the street, while she herself stooped by Louisa’s side as best as she was able given her own cumbersome condition. Wincing with discomfort, she reached out and brushed sweat-varnished strands of lank hair from the panting woman’s forehead as she spoke to her.
“Let’s hope this doesn’t set me off as well, or we shall have a right to-do. Now, what’s your name, dear, and however have you come to be in this predicament?”
Between gasps, Snowy’s wife responded that she was Louisa Vernall and had been attempting to get home to Lollard Street when the birth process had begun. The rescuer made two or three tight little nods as a response, her fine-boned features thoughtful.
“And where is your husband?”
Since this question coincided with her next contraction, poor Louisa was unable to reply except by lifting one damp, trembling hand to point accusingly towards the sky directly overhead. At first interpreting the gesture as a signal that Louisa was a widow with a husband now in heaven, the expectant Good Samaritan eventually cottoned on and raised her own dark, long-lashed eyes in the direction that the moaning girl was indicating. Standing straddling the roof-ridge, statue-still above the scene save for the blizzard flurry of his hair, even his jacket hanging oddly motionless in a stiff breeze, John Vernall might have been a whitewashed weathervane to judge from the expression that was in his face as he returned the woman’s startled gaze with one that was unflinching and incurious. She stared him out for only a few moments before giving up and turning back to speak to his distressed young wife, thrashing and breathing like a landed fish there on the paving stones beside the crouching would-be midwife.
“I see. Is he mad?”
This was delivered as a straightforward enquiry, without condemnation. Snowy’s wife, then resting in a too-brief trough between the waves of pain, nodded despairingly while mumbling her affirmation.
“Yes, ma’am. I fear very much he is.”
The woman sniffed.
“Poor man. The same could happen, I suppose, to any one of us. However, I propose that for the moment we forget him and attend to you instead. Now, let’s see how we’re getting on.”
With this she shifted to a kneeling posture so that she might minister with greater comfort to her more immediately needy sister in maternity. By now the fellow who’d gone door-to-door in search of blankets and warm water had returned bearing between both hands a steaming wide enamel bowl, towels draped across one arm as if he were a waiter at a posh hotel. Despite the greater frequency of poor Louisa’s screams the situation seemed to be under control, although of course in actuality it never had been any other. Just as John had known it would do, everything was happening in time. Smiling at his own unintended wordplay, no doubt picked up from his father, Snowy tilted back his head and reappraised the sky. More threadbare bed-sheet clouds had been snatched up in haste and dragged halfway across the naked sun, which, judging from such flinching and contracted shadows as remained, was now precisely at its zenith. There was a good twenty minutes left before his daughter would be born. They’d name her May, after Louisa’s mum.
He was the snow-capped pole of Lambeth and the borough whirled beneath his feet. Up to the north, beyond the chimneypots, was sooty Waterloo. Down on his left and to the south, he thought, was Mary’s Church, or St. Mary’s-in-Lambeth as it was more properly called, where Captain William Bligh and both the flora-cataloguing Tradescants were buried, while due west in front of him stood Lambeth Palace. Not far to the east, of course, not far enough for him at any rate, was Bedlam.
He’d not seen the place in seven years, not since he was a lad of nineteen with their Thursa two years younger, which was when his father Ern had finally passed away. There’d been a notifying letter come from the asylum, at which he and Thursa had made the short journey up the road to see their parent prior to burial. A trip of at the most ten minutes’ walk, it had become apparently more lengthy and more difficult to make with every passing year, dwindling from a monthly to an annual occurrence, usually at Christmas, which for Snowy ever since had seemed a dreadful season.
That wet afternoon in the July of 1882 had been the first time Snowy or his sister had seen someone dead, this being some few years before their father’s mum, their grandmother, had gone as well. The two unusually quiet and dry-eyed youngsters had been shown through to a rear shed where the corpses were laid out, a cold and overcast place in which Ernie Vernall’s alabaster body seemed almost the only source of light. Face upward on a slab of pale fishmonger’s marble with his eyes still open, John and Thursa’s dad had the expression of a military recruit stood to attention on some ultimate parade ground: carefully neutral, focussed resolutely on the distance, trying hard not to attract the scrutiny of an inspecting officer. His blanched skin, now a hard and chill veneer beneath John’s cautiously exploring fingertips, had turned the colour of his hair, had turned the colour of the sheet with sculpted, dropping folds that covered the nude form to just above its navel. They could no longer determine, quite, the point at which their father’s whiteness finished and that of the mortuary plinth supporting him began. His death had chiselled, sanded down and polished him, transformed him to a stark and beautiful relief.
This was their father’s end. Both of them understood that, though not in the same sense that most other people would have done, with ‘end’ as a mere synonym for death. To John and Thursa, tutored by the late Ern Vernall, it was no more than a geometric term, as when one talked about the ends of lines or streets or tables. Side by side they’d looked in awe on his arresting stillness, knowing that, for the first time, they saw the structure of a human life end-on. It had been wholly different from the side-on view one usually had of people while they were alive, while they were still caught up in the extension and apparent movement of their selves through time, along Creation’s hidden axis. Snowy and his sister stood regarding their dead father, both aware that they were gazing down the marvellous and fearful bore of the eternal. Thursa had begun to hum, a fragile little air of her own slapdash and impromptu composition, rising strings of notes left hanging with unnaturally long intervals, during which Snowy knew his sister heard an intricate cascade of subdivided echo filling in the gaps. He’d cocked his head and concentrated until he could hear the same thing she did and then taken Thursa’s warm, damp hand, the two of them together in the morgue-hut’s whispery pall and thrilling to an implied music that was both magnificent and bottomless.
As Snowy thought about it now, high in the eaves of Lambeth, he and Thursa always had been differently disposed towards the worldview that their father had impressed upon them. For his own part, Snowy had elected to immerse himself entirely in the storm of the experience, to plunge into this new exploded life the way that, as a child, he’d plunged unhesitatingly into the iron-green wall of each oncoming wave upon the yellow shore at Margate. Every moment of him was a roaring gold infinity with Snowy spinning giddy and resplendent at its whirlpool heart, beyond death and past reason.
Thursa on the other hand, as she’d confessed to him not long after their dad’s demise, saw in her brother’s glorious tempest a devouring force that could mean only the disintegration of her more frail personality. Instead she’d chosen to block out the broader implications of Ern Vernall’s madhouse lessons and to fix all her attention on one narrow strand, this being how her father’s new conception of geometry applied to sound and its transmission. She had trained herself to hear a single voice in the arrangement rather than risk being swallowed by the fugue of being in which Snowy was consumed. She hung on to herself for dear life, clinging tightly to the mooring of her piano accordion, a scuff-marked veteran beast of fawn and tan which Thursa carried with her everywhere. At present both she and her skirling instrument were lodged with relatives at Fort Street in Northampton, while her eldest brother wore a pendulum track between there and Lambeth, hiking three score miles and back from one location to the other.
Down below the woman with the stagy accent urged Louisa to push harder. Snowy’s wife, her thick limbs and broad features glistening with perspiration, only bellowed.
“I am fucking pushing, don’t tell me to fucking push! Oh no, I’m sorry. Please, I’m sorry. I don’t mean it. I don’t mean it.”
He adored Louisa, loved her with his every fibre, with each strange and convoluted thought that passed, like party streamers in a gale, through Snowy’s frost-crowned head. He loved her kindness, loved the thick-set look of her, at once as plain and pleasing to the eye as fresh-baked bread. Her mass of personality ensured that his wife was a creature of the earth, one grounded in the solid world of streets and bills and childbirth, of her body and biology. She did not care at all for spires or sky or the precarious, preferring hearth and walls and ceiling to her husband’s altitudes, the steeplejack obsessions he’d inherited from his late father. She cleaved to the gravity that Snowy knew he’d spend the whole of his unusual existence trying to overcome, and doing so became his counterweight, a vital anchor that prevented him from bowling off into the heavens like a lost kite.
In return, Louisa could enjoy the more remote and somewhat safer thrills of the kite-handler, watching heart in mouth or cheering with delight as he negotiated each fresh updraft, shivering and squinting sympathetically in the imagined gust and glare. He knew that fifty years from now, after his death, she’d hardly venture out of doors again, shunning a firmament into which, by that time, her painted paper dragon would have long since blown away and left her only with a memory of the wind that tugged with such insistence on his string, an elemental force that would at last have won its battle and pulled Snowy Vernall from her empty, reaching fingers.
That, of course, was all in the now-then, while down beneath him in the now-now he could hear, behind Louisa’s screams and the bystanders’ muffled mutter, the low storm-front rumble of his daughter’s coming life as it approached this worldly station. Snowy thought about the cross of whispered rumours that his child would always carry with her, all the talk of madness in the family like something from a gothic novel. First her great-grandfather John, who Snowy had been named for, then poor Ern, the grandfather that she would never know, both locked away in Bedlam. Snowy knew that such was not to be his fate, but that his reputation as a madman would be none the less for this, and neither would the heavy legacy his soon-born daughter should be made to carry. Looking down towards the square of paving where his and Louisa’s baby would be shortly making her appearance, he recalled the eerie splendour that had spoken to his father in St. Paul’s Cathedral all those years ago; the words with which, according to Ern Vernall, that extraordinary conversation had commenced. Snowy was smiling with amusement and yet felt the hot tears pricking in his eyes as he repeated the phrase softly to himself, while overlooking all the furious activity in Lambeth Walk below.
“This will be very hard for you.”
He meant his child, his wife, himself, meant everyone who’d ever struggled from the womb to somewhere that was brighter, colder, dirtier and not so loving in its ways. This, THIS, this place, this eddy in the soup of history, this would be very hard for all of them. You didn’t need an angel to come down and tell you that. It would be hard for everybody else because they lived within a moving world of death, bereavement and impermanence, a world of constant seeming change that bubbled with machine-guns, with the motor-driven carriages that he’d heard talk of, with smudged paintings, smutty books, new things of all kinds all the time. It would be hard for Snowy because he lived in a world where everything was there forever, never ended, never altered. He lived in the world as the world truly was, as his late father had explained it to him. As a consequence of this he had become, despite his various acknowledged skills, both lunatic and unemployable. He had become the kind of man who stands about on rooftops with glass doorknobs in his pockets.
Even given this, on balance Snowy felt that he was blessed rather than blighted. There was no point feeling differently, not in a world where every instant, every feeling carried on forever. He would sooner live a life of endless blessing than one of undying curse, and after all, it was in how you chose to see things that the narrow border between Hell and Paradise was traced. Though his condition, part inherited and part acquired, had many drawbacks in material terms these were outnumbered by the almost unimaginable benefits. He was entirely without fear, able to scale sheer walls without regard for life or limb, simply because he knew that he was not destined to perish in a fall. His death would come in a long corridor of rooms, like the compartments on a railway train, and Snowy’s mouth would be crammed full of colours. He had no idea yet why this would be so, but only that it would be. Until then, he could take risks without anxiety. He could do anything he pleased.
This freedom was at once the aspect of his state that he valued most highly, and its greatest contradiction. He was free to do the most outrageous things only because these actions were already fixed in what to others was the future, and because he had to. When he looked at it objectively, he saw that the real measure of his freedom was that he was free of the illusion of free will. He was unburdened by the comforting mirage that other men took faith in, the delusion that allowed them to take walks or beat their wives or tie their shoes, apparently whenever they should wish, as if they had a choice. As if they and their lives were not the smallest and most abstract brushstroke, a pointillist dab fixed and unmoving in time’s varnish, there eternally on an immeasurable canvas, part of a design too vast for its component marks to ever glimpse or comprehend. The terror and the glory of John Vernall’s situation was that of a pigment smear made suddenly aware of its position at the corner of a masterpiece, a dot that knows that it is held in place forever on the painted surface, that it’s never going anywhere, and yet exults: “How dreadful and how fabulous!” He knew himself, knew what he was and knew that this advantaged him in certain ways above his fellow squiggles in the picture, who were not so conscious of their true predicament, its majesty, nor of its many possibilities.
Magical powers were his, besides the fearlessness that lifted him amongst the slate slopes of the skyline. He could easily accomplish an unbearably long walk, or any other lengthy undertaking for that matter, by the application of techniques learned from his father. Ernest had explained to him and Thursa how there was a way of folding our experience of space as easily as we might fold a map to join two distant points together, say the Boroughs of Northampton and the streets of Lambeth. These two places were in fact unusually easy to bring into close proximity, due to the numerous others who had made the trip before and, doing so, had worked the fold into a worn and whitened crease. Snowy exploited it whenever he was called upon to travel between Thursa in the Boroughs and his mum’s in Lambeth with young Messenger and Appelina. All he had to do was set off on his journey and then, as his dad had taught him, lift into a different sort of thinking that moved like the passage of events in dreams, outside the realm of minutes, hours and days. Time then would settle easily into this old, familiar wrinkle and the next thing Snowy knew he’d be arriving at his destination, having sore feet but without fatigue, without the memory of a moment’s boredom and, indeed, without a memory of any kind at all. As Ernest had expressed it to his children, it was easier when travelling to move one’s consciousness along the axis of duration rather than the one of distance, though your boot-heels would wear down as quickly either way.
Nor was this all of Snowy’s learned abilities. He knew the future, cloudily, not in a sense of prophecy but more in that he recognised the future when he saw it, knew how things would work out in the instant that he came upon them, as with scenes found written in a book embarked upon without recalling that it has been read before, in some forgotten summer, where there comes a tantalizing premonition of what waits beyond the next turned page.
He also had the trick of seeing ghosts. He saw the ordinary sort that were the spirits of past buildings and events embedded in the unseen temporal axis, spectral structures and scenarios which other people thought of as their memories. He furthermore had been a witness to the rarer but more famous kind of wraiths that were the restless dead: pained souls who shirked the repetition of their painful lives and yet who felt unready or unwilling to move on to any further state of being. He would sometimes apprehend them in the corner of his eye, smoke-coloured shapes endlessly circling their old neighbourhoods in search of ghostly conversations, ghostly ruts, in search of ghost-food. Just a year ago he’d seen the shade of Mr. Dadd, the fairy-painter who’d gone mad and murdered his own father. Dadd had died himself early in 1886 at Broadmoor Hospital, an institution for the criminally insane. On the occasion Snowy saw the artist’s phantom form it stood, looking regretful, at the gates of Bedlam wherein Dadd had previously been incarcerated. Snowy had observed the faint peripheral blur while it plucked something similarly indistinct from the asylum’s worn stone gatepost and proceeded, seemingly, to eat it. The dead painter, from the vague suggestion of his posture and demeanour, had appeared to be not so possessed nor so maniacal as when in life, but rather now clear-sighted and suffused by a profound remorse. The doleful apparition had persisted for some several seconds, glumly chewing its mysterious findings while it stared at the bleak edifice, then melted to a patch of damp discoloured brickwork on the madhouse wall.
The artist William Blake, who’d lived up Hercules Road getting on a century ago, had also seen and spoken with the creatures of the other world, with the deceased, with angels, devils, with the poet Milton who had entered like a current through the sole of Blake’s left foot. The Lambeth visionary’s notions of a fourfold and eternal city seemed at times so close to Snowy’s own view, right down to the exact number of its folds, that he had wondered if there were some quality in Lambeth that encouraged such perceptions. There may be, he’d often thought, some aspect of the district’s shape or placement when considered on more planes than three that made it most especially conducive to a certain attitude, to a unique perspective, though he knew that in his own case there had also been heredity as a prevailing influence. He was a Vernall, and his father Ern had taken pains that Snowy and his eldest sister should both know precisely what that meant.
“Nomen est omen”, that was how their dad had put it, an illiterate somehow quoting Latin proverbs. This had been the stated rationale, if such it might be called, behind the naming of his youngest children Messenger and Appelina, with one moniker suggestive of a herald angel and the other of our fallen mother Eve. Nomen est omen. The name is a sign. Ern had explained to John and Thursa that there was a place “upstairs” where what we thought of down here as our names turned out in many instances to be our job descriptions. Vernalls, as their father had defined the term, were those responsible for tending to the boundaries and corners, to the edges and the gutters. Though a lowly post in the ethereal hierarchies it was a necessary one that carried its own numinous authority. In Snowy’s understanding, by the odd linguistic laws of the superior plane that Ernest had referred to, Vernall was a word with connotations similar to “verger”, both in the old sense of one who tended verges and of one who bore the verge, or rod of office, as in the ecclesiastical tradition. But the language of “upstairs”, according to Ern Vernall, was a form of speech that were as though exploded, every phrase uncrumpling itself into a beautiful and complicated lacework of associations. Rods were wands of government and yet were also rulers made for measurement, which was presumably how rods of land beside a property were first called verges: grassy strips erupting into life with Spring, the vernal equinox, which also led back to the family name. This aspect of fertility was echoed in Old English, wherein the expression “verge” or “rod” was slang for what men kept inside their trousers, or at least thus was the etymology as passed on by their father, who could neither read nor write. In sum, a Vernall ministered to borderlines and limits, to the margins of the world and the unmowed peripheries of worldly reason. This, Ern had insisted, was why Vernalls tended to be raving mad and penniless.
As he looked down on the arrival of the latest baby to be thus afflicted, he allowed his consciousness of time to crystallise around the quarter-inch of the duration axis that the moment represented so that things slowed to a crawl, the progress of events barely perceptible. It was another talent or disease that he and Thursa had inherited, the means to charm the universe unto a standstill. “Pigeon eyes”, their dad had called this gift, without explaining why. The clouds were stopped and curdled in the sky’s blue juice, masking a sun that had moved on a little past its peak and was just fractionally behind him, its scant warmth upon his shoulders and the rear top of his head.
Below his parapet in Lambeth Walk the thoroughfare was now become a sculpture garden, all its mid-day rush and bustle rendered motionless. Litter and dust snatched up by the March breeze was frozen in its blustering ascent, suspended in the air at distinct intervals, so that the unseen currents of the wind were speckled with debris and thus made visible, a grand glass staircase sweeping up above the street. A pissing horse produced a necklace-string of weightless topaz, tiny golden crowns formed where the droplets were caught in the process of disintegrating on the slimy cobbles. The pedestrians who had been captured halfway through an action were now posed like dancers in outlandish ballets, balancing impossibly on one foot with their weight thrown forward in an uncompleted stride. Impatient children floated inches over hopscotch squares and waited for their interrupted jumps to finish. Young men’s neckerchiefs and women’s unpinned hair flew sideways in a sudden gust and stayed there, sticking out as stiff as wooden flags from railway signal-boxes.
Noise was also slowed, the chorus-voice of Lambeth Walk now born by sluggish waves as though through a more viscous medium, become a dark bass slur, an aural bog. The seamless clattering of hooves was turned to endlessly reverberating single anvil beats sounded at lengthy intervals by a fatigued and unenthusiastic blacksmith, while the rapid trills of indecipherable birdsong had a cadence reminiscent now of trivial and pleasant conversation between old boys playing dominoes. Street vendors’ cries from down on Prince’s Road creaked like ghost story doors that opened with excruciating languor on some fettered horror. Two dogs fighting down in Union Street mimicked a background rumble of industrial machinery, their barks extended to the snarl of buried engines, to a humming undertone of violence, a continuous vibration in the pavements that was seldom noticed, always there. Amidst it all there swelled the wavering soprano counterpoint of poor Louisa’s latest scream, drawn out into an aria. The pregnant midwife kneeling on the filthy street beside her had been halted halfway through a further exhortation for his wife to push, and was emitting a protracted minotaur-like bellowing that Snowy took to be a vowel inflated to the point of bursting.
Snowy’s wife seemed similarly puffed up and upon the brink of an explosion. Almost half the baby’s head was out, a bluish rupture greased with blood emerging from the stretched lips of Louisa’s privates, now impossibly distended to a painful circle, a pullover neck. A torus.
In the dreadful halls of Bedlam, Ernest Vernall had leaned in towards his children, his remaining clumps of hair unkempt and white as hedgerows on a drovers’ path. His voice descending into a dramatic whisper both conspiratorial and urgent, he’d impressed upon them the supreme importance of this previously unheard word, a term most usually employed in either architecture or solid geometry. A torus, as their father had explained it to them, was the rubber-tyre shape generated by the revolution of a conic disc around a circle drawn on an adjacent plane, or else the volume that would be contained by such a spatial movement. Tori, at least as their dad defined them, were the single most important forms in all the cosmos. All Earth’s living creatures that had more than one cell to their names essentially were tori, or at least they were when looked at from a topographical perspective; irregular tori with their mass arranged around the central holes provided by their alimentary canals. In its fixed orbit round the sun, if this should be considered without the illusion of progressing time, their world described a torus. So did all the other planets and their moons. The stars themselves, rotating with the swirling vortex of the galaxy, were tori of stupendous magnitude that had diameters one hundred million years across from side to side. Ernest had intimated that the glittering universe in its entirety revolved about a point in uncreated nothingness (although there were no means by which we might detect this motion, being relative to literally nothing), and that should both space and time be seen as one undifferentiated substance then the whole of God’s creation might be held to be toroidal.
This, apparently, was why the humble chimneypot was such a potent and unsettling configuration. This was at least partly why Ern Vernall’s eldest son spent so much of his time on rooftops, in amongst the reeking stacks: you had to keep your eye on them.
The chimneypot … essentially a stretched-out torus when considered topographically … was a materialisation of the form in its most dreadful and destructive aspect, was the great annihilating void that it contained made manifest, its central hole become a crematorium pipe up which things deemed no longer necessary to requirements might be easily disposed of; corpses, broken bedsteads and outdated newspapers belched as a foul miasma from these stone or terracotta death-mouths into an insulted sky. The blackened smokestacks thus served also as a social oubliette, as vents that whole swathes of the lower classes had been stuffed up, children first. They smouldered with the awful breath of nothing. The banked chimneypots that Snowy knew stood four abreast behind him on the ridge were fragile shells surrounding empty pits of that same non-existence men came out of and eventually went into, were a grim inversion of that other torus gaping currently between Louisa’s thighs that spilled out life where they spilled out its opposite.
Below, although the woman helping to deliver Snowy’s child had not yet reached the end of her command to push, being at present caught up in a windy rush of sibilants, the baby’s head was now emerged completely. Snowy’s wife had the appearance of those peg dolls you could buy that were reversible and had a head on each end at the junction of the limbs. As he stared down through the resplendent treacle of the moment at the half-born infant’s gory scalp, he understood that this perspective was a converse to the end-on view of their dead father that he and his sister had once shared in an asylum mortuary. This was life seen, for the first time in his own experience, from its other terminus. It was, if anything, an even lovelier and more terrible thing when looked at through this end of its breathtaking telescope.
He gazed along the long jewelled tube that was his daughter’s enviable mortal span, and saw how bright and beautiful the near roots of the coral structure were compared to the gnarled darkness at its distant further tip. He saw the furling sub-growths that were her own children, half a dozen of them budding forth and branching from her mother-stem about a quarter of the way along its length. All six of the gem-crusted offshoots had a handsome lustre that would make her proud of them, but when he saw the closest and thus first-born sprout, both its exquisite burnish and its brevity, he felt the heartbreak aching in his throat, saltwater burning in his eyes. So precious and so small. Now Snowy noticed that a later branch, the next to last, was also cut short some few decades sooner than his girl-child’s own demise, and wondered if these losses might account for the deep melancholic colouration he could make out at the human tunnel’s furthest end.
His daughter’s life reached more than eighty years into what most would call the future, but which he thought of as ‘over there’. The murky and discoloured far extremity of her lay in an England that to Snowy was unrecognisable, a place of blocks and cubes and glaring lights. She’d die alone upon the outskirts of Northampton in a monstrous house that seemed to be the whole street pressed into one building. He could see her face down in a too-bright hallway, jowly, liver spotted, features blackening with settled blood. She would be struggling to get to the front door and the fresh air, but the determined heart attack would get there before she did and would have her legs away from under her. His and Louisa’s gorgeous little girl. A bundle of old rags, that’s what she’d look like, dumped there in the passage inches from a doormat that was bare of letters, undiscovered for two days.
He couldn’t bear this. This was too much. Snowy had assumed that by surrendering to the mad splendour of his father’s theories he would be in some way made divine, made wise and strong enough to cope with his perceptions, would become immune to the assaults of ordinary feeling. It appeared that this was not the case. He now seemed to remember, as if from before, that this experience, standing on a roof and witnessing May’s gutter birth-throes with her lonely death already there, embedded, would turn out to be the first occasion where he’d truly understand the weighty rigours of a Vernall’s occupation. This appalling vista of a life foreshortened was simply the viewpoint from the corner, and he’d best become accustomed to it. After all, he was not in reality more gifted nor more cursed than any other man. Did people not speak often of how time would seem to slow for them when in a dangerous situation? Were there not accounts of premonitions, lucky guesses, the uncanny sense that things have happened just this way before? Wasn’t it true that everybody had these feelings but elected for the most part to ignore them, perhaps sensing where such notions might eventually lead? <em>Everyone knows the way there, hey there, hey there!</em> Surely all parents knew that in their child’s birth was its death also contained, but made inside themselves, perhaps unwitting, a decision not to look too deep into the marvellous and tragic well that Snowy was now gazing down.
He didn’t blame them. From the customary standpoint, birth must seem a capital offence with an unvaried sentence. It was only natural that people should attempt to dull their comprehension of so terrible a circumstance, if not with drink then with a comfortingly warm and woollen vagueness. Only enflamed souls like Snowy Vernall could be reasonably expected to endure the blizzard of existence without shielding wraps and without merely peeping at its brilliance through smoked glass, stood naked in the stark immortal roar of everything. He there and then resolved he should not pass the Vernalls’ rarefied awareness to his daughter in the way that their own dad had handed it to him and Thursa once. The almost-born child had some two decades of happiness and carefree beauty before life would start to load her with its burdens. He would let her have the good years that were due to her without the fore-cast shadow of their ultimate result. Though his condition came with limitations and constraints so that he could not change what was in store for either of them, he at least could give his first-born this, the blessed balm of ignorance.
He now allowed his own unflinching focus to relax, loosening his grip on the lapels of time so that the instant might move on, the horse conclude its piss, the boys continue with their hopscotch. All the frozen clamour of the instant was now of a sudden thawed so that the vulgar bawl of Lambeth Walk accelerated from its droning torpor much like a wax cylinder recording that has slowed and stopped then been rewound, its din spiralling drunkenly back to its usual tumult and crescendo.
“… sh!” the midwife cried. “Push hard! It’s coming now!”
Louisa’s final wail climbed to a jagged pinnacle then swooned exhausted into its relieved fall. Slippery and silver as a fish, the baby girl was effortlessly poured into the world, the makeshift midwife’s arms, the waiting towels and blankets. A warm murmur of appreciation moved across the bystanders like rippling breeze on a still reservoir, and then his child announced her own arrival with a rising, hiccoughing lament. Louisa wept in sympathy and asked the woman kneeling by her was it all right, was it normal, reassured in soft tones that it was a lovely little girl, that she had all her fingers and her toes. The sun parted its curtain cloud-bank and was on his neck now, some degrees behind him, with a wide stripe of cool shadow thrown down on the slabs of Lambeth Walk below, a flattened triangle with the black cut-out shape of a perspective-stunted Snowy Vernall at its apex. Casually, as if the action were not timed to its last fraction of a second, Snowy reached into both weighted, hanging pockets of his jacket and took out the heavy cut-glass doorknobs, one held by a chill brass stalk in either fist.
He raised his arms on each side, in the way his dad had told him that the angels did when they wished to affirm or else rejoice, a motion like a pigeon lifting up its wings to take off on the downbeat. Sunbeams plummeted from overhead and were cut into ribbons on the edges of the crystal globes. Shavings of varicoloured brilliance, rays sliced thin enough to see their tinsel strata, blue and blood and emerald, fell in paint-box drips on Lambeth Walk, feathers of dye-dipped light that trembled on its curbs and cobbles, brightest in the band of shade now covering his wife and child. Passing the wiped and swaddled newborn to her anxious mother, the still-crouching woman who’d assisted with the birth frowned with bewilderment at one such iridescent jaguar-blotch that was then gliding down over the baby’s wrappings and across the midwife’s dainty fingers. Stained with jewel she tipped her head back, peering to identify the source of the phenomenon and gasping with amazement once she had, whereon Louisa and those gathered round the birth-slabs followed her example, turning up their faces in the peacock rain.
John Vernall, mad John Vernall was a faceless silhouette stood on the roof-ridge with the sun behind his head and white hair like St. Elmo’s Fire or phosphorus, his arms flung up to heaven, a gaunt storm-bird come after the flood with rainbows shredded in its lifted claws, radiant streamers leaking from the cracks between clenched fireball talons. Spectra splashed over the silenced throng in luminous and vivid moth-wings, shed and yet still fluttering on drainpipes, doorsteps, people’s cheeks and drooping chins. The fresh-delivered child stopped crying, squinting mystified up into her first glimpse of being, and his wife, released from her ordeal and giddy with reprieve, began to laugh. Others amongst the gathered crowd joined in, one man even beginning to applaud but trailing off embarrassed and alone into the general hilarity.
At length he let his arms sink to his sides, returning the glass doorknobs to his jacket pockets. From the street below he heard Louisa tell him to stop buggering about, to come and see their daughter. Fishing from behind one jutting ear a stub of yellowed chalk secreted there, he turned his back upon the rooftop’s edge and took three careful steps along its ridge towards the tall brick chimney breast that now loomed up before him. In a generous and looping hand he scribbled “Snowy Vernall springs eternal” on the brickwork, standing back a moment to admire his work. It would not be washed off by the next rain, which would come from the east, but by the shower immediately thereafter.
Snowy sighed, and smiled, and shook his head, and then went down to face the endless music.
** <strong>THE BREEZE THAT PLUCKS HER APRON</strong>
<strong>T</strong>he Fort Street deathmonger was Mrs. Gibbs, and on that first occasion when she called her pinafore was starched and spotless white with butterflies embroidered on its hem. May Warren was then just nineteen years old, scared stiff in her confinement’s final stage, but even through the unexpected pain and scalding tears she was aware that she had never known this woman’s like before.
It was still freezing and the outside lav was blocked with ice, which meant these last two days they’d had to burn their business on the fire. The living room still stank but Mrs. Gibbs made nothing of it, taking off her coat to show the splendid apron underneath, white as a lantern in the downstairs gloom, with summer moths in pink and orange thread ascending her stout thighs and winter paunch.
“Now then, my dear, let’s see what we’re about.” Her voice was like bake pudden, thick and warm, and while May’s mam Louisa made fresh tea the deathmonger produced a tin of snuff, small as a matchbox, with upon its lid the late Queen in enamel miniature. Thumb curled back so a hollow was produced between the bones where they met with her wrist, next Mrs. Gibbs, with great precision, tipped a measure of the pungent russet dust into the shallow cavity thus formed. Hand lifted and head lowered she swept up the heaped gunpowder in two fruity snorts, half in each barrel, which she then discharged explosively into a handkerchief, something of a brown study in itself. Beaming at May she put the tin away and got down to her work between May’s knees.
The young mother-to-be had never seen a woman taking snuff before and was just going to ask about the habit when contractions drove the question from her mind. May growled and moaned and at the kitchen door her mam appeared with tea for Mrs. Gibbs. She eyed her daughter sympathetically yet could not keep herself from pointing out that May’s own birth had been a worse ordeal.
“You think that’s bad, gal, you’ve got no idea, all of the trouble that I had with you. You’re not abed because we’ve got no fire upstairs, so you’re down here on the settee, but you be glad you’re not on Lambeth Walk, like I was, with your dad up on that roof.”
May huffed and glared and turned her face away towards the wallpaper behind the couch, smoke cured so that its pimply rose designs had each turned with the faltering indoor light into a sad-faced tawny lioness. She’d heard it told that many times before – the tale of how she’d come into the world on cobbles flecked with phlegm and orange peel, her dad perched like a gargoyle up above – as if it somehow made her mother proud to start a family tree that had its roots sunk in the poorhouse and the madhouse both.
She heard a muffled bump from the front room: her brothers or her sister playing up, most probably because they were all vexed to be shut in the parlour out the way. May’s sister Cora, lately turned sixteen, was keen to know what pregnancy entailed, while their Jim was as keen that he should not. Young Johnny, having reached the dirty age, just wanted to look up a woman’s frock.
Her mother, who had heard the noise as well, went tutting from the room to find its source, which left May on her own with Mrs. Gibbs. The deathmonger explored May’s private parts as though a fragile ledger of accounts, careful as a solicitor or judge. She seemed to be above the meat and mess the way May thought a druid might have been, unmoved while cutting a lamb’s throat at dawn. The hearth flames, greenish when they’d burned the shit, did not so much illuminate the scene as lend it a dull torture-chamber scowl and startle shadows from beneath its chairs. Fire-lit down one already florid cheek the older woman glanced up now at May. Ceasing her intimate inspection she next rinsed her hands and dried them on a rag, a tight smile signifying all was well.
“Let’s have some light in here, shall we, my dear? It wouldn’t do to have a baby born into a world without a bit of cheer.”
Taking an oil lamp from the mantelpiece and lifting off its milky covering, the deathmonger produced and struck a match. Touched to the limp black caterpillar wick it yielded a small flame of mystic blue, an engineer smell, safe and workmanlike. The lamp’s tall chimney, tiger-striped with soot around its base, flawed by a ghostly crack, was set back into place so that the room was steeped now in a pale, warm yellow glow. The worn-out curtains looked like velvet wine. The room’s glass surfaces shone like doubloons, a splendid glitter everywhere upon the mirror and barometer, the face of the slow-thudding Roman-numbered clock. May’s dark red hair burned bright as gorse at dusk, even where it was plastered to her brow or slicked down on her damp and gleaming mound. The dismal birthing-pit was quite transformed into a painting done by Joseph Wright of Derby, like his air-pump or his forge. May started to make comment on the change but halfway through was interrupted by her next contraction, the most wrenching yet.
When finally her scream broke like a wave into a shingle hiss of trickling sobs the frightened girl slowly became aware of Mrs. Gibbs close by, holding her hand, hushing and humming sympathetically, as natural and comforting as bees. Her fingers had a dry and papery feel, cool at least in comparison with May’s. Her voice took May back to the nursery.
“My goodness, dear, that sounded like it hurt. You’ve not long now, though, if I’m any judge. Just try to rest while I nip out the room and have a little conference with your mam. I think it’s better if she stays through there and keeps your sister and your brothers quiet, then we can manage things between ourselves without nobody sticking in their nose. Unless of course you’d rather she be here?”
It was like Mrs. Gibbs had read May’s mind. May loved her mam in the fierce, angry way that she loved all her family and friends, but just that minute she could do without Louisa’s tales of greater suffering, of waters broken far more copiously, as if pain and embarrassment were just a competition her and May were in. May looked up eagerly at Mrs. Gibbs.
“Ooh, no, keep her through there, if you don’t mind. If I hear her tell anybody else about how I popped out on Lambeth Walk with our dad watching from the bloody roof, I swear to God I’ll wring her bloody neck.”
Mrs. Gibbs chuckled, a most pleasant sound, like several apples rolling down the stairs.
“Well, now, we shouldn’t want that, should we, dear? You just sit tight and I won’t be two shakes.”
With that the deathmonger slipped from the room, removing with her a faint pepper scent of snuff, unnoticed until it was gone. May lay there on the settee, breathing hard, and heard the muffled chat from the front room. A single yelp of protest that May thought was probably their Johnny sounded, then the voice of Mrs. Gibbs raised sharp and clear despite the bricks and plaster in the way.
“If I was you, my dear, I’d learn my place. If a deathmonger says to do a thing, then you be sure that you do what she says. We shoulder life. We know its ins and outs. We’ve felt the draft at either end of it. What you’re most frit of, that’s our bread and jam, and none of us ain’t got no time to spare on ignorant, bad-mannered little boys. Don’t you dare leave that spot while I’m at work.”
There was a subdued mumble of assent, footsteps and doors closed in the passageway, then Mrs. Gibbs came back into the room, all crinkling smiles with Punch and Judy cheeks as if she hadn’t just that moment scared a cheeky twelve-year-old out of his skin. Her voice, severe with frost a minute back, was sweet and oak-matured as a liqueur.
“There, now. I think we’ve got things straightened out. Your youngest brother didn’t like it much and started on at me, but I was firm.”
May nodded. “That’s our Johnny acting up. He’s always full of talk and big ideas of him on stage or in the music hall, though doing what, he hasn’t got a clue.”
Mrs. Gibbs laughed. “He knows already how to make a show of himself, right enough.”
It was just then the pain-tide came back in, smashing her bones like driftwood, she felt sure, before receding with an undertow May knew could drag her off, out of this world. One in five mothers died in childbirth still, and May grew faint to think how many times these agonising straits had been the last of life that countless women ever knew. To pass from this delirium to death, knowing the babe you’d carried for so long would in all likelihood be joining you, knowing your family’s lineage was crushed to nothing in the hard gears of the world, that bloody millstone grinding till time’s end. She clenched her teeth upon the dread of it. She whined and strained until her face went red, the freckles almost bursting from her cheeks, which earned a stern rebuke from Mrs. Gibbs.
“You’re pushing! You don’t want to push just yet. You’ll hurt the baby and you’ll hurt yourself. You breathe, girl. You just breathe. Breathe like a dog.”
May tried to pant but then burst into tears as the contraction drew back from its edge, subsiding to a mere residual ache. She knew that she would die here in this room, pretty May Warren, not turned twenty yet, breathing incinerated excrement. She had a terrible presentiment of some awesome occurrence bearing down – of the uncanny, hovering close by – and took it for her own mortality. She only gradually became aware that she was holding the deathmonger’s hand as Mrs. Gibbs crouched there beside the couch, wiping away the dew of May’s ordeal, crooning and whispering to her soothingly.
“Don’t fret. You’re doing well. You’ll be all right. My mam was a deathmonger before me, and her mam and grandmother before her. I wouldn’t like to swear in all that time we’ve never lost a mother or a child, but we haven’t lost many. I’ve lost none. You’re in safe hands, my dear, safe as they come. Besides, you’re from old-fashioned healthy stock. I understand you’re Snowy Vernall’s girl.”
May winced and shrugged. Her dad embarrassed her. He was half-barmy, everyone knew that, at least since he’d been took to court last year, had up for standing on the Guildhall roof after he’d spent all morning in the pub, drunk as a lord with one of his arms round the waist of that stone angel what’s up there, declaiming rubbish to the puzzled crowd that had collected down in Giles Street. What he’d been thinking of nobody knew. He’d worked at the town hall not long before, up by its ceiling on a scaffolding retouching the old frescos round the edge, but since his escapade up on the roof had been in all the papers it was clear he’d never have employment there again. Folk loved his high jinks, but it wasn’t them that his behaviour kept in poverty.
The stunts ensured he seldom had a job, but that was not what May resented most. The pranks weren’t half the obstacle to wealth that her dad’s principles had proved to be, principles nobody could understand except her father and her barmy aunt. Two years before, in nineteen hundred six, a fellow who’d admired her father’s skills had offered him a business partnership, a glazier’s firm that he was starting up. He’d gone on to make thousands, but back then he’d promised May’s dad half-shares in it all, with one condition he insisted on: if Snowy could just keep out of the pub for two weeks the directorship was his. Dad hadn’t given it a moment’s thought. He’d said “I won’t be told what I should do. You’ll have to find your partner somewhere else.” The bloody fool. It made May want to spit, to think that she was lying giving birth in Fort Street, while the glazier had a house stood three floors high up on the Billing Road. If ever Dad walked past it with May’s mam he’d get an earful over what he’d done, cursing his family with impoverishment for generations after, more than like. May muttered some of this to Mrs. Gibbs.
Still smiling, the deathmonger shook her head.
“He’s thought of very well around these parts, though I can see he might get on your nerves if you were living with him all the time. The thing is, he’s a Vernall. So are you. Like deathmonger, that’s not a term you hear nowhere ’cept in the Boroughs. Even then, half them as says it don’t know what it means. They’re old names, and they’ll soon be gone, my dear, with all us what gets called them gone as well. Respect your father, and respect your aunt, her what you see with her accordion. They’re of a type I doubt we’ll know again, especially turning all that money down. Yes, you could be a rich girl now, but think. You’d have been too well off to wed your Tom, and then where should this little baby be? Things are for reasons, or they are round here.”
The mention of May’s husband got to her. Tom Warren treated May with more respect than any other man she’d ever known. He’d courted her like she were royalty, as if she were the daughter of a king and not that of a village idiot. The deathmonger was right. If May was rich she’d have thought Tom was after all her cash. If she’d been living up the Billing Road he’d not have got within ten yards of her. This child, that May wanted so desperately, would be one more unwritten human page.
Not that these facts let Snowy off the hook. He hadn’t acted for May’s benefit, but simply out of bloody-mindedness. He couldn’t have known that she’d marry Tom unless he was a fortune-teller too. As always, he had pleased his bloody self with not a thought for anybody else. It was like when he’d vanish up the Smoke, walk all the way to Lambeth, gone for weeks, and what he’d done was anybody’s guess. Oh, certainly he’d been doing his work and always had a pay-packet to show, but May knew that her mam Louisa thought that he had other women there as well. May thought her mam was very likely right. He was a lecherous old so-and-so who could be stood hobnobbing with his pals while looking goats and monkeys at their wives. May hoped none of it rubbed off on her Tom, who got on great shakes with his dad-in-law. That morning, as it happened, they were both off up the pub together, out the way. It had been May insisted that they go. She didn’t want Tom seeing her like this.
The light was sweet as butter on the hearth, spread thick on the brass knobs that topped the grate. The hunching shadow cast by Mrs. Gibbs across the rose-papered end wall seemed vast, that of a giantess or of a Fate. Made dreamy with exhaustion May could sense some great approach, some presence drawing near, but then the brute fist clenching in her womb tore out each flimsy thread of thought like hair.
This time, although the agony was worse, May did at least remember to breathe out, panting and gasping the way she recalled she had when this pain-bundle was conceived. The thought was comical and she began to laugh, then settled for another scream. Mrs. Gibbs murmured soft encouragements. She told May she was brave and doing well, and squeezed her hand until the flood had passed.
The upset jigsaw pieces of May’s thoughts were strewn across her mental carpeting, a thousand coloured, slightly different shapes she was compelled to sort and pick among, establishing each corner, then each edge, distinguishing the blue bits that were sky from those that were the Easter-speckled ground. She patiently restored her picture of herself, of who and where she was and what was going on, but the rhinoceros of childbirth came stampeding through the place again when she’d not been expecting it so soon after its previous foray, and with a rough toss of its horn undid all of her efforts to compose herself. The deathmonger released her hand and moved down to the sofa’s end, between May’s knees. Mrs. Gibbs’s voice was firm and military, conveying urgency without alarm.
“Now you can strain and push. It’s almost here. Bear up, dear, and bear down. We shan’t be long.”
May sealed her lips upon her bubbling shriek and forced it down instead into her loins. She felt like she was trying to shit the world. She pushed and shoved although she was convinced that all of her insides were coming out. The hurt swelled up, inflating to a rim far wider than May knew she was down there. She’d burst, she’d rupture, she’d be split in two, need stitches from her gizzard to her arse. The howl she caged behind her gritted teeth was singing like a kettle in her ears, released to fill the cramped and golden room as she boiled over in a foaming rush.
There was a stifled gasp from Mrs. Gibbs. The baby’s head was out and if May looked down over the horizon of her waist she could just make out slicked-down ginger curls that were like flames, much brighter than her own. Mrs. Gibbs stared wide-eyed, as if she’d been briefly transformed to stone. Recovering, the deathmonger snatched up a folded towel and leaned in ready to receive the birth. Why did she look so pale? What could be wrong?
The moment seemed to shimmer in and out of focus, slide from real to dream and back. Did strong wind at one point blow through the house, though all the doors and windows were shut fast? What stirred the curtains and the tablecloth and the embroidered butterflies that swarmed on the deathmonger’s flapping apron hem? Mrs. Gibbs’s voice, heard as if through a storm, was saying one last grunt should do the trick, then the discomforts of the last nine months just melted out of May into the couch, into relief more blissful and complete than any she’d imagined in this world. Mrs. Gibbs took the sharp knife that she’d stuck blade-down into the fresh brown garden soil around the roots of a geranium, wilting and potted on the window sill. With one determined slice, she cut the cord.
May struggled to sit up, remembering the look that was on Mrs. Gibbs’s face when just the baby’s head was sticking out.
“Is it all right? What’s wrong? Is something wrong?”
May’s voice was ragged, an enfeebled squawk. The deathmonger looked sombre and held up the towel-wrapped shape she cradled in her arms.
“I’m very much afraid there is, my dear. You have an awful beauty in this child.”
As she reached for her baby May daren’t look, squinting against the lamp and firelight both, the infant edge-lit copper down one side, the other cream. What had the woman meant? She realised with a sudden panicked lurch the baby hadn’t cried, then heard it mew. She felt the swaddled weight move in her hands and, flinchingly, risked opening her eyes, as on a furnace or the glare of noon.
Its head was like a rosebud: though scrunched tight May knew it would be glorious unfurled. Its eyes, the ghostly blue of robins’ eggs, were big as brooches, focussed on May’s own. Their colour was a perfect complement to the new-born child’s blazing orange hair, clear summer sky down at the terrace end, framed by Northampton brickwork set alight in the last rays of a descending sun. The baby’s skin was dove white, glistening as if beneath a talcum of ground pearl, dusted with highlight on the thighs, the toes, a canvas primed awaiting the soft brush of time and circumstance and character. The wonderstruck young mother’s drifting gaze lighted on her first-born’s extremities, always returning as though mesmerised to those eyes, that extraordinary face. It was as though the universe had shrunk down to the tube of a kaleidoscope, a gleaming well along the length of which, from each end, child and mother’s glances locked, adoring, mirrored and suspended in the amber of the moment for all time. May watched the pink purse of the hatchling’s lips work round the shapes of its first burbling sounds, quicksilver spittle in a glinting bead spilt from one corner, lowered on a thread. An aura seemed to hang round the event, lending a burnish, a renaissance glaze. She kissed the russet crown that had a scent like warm milk drunk in bed last thing at night, and knew that she possessed a treasure here. She realised that somehow she’d brought forth a vision of unearthly loveliness so exquisite it unnerved Mrs. Gibbs.
Belatedly, as though an afterthought, May also realised it was a girl.
“What shall you call her, dear?” asked Mrs. Gibbs. May looked round blankly, having quite forgot that there was anybody in the room save for her tiny daughter and herself.
She had agreed with Tom that, if a boy, their offspring should be Thomas, after him, whereas a girl would be named after her.
“We thought we’d call her May, like me” she said. The child’s ears seemed to prick up at her name, her round head rolling, shifting restlessly on the lamp-yellowed halo of the towel. Mrs. Gibbs gave a nod, a subdued smile, seeming to be not quite recovered yet from the new baby’s petrifying charm, its beautiful Medusa radiance. Was she afraid? May pushed the thought away. What, in a precious blossom such as this, was there to be afraid for? It was daft, just May’s imagination running wild, all of the superstitious tommyrot surrounding birth she’d picked up off her mam. It hadn’t been that many hundred years since them like Mrs. Gibbs were made to swear an oath they’d not do magic on the child, say any words while it was being born, or swap it for a fairy in its crib. That was before they’d called them deathmongers, back when such women were called other names. But that was then. This was 1908. Mrs. May Warren was a modern girl, who’d just produced a wonder of the world. She’d feed it, keep it clean, look after it, and that would do more good than paying mind to old wives’ tales and reading omens in a teacup or a midwife’s tone of voice.
The baby, cradled at May’s ample bust, was half asleep. May turned to Mrs. Gibbs.
“She’s quite a sight, my daughter, don’t you think?”
Mrs. Gibbs chuckled, tidying up her things.
“She is at that, my dear. She is at that. A sight I shall remember all my life. Now, cover yourself up before they all come trooping in to see her for themselves.”
The deathmonger reached down between May’s thighs where with a single move, deft and discreet, she pulled the afterbirth out with a tug of the cut cord, whisking it off before May even realised that it was there. While Mrs. Gibbs got rid of it somewhere May sorted herself out as best she could. Then, just as Mrs. Gibbs had said they would, the family crowded in to take a look.
May was surprised how well-behaved they were, tiptoeing in and talking in a hush. Her mam Louisa cooed and fussed about while Jim was bright red with embarrassment or joy, beaming and nodding in delight. Cora was dumbstruck by the baby’s looks, her face much like the deathmonger’s had been. Even their John was at a loss for words.
“She’s lovely, sis. She’s grand” was all he said.
Louisa made another cup of tea for everyone, and May had one as well. It was hot nectar, strong, with sugar in, and while her mam and sister carefully passed the baby round, May sipped it gratefully. The atmosphere, the low and murmuring talk with baby May’s infrequent drowsing cries, was like a church event, not even jarred when her Tom and her father came back home.
Dad smelled of beer, but Tom had nursed a half all morning long, which meant his breath was clean. May put her tea down so that they could kiss and cuddle before Tom picked up their child. He seemed amazed, kept looking back and forth between his two Mays. His expression said that he could not believe his and May’s luck at turning out this painting of a child. He gave her back, then went to buy May flowers.
Her dad, half cut, declined to hold the babe, which saved the trouble of forbidding him. He’d had six pints before noon, two for lunch, bought with caricatures and rude cartoons, the funny-looking drawings Snowy did of folk, insults for which they paid in ale. Even with a prolific morning’s work, May thought it odd her father had been sent on such a bender by his grandchild’s birth. Just as rare for her dad, the booze appeared to have brought on a melancholy mood. He couldn’t take his eyes from little May, although he viewed her through a quivering lens of tears, the soppy bugger. She’d not known her dad had got a sentimental bone in all his wide-eyed, staring, scrawny frame. She found she liked him a bit more for it. If only he were like it all the time.
Snowy now looked toward the elder May. By this time both creased lids had overflowed and wet was running down her father’s cheeks.
“I didn’t know, m’love. I never dreamed. I knew she’d be a smasher like your mam and you, but not a precious thing like this. Oh, this is hard, gal. She’s that beautiful.”
Snowy reached out and placed one hand upon May’s arm, a poorly-hid crack in his voice.
“You love her, May. Love her with all you’ve got.”
With that her father bolted from the room. They heard him clump upstairs, most probably to sleep off all the beer he’d put away. Throughout all this Mrs. Gibbs had sat quiet, drinking her tea, speaking when spoken to. May’s mam Louisa slipped the deathmonger two shillings, twice the usual going rate. Firmly, Mrs. Gibbs gave one of them back.
“Now, Mrs. Vernall, with all due respect, if she’d been ugly I’d not charge half price.”
Stooped by the couch she said farewell to May, who thanked the deathmonger for all she’d done.
“You’ve been a godsend. When I have me next I’ll make sure that they send for you again. I’ve made me mind up that I want two girls, then after that I’ll stop, so I suppose you’ll be back when me second daughter’s due.”
May got a wan smile in response to this.
“We’ll see, my dear. We’ll see” said Mrs. Gibbs.
She said her goodbyes to the family, the lengthiest her one to baby May, then said no one need show her from the room. She put her hat and coat on. They could hear her as she stamped along the passageway and, after fumbling briefly with the catch, went out, leaving the front door on the latch.
<br>
The tuneless wail of an accordion moved on the river’s surface with the light and rippled the September afternoon. From where May stood upon the wrought-iron bridge between the river island and the park, her eighteen-month-old daughter in her arms, she could make out Aunt Thursa, far away, a small brown dot that walked the green’s far edge towards the cattle market further up.
Although too distant to be clearly seen May could imagine all too vividly every distressing detail of her aunt, who, next to her dad Snowy, May believed to be their family’s worst embarrassment. She could just picture Thursa’s bird-like head with its proud beak, its pale and staring eyes, its grey hair that erupted up in tufts and looked as though her brains were smouldering. She’d have her brown coat on and her brown shoes, bloody accordion slung around her neck, an ancient mariner with albatross. Both night and day she’d wander through the streets extemporising, fingers fluttering on the grey keys of her weighty instrument. May’s sense of shame would not have been so great if Thursa had displayed the faintest sign of any musical ability. Instead, her aunt made an unholy row, short stabs of falling or ascending chords all smudged into a skirling banshee wheeze, which stopped dead at the sudden precipice of Thursa’s frequent random silences. From noon till midnight seven days a week you’d hear her frightening cacophony, winding amongst the yards and chimneypots, that scared cats and woke babies in their cribs, that scattered birds and showed the Vernalls up. Stood there upon the bridge, May watched the speck of noisy sepia that was her aunt as, like a heron, the madwoman picked her way along the shore of Beckett’s Park, where leaves frothed up against Victoria Prom. When Thursa and her grim accompaniment both faded in the distance, May turned back to the blonde infant cradled in her arms.
The red hair that May’s daughter had at birth had fallen out and come back as white-gold, luminous catkins in a halo blaze that looked, if anything, more glorious than the hot copper with which she’d been born. Looked even more unearthly, certainly. The younger May grew lovelier each day, to May and Tom’s uneasy wonderment. She’d hurt to look at if it carried on. Both parents had at first merely assumed their child was only marvellous to them, that friends were being complimentary, but gradually had come to realise from the reaction everywhere she went that this was beauty without precedent, beauty that startled up a flock of gasps, a nervous awe, as if onlookers saw a Ming vase or the first of a new race.
May purred and drew her baby close to her so that their foreheads touched, pebble to rock, and so that their eyelashes almost beat against each other’s like two courting moths. The child gurgled with unrestrained delight, her sole response to nearly everything. She seemed that pleased to simply be alive and evidently found the world at large just as astonishing as it found her.
“There. All that nasty racket’s gone away. That was your auntie Thursa who’s half sharp, out with her squeeze-box kicking up a fuss. But she’s cleared off now, so that me and you can get on with our visit to the park. Out on the island there might be some swans. Swans. Should you like that? Here, I’ll tell you what, let your mam get into her pocket here, and you can have another rainbow drop.”
Fumbling in a side vent of her skirt her fingers found the small brown paper cone, top twisted, that she’d bought at Gotch’s shop in Green Street on their way down to the park. One-handed, with her other full of child, May unscrewed and then opened up the bag, reaching in to retrieve three chocolate drops, hundreds-and-thousands speckling their tops, one for her infant daughter, two for her. She held the first sweet to her baby’s lips, which opened with a comic eagerness to let May place it on the minute tongue, then pressed the two remaining chocolate discs together into one, shaped like a lens, the coloured flecks now beading the outside in little dots like the French painters used. She popped it in her mouth and sucked it smooth, her favourite way of eating rainbow drops.
With little May against one shoulder like a set of bagpipes not in current use she sauntered from the slight hump of the bridge onto the island’s sparse and yellowed grass. The isle, two or three acres all in all, had the Nene forked around it to its north, continuing as two streams that re-joined to form one river at the land’s south tip. A foot-worn path ran round the island’s edge, enclosing at the centre marshy ground that was sometimes a pond, but not today. Once off the railed bridge May turned to her right, starting an anticlockwise circuit of the riverside, breeze in her dark red hair, her daughter slobbering chocolate on her neck. Some clouds slid through the azure overhead so that May’s shadow faded then sprang back, but otherwise it was a perfect day.
She walked now with the water on her right and the broad swathe of Beckett’s Park beyond, its old pavilion tinted lime by moss, its benches, bushes, and its public lavs, trees scorched by autumn starting to catch fire. The river’s mirror-ribbon ran below the dark reach of the overhanging boughs, reflecting shattered umber, cloudy sage, torn scraps of sky in peacock blue beneath the medalled shimmer of its rippled breast.
If today was a Sunday, there’d have been chaps renting boats out from the peeling hut propped up between the crowding elms there on the bank towards its cattle-market end. Most weekends, if the weather was all right, you’d find half of the Boroughs down the park in their best bonnets, walking arm in arm, shrieking and laughing as they rowed upstream through trailing willow fingers for a lark. The chimney-sweep from Green Street, Mr. Paine, who’d got one of them wind-up gramophones, would take it out with him on his hired boat. It was nice, hearing music out of doors; nice seeing Mr. Paine play sweet old songs while he cruised down the river in amongst the lovebirds and the splashing families. It made it seem as if times weren’t so bad.
May got on well with Mr. Paine. He’d once shown her the flowers he’d grown in his back yard, which was just down from Gotcher Johnson’s shop. Crammed into the brick rectangle there’d been more colours than she’d ever seen before, sprouting from a bewildering array of makeshift flowerpots. Pinks bloomed from tins. Apothecary jars spilled marigolds. Cracked piss-pots brimmed with fragrant jasmine sprays. May liked the Green Street crowd in general. She’d often thought that one day her and Tom might find a decent house to rent down there, away from Fort Street and her mam and dad, perhaps not far off from the chimney-sweep who’d got Eden in saucepans out the back, whose murmuring Victrola charmed the crowds out strolling on the Sunday riverbanks. And he loved little May. Who didn’t, though?
The riverside path curved round to the left, its grass a threadbare carpet, pile rubbed flat by strolling old men, lovers, truant boys. May followed it towards the isle’s far side, her pace unhurried and her skirt’s thin hem billowing at her ankles in the breeze. Head on her mother’s shoulder, little May was chattering fluently, unhindered by irrelevant concerns like sense or words.
Of course, May understood that while her child was almost universally admired, some people’s admiration might be shown in ways that were intolerably cruel. There’d been that afternoon some months before when her and Tom were walking in this park, having a Sunday outing with young May. They’d carried her or let her trot a while between them, holding one of her hands each, lifting her up for slow suspended leaps to skim the puddles and the buttercups. There’d been a well-dressed couple marching by, keeping their distance from the Boroughs types, keeping at nose’s length, the way they do. The woman with her gloves and parasol stared at the Warrens and their little girl, remarking to her husband as they passed, “You know, it does upset me when I see a tiny child as beautiful as that being brought up by people of their sort.”
The bloody cheek. The bloody, bloody cheek that woman had, to say a thing like that. Tom yelled “You what?” at their retreating backs but they just walked on like they hadn’t heard. May could remember how she’d cried herself to sleep that night, face hot and red with shame. You’d think that her and Tom were animals, not to be trusted with a baby girl. May knew, just from the woman’s tone of voice, that if the couple could have found some means to have May’s daughter took away from her, then they’d have done it without thinking twice. The incident had sparked a fierce resolve, a fire that scorched her throat and stung her eyes. She’d show them. She’d look after little May better than some posh woman could have done.
Mother and child had by now wandered round the island’s northern, cattle-market end, dawdling along beside the river’s edge towards Midsummer Meadow and the south. The baby’s eyes, clear blue like winter sky, gazed fascinated at the central bog where ducks with heads beer-bottle emerald still pecked and fussed near almost emptied nests. Far off, a factory horn made brief complaint.
Around May’s snub-nosed shoes were ghost-green leaves with queer pods bulging from their fallen stems. Split with a thumbnail they’d have grubs inside, the offspring (or so May’s dad had once said) of small black flies who’d lay eggs in the bud, deforming it to what was called a gall. It was a nasty thought, but better than the first conclusion she had drawn, which was that worms and maggots somehow grew on trees, signs of death blossoming unnaturally from leafy boughs that represented life. The bank was strewn, beside the blighted leaves, with other bits of litter here and there: dog muck blanched by a diet of well-gnawed bones, an empty packet of ten Craven ‘A’ that had the black cat mascot on its box in sodden cardboard and a half-inch tall, now at the mercy of the island’s birds.
Apart from this there was a pair of pants, a set of ladies’ bloomers in the grass between the tree roots, white and crumpled up. Some couple had come here to have it off far from the gaslights on Victoria Prom, the river’s tinkle lost beneath their groans, then not cleared up behind them when they’d done. May tutted, though she’d done the same herself with Tom before they’d married, here at night beside the river, him on top of her, then afterwards they’d sit here and they’d talk, propped up together underneath a tree. Head resting on Tom’s breast she’d heard his heart, both gazing off towards the stream’s far side, the scrublands and the railway tracks that stretched off to the abbey out at Delapre. She’d listened to him, quiet and wonderstruck, while he told her his tales from history, the subject that had been Tom’s best at school. The whole Wars of the Roses, he’d explained, the wars between the Lancasters and Yorks, had been decided on the soil across the river from where May was walking now. The King was captured on the waste-ground that the Boroughs thought of still as its back yard. She’d sprawled there, half asleep and marvelling at the important things these fields had seen, at the low voice of her husband-to-be, whose spunk hung cooling from the dandelions. The memory made May warm between her thighs so that she had to stop and shake her head to clear it before she could concentrate on her and young May’s Friday afternoon. She went on, curving round the isle’s south end and back in the direction of the bridge.
Re-entering the main grounds of the park she peeped to see if Thursa was nearby. Her aunt, however, was by then long gone, as were the other sorts who’d been about. Perhaps her aunt had led them dancing off Pied Piper fashion with a cockeyed tune on her accordion, brown coat a-flap, her grey hair streaming like a chimney fire. May laughed and so did young May, joining in.
The only other people she could see were up near Derngate and the hospital, mothers or governesses pushing prams by Becket’s Well at the park corner there. Snobs. Why, even their servants put May off, looked at her like they thought she’d steal their purse, despite being no better born than her … although that wasn’t strictly speaking true. Being hatched in a gutter full of shit, near everyone was better born than May.
That didn’t make her a bad mother, though. It didn’t mean that woman had been right. She took more care of her own little girl than all the la-di-da types did of theirs. May looked after her daughter to a fault, at least if what the doctor said was right. What that had been, young May kept getting colds, just coughs and sniffles how most babies do. The doctor came to see her, Dr. Forbes, annoyed he’d been called out so many times, and they’d had words, him and the older May. He’d led her out onto her own front step and pointed further off down Fort Street’s length to where the simple girl from down the way was sitting on the cold, uneven flags with a toy tea-set spread out all around, sharing black puddle-water with her dolls.
“You see? That child is healthier than yours, because her mother lets her play outside. Your baby, Mrs. Warren, keeps too clean to build up a resistance to disease. Let her get dirty! Don’t they say you’ve got to eat a peck of dirt before you die?”
It was all very well for him to talk, him up Horsemarket in his doctor’s house. Nobody would accuse him or his wife of being unfit to bring up a child, the way that old cow had with her and Tom. His children, May knew, could have mucky knees and nobody would think the worse of him. It wouldn’t be him that got talked about, or be his wife what cried herself to sleep with the humiliation of it all. Having some money spared you all of that. The Doctor didn’t know what it was like.
Here young May shifted in her mother’s arms and pulled a face. It was her ugliest one, although it would have shamed a work of art. If the wind changed and she’d been stuck like that, May’s baby would still knock spots off Miss Pears. The reason for her daughter’s restlessness was more than likely want of rainbow drops. She reached in her skirt’s pocket for the bag, discovering they’d only got three left. Giving May one she pressed the other two into another sandwich for herself. With her miniature vision in the crook of one arm, so May senior went on beside the railings and the lavatories towards the dung-chute of Victoria Prom. The sun was lower. Time was getting on. She didn’t want to keep her little girl outdoors too long, despite old Forbes’s advice. With little May not long rid of one cough some fresh park air had seemed a good idea, but there was no sense overdoing things. They’d best get home and in the warm while there was still some bright, and it was quite a walk. Stepping from under tea-leaf coloured trees they turned left on the curving promenade and carried on through cattle market musk towards the iron gas-holder’s rotund bulk.
May passed the Plough Hotel across the road at Bridge Street’s mouth, continuing until the pair had reached the foot of Horseshoe Street where they turned right, beginning the long trudge uphill along this eastern boundary line into the Boroughs’ grubby, glad embrace, into its welcoming and soot-streaked arms. The sun was a Montgolfier balloon descending on the railway station yards. Breeze stirred the pale curds of her daughter’s hair and May was pleased she’d brought her out today. There was a feeling in the air, perhaps brought on by sunset or the autumn’s cool, as if these hours were a last precious glimpse of something, of the summer or the day, which made them twice as flawless and as fair. Even the Boroughs, with its bricks rubbed raw, seemed to be trying to look its very best. A wealth of newly-smelted golden light slicked its slate rooftops and its guttering, spread blinding scum on the rainwater tubs. The scraps of lilac cloud over Bellbarn were handbill fragments, torn, left pasted up on the great awning’s deepening blue above. The world seemed so rich, so significant, like an oil painting May was walking through with her Gainsborough baby on her hip.
Across the trot and creak of Horseshoe Street, its cobbles greased with fibrous olive smears, was wasteland where St. Gregory’s once stood, or so May’s dad had told his daughter once. There’d been some tale about an old stone cross a monk had brought here from Jerusalem, so as to mark the centre of his land. They’d set it in an alcove at the church, and for some centuries it was a shrine where folk made pilgrimages and all that. “Rood in the Wall” they called it. ‘Rood’ meant cross, though in May’s mind she mixed it up with ‘rude’ and thought of the stone cross as plain or coarse, chipped ruggedly with rudimentary tools from hard grey rock, rough-cut and biblical. The monk was sent by angels, so he’d said. Angels were common in the Boroughs then, gone now unless you counted little May. The church itself was also long since gone, with only nearby Gregory’s Street to mark the fact that it was ever there at all. Now buddleia and nettle ruled the plot, the first with fallen petals thick as meat, the latter thrusting white and senile heads up into the last spare rays of the sun, lit with a burning citrine at their tips. To think it was the centre of the land.
The baby chuckled, clutched against May’s side, so that her mother turned to see what for. Some way uphill, where Gold Street and Marefair cut across Horsemarket and Horseshoe Street to form a crossroads, on the corner there outside Vint’s Palace of Varieties a slim young fellow leaned against the wall, looking away then slyly looking back as he played peek-a-boo with little May.
Her daughter seemed enchanted by the man, and an inspection forced May to admit that there was much to be enchanted by. He wasn’t tall but had a slenderness, a litheness, not a wiriness like Tom. The fellow’s hair was blacker than his shoes, a springy nest of unwound liquorice whips. His girlish, long-lashed eyes were darker still, batting flirtatiously to tease the child. Fancied himself, May thought. And fancied her.
She knew the type, their baby strategy: strike up a conversation through the tot, so your advances won’t seem obvious. She’d had that quite a bit when she’d been out with little May in this last year-and-half. With such a lovely offspring, it was nice to sometimes get attention of her own. May didn’t mind a whistle and a wink, so long as it weren’t from a lush or thug. Or if it was, she could soon brush them off, was tough enough to look after herself. But if the lad should be presentable, like this one was, she didn’t think it hurt to flirt a bit, or pass five minutes’ chat. It wasn’t that she didn’t love her Tom nor had her eye on anyone but him, but she’d been quite a smasher as a girl, and sometimes missed the looks and compliments. Besides, as they drew closer to this bloke May had a feeling that she knew his face, though for the life of her she couldn’t think where it was that she recognised him from. If it weren’t that, then it was déjà vu, that feeling like something’s happened before. Also, May’s daughter seemed to like the chap, who had the knack for making children laugh.
The next time that he turned, mock-shyly, round to sneak a peek at little May he found her mother gazing back at him as well. May spoke first, taking the initiative, saying he’d an admirer in her child, and he came back with something daft about how he’d just been admiring little May. He knew as well as she did this was tosh, and that he’d had his eye on big May too, but they both played along with the pretence. Besides, he could see now that she were wed.
He made an awful fuss of little May, but seemed for the most part to be sincere, saying as how she’d end up on the stage and be a famous beauty of her time and all that. He was on the stage himself, appearing at Vint’s Palace later on and only idling on the corner while he had a fag or two to calm his nerves. And look at women, May thought to herself, but let it pass since she enjoyed his talk. She introduced herself and baby May. He said to call him “Oatsie” in return, which was a nickname she’d not heard for years, not since she’d lived down Lambeth as a girl. This set wheels turning in May’s mind until she worked out where she’d seen Oatsie before.
He’d been a small boy of about May’s age who’d lived in West Square off St. George’s Road. She’d seen him, when out with her mam and dad, and recognised him by the pretty eyes. He’d had a brother, older than himself as she recalled, but when she told him this he looked at her as if he’d seen a ghost, out of a past he’d thought behind him now. He looked at her as if he’d been found out. The man’s confusion and pop-eyed surprise made May laugh. He’d not been expecting that. He’d bit off more than he could chew with her. She played him on in this way for a while, then, taking pity, let him off the hook, confessing that she too was Lambeth born. He looked relieved. He’d evidently thought she was a Sybil or an oracle, not just an escaped cockney like himself.
Put in his place like this it was as if he didn’t need to go through such an act, and their street-corner chat grew more relaxed and warm, without the need for any show. They nattered on discussing this and that, her brother John’s ambitions on the stage, the history of Vint’s Palace where they stood, and so on, him and her and little May in cheery conference while the Boroughs sky turned from brocade to sapphire overhead. At last, her daughter squirming in her arms, and mindful there were no more rainbow drops, May knew she’d better get the baby home to have her meat-paste sandwiches for tea. She said her farewells to the handsome clown and wished him good luck with his show that night. He told her to take care of little May. She didn’t think it odd, not at the time.
The climb up Horsemarket didn’t take long although, after some hours of walking round, the child seemed heavier in May’s tired arms. Ascending past the lofty houses there, the doctors’ residences, lit up warm, she wondered which belonged to Dr. Forbes. Past open curtains children home from school sat on plump sofas next to roaring fires, ate muffins, or else read improving books. She felt briefly resentful at her dad. If he’d not sniffed at that director’s job, if just once her old man had spared a thought for someone other than his wilful self, that could be her and little May in there, well-fed and snug, May’s daughter on her knee and being read to from a picture book with embossed covers and bright tipped-in plates. She snorted, and turned up St. Mary’s Street.
The heavens in the west ahead of her showed bruises from the roughhouse of the day, purpling into dark above the roofs of Pike Lane and Quart Pot Lane further on. It startled May, the way the nights fell in when you got close to this end of the year. St. Mary’s Street looked haunted in the gloom. Its alcove doorsteps sucked the shadows in, and splintered work-yard gates clanked on their chains. May strode on with her child held up in front like a blonde candle through the crowding dusk.
She’d have to say she weren’t at all surprised that this was where the great fire had broke out, back two hundred and something years ago. There was a simmering feel about the place, as if it could boil over into harm at any time, quick as you could say ‘knife’. No doubt it went back to the Civil War with all the Roundheads bivouacked near here, Cromwell and Fairfax kipping overnight in Marefair, parallel to Mary’s Street, before they went to Naseby the next day and sealed King Charlie’s and the country’s fate. Wasn’t it Pike Lane where they’d made the pikes? That’s what May’s dad had said, at any rate. She carried on and over Doddridge Street, continuing across the burial ground that ran from Doddridge Church down to Chalk Place. The Reverend Doddridge, who had preached down here, while not a terrible destructive force like old Oliver Cromwell or the fire was as incendiary in his own way, fighting for Nonconformists and the poor, and suited the spot’s troublemaker air. May pressed on through the bone-yard’s overgrowth and hoped her daughter wasn’t getting cold.
In Chalk Lane, by the chapel’s western wall, little May started kicking up a fuss and pointing to that queer door halfway up, as if wanting to know what it was for.
“Don’t ask me, love, I haven’t got a clue. Come on, let’s get you home and lay the fire for when your dear old dad comes back from work.”
Except a burp, young May made no reply as Castle Terrace led to Bristol Street. The lamps were going on at the far end which meant that Mr. Beery was about, walking from post to post with his long pole, angling it up towards the gaslight’s top, flame held beside the jet until it caught. He looked like he was fishing for the dark, using his little glow-worm light as bait. May’s child cooed at the distant, greenish gleams as though they were a Roman candle show.
They went on, heading for the Fort Street turn, when from the unlit terrace at May’s heels there came a washboard clatter drawing near, a rattling sound as someone dragged a plank across the bumping cobbles to their rear. A voice as rich as broth called out “Why, Mrs. May and Missy May! You ladies been off gallivanting all around the town, I bet, you only just now coming home!”
It was Black Charley, him from Scarletwell who had the rag-and-bone cart and the bike with ropes all round their wheels instead of tyres. The sound she’d heard had been the blocks of wood he had strapped on his feet to use as brakes. May laughed to see him, but then told him off for scaring them, although in truth he’d not. He was a local marvel, who she liked. He brought a touch of magic to the place.
“Black Charley! Blummin ’eck, you made me jump!” She told him there should be a law that forced black men to carry sparklers after dark, so you could see them creeping up on you, then thought it was a silly thing to say. For one thing, there weren’t black men round these parts. There was just him, Black Charley, Henry George. Also, she knew her quip made no more sense than if he’d said white people should black up so he could see them coming at midday. He didn’t take offence though. He just laughed and made the usual fuss of baby May, saying she was an angel and all that, a compliment May briskly swept aside. Angels were mostly a sore point with her, part of the madness in the Vernall clan. Her dad and granddad and her barmy aunt had all insisted that such things were real, which, in May’s own opinion, said it all. Nobody took stuff like that seriously, or at least nobody who was all there. They hadn’t since the times of that old monk who’d brought the cross here from Jerusalem. The only angel, little May aside, was that white stone one on the Guildhall roof her dad had cuddled with when he’d been drunk. Besides, May found thoughts like that frightening, great winged chaps watching over people’s lives and knowing what would happen ’fore it did. It was like ghosts or anything like that, it made you think of death, or else that life was a big, foggy, overwhelming place you knew would kill you going in the door. She didn’t dwell upon unearthly things. Anyway, angels would be snobs, May knew, judging her like that pair in Beckett’s Park.
She chatted to Black Charley for a while, and little May, God bless her, tried her best, calling him Char-Char and grabbing the beard that grew in a white frizz around his chin. Eventually, they let him cycle on, shouting goodbye in his deep Yankee voice, down Bristol Street back home to Scarletwell, which was a street May didn’t like to go. It just gave her the willies, that was all, although there was no reason why it should. There was that funny creature of Newt Pratt’s, on Sundays, drunk outside the Friendly Arms, but that weren’t what frit May about the street. Perhaps it was the bloody-sounding name, or else that up round Scarletwell they kept the fever cart, high windows, leaded glass, that let in light but wouldn’t let you see the poor buggers inside that it took off, with scarlet fever or that other one whose name May wasn’t sure how to pronounce, to camps out on the edges of the town. Whatever it was that got on her nerves about the old hill, you could safely say as Scarletwell Street weren’t May’s favourite place. That might change, she supposed, in a few years when she was traipsing up there every day and taking little May to Spring Lane School, but until then she’d give it a wide berth.
May turned left into Fort Street where there was no cobbled road, just flagstones wall to wall. Although she knew it bent round to the right at its far point and ran along the back of Moat Street, sloping down into Bath Row, her home street always looked like a dead end where vehicles couldn’t go, that led nowhere of very much importance anyway. Her daughter was now bouncing up and down with shrill excitement in May’s freckled arms, the child having by this point recognised the dear, familiar row down which they walked. May clacked on over the rough tilting slabs and past her mam and dad’s house, number ten. Gaslight was shining from their passageway out through cracks round the poorly hung front door; the parlour dark, empty save ornaments.
Johnny and Cora and her mam and dad would at this time of night most likely be round the tea-table in the living room, having their bread and jam and bit of cake. She went on to her own house, number twelve, and opened its unlocked door with one hand, not putting May down ’til she was inside. She lit the mantle first, then lit a fire, sticking her daughter into the high chair while she went to retrieve the potted meat from the tin safe atop the cellar stairs. She made the baby’s tea and served it up after she’d carefully trimmed off all the crusts. Little May slowly ate her sandwiches, taking her time, making a lot of mess, while her mam took the opportunity to do a nice liver and onion roll, then put it in the stove for her and Tom.
The evening nigh on flew by after that. Tom got home from the brewery where he worked, his Friday night pay-packet in his hand, in time to say goodnight to little May before she got took off upstairs to bed, up the apples and pears to Uncle Ned. Next her and Tom had dinner by themselves, then chatted until they retired as well. They cuddled once the candle was blown out, then May asked Tom to pull her nightgown up and get on top so he could put it in. It was their favourite time, a Friday night. No need to get up early the next day, when with a bit of luck their little girl would sleep in long enough for May and Tom to have another fuck when they woke up. Beneath her man, May hardly spared a thought for that chap by Vint’s Palace earlier on.
By Saturday, their daughter’s cough was back and it seemed like she had a job to breathe. They called old Forbes out, Sunday afternoon, when they’d meant to be walking in the park. The doctor turned up, as he always did, moaning about them spoiling his weekend, then shut up after he’d seen little May. The child’s skin had took on a yellow cast which they’d both hoped they were imagining.
He said their baby had diphtheria.
The wagon from the top of Scarletwell was summoned. Little May was placed aboard and off it went, windows of leaded glass placed too high up its sides to see in through. The hooves and coach-wheels hardly made a sound, rolling away down the uncobbled lane as the one ray of light that lit May’s heart was taken off inside the fever cart.
<br>
The second time that Mrs. Gibbs called round she had a different coloured apron on, black where the previous one was pristine white. When May recalled it afterwards she thought that it had had a decorated hem, Egyptian beetles in viridian embroidered there instead of butterflies. That was just her imagination, though. The apron was an unadorned plain black.
May was sat by herself in the front room. The half-sized coffin, resting on two chairs like a mesmerist’s audience volunteer, was by the window at the room’s far end. Her baby’s sleeping face looked grey, suffused by dusty light decanted through the nets. She’d no doubt look all right when she woke up. Oh, stop it, May thought to herself. Just stop. Then she began to shake and cry again.
The cruellest thing was that they’d brought her home. After a week May’s child had been sent back to Fort Street from the remote fever camp, so May and Tom had thought she’d be all right. But what did they know of diphtheria? They couldn’t even say it properly and called it ‘Dip’ like everybody else. They didn’t know that it came in two parts, or that most people got over the first only to have the next stage take them off. Weakened by the onset of the disease, they’d got no fight left when it stopped their hearts. Especially young children, so they said. Especially, May thought, the ones whose mams had kept their little boys and girls too clean. Whose mams had been concerned lest people say that they weren’t fit to take care of a child, and then gone on to prove those people right.
It was her fault. She knew it was her fault. She’d been too proud. Pride came before a fall, that’s what they said, and sure enough it did. May felt as if she’d fell out of her life, the lovely life she’d had two weeks before. She’d fell out of her dreams, her hopes. She’d fell out of the woman that she thought she was into this dreadful moment and this room, the coffin and that bloody noisy clock.
“Oh, my poor little darling. My poor lamb. I’m here, my love. Mam’s here. You’ll be all right. I shan’t let anything bad …” May trailed off. She didn’t know what she’d been going to say, hated the sound of her own useless voice making a promise she’d already broke. All of the times she’d comforted her child and told her she’d always look after her, sworn sacred oaths like every mother does then let her daughter down so wretchedly. Said she’d always be there for little May but didn’t even know, now, where ‘there’ was. Just eighteen months, that’s all they’d had with her; that was as long as they’d kept her alive. They’d joined that tragic and exclusive club folk whispered sympathetically about and yet preferred to keep their distance from, as though May were in quarantine for grief.
She wasn’t even thinking, sitting there. Thoughts wouldn’t stick together anymore, led nowhere that she was prepared to go. What filled her was a wordless, shapeless hurt, and the enormity of that small box.
There were black holes burnt in the hearthside rug that she’d not noticed, prior to today. The wicker footstool was unravelling. Why was it such hard work to keep things new?
The door being as usual on the latch, May didn’t hear the deathmonger come in. She just glanced up from studying the rug and Mrs. Gibbs was stood beside the chair, her apron showing up the dust flecks like the powdered, folded wings of a black moth. It was as if the previous eighteen months had never happened, as though Mrs. Gibbs had never even truly left the house that first time. There’d just been a change of light, a change of apron, butterflies all gone, embroidered summer’s day replaced by night. It was a ‘spot the difference’ picture game. The baby had been switched on May as well. Her lovely copper cub had disappeared and in its place was just this hard blonde doll. And May herself, that was another change. She wasn’t who she’d been when she gave birth.
In fact, upon closer inspection May realised that the whole picture was now wrong, with nothing else but differences to spot. Only the deathmonger remained the same, although she’d put on a new pinafore. Her cheeks, like Christmas stocking tangerines, weren’t changed a bit, nor her expression which could mean whatever you supposed it meant.
“Hello again, my dear,” said Mrs. Gibbs.
May’s “hello” in reply was made from lead. It left her lips and thudded on the mat, a lump of language, blunt and colourless, from which no conversation could be built. The deathmonger stepped round it and went on.
“If you don’t feel like talking, dear, then don’t. Not lest you need to but you don’t know how, in which case you can tell me all you want. I’m not your family, and I’m not your judge.”
May’s sole reaction was to look away though she conceded, at least inwardly, that Mrs. Gibbs had hit on something there. She’d had no one to talk to properly these last two days, she thought, except herself. She couldn’t speak above two words to Tom without she’d weep. They set each other off, and they both hated crying. It was weak. Besides, Tom wasn’t there. He was at work. May’s mam, Louisa, that was useless, too, not just because her mam wept easily. It was more May had let her mother down. She’d not been a good mother in her turn, not kept up the maternal tapestry. She’d dropped a stitch and failed the family. She couldn’t face them, and they couldn’t help. Her aunt’s attempt had been an awful scene that May was keeping shut out of her mind.
As a result, May had been left cut off. It was her fault, along with all the rest, but she was stuck with nobody to tell about all that was going on inside, the frightening thoughts and ideas what she had, too bad to say out loud to anyone. Yet here she was, and here was Mrs. Gibbs, a stranger, outside May’s immediate clan or any clan as far as May could see, except that of the deathmongers themselves. Mrs. Gibbs seemed outside of everything, as carefully impartial as the sky. Her apron, deep and private like a night, or like a well, was a receptacle that May could empty all this horror in without it ringing round her brood for years. May raised her sore red eyes only to find the other woman’s grey ones gazing back.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what I shall do. I don’t know how I shall get over it. They’re burying her tomorrow afternoon and then I shan’t have nothing left at all.”
May’s voice was rusty, cracking with disuse, a crone’s voice, not a twenty-year-old girl’s. The deathmonger pulled up the fraying stool, then sat down at May’s feet and took her hand.
“Now, Mrs. Warren, you listen to me. You’re not to tell me you’ve got nothing left. You’re not to even think it of yourself. If nothing’s left, what was your child’s life worth? Or any of our lifetimes, come to that? It’s all got value, else none of it has. Or do you wish you’d not had her at all? Should you prefer that you’d not seen me once if you were going to have to see me twice?”
She took it in and found it was all true. Put like that, asked in such straightforward terms if little May were better never born then she could only dumbly shake her head. The lank red strands, uncombed, fell on her face. She’d not got nothing, she’d got eighteen months of feeding, burping, going down the park, laughing and crying, changing tiny clothes. The fact remained, though, that she’d not got May. She’d got her memories of her little girl, favourite expressions, gestures, favourite sounds, but they were painful in the knowledge that there’d be no new ones added to the list. And that was just her sorrow’s selfish part, her pitying herself for what she’d lost. It was her baby should be pitied more, who’d gone into the dark all on her own. May looked up hopelessly at Mrs. Gibbs.
“But what about her? What about my May? I want to think she’s up in Heaven but she’s not, is she? That’s just what you tell kids about their cat or dog when all the time you’ve found it with its back broke in the street.”
At this she wept again despite herself and Mrs. Gibbs gave her a handkerchief, then squeezed May’s hand between her papery palms, a bible closing on May’s fingertips.
“I don’t hold much in Heaven, personally, nor in the other place. It sounds like tosh. All I know is, your daughter’s upstairs now, and whether you believe me or you don’t is none of my concern and none of hers. That’s where she is, my dear. That’s what I know, and I’d not say it if I wasn’t sure. She’s upstairs, where we all are by and by. Your dad’s told you already, I dare say.”
The mention of May’s father made her start. He had said that. He’d used that very word. “She’s upstairs, May. Don’t fret. She’s upstairs now.” In fact, now that she thought, she’d never heard him speak of death in any other way. Not him, her kin, nor anyone round here. They never said “in Heaven” or “with God”, nor even “up above”. They said “upstairs”. It made the afterlife sound carpeted.
“You’re right, he did say that, but what’s it mean? You say it’s not like heaven in the clouds. Where is it, this upstairs, then? What’s it like?”
In May’s own ears her voice was sounding cross, angry that Mrs. Gibbs was so cocksure about a thing as terrible as this. She hadn’t meant it to come out that way and thought the deathmonger would take offence. To her surprise, Mrs. Gibbs only laughed.
“Frankly, it’s very much like this, my dear.” She gestured, at the armchair, at the room. “What else should you expect it to be like? It’s much like this, only it’s up a step.”
May wasn’t angry now. She just felt strange. Had someone said those words to her before? “It’s much like this, only it’s up a step.” It sounded so familiar and so right, although she’d got no idea what it meant. It felt like those occasions, as a girl, when she’d been let in on some mystery, like when Anne Burk told May the facts of life. “The man puts spunk on the end of his prick, then puts it in your crack.” Though May had thought spunk would be soap-flakes in a little pile, spooned on a flat-topped cock-end into her, she’d somehow known that the idea was true; made sense of things she’d previously not grasped. Or when her mam had took her to one side and gravely told her what jamrags were for. This was like that, sat here with Mrs. Gibbs. One of those moments in a human life when you found out what everybody else already knew but never talked about.
May glimpsed the coffin at the room’s far end and knew immediately it was all junk. Upstairs was heaven with a different name, the same old story trotted out again to console the bereaved and shut them up. It was just Mrs. Gibbs’s atmosphere, the way she had, that made it sound half-true. What did she know about the hereafter? She was a Boroughs woman, same as May. Except, of course, she was a deathmonger, which gave the rot she talked that much more weight. Mrs. Gibbs spoke again, squeezing May’s hand.
“As I say, dear, it doesn’t matter much if we believe these things or if we don’t. The world’s round, even if we think it’s flat. The only difference it makes is to us. If we know it’s a globe, we needn’t be frit all the time of falling off its edge. But let’s not talk about your daughter, dear. What’s happened can’t be helped, but you still can. Are you all right? What’s all this done to you?”
Again, May found she had to stop and think. No one had asked her that, these last two days. It wasn’t something that she’d asked herself, nor dared to in the wailing, echoing well her private thoughts had recently become. Was she all right? What had this done to her? She blew her nose on the clean handkerchief that she’d been given, noticing it had no butterflies, just one embroidered bee. When she was done, she screwed the hanky up and shoved it in one jumper-sleeve, a move that meant Mrs. Gibbs letting go May’s hand, although once the manoeuvre was complete May slid her fingers voluntarily between the digits of the deathmonger. She liked the woman’s touch; warm, dry, and safe in the wallpapered whirlpool of the room. Still sniffing, May attempted a reply.
“I feel like everything’s fell through the floor and dropping down a tunnel like a stone. It doesn’t even feel like I’m meself. I sit and cry and can’t do anything. I can’t see any point in doing things, brushing me hair or eating, anything, and I don’t know where all of it shall end. I wish that I was dead, and that’s the truth. Then we’d be put together in one box.”
Mrs. Gibbs shook her head.
“Don’t say that, dear. It’s both a cheap and silly thing to say, you know it is. And anyway, unless I’m wrong, you don’t wish you were dead at all. It’s just that you don’t want to be alive because life’s rough and don’t make any sense. Those are two very different things, my dear. You’d do well to be sure which one you mean. One can be put right and the other can’t.”
The clock ticked and the tumbling dust motes stirred in sunbeams that fell slanting on the floor while May considered. Mrs. Gibbs was right. It wasn’t that she truly wanted death, but that she’d lost the reason for her life. Worse than this, she had started to suspect that life, all life that walked upon the earth, had never had a reason from the start. This was a world of accident and mess without a divine plan that guided things. It weren’t that God moved in mysterious ways, more that you never saw him move at all. What was the point of going on with it, the human race? Why did everyone keep on having babies, when they knew they’d die? Giving them life then snatching it away, just so you’d have some company. It was cruel. How had she ever seen things differently?
She tried conveying this to Mrs. Gibbs, the senselessness that was in everything.
“Life don’t make sense. It’s not made sense to me since Dr. Forbes said May had got the Dip. The fever horse come trotting up the street over the paving slabs where there’s no road, when generally carts wait along the end. Just like that, she was gone. They took her off in that dark wagon, off and down Bath Row, and that was that. I stood there in the road, roaring, and chewing on me handkerchief. I shan’t ever forget it, standing there …”
Cocking her bun-crowned head upon one side, Mrs. Gibbs silently renewed her grip on May’s hot hand, bidding her to go on. May hadn’t realised until now how much she’d needed to recount this to someone, get it all into words and off her chest.
“Tom was there. Tom had got me in his arms to stop me running off after the cart. Me mam, at number ten, she stayed inside to keep our Cora and our Johnny quiet, so that they’d not come out and join the fuss.”
Mrs. Gibbs pursed her lips enquiringly and then chimed in with what was on her mind.
“Where was your father, dear, if I might ask?”
May seemed to ponder this, and then went on.
“He was just standing out on his front step and … no. No, he were sitting. Sitting down. I hardly noticed him, not at the time, but thinking now, he was sat on that step as if it were a Sunday in July. As if there wasn’t an emergency. He looked glum, but not upset or surprised like everybody else. To tell the truth, he seemed more rattled back when she were born.”
She paused. She squinted hard at Mrs. Gibbs.
“And come to think about it, you did, too. You went white as a sheet when she came out. I had to ask if anything was wrong, and you said that you were afraid there was. You said it was her beauty, said she’d got an awful beauty, I remember it. Then later on, when you were leaving you took ages over your goodbyes to her.”
The penny dropped. May stared in disbelief. The deathmonger, impassively, stared back.
“You knew.”
Mrs. Gibbs didn’t even blink.
“You’re right, my dear. I did. And so did you.”
May gasped and tried to pull her hand away, but the deathmonger wouldn’t let it go. What? What was this? What did the woman mean? May hadn’t known her child was going to die. The idea hadn’t crossed her mind. Although …
Although she knew it had, a thousand times, scaring her in a score of different ways. The worst was feeling it was a mistake, this gorgeous child being given to her when it was clearly meant for royalty. There’d been some error, been some oversight. Sooner or later, it would get found out, like a large postal-order that had been delivered to an incorrect address. Somebody would be round to take it back. She’d known she wouldn’t get away with it, not with a child what shone like hers had done. Somewhere inside her, May had always known. That was the real reason, she now saw, why she’d took that woman’s remark so bad, that time in Beckett’s Park. It was because it told her something she already knew and yet was keeping from acknowledging: her daughter would be took away from her. They’d hear a knock upon the door one day, someone come from the council or police, or a Barnardo’s woman, looking sad. She’d just not thought it would be Dr. Forbes.
The clock ticked, and May wondered fleetingly how much time had gone by since its last beat. Mrs. Gibbs watched until she was convinced that May had took her point, then carried on.
“We know a lot more than we tell ourselves, my dear. Some of us do, at any rate. And if I’d said back when your May were born what I’d foreseen, then should I have been thanked? There’s no point served in saying things like that. If you yourself had taken notice of such premonitions as you might have had, it wouldn’t have prevented anything except for eighteen months of happiness.”
The deathmonger sat forward on the stool, her crisp black apron almost crackling.
“Now, you’ll forgive me saying this, my dear, but it appears you’ve took this on yourself. You think you’re a bad mother, and you’re not. Diphtheria don’t pick and choose like that or come to people ’cause of how they live, although the poor are very vulnerable. It’s a disease, dear, not a punishment. It’s no reflection on you or your bab, nor a result of how you brought her up. You’ll be a better mam for this, not worse. You’ll have learned things not every mother learns, and you’ll have learned them hard, and early on. You lost this child, but you shan’t lose the next, nor them that likely follow after that. Look at you! You’re a mam by nature, dear. You’ve got a lot of babies in you yet.”
May glanced away, towards the skirting board, at which the deathmonger narrowed her eyes.
“I’m sorry if I’ve spoken out of turn, or said something I shouldn’t ought have done.”
May blushed and looked back up at Mrs. Gibbs.
“You’ve not done nothing. You’ve just hit upon one of the things been going through me mind. Them babies in me, like you said. It’s daft, but I keep thinking one’s already there. There’s nothing what I’ve got to base it on, and half the ruddy time I think it’s just something I’ve dreamed up, to make up for May. I’ve had no signs, but then I wouldn’t do. If I’m right in this feeling what I’ve got, then I fell pregnant just two weeks ago. It’s all a lot of nonsense, I’m quite sure, just something I’ve come up with that it’s nice to think of, ’stead of crying all the while.”
The deathmonger began to stroke May’s hand, between caress and therapeutic rub.
“What is it, if it’s not too personal, that makes you think you’re in the family way?”
May blushed again.
“It’s nonsense, like I say. It’s just that … well, it was that Friday night, before they sent the fever cart for May. I’d been out round the park with her all day and she was wore out, the poor little thing. We put her to bed early, then we thought, it being Friday, we’d go up ourselves. So then we … well, you know. We had it off. But it was special, I can’t say just how. I’d had a lovely day, and I loved Tom. I knew how much I loved him on that night, when we were in bed getting up to it, and knew as well how much he loved me back. We lay there afterwards, and it were bliss, talking and whispering like when we first met. Upon my life, afore the sweat were dry I thought “there’ll be a baby come from this”. Oh, Mrs. Gibbs, whatever must you think? I never should have told you all of that. It’s nothing I’ve told anybody else. You only come round here to do your job, and here I’m dragging all me laundry out. You must think I’m a proper dirty cat.”
Mrs. Gibbs patted May’s hand, and she smiled.
“I’ve heard worse, let me tell you. Anyway, it’s all included in my shilling, dear. Listening and talking, that’s the biggest part. It’s not the birthing or the laying out. And as for if you’re pregnant or you’re not, you trust your instincts. They’re most likely right. Didn’t you say to me you’d have two girls, and then you’d stop and not have any more?”
May nodded.
“Yes, I did. And laying there that night I thought ‘here’s daughter number two’. Although it’s not, now, is it? It’s still one.”
She thought about this briefly, then went on.
“Well, it don’t make no difference. I still want two little girls, same as I said before. If it turns out I’ve got one on the way, I’ll have one more and then that shall be it.”
May marvelled, hearing herself saying this. Her darling girl was cold and lying in a half-pint box down at the parlour’s end, not six foot from where May was sat herself. How could she even be considering a baby, let alone one after that? Why wasn’t she just sitting here in tears and trying to get herself under control, the way she had done for these past two days? As though she’d found some stopcock in her heart, the waterworks had been at last shut off. She felt like she weren’t falling anymore, May realised with surprise. It wasn’t like she was filled up with happiness and hope, but at least she weren’t plunging down a hole that had no bottom, or light at the top. She’d hit some bedrock where she’d come to rest, a floor that didn’t give beneath her grief. There was a faint chance she’d get out of this.
She knew she owed it to the deathmonger. They handled death and birth and everything that come as part of that. It was their job. These women – always women, obviously – had got some place to stand outside it all. They weren’t rocked by the mortal ebb and flow. Their lives weren’t those arrivals would upend, nor would departures leave them all in bits. They stood unmoved, unchanged, through all life’s quakes, invulnerable to joy and tragedy. May was still young. Her daughter’s birth and death had been her first exposure to these things, her first instructions in life’s proper stuff, its gravity and frightening suddenness, and frankly it had all knocked her for six. How would she get through life, if life did this? She looked at Mrs. Gibbs and saw a way, a woman’s way, of anchoring herself, but the deathmonger had begun to speak again before May could pursue the thought.
“Anyway, dear, I’d interrupted you. You were just telling me about the day the fever cart took off your little girl. I butted in and asked about your dad …”
For just a mo, May looked at her gone out, and then remembered her unfinished tale.
“Ooh, yes. Yes, I remember now. Our dad, sat on the step while it were going on, like he already were resigned to it, while I stood roaring in the street with Tom. I barely noticed him, not at the time, and can’t hold it against him even now. I know that I go on about our dad, how he’s an old fool and he shows us up with all his climbing round the chimneypots, but he’s been good to me since our May died. Me mam, the others, I can’t talk to them without the whole lot ending up in tears, but our dad, it turns out, he’s been a brick. He’s not been down the pub or on his jaunts. He’s been next door in earshot the whole time. He don’t intrude. He pops in now and then to find out if there’s anything I want, and for once in me life I’m glad he’s there. But on that day, he just sat on the step.”
May frowned. She tried to go back in her mind to Fort Street on that Sat’day dinnertime, shuddering in her husband’s arms while they watched little May go trundling off inside the fever cart, across the listing flags. She tried to conjure all the sounds and smells that single moment had been made up from, sausages burning somewhere on a stove, the railway shunts and squeals come from the west.
“I stood and watched the fever cart roll off, and it come welling up inside of me, just losing her, losing my little May. It all come welling up and I just howled, howled as I haven’t done in all me life. The row I made, you’ve never heard the like. It was a noise I hadn’t made before, fit to break bottles and curdle the milk. Then, from behind me, I heard the same sound, but changed, an echo with a different pitch, and just as loud as my own screech had been.
“I broke off from me wailing and turned round, and standing there, down at the street’s far end, there was my aunt and her accordion. She was stood there like … well, I don’t know what, her hair like wool from hedgerows round her head, and playing the same note as what I’d screamed. Well, not the same note, it were lower down. The same but in a lower register. A thunder roll, that’s what it sounded like, spreading down Fort Street. Smokey, like, and slow. And there was Thursa, holding down the keys, her bony fingers and her great big eyes, just staring at me, and her face were blank like she were sleepwalking and didn’t know what she were doing, much less where she was.
“She didn’t care what I were going through, or that my child was being took away. She was just off in one of her mad dreams, and I hated her for it at the time. I thought she was a callous, useless lump, and all the anger what I felt inside for what had happened to my little girl, I took it out on Thursa, there and then. I drew a breath and yelled but it weren’t grief like it had been the first time. This were rage. I hollered like I meant to eat her up, all bellowed out in one long snarling rush.
“My aunt just stood there. Didn’t turn a hair. She waited until I were done and then she changed her fingers’ placement on the keys, holding them down to strike a lower chord. It was like when I’d first screamed, done again: she hit the same note lower down the scale as though she thought she was accompanying me. Again, it was a rumble like a storm, but one that sounded nearer, nastier. I give up then. I just give up and cried, and blow me if that silly ruddy mare weren’t trying to play along with that as well, with little trills of notes like snuffling and sounds like that noise you make in your throat. I’m not sure quite what happened after that. I think old Snowy got up off the step and went along to quiet his sister down. I only know when I turned and looked back the other way down Fort Street, May were gone.
“That was the worst, Thursa’s accordion. It made me feel like none of it made sense, like all the world was barmy as my aunt. It was all pointless. None of it were fair, had no more scheme or reason than her tunes. I still don’t know. I don’t know why May died.”
She lapsed here into silence. Mrs. Gibbs released May’s hand and raised her own to place them on May’s shoulders with a soft, firm grip.
“Neither do I, dear. Nor does anyone know what the purpose is in anything, or why things happen in the way they do. It don’t seem fair when you see some of them mean buggers living to a ripe old age and here’s your lovely daughter took so soon. All I can tell you is what I believe. There’s justice up above the street, my dear.”
Where had May heard those same words said before? Or had she? Was that a false memory? Whether the phrase was ever spoke or not, it seemed familiar. May knew what it meant, or sort of understood it, any road. It had the same ring to it as “upstairs”, the ring of somewhere that was higher up and yet was down to earth at the same time, without all the religious how-d’you-do and finery, what just put people off. It was one of those truths, May briefly thought, that most folk knew but didn’t know they knew. It hovered in the background of their minds and they might feel it flutter once or twice but mostly they forgot that it was there, as May herself was doing even then. Just an impression of the warm idea remained, the bum-dent left in an armchair, a fleeting sense of high authority that was summed up somehow in Mrs. Gibbs. May’s earlier notion now came back to her, of the deathmongers as a breed apart who’d gained their ledge within society where they could stand above the churning flood of life and death that was their stock in trade, unmoved by the fierce currents of the world that, these last days, had nearly done for May. They’d found the still point in a life that seemed, alarmingly, to have no point at all. They’d found a rock round which the chaos dashed. Barely afloat upon a sea of tears, in Mrs. Gibbs May caught sight of dry land. She knew what she must do to save herself, blurted it out before she changed her mind.
“I want to know what you know, Mrs. Gibbs. I want to be a deathmonger like you. I want to be stuck into birth and death so I’m not frit by both of them no more. I’ve got to have a purpose now May’s gone, whether I have another child or not. If kids are all the purpose what you’ve got, you’re left with nothing when they’re took away by death, policemen, or just growing up. I want to learn to do a useful task, so’s I should be somebody for meself and not just someone’s wife or someone’s mam. I want to be outside of all of that, to be someone who can’t be hurt by it. Could I be taught? Could I be one of you?”
Mrs. Gibbs let May’s shoulders go so she could sit back on the stool and study her. She didn’t look surprised by May’s request, but then she’d never looked surprised at all, except perhaps when little May was born. She breathed in deep and exhaled down her nose, a thoughtful yet exasperated sound.
“Well, I don’t know, my dear. You’re very young. Young shoulders, though you might have an old head. You will have after this, at any rate. What you must understand, though, is you’re wrong. There isn’t any place away from life where you can go and not be touched by it. There’s no place where you can’t be hurt, my dear. I’m sorry, but that’s just the way things are. All you can do is find yourself a spot that you can look at all life’s turmoil from, the babies born and old men passed away. Take a position close to death and birth, but far enough away to have a view, so you can better understand them both. By understanding, you can lose your fear, and without fear the hurt’s not half so bad. That’s all deathmongers do. That’s what we are.”
She paused, to be sure May had took her point.
“Now, bearing all of that in mind, my dear, if you think you’ve a calling to my craft, there’s no harm in me showing you a bit. If you’re in earnest, then perhaps you’d like to be the one what brushed your daughter’s hair?”
May hadn’t been expecting that at all. It had been all conjecture up to then. She’d not thought she’d be called upon so soon to put her new ambition to the test, and not like this. Not with her own dead child. To pull a comb through those pale, matted locks. To brush her daughter’s hair for the last time. She choked, even upon the thought of it, and glanced towards the box at the room’s end.
A cloud had pulled back from the sun outside and strong light toppled at a steep incline into the parlour, strained through greying nets, diffused into a milky spindrift fog above the coffin and the child within. From here, she could just see her baby’s curls, but could she stand it? Could she brush them out, knowing that she’d not do it anymore? But then equally daunting was the thought of giving someone else that sacred job. May’s child was going away, and should look nice, and if she could have asked she’d want her mam to get her ready for it, May was sure. What was she scared of? It was only hair. She looked back from the box to Mrs. Gibbs and nodded until she could find her voice.
“Yes. Yes, I think as I can manage that, if you’ll bear with me while I find her comb.”
May stood up, and the deathmonger did too, patiently waiting while May sorted through the bric-a-brac heaped on the mantelpiece until she’d found the wooden baby-comb with painted flowers on she’d been searching for. She gripped it, drew in a determined breath and made to walk towards the parlour’s end where the small coffin waited. Mrs. Gibbs placed a restraining hand upon May’s arm.
“Now then, dear, I can see you’re very keen, but first perhaps you’ll join me in some snuff?”
Out of an apron pocket she produced her tin with Queen Victoria on its lid. May gaped at it and blanched, and shook her head.
“Ooh no. No, thank you, Mrs. Gibbs, I shan’t. Excepting for yourself I’ve always thought it was a dirty habit, not for me.”
The deathmonger smiled fondly, knowingly, continuing to hold the snuffbox out towards May, its enamel lid flipped back.
“Believe me, dear, you can’t work with the dead, not lest you take a little pinch of snuff.”
May let this sink in, then held out her hand so Mrs. Gibbs could tip a measure of the fiery russet powder on its back. The deathmonger advised that May should try to sniff half up each nostril if she could. Gingerly dipping her face forward May snorted raw lightning halfway down her throat. It was the most startling experience she’d ever had. She thought that she might die. Mrs. Gibbs reassured her on this point.
“Don’t fret. You’ve got my hanky up your sleeve. Use that if you’ve a need to. I don’t mind.”
May yanked the crumpled square of linen from the bulge it had made in her jumper’s cuff and clutched it to her detonating nose. Down at one corner the embroidered bee was smothered by royal jelly in result. There were some minor tremors after this, but finally May could control herself. She cleaned herself up with a dainty wipe, then stuffed the ruined rag back up her sleeve. Mrs. Gibbs had been right about the snuff. May couldn’t now smell anything at all, and doubted that she ever would again. Upon the spot she made a firm resolve that if she took up this deathmonger lark she’d find another way to mask the scent. Perhaps a eucalyptus sweet might work.
Unhurriedly, and walking side by side, the women went down to the room’s far end and stood a moment there beside the box just gazing at the luminous, still child. The clock ticked, then they both got down to work.
Mrs. Gibbs first took off the baby’s clothes. May was surprised how supple the child was, and said as how she thought it would be stiff.
“No, dear. They have the rigor for a time, but after that it all goes out of them. That’s how you know when they’re best in the ground.”
Next they dressed little May in her best things, what were laid out already on a chair, and the deathmonger did her hands and face with some white powder and a bit of rouge.
“Not too much. You should hardly know it’s there.”
At last, May was allowed to brush the hair. She was surprised how long it took to do, although it might be as she dragged it out and didn’t want it to be finished with. She did it gently, as she always did, so that she didn’t tug her daughter’s scalp. It looked like spun flax by the time she’d done.
The funeral next day went off all right. For saying, there were a big crowd turned up. Then everyone got back on with their lives and May discovered she’d been right about the second child she’d thought was on the way. They had another girl, 1909, little Louisa, named after May’s mam. May was determined, still, to have two girls, but rested after having baby Lou just for a year or two, to get her breath. The next child was put off for longer than intended when an Austrian Duke got shot so everybody had to go to war. May and a five-year-old Lou waved Tom off at Castle Station, praying he’d come back. He did. That First World War, May got off light, and afterwards the sex was better, too. She had four babies, straight off, on the trot.
Though May thought one more girl and then she’d stop, their second child, in 1917, turned out to be a boy. They named him Tom, after his dad, the way that little May, their firstborn girl, was named after her mam. In 1919, trying for a girl to go with Lou, she had another boy. This one was Walter, and the next was Jack, then after that was Frank, then she give up. By that point her and Tom and their five kids had moved to Green Street, down along the end, and all this time May was a deathmonger, a queen of afterbirth and of demise who took both of life’s extremes in her stride. She was thick limbed by then, and dour, and stout and all her youthful prettiness was gone. Her father died in 1926 and then her mother ten years after that, in 1936, after a score of years where she’d not come outside her house. May’s mam had trouble walking by that time, but that weren’t really why she stayed indoors. The truth of it was, she’d gone cornery. May’s brother Jim got her a wheelchair once, but they’d not reached the end of Bristol Street before she’d screamed and pleaded to go home. It was the cars, which were the first she’d seen.
Her husband Tom died two years after that, and that took all the wind out of May’s sails. Their daughter Lou was grown and married now, and May had grandchildren, two little girls. May wasn’t a deathmonger anymore. All that she asked for was a peaceful life, after the upsets and the scares she’d had. It didn’t seem much, though that was before they started talking of another war.
** <strong>HARK! THE GLAD SOUND!</strong>
<strong>A</strong>spidery piano music picked its way in cold mist from the Abington Street library to the workhouse in the Wellingborough Road. His feet like ice inside his work boots, Tommy Warren took a last pull on his Kensitas then flicked the glowing dog-end to the ground, a tiny fireball tumbling away in marbled dark, smashed into sparks on frosted paving stones.
The distant, tinkling notes were creeping from Carnegie Hall above the library and out through this November night, their sound a string of icicles. Its source was Mad Marie, marathon concert pianist, booked at the hall that evening, giving one of her recitals which might last for hours. Days. Tom was surprised that he could hear her right up here outside St. Edmund’s Hospital, the former workhouse, where he stood while waiting for his wife Doreen, somewhere inside the institution, to give birth to their first child. Though faint and unidentifiable, the veering tune was audible despite the distance and the muffling fog.
There wasn’t much traffic to speak of in the Wellingborough Road that time of night … it was about one in the morning as he reckoned it … so it was very quiet, but Tommy still couldn’t make out which number Mad Marie was at that moment grinding through. It might have been “Roll Out The Barrel” or conceivably “Men Of The North, Rejoice”. Considering how late it was, Tommy supposed that Mad Marie could well be suffering from lack of sleep, swinging from one piece to the other without any real idea what she was playing, or of which town she was in.
It all reminded him of something, standing here in swirling blackness listening to an old song come from far away, but he was too preoccupied just now to think what it might be. All that was on his mind was Doreen, back there in the hospital behind him, halfway through a labour that looked set to carry on for ages yet, like Mad Marie and whatever the racket was that she was bashing out. Tom doubted that it had been music swelling his wife’s belly for these last few months, though from the bagpipe skirl that Doreen had been making when he heard her some ten minutes back, it might as well have been. The row Doreen had made was probably more tuneful than the swerving jangle Mad Marie was currently accomplishing, but it made Tommy wonder what kind of a melody had been composed inside his wife during her pregnancy, a soppy ballad or a stirring march: “We’ll Gather Lilacs” or “The British Grenadiers”? A girl or boy? He didn’t mind as long as it weren’t one of Mad Marie’s bizarre improvisations, where nobody had the first idea what it was meant to be. As long as it weren’t the men of the north rolling out barrels, or the British Grenadiers gathering lilacs. Just as long as it weren’t a conundrum. There’d been far too many of them in the Warrens and the Vernalls as it was, across the years, a great deal more than their fair share. Just this once, couldn’t him and Doreen have a normal kid who wasn’t mad or talented or both? And if there were a certain number of such problem children to be divvied out by fate, couldn’t some other family somewhere take their turn at shouldering the burden? People who had ordinary relatives just weren’t pulling their weight, as far as Tommy was concerned.
A solitary big grey car shoving piss-puddle headlight beams before it surfaced briefly from the big grey cloud beneath which all Northampton seemed to be submerged, and then was gone again. Tom thought it might have been a Humber Hawk, but wasn’t sure. He didn’t really know much about motors, except to his way of mind there were too many of the things about these days, and he could only see it getting worse. The horse and cart was on its way out, and it wasn’t coming back. Where Tommy worked in Phipps’s brewery at Earl’s Barton they still kept the old drays, all the great big shire mares steaming, snorting – more like sweaty railway engines than they were like animals. But then you’d got the bigger companies like Watney’s, they’d got lorries now and were delivering right across the country, whereas Phipps’s was still local. Tom could see them getting squeezed out given ten more years of it, if they weren’t careful. There might not be much of work or horseflesh by then to be found around Earl’s Barton. Tom supposed it wasn’t what you’d call the best or most secure of times for him and Doreen to have brought a kid into the world.
He screwed his Brylcreemed head round to regard the workhouse forecourt he was standing in and thought that, to be fair, it was a long shot from the worst of times as well. The war was finished, even if there was still rationing, and in the eight years since VE Day there’d been hopeful signs that England was back on the up again. They’d voted Winnie Churchill out, almost before the bombs had finished dropping, so Clem Atlee could get on with putting everything to rights. Granted, at present they’d got Churchill back again, saying as how he wanted to de-nationalise the steelworks and the railways and all that, but in them years after the war there’d been a lot of good work done for once, so things could never be rolled back the way they’d been. They’d got the National Health now, National Insurance, all of that, and kids could go to school for nothing until they were, what, seventeen or eighteen? Or longer, if they passed exams.
It wasn’t like when Tommy had won his mathematics scholarship and could have theoretically gone to the Grammar School, except that Tommy’s mam and dad, old Tom and May, could never have afforded it. Not with the books, the uniform, the kit, and most especially the big gap in the family income that Tom’s staying on at school would have entailed. He’d had to leave at thirteen, get a job, start bringing a pay packet home with him on Friday night. Not that he’d ever for a minute been resentful, or had even idly wondered what life might have been like if he’d taken up the scholarship. Tommy’s first duty had been to his family, so he’d done what he had to and got on with it. No, he weren’t brooding over his lost chances. He was just glad that things would be better for his little lad. Or lass. You never knew, although if he were honest Tom was hoping it would be a boy.
He paced a little, up and down outside the hospital, and stamped his feet to make sure that the blood was circulating. Every breath became an Indian smoke-signal on meeting the chill air, and just across the street the black bulk of St. Edmund’s Church thrust up like a ghost story from the fog. The tilting headstones in its walled yard poked above the mist, stone bed-boards in an outdoor dormitory, with damp and silvery eiderdowns of vapour spread between them. The tall midnight yews were line-posts where the wringing grey sheets of cold haze had been hung out to dry. No moon, no stars. From the direction of town centre came a faltering refrain that sounded like a Varsity Rag waved at an Old Bull and Bush.
The reason he’d prefer a boy was that his brothers and his sister all had boys already that would carry on the name. His older little sister Lou, six years his senior and nearly a foot his junior, had got two girls as well, but her and her chap Albert had produced a youngest boy, it must be getting on twelve year ago. Their Walt, Tom’s younger brother and the pride of the black market, he’d got married not long after the war’s end and had two lads already. Even young Frank, he’d beat Tommy to the altar and had had a son only the year before. If Tommy, who was after all the eldest brother, hadn’t had a kid of some kind by the age of forty, then he’d never hear the last of it from May, his mam. May Minnie Warren, leathery old so-and-so who’d got a voice like a dockworker’s fist, with which she’d no doubt pummel Tom to death if him and Doreen didn’t get a shift on and extend the Warren line. Tommy was frightened of his mam, but so was everyone.
He could remember, on Walt’s wedding night in 1947 or round then, the way their mam had cornered him and Frank out in the corridor at the reception, which was at the dance hall up in Gold Street. She’d stood there by the swing door, with people going in and out so that she’d had to shout over the music that kept blasting forth – it was the band May’s youngest brother managed, Tommy’s uncle Johnny – and his mam had read the riot act to him and Frank. She’d got half a pork pie held in one hand what she’d had off the buffet table and the other half of it was in her mouth part-chewed while she was talking, flakes of lardy pastry, ground pink pig-bits and yellowy jelly mashed together by her few remaining teeth or in a meat spume, spraying over Tom and his young brother as they stood there quaking in their boots before this strychnine Christmas pudding of a woman.
“Right, that’s Walter and our Lou both married off and out from underneath me feet, so you two better buck your ideas up and find yourselves a gal who’ll have yer, toot sweet. I’ll not have everybody thinking I’ve brought up a pair of idiots who need their mother to take care of ’em. You’re thirty, Tommy, and you, Frank, you’re nearly twenty-five. People are going to ask what’s up with you.”
That had been getting on six years ago. Tommy was thirty-six now, and until he’d met Doreen two or three years back, he’d been starting to ask what was up with him himself. It wasn’t like he’d never had a girlfriend, there’d been one or two, but there’d been nothing that had come to much. Part of it was that Tom was shy. He wasn’t impish or adventurous like Lou, his sis. He couldn’t charm the birds down out the trees then sell them shares in cloud-apartments like their Walter did, nor could he manage all the easy, near-the-knuckle sauciness that Frank would dish out to the girls. Tom was, in his own private estimation, the most knowledgeable of his siblings. He weren’t wise like Lou, ingenious like Walt or even crafty like their Frank, but Tommy knew a lot. About the only thing he didn’t know was how to set that learning to his own advantage, and when it had come to women he’d been lost and couldn’t put a foot right for the life of him.
Another car swam from the fogbank, possibly a snub-nosed Morris Minor, this one headed west and travelling in the opposite direction from the previous vehicle. Its watery headlights splashed across the rough, dark limestone of St. Edmund’s bounding wall when it went spluttering past him, and then there were only the bright rat-eyes of its rear reflectors as it seemed to back away from Tom into the shrouded corner represented by Northampton’s centre. Mad Marie struck up a bold rendition of “O Little Town of Burlington”, or possibly “Bethlehem Bertie”, as if welcoming the new arrival.
Tommy was still thinking of his previous luck with girls, or lack of it. When Tom had been a lad back in the ’Thirties, not that long before his dad died, he’d been briefly smitten by the daughter of Ron Bayliss, who was at the time Tom’s captain in the Boy’s Brigade. It was the 18<sup>th</sup> Company, who’d met up for drill practice once a week in the big upstairs hall of the old church in College Street. Since Tom had always been not just the shyest but the most quietly religious member of his family, the regular attendance at the church and the band marches once a month suited him fine, and when he’d first clapped eyes upon Liz Bayliss it was just one more incentive. She’d been very pretty and a cut above Tom socially, but he knew he was a good-looking chap himself, and round where he came from in Green Street he’d been thought of as a snappy dresser, too. So he’d worked up the nerve and, after church one Sunday morning, asked her if she’d come to the theatre with him.
Lord knows why he’d said “theatre”. Tom had never been to a theatre in his life, had simply thought it sounded cultured and impressive. Anyway, he’d not expected her to say she’d be delighted, and had only stuttered, “Oh, good. Then I’ll see you there on Thursday”, without any idea what was on the bill that night. As it turned out, it had been Maxie Miller, and it hadn’t been his white book the comedian had been performing from on that particular occasion.
Bloody hell. It had been both the funniest and most embarrassing half-hour of Tommy’s life. As soon as he’d seen Miller’s name up on the posters, Tommy had been horrified, had known that this was the last place on earth that he should take a fervent Baptist like Liz Bayliss, but by then he’d bought the tickets and there wasn’t any way he could back out. Besides, he’d heard Max Miller did a clean night now and then, so thought there was a chance he’d get away with it. At least, he’d thought that until Max had come out on the stage in his white suit with big red roses in brocade all over it, his wicked cherub face grinning up at the audience from underneath the brim of his white bowler hat.
“D’you like the seaside, ladies? Yes, I’ll bet you do. I love it, me. I was down Kent the other week, ladies and gents, lovely down there it was. I took a stroll, I took a stroll along the cliff-tops it were such a smashing day. Walking along this narrow little path, I was, with a sheer drop down to one side of me and ooh, it was a height, ladies and gents, the waves all crashing round the rocks hundreds of feet below. This path, well, it weren’t very broad, just wide enough to have one person on it but without the room for two people to pass, so just imagine, gents and ladies, just imagine my alarm when who should I see coming down the path the other way but a young lady in her summer frock and what a lovely thing she was, ladies and gents, I don’t mind telling you. Well, now, you can see my dilemma. I stopped in me tracks, I looked at her, I looked down at the rocks below and didn’t know what I should do. I’ll tell you, I weren’t sure if I should block her passage or just toss meself off and be done with it.”
In her seat next to Tom, Liz Bayliss had turned white as Miller’s hat. As the theatre all around them had erupted into laughter, Tom had struggled to compose his face into a look as mortified as that of his companion while preventing himself rattling like a boiler with suppressed hilarity. After a further twenty minutes, when the tears were running down Tom’s cheeks into the corners of his desperate rictus grimace, Liz had asked him in a voice like graveyard marble if he would escort her out and take her home. That had been more or less the last he’d seen of her, since he’d felt far too awkward to keep up his Boy’s Brigade or church appearances much after that.
The Wellingborough Road stretched out to either side of him, its weak electric lamps suspended in the churning dark at lengthy intervals, like lanterns hung from masts on quayside fishing boats. They weren’t much use for lighting up a stretch of road like this, not on a foggy night, but they were better than the gas lamps that were still in use in some parts of the Boroughs, such as Green Street where his mam lived on her own with no electric. Tommy pictured her, a scowling boulder in her groaning armchair by the fireside shelling peas, with her cat Jim down at her still-small but carbuncled feet, the hissing gaslight dyeing the room’s shadows to a deep dead-nettle-green. Next time he saw his mother, Tom was hoping he’d be able to hold up a grandson like a shield in front of him to stave off her attack. Or a granddaughter, obviously, although a son would probably be bigger and thus slow Tom’s mother down for longer.
From across an empty main road the St. Edmund’s bell chimed once, although if it were for one or half past he wasn’t sure. He squinted at the church tower through the intervening billows and reflected how he wasn’t sorry that he hadn’t been to church so much since the Liz Bayliss incident. Tom still believed in God and in the afterlife and all of that, but in the war he’d come to the conclusion that it wasn’t the same God and afterlife they talked about in church. That sounded too stuck up and fancy in the way that everybody dressed, behaved and talked. What Tom had first liked, as a kid, about the Bible was how Jesus was a carpenter, who would have had big callused hands and smelled of sawdust and said “bugger” just like anybody if the hammer caught his thumb. If Jesus was God’s son, it made you think his dad had very likely acted much the same when he was knocking up the planets and the stars. A working bloke; the hardest working bloke of all, who favoured working men and paupers throughout all the best loved stories in the Bible. The same rough and ready God that Philip Doddridge used to preach about on Castle Hill all of them years back. Tommy didn’t hear that cheery gruffness in the pious tones of vicars, didn’t feel that coarse warmth striking from the polished pews. These days, though Tom’s faith hadn’t budged an inch in its conviction, he preferred to worship privately and at a ruder altarpiece, alone inside his thoughts. He didn’t go to church except for funerals, weddings, and, if this went well tonight, for christenings. He didn’t let his lips move when he prayed.
That was the war, of course, a lot of that. Four brothers setting out, three coming home. It still upset him when he thought of Jack, and at the time he hadn’t seen quite how the Warren family would get over it, although you did, of course. You had to. It was like the war itself. It had been inconceivable to everybody while they were still getting through it that there’d ever be another way of living, that they could recover from it, all the bombs, all the dead relatives. Nobody could imagine much beyond more of what they were suffering already, only worse. The future, back then, it had been something that Tommy couldn’t think about, a place he’d never honestly expected he should see.
Yet eight years later here he was, a married man stood waiting for the birth of his first child. As for the future, Tommy thought of nothing but. Things weren’t the way they’d been before the war. Nothing meant quite the same as what you’d thought it did, and England was a different country now. They’d got a pretty young queen that the papers likened to the previous Good Queen Bess, and even ordinary working people had got televisions so as they could watch the coronation. It was all like something out of <em>Journey into Space</em>, how quick the onslaught of this modern world had been, as though the war’s end had removed a great impediment and finally let the twentieth century catch up with itself. Tom and Doreen’s first child – and they’d talked already of another one – would be one of these New Elizabethans everyone was going on about. They might grow up to live a life that Tom could never dream of, all the things that scientists would have discovered and found out about by then. They might have all the chances that Tom hadn’t had, or else had been compelled by circumstances to forgo.
Off in the curdling greyness, Mad Marie still serenaded him with “My Old Man Said Onward Christian Soldiers”, her piano sounding small and far away, a broken music-box that had been set off accidentally in another room. Tom thought of his maths scholarship again, the one that he’d passed up to take the brewery job instead. While it was true he’d not resented missing out on education if it meant that he could help his family, he still missed all the fun he used to have with sums and numbers, when it was all new to him.
It was his granddad, Snowy, who he’d got the skill with figures from. Although the old boy had passed on in 1926 when Tom was nine (gone mad and eating flowers out of a vase according to Tom’s mam), the pair had got on well and in those last two years of his grandfather’s life Tom had spent most Saturday afternoons at his grandparents’ house in the grim, narrow crack of Fort Street. While Tom’s granny Lou had fussed around in the dark kitchen, Snowy and young Tom had chanted their way through all the multiplication tables, sitting in the living room. Geometry, that was another thing that Tommy’s granddad had instructed him upon: rough circles drawn around milk-bottle bases with a titchy stub of pencil, sheets of butcher’s paper covering the tea-table until you couldn’t see the wine-red tablecloth. Snowy had told his grandson that most of the know-how came from his own father, Tom’s great-granddad Ernest Vernall, who had once worked touching up the frescoes of St. Paul’s Cathedral in Victorian times. Snowy said him and his sister, Tommy’s great-aunt Thursa, had been given lessons by their dad while he was at a rest home. Only some years later, after badgering his mam, had Tommy found out that the rest home had been Bedlam, the original asylum what they’d had in Lambeth.
He recalled the afternoon, fumbling now in his mac pocket for the pack of Kensitas, when they’d been working on the eight- and nine-times-tables. His granddad had pointed out how all the multiples of nine, if you just totalled up their digits, always added up to nine: one plus eight, two plus seven, three plus six and so on, for as high as you could go. The memory smelled of fruitcake, from which Tom assumed his gran had been out in the kitchen baking, that particular occasion. It had tickled him, the thing about the number nine, and for a lark he’d added up the digits in the answers to his eight-times-table, too. The first was just eight, obviously, while the next, sixteen, was one plus six and therefore added up to seven. The next, twenty-four, was two plus four and added up to six, while thirty-two reduced in the same way to five. Tommy had realised with a growing sense of intrigue that his column of additions counted down from eight to one (eight eights were sixty-four, in which the six and four thus added up to ten, the one and nought of which totalled just one), and then began the countdown all again commencing with the number nine this time (nine eights, seventy-two, the seven and the two of which made nine). This run of numbers, nine to one, was then repeated, on and on, presumably unto infinity. That had been when Tom’s grandfather had pointed out that this was the same sequence as the one-times-table, only in reverse, and that had set both of them thinking.
Taking one short untipped cigarette out of the pack, with its sleek, smarmy butler mascot in red, black and white, Tom lit it with a Captain Webb’s and threw the spent match in the vague direction of an unseen gutter, lost somewhere in the cold smoulder down around his feet. The fag-pack with its butler and the matchbox with its bold, moustachioed channel swimmer both went back into his raincoat pocket. He’d a Fry’s Five Boys bar in there, too, with a quintet of lads at various emotional extremes upon its wrapper. All this advertising and this packaging that you got nowadays, it meant that he was carrying seven tiny people in his pocket, just so he could have a smoke and possibly a square of chocolate if he should feel peckish later on.
Upon that memorable afternoon getting on thirty years before, Tom and his grandfather had swiftly reckoned up the digits in the answers to the rest of the multiplication tables. He remembered the excitement that he’d felt, the giddy, sheer thrill of discovery now come back to him in a fruitcake rush of allspice, candied peel and Snowy Vernall’s rubbing liniment. The two-times-table, if you added up the figures of the products, it transpired, resulted in a number-pattern that first ran through all the even numbers, two, four, six, eight, then all of the odd ones, one (one plus nought), three (one plus two), five, and so on up to nine (eighteen, or one plus eight). Remembering the way the one- and eight-times-tables had both yielded up numerical progressions that were backwards mirror-versions of each other, Snowy and young Tom had looked at the seven-times-table, where they’d learned that first the added answers counted down through the odd numbers, seven, five (one plus four), three (two plus one), one (two plus eight, which made the ten, the digits of which added up to one), and then went on to run down through the even numbers. Eight (three plus five), six (four plus two) and so on until the countdown of odd numbers started up again. The number seven seemed to work exactly like the number two, but with the sequence running back to front.
The number three, which just went three, six, nine, three, six, nine, unendingly if you made sums out of its multiples, appeared to be twinned with the number six, which went six, three, nine, six, three, nine, if you did the same thing. The number four produced a pattern that seemed complicated at first sight, in that it counted down from two numbers in parallel, and alternated in between the two. Thus, what you got was four, then eight, then three (or one plus two), then seven (one plus six), then two (two plus nought), six (two plus four), one (two plus eight, adding up to ten, or one plus nought), five (thirty-two, or three plus two), et cetera, et cetera. The five-times-table, unsurprisingly by now, did just the same thing in reverse. It alternated in the same way between two progressions, this time counting up instead of down, so that the sequence in this case was five, one, six, two, seven (two plus five), three (three plus nought), eight (three plus five) and so forth. Tommy and his grandfather had looked at one another and just burst out laughing so that Tom’s grandma Louisa had come out the kitchen to see what was up.
What had been up was that there seemed to be a hidden pattern in the sums that could be generated by the answers of the one- to eight-times-tables. They were all symmetrical, one mirrored eight, two mirrored seven, three worked just the same as six, four was like five. Only the number that had sparked off their investigations, nine, remained alone out of the single figures in that it did not possess a twin, a number that no matter how much it was multiplied would yield the same unvarying result.
Tom, eight years old, had been attempting to explain all this to his uncomprehending gran, when out of nowhere his granddad had yelped with glee, snatched up the midget pencil and, in faint lines on the thin and shiny butcher’s paper littering the table, had inscribed two circles, one inside the other. With one Capstan-yellowed index finger, Snowy had jabbed meaningfully at the drawing, looking up at Tommy from beneath the winter hedgerow of his brow to ascertain whether his grandson understood or not. The old man’s eyes were shining in a way that had reminded Tommy, there amidst the fruited oven-fug and camaraderie of the maths game which they’d been working out together, that his grandfather was said by many to be mad, including Tommy’s mam. And everybody else, now that he’d thought of it. His granddad had just grinned and once again poked at his mystifying scribble with an urgent finger. All that there had been to Snowy’s drawing was just two concentric circles, like a car tyre, or an angel’s halo standing on its side. Tommy had squinted at the simple shape for what seemed minutes before he’d become aware that he was looking at the figure nought.
It had been just as if the lights had been switched on. Nought was the only number, other than the number nine, that didn’t change if it were multiplied. All of the single digit figures between nought and nine made sequences by adding up their multiples that had a perfect symmetry. As if to underline this, Tom’s granddad had once more taken up his pencil, and had written those ten numbers in, all in a ring between the zero’s innermost and outer circles, like the numbers round the edges of a clock. The number nought was roughly where the one would be upon a normal timepiece, with the numerals proceeding clockwise round the dial and leaving spaces where the six and twelve were usually positioned. The effect of this was that each number was now set at the same horizontal level as its mirror-twin, the nine up at the top left face now lined up with the nought at the top right. The eight and one were opposite each other at both ten-to and ten-past, the seven and the two were diametrically opposed, each at the quarter-hour mark, with the six and three below that, and the five and four facing each other down the bottom, one at five-and-twenty-to, the other one at five-and-twenty after. It was lovely. In one simple flash a hidden pattern that had been there all the time, concealed beneath the surface, was revealed.
Neither Tom nor his grandfather had had the first idea what their discovery might mean, or could conceive of any useful application for it. Indeed, it was so blindingly obvious once you’d first seen it that they’d both assumed that someone, or more likely a great many people, had stumbled across the notion previously. It didn’t matter. In that moment Tom had felt a sense of triumph and sultana-scented revelation that he’d never known before or since. His grandfather had smiled a cracked smile that looked rueful rather than elated, and had stabbed once more with one black fingernail at the blank space enclosed by the big number nought’s interior ring.
“The nought’s a torus. That means, like, a lifebelt shape what’s got a hole in. Or it’s like a chimneypot, looked down on from above. And at the middle of the nought here, down the barrel of the chimney, that’s where all the nothing’s kept. You’ve got to keep your eye on nothing, lad, or else it gets all over everything. Then there’s no chimneypot, there’s just the hole. Then there’s no lifebelt, there’s no torus. There’s no nothing.”
With this, Snowy Vernall had seemed to get angry or unhappy, just like that. He’d screwed the piece of paper with the altered clock face drawn upon it up into a ball and thrown it on the fire. Tom hadn’t comprehended any of what his granddad had just been going on about, and must have looked scared by the old boy’s sudden change of disposition. Tommy’s gran Louisa, who looked like she’d seen these swings of mood before, had said “Right, that’s enough sums for today. Young Tommy, you run off back home before your mam gets worried. You can see your granddad Snowy on another Sat’day afternoon.” She hadn’t even shown Tom out, perhaps because she’d known that there was an explosion imminent. Tommy had barely shut the worn front door behind him and stepped outside into Fort Street when he heard the furious bellowing and, shortly after, breaking glass. Most probably it would have been a window or a mirror, mirrors being something that Tom’s grandfather was known to have become suspicious of. Tommy had scarpered off down Fort Street which, although it had been barely the mid-afternoon, Tom pictured now as having then been ominously dark. However, he recalled that this had happened in the ’Twenties, long before the Borough Waste Destructor had been pulled down to make way for flats in Bath Street, so that was one mystery solved.
Tom pulled upon his Kensitas and blew an unintended smoke-ring, almost instantly made indistinguishable from the chilly, writhing fumes surrounding him there in the Wellingborough Road. He wished he could blow one like that when somebody was watching. When Doreen was watching.
Drifting up from the town centre, to the west and on Tom’s right, the jingling and meandering performance of the marathon concert recitalist was still continuing, notes hung on the infrequent threads of breeze like the glass lozenges that dripped from chandeliers. It still reminded him of something, of some other night like this, perhaps, some other music drifting from some other fog? The memory, much like fog, was elusive, and he let it go and instead wondered how Doreen was getting on. She probably would have been in no mood to have appreciated Tommy’s smoke-ring, even if she’d seen it. She’d most likely other things upon her mind right now.
He’d go back in. Another fag or two, he’d go back in and sit there in the small beige waiting room close to the front doors of the decommissioned workhouse, where at least it would be warm. He’d sit and drum one foot upon the varnished floorboards, in his mac and his demob suit, just like both the other blokes whose wives were having babies this same night, the seventeenth, who were already sat expectantly inside. Tommy had waited in there with them for a while, just after he’d brought Doreen to the hospital and she’d been took to the delivery room, but he’d not been there very long before the silence had begun to get upon his nerves and he’d made some excuse to quietly slip outside. Nothing against the other chaps, it was just that they hadn’t much in common past the fact that nine months earlier they’d had a lucky night. It weren’t like they were going to sit and talk about their hopes and fears and dreams, like actors might do in a film. In real life, you just didn’t. In real life, you didn’t really have much in the way of hopes and fears and dreams, not like a character who’s in a film or book had got. Things like that, in real life, they weren’t important to the general story in the way they had to be in literature. Dreams, hopes, they weren’t important, and if someone were to bring them up then everyone would say he thought that he was Ronald Colman, looking sensitive with his long eyelashes in black and silver through the cigarette smoke at a matinee.
The Wellingborough Road felt like a riverbed, with grubby lamb’s-wool vapour rushing down it in a flood of murk, eastwards to Abington, the park, and Weston Favell. The benighted shops and pubs were vole-holes dug into its banks below the waterline, hiding dark merchandise. As Tommy watched, a lone Ford Anglia came darting like a pike out from the grounded cloud then swam away in the direction of town centre, battling upstream against the current of the mist and in the face of Mad Marie’s continuing recital. The Ford Anglia was one car Tommy recognised by what he thought of as its sharp italic tilt, a term he’d picked up from his penmanship at school and which had stuck with him. Its cream and cornflower paintwork vanished in the oyster drifts beneath which Abington Square and Charles Bradlaugh’s statue were submerged, and Tommy was alone again, scuffing his boots against the rolling torrent’s stone and tarmac bed-sands, sucking in the fog through the last half-inch of his Kensitas and blowing it out suavely down his nose.
He knew that thirty-six was late, comparatively, to be starting off a family, but it weren’t too late. Tom had known blokes a good sight older than what he was, siring a first child. But then, with both his younger brothers having kids already, he’d not felt that he could leave it any later. If he wasn’t a grown man and fit to raise a son by now, after the things he’d been through, then he’d never be one. While the war had took their Jack away from him, the whole affair had given Tom a sort of confidence he hadn’t felt before, a sense that if he’d managed to survive all that then Tommy Warren was as good as anybody else. He’d come back home from France with a new twinkle in his eye, a different swagger there in every well-dressed step. Not flashy or expensive, mind you. Just well-dressed.
He could remember his homecoming, pulling into Castle Station on a train packed full of children, matrons, business people, and scores of returning men in uniform like him and Walt and Frank. Standing room only, it had been, all of the way from Euston Station, Tom and his two brothers stuck out in the corridor with getting on two dozen other people, swaying and complaining straight through Leighton Buzzard, Bletchley, Wolverton. As far as Tommy could recall, he’d been stood trading stories with their Walter, which as always was a contest that you couldn’t hope to win. He’d been halfway through telling Walt about the night when all the idiot British officers got pissed and drove a tank over the front gate of the ammo dump that Tom was guarding, so he couldn’t even shoot the overpaid guffawing twits for fear of setting off the shells. It was at that point in his story, just past Wolverton, that a big Yank, a GI who’d got on the train at Watford and was going on to Coventry, had joined them in the crowded, lurching corridor.
Sometimes, the Yanks, they were all right, and you could have a laugh with them, but by and large they got right up Tom’s nose, the way they did with most people he knew. On the front line they’d always used to say that when the Luftwaffe went over, all the English ran, and when the RAF went over, all the Germans ran. When the Americans went over, everybody ran. The cocky buggers had backed Hitler until 1942, then come into the war late and took all the credit, even after they’d walked slap into a Jerry trap and probably delayed the war’s end with their ‘Battle of the Bulge’, or Operation Autumn Mist as Fritz proudly referred to it. The soldiers over here, though, were the worst, or anyway the white ones were. The darkies were as good as gold, you couldn’t meet a nicer bunch of chaps, and Tommy could remember being home on leave and seeing the Black Lion’s landlord slinging out some white GIs when they’d complained about the black ones they were forced to share a ‘barroom’ with. “Them niggers in the back there,” as they’d called them. Some Americans could be right Herberts, and this fellow who’d come up to Tommy and his brothers on the train was one of them.
Right from the get go, he’d been mouthing off about how much more pay the Yanks got than the English, how they’d give them bigger rations, all of that. Walter had nodded sagely and said “Well, that’s only fair, you’ve bigger mouths to feed”, but the GI went on as though he hadn’t noticed that their Walt had made a dig. He’d started telling them, in a low whisper on account of all the ladies that were in the corridor, about how many rubber johnnies his lot had been issued by the US army. Seeing as this chap was stationed over here in England this was just as good as saying they’d been given them to use with English girls, which wasn’t something British chaps were likely to take kindly to. Tommy had seen the look come in his brothers’ eyes, the same as he supposed had been there in his own. Walter had smiled a great big smile, eyes sparkling, which wasn’t usually a reassuring sign, and Frank had just gone quiet with a tight little grin on his lean face, which meant the Yank, big as he was, was looking for a swift punch up the bracket if he didn’t watch himself. It was the Warren boys that he was talking to, who’d made a decent name for themselves liberating their small piece of France, who’d lost their brother, the best-looking out the lot of them, and who’d been given in return a lot of medals that they didn’t want. Taking their dangerous silence for respect or awe, the GI had elected to back up his brag by fishing out the US army-issue tin he kept his condoms in, prising its lid up to reveal perhaps two dozen prophylactics. Tom had wondered idly if Americans wrote chirpy slogans on the sides of rubbers, like they did with bombs. “Here’s looking at ya, Princess Liz!” or something of that nature. Walter had peered down into the open tin and said “I see you’ve a lot left, then.” Frank had ground his teeth and bunched one fist up, ready to kick off, and it was just then that the train had gone over a bump, so that their carriage clanked and rocked.
The johnnies had all shot into the air like sparks out of a Roman candle, falling in a rubber rain on bankers’ shoulders, into schoolboys’ satchels and on ladies’ hats. The Yank had gone as red as Russia, crawling round on all fours gathering them up, apologising to the women while he fished the little packets from between their heels and stuffed them back into his tin. Walter had started singing “When johnnies come marching home again, hurrah” and everybody in the carriage but the Yank had had the best laugh that they’d had since 1939.
Tom risked a burned lip with a last drag on his fag then flipped the ember end of it away into the invisible gutter with its predecessor. That had been a rare old time, back then when they were fresh home from the war. Out every Friday night they’d been, the famous Warren lads all in their suits, but only eldest brother Tommy with the matching handkerchief in his breast pocket. Sauntering from pub to pub, the shunt and jingle of the one-armed bandits strewing fruit and bells before them as they went, the busty landladies’ admiring smirks, war heroes, such a shame about your handsome brother. Free shots from the optics, Walter telling jokes and selling knocked-off nylons, only used once previously, miss, and that were by a nun. Frank leering, Tommy going red and trying not to laugh when they were stepping over brawling lezzies on the Mayorhold, and a head-of-Guinness moon cut free to sail above the Boroughs like a pantomime effect.
That snowy Christmas Eve when Walt had found an apple crate up on the market, harnessed Frank and Tommy to it with some string then jammed his tubby arse inside so they could pull him round town centre like two reindeer towing Father Christmas. “Ho ho ho, you buggers! Mush!” They’d gone into the Grand Hotel and bought a round of drinks, just for the three of them, and they’d been charged more than a pound. With Walt directing, Frank and Tom had gone to either side of the big hotel lounge and started rolling up the huge expensive carpet, asking people to lift up their chairs and tables so that they could roll it under them. The manager or someone had come storming out and asked Walt what the devil they thought they were playing at, to which Walt had replied that they were going to take the carpet, since they’d paid for it. They’d had to make a quick escape, without the rug, but luckily their apple crate was still roped to a lamppost outside the hotel. They’d jingled all the way down Gold Street, faces flushing blue and yellow in the fairy lights, along Marefair, back home to Green Street and their waiting mam. Hitler was dead and everything was ruddy marvellous.
Except for Jack, of course. Tommy recalled, with a queer shudder of appalled nostalgia, how the Warren family’s Christmas ritual had been that first year after Jack was gone. The family had gathered in the front room, just as they’d done for as long as anybody could remember. Tommy’s mam had leadenly retrieved the fancy China piss-pot – easily a foot across, having been manufactured in a time of bigger arses – from its perch atop that old glass-fronted cabinet they used to have. While Frank and Walt and Lou and Tommy had looked on, their mam had filled the guzunder up to its rim with a grotesque and undiscriminating mix of spirits; drainings from the staggeringly varied complement of bottles to be found around their heavy-drinking household. Brimming with a shimmering pale-gold aggregate of whiskey, gin, rum, vodka, brandy and possibly turpentine for all that anybody knew, the glazed white chalice, hopefully unused, had been solemnly passed around the family circle, this accomplished only with both hands and some degree of difficulty. It was obviously impossible to drink from a receptacle that had quite clearly never been designed with that function in mind, at least without a certain drenching of the shirtfront, and this spillage had been worse with every circuit of the front room and of the increasingly incapable and uncoordinated individuals gathered there. On all the previous occasions when this ritual had been enacted there had been a kind of glory in its wretchedness: it had been somehow comical, and brave, and as if they were proud of being the uproarious and filthy monsters that their betters saw them as. There’d been a kind of horrid grandeur to it, but not after Jack was gone. That had been proof that they weren’t mighty and immortal ogres after all, invincible in their inebriation. They’d just been a crew of vomiting and tearful drunks who’d lost their brother; lost their son. Tom couldn’t now remember if they’d bothered with the Christmas ritual after that unhappy year of victory.
Across the Wellingborough Road, St. Edmund’s clock struck twice for two and must have scared a roosting bird awake and into some state of activity, at least to judge from the plump tear of pigeon muck that silently dropped from the mists above him, splattering his mac’s lapel with liquid chalk and caviar in its descent. Tom growled and swore and fished out his clean hanky from the pocket with no matches, fags or chocolate bars, wiping the white smear hurriedly away until only a faint damp stain remained. Making a mental note that he must have it washed before he blew his nose on it again, he shoved the used rag back into his coat.
Of course, all that post-war exhilaration hadn’t lasted. Not that things had gone bad, not at all. Times had just changed, the way they always did. First Walt had met a little beauty and got married, which had prompted their mam’s laying down the law to Tom and Frank at the reception, shouting at them over all the noise that Uncle Johnny’s band were making at the dancehall there in Gold Street, telling them they’d better find themselves a pair of girls or else. Frank, wry and wiry with his line of saucy banter, had been quicker off the mark than Tommy in responding to their mother’s ultimatum. He’d gone out and found a ginger lass as near the knuckle as what he was and they’d wed in 1950, which had just left Tom to bear the brunt of their mam’s grunted disapproval.
Tommy could remember seeking refuge and advice during that period with his big little sister, popping up to see Lou and her husband Albert and their children out in Duston at the least excuse. As always Lou had been a darling, bringing him a cup of tea in her nice, airy little front room, listening to his troubles with her head on one side like a soft toy of an owl. “Your trouble is, bruv, that you’re backward coming forward. I’m not saying as you should be a smooth talker like our Walt, or else a dirty little bugger like our Frank, but you should put yourself about, or else the girls won’t know you’re there. It’s no good waiting for them to find you, that’s not what girls are like. I mean, you’re a good-looking chap, you’re always dressed a treat. You’re even a good dancer. I can’t see as anything’s the matter with you.” Lou’s voice, low and chuckling, had a lovely croak to it, almost a buzz or hum that, with his sister’s compact shape, made Tommy think of beehives, honey, and, continuing with the association, Sunday teatime. She could always be relied upon to set you straight and have a laugh while she were doing it. Tom sometimes saw in Lou a glimpse of what their mam must have been like when she were young, before she lost her first child to diphtheria and started getting bitter, back before she were a deathmonger.
The only incident Tom could recall relating to his mother’s trade in birth and death concerned an isolated morning in his childhood which had nonetheless left an impression. Mr. Partridge, a big, portly chap who’d lived only a few doors from their house in Green Street, had passed on but was too fat to get out through the door of the front bedroom where he’d died. Tommy had watched from down the Elephant Lane end of Green Street while his mam had stood there in the road directing the removal of the house’s upstairs window and the lowering of an immense and almost purple Mr. Partridge, with a winch and trestle, down into the horse-drawn hearse that waited patiently below. Of course, with all the Co-op funeral schemes they had these days there weren’t much work for deathmongers about. Tom’s mam had packed it in, the end of 1945. With Jack gone, he supposed she’d had enough of death by then, and with the National Health on the horizon, then perhaps she’d reckoned that the birth end of the racket would be gone too, before long.
These days, most women having a first child would come and have it here, in hospital. There were still midwives, naturally, for later children or for people stuck out in the country, but these were all midwives working for the National Health. They weren’t freelancers like his mam, and no one called them deathmongers these days. Tom thought it was a good thing, by and large. He was a modern bloke, and he for one was glad that his wife was just now having her child delivered in a modern ward, with proper doctors gathered round, not in a dark back bedroom with some cackling old horror like his mam bent over her. Doreen had enough reservations about Tommy’s mam as things stood, and if May had stuck her nose into the birth of their first child then that would have put the tin hat on the occasion good and proper. Tommy shivered, even thinking of it, though that might have just been the November night.
It was Doreen who’d rescued Tommy from his bachelor state and his mam’s approbation. That had been a bit of luck, his finding her. It was just like his Lou had said, he was too reticent with girls and couldn’t turn the charm on like their Walt or Frank. Tom’s only hope had been to find somebody even shyer than what he was, and in Doreen that’s just what he’d found, his perfect complement. His other half. Like Tom, she wasn’t shy as in the sense of cowardly or weak. There was a backbone under her reserve; she just preferred a quiet life without a lot of fuss, the same as he did. She, like him and every other bloke who’d seen the inside of a trench, preferred to keep her head down and get on with things, to not attract attention. It was something of a marvel that he’d spotted her at all, stood shrinking back behind her louder, gigglier mates from work, as if for fear that anyone should see how beautiful she was, with her big watery blue eyes, her slightly long face and her bark-brown hair curled up into a wave. With her theatre glow, that mistiness she had about her like a lobby card. He’d told her, soon after they’d met, that she looked like a film star. She’d just pursed her lips into a little smile and tutted, telling him he shouldn’t be so soft.
They’d wed in 1952 and though it would have made more sense, in terms of room, for them to go and live in Green Street with his mam, no one had wanted that. Not Tommy’s mam, not Tommy, and particularly not Doreen. She was the only person Tom had ever met who, even though she had a timid and retiring nature, wouldn’t put up with May Warren’s bullying or her intimidating manner. Tom and Doreen had instead decided to reside down in St. Andrew’s Road with Doreen’s mother Clara and the other members of her family that lived there, or at least had lived there until recently. Though the idea of him and Doreen living with Tom’s mam had been like something from a nightmare, these last two years living down the bottom of Spring Lane and Scarletwell Street hadn’t been much better.
Now, this hadn’t been because of Doreen’s mam, the way it would have been with Tommy’s, round in Green Street. Clara Swan had worked in service and remained a very proper and religious woman in her own quiet fashion, and though she could be both strict and stern if things should warrant it, she was in almost every way completely different to May Warren, thin and upright where his mam was short and stout. No, Tommy got on fine with Doreen’s mam, just like he did with both her brothers and her sister, their respective spouses and their children. It was just that there had been so many of them, until recently, and it was such a little house.
Admittedly, the eldest brother, James, he’d married and moved out before Tom got there, but it had still been a tight fit, packing everybody in. First there was Doreen’s mam herself, whose house it was, or at least it were her name on the rent book. Next was Doreen’s sister, Emma, and her husband Ted, with their two children, John and little Eileen. Emma, older than Doreen, was the first woman railway guard in England, and it had been on the railway that she’d met her dashing engine driver husband, Ted, who cleaned his teeth with chimney soot. Then there was Doreen’s younger brother Alf, the bus-driver, his wife Queen and their toddler, baby Jim. With Tommy and Doreen as well that had made getting on ten people crammed in a three-bedroom terraced house.
Doreen and Tom had started out with a few months of sleeping best they could upon the couch in the front room. Emma and Ted and their two kids had the front bedroom, Clara had the smaller bedroom next to that, which was above the living room, then Alf and Queen were in the smallest room, right at the back above the kitchen. Baby Jim slept in the wardrobe drawer. The nights, then, had been cramped-up and embarrassing, but early evenings had been worse, just after tea with everybody home from work and gathered in the living room to listen to the wireless. Ted and Emma would have hostile silences between them that could last for days, just glaring at each other over the tinned salmon sandwiches and <em>ITMA</em> catchphrases: “Dis iss Funf speaking”. “Mind my bike”, and, “Don’t forget the diver”. Alf would come home every night exhausted after being up so early with the buses, and would flake out snoring on the mat before the fire, just like a cat big as a man and dressed in a bus driver’s uniform. His wife Queen, who was also by coincidence the sister of Ted, Emma’s husband, would, on most nights, just sit by the fire and weep. You couldn’t blame her. Upstairs, baby Jim would have climbed from his wardrobe drawer and started banging on the bedroom door, sometimes for hours on end. You couldn’t blame him, either, the poor little sod, not living in a wardrobe. If that wouldn’t send you cornery, Tom didn’t know what would. Baby Jim’s difficulty was, he was too clever. No one in the Swan or Warren families was what you’d call a dim bulb, but baby Jim was the next generation and you could see from the outset that they’d be as sharp as knives, particularly baby Jim. By three years old he’d managed to escape twice from the house and get four blocks away before the police apprehended him and brought him back. Mind you, given how hazardous a child’s life could be down St. Andrew’s Road, he’d probably have been a good sight safer if they’d left him where he was.
Again, it wasn’t that the adults in the house were negligent, it was just there were seven of them and three children, getting on each other’s wicks and underneath each other’s feet, so accidents were bound to happen. Ted and Emma’s eldest, John, had liked to sit up on the back of the armchair before the day he lost his balance and tipped over, falling backwards out the window of the living room into the back yard in a shower of broken glass. Then Ted and Emma’s youngest, pretty Eileen, had fell face down in the fire with all the red hot coals, necessitating an immediate race up to the family doctor, Dr. Grey in Broad Street, his Doreen and her big sister Emma running frantically across a darkened Mayorhold holding the miraculously unscarred child wrapped in a blanket.
Mercifully, this last year things had fallen right. First Ted and Em had moved out, to a house further along St. Andrew’s Road, in Semilong. Then Alf and Queen had gone as well, up to the Birchfield Road in Abington. They’d taken baby Jim with them, of course, but for some reason, at the age of five, he’d broken out of his new home as well and managed to negotiate about two miles of busy roads, finding his way back to the Boroughs and his gran’s house unescorted. Tom supposed it might have been that Jim, in the same way that new-hatched ducklings sometimes got confused, had mixed up his attachment to his mum with an attachment to the wardrobe. Anyway, the upshot of it was that there were only Clara, Tom and Doreen living down St. Andrew’s Road at present. Tom and Doreen had the big front bedroom Ted and Emma had vacated, and with fewer people milling round, this baby that the two of them were having would be born into a safer house. Into a safer world, or at least that’s what everybody hoped.
Tom tucked his bristly chin in, squinting down at his lapel. He could still see the stain left by the bird-muck and glumly resigned himself to scrubbing it with Borax after he got home.
He thought that by and large it was a safer world, although not when it came to bird-muck, obviously. The war was finished, this time, and he didn’t think even the Jerries would be keen to kick it off again, especially not after losing half their country to the communists. There’d been Korea, obviously, but his lad, if it was a lad, wouldn’t be growing up to be conscripted off like Tommy, or to spend nights shivering beneath the table in the living room when there were air raids, which was how Doreen had spent the war, her being ten years Tommy’s junior. And anyway, after the A-bomb what the Yanks had dropped onto Hiroshima, didn’t they say that if there was a third world war, then it would all be over in about five minutes? Not that this was a cheering thought, admittedly. Tom felt the craving for another Kensitas, but since he’d only got five left and didn’t know how long he’d have to stretch them out, he thought he’d better wait.
Churchill had seen to it that Britain let off its first bomb last year, and France was keen to have one too. The Russians and the Yanks had both got hundreds, but Tom couldn’t say it worried him that much. To his mind, it would turn out to be like the gas that everybody was so scared of in the war, poor little Doreen having to run back home to St. Andrew’s Road from Spencer School when she’d forgot her gas mask. In the end, nobody had been mad enough to use it, even Hitler, and these atom bombs would turn out just the same. Nobody would be mad enough. Although, of course, the Yanks already had, but Tom was standing waiting on the birth of his first child with quite enough to fret about already, and so he decided that he’d let that idea go.
The faint wind from the west at this point made an unexpected push and briefly rattled Tommy’s mac. It shoved the fog to one side for a second from the shuttered pub, the Spread Eagle, just past the workhouse front on Tommy’s left. The toucan’s orange bill on the tin Guinness advert what were bolted up outside poked from the mist and then was gone again. The breeze brought also a renewed burst of cascading notes from Mad Marie down at Carnegie Hall, her mongrel melodies sliding about like nutcase furniture on casters, juddering off along the Wellingborough Road. The music was the usual mishmash; don’t sit under the old rugged cross with anybody else but me, no no no, and then suddenly she was just playing one tune, clearly and distinctly, even if she only held it for a few bars before it collapsed into the general piano soup.
The tune was “Whispering Grass”.
That did it. Tommy knew at once what the peculiar music in the swirling dark had been reminding him of all along: five, nearly six years back now, in the early months of 1948 not long after their Walter had got married, that time Tommy had gone drinking in the old Blue Anchor up Chalk Lane. It all came back to him in a great sepia wash of beer-blurred snapshot pictures, captured moments from his drunken stumble to the wild accompaniment of a fogbound piano and accordion, and Tommy marvelled that he hadn’t thought of it before. How had he forgotten that strange, startling occasion, all the fears and questions it had thrown up in the face of Tommy and his family? He supposed in his defence he’d been preoccupied, what with the thought of Doreen and the bab, but even so he’d not have thought a night like that would slip so easy from his mind.
Tom lit another fag before remembering he’d planned to stretch them out, then turned his collar up as if he was a crook or haunted lover in a film, which was the ambiguous mood the mist and memories had put him in. The collar’s stiff edge rubbed on the ear-level stubble of Tom’s once-a-week short, back & sides, the haircut that he’d stuck with since his army days. Tommy could take the silver paper from a fag pack, wrap it round a plain brown penny and then burnish it against the bristles there behind his skull until it looked just like florin, which was something Walt had showed him how to do. Unlike their Walt, though, Tom had never had the nerve to pass off his nape-minted two bob bits as the real thing. He’d never had the nerve or was too honest, one or other.
On that evening several years before Tom and his youngest brother Frank had been to the Blue Anchor, which had stood just up past Doddridge Church there on Chalk Lane, almost in Bristol Street. The pub was something of a family favourite as its previous landlord and landlady had been Tommy and Frank’s great-grandparents on their mother’s side. Their gran Louisa who’d died back in the late thirties, as a girl she’d been the busty landlord’s daughter serving drinks at the Blue Anchor in the 1880s when young Snowy Vernall had called in on one of his long walks from Lambeth. If Tom’s grandfather had been less thirsty or had strolled the extra twenty yards up to the Golden Lion then there’d have been no May, no Tommy and no baby struggling towards existence right now in the hospital behind him. This explained his family’s fondness for the place before it had been torn down a few years ago. Anyway, him and Frank had been in there putting the pints away, and while it had been all right it had all felt a bit lifeless and subdued, to Tom at any rate. Part of it, obviously, was they were missing Walt who’d gone and married six months earlier, which meant that their three musketeers act had been whittled down to two. And without Walter’s inexhaustible supply of gags, there was more time to sit and mourn for their fourth musketeer, their Jack, their dead D’Artagnan with his grave in France and with his name down on the monument at Peter’s Church.
Whatever the real reason, Tommy had been out of sorts with things that night in the Blue Anchor. Him and Frank had run into some chaps Frank knew from work but who Tom weren’t so chummy with, so he’d begun to feel a bit left out and thought perhaps he’d try another pub. Tom had made his apologies to Frank then left him chatting with his mates while he’d put on his coat and stepped out through the pub’s front door into Chalk Lane. It had been very like tonight, with all the fog and everything, but being down there in the Boroughs as opposed to up here on the prosperous Wellingborough Road, it had been a lot eerier. Even St. Edmund’s Church with all its looming tombstones just across the street didn’t give you the shivers, at the stroke of midnight, how some places in the Boroughs could do even by the light of day.
Cut loose and on his own, Tom had decided to head for the nearest hostelry where he’d be sure to know someone, which was the Black Lion down on Castle Hill. Although the place had no direct familial associations such as was the case with the Blue Anchor, in a way it had been a more constant focus of the Warren clan’s attentions down the years. Or anyway, it had since Tommy’s mam and dad had moved to Green Street, with their house just downhill and across the green from the back gates of the Black Lion’s cobbled yard. Being stood since time immemorial there beside St. Peter’s Church, it had provided a convenient venue to retire to after family funerals and christenings, and, being just two minutes’ walk away, was ideal for a swift half almost any time of day or night. In summer the old gates were opened to the buttercups-and-grass slope at the ale-yard’s rear behind St. Peter’s, where Tom’s mam would often sit out on a creaking bench dusted with emerald mould to have a drink with her surviving friends: old women with black bonnets, coats and dispositions like herself. His mother’s best pal, Elsie Sharp, had died before May’s eyes on one such sweet, long-shadowed evening after she’d knocked back a swig of stout straight from the bottle and had in the process swallowed a live bumblebee, which was just then crawling about within the brown glass neck. Stung from the inside Elsie’s throat had swollen up and closed, and after an unpleasant minute she’d been dead there in the birdsong and the lemon cordial light diffusing up above the railway station.
Once outside of the Blue Anchor, Tommy had turned left and headed down Chalk Lane to Castle Hill. There’d been a window lit in Doddridge Church, perhaps some group that met up in its rooms, and glancing up across the high stone wall Tom had been able to make out the set of loading doors, positioned halfway up the church’s side. As well as an abiding love of mathematics, one of the things Tom had picked up from his barmy grandfather was a deep fascination for the facts of history, especially that subject’s local aspect. Even so, he’d never had a proper answer for what those impractically high doors were doing there. The nearest he could get was that before the Reverend Philip Doddridge had arrived at Castle Hill and made the building there into a Nonconformist meeting-house, it had perhaps been used for something else, some business that required off-loading and delivery of goods by winch and pulley up to the first floor. Something about that explanation, though, had never rung quite true to Tom, which left the doors as an enduring question mark on his internal map of the location and its cloudy past.
Doddridge himself, Tommy had thought as he’d gone down beside the chapel and its burying ground, had been as big a puzzle as his church. Not in the sense that anything about him was unknown, but more that he’d been able to achieve such a long-lasting change in how the country thought about itself religiously, and that he’d done it from this tiny plot of land deep in the rat-runs of the Boroughs.
It had been Queen Anne’s death during 1714 that had prepared the ground for Philip Doddridge, then a lad of twenty-seven, to come here to Castle Hill one Christmas Eve fifteen years later to take up his ministry. Anne Stuart had, during her reign, attempted to stamp out the Nonconformists. When she’d died the minister who had announced it had said, quoting from the Psalms, “Go, see now this cursed woman, and bury her; for she is a king’s daughter.” That was a signal for all the Dissenters and the Nonconformists to start celebrating as it meant that George the First, who was a Hanoverian and had vowed to support their cause, would soon be on the throne. All of them little groups – hangovers from the Independents, the Moravian Brethren, that tradition come down from John Wycliffe’s Lollards in the thirteen-hundreds – they must have been popping wine corks at the thought of all that they’d be able to do now to shake things up, and Doddridge coming to Northampton had been part of that. Looked back on from the present day, you could say it had been the biggest part.
Sauntering past the unkempt burial ground that evening, Tommy had supposed the town would have been an attractive proposition to a young dissenting minister back then, what with its long tradition as a haven for religious firebrands, insurrectionists and the plain mad. Old Robert Browne who formed the Separatists in the late sixteenth century was buried in St. Giles churchyard, and the town was filled by Nation of Saints puritans and Ranters with their fiery flying rolls during the century that followed. There’d been fierce radical Christians shouting heresies from every rooftop, saying there was no life other than this present one, that Hell and Heaven were nowhere save here on earth and, worst of all, suggesting that the Bible showed God as a shepherd of the poor and not the wealthy. By the time that Philip Doddridge stepped out of the snow that Christmas Eve, 1729, rubbing his hands with frostbite and with glee, Northampton’s reputation as a hotbed simmering with spiritual unrest would have been well established.
Doddridge’s Evangelism, nine years earlier than that of the more widely-sung John Wesley, was the force that by Victoria’s reign had transformed almost all of the Dissenting sects and the whole ruddy Church of England in the bargain. He’d accomplished this from what was even then one of the humblest places in the land, and done it in a little over twenty years before the TB took him when he hadn’t yet turned fifty; done it all with words, his teachings and his writings and his hymns. To Tom’s mind, “Hark! The Glad Sound!” was about the best of them. “The Saviour comes, the Saviour promised long.” Tommy had always thought of Doddridge writing that sat looking out from Castle Hill, perhaps imagining the last trump sounding in the heavens up above St. Peter’s Church just down the way, or picturing a ragged, resurrected Jesus walking up Chalk Lane towards the little meeting house, his bloodied palms spread wide in universal absolution. During the more-than-a-thousand years this district had existed it had seen its fair share of extraordinary men, what with Richard the Lionheart, Cromwell, Thomas Becket, all of them, but in Tom Warren’s estimation Philip Doddridge could be counted with the worthiest. He was the Boroughs’ most heroic son. He was its soul.
St. Edmund’s clock struck once for half-past two and snatched Tom back to where he was, stood outside the converted workhouse with his Kensitas burning away forgotten there between his nicotine-stained fingers. That had been a waste. He flung the smouldering end into the broader smoulder that surrounded him and let his mind return to February 1948 and to a night just as opaque and grey.
He’d come out of Chalk Lane past the newsagent’s where he sometimes bought his paper of a Sunday morning; that had once been part of Propert’s Commercial Hotel, and crossed the tarmac-smothered cobbles and disused iron tramlines of Black Lion Hill towards the pub the hill was named after. Pushing inside through its front door Tommy had been hit by a near solid wall of chatter, scent and warmth, the captured body heat of everyone who was crammed into the Black Lion on that chilly night. Before he’d took his coat off and stepped through the press of people to the bar, Tom had been feeling glad already that he’d chosen to come here tonight, rather than to have stayed with Frank at the Blue Anchor. There were always more familiar faces at the Lion.
Jem Perrit had been there, whose dad The Sheriff had run a horse-butcher’s business in Horsemarket, and who lived himself with his wife Eileen and their baby daughter by the wood-yard that Jem kept in Freeschool Street, just round the corner from the Black Lion and off Marefair. As Tom now recalled the scene, Jem had been playing ninepins at the skittle table up one corner with Three-Fingered Tunk – who had a stall in the Fish Market up on Bradshaw Street – and Freddy Allen. Fred had been a moocher who you sometimes saw around the Boroughs still, who slept beneath the railway arches in Foot Meadow and who got along by pinching pints of milk and loaves of bread off people’s doorsteps. The tramp had been narrowing his bleary eyes as he took aim and threw the wooden cheese, but it had looked to Tom as though Jem Perrit or Three-Fingered Tunk would probably be trouncing him. Propped up against the heaving bar there had been Podger Someo, locally famous former organ grinder, now retired, and everywhere that Tommy looked there had been grimy area legends nursing mythic grudges, a run-down Olympus full of sozzled titans spluttering filthy jokes through mouthfuls of foam-topped ambrosia, fishing clumsily as minotaurs inside their crisp bags for the blue wax paper twist of salt.
Tommy’s own family, at least the Vernall side of it, had been well represented in the pub that night. Tom’s uncle Johnny – his mam’s younger brother – had been there with Tom’s aunt Celia, and sat up one corner by herself with a half pint of Double Diamond and her battered old accordion across her lap there had been Tommy’s great-aunt Thursa, in her eighties by that point and even harder to get any sense from than she’d previously been. Tommy had said hello to her and asked if he could get her a fresh drink, at which she’d looked alarmed as if she weren’t sure who he was, but then had nodded in acceptance anyway. Thursa had always liked to play on her accordion al fresco, trudging round the Boroughs, although some years earlier during the war she’d taken to performances that were exclusively nocturnal. More specifically, she’d only gone out in the street to play her instrument during the blackouts, with the German bombers droning overhead and the ARP wardens threatening to arrest her if she didn’t stay indoors and stop that bloody racket. Tom had never heard, at first hand, his great-aunt’s Luftwaffe sing-alongs, having been stationed overseas. His older sister Lou, however, had described them to him with the tears of laughter running down her cheeks. “They sent me out to fetch her in, and honestly, I swear that she was standing there in Bath Row, looking up at all the big dark planes against the sky and playing little tootles and long drones on her accordion, as if the bombing raid was like a silent film and she was its accompanist. It was that awful engine noise, the way it echoed right across the sky, and there was Thursa doing little bits that fitted in with it, these little bits that sounded like somebody whistling or skipping. I can’t properly describe it, but her little tra-la-las sounding above the frightening thunder of the aeroplanes, it made you want to laugh and cry at the same time. Laugh, mostly.” Tom had pictured it, the skinny old madwoman with her mushroom cloud of white hair standing caterwauling in the blacked out street, the vast might of the German air force overhead. It had made Tommy laugh too.
With the drinks arrived and Tommy’s dotty great-aunt taken care of, he’d sat down with his quiet auntie Celia and his lively uncle Johnny, who he got on well with and could be relied upon to keep Tom company till closing time. Tom could remember, back before the war, being with Walt and Jack and Frank one night in the Criterion up King Street when their uncle Johnny Vernall had come in and had a drink with them. He’d kept them all enthralled with tales of what the almost empty pub had been like in its heyday, with a loaf of bread, a ham, a jar of pickles and a wedge of cheese provided free on every table. The increase in custom, Uncle Johnny said, had more than paid for the comestibles, and you’d had no one getting drunk or rowdy since they’d all got something in their stomachs to soak up the booze. To the four brothers it had sounded like an Eden, a lost golden age.
Sitting down with his aunt and uncle in the Black Lion’s snug, Tommy had asked them how they were and also asked after his cousin Audrey, who just about everybody in the family had a soft spot for, and who played piano accordion in the dance band that her father, Uncle Johnny, managed. This was the same band that had performed so well at Walt’s wedding reception up in Gold Street just a few months previously, when Tom and Frank had both been lectured by their mam and where, in Tom’s opinion, his young cousin Audrey hadn’t ever played so well or looked so lovely as she did upon that night, belting out swing and standards to the lurching celebrants who packed the dance-floor. Audrey was a little smasher, all the family thought so, but on that particular night in the Black Lion, Tom’s uncle had just shook his head when Tom enquired about her, and said Audrey was at home and going through a lot of young girl’s sulks and moods at present. Tom had been surprised, since Audrey had always seemed such a sunny little thing, but he’d supposed that this reported tantrum was to do with women and the changes that they went through, which at that point, mercifully, Tommy had known almost nothing of. He’d nodded and commiserated with his aunt and uncle, and had told them he was sure their daughter would get over it and be back to her old self in a day or two. On that count he’d been wrong, as it turned out.
Hobnobbing with his relatives, Tom had reflected on how much he liked his uncle Johnny, who he thought added a touch of colour to the family with his loud ties and his jacket’s mustard check, his showbiz flair. There was just something up-to-date about the bloke, the way he ran a band and talked of dates and bookings, as if he were rising to the challenge of the world and future we’d got now, after the war, bursting with energy and eager to get on with a new life. According to Tom’s mam, her younger brother Johnny had since childhood talked of nothing except going on the stage, of being part of all that sequinned razzmatazz, although he’d got no talent of his own to speak of. That was no doubt why he’d hit on managing a dance band if he couldn’t play or sing in one. When his young Audrey had turned out so talented with the accordion, a taste for which she’d evidently picked up from her great-aunt Thursa, Johnny must have been as pleased as Punch. Tommy had often thought that when his uncle Johnny hovered in the wings and watched adoringly while Audrey played, it must have been like he was seeing his young self out there, all of his hopes and dreams at last parading in the footlights. Well, good luck to him. Perhaps the baby boy that Tom was waiting on now in the Wellingborough Road would end up good at something Tom himself had always had a hankering for, like, let’s say, football. Tommy couldn’t swear that if that happened he’d not be stood on the touchlines cheering, just like Uncle Johnny beaming proudly in the dark and tangled wires offstage.
Tom’s auntie Celia was a different matter in that she was quiet where Johnny made a noise, and didn’t fuss over their Audrey quite so much as Johnny did. Aunt Celia was always friendly, even cheerful in her way, but never seemed to have a lot to say for herself about anything. She weren’t stuck up or toffee-nosed, but if Tom’s uncle Johnny should crack one of his blue jokes she’d only smile and look away into her bitter lemon. Tommy’s mother didn’t care much for her sister-in-law, and said that she thought Aunt Celia had got no gumption, but then Tommy’s mam didn’t care much for anyone.
He’d kept his aunt and uncle company, that February night five or six years ago, until the landlord called out for last orders and they’d said that they’d not have another one. They’d finished up their drinks while Tommy was just starting his last pint, then got their coats on ready to go home. They hadn’t far to go. Johnny and Celia lived with Audrey down in Freeschool Street, just uphill of Jem Perrit and his family, so it was only round the corner past the church. Tommy remembered Uncle Johnny standing up from his chair in the snug and settling his titfer on his head, what made him look as if he were a bookie. Helping Auntie Celia to her feet, Johnny had sighed and said, “Ah, well. I ’spect we’d better goo back ’ome and face the music”, meaning Audrey and her bad mood, which was no more at the time than just an innocent remark.
They’d said ta-ta, and Tom had watched their exit from the smoky pub, with its interior as clouded as the foggy street revealed outside when Celia and Johnny had shoved open the Black Lion’s door and stepped into the night. Tommy had taken his time finishing the half of bitter what were left out of his pint, eyes roaming idly round the bar on the off chance there might be a half-decent-looking woman in there. He was out of luck. The only female still remaining in the Black Lion other than the landlord’s dog was Mary Jane, the brawler who was found more often up the Mayorhold at the Jolly Smokers or Green Dragon, one of them. One of her eyes was closed and violet, puffed up to a slit, and her whole face looked like it had once been a very different shape. She sat there staring into space, shaking her head occasionally as if to clear it, though you couldn’t tell if that was because she were punchy, or if it were from the drink she’d put away. Even Tom’s great-aunt Thursa had slipped out the pub while he weren’t looking. Tommy was alone in an entirely masculine, predominantly broken-nosed domain, even including Mary Jane in that appraisal. While he was used to having mostly men around him from his work, and while he found that much less nerve-wracking than an extended company of women, it was much duller in the bargain. Tommy had knocked back the thin dregs of his pint, said goodnight to the people that he knew, and headed for the door himself while fastening his coat.
Outside the Black Lion, with the cold burning his throat, he’d been in two minds as to which way was the quickest home, back to his mam’s in Green Street. Finally he’d opted to walk up by Peter’s Church and cut along the alley there to Peter’s Street, that marked the top edge of the green. It was just slightly longer than if he’d gone down around Elephant Lane, but being drunk and sentimental Tom had thought he’d like to head up by the churchyard so that he could say goodnight to Jack, or to the monument at any rate. What had been left of Jack was still out there somewhere in France.
Leaving the pub behind, Tommy had gone up Black Lion Hill and onto Marefair, with the mist now snagging on the iron churchyard railings to his right. He’d nodded, half-embarrassed, to the war memorial that poked up from the bed of drifting cotton wool around its base, and wondered who’d struck up the tune that he could hear, come from the inn that he’d just left. It had took Tommy several moments, beer-befuddled as he was, to work out that there wasn’t a piano to be found at the Black Lion, and anyway, the noise hadn’t been coming from behind him but instead was faint and shimmering, emerging from the Marefair shadows that were curdling up ahead.
Intrigued, Tom had walked past the narrow alley that ran down between the church and Orme’s, the gent’s outfitters, where he’d been intending to cut through to Peter’s Street. He’d wanted to know who it was, making a row at this hour of night, and to make sure that there was nothing untoward transpiring in the neighbourhood. Besides, as he went on past Cromwell House, Tommy could hear the slightly frantic-sounding tune more clearly, and could almost make out through his middling stupor what it was. It had appeared to be emerging from the neck of Freeschool Street just up ahead of him, the tumbling refrain flowing across the pavement with the fog and tangling round Tom’s half-cut feet to trip him up.
He’d paused, outside the brown stone building where the Lord Protector had been billeted the night before he’d gone to fight at Naseby field, and steadied himself with one hand on the rough wall to check his wavering balance. That was when he’d seen his uncle Johnny and his auntie Celia come reeling out of Freeschool Street into Marefair, clutching their mouths, holding their hands across their faces as though they were weeping, hanging on each other’s sleeves like two survivors of a train wreck clambering up the embankment. What on earth had happened?
What he should have done, he thought now, blowing in his hands to warm them up outside the hospital, was simply to have called out to his aunt and uncle, asking what was wrong. He hadn’t done that, though. He’d stood there hidden in the mist and watched the couple, looking like they’d aged ten years within the last ten minutes, as they’d stumbled off into the damp miasma clinging to each other, lowing like maimed animals. They’d headed off in the direction of Horsemarket, the wet noises of their misery becoming fainter. Tom had watched them go from his place of concealment and had burned with shame to think that he’d seen family in distress and simply stood there doing bugger all, not even offering to help.
It had just seemed so private, Uncle Johnny and Aunt Celia’s grief. That was all Tom could say now in his own defence. He’d been brought up to help people when things were going rough for them, but then he’d also been taught not to poke his nose in others’ private business, and it sometimes felt like a fine line between the two. That was the way that it had been with Uncle Johnny and Aunt Celia that night. It looked as though their lives had just that moment fell to bits, as though they’d fallen in upon themselves, as though whatever had upset them was so personal and so humiliating that to have someone intrude upon it would have only made it worse. Thinking about it now, perhaps what he’d picked up on was that Celia and Johnny weren’t seeking assistance with whatever had occurred. They weren’t out banging on the neighbours’ doors and asking somebody to fetch a fire engine or ambulance. They hadn’t gone just down and round the corner to Tom’s mam’s in Green Street, Johnny’s own big sister. They’d not sought help in the Boroughs, but had made for Gold Street and town centre. Tom had later learned that Uncle Johnny and Aunt Celia had sat till dawn both huddling devastated on the steps of All Saints, underneath its portico.
Upon the night itself, he’d watched his aunt and uncle until they were gone, then wandered into Freeschool Street to find out what was going on. He’d stumbled haltingly down the black crevice, where the Free School had been situated in the fifteen-hundreds, walking in the face of all the mournful, stirring music that rang from the haze more loudly with Tom’s every cautious step. All the low notes had resonated in the lightless window-glass of the soot-dusted manufacturing concerns to Tommy’s right and left, making the panes buzz like trapped flies. It had been round about then that he’d first caught on what tune was being played over and over, being banged out on an old joanna somewhere in the gloom towards what used to be Green Lane. He’d started singing it, inside his head, familiar words all coming back to him before he’d even hit upon its title, though he’d recognised it as a song that he knew well. How did it go? “Why tell them all your secrets …”
Tommy had progressed hesitantly down the unlit street, as much for fear of tripping over something in the fog and knackering himself as of what he might find when he got further down towards the bottom end. He’d known already that it would be Uncle Johnny’s house the tune was coming from, that it would be their Audrey playing it. Who else down Freeschool Street could trot out such a lovely piece as that? “They’re buried under the snow …” Ever so well he knew it, he just hadn’t at that time been able to remember what the thing was called. The missing title nagging at his mind, Tommy had staggered further down into the invisible harmony.
In twenty paces, by the time he’d reached the junction with St. Peter’s Street, it had become clear that the old song was indeed emerging from his cousin’s house across the road, down near the Gregory Street corner. He had also realised that Freeschool Street was utterly deserted save for he himself and for one other: standing rooted in the crawling vapour that was boiling over Uncle Johnny’s doorstep, rigid and stick-thin with her wild head tipped back to gaze up at the lit-but-curtained parlour window that the music came from, had been Tommy’s great-aunt Thursa. In her arms she’d cradled the accordion like a mute and monstrous child, the waxy and translucent fingers of one hand stroking distractedly across the keyboard, back and forth as if to calm the silent instrument and to allay its fears at this alarming situation. Thursa hadn’t make a sound herself, but she’d been listening so intently to the music leaking from inside the house that you could almost hear her doing it. It carried on, the tune, stitching its thread of half-remembered lyrics on the blanket of the mist. “Whispering grass, don’t tell the trees …”
Of course, by that point Tommy had recalled the title he’d been grasping for. “Whispering Grass”. That had been an old favourite for years by then, had even worked its way into the language as the slang for an informer, or at least that’s where Tom thought that the expression “grass” had come from. Prior to that point it had been Tom’s opinion that the song, though haunting, was too soppy and too whimsical, with its idea of grass and bushes talking to each other, just like something that Walt Disney might have done. Hearing it from the creeping fog in Freeschool Street though, on that February night, it hadn’t sounded whimsical at all. To Tom’s ear, it had sounded terrible. Not terrible as in the sense of bad or badly played, but more as if it spoke of something terrible, of some great hurt too terrible to mend, or of some terrible betrayal. It had sounded angry in the way its chords crashed out, notes almost splintering beneath the impact of the unseen fingers. It had sounded like an accusation and, as well, like an unburdening, an agonized confession that could never be retracted, after which things couldn’t be the same again. It had been music for the end of something.
“… ’cause the trees don’t need to know.” Ashamed. That had been, Tom thought now, another quality apart from hurt and anger that the tune had brought to the dank evening air: an overpowering sense of shame. Even the awful jollity into which the refrain would sometimes break sounded sardonic, sounded vengeful, sounded wrong. Tommy had been disturbed, mostly because he hadn’t for the life of him been able to imagine such an unexpected torrent of confused emotions pouring from so self-effacing and demure a vessel as his cousin Audrey. What can have been going through her mind for it to have emerged in the spine-tingling, feverish way it had? What had she been feeling that produced a reeling, stomach-dropping noise like that?
God knows how many times she’d played the tune already before Tom or anybody else had ventured into Freeschool Street to hear it, but as he and his great-aunt had stood there separately listening in the fog he’d heard the song repeated at least four more times, all the way through, before it had eventually ended in a sudden yawning silence that had been in some way even more upsetting than the row preceding it.
A tense few moments had elapsed, perhaps to make sure the recital was completely over, and then great-aunt Thursa had, from nowhere, pressed just four notes from the squeeze-box slung on its worn leather strap around her stringy neck, four grave and trudging tones that Tom had recognised with a mild tingle of alarm as the beginning of “The Funeral March”, or at the time he’d thought that’s what it was, at any rate. But with only that mournful opening completed his great-aunt had fallen silent and allowed her parchment fingers to drop from the keys. Abruptly, Thursa had turned round and marched away down Freeschool Street as if, aside from her own brief musical contribution, there was no more to be done. Within a moment her gaunt figure had dissolved into the cold seethe of the night.
Tom realised now, stood shuffling in the forecourt of St. Edmund’s Hospital, that it had been the last time he’d encountered great-aunt Thursa, who’d took ill with bronchial troubles and had died some two months afterwards. The mental picture of her walking off into the fog, into the roiling mystery, was the last image of her he could call to mind. Perhaps her short rendition of “The Funeral March” had been a prophecy, though as he thought about it now he saw that those four notes could just as well have been “Oh Mine Papa”, or probably a dozen other tunes.
After his great-aunt had departed, Tom had stood there for perhaps five minutes more, just staring at the now-hushed house across the way with the soft gaslight filtered through drawn curtains from its parlour window. Then he’d stumbled off down Freeschool Street, along Green Lane to his mam’s house in Green Street. May had been abed already by the time that he got in, and Frank hadn’t come home yet from the Anchor. Tom had lit the mantle, lit a fag from the same match, then had a sit in the armchair for a few minutes, just before he went to bed.
Across a small room shrunken further by the gaslight, up against one wall had stood the family piano, black and polished like a coffin. Perched on top of it had been an empty vase and a big, glossy eight-by-ten inside a prop-up frame. The photo had been taken for the purpose of publicity, clearly by a professional, and was a group shot of the outfit Uncle Johnny managed. Standing front and centre of the picture, no doubt with an eye to showing off the dance band’s most attractive asset, there had been Tom’s cousin Audrey with her piano accordion almost bigger than what she was. Resting on its keys her slender hands were placed so elegantly you could tell that it was artificial; she’d been told to hold the pose and the accordion in just that way by the photographer. Tom could imagine it, the chat and patter while he’d took the shot, with the flirtatious manner blokes like that seemed generally to have about them. “Right, that’s lovely, let’s have a big smile now from the ravishing young lady.” And then Audrey would have cast her eyes up, just as she was doing in the picture, looking comically exasperated as she laughed away the compliment – “Oh, honestly!” – but flattered, pleased he’d said it even if he’d done so just to make her smile. Her head was tipped back slightly as if she were making an appeal to heaven, asking for deliverance from men and their smooth, silly talk, and you could see the strong line of her chin, the straight slope of her nose, the finely sculpted head with her dark hair cascading down onto the shoulders of her ironed white blouse. His cousin at that time had been around eighteen years old, and Tommy had thought that the photo looked as if it had been taken two or three years earlier, when Audrey had been fifteen or sixteen. She’d looked so lively and so wry that Tom had sat there in the gas-lit living room a good half hour just trying to fit together the young woman in the picture and the frightening performance he’d just heard in Freeschool Street.
Of course, over the next two or three days, Tom had learned more of what had happened on that night. According to his mam, who by that time had heard her younger brother’s full account of things, Tom’s uncle Johnny and his auntie Celia had got back home to Freeschool Street from the Black Lion to find their only child had locked them out the house while she sat there inside and played the same lament repeatedly on the piano, pointedly ignoring all their poundings on the door and their demands to be let in. As the demands had swiftly turned to worried pleas, his cousin Audrey had apparently made vocal interjections of her own, shouting above the avalanche of her own playing: “When the grass is whispering over me, then you’ll remember.” Finally her parents had just given up and slunk away into the mist, away up Gold Street where they’d sheltered under All Saints’ portico all night, crushed by the realization of the dreadful thing that had just happened. Their one daughter, their bright, pretty, talented young daughter who they’d hoped would carry all their dreams into the future had gone off her head, gone round the corner. That next morning doctors had been called and Audrey Vernall had been taken up the Berry Wood turn to St. Crispin’s mental home, struggling and kicking, screaming out all manner of fantastical delusions as Tom’s uncle Johnny had recounted it. She’d been in the asylum ever since, would very likely be there all her life, a shame and a disgrace upon the family. Her name was only mentioned rarely now.
The general consensus, naturally, had been that Audrey’s problems were inherited, part of the curse passed down amongst the Vernalls, as displayed in both Tom’s granddad Snowy and his great-aunt Thursa.
There it was. The madness in the family. That was a cheery thing to think about while you were waiting for your first child to arrive, but Tom supposed there was no hiding from it. It was just a fact, part of the complicated lottery of birth that would decide whether the baby had brown hair like Doreen or black hair like Tom, whether its eyes were blue or green, if it was to be tall or short, well-built or skinny, sane or insane. Nobody had a say in how their children would be born, but then nobody had a say with most of the important things in life. All you could do was make the best of what you had. All you could do was play your cards as they’d been dealt.
He glanced around at his surroundings, at the gauze fog bandaging the blackness, at the crumbling church across the street, its weight and presence felt rather than seen. On Tommy’s left a necklace of dim streetlamps wound away through the dark miles to Wellingborough. To his right the mongrel rhapsodies of Mad Marie were tangled round town centre in haphazard strands of flimsy tinsel and behind him loomed the rehabilitated workhouse, like a thuggish bailiff who’d been given a new job and uniform and swore he was a reformed character. Tom realised with a start that they were more than halfway through the twentieth century already.
Tom also began to see that it weren’t just the blood and the heredity that would determine how a child developed. It was everything. It was the aggregate of all the planet’s parts and all its history, of every fact and incident that made the world, that fashioned the child’s parents, all of these components leading up to that specific baby floating there in that specific womb. With his own offspring brewing now inside Doreen’s distended belly waiting to be poured out, Tommy understood that there would be no element of his or his wife’s lives that would not influence their baby, just as every circumstance of their own parents’ lives in turn had made its mark on them.
The job as a director Snowy Vernall had turned down, for an example, played its part as to what kind of family and upbringing their newborn could expect. Tom’s mother’s first child dying of diphtheria had meant that she’d not stopped with just two girls but had gone on to have four boys as well. Had it been otherwise, then neither Tommy nor his own forthcoming child would have existed in the first place.
Then there was the war, of course, and all the politics that had come both before and after it. All those things that decided how this coming generation should be educated, what the streets and houses would be like where they grew up and whether there’d be any jobs about once they were grown. And these were just the obvious things that anyone could see would have effects upon a kiddie’s chance in life. What about all the other things, events so small they were invisible and yet which added up to someone choosing one path rather than the other, added up to something that might have an impact on the world, upon his child, for better or for worse?
Tom wondered at the whirlpool of occurrences, of lives and deaths and memories that were at present being funnelled into Doreen’s each contraction, pressing out an imprint on their baby as it writhed towards the light: the air raid nights, the dole queue days, the wireless programmes and the demolition sites. Glimpse of a woman’s legs with fake seams drawn in eyebrow pencil down the calf, of rubber johnnies raining on commuter’s hats. Grave of a fifteen-year-old German sniper by the road in France. Tom’s granddad crumpling up his careful ring of numbers in a rage to throw it on the fire, the black hole spreading from the centre of the paper as it burned. The photograph of Audrey standing framed on the piano, with her posed hands and her blithe smile and the grinning band members behind her in their bow ties, holding their guitars and clarinets. The fog, the pigeon-shit and Mad Marie all somehow filtering into the new arrival who’d be drawing its first breath and making its first wail within an hour or two, all being well.
St. Edmund’s clock struck three times from the higher storeys of the mist. His toes were so cold in his boots he couldn’t feel them anymore. Bugger this for a game of soldiers. With his hands thrust deep in his mac’s pockets, Tommy Warren turned round on his heel and started walking back along the hospital’s long drive towards the blurred and distant lights of its maternity wards, twinkling faintly in the gloom. Doreen couldn’t have had it yet, or someone would have been sent out to fetch him. Walking up the path he noticed that the wavering piano was no longer audible, though Tommy didn’t know if that meant Mad Marie had stopped at last, or if it merely meant the wind had changed directions. Humming absently to fill the sudden silence, breaking off when he became aware that he was humming “Whispering Grass”, Tom changed his tune to “Hark! The Glad Sound!” and then carried on. The bulb-lit porch outside the waiting room was drawing gradually nearer. Picking up his pace and perking up his ideas, Tommy went to welcome in his first-born baby boy.
Or girl.
** <strong>CHOKING ON A TUNE</strong>
<strong>W</strong>hatever his big sister had implied across the years, or had indeed at one point written on his forehead using magic marker while he was asleep, Mick Warren wasn’t stupid. If there’d been a hazard label on the drum, perhaps a yellow death’s-head or a screaming stick-man with his face burned off, then Mick would almost certainly have realised that hitting it quite hard with an enormous fuckoff sledgehammer was not the best idea he’d ever had.
But for some reason there’d been no fluorescent stickers, no white government advisory, not even the insipid kind that warned against skin ageing or low birth weight. Mick had blithely hefted the great hammer back just over his right shoulder and then swung it down through its familiar and exhilarating arc. The satisfying clang when it connected, ringing off into the windswept corners of St. Martin’s Yard, was only marred by his own startled bellow as the whole front of Mick’s head, which he had always thought of as his better side, was sandblasted by poison dust.
His cheeks and brow had instantly been blistered into bubble-wrap. Dropping the weighty hammer, Mick had tried to run off from the toxic cloud his mystery drum had just exhaled as if it were a swarm of bees, swatting his hands around his face and roaring angrily, not “squealing like a girl” as one close relative had later claimed. The relative in question, anyway, had got no cause to talk. At least he’d only looked the way he had for several days as a result of an industrial accident, whereas she’d looked that way since birth and had no such excuse.
Blinded and howling, this according to the subsequent colourful witness statements of fellow employees, Mick had charged round in a semicircle and, with all the slapstick timing of a radiation-scarred post-nuclear Harold Lloyd, had run head first into a bar of steel protruding from the outsize scales on which the flattened drums were weighed. He’d knocked himself out cold, and looking back congratulated himself on the speed with which, in trying circumstances, he had improvised a painkiller that was both total and immediate in its effect. Hardly the actions of a stupid man, he’d smugly reassured himself after a day or two, by which time the worst bruises weren’t so bad.
He must have only lay sprawled on his back there in the dirt unconscious for a second before Howard, his best mate down at the reconditioning yard, caught on to what was happening and had rushed to Mick’s assistance. He’d turned on the tap that fed the business’s one hosepipe, training the resultant jet into Mick’s comatose and upturned face, sluicing away the caustic orange powder covering the blistered features like a minstrel make-up meant only for radio. From what Howard reported afterwards, Mick had come round at once, his bloodshot eyes opening on a look of absolute confusion. He’d apparently been mumbling something with great urgency as he recovered consciousness, but far too softly for his concerned workmate to make out more than a word or two of what he’d said. Something about a chimney or perhaps a chimp that was in some way getting bigger, but then Mick had seemed to suddenly remember where he was and also that his blistered and rust-dusted face was now an agonising bowl of Coco Pops. He’d started hollering again, and after Howard had washed off the worst of the contamination with his hose he’d got permission from the anxious management to drive Mick over Spencer Bridge, up Crane Hill, Grafton Street and Regent Square, across the Mounts, then take a complicated set of turns to Billing Road to Cliftonville, this being where the casualty department of the hospital was now. Despite the fact that Mick had spent the whole duration of this journey swearing forcefully into the wet towel that he’d held pressed to his face, something about the route they’d taken had felt queasily familiar.
He’d been lucky, happening to hit a quiet patch at the hospital, and had been treated straight away, not that there was a lot that they could do. They’d cleaned him up and put drops in his eyes, told him his eyesight should be back to normal the next day, his face within a week, then Howard ran him home. All the way there Mick had gazed silently from the car window at the blur of Barrack Road and Kingsthorpe through his swollen, leaking eyelids and had wondered why he felt a sense of creeping and insidious dread. They’d given him the all-clear down at casualty. It wasn’t like he had to fret about the accident’s long-term effects, and with the few days of paid sick leave that he’d get off work from this you could say he’d come out on top. Why did he feel, then, as if some great cloud of doom was hanging over him? It must have been the shock, he’d finally concluded. Shock could do some funny things. It was a well-known fact.
Howard had dropped him off in the pull-over spot down at the foot of Chalcombe Road, barely a minute’s walk from Mick and Cathy’s house. Mick said goodbye and thanked his colleague for the ride then mounted the short lane that led to his back gate. The rear yard, with its patio and decking and the shed he’d built himself was reassuring in its tidiness after the chaos and confusion of his day thus far, even seen through the bleary filter of his current puddle-vision. The interior with its gleaming kitchen and neat living room was every bit as orderly and comforting, and with Cath off at work and both the boys at school he had it to himself. Mick made himself a cup of tea and sank into the sofa, lighting up a fag, uneasily aware of the precarious normality of everything.
Although Mick did his fair share of the work, the driving force behind the pristine smartness of their home was Cathy. This was not to say that Mick’s wife was obsessed with cleanliness and order. It was more that Cathy had a deep aversion to untidiness and grime and what they represented to her, a conditioning instilled by having grown up in the Devlin family den. He understood that what to him might seem a barely-noticeable minor carpet stain, to Cathy was a crack in the high wall she’d built between her present and her past, between their current comfortable domestic life and Cathy’s not particularly happy childhood. Children’s toys left scattered on the rug, if not picked up at once, could mean that the next time she looked there’d be her late dad and a gang of drunken uncles sprawled about the place, what looked like a scrap metal business opening in the back yard, and more policemen coming to the door than milkmen. This fear wasn’t rational, they both knew that, but Mick could see how growing up a Devlin could impress it on a person.
Mick got on with all his in-laws, very well with some of them, and thought that by and large they were a lovely crowd, at least the ones he knew. Cath’s sister Dawn, for instance, was a social worker down in Devon, where Mick and the family had taken lots of holidays as a result. Dawn’s youngest daughter Harriet, at the tender age of four, had said about the funniest thing that Mick had ever heard from any child or adult when her dad had asked her if she knew why crabs walked sideways and she’d moodily replied, “Because they’re arseholes.” Perhaps because there were a lot of similarities in background with the Warren family, Mick had always felt very comfortable about being related to the Devlins.
Mind you, they were still the Devlins. Bulletins through Cathy from the wilder reaches of the massively extended clan still had the power to startle or alarm. There’d been a funeral some weeks before that Mick had not been able to attend thanks to his work. Cathy had gone, and it had been by all accounts the spirited affair that Devlin funerals usually turned out to be. At one point in the service, Cathy’s sister Dawn had nudged her and said, “Have you seen our Chris?” This was a distant cousin Cathy had already spotted, standing in the crowd towards the chapel’s rear, and so she said that, yes, she’d seen him. Dawn, though, had persisted. “No, but have you <em>seen</em> him? Have you seen the chap that he’s got with him?” Cathy had glanced back across her shoulder and there stood her cousin, next to someone just as tall as he was who seemed to be struggling to control his feelings at the sad occasion. It was only later, at the wake, that Cath had realised why he’d been standing so close to Cousin Chris. The two of them were handcuffed to each other. The emotionally overwrought man, who’d embarrassed everybody at the do by going on about how wonderful the Devlin family were and just how much he’d been moved by the ceremony, was the plain-clothes prison officer responsible for supervising Chris’s day release. Armed robbery, apparently.
Mick’s wife’s kin were a colourful and various bunch grown from the same black, soot-fed Boroughs earth as were the Warrens. No doubt this was why Cath wouldn’t tolerate that self-same native soil if it got tracked across her fitted carpets. The pastel walls and polished dining table were a barrier against the mud that hung in clumps round Cathy’s roots, but Mick enjoyed the neatness, the predictable serenity. The only problem with it at the moment came when Mick caught sight of his reflection in the glass doors of the cabinet. Sat there with his erupting face sipping his tea amongst the decorous furnishings he looked like something from a George Romero film, a wistful zombie trying to remember how the living did things.
This stray thought brought with it the return of Mick’s unfocussed, inexplicable anxieties from earlier. He still didn’t know where they were coming from. Had something happened in his head while he was out? A stroke or something, or perhaps he’d had one of those dreams that you can’t quite remember but which leave a nasty atmosphere all day. What had been going through his mind in those first seconds when he came round flat out in St. Martin’s Yard, babbling nonsense with volcanoes in his eyes? What had his first thought been upon awakening?
With a lurch he realised that it had been, simply, ‘Mum’.
His mother, Doreen Warren who’d been Doreen Swan, had died ten years before in 1995 and Mick still thought about her fondly almost every day, still missed her. But he missed her as an adult misses people, and he didn’t think about her with the tone of mental voice he’d heard in his first thought upon recovering consciousness. That had been like a lost child calling for its mother, and he hadn’t felt like that since …
Since he’d woken up in hospital when he was three.
Oh God. Mick stood up from the sofa, then sat down again, unsure of why he’d risen in the first place. Was that what this simmering unease was all about, a chance event of no lasting importance that had happened more than forty years ago? He stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray that he’d brought through from the kitchen then stood up again, this time to crack a window open and allow the smoke time to disperse before the kids and Cathy came home from their days at school and work. This task accomplished he sat down and then stood up again, and then sat down. Shit. What was wrong with him?
He could remember what it had been like when he was three, opening up his eyes to grey ward walls and the pervasive smell of disinfectant, having no idea of where he was or how he’d got there. He’d been forced to put the missing incident together one piece at a time from scraps of information that he’d wormed out of his mum over the next few days, how they’d been sitting in the back yard when a sweet had got itself stuck in Mick’s throat so that he couldn’t breathe, and how the man who lived next door to them along St. Andrew’s Road had driven Mick all limp and lifeless to the hospital, where they’d unblocked his windpipe, taken out his swollen tonsils for good measure and returned him to his family as good as new by the weekend. He knew, then, what had happened to him but he only knew it second hand. When he’d first woken up with a strange nurse and doctor looming in above him he’d had no recall of anything from earlier that day at all, not sitting in the garden on his mother’s knee, not choking and not being rushed to hospital. For all he’d known, the bleak and pungent ward with all the Mabel Lucie Attwell posters tin-tacked to its walls might have been his first moment of existence.
That, though, had been then. This time, on waking from his accident at work, there’d been a moment when Mick’s mind was far from blank; a moment in which Mick had suddenly remembered quite a lot. The problem was that in those first few panicked seconds of recovered consciousness, his sudden rush of memories had not been those belonging to a forty-nine-year-old. He hadn’t even known that was his age, had not straight away understood what he was doing in this open yard with steel drums everywhere. He hadn’t thought immediately of Cathy, or the kids, or of the many other reference points to which, in normal circumstances, he had anchored his identity. It was, in those befuddled instants, just as if the last four-decades-plus-change of his life had never happened. It was as though he were once again a three-year-old awakening in 1959 down at the General Hospital, except this time he’d been a three-year-old who could remember what had happened to him.
All the details of the incident in the back garden that had been wiped from his memory as a child had, after more than forty years, been given back. Granted, they’d been returned in a compressed and jumbled form that mainly manifested as a vague uneasy feeling, but if Mick just sat and thought it through he felt convinced that he’d be able to untangle it, to pick this sense of being haunted that he had apart like so much yarn. He closed his eyes, as much to stop them stinging as to aid his reverie. He saw the yard, saw the old stable that was visible across a five-foot-high back wall, its roof with the black gaps where slates were missing like a crossword puzzle blank. The sofa’s cushions underneath him were Doreen’s lap, and its hard and bony wooden edge her knees. He sank into the warm ancestral dough without the slightest difficulty or resistance as the spacious living room surrounding him contracted to a narrow brick enclosure, with the backsides of the terraced houses rising up to right and left, a ragged patch of washed-out blue sky overhead.
The Boroughs had been an entirely different place back then, that smelled and looked and sounded nothing like the abattoir of hope and joy it was today. Admittedly, the odour of the neighbourhood had been much worse in those days, or at least in the most literal and obvious sense. There’d been a tannery just north along St. Andrew’s Road, with great mounds of mysterious turquoise shavings piled up in its yard and a sharp chemical aroma like carcinogenic pear drops. This came from the noxious blue substance painted on the sheepskins to burn out all the hair follicles and make the wool coats that much easier to pull, and wasn’t half as bad as the smell coming from the south, which issued from a rendering plant, a glue factory on St. Peter’s Way. The west wind brought a perfume of scorched engine oil blown from the railway with an iron aftertaste of anthracite from the coal merchants, Wiggins, just across the road, while from the opposite direction when the dawn sun rose above the stable’s leaking rooftop it would lift the rich scents from the Boroughs’ streets themselves, wafting them downhill from the east in an olfactory avalanche: the steamy human essence piping from a hundred copper boilers, good food, bad food, dog food and dog carcasses, brick dust and wild flowers, rancid drains and someone’s chimneypot on fire. Hot tar in summer, the astringent smell of frosty grass in winter, all of this and then the River Nene on top, its cold and green bouquet drifting from Paddy’s Meadow just along the way. These days the Boroughs had no distinct fragrance that the nose could ascertain, and yet in the imagined cilia of the heart it reeked.
As for St. Andrew’s Road itself, or at least as far as their little strip of it had been concerned, that was just gone, replaced by a grass verge that harboured a few trees and the odd ornamental shopping trolley, stretched between the foot of Spring Lane and the foot of Scarletwell. There’d been twelve houses there, two or three businesses, God knows how many people on a plot that now seemed to be the sole province of the upturned mobile birdcages, the cold and hard providers of three generations’ packaged sustenance sprawling there in the weeds like obsolete wire mummies that the lab chimps had at last lost interest in.
Sitting there on the sofa in his Kingsthorpe living room he let his mind trickle away down vanished conduits and lost lanes to soak into the past. He saw the narrow jitty that ran parallel with Andrew’s Road, up past the back yards of the row, a solitary disused gas lamp halfway down its length. For some years after all the houses were demolished you could still make out the cobbles of the obsolete back alley as they bulged up through the turf; the sawn-through base of the old lamp standard, a ragged-edged iron ring inside which the cross-section bores of smaller wires and pipes had still been visible, the neck-stump of a buried and decapitated robot. This was gone now, swallowed by the grass, or by the bulging fence that ran along the bottom of Spring Lane School’s playing field, this boundary having crawled a little to the west within the thirty years or so since his home street had been pulled down and its inhabitants strewn to the wind. There was nobody left who could object or halt the playing field’s encroachment. In another twenty years Mick thought the wandering chain link barrier might have got down to Andrew’s Road itself, where it would have to wait beside the curb for a few centuries before it crossed.
The road, named after the St. Andrew’s Priory that had stood along its northern, Semilong end long before, had once been the town’s western boundary. This was in the twelve-hundreds, when the area called the Boroughs now was then Northampton, all there was of it. The locals and the Bachelerie di Northampton – the notoriously radical and monarch-baiting student population of the town – had sided with Simon de Montfort and his rebel barons against King Henry the Third and the four dozen wealthy burgesses who had been governing the place for fifty years since Magna Carta, creaming off its profits, and were forerunners of the still forty-eight-strong council that was running things today, in 2005. Back then in the 1260s, an irate King Henry had sent out a force of soldiers to quell the revolt with extreme prejudice. The prior of St. Andrew’s, being of the Cluniac order and thus being French, had sided with the Norman royal family and let the King’s men enter through a gap within the priory wall, probably more or less across the street from where the Warrens’ house had later stood. The troops had sacked and burned the previously prosperous and pleasant town, while in reaction to the rabble-rousing students it had been decided that it would be Cambridge that became a seat of learning, rather than Northampton. As Mick saw things, that was where the punishment and disenfranchisement of his home turf had started, kicking off a process that continued to the present day. Refuse just once to eat the shit that you’ve been served up and the powers that be will make sure there’s a double helping steaming on your plate at every supper for the next eight hundred years.
That day in 1959 the district had been spread out like a musty blanket on the summer, stalks of bleaching grass poked through its threadbare weave. The factories clanged at intervals or sprayed acetylene sparks in brief, shearing arcs behind smoked Perspex windows. Martins chattered in the baking eaves to either side of tilting streets where women in checked headscarves trotted stoically along beneath their panniers of shopping; where old men at ten past three were still attempting to get home, dizzy with dominoes, from their quick lunchtime half down at the Sportsman’s Arms. The school uphill across the yellowed playing field, deserted for the holidays, was deafeningly silent with the non-shrieks of two hundred absent children. It had been a harmless, pleasant afternoon. The tower blocks hadn’t been erected yet. The sand-blonde film of demolition dust coating the neighbourhood evoked only the season and the beach.
The whole front of the terraced house had been deserted, Mick’s dad Tommy being off at work over the brewery in Earl’s Barton and the other family members out in the back yard taking advantage of the weather. From the smooth-worn pavement of St. Andrew’s Road, three steps led up into the alcove cowling the tired red of their front door, a black iron boot-scrape, which Mick hadn’t fathomed the intended function of until he was approximately ten, set back into the wall beside the bottom doorstep. To the door’s right, as seen by a visitor, there was the framed wire grid at pavement level ventilating the pitch-dark coal cellar, and above that was the front room window with the china swan gazing disconsolately out at Wiggins’s yard, the rust-and-bindweed railway sidings stretched beyond and the occasional passing car. Left of the front door was a mutual drainpipe and then the front door and windows of Mrs. McGeary’s house, which had a frayed and peeling wooden gate beside it giving access to the cobbled yard and the dilapidated stables at the rear.
Once up the steps and inside number seventeen, there was the plain coconut doormat and the passageway, with ghostly ochre flowers fading into oblivion on its wallpaper and a flypaper-coloured light falling upon its worsted-burdened coat pegs. The first door upon the right led to the then-evacuated front room with its ponderous grandfather clock, its horsehair settee and its easy chair, its paraffin stove and its polished cabinet of fancy crockery that no one ever used, its table mat-sized rented television with a cabinet-style set of doors that closed across the screen. The second offshoot from the passage led into the similarly empty living room, while straight in front of you the stairs rose to the upper floor, carpeted with a writhing brown design that looked like catkins made from Christmas pudding. The top storey of the old house had got his and Alma’s room towards the rear up at the stairway’s top, then up one sideways step onto the landing where their gran’s room likewise overlooked the narrow L-shape of the semi-tiled back yard, with Tom and Doreen’s room, the biggest in the house, being along the landing’s end, its windows overlooking Andrew’s Road above the ones downstairs with the resigned white china swan. This upper level, being mostly uninhabited by day, he’d thought of as his home’s night-storey, lending it a slightly sinister and creepy air. Whenever he’d had childhood nightmares that had used his own house as their set, the scariest bits had always taken place upstairs.
The ground floor was too cosy to be frightening, despite the shadows in the generally sunless kitchen and those in the living room, just off the gloomy hall. Here space was at a premium, occupied by the drop-wing dining table with two matching seats, a stool and rugged wood chair making up the set. Two comfy armchairs (one of which Mick’s cousin John had fallen back out through the window from years earlier) flanked the meteoric-looking iron fireplace (into which John’s sister Eileen had plunged face first at around the same time), with the tiny room also accommodating the large junk-sarcophagus that was the sideboard. A stepped plaster beading, once presumably intended to be decorative, ran round the edges of the ceiling and conspired to make the roof seem even lower than it did already. Hanging from the picture rail of the wall opposite the hearth were washed-out portrait photographs in heavy frames, beige and white images depicting men with knowing grins and bright eyes gazing from beneath the thickets of their brows: Mick’s great-grandfather William Mallard, and his gran’s late husband, Mick’s maternal grandfather Joe Swan with the moustache that appeared wider than his shoulders. There was a third picture also, of another man, but Mick had never bothered asking who it was and nobody had ever bothered telling him. Instead, he called to mind the face of the anonymous chap in the picture as a stand-in if somebody mentioned a dead relative he hadn’t known. One week the man might be Gran’s brother, Uncle Cecil, and the next he could be Cousin Bernard, drowned during the war whilst trying to rescue others from a sinking battleship. For a bewildering fortnight he’d been Neville Chamberlain before Mick had worked out that the Hitler-appeasing former premier wasn’t a close relative.
Cut into the dividing wall between the front and living rooms there was a recess which contained a single panel of stained glass, a floral emblem in bright yellow, emerald green, and red like ruby port. Some evenings around teatime, when the sun was going down behind the railway yards across St. Andrew’s Road, an almost-horizontal shaft would strike in through the parlour window, glance across the dipped head of the china swan and blaze through the connecting pane of coloured glass into the dim-lit living room to splash its marvellous and trembling patch of phantom paint upon the bland-faced wireless, wall-mounted between the back-yard window and the kitchen door.
The poky kitchen with its white distempered walls and chilly blue and red slabs making up its floor was down a short step from the living room. Descending this, you had the cellar door on your immediate left, a rusted meat-safe stood behind it there atop the cellar stairs. Upon your right was the back door which led out to the top half of the yard, with just beyond a coarse stone sink sporting a single brass cold-water tap, inlaid with verdigris, beneath a solitary window. Opposite had stood the gas-stove, the old woodworm-riddled kitchen table and the treacherous mangle, and above them, from a nail, had hung the one-size-fits-all zinc bath that the family used for its various ablutions. When required this would be half-filled with hot water from the copper boiler, a gunmetal-coloured cylinder pimpled with condensation at the room’s far end, next to the boarded-up and unused kitchen fireplace. Mick remembered the short wooden pole that would be propped beside the copper for the purposes of stirring up the simmering laundry, one end waterlogged and blunted by perpetual use, its grain and fibres turned to corpse-pale slime and given a cyanic tinge by the deployment of excessive Reckitt’s Blue, a small cloth bag of sapphire dye dropped in amongst the washing to ensure that shirts and sheets looked iceberg-white. He could remember shelves that weren’t much more than grubby planks on brackets, bowing with the weight of saucepans, iron frying pans, the pudding basin that contained a cloudy amber puddle of solidifying dripping in its rounded depths with their mosaic craquelure.
Upon the day in question, Mick’s gran Clara had been working quietly and methodically out in the kitchen, juggling several tasks at once the way that she’d been taught to when she worked in service. Clara Swan, who’d died not far into the 1970s, would have been in her early sixties then, but to her grandchildren had always seemed as ancient and authoritative as a biblical papyrus. What she lacked in height she made up for in bearing, upright to the point where no one noticed that she wasn’t tall. She stood straight like an ivory chesspiece, scuffed by years of tournaments; was as impassive and as patient and as purposeful. Always a spare and slender woman in her iron-eyed youthful photographs, by 1959 she’d been more stick-like, the long silver hair that hung below her waist bound up in a neat bun. The broomstick spine topped with grey wool gave her the aura of a mop, if mops were seen as things of simple dignity, as endlessly reliable in their utility, were as revered as sceptres and not treated as a lowly household object found most often in the kitchen.
Number seventeen was Clara’s house, with her name on the rent-book, and she ruled it unobtrusively. She never laid the law down and she didn’t need to. Everybody knew already where her lines were drawn, and wouldn’t dream of crossing them. Her power was a less obvious and ultimately more impressive kind than that wielded by May, Mick’s nan, his other grandmother. May Warren had been an intimidating rhino of a woman who would get her way through warning growls and threatened slaps and what in general was a bullying demeanour. Whip-thin Clara Swan, by contrast, never raised her voice, and never threatened. She just acted, swiftly and efficiently. When Alma at the age of two, already more foolhardy and impetuous than anybody else within the household, had decided to try biting Clara, Mick’s grandmother hadn’t shouted or announced a smacking. She’d just bitten Alma’s shoulder, hard enough to pierce the skin and hard enough to ensure that Mick’s sister never, ever tried again to kill someone by eating them. If only, he reflected, she’d cured Alma of the strangling as well. Or the attempts with poison gas, as when Alma persuaded her young brother to stay with her in the kitchen while she lit a mustard-yellow shard of sulphur. Or her pygmy head-hunter approach, like when she’d shot him with that blowpipe dart. No, really. Mick supposed, in fairness, that even his granny’s methods of behaviour modification had their limits. Clara had been in the kitchen on that drowsy afternoon, been shredding suet, baking a bread pudding, boiling handkerchiefs and shuffling back and forth from one task to another uncomplainingly, alone there with the aromatic bogey broth. The badly-fitting back door, hanging open on this fine day to air out the house, allowed the chat and babble of her daughter Doreen and the children to come floating in to Clara from where they’d been sitting just outside, on the slim draughtboard strip of cracked pink and blue tiles that formed the upper level of the house’s cramped back garden.
Sitting now in his still, relatively spacious Kingsthorpe parlour, stinging from his honourably-withdrawing-not-retreating hairline to his dimpled chin, he tried to reconcile the cluttered confines of his childhood with the streamlined <em>TV Century 21</em> surroundings of his current middle-age. Mick looked once more at the reflection of his raw face in the glass front of the cabinet, deciding on the strength of his disaster-struck complexion that he must be Captain Scarlet. He tried fitting the mostly contented adult he’d become with the unspeakably contented three-year-old he’d been and found that the connection was surprisingly smooth and continuous, Mick’s recollection of his young self neither clouded by unhappiness nor tainted by that sorry wistfulness he sometimes heard in others’ voices when they talked about their boyhood days. Life had been good then, life was good now. It was just that life was different, in that it was being seen through different eyes, being experienced by a different person, almost.
The most striking thing about the past, at least as Mick remembered it, was not the obvious difference in how people dressed, or what they did, or the technology they did it with. It was something more difficult to grasp or put a name to, that by turn delightful and unsettling sense of strangeness that came over him on handling forgotten photographs, or suddenly recalling some particularly vivid reminiscence. It would come to him as the weak flavour of a fleeting atmosphere, an unrecoverable mood, as singular and as specific to its place and time as the day’s weather or the shapes its clouds made, just that once, never to be repeated. He supposed that the peculiar quality that he attempted to describe was no more than the startling texture of the past, the way it might feel should you brush your memory’s fingertips across its nap. It was the grain of his experience, composed from an uncountable array of unique whorls and bumps, from almost indiscernibly protruding detail. The string netting of the decomposing dishcloth hung by the back door, stiffened and dried into a permanently tented elbow shape, perfumed by dirty water and warm ham. The finger-sized holes in the blocks that edged Gran’s yard-wide flowerbed, beside the faded red and blue check of the path. A secret ant-nest gnawed into the crumbling cement between two courses of the kitchen wall, beside the steps that led down to a lower level of their closed-in yard. That afternoon there’d been the smell of sun-baked brick, black soil, the tinny scent of recent rain.
Now that he thought about it, not without a faint vestigial flicker of resentment, the entire life-threatening incident that had occurred in the back yard that day had been as a direct result of being poor. If he’d not been one of the offspring of the Boroughs then he wouldn’t have been sitting on his mother’s lap in the sunlit back yard sucking the nearly-lethal cough-drop in the first place.
Mick – or Michael as he’d been then – had been suffering from an inflamed gullet for about a week before that point. When Doreen’s homemade remedy of butter-knobs that had been rolled in caster sugar failed to work, she’d wrapped him up and taken him down Broad Street, off the Mayorhold, to the surgery of Dr. Grey. Though neither Mick nor any of his family had thought about it then, he understood now that the doctors who had tended to his neighbourhood must have resented every minute of their unrewarded, undistinguished toil in ministering to such a lowly and benighted area. They’d almost certainly be working harder than their more illustrious colleagues, just by virtue of the Boroughs being what it was and having more ways people could get ill. They must have come to hate the sight of all those over-anxious mothers wearing toffee-coloured coats and tea-towel scarves, parading half-baked snot-nosed children through their practices at the first sneeze. It must have been all they could do to feign an interest in the wheezing brat for the five minutes that it would be in their office. That was clearly the approach that Dr. Grey had taken with Doreen and Mick that time. He’d shone a torch down Michael’s carmine and inflated gullet, grunted once and made his diagnosis.
“It’s a sore throat. Give him cough-sweets.”
Mick’s mum would have no doubt nodded gravely and compliantly. This was a doctor speaking, who’d had training and could write in Latin. This was someone who, by just a glance at the small child she’d brought in with a poorly throat in which it was experiencing soreness, had seen straight away that this was a near-textbook case of Sore Throat that required immediate intervention from a bag of Winter Mixture. Nineteen-fifties social medicine: it must have seemed a step up from the days when laryngitis would be driven out by exorcism. Mick and Alma’s parents had been grateful for it, anyway, and Doreen would have thanked the general practitioner for his advice with touching earnestness before she’d wrestled Mick into his duffle-coat and carried him back down St. Andrew’s Road, possibly stopping off at the newsagent, Botterill’s on the Mayorhold, to buy the medicinal confectionery that had been prescribed.
And that was how he’d come to be in their back yard, in his pyjamas and his scratchy tartan dressing gown, squirming on Doreen’s lap while she perched on the curve-backed wooden chair brought out into the garden from the living room. His mum sat just beneath the kitchen window with her back to it, the rear legs of her seat against the edging of the kitchen drain, a foot or so of gutter running from below the window to a sunken trap close by the ant-nest, hidden near the garden’s three rough steps. The kingdom of the ants had been the property of Mick’s big sister, and, as she’d explained it to him at the time, was hers by legal right of being eldest child. When she was playing Sodom and Gomorrah with the insects, though, to give Alma her due, she’d let Mick be a kind of work-experience avenging angel to her merciless Jehovah. He’d been put in charge of rounding up escapees from the Cities on the Plain, until Alma had fired him for preventing one of his six-legged charges running off by hitting it with half a brick. His sister, who’d been at that moment either drowning or incinerating ants herself, had turned upon him with a look of outrage.
“What did you do that for?”
Little Mick had blinked up at her guilelessly. “It kept escaping, so I stunned it.”
Alma, half-blind even then, had squinted at the ant in question, which had lost a whole dimension, and then squinted at her brother in appalled incomprehension before stamping off to play alone indoors.
Alma had been at home that afternoon by virtue of it being the school holidays, probably wishing she could be out in the park or meadow rather than stuck there in the back garden with her mum and useless croaking bundle of a baby brother. While Doreen and Mick had sat there on the upper strip of path, Mick’s elder sister, then a tubby five- or six-year-old, had batted energetically around the yard’s brick confines like a moth trapped in a shoebox. She’d run up and down the garden’s three stone steps a dozen times, her white knees pumping back and forth like juggled dumplings, then raced in a circle round the nine-foot-by-nine-foot enclosure, half brick paving, half compressed black dirt, that was the bottom of the garden. She’d hidden from nobody in particular, twice in their outside toilet and once in the narrow rectangle of dead-end concrete alleyway that ran along its side, the left-hand side if you were sitting on the bowl and facing out.
That little shed with its slate roof – their outdoor lavatory down at the bottom of the yard without a cistern or electric light – had been most notable to Mick amongst the Warren family’s various anti-status-symbols. Their back toilet, he had realised at the age of six or so, was an embarrassment even within a neighbourhood not known for its amenities. Even their nan, who lived on Green Street in a gas-lit house that had no electricity at all, at least she had a cistern in her lav. Trips to the loo after the sun went down didn’t require a stuttering Wee Willie Winkie candle or a big tin bucket filled near to its brim with water from the kitchen tap, the way they did along St. Andrew’s Road.
As a small child, he’d hated their outside lav after dark and wouldn’t use it, far preferring either just to hold it in or else use the pink plastic chamber pot stuck under his and Alma’s bed. For one thing, he’d been slightly built back then, rather than a great hulking lummox like his sister. Whereas she could confidently clomp off down the garden path with a huge sloshing bucket in one hand and flickering night-light in the other, he could barely lift the bucket using both his hands; would only have been able to affect a comic stagger as far as the garden steps before he’d spilled the ice-cold water down his leg and/or set his blonde curls alight with the incautious flailings of his candle.
Anyway, even if somehow back then in his larval cherub stage he could have managed to successfully transport the heavy pail, their yard by night was altered, unknown territory, too eerie to negotiate alone. The gap-toothed stable roof across the bottom wall was a mysterious slope of silver slate where rustling night-birds came and went through the black apertures. Its grey, ramshackle incline with the dandelions and wallflowers struggling from between its cracks was a steep ramp that led up into night. The tiny five-by-three-foot stretch of alleyway between the toilet and the garden wall was plenty big enough to hold a ghost, a witch and a green Frankenstein, with lots of room left over for those black and spiky imps like charred horse-chestnuts that there used to be in <em>Rupert</em>. Mick had always had the feeling, during childhood, that the back yards of St. Andrew’s Road by night were probably a bustling thoroughfare of ghouls and phantoms, though that may have just been something that his sister told him. Certainly, it had that ring about it.
It had been all very well for Alma. Not only had she been big enough to lift the bucket, but she’d always been much, much too comfortable with the idea of spookiness. It was a quality, he thought, that she had actively aspired to. Nobody could end up like Mick’s sister had unless it was on purpose. He remembered when, aged eight, he’d had a passion for collecting boxed battalions of minuscule Airfix soldiers: British Tommies just two centimetres tall in ochre plastic, ant-sized snipers sprawling on their bellies, others posed on one leg charging with fixed bayonets; or Prussian Infantry in bluish-grey, frozen in mid-throw with their funny rolling-pin grenades. You’d get a dozen soldiers sprouting from each waxy stem, fixed by their heads so that you had to twist them free before you played with them, perhaps five stems in every window-fronted cardboard box. He’d been halfway through an elaborate campaign – French Foreign Legion versus Civil War Confederates – when he’d become aware that both his armies were abnormally depleted. Ruling out desertion, he’d eventually discovered that his elder sister had been stealing soldiers by the handful, taking them down to the outside toilet with her (and her bucket and her candle) when she paid it a nocturnal visit. She’d apparently discovered that if you should light the soldiers’ heads using the candle-flame, then miniature blue fireballs made of blazing polythene would drip spectacularly down into the waiting bucket, making an unearthly <em>vvwip</em> – <em>vvwip</em> – <em>vvwip</em> sound that was terminated in a hiss as the hot plastic met with the cold water. He imagined her, sat there on the cold wooden seat beside the bent nail in the whitewashed wall where scraps of <em>Tit-Bits</em> or <em>Reveille</em> would be hung for use as toilet paper, with her navy knickers round her swinging ankles and her eager face lit indigo in ghastly flashes from beneath as a diminutive centurion was turned into a Roman candle. Was it any wonder that the thought of lurking back-yard spectres hadn’t bothered her? The moment that they’d heard her footsteps and the clanking bucket, they’d be off.
On that particular occasion with Mick, aged three, convalescing on his mother’s lap, Doreen had quickly wearied of her eldest child’s stampede around the otherwise agreeable and peaceful yard.
“Ooh, Alma, come and sit dayn ’fore yer make us dizzy. Aya got St. Vitus’ Dance or what?”
Like Mick, his sister generally did as she was told without resistance, but had obviously learned that if she <em>over-</em>did what she was told then it could be a lot more fun than actual disobedience, and was much more difficult to punish or to prove. Obligingly, his sister had skipped up the steps and sat herself down with her legs crossed on the warm and dusty tiles beneath the window of the living room. She beamed up at her mum and ailing baby brother with bright-eyed sincerity.
“Mum, why is Michael croaking?”
“You know why ’e’s croakin’. It’s because ’e’s got a sore throat.”
“Is he turning to a frog?”
“No. I just said, ’e’s got a sore throat. ’Course ’e’s not turnin’ into a frog.”
“If Michael turns into a frog, then can I have him?”
“ ’E’s not turnin’ to a frog.”
“But if he does, then can I keep him in a jam-jar?”
“ ’E’s not … No! No, ’course yer can’t. A jam-jar?”
“Dad could use a screwdriver and punch some air-holes in the lid.”
There’d come a point in any conversation between Alma and their mum in which Doreen would make a huge strategic blunder and would start to argue in the terms of Alma’s logic, whereupon she would immediately be lost.
“You couldn’t keep a frog inside a jam-jar. What’s it s’posed to eat?”
“Grass.”
“Frogs don’t eat grass.”
“Yes they do. That’s why they’re green.”
“Is it? I didn’t know that. Are you sure?”
This was the juncture at which Doreen would compound her previous tactical mistake by doubting her own intellectual capabilities as an adult against those of her infant daughter. Mick’s mum didn’t think that she was very clever or well-educated, and would endlessly defer to anyone whom she suspected might have a more firm grasp of the facts than she herself did. Ruinously, she included Alma in this category for no more reason than that Alma, even at the age of five, pretended to know everything and made her proclamations with such ringing confidence that it was simply easier to go along with her than to resist. Mick could remember how on one occasion, his eight-year-old sister had come home from school demanding beans on toast, a dish she’d heard her classmates mention but which was a new one on Doreen. She’d asked how Alma’s school-friends’ mothers would prepare the meal, at which Mick’s sister had insisted that cold beans were tipped onto a slice of bread, which was then toasted on a fork held to the fireplace. Astonishingly, Doreen had attempted this, purely on Alma’s say-so, and had not thought to employ her own superior judgement until their whole hearth was smothered in baked beans and splashes of tomato sauce with coal dust in suspension. That, or something equally unlikely, was how things turned out whenever anybody took Mick’s sister seriously. He could have told his mum that, back there in the shade and sunlight of the upper yard, if he’d been able to say anything through the balloon of sandpaper that was then steadily inflating in his throat. Instead, he’d shifted on her slippery lap and grizzled slightly, letting her get on with the ridiculous discussion that she’d stumbled into. Alma was now nodding in excitement, backing up her ludicrous assertion.
“Yes! All of the animals that eat grass are turned green. They told us it at school.”
This was a flat lie, but was one which played on Doreen’s insecurities about her own substandard 1930s education. You heard such a lot of marvellous new ideas in 1959 what with the Sputniks and all that, and who knew what astounding and unprecedented facts were being taught in modern classrooms? Decimals and long division, things like that, which Doreen’s own school days had barely touched on. Who was she to say? Perhaps this business with green animals all being fed on grass was something new that people had found out. But still she harboured doubts. It had been Alma, after all, who’d told her that lime cordial poured in boiling milk would make a kind of hot fruit milkshake.
“What about the cows ’n’ ’orses, then? Why ent they green, when they eat grass?”
Unflappable, Alma had waved aside her mother’s hesitant appeal to common sense.
“They are green, some of them. The ones that ent will go green when they’ve eaten enough grass.”
Too late, Mick’s mum had realised she was entering the world of quicksand nonsense that was Alma’s centre-parted, pigtailed, butterfly-slide-decorated head. She’d made a feeble yelp of protest as reality gave way beneath her feet.
“I’ve never seen a green cow! Alma, are you making all this up?”
“No” – this in a hurt, reproachful tone of voice. Doreen remained to be convinced.
“Well, then, why ent I seen one? Why ent I seen a green cow or ’orse?”
Alma, sitting beneath the window of the living room, had looked up at their mother levelly, her big grey-yellow eyes unblinking.
“Nobody can see them. It’s because they blend in with the fields.”
Despite, or possibly because of the dead serious tone in which this was delivered, Mick had been unable to prevent himself from laughing. Luckily, his ragged throat had done this for him, and the laugh came out as an unlubricated squeak, exploding halfway through into a jumping-jack-like string of coughs. Doreen had glared at Alma.
“Now look what you’ve done wi’ yer green cows!”
Surprised by their mum’s sudden conversational manoeuvre, Alma had for once been at a loss, unable to come up with a reply. Irrationality: Alma could dish it out all right, but couldn’t take it. Doreen had turned her attention to her youngest child, hacking and mewling there upon her knee.
“Ahh, bless ’im. ’Aya got a poorly throat, me duck? E’yar, you ’ave a pep like what the doctor said you should.”
“Pep” was the Boroughs’ term for sweet, and as Mick thought about it now it struck him that he’d never heard it used outside the district, or outside the homes of people who’d grown up there. Keeping Michael on her lap with one arm round his waist, Doreen had fumbled in her pocket for the square-shaped foil-and-paper tube she’d bought at Botterill’s, finally emerging with the pack of cherry-menthol Tunes. Deftly and with one hand, Doreen had carefully opened one end of the packet with her generous fingernails, squeezed out a single cough-drop, then proceeded to unpick the envelope-tucks of its individual wax-paper wrapping, where the tiny word “Tunes” was repeated several times in medicine-red. With a polite “ ’Scuse fingers” Doreen had held up the sticky crimson jewel to Michael’s lips, which had immediately parted like a hatchling’s beak so she could place the square-cut crystal on his tongue. He sucked it slowly, with its blunted corners poking up against his palate and his gums, especially the sore white-tipped ones at the back where teeth were starting to come through.
Doreen had sat there looking down at Michael fondly, her big face obscuring most of the blue Boroughs’ sky that had been visible between the leaning housetops. She must have been in her early thirties then, still trim and pretty with long features and dark, wavy hair. She’d lost the ghostly and unearthly silent film-star beauty that she’d had in pictures Mick had seen of her when she’d been younger, with her huge, wet, dreamy eyes, but it had been replaced by something warmer and less fragile, the appearance of somebody who’d at last grown comfortable with being who they were, somebody who no longer wore those painful clip-on button earrings. He’d gazed back at her, the cough-sweet tumbling and turning over in his mouth, losing its edges in his cherry-infused spittle, gradually transformed into a thin rose windowpane. Smiling, his mum had brushed a stray curl from the damp pink of his brow.
And then he’d coughed. He’d coughed until the air was forced out of his lungs and then had drawn a great big sucking breath in order to replace it. Somewhere in amongst this spluttering and confused bronchial activity, Mick had inhaled the Tune. Like a stray sink-plug dragged into the plughole of a draining basin to arrest its flow, the sweet fitted exactly in the small gap which remained in Mick’s absurdly swollen windpipe.
With horrific clarity, which made him grip the arm of the settee as he sat in the peaceful Kingsthorpe living room, Mick could remember the appalling moment when he knew his breath had stopped, a memory he had been spared until revived from his concussion earlier that day. He could recall his sudden and uncomprehending shock, his realisation that something was badly wrong and his uncertainty as to what it might be. It was as if he hadn’t previously noticed he was breathing, not until he found he couldn’t do it anymore.
The terror of the moment had been overwhelming, and he’d somehow drawn away from it, as if to a remote place deep inside himself. The sounds and movements of the garden seemed far off, as did the desperate, frightened tightness in his chest. His eyes must have glazed over, staring up into his mother’s overhanging face, and he remembered how her own expression had changed instantly to one of puzzlement and then mounting anxiety. He’d known, from his dissociated vantage, that he was the cause of her concern but couldn’t for the life of him remember what he’d done that had upset her so.
“Ooh Guy, ayr mam! Come quick! Ayr Michael’s chokin’!”
The receding porthole that was Michael’s field of vision had been jiggled frantically, turned on one side and then the other, with his grandma’s taut-skinned features suddenly protruding into view, alarm suppressed beneath the glitter of her bird-like eye. Shudders of impact came from far away, hard and repetitive, like someone banging on a television set when the reception went. That must have been his gran or Doreen, thumping him upon the back as they attempted to dislodge the cough-sweet, but it hadn’t budged. He could remember the sensation of an animal with a metallic taste like pennies that had tried to climb inside his mouth, so that he’d bitten down reflexively on his mum’s fingers as she’d struggled to retrieve the blockage from his throat. There had been voices in the distance, women shouting urgently or wailing, though he hadn’t thought that this had anything to do with him.
The picture of the garden he was seeing had turned upside down at one point, which, from what he’d heard about the incident from Alma and his mum, must have been when Doreen had shook him by his ankles, hoping gravity would do the trick where all her other efforts had drawn blanks. Mick had an image of a red inverted face, an unfamiliar thing between a dog and a tomato that he’d never seen before, a kind of joke-shop devil mask he did not recognise as his distraught and weeping older sister. His short life and all its details, as they’d slid away from him, had seemed like a strange little picture-story that he’d only been half-reading anyway, with all the settings and the characters forgot even before the book was closed and put aside. The sobbing objects in the dwindling illustration, he had dimly recollected, were called people. These were something like a toy or rabbit, in that they were always doing funny things. The bricks surrounding them, piled up in flat or bulky shapes, were something he was pretty sure was known as a back-yarden in the story. Something like that, anyway, although he didn’t know what such arrangements had been used for or to do with. On the blue sheet up above were big and drifting shapes of white that you called lions. No, not lions. Cabbages, was that the word? Or generals? It didn’t matter. All these things had just been silly bits and pieces in the dream that he was waking up from. None of it was real, nor had it ever been.
He had been floating through the air, presumably borne by his mother, and was gazing up at the unfolding forms of all the lions and generals above. There’d been a gruff voice in amongst the ladynoise, which he assumed now had been that of Doug McGeary from next door, the yard with the big wooden gates on Andrew’s Road and the ramshackle stable at the rear. According to what Mick had been told afterwards, mostly by Alma, once the situation had been hurriedly explained to Doug, the fruit and veg purveyor had offered immediately to drive Mick to the hospital in his delivery lorry that he kept parked in the leaking stable. The unbreathing three-year-old, eyes glazed and staring, had been passed by Doreen over the back wall into the sure hands of Mrs. McGeary’s eldest son, or so the story went. Now, though, as the event came back to him, he saw that Alma must have got it wrong, at least that bit of it. His mum had merely held him up to show to Doug, not handed him across the wall. That made a lot more sense than Alma’s version, now he thought about it. Doreen had been too upset to pass her choking baby to somebody else, and what would be the point, in any case? Doug had to start his lorry up and get it out the barn, to wrangle it around the corners of their L-shaped yard, out through the splintering and distressed front gates onto St. Andrew’s Road. He wouldn’t need a half-dead toddler in the cab beside him while he took care of all that.
No, what had really happened, Mick decided as he reconstructed the occurrence, was that Doug had told Doreen to meet him out the front in half a minute, when he’d had a chance to get his vehicle into juddering and coughing action. Christ, what would his mum and gran have done if Doug McGeary hadn’t been at home? There’d been nobody else along St. Andrew’s Road or nearby in the Boroughs who had transport, motorised or horse-drawn, and as far as calling for an ambulance went, well, you could forget it. No one in the district had a phone, there was a single public call box near the old Victorian public toilets nestled at the foot of Spencer Bridge, and anyway, there wouldn’t have been time. In Mick’s own retrospective estimate, a good two minutes must have passed by that point since the last occasion that he’d drawn a breath.
He remembered floating back up the stone steps into the top half of the yard, carried along in a soft cloud of hands, of red and tear-stained faces he no longer knew, a drift of frightened voices indistinguishable from the background twitter of the rooftop birds, the breeze that strummed the television aerials, the crackling of aprons. All the world he’d had three years to get familiar with was gradually unravelling, its sounds and its sensations and its images all turning back into the flat words of the narrative that someone had been reading to him, which was coming to an end. The person in the tale that he’d liked best, the little boy, was dying in a funny little house upon a street that nobody would ever hear of. He remembered feeling slightly disappointed that the story hadn’t had a better ending, because up to then he’d been enjoying it.
A bumpy current that had fingers swirled him from the light and space and blue of the back yard into the sudden grey gloom of the kitchen and the living room. Doreen, he reasoned now, must have been holding him face-up since he recalled a moving frieze of ceiling scrolling by above him, first the flaking and uneven whiteness in the kitchen and then the expanse of beige with the stepped beading round its edge that topped the living room. His mum had carried him between the unlit summer fireplace and the dining table, heading for the passage and the front door and her rendezvous with Doug. But then something had happened. His glazed eyes had been fixed on the decorative trim around the higher reaches of the room, coming to rest within the shadow-drinking recess of an upper corner. And the corner had been … bent? Reversible, so that it stuck out where you would expect it to go in? There had been something wrong about the corner, he remembered that much, and there had been something else, what was it? Something even stranger. There’d been …
There had been a little tiny person in the corner, shouting to him a voice that came from far away, and beckoning, and telling him come up, you come up here with me, you’ll be all right. Come up. Come up. Come up.
He’d died. He’d died halfway across the living room and hadn’t made it even to the passage or the front door, let alone the cab of Doug’s delivery truck, of which he could remember nothing. He could not recall the panicked journey to the hospital … along the same route Howard had taken him today, he realised belatedly … because he hadn’t been there. He’d been dead.
He sat there on the sofa, looking like a gargoyle suffering from sunstroke, and attempted to absorb this fact, to swallow it, but like the Tune he found that it would not go down. If he’d been dead, then what were all the other memories pressing in upon him now, these images and names he half-remembered from a period that was after his demise between the fireplace and the dining table, but before he’d woken clueless and disoriented in the hospital? More to the point, if he’d been dead, how had he woken at the hospital at all? Mick felt a sort of heavy cloud descending on his heart and gut, and noted with detached surprise that in his tidy, sunlit parlour he was very, very scared.
It was at this point that Cath and the kids came home. First from the kitchen and into the living room was Jack, Mick’s oldest boy, a glowering and solidly built fifteen-year-old aspiring stand-up comedian who everyone had always said, in worried tones of deep foreboding, was the spit of his aunt Alma. Jack stopped in his tracks, a pace inside the door, and stared expressionlessly at his dad’s new acid facial. Looking back across his shoulder, he called to his mother and his younger brother Joe, both in the kitchen still.
“Did anybody order pizza?”
Cathy had leaned round the door to see what Jack was on about, looked blankly at her husband for an instant and then shrieked.
“Aaah! Fucking hell, what have you done?”
She rushed to Mick’s side, taking his head gingerly between her hands, turning it gently one way then another as she tried to see how bad the damage was. Their youngest son, Joe, wandered in serenely from the kitchen, taking off his zip-up jacket. Slightly built and blonde and at eleven years old easily much cuter than his older brother, Joe looked quite a bit like Mick had as a child, at least according to the same authorities (including Mick’s late mother Doreen, who should know) that said Jack looked like Alma. Joe, like the young Mick, was quieter than his elder sibling, hardly difficult since Jack’s voice had not just recently broken but had melted down like a reactor and was heading for the centre of the Earth. With Joe, although he didn’t broadcast on the china-rattling frequency or at the volume of his elder brother, you could tell that every bit as much was going on inside, and that most probably it would be every bit as bonkers, if less loudly advertised. Hanging his jacket on a chair, Joe gazed across the room at his dad’s altered countenance, then simply smiled and shook his head as if in fond exasperation.
“Did you get your blowtorch and your shaver muddled up again?”
While Cathy pointedly suggested that both Jack and Joe piss off upstairs if they weren’t being any help and Mick tried not to undercut the seriousness of his wife’s rebuke by laughing, he reflected that this wonderfully protective smart-arsed callousness with which his kids would greet potential disaster was most probably the fault of him and Alma. Alma, mostly. He remembered when Doreen, their mum, was diagnosed with cancer of the bowel and had called her grief-stunned son and daughter into her ward cubicle to have a serious talk about how everything should be arranged. Taller than Mick in her stack heels, Alma had bent down to deliver a conspicuous stage whisper in his ear. “You hear that, Warry? This is where she’s going to tell you you’re adopted.” They’d all laughed, especially Doreen, who’d smiled at Alma and said “You don’t know. It might be you who was adopted.” Mick believed that in life there were times when the entirely inappropriate was the only appropriate response. Perhaps, though, it was only him and Alma who thought that way. Mostly Alma.
Cathy, once she’d been assured Mick’s new complexion wasn’t permanent or otherwise life-threatening, had switched her inner thermostat up from compassionate concern to moral outrage. So, why wasn’t there a label on that drum? Why hadn’t his employers even called to find out how he was since Howard brought him home from casualty? She’d fumed about it for an hour then phoned Mick’s boss, who had at least learned first-hand from the chat what it was like to have a drum of poison go off in your face. When at length it was out of Cathy’s system and she’d dropped the probably red-hot receiver back into its cradle, they’d decided to have dinner and as ordinary an evening as they could manage. As a plan this worked quite well, despite the fact that Mick’s deformity gave things the feeling of an Elephant Man family video reel.
Dinner was tasty and appreciated and passed by without event. During the main course, Cathy turned reproachfully to Jack and scolded him about his eating habits.
“Jack, I do wish that you’d eat your vegetables.”
Her eldest son gave her a look of condescending sympathy.
“Mum, I wish women would fall at my feet, but we both know it isn’t going to happen. Let’s just face it and move on.”
Halfway through pudding, little Joe – if only they’d have named his elder brother “Hoss”, Mick suddenly thought, ruefully – had broken from his customary introverted silence to announce that he’d decided what he’d like to be when he did Work Experience next year: “A fridge.” Mick, Cath and Jack had all looked at each other worriedly, then gone on eating their desserts. It was a fairly normal dinnertime, as those things went.
After they’d done the washing up, Jack said he had the second series of Paul Abbott’s <em>Shameless</em> which was out on DVD, and asked if they could watch it. Since there wasn’t much of interest showing on terrestrial or Sky, Mick had agreed. Besides, he didn’t get to view a lot of television, what with getting up so early in the mornings, and although he’d heard Alma and Jack discussing the new sink-estate-set comedy, he hadn’t seen it yet. He’d got the rest of the week off from work, most probably as a result of Cathy’s phone call, and so could afford to sit back with a beer and take it in. If nothing else, it would be a distraction from the frightening train of thought his family had interrupted by arriving home. Although the sitcom’s sense of humour was notoriously grim, he doubted it was grimmer than a memory of dying in the Boroughs at the age of three.
It was the second season’s final episode they watched, Jack having seen the others previously. Though Cathy shook her head and tutted, wandering off to get on with some chores around the house, Mick thought the show was pretty good. From what he’d overheard of Jack and Alma’s fierce debate about its merits, Alma hadn’t liked it, or had liked it only grudgingly, but then Mick’s sister would find fault with almost anything that wasn’t her own work, as if on principle. “Like <em>Bread</em> with STDs”, that had been one of her off-hand dismissals. If Mick understood the gist of Alma’s doubts about the programme, what she didn’t like was the portrayal of the working class as having inexhaustible reserves of strength and humour in adversity, with which they could laugh off the gruesome deprivations of their genuinely dreadful situation. “Families like that,” she’d say regarding the show’s central clan, the Gallaghers, “in real life the old man wouldn’t be such an ultimately loveable disgusting drunk, and every train-wreck that he dragged his family through with him wouldn’t end up in a heart-warming group cackle. That thirteen-year-old girl with the supernatural coping skills would have been shagged by half the married blokes on the estate for alcopops. The thing is, people watch a show like that … and it’s well made, well written, funny and well acted, I’m not arguing with that … and in a funny way it reassures them about something that they shouldn’t feel so reassured about. It’s not okay that people have to live like that. It’s not okay that terms like sink estate are even in the language. And this plucky, mirthful underclass resilience, it’s a myth. It’s one the underclass themselves are eager to believe so they don’t have to feel so bad about their situation, and it’s also one the middle class are eager to believe, for the exact same reason.” As Mick now recalled, on that occasion Alma’s diatribe (which had been vented, it must be remembered, at her fifteen-year-old nephew) had been terminated when Jack ventured his own counter-argument: “Jesus, Aunt Warry, lighten up. They’re only puppets.”
Mick was more or less on Jack’s side there. At least in <em>Shameless</em> there was a more honest picture of existence in the lower margins than in shows like <em>Bread</em>, with or without the STDs. And how could Alma honestly expect a situation comedy to reproduce her own bleak and consistently enraged view of society? It would be like an episode of <em>Are You Being Served?</em> by Dostoevsky. “Mr. Humphries, are you free?” “None of us are truly free, dear Mrs. Slocum, unless it is in the act of murder.”
No, the only problem with the show for Mick was that the longer it went on, the more he was reminded of the strange anxieties that he was watching television in an effort to forget. That little figure he’d remembered, calling from its upper corner of the living room at 17, St. Andrew’s Road, what could that mean except that he had died, been taken up into some kind of afterlife by some, Mick didn’t know, some sort of angel?
Well, it could mean he was going round the corner. Going barmy. There was always that to be considered in the Vernall clan and offshoots, like the Warrens. Hadn’t his dad’s grandfather gone mad, and his dad’s cousin, Audrey? It was in the family, everybody said, and looked at logically was a more likely cause for Mick’s peculiar memories and feelings than that he’d been lifted up to Heaven by an angel. Anyway, the more he thought about it, then the less the tiny person that had been perched in the corner seemed like any sort of angel that he’d ever heard of. It had been too small, too plainly dressed, in its pink cardigan, its navy skirt and ankle-socks. A girl. Mick could remember now that the homunculus he’d seen had been a little girl with blonde hair in a fringe. She hadn’t looked much more than ten, and definitely hadn’t looked much like an angel. She’d had no wings and no halo, though there had been something odd, what was it, draped around her neck like a long scarf? A fur scarf, that was it. All drenched in blood. With little heads grown out of it. Oh, fuck.
He didn’t want to be insane, he didn’t want his wife and kids and friends to have to see him in that state, to feel bad when they left it longer each time between visits to whatever institution he’d end up in. Madness was all very well if you were Alma and in a profession where insanity was a desirable accessory, a kind of psycho-bling. You couldn’t get away with it down Martin’s Yard, though. In the reconditioning business there was no real concept of delightful eccentricity. You’d find yourself as the recipient of a pharmaceutical lobotomy provided on the National Health, as a result of which your waistband would expand as your abilities to think, talk and respond to stimuli contracted. This was not an idea that Mick found agreeable, or even bearable, but at that moment it appeared to be a serious possibility. Mick could feel thousands of unlikely details as upsetting and impossible as the girl’s blood-soaked fur scarf, bulging from underneath the floorboards of his memory, waiting to burst up from below and overwhelm his happy, ordinary life. Ideas like that just wouldn’t fit in Mick’s existence. They would bend it out of shape, destroy it. With renewed determination, Mick fixed his attention on the episode of <em>Shameless</em> he was watching. Anything in order to avoid the stubbornly persistent vision of that little girl, dressed in her furry necklace made of death.
The hour-long show was almost over, with the Gallaghers all massed in a communal living-room and trying to get the two twin babies they’d been left in charge of off to sleep. The babies’ mother, an emotionally-overwrought Seroxat casualty, had left instructions that the twins could be lulled into nodding off by singing hymns to them, their favourite being Blake and Parry’s almost universally admired “Jerusalem”. The family are croaking their way through another repetition of the much-loved standard, with no obvious effect upon the howling babies, when the mother of the twins at last gets home. Despite her welders’ goggles and her OCD, she then proceeds to send the twins to sleep with a surprisingly ethereal rendition of “Jerusalem” delivered in an unexpectedly well-trained and beautiful soprano. “And did those feet, in ancient time <em>…</em>”
The tears welled up from nowhere in Mick’s eyes, so that he had to blink them back before the kids could see. He’d no idea where this was coming from. It was just something in that melody, the simple way its notes marched up and down, that broke his heart. Worse, there was something in the way the hymn was being used here in this episode of <em>Shameless</em>, like a ray of light amongst the busted sofas and the Tourette’s and the tea-cup rings, its purity and confidence more bright and blinding for the hopelessness of its surroundings. This fierce, blazing sanctity amidst the squalor was what did for Mick. It had a feel about it that chimed perfectly with all of the disturbing memories from his childhood he was at that moment trying to suppress, a sense of crystal vision thrusting up between satanic mills that fitted like a key in all of Mick’s internal locks. The cellar door of his unconscious was thrown open from beneath and a great flood of bubbling unearthliness surged up, much more than he’d imagined could be down there, filling him with images and words and voices, with the language of an alien experience.
<em>Destructor, Bedlam Jennies, length and breadth and whenth and linger, Porthimoth’ di Norhan’, crook doors and a Jacob Flight. “It’s an old can of beans, but every bubble that you ever blew is still inside.” Mansoul, the strangles and the Dead Dead Gang. Destructor. Trilliards is the proper name for Builders’ Marbles. Pay attention to the chimneys and the middle corners. Some call it the five-and-twenty thousand nights. Ghost-seam. Destructor. Spacemen means it isn’t ripe. A saint up in the twenty-fives where all the water level’s rising. Angles from the realms of Glory. “You all fold up into us, and we all fold up into him.” A balance hangs above a winding road. Soul of the Hole, you see it in their furious eyes. The bare girls dancing on the tannin barrels, what a day that is. “We can go scrumping in the madhouse,” and Destructor and Destructor and Destructor. Everywhere and everyone he loved, sucked in and gone. The rood is broke, that’s why the centre cannot hold. He rapes her in the car park where Bath Gardens used to be and we run off to find the ghosts that we’ve annoyed. Woodwork and painted stars upon the landings, Puck’s Hats sprouting from the cracks …</em>
Mick rose abruptly and excused himself, pretending that he needed to go to the bathroom. Joe asked if he wanted them to pause the DVD, but he said that they needn’t bother, calling back to them from halfway up the stairs. Locking the bathroom door he sat there on the toilet with its lid down for a good five minutes until he’d stopped shuddering. It was no good. He couldn’t keep this to himself. He’d have to tell someone.
He stood and lifted up the toilet seat, taking a token piss before he went back down again, and out of habit washed his hands in the small basin nearby when he’d done. He glanced up at the mirror on the bathroom cabinet and started at the raw and peeling face confronting him, having by then forgotten all about his accident at work. His features looked so much like unconvincing make-up from a horror film, that what with all the supernatural visitations crowding in his head right then, Mick had to laugh. The laughter sounded wrong, though, so he packed it in and went downstairs to join his family.
Somehow he managed to last out the evening, acting normal, without giving anything away, though Jack and Cathy both remarked that he was more than usually quiet. It wasn’t until he and Cathy were in bed that it came spilling out, disjointed and so mangled in the telling that it made no sense, even to Mick himself. Cath listened calmly while he told her he was scared that he was going mad, then sensibly suggested he phone up his older sister and arrange to go out for a drink with her, so that he could ask Alma what she thought about it all. In any practical concern that was related to the real world Cathy wouldn’t trust her sister-in-law’s judgement for a second, but with matters of the twilight zone like those afflicting Mick there was no one she trusted more than Alma. Set a thief to catch a thief. Fight fire with fire. Send for a nightmare to arrest a nightmare.
Mick did just as Cathy said. He might be mad, he wasn’t stupid. He arranged to meet his sister at the Golden Lion in Castle Street that coming Saturday, though he’d no clear idea as to why he’d suggested this specific venue, a decaying and unprepossessing hostelry smack in the Boroughs’ devastated heart. It just seemed like the right place, that was all, the right dilapidated wonder of a place to tell his older sister his dilapidated wonder of a tale, about the little boy who’d choked to death, to actual death, when he was only three.
About the girl in her pink cardigan and stinking, gory neckerchief who’d reached down from the corner with her hot and sticky hands and said “Come up. Come up.”
And taken him upstairs.
<br>
* <strong>Book Two: MANSOUL</strong>
<br>
<quote>
It moves me most when slanting sunbeams glow
On old farm buildings set against a hill,
And paint with life the shapes which linger still
From centuries less a dream than this we know.
In that strange light I feel I am not far
From the fixt mass whose side the ages are.
<strong>—H. P. Lovecraft,</strong>
<br>
<strong>from “Continuity” (</strong><em><strong>Fungi from Yuggoth</strong></em><strong>)</strong>
</quote>
** <strong>UPSTAIRS</strong>
<strong>G</strong>rand, grand, how grand it was. The little boy ascended with the wonder-thunder rumbling all round him like a brass band tuning up and up. This was the sound the world made when you left it.
Michael felt like he was floating in a rubber ring, just underneath the smoky yellow ceiling of the living room. He wasn’t certain how he’d got there and he didn’t know if he should be alarmed about the corner-fairy who was waving to him from the shady recess only a few feet above. Although she seemed familiar, Michael wasn’t sure he ought to trust her. Michael wasn’t even sure if corner-fairies were a thing he’d noticed in their house before that moment, or had heard his parents talk about, though he supposed he must have done. The fact that there were tiny people in the corners didn’t seem unusual anyway, not in the sparkly dark that he was rising up through, gilded in bewilderment.
He tried to work out where he was, and realised that he couldn’t even properly remember who or where he’d been before he’d found himself adrift amongst the glimmer and the cymbals. Even though his thoughts felt cleverer than any that he’d previously had – not that he could remember many previous thoughts at all, if he were truthful – he still couldn’t piece together what had happened to him. Had there been somebody telling him a story, one of the old, famous stories everybody knew, about the prince who choked upon a wicked cherry? Or, unlikely as it seemed, had he been someone in the tale itself, perhaps even the prince, in which case all this business with him bubbling up through musicals and murk was just the next part of the story? Neither of these ideas sounded right, but he decided that he wouldn’t puzzle over things just then. Instead he’d pay attention to the corner, which he seemed to be approaching. Either that, he thought, or it was getting bigger.
Michael couldn’t make his mind up if he’d always known that corners went two ways, like this one did, so that they stuck out and poked in at the same time, or if this was a notion that had just this moment popped into his thoughts. It worked, he could now see, in much the same way as those tricky pictures that you found on school chalk-boxes did, with all the cubes stacked in a pyramid, but so you couldn’t tell if they went in or out. He understood, now that he had the chance to see a corner from up close, that they did both. What he had taken for a recess was revealed as a protrusion, less like the indented corner of a living room than it was like the jutting corner of a table, that had fancy carved trim round its edges where the ceiling had a beaded moulding. But of course, if it was like a tabletop then that meant he was looking at it from above, not peering up at it from underneath. It meant that he was sinking down towards it and not rising up to bump his head on it. It also meant the living room had been turned inside out.
The idea that he was descending, coming in to land upon the corner of a giant table, made more sense of how things looked to him just then, especially because it gave the corner-fairy something to be standing on, whereas before she had appeared to be stuck, unconvincingly, somewhere up past the picture rail. Although, if she was lower down than he was, why would she be calling to him in her bee-sized voice and telling Michael to come up?
He peered at her suspiciously and tried to tell if she seemed like the sort who’d have him on or play a nasty trick on him, deciding that, yes, probably she did. In fact, the closer Michael got to her, the more the fairy looked like any ten-year-old girl from his neighbourhood, which meant that she was more than likely vicious, one of those from round Fort Street or Moat Street who would knock you cold with shopping bags full of Corona bottles they were taking back for the deposit.
Like the corner she was standing on or in, the fairy gradually grew bigger until Michael had a better view of her, so that she wasn’t just a squeaking, waving dot in blue and pink among the fly-specks covering their ceiling. He saw also that she wasn’t a real fairy, but a normal-sized girl who had previously been far away and had, therefore, appeared much smaller than she really was. She had blonde hair with just a taste of ginger hanging down an inch or two below her ears, worn in a fringe as if a pudding basin had been placed upon her head and cut around. If she were from the Boroughs, then it very likely had.
It lazily occurred to him that he was starting to remember bits and pieces of the life or story that he’d been involved in until only a few moments back, before discovering that he was bobbing in the fawn drifts of the upper living room. He could remember pudding basins and the Boroughs, Moat Street, Fort Street and Corona bottles. He remembered that his name was Michael Warren, that his mum was Doreen and his dad was Tom. He’d had a sister, Alma, who would make him laugh or badly frighten him at least once every day. He’d had a gran called Clara who he’d not been scared of, and a nan called May who he most definitely had been. Reassured to have at least these scraps of who he was back in their proper order, he turned his attentions once more to the matter of the little girl, now hopping up and down in agitation a scant inch or two above him. Or below him.
He had guessed her age as being nine or ten, what Michael thought of as an almost-grown-up time of life, and as he neared her then the more he was convinced that he’d been right. She was a bony, sturdy child, a little older and a little taller than his sister Alma, prettier and slimmer with a wide and smirky mouth that seemed continually on the brink of bursting open in a laugh bigger than she was. He’d been right, as well, about her being from the Boroughs, or at least from somewhere like it. She just had that local look about her in the way she dressed and the condition of her scabby knees. Her white skin, only tanned by Boroughs drizzle, had a grey shine rubbed into its creases from the railway dust that covered everything and everybody in the district. Gazing at her now, though, Michael saw it was the same pale grey that storm clouds sometimes had, where you could faintly make out rainbow tinsels trying to break through. To tell the truth, he thought the dirt looked quite nice as she wore it, as if it were an expensive rouge or powder you could only get from rare and distant islands of the globe.
He was surprised how good his eyesight was. It wasn’t that he’d ever had a problem with his eyes, the way his mum and sister had, but simply that his vision seemed much clearer now, as if someone had dusted all the fogwebs from it. Every tiny detail of the girl and of the clothes that she was wearing was as sharp as an engagement diamond, and the muted colours of her dress and shoes and cardigan were not so much made brighter but were just more vivid somehow, bringing stronger feelings from him.
Her pink jumper, worn into a threadbare safety-net of faded rose strands round its elbows, had the strawberry ice-cream glow of summer teatimes to it, when the last rays of the sinking sun leaned in through the small stained-glass window set into the west wall of the living room. It looked as right and natural with her frock of navy blue as the idea of happy sailors eating candyfloss from sticks upon a bulb-lit promenade. Her slush-white socks had crumpled into concertinas or shed caterpillar skins, one noticeably lower than the other, and her scuff-toed shoes were dyed or painted in an old, deep turquoise with a faint map of burnt orange cracks where you could see the leather showing through from underneath. The fraying straps with their dull silver buckles looked as full of history as charger-bridles from a knight-and-castle past, and then there was the swanky duchess stole she had around her shoulders. This gave Michael quite a start when he examined it more closely.
It was made from twenty-four dead rabbits hung together on a bloody string, all hollowed out to flat and empty glove-puppets with paws and heads and velvet ears and cotton-wool-ball bums attached. Their eyes were mostly open, black as elderberries, or the backwards midnight eyes that people had in photo negatives. Though he supposed a scarf of furry corpses was quite horrible, something about it seemed excitingly adult at the same time. It was most probably against the law, he thought, or at least something you could get told off for, and it only served to make the little girl appear more glamorously adventurous.
Only the whiff of her pelt-garland put him off, and at the same time told him that it wasn’t just his eyes that had been suddenly rinsed clean. The scent of things had never previously made a big impression on him, or at least not when compared with the rich, bitter broth he was experiencing now. It was like having orchestras up both sides of his nose at once, performing symphonies of stench. The girl’s life and the four-and-twenty rabbit lives around her neck were stories written down invisibly, in perfume, and he read them through his squinting nostrils. Her skin had a warm and nutty smell, mixed with the ruddy-knuckled odour of carbolic soap and something delicate like Parma Violets on her breath. Wrapped round all this was the aroma of her gruesome necklace with its flavourings of tunnel dirt and rabbit poo and green juice chewed from grass, the sawdust fustiness of all those dangling empty coats, the tinny sniff of gore and putrid fruitiness lifting in warm waves from the meagre, mangy meat. The reek from all of this combined was so intoxicating and so interesting that he didn’t even think of it as ghastly, necessarily. It was more like a pungent soup of everything that had the whole world somewhere in its simmering, the good bits and the bad bits both at once. It was the tang of life and death, both taken as they came.
Michael was seeing, smelling, even thinking much more clearly than he could remember doing as a floor-bound three-year-old, when all his senses and his thoughts had been comparatively fuzzy, as though viewed through streaky glass. He didn’t feel three anymore. He felt much cleverer and more grown up, the way he’d always thought that he would feel when he reached seven, say, or eight, which was about as grown up as he could imagine. He felt properly adult. This brought with it a sense of being more important, just as he’d expected it to do, but also brought the troubling notion that there were now more things he should worry over.
The most urgent of these new concerns was probably the matter of what he was doing bumbling up against the ceiling with this smelly little girl. What had just happened to him? Why was he up here now, and not down there, where he’d been before? He had the vaguest recollection of a sore throat and the safety of his mother’s lap, of fresh air and of puny wallflowers rooted in the soot between old bricks, then there had been some sort of a commotion. Everybody had been running round and sounding frightened like they did on those occasions when his gran let down her bun and, combing out her long and steely hair before the open hearth, set it on fire. This time, though, it had been something much worse, worse even than Michael’s grandmother with a burning head. You could tell from the panic in the women’s voices. Distantly, it came to him that this was what was causing all the lovely thunder mumbling around him: it was how the high-pitched shrieking of his mother and his grandmother would sound if it was slowed down almost to a stop, with all the different noises just left hanging there and trembling in the air.
It struck him suddenly, an ominous gong sounding in his stomach, that his mum’s and gran’s distress might be connected with his current puzzling circumstances. It was Michael that they were upset about, a fact so obvious he wondered why he hadn’t hit on it immediately. He must have had a shock, so that he’d needed time to put his thoughts in order. It seemed reasonable to assume that what had shocked him was the same thing that had made his mum and gran sound scared to death …
No sooner had the word entered his mind than Michael, in a rush of helpless terror, understood exactly where he was and what had happened to him.
He had died. The thing that even grown-ups like his mum and dad lived with the fear of all their lives, that’s what this was, and Michael was alone in it just as he’d always dreaded that he would be. All alone and far too little, still, to cope with this enormous thing the way that he assumed old people could. There were no big hands that would grab him up out of this fall. No lips could ever kiss this better. He knew he was entering a place where there weren’t mums or dads or fireside rugs or Tizer, nothing comforting or cosy, only God and ghosts and witches and the devil. He’d lost everyone he’d had and everything he’d been, all in a careless moment where he’d just let his attention wander for an instant and then, bang, he’d tripped and fallen out of his whole life. He whimpered, knowing that at any moment there would be an awful pain that would just crush him to a paste, and then there’d be a nothing that was even worse because he wouldn’t be there, and he’d never see his family or his friends ever again.
He started struggling and kicking, trying to wake up and make it just a petrifying dream, but all his desperate activity served only to make everything more frightening and more peculiar. For one thing, all the empty space around him wobbled like a slow glass jelly as he thrashed about, and for another, all at once he had too many arms and legs. His limbs, which he was slightly reassured to find were still clad in his blue and white pyjamas and his dark red tartan dressing gown, left perfect copies of themselves suspended in the air behind them as they moved. With one brief, wriggling spasm he had turned himself into a lively, branching bush of stripy flannel that had pale pink finger-blossoms by the dozen sprouting from its multiplying stems. He wailed, and saw his outcry travel in a glittering trumpet ripple through the crystal glue of the surrounding air.
This only seemed to make the little blonde girl who was in or on the corner cross with him, when what with finding out that he was dead and all of that, he’d quite forgotten she was standing there. She stretched her grubby hands towards him, reaching up or down depending on which aspect of her chalk-box optical illusion he was focussing upon. She shouted at him, near enough now so that he could hear her, with her voice no longer like that of a beetle in a matchbox. Closer up, Michael could hear the Boroughs creaking in her accent, with its grimy floorboards and its padlocked gates.
“Come up! Come on up ’ere, yer’ll be all right! Gi’ me yer ’and, and pack up wi’ yer fidgetin’! Yer’ll only make it worse!”
He didn’t know what could be worse than being dead, but since at that point he could hardly see her for a forest full of tartan trees and striped-pants shrubbery he thought he’d better do as she advised. He held himself as still as he could manage and, after a moment or two, was relieved to learn that all the extra elbows, knees and slipper-covered feet would gradually fade away to nothing if you gave them enough time. Once all of his superfluous body parts had disappeared and weren’t obstructing his view of the corner-fairy anymore, he cautiously reached out towards the hand that she was holding down or up to him, moving his own arm very slowly so that all the trailing after-pictures were reduced to a bare minimum.
Her outstretched fingers wrapped around his own, and he was so surprised by how real and how physical they felt he almost let them go again. He found that, as with sight and scent, his sense of touch had suddenly been made a lot more sensitive. It was as though he’d taken off a pair of padded mittens that had been tied on his wrists soon after he’d been born. He felt her palm, hot as a new-baked cake and slippery with sweat, as if she’d held it guarding pennies in her pocket for too long. The soft pads in between her digits had a sticky glaze, like she’d been eating ripe pears with her bare hands and had not had time to wash yet, if she ever did. He didn’t know exactly what he’d been anticipating, possibly that being dead his fingertips would simply pass through everything as if it were made out of steam, but he’d not been expecting anything as clammily believable as this, these humid crab-legs scrabbling for his wrist and clamping on the baggy cuff of Michael’s dressing gown.
Her grip, not only startlingly real, was also much, much stronger than he would have thought to look at her. Yanking him by the arm she hauled him up, no, down towards her, much like someone trying to land a frantic, flapping fish. He suffered an unpleasant moment during this when both his eyes and stomach had to flip from thinking he was being pulled down to a table corner that poked out, and instead see it as a backroom corner that tucked in, with the girl straddling it and reaching down as if helping him up out of a swimming pool, while she stood safely in the dry astride the junction where its edges met. The room lurched outside-in again as he was dragged up through a sort of hinge, where everything you thought was going one way turned out to be actually going in the other, and next thing he knew Michael was standing wobbly-kneed on the same painted wooden ledge as the small girl.
This narrow platform ran around the rim of what appeared to be a big square vat some thirty feet or more across, with their precarious perch being the lowest level of a tiered amphitheatre that sloped up for several steps on all four sides, like a giant picture-frame enclosing the wide fish-tank void he’d just been rescued from. The ten-yard sweeps of stair that led up from the edges of the pool-like area were, even in his confused condition, obviously impractical and ludicrous. The treads were far too deep, being some feet across from front to rear, while at the same time all the risers were too shallow, no more than three inches high, harder to sit on than a roadside curb. The gently-stepped surround seemed to be made of tiered white-painted pine with its sharp corners rounded into curves, covered all over with a thick and flaking coat of paint, a yellowing cream gloss that looked as though it had been last touched up before the war. To be quite frank, the more he peered at them the more the steps resembled the old beaded moulding that ran round the ceiling of their living room in Andrew’s Road, except much bigger and turned upside down. As he stood with his back towards the rectangular pit he’d been pulled out of, he could even see a patch of bare wood where the paint had peeled away leaving a shape a bit like Britain lying on its back, identical to one he’d noticed once up on the decorative trim above their fireplace. That one, though, had been no larger than a penny postage stamp, whereas this was an unjumpable puddle, even though he felt sure that the wriggling contour lines would prove a perfect match on close inspection.
After blinking at the woodwork in astonishment for a few seconds, Michael shuffled round in his plaid slippers until he was face to face with the tough little girl who stood beside him on the pine boards with her collar made of rancid rabbits. She was just a fraction taller than he was himself, which, taken in conjunction with the fact that she was wearing proper clothes while he was still dressed in his night-things, made him feel as if she had him at a disadvantage. Realising that they were still holding hands, he let go hurriedly.
He meant to say something along the lines of “Who are you,” or “What’s been done to me,” but what came out instead was “You who,” followed almost instantly by “Worlds bent under me.” Alarmed, he raised his fingers to his lips and felt around to make sure that his mouth was working properly. Lifting his arm to do so, Michael noticed that he was no longer leaving picture-copies every time he moved. Perhaps that only happened in the floaty place he’d just that moment been fished out of, but right then Michael was more concerned about the rubbish he was coming out with when he tried to talk.
The girl stood looking at him in amusement with her head cocked on one side, her wide lips pressed together in a thin line so that she could keep from laughing. Michael made a fresh attempt to ask her where they were and what had happened to him.
“Ware whee are, wore ’way? And throttles happy tune me?”
Though the stream of nonsense was no less upsetting, Michael was astonished to discover that he almost understood himself. He’d asked her where they were as he’d intended to, but all the words had come out changed and twisted round, with different meaning tucked into their crevices. He thought that what he’d said translated roughly to “Where are we, in this place where I feel so aware, that makes we want to shout whee, but which makes me wary, looking all run-down and worn away, the way it does? And what has happened to me? I was happy where I was, but fear I may have throttled on a Tune that has choked off my joyous song.” It sounded a bit posh and weedy put like that, but he supposed that it contained the feelings he was trying to convey.
The smirking urchin could contain her mirth no longer and laughed in his face, loudly, though not unkindly. Minute beads of opal spittle, each with all the world reflected in it, hurtled from her mouth to break against his nose. Amazingly, the girl seemed to at least have caught the gist of what he’d meant to say, and when her giggles had subsided she made what he took for a sincere attempt to answer all his questions as directly as she could.
“Yoo hoo to you as well. I’m Phyllis Painter. I’m boss of the gang.”
Those weren’t the exact words she used, and there were corkscrew syllables that made him think of “gasbag” and “bass gong”, perhaps a reference to how much she talked or how deep, for a girl, her voice was, but he could make out what she was saying without difficulty. Clearly, she’d got her mouth under more control than Michael had his own. She went on and he listened, both intently and admiringly.
“What’s ’appened is the world’s bent under yer and out yer’ve fell like everybody does. Yer’ve chuckled on a sweet.” This seemed to say that he had throttled or had choked to death as he’d suspected, though with comical associations as if neither death nor choking could be taken very seriously round here. The girl continued.
“So I tugged yer ayt the jewellery and now ’ere we are Upstairs. We’re in Mansoul. Mansoul’s the Second Borough. Do yer want to join me gang or don’t yer?”
Michael comprehended almost none of this except the last part. He jumped back from her like he’d been stung. His spirited refusal of her offer was spoiled only by not being in a proper language.
“Know eye doughnut! Late me grow black square eyewash be four!”
She laughed again, less loudly and, he thought, not quite so kind.
“Ha! You ent found yer Lucy-lips yet. That’s why what yer saying clangs out wrong. Just give it linger and yer’ll soon be spooking properly. But as for where you wizzle be before, there ent no go-back. Life’s behind yer now.”
She nodded past him, and it sank in that her last remark had been intended as more than a turn of phrase. She’d meant his life was currently behind him. With his neck-hairs tingling as they lifted, Michael swivelled carefully to look at it.
He found that he’d been standing with his back turned to the very edge of the huge, square-shaped tank he’d been dragged up from, with a worrying drop beneath him at his slipper-heels. The area he was looking at, while not much bigger than the children’s boating lake he’d seen once at the park, was certainly much deeper, to the point where Michael couldn’t tell exactly how far down it went. The great flat pool was filled up to its brim with the same wobbly, half-set glass that he had lately been suspended in. The surface was still quivering slightly, no doubt from the violent jerk with which he’d been pulled out.
As Michael peered down through the shuddering substance he could make out still forms that extended through the glazed depths, motionless and twisted trunks of intricately textured gemstone that were wound around each other as they stretched across the space beneath. He thought it might look a bit like a coral garden, though he hadn’t really got a clear idea of what those words actually meant. The interwoven strands with all their branches and their surfaces seemed to be made of something you could see through, like a hard, clear wax. These frilly, tangling cables had no colour of their own, but you could look inside them to where lights of every shade swam back and forth. He could distinguish at least three of the long convoluted tubes, each with its own specific inner hue, as they snaked in amongst each other through the rubbery fathoms trembling far below, like an ice-statue of a gorgeous knot.
The thickest and most well-developed of the stems, lit from inside by a predominantly greenish glow, was the one Michael thought looked nicest, though he couldn’t have told anyone precisely why. It had a peaceful quality about it, with the sculpted emerald bough stretched right across the massive box of shivering light, from where it entered through a tall rectangle in the vat’s far wall, then coiled around the monster fish-tank prettily towards him before curving off to Michael’s left and exiting his field of vision through another looming aperture.
He thought it was an interesting coincidence that both these openings were in the same relation to each other as the doors that led out from their living room down Andrew’s Road into the kitchen and the passageway, although these entrances were vastly bigger, more like those you’d find in a cathedral or perhaps a pyramid. As he looked closer with his improved eyes he saw that there was even a black tunnel cut low down into the right-side wall halfway along, in the precise location that their fireplace would be if it were huger and if he were staring down at it from a position up above.
While he was pondering this unlikely similarity he noticed that his favourite frond, the green one, had a rippling and attractive ruff along one side up near the top, resembling a stripe of fanning mushroom gills. At the point where the complicated cable of translucent jade bent to the left, which was the point where it was also nearest him, he had the opportunity to view these gills side-on and realised with a jolt that he was looking at an endless row of duplicated human ears. Only when Michael saw that every one was wearing an identical facsimile of his mum Doreen’s favourite clip-on button earrings did he understand at last what he’d been gawping at.
The jelly-flooded chamber, weird as any undiscovered planet, was in fact their dear, familiar living room but somehow swollen up to a terrific size. The luminous, contorted crystal shafts laced through it were the bodies of his family, but with their shapes repeated and projected through the chandelier-like treacle of their atmosphere, the way that Michael’s arms and legs had looked when he himself was floundering in the viscous emptiness. The difference was that these extended figures were immobile, and the images that they were made from didn’t promptly fade out of existence in the way that his spare limbs had done. It was as though while people were still living they were really frozen motionless, immersed in the congealed blancmange of time, and simply thought that they were moving, when in truth it was just their awareness fluttering along the pre-existing tunnel of their lifetime as a ball of coloured light. Apparently, only when people died, as Michael seemed to have just done, were they released from the containing amber and allowed to rise up spluttering and splashing through the aspic of the hours.
The biggest, greenest structure, that he’d already expressed a preference for, was Michael’s mum, passing at great speed through the living room, from kitchen door to passageway. He dimly calculated that in normal circumstances this would only take his mother a few instants, which suggested that the slice of time on permanent display in this capacious tank was, at the most, ten seconds thick. Even so, you could tell from the tortuous interweaving of the sunken lumps that quite a lot was going on.
The curling reef of bottle-glass that was his mother – he could now discern her lime-lit features shuffled through the ridge’s uppermost protrusion like a stack of see-through masks – appeared to have a bright fault all along the greater part of its extraordinary length. Where it grew into the enclosure on its far side, through the towering gap beneath the waterline that was in actuality their now-enormous kitchen door, the green mass had a smaller form enclosed within, a roughly star-shaped splotch of radiant primrose running through its centre like the lettering in a stick of rock. This inner glow remained inside the gooseberry-toned configuration from the point at which it surged in via the chasm of the doorway, following it as it briefly veered to Michael’s right and then resumed its path towards him, a manoeuvre undertaken to avoid the obstacle of a drowned mesa that he reasoned must be their living-room table. It was here, however, right between the table and the yawning cavern of the fireplace, that the yellow brilliance seemed to leak out from the moulded olive vessel that contained it. A diffused gold plume rose smokily through the engulfing negative-space gelatine, a cloudy and unravelling woollen strand of lemonade that trailed up to the gumdrop pane of the vat’s surface quite near Michael’s plaid-clad feet as he stood on the framing wood surround. It looked like clean bath water somebody had done a wee in. The soft star-shape with its five blunt points was still inside the greater rolling bulk as this swerved to one side and went out by the presently colossal passage door on his far left, but now it was a colourless and empty hole amidst the warm, enfolding green. The summer light had all drained out of it.
After a while it came to Michael that this had been him, this frail five-petal marigold of brightness which at first glance seemed to be inside the larger crystalline arrangement that was Michael’s mum. She had been carrying him with both arms in front of her, so that her wider contours seemed to swallow his as she rushed forward in her stream of repetitions. And the point in her trajectory between the table and the fireplace where his smaller light switched off, that was where he had died, where life had cracked and his awareness had seeped into the enveloping consommé of coagulated time. The yellow traces straggling upwards in the prism-syrup were the ones that his pyjama-swaddled consciousness had left behind when he’d dog-paddled up and through the ceiling.
He gazed down into the grotto at the submarine contortions of the other two illuminated ferns, a spiky russet hedge of what looked like refrigerated orange pop and which he took to be his gran, and then a pale mauve tube much closer to the floor that had a violet torch-beam flare dancing inside it. He assumed this was his sister, flickering with all her purple thoughts. With its delicious paint-box tints and its aquatic layers of transparency, Michael could see why the unnerving girl who’d hoisted him aloft had spoken of it as “the jewellery”. It was delicate and beautiful, but he thought there was something sad about it, too. Despite its shifting, coruscating sparks the ornamental diorama had the look of a forgotten snarl of river-bottom junk, so that it seemed a common and neglected thing.
The girl’s voice issued over Michael’s shoulder from behind him, thus reminding him abruptly that she was still there.
“It’s an old can of beans, but every bubble that you ever blew wiz still inside.”
Oddly, he knew just what she meant. It was a rusty and discarded old container he was looking at, but all his hopes and wishes had been in it, had been born from it. It was a treasure chest that turned into a coal scuttle once you could see it from outside, yet still he couldn’t help but miss the slack that he’d mistaken in his inexperience for finery. He mooned down for a moment at the royal carpet river of malachite filigree that was his mother’s hair, then looked round at the girl. She sat, kicking her ankles, on the shabby cream steps banked around the sunken living room. Michael was starting to accept that in some way this framing woodwork was in fact the moulding up around their ceiling, but turned inside-down or upside-out and blown up larger. She was looking at him quizzically, so that he felt he ought to say something.
“Wiz this play seven?”
His enunciation was still bungling his tongue, but Michael thought it might be slowly getting easier to communicate. The trick appeared to lie in meaning every word you said in a precise, pure way that left no room for ambiguity. This seemed to be a place where language would erupt in connotations and conundrums without provocation, given half a chance. You had to keep your eye on it. At least this time his new posthumous playmate wasn’t sniggering at his speech-defect as she answered him.
“Yiss, if you like. Or ’ell. It’s just Upstairs, that’s all. It’s up the wooden ’ill, the Second Borough, what they call Mansoul. We’re in amongst the angles, and it wunt be long afore yer’ve got the ’ang of it. You’re lucky that I wizzle passing, what with you not ’aving family ’ere to welcome yer aboard.”
Michael considered this last, casual observation. Now he thought about it, all this being dead and going up to Heaven business did seem rather poorly organised. It wasn’t like he’d had a lot of expectations about angels, trumpets, pearly gates or anything like that, but he would not have thought it would be too much trouble to arrange a passed-on relative or two, just as a welcoming committee to this funny, slipshod afterlife. Although, to be fair, all of his dead relatives had died before Michael was born so that they wouldn’t really know him, not to talk to. As for all the members of his family that he was closer to, he’d messed that up by dying out of order. He’d assumed that in the normal run of things, people would die according to how old they were, which meant that his nan May would be the first to go, then his gran Clara, then his dad, his mum, his older sister, him himself and finally their budgie, Joey. If he hadn’t died before it was his turn, then all of them except the budgie would be here to lift him up out of his life, to clap him on the back and introduce him to Eternity. It wouldn’t have been left to just some girl, some perfect stranger who just happened to be strolling by.
As it was now, though, he’d be here all on his own arranging the reception for his terrifying nan. And what if it were years until somebody else died, years with just the two of them waltzing around together on these eerie, creaking boards? With his eyes desperate and darting at the very notion, he attempted to convey some of his musings to the little girl. Wasn’t it Phyllis something that she’d said her name was? He spoke carefully and slowly, making sure of the intention of each word before it passed his lips, so that it wouldn’t suddenly betray him by exploding into puns and homonyms.
“I’ve died while I’m still little. That’s why no one elf wiz here to meet me yet.”
He was improving, definitely. That sentence had been going fine until the bit where he had inadvertently referred to his young, bowl-cut benefactor as a “no one elf.” Upon reflection, though, this didn’t seem entirely inappropriate, and she herself didn’t appear as if she’d taken it amiss. She sat there on the ancient paintwork, straightening the navy linen of her skirt over her grit and gravel-studded kneecaps, idly picking at the brittle, yellowed edges of the flaking gloss. She looked up at him almost pityingly, and shook her head.
“That’s not the way it works. Everyone’s ’ere already. Everymum’s always been here already. It’s just dayn there where yer get yer times and chimes mixed up.’
She nodded to the glistening cavity of Michael’s former living room, behind him.
“Only when we’re reading through the pages wizzle there be any order to ’um. When the book’s shut, all its leaves are pressed together into paper inches that don’t really goo one way or t’other. They’re just there.”
He’d absolutely no idea what she was on about. Quite frankly, Michael was still entering a mounting state of panic at the idea of him turning out to be May Warren’s escort in this peeling paradise. In fact, the horror-stricken and appalled reaction to this whole state of affairs that he’d been putting off seemed to be creeping up on Michael in a thoroughly upsetting manner. As the awful fact of his demise continued to sink in, just when he thought that he’d accepted all there was of it, he found his hands were shaking. When he tried to speak he found his voice was, too.
“I don’t wilt to be dead. This wizzn’t right. If all this wizzle right, there’d be somebody that I knew here waiting four me.”
Wizzn’t? Wizzle? Michael realised he was using words the little girl had used as if he’d always understood them perfectly. For instance, he knew “wizzle” was a term that had “was”, “is” and “will be” folded up inside it, as though to divide things up to present, past and future was thought an unnecessary complication in these parts. This insight only served to make him feel even more lost and worried than he was already. He knew that even if he was here until the end of time, he’d never understand the first thing that was going on. He had an overpowering urge to run away from all of this, and all that kept his feet still was the knowledge that there wasn’t really anywhere safe in the world that Michael could still run to.
Sitting on the low steps, toying with her rotten rabbit wrap, the girl was now regarding him with a more wary and uncertain look, as if he’d said something that she mistrusted, or as if some new fact had occurred to her. She squinched her eyes, Malteser brown, to twin slits of interrogation, with the freckled bridge of her snub nose suddenly corrugated as a consequence.
“This wiz a bit of a pecuriosity, now that I come to think. Even the ’Itlers ’ave their granddads waitin’ for ’um, and I shouldn’t think yer’d ’ave ’ad time to be as bad as that. What wiz you, six or seven?”
For the first time since he’d landed here, he looked down at his body. He was satisfied to find that in this new light, even his old night-clothes were as mesmerising in their tucks and textures as the clothing of the little girl appeared to be. The tartan of his dressing gown, in reds so deep they verged on the maroon, was bursting with the dried-blood histories of proud and tragic clans. His deckchair-striped pyjamas, alternating bands of ice cream cloud and July sky, made sleep seem like a seaside holiday. Michael was pleased to note, as well, that he was bigger than he’d been: still skinny, but a good foot taller. It was more the body of a smallish eight-year-old than that of the mere toddler he had been just moments earlier. He tried to answer the girl’s question honestly, even if that meant that she’d think he was a baby.
“I think that I wizzle three, but now that I’m glowed up I’m more like seven.”
The girl nodded in agreement.
“That makes sense. I ’spect yer’d always wanted to be seven, ay? That’s ’ow we are ’ere, looking as we best think of ayrselves. Most people monger themselves younger, or they’re ’appy ’ow they are already, but infantoms like yerself are bound to be an age such as they wizzle looking forward to.”
Adopting a more serious expression now, she carried on.
“But ’ow wiz it a three-year-old ’as got no family Upstairs to take ’im in? There’s more to you than meets the I, me little deady-boy. What wiz yer name when you wiz in yer fame?”
None of this chat was making him less nervous, but he couldn’t see how telling her his name would make things any worse, so he replied as best he could.
“I’m Michael Warren. It might be there’s no one here because I wizzn’t properly supposed to come up yet to Deadfordshire. It might be a missed ache.”
He’d meant to say “mistake”, and didn’t know where “Deadfordshire” had come from. It felt like a kind of slang that he was picking up out of the air, the way that words and phrases sometimes came to him in dreams. At any rate, the girl appeared to have no trouble understanding him, which indicated that his grasp of cemetery Esperanto was improving. With a troubled look upon her face she shook her head so that her blonde fringe shimmered like a midget waterfall.
“There’s no missed aches. I might ’ave known I wizzn’t skipping through the Attics of the Breath by accident when yer clogs ’appened to pop up. I thought I’d took a short cut from where I’d been scrumping for Mad Apples at the ’ospital, back ’ome to the Old Buildings, but I see now that I’d got superintentions what I didn’t know about. It’s like they always say round ’ere, the character don’t run a mile before the author’s writ a while.”
She breathed a drawn-out “hahh” of deep exasperation, then stood up with a decisive air about her, smoothing down the heavy fabric of her midnight-blue skirt out of habit.
“Yer’d better come with me until we can find out what all this wiz abayt. We can call at the Works and ask the builders. Come on. This wiz borin’, all this past and plaster what’s round ’ere.”
She turned and started walking with deliberation up the shallow stairs of painted planking, obviously expecting him to follow her as she ascended from the inlaid cavity of their amphitheatre. Michael didn’t know what he should do. On one hand, Phyllis … Painter, was it? Phyllis Painter was the only person that he’d got for company here in this echoing and lonely afterdeath, even if Michael wasn’t sure he ought to trust her. On the other hand, the fifty-foot-wide jelly-cube behind him was his one connection with the lovely and unwitting life he’d had before. Those frilly dragon statues down there in the instant’s diamond varnish were his mum and gran and sister. Even if his new acquaintance found it boring, Michael felt uneasy about wandering off and leaving it behind. What if he never found his way back here again, the way that he could never find his way back to the places in his dreams, which this experience resembled? What if this was his last glimpse of number 17, St. Andrew’s Road, of his beige living room, his family, his life? He glanced back hesitantly at the yawning tank that had his final moment in it, frozen and electroplated like a pair of baby-shoes. Then he looked up the flattened steps to where his rescuer was climbing past the edge of the concavity and out of sight, without a backward glance.
He called out “Weight”, noticing how his cry reverberated in the different sort of architecture that they had up here, the way it whispered in undreamed-of distances, then he chased after her. He bounded up the chipped cream layers of the framing woodwork, desperately afraid that when he reached their summit she’d be gone. She wasn’t, but as he emerged out of the square-cut sink and had for the first time an unimpeded view of where he was, he felt the same despair as if she had been.
It was a flat prairie, though that term did not adequately convey its vastness, nor the fact that it was made entirely out of bare untreated floorboards. Or its shape, for that matter. Staggeringly long yet relatively narrow, it was more like an enormous hallway than a sagebrush plain, being perhaps a mile in width but with a length extending both in front of and behind him for as far as he could see, even with his new eyesight. To all practical intents and purposes, the wooden prairie’s length was infinite. Also, the whole eye-boggling reach of it was covered with an endless antique railway-station roof, elaborate wrought iron and ghoul-tinged glass a thousand feet above. It looked like there were pigeons nesting on its giant girders, dust motes of pale grey against the dark green of the painted metal. Up above this, out beyond the tinted glasswork’s undersea translucency, there was … but Michael didn’t want to look at that just yet.
He stood there in his slippers, teetering and awestruck on the dirty butter-coloured rim of what had been his living room, his dying room, and forced his gaze down from the eyestrain heights back to the great, boarded expanses that surrounded him. These were not, as he’d first thought, featureless. He saw now that the tiered frame he perched wobbling on the edge of was in fact just one of many near-identical wood rectangles enclosing sunken indentations like the one he occupied. These were arranged in an extensive grid with broad blonde boardwalks running back and forth between them, like a kind of mile-wide gingham. It resembled rows of windows that were set into the floor for some unfathomable reason, rather than the walls. Because this regular and neatly-ordered pattern covered all of the terrain between him and the far, invisible horizon, the most distant trapdoor recesses were shrunken to a screen of close-packed dots, like when he’d held his eyes close to the printed pictures in the comics from America his sister saved.
He thought he’d probably be stricken with a headache if he stared for too long at the vanishing extremities of the preposterously big arcade that he was in. “Arcade”, Michael decided, was a term that better conjured up the atmosphere of this immense, glass-covered hall than “railway station”, which had been his first impression. Actually, the more that he considered it, the more he came to see that this place was exactly like the old Emporium Arcade that ran up from Northampton’s market square, but realised on a glorious, titanic scale. If he looked right or left, across the sweeping breadth of the huge corridor, he saw the bounding walls were a confusion of brick buildings stacked atop each other and connected by precarious flights of stairs with banisters and balconies. Amongst these he could see what looked like decorated if dilapidated shop-fronts, such as those which ran up either side of the emporium’s perpetual twilight slope. The deep-stained hardwood balustrade that edged the balconies appeared to be the twin of that which ran around the upper floor of the terrestrial arcade, but he was much too far away, even from this huge hallway’s nearest walls, to tell if that was genuinely the case.
It smelled big, smelled like morning in a church hall where a jumble sale was going on, the air a weak infusion in which stale, damp coats steeped with the crumbling fresh pinkness of homemade coconut ice, the sneeze-provoking pages of old children’s annuals and the sour metal lick of cast-off Dinky cars.
Training his eyes upon some of the nearer dots, and bearing in mind that even the further ones were apertures some hundred square feet in dimension, Michael saw that here and there massively enlarged trees were growing up through one or two of the more distant rectangular openings. He counted three of these, with possibly a fourth much further off along the endless bore of the arcade, so distant that it might have been another tree but could as easily have been a pillar formed by rising smoke. A couple of the leafy outgrowths, boughs and branches greatly magnified, reached almost to the glass roof, dizzyingly far above. He could see ash-fleck pigeons swirling up and down the huge and jutting trunks from perch to perch, with their size having not apparently been increased in the same way as that of the foliage, so that they now looked less like fowl and more like pearl-grey ladybirds. So small were they, compared with the immense arboreal structure they were roosting in, that some sat sheltered comfortably within the corrugations of its bark. Their ruffling coos, echoed and amplified by the unusual acoustics of the glass emporium roof that curved above, were audible despite the gaping distances involved, a kind of feathered undertow of murmur he could hear beneath the general background rustle of this extraordinary space. The presence of the trees combined with the sheer scale of everything around him meant that Michael couldn’t tell if he felt like he was inside or out of doors.
Since he already stood with his eyes lifted to the topmost tablecloth-sized leaves of the immeasurable giants, Michael thought that he might risk another cautious squint at the unlikely firmament that lay beyond the curling ironwork and Coca-Cola bottle panes that formed the covering of the great arcade.
It wasn’t quite as bad as he’d expected but, once looked at, it was very difficult to look away. Its colour, or at least its colour over that giant stretch of passage where he found himself, was a more deep and priceless azure than he could have previously imagined. Further off along the mighty hall and at the limits of what he could see from where he stood, the regal blue appeared to have ignited, to have melted down to furnace reds and golds. Michael glanced back across his shoulder, looking down the stunning corridor the other way, and saw that at its most remote extremes the boundless sky, which could be seen through the glass panels of the arcade’s ceiling, was on fire. As with the blue above, the hotter hues he could see flaring in the distance seemed almost fluorescent in their brilliance, like the unreal shades you sometimes got in films. However, though the sizzling colours of the heavens were most certainly arresting, it was the unearthly bodies drifting through that vista that had seized Michael’s attention. It was these that made the sight almost impossible to tear his gaze away from.
They weren’t clouds, although they were as variously sized and just as graceful and unhurried in their motion. They were more, he thought, like blueprint drawings that someone had done of clouds. For one thing you could only see their pallid silver graphite lines and not their contours. For another, all those lines were straight. It was as if some very clever student of geometry had been assigned the task of modelling every crease and convolution of the drifting cumuli, so that each cloud’s shape was constructed from a million tiny facets. The effect was more like haphazardly crumpled balls of paper, albeit paper he could see through to discern the lines and angles of their every inner complication. This meant also that the blazing background colours of the sky were visible between the intricate and ghostly limning of the floating diagrams.
Beside their gradual drift across the mile-wide ribbon of celestial blue that he could see through the emporium’s roof, he noticed that the forms were also moving and contorting slowly in themselves as they progressed across the sky, the way that real clouds did. Instead of languid and unfurling tongues of vapour, though, the movement here was that, again, of badly crinkled vellum as it gradually unfolded from its scrunch in the recesses of a wicker paper-basket. Faceted extrusions crept and crackled as the towering heaps of blueprint-weather lazily unpacked themselves, and there was something in the way that the interior lines and angles moved which he found fascinating, though he struggled to define exactly what it was.
It was a bit like if you had a cube of paper but were looking at it from end on, so that you couldn’t see it was a cube with sides, and all you saw was a flat square. Then, if you turned the cube or changed your viewpoint slightly, all its true depth would swing into view and you would understand that you were looking at a solid shape, not just a cut-out.
This was like that, only taken a stage further. In the shifting of the geometric tangles he surveyed, it was as if he gazed directly at something he took to be a cube, but then it was rotated or his vantage somehow altered, so that it turned out to be a much more complicated form, as different from a cube as cubes were from flat squares of paper. It was a lot cubier, for a start, with its lines running in at least one more direction than there really were. He stood there balanced on the framing edge of the square vat behind him, head tipped back so he could goggle at the spectacle above, and tried to think it through.
The strange new solids blossoming within the crenellations of the diagram-clouds were ones that Michael had no names for, though he found he had an inkling of the way in which they were constructed. Thinking of the paper cube that he’d imagined earlier, Michael realised that if you unfolded it then you’d have six flat squares of paper joined together in a Jesus-cross. The shapes that crawled across the endless strip of skylight overhead, however, were more like what Michael thought you’d get if you could somehow take six or more cubes and fold them all up neatly into one big super-cube.
How long had he been standing frozen on the tank’s rim, gaping up into the churning mathematics? Suddenly alarmed, he looked down to the wooden plain of windows stretching all around him and was pitifully relieved to find that Phyllis Painter was still standing patiently a yard or three away across the smooth-planed planks that were the arcade’s floor, close to another of the inlaid holes. She looked at him accusingly, as did four dozen of the dead and gleaming rabbit eyes that sequined her repulsive stole, like shotgun pellets blasted into velvet.
“If yer’ve finished gawkin’ at the gret big ’ouses like yer’ve just got ’ere from Bugbrook, then perhaps we can be on ayr way. I’ve better things to waste me death on than just showing shroud-shocked little kids abayt.”
Flinching at the sharp edge her voice had taken on, Michael jumped down obediently from the raised edge of his former living room’s tiered framework, to the smooth pine floorboards she was standing on. He padded dutifully across to her, the sash-tie of his tartan dressing gown undone and trailing round his slippers, then stood looking up at her as if awaiting fresh instructions. Phyllis sighed again, theatrically, and shook her head. It was a very grown-up mannerism that belied her years, but then that was how all the little girls around the Boroughs acted, much like Russian dolls that had been taken from inside their unscrewed mothers and were just the same, but smaller.
“Well, come on, then.”
She turned with a maypole swirl of dangling rabbit hides and started to walk off across the width of the titanic corridor, towards the bounding wall on Michael’s right with all its balconies and shops and buildings piled higgledy-piggledy, perhaps a half-a-mile away. After a moment’s hesitation Michael trotted after her and, as he did so, happened to glance down into the great square vat that she’d been standing near, the next one up the line from that which Michael had himself emerged from.
It was almost perfectly identical, down to the details of the beaded moulding, enlarged and inverted, that made up the tiered steps from the tank’s sides down to the sunken jelly-cube that was its centrepiece. Michael could even see the patch of flaking paint that looked like Britain sprawling on its back, playing with Ireland like a deformed kitten with a ball of wool. This was his living room again, but when he peered down at the central tableau’s depths Michael discovered that the jewellery was altered. The green mother-shape that had contained his yellow child-shape was now gone, and only the extended gem-fern caterpillars representing Michael’s gran and sister still remained. The amethyst Swiss roll that was his sister trailed across the room’s floor, up onto some sort of raised plateau which Michael reasoned must be the armchair that stood to one side of the fire. Here it curled into a stationary loop in which the violet sparks looked dull and sluggish, like a disconsolate Catherine Wheel. Meanwhile the bigger, spinier glass animal that was his gran, lit from within by autumn bonfire lights, coiled back and forth in tight loops through the mammoth kitchen door. It was as if his sister was slumped still and sobbing in the fireside armchair while their grandmother kept popping from the kitchen to the living room to see if the unhappy infant was all right. Michael concluded that this was the next brief time-slice in the continuity of their back room, some moments after his mum Doreen had rushed out into the passage, carrying in her arms the child she did not realise was already dead. All of the sunken window-frames in this particular unending row, he thought, must open down upon the same place but at different points in time. He had an urge to run along the file of apertures and follow the sequential glimpses of his living room as if they were a story in the <em>Dandy</em>, but his escort, draped in dead things, was already some way off, heading across the endless corridor and not along it. Stifling his curiosity, he hurried to catch up with her.
As he fell into step beside her, Phyllis Painter cast a sidelong look at him and sniffed, as though in reprimand for Michael having lagged behind again.
“I know that it’s a marvelation to yer, but yer’ve got fourever to explore and see the sights. All this’ll still be ’ere when yer get back. Reternity ent gooin’ anywhere.”
He more or less knew what she meant but still wanted to understand as much of this new territory as he could while he was passing through it. This was not as far as he could see unreasonable, and he decided to risk irritating his corpse-hung companion further with what seemed to him entirely natural questions for an expired lad in his position.
“If the longways rows wiz all our living room over again, then what wiz all these wideways ones?”
He gestured, with one little hand protruding from a too-large tartan sleeve, towards the framed vat they were walking past. Rather than wooden edging, all the inlaid rectangles in this specific row seemed to be bordered with white plasterwork, at least for nearly three of their four sides, with pointed blue brick capstones constituting the remainder of the frame. The girl nodded disinterestedly at the enclosure closest to them on their left as they strolled down one of the mile long avenues that led between the tanks, towards the heaped-up jumble of the arcade’s nearest side.
“See for yerself, so long as you don’t dawdle over it.”
He scampered extra quickly to the raised edge of the thirty-foot-square vat, just to convince her that he wasn’t dawdling, and peeped over its side. It took him a few seconds to work out what he was peering down at, but eventually he understood that it was an expanded overview of the top floor of 17, St. Andrew’s Road, or the back section of the house, at any rate. Banked plaster steps with what looked like wallpaper carpeting replaced the peeling, painted woodwork that had framed the elevations of their living room, but only for two-and-a-bit sides of the oblong’s tiered perimeter. This was because the greater portion of the open-topped space that the frame enclosed was taken up by a big L-shape made from bedrooms, stair-head, and a section of their landing as glimpsed from above. The vertical bar of the L was formed by his and Alma’s bedroom, with the top of their stairs and some of the landing visible down at the bottom, where it met the horizontal line that was their gran’s room. This indoors-part of the roughly-square area contained within the frame was what accounted for the wallpaper-and-plaster trim that he could see along at least two of its sides, while the remainder of the shape was taken up by a view straight down from the level of the guttering into the higher part of their back yard. It came to Michael that the slate-blue capstones edging the rightmost upper corner of this tank were an expanded version of the stones that topped their garden wall.
There were none of the frilly, crawling jewels that Michael knew to be his family apparent in the scene below him, neither upstairs in the empty bedrooms nor down in the yard below. He could, however, still make out the wooden chair that he and his mum had been sitting on before he’d choked. This must, he thought, be a few moments after everyone had rushed indoors out of the yard and left the chair behind. All the human activity was going on down in the kitchen and the living room, the scene that he’d just witnessed with his sister sitting weeping and his gran keeping an eye on her, so that the bedrooms were both empty here. The only living thing that flickered through the crystallised scenario was an amazing iridescent column that appeared to be made out of beautifully crafted ladies’ fans. This seemed to plunge into the clarified time-gravy from a point close to the rooftop’s rim, and then described a breathtakingly elegant trajectory down into the far depths of the back garden. It occurred to him that it was probably a pigeon, with its moving wings transforming it to an exquisite glass-finned ornament.
Aware that if he wasn’t careful he would break into a dawdle, Michael turned away from this enchanting still life, though reluctantly, and hastened to re-join the little girl. The trouble with this place, as far as Michael was concerned, was that there wasn’t anything that didn’t fascinate him. Its most minor detail seemed to be inviting him to stare entranced at it for hours. Why, probably even the plain pine floorboards he was walking on, if he were only to look down at them, would …
… would envelope him within a flowing tide-map universe of grain, with near-invisible striations rippling from the knothole’s vortex eye into a peacock feathering, the frozen pulse of a magnetic field. The engraved hearts of hurricanes, reverberating outward in concentric lines of vegetable force; the accidental faces of mad, decomposed baboons trapped snarling in the wood; trilobite stains with legs that trailed away to isotherms. The sweet and fatherly perfume of sawdust would completely overwhelm him with its atmosphere of honest labour, would immerse him in long, silent histories of dripping forest and time measured out in moss, if he were only to look down beyond his stumbling slippers and …
Michael snapped out of it and hurriedly fell into step with Phyllis Painter, who’d not broken stride while he inspected the new aperture, and who was clearly finished with indulging Michael in his tardiness. They carried on along the wooden avenue between the vats towards the heaping side-wall of the grand arcade gradually getting bigger up ahead of them, a teetering hodgepodge pile of mismatched buildings, taller than a town. He wondered what ungraspable new shapes the folded paper clouds were making up beyond the see-through ceiling overhead, but prudently decided that he wouldn’t look to see. Instead, he thought he’d better concentrate upon his ragamuffin tour-guide before she lost interest in him altogether. To this end, he plied her with fresh questions.
“Wiz this all Northampton what we see here, open for Upstairs-men to look down on?”
She spared him a faintly condescending sideways glance, letting him know she thought he was an idiot.
“ ’Course not. This wiz just the Attics of the Breath above your bit of Andrew’s Road. In the direction what we’re gooin’ now, the attic doors all open dayn on different rooms and floors and whatnot of the ’ouses in your street. The line we’re walking dayn, that’s all them different places laid ayt in a row, so it goes on a mile or two but don’t goo on forever. Now, the other way, along the overhall …”
She pointed with her skinny left arm here, down the immeasurable length of the vast corridor, to where the thirty-foot vats were close-stippled dots beneath the bloody, golden forge-light beating down through the glass roof high up above.
“That’s the direction what up here we call the linger or the whenth of something, and it <em>does</em> goo on forever. What it is, if this way what we’re walking now is all the different rooms along your bit of Andrew’s Road, then that way, lingerways, that’s all the different moments of those rooms. That’s why the sky above this bit what were in now is always blue, because it’s ’alf-way through a summer’s day. The bit along the far end where it guz all brass and fireworks, that’s the sunset, and if yer went further on there’d be a stretch where it was purple and then black, and then yer’d ’ave tomorrow morning goo off like a bomb, all red and gold again. If yer get lost, then just remember: west is future, east is past, all things linger, all things last. Ooh, and be careful if yer ever in the twenty-fives, because they’re flooded.”
She appeared to find this a sufficient answer to his query, and they marched on side by side across the springy floorboards without speaking for a while, until he’d thought of something else that he could ask. He sensed it wasn’t quite as good a question as his previous one had been but posed it anyway, if only because he was finding that the lapses in their conversation gave him time to think about what had just happened to him, his new status as a dead kid, and that only made him scared.
“How wiz it that our bedroom and downstairs wiz all on the same floor up here appear?”
He’d been right. It had obviously been a stupid question. Phyllis rolled her eyes and tutted, hardly bothering to disguise the weariness and the annoyance in her voice as she replied.
“Well, ’ow d’yer think? If yer’d got plans made for a cellar that was drawn on the same bit of paper as plans for an attic, should yer think as that was queer, that they was on the same sheet, the same level as each other? ’Course yer wouldn’t. Use yer flippin’ loaf.”
Chastised but none the wiser, Michael scuffed along in silence there beside the slightly older, slightly taller girl, running a few steps now and then in order to make up the difference in their strides. A glance into the wooden-edged recess they were then passing on their right revealed a view down to an unfamiliar living room, with different furnishings to number 17 and with its doors and windows round the other way like a reflection in a mirror. Extending through the depths of the enlarged room were more glassy gorgon tentacles with lights inside, but these were different colours – dark reds and warm browns – clearly from a quite separate palette to Michael’s own family. Perhaps these were the living quarters of the Mays or possibly the Goodmans, further down the terrace?
He walked on with Phyllis Painter, briefly entertaining the not-utterly-unpleasant notion that if anyone should see them out together for a stroll like this then Phyllis might be taken for his girlfriend. Having never, as a three-year-old, experienced this enviable state, the thought put quite a swagger into Michael’s step for a few paces, until he remembered he was clad in slippers, baggy dressing gown and his pyjamas. The pyjamas, now he thought about it, might have a small yellow wee-stain on the fly, although he wasn’t going to check and call attention to it. Someone seeing them would be more likely to take Phyllis for his junior nurse than for his girlfriend. Anyway, they were both dead, which made the whole idea of being someone’s boyfriend less romantic and attractive.
Up ahead the variegated tumble of walls, ladders, balconies and windows was much nearer and much bigger than when he’d last looked. He could see people moving on the higher fire-escapes and walkways, although he and Phyllis were still too far off from these to make them out in any detail. This was probably just as well, he thought, since some of the parading figures didn’t seem entirely normal, being either the wrong size or the wrong shape. It struck him that the place in which he found himself was not like anything he’d been expecting to be waiting for him after his demise. It wasn’t like the Heaven that his parents had once sketchily described to him, which was all marble steps and tall white pillars like the adverts Pearl & Dean did at the pictures. Nor was it the Hell that he’d been warned of, not that he had been expecting to be sent to Hell. His mum had told him that he wouldn’t go to Hell except for something really bad like murder, which had seemed to him like manageable odds, assuming that he could get through his whole life without killing anybody. Luckily he’d died when he was three, and hadn’t had to put this to the test for very long. If he’d lived to be older, he consoled himself, he might have murdered Alma once he had the strength. Then he’d be burning in the special kind of fire his mum had muddily depicted as not ever killing you or melting you away to nothing, even though it was more hot than you could possibly imagine.
He was glad, all things considered, not to be in Hell, although this didn’t help with finding out where else this place might be. He thought that enough time might have elapsed since his last hesitant enquiry for him to attempt another one.
“Does this Upstairs have a religature? Has it got Pearl & Deany gates, or toga-gods with chess and peeping-pools like at the pictures?”
Though her eyes did not light up at his renewed interrogation, at least this most recent question didn’t seem to make her more annoyed with him.
“All the religatures are right in parts, which means none of ’em are ’cause they all thought as it was only them knew what wiz what. It doesn’t matter, anyway, what yer believe when yer daynstairs, although it’s best for yer that yer believe in something. Nobody up ’ere’s much bothered what it wiz. Nobody’s gunner make yer say the password, and nobody’s gunner throw yer out because yer didn’t join the right gang dayn below. The only thing what really matters wiz if you wiz ’appy.”
Michael thought about this as he walked beside her down the row of floor-doors. If the girl was right and all that mattered in life was one’s happiness, then he’d done relatively well, having enjoyed three years during which time he’d hardly managed to stop giggling. But what about if people had been happy doing things that were unpleasant, even horrible? There were such people in the world, he knew, and wondered if the same criteria applied to them as well. And what about those who through no fault of their own led lives that were continually miserable? Would that be held against them here, as if they hadn’t had a rotten enough time already? Michael didn’t think it sounded fair, and was about to chance his arm by asking Phyllis to explain herself when movements on one of the elevated balconies they were approaching caught his eye.
The pair had almost reached the near side of the cavernous arcade, and thus were close enough for Michael to make out the various people strutting back and forth along its levels in more detail. On the platform that had captured his attention, a railed walkway two or three floors up, two grown-up men were standing talking. Both seemed very tall to Michael and he judged them to be quite old, in their thirties or their forties. One of them had whiskers and the other had white hair, though, so he couldn’t really tell.
The white-haired and clean-shaven man was dressed in a long nightshirt, and he looked as if he’d just been in a fight. One of his eyes was closed and blackened, and some blood from a split lip had stained his otherwise completely spotless robe. His face was frighteningly angry and he gripped the wooden rail with one hand – in his other hand he held a long staff – as though he’d stepped out onto the balcony in order to calm down, although it didn’t look as though his whiskery companion standing next to him was helping much in this attempt. This second person, dressed in a great bush of dark green rags, appeared to be in fits of laughter over the first chap’s predicament. With his forked beard and with a mass of chestnut curls beneath his broad-brimmed leather hat, it looked like he was prodding the white-robed man in the ribs and clapping him upon the back, neither of which activities seemed likely to alleviate his black-eyed comrade’s filthy mood.
Just then a gust of breeze must have blown down the walkway, with the bearded man’s confusion of green pennant rags all fluttering wildly as a consequence. Michael was startled to discover that each flapping scrap was lined upon its underside with silk of brilliant crimson. As the wind disturbed the laughing figure’s tatters they flared upwards, rippling in abandon, so that the effect was like a leafy shrub that had spontaneously and suddenly burst into flame. It was a wonder, Michael thought, that the man’s leather hat had not blown off as well. Probably it was held in place with cord tied underneath his whiskered chin much like the headgear worn by Spanish priests, which it resembled.
Michael realised that he was in danger of becoming engrossed in this place’s details once again, and lowered his gaze from the crow’s-nest perches overhead back down to Phyllis Painter. She was by now quite some way in front of him and Michael felt a surge of panic as he ran to catch her up. He knew that if he lost sight of her it would be the way it was in dreams, where he could never find the people that he’d promised he would meet.
He overtook her just as she was coming to the end of the long boardwalk, with the last line of the inset vats reaching away on either side of her. A quick peep into one of these revealed another aerial view of a back garden not his own, despite some superficial similarities. Since it was right at one end of the mile-long row, he wondered if it might be the back garden of the corner house, where Andrew’s Road ran past the foot of Scarletwell Street. Michael had no time to ponder this idea, since Phyllis Painter was already marching out beyond the endless grid of apertures to where the wooden floorboards ended, somewhat startlingly, in a raised curb made of worn grey brick and then a broad strip of distressed and fractured paving slabs, just like the ones along St. Andrew’s Road.
Across these flagstones, facing Michael and the bunny-collared little girl, the lowest level of the monster arcade’s bounding wall confronted them, a lengthy terrace made from disparate brick buildings that were clearly not intended to be standing side by side with one another. Two or three of them resembled houses from his street but changed, as if they’d been remembered incorrectly, so that one had got its front door halfway up the wall on the first floor, with almost twenty stone steps rising to it rather than the normal three. Another had the nettle-fringed earth entrance of a rabbit hole where the brick hollow of the boot-scrape should have been, at pavement level down to one side of the doorsteps. In amongst these hauntingly familiar yet distorted house-fronts there were other almost-recognisable constructions, though the places they reminded Michael of did not belong in Andrew’s Road. One of them bore a strong resemblance to the school caretaker’s house up at the top end of Spring Lane, with black iron railings fencing off a downstairs window that was set perhaps a foot back from the street. Beside this was a section of the school wall which enclosed the always-locked arched entranceway that led into the juniors’ playground.
Set between this odd assortment of locations, which at least were all from the same neighbourhood, was one half-glass door with a display window next to it that Michael thought more properly belonged in the town centre. More precisely, it belonged in the real-life Emporium Arcade, that dim-lit incline rising from the fancy scrolling ironwork of its gateway on the Market Square. The shop that he was looking at, nestled incongruously amongst the displaced houses, was an almost perfect duplicate of Chasterlaine’s Joke, Novelty & Toy Shop, halfway up the right side of the arcade’s slope as you ascended. The wide window with the shop’s name in antique gold lettering above it, as he saw it now, was bigger than it should be and the words upon the sign seemed to be wriggling into different orders as he watched, but it was definitely Chasterlaine’s, or at least an approximation of the place. “Realist chanes” was what the shop appeared to be called at the moment, though when he looked back it seemed to read “Hail’s ancester”. How long had he been able to read, anyway? Regardless, Michael was so taken by surprise at this familiar store in such an unfamiliar setting that he thought he’d ask the girl about it as they walked the last few yards of floorboards to the boundary of the massive passageway.
“Are we in the Euphorium Arcade, like on the market? That place there looks like the Choke & Joy Shop.”
Phyllis squinted in the vague direction that one baggy sleeve of Michael’s dressing gown was pointing.
“What, yer mean The Snail Races?”
Michael looked back at the shop in question and discovered that “The Snail Races” was indeed the name that the establishment was trading under at that instant. He and Phyllis were mounting the curb that edged the wooden Attics of the Breath, as she’d referred to the huge hall, so that Michael was close enough to see the merchandise on show within the 40-watt-bulb-lighting of the window. What he’d taken to be Matchbox cars all standing on a podium of the red-and-yellow cardboard boxes that they came in, such as would have been displayed at the real Chasterlaine’s, were in fact life-sized painted replicas of snails. Each stood upon its little individual box, the way that the toy cars and lorries would have done, but now the packaging had got a picture label showing the specific model snail resting on top of it. The reproduction molluscs all had shells that had been customised or painted in the style of actual Matchbox cars that he had seen, so that one was in navy blue with “Pickford’s” in white lettering across it, while another had the snail itself in pillar-box red with a tiny curled-up fireman’s hose set on its back where normally the spiral shell would be. Looking back up at the sign above the window, Michael saw that it still read as “The Snail Races”, so perhaps he had been wrong about the letters changing. Probably that’s what the sign had said the whole time he’d been scrutinising it. Still, all this made no difference to his basic point, which had been that the place resembled Chasterlaine’s Aladdin’s cave of novelties, up the Emporium Arcade. Michael turned back to Phyllis Painter – they were walking over the broad ribbon of cracked pavement now – and stubbornly restated his assertion.
“Yes, The Snail Races. It looks like the shy-top in the arcade on the market. Wiz that where we are?”
Venting a heavy sigh that sounded put-upon and obligated, Phyllis halted in her tracks and gave him what her tone of voice made clear would be her final explanation.
“No. Yer know it’s not. The arcade what you mean, that’s Daynstairs. Lovely as it wiz, it’s a flat plan compared with this one.”
Phyllis gestured to the plane of floor-bound windows stretching off behind them and the high glass ceiling overhead where origami clouds unfolded mystifyingly against a field of perfect iridescent blue.
“In fact, the ’ole of Daynstairs wiz a flat plan of what’s Upstairs. Now, this arcade what we’ve got up ’ere, over the Attics of the Breath, that’s made from the same stuff as these Old Buildings what we’re coming to.”
She swung her stick-thin arm around so that her trophy-necklace swished repulsively and indicated the long, muddled terrace facing them across the fissured paving slabs.
“All this wiz made from people’s dreams what ’ave built up. All of the people what lived hereabouts Daynstairs, or all them what passed through, all ’avin’ dreams abayt the same streets, the same buildings. And all of ’um dream the places a bit different, and each dream they ’ave, it leaves a kind of residue up ’ere, a kind of scum what forms a dream-crust, all made out of ’ouses, shops and avenues what people ’ave remembered wrong. It’s like when all the dead shrimps build up into coral reefs and that. If yer see someone up ’ere who looks hypnotised, walkin’ abayt in just their underpants or night-things, it’s a safe bet that it’s someone who’s asleep and dreamin’.”
Here she paused and looked down thoughtfully at Michael, standing there in his pyjamas, dressing gown and slippers.
“Although I could say the same thing about you, but I just saw yer choke to death.”
Oh. That. He’d almost put that whole unpleasant business from his mind, and frankly wished that Phyllis wasn’t quite so blunt about the fact that he was recently deceased. It was a bit depressing, and the fact of it still frightened him. Ignoring his distressed wince, Phyllis Painter carried on her morbid monologue.
“I mean, if yer wiz dead, then I’d ’ave thought yer’d ’ave been in yer favourite clothes what yer remembered. Unless yer pyjamas wiz yer favourite clothes, yer lazy little bugger.”
He was shocked. Not by her implication that he was bone idle – indeed, his pyjamas were his favourite clothes – but by the fact that she had sworn in Heaven, where he’d not have thought that this would be allowed. Phyllis continued, blithely unconcerned.
“But then, if yer wiz dead, why wiz nobody there to pull yer up and dust yer dayn except for me? No, yer a funny little fourpenny funeral, you are. There’s summat about yer what’s not right. Come on. We better get yer to the Works and let the builders ’ave a look at yer. Keep up and don’t get lorst in all the dreamery-scenery.”
Lorst. The same way Michael’s mum pronounced the letter ‘o’ in lost or frost or cost or any word remotely similar. “Don’t get lorst.” “We’ve ’ad some frorst.” “ ’Ow much is all that gunner corst?” Not only was his escort definitely from the Boroughs, she was almost certainly from down the bottom end of it, near Andrew’s Road. He’d never heard of any Painters round where he lived, unless Phyllis had lived long before his time, of course. Michael was not allowed a breather to consider this, however. True to her word, Phyllis Painter was already skipping off across the moss-seamed paving stones without a backward glance to see if he was following. He shuffled dutifully in her wake, not able to run properly without the danger of his slippers coming off.
As he slapped awkwardly across the slabs he saw that there were openings let into the terrace on the far side of the bounding pavement, passages that he presumed led deeper into the heaped-up confusion of dream architecture. His companion, with her hydra-headed rabbit stole flailing about her, was about to disappear into one such dark chink, an alleyway that ran off from the house-fronts right between the place with its front door positioned halfway up its wall and the façade of the refigured Joke Shop. Picking up his pace Michael trailed after her, her pink-and-navy banner fluttering ahead, leading him on.
The alley, when he reached it, was exactly like the narrow jitty that ran from Spring Lane to Scarletwell Street, all along the back of Michael’s house-row. It was cobbled just the same and edged with weeds, and he could even see the grey roof of the stable with its missing slates in next door’s yard, the place that Doug McGeary kept his lorry, but viewed from the back. The major difference was that on his right, where there should be the wire fence and hedgerow at the bottom of Spring Lane School’s playing fields, there was now a whole row of houses with their latch-gates and their back-yard walls with the rear windows of the red brick dwellings looming up beyond. “Scarletwell Terrace” came into his mind, but was as quickly gone again. Already Phyllis Painter was some distance down the transformed alleyway and showed no sign of slackening her pace or caring much if he got left behind. He padded after her over the cobbles of the shadowed crevice that in real life or in dreams had always made him apprehensive.
On each side a corridor of back walls hemmed him in, the ones on Michael’s right completely unfamiliar to him and even the ones upon his left much altered from their counterparts along the rear of Andrew’s Road. He ventured a glance upward at the sky above the alley and discovered that this was no longer the unearthly picture-postcard blue that he’d admired through the glass roof of the arcade, nor were there clouds of rarefied geometry uncrinkling as they slid across it. This, instead, was a grey slice of Boroughs firmament that made the spirits sink, fulfilling as it did the usual pessimistic forecast. Michael was alarmed at just how suddenly this colour-change had altered the whole mood of his experience. Instead of being someone on a dazzling adventure, he felt orphaned and bereft, felt pitiful and lonely like a lost child out in his pyjamas past his bed time, trudging down a miserable back entry and expecting drizzle. Except he was worse than lost. He was already dead.
Anxiously, Michael cast his eyes back down from the bleak heavens visible between the rainspouts and the chimneypots and found that, to his horror, he’d been dawdling. The little girl was now much further off from him along the alley than she’d been before, shrunken by distance to the size she was when he’d thought of her as a corner-fairy, which now seemed like hours ago. He reassured himself that if he just ran faster and could manage not to take his eyes off her again, then he’d inevitably catch up with her.
Running with his gaze fixed straight ahead, however, meant that Michael wasn’t looking properly where he was going. He caught the plaid toe of his slipper in a sudden hole from which a cobblestone had been prised loose and pitched abruptly forwards on his hands and knees. Although the rounded stones felt hard and solid through the thin material of his pyjamas, Michael was agreeably surprised to find that his fall hadn’t really hurt him. It had scared him and upset him slightly, but he felt no pain, nor were there any injuries that he could see. One knee of his striped trousers had got rather wet and dirty, but the fabric wasn’t torn and, all in all, he thought he’d got off lightly.
Phyllis Painter, though, was gone.
Even before he’d lifted up his eyes to find the alley empty save for him he’d known she wouldn’t be there with the certain fatalism that he’d felt before in nightmares, in those dreams where the one thing you’re most afraid of is the one thing that you know is guaranteed to happen.
All around him was the sooty, weathered brickwork of the jitty, with on Michael’s right what seemed to be the rear wall of a factory or warehouse interrupting the long run of washing-line-festooned back yards. Was this “the Works” the girl had mentioned as their destination? A black wire mesh could just about be seen through the thick dust of this establishment’s high, isolated windows, and a rusting pulley-wheel stuck out beside the gated wooden platform of what Michael thought must be a loading-bay. The empty alley stretched before him, a much greater distance than he could recall its mortal counterpart extending, and he didn’t think that Phyllis Painter would have reached the far end of it before he’d looked up, even allowing for his clumsy tumble. It seemed much more likely to him that she’d turned off from the dismal passageway into a door or gate that opened in the factory’s rear on his right side.
Keeping this hopeful notion in his mind he stole a little further down the alley’s pathway, like a cobbled streambed in the overcast grey light, until he was around the point he thought the girl had been when he’d last sighted her. Between the blunt stones of the alley floor sage-coloured grass poked up and there were the same minute scraps of refuse that he would have ordinarily expected to be there: an untipped cigarette end, a beer-bottle cap that had been dented in its middle by a bottle-opener, some chips of broken glass. The bottle-top had “Mask-Mask” printed on it where there should have been the brewery’s name, and the glass fragments seemed on close inspection to be shards from broken soap-bubbles, but Michael doggedly refused to pay these things attention. He trod slowly onward, looking for an opening in the wall, a door or gap that Phyllis might have vanished into, and at last he found one.
Set into the rear face of the factory or warehouse was a covered stairway, made of old and foot-worn stone that ran up from behind a barred iron gate that stood ajar, half open on the otherwise deserted alleyway. The odd arrangement seemed familiar, and reminded Michael of a gated flight of steps that he’d once seen in Marefair, opposite St. Peter’s Church. He’d asked his mum about it and she’d recollected with a shudder how, during her girlhood, Doreen and her best friend Kelly May had climbed the old stone staircase for a dare, only to find a tower-room that was empty save for dead leaves and “a gret big nest of earwigs”. Michael wasn’t fond of earwigs, since his sister had once told him how they got in people’s ears and ate straight through their brains until they reached the warm pink daylight filtering through the other eardrum. Alma had provided helpful sound effects to illustrate what he would hear during the week or so it took for the determined bug to tunnel through his tousled infant head: “Munch, munch … creep, creep, creep … munch, munch, munch … creep, creep, creep.”
On the other hand this daunting stairway seemed like his best chance of catching Phyllis Painter, who, although he didn’t really like her much, was the one person in this run-down paradise that Michael knew the name of. If he couldn’t find her, he’d be lost <em>and</em> dead. With this in mind he summoned all his pluck and pulled the iron gate a little further open so that he could slip inside. The bar he wrapped his fingers round was gritty and abrasive to the touch and had a kind of mild sting to its texture. Opening his hand he found that it had left a toilet-smear of rust across his palm. It smelled of stewed tea.
Sucking in his tummy so as not to get the rust and muck on his pyjamas he slid through the gap that he had made between the gate and its brick frame. Once Michael was inside he pulled the railed gate shut behind him without really knowing why. Perhaps it was to cover up the fact he’d broken in and he was trespassing, or possibly it just made him feel safer knowing nothing could creep up the stairs behind him without Michael hearing the gate grating open down below. He turned and peered uncertainly into the darkness that began just six steps up. In normal circumstances he supposed his breathing would be tremulous and shallow, his heart hammering, but Michael realised belatedly that his heart wasn’t doing anything at all and he was only drawing breath when he remembered to, more out of habit than necessity. At least he didn’t have a sore throat anymore, he told himself consolingly as he began to mount the stairs. That had been really getting on his nerves.
He had been climbing in the dark for a few minutes when it struck him that this foray up the staircase had been a disastrously bad idea. His slipper-shod feet crunched, with every rising step, through a detritus that felt like dead, brittle leaves but could as well have been black drifts of earwig-husks. To make things worse, the stairs that he’d expected to be straight turned out to be a winding spiral, forcing Michael to proceed more slowly in the blackness, with his left hand resting on the turret wall and following its contour as he stumbled upwards, resting lightly, in case there were slugs or other crawling things he didn’t want to accidentally stick his fingers in.
Hoping he’d soon get to the top, Michael continued his ascent beyond the point where the idea of turning round and going back became unbearable. Five minutes more of crunching upwards through the darkness, though, convinced him that there wasn’t any top, that he had seen the last of Phyllis Painter and that this was how he was condemned to spend Eternity, alone and climbing through an endless blackout with the possibility of earwigs. Munch, munch. Creep, creep, creep. What had he done, in his three years, to merit punishment like this? Was it when him and Alma killed those ants? Did an ant-murder count against you when it came to the hereafter? Worried now, he carried on his halting progress upward, having no idea what else to do. His only other plan was to start crying, but he thought he’d save that until later on, when things got desperate.
As it turned out, this was roughly nine steps later. Michael missed his mum, his gran, his dad. He even missed his sister. He missed 17, St. Andrew’s Road. He missed his life. He was just trying to decide which step he should sit weeping on until the end of time when Michael noticed that the pitch black up ahead of him appeared to have a greyish quality about it. This might be, he thought, because his eyes were gradually adjusting to the dark, or it might mean that there was light a little further on. Encouraged, he renewed his clamber up through pearly gloom where there had previously been only opaque black. To his delight he could soon even see the spiral stairway he was climbing, and was much relieved to find that the crisp forms he had been crunching through were neither leaves nor earwigs. They were the wax paper wrappers that you got on individual cough-sweets, hundreds of them, littering the steps. Each one had the word ‘Tunes’ in tiny, cherry-coloured writing, this repeated several times on every crumpled scrap.
Turning a final bend he saw a door-shaped opening through which weak morning light was falling, only a few steps above. With the medicinal pink blossoms of the cough-sweet wrappers fluttering up around his heels he broke into a run up these last stairs, eager to be on level flooring and able once more to see where he was going.
It was a long interior corridor, painted pale green to halfway up its high walls and with stained and varnished boards forming its floor. It was the sort of passageway that Michael thought belonged inside a school or hospital, only much loftier, so that even an adult would feel child-sized by comparison. Along each of its sides the hall had windows which were letting in the washed-out daylight, though these were positioned too far up for Michael to see out through. Those upon his right, if he looked up through them, revealed only the same drab, leaden sky that he had seen outside over the alleyway. The row of windows on his left, alternatively, seemed to look in on some sort of ward or classroom. Somewhere indoors, anyway, of which Michael could only glimpse the beams and boards that formed its pointed ceiling. The hallway was empty save for two or three big metal radiators, painted in the same dark green you saw upon electric junction boxes, spaced out down the length of the hushed corridor. There was the smoky, biting scent of rubber and the smell of powder paint, like toxic flour. Whatever this place was, it didn’t seem to be the factory or warehouse he’d presumed it to be when he was outside, although after the twists and turns of the unlighted stairway Michael wasn’t even certain that he was in the same building anymore. The only thing he knew for sure was that there wasn’t any sign of Phyllis Painter.
Probably the best thing that he could have done would have been to descend the lampless steps back to the alleyway, to see if he could find her there, but Michael found he couldn’t face the prospect of another hoodwinked fumble through the darkness, and especially not one that entailed going downstairs this time, with a greater risk of tripping up and falling. There was nothing for it except to continue onwards, down the silent and puncture-repair-kit-perfumed corridor to its far end.
Along the way he thought of whistling to keep his spirits up, but realised that he hadn’t yet learned any tunes. Besides, he couldn’t whistle. As another way of interrupting the oppressive quiet he trailed his fingernails across the chunky upright bars of the huge radiators when he passed them. Icy to the touch, they indicated that the heating system they were part of had been turned off for the summer. Furthermore, to his surprise, Michael discovered that each hollow shaft of metal had been tuned by some means to produce an individual note. Each radiator was equipped with seven bars, and when he let his fingers wipe across the first such row of pipes it played the opening part of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”, one of the only melodies familiar in his thus-far limited experience of music. Both intrigued and charmed by this he hurried on to the next radiator, further down the hall, which turned out to be tuned so that it played the “How I wonder what you are” part when he brushed it.
By the time he’d got to “Up above the world so high” Michael was at the passageway’s far end where, having reached a corner, it turned sharply to the left. As cautious and as stealthy as an Indian scout he peered around this bend and saw only another stretch of empty landing without anything to differentiate it from the first. It had the same wood floorboards and the same walls, pale green at the bottom, chalky white above. The row of high-set windows on his right looked up onto a dreary fleece of sky while those upon his left looked up into the rafters of the ward or schoolroom that he wasn’t tall enough to see into. On the plus side, however, there were three more radiators, and this length of corridor appeared to end not with another corner but with a white wooden door, closed shut but hopefully not locked.
The first of the three radiators that he came upon played “Like a diamond in the sky” when Michael drew his taut and stiffened fingertips across it, as if he were strumming an industrial harp. The next two, as he had by then anticipated, clanged out the last couplet that completed the refrain by echoing its opening lines, with the concluding “How I wonder what you are” only a dozen paces from the closed door in which the long passage terminated. Nervously, he tiptoed over to it then reached up his hand to turn the plain brass knob and find out what existed on the far side. How he wondered what it was.
It wasn’t locked. That much at least was in his favour, but he still reeled back from all the unexpected brightness and fresh air that rushed in through the open door to overwhelm him. Blinking, he stepped out into a faint refreshing breeze and found that he was on a balcony, its black wood railing running left to right in front of him, coloured as if with a protective coat of pitch. Walking across to this and gazing out between its rails, Michael was looking down on a vast hall, its many-levelled far wall a full mile away. The hall’s floor was divided up into a sprawling grid of sunken apertures that looked like windows that had been erroneously installed in the wrong surface. Up above this plain of holes, out through the glass tiled roof of a Victorian arcade, faceted clouds unfolded languidly into impossibility against the background of an unsurpassable azure. He was back in the Attics of the Breath, or at least on the balustrade-edged walkways overlooking them. Could that be right? He didn’t think he’d made enough turns to have come almost full circle, but then that long spiral staircase had confused him so he didn’t know in which direction he was heading.
Looking to his left along the elevated walkway he could see a distant figure who was striding resolutely off across the boards away from him. He hoped for a brief instant it was Phyllis Painter, but no more than that. For one thing, the retreating person was much taller than the little girl had been. Also, despite the longish hair and long white frock that they were wearing, they were clearly male. The man stalking away along the balcony was powerfully-built and barefoot, and held one hand to his face as though he nursed some injury. In his other hand he held a slender rod or staff that thudded on the planks at every step. With a slight start, Michael recalled the angry-looking man with the split lip and the black eye who he’d glimpsed from the floor below when he was crossing it with Phyllis. This was the same person, surely? Him, or someone very like him.
Michael then remembered that there had been someone else standing in conversation with the white-robed brawler, someone who had whiskers and a coat of green rags with a bright red lining. From the prickling of his neck he knew that this was who would be behind him when he turned around, even before the cracked brown leather voice spoke from just over Michael’s tartan shoulder.
“Well, now. It’s a ghostly little fidget-midget.”
Michael shuffled round reluctantly, with his plaid slippers moving like the hands of a disoriented clock.
The ruddy and bewhiskered giant, who clearly had a good foot-and-a-half on even Michael’s strapping dad, was leaning with one elbow on the pitch-stained railing, smoking a clay pipe. His broad-brimmed priest’s hat threw a band of blackness over deep-set crinkly eyes that Michael noticed with a growing feeling of uneasiness were two entirely different colours, one like inlaid ruby and the other a reptilian green. They glinted like impossibly old Christmas baubles from the shadows of a heavy, straggling brow, above a hooked nose with a bend that turned almost straight downwards, like an eagle’s beak. The man’s skin, on his lower face and his bare arms where they protruded from his coat of rags, was sunburned and smeared here and there with blotches of what looked like tar or motor oil. He smelled of coal and steam and boiler-rooms, and underneath his flapping rags were dark green britches and stitched boots of well-tanned leather. Though his mouth could not be seen amongst the brassy tangles of his beard and his moustache, you could tell he was grinning from the way his cheeks bunched into shiny balls of sun-scorched flesh and broken veins. He puffed on his clay pipe, which Michael saw now had the features of a screaming man carved on its bowl, and let a wisp of violet smoke twist upward from the balcony before he spoke again.
“You look lost, little boy. Oh dear, oh dear. We can’t have that, now, can we?”
The man’s voice was worryingly deep and creaked like some great prehistoric monster opening its wings. Michael decided that he’d better act as if this were a normal conversation with somebody who was offering directions. Noticing that on his right were more of the high windows that he’d seen when in the corridor, he feigned an interest in them with a voice that was embarrassingly high and piping after the man’s grown-up growl.
“That’s right. I’m lost. Can you see in those windows for me so that I’ll know where I am?”
The bearded fellow frowned in puzzlement, then did as he’d been asked and glanced in through the windows that looked out onto the balcony. Having thus satisfied himself, he once more turned to study Michael.
“Looks like it’s the needlework-room that’s upstairs at Spring Lane School, only a fair bit bigger. I hang out round here because I’m very fond of handicraft. It’s one of my great specialities. I’m also rather good at sums.”
He cocked his curly, bushy head upon one side so that his hat-brim tipped down at a slant and sucked once more upon his pipe, a grey fog brimming from his fleshy lips as he opened his mouth to speak.
“But you don’t quite add up to anything that I’m familiar with. Come, little chap. Tell me your name.”
Michael was not completely certain he should trust this stranger with his name, but couldn’t think of a convincing alias in time. Besides, if he was found out in a lie he might get into trouble.
“My fame’s Michael Warren.”
The tall man took a step back with his mismatched eyes widening in what seemed to be honest surprise. The trailing triangles of cloth that formed his coat suddenly fluttered upward to reveal the red silk lining of their undersides so that he looked as though he had been briefly set on fire, although Michael had felt no gust of wind. With an increasing sense that all of this was going badly wrong, he understood that it had not been breeze that moved the old man’s coat, but more an action like a peacock ruffling its feathers in display. Except that this would mean the two-toned scraps of cloth were part of him.
“<em>You’re</em> Michael Warren? You’re the one to blame for all this trouble?”
What? Michael was stunned, both that his name was known up here and that already he had been accused of something which, from how it sounded, was quite serious. Briefly, he thought of trying to run away before the man could grab him and subject him to some punishment for his unknown transgression, but the big bloke just threw back his head and started laughing heartily, which rather took the wind from Michael’s sails. If he’d caused trouble like the tattered man had said, how was that funny?
Breaking off his gale of laughter for a moment, he gazed down at Michael with what looked like dangerous amusement flashing in his jade and garnet eyes.
“Wait ’til I tell the lads. They’ll be in fits. Oh, this is good. This is extremely good.”
He once again began to roar with mirth, but this time, when he tipped his head back in a guttural and hearty guffaw his broad leather hat slipped off to hang down on his shoulders by the cord that he had knotted underneath his chin.
The man had horns. Brown-white like dirty ivory they poked up from the curls and ringlets of his hairline, thick, stubby protuberances only a few inches long. This was the time, Michael decided, to start crying. He looked up at the horned apparition with tears welling in his eyes, and when he spoke it was with an accusing snivel, sounding wounded by the mean trick that the man had played upon him.
“You’re the devil.”
This seemed to choke off the coarse, uproarious laughter. The man looked at Michael with his eyebrows raised in almost comical bemusement, as if he was dreadfully surprised that Michael should have ever thought that he was anybody else.
“Well … yes. Yes, I suppose I am.”
He crouched down on his haunches until his unnerving gaze was level with that of the little boy, who stood there rooted to the spot with fear. The horned man leaned his head a little closer in to Michael with a lazy smile and narrowed his jewelled eyes inquisitively.
“Why? Where did you think you were?”
** <strong>AN ASMODEUS FLIGHT</strong>
<strong>T</strong>he devil couldn’t call to mind the last time he’d enjoyed himself as much as this. This was a great laugh in the greatest sense of the word great: great like a war, a white shark or the Wall of China. Oh, my sweethearts in damnation, this was priceless.
There he’d been, just leaning on somebody’s old dream of a balcony and puffing on his favourite pipe. This was the one he’d whittled from the spicy, madness-seasoned spirit of an eighteenth-century French diabolist. He fancied that it made his best tobacco taste of Paris, sexual intercourse and murder, somewhere between meat and liquorice.
Anyway, there he’d been, loafing around above the Attics of the Breath, close to the crux of Angle-land, when up had come this builder, <em>Master</em> Builder mind you, with a split lip and a shiner like he’d just been in a fight. I mean, the devil thought, how often do you get an opportunity to take the piss on such a sewer-draining scale as that?
“My dear boy! Have we walked into a pearly gate?” Not too bad for an opening remark, all things considered, dripping as it was with obviously false concern, as if enquiring on the health of an obnoxious nephew you transparently despised. The thing with builders, <em>Master</em> Builders in this instance, was that while they were quite capable of levelling a city or a dynasty, they hated being patronised.
The Master Builder – the white-haired one who’d made something of a name for himself playing billiards; held his cue in one hand at that very moment, for that matter – stopped and turned to see who was addressing him. Scowled like a fondled choirboy when he found out, naturally; that thing the builders did to make their eyes flash a split second before they incinerated you. My word, he <em>was</em> in a bad mood, was Mighty Whitey.
To be honest, this made a refreshing change from the unasked-for pity and the bottomless forgiveness that was usually in their gaze. Builders would order you at snooker cue-point to inhabit depths that were unspeakable, lower than those endured by syphilitic tyrants, and then add insult to injury by forgiving you. It was a treat to come across one in the throes of a demeaning temper tantrum. The rich possibilities for some inflammatory satire made the devil’s ball-sack creep.
The builder, sorry, <em>Master</em> Builder, sounded entertainingly slow-witted, with his speech slurred by the swollen lip as he replied.
“Murck naught mye shamfall strate, thyou dungcurst thorng …”
It was the same profound, exploded rubbish all the builders talked, the strangely resonant and blazing words reverberating off to whisper in the extra set of corners that there were up here. Delightfully, however, even phrases of world-ending awesome fury, spoken through a split lip, were quite funny.
Unaware that everything he said sounded hilariously punch-drunk, the indignant Master Builder had gone on to justify his woebegone condition by explaining that he’d just been in a fight with one of his best mates over a game of snooker. It seemed that this chum had wilfully endangered a specific ball that everyone had known the white-haired Master Builder had his sights on. Technically this was permitted, but was thought of as appalling form. As was invariably the case this ball had got a human name attached to it, but it was somebody the devil hadn’t heard of. Not at that point, anyway.
It turned out that the builders had got into an unseemly row across the billiard table, and that the white-haired one had eventually called his colleague something dreadful and suggested that they step outside to settle it. They’d left the shot unplayed, gone out and had their brawl, and were now skulking back towards the game-hall to continue with their uncompleted competition. Talk about showing yourself up. All the scrounging Boroughs ghosts had stood round in a ring shouting encouragements, like boot-faced school-kids at a playground punch-up. “Goo on! Give ’im one right up the ’alo!” Talk about ruffling your feathers. It was all so wonderfully wretched that the devil had to laugh.
“It’s not your fault, old boy. It’s just competitive sports, in a neighbourhood like this. Brings out the hooligan in everybody. I’ve seen people have their throats cut over games of hopscotch. What you ought to do is drop the snooker and go back to organising dances on the heads of pins. Not half so violent, and you’d have a good excuse for wearing ball gowns all the time.”
The devil nudged the builder in the ribs good-naturedly, then laughed and clapped him on his back. The one thing that they hated more than being patronised was people being over-intimate, especially if that went as far as someone touching them. All of those pictures that depicted builders holding hands with wounded grenadiers or sickly tots, in the opinion of the devil, were just mock-ups for the purpose of publicity.
Slow as the builders generally were in understanding jokes, the white-haired chap had finally caught on to the fact that he was being made fun of, which they hated almost as much as they hated being condescended to or touched. He’d spouted some blood-curdling holy gibberish which more or less boiled down to “Leave it out, Tosh, or I’ll ’ave yer”, but with extra nuances involving being bound in chests of brass and thrown into the lowest depths of a volcano for a thousand years. Whips, scorpions, rivers of fire, the usual rigmarole. The devil raised his thorny eyebrows in a look of hurt surprise.
“Oh dear, I’ve made you cross again. I should have known this was your ladies’ special time, but I barged in making insensitive remarks. And right when you were no doubt trying to calm down in order to take this important shot. I should be inconsolable if just as you were lining up your cue you thought of me and ripped the baize or broke your stick in half. Or anything.”
The Master Builder reared up with a sudden sunburst of St. Elmo’s Fire around his snowy head and bellowed something multi-faceted and biblical, essentially refuting that this was his ladies’ special time. The second part of what the devil had just said then seemed to sink in, about ruining his game by being in the throes of rage. He checked himself and took a deep breath, then exhaled. There followed a celestial burst of nonsense-poetry where a gruff, unadorned apology would have sufficed. The devil thought about a further goading, but decided not to push his famous luck.
“Think nothing of it, old sport. It was my fault, always taking jokes too far and spoiling things for everybody else. You know, I worry privately that deep inside I’m not a terribly nice person. Why am I aggressive all the while, even when I’m pretending to be jovial? Why do I have all these unpleasant defects in my personality? Sometimes I convince myself it’s work-related, as if having been condemned to the unending torments of the sensory inferno was an adequate excuse for my regrettable behaviour. Good luck with the snooker tournament. I’ve every confidence in you. I’m sure that you can put this unimportant fit of murderous rage behind you, and that you won’t irrevocably mess up somebody’s only mortal life by having acted like a petulant buffoon.”
The fellow seemed uncertain how to take this, narrowing his sole functioning eye suspiciously. Eventually he gave up trying to work out who, precisely, was at fault here and just grimaced as though indicating that their conversation had been satisfactorily concluded. With a curt nod to the devil, who had gallantly tilted his leather hat-brim in reply, the Master Builder carried on along the walkway, lifting up one hand occasionally to tenderly explore the purple flesh around his pummelled brow.
You could tell from the stiff way that he held himself as he was flouncing off that the white-robed chap was still fuming. Anger, as with handicrafts and mathematics, was amongst the devil’s fields of expertise. All three things were exquisitely involved and intricate, which sat well with the devil’s admiration for complexity. He could have hours of fun with any of them. Oh, and idle hands. He liked those too. And good intentions.
He’d relit his pipe, striking a spark off of a thumbnail like a beetle carapace, and watched the builder as he stalked off grumpily towards the vanishing point of the lengthy balcony. Poor loves. Walking around all day looking Romantic, feeling like the very spinning clockwork of the fourfold Universe with everybody singing songs about them. All those Christmas cards they were expected to live up to and the work that it must be to keep those robes clean all the time. How did they cope, the precious poppets?
He’d been leaning on the pitch-stained balustrade and wondering what he should do next to amuse himself when suddenly, as if in answer to his seldom-answered prayers, a door creaked open in the long wall of accumulated dreams that was behind him and a little boy clad in pyjamas, dressing gown and slippers padded hesitantly out onto the bare boards of the balcony. He was adorable, and secretly the devil had a weakness for small children. They were scared of absolutely everything.
With blonde curls and with eyes song-lyric blue, the little sleepwalker had not at first appeared to realise that he was in the presence of the devil, with the door that he’d emerged from being some yards off from where the fiend was standing. Looking apprehensive and with eyebrows lifted in perpetual startlement, the youngster slippered over to the blackened railings of the walkway and gazed out between them at the stretching Attics of the Breath. He’d kept this up for a few moments, looking puzzled and disoriented, then had turned his head and glanced off down the landing to where you could just make out the battered builder vanishing into the distance, dabbing at his eye.
The kid still hadn’t noticed that the devil was behind him, but then people never did. The devil wondered if the boy were dead or merely sleeping, dressed up in his night-clothes as he was. Conceivably, it might not even be a human child at all. It could have been a figment wandered off from someone else’s dream or possibly a character out of a bedtime storybook, a fiction given substance here by the built-up imaginings accreted over many readings, many readers.
In the devil’s judgement, though, this lad seemed to be real. Dreams and the characters from stories had a tidy quality to their construction, as if they’d been simplified, whereas this present nipper had a poorly-thought-through messiness about his personality that smacked of authenticity. You could tell from the way he stood there, rooted to the spot and gazing after the retreating builder, that he didn’t have the first clue where he was or what he should do next. People in dreams or stories, to the contrary, were always full of purpose. So, this little man was definitely mortal, although whether he was dead or dreaming was a matter harder to determine. The pyjamas indicated that he was a dreamer, but of course small children generally died in hospital or in their sickbeds, so infant mortality was still a possibility. The devil thought he’d enquire further.
“Well, now. It’s a ghostly little fidget-midget.”
There. That hadn’t been an over-terrifying opening remark in his opinion. While he might from time to time enjoy a bit of fun with helpless humans, even to the point of driving them insane or killing them, that didn’t mean that he was undiscriminating. Children, as he’d noted, were already frightened as a natural consequence of being children. Burst a crisp-bag and they’d jump. Where was the sport or the finesse in that?
The small boy turned around to face him, wearing a ridiculous expression on his elfin face, eyes goggling and his mouth stretched at both sides into a rubber letterbox. It looked like he was trying to conceal his real expression, which was probably pure dread, in order not to give offence. His mum had more than likely taught him it was rude to scream at the deformed or monstrous. Quite frankly, the child’s blend of paralysing fear and genuine concern for other people’s feelings struck the devil as being both comical and rather sweet. He thought he’d try another pleasant conversational remark, now that he had the lad’s attention, so to speak.
“You look lost, little boy. Oh dear, oh dear. We can’t have that, now, can we?”
Even though the devil’s tone was clearly that of an avuncular child-murderer, the tousled moppet seemed to take it at face value, visibly relaxing and assuming he was out of danger at the first sound of a sympathetic voice. This trusting little dickens was a find, and no mistake. The devil wondered how he’d lasted for five minutes in the unforgiving mechanisms of the living world, and then reflected that most probably he hadn’t. Actually, the longer that he spent in the tyke’s company, the likelier it seemed that this was someone dead rather than someone dreaming, someone who’d been lured into a stranger’s car or an abandoned fridge dumped on an out-of-earshot wasteland.
Watching the boy’s features you could almost see what he was thinking, almost see the cogs turn in his as-yet undeveloped mind. He looked as though he thought that he was trespassing, but that if he kept up an act the devil wouldn’t realise this was the case. He looked like he was trying to come up with an excuse for being here, but, being young, had not yet had a great deal of experience in telling lies. As a result of trying to construct an alibi, when he eventually piped up he sounded tremulously guilty, even though his flimsy story was most probably the truth.
“That’s right. I’m lost. Can you see in that window for me so that I’ll know where I am?”
The boy was nodding to the glinting memories of windows set into the dream-wall he’d emerged out of. He clearly couldn’t care less what was on the other side but, once told, would pretend to have his bearings and then thank the devil nicely before running off as fast as his short legs would carry him, getting as far away as he could manage, the direction unimportant. He was obviously frightened but was trying not to show he was afraid, as if the devil were no more than an uncomfortably big dog.
Frowning in mild bemusement, the arch-enemy of mankind shot a casual glance through the glass panes the child had indicated. Nothing of much interest lay beyond, just an exaggerated phantom of a local schoolroom plucked from someone’s night-thoughts. It was a location that the devil knew, that much went without saying: there were no locations that the devil didn’t know. The world of space and history was big, no doubt about it, but then so was <em>War & Peace,</em> yet both were finite. Given enough time – or, if you liked, given no time at all – then you could easily attain a detailed grasp of either of them. There was no great trick about omniscience, the devil thought. Just read the story through enough times at your near-infinite leisure and you’ll be an expert. He looked back towards the apprehensive toddler.
“Looks like it’s the needlework-room that’s upstairs at Spring Lane School, only a fair bit bigger. I hang out round here because I’m very fond of handicraft. It’s one of my great specialities. I’m also rather good at sums.”
This was all true, of course. One of the ways in which people continually misunderstood the devil, woundingly so in his own opinion, was that they thought he was always telling lies. In fact, though, nothing could be further from the case. He couldn’t tell a lie if he was paid to, not that anybody ever paid him to do anything. Besides, the truth was a far subtler tool. Just tell people the truth and then let them mislead themselves, that was his motto.
What the truth was with regard to this small boy, however, wasn’t really clear. Assuming that the child was dead and not just dreaming, he did not appear to have been dead for long. He looked like someone who had only just that moment found themselves here in the Second Borough, in Mansoul, somebody who had yet to get their bearings. If that was the case, what was he doing scuttling round here in the dream-sediments? Why hadn’t he just automatically dived back into his short life at the point of birth, for one more go-round on his little individual carousel? Or if, after a million turns on the same ride, he felt he’d finally absorbed all that it had to offer and elected to instead come up to the unfolded town, why was he unaccompanied? Where were the beery crowds of celebrating ancestors? Even if there were some unprecedented circumstance in play here, you’d still think that management would have arranged an escort. In fact, management was so efficient that an oversight was quite unthinkable. Actually, the devil thought, that was a good point. It suggested more was going on here than immediately met the eye.
The devil puffed his pipe and contemplated the intriguing half-pint specimen that shuffled nervously before him, who was visibly attempting to compose an exit-line and end their conversation. That would never do, and so the devil plucked the pipe-stem from his smouldering maw and made sure he got his two penn’orth in before the infant did.
“But you don’t quite add up to anything that I’m familiar with. Come, little chap. Tell me your name.”
That was the point at which the foundling child made his astounding revelation.
“My name’s Michael Warren.”
Oh, my dears, my cousins in the sulphur, can you possibly imagine? It was better than the time when he tricked self-important, brooding Uriel into revealing where the secret garden was located (it was in a fizzy puddle in Pangaea). It surpassed, in terms of comedy, the look on his ex-girlfriend’s perfect features when her seventh husband in a year died on their wedding night, the devil having stopped his heart a second prior to the intended consummation. Why, it even beat that moment of hilarity during the Fall, when one of the low-ranking devils, Sabnock or some other marquis, who’d been consequently pushed down further into the excruciating quagmire of material awareness than the others, had called out “Truly this sensate world is one beyond endurance, though I am delighted to report my genitals have started working”, whereupon the builders and the devils they were using as a form of psychic landfill all put down their flaming snooker cues for a few minutes until they’d stopped laughing. This dazed baby trumped all that though, knocked it into a cocked hat: his name was Michael Warren. He’d just said so. He’d just come straight out with it as if it was of no significance, the modest little beggar.
Michael Warren was the name attached to the precariously-balanced billiard ball that had kicked off the fight between the builders.
And they hadn’t had a fight since, what, Gomorrah? Egypt?
The events that were in orbit around this unwitting child had an intoxicating whiff of intricacy to them, complex as a clockwork anthill, complex as the mathematics of a hurricane. The possibilities for convoluted entertainment that this clueless little soul presented to the fiend were such an unexpected gift that he took an involuntary step backwards. All the dragon frills that edged the image he was wearing rippled in anticipation, flaring up in a display of his heraldic colours, red and green, bloodshed and jealousy.
“<em>You’re</em> Michael Warren? You’re the one to blame for all this trouble?”
Oh, the way his little jaw dropped, so that you could tell it was the first he’d heard about his sudden notoriety. This whole thing was becoming more delicious by the moment, and the devil laughed until he thought he’d burst a testicle. Wiping the hydrochloric tears of mirth from his peculiar eyes, he focussed them once more upon the boy.
“Wait till I tell the lads. They’ll be in fits. Oh, this is good. This is extremely good.”
That set him off again, the thought of how his fellow devils would respond when he informed them of his latest stroke of undeserved good fortune. Belial, the toad in diamond, would just blink his ring of seven eyes and try to make out that he hadn’t heard. Beelzebub, that glaring wall of porcine hatred, would most likely cook in his own rage. And as for Astaroth, he’d simply purse the lipstick-plastered mouth upon his human head into a vicious pout and would be looking daggers for the next three hundred years. The devil really had the giggles now. He laughed so hard his broad-brimmed hat fell back around his neck, at which point the already nervous child abandoned all the manners that his mother had instilled in him and screamed like an electrocuted aviary. The infant’s eyes began to well with frightened tears.
Ah, yes. The horns. The devil had forgotten he had horns in this particular ensemble. Horns, for some unfathomable reason, always made them jump when actually they should consider themselves lucky. Horns were nothing. Horns were just his work-clothes. They should see him when he was in fancy dress, for state occasions and the like, wearing one of his more finely-tailored robes of imagery. The coruscating spider/lizard combination, for example, or the gem of infinite regress. By Jingo, then they’d have something to cry about.
Blubbing profusely now the lad looked up with that expression of mixed accusation and outraged betrayal with which people generally seemed to greet him. He had seen it on the faces of Renaissance alchemists and Nazi dabblers alike. The message it conveyed, in essence, was ‘This isn’t fair. You’re not meant to be real.’ That was the main thrust of what the aggrieved and weeping cherub was now saying to him.
“You’re the devil.”
Children. They’re so wonderfully perceptive, aren’t they? Probably the horns were what had given him away. He felt a flicker of mild irritation at the fact that while people continually identified him as a devil, nobody was ever sure which one he was. It would be like somebody greeting Charlie Chaplin in the street by shouting “You’re that bloke out of that film”. It was insulting, but he didn’t let it get him down. He was in much too fine a mood for that. He’d broken off his laughing-jag and glanced down at the tot, good-humouredly.
“Well … yes. Yes, I suppose I am.”
Poor mite. He looked like he was getting a stiff neck from craning up to keep his brimming gaze upon the demon regent. Out of pure consideration and concern, the devil squatted down upon his haunches and leaned forward so that he and the small boy were eye to eye, the child’s blue puddles staring earnestly into the devil’s traffic-lights. He thought he’d tease the kid, just for a bit of mischief. What could be the harm in that? He spoke in puzzled tones of the most innocent enquiry.
“Why? Where did you think you were?”
That, thinking back, would seem to have been the remark that finally undid the little scamp. He’d shrieked something that sounded like “But they were only ants” and then had taken off along the endless landing, going nineteen to the dozen, holding his pyjama bottoms up with one hand as he ran to stop them falling down around his ankles.
Oh dear. Him and his big mouth. Despite the wholly innocent intent behind the devil’s harmless query, it appeared that Michael Warren had inferred from it that he’d been sent to Hell, possibly for a crime involving ants. Wherever did these jumped-up monkeys get all their ideas from? Not that he was saying that this <em>wasn’t</em> Hell, mind you. More that the actual situation was far less simplistic than that word implied, and where this devil was concerned one over-simplified at one’s own risk.
So there he was, watching the famous Michael Warren running full tilt down the walkway, trying to hold his pants up, squeaking like a fresh-hatched banshee. Was it any wonder that the devil couldn’t call to mind the last time that he’d had such fun?
He straightened up out of his crouch and flexed his two-tone rags to straighten them. The fleeing boy was some way off along the monstrously extended balcony, slippers flapping comically against the floorboards underfoot. The devil wondered where the child thought he was going.
Leisurely, he knocked his screaming, man-faced pipe against the balustrade to empty it, and then put it away into a pocket of himself. His smoke-break was now evidently over, and he couldn’t stand round here all day. He eyed the by-now tiny figure of the child as it continued its disorganised retreat into the distance of the elevated boardwalk. It was time to get on with some work.
The devil took a short unhurried step, putting his boot down on the boards, heel first and then the ball of his foot in a soft, percussive double thump a little like the beating of a heart: <em>bump</em>-<em>bump</em>. He took another step, this time a longer one that swallowed up more ground, so that it seemed like a protracted pause before the double footfall came again: <em>bump</em>-<em>bump</em>. He took a further pace. This time the pause went on and on. The twin thud that would signify the step’s end never came.
The devil floated a few feet above the floor, still carried slowly forward by the slight momentum of the step or two he’d taken when he launched himself. He narrowed his mismatched eyes, like malefic 3D spectacles, fixed on the dwindling form of the escaping child along the balcony’s far end. He grinned and let his scarlet and viridian pinions snap like stormy flags behind as he began to gather speed. He crackled and he burned. He did his trademark chuckle.
Comet-arsed and showering coloured embers like a Roman candle in his wake, the devil sizzled down the walkway, screeching after the small fugitive, closing the gap between them effortlessly. In a way, the boy’s intuitive attempt to treat the fiend as an uncomfortably big dog had not been so far off the mark. Certainly, you should never run from devils. Your retreating back will simply lend you the appearance of absconding prey, which, when it comes to dogs and demons, only tends to get them going.
Hearing from behind him the approaching firework rush, mixed as the sound was with that of the devil’s escalating cackle, the boy glanced back once across his shoulder and then looked as if he wished he hadn’t.
<em>Whoosh</em>. The devil reached down with both scorched and blistered hands to grab the squealing escapee beneath his armpits from the rear, snatching him fast into the whistling air, across the balustrade and up into the glass and ironwork altitudes above the Attics of the Breath. The child’s scream rose as they did, spiralling aloft with them to ring amongst the giant painted girders, startling the pigeons nested there into a brief ash-flurry of activity. With his slipper-clad feet pedalling frantically, the kid first pleaded for the fiend to let him go, then realised how high up he was and begged instead not to be dropped.
“Well, make your mind up,” said the devil, and considered dropping Michael Warren a few times then catching him before he hit the floor, though on reflection he thought better of it. It would over-egg the lily. It would gild the pudding.
They were hovering there, treading air, a thousand feet or more between them and the vast checked tablecloth of square holes spread below. Having considered all the aspects and the angles of this novel circumstance, the devil opted for a gentler approach in his communications with the boy. You caught more flies with honey than you did with vinegar, and you caught more with bullshit than you did with either. Tipping forward his horned head he whispered in the lad’s ear to be heard above the flap and flutter of his banners, red and green, hot coals and absinthe.
“Something tells me that we’ve got off to a bad start, haven’t we? I’m sensing, from the screaming and the running off, that I’ve said something to upset you without meaning to. What do you say we put it all behind us and begin afresh?”
With frightened, pin-prick eyes still fixed upon the hideous drop beneath his kicking slippers, Michael Warren answered in a wavering falsetto, managing to sound scared witless and indignant at the same time.
“You said this wiz Hell! You said you wiz the devil!”
Hmm. Good point. The devil had at least implied both of those things, but took care to sound pained and woefully misunderstood in his response to the boy’s accusation.
“Come now, that’s unfair. I didn’t claim that this was Hell. I merely asked you where you thought you were and you jumped to your own conclusions. As for me being a devil, well, I am. There’s no escaping it. I’m not <em>the</em> Devil though, or at least, not the one that you were probably expecting. I’m not Satan, and besides, he doesn’t look like this. You’d be surprised what Satan looks like, and I promise you you’d never recognise him in, ooh, what, nine billion years?”
By now more confident that his small body would not be allowed to fall, the dangling darling tried to twist his head around, to face the fiend across his shoulder as he spoke.
“Well, if you’re not him, who are you, then? What’s your name?”
That was a tricky one. The rules that governed what he was – essentially, a field of living information – meant that he was more or less compelled to answer any direct question and to do so truthfully. It didn’t mean, of course, that he was under any obligation to make matters easy for the questioner. Given that devils were reluctant to reveal their names, which could be used to bind them, he would generally employ some form of code, or else engage human interrogators in a guessing game. With Michael Warren, he decided to provide his answer in the manner of a crossword clue.
“Oh, I’ve been given dozens of old nicknames, but in truth I’m just plain, mixed-up Sam O’Day. Why don’t you call me Sam? Think of me as a roguish uncle who can fly.”
Oblivious to the anagram, the child seemed to accept this, albeit grudgingly. Young as he was, he was already obviously acquainted with the concept of the roguish uncle, and yet was still of an age where he was probably uncertain as to whether they could fly or not. He ceased his futile struggling at any rate, and simply hung there acquiescently. When the boy spoke again, the devil noticed that he had his eyes shut to block out the horrid plunge beneath his tingling toes.
“Why did you tell me that I wiz in trouble?”
All these bloody questions. What had happened to the days when people either exorcised you or else haggled with you for a good price on their souls? The devil sighed and once again took on the same slightly offended tone he’d used before.
“I didn’t say you were in trouble. I said that you’d caused some trouble. Quite unwittingly, of course, and nothing anybody’s blaming you for. I just thought you’d like to know, that’s all.”
The kid persisted. That was a big problem these days: everybody knew their rights.
“Well, if I’m not in trouble, wizzle you please put me down? You’ll make my arms fall off holding me up like this.”
The fiend clucked reassuringly.
“Of course I won’t. Why, I’ll bet they’re not even aching. I don’t know how you could possibly mistake this place for Hell. Bodily pain’s unheard of up here.”
Agonizing torments of the heart and spirit, though, were well known everywhere, but naturally the devil didn’t think to mention this. Instead, the fiend glossed smoothly on with his persuasive patter.
“As for me putting you down, are you quite sure that’s what you want? I mean, your arms aren’t really hurting, are they? And you didn’t look as if you knew where you were going when you <em>were</em> down on the ground. Putting you back and leaving you alone would just mean you were lost again. Besides, I’m quite a famous devil. I can do all sorts of things. Dismiss me, and you’re passing up a deathtime’s opportunity.”
The lad’s eyes opened, just a crack.
“What do you mean?”
The devil glanced down idly at the Attics of the Breath below. Some of the wandering ghosts and phantasms down there were looking up at Michael and the devil, hovering just beneath the green glass ceiling of the grand arcade. The fiend could see a group of urchins, dead or dreaming, who seemed to be paying him particular attention. No doubt they could see he’d caught a child and wondered if they might be next. Have no fear, little children. For today, at least, you’re safe. Perhaps another time. Returning his gaze to the back of the suspended boy’s blonde head and breathing hot upon the nape the devil answered his last query.
“I mean there are things that I can tell you. There are things that I can show you. It’s well known. I’m practically proverbial. I get a mention in the Bible … well, in the Apocrypha, but that’s fairly impressive, don’t you think? And I was Adam’s first wife’s second husband, though that got left out of Genesis. It’s like with any adaptation, really. Minor characters omitted to speed up the story, complex situations simplified and so forth. You can’t blame them, I suppose. And I was very close to Solomon at one point, though again, you wouldn’t guess that from the Book of Kings. Shakespeare, however, bless him, Shakespeare gives me credit where it’s due. He talks about a kind of trip I can take people on. It’s called ‘Sam O’Day’s Flight’, and it’s more wonderful and thrilling than the biggest fairground ride you ever dreamed of. Do you fancy one?”
Dangling limply in the devil’s arms, the Warren kid seemed unenthusiastic.
“How do I know if I’d like it? I might not. And if I didn’t, how do I know you’d stop when I wanted to?”
The Fifth Infernal Duke, noting that this was not quite a refusal, bent his head close to the lad’s pink ear as he moved in to make the sale.
“If I hear you ask me to stop, I’ll stop at once. How’s that? And as for payment for the ride, well, I can see that you’re an offspring of the Boroughs, so I don’t expect that you get pocket money, do you? Doesn’t matter. Tell you what, because I’ve taken quite a shine to you, young man, I’ll do this as a favour. Then, at some remote point in the future, if there’s ever something useful you can do for me, we’ll call it quits. Does that sound fair to you?”
The child’s eyes were wide open now, at least in the most literal sense. Still trying not to look directly downwards, he was tilting back his curly head to stare up through the arcade roof at the unfurling geometeorology. The devil could see an enchantingly baroque arrangement of some several dozen tesseracts that were engaged in folding up to form something resembling a ten- or twenty-sphere. No wonder the small boy looked mesmerised and sounded far away when he eventually replied.
“Well … yes. Yes, I suppose so.”
That was all that the fiend needed. True, a minor’s spoken affirmation couldn’t technically be called a binding compact, nothing written down, nothing in red and white, and yet the devil felt that it could be interpreted as an agreement to proceed.
He dived.
Dived like a crippled bomber, the descending engine drone, dropped like a stone or like an owl that’s sighted supper, plunged like the astounding cleavage of his ex-wife, fell out of the vaulted heights above the Attics of the Breath as only he could fall, his coloured streamers rustling in a deafening cacophony. The child was screaming something, but above the wind of their descent you couldn’t make it out. As a result of this the devil could say, in all honesty, that he had not yet heard the infant ask to stop.
At the last moment, barely fifty feet above the boarded floor with its enormous vats, the devil pulled out of his plummet in a sharp, right-angled swerve that took them soaring off along the length of the immense emporium. The scruffy little Herberts who’d been rubbernecking at the devil and his captive only a few moments back were now running for cover, probably convinced that he’d been swooping down to gather them up in his claws as well. He seared down the gigantic corridor, a dangerous gobbet of ball-lightning shedding sparks and keening with the process of its own combustion, scattering those few scant souls who were about the Attics at that precise juncture of the century, the year, the afternoon, holding a baby in his sweltering arms. The toddler’s howl was stretched into the Doppler wail of an approaching train by the velocity of his blurred transit, streaking yards above the pale pine boards which were lit briefly by the demon’s passage, red and green, poppies and putrefaction.
They were heading west towards the blood-burst of that day’s specific sunset, where the light poured in like smelted ore through the glass panels of the arcade roof. The devil knew the nipper’s eyes would be wide open during all of this. At speeds like these, with all the spare flesh on one’s face rippling towards the rear side of the skull, it was impossible to close them. Saying anything, even a single syllable like ‘stop’, was quite out of the question.
The boy’s head was angled down, watching the huge square vats flash by beneath them. The experience, the devil knew, was very much like viewing a surprisingly engrossing abstract film. The files of apertures that ran along the length of the great attic each allowed a view into a single room at different stages of its progress in the fourth direction. Living beings in those rooms appeared as static tentacles of gemstone, inner lit and still as statues as they wound amongst each other, only the elusive darting lights that were their consciousnesses lending the illusion of mobility and motion. Zooming down a row of tanks from just above them, though, the vats became like single frames on an unreeling spool of celluloid. The winding, frozen shapes appeared to move in the unchanging confines of the endlessly repeated room containing them, sometimes withdrawing altogether for brief stretches when the space was empty, flickering into view again a moment later to resume their strange, fluorescent dance. The fluctuations of the coloured forms mapped random mortal movement through these worldly chambers in a way that was hypnotic and, at times, hauntingly beautiful. The little boy, at least, appeared to be absorbed, in that his high-pitched shriek had sunk to a low moan. This probably meant it was time to step on the accelerator, since the devil didn’t want his passenger to nod off out of boredom. He’d his reputation to consider.
A reverberating peal of layered thunder marked the point where they surpassed the speed of sound, and then a little after that there was a pocket of unearthly stone-deaf hush when they exceeded even the velocity of silence. The resplendent devil and the scamp that he was baby-sitting roared down the unending throat of the arcade, the sky beyond the hall’s glass roof changing its colours every other moment as they dashed through days and days. The sunset red became first violet and then purple, deepening to a profound black in which the construction lines of the unfolding hyper-weather were picked out in silver. This was followed by more purple and then the cerise and peach of dawn. Blue mornings and grey afternoons smeared past in stroboscopic washes. Long and sleepless nights were gone in seconds, swallowed in the brief flare of another molten sunrise. Faster still they hurtled until neither of them could distinguish the exact point at which one hue turned into another. Everything became a tunnel of prismatic shimmer.
Swerving on a sixpence and without reducing speed, the devil veered all of a sudden so that they were locked on a collision course with one of the enormous trees that thrust up through its fifty-foot-square hole on the far side of the emporium: an elm expanded to an ancient redwood by the variation that there was between dimensions. The ear-piercing screech that came from Michael Warren indicated to the devil that at least his charge had shrugged off the ennui from which he’d earlier seemed to be suffering.
The stretch of corridor that had the giant elm erupting through its floor was in the night-miles that provided punctuation along the vast Attics’ length at measured intervals. The firmament seen through the darkened glass above was lustrous ebony. Chrome traceries of snail-slime were delineating the evolving contours of the supra-geometric cumuli outside, the radiance from those huge bodies lending these benighted reaches of the never-ending hall a moonlit and crepuscular appearance. Mixed-up Sam O’Day, the King of Wrath, the groom-slayer, the devil, he scorched through the shadows and the cloudlight, heading for the leafy wooden tower that swelled up terrifyingly out of the silvered murk before them.
Pigeons, rendered almost microscopic in comparison with the huge boughs that sheltered them, awoke from their slow-motion dreams and flapped up in alarm at the loud, spitting pyrotechnics of the fiend’s approach. The devil knew that this most special family of birds were more or less unique in their ability to pass between the Upstairs and the Downstairs world, and often would take refuge in a tree’s higher dimensions where they knew that they’d be fairly safe from cats. Cats, it was true, could sometimes scrabble through an aperture into the Attics of the Breath – the fiend assumed they’d learned this trick originally by climbing after pigeons – but the higher realm was petrifying for a living feline. Usually, they’d noisily evacuate their bowels and leap straight down the nearest window back into the world. The whole manoeuvre was so stressful for them that they seemed to only use it when they needed to move straight from one room to another without passing through the intervening space. The talent wasn’t any use, though, when it came to hunting, so the roosting birds were safe. Not from the devil, obviously, but from practically every other predator that they might reasonably expect to whiz out of the dark towards them, coughing fire. The flock had just been woken unexpectedly from sleep and taken by surprise. There isn’t much, the devil thought, which takes a pigeon by surprise. That was no doubt the reason for their agitation.
A split second before he and Michael Warren would have smashed into the thirty-foot-wide trunk the devil executed one of his most showy moves, a sudden spiral swoop that cleverly combined the Golden Section and the Fibonacci sequence, blazing in a corkscrew-tight trajectory that took them down around the tree, just inches from the elephant-hide of its enlarged bark. The zip and zing of it, the helter-skelter swish, was wickedly exhilarating. They looped five times round the wood Goliath, and somewhere in the hair-raising rip of their descent the devil felt his inner compass flip into the new orientation that attended the inferior, three-sided world. He and his passenger were now immersed in the tenebrous gelatine of Time, careening on a left-hand thread around an elm that now appeared to be of normal scale. They came out of their circling nosedive only feet above the tufted knuckles of its roots, then shot up and away into the intermittent twinkle of the overcast night sky above. Swimming as they now were in the sequential soup of minutes, hours and days, they left a Technicolor mess behind, an afterburn procession of spent images trailing flamboyant in their wake. Predominantly these were in the devil’s signature array of reds and greens, a wild rose-garden stripe bursting from nowhere that wound down around the tree and then fired itself up into the dark and starlight
Thirty feet above the ground the devil slammed the brakes on and stopped dead, hanging there in the brisk night breeze and summer-scented shadows with his rag-flags spread around him in a rattling carnation cluster. Still clutched in the demon’s sooty grip, the bug-eyed little boy sucked in his first breath of the last half-minute and yelled “Stop”, rather unnecessarily, as they just had. On realising this, the child twisted his head around as far as it would go, so that he could look up across his shoulder at the devil. It was one of those looks kids put on when they’re pretending to be traumatised, the wobbling lower lip, the haunted eyes and obvious affectation of a shell-shocked twitch.
“I never said! I never said I wanted to go on your Flight. I only wanted to go home.”
The devil did his best to sound surprised.
“What, that? That little jaunt that we’ve just been on? That wasn’t my Flight. That was a warm-up lap. Give me some credit, my dear fellow. That was only fast, it wasn’t fabulous. The real ride is much slower and much more mysterious. I promise you you’ll like it. As for wanting to go home, perhaps you ought to take a look around and find out where we are before you start complaining.”
There. That shut the little blighter up.
They were suspended in the night air up above the intersection formed where Spencer Bridge and Crane Hill crossed St. Andrew’s Road. Beneath them as they hung there facing roughly south there was the meadow where the old Victorian slipper-baths had been converted to a public toilet. A broad tarmac pathway stretched diagonally across the swathe of grass below, from Spencer Bridge to Wiggins’s coal yard further up the road. Amongst the trees that fringed the patch of ground there stood the inconspicuous elm down which the fiend and his reluctant cargo had swirled recently from the superior to the lower realm. Upon their left a scattering of headlights crawled up Grafton Street, mounting the valley slope between the factories and pubs on one side and the wasteland sprawl of earth and bricks that had ten years before been people’s homes upon the other.
Up ahead and to their right was the illuminated cobweb knot of Castle Station, strings of light running towards it and away through the surrounding blackness. This site was perhaps the devil’s favourite of the many ruined vistas that the Boroughs had to offer. He recalled the castle that the railway station had deposed with an abiding fondness. Several hundred years back down the line the devil had obtained a ringside seat for King Henry the Second’s spiritually ruinous betrayal of his old chum Tommy Becket, summoning the fledgling saint here to Northampton Castle only to surprise him with a hanging jury of intemperate barons bellowing for the Archbishop’s head (and also for his land, although the fiend could not remember any of them saying this out loud upon the actual occasion).
Sideways Sam O’Day – a name he was becoming gradually more pleased with – also had warm recollections of the castle from the time when he’d stood unseen at the elbow of Richard the Lionheart and tried to keep from sniggering as the King set off on his crusade, the third crusade and thus one of the Christian world’s first major contacts with the world of Islam, which would set the tone for some side-splitting high jinks further up the road. Oh my word, wouldn’t it just, though? It had been at the castle, too, where the fiend had the opportunity to sit in on the western world’s first parliament, the National Parliament raised in 1131, and smirk at how much difficulty that was going to cause. And please, don’t even get him started on the poll tax that had so upset Walter the Tyler and his peasant army back in 1381. The convoluted nature of the troubles that had blossomed here, close to the country’s crux, made it one of the devil’s favourite picnic spots, not just in Angle-land but in the wider 3D world.
Cradled there in the devil’s tender arms above the crossroads, Michael Warren stared down at the streets that he had known in life with an expression of astonishment and longing. For the infant’s benefit the devil executed a slow aerial pirouette, rotating counter-clockwise to show off the glittering nocturnal panorama that surrounded them. By moving slowly, the distracting trail of after-images they left behind them was reduced. Their gaze crawled lovingly across the Boroughs, past the southeast corner that the builders signified upon their gaming-table with a cross of gold. Progressing, Grafton Street climbed east towards the squinting cafeteria- and shop-lights set like a tiara at its top on Regent Square. Then, as the demon monarch turned, the parallel tarmac toboggan-runs of Semilong came into view, slate rooftops with a graphite sheen crowning the rank of terraces as they descended to the valley’s bottom, to St. Andrew’s Road and to the river winding by on its far side. Continuing their lazy swivel, Michael Warren and the fiend next overlooked the dark grass sprawl of Paddy’s Meadow with the Nene a nickel ribbon that unravelled through it, the reflected trees like black and tangled salvage in the river’s cloudy depths.
It was along here to the north, if scrambled Sam O’Day remembered rightly, that the wall of the St. Andrew’s Priory had once extended. Back upstream in the 1260s, King Henry the Third sent out a punitive platoon of mounted troops to quash unrest and insurrection here in this pugnacious little town, the army let in through a breach in the old priory wall by a French Cluniac prior who sympathised with the French monarchy. They’d pretty much destroyed the place, raped it and robbed it and set fire to it, marking this northwest corner of the Boroughs as the point of penetration. On the builder’s billiard table – or their trilliard table as it was more accurately called – this spot was represented by the pocket with the golden penis etched into the wood beside it. Regent’s Square in the northeast, conversely, that was the death corner where the severed heads of traitors were displayed once, and its corresponding snooker pocket was emblazoned with a golden skull.
They twirled above the traffic junction, looking out across the business premises just over Spencer Bridge, the new estates of Spencer and King’s Heath beyond. Spencer. Another local name, the devil noted, that had interesting repercussions up and down the track. Like figures circling on top of a dilapidated music-box, the devil and his passenger revolved unhurriedly to take in Jimmy’s End and then Victoria Park, pretty and melancholy as a jilted bride, arriving finally at the far lights of Castle Station where their orbit reached its end. Clanking and shunting in the dark, the railway terminus was at the Boroughs’ southwest corner, with a gilded turret scratched into the grain of the appropriate pocket on the builder’s table, representing stern authority. Fidgeting in the devil’s grip, the small boy at last found his voice.
“That’s it. That’s where I wiz. That’s where I live.”
One midget hand protruded from his dressing gown’s capacious sleeve to point towards the part-lit terrace on their left, a little further south along St. Andrew’s Road. The devil chuckled and corrected him.
“Not quite. That’s where you lived. Until you died, of course.”
The child considered this, and nodded.
“Oh. Yes. I’d forgotten that. Why has it all got dark so quick? It wiz all sunny earlier, and I’ve not been away for very long. It can’t be night already.”
Obviously, the fiend observed, his young friend needed setting straight on that one, too.
“Well, actually, it can. In fact, this isn’t even the same day as that of your departure. When we flew along the Attics of the Breath just now we must have passed three or four sunsets, which means that we’re presently at some point later on in that same week. From all the cars in Grafton Street, I’d say it looks like Friday night. Your family are probably right in the middle of their teatime about now. How would you like to see them?”
You could tell from the protracted silence that the kid was thinking about this before he answered. Naturally, he’d want to see his loved ones one more time, but seeing them in mourning for him must have been a daunting prospect. Finally, he piped up.
“Can you show them to me? And will they be shapes with lights in, like they were when we wiz back Upstairs?”
The devil issued a good-natured snort, so that wisps of blue smoke like car-exhaust leaked from his flaring nostrils.
“Well, of course I’ll show them to you. That’s the main part of Sam O’Day’s Flight, in fact. It’s what I’m famous for. And as for what they’ll look like, it won’t be the same as how they seemed from up above. Do you know what the word ‘dimension’ means?”
The infant shook his tousled head. This would, the devil thought, be a long night.
“Well, basically, it’s just another word for plane, as in the different planes a solid object has. If something has length, breadth and depth we say that it has three dimensions, that it’s three-dimensional. Now, in truth, all things in this universe have more than three dimensions, but there’s only three that human beings seem to notice. To be honest, there are ten, or at a pinch eleven, but there are just four of them that need concern you at the moment. These are the three planes that I just mentioned plus a fourth that is as solid as the others, but which mortal men perceive as passing time. This fourth dimension, viewed in its true light, is how we see it from Mansoul, the realm Upstairs, which is a higher-up dimension still. Looked down on from up there, there is no time. All change and movement are just represented by the snaking crystal forms with lights inside that you saw earlier, winding along their predetermined paths. That’s when you’re looking from up there, remember.”
“As for where we are now, we’re not up there anymore. We’re down in the three-sided world where time exists, but we’re still seeing it with higher eyes. That minor detail, by and large, is the whole basis of my fabled Flight, which, if you’ll now permit me, I shall demonstrate.”
The babe in arms, who’d listened to the devil’s monologue uncomprehendingly for the most part, made an ambiguous whining sound that had a slight upward inflection and could thus be taken as conditional assent. Taking his time so as not to alarm the child unnecessarily, and also to restrict their streaming image-trail, the fiend began to float towards the short and semi-darkened row of houses that the boy had indicated, opposite the coal-yard further up St. Andrew’s Road. They drifted over the converted slipper-baths, the devil’s emerald and ruby tatters crackling like a radio of evil, and across the unmowed triangle of meadow, moving south. Upon their left as they approached the corner of Spring Lane they passed the looming tannery, its tall brick chimney and its gated yards with dyed skin-shavings heaped in turquoise treasure-mounds, the bald white stumps of tails left on the cobbles and dissolving into soap and gristle. From this height, the puddles near the pulling-sheds were mother-of-pearl fragments, bright and flaking.
Michael Warren and the devil came to rest suspended up above the yard of the coal-merchant, facing east and looking down at a slight angle on the stretch of terraced houses opposite that ran between the bottom openings of Scarletwell Street and Spring Lane. Dipping his horned and auburn head, the devil whispered in the youngster’s ear.
“You know, whenever they describe this ride I can provide, they always get it wrong. They tell how the great devil slippery Sam O’Day, if asked, will bear you up above the world and let you see its homes and houses with their roofs gone, so that all the folk inside are visible. That’s true enough, for as far as it goes, but it misunderstands what’s really going on. Yes, I bear people up above the world, but only in the sense that I can lift them, if I choose, into a higher mathematical dimension such as those we’ve been discussing. As for my supposed ability to vanish all the rooftops so that sorcerers can spy upon their neighbours’ wives at bath-time, how am I expected to do that? And if I could, why would I bother to? This Flight is my most legendary attribute, apart from all the murders. Don’t they think I might have something to impart that’s rather more important than a glimpse of nipple? Here, you look down at the houses for yourself, and tell me what you think you’re looking at. Have I made all the rooftops disappear, or haven’t I?”
Of course, the devil knew that this was far from a straightforward question. That was largely why he’d asked it, just to watch the puzzled and conflicted look upon the child’s face when he tried to answer.
“No. All of the rooftops are still there and I can see them, but …”
The boy paused for a moment, as if inwardly debating something, then went on.
“… but I can see the people in the rooms inside as well. In Mrs. Ward’s house on the end I can see Mrs. Ward upstairs putting a stone hot-water bottle in the bed, and Mr. Ward’s downstairs. He’s sitting listening to the radio. How can I see them both when they’re on different floors? Shouldn’t there be a ceiling in the way? And how can I see either of them if the roof’s still there?”
The devil was, despite himself, impressed. Children could sometimes take you by surprise like that. You tended to forget amidst the chatter and inanity that their perceptions and their minds were working much, much harder than those of their adult counterparts. This infant had just posed a more incisive question, with more honest curiosity, than mangled Sam O’Day’s last fifteen hell-bound necromancers put together. Thus, he did his best to furnish this intelligent enquiry with a suitable reply.
“Oh, I should think a bright young spark like you could answer that one for himself. You take a closer look. It isn’t that you’re looking <em>through</em> the roof and ceiling, is it?”
Michael Warren squinted dutifully.
“No. No, it’s more like I’m looking round the edge of them.”
The devil hugged the boy until he yelped.
“Good lad! Yes, that’s exactly what you’re doing, peeping into a sealed house around an edge you normally can’t see. It’s like if there were people who were flat, what they call two-dimensional, who lived on a flat sheet of paper. If you were to draw a box round one of them, then that flat person would be sealed off from the rest of the flat world and its inhabitants. They wouldn’t see him, since he would be out of sight behind the line-walls that you’d drawn around him, nor would he be able to see them, enclosed in his flat box.
“But you’re the one who drew the lines, and you have three dimensions. In comparison to all the little flat folk, you have one more whole dimension you can work with, which gives you a big advantage. You can look down through the open top side of the square you’ve drawn, look down through a dimension that the flat folk cannot see and do not know about. You can look down upon the flat chap in the box by looking at him from an angle that, to him, does not exist. Now do you understand how you can see your upstairs and your downstairs neighbours both at once, despite the roof and ceiling in the way? It’s just a matter of perspective. Doesn’t that make much more sense than me conspiring to hide all the rooftops in some unimaginable manner? What am I supposed to do with all the slates?”
The child was staring down towards the row of houses with a dazed expression, but was slowly nodding as if he had taken in at least the bare bones of what he had just been told. Kids had a flexibility and a resilience to their ideas about reality that grown-ups didn’t, in the main. In scrambled Sam O’Day’s opinion, trying to break the spirit or the sanity of children was more effort than the task was worth. Why bother with it? There were adults everywhere, and adults snapped like twigs. Warming reluctantly towards his sickeningly likeable and picture-postcard pretty passenger, the devil went on with his tour-guide’s monologue.
“In fact, if you were to look closer at your neighbours, you’d discover that you can see their internal organs and their skeletons around the edges of their skin. If you got closer still you could look round a hidden corner of their bones and see the marrow, though I wouldn’t recommend it. That’s the major reason why I keep my flight to up above the house-tops, if I’m honest. If we were much closer, you’d be too distracted by the blood and guts to properly take in the more important aspects of this educational experience. Would you like to look at the house that you once lived in?”
Michael Warren peered back up towards the fiend across one tartan shoulder. He looked eager, apprehensive, and quite sad. It was, the devil thought, a very adult, complicated look for such a youthful face.
“Yes please. Only, if everybody’s crying, can we go away again? That wizzle make me cry as well, if they’re unhappy.”
Shifty Sam O’Day refrained from pointing out that Michael’s family were hardly likely to be wearing party hats and blowing paper squeakers so soon after his demise, but simply carried the dead child a few doors further down the terrace, heading south. A breeze out of the west brought the perfume of iron and weeds from off the rail-yards where forgotten tenders peeled and rusted, and the white lights were a rationed, sparing sugar frosting on the blustery Boroughs dark. The devil halted over number 17.
“There, now. Let’s see what’s going on.”
The devil gasped at the same moment that the little boy did. What they could glimpse going on inside the house was, frankly, the last thing that either of them had foreseen. If anything the fiend was more astonished than the kid, being much less accustomed to surprises. This one was a shock and no mistake, like when they’d driven him from Persia all those centuries ago by burning fish livers and incense. He’d not been expecting that, and neither had he been expecting this.
The upstairs floor of number 17 was currently deserted, as were the front room and passageway. Only the living room and kitchen were lit-up and occupied, containing half a dozen people by the devil’s estimate. A thin old lady with her smoke-grey hair pinned up into a bun stood in the small back kitchen, waiting while a dented kettle on the gas stove reached the boil. Everyone else was loitering in the adjacent living room around a table set for tea. At one end, near the open kitchen door, a little girl of five or six was sitting in an infant’s high chair, which was much too small for her. An upturned pudding basin had been placed atop her head so that the man who stood behind her chair, a dark-haired fellow in his thirties, could cut round it as he trimmed her fringe. Another woman, also in her thirties, was positioned in between the table and the fireplace. She was in the act of moving a small plate of butter from the hearthside where it had been melting into golden oil and placing it towards the centre of the spread white tablecloth. As she did this she was glancing up towards the door that led out to the passage, which was opening as someone entered. This was a tall, solid-looking chap who had a red complexion and the leather-shouldered donkey-jacket of a labourer. In his arms he held …
“It’s me,” said Michael Warren in a startled tone of disbelief.
It was, as well. There was no getting round it, even in the fourth dimension.
Coming through the door into the living room with a broad grin across his rosy face, the burly working man was carrying a child, perhaps three years of age, a boy with elfin features and blonde curls that were quite unmistakeable. It was a slightly smaller version of the little spirit that the fiend was currently suspending up above the rooftops. It was Michael Warren, evidently very much alive and unaware that he was at that moment being studied by his own bewildered ghost.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” predicted screwed-up Sam O’Day with confidence.
How had the white-haired builder managed it, especially with a black eye and mild concussion? How had he escaped the snooker that his colleague and opponent had ensnared him in? The devil tried imagining a trick shot that would furnish the unprecedented outcome he was at that moment witnessing, but found to his embarrassment that he could not. The trilliard ball that represented Michael Warren must at some point have been knocked into the pocket that was decorated with a golden skull, the death-hole at the table’s northeast corner. Otherwise his soul would not have been careening round the Attics of the Breath in its pyjamas. Just as obviously, the ball had then somehow bounced out again, or in some other fashion been returned to play, returned to life. If not, who was the rascal with the white-gold ringlets being welcomed back into the bosom of his family, down below in the unfolded pop-up book of number 17, St. Andrew’s Road? This merited, the devil thought, closer investigation.
“This is certainly a turn-up for the books. Up here you’re dead, yet down there you’re alive again. I wonder why? Are you by any chance some kind of zombie from a voodoo film? Or, more remotely, I suppose you might be the messiah. What do you think? Were there any signs or omens coinciding with your birth, clouds shaped like crowns, rays of unearthly light or anything like that?”
The youngster shook his head, still gaping at the cheery scene being played out beneath him.
“No. We’re only ordinary. Everybody’s ordinary on Andrew’s Road. What does it mean, that I’m down there? Does it mean that I won’t be dead for very long?”
The devil shrugged.
“It certainly appears that way, though I confess that for the life of me I can’t see how. There’s something very complicated going on with you, young man, and I’m a devil for complexity. Perhaps your background might provide some sort of clue? Come, tell me who those people are, the ones squealing with joy at your return and milling round the room down there. Who’s that old lady in the kitchen?”
Michael Warren sounded both cautiously proud and touchingly protective as he ventured his reply.
“That’s Clara Swan, and she’s my gran. She’s got the longest hair of anybody in the world, but it’s all tied up in a bun because when it hangs down it catches fire. She used to be a servant for some people in a great big house.”
The devil raised one bristling eyebrow thoughtfully. There were a number of big houses round these parts. It wasn’t likely that this toddler’s grandmother had served the Spencers out at Althorp, but you never knew. The boy continued his inventory.
“The other lady is my mum, who’s called Doreen. When she wiz just a little girl they had a war, and her and my aunt Emma watched a bomber crash in Gold Street from their bedroom window. That man carrying me, coming through the door, that’s my dad. He’s called Tommy, and he rolls big heavy barrels at the brewery. Everybody says he dresses very well, and that he’s good at dancing, but I’ve never seen him doing it. The other man’s my uncle Alf who drives a double-decker bus and rides a bicycle when he calls in to see our gran on his way home from work. He cuts our hair for us, the way he’s doing for my sister Alma. She’s the bossy girl in the high chair.”
Unseen by his small passenger, the devil’s irises turned black for several seconds with surprise, then faded back to their initial colours, red or green, the stains of war or else the stains of outdoor love. His young charge had a sister, and her name was Alma. Alma Warren. Reconstructed Sam O’Day had heard of Alma Warren. She’d grow up to be a moderately famous artist, doing paperback and record covers, who had intermittent visionary spasms. During one of these she would, in thirty years or so, attempt a portrait of the Fifth Infernal Duke in his full dress regalia, the reptile and arachnid image-wrap with the electric peacock-feather trim. The picture wouldn’t be much of a likeness, and she wouldn’t even bother trying to depict the lizard lining of his tailored aura, but the devil would feel vaguely flattered all the same. The artist clearly found her subject beautiful, and if he’d felt the same way about her it might have been his Persian passion all over again. Unfortunately, Alma Warren would grow up into a frightful dog, and switchback Sam O’Day was very picky when it came to women. Back in Persia, Raguel’s daughter Sara had been luscious. Even Lil his ex-wife, who had fornicated with abominations, hadn’t let herself go to the same extent that Alma Warren would do. Though the devil would admit that he quite liked the woman, he would also quickly point out that he didn’t like her in <em>that</em> way, just in case anybody got the wrong idea.
So, Michael Warren was the pretty brother of alarming-looking Alma Warren, who could somehow entice fiends to sit for her. And then there was that strange event of cryptic import that would take place nearly fifty years from now, in 2006, with which the woman artist would be heavily involved. Within the trillion-fragment jigsaw of the demon-king’s elaborate mind, the pieces started tumbling into intriguing new arrangements. Something positively Byzantine was going on, the devil was more certain by the moment. He reviewed what he could pre-remember of the labyrinthine pattern of events that would surround the early years of the next century, looking for clues and for connections. There was all that business of a female saint in the twenty-fives, with which the devil had a personal involvement. That affair had tenuous links with the occurrences in 2006, links that related to the ancestry of Alma Warren …
And her brother.
Oh, now, this was interesting. They were siblings, and so had their ancestry in common.
That meant Michael Warren was a Vernall too. It didn’t matter if he knew it, and it mattered less whether he liked it. He was tied by blood-bonds to the old profession, to the ancient trade.
The fiend knew that the greater part of Mansoul’s unique local terminology came from the Norman or the Saxon, phrases such as Frith Bohr, Porthimoth di Norhan and the like. Vernall was older, though. The devil could recall hearing the word around these parts since, what, the Roman occupation? And he had a notion that it might derive from earlier traditions still, from Druids or the antlered Hob-men that preceded them, weird figures crouching in the smoke-drifts of antiquity. Though Vernall was a job description, it described an occupation that was based in an archaic world-view, one which had not been in evidence for some two thousand years and one which did not see reality in terms the modern world would recognise.
A Vernall tended to the boundaries and corners, and it was in the mundane sense of a common verger that the term came to be understood throughout the Boroughs during medieval times. The ragged edges that comprised a Vernall’s jurisdiction, though, had not originally been limited to those weed-strangled margins of the mortal and material world alone.
The corners that a Vernall had traditionally marked and measured and attended to were those that bent into the fourth direction; were the junctions that existed between life and death, madness and sanity, between the Upstairs and the Downstairs of existence. Vernalls overlooked the crossroads of two very different planes, sentinels straddling a gulf that no one else could see. As such they would be prone to certain instabilities, yet at the same time often were recipient to more-than-normal insights, talents or capacities. In just the recent lineage of Michael Warren and his sister Alma, shook-up Sam O’Day could think of three or four striking examples of these odd hereditary tendencies. There had been Ernest Vernall, working on the restoration of St. Paul’s when he fell into conversation with a builder. Snowy Vernall, Ernest’s fearless son, and Thursa, Ernest’s daughter, with her preternatural grasp of higher-space acoustics. There had been ferocious May, the deathmonger, and the magnificent and tragic Audrey Vernall, languishing at present in a run-down mental hospital abutting Berry Wood. Vernalls observed the corners of mortality, and watched the bend that all too often they would end up going round themselves.
Hanging above St. Andrew’s Road with Michael Warren’s tiny essence held between his claws, the devil counted all the aces in the hand of information he’d been dealt. This clueless child, currently dead but in a few days time apparently alive, had been the cause of a colossal brawl between the Master Builders. More than this he was a Vernall by descent, related to a woman artist who was central to the crucial business that would take place in the spring of 2006. This forthcoming event was known, in Mansoul, as the Vernall’s Inquest. Much depended on it, not least the eventual destiny of certain damned souls that the fiend had a specific interest in. There might be some way slipshod Sam O’Day could tweak the dew-dropped strands of interwoven circumstance to his advantage. He would have to think about it.
Though excited by the tingling web of possibilities, the devil managed to sound nonchalant as he addressed the captive boy.
“Hmm. Well, your family all seem very pleased to have you back with them, but it appears there’s been a dreadful mix-up here. At some point over the next day or so you obviously come back to life, so probably you’re not meant to be running round Upstairs at all. I’d better end my flight and take you back up to the Attics of the Breath until I can decide what’s to be done with you.”
The astral toddler shifted in the devil’s grip. It seemed as if, once reassured that being dead would not be permanent in his case, Michael Warren was beginning to enjoy this ride the fiend had promised him and was reluctant to see it concluded. He conceded with a heavy sigh, as if doing the devil an enormous favour.
“I suppose so, but don’t go so fast this time. You said you’d answer questions for me, but I can’t ask any if my mouth’s all full of wind.”
The devil gravely tipped his horns in the direction of the infant dangling beneath him.
“Fair enough. I’ll take it nice and easy, so that you can ask me anything you like.”
He turned in a great spiral fan of red and green and started drifting north along St. Andrew’s Road towards the meadow sheltering at the foot of Spencer Bridge. They’d barely reached the fireside-flavoured heights above the coal merchant’s before the lad had formulated his first irritating query.
“How does it all work, then, life and death?”
How nice. He’d got a little Wittgenstein for company. Unseen behind the kiddy’s back, the devil opened wide his fang-filled jaws and mimed biting the baby’s head off, chewing it a time or two, then spitting it into the bays of heaped up slack below them. Relishing this fleeting fantasy, he let his features settle back into their customary insidious leer as he replied.
“There’s really only life. Death’s an illusion of perspective that afflicts the third dimension. Only in the mortal and three-sided world do you see time as something that is passing, vanishing away behind you into nothingness. You think of time as something that one day will be used up, will all be gone. Seen from a higher plane, though, time is nothing but another distance, just the same as height or breadth or depth. Everything in the universe of space and time is going on at once, occurring in a glorious super-instant with the dawn of time on one side of it and time’s end upon the other. All the minutes in between, including those that mark the decades of your lifespan, are suspended in the grand, unchanging bubble of existence for eternity.
“Think of your life as being like a book, a solid thing where the last line’s already written while you’re starting the first page. Your consciousness progresses through the narrative from its beginning to its end, and you become caught up in the illusion of events unfolding and time going by as these things are experienced by the characters within the drama. In reality, however, all the words that shape the tale are fixed upon the page, the pages bound in their unvarying order. Nothing in the book is changing or developing. Nothing in the book is moving save the reader’s mind as it moves through the chapters. When the story’s finished and the book is closed, it does not burst immediately into flames. The people in the story and their twists of fortune are not disappeared without a trace as though they’d not been written. All the sentences describing them are still there in the solid and unchanging tome, and at your leisure you may read the whole of it again as often as you like.
“It’s just the same with life. Why, every second of it is a paragraph you will revisit countless times and find new meanings in, although the wording is not changed. Each episode remains unaltered at its designated point within the text, and every moment thus endures forever. Moments of exquisite bliss and moments of profound despair, suspended in time’s endless amber, all the hell or heaven any brimstone preacher could conceivably desire. Each day and every deed’s eternal, little boy. Live them in such a way that you can bear to live with them eternally.”
The pair were floating in amongst the treetops of the darkened meadow, heading in the rough direction of the public lavatories that had once been a slipper-baths, at the far end. A plume of fading snapshots smouldered in their wake. The dangling child was silent for a while as he digested what the devil had just said, but only for a while.
“Well, if my life’s a story and when I get to the end I just go back and live it all again, then where wiz that Upstairs place that you found me in?”
The devil grimaced, by now starting to get bored with the responsibilities of parenthood.
“Upstairs is simply on a higher plane with more dimensions than the three or four that you’re familiar with down here. Think of it as a sort of library or reading room, a place where all of you can stand outside of time, re-reading your own marvellous adventures, or, if you should choose, move onward to explore your further possibilities in that remarkable and everlasting place. Speaking of which, the elm that we’re approaching is the one we can ascend into the Attics of the Breath. If you’d prefer I’ll go up slowly so that you can understand what’s happening.”
Hanging there in a breeze perfumed by coal and chlorophyll, suspended like the undercarriage of some gaudy pirate zeppelin, Michael Warren uttered a mistrustful murmur of assent. As they sailed closer to the designated elm the devil savoured the small boy’s bewilderment at the perceptual changes he was no doubt going through. The tree seemed to be getting larger as they neared it, just as one would usually expect, except that this was not accompanied by a sensation that the pair of them were truly getting any nearer to their destination. It felt more as if the further they progressed towards the tree, the smaller they themselves were getting. In an effort to pre-empt a flood of questions from his passenger, the fiend instead elected to explain the process to the lad.
“You’re probably wondering why we appear to be becoming smaller, or alternatively why that elm there seems to be becoming monstrously enlarged as we get closer to it. It’s all on account of a discrepancy between the way dimensions look to one another. We talked earlier about the notion of flat people who had only two dimensions, living hypothetically within the limits of a sheet of paper. Well, imagine that the sheet of paper they were living in had actually been folded up to form a paper cube. They would be living in a world of three dimensions, but with their perceptions limited to only two dimensions, they could never see or understand it to be so. That’s quite like human beings, things with three dimensions living in a universe of four dimensions that they cannot properly perceive.
“Now, you’ve been taken up onto a loftier plane yet, as if our little flat chap had been moved into a space where he could overlook not only his flat world of two dimensions, but could also see the cube that it in fact was part of. How would a shape with three dimensions translate in the thoughts and the perceptions of a being who had only two? Without the concept of a cube, might not our flattened fellow see it as much like the flat, square world he was familiar with, but bigger somehow, in some way that he could not define? That’s the effect that you’re experiencing now, that you experienced if you looked back into whichever portal you climbed up through to the Attics of the Breath. Didn’t the room in which you’d died look so much vaster than it had in life? In fact, I don’t know if you ever suffered from a fever or delirium when you were still alive, in which the bedroom walls seemed to be frighteningly far away? You did? That sometimes happens when a human’s wandering in the clammy territories between life and death. They get a glimpse of their environment’s true scale, as it will seem to them when they’ve moved up a plane or two. I mean, look at the elm now. It’s enormous.”
And indeed it was, as was the formerly small meadow that surrounded it. The devil tipped into a spiralling trajectory around the vertical and craggy landscape of the trunk, reprising the manoeuvre he’d adopted when he’d carried Michael Warren here into this world, except at greatly reduced speed and heading up instead of down. As they described their first slow circle round the tree and doubled back upon themselves, the phantom ribbon of stop-motion images that they were leaving in their wake became more evident, predominately red and green, winding across the grassy plot to wind itself around the now-gigantic elm. They spiralled up towards the hidden point at which shambolic Sam O’Day knew there to be a crook-door that would let them back into the Attics, but before they’d reached it his increasingly infuriating cargo had thought up another tiresome question.
“How do trees grow up into the Upstairs place, when they’ve got roots down here next to the public lavs? And what about the pigeons that wiz sitting in the branches higher up? How can they all go back and forth without them being dead like me?”
Anagram Sam was glad that his and Lil’s relationship had borne no offspring. Well, she’d given birth to a great ooze of monsters, obviously, things like dogs turned inside out and things like flattened yard-wide crabs that were the lurid pink of bubble gum. Such horrors, though, did little more than babble senselessly or howl until their mother got fed up and ate them during her post-natal blues. They barely had awareness of their own grotesque existence, much less the ability to formulate an irritating question, and were thus preferable to human kids like this one was, for all that he had two blue eyes and they had either none at all or several red ones clustered at the centres of their faces as is the arrangement with tarantulas. The devil tried to keep a civil tone as he replied.
“My, aren’t you the enquiring little scholar? Well, the answer is that in the case of trees and certain other forms of plant life, they already have a structure that expresses perfectly a timeless life in more than three dimensions. Being motionless, the only movement is that of their growth, which leaves a solid trail of wood behind in much the same way we ourselves are leaving a long stream of ghostly images. The tree’s shape <em>is</em> its history, each bough the curve of a magnificent time-statue which I can assure you that we folk Upstairs appreciate just as enthusiastically as do you humans.
“As for pigeons they are not at all as other birds, and different rules apply to them. For one thing, their perceptions are five times as fast as those of people or most other animals. This means they have a very different sense of time, with all things in the world save them slowed to a crawl in their quicksilver minds. More interesting still they are one of the only birds, in fact one of the only living creatures not a mammal, which can feed its young with milk. I don’t pretend to know exactly why the pigeon should be favoured over all the other beasts in its relation to the higher realm, but I imagine that the business with the milk has got a lot to do with it. It probably enhances their symbolic value in the eyes of management, so that they have a special dispensation to behave as psychopomps and flutter back and forth between the pastures of the living and the dead, something like that. I’m not sure what they’re for, but mark my words, there’s more to pigeons than most people think.”
They circled upward at a stately pace around a trunk now some ten yards across and getting on a hundred feet in its circumference. Aware now that the crook-door which gave access to the Attics of the Breath was only one twist further up the spiral, well-spun Sam O’Day decided that he’d best inform his bothersome young fellow traveller exactly what the doorway was before he took him through it, to forestall the high-pitched inquisition that inevitably would accompany such an initiative.
“Before you ask, just up round the next bend there’s something called a crook-door. It’s a kind of four-way hinge between dimensions that will take us back Upstairs into Mansoul. Most earthly rooms have got a crook door in at least one upper corner, and most open spaces have as well, although with open spaces you can only make out where the corners are when you’re Upstairs and looking down. Unless, of course, you happen to be something that has made the journey countless times, like, say, a demon or a pigeon, and you know by heart where every entrance is located. Be prepared, now. There’s a crook-door just ahead of us, and as we go through you’ll feel something flip inside you as we switch from the perspective of this lower world to that of the superior plane above.”
The fiend increased his speed a little, soaring up towards the occult corner he could sense, invisible, not very far above. As they and the red-green procession trailing after them swirled closer to the unseen aperture, like paint-stained water circling an inverted sky-drain, all the noises of the neighbourhood were stretched and elongated to the escalating din of a string-heavy orchestra. The cars on Spencer Bridge, the goods-train rattling beneath it and the murmur of the nearby river, all these sounds were pulled into a cavernous bass drone by the acoustics of the Upstairs world that waited overhead.
As the syllabic salad that was Sam O’Day had just predicted, when they shot out through the crook-door and traversed the juncture of two planes there was a moment when it felt as if their stomachs had turned over, but inside their heads. Then, in a flurry of bright apple colours they exploded from a fifty-foot square aperture framed with a trim of bark that had been greatly magnified, zipped one more time round the titanic elm and splashed amidst a pillow-fight of pigeons up into the ringing heights above the Attics of the Breath.
Beyond the glass roof, silver lines on black mapped out the facets of a splendidly unfurled dodecahedroid that was moving slowly, like a becalmed galleon of lights, through the unbounded darkness outside the immense arcade. The devil hovered for a moment with the dressing gown-clad child clutched tight against his breast, against the clanging of his mighty anvil heart, and then commenced a leisurely flight back along the vast emporium’s length towards the purple and vermillion of sunset in the east. He’d take the boy back to the stretch of that colossal corridor, the early afternoon of some few days before, where they’d first happened on each other. Once there, he’d decide what should be done about this little puzzle, who was dead one minute and alive the next, whose plight had got the very builders worked up into a stupendous slapping match.
He hoped to pass the journey privately reviewing all his options, all the moves that might be made in the trans-temporal chess game that was his elaborate existence, his bedizened web. Ideally, he’d have time to carefully consider every way in which his opportune encounter with this bonny lad, this Vernall that he’d met upon their customary corner between here and the hereafter, could be turned to shuffling Sam O’Day’s future advantage. Sadly, his anticipations proved unduly optimistic and they’d barely sailed a hundred yards before the pendant tyke struck up another round of Twenty Questions.
“So, then, why is this place called Mansoul?”
The devil was beginning to chew through his famously short tether. Yes, he’d promised that he’d answer any queries that the kid might put to him, but this was getting past a joke. Didn’t this squeaking ferret ever take a break from his interrogations? Suspect Sam O’Day was modifying his appraisal of the manner in which Michael Warren’s life had ended. Where he’d earlier supposed that the boy’s trusting nature might have led him into murderous hands or an abandoned fridge, he now thought it more likely that the infant had been done away with by his relatives in an attempt to shut the little blighter up. Although obliged by all the rules of demonology to furnish a reply, the devil couldn’t keep a bitter edge entirely from his tone as he complied.
“It’s called Mansoul because Mansoul’s its name. It’s like somebody asking you why you’re called Michael Warren. You’re called that because that’s who you are, and Mansoul’s called Mansoul because that’s what it is. I mean, you couldn’t give a thing a plainer label. It’s entirely self-explanatory and anyone with any sense would just accept it, although I can see you’re not included in that category.
“One of your better human poets, footsore Bunyan, jailbird John, he used to wander through the earthly township of Northampton from his home in nearby Bedfordshire, and at the same time he was wandering in his poetic vision through this higher aspect of the place. Some passing spirit must have told him the location’s name, and by some huge fluke he was able to remember it when he returned to mortal consciousness, or at least long enough to jot it down and use it in his pamphlet <em>Holy War</em>.”
They soared down the eternal hall, while up above the colours of the firmament outside wound back through time, from midnight jet to violet dusk and sundown like a burning slaughterhouse. Below, the dizzying row of vats went flickering by, punched holes on the unreeling music-roll of an old Pianola. As they passed beneath the blue-grey heavens of the previous day and on towards the glistening oyster-shell of dawn, the devil felt sure from the quality of Michael Warren’s thoughtful silence that the child was formulating yet another fatuous enquiry, and at least in that one sense he wasn’t disappointed.
“Why did you say that it wiz a fluke how that man could remember anything? And wizzle I remember all of this when I come back to life?”
The devil snarled his answer, spitting inadvertent beads of caustic venom on the collar of the infant’s dressing gown and bleaching out the tartan fabric in a trail of smouldering white-yellow burns.
“No, sonny Jim, you won’t. It’s one of the immutable conditions that attends the way in which the thing you see as time is really structured. Nothing that occurs here, in this place outside of time, truly has time to be committed unto mortal memory. If you pass through the narrative that is your life a thousand times, still every thought and deed shall be exactly as it was upon the first such passage. You’ll have no recall of having said or done these things before, save for those momentary lapses of forgetfulness that people know as déjà vu. And save such fragments as you may retrieve from dreams, or rarities such as John Bunyan’s vision, no one ever has the faintest recollection of what happens to them in these elevated climes. So, really, there’s no point in asking me these bloody stupid questions, is there? You’ll forget the whole experience once you’re returned to life, and that will mean that it has been a waste of your time, and, more woefully, my own. If you’d got any idea what a devil has to go through in the normal course of its existence then you wouldn’t plague me with these ultimately useless trivialities.”
They were then travelling through the pearl and raspberry atmosphere of Friday’s dawn, onward and into the black thread-lit tunnel that was Thursday night. Craning his neck to look back at the fiend across one drool-scorched shoulder, Michael Warren’s cherub face was such that you might think he was attempting to be sly as he responded to the devil’s outburst, if his slyness hadn’t been so clumsy and transparent.
“Well, why don’t you tell me what a devil has to go through, then? What are you, anyway? Are you somebody who wiz very bad, or have you always been a devil? You said that you’d answer anything I asked you, so you answer that.”
The devil ground his fangs to glistering pumice, although looking on the bright side, if he absolutely had to chat to this insufferably perky young pyjama-piglet, then it might as well be about something that he never shied from speaking of at length, namely himself.
“Well, since you ask, no. No, I haven’t always been a devil. When the luminescent halo that is space-time rippled out from non-existence, all at once, then I saw the entirety of my immortal being, which included this benighted period that I must spend in service as a lowly fiend. But how I am now is not how I was back at the start of things, nor is it how I shall be when I’m further down my road. Back at my outset, I was but a glorious part, one of a myriad comprising a far greater entity that basked in simple being, there before the advent of both world and time. I was a builder back then, if you can believe that. Had the white frock and the billiard cue and everything.
“You have to bear in mind that this was back before there was time as we know it now, or a material universe of any sort. There wasn’t any trouble. Naturally, that didn’t last. It was decided higher up that part of the great being of which I was one component should be pushed down two or three dimensions to create a plane of physical existence. In effect, some of us were demoted from a world of naught but light and bliss into this new construction, this new realm of bodily sensation, of emotions and the endless torrent of delights and torments that those things entail. I’ll grudgingly admit that this disastrous reshuffle might well have been necessary, in some way that we who laboured in the lower ranks were not aware of. Even so, it bloody hurt.
“I’m not complaining, mind you. There were others far worse off than I. You might recall I mentioned Satan earlier, and said you wouldn’t recognise him if you saw him. That’s because he was the first and greatest to be cast down into emptiness, his fiery energies cooled and condensed to matter, that sublime magnificence reduced to backfill. Take a peek beneath us at the tanks we’re flying over, at the apertures that look down on the mortal plane. In their depths you can make out the contorted coral stems that are in fact the living as seen without time. Their luminous and gem-like qualities have earned these growths, amongst the spirit population of Mansoul, the name of ‘jewellery’. That’s not, however, what we devils call them. We refer to them as ‘Satan’s Guts’. That’s him, in every shuddering, mysterious particle of the corporeal universe. That’s what became of him, of his immortal blazing body. Like I say, I got off light, comparatively speaking.”
Unstuck Sam O’Day, an oriental fighting kite of threatening device, fluttered in silence for a moment down the Attics of the Breath, along the starlit stretch of passage that was Wednesday night, towards its sunset end. He’d quite upset himself with all that talk about the shining hero who’d become the solid world, become the Satan, the great obstacle, the stumbling block. Still, the distressing tale had kept his paying passenger from kicking up a fuss … and Michael Warren would at some point pay his fare as they’d agreed, the devil would make sure of it. He hadn’t made his mind up as to how yet, that was all. Mindful in case too long a pause should launch a fresh barrage of questions and complaints, the fiend resumed his narrative.
“So there we were, in a dawn world constructed from the living substance of our former governor, still reeling from the onslaught of new feelings and perceptions, left entirely to our own devices, or as much as anybody can be in a predetermined universe. Those were great times to be alive in, I can tell you. They still are, if I fly eastward far enough along the temporal axis of my being. All of those tremendous days still going on, back where we’re all still young and angry and invincible.
“We soon found out, from one of the more easily-duped builders, what this whole new earthly plane had been created for. It turned out it was something called organic life. This, in our eyes, was an exceptionally tricky form of muddy puddle, though in your terms it was probably your trillion-times-great-grandmother. But long before anything even faintly like a human being turned up, we realised that this fleshy business was the only game in town. However, credit where it’s due, it wasn’t until people scrambled wet and shivering from the gene-pool that we knew we’d hit the jackpot. Naturally, by then we’d seen a preview of the whole thing played out on the symbol-level, with the man and woman in their garden and all that, but actually, if anything the squalid mess of the reality was even better.
“Due respect to the symbolic version, though. It had its high points. The young lovely cast initially as Adam’s wife before Eve got the part was a real shocker by the name of Lil. I later married her myself, after she’d walked out on her husband in the first celebrity divorce, with incompatibility as the main reason cited. What had happened was that Adam, being up here on the symbol plane, had eyesight that perceived the world with four dimensions. It was like when you were looking down upon your house just now, and you could view your home’s interior by peering round the walls, around an edge that isn’t usually there. That’s how it went with Lil and Adam. His first glimpse of her was a disaster. He could see around her skin, around the muscles underneath, around her bowels to where the slow chyme moved within them. He was sick all up the Tree of Knowledge. Lil was understandably offended, and went off to copulate with monsters, of which, luckily, I was amongst the very first.”
The King of Wrath and Michael Warren glided down the length of Wednesday, with the sky beyond the curved glass canopy an overcast and nacreous grey, the lines and angles of its hyper-cumuli limned in a ghostly pink. The tartan package slapdash Sam O’Day was carrying appeared to be absorbed in the unfolding of the fiend’s autobiography and, grateful for the silence, the infernal eminence decided to continue with his deadtime story.
“Back near the beginning, there’s a patch where me and Lil are married, but it doesn’t last. She was too clingy when she could get suction, and I was too headstrong with too many heads. Besides, the human race was waiting just a little further up the line, with all those comely beauties. Human women were a revelation to me, I can tell you, after Lil. Once you’ve had vertebrate there’s no return, and once you look at something with a backbone, there’s no looking back. You’re only young, so you won’t understand about all this, but trust me. I’m the devil, and I know whereof I speak.
“Of all the fiends in Hell, I like to think I was the most romantic and the most appreciative of female charms. In Persia, long ago, there’s an occasion where I fall horns over tail in love with an exotic flower named Sara, daughter of a chap named Raguel. You should have seen how shy I was when I was courting her. I’d give her precious gifts and hardly let her get a glimpse of me, just leave some sign to tell her I’d been there: a necklace resting on a silken cushion, possibly, while part of the room’s carpet was on fire nearby. When finally and bashfully I introduced myself to her, as I thought in the manner of the Beauty and the Beast, her overwrought reaction was no idyll from a fairy tale, I can assure you. Barely were the words ‘I love you’ spoken by one of my mouths than my beloved suffered what I think you humans call a stroke. It wasn’t serious, and after a few days she could speak properly again, at which point she began describing her encounter with me in the most unflattering of terms.
“I was castigated as a horror, a destroyer, when the woman hardly knew me. She completely overlooked all of the admirable things there are about me, and instead portrayed me as some violent and inhuman stereotype. What’s worse, she really rubbed it in by suddenly announcing her forthcoming marriage to another suitor. Naturally, I choked the life out of him on their wedding night, but that’s only what anyone would do in such provoking circumstances. And besides, despite what she claimed later, I could tell that she was only flirting with these other men because she liked to see me angry. Why else would she have proceeded to announce her marriage to a second groom before her first was buried, if she wasn’t trying to lead me on and make me jealous? So I killed him too. I threw him off a balcony. To cut a tedious story short, I did the same with her next five. That’s seven men in all that I despatched by choking, falling, drowning, burning, straight decapitation, an internal haemorrhage, and finally a heart attack. I almost thought of it as sending her bouquets. I thought she must be interested in me. Why else would she constantly be trying to attract my murderous attention by announcing yet another marriage? Any normal woman, surely, after number five’s head had gone bouncing off down the bedchamber stairs, would have just given up on matrimony and enshrined herself within a nunnery.
“Well, anyway, it turned out I was wrong. She wasn’t playing hard to get. She genuinely didn’t like me. Off she goes to see some conjuror … a class of people, incidentally, that I despise … and gets him to enact what these days would be known as a restraining order. He burned certain substances upon a brazier, preventing me from going near her, in effect deporting me from Persia into Egypt. The ingratitude! Where did those people think they had acquired their grasp of numbers and exquisite patterning if not from me? So, knowing where I wasn’t wanted, I decamped to Egypt and took all the mathematics with me. That, I thought, would teach them, or to be more accurate, it wouldn’t.”
Up beyond the glass roof, Wednesday’s dawn flared briefly before giving way to the black miles of Tuesday night. The hanging toddler was still listening intently to the devil’s monologue.
“In Egypt, though, I got into a spot of bother. Egypt had a reputation as a demon hotspot back at that point of its history, and there were dozens of us hanging out down there. You talk about associating with the wrong crowd. It was trouble waiting quite demonstrably to happen.
“Things came to a head when one of the more lowly devils was tormenting mortal builders in nearby Jerusalem. When the unsettled victims sought King Solomon’s protection, he was able to use magic to ensnare the demon that had been responsible. Now, Solomon, he was a clever bugger, no mistake. This devil that he’d captured was then pressurized and threatened until he gave up the names of everybody in the gang, the whole six dozen of us, from Bael to Andromalius. I was about the only one who put up any sort of fight, but it was ultimately pointless. Solomon had got us dead to rights and set us all to work building his temple for him, in a sort of community service scheme. We got our own back though. There’s troubles that we built into that temple and its site that people wouldn’t understand the scale of for three thousand years or more.
“Since then we’ve roamed the lower and the upper worlds unsupervised, having adventures, dooming occultists, pursuing various hobbies and that sort of thing. In mortal terms, we’re probably best seen as living patterns made out of distinct and different urges, different energies. We’re also a dimension down from the three-sided human realm, in that compared to you we’re flat like parquet flooring, although naturally our tessellations are much more elaborate.
“We’ve had the time, since we were first cast down, to come to terms with our condition and to understand our place in the divine arrangement. We believe that we, like all created things, have the capacity to change and grow. It is our hope that in a thousand or so mortal years we shall again attain the limitless, exalted state that we were born to. Mankind is the sole impediment to our ambitions. If we are to reach the highest realm from our current location in the lowest, then the middle realm must first be pushed up from below, ahead of us. If not, our one alternative is clawing our way through you, I’m afraid, should we desire to ever see the sun again.”
Outside, the heavens changed from black to mauve to gold, from gold to grey, from Tuesday night to Tuesday morning. As non-standard Sam O’Day flapped backwards down the days with Michael Warren in his rustling arms, he was in one compartment of his Chinese Box intelligence still calculating means by which he might exploit his meeting with the boy. There was somebody in the Boroughs, waiting unsuspectingly some decades down the line, that the arch-demon wanted killed, and someone else he wanted saved. There might yet be some way he could persuade this trusting child to help with one or both of these endeavours.
Tacking against the cold drafts of the unending corridor, they swooped through pale dawn into blacked-out small hours and the miles of Monday midnight. In the east, the sunset of the afternoon on which his passenger had died was looming. Evidently having realised that the devil’s narrative was over, his dependent with the bright churned-butter locks had rapidly devised another pointed question.
“Well, what I don’t understand wiz what you’re doing in the Boroughs when you’re so important. Why aren’t you off somewhere famous like Jerusalem or Egypt?”
The sky above the arcade was now molten as they came out of a graded lilac dusk. Though faintly riled by the young whippersnapper’s disbelieving tone, the fiend conceded that the point raised was a fair one, which deserved an answer.
“Frankly, I’d have thought it would be fairly obvious, even to you, that someone who has access to these timeless higher reaches can quite easily be almost everywhere at once. I’m not <em>just</em> in the Boroughs, and on this specific day in 1959 I’m up to mischief all over what people used to call the Holy Land, and in a lot of other volatile and sunny spots as well. But if I’m honest with you, as indeed I’m forced to be, I have grown very fond of this half-a-square-mile of dirt across the centuries.
“For one thing, well over a thousand years ago the Master Builders chose this town to site their rood, their cross-stone, marking out this land’s load-bearing centre. There, down on the lowly district’s southeast corner, there is England’s crux. Out from this central point extends a web of lines, connective creases on the map of space-time linking one place with another, paths imprinted on the fabric of reality by multiple human trajectories. People have journeyed to this crucial juncture from America, from Lambeth and, if we include the monk who followed the instructions of the builders in delivering their cross-stone, from Jerusalem itself. Though all these regions be remote one from another upon the material plane, seen from these higher mathematic reaches they are joined in the most gross and obvious of ways. Indeed, they’re almost the same place.
“The destinies of these locations are entangled in a way that living people cannot see. They act upon and so affect each other, but remotely, at a distance. If the monk I mentioned hadn’t come here from Jerusalem in the eighth century, come here from hallowed ground near where the lads and I built Solomon his temple, then there would have been no channel for the energies of the Crusades when they went crackling back from this site to Jerusalem some three hundred years later. And of course, after one of the earlier Crusades, one of your Norman knights was good enough to build a perfect replica, in Sheep Street, of the temple that King Solomon had made us put up for him in the Holy City. In the lattice of event and consequence, your meagre borough is a vital crossroads whereat war and wonder meet to shake each other by the hand. No, mark my words, this neighbourhood has fights and fires that make it fascinating to things such as I, and also less ignoble presences.
“Beyond all that, though, do you know, I’ve rather come to like the people here as well. Like is perhaps too strong a word, but let us say I feel a certain sympathy and kinship. Destitute and dirty, drunk as often as they can afford, avoided with revulsion and distaste by anyone of breeding, they, like me and mine, know what it is to be cast down and made into a demon. Well, good luck to them. Good luck to all of us disreputable devils.”
From the lodestone heights of sundown, Michael Warren and the fiend began a slow sycamore-pod descent into the languid summer atmospheres of Monday afternoon. Over the see-through arcade ceiling up above them, lines of polar white described the jewel-faced contours of an algebraic cirrus that unfolded against breathtaking cerulean. Below, the Pianola-music of the Attics’ floor was coming closer with its rows of great square spy-holes opening onto world and time, onto the gemstone snarl of Satan’s Guts.
Upon the corridor’s north side, dismembered Sam O’Day could see the pitch-sealed woodwork of the balcony where he’d first apprehended the small dressing gown-wrapped pilgrim, and, a little further down, the lower storeys where accreted dreams had risen up like stalagmites of psychic guano, forming a long terrace of surreal house- and shop-fronts. One of these establishments, a jumble of unconscious nonsense called ‘The Snail Races,’ had an alley-mouth not far away from it where a rotund old woman who was either dead, or dreaming, or else being dreamt, had set up a night-watchman’s brazier on which it seemed that she was roasting chestnuts. Other than the crone, hunched over her hot coals and utterly oblivious to the devil or his youthful hostage, there was nobody about the Attics of the Breath, at least in the vicinity of this specific moment of the day. Most gratifyingly, there were no black-eyed builders stalking back and forth with trilliard cues to set about the child-abducting Duke of Hell on his return. It looked like a safe place to put the boy down until spiral Sam could work out what to do with him.
Like settling vicious blossom with his streamers rippling up above him in Meccano colours, green and red, the devil touched down lightly on the sprung pine floorboards. He made a great show of setting Michael Warren safely back on terra firma in one piece, so that the infant would feel bad for ever having doubted his infernal benefactor’s honourable intentions.
“There! We’re right back where I found you, and without a blonde curl out of place. I’ll bet you’re starting to appreciate just what a decent fellow I can be. As well, I’ll bet you’re worrying about exactly how you’re going to pay me for the marvellous excursion we’ve just been on. Well, you needn’t fret. I’ve got a tiny errand you could do for me in mind. Then we’d be quits, like we agreed. You do remember our agreement, don’t you?”
The tot’s eyes were darting back and forth as he in turn considered and ruled out escape routes. You could almost see the miniature cogs turning in his head before he came to the discouraging conclusion that there wasn’t anywhere that he might run to where the devil couldn’t snatch him up before he’d gone three paces. With his gaze still fluttering about evasively, he nodded with reluctance in response to the fiend’s question.
“Yes. You said if I did you a favour sometime then you’d take me on your ride for nothing. But that wiz only a little while ago. You made it sound as if I wouldn’t have to pay the favour back until a long time had gone by.”
The devil smirked indulgently.
“I think you’ll find that what I said was you could do a favour for me further down the line, which is to say at some point in the future. As it happens, that’s exactly where my little errand’s going to take you. There’s a person living forty or so years due west of here, in the next century, who I’m not very happy with. What I’d be very much obliged if you’d arrange for me is to have this unpleasant person killed. Specifically, I want their breastbone smashed to flakes of chalk. I want their heart and lungs crushed into an undifferentiated pulp. Just carry out this simple task for me, and I’ll magnanimously cancel all outstanding debts between us. How’s that for a handsome proposition?”
Michael Warren’s jaw fell open and he mutely shook his head from side to side as he began to back uncertainly away from slinky Sam O’Day. The devil sighed regretfully and took a step towards the boy. Perhaps a livid and perpetual scar across his spirit-belly would convince him that there wasn’t really much room for negotiation here.
It was at this point that the sharp voice of the chestnut lady rang out from behind the demon’s back.
“Not that way, dear. You come towards me. Don’t let that old fright tell you what’s what.”
The fiend wheeled round indignantly upon the source of this ill-mannered interruption. Standing upright now beside her smoking brazier, the dream or ghost of the old biddy had pink cheeks and iron eyes that were fixed unwaveringly on the fiend. Dressed in black skirts she wore an apron that was also black, with iridescent scarabs and winged solar discs embroidered on its hem. The woman was a deathmonger, and something told the devil that her presence here did not bode well for his immediate intentions with regard to Michael Warren. She called out again, not taking her dark, beady eye from the arch-demon for an instant.
“That’s a good boy. You go round him and you come to me. Don’t worry, dear. I’ll see he doesn’t hurt you.”
From the corner of his red left eye he saw the child run scampering past in the direction of the brazier’s sulking glow. Incensed, the devil turned his most bone-melting glare on the old relic as he spoke directly to her.
“Oh. You’ll see that I don’t hurt him, will you? And how will you manage that, exactly, from the septic depths of my digestive system?”
The old girl’s eyes narrowed. Stepping timidly out of the shadows of the alley-mouth behind her were a gang of dirty and delinquent-looking children, possibly the ones he’d dive-bombed earlier when him and Michael Warren had been setting off upon their flight. As the deathmonger spoke again she did so slowly, in a tone of cold deliberation.
“I’m a deathmonger, my dear, and we know all the oldest remedies. We’ve even got a remedy for you.”
Taking one small hand from behind her back she hurled a fistful of some viscous substance on the greying coals. She then took from a pocket of her apron a small bottle of cheap scent which she upended over her night-watchman’s brazier. Stale perfume hissed upon hot embers where the rancid fish-guts were already cooking, and the devil screamed. He couldn’t … aah! He couldn’t stand it. An allergic spasm shuddered through his substance and his rags stood up stiff as he retched. It was the cursing conjuror in Persia, it was stinking Persia all over again and like then he could feel his very semblance starting to unravel. He boiled up into another body, an enormous brazen dragon with a bellowing three-headed man astride its back and snorting through his bull’s head, lowing though his head like a black ram and stamping, stamping until all the timbers of the timeless Attics shook like straw, like water. Down below him he could see the scuttling tartan form of Michael Warren as the toddler ran to hide in the deathmonger’s skirts.
He was swallowing his own volcanic spit, the nausea and wracking torment threatening to shatter him. He coughed, and down his human nose came burning snot, black blood and a confusion of exotic sub-atomic particles, mesons and anti-quarks. The devil knew he couldn’t hold this form together for much longer before it collapsed into a pyroclastic flow of rage and rue. He focussed all eight of his stinging, swollen eyes upon the cowering infant, and his voice was like an atom bomb in a cathedral, cracking five of the glass panes above the Attics of the Breath.
“WE HAD A DEAL!”
Both of his hides, the man-like skin and dragon scales alike, erupted into giant blisters that had surfaces like dying bubbles, swimming with a spectrum of slick petrol colours just before they burst. Rapidly losing an entire dimension, he leaked shape and modelling into the ether. Realising that he only had sufficient power left for a flat display, the devil squirmed into a monstrous borealis, shimmering spider-lizard curtains made of light that seemed to fill the stupefying whole of the emporium. For a few moments it was as though all the boards and rafters were on fire with him, and his bird-eating eyes in headlamp clusters glared from every twisting flame, now red, now green, fire engines and gas chamber doors.
Then there was nothing left of him save a few sparks, bowling along in a fish-flavoured breeze down the eternal hallway.
** <strong>RABBITS</strong>
<strong>O</strong>h, and weren’t they all the talk Upstairs, the Dead Dead Gang, their muckabout and mischief round the everlasting drainpipes, famous exploits that had dished out scabs for medals? They were much loved in the shitty gutters of Elysium, wanted for questioning in four or five dimensions and admired by boys and girls throughout the whenth and linger of this shiny, well-worn century. They were a pack of quick and dirty little animals and there were far too many of them, running up and down the world all day.
They trespassed upon babies’ dreams and took short cuts across the thoughts of writers, were the inspiration and ideal for every secret club and Children’s Film Foundation mystery, for all the books, for every Stealthy Seven, every Fearless Five. They were the mould; they were the model with their spit oaths and their tramp marks, their precarious dens and their initiation tests, which were notoriously tough: you had to have been buried or cremated before you could join the Dead Dead Gang.
Their boss was Phyllis Painter, partially because she said so but, as well, because the gang she’d been in while alive had got a better pedigree and reputation than the mobs that all the others had to brag about. Although she’d lived on Scarletwell Street, Phyllis had been in the Compton Street Girls, who’d been several cuts above the Green Gang or the Boroughs Boys or any of that scruffy lot. It weren’t that they were better scrappers, obviously. More that they thought about things for a bit before they did them, which was more than could be said for all the lads. <em>We are the Compton girls, We are the Compton girls, We mind our manners, We spend our tanners, We are respected wherever we go, We can dance, We can sing, We can do anything, ’Cause we are the Compton girls!</em> Of course, all that had been some time ago, but Phyllis could still be relied upon to take command if there was trouble.
Therefore, as she stood now a safe distance back behind the stern deathmonger and her brazier, watching an important demon come to pieces brilliantly like a Guy Fawkes Night accident, there was a measure of grim satisfaction in her pursed lips and her narrowed eyes. It was a pity, Phyllis thought, that this high-ranking devil would soon sputter out of visible existence altogether. If he only left a smoking length of his barbed tail, or, better still, a skull with horns, Phyllis could nail it to the ghost of the old town’s north gate. Then all six dozen demons, which she thought of as a rougher and more grown-up rival crew, would know to leave this district of Mansoul alone, would know it was the hallowed, yellowed turf of the Dead Dead Gang. And then all the devils round here would be little ones like her, her young ’un Bill, and Handsome John; like Reggie Bowler and Drowned Marjorie. Then they’d have nothing else to do except play out until a bedtime that would never come, above the drowsy days in their decrepit, sweet forever.
Phyllis had been out of the long dream-jitty’s far end and halfway up Spring Lane before she’d realised Michael Warren wasn’t following behind her anymore. She’d pondered for a moment over whether it was really worth the effort which would be entailed in going back and finding him, eventually deciding that, most probably, she better had. That business with there being no one in the Attics of the Breath to greet him when he died smacked of suspicious circumstances if not outright funny business. You could never tell. This pipsqueak in pyjamas might turn out to be important or, if not, he’d be at least an entertaining novelty and a potential new recruit. With this in mind she’d whistled up the other members of her crowd, and they’d set out to scout the shifting neighbourhood for the post-mortem toddler. Her and Bill had searched the memory of shops. The other three had scoured the Attics in case he was acting up and hiding.
Finally Drowned Marjorie had spotted the lost child up near the curved, transparent roof of the arcade, apparently a prisoner to one of the more spiteful fiends that were upon occasion to be found about the area. When the flaming horror had appeared to see them and had dived, they’d run like Billy-oh until they could be sure he wasn’t following and then regrouped at The Snail Races to discuss what they should do. Phyllis herself had favoured visiting the Works to notify the builders, as she’d planned originally, but then her Bill pointed out that being builders they’d already know. Taking his hat off so that he could scratch his black curls in the search for inspiration, Reggie Bowler had suggested that they wait in ambush for the demon-king. However, when Drowned Marjorie had sensibly enquired as to the next part of the plan, asking what they would do if the arch-devil actually showed up, Reggie had put his hat back on and turned moodily silent.
At last Handsome John, who Phyllis secretly admired, had said that they should find a deathmonger. If builders weren’t available to deal with this or were too busy elsewhere, and if there weren’t any saints around then a deathmonger would be the next-highest figure of authority. Drowned Marjorie had timidly suggested Mrs. Gibbs who had, in life, made such a lovely job of Marjorie herself when the bespectacled and tubby six-year-old had been pulled from the cold brown river under Spencer Bridge. Both Handsome John and Phyllis had said that they’d also heard of Mrs. Gibbs during their mortal days down in the Boroughs, which made the decision more or less unanimous. The five of them had then spread out to comb the nearer reaches of Mansoul for the respected senior deathmonger, eventually locating her inside a fusty dream of the Green Dragon’s lounge bar, near the Attics of the Breath above the Mayorhold in the early ’Thirties. Mrs Gibbs had looked up from her ghostly half of stout and not-exactly-smiled at them.
“Well now, my dears, what can I do for you?”
They’d told her about Michael Warren and the fiend, or more precisely Phyllis had, being the only one involved in this adventure since its outset. Handsome John and Mrs. Gibbs alike had both looked startled when they heard the child’s full name, with the deathmonger suddenly becoming very grave and serious as she asked Phyllis for the details of the devil that they’d seen abducting the small boy. What was his colouration like? What did he smell of? What could they remember of his general disposition? Having next received, respectively, the answers ‘red and green’, ‘tobacco’ and ‘extremely cross’, the deathmonger had swiftly reached a diagnosis.
“That sounds like the thirty-second spirit, dear. He’s one of the important and ferocious ones, who’ll give you more than just a nasty bite. He’s wicked, and it’s just as well you’ve come to me. Take me to where you saw him with this little lad and I’ll give him a talking to, tell him to pick on somebody his own size. I shall need a brazier or some sort of stove, and other things that I can pick up on the way. Come on. Look lively, now.”
In Phyllis Painter’s estimation there were few things more impressive than a deathmonger, alive or otherwise. Of all the people in the world, these fearless women were the only ones attending to the gates at either end of life, were in effect doing the timeless business of Mansoul while they were still amongst the living. No other profession had a link so seamless between what folk did when they were down in the twenty-five thousand nights and what their jobs were afterwards, when all of that was done. Deathmongers, living, always had an air about them that suggested they were half-aware of simultaneously having an existence on a higher floor. Some of them, posthumously, would return to funerals they’d arranged during their lifetimes so that they could be the one to welcome the deceased on their disoriented arrival in the Upstairs world, a continuity of service and a dedication to one’s job that Phyllis thought was awesome. Taking care of people from their cradles to their graves was one thing, but to take responsibility for how they fared beyond that point was quite another.
They’d found Mrs. Gibbs a smouldering brazier left over from a market-trader’s nightmare, which both Handsome John and Reggie Bowler carried carefully between them, old rags wrapped around their hands. The deathmonger had called in at the ghost of the fishmonger’s, Perrit’s in Horsemarket, and had obtained fish-guts from a man that she referred to as “the Sheriff”. Handing the malodorous parcel, wrapped in newspaper, to Mrs. Gibbs across his counter, the fishmonger with the hook nose and the huge moustache had simply grunted “Devils, wiz it?”, to which Mrs. Gibbs responded with a nod and with a faintly weary “Arr” of affirmation.
When the Dead Dead Gang and Mrs. Gibbs had made their way back to the section of the Attics that was the specific afternoon in 1959 where Phyllis had first chanced on Michael Warren, there was hardly anyone about. They saw the dream-self of a hard-faced woman in her forties, standing staring out in puzzlement across the endless sea of wood-framed apertures before she shook her head and wandered off down the arcade. She had red hands that looked like boiled bacon, so that Phyllis thought she might be somebody who did a lot of laundry. Also, she was in the nude. Her Bill and Reggie Bowler started smirking about this last detail until Phyllis told them to grow up, knowing full well they never would.
Meanwhile, the deathmonger instructed the two bigger lads to set their pot of hot coals down within the entrance of the cobbled alley that led from the Attics off into the lanes of jumbled memory beyond, that Phyllis and her pals called the Old Buildings.
“You can put it there, my dears. If this is where that awful creature stole the child from, you can bet that this is where he’ll bring him back to when he’s done with him. I’ve got me fish’s innards from off the Sheriff, and I think I’ve got a drop of scent tucked in a pocket of my apron, so that we’ll be ready for him when he comes.”
Mrs. Gibbs’s aprons were almost as famous in Mansoul as was the deathmonger herself. She owned a pair of them, just as she had when she was still Downstairs: the white one with embroidered butterflies around the hem, for hatches, and the black one, for despatches. In this upper realm she wore her blinding pinafore adorned with butterflies if she were welcoming some just-departed soul up gasping through a floor-window into the Attics of the Breath, into a bigger life outside of time. Her black apron, in life, had been a plain one without any decoration, though from how it looked at present it would seem that Mrs. Gibbs had always thought of it as something more elaborate. Around its edge were scarab beetles picked out in green iridescent thread, Egyptian styli and Kohl-cornered eyes stitched in metallic gold. She only wore this one when someone needed seeing off, and Phyllis wondered how the deathmonger had known to put it on today. Most probably it was just something she’d felt in her water, in her dust, her atoms. You could always sort of tell when devils were about. There was that smell, and everyone felt quarrelsome and fed up with themselves.
The six of them had waited there a while, lurking around the alley-mouth. Drowned Marjorie and little Bill had burgled a few lumps of slack out of the nearby dream of Wiggins’s coal-yard so that Mrs. Gibbs could keep her brazier going until Michael Warren and the fiend showed up, if they were ever going to. Phyllis and Handsome John stood leaning up against the window of The Snail Races, staring up at the unfolding diagrams of weather over the emporium, out through the glass panes of the arcade roof. Faceted clouds crumpled impossibly, traced in white lines upon a perfect, shimmering blue. Neither of the two youngsters spoke, and Phyllis wondered for a moment if John might not take her clammy hand. Instead he turned away and peered through the shop window at one of the decorated model snails, a white one with a red cross painted on its metal shell to make it look like a toy ambulance. She tried to keep the disappointment from her voice when John asked what she thought of it, and said she thought it wiz all right. Sometimes she wondered if it was her scarf of rabbits what put people off.
They’d not been standing there for very long when Reggie Bowler, who’d gone wandering on his own along the hallway to the west, came haring back down the arcade excitedly, dodging between the fifty-foot-square apertures with one hand raised to hold his dented hat on and his long Salvation Army overcoat flapping about his ankles as he ran.
“They’re comin’ out the sunset! I just seen ’em! Bugger me, that devil’s big.”
Phyllis was squinting down the length of the great hall in the direction Reggie’s flailing sleeve had indicated, at the tangerine and bronze eruption of that evening’s sunset going on above the glass roof in the west. She could make out a flickering dot in silhouette against the riot of bloody light, a blackened paper scrap high in the upper reaches of the Attics that appeared to be becoming larger as it flew towards them from the future. Reggie had been right. She’d been too busy running when it dived towards them earlier to get a proper look at it, but this was certainly no minor imp.
Reasoning that the devil might have had more time to study Phyllis and her friends than they’d had time to study it, she ordered everyone into the jitty so that they should not be recognised and give the game away.
“Come on. Get in the alleyway and behind Mrs. Gibbs, so ’e don’t see us. Just leave everything to ’er.”
Nobody seemed inclined to argue with this eminently sensible idea. By now the fiend had drifted closer so that its alarming size was more apparent and likewise its colouring of flashing red and green, as if a cup of salt had been thrown on a bonfire. Even Reggie Bowler made no protest when instructed to take shelter behind Mrs. Gibbs. He’d evidently reconsidered his original idea, which had been to somehow leap upon the demon’s back from hiding.
Handsome John, surprisingly and gratifyingly, took Phyllis by one skinny arm and steered her to the safety of the jitty. He was looking back, the pink glow from the west upon his lean face and his wave of sandy hair. He frowned and creased the sooty and poetic smudge of shadow round his pale eyes, luminously grey like torch-beams playing over water.
“Bloody hell, Phyll. It looks like a Jerry biplane coming down to buzz the trenches. Let’s get in the alley where it’s safe.”
They sheltered breathless in the jitty entrance with their backs so flat against the red brick wall that Phyllis thought they might leave all their colours and their lines behind like tattoo transfers when they peeled themselves away. Her Bill was nearest to the corner, circumspectly poking out his ginger head and then retracting it, keeping an eye on the approaching demon’s progress. Mrs. Gibbs, positioned at the centre of the alley mouth and in full view of the enormous corridor, calmly continued tending to her fire with a bent poker, which had been inside the brazier when they’d found it. As she let the air between the sullen coals a blacksmith glow flared up to under-light her face, impassive, with its skin like autumn fruit. Bill called out from the row of children’s far end, trying to keep the nervousness out of his voice.
“He’s circling in to land, and he looks horrible. He’s got horns, and his eyes are different colours.”
Phyllis lifted one small hand and made the rabbit sign, her middle- and ring-fingers touched against her thumb to form the nose, her first and little fingers raised like ears. As quiet as rabbits in the grass the whole gang tiptoed forward stealthily to join Bill near the corner, from which vantage they could see more of the mile-wide Attics’ floor. Despite their advance warning, all of them except for Mrs. Gibbs jumped visibly when the infernal being finally came into view, drifting down slowly from above like an immense and lurid parrot-coloured blossom, the pyjama-clad child held fast in its sunburned arms.
One of the creature’s legs uncurled beneath it with the leather boot’s toe pointed dancer-fashion, nimbly alighting on the pine boards in between the rows of sunken vats. For all of its apparent mass the monster landed almost silently, facing away from them with its bright tatters fluttering upward from the draught of the descent, in cockscomb red and poison apple green.
The glamour that it wore was very like a man, albeit one some eight or nine feet tall. A leather priest’s hat hung between its shoulders from a cord tied underneath its bearded chin, revealing a long mane of curling russet hair from which protruded two horns, like a goat’s. From where she stood beside John, Phyllis couldn’t see its face, for which she was immensely grateful. She had never seen a devil this close to before, and frankly she was having enough trouble trying to cope with its upsetting atmosphere, without the added stress of thinking what she’d do if it should turn and look at her.
With a surprising gentleness, the ragged fireball of coagulated ill intentions set down Michael Warren on the Attics’ floor before it. The poor little bugger stood there quaking in his striped pyjamas and his dressing gown, which looked the worse for wear since Phyllis had last seen it. There were small tears in the tartan fabric where the monster’s claws had evidently snagged, and on the collar and the shoulders were discoloured patches where it looked as if somebody had dripped battery acid. One spot was still smoking faintly. Poor kid, he looked scared to death and then scared back to life again. Although he stood so he was facing towards Phyllis and the jitty-mouth he clearly couldn’t take his eyes off of the devil looming over him, and so was yet to notice her.
The thing seemed to be talking to the little boy, stooping towards the trembling infant with an air that looked as menacing as it was condescending. It was speaking in a voice too low to hear from where she stood, the gas-jet roaring of a forest fire ten miles away, but its intentions were transparent. Phyllis recognised the hunched, intimidating bully posture from a dozen Boroughs bruisers, although unlike them and contrary to everything her mother had once said to her, this bully didn’t look as if he’d turn out to be secretly a coward. Phyllis doubted that there could be anything much worse than him for him to be afraid of, and she wondered for the first time whether Mrs. Gibbs would be enough to deal with this.
It had appeared to Phyllis, at that point, as though the rustling horror had suggested something awful to the toddler, who’d begun to back away, shaking his flaxen head. Whatever the proposal had involved, it didn’t look as though the fiend was in a mood to tolerate refusal. With its variegated foliage shivering threateningly it took one crouching step forward pursuing the retreating child, one callused hand raised to show off the sharpened ivory of its fingernails as if it meant to open Michael Warren like a pea-pod made of flannelette, and Phyllis Painter closed her eyes. She had expected the next thing she heard to be a bubbling scream, like a coursed hare. Instead, it was the reassuring cradle-creak of Mrs. Gibbs’s voice.
“Not that way, dear. You come towards me. Don’t let that old fright tell you what’s what.”
Cautiously, Phyllis let her eyelids part to feathered, blurry chinks.
She’d been surprised to find that Michael Warren was not dead, or, anyway, no deader than he had been a few moments back. The little boy had by now noticed Phyllis and the gang, alerted by the interjection of the deathmonger. He’d ceased to back towards the far wall of the vast arcade and was now edging to one side in an attempt to come towards them and the alleyway, while still giving the fiend as wide a berth as possible.
The devil stood stock-still for an exaggerated instant, then turned slowly until it was facing Mrs. Gibbs and the five cowering children. Every one of them except the deathmonger had drawn a sharp breath at this first glimpse of its archetypal features, in which utter evil was expressed so perfectly that it became a horrible cartoon, grotesque and terrifying to the point where it was almost comical, although not quite. Its face was a boiled mask on which the red-brown brows and whiskers drifted in a thick chemical steam. Its ears rose up to curling points but, unlike those of elves in picture-story books, in real life this looked sickening and deformed. The horns were dirty white with rusty smears around the base that might have been dried blood, and, as her Bill had pointed out, its eyes were different colours. They had different stories in them, almost different personalities. The red one radiated torture-chamber interludes, thousand-year grudges and campaigns of merciless attrition, while the green one told of doomed affairs, bruised childhoods and of passions fiercer, more exhausting, than malaria. Together they were like a pair of painted bull’s-eyes and were fixed, unwaveringly, on Mrs. Gibbs.
The deathmonger did not appear to be impressed. She held the creature’s gaze while speaking almost casually to Michael Warren.
“That’s a good boy. You go round him and you come to me. Don’t worry, dear. I’ll see he doesn’t hurt you.”
Clearly very much afraid despite the deathmonger’s encouragements, the little squirt (who, Phyllis Painter had already made her mind up, was a bit soft) nonetheless heeded her cue to make a break for it. He scampered in a wide arc to the devil’s left and everybody else’s right, so scared of getting close to his tormenter that his route would take him up as far as The Snail Races before he came doubling back towards the alley and his rescuers. Phyllis and her four cohorts had unpeeled themselves off of the jitty’s red brick wall and shuffled timidly to form a ragged semi-circle, some feet safely back from Mrs. Gibbs. Fiddling in nervous agitation with her rabbit necklace, Phyllis’s attention darted between Michael and the demon, so she’d caught the moment when the fiend’s appalling glare swept sideways to take note of the escaping toddler and then returned with a renewed vindictiveness to settle once again on the old woman in the scarab apron, standing prodding at her brazier. The things the creature’s gaze had promised Mrs. Gibbs were things that Phyllis didn’t want to name or think about. Its viscous voice was like a burning sulphur treacle when it spoke, purple and toxic.
“Oh. You’ll see that I don’t hurt him, will you? And how will you manage that, exactly, from the septic depths of my digestive system?”
Phyllis, if she’d still been able to, would almost certainly have wet herself. It had said it was going to eat them, though not in as many words. Not only eat them but digest them, their immortal essences still conscious in the scalding darkness of a monster’s bowel. At just that moment Phyllis had been on the verge of telling the arch-devil that it could have Michael Warren and do what it wanted with him, if it didn’t wolf them down and turn them into demon-poo. The deathmonger was made of sterner stuff, however. She had stared into whatever abattoir-cum-jungle chaos seethed behind the nightmare’s mismatched irises, and as yet had not even blinked. Her voice was level, unaffected as she answered.
“I’m a deathmonger, my dear, and we know all the oldest remedies. We’ve even got a remedy for you.”
What happened next was one of those things which occurred so fast that nobody could tell the precise order of events until much later, when they’d all gone over it a dozen times. Mrs. Gibbs had been holding a soft handful of fish-offal out of sight behind her back, and now she brought it forth to fling on the hot coals in a dramatic, spraying arc. The rancid hearts and lights and livers hissed and sizzled as they melted, but the deathmonger was already at work retrieving from her apron a small tear-shaped bottle of what looked like cheap scent bought from bottom Woolworth’s, or the wistful dream of some. Removing first its cap with practised ease, the deathmonger inverted this above her brazier so that its contents rained down on the glowing stones. Steam billowed up in an expanding column that smelled absolutely vile, like wild flowers growing in a filthy toilet bowl. Even for Phyllis, who had long since ceased to notice the perfume of her own rabbit-garland, this was an eye-watering experience. The fiend’s reaction to the rich and singular bouquet, though, was much worse.
It arched, spine rippling like a nauseous cat, and all its coloured rags stood up on end in flattened triangles, as though they were the spines of a toy hedgehog. The infernal regent spat and shuddered, and the edges of its image started curdling biliously, blotched molten white as with a ruined photograph, afflicted by an acne of burning magnesium. On contact with the noxious fumes from the deathmonger’s brazier, the devil’s substance seemed to become vaporous itself, crumpling to a dense and heavy gas in writhing billows that retained the creature’s basic shape yet had about their texture something of the intricate and craggy look you found in cauliflower. As if a gas-main had been burst, this nine-foot cloud of poison fog erupted upwards suddenly, became a red-green pillar of smoke hundreds of yards high. Phyllis had watched with ghastly fascination as the towering cumulus had seemed to knit itself together in a new configuration, so enormous and so complicated that she couldn’t tell at first what she was looking at.
Oh blimey. Flippin’ heck, it had been terrible.
It had been a gigantic dragon, gaudy red and green glints flashing from a million scales as big as high-hat cymbals. Sitting lewdly naked there astride the broad back of the roaring, stamping juggernaut there was a being which, despite its horrifying size, had the proportions of a baby or a dwarf. A snake-tail thrashed behind it, although Phyllis couldn’t tell if this belonged to the infuriated mount or to its rider. She supposed that they were both the same thing in the end. Its heads, for it had three of them, were left to right those of a maddened bull, a raging homicidal tyrant in a ruby crown, and a black ram with rolling eyes as if in rut. It held in one fist an iron lance, high as the Eiffel Tower and caked thick with dried blood and excrement, as if it had run something through from bum to brain. A banner flew from this, green with a red device that was all arrows, curls and crosses, and the agonised and furious fiend pounded the lance’s hilt against the Attics’ floor in screeching, bellowing exasperation. Worst of all, in Phyllis’s opinion, had been the thing’s feet as it crouched there on its prismatic, smouldering steed. The hell-king’s calves and ankles tapered gruesomely to pink and bristling stalks, from which sprouted the webbed feet of some monstrous duck. The webbing, stretched between the yellowed digits, was an unappealing grey with white discoloured patches as though from some waterfowl-disease, and it made Phyllis queasy just to look at it.
The Attics of the Breath were shaking from the dragon’s footfalls and the unrelenting thunder made by that appalling lance, crashing repeatedly against the wooden floorboards until Phyllis had thought that the whole Upstairs was going to collapse, all of its dreams and ghosts and architecture tumbling through a great hole in the sky upon the startled mortal world below. From where she’d stood, huddled near Handsome John and peeking out between her parted fingers, Phyllis had distantly taken in the tartan blur of Michael Warren hurtling into view from somewhere to her right, his terrified wail rising like the horn of an approaching train as he came stumbling into the alley-mouth and hid behind the black, capacious skirts of the deathmonger. Phyllis barely noticed him, all her attention fixed on the jaw-dropping spectacle that loomed above them with its three heads almost brushing the glass canopy which covered the immense arcade.
Its anger and distress were hideous to behold. A great convulsion seized it and it seemed to cough or vomit through its central, nearly-human mouth, a blazing spew of fire and blood and tar along with other more unfathomable debris that trailed scribbled lines of light behind its fragments as they spiralled into nothingness. The devil looked as though it were about to fall apart and, what’s more, looked as if it knew it. Summoning what Phyllis hoped might be its last reserves of strength and concentration it had focussed all its bleary eyes … those of the bull, the ram, the howling tyrant and the dragon that they rode … upon the small boy in pyjamas peering currently in dread around the black-draped bulge of the deathmonger’s hip. The demon pointed down at Michael Warren with the claw-tipped index finger of its lance-free hand, and when it screamed its farewell curse it was the worst noise Phyllis Painter ever heard, alive or dead. It sounded like a lot of big jet aircraft taking off at once, or like the whole world’s elephants in one berserk stampede. A mighty <em>whuff</em> of blue flame belched out from the central crowned head as it opened its vast mouth to speak, and as one Phyllis and the Dead Dead Gang all took their hands off of their eyes where they’d been using them as blindfolds, clapping them across their ears instead. It didn’t do much good, and everybody could still hear exactly what the devil shouted at the infant as he quaked there behind Mrs. Gibbs.
“WE HAD A DEAL!”
This was about what Phyllis would expect from Michael Warren. All she’d had to do was take her eyes off him for half a second and he’d evidently gone and signed a compact with a thing from the undying furnace. Was the kid half-sharp, or what? Even her little Bill, who could be silly as a bag of arseholes, even Bill would never do a stupid thing like that. She’d had to forcibly remind herself that Michael Warren had been only three or four when he’d expired and even younger than he looked at present, whereas her and Bill had both been a bit older. On the other hand, you couldn’t just excuse the boy because of youthful inexperience: the fact that Michael Warren wasn’t five years old and yet had somehow managed to not only die but also to enrage one of the great biblical forces within minutes of his death suggested that the child was not just clumsy but was bordering on the catastrophic. How could someone who looked so much like an Ovalteeny have upset a horror from the pit so badly, in so short a time? She should, she thought, have heeded her first instincts and just left the dozy little bugger wandering round the Attics of the Breath in his pyjamas.
But she hadn’t. She had always had a soft spot for the genuinely pathetic, that was Phyllis Painter’s trouble. It was one of her worst failings. She remembered when she’d been alive, playing down Vicky Park with Valerie and Vera Pickles and their younger brother Sidney. All three kids came from a family of fourteen at the bottom end of Spring Lane, just down past Spring Gardens, but three-year-old Sidney Pickles was the ugliest of the family by far. He was the ugliest kid that she had ever seen, poor little beggar. No, she shouldn’t laugh, but, honestly, Sid Pickles. He’d a face with hardly any features on it, like he’d drawn it on himself with a wax crayon. He’d got bow legs and a lisp, short-tongued was what they called it then, and when he’d waddled up to where her and his elder sisters were constructing tents from bits of sacking by the stream there in Victoria Park, they’d realised from the smell exactly what his problem was, even before he’d proudly told them all.
“I’m thyit methelf.”
Vera and Valerie had both refused point blank to go with Sidney on the long walk over Spencer Bridge back to Spring Lane, which meant that Phyllis felt she’d got no option but to take the boy herself, although he stank. Stank to high heaven. What made matters worse was that he’d catch the eye of every passer-by between the park and Spring Lane to triumphantly announce “I’m thyit methelf”, even though Phyllis begged him not to and despite that fact that his confession, from the looks on people’s faces, clearly told them nothing that they hadn’t by then worked out for themselves. She’d only volunteered to walk him home when it became apparent no one else was going to do it, which was more or less the reason she’d helped Michael Warren up out of his life onto the boardwalks of Mansoul. That, and the fact that he’d seemed troublingly familiar. Even if since then he’d somehow incurred a demon’s unrelenting wrath, at least he didn’t have a squinting turnip for a head like Sidney Pickles and at least he hadn’t shit himself, as far as Phyllis knew.
She tried now to draw some slim consolation from these dubious benefits while staring up transfixed at the enormous demon, which had boils and welts as big as tractor wheels erupting from its hide, standing there writhing in the noxious fug from the deathmonger’s brazier. These blisters popped and sprayed their hot gold pus in a fine aerosol, like bursts of burning pollen or like puffball detonations. Looking closer with the deeper vision of the afterlife, she saw that the infinitesimally tiny droplets were in actuality a spray of blazing numbers, mathematic symbols and illuminated letters from a wriggly foreign alphabet that Phyllis thought was Arabic. This churning tumble of notations flared like sparks for just an instant, then were gone. It was as if all of the devil’s facts and sums were leaking out of it. It almost seemed as though the demon were deflating, although Phyllis knew that didn’t quite describe what she was seeing.
More precisely, as the neon characters and numerals escaped, the fiend appeared not so much to be going down like a flat tyre as it did to be something that had in reality always been flat. Perhaps because it had a bull’s head and a ram’s, she found herself reminded of the toy farm animals she’d played with as a little girl. These had been lovely painted illustrations of fat roosters, pigs and cows, printed on shiny paper and then glued to sheets of wood cut to the right shape with a jigsaw. Standing on their slotted wooden bases, they’d been absolutely realistic if you only looked at them side-on. You barely had to change the angle of your view, though, and they’d start to flatten out and look all wrong. Seen from behind their permanently raised and swishing tails, the solid-looking beasts were hardly there. This was the same thing that was happening now to the colossal, many-headed monster as it spewed out phosphorescent algebra from yard-wide pimples and collapsed into a detailed and painstakingly embellished drawing of itself.
From the expressions on its four vast faces, even this reduced condition was a struggle to maintain. Venting a final booming snarl of loathing and frustration, the huge apparition shattered into countless tongues of Christmas-coloured radiance that seemed to lick from every board and rafter in the Attics of the Breath, as though the whole emporium were on fire with the unravelled fiend’s dispersing imagery. In every flare there was the same repeated pattern, intricate and squirming in a filigree of what looked now like lime-green newts, now like a scarlet lace of murderous tarantulas. Multiple lizard or else spider shapes at different scales knitted themselves into the most deranging wallpaper design that Phyllis could conceive of, all of this reiterated in each twist of flame throughout the echoing arcade.
Then it was over and all of the fiend’s spent fireworks fizzled into nothing, leaving only the pervasive stench of perfumed fish-guts and an atmosphere of slapped shock in that monumental corridor. The devil-king was gone.
Mrs. Gibbs merely bobbed her chin once in a quiet and workmanlike display of satisfaction, then produced a handkerchief that had a bee embroidered on one edge to wipe the haddock sheen from her pink fingertips. Politely, she instructed Handsome John and Reggie Bowler to lift the no-longer-smouldering but still offensive brazier and lug it to some far remove along the jitty where, if no one dreamed about it for a week or two, it would break down into the homogeneous mind-residue from which the avenues and alleys of Mansoul, the Second Borough, were constructed. As the bigger boys wrapped rags around their palms again and grudgingly bent to their task, the deathmonger fastidiously folded her now-fishy hanky, tucking it away into whatever obscure corner of her funeral pinafore it had emerged from. Having cleaned and tidied herself thus, she turned her head and peered as best she could at Michael Warren who, in spite of the arch-demon’s disappearance, was still sheltering behind the black Niagara of her skirts.
Phyllis was still recovering from the events of the past several minutes. It occurred to her that, frightening as the visitor from Hell had been, this rosy-cheeked old lady was the terror everybody should watch out for. Deathmongers alive were nothing else if not formidable, but dead they were a good sight more impressive. Mrs. Gibbs was a rotund black skittle shape sporting a bonnet, almost seen in silhouette against the dazzling blueness over the arcade as Phyllis, Michael Warren and the other titches in the gang looked up at her. She seemed to be considering the little blonde boy as he stood there and regarded her uncertainly in his pyjamas, slippers and plum tartan dressing gown, which had been stained by something yellow and sulphuric, more than likely demon-slobber.
“So, now, you’re this Michael Warren that I’ve heard so much about. Don’t shuffle round behind me when I try to talk to you, my dear. Come out where I can see you proper.”
Nervously, the toddler sidled from behind the deathmonger and stood in front of her, as he’d been bidden. His blue doll-eyes darted everywhere, from Mrs. Gibbs to Phyllis Painter, then to her Bill and Drowned Marjorie. He looked at everyone as if they were his firing squad, with not a word of thanks for saving him from hellfire and damnation just a moment back. As he returned his apprehensive gaze to Mrs. Gibbs he tried to give her an engaging smile, but it came out like a peculiar wince. The deathmonger looked pained.
“There’s no need to be frit of me, my dear. Now, did that brute do anything to hurt you when he had you in his claws? What was that business that he mentioned about how you had a deal with him? I hope you’ve not made any promises to a rough chap like that.”
The freshly dead child moved his weight from one plaid slipper to the other, fiddling with the sash cord of his dressing gown uneasily.
“He tolled me he wiz glowing to snake me four a raid, and shed that I could prey him back by dooming him a fever.”
Her Bill guffawed rudely at the boy’s derailed pronunciation, which revealed him as a new arrival in Mansoul as surely as a country twang would have betrayed him in a city. Phyllis noticed that the Warren kid’s ability to make sense when he talked had taken a step backwards since she’d seen him last. When she’d escorted him across the Attics to the jitty where they were now standing, he’d appeared to be finding his Lucy-lips and was beginning to speak clearly without mangling every phrase as it was born. From his performance now, however, it seemed as though witnessing the giant fiend’s extraordinary fit of pique had set him back a bit. His sentences went everywhere, like matchsticks from a box that had been opened upside-down. Luckily, Mrs. Gibbs, by virtue of her work on either side of death’s sharp corner, was conversant with the diction of the recently deceased and could take Michael Warren’s gibberish in her stride.
“I see. And did he take you for this outing that he’d promised you, my dear? Where did he fly you to, if I might ask?”
At this the nipper’s face lit up, as though a grown-up had just asked him to describe which ride he’d liked best at a funfair that he’d visited.
“He shook me down into nixed Fraidy night, to where my hours wiz instant Andrew’s Road. Eyesore myself, and I wiz back true life again!”
Now everyone was staring in bewilderment at Michael Warren, and not on account of his exploding elocution. Everybody was too startled by what he’d just said to take much notice of the way he’d said it. Could it possibly be true? Could the arch-devil have transported the boy into the immediate future, where he’d glimpsed himself restored to life? Barring a miracle this made no sense at all, and Phyllis tried to find a more feasible explanation for the child’s unlikely story. Possibly the fiend had carried him into the past and not into next Friday night, as the lad obviously believed. The devil had cold-bloodedly deceived the kid by giving him a glimpse of himself back within the bosom of his family, then had told him this was something that would happen in a few days time, rather than something which had already occurred, a week or two before the toddler had choked to death. It was a cruel and spiteful hoax, intended to crush Michael Warren’s infant soul by offering false hope. While Phyllis much preferred her cynical interpretation to the more miraculous alternative, something about it didn’t ring entirely true.
For one thing, Phyllis and her gang had seen the demon streaking off with Michael into the red west with their own eyes, the same direction that they’d just seen him returned from. <em>West is future, East is past, all things linger, all things last</em>. Not only that, but it was well known that a devil had no more capacity to lie than did a page of hard statistics. Like statistics, they could only seriously mislead. Moreover, although Phyllis hated demons generally, she had to grudgingly admit that they were seldom petty. Playing heartless tricks on three-year-olds was probably beneath them, or at least beneath the more high-ranking fiends, such as the one who’d stolen Michael Warren had appeared to be. Of course, this line of reasoning led to the plainly unacceptable conclusion that the boy was right, and that within a day or two he’d be alive again, back with his family in St. Andrew’s Road. Phyllis regarded Mrs. Gibbs and saw from the deathmonger’s manner as she scrutinised the little chap that the old girl had independently arrived at the same impasse in her thinking.
“Well, now, there’s a fine kettle of fish. And why, I wonder, did that old snake take an interest in you in the first place? You think hard, my dear, and tell me if there’s anything he said as might give me a clue.”
The child in nightclothes, who was evidently unaware of the tremendous import of what he was blithering about, tried to look thoughtful for a moment and then beamed up helpfully at Mrs. Gibbs.
“He tolled me that hide claused sum trouble here Upscares.”
The deathmonger looked blank at first, then slowly corrugated her age-spotted brow as if with dawning comprehension.
“Oh, my dear. You’re not the little boy who’s caused the falling-out between the builders? Someone told me earlier as they was having a big scrap up at the Mayorhold, on account of one of ’em had cheated in their trilliard game, but I’d not dreamed as it was you was at the bottom of it.”
What was this? A fight between the builders? Phyllis gaped incredulously, and to judge by the sharp gasps that came from her Bill and Drowned Marjorie, it was the first they’d heard of it as well. Wouldn’t a fight between the builders mean that the whole world would fall in half, or something terrible like that? Sounding excited by the prospect, Bill relayed his obvious enthusiasm to the deathmonger.
“Cor! Whenabouts are they having it, the angles’ punch-up? I’d like to be there for that.”
Not for the first time, Phyllis felt embarrassed that her kid was such an unapologetic little ruffian. Mrs. Gibbs clucked at young Bill disapprovingly.
“It’s not a game, my dear, and if the builders are at odds it would seem disrespectful to be stood there goggling at them. And of course it would be very dangerous, and not a place for little children, so you put that idea right out of your head.”
Though Phyllis knew he hadn’t put the idea from his thoughts at all, Bill pulled his glum and reprimanded face to make the deathmonger think that he had. Mrs. Gibbs turned away from him and carried on with her appraisal of the hapless Michael Warren.
“Well, my dear, it sounds to me as if you’re at the middle of some funny goings-on. I’m not surprised, given the things I know about your people and the family you come from. Even so, I’ve never heard the like of this. You’ve drawn attention from a fiend … the thirty-second devil, who’s a bad un … and done something that has made the builders have a falling-out. On top of that, you’re dead one minute and alive the next, if you’re to be believed.
“Now, as regards that devil, when it said it wanted you to do a favour for it in return for giving you a ride, did it say what the favour wiz, at all?”
The little boy stopped beaming and turned pale enough to stand out in the present company of ghosts.
“He said I’d got to help him kill somebody.”
Phyllis thought it was a measure of how shaken-up the thought made Michael Warren, that he’d managed to get through a sentence without garbling any words. Mind you, it was a dreadful thought, one frightening enough to cure a stutter. Bill said “fucking hell” and Phyllis slapped him hard on his bare lower leg where it stuck from under his short trousers, before Mrs. Gibbs did. With a withering sideways glance at Bill, the deathmonger turned her attention back to the suddenly worried-looking younger lad.
“Then that was very wrong of it, my dear. If it wants someone killed, then it can do it by itself. From what I hear about it, it’s had more than enough practice. Frankly, I’m surprised it was allowed to snatch you up and say such awful things to you …”
The deathmonger broke off, and cocked her head upon one side. It looked to Phyllis as though Mrs. Gibbs had just been struck by the full implications of the words that she had said, which prompted Phyllis to consider them herself. Allowed: that was the word on which the matter rested. Why had all of these outlandish breaches of the normal regulations, in the first place, been allowed? As Phyllis had observed when she was helping Michael Warren up into the Attics of the Breath, nothing in Mansoul was by accident, neither the issue of there being no one there to greet the child, nor Phyllis happening upon the scene while she was skipping homeward from a scrumping expedition. Phyllis felt the soft touch of a larger hand in these affairs, so that the memory of her flesh crawled briefly in response. From Mrs. Gibbs’s face, it looked as though the deathmonger were having many of the same considerations. Finally, she spoke again.
“To be quite honest, dear, I don’t know what to make of you. I have a feeling there’s a lot more to all this than meets the eye, but if the builders are involved then it’s too much for me to puzzle out all on my own.”
At this point Handsome John and Reggie Bowler sauntered back along the jitty, brushing off their hands as they re-joined the gang, having responsibly disposed of the dream-brazier somewhere in the alley’s depths. Mrs. Gibbs noted their return with a curt nod, then carried on with what she had been saying.
“As I say, my dear, I’m out my depth. What I suggest is that you don’t go running off all by yourself again, or who knows what could happen? You stick with these older children, and I’m sure they’ll see you don’t get into any mischief. In the meantime, I intend to have a word with someone higher up than me, who knows what’s going on. I think I’ll call on Mr. Doddridge, and see what he’s got to say. You do as you’ve been told, and keep safe with these boys and girls. I’ll see you later on, when I’ve found out what’s what, so you be good until I do.”
With that, the deathmonger turned on her heel and glided off along the great emporium, heading east, dawnwards over the strip of flagstones bordering the Attics’ mile-wide sea of wood and windows. Standing mutely in the jitty-mouth the children watched her go, a big black pillow dwindling to a pin-cushion as she receded into the arcade’s far reaches, into yesterday and out of sight.
Surprised by the abruptness of the deathmonger’s departure, Phyllis wasn’t sure what she should think. On one hand, Phyllis understood that Mrs. Gibbs was simply getting on with things that needed doing in her usual brisk, efficient way, but on the other hand she couldn’t help but feel a bit abandoned. Other than keep Michael Warren out of trouble, what were her and the Dead Dead Gang going to do with him? From what the deathmonger had said, it sounded like this moppet in a dressing gown was turning out to be a much thornier problem than he’d first appeared. If Mrs. Gibbs, who’d just stared down the worst that Hell had got to throw at her without so much as blinking, if she’d said that Michael Warren was too big a quandary for her alone, then how were Phyllis Painter and her gang expected to look after him? She fiddled agitatedly with one frayed end of the two-stranded sisal where her rabbit pelts were hung, deliberating over it.
After a moment’s thought, though, Phyllis saw more sense in what the deathmonger had done by making the boy Phyllis’s responsibility. There was that feeling of a higher hand in all of this, and Phyllis knew that Mrs. Gibbs had felt it too. In Mansoul, nothing was by accident, and given that she’d been the first to greet the child on his arrival, this meant she was already involved in the unfolding of events. This clingy, helpless little lad was evidently meant to be with Phyllis, not because he’d thyit himthelf and not just because Mrs. Gibbs had said so. This was more like something designated higher up, by management, and Phyllis knew that her and her four cronies would just have to make the best of it. Looked at in one way it was quite an honour, and she there and then resolved that the Dead Dead Gang would prove worthy of the task that they’d been set. She wouldn’t have it said around the Attics of the Breath how they weren’t up to it, how they’d turned out to be no better than the little hooligans that everyone already thought they were. Between them, they’d pull off this babysitting job a treat, and they’d show everybody. All their varied talents would be brought to bear upon the matter, and those were considerable.
The Dead Dead Gang could be whatever they desired in the great liberty that waited beyond life and substance. They could scurry in the bushes and the alleys of Eternity and be the scourge of ghosts and devils, or they could be valiant myrmidons, or stealthy savages, or master criminals. In Michael Warren’s case, with all the mysteries surrounding him, she thought that they could be secret detective spies as easily. They’d find out who he was, and find out what this bother was about, and … well, they’d make sure everything turned out all right by some means Phyllis hadn’t had a chance to think of yet. She knew that this was going several steps past the strict outline of the babysitter role that Mrs. Gibbs had had in mind for her, but felt that she was acting in accordance with the spirit of the deathmonger’s instructions, rather than the letter of them. If the powers that be hadn’t intended Michael Warren to get mixed up with a crowd of scruffy kids, then Phyllis wouldn’t have been skipping back across the Attics when he’d crawled up through the afterlife trapdoor. That so unlikely an event had happened was as good as saying Phyllis Painter had been placed in charge of the pyjama-clad boy and the grand adventure that apparently surrounded him. The parting comments Mrs. Gibbs had made only confirmed it. Phyllis was still boss of the Beyond, and knew the Dead Dead Gang were all depending on her to come up with some sort of a plan, as she’d be called upon to do in all their other dead, dead games.
By now the figure of the deathmonger was lost from view in the wet salmon light that bathed the dawn-end of the everlasting corridor. Phyllis turned round to look at Michael Warren, wondering not for the first time who she’d been reminded of when she’d first seen him and he’d seemed so tantalisingly familiar. She’d thought at first that there might be a faint resemblance to Handsome John despite the five-year difference that there was in their apparent ages, Michael Warren being an apparent seven and John being an apparent twelve, but looking at them now she couldn’t really see it. The blonde toddler lacked the sculpted and heroic gauntness that there was about John’s face, and didn’t have the deep-set eyes with shadow round them in a sad, romantic soot like John did. No, she was convinced that she recalled the little boy from somewhere else, but couldn’t for the death of her think where. Possibly it would come to her, but for the moment she had more important matters to attend to. Michael Warren was now looking back at Phyllis, staring up at her forlornly in his demon-distressed dressing gown with its drool-blemished collar. She returned his gaze with a no-nonsense look, then softened.
“Well? How are yer diddling? I’ll bet that put the wind up yer, that devil carrying yer orf like that.”
The infant nodded, gravely.
“Yes. He wizzn’t very nice, although he wanted me to think he wiz. Thank you for coming back to find me and rescape me.”
Phyllis sniffed and ducked her head once, modestly, dismissively. Her rotten rabbits rattled with the movement. She was pleased to note that Michael’s capabilities with language were once more progressing steadily after the relapse his encounter with the demon had brought on. Perhaps he’d find his Lucy-lips yet, after all.
“Yer welcome. Now, what are we going to do with yer? What do yer say we take yer to ayr ’ideout until we can all decide on what comes next?”
The child gave a delighted beam.
“Wizzle that mean I’m in your gang?”
Oh, <em>now</em> he wanted to be made a member, did he? Well, he’d changed his tune since earlier, then. Despite the fact that Phyllis was at last beginning to develop a degree of sympathy for her pyjama-sporting stray, she had to take a firm line with him. She was leader, and if Phyllis were to bend the rules for everybody that she’d felt a pang of pity for, where would they be? She pulled a serious face and shook her strawberry blonde fringe decisively, though not unkindly.
“No. I’m sorry, but yer can’t join now. Not with what yer just said about ’ow yer’ll be back to life again by Friday. In the Dead Dead Gang we’ve got initiation ceremonies and all things like that. There’s tests what yer just wouldn’t pass.”
Hurt and a bit indignant, Michael Warren looked as though he thought that Phyllis was just being nasty.
“Howl do you know? I might be the bestest in the test. I mighty be a champernaut.”
At this point, much to Phyllis’s surprise, Handsome John intervened on her behalf, placing a chummy and consoling hand upon the infant’s tartan shoulder, which was flecked by fiend-foam.
“Come on, kid. Don’t take it personal. She’s only telling you the way things are up here. To be in the Dead Dead Gang, in the rules it says you’ve got to be cremated or else buried. Very nearly both in my case as it turned out, but the point is, if you’re going to be alive again on Friday, then you’re neither. Here, I’ll tell you what, we’ll let you be an honorary member for the time you’re up here, like a sort of mascot or a regimental goat. Then, if one day you manage to die properly, we’ll take you on full time. How’s that?”
The toddler tilted back his head to scrutinise John carefully and seemed partially mollified, prepared to trust the sterling look John had about him and his reasonable tone of voice. Only a faint trace of uncertainty remained, most probably because the new boy didn’t know who John was and had not been introduced to him. Phyllis decided to take care of this last oversight.
“I wiz forgetting that yer don’t know anybody in the gang. This ’ere is John, and over there that’s Reggie, in the ’at. Reggie’s been in the gang longer than anybody, aytside me and ayr Bill, because ’e’s been cold the longest. This is Marjorie, who drayned dayn Paddy’s Meadow, and this is ayr Bill. We’re the Dead Dead Gang, so we play ayt after dark and after death, and won’t goo ’ome until we’re called. Now, should you like to see ayr den? It’s only dayn the jitty ’ere and up Spring Lane a bit.”
Without agreeing vocally to anything that had just been proposed the little boy fell into step with the loose gaggle of dead children as they started to meander down the alleyway and left the Attics of the Breath behind them. Michael Warren trotted dutifully along over the damp, fog-coloured cobbles, in between Phyllis herself and Handsome John. The kid would first peer up at one of them and then the other, frowning slightly and still with a lot of questions clearly on his mind.
“Why did you scrawl yourselves the Dead Dead Gang? It’s funny when you say it twice like that.”
John chuckled, with a lovely toasty sound that Phyllis would have ate for breakfast if she could.
“Well, when we wiz alive we wiz in different gangs. Me and my brothers used to hang out in the Green Gang, Phyllis here wizzle be in the Compton Street Girls, while old Reggie wiz a member of the Gas Street Mob and then the Boroughs Boys. Drowned Marjorie, I think, wiz in a secret club from Bellbarn. Just about the only one of us who didn’t grow up in the Boroughs was Phyll’s little Bill, and he was in a bunch of kids up … Kingsthorpe, was it, Phyll?”
Casting an eye to where Bill walked ahead of them along the jitty’s gloomy urban crack with Marjorie and Reggie Bowler, Phyllis piped up briefly in correction.
“Kingsley. ’E wiz in the Kingsley Lads.”
“Kingsley, that’s right. So, anyway, rather than argue over whose old crowd we’d take our name from, Reggie said we ought to call ourselves the Dead Dead Gang. From what I can remember, it wiz from a dream he’d had while he was still alive. He’d dreamed he wiz in school, having his lessons, and the teacher held a book up what he said that they wiz going to read from. It had got a green cloth cover with a line drawing embossed in gold what showed a load of kids, and one of them had got a bowler hat on and an overcoat down to his ankles like what Reggie wore. The book was called <em>The Dead Dead Gang</em>. Reggie suggested that was what we called ourselves, and we all thought it sounded snappy so we went along with him.”
Wandering down the narrow alley with brick walls on one side, back gates on the other and a memory of leaden sky above, John grinned at Michael.
“As for what it means, I couldn’t tell you. All that I could think of was, some people are dead lucky and some people are dead clever, but not us lot. We’re dead dead.”
A little further down the alleyway, young Bill had evidently made some smart remark that had upset Drowned Marjorie. A pushing match had then ensued, and Phyllis was alarmed to note that Marjorie, who’d set her mouth in a determined line, had taken off her spectacles and handed them to Reggie Bowler for safekeeping. This was never a good sign with Marjorie, and Phyllis thought someone had better intervene before affairs got out of hand.
“John, go and see to them. Tell Marjorie to put ’er specs back on and tell ayr Bill that if he dun’t behave I’ll smack his arse so ’ard ’e’ll end up in another cemetery.”
John smiled and nodded, ambling ahead of Phyllis and the toddler on his long legs with the grey socks pulled up smartly. Reaching Bill and Marjorie he draped a friendly arm around each of their shoulders, walking in between them so that neither one could take a wild swing at the other, steering them along the cobbled jitty as he steered their conversation into calmer waters. Handsome John could always be relied upon to sort things out so that nobody was left feeling in the wrong, Phyllis observed with a faint glow of second-hand pride, just from being in the same gang as what he was. He was such a natural peacemaker that Phyllis found she couldn’t picture him at war, for all she knew how fearless he could be.
Walking beside her, Michael Warren pointed suddenly towards the recessed entrance of a staircase, dark behind an iron gate set in the alley wall upon their right.
“That’s where I thought you’d gone to when I lost you, up them stairs. The steps wiz dark and there wiz crunchy things on them I thought wiz earwigs, but they turned out to be wrappers off of Tunes. There was a horridor up at the top that had a radigator what played ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’, then after that the devil caught me.”
Phyllis nodded as they passed the gated alcove. As the leader of the Dead Dead Gang she knew all of the secret passages and the hereafter shortcuts.
“Yes. It leads up into someone’s dream of Spring Lane School, if I remember right. Spring Lane’s a lovely school if yer still down in the Twenty-five Thousand Nights, but if yer find yerself there in yer dreams it’s a bit frightening, and frightening things can ’appen. Specially at night, but even in the day it’s never very bright inside. I’m not surprised that bogey found you there.”
They were just scuffling past the beautiful imaginary gas-lamp standard that in Phyllis’s opinion was the nicest thing about the jitty. What, down in the solid world, was only a plain cylinder and stem had been transformed, up here, to sculpted bronze. An oriental-looking dragon that had tarnished to a pale sea-green with glinting golden flecks of metal showing through from underneath wound down the tall post to coil sleepily in low relief about the base, where a nostalgia for grass thrust up in tufts out of the summer grit and puddle gravy. Up atop the serpent-circled shaft, the lamp itself had stained-glass panes in its four tapering windows. Of these only three were visible, the panel at the rear being continually out of sight, and since the lamp was not alight at present even these three weren’t that easy to make out.
The leftmost one, as looked at from the front, was decorated by the portrait of an eighteenth-century gentleman who had a blunt and thuggish face yet wore a pastor’s wig and robes and collar. Over on the right-side pane was the translucent image of a coloured chap with white hair, sat astride a bicycle contraption that had rope, not rubber, fastened round its wheel-rims. Phyllis knew that this was meant to be Black Charley, who had lived in Scarletwell Street while he was alive and who you sometimes saw still, pedalling around Upstairs. The central pane between these two was without colour and had only black lead lines on its clear glass. It showed a poorly-rendered symbol rather than a proper picture: the loose ribbon of a road or pathway and above it a crude balance, little more than two triangles joined by two straight lines. This, Phyllis knew, was the town crest of Mansoul and you saw it everywhere, although she wasn’t sure what it was meant to represent.
Beside her, Michael Warren wasn’t taking any notice of her favourite lamppost, but from his expression was engaged in brewing up another silly question.
“What’s that what you said, Twenty-five Thousand Nights? It sounds like stories about skying carpets or a turban genie-bottle.”
Phyllis looked at the dishwater sky above the alleyway and pushed her lips out while she thought about it for a moment.
“Well, I s’pose it <em>wiz</em> a lot of stories abayt wondrous things that ’appened once and then never again, but it’s <em>ayr</em> stories that folk mean when they say that, Twenty-five Thousand Nights. It’s just the number of nights, roughly speaking, that most people get, seventy years or so. Of course, there’s some get more, and then there’s some … especially raynd ’ere … who got a good sight less. Poor Reggie Bowler froze to death when ’e wiz sleeping rough on the old burial ground by Doddridge Church, that wiz some way back in the eighteen-sixties or the seventies, and ’e wiz no more than thirteen. Four thousand nights, give or take a few ’undred. Or there’s Marjorie, who went into the river dayn at Paddy’s Meadow when she wiz nine, trying to get ’er dog ayt, silly little sod. ’E got ayt right as rain, but Marjorie didn’t. She washed up where it gets shallow under Spencer Bridge. They didn’t find ’er till next day. Three thousand nights or thereabouts, that’s all she ’ad. When they say twenty-five, that’s just the average.”
The little boy appeared to think about this for a while, perhaps attempting to work out how many nights he’d personally had. As Phyllis calculated it, it was a bit more than a single thousand, which was in itself no reason he should feel hard done by. There were those who’d died when they were tiny babies and had only a few dozen or few hundred days … and, unlike Michael Warren, they would not be coming back to life again to notch up who knew how many more thousand nights before they finally and permanently passed away. He didn’t know just how well off he was. The ghost-kids these days, Phyllis thought not for the first time, they don’t know they’re died.
Over against the jitty’s left-hand wall ahead of her and Michael, Phyllis noticed Mrs. Gibbs’s brazier, that she’d got John and Reggie to dispose of. It was already beginning to break down into the dream-mulch that collected at the curbs and corners of Mansoul, starting to lose its form and function as the rusting fire-basket curled back in corroded petals from the spent coals resting at the blackened centre. Its three tripod legs were buckling together, fusing to a single stalk so that the whole thing looked like it was turning to a metal sunflower, charred from having grown too near the sun. It didn’t pay to sit still for too long here in the Second Borough, where things slid and shifted and you never knew what you’d end up as.
Stumbling along beside her, Michael Warren gave her what was probably as close as he could get to an appraising look.
“How old wiz you, then, befour yew wiz dread? Did you get many nights?”
Phyllis gave him a look that could have fried an egg.
“Don’t be so cheeky. Yer should never ask a lady when it wiz she died. Old as me tongue and a bit older than me teeth, I wiz, and that’s as much as yer’ll get ayt of me.”
The child looked mortified and slightly scared. Phyllis decided that she’d let him off the hook.
“Now, if yer’d asked when I wiz born, that’d be different. I wiz born in 1920.”
Obviously relieved to find he hadn’t irrecoverably overstepped the mark, the little boy moved onto safer ground as he resumed his questioning.
“Wiz that round here, down in the Boroughs?”
Phyllis gave a little hum of affirmation.
“I wiz born in Spring Lane, up the top. When I wiz late for school I could climb over ayr back wall into the playground. Dayn ayr cellar, yer could pull a board away and look dayn in the dark upon the spring itself, what Spring Lane wiz named after. There wiz never any money, but my childhood up there wiz the happiest time I ever ’ad. That’s why I’m like I am now. This is me ’ow I remember me when I wiz at me best.”
Ahead of them, the other four had reached the alleyway’s far end, where it emerged into Spring Lane. Her Bill and Reggie Bowler were already out of sight, having apparently turned right and started trudging up the hill, but Handsome John and Marjorie were hanging back to make sure Phyllis and her small companion knew where they were going. John waved to her from the jitty’s mouth and pointed up Spring Lane to indicate that was where him and Marjorie were heading next and Phyllis grinned, raising one thin arm in reply. The infant shuffling beside her in his slippers was still seemingly preoccupied by her last statement, about how she looked now being what she thought of as her best.
“Well, if this wiz your best, why wiz them niffy raggit-thins all round your neck?”
If she’d have wanted, Phyllis could have took offence at having the rank odour of her garland raised in conversation, when to her it was a smell she hardly noticed anymore. However, she was starting to find Michael Warren at least tolerable company and didn’t want to bust things up when they were going well. She kept the faint affront out of her voice as she replied to him.
“There’s lots of reasons. Rabbits are the ’oly magic animal raynd ’ere, along with pigeons. There are some who say that’s why they call this place the Boroughs, that it should be ‘Burrows’ ’cause of ’ow the streets are tangled in a maze and ’ow folk dayn there breed like rabbits. That’s not really why it’s called the Boroughs, naturally, but it just shows yer ’ow some people think. One of the reasons why I wear them is because, up ’ere, the rabbit stands for girls just like the pigeon stands for boys. Abington Street up town wiz what they used to call the Bunny Run because of all the factory girls went up and dayn it and yer’d have the chaps stood at the edges, whistling and winking. I wiz told that Bunny wiz an old Boroughs expression for a girl, by reason of another name for rabbit being coney, what wiz also called a cunny, and … well, it involves bad language what I shouldn’t say, so yer’ll just ’ave to take my word for it. And then, of course, they say that Chinamen can see a lady in the moon where we can see a man, and that she’s got a rabbit with ’er, so there’s one more reason rabbits are to do with girls.
“As for the Boroughs, rabbits sum it up, the life down ’ere. There wiz so many of them on the wastelands and the bits of meadow what we ’ad about, we thought of ’em as vermin, just like all the people as lived at the better end of town would think of us: all ’opping raynd between the weeds and looking for a scrap to eat, all in ayr grey and brown and black and white, all ’aving lots of children because we knew nature would take some of them away. We thought of them as vermin, rabbits, or we thought of them as supper, and ayr dad would go ayt ’unting them, then bring ’em ’ome and skin ’em by the fire. We’d eat the meat and ’ang the skins up on a string, and when we’d got enough, ayr mam would send me up the rag-and-bone yard where the man would give me a few coppers for them. They’d be in a great long necklace, just like they are now.
“One time I ’adn’t gone straight to the junkyard with them, because I wiz ’aving fun pretending that I wiz a duchess with me fur coat raynd me shoulders. I wiz playing with the other Compton Street Girls, up Bellbarn and Andrew’s Street and all raynd there, and in St. Andrew’s Church there wiz a wedding gooin’ on. Of course, we thought all that wiz very glamorous and so we slipped into the chapel and we took a pew together at the back, so we could watch.
“The smell from off my rabbit skins wiz so bad that they ’ad to stop the wedding while the ushers chucked us ayt. I didn’t care. I liked ’em, and I still do. After all this time I’ve got so I can’t smell ’em anymore. Give it a while and yer won’t notice them yerself.”
They were now almost at the alley’s end, where it met Spring Lane’s slope in a T-junction. Phyllis noticed Michael Warren peering up at the old metal street-sign bolted to the jitty wall, black painted letters on a white ground specked with faecal orange, the plaque’s edges oxidised to friable iron wafer. Neither of the two words on the sign was wholly visible, obliterated by the rust so that only the cryptic message SCAR WELL RACE remained. Phyllis translated, for the toddler’s benefit.
“Scarletwell Terrace. It wiz what the jitty wiz before it wiz a jitty. That’s what all these back gates are that we’ve been passing on ayr right. Daynstairs in the three-sided world, all this ’as been pulled dayn by your time and there’s just the bottom playing-field of Spring Lane School, but up ’ere in the dream-crust it’s still standing.”
Michael didn’t comment on what Phyllis had just said, but seemed to understand. They traipsed around the corner, turning right into Spring Lane and facing up the hill. The view stopped Phyllis’s diminutive companion in his slipper-slapping tracks and made him gasp, so that she had to forcibly remind herself that all of this was new to him. Beyond the Attics of the Breath and the back alley they’d just left, the toddler had seen nothing of Mansoul itself. Watching the feelings and reactions wash across his upturned face as he gazed up the sloping lane, she tried to put herself back to when she was fresh arrived here in the Second Borough, tried to see the dream-hill as the child was seeing it.
It clearly wasn’t an abundance of the customary phantasmagoria you found around Mansoul that had so taken the small boy aback: Spring Lane was very much as it had been in life when Phyllis had been living down here, only more so. There were hardly any dreamlike touches of the kind that typified the upper world, no cellar grids with blackened teeth instead of bars, no fur upon the paving slabs. Instead there was no more than the familiar incline, but on fire with itself and shimmering with identity, with its own foot-worn history, with all the lights it had been saturated by across the thousand years of its existence.
Spring Lane burned with a mythology of chipped slates, pale wash-water blue and flaking at the seam. The summer yellow glow of an impending dawn diffused, diluted in the million-gallon sky above the tannery that occupied this low end of the ancient gradient, across the narrow street from where Phyllis and Michael stood outside the alley-mouth. The tannery’s high walls of browning brick with rusted wire mesh over its high windows didn’t have the brutal aura that the building had down in the domain of the living. Rather it was softly iridescent with a sheen of fond remembrance – the cloisters of some mediaeval craft since disappeared – and had the homely perfume of manure and boiled sweets. Past the peeling wooden gates that lolled skew-whiff were yards where puddles stained a vivid tangerine harboured reflected chimney stacks, lamp black and wavering. Heaped leather shavings tinted with corrosive sapphire stood between the fire-opal pools, an azure down mounded into fantastic nests by thunderbirds to hatch their legendary fledglings. Rainspouts eaten through by time had diamond dribble beading on their chapped tin lips, and every splinter and subsided cobble sang with endless being.
Michael Warren stood entranced and Phyllis Painter stood beside him, sharing his enchantment, looking at the heart-caressing vista through his eyes. The district’s summer sounds were, in her ears, reduced to a rich stock. The lengthy intervals between the bumbling drones of distant motorcars, the twittering filigree of birdsong strung along the guttered eaves, the silver gurgle of a buried torrent echoing deep in the night-throat of a drain, all these were boiled down to a single susurrus, the hissing, tingling reverberation of a cymbal struck by a soft brush. The instant jingled in the breeze.
Uphill, the other four official members of the Dead Dead Gang were climbing through a tentative prismatic haze that seemed to fog – deliciously – each windowsill and curbstone in the slanted lane. Making hard work of it, their slogging forms looked every bit as marvellously typical as the scrubbed doorsteps they were trudging past, looked just as indispensable to the beguiling composition of the scene. Phyllis’s Bill and Reggie Bowler were the closest to the top, with Handsome John and Marjorie sharing a joke as they ascended past the entrance to Monk’s Pond Street, opening to their left on Spring Lane’s other side. Trading a glance in which they both acknowledged what a marvel this all was, Phyllis and Michael started dawdling up the perfect street after their comrades.
Fastening the wine-red dressing gown more tightly round his waist the little boy took big steps to keep up with Phyllis, staring all the time in wonderment at the long terrace reaching from the hill’s foot to its crown, the row of painted wooden doors almost uninterrupted on their right as they went up. At last he could contain his curiosity no longer.
“What are all these houses? Spring Lane wizzn’t like this when I wiz alive still.”
Placing one blue shoe before the other on the pink and weathered pavement as she struggled up the hillside, Phyllis glanced towards the homes that they were passing with a wistful look upon her fair-skinned face.
“Yer right, it wizzn’t, but it wiz when I wiz little. Most of these got knocked dayn right before the war, and then it wiz just wasteland for the kids to play on until it got turned to the school playing field. That little row of ’ouses where your house wiz, on St. Andrew’s Road, that’s all that’s left of a big block of ’ouses. They wiz all up Scarletwell Street and Spring Lane, all along Crispin Street up at the top, and there wiz whole streets in between what ain’t there now. Scarletwell Terrace, what we’ve just come ayt of, that wiz one, and a bit further up on this side of the lane there’s Spring Lane Terrace.”
Michael Warren was still listening, but he was letting his gaze wander to the road’s far side where now the entrance to Monk’s Pond Street opened up, running off north from Spring Lane’s east-west line. Phyllis reflected that this side-street would look vastly altered, too, from the small boy’s perspective. Closest to them, on the left-hand side as they looked down Monk’s Pond Street, stood the east wall of the tannery, which would be recognisable from Michael’s lifetime. Opposite and on the right, however, some two dozen well-kept doorsteps stretched away north to connect with Crane Hill and the bottom end of Grafton Street. Two dozen sprawling families, perhaps two hundred people in their proudly-maintained row, which would, by Michael Warren’s day, become a patch of rubble that the local children called ‘The Bricks’ or else be factory property fenced off by walls of corrugated tin. Only up here, in the magnetic fields of dream and memory, were the old homesteads manifest.
Along the thoroughfare’s far end upon its leftmost, western side there was the feature that had evidently captured the youngster’s attention. The expansive pond from which the street derived its name, dried up down in the timely world since the late sixteen-hundreds, glittered in the sourceless sunlight. Two or three unhurried figures in dun-coloured habits stood conversing by the waterside, one of them carrying a fishing pole.
“They’re monks,” Phyllis explained to Michael. “They’re monks who lived a long while back at Andrew’s Priory, which wiz up near where St. Andrew’s Church wiz now, that I got booted ayt of when me rabbit skins wiz causing such a stink. They’re Frenchies most of them, I think, and it wiz one of them who let the King’s troops in to ransack everything, eight ’undred year ago. Up ’ere that’s all forgiven, by and large, but mostly they don’t mingle wi’ the local ghosts and still keep to themselves. Or sometimes the more boozy ones will ’aunt a pub, just for the company. There’s several of the inns round ’ere ’ave got a ghostly monk in the back cellar or the snug, though I can only think of one by name and that’s Old Joe who floats araynd the Jolly Smokers on the Mayorhold. Old Joe’s not his real name, ’cause that would be something French, but it’s just what the people Daynstairs call him.”
Michael Warren looked at her, perplexed.
“Can people who are still aliveable see ghosts, then?”
Phyllis shrugged.
“Some of them can, but only if they’re a bit funny in the ’ead, like mystic people are, or people who’ve gone mad. People who drink a lot or who smoke opium or things like that, they can see ghosts as well. That’s why yer get more ’aunted pubs than any other sort of building, because dead folk like a place where there’s a chance someone wizzle be drunk enough to notice them. But even the few people what are able to see ghosts can only see them when they’re wandering abayt dayn in the ghost-seam.”
Monk’s Pond Street was vanishing behind them on their left as they continued up the fond and sparkling daydream of the hill. The tartan-shrouded toddler’s attention was now wholly fixed on Phyllis.
“What’s a ghost-seam?”
Phyllis couldn’t help herself from saying “Funny, till yer get to know ’im,” which was an old joke up in Mansoul and which the baffled infant clearly didn’t get. She answered him again, more seriously.
“The ghost-seam’s what it saynds like. It’s a ragged seam what joins the Upstairs to the Dayn-below, and it’s where all the real ghosts ’ang ayt, all the ones what don’t feel comfortable up ’ere. It’s like the Second Borough’s on the top with the First Borough underneath, and in between them there’s the ghost-seam, like when yer go in a pub and all the fag-smoke’s ’anging in the air like a grey blanket, wobblin’ abayt when people move and cause a draught. That’s what the ghost-seam’s like. ’Ere, look ’ere on the right. It’s Spring Lane Terrace, what I said abayt, one of the streets what got pulled dayn to make the playing field.”
They were just walking past the corner where the terrace trickled off due south, towards their right, with house-fronts in a line to either side of dusty flagstones that were smeared with a thin margarine of morning light. Rather than peering down the tributary street, however, Michael Warren was more interested in the corner of it that was opposite the one which he and Phyllis had just passed, the corner they were now approaching as they walked across the mouth of Spring Lane Terrace. In the stead of doorways and net-curtained downstairs windows like the ones that started further down the side street, up this end was only plain brick wall supporting low slate roofs, which Phyllis knew to be the backside of a row of stables. As the pair of them continued up Spring Lane, leaving the offshoot terrace in their wake, they passed the gated yard upon their right out onto which the stables opened. There was the warm, hairy Bovril scent of horses and the stronger smell of disinfectant, which, though Phyllis didn’t like it, always made her nose excited.
The small boy gazed pensively at the closed gate as they walked by it, carrying on uphill. The deep fire-engine red that its gnawed woodwork had once been was faded by forgotten decades to the colour of a kiss. Phyllis explained, before the kid could ask.
“I think this yard’s still ’ere while yer alive, but it’s part of a factory by your time. Back when I was living dayn ’ere, though, it wiz the place they kept the fever cart.”
It made her ghostly substance shiver, even to pronounce the words. The fever cart, to Phyllis, had since she was small seemed to be from the night-side of the Boroughs. Rattling down the huddled byways it had been one of those sinister phenomena, like deathmongers or phantom monks, which she’d believed to be peculiar to the area. Such things spoke of the neighbourhood’s relationship with death, a tiger-trodden foreign land to little girls enjoying a relationship with liquorice-whip and dandelion-clock life.
The baby in his night-things, trotting there beside her, just stared at her blankly.
“What’s a fever cart?”
She sighed theatrically and rolled the memory of her childhood eyes. She’d obviously been right in her assumption that this nipper had been brought up soft. Phyllis supposed that most of those born in the ’Fifties had things cushy, what with all the science and medicine they had by then, at least compared with how things were when she was young.
“Yer don’t know nothing, do yer? What the fever cart wiz, it wiz a big wagon what they put the kids in when they ’ad the smallpox and diphtheria and that. It took ’em to a camp near the stone cross what’s ayt near ’Ardingstone, that’s there to mark the spot where Queen Eleanor’s body wiz put down when she wiz being taken back to London. In the fever camp, ayt in the open air with all the other children what were ill, they’d either die or they’d get better. Usually they’d die.”
The child was gazing at her now with a new look in his blue, long-lashed eyes. Above them, the remembered Boroughs sky graded from Easter yellow into watery rose.
“Wiz there a lot of things what made you poorly, when you wiz down here? Wiz that what made you dead?”
Shaking her head, she put him straight.
“No. There wiz a lot of bad diseases, right enough, but none of ’em put paid to me.”
She rolled one pink sleeve of her jumper up, wearing a gruff and businesslike expression as though Phyllis were a pint-sized stevedore. Thrusting her bony arm out under Michael Warren’s nose she showed him two blanched areas the size and shape of sixpences, close to each other on her pale, soft bicep.
“I remember I wiz playing raynd the Boroughs with ayr sister. Eight, I must have been, so this wiz still back in the ’Twenties. We saw this big queue of people leading ayt the door of Spring Lane Mission over there, where we’d go for ayr Sunday School.”
She gestured to the far side of the lane that they were climbing, where the tan stones of the mission’s plain façade wore their humility and lowliness with a pride that was almost luminous.
“Seeing the queue I thought as they wiz giving something ayt, so I got on the end of it and made ayr sister do the same. I thought it might be toys or something good to eat, ’cause back in them days sometimes yer’d get parcels give by better-off folk, what they’d distribute around the Boroughs. Anyway, it turned out it wiz vaccinations they wiz lining up for, against smallpox and diphtheria, so we got given ’em as well.”
She rolled her jumper sleeve back down again, concealing once more the inoculation scars. Her young companion glanced behind him at the yard that they’d just passed, and then returned his gaze to Phyllis.
“Did the other places in Northamstrung all have their own fever carts as well?”
On this occasion Phyllis didn’t snort or role her eyes at his naivety, but merely looked a little sad. It wasn’t that the boy was stupid, she decided. Just that he was innocent.
“No, me old duck. Only the Boroughs ’ad a fever cart. Only the Boroughs needed one.”
They went on up the hill in silence. On their left across the lane they passed the mouth of Compton Street, which ran off north towards a recollected Grafton Street with hazy Semilong beyond. The burnished lustre of Mansoul hung over everything, lovely and slightly wrong, as with hand-tinted postcard photographs: the doors that stretched away to each side of the street looked like they’d just been painted, apple red or powder blue, and faced each other in two ranks like guardsmen with their chests puffed out, stood waiting for inspection. Doorknobs seemed more gold than brass, and in the dusty fawn meniscus of the summer roadway flecks of mica winked the promise of a jewel mine. <em>We are the Compton girls, We are the Compton girls</em> …
Phyllis remembered every one of them. Cath Hughes. Doll Newbrook. Elsie Griffin. The two sisters, Evelyn and Betty Hennel, and Doll Towel. Phyllis could see their faces sharp as anything, recalled them far more clearly than the people that she’d sat with in church congregations and school classrooms while she was alive. That was the thing with gang allegiances. You made them when your soul was pure and so they counted for much more than your religion, or the party what you voted for when you wiz old enough, or if you joined the Freemasons or something. She suppressed the urge to run off up the ghost of Compton Street to number 12 and call on Elsie Griffin, and instead turned her attentions back to Michael Warren. He was, after all, the job she had in hand.
The other four, ahead of them, had by now reached the summit where the north-south line of Crispin Street and Lower Harding Street ran straight across the top end of Spring Lane. Reggie and Bill were halfway round the factory corner on the top left, disappearing into Lower Harding Street, with Marjorie and Handsome John some way behind them. Phyllis knew that John was hanging back to keep the drowned girl company, since she’d got shorter legs than him and couldn’t climb the slope as fast as he could. Phyllis thought that Handsome John was wonderful.
A little further up the hill and on their right the sacred slab of Phyllis’s own bottom doorstep jutted out an inch or two into the street. When they drew level with it, Phyllis put her hand on Michael’s tartan-covered arm and stopped him so that they could look at it. She couldn’t pass the place unless she paused to offer her homage, silent or otherwise. It was a habit with her, or a warmly-harboured superstition.
“This wiz where I used to live, back when I used to live.”
Up four stone steps the door of number 3 Spring Lane was olive green bleaching to grey, like stale sage, in the sun. The house was narrow and had clearly once been one half of a somewhat larger place along with number 5, next door and downhill on the right. Still further down in that direction were the rear wall and back gate of Spring Lane School, so that on mornings when she’d woken up too late, Phyllis could pull her trick of popping out of the back door, down to the bottom of the back yard that they shared with number 5 and climb over the wall to drop straight into the school playground. This had meant that Phyllis’s report card always had high marks for punctuality, although both Phyllis and her parents were aware that she didn’t deserve them, strictly speaking.
Phyllis knew that past the weathered door, where brittle paint peeled back from blisters to reveal imaginary continents of plain wood underneath, beyond the door there was no passageway or hall. You just stepped without preamble into the Painter family living room, which was the house’s only room downstairs. A twisting flight of stairs ran from it to the single chamber up above, her parents’ bedroom, with the attic in which Phyllis and her sisters slept directly over that. On Friday nights when it was warm they’d sit out on their window-ledge and watch the fights outside the pub across the street at chucking-out time. Shouts and shatterings would waft up to them through warm air that smelled of hops and copper, blood and beer. It was the 1920s, and they’d not had television then.
With only the one space downstairs there’d obviously been no room for a kitchen, and the nearest that they’d had was the cold water tap and old tin bucket, standing on a glistening-wet concrete block atop the flight of blue brick steps that led down to their cellar. This was shared, like the back yard, with number 5 next door and consequently it was cavernous with lots of twists and turns and alcoves that you could get lost in. Up one corner of the cellar, under number 5 and therefore technically a part of next door’s house rather than Phyllis’s, there was a stone slab in the ground what you could move if there were two of you. Lying there with your belly pressed into the chill and coal-dust of the cellar floor you could peer down a short black chimney-well, with pallid silver rings and ripples dancing on its sides, to where the spring that gave the lane its name roared downhill through the dark below. Although the secret torrent had foamed white as spit, Phyllis had always felt as if she were a doctor, gazing spellbound down an aperture into a rushing open vein, part of the Boroughs’ circulation system that would link up with the Monk’s Pond and the Scarlet Well. There was a lot of water hidden underneath the neighbourhood, and it was Phyllis’s conviction that the water was where all of the emotions and the memories collected as trace elements that gave the stream its biting, reminiscent tang; the cold, fresh spray which damped the cellar air.
Phyllis glanced down and to one side at Michael Warren, standing next to her.
“Do yer know, when I wiz alive, if I wiz very ill or very troubled for some reason, it would always be the same dream what I ’ad. I’d be stood in the street ’ere, in Spring Lane where we are now, and it would just be getting dusk. I’d be the age what I am now, a little girl, and ’stead of going in the ’ouse I’d just be stood ’ere, mooning up at ’ow the gaslight in the living room wiz made all green and pink as it fell through the coloured curtains what were drawn across the daynstairs window, ayt into the twilight. In the dream, I’d always ’ad the feeling that no matter where I’d been, no matter ’ow long or ’ow rough the journey wiz, when I wiz standing ’ere and looking at the light shine through the roses on those curtains, I’d come ’ome at last. I always felt sure that when I wiz dead, this place would still be waiting ’ere for me, and everything would all be ’unky-dory. As it turned ayt, I wiz right, as usual. There’s not a minute of ayr lives is ever lost, and all the pulled-dayn ’ouses what we miss are ’ere forever, in Mansoul. I don’t know why I ever got so worried in the first place.”
Phyllis sniffed and took a last look at her former residence for now, then they continued up the hill. The next door on their right and to the left of number 3 was that of Wright’s, the sweetshop, with the stout bay window that displayed its wares behind small, thick panes of myopic glass just past the bell-rigged door as you went up. Because this higher landscape was accreted from the husks of dreams, the row of glinting chandelier-glass jars that the shop wore like a best necklace in its window were not filled with actual sweets, but with the dreams of sweets. There were small Scotty dogs made out of amber barley-sugar that had twisted middles, many of them fused to nine-dog lumps by the warm day, and in the jar of rainbow sherbet (which you could make kali water out of) there were extra strata of the different-coloured powders which, unlike the ordinary ones, fluoresced. There was a purplish layer that you couldn’t really see up at the top, and at the bottom of the jar a pinkish layer that was similarly difficult to look at, but which made your tongue feel cooked if you ate any of it. Only chocolate rainbow drops seemed anything like normal, or at least until she noticed two or three of them were climbing up the inside of their jar and realised they were outsized ladybirds that had shells coated with hundreds-and-thousands, pink and white and blue. Though their mobility put Phyllis off, the pretty beads of sugar on their backs meant that they still looked as though they’d be nice to eat. She didn’t blame the toddler she was escorting for the way he lingered by the sweetshop, staring longingly in through its panelled window until Phyllis tugged the cuff of his pyjama top and made him hurry up.
Before they knew it, they were at the peak and gazing back down the long street that they’d just climbed. She knew that in the living world Spring Lane was nowhere near as long, nor yet as steep, but knew that this was how small children would remember it, hanging annoyingly onto their mother’s coat-tails as they tried to trick her into towing them up the demanding slope. Phyllis and Michael, standing at the top end of Spring Lane, looked west across the bottom of the valley over memories of the coal yard on St. Andrew’s Road, striped as though by the rays of a low sun. Beyond were railway yards where spectral drifts of steam like spirits of departed trains followed the lost, dead tracks on into nettle-beds, and past these the green daybreak of Victoria Park suffused the wide sky’s far edge with a lime blush that looked drinkable. After admiring the soft radiance of the deadworld panorama for a moment, both of them turned left and followed Handsome John, Bill, Marjorie and Reggie into Lower Harding Street.
Running along to Grafton Square where once the Earl of Grafton had some property, the resurrected Lower Harding Street was different in its atmosphere to the surrounding thoroughfares of the dream neighbourhood. It had not been remembered in its pristine state, with all the brickwork and the pointing good as new in brilliant orange that appeared to have been painted on. Instead, it had been fondly recollected from some later point, during the street’s decline. Where once two rows of terraced houses faced each other without interruption save the opening to Cooper Street which sloped off on the right, here there were breaks along the left-side row where dwellings had been emptied prior to demolition. Some of the abandoned buildings were already half knocked-down, with roofs and water services and upstairs floors conspicuously gone. Halfway up one sheer wall, which had become a palimpsest of several generations’ wallpaper, a former bedroom door hung on its hinges, opening no longer to the promise of a good night’s sleep but on a sudden plummet into rubble. Some half-dozen houses opposite the lower end of Cooper Street were barely there at all, their lines merely suggested by a few remaining outcroppings of brick shaped like stray jigsaw pieces, poking from the grass and weeds that had supplanted a beloved front-room carpet.
With the elegiac glow of Mansoul over everything, the dereliction did not seem forlorn or ugly but was more like sad and stirring poetry. To Phyllis, the effect was strangely comforting. It seemed to say that, in somebody’s dreams or memories, even the moss-bound stages of this slow deterioration were held dear. The sight of Lower Harding Street confirmed her feeling that the Boroughs had still been a thing of beauty throughout its undignified and gradual surrender. Though by 1959 and Michael Warren’s time this area’s downstairs counterpart would be a wilderness, Phyllis was confident that it would still retain its place in local hearts, or at least in the younger ones.
Beside her, Michael’s blonde head was tipped back to stare up at the partially demolished house-fronts that they were approaching as they followed their four dead confederates along the revenant terraces. The boy seemed taken by the exposed edge of a dividing wall, or with an ornate fireplace stranded in an upper room that had no floor. He turned and offered Phyllis a confiding look, so that she stooped towards him with one hand cupped at her ear to find out what he had to say.
“These houses look a bit like how my house down Andrew’s Road did when that dervlish showed me it, and I could look round all its walls to see what wiz on the inside.”
Phyllis herself had never undergone a ride like that on which the fiend had taken Michael Warren, and she’d only heard tenth-hand accounts from those rare individuals who had. As a result she only had the sketchiest idea of what the kid was going on about, and so responded with an indeterminate-yet-knowing grunt. Deterring further comment, Phyllis turned away from Michael and towards the rest of her Dead Dead Gang, who were gathered on the sun-baked slabs outside the broken houses opposite the mouth of Cooper Street and obviously waiting for the pair of stragglers to catch up. Reggie and Bill were playing a profoundly painful-looking game of knuckle-rapping with each other as they passed the time, while Handsome John stood there with folded arms and grinned as he looked back along the road at her and her pyjama-boy. Drowned Marjorie sat by herself upon the pavement’s edge and gazed up the incline of Cooper Street towards Bellbarn where she’d resided, before, unable to swim, she’d plunged into the Nene to save a dog who evidently could.
With Michael Warren pottering along behind her, Phyllis marched up to the others and asserted her authority.
“All right, come on, then. ’Ow’s this going to be ayr secret ’ideout if we’re always stood raynd in the street aytside and letting on to everybody where it wiz? Go through to the back yards where nobody can overlook us, and then if it’s safe we’ll let the lad ’ere see the den. Bill, you and Reggie pack that up and do as yer’ve been told before I give yer a good ’iding. And Marjorie, buck yer ideas up. Yer’ll get piles from sitting on the curb like that.”
With varying degrees of muttered insubordination, the dead children stepped through a mere absence in the brickwork where the door of number 19 Lower Harding Street had previously been and creaked in single file across the debris – colonised by snails – that had at some point served as the home’s parlour, living room and kitchen. The rear kitchen wall was gone entirely, so that it was hard to tell where what was formerly indoors came to an end and the back yard began. The only demarcation was a tide-line of domestic rubbish, which had drifted up against the single course of bricks that still remained, a band of refuse that was touchingly familiar and intimate. There was a doll’s head made of hard, old-fashioned plastic, brown and brittle, one eye dead and closed, the other open wide as though the undertaker’s penny had slipped off. There was a broken beer-crate and the undercarriage of a pram, along with solitary shoes, the deadly throat of a milk-bottle and one sodden and disintegrating copy of the <em>Daily Mirror</em> with a headline that referred to Zeus although the story underneath was all about the crisis in Suez.
Having negotiated the precarious obstacle-course of the roofless home’s interior, the gang collected in what there was left of the communal back yard that had once been shared by numbers 17 to 27, Lower Harding Street. It was an area some ninety feet in width, which slanted in an avalanche of tall, parched grass towards a crumbling bottom wall, a little under sixty feet downhill. The remnants of two double-privies stood against this lower boundary, which was at intervals collapsed into a scree of salmon-coloured brick, and here and there across the overgrown enclosure there were piles of junk composting down to dream-dross in amongst the yellowed shoots. Phyllis allowed herself a tight smile of self-satisfaction. If you didn’t know already it was there, then the Dead Dead Gang’s hidden den could not be seen.
She led the gang and Michael Warren down the slope, past a haphazard pile of corrugated iron sheets, discarded cupboard doors and flattened cardboard boxes. At a point approximately halfway down she stooped and gestured proudly to the bushy gradient itself, for Michael’s benefit.
“What d’yer think?”
Bewildered, Michael squinted at the screen of wilted stalks, and then at Phyllis.
“What? What do I think about what?”
“Well, abayt our den. Come on. Get closer up and have a proper butcher’s at it.”
Hitching his pyjama-bottoms up self-consciously, the little boy leaned further in, as he’d been told. After a while he gave a faintly disappointed yelp as he discovered something, although from the sound of it, it wasn’t anything much good.
“Oh. Wiz this what you meant, this grabbit-hole?”
He pointed to a minor burrow, only a few inches wide, and Phyllis laughed.
“Not that! ’Ow would we get dayn that? No, look a bit more to yer right.”
She let him root round in the empty region on the left side of the burrow for a moment and then told him which his right was. He resumed his search and found what he was meant to find almost immediately, although he sounded none the wiser as to what it was.
“Is it a clockpit from an aeroplane what’s gone down underground?”
It wasn’t, obviously, but you could see where he’d got that impression. In fact, what the boy was looking at was the green-tinted Perspex windscreen of a motorcycle sidecar that had been embedded in the slope, then smeared with ochre mud to cut down any telltale glints. That had been Handsome John’s idea, that clever military touch.
“No. It’s the window of ayr den. When we wiz playing ’ere one day we found the ’oles and thought they might all lead to a big burrow further back. The boys fetched shovels, and we dug dayn under where them sheets of metal are, back up the ’ill. It took some time, but we broke through into what ’ad been an old rabbit-warren but was empty now. We kicked all the old tunnel walls dayn and we dug it ayt some more until we’d got a massive pit, looked like a shell ’ad ’it it. Then we widened ayt the biggest rabbit ’ole so we could ’ave a window, where we put this windscreen off a sidecar what we’d faynd. We dragged old doors and that from ’ere-abayts and fitted them across ayr pit to make a roof, but so that it would look like rubbish somebody had dumped.”
She gave a nod and Reggie Bowler scrambled back a few feet through the tall grass, up the slanted yard to where the seeming pile of refuse was located. Bending forward far enough so that his battered hat fell off, he grubbed around amongst the scrap until his fingers found the edge of a dilapidated plywood screen. Grunting with effort – Phyllis thought that he was overdoing it a bit if truth be told – he dragged the mud-stained wooden sheet back, scraping over corrugated iron, until he’d revealed the pitch-black entrance of a tunnel. Stooping to retrieve his fallen bowler, Reggie sat down on the hole’s rim with his pale legs dangling away into the darkness and then, with a slithering motion very like a stoat, he disappeared from sight.
Giving Reggie time to find and light the Dead Dead Gang’s sole candle, Phyllis next sent her Bill and Drowned Marjorie into the subterranean lair, with her and Michael Warren following while Handsome John brought up the rear, since he was tall enough to reach and slide the plywood sheet back into place above them once they were all in.
The pit was roughly circular, perhaps eight feet across and five feet deep with a flat floor and sides of hard-packed soil. The curved wall had been dug to form a ledge just under halfway up so everybody had somewhere to sit, although not comfortably. The same shelf, running all around the den’s perimeter, also provided alcove space, which had been hollowed from the southern section of its arc. Here all the gang’s possessions were kept safe, not that there were a lot of them: two water-damaged copies of <em>Health and Efficiency</em>, black-and-white blondes with beach-balls on their cockled covers, which both Bill and Reggie Bowler had insisted be included in the treasury; a pack of ten Kensitas cigarettes that still had three fags left inside, although the picture on the box had been remembered wrong so that the pompous butler mascot had one gloved hand raised to hold his nose and it said ‘Sea Stink’ where the Kensitas name should have been; a box of matches that had Captain Webb the channel-swimmer on the front, and, finally, their candle. This stood fused by wax to a cracked saucer and supplied the underground den’s one source of illumination, if you didn’t count the greenish underwater radiance that filtered in through the mud-plastered windscreen set into the western wall.
They sat round in a ring there on the narrow and encircling ledge, the candle-glimmer fluttering across their grinning mugs, with only Michael Warren’s legs too short to reach the ground. His slippered toes swung back and forth scant inches from the mouldy carpet-remnant that concealed most of a trodden black-dirt floor. He looked so little Phyllis almost felt a twinge of fondness for him, smiling reassuringly as she addressed him.
“Well, then? What d’yer think?”
She didn’t wait for him to answer, since there was no doubt what he would think, what anyone would think. This was the best den in Mansoul, and Phyllis knew it. Why, they hadn’t even showed him the most thrilling thing about the place yet, and already he looked mesmerised. She carried on with her enthusiastic, bubbling tirade.
“It’s not bad, wiz it, for a gang of kids? For saying it wiz us who made it, like? Now then, I’d better call this meeting of the Dead Dead Gang to order so we can decide what’s to be done with yer. I reckon yer a mystery what needs solving, what with all this getting carried off by devils, starting fights between the builders and then being back to life again by Friday nonsense. So yer lucky yer’ve fell in with us, since we’re the best detectives in the Boroughs, ’igh or low.”
Drowned Marjorie said “Are we?” in a startled tone which Phyllis just ignored.
“Now, what we’ve got to find ayt first wiz who you are. Not what yer name wiz, yer’ve already told us that, but who yer people are, and where yer come from. And I’m not just talking about coming from St. Andrew’s Road, but where the stuff what made yer come from before that. Everything in the world what happens, everybody who wiz ever born, it’s all part of a pattern, and the pattern stretches back a long way before we wiz ’ere, and it guz on a long way after we’re all gone. If you want to find out what life’s abayt you have to see the pattern clearly, and that means yer’ve got to look at all the twists and turns back in the past that made yer pattern what it wiz. Yer’ve got to follow all the lines back, do yer see? Years back, or centuries in some cases. We might have to goo quite a long way before we find out what yer about.”
The little boy already looked disheartened.
“Have we got to walk all back along that big arcade for years? It’s lots of miles for even just a day.”
Drowned Marjorie, who sat the other side of Michael Warren on the packed dirt shelf, turned round to reassure him with the leaping candlelight smeared over each lens of the girl’s unflattering National Health spectacles. Her boggling, earnest eyes were lost in puddles of reflected flame.
“That wouldn’t be no good. Up in the Second Borough here, it’s not like how it wiz back down below. It’s just a sort of dream of how things used to be, so we could walk back down the Attics for as far as they went on and never find out anything worth knowing. It would all be thoughts and fancies, without much to do with anyone’s real life.”
You could almost hear the clockwork turning in the infant’s head as he considered this.
“But couldn’t we look down through all them big square holes and see all what wiz really going on below?”
Here Handsome John leaned forward, thrusting his heroic face into the halo of the candle as he butted in.
“All that we’d see is jewellery, the solid shapes what people leave behind them when they move through time. I’ll grant you, if you study them a long while you can more or less make out what’s happening, but it takes ages and you’re often none the wiser at the end of it.”
The little boy was clearly thinking so hard now that Phyllis feared his blonde head might inflate and blow to bits.
“But what if we went down the attic-holes like I did with that devil? We could see things normal then.”
Phyllis, at this point, snorted with derision.
“Oh, and seeing people with their guts and bones on the aytside wiz normal, wiz it? Anyway, it’s not just anybody who can take you for a ride above the daynstairs world like that. There’s magic powers what only fiends and builders ’ave. No, if we want to find ayt all the clues and bits of evidence that are to do with yer, there’s only one thing for it. We shall ’ave to use one of ayr special secret passages, that runs between Mansoul and what’s below. You do the ’onours, Reggie.”
Climbing to his feet in a half-crouch but with his bowler scraping on the hideout’s corrugated tin roof anyway, the gangly Victorian urchin cut a weird, fantastic figure in the candlelight with his Salvation Army overcoat swinging about his white and bony knees. He squatted on his haunches in a posture very like that of a jumping spider and began to roll the mouldering patch of carpet up from one end. It had had a pattern once, something with diamonds in two shades of brown, but through the gloom and rot only the barest rumour of design was visible as Reggie Bowler rolled it back. While he was thus engaged, Phyllis became aware that Michael Warren and the other members of her gang were edging gradually away from her along the hard black ledge where they were seated. Realising after a few moments that it was the odour of her rabbit pelts in this confined space that was driving them away she tossed her head dismissively and threw one end of the fur necklace back across her shoulder like an actress with a stole. Let them put up with it a minute or two longer. Soon enough they’d all be in a place where no one could smell anything.
The carpet remnant was now rolled into a damp cigar at one end of the rounded pit, exposing the distressed mahogany of an old wardrobe door apparently pressed down into the dirt beneath and which had been previously hidden by the mildewed rug.
“Give us a hand, John.” This was Reggie speaking as he worked his filthy fingernails down into the loose soil up at one end of the embedded door, fumbling for purchase. Handsome John stood up as best he could with the low ceiling and then got down on one knee at the far end of the scuffed wooden rectangle, pushing his fingers down into the crack between the door and its surrounding dirt like Reggie had. Upon the count of three and with a mutual grunt of effort, John and Reggie Bowler lifted the door clear and to one side.
It was as if someone had switched a television on in a dark room. A flood of nacreous grey light burst in to fill the cramped den, shining in a fanning hard-edged ray up through the ragged hole that had been underneath the wardrobe door, which had itself been hidden by the sodden carpet. Michael Warren gasped, beginner that he was. All the dead children’s faces were now under-lit as if by buried starlight and the candle was no longer necessary. Phyllis pinched it out, so’s not to waste it, and received a second skin of hot wax on her thumb and index finger for her pains. The Dead Dead Gang and their pyjama-sporting honorary member climbed down from their packed dirt perches, kneeling in a ring around the pearl blaze of the aperture as they stared mutely down.
The void, about three feet across, was like a peephole that spied down upon a luminescent fairy kingdom underneath the ground, a detailed landscape kept safe in a magic music box on which the lid had just been lifted. Nothing was in colour. Everything was black or white or one of several dozen finely-graded neutrals.
They were looking at a silvery patch of waste ground from above, with gouged clay soil from which grew buttercups and rosebay willowherb in vibrant monochrome. Tin grass shoved up its spears between a fallen sprawl of wet grey bricks, and the rainwater gathered in an upturned hubcap was reflecting only bands of quivering smoky shadow and the leaden clouds above. It was exactly as if somebody unpracticed with a camera had accidentally clicked the shutter while the box was pointed at the ground beneath their feet, had taken a fortuitously-lit and detailed photograph of nothing much at all. The snapshot world that they could see, though three-dimensional, had even got white creases running back and forth across it like a wedding picture left forgotten in a cluttered sideboard drawer, although on close inspection Phyllis knew that these would prove to be trajectories left in the wake of ghostly insects, which would fade from sight in moments.
Michael Warren glanced up from the landscape of burned platinum, its photo-album glow lighting his upturned chin from underneath as he gazed questioningly at Phyllis. He looked from her to the silent film view through the blot-shaped hole, and back again.
“What wiz it?”
Phyllis Painter hung her bloody bandolier of rabbit hides more comfortably around her skinny shoulders and was unable to keep from grinning smugly as she answered. Was there any other bunch of cheeky monkeys in the whole of Heaven had a bolt hole half as good as the Dead Dead Gang?
“It’s the ghost-seam.”
There below the grey breeze blew a sheet of blank, grease-spotted chip-wrap into view across one corner of the scene. Overexposed at its far edge the grainy and nostalgic image bled out to a flaring white, and one after another all the boys and girls went down into the zebra-and-Dalmatian dapple of the ghost-seam, down into the bleached Daguerreotype of a remembered world that was death’s mezzanine.
** <strong>THE SCARLET WELL</strong>
<strong>S</strong>traight down the rabbit hole, and through the wardrobe door: it seemed to Michael as if this was a completely proper and time-honoured way to get into another world, although he couldn’t for the death of him have told you why it felt like that. Perhaps he just remembered something similar from an old story that he’d once had read to him, or else he was becoming more accustomed to the way things happened in this curious new place that he was lost in.
After all the fuss and fireworks of his kidnap by the horrifying Sam O’Day and then his rescue by the eerie ragamuffins of the Dead Dead Gang, he had decided that the best thing he could do would be to treat the whole thing like a dream. Admittedly, it was a dream that seemed to carry on for an uncomfortable length of time, a bit like going into your back yard and finding half a dozen soap bubbles you’d blown three days before still rolling round there in the drain-trap, and in Michael’s heart of hearts he knew that this was not a dream at all. Still, with its colours and its strangeness, it was easy to pretend that he was dreaming, which was better than reminding himself every moment of his actual situation, of the fact that he was dead and in a shabby-but-familiar afterlife with devils and ghost-children everywhere, or anyway, that’s where he was for the time being. Treating it all like a nightmare or a fairy story was a lot less bother.
Mind you, that was not the same as saying it was effortless. He found that he was having to work quite hard to ignore all of the things that told him this was more than just a dream that had outstayed its welcome, such as how real all the people seemed to be. Dream-people, he had found, were nowhere near as complicated as real people were, nor half as unpredictable, in that they generally did what you expected them to do. There never seemed to be much to them, not in Michael’s estimation. All the people he had met in Mansoul, on the other hand, seemed just as messy and as genuine as his own family or neighbours were. The lady who had saved him from the demon, Mrs. Gibbs, who’d called herself a deathmonger, she’d been as real to him as his nan May. In fact, when Michael thought about it, out of the two women, Mrs. Gibbs was probably the most believable. As for the Dead Dead Gang they were every bit as real as a grazed knee, along with all their special signals and their shortcuts and their secret den, all of the funny bits and bobs that made them what they were. Even if all of this did somehow still turn out to be a dream he thought that he’d be best off sticking with the dead kids, who at least appeared to know what they were doing and who clearly knew their way around.
This ghost-seam though, the light from which blazed upwards through a wardrobe door-sized hole in the den’s floor, that felt a bit like trespassing. It felt like something older children might get you to do just so’s you’d get in trouble. Didn’t all the phantoms down there mind having a gang of hooligans running around and bothering them even after they were dead?
On Phyllis Painter’s orders they all climbed down through the glowing rectangle, with the good-looking older boy called John being the first one to descend. Michael supposed that this was probably because John was the tallest and could drop more easily into the black-and-white world underneath. Once John had found his feet below, he would be able to reach up and help the smaller members of the gang to clamber down beside him. The old-fashioned-looking boy with all the freckles and the bowler hat went next, and then the sober-sided little girl with glasses that they called Drowned Marjorie. The kid with ginger hair who Michael thought was more than likely Phyllis Painter’s little brother followed Marjorie, which left just him and Phyllis in the television flicker of the hideout, with the colourless light shining up out of the earth to make the ladies on the cover of <em>Health & Efficiency</em> look grey and chilly.
Michael thought he might be warming to the bossy little Dead Dead girl, especially since she’d come back and saved him from that rotten devil, and not just abandoned him like he’d expected her to do. She was all right, Michael decided, for a girl. However, although she’d gone up in his opinion over the last hour or so, and even though he’d gradually been getting used to how her scarf of rabbits smelled, he found that being in a closed-in space such as the den with her was a bit much. Because of this, he didn’t make a fuss when Phyllis told him that he was the next man down the hole. It would be a relief, quite frankly, to be out in the fresh air again, even if Michael didn’t really need to breathe it quite as urgently as he might once have done. Being inside the hideout with her was like being buried in a coffin full of weasels.
Phyllis told him to get down upon his tummy and to let her gradually lower him backwards, holding tight onto his tartan sleeves in case he slipped. When he was halfway down and had his upper half still poking up into the den he felt strong hands supporting him from underneath. He trusted them enough to let his head sink down below the level of the hideout’s floor, still clinging to the hard dirt of the hole’s rim with his sweaty palms.
It was a bit like going underwater suddenly. The light looked different and it changed the way you saw things, so that everything was sharp and crystal-clear but hadn’t got its colours in it any longer. This new level of the afterlife felt different, too, as though it were a little colder, although Michael didn’t think that was the proper explanation. It was more as if when he’d been in the world Upstairs there’d been a sticky memory of summer warmth, whereas down here there wasn’t any temperature at all. It wasn’t hot, it wasn’t cold. It just felt a bit numb. The same was true with how things smelled. The dreadful niff of Phyllis Painter’s rabbits vanished at the moment Michael’s nose dropped down below the level of the hideout floor, and he discovered that he was unable to smell anything at all. The realm that he was being dangled into had no more scent than a glass of tap-water. Even the background noises of the ghost-seam, swelling up around him, sounded just like his gran’s wind-up gramophone might do if it were being played inside a cardboard box.
The firm grip of what proved to be John’s hands moved up and around Michael’s ticklish midriff, and the next thing that he registered was being set down on the off-white grass that grew there in the country of the ghosts. Everything looked as though it had been drawn in Indian ink or charcoal, and to his surprise he found that he was once more leaving trails behind him as he moved, though these weren’t the fancy wine-red tartan plumes he’d sprouted when the devil took him on his flight. The fading pictures he was leaving in his wake now looked as soft and grey as pigeon feathers. Blinking, he peered all around at the odd place in which he found himself, trying to make his mind up if he liked it much. Colourless dandelions, he learned, looked quite upsetting, while the white wasps striped like flying humbugs left him feeling slightly queasy.
Phyllis Painter, meanwhile, made a big display of holding onto her plain navy skirt, now simply black, as John lifted her from the den down to the hilly wasteland where the rest of them were standing, with his eyes averted throughout in a gentlemanly manner. As she came down, Phyllis dragged one corner of the carpet remnant into place across the gap above her, with the wardrobe door itself being presumably too heavy for a single person. Since the carpet’s underside already had an indistinct and murky hue, the entrance to the den was neatly camouflaged against the cloudy Boroughs sky that it appeared to be suspended in, a jagged hole cut in the air a few feet up above the sparse turf and uneven ground. As John helped Phyllis find her feet, Michael continued to inspect the startling newspaper-coloured kingdom that was all around them.
Michael and the other children seemed to be in the same spot as the Dead Dead Gang’s den had been up in the dreamy, colour-drenched world of Mansoul that they’d just climbed from, but the version of the place that Michael looked out over now was very different, and not just because it was all black and white and sounded flat and hadn’t got a smell. The thing that made the most impression on him was the difference in the place’s atmosphere. It made it near enough impossible for him to keep up the pretence that he was dreaming, because this felt nothing like a dream. The landscape running off downhill before him was far too let-down and sad not to be real.
The houses that had stood there between Monk’s Pond Street and Lower Harding Street were gone; all of the fond and shining memories of homes they’d passed while they were trudging up Spring Lane and all the dwellings that were half pulled down and that they’d had to pick their way through to the derelict communal yard where the Dead Dead Gang kept their hidden den. All gone. Now there were just bleached weeds and straggling, sooty bushes rising from the heaps of rubble. Michael couldn’t even see the faintest lines to show where all the former walls and boundaries had been.
The whole of Compton Street, which had been roughly halfway down the sloping wasteland, had completely vanished. In its place was an unsurfaced track of grey and glistening mud that ran across the wilderness from left to right as he gazed down the hill. He recognised the area now, whereas the glowing streets of Mansoul had seemed unfamiliar: this was how the place had been in Michael’s lifetime. These were the demolished bombsite outskirts of the Boroughs where his older sister Alma played, and that he’d heard her call ‘the Bricks’.
He had a funny feeling, as if he were in a blurry photograph from this year, 1959, a creased old picture that was being looked at by somebody in a century from now, when he and everyone he knew would all be gone. It almost made him want to cry just thinking of it, of how quickly everything was finished and how everyone’s lives were as good as over with already, from the minute they were born. The colour-blinded landscape dropped away from him towards the west, where stands of nettles that were almost black rustled and swayed on slides of sunlit mud that flared with dazzling white. Uneasy, Michael turned back to the members of the Dead Dead Gang, who were all down on solid ground by now.
To Michael’s left stood Phyllis Painter, who looked like she thought she was Napoleon or somebody, stroking her chin as she surveyed her troops. Her small hand, raised up to her face, left grey and white shapes through the air behind it in a fan of ostrich plumes.
“Right, you lot. Back to Spring Lane and across it into Crispin Street. We’ll take ayr ’onorary member for a walk dayn Scarletwell Street to ’is ’ouse in Andrew’s Road. John, you walk up the front and keep an eye ayt for rough sleepers. Bill and Reggie, you ’ang back and do the same so that we dun’t get any mad ghosts come upon us from behind. Remember, there’s a lot of ’em what we’ve played tricks on, up and dayn the years, and they don’t like us. Most of ’em are ’armless, but if yer see Mary Jane or old Tommy Mangle-the-Cat then run like billy-oh. We’ll meet up later on the Mayorhold, where the Works wiz, if we should get separated.”
Michael thought this sounded more alarming than the pleasant stroll he’d been expecting. What, he wondered, were rough sleepers? Also, why would anyone be called “Mangle-the-Cat”? Nevertheless, he fell in with the other children as they climbed the slanting wasteland with its test-card tones, back up towards all that was left, by 1959, of Lower Harding Street. He tried to haul himself up a particularly steep bit of the slope by clutching at a clump of bindweed, but discovered that his fingers passed through the white trumpet blossoms and the thick grey veins of creeper as if he was made completely out of cigarette smoke, rather than just being the same colour as it at that moment. He supposed it made sense if the weeds were real and he was ghostly, but then what about the ground that he was clambering on? Why didn’t he and his new dead friends sink down through it to Australia or somewhere? He decided to ask Phyllis, who was struggling up the hill ahead of him.
“What makes the flaw be solid when the rest of everything is mistreous?”
He pulled a face, dismayed to find his tongue was playing up again. It seemed to happen most when he was nervous, and he thought that it was very likely all this talk of mad ghosts and cat-manglers that was upsetting him. Phyllis scowled back at Michael over one pale woollen shoulder of her jumper, which looked warm grey even though he knew that it was really milkshake pink. Smudged after-images were smoking from her back.
“Yer don’t ’alf ask some silly questions. All them things grown ayt the land, all of the ’ouses and the people and not just the plants and trees, they’re only ’ere a little while. It’s only like a month, a year, a century or what-not, and they’re gone. The linger of ’em ’ardly ’as a chance to make a real impression on the worlds what are all up above. Some places, like St. Peter’s or the ’Oly Sepulchre what ’ave been there for ages, it can be a struggle walkin’ through the walls of ’em because they’re thickened by ’ow long they’ve been there. There’s a beech tree up in Sheep Street what’s been there eight ’undred years, so yer can give yer ’ead a nasty smack on that, an’ all. Compared with that, gooin’ through factory walls or them in people’s ’ouses wiz a piece o’ cake. You just pass through ’em like yer made from steam. This slope we’re walkin’ up, though, that’s been ’ere for like a million years, so it feels solid even to a ghost. Now, keep yer trap shut ’til we’re up the ’ill.”
They climbed on for a moment or two more, and then the whole gang reassembled on the cracked stone paving slabs of Lower Harding Street. Michael was pleased to see that all the houses on the street’s far side had people living in them and were being kept in good condition, with the gentle rise of Cooper Street still running up to Belbarn and St. Andrew’s Church, although the near side of the street where he stood with the other ghost-kids had all been pulled down. Above the street, the polished silver pot-lid of the sun was blazing from a wide expanse of cool grey sky, which Michael thought might be a summer blue if it were looked at by the living. Little white clouds stood out from the background here and there, as if drops of peroxide bleach had fallen onto blotting paper.
In a trailing throng the gang of phantom children made their way down the old-fashioned crackling newsreel of a street and back towards Spring Lane, each with a row of fading look-alikes that streamed along behind them. As they’d been instructed, little Bill and Reggie what’s-his-name brought up the rear, while Phyllis and Drowned Marjorie walked side by side towards the middle of the line, engrossed in giggling female conversation that was punctuated by swift, furtive glances at the unsuspecting tall lad, John, who paced along in front of everybody.
Michael tried to walk with Marjorie and Phyllis so that he’d have somebody he knew to chatter with but Phyllis tossed her fringe, causing her rabbit necklace to swing back and forth, and told him that it was “a private matter” what they were discussing. Given that he wasn’t sure yet what to make of the mischievous Bill or the tough-looking Reggie, Michael hurried to catch up with John, who strode with a heroic bearing at the front of their ragtag parade. This oldest member of the Dead Dead Gang appeared to Michael to be a dependable and decent sort of lad. He glanced round and grinned amiably as the pyjama-clad child scampered from behind to trot along beside him.
“Hello, nipper. Phyllis given you your marching orders, has she? Never mind. You keep me company instead. You never know, it might be we could learn a thing or two off of each other.”
Michael did a sort of double skip in order to keep up with John’s long legs and greater stride. He liked the older boy a lot. For one thing, John was the first person that he’d met up here who seemed as though he wouldn’t get annoyed if Michael asked him things. Michael decided that he’d put it to the test.
“What wiz that Phyllis said about rough sleepers? Are there bad ghosts going to come and get us? Wiz that what you’re looking out for?”
John smiled reassuringly.
“They’re not bad ghosts, not really. They’re just people who aren’t sleeping soundly in their afterlives because of one thing or another. They don’t fancy running through their lives again, and they don’t feel right going upstairs to Mansoul. Some of ’em don’t feel like they’re good enough, and some of ’em just like it here where everything’s familiar, even if it’s all in black and white and there’s no smell or anything.”
The handsome boy’s face took on a more serious look.
“They’re harmless for the most part, that sort, but there’s one or two of them who ain’t. There’s ones who’ve been down here a long time and it’s sent them funny, either that or they were funny to begin with. Then there’s ones who’ve got too fond of ghost-booze, Puck’s Hat Punch they call it. They’re the worst to look at. They can’t hold themselves together properly, so they get shapes and faces that are mixed up like a jumble sale, and they’re forever flying into rages. Old Mangle-the-Cat, he’s one of them, and I’ll tell you for nothing, if a ghost gives you a thick ear then you’ll feel it.”
John gave Michael a soft prod in his left shoulder with one finger as a demonstration, and although it didn’t hurt, the younger boy could see it would have done if John had put more force behind it. Satisfied he’d made his point, John next untucked his phosphorescent shirt tails from the waistband of his knee-length trousers, pulling up the garment and the pullover he wore above it to reveal his belly. Just below the ribcage on John’s right-hand side there was a dull grey light that seemed to pulse at intervals beneath the skin, as if John had a tiny road-lamp flashing in his stomach.
“That’s where Mary Jane put in the boot when we’d been playing tricks on her, some while back now. A ghost-bruise like this, it’ll fade away eventually, but I dare say that if you got enough of ’em at once, your spirit might be done some damage that’d be a job to fix.”
John rolled his shirt back down and tucked it in. The action left a churning storm of ghostly hands and cuffs around his waistband that dispersed after a moment.
On the other side of Lower Harding Street a front door opened with a muted squeak and a disgruntled-looking woman in her forties came out through it, as did a brief burst of wireless-music playing from somewhere inside the house. It was a song that Michael recognised, by an American. He thought it might be called something like “What Did Della Wear”, but it was cut off as the woman shut the door behind her and then bustled down the terrace a short distance, with arms folded truculently and her dark permed hairdo bobbing like a feeding blackbird. Calling at a neighbour’s some doors down she knocked upon the door and was let in almost immediately by a tall lady whose short hair was either blonde or grey. Neither of the two women left a trail behind them as they moved, nor spared the gang of children wandering by upon the street’s far side a second glance.
“They’re still alive, so they can’t see us,” John remarked conspiratorially. “The way that you can tell wiz that they don’t have streamers following behind ’em, like what we’ve got.” Here he waved one arm so that it fanned out like a hand of cards, the extra limbs persisting for an instant before disappearing.
“If you see somebody without streamers and it looks like they can see you, chances are it’s someone who’s asleep and dreaming. You don’t get as many of ’em hanging round the ghost-seam as you do Upstairs, but every little while you’ll get a couple of ’em what have blundered down here and are having all their dreams in black and white. Most of ’em, they’ll be wearing just their vest and pants or they’ll be in the nude. If you see someone dressed who’s looking at you, and they don’t leave any pictures when they move, it’s one of them few characters what are alive but can still see things. If they’re drunk or dosed with drugs, or if they’re a bit barmy, then they’ll glimpse you sometimes. Barmy or poetic, either one will do. Most of the time they won’t be sure they’ve really seen you, and they’ll look away.”
Walking along by Michael’s side with Michael hurrying to keep up, John gazed down at the pavement reeling by beneath their feet and frowned, as if he was recalling something that he didn’t like.
“The psychics and the swamis, they’re all tosh. They’ll look straight through you while they tell your mum how happy and how comfortable you look, and how you didn’t suffer. You can stand there screaming ‘Mum, I got blew up and it wiz bloody horrible’, but she won’t hear. Nor wizzle they, the phoney buggers.
“Mind you, once I went round to a séance this old girl wiz throwing, in her parlour. She wiz faking everything and telling people that their loved ones wiz beside her when they wizn’t. It was only me, I wiz the only ghost there, so I went and stood in front of her and blow me if she couldn’t see me! She just looked at me and she burst into tears. Right there and then she called the séance off and sent the people home. She packed the table-tilting in just after that. She never held another meeting, and she wiz the only one I ever met who I’d call genuine.”
Ahead of them the top of Spring Lane was approaching and the ancient street ran off downhill upon their right, where Lower Harding Street turned into Crispin Street once it had crossed the lane. The waste-ground that they walked beside had been fenced off with criss-cross wire, beyond which they could see the early stages of some building work. A big sign stood behind the wire, propped on a steel-pipe scaffolding, with words to the effect that all the fenced-in ground belonged to somebody called Cleaver, who was putting up a factory sometime soon.
John strolled along by Michael’s side, keeping him company, thoughtfully taking shorter strides so that the youngster could keep up with him more easily. He kept on glancing down at Michael with a faint smile, as if he was privately amused by something but was for the moment keeping it all to himself. At last he spoke again.
“They tell me your name’s Michael Warren. So, whose lad are you, then? What’s your dad’s name? Is it Walter?”
Michael was confused by this, and wondered if the bigger boy were making fun of him in some way that he was too young to understand. He shook his head.
“My dad’s called Tom.”
John beamed, giving the smaller boy a disbelieving look that was at the same time admiring and delighted.
“What, you’re Tommy Warren’s son? Well, I’ll be blowed. None of us ever thought that Tom would marry, with him being a late starter like he wiz. How wiz he, Tom? He’s happy, wiz he? Settled down and that, not living with his mam round Green Street anymore?”
Michael was flabbergasted, looking at the big lad in bewilderment, as if John had produced a flock of parrots out of thin air.
“Did you know my dad?”
The older boy laughed, swinging one leg idly as if to kick a bottle-top off of the pavement, though his foot passed through it.
“Blimey, I should say so! I hung round with Tommy and his brothers on the green, when we wiz kids. He’s a good bloke, your dad. If you should get took back to life like everybody round here seems to think you wizzle, don’t you play him up too much, ay? It’s a decent family what you come from, so don’t let ’em down.”
Here John broke off and gave the fenced-off area that they were walking past a thoughtful look. Grey rain hung trembling on the grey weave of the wire.
“You know, your granddad … no. No, it’s your father’s granddad, your great-granddad. He wiz an old terror they called Snowy. He turned down an offer from the man whose company wiz putting up this building here. This feller said that he’d make Snowy a half-partner in the business, on condition Snowy kept out of the pub for the next fortnight. ’Course, he got told where to stick his co-directorship and that wiz that. He wiz a mad old bugger, Snowy Vernall, but he’d got the power in him, right enough. However poor he wiz, he’d got the power to throw away a fortune just like that.”
From Michael’s point of view this didn’t seem much of a power, not when compared to flying, say, or turning to a giant. He’d have asked John to explain, but by that point they’d reached the corner of Spring Lane, unreeling down from where they stood towards the coal-yard and the west, where John suggested that they wait until the others had caught up a bit. Michael gazed off and down the hillside as he whiled away the time.
Even without its dusty, faded colours, this was the Spring Lane that Michael recognised, Spring Lane as it was in the summer months of 1959 and not as it had been in the bright-tinted memories of Phyllis Painter or the other people who had lived here long ago. For one thing, nearly all the houses on the lane’s far side had been pulled down. The homes that had been near the upper end were gone, including Phyllis Painter’s and the sweetshop that had stood next door, demolished to make room for a long patch of grass that ran along the top Crispin Street edge of Spring Lane School, just a few stone steps up from the school’s concrete playground. This was silent and deserted on account of the school holidays.
The houses lower down the hill, the ones that had been standing in between Scarletwell Terrace at the bottom of the slope and Spring Lane Terrace halfway up, these had all disappeared, as had the terraces themselves. The lower playing field of Spring Lane School now reached from the old factory where the fever cart had once been kept, down to the jitty-way that ran along behind the houses on St. Andrew’s Road. Although the view was cosy and familiar, Michael found that he was looking at it in a different way, as somebody who knew what had been there before and knew how much was gone. The gaps between the buildings didn’t look as if they had been planned, the way they’d looked to him before, but seemed more like reminders of some great disaster.
Michael understood for the first time that he’d been living in a country that had not had time yet to get over being in a war, although he didn’t think that many German bombs had fallen on Northampton while all that was going on. It just looked like they had, or as if something every bit as bad had happened. It was funny. If he hadn’t seen Mansoul and seen how Spring Lane looked in people’s hearts, then all of this would seem normal to him, instead of being bare and broken-looking. It would look like it had always been this way, with all its holes and empty bits.
The other children had by then caught up to him and John, with Phyllis and Drowned Marjorie still smirking slyly as they whispered to each other. The boy Reggie, in his dented bowler hat, had once more started up the game of knuckles he’d been playing earlier with Phyllis’s young brother Bill, as they lagged back behind the rest of the Dead Dead Gang. Ginger Bill was blonde like Michael in the ghost-seam, which was colourless as a new Magic Painting book before you’d brushed the water on. As Bill and Reggie’s clenched hands hurtled down to smack each other on the knuckles, the two boys were blossoming with fists like angry monsters or like funny gods that people from another country might believe in. Michael wondered briefly if this was the reason why so many things in legends had got extra heads or arms, but just then his attention was seized by a passing bright grey ladybird, so that the idea trailed off uncompleted.
Once they had regrouped, the ghostly urchins crossed Spring Lane and carried on down Crispin Street, beside the woven wire boundary that fenced off the grubby white fur of the school’s top lawn. It wasn’t until Bill and Reggie plunged straight through the fence to rough-and-tumble there upon the pale and poorly-looking grass that Michael was reminded how he now had the ability to pass through walls and things. He wondered why he and the others kept so strictly upon one side of the wire partition. He supposed that it was habit, and decided not to test it out by joining Bill and Reggie. If he wasn’t walking through things all the time then it was easier to pretend that everything was normal, if you didn’t count the lack of colour or the burst of twenty hands he now apparently required to quietly pick his nose.
As they got nearer to the scuffed and silvery metal hurdle of the crossing-barrier that stood outside the school’s top gate, Michael gazed over Crispin Street to Herbert Street; there it ran off uphill between two patches of tall grass and rubble where it looked like there had once been houses. In his ordinary life, wheeled past it in his pushchair by his mum Doreen, Michael had thought that Herbert Street looked like a run-down sort of street where run-down people lived, although it might have been the name that gave him that impression. Herbert Street, he half-believed, was where the Herberts started out, including not only the Scruffy Herberts and the Lazy Herberts that his dad had often mentioned, but also their more successful-sounding relatives, the Crafty Herberts. This was an idea which more than likely had been passed on to him, like an eyeless teddy bear, by his big sister.
Thinking idly about families and where they started out, including all the things that John had said about his dad and his great-granddad, he was startled when the big boy grabbed him by the collar of his dressing gown and pushed him face down on the grass-seamed paving stones. John did this with such force that for a second Michael’s face was shoved below the surface of the street, which was alarming until he discovered that it wasn’t really a great inconvenience, although there wasn’t much to look at except worms. Bobbing his head back up he caught the tail-end of what John was shouting, with the bigger boy himself down on the ground now, next to Michael.
“… body get down! It’s Malone at ten o’clock, up over Althorp Street! Were the same grey as what the path wiz, more or less, so if we stay still he won’t see us, being right up in the sky like that.”
Although afraid to move a muscle, Michael slowly tipped his head back so that he could peer into the firmament above them.
At first, he mistook it for a smear of dirty smoke, a drifting stain of factory black above the chimneypots that rose between here and the Mayorhold, uphill to the east. It scudded over the slate rooftops like a small but viciously determined thunderhead, and Michael was just wondering why anyone would name a cloud “Malone” when he first noticed the two yapping terriers that it was carrying beneath its arms.
It was a man, a dead man judging from the smudge of picture-portraits stuttering behind him in his wake as he progressed across the off-white heavens. He wore hobnail boots, a shabby suit and long dark coat, the outfit topped off by a bowler hat like Reggie wore, though a much smarter one that looked more business-like. It was the fading plume of after-images from this drab clothing that had looked like smoke when Michael first set eyes on it, a filthy airborne blemish caused by someone burning tyres. However, as he studied it more closely with the better eyesight that he’d had since he’d been dead, more and more horrid details became readily apparent.
There was the chap’s face for one thing, a white mask suspended in the churning black steam of his head and body. Pale, with small grey wrinkles where the eyes should be, the ghostly countenance was smoothly shaven, almost rubbery, that of a well-kept sixty-year-old man with absolutely no expression. Michael thought the deadpan features looked more frightening than droll. They didn’t look like they’d react to anything, no matter how sweet, terrible or sudden it might be. The colour of the fellow’s hair was hidden underneath a stream of bowler hats, but Michael thought that it was more than likely white and oiled, like feathers from an albatross.
Not very tall yet wiry in his build, the man was upright as he moved across the sky, legs pedalling as though he sat astride an unseen bicycle, or as though he were treading air. Each sweep and swing of his long coat hung there recorded on the space behind him in a tongue of tarry vapour. Underneath his arms he clutched his pair of dogs, one black, one white, like on the label of Gran’s whiskey bottle, while up from his jacket pockets boiled the writhing heads of what the horror-stricken Michael first took to be snakes then realised were ferrets, not that this was any less distressing. He could hear their distant cheeps of threat and panic, even in amongst the startled barking of the terriers, despite the ghost-seam’s soundproofing that sucked the echo out of every note.
“What wiz he?” Michael asked John in a whisper as the two of them lay face down, side by side upon the tiles of Crispin Street. The older boy kept his poetic-looking eyes fixed watchfully upon the smouldering figure passing overhead as he replied.
“Him? That’s Malone, the Boroughs’ ratter. He’s a fearsome man, make no mistake. They say he does a party trick where he’ll catch rats and kill ’em with his teeth, although I’ve never seen him do it. Phyllis stole his bowler once and put it on a great big rat. All you could see was this hat with a rat’s tail scuttling down the street, and old Malone grey in the face as he went running after it. Malone wiz furious. He said that he’d hang Phyllis with her rabbit-string if he caught up with her, and sounded like he meant it. From the way he’s headed, I’d say he’s just come out of the Jolly Smokers. That’s the pub they haunt, up on the Mayorhold, so he might have had a drink. At any rate, you’re best off steering clear of him, whether he’s drunk or sober. With a bit of luck he’s heading home to Little Cross Street, where he lived, and he’ll be passed by in a minute.’
As it turned out, John was right. Although he moved as slow as treacle, the dead rat-catcher progressed in a south-westerly direction through the ashen Boroughs’ sky, cutting across the corner of the school’s top lawn from Crispin Street to Scarletwell Street, floating off above the maisonettes, past Bath Street to the tangled courts and passages beyond. The whining of the hounds grew fainter as their master’s blot-like shape was shrunken to a smut, a breeze-borne speck like something in your eye, no different from the other black flakes carried from the railway station.
Cautiously, the Dead Dead Gang climbed to their feet once they were sure he wasn’t going to come dog-paddling back through the still summer air and pounce upon them. Bill and Reggie were both giggling as they reminisced about the rat-and-bowler incident that John had mentioned, although Phyllis had a faintly worried look and fiddled nervously with her long scarf of putrefying rabbit pelts. Only Drowned Marjorie seemed unconcerned by the experience, dusting her skirt down with a brisk efficiency and brushing bits of ghost-grit from her chubby knees as she stood up. Michael was starting to see the bespectacled girl as the gang’s most stoic member, taking every new experience in her stumpy stride without complaint. He thought that this might be an outlook that came naturally to someone drowned before the age of seven. Things would probably seem relatively unsurprising after that, even if they were flying rat-catchers.
Although the sighting of Malone had evidently rattled Phyllis, she still managed to maintain a tone of calm authority as she addressed her men.
“Come on. If we’re to find ayt all the clues an’ evidence abayt ayr regimental mascot then we better get dayn Scarletwell, before somebody else comes sailin’ past.”
Michael fell into step beside the gang as they continued along Crispin Street. In the square holes where paving-tiles had been prised up were puddles, shimmering like chips of mirror on a pantomime princess’s ball-gown. Shuffling in his slippers to keep up with John, Michael was unable to put Malone the ratter’s recent aerial stroll out of his mind.
“How wiz he flying, right up in the air like that?”
The older boy frowned quizzically at Michael, so that Michael thought he must have said his words the wrong way round again.
“What do you mean? Malone’s a ghost. Ghosts don’t have any heaviness, what they call mass, so here in the three-sided world the pull of things don’t make no difference to ’em. Not much, anyway. It’s just the same for us lot. Here, give me your hand and jump as if we’re in the long-jump.”
Michael did as he was told. To his astonishment he found that he and John were sailing through the air in a slow arc which, at its summit, took them higher than the fencing of the school yard to their right. As light as dandelion clocks they drifted back to earth again a few yards further down the street, their after-images like kite-tails settling behind. Michael was speechless with delight at this exciting new discovery but nonetheless resumed his normal walking style there next to John, who had by now let go of Michael’s hand.
“There’s lots of things like that what you can do. You can jump off a roof and fall so slowly that you don’t get hurt. Or you can fly like old Malone, although there’s lots of different ways of doing it. Most people pick their feet up off the floor until they’re sort of lying in the air, then do a breast-stroke like they’re swimming. Others do a doggie-paddle like Malone, and some just swoop about like bits of paper in the wind. You’ll find with the majority of ghosts, though, that they can’t be bothered flying everywhere. For one thing, it’s too bloody slow. The air’s as thick as marmalade. You’re faster walking, or else running in the special ways that ghosts can run: there’s skimming like you’re on a frozen slide that’s just an inch above the pavement, or there’s what we call the rabbit run, on all fours so that just your knuckles graze the ground. That’s a good laugh, if everybody’s in the mood for it, but by and large it’s safer walking. You’ve got time to spot all the rough sleepers before they spot you.”
They were now at the end of Crispin Street, where it ran over Scarletwell Street and turned into Upper Cross Street. John insisted that they wait again at this new junction for the others to catch up, so Michael practised jumping on the spot, achieving altitudes of several feet before John asked him, genially, to pack it in. From where they stood upon their corner, Scarletwell Street was unrolled down to St. Andrew’s Road upon their right, while on their left it sloped up in between the facing terraces towards the cosy oldness of the Mayorhold. Michael always thought of this familiar enclosure as a sort of town square that was meant for just the people of the Boroughs, even though he knew that the real Market Square was further off uptown.
Standing there in his drool-scorched dressing gown, there in the draughtboard-coloured copy of his neighbourhood, the little boy looked at the weathered brickwork of the houses at the top of Scarletwell and had a sense, for the first time, of how long everything had been here before he’d been born. There was what John had told him about playing on the green behind St. Peter’s Church with Michael’s dad when they’d been boys. He hadn’t really thought before about his dad having once had a childhood, although now it struck him, shockingly and suddenly, that everyone must have been little once. Even his dad’s mum, his nan, May, she’d have begun life as a tiny baby somewhere. Then there was her dad, Michael’s great-grandfather, who John had mentioned, who was mad and had the power to not have any money. Snowy, had John called him? Snowy must have been a boy of Michael’s age once, long ago, who’d had a mother and a father, and so on and so on, back to times he’d heard about “when we were living in the trees”, which he’d assumed were probably the ones down in Victoria Park. Michael stared off down Scarletwell, between the modern maisonettes or flats on one side and the playing fields of Spring Lane School upon the other, feeling as if he were peering down a real well, one that dropped away beneath him, down through all the mums and dads and grandmas and great-granddads, back through all the days and years and hundred-years into a smelly, dark place that was damp and echoey, mysterious and bottomless.
Once all the other dead kids had caught up and joined them on the corner, John and Michael carried on down Scarletwell Street. From the hill’s top, gazing down across the squeaking railway yards towards Victoria Park and Jimmy’s End, the view was much the same as it had been up in Mansoul, except that here it looked like an old silent film, silver like fish-skin, without all of the remembered warmth and colour. It was only when he thought about the way things would have been only a little while back, in his parents’ day, that it occurred to Michael how much change the district must have seen in those few years.
Judging from how he’d heard his mum and gran describe it, the whole big oblong of ground, which stretched from Scarletwell Street to Spring Lane and from St. Andrew’s Road to Crispin Street, had been much simplified. Where once the block had been a maze of homes and yards and businesses, now there were just the classrooms of Spring Lane School sheltered in a concrete hollow at the hill’s crest and a single row of houses at the bottom on St. Andrew’s Road, the terrace that Michael had lived in when he was alive. All of the land between was now banked playing fields, with the exception of a sole surviving factory over on Spring Lane. A hundred warehouses, sheds, pubs, homes that had served for generations, alleyways for kissing couples, outdoor toilets and lamplighter’s shortcuts had been swept away to leave grey meadows where the whitewash margins of the football pitch stood out like old scars. Although this was Scarletwell as Michael knew it, somewhere that seemed always to have been the way it was and where his own house still stood safe and sound, he had a sudden tingling sense of all the names and stories that had been rubbed out to make a place where school-kids could have sack races on sports day. All the people that were gone, and all the things they’d known.
Michael was walking beside John, still, as they sauntered down the washed-out reproduction of the hill. Not far behind them, Phyllis and Drowned Marjorie were sniggering conspiratorially again and Michael wondered if it was at him, but then he always wondered that with girls. Or boys. Following at the rear, Phyllis’s little brother Bill conferred in hushed tones with the bowler-clad boy, Reggie, telling him what Michael thought was probably a dirty joke, then having to explain the modern parts of it that the Victorian boy obviously didn’t get. Michael could hear him saying “Well, okay, the woman in the gag’s not Elsie Tanner, then. What if it’s Mrs. Beeton?” Michael didn’t know the first name, but he thought the second had something to do with either cookery or nursing, or perhaps she’d been a murderer. He strained to hear the finish of the story, which appeared to involve either Elsie Tanner or else Mrs. Beeton answering the door to a delivery boy when she was nude and straight out of the bath, but Phyllis Painter turned round to her younger brother and told him to knock it off before she clouted him. There was a tightness in her voice that Michael didn’t think had been there before they’d had their near run-in with Malone. She sounded a bit scared, and in the light of what he’d heard about the fearless pranks that Phyllis played on ghosts, this puzzled him. He thought that he’d ask John.
“So, if ghosts frighten Phyllis, why does she play tricks on them? If she wiz to leave them alone, perhaps they wizzle do the same.”
John shook his head, so that for a brief instant he had three of them. He and the younger boy were just then strolling past the south side of the school’s top lawn, towards the stone posts of its main gate, further down.
“It’s not Phyllis’s nature, to leave ghosts alone. I’ll tell you, she knows how to bear a grudge, does Phyllis, past the grave if necessary. What it wiz, when Phyllis wiz a living girl, she wizn’t scared of nothing except ghosts. Even if the ghosts wizn’t really there, they played upon her nerves so bad that she made up her mind to one day have revenge. She swore that if she ever got to be a ghost herself, then she’d give all the other ghosts what for, for scaring little children. She’d be such a terror that the ghosts would all end up afraid of kids and not the other way around. I have to say, she’s done a good job so far, even if there’s places in the Boroughs we can’t go in case they lynch her.”
John and Michael neared the entrance of the schoolyard, with its own iron crossing barrier stood there in front of it, the gates locked for the summer holidays. Across the road from this the mouth of Lower Cross Street opened, running south along the bottom of the maisonettes to cut across the slope of Bath Street, heading towards Doddridge Church in the blurred snapshot of the distance. Down this side-street, rumbling towards the junction where it met with Scarletwell, there came a baffling assortment of fused body parts and cycle-wheels that Michael couldn’t come to terms with for a moment. It appeared to be a man in a dark trilby, riding on a bicycle, but all the images that he left trailing after him had got their black and white reversed, like when you saw the negatives of photographs. This, Michael thought, was surely a notorious and perhaps dangerous rough sleeper. He tugged hard upon John’s sleeve and stammered the alarm, although the tall lad didn’t seem unduly worried by the apparition. After a few moments Michael understood the reason why, or, at least, he began to understand it.
The gruff-looking fellow in the trilby turned left at the corner and free-wheeled away down Scarletwell Street on his bicycle, a creaking old contraption that looked pony-sized to Michael. As the man rolled off downhill he left no pictures of himself behind, which meant that he was still a living person. The peculiar thing that Michael had at first mistaken for a string of after-images in negative remained, unmoving, at the end of Lower Cross Street.
This turned out to be a coloured man with white hair, also sat astride a bicycle, who appeared fleetingly familiar to the little boy. Had Michael glimpsed a picture of this old chap somewhere recently, an image on a circus poster or a stained-glass window or something like that? The black man changed his grip upon the handlebars, and Michael noticed a brief flurry of too many fingers, from which he deduced this cyclist was the ghost, and not the other one. When Michael had first noticed him approaching Scarletwell Street, he must have been riding his ghost-bicycle so that he occupied the same space as the trilby-sporting white man, which explained how they’d seemed all mixed up together. Looking closer, Michael also realised that the black man’s bike (which pulled a two-wheeled cart behind it) had white tyres made out of rope, rather than the black rubber ones that had been on the living rider’s vehicle. This had probably helped give him the impression that one cyclist was a reversed copy of the other, now he thought about it.
As they both approached the school gate and its finger-worn gunmetal crossing barrier, John ducked his head to whisper an aside to Michael, who was diligently shuffling along beside him.
“That bloke who just rode off down the hill, the living fellow with the trilby on, he wiz the one you should be scared of out of them two. He’s George Blackwood, who rents half the houses in the Boroughs out, and half the women too. Bit of a gangster, Blackwood wiz, collecting rent and his cut of the takings from the prostitutes. He’s got a lot of hard men who he pays to back him up. ‘Soul of the Hole’, we call his type up here. He’s one of them where you can see the first signs of a kind of emptiness that gets into a place and turns it rotten.”
Michael didn’t have the first idea what John was on about. He merely nodded wisely so that his pale ringlets bloomed double-exposed into a lamb-white catkin-bush, and let the older lad continue.
“Everybody’s scared of Blackwood. The exception, funnily enough, wiz your nan, May. May Warren treats him just the same as she treats everybody else, which wiz to say she tells him off and scares him stiff with a right earful and then asks him if he wants a cup of tea. Old Blackwood likes her. He respects her, you can tell. And I’d not be surprised if him and his young ladies hadn’t needed a good deathmonger at times over the years, if you know what I mean.”
Though Michael didn’t, he tried hard to look as though he did. The bigger boy went on.
“The coloured feller, on the other hand, he’s good as gold. His name’s Black Charley and you won’t find anybody more well-liked throughout Mansoul. The Mayor of Scarletwell, that’s what they call him. If you look close you can see he’s got his chain of office on, around his neck.”
Michael looked closer, as instructed, and saw that the black chap had indeed got something like a rough medallion hanging down to his white shirt-front. In its way, it was as memorable a piece of neckwear as the scarf of rabbit-hides that Phyllis had got on. It seemed to be a tin lid hanging from a lavatory chain, but with the pale grey metal polished so that it was blinding when it caught the silver of the sunlight. The old coloured bloke was gazing, not unkindly, at the gang of kids as they approached the junction, obviously waiting there upon his funny-looking bicycle so he could talk to them. Michael spoke from the corner of his mouth to John, in much the way that tough Americans talked in the films you saw on telly.
“Wiz he a rough sleeper?”
John dismissed the notion with a wave, a dozen hands in grey-white like the pages of a fanned-through book.
“Nah. Not Black Charley. The rough sleepers, for the most part, hang about here in the ghost-seam because they don’t think they’d like it in Mansoul, up in the Second Borough. I’ve heard some say as the ghost-seam’s purgatory, but if it wiz, it’s one that people chose themselves. It’s not like that with Charley. He’s like us, he comes and goes exactly as he pleases. He’s as happy Upstairs as he wiz down here, and if he’s passing through this layer it’s because he wants to, just like us. What’s more, he’s one of the few ghosts, along with Mrs. Gibbs, that Phyllis shows respect for, so there’s no bad blood between Black Charley and the Dead Dead Gang, just for a change.”
They were now down beside the crossing barrier, outside the padlocked gates of Spring Lane School. John raised one hand and called across the road to the old black man on the other side. He had to shout a bit to get his voice to carry in the deadened atmosphere of that unusual half-world, where there wasn’t even any colour to the sound.
“What ho, Black Charley. How’s death treating you, then?”
All the other children had by this point reached the school gates, catching up with John and Michael, and were calling their own greetings to the phantom cyclist. The black rider laughed and shook his tight white curls into a phosphorescent blur, as though in amiable resignation at the sight of the dead urchins. Easily distracted, Michael noticed that a windborne sheet of newspaper was leaving a whole magazine of after-images behind it as it tumbled off down Scarletwell Street. He supposed it must be a ghost-newspaper, ghost-rubbish snatched up by the faint ghost of a breeze he thought he felt on his bare neck and ankles. Putting it out of his mind he turned his full attention back to the old coloured man who sat across the street astride what looked like home-made transport.
“My eternal life be treatin’ me just fine, thankin’ you kindly, master John. I’m just here carryin’ out the duties what I got as Mayor o’ Scarletwell, warning the local dead folks about this bad weather we got comin’ up and tellin’ ’em to get theyselves indoors, but now I’m more concerned about you little outlaws, gettin’ up to trouble all the time. Miss Phyllis, don’t you play no stunts on any o’ them gentlemen what takes their liquor at the Jolly Smokers. They’s a rough crew, so take my advice an’ keep away from ’em.”
He glanced around at all the other children, as if counting heads and making sure they were all present and correct.
“Miss Marjorie and Master Bill, hello to you, and to old Reggie Got-His-Hat-On I can see stood up the back there. And who’s this young feller what you’re no doubt leadin’ into wicked ways?”
Michael realised belatedly that the good-natured ghost was talking about him. Phyllis chimed in on his behalf and introduced him to Black Charley.
“This wiz Michael Warren and ’e choked upon a pep, or so ’e says. I faynd ’im in the Attics of the Breath with no one there to meet ’im, so I took ’im underneath me wing. He’s been nothing but trouble ever since. First ’e got kidnapped by a devil, then we faynd ayt that ’e’d started a big fight between the builders, and now it turns ayt ’e’ll be come back to life by Friday. It’s a lot of bother, but the Dead Dead Gang are looking into it. We’ve brought him dayn ’ere, where ’e lived, so that we can investigate ’is murder-mystery.”
Michael piped up here in protest.
“I coughed on a choke-drop, so I wizzn’t murdered.”
Phyllis turned to stare at him. She clearly didn’t much like being interrupted.
“ ’Ow do you know? What with all the bother what yer cause, I’d be surprised if <em>somebody</em> weren’t planning to get rid of yer. If I were yer mum, I’d be shoving cough-sweets dayn yer throat without unwrapping ’em or even bothering to take them ayt the packet! Anyway, we’re the detectives and yer only the dead body what we’re trying to solve the killing of, so you keep quiet and don’t get in the way of ayr enquiries, or we’ll ’ave you booked for wasting police time and you’ll be put in prison.”
Michael, even though he’d died this morning, hadn’t been born yesterday and was beginning to catch on that almost all of Phyllis’s authority was just a game and a pretence. He took no notice of her, his attention caught instead by what he thought must be a whole flock of ghost-pigeons that were passing overhead towards the foot of Scarletwell. Each of the dead birds drew a fluttering queue of grey potato-prints behind it, dozens of long smoky threads unravelling towards the west, where the blanched sun was slowly settling above a burnished steel-engraving of the railway yards. Michael was more intrigued by the idea that birds and animals went Upstairs when they died than he was in replying to what Phyllis had just said, and anyway, it was at that point that Black Charley intervened, replying for him.
“Now, Miss Phyllis, don’t you tease the child like that. Did you say how he’d started a big ruckus in between the builders?”
The black ghost was staring hard at Phyllis now. She nodded. Something with veined wings that looked like an enormous bat sailed past, bouncing in short hops down the hill and leaving pictures of itself behind it, making Michael jump until he realised it was just the ghost of somebody’s umbrella. Satisfied that Phyllis wasn’t having fun with him, Black Charley carried on.
“Then this boy is the one what I’ve been hearin’ about. Michael Warren, did you say? The way I heard, he plays some part in that big capstone ceremony what the builders talk about, their Porthimoth di Norhan like they calls it. That’s how come the players at the table got upset when this child’s trilliard-ball got placed in dreadful danger, and that’s how come two of ’em wiz fightin’. It’s their battle what they have up on the Mayorhold causin’ all this wind what’s comin’, what I’m warnin’ folks about.”
All of the ghost-kids except Michael suddenly looked worried. Reggie took his bowler hat off as if he were at a funeral, questioning Black Charley anxiously in his peculiarly-accented and twangy voice.
“Gawd love us. There’s not gunna be a ghost-storm, wiz there?”
Charley nodded, gravely and emphatically.
“I fear so, master Reggie, and you bin round these parts longer’n what I have, so you know what happens when them ghost-winds start up blowin’. My advice is get yourself inside and get Upstairs, or up to sometime where the weather ain’t so bad. And you make sure as you look after master Michael here, because if this wiz what the builders do when he’s just put in danger, I don’t wanna think about the way they’d take it if’n you should get him hurt.”
A black cat skittered yowling past, pulling behind it a half-knitted sock of trailing images and followed by the tinkling ghost of a pale ale bottle. Buzzing shoelace threads stitched themselves through the air that Michael finally concluded were a pair of phantom flies. Black Charley picked one foot up off the ground decisively and set it on a pedal. Michael was surprised to notice that the coloured man had blocks of wood strapped underneath his shoes.
“I got me dead folks I should warn about the storm in Bellbarn and around St. Andrew’s Church, so I can’t wait around here anymore. You get yourselves out of harm’s way, and look after that little boy. He’s got important wagers ridin’ on him.”
With that, the determined-looking ghost trod down upon his upraised pedal and the bicycle-and-cart rolled over Scarletwell Street and away uphill, with fading likenesses of its white wheels bowling along behind it in a long string of Olympic hoops. Black Charley rode away from them, into the wind that was now clearly rising, ruffling the ghost of everybody’s hair. To Michael the old coloured fellow seemed strangely heroic, pedalling his rope-wheeled junk-cart like a crow-black herald of the coming storm. The Dead Dead Gang seemed to stand rooted to the spot for several moments after his departure, goggling at each other with wide, anxious eyes. Above them all, a squawking static-pattern of dark stripes that might have been a phantom budgerigar blew past, as did a ghostly undertaker’s top hat with a dove-grey hatband ribbon rippling in its wake amongst the rush of after-pictures. At last, Phyllis Painter broke the silence with a panicked but commanding yelp.
“Ghost-storm! You ’eard ’im! Everybody rabbit-run, dayn to the ’ouse what’s on the corner!”
With a suddenness that frankly startled Michael, Phyllis dropped onto all fours and raced off down the hill with the most puzzling gait that he had ever seen. Taking advantage of the slow, treacle-like quality that ghost-seam air possessed, Phyllis was able to skim lightly down the slope with just her scampering knuckles grazing on the surface of the road, propelled by circling back legs that barely needed touch the ground themselves. It was a sort of rabbit-movement, he supposed, explaining the manoeuvre’s name, although to Michael it looked more like how he though baboons might run, except for all the trailing reproductions that made Phyllis look like a long locomotive that had wheels made out of skinny little girl’s legs. To his great alarm, first Marjorie then Bill and Reggie followed Phyllis’s example, crouching down then bounding off downhill with a surprising speed. He was just starting to get worried about being left behind by all the dead kids when he noticed John, who’d hung back to look after him and who was now encouraging the smaller boy to try the rabbit-run himself.
“Come on, it’s easy. You’ll soon get the hang of it. Just get down on all fours then lift your feet up so you’re walking on your hands.”
Michael squinted uphill into the gathering wind. The sky above the Mayorhold at the top of Scarletwell was speckled by what Michael realised with a lurch of horror was ghost-debris, some of it comprised of flailing animals and people, and all of it blowing rapidly towards them. He needed no further urging. Dropping down onto his haunches and then lifting up his feet as he’d been told, Michael soon found himself bowling along like stripy flannel tumbleweed. Only his hands were scrabbling across the gritty surface of the road beneath him as he scuttled down the hill after the other children, heading for the corner at the bottom where St. Andrew’s Road met Scarletwell Street.
John had been correct. This method of getting around wasn’t just easy, it was also massive fun. It seemed like such a natural way to travel, effortlessly rushing through the streets with your back legs sizzling along behind you like grey Catherine Wheels, kicking up ghost-grit in a shower of welding-sparks. He took to it so readily and found the form of movement so surprisingly familiar that Michael wondered if he had an instinct for it. Was this how his family had walked once, back when they’d reportedly been “living in the trees”, possibly in Victoria Park? It certainly made his descent of Scarletwell into a thrilling ride, the off-white flats flickering by on one side with their rounded balconies that made him think of going to the pictures, and the bleak school playing fields that smeared past on the other.
He was starting to enjoy it when the ghost of an old busted armchair spoiled all that by somersaulting through the air above him, followed by two stony-faced but obviously embarrassed phantom monks and a whole shower of ghostly bird’s-nests, broken deckchairs, pencils, fag-ends, ants, books that had pictures of bare ladies in, chipped bathroom tiles and spectral bars of soap, each hurtling object with a fuming trail of after-images behind it, like a swarm of angry burning bees. The prospect of this wave of haunted shrapnel overtaking him reminded Michael, forcefully, of the ghost-squall that surged behind them and which they were trying to get away from. He decided that he’d better take this rabbit-running business far more seriously, redoubling his efforts as he tore downhill towards the other dead kids, who were gathering near Scarletwell Street’s bottom corner.
As he slowed and stumbled to a halt beside them with ghost cinders, toffee wrappers and lost plimsolls whistling past his ears, he noticed that they hadn’t congregated at the junction with St. Andrew’s Road, the terrace where he’d lived and died, but were instead a house or two up from the corner, huddling beside the long brick wall of a back yard belonging to one of the homes in the short row between the jitty-mouth and the main road. The dead gang’s hair and clothing flapped and rippled like grey signal-flags and they were clutching at each other’s jumpers as they tried to keep from being blown away.
Buckets and boaters cart-wheeled by above them; afterlife coal-dust in a cloud that turned the sky black even though you could still see the calm and sunny mortal afternoon behind it all. Through the miasma, Michael could make out scores of uprooted ghost-seam residents, cursing or wailing, struggling or hanging there limp and resigned as the ferocious wraith-wind blowing from the Mayorhold hurled them through the darkening heavens overhead, all dragging their last several instants in their wake like advertising banners, cheap ones where they couldn’t afford colour. He saw several monks, all holding hands and gliding in formation, and a cross old lady in a district nurse’s outfit who tried to arrest her flight by grabbing at the television aerial of the end house as it whizzed by below. Her insubstantial fingers passed straight through the metal letter H without effect and she was whipped away by the ethereal hurricane towards the overexposed photo of the train yards and the de-greened park beyond. Standing in front of Michael with her string of rotten rabbits being tossed about in an impossible confusion of repeated ears and tails and eyes, Phyllis was shouting something at him through the dead acoustics of the ghost-seam and the howling wuther of the gale.
“… in through the wall! We’ve got to get inside the corner ’ouse so we can all get ’igher up, ayt of this wind!”
The blustering force behind him was propelling Michael haltingly in Phyllis’s direction, his plaid slippers slithering upon the paving slabs beneath them. Reaching blindly he clutched on to something solid, only realising afterwards that it was John’s arm, with the tall lad having stood protectively at Michael’s back to shield the youngster from the eerie blizzard. With his forward slide thus halted, Michael gaped at Phyllis in bewilderment. Just past her he could see Drowned Marjorie as the bespectacled and tubby little girl threw herself headlong at the wall that they were sheltering beside, only to disappear into or through the mother-of-pearl sheen upon the brickwork and be gone from sight. Phyllis’s younger brother Bill went next and then the gangling and freckled Reggie, clutching his hat tight against his chest so that it wasn’t ripped away from him by the typhoon as he ducked through the wall into whatever back yard was presumably beyond. Michael was still confused, and called to Phyllis over the ghost-tempest.
“But that’s knot the corner house. That’s slumboggy’s back-yarden. There’s the corn ear just downhill behive you.”
Phyllis glinted at him, something in between glaring and squinting, as she faced into the flickering thunderstorm of distressed apparitions that were gusting straight towards them down the ancient hill.
“That dayn there’s where the corner wiz. We’re climbing up to when the corner wizzle be in ten or twenty years, where ’opefully we’ll be above this weather. Now, come through the wall with us or get blown dayn to Vicky Park with all them other silly buggers. I’m not got the time to stand ’ere and debate wi’ yer.”
With that she jumped into the jigsaw pattern of grey bricks and whitish mortar, vanishing into the wall. Michael stood hesitating for a moment even then, before John grabbed him by the spit-scorched collar of his dressing gown and hurried him towards the very solid-looking boundary.
“Do as she says for once, ay, Tommy’s boy? It’s for your own good.”
John shoved Michael at and through the wall. Although he closed his eyes instinctively just prior to the expected impact, this did not shut out a brief glimpse of exactly what bricks looked like from within, with all the little cylinders of nothing where the vent holes were. Emerging spluttering and gasping on the other side with John stepping unhurriedly out of the wall immediately after him, Michael discovered he was in a large though fairly plain and bare rear yard, with just a garden shed, a single narrow flowerbed and a washing-line with wooden prop and hanging sheets to occupy the mostly cobble-stone enclosure. The high brick walls, having stood in that spot for some eighty to a hundred years, served to keep out a fraction of the raging ghost-tornado boiling through the Boroughs, though not all of it by any means. Revenant grime and litter spun in frantic eddies at the back yard’s corners, the attendant after-images smudged into solid doughnut shapes by the rotation.
Phyllis Painter was already organising the Dead Dead Gang into what, for Michael, was unfathomable action. Reggie stood there at the centre of the yard with Phyllis perching balanced on his shoulders like they were both in a circus act. Drowned Marjorie held Reggie’s bowler hat while he had both hands clasped around Phyllis’s ankles, steadying her. The plucky little dead girl in her scarf of rancid rabbits stood there wobbling with both her cardigan-clad arms raised up above her head, where she made pawing motions with her hands as if attempting to dig upwards into empty nothing like a mole with no sense of direction. Looking closer, Michael noticed that the air around her clawing fingers seemed to bend and quiver. He could make out moving bands of black and white like television interference patterns, glimmering stripes squeezed together, pushed to one side by the ghost-child’s frantic burrowing. He dimly understood from what Phyllis had said a moment or two previously that she was climbing up through time to “when the corner wizzle be in ten or twenty years”, and he supposed the strips of wavering white and black might be the days and nights that she was forced to tunnel up through, vellum mornings interleaved with carbon-paper darkness. Clearing away minutes, hours and years like layers of onionskin her flickering hands were grey anemones of fingers. Michael realised that the more he got to know the often bossy and unfriendly self-appointed leader of the Dead Dead Gang, the more he came to like her and admire her. She was someone you could count on, someone with resources.
In the windswept yard the other members of the outfit looked on agitatedly as Phyllis teetered there on Reggie’s shoulders, excavating thin air, while above a howling torrent of unearthly jetsam seethed and skittered through the rectangle of sky over their brick refuge. There were uncanny ironing-boards with their crossed legs leaving a string of fading kisses through the afternoon behind them, a whole set of dominoes stretched into spotted liquorice sticks by the array of visual echoes that each one was dragging, several million splinters of ghost-wood or ghost-glass, whole spook-trees with wraith-soil raining from their exposed roots in wispy picture-streamers, toppling tattered pets and men and women, a confetti of careening and complaining shadow-shapes, all the torn phantoms of Northampton.
Meanwhile, Phyllis’s young brother Bill appeared to have discovered something nestling in an obscure corner of the brickwork.
“Bingo! There’s mad-apples over ’ere!”
His voice was faint, damped by the ghost-seam and submerged beneath the banshee chorus of the roaring storm. Peering into the juncture of the yard walls that the previously ginger but now ashen scamp was pointing to, Michael could see what looked like two small slate-grey flowers sprouting from a fissure in the crumbling mortar. On further inspection he was slightly unnerved to discover that each petal was a nasty-looking little figure with a big head and a pair of glittering jet eyes. Balancing awkwardly on Reggie’s shoulders, Phyllis frowned down angrily at Bill and his discovery.
“Leave ’em alone, you nit! They’re elf-ones, so they’ll gi’ yer bellyache. Yer’ve gotta leave ’em until they can ripen into fairies. Anyway, I reckon I’ve broke through up ’ere, so you can climb up Reggie’s back and ’elp me.”
Bill abandoned the grey horror-blossoms and went grudgingly to do his sister’s bidding, and yet Michael found it hard to take his eyes off of the things once they’d been called to his attention. From the shadowed angle of the back yard’s corner he could feel the man-buds watching him and sensed they were unpleasantly aware in their own way. Michael could not imagine what kind of awareness that might be, what murky thoughts or vegetable desires might pass through all those joined-together heads, and found upon reflection that he wasn’t really that keen on imagining it anyway. Reluctantly he tore his gaze away from the disturbing corner-fruit and tried instead to concentrate on what the Dead Dead Gang were up to.
As the essence of a sideboard turned elaborate pirouettes through the junk-peppered maelstrom shrieking above Scarletwell Street, young Bill was obeying Phyllis’s instructions and was clambering up Reggie’s back while shedding picture-copies in a smoky squirrel-tail behind him. Michael noticed that just over Phyllis, at the point where she’d been scraping at the air so frantically, there was now a round patch of solid blackness slightly wider than the circle of a dustbin. Bill shinned onto Reggie’s shoulders and then started climbing Phyllis, who was standing there as well. Michael was wondering how the pug-nosed Victorian urchin could support the load when he recalled what John had said about how ghosts weighed hardly anything. Upon consideration, he supposed that this was how the fierce winds blasting downhill from the Mayorhold could uproot seemingly heavy things like – he glanced upwards at the square of rushing sky above them all – like prams and tramps and double beds and the bewildered spirits of inverted horses, sending them all spiralling away across the burnished railway yards into the soot-smudged whiteness of the sunset. Michael watched as Bill hauled himself up onto his sister’s back and, in a squirm of after-images, continued crawling upwards through the dark hole in the air, completely vanishing from sight.
Swaying on Reggie’s shoulders, Phyllis Painter craned her neck to look down at the other dead kids on the cobblestones beneath her.
“Marjorie, you’re next, and then the new boy.”
The whole yard was resonating now, making the mournful sound milk-bottles make if someone blows across the neck of them, this plaintive tone mixed with the deafening bellow of the ghost-squall so that Phyllis’s commands were hardly audible. Nevertheless, Drowned Marjorie obediently scrambled over lanky Reggie and up Phyllis, holding Reggie’s bowler hat between her clenched teeth as she did so, vanishing into the same black aperture that had claimed Bill just moments earlier. Now it was Michael’s turn.
Casting a doubtful look at John, who gave merely a tight nod in reply, he started his ascent of Reggie and discovered it was all much easier than he’d anticipated. The near-weightlessness meant that there wasn’t any need to haul himself laboriously up, hand over hand, and that his grip on Reggie’s damp jumble-sale coat was only necessary to keep him from floating off into the screaming flood of spectres being dashed across the district by this supernatural tempest. As he climbed on over Phyllis with his small hands clenched in her ghost-cardigan, he saw that from close up the black space overhead was not completely black, just dark, as if it led into an unlit attic. Round the edges of the sky-hole he could see the pattern of the black and white lines that he’d spotted earlier, the bands of night and day now squeezed into a luminous grey trim of shimmer at the aerial excavation’s rim. More startlingly, as he reached Phyllis Painter’s summit and stared up into the lightless opening, he could see a quartet of hands emerging from it, reaching down to grab him in a flurry of repeated cuffs and thumbs and filthy fingernails.
Before he’d had a chance to work out what was going on he was dragged upward through a wriggling and kicking outburst of himselves and pulled across the sparkling threshold into blackness. Suddenly he found that he was sitting on the upstairs landing of a dark and unfamiliar house, between Drowned Marjorie and Bill. Before them in the landing’s faded carpet was a hole, up through which flared the pewter-coloured radiance of the ghost-seam, shining up to glint on wooden banisters and crowded wallpaper that writhed with roses, under-lighting the three children’s faces as they knelt or sat around the blazing well-mouth gaping in the floor. Drifting up out of this came the faint voice of Phyllis Painter.
“Pull me up next, then all of us can ’elp with John and Reggie.”
Following Bill and Drowned Marjorie’s lead, Michael leaned over the hole’s rim and squinted down into the glare. Beneath him was the cobbled yard, with Phyllis swaying as she stood on Reggie, reaching up towards them with both hands and an aggrieved look on her face. The trio of ghost-infants crouching on the silent midnight landing took her by the wrists and pulled her gossamer-light form up through the shimmering gap, onto the carpeting and floorboards they were crouching on.
Phyllis peered into the gloom about them.
“Bugger. I’ve dug up too ’igh. This is up in the nothings. Ne’ mind, ay? Let’s ’elp up John and Reggie and we’ll work ayt what to do from there.”
Down in the yard beneath them, John had now taken his place upon the shoulders of the uncomplaining Reggie. With a still-surprising lack of effort, the four smaller members of the dead gang whisked him up onto the boards beside them. Next, all five of them caught hold of Reggie as the freckle-faced Victorian boy, lacking a human ladder, was compelled to burst up through the radiant opening from a standing jump.
Once they were reunited on the strip of grey and mottled carpeting they stopped to catch their wistful memory of breath. The old dark of the unknown house about them ticked and creaked and bumped at intervals with muffled sounds of habitation on a lower floor, and Phyllis Painter raised a stream of fingers to her lips, shooting a warning glance at her companions. When she spoke, it was an urgent whisper.
“Don’t make any noise. I’ve dug us up into the nothings by mistake, when there’s a watcher livin’ at the corner. Let’s just cover up this ’ole, then we can plan ayr next move.”
With a frown of concentration, Phyllis started scrabbling her sudden multitude of fingers at the shimmering edges of the aperture. She teased long strands of carpet-coloured fume out from the hole’s perimeter and combed them carefully across the gap in space, through which the walled enclosure down in 1959 could still be seen, its flickering Laurel and Hardy light erupting through the landing floor to make the ring of children’s faces glow like weird theatre masks. Below, the ghost-typhoon still raged in the deserted yard, flinging its multiple-exposure phantom debris through the air in a bewildering profusion that included fishing tackle, wailing stillborn kittens in a wicker picnic hamper, a collection of diversely decorated beer-mats and the angry spirit of a swan that hurtled past beneath them in a hissing pinwheel tumble of exploding white rosettes. Drowned Marjorie and John joined in with Phyllis’s attempt to spread the smouldering fibres from the rim over the opening, so that in moments the illumination from below was broken into triangles and misshapes by the crisscross web of smoky filaments they’d dragged across it. Instants more and these remaining chinks were also covered over, with the thin spindles of brilliance that shone up into the landing’s darkness snuffed out one by one. At last the six of them were crouched around a patch of carpet upon which the rudimentary floral pattern was uninterrupted, just as if it hadn’t been a mass of vaporous tendrils only minutes earlier. Nobody would have known the tunnel into 1959 had ever been there.
Though the only source of light had been obliterated by the matted substance of whatever present day this was, Michael discovered that he could still see the looming banisters and his companions in surprising detail even through the unrelenting gloom, as if the scene were picked out in fine silver stitches on black velvet. He supposed that since ghosts mostly seemed to venture out at night, it followed that they probably could see well in the dark, along with all their other strange abilities. Phyllis was talking now, her voice low and conspiratorial, her crafty face and dangling rabbit stole drawn with thin tinsel lines upon the blackness.
“Right. I reckon as we’re up in nothing-five or nothing-six. We can dig dayn again into the fifties if we want to, but I don’t think we should do it ’ere, not in the corner ’ouse. This is a special place, and there’s somebody livin’ daynstairs who’s bin put ’ere to take care of watchman duties, so remember: they can see us, they can ’ear us. They can get us into trouble what’s so bad it sets me teeth on edge to even think abayt it.”
Most of this was said with Phyllis’s eyes fixed unwaveringly upon Michael Warren, as if it were mainly for his benefit. He felt he ought to say something, or at least whisper it.
“Whine wiz this corner-how a spatial plays?”
His syllables were acting up again, perhaps because the ghost-storm the Dead Dead Gang had so recently escaped had literally rattled him, but everybody seemed to catch his general drift, particularly Phyllis. Mumbling an aside to the effect that he still hadn’t found his “Lucy-lips” yet, she replied in a dramatically hushed version of the scornful tone that he was starting to imagine was affectionate.
“It’s a special place because it’s like an ’inge between the First and Second Boroughs. It’s to do with this ’ouse being on the corner at the bottom left of Scarletwell Street, while the Works where all the builders goo wiz up on the top right, where the old Tayn ’All used to be. In the four-sided world, they’re folded up so that they’re the same place. From ’ere yer can goo straight up to Mansoul. This is where the rough sleepers sometimes come, if they ever get up the nerve to leave the ghost-seam and to make their way Upstairs.”
Seeing the answering look of blank incomprehension upon Michael’s face, she gave a subdued sigh and then climbed to her feet in a profusion of repeated knees and ankle-socks. The other gang-members obediently followed suit, with Michael getting the idea and also standing up, a moment or two after all the rest. There in the curiously see-through shadows of the landing, Phyllis seemed once more to be addressing only him. Around her mouth the shiny pencil tracings on the blackness that were very likely dimples flickered in and out of being with the movement of her whispering lips.
“I s’pose that since yer ’ere, yer might as well see ’ow it works. If I remember right, they’ve got a Jacob Flight in the end bedroom, just along the landin’. We’ll be right above the front room, where the look-out’s more than likely sittin’ watchin’ telly, so be extra quiet and goo on tiptoes. We’ll just take a quick peek, then we’ll goo daynstairs and ayt the front door before anybody knows we’re ’ere.”
With this the little ghost-girl turned away and started heading for the far end of the landing, walking with a comically exaggerated tiptoe motion like a cat in a cartoon. As he fell in with the four other members of the Dead Dead Gang behind her, Michael looked about him, taking note of his surroundings. Reaching from the stair-head that was somewhere to his rear, the upstairs passageway led to a closed door at its further end, towards which Phyllis was now stealthily advancing. Upon his right were banisters that overlooked the darkened staircase, while upon his left the wallpaper was now adorned with a gorgeous gilt filigree of twisting roses, which was just the way its faded pattern looked to Michael’s ghostly new nocturnal vision. Up ahead of him, Phyll Painter walked on tiptoe at the head of a short, slowly disappearing column of Phyll Painters. Without breaking step, she walked into the closed door, disappearing through it with her queue of duplicates pulled after her like a grey tail. Drowned Marjorie was next to stride into the panelled wood and out of sight, followed by Bill and Reggie. With a gentle shove from John, who walked behind him, Michael stepped into what turned out to be a brief vision of whorled grain, a fraction of a second in duration, before he emerged into the room beyond. Most probably the door had only been there a few years, which would explain why he had barely noticed passing through it.
On the other side, there were faint colours to the wavering light that fell in curtains, dappling the room, delicate pinks and greens and violets that were the first hues he’d seen since entering the ghost-seam. Only as he stood there with the other phantom children, gazing awestruck in the painted underwater shimmer, did he realise how much he’d missed blue and orange whilst he’d wandered through the black and white streets of this half-world. They were like best friends he hadn’t met in ages.
Michael and the ghost gang were now obviously in a bedroom, not unlike his mum and dad’s back down in 1959, except that all the furnishings and fittings looked a bit wrong and he couldn’t see a chamber-pot beneath the bed. There was a dainty bedside table, although where you might expect to find a tin alarm-clock ticking reassuringly there was instead a flat box. It was roughly book-sized and upon its black front edge had numbers made of straight white lines, a little like the numerals that he’d seen people fashion from spilled matchsticks during idle moments. 23: 15 was how it read at present, with the two dots in the middle blinking on and off, and … no. No, it was 23: 16. He’d evidently been mistaken. After staring at this cryptic message for a while and wondering what it meant, Michael at last thought to look up towards the source of the pale rainbow light that bathed the room where he and his dead friends were trespassing.
Up in the far right corner of the ceiling was an opening, perhaps the entrance to a loft and roughly four feet square. This blazed with pure and undiluted colour like a jazzy modern painting, splashing a pale echo of its vivid shades onto the grey and upturned faces of the spectre-children gathered there below. Immediately beneath this dazzling panel an impossibly cramped flight of steps descended to the bedroom floor, with both its angle and its shallow tread more like a ladder than a staircase. Michael thought that both the window to another world and the strange rung-stairs underneath it looked like they were made from something different to the ordinary room that these were situated in. They looked like they were made from ghost-stuff, and he doubted that they would be visible to ordinary people. Standing next to him with shivering bands of watery rose and turquoise slipping over the sharp contours of her face, Phyllis explained what the fluorescent trapdoor was in tones so hushed that they were barely audible.
“It’s what they call a crook-door, and that stairway underneath it wiz a Jacob Flight. It leads straight to the Works, up in Mansoul. That’s why yer can see all the colours everywhere. It’s been in place ’ere on this corner or nearby since Saxon times, ever since ’ere-abayts became a proper settlement. It’s an important entry to the Second Borough, and that’s why there’s always been somebody ’ere to sit watch on the gate and keep it safe. The ones what mind the corner between one world and the other, they’re a scary bunch of customers what we call Vernalls. They’re like deathmongers: they’re ’uman, but they’re half-Upstairs even before they’ve kicked the bucket.”
Michael, gazing up entranced into the bright-dyed portal of Mansoul, ventured a dreamy interjection here.
“My dad’s mum was called Vernall befour she got weddled.”
It was as if somebody had dropped a snowball down the back of Phyllis’s grey cardigan. Forgetting all her admonitions to keep quiet she yelped in sheer astonishment.
“You <em>what?</em> Well, that’s why all of this is ’appening, then! That’s why yer die and then come back to life. That’s why the builders ’ad a fight, that’s why the devil picked on yer, that’s why Black Charley said abate the Porthimoth di Norhan, and that’s why yer family wiz down ’ere near Scarletwell! It’s in your ancestors. It’s in your blood. Why wizn’t I told all this sooner?”
Standing absolutely still in the weirdly-illuminated bedroom with confetti-coloured light falling around them, the Dead Dead Gang were all staring nervously at Phyllis now. Looking a little sheepish for some reason, John reached out in an array of pullover-clad arms and placed one hand upon Phyllis’s shoulder.
“Don’t blame him, Phyll. To be honest, I knew that his nan had been a Vernall, but I never thought to bring it up. Besides, it’s not like everybody who’s related to that family shares their calling, wiz it? Most of them are ordinary people.”
Phyllis glared at John indignantly and was apparently about to answer when Drowned Marjorie hissed urgently from where she stood beside the bedroom’s dressing table. Michael noted that neither the tinted radiance nor the bespectacled and tubby ghost-child were reflected in its mirror.
“Shush, the pair of you! I think I just heard something move.”
In the tense and exaggerated hush that followed Marjorie’s announcement, they could all make out the rhythmic grunt of floorboards as somebody slowly crossed the room beneath. There came the rattle of an opening door and then a voice came drifting up the stairs, reedy and high with age yet still spine-tingling in its effect.
“Is there somebody up there? Woe betide if it’s all you dead little buggers treading ghost-mess round my house!”
Footsteps, slow and deliberate, began to mount towards the landing from the passageway downstairs, the squeak of every tread attended by the sound of laboured breathing. Michael had no flesh to creep or blood to run cold, but as he stood with his new friends in the pastel light that drizzled from the opening above, he felt an afterlife equivalent to both of those sensations, a sick ripple in the phantom fibre of his being. The unearthly presence climbing ever closer on the other side of the closed bedroom door was the strange corner-keeper, not entirely human, who could get them into difficulties that set plucky Phyllis Painter’s teeth on edge to even think about. Though he had often heard his parents or his gran use the expression ‘woe betide’ before, he’d never previously heard it uttered with an intonation that conveyed so clearly what it meant: a sea of woe, a churning tide of troubles reaching to the grey horizon. Michael thought that he was probably about as scared as he could get, and then belatedly remembered that the stairs and landing along which the eerie watchman was approaching had been the Dead Dead Gang’s planned escape-route. <em>Then</em> he was about as scared as he could get.
It looked like Phyllis and the other kids had realised their predicament at roughly the same moment that it had occurred to Michael. Phyllis’s eyes darted round the bedroom with its settling rainbow-sherbet light, looking for hiding places or an exit of some sort, finally narrowing to slits of stern determination.
“Quick! Ayt through the wall!”
Rather than bothering to say which wall she meant, the ghost-gang’s self-appointed boss led by example, running full tilt at the pulled-to curtains of a window opposite the bedroom door, a fading trail of little girls with flailing rabbit-scarves pursuing her. Without an instant’s hesitation Phyllis flung herself out through the hanging drapes, which didn’t even tremble as she vanished into them and out of sight. Michael remembered, with a start, that they were upstairs. There’d be no floor on the far side of that outer bedroom wall, only a drop to Scarletwell Street down below. Phyllis had just as good as jumped off of the roof. More worryingly, everybody else was following her lead. First little Bill, then Reggie and Drowned Marjorie, charged at the curtained window or at the dull wallpaper to either side of it, hurling themselves out through the wall into the sheer drop and the night beyond. As usual, it was John who’d hung back to make sure that Michael was all right.
“Come on, kid. Don’t be frightened of the drop. I told you, things don’t fall as quickly here.”
Out past the bedroom door, the creaking footsteps were now coming down the landing, drawing closer with the ragged breathing that was their accompaniment. Clearly deciding there was no time to let Michael reach his own decision, John scooped up the night-clothed infant underneath one arm and ran towards the wall that their companions had already disappeared through. Stretched into a many-legged tartan centipede of blurring motion, Michael thought he heard the doorknob turn behind them as John leapt towards the curtains.
There was a brief flash of insubstantial linen, vaporous glass, and then they were both tumbling like smouldering blossom through a lamp-lit darkness. As the older boy had promised it was an unusually slow descent, as if submerged in glue. Although the other children had all plunged out through the wall into the night moments before, Michael could see that Marjorie, the last to jump, had not yet reached the ground. She fell on Scarletwell Street in a waterfall of spoiled and streaky snapshots, stout legs bending in a bulge of chubby knee as she touched down upon the paving slabs below. Michael supposed that he and John must have the same spent-firework plume of pictures dribbling behind them as they sank down through the viscous shadows, John’s long limbs already bracing for the negligible impact.
From the moment that they’d left the bedroom with its haze of colour they had been once more immersed in the black, grey and ivory landscape of the ghost-seam. Even so, to Michael there appeared to be a sickly tinge about the lamplight, giving the impression that it wasn’t the clean white electric gleam that he was used to. He and John were almost at the end of their languid trajectory, about to bump down on the gritty slope of Scarletwell where their four friends were waiting, gazing up at the descending pair with eager, anxious eyes. There was the faintest shudder as John’s scuffed-toe shoes connected with the ground, and then Michael was being set down on the pavement with the other children. Still a little dizzy from the breathless pace of their escape he hadn’t had a chance to get his bearings yet, and Phyllis Painter didn’t seem inclined to give him one.
“Come on. Let’s get away from ’ere in case they come ayt after us. We’ll ’ave time to think over all this Vernall business later. We can ’ead towards the Mayorhold through the flats and alleys, so we shan’t be spotted struggling back up Scarletwell Street if the watcher steps aytside to ’ave a nose abayt.”
She fixed on the disoriented Michael by one tartan sleeve and started dragging him across the street towards the ‘PRESS KNIVES’ factory on Bath Street’s blunted corner (although the familiar sign was for some reason missing), with the other ghost-kids shuffling along in a loose cluster that had him and Phyllis at its centre. Something wasn’t right.
He peered across the midnight street in the direction they were headed and for a brief moment he was lost. Why was this bottom end of Scarletwell Street suddenly so wide? It seemed to just fan out unbounded, and Michael was wondering why he could see so far up the dark length of Andrew’s Road towards the station when he realised that the terraced houses opposite the one that they were fleeing had completely disappeared. Only a swathe of turf was stretched between the main road and a long blank wall some distance further up the hill. The unexpected grassy emptiness, where things that looked like monstrous birdcages on wheels lay toppled miserably on their sides at intervals, was somehow horrifying. Michael started to ask Phyllis what was going on, but she just marched him over the deserted street with greater urgency.
“It’s nothin’ need concern yer. You just ’urry up and come with us … and don’t look back in case the watcher’s peerin’ ayt their window and they see yer face.”
This last bit sounded like an over-clever afterthought, which meant it sounded like a lie, or as though Phyllis had some other reason why she didn’t want him to turn round. Together with the way that the Dead Dead Gang crowded in about him as if shielding something from his sight, her blustering tone made Michael more convinced than ever that something was wrong. In mounting panic, he pulled free from Phyllis’s tight grip upon his arm and wheeled around so that he could look back towards the house near Scarletwell Street’s bottom corner, from which they had just escaped. What could there be about the place that was so dreadful no one wanted him to see it?
Looking solemn, Reggie and Drowned Marjorie fell back to either side so that Michael could gaze between them at the building they’d so recently vacated. It stood silent, with a weak light filtering through the curtains pulled across its downstairs window. If you didn’t count the fact that it seemed bigger, like two houses knocked together into one, then other than the detail of it being situated in a space where Michael knew an empty yard had been in 1959, it looked completely normal. There was nothing odd or terrible about the residence itself that he could see. It was just everything except the house that was all odd and wrong and terrible, that was all gone.
The terraced row along St. Andrew’s Road between Spring Lane and Scarletwell, where Michael and his family and all their neighbours lived, had vanished. There was just the bottom fence and hedges of Spring Lane School’s playing fields and then another patch of empty grass before you reached the pavement and the road immediately beyond. Save for a few small trees the double-sized house near the corner stood alone on the benighted fringe of ground, a single eye-tooth still remaining when the jaw itself had rotted down to nothing. From where Michael stood amongst the other phantom children, halfway over Scarletwell Street, he could see the little meadow on the other side of Andrew’s Road, which nestled at the foot of Spencer Bridge … or rather, he could see the place the meadow had been, the last time he’d looked. Save for a bordering fringe of trees there were now only rows of giant lorries hulking in the dark, much bigger than the vegetable truck that the man next door had tried to take him off to hospital inside. These each looked like two tanks piled up on top of one another, or perhaps a mobile branch of Woolworth’s. Spaced out along the main road into the twinkling blackness of the distance there were things that looked like streetlights in a dream, impossibly tall metal stems each flowering at the top into two separate oblong lamps. The sickliness Michael had noticed in the lighting earlier seemed concentrated round these lanterns in unhealthy halos, which suggested that they were its source. Their wan rays fell upon the slumbering trucks and on the glistening tarmac of the empty roadway, on the whispering carpet that had grown across the floorboards of his missing birthplace, his evaporated street. The place he’d lived. The place he’d died.
This was what Phyllis and the others hadn’t wanted him to see. His holy ground, except for the one single household that incongruously remained, had been razed flat. His devastated wail could be heard blocks away by those who weren’t alive, despite the stagnant sonic currents of the ghost-seam. Filled with endless loss the wrenching cry unlaced the night, splitting the dead world end to end, while all around the living Boroughs slept on unaware and dreamed the troubled husks of its disgraceful future.
** <strong>FLATLAND</strong>
<strong>R</strong>eginald James Fowler was the beautifully-written name upon the only two certificates he’d ever been awarded, which were the same two that everyone got, just for turning up.
He’d been called Reggie Bowler ever since Miss Tibbs had got his name wrong, reading out the register on his first day at school. The actual hat had come much later, and he’d only started wearing it to fit in with the name. He’d found it, with his much-too-big, perpetually-damp overcoat, amongst the rubbish on the burial ground near Doddridge Church, when he’d been sleeping there just after his twelfth birthday. He’d already had the dream by then, of Miss Tibbs holding up a book called <em>The Dead Dead Gang</em> with an overcoat-and-bowler-sporting urchin in gold inlay on its front, but when he’d come across those articles of clothing in real life this premonition was forgotten and was quite the furthest thing from Reggie’s mind. He’d just been overjoyed to find the free apparel, the first bit of luck he’d had since losing both his parents.
At the time he’d tried to jolly himself up by looking on the hat and coat as presents, kidding himself that his dad had come back and had left them there for him, hung on the brambles growing in the crook of a stone wall already peppered green with age. If he was honest with himself he knew the garments were more likely those of an old man named Mallard, who’d lived in Long Gardens off Chalk Lane and who had killed himself in a depression. Probably his son, who’d very soon thereafter taken up employment as a slaughter-man in London, had got sick of looking at the suicide’s old clothes and thrown them out. That would have been, by Reggie’s reckoning, around ’Seventy-one or two, about a year before the bad frost that had finally seen Reggie off.
There’d been a lot of people do away with themselves in the Boroughs down the years. Old Mallard only stuck in Reggie’s memory because he’d been a man, when nearly all the others had been female. It was harder for the women, or at least that’s what he’d heard their husbands tell each other over beer in a pub garden, if the subject should arise.
“It’s something that’s in them old houses,” was the general opinion. “For the chaps it’s not so bad, because they’re out to work. The women, though, they’re left indoors with it and they can’t get away.”
He’d often wondered, in his idle moments, what “it” was. If it was something somehow “in” the houses, then it could be damp or dry-rot, some miasmal presence seeping from the beams and brickwork that could make a person so ill that they’d want to take their life, although he’d never heard of such a thing. Besides, the way that grown-up fellows talked about the matter, nodding solemnly over their pints of watery pale ale, had given Reggie the impression they’d been speaking of a living creature, something that had wandered in one day to take up residence and then refused to leave. Something so upsetting and so miserable that you’d be better dead than stuck at home with it, trying to do your housework with it sitting in the corner wriggling and clicking, looking at you with its knowing little black eyes. Reggie always pictured “it” as a giant earwig, although part of him knew full well it was only ordinary despair.
This was the nesting horror that had done for Reggie’s mother, so he thought about it quite a lot. She’d tried to kill herself so many times that by her third try even she could see the funny side. Her first attempt had been at drowning, in the Nene where it ran through Foot Meadow, but the river wasn’t deep enough at that point to accommodate her and she’d given up. Next she’d jumped from the bedroom window of their house in Gas Street, which resulted only in a pair of broken ankles. On the third occasion she’d tried kneeling with her head inside the oven, but the gas ran out before she’d finished and she didn’t have a penny for the meter. It was that, being too poor to even gas herself, which in the end made Reggie’s mother laugh about her troubles. So surprised were Reggie and his dad to see her chuckling again that they’d joined in, laughing along with her there in the freezing kitchen, with its windows open to dispel the rubbery and acrid fumes. Reggie himself had giggled most, although he hadn’t really understood the situation and was only laughing because everybody else was. Also, he supposed that he’d guffawed out of relief and gratitude, convinced that a dark chapter of his family’s story was now over.
In a sense, of course, he’d been quite right: some few weeks after the hilarity in the cold, smelly kitchen, Reggie’s mother once more threw herself out of the upstairs window, this time managing to hit the ancient and indifferent paving stones of Gas Street with her head, which finally seemed to do the trick. A chapter certainly had been concluded, but the ones that followed it were even darker, even worse.
Following his wife’s successful fourth and final stab at self-destruction, Reggie’s dad had started drinking heavily, chucking the ale back for dear life, and then had started fights. Night after night he’d carried on like that, blood jetting from smashed noses up against a privy wall, teeth spat into the Gas Street drains like miniature bone rockets with a shower of red sparks behind them, and inevitably the constabulary would be called. His first offence, they beat him up. His second one, they locked him up and Reggie hadn’t even known which gaol his dad was in. Abandoned, Reggie had lived in the Gas Street house alone for getting on a week, eating and sleeping in his parents’ big bed for the luxury of it, not answering the door the first time that the rent-man called. On his next visit, though, the rent-man had a bailiff with him, who had simply kicked the door in, by which time Reggie was scarpering through an untended back yard, hurdling the bottom wall and making off along the alleyway.
His subsequent address had been the wasteland that they called the burial ground, opposite Doddridge Church. He’d been pleased with himself about the little house he’d built there, up against the bounding wall that overlooked Chalk Lane. Even though it had only been a plywood packing crate, Reggie was proud of his own ingenuity in turning it into a home. He’d tipped it on its side, swept out the snails and tacked someone’s discarded curtain up across the opening as a sort of door. He camouflaged it with dead branches, thinking that this sounded like the sort of thing an Indian scout would do, and made a spear with which he could defend himself by sharpening a long stick with his rusty penknife, before realising the knife itself would make a better weapon. He’d been a bit dim back then, but then, he’d only been eleven.
That said, finding food and getting by, which in the circumstances you might well expect to be a hardship, these were things that Reggie found he took to naturally. He’d haunt the edges of the square on market night and find squashed fruit and veg thrown out amongst the tissue paper, straw and empty boxes. The back doors of baker’s shops at closing time would often yield a loaf that was no longer saleable though not entirely stale, and from the butcher’s there were sometimes bones for soup.
He’d realised, after trudging through the streets with a bowed head for one long afternoon, how many small coins people lose, especially in the larger shops. Other than what he found, Reggie would sometimes beg a ha’penny or two, and had once tossed off an old tramp who’d promised him a thrupenny bit but then reneged. That had been in the jungle of unused riverside land between Victoria Park and Paddy’s Meadow, inaccessible except by paddling under Spencer Bridge, a wilderness where the damp-scented vagrant had a modest campfire made from bits of cardboard, wood and cut-off ends of carpet. Reggie still remembered with a shudder how the whiskery chap’s spunk had sizzled, following a slippery liquid arc into the yellow flames, and all for nothing, not a farthing. Still, despite such disappointments, Reggie managed to survive. He wasn’t hapless, wasn’t weak, not in his body or his mind. It hadn’t been a lack of sustenance that killed him, it had been an English winter, and however strong or clever or resourceful Reggie was there’d been no getting round it. When they’d found him curled up in his packing crate after a day or two, one of his eyelids was still frozen shut and sticking to the ball. That had been that, the end of Reggie’s life, though obviously not of his existence.
To be honest, he’d turned out to be better at death than he had ever been at life, taking to the new medium like a duck to water. Even so, he still remembered how surprised and lost he’d been, those first few hours after he’d passed on. It had been on a Sunday morning when it happened. He had woken to the sound of oddly-muffled church bells and the somehow worrying realisation that he was no longer cold. He’d tried to pull the curtain remnant serving as his door aside, but something puzzling had happened and he’d found himself crouching on hands and knees outside his makeshift crate-house, where the rags tacked up above its entrance were still hanging motionless and undisturbed.
The first thing that had struck him, thinking back, was that the grass upon which he was kneeling was now oyster-grey instead of green, although its rime of frost remained a granulated white. On climbing to his feet and looking round he’d seen that everything was black and white and grey, including the faint floral pattern on his tacked-up curtain, which he’d known should actually be an insipid blue. It made him smile now to recall how, with the subdued chiming of the bells, the black and white of everything had led him to the frightening conclusion that at some point in the night he’d been sent deaf and colour-blind, as if those were the worst things that could happen to you on a winter’s evening. It was only when he’d noticed all the pictures of himself that he was leaving every time he moved that Reggie had suspected there was something badly wrong, wrong in a way that spectacles or hearing trumpets would not remedy.
Of course, soon after that he’d started to experiment with touching things, discovering that he no longer could. Attempting to draw back the curtain from the mouth of his crude shelter, he’d found that his hand now passed through the material as if it wasn’t there and disappeared from sight until he’d pulled it out again. At that point Reggie had decided that to see inside the crate he’d have to push his face in through the fabric of the entrance, in the same way that he’d just done with his fingers.
He’d been pitiful, the little boy inside the box. Frozen into the same position in which he’d fallen asleep, bald knees drawn up and one hand welded to a flattened ear, his eyebrows had been frosted white. A crystal dusting glinted off the fine hairs of his freckled cheek and from one nostril there depended a grey icicle of snot. Unlike a lot of ghost-seam residents that he had subsequently met, Reggie had recognised his own corpse straight away. For one thing, the dead child was dressed in a long coat and bowler hat identical to those that he himself appeared to still be wearing. For another, it had Reggie’s tea-stain birthmark, roughly shaped like Ireland, on the left calf above the stiffened folds of its refrigerated ankle-sock. The leaping commas that he’d glimpsed out of the corner of his eye had turned out to be sober and pragmatic fleas abandoning their host. He’d screamed, a curiously flat sound that had little resonance, and jerked his head back through the hanging curtain, which had not so much as trembled as he’d done so.
Reggie had then sobbed for some time, the unsalted globs of ectoplasm rolling down his face, more like the memory of tears than tears themselves. At last, when it became apparent that however much he wept no one was going to come and make it better, he’d sniffed loudly and had stood up straight, resolving to be brave. His lower lip and chin thrust out, he’d marched determinedly across the burial ground heading for Doddridge Church, with the frost-hardened soil feeling somehow springy and giving underneath his insubstantial tread, like sphagnum moss. Grey replicas peeled from his back, pursuing him in single file over the January wasteland, hindmost figures fading out as more were added to the front end of the queue.
It having been a Sunday, Reggie had seen a few individuals and couples making their way through the slanting Boroughs streets towards the church, although since it was also perishingly cold these were less numerous than they might otherwise have been. Striding across the burial ground towards the old church and its gathering congregation, he’d become aware that no one else was shedding pictures of themselves behind them in a trail the way that he was. He’d had an uneasy intimation as to what this meant, but had tried calling out to the churchgoers anyway, bidding them a good morning. This had come out as “God mourning” by mistake, although he didn’t think it would have made a difference to the pious throng’s response, however he’d pronounced it. They’d ignored him as they exchanged pleasantries with one another, bundled in their winter clothes and shuffling towards the building’s worn iron gates. Even when he’d danced round in front of them and called them names – queer jumbled-up names that had sounded wrong even to Reggie – they just looked straight through him. One of them, a tubby girl, had even <em>walked</em> straight through him, giving him a brief unwelcome glimpse of squirting veins and bones and flickering stuff that he’d thought might be her brains. Reggie had been at last convinced of his condition by this incident, had finally accepted that these people neither saw nor heard him, being still amongst the living whereas he was now apparently amongst the dead.
It had been while he’d stood there by the gate allowing this dire fact to sink in that he’d heard the tiny, chirping voices from above him and looked up towards the eaves of Doddridge Church.
Since he’d passed over Reggie must have had the whole phenomenon explained to him a thousand times, how all of it made sense according to some special version of geometry, but for the life of him he couldn’t get to grips with it. He’d never really fathomed ordinary geometry, which meant this new variety was bound to be beyond his grasp. He doubted he would ever truly understand what he had seen when he’d glanced upwards at the higher reaches of the humble structure.
All the buttresses and things that you’d expect to poke out from the upper walls had looked instead like they were poking in, as if they’d all turned inside out. In the apparent cavities and indentations caused by this effect there had been little people perching, no more than three inches high, all waving frantically at Reggie as they called down to him with their twittering bat-like voices.
Back then, at the age of twelve, he would have probably been just about prepared to accept that they might be pixies, if they hadn’t been so drab and scruffy in their dress or homely in their features. In minute flat caps and baggy trousers hoisted by minuscule braces, wearing aprons and black bonnets, they’d milled back and forth along miniature balconies formed from inverted recesses. They’d beckoned and gesticulated, mouthed at him through lips that were infinitesimal, their faces marked by all the warts and lazy eyes and strawberry noses that you’d find in any ordinary pauper crowd on market day. The women’s coats had microscopic brooches, cheap and tarnished, pinned to the lapels. The fellows’ waistcoat buttons, those that weren’t already missing, verged on the invisible. These hadn’t been the sharp-eared fairies from the picture-books in all their gaudy finery, but had instead been normal folk in all their plainness and their ugliness, somehow shrunk to the size of horrid, chittering beetles.
As he’d stood and gaped in mingled fascination and revulsion at the capering homunculi, he’d noticed that nobody else amongst the scattering of worshippers converging on the church was doing so. No one had looked up at the strangely concave ledges where the slum-imps gestured, trilled and whistled, and it had occurred to Reggie that live people could not see them. He’d concluded that only the dead could do that, displaced souls like him who left grey pictures in their wakes rather than the faint puffs of fogging breath that marked the living on that bitter January day.
He’d not known what the creatures were and, back then, hadn’t wanted to find out. It had been slowly dawning on him, ever since he’d seen what was inside the crate, that he was dead yet didn’t seem to be in heaven. That, in Reggie’s limited grasp of theology, left only one or two more places that this ghostly realm might be, and neither of them sounded very nice. In mounting panic he had backed away, passing between or through oblivious Boroughs residents arriving at their place of worship, all the while keeping his eyes fixed firmly on the scuttling apparitions in the eaves, in case the rat-like men and women suddenly teemed skittering down the church walls and surged towards him.
Finally he’d turned and run away with his pursuing trail of after-pictures hurrying to keep up, haring around the left side of the church and into Castle Terrace, where an even more bewildering sight awaited. It had been that old door, halfway up the western face of Doddridge Church. In life he’d often puzzled over this and tried to guess its purpose, but as he’d dashed round the corner and stopped dead with all his phantom doubles piling up behind him, Reggie had at last been furnished with an answer, even if he had no way of understanding it.
Although he looked back with amusement now at his uncomprehending first glimpse of the Ultraduct, if he was honest Reggie wasn’t that much clearer as to what it was or how it functioned even after all these years, whatever meaningless immeasurable number that might be. He just recalled the breathless awe with which he’d reeled, dazed, through the spaces of its marvellous white pilastrade, his head tipped back to goggle at the glassy underside of the impossibly-constructed pier above him. Beyond the translucent alabaster of its planking, phosphorescent patches had moved purposefully back and forth, over his head and over Castle Terrace, fugitive light falling through the chiselled struts to settle on his upturned features like the snow that everyone had said it was too cold for.
Passing underneath the glorious eye-straining structure in a dazzled trance he had eventually stumbled out the other side, with his evaporating replicas all stumbling after him. Freed from the Ultraduct’s transfixing glamour, Reggie had let out a great moan of perplexity at the sheer overwhelming strangeness of his situation. Without looking back he’d raced off in a funk down Bristol Street, his ghost-hat clapped tight to his head, his spectral greatcoat flapping around his bare knees. Blindly he’d charged deeper into the sallow echo of the Boroughs that had seemed, then, to be his new home for all eternity, the awful place he’d been condemned to. He’d roared down the colourless coal-chute of Bath Street like a steam-train, towing look-alikes instead of carriages and tenders. Down there in the district’s pallid guts he’d trickled to a halt, then sat down in the middle of the road and taken stock of things.
Of course, it hadn’t been long after that when he had come across his first rough sleepers: a small crowd of what had looked and talked like drinking men from several different centuries. They’d put him straight about the nature of the ghost-seam or, as they had called it, purgatory. Like many of the Boroughs’ wraiths they’d been at heart a sentimental crew and taken him beneath their wing, instructing him in a variety of useful skills. They’d taught him how to scrape away accumulated circumstance and dig through time, then told him where to find the sweetest Bedlam Jennies, growing in the higher crevices that people with a heartbeat couldn’t see. They’d even found the ghost of an old football for him, although his first kick-around had underscored the limitations of the game, or at least this posthumous version of it: for one thing, the football didn’t bounce so high, in much the same way as sound didn’t resonate so clearly. For another, being insubstantial, the ghost-ball would be forever sailing through the house-walls of the living. Constantly retrieving it from underneath the table or inside the armchair of a family eating dinner unaware had rapidly become far too much of a bother.
Reggie had been grateful for the old revenants’ help and camaraderie, and yet with hindsight he could see they hadn’t really done him any favours. While they’d helped him to adjust to his new state they’d also fostered in him the belief that this bleak half-world, this unsettling ink-wash purgatory, was all that he deserved. He’d taken on their disappointed, self-defeating outlook as his own and looked to them for all his cues. They’d told him he could have his life over again if that was what he wanted, although there was something in the way they’d said it which implied that this would be a very bad idea. Back then, he’d been inclined to share this view, and in a sense was still of that opinion. Living through his mother’s suicide attempts again was nothing he looked forward to, and neither was the prospect of reprising his dad’s drunken rages. Nor did a repeat of wanking off the tramp or being once again frozen to death inside a packing crate seem to provide much real incentive. Now he was outside his life he could at last admit to himself what a nightmare and a torment it had been. The thought of going through it all again, a thousand times or even just the once, was more than he could bear.
The broken-hearted mob of ghosts who had been Reggie’s mentors in the afterlife had also counselled against going “Upstairs” to a place they called “Mansoul”. That, they’d explained, was for a better class of dead folk who had led respectable and carefree lives, not for the sorry likes of Reggie and his new-found friends. Their poor opinion of themselves had chimed with his own faltered self-esteem, and it occurred to Reggie that he might still be one of their company, to this day shambling through the joyless alleys of the ghost-seam with them, listening to their complaints and their regrets there in that muted landscape where each sound and every hope fell flat. He’d almost certainly still be amongst that wretched fellowship, he realised soberly, if it had not been for the great ghost-storm of 1913.
That had been like the Almighty trumping, in that it was deafening and unexpected. It had been much worse than the comparatively minor squall that Reggie and the Dead Dead Gang had just affected their escape from, down in 1959. Both had been caused, though, by the same phenomenon: by the violent activity of higher supernatural forces in the region of Mansoul that corresponded to the Mayorhold, where there was a place they called the Works. In 1913 these superior powers, be they the builders or the former builders who had been reclassified as devils, were in uproar over something that was said to be connected with the coming war. Their outraged flailings had provoked a wind of terrible ferocity that had torn through the phantom neighbourhood and had blown all of Reggie’s fatalistic chums away to Delapre. That was the reason it had put the wind up Reggie, so to speak, when him and all the other kids had heard Black Charley say there was a ghost-storm on its way: Reggie had been through one before.
There’d not been any warning, just a sudden rush of phantom dust and debris bowling down the middle of St. Mary’s Street, and then a ghostly rubbish bin had come careening out of nowhere and hit Reggie smack between the shoulder blades, so that he fell flat on his face. That, looking back, had been what saved him. Toppling forward, with his bowler somehow landing pinned and flattened underneath him, he’d instinctively put out both hands to break the fall and found himself embedded past his elbows in the ancient and thus partially substantial Boroughs soil. His scrabbling spectral fingers, out of sight a foot or two beneath the ground, happened upon a tree root that was also of sufficient age to get a grip on, and he’d thus been anchored more or less securely when the main sledgehammer blow of the ghost-gale had hit them only instants later.
Old Ralph Peters, a bankrupted grocer from 1750-something who’d looked like John Bull, had voiced a startled and despairing cry when he’d been lifted up into the air, as weightless as a feather, and had been sent soaring off in the direction of St. Peter’s Church. They’d all been rummaging about amongst the trees and overgrowth between the burial ground where Reggie had passed over (and had subsequently been interred), and Marefair. As the fierce north-easterly had torn poor Ralph into the sky he’d clutched in desperation at the topmost branches of an elm in hope of finding purchase, but the twigs had been new growth and had passed through the portly spirit’s hands like they weren’t there. Ralph had been snatched away arse-first towards the south horizon with the frightening velocity and dreadful noise of a deflating grey balloon, the after-pictures of his shocked face spiralling behind him like a hundred John Bull posters gushing from a printing press.
While Reggie had sprawled there screaming inaudibly above the tempest, clinging to the buried tree root for dear death, he’d watched as one by one the rest of the threadbare assembly – Maxie Mullins, Ron Case, Cadger Plowright, Burton Turner – had careened away into the clouds, passing through factory chimneys, fences made of rusty tin and the brick walls of people’s houses as they went. He’d heard Ron Case’s shriek of agony as the stooped little ghost with the perpetual sniffle had collided at high speed with the nine-hundred-year-old spire of Peter’s Church, a building venerable enough to have accumulated solid presence even in the ghost-seam. From what Reggie had been told a few years later, Ron had hit the church tower and been bent around it, caught upon it like an airborne ribbon hooked upon a nail. The raging winds had pulled his insubstantial body out as if it were a paper streamer, with the outcome being that by all accounts he’d ended up as something twice the height and much too thin to look at without shuddering. As for the others, Reggie didn’t have the first idea where they’d eventually been set down: from that appalling day to this, he’d never met with any of the kindly but dejected bunch again. For all that he knew they might still be up there, moaning and complaining as they twirled and flapped, caught in the planet’s jet-streams for eternity.
He’d been alone, then, in the spiritual hurricane, face down and shoulder-deep in Boroughs rock with his feet lifted off the ground and trailing in the churning air behind him, a whole football team of after-image boots and darned socks kicking helplessly. As he recalled he’d been debating whether to keep clutching at the root until the storm abated, if it ever did, or whether to let go and join his colleagues. He had just about decided on the latter of these options when he’d noticed that something peculiar was happening to the wasteland turf about a yard in front of him. There’d been concentric bands of black and white that seemed to ripple outwards from a dark spot in the middle, and it had been from this shimmering central point that Reggie had seen what he’d at first taken to be plump and ghastly worms but had then understood were a child’s fingers, wriggling up from underneath the earth. As there were at least thirty digits visible at one point, he had realised that the owner of the hands must be a ghost-child like himself, which had provided cause for cautious optimism.
Scraping back the wavering Liquorice Allsort stripes to either side with movements like the shovelling front paws of a mole, the mystery hands had very quickly made the portal wide enough for larger body-parts to be pushed through. Thus it had been that he had found himself with arms sunk in the earth, cheeks fluttering and eyes watering in the fierce wind as he’d stared disbelievingly at the small girl whose head and shoulders had suddenly poked up from the waste-ground a few feet in front of him. Around her neck had been a ruff of rabbit skins that made it look like she was surfacing out of a barrel of dead animals. Her bowl-cut hair had whipped about all round her head in the still-raging tempest, every loose strand dragging after-image curtains of itself to veil her scowling features in a mask of matted steam. That had been his first meeting with ferocious, mouthy, brave, infuriating Phyllis Painter.
Verbally abusing him throughout and treating him as if he were an idiot, Phyllis had managed to reach out and grab him by the wrist once he’d unearthed one of his arms. With what had turned out to be her kid Bill holding her ankles from below, she’d somehow hauled both Reggie and his squashed hat through the opening she’d dug, yanking him down into the glittering see-through darkness of a tunnel that had run from Peter’s Church up to St. Sepulchre’s, or at least had done in the thirteen-hundreds, which was the time period that Phyllis had been digging her way up from when she’d happened upon Reggie. They’d all landed in a heap on top of Bill, struggling on the packed dirt floor amidst dropped Saxon coins and Norman dog-bones, giggling and yelling as if the whole dire predicament had been enormous fun. After the untold years of his association with resigned old men who hadn’t even had death to look forward to, Reggie had known once more the spirit-lifting thrill of being a daft little lad unburdened by regret. They’d finally stopped laughing and sat up, there in the fourteenth-century gloom, to shake hands and make proper introductions.
Him and Bill and Phyllis had been more or less inseparable from then on, organising games of hide and seek in heaven, playing ghost-tag, sliding on their bottoms down the dusty decades. As he’d got to know them better, Reggie had picked up the odd fact here and there, such as how they were both from the same family and had both lived and died a good while after he had. He’d found out that Phyllis’s last name was Painter, which was more than Reggie knew about his other young pals. He assumed that Bill must be a Painter too, but he’d got no idea as to the surnames of Drowned Marjorie or John, whom Reggie and the Painters had encountered some time after the three of them had first met, in medieval times, beneath the burial ground. As with living kids, dead ones preferred to deal almost exclusively in Christian names, or so it seemed to Reggie.
Bill and Phyllis had before long disabused him with regard to the forlorn philosophy he’d picked up second-hand from Maxie Mullins, Cadger Plowright and the rest. They’d taken him up to Mansoul, up to the Second Borough on the floor above the mortal realm, where the reverberant sound and overwhelming colour had brought Reggie to his knees, as had the smell of Phyllis’s dead-rabbit scarf once they’d climbed from the odourless dominion of the ghost-seam. Having met the down-at-heel but glorious individuals who resided mostly in that upper world, people like Mrs. Gibbs, old Sheriff Perrit or Black Charley, Reggie had revised his idea of himself. The afterlife – which was in some ways also the before-and-during life – had not turned out to be the snooty and judgemental place that Burton Turner and the others had described. It had instead been both a wonder and a terror, the most thrilling playground for a child that Reggie could imagine, and he’d understood that all its shining residents were only people who had lived their lives and done the things they’d had to do, the same as Reggie had. All the disheartened spirits that he’d previously knocked about with, he had realised, were not condemned to purgatory by anything except their own shame and a mercilessly low opinion of themselves.
It had been at some point during the early days of their association, possibly just after the Adventure of the Phantom Cow and just before the Mystery of Snow Town, that the three of them had first decided that they were now an official gang. This would have been about the time that Reggie had remembered his old dream about Miss Tibbs and had suggested that they call themselves the Dead Dead Gang, which everybody had seemed tickled by. They’d stuck together ever since then, although Reggie had got no idea how long ago the founding of their happy throng had been, nor even how you’d calculate a thing like that on the time-free plane of Mansoul.
Time being what it was up in the Second Borough, Reggie kept things straight by reckoning events in the same order he’d experienced them, the way most people did. He had a notion that the builders and the devils saw things differently, but that was somehow tied up with the business about special geometry and mathematics and dimensions, so he tended not to dwell upon it very much. For Reggie, keeping track of years and dates had always been a headache, and the best that he could manage was to maintain an internal list of big occasions in their proper sequence. For example, following the naming of the gang they’d pretty soon embarked upon the Snow Town business, when the three of them had gone exploring in the twenty-fifties, and right after that there’d been the Case of the Five Chimneys. Their next exploit, The Dead Dead Gang Versus the Nene Hag, had been the one where they’d picked up Drowned Marjorie, and eight or nine adventures later they’d encountered John, with his boy’s-paper hero looks, during the Subterranean Aeroplane Affair. Though weeks, years, decades or possibly centuries had passed since then, to Reggie it seemed like one endless afternoon in much the way that children think of their school summer holidays, measured in games played or best-friendships forged.
That period, with its Riddle of the Crawling Arm and Incident of the Delirious Blackshirt and the rest, had been a largely calm and happy one for Reggie. Now, though, with their current operation (“The Enigma of the Soppy Little Kid”), he wondered if those carefree times were drawing to a close, the way his days with the rough sleepers had done. First there’d been that trouble with the devil, the first really famous fiend that Reggie had bumped into in his time Upstairs, and then there’d been that stuff about this nipper kicking off a scrap between the Master Builders. Throw in the unsettling ghost-storm and in Reggie’s estimation this whole latest escapade was turning into a complete disaster. He had previously thought that having died inside a packing crate would be the worst thing that could ever happen to him, and that relatively speaking the remainder of eternity would be a pushover. This Michael Warren business, though, with all its demons and its dangers, made that notion look too optimistic. Privately, he was of the opinion that the sooner they dumped the new blonde kid down the scarlet well and into the fifth century, the better.
Look at the fuss he’d made just now, when he’d turned round and noticed that his house and street had gone, Reggie thought scornfully. The lucky little beggar had already found out he’d be coming back to life again, and then he goes and throws a fit about some buildings that had been demolished. He should try freezing to death inside a crate. As Reggie saw things, all these sissy little modern kids should try freezing to death inside a crate. It’d be good for them.
Reggie stood with his comrades and the new boy at the junction of Bath Street and Scarletwell, sometime in nothing-five or nothing-six, up in the twenty-somethings. Michael Warren was still blubbering and pointing to the place his home had been while big John tried consoling him and Phyllis told him not to be so daft. Contemptuously, Reggie hawked some ectoplasm up and spat it out into the gutter. Tilting down his bowler’s brim to what he thought might be more of a tough chap’s angle, he looked off downhill towards St. Andrew’s Road and the lone house, there near the corner, that they’d just escaped from. In all fairness to the wailing toddler, Reggie didn’t much like being this far up the ladder of the decades either. His own century, the nineteenth, was all right, despite it having treated him so poorly, and he thought the first half of the twentieth was reasonably presentable if you ignored the wars. Time periods much after that, though, and it all went funny. This one that they were in now, the twenty-first, was somewhere that he’d kept away from ever since the Snow Town episode. Despite the fact that Reggie was a ghost, this present century gave him the willies.
What was worst were all the houses they had here: the flats. Where Reggie could remember tangled lanes crowded with individual homes now there were only great big ugly blocks, a hundred residences crushed into a cube, like when they squash old cars in a machine. And naturally, having to live a new way had made everybody different. These days families were all divided up like eggs in cartons, one to a compartment, and folk didn’t hang together in the way they’d done when their untidy streets and their untidy lives had all been knotted up in one big ball. It was as if society had finally caught up with Reggie Bowler, so that now the vast majority of people were content to live and die alone, inside a box. Aimlessly gazing at the single red-brick structure jutting from the night grass near the junction with St. Andrew’s Road, he realised with a start that up here in the twenty-somethings, this peculiar relic was the only proper house still standing in the Boroughs. All the rest had been replaced by concrete lumps.
Behind him, Michael Warren was berating Phyllis, between sobs and gulps for breath, over the way she’d brought him here to this upsetting place. He said he didn’t think that she was really looking after him at all, and that she was just doing what she wanted to and being selfish – which from Reggie’s point of view there may have been some truth in, but he knew it was a bad idea for the new kid to point it out to Phyllis like that. Sure enough, the Dead Dead Gang’s girl boss immediately got on her high horse, and then got that to balance on the saddle of an even higher horse as she turned her ferocious approbation on the sniffling little boy, loudly recalling how she’d helped him in the Attics of the Breath and how she’d saved him from the clutches of the devil-king. Letting the whole debate sail past him Reggie spat again into the dark, the wad of ghost-phlegm leaving pale dots on the darkness as it arced towards the pavement, like a perforation line. Returning his attention to the faded ribbon of St. Andrew’s Road as it spooled through the night towards the north and Semilong, Reggie inspected its infrequent motor traffic that passed back and forth beneath the craning streetlamps with their sickly grey coronas.
Cars had frightened Reggie when he’d first encountered them while playing tiggy-through-the-wall with Bill and Phyllis in the 1930s, and had then amazed and fascinated him as he’d become increasingly familiar with them. Reggie fancied that he had turned into something of a connoisseur of motor vehicles across the timeless time since then, being particularly fond of those you came across down in the 1940s and the 1950s. Double-decker buses were his favourite, especially after Phyllis had informed him that as living people saw them, they were a bright red. He liked the transport of the twentieth century’s middle decades largely for its pleasing shapes, its mudguard curves and bumper bulges. Also, Reggie thought the cars you saw around those years had cheerful faces, the arrangement of the headlights, bonnet mascot and the radiator grill that Reggie couldn’t help but see as eyes and nose and mouth.
The intermittent modern cars that hummed and hurtled through the night along St. Andrew’s Road were, like so many of this current era’s trappings, less to Reggie’s liking. They had either the sleek bodies of malicious cats advancing rapidly on something through tall grass, or they resembled trundling military tanks that had been geed-up to go faster. Worst of all, in his opinion, were the cold, mean-spirited expressions of their features, crowded in beneath the forehead of the bonnet like the blunt and vicious masks of fighting fish. The headlamps were now lidded and inscrutable above the radiator’s surly overbite, the entire four-wheeled metal skull now that of a belligerent bull-terrier. He’d once remarked to Phyllis that they looked like they were out hunting for something in the dark, and she’d just sniffed and said “Round ’ere, it’s girls.”
The row between Phyllis and Michael Warren was still going on, back over Reggie’s greatcoat-shrouded shoulder. Phyllis said, “I oughter just abandon yer, if that’s the way yer feel abayt it”, and then Michael Warren said, “Glow on and see a fakir”, which to Reggie’s ear made very little sense. But then, that was the way the newly dead found themselves talking before they were used to the expanded possibilities of language that there were in Mansoul, alongside the richer sounds and colours. Before they had found their “Lucy-lips”, as the expression went. Reggie remembered his own early gibberish tirade at the unwitting members of the congregation filing into Doddridge Church down in the 1870s, and felt a pang of sympathy for the disoriented youngster, though not much of one. As there were no cars passing by at present, Reggie was about to turn back to the other ghost-kids squabbling behind him and resume his part in their discussion when he noticed something odd emerging from the featureless brick wall bounding the enclosed garages belonging to the flats, a little further downhill from where they were standing, nearer to where blacked-out Scarletwell Street joined the sodium-lit ribbon of St. Andrew’s Road.
It was a patterned smear extruded from the high wall of the garages, extending itself down across the dark grass like a line of dribbled paint or, more exactly, like a squirt of that astounding toothpaste with the stripes in that Phyllis had shown him in the novelty-filled reaches of the 1960s, except that the rolling globule here was checked rather than striped. Also, to judge from the subdued sounds that at intervals would issue from it, it was weeping. After a few baffled moments, Reggie saw that it was a rough sleeper, a stout fellow in a loud checked jacket that left a predictably eye-popping streak of after-images behind it. The ghost’s hair was black, as was the pencil moustache on his upper lip, though Reggie thought that both looked dyed, as if the spirit best remembered himself as an older man still trying to look young. He wore a grey bow-tie with a white shirt that bulged out like a flour-sack at his midriff and from his trajectory as he streamed down across the rustling weeds towards St. Andrew’s Road, Reggie suspected that he might have just emerged from Bath Row at some juncture several decades further down into the past, when the constricted cut-through was still standing. Setting his bowler hat more tightly down around his ears because he privately believed this made his thoughts more disciplined, Reggie observed the weeping phantom as it stumbled down the slope and realised belatedly that it was headed for the sole remaining residence that stood near Scarletwell Street’s corner, the same heaven-haunted house they’d just escaped from. He decided that he’d best alert his comrades to this new development, just in case it should turn out to be anything significant. When he spoke, it was in an urgent whisper.
“ ’Ere, look at this chap. ’E’s makin’ fer the corner ’ouse, and ’e looks in a right state.”
Everybody turned to see what Reggie was referring to, then gazed in silence as they watched the tearful spectre in the snazzy jacket make his way across the turf that had replaced dozens of houses, lifting chubby hands to hide his face and blubbering more volubly as he approached the lonely edifice that loomed there on the other side of Scarletwell. Presumably able to see despite his ectoplasmic tears and pudgy fingers, the Dead Dead Gang stared as the ghost made a sudden detour in a semi-circle from the straight path that he’d previously been following.
“That’ll be the scarlet well that he’s avoiding. ’E don’t want to fall through a few ’undred years of dirt and find ’imself splashin’ about in bloody-lookin’ dye.”
In grunts and nods, the rest of the dead children quietly concurred with Reggie’s explanation. Only big John actually spoke up.
“You know, I think I know him. I think that’s my uncle. I’ve not seen him since I passed on, and I never dreamed that he’d end up as a rough sleeper, but I’m sure that’s him. I wonder what he’s got to feel so down upon himself about?”
“Why don’t yer ask ’im?”
This was Phyllis, standing at John’s side with her truculent features picked out in the dark in silvery needlepoint. The tall good-looking boy, who Reggie somehow managed to resent, envy and like tremendously at the same time, peered off into the gloom towards the sobbing snappy dresser and declined, shaking his head.
“I wizn’t really close to him back when we were alive. Nothing he’d done, just something in his manner that I never cottoned to. Besides, he looks like he’s got enough on his plate already. When someone’s roaring their eyes out like that, generally all they want wiz to be left alone.”
Still covering his tear-stained face, the chequered wraith slid over Scarletwell towards the doorstep of the street’s single remaining house. Wiping one garish sleeve across his dark-ringed eyes the plump man hesitated for a moment on the threshold, and then melted into the closed front door and was gone.
And when they looked round, so was Michael Warren.
“Oh my giddy aunt, ’e’s run orf! Quick, which way’s ’e gone?”
Reggie was mildly startled at how panicked Phyllis sounded. She was turning round in anxious circles, squinting anxiously into the silvered darkness for some sign of the absconded toddler. Settling his bowler hat to what he thought was a more sympathetic angle, he did his gruff best to reassure her.
“Don’t worry, Phyll. ’E’ll soon be back, and even if ’e’s not, it’s not our business. Everybody says ’e’s going back to life soon, anyway. Why not let all that take care of itself? Then we can just get on with scrumping Puck’s Hats from the madhouses, and our adventuring and everything. What about Bill’s plan to dig a big ’ole all the way down to the Stone Age, so that we can capture a ghost woolly-elephant and tame it for a pet?”
Phyllis just stared at him as if appalled by his stupidity. Reggie adjusted his hat to a more defensive slant as she replied in an explosive shower of double-exposed spirit-spit.
“ ’Ave you gone orf yer ’ead? You ’eard what Mrs. Gibbs an’ old Black Charley said about the builders and their punch-up! And there’s all this to-do with the Vernalls and the Porthimoth di Norhan that we ’aven’t sorted ayt yet! You goo and catch mammoths if yer like, but I’m not gunna be in the Third Borough’s bad books, not if I can ’elp it!”
With that, Phyllis turned and raced towards the gated lower Scarletwell Street entrance of Greyfriars flats, which was about the only place that Michael Warren could have disappeared into while they weren’t looking, rabbit-scarf and pictures of herself trailing behind her in a string of grimy flags. The other members of the Dead Dead Gang stared after her for a stunned instant, shocked as much by Phyllis’s bold reference to the Third Borough – Reggie hardly dared to even think the name – as they were by her desperate flight. Gathering themselves up from their gaping stupor they rushed after her, a clattering mob of four, twelve, sixteen, eighty phantom children pouring down the brief and narrow passage leading to the inner courtyard of Greyfriars, pushing their smoky substance through the black iron railings of a gate that had been there for only a few years and thus provided no impediment. Hot on the multiplying heels of Phyllis Painter they burst out into the lower level of a large two-tier concrete enclosure ringed by silent 1930s flats, where everybody paused to take stock of their suddenly alarming situation.
From the gilt-trimmed shadows of the upper courtyard came the frightened cries of cats and dogs, who were no fools when it came to detecting ghostly presences, and the cross shouting of their human owners, who quite clearly were. Along with his deceased companions, Reggie peered into the gloom of the split-level quadrangle. Down at the lower end where they were, half-dead vegetation rustled on a small patch of neglected ground originally intended as a modest arbour. Up three granite steps, on the top deck of the communal yard, a single pair of lady’s tights dangled forgotten from the washing line and brick dustbin-enclosures guarded black bags, split and spilling the unfathomable prolapsed waste of the twenty-first century, the slimy plastic trays and rinds of unfamiliar fruit. Of Michael Warren there was not the slightest trace.
Seeming to summon fresh resolve out of adversity, a steely and determined look came into Phyllis’s pale eyes.
“Right. ’E’ll ’ave either ’eaded up the ’ill and over Lower Crorse Street to the maisonettes, or ’e’ll ’ave cut along the bottom ’ere and come ayt into Bath Street. We’ll split up in two groups so we’ve got a better chance of findin’ ’im. Marjorie, you and John and me wizzle search through the maisonettes. And as fer you two …”
Phyllis turned a somewhat frosty gaze on Bill and Reggie.
“You two can search Bath Street and Moat Place and all round there … or yer can goo and look fer woolly elephants, fer all I care. Now, ’urry up and piss orf, or there’s no tellin’ ’ow far away the little nuisance might ’ave got.”
With that, Phyllis and John and Marjorie swirled up the stone steps and away into the tinfoil glitter of the Greyfriars darkness, leaving Bill and Reggie on the murky path that cut across the courtyard’s lower reaches from Bath Street to Scarletwell. Bill laughed, the laugh of a much older and much lewder individual, despite the little boy’s high voice.
“The dirty old tart. She just wants to be off in the dark with Johnski, and she’s letting poor old Drowned Marge tag along for cover. So, it looks like it’s just you and me then, Reggie me old mucker. Where d’yer fancy lookin’ first?”
Reggie had always got on well with Bill. The lad had substance but it was a substance with rough edges to it; less intimidating than the burnished aura of nobility that hung around big John in a heraldic sheen. The ginger nipper was approachable and funny, with a repertoire of more rude jokes than Reggie had imagined could exist, and was astonishingly knowledgeable for an eight-year-old, even a dead one. Reggie shrugged.
“I reckon we’d be best to do as Phyllis says fer once, so we’re not in worse trouble with ’er. We can catch that woolly elephant another time. Let’s ’ave a look in them new flats where Moat Street was and see if we can spot the little blighter. Then we can be shot of this whole bloody century and get back down where it’s more comfortable.”
The two of them were walking side by side, their hands deep in their pockets, following the path along the bottom edge of the night-steeped enclosure, wandering unhurriedly towards another gated passage that led out to Bath Street. Bill was nodding in acknowledgement of Reggie’s last remark, the after-images stretching his face into a sort of carrot shape to match his carrot top, albeit only momentarily.
“You’re not wrong, Reg, much as it pains me to admit it to a fuckin’ dead Victorian bugger like yerself. Now, me, I lived into this fuckin’ century we’re in now, lived for a lot longer than I was expecting, and I’ll tell yer, even I think it’s a load o’ shit. Give me the ’Fifties or the ’Sixties any day. I mean, I know places like this wiz run-down even then, but look at all this. This wiz just taking the fuckin’ piss.”
Bill’s sweeping many-handed gesture took in the wide, litter-strewn tarmac expanse upon their left, the patch of dying hedges to their right side and, by implication, the whole devastated neighbourhood surrounding them. As they passed through the black bars of the Bath Street gate and left the shadow-crusted yard behind them, Reggie studied Bill appraisingly and wondered if he could confess his ignorance of almost the entire world they existed in without appearing stupid or inviting ridicule. Despite the fact that Bill appeared a great deal younger than did Reggie, Reggie thought he’d very likely lived to be much older and much wiser than Reggie himself had managed, with his wretched twelve years. In a strange way, he looked up to the much shorter boy as if Bill were an adult of considerable experience, and Reggie was reluctant to expose his own humiliating lack of knowledge by bombarding Bill with all the questions that he’d dearly love to know the answers to: the basic details of their puzzling afterlife that he had never had explained to him and had been too embarrassed to enquire about. His policy had always been to maintain a façade of knowing, worldly silence so that no one could make any smart remarks about him being an unschooled and backward half-wit from a backward century, which secretly he feared he was. Still, Bill had never seemed like the judgemental sort and as they ventured out onto the dark incline of Bath Street, Reggie thought he’d chance his arm while they were both alone together and he had the opportunity.
“Wiz you expecting it to be like this once you wiz dead? With all the builders and the black and white, and all the leaving pictures of yourself behind yer?”
Bill just grinned and shook his briefly-multiplying heads as the boys drifted over the benighted street in the direction of the Moat Place flats.
“O’ course I wasn’t. I don’t reckon anybody thought that it’d be like this. None o’ yer main religions sussed it, and I don’t remember any of the Maharishis or whatever talking about after-images, or Bedlam Jennies, or just living the same life time after time, with all yer fuck-ups coming back to ’aunt yer and fuck all that you can do to change ’em.”
They were starting to head down a drive that dipped into a hollow, with the garage doors of the flats’ basement level on their left and on their right a stretch of featureless grey brickwork. Bill was looking thoughtful, as though reconsidering his last remark.
“Mind you, ’avin’ said that, there wiz this bird that I used to knock about with, and fuck me, she knew all sorts of stuff, and she’d go on about it if you let ’er. I remember ’er tellin’ me once ’ow she thought we ’ad the same lives over again. She said it ’ad to do with stuff about the fourth dimension.”
Reggie groaned.
“Oh, not the ruddy fourth dimension! I’ve ’ad everyone try and explain it to me and I’m none the wiser. Phyllis said the fourth dimension was the length of how long things and people last.”
Bill wrinkled up his nose into an amiable sneer.
“She don’t know what she’s on about. I mean, she’s right in one way, but time’s not the fourth dimension. As this bird I knew described it to me, passing time’s just ’ow we see the fourth dimension while we’re still alive.
“She used to talk about these blokes who first went on about the idea of the fourth dimension, chaps from not long after your time. There was this bloke ’Inton, who got in the shit over a threesome with his missus and another bird and ’ad to leave the country. He said what we saw as space and time wiz really one big fuck-off solid block with four dimensions. Then there wiz this other feller, by the name of Abbott. He explained it all with kinda like a children’s story, in this book called <em>Flatland</em>.”
As they floated up the concrete steps to one side of the wall that blocked the hollow’s far end, Reggie wondered if a “threesome” was the racy episode that he imagined it to be, but then forced his mind back with some reluctance to the subject that Bill was discussing. Reggie felt sure that if he was ever going to understand this special geometric business, then an explanation told so that a child could understand it was, in every likelihood, his last, best hope. He did his best to concentrate upon what Bill was saying, listening intently.
“What ’e did, this Abbott geezer, was instead of goin’ on about a fourth dimension nobody could get their ’eads round, Abbott talked about the whole thing as if it was ’appenin’ to little flat things what wiz in a world with two dimensions, as if they wiz livin’ on a sheet o’ paper. How he told it, these flat fuckers, right, they’ve just got length and breadth, and they can’t even picture depth. They’ve got no idea about up and down. It’s all just forwards, backwards, right and left to them. The third dimension what we live in, it makes no more sense to them than what the fourth dimension does to us.”
This was already sounding promising to Reggie. He could easily imagine two-dimensional things, flatter than the wrigglers you could sometimes see if you got right down near a pool of rain and squinted with the vastly improved vision of the dead. He pictured them as shapeless little blobs going about their forwards-backwards-sideways lives on their flat sheet of paper, and the image made him smile. They’d be like draughts manoeuvring around a board, though obviously much thinner.
At the top of the stone steps there was a car park, open to the night sky and hemmed in by high black hedges on its southern side, though Reggie had a notion that when him and the Dead Dead Gang had passed through here in the 1970s, while on their way to Snow Town, it had been a queer and ugly playground for the bafflement of children. Now a dozen or so modern cars, snub-nosed and predatory, were hunkered down in darkness as though snoozing between kills. The Warren kid was nowhere to be seen.
The car park had been built where Fitzroy Street was situated, half a century beneath them in the past. Reggie and Bill streamed up its slope beneath the black quilt of a sky patched with grey cloud and a few isolated stars, almost too faint to see. The sprawl of square-cut buildings they were leaving, the drab, peeling blocks of Fort Place and Moat Place with their railed balconies and sunken walkways, had been put up in the 1960s on the rubble of Fort Street and Moat Street, and to Reggie’s eye looked even more disheartening than the neglected 1930s hulk of Greyfriars, which at least had some curves to its concrete. As their likenesses went stuttering up the darkened car park’s exit ramp towards Chalk Lane and the raised hillock at the foot of Castle Street, Reggie could make out lumpy children’s drawings stuck up in the windows of the single-storey building on the mound. He had an idea that the place was once a dancing-school of some sort, but across the flickering passage of the years had been transformed into a nursery. Still, there were worse fates. In the silver-threaded murk beside him, Bill continued his description of the little flattened people in their squashed world that they thought was the whole universe.
“So, if a little flat bloke wants to be indoors, away from everybody, all ’e’s gotta do wiz draw a square on ’is flat sheet o’ paper, and then that’s ’is ’ouse, right? Fuck the other flat blokes. If ’e wants to, our chap can just go inside ’is square and then ’e’s shut away so none o’ them can see ’im. Now, ’e don’t know there’s a third dimension up above ’is, where there’s us lot looking down and <em>we</em> can see ’im, sitting there all safe and sound inside ’is four lines what ’e’s got as walls. ’E can’t even imagine nothin’ up above ’im, ’cause ’e can’t even imagine <em>up</em>, just forwards, backwards, right and left.
“Poor little cunt, ’e might be sitting there and we just, like, reach down and pick ’im up, then put ’im down again outside ’is ’ouse. What would ’e make o’ that? To ’im it would be like some fuckin’ weird shape just appearing out o’ nowhere and then draggin’ ’im out through the wall or something. It’d do ’is ’ead in. It’s like us, when we’re up in the Attics of the Breath and lookin’ down into somebody’s gaff. We’re up above ’em in a way what they don’t know about and can’t even imagine, because their world’s flat compared to ours, just like the piece-of-paper world is flat compared to theirs.”
The wraith-boys were emerging onto the deserted roadway at the join of Little Cross Street and Chalk Lane just opposite the nursery, and off in the Northampton night there was a muffled uproar of drunk cheers and angry bellows, startled squeals, the constant wheeze from a catarrh of distant motor traffic or protracted and nerve-shredding bursts from eerie, unfamiliar instruments that Bill said were alarms or phones or sirens, every sound damped into a peculiarly urgent murmur by the dead acoustics of the ghost-seam. It struck Reggie that in nothing-five or nothing-six they had a lot more jangling and unnerving noises and a lot less starlight than in the decades below, where Reggie found the ratio between these two phenomena more to his liking.
As their ambling path began to gradually veer towards the left and Little Cross Street, Bill continued chattering about the fourth dimension and to Reggie’s great surprise he found that he was following the drift of it, despite the bits of slang he didn’t recognise and couldn’t work out for himself. “Bird”, for example, sounded like another way of saying “girl” or “woman”, and Reggie supposed it was a bit like “chickabiddy”, which he’d heard men use while he was still alive, down in the eighteen-hundreds. On the other hand, he’d no idea what a “gaff” was, not unless it was a sort of street fair or the yells and outcries that a fair like that would raise, and Reggie didn’t reckon Bill meant that by it at all. The way he’d used it, it had sounded more like it meant “room” or something like that. Reggie let it go and concentrated on what Bill was saying at that moment.
“Anyway, this bird said ’ow people like Abbott and this ’Inton kicked off all the fuss about the fourth dimension in the 1880s or around then. Come the 1920s, though, and everybody’s into it. All of the artists and the cubists and Picasso and all them, they were just tryin’ to think ’ow it would look if, say, somebody turned their ’ead towards yer and yer could still see ’em side-on. I mean, that’s ’ow us lot see each other all the time.”
To demonstrate, Bill whipped his head around and grinned at Reggie. Reggie didn’t really know what cubists or Picassos were, but he could see what Bill had meant: the after-image of the ginger nipper’s profile was still hanging in the air even though Bill now faced him, a translucent ghost-ear superimposed fleetingly on Bill’s right eye. Perhaps that was the sort of thing that the Picubos painted.
“And it wizn’t just the artists. All the spiritualists and the dodgy séance types wiz celebratin’. They wiz well chuffed, ’cause they thought the fourth dimension would explain all of the weird things ghosts wiz s’posed to do, like seeing inside boxes and all that old bollocks. For a time down in the 1920s, even all the boffins and the scientists an’ what-not thought the table-rappers might be onto somethin’ with this fourth dimension business. Then I ’spect they ’ad a war, or summat else come up, and everybody just forgot about it.”
Reggie silently absorbed this. Though he couldn’t say that any of it was the revelation he’d been hoping for, it made at least a bit more sense of Reggie’s circumstances. He’d not realised that the trails of pictures following the dead about were tied up somehow with this fourth dimension, having previously considered the phenomenon merely a random nuisance. Now he knew that it was scientific, it might not be so much of a bother.
As he listened to Bill ramble on – something about a chap called Einstein, probably another painter – Reggie scanned the unlit neighbourhood about them, part of his attention still fixed doggedly upon the task of finding the ghost-runaway. Glancing across his shoulder to the right he saw the nursery on the mound and, just across the mouth of Castle Hill, the blunt age-rounded corners on the sandstone mass of Doddridge Church. From where he stood with Bill he couldn’t quite see the queer doorway stranded halfway up the church’s wall, nor the appalling, vision-straining splendour of the Ultraduct that sprouted from it, curving off unfathomably to the south, towards the madhouses on Mansoul’s outskirts and beyond that London, Dover, France, Jerusalem. Although the structure was itself invisible from Reggie’s current angle, he could see the falling chalk-dust light it scattered as it settled on the ragged end of Little Cross Street.
Just across the road, in front of the two phantom boys and to their left, there loomed the gaunt west face of Bath Street flats, their bruise-dark 1930s brickwork glistening like snail slime in the intermittent lamplight. Although Reggie doubted that there had been more than a few years between the raising of their Greyfriars counterparts and these somehow forbidding residences, there was an immense dissimilarity in their respective atmospheres. Greyfriars had seemed no more than miserably disappointed, but the soulless and disinterested windows of the Bath Street buildings wore a genuinely dreadful look, as though they’d seen the worst and were just waiting now to die.
Though in the ghost-seam’s monochrome the flats’ bricks were a charred grey, almost black, Reggie had heard they were the brownish-red of dried blood, each one like a block of corned beef slithered from its tin, with yellowed lard for mortar. At a point halfway along the west wall, double doors more suited to a closed-down swimming-baths stared menacingly from beneath the sagging hat brim of their portico. The only glass pane that remained intact was cracked, the other three replaced by speckled plasterboard. Two low brick walls, on one of which white moss was crawling, bordered a thin concrete passage, running from the hooded doorway and across a grass verge to the paving slabs of Little Cross Street. Unreadable words were scrawled in pale paint on the stout brick end-posts, and accumulated in the angle between wall and turf was a dismaying silt of rubber johnnies, dead birds and dead fag-ends, hinged and gaping square-cut oysters made of plastic foam that haemorrhaged cold chips, a single child-sized buckle shoe, six flimsy beer-tins crushed in rage or boredom, several … Reggie brought himself up short. Moss didn’t crawl. He looked back at the clump of ashen tufts which even now appeared to be progressing slowly, like a great albino caterpillar, as it crawled along the flat top surface of the nearside wall. Except it wasn’t really something fluffy balancing upon the wall, but was instead the blonde hair of somebody crouching down and shuffling along behind it.
“Bill! I see ’im! Look, ’e’s over there!”
No sooner had the words left Reggie’s mouth than he regretted them and wished he’d thought to try a subtler approach. Over upon the other side of Little Cross Street, Michael Warren stood up from behind the wall where he’d been hiding and gaped, horrified, at Bill and Reggie as their multiplying images began to blur across the road towards him. Venting a brief yelp of panic, the pyjama-clad child whirled around and plunged into the plasterboard and glass of the closed doors, without the least trace of his earlier hesitation with regard to passing through substantial objects. Reggie dashed over the empty roadway in pursuit with Bill swearing beside him, both of them aware that the new kid had only run away because their roughness frightened him. If John or even Phyllis had been present, Michael Warren would have probably just given up the chase and gone along with them, grateful to be no longer lost in this unfriendly century. By shouting out the odds the way that he just had, Reggie had possibly scared off the little boy for good. If he should dig into another time, even a half-hour back or forward, they would very likely never find him and then all the dire consequences everyone had promised if they lost the hapless tot would come to pass.
In this eventuality, he couldn’t bear the thought of facing Phyllis and explaining to her how he’d messed things up. Frantic lest Michael Warren should escape again, the boys and their attendant images charged in a conga-line of hooligans, diagonally across the grass and straight in through the western wall of Bath Street flats, not bothering to enter by the double doors as the blonde fugitive had done. Reggie and Bill dived recklessly through the blood-pudding bricks into the startling, unexpected realm beyond.
The first apartment that they rushed through was unlit save for the hissing radiance of a television set tuned to an empty channel. Sitting in the room’s sole chair, a middle-aged man stared into the incoherent static, weeping while he clutched a woman’s straw hat to his face. The two ghost-boys smeared past him, passing through the rear wall and the empty kitchenette beyond into another flat, this one blacked out save for the spidery chrome lines of their nocturnal vision. Picked out as if by metallic thread, Reggie could see a filthy baby sleeping fitfully in its dilapidated cradle, the place otherwise unoccupied save for five underfed cats and their droppings. Him and Bill moved on, a ruffian wind that bowled down passageways and under doors, through hovel after hovel: three excited black men playing cards while in one corner lay a fourth, bloody and whimpering; a plump and vacant-eyed old woman in her underwear, patiently counting and arranging tins of dog-food in a pyramid without the least trace of a dog in sight; a skinny young dark-skinned girl with her hair in plaited stripes, who alternated between sucking smoke out of a dented tin and pasting cut-out photographs of a blonde woman into an already-bulging book.
At last the pair of junior apparitions flowed through an exterior wall, emerging gratefully into what, if they’d still been capable of breathing, would have been fresh air. They were now in the central avenue that split the flats, effectively, into two halves. A straight path with a strip of lawn to either side, bounded by walls with strange half-crescent arches, Reggie knew that getting on for ninety years beneath them this was the bleak recreation ground known as the Orchard. The whole place was greatly changed since then, of course. In fact the place was greatly changed, at least by night, since Reggie last remembered passing this way, on a short-cut through the 1970s. Although the basic structure of the buildings had not altered, Reggie was amazed to see that every grimy balcony or stairway visible through the brick arches bordering the path was lit up from beneath, so that these features floated in the dark and made the flats seem like some fabulous abandoned city of the future, full of blazing lanterns but devoid of people. At the central path’s south end, before it got to Castle Street, it turned into a broad and brick-walled concrete stairway. On the bottom step towards its middle sat the ghost of Michael Warren, narrow tartan shoulders shaking as he wept into his lifted hands.
This time, Reggie and Bill approached the clearly frightened kid more carefully, moving so slowly that they hardly left a single duplicate behind them. Not wanting the child to glance up suddenly and think that they were creeping up on him, Reggie called out in the most soft and reassuring tone that he could manage.
“Don’t be scared, mate. It’s just us. Yer not in any trouble.”
Michael Warren looked up, startled, and for just a moment you could see he was debating whether to run off again or not. Evidently he finally decided ‘not’, lowering his head again as he resumed his sobbing. Bill and Reggie walked up and sat down on the stone step to either side of him, with Reggie draping one long coat-clad arm around the spectral infant’s heaving shoulders.
“Come on. Blow your nose and pull yerself together, ay? It’s not so bad.”
The little boy looked up at Reggie, ectoplasm glistening on his cheeks.
“I just want to glow home. This wizzn’t the place I leaved in.”
Reggie couldn’t really argue there. The angular black masses with their hovering islands of illumination looming up around them weren’t the place that he had lived in either, or the place he’d left. And what was more, in Reggie’s case the glow of home was some hundred and fifty years beneath them, down there in the Boroughs dirt. He gave the troubled ghost-child’s arm a brief squeeze through the tartan fabric of his ghostly dressing gown.
“I know. Tell yer the truth, me and Bill don’t much like it up here in the nothings either, do we, Bill?”
On Michael’s other side Bill shook his head into a scruffy, momentary hydra. “Nah. It’s pants, mate, and the further up yer go, the worse it gets. I mean, there’s cameras stuck up everywhere around ’ere as it is – that’s why there’s all these lights – but if you go up into nothing-seven or round there, the fuckin’ things start talkin’ to yer. ‘Pick that fuckin’ litter up’. I’m serious. Old Phyllis only dug ’er way up ’ere by accident, to get us out that storm. I bet when we meet up with ’er, she’ll want to tunnel back down to sometime a bit more civilised. So don’t go runnin’ off again, ay? We’re yer mates. We want to get you out of ’ere as much as you do.”
Michael Warren sniffed and wiped a mollusc-trail of ectoplasm on one tartan sleeve.
“Where hag our how’s gone?”
From the note of piping query in the toddler’s voice, it sounded as though he was cautiously prepared to be consoled. Reggie attempted to address the infant’s question sympathetically, putting aside his earlier opinion that the Warren kid should simply grow up and get over it. Everyone had their cross to bear, Reggie supposed, and Michael Warren had been very young when all this happened to him. He deserved a chance.
“Look, Phyllis dug up nearly fifty years, and nothin’ lasts forever, does it? Nearly all the ’ouses what us lot grew up in are pulled down before the twenty-somethings, but they’re all still standing somewhere underneath us in the bygone, so don’t worry. We can dig you back to 1959 again before you can say knife.”
This did not appear to reassure the lad as much as Reggie might have hoped. He shook his blonde locks ruefully.
“Blub I don’t want all this to be here. Ebonything’s all nasty, and I used to like it when my mum cut through these flats to take us home. I remumble once when I wiz in my plushchair, and she bumped me down these stairps. It took a long time and my hisster sat on that wall there and read her comet-book. She said it was about forbidden worlds, and there were planets on the letters …”
As if realising that his ramblings were not conveying his great sense of loss, the ghost-boy let his reminiscences trail off and simply gestured to the dark aisle they were sitting in, its under-lit verandas flaring as they hung suspended in the night to either side.
“I just don’t like what’s magicked all that into this.”
With a deep sigh and a pistol-like report from the ghosts of his knee-joints, Reggie stood up from the step and signalled Bill to do the same. Realising that the other lads had risen to their feet provoked the Warren kid to follow them. When they were all standing, Bill and Reggie each took Michael by one of his hands, both hoping that they didn’t look like sissies, and proceeded to walk with him down the grass-fringed avenue between the two halves of the flats, heading for Bath Street in a three-strong column of pursuing pictures like a marching band. Reggie looked down towards the little boy.
“None of us like it, mate, the thing what’s made this place the way it is. Soul of the ’ole, that’s what we call it. If we walk down further this way, you’ll see why.”
Having reached the north-most end of the long walkway, they stepped into Bath Street. The two older children paused here, and when Michael Warren looked up questioningly Reggie nodded grimly to a spot a little further down the lamp-lit hill.
It was such an unprecedented sight, a little like one’s first glimpse of the Ultraduct, that Michael Warren wouldn’t know at first what he was looking at, Reggie felt certain from his own experience. Unlike the Ultraduct, however, the phenomenon that hung there swirling in the night air down by Little Cross Street did not inspire overwhelming awe so much as crushing dread.
It was a scorched and blackened hole burned in the supernatural fabric of the ghost-seam. Roughly twenty yards in its diameter it hung there a few feet above the listing and subsided Bath Street paving slabs, spinning unhurriedly. Quite clearly not a thing of the material world, its furthest edges passed straight through the bacon-coloured brickwork of the flats’ north side, seeming to make the walls transparent as it did so. Reggie could see through into the inner chambers, where the cindered edges of the gradually revolving discus reached into one of the rooms that he and Bill had passed through a few moments back, in which the dark-skinned woman with her hair in stripes sat sucking smoking melted grains of glass out of her tin and pasting pictures in her scrapbook. The hole’s turning rim cut through the girl’s translucent body like a black circular saw, the charred flakes of its millstone passage fluttering down to settle in her exposed inner workings, all without her knowledge. On the other side of Bath Street the gyrating aperture’s far edge was doing much the same thing to an upper corner of the maisonettes in Crispin Street. A see-through fat man sat upon a see-through toilet, ground unwittingly on the monstrosity’s sooty perimeter as it rotated through his bathroom. A terrible seared cog that had oblivious anatomic specimens caught on its teeth, the horror wheeled with a dire inevitability there at the night-heart of the unsuspecting neighbourhood, as though it were the works and movement of some huge and devastating timepiece. Michael Warren gaped at the infernal spectacle for some few moments and then he glanced up, appalled and lost, looking to Bill and Reggie for some explanation.
“What wiz it? It smells cackrid, like old guttercats.”
The kid was right. Even here in the ghost-seam where Phyll Painter’s rotten rabbits had no odour, you could smell the crematorium perfume of the slowly-whirling abyss, biting and unpleasant on the membrane of your phantom throat, behind the cringing spectral nostrils. Tightening their grips on Michael’s hands, Reggie and Bill propelled him swiftly over Bath Street, past the yawning maw of the black nebula languidly spiralling only a dozen paces down the street. They didn’t want him getting scared again and running straight into the bloody thing.
“It’s like the wraith of a big chimney what they ’ad down ’ere for burnin’ all Northampton’s muck. In the three-sided world, the smokestack wiz pulled down seventy years ago, but nobody could put its fires out down ’ere in the ghost-world. It’s been burnin’ ever since, and gettin’ bigger. If you think it looks and smells bad ’ere, you ought to see it from Upstairs. We call it the Destructor.”
Simply to pronounce the word, for Reggie, felt like smashing both fists down upon the keys to the left side of a piano, and appeared to have the same effect upon the trio’s spirits as they soldiered on in silence over Bath Street to the square of army haircut-mown grass on its further side. Michael kept looking back across his dressing gown-clad shoulder at the levitating maelstrom. Reggie knew the nipper would be asking himself the same question everybody did the first time they set eyes on the Destructor: what about the mortal spaces and the living people that it intersected with? What was it doing to them when they didn’t even know that it was there? The simple truth was that nobody knew, although you didn’t have to be a brain-box to conclude that in all probability it wasn’t doing anybody any good. Now, ghosts who accidentally got too close to it, this was another matter. Everybody knew what happened then: they were incinerated and next pulled to pieces, pulverised to atoms by its vortex currents with their residue dragged into the remorseless onyx swirl. For all that anybody knew, the essences of these unfortunates might still be living and aware within that frightful, endless turning. Reggie didn’t want to think about it and urged Michael Warren on across the lightless swathe of lawn.
Just when the older boys were starting to believe that their young charge would never again tear his eyes away from the Destructor, then, as is often the way with smaller children, his attention was seized suddenly by something that he evidently found still more remarkable, the soul-destroying whirlpool hovering in Bath Street there behind them instantly forgotten.
It was the two tower blocks, Claremont Court and Beaumont Court, that had entranced the kid. The twelve floors of each monolith soared up towards the torn cloud and the mostly-absent stars above, postage-stamp rectangles of curtain-filtered light gummed here and there upon the buildings’ tall black pages. Although Reggie smirked a little at how easily impressed the infant was, in fairness he’d had longer to grow blasé with regard to the colossal headstones. The first time he’d chanced upon them he’d been every bit as dumbstruck as was Michael Warren now. They’d been the tallest houses that he’d ever seen, truly gigantic packing crates dumped on a truly vast expanse of scrubland. The big metal letters up towards the top of each huge block, recent additions spelling NEWLIFE, had been put up sideways for some clever modern reason, making the two towers seem to Reggie even more like packaging that had been turned onto its side. Around the concrete base of the dual edifices, scattered scraps of litter shone like funeral lilies in the silver-threaded darkness. Michael was as much perplexed as awed.
“I thought it wiz all pawed-down houses here. Where did these thingers come from?”
Reggie laughed, not in derision. It was true. He’d never thought of it before, but the towers did look like two great big fingers raised in a titanic V-sign to the Boroughs. Letting go of Michael’s hand he ruffled the boy’s milky hair instead.
“That’s a good question, little ’un. When wiz it, Bill, these ugly bastards wiz put up?”
Bill screwed his face up pensively.
“Down sometime in the early ’Sixties, I’d ’ave thought. When yer took back to life in 1959, yer’ll probably be seeing these things go up in a year or two. So what yer getting now’s a preview, but yer won’t remember it when yer alive again.”
Reggie inclined his bowler, nodding in solemn agreement. That was well known. You could no more take a memory back from the ghost-seam or Mansoul than you could bring a treasure-chest back from an avaricious dream to waking life. Returned to the three-sided mortal domain, Michael Warren would be utterly unable to recall the slightest detail of his exploits Upstairs with the Dead Dead Gang except perhaps as fleeting instances of déjà vu, quickly forgotten. Reggie was still pondering this vaguely disappointing fact when Phyllis, John and plucky little Marjorie burst from the pebble-dashed wall of the maisonettes in Crispin Street and streamed across the road towards the wide grass verge where Reggie and the other two were standing, lightning sketches of the newcomers peeling as though out of an artist’s sketchpad in their wakes.
“Yer found ’im, then. Yer slippery little beggar. What d’yer think yer doin’, runnin’ orf like that?”
Phyllis looked very cross as she stood towering over Michael Warren, albeit only by about four inches, buckled shoes planted apart and bunched fists resting on her skinny hips. Even the glassy black eyes of her rabbit stole seemed to be glaring disapprovingly at the poor kid. Having somewhat revised his own opinion of the little ghost-lad, Reggie didn’t think that Phyll was being fair. He was about to intervene, although reluctant at the thought of facing up to Dead Dead Gang’s self-appointed leader, when big John stepped in and saved Reggie the trouble.
“Take no notice of her, titch. She’s just relieved we’ve found you and that you’re all right. You should have heard her a few minutes back when she thought that you’d been done in by the rough sleepers and your remnants flung in the Destructor. She wiz getting so upset, her lip was wobbling.”
Phyllis turned and scowled at John. She tried to stamp hard on the tall, good-looking ghost’s toes, but he laughed and whipped his foot back just in time. Phyllis attempted to sustain her indignation in the face of John’s hilarity as it began to spread amongst the other spectral children. Even Reggie sniggered at how vexed she looked, but turned it to a cough in case she heard him.
“I wiz not! I wiz just worried that ’e’d ’ave an accident or get grabbed by another devil, and then we should be in trouble! As if I give tuppence if ’e falls base over apex dayn the scarlet well, or gets et up by Malone’s terriers so all we find is dogshit with ’is blonde curls stickin’ out of it!”
Disastrously for her composure, this last bit even made Phyllis giggle. They all stood there laughing on the night lawns, and soon everyone was pals again.
While Michael Warren and the others made up and swapped tales of their adventures since they’d split up at the bottom end of Scarletwell Street earlier, Reggie and Bill amused themselves by playing idly in the shadows on the cropped grass. Bill suggested they play knuckles, but when both of them inspected their own hands they found the finger-joints still weakly pulsed with dull grey bruise-lights from their previous session, and decided to do something else instead. At last they settled down to running in tight circles round a piece of chip-wrap that was crumpled on the turf, to see if they could make it flutter. Sometimes you could do that, if there were enough of you. You just ran round and round an object like a toy train circling a little track, fast as you could, and if you could get up enough speed it would wear a temporary groove into what Reggie had heard others call the time-space or the space-time of the mortal plane. Eddies of wind would funnel down to fill these small depressions, and if you ran quick enough for long enough you could start miniature tornados in the little car park between Silver Street and Bearward Street down in the 1960s, or make tiny whirlwinds blossom from the straw and orange-peelings at the corners of the market square. On this occasion though, with only him and Bill contributing to the effect, they couldn’t do much more than make the litter shift a half inch. When Phyll told them to stop playing silly buggers and get ready to move on, they gave the dizzying pastime up with quiet sighs of concealed relief, grateful for the excuse to quit their unproductive efforts.
The six ghostly children and their mob of trailing look-alikes made their way up the gentle grassy incline bordering the tower blocks and parallel with Bath Street, heading for the row of homes that ran along the lawn’s top edge beside a path that Reggie thought was possibly called Simons Way. It looked like Phyllis had decided they should cut behind the hulking NEWLIFE flats to Tower Street, which was what the former top end of Scarletwell had been renamed. Most likely she was making for the Works, though Reggie hoped she didn’t plan on visiting it here in nothing-five or nothing-six, or wherever the ruddy heck they were.
Although Reggie judged it to be in the morning’s early hours, one or two living people were about their business, unencumbered by the strings of replicas that Reggie and his posthumous ensemble dragged behind them. A small-eyed and porky fellow with a smooth-shaved head emerged from a front door in Simons Walk to leave a pair of filmy milk-bottles on his front step before retiring back inside again. Although the children all slapped their grey, insubstantial hands through his bald cranium as he stooped to put the bottles down, he didn’t show the least awareness of their presence, which was as it should be. This was not the case with the nocturnal stroller that they next encountered as they turned right into Tower Street, with the looming concrete monuments now at their back.
It was a tall skinny feller with black curly hair, who looked to be somewhere around his forties or his fifties, and who’d obviously had more than a few too many. He was veering slowly down the length of Tower Street towards the phantom kids, having presumably descended to this level via one of the flights of steps at its top end. He was reciting something in a slurred voice to himself that sounded like a poem, something about people being “strange, nay, rather stranger than the rest”. Reggie and Bill both had a laugh at that, and were starting to take the mickey out of the half-cut chap when he stopped dead in his tracks and looked straight at them.
“I can see yer! Ah ha ha ha! I know where you’re hiding, round the bend and up the flue. Ah ha ha ha! I see yer, all right. I’m a published poet.”
The dead kids stood rooted to the spot, gaping in disbelief. There was always a chance, of course, that someone living might occasionally glimpse you, but they’d almost always look away, concluding that they hadn’t really seen what they had thought they’d seen. For them to try and speak with you was practically unheard of, and as for a living soul who greeted your appearance with amusement, well, it never happened. Even Phyllis and big John were looking at the sozzled bloke gone out, as if they’d no idea what to do next.
Fortunately, the serious predicament this could have led to was averted by the timely opening of a bedroom window on the top floor of the first house in the row, behind the ghost gang and up to their left. An ancient but incredibly resilient-looking little woman in a dressing gown leaned out and hissed down sharply at the drunk chap swaying in the lamp-lit street.
“Yer silly ’ape’orth! Are yer crackers? Come in ’ere before I clock yer, standin’ talkin’ to yerself when it’s the middle of the night!”
The clairvoyant lushington looked up towards the window with his generous eyebrows rising in surprise. He called out to the woman with the same distinctive cackle that he’d just greeted the children with.
“Mother, behave! Ah ha ha ha! I was just chatting with these … oh. They’ve gone. Ah ha ha ha!”
The man had dropped his gaze once more to Tower Street and stared directly at the ghost-kids, but he blinked and looked uncertain now, squinting his eyes as if he could no longer see them. Further admonitions from the woman, who appeared to be his mother, prompted him to stumble forward, laughing to himself and fumbling for his house-keys as he passed unheedingly through the half-dozen junior apparitions standing in his path. The dead gang turned to watch him struggling with the Yale lock on the door of the end house, all the while giggling to himself, the muttering old woman having loudly pulled her bedroom window shut by now, leaving her drunken offspring to his own devices.
Phyllis shook her head as the gang turned away from the sloshed feller trying to open his front door, resuming their ascent of Tower Street.
“Flippin’ Nora. What the devil wiz ’e, when ’e wiz at ’ome? And to think livin’ folk are frit of us!”
She made her shoulders ripple in a comically exaggerated shudder to imply that living beings were much stranger and a great deal spookier than ghosts. Reggie agreed. In his experience, dead people were a lot more down to earth.
The gang came to a halt outside some sort of modern undertaking owned by the Salvation Army that was closed up for the night. These premises were on the children’s left, while up ahead of them there loomed the ugly grey-on-grey mosaic of the wall bounding the traffic junction that the Mayorhold had become. Sneaking a glance at Michael Warren, Reggie realised that the youngster couldn’t get his bearings amongst all this unfamiliar architecture, and thus had no idea where he was. Considering what had happened to the Mayorhold, this was probably as well. Look how the kid had taken it when it was just one row of houses that had disappeared.
The raised-up intersection blazed with sodium lamps that Reggie had been informed were the yellow of stale piss when seen by mortal eyes. This was what lent the ghost-seam’s monochrome such an unhealthy tinge, the sick light spilling from the elevated motor-carousel to splash upon the streets and underpasses down below, where the Dead Dead Gang gathered in a ring about their leader. Phyllis was explaining what she thought would be the best thing to do next, mostly for Michael Warren’s benefit so that the toddler didn’t suffer any more ghastly surprises.
“Right. I’ve ’ad a think abayt all this. We know that titch ’ere is a Vernall, who are people with great works to do, what very orften they don’t know nothin’ abayt. We know ’e’s gooin’ back to life again, and that it’s all summat to do wi’ this big job the builders ’ave got on, the Porthimoth di Norhan. Now, ’e’s so important to this contract that the builders ’ave ’ad a big dust-up over ’im, back dayn in 1959. I reckon we should goo back Upstairs to Mansoul and watch the fight. We might find ayt a bit more abayt ’ow ’is nibs ’ere wiz involved in it.”
Shifting uncomfortably inside his outsized overcoat, Reggie protested.
“Don’t go Upstairs ’ere, Phyll. Not ’ere in the nothings. ’E’s already seen ’ow the Destructor looks, just ’angin’ there in Bath Street …”
Phyllis bristled.
“Do I look ’alf sharp? ’Course I’m not gunna goo Upstairs from ’ere! Fer one thing, we’d be traipsing miles along the Attics of the Breath to get to where the builders ’ad their scrap. We’re gunna dig down inter 1959 first, then we’ll make ayr way Upstairs from there.”
Bill, standing on the outskirts of their circle, kicking pointlessly at dandelions and pebbles that he could not touch, frowned in concern.
“That’ll just drop us straight back in that ghost-storm, won’t it?”
Flinging her long stole around her neck in what would have been a dramatic film-star gesture had it not been for the putrefying rabbits and their after-pictures, Phyllis fixed her younger relative with an unnerving glare.
“Oh, use yer loaf fer once, ayr Bill. Not if we dig back to an ’our or two before all that kicked orf it won’t! If we goo careful, we’ll know when we’ve reached the stripe where all the wind wiz, so it’s just a layer or two down past there. Now, anyone ’oo wants to ’elp me can, and anyone ’oo don’t can clear orf ayt the way.”
With that, she marched across towards the fabricated wall of the Salvation Army building in a single file of glowering schoolgirls and began to scrape at its accumulated time with both hands. Shimmering bands of black and white that Reggie knew were days and nighttimes interleaved began to gather in a loose whorl round her pawing fingertips, as, grudgingly, the other members of the gang walked over to assist her. Only Michael Warren and Drowned Marjorie were excused tunnel duty, Michael on the grounds of probable ineptitude and Marjorie because they were all frightened that the small boy would run off again if he had nobody to sit and keep him company.
After a minute or two’s dedicated scrabbling at the wall, Phyllis announced that she could feel the ghost-storm slicing into windy ribbons on her fingernails. Progressing with more caution, she rolled back the tissue edges representing the duration of the squall, dragging them out into the wavering Belisha-beacon stripes around her tunnel’s widening mouth. A moment more and she reported that she could feel through into a place without a breeze, inviting her confederates to help enlarge the aperture, now that she’d done all of the hard work for them.
Pitching in with everybody else to haul the hole’s rim further out and make it bigger, Reggie was surprised to see that there was just more blackness on the portal’s other side, and not the 1950s daylight that he’d been expecting. When the opening was sufficiently distended for the gang to climb through, though, he found that they were in a cellar, which accounted for the dark. Boxes that turned out to be filled with racy magazines and paperbacks were stacked up by one wall and a great heap of coal and slack reclined against another, the whole scene delineated in the silverpoint of the dead children’s night-sight. One by one the kids climbed through the entrance into 1959, with Phyllis herself bringing up the rear while ushering Drowned Marjorie and Michael Warren through in front of her. Once everyone was in the darkened basement Phyllis got them to seal up the hole behind them, that led out to nothing-five or nothing-six. Diligently they combed the smoky fibres of the present day across the gaping vent until no sign of Tower Street or its blocks of flats against a star-deserted sky remained. Having observed the ghost-seam protocol about shutting the gate behind you, Phyllis next turned to address the gang. She wasn’t whispering, so evidently there were no watchmen here with second sight, the way there’d been in that lone house down at the bottom end of Scarletwell.
“In case yer wonderin’ where we are, it’s ’Arry Trasler’s paper-shop, just orf the Merruld ’fore yer get to Althorp Street. We’re in ’is cellar. All we’ve gotter do is goo upstairs and we’ll be just araynd the corner from the entrance to the Works.”
They found the cellar stairs beyond a string-bound stack of <em>True Adventure</em> magazines, which looked American and had almost-bare ladies on their covers, nude save for their underwear and Nazi armbands, who were menacing manacled men with uniformly gritted teeth by brandishing hot irons and bullwhips. Going up the steps one at a time the children passed out through a closed and bolted cellar door into a daylight passageway that led to the newsagent’s shop itself: a former front room that had comics, paperbacks and magazines hanging from great iron bulldog clips in a bay window given over to display. Here, behind an old and black-grooved wooden counter that divided the small room in two along its length, a balding and pot-bellied man with sallow skin and dark-ringed eyes stood calculating the returns upon the morning papers during a brief intermission between customers. Reggie presumed that this must be the Harry Trasler that Phyllis had mentioned as the shop’s proprietor. Morose and seemingly preoccupied, he didn’t even look up from his jotted column of additions as the ghost-kids melted through his countertop, which was apparently not old enough to stop them doing so despite appearances, and drifted out into the July sunshine that was just then painting the serene enclosure of the Mayorhold.
It did Reggie’s phantom heart good to see once again that passably rectangular expanse where eight streets ran together, hemmed in by various tradesmen’s yards, five public houses, getting on a dozen cosy-looking little shops and the imposing pillar-decorated façade of the Northampton Co-operative Society. This outfit had first started out down Horsemarket in Reggie’s day as the West End Industrial Co-operative Society, and he was pleased to see the worthy venture was still doing nicely more than seventy years later. Flanked on one side by a butcher’s shop and on the other by the old Victorian public toilets curving round and into Silver Street, the Co-op seemed to be the busiest area of the Mayorhold on this summer morning. Women laden down with raffia shopping bags and wearing headscarves chatted in the recess of the shop’s front doorway, stepping back occasionally to let some other customer pass in or out of the establishment.
Pleasingly dusty light was sprinkled on the hard-faced women who were going at that moment into the Green Dragon by the mouth of Bearward Street, and on the motor-coaches sleeping near the Currier’s Arms here on the western side of the forgotten former town square. Just emerging from the sweetshop that was next to Trasler’s, three young lads in knee-length grey serge trousers held up by elasticated belts with S-shaped buckles shared what seemed to be a bag of acid-drops as they barged through the ghost-gang without noticing that they were there.
Reggie and company continued on past the Old Jolly Smokers on their right, mindful that in the astral upper reaches of the pub where the rough sleepers congregated, Mick Malone the ratter would be knocking back his Puck’s Hat Punch and thinking about heading home across the sky to Little Cross Street with his ferrets in his pockets, as they’d seen him doing earlier. The ghost-kids almost tiptoed past the saloon bar’s swing door, crossing the top of Scarletwell Street where it ran into the Mayorhold.
Opposite the Jolly Smokers on the other corner of the run-down thoroughfare was a three-storey building, old and derelict, its timbers and its stonework so dark they looked almost smoked. The windows of the place were boarded up within their weathered, splintering frames and up above the similarly-boarded door were remnants of what seemed to be a shop-sign, too few painted letters still remaining to make out the former owner’s name, or what it had once sold. Although Reggie remembered the place being open once, back in the early nineteen-somethings, he still couldn’t for the death of him recall what kind of shop it was. He only knew that a good while before that, right back in the 1500s before Reggie had been born, this ruin had once been the Town Hall of Northampton.
The kids entered through the front wall, finding themselves in a stripped and shadowy interior where wands of sunlight fell through chinks between the nailed-up lengths of wood across the window. Wallpaper that was four generations thick in places sagged and separated from damp plaster, hanging like loose skin, while a far corner had been decorated by some empty Double Diamond bottles and what looked to be a human bowel movement. They ascended a collapsing staircase to the first floor, floating over mildewed voids where steps were rotted through, and then continued on to the top storey. Here, a dozen or so missing slates had made the building open to both birds and rain, transforming it into a maze of dismal chambers carpeted with stalagmites of pigeon shit and clouded puddles.
The crook-door and its attendant Jacob Flight were in the end room, coloured light falling in party streamers through the radiant portal, settling on the children’s upturned faces, on the sodden planks and rugs and papers that had fused into one substance, on the pitifully narrow treads of the celestial ladder.
Reggie felt a tightness in the memory of his throat, and the spook-fluids welled up in his eyes. This was the place Phyllis and Bill had brought him to that first time, not long after they’d all met in fourteenth-century catacombs while sheltering from the Great Ghost-Storm of 1913. This was where they’d finally convinced him he was just as good as anybody else, with as much right to Hell or Heaven. He had no idea why all these feelings should well up inside him every time he saw these stairs to Mansoul. They just did. He wiped his brimming eyes upon one coarse sleeve of his greatcoat furtively, so no one else should see.
Phyllis was first to climb the Jacob Flight, her rabbit necklace swaying and her after-pictures burnt away like morning fog as she went up into the colours and the brilliance. Michael Warren followed her, with lanky John behind him and then Bill and Marjorie.
Taking a last look round at the smudged pencil-drawing of the ghost-seam, Reggie followed suit. He was a bit scared, he supposed, at the idea of being audience to a brawl between the builders. Having witnessed the resultant howling gale he wasn’t sure that he was ready for the fight itself, but that was only nerves and common sense. That wasn’t the whole reason for the teary-eyed reluctance that descended on him every time he climbed these rungs and ventured up the wooden hill to Deadfordshire.
He still didn’t believe it, that was what it finally came down to. Even after all of these incalculable years, he still couldn’t accept that there was somewhere wonderful where he was wanted, where there was a place for him that wasn’t just an unmarked plot on Doddridge Church’s burial ground. He blinked away the ghostly moisture in his eyes and sniffed back a thick gob of ectoplasm as he manfully composed himself before resuming his ascent, out of the grey into the gold and blue and rose and violet.
Hat tipped at a jaunty angle to disguise the fact that he’d been weeping, Reginald James Fowler clambered through the crook-door up into the Works, where suddenly about him were unfurling sounds and rich painterly tones, the holy smell of planed wood and the honest sweat of builders. He’d pulled back the tacked-up curtain, so to speak.
Reggie was home.
** <strong>MENTAL FIGHTS</strong>
<strong>S</strong>crambling up out of the crook-door after Phyllis Painter, all the ringing uproar of the Works – its scale and colour and especially the niff of Phyllis’s putrescent scarf – hit Michael Warren squarely in the mush. The factory floor that the Dead Dead Gang had emerged onto, big as an aerodrome and flooded with a pearly light from its improbably high windows, hummed with purposeful activity. Builders were everywhere, on ladders and on gantries, striding back and forth with scrolls and sheaves of documents, calling instructions to each other in a language where each syllable flowered to an intricate and lyric garden.
Clad in wooden sandals, wearing plain robes of soft pigeon-grey that had a hint of green or purple in the folds and shadows, these seemed to be builders of a different rank to the white-haired one Michael had glimpsed earlier, with his bare feet and icy, shining gown. Whereas he’d had the bearing of an artisan, the several dozen individuals industriously employed about the vast enclosure had the look of labourers, albeit labourers who carried themselves with more grace and dignity than any emperor that Michael had seen pictures of, or ever heard about.
One of the builders, a lean, pious type with slightly elongated features and tight ashen curls at his receded hairline, passed the rather cowed gang of ghost-children as he marched across his whispering cathedral of a workplace. Having just come from the ghost-seam, Michael found it odd at first that there were no evaporating duplicates trailing behind this purposeful employee as he walked, but then remembered he was somewhere different now. The long-faced worker paused in his traversal of the large and intricately decorated flagstone tiles to scrutinise the gaggle of dead urchins with eyes that were endless and of brilliant emerald.
“Wvyeo gaurl thik comnsd! Pleog chrauwvy ind tsef!”
These words (if that was what they were), delivered in a voice neutral as breeze and frilled with echo, seemed to put down heavy, lumpy suitcases in Michael Warren’s mind which then proceeded to unpack themselves into progressively more compact and ingenious parcels of significance.
<em>“We golden ones, we toilers in this veiled vale, we who tread the vintage in these glorious vineyards of undying wisdom, we grey guardians of the endeavour welcome thee, welcome thee to our wonder, to our world, our wealth, our ward, where are our Works made! For lo, it doth please us, if it should please you, here to present a plan and a prospectus of our pasture as it was in ages past and so shall endure unto the far ending of eternity, so that it shall serve as thy guard, thy guide and great deliverance within these walls, these halls, these hallowed houses of the endless soul and self!”</em>
As Michael understood it, this boiled down to “Welcome to the Works. Please have a guide.” The labourer extracted half-a-dozen leaflets with a single fold from the untidy stack of papers that he carried under one arm, handing copies of the slender booklet to each of the six deceased kids before nodding curtly and continuing across the busy floor towards a boundary wall that was too far away to clearly see, his raincloud-coloured robe glinting with pinks and mauves as it swung near his ankles.
Michael looked down, as did his companions, at the pamphlets they’d been given. Printed in gold ink on thick cream paper, all four pages of the folded sheets were covered in dense text that was apparently composed of small and wriggly symbols from a foreign alphabet. At three years old and having barely learned to recognise more than a word or two of written English, Michael was convinced that he’d have to get someone to explain it to him, but this turned out not to be the case. Upon closer inspection all the tiny, unfamiliar characters seemed to impart their meaning in ideas and words that he could understand – or at least, concepts he could understand now, in his present state. He’d noticed he was getting cleverer since he’d been dead, as if the soul continued to develop to its proper level even when the mind and body were both gone. He gazed down at the teensy, crawling letters with his improved ghostly eyes and he began to read.
*** <strong>THE WORKS</strong>
<br>
<quote>
The Works is founded in the lower world during the year 444 AD, where the First Borough is established. Its material manifestation is originally a marker-stone set at the top end of a footpath leading to the scarlet dyers’ well. However, in the Second Borough the four Master Angles do contrive to skilfully unfold the single, rough-hewn granite block unto a mighty fortress for the purpose of their wondrous manufacture. For its signboard and its seal, so all might know that Justice Be Above the Street, this being the chief slogan of the enterprise, it is marked thus:
<br>
Its situation is about the central point of the First Borough, though offset a little to the East that it should thus more accurately represent the crossways of those lines described diagonally on the district, so as to connect its corners. These four corners are the termini of the arrangement, channelling its four disparate energies, with each distinguished by its emblem. In this way, the southeast corner is emblazoned with the Cross, being the fiery quarter of the spirit, while the southwest corner bears the image of a Castle as the airy quadrant governing material majesty. The northwest corner is adorned by a crude Phallus though it is a watery and female quarter, for this is the site of penetration and invasion. Finally the northeast corner shows a Death’s-head, for this is the earthy part of the design and to it is attributed demise. The symbols are initially scratched on the granite keystone, one inscribed by each of the four Master Angles in accordance with their signal temperaments and humours. With these glyphs shall their domains be known:
<br>
These premises are presently engaged in the construction of a Porthimoth, or “Worthy point or portal, properly proportioning the hem or trim of the immortal psyche, with this Art our theme, our path, our permit”, commonly described as a four-folded capstone to be set upon the summit of a greater chronologic structure, thus to tie together all the moral lines and rafters of event comprising that immense Time-architecture. While this work is underway, the Management regrets that builders will not be available to escort visitors on tours of the establishment, respectfully suggesting that this guide be kept about the person at all times as a convenient source of reference.
On the ground floor is the main entrance, opening onto the Attics of the Breath above the present Mayorhold. Two quadrivial-hinged ingress-points or ‘crook-doors’ placed at either end of the 5<sup>th</sup> century well-path also offer access to this lowest storey, where specific parts of the endeavour are assembled and where labours are allotted and coordinated. Visitors may notice that the floor is made from two-and-seventy great slabs, each one a hundred paces long or wide and set into a nine-by-eight arrangement. These large tiles, upon inspection, have a tessellate design to their adornments, this peculiarity occasioned by the …
</quote>
<br>
Michael looked up in surprise from the engrossing booklet to discover that his five ghost-comrades were starting to wander off en masse in the direction of the nearest wall, which was perhaps a quarter of a mile away towards the east. Rolling the helpful leaflet up into a tube and thrusting it into one tartan pocket of his dressing gown he hurried after them as quickly as his flapping slippers would permit. He’d scared himself when he’d run off and left them at the foot of Scarletwell Street, and he didn’t want to become separated from them anymore.
That, Michael thought, had been a stupid thing to do. It had just been the shock of suddenly seeing St. Andrew’s Road like that: an unused grass verge where his terrace used to be. It looked so wrong. Worse, it had seemed to say that nothing would turn out the way that anybody hoped it would; that all his mum’s and dad’s dreams ended up in trees and turf and wire carts on wheels. He hadn’t wanted to accept that, and still didn’t. He’d not wanted to be looking at that flat ground, with its flat proof, so he’d run away into a midnight neighbourhood that he no longer recognised.
While all the other children had been looking at the weeping ghost in the check suit as he’d wandered towards that awful, solitary house that stood upon the corner, Michael had been overwhelmed by all the strangeness and the desolation of his circumstances, unable to cope a moment longer with this eerie and upsetting afterlife, this dreadful and demolished future. He’d slipped silently away and ducked into the reassuringly familiar folds of Greyfriars flats, and though the black iron gate across the narrow entrance gave him pause for thought – why had the former unofficial children’s playground that was Greyfriars courtyard been barred off like this? It hadn’t stopped him sliding through the bars like kettle-steam, into the hushed and shadowy enclosure.
Greyfriars’ inner yard had been almost the same as he’d remembered it from pram-bound shortcuts in the 1950s, although obviously he’d never seen how it looked in the middle of the night before. The only noticeable difference, other than the gates, had been a sort of tiredness and untidiness, as if the place had given up. He’d passed along the pathway at the bottom of the courtyard’s lower level, drifting through another locked gate at the far end and out into Bath Street. Only then had it occurred to him that he’d got no idea where he was.
The somehow sheltering incline of red brick houses on the street’s far side, including Mrs. Coleman’s sweetshop and its sugar-dusty jars, had been taken away. Replacing this accustomed view were ugly flats with rust-railed concrete steps, rectangular black windows staring coldly from prefabricated walls that had at some time in the past been painted white, to best show off the Boroughs grime.
Michael had crept disconsolately up the hill with his equally-stealthy duplicates in Indian file behind him. Only when he’d got as far as Little Cross Street, where the row of homes that used to prop each other up like punch-drunk fighters had also been done away with by the white-walled modern buildings, had he happened on a place he knew in the surprisingly consoling bulk of Bath Street flats
Upon closer inspection, even these had turned out to be not all that they’d once been. Rough and mottled lengths of cheap board had been used to patch the double doors beneath their cinema-like portico where someone had kicked in the glass. He’d crouched beside one of the low brick walls edging the path that ran from the dilapidated doorway, had a little weep and tried to think what he should do. That had been when he’d spotted Bill and Reggie Bowler, ambling up the tarmac slope where Fitzroy Street once was, and shortly after that, they’d spotted him.
If they’d not shouted and come scuttling across the road at him like that, with all their extra eyes and arms and legs, he might have just stayed where he sat and let them catch him. As it was though, he had taken flight and run off through the partly-boarded door into the flats themselves. That had been frightening, all of those funny-looking rooms with horrid people doing things he didn’t understand. When he’d burst out onto the open central walkway with the steps it had been an immense relief, despite the strange lights floating everywhere.
This time, when Bill and Reggie seeped out through the drab red brickwork and approached him he had more than had enough, was even pleased to see them. Chastened by his unsuccessful stab at ghostly independence, he’d allowed the older boys to take his hands and lead him past the terrifying spectral hole in upper Bath Street, over to the grounds of those two stupefying towers, where they’d been reunited with John, Marjorie and Phyllis. Even though the Dead Dead Gang’s girl boss had told him off for his desertion, Michael was beginning to know Phyllis well enough to understand just how relieved she’d been to find him and to see he was all right. He wondered if she was perhaps developing a secret crush on him, the way that he suspected he was starting to develop one on her. Whether or not this was the case, he didn’t want to let her or the gang out of his sight again, and scampered hurriedly behind them now across the busy work-space, trying to catch up.
As he drew level with the knot of urchins, big and friendly John looked round and grinned at him.
“Are you still with us, titch? We thought we’d lost you for a minute there. Here, what about all this, eh? It’s a picture, wizn’t it?”
The tall lad gestured to the bustle and commotion going on around them, the incessant to and fro of the grave builders in their shimmering grey robes, waving just one slim arm where Michael was still half-expecting there to be a dozen. The interior of the Works was, to be sure, a picture. Over giant flagstones, with complex and colourful designs that seemed to crawl and flicker in the corners of the vision, moved the solemn builders at their diverse tasks, while high above the multitude, on a huge boss raised from the wall that they were nearing, was the queer design that Michael had seen in the pamphlet: a flat scroll or ribbon that seemed to unroll away towards the right, and over that two triangles joined by a double line. Rough and unpractised, it looked more like something that a three-year-old like him might scribble rather than the work of the mysterious ‘Master Angles’. Trotting there alongside John, Michael blinked up at him.
“Wiz that big mark up there an advertising sign?”
John chuckled.
“Well, yes, I suppose it wiz. It means ‘Justice Above the Street’ which wiz a sort of motto here, much like ‘Out of the strong shall come forth sweetness’ on the treacle tin. It tells you all about it in this guide the builder gave us just now. Have you read it?”
Michael said he’d read a bit of it before he’d stuffed it in the pocket of his dressing gown for fear of being left behind. John smiled and shook his head.
“Nobody’s going to leave you anywhere, not after how frit Phyllis wiz when you ran off. You ought to take another decko at that pamphlet. It’ll tell you loads of things, like about all the different devils that they’ve got trapped in these floor-tiles.”
Michael stopped dead in his tracks at that and stared down at the hundred-yard-long slab they were then passing over. When you paused to properly examine its involved design it really was an eyeful. The elaborate pattern was ingeniously composed of two repeated shapes that had been artfully contrived to interlock, one of the forms arranged to fit into the empty gaps between the carefully-spaced outlines of the other. Both of the two different figures making up this wallpaper-effect were quite unpleasant, with one having the appearance of a wolf that had a slimy snake-tail where its own should be while gouts of crimson flame belched from between its snarling jaws. The second shape was that of a disturbingly fat raven, its beak open to display the fangs of a big hunting dog.
The means by which the contours of the two dissimilar monstrosities fitted together was a marvel of delineation, aided by the flames erupting from the wolf-snake’s maw to wrap its lupine body in an aura of red fire, the scalloped edge of these fitting exactly with the black serrations in the wings of the dog-raven that was set to face the other way. Hypnotically, the ragged lines where the two different pictures intersected seemed to be perpetually moving, as if either the flame-halos around the wolf-snakes licked and leaped or else the dog-ravens were ruffling their feathers angrily. Retrieving the guide-pamphlet from his pocket, Michael resumed reading at the point where he’d left off in hope of learning what this convoluted parquet flooring was in aid of.
<quote>
Visitors may notice that the floor is made from two-and-seventy great slabs, each one a hundred paces long and wide, and set into a nine-by-eight arrangement. These large tiles, upon inspection, have a tessellate design to their adornments, this peculiarity occasioned by the comprehensive catalogue of former employees that are both flattened and compacted in their manufacture.
These ex-builders, commonly called devils, are compressed into a two-dimensional plane of existence by the Master Angles and their armies during the foundation of the mortal and material realm. Once subjugated, these are governed by a golden torus worn upon one finger of the Master Angle Mikael as a controlling ring of holy dominance. In the symbolic strata overlooking the substantial world, the Master Angle Mikael then gives this token to King Solomon that he might likewise triumph over the same demons, setting them to build his temple at Jerusalem. This structure is reprised in the First Borough as the round church of the Holy Sepulchre, just as the Master Angle Mikael himself, conflated with Saint Michael of renown, presides over the earthly township from his vantage at the great Gilhalda of Saint Giles.
The full six dozen fiends incarcerated in the tiles, commencing from the southeast corner are in their depictions and their names as follows:
The first Spirit is a King that rideth in the East called BAEL. He makes men to go invisible. He ruleth over six-and-sixty Legions of inferior spirits. He appeareth in divers shapes, sometimes like a cat, sometimes a dog and sometimes like a man, or sometimes in all of these forms at the one time …
</quote>
<br>
There then followed a long list of these appalling creatures and their attributes, most of which sounded horrible. Realising that the southeast corner of the cavernous enclosure was the one ahead of them and to their left, Michael could count along the massive flagstones to the one that him and the Dead Dead Gang were now standing on, which was the seventh from the end. Moving his finger down the column of demonic dukes and princes until he’d reached the appropriate spot, he then began to read.
<quote>
The Seventh Spirit is called AMON. He is a Marquis, great in power and most strong. He appeareth like a wolf that hath a serpent’s tail, vomiting out of his mouth flames of fire, yet sometimes he appeareth like a Raven that has dog’s teeth in his head. He telleth all things past and present and to come; procureth love; and reconcileth all controversies twixt friends & foes. He governeth full forty Legions of inferior spirits.
</quote>
<br>
That seemed to be it for dog-toothed, serpent-tailed wolf-raven Amon, as the mostly red and black and grey moving design beneath Michael’s plaid slippers was apparently addressed. Michael gazed down at the depicted creatures’ two visible eyes: one that of the in-profile raven and the other that belonging to the similarly side-on wolf. Now that he knew more of how timeless Mansoul functioned, the ability to “telleth all things past and present and to come” quite frankly didn’t seem much of a trick, though he supposed a talent for acquiring love might be seen as impressive if he were a little older. Mind you, since he felt a great deal older as it was, he thought it sounded quite good even at the moment. Rolling up the leaflet once again and putting it back in his pocket, Michael frowned enquiringly at John.
“What wiz it makes the pictures move?”
John offered him a sympathetic look.
“These what we’re walking on ain’t pictures, titch. These are the gentlemen themselves. You should be grateful they can only move the little that they can.”
Michael looked back down at the slab that they were standing on, with its writhing embellishments. He gave a little squawk and then performed a complicated dance in which he seemed to be attempting to lift both his slipper-clad feet from the tile at once, as if afraid of infernal contamination. In the end he stood on tiptoe, which was evidently the best compromise that he could manage. John was trying not to laugh, capping the sound off in a muffled detonation of amusement somewhere up his nose.
“Don’t worry, they can’t hurt you. When they’re flat like this they’re no more dangerous than Keyhole Kate or someone else out of a comic. Anyway, we’re nearly at the floor’s edge as it wiz. We’ll soon be on the stairs, where there’s no devils.”
Just as John had said, the vast wall rose immediately ahead of them and running up across it in diagonals there was a wooden staircase, its great zigzag length connecting four strata of balcony, the highest almost level with the poorly-drawn seal of the Works on its enormous plaque. The steps themselves were broad and sturdy and looked relatively normal in their ratio of tread to riser, unlike those that Michael had experienced a moment back while clambering up the Jacob Flight out of the ghost-seam. Anxious to be off this squirming carpeting of interlocking horrors, Michael didn’t risk any more dawdling until he and the gang had safely reached the possessed factory floor’s near side.
Seen from close up the stairs were several yards in width, bounded on one side by the sheer and soaring wall and on the other by a masterfully-wrought and polished banister of what was more than likely oak. Each step was cut from some unknown variety of marble, a profound and rich dark blue with mica twinkles seemingly suspended inside the translucent stone at differing depths, rather than simply glinting uniformly from its surface. Every one was like a solid block hewn from the night sky, and amongst the sparking flakes of mica here and there, Michael discovered, there were curdled nebulae and comet smears. It was a fire escape made out of universe, though he supposed they all were really, when you stopped to think.
The Dead Dead Gang began to climb the stairway from the dove-like murmur of the workplace, Phyllis Painter in the lead and striding up ahead of everybody else. As he ascended, somewhere near the group’s rear with big John, Michael looked down across the oaken balustrade towards the tiled floor dwindling beneath them. From this raised perspective he could almost see a unifying pattern to the movement of the builders as they hurried back and forth on their inscrutable trajectories, as if each worker were an iron filing caught up in the loops and whorls that radiated unseen from a magnet.
He could also now see clearly, thanks to his ghost-vision, all six dozen of the giant demon-haunted flagstones that comprised the floor, set out like an array of nightmare playing cards. He thought he could remember the deathmonger, Mrs. Gibbs, saying that out of all the devils that there were, the one who had abducted Michael, sneaky Sam O’Day, was number thirty-two. If that was right then his specific slab should be against the left-side wall, four rows away. He stood there gazing out over the wooden banister, moving his lips and jabbing at the air with one pink index finger as he counted to make sure. The stone in question, once he’d found it, was quite unmistakeable.
For one thing, it was one of only three or four flagstones in the arrangement that all of the builders seemed to manage to avoid as they traversed their busy place of labour. For another, unlike his confederate Amon, Sam O’Day was only shown in one form on the tile, this being the three-headed thing astride a dragon that had raged above them in the Attics of the Breath, what seemed a day or so ago. This complicated semblance was repeated something like a hundred times across the area of the slab, its contours engineered precisely so that all of the identically irregular shapes fitted perfectly together with an intricacy that was genuinely infernal. Empty spaces in between the creature’s many heads, as an example, were placed to accommodate the four legs of the dragon-steed belonging to the duplicate immediately above them in the pattern, while the tapering tail of each such mount was tailored to fit neatly in the open jaws of an identical heraldic dragon waddling behind it. Taking out his guide and scanning down the lengthy roll of hellish eminences until he’d reached number thirty-two, he tried to find out more about the fiend who had both literally and figuratively taken Michael for a ride.
<quote>
The two and thirtieth Spirit is called Asmoday. He is a great King, strong and powerful. He cometh with three heads, whereof the first is like a bull, the second is like to a man and the third like unto a ram. He hath a serpent’s tail and belches noxious gas. His foot is webbed like to a goose. He sitteth upon an infernal dragon, carrying a Lance and Standard in his hand, whereon his ensign is displayed as so:
<br>
He giveth of the ring of Virtues, and teacheth the arts of Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy and handicraft. He giveth of full and true answers to all questions and can maketh men invisible. He showeth places where is treasure hidden and he governeth a full six dozen Legions of inferior spirits. If requested he may lift the conjuror into a higher place where they may looketh down upon their neighbours’ homes and see their fellows at their business as though it were that the roof had been removed.
Of all the eminences here bound and contained, most special caution is advised in all transactions with this Spirit. Of the devils captured by King Solomon on the symbolic plane, the fiercest and most difficult to subjugate is Asmoday. Indeed, in the rabbinical tradition it is said that Asmoday alone is proof against the magic ring of Mikael that he hath gifted to King Solomon. In their encounter, it is Asmoday who triumphs, hurling the defeated King so far into the sky that when he is returned to Earth he has forgotten quite that he is Solomon. Unchallenged, Asmoday assumes the form of Solomon and goeth on in this impersonation to complete the building of Solomon’s temple at Jerusalem and next take many wives, and to raise other, lesser temples to the foreign gods that these wives worship.
He is husband to the monster Lilith, Queen of Night and Mother of Abominations. While besotted with a princess in the land of Persia, Asmoday does slay as many of her rival suitors as there are days in the week, for which crimes is he driven out by exorcism into antique Egypt, spitefully removing all his mathematic insights from one kingdom to the other in attrition.
Asmoday, in the arrangement of ten rings or tori by which Hell and Heaven are composed, is the demonic ruler of the Fifth plane and is thus associated principally with Wrath. The flower of this particular domain is the five-petal rose, this being emblem to the mortal township, making it conducive to the fiend. Similarly, the reproduction of Solomon’s Temple raised in the First Borough is believed to strengthen the affinity felt by this Spirit for the earthly district. He is the most terrible of all the devils here confined, and in his wrath he is implacable. Asmoday’s colours, by which he is known, are red and green, which signify both his severity and the emotive nature of …
</quote>
<br>
Michael glanced up from his guide-booklet, colour draining from his face until he looked almost exactly as he had done in the black and white expanses of the ghost-seam. Sizzling Sam O’Day, it seemed, was not just any common devil. He had beaten up King Solomon despite the King’s almighty magic ring which he’d been given by a Master Angle. He was “the most terrible of all the devils”. In his wrath he was “implacable”, which Michael thought meant something like “will get you in the end”. The small boy squinted hard at the end slab in the fourth row until he realised that the ram’s eyes, bull’s eyes, dragon’s eyes and man’s eyes in each picture, multiplied a hundred times across the writhing surface of the stone, were all staring directly at him. It was not a loving look.
Not without difficulty, Michael tore his gaze from the entrancing scintillations of the thirty-second Spirit and fell in with Phyllis and the others as they struggled up the constellated stairs to the first landing where, if he had understood their plan correctly, they intended to serve as spectators in a dreadful and unprecedented fight between the Master Builders. As Michael himself was seemingly the cause of this affray he wondered if attending it in person was the safest thing to do, the doubts he’d had on Scarletwell Street’s corner about how well Phyllis and the gang were looking after him resurfacing, if only for a moment. The five Dead Dead children were the only real friends that he’d got round here. Sticking the leaflet back into his pocket, Michael scurried upstairs after them.
A pair of builders passing down the wide and sweeping staircase in the opposite direction seemed to pay particular attention to the gang of ghost-kids, and specifically to Michael Warren. One inclined his head towards the child, at which the other nodded sagely. Both of them then smiled at Michael before walking on down the star-spattered steps, in their long trailing gowns of grey with peacock colours shimmering at the hem. Michael was faintly startled, having not seen this expression on the faces of the other builders labouring below. While they’d seemed fond or even proud of him, which made him feel warm and important, just the simple fact that they’d appeared to know him was a bit unnerving and raised fresh concerns regarding the advisability of turning up to watch the angle-fight.
By now the six of them had reached the first of the three landings jutting out from the east wall. A heavy swing door with a stained-glass panel and brass push-plate, like the ones that he had seen in pubs, led from the stellar marble of the platform out onto the floorboards of a long and relatively crowded balcony with a black railing of pitch-treated wood. It looked a lot like the raised walkway up above the Attics of the Breath where the toddler had met with shifty Sam O’Day, and as big John held the door open for them while they filed out into crystal-perfect daylight, Michael briefly thought that it might be the same place but then realised swiftly that it wasn’t.
The most obvious and immediate difference was the sheer amount of people milling back and forth along the endless gallery, or leaning on its rail and chattering excitedly like patrons in the gods, the upper circle at a theatre. By Michael’s flailing estimate, along the reach of the veranda for as far as he could see, there must have been perhaps two or three hundred ghosts. He wondered if there was a special word like “pride” or “flock” or “herd” that you should employ when discussing such enormous quantities of phantoms, and asked his five ghost-pals if they’d heard of one. Phyllis insisted with an air of great authority that the appropriate term was “a persistence”, while Bill ventured “an embarrassment” as his alternative. Then John ended the speculation by suggesting that the best expression for a spectral multitude would be “a Naseby”, which he then had to explain to Michael, although everybody else was nodding gravely in agreement.
“Naseby wiz the village just outside Northampton where they had the final battle of the English Civil War. King Charles wiz captured and the field ran red, with bodies piled up in its ditches. Never visit Naseby while you’re in the ghost-seam, nipper. There’s dead cavaliers and Roundheads standing thick as rows of corn, chaps with great pike-holes through their jackets, all blood-black and bone-white and brain-grey, dragging maimed photo-trails behind ’em through the mud. You’ve never seen so many angry dead men. No, ‘a Naseby of ghosts’: that’s the only way to put it when you’ve got a crowd like this one here.”
The ghosts surrounding the Dead Dead Gang on the balcony were certainly diverse, containing representatives from most of the twenty or thirty centuries that there’d been people living in the present town’s vicinity. As he and his companions passed along the boardwalk, dodging in and out amongst the swarm of wraiths, Michael saw women clad in mammoth fur and children naked save for their deep blue tattoos. Homesick Danes with long golden plaits rubbed shoulders with jocular infantrymen who’d been casualties of World War One. A haughty-looking man with no chin and a black shirt leaned against the balustrade smoking a coloured cocktail cigarette, glumly discussing Jews with what appeared to be an equally disgruntled lower-ranking Roman soldier. There were even one or two of the ghost royalists and Roundheads John had mentioned, which suggested that they hadn’t all remained down in the ghost-seam out at Naseby, wallowing in the black mud they’d died in. Strangely, one man in a plumed hat who was the most obvious cavalier in the assembly stood there at the rail in amiable conversation with a hulking, grey-garbed man who had a cropped head and, even with no distinctive peaked iron helmet to confirm the fact, looked very much like someone who’d fought on the other side back in the 1600s. Puzzled, Michael pointed out the pair to John, who made a sound of mingled admiration and surprise on recognising at least one of them.
“Blimey! Well, I don’t know who the long-haired fellow wiz, but I expect you’re right and he fought for King Charley. Now, the big bloke with the shaved bonce, he’s a different matter. That’s Thompson the Leveller and, yes, he wiz on Cromwell’s side at first, but it wiz Cromwell in the end who laid him low, as surely as he did that cavalier what Thompson’s talking to. Old Cromwell, when he needed everybody he could get for taking on the King, he promised the idealists and the revolutionaries like the Levellers that if they helped him they could make England the place they’d dreamed about, where everyone wiz equal. Once the Civil War wiz won, of course, it wiz a different story. Cromwell had the Levellers done away with, so they wouldn’t cause him any trouble when he backed down on the promises he’d made ’em. Thompson – you can yourself see what a fierce-looking sod he wiz – he made his last stand in Northampton, and it looks as though he’s hung around here ever since. No, him and the old laughing cavalier there, they’ve both got a lot in common, I expect. You very seldom see him as high up as this, old Thompson. It looks like this fight between the builders has pulled in a crowd from up and down the linger of the Second Borough.”
It was true. As the ghost-children passed on down the length of the veranda, the thick crowd parting before them when they caught the scent of Phyllis Painter’s rancid necklace was like a peculiar historical parade or pageant, only one where no one looked as if they knew they were in fancy dress. Of course, most of them weren’t. A large majority of the good-natured jostling mob were ordinary Boroughs residents of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, their clothing hardly different to the togs that Michael and the others had got on. The sightseers who’d turned up from other eras weren’t that difficult to spot, and most of them were easy to identify: a sack-clad Saxon drover with a modest herd of half-a-dozen ghost-sheep bleating all around him as they clattered down the timeless boards; innumerable monks of different dates and different orders, all with very little to debate except how wrong they’d got the afterlife; anxious and flinching Norman ladies; angry-looking Ancient Briton prostitutes who’d been sequestered to a Roman legion.
There were also other figures that were hard to put a name or time to. Something very tall was coming down the balcony towards them from the opposite direction, looming up a good two or three feet above the heads and shoulders of the milling horde around it. It looked like a kind of wigwam made of rushes, with a hollow wooden tube protruding from its upper reaches that looked something like a beak and gave the whole thing the appearance of a huge green wading bird. As they passed it, Michael noticed that it walked on stilts that poked out past the interwoven reeds around the hem of its strange gown. He’d got no idea what it was, nor what unheard-of period it had originated from. He watched it stalk away down the long landing, melting into the delirious masses that were gathered there, and was about to ask John for an explanation when his eye was caught by something that, to Michael, appeared every bit as curious.
It was a cowboy – a real cowboy in dust-coloured clothes and a soft hat that had been battered shapeless, old boots with a second sole of dry blonde mud and at least seven guns of different types and sizes, shoved in everywhere they’d fit. Two were in splitting leather holsters hung from a cracked belt with three more jammed into the fellow’s waistband. One was stuffed down one side of a boot, another jutting from a trouser pocket. All of them looked ancient and as dangerous accidentally as by intent. The man stood leaning on the rail, gazing across it with a prairie stare, and his smooth, flawless skin was blacker than the pitch with which the balustrade was painted. Slouching there at rest he had the lithe lines of a jaguar, the carved and stylised head of an Egyptian idol in obsidian. He was quite simply the most beautiful and perfect human being – man or woman – that the child had ever seen. The idea of a cowboy being black, though, seemed improbable, as did his presence here amongst the teeming, phantom flow of former Boroughs residents. This time, John noticed Michael gawking and was able to provide assistance without being asked.
“That one, the black chap there, he’s not a ghost. He’s someone’s dream. Somebody from the Boroughs dreamed about this bloke enough for him to have accumulated a fair bit of presence up here.”
Bill, who had been listening in on what John said to Michael as the dead gang walked along, put in his own two penn’orth.
“Yeah. I saw the Beatles a few minutes back, dressed in all that ‘I am the Walrus’ kit they wore. Somebody must have dreamed them ’ere as well.”
There then ensued an unproductive several moments in which Bill attempted to explain all about beetles dressed as walruses before he realised he was talking about things that hadn’t happened during John’s or Michael’s lifetimes. This itself seemed to provoke fresh questions from the dressing gown-clad toddler.
“So how wiz there dreams up here that people haven’t had yet? Do dreams just queue up round here waiting to be dreamt?”
John seemed quite taken with the thought, but shook his head.
“It’s not like that, or I don’t think it wiz, at any rate. It’s more to do with how time works a different way when we’re Upstairs. I mean, the future here, it’s only a few miles down that way.”
Here he gestured to the west, somewhere behind the ghost-gang as they made their way along the endless boardwalk, before he continued.
“Dreams can walk here from the times to come as easily as they can from the past. The same thing’s true with all the ghosts. You must have noticed some of the daft clothes these silly beggars have got on, the puffy coats and things like that girl there.”
John nodded to the phantom form of a young woman they were just then passing, who had trousers on that were either too small for her or else were falling down so you could see her bum-crack, which had some kind of elasticated string caught up it. Now that Michael looked around he noticed a few more outlandishly-garbed individuals who, following John’s explanation, now looked likely to be spirits from the future of the Boroughs, people who by 1959 had certainly not died yet and in many cases had still to be born. Michael was looking out for other ladies with their bums half showing since these were a fascinating novelty he hadn’t seen before, when the whole group of children suddenly stopped dead. Putting aside his search for half-mast trousers, Michael himself shuffled to a halt, wondering what was up.
“Oh, Christ,” said Phyllis Painter. “Everybody get over one side, against the rail.”
The other ghost-kids did as they were told immediately, to find that almost all the other phantoms on the balcony were trying to accomplish the exact same thing, crowding against the railing in a muttering and fluorescent crush like startled parrots in an aviary. Attempting to see past the human billows and learn what was prompting this unusual activity, Michael could hear John saying, “What the bloody hell wiz that?” and Reggie Bowler gasping. Little tubby Marjorie said, “Oh my Lord. That poor man,” to which Bill replied, “Poor man my arse. That cunt’s done it ’imself.” For once, Bill’s older sister didn’t reprimand him for his swearing. Phyllis just gravely intoned, “That’s right. That’s right, ’e has. ’E’s …”
The remainder of whatever she’d been going to impart was drowned beneath a growing thunder-roll which Michael realised had been building up for some few moments, even though he hadn’t really been aware that he was hearing it. He craned his ghostly neck, trying to see.
Proceeding slowly down the balcony towards them, taking small and halting steps like a pall-bearer, came a walking flower of noise and fire. It seemed to be a man from the waist down, and yet its upper half was a great ball of light in which small specks of darkness were suspended, motionless. The rumbling noise seemed to be wrapped around the figure in some way, circling round the blinding flare that was his body and increasing to a deafening roar as he approached. When he drew level with the frightened children, flattened up against the balustrade to let him pass along with all the other ghosts, Michael could make out more of his appearance, squinting through the glare surrounding the appalling spectacle.
It was a foreign person, Michael wasn’t sure what sort, dressed in a quilted jacket and a little round white pillbox hat or skullcap of some kind. His youngish face was turned towards the sky, his bearded chin tipped back, a smile held wilfully upon his lips despite the fat teardrop evaporating on one floodlit cheek, and eyes filled with a look that might have been salvation but could just as well have been excruciating shock or agony. The padded jacket seemed to have been captured in the moment it was torn to shreds, dark ribbons of material twisting upwards into ragged and fantastic shapes as if attempting to escape the dazzling whiteness flooding from beneath it, where its owner’s breast had evidently opened in a spray of phosphorous. Michael could see now that the dark blots hanging there unmoving in the brilliance were some several dozen screws and nails, an asteroid belt of dark specks eternally caught in their rush away from the exploding heart of light and heat behind them. Deafening noise was crawling all around the figure now, unchanging in its pitch as though it was the sound of one brief, devastating instant that had been protracted infinitely, slowed down from the tumult of a second to the drum-roll of a thousand burning years. The hybrid creature, half man, half St. Elmo’s Fire, continued forward in small painful steps along the landing, hands raised slightly from his sides with palms turned outwards, features still contorted into that ambiguous, uncertain smile. A walking cataclysm it moved past the gaping children, heading on down the veranda with its ball of frozen flash and clamour, with its shrapnel halo of hot bolts and rivets. In its wake, the transfixed phantom crowd backed up against the wooden rail began once more to move and mutter, wandering off to occupy the rest of the broad walkway that they’d cleared to let the blazing thing go by.
Michael stared up at John.
“What wiz it?”
John’s dark eyes, matinee-idol smudges in repose, were now as big and as bewildered as the toddler’s own. Speechless, the older boy just shook his head. For all of John’s experience, he’d clearly no more understanding of the spectacle that they’d just witnessed than Michael himself had. Marjorie and Reggie were likewise uncomprehending, mute and quietly horrified, and it was left for Bill and Phyllis to shed light upon the startling incident. The girl leader of the Dead Dead Gang seemed shaken as she tried to take charge of the situation.
“ ’E wiz what they call a terrorist. Suicide bomber, weren’t it, Bill? I never liked to read abayt ’em in the papers while I wiz alive. Gi’ me the willies, all that business did. Bill ’ere knows more abayt all that than I do.”
Bill, as it turned out, had read the papers and knew quite a bit about the almost mystical incendiary vision that had just passed close enough for them to feel its heat, though even the resourceful red-haired urchin seemed uncertain and perplexed.
“Phyll’s right. Suicide bombers started cropping up in England around nothing-five, all Moslems with a strop on because us and the Americans had fucked Iraq up past all recognition, and ’cause we wiz crackin’ down on rag ’eads generally. It wiz a bit like with the IRA and that lot: you could see they’d got a fair point to start off with, then they went and fucked it up by blowing kids to bits and actin’ like a load o’ twats. Suicide bombers, what they’d do, they’d ’ave this thing they called a martyr vest, packed full of some home-made explosive, fertiliser or chapatti flour, something like that. They’d get on buses or on tube trains and just blow themselves up, tryin’ to take as many people with them as they could.”
John looked aghast.
“What, just blowing up civilians, like? The dirty sods. The dirty, evil buggers.”
Bill just shrugged, though not unsympathetically.
“It’s just what ’appens, ennit? I don’t s’pose you were around to see what our lot did to Dresden, or the Yanks did to the Japs. These days, John, me old mucker, it’s not like it wiz in your day. There’s no country what can stick its ’and up an’ say ‘No, not us, mate. We’re not like that.’ Those times are long gone, all that God, King and Country bollocks. We know better now.
“As for old matey-boy who just went sizzlin’ past, I reckon as ’e looked the way ’e did for the same reason Phyllis still ’as all ’er fuckin’ stinkin’ rabbits.” Bill ducked nimbly as he dodged a swipe from his big sister before he went on.
“I’m only sayin’ that it must be ’ow it wiz for all of us: we look the way we best remember ourselves being when we wiz alive. For bomb-boy what we just saw, that must be the way that he prefers to see ’imself, right at that moment when he pulled the string or whatever they do and took out ’alf o’ Stringfeller’s or Tiger Tiger. From ’is eyes and from the way that ’e wiz walkin’, it looked like he’d shat ’imself, but I suppose it’s all part o’ the martyrdom, ay?
“What I can’t get me ’ead round wiz what ’e wiz doin’ up ’ere in Mansoul. At a rough guess, I’d say it must be because ’e grew up around the Boroughs, or because ’e died ’ere. Grew up, or else blew up. But I don’t remember anybody like that from my lifetime. ’E must be from further up the line than me an’ Phyll.”
Everyone thought about that for a while, the idea that the Boroughs would at some point in its future either suffer the attentions of a suicidal bomber, or produce one.
Michael turned towards the pitch-stained balustrade that he and the Dead Dead Gang had not moved from since the passing of the smiling, shuffling explosion. It appeared that the upsetting visitation had produced at least one helpful side effect, in that the six ghost-children now had their own strip of rail, over or through which they could look at the impending fight between the builders without having lots of grown-up ghosts in front of them. He also realised that the reason why the older phantoms hadn’t crowded straight back in and jostled the wraith-kids out of the way was more than likely Phyllis Painter’s rabbit scarf, which obviously had its uses.
He supposed it was a bit like the one time his mum and dad had taken him and Alma up to see the Bicycle Parade in Sheep Street at the top of Bull-Head Lane. Michael had travelled up there in his pram, but had been unstrapped on arrival to stand by his mum, Doreen, holding her hand. Unfortunately, he’d been so excited that he’d been sick over two whole paving stones where they were standing. This had ensured that he and his family were given lots of room in which they could enjoy the simultaneously thrilling and disturbing cavalcade of marching bands, princesses, clowns on bicycles and horrors with great peeling heads of papier-mâché, Michael’s vomit having much the same effect that Phyllis’s putrescent stole was having now.
Not being tall enough to see over the rail, he looked between the wooden bars like a surprisingly young jailbird, out across the mesmerising view available from this first-storey balcony that jutted from the Works.
His first impression was that he was looking down upon the Mayorhold, or on something that the Mayorhold might have been a Matchbox toy-scale reproduction of, almost as if the modest mortal square were a page out of a closed pop-up book that had been opened and unfolded here upon this higher plane. Seen from this elevated angle it was very much like being in some giant amphitheatre, peering down into a well that was a mile or so across and seemingly descended through some several layers of reality. The different worlds in slowly undulating bands stacked one upon the other, like trick drinks he’d seen on telly, in a tall glass with the different booze in different-coloured stripes.
The highest level was perhaps on one of the two floors above him, with their balconies protruding from the front wall of the Works directly overhead, or possibly the vast expanse of Mansoul sky that dominated the enclosure, where the funny geometric clouds unfolded themselves in progressively more complicated shapes, pale lines against a singing and celestial blue. However you divided it, the Second Borough was on top of the arrangement, with the buildings ringing this expanded Mayorhold being of the same dreamy immensity that seemed to be a feature of the architecture here Upstairs.
Michael allowed his gaze to slide down the steep lines of the huge structures opposite him, on the far side of the former town square. These appeared to be inflated and flamboyant versions of the humble enterprises that, down in the living world, looked out upon the Mayorhold. Straight across from him there was a sort of layered pyramid composed from two varieties of marble, one white and the other green, arranged in alternating giant blocks. Tall windows interrupted the façade, and round the curve of a high decorative arch that crowned the building, picked out in mosaic letters, was the legend ‘Branch 19’. He realised he was looking at a higher version of the Co-op, the same place they’d glimpsed a little while ago when they were in the faded duplicate of 1959 that was the ghost-seam. Having recognised this landmark, he was able to deduce that the austere grey tower just south of the stretched-out Co-op, which he’d taken for a sober-looking church or temple of some kind, was actually a Mansoul-style exaggeration of the public toilets at the foot of Silver Street.
As he continued to inspect the ever-lower reaches of the premises on the Mayorhold’s far side, he reached the second trembling and vaporous strata of the piled realities. Here, following a pitch-railed wooden walkway running round the bottom of the higher edifices, the great swooping contours of the Mansoul-made constructions were continued down into the hue-forsaken smoulder of the ghost-seam, their lines narrowing in steep perspective for the necessary fit with the much smaller, more realistically-scaled half-world. As seen from the vantage of Upstairs, this foggy black and white realm of self-denigrating wraiths appeared to be translucent, like a sheet of colourless grey jelly of the type found in pork pies. Burrowing through this viscous medium hundreds of feet below, with streams of tiny after-pictures dissipating in their wakes, were several of the area’s rough sleepers, although none that Michael recognised.
He found that if he focussed with his ghost-eyes, he could see down through the level where the sorry apparitions went about their business, and see down into the plateau underneath. This was a plane of writhing, interwoven crystal growths in which moved variously coloured lights, and he assumed that this must be the mortal Mayorhold as seen from the Second Borough, just as he’d looked down upon the jewellery snaking through his human living room when he’d first surfaced in the Attics of the Breath. The tangled intestinal lengths of hematite and opal were, he knew, the ordinary living people of the district, viewed as though they were extended through time into gorgeous and unmoving coral millipedes. These knotted into an elaborate carpeting of vivid gem-strands and apparently provided a ground floor upon which the superior tiers were standing. Michael stared entranced between the pitch-stained bars, down through the onion layers of the world.
As with the normal earthly Mayorhold, its exploded Mansoul counterpart was situated where eight mighty avenues converged, these being gloriously unrestricted complements to Broad Street, Bath Street, Bearward Street, St. Andrew’s Street, Horsemarket, Scarletwell Street, Bull-Head Lane and Silver Street. These thoroughfares led off from the enclosure like the plastic legs plugged into the main body for a game of beetle-drive, eight spindly tributaries running to a massive central reservoir. The soaring super-buildings circling this huge expanse were like great cliff-faces with windows and verandas, and pressed up against each pane or perched on every ledge and balcony there were the countless threadbare spectres of the Boroughs, in centurions’ cloaks or fingerless wool mittens, here to watch the Master Builders come to blows. The rustle of a thousand ghostly conversations whispered round the auditorium like ebb-tide hissing over shingle. Michael thought it was a bit like being at the pictures in the bit before the lights dim almost imperceptibly and everyone goes quiet.
The children lounged against the balustrade, waiting for the main feature to commence. Reggie and John were tall enough to lean upon the rail itself, chins in their hands, while all the others had to be content to crouch with Michael, peering through the upright bars like four afterlife monkeys. Bill was holding forth about the human firework that they’d just been witness to, John having asked him why these people were prepared to kill themselves for their beliefs.
“It’s the beliefs what are the trouble. Far as I can make out, all these nutters reckon that they’re gunna be blown up into the sky and land in paradise, where there’ll be all these fourteen-year-old virgins to attend their every whim. Fuckin’ good luck, mate, that’s all I can say. I mean, it’s a bit fuckin’ weird, ’avin’ ideas like that to start with, where you blow up a few dozen blameless individuals and that gets you past the bouncers in nonce ’eaven. That bloke we just saw must wonder where the fuck ’e wiz. Not only that, but where the fuck’s ’e gunna find a fourteen-year-old virgin in the Boroughs?”
Bill went on to talk about the fighting in a country called Iraq, which John had never heard of, at which Bill explained that it shared borders with Iran, which John had never heard of either.
“Look, it’s not that far away from Israel …”
“Israel?”
They appeared to be discussing two completely different planets, about neither of which Michael Warren had the faintest clue. He gazed distractedly between the blackened bars and puzzled over other matters, such as how it was that Phyllis Painter could remember so far back into the 1920s and around then, before Michael had been born, and yet appeared to have survived to a much later date than any of her fellow Dead Dead Gangsters, Bill excepted. Michael was deliberating on this thorny issue when he noticed that the background downpour of excited Boroughs’ voices had thinned to a drizzle and then stopped. Only an anxious-sounding whisper came from Reggie Bowler, barely puncturing the newly-imposed silence.
“ ’Ere they come.”
All of the faces crowding on the balconies and at the windows were now turning to peer in the same direction, to the southern end of this projected Mayorhold, where the wide unfolded canyon that was the Mansoul equivalent of Horsemarket surged up the hill from Horseshoe Street and Marefair. Shifting round and angling his head to get a better view out through the railings, Michael’s enhanced ghost-sight made it possible for him to take a look at what was happening down at the foot of Horsemarket’s steep gradient.
A dust of light was being kicked up to obscure the south end of Mansoul: a desert hurricane with sparks instead of sand that hung a borealis curtain over Gold Street. At the centre of this luminous and roiling cumulus were two dots of white brilliance, so intense that they left coloured shapes of splattered Plasticene inside your eyelids if you stared at them, like when you accidentally looked at a light-bulb filament, or at the sun. The dots, Michael could see by squinting through his lashes, were two men in gowns of blinding white, both carrying slender staffs of some description as they walked with an impatient, angry gait uphill towards the Mayorhold.
A small voice piped up which turned out to be Marjorie’s, who never said a lot and thus took Michael a few instants to identify.
“I never knew they did that. Look, they’re getting bigger as they come towards us!”
At first, Michael thought that poor Drowned Marjorie must have had time for very little education before jumping in the Nene to save her dog at Paddy’s Meadow. Even he knew everything got bigger as it came towards you. Then he took a closer look and understood what Marjorie had meant.
The figures stalking up Horsemarket weren’t just seeming to get bigger as they neared the erstwhile town square. They were genuinely getting bigger. What had started at the bottom of the hill as men of roughly normal height, by halfway-up had been transformed to two colossi, twenty feet or more in stature and continuing to grow as they came closer. By the time they strode out into the immense arena of the Mayorhold, they were each at least as large as the twelve-storey NEWLIFE flats that Michael had been so impressed by when he and the Dead Dead Gang had made their eerie detour through the ghost-seam into nothing-five or nothing-six. In Michael’s judgement, standing on the balcony with all the other gawping ghosts, he was approximately level with the towering builders’ abdomens and had to crane his neck back and look up to see their sphinx-sized faces.
One of them was the same Master Builder that he’d seen talking to shuffling Sam O’Day above the Attics of the Breath, the one with white hair, which, on this scaled-up representation looked quite like the whiteness of a mountain peak above the snowline. The wide ocean-liner planes of the unearthly sculpted face rose up away from Michael, who found himself fascinated by the rippling play of the reflected light trapped in the shadows of the chin’s vast underside. The white-haired builder paced around the spacious confines of the unpacked Mayorhold with his blue-tipped rod gripped in one monstrous marble fist, big as a bungalow. His naked feet, a dizzying distance down beneath the children’s first floor balcony, appeared to walk upon the writhing coral carpet that was what the mortal world looked like seen from Upstairs. The angle waded through the ghost-seam, with its dirty grey tideline seeming to lap about his redwood thighs, and reared up to the floating mathematics of the sapphire firmament above, spanning three realms of being as he circled the enormous hushed enclosure, fuse-fire crawling in his pale, millwheel-sized eyes.
The other builder was a different matter. Not that he was any the less awesome or imposing, simply that he had a very different atmosphere attaching to his monumental semblance. The eye-watering glare of his apparel seemed to only reinforce the air of dark there was about him, from his close-cropped hair – jet black where his opponents was both long and fair – to his green eyes set deep within their sooty sockets. High above the balcony he turned the shadowy cathedral mass that was his head and curled lips long as barges into a blood-curdling snarl of fury and resentment, baring teeth like city gates of polished ivory, glowering poisonously at the other white leviathan, shifting his grip upon the slim and street-length wooden wand he held in hands that could have cupped a village. Stamping round the yawning stage that was an utter realisation of the Mayorhold, every footfall sending shudders through the nearby Mansoul residences that the ragged ghosts assembled on their balconies could feel, two of the four great pivots of the cosmos spiralled fatefully towards each other, as unhurried and inevitable as colliding glaciers.
The tension in the stadium-like corral was like tiptoeing over creaking glass: a dreadful apprehensive hush as several hundred numinous spectators on the balconies held breath that they no longer truly had. Even a deathly silence, Michael noticed, had an echo in the outlandish acoustics of the Second Borough, where even a purely nervous pressure was enough to make your ears pop. Toes curled up and ghost-teeth grinding anxiously, the toddler was just wondering if fainting might be a way out of this unbearably fraught situation when the dam broke, and all of the witnesses like Michael who’d been hoping only moments earlier that it would do just that found themselves desperately wishing that it hadn’t.
The dark Master Builder suddenly broke from his wary circling to rush across the three-tiered battleground, the twisting crystals of the mortal bedrock shivering beneath his tread and the grey blanket of the ghost-seam warping and distorting like a murky fluid around the gargantuan form splashing through it. Michael could see colourless ghost-busses bending in the middle and the hapless spectres still down in the half-world washed against the phantom Mayorhold’s walls in bath-scum ripples by the churning passage of the angry craftsman. From a throat deep as a railway tunnel came a vengeful howl that sounded like wind keening through dead cities. Furnace doors swung open in the crew-cut giant’s eyes as he brought up his staff with both hands clasped around its base, moving the pallid shaft so quickly that its whiteness broke apart into component colours and an arcing rainbow smear was left behind as it sliced through the tingling air.
His white-haired adversary, just in time, brought up his own azure-tipped wand to block the lethal blow, held with a hand towards each end as an unyielding bar.
The two rods smashed together with the sound of a whole continent snapping in two, and in that moment the blue china bowl of Mansoul’s sky turned an impenetrable black from rim to rim. Out from the point of impact, jagged threads of lightning crazed the heavens with a spider-web of trickling fire, cracking the sudden darkness to a million spiky fragments. The report of the explosion rumbled off into the over-world’s unfathomable distances and it began to pour with something that appeared to be a very complicated form of rain. Each droplet was a geometric lattice, like a snowflake, but in three dimensions so that they resembled silver balls with intricately carven filigree that you could peer through to the empty space inside; these tiny structures somehow built from liquid water rather than from ice. As each bead splashed against the rail or boardwalk it broke into half a dozen even smaller perfect copies of itself, rebounding up into the suddenly dark air. Michael found himself wondering briefly if this was what water really looked like, with the type he was familiar with from Downstairs in the mortal realm being an incomplete perception of an actually four-sided substance. Then the sheer force of the frightening downpour drove all such considerations from his mind as, with the district’s other phantom residents, he inched back from the railing, trying to get beneath the meagre shelter offered by the balconies above.
Against a new black sky, the warring Master Builders blazed like two Armada beacons. The white-haired one, having dropped to one knee while he staved off his opponent’s blow, now sprang up with a speed borne of his greater leverage and, with his staff held only in one hand now, drove the other fist up from below into the darker angle’s face. There was a bubbling spray of what should have been blood but in the current circumstances turned out to be molten gold, the costly gore steaming and hissing, tempered by the pounding wonder-rain to rattle down upon the lower levels of reality as smoking ingots, precious misshapes.
An entire exchequer dripping from his ruined nose, the injured Master Builder reeled back swearing in his own unravelled language. Michael somehow knew that with each curse, somewhere across the world a vineyard failed, a school was closed, a struggling artist gave up in despair. With an afraid, sick feeling mounting in the memory of his heart, he knew this wasn’t just a fight. This was all that was right or true about the universe, attempting to destroy itself.
The shaven-headed builder lashed out blindly with his rod in a one-handed scything sweep which, by sheer luck, hit his opponent in the mouth. Lip cut and gushing bullion, his white-haired antagonist gave an ear-splitting bellow, shattering every window in the higher town square. Lightning forked again across the black dome up above them, and the monsoon of unfolded rain redoubled in its onslaught. Both the giants were bleeding treasure now, starting to miss their footing on the crystalline entanglements of the material world beneath them, where the jewel-web and its crawling coloured lights were lost beneath a slick of pelting hyper-water.
Michael realised with a start that when he’d seen the white-haired builder earlier, up in the Attics of the Breath, the Master Angle had been nursing wounds and on his way back from the fight that Michael and the other members of the Dead Dead Gang were watching now. Since on that first occasion Michael had only just died, did that mean that right now down in the mortal world his mum Doreen was carefully unwrapping the red cherry-menthol cough-sweet from its small waxed-paper square with “Tunes Tunes Tunes” all over it? As the snow-peaked colossus cast his turquoise-pointed wand aside and threw himself across the sizzling rain-drenched Mayorhold at his enemy, was the pink lozenge at that very moment sliding into Michael’s dangerously restricted mortal windpipe in the sunny yard of 17, St. Andrew’s Road, down there in the First Borough? Worse still, somewhere in himself the infant knew that this divine affray and his own deadly choking fit, both terrible events in their own way, were intimately linked and were in some unfathomable fashion causing one another to occur.
Over on the supernal town square’s far side now, a mile or two away, the paler of the combatants crashed into his more saturnine foe and the pair of them went over like collapsing skyscrapers. The phosphorescent robes billowing all about them as they fell must have glanced up against the balconies of the ennobled Co-op Branch 19 exactly opposite, since its wood railings burst immediately into flames, these luckily being extinguished by the convoluted and torrential rain almost immediately.
It seemed to Michael, watching from between his parted fingers, that the bloody golden free-for-all occurring up here in the heights of Mansoul must be having repercussive echoes in the stacked-up planes below. Indeed, down in the pearly film of gelatine that was the ghost-seam he could see fights breaking out in sympathy amongst the surly wraiths who were the half-world’s occupants. Comparatively minuscule, their monochrome forms paired up into tiny clots of vigorous animosity around the massive warring planetoids that were the Master Builders, intertwined and pummelling each other at the Mayorhold’s centre, rolling blood-stained in the hopping, spitting puddles wide as boating lakes. He saw two lady apparitions laying into one another outside the grey ghost of the Green Dragon at the foot of Bearward Street, opening brutal fans of after-image limbs with every swinging punch or kick. One of the brawlers was a squat tank of a woman with an eyelid hanging off, the other smaller and already bleeding worryingly from one ear yet armed with a phantasmal broken bottle that she wielded with both relish and efficiency. Their multiple arms whirling like two murderous windmills, the ghost-women tilted at each other as though they were re-enacting some unsettled feud from when the pair of them were living, blow for vicious blow. Elsewhere in the smoky domain of the rough sleepers, outside the old public toilets at the bottom end of Silver Street, the spirits of two Romany or Jewish market traders were engaged in gleefully kicking the stuffing from the man in a black shirt that they’d got on the floor between them. Everywhere about the ashen shade of the enclosure, abject disembodied souls used strangleholds and tried to gouge each other’s eyes, joyously joining in with the ethereal hostility of the titanic Master Angles as they wrestled there amidst the ghost-spite and the hammering deluge.
If Michael focussed on the layer underneath the ghost-seam, where the twining spark-lit fronds of coral that were living people knitted to a glittering foundation for the terraces above, then even here the heavenly aggression that cascaded down from the superior worlds was having its effect. He fancied that in some of the livelier areas of the human pattern, he was looking at the stationary vectors of a mortal punch-up where the green and blue and red glass millipedes seemed more than usually contorted and wound into knots that were fantastic and intractable. One such arrangement, a confused and looping mess of coloured filaments, put him in mind of the three living schoolboys that they’d seen outside the sweetshop next to Trasler’s newsagent’s in the ghost-seam. Michael wondered if the lads had somehow managed to fall out over dividing up their gobstoppers and had now come to blows down in the mortal shopping-square, unconsciously responding to the unseen skirmish going on above them. Staring in mute dread at the enormous builders as they rolled together in the rain, engrossed in their expensive bloodshed, Michael didn’t doubt that there were ants and microbes battling at the mortal school-kids’ feet, nor that in the incomprehensible geometries that drifted far above Mansoul there might be abstract formulae at war, fractiously trying to disprove each other. It was like a tower of wrath and violence with the raging builders at its centre, reaching from the very bottom of existence to the unimaginable top, and it was all because of him. He was the reason this was happening, him and his cough-sweet.
As if underscoring this unnerving fact, the white-haired builder was now trying to regain his feet, crouched over in the unrelenting downpour close to the west wall of the enclosure, where the Works was situated. As the Master Angle strived to pull himself up from the muck and wet there came a terrifying instant when one of his huge hands settled on the wooden balustrade, four marble fingers thick as Doric columns clenching suddenly on the pitch-painted railing so that all the ghost-spectators gathered there jumped back and screamed, the adult spectres just as loudly as the phantom kids. The motley audience shrank against the balcony’s rear wall and trembled as the giant figure, painfully and slowly, hauled itself erect. As though a monstrous candle had been snuffed, a gasp that split into a thousand skittering echoes went up from the cowering mob as first a forest of white curls and then the stunning face, wide as a circus tent, were dragged up into view over the handrail like a pale and angry sun inching above a flat and black horizon. As the Cyclopean visage drew level with the crowded landing, the ferocious battering that it had taken was horrifically apparent. The carved ship’s-prow of his chin was gilded with the angle’s priceless blood, spilled from a split lip that had now scabbed over with doubloons and ducats. One of the vast eyes was swollen shut with a bruise-sheen of shimmering opal pigments starting to erupt in the abraded alabaster flesh. The other, full of weariness and urgent import, fixed its endless stare for several paralysing seconds upon Michael Warren. Nothing was conveyed by that long glance save powerful recognition, but if Michael had still had a bladder he would have released it there and then. <em>I know about you, Michael Warren. I know all about you and your cherry-menthol Tune.</em>
Breaking the gaze and straightening up so that his head and shoulders were once more high overhead above the parapet, the Master Builder wheeled round in a showering swish of soaked and heavy robes, striding as if with renewed purpose to the far side of the Mayorhold where his crop-skulled fellow combatant was on his knees in the congealed arterial gold, punch-drunk and still attempting to stand up. The shining ogre leaned upon his polished staff, one huge paw fumbling for purchase on the cream and emerald ledges of Co-op Branch 19, where the ghostly onlookers scattered in squealing terror.
Rushing upon his dazed, downed adversary from behind, the white-crowned builder voiced a terrible world-ending roar and seized his groggy former comrade by the gown’s damp shoulders. In a petrifying show of strength that seemed to violate every law of mass and motion that existed, the dark builder was whipped up into the air as weightless as a scarecrow. His limp form described a rapid, blurring semi-circular trajectory before he was slammed down agonisingly onto his back, the impact juddering through the foundations of Mansoul. So swiftly had the move been executed that its draft could be felt on the balcony outside the Works, where mangy spirits who had sidled back towards the balustrade once the pale Master Builder had removed his hand were now blown back against the landing’s rear wall, their red Roman cloaks and Saxon furs and shiny-kneed de-mob suits flapping frantically. Phyll Painter looked round at the other children, shouting to be heard above the moaning of the unexpected wind.
“Ay up! This wiz that ghost-storm gettin’ gooin’, so we’d best be ayt of ’ere before it kicks orf proper. Why don’t we goo earlier, dayn the billiard ’all, then we can see ’ow all this started!”
This at least sounded to Michael like some sort of plan, though the details of its accomplishment seemed vague. As the Dead Dead Gang began heading back the way they’d come along the walkway, shoving through the gathered horde, Michael took one last look at the dismaying and yet thrilling spectacle that they were quitting. The white-haired immensity, with effort, lifted up his by now only semi-conscious foe above his head, no doubt preparing for another pulverising throw. The ringside mob observing eagerly from their high walkways now commenced to chant their favourite’s name in guttural encouragement, their mass voice thundering in the acoustic labyrinth of magnified and murmuring Mansoul.
“MIGH-TY! MIGH-TY! MIGH-TY!”
As Michael hurried after his departing colleagues, ducking between adult legs along the busy balcony, there came another dull, earth-shattering boom that shook the timbers underneath his plaid-clad feet and which he thought was probably the crew-cut builder being dashed to the wet, streaming squiggles of the higher Mayorhold’s floor again. This squeezed fresh lightning from the crackling jet sky above and wrung new cheers from the excited audience of shabby afterlifers.
“MIGHT-TY! MIGH-TY! MIGHT-TY!”
Following in Phyllis’s malodorous and therefore relatively crowd-free wake, the phantom kids retraced their steps, back through the swing doors to the Works’ interior then down the starry midnight stairs and gingerly across the wriggling expanse of the demonically-tiled workplace to the crook-door in one corner. From here, backing one by one precariously down the Jacob Flight with its ridiculously narrow treads, they re-submerged themselves within the colourless and muffled fathoms of the ghost-seam, where you almost missed the reek of Phyllis Painter’s rabbit wrap and where you found yourself examining the rear of your own head as you climbed backwards down the creaking rungs with grey, proliferating after-images trailing in front of you.
Descending, light as scruffy thistledown, they made their way down through the ruined and soggy storeys of the building that had centuries ago been the town hall, drifting across the gaps in the collapsing stairway to the ground floor, passing out through the warped boards that had been nailed across a once-grand door into the faded memory of the Mayorhold, drained of all its paint and life and perfume.
As they stepped into the half-world’s open air Michael discovered that it was still raining hard down in the ghost-seam, although judging from the dry clothes and unhurried gait of the enclosure’s living occupants along with the sharp-edged black shadows that they cast, the mortal Mayorhold still luxuriated in a sunny Summer’s lunchtime, unaware of the bad weather punishing its higher reaches. On the square’s far side, much closer than it had appeared to be up in Mansoul, the two wraith-women were still pummelling each other, spattering the pavement outside the Green Dragon with black ghost-blood. Noticing that Michael had his eye upon the pair of harridans, whose spattering ink and multiply-exposed limbs made them look like brawling squids, John stooped to mutter an aside to him as the dead children made their way along the Mayorhold’s western edge towards Horsemarket.
“That’s the lezzies, settling scores over who pinched whose girlfriend. That one with the broken bottle there, the little nippy one, that’s Lizzie Fawkes. The other one, the monster with a torn eye, that one’s Mary Jane. She gave me that bad bruise I showed you earlier, where she’d kicked me in the ribs. This what we’re seeing now’s a famous fight they had when they wiz living. Nearly killed each other, so I heard, but I suppose they must have both enjoyed it or they wouldn’t be down here replaying it all, time and time again.”
The Mayorhold’s other spectre-fights were all still going on across the breadth of the enclosure. The two hook-nosed market traders by the public lavatories were dragging the black-shirted man inside, across piss-glistening tiles, to mete out further punishment. Michael could also see that there were tempers flaring up amongst the area’s live inhabitants. The shoppers who’d been chatting amiably together in the doorway of the Co-op were now hissing accusations, both with arms folded aggressively and heads bobbing from side to side like wobbly toys. He saw too that his intuition with regard to the three mortal school-kids had been accurate: just outside Botterill’s, the square’s other newsagent, two of the boys were ganging up on the remaining lad, who held the bag of sweets they’d purchased earlier. A nasty atmosphere had settled on the formerly agreeable enclosure, but of the celestial presences that Michael knew to be the cause of this unpleasantness there was no sign at all. He realised that neither the massive Master Builders nor the soaring pinnacles of Mansoul that surrounded them were visible from down here in the ghost-seam, or at least they weren’t unless you knew what you were looking for.
After a moment or two’s peering through the curtain of unfolded rain, Michael still couldn’t see the feuding builders, but he could make out the areas where they weren’t. One of the motor-coaches parked down at the Mayorhold’s lower end seemed suddenly to swell up like a bubble until one half of its cab was ten times bigger than the other half, deflating back to normal almost instantly as the strange patch of visual distortion moved on to inflate the front of the Old Jolly Smokers, bending both the ghosts and living people who were loitering outside the tavern into bowed and elongated smears. It was as if something were moving a great magnifying lens about the square, or as though an immense glass marble of flawless transparency trundled invisibly around the Mayorhold, curving all its light into enormous fisheye bulges. This phenomenon, he reasoned, must be tracking the unseen moves of the Master Angles as they smashed the gold out of each other in the higher realms above.
The tartan toddler also became anxiously aware of the abrupt and startling gusts of wind that were erupting out of nowhere to cause sudden eddies in the ghost-dust or to send the flat cloth caps of local phantoms bowling off down Broad Street with their after-images and owners in forlorn pursuit. This was quite obviously, as Phyllis had remarked, the onset of the howling ghost-squall that had almost blown them all away down at the foot of Scarletwell Street. Since on that occasion they’d not seen their own forms sailing overhead towards Victoria Park then he supposed this meant that they were going to escape the rising storm in some way, although Michael still kept shooting worried glances at his fellow dead kids, waiting for somebody to suggest something.
Predictably, Phyllis already had a plan. As the ferocity of the ghost-breeze began to mount she led her miniature commando troop across the top of Bath Street where it joined the Mayorhold. Squinting down the sloping lane Michael could just about perceive a slow black swirling in the grey air outside Bath Street flats, but if this was the grinding wheel of the Destructor it was clearly nowhere near the scale it would achieve by nothing-five or nothing-six. Rotating dolefully above the empty road it didn’t really seem to pose an actual threat as such, and Michael wondered if he’d made too much of it by coming on the twirling burn-hole suddenly by night when he’d been upset anyway.
Once over Bath Street, the gang congregated by one of the waist-high hedges bounding the top lawn of the distinctly 1930s flats. The wind was really getting up now, lashing the chandelier-crystal droplets of the super-rain across the paving slabs in frilled and spraying sheets of fluid glass. As the drops shattered into even more exquisite copies of themselves against the toes of the tot’s slippers, each wet bead trailing an after-image necklace through the ghost-seam glaze behind it, it occurred to Michael that though he could feel the complicated splashes hitting him, he wasn’t getting wet. The gems of liquid seemed to keep their rubbery surface tension even after being subdivided into intricately-structured dots no bigger than a pin-head, rolling from his striped pyjama cuffs while leaving nothing of themselves behind. His dressing gown pulled up into a cowl to shield his head while leaving both his legs and bum exposed, he ran bent double through the rain towards the doubtful shelter of the hedging where his ghostly pals were gathered, doppelgangers scurrying behind him like a pygmy hunting party.
Crouching by the hedge, Phyllis was making the by-now familiar pawing motions with her hands as she began to tunnel into time, although the wavering interference-pattern bands of black and white around the widening portal were on this occasion absent. There was a pale, single stripe of luminosity around the hole’s edge, and it came to Michael that if Phyllis were just trying to dig an hour or two into the past or future then there’d be no black stripes representing night-times squeezed into the opening’s flickering perimeter.
As it turned out, this was indeed the case. Digging the shallow hole unaided in less than a minute, Phyllis wriggled through it and did not appear above the hedge on the far side, an obvious invitation for the other members of the gang to follow her. John indicated with a nod that Michael should go next, at which the infant got down on his hands and knees, rain drumming on his neck and ghost-wind whistling around his ears, to follow the gang’s leader through the light-rimmed aperture.
When Michael crawled out on the other side he found that, unsurprisingly, he was still on the hedge-fringed upper lawn of Bath Street flats that ran down by Horsemarket, with Phyll Painter standing some few feet away, tapping her toe impatiently. He stood up and looked back across the top of the low privet wall, noticing with alarm that Bill, John, Marjorie and Reggie were no longer anywhere in sight. An instant after that he realised that there was no wind, and that it had stopped raining. He remarked as much to Phyllis, but she smirked and shook her head into a momentary rosebush of blonde, grinning blooms.
“Nah, titch, it’s not stopped rainin’. It just ’asn’t started yet.”
Meanwhile, the other members of the Dead Dead Gang emerged on all fours through the time-gap in the box-cut foliage. When the six phantom kids stood once more reunited on this much more clement and less windswept side of the trimmed bush, Michael gazed back across the top of Bath Street to the Mayorhold. The enclosure was both dry and sunny, albeit only with the wan grey sunlight of the ghost-seam. There were no rough sleepers fighting on the corner next to the Green Dragon, nor outside the public toilets at the foot of Silver Street. The trio of live boys who’d come to blows over their bag of sweets were nowhere to be seen. Phyllis explained.
“I’ve dug us back abayt three-quarters of an ’our, ayt o’ the wind and rain. Now we can all goo dayn the billiard-’all and see ’ow the scrap started.”
With that, drifting through the hedge onto the pavement bordering Horsemarket, the gang started to move down the hill towards Marefair and Gold Street, each one with a dissipating stream of grubby copycats behind them. It occurred to Michael that if this was half an hour or so before the angles had their fight, then it must also be before he’d choked to death in the back yard down on St. Andrew’s Road. Was Doreen at this moment taking out her straight-backed wooden chair to set down in the top half of the yard beside the drain-trap, telling Michael that fresh air would do him good? Was Michael’s sister Alma getting bored already, starting to charge round the close brick confines of the cramped apology for a back garden? Fretting over these concerns he hurried to catch up with Phyllis Painter, tugging at her foggy woollen sleeve until she turned and asked him what he wanted.
“If this wiz before the sweet-cough croaked me, we could glow drown Andrew’s Woad and swap this from unhappyning!”
Phyllis was firm, but not unsympathetic.
“No we couldn’t. For one thing, it’s all already ’appened, and will never ’appen any different. For another, if we did goo dayn to Andrew’s Road then I’d ’ave seen us when I ’auled you up into the Attics of the Breath. I’ve come to the conclusion that if this wiz ’appenin’ then it’s ’appenin’ for a reason, and it’s up to us to see it through and make sense of it all. If I were you, I wouldn’t waste time tryin’ to change the past. In the Dead Dead Gang, what we’ve found wiz that it’s always best to just get on with the adventure and find out ’ow everythin’ ends up. Come on, let’s pay a visit to the snooker ’all and see what got them builders into such a lather.”
With that, Phyllis took his hand and they spontaneously began to skip together down Horsemarket’s incline, every bouncing step taking them both higher and further. Michael was so thrilled to feel the touch of her cool fingers twined with his that he began to giggle with delight and then they were both laughing, bounding down the hill together leaving arcs of after-images behind them that looked like bunched Christmas decorations, only nowhere near as colourful. They only paused when they were almost at the bottom and abruptly realised that they’d raced too far ahead of their companions, who were dawdling halfway up the slope while they watched Bill and Reggie throw themselves in front of hurtling cars. This looked to be a lethal pastime, although obviously the modern traffic passed harmlessly through the spectral roughnecks, and besides, Reggie and Bill were both already dead. Michael assumed that, viewed from their perspective, dying had just meant they could relax and be a bit more reckless in their play, hurl themselves under trains or off ten-storey buildings with aplomb and things like that. For Boroughs kids, it seemed, death was a marvellous amusement park without the queues or irritating safety regulations. Phyllis watched what Michael now believed was almost certainly her younger brother, shaking her head ruefully but smiling fondly as she did it.
“ ’E’s a silly little bleeder. ’Im and Reggie, they both do that all the time, jumpin’ in front o’ cars like that. ’E says you get to see all o’ the complications of the engine in what’s like a stack of diagram-slices as you rocket through ’em, but I’ll take their word for it. I never ’ad much time for cars, meself.”
Phyllis and Michael waited down towards the Horseshoe Street and Gold Street crossroads for the stragglers to catch up. They floated up to sit on a high window ledge together while they waited so that all the living people that there were about the intersection wouldn’t keep on barging through them all the time. While Michael knew they weren’t aware that they were doing it, he didn’t want a lot of blithely unselfconscious strangers showing him their bowels without a by your leave. Also, it felt nice to be sitting there unseen upon the ledge with Phyllis in the silvery mid-day sun. It felt as if they were invisible tree-pixies, crouched there beaming on their knotted bough in an old grey engraving while woodsmen and peasants passed by unaware beneath them.
When the other four at last arrived, Michael and Phyllis jumped down holding hands in a slow waterfall of after-images, and the Dead Dead Gang carried on towards the bottom of Horsemarket. Heading down the hill, they passed over the east-west axis of the crossroads and continued into the steep tilt of Horseshoe Street, floating across it to the Gold Street side that had Bell’s gas-fire showroom on the corner.
Halfway down was a flat-topped, three-storey building that appeared to be of 1950s vintage and thus put up only recently, a drill-hall or a sports and social club of some sort. Slipping through the closed front doors, the ghost-tykes found themselves within a shadowy interior where patches of mosaic light fell through wire-reinforced glass from the high-placed windows. There was hardly anyone about at this time of the morning save for several owners or employees who were tidying up and couldn’t see the phantom children, and a marble-coloured tabby that quite evidently could. A grey and furry fireball it streaked yowling off down a rear corridor, leaving the Dead Dead Gang to follow Phyllis, wafting lightly up a white-walled stairway to the upper floors.
These higher levels were, as far as they could tell, deserted. At the very top, hidden away in a spare room where there were stacks of chairs and cardboard boxes full of documents, there was a crook-door and a Jacob Flight. Unlike the previous examples Michael had experienced, down at the foot of Scarletwell in nothing-five or nothing-six and underneath the Works just a short time ago, no ribbon-lights unravelled from this opening in pale fruit-cordial colours, nor were there any rippling Mansoul sounds that filtered from the baffling spaces up above. These stairs, apparently, did not go all the way up to the Second Borough. Either that or it was a good few flights further up.
The children scaled the awkward rung-like steps one at a time, again with Phyllis in the lead and Michael following behind her. Passing through the ceiling of the dusty lumber-room, the Jacob Flight continued as a steeply-angled chute enclosed by flaking plaster walls. The two-foot risers and the three-inch treads beneath them as they climbed laboriously upwards had a covering of distressed brown carpet with an ugly creeper-pattern, held in place by scuffed brass stair-rods. As he clambered on with Phyllis struggling in front of him he tried his best not to look at her knickers, but it wasn’t easy with the stream of after-pictures peeling from her back to break like photo-bubbles in his face. At last the gang emerged through a trapdoor into what seemed to be a small back office-room with kippered wallpaper, a polished desk and fancy throne-like chair, these last two made of scarred and ancient wood that might have come from Noah’s Ark. Across the dark and varnished floorboards there was a fine dusting of what seemed to be a queerly luminous white talcum with a host of worn-down shoe and boot prints leading through it, from the trapdoor to the office entrance.
Tiptoeing across the room, the floor and furniture of which felt solid to the children being made of ghost-wood, they went through the creaking office door the normal way, by opening it first. This led them out into a cavernous and shady gaming-room that seemed to take up what was left of the three-storey building’s unsuspected fourth floor. This huge area was windowless, illuminated only by the chiselled pillar of white light that crashed down on the single monstrous billiard-table in the centre of the black expanse.
Crowding the shadows at the chamber’s edges were a horde of fidgeting rough sleepers, abject ghost-seam residents from different periods – although it seemed to Michael that there wasn’t such a wide variety of centuries here represented as there had been on the balconies outside the Works. Despite the presence of a few historic-looking monks, the phantom mob appeared to be mostly composed of individuals from the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. Some had gabardine macs on, some wore braces, all of them were wearing hats and almost all of them were men. They stood there shuffling in the restless gloom, their dead eyes glued upon the floodlit table in the middle of the yawning hall, and on the dazzling quartet of shapes that moved around it.
Bright as sunlight flashing Morse-code dots and dashes from a pond, these were almost too fierce to look at properly, although Michael persisted. Once his eyes had got used to the glare he realised that two of the figures striding round the edges of the table were the Master Builders that he’d just seen fighting in the Mayorhold, only shrunken to a slightly more realistic size. The white-haired angle seemed to concentrate his game upon the giant table’s southeast pocket which was one of only four, though Michael thought that he remembered normal snooker tables having more than that. Meanwhile, the shaven-headed builder with dark eyes appeared to be more focussed on the northeast corner of the grey baize, sighting down his long smooth billiard cue – these were the wands the angles had been wielding, Michael realised belatedly – towards the colourless, undifferentiated multitude of balls spread out across the outsized field of play. He didn’t recognise the other two contestants, situated to the southwest and southeast, but thought that they were probably of equal rank. Their robes, at any rate, were just as blinding. Someone’s mum used Persil.
Noticing that there were symbols scratched in gold into the wooden discs affixed to the four corners of the table, Michael could recall reading about them in the guide-book he’d been given at the Works, which he remembered was still stuffed into the pocket of his dressing gown. Retrieving it, he scanned its somehow legible-though-writhing pages, finding that his ghostly night-sight made it readable despite the darkness. Michael thought that it must be like Alma reading underneath the bedclothes but without the leaking shafts of torchlight that would usually give her away. He re-read the bit about the four poorly-drawn symbols, then skipped through the lengthy list of seventy-two devils, This was followed by a register of seventy-two corresponding builders, which he also skipped, and then by some material about the billiard hall, which was what he’d been looking for. Peering intently at the squirming silver things that weren’t exactly letters as they twinkled on the dark page, he began to read.
<quote>
At the south-eastern corner of the physical domain, near to the Centre of the Land, is to be found a gaming hall wherein the Master Angles play at Trilliards, this being what their Awe-full game is rightly called. The intricacies of their play determine the trajectories of lives in the First Borough, such lives being subject to the four eternal forces that the Angles represent. These are Authority, Severity, Mercy and Novelty, as symbolised respectively by Castle, Death’s-head, Cross and Phallus. The Arch-Builder Gabriel governs the Castle pocket, Uriel the Death’s-head, Mikael the Cross and Raphael the Phallus.
“Due to the multiplicity of their essential natures, capable of manifold expressions, the four Master Builders never cease their game of Trilliards, even though they simultaneously may be required and indeed present elsewhere. The single exception to this otherwise unvarying rule is the event of 1959, when two of the four Master Angles leave the Trilliard table to pursue an altercation above the terrestrial Mayorhold, their quarrel precipitated by what is claimed to be an infringement of the rules regarding a disputed Soul named Michael Warren. He …
</quote>
<br>
Hurling the pamphlet to the billiard-hall floor as if it were a poisonous centipede, Michael let out a yelp of mortal terror. He was a “disputed Soul”, the only one there’d ever been if what the guide-book said was true, and Michael didn’t for a moment doubt it was, in every last eternal detail. It was only when he looked up from the suddenly disquieting leaflet on the floor that Michael realised everybody else was looking at him, his abrupt shriek having evidently drawn attention in the otherwise tense hush that hung above the contest. Phyllis and the other members of the Dead Dead Gang were shushing him and telling him spectators weren’t allowed to interrupt the game, while the rough sleepers lurking by the walls were frowning at him through the murk and trying to work out who he thought he was. Amongst the Master Builders grouped around the table, though, there was no such uncertainty. All four were looking at him, and all of them looked as though they knew him.
The dark, crew-cut builder seemed to pay Michael the least attention, merely glancing up to register the source of the sharp outcry and then smiling chillingly across the room at the ghost-infant before bending once more to the table and his shot. The pair of unfamiliar builders on the table’s western side stared first at Michael, then each other, then Michael again, wearing identical expressions of startled anxiety. The most surprised to see him out of the four Master Builders, though, was the white-haired one.
Standing by his southeast corner of the table with a gold cross gouged into its mounted wooden disc, the curly-headed angle stared at Michael with a look of terrible bewilderment that seemed to say, “What are you doing dead?”, reminding Michael that although this was the second time he’d seen the builder in the last half-hour or so, from the perspective of the builder this was the first time they’d met. The suddenly alarmed and puzzled-looking angle looked like he was running at enormous speed through a long list of calculations in his head, trying to come up with an explanation for the toddler’s presence here in this weird snooker-parlour of the dead. With widening eyes as if he’d just considered an unpleasant possibility, the white-haired builder turned back to the table just in time to see the dark and shaven angle take his shot.
Along with every other spectral presence in the room, including the rough sleepers, the Dead Dead Gang and the other Master Builders, Michael looked towards the billiard table with a horrible presentiment of what was just about to happen.
The crop-haired and saturnine contestant had just jabbed his lapis-tipped cue with considerable force into one of the hundred balls in play upon the table, each a subtly different tone of grey. The sphere that had been hit streaked off across the baize with a long, blurring string of after-images pursuing it. Several shades darker than a large majority of the surrounding balls, Michael thought that it might be a deep cherry-red if seen without the colour-blindness that was a condition of the ghost-seam. In fact, Michael thought it might be the exact same colour as the sticky lozenge he had choked upon. In an instinctive flash that seemed to come from nowhere, Michael knew that this ball somehow stood for Dr. Grey, the Boroughs’ doctor up in Broad Street who’d told Doreen that her youngest child was suffering from no more than a sore throat and should be given cough-drops. As he watched the Dr. Grey-ball rocket up the length of the huge table, Michael felt, deep in his sinking stomach, that he knew where all of this was leading.
With a mighty crack the hurtling ball collided with another, a much paler orb that Michael understood with a transfixing clarity was somehow meant to stand for him. This second grey globe spun off from the impact to rebound against the south-side cushion and cannon towards the table’s northeast corner, where the raised disc was emblazoned with a childish golden scribble that was meant to be a skull. The Michael-ball, slowed to a trickle after its collision with the cushion, rumbled inexorably towards the death’s-head pocket, gradually losing momentum in nail-bitingly small increments to finally stop dead less than a hair’s breadth from the corner-hole’s dark edge. More than a third of its dull ivory curvature protruded out precariously over the skull-marked miniature abyss like a swollen belly, looking as though the slightest vibration in the billiard hall’s floor would send it toppling over the rim into pitch black oblivion. Although he knew nothing about snooker, Michael sensed that with this shot both he and the pale Master Builder had been placed in an almost impossible position.
It appeared that the white-haired contestant had come to the same regrettable conclusion. He stared at the table silent and aghast for some few seconds as though he could not believe that one of his three blazing colleagues had seen fit to snare him in this awful and apparently insoluble predicament.
He looked up from the threatened billiard ball towards the shaven-headed angle who had landed it in such appalling jeopardy, his eyes so filled with fury that the audience of deadbeat Boroughs ghosts all shrank back nervously into the shadows, deeper than they were already. Without blinking and without a flicker of expression on a face that was now statue-like, the white-haired builder carefully pronounced one word in his fourfolded tongue.
“Uoricyelnt.”
Everyone gasped, except for one or two who laughed involuntarily then choked it off into a dreadful and embarrassed silence as they realised what the Master Builder had just said, give or take several layers of subsidiary nuances and meanings.
“Uriel, you cunt.”
It brought the house down, almost literally. The shaven-headed builder’s face appeared to pass through an eclipse, where you could see the swathe of shadowy emotion move across his features from the hairline’s stubble down to the bone bulwark of his jaw. He brought the hand that held the cue round in a swift arc, overarm across his shoulder with a sweep of white and molten after-images behind it, burning pinions in a savage, slicing wing, and hurled his cue down on the snooker-parlour floor. It boomed, the very crack of doom, so that the entire building lurched and tilted with a number of rough sleepers staggering and tipping over, ending in a jumbled heap with their associates against the billiard hall’s rear wall. Michael was both relieved and mystified to note that throughout all this shaking, shuddering and falling over, not one of the balls on the grey table even trembled.
Dust rained from the ceiling, flakes of plaster settling as if lowered on threads of multiple exposures. Even in the flat acoustics of the ghost-seam, rumbling repercussions from the slammed-down snooker cue still charged like bulls around the premises, while the assembled wraiths who were still on their feet stood rooted to the spot in a religious panic. Surely, time would end now. Stars would be tidied away, put back inside in their jewellery casket, and the sun would pop.
As Michael stood there boggling, he found himself seized by his dressing gown’s fiend-phlegm-flecked collar from behind and yanked into activity by somebody who turned out to be Phyllis Painter.
“Come on, ’fore the shock wears orf and everybody’s tryin’ to get ayt of ’ere at once!”
The Dead Dead Gang moved quickly and efficiently, clearly experienced in ducking out and scarpering from the most unexpected and apocalyptic situations. Streaming with their after-images across the billiard hall as if someone had just turned on an urchin-tap, the children smeared across the small back-office, tumbling down the Jacob Flight and then continuing at speed, descending through the mortal building to the bottom floor by jumping down the stairs twelve at a time, scaring the same grey-marbled cat that they’d upset on their way in.
They reached the lobby of the sports and social centre, with the thunder of the now-stampeding phantom snooker crowd pursuing them down from the higher storeys as the other ghosts belatedly came to their senses and made an attempt to clear the room. Michael and all the others were about to bolt out through the double doors and into Horseshoe Street when Phyllis yelled for them to stop.
“Don’t goo ayt there! The ’ole mob’ll be pouring through them doors in ’alf a minute! I’ve a better way!”
With that she closed her eyes and pinched her nose between her thumb and forefinger like somebody preparing to jump from the baking concrete pool edge into the opaque green waters of the lido at Midsummer Meadow. Making a short rabbit-hop into the air, she plunged down through the floor and disappeared beneath the lobby’s tiles, leaving the just-mopped surface undisturbed by so much as a ripple. Looking at each other doubtfully then glancing up as one towards the ceiling where the avalanche-roar of escaping ghosts was growing louder as it neared, the children followed Phyllis’s example. Shutting eyes and nostrils tight, they did their little jumps and found that they were falling through a foot or so of flooring into damp and all-embracing darkness.
Picking himself up from noticeably hard and therefore very likely ancient flagstones, Michael looked round with his tinsel-trimmed ghost-vision at the sparkling outlines of his five chums, who were similarly rising to their feet and dusting themselves down. They seemed to be in a big unused cellar with brick walls, cobwebbed and black with age. Phyll Painter, having been the first one back up on her feet, was standing at the basement’s western end and scraping at a patch of brickwork that looked relatively modern in comparison with its surroundings, possibly a former doorway that had been sealed up. As her companions gravitated to her, gathering in a loose ring at her back, she generously shared the scheme which, of course, they were by then already committed to.
“I reckon that we’ve seen as much o’ why the builders ’ad their barney as we’re gunna see. I think it’s time we went to meet with Mrs. Gibbs at Doddridge Church, the way that we agreed, an’ see if anybody’s faynd ayt anythin’.”
John, looking baffled, interjected here.
“But surely, Phyll, the quickest way to Doddridge Church is straight along Marefair to Doddridge Street. Why are you digging through the years again?”
At the gang’s rear, Michael stood on his toes to see what the tall youngster was referring to. Phyllis was standing with her back towards them, burrowing into the brick wall like one of the rabbits that hung dismally around her neck. Just as the hour-deep hole that she’d dug in the Bath Street hedge had had a rim of daylight only, so the one that she was hollowing out now was bordered by uninterrupted darkness. Heaven only knew how many lightless days or years or decades she was folding back into its black perimeter.
“I’m takin’ us along Marefair to Doddridge Street, yer nit. There’s nothin’ says we ’ave to goo the borin’ way. There’s tunnels dayn this end o’ tayn what goo back to antiquity and link up all the oldest churches an’ important buildings. That’s where me and Bill faynd Reggie, in the passageway what runs from Peter’s Church up to the ’Oly Sepulchre. This cellar what we’re in now used to be part of the underground route from St. Peter’s, through St. Gregory’s and up towards All Saints, what used to be All ’Allows when it wiz still built from wood. Down ’ere it doesn’t take much diggin’ till yer right down in the twelve- and thirteen-’undreds with the later centuries all over ’ead so that yer can dig up into whatever time yer fancy. There. I think that’s done it.”
Phyllis stepped back so that everyone could see, although in truth there wasn’t very much to look at. She had dragged the midnight edges of the time-gap out to roughly the dimensions of a motor-tyre, with nothing visible upon the hole’s far side except more blackness. Still, if Phyllis said that this was the exciting way to travel along Marefair, Michael was prepared to trust her. Her announcement that the gang were at last going to meet with Mrs. Gibbs had done much to dispel his earlier worries that she might be recklessly exposing him to trouble, and as she hitched up her skirt to clamber through the space she’d made he jostled forward past the other members of the crew to be the first one after her.
Only the tunnel’s rough and glistening limestone walls betrayed the fact that they were now in medieval times, with total darkness being much the same in any century. The glittering embroidery of Michael’s night-sight picked out fragments of archaic debris littered here and there – part of an old stone bottle with a wire-and-marble stopper, lumps of dog-mess that looked fossilised and half a hobby-horse with wooden spine snapped just below the head – but nothing that seemed very interesting. With the remainder of the gang and their attendant images in tow, Michael and Phyllis began walking into the impenetrable blackout, heading roughly west.
They hadn’t travelled very far, about the width of Horseshoe Street as far as Michael could make out, before the tunnel widened into what he thought was an abandoned vault of some kind, with a flagged floor on which jigsaw chunks of broken stone were strewn, perhaps the shattered lid of a sarcophagus. Phyllis confirmed the tot’s suspicions.
“Yiss, this wiz what’s underneath St. Gregory’s Church, or under where it used to be, at any rate. This wiz the very spot where one of the four Master Builders told a monk to come, ’undreds of years ago. This builder, it wiz probably your mate the curly chap, ’e made the monk bring a stone cross ’ere, all the way across the deserts and the oceans from Jerusalem, to mark the centre of ’is land, slap in the middle o’ the country. That old cross – the Rood, they used to call it – wiz the thing what makes the Boroughs so important. Upstairs, it’s the hub of England’s structure so it’s bearin’ all the weight. That’s why the nasty burn-’ole what you saw in Bath Street earlier is gunna end up as a flippin’ gret disaster if someone ent careful.”
Michael chose not to ask Phyllis what she meant as he did not particularly want to think about the nasty burn-hole that they’d seen in Bath Street. The six junior wraiths meandered on along the subterranean passageway, leaving the ruined vault of St. Gregory’s behind as they progressed into the antique darkness under Marefair.
After another fifty or so paces, Phyllis called the company to a halt and pointed to the burrow’s moist and dripping roof, mere feet above them.
“This is where I reckon we should dig up to the surface. It’ll bring us ayt just opposite the mouth o’ Doddridge Street in Marefair. Give us a leg up, John, would yer?”
The best-looking member of the ghost-gang did as he was told, cupping his hands into a stirrup so that the near-weightless Phyllis could stand on them and commence her pawing at the tunnel’s ceiling. This time there were shifting bandwidths of both black and white around the fringes of the excavation, which suggested that the space above them was at least familiar with the ordinary procession of successive days and nights.
To Michael’s eye Phyllis was being much more careful in her digging, wiping patiently away at the accumulated ages like a cautious archaeologist rather than scrabbling frantically, which was the only technique that he’d seen her use before. It looked as if she were attempting to bore through to a specific year or even a specific morning, so precise and delicate were the progressions of her ghostly multiplicity of fingers, scratching in the dark.
At last she seemed to have achieved exactly the degree of penetration she was seeking, with a sizeable breach in the fabric of the tunnel that afforded a restricted view up into what appeared to be the shadowy and laughably low-ceilinged room above. With a delighted and triumphant chortle, Phyllis scrambled up and through the opening she’d fashioned, reappearing moments later crouched beside the time-hole’s rim and grinning down towards them from above. She called to Michael, holding out her hand and telling him that he should come up next. Obediently, the toddler hopped up into John’s linked hands and allowed Phyllis to manhandle him up through the rend in the stone roof, into the dusky chamber overhead.
He found himself not in a crawlspace with its wooden ceiling only three feet overhead, as he’d believed he would, but underneath a table. As he kneeled with Phyllis by the aperture, helping first Marjorie then Bill to struggle up beside them, Michael noticed that beneath the near side of the tabletop the lower reaches of a seated man were visible. Perched on a stately hardwood chair, his most prominent feature was the pair of high, soft boots with dull iron buckles just below the ankle and a flap of leather rising to obscure each knee. The man was obviously alive, since when he moved one foot it left no after-images behind it, which meant that probably he couldn’t hear them. All the same, Michael tried not to make a noise as Reggie and then John were hauled up through the time-trapdoor, whereupon the entire gang crawled like bear-cubs out between the table-legs into a large and quiet room with long slanted rays of afternoon light falling through its criss-cross leaded windows.
Standing there to one side of the high-roofed quarters with his spectral playmates, Michael gazed across the polished oaken tabletop towards the top half of the man whose high boots he’d already seen, sitting at the far end and writing with a quill pen in some sort of log or ledger.
Dark hair, lank and greasy-looking, hung down to the dusty mantle of the man’s old-fashioned tunic, and his bowed head, bent above his writings, had a poorly-concealed bald spot. It was hard to judge his stature, seated as he was, although he didn’t look to be unduly tall. Despite this, his broad chest and shoulders fostered an impression of solidity and bulk. Skin grey in the drained radiance of the ghost-seam, the man looked like a lead soldier scaled up for the play of giants.
Coming to the end of a long paragraph the fellow sat back in his chair to read what he had written, so that the ghost-children could more clearly see his face. To Michael, the grave countenance looked almost thuggish, even though the general bearing of man suggested rank and prominence. His features were like thick-cut bacon, broad and fleshy and possessed of what might almost be an earthy sensuality if not for the expressionless grey eyes like flattened musket balls that dominated the arrangement, staring down unblinking at the page of cramped but ornate script that he’d just authored. A fat wart jewelled the depression between lower lip and chin, with a much smaller growth just over his right eyebrow. There was a nerve-wracking stillness to him that Michael imagined to be like the stillness of a bomb the moment after it’s stopped ticking.
Standing in the silent room beside him, Phyllis nudged him gently in his phantom ribs. She looked pleased with herself.
“There. See ’im? That’s the Lord Protector, that wiz.
“That’s Oliver Cromwell.”
** <strong>SLEEPLESS SWORDS</strong>
<strong>T</strong>hat blowing-up bloke on the balcony had rattled John. He liked to think that generally he kept an even keel but the two-legged fireball had upset him, there was no denying.
For a kick-off, John had never seen before what an exploding person looked like, not in all that frozen detail and not from outside. When John himself had copped his lot over in France he hadn’t even realised it had happened for a good few minutes. He’d just taken it for a near miss and had gone running up the road with all the other lads. He’d noticed that the shell-fire was now muffled and that he was seeing everything in black and white, but just assumed the bang had made his eyes and ears go funny. Only when he’d realised he was leaving pictures in his wake, unlike his strangely unresponsive squadron-mates, had John begun to take in what had happened.
Once he’d understood his circumstances he’d been overcome by horror, which was only normal: it had been a gruesome way to perish. So to see that fellow on the landings at the Works, inside his lethal halo with that forced smile and the tears turning to steam upon his cheek, remaining in that awful second for eternity because that was the way that he remembered himself best … John couldn’t make it out. When Bill had told them that these human bombs were doing it as part of their religion, waging holy war as you might say, that had just made John even more bewildered.
John had been a Christian while he was alive. Never a good one, mind you, nowhere near as serious about religion as his eldest brother had been, but more serious than his sister, mam, or either of his other brothers were. He’d gone to church up College Street most Sundays, where he’d been a member of the Boy’s Brigade. That was where John had prayed, sung hymns, been taught to march, and learned to see this combination as entirely natural. Onward Christian soldiers and all that.
There had been no religious books to speak of in the family home where he’d grown up except the Bible, which John was ashamed to say he’d found as dry as dust, and an old copy of <em>The Pilgrim’s Progress</em>, which he’d fared a little better with. He’d not had much idea, back then, what Bunyan’s allegorically-named characters were meant to represent, but found that he enjoyed the tales and fancied that he’d caught their basic moral gist. He’d even got halfway through Bunyan’s <em>Holy War</em>, the first place that he’d come across the name “Mansoul”, before he’d given up in bafflement and boredom. All of this had only underlined the notion that had been instilled in him by Boy’s Brigade – ten minutes’ prayer after an hour’s drill practice in the upper church hall, blue-black military caps on bowed young heads – the sense that Christianity and marching were bound up together inextricably. He was no stranger, then, to the association between warfare and religion, but that, surely, was a thing for proper wars, with soldiers who had proper uniforms. The fellow on the landing, a civilian blowing himself up and taking others with him in the name of God, that was a different matter. That was neither warfare nor religion as John comprehended them.
Also, whatever Boroughs-of-tomorrow the perpetually exploding man had wandered back to 1959 from, that was not a future that John comprehended either. How could his scuffed, peaceful neighbourhood produce something like that in only sixty years or so? Though John had been on various sorties into the twenty-first century with the Dead Dead Gang since first hooking up with them, he realised that he’d no more than the barest understanding of how people felt and thought and lived during those future decades, anymore than he could claim to know much about France simply because he’d died there. All he knew was that the sight of that half-man, half-Roman candle made him fearful for the Boroughs, and the England, and the whole world that was yet to come. Throughout the fight between the builders and the drama in the billiard hall, John had found that he couldn’t take his mind off that illuminated and fragmenting figure, shuffling on the wooden walkways of a Heaven that it couldn’t have conceived of or anticipated, wrapped forever in the flames of its own savage martyrdom.
Indeed, not until John had realised where Phyll Painter meant to take the gang after escaping from the snooker parlour had he started to pay much attention to their present undertaking, unable to banish the compelling vision of the man-explosion from his thoughts. The English Civil War, though, was John’s hobby in the afterlife, much in the same way Reggie Bowler had a craze for cars or Marjorie liked books. If anything could stop the image of the walking detonation from preoccupying him, it was the thought of tunnelling into the evening of June 13<sup>th</sup>, 1645, here in Marefair at Hazelrigg House, or, as locals called it, Cromwell House.
In the brief interlude between his death and his encounter with the Dead Dead Gang, a few subjective years at most, John had pursued his interest independently. He’d twice been out to Naseby, once an hour or two before the battle and once during, and he’d travelled up the Wellingborough Road to Ecton for a look at how the Royalist prisoners were treated afterwards. He’d never previously paid a visit, though, to the occasion he was currently observing: fresh from his promotion to lieutenant-general, rising Parliamentary star Oliver Williams-alias-Cromwell, bivouacked in Marefair on the night preceding the decisive battle of the English Civil War.
John could remember how alone he’d felt in those years following his death, before encountering Phyll and the gang. His journey back from France had been accomplished with surprising speed. One moment he’d been standing in the shell-pocked mud, staring appalled at his own offal, glistening as it spilled from the burst body at his feet, desperately wishing that he’d lived to see his home again. The next, he’d found himself stood in the middle of the green behind St. Peter’s Church, now grey and silvery in the colourless expanses of the ghost-seam. Spilled-milk clouds drifted at anchor in a sky of blazing summer platinum, and John had bounded down the grassy slope towards the terrace at the bottom, leaving a parade of muddy soldiers in the air behind him.
Yes, he’d seen his mam and even seen his sister who was visiting with her two little girls, but since they’d not been able to see John he’d found the whole encounter both frustrating and depressing. What had made it worse was that his mam and sister, obviously, didn’t know that he was dead yet. When his sis had started reading out a letter John had sent home to her daughter Jackie, talking about all the fun he’d have the next time he was home on leave, with all of them sat round the family dinner table, tucking into mam’s bake pudden, John had broken down. His mam, sat in her armchair up the corner, had smiled fondly as her only daughter read the letter, scrawled in pencil on the tiny pages of a jotter, clearly looking forward to bake pudden with her sons as much as John had been the night he’d written to his niece. She didn’t know that the reunion feast would never come. She didn’t know that her son’s ghost was sitting on the lumpy horsehair sofa next to her, weeping with helplessness for her and for himself and for the entire rotten business of that bloody war. Unable to take any more, John had streamed through the closed front door, away along Elephant Lane towards Black Lion Hill, commencing his short-lived career as a rough sleeper.
Not that John had been as rough as most of that sort were, by any means. He’d always kept himself presentable while he was still alive, and thus approached the afterlife with a Boy’s Weekly sense of military discipline. He’d made himself a den in the unused round tower jutting incongruously from condemned Victorian business premises upon the far side of Black Lion Hill. He’d chosen the location partly from a sense that proper ghosts should haunt somewhere that looked appropriately creepy like a turret, and partly because his previous choice, St. Peter’s Church, seemed to be overrun by ghosts already. John had met at least fifteen on his first tentative excursion to the Norman-renovated Saxon building. By the gate in Marefair there had been the spectre of a crippled beggar-woman, talking in a form of English so archaic and so thickly accented that John could barely understand a word of it. Around the church itself John had met phantom pastors and parishioners from several different eras, and encountered a geologist named Smith who claimed to have identified the limestone ridge that stretched from Bath to Lincolnshire, called the Jurassic Way. According to the affable and chatty soul, it was the way that this primordial cross-country footpath met the river Nene which had determined where Northampton would be most conveniently situated. Smith himself, coincidentally, had died here in Marefair while passing through the town and was commemorated by a plaque fixed to the church wall, which he’d proudly pointed out to John.
After that limited exposure to the ghost-seam’s other occupants, John had decided on a policy of keeping for the most part to himself. He’d watched the wraiths coming and going from the window of his tower-room, but they’d seemed to him peculiar things, some of them monstrous, so that he’d not felt inclined to seek their company. For instance, John had one day spotted the giant wading-bird made out of stilts and rushes that he’d seen again just recently, up on the balconies outside the Works. Upon that first occasion he had watched it striding round St. Peter’s Church in a full circuit before struggling through a wall of thousand-year-old stones and out of sight. Back then he hadn’t had a clue what it might be, and was no wiser now. The wood-beaked creature that left puddles of ghost-water everywhere it set its spindly legs served only as an illustration of the half-world’s oddness, which had prompted John to take an isolated, self-sufficient path in all his dealings with the afterlife.
He’d found that he liked his own company, liked planning expeditions such as those he’d made to Naseby, even though his second visit halfway through the actual battle had been horrible and made him glad that he’d been done in by a shell and not a pike. In general, he’d felt lively and adventurous during those early months of being dead, and it had been around then John had realised that he was no longer wearing his army uniform. He’d just looked down one day and found that he was in black knee-length shorts, a jumper that his mam had knitted and the shoes and socks he’d worn when he’d been twelve. He realised now, of course, that his ghost-body had been slowly gravitating to the form that it had been the happiest with in life, but at the time he’d simply been delighted to discover that he was a lad again, and didn’t care to speculate how this had come about.
He’d thrown himself into his solitary escapades with renewed vigour, always choosing the most daring situations to investigate, fancying himself as a dead Douglas Fairbanks Junior. When that British bomber had crashed at the top of Gold Street, John had watched it passing overhead from his tower’s window at the foot of Marefair and had straight away gone racing through the sparkling dark along the east-west avenue, chased by a scrum of after-image schoolboys as he’d rushed to see if anyone was dead, if there were any new ghosts stumbling about confused, needing advice.
As it had turned out, nobody was killed by the huge aeroplane’s astonishing descent, the crew and pilot having already bailed out and the sole casualty being a late-night Gold Street cyclist who’d sustained a broken arm. The only ghost other than John upon the scene that evening was that of the plane itself. Amazingly, although its substance had been almost totally destroyed on impact, the ethereal framework of the aircraft had been driven down into the misty topsoil of the ghost-seam, so that underneath the surface of the street a phantom bomber was at rest and perfectly intact. It had been while John sat there in its cockpit, shouting out commands to his imaginary crewmen and pretending he was on a bombing-mission that, embarrassingly, he had found himself surrounded by four snickering ghost-children who had introduced themselves as the Dead Dead Gang.
Standing now in Hazelrigg House, watching Cromwell writing in his journal as the long, last rays of the day’s sun were spent outside, John smiled as he recalled that first adventure with the other ghost-kids, or “The Subterranean Aeroplane Affair” as Phyllis had insisted that they afterwards refer to it. Larking about there at the controls of the immaterial craft, the spectral urchins had discovered that they could make it move slowly forward by merely pretending they were flying it, provided they pretended hard enough. Although they couldn’t get up enough speed to break the surface tension of the streets and take the plane back up into the air, they found that they could glide round underground at a serene and stately pace, and even execute a dive into the geologic strata underneath the town by leaning on the joystick. Travelling through clay and rock, though, hadn’t been much fun, and so they’d mostly kept to a flight corridor that was a few feet down beneath the surface. Here they’d droned through tunnels, crypts and cellars and endured a comically disgusting episode while taxiing along a vintage iron sewer-bore. At last, laughing at their own ingenuity, they’d steered their phantom aircraft carefully into the space presented by a subterranean speakeasy, on the corner of George Row and Wood Hill, which, bizarrely, had been built to replicate the fuselage and seating of a passenger plane and so made a perfect parking-place for their ghost-vessel.
John had given up his independent ways upon the spot, throwing his lot in with these hooligans who’d managed to make death into their funfair. He’d not been back to his lonely turret-room since that hilarious night, preferring the nomadic life of the ghost-children as they capered through the decades and dimensions, moving between purgatory and paradise, from hidden den to hidden den. He liked the crew he’d fallen in with a great deal, even if Reggie Bowler sometimes seemed to squint resentfully from underneath his hat-brim and you seldom heard more than a word or two out of Drowned Marjorie.
He got on best with Phyllis Painter. In a funny sort of way he thought that they might even be in love. He saw the admiration in her bright eyes every time she looked at him and hoped that she could see the same in his, although he knew that what there was between the pair of them could go no further, not without the whole thing being ruined. As John saw it, what he had with Phyllis was perhaps the very best of love in that it was a child’s game of love, an infants’ school idea of what it meant to be somebody’s boy or girlfriend. It was heartfelt and unsullied by the smallest cloud of practical experience. Before he’d died aged barely twenty, John had several girlfriends and had even had it off with one of them. Likewise, although he’d never asked her outright, he got the impression that Phyll Painter had lived to a ripe old age and had at one point even possibly been married. So to some extent they’d both been through the grown-up part of love, the animal delight of sex, the troughs and torments of a passion off the boil.
They’d both known adult love and yet had opted for the junior version, for the thrill of an eternal playground crush, romance that hadn’t even progressed to behind the bike-sheds yet. They had elected to taste nothing but the dew upon love’s polished skin, and leave the actual fruit unbitten. That was how John felt about it, anyway, and he suspected it was probably the same with Phyll. At any rate, whatever the success of their relationship was due to, they’d loved in their fashion for some several timeless decades, and John hoped they might keep on like that until the very doorstep of infinity.
All things considered, John’s death suited him as well or better than his life had. The wayward agendas of the ghost-gang, scampering from one absurd adventure to another, meant that John was never bored. With the grey blush of every phantom morning there was always something new. Or, in the case of Bill and Reggie’s plan to tame a spectral mammoth, something very old.
Take all of this to-do over the ghost-gang’s latest member, for example. While John felt, as Phyllis did, that being in charge of the temporarily-dead infant was a grave responsibility, he also felt that this was turning out to be their grandest episode to date. In fact, John had good reason to take Michael Warren’s plight even more seriously than Phyllis did, and to be even more concerned about the toddler’s safety. He was buggered, though, if he’d let that stop him enjoying an extraordinary outing: demon-kings like plunging Messerschmitts! Ghost-storms and deathmongers! This was the kind of dashing spree he’d fondly hoped a war might be, before he’d found out otherwise. This was more what he’d had in mind, the very picture-paper essence of adventure with no scattered entrails and no grieving mums to turn a radio-serial romp into a tragedy. This was the best bits, all the spills and spectacle without the mortal consequence. John marvelled as he thought of the colossal builders, bleeding gold and lashing at each other with their billiard cues on the unfolded acres of the Mayorhold, then broke off that train of thought on realising that it led him back to the exploding man, the stumbling phosphorescence on the balcony with his suspended nails and rivets, his soiled trousers, his evaporating tears.
To rid himself of the recurring apparition, John switched his attention to their current whereabouts, the downstairs parlour of Hazelrigg House, an ominous June evening in the mid-seventeenth century. Having emerged from underneath a gleaming rosewood table, the group stood assembled at the spacious chamber’s eastern end, all taking in the monumental presence sitting at the table’s further edge, one side of his great griffin snout lit by the sunset falling through the leaded windows from outside, his warts in shadow.
John, of course, had recognised old Ironsides from the previous occasions when the plucky youth had visited the dark days of the Civil War. He’d witnessed Cromwell, riding out with General Fairfax and his major-general of foot-soldiers, Philip Skippon, on the slopes of Naseby Ridge at first light on June 14<sup>th</sup> – or tomorrow morning from John’s current point of view. Cromwell on that occasion had seemed giddy with delight as he inspected the terrain between the ridge and Dust Hill, getting on a mile off to the north. Cantering back and forth in his black armour, he had burst out laughing intermittently, as if by looking at the land he saw the battle in advance and chuckled over the foreseen misfortunes of his enemies. John had seen Cromwell with another face as well, a semblance cast from flint, unblinking in the screaming heart of battle as his cavalry pursued the Royalist horse almost to Leicester, cutting down the hindmost by the score. Whatever mood they were expressing, he’d have known those features anywhere.
Phyllis and Bill quite clearly also knew who they were looking at, and so did Reggie Bowler, who was nodding knowingly with a wide grin across his freckled face. Although Drowned Marjorie remained impassive, staring flatly through her National Health spectacles, John had an inkling that somebody as surprisingly well-read as her might well know more about the lank-haired man than all the rest of the gang put together. That left Michael Warren – Michael Warren, son of Tommy Warren, John reflected to himself with an amazed shake of the head – as the one person in the slowly darkening room without a clue regarding what was going on. John was about to venture his own explanation for the nipper’s benefit when Phyllis intervened and beat him to the punch.
“There. See ’im? That’s the Lord Protector, that wiz. That’s Oliver Cromwell.”
It was painfully apparent that the name meant nothing to the little boy, thus giving John a chance to stick his oar in after all and give his expertise an airing.
“Where we are now, it’s the 1640s. Charles the First wiz on the throne, and hardly anybody thinks he’s making a good job of it. For one thing he’s brought in this tax, Ship Money, which wiz paid direct to him and makes him less dependent on the English Parliament. Nobody likes the sound of that, especially since they know Charles wiz matey with the Catholic Church and may be plotting to sneak in Catholicism by the back door. Bear in mind that all of this wiz happening in an England where the rich and poor have grown apart since the beginning of the 1600s, when the gentry had begun enclosing common land and taking people’s livelihoods away. You can imagine how cross and suspicious everybody wiz. England wiz like a powder keg, just waiting to go off.”
John paused here as an image of the detonating man-bomb shuffled weeping and unbidden through his mind, then carried on.
“In the last months of 1641, the whole of Ireland wiz in flames with a rebellion against English rule. The rebels were destroying or else seizing back the land that had been given to Protestant settlers, killing many of these settlers in the bargain. Back in England, this wiz looked on as a Popish plot that Charles the First wiz in collusion with. Rebels in Parliament published a <em>Grand Remonstrance</em> airing all their grievances with Charles, which only served to push both camps further apart. In January, 1642, the King left London to the rebels and began to gather armies for a civil war that by then everybody knew wiz coming. God, that must have been a terror. From one end of England to the other, families must have been on their knees and praying that they’d get through the next years without too many members dying.”
That was certainly how it had been for John’s clan during 1939. He watched the figure at the room’s far end arrest its writings for a moment with quill poised a fraction of an inch above the page, perhaps deliberating over word-choice, before dipping once more to the vellum and continuing its row of Gothic curls and slanting, marching uprights. John supposed that his own family’s prayers upon the eve of war must have been heeded, for the most part. Everyone lived through it, after all, with present company excepted.
Looking round, John realised that the other members of the Dead Dead Gang were waiting patiently for him to carry on. Even Drowned Marjorie, behind her jam-jar lenses, appeared interested.
“Anyway, that fellow over there, Oliver Cromwell, wiz born to a fairly well-off family in Huntingdon. Their name wiz Williams, but they were descended from Henry the Eighth’s adviser Thomas Cromwell and had taken on his name, grateful for all the good he’d done the family as the bloke who’d managed Henry’s great Protestant Reformation, and defiant at the way he’d later been beheaded for his troubles. Ollie over there calls himself ‘Williams, alias Cromwell’ all the way through life, but I suppose that Cromwell has more of a ring to it than Williams.
“He has a wife, a family and a comfortable life, but I suspect he’d always wanted more than that. In 1628, aged twenty-nine, he entered politics as the MP for Huntingdon, and by the time the Civil War wiz brewing some fourteen years later he wiz one of the King’s sternest critics in what they called the Long Parliament. When Charles requested help from Cambridge, Cromwell stormed straight down there with two hundred armed men, bullied his way into Cambridge Castle and grabbed all their armaments. Not only that, he also stopped them from transferring any silver to help out the Royalists – and this was at a time when almost everybody else was dithering about what should be done. By seizing the initiative, Cromwell began to look like good material for the Parliamentary cause, and was promoted from a captain to a colonel.
“He was busy, in them next few years, dealing with Royalists in King’s Lynn and Lowestoft and then securing all the bridges on the River Ouse. With that done, he went on to fortify the Nene – we can go outside in a minute, and I’ll show you what I mean. Anyway, Cromwell proved himself in scraps like Gainsborough in Lincolnshire, and battles like the one on Marston Moor near Manchester in 1644, where Cromwell led the cavalry. Bouts like that led to Parliamentary General Sir Thomas Fairfax making Cromwell the lieutenant-general of horse at a war-council that took place …”
Here John paused and pretended, for effect, to search his memory for some venerable date before continuing with, “… ooh, it must have been an hour or two ago. Today, June 13<sup>th</sup>, 1645. For Mister Cromwell over there, today’s the turning point of his whole life. He’s finally been given power enough to carry out the task he’s got in mind, and straight away he’s been sent to Northamptonshire to deal with Royalist Forces under King Charles’s son, Prince Rupert. Rupert has just taken Leicester by siege from the Parliamentary forces, and when Cromwell turned up at the Roundhead camp near Kislingbury this morning, just a mile or two southwest of here, they greeted him with cheers. Last night a Parliamentary advance guard surprised some Royalists close to Naseby village, five miles south of Market Harborough on the edge of Leicestershire. Before that happened neither side had realised quite how close their armies wiz to one another, but now everybody’s worked out that they’re in for an almighty battle come tomorrow morning. That’s why all the Roundhead troops wiz overjoyed when Cromwell turned up: he’s the only bugger within hundred mile of here that’s looking forward to it.”
On an impulse, John detached himself from the grey cluster of the Dead Dead Gang and crossed the varnished floorboards to the room’s far side, so that he stood behind the seated figure, raven-hunched over its writings. The unusually sharp sight that being dead afforded John detected three or four fat lice that foraged in the greasy undergrowth of the lieutenant-general’s thinning scalp. He’d never been as close as this to Cromwell, having only seen him gallop past during his previous visits to the actual field of battle. He could almost feel the thrumming dynamo-vibrations of the future Lord Protector’s personality filling the air between them, and wished he could breathe in Cromwell’s scent without the odourless encumbrance of the ghost-seam being in the way, just to determine what variety of animal the man might truly be. Bill interrupted John’s close-up inspection here by calling from the chamber’s far side, where he stood with Phyllis and the others.
“What’s ’e writin’?”
It was a good question, and John transferred his attention from the escapades of Cromwell’s head-lice to the page across which the man’s crow-quill moved. It took John several moments’ scrutiny before he had the hang of the peculiar cursive script, then he glanced up as he addressed the gang.
“It looks like it’s the first draft of a letter to his wife. I’ll read you what I can of it.”
Placing his hands on his bare knees John angled himself forward, leaning over Cromwell’s shoulder to peruse the missive’s contents.
“ ‘My most dear Elizabeth – I write with what I trust is welcome news. Your fond and constant husband is this day appointed to lieutenant-general of horse by Sir Tom Fairfax, and at once despatched to attend some small matter in Northamptonshire, from whereabouts I pen these lines. I am, you may be sure, of a good humour and feel certain we shall have a fair result upon the morrow, but please do not think that this promotion tempts me to vainglory. Any victory is surely that of God alone, nor is my elevation of importance, save in that I am enabled to more vigorously work His will.
“ ‘Now, let us have no more of your unworthy husband’s bragging, and instead hear tidings of more estimable things. How fares our humble Huntingdonshire cot, that is forever in my thoughts with you and all our little ones about your skirts, stood at its door? Bridget, I know, will scoff at being called a little one, and so will Dick, but they are as such in my thoughts and ever shall be. Oh, Elizabeth, that I might have you by me now, for your sweet presence lifts my soul more than all laurels and high office ever could. All that I do, I do for God and in the same kind do for you, my pretty Beth, that you and our dear children might live in a godly land, safe from the tyrannies of Antichrist. I know that our young Oliver would say the same, were it not for the cruel camp-fever this last year. Please God that by my efforts shall his sacrifice, with those of many more Parliamentarian lads, be made worthwhile.
“ ‘I should be pleased to hear of how the garden comes along, for it is a fine thing about this time of year, and with the present tumult I am feared I shall miss all of it if you will not describe it for me. In a like vein, tell me of your least affairs, your travels to and fro about the town and your most minor inconveniences, that I may pretend I hear again your voice and its familiar turns of phrase. Tell little Frances that her father promises to bring her a fine pair of shoes back from Northampton, and tell Henry I am confident that he will do his duty and make sure the dogs are exercised. Now that I think on it, I wish that you would send me a good wooden pipe, for all the clay ones to be had about these parts are easy broken and …’ That’s more or less how far he’s got, and it seems he’s just going on about his home and family. To be honest, he don’t strike me as a bad bloke, not from reading this.”
John straightened up, beginning to view Cromwell with a different attitude. Across the room with its pitch-painted beams and copper ornaments, Marjorie shook her head.
“Well, I don’t know. He don’t sound as if he’s all there to me. I mean, he knows how rough this battle’s gunna be tomorrow, and just look at him: as calm as anything, asking her how the garden’s getting on. It’s like he don’t think any of it’s real, like it’s a play he’s watching through to see the end. You ask me, he’s got summat missin’.”
Everybody gaped at Marjorie, astonished less by the perceptive point she’d made than by the sheer amount of words she’d used in making it. No one had ever heard her say so much before, and nor had they suspected her of harbouring such strongly held opinions. John considered what she’d said for a few moments and concluded that the tubby little girl was more than likely right. In his own letters home, John had sometimes made light of his grim circumstances, it was true, but not to the extent that Cromwell was engaged in doing. John had never written to his mam about attending ‘some small matter’ off in Normandy, or rattled on about bake-pudden to the point where you forgot there was a war on. Cromwell’s writings were those of a normal man in normal times, and on both counts you couldn’t help but feel that this was knowing misrepresentation. Gazing at Drowned Marjorie across the chamber through the failing light, John nodded soberly.
“I think you might have something there, Marge. Anyway, it doesn’t look like he’ll be doing much in the next little while. Why don’t we go outside while it’s still light and see what’s happening?”
There was a mutter of assent. Leaving the statue-still lieutenant-general to his writings, a dark shape losing its definition in a darkening room, the children flocked out through Hazelrigg House’s thick walls of coursed rubble to the street beyond, where there was much activity. Marefair, with low but well-appointed buildings to each side of it, bustled with life in a tin sunset. The last drip of daylight glinted from the points atop iron helmets, from the bundled blades of the long pikes that an old man was just then carrying into Pike Lane for sharpening. It flashed upon the bridles of fatigued and steaming horses, sparked from the tall mullioned windows of Hazelrigg House, dotting the ghost-seam’s murk with points of brightness, dabs of white relieving thick umber impasto on the day’s completed canvas. Delicately beautiful and subtly disturbing; it was the fragile illumination just before a summer storm, or during an eclipse. Tired Roundhead soldiers slogged through the well-trodden mud of the main concourse, looking for a tavern or else stabling their bony mounts, while such few local men and women as there were about Marefair did all they could to keep out of the troopers’ way. John saw a dog kicked with a Parliamentary boot; a pock-marked youth cuffed to one side by a stout leather glove.
On every countenance, both military and civilian, was the same look of profound and paralysing dread. It only underlined Marjorie’s point about the calmness of the man who still sat writing in the room they’d just vacated, with his face like a heraldic beast and his detachment in stark contrast to the fearfulness afflicting everybody else upon this otherwise serene June evening. These were monstrous times, in which only a monster might feel comfortable. Somewhere behind John, Bill began to sing what sounded like a fragment from a catchy song, although it wasn’t one that John had ever heard before.
“… and I would rather be anywhere else than here today.”
Bill broke off with a rueful, knowing chuckle. He and Reggie Bowler wandered over to the street’s far side where they distracted themselves with the manufacture of small dust devils by racing round in circles. They weren’t doing very well until Drowned Marjorie went over to assist them, at which point they raised a whirlwind big enough to make at least one burly Roundhead step back in surprise and cross himself. Meanwhile, Phyllis and John were left in charge of Michael Warren, standing on the funny wooden duckboards outside Cromwell House. The infant turned his curly blonde head back and forth, trying to work out where he was. Finally he looked up at John and Phyllis.
“Wiz this Marefair? I can’t tell what bit of it I’m looking at.”
Phyllis took Michael’s hand – she had a way with kids, John thought, as if she might have had a couple of her own – and crouched beside the infant as she turned him round until he faced due west.
“Don’t be so daft. O’ course yer can. Look, that dayn on the left wiz Peter’s Church. Yer know that, don’t yer? And next door, even this long agoo, there’s the Black Lion.”
John peered in the same direction that the toddler was being pointed to. A little further down Marefair on their side of the street, St. Peter’s Church seemed much the way it had during John’s life, sombrely overlooking Parliamentary battle preparations with the same impartiality that it would show three centuries later as it watched the unmanned bomber plunging towards Gold Street. Next door to the church on the same side, as Phyllis had just pointed out, stood a two-storey wooden hostelry from which there hung a signboard that declared the place to be the Black Lyon Inne, although the animal depicted on the board looked more like a charred dog.
Only when John allowed his eyes to wander past the tavern, down the slope on which it stood and on towards the town’s west bridge, was he presented with a view markedly different from the same scene in the twentieth century. The bridge itself, a wooden structure as opposed to the stone hump that would come later, had been pulled down and rebuilt a year or two ago on Cromwell’s orders. It was now a massive drawbridge that had iron chains and winding mechanisms so that it could be pulled up if Royalists should attempt to cross the Nene. As the three young spooks stood and watched, a heavy-laden wagon creaked across its timbers and rolled on towards what looked to be a mill in the southwest while all the day bled from the sky above. As odd as this fortification seemed to modern eyes, however, it was instantly forgotten as the ghost-kids’ gaze crept further right, until they overlooked the site on which the railway station would one day be raised. Both John and Phyllis were familiar with the spectacle, but Michael Warren gasped aloud.
“What wiz it? It black-blocks the sky out so I can’t see the Victorious Park.”
Phyll laughed and shook her head, so that the after-image of her swinging bangs transformed it briefly to that of a wilted dandelion.
“Victoria Park won’t be there for abayt two ’undred years, and neither will the railway station. That’s Northampton Castle, what they named the station after. Get a good look at it while yer can. It’s been ’ere since eleven-’undred, by this bridge for ’alf a thousand years, and in another sixteen it’ll be knocked down.”
John nodded gravely as he took in the enormity of the dark pile before him, the oppressive bulk of its square towers, the corrugated and judgemental brow of its long, frowning battlements against the silver-lode of the horizon. Sprawling and immense, the brooding structure was encircled by the black scar of a moat, and on the plunging trench’s far edge sputtering firebrands that appeared to be as tall as John himself were set to either side of the great gateway, a stone mouth with its portcullis teeth bared, clenched in agony or rage. A curdling mix of light and smoke dribbled up from the torches across high, rough walls where archery-slits squinted out untrustingly into a gathering dusk.
Upon the open land around the edifice’s south side, at the margins of the dirt road that continued Gold Street and Marefair’s line west past the converted bridge, a hundred or so men of the New Model Army were erecting ragged tents on the parched summer grass. Retrieving deadwood and dry bracken from the copses in Foot Meadow just across the river, the bedraggled troops were lighting campfires, chalk-white smudges flaring here and there about the castle’s twilight flank, islands of faint cheer floated on an ocean of approaching night. Despite the muffle of the ghost-seam, on a frail westerly breeze John heard guffaws and curses, a lone fiddle tuning up, the firewood’s damp spit or the crack of an exploding knot. Horses were whinnying their anxious lullabies, silenced and hidden by the campfires’ drifting smoulder when the wind changed, just as it was changing through the length and breadth of England on this fraught and dangerous night.
Whispering as though awe-struck by the vista, or as though he thought that the foot soldiers shambling past along Marefair could hear him, Michael Warren looked from John to Phyllis as he spoke.
“Why dig they knock it drown?”
John grimaced.
“Well, you see, the battle out at Naseby that they’re going to fight tomorrow morning, Cromwell and the Parliamentary army win the day. The Civil War limps on for several months, but after Naseby there wiz no chance of the Royalists coming out on top. Once Parliament has won, Cromwell starts calling all the shots. Within four years, in 1649, he’ll have King Charles the First beheaded and turn England into a Republic that will last until his death in 1658. His son Richard succeeds him, but he abdicates within the year. By 1660, you’ll have Charles the Second made king and the monarchy restored. This new King Charles will hate Northampton, so as soon as he’s had everybody who conspired in his dad’s downfall executed, he’ll demand Northampton Castle be demolished.”
Michael looked perplexed.
“Why wizzle he do that?”
Here Phyllis chimed in from where she was crouching on the toddler’s other side.
“Just take a gander at that bloody drawbridge there, yer’ll ’ave yer answer. This place wiz a Parliamentary strong’old in the Civil War, and we backed Cromwell all the way. I ’spect that Charles the Second blamed us for the way that we’d ’elped get ’is father’s ’ead chopped orf, especially wi’ Naseby bein’ in this county. Come the restoration o’ the monarchy and we wiz on the ayts with England, good an’ proper.”
John considered this, glancing behind them back up Marefair. Reggie, Bill and Marjorie were still creating pygmy dust-storms, to the consternation of the passers-by in these times where each natural phenomenon was looked on as an omen of unrest, as if omens were needed. Satisfied that their gang-mates weren’t causing too much mischief, John turned his attention back to Phyllis and the infant.
“To be fair, Phyll, we were in this country’s bad books long before the Restoration. We’ve been seen as troublemakers here for centuries, at least since all the rebel students during the twelve-hundreds who provoked Henry the Third to sack the place. Then from the thirteen-hundreds we had Lollards here, more or less preaching that ideas of sin were all made up by clergymen for keeping down the poor. During the Civil War this wiz a hotbed of extremists, Muggletonians, Moravians, Fifth Monarchists, Ranters and Quakers – and these weren’t the Quakers who are pacifists and own all of the chocolate companies. These were fanatics calling for the overthrow of worldly kingdoms in God’s name.
“And all these sects, although they had big differences, they all made much of how Jesus had been a carpenter and all of his apostles lowly working men. The way they saw it, Christianity wiz a religion of the poor and the downtrodden, and it promised that one day the rich and godless would be done away with. Ever since the early sixteen-hundreds, when the gentry were permitted to enclose what had been common land, the rich folk had been doing well, the ‘middling sort’ like Cromwell had been struggling to keep afloat, and the poor people had been starving. It wiz during these times that you first heard everybody saying how the rich got richer and the poor got poorer, and there wiz more people being turned to beggars every day. Around the century’s mid-years, like we’re in now, there would be tens of thousands of what they called masterless men roaming round the country, vagabonds and tinkers answering to no one. All it took wiz a bright spark like Cromwell to work out how all these angry paupers could be put to use.”
John gestured to the scores of Roundhead soldiers who were trudging along Marefair, or sat baking spuds around their campfires on the grounds beside the hulking castle.
“I suppose one of the reasons why Northampton took to Cromwell wiz that the poor people here wiz as rebellious as you could find just about anywhere in England. This had been the first place to protest the land enclosures, with an uprising led by a chap called Captain Pouch. The uprising wiz quashed, of course, and Pouch wiz chopped to bits, but the resentments that would lead to civil war in fifty years wiz nowhere stronger than here in the Midlands. Now, I dare say a good many round here played along with Cromwell because they were frightened of him, but I bet there were a lot more who’d been praying for someone like him to come along. In 1643 there was a feller from Northamptonshire who’d said ‘I hope within this year to see never a gentleman in England’. Around here we thought of Cromwell as, quite literally, a Godsend. It’s no wonder that we got the job of kitting out his army with thousands of pairs of boots.”
Here Michael Warren put in his two-penn’orth, just to show that he’d been following the conversation.
“Why wiz we so poor, then, if the people who made shoes had all that work?”
John was about to answer this surprisingly sharp question when a cackling Phyllis Painter beat him to it.
“Ha! That’s because bloody Cromwell never paid us for the bloody boots! Once we’d ’elped get ’im into power ’e turned on us same as ’e turned on everybody else who’d been ’is mate when times were rough, the miserable old bugger. While we’re on the subject, d’yer reckon ’e’ll ’ave finished writin’ to ’is missus yet? It don’t look like there’ll be a lot more gooin’ on ayt ’ere, other than soldiers getting’ sloshed and chasin’ after ’ores. We should look in upon old Ironsides before we move on.”
John nodded, glancing back along Marefair through a descended gloaming that still clinked with reins and scabbards, the gloom punctuated here and there by a dull pewter gleam from peaked round helmet or iron musket-barrel. On the dusty boards outside Hazelrigg House, Bill had enlisted Marjorie and Reggie’s help in manufacturing an even bigger whirlwind than their previous attempts. The three of them were racing furiously in a solid ring of after-images around the knees of an unlucky and astonished broadsheet-seller. Wailing in confusion and religious terror, the poor fellow couldn’t see the children and was only conscious of the sudden wind from nowhere, tearing pamphlets from his grasp and spinning them into the dark above him like outsized confetti. John was chuckling despite himself as he replied to Phyllis.
“Yeah, I reckon that you’re right. We can leave your Bill and the others to their monkey business, since they look as if they’re having fun.”
Each taking one of Michael Warren’s hands, Phyll and John led the foundling back towards Hazelrigg House amidst a fluttering rain of the dismayed street-vendor’s tumbling tracts. Scanning a folded sheet already fallen to the floor, John noted that it was entitled <em>Prophecy of the White King</em> and seemingly foretold a violent end for Charles the First, based on astrology and various prophecies attributed to Merlin. Given that the leaflet bore tomorrow’s date and was apparently fresh off the printing press, John smiled and gave the publisher ten out of ten for timing, even if the source of his predictions seemed a little flimsy. Out of habit, John made an attempt to kick the pamphlet to one side, feeling like a buffoon as his foot passed straight through it ineffectually and he remembered he was dead. He only hoped that Phyllis hadn’t noticed.
As luck had it, Phyllis was at that moment distracted by a rather pretty living man who was approaching the front door of Hazelrigg House just ahead of them. His long hair, girlish to John’s way of thinking, fell in curling waves around the high white collar that he wore above black armour, plated on the arms and shoulders so that it resembled a fantastic beetle carapace. A sheathed sword swung at his left hip. The gallant’s face, its plumpness offset by a well-trimmed beard and a moustache, was one that John felt he had seen before, perhaps in combat out at Naseby, though a name refused to come to him.
John watched as the chap rapped on the stout wood door and was immediately bidden enter. Not wishing to miss the introductions, John yanked Phyll and Michael through the thick stone wall into the inner chamber, where he noticed that three tallow candles in a branching holder had been lit during their absence. There was something feverish about the tilting shadows as they lurched across the bare white plaster walls and lunged at the complaining black beams that held up the ceiling. Cromwell was still seated where they’d left him on the far side of the table, closing the front cover of his journal now and looking up without expression as the young man entered.
An approximation of a smile twitched briefly into being upon Cromwell’s lips and then was gone. Not rising to his feet to meet the newcomer as John might have expected, the new Parliamentary lieutenant-general spoke only the man’s name by way of greeting.
“Henry. It does my heart good to see thee.”
Henry Ireton. With only a little prompting John had placed the long-haired chap, whom he remembered that he had indeed seen previously, or to be more exact would see tomorrow morning, getting wounded and then captured as he led his regiment up the left flank at Naseby Field. The young man nodded courteously to the still-seated Cromwell.
“As it does mine own to see thee, Master Cromwell. My congratulations upon your appointment as lieutenant-general of horse. I was myself promoted as a commissary-general not a week since. It seems that a man may of a sudden rise or fall amidst the boiling waters of our present conflict.”
Ireton’s voice was light, at least contrasted with that of the older man, who clasped his hands together on the table and sat back a little in his chair as he responded.
“By God’s grace, lad. Only by His grace are we raised up, as by His grace shall our opponent be cast down upon the morrow. Praise be, Henry. Praise be unto God.”
In John’s opinion Ireton looked a bit uneasy here, even as he was nodding in agreement with the seated general’s ardent proclamation.
“Yes. Yes, of course. Praise be to God. Do you believe that we shall have the day? The prince may be spurred on by his late victory in Leicester …”
Cromwell waved one fleshy hand dismissively, then laced its fingers with the other, resting on the polished tabletop before him.
“I do not believe that we shall have the day, but rather know it in my bones. It is my destiny that I should win, just as it is King Charlie’s destiny that he should fail. I know it just as surely as I know that Christ hath promised our salvation, as He hath so done with all of His elect. I must ask thee how thou dost doubt God’s providence, that levelleth the cities of the plain, and bringeth plague upon the house of Pharaoh?”
Looking over-warm inside his armour on this summer evening, Ireton tugged at his starched collar as though in a vain attempt to make it looser. Even though the younger man ranked only slightly beneath Cromwell, John could see the deference and nervousness in Ireton’s manner as he struggled for a suitable rejoinder. Phyllis, John and Michael went and squatted on the lower steps of a contorted spiral staircase over in one corner of the room, the better to observe this somehow threatening and yet compelling interview. At last, the bearded man risked a reply.
“Think not that I do doubt the Lord, but only that mine confidence in such predestinations be less sturdy than thine own. Is there not risk that we may be complacent in assurances of our salvation, and in this way be made negligent in our pursuit of faith?”
Now, for the first time, Cromwell curled his meaty lips into a smile that showed his grey teeth and was genuinely dreadful to behold. The midnight marbles of his eyes glittered beneath half-lowered lids.
“Dost thou think me some Antinomian heretic, that sins, and lazes in the sun, secure in his belief that he be saved, no matter whatsoe’er that he be wicked? Though I be convinced that all the times to come are surely writ already, nor do I shirk from my part in bringing them to be. Oh, trust in God by all means, Henry. Trust in God, but do not fail to keep thy powder dry.”
Here Cromwell laughed, a startling bark that rumbled gradually off to nothing, like a thunderclap. Ireton, who’d started visibly at the laugh’s onset, seemed now to be reassured by his superior’s good humour. Smiling forcedly at Cromwell’s oft-repeated joke, Ireton apparently thought it appropriate to venture a restrained jibe of his own.
“Good Master Cromwell, truly do I know thou to be neither Antinomian nor heretic of any stripe. ’Tis but the Ranters, that cry out thy praises in the marketplace, who would make their foretold salvation to a license for debauch.”
As quickly as they’d been dispelled, the dark clouds rolled back in across Cromwell’s broad features. Over on the last step of the spiral staircase, looking in unseen on the exchange, both Michael Warren and Phyll Painter shivered in spontaneous unison.
“Do not concern thyself with Ranters, Henry. When our war is won, then where will be the need for Ranters or their fiery, flying rolls?”
Ireton looked unconvinced.
“Are you so certain of tomorrow’s victory?”
The older man’s face was as still as a carved sphinx.
“Oh, yes. Our men have not been paid for some few weeks. Their bellies grumble, but I have assured them that a win tomorrow will provide a sizeable exchequer from which we may swiftly make remunerations. I have fashioned of myself a sword for God to wield. He shall not be gainsaid. Naseby shall do the trick, thou may be certain, and then afterwards I shall, that is, <em>we</em> shall determine what is to be done about such dross as Ranters, Levellers or Diggers.”
Frowning disconcertedly and narrowing his eyes, Ireton appeared mildly alarmed.
“Surely you would not see such men suppressed, that have fought bravely for our cause? Would it not shame us to take rights from those who campaign only that the rights bestowed by Magna Carta be upheld?”
Here Cromwell laughed again, this time a throaty chuckle that was less loud and less disconcerting than his previous outburst.
“Magna Farta, it might with more truth be called. Why, old King John was under siege some six weeks at the castle down the way before he could be made to sign it. Such conventions are by force of arms alone brought into being, and by force of arms may be revoked, and we shall see what we shall see.”
The senior general’s head, a trundling cannonball, rolled round upon his neck until his leaden eyes were fixed directly upon John. The lanky ghost-boy shrank against the curving staircase wall, convinced for just a second that Cromwell was looking at him before realising that the seated man was merely staring into empty space as he reflected.
“We are come upon a fateful place, which hath oft-times served as a pivot for the swivellings of history. The fortress stood at this hill’s foot was where the sainted Thomas Becket was most treacherously brought to trial for doing God’s will rather than a king’s. Holy crusades were raised up thereabouts, as likewise were our earliest Parliaments. Not half a mile off to the south is the cow-meadow where Henry the Sixth was beaten by the Earl of March in an affray that ended the War of the Roses. Be assured this town, this soil, it hath the matter’s heart within it, and it looks not kindly upon kings and tyrants. If I listen, Ireton, up above the hollow sound that the wind maketh in the chimney-tops, I fancy me to hear the grinding and annihilating mills of God.”
From his position halfway up the spiral stairs John thought that he could hear them too, but then decided that the sound was more probably that of a big cannon being wheeled along in darkness through the quagmire of Marefair outside. Considering what Cromwell had just said, John found himself reminded of the only line from John Bunyan’s <em>The Holy War</em> that had lodged in his memory: “Mansoul it was the very seat of war.” The words rang true, whatever sense you took them in. Northampton, in all its obscurity, was birthplace to an inexplicable amount of conflict and the point of culmination for a great deal more. Crusades, Peasant’s Revolt, War of the Roses and the Civil War, all of them had begun or ended here. If, on the other hand, you took the word ‘Mansoul’ to mean just what it said, to be the soul of man, then that too was a source of warfare, be it Cromwell’s fierce Protestant zeal or the religion to which the exploding martyr on the Mayorhold’s higher landings had belonged. Mansoul it was the very seat of war, no doubt about it. That had been the message behind every quick march and about turn in that chilly upper hall at College Street, when John was in the Boy’s Brigade.
The memorable quote caused him to spare a thought now for the other John, John Bunyan, and to idly wonder what the seventeen-year-old author-to-be was doing upon that momentous night. As a young Roundhead soldier he might be commencing a first watch there in the garrison at Newport Pagnell, where Bunyan was stationed during 1645. Perhaps he smoked a pipe there in his watch-post and gazed up at the abundant stars, trying to read in them some sign that Christ would be returning soon to overturn King Charles and all his kind, then to announce a new Jerusalem here in the English heartlands. To declare a nation of elected saints amongst which both John Bunyan and the figure sitting now across the candlelit expanse believed themselves to be included.
Breaking off from his grim reverie, Cromwell looked up at Ireton.
“Tell me, Henry, do your men find themselves billets near these parts? At first light I must hurry to inspect the ground at Naseby, and wouldst soon be in my bed.” Realising that he’d been dismissed, Ireton appeared almost relieved.
“My regiment and I have quarters but a short way off, and will be ready with the dawn. I would not keep you from your rest, yet only ask, Sir, that you should convey my most sincere endearments to your daughter.”
John belatedly recalled that Ireton had eventually become son-in-law to the other man by marrying his eldest daughter, Bridget. Cromwell chuckled almost warmly, scraping back his chair as he stood up.
“Pray do not Sir me, Henry. Sooner would I have thee call me father, for so it shall be in time. I have just now been at a writing of a letter to my home, and when I copy it in fair I shall be glad to pass to Bridget your affections. But enough of such things. Get thee to thy regiment and to thy bed, and in the morn may God be with thee.”
Stepping from behind the table, Cromwell crossed to Ireton, reaching out to shake the young man stiffly by the hand. Ireton blinked rapidly and swallowed as he answered.
“And with thee, good Master Cromwell. I shall bid thee a good night.”
With that the interview appeared to be concluded. Cromwell opened the front door for Ireton, who stepped back into the darkness of Marefair and was immediately gone from sight. His guest having departed, the lieutenant-general sighed and walked towards the spiral staircase in the corner, picking up the flickering candelabra on his way. Kicking unwittingly through the three ghost-kids that were sitting there, he mounted the steps wearily, presumably towards his bedroom on the building’s upper floor. Exchanging glances, Phyll and John drifted like vapour up the stairway after him, towing the tiny shade of Michael Warren in between them. Clearly, both of them were eager to learn how the future regicide and Lord Protector slept upon the eve of his most famous battle.
John, though, was still thinking about Henry Ireton. Although he was fated to receive a pike-wound and be captured by the Royalists tomorrow morning, Ireton’s captors would release him in the later stages of the battle, fearing for their own lives as the Parliamentary forces moved in for the kill. He would go on to marry Bridget Williams-alias-Cromwell, shackling himself inseparably to the Cromwell family and their fortunes for the rest of his short life. By 1651 Ireton would be stationed in Ireland trying to end the Catholic rebellion by laying siege to Limerick, a rebel stronghold, where he would succumb to plague. His death, however, would not spare him Royal retribution nine years later when King Charles the Second was restored as monarch. Shortly before pulling down Northampton Castle the new king would have the bodies of both Ireton and his father-in-law dug from their Westminster Abbey tombs and dragged through London’s streets to Tyburn, where the pair would be somewhat unnecessarily hung, drawn and quartered. As with many wars, holy or otherwise, in John’s opinion neither side had much to recommend them when it came to manners.
Phyllis, John and Michael were now on the upstairs landing at Hazelrigg House, pursuing Cromwell as he slouched with candelabra in one hand towards his bedchamber. The hulking hunchbacked shadow that crept after him reminded John of the frontispiece illustration in his childhood copy of <em>The Pilgrim’s Progress</em>. It had been a funny-looking picture, not at all realistic in the style that John preferred although if he remembered rightly it had been a painting done by William Blake, who was quite famous and respected even though to John’s eye he drew like a baby. The wash reproduction had shown Bunyan’s Christian with his weighty moral burden strapped onto his back, bent double over the beloved book that he was reading as he trudged along. This was the shape that sidled after Cromwell now along the landing, a devout giant trailing in the future Lord Protector’s wake much as the massed horde of poor, godly English people did. Or, it occurred to John, was that pious and down-at-heel shadow-colossus driving Cromwell on before it and not following him after all? Whose will was truly being done in England during this tumultuous and bloody decade? Who was using who?
Cromwell turned from the passageway and through the open door of a room on the children’s right, closing it after him. Following his example John and Phyllis poured into the portal’s timbers in pursuit, with Michael Warren dragged between the duo and grey chorus-lines of after-pictures shimmering behind them.
The bedchamber turned out to be overlooking Marefair through the diamond grid of the tall windows on the room’s far side. Out through the criss-crossed panes John could see pale forms fluttering through the night, strange nightingales accompanied by streams of stop-motion photography and ringing peals of mirth. Only when he’d observed that one of the unusually aerobatic creatures wore a pair of National Health glasses did John realise that Reggie, Marjorie and Bill had got fed up of raising dust-storms and had taken to the air, swooping above the street and shrieking as they played at being proper spectres of the sort you found in horror-stories. John thought that they showed a shocking lack of discipline but probably weren’t doing any harm, and so turned his attentions to the hefty wooden bed, like something from Hans Christian Andersen, which was the chamber’s centrepiece.
Cromwell sat on its edge, wearily pulling off his boots. Beside the closed door, set out on or near a wooden trunk, John noticed the black-painted armour, pretty much identical to Ireton’s, which Cromwell would wear tomorrow morning. Cromwell’s suit would do a better job protecting him than Ireton’s would, though, John reflected. Unlike Ireton with an ugly pike-wound to his shoulder, his father-in-law to be would come through Naseby and emerge unscathed, no more than winded while defeated cavaliers were being rounded up, or while Fairfax’s men were raping and disfiguring the women in a captured Royalist wagon-train. John had seen, or would see, some of that for himself after tomorrow’s battle. He remembered that it had been this climactic scene of cruelty, ears cut off and noses slit, that had forced him to tunnel back to his own time on that first visit to the battle, some while prior to meeting the Dead Dead Gang. Of the horrors John had witnessed, both in 1640s Naseby and in 1940s France, the mutilation of the Royalist women, wives and sweethearts labelled “whores and camp-sluts” of “that wicked army”, had been easily the most unbearable. For God’s sake, they were women.
Cromwell had by now removed all of his clothes, briefly exhibiting a saddle-callused arse before he pulled on the long nightgown that had been left folded up on his top blanket. Kneeling, the lieutenant-general of horse pulled a stone chamber-pot from underneath the bed and piddled into it, at the same moment letting off a lengthy trombone-tuner of a fart that reduced Michael, Phyllis and eventually even John to helpless laughter. When he’d finished urinating and returned the heavy Jeremiah to its hiding place in the below-bed shadows, Cromwell remained kneeling with hands pressed together and eyes closed as he recited the Lord’s Prayer. With this completed, he stood up and pinched off the three flames that flickered from his candelabra where it rested upon a plain chest-of-drawers beside the window. In the darkness outside the three corresponding starbursts of reflected brightness winked out one by one, leaving the night to Reggie, Bill and Marjorie whom John could still hear giggling as they sailed through the black heavens over Marefair. Grunting as though with discomfort from stiff joints, Cromwell walked back across the room and climbed beneath the bedclothes. After a surprisingly few moments’ grumbling and turning he appeared to fall asleep, apparently not troubled in the least by all the slaughter that awaited him come daybreak.
“Well. I ’spect that’s that, then.”
Phyllis sounded disappointed, and John was forced to admit that he felt the same way. He felt let down, although he didn’t know what he had been expecting. Doubts and tears, perhaps, or evil gloating like a fiend from the Saturday morning pictures down the Gaumont; manic cackling to scare the nippers at the flicks, the tuppenny rush?
As Cromwell snored contentedly, John drifted over to the window so that he could see what capers their three gang-mates had been getting up to. Squinting upwards through the lead-striped glass he saw them swinging back and forth on the night breezes high above the street. They’d evidently startled pigeons from their roosts in Marefair’s eaves and were now chasing the bewildered fowl against a cream three-quarter moon and its corona, cast upon the summer haze. John called Phyllis and Michael over from where they were standing by the bed, amusing themselves by inserting ghostly fingers into the black, gaping nostrils of its sleeping occupant.
“Here, leave his nose alone and come and see what your kid and the other silly beggars have been doing while we’ve been in here.”
The ghost-gang’s leader and her little charge did as John had suggested. Soon they stood beside him, pointing upwards through the patterned panes and making comments in alternate glee and disapproval as their wayward colleagues herded baffled birds amongst the moonbeams, far above Northampton. Entertaining themselves in this fashion, the three children were engrossed to the extent that for a moment they forgot completely where they were. The deep voice sounding from the dark behind them, then, came as that much more of a shock.
“Who are you, and what is your business?”
Michael screamed and grabbed John’s hand. The phantom children wheeled about in startlement to find a sour-faced boy of something like eleven years of age standing there nude beside the bed, in which Cromwell still snored, and glowering at them through the shadows. The lad was afflicted by the most terrible haircut John had ever seen, shaved to grey stubble high up at the back, the bristles ending where a basin cut began. The boy’s dark hair looked like a toadstool with his spotty, luminously pallid face and neck providing the black deathcap with its soapy and translucent stem. John’s mind raced as he tried to work out just what they were seeing, and a sidelong glance at Phyll confirmed that she was in the same boat. Michael simply stood there, lids peeled back as if attempting to expel both eyeballs from their sockets by sheer force of will.
“I ask again your business in my farmer’s house. Be quick to tell me, and not in a frightful way!”
It was a man’s voice, John thought, coming from a boy barely in puberty to judge from the one isolated hair on a pudenda otherwise entirely bare. Something about the way the figure framed its sentences, the way that it said “farmer’s house” but sounded as if it meant “father’s house”, suggested someone newly dead who hadn’t found their Lucy-lips yet. On the other hand, the nervous movements that the lad made weren’t attended by the usual visual echoes, which suggested that he was alive. On yet a third hand, he could see them, when in normal circumstances he would not be able to unless he was deceased.
Or dreaming.
Everything fell into place. John placed the adult tones at the same moment that he noticed the beginnings of a wart between the boy’s chin and his lower lip. Turning towards the still-bewildered Phyllis, John permitted himself a smug chuckle.
“It’s all right. I’ve worked out who it wiz.”
He looked back at the naked waif standing beside the bed.
“It’s all right, Oliver. It’s only us. You recognise us, don’t you?”
Now it was the youth’s turn to seem puzzled. Blinking rapidly he looked from John, to Michael, then to Phyllis, trying to remember where he knew them from, if anywhere.
Cromwell was dreaming. He was dreaming himself in the form he’d had when he was small and vulnerable yet kept the deep voice of an older and more armoured self, perhaps because it had become like second nature and was thus not easily abandoned. John had no idea where the lieutenant-general believed himself to be, or what his dreaming mind thought it was seeing. He just knew that dreamers were suggestible, and if you told them something they’d accept it and would work it in amongst the fabric of their dream as best they could. The younger Cromwell squinted at them now, as if he’d made his mind up.
“Yes. I see you now. You are my little ones, Richard and Henry and dear, pretty Frances. You must not annoy your father now, when he has much to do upon the morrow. Be about your catchy schisms!”
John decided that the last bit was most probably intended to be “catechisms”. Evidently, Cromwell now believed they were his children, even though he dreamed himself as too young to have fathered them. Such was the logic that sufficed in dreams. John was intrigued by the bare youngster’s comment about having much to do tomorrow, though. Was this some dim awareness of the coming battle that had lingered in the general’s sleeping mind? He thought that he’d investigate a little further.
“Father, we’ve already said our prayers, don’t you remember? Tell us what you’re going to do tomorrow morning.”
The boy nodded gravely, agitating the black mushroom of his brutal haircut.
“I’m going to fight Pope Charles the First, and if I win then I shall make them take his hat off. I shall bring it to your mother, with blood on its feathers, so that she may set it on our mantelpiece above the fire.”
Phyllis was snickering. Wondering why, John glanced down at the fledgling Cromwell’s groin and realised that the boy’s knob had gone on the bone, was pointing to the timbers of the bedroom ceiling with its owner unaware. It made John feel uncomfortable, especially with Phyllis being there. The unfulfilled first blush of love that existed between Phyll and him was harder to believe in with even a crayon-sized erection in the room. He made an effort to divert young Cromwell’s dreaming mind to territory that would hopefully prove less arousing.
“Father, what about when you have won your fight? What then?”
Initially, this line of questioning did not appear to have deflated the youth’s errant member, and indeed seemed to have made things rather worse. Grey eyes alight with visions of his future glory, Cromwell was apparently becoming more excited by the moment. His gaze glittering with firebrands, fixed on some unguessable horizon, the boy smiled, voice soft with awe at his own majesty as he replied.
“Why, then I shall be Pope instead.”
The stripling’s wonderstruck expression of self-satisfaction lasted only a short while before the chilly shadow from a cloud of doubt was cast across it. The young Lord Protector suddenly looked frightened, and John was relieved to see that his tumescence was subsiding. When the naked child began to speak again the adult voice was gone, with in its place the tremulous and reedy piping of a scared eleven-year-old boy.
“But if I am become a Pope, shall not God hate me? And the pauple, the poor people that have followed me shall hate me also if I dress in purple. They will find me out and hate me. They will take away my hat from off my shoulders. You must help me! You must tell them that your father was a child, a child like you who did not know what he was doing. You must …”
Here the boy trailed off, and something of his older self’s grey steel once more entered his eyes. The voice was now again the rough growl of a grown-up.
“You are not my children.”
Pimply face contorting to a mask of rancour, the bare body started fading in and out of view like something on a television set with faltering reception. Both the picture and the sound seemed to be going at the same time, so that anything the boy said was now punctuated by transmission gaps. Meanwhile the slumbering form upon the bed, a dark mass only visible to the three children’s tinsel-trimmed night vision, started mumbling in an eerie counterpoint to the dream-Cromwell’s flickering and interrupted speech.
“… fatherless bastards of a low kind, skulking … half the whores in Newport Pagnell say it was the Holy Ghost who put it in them! Get thee … or must I be pinn’d like a soot-coloured moth to history and ever … Father? Leave me be! I have not … faeries. They are devils, ghosts or faeries and they look upon my …”
Phyllis nudged John, leaning over Michael as he stood between them.
“ ’E looks like ’e’s wakin’ up. Come on, let’s goo aytside and see what them daft sods are gettin’ up to, ’fore ayr Bill does summat as ’e shouldn’t.”
Still with Michael dangling between them, John and Phyll turned from the intermittent spectre of the dream-youth and jumped through the front wall of Hazelrigg House, passing through stonework which, in 1645, had been in place less than a decade. Showering down upon the boggy street in a grey snapshot waterfall, the children dusted themselves off then peered into the dark for some sign of the gang’s remaining members.
John spotted them first, still scaring pigeons in the upper reaches of a night sky like blackcurrant cordial, darkness thick and settled at the bottom but diluting in the moonlight higher up. He could see trails of after-images dragged back and forth across the milky firmament like grubby woollen football scarves, and could deduce their pigeon-worrying from the abrupt and unexpected rain of bird-shit, spattering in Marefair’s mud from high above. In John’s opinion, having a bird do its business on your head was even worse for ghosts than it was for the living. Granted, you were spared the fuss of having to wash the repulsive stuff out of your hair and clothes, but on the other hand the droppings fell straight through you and you sort-of felt them, plunging through your skull into your neck, splashing on down to exit through your shoe-soles as a radiating splat of black and white. It came to John that pigeon-shit looked no worse in the ghost-seam’s half-tones than it did in mortal life’s full Technicolor. It was one of those things like remorse or unfulfilment that would still get on your nerves when you were dead.
Phyllis, who’d suffered from the aerial bombardment just as much as John had, lost her temper and announced that she was “gunna adda goo up there and sort ’em ayt”. Making a little hop to get her started, she commenced to swim laboriously up through the seam’s thicker and more buoyant air, doing a variation of the breast-stroke. Only after half a minute, when she was perhaps ten feet above them, did John realise that both he and Michael were intently staring up her frock. He thought that he’d strike up a conversation in an effort to divert them both into something more suitable.
“How do you like the Dead Dead Gang, then, nipper, now you’ve had a chance to get to know us? I’ll tell you for nothing, it’s a lot more fun than being in the army.”
All around them, Marefair was surrendering to blackness. A few couples wandered to and fro between the alley-mouths of Pike or Chalk Lane and the still-lit doors of the Black Lion, soldiers stumbling arm in arm with chortling, whispering women, pressed so close together that they looked like pairs in a licentious, drunk three-legged race. Strewn on the castle’s flank downhill the campfires had all burned down to a sullen glow, and other than the lustful mumblings of the stragglers the only other sound was that of bats, needle-sharp voices threaded round the steeple of St. Peter’s Church. Michael looked up at John from where he stood beside him, his blonde ringlets multiplying with the motion so that he looked for a moment like a tidier Struwwelpeter or a bleached-out gollywog.
“I like it ever such a lot. I like the clambering about in different days, and I think everybody’s nice, especially Phyllis. But I miss my mum and dad and gran and sister and I’d like it if I wiz back with them soon.”
John nodded.
“Well, that’s understandable. I bet your family are real good sorts, or at least if your dad wiz anything to go by. What you should remember, though, wiz that all these adventures what you’re having here are happening in no time at all. Up in the living world you’re only dead for a few minutes, if what everybody’s saying wiz to be believed. Looked at like that, before you know it you’ll be with your parents and this wizzle be forgotten, just as if it hadn’t happened. I’d enjoy it while you can, if I wiz you. Besides, I’ve got an interest in your family and I’m getting quite attached to having you about.”
Michael looked thoughtful, narrowing his eyes as he gazed at the older boy.
“Wiz it because you knew my dad and used to play with him?”
John chuckled, reaching out with four or five left arms to scuff up Michael’s hair.
“Yes, I suppose it’s something like that. I knew all your dad’s side of family, back when I wiz alive. How’s old May getting on, your dad’s mum? Wiz she still a terror? What about your aunt Lou?”
He still wasn’t sure why he was keeping the full story back from Michael, when it wasn’t really in John’s nature to be secretive. He’d wondered, when he’d first heard Michael’s surname, if it might be the same Warren family that he knew, but there’d been no point in mentioning that at the time in case he was mistaken. Then, when it had been confirmed, he’d quite enjoyed having a piece of secret information for himself, something than even Phyllis didn’t know about – although that wasn’t the whole picture, if he was completely honest. What it was, he didn’t want to burden Michael with the truth of who he was or their relationship. He didn’t want the boy or any of his family to hear first-hand the facts about how John had died in France, how scared he’d been, how he’d been trying to work up the courage to desert when they’d come under fire upon that country road. That was the real reason he’d spent all those years haunting a disused turret after he was dead, rather than going straight up to Mansoul. He’d had a guilty conscience, just as much as Mick Malone or Mary Jane or any of the area’s rough sleepers did, because both John and God knew that John was at heart a coward. Better, surely, to let all that rest. Better to keep up his white lie, best to allow the tot who now stood pondering beside him to retain his blissful ignorance of how the world could sometimes be, even in how it treated little boys who came from decent, working families. Michael was still considering John’s questions before venturing his answers.
“Well, I like my nan, but sometimes she gets a bit frightening and I have dreams about her where she’s trying to catch me. Aunt Lou’s like a lovely owl, and when she used to pick me up she’d chortle to me and I’d feel it running through her when she held me. Nan wiz nice, though. If we go round her house she gives me and Alma each an apple and a sweetie from her jar that’s on the sideboard.”
In the moonlit reaches far above them John could make out a grey comet with a tail of fading photographs that he thought was most likely Phyllis, herding a disgraced triumvirate of similarly pluming spectres back towards the Earth. It looked as if the ghostly kids were playing join-the-dots between the stars. He smiled at Michael.
“No, she’s not a bad sort, May. I know there’s times when she can put the fear of God in you, but she’s had a hard life that’s made her that way, ever since she first popped out into the gutter down on Lambeth Walk. You shouldn’t judge her harshly.”
The four other members of the Dead Dead Gang had by this time floated down far enough to be in hailing distance. John could hear Phyllis regaling Bill as they descended.
“… and if you chase pigeons, the Third Borough knows abayt it! You’ll be lucky if ’e don’t turn you into a pigeon and then make a pigeon pie out of yer!”
Bill, doing an ostentatious butterfly stroke through the air with after-image arms like spinning wagon-wheels grown from his shoulders, clearly wasn’t taking any notice. A broad smirk kept threatening to break out and spoil the usually-ginger troublemaker’s penitent expression. Before long Phyllis had guided the three truants in to land and then had settled down upon Marefair herself, an ashen dandelion clock or man-in-the-moon as John had always called them, spilling picture-parasols up into the night sky behind her.
After Phyllis had conducted a brief show-trial for the trio of miscreants and issued what she must have felt were necessary recriminations, the gang had a vote on what route they should take back to the nineteen-hundreds. The resultant show of hands – something like fifty if you counted all the after-images – appeared to be unanimous in favouring a somewhat indirect approach commencing at the Black Lyon Inne a little further down the way. The sole abstention in the crowd was Michael Warren who, as regimental mascot, didn’t really get a ballot anyway. John sympathised with Michael in his simply wanting to go home, but it was true enough what he’d said earlier about these exploits taking up no time at all, back in the mortal world that Michael all too soon would be returned to. John had also meant what he’d said about having become quite fond of the nipper, and he didn’t want him going back to life and thus forgetting all of this just yet.
The gang moved down Marefair towards the castle, on the slopes of which the soldiers’ campfires were all now extinguished. On their left they passed by the bat-sanctuary of St. Peter’s Church, where the dog-whistle squeals pierced even the soundproofing of the ghost-seam. In the shadows of the gateway John could make out the slumped shape of the lame beggar-woman’s ghost that he’d met on his first posthumous visit to the church, but didn’t call the other kids’ attention to her. Motionless and silent she watched them pass by, her luminous eyes hanging in the dark, disinterested.
The Black Lion, when the children reached it, still seemed to be serving even though its front door had been closed up. Passing through this, John found himself in a pub that was disturbingly familiar in its basic layout while the people and the pastimes it contained were wildly different. Bleary Roundheads sat and drank a treacly-looking beer as they attempted to forget that this might very well be their last night on Earth, while others who had women on their laps were working their scarred fingers back and forth beneath flounced layers of underskirt. The room, split level as in John’s day with three stairs connecting the two tiers, was made almost entirely out of wood. The only metal seemed to be that of the burnished oil-lamps or the heavy tankards, if you didn’t count the swords and helmets that were in the place at present, and save for the windows there was no glass to be seen. The lone quartet of bottles that presumably had spirits in, standing upon an otherwise unoccupied shelf at the bar’s rear, were all made of stone. John was surprised how much the lack of glinting highlights in a hanging blur altered the feeling of the pub, and there were other things that made an unexpected difference, too.
One of the tables had been set aside for food, a bowl of perished fruit, wedges of cheese and a half-eaten loaf, onions and mustard and a ham that had been sliced down to its stump-end, hovered over by a troupe of pearly-bellied meat-flies. Two or three dogs snuffled round the legs of chairs and the whole sound of the inn seemed subdued to John, even allowing for the way the ghost-seam muffled things. Such chatter as there was, including that between the troopers and their girlfriends, sounded hushed and reverent to modern ears. Apart from an occasional loud clump of boots across the floorboards as somebody went to use the privy in the pub yard, or a faint snort from one of the horses stabled there, then lacking the familiar chink of glass on glass there was no noise at all. It wasn’t even modern silence, having no thud of a ticking clock to underline it.
Bill and Reggie seemed intrigued by all the unselfconscious groping that was taking place up in the tavern’s darkened corners, but John didn’t like it and was pleased to see that Phyllis didn’t either. With a military briskness that concealed their mutual embarrassment they organised the gang into another human tower, this time with Reggie on the bottom and Bill standing on his shoulders, scraping with both hands in the accumulated time of the inn’s ceiling. Being upwards of three hundred years, the excavation was quite clearly going to take a while, leaving John, Michael and the two girls with no other option than to stand there awkwardly amidst the almost-mute debauchery, trying to find something that wasn’t sexual to stare at.
As his gaze shifted uneasily around the half-lit room, John realised with surprise that he and his five comrades weren’t the only phantoms frequenting the Black Lyon Inne on that specific evening. On a long and pew-like wooden seat against one wall there sat one of the Roundhead troops, a freckled nineteen-year-old boy who had no chin to speak of, with a hard-faced woman in her thirties grunting softly as she sat astride his lap, her back against his belly. Her long skirts had been arranged in a desultory attempt to hide the obvious fact that the lad had his implement inside her as she surreptitiously moved up and down, trying to make it look like rhythmic fidgeting.
To each side of this not-so-furtive copulating couple sat a pair of middle-aged men in long robes, one chubby and one thin, whom John at first assumed to be the lovers’ friends. Granted, he’d thought the friendship seemed unusually close if it permitted their acquaintances to be spectators on such intimate occasions, but then what did he know of the actual moral climate of the sixteen-hundreds, where it was apparently acceptable to have sex in a public bar? Only when one of the two men lifted a fan of several arms to scratch his eyebrow did John realise that they were both ghosts, peeping-tom spirits that the whore and soldier didn’t know were there. Looking a little closer, John could make out that the voyeuristic duo were some type of monks, perhaps the Cluniacs who’d had their monastery a little north of here, three or four hundred years ago. Each one sat with hands folded piously and resting in his lap, not hiding the tent-poles that they were putting up under their habits as they watched the panting trooper and his wanton with wide-eyed attention. So absorbed were the two friars that they evidently hadn’t noticed there were other ghosts, children at that, just feet away across the room, John thought indignantly.
All of a sudden, though, the tableau shifted from merely unpleasant to unspeakably grotesque. One of the spectral monks – the tubby one who sat upon John’s far side of the pair – removed a plump hand from his own lap and, before John could work out what he was up to, swept it in a stream of after-images to plunge it through the apron of the mounted woman, thrusting his arm to the elbow in her labouring body, all while she remained completely unaware. From the lewd grin that bulged the friar’s ample cheeks and from the sudden increase in both gasps and agitated thrusts between the lovebirds, it appeared as if the monk had his whole fleshy hand inside the woman’s lower abdomen, grasping the soldier’s … John felt a bit sick and looked away. He’d never seen a dead man do a thing like that before, had not even imagined it. Ah, well. You died and learned.
Luckily, no one else seemed to have noticed the repulsive spectacle, and it was just then that Bill gleefully declared his tunnel up into the twentieth century to be completed. Phyllis was the first to scramble up the ladder formed by Bill and Reggie, disappearing into the pale gap with twinkling edges dug into the plaster ceiling, in between the kippered beams. Next Michael made the climb, multiple photographs extending his short dressing gown into a tartan bridal train as he ascended. Marjorie went after Michael, followed rapidly by Bill, leaving first Reggie and then John to leap up through the time-hole from a standing jump, buoyed by the ghost-seam’s viscous atmosphere.
Only when John had rocketed up through the aperture to find himself in a synthetic habitat where everything had rounded edges, in which Phyllis was haranguing Bill with more than usual vigour, did he realise there was something wrong. This wasn’t 1959. The room that they were in looked sparse and sterile, like a kitchen in a super-modern hospital with a steel sink, some kind of sleek and complicated cooker and two or three other hefty metal boxes that had dials, the functions of which John was unfamiliar with. Next to the doorway stood a dozen plastic canisters of bleach, designed to look like bath-toy buzz-bombs with unscrewing nose-cones, held together in a cube formation by a skin of laddered polythene that seemed to have been sprayed on. In a cardboard box beneath the chamber’s solitary rain-streaked window were what looked like Toyland hypodermic needles, flimsy little items each in its own individual see-through bag. Looking more closely, John saw that there were numerous cartons packed with bottled pills stacked up haphazardly wherever there was space, along with sacks of bulk-bought oats and rice, multiply-packaged tins of baby-food and an incongruous assortment of other mass-purchased medical or culinary supplies. Posters tacked to a sheet of pasteboard on one wall bore names and slogans that were utterly incomprehensible to John: ST. PETER’S ANNEXE; NO GRAZING, NO SLIM; NOISE KILLS; BLINDER AND TASER AMNESTY; DON’T LET C-DIF BECOME C-IMP; SEX TRAUMA INDICATORS; CONFLICT TRAUMA INDICATORS; SPOT A SPARROW; TENANTS AGAINST TREACHERY … where on earth were they? John was going to ask Phyllis but before he could she turned to him with an exasperated look and answered anyway.
“ ’E’s dug us up too ’igh, the little sod. We’re in the twenty-fives, up in St. Peter’s Annexe. Look at all that bloody rain!”
John glanced out of the window onto what he thought must be Black Lion Hill, although the view was unfamiliar. Marefair was unrecognisable, paved with a parquet of pale tiling where the cobbled and then tarmac-covered road had been. Through the torrential sheets of downpour he could see a glass-walled overpass that arced above the mouth of a much-changed St. Andrew’s Road, connecting the extended sprawl of Castle Station with the raised ground near the bottom of Chalk Lane, right where John’s long-demolished turret had once been. Here there were bulging Marmite-pot constructions with designs that seemed to have resulted from a joke or dare, across the lane from older, plainer structures with which they contrasted jarringly. The self-consciously futuristic bridge, a length of transparent intestine ravelling across the scene from west to east, looked like a tawdry, worldly apprehension of the Ultraduct to John, an earthly copy of the sweeping immaterial span that reached from Doddridge Church. Beneath the bridge peculiar traffic hissed amidst the deluge, back and forth along St. Andrew’s Road, none of it venturing up into Marefair which appeared now to be only for pedestrians. Most of the flow of vehicles was made up of the brick-shaped cars that John had seen during the ghost-gang’s recent foray into nothing-five or nothing-six, but there were also a great many stranger vehicles, near-flat contrivances like armoured skate that were completely silent and a uniform jet-black in colour. Even Reggie Bowler, the gang’s car-fanatic, stood beside the window with his hat off, scratching his dark curls perplexedly. Phyllis was fuming, which, if anything, made her look prettier.
“If we were any bloody further up we’d be in bloody Snow Tayn! ’E’s done this on purpose, all because I wouldn’t let ’im gawp at all them old pros gettin’ interfered with down there in the sixteen-’undreds!”
Bill protested.
“Oh, and when you dug us up too ’igh down Scarletwell Street that wiz different, wiz it? You’re a bossy old bat, wanting everything your own way. Who’s to say we shouldn’t have a nose round while we’re up ’ere, anyway? It might be educational, which I remember you bein’ in favour of when I wiz only a daft kid.”
Phyllis sniffed haughtily.
“Yer still a daft kid, and yer still a bloody nuisance. All right, I suppose we might as well see ’oo’s abayt, now that yer’ve dragged us up ’ere. Only fer a minute or two, mind, and then we’re gooin’ straight back dayn that ’ole to Cromwell’s time, so we can take another route to Doddridge Church.”
Drowned Marjorie, standing beside a little wooden book-rack stuffed with dog-eared paperbacks and no doubt trying to extend her knowledge of twenty-first-century literature, peered at the others through her spectacles’ milk-bottle-bottom lenses.
“Out through that door I think there’s a passageway to an extension that pokes into Peter’s Churchyard. I remember it from The Return to Snow Town, just after The Dead Dead Gang Versus the Nene Hag and before The Incident of the Reverse Train.”
Marjorie was turning into quite the little chatterbox. John was impressed, though, by her cataloguing of the gang’s adventures in such careful order, even if they were more kid’s games than heroic exploits, truth be told. The six ghost-children filed out through the door of the deserted doctor’s surgery or kitchen that they’d tunnelled into, leaving the time-hole uncovered in anticipation of their exit back to the seventeenth century.
Beyond the door, as Marjorie had already predicted, was a corridor. This had an area that seemed to be a children’s playroom running off one side, in which perhaps a dozen infants of various nationalities were making an ungodly mess with powder paints under the supervision of a patient-looking bald man in his middle fifties. Even though the light within the room was poor, John thought that this was due more to the weather than the time of day, which he supposed to be mid afternoon. A calendar that John had noticed in the surgery-cum-kitchen – one that had a stout Salvation Army lady posing on it, John remembered suddenly, naked except her bonnet and trombone – had said that this was July 2025, although it looked too cold and wet outside to be mid summer.
An entrance at the passage’s far eastern end gave access to a couple of prefabricated dormitories, each subdivided into half a dozen modest cubicles by curtains hung on mobile railings. The first such enclosure that they came to seemed to have been set aside for females only, with a few women of different ages sitting watching an enormous television on which nude young men sat in some species of communal bath or paddling pool and told each other they were “out of order”. The bored-looking women who were viewing this unedifying spectacle ventured disdainful comments on the program in what might have been a Norfolk accent. John presumed that a male dormitory must lie beyond the closed doors at the room’s far end, and went to stand with Michael Warren who was jumping up and down as he tried to see out of the rear window.
This looked south towards the area behind St. Peter’s Church and over whatever was left by this date of the green that John had played upon with Michael Warren’s dad when they were boys. John helpfully picked up the hopping infant so that he could see, not that a lot was visible through the incessant rain.
“Not much to look at, wiz there? How d’you fancy jumping through the wall and going for a poke-about outside? We won’t get wet because the rain passes right through us.”
Michael frowned up dubiously at John.
“Will it feel horrible when it falls through my tummy like that bird-poo did?”
Grinning, John shook his noble, chiselled head so that it double-exposed into an array of film star eight-by-tens.
“No. Rain feels clean when it goes through you. Come on. Phyllis and the others wizzle be mooching around here for a good while yet, so we’ve got lots of time. Remember what I said about how all of this wiz flashing past like lightning in the living world, and take the opportunity to go exploring while you can.”
Michael considered this for a few moments and then nodded in consent. Still holding the tartan-wrapped toddler in his arms, John stepped out through the shell of glass and plasterboard into a shower of silver, falling with the rain and his attendant after-pictures to the churchyard’s beaded turf a floor below. Once they had landed John set Michael down upon the sodden ground beside him and then, hand in hand, the two of them drifted around the west face of the church towards its rear. John was agreeably surprised to note that all the funny or horrific Saxon carvings high on the stone wall were still intact, although when he and Michael were behind the church and looking between its back railings at the derelict green his surprise was less agreeable.
Green Street was gone. Elephant Lane, Narrow-Toe Lane, both gone. Freeschool Street was transformed into bland forts comprised of offices or flats that looked suspiciously unused. Across the altered landscape in a curving scalpel-swipe was the disfiguring surgical scar of a broad two-lane motorway that ran from Black Lion Hill, away south through grey veils of inundation towards Beckett’s Park and Delapre, a distant skyline where the break between tall concrete and descending storm clouds could no longer be discerned. The green itself, neglected and unkempt, had lost its edges and its definition, its identity. It was purposeless grass now, melting in the rain as it awaited the surveyors, the developers. Standing there next to John with his lip trembling, Michael Warren made a disappointed, whining sound.
“The street that wiz down at the bottom of the green wiz gone, just like my street on Andrew’s Road. My nan used to live there!”
Keeping up his pretence, John didn’t look at Michael as he answered.
“Yes, I know. That’s where your dad grew up, as well, with all his brothers and his sister. That where your great-granddad died, sitting between two mirrors with his mouth stuffed full of flowers. All of the things that happened in that little house, and now …”
John trailed off. There was nothing else that he could say without revealing matters best kept to himself. With copies of the boys trailing behind them through the graveyard like a funeral procession for the neighbourhood, Michael and John went back the way they’d come, towards the two-storey prefabrication jutting into consecrated ground out from the modified Black Lion next door. This meant that they walked past the black stone obelisk that stood some feet west of the ancient church and which John had paid no attention to when they passed by the other way just moments earlier.
Glistening wet like whale-hide in the drizzle, the dark monument appeared to be a war memorial. It hadn’t been in evidence when John had paid his one and only visit to the place just following his disembodied homecoming from France, when all the ghosts had put him off from coming back again. He paused to look at it more closely, bringing Michael similarly to a halt. He was just reading the inscriptions when the toddler yelped down at his side and pointed to the needle’s base.
“Look! That man there has got the same last name as me!”
John looked. Michael was right. Nobody spoke for a few seconds.
“So he does. Ah well, I s’pose we should be should be getting back to Phyllis and the rest, see what they’re up to. Come on, before they go back to 1645 without us.”
Hand in hand the two wraiths slid amidst the tippling precipitation, passing through the insulated layers of the pub extension’s lower walls into an office where a pretty, burly, coloured woman with a dreadful scar above one eye was talking to what looked like a stamped-on sardine tin held against her ear.
“Don’t give me that. The government awarded all this money weeks ago, when Yarmouth had the floods. I’ve got two dozen people here, and some of them are ill, and some need drugs. Don’t tell me that the payments have to go through channels when the fucking cheque is sitting there in your account and earning interest for the council.”
There was a brief pause and then the Amazon resumed her fierce tirade.
“No. No, you listen. If that cash is not wired into the St. Peter’s Annexe account by next Tuesday at the latest, I’ll be at the Guildhall for the meeting on the Friday after with a list of every dodgy deal between you lot and the Disaster Management Authority. I’ll strap one on and give your mates a public fucking so rough that they won’t be sitting down in council or anywhere else for months. Now, get it sorted.”
With a sneer that curled her luscious glistening lips to form a swimming-pool inflatable the woman snapped a lid across the sardine tin, contemptuously tossing it into the innards of a cartoon dog that sprawled there gutted on a work-surface and which John finally identified as some variety of handbag. Tipping back her office chair and flipping through a file she’d taken from a shallow wire tray on her desk, she was magnificent, quite unlike any female John had seen before. Although he didn’t hold with women swearing and although he’d never really been attracted to what he thought of as half-caste girls, this one possessed a kind of atmosphere or aura that was absolutely riveting. She had as much intensity about her as Oliver Cromwell had, a short walk down Marefair and getting on four hundred years ago, except that the force burning in her was less black and heavy than the energy that churned inside the Lord Protector.
She was also a much healthier and more attractive specimen. Her ludicrously splendid mane of catkin hair fell to her shoulders which were naked where her thick, masculine arms, those of a lady weightlifter, emerged from the chopped-off sleeves of her T-shirt. This had a man’s face printed upon it, his hairstyle almost identical to that affected by the garment’s wearer, with above it the word EXODUS and then below it the phrase MOVEMENT OF JAH PEOPLE. The girl looked to be in her late thirties, but the radiance of youth was undercut by the grown-up and very serious-looking ragged seam of flesh just over her left eyebrow. This did not deface her beauty so much as it loaned a strength and gravity to her young countenance. John was just thinking that her powerful, mannish arms and air of resolute nobility gave the impression of a Caribbean Joan of Arc when he put two and two together and remembered where he’d heard about this girl before, blurting the answer out to Michael Warren.
“It’s the saint. It’s that one that I’ve heard about who looks after the refugees here in the twenty-fives. I think that I’ve heard people call her ‘Kaff’, so I suppose that’s short for Katherine. She pioneers some treatment here that wizzle save lives right across the world, folk who are on the run from wars and floods and that. They say that in the nothing-forties people talk about her like a saint. She’s the most famous person that comes from the Boroughs in this century, and here we are getting a look at her.”
Michael regarded the oblivious woman quizzically.
“Where did she get that nasty cut that’s near her eye?”
John shrugged, with briefly multiplying shoulders.
“I don’t know. I don’t know much about her, to be honest, other than the saint thing. Anyway, we can’t stand nattering here. Let’s find our way back to the first floor and catch up with Phyllis and the rest.”
Walking around the seated goddess as she finished with her scrutiny of the plain folder and replaced it with another from the same wire tray, Michael and John stepped through the office wall and found themselves in a short corridor that had the lower reaches of a stairway leading up from it. As the pair floated up this on their way to rendezvous with the remainder of the Dead Dead Gang, John found himself considering what it would take to get you labelled as a saint.
It all depended, very probably, upon the times that you were in, the background that you came from. In the middle ages it required a miracle, like the one that was said to have occurred here in St. Peter’s Church down in 1050-something, where an angel had apparently helped find the body of the man who would become Saint Ragener, the brother of Saint Edmund. Then in Cromwell’s day, a hundred years after Henry the Eighth had severed England’s ties with Rome, the saints were living people, men like Bunyan who believed that they were destined to be counted with that rank when sinful worldly kingdoms had been swept away and were replaced by an egalitarian society united under God, an entire nation of the saintly that would not be needing either priests or governments.
Just when he thought he’d finally forgotten all about it, John found that he was reminded of the blowing-up man there on Mansoul’s landings. Wouldn’t he be thought of as a saint, a martyr, by the people who believed what he did? John supposed that one thing that united Bunyan, Cromwell, Ragener, the human bomb – and from the look of that scar near her eye the girl downstairs as well – was that they’d all passed through some sort of fire. That was a factor, clearly, although not the only one, otherwise John would be a saint as well after his own dismemberment in France. John thought that it must be the attitude with which one went into the flames that made the difference. It must be one’s courage, or the lack of it, that sainthood rested on. There was much more to being canonised than getting shot at by a cannon.
Just when John and Michael reached the first floor, pandemonium erupted. At its top end, the staircase emerged into a corridor with two doors leading off on the right side, which John assumed must be the dormitories they’d caught a glimpse of earlier. He was about to poke his head into the wall looking for Phyllis when a small and sickly flying saucer sailed out through the nearest of the shut-fast doors with insubstantial doubles of itself behind it, marking its trajectory. Before it hit the floor, a whirling tumbleweed of streaming motion like two Siamese cats fighting followed the disc through the solid door and caught it in mid-hover. Still for just a second, this grey blur resolved into Drowned Marjorie and then ducked back into the presumed dormitory taking the captured object with her. John and Michael looked at one another in astonishment then raced across the passageway to follow Marjorie in through the chamber’s flimsy modern wall.
As John had guessed, on the wall’s far side was a dormitory, a more or less identical male counterpart to the girl’s quarters that they’d passed through a short while ago. As for the frantic action taking place inside, however, John had not predicted that at all.
Four living men sat playing cards, their ages ranging from about eighteen to forty, all completely unaware of the spectral commotion going on around them. In the riot of proliferating ghost-forms hurtling around the room it was almost impossible at first to make out what was happening, but after a few moments John believed that he had grasped the situation: counting John and Michael there were seven ghosts inside the dormitory, six being the assembled Dead Dead Gang. The seventh was an adult phantom, a rough sleeper that both John and Phyll had known of while they were alive, named Freddy Allen. In his mortal day Freddy had been a well-known Boroughs vagrant, sleeping under railway arches in Foot Meadow and keeping alive by pinching loaves of bread and pints of milk from people’s doorsteps, slinking off in the deserted and conspiratorial hush of early morning. Since his death, he’d been one of the most anonymous and harmless spirits to frequent the sorry territories of the ghost-seam, much less of a terror than Malone, or Mary Jane, or old Mangle-the-Cat. Unfortunately, this made Freddy a convenient and relatively risk-free target for Phyll Painter’s ongoing vendetta against grown-up ghosts.
What must have happened was that Freddy had been up here in the twenty-fives and minding his own business, sitting in upon a mortal hand of three-card Brag, when Phyllis, Reggie, Bill and Marjorie had burst in through the wall and started mucking him about. The ‘flying saucer’ that John had seen Marjorie retrieving from the corridor a moment or two back was Freddy’s hat, plucked from his balding crown by one of the ghost-children, who were now engaged in running round the dormitory and throwing Freddy’s battered trilby back and forth to one another while the paunchy and out-of-condition revenant flailed helplessly there at their centre, trying to catch his headgear as it whistled past. As the Dead Dead Gang tossed the ghostly hat from hand to hand, its after-images persisted long enough to leave a looping chain of wan and cheerless Christmas decorations strung around the upper reaches of the room.
Freddy was spluttering and furious.
“You give that ’ere! You give that ’ere, you little tearaways!”
The item of apparel he was after spun in a high arc above his bare grey pate, out of his reach, to be plucked from the air by Phyllis Painter, who was dancing up and down next to the dormitory’s windows. Waving the old trilby back and forth above her head until it multiplied into a solid stripe of hats, she grinned at Freddy.
“Come and get it, you old bugger! Serves yer right for ’avin’ all them loaves orf people’s doorsteps!”
With that, Phyllis hurled the immaterial trophy through the hard glass of the windowpane into the open air outside, where it went sailing down into the rain-lashed churchyard. The ghost-tramp howled in dismay and, with a final angry glare in Phyllis’s direction, dived out through the window after it.
Phyllis, already starting to step through the wall into the women’s dormitory next door, called for the gang to follow her.
“Come on, let’s get back dayn to the Black Lion in Cromwell’s times, before the old git finds ’is ’at and comes to look fer us.”
The astral-plane adventurers followed their leader back through the adjoining girls’ communal bedroom. On the huge, sideboard-sized television one of the chaps who’d been bathing earlier was in a futuristic kitchen having a foul-mouthed exchange with a young woman wearing what John could only assume were artificial joke-shop breasts. The man, apparently, was ‘fuckin’ mashin’’ the girl’s ‘fuckin’ swede’, whatever that entailed. The women sitting on their beds and watching the enormous telly tutted and remarked upon the on-screen harridan’s augmented bosoms in their flat east-country tones as the ghost-children passed unseen amongst them.
Gliding down the corridor beyond the far wall of the dormitory the gang came to the room with all the bleach, syringes and tinned baby-food, where they had unintentionally emerged into this strange, overcast century. The hole that Bill had made still gaped there in the antiseptic lino-tiling of the floor, but it looked down now into unrelieved and silent blackness, rather than the lamplight and the amorous rustlings that they’d climbed up out of. Reggie Bowler lowered himself into the time-tunnel first, vanishing down into seventeenth-century dark so that he could help the gang’s smaller members clamber after him. Phyllis descended next, then Michael, Bill and Marjorie.
Taking a final, mystified look round at all the medicines and the unfathomable posters – THANK YOU FOR NOT SCREAMING; TALKING ABOUT TYPHOID – John let himself down into the black well after his companions.
Below, in 1645, the tavern was deserted and had evidently been closed for the night, its final patrons chucked out into mud and starlight. Phyllis stood on Reggie’s shoulders and patiently wove the fabric of the moment back across the aperture that Bill had made, observing an afterlife version of the country code, which John approved of. Although living people couldn’t physically pass through a time hole in the way a spirit did, one that had been left open could still pose a threat to them. A mortal person’s mind might fall through such an opening although their bodies were not able to, producing the potentially nerve-shattering experience of being in another time. John hadn’t ever heard first-hand of this occurring, but he’d been assured by older, more experienced wraiths that such things were a horrifying possibility. Better to close your burrows off behind you, just in case.
When Phyll was done with covering their tracks, the children leaked out through the old inn’s bolted door onto a Marefair quite devoid of life or afterlife. The gang meandered in the general direction of Pike Lane, a lightless crack that ran north from the main street, and John turned it over in his thoughts, this business about warrior saints, this death and glory lark.
In John’s opinion it was all a fraud, the stuff he’d had drummed into him when he was in the Boy’s Brigade, singing “To Be A Pilgrim” while associating being good with church and church with marching; diligently painting Blanco on your lanyard; taking orders. All these things had been mixed up together for John’s generation. Ritually blackening the cold brass buckle of a B.B. belt above a candle flame before you polished it led seamlessly into the sense of Christian duty that you felt when you first got your call up papers. “Hobgoblin nor foul fiend shall daunt his spirit. He knows he at the end shall life inherit.” The next thing you knew you were in Naseby getting run through by a pike, you were exploding in a shower of nails and brilliance, you were being blown out of your flesh by an artillery shell in France. It wasn’t life that you inherited. That was just what they told you so that you’d die in their military campaign without a fuss. All wars were holy wars, which was to say they were all ordinary bloody wars that someone had decided to call holy when it suited them, some king, some pope, some Cromwell who believed he knew what Heaven wanted. As John saw it, if you were engaged in killing people then you very probably were not a saint. Perhaps that coloured girl with the appalling scar was the best candidate for the position after all, unlikely as she looked. Her only weapon had been a sardine tin.
Up ahead of them Pike Lane sloped gently from Marefair to Mary’s Street, which led to Doddridge Church, their destination. John was idly musing about Mary’s Street and what had happened there when Bill seemed almost to pick up these thoughts, loudly proclaiming his new idea for procrastination as he hopped from one foot to the other in the narrow and benighted side-street, generating extra legs with every bounce. Whatever he’d got on his mind, he seemed excited.
“I know! I know! We could go and see the fire! It’s only thirty years up that way!”
Everyone agreed. It would be a tremendous waste to be in Mary’s Street during the sixteen-hundreds and not go to visit the Great Fire.
Phyllis began to dig into the midnight air. She said she’d stop when she hit sparks.
** <strong>MALIGNANT, REFRACTORY SPIRITS</strong>
<strong>Y</strong>ou see more naked people when you’re dead, or at least this was the conclusion Michael was fast coming to. There had been nudes and semi-nudes amongst the crowd on Mansoul’s balconies, sleepwalking dreamers in their underpants, and there had been the Cromwell boy only a little while ago in Marefair. In the afterlife, nobody seemed to mind if you’d not got your clothes on. This approach appealed to Michael, who had never understood what all the fuss was over in the first place.
Then there were the two young women Michael was now looking at, capering bare along the drab September length of Mary’s Street in the mid-1670s. So beautiful even a three-year-old could see it; they were hardly real women at all and more like something made-up from a film or magazine as they skipped gaily through the cooking steam and refuse in the narrow lane at that time of the bygone morning. These, he dimly comprehended, might just be what the commotion over nudity was all about.
The prancing females were, he thought, a lovely shape, even though one was skinny and the other plump. He liked the extra bits they had upon their chests, and how they didn’t have the corners grown-up men had, being rounded like the country was rather than square-cut like a town. As usual, he wondered vaguely what had happened to their willies but was confident that this would all make sense eventually, like jokes or frost-patterns.
Of course, the really striking thing about the two nymphs was the colour of their hair: it had a colour, even in the ghost-seam’s unrelenting black-and-white. Tossed up above their heads as if by the strong breezes from the west, billowing out and tangling in the wind, their manes were vivid orange on the half-world’s photo-album grey.
The dead girl that he was starting to think of as his secret sweetheart, Phyllis Painter in her rotten rabbit ruff, had dug a tunnel up from midnight Marefair on the eve of battle in the 1640s into daylight Pike Lane only thirty years thereafter. Michael and the gang had clambered through the opening into a side street where two men were arguing about the tallied chalk-marks on a blackboard hanging by the doorway of their ironmonger’s shop, and where old women wearing threadbare pinafores emptied the contents of cracked chamber pots into already-brimming gutters. Since there were no other ghosts around, no one could see the children as they conscientiously repaired the hole they’d made arriving here, out of a night three decades gone.
The phantom ruffians had streamed up to St. Mary’s Street, where there were jumbled yards and cottages piled up higgledy-piggledy, alive with chickens, dogs and children; not at all like the neat modern flats of Michael’s day. From where the six of them were at the upper entrance to Pike Lane they could see only nondescript wood buildings on the mound towards the west where Doddridge Church would later stand. Looking towards the east and Horsemarket, however, they had spied the beautiful bare ladies with their hair in colour, twirling blissfully along the busy morning street, apparently unnoticed by the downcast wagon-drivers and preoccupied pedestrians going about their business. Phyllis had seemed pleased to see the pair.
“That’s good. We’re ’ere before they’ve properly got started. We can watch the ’ole thing now, from start ter finish.”
Michael had been puzzled.
“Who are those two ladies? I thought we wiz coming here to see the Great Fire of Northampton.”
Phyllis looked at Michael patiently, patting his tartan sleeve as she explained.
“They <em>are</em> the Gret Fire o’ Northampton.”
Tall John butted in.
“Phyllis wiz right. That’s why nobody else can see ’em, and that’s why their hair wiz coloured when the rest of us are all in black and white. If you look closer, it’s not hair at all. It’s flames. They’re Salamanders.”
The fire-headed women tripped and laughed amongst the dross of Mary’s Street. They looked enough alike for Michael to be sure that they were sisters, with the plumper of the pair being perhaps nineteen or twenty and the leaner one some five years younger, barely in her teens. He noticed that right at the bottoms of their tummies, where their willies should have been, the little patch of hair they had was made of orange fire as well, with stray sparks drifting up around their belly-buttons. They swung lazily around the wooden posts supporting musty barns and tightrope-walked along the duckboards. Neither of them spoke a word – Michael was somehow sure they couldn’t – but communicated only in shrill laughs and giggles that were reminiscent of the way that early-morning songbirds talked together. The two didn’t seem to have a single thought between them that was not about their laughter or their random, skittering dance. They were so happy and carefree that they looked almost idiotic.
Seeming to guess what the little boy was thinking, Phyllis gently put him straight.
“I know they look ’alf sharp, but that’s just ’ow they are. They don’t ’ave proper thoughts or feelings like we ’ave ’em. They’re all spirit. They’re all urge, all fire. Me and Bill saw ’em first, before we started up the Dead Dead Gang. We’d both been dayn to Beckett’s Park, Cow Medder, in the fourteen-’undreds at the old War o’ the Roses, and we wiz just diggin’ ayr way back up through the sixteenth century. Abayt 1516 we broke through into this one day where everything wiz like a bloody gret inferno with the Boroughs burning dayn araynd us, and this wiz when there weren’t much more to Northampton than the Boroughs, mind you.
“The two Salamanders, the two sisters, they wiz pirouettin’ through the blaze and settin’ fire to everythin’ they touched. O’ course, they wiz both younger by a century or two in them days. The plump girl, the eldest one, she looked abayt eleven and the youngest one wiz only five or somethin’. They wiz trottin’ back and forth between the burnin’ ’ouses, carrying the fire with ’em in their cupped ’ands and then splashin’ it all over everywhere like two kids playin’ with a tub o’ water. Only it weren’t water.
“I’ve met ghosts who’ve told me abayt when the two of ’em were first seen araynd ’ere. That wiz twelve-sixty-somethin’, when ’Enry the Third ordered the town burned dayn and ransacked as a punishment for sidin’ with de Montfort and the rebel students. From what these old-timers told me, when King ’Enry’s men were let into the Boroughs through a big ’ole in the priory wall dayn Andrew’s Road, the sisters came in through it with them, walkin’ naked and invisible beside the ’orses. The big girl looked to be six then, and was carryin’ ’er baby sister in ’er arms. Nobody’s ever ’eard ’em say a word. They only giggle and set light to things.”
The ghost gang watched the trilling, tittering duo as they flounced from house to house along seventeenth century St. Mary’s Street, slipping between the traders and the scowling, put-on housewives without anybody knowing they were there. Their hair billowed behind them on the westerly in trailing orange pennants, flickering and hazardous. Seeing them, Michael noticed for the first time just how well grey and bright orange went together, like a bloated morning sun seen through the fog above Victoria Park. In their meandering the women seemed to gravitate towards a single dwelling, a thatched house on the Pike Lane side of the street, a little closer to Horsemarket than the children were.
“Come on. It looks like that’s the ’ouse. Let’s goo and ’ave a butchers at ’em when they set it orf.”
Following Phyllis’s suggestion the dead urchins doppelganged towards the ordinary-looking dwelling, just in time to pursue the two sisters in through its front door, a poorly-fitting thing propped open by a brick. Inside, the downstairs of the cottage was a single room, gloomy and cluttered, evidently serving as a front room, living room, kitchen and bathroom all rolled into one. An infant with a dirty nose crawled on the coarse rugs that were spread about a cold brick floor, while by the open hearth a woman who appeared too old to be the baby’s mum stood frying scraps of meat in melted dripping, shaking the round-bottomed iron pan she held above the fireplace in one hand. At the same time, using her other hand, she stirred a clay jug of what turned out to be batter with a wooden spoon. The way that the old lady could do both things at the same time impressed Michael. When he’d watched his mum and gran cook in their kitchen down St. Andrew’s Road, they’d always split the chores so that each of them only had to do one thing at once. The other members of the Dead Dead Gang were nodding knowingly, all except Bill who was too busy ogling the naked fire-nymphs as they poked inquisitively round the crowded, cosy living space.
“She’s makin’ a Bake Pudden. When she’s stirred the batter up, she’ll tip it in atop the meat, then put the ’ole lot in the oven – that’s the little black iron door beside the fireplace – until it’s done. A lot o’ people say as Yorkshire Puddin’ is a recipe them northern buggers pinched from us, but were too tight to put the bits o’ meat in. It was just a way of makin’ up a proper meal from leftovers and odds and ends.”
As Phyllis wandered into the specifics of Bake Pudden-making and its history, Michael was watching the two sisters in their progress round the murky, fire-lit room. Surprisingly, they seemed uninterested in the fireplace itself and were converging on a patch of carpet to the far side of the central wooden table, where the crawling infant was investigating a fat garden spider that had probably retreated indoors at the first hint of a chill to the September air. The Salamanders made a great fuss of the baby, stooping down and chuckling in their musical brass wind-chime voices to it while they pulled a lot of silly, grinning faces.
Michael realised with a start that the small child, barely a year old from the look of him, could see the snickering, flickering young women. The tot’s gaze was shifting back and forth, tracking the movement of their bonfire beehive hairdos as they wavered in the drafts blown from the open door. The Salamanders winked and smirked and played games, walking their slim fingers back and forth along the table’s edge like tiny pairs of legs to catch the babe’s attention as it crawled there on the floor below. They marched their digits over the piled apples in a wooden fruit bowl resting on the tabletop, cooing and beaming at their fascinated audience of one. The baby gurgled happily as it watched the two flame-haired women from its spot down near the dangling hem of a slipped tablecloth that looked like it had previously seen service as a lady’s shawl. Only when the child’s chubby, grubby hand reached for the cloth’s fringed edge did Michael realise what the fire-sprites were up to. He called out a garbled warning to the others – “Look! The fieries want to bake the maybe start an appleanch!” – but by the time they’d worked out what he meant, it was too late.
Things came together like the comically elaborate machinery in a cartoon: the baby grabbed the hanging makeshift tablecloth, thus dragging the heaped fruit-bowl to the table’s edge, then over it. Missing the child the wooden bowl fell clattering to the rug, although one of its bouncing apples struck the startled mite above his eye and made him wail. Alarmed, the stooped old woman who was possibly the baby’s grandmother turned from her cooking to see what was up, at which point the round-bottomed iron pan that she was using tipped up slightly, spilling melted fat into the blazing hearth and setting fire to the pan’s contents simultaneously. The hissing gout of flame resulting from this momentary carelessness surged upward to ignite the dusters hanging with the pots and saucepans from the mantelpiece, causing the by-now frightened and confused old dear to reach out with her ladle, batting the offending blazing rags down from the hearthside to the brick floor and, disastrously, one of the dusty rugs. Within about five seconds nearly everything that could be on fire was. The woman stood there staring in stunned disbelief at what she’d done for a few instants, then ran round the table to scoop up the howling tot before she hauled it through the front door, shrieking “Fire!” as they fell stumbling out into St. Mary’s Street.
The sisters clapped their hands together in excitement, jumping up and down and squealing as the conflagration spread around the room. Only the tangerine tongues licking from the Salamanders’ heads had any colour, Michael noted. All the other flames now roaring in the cluttered cottage were bright white around the outside with profound grey hearts as they ascended like a line of ants towards the ceiling’s timber beams. Phyllis grabbed Michael by the scorched, discoloured collar of his dressing gown.
“Come on, we’re gettin’ ayt of ’ere. We don’t wanna be all stuck jostlin’ in a burnin’ doorway with the two o’ them.”
The elder of the crackling, spitting females had now hopped onto the table and was executing a variety of cancan, while her younger sister laughed and posed coquettishly amongst the smouldering curtains. The wraith children burst out through the doorway like a spray of playing cards, all Jacks and Queens, all spades and clubs without a splash of red between the six of them.
St. Mary’s Street was in the grip of an incredible commotion. Dogs and people ran this way and that, their barks and shouts and panicked screams uproarious despite the ghost-seam’s dampening effect. Two or three men were racing frantically to the afflicted home with slopping pails of water in their hands, but only got to within ten feet of its door before what Phyllis had predicted came spectacularly true: the Salamanders leapt together from the house into the street, accompanied by loud peals of hilarity and a great furnace blast of white flame that drove back the would-be firemen and their useless little buckets. It was almost ten o’clock upon the morning of September 20<sup>th</sup>, 1675.
Michael was asking John why the two easily-amused fire-fairies were called Salamanders when the younger, thinner one began to clamber effortlessly up the front wall of the burning cottage, reaching its thatched roof in seconds with her fleshier and more formidable big sister scuttling immediately behind her. Neither of the young girls moved like people, Michael thought. They moved like insects, or perhaps like …
“Lizards.” This was John.
“A salamander, with a little ‘s’, that’s like a lizard or a newt. But people once believed that salamanders lived in flames, so when we talk about a Salamander with a big ‘S’ then we’re talking about what’s called elementals, spirits of the fire.”
Marjorie interjected here, reflected firelight flaring from her spectacles.
“The ones that govern water are called Undines. The Nene Hag, who almost got me when I had me accident down Paddy’s Meadow, she wiz one of them. Snail-shells for eyes, she’d got. Then there’s the ones what rule the wind, they call them Sylphs although the only ones I’ve ever heard of have been horrible old men who stand a mile high. Spirits of the earth, they’re what’s called Gnomes officially, although round here we call ’em Urks or Urchins. You don’t see ’em much above ground, but they ride round the tunnels underneath upon these big black dog-things what are known as … oh, hang on. Looks like they’re off and running.”
The drowned girl was pointing up towards the rooftops, where the brace of Salamanders were commencing an outlandish waltz along the ridge of the thatched buildings. The incendiary beauties clung together tight, helpless with mirth, whirling each other round with an accompanying flame-tornado rising from the parched straw at their heels as they progressed from roof to roof. The dozens milling in the lane below watched helplessly as cottage after cottage was consumed by the fire-spirits’ unseen choreography. Unwittingly, the mob were following the sisters’ dazzling performance as they moved with the west wind along St. Mary’s Street towards Horsemarket, kicking up a loud din as they did so. There were curses, groans, despairing cries and several different sorts of weeping. An old man with cataracts was calling up above the clamour in a high and reedy voice, declaring that the fire was punishment from God as a result of papists in the Parliament withdrawing Charles the Second’s Declaration of Indulgence for dissenting congregations. A cross-looking youth who stood beside the raving ancient pushed him over in the mud and was immediately set on by two burlier and crosser-looking fellows who’d seen what the boy had done. A fight broke out in the already-distraught byway while, above, the Salamanders danced amongst the chimneypots with sheets of flame rolling and billowing about their bare legs like flamboyant ball-gowns. As the pair approached Horsemarket, people at that eastern end of Mary’s Street were already evacuating their doomed dwellings, moving what they could of their meagre possessions out into the frantic and stampeding avenue.
Michael ran hand in hand with Phyllis through the crowd, literally in some instances, as the Dead Dead Gang kept up with the devastating Salamander ballet. By the time the incandescent nudes had reached the wide dirt track of Horsemarket that sloped north-south across the thoroughfare’s far end, both sides of Mary’s Street were angry walls of fire with burning straws from the disintegrated thatching carried on the wind across the road. Chains of combustion snaked off down the incline towards Gold Street while at the same time the brilliant rivulets trickled uphill into the Mayorhold. Pausing only to squat down in turn over the chimney of the last house in the row and piddle streams of golden sparks into its darkness, the two sisters swarmed face first down the end wall, both snickering like cracking hearth-logs.
Hopping from one burning, bolting wagon to another they crossed Horsemarket and scampered gaily eastwards up St. Katherine’s Street, with townsfolk scattering before them, the ghost-ruffians and their after-pictures hurrying behind, not wanting to miss anything. When they were nearing College Street the redheads stopped before the gated entrance of what seemed to be a family-business tannery. The gorgeous monsters gazed towards the premises, then at each other, struggling to keep a straight face as they did so. Each one with an arm draped chummily around the other’s naked shoulder, the two giggling sisters stepped through the now-blazing gateway, vanishing from sight into the walled yard. Before Michael, Phyllis and the gang could follow them, the whole establishment blew up. It didn’t just ignite in a great rush like all the other buildings had done; it exploded, with a tower of fire erupting up towards the overcast September sky and needle-shards of debris trailing threads of smoke behind them raining for a hundred yards in each direction, falling through the spectral children while they stood there gaping in astonishment.
Michael spoke first.
“Whop wiz all that big clangerbang?”
John shook his head, staring in disbelief as the two Salamanders stepped from the inferno of the flattened workplace with volcanic lava-coloured tears of mirth now streaming down their silvery cheeks, holding each other up to stop themselves collapsing in a quaking, sniggering heap.
“I’ve no idea. That wiz like an artillery shell. I’d always wondered how the Great Fire spread from Mary’s Street to Derngate in just under twenty minutes, but if there were blasts like that to help it on, I’m not surprised.”
Drowned Marjorie’s moon face was crumpled by a frown, as if she was considering some problem, turning the alternatives this way and that inside her mind. Whatever she was thinking, the bespectacled child didn’t seem to come to a conclusion that she thought worth mentioning. Marjorie kept her ruminations to herself as Phyllis led the gang along the roaring corridor after the fire-girls, who were by that time advancing merrily into the tinderbox of College Street, or College Lane as the incline was currently referred to, Michael noticed from a signboard that he read without the least surprise that he could do so. Pyrotechnic trails unravelled from the sisters, bowling through the slanting lane in both directions, turning everything with which they came in contact to another glaring torch. Appearing to pick up their pace, the clearly-tickled creatures sauntered through a charring gate on College Street’s far side and disappeared into the long dark passageway that Michael knew would later on be called Jeyes’s Jitty and which cut through to the Drapery. Chirping and twittering their happy nonsense, the two pretty engines of destruction wandered off into the alley’s blackness with their fiery tresses sputtering behind them and the grey ghost-children in pursuit.
It wasn’t until they stepped out into the Drapery that Michael realised the full scale of the disaster. People in their hundreds wept and bellowed as they fled in mortal dread or else charged impotently up and down the busy high street dragging pointless, slopping buckets as they tried to save their businesses. Vast flocks of startled birds flowed from one abstract shape into another under palls of smoke that turned bright morning into twilight. Just south of the alley entrance, the top end of Gold Street was ablaze and a slow river of incinerating light was starting to roll inexorably away down Bridge Street, driving soldiers, sheep and shopkeepers before it. Half the town was burning down, and it had only been ten minutes since the baby pulled the fruit bowl from the tabletop.
Across the way, the timber pillars holding up a wooden version of All Saints Church were on fire. The sisters watched for a few moments until they were certain that the building had caught properly and then proceeded up the Drapery, tripping amongst the milliners’ and cobblers’ stalls and pausing to inspect some item every now and then, like fussy ladies on a shopping jaunt, looking for something in particular. On the rough cobbles just outside a pitch displaying boots and shoes, they evidently found what they were after. Stopping dead they gazed towards some barrels standing in a row against the avenue’s east wall, then both threw up their hands and shrilled with glee. Holding their sides they staggered round in fiery rings, bent double with amusement and convulsing at some private joke apparent only to the two of them.
Drowned Marjorie gave a tight little smile of satisfaction. Clearly, she’d worked something out.
“So that’s it. That’s why the whole town burned down in under half an hour.”
The younger of the Salamanders, the slim thirteen-year-old with the flat chest and lone curl of pubic flame where her plump older sister had a brush-fire, suddenly sprang into action. From a standing jump she made a ballet dancer’s leap through the cascading smoke, her hair in a long orange smear behind her shedding sparks like dandruff, to alight on top of the end barrel, standing on her pointed toes with skinny arms curled up to either side for balance.
She’d just hopped to the next barrel when the first one in the line blew up, smashed from within by a huge fist of liquid fire that sent its wooden staves sailing into the sky and sprayed a burning dew over the as yet untouched properties to either side. The slender little girl danced nimbly onto the lid of the third container as that of the second took off like a rocket: a black, flaming disc that disappeared over the roof into the Market Square beyond. A lake of blazing fluid began crawling down the Drapery. The sprite skipped from one barrel to the next and they exploded like a deafening string of jumping jacks while the performer’s older sister looked on and applauded, jigging on the spot in her enthusiasm. Everything in sight was now on fire. Drowned Marjorie gave the assembled phantom kids the benefit of her considered verdict.
“Tannin. It wizn’t a strong west wind all on its own what made the town burn down so quick. It was the tannin. As long as there’s been a town here, it’s been known for gloves and boots, and that’s because we had all the right things here to make leather. We had lots of cows, and lots of oak trees. You need oak trees for the tannin, from the bark. The thing is, tannin wiz like aeroplane fuel. It speeds up a fire and makes it worse. That’s why the tannery in Katherine Street blew up, and that’s what’s in them barrels that she’s dancing on. I mean, you think of all the tannin that wiz in the Drapery, and then over the back there on the Market Square, that was the Glovery – ”
The little girl broke off as the whole top end of the street went up with an enormous boom. From the direction of the market came what sounded like the racket of a big jet aircraft taking off until Michael remembered that this was the sixteen-hundreds, realising that the noise was actually that of a lot of people screaming all at once. Squinting between fountains of flame and through a lowering curtain of black, fuming fragments he could see the elementals as they climbed once more towards the rooftops, sticking to the blazing walls, a giggling pair of orange-crested reptiles.
Just uphill the lower end of Sheep Street was now also catching fire. A riderless and burning horse was spat out of the ancient byway’s mouth to gallop terrified in the direction of All Saints, rolling its eyes. Nothing was safe and almost everything was flammable. By mutual assent the children raced around the top east corner of the Drapery into the caterwauling nightmare of the marketplace, into the bright core of the cataclysm, which made all they’d seen so far a preamble.
The Salamander sisters, having skittered up to the thatched ridges, had abandoned their pretence at dancing and commenced to race around the upper reaches of the square like two competing sprinters. That, however, was where all human comparisons were swept away: the pace at which the women ran along the roofs was so unnatural as to be genuinely horrid, like the unexpected speed of spiders. The sight would have been upsetting even if it hadn’t been attended by the realisation that the people in the square, and there were scores of them, were now contained in a sealed box of fire.
The tradesmen in the premises that ringed the marketplace ran back and forth, arms laden with whatever items they could carry from their threatened shops as they deposited the rescued wares in at least temporary safety on the cobbles of the square. As the extent of their predicament began to dawn on them, however, the trapped townsfolk for the most part became less concerned with saving their possessions than with getting out alive. Not all of them, though. Some were plundering the burning stores, and there were dreadful scenes towards the bottom of the market where an over-greedy looter who’d caught fire was being driven back inside the blazing building he’d been trying to rob by angry market traders armed with poles and meat-hooks. Individual squeals and bellows were inaudible, subsumed within one deafening common shriek as people stormed through the familiar enclosure that had turned into a crematorium, desperately looking for an exit.
Not only were living townspeople attempting to escape. Amongst the various establishments that ringed the marketplace were several taverns, notably the coaching inn there on the square’s far side, and these vomited spectres. Gushing from the doors and windows, leaking through the wooden walls in forms inseparable from the surrounding smoke, four or five hundred years’ worth of accumulated gentleman spooks, medieval ghouls and shapeless ancient apparitions joined the panic-stricken living hordes who were unfortunate enough to be at market on that fateful day. Dead dogs streaked past with photo-finish images strung out behind them like a greyhound race, and up above it all the lovely human fireworks crowed and leapt and somersaulted as they overlooked their handiwork.
Out from the flaming, overflowing cauldron of the town square, tributaries roared up Newland and through Abington Street, Sheep Street, Bridge Street, Derngate, the whole town turned to a burning cobweb with the market crowd stuck struggling at its centre. Michael started crying at the awfulness of all the people who were going to die, but Phyllis gave his hand a squeeze and told him not to worry.
“Nearly everyone wizzle get out of ’ere all right, you’ll see. In the ’ole town only eleven people died, and that most likely wizn’t many more than yer’d get on an ordinary day. Ah! There, yer see? Over the market’s other side, there at the bottom end of Newland, where the crowd are makin’ for …”
She pointed to the northeast corner of the square, towards which the majority of the great panicked herd seemed to be heading. Men were waving, shouting something as they urged their fellow escapees to follow them. The phantom children drifted in the same direction as the fleeing mob, and as they neared the far side of the market’s upper reaches Michael saw that everybody was converging on a single building at the foot of Newland, a place which by his day would have been transformed into a funny little sweetshop that had coats-of-arms and things like that carved in the plasterwork above its door. These decorations, he saw now, had been a feature of the house as far back as the sixteen-hundreds. The trapped people in the square were filing underneath the plaster heraldry as they all tried to cram themselves into the house, like circus clowns attempting to get back inside their too-small car. As the gang stood and watched this almost-comic exodus, Phyllis explained to Michael.
“That’s the Welsh House. I dare say it wiz a sweetshop when you wiz alive, same as it wiz fer me. Before that, though, it wiz like the paymaster’s office fer the drovers what ’ad brought the sheep from Wales. The ’erds would all arrive in Sheep Street, and the chaps who’d ’erded ’em across the country would all come dayn ’ere to pick their money up. As yer can see, it’s mostly stone and it’s got slates up on its roof instead o’ thatchin’, so it doesn’t burn as quickly as the ’ouses all araynd it. Everybody’s gooin’ in its front and comin’ ayt the back into the alleys, where they can all get to safety.”
It took very little time for the humanity-filled bladder of the burning marketplace to empty itself through the pinched urethra of the Welsh House, flooding with a great sense of relief into the backstreets further east. Most of the square’s ghosts also chose this method of escape from their predicament, traipsing invisible along the house’s passageways amongst the living. They appeared reluctant to just walk out through the market’s flaming walls, perhaps because the way they’d learned to treat fire when they were alive still had a hold on them now they were dead. Michael saw one such phantom looking more confused and frightened than the rest, constantly glancing back over his shoulder in alarm at his own tail of fading images as he fell in with the long, shuffling queue of spooks and citizens who were evacuating the condemned ground. After a brief stint of puzzled peering, Michael recognised him as the looter who’d been driven back into the blazing building by the vengeful tradesmen only minutes earlier. The toddler watched the hunted-looking spirit, stumbling through the crowd-crammed doorway with the other fugitives, until he was distracted by a yell from Reggie Bowler.
“Well, blow me! Where ’ave the Sally-Mandies gone? I took me eye off ’em for just a minute and they’ve bloody disappeared!”
They had as well. The posse of ghost-children all looked up and scanned the market’s fire-fringed skyline, searching for some smudge of orange, some sign of the sisters, but the two torch-headed girls were nowhere to be seen. Although the kids were all privately disappointed to have lost sight of the thrilling elemental arsonists, Phyllis made an attempt to treat the matter philosophically.
“I ’spect they’ve both got bored and gone orf to wherever they call ’ome, now that they’ve seen the best of it. I mean, this’ll be burnin’ for another five, six ’ours or more, but all the biggest spectacles are over, pretty much. We might as well walk back the way we come, dayn to St. Mary’s Street. We can make our way up from there to Doddridge Church in 1959, where Mrs. Gibbs is waitin’ for us. Then we’ll find ayt what she’s learned abayt ayr mascot ’ere.”
Seventeenth-century Northampton spewed fire from its windows, its scorched timbers cracking and collapsing into cinders everywhere about them. The Dead Dead Gang flickered back like newsreel refugees across the now-deserted square, towards its northwest corner and the passage through into the Drapery. Just like the marketplace this was abandoned to the radiant catastrophe, even the neighbourhood ghosts having given up the ghost. As they meandered on the sputtering, flaring incline of the devastated high street, the six wraith-waifs found themselves looking into the smouldering mouth of Bridge Street further down. The town appeared to be alight as far as South Bridge and the river, and the chilly glass bowl of the early autumn sky arced overhead was soot-black, like an oil-lamp’s mantle. Other than those distant uproars carried on the wind, the only sounds were those of the inferno: its deep sighs and coughs that sprayed a sputum of bright sparks across the street; its irritated mutter in the splitting doorframes.
Walking back along the spindly fissure into College Street was a peculiar experience, since this forerunner of Jeyes’ Jitty was by now wholly consumed and filled with a blast-furnace blaze from one end to the other. Being made for the most part from ectoplasm, which is naturally a damp and largely fireproof substance, the ghost-children weren’t in any danger as they trooped along the narrow pass but, as Michael discovered, they could feel the fire inside of them as they passed through it, just as they had felt the bird-poo and the rain. Deep in his phantom memory of a tummy he could feel the tickle of the flames, developing to an unbearably delightful and insistent itch that felt, if anything, much, much too good. It sort of made him want to do things just on impulse without any thought for whether they were right or not, and he was glad when they were out of the infernal alleyway and crossing over what was left of College Street. The old sign that identified the place as College Lane had been reduced to ashes and the ashes blown away. There were some looters at the top end of the side-street loading goods from an abandoned shop onto a two-wheeled cart, but otherwise the lane was bare.
St. Katherine Street, like all the surrounding byways, looked like Hell, or at least looked the way that Michael had imagined Hell to be before he’d had his run-in with sardonic Sam O’Day and found out that it was a flat place made entirely of squashed builders, or something like that at any rate. In the exploded ruins of the tannery up near the top, a twenty-foot wide scorch-mark bristling with spars of blackened rubble like a giant bird’s nest struck by lightning, they found what had happened to the Salamanders.
It was Bill and Reggie, running into empty dwellings on their route simply to nose about, who made the big discovery and called excitedly for Michael, Phyllis, John and Marjorie to come and have a look. Phyllis’s little brother and the freckle-faced Victorian were standing in the middle of the flattened yard, next to a pockmark in the dark soil and the smoking wreckage, a small crater that was no more than a foot or so across. They both seemed very pleased with what they’d found.
“I’ll eat my hat! This wiz a blessed queer thing. Come and have a look at this, you lot.”
At Reggie’s invitation, the best dead gang in the fourth dimension gathered round the shallow indentation in a whispering and excited huddle, even though it took them a few moments before they worked out what they were looking at.
The circular depression was a hollow of grey, cooling ashes and curled up within it, silvery skin almost indistinguishable from the powdery bed that they were resting on, were the two sisters. Both of them were sleeping, having been no doubt worn out by their caprice, appearing very different in repose to how they’d looked when they were jigging on the rooftops of the Market Square only a little while ago. For one thing, all the tangled flames sprung from their scalps had been extinguished so that both of them were hairless. For another, neither of them was now taller than eleven inches.
They had shrunken into bald grey dolls, half-buried and asleep there in the fire’s warm talcum residue, reclining head-to-toe so that they looked like the two fishes on the horoscope page of the daily paper. You could tell they were alive because their sides were going up and down, and with the better vision that the dead have you could see their tiny eyelids twitching as they dreamed of Lord knows what. Exhausted by their great annihilating spree, the nymphs were evidently dormant. They had eaten a whole town and would now drowse away the decades until next time, shrivelling to cinders of their former selves as all the heat went out them, and slumbering beneath the Boroughs in their bed of dust and embers.
After a brief conference on the merits of attempting to wake up the pair by prodding them, which Bill suggested, the children instead elected to continue with their saunter through the burning lanes towards St. Mary’s Street and, ultimately, Doddridge Church. They left the Salamanders snoozing in the ruined tanner’s yard with poison fumes for bed-sheets, carrying on down St. Katherine’s Street as they headed for the blackened remnants of Horsemarket at the bottom. Michael scuffed along in his loose slippers between John and Phyllis while the other three ran on ahead, their grey repeated shapes soon disappearing in the drifts of smoke that crawled an inch above the cobbles.
“Wiz the Boroughs all barned down, then?”
Phyllis shook her head in a briefly-enduring smear of features, much like when you drew a face in ballpoint pen on a balloon then stretched the rubber out.
“Nah. There wiz a west wind, so all the fire got blew towards the east and burned the Drapery and the Market and all that. Other than Mary’s Street, Horsemarket and a bit of Marefair at the Gold Street end, the Boroughs came ayt of the episode unmarked.”
Michael was cheered to hear this reassuring news.
“Well, that wiz lucky, wizn’t it?”
John, wading knee-deep in a blazing fallen tree on Michael’s right, didn’t agree.
“Not really, nipper, no. You see, the east part of the town wiz levelled by the flames, so that all got rebuilt with new stone buildings, some of which are still standing around the Market Square in your time. Everywhere else in Northampton got improved, except the Boroughs. That wiz pretty much left as it had been when the fire broke out there in the first place. Should you date exactly when the Boroughs first began to be seen as a slum, you’d have to say that it wiz after the Great Fire, here in the sixteen seventies. If there’d been an east wind today, then all of us might well have grown up somewhere posh, and all had different lives.”
Phyllis was sceptical. Michael could tell this by the wrinkles suddenly appearing on the top bit of her nose.
“But that’s not ’ow it ’appened, wiz it? Things only work out one way, and that’s the way they ’ave to work out. If we’d grown up in posh ’ouses then we wouldn’t be us, would we? I’m quite ’appy bein’ ’oo I am. I think this wiz ’oo I wiz meant to be, and I think that the Boroughs wiz meant to be ’ow it wiz, as well.”
They’d reached the bottom of the street and were confronted by Horsemarket, a charred ribbon that unreeled downhill and where people were diligently working, with some small success, to bring the blaze under control. The spectral children fogged across the road, swirling between the chains of bucket-passing men on whom the sweat and soot had mixed to a black paste, an angry tribal war-paint.
They unwound into the little that was left of Mary’s Street like spools of film, only to find the fire was almost out, here in the lane where it had started. People picked disconsolately through a clinging scum of sodden ash or stroked their weeping spouses’ hair like doleful monkeys that had been dressed in old-fashioned clothes for an advertisement. Unnoticed, the dead ne’er-do-wells floated amidst the desolation, past the black and cauterised gash that was Pike Street as they made their way to Doddridge Church, which wouldn’t be there for another twenty years. Moping along a little way behind the others, Reggie Bowler was beginning to look a bit sad and lonely for some reason, pulling his hat further down onto his head and shooting melancholy glances from beneath its brim towards the wastelands spilling downhill from the as-yet non-existent church. Perhaps something about the place awoke unhappy memories for the ungainly phantom guttersnipe.
Michael, who’d been expecting somebody to dig another mole-hole up into the future, was surprised when Phyllis told him this wouldn’t be necessary.
“We don’t need to do that, not dayn ’ere. There’s summat near the church what we can use instead. Think of it like a moving staircase or a lift or summat. They call it the Ultraduct.”
They were now on the low slopes of the mound called Castle Hill, where Michael had thought there were only barns and sheds when he’d looked earlier. However, as they neared Chalk Lane – or Quart-Pot Lane as signs proclaimed it to be called at present – he could see around the west side of the flimsy, makeshift buildings, to what he assumed must be the structure Phyllis had just mentioned.
Whatever it was, it still appeared to be under construction. Half a dozen of the lower-ranking builders that he’d seen going about their business at the Works were labouring upon the pillars of some sort of partly-finished bridge, their grey robes shimmering at the hem with what were almost colours, but not quite. As Michael looked on three old women, who were obviously alive, beetled around the mound’s flank from the north, wearing expressions of concern to mask their natural morbid curiosity as they came to observe the fire’s aftermath. They walked straight through the builders and the posts they were erecting, utterly oblivious to their presence, while for their part the celestial work-gang didn’t let the three distract them for a moment from their various tasks. To judge by the intent look on their faces, they were trying to meet a demanding schedule.
The material that they were working with was bright white and translucent, pre-cut planks and columns of the stuff swung into place with ropes and pulleys. The immense span of a bridge that looked like it was more or less completed stretched across the Boroughs from the west, only to finish in mid-air some few feet from the end barn that stood there on Chalk or Quart-Pot Lane. The elevated walkway, which appeared to curve off to the south, away into the grey and misted distance, was supported all along its dream-like length by the same alabaster pillars that the builders were attempting to manoeuvre into place there on the gentle, grassy slopes of Castle Hill. Something about the way the columns were positioned struck Michael as being very wrong.
The bridge was held up by two rows of the semi-transparent posts, one on each side. The problem was that if you trained your eyes on what you thought to be the bottom of a nearside strut and traced it upwards, it turned out to be supporting the far side of the construction. Similarly, if you focussed on the upper reaches of a pillar that was holding up the walkway’s closest edge and followed it straight down towards its base, it would invariably end up being in the further row of columns. When you took in the whole thing at once, it looked right. It was only when you tried to make some sense of how it all fitted together that you realised the impossibility of the arrangement you were staring at. As he approached it with the Dead Dead Gang, Michael discovered that just seeing it gave him the ghost of a tremendous headache. Screwing shut his eyes he rubbed his forehead. Phyllis gave his hand a sympathetic squeeze.
“I know. It makes yer brains ’urt, dunnit? It guz all the way to Lambeth, then to Dover, then across the channel and through France and Italy and that, to end up in Jerusalem. From what I ’ear, it’s much the same as when the council put a proper street where previously there’d only been a footpath worn into the grass. The Ultraduct began like that, as just a crease that had been trodden into bein’ by the men and women gooin’ to an’ fro, except the Ultraduct wiz a path worn through time and not just grass. It ’ad been there since long before the Romans, but they were the ones ’oo properly established it, as you might say. Then people like that monk who come ’ere frum Jerusalem and brought the cross to set into the centre, they trod it in deeper. Then, o’ course, there wiz all the Crusaders, back and forth between ’ere and the ’Oly Land. Around ’Enry the Eighth’s time in the fifteen-’undreds, when ’e broke up all the monasteries and forced the split with Rome so ’e could get divorced, that wizzle be about the time the builders started puttin’ up the Ultraduct. What we’re lookin’ at ’ere wiz when it’s nearly finished, which’ll be in abayt twenty years frum now.”
In a concerted effort to stop staring at the eye-deceiving pillars, Michael gazed instead towards the Ultraduct itself, the alabaster walkway sweeping off across Northampton to the far horizon. All along the railed bridge there appeared to be some sort of blurred activity, a sense of constant motion even though you couldn’t really see anything moving. Waves of what seemed to be heat-haze pulsed both ways along the overpass and rippled into intricate and liquid patterns where they crossed each other. Even though the structure was unfinished, it was clearly already in use by some person or persons who were travelling too fast to see. Or, Michael thought, they might be travelling too slow to see, although he had no idea what he meant by that.
The gang had by now reached the spot on Chalk Lane where the grey-robed builders were at work. Being the outfit’s self-appointed spokesman, Phyllis elbowed her way past her colleagues, dragging Michael in her wake as she approached the nearest of the labourers, one skinnier and taller than the others with a shaved head and a long and mournful face. Phyllis addressed him, speaking slowly and deliberately in the way you would if you were talking to somebody who was deaf or a bit dim.
“This Michael Warren. We the Dead Dead Gang. Can we go on the Ultraduct and talk to Fiery Phil?”
The builder peered down at the ghost girl in her grisly scarf, and at the dressing gown-clad little boy beside her. His grey eyes were twinkling and he pursed his lips as though to keep himself from laughing.
“Dje banglow fimth scurpvyk?!”
Michael was beginning to get used to how the builders talked. First they would speak the gibberish that was their version of a word or sentence, then that nonsense would unroll itself inside the listener’s head into a long speech full of thunderous and ringing phrases. In the current instance, this expanded monologue began with <em>In the Big Bang’s glow we stand, I and thee, child of whim …</em> and then seemed to continue in that vein for ages. Finally, as Michael understood it, once you’d listened to them talking and absorbed it all as best you could, you sort of came up with your own translation. If he’d heard the builder right, the tickled-looking chap had just said, “The Dead Dead Gang? Why, I’ve read your book! So I’m the angle that you met when you were at the Ultraduct in chapter twelve, “The Riddle of the Choking Child”, and then again at the end of the chapter. What an honour. Now, let’s see, you must be Phyllis, with your rabbit scarf, and this is Alma’s brother Michael. I suppose that must be Miss Driscoll herself behind you. Yes, of course you can see Mr. Doddridge. I’ll take you myself. Goodness, just wait until I tell the others!”
Looking puffed up fit to burst the builder gently herded them towards a ladder that was propped against the elevated walkway, though as they got closer Michael saw that it had carpeting and was in fact a narrow section of what he’d heard called a ‘Jacob Flight’. The cluster of ghost-children all shuffled obediently forward as they’d been directed, with nobody kicking up the usual ruckus. Everyone, in fact, looked too astonished by what the grey-robed beanpole had just said to make a sound. Although the Dead Dead Gang liked to pretend to being famous, you could tell that they were flummoxed by the thought that even builders had apparently read their adventures. Where, though, had they read them? There were no real books about the gang except the one in Reggie Bowler’s dream, which clearly didn’t count. And who was this Miss Driscoll? As he reached the bottom of the staircase-ladder, Michael could hear Bill and Phyllis whispering excitedly, somewhere behind him.
“ ’E said about <em>Forbidden Worlds</em> when me an’ Reggie found ’im up in Bath Street flats, but still I didn’t catch on.”
“Well, I knew as I’d seen ’im before when I first faynd ’im in the Attics o’ the Breath. I just couldn’t think where, but now I know. It wiz the show, just up the street there. Well. This changes everything.”
It sounded as if they were talking about him, but Michael couldn’t really make much sense of it. Besides, he’d reached the bottom of the Jacob Flight with everybody else queued up behind him, so he had to concentrate upon the climb. As usual, this was awkward, with the tiny treads too small for even Michael’s feet, but his ascent was much assisted by the ghost-seam’s general weightlessness. In moments he was clambering up onto the shining, milky boardwalk of the Ultraduct.
He stood there rooted to the spot and lit from underneath by the white crystal planks of the unfinished bridge, his small form almost bleached out of existence like a figure in a photo that the light had spoiled. As his five comrades and the helpful builder climbed onto the boards behind him, Michael stared transfixed at the changed landscape that was visible from this new vantage point, this overpass that Phyllis said was built upon a path worn into time itself.
Around them, from horizon to horizon, several different eras were all happening at once. Transparent trees and buildings overlapped in a delirious rush of images that changed and grew and bled into each other, see-through structures crumbling away and vanishing only to reappear and run through their accelerated lives over again, a boiling blur of black and white as if a mad projectionist were running many different loops of old film through his whirring, flickering contraption at the same time, at the wrong speed. Looking west down the raised highway, Michael saw Northampton Castle being built by Normans and their labourers, while being pulled down in accordance with the will of Charles the Second fifteen hundred years thereafter. A few centuries of grass and ruins coexisted with the bubbling growth and fluctuations of the railway station. 1920s porters, speeded up into a silent comedy, pushed luggage-laden trolleys through a Saxon hunting party. Women in ridiculously tiny skirts superimposed themselves unwittingly on Roundhead puritans, briefly becoming composites with fishnet tights and pikestaffs. Horses’ heads grew from the roofs of cars and all the while the castle was constructed and demolished, rising, falling, rising, falling, like a great grey lung of history that breathed crusades, saints, revolutions and electric trains.
The castle, obviously, was not alone in the transforming flood of simultaneous time. Above, the sky was marbled with the light and weather of a thousand years, while there beside the shimmering edifice the town’s west bridge shifted from beaver dams to wooden posts, from Cromwell’s drawbridge to the brick and concrete hump that Michael knew. Now standing next to him, Phyllis gave him a slightly funny look, as if regarding him in a new light. At last she smiled.
“What d’yer think, then? How’s that for a view? I tell yer what, if yer’ve got any business you want answered, you just ask away. I know I might ’ave told yer to shut up and not ask questions all the time, but let’s just say I’ve ’ad a change of ’eart. You ask me anything yer want, me duck.”
Michael just blinked at her. This was a turn-up for the books, and he’d no idea what had brought it on so suddenly. That said, he thought he’d take advantage of this new spirit of openness in Phyllis while it lasted.
“All right, then. Wizzle you be my girlfriend?”
It was Phyllis’s turn now to stare at Michael blankly. Finally she draped a sort of consolation-arm around his shoulder as she answered.
“No. I’m sorry. I’m a bit too old for you. And anyway, when I said about questions, it weren’t questions like that what I meant. I meant about the Ultraduct and things like that.”
Michael looked up at her and thought about it for a moment.
“Oh. Well, then, why can we see all different times from here?”
The whole gang and the builder who had volunteered to be their guide were by now heading slowly for the walkway’s ragged, uncompleted end. Phyllis, who looked immensely grateful for the change of topic, answered Michael’s query with enthusiasm as they walked along together.
“This wiz what time looks like when yer up above it, looking dayn. It’s a bit like if you were in a gret big city, walking in its streets so yer could only see the little bit what you were in at present, and then yer got taken up inter the sky, so you could look dayn and see the ’ole place with all its buildings, all at once. The Ultraduct is mostly used by builders, devils, saints and that lot, when they’re moving through the linger what’s between ’ere and Jerusalem. They’re used to seein’ time like this, so they think nothin’ of it, but to ordinary ghosts it still looks funny. ’Ave a decko at the church along the end ’ere if yer don’t believe me.”
Michael glanced away from Phyllis and towards the jutting and unfinished pier-end that they were approaching. Just beyond the point where the bridge terminated in mid-air was a tremendous visual commotion, churning imagery somewhere between a speeded-up film advertising the construction industry and a spectacular Guy Fawkes Night firework show. He saw the naked prehistoric slope that would be Castle Hill and over this, superimposed, he saw outbuildings of the Norman castle as they rose and fell, a single stone retreat encircled by a little moat, the lonely turret crumbling down to rubble, the surrounding ditch drained and filled in to form a ring of hard dirt lanes around the mound. A wooden chapel bloomed and crumpled into empty grass, with burdened plague-carts blurring back and forth as they delivered human backfill to a briefly-manifested burial pit. The barns and sheds that he’d seen on the site when he’d been back down in the 1670s a little while ago were flickering in and out of being and amongst it all an oblong structure made from warm grey stone was starting to take shape.
At first the building was just walls that knitted themselves into being from the bottom upward, leaving gaps for three high windows on the southern face and two long doorways where the bricks swirled out in an extension to the west, which looked as if they might be loading bays of some sort. Michael noticed that the luminous white walkway he was standing on seemed to be leading straight into the top half of the leftmost door, but was distracted by a slate roof rattling into existence as it unrolled from the eaves, just as a similarly slate-topped porch that had its own brick chimney started to squeeze itself forward from the block’s south side, right under the three windows. Boundaries sprang up a few yards from the property, enclosing it in limestone walls that rose to curious rounded humps where the four corners should have been, only for these to melt into the lower and more sharp-edged forms that Michael was familiar with. At the same time – and all of this was at the same time, from the ancient grassy hillock to the Norman turret and the teetering, ramshackle barns that followed it – he saw the porch with its lone chimney and its steep slate roof collapse into a broader, grander church-front: a Victorian vestibule that had a flagged and iron-gated courtyard spread before it. Looking back towards the nearest, western side he saw that the two lengthy doorframes had been mostly filled in, leaving one small entrance halfway up the wall of the extension, corresponding neatly with the end-point of the Ultraduct. This previously uncompleted juncture of the walkway had apparently been finished in the last few seconds and now fitted perfectly against the chapel, leading smoothly into the suspended doorway. Doddridge Church, now wholly recognisable, exploded into space and time as modern flats and houses licked the skyline to its rear with tongues of brick.
Meanwhile, above the forming contours of the building, something else was going on. Strokes of pale light were sketching in a towering diagram of scaffolding and girders, an enormous, complicated latticework of luminescent tracings that soared in a square-edged column to the curdling heavens, with its upper limits out of sight beyond even the range of Michael’s ghost-eyes. Matchstick lines of fleeting brilliance scintillated in and out of view, elaborate grids of white against the swirling centuries of sky that fogged and clarified above, suggesting something vast of which the earthly church was merely a foundation stone. He looked up quizzically at Phyllis, who smiled proudly in return.
“And you thought that them tower blocks up in nothing-five or six wiz big, ay? Well, they’re not a patch on Fiery Phil’s place. It goes straight up to Mansoul and even ’igher, up to the Third Borough’s office if the rumours are to be believed.”
Michael was puzzled by the name which, even though he thought he might have heard it earlier, had yet to be explained.
“Who’s the Third Borough?”
“Well, it’s like the normal livin’ neighbour’ood, that’s the First Borough, like I told yer. Then above that there’s the Second Borough, what we call Upstairs. And up above that … well, there’s the Third Borough. He’s a sort of rent-collector and he’s sort of a policeman at the same time. He runs all the Boroughs. He makes sure that there’s justice above the street and everythin’ like that. You never see ’im, not ’less yer a builder. ’Ere, come on, let’s goo in through the crook door and meet Mrs. Gibbs, see if she’s faynd ayt anythin’ abayt this big adventure what yer on.”
The group had reached the point at which the shining walkway ended with the wooden doorframe halfway up the church’s western wall. Taking his hand in hers, Phyllis pulled Michael through the door’s black-painted boards into rich, sudden colour and ear-popping sound. As bad as or else worse than he remembered it, the reek of Phyllis’s pelt-necklace curled into his nostrils before he could clench them shut and made him want to retch. The after-images that had been trailing them on their excursion through the Great Fire of Northampton all abruptly vanished, indicating that they were now up above the ghost-seam. They were Upstairs. They were in Mansoul.
That said, the room in which they found themselves appeared to be of normal size and hadn’t been expanded into one of Mansoul’s endless, gaudy aerodromes. Its furnishings – its tables, chairs and carpets – were all of an eighteenth century design, and though they glowed with dearness and with presence they did not seem to be those of a rich man, nor one who was extravagant or showy.
As the children and their grey-robed escort percolated into the gold-lit room through its half-sized wooden door they found that Mrs. Gibbs was there already, waiting for them. The rotund and pink-cheeked deathmonger stood at the far end of the chamber, wearing a white apron that had brightly coloured bees and butterflies embroidered round its edges. There beside her was a man of moderate height who looked to be in early middle age. His chiselled features, with the smooth brow and the curved blade of the nose, were nonetheless inclined to plumpness, a slight bulge of fat between the rectangle of his antique starched parson’s collar and the firm, cleft chin. His eyes, however, had a somewhat sunken quality, the kindly slate-blue gaze retreated into wide, round sockets that appeared to catch reflected light around their rims, a fever-bright shine smeared on the high cheekbones. The cascading golden curls of what Michael realised belatedly must be a wig fell to the shoulders of the pastor’s long black smock, enclosing the kind, noble features in a fancy gilded frame, like an old painting. A fond smile haunted the corners of the thin lips’ longbow line. This, Michael thought, must be the man that Phyllis had called Fiery Phil, although he didn’t seem to have the slightest thing about his manner that was fiery. Fire, as Michael had experienced it recently in the cavorting of the Salamander girls, was nowhere near as reasonable or considerate in its appearance.
Both Mrs. Gibbs and the somehow imposing clergyman seemed pleased to see the scruffy phantom children and the builder that accompanied them. The deathmonger bustled forward, beaming.
“There you are, my dears. And Mr. Aziel, how nice to meet you. Now then, this wiz Mr. Doddridge who I said I’d have a word with. Mr. Doddridge, this wiz the Dead Dead Gang, who I dare say you’ll have heard of.”
Doddridge smiled, although the radiant eyes looked a bit sad to Michael.
“So these are the very terrors of Mansoul! My word, but we are honoured. My wife Mercy often reads your exploits to our eldest daughter, Tetsy. I must introduce you to them presently, but for the moment there wiz one amongst you that I am most eager to encounter.”
Michael thought that this would more than likely turn out to be him, since everybody in the afterlife seemed to be taken with him. At the same time, unbeknownst to Michael, Phyllis Painter was assuming that the clergyman meant her, as the Dead Dead Gang’s leader. Even Marjorie, for her own reasons, puffed up just a little in anticipation before all three were let down when Doddridge strode across the diamond-patterned carpet, walking in between them to clasp Reggie Bowler by the shoulders. None of them had been expecting that, least of all Reggie.
“By your raiment I can surely tell that you are Master Fowler. When I read that you had met your frozen end in plain sight of our little church it made me weep, and Mercy wept as well. You must take time away from your adventures to attend the ghost academy I am attempting to establish, where those spirits that are less advantaged may partake of learning even when their mortal term has been concluded. Tell me that you’ll visit us, for that should make my heart most glad.”
Dumbfounded, Reggie nodded and shook the man’s proffered hand. The clergyman beamed with delight and then turned his attention to the other children.
“So, then, let us see. This must be Phyllis Painter in her famously offensive scarf, which means that over here we have our little author. The tall fellow at the back must be our dashing solider-boy, and from your family resemblance to young Miss Painter I assume you must be Bill. Be sure that I shall keep my eye on you.”
Finally Doddridge turned to smile at Michael, crouching down upon his haunches so that his gaze would be level with that of the dressing gown-clad child.
“By process of elimination, then, this bonny little fellow must be Michael Warren. Poor lad. I imagine that all this bewilders you, the ins and outs of our existence in Mansoul while all the time your earthly body speeds towards the hospital I founded with my good friends Mr. Stonhouse and the Reverend Hervey. And if that wiz not enough, dear Mrs. Gibbs informs me that one of the higher devils has deceitfully ensnared you in some wicked bargain.”
Michael’s lips began to tremble at the memory.
“He said I’d got to help him do a murder. I won’t have to, wizzle I?”
Doddridge glanced down towards the cream-and-chocolate decorations of the carpet for a moment and then once more raised his gaze to look at Michael, his eyes now grave and concerned within the bright-rimmed sockets.
“Not unless it be the will of He who buildeth all things, though it may be so. Be brave, my boy, and know that nothing can occur save by necessity. Each of us has his part to play in the immaculate construction, in the raising of the Porthimoth di Norhan, and none more so than yourself. Your part entails no more than that you carry on with your adventure. See all that you can of this eternal township where we are continued, even if those sights are on occasion dreadful. See the angles and the devils both, fair lad, and try hard to remember all that you experience. Your time here shall provide the inspiration for events that, be they modest, are essential to the Porthimoth’s completion.”
Phyllis here jabbed Bill hard in the ribs with one sharp elbow, hissing “See? I told yer!”
Michael still had no idea what they were going on about, and anyway was more concerned about something that Mr. Doddridge had just said.
“That Sam O’Day said that I wizzn’t going to remember anything when I went back to life again. He said that wiz the rules of Upstairs.”
The preacher nodded, trembling the golden ringlets of his wig. He smiled at Michael reassuringly then looked up at the other children, fixing them with his calm gaze.
“It never ceases to surprise me, but the plain facts are that devils cannot lie. We all know what our young friend has just said to be the truth, that all events in Mansoul are forgotten in the mortal realm. I fancy, also, that a couple of you know already why this must not be the case with Michael. You must do all that you can to see that he recalls his time with us. Though this would seem impossible, a way exists by which such things may be accomplished. From what I have read of your most entertaining novel, you should simply put your trust in your own reasoning and be assured that, in the last analysis, all shall be well.”
Drowned Marjorie piped up here, sounding peeved as she addressed the minister.
“If you already know the way we’re going to sort things out, then why don’t you just tell us and save us the bother?”
Rising to his feet, the cleric laughed and ran one hand through the stout little girl’s brown hair, ruffling it up affectionately, although Marjorie glowered through her National Health spectacles and looked affronted.
“Because that’s not how the tale goes. At no point within the narrative that Mercy read me did it say that poor old Mr. Doddridge intervened and told you how the story ended, so that you could skip ahead and spare yourselves the bother. No, you’ll have to work it all out on your own. For all you know, the bother that you’re so keen to avoid might be your yarn’s most vital element.”
Mrs. Gibbs gently butted in.
“Now then, my dears, I’m sure that Mr. Aziel and Mr. Doddridge have got matters what they’d like to talk about. Why don’t I take you through to meet with Mrs. Doddridge and Miss Tetsy? I think Mrs. Doddridge said as she’d be making tea and cakes for everybody.”
The whole ghost-gang seemed to be inordinately cheered by this announcement, flocking round the deathmonger as she began to shepherd them out through the bright room’s further door into the passageway beyond. The mention of refreshments came as something of a shock to Michael, who until that moment had assumed that ghosts could neither eat nor drink. He realised that the last thing past his lips had been the cherry-menthol Tune his mum had given him there in their sunlit back yard down St. Andrew’s Road, at least a week ago by Michael’s reckoning. Since then he hadn’t felt the need for food, but now the memory of how good it had been to chew and swallow something nice was making him feel hungry and nostalgic at the same time, so that both sensations were mixed up together and could not be told apart. He was becoming ravenously reminiscent.
Michael and the other children followed Mrs. Gibbs into the cosy, creaking passageway, leaving the reverend and the tall, bony builder to their conversation. Mr. Doddridge and the man that Mrs. Gibbs called Mr. Aziel were settling themselves into two facing armchairs as the parlour door swung shut behind the children and the deathmonger. The corridor in which the phantom kids now found themselves was short but pleasantly arranged, with pink and yellow flowers in a vase upon the single windowsill, caught in a slanting column of fresh morning light that fell as a white puddle on the varnished floorboards. A framed panel of embroidery hung from the mint-green pinstripe of the wallpaper on Michael’s left, with the roughshod design that he had seen already in Mansoul, the ribbon of a street or road unwound beneath a crudely rendered set of scales, picked out in golden thread on plump rose silk. There was the most delicious smell of baking leaking out into the passage from the far end, sweet and fragrant even in its competition with the niff of Phyllis Painter’s decomposing rabbits.
Bustling like a black hen, Mrs. Gibbs led the delinquent spectres through the plain oak doorway at the landing’s end into the Harvest Festival glow of a cheery and old-fashioned kitchen. This, Michael determined instantly, was where the fruit-pie perfume he’d detected in the passage had originated from. Two very pretty and nice-looking ladies with their raven hair pinned up in buns were standing talking by the black iron stove, but turned delightedly to the deathmonger and her flock of phantom roughnecks as they entered.
“Mrs. Gibbs – and these must be our little heroes! Do come in and find yourselves a chair. Tetsy and I count ourselves amongst your most ardent admirers, and now here we are, right in the middle of your ‘Choking Child’ chapter, saying all the parts of dialogue that we’ve already pored over a dozen times. It really wiz the strangest feeling, and tremendously exciting. You must all sit down while I make us some tea.”
It was what Michael took to be the older of the women who had spoken. She was slightly built, having a heart-shaped face and kindly eyes, clad in a dress of white damask embroidered with silk blooms and speckled orange butterflies like those around the edge of Mrs. Gibbs’s apron. On her rather small feet she wore shoes of soft, pale ochre leather, which had stitches of black thread to look like leopard spots and heels that were perhaps two inches high. Motherliness hung everywhere around her in a warm, toast-scented blanket so that Michael wanted to attach himself to her and not let go. As the nice lady led him to one of the wooden chairs around the kitchen table, over by the beautifully-tiled fireplace, he missed his mum Doreen more than ever. Mrs. Gibbs was making introductions.
“Now then, my dears, pay attention. This wiz Mrs. Mercy Doddridge, Mr. Doddridge’s good lady wife, while this young lady standing by me wiz their eldest daughter, Miss Elizabeth. You wouldn’t think to look at her, but Miss Elizabeth wiz younger than a lot of you are. You wiz six, dear, wizn’t you, back when you turned the corner into Mansoul?”
Miss Elizabeth, a younger and more animated version of her mother, wore a frock that was the delicately-tinted primrose of the east horizon in the minutes before dawn, embellished here and there with tiny rosebuds. She had a mischievous laugh as she responded to the deathmonger’s enquiry, shaking her black curls. To judge from their expressions Reggie, John and Bill were already infatuated with the reverend’s daughter, hanging on her every word.
“Oh no. I wizn’t even five before I came to grief with lots of bother and consumption. I remember that I died the week before the party celebrating my fifth birthday, so I never got to go to it, which made me awfully cross. I think that I’m still buried under the communion table downstairs, aren’t I, Mama?”
Mrs. Doddridge gave her daughter an indulgent, fond look.
“Yes, you’re still there, Tetsy, although the communion table’s gone. Now, be a pet and take our fairy-cakes from out the oven while I make the tea. The over-water surely must be boiled by now.”
Sitting beside the fancy fireplace with his slippers kicking idly back and forth, Michael looked up towards the stove. A big iron saucepan steamed upon the hob, seemingly filled with the same balls of liquid filigree that he’d seen raining on Mansoul during the fight between the giant builders. This, to judge from the small intricate beads spat above the pan’s rim, must be over-water. Mrs. Doddridge crossed the spacious kitchen to a wooden counter-top on which a lustrous emerald teapot of glazed earthenware was resting. With his ghost-sight he could see a bulbous miniature of the whole room reflected in the ocean-green bulge of its sides before the reverend’s wife stepped up to the counter and obscured his view. Taking the lid from off the teapot, she reached up towards the higher reaches of the window overlooking her wood worktop, pulling down one of the oddly shaped things that were hanging from the window-frame on strings as if to dry out. Michael hadn’t noticed these before, but once he had they gave him quite a start.
They ranged in size from that of jam-jar lids to that of a man’s hand, resembling desiccated starfish or the dried-up husks of massive spiders, albeit spiders with a pleasant ice-cream colouration. This idea was in itself unsettling enough, but peering closer Michael found that the true nature of the dangling shapes was even more disturbing: each one was a cluster of dead fairies, with their little heads and bodies joined together in a ring so that they formed a radiating web that looked like an elaborate lace doily, only plumper. They reminded Michael of the strange grey growth that Bill had found when they’d been digging their way up out of the howling ghost-storm, from the back yard near the bottom end of Scarletwell Street. Those, though, had been horrid things with shrunken bodies, swollen heads and huge black eyes that seemed to stare at you, whereas these specimens were gracefully proportioned and did not seem to have any eyes at all, with only small white sockets like the chambers in an apple core when someone had dug out the pips. They hung down on four knotted lengths of cord, with two or three of the dried fairy-clusters to a string, making a hollow clatter as they knocked together like a set of wooden wind chimes.
Mrs. Doddridge yanked one of the larger blossoms free, breaking a couple of the brittle fairies’ lower legs off accidentally as she did so. Briskly and unsentimentally the reverend’s wife began to crumble the conjoined nymphs into pieces that were small enough to fit in the receptacle, whereon she hurried to the stove and lifted up the pan of bubbling super-water by its handle so that she could pour the contents out into her teapot, over the crushed fairies. A mouth-watering aroma rose from the infusion, very much like tangerines, if tangerines were somehow peaches and perhaps a bag of aniseed balls at the same time.
Meanwhile, the enchanting Miss Elizabeth was taking a black baking tray out of the oven. Laden with a dozen or more small pink cakes it smelled, if anything, more tempting than the perfumed tea. Setting it on the side to cool, the younger of the Doddridge women fetched a small plain basin from the mantelpiece of the tiled fireplace close to where Michael was seated. As she passed him, he could not contain his curiosity.
“Why are you called Tetsy if your name’s Elizabeth and why are you so grown up if you’re only four? What’s in that basin? My name’s Michael.”
Miss Elizabeth stooped down to beam at him.
“Oh, I know who you are, young Master Warren. You’re the Choking Child from chapter twelve, and I’m called Tetsy because that’s how I said Betsy when I wiz a little girl. The reason I’ve decided to grow up since I’ve been dead wiz that I never really got a chance to see what growing up wiz like while I wiz still alive. As for the basin, well, see for yourself.”
She held the bowl down, tilting it so he could see inside. Heaped at the bottom of it was a midget dune of powdered crystal, quite like granulated sugar except that this substance was the blue and white hue of a perfect summer sky. Elizabeth invited him to take a dab of the cerulean dust upon one fingertip and taste it, which he did. It was a bit like normal sugar though it also had a sharp and fizzy taste, like sherbet. Being taken with the novel flavour, Michael asked her what it was.
“It’s all the little blue pips that we pick out of the Bedlam Jennies. Once we’ve got enough of them we grind them down into Puck-sugar with a pestle so that we can sprinkle it upon our fairy-cakes.”
Belatedly, he realised what had happened to the missing eyes from the suspended clusters of dead fairies. Sticking out his tongue as if he didn’t want it in his mouth after its dalliance with the eyeball frosting, Michael pulled a face that made the reverend’s daughter laugh.
“Oh, don’t be silly. They’re not really fairies. They’re just parts or petals of a larger and more complicated fruity-mushroom sort of thing that’s called a Puck’s Hat or a Bedlam Jenny. We once had the spirit of a Roman soldier visiting us from Jerusalem, and he called them Minerva’s Truffles. They grow in the ghost-seam or the Second Borough, rooting anywhere there’s sustenance. When they’re still small they look like rings of elves or goblins and you mustn’t eat them. You must wait until they’ve ripened into fairies. People in the living world can’t see the blossoms. They can only sometimes see the shoots that the Puck’s Hat sends down into the lower realm, where what wiz actually a single growth looks like a ring of separate, dancing fairies – or a pack of horrible grey goblins with black eyes if they’re not ripe. They’re really all we have to eat up here, although there wiz a sort of ectoplasm-butter you can get from ghost-cows. On its own it doesn’t taste of anything, but if you grind the blooms down into flour you can rub in the phantom fat to form a sweet, pink dough. That’s what we use to make our fairy cakes, and now if you’ll excuse me I believe they must be cool enough for me to spoon the Puck-dust on and serve them up.”
The younger Doddridge moved on round the kitchen table, letting all the other children have a lick of the sweet powder, even-handedly distributing the treat. Meanwhile her mother had produced an absolute flotilla of small cups and saucers from a previously unnoticed cupboard and was pouring everyone a measure of the rosy, steaming brew out of the deep green teapot that gleamed like a fat ceramic apple. Mrs. Doddridge fussed between the wooden worktop and her seated guests, dispensing tea to everyone and telling all the younger children to be careful that they didn’t spill it.
“And be careful not to scald your tongues. Blow on your tea to make it cool before you drink it down. We have a jug of ghostly milk if anyone requires it, although we find that it rather spoils the taste and gives the tea a chalky flavour.”
Meanwhile, Tetsy finished sprinkling powdered fairy-eyes onto the warm cakes, dusting each pink fancy with a twinkling frost of cobalt. Mrs. Gibbs and the six children were allowed to take one each from the large plate on which the freshly-baked confections stood, a flock of sunset clouds against a wintry china sky. Pouring refreshments for themselves, the Doddridge women pulled up wooden stools beside the table, both selecting one of the remaining treats to nibble at and joining in with the soft susurrus of teatime conversation.
Mrs. Doddridge, who had seated herself next to Mrs. Gibbs, was questioning the deathmonger regarding an old bylaw that concerned the gates of Mansoul, of which there were five, apparently. From where he sat beside the fireplace Michael couldn’t really follow the discussion, which appeared to draw comparisons between the various entrances and the five human senses. Derngate, from the sound of it, was touch, whatever that meant. Mystified, the little boy switched his attention to vivacious Tetsy, who had sat down next to Marjorie and was now eagerly interrogating the drowned schoolgirl on some subject even more unfathomable than the talk of taste buds and town gates.
“My favourite chapter wiz the one with that hateful black-shirted fellow blundering around Upstairs whilst suffering from delirium in his mortal body. It made Mama and I laugh so much that I could hardly read it to her. And the passage where the phantom bear from Bearward Street turns out to be pro-Jewish and pursues him through the ghost-seam into the V.E. Day celebrations wiz a marvel.”
Marjorie seemed very pleased to hear all this, though none of it made sense to Michael. Further round the table, John and Phyllis sat and talked together as they slurped their tea. They looked as if they liked each other, and although he was still faintly disappointed about Phyllis saying that she didn’t want to be his girlfriend, Michael thought they made a lovely couple. Seated opposite him, Bill and Reggie were still making plans to capture a ghost-mammoth, spraying violet crumbs upon each other’s faces as they both talked through unsightly mouthfuls of partly-chewed fairy-cake.
Having no one to chat with at that moment, Michael thought that he might take the opportunity to try the dainty pink-and-blue creations for himself. He lifted up the tempting morsel he’d been given, holding it beneath his nose and sniffing its warm perfume. Like the tea, the cake had a delightful yet ambiguous aroma. Michael could tell that it wasn’t aniseed, exactly, that was mixed in with the hints of peach and tangerine, but it was something as distinctive and unusual. He bit into the sapphire-sugared topside and almost immediately his mouth exploded with sensations so immense and intricate he felt his tongue had finally arrived in Heaven with the rest of him. The cake tasted as rich and complicated as, say, a cathedral looked or sounded. The elusive tang of unknown fruits from half-imaginary islands rang around his cheeks like organ music and the airy, crumbling texture was like Sunday light through stained glass. As he swallowed he could feel a tingle starting in the centre of him where his tummy used to be and spreading to his toes, his fingers and the tips of his blonde curls. Feeling as if his spirit had been dipped in the rose scent that people sometimes put on birthday cards, Michael luxuriated in an aftertaste that echoed through the toddler like a hymn. It filled him with a fresh vitality and at the same time was so satisfying that it brought a dreamy and delicious drowsiness. It was a very contradictory experience.
He blew upon his tea as Mrs. Doddridge had suggested, and then took a cautious sip. The taste was like the cakes but clearer and more pleasingly astringent, like a hot breeze blowing through his phantom mind and body rather than like anything substantial. Michael thought that he was as contented and relaxed as he had ever been, sitting with friends in this somehow familiar kitchen that he’d never seen before. The chatter of the other people at the table was receding to a distant murmur – Reggie asking Bill what the best bait would be to lure a ghostly mammoth, Tetsy Doddridge wondering aloud to Marjorie if having two gang-members with the surname Warren might not be confusing for the readership – but Michael was no longer bothering to keep up with the various conversations. He munched on his fairy cake and drank his fairy tea, discovering that these were reawakening in him the thrilling sense of marvel that he’d felt when Phyllis had first pulled him up into Mansoul.
Back then, when it had all been new to him, he’d been completely mesmerised by every surface and each texture, getting lost in woodgrain or the worn pink threads of Phyllis Painter’s jumper. Though he hadn’t noticed it occurring, since then his appreciation of the wonderful displays surrounding him had grown more dull and blunted, as if he were coming to take this extraordinary afterlife and all its finery for granted. Not until his faculties had been enlivened by this vicarage tea-party had Michael realised how complacent he’d become, or how much he was missing. Now he looked around him at the kitchen with its milky morning light and the dear scuffs or marks of wear on its utensils, glorying in all the humble wonders and the profound sense of home that they entailed.
His gaze alighted on the decorative tiling of the fireplace beside him and he saw for the first time its stupefying detail. Each tile had a different scene delineated on it in the graded blue tones of a willow pattern saucer, fine lines of rich navy on a background of an icier and paler shade. After a moment or two, Michael understood that the square panels were arranged in order so that all the separate pictures told a story, like they did in Alma’s comics. If that was the case, it seemed to him that the most sensible place to commence the tale would be the bottom left side of the fire’s surround, next to where he was sitting.
Looking down, he was immediately absorbed in the depicted episode, his enhanced vision swimming in its deep blue intricacies until with a start he comprehended that it was almost an image of himself, a small boy staring at a story told in painted tiles around a fireplace, pictures in a picture in a picture. Michael was more fascinated by this endless regress than he’d been by all the spectacle and sparkle when he’d glimpsed the Attics of the Breath for the first time. Although the infant in the miniature didn’t resemble him, having dark hair styled in a pudding-basin cut and wearing buckled shoes with knee-length britches, Michael felt himself being sucked into the exquisite illustration. He was not sure anymore if he was Michael Warren, sitting in a kitchen eating cake and staring at a tile, or if he was the painted youngster leaning on his mother’s lap as she perched by the fire and pointed to the bible stories on the painted tiles around it. The warm room about him and its crowded table melted to a wet ceramic gloss, became a parlour in another century and doing so acquired a lustrous Prussian tint. His own hands were now cyan outlines on a wash of faint ultramarine and he was …
<em>He was Philip Doddridge, six years old and learning scripture from his mother Monica, her blue-limned right arm round his shoulders as she read from the worn Bible resting on her slippery skirted thighs. She gestured with her other hand towards the Delft tiles round the fire by which she sat, each one emblazoned with a scene from the New Testament, a crucifixion or annunciation to illuminate the passage she was reading to her son. It was a rainy afternoon during the autumn months of 1708 and by the fireside of the drawing-room in Kingston-upon-Thames all things seemed holy. On the mantelpiece a pair of paper fans flanked an ornate brass clock enclosed within a giant bullet of clear glass, and royal blue firelight glistered on a lacquer screen to one side of the hearth. Monica Doddridge’s soft voice continued its instruction while her son’s glance darted back and forth over the beautiful Dutch tiling. Here an enormous Jonah was regurgitated by a whale no bigger than a chubby pike, while not far off a prodigal son in a periwig was welcomed back into the fold. So entranced was the boy in the beguiling tableaux that he almost felt a part of them, a nearly-turquoise figure underneath the glaze, perhaps an infant Jesus lecturing his dumbstruck elders on the temple steps. Becoming lost among the indigo embellishments, Philip composed himself and pulled back from the biblical scenarios before he was immersed completely. He was …</em>
He was Michael Warren. He was sitting in a sunlit kitchen in Mansoul, gathered around a table with five other children and three grownups, all of whom were chattering convivially and paying Michael no attention whatsoever. Wondering what had just happened to him, he let his attention creep back to the tile-work, this time peering cautiously towards the second tile up from the bottom on the left. It didn’t look …
<em>It didn’t look like much of an occasion, on that August morning in the Congregational Church there at Fetter Lane in 1714. Philly was twelve, a sickly sketch in blue fountain-pen ink, sitting between his father and beloved Uncle Philip in the front pew, listening to Mr. Bradbury the minister delivering his morning sermon. Philly’s mother had died suddenly three years before, and the frail, uncomplaining child did not believe his father or his uncle would be with him for much longer. It was not a family that knew rude health, with Philly and his elder sis Elizabeth the only two survivors out of twenty children and the other eighteen all dead before he was even born. A movement in the upper gallery roused Philly from his reverie and looking up he saw a falling handkerchief, a lacy thing with cornflower stippling, caught in its leisurely descent towards the flagged church floor. Everyone gasped except for the boy’s father, Daniel Doddridge, who began to cough. The kerchief was a signal, dropped deliberately by a messenger from Bishop Burnet to announce the passing of Queen Anne, the Stuart monarch who had done so much to harm their Nonconformist cause. Indeed, her latest effort to discomfit them, her Schism Act, was due to be made law that very day. It was a clear attempt to undermine the grand tradition of religious discontent that reached back to John Wycliffe’s Lollards in the fourteenth century or the great radical dissenter Robert Browne two hundred years thereafter. It attacked the faith of Bunyan and his revolutionary affiliates the Muggletonians, Moravians and Ranters, but the Schism Act would almost certainly now be abandoned with the passing of Queen Anne, its instigator. Shuffling on the hard pew Philly felt extremely nervous but was not sure why. Alerted by the signal from the gallery, the minister curtailed his sermon hurriedly and offered up a prayer for their new King, the Hanoverian George the First who had already sworn support for Nonconformity. By now the church was rustling with excited whispers and the thrilling realisation that the hated Anne was dead at last. Smiling with private satisfaction, Mr. Bradbury led the singing of the 89<sup><em>th</em></sup> Psalm before once more reading sternly from the text. “Go, see now this cursed woman, and bury her; for she is a king’s daughter.” Philly’s ears were ringing as he realised he was present at the dawn of a new age, an era of religious freedom that the boy could scarcely visualise. He felt …</em>
He felt the hard edge of the kitchen chair pressing against his thighs, the sweet and slimy gobbet of unswallowed fairy cake at rest upon his tongue. He gulped it down and took a hasty swig of tea before inspecting the next tile. He found that he …
<em>He found that he was dressed up in a nightgown and a borrowed petticoat, wearing a pudding-tin atop his dark hair as a helmet. He was twenty-one years old, performing Rowe’s play</em> Tamerlane <em>with friends and fellow students from the Dissenting academy in Kibworth, Leicestershire, acting the part of the illustrious Sultan Bazajet. All the impromptu cast were laughing until tears rolled down their cheeks, including good old Obadiah Hughes, whom they called Atticus, and little Jenny Jennings whom they nicknamed Theodosia, the daughter of the reverend conducting the academy. His own cognomen was Hortensius and as he flounced his lavender-blue skirts he wished that this hilarity could last forever, that he could somehow stop time and thus preserve the moment for eternity, a giggling and joyous fly in amber. The Lord knew that there’d been precious little laughter in Hortensius’s life thus far. An orphan at the tender age of thirteen, he’d been made ward to a gentleman named Downes who would lose all the lad’s inheritance to ruinous financial speculations in the City. Following a shiftless and unsettled period living with his big sister Elizabeth and her husband the Reverend John Nettleton, Hortensius had found a place in the Kibworth establishment, where by God’s grace had been instilled in him the discipline and the humility that would, he hoped, sustain him all his days. The Reverend John Jennings and his wife had been almost a second set of parents to the boy, so dear were they and so concerned with his development. It had astonished him to learn that Mrs. Jennings’ father had been one Sir Francis Wingate from Harlington Grange in Bedford, who’d committed poor John Bunyan unto Bedford gaol. Now, doubled over in his mirth with his makeshift tin helmet clattering down upon the floor and all his friends about him, he was stricken by the contrast between this frivolity and the abiding loneliness he felt throughout most other areas of his life. There was the passion that he felt for Kitty Freeman, his Clarinda as he called her, though he feared that his affections by and large went unrequited. Tripping on the lapis line that was his nightgown’s edge, thereby provoking renewed squeals of merriment, he wondered if some perfect partner waited in the future for him. Was that in God’s plan, if God’s plan should indeed include Hortensius? Did a wife and suitable vocation figure in that great, ineffable design? What was his destiny? What was …?</em>
What was all this? Michael had the sensation he’d been cut adrift somewhere between this homely kitchen and the fine engraved world of the tiles, a gleaming china landscape rendered in the hues of billiard chalk with all of time reduced to thin blue strokes on white enamel. Though he knew that he was being helplessly pulled into each new image that he gazed upon, he found he couldn’t stop himself from looking. The euphoria that had accompanied the tea and cake surrounded Michael like a deep and fluffy blanket, dulling the anxiety that he would end up trapped amongst the painted curlicues. He let his scrutiny slide upwards to the next representation in the sequence. It looked …
<em>It looked eerie, the diffusing morning mist, white on the sapphire brambles of the country lane; the travelling minister who’d paused to talk with a young woman clad in cross-hatched tatters, her eyes wide and bright against an almost imperceptible slate wash in the bucolic byway. Reverend Doddridge, passing through the villages about Northamptonshire and speaking to those congregations where he was invited, sat astride his patient mare and marvelled at the sallow and unearthly-looking girl who blocked his path. Her name was Mary Wills, and she was a respected prophetess from nearby Pitsford, a hedge-seer and a mystic who had called out to the pale, much-in-demand young preacher as he went upon his way. She seemed a thing assembled from the fog that trickled in the ditches, built with weeds or sodden deadfall, and she claimed that in her sight the future was a book already writ, a sculpted form encased within the iron mould of time. “ ‘And when he would not be persuaded, they ceased, saying, The will of the Lord be done.’ Those are the words of the first sermon you shall preach in the poor boroughs of Northampton, where it is that you shall be a pastor.” He would meet the ragged oracle again across the years and would come not to doubt her visions, yet upon this first occasion he was twenty-six years old and thought her prophecies a sham, though he was not unkindly or offhand to her in his behaviour. It was the business of a ministry here in Northampton, Doddridge thought, that gave the lie to her predictions. He had only just agreed to the entreaties of his colleagues within the Dissenting congregation, Dr. Watts and David Some and all the rest, who’d begged him to take up the running of the Dissenting academy at Market Harborough, a post made vacant by the passing of its former minister, the much-missed Reverend John Jennings. Wagons had already taken Doddridge’s belongings to the Harborough residence where Mrs. Jennings would continue managing household affairs, and Doddridge further entertained the hope of an affectionate relationship with Jennings’s delightful daughter, Jenny. The idea that he might be prevailed upon to sacrifice such an illustrious position for some draughty shack in the benighted districts of Northampton was therefore a senseless fancy that, he was assured, should never come to be. He thanked the weird child for her warnings and continued with his journey. There was</em> <em>…</em>
There was no escaping the implacable progression of the tiles once Michael had surrendered to the tale’s compelling undertow. Drowning amongst the glassy blue-white breakers he gave up his feeble thrashing and went under, tumbling in the current of the narrative from one scene to the next. He didn’t really know …
<em>He didn’t really know why he was doing this, leading his horse through delicate lace curtains of descending snow on Christmas Eve, towards the warm lights of the meeting-house on Castle Hill. He crunched through the crisp drifts over the burial ground, a stew of paupers’ ribs and plague-skulls somewhere underneath the ice crust and the frigid, powdery depths that it concealed. He had been settled into his academy at Market Harborough but a month or two when he’d received the earnest imprecations offered by the people of Northampton, that he should take up instead the ministry at Castle Hill here in the lowliest, western quarter of the town. The district was a crumbling eyesore that had been denied the pretty renovations undergone by the remainder of the township after the great fire, and he was anyway committed to his work at Harborough. He’d gracefully declined the offer, but the humble congregation were persistent. Finally the popular young reverend had chosen to deliver his refusal personally, gently conveying to his would-be flock that they should cease from their entreaties, by means of a sermon. This began “And when he would not be persuaded, they ceased, saying, The will of the Lord be done”, and yet he had not thought of Mary Wills or her prediction until halfway through his sermon, where he found himself fulfilling it. The folk of Castle Hill, moreover, had seemed filled with such good will towards him that his thoughts were all in turmoil as he’d walked back to his lodgings at the foot of nearby Gold Street. Passing by an open door he’d heard a boy reading aloud from scripture to his mother, as the troubled reverend himself had done so many times, declaring, “As thy days, so shall thy strength be”, in a clear, true voice. The sentiment had been impressed upon him in that instant with great force, so that it seemed a revelation: all his days were part of Doddridge, part of his eternal substance, and he was comprised of nothing save those days, their thoughts and words and deeds. They were his strength. They were his all. He had decided there and then to give up his academy in Harborough and to accept instead the less promising post here in Northampton. His fellows, Mr. Some and Samuel Clark, had been outraged at first and begged that he should reconsider but had both reluctantly decided that, so strange were the events, a higher cause than theirs may have decreed the outcome in accordance with its own inscrutable agendas. And so here he was on Christmas Eve, trudging towards his destiny through blue-black shadows flecked with falling white. Only with difficulty could …</em>
Only with difficulty could Michael remember anything about the kitchen or the cake. The blue-etched episodes were coming thick and fast now. He knew he was …
<em>He knew he was meant for Mistress Mercy Maris from the moment he set eyes on her, there in the Worcester parlour of her great-aunt, Mrs. Owen. Six years younger than himself at twenty-two, with a good humour and a fresh complexion, she had been the bright jewel that he’d feared he was without the means to purchase. He’d but recently proposed to sixteen-year-old Jenny Jennings, yet upon being rebuffed had raised his siege and had considered himself pleased in her continuing friendship. The impulse that had possessed him, though, on that recent occasion, was as nothing to the passion that he felt towards Miss Maris, which had struck him like a very thunderbolt. He had persisted in his suit, unable to do otherwise, and found to his delight that his affections were reciprocated. They’d been wed upon the 29<sup><em>th</em></sup> day of November in 1730 at Upton-on-Severn, and his new wife had arrived to live with him here at Northampton, joining in enthusiastically with all his works despite the meanness of the neighbourhood. The local people had been models of good cheer and helpfulness, for all the squabbling that would break out between what may have been a dozen different Nonconformist creeds. Indeed, both he and Mrs. Doddridge found their congregation most agreeable despite the reputation it had earned for insurrection and unrest, this quiet nook where the most seditious of the ‘Martin Marprelate’ broadsides had been pseudonymously writ and published in the previous century. Had not Sir Humphrey Ramsden stated that Northampton was “a nest of puritans” in correspondence with John Lambe, describing the townspeople as “malignant, refractory spirits who disturb the peace of the church.”? And yet it was in this shire that churchgoers first insisted, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, upon hymn-singing at their ceremonies, where before were only chanted psalms. It was a good place, in its way a place holy as any other, and his wife and he were well to be here, although Mary Wills the prophetess had told him that their first attempt to bear a child would end in sadness. Still, perhaps on this occasion she should be proved wrong. After all, regarding his position on determinism, he stood …</em>
<em>He stood in the darkening church at Castle Hill and wept; gazed through a quivering salt lens at the small gravestone set amongst the floor tiles under the communion table. He’d believed the crying to be done with, and this sudden bout surprised him. It had no doubt been occasioned by the pamphlets, recently delivered from their printing company, one of which he held now in between his trembling hands. “Submission to Divine Providence in the Death of Children recommended and inforced, in a SERMON preached at NORTHAMPTON on the DEATH Of a very amiable and hopeful CHILD about Five Years old. Published out of compassion to mourning PARENTS By P. DODDRIDGE, D.D. Neve Liturarum pudeat : qui viderit illas. De Lachrymis factas sentiat esse meis. OVID. LONDON: Printed for R. HETT, at the Bible and Crown, in the Poultry. MDCC XXXVII. [Price Six-Pence.]” It had been writ more in tears than ink and now the former splashed down, further to dilute and blotch the latter. It was …</em>
<em>It was not, perhaps, so splendidly appointed as was the academy at Harborough, standing here in Sheep Street with the mouth of Silver Street just opposite, but Doddridge thought that in its practice it was quite the best in England. He and Mercy and their four surviving children had resided comfortably enough down at his previous establishment upon the corner of Pike Lane and Marefair, but with fresh students arriving every week to study scripture, mathematics, Latin, Greek or Hebrew it was evident that the Dissenting institution’s newer and considerably larger premises would be required to hold them all. He hoped …</em>
<em>He hoped it was his tolerance that had acquired for him so many worthy friends. His church enjoyed an amiable acquaintance with the Baptist ministry in College Lane, and in his private life he counted Calvinists, Moravians and Swedenborgians alike among his fellows. He stood now in George Row on a March morn in 1744, with his most valued and unlikeliest companion by his side. Mr. John Stonhouse had led an eventful, reckless life and had at one point even penned a tract attacking Christianity. One evening, on his way to rendezvous with a loose woman, he had stopped to hear the famous Philip Doddridge speaking and upon the spot renounced his former ways, becoming a most steadfast ally of the doctor’s cause and helping him inaugurate a town infirmary, the first outside of London, which was the occasion that had called them to George Row upon this blustery morning. From the …</em>
<em>From the dark November sky above him firework flowers shed burning cream-and-cobalt petals in a rain on the Sheep Street academy, brightly illuminated by a horde of candles that had been arranged to spell out “KING GEORGE, NO PRETENDER”. Doddridge had been long aware how lucky the Dissenters were under this Hanoverian monarch, and had warned his congregation to be wary of a Stuart resurgence that might re-establish Catholic oppression. Now, though, in 1745, the threat was more than hypothetical, with Prince Charles Edward Stuart, the pretender to the British Throne, raising his standard at Glenfinnan and then marching south and into England. Doddridge, warned six years before of this eventuality by Mary Wills of Pitsford, was prepared. Enlisting his good friend the Earl of Halifax, he’d galvanised a parliament apparently indifferent to the Young Pretender’s threat and raised a force more than a thousand strong that had two hundred cavalry, most of them garrisoned here at Northampton. The Pretender, who had counted on strong Jacobite support that had not been forthcoming, was reputedly further discouraged by the news of armed men waiting just a little further south. He had already started his retreat back towards Scotland and, presumably, eventual ruin, hence these splendid bonfire celebrations. He rejoiced in …</em>
<em>He rejoiced in God’s great providence as he lay dying in the little country house a few miles outside Lisbon. He and Mercy, aided by donations from the kindly folk of Castle Hill, had been sent forth on a recuperative voyage to Portugal when his health, never sturdy, had at last begun to comprehensively decline. That sunlit country, in 1751, was famed for its good weather and for the restorative effects of its environment, though their advisers in Northampton clearly had not known that late October marked, traditionally, the commencement of the annual rainy season. Now it was approaching three o’clock on the black morning of the twenty-sixth. He listened to the downpour drumming on the roof and fancied that the end would not be long. Mercy herself was ill, a victim of the climate, and he knew that she could not assist him though she wanted to with all her heart. He thanked God for that loyal and beloved woman who had so enriched a goodly number of the forty-nine years he had spent on Earth. He thanked God for his life, its every triumph and reversal, for allowing him to further the Dissenting cause to the remarkable extent he had, forcing the church to recognise its Nonconformist brethren, and all this accomplished from the lowly mound where stood his humble meeting-house. Mercy was sleeping next to him. He heard the rain, and felt her breath upon his cheek. He closed</em> <em>…</em>
He closed his eyes. Michael was under the impression that ghosts didn’t sleep, but then he’d thought that about eating until he’d been served the tea and fairy-cake. Sinking into a pinkish drowse he idly supposed that while dead people didn’t really need a meal or nap, they probably indulged in both things now and then, just for the simple pleasure of it. He could still hear all the other voices in the sunny kitchen, but they sounded far away and nothing much to do with him. He felt somebody – probably one of the Doddridge ladies – take the cup and saucer from his slackening grip before he spilled it on the floor. He’d either eaten his cake or already dropped it, but he didn’t know which and it didn’t matter.
Bill and Phyllis murmured to each other somewhere nearby. Bill was saying “Well, we must be gunna work out some way ’e can keep ’is memories, ’cause we’ve seen the pictures.” What did that mean? Were they talking about all the pictures on the tiles that Michael still felt half-submerged in? Elsewhere, Tetsy Doddridge was insisting that Drowned Marjorie should sign her name on something. “Won’t you be a sport? It shall take but a moment.” He could hear a faint and rhythmic beat that he at first took for his pulse before remembering he didn’t have one anymore and realising it must be the ticking of a kitchen clock, counting the moments of that timeless world.
At some point later on he was picked up by someone, one of the two older boys to judge from how it felt, and, judging from the clean and dry smell, probably not Reggie Bowler. That meant it was John who carried him, like a limp sack of flour against the taller youngster’s chest and shoulder, from the kitchen into the short passageway and on towards the parlour. Michael heard the other members of the gang clumping and clattering around them and presumed they were all leaving now that teatime was concluded. He was sure that if his mum Doreen were here she’d tell him to wake up, to thank the Doddridge family for having them and say goodbye to everybody properly. He did his best to rouse himself and tried to force his eyelids to creak open, but they wouldn’t budge and anyway he was too snug and comfortable in John’s arms for the moment. He remained content to let it all slip by him in a luminous and rosy fog.
They were now in the parlour and ahead of them he could hear Mr. Doddridge bringing to an end his conversation with the grey-robed builder chap, who Mrs. Gibbs had said was Mr. Aziel. Michael discovered that it was much easier to understand the strange, spiralling rubbish that the angles spoke if you were half asleep. From what he could make out, the gold-wigged doctor of divinity was still interrogating Mr. Aziel upon the subject of suspicious Sam O’Day, asking the worker how the different entities related to each other, all the devils and the ordinary people and the builders, and how all of these connected up to the mysterious “Third Borough”. Doddridge’s guest chuckled and said “Te wysh folm updint”, which instantly unravelled within Michael’s slumbering awareness into something that was only marginally more comprehensible:
“They fold up into you. You fold up into us. We fold up into Him.”
This seemed to both intrigue and satisfy the parson, who hummed thoughtfully before he ventured one last question to the amiable artisan.
“I see. And might I ask if, anywhere in this ingenious arrangement, any of us ever truly had Free Will?”
The lanky angle sounded somehow mournful and apologetic as he answered with a syllable that was apparently the same in English as in his own tongue.
“No.”
After a well-timed pause as if before the punch line of a joke, he went on to pronounce another angle-word that Michael understood almost immediately.
“Dyimoust?”
What this meant was “Did you miss it?”
There was a shocked silence, and then both the reverend doctor and his guest began to laugh uproariously although Michael didn’t see what was so funny. As with the majority of grown-up jokes, he evidently didn’t get it. Like the one that ended ‘If I put a penny in the slot and press the button, will the bells ring?’ He’d had no idea what that one was to do with either, eider, duck-down drifting off into the candyfloss of his snug thoughts.
When the amusement shared by Mr. Doddridge and his visitor had died away, the doctor said his farewells to the children, as did Mrs. Gibbs, Miss Tetsy and her mother. Of these goodbyes, Mr. Doddridge’s was the most lengthy and effusive.
“Thank you, children, for your visit. I hope I shall see you all again, and not just Master Reggie when he comes to study at my afterlife academy. And as for you, young Phyllis Painter, you should know that you and your associates are being trusted with this child because such wiz the will of the Most High. All the experiences you share with him, even your truant capers and transgressions, are the lessons he must learn. That he recall those lessons shall be your conundrum to unpick, though be assured that we who serve Mansoul have every faith in you. As for the fiend we spoke of earlier, it seems apparent he shall have his way at some point, and when that time comes then my best counsel would be to remind you that even the lowest creatures are but the unfolded leaves of the Third Borough and are in the end subservient to His design. Now, be upon your way with our friend Mr. Aziel. Have faith, and do not fear.”
As if from far away, Michael heard Phyllis ask the reverend if what he’d said regarding truant capers and transgressions meant that the Dead Dead Gang could take Michael scrumping for mad apples out at the asylums, without getting into any trouble? Doddridge laughed again, and said that he supposed it did. There followed more goodbyes and Michael felt at least two small, damp kisses on his almost-sleeping cheek, most likely from the doctor’s wife and daughter.
Then there was the brief sensation of elaborate wood-grain as they passed through the door halfway up the church’s western wall. It wasn’t as if Michael suddenly felt cold, simply that he no longer felt the slightest trace of any temperature at all. The smell of Phyllis Painter’s vermin stole was shut off like a tap and he could almost hear the crinkling of the ghost-seam’s cotton wool, stuffing itself into his ears. He opened eyes gluey with ectoplasm to a world of black and white, just as John gently lowered him onto the phosphorescent planking of the Ultraduct, where time boiled up like scalding milk all round them.
Phyllis asked if anybody was still hungry.
** <strong>THE TREES DON’T NEED TO KNOW</strong>
<strong>M</strong>arjorie Miranda Driscoll was amongst the well-read dead. She hadn’t been much of a reader when she’d followed her dog India into the dark Nene down at Paddy’s Meadow, but she’d caught up in the timeless time since then. She’d loitered, liminal, in libraries, skulked spectrally in sitting rooms and crept, crepuscular, through classes. The bespectacled girl’s tubby, weightless form had bobbed unseen at scholars’ shoulders like a grey, translucent pillow as she’d followed them through Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake and Dickens, into the linguistic hinterlands of Joyce and Eliot with quite a lot of M.R. James and Enid Blyton on the way. She’d enjoyed nearly all of it, particularly Dickens, although she’d remained entirely unimpressed by the demise of Little Nell, who Marjorie considered a theatrical young madam. If she’d written it, somebody would have chucked the whining little bugger in the Thames; see how she handled that.
Not that Marjorie could have written <em>The Old Curiosity Shop</em>, if the truth be told. She knew, despite the recent unexpected flattery from Mr. Aziel and the Doddridge family, that she was nowhere near as good as that. It was exciting, she’d admit, to think that somewhere further down the linger of eternity her novel was already finished, somehow published, and apparently quite well received. However, being a realistic sort, Marjorie thought her future popularity was probably more on account of <em>The Dead Dead Gang</em>’s novelty than any special literary merit. Hardly anybody wrote books after they were dead and even fewer saw their efforts through to ghostly publication, and so she supposed that anyone who did was bound to get a fair bit of attention.
Marjorie was a beginner, she knew that, with only a beginner’s sense of how to craft a narrative or shape a story. She’d worked out a few things on her own – a chapter would seem more complete unto itself if it set up some minor question in the reader’s mind right at the start, then answered it, perhaps in the concluding lines – but other than a smattering of similar devices, she felt horribly under-equipped to deal with the demands that writing a whole book had placed upon her.
What was irritating was that nobody would tell her how her novel ended or how she was meant to get it into print. She’d heard that Mr. Blake still published from a glowing workshop in the higher territories over Lambeth, but that seemed like a long hike along the Ultraduct just on behalf of the eleven sketchy and meandering chapters she’d completed thus far. Still, judging from her admirers within Mansoul’s upper echelons, the stoic little girl accepted that it was a journey she might one day find herself upon. Then she would have a green-and-gold bound copy of her memoir that she could hide in a century-old fantasy of Spring Lane School for Reggie Bowler to find in a dream, which was the thing that had inspired Marjorie’s novel in the first place. When she’d found out where the Dead Dead Gang had got their name from, she’d decided that to write the dream-book whence the name originated would be a dead clever writer’s trick. A fine conceit, as she had learned such things were called – not that she’d ever speak the phrase in earshot of her roughneck phantom colleagues, who would only take the mickey. It was fear of ridicule or even being ostracised that had made the otherwise fearless child feel disinclined to read or write much while she’d been alive. Down in the mortal Boroughs – the First Borough – all you really had was other people, all in the same leaky boat that you were in. Start talking posh or walking round with <em>Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man</em> underneath your arm and you risked everybody thinking you were trying to get above yourself. Above them. People might just laugh and call you Brains or Lady Muck at first, but then they’d break your glasses. Even though she didn’t think that any of her current crowd would act like that, she’d still elected to pursue her literary education and commence work on her novel unannounced, so that she wouldn’t look so stupid if she failed.
Although she’d been with her ghost-gang associates for almost every moment since they’d saved her from the Nene Hag, Marjorie had found out that her secret double life as scholar and aspiring author was ridiculously easy to keep up, thanks to the ghost-seam’s solid nature. In the ghost-seam, time was something you could dig through. You could leave whatever you were doing, burrow off to somewhere different – say six months haunting a public reading room – and then dig back to half a second after you’d departed, before anyone had noticed you were gone. Marjorie had her own private existence outside the Dead Dead Gang and assumed the other members more than likely did as well. Phyllis had once said something that led Marjorie to conclude that she had another grown-up life, or lives, elsewhere within the simultaneous reaches of the afterlife, perhaps a husband in one region and a boyfriend in another. Nothing wrong with that, of course. Phyll Painter had lived to a ripe old age and it was only natural that there were different periods in that life that would be dear to her in different ways. Marjorie hadn’t even had the time to form a crush on anyone before she’d waded after India into the night chill of the river, so she didn’t have as many choices. It was the Dead Dead Gang, or the library, or nothing.
That said, Marjorie had been impressed by Tetsy Doddridge. Here was someone who’d been plucked from life at a much younger age than Marjorie, yet who had chosen to grow, posthumously, to a vibrant and attractive woman. It implied that Marjorie could have the same afterlife for herself, if that was what she wanted, and if that was what she dared. She could be taller, slimmer, prettier, without the National Health glasses that she only wore because she’d worn a pair in life. She wouldn’t even have to let her comrades know that she was gallivanting round the district’s spectral nightspots as a lovely debutante, since when she was with them she’d manifest as a four-eyed and podgy ten-year-old, the same as always. Marjorie imagined herself in the arms of some handsome young wraith or other, maybe Reggie Bowler if he grew a foot and smartened himself up a bit, both twirling round a ghostly Salon Ballroom. Wondering momentarily what sex was like, she felt herself blush a profound grey in the colourless continuum of the ghost-seam. Hoping nobody had noticed, the young author focussed herself on her current circumstances to dispel the clouds of heated speculation that had bothered her at intervals since she’d become a writer.
Marjorie was standing on the brilliant boardwalk of the Ultraduct with the Dead Dead Gang and the builder, Mr. Aziel. Looking out across its alabaster rail, they watched as all the idle moments of the Boroughs piled themselves up into decades: centuries of cobblers and crusaders, with the castle blooming like a huge and heavy granite rose only to wither with its petal bulwarks picked or fallen, one by one. Time steamed, and in its vapour-curls fugitive images and instants flared and melted as the past and future churned together, simultaneously and forever. One of the recycled flickering vignettes in particular caught Marjorie’s attention, blazing into being to go through its motions before vanishing, with this cycle repeating every few subjective minutes: on a low stone wall that had sprung up around the southerly front side of Doddridge Church down to her left, she saw a pair of oldish-looking men sitting there side by side, bent over double and convulsed with laughter. One of the two blokes, the tallest one, looked like he might be queer, dressed in a fluffy, girlish sweater with his messy hair down to his shoulders and what looked like make-up on his face. The other one, weeping with mirth beside his freakish friend, was really quite good-looking, even though he’d gone a bit bald at the front. Marjorie had the fuzzy and uncertain sense that she might know this second man from somewhere; that she might have run into him once but had forgotten it. She was just puzzling over this when lanky John distracted her by calling out from where he stood beside the rail, two dead kids and a builder to her right.
“Well, blow me. Come and look what I’ve found, nipper. Phyllis, hold him up so he can see what’s carved onto this railing.”
John was talking to the new boy, Michael Warren. Evidently, the tall lad had found something of note inscribed on the translucent balustrade that edged the Ultraduct. As Phyllis Painter followed John’s instructions, lifting up the dressing gown-clad toddler so that he could see, Marjorie and the other phantom children crowded round them as did Mr. Aziel, anxious for a peek at the discovery. Marjorie, at the group’s rear and herself not that much taller than the Warren kid, had to make do with second-hand descriptions, being unable to look at the graffiti for herself. She made sure she remembered all the details, though, convinced that she would need them when she wrote up her next chapter, or “The Riddle of the Choking Child” as she’d been recently informed that she was going to call it. John was pointing out something scratched on the handrail to the infant.
“See? There, dug into the marble-work or whatever it wiz, right where I’m pointing. ‘Snowy Vernall springs eternal’. That’s your granddad, that wiz. No, hang on. It’s your <em>great</em>-granddad. He must have been up here on the Ultraduct at some point, although Lord knows what he used to carve his name in the stone rail like that … unless he’d pinched one of the angles’ chisels.”
It was at this point that Mr. Aziel interjected, the lugubrious artisan sounding somehow annoyed, sad and reluctantly amused at the same time as he pronounced his brief burst of cascading gibberish.
“Hevdrin fawgs mobz cluptyx.”
This unfolded, in a part of Marjorie’s mind that seemingly existed only for the purpose of deciphering builder-talk, into a rolling and fluorescent speech that would have taken a good twenty minutes to read out, and then condensed again into the normal English of the chubby little girl’s own summary:
“He did indeed, and it wiz my own chisel that he stole. With his grandchild, beautiful little May astride his shoulders, he has gone exploring to the furthest reaches of the Ultraduct, walking and clambering unto the ends of Time itself. I have myself been up as far as twenty centuries hence and found this same inscription waiting for me, though I have as yet not found my chisel.”
After this had sunken in, John vented a low and admiring whistle.
“So that’s why I’ve not seen him or little May since I’ve been up here. It’s like when he used to make his long walks, back and forth from here to Lambeth.”
Mr. Aziel nodded.
“Solft minch bwarz kepdug.”
After passing through the florid, epic stage of the verbal filtration process, this emerged as something marginally more edifying.
“So it wiz. In fact, his lengthy walks helped form the crease through Time on which the Ultraduct wiz founded and constructed.”
Marjorie was memorising all of this with glee. It was such great material, not only as a background detail she could use in Chapter Twelve of <em>The Dead Dead Gang</em>, but as a potential subject for her second novel, if she ever wrote one. She could see the central image in her mind’s eye. White-haired and eccentric Snowy Vernall, whom she’d heard of – everybody in Mansoul had heard of Snowy Vernall – trekking through the ages into the far future, with the supernaturally attractive baby May sat perched upon his shoulder. Marjorie had heard about the lovely deceased infant, too, although she hadn’t realised until this moment that the tragically young beauty was related to the mad and fearless steeplejack of legend. From what she’d been told, the eighteen-month-old had elected to remain in the same gorgeous baby semblance that she’d had before she’d been snatched by diphtheria, although her mind and her vocabulary had matured into those of what was by all accounts a wise and eloquent young lady; Tetsy Doddridge if she’d left her infant semblance just as it was. Marjorie imagined all the marvellous exchanges they could have, the dialogues between the strange old man and the exquisite baby girl as they paused on their possibly unending quest into futurity and overlooked some unimaginable landmark, perhaps entire cities sculpted out of insulated ice up in the twenty-second century or tented desert townships in the twenty-fourth. Realising that her writer’s cloud-cover of fervent speculation had crept in once more, she returned her attention to the conversation of her fellow Dead Dead gangsters.
Phyllis, who’d set Michael Warren down onto the Ultraduct again after she’d lifted him up so that he could see the words carved on its railing, was insisting loudly that her colleagues take up the suggestion that she’d made when she’d first stepped back out onto the shining bridge and asked if anybody was still hungry.
“Come on. We’ve all ’ung abayt ’ere long enough. We ought to be off scrumpin’ for mad apples ayt at the asylums, like I said. When I faynd titch ’ere in the Attics o’ the Breath, I wiz just on me way back from the loony-bins to tell you lot that all the Puck’s ’Ats ’ad turned ripe for pickin’. While we’re up ’ere on the Ultraduct we might as well pop out as far as Berry Wood so that we can collect ’em all. Besides, you ’eard what Mr. Doddridge said. It’ll be educational for little Michael ’ere.”
Nobody had an argument with that, and Marjorie herself thought that it sounded like a good idea. She had been tantalised rather than satisfied by the delicious fairy-cakes and Puck’s Hat tea that Mrs. Doddridge had served up. The prospect, then, of ripe, moist fairy-clusters hanging from the madhouse eaves in bucket loads, dripping with juice, was one she found rather appealing. She’d discovered that she always had the best ideas for stories when she’d gorged herself on Bedlam Jennies, and besides was always interested in a musical and literary field-trip out to the asylums. Marjorie had heroines and heroes there.
They all said their goodbyes to Mr. Aziel, who shook everybody by the hand and shook Marjorie’s twice, before they set off boldly down the Ultraduct as it curved out to the southwest, leaving the glum and bony builder to re-join his fellow craftsmen somewhere at the bottom of his Jacob Flight, down near the base of the walkway’s support posts in the late seventeenth century. As the ghost-hooligans strolled cheerily along they sang the club song that Phyllis had introduced, though Marjorie suspected that it was an old song from whatever mob that Phyllis used to be in, which had seen its lyrics modified.
“We are the Dead Dead Gang! We are the Dead Dead Gang! We mind our manners, we spend our tanners, we are respected wherever we go. We can dance, we can sing, we can do anything, ’cause we are the Dead Dead Gang!”
Even the puzzled-looking Michael Warren picked the words up after a few repetitions and sang lustily, if squeakily, along with all the rest. As Marjorie mumbled in tune with the bold marching air, she mused upon the fact that hardly any of the song was true. They were the Dead Dead Gang, that part was straightforward enough, but it had been some time since any of them minded manners or spent tanners. Neither could they technically be said to be respected wherever they went, not even in the ordinary places where they went most often. Most of the more reputable ghosts thought Phyllis and her crowd were ectoplasmic scum, while most of the disreputable ghosts agreed with them. They couldn’t dance for toffee, and as far as singing went Marjorie thought that the ungodly racket they were making at the moment had shot that claim down in flames as well. Other than manners, tanners, dancing, singing and commanding the respect of others, though, the song was right. They could do anything.
She thought about the funny night she’d met them. “India! Come back, you bloody, bloody silly bloody thing!” It was the most appallingly-constructed sentence that she’d ever spoken, and thank God she hadn’t written it. She’d waded out and as the freezing river water overflowed into her Wellingtons she’d suffered her first moment of uncertainty, but brushed it to one side as she plunged deep into the crawling darkness of the Nene after her bloody, bloody dog. She could remember thinking, as the coldness reached her knickers and her waist, “This is what a brave little girl would do.” In retrospect, Marjorie saw that she would have been better off in thinking “Can I swim?” She must have thought the Nene was shallower than it turned out to be, or possibly she was assuming that swimming was something that came naturally to mammals when they got out of their depth. To be quite honest, she had no idea what had been going through her mind, other than her misplaced concern for India.
The raucous choir of spectral juveniles strode on along the Ultraduct, which hummed and resonated with their sloppy footfalls. Down beneath them, Chalk Lane churned with pubs, dust and fanatics, and as the dead children sauntered down the elevated pier with all their after-images shuffling behind them, they became aware that they were not alone upon the phosphorescent planking. Dull lights streamed towards them from the distant vanishing point where the walkway’s parallel rails seemed to meet, resolving briefly into milky and translucent figures as they neared, then passing through the gang to hurtle on towards the church behind them. These, Marjorie knew, were travellers from different times as they moved back and forth along the shining overpass. Some of them were, no doubt, the ghosts of Normans, Saxons, Romans, Ancient Britons, while a few were smouldering demons and the rest were builders. To these other voyagers, the Dead Dead Gang would look as fleeting and as insubstantial, briefly-glimpsed shapes flickering across that vast and timeless span.
By now they’d crossed Chalk Lane and were progressing over the peculiar and unfolded stretch of wasteland that extended to the high wall of St. Andrew’s Road. This was a startling feature of the landscape, even by the standards of the ghost-seam, and so Marjorie was not at all surprised when Michael Warren asked the gang to pause so he could take a look at it. From what she’d pieced together from the ghostly conversations that she’d overheard, Marjorie understood the patch of rough ground to be an example of astral subsidence, very like the overlapped asylums that the children were at present heading for. She found the concept of ethereal collapse obscurely frightening, the thought that even the eternal had its breakable and transient components, and yet here beneath her was the evidence.
Part of the higher reaches of Mansoul, made out of congealed dreams and memories, had tumbled through into the ghost-seam, so that the grey half-world was itself pressed down into the mud and puddle-sumps of the material domain. This lowest, earthly level, as seen from the Ultraduct, seemed to have been a wilderness for some considerable time, without the constant rise and fall of mortal dwellings that seethed everywhere about. Only the craggy contour lines of the neglected land were warping, shifting up and down, with straggly trees and bushes flowering briefly into life before they were sucked back into the underlying clay, like transient blooms of algae. On this relatively tiny scrap of physically-existent dirt, the massively expanded and imaginary structures of Mansoul had fallen in, so that the area that they were looking down on seemed in consequence immense: a yawning earthworks where straight edges were cut into looming cliffs of flint and limestone and compacted soil. What were no more than puddles down there on the bumpy waste ground of the mortal level were also refracted in the higher spaces that had caved in from above, the separate spills of petrol-coloured rain unwrapping into an opaque lagoon that lapped against the towering and irregular mud walls. Seen from above the excavation looked enormous, prehistoric, like a monstrous rock pool where the escaped fantasies of Mansoul or back-broken wraiths from the crushed ghost-seam might be scuttling like awful crabs beneath the black and silver shiver of the lake’s reflective surface. All in all, it looked like a tremendous place for scruffy little apparitions to have fun in, and predictably the Warren toddler asked if they could clamber down and play there for a while. Phyllis refused, of course, though not in an unkindly way. Something about Phyll Painter’s attitude to Michael Warren seemed to have changed drastically since they’d all been to visit Doddridge Church, at least in Marjorie’s opinion.
“If that’s where yer fancy gooin’ then we’ll ’ave a poke abayt there a bit later, on ayr way back from the madhouses. We’ll goo and do ayr bit o’ scrumpin’ first, though, so we won’t be playin’ on an empty stomach and get shirty with each other. ’Ow does that saynd?”
This seemed to mollify their mascot, and so they continued on their way, over the deep plunge of St. Andrew’s Road and further still, across the railway station and the river, which as usual made Marjorie think of her bit of bad luck, and the Nene Hag.
She had known that she was going to drown the moment that the toecaps of her scuffed shoes were unable to locate the river bottom and she’d at last understood the simple physics of her situation. Still, she’d had Victorian stories read to her where heroines slipped peacefully and elegantly to a watery death, their petticoats billowing up around them, opening like lace anemones, which all made drowning sound like quite an easy, dignified and above all poetic way to die. That had, of course, turned out to be a load of shit.
In her post-mortem readings she had learned that the first stage of drowning was what experts called “the surface struggle”, which in Marjorie’s own view was a succinct and accurate description of the process, or at least as she remembered it: the first thing is the frightening realisation that you’re having difficulty keeping your head up where there’s still air for you to breathe. Then, if you can’t swim, what you try to do is try to climb out of the river as if you’re caught in a flow of stepladders rather than icy water. When that doesn’t work you thrash around in desperation for a bit and then get tired, and stop for just a second, and go under. As you sink, you’ll hold your breath and wait for the Victorian swoon to come, so that you won’t know anything about what’s happening, but it doesn’t, and eventually you can’t help …
Marjorie was shuddering and squirming at the same time as she thought about it. The idea, the memory of it, set her ghostly teeth on edge and made her phantom toes curl up.
Eventually you can’t help opening your mouth and breathing in some water, then that makes you cough so that you inhale a lot more and … <em>aarrgh</em>. She couldn’t stand it, the remembered black ache in her chest. That dreadful instant when you understand that you will never draw a breath again, and that your life is finished as the empty, silent darkness at the edges of your sight begins to crowd into the centre and the pain and horror is all happening to someone else; to that fat, specky little girl down there.
It was the next bit, though – the stage of drowning that is talked of everywhere but very seldom written of in reputable journals – that had been the point where everything became all weird and unexpected. This was the supposed juncture of the drowning process where “you see your whole life flash before your eyes”, and yes, Marjorie could confirm from personal experience that this was just what happened, although not quite in the fashion that the phrase would lead you to expect. Marjorie had assumed that when your whole life flashed before your eyes it would be like an old Mack Sennett film and full of crackling people flashing through each comical or poignant episode. The actuality of what had opened up inside her mind as she had drifted down towards the river-bottom’s rising sediments with her lungs full of freezing green, however, had been nothing like that. For one thing, the Keystone Kops scenario that she’d envisaged would have had its giddy and accelerated incidents all happening in a sequence, chronologically, with one thing following another. This came nowhere near describing the phenomenon that Marjorie had subsequently learned was called “The Life Review”.
It had been a mosaic of moments, an arrangement like the Delft tiles Marjorie had lately noticed all around the fireplace at the Doddridge house. Each vital second of her life was there as an exquisite moving miniature, filled with the most intense significance and limned in colours so profound they blazed, yet not set out in any noticeable order. Furthermore, each scene was less a painted vignette than it was a whole experience, so that to look on a depicted instant was to live through it again, with all its smells and sounds and words and thoughts intact, its shockingly strong pleasures and its crystal-sharp ordeals.
The glowing, living pictures weren’t a bit like, say, for instance, <em>The Rake’s Progress</em>, in that firstly they weren’t all arrayed as a progression of events, and secondly they didn’t have a moral. Some of the illuminated episodes portrayed deeds Marjorie was not particularly proud of, some showed what she thought of as her better side, and the majority appeared to be entirely neutral, even insignificant. Nowhere in any of the glimmering vignettes, though, did she feel a sense of moral judgement, or have the impression that one likeness represented good things she’d accomplished while another signified the bad she’d brought about. Instead, the foremost apprehension that accompanied the tessellated drift of imagery was, overwhelmingly, one of responsibility: these, good or bad, were things that Marjorie had done.
As an example, she remembered now one of what, at the time, had seemed like the more humdrum and less promising scenarios. Amongst the mosaic tableaux spread before her was a study in soft browns and greys, Marjorie and her mother in the unlit kitchen of their house in Cromwell Street. Her mum fussed at the stove, scrawny and woebegone, with an expression of exasperation as her little daughter tugged her skirts and pleaded with her. Studying the moment as it hovered with its fellows in the shimmering curtain honeycombed with moving images that hung before her, Marjorie had lived it all again down to its most minuscule detail. She had smelled once more the nothing-scent of suet off the glutinous bacon-and-onion roll her mother was preparing, and had heard the instantly-familiar rhythm of the dented brass tap as its signature drip-pattern fell into the old stone sink. One of the Bakelite stems of her ugly spectacles was chafing over her right ear, where it had made a sore pink place, and most of all she relived every impulse, every notion that had crossed her mind and every syllable that passed her lips as she’d stood in the gloomy kitchen, badgering her poor mother relentlessly, the same words over and over again. “Can we, mum? Can we have a dog? Why can’t we have a dog, mum? Mum? Mum, can we? I’d look after it. Mum, can we have a dog?”
It wasn’t good, it wasn’t bad, it was just something Marjorie had done. She was responsible. She was responsible for going on and on until her parents finally gave in and bought her India, got the dog that would lead Marjorie out through the rushes and into the chilly, breathless deep. The realisation had been shocking, sobering, and only one among a thousand such small revelations glittering in the supernatural lobby-card display of highlights excerpted from her short life. She’d hung there in a kind of shining nowhere, contemplating all the mysteries of her existence and discovering that their answers had been obvious all along. Marjorie didn’t know how long she had remained in this condition – could have been a century or could have been only those final seconds as her heart stopped and her brain shut down – but she could still recall with absolute precision how and when her everlasting reverie had ended.
She’d become aware of subtle movements on the surface of the time-tiles spread out there before her – moving threads of light, luminous flaws that seemed to travel from the heart of the pictorial assembly to its edges – and had understood after a while that they were ripples. It was as though the kaleidoscope view of her life had been made liquid or as if it had been liquid from the start, the still meniscus of a lake that only now was troubled by some unseen movement in its depths beneath the flashing, visionary surface.
That was when the giant face of the Nene Hag had pushed itself in three bulging dimensions into being out of Marjorie’s flat, decorated screen of memories.
The pictures broke apart in coloured pond-scum; wet balloon-skin clots of vivid oil-paint slithering like rainbow mucous through the corpse-floss strands of weed that trailed to each side of that awful, sculpted face. The slimy fragments of the drowned girl’s recollected life slid down a lunging brow thrust forward so aggressively that it was almost flat; the thuggish, narrow temples of a pike. Gobbets of pink and turquoise reminiscence, still with fluid and distorting scraps of a familiar place or person rolling on their jelly contours, dribbled from the forehead’s grotesque overhang to drip across the lightless mouths of the eye-sockets’ grotto-caves, or trickled down the threatening scythe-blade of the creature’s nose. There in the black depths of its eye-pits was a sticky mollusc gleam and, down beneath a hooked proboscis quite as large as Marjorie herself, a horrid little mouth worked shut and open as if chewing mud or uttering a complicated silent curse. It had dead cats and the corroded skeletons of bicycles between its jutting, rotten, sunken tea-chest teeth.
The shattered Life Review melted away, became diluted pigment-ribbons floating off into the murky soup of the nocturnal Nene, and Marjorie had found herself back under water but no longer inside her own body. This was tumbling away from her, a grey and lumpy parcel that collided slowly with the silted riverbed amid the rising cumuli of muck and rubber Johnnies. Marjorie had found herself adrift in a continuum of black and white that had no temperature and where it seemed she sprouted extra arms and legs with every movement. As alarming as she’d found these strange phenomena, however, they’d not been her greatest worry.
The Undine, the water-elemental that she’d later learned to call the Nene Hag, had been there in the subsurface twilight with her. The monstrosity’s enormous face was right in front of Marjorie, half pike and half deformed old woman, the jaw hanging open, the decayed fangs dredging through the bed-sands. The wraith-thing’s translucent body trailed away behind it in the river darkness, an indefinitely long affair that had seemed to be mostly neck, a ten-foot thick eel or perhaps a section of the transatlantic cable. Up towards the looming head-end of the creature wizened little arms that sported disproportionately massive and web-fingered claws grew from the trunk to either side. One of these had unfolded, with a brief impression of too many elbows, to grasp Marjorie’s confused and helpless ectoplasmic form around one ankle, dragging down the struggling fresh-hatched ghost to its own eye-level so it could take a better look at her.
Suspended there before the horror with its waterweed mane billowing and twisting up around her, eye to snail-shell eye, she’d watched the chewing movements of the ghastly, too-small mouth and had concluded that this wasn’t the inhabitant of any hell or heaven Marjorie had ever heard of. This was something else, something appalling that implied an afterlife of endless and unfathomable nightmare. What kind of a universe was everybody living in, she’d thought with mingled fear and anger, when a ten-year-old who’d only tried to save her dog could find herself confronted not by Jesus, angels or a much-missed grandparent, but by this gnashing, slavering abomination with its train-sized head?
The worst thing, though, had been the moment when she’d finally met the apparition’s gaze, had stared into the lightless wells that were its orbits and had seen the eyes gleam in their depths like tight-coiled ammonites. In those vile seconds, and although she desperately hadn’t wanted to, Marjorie understood the Nene Hag. All the awful and unwelcome details of almost two thousand years alone in cold gloom had rushed flooding through the newly-dead girl’s paralysed awareness, filling her with moonlit metal and aborted foetuses, the hateful dreams of leeches, until all the terror came exploding out of her in a long, bubbling scream that nobody alive could hear …
Marjorie traipsed along the Daz-white Ultraduct behind her chattering colleagues. She knew that she had a reputation for not saying very much, but that was only because she was always thinking, trying to find the right words to convey her urgent memories and feelings so that she could get them down upon a literally ghost-written page. The elevated walkway had now borne them safely far across the river and above the sunken pasture of Foot Meadow, on to Jimmy’s End. Once past the reminiscent swirl and slop of the lead-coloured torrent, Marjorie found she could put the business that had happened there behind her, at least for the moment, and turn her attention to their present whereabouts.
St. James’s End, bubbling beneath them as they gazed down from the soul-bridge into its contemporaneous flux, seemed to have been possessed since its inception by an air of bleak municipality. Even the Saxon hovels that were building and demolishing themselves down in the deeper time-layers looked to be too widely set apart from one another, with great lonely windswept gaps between them. On more modern levels, coexisting with the mud-and-straw huts of an earlier vintage, cramped Victorian shops burst newly painted into life and then went bust, collapsing to a disappointment of soaped glass and peeling, sunburned hoardings. A bus depot bloomed and died repeatedly, the double-deckers hunched in a perpetually rain-lashed forecourt, and across the squirming neighbourhood a kind of shabby, brash modernity was everywhere, spreading and shrinking back across unfathomable store-fronts like a blight. What was a Carphone Warehouse? What was Quantacom? On slack-jawed wooden gates and fencing made from corrugated tin, graffiti writhed, evolving from the neat calligraphy and simple sentiments of ‘Devyl take the King’, through BUF and NFC and GEORGE DAVIES IS INNOCENT in blunt, utilitarian whitewash capitals, into a melted and fluorescent lexicon of arabesques that were illegible and marvellous: inscrutiful. Marjorie wished that she were seeing it in colour.
The Dead Dead Gang wandered, chatting, whistling and singing down the brilliant boardwalk as it swept over St. James’s End, swooping above the Weedon Road and out to Duston. Here, on the more recent strata of the simultaneous timescape, there were nicer homes, at least when compared with the Boroughs’ soot-cauled terraces. Semi-detached, these were the homes of families who, through hard work or luck, had managed to put a considerable and literal distance between themselves and the downtrodden neighbourhoods their parents had been born in. Houses like the ones in Duston, not the sweet stone cottages of the original outlying village but the later dwellings, always looked to Marjorie as if they had expressions of pained condescension on their big flat faces, probably something to do with the arrangement of those wide and airy modern windows. They all looked as if somebody had just dropped one. Marjorie’s own view was that those who decried it very probably supplied it.
From her current vantage, looking down upon the architecture of a dozen centuries occurring all at once, Marjorie couldn’t see the people, live or dead, who must presumably be swarming through the different structures as they rose and fell. Compared with static streets or buildings, ghosts and living people never stayed still long enough to register in the accelerated urban simmer that was visible from up here on the Ultraduct. Even so, Marjorie had ventured out this way before, down in the ordinary ghost-seam, and she knew about the phantoms who resided in the drained grey cul-de-sacs and crescents that the gang were passing over, although they were nowhere to be seen at present.
She knew, for example, that the pleasant mews beneath them had a much more crowded ghost-seam than did the run-down lanes of the Boroughs. Whereas in the phantom half-world superimposed over Scarletwell Street you might bump into perhaps another ghost or two at any given time, in this more well-to-do location there were often dozens of dead doctors, bankers, office managers and neatly coiffured housewives loitering beside well-tended flowerbeds or running wistful, immaterial hands over the contours of parked cars. In the sedate front parlours of homes sold by grown-up children following their parents’ deaths you would find uncommunicative deceased couples criticising the new owner’s renovations, fretting endlessly about whether the value of their former property was going up or down. Sometimes you’d see a crowd of them: an otherworldly civic action group standing there glumly on the edges of some previously rural meadow where they’d used to walk their Labradors and where a new council estate was now under construction. Either that or they’d convene in the back garden of whatever Pakistani couple had just moved into the area, simply to mutter disapprovingly and glare, these demonstrations obviously rendered doubly futile by the protestors’ invisibility. That must be, Marjorie concluded, why they never bothered making any placards.
It was funny, now she thought about it, all the differences there were between the spirit world above the Boroughs and the one over this better class of residences. The main difference, paradoxically enough, was that down in the Boroughs there was nothing like the number of rough sleepers, people resting only fitfully in their own afterlives. Moreover, the unhappy spectres of the poorer neighbourhood were for the most part burdened only by low self-esteem, a sense that they weren’t good enough at life to dwell up in the higher district of Mansoul. That clearly wasn’t what was keeping the successful types below tied to their earthly habitats, however. Was it, then, the opposite? Was the suburban ghost-seam that the gang were passing over occupied by souls that felt they were too good for Heaven?
No. No, Marjorie suspected that it wasn’t as clear-cut as that. Perhaps it was more that the poor had fewer things in their material lives that they were reluctant to give up. There wasn’t much point, after all, in hanging round the home in which you’d lived your life when it had been demolished or passed on to other council tenants. Not when you were only renting anyway. It was much better to go up into the “many mansions” of Mansoul, the way that the majority of Boroughs people did. The spirits around these parts simply didn’t have the same incentives to salvation as they did where Marjorie had come from, but she was still not wholly convinced by her own argument. An inability to let go of material possessions seemed an insufficient reason to forgo the glories of the Second Borough, even if you were ridiculously posh. It didn’t ring true. Anyway, there were a lot of lovely people in Mansoul who were by no means working class and yet who’d rushed Upstairs without a second thought the instant that their lives were over. Look at Mr. Doddridge and his family. It must be something else, some other factor that prevented such a lot of these suburbanites from moving up to the eternal avenues above.
It came to her after a moment’s thought that it was more than likely status. That was probably the word that her beginner-writer’s mind was searching for. The well-off phantoms down beneath her shunned Mansoul because one’s earthly status had no meaning there. Other than builders, devils, Vernalls, deathmongers and special cases like the Doddridge family or Mr. Bunyan, Mansoul was without rank. One soul could not be rated superior to another, save for in whatever individual innate virtues they might happen to possess, and even that was in the eye of the beholder. For those people, of whatever class, who’d never really been concerned by status, moving up into Mansoul was not a difficulty. On the other hand, for those who could not bear that radiant commonality, it was to all intents and purposes impossible.
She thought about the few scraps of the Bible that she could recall from Sunday school, the bit about the camel squeezing through the needle’s eye and how rich people would find it as hard to enter Heaven. When she’d heard that, she’d assumed there must be some bylaw in paradise prohibiting the posh from getting in, but now she realised it wasn’t like that. There was no door-policy in Mansoul. People kept themselves out, rich and poor alike, either because they thought they were too good to mingle, or too bad.
Pursuing the idea – it might turn out to be a poem or short story one day, who could say – Marjorie felt that it could also be applied to the born aristocracy, those who were truly posh and truly rich, the upper classes with their country seats or castles in Northamptonshire’s outlying towns and villages. By definition, they’d have more material possessions to relinquish and more status to give up than anyone. No wonder there were so few toffs in Mansoul. Oh, you got the odd one, rarities who’d been born to the purple but had never placed much stock in their position or had even turned their backs on it, but they were in a vanishingly small minority. The vast majority of people Upstairs were the working classes of a dozen or more centuries, with a comfortable rump of middling sorts and then a scattering of isolated Earls, Lords and repentant squires like golden pimples on that rump.
Meanwhile the ghost-seam of the Boroughs was in consequence mostly deserted, and these streets out in the suburbs appeared relatively thick with posthumous professionals and suchlike by comparison. What must the stately homes be like? Packed with innumerable generations’ revenants and banshees bearing medieval grudges, everybody claiming seniority and wondering where all the underlings had gone … Marjorie shuddered even as she sniggered. It was hardly any wonder that such fancy places were notoriously haunted: they were dangerously overpopulated, creaking at their stone seams with ancestral ghouls and spectres, twenty to a parlour, contravening astral fire and safety regulations. It was strange to think of all the regal piles and palaces as overcrowded wraith-slums, heaving ghostly tenements with syphilitic great-great-great-grand-uncle Percy raving about Gladstone in the next room, but in some ways the idea made perfect sense. The first shall be the last, and all of that. Justice above the Street.
Trudging along in front of Marjorie, Phyllis’s little handful Bill was earnestly debating all the ins and outs of phantom mammoth husbandry with Reggie Bowler, who seemed unconvinced.
“It’d take ages, that would, digging right back to the ice age so as we could round up a ghost-mammoth. I don’t reckon as you’ve thought this through.”
“Don’t be a twat. Of course I ’ave, and it’ll be a piece of piss, I’m tellin’ yer. What does it matter if it takes us ages, you daft bastard? I thought that was what eternity was all about, things takin’ ages? We can dig back, find a mammoth, take as long as we want taming ’im, then bring ’im back up ’ere five seconds after we set out.”
“How are we gunna tame it, then, and anyway, how do you know as it’s a him? It might be, I don’t know, a mammothess for all you know.”
“Oh, fuckin’ ’ell. Look, are we partners in this mammoth plan or ain’t we? It don’t fuckin’ matter if it’s male or female. As for ’ow we tame it, we just gain its trust by giving it a lot of what ghost-mammoths like to eat.”
“What’s that, then, you’re so bloody clever?”
“I’m not clever, Reggie, I’m just not as fuckin’ thick as you are. Puck’s ’Ats, Reg. We’ll feed it Puck’s ’Ats. Name me one dead thing that would refuse a sack of Puck’s ’Ats.”
“Monks. Some of the ghost monks, they’re not s’posed to eat ’em ’cause they reckon they’ve got devils in ’em.”
“Reggie, we’re not going to come across a mammoth who believes that, you can trust me. There weren’t any Christian mammoths. Mammoths didn’t ’ave religion.”
“Well, perhaps that’s why they all died out, then, you don’t know.”
Marjorie tuned the nonsense out and listened to the overlaid dawn choruses of several centuries of birds, a blissful tide of sound that slopped across the sky and sounded wonderful despite the muffling of the ghost-seam. In fact, heard without the half-world’s dull acoustics it might well have been unbearable.
The Ultraduct rolled on through Duston, the railed span’s magnesium-ribbon brightness running level with the multi-temporal bubbling of the treetops. Marjorie could work out which trees were the oldest and most permanent by how they changed the least, and by the way in which their upper branches seemed alive with a St. Elmo’s Fire of muted colours, even in the ghost-seam’s Cecil Beaton monochrome. This was because the oldest trees, all fourth-dimensional constructions in their own right, poked up out of the material plane into the Attics of the Breath there in the corresponding regions of Mansoul, with all of the specially-favoured pigeons passing up and down their transcendental trunks, between two worlds.
Marjorie wondered what it must be like to be a tree, to never move unless gripped by the wind but only to grow up and outwards into time, the bare twigs raking at the future, clawing for next season and the season after that. Meanwhile the roots extended down past buried pets or buried people, twisting through flint arrowheads and in amongst the ribs of Bill and Reggie’s mammoth, reaching for the past. Sometimes a sawn-through trunk would expose an embedded musket-ball, a deadly little iron meteorite surrounded by the thickening of age and time, the growth-rings spreading out like surf-line ripples to engulf this violent instant from the 1640s in a smothering wooden tide.
Were trees in any way aware, she wondered, of the animal and human flow that rushed so frantically about them in their still longevity? Marjorie thought that trees must have <em>some</em> knowledge of mammal activity, if only in the broad historic sense: forested Neolithic valleys razed to black stumps by the first land-clearances and acres of felled timber to erect the early settlements. Wars would leave their reminders – spears and shrapnel sunk into the bark – while hangings, plagues and decimations yielded welcome human compost; nutrients to spark fresh growth. Extinctions brought about through over-hunting, whether by man or by other predators, would change and modify the woodland world in which these timeless giants existed, sometimes in a minor way, sometimes disastrously. The mounting centuries would be accompanied by urban overspill, planning permission, yellow bulldozers and diggers. All of these would have their impact, would send tremors through the hushed continuum of an arboreal consciousness, a vegetable awareness rising and descending with the sap.
She thought it likely, then, that trees knew of the human world remotely. Its large-scale events would filter through eventually, if these were of adequate duration. Those despoliations and depletions that went on for years or centuries would surely register, but what of the more fleeting interactions? Did the forest notice every gouged heart, every lovers’ declaration cut deep to disguise any forebodings or uncertainties? Did it maintain a record of each walked dog and its piss-map? Queen Elizabeth the First, as Marjorie remembered, had been sitting underneath a tree when told of her succession to the throne, while Queen Elizabeth the Second, some five hundred years thereafter, had been sitting up one. What about the anecdotal apple tree that Isaac Newton sat beneath while formulating the ideas that would power the machine age, ideas that would set the trundling earth-movers on their implacable advance towards the tree-line? Was there any nervous rustling in the leaves? Did the boughs sigh with weary premonition? Marjorie thought privately that probably they did, at least in a poetic sense, which was certainly good enough for her.
The alabaster walkway that the ghostly kids were on was curving noticeably now in its approach to the asylums, up amongst the simultaneously withering and budding treetops. Glancing back across her shoulder, Marjorie could see the children’s dissipating after-pictures following them in a rowdy-looking albeit silent crowd. She studied her own dumpy little image, stumping along at the group’s rear, and was disappointed at how stolid and expressionless she looked. Almost immediately, though, the trailing multiple exposures caught up with the instant at which Marjorie had turned to look back, and she found that she was squinting without much real interest at the rear of her own head. Observing that from this angle she seemed to have a case of phantom dandruff she faced forward once more as the Dead Dead Gang slowed to a halt on the celestial viaduct. It seemed that Michael Warren needed something else explained to him.
“Why wiz that place that’s in front of us all punny-looking? I don’t look the like of it.”
The toddler sounded anxious. Marjorie could tell by how he mixed his words up into dream-talk, having not yet settled comfortably into the more flexible vocabulary of the afterlife. She knew exactly what he meant, though, and she fully understood the reasons for the infant’s apprehension.
Up ahead of them, the glowing boardwalk passed above an expanse of the ghost-seam that appeared to be much more abnormal than was normal, so to speak. For one thing, there were sudden flares of vivid hue amongst the unrelenting greyness of the muffled half-world. For another … well, the air itself was sort of creased, as were the faintly eerie structures that you could see through it. Space itself appeared to have been hideously mangled, crumpled up like paper in a giant’s fist, with random fold-lines running everywhere and all the grounds and buildings of the place beneath them made into a clumsy, mad collage. This spatial fragmentation and distortion, added to the shift and flow of different times that was already evident, made the asylums an alarming sight. Reality was crushed into a faceted, chaotic tangle of now, there, and here, and then: an indescribable topography that was one moment crystalline and convex and the next a field of odd-shaped cavities and holes, where black and white inverted forms were drenched at intervals by colour-bursts of frightening hallucinatory blue, or hot and lurid Polynesian orange. Wondering how Phyllis Painter could conceivably make sense of this demented and yet somehow glorious spectacle to wide-eyed Michael Warren, Marjorie was all ears. She might learn something important, and besides, she always made an effort to remember dialogue.
“Well, what we’re comin’ up to ’ere, it’s what we call the mad-’ouses or the asylums. It’s a bit like all that funny waste-ground between Chalk Lane and St. Andrew’s Road what we saw earlier, where I said we could goo an’ play on ayr way back, if yer remember. In both places it’s a kind of a subsidence. Fer whatever reason bits of Upstairs ’ave fell through ter Daynstairs. What we’re lookin’ at, dayn in the world below it’s more or less in the same place as Berry Wood, the mental ’ospital. Saint Crispin’s, what they call it. But, because most of ’em what are livin’ dayn below us are doolally, it’s a bit more complicated than it saynds.
“See, up in Mansoul, where I faynd yer in the Attics o’ the Breath, all o’ the shops and avenues and whatnot are all made from like a crust o’ livin’ people’s dreams and their imaginings. The problem ’ere wiz that ’alf o’ the lunatics what places like this ’ave ’ad in ’em dayn the years, they don’t know where they are. Some of ’em don’t know <em>when</em> they are, and that means that the area of Mansoul that’s above ’em wiz made out of dreams and memories what are wrong. Thoughts, Upstairs, are builder’s materials, and if the thoughts are flawed then all the architecture what’s built out of ’em wiz flawed as well, and that’s what’s ’appened ’ere. A faulty part o’ Mansoul ’as fell in and crushed the ghost-seam, and as a result all the asylums in Northampton ’ave collapsed into one place, at least from ayr perspective. It’s because the patients don’t ’ave much idea which mental ’ome they’re in, so everythin’ gets all confused up on the ’igher levels too. That what we’re looking at dayn there, it’s the St. Crispin’s ’Ospital at Berry Wood, but bits of it are from Saint Andrew’s ’Ospital on Billing Road and other bits are from the mad-’ouse what there used to be in Abby Park, where the museum wiz now. All o’ them colours what keep flashin’, that’s where coloured rubble from Mansoul ’as ended up embedded in the ghost-seam. It’s in a right two-and-eight, and you wait ’til we’re dayn there in it! Livin’ and dead loonies everywhere, and even they can’t tell one from the other!”
Marjorie agreed inwardly. It was most probably as succinct an appraisal of the madhouses as she herself could have come up with, and she hadn’t previously known that the subsidence in the Second Borough had been caused by the frail, broken minds that were supporting it down in the earthly realm. She’d known that all the different mental institutions overlapped, so that deluded inmates from one place or time could mingle freely with the medicated shufflers of another, but she hadn’t fully understood the way that it all worked. Phyllis’s explanation made sense of the startling eruptions of pure colour, too: the visual qualities of a collapsed Mansoul reacting with the firework emotions of the mentally disturbed.
With Michael Warren’s curiosity now wholly satisfied and with his fears only somewhat allayed, the clutch of latchkey phantoms headed on along the Ultraduct, deeper into the fold and flux of the asylums. Marjorie, who’d had her inner reverie interrupted by the toddler’s query, found that she could not recall what she’d been thinking. No doubt it had been some vaguely literary musing about birds or clouds or something, but now it had vanished. Lacking its distraction, Marjorie Miranda Driscoll found her thoughts returning to their customary drift of shadowed memories and images, the very things that she indulged in literary musings to avoid.
The Nene Hag’s massive, murky shape had hung there in the river-bottom gloom before the drowned child, with its horrid and incalculable length trailing away behind it into underwater blackness. Brilliant fragments of Marjorie’s shattered Life Review were still caught in the strangling tangles of the creature’s hair, swirling and curling all about them both. One of the Hag’s umbrella-pterodactyl hands was clamped tight on the newly-dead girl’s ankle, holding her immobile as it studied her. Right at the bottom of the slimy wells that were its sockets, she had seen the slug-like glisten of the monster’s eyes and in them was the mer-thing’s whole unbearable, unasked-for story; every terrifying detail of its near two-thousand-year existence leaking into Marjorie like septic drainage from a rusted cistern.
It was of the Potameides, of the Fluviales. Merrow, naiad, Undine, it was all of these and had been called Enula once, when last it had a name; had been called ‘She’ when last it had some vestige of a gender. That had been during the second century, when what was now the Nene Hag had been then a minor river goddess, worshipped by a crew of homesick Roman soldiers garrisoned at the town’s south bridge in one of the many river-forts erected between here and Warwickshire, along the Nene. Those ancient afternoons, the clots of colour that were sodden floral offerings, drifting with the current. The Latin imprecations, half believing, half embarrassed, muttered underneath the breath. Enula – had that really been her name or was it a mishearing, a false memory? The creature didn’t know or care. It didn’t matter. Enula would do.
She’d started life as hardly anything at all, a mere poetic understanding of the river’s nature in the minds and songs of the first settlers; a flimsy tissue of ideas, barely aware of her own tenuous existence. Gradually, the songs and stories that had brought her to the brink of being grew more complex, adding to her bulk with new and more sophisticated metaphors: the river was the flow of life itself, its constant one-way passage that of time, its quivering reflective surface like the mirror of our memory. She’d taken on a fragile substance, at least in the world of fables, dreams and phantoms that was closest to the muddy mortal sphere, and finally had been made spiritually concrete when they’d given her a name. Enula. Or had it been Nendra? Nenet? Something like that, anyway.
Back then she’d been a beautiful young concept, her appearance that of an unusually elongated mermaid, ten or twelve feet prow to stern, her face a fabulous confection. Each eye, then much closer to the surface of her head, was an exquisite violet lotus with its myriad petals opening and closing on the crinkles of her smile. Her lips had been two foot-long curls of iridescent fish-skin where prismatic hues of lavender and turquoise played, and lustrous tresses of deep bottle-green drifted about the polished pebble hardness of her breasts and belly. Both her eyebrows and her maidenhair were of the softest otter pelts and her extraordinary tail was terminated in a fin like an immense jewelled comb, big as a longbow. Her bright scales and her eight oval fingernails alike were made from mirror, where black bands of shadow rippled like reflected trees.
She’d even had a love, those many centuries ago. His name had been Gregorius, a stranded Roman soldier working out his term of duty at the river-fort, missing his wife and children far away in warm Milan. His floral offerings to the spirit of the waters had been the most frequent and the most profuse, and every other morning he’d bathe naked in her chilly flow, his balls and penis shrivelled to a walnut. She remembered, dimly, the distinct smell of his sweat, the way he’d sweep the water back across his scalp to wash the dark, cropped hair. Her opal droplets trickling down his spine towards the buttocks. Once, during his riverside ablutions, he had masturbated briefly and discharged his seed into the torrent foaming at his knees, the congealed sperm swept off towards the distant ocean. Lovesick, she had followed this most precious offering almost to the Wash before she’d given up and headed back for home, wondering all the way at the ferocity of the obsession that had seized her.
Then one dismal morning her young man had gone, as had his cohorts. The abandoned river-fort became a crumbling playhouse for the local children and, within a few years, had been scavenged and dismantled to the point where it no longer served as anything at all. She’d waited and she’d waited, writhing in frustration down amongst the silt and sediment, but she had never seen Gregorius again, nor any of his kind. There had been no more flowers, but only night-soil flung upon her bosom by the hairy, slouching Britons when they rose each morning. Clearly, she was not regarded as even a demigoddess any longer and, accordingly, down in her cold, resentful darkness she’d begun to change.
She’d been so lonely. That was what had altered her by inches, turning her from lovely Nenet, Nendra or Enula to the Nene Hag, to the mile-long thing she was today. Her simple solitude had fashioned her into a monster, had precipitated all the desperate actions since then. All the drowned souls she’d claimed, all of them taken only for companionship.
She’d held herself back, had restrained her urges for some several centuries before she’d given in and grabbed a ghost as it was struggling to escape its bobbing body. She had been aware that once that step was taken it was irrevocable, a vile crime of the spirit from which there could be no turning back. That’s why she’d put the moment off for so long, why she’d hesitated until the idea of an eternal life without love could not be endured another instant. That point had been reached one summer night in the ninth century, almost a thousand years ago. The man’s name had been Edward, a stout crofter in his fortieth year or so, who’d tripped and fallen in the river as he’d made his way home through the dark fields with a belly full of ale. Edward had been her first.
These were not pleasant things from her perspective, neither Edward’s taking nor their subsequent relationship. She’d never really bothered to consider what the drowned man’s own view of such matters might have been. During the years they’d spent together, Edward had appeared to be in a continuous state of shock or trauma anyway, right from the moment when she’d closed her huge webbed hand around his thrashing and disoriented spectral body. In his widening eyes she’d caught her first glimpse of what she must look like now, the way that she must seem to them, the humans. Even if she should be fortunate enough to find a new Gregorius, how would she stop him screaming at what she’d become?
Edward, of course, had screamed at first – long bubbling spirit-noises that were somewhere between sound and light. Eventually, he’d fallen silent of his own accord and had retreated to the glazed and trance-like state in which he’d stayed for the remainder of their courtship. He became a paralysed and staring pet-toy, drifting and inert as Nendra or Enula batted him this way and that between her crab-leg fingers or attempted to communicate with him. Unable to elicit a response that went beyond a moan, a twitch or a convulsion, the Nene Hag had at last settled for a one-way conversation that went on uninterrupted for the full five decades he was with her. She unburdened herself of her many trials and disappointments, several times, and even told him of the day when she had chased Gregorius’s clotted sperm to the freshwater limits of her territory. He made no sign that he heard or understood her utterances, and she might have thought that she had no effect upon him whatsoever were it not for the continuing disintegration of his personality, shedding layers of awareness in an effort to escape the unrelenting horror of his circumstances. Finally, when Edward had no more self than a knot of driftwood, Nenet let him go. A piece of ghostly flotsam, used-up and sucked dry of its vitality, she’d watched as he was swirled away towards the east, towards the sea, still silent and still staring.
Then she’d gone and caught another one.
How many had there been since then? Two dozen? Three? The Nene Hag had lost count and had by now forgotten most of her companions’ names. She thought of all of them as “Edward”, even the half-dozen women that she’d netted down the decades, when she thought of them at all. Some of them had been more responsive to her presence than the first Edward had been. Some of them had tried pleading with her, some had even asked her questions as they’d struggled through their fear to comprehend her and to understand the nightmare they were caught in. All of them, however, would sink into her first suitor’s catatonic state, sooner or later. And when there was almost nothing left, when consciousness had shrunken to a numb, insensate dot, she would get rid of them. When their eyes ceased to follow the rare shafts of sunlight filtered from above as through a dirty glass, when their whole souls went limp and did not move thereafter, when there was no longer even Nendra’s dreary entertainment to be had from them she sent them off upon her stately and unhurried currents, never wondering what became of them, whether they would remain as mindless husks until the end of time or if they might one day recover. Mute and unresponsive she had no more use for them, and there were always more fish in the stream.
It – for it was most certainly an ‘it’ by now – had only taken women when no men were to be had, having arrived at the conclusion that ghost females caused more fuss than they were worth. Most of the women, it was true, had lasted longer than the men before withdrawing to a vegetative torpor, but they’d also been more fierce and frightened and had fought harder as well. Combining with Enula’s natural antipathy to its own former gender, this resistance had brought out a streak of cruelty in the Nene Hag’s nature, where before had only been abiding loneliness and bleak embitterment. One of the female Edwards who’d got on the creature’s wrong side had been slowly psychologically dismantled, picked apart in tumbling flakes of astral fish-food and then, after almost ninety winters, had been flung away. The ancient sub-aquatic phantasm had been surprised by the response that this deliberate torture had awoken in it: a dim, distant glimmer of sensation that was almost pleasure. Obviously, once discovered, this new tendency to inflict suffering had rapidly become more urgent, more pronounced, more necessary to the river-monster’s equilibrium.
It hadn’t caught a child before. It hadn’t felt the need, regarding them as minnows, no more than a mouthful when there was a great abundance of more adult sustenance to hand with each new year, all of the accidents and suicides. The nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, however, had been something of a lean stretch on account of the increasing numbers that were learning how to swim. Around the join of the two periods, Nenet had noticed with disdain an old man giving swimming lessons to a flock of nude young boys there on the stretch of it that marked the old town’s western boundary. Infuriatingly, from waterside discussions it had overheard, it later learned that the long meadow in the area, near where Saint Andrew’s Priory once stood, had been renamed after this irksome Irish lifeguard, an ex-military man named Paddy Moore, and was now known as Paddy’s Meadow. Consequently, through the interfering efforts of such people, most of those who entered the Hag’s province would climb safely out again. The creature had been without company since it had let the remnants of her last associate go, sometime during the 1870s, but now its dry spell had come to an end. Now it had Marjorie.
This entire tide of dreadful history had rushed into the helpless phantom child, along with a great host of other apprehensions, mysteries and gruesome trivia pertaining to the creature’s long, famished existence. Though transfixed by terror, Marjorie had suddenly known all the river’s cloudy secrets, known the whereabouts of both the missing and the murdered, had known where the lost crown jewels of Bad King John had ended up, the ones that never did “all come out in the Wash”. The little girl had stared into the wet grey spiral of the Undine’s eye and understood with absolute conviction what was to become of her: she’d spend unbearably protracted decades, horribly aware of how her very being was unravelling, flinching itself to pieces as it bore the undivided weight of the Nene Hag’s attentions, and then in the end when even Marjorie’s identity and consciousness were too much to endure she’d be discarded, one more used ghost heading for the east coast, dead twice over.
It was as all this was sinking in that there had been a terrible commotion in the nearby waters. The Nene Hag’s glutinous eyes had narrowed and contracted, squinting in surprise at this unwelcome interruption. The huge flattened head had turned, seeking the source of the disturbance, and then it had –
Marjorie bumped suddenly into the back of Reggie Bowler, who had stopped dead on the Ultraduct in front of her. The radiant flyover was evidently passing just above a central point in the web of entangled lunatic asylums, this being where Phyllis Painter had seen an abundance of mad-apples earlier, before she’d got mixed up with Michael Warren in the Attics of the Breath.
“All right, ’ere’s where I saw the Puck’s ’Ats. There wiz ’undreds of ’em, ’angin’ from the trees and from the gutterin’. If we jump dayn from where we are now, we can bag the lot of ’em.”
So saying, Phyllis clambered nimbly up onto the alabaster rail that edged the walkway, asking John to pass up Michael Warren so that Phyllis and the toddler could jump from the Ultraduct together, holding hands. The other children followed suit, and soon they were all plunging slowly through the ghost-seam’s treacle atmosphere towards the scrunched-up time and space below, grey after-pictures in a smear behind them marking their trajectories. The phantom ruffians fell towards the overlapping madhouse lawns like graceful and unhurried smoke grenades.
Marjorie landed in a crouch upon the shaved baize, with her staggered rain of multiple exposures in accompaniment. The piece of lawn she landed on appeared well tended and was therefore probably a displaced fragment of St. Andrew’s Hospital, rather than part of the more lowly nuthouse here at Berry Wood. Upon closer inspection she could even see the seams where neatly-manicured St. Andrew’s verges met with the more roughly-shorn grounds of St. Crispin’s or Abington Park: irregular trapeziums and wedges of dark or light grass fitted unevenly beside each other like a poorly manufactured jigsaw, different places crumpled up into a single landscape by the cave-in of the higher planes above. Tilting her head and looking up, Marjorie noticed that the sky itself appeared pasted together; distinct cloud types from diverse locations and from wildly varying altitudes clumsily juxtaposed, with only rough torn-paper lines dividing them. From some segments or slices of the heavens, it was drizzling.
As disorienting as the natural features of the view such as the grass and sky might be, the folded-in and mixed up buildings of the various institutions that surrounded them appeared much more peculiar. Stretches of ivy-covered limestone that were clearly part of the asylum-turned-museum in Abington fused jaggedly with pale and stately ship-like buildings from St. Andrew’s Hospital, metamorphosing ultimately to the faintly sinister brick edifices of St. Crispin’s. These bizarre, Victorian constructions were most prevalent amongst the mix of madhouses, no doubt because St. Crispin’s was the actual geographical position in the ghost-seam that these other places had become conflated with, both in the upper territories and the confused inmate dreams those higher realms were founded on.
The architecture of the institution here at Berry Wood had seemed perverse to Marjorie since she’d first learned the word “perverse”. It just seemed wrong, housing the mentally disturbed in an unsettling environment such as St. Crispin’s, where the high-windowed brick wings huddled together in a whispering conspiracy, peering suspiciously from under the steep brims of their slate hats, and where a spidery tower of no apparent purpose rose obscurely from the already oppressive skyline. Taken as a whole, St. Crispin’s Hospital had the demeanour of a strange Bavarian social experiment, left over from a bygone century. There was a gaol or workhouse flavour to its labyrinthine paths, its curfew hush, its isolation. Frankly, having fragments of St. Andrew’s or the Abington Park madhouse muddled up with it was rather an improvement.
The ghost-children were progressing cautiously across the variegated lawn towards a hodgepodge of asylum buildings dominated by the purposeless St. Crispin’s tower, a thing too slender to make any sense save as a crematorium chimney stack. One of the huddled structures near the turret’s base was a prefab extension of its native hospital, a single-storey unit where on previous visits Marjorie had stumbled upon various framed artworks executed by the inmates. In amongst the strangely captivating landscapes on display, the burning orange skies, the metal shrubs trimmed to a dangerous and spiky topiary, she’d been unsurprised to find painted depictions of the way the overlapping madhouses appeared when looked at from the ghost-seam, lumps of Abington Park or St. Andrew’s spliced in with St. Crispin’s as though by mistake. Even the sudden bursts of higher-space phenomena – like the cascading moiré pattern currently erupting from behind the spindly brick spire ahead of them – were reproduced upon some of the canvasses, a proof that living people in an extreme mental state could sometimes see the upper world and its inhabitants. She’d even found a crayon drawing of a figure that looked the dead spit of Phyllis Painter, with the rabbit skins hung in a rancid garland round her neck. It had been a distorted charcoal sketch that made the ghost gang’s leader look a lot more frightening than she was in real life or death.
Marjorie’s reverie was interrupted by a sudden loud, indignant outburst from the real Phyll Painter, the sheer vehemence of which made Marjorie think that the unknown mental patient’s portrait might have been more accurate than she’d at first supposed.
“Some bugger’s ’ad ’em! There wiz ’undreds of ’em earlier, and all these trees wiz nearly creakin’ wi’ the weight of ’em! If I find out who’s come and nicked our Bedlam Jennies before we could nick ’em then I’ll punch ’is bloody lights out, even if it’s the Third Borough!”
Everybody else, even her presumed younger brother Bill, seemed stunned by the near-blasphemy of Phyllis’s incendiary rant. Marjorie glanced towards the nearby trees and madhouse eaves. She noticed that while there were still enough Puck’s Hats growing upon them to provide a satisfying meal for the dead youngsters, there were nowhere near as many as Phyllis had led them to expect. Was their infuriated leader right? Was there some other well-informed and highly organised ghost-scavenger at work here, possibly a rival phantom gang attempting to encroach upon their territory? Marjorie hoped that this wouldn’t prove to be the case. She’d never previously heard tell of gang warfare in Mansoul, but she imagined that it could get luminously ugly. Wraith-brawls spilling over from the Mayorhold, urchins swinging dreams or memories of pickaxe handles, although how would they distinguish between differing gang colours in the monochrome arena of the ghost-seam? One side could wear black, perhaps; the other white, like violent, scruffy chess. Her wandering thoughts had got as far as revenge doorstep exorcisms when she realised that she wasn’t thinking about her real, present circumstances at all but was instead plotting a third book, presumably a follow-up to her forthcoming novel about Snowy Vernall and his beautiful granddaughter hiking through Eternity.
It was as Marjorie was forcing her unruly literary fancies back into their cage that tall John cried out suddenly.
“I can see one of the blighters! Look! He’s peeping from behind the tower!”
Marjorie turned in time to see a tiny fair-haired head bob back behind one corner of the edifice’s base. You could tell that it was that of a ghost-kid by how it left a grey stream of little heads evaporating in its wake. So, she’d been right. There was a rival gang of spectral ruffians who’d beaten them to the mad apples. There were poachers on their land! Surprised by her own sense of angry indignation, Marjorie joined with the other children as they stormed towards the tower, their half-a-dozen swelled into a shrieking Mongol horde by all the trailing doppelgangers.
Rounding the dark brickwork of the corner they stopped dead and Marjorie once more found herself piling into Reggie Bowler’s back. Recovering, she peered between the taller gang-members in front of her, taking her glasses off to polish them upon one sleeve before replacing them, as if unable to believe what she and her confederates were seeing. It was actually a gesture she’d seen someone do once in a film – possibly Harold Lloyd – rather than natural behaviour. As if whatever startling vista you were seeing was a smear of grime to be wiped from the lens. It would, she thought, have to be quite an oddly-shaped and convoluted smear, especially in this current instance.
Some way off, a time-hole had been opened in the air quite near ground level, being almost three feet in diameter by Marjorie’s own estimate and bordered by the flickering static bands of alternating black and white that usually attended such phenomena. There were two tough and grubby-looking ghost-boys, one tall and the other short, holding between them what looked like some sort of lettered banner that was sagging under what must have been hundreds of ripe Puck’s Hats, all the moist and interlocking fairy figures in their starfish clusters, hints of colour in their glisten, fugitive and delicate, piled up like so many prismatic turnips on the strange flag being used to carry them. Now that she looked more closely through her dead-eyes and her polished spectacles, Marjorie could see the tops of some embroidered letters on the banner that appeared to spell out the word ‘union’ or ‘upiop’, most probably the former. Had somebody formed a Union in Heaven, bargaining for better outfits and a shorter working ever-after? Focussing upon the two unlikely union representatives who were about to make off through their warp-window with all the stolen wraith-food, Marjorie could not help noticing that the loftier interloper wore a hat like Reggie Bowler’s …
On a head like Reggie Bowler’s. And a body.
It was Reggie Bowler, several yards away from her and from the other Reggie who was standing just in front of Marjorie and moaning in bewilderment as he surveyed his evil Puck’s Hat-thieving twin. The Reggie look-alike was holding one end of the heavy-laden banner while the other end was gripped by a precise and vivid reproduction of Phyll Painter’s nipper, rowdy little Bill. The real Bill, meanwhile, was stood swearing fluently beside his elder sister, who for once did not admonish him. Marjorie took her glasses off and polished them again, being unable to come up with any more appropriate reaction. This she left to Phyllis, who was after all the gang’s titular leader.
“William! What the B– ’Ell d’yer think yer playin’ at, you effin’ little C?”
Marjorie gasped. She’d never thought that Phyllis Painter would be one to use such coarse and vulgar letters of the alphabet. It was then that big John pitched in, sounding almost as angry.
“That’s a British Union of Fascists banner that you’re holding! If you’ve joined the Moseleyites as well as taking all our Bedlam Jennies then I’ll knock your heads together!”
By this point the surplus Bill and Reggie towards whom these hostile comments were addressed had managed to manoeuvre their apparently Blackshirt-affiliated makeshift stretcher full of Puck’s Hats through the time-hole. They were on the gap’s far side, weaving the interference-coloured edges back across the centre as they sealed the aperture behind them. Just before the opening disappeared completely, Reggie and Bill’s doubles gazed back through it at their dumbstruck counterparts.
“There’s a good explanation for all this, so don’t go blamin’ me.”
“Shut up, Reg. Listen, everybody, just remember that the devil’s in the driver’s seat. That way it won’t be a surprise when – ”
It was at this juncture that the final shimmering filaments were drawn across the breach in space, cutting off Bill’s twin in mid-sentence. There remained only the fractured view of the conjoined asylums, where a hundred or so years of inmates wandered aimlessly across a differently-toned patchwork of amalgamated lawns, and there was nothing to suggest that the time-hole had ever been there. It had vanished without trace.
Speechless with rage, Phyllis smacked Bill around the ear.
“Ow! Fuckin’ ’ell, you mad old bat! What are yer ’ittin’ me for?”
“Well, what are you stealin’ all ayr Puck’s ’Ats for, yer rotten little bugger? And what was that business abayt devils in the drivin’ seat?”
“Well, I don’t know! Are you completely fucking mental? I wiz standin’ over ’ere the ’ole time. That weren’t me and Reggie. It just looked like us.”
“Looked like! I’ll gi’ you looked like in a minute! That wiz you! D’yer think as I don’t know me own flesh and blood? That wiz just you from somewhere up the linger, from a moment we ent got to yet! You’re gunna dig back ’ere and pinch ayr mad apples before we ’ave a chance to ’arvest ’em, you and this silly bastard stood beside yer.” Phyllis glared at Reggie here. Disastrously, Bill tried to reason with her.
“Well, ’ow am I supposed to know what it all meant if we ain’t got there yet? I’m only fuckin’ dead, I’m not clairvoyant. John, mate, can’t you reason with her? When she’s off ’er HRT like this I might as well not bother.”
The good-looking older boy gave both the errant duo a refrigerated look of withering contempt.
“Don’t try to creep round me, you pair of bloody Nazis. Come on, Phyll. Let’s you and me and Michael go and gather up whatever pickings these two bandits have seen fit to leave us with.”
So saying, John and Phyllis each took one of Michael’s hands and walked off with the toddler in the direction of a spinney, swinging him between them in the ghost-seam’s feeble gravity. Marjorie felt a little disappointed at the way that she’d been casually left with the renegades, but thought that the apparent snub was in all likelihood a thinly-veiled excuse for John and Phyllis to sneak off together, rather than a personal affront. Besides, she’d always got on slightly better with Reggie and Bill than she had with Phyll Painter and big John. Phyllis could be ever so bossy, while John sometimes played upon his war-hero good looks too much. Bill, on the other hand, once you’d got past the lewd remarks about your knockers or your knickers, was surprisingly well-read and well informed, while Marjorie had always had a soft spot for poor Reggie. Reggie bordered on good-looking in a certain light, although she had to privately agree with Phyllis’s appraisal of his intellectual faculties: he was a silly bastard.
“What was all of that about, then? Have you got some plan to nick the Puck’s Hats and divide ’em up between you two and your new Blackshirt comrades?”
Reggie started to protest his innocence, but Bill grinned ruefully.
“Well, I ’ave now, I’ll tell yer that for fuckin’ nothin’. If that old cow’s gunna bat me ’round the ’ead for summat I’ve not done yet, then I’m gunna make sure that I fuckin’ well deserve it. I don’t know so much about joinin’ the Nazis, although I’ve thought very often that I’d look quite rock ’n’ roll in jackboots. No, Marge, that was fuckin’ weird, seein’ meself like that. I wonder what I meant about the devil being in the driver’s seat?”
Reggie looked thoughtful, or least as thoughtful as he ever did.
“I reckon as that wiz a trick done with a mirror.”
Bill snorted derisively.
“Reggie, mate, you’re not the sharpest suit in Burton’s window, are yer? How wiz it a trick done with a mirror? They were dragging a great banner full of Puck’s Hats whereas we conspicuously ain’t. And anyway, how wiz a mirror s’posed to talk to us? It’s only light what they bounce back, not voices. Now come on, let’s see if we can get back into Phyllis’s good books by finding lots of fairy fruit for ’er to scoff, the stroppy bitch.”
They were all laughing now at Phyllis’s expense as the three of them strolled around the various confused and fused asylum buildings, peering up into the gutter’s underhang for any sign of the elusive delicacies. A fountain of almost-fluorescent acid green erupted suddenly into the pieced-together heavens from behind a nearby shed or annex, making them all jump, then giggle in relief as the effect subsided and was gone.
On what appeared to be a misplaced slice of the asylum chapel from St. Andrew’s Hospital they found a luscious cluster of ripe Puck’s Hats that the other Bill and Reggie must have overlooked, growing there in the shadowed angle underneath a window-ledge. Reggie removed his hat for use as a receptacle while Marjorie and Bill began to harvest the abundant hyper-vegetables or 4D fungi or whatever the peculiar blossoms truly were. Reaching beneath one foot-wide specimen that was especially magnificent, Marjorie pinched off the thick stalk with her ethereal thumbnail and could briefly hear a high-pitched whine like that of a small motor fading into silence, one of those sounds that you didn’t know that you’d been listening to until it stopped. She held the splendid trophy up, supported by both chubby little palms, and, with a writer’s eye, examined it.
The fairy figures, radiating in their doily pattern like a ring of paper dolls, were in this instance blonde. A golden tassel of their mutual mane grew from the fluffy dot at the thing’s centre, where the tiny heads were stuck together in a bracelet loop, while the minuscule tufts of ersatz pubic hair that sprouted from the intersection of the petal legs was also golden. Even in the colourless dominion of the ghost-seam, you could see a rouged blush on their minute cheeks, a sky-blue glitter in the circle of unseeing pinprick eyes. Except the Puck’s Hat wasn’t really a bouquet of pretty individual fairies, was it? That was only what it looked like, so that it could entice ghosts to eat it and spit out its crunchy blue-eyed seeds. In actuality, the Puck’s Hat was one single life form with its own inscrutable agendas. Trying to ignore the winsome female countenances, Marjorie instead attempted to see the true face of the mysterious organism.
Gazed at without thinking of the creature’s separate parts as miniaturised people, and without the natural sympathies that this resemblance provoked, the meta-fungus was a truly horrid-looking thing, a candy-tinted octopus with squirm-inducing convolutions that were messy and unnecessary. Ringed around the wrongness of its central honeyed top-knot were at least fifteen or twenty tiny and inhuman eyes, many of them disturbingly inverted, with outside this a concentric band of rosebud mouths like nasty little sores. A band of sculpted pseudo-breasts came next, then navels, then the obscene dimpling of the pudenda where the blonde fuzz grew like blots of penicillin. Looked at as a whole it was a frightening iced cake, decorated with unnerving symmetry by a hallucinating schizophrenic.
Before she could develop an aversion to the things for the remainder of her afterlife, Marjorie shuddered and hurriedly thrust the suddenly-alarming ghost-fruit into Reggie’s upturned bowler. What with it being so large, her find immediately took up nearly all the space inside the hat, prompting the boys to improvise by taking off Bill’s jumper with its sleeves tied in a knot, converting it into a somewhat more capacious sack. Marjorie watched them for a while as they continued to collect the riper specimens amongst those crowding underneath the window sill, leaving the immature and bluish spaceman-blossoms well alone. The dumpy little phantom girl did not even attempt to see the alien countenance that these concealed behind their individual skinny foetus forms. They were quite horrible enough when looked at in the normal manner. It was possibly the unborn baby look they had to them, with those enormous heads, but Marjorie had always thought they most resembled some extraordinary pre-natal disaster, Siamese octuplets with their skulls fused to become the petals of a hideous daisy. Marjorie knew from bitter past experience exactly what they tasted like, but always found the acrid flavour maddeningly difficult to translate into words. It was a bit like eating metal, but if metal had the soft consistency of nougat and could putrefy in some way so that it went sour like sweaty pennies. She knew some ghosts who would eat an unripe Puck’s Hat if the adult fairy fruit were unavailable, but for the death of her she’d no idea how they could manage it. She’d sooner do without until the end of time, which was about how long her memory of that first incautious bite would last. Besides, she got that same sense of a hearty meal and spiritual sustenance provided by the Bedlam Jennies from a good book these days. On the minus side of the equation though, a bad book could be left for decades and would never ripen into something sweeter.
Bill and Reggie gathered all the edible mad-apples from the cluster underneath the window and then wandered vaguely off, looking for more and heatedly discussing what their duplicates might have been up to, pilfering the crop of ghost-fruit before Phyllis and the gang could do so.
“Well, it’s gotta be us in the future, ennit? It’s somethin’ what we’ve not done yet.”
“You don’t know that. It might be us in the past.”
“Reggie, wiz that fuckin’ ’at too tight or somethin’? If it wiz us in the past then we’d remember it, you twat. And anyway, ’ow would we know when all the ’Ag’s Tits would be growin’ ’ere? We only just found out when Phyllis told us. No, you take my word, Reg, all that business what we saw, that’s somethin’ what we’re <em>gunna</em> do. All that we need concern ourselves about wiz why and when we’re gunna do it. That, and what the other me meant when ’e said about the devil bein’ in the driver’s seat.”
The two boys had apparently forgotten Marjorie. Engrossed in their discussion they meandered in amongst jaggedly juxtaposed asylum buildings, seeking out fresh pickings. Marjorie wasn’t that bothered, to be honest. Having rather put herself off Puck’s Hats and their harvesting for a few hours at least, she thought she’d take a stroll across the vast composite lawn in the direction of the copse towards which Phyllis, John and Michael had been headed when she’d seen them last. A rippling fan of brilliant yellow opened suddenly above a prefab observation wing, lasting for a short while before subsiding once more into graded half-tones: to the ghost-seam’s different shades of smoke. Marjorie glanced across her shoulder, through the dissipating doubles that were following her, and caught a brief glimpse of Reggie Bowler as he disappeared around a madhouse corner, still stubbornly arguing with Bill.
“Well, I don’t see why it can’t be us from the past. It might be summat what we did as we’ve forgot about, for all you know!”
Marjorie smiled as she turned back and carried on along her own path over the inexpert patchwork of the grass, towards the distant trees. She thought about the first time she’d seen Reggie, on the night she’d drowned. He hadn’t had his bowler on, on that occasion. Or his coat. Or anything, now that she stopped to think about it.
The Nene Hag had turned its elongated face away from her, revealing a disturbing profile like an alligator with a beak. Its flat brow had been corrugated by a frown of puzzled irritation as it squinted through the underwater shadows, looking for the source of the commotion, the splash that had just distracted it before it could begin its awful soul-destroying work on Marjorie.
Some way off, flailing in the grey murk of the river, there had been a naked boy – or at least, there had been the displaced spirit of a naked boy, with all the extra naked arms and legs that Marjorie would later realise were the mark of someone dead. Still clutched tight in the Hag’s webbed claw, she’d felt the Undine’s bafflement: after a long drought with no suicides or accidents for the monstrosity to claim, had fate delivered it two offerings in one night?
The boy was long and white and thin, plummeting down towards the silt and pram wheels of the riverbed. While he was not, perhaps, the beauty that her bathing Roman lad had been, he was at least young, probably much younger than the paunchy old drunks that had typified Enula’s catches from the outset. Also, most importantly of all, he was a male. In every likelihood the creature had not actually been looking forward to dismantling Marjorie, given its antipathy for females and especially for those too young to have developed a real personality that would be worth taking to pieces. For an instant, the Nene Hag stared at the struggling nude figure through the sub-aquatic gloom while weighing up the options, and then it made its decision. The three pallid crab-leg fingers holding Marjorie were suddenly withdrawn as the Hag lunged against the sluggish current, making an upriver dart towards the clearly helpless youth. It was at this point that things had begun to happen rather quickly, so that Marjorie had only pieced together later what had actually occurred.
Newly released, floating there dazed and frightened in the lightless waters with her incorporeal form gradually drifting up in the direction of the surface, Marjorie had watched the Hag’s fresh prey as the bare boy alighted on the muddy river-bottom. She’d had time to notice that he’d landed in a crouching posture which appeared to be planned and deliberate, in contrast to the aimless thrashing that he’d demonstrated up until that moment. As the entire stupefying length of the huge Undine nosed towards him through the blackness, he even appeared to have a grin across his freckled, snub-nosed features.
It was then that something plunging down into the water from above them had grabbed Marjorie beneath the arms and hauled her up into the clear night air, which she’d discovered she no longer needed now she wasn’t breathing anymore. She’d known a moment’s dread during which she believed herself to now be in the grip of some enormous astral herring-gull when she had had only just escaped the clutches of a massive ghostly eel, but these fears were displaced by genuine bewilderment once Marjorie had truly grasped her situation.
What was dragging her aloft had turned out to be something even odder than the giant phantom bird of her imaginings, in that it had seemed to be a trained trapeze act comprised of two upside-down ghost-children and a lot of eerily-suspended rabbit corpses. A small boy was holding Marjorie beneath the arms, his ankles held in turn by a girl who looked somewhat older and was dangling with her buckled shoes wedged in the forked branch of an ancient tree that overhung the river. Wrapped around her neck was a long piece of string from which swung all the velvet carcasses that Marjorie had noticed. This at least explained why the dead animals had looked like they were floating, but not why the girl was wearing them as jewellery in the first place.
The pair of young aerialists had evidently sliced down through the surface of the water in an arc to snatch up Marjorie, with their momentum carrying all three of them high up into the air as though upon a dangerously stoked-up swing. Right at the peak of their trajectory, the little hands beneath her arms had let Marjorie go and she’d sailed upward, cart-wheeling into the starlight with a dreamy slowness, just as though the air were made of honey. In an instant, her two rescuers came streaking from below her to arrest her tumbling ascent, with this time each child grasping one of Marjorie’s outstretched and wildly flapping hands. Linked like a charm bracelet the trio had sailed further up into the night through the thick, gluey atmosphere until they’d hovered, treading nothingness, some fifty feet above the Nene and looking down at its slow silver ribbon, its reflected constellations.
That was when the naked adolescent boy came rocketing up from the river as though fired out of a submarine, with a long stream of photo-reproductions trailing through the dark behind him. Marjorie remembered thinking that this would explain the crouch with which the lad had landed on the riverbed, the better to propel himself up from the depths into those starry altitudes after he’d served as a diversion for the ghastly river-nymph. No sooner had she thought this than the placid Nene below exploded, shattered from beneath by a ferocious impact that had made all of the children scream and not only the relatively inexperienced Marjorie.
Rearing up to treetop level out of the benighted torrent came the first thirty or forty feet of the Nene Hag, as if some hurtling underwater train had jumped the rusted tracks to fling itself into the sky. The creature’s long umbrella fingers were extended to their fullest with the grey and blotchy membrane stretched tight in between them as the towering, swaying monster raked the air in an attempt to capture its escaping prey. The nude boy’s earlier grin of self-assurance had been swapped for an expression of surprise and terror as he realised belatedly the mer-thing’s true extent and reach. Kicking his legs and doing what appeared to be a vertical front-crawl the plucked and plucky youngster shot beyond the swaying horror’s grasp, into the safety of the sequinned heavens over Paddy’s Meadow, where Marjorie and the other spectral children floated, breathless with excitement and mortality.
The Undine shrieked in its frustration and its rage, its disproportionately tiny forelimbs clutching uselessly at empty space for several seconds before it gave up and, with a disappointed wail that chilled its nervous audience, fell back towards the Nene like a collapsing chimneystack. There was no splash as its great insubstantial length hit the material surface of the water, only an unnerving final moan having the sound of something that had once been very close to human speech but which had turned into a strangled bellow through disuse. For one appalling instant it had sounded as though it were trying to say “Gregorius”.
And after that, once Marjorie had been formally introduced to the Dead Dead Gang, they’d all drifted light as thistledown towards the point a little further up the grassy bank where Reggie Bowler had left all his hurriedly discarded clothing underneath a squeaking, listing death-trap called a Witch’s Hat which was erected in the children’s playground there upstream. Along the way they’d passed above a bobbing parcel, turning slowly in the petrol sheen and pond-scum on its way to Spencer Bridge, which Marjorie had scrutinised for some time without realising it was her; her human envelope, its ugly glasses gone at last, its lungs all filled with water.
She had also spotted bloody, bloody, silly bloody India, who, as it turned out, could swim after all. The dog was scrabbling up onto the bank, where next it shook itself and then commenced to trot beside the water, barking as it kept pace with the drifting body. That had been that. Chapter Seven: The Dead Dead Gang versus the Nene Hag. That had been Marjorie’s short life.
She walked now on a patch of crew-cut grass, mown into stripes, which must presumably be part of the better-maintained St. Andrew’s Hospital. This was confirmed by the quite evidently better class of lunatics at large upon the broad swathe of grey-greenery, dotted about across the neatly-shorn expanse like chessmen, lost without their grid. As she progressed across the lawn in the direction of the spinney, Marjorie passed by one living inmate whom she thought she recognised, a shuffling fellow in his sixties, dressed in a loose cardigan and trousers stained by breakfast. The poor man was humming something complicated and askew beneath his breath as he made his laborious way past her, unaware that she was there, and she was almost certain that it was the old composer chap, the one who’d made his name long after Marjorie had lived and died. Sir Malcolm Arnold, that was it. Him who’d made wild, delirious music out of Robbie Burns’s <em>Tam O’ Shanter</em> and who’d orchestrated “Colonel Bogey” with a full arrangement of impertinent and farting brass. Bemused and balding, very likely drunk or medicated, Arnold slippered on across the fractured madhouse grounds without acknowledging her presence, crooning his refrain with only ghost-girls and the nearby trees to hear it.
Marjorie, quietly appalled, noticed that the composer had a ripe and thriving Puck’s Hat growing from his liver-spotted forehead, just above one eye. She knew that Bedlam Jennies favoured the proximity of people who were mad or steeped in alcohol or both, which she supposed was where they’d got their name from, but she’d never previously seen one with its roots apparently sunken directly into someone’s brain. His dreams must be infested, overrun by twittering and mindless pseudo-fairies to the point where Marjorie imagined that fresh compositions would be near impossible. And how could the affliction ever be removed when by the very nature of the 4D fungus, nobody alive could see it? Nobody, including the composer himself, was aware that it was there. Marjorie watched Sir Malcolm tottering away from her towards the riot of mismatched asylum buildings, with the pulchritudinous growth bobbing on his skull at every step. The blank-eyed little nymphs whose naked bodies formed the blossom’s petals even seemed to wear miniature knowing smirks upon their ring of overlapping faces.
Marjorie walked on, passing between the optical-illusion pillars of the Ultraduct as it swept overhead on its long arc between Jerusalem and Doddridge Church, its endless alabaster mass casting no shadow on the composite of institution lawns below. When the grass changed from light to dark, from short to shaggy and unkempt beneath her lace-up shoes, she knew that she’d crossed into territory belonging to either St. Crispin’s or the older madhouse in Abington Park. The thick and bristling copse was now much closer, and she could see Phyllis, John and Michael sauntering amongst its trees, collecting the few Puck’s Hats that the future-Bill and future-Reggie hadn’t plucked already. Phyllis waved to her.
“All right, Marge? I expect that them two thievin’ buggers are both gloatin’ over ’ow they’re gunna come back ’ere and pinch our Puck’s ’Ats, somewhere up the road.”
Wandering up to join the other children in the dapple of the overhanging leaves, Marjorie shook her head.
“Nar. They’re as confused about it as the rest of us. Your Bill’s filling ’is jumper up with all the Jennies they can find, to make it up to you.”
Phyllis appeared surprised by this, and stuck her lower lip out pensively as she considered.
“Hmm. Well, I suppose as I’m not bein’ fair, takin’ the ’ump with them before they’ve even done the thing what’s made me cross. Besides, we’ve found enough mad-apples just on these few trees to make the visit worth ayr while. Look – they’re all ripe and everything, but they’re just little uns.”
Festooned with hollow, decomposing bunnies, the Dead Dead Gang’s leader held out her white handkerchief for Marjorie’s inspection. There at its unfolded centre rested half a dozen tiny Bedlam Jennies, with the biggest being no more than two inches in diameter. As Phyllis had affirmed, the hyper-fruits were ripe, with every fairy-petal fully formed down to the last infinitesimal detail, despite the fact that some of them measured no more than half an inch from toes to crown. Marjorie found that it took both the enhanced vision of the dead and her entirely decorative National Health spectacles to spot the smaller features, such as their near-microscopic navels. With each specimen at most providing one or two good mouthfuls, it was easy to see why this dwarf strain had been overlooked by the two scavengers from some point in the future. Phyllis, John and Michael all had pockets full of coin-sized blooms, adding transportability to the variety’s advantages. They also seemed to be abundant, growing in a virtual carpet down the rear sides of the elms and silver birches, where these faced away from the asylum grounds and turned instead to the interior of the bordering woodland. Fighting down her recent self-induced revulsion for the fungal creatures, Marjorie agreed to try a couple, then a couple more.
They really were extremely good. The taste was even sweeter than that of the larger species, and the perfume more evocative, more concentrated. Better still, once swallowed, the immediate benefits were more pronounced. The energising tingle of euphoria pervading every fibre of one’s self which Marjorie associated with the full-sized Puck’s Hats was more noticeable here and seemed to last for slightly longer. Filling her own jumper-pockets with as many of the things as they would hold, she ate them as though they were a particularly more-ish type of fruit-drop, stuffing one or two into her mouth at once while playing an impromptu game of tag with the three other ghost-kids. Giggling and shrieking they ran back and forth amongst the trees that edged the muddled institutions’ equally disjointed lawns and gardens.
Marjorie was first to recognise the living female inmate who appeared to be performing an incomprehensible routine upon the neatly-trimmed St. Andrew’s grass not far away, although it was young Michael Warren who was first to notice her.
“Look at that funny lady over there. She’s walking like that man does in the films, and doing crossed eyes like that other man.”
Marjorie looked, along with John and Phyll, and saw what the pyjama-clad child was referring to. The woman patient skipped or danced or waddled, back and forth, across an area of grass that was approximately the same size as a small repertory stage. Her movements, which seemed to include incongruous ballet-like leaps and twirls, were nonetheless, as Michael had observed, an eerily exact impersonation of the ‘little tramp’ walk first made popular by Charlie Chaplin, that man in the films. To flesh out her impression, the dark-haired and middle-aged asylum inmate had appropriated a long, slender tree-branch from the nearby vegetation, tucking it beneath one arm like Chaplin’s cane as she paced to and fro, continuously muttering long strings of almost-musical nonsense and gibberish to herself: “Je suis l’artiste, le auteur and I live, your plural belle, I liffey laved in Lux, in light, in flight, in fluxury and in flow-motion, gravually unriverling translucid lingo, linger franker in ma-wet streams, ma-salt dreams as I slide see-ward and I’ve not a limp-bit nor a barnacle to hinder me and it’ll come out in the strip-wash, murk my words, about my Old Man of the Holy Roaming Sea when he was on my back or I was, cat-licked and that’s how it got my tongue …”
The insane monologue ploughed on, quite independent of the twirled cane or the Chaplin walk, the twitch-nosed waggling of an imaginary moustache or the occasional surprising pirouette. Though he’d been right about the woman’s strange gait, Michael Warren had been wrong when he’d assumed her eyes were crossed in an impression of Ben Turpin or whoever he’d meant by “that other man”. Marjorie knew that this was how the woman’s eyes looked naturally. She inclined her stout body to one side so that she could speak softly into Michael Warren’s ear. She’d no idea why she was trying not to make a noise when the live mental patient couldn’t hear them anyway, but thought it might be in response to the deluded woman’s strong resemblance to a rare, easily-startled bird. She whispered to the toddler in a probably unnecessary effort not to scare the inmate off.
“You know how when you’re dead like us, and sometimes all your words get mixed up so they come out wrong? And Phyllis or somebody else will tell you that it’s taking you a while to find your Lucy-lips?”
The infant blinked and nodded, shooting sidelong glances at the madwoman who jigged this way and that upon the grassy boards of a theatre only she could see. Marjorie went on, still in the same pointlessly low murmur.
“Well, that woman there, that’s Lucy.”
Even Phyllis seemed astonished by this.
“What, that’s wossername, old Ulysses’s daughter? ’Im ’oo wrote the racy book?” The ghost-gang’s leader had announced her questions at her normal, raucous volume-level, prompting Marjorie to give up on her own subdued tones as she answered Phyllis.
“Yes. That’s Lucia Joyce. Her dad was James Joyce, and she used to dance for him when he was writing his great book, <em>Finnegans Wake</em>, to give him inspiration. When he took the writer Samuel Beckett on as his assistant with the work, Lucia thought that she’d been elbowed out. She also started thinking Beckett was in love with her, and began having mental problems generally. She’s up there on the Billing Road now, at St. Andrew’s, where she’s been for a few years. They say that Beckett sometimes goes to visit her there, if he’s in the area. Her family, the ones that are alive, they play down her existence in case it should cast a shadow on her father or his works. Poor woman. It’s a shame the way that she’s been treated.”
Phyllis was regarding Marjorie suspiciously.
“Well, ’ow come you know such a lot abayt it all? I never knew you wiz a reader.”
The rotund girl peered impassively up through her glasses at her rabbit-wrapped senior officer.
“I’m not. I just keep up with all the gossip.”
Phyllis appeared satisfied by this, and after a few moments more of watching Lucia’s repetitive and oddly mesmerising act, the four of them resolved to make their way back over the broad sweep of recombined lawns and find Bill and Reggie. Pockets bulging with a hoard of the dwarf Puck’s Hats that would more than compensate for the ones stolen by the future duo, everyone agreed that it had been a very nice excursion but that there was no point in extending it now that they’d got the bounty that they’d come for, or at least a reasonable substitute. Once they’d located their two disgraced members – who it seemed that Phyllis was prepared to pre-forgive after her earlier prejudgement – they could head back up the Ultraduct to Doddridge Church and possibly take time to play on the subsided wasteland that they’d passed above when they were on their way here.
Marjorie was thinking about Lucia, thinking about Sir Malcolm Arnold and all the other inmates, past and present, of Northampton’s various asylums. John Clare, J.K. Stephen and the countless others whose names no one save for their immediate relatives and friends would ever know, all of them eventually wandering across the unmarked boundary that separated the acceptable and minor madnesses of ordinary life from the more unacceptable behaviour and opinions that were classed as lunacy. What was it like, she wondered, going mad? Were you aware that it was happening? In the first stages, did you still possess a measure of self-consciousness allowing you to notice that the world surrounding you and your responses to it were markedly different from the way they used to be? Did people fight against it, the descent into insanity? It struck her that, for a great many people, ordinary life itself was something of a surface struggle.
As they made their way along the copse’s edge, taking a slow, circuitous route back towards the jumbled madhouse buildings, they stumbled upon two women who sat talking on a weathered bench. Both living, neither of the pair seemed to detect the presence of the phantom children. From the length and colour of the grass where they were seated, Marjorie judged that the two were actually materially present in St. Crispin’s Hospital, rather than overlapping from St. Andrew’s in the mayhem of the higher world’s collapse, as both Sir Malcolm Arnold and Lucia Joyce had been. Marjorie didn’t recognise the pair, at any rate. They both seemed to be women in their middle years, one tall and somewhat gaunt, the other shorter but more fully rounded. Marjorie could see that only one of them, the lanky one, appeared to be a patient, while her friend carried a handbag and looked more as if she might be visiting. Other than this, there didn’t seem to be much you could call remarkable about them. Marjorie would have walked on if tall, good-looking John had not stopped suddenly and stared from one face to the other in amazement before making an announcement to the group in general and to Michael Warren in particular.
“Well, I’ll be blowed. I reckon that I know these two. The littler one, that’s your dad’s cousin Muriel, nipper, and I think the other one’s his and her cousin Audrey. Audrey Vernall. She went barmy just after the war. She used to play accordion in a show-band that her father managed, then one evening when her mum and dad had been out down to the Black Lion, she locked them out and sat there playing “Whispering Grass” on the piano, over and over again. Her parents had to go and sit beneath the portico of All Saints Church all night, there on the steps, and in the morning they had someone come and bring her to the hospital up here at Berry Wood. She’s been here ever since, from what I’ve heard.”
Marjorie scrutinised the taller of the seated pair more closely, in the light of John’s account. The woman, Audrey, had a strong face and a pair of large and luminously haunted eyes. She seemed to be addressing Muriel, her visitor, with some considerable urgency, her cousin’s hand gripped tight in Audrey’s long and sensitive accordionist’s fingers. Because John’s announcement had caused everyone to cease their idle chattering and pay attention to the women’s conversation, all four of the ghostly children clearly heard the words that Audrey Vernall said next, after which Phyllis and John had both looked nauseated and embarrassed, and had hurried Michael Warren off before he could hear any more.
Soon after that they found Reggie and Bill, who’d gathered a huge haul of Puck’s Hats as an act of penitence for crimes they’d not committed yet. Once Phyllis had officially forgiven them for their impending larceny, the gang ascended back up to the Ultraduct by leaping high into the ghost-seam’s thickened atmosphere and then dog-paddling up for the remainder of the distance, John and Phyllis towing Michael Warren in between them.
As they headed back along the dazzling overpass to Doddridge Church they munched upon their mad apples and Phyllis once more made them all strike up the Dead Dead Gang’s club song. Marjorie thought that Phyllis was most probably attempting to make lots of noise so everybody would forget what gaunt and wild-eyed Audrey Vernall had said to her cousin when the two of them were sitting on their bench and didn’t think they could be overheard. Marjorie, though, could not forget it. It had had a dreadful ring to it, that stark confession there amongst the rustling and eavesdropping boughs, and with her writer’s sensibilities she thought that it would make a powerful ending for at least a lengthy episode in her forthcoming Chapter Twelve:
“Our dad used to get into bed with me.”
The gang continued, heading east to Doddridge Church and singing as they went.
Oh, and the dog was called that because on its side it had a dark brown blotch that looked a bit like India.
** <strong>FORBIDDEN WORLDS</strong>
<strong>I</strong>n Bill’s experience, being both intelligent and working class was usually a recipe for trouble. In the lower orders – lacking academic aspirations – genuine intelligence most often manifested itself as a kind of cunning, and if Bill was honest with himself he’d always been too cunning for his own good. Just look at the frankly awful current circumstance that his latest scheme had led to, cowering behind the portly shade of Tom Hall while a gang of nightmarish and drunken spectres tortured a bald, weeping man who seemed to be made out of wood. Hardly an ideal outcome, even for a serial optimist like Bill who generally tried to make the best of things.
He could remember the first intimations that had led to his disastrous plan. That had been quite a while ago, just after they’d escaped the ghost-storm by ascending to the isolated corner-house on Scarletwell Street, sometime during nothing-five or nothing-six. On that occasion, upset to discover that his terraced street had been long since demolished, Michael Warren had run off into the haunted night and it had been Reggie and Bill who’d found him, sitting on the central steps of Bath Street flats and whingeing about how he missed his sister and the comics that she used to read. <em>Forbidden Worlds</em>, that had been the specific title that the little boy had mentioned, which had sounded vague alarm bells in the cloudy reaches of Bill’s less-than-perfect memory.
It hadn’t been until the gang’s encounter with Phil Doddridge, though, when the great man had casually let slip the Christian name of Michael Warren’s sister, that Bill had found all the puzzle-pieces starting to slide neatly into place. The comic-reading sister’s name was Alma, Alma Warren. Well, of course. With origins down in the Boroughs and with an enthusiasm for weird fantasy and horror stories from an early age, who else could it have been? Bill had known Alma while he’d been alive, known her quite well. Certainly well enough to be aware that what the moderately-famous artist thought of as her most important work was an arresting and inscrutable series of paintings which she claimed were based upon a visionary near-death experience reported to her by her younger brother. Michael Warren, clearly, was the brother that she’d been referring to, while all the little boy’s excursions with the Dead Dead Gang, presumably, must be the visionary near-death experience that he at some point had related to her. Bill, if his legs had been slightly longer in his current child-form, could have kicked himself for having failed to make the obvious connection between Michael Warren and the Alma Warren that he’d been familiar with in life.
Of course, once Bill had worked out what was going on he’d talked it through with Phyll, the only other member of the gang who’d have the first idea what he was on about. Phyll had known Alma too, albeit not as well as Bill had. Him and Phyllis had agreed between them that this piece of information pretty much changed everything. For one thing, they’d already learned that Michael Warren was a Vernall on his father’s side, one of that odd, tinker-like breed who, in Mansoul, were trusted with the maintenance of boundaries and corners. And if Michael Warren was a Vernall, then so was his sister, Alma. This brought other factors into the equation, many of them much more large and ominous than even Alma herself had been, as Phyllis and Bill remembered her.
Most worryingly, there was all this stuff about the Vernall’s Inquest to consider. As far as Bill understood it, “Vernall’s Inquest” was a term – like “Porthimoth di Norhan” and expressions such as “deathmonger” – that was historically unknown outside the Boroughs of Northampton. Bill thought this was probably because the phrases all originated Upstairs in Mansoul, the Second Borough, and had somehow filtered down to enter usage in the lower territory, the First Borough, this specific mortal district that appeared to be of such importance to the higher scheme of things. The centre of the land, apparently, where angles had instructed that eighth-century monk to put down his stone cross from faraway Jerusalem, right opposite the billiard hall. The rumour circulating amongst well-informed ghosts and departed souls was that the top man, the Third Borough (which title or office was itself found nowhere save Northampton) had something important planned for this unprepossessing neighbourhood.
The friendlier and more communicative builders even had a name and target date for the completion of this seemingly momentous project, this event: it would be called the Porthimoth di Norhan, a tribunal at which boundaries and limits would be finally decided, where a judgement would be handed down once and for all, and this would all take place during the early years of the twenty-first century. Bill had no clear idea of what that meant, of course, it was just gossip that he’d heard. Given that the decision would be made upon the highest level, somewhere above life and time, Bill thought it likely that the boundaries and limits under scrutiny would be accordingly significant, rather than hedge disputes brought up by feuding neighbours. Who could say? Perhaps the borders in between dimensions were about to be revised. Perhaps the boundary line of death would be redrawn. Something of that scale, anyway, which sounded disconcertingly like some variety of judgement day to Bill. That was the Porthimoth di Norhan. Before any judgement could be made, however, there must first take place a full and rigorous inquiry, also instigated by Mansoul’s mysterious management, and this preliminary investigation was known as a Vernall’s Inquest.
Now, according to the word on heaven’s streets, the Porthimoth di Norhan would be held during the first decades of the twenty-first century, before half time, and with the necessary Vernall’s Inquest taking place sometime before that, Bill presumed, perhaps during the century’s first ten or fifteen years.
He could remember seeing Alma’s paintings, a good while before he’d popped his clogs from the effects of hepatitis C, and could remember the impression, albeit fleeting, that they’d made upon him. Those astonishing surrealist landscapes populated by peculiar entities and full of dazzling colour; the soft charcoal studies of the Boroughs’ streets and alleys, trodden by grey figures that left fading after-images behind them – not until Bill had passed on himself did he fully appreciate how closely Alma’s pictures had resembled the realities of Mansoul or the ghost-seam. He recalled her telling him of how she’d been inspired by something that her brother Michael had related to her, how after some accident at work he’d found that he was able to remember details from an earlier incident, the aforesaid near-death experience in infancy. The accident had happened, if Bill’s recollection was correct, during the spring of 2005. Alma had somehow managed to get all the work completed in a single year, and Bill had first seen the hallucinatory result in 2006. This date was well within the period allotted for the Inquest, for the vital preamble to the forthcoming Porthimoth di Norhan, and as they’d all recently discovered, Alma Warren was a Vernall.
If – and Bill was speculating – Alma’s paintings were in any way essential to the Vernall’s Inquest, and if they had been inspired by the adventures of her younger brother during his brief visit to the afterlife, then that would explain everything. It would explain why the two Master Builders had considered one child’s life or death sufficiently important to provoke a public brawl up on the Mayorhold. It might even explain why that demon who’d abducted the poor kid had taken such an interest in him. It was an illuminating notion that cleared up a lot of things, although as far as Bill could see it left him and the rest of the Dead Dead Gang squarely in the shit.
The worst thing, naturally, was the responsibility. Responsibility, while Bill had never shunned it, wasn’t something that he’d ever actively sought out. When Philip Doddridge and that quietly scary and formidable deathmonger, Mrs. Gibbs, had told them that Mansoul’s authorities were leaving the whole Michael Warren business up to them, Bill’s largely metaphorical blood had run cold. It sounded, on the face of it, like adults taking an indulgent and relaxed view in regard to the inconsequential games of children, but that wasn’t it, Bill knew. That wasn’t what was going on. The Reverend Dr. Doddridge and the deathmonger weren’t really adults, for a start-off, anymore than the Dead Dead Gang were real children. They were all just ageless, timeless souls suspended in the pyrotechnic linger of Eternity, all dressing themselves in the forms and personalities that they thought they looked best in. And the doctor of divinity’s instructions to the gang amounted to something a lot more serious than “run along and play.”
If Michael Warren was as crucial to the pending Vernall’s Inquest and the Porthimoth di Norhan that would follow it as Bill was starting to believe he was, then the success or otherwise of a divine plan had been left to an unruly mob of phantom ruffians. It was <em>Mission: Impossible</em> over again, only without the handy get-out clause of “Your mission, should you choose to accept it …”. The gang didn’t really have a choice about accepting it, considering the source the orders came from. Bill hoped, not without a sense of irony, that the Third Borough knew what he or she or it was doing, although given Bill’s lifelong mistrust of management, he frankly rather doubted it. The central flaw in the proposal, as Bill saw it, was that they’d been more or less instructed to make sure that Michael Warren was returned to life with at least some recall of where he’d been, so that he could inspire his sister’s apparently necessary paintings. And yet all the regulations of Mansoul, which were like laws of physics and could not be broken, stated that it was impossible to retain memory of your exploits in the higher world once you’d returned into your life again. Otherwise everybody would remember from the moment of their birth that this had all occurred a billion times before. Since this was not what everybody had experienced during their own nativity, then for them suddenly to realise it would be to change what had happened, what was happening, what would forever happen. It would alter time, time as a physical dimension, time as a solid component of a solid and changeless eternity. You simply couldn’t do it. Even the Third Borough couldn’t do it, and as a result what happened in Mansoul stayed in Mansoul.
This was the problem him and Phyllis had been wrestling with for a good deal of their long walk along the Ultraduct to the collapsed and merged asylums. They’d debated how to go about returning Michael Warren to the mortal world without him just forgetting everything, their sense of hopelessness only allayed by the assurance of eventual success that their own memories allowed them. After all, they’d both seen Alma’s finished paintings during their own mortal lifetimes, which implied that they were going to find some way to sort this mess out, so that Alma’s pictures could reflect her brother’s vision of this comical and frightening before-and-afterlife.
The problem was, Bill hadn’t really paid that much attention to the artworks when he’d seen them, and could not remember how specific they’d been in depicting Upstairs or the ghost-seam. He recalled a wall-sized board of tiles that looked as if it had been swiped from M.C. Escher, and another terrifying large piece that had been like looking down into a mile-wide garbage grinder that was in the process of devouring everything noble or dear in human history. There had been all the charcoal drawings with their double-exposed figures reminiscent of the half-world’s desolate rough sleepers, and those jewelled acrylic studies of immense interiors that may have represented Mansoul, although Bill couldn’t remember anything conclusive. The piece that Phyllis and Bill had found the most impressive had been that scaled down papier-mâché model of the Burroughs, which had not had any obviously supernatural elements and which had not eventually been included in the final London exhibition of her work that Alma had put on. Unsettlingly, it had occurred to Bill that just because Alma had done some pictures of an afterlife, it didn’t mean they were the right ones. What if the Dead Dead Gang didn’t manage to return Michael to life with enough memory of his vision to make Alma’s paintings meaningful, make them sufficient to the task required of them? What if the Vernall’s Inquest was a failure, and the Porthimoth di Norhan could not then be held? It struck Bill that this current caper, far from being the gang’s greatest triumph, could turn out to be a damning failure that would reverberate unendingly throughout the long streets of forever. Him and Phyllis were still chewing all this over when they’d finally reached the asylums and their conference had been interrupted by another Reggie Bowler and another Bill, bewildering invaders from the future, having all the mad-apples away wrapped in a fascist banner.
He’d got no idea what all that was about. It must be something him and Reg were going to do at some point, but with all the other problems he was wrestling with he hadn’t really had the time or inclination to consider it. The thing with Michael Warren, that was the main business, and since Phyll had gone all huffy with him after the appearance of his thieving future self he’d had to think it all through on his own. The best that he’d been able to come up with was that they’d be better off in nothing-five or nothing-six, up closer to the time when these events were meant to come about, so that they’d have a better sense of what was going on. He’d mentioned this to Phyllis on their way back from the madhouses, once she’d recovered from her strop and had decided that she was still speaking to him, and she’d grudgingly agreed that it was probably a good idea. She hadn’t got a better one, that much was obvious. In fact, Phyllis had seemed a bit distracted and upset after her, Michael, Marjorie and John had re-joined Bill and Reggie up at the asylums. Bill wasn’t certain what had happened in the half-an-hour or so that they’d been separated, although it had looked to him like Phyllis now had worse things on her mind than his and Reggie’s future theft of a few mad-apples.
The six of them had walked along the Ultraduct, stuffing themselves with Puck’s Hats and attempting to sing Phyllis’s “We are the Dead Dead Gang” song through a mouthful of chewed fairies, spraying bits of wing or face or finger when they laughed. Their rowdy after-images pursued each of them like a cheerier, paediatric version of <em>The</em> <em>Dance of Death</em>, the jigging figures streaming back along the alabaster boardwalk in their wakes.
Above them, sunsets borrowed from ten thousand years of days and nights competed for attention in the shifting, melting heavens. Bill had marched and sung along with all the others, had allowed the stimulating and invigorating tonic of the Bedlam Jennies to spread through his ghostly system, hopefully inspiring him with some solution to his baffling predicament. As the familiar dreamy and creative glimmer of the meta-fungi gradually enwrapped his thoughts, Bill had gazed down across the blazing causeway’s handrail at the bubbling suburban trees and houses they were then passing above, the crofts and cottages and Barratt Homes constructing themselves out of dust and then as quickly disassembling themselves back down to that same substance. Doubting that his cunning would be adequate to the huge metaphysical conundrum facing him, Bill had reviewed the Michael Warren matter inwardly, turning it over in his mind while he and his companions headed back along the glowing overpass to Doddridge Church.
As he’d recalled, it was this accident at work sometime in 2005 that had restored the adult Michael’s memory of what had happened following the choking incident when he’d been three or so. Bill could remember Alma telling him, with snarling indignation, how her brother had been at work reconditioning steel drums in Martin’s Yard, pounding them flat with a sledgehammer as he was employed to do. Apparently, Michael had flattened an unlabelled drum that had turned out to hold corrosive chemicals. These had exploded out into his face, burning and blinding him, thus causing Michael to run into a conveniently-placed steel bar, knocking himself unconscious in the process. It was when he’d woken up from that, Alma had told Bill, that her brother had been suddenly beset by memories of those few childhood minutes when he’d been technically dead.
It had occurred to Bill, strolling along the Ultraduct while munching upon a particularly flavourful and fragrant Puck’s Hat, that if that was what he could remember Alma telling him, then that was almost certainly what happened. It had happened, therefore it would happen, was constantly happening in their fourfold eternal universe where Time was a direction. It would happen, had already happened, whether Bill came up with a solution to the Michael Warren mess or not. Which let him neatly off the hook for perhaps thirty seconds, at which point he’d realised that the “accident” at work might well have only come about because of some as yet undreamed of cunning stunt that Bill himself was going to pull, which of course placed him back upon the same uncomfortable barb. It had all called to mind the snatch of conversation that they’d overheard between that Aziel bloke and Mr. Doddridge, where the minister had asked if anyone had ever really had free will, although Bill couldn’t have explained exactly why this brief exchange seemed to be relevant to his present dilemma. He’d just known he’d better come up with an answer to the problem and he’d better do it quick.
So, he had reasoned, if he thought there was a chance that he might in some way end up contributing to Michael Warren’s accident perhaps that was the area of strategy that he should focus on. How could he manage such a thing, he’d asked himself? Was it even a possibility? With his imagination perked up by the Puck’s Hats, he’d wondered at first if there was some way that he could be instrumental in positioning the iron bar that would knock Michael out, but as with all the profit making schemes he’d once come up with after a few joints, the obvious dead-ends in his blue sky thinking had swiftly revealed themselves.
Foremost amongst these was the issue of how Bill, encumbered by his ghostly state, was going to move an iron bar or, worse, the more than likely heavy mechanism that the iron bar was attached to. How was he going to do that, when the only way that phantoms could affect the physical world was by running themselves dizzy in some corner of a car park, trying to shift a fucking crisp bag? Even then, it would take two of you to generate a tiny dust storm. You’d need a whole continent of ghosts, all running in a circle, before you could shift an iron bar …
It had been then, just as the gang were coming to the Doddridge Church end of the Ultraduct that Bill had first begun to formulate the idea that had led him to his current difficulty, crouching with a clearly-distraught Michael Warren behind the voluminous form of the late Tom Hall, upstairs at the wraith-pub, the spectral Jolly Smokers, watching the horrific floorshow.
Bill had been struck suddenly by inspiration just as Phyllis called a halt, some yards short of the little door halfway up Doddridge Church’s western wall which marked the end of that stretch of the Ultraduct. What if there was some object that was much, much lighter than the iron bar, and yet which might have just as great a part to play in Michael knocking himself out? Bill had been thinking about this when Phyllis told them that if they all jumped down from the shining overpass at this point, they could go and play in the collapsed earthworks-lagoon they’d noticed earlier, as she’d promised Michael.
The peculiar little acre of unfolded wasteland, there between Chalk Lane and the brick wall that was the boundary of St. Andrew’s Road, had always been one of Bill’s favourite places in the ghost-seam. Like the merged asylums, this rough patch had been subjected to astral subsidence and collapse, although unlike the situation with the madhouses, nobody seemed to be sure why this should have happened. At the institutions, after all, were lunatics whose confused thoughts and dreams had led to faults in the foundations of the higher world above. Here, as far as anyone knew, the area had always been a wasteland except for five hundred years or so when it had been an obscure and unpopulated outskirt of the castle grounds. Why should the gaudy floorboards of Mansoul choose this point to fall in, when nothing much had ever happened here and where there were no inmate nightmares or delusions undermining the celestial territories that were overhead? Perhaps, Bill had surmised, this region was the way it was because of its proximity to the end of the Ultraduct, or possibly it had just fallen in because of old age and neglect, the way that most things tended to.
The children had jumped down from the white walkway above history, grey after-pictures in a rubber-stamp trail following behind them, and had landed in the Chalk Lane car park on an evening in the spring of nothing-six. Just over the deserted lane they could see Doddridge Church, with its low outline crouching against the impending dusk and multi-storey flats that loomed around it menacingly. Nearly all of the surrounding district was unrecognisable from when the gang had seen it in the 1600s, or even the 1950s. Phyllis, still seeming a bit distracted by whatever she had overheard or witnessed up at the asylums, shepherded the gang across the hushed enclosure to its northwest corner, where you could climb up onto the piece of land that the collapsed lagoon was coexistent with. Upon the mortal plane, the stretch of wasteland had been designated as a remnant of Northampton Castle, purely for the benefit of hoped-for tourists who had never actually turned up, but everybody local knew that this was pants. Logs had been placed as if to replicate some vanished set of castle steps, when all there’d ever really been in this location was a lot of mud and grass, the same as there was now.
The children clambered up to the raised ground, with Phyllis hurrying them from the rear. Bill was the last but one to make the climb, and having done so he turned round to reach down and give Phyllis a hand up. That was when he had noticed the young living woman making her way up Chalk Lane, across the car park’s far side, and had paused to wonder where he recognised her from.
She’d looked like she was on the game with the short skirt and heels, the PVC mac, but Bill hadn’t thought this was the context that he’d seen her in when he had noticed her before. In one of those bizarre and tenuous chains of association, he’d found that she called to mind the phrase <em>Forbidden Worlds</em>, which was the comic-book the Warren kid had mentioned after Bill and Reggie Bowler found him sitting on the central steps at …
Bath Street flats. That was where Bill had seen the girl before. It had been while Reggie and him were showing Michael Warren the Destructor, the vast, smouldering astral whirlpool emanating from the point in Bath Street where the waste-incinerator chimneystack had stood until the 1930s. Its slowly-rotating radius of obliteration had appeared to intersect with various rooms inside the blocks of flats, including one where this same girl, her hair arranged in corn-rows, had sat doing crack and gluing pictures in a scrapbook, unaware that a great whirling phantom buzz-saw scraped at her insides, her spirit.
It had been just as Bill managed to haul Phyllis up beside him that the woman, a mixed-race girl from the look of her, had turned her head towards them, squinting at them through the shadows of the car park as if not entirely certain whether they were really there or not. He’d pointed the girl out to Phyllis.
“ ’Ere, Phyll, look at that, her over there. I reckon she can see us.”
Phyllis, with her rabbit necklace dangling around her neck, had glanced across her shoulder at the puzzled-looking prostitute before she’d struggled to her feet and carried on into the waste-ground.
“Well, I’m not surprised if she could see us. She looked like a tart, and all o’ them raynd ’ere are on the stuff, the crack. I shouldn’t be surprised if she’d not seen things a lot worse than us. Yer shouldn’t ’ave been looking at ’er, anyway, yer dirty-minded little bugger.”
Even buoyed up by the Puck’s Hats that he’d eaten, Bill had not been able to muster the energy required for arguing with Phyll. He could have pointed out that he’d been looking at the girl because he thought he’d recognised her, but it would have been a waste of breath. Well, not exactly breath because he’d not had any of that in a long time, but it would have been a waste of something.
As the pair of them had stepped over the grassy crest for their first sight of the lagoon-cum-earthworks, an impressive sunset had been going on in radiant grey and white above the ugly sprawl of Castle Station. Somehow glorious and ethereal despite the lack of colour, this display was beautifully reflected in the dream-lakes bounded by the sheer soil walls of the unfolded earthworks. Down the hunchbacked roller-coaster path ahead of Bill and Phyllis, leading to the edge of the still waters, the four other members of the ghost gang were already playing on the banks and rocky ledges of the vast anomaly. Great granite tablets, biblical in their proportions, jutted at steep angles from the tar-and-chromium dapple of the surface, fused with the inverted mirror-images beneath them into weathered 3D Rorschach blots, and all around the square-cut earthen walls and corners of the quarried landscape rose towards the grey blaze of the sky.
It had been the sheer scale of the environment, at least as looked at from the ghost-seam, which made the astral collapse apparent. The earthworks, as seen from here, appeared to be at least a quarter-mile across, while when observed from the perspective of the mortal realm, the corresponding patch of wasteland – or castle remains if you preferred it that way – measured barely fifty feet. What were unnoticed sumps and puddles in the physical three-sided world had here unpacked themselves into opaque lakes like black looking-glasses, where dream-leeches and imaginary newts wriggled invisible through unseen depths.
He’d known that living people sometimes dreamed about that place. He’d seen them wandering its shorelines in their underpants or their pyjamas, gazing mystified at its black cliffs, perturbed by its beguiling mix of the primordial unknown and the achingly familiar. While he’d been alive, he’d thought he could remember visiting it once himself during some nocturnal subconscious ramble. Both in his almost-forgotten dream and as the place had seemed then, when he’d wandered down towards the waterside with Phyllis, it had had the same haunting and faintly melancholy atmosphere. The locale’s rough-hewn contours spoke of something timeless and enduring, something beside which the human lifespan barely registered. “We have been here forever”, the great silent bulwarks seemed to say, “and we don’t know you, and you’ll soon be gone.” The sky above its dark cliff edges had a watery clarity, a graded and nostalgic look to it as it had deputised for the receding sunset.
Bill had messed about with all the others, playing chase at the lagoon’s edge, leaping from one slanted rock perch to the next, but all the time he had been running through the finer details of his coalescing plan. If where they were at that point was the spring of 2006, then the adult Mick Warren’s accident at Martin’s Yard must have presumably occurred roughly a year before. Perhaps a spot of burrowing back to the earlier period was called for, though Bill hadn’t felt inclined to go through proper channels and consult with Phyllis. Even though she’d sort-of made up with him after all that business with the scrumping doppelgangers from the future, it still hadn’t felt to Bill like she completely trusted him. If he were to suggest his plan to her while she was still annoyed with him, he’d thought there was a good chance that she’d veto it, just to be awkward. The best course of action, he’d decided, would be to just bypass Phyllis altogether, though that in itself would take some planning.
Squatting on a flinty outcrop overlooking the hushed rock-bound pools below, he’d spotted lanky John and Phyllis sitting talking earnestly upon a sheltered patch of grass down near the water. He’d thought at the time that they might be discussing whatever it was that had upset them out at the composite nuthouses, not that it had much mattered to his strategy. After Bill had conferred discreetly with Drowned Marjorie and Reggie, just to make sure they were up for an excursion if the opportunity arose, he’d gone and plonked himself down next to John and Phyllis who’d both looked a little irritated by this interruption to their conversation.
“ ’Ere, Phyll, wiz it all right if we dig about into some of the other times round ’ere? Reg says that back in his day he thought there wiz ’ouses where we are now, but I don’t see as that can be right. We could take Marjorie and Michael with us, ’ave a poke about, find out what’s what, and all be back ’ere before you knew we wiz gone. I mean, you two could come as well, but I thought that it looked like you wiz talking.”
Phyllis had drawn in a breath as she’d prepared to tell him that if he thought she’d trust Michael Warren to a layabout like him he must be crackers, or at least Bill had assumed that this was going through her mind, but then she’d stopped herself and just looked pensive for a moment. To Bill, it had looked as if she was considering who it would leave alone up here if him and Reggie Bowler and Drowned Marjorie and Michael were to tunnel off into the past for half an hour. The answer, obviously, had been her and tall, good-looking John. Once Phyllis had performed the necessary calculations, she’d appeared to change her stance.
“All right … as long as yer not digging back to join the Blackshirts and pinch all ayr Puck’s ’Ats.”
Bill had struck an attitude of injured protest.
“ ’Course we’re not. That’s why we’re taking Michael and Drowned Marjorie along, so they can keep an eye on us, and because you know that they wizn’t with us when we saw ourselves out at the madhouses … but, look, if you don’t trust us we can all stay ’ere with you. It makes no odds to me.”
Probably fearful at the thought of losing her idyllic twilit lagoon interlude alone with John, Phyllis had quickly done her best to smooth what she thought were Bill’s ruffled feathers.
“No, no, you goo on and play. Just don’t get Michael into any mischief.”
Bill had sworn he wouldn’t, and then bounded off from stone to stone along the water’s edge to tell the others that he’d got permission for a jaunt into the earthworks’ past. From their bemused expressions, Bill had received the impression that nobody thought this sounded like much of an outing, but once Reg had loyally agreed to go with Bill, the other two abandoned their resistance.
Scrabbling with their fingertips in empty air, they’d swiftly pulled away the crackling black and white time fibres representing nights and days to make a hula-hoop-sized hole approximately twelve months deep. As he’d followed his three companions through the aperture into last year, he’d even risked a cheery wave to John and Phyllis before climbing through the gap in time and sealing it behind him.
On the portal’s far side he’d found Reggie, Marge and Michael all standing about morosely in a flooded excavation that was the dead spit of where they’d been ten seconds earlier, only a little darker. Reg had fiddled with his bowler’s angle for a minute and then spat a gob of ectoplasm into the lagoon, a sure sign that the gangly Victorian waif was cross about something or other.
“Well, this don’t look like much fun to me. I thought as you’d ’ave something a sight livelier than this place up yer sleeve when you said we could ’ave an expedition.”
Bill had given Reggie an appraising look, and then had asked him what he’d thought of Oddjob in <em>Goldfinger</em>. Reggie, who was good with naming cars but who had barely heard of moving pictures, had just frowned uncomprehendingly.
“I don’t know what odd job you’re on about, or what it’s doing in a finger. You’re not making sense. ’Ave you gone off your ’ead, lad?”
In reply, Bill had just grinned and deftly plucked the hat from Reggie’s curly locks before flinging it like a Frisbee, up through the descending darkness and across the gouged-out cliff-top looming to the north, where it completely disappeared from view, rapidly followed by its graceful trail of after-images.
“No, but there’s something gone off yours.”
With Reggie slack-jawed at the sheer effrontery of what Bill had just done and Marjorie and Michael Warren both starting to giggle, Bill had scampered off in the direction that he’d thrown the bowler, pausing halfway up the earthworks’ northern wall to shout back down to Reggie.
“And if I get to it first, I’m gunna piss in it!”
As he’d continued up the slope, Bill had heard the three other ghost-kids whooping as they chased him, Marjorie and Michael both shrieking with mirth while Reggie was just shrieking that Bill better not piss in his hat. Bill hadn’t really been intending to, of course, and if Reg had just thought about it for a second he’d have realised that ghosts couldn’t piss. Well, they could squeeze a drop or two out if they wanted to, just like Reggie could spit, but it was hardly like ghosts had a lot of extra moisture that they needed to unload. Made mostly out of energy, wraiths were not succulent or sweaty or incontinent. They were as dry as brown October leaves save for the ectoplasm, which tended to make them a bit chesty.
Reaching the cliff’s top, where the unfolded and enlarged zone of the astral earthworks ended, Bill had sat himself down on the expanse of grey grass that ran alongside the St. Andrew’s Road down to the foot of Scarletwell Street while he’d waited for the others to catch up. It had been well and truly dark by then, and other than the odd car purring up or down the main road on its way to Sixfields or to Semilong it had been pretty much deserted. Reggie’s phantom bowler had been lying there upturned, the freckled boy had noticed, some yards from Bill’s sprawling boots, but it had been too far away to piddle into.
Gazing over the redundant stretch of empty lawn, an unused playing field where there had once been twenty or more houses, Bill’s attention had eventually settled on the solitary building rearing at the bottom end of Scarletwell Street, the lone terraced house abandoned by its terrace. Even back while Bill had been alive, he’d thought the place an oddity, and that had been before he’d found out about its loft-ladder to Mansoul or its current ghost-sensitive inhabitant, the so-called Vernall that they’d fled from earlier. As it had been related to him, the space occupied by the peculiar remaining house had been owned by an admirably bloody-minded individual, an Eastern European bloke if Bill had heard it right, who had refused to sell his property to the town council just so they could knock it down. Its history since that point had been cloudy, although Bill supposed that the original unbudging owner must be long since dead, the property passed into other hands. He’d heard that at one point the council had been using it as a halfway house, somewhere to stick mental patients who’d been turfed out of their institutions and placed in the largely non-existent care of the community, but that had been some time back and he didn’t think that it was still the case. These had been more or less the limits of the information that Bill had concerning the official story of the corner house, and of its supernatural situation he’d known even less.
As far as he’d been able to make out, the lonely edifice possessed its gateway to the realm Upstairs and current eerie resident thanks to its geometrical relationship with what had once been the original town hall, up at the top corner of Scarletwell Street and upon the street’s far side, the structure that provided a foundation for the huge builders’ headquarters called the Works from which Mansoul was governed. That was all that Bill had known about the place’s more ethereal aspects, and, to be quite honest, even that he didn’t really understand.
Besides, just at that moment, Bill had been less bothered by the house’s history, material or otherwise, than he’d been by its probable effects on Michael Warren. After all, that had been the exact point which the dressed-for-bedtime child had done a runner from the yawning strip of vacant turf where Michael’s home and street and family had once been situated. Since Bill could by then hear his three pursuers as they climbed over the cliff-edge and onto the gentle slope behind his back, he’d swiftly made his mind up to avoid the creepy, isolated corner house and take a different route to Martin’s Yard, which was the place that he had been intent on reaching all along.
Reggie had run up behind Bill and hurdled him, pouncing upon his fallen bowler and inspecting it at length before he’d crammed it on his head. He told Bill that Bill better not have pissed in it, but he’d been laughing as he said it, as were Marjorie and Michael when they’d finally caught up with the two jostling boys. That was when Bill had come clean as to the true purpose of their outing, or at least as clean as he could comfortably manage.
“Listen, what it wiz, I’ve had this idea what I reckon could sort out a lot of everybody’s problems, but if I told Phyllis it, I’m pretty certain she’d refuse just out of spite. What it involves wiz us takin’ a trip to Martin’s Yard – that’d be Martin’s Fields to you three – and attempting an experiment what I’ve come up with. I know it don’t sound like much, but I thought if we flew there rather than just walking it, it might liven things up a bit.”
This last bit, the flying, had been an improvisation that was actually intended to get everyone to Martin’s Yard without the added obstacle of walking Michael Warren past the old house at the foot of Scarletwell Street, but the prospect of an aerial manoeuvre had seemed to go down well with the other three, so Bill was glad he’d thought of it.
The quartet had laboriously taken to the air using the method of an escalating series of high lunar-landing leaps and bounces. This had largely been because it was the easiest means of getting novice flyers such as Michael Warren up into the sky. When the beginner had bounced high enough you just encouraged them to either dog-paddle or swim in order to maintain or possibly increase their altitude, helping them with a tow if necessary, as it had been in the case of Michael Warren. Once they’d all ascended to a fair way up above the railway yards on Andrew’s Road, Bill had grabbed Michael’s hand so that the bright-eyed and clearly delighted youngster could remain aloft. He’d noticed, peering through the darkness with his spectral night-sight, that Drowned Marjorie had been pretending that she couldn’t swim or doggy-paddle either, prompting Reggie to assist her by taking her hand. Marjorie’s inability had been a con, Bill was convinced. She may have not yet learned to swim when the Dead Dead Gang had first hauled her spirit-body from the Nene all of those years ago, but she’d been managing a competent breast-stroke when they’d been chasing pigeons over Marefair back in 1645. Was Marjorie getting a crush on Reggie, Bill had wondered as he’d climbed with Michael Warren through the Boroughs night towards a lemon-wedge half-moon?
Their as-the-crow-flies journey across railway yards and parked overnight lorries towards Spencer Bridge and Martin’s Yard beyond had been exhilarating, even for a frequent flyer like Bill. Perhaps because he’d been accompanied by the wide eyed and relatively speechless Michael Warren, Bill had found that he was able to remember what his own first post-death flight had been like, prompted by the marvelling expression on the toddler’s face.
Beneath them, even in these Stygian outer reaches of the town, had blazed a galaxy of lights, all of them rendered white or off-white by the ghost-seam’s lack of colour. Interrupting these illuminated clusters were dark masses representing whistle-emptied factories and unlit meadows, with a hundred street-lamp sequins crusting on the edges of these black and cryptic shapes like phosphorescent barnacles. St. Andrew’s Road, unrolled beneath them, north to south, was a chrome-studded leather belt that had provoked a comment from the infant struggling through the air beside Bill, even though he’d had to shout above the bluster of the wind.
“This wiz near where that devil took me on his flight, bit it wiz all in colour then.”
Bill had called back across the few feet separating them, a distance equal to their clasped-together hands and outstretched arms.
“That wiz because the pair of you had come straight down to the First Borough from the Attics of the Breath, travelling in a special way what only builders, devils and the likes of that can do. Even meself, I’ve never seen it from up ’ere in colour. I bet it wiz quite a sight.”
It had been about then that they’d been passing over Spencer Bridge which drew a bellowed comment from Drowned Marjorie, soaring there hand in hand with Reggie Bowler on Bill’s starboard side.
“Look at that bloody bridge down there below us. That’s the one they found me under. I can tell you one thing, I’m glad we’re up here and not down there walking across it. It gives me the willies still, the thought of that old eel-woman, down there in the dark and damp.”
Bill hadn’t had an argument with that. He could remember the hair-raising night they’d rescued Marjorie from the Nene Hag, and of all the astounding sights that Bill had seen both in his life and out of it, that glimpse of the seemingly endless creature as it had reared up out of the midnight river, raking at the air with its long foldaway claws and the leprous membrane stretched between them, howling its frustration and its murderous hatred at the stars, had been the most spectacular … at least until that giant snorting, stamping demon had turned up. Or the two Master Builders fighting. Those had been pretty amazing too, when he had stopped to think about it. Oh, and those two Salamander girls spreading the Great Fire. Those aside, Bill had thought the Nene Hag was absolutely blinding.
With their trailing smoke of after-images, the children had descended gently into the drum-reconditioning premises in St. Martin’s Yard like slow, spent skyrockets. As he’d let go of Michael Warren’s hand the toddler had retied the dangling tartan sash belt of his dressing gown and had stood for a moment taking stock of his surroundings before looking questioningly up at Bill.
“Where’s this place, then?” he’d asked.
This is the place you’re going to work when you’re a man. This is what all those boring hours at school were to prepare you for. All of the hopes and dreams you’re going to have while growing up will all end up here being beaten flat with hammers; being reconditioned. All these answers, honest but too cruel and painful for a child to bear or even understand, remained unspoken at the sore tip of Bill’s bitten tongue. He’d felt a sudden surge of empathy for the poor kid, standing there blissfully oblivious to the bleak, disheartening prospects that were all around him, staring him right in the face. Bill, while he’d been alive, had worked in places just as joyless and soul-deadening, but never for more than six months or so. From what he could remember Alma telling him about her brother, Michael would be labouring in this grey, uninspiring place for far too many years. If he’d have murdered his employers in the way that they so patently deserved, he would have been released from his confinement sooner, the poor little bleeder. Trying to conceal these sombre thoughts behind his most impermeable cheeky grin, Bill had looked down at Michael as he’d tried to formulate an answer to the infant’s question that he thought the kid could live with. Well, not <em>live</em> exactly, but Bill had known what he meant.
“It’s a bad place, titch. Spots like this, Soul of the Hole wiz what we call ’em, and they won’t do you or anybody else no favours. Never ’ave done, never will do. So, if we were to do something a bit naughty, then we’d not be hurting anybody who didn’t deserve it.”
This last bit had been an abject lie. The person who’d be most hurt by the “naughtiness” that Bill proposed would be Michael himself, given an acid facial and then knocked out by an iron bar, and Michael certainly did not deserve to undergo such tribulations. On the other hand, of course, his personal misfortune would be in the service of a greater good, or at least theoretically, but Bill had the uneasy feeling that they’d probably said that to all the whippets they’d had smoking eighty fags a day at the laboratories.
By this time Marjorie and Reggie had alighted too, looking self-conscious as they’d let go of each other’s hands, and had wanted to know what this wild jaunt to the arse-end of nowhere was in aid of. He’d explained as best he could, with Michael being present.
“Look, you know that stuff that Fiery Phil wiz telling us at Doddridge Church, when he said that us lot had got a challenge on our plates, but that the powers that be were confident as we could ’andle it? Well, ’e wiz talkin’ about Willie Winkie ’ere. Apparently, when ’e’s brought back to life, we ’ave to make sure ’e remembers at least some of this what’s happened to him, even though that’s s’posed to be impossible. Now, I think I’ve worked out a way it can be done, but I can’t go into the ins and outs of it in present company. Little pitchers, if you catch me drift.”
Here Bill had been staring at Marjorie and Reggie, who’d both nodded almost imperceptibly to signal that they’d understood and were prepared to go along with Bill, despite the fact he couldn’t really explain anything with Michael present. As for the toddler himself, he’d nodded wisely too, while obviously having no idea what Bill was on about. Encountering no objections, Bill had pressed on with his scheme.
He had originally been intending to have a poke round in the surrounding days and nights, to make sure that they’d got the right date and the right occasion, but he’d changed his mind. It had been what Phil Doddridge said to them, about how they should feel free to take Michael where they pleased and rest assured that anything that happened would be what was meant to happen. This predestination and free will lark cut both ways, as far as Bill had been able to see. If he’d brought Michael and the others to the yard on this precise night, that was divine destiny at work and it would have been almost rude to double-check. Bill had begun to realise that accepting the idea of Fate could actually remove some of the burden of responsibility. You could delegate upwards.
Having thus decided that they were indeed in the right place at the right time, Bill had next led the foursome on a wander round the reconditioning yard, inspecting stock and searching out likely material for what he’d had in mind.
It really had been a depressing place, that yard. Bill had remembered stories that his mum had told him, about when she’d been a little girl and would come round to Martin’s Fields, as this place had then been, when she was out ‘May Garling’. This had been something her and her mates did on the first of May. They’d go round door to door displaying a small basket full of wild flowers with a kiddie’s doll sat in their midst, and for a halfpenny a turn they’d sing their little Mayday song that they’d all learned: “On First of May, my dear, I say, before your door I stand. It’s nothing but a sprout, but it’s well budded out by the work of Our Lord’s hand.” Looking around him at the heaps of dented cylinders, Bill had reflected that the yard, or fields, had sounded a much nicer and more picturesque location in his mother’s day.
From Bill’s own lifetime, his most striking anecdote about the place had been one that he didn’t even feature in himself. It had been there in Martin’s Yard, as he recalled, that the police had placed surveillance officers when they were keeping an eye on the land along the far end of St. Andrew’s Road belonging to Paul Baker, a notorious villain Bill had known back in the day. The coppers had thought Baker might be hiding loot from some bank job or other on the property, and had their suspicions raised when they’d spotted two shady types who’d appeared to be tunnelling into the fifty-year-old piles of ashes and composted waste that hulked from Baker’s territory.
In actuality, these two supposed accomplices had been Bill’s old mates Roman Thompson and Ted Tripp. Ted had been an accomplished and discerning burglar who only burgled stately homes, while Rome had been a fearless union fighter and a celebrated all-round nut job. They’d been on Paul Baker’s patch of ground with his permission, digging in the mounds of compressed mud and cinders dumped there decades earlier as waste from the Destructor up in Bath Street. Ted and Roman had been on a hunt for old Victorian stone bottles, the kind with the little marble for a stopper, for which they could likely get a few bob up at the antique shops. Rome, who’d always taken reckless courage to the point of death-wish, had been tunnelling into the heap’s side, tempted further in and further still by an enticing partial glimpse of the words ‘ginger beer’ upon a curving surface. In the end, there’d only been his ankles sticking out, which had been when the entire hillock had decided to collapse on top of Roman Thompson.
Ted, a sturdy chap considering his size, had taken hold of Roman’s feet and hauled him from the suffocating dirt and clinker in a great surge of adrenaline. It was at this point that some two or three cars full of coppers, who’d been watching the whole episode from up St. Martin’s Yard, had roared onto Paul Baker’s premises and had come screeching to a halt beside the thoroughly disoriented pair. Bill hadn’t known what the police were hoping to achieve by their manoeuvre, but he’d bet they weren’t expecting the appalling sight of Roman Thompson, covered head to toe in black filth, hair and beard plastered to muddy spikes and his crazed, furious eyes blazing amidst the soot and mire. It had occurred to Bill, as he’d thought back upon the incident from there in Martin’s Yard, nosing around with Reggie, Marjorie and Michael, that if not for Ted Tripp’s timely actions, the Destructor would have killed Rome Thompson even after it had been demolished for the better part of forty years. If Bill had been the superstitious type, the sort who readily believed in demons, ghosts and thousand-yard-long river monsters, he might even have concluded that this had been the Destructor’s murderous intent.
As they’d continued wandering around the reconditioning yard – Bill hadn’t known what time it was, except that it was clearly outside working hours – they’d come at last upon about a dozen drums that had been set apart from all the rest, perhaps to begin work upon first thing the morning following. One of the battered metal cylinders, which stood a yard or two away from its companions, had a strip of tape dangling from it; its fierce warning-notice trailing into grit and oily puddles where it had become detached at one end.
Destiny. Fate. Kismet. Bingo.
Bill, delighted that for once in his precarious existence things seemed to be working out as planned, had organised the other three ghost-children as if for a game of trains. Since Reggie was the tallest, Bill had let him be the locomotive at the front of their impromptu conga line, with Michael, Marjorie and Bill himself playing the coal tender and coaches. With Reg Bowler trying hard to make appropriate train-whistle sounds and puffing noises, they’d set off in a restricted circle round the isolated drum, chugging around their miniature loop of imaginary track as if they were pretending to be a toy train rather than a full-sized one.
Even in the sluggish atmospherics of the ghost-seam they had quickly gathered speed, as Bill had learned would happen if there were enough of you all pushing. Circling faster and still faster, their pursuing after-images had fused into what must have looked from outside like a grey and spinning giant doughnut made of blur: a torus, as Bill had heard this apparently important shape described by Mansoul’s brainier inhabitants. About the bottom of the drum, the dust and fag-ends had begun to get caught up in the rotating currents of the mini-whirlwind that the phantom kids had been creating. Glittering metallic toffee-wrappers and spent matches spiralled up into the night, and Bill had shouted above Reggie Bowler’s dopey sound effects for the Victorian urchin to run faster. The detached end of the warning tape had started lifting itself from the pool of water, oil, and indeterminate hazardous chemicals that it was draped in, flapping dolefully, with toxic droplets flung out from its snapping, fluttering extremities. Bill had called out to Reg again, to tell him he was running like a girl, which had resulted in the anger-fuelled acceleration Bill had hoped for. Soon the drum had been wrapped tight in a tornado of revolving lolly-sticks and spinning grit, the length of tape standing straight up into the darkness over the container, rattling against the cyclone like a tethered kite.
Eventually the other end had come unstuck as well, at which point Bill had yelled for Reg to stop and they’d all run into each other, falling over in a breathless, laughing heap. The roughneck spectres had sat in St. Martin’s Yard and watched while the soiled streamer sailed away, bowling across the property’s enclosing fence and off into the sodium-lamp sparkle of the night. Mission accomplished, even if nobody except Bill had known precisely what the mission was.
They hadn’t hung about long after that. They’d bounced and swum and doggy-paddled up into the windswept firmament as they’d returned to the unfolded earthworks, back the way they’d come, treading the moonlight over Spencer Bridge and the whore-magnet of the overnight long-distance lorry park. This was tucked in the corner where the bridge met with Crane Hill and the St. Andrew’s Road, the transport café that had previously been a public lavatory and, prior to that, a slipper-baths. This had become a major point of trade that had supplied the customers who drew the girls, who brought the pimps, who dealt the drugs, which bred the guns that shot the kids who lived in the house that crack built. Even though Bill had lived a fair way into that current century, the twenty-first – much longer than he’d been expecting to, at any rate – he’d found that visiting the period made him just as uncomfortable as it made Reggie Bowler or, to judge from her expression, Marjorie.
It had been something in the way the streets and factories and houses looked from up above, something that made you think of all the sacrifices and the struggles, the ambitions and the childbirths and the deaths and disappointments that those doll-sized little homes had seen across the years, all of it leading up to what, exactly? Bill had been unable to suppress the melancholy feelings that things had been meant to turn out a lot better than the way they had. The world that everybody had been given hadn’t been the one that they’d been promised, that they’d been expecting, that they’d been supposed to get. Although when Bill had thought about the state Mansoul was in during these early reaches of the new millennium, the damage done by the Destructor and its widening arc of influence, he couldn’t say he was surprised. The modern streets of heaven were in terrible condition, right here at the divinely appointed centre of the country’s fabric. Was it any wonder, Bill had mused, that present-day English society should start to fall to bits, start to unravel, as the burn-hole in the middle of its painstakingly-woven fibres had begun to spread, to gradually unpick the whole of the material?
While Bill had been considering these notions, up there in the haunted sky above the railway yards with Michael Warren, and with Reggie and Drowned Marjorie riding the night breeze hand-in-hand beside them, he’d been struck by his second and, with hindsight, more disastrous idea. Perhaps he’d been encouraged by the seeming unanticipated success of his first scheme, or perhaps it had still been the Puck’s Hats that he’d eaten having their enlivening effect upon Bill’s consciousness, but he’d all of a sudden made a startling connection. He’d been thinking about the Destructor and the miserable twenty-first century view from there above the Boroughs when he’d made a lateral leap to Alma Warren’s paintings, most especially the huge and terrifying one that had looked down into some sort of mile-wide rubbish-grinder or incinerator.
That was the Destructor, he had realised with a jolt. That was the way it looked when seen from the perspective of a semi-devastated Mansoul at this sordid juncture of the century. Since Alma had received all of her images at second-hand from Michael, Bill had understood that at some point they must be going to take the toddler up there, even though it was a dreadful place and time, most usually avoided by all but the Master Builders and those souls who were already damned. Certainly not the place that anyone in their right mind would dream of taking an easily-frightened child, though clearly they were going to have to. He would see to it. He had decided to tell Phyllis all about this latest side-trip that he’d slotted into their itinerary before they took the toddler back to 1959 and his resuscitated infant body. There was no way of avoiding Phyllis’s involvement in an expedition fraught with such dismay and danger and besides, he’d reasoned, she’d seen Alma’s all-devouring vision of apocalypse as well. She’d understand why it was necessary, what Bill was suggesting.
The four of them had alighted gently on the same deserted stretch of turf that they’d set out from, up towards the railway station end of Andrew’s Road. Unhurriedly – they’d had a whole year before they were due to rendezvous with John and Phyllis, after all – they’d wandered up what seemed to be a grassy incline leading to the modest patch of land on which the ‘castle remains’ were exhibited. At least, the slope had seemed that way, the way a living person would experience it, until they had reached its top, when they’d found themselves looking down the astral earthworks’ plunging walls into the dark collapsed lagoon, rather than staring in disinterest at a few half-hearted plaques and cheaply-recreated castle steps.
Like grubby mountain goats they’d made their way down a meandering and narrow cliff track, single file, into the lower depths of the phantasmal excavation. Here the shadows had appeared to lay around in solid slabs, propped up at eerily suggestive angles on each other, while off in the dripping blackness there were small and sudden sounds. He’d heard a tinkling splash of aural chromium as though some dream-thing, perhaps plated all in iridescent scales and without eyes, had surfaced briefly to devour another dream-thing that had the misfortune to be hovering too close to the midnight meniscus on its lacy tinsel wings. The night was lively with carnivorous imaginings.
When they’d descended to the waterside point where Bill had grabbed Reggie’s hat and sent it skimming off into adventure, Bill had started scraping the nocturnal air as he’d begun the time-hole that would take them up twelve months into the spring of 2006. Dragging the alternating black and white onionskin layers representing night and day to one side, he’d soon opened up a yard-wide aperture with a migraine-like flickering on its perimeter. Without a second thought, he’d clambered through the crackling gap and called a raucous greeting into the surrounding gloom.
“All right? It’s us. We’re back.”
The first thing Bill had seen that indicated there was something funny going on had been the string of rancid rabbit pelts just lying there discarded on a jutting granite outcrop several feet away. His ghostly night-sight, which embroidered every hidden thing with silver stitching round its edges, had leapt instantly upon the fallen carnal garland and his phantom heart had dropped. Phyllis had got so many enemies throughout the mezzanine-realm of the ghost-seam, he’d concluded grimly, that something like this had been bound to occur sooner or later.
Bill had just been in the act of summoning whatever last reserves of cunning he’d had in him to cope with this new and desperate situation when two figures had stood up from an inviting mossy hollow in the rocks nearby: a man and woman who both looked to be in their mid-twenties. The young fellow was a squaddie, hurriedly refastening the gleaming buttons on his army jacket, glaring angrily at Bill throughout with deep and dark matinee-idol eyes. The woman smoothing down her knee-length 1950s skirt as she’d stood there beside him had been a real smasher: a pale blonde with glistening lipstick and strong, finely-chiselled features that had just then been arranged in an expression of dismay, appalled and startled. There had been something so familiar about both of this strikingly handsome pair that Bill had briefly wondered if they might be famous film stars, actors that he’d previously seen in some Ealing production, a repeat shown on a Sunday afternoon during his boyhood. Certainly the grey tones of the spectral half-world, with their whiff of <em>Brief Encounter</em>, had done nothing to reduce the post-war cinematic quality that had perhaps created this impression.
It was then that Bill had finally realised who the couple were. More unaccountably embarrassed than he’d ever been during his earthy and robust existence, he’d ducked straight back through the time-vent into 2005, colliding with Drowned Marjorie, Reggie and Michael Warren who’d been just about to step through the hole after him. It had required some rapid thinking.
“Sorry, chaps. Don’t mean to hold you up or anything, but I’d got a nice juicy Puck’s ’At in me pocket what I’d kept for later, and it’s not there now. I reckon as I must ’ave dropped it, stepping through this bloody ’ole. Why don’t you be good eggs and help us look for it?”
The four of them had plodded round in circles for a good few minutes, scrutinising the surrounding area with their enhanced afterlife vision until Bill had sighed dramatically and had announced in woeful, disappointed tones that he must have misplaced his cherished Puck’s Hat elsewhere, and that they could give up on their search and at last follow him back through the glittering window into a year later.
This time, when Bill had stepped back into the almost identical place on the hole’s far side, he’d been relieved to find that everything was back to normal. Tall John was sat perched upon a brick-shaped boulder some way off, chewing a stem of ghost-grass as he idly scratched one knee beneath the hem of his short trousers. He’d not bothered to look round as Bill and the three others had climbed through the time-gap to re-join Phyllis and him. Phyllis herself had been standing not far from the rent in time’s fabric when the four adventurers returned, dressed in her dark grey skirt and light grey cardigan, her blunt-toed buckle shoes. She’d stood there primly rearranging her disgusting rabbit necklace, draping it around her shoulders before looking up at Bill impassively, searching his grinning features for some indication as to what he’d seen or what he knew before, at length, she spoke to him.
“So ’ow did yer get on, then? Took yer long enough, whatever you wiz doin’. Up to no good, I’ll be baynd, yer shifty little beggar.”
Phyllis had been smiling faintly as she spoke, and Bill’s own grin had widened in reply.
“Oh, you know. We did all right. And by the way, you needn’t worry about ’ow we’re gunna make sure the boy wonder ’ere gets back to life with all his memories and what-not. I’ve took care of it.”
She’d looked surprised and slightly angry.
“You’ve done what? You little sod. Why didn’t you tell me?”
Still grinning, Bill had put one arm around her waist and given her a little squeeze.
“I can remember my dear mother saying as ’ow everybody wiz allowed their little secrets, gal. She also used to say that if you asked no questions, you’d be told no lies.”
Phyllis had laughed then and affectionately punched him in the gut. For just a moment it had almost been like how they’d used to be together, their relationship when they’d both been alive. She’d always had an eye for a well turned-out gentleman back then as well, Bill had reflected with amusement, even when she’d been a woman in her seventies.
Seeing as she’d appeared to be in a good mood, Bill had taken the opportunity to tell her about where he thought they should next escort Michael Warren, taking a circuitous route before getting to the matter’s heart, so that he didn’t put her off.
“ ’Ere, Phyll, do you remember that big painting Alma did? The one where you’re above some sort of horrible great waste-disposal unit, looking down, and there’s all little terraced streets and little people sliding into a big smoking hole?”
Phyllis had nodded, rattling her rabbits.
“What abayt it?”
“Well, I reckon that I’ve worked out what it wiz. It’s the Destructor, Phyll. It’s the Destructor when you look down on it from Upstairs, Upstairs as it is now, in these first years o’ the new century.”
The Dead Dead Gang’s girl leader had turned pale. To call it deathly pale, he’d realised, would be a redundancy given their posthumous condition.
“Oh bloody ’ell. Yer right. I can remember when we saw it, what a funny turn it give me, ’ow it looked as though the world wiz comin’ to an end. I ’adn’t thought abayt it since I got up ’ere, though, so I ’adn’t thought abayt ’ow much it looked like the Destructor. Bloody ’ell. Does that mean as we’ve gotta take ’im up there so that ’e can see it an’ describe it to ’is sister?”
Bill had nodded glumly. Even though it had been his idea, a trip to Mansoul in its current state was nothing that he’d been particularly looking forward to. Now blanching to a shade of what Bill had thought must be infra-white, Phyllis had fretfully continued.
“But you know ’ow bad it’s got up there. It’s only the fire-fighters what’ll go anywhere near it! There’s been souls fall in, as well, and not come ayt again. What if we take the nipper up there, before we can take ’im back to 1959 and ’is own body, an’ it all guz wrong? What if ’e’s damaged and we end up spoilin’ everythin’? If the ’ole Vernall’s Inquest and the Porthimoth di Nor’an come to nothin’ and its all ayr fault? I’ll tell yer now, it’ll be you explainin’ it ter the Third Burrer and not me, if anything should ’appen.”
Good old Phyll, as swift as Bill himself when it came to shirking responsibility. Now that he’d thought about it, that was more than likely where he’d got it from.
“Yeah, but you ’eard what Doddridge said, about ’ow we should take ’im where we wanted to and rest assured that it’d be where we were meant to take ’im. I’ve got an idea that this decision what we’re faced with now might be exactly what ’e meant. Perhaps ’e told us that so we’d ’ave confidence enough to make the right choice. This might be really important, Phyll. This might make all the difference as to whether we succeed in doin’ what we’ve been told we should do, or not.”
That had seemed to persuade her. Phyllis had marshalled her soldiers with competing terror and determination in her voice and her expression. She’d told them that they’d got one last stop to make before returning their new regimental mascot and most recent member to his own time and his own resuscitated body. She’d explained that this would mean another short trip to the Mayorhold, up to Tower Street where they’d been the last time they were in this century, before they’d dug back down to 1959 so they could go upstairs and watch the Master Builders have their fight. She hadn’t spelled it out much more than that, presumably for fear of scaring Michael Warren, but you could see in the eyes of Reggie, John and Marjorie that they’d known something serious was up, just by the strain in Phyllis’s tight voice.
She’d led the ghost gang and their trailing duplicates up the same northern earthworks’ wall from the collapsed lagoon that Bill and his accomplices had climbed up on their brief trip back to 2005. This brought them out onto the same long slope of grass that ran down alongside St. Andrew’s Road to Scarletwell Street and the solitary house that loomed there near its corner. Bill had been just about to point out to Phyllis that this was the spot that had scared Michael Warren into running away earlier – which was why Bill had chosen flying over walking, after all – when Michael himself had piped up and put his own two penn’orth in.
“Is that our street down there, that’s got the haunt-head house stood all Malone upon its corner? I shed like to go and have a lurk at it, if that’s all ripe. I premise I won’t ruin away again, like I dead lost time.”
Although you could tell from how he’d mixed his words up that the small boy had been nervous, you could also tell that he’d been serious. He seemed to have matured quite rapidly since he’d absconded earlier, perhaps starting to grow into his timeless and eternal soul the way that people did when they were dead, regardless of what age they’d died at. Anyway, he’d seemed quite keen to go and have a look at the bare turf and young trees that were now presiding where his family home had previously been, and so the gang had all traipsed down the slope with him towards Scarletwell corner. When he’d thought of all the pains he’d taken to avoid the place for Michael’s benefit, Bill had been moderately annoyed to think that they’d all been for nothing. Of course, if the four ghost-children had walked over Spencer Bridge then that would have upset Drowned Marjorie, and anyway, the flights they’d taken there and back had both been lovely. Plus, the aerial view had tipped him off as to what Alma’s wall-sized Armageddon painting had been all about, so he’d come out on top, whichever way you looked at it. He’d decided to quit all his internal moaning and just get on with the job in hand.
The gang and their pursuing after-images had trickled to a halt halfway along the unattended patch of lawn there just past Scarletwell Street corner and its lonely single house. They’d all stood silently as an unusually sombre Michael Warren had paced in his slippers up and down between the thirty-year-old silver birches that had first been planted sometime after his home street had been demolished. When the ghost-child had at last identified a spot where he seemed satisfied his house had stood he’d simply sat down on the turf and had a private weep, both dignified and brief, before he’d wiped the tears of ectoplasm from his eyes with one sleeve of his tartan dressing gown and then stood up again, re-joining his dead friends who’d all been standing a few feet off, keeping a respectful distance.
“That wiz all I wanted, just to find out how it felt with nothing there, but it wiz peaceful, like it always wiz. We can all go up to the Mayorhold now, if that wiz what you thought we ought to do before you take me home.”
They’d all been just about to do as Michael had suggested when the young girl in the mini-skirt and PVC mac that they’d spotted earlier in Chalk Lane had come clicking on her high heels down the hill and started walking back and forth along the strip of pavement between Scarletwell and Spring Lane while the gang had stood there on the grass verge, watching her.
Reggie and Marjorie had both begun to giggle when they’d realised that the mixed-race woman with her hair done up in frizzled corn-rows was a prostitute, while Michael Warren had sniggered along with them without having the first idea what he was laughing at. At this point the young woman had stopped in her tracks and turned her head in their direction, peering puzzled and uncertain through the gloom towards them for a moment before she’d resumed her pacing to and fro along the empty former terrace.
Phyllis had hissed in reproach at Reg and Marjorie for laughing.
“Cut it ayt, you two. Me and me little ’un saw her earlier in Chalk Lane, and we reckon she can see us, with whatever drugs she’s on or comin’ orf of.”
Reggie, peering at the young pro as she got to Scarletwell Street and turned round again to face them, walking back along with her arms folded to suppress a shiver, had removed his hat to scratch his curly head and then had stooped to speak to Phyll in a stage whisper.
“I reckon as I’ve seen ’er before as well, although I can’t think where it wiz.”
Bill had chimed in, putting his less quick-witted chum out of his misery.
“We saw ’er up in Bath Street, you big bowler-hatted berk. She wiz sat in ’er flat and we could see ’er through the walls, with the Destructor grindin’ at her innards while she did ’er scrapbook. You remember. It wiz just when we were bringin’ titch ’ere out the flats, after we’d found ’im on the steps there, talkin’ about ’is <em>Forbidden</em> <em>Worlds</em> and that.”
Reg had grinned amiably.
“Oh, yeah, that’s right. I can’t remember nothin’ about no forbidden worlds, but I remember seein’ ’er with that big smoking wheel workin’ away at ’er, and her with no idea as it wiz ’appenin’.”
It had then been Drowned Marjorie’s turn to raise objections.
“Well, what about me, then? I weren’t with you when you found him up by the Destructor. I wiz with Phyllis and John, and yet I think I know her from somewhere as well. Haven’t we seen her working somewhere, not the work she’s doing now, but in a shop or something? Oh, I can’t remember. P’raps I’m makin’ a mistake.”
While the ghost-children had stood talking on the grass, a number of the era’s stern and serious cars had hurtled past, narrow-eyed and suspicious, heading for the station or for Spencer Bridge and the attendant lorry-park. Bill had mused idly and perhaps mean-spiritedly that when they’d brought Princess Di back to Northamptonshire for burial, they should have brought her through Spencer Estate and over Spencer Bridge, so that she could have passed at least once over the dilapidated byways that her family had loaned its name to. He’d gone on from this to wonder why the girl was plying her trade here, when not two hundred yards away there was the Super Sausage café and the lorry park with its potential customers, the lonely men away from home nursing their urgent super sausages. He’d watched her shivering and shaking as she’d paced the meagre limits of her territory, most probably quaking from drug withdrawal rather than the cold on such a mild spring night, and it had come to him that unlike in the area near Spencer Bridge, there were no cameras here. That was the likely reason that she’d picked this spot, even though there was much less chance of passing trade.
As if to prove Bill wrong, it had been then that the dark-shelled Ford Escort had come purring down St. Andrew’s Road, proceeding northwards from the station end towards them, slowing down and coming to halt beside the curb across the other side of Scarletwell Street, near the buried site of the old scarlet well itself. The by-now shuddering and clearly desperate girl had gazed in the direction of the idling vehicle for a moment, hesitating as she tried to weigh the situation up, before she’d clicked and clacked along the vanished terrace, making for the creepy single building at the path’s far end, for Scarletwell Street and the waiting car beyond.
The car, a nondescript affair only a few years old, had been wrapped in an aura of bad news that the ghost-children could pick up from getting on a hundred yards away. “Soul of the hole,” Drowned Marjorie had said in a hushed voice, and all of them had known that she was right. They hadn’t, from that distance, been able to see how many men there were inside the Escort, even with their enhanced vision. Nonetheless, they’d all sucked in a nervous breath as the young woman bent down from the waist to exchange words through the side-window with the driver and then tottered round the car’s front, briefly silhouetted in the headlights, before clambering into the passenger seat by the offside door. The engine had roared into life and the almost-black car had taken off, turning a sharp right as if it intended to head off up Scarletwell Street but then turning right again to disappear into the lower elbow-end of Bath Street, after which the motor noise had suddenly cut off completely.
It had obviously been none of their business, and the six ghost-tykes had all begun to walk along the hidden remnant of the old back alley, up against the wire fence and hedges bordering Spring Lane School’s lower playing fields. Reduced to a few cobbles, this vestigial jitty led them onto Scarletwell Street right beside the lonely edifice, apparently without disturbing its clairvoyant resident. Making a left, the six of them had started heading up the battered gradient towards the Mayorhold. They’d barely begun to do this, trudging uphill by the school fields on the far side from the flats, when they’d heard the faint cries, dulled by the ghost-seam’s dead acoustics, which had issued from the black and gaping mouth of Bath Street, just across the road.
It hadn’t been their business. It had been a matter of the mortal world, already pre-ordained, and had nothing to do with them. It hadn’t been as if they really knew the girl and, anyway, they’d been on an important mission. Besides, if it had been serious the screams wouldn’t have broken off almost as soon as they’d begun, now, would they? Even if it <em>had</em> been something serious, what were they going to do about it? They were just a bunch of kids, dead kids at that, who couldn’t touch or alter things in the material world, unless it was a crisp bag or a length of hazard tape. Even if, for the sake of argument, that girl had been in awful, dreadful trouble, then what … were … <em>Shit</em>.
Phyllis and Bill had both spontaneously begun to run towards the Bath Street opening at the same time, with the four others following a fraction of a second later. Spouting misty after-pictures like a boiling kettle, the Dead Dead Gang had streamed into the bent, crooked lane only to find it empty, simmering in dark and silence. After a few moments’ bafflement, as one they’d stared towards the gap in the curved line of Bath Street’s further side, the entrance into a secluded walled space that provided garages and parking for the Moat Place and Fort Place developments. If Bill remembered right, the draughty tarmac strip descending into the enclosure had once been a little terraced street known as Bath Passage. The ghost-kids had drifted down it, cautiously, into the absolute night of the parking area.
The stationary Escort had been sitting in the middle of the surfaced rectangle that the row of gunmetal garage doors faced onto, with its snout pointing away from the ghostly ensemble. Muffled yelps, along with bumps and growls, had been escaping from the crouched, unmoving vehicle, sounding as if two boisterous Alsatians had been negligently left locked up inside. The children had approached the car. If they’d had hearts, their hearts would have been in their mouths.
They’d peered into the dark of the posterior windscreen. In the car’s rear seat the woman had been on her back, her skirt either torn off or else scrunched up into invisibility. Kneeling between her pitifully thin legs, raping her at the same time as he was punching her about the head, had been a stout and almost babyish-looking man in his late thirties, short black curly hair already greying at the temples. Flushed and, if it were not for the ghost-seam, full of colour, his plump cheeks had wobbled faintly with each thrust that he made into her, each blow he landed on her face or shoulders. Despite the ferocity with which he’d hit her and despite the snarled instructions to just shut up and do as he’d told her, judging from the man’s expression, he’d not even seemed to be possessed by uncontrollable rage, or, indeed, by anything. His features had been blank and dead, almost disinterested, as if the whole sordid nightmare was something on television; was a porn-loop he’d already seen too many times to muster any real enthusiasm. As the horror-stricken children watched, the man had smashed one ring-decked fist into the woman’s forehead just above her eye. Even in black and white, the blood erupting from the wound had looked appalling. It had run across her face, across her split lips that were opening and closing around noises she was too afraid to make.
There’d been three figures in the car. There’d been a second man, wearing a broad-brimmed hat, who had been sitting in the right front seat behind the steering wheel, facing away from everybody and apparently entirely unconcerned by what was happening behind him.
Possibly encouraged by the hand-in-hand flight up to Martin’s Yard they’d shared together, Michael Warren had reached out and clutched Bill’s mitt, looking for reassurance. Standing rooted to the spot by the vile moment he was witnessing, Bill had until then utterly forgotten Michael’s presence and had cursed himself for letting a small child see this abomination. He’d taken a step or two away, still holding Michael’s hand, and they had ended up a few feet to the car’s right, further down the gentle tarmac slant of the enclosure. Inadvertently, this had meant they could see the hat-clad figure sitting in the front seat both more clearly and in profile … or at least, he’d been in profile until he had turned and smiled at Bill and Michael.
Although every other object in Bill’s field of vision was a different tone of grey, he’d realised that the man’s eyes were in colour. One was green. The other one was red. So that was what his future self had meant, about the devil being in the driving seat.
The thirty-second spirit, who’d been hundreds of feet high, sporting three heads and sat astride a dragon on the last occasion Bill had seen him, had leaned casually through the side-window of the Escort to address the boys. He hadn’t wound the window down or broken it in any way. He’d just leaned through it. By now, the remainder of the gang had gathered behind Bill and Michael to see what was happening, but when the fiend spoke it had been quite clear that his words were meant only for young Michael Warren.
“Ah, my little friend. I knew you wouldn’t have forgotten our agreement. I had faith in you, you see? I knew that you’d remember I’d arranged a job for you, up in this brash new century, as payment for that lovely trip I took you on. Specifically, if you recall, I wanted someone killed, their breastbone smashed to flakes of chalk, their heart and lungs crushed into an undifferentiated pulp. Do you think you could do that for me, or have you perhaps a hankering to see again what happens when you make me cross? Hm? Wiz that it? All of my different heads as big as tower-blocks and all screaming at you, when your little deathmonger, your little hag who stinks of afterbirth wizn’t around to save you? Wiz that what you want?”
The traffic-light eyes glittered. Small blue flames had drooled incontinently from the corners of the fiend’s lips as it spoke. There in the rear of the unmoving car, the fat man in the white shirt and grey windcheater had turned the by-now bloody girl onto her hands and knees, he and his victim wholly unaware that something mentioned in the Bible sat there in the front seat watching them, appreciatively, and with some amusement.
Looking back, the Dead Dead Gang’s reaction had resembled some posthumous sequel to <em>The Goonies</em> or an episode of <em>Scooby-Do</em>: they’d screamed in perfect unison and then they’d run away, with Bill still holding Michael Warren’s hand, both of them shrieking as he’d dragged the infant out of the garage enclosure into lower Bath Street. The whole mob of them had been halfway up Scarletwell Street before they’d ceased howling and had stopped to draw a breath, or at least figuratively speaking. Everyone had been aghast, and no one had known what to do. Phyllis had looked more worried and upset than Bill had ever seen her, in an even worse state than that time she’d come to visit Bill down in the cells, when he was in there for that stabbing.
“What are we all gunna do? We can’t just let that poor girl ’ave that done to ’er and not do nothin’. Ayr Bill, can’t you think o’ summat?”
Bill, still trembling from the run-in with the demon, had been absolutely blank, unable to come up with anything, as if he’d used all of his cunning on the business out at Martin’s Yard.
“Well, I don’t know! We could go and find some of the bigger and uglier rough sleepers what are round ’ere, see if they knew what to do, except that they all want to kill us because you keep pissing ’em about!”
Phyllis had gone quiet and had stared into empty space for a few moments before she’d replied.
“What abayt Freddy Allen? We’ve not ’urt ’im, we’ve just messed abayt with ’im, and ’e’s a good sort underneath. ’E’d ’elp us if we asked ’im.”
Bill had shook his head in violent disagreement, briefly growing extra noggins like a hydra as he did so.
“What good could ’e do? ’E’s no more use than we are. Anyway, where are we gunna find ’im, even if ’e ’as forgiven us for nickin’ ’is ’at earlier, when we wiz up there in the twenty-fives?”
Phyllis had thought about it for a moment.
“What abayt the Jolly Smokers? Most o’ the rough sleepers goo there of an evenin’, and if Freddy wizn’t there, there’d be somebody ’oo knew where ’e wiz.”
Bill had goggled at her in disbelief, the other children looking on in anxious silence.
“Are you fuckin’ mad? The Jolly Smokers, that’s where Mick Malone the ratter and all them go! Tommy Mangle-the-Cat and Christ knows who else! If us lot set foot in there, they’ll pull our heads off and then stick ’em on the beer pumps!”
Phyllis had just looked at him, a queer and thoughtful look stealing across her pointy little face.
“Yiss. Yiss, I can see that, what yer sayin’. If I wiz to go up there, that’s what they’d do to me, yer can be sure. But what if just you wiz to go up there and ask for Freddy Allen? After all, it wiz you what reminded me abayt what Mr. Doddridge said, ’ow we should just go where we please, and rest assured as that was the place we were meant to go.”
In retrospect, Bill saw now that this had been when his big ideas had taken a quite definite turn for the worse. Disastrously, he’d made a feeble effort to use logic as a means of extricating himself from the bear-pit of responsibility he’d accidentally dug.
“No. No, what Doddridge said, that was just Michael ’ere who ’e meant, ’ow we should feel free to take ’im anywhere because it would just be part of ’is education. If we’re takin’ Michael somewhere, that means that it’s all been planned by management, and that we’ll all most probably come out all right. If it’s just me, all on me own, then it’s quite likely that I could get slaughtered without it affecting any ’igher plan. No way. No, I’m not doin’ that.”
Phyllis had cocked her head. She’d looked like she was making quite a big decision.
“All right. Take ’im with yer.”
Bill hadn’t been sure he’d heard her right. Quite frankly, he’d not been expecting that.
“What? Take who with me?”
Phyllis had remained expressionless.
“Take Michael with yer. If you take ’im, then it wizzle be part of ’is education, like yer said, and both of yer wizzle be okay. If you expect me to take ’im Upstairs, in the state it’s in at present, just upon your say-so, then you ought to be prepared to put yer money where yer mayth is.”
Bill had floundered, possibly knowing already that his argument was doomed even before he had attempted to express it.
“W-Well, why can’t we all go up, in that case? Or why can’t just you and Michael go?”
Phyllis had given him an almost pitying smile.
“Well, if we all went up there, it’d look provocative. And if I wiz to go up there, that’d be even worse. All things considered, yer the best one for the job, ’cause yer’ve ’ad more experience with rough pubs then the rest of us lot put together.”
Well, there’d been no arguing with that. She’d had him there, game, set and match. The gang had carried on uphill as quickly as they could, with Bill still holding Michael’s faintly sticky hand. They’d swirled around the bases of the ironically-titled NEWLIFE flats and into Tower Street, the short terrace, leading to the raised wall of the current Mayorhold, which had once been the top part of Scarletwell Street.
They walked to the street’s end, past the house where they’d seen the pissed-up bloke earlier, the one who’d had the funny laugh and who had seemed to see them, too. With their grey multiple-exposures smouldering behind them they’d moved through the sickly sodium-light which spilled down from the elevated traffic junction that the Mayorhold had become into the underpasses and walkways below. They’d turned left out of Tower Street and there, almost upon the corner, had been the concealed front doorway of the Jolly Smokers.
It had looked like a thin sheet of vapour, door-sized and just hanging in the lamp-accentuated gloom near the Salvation Army hall, across from the ugly mosaic ramparts of the Mayorhold. Absolutely two-dimensional in its appearance, it had been too flat to see at all when looked at from the side and, unless you were dead, nor was it any more discernible when looked at from the front. With wraith-sight you could see the doorway if you stood before it, though why anyone would want to see such a dishearteningly ugly thing had been beyond Bill’s comprehension. Even by the miserable standards of the half-realm, the pub entrance had been drab and uninviting. Its ghost paint had peeled, hanging away from the worm-eaten phantom wood beneath in little curls resembling dead caterpillars. Scratched upon its upper timbers as if by a pen-knife in a childish and uneven hand had been the legend <em>Joly Smoaker’s</em>, and when the Dead Dead Gang listened past the mezzanine-world’s sonic cotton-wool they’d made out drunken shouts and bursts of nasty-sounding laughter, seemingly originating from the empty, sodium-tinged night air above the sunken walkway.
Bill, quite frankly, had been bricking it. The last place in the universe that he’d wanted to visit was the most notorious ghost-pub in the Boroughs, the ghost of a long-demolished pub, where all the old-school horrors of the neighbourhood had congregated. Although Bill had always been an anarchist at heart and generally applauded the largely unsupervised conditions of the afterlife, he’d long accepted that rule-free utopias would end up harbouring some complete fucking nightmares, like the Jolly Smokers. Christiana, out in Denmark, the sprawling and well-established hippy free-state that he’d visited while on his mortal travels was a good example, starting out with marvellous and visionary homes, domes made from empty beer-cans that would open to the stars, and ending up at one point, so he’d heard, in games of football played with human heads. No, it was fair to say, for once, that Bill had not been looking forward to the prospect of a session in the pub.
That had been right when the most welcome sight that Bill had ever seen came billowing out of the underpass’s mouth which opened from the Mayorhold’s bounding wall some distance to their left. The massive figure – it had been a man – had clearly been deceased like they were, judging from the burly medicine-ball after-images that had rolled after it out of the tunnel entrance and onto the lamp-lit walkway.
Even though the large ghost was in monochrome like his surroundings, there’d been no denying that he looked innately colourful. A floppy and vaguely Parisian beret slept like a minimalist cartoon cat atop his shoulder-brushing mullet, or “the hairstyle of the gods” as Bill remembered the voluminous spook once describing it, back when he’d been alive. The hair, in its then-current circumstances, had been smoky grey like the neatly Mephistophelean beard, or the moustache with its ends curling up in two waxed points. Round as the moon, the spirit’s awe-inspiring girth was draped in clothing that could only have been manufactured for that very purpose. Sewn-on teddy bears gaily arranged a tablecloth to have their picnic on the slopes of the impressive stomach, under the white fluffy clouds and cheerful sun that had been carefully stitched across the noble bosom of his dungarees. Worn over these was a capacious summer jacket sporting bold vertical stripes, giving the wearer the appearance of an ambulatory deckchair, or at least of something that suggested summer and the seaside. In one hand, the welcome apparition had been carrying a sturdy walking stick, while in the other hand he’d held a leather instrument case like a giant black teardrop, the unusual shape suggesting that it contained a pot-bellied mandolin.
Tom Hall. The glorious spectre rumbling towards them had been Tom Hall (1944 to 2003): Northampton’s minstrel, bard and one-man Bicycle Parade – a memorable show each time he’d set foot outside his front door. He’d been the wildly Dionysian and tireless founder of numerous brilliant groups from the mid-’60s onwards, like the Dubious Blues Band, Flying Garrick, Ratliffe Stout Band, Phippsville Comets and a dozen more that Bill remembered seeing play in the back room of the Black Lion. This had been the Black Lion in St. Giles Street, and not the older pub of the same name down there by Castle Station. The St. Giles Street Black Lion, hailed as the most haunted spot in England by ghost-hunters such as Eliot O’Donnell, had been sanctuary to the town’s drugged-up bohemians and drunken artists from the 1920s to its sorry end during the 1990s when it had been ruinously improved, converted to a tavern meant for an expected passing trade of lawyers and renamed the Wig & Pen. For all those decades, though, the Black Lion had provided a fixed point about which a great deal of the town’s lunacy could orbit, and of all the many legendary titans that had at one time presided over the cacophony of its front bar, Tom Hall was without doubt the very greatest.
The respected revenant, in sandals and carefully clashing socks, had sloshed and sauntered down the walkway with a gait that Bill found reminiscent of a berthing tugboat, stopping in his tracks on sighting the Dead Dead Gang, at which point his trailing look-alikes had piled into the back of him and melted. His calm gaze, continually unsurprised and unshakeably confident, had fallen on the huddle of ghost-children standing there outside the entrance to the Jolly Smokers, hanging in the air before them. Bristling brows had knitted to a frown and for a moment the benign but very tough musician had looked stern and frightening, a bit like Zeus or one of them. And then Tom Hall had laughed, like a delinquent cavalier.
“Haharr. What’s this, then? Have they finally found out where all the Bisto Kids were buried?”
Bill had eagerly stepped forward, dragging Michael Warren with him. He’d known that Tom wouldn’t recognise him in his current form, nor by his current name. William or Bill, although it was what he’d been christened, was a name only his family had called him during life. He’d thought he better introduced himself to Tom using the nickname that had been bestowed upon him in his youth by a forgetful P.E. teacher in the course of a particularly energetic game of football: “Come on! Pass the ball to … Bert.”
Michael and Bill had stood there looking up at Tom from what would have been the site of a full eclipse if the enormous poet, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist had still possessed a shadow. Bill had grinned.
“ ’Ello, Tom. ’Ow yer gettin’ on, mate? It’s me, Bert, from Lindsay Avenue.”
The brows had risen in a querying expression, with a slightly mocking undertone to it that Bill remembered from their earthly conversations.
“My dear boy! Not Bert the Stab?”
This winning soubriquet, bestowed after the unfortunate teenage incident that night in the back room of the Black Lion – there’d been extenuating circumstances, Bill was reasonably certain – had been Tom’s at once affectionate and ridiculing nickname for the young and almost beardless Bill. Acknowledging that he was indeed Bert the Stab, Bill had explained to the deceased performer how this part of him, the part that had loved being eight and playing in the streets, was currently involved in quite a serious adventure with his mates, the Dead Dead Gang. The immense apparition had thrown back his head, somehow without dislodging the beret, and had let laughter like an earthquake ripple through his ectoplasmic bulk so that the stitched-on teddies shimmied on his paunch.
“HaHAAAR! Har HA har! The Dead Dead Gang. I like it.”
The compulsive versifier had begun extemporising on the spot.
“The Dead Dead Gang, the Dead Dead Gang, so bad they killed them twice! The Dead Dead Gang were born to hang for paediatric vice! HaHAAAR! How about that? That could be your theme tune, couldn’t it? Whaddaya think? Ha HAARR!”
Phyllis had scowled at the lyric leviathan with genuine menace, toying meaningfully with her ribbon of dead rabbits.
“We’ve already got a theme tune.”
Stepping in, Bill had attempted to stop Phyllis alienating yet another otherwise-accommodating spirit by steering the conversation back from theme tunes onto the more pressing matters that were currently at hand.
“Tom, what it wiz, I’ve got to pay a visit to this place ’ere, to the Jolly Smokers. There’s somebody what I’m searchin’ for who might be up there, but quite frankly I’m not lookin’ forward to it, not at this size, and not with the nutters that you get up there. You couldn’t chaperone us, could you, mate? Me and the nipper ’ere?”
The genial colossus had beamed radiantly.
“Your want to go up to the Smokers? Well, you should have said. That’s where I’m off to now. I’ve got a gig up there with me new band, Holes In Black T-Shirts. It wiz Tom Hall’s Deadtime Showstoppers for a few years, but then I got fed up and changed it. ’Course I’ll take you up there, little Bert the Stab. HaHARRR! I wouldn’t leave you sitting out here on the front step with a bottle of Corona and a bag of crisps while I went in like a neglectful dad and had a drink, now, would I? Har har har. Come on.”
With that, Tom had placed one palm flat against the hanging 2D tissue of the door, and pushed. The portal had swung inwards and away from them, seeming to gain a third dimension as it did so. It had opened onto a drab, narrow hallway with depressingly dark wallpaper, a space apparently carved into empty air which, when Bill had leaned out round the door’s edge to check, had turned out to be utterly invisible if looked at from the side. Tom had already entered and was rumbling away down the grim corridor that wasn’t there. With a last anxious glance at Phyllis, and still dragging Michael Warren by one hand, Bill had stepped through the door, pushing it shut behind him. Him and his bewildered infant charge had followed the beloved entertainer into the notorious wraith-pub, listening to the pandemonium above increase in volume as they neared the rotting staircase at the hall’s far end.
Without breaking his leisurely, unhurried pace, Tom had looked back and down across the shoulder of his stripy humbug jacket, studying the pair of phantom children, who were dutifully scampering after him, their trailing after-images completely swallowed within the much larger ones that he himself was leaving in his wake.
“So who’s the little cherub with you, then? We’ve not been introduced. Wiz it somebody else I should remember? Christ, it’s not John Weston, wiz it? Ha HARR!”
Bill, by now laughing himself at the very thought that Michael Warren might grow up into the mutually-acquainted chemical and human train wreck that the troubadour had named, had shaken his head in denial, briefly growing new ones as he did so.
“No. No, this wiz Michael Warren, and ’e’s the same age as what ’e’ looks. ’E’s technically dead at present, like, but back in 1959 he’s in a coma or what-have-you for ten minutes, and then ’e’ll be goin back Downstairs and back to life. ’E’s Alma Warren’s little brother. You remember Alma.”
Tom had stopped in his ponderous tracks, close to the foot of the dilapidated stairs.
“Well of course I can remember Alma. I’m cremated, I’m not senile. She read that stuff at my funeral about me being … manly … in my stature, and about how I’d bust three of her settees, the disrespectful cow. So this is Alma’s brother. Michael. Michael. Do you know, I think I met you when I turned up to play at that birthday party you were holding for your aunt, who’d died the day before and couldn’t make it. O’ course, you wiz so much older then. You’re younger than that now. HaHAAAAR! I’m pleased to meet you, Alma’s brother.”
Tucking his impressive walking-stick beneath his arm, Tom had bent over and elaborately shaken hands with Michael, the child’s tiny paw engulfed in the musician’s fist up to the forearm.
“You know, this lot that I’m playing with tonight, Holes In BlackT-Shirts – its Jack Lansbury, Tony Marriot, the Duke and all that lot – I got the name out of a dream I had about your sister. She’d got my three kids all lying on a railway track and said that if a train ran over them, then they’d become invisible. Her idea was that when they were invisible, we’d dress them up in her old shirts and put a show on called “Holes In Black T-Shirts”. HaHAAR! Good old Alma. Even in your dreams she was value for money!”
After that ringing endorsement, they’d begun to mount the creaking spectral staircase to the main bar of the Jolly Smokers. Which was where they were now, cringing in the shelter of the mountainous performer, peering nervously between his teddy-decorated legs at the demented horror of the scene beyond.
It wasn’t <em>Texas Chainsaw</em> horror, lacking both the colour and the blood. This was a <em>Dr. Caligari</em> horror shot on hazardous and decomposing film stock, eerie black and white scenarios melting into a rash of supernovas from the heat of the projector. Writhing hieroglyphic filigrees of murderous graffiti were gouged into all the scarred and ancient tables, scrawled on each available bare area of wall in hundred-year-old palimpsests of bile and bitterness. There was a light like rotten silver trickling over every pin-sharp detail of the resurrected alehouse, dripping from pump-handles fashioned out of horse skulls, glinting on the cracked ghost-mirror, hung behind the optics, in which nothing was reflected but an empty, fire-damaged room. In actuality, the front bar of the Jolly Smokers did not appear fire-damaged, but then neither was it empty.
Every badly-varnished barstool, every corner alcove with its threadbare, stained upholstery was fully occupied by the degenerate spectres of a neighbourhood that had been running down for centuries. The place heaved with belligerent ectoplasm and perspired a morbid jocularity that would have made flesh creep if there’d been any flesh around. Upon a mottled carpet that on close inspection turned out to be different strains of mould on bare wood boards; beneath a nicotine-glazed and oppressively low ceiling that was hung with rusted tankards, verdigris horse brasses and a mummified cat swaying up one corner; in an atmosphere that seemed smoke-saturated on account of all their overlapping after-images, the ugly spirits of the Boroughs jostled and cavorted.
In one corner was George Blackwood, gangster and procurer, sprouting extra arms as he dealt cards, properly ghostly now and not a living man like when Bill and the gang had seen him earlier, down in the 1950s. Blackwood sat across a tilted table from the terrifying ratter, Mick Malone, whose many-headed ferrets bubbled from his jacket pockets, sniffing the rank barroom air, and whose black and white terriers snapped and snarled around his polished work-boots. Having been part of the operation when Phyllis had slipped a ghost-rat under Malone’s bowler, Bill shrank back behind the ample cover that Tom Hall afforded before the rat-catcher saw him.
Gathered round the bar were other revenants Bill recognised, at least the ones who still had normal faces. Old Jem Perrit stood nursing a shot-glass that contained a double measure of the tavern’s home-made Puck’s Hat punch, distilled from the fermented fairy-blossoms. He was cackling uproariously, sharing some dark joke with his companion at the bar. This was Tommy Mangle-the-cat, the local wraith who was a casualty to the ferocious brew, mad-apple cider as Bill usually referred to it. Repeated and prolonged exposure to the potent moonshine had affected Tommy’s mind, which had of course been all that kept his insubstantial form together, with its various components in their proper order. As Bill watched, the dissolute ghost’s bleary eyes were both commencing a slow, slithering trip up one unshaven cheek towards the mostly-toothless mouth that gurned and grimaced disconcertingly slap in the centre of the dead man’s forehead, spraying phantom spittle when it laughed. The awful convolutions of a cauliflower ear, upside down, provided an appropriate centrepiece in the position where you might expect the nose to be. Presumably, the other ear and Tommy’s actual nose were off upon some expedition to the back of the grotesquely scrambled head and would both be returning presently.
Although Mangle-the-cat’s visage was pretty much unbearable to look at, it was not the most disturbing feature of the scene enacted there beside the bar. Along with old Jem Perrit and his carrion laugh, the lesbian bruiser Mary Jane and various assorted Cluniac or Augustan monks, Tommy was having fun watching what was, quite literally, a floor show: somehow struggling in the floorboards at their scuffling feet was an apparently alive and conscious relief-sculpture of a man, made out of living, moving wood. From what Bill could make out through all the whorls of grain and double nail-heads that formed the half-submerged figure’s screaming and contorting countenance, it looked to be a young lad, no more than nineteen at most. His scrawny wooden arms flailed in the air, pine fingers with exquisitely-carved bitten fingernails flexing and clawing as though seeking purchase. His puppet legs thrashed, a bent knee made from seemingly supple planking rising briefly from the surface before straightening and sinking back into the filthy, mildewed timbers. Brutally, Jem Perrit ground one heel upon the trapped form’s nose, pushing its sculpted face back down beneath the arabesques of mould that carpeted the naked boards, guffawing raucously throughout, mocking the animated figurine while forcing its head under so that it could drown in unswept floor.
“Goo on, yer useless little bugger. Get back dayn where yer belong. We dun’t want yer up ’ere!”
The same did not hold true, it seemed, when it came to another apparition made out of unusually limber bits of plank, this one fully emerged and standing sobbing by the bar. This second human marionette appeared to Bill to be a slightly older specimen than his floor-bound and struggling teenage companion, maybe somewhere in his early thirties. Badly overweight and with the loops and knotholes of his carpentry clearly delineated on a shaven skull, the portly doll-thing moaned and wailed, perfectly whittled tears of liquid balsa rolling down his wobbling wooden jowls. This was no doubt because the hairy-arsed butch mauler, Mary Jane, had got him by one lathe-turned forearm and was carving her initials in his splintery and syrup-weeping flesh with a ghost-screwdriver. Wherever the doomed woodentop had come from, Bill observed, he should have known that within a graffiti-smothered dive like this he simply represented a fresh canvas.
All around the yammering and infernal hostelry, walk-ons from nightmares slapped each other on the back or else hawked bronchial ectoplasm up into each other’s drinks. In a cleared area against the room’s west wall a casually-dressed collection of deceased local musicians that Bill recognised were setting up their crackling phantom amplifiers. There was Tony Marriot, the drummer with the physique of a farmer and the hairstyle of a farmer’s scarecrow, grey straw tickling his shoulders at the back though it receded sharply at the front above a stolid, faintly punch-drunk fizzog that looked braced for disappointment. Next to Marriot, Pete Watkin, who they’d called the Duke, stood tuning up his bass and grinning quietly at the supernatural mayhem that surrounded him, shaking his mop of Jerry Garcia curls into a double-exposed pussy-willow bush with amazed disbelief. Meanwhile Jack Lansbury emptied ghost-spit from the mouthpiece of his spectral trumpet and looked disapprovingly at the array of tomb-wights, relics and rough sleepers that comprised his audience. He looked as though he’d played to either a dead crowd or else a rowdy audience in the past, but never both at the same time.
Bill scanned the room between Tom’s tree-trunk thighs. The scrounging shade of Freddy Allen, who Bill had been sent up here specifically to find, was nowhere to be seen. Though he supposed that Freddy might be skulking somewhere at the rear of the tightly-packed supernatural inebriates who filled the bar, Bill didn’t fancy wandering amongst them so that he could take a look. Not with Mangle-the-cat and Mick Malone and all the rest of the Dead Dead Gang’s not-so-mortal enemies about. In this rare if not wholly unique instance, Bill found that he didn’t have the nerve.
He looked up at Tom Hall, who had the nerve to dress up in teddy bears’ picnic pantaloons, and if he’d got the nerve for that he’d got the nerve for anything. Bill could recall an incident in the front room of the Black Lion, the area where all the older and more serious offenders congregated. Tom had been, as was his custom, cuttingly sarcastic in his treatment of a drug-addicted, truly homicidal patron of the old Bohemian pub, a towering leather-padded skeleton called Robbie Wise. The easily-offended junkie, bridling at Hall’s remark, had whipped an open straight-edge razor from his raincoat pocket and had held it up to the musician’s face. Tom had just tipped his head back and drawn a straight line across his own throat with one chubby index finger, just below the beard-line. “My dear boy, just cut it here. HahahaHARRRRR!” Robbie Wise had looked almost terrified for some taut seconds before pocketing his blade and rushing from the Black Lion’s front bar in a panic, out into the dark and wind of the St. Giles Street night. No, Tom Hall was completely fearless, in his life and no doubt in his death. He was the one Bill should consult about the Freddy Allen situation.
“Tom? Look, we wiz sent up ’ere to look for an old tramp called Freddy Allen. Could you ask if anybody’s seen ’im anywhere?”
The corners of the maestro’s eyes crinkled with mirth. Bill thought that Tom’s admirers had been wrong when they’d said that he was like Falstaff. Rather, he was more the man that Falstaff wished he was. His voice, when he called down to Bill over the hubbub, possessed the endearing creak of honey casks or kegs of mead.
“Hahaar! As if I could say no to little Bert the Stab! I’ll see to it immediately.”
Turning his personal volume to eleven, the seasoned performer next addressed the bustling room. All conversation stopped as the attendant phantoms paid attention to this noisy soul who seemed to be dressed as a monstrous bag of sweets. Even the wooden torture-victim at the bar and his bull-dyke tormentor stopped what they were doing so that they could listen.
“HahaHAAAR! Lamias and gentlemen, boys and ghouls, can I have your attention for a moment PLEASE! Thank you. You’re very kind. You’re very generous for a crowd of unsuccessful coffin-dodgers. Now, does anybody know the whereabouts of somebody called … Freddy Allen was it? Freddy Allen. Is he in heaven or is he in hell, that damned elusive pimpernel? Hahaaaar!”
Jem Perrit, pausing for a moment in his trampling of the bulging mask-face back into the floorboards, raised his black and flapping crow-voice in the sudden silence.
“Fred Allen’s dayn the place along the end o’ Sheep Street, Bird in ’And or Edge O’ Tayn or whatever they calls it now. The breather pub. ’E’s dayn there with that ’alf-sharp lad o’ mine. When are we gunna ’a’ some music, then?”
That was the long and short of it. Bidding a fond farewell to Bill and Michael, Hall had drifted like some playschool sea-mine through a lapping scum-tide of the place’s patrons, making for the spot where his accompanists were tuning up. The two ghost-children, their corpulent cover gone, rushed for the bar door and went down the staircase in one long, slow jump, with Bill still holding Michael’s hand as he had been throughout. The infant hadn’t said a word during their visit to the phantom watering-hole. He’d simply stood there, rooted to the spot with terror, staring transfixed at Mangle-the-cat and all the other monsters, the poor little bugger. Bill wished that he hadn’t had to take the toddler up there with him, but it had helped ensure Bill’s own safety and besides, wherever they took Michael would turn out to be where he was meant to go. That was what Phill Doddridge had said.
They reached the street door, bursting out onto the lamp-lit walkway where their friends were waiting for them. Slamming the air-door back to its 2D state behind him, Bill informed Phyll as to the suspected whereabouts of Freddy Allen, upon which the gang took off for Sheep Street. Swimming through the air or bouncing upwards from a standing start, the gang ascended from the underpass and smeared themselves across the busy traffic junction of the Mayorhold, after-pictures mingling with the exhaust fumes as they poured into the mouth of Broad Street.
The ghost-kids raced down the grimly functional dual carriageway along the three-foot high raised concrete wall that was its central reservation, rivers of bright light and metal flowing in opposed directions to each side of them. They were approaching Regent Square, where Sheep Street and Broad Street converged, north-eastern limit of the Boroughs that was marked upon the angle’s trilliard table with a crudely-rendered skull, the corner-pocket of demise, death’s quadrant. This was where they’d burned the witches and the heretics, where they’d stuck heads on spikes, with astral remnants of these dreadful moments sometimes visible on a clear day, despite the intervening centuries. It struck Bill forcefully, not for the first time, what an unbelievably strange place the Boroughs was and always had been.
Bill had not been born down in the area, nor had he lived there, but it was the place his mum’s side of the family had come from. Bill, like stately-home-invader Ted Tripp, had been raised a Kingsley boy, but from an early age he’d known about the Boroughs and its alternately wondrous or disturbing aura. The district’s split personality was nicely illustrated by that time when Bill had been comparing childhood anecdotes with Alma, the unnerving elder sister of the wee ghost he was just then chaperoning along Broad Street. Alma had described an incident when she’d been visiting her fearsome-sounding grandma, May, who’d lived down Green Street. May had chicken-coops in her back yard, apparently, as did a lot of people during those days of post-war austerity. Alma had dreamily recalled the magical occasion when she’d been called by her dad to have a look at what was happening in her nan’s kitchen. Sitting on the top stone step, she’d gazed down at the sunken floor, which was completely carpeted with fluffy yellow chicks, chirping and stumbling against each other on their new legs. That was the idyllic aspect of the Boroughs, while the anecdote that Bill had countered with, though similar in many ways, reflected the old neighbourhood’s more startling face.
Bill, too, had been out visiting a grandparent who lived down in the Boroughs, though in Bill’s case it had been his granddad’s house in Compton Street. He’d been accompanied by a parent, just like Alma had, albeit by his mother rather than his dad, and there had been a miracle of nature in the kitchen, although nowhere near as charming as the Easter vision Alma had remembered. What it was, Bill’s granddad used to catch and jelly his own eel. On the occasion when five-year-old Bill and his mum had been visiting, the old man had just brought home a fresh load of elvers, baby eel he’d netted from the wriggling hordes that were then currently migrating up the River Nene. He’d got them in a big iron pot, its lid held down securely, and was taking them into the kitchen so that he could kill and skin them. Bill had only wanted to see all the little eel, and even though his mum and granddad had done their best to dissuade him, although they’d explained that the eel would be released in a sealed kitchen which would not be opened up until the job was done, he’d still insisted. Even at that age, he’d usually had his own way, and even at that age it had all usually ended up as something dreadful. This occasion had been no exception. He’d followed his grandfather into the little kitchen and his mum had shut the door behind him, from the other side. She wasn’t stupid, and knew what was coming next. Bill’s granddad had then cautiously removed the iron cover from the pot.
The slippery black question-marks had boiled up in a horrifying rush from the receptacle, desperate for liberty, and had gone everywhere. There must have been at least two hundred of the fucking things, slivers of inner-tube with tiny staring eyes, rippling across the worn tiles of the kitchen floor and somehow pouring themselves up the walls, the door, the table-legs, the screaming five-year-old. They’d been all over him, inside his clothes and in his ginger hair, and he had realised too late why no one would be opening the kitchen door to let him out until all this was over. Grim-faced and, with time, completely drenched in eel-blood, Bill’s grandfather had beheaded and then skinned the slithering abominations by the handful. It still took a good half-hour, by which time young Bill had been absolutely traumatised, standing there with the shakes, staring and mumbling, nowhere near as pleased with the experience as Alma had been by her lovely little chickens. But then that was what the Boroughs had been like, he thought now: fluffy sentiment next door to wriggling fear and madness.
The ghost-gang had by now reached the end of Broad Street and were flurrying in a smudged arc about the rounded building on the end. This place had once belonged to Monty Shine, the bookmaker, before it had become a night-spot and had undergone so many changes in identity that Bill thought it might be in some witness-protection programme, for its own good. It had been at one point a Goth hangout called MacBeth’s, and Bill knew that its curving front wall had been painted a vampiric lilac, although in the ghost-seam this appeared as a cool grey, which looked much better. Bill had often thought that giving this place a Goth makeover was over-egging the blood-pudding or gilding the funeral lily. Heads on spikes, witch burnings … just how Gothic did these people want it?
Crossing Sheep Street, walking straight through the unwitting mortal punters who were out that evening, the gang slipped in through the front wall of the Bird in Hand. The place was full of rowdies but, being the living, breathing sort, they were no problem when compared with their posthumous counterparts up at the Jolly Smokers. Shimmering through the cigarette smoke in the bar – Bill thought that indoor smoking had been banned later that year – the pint-sized poltergeists located Freddy Allen without difficulty. He was perched upon an empty stool beside a table at which two still-living men sat talking, which was unsurprising in itself: a lot of the rough sleepers liked to knock about in pubs, where there was more chance of a heavy drinker glimpsing them and where they could eavesdrop on mortal conversations for old times’ sake. What took Bill and his colleagues aback, however, was that Freddy wasn’t merely listening to the chatter of the living. He was joining in.
When Bill examined the two men that the ghost-tramp seemed to be talking to, he recognised the pair of them and had a partial answer to the question of how Freddy could be in debate with anyone who wasn’t among the departed. The man Freddy was addressing was the same peculiar individual that the kids had seen arriving home in Tower Street sublimely pissed, before they’d gone up to Mansoul to watch the angle-scrap. He’d been able to see the phantom children then, and so presumably could see and talk to Freddy now. The other chap, sitting across the table from the spectral moocher with his anxious eyes fixed firmly upon the warm-blooded drunk beside him, was a little fat man with curly white hair and glasses who Bill recognised as Labour councillor Jim Cockie. He looked quietly terrified, although Bill quickly realised that this wasn’t due to Freddy’s presence. Cockie couldn’t see the spectre he was seated opposite to, and was instead frightened by his table-mate, the chap with the repeated and demented laugh who was, as far as the plump councillor could tell, conversing with an empty stool.
Phyllis had taken a deep breath, if only for the way it sounded, and marched boldly up to the three seated men, two living and one dead. The moment Freddy spotted her he leapt up from his seat and clutched his weather-beaten hat close to his balding scalp.
“You keep away from me you little buggers! I’ve had quite enough o’ you lot for one day, with all that messin’ me about when you were up there in the twenty-fives.”
Phyllis had raised her palms towards the angry spirit in a calming and placating gesture.
“Mr. Allen, I know we’ve been rotten to yer, an’ I’m sorry. We wun’t do it anymore. I’d not ’ave bothered yer, except by all accaynts yer thought to be a decent sort, and there’s this young girl what’s in trouble.”
From the moment Freddy had stood up, the pissed-up and apparently clairvoyant chap beside him had begun to laugh uproariously, transferring his inebriate attentions to the clearly nervous councillor instead.
“Ahahaha! Did you see that? He just stood up like he’d got piles. He’s cross because a load of little blighters just come in.” The psychic drunk had turned his head to look directly at Bill and his dead confederates here. “You can’t come in! You’re underage! What if the landlord asks to see your death-certificates? Ahahaha!”
The rattled councillor glanced briefly in the same direction that the other man was looking, but appeared unable to see anything. Cockie looked back towards the chuckling boozer seated next to him, badly unnerved now.
“I don’t understand this. I don’t understand you people.”
Freddy, meanwhile, had become less furious and more puzzled at Phyll’s mention of a young woman in trouble.
“What young girl? And anyway, what’s it to me?”
The drunken, giggling bloke was turning to the councillor now, saying “I can’t hear ’em. Even when they’re right up next to you they sound faint, have you noticed? Ahaha.”
Phyllis persisted.
“I don’t know if you’ll ’ave seen ’er, just around and that, but she’s an ’alf-caste girl about nineteen, who’s got ’er ’air all done in plaits, like stripes. She wears one o’ them shiny coats, an’ it looks like she’s on the game.”
A glint of recognition came into the threadbare apparition’s sad eyes.
“I … I think I know the one you’re on about. She lives down Bath Street flats, in what used to be Patsy Clarke’s old place.”
The ghost gang’s leader nodded once, doubling the number of her heads and sending a brief tremor through her hanging rabbit pelts.
“That’s ’er. There’s some bloke got ’er in that little garage place down where Bath Passage used to be. ’E’s got ’is car parked down there an’ ’e’s doin’ you-know-what to ’er. Not as a customer, like, but against ’er will.”
From the expression on his face, it looked like an inviolable line had been crossed on Fred Allen’s private moral playing-field.
“Bath Passage. I passed by there earlier, visiting me mate. I could feel something bad wiz going to ’appen. Oh my God. I better get down there. I better see what I can do.”
With that, the ragged soul of the notorious doorstep-robber streaked straight through five or six customers, a table, and the front wall of the Bird In Hand, gushing into the night outside like angry steam. Bill didn’t know if the ghost-vagrant would be able to help that young girl or not, nor if the demon would still be in the front seat when Freddy got there, but it didn’t matter. They’d done all they could and now it was out of their hands. Perhaps it always had been.
With the hooked-nosed drunk still giggling as he pointed at the ghostly children only he could see, the dead gang followed Freddy out into the dark gullet of Sheep Street, but the disincarnate dosser had already vanished, off about his urgent business. Phyllis threw her putrid stole across her shoulder like a zombie child-star and announced that they’d head back up Broad Street to the Mayorhold, where they would return to Tower Street and next ascend up to the Works, or what was left of that sublime establishment in 2006. Then they’d take Michael back to 1959, his body, and his life.
This had of course been Bill’s idea, but in the pit of his long-vanished stomach he was dreading it, the spoiled Mansoul and the Destructor, most especially the latter. It was what it represented, the annihilating thing in everybody’s lives, regardless of what form it took. For Bill, he’d first felt its remorseless turning currents when he’d been alive, a seventeen-year-old freshly expelled from school and trying his first shot of smack in a candle-lit party room, one Friday night after the pub. They’d all been there, all of his mates, or at least a good number of them. Kevin Partridge, Big John Weston, pretty Janice Hearst, Tubbs Monday and about four others that Bill could remember. Tubbs had been the generous supplier of the goods in question, and it had been his works that the rest of them were passing round. And while it had turned out he was himself immune to the disease, Tubbs was the carrier who’d passed on Hepatitis B and C to everybody else.
Bill could remember every daft word of their unimportant chatter as they’d sat handing the spike around, even remembered the chill instant when he’d briefly thought to himself I shouldn’t be doing this, almost as if he’d known this was the action that would kill him, forty years or so along the linger of his life. That was the moment when, in retrospect, he’d felt the brush of the Destructor, felt its sobering breeze blown from the future. And yet Bill had done it anyway, as if he’d had no choice about it, as if it was destiny, which he supposed it had been. “Yeah, cheers”, Bill had said, and pushed the needle in.
He thought about the chat he’d overheard, between the friendly builder Mr. Aziel and Phil Doddridge, when Doddridge had asked the angle if mankind had ever truly had free will, to which the long-faced Mr. Aziel had responded glumly in the negative, then added “Did you miss it?”, followed by unfathomable laughter. Unfathomable at the time, at least, although Bill understood it now. He got the gag. In some ways, it was almost comforting, the notion that whatever you did or accomplished, you were in the end only an actor running through a masterfully scripted drama. You just didn’t know it at the time, and thought you were extemporising. It was sort of comical, Bill saw that now, but he still found some solace in the thought that in a predetermined world, there was no point at all in fretting over anything, nor any purpose to regret.
He was still trying to draw reassurance from that when the Dead Dead Gang arrived in Tower Street and began their climb up to the sooty wreck of Heaven.
** <strong>THE DESTRUCTOR</strong>
<em><strong>“M</strong></em><em>ichael? Ooh Gawd. Michael, can you ’ear me? Please cough. Please breathe …”</em>
<em>“ ’Old on, we’re nearly there. ’Old on, Doreen.”</em>
The sight of sulphurous Sam O’Day leaning out through the window of that car, the one that had the lady being hurt inside it, that had nearly done for Michael. And the pub full of bad ghosts, with those two screaming wooden people and the man whose features floated round his face like clouds, that had almost been worse. Those things aside, though, he was starting to get used to all this haunting business.
He liked burrowing through time, and being in a gang, and having fallen secretly in love with Phyllis even though she didn’t want to be his girlfriend. Being in love was the main thing, after all, and Michael couldn’t see that it much mattered if the other person felt the same or even knew you loved them. Surely just that sad and lovely feeling was enough? That was the thing that everyone wrote songs and poems about, wasn’t it?
Michael was even growing fond of all the other Michaels that would split off from him every time he moved. It was a bit like having your own home crowd of football supporters following you everywhere, and made you feel more confident and not so lonely. Even though he knew that all his doubles were made out of nothing more than ghost-light, he was getting quite attached to them. He’d even started giving them all separate names, but as these were all variations or diminutives of Michael – Mike, Mick, Mickey, Mikey, Micko and some others that were just sounds he’d made up – it had been pointless and he’d packed it in. Besides, they melted into thin air after only a few seconds, and if you’d made friends with them and given them a name it only made it that much harder.
Actually, there were a lot of things about the afterlife that Michael liked. Walking through walls was fun, and seeing in the dark, and flying through the night was the thrill of a deathtime, but by far the best thing about being dead was eating Puck’s Hats. He had been put off at first by the idea of biting into pretty little fairies, but once he’d found out that they had sweet and succulent white fruit inside rather than giblets he had taken to it with surprising gusto. It was only like eating a jelly baby after all, he’d rationalised, even if, as with jelly babies, you still felt a wee bit guilty when you bit their feet off. Anyway, given the phantom blossoms’ luscious flavour, Michael thought he might have wolfed down Puck’s Hats by the dozen even if the starfish things had kicked and wept and begged him not to. Well, not really, but they did taste wonderful. He’d miss them when he finally got taken back to life again.
From what Phyllis had told him this would be quite soon, although apparently the Dead Dead Gang needed to take him for one last trip to the Upstairs place, Mansoul, before they took him home. That was why they’d just billowed like a thick fog of old photographs across the Mayorhold, letting the cars hurtle through them so that they’d caught blurry glimpses of dash-lit interiors, men muttering to themselves and couples bickering, before the gang had settled once more on the sunken paths of Tower Street. Peering up towards the hulking blocks of flats, the two huge landmarks with the NEWLIFE lettering that loomed over the underpasses and the cowering council houses, Michael thought the massive tombstones looked more worn out than they’d been a short while earlier, before the giant builders had their fight, when Michael had run off from all the others and got lost. The burrowing about through time could get confusing, it was true, but by his reckoning the previous visit to the tower blocks would have been no longer than twelve months ago. How could somewhere start looking so roughed-up and old within a year? His house along St. Andrew’s Road, the one that wasn’t there up in this draughty century, had been about a hundred years old when he and his family were living in it, and had still looked better-kept and nicer than the tall flats did.
He still wasn’t entirely sure what Phyllis and the others wanted him to see up in Mansoul or why they were determined he should see it, but if it was to be his last adventure in the Upstairs world then he was going to make the most of it. He privately suspected that the gang were going to show him something that was even more fantastic than the things he’d seen already, as a sort of special treat or party to commemorate his going away. At three, he’d been through enough Christmases and birthdays to know that when somebody was planning a surprise for you, you had to make out that you didn’t know, or else you’d spoil it. That was why he was just quietly smirking to himself while Phyllis and the others sorted out their entrance to the builders’ meeting-place, the Works, and all pretended to be worried over something. Michael knew what they were doing. They were trying to throw him off the scent of the amazing pageant they were organising to mark his departure, but he didn’t let on that he knew. He didn’t want to hurt their feelings.
Michael played along, then, as the gang assembled on each other’s shoulders, a manoeuvre he’d seen them perform before. John stood at the bottom of the tower, then Reggie Bowler, balanced with his worn-out boots to either side of John’s heroic face. Clambering up the two boys like a mountaineer, Phyllis was perched on top of Reggie, fumbling in the air above her at the summit of the human pile. Since Michael, Bill and Marjorie were littlest and therefore of no great advantage to the height of the arrangement, they just stood and watched from a few paces further up the walkway.
Mildly puzzled, Michael asked Bill what the gang’s three tallest ghosts were up to.
“Well, if you remember, the last time we wiz up ’ere in this new century, we dug back down to 1959 and went from there up to Mansoul. We went in through that boarded-up old building that wiz on one corner of the Mayorhold, where the first town hall had once stood, ages back. The thing wiz, this time we don’t want to show you Mansoul like it wiz in 1959. We want to show you what it looks like now, in 2006, and up ’ere there’s no place left standing we can enter through. But that’s all right. When we ’ad all of our adventures in the future, up in Snow Town and all that, we left a hole up in the air around ’ere, covered over with a bit of carpet like the trapdoor of our den on the rough ground near Lower ’Arding Street. That’s what our Phyll’s looking for now. Oy, Reggie! ’Ere’s your chance! Look up ’er frock!”
Teetering above them, Phyllis called down through the sickly sodium light.
“Just you dare, Reggie Bowler, an’ I’ll piddle on yer ’ead. Now ’ush up an’ behave. I think I’ve found it.”
Making pulling motions in the dark above her as if hauling something to one side, the Dead Dead Gang’s intrepid leader was uncovering a ragged patch of violet-blue which hung there in an overcast sky that was otherwise completely colourless. Having thus located the gang’s route up through the shouts and sirens of the night into Mansoul, Phyllis next went about directing their ascent. She told the crew’s three smallest members to climb up the ladder formed by their companions, with Bill going first, then Michael, and then Marjorie. When this was done they helped her up and through the sky-hole so that she in turn could help up John and Reggie. After they’d replaced the waterlogged and filthy carpet-remnant that had been used to conceal the aperture, the ghost-gang stood beside it for a moment, taking stock of their ominous new surroundings. Michael was a bit put out, as these did not suggest the special treat he’d been expecting. Probably, he thought, the others were just dragging things out so it would be more of a surprise.
The space that the gang stood in, cavernous and indigo, was nonetheless still recognisable as the same ghost-structure they’d climbed through just before the angle-fight, although in a much worse state of repair. At least one of the phantom floors had fallen in completely, due to what seemed to be water-damage from above. Sodden and broken beams stuck out from halfway up one tall and badly distressed wall like snapped ribs and the bluish light was everywhere, scabbing to purple where the shadows pooled.
Michael remembered that in 1959 this building had been all in black and white, with no apparent hue at all until you went up to Mansoul by that short flight of useless, narrow stairs on the top floor. It looked as if the world Upstairs was leaking colour, amongst other things. Michael couldn’t remember all this water being here before, streaming like silver down the derelict and towering walls, or gathering in hollows like carpeted rock pools down amidst the rubble of the floor. It also seemed as if the quality of sound found in Mansoul had percolated down into the usually-muffled phantom realm along with all the wetness and the moody coloured light. Each plip, drip, splash and glassy tinkling reverberated eerily about the echoing, damp-scented ruin, which resembled nothing more than some enormous warehouse after an insurance fire.
Damp-scented? Michael realised that along with sound and colour filtering down from above, his sense of smell had started to improve to something more like the rich, overwhelming faculty that it had been Upstairs, where there were entire stories in the way that something smelled. He was beginning, for example, to detect the stink of Phyllis’s fur wrap, along with the perfumes of mould, decay and – what was it, that other thing? He sniffed the air experimentally, confirming his suspicions. It was smoke, the faintest whiff of it, and Michael couldn’t tell where it was coming from.
He stood with his five phantom friends, who all seemed genuinely hushed by the thick atmosphere of desolation that had fallen on them – along with the cobalt light and the cascades of water – from above. While he suspected they were only putting on an act to conceal the surprise they had in store for him, Michael was feeling a bit put out by his going-away party so far and sincerely hoped that it would pick up later. He gazed up into the dripping blue gloom overhead and listened to the ringing leaky-tap noises, the gush and spatter, burbling liquid trills that almost had the sound of whispered conversation.
<em>“Ooh, Gawd. Ooh, Gawd, Doug, I think ’e’s gone. Whatever shall we do?”</em>
<em>“Just you ’ang on, Doreen. ’Ang on, gel. It’s just up over the Mounts. We’ll be there in another minute …”</em>
Still with no one really saying very much, Michael had joined his ghostly playmates as they’d started their ascent of the partly-collapsed building’s interior. This proved a lot more difficult than when they’d come this way before. For one thing, the dilapidated staircase they’d used then looked to be long since gone, requiring the six children to climb up the crumbling walls like spiders, but with half as many legs. Brave John went first, pointing out foot and handholds, indentations in the sodden plaster, for the benefit of the five spectral youngsters who were following him.
For another thing, besides there being vestiges of Mansoul’s sound and smell and colour down here in the normally sense-stifling ghost-seam, traces of the upper world’s increased feelings of weight and gravity were also evident. If they’d have fallen from the sheer face of the wall, they’d probably still have descended slowly enough not to seriously hurt themselves, but flying through the air or bouncing up like lunar beach balls obviously wasn’t going to work. All of them felt too heavy and too solid, meaning that they had no other choice but to climb slowly and laboriously up the high wall in a cautious human chain. They still had a few after-pictures peeling from them, but as they went higher these grew flimsier and fainter, and then winked out of existence altogether.
Part of the top storey had not yet collapsed completely, with some areas of floorboards and a few supporting beams remaining, though these sagged and looked precarious. After what seemed to Michael like at least an hour of climbing, the Dead Dead Gang at last reached these creaking islands of comparative security. The temporarily-dead toddler wriggled on his tummy up over the soggy planks that were the platform’s edge, with Phyllis pushing from behind and big John pulling from in front. It felt nice, being able to stand up – if only on the sturdier, beam-reinforced parts of the floor – and have a short rest after all that scrambling.
While they all recovered, Phyllis generously passed around some of the dwarf variety of Puck’s Hats that they’d found at the asylums, where the little fairies were only a half-inch tall. Michael discovered that when eaten in closer proximity to Mansoul, where your senses all woke up, these tasted and smelled even better than they had down in the ghost-seam. Sweet juice glistening on his chin, he’d sat against a doorframe that was only half there with his slipper-clad feet hanging past the rotted flooring’s edges, kicking back and forth above the sapphire-tinted abyss.
He thought about where they’d been, the things they’d seen and heard. They’d gone for tea and cakes at Mr. Doddridge’s, and then they’d walked along that funny bridge-thing out to the asylums. The asylums were where they kept people who’d gone cornery, and because people like that were all mixed-up in their heads then the asylums had got all confused and muddled up together too. It had been a peculiar place, with all the firework-sprays of coloured light and then the other Bill and Reggie from the future turning up and stealing most of the mad-apples. What had struck him as the oddest thing, though, was the way that Phyllis, John and Marjorie had acted when they’d happened on that pair of living ladies who were sitting on the bench. These had both looked completely normal and were just having a talk, the way that grown-ups did sometimes. Michael had not been really listening to them, but he thought the taller and more fragile-looking one had said that her dog used to get in bed with her. This sounded like the sort of thing that a pet dog would more than likely do, and on reflection it was probably the reason why his mum had never let him have one, but he couldn’t see why that had made Phyllis and John look so upset. Perhaps they had both come from tidier and more fastidious homes than his.
It had been after they’d returned from the asylums, though, when they’d come up into this funny-feeling century which he’d disliked so much the last time they were here, that things had started to turn a bit horrible. When they’d jumped from the Ultraduct down to Chalk Lane in nothing-six or wherever they were, it had just been beginning to get dark, which Michael always found a bit unsettling. When he’d still been alive, if he’d had dreams where it was night-time in the dream, they’d always turn out to be nightmares. For a long while he’d thought that this was the definition of a nightmare: they were dreams where the strange things that happened all took place by night. So when the darkness had begun to settle while the ghost-gang mucked about down in that big lagoon-place, he’d been feeling a bit nervous from the start.
The trip he’d taken with Bill, Marjorie and Reggie – which he hadn’t really understood the purpose of – had been a bit of fun, or at least those parts that involved playing at trains or flying through the night sky had been. Michael hadn’t liked that draughty yard with all the metal barrels in it much, though. Miserable and uninviting as the enclosure had looked, there’d been something about it that the child had found disturbingly familiar, even though he’d never visited the place before. Perhaps he’d seen it during one of the innumerable run-throughs of his life which Phyllis and the rest assured him he’d experienced already, even if he didn’t actually remember any of them. Perhaps the drab yard was somewhere that he would one day become familiar with, although he found that this thought filled him with a heartache that was inexplicable.
It had been after they’d returned through the night sky to the lagoon, however, that events had taken a severe turn for the worse. He’d cried a little bit when Phyllis and the rest had let him go and have a look at the bare grass patch on St. Andrew’s Road, with nothing left to show him and his family had ever lived there, but the crying hadn’t been a bad thing. It had just been Michael starting to accept the way things were, the way that in the mortal world people and places would just flash by and be done with in an instant. That was how life was, but in the end none of that mattered because death was different. Death and time weren’t really happening, which meant that everyone and everywhere were there forever in Mansoul. His house was up there somewhere, with its faded red front door, its china swan in the front window and its largely-unused boot-scrape set into the wall beside the bottom doorstep. He’d been comforted by that and so had wiped his eyes and set off with the rest of the gang for the Mayorhold, which was when the really bad things had commenced.
The first and probably the worst had been the thing that happened in that little walled-in garage place just off the lower end of Bath Street. Everyone had crowded round the parked car as if to stop Michael seeing what was going on inside, but he had glimpsed enough to know that a bad man had got a lady pinned down underneath him and was hurting her, punching her like he was a boxer. Then when Bill, who Michael had begun to like, had led him away from the vehicle and to one side, that’s when they’d seen the other person sitting in the driver’s seat. That’s when he’d seen side-winding Sam O’Day and been so frightened that his heart had almost started beating.
He had known that he was bound to meet the devil at least once more, with the inevitability that a bad dream has, or a frightening program on the telly. He just hadn’t been expecting it to be right there and then, nor had he thought the demon would remember all that business about Michael having someone killed. He was at least relieved that he had managed to avoid doing a dreadful thing like that. That stuck-up Sam O’Day had thought he was so clever, but he’d still not managed to turn Michael to an instrument of murder, for which Michael felt he could congratulate himself.
Of course, once they’d thwarted the fiend by the surprisingly successful and simply-accomplished trick of running away screaming, they’d gone to that dreadful pub that Michael didn’t even want to think about. Upon the few mortal occasions when he’d been taken into a tavern’s yard or garden by his mum and dad, he’d found pubs a bit gruff and grown-up and intimidating for his tastes, but that was nothing when compared with how he’d felt up at the Jolly Smokers. The man with a crawling face, and those poor wooden things that had apparently just surfaced from the barroom floor, he was quite certain that these images would be with him for the remainder of his life, no matter what everyone said about how all of this would be forgotten once they’d got him back inside his body and he’d somehow been reanimated. Michael wondered how all that was going, then remembered he was now in nothing-six, the choking incident over and done with nearly fifty years before, and wondered instead how all that had gone.
<em>“Michael? Come on, Michael. Breathe. Breathe for yer mum.”</em>
When everyone had finished the emergency supply of midget Puck’s Hats, Phyllis led the way through what remained of the deteriorating building’s upper floor, across the safest-looking planks and beams to what upon their previous visit had been a small office at one end but was now an anonymous and open space, squelchy with water. Up against one of the two surviving walls, with a few of its narrow rungs gone since the last time that they’d seen it, was the Jacob Flight which led up to a cloudy-looking crook-door in the ceiling. This, thought Michael, would be when everyone all jumped out and yelled ‘surprise’ and showed him all the ice-cream and the jellies and the presents at his going-away party.
But there wasn’t any special treat awaiting Michael in Mansoul. There wasn’t any party. There was hardly a Mansoul.
The crook-door had looked cloudy because the whole ground-floor area of The Works was prowled by huge and rolling billows of white smoke. This was due to the fact that one vast wall of the cathedral-sized hall was on fire, with builders and some larger and more indeterminate forms visible through the thick haze, all working hard to put it out. Arranging themselves into chains they passed gigantic goblets hand to hand, there seemingly being few buckets to be found about Mansoul. The spillage, bouncing Chinese ivory-puzzle droplets of the more-than-3D water Michael had seen earlier, had spread across the massive flagstones of the floor and was presumably responsible for all the flooding and despoliation down below.
The Dead Dead Gang climbed from the dank and doleful blue expanses of the phantom building up into the even worse place that was up above it. Standing huddled round the crook-door set into the flagstone flooring of the Works, the tough crew were quite clearly frightened as they peered into the drifts of smoke that scudded everywhere about them. With a sinking feeling, Michael realised that their anxious glances hadn’t been an act to cover up some carefully-planned celebration. They had been exactly what they looked like, terrified expressions on the faces of small children who were going to watch Heaven burning.
Phyllis was holding up her woollen cardigan – which was now ice-cream pink again – to cover both her mouth and nose against the acrid fumes. At least, thought Michael with his blue eyes watering, you couldn’t really smell her rabbit necklace when this smoke was everywhere. She gave her orders between coughs.
“All right, let’s make a line with everybody ’anging on the coat or jumper o’ the kid in front, so as we wun’t get lorst. We’ll try and get across the floor to where them stairs wiz last time we wiz ’ere, so we can get ayt on the balcony. Come on, you lot. This wun’t get any better if we stand araynd from now until the cows come ’ome.”
Obediently, Michael gathered the collar of his dressing gown together with one hand, holding it up over his nose and mouth, while with the other hand he grabbed at the rear waistband of John’s trousers as the older boy stood in the line ahead of him. Behind him, Michael could feel Phyllis take a hold upon the tartan belt that he had knotted round his midriff. In this fashion, single file as if they were explorers in a vapour-jungle, they set off across a floor they knew was vast despite the fact that at that moment everything more than a yard or so away from them was hidden by the creeping smoke.
The gang had gone only a little way before Michael remembered the demonic decorations, all the intricate and interlocking devil-patterns that had writhed with a malign vitality on the six dozen massive flags that formed the area’s floor. He looked down in alarm at the huge paving slab that his plaid slippers were then scuffling over, half-expecting to see some grotesque design of jigsaw-fitted scorpions and jellyfish, but what he actually saw was only cracked and broken stonework, which was somehow worse. Beneath a sliding veil of grey smoke and a scattering of the discarded leaflet-guides that Michael had read on his previous visit, there was only the smashed paving, fissured into monstrous pieces as if broken and pushed up by tree roots or some other great force from below. The colourful and fiendishly involved depictions of the seventy-two devils were completely absent. They weren’t shattered with the stones that they’d been painted on, nor were they faded or concealed behind graffiti. They were simply gone, as if those ghastly and resplendent presences had seeped out of their portraits once the glaze was fractured. Still holding his dressing gown over his nose like a cowboy bandanna, Michael glanced round nervously into the churning billows. If the devils weren’t trapped in their pictures then where were they?
The six children, heading for the huge workplace’s south wall in their stumbling chain-gang line, had not gone far across the smoke-wreathed factory floor before the toddler had an answer to his question: trundling from the bitter fug ahead of them was an enormous wagon, an immense flat cart that had eight mighty wagon-wheels on either side. The vehicle was slowly being towed with numerous stout, tarry ropes towards the building’s blazing northern end by what seemed to be at least thirty of the lower-ranking builders in the pigeon-coloured robes, with more of them grouped to the rear of the colossal trolley, pushing from behind while their companions pulled and heaved in front.
These rank-and-file celestial workers all looked much the worse for wear compared with the brisk, bustling employees that they’d been when last the Dead Dead Gang came to Mansoul, in 1959 to watch the angle-fight. Their hands were scratched and callused and some of them wore no sandals. As they hauled upon their creaking ropes, Michael could see their delicately-tinted robes were torn and scorched, their melancholy faces smudged with soot and grease. They kept their downcast eyes upon the splintered flagstones at their feet, perhaps to avoid dwelling on the mountainous impossibility that they were trying to move, the behemoth that squatted unconcerned upon their rolling platform.
At first Michael took this for a statue or an idol of some kind, an incalculably large toad carved from what seemed to be solid diamond, bigger than a church or a cathedral. Then he noticed that its dazzling sides were going in and out and realised it was breathing. As he understood that he was in the presence of a living creature, almost certainly one of the missing devils from the flagstones, Michael looked more closely.
Its blunt head, as flat and wide as if it had been squashed, was tilted back imperiously upon several bulging chins, great rolls of diamond fat like layers in a jewel-and-zeppelin sandwich. Seven disproportionately tiny piggy eyes, arranged to form a ring, were set into its precious brow. These would each blink indifferently after unbearably protracted intervals, in no distinguishable sequence, then return to staring loftily into the white or blue-brown clouds that hid the upper reaches of the Works from view. It seemed to regard being dragged upon a trolley as a terrible indignity, and Michael wondered if felt ashamed about its size and weight.
Whatever it was really made from – be it diamond or, for all that Michael knew, cut glass – it was translucent, and Michael got the impression that the monster was completely hollow, like an Easter-egg. What’s more, when he peered through its swollen sides he thought that he could see a sort of blurry sloshing motion, as though the leviathan were half filled-up with water. From the way it pursed its wide slash of a mouth the creature looked uncomfortable, and Michael thought that having all that liquid in its belly, turning it into a whopping crystal jug, might possibly explain this.
The great wagon rumbled slowly forward on its way to the north wall of the fire-fogged enclosure, while the line of phantom children passed it as they crept and coughed their way by, heading in the opposite direction. Michael wished he could ask Phyllis why these awful things were happening, but everybody had their coats or jumpers covering their mouths and noses, and so nobody could talk.
Only when the cart and its tremendous burden had almost completely passed the ghost-gang by did one amongst the scores of angles pushing from the rear notice the scruffy throng of dead kids and raise an alarm.
“Wharb mict yel doungs?”
This meant <em>What are you doing here amongst these ruins and these smoking relics when thou art but children</em>, and a further paragraph or so in the same vein, translating roughly to “Oy! You lot! Clear off!”
Everyone froze, not sure what they should do, with even Phyllis seeming disconcerted. It was clearly one thing to be generally disobedient and cheeky when it came to ghosts or devils, but if builders told someone to do something, even the lower-ranking builders, then there wasn’t any argument. Everyone did what they were told. They just did. Luckily, it was at this point that a second dove-robed labourer detached himself from the main team that strained and pushed at the huge wagon’s rear, to intervene upon the gang’s behalf. He called to his more bellicose confederate in a convivial and reassuring tone.
“Whornyb delm stiv cagyuf!”
<em>Worry not, my brother, for this is the Dead Dead Gang that I did tell you of some several centuries ago</em> … and so on. It was Mr. Aziel, the builder who had taken them to visit Mr. Doddridge following the Great Fire of Northampton back down in the sixteen-hundreds. The first angle, who had shouted at the children, now turned round to gape at Aziel in disbelief.
“Thedig cawn folm spurbyjk?”
<em>The Dead Dead Gang we read of in that splendid book? My brother, why did you not say? Is that Drowned Marjorie with all those stinking rabbits round her neck?</em> When all the meanings of the other builder’s breathless outburst had subsided, Mr. Aziel shook his head. His long, lugubrious face was still recognisable beneath its mask of sweat and black dust, shaking his head as he replied to his companion.
“Nopthayl jis wermuyc.”
<em>No, that is Phyllis Painter. Now, I must accompany them on their journey. It is written.</em> With that Mr. Aziel turned from his colleague and began to walk across the ruined flagstones, heading for the children with a fond smile showing through the inadvertent blacking.
“Herm loyd fing sawtuck?”
<em>Hello, my young friends. Shall I take you to see the great end of all wonders?</em>
All the other children nodded, since consenting verbally would have meant taking down the tents of clothing that they held across their mouths. Though Michael wasn’t certain what he was agreeing to, he nodded along with the rest of the Dead Dead Gang, so as not to be the odd one out.
Aziel led them from the front end of their shambling, wheezing queue, with tall John holding tight onto a rear tuck of the artisan’s singed green-and-grey-and-violet gown. Although it still took ages to reach the south wall where all the comet-spangled steps were, they made better time than if they hadn’t had the builder guiding them. What’s more, they were less cowed by all the towering and unnatural shapes that stalked or slithered past them in the mercifully obscuring clouds, going the other way. At last the angle, who was seemingly impervious to smoke, announced that they were at the bottom of the south wall’s staircase. Its oak banisters and rail were mostly gone or else reduced to charred stumps, but the night-blue stairs with their embedded constellations were intact. Still clutching at each other’s clothing, for they were not yet above the level of the roiling fumes, the ruffians cautiously ascended in the wake of Mr. Aziel.
When they were roughly halfway up the first of the long zigzag flights of stairs … fifty or sixty feet over the workplace floor by Michael’s estimation … they broke through the surface of the curdling vapour-ocean into something that was more like air. Michael, however, thought he must have accidentally inhaled some smoke since he was still experiencing difficulty in catching his breath.
<em>“Get ayt the way! Get ayt the way, yer silly bugger! Can’t yer see we’re in an ’urry?”</em>
<em>“Ooh, Doug, ’e’s dead. Ayr Michael’s dead. What are we gunna do? What shall I tell Tom when ’e’s ’ome from work? Ooh, God. Ooohh, God …”</em>
Once they were clear of the asphyxiating fog by several large and midnight-speckled steps, the builder let the children pause to pull down their makeshift bandannas and take in the sights from their new elevation.
The whole bottom level of the vast celestial warehouse was filled by a cube of smoke some sixty feet deep, and the children’s view was as if they were up above the clouds, like people in an aeroplane. The eight-by-nine arrangement of cracked flagstones that had previously kept the devils captive was invisible beneath the shifting, suffocating blanket, as were all the many builders occupied in battling the conflagration threatening the northern wall. The only things that Michael could see poking up above the level of the smog were what he quickly realised must be the smashed floor-tiles’ former occupants.
Something that looked either like a dragonfly or a glass skyscraper was picking its way carefully across the vista upon twelve or so impossibly thin crystal legs. Considerably smaller but still big enough to loom out from the fumes was a tremendous spider-thing that had three heads. The nearest one looked like a cat’s head, if a cat’s head were the same size as a whale, while the one in the middle was that of a tittering long-haired man with lipstick and eye make-up on, who wore a golden crown. The spider’s third head was too far away from Michael to see properly, but he thought it might be a fish or frog. Colossal horrors paced this way and that through the grey fields of murk that stretched below his vantage point as he stood there upon the galaxy-stained stairs with their black stumps of banister. To Michael’s puzzlement, they seemed to be assisting with the fight against the blaze.
At the enormous chamber’s far, north end, Michael could see the diamond toad upon its trolley, or at least could see its head and shoulders where they rose above the smoke. Its priceless cheeks were puffed out like balloons, and with a vehement expression in its ring of piggy eyes it was expelling a great waterspout against the burning wall, so that hot gouts of steam surged up to join with the surrounding swirl. Michael, quite frankly, would have liked to look at it for longer, but that was when Mr. Aziel suggested that they should resume their climb.
They carried on up the star-pimpled stairs. The high-set windows of the Works above them, which had looked out onto clear blue sky the last time Michael had been up this way, now glowered a sullen red. Alarmed, he looked up at the great seal of the Works, the raised disc with the balance and the scroll on, just to make sure it was still all right, but it seemed more or less untouched. He wasn’t certain why he found the crude design’s survival quite so reassuring, unless it implied that even in all this confusion and distress, Justice was still above the street.
Somewhat consoled, Michael continued his ascent. None of the gang were clutching at each other’s jumpers now that they could see where they were going, and Michael made sure that he kept well clear of the stairway’s outside edge, where there were only blackened stumps of balustrade between him and the long drop to the broken slabs below. At last they reached the building’s lowest landing, where the heavy swing-door that led out onto the balcony was situated. The thick portal’s stained glass, heavily discoloured, had been broken in one lower corner. The brass plate was now completely jet with soot, save for the butter-coloured smudges left by Mr. Aziel’s fingers pushing on it, opening the door onto the balcony. A wall of air as thick and warm as gravy rushed in from outside and dashed itself over the builder and the kids, making them blink and gasp. Still following the mournful lesser angle, the Dead Dead Gang filed out through the entrance to the once-majestic walkways of Mansoul.
John crossed himself, while Phyllis groaned as though tormented. Reggie Bowler screwed his hat down tighter and spat spectral phlegm over the remnants of the pitch-daubed handrail. An infernal torture-brazier light crawled on the children’s faces, on the split boards at their feet and sidled everywhere in the prevailing darkness. His expression now more melancholy than was customary, Mr. Aziel gently shepherded the ghost-kids out onto the endless landing, steering them towards a section of the wooden railing that was still intact so that they could see down into the great well of the astral Mayorhold, the arena wherein the gigantic Master Builders had their fight in 1959. For his part, Michael didn’t want to look, and instead focussed his attention on the upper balconies surrounding the unfolded former town square, well above whatever was providing the hell-tinted radiance that was under-lighting everything.
It looked like there was more activity up on the elevated boardwalks than there had been on the smouldering ground floor of the Works. Angles conferred with devils as they overlooked the Mayorhold. Demon work-gangs rasped commands to one another in toe-curling voices that were those of carrion birds or insects, greatly amplified. There were no ghostly throngs of spectators filling the balconies as there had been on Michael’s previous visit here, however, and the few lone, wandering phantoms he could make out all looked frightful or a bit mad.
He could see a chubby man who wore old fashioned clothes and had a round, pink baby face, standing upon the walkway opposite and singing an old hymn in a sweet tenor voice above the chittering and buzzing racket of the labouring devils. In the endlessly unravelling acoustics of Mansoul the singer’s every word was audible despite the distance: “Yea, though I walk through death’s dark vale, yet shall I fear no-oh ill …” The man’s expression, staring petrified into the hell-glow, contradicted the song’s lyrics pointedly. He looked as if he feared ill very much. Elsewhere upon the landings, Michael saw a small gaggle of elderly men and women who clung desperately to one another as they screamed and wept and pleaded for deliverance. Judging from the fact that all of them were naked or clad only in stained underwear, Michael concluded that they must be people having a particularly nasty dream.
The most upsetting stroller on the balconies, however, was a solitary figure on the same stretch of the walkway as the children, someone Michael recognised. Coming towards them from the scorched and partly-ruined landing’s far end was the rumbling ball of frozen fire that walked upon two legs, the blowing-up man that the children had glimpsed in this very spot the last time they’d been up here, nearly fifty years before. He looked the same as he had then, amid the same wasp-swarm of light and shrapnel, walking with the same stiff-legged and deliberate gait, as if he’d done his business in his trousers. The slowed and protracted sound of the explosion that had killed him, stretching and reverberating as it rolled eternally around his blissfully disintegrating form, was audible even across the distance separating Michael and the walking bomb-burst, a low modulated drone that growled aggressively down at the lower threshold of the small boy’s hearing. Tall John, standing next to Michael, had apparently seen the continuously detonating ghost as well.
“Oh. It’s that silly sod blowing himself to bits up here as well, then. If he’s walking back along the linger of Mansoul, then I expect it must be sometime around now that he set out from. I can’t say as I’m surprised, not from the look of things round these parts. If Mansoul itself wiz on fire up in this new century, then wiz it any wonder you’ve got living people doing stupid bloody things like that?” John nodded to the man in question, who was still some distance off and only very slowly getting closer.
“From what Bill said, they’re prepared to get blown up because they think that they’ll end up in Heaven. I suppose that’s what I thought as well, and that’s what all the Jerries thought, and all the Japs. We’re all half-sharp, the lot of us. As if there could be any more to us than what we make of ourselves and our lives while we’re still living them. The people that we are when we’re alive, that’s who we are forever, nipper. Like that dibby Herbert all in pieces down the walkway there.”
John placed one hand upon the toddler’s shoulder, drawing back his fingers when he realised they were touching the discoloured patches where slobbering Sam O’Day had dribbled. Quietly, the taller boy steered Michael over to the fragment of surviving railing where the scorched and sorry-looking builder stood with their four friends.
“Come on. From what Phyll told me while we waited for you and Bill there outside the Jolly Smokers, you’ve been brought up here so we can show you the Destructor. We might just as well get it all over with, then we can take you home.”
Michael felt suddenly afraid and shied back from the landing’s edge, protesting fretfully to the determined-looking older boy.
“But obscenic be four, in Birth Street. It wiz like a sinning-wheel, all smokery and dredgeful and choo-chooing heavenlything to grits!”
John’s resolved expression softened. He could tell how frightened Michael was by the degree to which the infant’s language skills had been derailed by just a solitary mention of the word “Destructor”. Firmly and yet sympathetically, he shook his head.
“No, nipper. You’ve not seen it from up here before, and that makes all the difference, you can trust me. You see, down in Bath Street in the living world, all people see wiz the effects of the Destructor, all the, well, the prostitutes. The drink and drugs and all the fighting, long as anybody can remember but much worse, the way it’s got in these times. Then, if you’re with the rough sleepers in the ghost-seam, you can see the thing itself, or at least you can see a bit of it: the hub, the big dark whirlpool thing that you saw down in Bath Street. From up here in Mansoul, though, you see a bigger picture. You can see the whole of it.”
By now the pair were closer to their friends and Mr. Aziel. Phyllis Painter reached out and took Michael by the hand.
“Look, it’s important that yer know abayt this. This’ll show yer why things are the way they are. See, yer remember ’ow we told yer all abayt the monk ’oo brought the cross ’ere from Jerusalem, to mark the centre o’ the land? Well, this place wiz the centre in all sorts o’ ways. It’s in the middle o’ the country, true enough, and it’s the middle of the country’s spirit, too. It’s where all o’ the big religious changes and upheavals are kicked off, and where the wars are finished. But the most important way that we’re bang in the middle wiz that we’re the centre of the … what’s it called, John? The way things are all fitted together in one piece?”
“The structure.”
“Structure, that’s the word. The Boroughs is the middle bit of England’s structure. It’s the knot what ’olds the cloth together, if yer like. And back when everybody sort of understood that, understood it in their ’earts, then even when the times wiz bad they’d still got that big structure, that cloth, like a safety-net they could fall back on. But there come a time – I reckon it was back araynd the First World War meself – when all that started changin’. People started to forget abayt the things that ’ad been so important to ’em fifty years before. They weren’t so certain abayt God, or King, or country, and they started pullin’ dayn the Boroughs, lettin’ it fall into disrepair. Can yer see what I’m gettin’ at? It wiz the centre of the land, of England’s structure, and they let it come to bits. They put up the Destructor, and for years all of Northampton’s shit went up that chimney – ’scuse my French – and there wiz stinking smoke from Grafton Street to Marefair. It become a symbol of the way that people saw the Boroughs, even us what lived there, as a place where all the rubbish went. It wiz that disrespect what done it, if you ask me. It wiz that what give one filthy chimney so much power in people’s minds.”
Here, Mr. Aziel interjected.
“Bixt vorm fwandyg sulpheck.”
<em>It is a torus, is the secret shape of space and time. Tori enclose the necessary holes within the fabric of existence, but their spread endangers all. The man who stole my chisel, Snowy Vernall, had learned from his father that a chimney is a torus. That is why he spent much of his life on roofs, keeping an eye on the infernal things, when all the time it was the chimneystack in Bath Street here that posed the only serious threat.</em>
A rush of sparks erupted from the well-mouth of the Mayorhold, scurrying up into the dark behind the silhouetted builder. Timber was collapsing somewhere lower down. Michael was still attempting to look anywhere but at the view beyond the railings. The old people in their underpants still huddled in a wailing, weeping mass of wrinkled pink and scrubby grey. The baby-faced man was still singing the same hymn, eyes streaming as with mad determination he stared fixedly into the heat-haze. The exploding person further down the balcony seemed to have paused in order to appreciate the view, one spectacle looking admiringly upon another. Somewhere nearby, perhaps on the landing overhead, a team of fire-fighting demons were discussing the logistics of those devils who had wings flying reconnaissance above the fire-pit of the former town square. Michael played for time.
“Gut eye don’t blunderstand! How clang one chillery-pot claws all dis turble?”
John sighed.
“Because of where it wiz and what it meant, that’s how. It wizn’t just Northampton’s waste that the Destructor wiz intended to destroy, it wiz the whole community that it wiz built right in the middle of. Destroying people’s dreams and hopes about a better future for their kids, that takes a special sort of fire, a fire that people in the living world can’t even see, not even when its turning all their houses, schools and clinics into rubble. The thing wiz, a fire like that, you can’t just put it out by knocking down the waste incinerator that it started from. By the time the Destructor wiz pulled down, back in the ’Thirties, its effects had spread into the way that people thought about the Boroughs and about themselves. Its special sort of fire had spread right to the heart of things. Down in the half-world all our ghosts and memories were smouldering, until Mansoul itself wiz set alight. It’s burning, nipper. Heaven’s burning. Come and have a look yourself, then we can all get out of here.”
Still unconvinced but prompted by the promise of an early exit from this dreadful situation, Michael took a slippered step towards the landing’s edge. He didn’t know if it was fear that made his throat so sore and tight or if it was the Guy Fawkes tang the air had, but he almost felt like he was choking.
<em>“Doug, that policeman blew ’is whistle at us.”</em>
<em>“I don’t care. It’s only down York Road now. You just ’ang on.”</em>
Almost at the gap-toothed railings, Michael thought he heard his mum’s voice over all the clamour of the devils and the high-voiced man who still sang the same hymn, but realised that he must have just imagined it. With John and Phyllis standing to each side of him, he stepped up to the short stretch of remaining balustrade and gazed down, between its pitch-painted bars, into the roaring, swirling mouth of the Destructor.
It was all the dogs, the drain, the smoke that everything was either going to, or down, or up in. It was rack, and it was ruin, and the destination of the handcarts. It was other people. It was where you led apes. It was what you rode for leather and what came in absence of high water.
Pink light broke on Michael’s cheeks, his forehead, and below the Mayorhold was a mile-wide maelstrom, all ablaze. Worse, as John had explained, this was not common fire that lit a cigarette or charred a house. This was instead a pure and awful poetry of fire, that set morality and trust and human happiness alight, that turned the fragile threads connecting people into ashes. This was fire enough to burn down decency, or self-respect, or love. Michael looked down into the spitting, crackling chasm. From the flaming debris turning in its magma stir he realised that it was consuming nothing physical, but only a more precious fuel of wishes, images, ideas and recollections. It was as if something had collected up a thousand different family albums full of corner-mounted photographs, remembered moments that had been important to somebody once, and in a fit or misery or rage had thrown them all into a furnace. Blistered incidents and scorching pictures circled sluggishly in the volcanic eddy, in the churning black and red.
He saw terraced houses fall against each other in a run of demolition dominoes, complex spider-webs of jitties and rear-entries simplified to blocks of flats like giant filing cabinets. Hundreds of heirloom prams rolled rattling and squeaking down a smoky gradient into the abyss. Everybody’s pets died, countless budgie-cages empty save for shit and sandpaper that tumbled endlessly through ruddy darkness. Everybody’s favourite toys were lost. Small girls who wanted to be nurses, show-jumpers or film stars played a skipping game, ageing with each turn of the rope to drudges, inadvertent mothers or hairnets and pairs of hands on a conveyor belt. Small boys who wanted to be football heroes kicked and kicked and kicked and never realised that their goal was unattainable, was only drawn in chalk onto the shabby brickwork. Envelopes fell with a sigh on bristly doormats bringing bad news from the front line, bank or hospital. A desperate landlord murdered a streetwalker with a hammer in the back yard of his pub, and at the head of Scarletwell Street men in black shirts with moustaches and their skulls shaved halfway up the back held rallies, shouted slogans and folded their arms like gods. Everything burned and didn’t know it burned. These were the pictures in that frightful, final hearth.
Sheep Street seemed to have broken in the middle, its near end a steep slope that was almost vertical, and toppling down it there were fifty years of Bicycle Parades. Girls dressed as fairies rattling their collection tins, deliberately wonky bikes with oval wheels and men whose papier-mâché heads with leprous, peeling paintwork were much bigger than their bodies – all of these poured down the chute into the gaping conflagration of the Mayorhold and were lost. A marching band assembled by the Boy’s Brigade went tumbling after them in a percussion-heavy clattering of drums and cymbals, a lone glockenspiel attempting to perform “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” before it was swallowed in the light, the thunder, the collapse. Eleven-year-old boys with plastered hair that smelled of chlorine and with damp Swiss rolls of towel and swimming trunks inside their shouldered kitbags skittered on the tilting cobbles, trying to arrest their slide. Nothing was safe, the district’s sense of safety having been the first thing to catch fire.
A line of butcher’s, barber’s, greengrocer’s and sweetshops all went in, and then a whole church that he thought might be St. Andrew’s. Michael watched it as it ground and slithered inexorably towards the glaring edge and then tipped over, limestone buttresses crumbling away from the main structure, falling to the firestorm in a shower of smashed stained glass and smoking hymnals. Pews that still had tiny people kneeling in them spilled out of the plunging buildings through its broken doors and windows, dropped into the all-consuming mortal bonfire like unwanted dollhouse furniture. Eyes stinging, Michael saw his own home on St. Andrew’s Road, its windows covered up with corrugated tin, as it sank helplessly into a quicksand of rough grass, its chimney at length disappearing underneath the patch of turf that was itself creeping towards fiery oblivion down an upended Scarletwell Street. Horses pulling tinkling milk floats shied and snorted in distress, dropped steaming fibrous pancakes, good for roses, which were quickly shovelled up into tin buckets by the grubby children who were plummeting behind them on the sudden incline. Everything went on the pyre, went down the flaming pan.
Michael understood that it was meaning that was being turned to ash here, and was not really surprised that many of the burning, blackening scenarios were only meaningful to him. He saw his stick-thin grandma, Clara, fall abruptly to a shiny kitchen floor that wasn’t red and blue tiles like the one they had down on St. Andrew’s Road. He saw his nan, May, clutching at her drooping bosom as she stumbled down the passage of a little modern flat somewhere that wasn’t Green Street, trying to reach the front door and fresh air, collapsing on her face and lying still instead. He saw a hundred other old men and old women moved from the condemned homes where they’d raised their families, dumped in distant districts with nobody that they knew and failing to survive the transplant. By the dozen they keeled over on the well-lit stairs of their new houses; in the unfamiliar indoor toilets; onto their unprecedented fitted carpets; on the pillows of magnolia-painted bedrooms that they failed to wake to. Countless funerals fell into the Mayorhold’s fires, and furtive teenage love-affairs, and friendships between relocated children sent to different schools. Infants began to understand that they would probably now never marry the classmate that they had been expecting to. All the connecting tissue, the affections and associations, became cinders. He became aware that he was weeping, had presumably been weeping for some time.
In the shifting lava patterns of the hell-well he could see that all of it, the wasting of his neighbourhood, had been, was, or would be for nothing. The decline and poverty that marked the Boroughs was a sickness in the human heart that would not be improved by pulling down its oldest and, inevitably, best-constructed buildings. Scattering the displaced occupants would only spread the heartbreak and malaise to other areas, like trying to put out a burning pile of leaves with an electric fan. It was that spread of the Boroughs’ condition, Michael knew, that was the worst part of this whole disaster. Michael knew how it had happened and how it would all work out. He saw both past and future in combusted rubbish circling the nightmare plughole of the astral town square.
There were sepia councillors and planners in Edwardian offices changing the way they thought about the poor, from seeing them as people who had problems to problems themselves, problems of cost and mathematics that could be resolved by tower-block proposals or by columns in a balance-book. He saw blue posters with a woman’s face on. She had pained eyes like somebody who’s embarrassed by you but is too polite to say, and a nose built only for looking down. Out of the hoardings she gazed condescendingly across a landscape where the clearance areas multiplied, England unravelling from its centre outwards until almost everywhere was drunk and out of work and in a fight, just like the Boroughs. Every region started to descend the same slope that led here, that led to soot, sparks and annihilation. On the posters, background colours altered and the woman’s picture was torn down to be replaced by those of men whose smiles looked forced or insincere, if they could even smile at all. Spy cameras flowered from lampposts and the pub names melted into gibberish. People waved their fists, then knives, then guns. He could see money, rustling flows of blue and pink and violet paper bleeding from stabbed schools and gashed amenities. He could see an entire world spiralling down into the incendiary maw of the Destructor.
Over on the square’s far side, standing upon one tier of what seemed to be an unfolded wedding-cake of ugly concrete, the pink-faced man started up his hymn again from the beginning. Elsewhere, one by one, the underdressed and weeping pensioners winked from existence as they woke from their appalling dreams to wet sheets, wards or care-home dormitories. Further down the damaged landing that the builder and the phantom kids were perched upon, the walking ball of light and noise and shrapnel broke off from his contemplation of the fall of Mansoul and commenced again his patient, soiled-trouser shuffle down the balcony towards them, weeping steam, with flying nails and rivets as his halo. It was time to go. Michael had seen enough.
They re-entered the Works by the swing door and went back down the carven blocks of firmament that were the stairs, pulling their dressing gowns or jumpers up over their noses long before they reached the level where the smoke began. Above the choppy vapour ocean, Michael could see the upper reaches of the larger devils as they waded through the fuming fathoms to attack the blaze at the north end. Something that had the head and shoulders of an immense camel – if camels were made from dirty bubble-gum – stood squirting spinning globes of hyper-water at the burning northern wall. Forming a line again and hanging on the clothing of the ghost in front of them, the Dead Dead Gang let Mr. Aziel lead them down into the suffocating shroud.
<em>“There it is! There’s the ’orspital! Goo faster, Doug. Goo faster.”</em>
It took a while for them to make their way back over the smashed, fiend-vacated flagstones to the crook-door in the corner, where the mournful builder shook their hands and said farewell to them, with the farewell alone taking a good five minutes. The gang navigated the disintegrating top floor of the ghost-building below the Works, then carefully descended through the soaked and gaping storeys lower down, hand over hand, the same way they’d gone up. Nobody said much. There was nothing much to say after they’d witnessed the Destructor. Before Michael knew it, he was dropping through the ghost-gang’s secret trapdoor in the phantom ruin’s waterlogged floor, down onto the lamp-lit pavement outside the Salvation Army place in Tower Street. The six kids assembled with their trailing look-alikes upon the sunken walkway, odourless and colourless again now they were back down in the half-world, and awaited Phyllis’s command.
“Right, then. Let’s dig back into 1959, so we can goo up to Mansoul when it’s not burnin’ dayn. If Michael ’ere’s to get back to ’is body, it’ll ’ave to be done from the Attics o’ the Breath, the same way ’e come up ’ere. Everybody pitch in so we get the ’ole dug quicker, and be careful to stop diggin’ ’fore we reach that bloody ghost-storm. If we go back to just after them two Master Builders ’ad their fight, I reckon that should do us.”
And that was precisely what they did, scraping away some fifty years of Mayorhold until they were all able to climb through the resultant hole into the bulb-lit cellar of the newsagent’s, owned by poorly-looking Harry Trasler there in Michael’s native time-zone. They picked their way through all the American adventure magazines, swaggering and salacious mountains that most probably intimidated the neat, nervous stacks of <em>Woman’s Realm</em> which they were standing next to. Floating up the stairs and through the cluttered shop, where the proprietor and his elderly mother were conducting an entirely silent argument, the gang and their pursuing after-pictures poured themselves onto the grass-pierced pavement bordering the Mayorhold.
It was evidently some time following the previous occasion that they’d been down there, but not by very long. The mortal former town square still enjoyed its sunny afternoon, and the boys with the acid-drops whom they’d seen fighting earlier appeared to have made up. As for the ghost-seam, it too seemed to have returned to something like normality. The super-rain was over, leaving phantom puddles fizzing in the cobbled gutters, unseen by the living, and though Michael’s dressing gown was ruffled by mild gusts of an abiding spectral wind he thought the ghost-storm must be finished with by now. The lens-like areas of visual distortion that had rolled around the place and signified the presence of the brawling Master Builders in the world above were gone, and so were the two murderous ghost-women who’d been trying to tear each other into cobwebs outside the Green Dragon. The only remaining indications of the bad mood that had gripped the Mayorhold earlier were the two Jewish-looking ghosts, chuckling and dusting off their hands as they stepped from the public toilets on the square’s far side, into which Michael, earlier, had seen them drag one of those men in the black shirts who turned up around here from time to time. Apart from that it was a perfectly agreeable day, there in 1959 at the convergence of the eight streets that had once comprised the ancient township. Phyllis, with one arm draped around Michael’s shoulder, took charge of the situation.
“Well, then it looks like it’s time to take ayr regimental mascot ’ome. We’ll go up through the old Tayn ’All into the Works and then take ’im across the Attics to the ’orspital.”
Drowned Marjorie piped up at this point, sounding a bit irritated.
“Phyll, that’ll take ages. You know ’ow much bigger everything wiz Upstairs. Why can’t we just take him through the ghost-seam and then go Upstairs when we get to the … oh. Oh, right. I see. Forget that I said anything.”
Phyllis nodded, satisfied by Marjorie’s sort-of apology.
“See what I mean? Dayn at the ’orspital there isn’t any Jacob Flight so we can get Upstairs. I know it’s a long slog across Mansoul, but there’s no other way to do it.”
Bill, who had been standing by himself and staring thoughtfully towards the public toilets at the foot of Silver Street, spoke up at this point.
“Yes there wiz. I know a way that we could get there quicker. Reg, you come with me. As for you others, we’ll meet you lot Upstairs in five minutes’ time.”
With that, grabbing the sleeve of a bewildered Reggie Bowler, Bill ran off along the west side of the Mayorhold before Phyllis could forbid whatever he was planning. The two boys turned right just a little way off, vanishing into the upper stretch of Scarletwell Street that had been the sunken walks of Tower Street up in 2006 only ten minutes back. By the time that the gang got to the corner that their pals had disappeared around, the corner where the mortal Jolly Smokers stood, Reggie and Bill had dug a narrow time-hole and squeezed through it. They were on the aperture’s far side, hurriedly filling in the gap they’d made by dragging threads of day and night across the opening, so that it winked out of existence altogether before Phyllis and the others reached it.
“Ooh, that aggravatin’ little bleeder! You wait ’til I get my ’ands on ’im and bloody Reggie! As if we’d not got enough on ayr plate as it wiz, withayt them clearin’ off like that. Well, sod ’em. We’ll take Michael ’ome withayt ’em. Come on.”
With her string of rabbits swinging angrily she marched across the Scarletwell Street cobbles to the derelict place on the corner opposite the Jolly Smokers. Michael, John and Marjorie trailed after her with the exhaust-fume putter of her after-pictures breaking up against their faces. Michael noticed Phyllis making nervous glances back across her shoulder at the Jolly Smokers as she did so, as if half-expecting Mick Malone or that man with the crawling face to burst out from it and devour her.
Seeping through the boarded-up front door of the forgotten town hall, the quartet of ghost-kids found the place in much the same condition as when they’d come up this way to see the angles fighting. The same wallpaper hung from the plasterwork like sunburn, the same saveloy of poo still curled there in its nest of Double Diamond bottles. The abandoned edifice was still a thing of bricks and mortar here in 1959, where ordinary sunlight fell through slats and carpeted the messy floor in blazing zebra hide. There was no indication of the water-damaged phantom building that they’d recently ascended through, which would be all that stood here within less than fifty years. Michael went with the others up the half-collapsed stairs, grateful that they didn’t have to climb like spiders up that treacherous and trickling wall again.
On the top floor they made their way along into the mouldering boxroom at the end, where a confetti of pale hues diffused into the ghost-seam’s grey through the crook-door atop a creaky Jacob Flight, fugitive colour filtering from the higher world. The gang mounted the useless shallow steps in single file, taking on pink and blue and orange as if they were outlines in a colouring book. The sounds of Mansoul welled around them like theme music in the last five minutes of a film.
As the children emerged onto the echoing and bustling shop floor of the Works, Michael was pleased to see that it was just how he remembered it from the first time he’d been up here. The lower-ranking builders with their robes tinted like pigeon-necks were hurrying everywhere across the seventy-two massive flagstones that now writhed with painted imagery again, the paving’s demon occupants all back in place and scintillating with malevolence. There were no smudge-faced angles or huge diamond toads engaged in battling a blaze and there was no smoke … or at least, not yet. Not for another forty years or so. The toddler felt haunted, felt all horrible whenever he involuntarily remembered the Destructor; when he thought of that incendiary millwheel grinding Michael’s home and world and grandmothers to nothing while it consumed paradise. How could that be? How could this busy realm of enterprise and order go so literally to hell in a few decades, more than likely within Michael’s renewed lifetime? How could heaven be on fire unless it was the end of everything, only a few score years into the future? It disturbed him more than any of the frights or freaks he’d witnessed in the ghost-seam, and he really didn’t like to think about it.
Deftly, the Dead Dead Gang wove their way into the complicated choreography of the industrious builders, ducking through brief gaps in the continuous processions of these grey-robed workmen, skipping over numerous discarded “Welcome to the Works” books that had been dropped to the demon-decorated flooring. They were heading not for the south wall that had the stellar stairway and the crudely-rendered emblem halfway up it, but towards the eastern side of the enclosure, where it looked as if there were a door that led out to street-level rather than the elevated balconies. Like the exits upstairs, this was a swing portal with a stained-glass panel similar to the ones you sometimes saw in pubs. They pushed it open and the morning breezes of Mansoul washed over them, almost dispelling the aroma of their leader’s rancid necklace.
It was a fine day Upstairs, with that smell like burned soil which hung over summer streets after a storm. On the mile-wide expanse of the unfolded Mayorhold there were many brightly-dressed ghosts standing there chatting excitedly about the just-concluded brawl between the builders. Meanwhile other spirits tried to chip off fragments from the solid pools of hardened gold that lay in dazzling splotches round the square which Michael, with some consternation, realised were dried angle-blood. The fight had obviously finished only recently, and Michael found himself considering the combatants and wondering what they were doing now, although somehow he knew.
In his mind’s eye he saw the white-haired builder, who would even now be striding angrily along the walkways up above the Attics of the Breath with one eye blackened and his lips split. He’d be on his way back to the trilliard hall to take his interrupted shot when he met with sardonic Sam O’Day there on the balconies over the vast emporium. Right at this moment, Michael knew that elsewhere in Mansoul the two eternal foes confronted one another on the landing while, somewhere below them, he himself looked up and wondered who they were. What if he got the gang to take him to the Attics now, so he could meet himself and other-Phyllis as they made their way across the giant hall of floor-doors? Except he couldn’t do that, could he, because that had not been what had happened?
With his three ghost-friends, Michael set out across the Upstairs version of the Mayorhold, the unfolded boxing-ring where the two titan builders had but lately come to blows. Across a sky so blue that it was almost turquoise sailed white clouds much like their earthly counterparts, save that the marble shapes and faces which you saw in them were much more finely chiselled, much more finished: penguins, Winston Churchill, a trombone, perfectly sculpted in the aerial snowdrifts.
Now the Master Angle would be in sight of the trilliard hall, his pace marked by the rhythmic drumbeat of the blue-tipped staff he carried, thudding on the boardwalks of Mansoul with every other step. He’d cross the path of his dark-haired opponent, who’d return to the celestial snooker parlour by a different route, and the two shining entities would nod to one another without speaking as they both made for the outsized table to resume their play. Michael could almost see the crowded solar system of the balls grouped randomly upon the wide green baize, could almost see his own smooth, polished sphere balanced precariously, trembling on the lip of the skull-decorated pocket.
The ghost-children had progressed what seemed barely a hundredth of the distance over the unfolded former town square. Bill, apparently, had been correct. It would take days for them to get down to the hospital at this rate. Michael’s thoughts were just beginning to drift back to the enormous gaming table and the shot upon which everything depended when the strangest sound that he had ever known suddenly issued from behind him, rolling and reverberating in the augmented acoustics of the Second Borough. It was like a thousand oriental monks blowing their thigh-bone trumpets all at once, and, given where they were, Michael was worried that it might be the great blast announcing Judgement Day that he’d heard his gran mention once. The noise rang out again. With Phyllis, John and Marjorie he turned to gape at what was thundering across the square towards them.
It appeared to be some sort of elephant. Against the gloriously decorated hoardings and façades of Mansoul, with their painted circus stars and funfair dodgem swirls, it somehow didn’t look entirely out of place.
Whatever it was, it was certainly approaching them at a tremendous lick, eating the ground that lay between them as it cannoned out of what must be the higher version of St. Andrew’s Street, carelessly throwing back its trunk at intervals to sound its thrilling and inspiring war-cry along with the cavalry of echoes that immediately followed. As it came within the range of Michael’s crystal-clear afterlife vision, he observed that it wasn’t much like the elephants that he had seen on posters. For one thing it wasn’t grey, but was instead a lovely russet brown. This was because it had either been dressed up in a giant-sized fur coat, or else was covered in a layer of hair. The idea that it might be garbed in clothing of some sort didn’t seem very likely, although Michael was prepared to entertain it since the shaggy elephant was also wearing some form of novelty hat atop its massive skull.
This disproportionately tiny headpiece, though, upon closer inspection, was an ornamental plaster garden gnome holding a fishing rod. Then, after a few seconds when the beast had rumbled a considerable distance nearer, it turned out that it was Bill sitting there on the creature’s cranium, clutching the makeshift fishing-rod with Reggie Bowler hanging on for dear death just behind him. What in here’s name was all this about? And whose voice was that he’d just heard, talking to someone called Doug? Who was Doug?
<em>“Is this the right way what we’ve come in, Doug? Do they take people with emergencies in at the front like this?”</em>
<em>“They’ll ’ave to. Open the door your side, Doreen. I’ll goo round and lift ’im out</em> …<em>”</em>
Michael was hearing things again. He shook his golden head to clear it just as the huge trumpeting behemoth slowed and juddered to a halt barely ten feet away.
Perched there upon the monster’s crown, holding a pole from which there hung a string of Puck’s Hats, Bill grinned down at Michael and the rest with Reggie Bowler making faces from behind his shoulder.
“There. Wiz this the bollocks, or what? Climb on up and we’ll be down the ’ospital in no time.”
Phyllis stared up at her reputed little brother blankly, then gazed at the thing that he was riding, equally uncomprehendingly, and then looked back at Bill.
“What wiz it?”
Bill was just about to answer when John did it for him.
“It’s a woolly mammoth, Phyll, or rather it’s the ghost of one. They’ve been extinct since prehistoric times. Where did the two of you find one of these so quickly?”
Bill and Reggie were both laughing now.
“Quickly? You’re joking. We’ve spent nearly six months finding Mammy ’ere and training ’er and everything. You want to try it sometime.”
As he spoke, Bill was allowing the apparently tame animal to snag a couple of the dangling Puck’s Hats with its trunk, tearing the fairy-blossoms from the length of twine that they were strung on. It chewed up the ghost fruit noisily, two or three in a single mouthful, and drooled ectoplasm as it did so.
“What we did, just after we left you, we dug about five minutes up into the future and went over to the public lavs there on the corner of the Mayorhold in the ghost-seam.”
Reggie broke in here, unable to contain himself.
“I tell yer, Marjorie, gal, it was a right laugh! We’d seen them two old Jewish fellers coming out the privy looking pleased as Punch, and we remembered ’ow we’d seen ’em drag one o’ them chaps with the black shirts in there when the two builders ’ad their scrap. Me and Bill, we goes in, right, and ’e’s laying there knocked silly with ’is short-back-and-sides resting in the trough. He’s ’aving a good cry, like, and there’s that queer feller whose ghost lives there in the toilets, ’e’s just standing there taking the mickey out the bloke wi’ the black shirt on. ’Onestly, you should have seen ’em.”
Reggie, by this point, was laughing too hard to continue, and so Bill took up the tale.
“So, anyway, Reggie and me, we ’elp this Blackshirt to ’is feet and wring the ghost-piss out ’is trouser leg, while ’e goes on about us being fellow Aryans and all that. I didn’t tell ’im ’ow our dad threw Colin Jordan in the Tyne once, because we were getting on so well I didn’t want to spoil it. Me and Reggie said we’d ’elp him to get back to his own times, back there in the ’Thirties when the Blackshirts ’ad their office on the Mayorhold ’ere and there were a few Blackshirt ghosts for ’im to knock about with.
“Well, we dug him back into the ’Thirties, only when we ran into ’is fascist mates we told ’em ’ow we’d seen two Jewish blokes come out the toilets lookin’ satisfied and then gone in to find their chap in conversation with a well-known ’omosexual. They thanked us for tellin’ ’em, then while they dragged ’im out to the back yard so they could kick ’is ’ead in, me and Reg ’ere nicked the ghost or dream of their big British Union of Fascists banner, and then we dug our way up to a few ’ours before we all went to the asylums so that we could get there first and grab most of the Puck’s ’Ats.”
Phyllis, who Michael had thought would go berserk at this point in the narrative, was instead looking from Bill to the munching mammoth and then at the dwindling string of mad apples that were suspended, tantalisingly, above the creature’s head. At last a broad smile broke across her pointed, fox-like features as she worked out what had happened.
“Ooh, you crafty little bleeder. D’yer mean to tell me that you took all of them Jennies, wrapped up in the banner, and dug all the way back to – ”
Bill looked so smug that he was going to have to grow an extra head to fit his smirk on.
“… all the way back to the Ice Age. It was bloody cold. I tell yer, you could feel the draft from the third century BC and it got worse the further back we went. In the end we ’appened upon Mammy ’ere while she was still alive, and then waited for ’er to kick the bucket so that we could make friends with ’er ghost by feeding ’er the Puck’s ’Ats. That’s what took most o’ the time. Once we’d all got to know each other we led Mammy back along the time-hole into 1959, and then got ’er up ’ere out of the ghost-seam so that she could be our ride down to the ’ospital. Come on, climb aboard. I tell yer, it’s like Whipsnade Zoo being up ’ere.”
Now everyone was grinning, and especially Michael. This was it. This was the treat, the party, the surprise, the send-off he’d been hoping for. All giggling, Phyllis, Michael, John and Marjorie tried to work out how they were meant to mount the mammoth, finally electing to just climb up its back legs using thick tufts of golden-brown hair for their handholds. Mammy didn’t seem to mind. Her small eyes blinked contentedly deep in the wrinkle-vortex of their sockets as she cannily detached another Puck’s Hat from the dangling string and wolfed it down. This being the last one, Bill passed the pole and empty line to Reggie, who sat on the bristling hump of Mammy’s neck immediately behind him with a half-full fascist sack of Bedlam Jennies in his lap. Swiftly and expertly – he’d had six months to practice, after all – the bowler-hatted urchin threaded eight or nine of the ripe ghost-fruits on the lure and gave it back to Bill.
While this refuelling operation went on, the four other wraith-kids scrambled up into position on their prehistoric steed. Drowned Marjorie climbed up onto the mammoth’s back first so that she could sit there behind Reggie, with her arms looped round his middle as if he were taking her out for a ride upon the pillion of his hairy, ice-age motorbike. Michael went next, clinging in the massive ghost’s toast-coloured fur, rubbing his cheek against the nap and drinking in the ancient must. Phyllis was snuggled up to Michael’s back, which was a lovely feeling but smelled dreadful, while John sat there at the tail-end and held on protectively to the Dead Dead Gang’s leader. The perfume of Phyllis Painter’s vermin-ermine didn’t seem to bother John at all.
The various ghosts about the Mansoul Mayorhold on that radiant blue afternoon had mostly stopped what they were doing to admire the mastodon, this grand, ten-foot high specimen with its sixteen-foot tusks that had so unexpectedly arrived there in their midst. Even the gold-prospectors, who were still trying hard to chisel up a precious fragment of coagulated angle-blood from the flat puddles that were everywhere, paused in their labour to inspect this latest novelty. What an extraordinary day, they must have all been thinking, even by the extraordinary standards that applied Upstairs. First two colossal Master Builders smack each other silly, there in the unfolded town square, and now this turns up! Whatever next?
Cosy against the prehistoric plush, Michael was thinking about Mighty Mike, his namesake with the even paler hair, who even at this moment would be pacing on the twenty-five foot margins of the trilliard table, studying the angles and deliberating while the grey mob of rough sleepers looking on all held their breath forever. A nerve ticking at one corner of his damaged eye, he’d grind the cube of chalk with too much force against his cue, gaze fixed unwaveringly on the off-white globe that hung in peril at the death’s-head corner, teetering upon the black brink of the pocket’s drop. This, of course, was the off-white globe which represented Michael’s soul.
There was a sudden lurch that interrupted Michael’s reverie, almost dislodging him from his perch on the creature’s back and causing him to clutch tight at the rusty fur. Bill clapped his feet against the matted flanks and swung his pole so that the string of Puck’s Hats hung a tempting inch or two ahead of Mammy’s uncurled woolly caterpillar trunk. The ginger mammoth-jockey called out into the stupendous echo-chamber of Mansoul.
“Hiyo Mammy! Awaaaaaay!”
And they were off. Braying magnificently through her swaying, raised proboscis, the apparently sweet-natured Palaeolithic throwback broke into a trot, and then a canter, then a gallop. Its hairy umbrella-stand feet pounded on the sacred paving, crunching through the gold scabs still remaining from the builders’ fracas, fracturing the hardened puddles’ bullion sheen into a fine web of ceramic cracks in passing. All the coloured-costume phantoms and the semi-naked sleepers gathered in the astral Mayorhold cheered and waved their caps or bonnets. From the tiered verandas up above a multitude of dreams and ghosts yelled their encouragement. The shaven-headed giant in Roundhead uniform that Michael had been told was called Thompson the Leveller thumped rhythmically and jubilantly on the handrail as he watched, and the ethereally handsome black-skinned cowboy they’d seen earlier fired his six-guns in the air in celebration.
The gang and their wondrous mount rumbled up an unfolded higher surrogate of Silver Street, one of the eight archaic lanes converging there in the original town square. Since Mansoul was built out of nothing more than dreams and poetry and stray associations, the considerably widened street was made wholly from silver. What was no more than a narrow lane down in the mortal realm was here a polished swathe of silver cobbles, with a fish-eye miniature of Mammy and her ghost-child cargo swimming in the bulge of every argent stone as they stampeded by, splashing through pools of super-rain left by the recent downpour, sending sprays of complicated droplets bouncing in the hallmarked gutters. From moon-metal landings overlooking the exalted thoroughfare, Silver Street’s ghostly occupants of several different centuries were whooping and applauding as the famous Dead Dead Gang rode past on their pet mammoth.
There were beautifully painted nancy boys from the public convenience at the lane’s bottom end, a magnified Mansoul enhancement with its fifty-foot-long trough and endless row of cubicles all fashioned from white marble. Dressed in flouncy, near-fluorescent outfits that they would have never dared to wear while they were still alive, the pretty sissies cooed and shrilled like birds of paradise, and one called out “We love you, Marjorie”, brandishing a green-and-gold jacketed book as Mammy passed beneath them. There were Rabbis from the vanished synagogue up at the top end of the passage, where the lofty-windowed cube of brick that was the Fish Market stood, down in the material world. The Hebrew clerics clapped politely and seemed to be nodding in agreement, although Michael didn’t know what with. Balcony after balcony of ghostly silversmiths, streetwalkers, publicans, judo instructors, pawnbrokers, resplendent paupers and antique policemen had turned out, it seemed, to watch the temporarily dead infant taken back to life. Michael clung tight to Mammy’s fine, luxuriant pelt and felt a bit intimidated by all the attention. He’d had no idea he was so famous. He tried to shrink further down into the musty fur, but found that as upon those bitter winter nights when he’d tried sleeping right down underneath the bedclothes, it was hard to breathe.
<em>“… this lady’s little boy. ’E’s got a sweet lodged in ’is throat …”</em>
<em>“ ’E ent breathed. ’E ent breathed all this time!”</em>
<em>“Oh, my goodness. Give him here, dear. Nurse, can you fetch Dr. Forbes, please, and tell him to hurry?”</em>
<br>
Out from the old metalworker’s lane their Pleistocene Express banked to the right, into a yawning plaza that was very like the lower end of Sheep Street, only massively inflated. Mammy blasted out a nasal fanfare as she stormed past the old, stately-looking building that was opposite the mouth of Silver Street, which, although much expanded, Michael recognised as the academy he’d seen in Mr. Doddridge’s Delft tiles. Upon its soaring terraces the young and fiery scholars were applauding, shouting their approval in Greek, Latin, French and Hebrew as they celebrated and lit bottle-rockets. On the lower levels of the glorious edifice a hundred thousand candles had been patiently arranged to spell out KING GEORGE – NO PRETENDER in massed choirs of primrose flame. The sky above was grading into violet where the students’ fireworks banged or twittered and strewed coloured sparks in great hot handfuls down upon the Dead Dead Gang’s parade.
Perched behind Michael as they avalanched down the titanic phantasm of Sheep Street, Phyllis shouted in his ear over the racket of the pyrotechnics and the constant drum-roll of their charger’s footfalls.
“ ’Ere, I just thought. Ask ayr Bill ’ow ’im and Reggie got this bloody great thing up ’ere to Mansoul. I mean, it’s ’ard enough for people to climb up a Jacob Flight, so ’ow did they get Mammy to goo up a ladder?”
Michael dutifully passed this on to Marjorie, in front of him, who conveyed it to Reggie sitting just in front of her. Reggie said something back to Marjorie and they both snickered before Marjorie turned round and hissed conspiratorially at Michael.
“They pushed Mammy upstairs through the bottom of our hideout up near Lower Harding Street. Apparently it wrecked the den, so there’s only a mammoth-sized hole where it used to be. If you tell Phyllis, she’ll go spare. Just say that Reggie can’t shout loud enough for Bill to hear him over all this noise. Tell her she’ll have to ask him later.”
Michael haltingly repeated this white lie to Phyllis, who narrowed her eyes suspiciously but seemed prepared to let the matter rest there for the moment. On they went down Sheep Street, heading for the Market Square and Drapery. Around their pet giant’s tree-trunk legs, the toddler noticed that there slopped a white tide made of sheep, all clattering and bleating idiotically as they tried to get out of the rampaging brute’s way. He assumed that these must just be part of Sheep Street’s poetry, like all the silver lampposts, drains and paving stones that Mammy had just passed in Silver Street. He hoped that they would not be going anywhere near Ambush Street, or Gas Street for that matter.
They passed by an enlarged Fish Market upon their right, the glass-roofed structure somehow fused into one building with the synagogue and Red Lion tavern that had previously occupied the site. Chaps with long ringlets spilling from beneath their skullcaps served dark beer across fishmongers’ slabs that were sequinned with scales and wet with highlight. Men in dazzling white coats and hats who wore cleavers or knives like jewellery were repeating Jewish prayers while filleting the cuts of cream or pink or vivid haddock-yellow that were spread upon a varnished public bar-top. Everyone looked up and smiled or raised their foaming tankards as the ghost-gang went galumphing by.
People were everywhere as they continued onward down a huge dream of the Drapery, where towering houses made of leather had been cut into fantastic shapes on each side of the sloping street. Palatial mansions in the form of boots or shoes loomed over them, and dizzy pinnacles like ladies’ evening gloves. Adnitt’s department store was a tremendous corset with a multitude of jubilant spectators sitting on the stitching of the upper levels as they cried out their support or adulation. There were lower ranking builders in grey gowns that were still pregnant with all sorts of other colours, like a rain-cloud. There were ghosts in party clothing who threw streamers; shabby poltergeists who just gave a thumbs-up and grinned. The women, men and children of the higher township lined its streets in an uproarious throng, accompanied by phantom dogs and smoky spectral cats, by ghostly budgerigars freed from their mortal cages and the brilliant souls of goldfish, without their confining bowls or water, that just shimmered through the air, staring and mouthing silently, occasionally releasing a small bubble to drift upward like a weightless pearl.
Some of the crowd held banners while some carried placards bearing goodwill messages or simply naming favourite members of the Dead Dead Gang. Posthumous teenage girls squealed and held signs up that said merely ‘John’, but all six children seemed to have their followers. Michael was slightly miffed to realise that the majority of flags and waving notices said “Marjorie”, although it looked as though he was the next most popular, which perked him up a bit.
Emerging from the bottom of the Drapery they rocketed around a version of All Saints Church that looked bigger than the Tower of Babel. In the higher world this still had its great portico supported by thick columns, but up here there were at least eight monstrous porticos stacked one atop the other, piling up into a many-layered monolith of brown and yellow limestone that looked like old gold against the shifting blues and purples of the sky. Gathered below the highest porticos were hundreds of onlookers and well-wishers, whistling and stamping as the previously-extinct animal rode by, while underneath the broad sweep of the lowest canopy stood only a few privileged spooks as if this area were reserved for special guests, celebrities or royalty. Behind him, Phyllis dipped her head to whisper into Michael’s ear.
“That there’s John Bunyan, and the old boy sittin’ in the alcove, that’s John Clare. There’s Thomas Becket, Samuel Beckett and I think the feller on the end there is John Bailes, the button-maker who lived until he was getting on ’undred and thirty. Saints and writers, for the most part. Look, they’re wavin’ to yer. Why don’t you wave back?”
So he waved back. As they swerved into George Row, an appreciative audience up on the sills and ledges of a swollen alabaster law court threw down laurel wreaths or floppy garlands of imaginary flowers, some of which caught on Mammy’s frightening tusks to swing and rustle decoratively in the crystal-clear, invigorating Upstairs air. Right at this instant, Michael knew, the white-haired Master Builder would be crouching to his crucial shot, be sighting down the glaring shaft of light that was his cue, closing his blackened eye and drawing back his elbow. There was everything to play for.
Petals fell upon them from above, and ticker-tape, and even, inappropriately, ladies’ pants. A set of these got caught on Mammy’s tusk beside the wreaths and floral tributes but, since they had little daisies on them, didn’t look entirely out of place.
They hammered down St. Giles Street, here a mind-bending boulevard, and on their left the Guildhall, the Gilhalda of Mansoul, was an immense and skyscraping confection of warm-coloured stone, completely overgrown with statues, carven tableaux and heraldic crests. It was as if an architecture-bomb had gone off in slow motion, with countless historic forms exploding out of nothingness and into solid granite. Saints and Lionhearts and poets and dead queens looked down on them through the blind pebbles of their emery-smoothed eyes and up above it all, tall as a lighthouse, were the sculpted contours of the Master Builder, Mighty Mike, the local champion. In one hand the great likeness held a shield, and in the other one he held his trilliard cue. Unfolding from his back were wings of chiselled glass that spread across the better part of the illuminated town, so that a rippling aquarium light fell on the countless couples who seemed to be getting married on the Guildhall’s greatly magnified front steps. Beautiful brides in virgin white or iridescent green, in shawls or veils or intricate mantillas threw their bouquets and blew kisses as the Dead Dead Gang, the darlings of the afterlife, went roaring by.
And, oh, the stamp and shout of it, the showering affection and the shine soaked into all of them, enflamed them, and was better than a hundred Puck’s Hats. They crashed past a much-ennobled Black Lion, not the pub in Marefair that they’d passed through on their Cromwell capers but the other one, the one with all the ghosts. These leaned out of the astral tavern’s great increase of upper windows, cranking wooden rattles and releasing half-a-dozen different colours of balloon, each with one of the children’s faces stencilled on it. The balloons sailed up into the opal permutations of a peerless Mansoul sky, and Michael noticed with some satisfaction that the ones which had his features on were powder-blue.
The Black Lion wraiths who’d launched the bright, bobbing flotilla heavenwards, famous haunts who were doubly immortal thanks to the attention they’d received from all the psychic sleuths and the pot-boiling ghost hunters, were by and large a more old-fashioned and traditional variety of apparition, more the kind of spooks you read about in stories. Some had trailing chains and some carried their heads beneath their arms like footballers before the kick-off. Some had torn their garments open to reveal bare ribs that caged a scarlet pumping heart while others, phantoms of the old school, weren’t much more than sheets and breezes. They all whooped and whistled, hurling down psychic phenomena upon the passing children as a tribute, séance drums and trumpets, lengths of slimy muslin, disembodied pointing hands cascading down onto the burnished cobbles where accusing bloodstains bloomed mysteriously, indelibly, around the mammoth’s padded trundle.
The Dead Dead Gang surged along St. Giles Street upon their one-horse cavalcade and Michael tried hard to burn every detail into his blue eyes. He knew that he must not forget this, ever. He must hold these streets of glory fast within himself, these hordes of roaring celebrants, and know that in Mansoul he was important. In his mind’s eye he could see the Master Builders in their monumental trilliard hall, the white-haired champion crouched over the baize sliding his luminous cue back and forth in halting practice-jabs upon the bridge of his spread fingers. The smooth lacquered rod, sweat-lubricated, slipped against the web of cushioning flesh between the almost-diametrically opposing forefinger and thumb. All the potential force and energy was trapped, was held inside the hesitating cue and focussed on the blue-hot tip of it, thrumming and simmering, waiting to burst out.
Lifting her trunk to sound a clarion, Mammy carried them along the great stretch of the St. Giles Street carriageway to where it blurred into Spencer Parade outside the honey-coloured stone spectacle of St. Giles Church. This building, monstrously increased, now had the upper reaches of its castellated steeple lost amongst the beautifully modelled clouds that passed by overhead: a seahorse and a birthday cake; a map of Italy; a bust of Queen Victoria. A sizeable stone badge or emblem was raised from the tower’s lower reaches, fish-shaped, with a woman’s figure at its centre and the words “FEED LAMBS”. The graveyard grass around the hyper-church had become a savannah from which soaring obelisks and headstones rose in cliffs of inscribed marble, and atop the tallest monument danced somebody that Phyllis, whispering to Michael from behind him, said was Robert Browne who’d started the Dissenting movement in the fifteen-hundreds and who’d perished in Northampton Gaol, an eighty-year-old man who couldn’t pay his parish rates. Fizzing around Browne’s spirit in the air was a corona of banned sermons, blazing words and excommunications, while the jigging figure capered as if overjoyed to be in this dissenting heaven, a spectator to this splendid pageant. Everyone exalted as the phantom kids urged their ghost-mammoth on towards the crossways of York Road and Billing Road, towards the ashlar-fronted coliseum of the Mansoul General Hospital that swelled up with its bays and arches, storey after storey, into the ethereal haze which hung above the town.
They swerved over the crossroads, with the carnival of Mansoul’s traffic backed up at the junction’s other openings in order to let the Dead Dead Gang through, a honking jam of tarot-decorated caravans, jewelled wagons and festooned palanquins joined in jostling ovation, with their passengers and costumed coachmen waving gaudy pennants or those green-and-golden books that everybody seemed to have a copy of.
On the opposite corner of the intersection loomed a bust of George the Fourth, big as a Rushmore head, the monarch’s slightly-baffled frown apparently fixed on the bunch of scruffs racing towards him from the mouth of Spencer Parade, bareback on their woolly mammoth. High on the bald marble plateau of King George’s skull stood three people whom Michael recognised as Dr. Philip Doddridge, his wife Mercy and their grown-up daughter Tetsy who had died days short of her fifth birthday. All of them were beaming down at the six children and their Stone-Age transport, fluttering their freshly-laundered handkerchiefs. Standing beside the family on the King’s head was a fourth person, droll and rakish in his gait, whom Michael realised was familiar from the moving scenes that tiled the Doddridge hearth. It was the ne’er-do-well John Stonhouse, who had been converted when he heard the reverend doctor speak and gone on to become his closest friend, co-founder with him of the first infirmary to be built outside London, in George Row. Having made that connection, Michael understood what Stonhouse and the Doddridges were doing here: this hospital, the old infirmary’s second and more capacious site, would not exist if it were not for the two men who stood above him now. Doddridge himself was calling down excitedly in the direction of the gang as Mammy loped around the giant regal cranium and through an arch of cathedral proportions, just below the doctor on his left.
“Wizn’t this grand? Everyone’s read your masterpiece, Miss Driscoll. That’s why you’ve got such a crowd turned out to see you. They all want to be in the last scene of chapter twelve! God speed you, Michael Warren, on your wild ride back to life! God speed you all!”
They rattled through the archway and into an endless auditorium that Michael thought looked very like the Attics of the Breath had when he first arrived Upstairs, except that this was floored with gleaming tiles instead of planks and had the ringing sound of a colossal public lavatory or swimming baths. Still a bit puzzled by the reverend Dr. Doddridge’s remarks, Michael nudged Marjorie who sat in front of him and asked her who Miss Driscoll was. She chortled and said “I am”, which left him not much the wiser. In the susurrus and echo of the cavernous infirmary he heard a million anxious voices whispering.
<em>“Now then, what’s going on?”</em>
<em>“This little boy is choking, doctor. They’ve just …”</em>
<em>“It’s a cough-sweet what ’e’s choked on. ’E’s not breathed this ’ole time. Is ’e dead?”</em>
<em>“All right, calm down. Let’s have a look at him …”</em>
Michael was joggling all over Mammy’s hump, holding on tight as she experienced difficulty with the massively-scaled hall’s tiled floor, slithering on its polished sheen, the mammoth’s inverted reflection struggling to keep up with her as she tobogganed on the slippery porcelain. Around them, just as in the Attics of the Breath, window-like vents were set into the flooring, an eye-boggling grid of them that reached off to the tiered walls of the arcade on either side. Above, through an immense glass canopy, the crystal-facet webs of lines that were the diagrams of clouds glided and changed their shapes against a backdrop of sublime azure. He felt convinced that this was just the section of the Attics that was up above the hospital, its field of trapdoors opening down on earthly wards and operating rooms below. As their mount went into a trumpeting and blaring skid that it could not arrest, Michael felt a sharp shock reverberating through him and knew that down at the trilliard-hall the Master Builder had taken his shot. The tiny blue fist of the cue’s tip had just punched the necessary ball so that it racketed across the crowded table with a pearl necklace of after-images trailing behind it. He could almost feel its spin and roll in Mammy’s uncontrolled trajectory across the glistening floor. He was in play, and there was nothing he could do about it.
Finally their carom reached a halt, only a dozen yards or so from one of the large apertures that opened down into the floor inside a white tiled frame a little like the raised edge of a paddling pool. A group of getting on for fifteen people were stood gathered round this opening, possibly previously passed-on relatives waiting for somebody now dying in the earthly hospital downstairs. They looked up in alarm as Mammy skittered to a stop with her half-dozen urchin riders toppling from her back, all giggling, down to the treacherous glaze. Michael could understand the worried glances from this afterlife reception-crowd when he considered that if their primordial steed had gone only a little further, then these people’s dying loved ones would find themselves trying to get into heaven while a hairy elephant plunged down the other way. Nobody wanted that.
Struggling to their feet and helping their pet mammoth do the same, the Dead Dead Gang set about searching down the rows of tile-rimmed floor-doors as they tried to find the place and time that Michael’s lifeless body had been brought to. Everywhere in the unending echo-chamber of the hyper-hospital there was a scent of purity and freshness, which after some several minutes Michael realised was the smell of ordinary pongy disinfectant that had been unwrapped into a new dimension. From horizon to horizon of this great indoors an almost church-like reverential hush hung over everything, and in the distance he could see Crimean nurses in their bonnets and black skirts conferring with staff of more recent vintage who wore perky white caps and blue nylons. There were visitors as well, who’d come to welcome up expiring friends and family, sometimes in thirty-strong committees or sometimes alone, and Michael even saw a deathmonger or two bustling down the eternal aisles upon their mortal missions. And down at the trilliard parlour he could feel the cue-ball hurtling at breakneck speed towards the ivory globe that represented him, balanced upon the death’s-head pocket’s rim. The gasp of the rough sleepers as they stood transfixed and watched the game merged with the constant murmur of the supernal infirmary around him. <em>Whisper</em>, <em>whisper</em>, <em>whisper</em>.
<em>“…</em> <em>God! This child’s got the worst case of tonsillitis that I’ve ever seen. Give me a tongue-depressor so that I can …”</em>
Michael’s reverie was interrupted by a cry from Reggie Bowler, who had taken charge of Mammy and was feeding Puck’s Hats to the docile mammoth as he led her down the wide, tiled pathways of the grid arrangement.
“Phyll? I reckon that this ’ere’s the lobby, over ’ere. That must be where they bring ’im in, like. Come and ’ave a look, see if the young ’un recognises anybody.”
Dutifully, everyone traipsed over to where Reggie and their shaggy mount were standing, next to one of the great thirty-foot long openings that were set into the floor. Leaning across the raised tiles of the edge, the gang peered down into the living world below where motionless and colour-filled transparent coral forms stood woven in a complicated knot, the whole glass-animal array suspended in a jelly-cube of time.
Michael gazed down into the jewellery, the strangles, into the twenty-five thousand nights. The space below appeared to be about the same size as his living room down in St. Andrew’s Road had looked when he had seen it from the Attics of the Breath, all of those Mansoul weeks ago and getting on ten worldly minutes back. He guessed that he was looking at some sort of doctor’s office or a little side room running off from the hospital lobby. There were four – no, five – distinct shapes intertwining in the chamber’s aspic depths, and with a sudden rush of joy the child identified one of the elongated figures as his mum, Doreen. He knew her by the gentle green glow emanating from inside her, not a showy emerald but the deep, sincere green that you found on mallards’ necks. With Doreen in the room there were four other fronded gem-forms, their streaming trajectories crossing or intersecting with her own, elaborately. One of the extended see-through statues had a rich, earth-coloured light within it that made Michael think, for no good reason, about nice Mr. McGeary who lived next door to them in St. Andrew’s Road, although he wasn’t certain why Mr. McGeary should be down there at the hospital, standing near Michael’s mum.
The other three jewel-patterns in the mortal room below were also grouped together in a cluster. There was a calm blue one, like a gas flame, that the ghostly infant thought might be a doctor, and a reddish growth of crystal that was possibly a nurse. This rose-tinged structure had translucent frills of arms along its winding flanks, the foremost pair clasping together at the toothpaste-squeezing’s front end as though holding something at the level of its chest, where a bust bulged out from the abstract shape’s façade as did a plump maternal face a little higher up – both of these features sculpted in pink glass. The final jewel-form, smaller than the rest and a pale, lifeless grey, was clasped at the convergence of the trailing limb-fins and held up before the rubicund extravagance’s bosom. Michael comprehended with a start that this was him, this colourless glass starfish at the heart of the display. This was his little human body. The tall blue construction, curled above it like a wave, seemed to be poking something down a tiny hole in the top end of it, of him.
<em>“… can see it. Come on out, you little blighter. Aa! I almost had it. Let me just</em> <em>…”</em>
His throat hurt, but that might have just been because he was going to have to say goodbye to all his friends, that hot lump that he sometimes felt when people went away. He leaned back from the aperture and turned around to sit instead on its raised boundary, kicking his slippered feet, with the Dead Dead Gang and their mammoth standing round and smiling at him fondly. Well, the mammoth wasn’t smiling, but it wasn’t glaring at him or looking offended either. Phyllis crouched down on her haunches so that she was at his eye-level, and took his hand.
“Well, then, me duck, it looks like this wiz it. It’s time for yer to goo back dayn where yer belong, back in yer own life wi’ yer mum and dad and sister. Shall yer miss us?”
Here he started snuffling a little bit, but blew his nose upon his dressing gown instead until he’d got himself under control. Michael was nearly four, and didn’t want the older dead kids thinking that he was a baby.
“Yes. I’ll miss all of you very much. I want to say goodbye to everybody properly.”
One by one, the rest of the gang came and kneeled or squatted beside Phyllis to make their farewells. Reggie Bowler was the first, lifting his hat off when he crouched as though he were in church or at a funeral.
“Ta-ta, then, little ’un. You be a good boy with yer mum and dad, and if yer dad goes off to prison and yer mum chuck’s ’erself out the bedroom window, don’t go sleepin’ in a packing crate, not when it’s winter. That’s the best advice what I can offer. You take care, now.”
Reggie straightened up and went to stand beside the mammoth, who contentedly chewed on her cud of Puck’s Hats. Marjorie took Reggie’s place, kneeling in front of Michael with her eyes swimming like tadpoles in the jam-jars of her spectacles.
“You look after yourself now, won’t you? You look like you’ll turn out to be everybody’s favourite character, in what seems to be everybody’s favourite chapter. I suppose we’ve solved the Riddle of the Choking Child, and so this is the chapter’s ending. Don’t go getting knocked down by a car in two years’ time and spoiling it so that I have to do a re-write. Although when you <em>do</em> die of old age or whatever it wiz, and you come back up here, then don’t forget to look us up. We can all get together for the sequel.”
Marjorie kissed Michael on one burning cheek and went to stand with Reggie. Michael hadn’t got the first idea what any of what she’d just said to him had meant, but felt it was meant kindly all the same. The next in line was Bill. Not much taller than Michael in his current form, the ginger-haired rogue didn’t have to kneel or crouch, but just reached out and shook the dressing gown-clad child by his free hand, the one that Phyllis wasn’t holding.
“Cheery-bye, kid. Say ’ello to Alma for us when you see the mental bint, and I expect that we’ll meet up again in forty year or so, downstairs, when we don’t recognise each other. You’ve got bottle, mate. It’s been good knowing yer.”
Big John came after Bill, so tall he had to grovel to look Michael in the eye, but grinning in a manner that suggested that he didn’t really mind.
“Goodbye for now, then, nipper. You give your dad, your nan and all your uncles and your aunts my love. And you can tell me one last thing: did your dad Tommy ever talk about his brother Jack at all?”
Though puzzled by the reference, Michael nodded.
“He’s the one what got killed in the war, I think. Dad talks about him all the time.”
John smiled and seemed inordinately pleased.
“That’s good. That’s good to hear. You have a good life, Michael. You deserve one.”
Standing up, John went to stand beside the others, which left only Phyllis crouching there before him with her dangling rabbit feet and faces, with her scabby knees protruding bluntly from beneath her navy skirt’s hem as she squatted.
“Goodbye, Michael. And if we’d ’ave met somewhere else in a different life or in a different time, I should ’ave loved to be yer girlfriend. You’re a smashin’-looking kid. You’ve got the same good looks as John ’as, and that’s sayin’ summat. Now, you go back to yer family, and try not to forget all what you’ve learned up ’ere.”
The infant nodded gravely as Phyllis gently detached her hand from his.
“I’ll try. And you must all look after one another and try not to make so many enemies. I shouldn’t like it if one of them hurt any of you. And Phyllis, you must look after your little brother and not always be all cross with him like Alma is with me.”
Phyllis looked confused for a moment, then she laughed.
“Me little brother? You mean Bill? ’E’s not me brother, bless yer. Now, let’s get you ’ome before that devil turns up or there’s summat else what stops yer gooin’.”
Phyllis placed her hands upon his shoulders and leaned forward, kissing him upon the lips. She drew back for a second, smiling impishly at Michael in the aftermath of their first and last kiss, and then she pushed him over backwards, down the hole, before he even had the time to yelp.
Down at the trilliard hall, the cue ball smashed so hard into the globe that represented Michael that it shattered instantly to powder. Michael’s ball was slammed across the gaping death’s-head pocket, spinning there in empty space above that dark obliterating plunge, and he was dead, dead for ten minutes, cradled by his weeping mother as the vegetable truck rattled through the town towards the hospital, as fast as it could go, dead for ten minutes, hanging there in nothingness then wham! His ball smacks up against the corner-pocket’s inner edge, rebounds across the void to shuttle down the baize with all its after-images behind it, heading for the pocket with the golden cross and he’s alive again and all the white-robed men around the massive table, even the dark-haired one who’d caused all the trouble, all of them throw up their arms in blinding pinion fans and yell “Iiiiyyyesssss!” and the on-looking phantoms and rough sleepers all go wild.
Michael was falling backwards with a silent splash and into the time-jelly, tumbling through the viscous moments with six little figures standing waving on a sort of corner that was inside out and up above him. With dismay, he realised that he’d already forgotten all their names, the grubby little corner-fairies. Was that what you called them? Or were they called lions, or generals, or cabbages? He didn’t know, didn’t know much of anything. He wasn’t even certain what he was, except that he was something which had lots of tartan arms and legs and which left a bright yellow trail that he hoped wasn’t wee behind it through the heavy clock-oil of the breathing world. Down, down he went and in the corner overhead were tiny little creatures, insects or trained mice, waving goodbye to him. Stretched sounds wrapped round him in long humming ribbons, and then something happened that was like a noise or flash or impact and he fell into a bag of meat and bones, a sack of solid substance that was somehow him, and there were fingers in his mouth and wind was whistling down his throat in a long gust that felt like sandpaper and he remembered pain, remembered what a nasty and upsetting thing it was, but nothing else. What was his name? Where was he and who was this woman holding him and why did it all taste of cherry cough-sweets? Then the flat, familiar world rose up about the little boy, and he forgot the marvellous things.
When Michael woke up properly, which was the next day, something felt wrong in his neck and he was told that somebody had taken out his tonsils, which, not having previously known that he possessed such things, he didn’t care that much about. At the week’s end his dad and mum came in a taxi-cab and took him back home to St. Andrew’s Road where everybody made a fuss of him and he was given jelly and ice-cream. He went to bed that night and the next morning he began to grow into a handsome forty-nine-year-old with wife and children of his own who got up every day and beat steel drums flat for a living. One day he was flattening a drum that, curiously, hadn’t got a label. Blinded by a rush of chemicals he knocked himself out cold and came round with his head full of impossible ideas that he recounted to his artist sister, on a slow night at the Golden Lion. Naturally, he hadn’t retained all the details of his afterlife adventures, but Alma assured him that if he’d forgotten anything it wouldn’t be problem.
She’d just make it up.
<br>
* <strong>Book Three: VERNALL’S INQUEST</strong>
<quote>
Now Besso has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only stubbornly persistent illusion.
—Albert Einstein,
<br>
Letter to Vero and Bice Besso, March 21, 1955
</quote>
** <strong>CLOUDS UNFOLD</strong>
<strong>A</strong>lways now and always here and always me: that’s what it’s like for you.
Now always and here always and me always: this is what it’s like for me.
Now. Here. Me.
Now always, even when it’s then. Here always, even when it’s there. Me always, even when I’m you; even when I’m in Hell and am I fallen, when am I a thousand fiends. They fold up into you. You fold up into us. We fold up into Him.
This will be very hard for you.
<br>
Above space, over history hovering, genocide and utopia in the downdraught. Whooomff. Whooomff. Whooomff. Bullroarer breath through the white feathers sent to conscientious cowards, blood objectors. Whooomff. Whooomff. Whooomff.
Seeing and being everything, never detached and never distant. Pitying you and admiring you, endlessly angry, endlessly in love. Auschwitz and Rembrandt in the upbeat. Whooomff. Whooomff. Whooomff.
The view from here is fierce. The view from here is final.
From above, the world is a stupendous flayed anatomy. Motionless on its slab of stars it does not move or change or grow, save for the way it is expressed in the concealed direction. Burning gas and vaporised ore spinning into molten balls, the magma crusting over with a thin black rind of elements, and in the heat and poison there is life here even now, microbial seethings in the cyanide drifts and the hydrochloric puddles.
Reading cosmos left to right, from bang to crunch, from germ to worm to glinting cyborg and beyond, the woven tapestry unpicks itself, reorganises into new designs. The marbling of cloud changes its colour. Leaning closer like impassive doctors, mottled planet-meat is visible, exposed, a skin of circumstance pinned back in plump and larded folds. The worms grow backbones and the newts sprout feathers. Bus routes alter and post offices are closed. Perfectly ripe, the scab lifts from the knee intact, reveals a waxy pinkness underneath.
I know I am a text made only of black words. I know you are observing me. I know you, and I know your grandmother. I know the far threads of your family line reading me in a hundred years, reading me now, from left to right, from Genesis to Revelation. Syphilis and Mahler in the wheeling arc, the holding pattern.
Whooomff. Whooomff. Whooomff.
<br>
In my beginnings am I a black word against the blinding white, am I a meaning, staining the ineffable. All my identity is in this quadrant crease, this angle wherein am I folded down from singularity with my three brothers. Each of us, in ninety paces, count the gold degrees of our awareness, our domain. Each of us has his corner, has his pocket. Each of us has his own element to work with and his own direction of the wind. These are our nails, these are our hammers, fire and flood and hurricane and avalanche. We are the strong hand in the nuclear flash, the weak hand in the isotope’s decay. We are the hand wherefrom the lightnings bristle, and the hand that flings the apple or the suicide alike to earth. Four Master Builders, we have rods and we have measures. We are crowbars of creation. We are smiling in the hum and harmony before the world starts.
Here am I become a soldier at the Fall, my staff made slippery with the ichors of the fallen as we drive them down into the low geometries, into the hells of substance and sensation, torture-mazes of the intellect, maelstroms of bile and longing. We are loving them and weeping as we run them through and tread them under, out of mathematical necessity. The thirty-second spirit, who is mighty, drags himself towards me down the cue-shaft that impales him, coughing up a blood of logarithms. Rape is in his red eye, murder in his green one. Algebra spills from his punctured breast and he reviles me, saying, “Brother! Fellow builder! How is it you treat us thus, when are we but unfolded leaves of thee? It is thine own selves that are trampled here into this dark, into this worldly muck!” The words he speaks are true. I raise my naked foot and plant it square against him, push his gory weight along my spear’s slick length, kick him from its blue-powdered end to plummet howling into stars and calendars and money, into form and passion and regret. Around me in this slaughter-firmament, this massacre of clouds, our painful war rages forever and the maimed djinns are like locusts, raining on parched fields where have we sown a universe.
Now on the sheer plateau of signs and symbols where shall be raised up Hierusalem, where shall be raised up Golgonooza and Mansoul and all the higher townships, am I stooped in conference with fabled Solomon. My language breaks against his leather cheek. Crumbs of mythology flake from our blazing edges and I gift him with the ring, the holy torus whereby may the stumbling blocks, the satans, all be bound to the construction of his temple. Only harm can come of this: Hierusalem, Mansoul, they are the very seat of War, for warring devils fidget in their stones, their architectures. I am but a builder. What am I to do, when rubble and demise are in the diagram?
And in Golgotha now I touch the perspiration-heavy sleeve of Peter that is once called Aegburth, telling him to take the stone cross jutting from the dry earth at his feet; to set it at the centre of his land. I take a step. We are in Horseshoe Street and he is a year older, dying in the marvels; dying in the pigeons and the rain. The lines are all precise. The spot is marked. The rood is in the wall.
<quote>
<em>In Tennessee I seize a drunk plantation-keeper’s hand</em>
<em>Curl it to scrolls and triangles as he designs the brand.</em>
</quote>
<br>
On his cathedral platform Ernest Vernall screams and weeps. The fire burns from his hair to leave white ash as he receives the brunt of an exploded education. My lips, moving in the fresco. He is cowering amidst the tins and dishes, and I am remembering the episode when I am him, how terrible it is to see my giant eyelids blinking from the antic skitter of the paint; how comical it is when I explain the shape of time and drive him mad with chimneys. Thunders roll about the dome, which are my skirts of noise and electricity. I am a builder, and I bang the words and numbers into him so that his children tally different sums or dance to altered music. And now Ernest is in Bedlam. I sit here by his asylum cot, the sheets marked with a dried shit of delusion, where I wait for him to speak out and not only look at me and cry.
My eyes are carved by R.L. Boulton, late of Cheltenham. Unblinking over Guildhall Road, George Row and Angel Lane I stare towards the south. In my left hand is there a shield and in the right I hold the trilliard-cue. The eldest son of Ernest Vernall stands beside me, one arm draped across my sprouting shoulder-blades with an unsettling familiarity as he harangues the gaping crowd beneath us. Even when I turn my granite head to whisper to him he but laughs and does not seem afraid, so foreign is he to mankind, so distant from the habits of the street. His tragedies affect him only as theatre: scenes restaged from a beloved melodrama that still wrench the heart on each fresh viewing, although the experience is aesthetic and the tears no more than a sincere appreciation of the play. In my petrified sight, his final scenes are acted between mirrors: a concluding chorus line of kicking, struggling old men with petals in their beards. Ah, mad John Vernall, furious Snowy; when I’m you, it near to frightens me.
I am in all my images. I watch you through a billion Christmas cards.
<br>
May Vernall slithers bare into a Lambeth gutter choked with fish-heads, rainbows, sodden blossom. Bare she copulates upon the grassy shoulder of the river at Cow Meadow. Gasps of joy unfold to screams of childbirth and the green bank, damp with starlight, is become a narrow downstairs chamber still perfumed by excrement recently burned upon its hearth, an offering to winter spirits that have filled the lavatory with ice. The deathmonger is hovering in her white apron, where embroidered moths swarm on the frill. She takes the lovely newborn from its mother’s gaping and tormented birth canal, carries it eighteen months and some few steps into the grainy light of a front parlour. Here she sets it carefully in a small coffin, and May Warren brushes out the golden hair her child has grown in its brief passage from the living-room through to this dying-room. Her life comes charging in, sweeps her away into further maternities and air-raid nights, corpse-hoists and fever carts, abortion kitchens, until finally she stumbles in the hallway of her little King’s Heath flat, falls dying, and the last thing that she thinks is <em>Charlie</em> <em>Chaplin</em>! <em>That’s</em> <em>who</em> <em>that</em> <em>man</em> <em>was</em>! <em>I</em> <em>talked</em> <em>to–</em> Now it’s two days later and her one surviving daughter, Lou, is peering through the letterbox after receiving no response to her increasingly impatient rapping. Supine, the coagulated blood has settled in May’s face and turned it black. For several moments, Lou believes that she is looking at a bundle of old rags, carelessly dropped there in the circular-and-leaflet flooded passage.
I am there in all my words, there in the hymn, there in the lovers’ flattering serenade. A bland popular song plays on the radio and for an instant I flare up, albeit vaguely, in a million minds, an angle playing in your heart.
Louisa Warren is amongst the sweetest strokes upon the canvas, mixing lavender and russet, with the vibrant line beginning on the dun and dusty under-colour of the Fort Street labyrinth, born as a consolation prize replacing her diphtheria-departed elder sister, little May. The line continues through four brothers, Tommy, Walter, Jack and Frank, its fine sweep broadening to become plumed and adorable, a twinkling flapper clacking through the Drapery’s November mists upon the arm of her intended, Albert Good. Off in the fog a lovelorn beau is shouting “Gloria? Where are you, Gloria?” – so desperate and forlorn that Albert mentions it; wonders aloud who Gloria might be. “Well, I’m sure I don’t know,” Lou mumbles into her fur collar, although Gloria is the name she’s given to the handsome chap who’s made an effort to romance her during Albert’s lengthy visit to the cloakrooms. Her bright line uncurls as she becomes Louisa Good, with children and grandchildren branching from the vine. Her eldest daughter weds a lighthouse-keeper, while the artistically gifted and bohemian daughter who comes next weds a French communist. The youngest child, a boy, sprouts washboards and a tea-chest bass as he grows through a skiffle band into an airline steward, marrying at first disastrously, then happily. Louisa finds her mother May dead, crumpled up like laundry in the King’s Heath hall. Louisa lives with Albert in their Duston home. In his decline he’s watching television dramas, afternoon plays that disturb him, even though the set is not plugged in.
At last her lyric contour is alone as it progresses left to right across the masterpiece, in the concealed direction. As she nears her eightieth birthday, her late brother Tommy’s kids, her niece and nephew, Mick and Alma, have arranged a party for her. This will be entitled “The Night of the Living Warrens”, so they’ve told her. All of the surviving family have been invited. It’s a few days prior to the event and Lou is having tea in the back garden of her nephew Michael Warren’s Kingsthorpe home. Michael’s wife Cath is there, and his two children, Jack and Joe. His sister Alma’s there and has a friend of hers in tow, another lady artist: an American girl called Melinda. At first it’s a nice day, but then some light specks of rain begin to fall. Lightnings attend our exits and our entrances.
Black clouds begin to gather and it is suggested everyone retire indoors. Lou finds she can’t stand up. As the two manliest amongst those present, Mick and Alma lift her chair between the pair of them, carry her like an empress on their improvised sedan into the living room. Her breathing is becoming difficult. The sudden stark reality of everything is overwhelming. Her niece sitting there beside her with one arm around Lou’s quivering shoulders, murmuring reassurances into her ear, kissing her hair. Cathy and Alma’s artist friend attend the worried children and then there are paramedics out of nowhere, lifting her up from her chair, calling her love. There is a mighty pounding like an anvil in her ears now. Whooomff. Whooomff. Whooomff.
She’s somehow in the ambulance, motionless in the rain-lashed close outside. Her nephew Mick is with her while the funny modern doctor in his green work-jacket presses down repeatedly upon her chest. I can see Alma Warren there beneath me, stood some yards behind the modern fever-cart upon the spattering tarmac drive, soaked through in just her vest and jeans, watching the bobbing medic through the vehicle’s rear window. Her messy hair is plastered to her hollow cheeks, to her bare shoulders, and she seems to tip her head back and stare up into my eyes as I strike with my cue’s blue tip against the great ball of the world. The black mirror of night is shattered and, for but an instant, in the ravelling cracks and fissures can be seen the sky’s half-silvered backing. With this sizzling flourish I conclude Louisa Warren’s painted swoop. Seen close it is a mark, a daub, but oh, when we step back and see what it is part of …
<br>
Some leave with the thunder, some with trumpets, some with only mother silence.
And now Michael Warren swings the hammer down through its foreordained arc onto the dented cylinder, a giant metal lung that flattens and expels its final withering breath into his face. The hammer falls upon the drum, the hammer falls upon the drum, this single act relived, resounding endlessly in a reverberant space-time and become an almost musical crescendo, a percussive storm that wells from thin air, a dramatic and hair-raising punctuation in the symphony: BDANK! BDANK! BDANK! The hammer falls upon the drum, the hammer falls upon the drum and from its threaded throat it coughs a tightly-crinkled cloud of orange poison that expands, unwraps itself, unfolds to fill the world of Michael Warren’s breath and vision. A cascade of half-dimensions, the unfurling chaos of its shape contains, just for an instant, every fugitive and frail line from his sister’s future paintings. He inhales the imagery that he spits back across the table at her now, now in the Golden Lion’s Saturday-night limbo and she wipes it from her face and smears it on her canvasses, just like the ambulance-light and the rain upon the night when her Aunt Lou dies in the thunderstruck rear access-way. She wipes it from her face and smears it on her canvasses. The hammer falls upon the drum. I am a builder, and with each new course my swift trowel catches up the surplus flab of mortar squeezed from in-between the bricks. I build the centuries, I build the moments. I am following the diagram. All of the weight is carried at the centre.
I am sighting down my straight cue at a rounded life, precariously at rest on the world’s baize, and in its glaze the dancing highlight glint of soul. I knock the reason and the colour both from Ernest Vernall’s head. I squeeze May out into a gutter and send fever-carts to carry off her firstborn daughter. I cram Snowy’s mouth with flowers and I throw the poison dust in Michael’s eyes. I bank, roll into the high thermals. Majesty and rubble in the dive, the tailspin. Whooomff. Whooomff. Whooomff.
<br>
Of course we know pain. We know cowardice and spite and falsehood. We know everything. I call my brother Uriel a cunt. We punch and gouge each other in the town square and the wind raised by our feud alone blows ghosts halfway to Wales. The repercussions ring across the Earth. He blacks my eye and China’s great leap forward carries it into an economic abyss. I collapse his nose and Castro comes to power in Cuba. From my split lip dribbles structuralism, rock ’n’ roll, and hovercrafts. We pick the golden clots before they’re ready and the Belgian Congo blooms with severed heads.
<br>
Of course we stride among you, thigh-deep in your politics and your mythology. We wade through the pink map-scrap petals of your rapidly disintegrating commonwealth. We march in a black tide on Washington. We juggle satellites and Francis Bacon. We are builders. We build Allen Ginsberg, and Niemeyer’s cathedral in Brasilia. We slap up the Berlin Wall. Clouds pass across the sun. We’re with you now.
Of course we dance on pins and level cities. We deliver up the Jews from Pharaoh, unto Buchenwald. We flutter tender in the first kiss, flap in agony above the last row in a draughty kitchen. We know what fellatio tastes like and how childbirth feels. We climb upon each other’s backs in shower cubicles to flee the fumes. We are in the serene molecular indifference of the Zyklon and the dull heart of the man who turns the wheel to open up the ducts. We are forever standing on those bank steps in Hiroshima as the reality surrounding us collapses into an atomic hell. That moment when you reach your orgasm together and it is the sweetest, the most perfect instant that you ever live through, we are both of you. We keep slaves, and we write <em>Amazing Grace</em>.
Of course we shout. Of course we sing. Of course we kill and love. We cheat in business and we give our lives for others. We discover penicillin and we dump the children we have strangled in back alleys. We bomb Guernica just to create that painting, and the bursts of smoke and scream beneath us are our brush-marks. We are from the realms of Glory; we are from the nursery, the school, the abattoir, the brothel. How could we be otherwise? You fold up into us. We fold up into Him.
We are in every second of a billion trillion lives. We’re every ant, each microbe and leviathan. Of course we’re lonely.
<br>
Everything swirls in my eye. If I but blink, all of existence breaks down to an alphabet of particles and thence to only numbers, to an endless sea of values circling in radiant symmetry about their axis, which reside between the figures four and five. When multiplied with their resultant digits added, these reflect each other perfectly, as do the three and six, the nine and zero, ten and minus one, sixteen and minus seven, on to positive and negative infinity alike. There at the centre of the numerical hurricane I stand. Its eye is mine. I am between the four and five, where is the pivot of the universe. I am revolving slowly between mercy and severity, between the blue shift and the red. I breathe in and the stars tumble towards me, toppling back into a single white-hot quark, into the minus numbers. I breathe out, an aerosol of black, exotic matter, galaxies and magnetars: positive sums exploding from my lips unto the cold and dark extremities of time.
I am too often angry, cleaving more toward the five, the fingers in a clenched fist, than towards the four, the ones clasped in a handshake, those extended in a stroke or a caress. Too often am I inclined to severity, towards the red, rather than to the cyan of forgiveness. This, then, is the reason that we keep our cue-tips blue: as a reminder of compassion and its weak force, so that even as we smash the balls towards their predetermined pockets we bestow sky-coloured kisses of eternal grace and mercy, made from billiard chalk.
<br>
I see Marla Roberta Stiles, aged four, arranging daisy-heads on miniature pink plastic plates for a tea party to which she’ll invite her teddy and her mother, the two soft toys that she loves best in the world. She pours a cold infusion of fruit pastilles in tap-water into tiny cups and takes it both ends in a spit-roast with her pimp Keith and his mate Dave just thirteen years later. Marla asks her mother if she’d like a dried sultana as dessert and spits out semen; scolds the glassily impassive bear for falling off his chair as she sucks up the crystal smoke. She calls sultanas “tanas”, and a rosy-cheeked father of two punches her in the face and rapes her in the back of his Ford Escort, and I love her.
I see Freddy Allen stealing pints of milk and dying underneath a railway arch. I see him as a younger man, waiting in Katherine’s Gardens for the doctor’s daughter that he plans to sexually assault upon her way to work. I’m running with him, weeping with him as he flees the scene in horror at himself, the deed undone. I see him sleeping in the weeds, I see the grey trudge of his afterlife, all Freddy feels that he deserves. His guilt has turned to anger, resonating through his days so that he has no hope now of release. The loaves and bottles are all gone, with the doorsteps they stood upon. Nothing can ever be put right.
I see Aegburth who is called Peter with his sandal idly scuffing the Golgotha dirt, revealing a protruding corner of grey stone, too obviously chiselled to be natural, its angles right. He claws and scrabbles for an hour to finally unearth the ancient rood, holding it up two-handed in the sun to see it better. Soil rains on his sweaty brow, his slippery cheek, falls into the Sargasso of his beard. He tastes the crucifixion ground and he wears the cold shadow of the cross upon his face. His weak heart sounds a rhythmic blacksmith clang, BDANK! BDANK! BDANK! He totters, unaware, upon the precipice of his mortality. There at the brink he sees me and the meaning of the universe is altered evermore about him. In France, for his mighty perspiration, he is known as ‘le canal’, which means ‘the channel’.
I see Oatsie Chaplin in debate with Boysie Bristol, there outside the Palace of Varieties on Gold Street corner in the first years of the twentieth century. “But if they’re millionaires, why do they dress as tramps?” I see him come home to his native Lambeth following the First World War, a famous film star now, returning from America. The cockneys – former neighbours who’ve lost sons or brothers to the conflict while he batted his long lashes for the camera – dash pints of beer into his face. Rescued by his assistants and wiped down with borrowed towels in a nearby public convenience, he smells his past, he smells his father in the sodden jacket, the damp trousers.
I see Henry George, praying in barns when he no longer trusts the church. Pigeons are cooing in the rafters and the light falls in a twinkling shaft through breaches in the slates, the thatching. On his shoulder flares a brand that is my own design, that is his private shame, that is his holy burning glory: pallid violet lines on purple skin, the balance and the road. Road of the exodus from Tennessee to Kansas, drovers’ road from Wales to Sheep Street where he washes up into the Boroughs on a bleating tide of white, all paths are one. The lynch-ropes of his youth are now the tyres that speed him on his way, with the black champions and martyrs of Northampton striding in his wake.
I see Benedict Perrit, writing lines of painful beauty, laughing, drinking, arguing with ghosts. I see him sitting up alone save for the distant sirens, fingers hesitating over his typewriter’s dusty keys on the night prior to Alma Warren’s exhibition. He stares like a lost explorer at the Arctic whiteness of the empty page, waiting for inspiration, for the least brush of my wing. Three miles away, off in the yellow Whitehills lamplight filtering through the curtains, Michael Warren cannot sleep and thinks about Diana Spencer’s funeral procession, all the people on the footbridge as she came into Northampton. All the eyes and silence.
I see Thomas Ernest Warren, Michael’s father, digging holes or taking time off work with a bad back which doesn’t seem to bother him much after his retirement. Earlier, he’s in his twenties, learning how to throw grenades. He’s part of a long file of men who one by one leap up onto a platform with their sergeant, pull the stalk from their iron pineapple, count three, and hurl the death-egg over a high wall of sandbags to explode. Tommy is next in line, wanting to do it right. The chap in front of him pulls out the pin and starts to count. Tom, over-eager, has already jumped up on the platform right behind the nervous soldier, who counts up to three, then accidentally drops the lethal fir-cone at their feet. Sighting along my cue, I hit their sergeant so that he streaks forward, knocking Thomas and the other man to either side and simultaneously sweeping the grenade over the barrier; into the death’s-head pocket, and we builders at the table all throw up our hands. Iiiiiyyyesssssss!
I see the stipple and the hatch, the filigree and the fine shading. I see Doreen Warren carefully unwrap the cherry-menthol Tune and place it in her infant’s mouth. I see the councillor, Jim Cockie, in his bed full of bad dreams. I see the pavement artist Jackie Thimbles, and Tom Hall, the minstrel ghost. I see Fat Kenny Nolan as he contemplates the species of <em>datura</em> he has cultivated, and I smile to see it is an Angel’s Trumpet with the blossom’s white bell hanging down, all rueful. I see Roman Thompson sitting in a borrowed car, silently in the darkened mouth of Fish Street with a snooker cue at rest on the back seat behind him, cold blood coursing through his heart. I see John Newton after his unblinding. I see Thursa Vernall turning German bombers into her accompanists, and the heroic dream of Britton Johnson. I see Lucia Joyce and Samuel Beckett, see him chatting to her in the institution; by her graveside. I see miseries. I see redemptions.
I see Audrey Vernall on the dance-hall stage, her fingers trickling on the keys of her accordion, tossing back her hair, with one small blue shoe keeping time on the worn boards, skirt swinging, “<em>When The Saints Go Marching In”</em>. Her tight smile falters in the spotlight and her eyes keeping darting sideways to the wings where her dad Johnny, the band’s manager, gives her the thumbs-up, nods encouragingly at her, and then, later on, he’s taking off his loud checked jacket, hanging it up on the hook for dressing gowns behind her bedroom door.
I see Thomas á Becket, and I see the brown-skinned woman with the scar who works from the St. Peter’s Annexe up in two thousand and twenty-five. I see the saints go marching in.
I see the dog turd on the central walk of Bath Street flats, unbroken on the Friday afternoon, stepped in by midday Saturday when Michael Warren notices it on his way to Alma’s exhibition.
I step back before the canvas, reeling in its splendour.
<br>
At the very start there are a thousand planets racketing about the solar system, ricocheting and rebounding, pulverising one another in a pinball free-for-all, and this is where we get the idea for our trilliard table. Something hits the fledgling world, with debris from both bodies settling at the edges of Earth’s field of gravity, coagulating to a moon, a lucky opening break.
Some short while later a less sizeable projectile makes its impact, and also its contribution to the culling of the thunder-lizards. In the aftermath, amoebic creatures called agglutinated foraminifera clothe themselves within protective tests of meteoric nickel and space-cobalt; plate their unicellular forms in peacock displays of microscopic diamond dust. The ornaments of their miniature cosmos, clad with jewellery from the void they scintillate there in the Late Cretaceous silence, in the very dusk of life. They neither know about nor have concern for the extinctions of the macrocosm. They remain oblivious to the trees and monsters toppling and dying overhead, in the long night that follows the extra-terrestrial collision. In their multitudes they are as various as snowflakes and yet I know each one intimately, know them by their individual coruscations, their signature sparkle. They move with the moon’s pull, with the magnet-tides, as do the generations that come after them, migrating on lunar meridians to feed the underwater bugs that feed the fish, that feed the birds and bears and crouching monkey-men.
You will appreciate that our game involves a great deal of strategy.
<br>
Sometimes we’re on the ball. Sometimes we get distracted, miss the easy shot, but only when we’re meant to. I give Solomon the holy torus and he wears it on his index finger when he subjugates the howling djinns that have rampaged through Egypt and the Middle East as an infernal weather-pattern, as a hornet swarm. When he elects that they should build his temple I try to prevent it with a safety shot but I misjudge; I miss.
The binding of the fiends is going well enough until the sorcerer-king gets to the thirty-second spirit, at which point the King is obviously out of his depth. He has failed to anticipate the unbelievable ferocity that senior devils like Asmodeus will resort to if you have them in a corner. The thing takes shape in the pentacle, three-headed and no bigger than a doll astride the cat-sized dragon form that is its steed. The bull’s-head lows, the ram’s-head bleats, and the crowned human dwarf’s-head in the centre lets forth both a flood of terrifying threats and its vile breath alike, to fill the room. It stamps the pommel of its gory lance upon the flagstones and the magus panics, flinching back so that the lamen hung about his neck comes untied at one end and clatters to the floor. By then the chamber is aflame with flickering spider-salamanders and the operation has become a screaming pandemonium, a catastrophe. I close my marbled eyes and turn away.
In consequence of this I do not know what next occurred. It may be that the founder of the temple was possessed by the efreet, or it may be as rabbinical scholars claim, with Solomon flung far away into a desert land and driven from his wits while the triumphant demon steals his shape. It may be that Asmoday merely takes advantage of the King’s discomfiture to plant destructive notions in his mind, or it may well be that the thirty-second spirit does nothing at all, and all of the calamities to come are Solomon’s alone. I only know that when I look back, the First Temple is completed, with the malice of the seventy-two tempters, flatterers and devastators coded in its columns and its lines. A focus for the world’s three most belligerent religions, I see crusade, jihad and retaliatory air-strike circling the pillars of the structure’s round. I see a foul and fruity pulp of tortured men, raped women and pulverised children sliding down its ancient walls.
King Solomon. What a colossal idiot.
<br>
Derek James Warner, 42, works as a driver for one of the big private security providers. Derek’s looking forward to the Friday night ahead of him, out scouting for a bit of skirt and confident he’ll be successful, even though he’s greying at the temples, even though he’s put on a few pounds just recently and even though he’s married with two children, Jennifer and Carl.
His wife Irene has taken them off to her mother’s house in Caister for the weekend. Derek drove them up there, but forgot to unload all the children’s rubber rings and beach-toys from the boot before he drove back home again. Irene has given him a bollocking for that over the phone already, earlier this evening. Derek doesn’t give a fuck. He can’t remember the last time the two of them had sex, the last time that he’d felt any desire for her. That’s why he’s off out on the prowl tonight, because of her.
He sits on the settee, the one that he’s still paying for despite the fact that it’s already knackered, perched beside the handset of his son Carl’s X-Box as he smokes a crystal chip of methamphetamine. He’s picked this up – the habit and the drug itself – from Ronnie Ballantine, another driver at the company that Derek works for. Ballantine’s a cocoa-shunter, though you wouldn’t know to talk to him. Great big bloke, great big driver’s forearms. He’d told Derek about crystal meth, how it would keep you going all night with a hard-on like a ripping chisel. Derek likes the sound of that.
He finishes the rock then goes out jingling his keys impatiently and climbs into the black Ford Escort. He feels like a killer robot or one of the Gladiators that they used to have on the TV. His Gladiator codename would be either Dominator or Tarantula, he can’t make up his mind. He’s getting movements in the corners of his vision, things that bob up into view but vanish if you look at them directly, like a game of Whack-A-Mole, but overall he’s feeling lucky, feeling good.
Look out, girls.
Here he comes.
<br>
Lucia Joyce is dancing on the madhouse lawn. Her twirling body is a fragile coracle, becalmed there on the still green sea of grass. She circles beautifully without effect, one of her inner oars misplaced. Her crossing has no other side, no harbour, no admirers cheering on the docks and no ships’ whistles blowing when her craft at last comes into view on the horizon. The reception crowd have either all died waiting or have given up on her and finally gone home.
Her Da, while living, sees her as a work in progress and perpetually unfinished, an abandoned masterpiece. Perhaps one day he’ll have another go at her, fiddle with her a bit and try to sort out the stalled plotlines, all the uncompleted sentences, but then he dies and leaves her stranded there in the excluded information, the ellipses …
Lucia’s family have edited her out, reduced her to a footnote in the yarn, all but excised her from the manuscript. Dear Sam still visits her, of course, but doesn’t love her, or at least not in the way she thought he did, the way she wanted him to love her. This too, as she sees it, is her father’s fault. By making Sam into the literary son he’s always wanted, he’s transformed that lovely man into the brother Lucia already has and never asked for in the first place. Beckett loves her like a sister. Nothing can go on between them now without occurring in an atmosphere of incest; in an air that Lucia can no longer bear to breathe. And yet she thinks about the monsoon of his hair, his long and leathery cheek, a sailor’s sorry wisdom in his stare.
She dances. She attempts to reduce the complexity of being to a gesture, tries to pull the whole world into every dip and turn, her history, her father’s book, the blinding light from the asylum’s wet slate roofs. She takes protracted and deliberate paces, planes her open hands as though attempting to smooth wrinkles from the empty space surrounding her. She cranes her neck to strike a perfect hieroglyphic profile so that her imaginary audience won’t notice the boss eye. In my sight she is perfect, the slight cast in one orb reminiscent of the ocular deficiency that Michelangelo bestows upon his David, the gaze misaligned deliberately so as to offer the most pleasing views when seen from either side. Such artistry is not intended to be looked full in the face.
Northampton wraps its arms around her, honoured by her presence: she could have gone there-ward but instead washed here-ward in the wake of her unsatisfying tour through European sanatoriums. At last she dances her way out of tempo, out of time into the Kingsthorpe cemetery just up the road from Michael Warren’s house, two or three headstones down from Finnegan himself, with Violet Gibson who shot Mussolini in the nose and was committed to St. Andrew’s Hospital not very far away. Lucia pirouettes ecstatic now on the eternal boardwalks of Mansoul. Now she can see straight. She knows what the work progresses to, and knows that not a single step was wasted.
<br>
I keep up with the continuing argument over ‘Intelligent Design’, although if one subscribes to late twentieth-century ideas of consciousness as an emergent property, the disagreement vanishes. If self-awareness can emerge from systems that have passed a certain threshold of complexity, then is not the expanding universe of space and time, by definition, the most complex system that can possibly exist? Mark that I do not seek to trespass on the faiths or ideologies of others with this observation. I’m just saying.
<br>
I glimpse Alma Warren in her early sixties, standing at her easel in the house there on East Park Parade during the year 2016. She steps off from the canvas, squints and curls her lip, mugging for cameras that aren’t there. She angles her long body forward as if stooping over prey and slops a thick impasto curl of dirty cream along a splashing wave-top, then leans back again, considering.
The large acrylic image is one of a series that she’s working on at present, for an exhibition tentatively titled <em>Landscapes?</em> These are scenic views which would at one point have been in the category suggested by that title, but are in the process of transforming into something else, a more ambiguous state. The painting that Alma is currently engaged with shows a public house towards the north end of the Yarmouth seafront, an art-deco structure from the 1930s called the Iron Duke. Though semi-derelict as it’s depicted here, the pub retains a grandness and a generosity of spirit, vestiges of the brave, misplaced optimism typifying the decade of its inception.
A decaying beauty, in its salad days it stands adjacent to North Denes, the busy caravan camp where Alma and Michael are brought by their parents for a factory fortnight, almost every summer of their childhoods. They meet all their Spring Lane classmates and their Boroughs neighbours on the salty promenades, in bulb-lit pub yards carpeted with cockleshells, the greater part of working-class Northampton having relocated to the east coast for the same two long-anticipated weeks.
The pub is now positioned slightly right of centre, in the painting’s middle-ground. Its rear-yard walls of dark red brick are listing from the building’s central bulk, slowly collapsing, while the glass panes of the higher moulded windows are surprisingly intact. Surrounding the deteriorated edifice are only the North Sea’s expanded waters. Wavelets capped with grey detergent suds lap at the fan of steps that lead, beneath a crumbling portico, from the saloon bar to a submerged car park. The deserted terrace with its curving balustrade now looks more like the fo’c’sle of a foundered galleon. Barnacles have colonised the lower reaches of the flaking drainpipes.
Alma has applied a texture to the drowned pub’s scabby brickwork, speckling its distressed surfaces with minute dabs of purple that are almost black, so that the walls seem pitted as though by ancient corrosions. This technique, known as decalcomania, is borrowed from the great surrealist Max Ernst, and in this instance is a reference to his jewelled and eerie masterpiece, <em>Europe after the Rain</em>. Off in the distance of her painting’s background Alma has suggested ruined pleasure-beach attractions, decommissioned roller-coasters, skeletal Big Wheels looming above the waterline, their spidery lines just visible through scumbled morning haze that she’s created using a dry brush. She wants the work to be at once serene, sad and unsettling; intends to use the hostelry and its clean Bauhaus contours as a symbol of man’s fragile notions of modernity, succumbing to the old simplicities of time and tide. She wants the viewer to hear gulls, infrequent splashes, and an absence of machines or voices.
In the cluttered ground-floor front room that she uses as her studio, books and paintings in various stages of completion are arranged haphazardly. A creased and battered paperback edition of <em>The Drowned World</em>, J.G. Ballard’s lyric conjuring of watery apocalypse, rests open on one worn arm of an equally distressed leather settee. A hashish smog has gathered under the high ceiling. It’s been ten years since her exhibition in the Boroughs. She’s more famous, more ungrateful and withdrawn than ever. Alma finds herself identifying with the ruin in the painting, both of them falling to bits and jutting picturesquely and conspicuously from an otherwise flat and unruffled ocean, both of them still decent-looking in a good light, if you like that sort of thing.
She paints until the brink of dusk, then walks to Marks & Spencer’s on Abington Avenue to buy a ready-meal. Above the cricket ground the evening sky grades like over-diluted lemon squash.
<br>
I sit through all of the extinctions, all the species that have reached the natural end of their extension into the concealed direction.
Every other week, a human language dies. Beautiful, unique life forms with intricate skeletons of grammar, delicately hinged by syntax, they grow weaker and fold in their wings of adjectival gossamer. They make their last frail noises and then crumble into incoherence, into silence, no more to be heard.
A stilled tongue, every fortnight. A concluded song. Hark, the glad sound.
<br>
There is a television channel that is broadcast only to the nearly dead, transmitted on a disinfectant fug through care-home dayrooms, terminal ward twilights. Senile screens provide the best reception, signals sparking in corroded diodes, fraying synapses. The station’s logo, white upon closed-eyelid black, depicts a crudely rendered set of balances above the winding ribbon of a stylised path. Accompanying this there is a four-note trumpet flourish, serving as the channel’s theme-tune.
Albert Good sits in the armchair at his Duston home, having just woken from a nap to find the telly on and some sort of afternoon play in progress. Even though it’s all in black and white, Albert can tell immediately that it’s one of those modern dramas that he doesn’t care for much, one of those Wednesday-night things where somebody’s always either sleeping rough or pregnant. He’d get up and switch it off, but he’s been feeling so run-down just lately that he hasn’t got the energy, can only sit and watch.
There seems to only be one set involved in the production, with the audience looking at a broad flight of stone steps which rise beneath the huge porch of a church. Giant stone columns, more than likely made from painted plywood, rear up at each side, framing the scene. To Albert, it looks very like the front of All Saints Church here in Northampton, although he supposes that there must be lots of places throughout England that look similar, having been built around the same time and in the same style. Between the Gothic pillars it is night. The only lighting is positioned to resemble that of off-stage streetlamps, filtering into a pearly gloom beneath the portico.
Whichever town the play is set in, it appears to be almost deserted after dark. To Albert’s way of thinking this suggests it’s taking place some years ago, possibly just after the war, before midnight town centres were lit up like Christmas trees and full of drunken youngsters. All the props and scenery have that cosy post-war feel about them, something Albert only finds these days in local photograph collections or in reprints of the annual <em>Giles</em> editions, the authentic flavour of the air back then. He squints uneasily in the direction of the relatively tiny screen and tries to make sense of what’s going on.
A man and woman, both in middle age, are sitting on the cold stone steps, stage centre. Albert finds the pair familiar and is almost certain that he’s seen both actors previously, in something else. The man, who wears a loud checked jacket, might have been in <em>Hi-de-hi</em>, now Albert comes to think of it. The woman, with her coat pulled tight around her neck against the evening’s chill and weeping intermittently, is possibly Patricia Haynes when she was younger. Though they seem to be a married couple, there is too much space upon the step between them. When the husband shuffles closer to the wife she flinches and moves further off, away from him. Their dialogue is sparse and cryptic, with long silences between the questions and the answers. Albert can’t make head or tail of it.
Even more baffling are the drama’s other characters, four or five figures in outlandish clothes who loiter underneath the portico, behind the man and woman in the foreground. Despite the oddness of their clothing and how loudly they are talking, neither of the seated couple seem to be aware of them. Eventually Albert works out that these other players, the ones chatting in the background, are meant to be ghosts of some sort. They can see the living wife and husband sitting on the church steps, and pass comment on them, but the mortal pair can’t see the phantoms and presume they are alone. Albert finds this disturbing. It gives the impression of so many ghosts that every paving stone and public toilet in the country must surely be haunted, every human conversation overheard by the eavesdropping dead.
He doesn’t want to look at this. He turns away and shuts his eyes. Although he isn’t able to determine the exact point at which he nods off again, he later realises that he must have done. When he awakens, Lou has come back from the shops. The television is now silent, from which Albert concludes that Lou must have switched it off when she came in. She asks him how he’s feeling, and he tells her about the upsetting play or old film or whatever it was meant to be.
“I watched this thing on telly that had ghosts in it. I didn’t like it much, to tell the truth. It put the willies up me. I don’t think they ought to show that kind of effort in the afternoons, when you’ve got kiddies home from school. I think it’s shocking. I’ve a good mind to complain.”
Lou cocks her head on one side like a bird and looks at him, then glances at the unplugged television set, which is just as she left it when she went out earlier. She clucks over her husband sympathetically, agrees that all the programmes these days are a waste of license money and then makes a pot of tea for both of them. Within an hour the mystery theatre presentation is forgotten.
When this secret television station of the near dead is off air it cannot be detected, except as a high-pitched and near ultrasonic whistling tone experienced in the inner ear. If you just listen carefully, you’ll find that you can hear it now.
<br>
Hymns are, of course, tremendously important, be they penned by William Blake, John Bunyan, Philip Doddridge or John Newton. An attempted transcendental poetry intended for the common multitude, they fertilise the dreams and visions that shall grow into the very boardwalks of Mansoul. As they delineate Hell or depict Heaven, so too do they build those places, brick by brick, stanza by stanza. Come, lift up your hearts and voices and rejoice. Give me a platform of ideas and harmonies on which to gesture and unfurl my wings. Give me a place to stand.
<br>
I know I am a text. I know that you are reading me. This is the biggest difference that there is between us: you do not know that you are a text. You don’t know that you’re reading yourself. What you believe to be the self-determined life that you are passing through is actually a book already written that you have become absorbed in, and not for the first time. When this current reading is concluded, when the coffin-lid rear cover is eventually shut tight, then you immediately forget that you’ve already struggled through it and you pick it up again, perhaps attracted by the striking and heroic picture of yourself that’s there on the dust-jacket.
You wade once more through the glossolalia of the novel’s opening and that startling birth-scene, all in the first person, foggily described in a confusion of new tastes and scents and terrifying lights. You linger in delight over the childhood passages and savour all the powerfully realised new characters as they are introduced, the mother and the dad, the friends and relatives and enemies, each with their memorable quirks, their singular allure. Engrossing as you find these youthful exploits, you discover that you’re merely skimming certain of the later episodes out of sheer boredom, thumbing through the pages of your days, skipping ahead, impatient for the adult content and pornography that you assume to be awaiting you in the next chapter.
When this turns out to be less an unalloyed joy, less abundant than you have anticipated, you feel vaguely cheated and you rail against the author for a time. By then though, all the story’s major themes are welling up around you in the yarn, madness and love and loss, destiny and redemption. You begin to understand the true scale of the work, its depth and its ambition, qualities that have escaped you until now. There is a dawning apprehension, a sense that the tale might not be in the category you have previously supposed, that of the picaresque adventure or sex-comedy. Alarmingly, the narrative progresses past the reassuring borderlines of genre into the unnerving territory of the avant-garde. For the first time you wonder if you’ve bitten off far more than you can chew, embarked upon some weighty magnum opus by mistake when you’d intended to pick up only a pot-boiler, holiday reading for the airport or the beach. You start to doubt your capabilities as reader, doubt in your ability to stick this mortal fable out to its conclusion without the attention wandering. And even if you finish it, you doubt that you’re astute enough to understand the saga’s message, if message there be. You privately suspect that it will sail over your head, and yet what can you do but keep on living, keep turning the calendar-leaf pages, urged on by that cover-blurb that says: “If you read only one book in your life then make it this one.”
Not until you’re more than halfway through the tome, near the two-thirds mark, do the earlier, seemingly random plot points start to make some kind of sense to you. The meanings and the metaphors begin to resonate; the ironies and the motifs reveal themselves. You’re still not certain if you’ve read all this before or not. Some elements seem awfully familiar and you have occasional premonitions as to how one of the subplots will work out. An image or a line of dialogue will sometimes strike a chord of déjà vu, but by and large it all seems like a new experience. It doesn’t matter if this is a second or a hundredth reading: it seems fresh to you, and, whether begrudgingly or not, you seem to be enjoying it. You don’t want it to end.
But when it is concluded, when the coffin-lid rear cover is eventually shut tight, you immediately forget that you’ve already struggled through it and you pick it up again, perhaps attracted by the striking and heroic picture of yourself that’s there on the dust-jacket. It’s the mark of a good book, they say, if you can read it more than once and still find something new each time.
<br>
If you could view the lone house there on Scarletwell Street’s corner from a higher geometrical perspective, you would understand why complex and unlikely circumstances had to come about in order for that edifice to remain standing, even when the terrace that it once was part of had been long demolished. When seen in the light of the events and the chronologies it is supporting, it becomes apparent that the isolated house is a load-bearing structure. It provides the anchor and foundation stone for a specific moment and occasion, and it cannot be pulled down before that date, tonight, Friday, May 26<sup>th</sup>, 2006. It would have been impossible to do so. Seen from one dimension up, the reasons for this would be obvious: time simply isn’t built like that. It was one demolition that was never going to happen, or at least, not until it was ready.
In the yellowed light of the front parlour sits the building’s occupant, the Vernall made responsible for that specific corner. Humming a jazz standard, they anticipate the frantic banging at the front door that will herald their celestial visitor. Tonight’s the night. It’s on the cards, it’s in the tea leaves. All they have to do is sit and wait for fate, for destiny, and it will all come marching in.
<br>
I see the world, and, through a lens of prose or paint or song or celluloid, the world sees me.
The emerald bauble of the planet, nested on a sequin-dusted jeweller’s cushion of black velvet, this is not the world. The several billion apes with improved posture that cavort across the planet’s surface, these are likewise not the world. The world is no more than an aggregate of your ideas about the world, of your ideas about yourselves. It is the vast mirage, baroque and intricate, that you are building as a shelter from the overwhelming fractal chaos of the universe. It is composed from things of the imagination, from philosophies, economies and wavering faith, from your self-serving individual agendas and your colourful notions of destiny. It is a flight of fancy spun to while away those empty-bellied Neolithic nights, a wishful fantasy of how mankind might one day live, a campfire tale you tell yourselves and then forget is just a tale that you are telling; that you have made up and have mistaken for reality. Civilisation is your earliest science-fiction story. You come up with it so that you’ll have something to do, something to occupy yourselves during the centuries to come. Don’t you remember?
For all that it manifests materially in castles, hospitals, sofas and atom bombs, the world is founded in the immaterial reaches of the human mind, is standing on a flimsy paradigm that has no actual substance. And if that foundation does not hold, if it is based perhaps upon a flawed perception of the universe that does not match with later observations, then the whole confection falls into an abyss of unbeing. Both in terms of its construction and its ideology, the world is far from sound. To be quite honest it’s a creaking death-trap, and there are all of these health and safety regulations. I don’t make the rules.
I am a builder. You’ll appreciate that this entails a lot of demolition work. Your world, the way you think about yourselves and your most fundamental notions of reality are the result of unskilled labour, cowboy workmanship. There’s bad subsidence; dry rot in the moral timbers. This will all have to come down, and it’s not going to be cheap.
Does the phrase “clearance area” mean anything to you?
<br>
Ideas of self, ideas of world and family and nation, articles of scientific or religious faith, your creeds and currencies: one by one, the beloved structures falling.
Whooomff.
Whooomff.
Whooomff.
** <strong>A COLD AND FROSTY MORNING</strong>
<strong>A</strong>lma Warren, barely out of bed and naked in the monstrous bathroom mirror, staring bleary at her sagging fifty-three-year-old flesh and still fancying herself something rotten. She finds her enduring vanity almost heroic in the scale of its delusion. She’s prepared to face the facts, safe in the knowledge that the facts will only scream and run away. All things considered, she’s a funny piece of work.
The big square bathroom with its plaster-rounded corners is a blunted cube of grey steam rising from the eight-foot chasm of the filling tub, an ostentatious lifeboat made from tide-lined fibreglass. Subjected to this sweltering rain-forest climate every morning for at least ten years the chamber’s blue and gold-veined lining paper has begun to droop down from the ceiling’s curve, a wilted winter sunrise. At the bottom of the giant bath itself there are the studs of an unused Jacuzzi fixture, gilt flaked off to show the dull grey metal underneath. Alma has never really had the knack of keeping something nice.
She picks a bath bomb from the green glass fruit bowl on the counter, Fairy Jasmine from the fragrant branch of Lush down in the Grosvenor Centre, lobs it casually into the deep hot water and takes childish pleasure from the scum of blue metallic glitter that seethes up out of the fizz and foment. She’ll have sequinned cheeks, hands, hair and sheets for a few days but, on the plus side, will be living in the early 1970s. Alma climbs up onto the near end of the boxed-in miniature lagoon and strikes a pose like a high diver, squinting down into the steam until she can imagine that her bathtub is a massive reservoir as seen from several hundred feet above. She makes as if about to execute a swallow dive but then appears to change her mind and steps down carefully into her bath in the conventional fashion. This strange pantomime is something she does each day without having any idea why. She only hopes that nobody ever finds out about it.
With a pig-pink soap-bar redolent of Woolworths’ Pick’n’Mix she lathers herself everywhere then sluices it all off, relaxing back into the heat and suds until only her face is visible above the surface as a floating mask. The long hair drifts about her outsized skull like waterweed, becoming sleek and saturated as she listens to the ringing underwater noises that her bath makes inadvertently, the peeling gold tap’s rhythmic dripping and the amplified scrape of a toenail on the long tub’s moulded sides. Alma feels comfortable, reduced to nothing but a bobbing face with all the rest of what she is concealed beneath the bubbles and the drifting clots of iridescent blue. This is essentially the strategy with which she faces life, believing that it lends her the advantage of surprise: there might be anything beneath the suds and sparkle, mightn’t there?
After an amniotic minute of submersion she sits up, hair a lank comma dribbling between her shoulder blades, and scoops a viscous palm-full of her lime and sea-salt shampoo from its pot, rubbing the gritty slime into her scalp. The product promises its user traffic-stopping shine and volume, although Alma is unable to remember the last time that she’d stopped traffic in a good way. Moulding her hair forward in a lather-stiffened quiff that sags towards its dripping tip a good eight inches from her forehead, Alma mumbles “Thang yuh verrah much” into the humid fog, then rinses it all off using a peeling golden shower attachment. She is, she likes to believe, the spitting image of the King if he’d lived to be an old woman.
Once the strands are squeaking like violin strings, she turns off the nozzle and lies back, her sodden head draining into the folded towel that she’s forethoughtfully placed on the long tub’s pointed end. Stretched out full length and motionless, a dead Egyptian monarch whose sarcophagus has first been flooded and then strewn with glitter for unfathomable ritual purposes, Alma reviews her thoughts, such as they are at this time of a Friday morning. Near the surface, a storm-layer of nonsensical rage and resentment is subsiding gradually into this foamy interlude between her breakfast Shreddies, her sensible daily aspirin and her bio-yoghurt drinks, already wolfed down, and her first joint of the day, which is still yet to come. Beneath this scum-line of residual anger is a tediously efficient secretary-strata, listing everything that Alma has to do today, Friday, May 26<sup>th</sup>, 2006: finish the <em>Chain of Office</em> picture, pay her treacherous bloodsucking council tax, go to the bank, visit the little day-care nursery down near Doddridge Church to see if everything has been delivered safely for tomorrow’s exhibition. Oh, and shop for food in town, because there’s nothing in the fridge except for weird, exotic relishes and dips she’s bought while in an altered state. Perhaps she’ll pop her head into the Grosvenor Centre branch of HMV to see if the new season of <em>The Wire</em> is out yet; maybe trawl the local-interest shelves at Waterstone’s, looking for photographs of sepia barges on a brown-ale river; lemming-waves of kids in 1950s swimming costumes running at the camera, splashing through the shallow end of the Midsummer Meadow lido.
Down below this relatively-tidy organising level are the ceaselessly-rotating cogs and flywheels of creative process. These are anxiously reviewing minor irritations in completed works – the central white-haired labourer in <em>Work in Progress</em> for example, looking back across his shoulder at the audience with eyes perhaps too stern and frightening – or else are sifting patiently through possibilities for paintings yet to come. She has a nebulous idea that involves tracking down the sites depicted by great, bygone landscape artists, recreating the same view in the same medium, with all the car-crammed motorways and modern alterations rendered classically in lustrous oils with patient glazes, freezing a degraded present in the unforgiving gaze of a more able past. There’s something in the notion that appeals to her, but it’s too glib and obvious in its present form. Besides, she’ll have had five ideas as good or better before she retires tonight. Alma’s attention skitters over this and other fledgling projects pretty much non-stop, even while other areas of her awareness are engaged in pressing matters of their own, such as pretending that whomever she is talking to has her complete attention.
Under this productive and untiring shop-floor of the mind we next encounter the vast, monitor-lit basement complex of a super-villainess, where part of Alma’s too-elaborate personality sits in a swivel chair amongst the shifting screens and contemplates deranged agendas. These include affecting the development of culture by the subtle introduction of extreme ideas, which, if pursued, will almost certainly precipitate widespread apocalyptic psychological collapse. This will fulfil Alma’s ambition, having first gone mad herself, of taking everyone else with her. Then, of course, there’s the ongoing scheme to argue her way out of death, which is progressing rather nicely. She sits swivelling and chuckling in her imaginary lair, but does not stroke a cat, having anticipated that her stature as a villainess would be severely undercut by the predictable and obvious sexual pun. Instead, when circumstance requires, she strokes a raucous and red-crested cock.
Descending further there are Jungian catacombs of alchemy, kabbalah, numerology and tarot, paranormal residues resulting from her still-current preoccupation with the occult. She decodes the day around her in accordance with the correspondence-tables of Cornelius Agrippa, Dr. Dee, Aleister Crowley, all the other occult heavyweights. Today’s a Friday, Freitag, Vendredi, day of the planet Venus and the number seven, a good female day in all. Its colours are three shades of green with amber as a complement. Its perfume is attar of rose, its metal copper. This specific zone of Alma’s consciousness allows itself to be productively distracted by the tangential idea of roses, following a fragile thread of free-association starting with Diana Spencer, “Goodbye, England’s Rose”, Taupin and John’s camp Monroe eulogy refitted for another blonde girl dead of cameras, misplaced ambition, and betrayal. The funeral cortège that Alma’s brother Mick had watched, bringing the body home along the summer motorway, thrown blossoms wilting on the bonnet, vivid on the dull gunmetal of the casket. Utter silence from the crowds beside the road. Northamptonshire, Rose of the Shires. The rose originates in Turkey, only red or white varieties available, and it is introduced in Europe by returned crusaders, many of these coming back here to the town where their crusades had started. Proving popular, the flower, in its two distinct shades, is eventually adopted as a symbol by the Houses of both Lancaster and York, with their subsequent conflict settled at the Battle of Cow Meadow, between Beckett’s Park and Delapré across the river. Blood and roses, a repetitive motif across the printed fabric of Northampton’s muddy skirt.
A little further down are Alma’s feelings, her emotional component, a far sunnier and less nightmarish pasture than appearances might lead one to suppose. In this enclosure, all of Alma’s friends and pets and family, alive or dead, frolic amidst enactments of her treasured moments. These might represent a dream, a first kiss, or that funny afternoon when she’d been nine, taking a long-cut home through Greyfriars flats down Scarletwell Street, noticing the bush, the single dangling caterpillar. All of Alma’s positive experiences are rerouted here for long-term storage. All her negative experiences are fed to an appalling thing with turquoise eyes, kept in a pen behind the recreation area and only taken out for walks upon special occasions.
Under all of this is Alma’s soul, the Real of her that cannot be expressed, which is a lovely and ingeniously fashioned artefact, if possibly a little showy and impractical. Essentially, it is that of a serious-minded yet imaginative and very clever seven-year-old girl, and at the moment is dissolving blissfully into the jasmine-scented, sapphire-dusted currents of a scalding hot bath.
When she starts experiencing pangs of proletarian guilt at her minor-celebrity indulgence, which takes only a few minutes in a tub of this preposterous size, she sits up suddenly and pulls the plug out. Leaping from the bath, she tries to dry herself and get her clothes on before all the water has drained gurgling away, a habit that she used to think of as simple efficiency but has since realised is just part of her quite ordinary individual madness. Finally, triumphantly, having completed dressing while the last few nebulae of foam and glitter are still circling the plug’s black hole by the simple expedient of not bothering with any underwear, she slings her robe over the banister and thunders down the stairs. It’s half-past seven in the morning and time to commence her hectic and demanding schedule of attempting to intimidate the planet’s other occupants. It’s not that Alma finds this wholly self-imposed task difficult, especially. It’s just that there’s so many of them, and so little time.
Downstairs, amidst a clutter of rare book and uncompleted canvas that is only reassuring to Alma herself, she fills her space-age kettle-jug and switches on its eerie blue light before settling into her armchair and beginning the construction of her first jazz cigarette. These ostentatiously long items, accurately labelled as “nine-inch Gauloise dick-compensators” by her one-time visitor Alexei Sayle, are a leftover from her younger days when she still went to parties and contrived a reefer long enough to still have something left for herself after it had circumnavigated a room full of people. When her partial deafness and increasing weariness with alcohol led to Alma foregoing parties and most often smoking on her own while working, she simply forgot to modify the length, that’s all. It’s not that she’s a drug-glutton or anything.
When all ten Rizla papers have been glued into a white flag of surrender and the filling of tobacco added, Alma cooks the blunt end of a bar of hash over her Zippo lighter. This current variety, which as a teenager she would have recognised as coming from Afghanistan or Pakistan, has more than likely been renamed Taliban Black to suit the present situation. She reflects upon this as she crumbles the still-smouldering resin into the tobacco, burning her almost entirely nerveless left thumb and forefinger in the process. Next there comes a scrabbling carpet-rolling motion and a swift pass of the gummed edge across Alma’s tongue, a twist at one end and a neat insertion of rolled cardboard at the other, all before her blue-lit orgone-kettle in the kitchen has stopped bubbling. She pours the boiling water, spattering, into a horribly discoloured BEST AT EVERYTHING mug, guides the sizzling torrent so that it falls on the centre of the circular grey teabag and inflates it satisfyingly into a pillow of trapped heat. Mashing it up against the cup’s side with her spoon to squeeze the last drop of its vital juices out, she flips the spent and steaming carcass into her conveniently open pedal bin. Foregoing milk and sugar – she prefers her beverages “black and bitter, how I like my men” – Alma transports the brimming mug back to her living room, her armchair and her waiting contraband cheroot.
Behind her chair there is an arching stained-glass panel where gold stars mark the positions of the kabbalistic spheres against a deep royal blue grading into aquamarine. The low sun through the room’s rear window falls through this and drenches Alma in cobalt and yellow radiance as she lights up the cigarette. The painted stars break eggs onto the cyan glaze of her wet hair. She holds the smoke in for a moment and then sits back and exhales into the gathering indigo, luxuriating in her own identity, in the incessant fun and mostly-pleasant strain of simply being her.
As the cloud-chamber of her consciousness begins to warm up, turbines whirring into life as it approaches normal operating speed, she reaches for the nearest page of print to give her rapidly engaging mental processes a point of focus. This turns out to be the latest issue of <em>New Scientist</em>, dated May 4<sup>th</sup>, open at an intriguing article concerning Alma’s favourite science philosopher, the beautifully-named Gerard ’t Hooft, whose criticisms of string theory she’d been so impressed by. It seems that ’t Hooft has formulated a hypothesis which would, if proven, finally resolve the quandaries of quantum indeterminacy; would resolve them right out of existence, if Alma is reading it correctly. The philosopher apparently suggests that there’s a deeper and more fundamental level, as yet undiscovered, underlying the mysterious quantum world. ’T Hooft predicts that once we have developed tunnelling microscopes that can reveal this previously unsuspected layer of reality we’ll find that Heisenberg’s idea of particles existing in a wide variety of states until observed is an illusion based upon misunderstanding.
Reading all this between alternating sips of tea and smoke, Alma allows herself the guttural chortle of an ogre who’s just realised where the schoolchildren are hiding. She can spot a well-constructed dangerous idea when she sees one, and ’t Hooft’s proposal strikes her as one of the most ingenious conceptual land mines that she’s ever heard of. The idea’s attractions are immediately apparent. Quantum indeterminacy is the stumbling block preventing any easy resolution of the vast discrepancies between the quantum world-view and the classically-constructed universe of Einstein, Newton and the rest. If tiny subatomic particles behave according to the Lewis Carroll laws that govern quantum physics, then why do entirely different laws govern the stars and planets? The attempts thus far to reconcile the quantum microcosm with the classic macrocosm have led to such mind-wrenching extravagances as string theory, notions that require extra dimensions, ranging between ten and twenty-six, before the mathematics will make sense.
That’s not to say that the string theorists might not be correct, Alma observes, but simply to suggest that to her ear it all sounds rather messy and unnecessary. If ’t Hooft is right, however, and there is no quantum indeterminacy, then the problem vanishes to leave a unified field theory which accounts for everything without resorting to exotic explanations that can often raise more questions than they answer. She can see how many scientists would find ’t Hooft’s hypothesis hard to resist, but then there is that other shoe to fall: if there’s no quantum indeterminacy, then there’s no free will. That, right there, is the problem, and in Alma’s estimation it has the potential to make all the other current disputes between Christianity and science pale by comparison.
That’s why she’s laughing as she reads. It’s all this free will business and the way that everybody gets so jittery about it, even thinkers that she has the greatest of respect for. Alma, having worked all year upon her brother Warry’s near-death vision, has grown very comfortable with predetermination, with the idea of life as a great recurrence that we re-experience, unvaryingly and eternally. During this time, though, she’s learned that both Nietzsche and one of her idols, the Brixton-based artist and magician Austin Osman Spare, have previously formulated almost the same concept but then shied away from it because of the implied negation of free will.
Alma can’t see what all the fuss is over. She’s convinced that no one really needs free will as long as there is a sustainable illusion of the same to stop everyone going mad. It also seems to her that our perception of free will depends upon the scale at which we view the issue. Looking at a single individual, it’s obviously impossible to accurately forecast what will happen to that person during, say, the next five years. This would seem to support the argument for free will and a future that is not yet written. On the other hand, if we consider a large group of people, such as the few thousand souls inhabiting the Boroughs or an average modern sink estate, then our predictions become frighteningly easy and precise. We can state, near enough exactly, just how many people will get sick, get stabbed, get pregnant, lose their jobs, their homes, have minor triumphs on the Lottery, will beat their partners or their kids, will die from cancer or heart failure or sheer blind accident. It strikes her, sitting in the rich blue light and finishing her smoke, that this is the same quandary faced by the physicists, translated into a context of sociology. Why is free will, like quantum indeterminacy, only evident when we look at the microcosm, at a single person? Where does free will disappear to when we turn our gaze upon the larger social masses, on the populations that are the equivalent of stars and planets?
Stubbing out the joint she puts the magazine aside and starts to roll another one. The mug of iron-black tea, only three-quarters finished, has grown cold with small tan platelets formed upon its surface like a skin. She’ll make a fresh cup before she gets down to work in a few minutes, now her hair’s not dripping anymore.
Still musing on the subject of Gerard ’t Hooft she drifts through the next slice of time to find herself stood at her easel by the window, with a newly-filled and steaming mug upon the high table beside her, near the ashtray and the as-yet-unlit second joint propped on its lip. She holds a double-zero brush in her right hand, dead still and horizontal like the raised spear of a patient jungle hunter, unblinking and confident her prey will make a movement before she does. It will give itself away, the image or the line that she is looking for, and then her short dart will stab forward, tipped with poison colour.
On the easel is the final piece to be completed before Alma’s exhibition opens up its playschool doors tomorrow morning. The last-minute nature of the painting is due to the fact that Alma didn’t make her mind up to include it until fairly recently. Entitled <em>Chain of Office</em>, it’s an afterthought, a kind of visual epilogue to the preceding works. It shows a single figure, standing posed as though for an official mayoral portrait, on an indistinct and drifting field of almost drinkable green pointillism, a deep emerald smoulder. The imposing subject, features still unfinished, stands draped in a strange and ornate ceremonial robe that hides the contours of its body, which could just as easily be male or female. Lacking a completed face to rest upon, the eye is drawn to the exotic and cascading fabric of the gown, which, upon close examination, seems to be what the whole picture is about. The intricate design of detailed scenes set in irregularly contoured panels, linked by a gold filigree of branching lines, turns out to be a lavishly illuminated map of Alma’s former neighbourhood, from Sheep Street to Saint Andrew’s Road, from Grafton Street to Marefair. On the decorated hem is a motif of paving stones, each individually cracked and weathered, fringed with seams of bright viridian moss. The cuff-buttons are glued-on snail-shells. Isomorphic images of Doddridge Church, bulging with ranting puritans, seem to be painted or embroidered on the garment’s folds, with Spring Lane School and Scarletwell Street sliding from a hanging pleat into the crease’s umber.
The imposing figure stands with both hands raised in welcome or in benediction, draped in its astounding coat of maps. Hung round the neck, in a dull grey that stands out strikingly against the riotous surrounding colour of the vestments, is the dented gong of an old saucepan lid attached to what appears to be a length of lavatory chain.
Alma’s one problem with the piece is that she can’t decide whose face this splendid Boroughs totem should be wearing. Philip Doddridge’s, perhaps? Black Charley’s? What about the sweet owl roundness of Alma’s beloved and deceased Aunt Lou, lost in a lightning storm? No. No, that will look wrong, perched on an already-completed body that is differently proportioned. She puts down her hovering brush and picks the joint up, lighting the touch-paper twist. After a pull or two, she sets the fuming column back down in the ashtray and retrieves her brush, having arrived at a decision.
For the next two hours she works upon the face until she’s satisfied, then spends a further half hour gazing love-struck at the finished painting, basking in her own magnificence. Finally, her vanity starts to exhaust her. Alma feels she’s earned a break.
She stands, with a theatrical sciatic groan, and slouches out into the kitchen where she fries up sliced halloumi while a brace of pitta pockets puff and fatten in the oven. When the thick-cut steaks of cheese have taken on a leathery autumnal mottle she retrieves them from the pan; slips them inside the pouches of warm bread with an accompanying spill of mixed leaf salad and some guillotined tomatoes. She can never eat halloumi without feeling a misguided sense of vegetarian guilt. This is because her first taste of the fibrous and salt Greek delicacy, decades earlier, had led her to assume that the halloumi was a possibly-endangered species of Cypriot fish. Even though she knows better now, she still can’t shake the frisson of forbidden and delicious flesh that comes with every carefully-chewed mouthful, and in fact she rather likes it that way.
After she’s devoured whichever meal her hasty fry-up was supposed to represent – elevenses or brunch or lunkfast (her own coinage) – Alma gets rid of the plate and rolls another smoke. Having completed <em>Chain of Office</em> an hour earlier than she’d anticipated she has time to pick over a couple of her other projects, maybe make laborious, autistic-looking jottings in block capitals across whatever unmarked pages she can find in one of several workbooks. She has never mastered joined-up handwriting. Along with tying shoelaces the ordinary way, it is a skill that she experienced initial problems with and instantly gave up on, stubbornly resolving that she’d come up with her own approach to things and stick with it, even if it was obviously wrong. This is the formative decision, made when she was seven, that has shaped her entire subsequent existence. In a recent interview, when asked if the political upheaval of the 1960s had caused Alma’s fiercely individual approach to life, her puzzling response of, “No, it was those fucking shoelaces” apparently became the subject of much speculation on the message boards she never saw but only heard about.
Settling back into her chair, her nest of curling vapour ribbons, she picks up the nearest blank-paged and hard-covered exercise book from the cluttered coffee table on her left, scooping up a blue ballpoint pen that still looks viable while doing so. She makes a few notes on the possible autobiography that she’s considered writing, which at present isn’t much more than a paragraph or two about her nan, May, and a working title, <em>We Was Poor But We Was Cannibals</em>. Alma composes a few dozen chapter headings, phrases that seem funny, resonant or smugly clever to her, and makes tiny notes beside each one suggesting what ideas or episodes that chapter might include. The details and the actual meat of things can all be worked out later, on the hoof, on wings and prayers.
Conveniently satisfied with her half-hour’s work just as she is starting to get bored with it, she puts the workbook down and reaches for whichever paperback or magazine or comic is closest to hand. As it transpires, this is a polythene-bagged copy of <em>Forbidden Worlds</em>, seemingly issue 110, dated March-April 1963 and published by the long-since vanished ACG, or American Comics Group. Being both sick and tired of the protracted adolescence typifying the contemporary comic business, publications of this vintage are almost the only ones that Alma will allow into the house.
Removing the frail pamphlet gently from the elderly and wilting plastic of its envelope, Alma examines the admittedly completely crappy covers, front and back. The rear is an advertisement, in black and white, for an impressive catalogue of novelties from Honor House Productions, boldly labelled as a “TREASURE CHEST OF FUN”. The fun seems to involve confusing adults with ventriloquism, frightening them with a cigarette-dispensing lighter that “looks like a Browning automatic”, or increasing their nuclear anxiety with an Atomic Smoke Bomb: “Just light one and watch the column of white smoke rise to the ceiling, mushrooming into a dense cloud like an A-Bomb.” These cost twenty cents. Also available are silent dog-whistles, Ju-Jitsu lessons promising that YOU, TOO, CAN BE TOUGH, a deck of marked cards and the snappily-described SEE BEHIND GLASSES that “enable you to see behind you without anyone knowing you’re watching. Really comes in handy at times.” Struggling to imagine on precisely which occasions these wing-mirrored spectacles would “really come in handy”, other than if she should be compelled to back her massive head out of a cul-de-sac, she turns instead to the front cover, all in citrus colour with its oversized seal of approval from the once-important Comics Code Authority and the black “9d” imprint of a British newsagent stamped on the planet-decorated logo.
The front image, by an artist Alma doesn’t recognise, is clearly a generic piece of cover artwork pulled from the inventory. It shows a thuggish-looking monk clad in green robe and hood grimacing from within a fortune-teller’s crystal ball. A blue-tinged cover blurb appended to the illustration tries to justify it by pretending that the sulky-looking figure in the snow-globe is “just ONE” of various menaces that the anthology’s single continuing character, Herbie, would meet inside. Flicking through two or three nondescript tales of strange adventure to the Herbie story at the back, the only reason that she’s kept the tattered comic-book, Alma discovers that this is the ruse she had suspected. The green monk is nowhere to be seen throughout the ten-page yarn, a favourite of Alma’s called “Herbie and the Sneddiger’s Salad Oil”.
Herbie had been created several issues previously in what may have been intended as a one-off tale. Readers, however, were intrigued by its protagonist, a spherical and solemn schoolboy with a bowl-cut hairdo, horn-rimmed glasses, unexpected supernatural powers and an unusual obsession with fruit-flavoured lollipops. Due to this favourable response the character appeared more frequently from then on, clad in his trademark attire of weirdly scaled-down adult clothing with blue pants, white shirt and a black tie. While obviously not a look that everyone could get away with, Herbie would have bailed out of <em>Forbidden Worlds</em> within a year of issue 110 and be established as the title character in his own comic, of which Alma owns a very-near complete collection.
The main reason for this singular compulsion is Alma’s infatuation with the strip’s distinctively obsessive artist, Ogden Whitney. Whitney, working in the business since the 1940s, had a drawing style that somehow managed to take smothering suburban blandness to extremes which should have been the envy of the avant-garde. His tidily-coiffured cast of generic middle-class Americans might have stepped from a magazine ad for soap-powder, cars or coffee were it not for a conspicuous lack of grinning toothy confidence. Instead, his characters wear tight expressions of barely-suppressed anxiety as they stand hesitating in the kitchens of their uniform white-painted homes or loiter upon bright green lawns so neatly-shorn as to be utterly devoid of texture, mere outlines left for the colourist to fill. And then, amidst this twitchy Cold War landscape with its populace of clenched neurotics, there is the still, planetary mass of Herbie Popnecker.
According to the legend, ACG house-writer Richard Hughes, writing under the pseudonym of Shane O’Shea, had become fascinated by the way in which the literal-minded Whitney would draw anything the script required of him in the same blandly realistic style. Possibly to amuse himself, the writer’s scripts become more comically surreal as the series progresses, treating the already baffled readership to strange encounters between the impassive levitating dumpling-child and a selection of then-current film-stars and world leaders like the Kennedys, Nikita Khrushchev, Fidel Castro, Queen Elizabeth the Second, or the Burtons. Typically, female celebrities are smitten with the spherical and enigmatic ten-year-old. Ladybird Johnson, Jackie Kennedy, Liz Taylor and Her Majesty the Queen all sigh and heave their bosoms as he walks away into the sky with an expression of supreme indifference, an unlikely fanny-magnet sucking jadedly upon a lollipop as round as he is.
All these real-life luminaries coexist contentedly with things from outer space, broom-riding witches, talking animals, anthropomorphic objects and the supernatural denizens of ACG’s distinctive green-tinged afterlife. This occult region, carpeted in limeade-coloured clouds, is a Rod Serling version of Eternity that features intermittently across the outfit’s other books and is referred to as “The Unknown” on what looks like a hand-painted sign in its cumulus-strewn reception area. The place is an abode of sheet-clad ghosts, trolls, leprechauns and monsters cribbed from Universal Studios’ back catalogue, along with wingless, robed custodians who seem like biliously-hued Frank Capra angels, tubby and avuncular. It distantly occurs to Alma that she may well have been influenced in some way by this secular, fantastical and folksy view of paradise while realising Warry’s childhood vision in the paintings and the illustrations she’s been working on for this last year. Despite the lack of any similarity between their styles, Alma’s elaborate depiction of a higher Boroughs filled with dreams and fiends and phantoms probably owes a great deal to Ogden Whitney’s staid surrealism.
On the other hand she is aware that Whitney’s merits, many though they be, are merely camouflage to mask the actual nature of her interest in his work. This is entirely based on Alma’s extreme identification with the artist’s best-known character. She’d been a portly little lump herself before her frankly terrifying growth-spurt and, like Whitney’s hero, had endured a pudding-basin haircut. She had also shared Herbie’s conviction that the powers and forces of the universe should all know her by name and have the basic common sense to get out of her way. In the adventure that she’s holding in her red-nailed strangler’s hands, “Herbie and the Sneddiger’s Salad Oil”, the omnipotent schoolboy scares away a full grown Frankenstein, a barrage of machine-gun bullets that have worried little faces and which swerve from their trajectory on recognising Herbie, lion-headed alien dinosaurs from the beleaguered planet Bertram, and even such astronomical phenomena as an aggressive comet, which veers from its course in panic at its first sight of the lollipop-addicted human bowling ball. As Alma sees it, this is no more than the same polite respect which she expects rampaging elephants, Cruise missiles, werewolves, corporations, bolts of lightning and invading spacemen to extend to her.
Another reason for her empathy is Herbie’s eyes, both for the heavy-lidded bored look that she knows from her own baby-photographs and for the ugly spectacles that he’s apparently compelled to wear. That’s how she could have ended up, what with the almost useless left eye that she has inherited from her mum, Doreen. She had only managed to avoid a pair of National Health face-deformers by the application of her seven-year-old ingenuity. When taken by her mother for a mandatory school eye-test, Alma had glanced at the chart in passing and had memorised it, top to bottom, utilising the extraordinary powers of recall that neither her school-friends nor family had noticed yet, and which she hadn’t been in any hurry to inform them of. The school optician had clamped Alma’s outsized head in Clockwork Orange goggles, then had pointed to the hovering grey blurs that floated in the fog while she reeled out a list of letters that she couldn’t see for toffee. This technique had kept her glasses-free until her teenage years, when the eye-test procedure had been altered unexpectedly and Alma had been caught out as a half-blind fraud with an almost vampiric sensitivity to light. She’d subsequently been made to endure two years of thin frames and blue-tinted lenses that had somehow managed to make her look even more pretentious than she was already. When one lens fell out and shattered, Alma’s colour-blind optician had replaced it with pink-tinted glass that made her look like someone from the audience of a 3D film. By then, she’d made her mind up that her vision without glasses was deteriorating, and this latest outrage had just piled insult on injury. She’d thrown the two-tone spectacles away, resolving that if she was going to go blind then she’d do it on her own terms, thank you very much. Later she’d learned that wearing no lenses at all produced what was known as a “negative lensing effect” within the muscles of the eye that actually improves the vision. Or is it a positive lensing effect? It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that in Alma’s own estimation, she’s been proven right. It’s Alma one, opticians nil, as far as she’s concerned.
Returning her attention to the story she is reading, Alma thinks again of Ogden Whitney, of his sad demise as detailed in <em>Art out of Time</em>, the lovely volume that Mike Moorcock sent her as a thank you for her cover illustration on a recently reissued Elric paperback. Within the wonderful collection of neglected and peculiar comic strips from bygone times, Alma had been delighted to see a characteristically demented <em>Herbie</em> offering included, with accompanying text about the artist. She’d been touched if unsurprised to learn that Herbie’s looks and general physique were based on those of Ogden Whitney as a child, and had filled up with tears to read how he had died, forgotten and insane from booze in an asylum. She imagines Herbie in his sixties, sitting in the day room at the home, white shirt and blue pants traded in for a stained bathrobe and his differently-powered lollipops replaced by bottles. The time-travel bottle-pop would be the only one that worked. His sleepy eyes gazing unfocussed through thick beer-glass lenses and his paunch now drum-tight with the enlarged liver. Greying, bowl-cut head filled with his flat, precisely-drawn dementia, lion-dragons and Sneddiger’s Salad Oil, the many ghosts and featured creatures of a green Unknown.
Taking a last pull on the sepia-streaked stub she grinds it out and stands up with another creaking outcry at the dull ache in her back. She’s barely consciously aware she makes these noises anymore, so constant and repetitive have they become. Sorting amongst the notebooks, comics, pens and paperbacks Alma locates a hairbrush that has somehow managed to survive its daily skirmish with her head. This one, a sturdy wooden item that is capable of ‘MEGA Taming’ if one pays attention to the printed promise on its handle, has already lasted for over a year with no more than a dozen or so of its plastic teeth wrenched out. Its predecessors, that have snapped in two or have been otherwise dismantled by their first or second painful drag through Alma’s tangled locks, were simpering pansies by comparison.
She’s learned early in life that if she doesn’t brush her mane once every day it will develop knots that in a week will have turned to impacted rhino horn; bolls of mahogany that it will take tree-surgeons, chainsaws, ropes and ladders to remove. Closing her eyes she starts to pull the brush down from the crown, her face immediately concealed behind a grey-brown safety curtain as the bristles rake excruciatingly through the unyielding snarls. The sound of ripping follicles and snapping vinyl prongs, she has discovered, make the ritual far more upsetting for anyone forced to listen to it than it is for her. Her artist friend Melinda Gebbie, would sit covering her ears and whimpering if she were witness to a brushing, frightened that Alma would yank part of her skull away while Alma was herself apparently oblivious to this self-scalping. Her relationship with pain has largely been one of indifference since she realised that its actual physical component rarely hurt that much, and that it is the psychological and the emotional attached files that do all the harm. As far as she is able, therefore, she has disconnected hurtful physical sensations from accompanying mental reflexes of shock or fear or anger. As a minor by-product of this largely successful process, Alma is no longer even ticklish. She terrorizes those who are with absolute impunity.
The worst part of the ordeal is now over. Alma’s giant head is now concealed within a church bell made of hair, so that if they should view her from the shoulders upwards, onlookers would have no clue as to which way round she was standing. Lifting both hands, Alma scrabbles with her scarlet fingernails down what feels like the middle of her Rushmore cranium in order to create a centre parting, dragging back the faded auburn curtains to each side so that she can peer at the mirror hung above the fireplace and weigh up the result. Alma decides that she particularly likes the vagrant ash-and-copper strand that snakes across her almost-blind left eye, which is her scariest one, possibly because it’s governed by the mad pre-verbal basilisk of her right brain. Alma’s right eye is the humane and twinkling one which understands that it’s preferable if people – humans as she calls them – like her and aren’t frightened off by her appearance or behaviour. Conversely, Alma’s left eye clearly doesn’t give a fuck. It glowers, grey and yellow and unfocussed, from beneath an overhanging forehead that swells gently into noticeable bumps, as if she’s either growing horns or a new frontal lobe.
Hair sorted, Alma paints a face on in the style pioneered by Mr. Potato Head. Her eyelashes soon sag beneath the weight of the mascara and resemble the deleted giant spider scene from the original <em>King Kong</em>. Next, pouting like Mick Jagger before the embalmers got to him, she coats her lips in a bloody impasto of red lippy. She believes that this wards off potential rapists and the like by making her appear to be the more voracious sexual predator. Finally satisfied, she grins at her reflection. Every day is Halloween for Alma.
Pulling on an ancient leather jacket, its lapels hung with a fat crop of outdated causes thick as August blackberries, she’s almost ready to confront the yammering planet and stare down reality again, but first she has to put her rings and finger-armour on. A splendidly malevolent array of jointed metal talons, sculpted scorpions and rearing silver snakes alongside a selection of big, colourful and bruising gemstones, these lethal adornments probably contribute more than the carnivorous lipstick to her rape-proofing, she realises upon the rare occasions when she thinks realistically. One slap and an assailant’s features would be hanging off in strips of soggy wallpaper. She’d do it, too. She’d once informed her brother Warry that although she almost thought of him as family, she’d open him without a second’s hesitation like a tin of Hula Hoops.
Making sure she’s got her chequebook and her key, she hurls herself along a cluttered hallway that has swathes of gold stars licking up its walls, out through a specially-carved front door with twin snakes in a caduceus design, down her front path onto East Park Parade. Its York stone paving slabs are bathed in clear blonde sunlight, a presentiment of summer, with the lovely trilobite erosions of an ancient riverbed picked out in sharp relief. Across the busy Kettering Road are the tall trees that edge the Racecourse, a green fringe around the immense parkland’s mile-wide lampshade sky. People walk on the broad grey paths in ones and twos or cut an independent course across the rolling sea of grass. Someone is trying to fly a kite, perhaps in an attempt to recreate some cherished illustration from a 1950s kids’ encyclopaedia, the washed-out yellow diamond faltering against a faded blue. Suspiciously enormous crows patrol the rippling turf, a bigger and more confident crowd of them every year, too many to be called collectively a murder these days. This is more a Harold Shipman of the fucking things.
Her indoor lungs adjusting rapidly to the cold draughts of breath that she sucks down, Alma turns left as she commences her walk into town. Her Dr. Martens scuff against the pavement’s fossil fronds and her mind floods with random ideas and associations, words and pictures snagging on the shop-front scenery that rattles by the other way as Alma hits her stride. She thinks about the flagstones vanishing beneath her tread, the only view afforded to the downcast, irrespective of which century they happen to be in. The old stones, obviously, remain unchanged since the nineteenth, but there are nuances to the discerning eye: deficiencies of dog-shit; chocolate wrappers that have been rebranded so as not to further mystify touring Americans; unfathomable particle-collider tags in whorls and spirals of white spray. Across the road a distant man attempts to steer some kind of sail-powered car across the Racecourse but the wind has dropped and he’s becalmed amongst the strutting crows and the abruptly plunging kites. If there’s no wind before it gets dark she supposes that the meadow-mariner is doomed. Despite the extra lighting that the vast and, by night, absolutely black expanse has relatively recently acquired, it’s still referred to as “The Rapecourse” by a healthy number of the town’s inhabitants.
She crosses from East Park Parade over Abington Avenue’s tail-end and carries on down Kettering Road. George Woodcock – Alma’s Arts Lab crony from her teenage years – had written a long, neon-lighted poem on this crumbling thoroughfare, a jewelled urban lament entitled <em>Main Street</em>, just before he’d jacked in all the literary bollocks and become a trucker. She can still see lines and phrases from the since-lost epic, smeared and tangled in the cobbled gutters; on the replaced plastic drainpipes. She can still see all the vanished incidents and nights and people that the lines referred to, former selves from several bygone decades striding up and down the shabby avenue, a noisy nineteen-year-old drunk girl in a posse of small-town bohemians, an angry-looking Gas Board office worker stamping her way home through drizzle on another Friday afternoon, a forty-something mad witch in a black cloak with a horde of Alcopop-emboldened simpletons calling her “Grotbags”, “lez” or “minger” from the safety of their passing vehicles if she goes out to do a bit of shopping. The town’s streets are like a living palimpsest to Alma, all the layers still intact, everyone still alive and everything still going on, the misguided romances and the rows, the shimmering acid trips, the hasty fucks in doorways.
This perception of a simultaneous eternity, while she’s had intimations of it on and off throughout her life, has only flared up into vivid actuality since she’s been working on these paintings. The idea, once fully formulated, was so dazzlingly obvious that she remains amazed at having reached the age of fifty-something without clearly understanding it: time as an everlasting solid in which nothing changes, nothing dies. It had been right before her eyes for all those years, and she’d not known what she was looking at until that moment with her brother in the Golden Lion when the penny finally dropped. The moment of apocalypse and revelation, almost like that time in Greyfriars’ flats when she’d been dawdling home from Spring Lane School at dinnertime. Down in the little patch of shrubbery at the bottom of the washing-line enclosure there’d been a single translucent grub or caterpillar hanging by a thread from one leaf of a bush that Alma didn’t know the name of. She had stood there staring at it for perhaps a minute, and then something strange had happened –
A black cab growls past and honks its horn. Unable to see clearly who the driver is, Alma lifts one metallic claw and waves convivially to his rear-view mirror. She gets on with all the local cabbies and they sometimes give her free rides into town if they should see her walking that way in inclement weather. To be honest she gets on with nearly everyone, which somewhat undermines the petrifying gorgon image that she’s worked so long and hard to put together. If this situation should persist she’ll have to chop up some Girl Guides in order to regain her rep.
Across the street, the mutable and transient hoardings flicker past. Charity outlets with batty proprietors and racks of cardigans that someone’s died in, Caribbean grocer-shops all facing north with no sun for the crated yams that languish in pink shadow. Alma sniggers at the name of one establishment, Butt Savouries, although at her age you’d hope she’d be more mature. A little further down the road is a kebab-house, Embers, that makes her feel wistful for the days when it had been Rick’s Golden Fish Bar. Not that she had ever been a customer, but she had often entertained the fantasy of going in and being served with mushy peas and chips by Humphrey Bogart, who would eye her ruefully and drawl “Of all the golden fish bars in the world, she has to walk into mine.” Somewhere behind her, the rapid staccato beep of the Pelican crossing slides subliminally into her awareness, prompting her to hum the fast bit of “The Donkey Serenade” without having any clue why she is doing so. There is another crossing, back along the Kettering Road in Kingsley, with an even more up-tempo rhythm that can leave her whistling “The Sabre Dance”. Susceptible as an eight-month-old baby and invulnerable as a pterodactyl made of diamonds, she continues into town.
A skinny boy in modern hair and spectacles stops in his tracks and gapes at her incredulously, face contorting in a rubbery cartoon expression which, if he were not so youthful, might be taken for a paralysing stroke. Remembering she hasn’t bothered putting on her knickers, Alma glances down to make sure that the zipper on her jeans is still intact then realises that the thunderstruck young man is an admirer. He tells her she’s Alma Warren, which she’s always grateful for. One of these days, when she’s gone wandering from the home, she’ll need that information. As he lists his favourite album sleeves, dust-jackets and comic-book covers Alma smiles, attempting to convey a girlish modesty but actually delivering the lipstick rictus and unblinking gaze of Conrad Veidt in a lost outtake from <em>The Man Who Laughs</em>. She shakes her stage-door Johnny’s nerveless mitt and thanks him for his kind words before carrying on down the Kettering Road, privately noting that his handshake had been far less manly than her own. Mind you, he more than likely hadn’t practised since the age of ten like she had, red-faced as she squeezed a set of bathroom scales until she could exert her own substantial weight with just the pressure of her thumbs. Before she’d left Spring Lane she’d given two boys a good strangling for picking, ill-advisedly, on her or little Warry. One of them had been left with appalling bruises round his throat like a jet necklace and his mother had come to the school and yelled at Alma. This would seem to have been largely ineffectual in that to this day she hasn’t properly absorbed the concept of a measured and proportionate response to anything.
She trots over another crossing, this one with the slow beep of a faltering heart-monitor that doesn’t provoke any musical accompaniment on her part, to the street’s far side. After a few more grocers’ shops with enigmatic individual atmospheres and an outlet for decent-looking Hip Hop clothing she is crossing Grove Road, with the once-majestic bulk of the Essoldo cinema just up the way. As far as Alma can remember, it was in Grove Road during the 1970s that people had their windows blown out by an IRA bomb at the RAF club that was somewhere in the neighbourhood. The government back then had been reluctant to describe the mess that everybody was involved in as a war of any kind, much less a war on terror. This had been before the war on drugs, of course, when launching military campaigns against abstract emotions or inanimate materials would have been seen as the behaviour of highly-strung and over-reaching Daleks.
On the corner with the Kettering Road is Queensgrove Methodist Church, an impressive nineteenth-century red brick edifice that is today without the posse of nice-looking black guys who in slightly warmer weather decorate its steps. Less than a dozen paces further on Alma walks past the open-plan contemporary phone booth that has played host to a fatal stabbing only a few nights before. What a way to go out, she thinks, in a glass coffin that’s been shrink-wrapped with an ad for season two of <em>Prison Break</em>. It’s good to talk.
The way she heard it, both the victim and the perpetrators had been black, and Alma doesn’t care much for the U.S. cop-show ring that has about it. That isn’t the way she likes to think about Northampton being stacked. The town’s relationship with racial issues is a subtle and a complicated thing that goes back centuries, and simplifying it all down into a criminal profiler’s class-skewed vision of society seems both disastrous and highly probable to Alma. She thinks about Black Charley – Henry George – one of the first black faces to be seen about the county and, in 1897, a tremendous novelty. That sense of novelty had lasted up until at least the 1960s, when her mate Dave Daniels had been the first non-white pupil at the Grammar School on Billing Road. They’d run a full-page article about it in the <em>Chronicle & Echo</em> at the time, including a large photograph of David looking apprehensive, just in case he wasn’t feeling singled out enough already.
Back during the 70s and 80s, all the rudeys and the rastas had set up a club in the magnificent Salvation Army fort that used to stand on Sheep Street, just across the road from where Phil Doddridge founded his academy. Three floors of people with impeccably cool names like Elvis, Junior or Pedro, coming, going, children playing round their ankles and always a pot of bean stew simmering somewhere upstairs, that was the old Matta Fancanta club. Its antique boards had quaked in time with U-Roy or Lee Perry on the sound system, dub beats she’d been convinced were deep enough to make her womb fall out. As she remembers, it had been when vehicles that should have only been affordable to whites began to manifest in the adjoining car park that local authorities began to take an adverse interest in the place. The fort – which should have been, surely to God, a listed property – had been demolished, as if it had proven easier to pull it down than shut it down. There’s only the ubiquitous bare grass there now where it once stood, just down from the arse-backwards gargoyle mass of Greyfriars bus station, built wrong way round to start with and more recently voted to rank amongst the most disgusting buildings in the country. That had been that for the public face of genuine black culture in Northampton, or at least until comparatively recently. Now there is a Northamptonshire Black History Association that is setting all the records straight, and Alma has been hanging out with a determined, racially-diverse young bunch of rappers from the Boroughs that are trading under the collective name of Streetlaw, which she thinks is at the very least a cute coincidence. Justice above the street and all that. No, it isn’t all gloom for the black community by any means, assuming that it can resist the dead-end role that Hollywood’s casting departments and the major record labels are apparently considering it for: let’s make the underclass a glamorous and edgy place to be, then people won’t mind being stuck there quite so much and we can craft dramatically-lit and well-mastered versions of their struggle to sell back to them for the few quid they’ve not already spent on scratch cards. Everybody wins.
Alma walks on, past the arched entrance to a cobbled yard, an unmistakeably Victorian construction that has “Dickens Brothers, Ltd” hand-lettered up above the archway. She suspects that elsewhere in the town there stands a black-beamed Tudor premises called “Shakespeare’s” and perhaps a “Chaucer & Sons” half-thatched cottage out near Hardingstone. Northampton, after all, is a well-labelled town. Once, from her window, she saw two vans pass each other, travelling in opposite directions on East Park Parade. One, possibly belonging to a mattress company, had the word DREAM stencilled upon its side. The other one, perhaps a television or computer retailer, was blazoned with the word REALITY. She’d noted that REALITY was heading for town centre, which was unsurprising, while DREAM followed a trajectory that would eventually lead it to Kettering. She thought that it was more than likely going there to die.
Picking the pace up, on her right the storefronts melt into her slipstream, into one long smear of shop where you can get a Chinese meal, a drum-kit, a peyote cactus, a tattoo or a tattoo removed. She veers around a quorum of rough-looking blokes with beer-cans, who all nonetheless grin toothlessly and growl a cheerful “Hello, Alma” as she passes. Thirty seconds later a young policewoman in a Day-Glo lemon waistcoat beams and nods in recognition at the former menace to society turned local institution. She’s the queen of Kettering Road.
Tacking due west now, Alma executes a smooth curve opposite a shop-soiled Unitarian church and banks into Abington Square, past the unoccupied new properties which have replaced a scruffy row of shops that used to stand upon this rounded corner. She remembers her and David Daniels hiking round the newsagents and second-hand shops on Saturday mornings when they were thirteen, looking for comics or science fiction paperbacks, often paying a visit to the murky enterprise that hung on here, in the perpetual umbra of the church across the street. The owner had been an old lady with a bad cough who was always in her dressing gown and slippers, flecking ragged copies of <em>Amazing Adult Fantasy</em> and yellow-jacketed pornography alike with inadvertent sputum.
Alma feels protective of these vanished people, insufficiently noteworthy or attractive for the sepia retrospectives; these anonymous dust-bunnies who got lost forever underneath the huge, immobile wardrobe of the twentieth century. She wants to fill the crowd scenes in her paintings with them, wants to think of them suspended with their hours and habitats in time’s huge starry jelly, hanging there forever with their feuds and frailties intact, notes on the stave of a stupendous music.
On her right now is the Jaguar dealership, Guy Salmon, a name that has since become Alma’s pet euphemism with which to refer to male ejaculate. Abington Square unfolds around her. Up ahead, Charles Bradlaugh’s statue stands upon its traffic-island plinth, facing away from her towards Abington Street. Nice arse. She’s always rather fancied Bradlaugh, although more for his moral ferocity than for his physical allure if truth be told. Dishing out contraceptive literature with Annie Besant, knocking round with Swinburne, standing up for subjugated India so vocally that youthful devotee Mohandas Ghandi turned up at his funeral. A riot-precipitating atheist teetotaller and champion of the poor, Bradlaugh is Alma’s dream-date. Curiously, whenever she attempts to picture this she always sees herself arriving at the school dance with an animated statue, white stone splinters flaking from its joints with every step. During the slower numbers at the evening’s end they’d leave a swirling chalk-dust trail on the gymnasium floor behind them as they clung together for <em>Wichita Lineman</em>, and then afterwards he’d conscientiously discuss the need for contraception before trying to feel her up on the way home. She looks up at the chiselled figure with its finger pointing ever westward and can hear him bragging to his mates at the pub afterwards: “Here, Algernon, smell this.”
She’s giggling to herself as she strides on towards the junction with the Mounts and York Road, where the snarling, swearing horsepower of the trucks and Chelsea tractors is constrained by pretty lights. A small boy towed behind his carrier-laden mother stares at Alma disbelievingly. A man nudges his wife and mutters “Here, that’s Alma Warren” as she lollops past them, and outside the Bantam Cock three young lads produce copies of the Moorcock <em>Elric</em> book for her to sign. They don’t seem to be frightened of her, joking amiably as she scrawls her lazy autograph, and Alma finds she rather likes them. They inform her that they share a private fantasy about her, in which Alma lives on top of the Express Lifts tower and overlooks Northampton from a throne of human skulls. It’s an arresting image, and she’s beaming fondly as she waves goodbye to them. Before she’s reached the traffic lights two pretty girls who look like art students have smiled and nodded at her, she has made another three-year-old look haunted and another cab has chirped its horn as it purrs by, prompting another clueless raising of the silver talons and another jingling rattle of the finger-armour. She reflects that she is fortunate to have been blessed by an inflated self-image since infancy. Anyone else subjected to this much attention would most probably start acting strangely, she concludes while searching for a kabbalistic insight in the sequence of red-amber-green.
Her personality is a long-running radio drama that is broadcast chiefly for her own amusement, much as she suspects is true of many people. Obviously some prefer personas that are tuned into light comedy, while judged by their expressions the few individuals waiting at the lights with her have modelled their essential natures on the weather forecast. Or perhaps Religious Affairs, Alma reasons after a consideration of the Deco edifice that looms behind her while she stands there by the crossing. Opened in the 1930s as the Savoy Cinema and operating as the ABC throughout her back-row dating years, hosting the Beatles once, the place is now amongst the growing number of town properties owned by the Jesus Army, an expanding horde of sometimes-strident evangelicals that had begun recruiting from Northampton’s pool of derelicts or drunks back in the early 1970s, whisking them from park benches off to Army headquarters in nearby Bugbrook. She recalls an incident from a few years ago when the group had been censured after traumatising children with an unannounced alfresco re-enactment of the Crucifixion, but apart from that they seemed to be permitted to do what they wanted, pretty much.
Alma is unsurprised by this. The town has been a thriving hotbed of religious nutjobs since the fourteen-hundreds, many of whom Alma feels a certain retroactive fondness for. She likes the poetry, she likes the attitude, the heresy and anarchy that sought to brush aside the King and clergy, sought to recreate society as an egalitarian domain of ranting tinkers, mechanic philosophers, a whole Nation of Saints that answered to no temporal authority but only to a moral vision, to an enflamed state of mind, a level of both spiritual and political awareness that would <em>be</em> Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land. She likes the Lollards and the Ranters and the Muggletonians. She likes the incendiary ravings of the founding Quakers, likes imagining that nice man on the oat-box tearing off his clothes and screaming for the violent overthrow of monarchy. She’s even partial to Moravians, albeit mainly for their freak-show value with that mental business about penetrating the messiah in his spear-hole and their influence on her enduring idol William Blake, but Alma doesn’t like the Jesus Army very much. She finds herself suspicious of religious zeal that has a business plan.
The lights change and she crosses to an intermediary island in the middle of York Road. Alma reflects that she is standing on the spot that Doug McGeary’s vegetable truck had rumbled over nearly fifty years before, transporting her unbreathing brother to the hospital. She realises that today Doug’s mercy-dash would have to take a different route, with it no longer being possible to sail down from the Mounts into York Road. He would have had to turn left at the cinema, circle the Unitarian Church and come back at the square the other way, adding some very-likely fatal minutes to his journey. Mind you, by all rights her brother should have been a goner when the truck was still halfway up Grafton Street, so perhaps the diversion wouldn’t have made that much of a difference.
Finally she squeezes past the barrier railings at the top of the pedestrian precinct and is in Abington Street, or at least in what’s left of it. Back a few hundred years ago this was the town’s east gate, called the St. Edmund’s End after the since-demolished church across the Wellingborough Road from the converted workhouse in which Alma had drawn her first breath, to voice the first of many furious and unreasonable complaints. Daniel Defoe, writing his guide to English towns, described Northampton as essentially a crossroads, with its north-south axis running along Sheep Street, down the Drapery and into Bridge Street while its east-west axis traced a line through Abington Street, Gold Street and Marefair towards the ruins of the castle. By pedestrianizing one end of this east-west passage, the town council have effectively stitched up a major vein, inviting gangrene. She can see it setting in already, read its symptoms in the plasterboarded windows and the bloom of estate agent shingles. There’s no passing trade and the shop rents are all ridiculously high. If this persists, Alma predicts, the town will turn into an economic crater where the money only circulates around the rim, through retail parks and giant chain-stores, while the centre is abandoned to the tumbleweed of repossession notices, transformed into an after-dark arena, to a Walter Hill set with more vomit, more teenagers lying in their own piss, and more incoherent war-cries. Incoherent wars. You know it’s a bad sign when you see bunches of commemorative flowers taped to lamps on the pink paving, with no road in sight.
Pigeons rise fluttering around her, blissfully oblivious to the mean-spirited poster pasted on a rubbish bin which states that feeding them is a variety of littering and therefore punishable by a fine. It isn’t that she thinks this will make any difference to the birds themselves, who after all can’t read and don’t depend on handouts from animal-lovers to sustain them in the first place, but she feels indignant at the sentiments expressed. What in the name of fuck is wrong with pigeons? If the council were attempting to discourage wasps, attack dogs or the Jesus Army she could see some sense in the campaign, but pigeons? With that green and violet shimmering on the ruff; that wobbling and fluffed-up coo? If the municipal authorities think getting rid of pigeons is their number one priority for the apparently-condemned town centre, then why don’t they just plant landmines on all of the window sills and get it over with instead of sticking up their pissy little threatening notices?
She carries on down Abington Street. There are very few other pedestrians but she is wading through a crowd of ghosts and memories, her killer robot hands deep in her jacket pockets like a 1950s badboy, Jimmy Dean after the menopause. She skirts around the dopey Francis Crick memorial erected in the centre of the thoroughfare, a piece of kitsch with silvery double-helix twists supporting what appear to be a pair of nudist superheroes, sexless manikins whose bald and featureless Barbie pudendas clearly won’t be passing on inherited genetic traits to anyone. Besides, the only thing connecting Abington Street with the local scientific pioneer is the conspicuous DNA evidence to be found following an average Friday night. Of course, the monument might be a comment on local inbreeding, with the figures diving upwards in a desperate spiral to escape a tiny, stagnant gene-pool, more of a gene-puddle if the truth be told. Alma recalls the rumour of an entire cyclops-village somewhere out near Towcester, full of cyclops postmen, cyclops publicans and cyclops toddlers, then remembers it was her that started it.
By curving round the structure to her left she is now walking down beside the library, the only building in the street that hasn’t changed since Alma was a little girl. She’d joined up at the age of five and visited the library several times a fortnight for the next ten years, mostly for ghost-stories and yellow-jacketed Victor Gollancz science-fiction. She’d had haunting, memorable dreams about the institution as a child, walking through winding corridors of wooden shelving with impossible and fascinating tomes propped up to every side, books that you couldn’t read because the words would crawl around upon the page if they were opened. Her dream-library had padded flooring covered in red vinyl like a bar stool or a car-seat into which were set round holes that were most probably vaginal, so that the book-browsing clientele could climb from floor to floor.
The actual waking library had been almost as marvellous in its interior – the tiny section like an open wardrobe that hummed with the aura of the books on séances and mesmerism that were kept there – and from the outside it was still beautiful, the busts of benefactors set into the honey-coloured stone. Alma likes showing visiting Americans the library, just so she can point to the carven likeness at the upper right of its façade and ask them who they think it is. They generally assume that it’s George Washington, an English gesture of respect for their first president, seeming bewildered when informed that it is in fact Andrew, George’s older relative, back from before the Washingtons left Barton Sulgrave for America when the New Model Army were converging on Northamptonshire during the sixteen-hundreds. The family, reputedly, had even pinched the village crest of bars and mullets to provide a basis for the starry, stripy flag of their adopted home. To be quite frank, the only Washingtons she unreservedly respects are Dinah, Booker T. and Geno, whom she feels at least gave something back.
She’s just about to cross the precinct to the Co-op Bank on its far side when she becomes aware of an unusually solid-looking ghost from bygone times approaching from the opposite direction, walking up past the dilapidated mouth of the former Co-op Arcade. Dragging her hair back from the soot-ringed blast-sites of her eyes to take a closer look, she realises that the only thing which marks the figure as a ghost is the anachronistic clothing it affects: the pinstripe shirt, the neckerchief and waistcoat. With her spirits lifting out of their default disgruntlement, she recognises the bucolic spectre as perhaps her oldest mate, Benedict Perrit. Ah, Northampton. Just when you’ve decided that the planners have clubbed her into insensibility, she throws you a bouquet.
The moment Benedict sees Alma, he goes into one of his routines. First the appalled look, then the turning round and going back the way he’s come as if pretending that he hasn’t seen her, then another sharp reverse to bring him back in her direction, only this time quivering with silent giggles. Good old Ben, mad as a Chinese situation comedy, the only one amongst Alma’s associates and former classmates to consistently out-strange her without even trying, and one of the few artists or poets from her teenage years who didn’t jack it all in for a comfortable life when they hit twenty-five. Anything but. Benedict’s face is creased with lines of verse and looks like it resulted from an ill-judged one-night stand between the masks of comedy and tragedy. He has been killed by poetry, and at the same time poetry is all that saves him and redeems him. Good old Ben.
He sticks one paw out for a handshake, but she’s much too pleased to see him and she isn’t having it. Dodging around the proffered hand she plants her bloody lips upon his cheek and scoops him up into a python hug. Sooner or later he’ll breathe out, which will allow her to constrict him further and then when he loses consciousness she’ll dislocate her jaw and swallow him. Before she can accomplish this he flinches back out of her grip, frantically wiping at the Girl-Ebola she has left smeared on his chops.
“Get off! Ah ha ha ha ha ha!”
His laugh is that of Tommy Cooper, left marooned upon a desert island until it has morphed into the seagull-scaring cackle of Ben Gunn. Delighted, Alma tells him he’s a suave Lothario and asks him if he’s writing these days. When he tells her he’s still scribbling, she remarks on reading “Clearance Area” a day or two ago and lets him know what a good poem she thinks it is. He looks at her uncertainly, unsure if she is being genuine.
“I weren’t bad, was I? Ah ha ha.”
The use of the past tense and subtle shift of subject from the poem to its author registers as a small blip on Alma’s radar of concern. It doesn’t sound good, like a clichéd western gunslinger retired to the saloon, fondly remembering his cordite-scented triumphs through a haze of redeye. What a load of shit. She sternly reassures him that he’d been considerably better than “not bad”, then, realising that she too has used the past tense, she attempts to rectify her blunder by just coming out and telling him without condition that he’s a good writer, whereupon he taps her up for a few quid.
This startles her, even as she is fumbling automatically in her jeans’ pocket for a piece of crumpled paper that won’t turn out to be an old till receipt from Morrison’s. Alma has gladly dished out cash to the town’s homeless ever since they blossomed in shop doorways during the late ’Eighties, and especially since it became official policy that this was just “encouraging the beggars”. Having come from a community of beggars, this only spurs on her bloody-minded generosity, much the same way that she’s been idly planning to strew crumbled blueberry muffins up and down the precinct ever since she spotted that annoying pigeon notice at the street’s top end. A friend, like Benedict, is always welcome to some spare cash if she has it, but as she presses a note into his palm she’s more concerned about the shift in self-esteem that seems to have befallen him since the last time they met. Taken along with the “I weren’t bad, was I?” comment, Alma’s feeling a bit worried for him. Making matters worse, he’s looking guilty now about taking the money, which she brashly brushes over by assuring him she’s “fucking loaded”, anxious to get on to safer ground. The moment passes. Alma asks him to tomorrow’s exhibition, not expecting him to come, and when they’re saying goodbye some few minutes later Benedict is telling her that he’s a Cyberman and Alma’s laughing like a drain. Everything’s good again.
Waving farewell while still snickering down her nose at intervals, she wanders a few paces further down the street and then remembers that she had originally been heading for the bank, correcting her trajectory accordingly. She’s thinking about Benedict, about how one of the most blazing and important moments in her life had been provoked by Ben’s inspiring idiocy. They were both something like ten or eleven and had worked out an ingenious way to climb up to the rooftops of the copper warehouse which stood on the corner that connected Freeschool Street with Green Street. This ascent, which obviously needed to be made at night, had first required a trip to Narrow-Toe Lane, just around the block, where they could wriggle on their bellies underneath the locked gate of a builder’s yard. Here they had clambered up a borrowed ladder onto a rear wall of the adjacent Perrit property and scampered giggling along the ridge of Benedict’s dad’s woodpile in the starlight. This eventually allowed them access to the warehouse outbuildings, from whence it was an easy scramble up to the slate roofs and chimneypots above.
For months it had been their precarious kingdom, only shared with cats and birds. Dangerous games of chase evolved to suit the slanted planes of the new landscape, but these had their limits: dead-end precipices that the two kids couldn’t find the nerve to overcome. The worst of these was at the far end of a guttering, a rain channel between the slope of one roof and the upright wall that was the boundary of the next. Their chases would end prematurely at this point, night after night, because of the sheer drop into a narrow alley filled with metal scrap and probable impalement that plunged down into the dark immediately beyond. The threatening passage had been only four or five feet wide and had the angled tiles of a one-storey storage shed on its far side. If it had been a jump between two chalk marks in a sunny playground they’d have made it without hesitation, but to try the same thing on a rooftop in pitch darkness with an abyss full of tetanus junk beneath you was a very different matter.
Then, one moonlit evening, Benedict had upped his game. Alma was chasing him across the blue-grey hills some thirty feet above the street, pursuing him with an unsettling degree of relish through a Caligari world of chimneys, tilts, and shadows. Benedict, only a few paces ahead of her, was giggling with terror that was wholly justified and understandable: most people would get through their lives without being pursued across the skyline by a predatory Alma Warren anywhere save in unusually vivid nightmares, while for Benedict this had been his unenviable reality. Upon the night in question she had herded him into the dead-end fold between the rooftops, knowing that she had him trapped and slavering triumphantly as she moved in upon her shrill and tittering quarry for the kill. It was at this point that Ben’s fear of being caught by Alma had at last outweighed his squeamishness regarding getting speared by shards of glass or rusty railings in the alleyway below. Benedict jumped, shrieking with fear and somehow laughing at the same time, hurtling across the lethal gap to land upon the shed roof, five or six feet lower down on its far side.
Alma, still running at full tilt behind him, had just seconds to decide that she preferred the possibility of gory death at age eleven to the utter certainty of someone beating her at something. Having made her mind up, when she reached the edge she just kept going.
In the fraction of a second during which she hung in empty space above the snarl of rusted implements and broken windows down below, Alma had been illuminated. As the instant stretched itself, she realised that she’d accidentally jumped free of all her fears and limitations, fears of injury and death and ruin. Trusting only to the moment she’d propelled herself past doubt and gravity and in that moment had known with abiding certainty that there was nothing she was scared of, nothing that she couldn’t do.
Even as an eleven-year-old girl she had, of course, been both considerably bigger and much heavier than Benedict. She sailed across the treacherous alleyway to land on the shed roof beside him and immediately went through it, shattering its slates and ending up embedded in its gradient to her scabby knees. Oh, how they’d laughed, exhilarated and hysterical, once they’d checked to make sure that nobody had lost an eye. The incident had given Alma an important insight into overcoming psychological impediments, which she’d experimented further with. Having a morbid dread of drowning, as a twelve-year-old she’d swum out to the steel partition that divided one end of Midsummer Meadow’s lido from the other and had dived down to one of the railed vents that were some feet underwater. She had pushed her arm between the bars then turned it round so that she wasn’t certain she could pull it out again. For perhaps thirty long and awesome seconds she had floated at the still heart of her wholly self-inflicted terror, trying to absorb and understand it, and then she had calmly turned her arm the right way round to pull it from between the bars and strike back for the glittering surface. Alma smiles now at the memory as she enters the bank. The critics and sometimes admirers who describe her as eccentric really haven’t got the first idea.
She knows all the bank staff by name, the Co-op having been her bank of choice for the last twenty years. She’d started with them solely on the basis of their ethical investment policies, but as the decades had ticked past on her milometer she’d come to notice that whenever there was a financial meltdown caused by banking improprieties, the Co-op’s frankly boring logo never featured in the cascade of shamed high-street brands that poured across the teatime news-screens. In the dizzying casino spin of a roulette economy, inside a threadbare circus tent stuffed with adrenaline-deranged rogue traders, oligarchs, and corporate bosses living beyond anybody’s means, the Co-op stood fast. Despite its refusal to invest resources with arms manufacturers, the bank stuck to its guns. Also, when Alma’s mum Doreen had died in 1995 they’d sent a big bouquet of flowers with personal messages from everybody at the branch. As far as Alma is concerned, they could be caught providing orphan baby seals for Rio Tinto Zinc to use as sex-slaves after that, and she’d most probably turn her blind eye.
After she’s said hello to everyone, Alma inspects herself on the closed circuit television while she waits in line. The camera is over by the Abington Street entrance several yards behind her, and so only gives a rear-view long-shot of the leather-jacketed old woman with the hanging-gardens hairstyle, a good head and shoulders taller than the other people in the queue. This is the nearest that she ever gets to an objective image of herself and finds she doesn’t like it very much. It makes her feel obscurely isolated, and besides, she doesn’t see herself like that. She sees herself as bigger and a great deal nearer. And not from behind.
She checks her balance and draws out a random wad of cash to stuff in the side-pocket of her jeans. Just yesterday she’d had a chat with the incorrigible serial-sympathiser and unlikely innocent Melinda Gebbie, her best mate from Semilong. The other woman artist had remarked on how she always liked to have some reassuring totem in her pocket, useful Kleenex tissues, dead bees or particularly pretty leaves that she’d picked up. Alma had thought about it for a while and then said “Yeah, well, see, for me that would be money.” While she’s probably lost several high-denomination notes across the years she still resists the idea of a purse or handbag, reasoning that this would only be a good way to lose everything at once. She thinks it highly probable that she’d eventually leave the handbag in a café, whereas it’s unlikely that she’d leave her trousers. Not out of the question, but unlikely.
Exiting the bank she nips next door into the premises of Martin’s, the newsagents, so that she can stock up on essentials: Rizla papers, fags, Swan matches, magazines. She pulls the latest issues of <em>New Scientist</em> and <em>Private Eye</em> down from their upper shelves, wondering if their placement might be part of an entirely sensible campaign to make sure that only the tall receive appropriate intellectual stimulation. One day soon, when she and her kind have grown smart enough to formulate a foolproof plan, then Stephen Fry will give the signal and they’ll all rise up and massacre the short-arse numbskulls in their beds. Something like that, at any rate. Let a girl have her daydreams.
Alma takes the two mags to the till where genial, bullet-headed Tony Martin and long-suffering wife Shirley have already got her forty Silk Cut Silver, five packs of green Rizla papers and two boxes of Swan matches waiting for her. Tony shakes his shaved dome ruefully while ringing up the Rizlas.
“Alma, honestly! All o’ these Rizla papers! Surely you must ‘ave got that scale model of the Eiffel Tower completed ages ago? What’s the matter with yer?”
Shirley looks up from re-stocking shelves and tells her husband to shut up and not to be so rude, but Alma’s grinning.
“Yeah, I did, but I got bored with it and started on a model of the Vatican. Now, are you going to ring those up, or shall I get my matchstick Pope to excommunicate you?”
It’s a running joke between them. Years ago someone who worked behind the counter had asked Alma why she bought so many Rizla papers, to which Alma had replied with a deadpan expression and without a beat that she was building a scale model of the Eiffel Tower out of the flimsy, gum-edged leaves. While this had only been a gag she’d found it an appealing one, an idea she could get a bit of mileage out of. Well, more than a bit as it turned out. She sees ideas much as a farmer sees his pigs, and doesn’t even want to waste the squeal if she can help it.
With her purchases inside a flimsy plastic carrier-bag, the national flower, she waves a clattering metallic goodbye to the Martins and steps back out of the shop into the wide pink precinct. She continues her descent of Abington Street, calling in at Marks & Spencer’s to pick up some bits and pieces for her evening meal: a couple of long demon-tongue Ramiros peppers, cranberry and orange stuffing, and some feta cheese. She navigates a designated path between the open-plan departments, overlooked by Myleene Klass and a still-lovely Twiggy. Alma never feels entirely comfortable in the conspicuously poncey store, but, having recently boycotted Sainsbury’s, lacks for a convenient alternative.
The Sainsbury’s episode still makes her smile, though it’s the ghastly smile of something that one really should have killed but only wounded. She had been emerging from the Grosvenor Centre branch of Sainsbury’s, where she knew most of the ladies at the tills by name, laden down by two bulging store-brand bags-for-life filled with her purchases. A uniformed security guard, shrewdly noticing the lizard-green-with-watermelon-pink-interior hoodie that she happened to be wearing, had deduced she was therefore a member of the underclass (which, emotionally at least, she was) and stepped to block her path, demanding to see Alma’s till receipt. Towering above the relatively pint-sized individual she had craned her neck, lowering her massive head to his eye-level as if talking to a woefully underachieving eight-year-old. Explaining that she wasn’t in the habit of collecting till receipts, Alma had asked if this was some new policy of random stop-and-search, or if he’d had some other reason for selecting her amongst the dozen or so more conventional-looking shoppers who were then emerging from the supermarket. Looking more and more uncertain by the moment, the guard had then pointlessly requested that she show him what was in her Sainsbury’s shopping bags, perhaps suspecting somehow that they’d prove to contain shopping that had come from Sainsbury’s.
She had repeated her inquiry, leaving an exaggerated gap between each word so that he had the time to fully comprehend one syllable before being required to struggle with the next. “Why … did … you … stop … me … specifically?” By this point other customers were nervously approaching and protesting Alma’s innocence, looking more worried for the clearly-new employee, understandably, than they were for the famously belligerent giantess. Attempting to salvage a sense of his authority in this deteriorating situation, the guard had said that Alma must keep her receipts. Alma had duly noted this new Sainsbury’s policy but had explained that since she wouldn’t be returning to the store, it wasn’t really going to affect her. Smiling anxiously as she’d begun to walk away, he’d called out a reminder to hang on to her receipt next time, which had made Alma pause, sigh heavily, and then explain in her best child-friendly voice what all the long words about not returning to the store in her last sentence were intended to convey. When she’d got home she’d rung customer services and told them it was Alma Warren calling, at which the young woman on the other end had chirpily informed her that she’d seen Alma on telly just the previous night. Alma had told her that was nice and then gone on to detail what had happened earlier, explaining that she could only interpret the guard’s scrutiny as being class-based and how this had prompted her decision to give Sainsbury’s a miss in future. She’d assured the perfectly-nice woman that she wasn’t asking Sainsbury’s for an apology, though anyone who knew her would have heard the implication that it was too late for such a useless trifle to placate her; that she was by now embarked upon a grudge that she would carry to the grave.
It hadn’t been the first time she’d attracted the attention of security in Sainsbury’s, although on the previous occasion she’d been in the company of her dear chum, the actor Robert Goodman, so she hadn’t really blamed them. Bob, blessed with what a desperate estate agent would call “distinctive features”, had during his various career played the Hamburglar, and the corpse-humping rapist solider in Luc Besson’s <em>Joan of Arc</em>, while in a number of advertisements for car alarms, alongside his appearances upon <em>The Bill</em>, <em>Eastenders</em>, and in <em>Batman</em> and <em>A Fish Called Wanda</em>, he had made the role of Second Scar-faced Thug his own. Given Bob’s murderous demeanour, she wasn’t surprised that they’d been followed round the store. If Alma didn’t know Bob personally, and if he wasn’t currently researching stuff on her behalf pertaining to tomorrow’s exhibition, then she’d have him taken out by snipers; would have more than likely done so long ago. This latest incident, however, had no such extenuating circumstances: she’d been stopped and questioned because she looked poor. In fucking Sainsbury’s, which Alma hadn’t realised was now such an elite concern. By contrast, here in poncey Marks & Spencer’s, the one guard who’d ever spoken to her had just smiled and said he was a fan. Class prejudice, apparently, is not seen as a major issue, possibly because its victims are traditionally inarticulate. Alma herself, of course, never shuts up, particularly when it comes to people of her background being demonised. She can drone on about the subject endlessly, most usually in the two or three media interviews she does each week, or some more permanent form. No, she won’t be needing an apology.
Back in Abington Street, burdened by two carrier bags now, she carries on towards the coffee shop down at the bottom, Caffè Nero. Why name a café after someone like Nero, Alma wonders? You might just as well call it Caffè Caligula or Caffè Heliogabalus. Or Caffè Mussolini for that matter. The caffeine of Europe.
The café stands roughly on the former site of the town hall, the intermediary model serving as a stepping stone between the first Gilhalda on the Mayorhold and the splendid current Guildhall round the corner in St. Giles Street. It was here on this spot almost ten years before that Alma had crossed paths with then-Prime-Minister-in-waiting Tony Blair, on a pre-landslide walkabout with suited <em>Reservoir Dogs</em> minders and the rictus grin and painted eyeballs of a ventriloquist’s dummy who’s determined not to go gack in the gox. The party had been sauntering down Abington Street just as Alma had been walking up, sunbathing in the awed attention they clearly imagined they were getting from the utterly oblivious passers-by. You could tell that inside their minds they were parading down the recently pedestrianised precinct, all in flattering slow-motion with the faint breeze ruffling their jet-moulded hair attractively.
Scanning the passing faces for a sign of something other than indifference, Blair’s eyes had eventually met Alma’s grey and yellow hazard lights. Of course, she hadn’t known at that point he was going to drag the country into an interminable and disastrous war, buddying up to the Americans with a view to his own retirement prospects, but she’d been aware of him for years and knew that he would almost certainly be doing <em>something</em> vile. She’d watched him and his party tacitly support repressive Tory legislation like Clause 28 or the Criminal Justice Bill. She’d watched him ‘modernise’ the Labour party by excising the last vestiges of the core values that her parents and grandparents had believed in; watched him sell the poor, the disinherited and even the trade unions who’d brought his party into being down the same endlessly rolling opportunist river. On the afternoon of her encounter with him, then, despite the fact he hadn’t been elected yet, she’d thought to get in her retaliation early. She hadn’t looked daggers at him, she’d looked Daisy-cutters, with a glare of such intensity that she would only normally employ it if she were attempting to blow up the moon. There had been fields once that had given Alma cause to look at them like that, where now there would be nothing growing for the next few hundred years. She’d held the contact long enough to make sure it had registered, waiting until Blair’s grin had frozen to a rictus and his startled eyes had undergone their first-to-see-the-creature moment before she had curled her lip and looked dismissively away, continuing with her ascent of Abington Street.
Entering the café now to grab a cup of hot black tea and slice of Tiramisu, she talks with the Polish girls behind the counter before relocating to a punch-drunk leather armchair by the window, still considering her brief encounter with the man who is at present hanging on to leadership with the desperate tenacity of a hand-chosen lobster clinging to the ornamental castle in the restaurant tank. This is the man who by his own account has felt the hand of history upon his shoulder with such dreary frequency across the years and yet has never realised that it’s fastening a label saying “stab me” to his back with Sellotape.
Levering up a forkful of her custard/coffee cake towards the tag team of bright red Mexican wrestlers that are her lips she thinks about the pair of local men, both former Labour Party members, who are currently confined by a restraining order which prevents them leaving England and forbids them talking to each other. One of them, a civil servant by the name of David Keogh who lives just off the Mounts, was a communications officer seconded to the Foreign Office during 2005. While thus employed, Keogh had received the transcript of a conversation between Blair and U.S. President George W. Bush in which the gangster and his moll had discussed the advisability of bombing non-combatant Arab television station Al-Jazeera. Understanding that this was a war-crime in the making, Keogh had panicked and passed on the information to his fellow Northamptonian and Labour Party chum, former political researcher Leo O’Connor, then employed as an assistant to Northampton South Labour MP and erstwhile Inter-City Firm football enthusiast Tony Clarke. Alma has always had a soft spot with regard to Clarke, who seems to her an honourable, decent man. To be fair, she supposes that unless he’d wanted to be in the frame himself as part of a conspiracy the MP would have had no choice but to do what he did upon discovery of the memo, which was putting in the call to Special Branch.
This has led to a minor quandary at the Foreign Office, detailed in the pages of a recent <em>Private Eye</em>. Apparently, while one department of that august body had been claiming that the Bush/Blair Al-Jazeera conversation never happened and was the malign invention of Keogh and O’Connor, a completely separate department had announced in its response to an enquiry on the case that although they possessed a transcript of the conversation, they could not release it. Alma wonders how they’ll charge the pair for breach of the Official Secrets Act without reminding everyone what the official secret under scrutiny had been. Her guess is that they’ll leave it a few months until some new catastrophe or scandal has eclipsed the matter and the overall amnesia of the general public has had time to kick in. Then they’ll rush the case through court with a D-Notice on the media, preventing press and television from giving details of the original offence in any coverage. That’s what she’d do if she were some pink-faced Magister Ludi in the depths of Whitehall.
Blotting mascarpone from the scarlet crime-scene of her lips, she feels indignant that this Kafka re-run should be happening to people from her town, one of them living on the Mounts just past the northeast corner of the Boroughs, her beloved neighbourhood. Mansoul, it is the very seat of war.
She jingles goodbye to the Polish girls and exits Caffè Nero, crossing the vestigial tarmac stump of Abington Street that’s still hanging on past the pink paving, heading for the market square. Alma remembers she’d been going to pay her Council Tax, but realises that she’s left the bill at home. Oh, well. Who cares? She’ll sort it out on Monday, when the preview exhibition’s over. Given how Northampton has responded to Poll Tax demands across the centuries, she doubts that her late payment will present much of a problem. After Margaret Thatcher overreached herself by introducing it back in the ’Eighties, bailiff’s wagons had been chased back to their depot by infuriated Eastern District tenants who’d gone on to wreck the repossession company’s business premises. A mob of protesters had taken over council offices, holding staff prisoner at fist-point in a day-long siege. Of course, all that was nothing to the fourteenth century when the first Poll Tax had been raised down at the castle at the south end of St. Andrew’s Road, precipitating upon that occasion the incendiary orgy that was the Peasant’s Revolt. No, they could wait until after the weekend and count themselves lucky that she wasn’t going to torch the Guildhall. Probably.
Walking in a diagonal across the market’s gentle gradient, stepping between the wooden posts of recently-vacated stalls or dodging under the perpetually wet-looking canopies, Alma is thinking still about Keogh and O’Connor, free will, Gerard ’t Hooft, Benedict Perrit and her rooftop leap across the scrap-filled chasm when she’d been eleven. She assumes that all the other people making their way back and forth across the square are similarly occupied with idiosyncratic matters of their own. This is reality, this teeming of illusions, memories, anxieties, ideas and speculations, constant in six billion minds. The actual events and circumstances of the world are just the sweaty and material tip of this immense and ghostly iceberg, the entirety of which no individual being can conceivably experience. For Alma, this raises the question of just whom or what reality is real <em>to</em>. You would have to postulate some hypothetic point of absolute omniscience outside the human world, some being constantly engrossed in knowing everything and therefore not having the time to act itself, a still and inert point of utter understanding, utter receptivity.
The nearest Alma can come to conceiving this sole motionless spectator of an ultimate reality is the stone angel that’s atop the Guildhall, somewhere to her rear as she strides up across the marketplace towards its northwest corner. The archangel Michael, hopelessly mixed up with Michael, patron saint of corporations, standing with his shield and snooker cue above the town, hearing its every thought yet never opening those birdshit-spattered lips to voice a warning or betray a confidence. Aware of several deaths and several hundred copulations every hour, knowing which of a hundred billion sperm will hit the mark, will end up as a nurse, a rapist, a social reformer or an accident statistic; end up going through divorce, a bankruptcy, a windscreen. Fully cognisant of every Starburst wrapper, every dog turd, every atom, every quark; knows if Gerard ’t Hooft’s equations of an underlying state beneath the charm and strangeness will turn out to be correct or not; knows if Benedict Perrit will be coming to her opening tomorrow. Every fact and fancy, everything reflected perfectly, exquisitely, upon the dull stone brow. This entire universe, including Alma and her current musings, caught in a synaptic shimmer of the gelid and impartial granite mind.
Halfway across the emptying market, it occurs to her that she is walking through the blossoming iron phantom of the monument, the empty spot where once it stood upon its stepped stone base. Perhaps she even transects an eight-year-old self sat risking piles on the cold pedestal, examining her knees where they extend beyond the pleated hem of her thin navy skirt. The vague, ungathered wool of memory that fills the square is spun into specific strands of yarn upon the monument’s ghost-spindle. Shiny, rain-licked cobbles emerge briefly through the pink replacement paving and the empty wooden outlines of each stall are coloured in, filled with dead traders and their long-since perished merchandise. A trestle of unbranded sweets, cartoon confectionery even then unseen outside the pages of <em>The Beano</em>, all presided over by a man with heavy black Italian eyebrows and a starched white coat. The stand of comics and used paperbacks that she still sometimes dreams about, Sid’s, its proprietor in cap and gloves and muffler, breath and pipe-smoke hanging in the winter air and all around a gaudy flowerbed of <em>Adventure Comics</em> and <em>Forbidden Worlds</em> held down by flat, round iron paperweights, <em>Mad</em> magazine or <em>True Adventure</em> with its Nazi temptresses and whipped G.I.s, hanging from bulldog-clips along a spring-like wire connected to the bookstall’s upper reaches, just below the green-and-white stripes of its canopy. In the pre-Christmas dark the huddled pitches look like painted paper lanterns from above, the white glare of the storm lamps sieved through coloured canvas. Glowing cigarette ends hover in the black. Magnificent and evanescent, the Emporium Arcade flares on her right, alight with toys and knitting patterns, before once again subsiding to a blank and stone-clad modern wall, the grand wrought-iron Victoriana of its entrance melting to a brutal concrete underpass where teenagers kicked an Albanian man to death a year or two ago.
As she is heading from the open corner of the marketplace towards the indeterminate point where the Drapery meets Sheep Street, Alma glances downhill to her left and notices the Halifax Building Society’s confident frontage on the corner of Drum Lane. Caught in the floss of other times, Alma can still see Alfred Preedy’s paper shop that occupied the premises forty or fifty years before, the place she’d had the dream about when she was five, the hooded foreman and his midnight crew of carpenters that she’d attempted to describe with <em>Work in Progress</em>. Was the job completed to its schedule, or is it still going on, she wonders, somewhere in the dreams of children? A fragmentary idea comes to her, something about the planed wooden boards of the nocturnal workers representing lengths of time or sets of linked events, with every human life a nail, her and her brother Warry, Tony Blair, Keogh and O’Connor, everyone she knows and everyone she doesn’t know, hammered into being by their parents’ coital rhythms, bang, bang, bang, immovably embedded in the hard grain of eternity, so that –
Her train of thought is interrupted by a genial young fellow in a baseball cap and trainers that are better-looking than her own. All that he wants to do is shake her hand and tell her that her work’s amazing while apologising for approaching her, which makes her feel all warm and motherly. Just as she’s saying goodbye to him, one of the remaining traders on the market square behind her calls out, “Me too! Well done, Alma!” giving her a brief round of applause. She beams and waves. Sometimes this is all like a dream, too pleasant, a reality suspiciously benevolent to Alma Warren. There are times when she suspects it’s all some ludicrously vain and self-regarding compensatory fantasy she’s dreaming in some other, less auspicious life. Perhaps she’s really sitting, heavily sedated, in a pool of her own piss at an asylum somewhere, or maybe she’s in a coma in the 1970s after she drank so much that she stopped breathing at her twentieth birthday party. It occurs to her that her unusually enjoyable existence might be some hallucination happening in the stretched-out instant of her death, a vision of the life she might have had. Who knows? Perhaps she never really cleared that alley full of rusted junk, back when she was eleven.
She passes between the Abbey National’s Drapery Branch and the majestic colonnaded front of the old Corn Exchange, its chiselled steps ascending into what had once been the town’s other major cinema, called variously the Gaumont and the Odeon. Here she’d been forced to watch <em>The Sound of Music</em> three times with her mum Doreen, which she considered to be technically a form of child abuse. She’d been stood up twice, waiting on the cold steps for some acne-stippled tossrag who’d quite evidently only asked her out when dared to by his mates. She’d also come here several years before her teenage trials, when she had been a member of the Gaumont Boys and Girls club. Every Saturday they’d be let in for sixpence and would then be led by an enthusiastic adult, Uncle Something, in the singing of peculiar old songs like “Clementine”, “The British Grenadiers” or “Men of Harlech in the Hollow” before they were allowed to watch a short cartoon, a Children’s Film Foundation main show that would frequently involve an island, schoolboys and a foreign saboteur, then finally one episode from an ongoing eight-week serial, <em>King of the Rocket Men</em> or an old black-and-white <em>Batman and Robin</em> where the couple drove around in a completely ordinary 1940s car and Robin pushed his cardboard mask up on his forehead while conversing with his costumed pal in public. The main entertainment had been crawling under people’s legs along the rows of seats, or deftly flicking an ice-lolly stick to maybe blind a seven-year-old stranger several rows in front.
These days, of course, the building is another theme pub, a Hard Rock Café, and the town’s major cinema is a bog-standard multiplex at Sixfields, out past Jimmy’s End and a car-ride away. There’s almost a conceptualist brilliance to it all: turn all the cinemas to pubs, get everybody ruinously pissed and then make sure that there’s no outlet for the spasms of imagination, fury or libido, nothing to drain off the clumsy fantasies that bob up to the surface of a seventh pint of Wifebeater. The simple-minded plotlines, absent motivation and pointless momentum of the cancelled celluloid will back up and spill out into the Saturday night streets. Before long you’ll have fascinating pieces of pure verité on every corner, budget Tarantino stabbings with assailants who hold their knives sideways and debate pop-culture trivia while giving you a Chelsea smile. The Oscars will be going to a flock of scattering shadows on CCTV.
Alma lopes across the woolly, shitty arse of Sheep Street to the gated entrance of the old fish-market, which she notices with some surprise is open. The big covered hall with its glass roof and glistening white slabs is part of Alma’s childhood landscape that she thought had been railed off forever. Vanished voices ringing from the wet tiles with an echo like a swimming-baths, and her nan May parting the crowds as she rolled through them like a black iron wrecking ball, lifting a liver-spotted hand and calling out to the fishmongers, all of whom she knew by name. The only one that Alma can remember is Three-Fingered Tunk, presumably so-called in order to distinguish him from all the other men called Tunk who had a different number of remaining digits.
She vaguely remembers hearing something about plans to turn the Fish Market into some sort of exhibition space or gallery, but has dismissed the idea as too fanciful. Not in Northampton; not in this world. It would never happen. The idea that she might have been wrong in her appraisal has, as usual, not occurred to her, which is perhaps why seeing the green metal concertina gates standing unlocked and open seems at first unreal. Feeling as if she’s stepping over the tiled threshold of a private dreamtime, Alma and her carrier-bags cross into the white emptiness of the interior.
The daylight falling through the dusty lens of the glass ceiling is diffused and milky, which transmutes the space into that of a realist painting. There are hardly any other figures to be seen about the echoing expanse, as dream-like and deserted as the streets in eighteenth-century prints. It’s early days yet, she supposes, with none of the promised art and fashion outlets up and running, but the church-like volume of the place impresses her. She’s never previously seen the Fish Market like this, denuded of its mumbling crowds, stripped of its cheery traders calling imprecations into the salt echo.
Now the slabs are bare and bloodless. The establishment is pared back to the bone, the trappings of its recent history sluiced away. Leftover shreds of topaz haddock, the prismatic gutter-silt of scales and staring collar-button eyes, swept off to join the horse-brasses and tankards of the Red Lion Inn that previously occupied this spot; join the menorahs and yarmulkes from the synagogue of a few centuries before. Its past removed, the market is a fertile vacuum waiting to be filled with future, a mysterious quantum void that hums with immanence and possibility. Alma is disconcerted by a sudden surge of hope, a cynicism override. Part of her is gloomily certain that the council will find some way to undo or undermine the venture, probably through sheer indifference rather than hostility, but the mere fact of its existence is a cause for optimism. It suggests to her that there are people in Northampton, people in the country, people in the world who have the will to make things be a different way. It’s the same feeling that she gets when she’s around her rapper buddies with their Boroughs-esoteric stage names: Influence, St. Craze, Har-Q, Illuzion. It’s the sense of social transformation that she sees, at least potentially, in art and occultism, even sometimes on the ragged Roman Thompson fringe of politics. This passionate desire to change reality into a domain more amenable to human beings, this is the ethereal fire that Alma can feel hanging in the brisk Fish Market air.
As if brought into being by her lifted spirits, one of the few blurred forms in Alma’s myopic middle-distance suddenly resolves itself on her approach into the unassuming and yet inspirational semblance of Knocker Wood, one of the greatest local antidotes for cynicism since the passing of the sorely-missed lyric barrage-balloon that was the late Tom Hall. Knocker – Alma had known him since they were both teenage hippies without ever learning his first name – had been achingly pretty as a young man, with his long black hair and the wild glitter in his eye that looked like poetry but turned out to be heroin. One of the town’s first junkies, Knocker had been part of that mysterious slapstick coterie who took part in their own Narco-Olympics every other Saturday, competitors in the 400-metre dash with stolen television set, haring along the Drapery to the cheers of the flowered-up bohemians gathered on the steps of All Saints Church.
Then everybody had got older. The majority of the long-haired spectators on the steps had straightened up and bailed out of the ailing freak-scene upon turning twenty, getting proper jobs and living up to parents’ expectations. This had left only the working-class contingent of the counter culture, who remained committed largely because they had nowhere else to go, and the addicted casualties like Knocker Wood for whom commitment was no longer the real issue. Knocker’s middle years had been a horror film, wilfully gothic in the way that only junkies can aspire to. Alma can remember scabby ghouls who held up their collapsing veins with safety-pins, a pre-punk gesture, or who’d ruefully announce that they were “forced” to shoot up in their eyeball or their cock.
While Knocker hadn’t been amongst this self-consciously morbid set, for long years he had been a babbling mess that Alma is ashamed to say she’d crossed the street in order to avoid on numerous occasions. He’d lost his wife to an overdose, their daughter to a strain of hepatitis, devastating blows that methadone and Carlsberg Special Brew could not completely muffle. He’d been on a hell-bound train that overshot its destination and ploughed on relentlessly for somewhere even worse when by some miracle he’d managed to leap off the footplate, tumbling helplessly down the embankment towards hard and cold sobriety. No-one had thought that he could do it. Nobody had seen it done before. Knocker had somehow managed to rebirth himself as a hill-walking rural rambler, a drink-and-drug-free boulevardier, a vision of redemption that these days Alma will happily cross several busy motorways to say hello to.
“Knocker! Good to see you. How’s it going?”
He’s still a good-looking man, beginning to bleach out attractively, worn smooth with age, but the stone-washed demeanour suits him to a T. The short grey hair is in retreat, daily conceding territory to the forehead, while his eyes are still as bright though clear now and engaging fully with the diamond world around him. He’s a soothing, peaceful sight, like clean blue pebbles in a stream. He beams and says hello to her, submitting to a hug and genuinely pleased to see her here; pleased to see every dust-mote spinning and illuminated in its Brownian waltz.
He tells her that he’s now a counsellor, bringing his own experience to bear on mending others, beating out the world’s dents where he can. Alma sees him as one of Bunyan’s “mechanick philosophers”, dispensing healing words among the other tinkers, a one-man Nation of Saints without the Christianity and bloody pikestaffs. She is overjoyed to hear about his new line of employment, as pleased for herself as she is thrilled for him. Knocker is an important, vital totem in the way that Alma sees the world, proof positive that even in the blackest and most hopeless circumstances things can sometimes turn out wonderful.
She tells him about tomorrow’s exhibition, which he says he’ll try to get to, and then they discuss the transformed Fish Market, its tundra whiteness stretching all about them. Knocker’s eyes light up and flash the way they used to do, though now it’s the anticipatory pre-Christmas sparkle of a child rather than the mad hypodermic glint of yore.
“Yeah, they say they’ll be having costume balls here and events and things, as well as exhibitions. I think it sounds great. Northampton’s never really had a place like this.”
About to launch into her usual expectation-lowering list of reasons why it isn’t going to work, Alma remembers who she’s talking to and brings herself up short. If Knocker Wood can be so bravely optimistic about the Fish Market’s prospects, then it’s somehow craven for her to indulge in comfy pessimism. She should step up to the mark, and not be such a whining bitch.
“You’re right. I like the light here, and I like the atmosphere. It could be really, really good. It’d be nice to see this place filled up again with crowds of people, all in fancy dress. It’d be like the dreams you have when you’re a kid.”
They talk for a few minutes longer, then they hug goodbye and carry on their individual trajectories. As Alma leaves the market, pushing open the glass swing door at its rear and stepping out into the muddled area at the top of Silver Street, she feels elated both by the encounter and the prospects for her little art-show of the following day. Perhaps her pictures can do what she wants them to. Perhaps they can live up to her unreasonable demands and do something to salve the wounded Boroughs, if it’s only by drawing the right kind of attention to the place. At very least she’ll have discharged the obligations that she’d taken on after her brother’s afterlife experience, and laid some ghosts to rest for both of them, possibly literally. That isn’t bad for a year’s work.
Alma’s descent of the wide road that narrow Silver Street became during the 1970s is her descent into the past, into the Boroughs, and inevitably the cheap pre-war scent of the locale’s charisma wells up to surround her, colouring her thoughts and her perceptions. This is the paved-over ground she grew between the cracks of. This is where whatever vision she possesses came from, these thin lanes that trickle downhill to St. Andrew’s Road like dirty bathwater. Across the busy road the Multi-storey car park squats upon two or three vanished streets and a few hundred hours of Alma’s childhood: the Electric Light Working Men’s Club in Bearward Street where she’d go with her parents and her brother on a Sunday night, the Judo club in Silver Street where she’d learned self-defence until she’d realised that she was too big and unpredictable for anyone to pick on. All the memories are crushed beneath the vast weight of the car park and compressed to a prismatic form of anthracite, a fuel that she’s been running on for more than fifty years.
The view from this point, high upon the area’s eastern slopes, has stayed essentially unchanged for all that time, if by ‘essentially’ you mean that the fleeced sky is in the same place and the angle of the sweeping incline remains constant. Nearly every other feature of the landscape has been altered or removed. The recently refurbished NEWLIFE buildings dominate the stepped-on vista, the surrounding circuit board of flats and maisonettes, communal cubes that have replaced the terraces of individual homes. Though greatly simplified, the neighbourhood’s original main thoroughfares are visible in their archaic tangle, Bath Street, Scarletwell, Spring Lane. Some patches of the panorama are dispirited and overcast while others briefly glory in their sudden spotlight as the afternoon sun pours down through a threadbare sheet of cloud. The graduations of the distance appear much the same as ever, or at least they do to Alma’s blurring eyesight. She sees bands of brick or concrete housing giving way to stripes of railway track with overhead wires, and then finally resolving to the grey-green smoulder of Victoria Park in the far west. Despite the shabby overlay of the last half-a-century, she knows the golden template of the district is still there somewhere. The buried heart still beats under the rubble. Forking off from Silver Street into the incline of an underpass below the roaring Mayorhold, Alma draws in a deep breath and ducks her head beneath the mottled surface of the present.
She emerges from the tunnel’s orange murk onto a sunken walkway lined with thirty-year-old tiling that suggests to Alma a bulimic Mondrian after a Spanish omelette. Turning left she climbs the ramp towards Horsemarket (West) and makes her way down into the bollard-occluded mouth of Bath Street, past the Kingdom Life building that was erected as a Boy’s Brigade Hall in the 60s. Alma’s brother had belonged to that peculiar Baptist paramilitary, the Baden-Powell Youth. He had marched with them and their cacophonous percussion-heavy band on Sunday mornings, an eleven-year-old with a brass badge and a lanyard, with a jaunty cadet cap atop his girly golden curls, a happiness and innocence in his blue eyes that Alma thought looked borderline subnormal. He’d have made a perfect paediatric Nazi if he could have carried off a decent goose-step without skipping like a cartoon milkmaid. Alma’s fairly certain he attended the odd torchlight rally at the pebble-dashed pavilion across the way, him and his mates all chanting “Arbeit Macht Frei” or “Be Prepared” or whatever their motto was.
She idly wonders if the former Boy’s Brigade Headquarters is located near where Moseley’s Blackshirts had their offices back in the ‘30s. This provokes a trailing strand of thought relating to an article by Roman Thompson, which the grizzled lefty veteran had photocopied for her, all about the B.U.F.’s activities around the Mayorhold. There’d been grainy reproductions from newspaper photographs of leading local fascists posing with Sir Oswald while he toured the provinces, with one name in the captions underneath the pictures whited out, presumably by somebody in the archive department. Roman hadn’t noticed the deletion and had no clue as to what the missing name might be, though Alma had heard unsubstantiated rumours about Mr. Bassett-Lowkes, the erstwhile local footwear manufacturer and former owner of a house in Derngate with interiors by Rennie Mackintosh. Who knows? If World War Two had gone a different way he might have launched a line of sporty jack-brogues to commemorate the Führer’s victory.
Alma carries on down Bath Street with the corned beef-coloured Moseley-vintage flat-blocks on her left, the NEWLIFE towers and their attendant modern terraced houses coming up on Alma’s right. Her inner musings still have a large National Socialist component, very like the winter scheduling on Channel Five. She’s heard, relatively recently, that Hitler’s planned invasion of the British Isles had ended with the capture of Northampton, as if once the centre of the country had been taken then the rest was a foregone conclusion. Alma giggles to herself. Say what you like about the Third Reich, at least they recognised places of historical strategic import when they saw them. And the area has ended up with all the brutal and intimidating Nazi architecture anyway. Albert Speer might have stuck eagles and swastikas up on the tower-blocks, but would that necessarily have made the locals feel more subjugated and discouraged than the cheesy sideways silver lettering that’s up there currently? Quite frankly, either way the message would be much the same: tomorrow, most assuredly, does not belong to you.
The further down the hill she goes the more subdued and shadowy her mood becomes, as though Bath Street were an emotional gradient. She’s thinking about history’s celebrated victims, thinking of the holocaust, the blight of slavery, female suppression and the persecution of sexual minorities. She can recall her own <em>Spare Rib</em> days in the 1970s and how she’d briefly entertained the idea that a woman leader might make all the difference. This had obviously been back in the <em>early</em> seventies. Her point is that despite the very real continuing abuses born of anti-Semitism, born of racism and sexism and homophobia, there are MPs and leaders who are female, Jewish, black or gay. There are none who are poor. There never have been, and there never will be. Every decade since society’s inception has been witness to a holocaust of paupers, so enormous and perpetual that it has become wallpaper, unnoticed, unreported. The mass graves at Dachau and at Auschwitz are, rightly, remembered and repeatedly deplored, but what about the one in Bunhill Fields that William Blake and his beloved Catherine were shovelled into? What about the one under the car park in Chalk Lane, across the road from Doddridge Church? What of the countless generations that have lived poor and have in one way or other died of that condition, uncommemorated and anonymous? Where are their fucking monuments and special ringed dates on the calendar? Where are their Spielberg films? Part of the problem is, no doubt, that poverty lacks a dramatic arc. From rags to rags to rags to rags to dust has never been an Oscar-winning formula.
Across the street a door opens in Simons Walk, one of the modern terraces that crouch beneath the high-rise buildings, and a fat bloke with a shaven head and internet-porn eyes emerges. He looks flatly and dismissively at Alma and quite blatantly hits the ‘Delete’ key on his Wank Bank before lumbering off along the walkway, probably towards the chip shop in St. Andrew’s Street. Alma lets her attention linger for a moment on the tree-walled ‘pocket park’ that’s just over the road, one of the only genuinely nice additions to the neighbourhood. She’s got an artist friend called Claire who lives down here in Bath Street flats and makes a point of keeping the small green enclosure litter-free and weeded. Claire had painted an intensely-felt cartoon depiction of her threatened acre with carnivorous tower blocks encroaching on it from all sides which she’d insisted upon giving Alma after Alma fell in love with it, refusing any money and deeply embarrassing the nouveau-riche celebrity, who is forever in her fellow artist’s debt. Claire’s brave and lovely and a bit bipolar. She makes Alma smile just thinking of her, with a psilocybin mushroom and the legend ‘MAGIC’ tattooed on one forearm; ‘FUCK OFF’ on the other. Both of these, to Alma’s mind, are worthy creeds to live by.
She considers the made-over bulks of Claremont Court and Beaumont Court, the NEWLIFE towers engaging in their double penetration of the sky. About ten days ago, knowing the renovations for the publicly-loathed swindle that they really were, the council had attempted a stealth opening event. Ruth Kelly’s deputy as Minister for Housing, Yvette Cooper, had been ferried in to cut the ribbon early on a Wednesday morning with no prior announcements made, in order to avoid alerting organised protesters. Roman Thompson, obviously, heard all about the covert visit on the night before it happened. Requisitioning a megaphone from local union premises, Roman had turned up bright and early with a hastily convened posse of local anarchists and activists, bringing the sleepy tenants of the maisonettes on Crispin Street out to their balconies by bellowing “GOOD MOOOOOOOORNING, SPRING BOROUGHS” through his borrowed loudhailer. When the pencil-necked Deputy Minister and partner of Brown-aide Ed Balls arrived with the attendant local dignitaries, Roman’s vastly-amplified Old Man of the Sea voice had gleefully regaled them with their recent improprieties. He’d sympathetically asked Labour MP Sally Keeble how well she was sleeping these days, after voting for the Iraq War. He’d loudly paid another councillor a compliment upon how smart he looked and speculated that this might be due to all the backhanders he’d recently received. At this point a policeman had rushed up to Roman and informed him that he couldn’t say that, to which Roman had replied by pointing out, with logic that was unassailable, that he already had. Alma is grinning. It had been an entertaining morning in the Boroughs, from the sound of it.
Reluctantly she turns her gaze back to the side of Bath Street that she’s walking down, the 1930s flat-blocks with the entrance to their central walkway on her left and just ahead. Alma stares at the spot where she is fairly certain that the hulking chimneystack of the Destructor had once stood and instantly her cheerful mental image of Claire’s painting shatters into shellac flakes of green and yellow. These immediately scatter on the wind to be replaced by Alma’s previous notion of the Boroughs and the other districts like it everywhere across the world as concentration neighbourhoods: zones where the population could be readily identified by prison uniforms of apron or shiny demob suit if they strayed beyond the boundaries, zones where the inmates could be safely worked, starved or simply depressed to death with no fear of a public outcry. Here in Bath Street they’d even provided the continually smoking tower of an incinerator chimney to enhance the death-camp ambience.
Alma, who makes little distinction between internal and external reality, doesn’t much care if the Destructor in her brother’s vision is the awful supernatural force that he described it as, or if it’s some hallucinatory and visionary metaphor. As Alma sees things, it’s the metaphors that do all the most serious damage: Jews as rats, or car-thieves as hyenas. Asian countries as a line of dominoes that communist ideas could topple. Workers thinking of themselves as cogs in a machine, creationists imagining existence as a Swiss watch mechanism and then presupposing a white-haired and twinkle-eyed old clockmaker behind it all. Alma believes that the Destructor, even as a metaphor, especially as a metaphor, could easily cremate a neighbourhood, a class, a district of the human heart. By the same token then, she must believe that art, her art, anyone’s art, is capable of finally demolishing the mind-set and ideas that the Destructor represents if expressed with sufficient force and savagery; sufficient brutal beauty. Alma has no other choice than to believe this. It’s what keeps her going. Hardening her eyes to the eroded Bauhaus balconies and arches, bricks the colour of dried blood, she turns left and begins to head up the long path that separates the two halves of the flats, towards the walled ramp that leads into Castle Street.
The sun absconds behind a cloud and the green lawns turn grey. The ornamental stepped edge of the brickwork, grass-cracked and distressed, takes on a different character. The architecture, neat and modern and efficient in its time, now looks its age, a pre-war civil servant who’d once had a promising career ahead of him but now is in his eighties, haunted and incontinent, incapable of recognising his surroundings. Past the flats’ drawn curtains are the chambers of a crumbling mind through which the tenants shamble like unfathomable dreams. Outpatients, rock-heads, migrant workers, prostitutes and refugees and transposed flowers like Claire somehow still painting pictures in amidst it all, the way that Richard Dadd had laboured on his tiny fairy visions in the screaming, defecating hells of Bedlam and of Broadmoor.
Alma realises that the place is like a grindstone on which reason, sense of self, and sanity are milled to an undifferentiated flour of madness. Mental illness and depression have been stirred into the mortar of these buildings, or have seeped into the plaster as a type of melancholic damp. Attempting to sustain even the ordinary notion of a purpose to existence in this bleak environment would slowly drive you round the bend, would send you cornery. She realises, wading through the thick air of the central walkway, that insanity occurs most often where a human vision meets the social brickwork. She remembers Pastor Newton’s old hymn-writing colleague, madhouse veteran William Cowper, in 1819, addressing William Blake: “You retain health and yet are as mad as any of us all – over us all – mad as a refuge from the unbelief of Bacon, Newton and Locke.”
This was a different Newton that the fragile poet was condemning, obviously, not hymn-composing and slave-trading John but Isaac, architect of a material scientific certainty that would supplant the levelling moral apocalypse of his contemporary John Bunyan. Isaac Newton, founding member of the Royal Society and of Freemasonry’s Grand Lodge, brutal commander of the Mint and therefore engineer to a financial system rife with Darien Disasters, South Sea Bubbles, Wall Street Crashes and Black Wednesdays. Instigator of the gold standard and thus of Britain’s gold reserves, which Blair’s chancellor Gordon Brown has quietly sold off just this last year. Sir Isaac, the inventor of an utterly imaginary colour, indigo, and the creator of the modern world’s materialistic rat-trap on so many different levels. The great tranquilliser of the spirit, the inducer of what Blake called, accurately, “Newton’s Sleep”. In Bath Street flats, amongst the destitute and desperate and depressed, she can see all the dreams with which that sleep is troubled.
She breaks from her train of thought to skirt around a recent-looking dog-evacuation that is in her path, a turreted turd-castle that’s as yet unbreached by toddler’s shoe or teenage trainer, perfect end-product of the material world and also its inevitable monument. It gives at least a semi-solid form to the most frequent word, most frequent thought upon the local modern mind, reiterates the creed of the Destructor: “This is where we send our shit, the things that we no longer have a use for. This means you.”
Heading towards the ramp that has replaced the steps that she remembers from her childhood Alma wonders, with a lurch, how many individuals have died down here, how many last breaths have fogged mirrors in unsatisfactory bathrooms or escaped into cramped kitchenettes. It must be hundreds since the flats were put up in the 1930s; all those disappointed souls, their stories worked into the grain of the veneer, encoded in the bar-stripes of the ugly wallpaper. She feels as though she’s walking on the bottom of a sea of ghosts, through suffocating fathoms of unruly ectoplasm reaching far above her. Bed-sand memories and voices rise in clouds of silt at every footstep. Poltergeist shells, astral rubbish, rusted ghoul-cans tumbling through the murk of her periphery. Grey ladies drifting on the sluggish phantom current like a strain of supernatural waterweed. An algae of dead monks. She wades with astronaut deliberation up the ramp, a channel-walker slogging up an underwater rise that might with any luck turn into Dover Beach, uncertain how much longer she can hold her breath beneath this sea of misery, this betiding woe.
Under the concrete of the ramp, the steps she sat on as a child must still be there. She can remember walking home once with her mum and little brother, cutting through from Castle Street to Bath Street. Alma would have been, what, nine or ten? She’d bought a comic from Sid’s bookstall on the market and had run ahead of Doreen so that she could sit here on the steps and read it for a moment while she waited for her mother to catch up. The comic, unsurprisingly, had been <em>Forbidden Worlds</em>. She can’t remember if there’d been a <em>Herbie</em> story in that issue, but it would have certainly contained the work of Ogden Whitney in one form or other. While she’d sat here on her chilly granite perch and marvelled, Whitney would have been already more than halfway down the boozy path that led to the asylum and the grave. She has a chilly premonition that somewhere in the year 2050 there is someone having much the same thoughts about her, as if Alma and Ogden are already both together in a pallid green Unknown with all the wolf-men and the Frankensteins; as if the whole world and its future were already posthumous and she was looking down on all this loveless folly from a point outside and over time, from the forbidden world. Everything’s dead already. Everyone is gone.
She steps out onto Castle Street and pauses, noticing the almost instantaneous shift in mood and light. Well, that was interesting. She turns to gaze back down the ramp, along the central path to Bath Street with the NEWLIFE tombstones rising up beyond, and smiles. Fear of decay and death, she thinks. Fear of depreciation, destitution and decline. Is that the best you’ve got?
With a refreshing dodgem whiff of new resolve flaring her nostrils, Alma heads down Castle Street towards the point where Bristol Street bleeds into Chalk Lane. Crossing over the deserted road towards its south side, Alma eyes up the dilapidated Golden Lion, the establishment where Warry had poured out his wild phantasmagoria to her only a year ago. A year. She can’t remember anything about it except painting, drawing, chewing Rizla papers up and spitting them into a bowl, the shifts of season only noticeable in the change of imagery upon her drawing board or easel, a whole summer spent delineating snotty-nosed dead children in soft pencil. And now here she is.
The junction she’s approaching used to have a sweetshop owned by someone that she and the other children knew as ‘Pop’, a white-haired portly chap with glasses who sold homemade penny ice lollies and penny drinks. The latter had been half-pint milk bottles filled up with tap water and homeopathic doses of fruit cordial, a water-memory of having once been shown a molecule of rosehip syrup. Still, on thirsty afternoons, even the immaterial concept of a tasty beverage had been enough. They’d paid their pennies and had gratefully gulped down a fluid that looked pinkish if you happened to be drinking it at sunset. Looking back, she realises that she should have automatically mistrusted anybody who called themselves Pop. Ah, well. You live and learn.
Down at the bottom end of Castle Street, she passes on her left the little patch of grass, still seemingly unoccupied, where she had almost been abducted as a child. It’s one of the few childhood memories that she still can’t properly resolve, where she’s still not sure what was really going on. Her and some other eight-year-olds had found the rusted shell of an abandoned Morris Minor on the grass and, in an area that offered little in the way of free activities and entertainments, they had treated it as if it were a theme park or at least a proto-bouncy castle. They’d climbed on its bonnet and had sat inside behind its steering wheel. Alma had been on top of the wrecked vehicle, manically jumping up and down on its corroded roof, using it as a heavy metal trampoline, when a black car had glided out of Chalk Lane into Bristol Street to pull up suddenly beside the stretch of turf where they were playing.
When the thin young man with Brylcreemed hair and a dark suit climbed from the driver’s seat and started striding angrily towards the child-infested Morris Minor, all the other kids had been positioned so they could immediately scarper, leaving only Alma stranded on the creaking roof. The man – whenever she tries to remember what he looked like she gets only a false, superimposed photograph of Ian Brady – had grabbed her from atop the wreck and carried her, screaming and wailing, back to his own motor, shoving her inside. There was a youngish woman in the car, with mousy brown hair, although once again Alma’s melodramatic memory has pasted in a shot of Myra Hindley, slightly younger and without the bleach or vampire panda make-up. Alma had been pleading, crying, struggling in the back seat. The young man had said that he was going to take her off to the police station but then had suddenly relented, perhaps when he noticed that the woman with him was by now looking almost as frightened as the tubby, weeping little girl. He’d opened the rear door and let her out onto the pavement before roaring off, leaving her standing sobbing by the roadside for her pals to find when they emerged from hiding. What had all that been about?
Part of her is almost inclined to take the story as it comes. She can quite easily see her would-be abductor as a sour-faced and emotionally strangled young churchgoer of the middle classes and the early 1960s, taking his fiancée for a daring spin through the poor quarter, wanting to impress her with his moral rectitude by scaring straight one of the district’s infant vermin. That seems much more likely than the lurid child-molester narrative she’d retroactively imposed on the scenario, although it doesn’t make her feel a lot less interfered-with, or less angry. She recalls the young man’s pasty skin and his cold little eyes. Whatever he’d imagined he was doing and whatever his intent, he’d been no different from the current rash of curb-crawlers, using the Boroughs as their private zoo. She’d been disturbed to learn that during the alarming weekend of apparent rapes that had occurred last year, one of the victims had reported being dragged into a car in Chalk Lane, almost on the same spot where Alma’s attempted kidnapping had happened. Walking past the unkempt slope of yellow-green she wonders if the place has some malignant genius loci, something in the soil that gives it a predisposition towards a specific crime, repeated down the decades. She remembers hearing that a skeleton had been found at the site during some excavations in the nineteenth century, but doesn’t know if it turned out to be the product of an ancient burial or of a relatively recent murder, doesn’t know if it was male or female, child or adult. Lacking any contradictory evidence, she construes the remains as those of an abduction victim, lonely underneath the earth and calling out for company. Whichever way she looks at it, this is a haunted piece of ground. How typical, then, that she’s chosen this place for her preview.
She turns left into Chalk Lane where she immediately sees the nursery with people moving round inside it, gingerly transporting canvasses from one side of the small space to another. Alma can’t see any obvious signs of damage or catastrophe and feels relieved, although to be quite honest she’s not in the least bit nervous about how tomorrow’s going to turn out. She’s confident that everything will be the way it’s meant to be.
Mounting the short flight of stone steps towards the door, she casts her mind back to when this place was the Marjorie Pitt-Draffen dance school, an oasis of refinement that had been incongruously situated in the Boroughs, not known for its Terpsichorean accomplishments, a place where they discouraged having sex while standing up in case it led to dancing. Her distinguished actor pal Bob Goodman has confessed to having often visited the dance school as a child, presumably back in the days before his face had caught fire and been put out with a shovel. She imagines him, a nervous middle-class kid shuffling up these very steps each Saturday to take his hated lessons, dressed up in a kilt. It’s probably all for the best that little Bob and little Alma never met back then, not with him in a tartan skirt and talking posh. She’d have well kicked his head in.
Pushing open the swing door, Alma takes in the scene. Other than her there are three people present. Visiting from Wales, Burt Regan is the one officially entrusted with getting the pieces down here and set up in the right place, although it seems he’s being helped in this by wiry Roman Thompson. Burt calls out to Alma as she enters.
“ ’Ello, Alma. ’Ere, was that yer finger-armour that I could ’ear rattlin’ when you were comin’ down the street, or ’ave you ’ad yer fanny pierced?”
“Yes, actually, I have. I got a length of anchor-chain from the Titanic that I wear as jewellery. That’s probably what you could hear. It cost me thousands, and it would have been twice that if I’d have bothered to have all the rust scraped off. Hello, Rome.”
Setting <em>Work In Progress</em> up against the makeshift gallery’s end wall, Rome Thompson grins, crumpling the moth-eaten glove puppet of his face, a distressed Basil Brush after the Pytchley Hunt has finished with him. Crafty wrinkles in a windscreen shatter-pattern radiate from eyes that still burn like gunpowder fuses. Alma thinks that Roman Thompson is quite possibly the most dangerous individual she has ever met, and she means this in an admiring way. Why are the best blokes always gay?
“ ’Ow are yer doin’, Alma? D’yer like ’ow we’ve set up yer exhibition? I’ve been supervisin’, like. Burt needs a foreman so that ’e don’t fuck it up.”
“You lying cunt! I’ve been ’ere since eleven, and this fucker turned up ’alf an ’our back. ’E’s refused to lift a fuckin’ finger ever since. ’E says ’e’s only ’ere in ’is capacity as an art critic. ’E’s like fuckin’ Sister Wendy, only interested in the ones with cocks.”
Leaving the two men to their robust interlocution, Alma sidles over to the nursery’s fourth occupant, a pretty, goggle-eyed young woman standing at the room’s far end and looking moderately intimidated by Roman and Burt, a pair of nutcase ogres from another century. This is Lucy Lisowiec, a representative of the community association CASPAR, a group that provides one of the few remaining neural networks still holding the senile neighbourhood together. Alma met her through the Streetlaw rappers, for whom Lucy seems to be a combination of street-credible but sensible big sister and benign probation officer. It was Lucy who managed to secure the nursery for Alma’s exhibition, which means that it’s Lucy’s job that’s on the line if anything goes wrong. This is no doubt the reason why she’s looking nervously at Burt and Roman, who give the impression that there’s something going badly wrong simply by turning up, like uniformed Gestapo officers at a pet funeral. Alma attempts to reassure her.
“Hello, Luce. I can see just from that look you’ve got on your face that these two – well, they’re little more than hired thugs, really – that they’ve managed to offend you. You poor love. You’ve probably heard things that someone your age shouldn’t have to hear, things that will stay with you forever. All I can do is apologise. The man down at the pen said if I didn’t give them work, then they’d be put to sleep.”
Lucy is laughing, showing off her winsome overbite. She really is a little darling, working on a dozen projects with the Boroughs residents at once, minding their kids down at the CASPAR offices in St. Luke’s House on nights when she’s there working late, shepherding Streetlaw to their gigs, living alone above MacDonald’s in the Drapery, developing a stomach ulcer at the age of twenty-seven – Alma has been recently force-feeding her both Actimel and Yakult – all from trying to cooperate creatively with wonderful, deserving people who are also sometimes utter fucking nightmares, Alma herself certainly included in that category.
“Aw, no, they’re all right. They’re house-trained. No, I was just looking at the pictures and the model and all that. Alma, this is fantastic. This is really full-on.”
Alma smiles politely, but is much more pleased than she lets on. Lucy is an accomplished artist in her own right, mostly working in the risky medium of brick and aerosol. The only female tagger in the county and as far as Alma knows one of the only ones in England, Lucy had been forced to start out working solo as the 1-Strong Crew before an influx of new member meant that she could upgrade to the 2-Strong Crew. Under the nom-de-guerre of CALLUZ, an urchin enunciation of the spectrum or of street-worn calluses, she’s beautified a number of unprepossessing premises throughout the years, although she now protests that she’s too old to climb and run. Alma suspects, however, that this façade of responsible maturity is liable to evaporate after a second Smirnoff Ice. Lucy, whatever she pretends, is still an active artist, and so naturally her opinion means a lot to Alma. More than this, though, Lucy’s young, part of a generation that Alma has very little knowledge of and isn’t certain that her work appeals to. If Lucy at least admires her stuff enough not to spray over it in bold metallic Fat Caps with Day-Glo drop-shadow, well, then Alma must be doing something right. She lets herself cast an appraising eye across the works that are already in position, which is to say most of them. She finds, possibly unsurprisingly, that she agrees entirely with Lucy’s assessment of her full-on and fantastic show.
Up at the room’s north end is the large tile arrangement partly cribbed from Escher, mounted on its backing board and titled <em>Malignant</em>, <em>Refractory Spirits</em>. Sharing the same wall as this are a variety of what seem to be illustrations from a children’s picture-book, some in soft pencil monochrome and some in gloriously-realised watercolour, like the psychedelic stand-out image <em>An Asmodeus Flight</em>. The east wall, the biggest one, is dominated by the overwhelming mass of <em>The Destructor</em>, which Alma is pleased to see has been left mostly covered by a hanging cloth: it’s too much, too distressing to stand in its naked glare, just as she wanted it to be. It’s Alma’s <em>Guernica</em>, and she doubts that it’s going to be hanging in the Mitsubishi boardroom any time this century. Quite frankly, she can’t see it hanging anywhere that ordinary decent people who just want to get on with their lives might stumble over it. The painting is so forceful that only the strongest of the smaller pieces can be hung on the same wall. <em>Forbidden Worlds</em>, with its infernal hostelry, goes to the left of <em>The Destructor</em>. When she brings the final painting, <em>Chain of Office</em>, down here to the nursery tomorrow morning, she decides she’s going to hang it on the west wall, facing the more devastating piece as some kind of aesthetic counterbalance.
In the middle of the room there are four tables pushed together to support the papier-mâché model that she’d made with all those Rizla papers, chewing them and spitting them into a suitable receptacle. Melinda Gebbie, her best mate, had looked a bit revolted when Alma had demonstrated her technique, which had made Alma try to justify her processes by referencing the book-devouring 1960s visionary John Latham, whom she’d met once and was an admirer of. She’d also tried explaining the importance of using her own saliva, so that in a literal sense her DNA would be part of the complicated structure she was building. In the end she’d given up and confessed that she just liked gobbing.
If she is honest with herself, the model is the only item in the exhibition that she isn’t wholly sure about. It doesn’t seem as if it’s saying much, just sitting there like that, solid and unambiguous. Maybe she’ll see how it goes down tomorrow at the preview and then leave it out of the ensuing London show if she’s not pleased with the response. There’s no point worrying about it now, at any rate. Things tend to sort themselves out, Alma thinks, although she knows that this directly contradicts the laws of physics, common sense, and her political experience of the last forty years.
She looks up from the tabletop display, out through the nursery’s front picture-window, where she notices that Chalk Lane teeters on the brink of dusk. A skinny little mixed-race girl with corn-row hair and a fire-engine red PVC mac is clacking through the umbra, her arms crossed defensively across her chest and a preoccupied expression on her face. Alma thinks ‘crack whore’, then berates herself for her descent into class-profiling and for her lazy and mean-spirited assumptions. By then the young woman has departed, tottering away into the twilight that is gathering in the east, spilling out from Horsemarket and down Castle Street in an obscuring violet avalanche.
Alma stands chatting in the borrowed space with Roman, Burt and Lucy for a little longer. Roman tells her that he’s been out door to door, drumming up interest in tomorrow’s exhibition from amongst the local populace. She asks him how the cartoon poster that she knocked off for his Defend Council Houses group is selling, and is told that it’s still moving steadily. This image, which depicts a Godzilla-sized ‘fat cat’ looming from behind the NEWLIFE towers to rake through Scarletwell Street’s surface with its monstrous talons, while not a well-drawn piece by her usual standards, had provoked some small controversy. With his keen eye for free publicity Rome had involved the local <em>Chronicle & Echo</em>, thus affiliating Alma publicly with his extremely worthy cause. In the accompanying article had been some rather piqued, dismissive comments from a Conservative councillor, one Derek Palehorse, who’d insisted that he couldn’t see what all the fuss was over when so much was being done to help the neighbourhood already. Alma smiles now at the memory. How nice of him to stick his head above the parapet. She can recall the recent scandal when through Roman Thompson’s machinations, the town council’s very generous remuneration of a former colleague had been published in the local paper, prompting councillors to protest that their dealings should never have been made public. When the newspaper had polled its readers to see what their feelings were upon the issue, they’d been startled to discover that most of the votes supported the town council’s right to secrecy. Then they’d found that almost all of these votes had issued from Councillor Palehorse in one way or other. It was mentioned on the “Rotten Boroughs” page of <em>Private Eye</em>, to the deserved embarrassment of everyone concerned. Honestly, Alma thinks. These people. What a bunch of shitclowns. This is a new word that she’s picked up from columnist and splendidly ill-humoured television writer Charlie Brooker, whom she wants to marry, and a term which she already can’t imagine how she got along without for all those years, for all that endless line of shitclowns climbing out of history’s collapsing car. Don’t bother, they’re here.
Taking a sudden fancy to the thought of walking home through her old neighbourhood, she waves aside the offer of a lift from Burt and kisses everyone goodbye. Rome Thompson hints mysteriously of something that he’s got to tell her but first wants to check his facts; something about the stretch of river next to the gas-holder down on Tanner Street. He says he’ll let her know tomorrow morning at the show. Leaving the others to arrange the last few details and lock up, she zips her jacket to the neck and exits by the swing door, shuffling down the stone steps onto Phoenix Street. Glancing towards her left and down Chalk Lane she can see Doddridge Church, with that bizarre door halfway up its western wall. Alma imagines the celestial flyover, the Ultraduct, as she’s depicted it in one of the works that she’s just been looking at, an elevated walkway that seems to be chiselled out of light emerging from the blocked-off loading bay to curve away towards the west, with phosphorescent figures blurring back and forth across its span.
The church itself seems, in her eye, to sum up the combined political and spiritual upheavals that have typified Northampton’s history. It occurs to her that most of these have been linguistic in their origins. John Wycliffe had begun the process in the 14<sup>th</sup> century with his translation of the Bible into English. Right there, by insisting that the English peasant classes had a right to worship in their own tongue, Wycliffe and his Lollards were establishing an element of class-war politics in the religious altercation. In Northampton, Lollards and other religious radicals seem to have found a natural home, so that by Queen Elizabeth’s reign in the fifteen-hundreds there are Northamptonshire congregations singing home-made hymns in English rather than just listening to chanted psalms in Latin as the Church demanded. Lacking any earlier examples that spring readily to mind, she wonders if her town is where the English hymn originates. That would explain a lot, now that she thinks about it.
Within fifty years of Queen Elizabeth’s demise, of course, the Civil War kicked off with Parliament greatly emboldened by the radical sects that seemed to be clustered in the English Midlands, all the Ranters, Anabaptists, Antinomians, Fifth Monarchists and Quakers, most of them engaged in publishing inflammatory texts or fiery flying rolls. Some of the openly seditious ‘Martin Marprelate’ tracts had been published secretly here in the Boroughs, and in general it seemed that the Protestant revolution hinged upon the word, with painting and the visual arts perceived as the preserve of Papists and elitists. To become a painter would require materials and means, while writing, strictly speaking, required only the most rudimentary education. Obviously, literature was still seen as the sole preserve of the elite, which is just one of many reasons why John Bunyan’s writings, crystal-clear allegories conveyed in common speech, were so incendiary in their day. His hymn, <em>To Be a Pilgrim</em>, was the anthem for the disenchanted Puritans migrating for America, while <em>Pilgrim’s Progress</em> would become a source of inspiration for the New World settlers second only to the Bible, and these weren’t the rakish, courtly witticisms or the fawning tributes of contemporaries such as Rochester or Dryden. These were written by a member of that new and dangerous breed, the literate commoner. They were composed by someone who insisted that plain English was a holy tongue, a language with which to express the sacred.
Of course, they’d banged Bunyan up in Bedford nick for getting on a dozen years, while art and literature are still most usually a product of the middle class, of a Rochester mind-set that sees earnestness as simply gauche and visionary passion as anathema. William Blake would follow Bunyan and, closer to home, John Clare, but both of these had spent their days impoverished, marginalised as lunatics, committed to asylums or plagued by sedition hearings. All of them are heirs to Wycliffe, part of a great insurrectionary tradition, of a burning stream of words, of an apocalyptic narrative that speaks the language of the poor. At the stone meeting house in Chalk Lane, Philip Doddridge pulled all the diverse strands of that narrative together. Hanging out with Swedenborgians and Baptists, taking up his ministry here in the poorest quarter, writing <em>Hark! The Glad Sound!</em>, championing the dissenting cause, all from this scruffy little mound … Doddridge is Alma’s foremost local hero. It’ll be an honour staging her show in the shadow of his church. Alma elects to walk down Little Cross Street and then follow Bath Street round to Scarletwell and her beloved strip of bare grass on St. Andrew’s Road.
She lopes down through the failing light with blocks of flats to either side of her, the Bath Street buildings’ west face on her right and to her left the 1960s landings and the sunken walkways of Moat Place, Fort Place, outlying features of a long-demolished castle become streets where Alma’s great-grandfather Snowy Vernall had lived, getting on a hundred years ago. Mad Snowy, marrying the landlord’s daughter from the long-since disappeared Blue Anchor pub in Chalk Lane, which he’d visited on one of his improbably long strolls from Lambeth. All these chance events, these people and their complicated lives, the trillion small occurrences without which she would not be her; would not be here.
Across the street, incontinent lamps stand apologetically in puddles of their own piss-coloured light. She just about remembers when Moat Street and Fort Street were still standing, and when Mrs. Coleman’s gingerbread-house sweetshop was down at the lower end of Bath Street, although Alma was no more than four or five back then. A much more vivid memory remains from slightly later, when the maze of red brick terraces had been demolished and there was just wasteland here, before the blocks of flats had been erected. She remembers playing with the first of many best friends, Janet Cooper, on vast fields of rubble and black mud beneath a dirty fleece of Boroughs sky. For some reason there had been industrial off-cuts scattered everywhere and gingering the puddles, L-shaped bits of metal which Alma and Janet had discovered could be plaited into rusty orange swastikas and skimmed across the demolition site like Nazi throwing-stars. Just as with the abandoned Morris Minor, the brick scree and piled-up devastation were regarded as civic amenities, play areas provided for the district’s young, tetanus crèches of a kind then common in the neighbourhood. Mind you, this had been back in the Macmillan years, the later 1950s. Alma and her little pals, flying kites into power lines, opening veins climbing through ragged gaps in corrugated tin, had never had it so good.
She turns left at Little Cross Street’s end, into the bottom part of Bath Street. Now the 1960s housing blocks are on her left, the shabby 1930s elegance of Greyfriars Flats across the darkening road upon her right. As she descends the flow of time becomes more viscous, thickened by historic sediments that have collected near the bottom of the valley. In the settling obscurity around her there are windows lighting up, weak colour washes filtered through thin curtains, faded postage stamps fixed to the night with unseen hinges. Everywhere is gluey with mythology.
The district’s different blocks of flats, which were already crowding out the terraced houses even forty years ago, had been no different to the district’s dumped cars or demolished buildings from a child’s perspective. All of it was landscape, meant to be inhabited and climbed and hidden in, its hulks transformed by juvenile imagination into frontier forts, unheard-of planets, a perpetually mutating Gormenghast of slates and splinters. Greyfriars Flats, being the nearest to their house down on St. Andrew’s Road, had always been a second, more expansive back yard to her for as long as Alma can remember, practically an annex to her tombstone-cold front doorstep. One of her two almost-murders had occurred here, the attempted strangling in a dustbin cul-de-sac, and she’s had dreams about the place that were more vivid than her memories. There was the dream where she was dead and confined to the inner washing-line enclosure of the flats, pursued by a mercury-poisoned and moth-eaten version of Carroll’s Mad Hatter round the overcast and dismal purgatory until the end of time. There was the dream with a tall, futuristic tower of blue glass erupting from the flats’ top end on Lower Cross Street, where Alma remembers being shown a quietly humming oblong mechanism with a small display screen upon which all of the universe’s particles were being counted. And of course, this was where Alma had been visited by her first life-transforming vision. Smiling to herself in the congealing twilight, Alma crosses the deserted road to Greyfriars’ southwest corner, carrier-bags swinging from one ornamented fist.
The bottom entrance to the inner rectangle is gated off with black iron rails and has been for some years. Residents only, which she finds entirely understandable. She can still stand there at the gate and peer along the path to where the little patch of shrubbery is partly visible. As she recalls, it had been on a chilly day in early Spring when she’d been eight or nine, sauntering home for lunch from Spring Lane School up at the top of Scarletwell Street. On a whim, she’d taken a diversion through the flats purely because she’d thought it might make a more interesting view than the plain slope of the old hill, the empty playing fields that bordered it, the rear windows of their surviving terrace on St. Andrew’s Road. Idling down the concrete pathways of the block’s interior amongst the flapping sheets and baby-clothing, she had reached the triangle where all the bushes grew down at the bottom end. She might have walked past and paid the familiar vegetation no attention were it not for the intriguing detail that had caught her junior miniaturist’s eye.
Hung from the thinnest needle of a twig, there on a waxy evergreen, was a translucent white grub that appeared to levitate, so fine was the material by which it was suspended, its minute head blind and glistening. Dangling in the cold crystal of the morning air it curled and shimmied like an escapologist, albeit one whose act worked in reverse and hinged upon secreting his own straitjacket. Twisting and contorting it deliberately wound itself up in the near-invisible strands that it was somehow producing. Alma had stooped closer to the bush in awe, her nose only an inch or two from the dependent caterpillar. She remembers wondering if it was thinking anything and making up her mind that probably it was, if only squishy little caterpillar thoughts.
She’d never witnessed this precise form of activity before, and she had puzzled over why the tiny creature was alone in its pursuit. She’d realised that she must be looking at the manufacture of a rice-grain sized cocoon, but hadn’t previously understood that this was such a solitary operation. It was then that Alma had observed to her relief that the grub had at least one little friend, another pallid maggot that laboriously inched along a nearby shoot, where there were …
Alma had gasped noisily and taken a step back. Reality had shivered, reconfiguring itself before her startled eyes. On every branch, on every twig and under every leaf of the coniferous shrub had been a thousand more identical white worms, all patiently engaged in the same task. The bush itself was an immense white cobweb, suddenly alive with writhing threads of alien purpose. How could she have stood there for five minutes and not noticed this spectacular and otherworldly sight? The moment had been an apocalypse, in the sense that the poets of that school might use the term, people like Henry Treece or Alma’s favourite, Nicholas Moore. She’d realised in that instant that the world about her was not necessarily the way she saw it, that amazing things might constantly be happening under everybody’s noses, things that people’s mundane expectations stopped them from perceiving. Watching what she’d later realised must be silkworms colonise what she’d belatedly construed to be a mulberry bush, she’d formed a vision of the world as glorious and mutable, liable to explode into unlikely new arrangements if you simply paid enough attention; if your eye was in.
She stands there, a suspicious figure peering through black bars and evening murk into the Greyfriars courtyard, and feels phantoms swarming everywhere around her. She is always here at this precise location and this moment, her ordained position in the simultaneous and unchanging 4D gem of space-time. Life is on an endless loop, her consciousness revisiting the same occasions for eternity and always having the experience for the first time. Human existence is a grand recurrence. Nothing dies or disappears and each discarded condom, every dented bottle-top in every alleyway is as immortal as Shamballah or Olympus. She feels the unending marvel of a beautiful and dirty world swell to include her in its fanfare music. Lowering her caked lashes, she imagines everything around her wriggling and alive, suddenly made out of a billion glossy organisms that she has not previously noticed, the whole landscape covered in a spectral gauze, a fresh-spun silk of circumstance.
At length she turns away from the locked gate and carries on down Bath Street into Scarletwell Street and on to St. Andrew’s Road. The short strip of ancestral grass is still the same. As usual she puzzles over the still-standing corner house and tries without success to work out where the Warren residence had once been situated. Actually, she’s pretty sure it was the spot between two young and sturdy trees about halfway along. It feels appropriately eerie, but she can’t be certain. Finally it strikes her that to be stood motionless beside the road down in this quarter of the town might possibly be sending the wrong signals and she turns away to walk the long route home, up Grafton Street to Barrack Road and then around the Racecourse back onto East Park Parade.
Crossing the Kettering Road up by the oddly decorative sheltered tram-stop where the town’s principal gallows at one time resided she is thinking about art in the Charles Saatchi era; art become mono-dimensional commercial gesturing directed at an audience so culturally lost it feels it has no platform from which it can venture criticism. Only other artists – and then only renegades – seemed confident enough in their opinions to effectively mount a rebuttal. She recalls the last time that she’d had Melinda Gebbie over for a memorable meal during which the expatriate American provided an unanswerable critique of Tracy Emin’s work which Alma wishes that she’d said herself: “My God, can you imagine being able to fit all the names of everyone you ever slept with in a <em>tent</em>?” Alma had gaped for a few moments and then soberly put forward her suggestions for capacious venues that might just about accommodate Melinda’s list. The Parthenon, Westminster Abbey, China, Jupiter.
Making her way along the gorgeously eroded pavement of East Park Parade she at last reaches her own door, fumbling in her too-tight trouser pockets to retrieve a temporarily elusive key before effecting entry. Inside Alma switches on the lights and winces ruefully at all the mess and clutter. Why can’t she be tidy like a proper adult? Inwardly, she blames it on the influence of Top Cat. When she and her brother Warry were both growing up they’d both aspired to live in a converted dustbin like their feline hero, somewhere where you could just brush your teeth then switch the nearby streetlamp off with a convenient pull-cord before pulling on the battered lid and bunking down. Only much later had she wondered where he spat the toothpaste.
Alma stuffs her peppers, covers them with feta cheese and sticks them in the oven. As they roast she rolls a joint and smokes it while she makes a start on leafing through her copy of <em>New Scientist</em>. After supper she has three or four more reefers while she finishes the science magazine, reads <em>Private Eye</em> and then re-watches two more episodes from the last season of <em>The Wire</em>. Around eleven she stubs out her final fatty of the day, gulps down her Red Rice Yeast pill and her ineffectual Kalms and turns off all the lights before retiring.
Naked underneath her duvet, Alma rests on her right side and pulls a tuck of quilt between her bony knees. Off in the smash and puke of Friday night are sirens, catcalls, curses from over-relaxed young men and women navigating their ways back and forth along East Park Parade. She rubs her feet together, satisfied by the dry rasp of sole on sole. Mulberry cobwebs creep across the inside of her eyelids.
On the edge of sleep, her mind replays an incidental image from the beautifully-written television drama that she’s just been watching: a bandanna-sporting corner-boy sits on his stoop amidst the desolated vacant lots or syringe-carpeted back alleys of West Baltimore. The muddily-remembered snapshot brings her suddenly awake with a deep pang of dread and loss that she does not immediately understand. Something about the Boroughs, something about all the neighbourhoods that are essentially just like it, right across the world. All of the men and women, all the kids inhabiting this universal landscape of cracked pavements, steel-jacketed grocer shops and meaningless corroded street-names from another century, living their whole lives among these sorry dead-ends with the knowledge that the concrete bollard and the chain-link fence will still be there when they are all long gone, long gone.
A bottle smashes, somewhere off along the Kettering Road. She pushes all the haunting thoughts of ghetto and mortality away, and tries instead to let the revelatory silkworms wrap her in a merciful cocoon of anaesthesia.
Alma’s got a big day ahead of her tomorrow.
** <strong>ROUND THE BEND</strong>
<strong>A</strong>wake, Lucia gets up wi’ the wry sing of de light. She is a puzzle, shore enearth, as all the Nurzis and the D’actors would afform, but nibber a cross word these days, deepindig on her mendication and on every workin’ grimpill’s progress. Her arouse from drowse is like a Spring, a babboling book that gorgles up amist the soils o’ sleep, flishing and glattering, to mate the mournin’ son. Canfind in this loquation now she gushes and runs chinkling from her silt and softy bed, pooring her harp out down an illside and aweigh cross the old manscape to a modhouse brookfast. Ah, what a performance, practised and applausible. She claps her hands, over her ears, to drone out all the deadful wile-ing and the sorey implecations of whor farmlay. With her bunyans all complainin’ she escapes the Settee o’ Destraction and beguines her evrydaily Millgrimage towar’s ridemption or towords the Wholly Sea; to wards, the tranquilisity of night.
Spoonin’ the tousled egg into her scrambled head she wells, as iffer, on the past now. Sadly hatched in Triste at seven past the century and seven past the year, born to the clench and stamour of a paupoise warld, she was denied the mummer’s teatre. Not a dripple Nora drop was she aloud. The molcow was sucked dry, by George, who went from one mamm to an udder all of his serpenitentine life. Eve’n the girden of her garlhood he had snaken from her, eden then, with him the dirty apple of their Mermaw’s eye and allwas raising cain, which Lucia had resistered for as long as she was abel. He’d been furteen, shy was only ten, to pet it baldly. Wristling under milky and transluciant sheets in a suck-session of clamped, crusterphobic rended rooms, the da off summerwhere with all his righting and the mudder rural, pagan in her unconcern, forever standing pisspots on the parlour table where they lifft their venerable beaded halos on the varnish. Giorgio’s dragon would rear up, out from the scampy wondergrowth and orgiantly demanding her at-ten shuns while their Moider only smirled, ingently dull, and let her borther press a head with his idventure, up into the little light, the little depth.
Not that she hoydent wellcomed his hardvances, penfull at forst, back then when she still beliffied that he loved her, back there in their papadise when she was tigrish in the milibloom of her youth-ray tease. Setting in the die-room now she chews over her toast, raised two old tines, and wanders if he ova reilly and tooralee was her brooder. Hidn’t there once been a scarlet letter, a dismissive from their Further in the Land of Ire? He’d met with Cowsgrope the Invincible who had confleshed to scraping the odd barnacle in nineteen nundread-for, the year that Orgy-porgy-puttin-pie was farst consceptered. Is Dis Nod my sun, her darkglassed da had cried in his tormental angruish, to witch the briny mare durst not deply. The mater had been left unseddled. Woden that expain a Lot, now, about Morma and her Gorgo? How the peer of hum were all-ways clost, unhearthily so in her cestimation, from the grendle to the crave? She maddily recalls her fishermum warmin’ up the jung mastur’s bait incide her muth on chillywilly ofterrnoons, or thinkshe-thinkshe does. Of curse, it wurd make plaint for alter see why they t’woo had insested she be liplocked with insanatoriums, fear Luci-lippi was heir poppy’s seed, his sperkle efferdent in all she set or dit, they way she allwise spoke her wheel, whoreas in Dirgeo was not a wit o’ the same subsdance to be scene. Old Gnawer had deicided then and there that her firstbore should carryon the dinnersty, no mutter that he mite halve been an utter mance. As for her lital gill, the da’s reel darter, shutter up in lumatrick asylence, like at Pranginstein’s or finalee herein Saif Handrue’s house-piddle.
Lucia’s nicey-nercy, featherly Patrisia, sips besight her while she bibs her searly monin’ cuppla Tees and mentalpatiently ensquires jest what the flameous rider’s cross-i, dot-t doubter well be druin’ with hersylph toda.
“Will, I thought I might have a wonder in the ground, now, seeing as it’s such a liffley day and all the flawers are in Bloom. I dent mind bein’ bi myself, and I dar say you’ve auther fish to frey. Bee off, and don’t you weary about me, Pat. Isle be writer’s reign.”
With her compinion thus-why’s beassured, Lucia blots her nips upon a paper lapkin and excurses herself, skipling out and thistling down a freshly dizzifected carrydor towheres glass D’orways at its fatherst and, light runnin’ inter light.
Outsighed, she stunnds and tics it in, from the cerebrulean skullbowl of the fymirment above to the sage cortin of the fir hereyeson, ur the flarebeds close at hand withal their petalsparks and fleurwork sprays o’ culeur. Though it’s not ideyll she likes displace the best of all she’s in-bin. She injoys the handson dictors with their bed’s-eye menners, und dien, roughly for o’cock, she aften langours at the gaits to watch the jesslin’ squallboys from the Glammar Scruel that stems adjescent to hier pysche-hattrick instincution. Spitty as a pricksure they go scruffling down the Bulling Roude beyond the iron realings, snurchin’ up each other’s badgered caps an’ grubbin’ at each other’s bawls wit’ wilde hellarity, obliffeyus to her sprying from the foolyage in wishtful, privet larchery.
Bud wort she likes the bestival apout her current reasidance is how it olders with the saysongs, nava quit the seam firm one die to the nicht. The weir and wen of it der knot same so influxable as some lockations that hav intertrained her persence down orcross the docaides. Her, she carn miander reedily betwin her pa’stime and her fewcheers; betorn hear an’ dare; betwhether wan welt under noxt. Heir at Feint Andruse Cycle-logical Infirmitry it is entimely passible, in Lussye’s questimation, to slep from the birthly whelm intru a terrortree o’ feary-tell and eld mirthology, where every mutterforth is an immadiate and enternal troth. Wye, summertimes she hurdly gnos whatch finny-form she’s in at prisent, or if altimately alder not-houses might nut torn out to bye the selfshame plaice, one vurst istabilismend trance-ending innernotional bindaries and filt-wit fausty dactyrs tyin’ to gut hauled ov hert sole.
The bride-green yawns strich all orerrnd her, wid the poplores, erlms and faroof bildungs all roturnin’ in her planetree obit, undherstood still art the cindre like the Son, the veri soeurce of lied. The sauce of her, now! With a gae spring in her stoop, she-sex out on her walk in purgress, on her wake-myop parundulations, on her expermission, heeding oft acrux the do-we grass twowords the poertree-line of the spinny wetting in the da’stance. Iff she flaunces, as veneficent as elled Sent Knickerless hermself, an innerscent ulled lay-die in a wurli cardiagran out strawling on the institrusion lorns.
What the upserver dursn’t know, hooever – and there’s all-ways en absurver, err at list in Lucia’s experience – is that she’s nu alld woman. En fict, she’s no age atoll: she’s orl her silves at whence, curdle to gravey, won insight the ether like a sat of Rushin’ dirlls. Her Babbo’s bibby is tocked in the smilest nookst, ind then Luukhere as a mer taddler, boock den winshe alice was his liddel girl, his larking-gloss. Allover turnage salves, the preena dolorinas and Fressh-kissen mnymthomaniacs are insat amist the nexted friguleens, alluv the maid-up shagbrag abawd underlit and moon-age formircations with a fuctional yang Letin lovher she’d unvented blyther cleudonym of Sempo, sempo fiddles, allus faithfeel, ween in factual act her lonly senxual explortations hid bone whet’her holdher bluther. F’all here olter passonalities are her aswill, the topsy-turpsichorean tosst of Gapery, the fancianable lispian when cunninglingloss was belegged to be saphosticated, or the dis-appointed dawncer tearnin’ down a prosterous careern at the prestageous Lastbet Druncan Shulethe becurse herr meister ’Merzed her in his kamflicated airy unphilosophies and fascile rachel pressurdice. Her inphant pass’d, her semi-terra’d feuture and here her-and-know, her iffrey liffing mement altergather, all her hypertenses prescent and currect. She’s a collacted valiume, a <em>Compleat Lucia</em> with her whorle lighf gethered into hadsome crepeskin bendings, a well-thrumbed uddition with eyndpeepers marvled and a speen that’s still integt, tespite freakwend miss-handlings.
She santas on aver the virdiant ex-pants, a toe’send bleeds o’ glass benearth hor rugulasian-isshu sleppers. Eyedully, she nowt’sees that the surgrounding surf o’ turf is fragtured into messmutched jagsore sharpes, march like a chasebird alce a botchwork qualt, inwitch the quallatee of deelight and, marova, the veriety of griss intself apeers entimely daffyrant, oz if the whirld abouter wher compised aft’her the fushion of a graund collageon, slappily kenstracted with its rawgged interstpaices painly vrisible. Et’s jest the noture of displace, Lucia raysuns, and cuntinuse widder moist egreable excushion, auntie-cockwise raund the midhearse’s extpensive grands.
In her distructed minderings she haz arrivered adder wouldlance hedge, its mystitrees all looning up befear her. Joust like some night of intiquity ur same puur Chretian she has Percivered end riched the ’odge of dee encharted forege. Evenadamant she has cum-to the bannederies of the sayfensecure premerdial Heden offer childhug, with ownlay the dirk bewildernicht bayond. She’s alene-out-yere-wandowt Goldinlocks, or alse is rapt in her Little-Read Writinghood indus stirred hisitratin undi brink o’ day inperitrouble thincket, where there beawolf. She est a fayllin angle inner roam eye, a maletonic Luciafer cast eyt unto the uuder dugnerss waa there riz a waiflin’ onder gnorashing of the teets. Hell, herroers, heil! Pravely, now, she stairps hover the defydin lion in her beehiveour and intersin amurkst the wundergrowpe, juts like widdel dir lewdist garrols, the wains that paws fa dardy phaedographs in gnawthin’ bott theer stripley tytts er stalkings awnd thair alas-bonds. Shy is queert shamalice impenetratin’ the forbeddin torrit’ry, a prypubascent maidel pasturinfer an ubseen Victimian phornotographer, projeculating a-lust tru ther lurkin’ glass from wanderneath the blacault cover’t mask-abating his trypoderastyc uptickle equimpent. Quirker then a shuddow she slaps entoe the cuncealing vagitation undies gonne fram mertail slight, dans-in a minnowette anipst the driftin waiterwades, Ophailure synching intow the abskewer gruen dipths.
At the frayd marchins awf the cupse she treps amokst the betterclaps and dayzes, pierroetting, harliquinderin upawn a feyn Arcabian corpet mead firm pines and neddles, strewen flircones that resymbol land-greenaids amd aviriwhere an everfessent frath o’ dendrilion perfbells. Braken shurds a’light descediment apun her form above in staint-glasp patures, dabblin’ her chik ornd spackoleeng her fairisle shulders arse she prancess in a brightol’ showher o’ blissom.
Schez awhere the viri wald bemyth her feat, the lenscake thot she walx and whends apen, isth mud o’ knowthing bit her slippin’ further’s bawdy, Offhas merciaful remainds wile hea hcelf drealms indergrind. She ken recurl her hoppy girlhoot, winn she whiz his esperation, dinsing thrue the strang of minochore apertmince dirt dey worr farover shuffering invection fam, end papper satin et his dusk hand writhin his morbidic mastapause whale shea skiffed merilee; weil shiperfoamed her caperet. Dahab a pirvarte lungwish, haven den, won dad dayspook betwin the purr of om, woil Gnor and Gorge sat bayeurl insispectin, two envalved in dare raw’n secretif eirnd iddypull relaidsonsip, lact in forbodin yernion, to play atension towhit litrel Llusia haund her nonesincical papyr wor prittiling abeaut. She was Jim’s choyce. They interstud ych auther. Ullulone aminxt the famely she wise the undly wanter reed his brooks. He rit thame furor and abaughter. She woos Nautycaa, who’s idyllescent chairms capt Droolysses bownned to her fraglant eyelend. Shim wash Inner Livea Pealobells, lakewise Isobbe, luttle Melliblum ar elso derti, flerti Girty whomb the altboys sliva effer, Muss MuckTrowell whench thy wah dirgin ub the dourt fur ther upsinetty invicestigmations. That hed bane a trime, now! All fier ovem carped up illtogather in Leurlittle flatus, lavin in itch athers puckets, undin awl the paypers vas descursions of the da’s simposaid pardarresty, hes implite defire fa ther litola ’gel. A’ curse, it hardent aver ban dirt waywid bold Lucenssyus andor Daddo … alt hier featherforking hid behn onour purly laterearly lovall … bud her mitherhood begon regradin’ whor sispiteously form that peint onwars.
It wish so unfrere! It worsent like her Ded whis dowin inny mar then fliterin’ wather, ifft’rawl. He ousent ficcing her: thirt wad haf born her ulter sobling. Babbo wesdee earnly ween who clared abitter, joyst as she curd abet hirm weathall his drunkin anders panefull ice, lake wanter pondres, ir it is agnawther probling woth his wakin procress thut affacts hum. Shade stook bli hom truettall, beck wone she kelled hoarfeyther “L’Esclamadore”, jest lark she galled hez god freund Maestre Pound “Signor Sterlina”. Owe, whirt grinnd end flightful temps thade behan!
Stell leyd of hert she haps en skirtles daanan uncline, thickwit glossom, herdin dipper unter thee assailem wordlanps, dieper entre nermadslant. Sche harezolvd that haretail shellnut gho inspoken, that seashal nite bey redust tu a mer fitnot in Ar Fathem’s arthurised iboglyphey. She coints hersoph a Queer’n of infanightly spece, wooryt nacht thot shee fusuelli horrs baed drames, ent shayl not stind boy-eyedly whyl her birthers sowspet buldlyin (loke her nepheud Stifen) rerote hyrstery by iditing Hant Lucia errta vit. Che wilt not rust containt endsay her forber’s misterplace disindhersted aund foolsley readefiled, his Cumalot unsecst and balderised by hod-faced creatics and their misledarts, mordred, iat sallus vurry plaintasy, by littelroary axecutioneers unwordthy ev a wroidar uth hixcalibre, parcivin hym as pnoragrophic in his carryspawndance und anladylac in alles desicryptions. Lucia hersoul wood be abandoned, unmememerd, liff dout aftey indarx, Messus Rechistered awry entira psycheattic hisspittle ernd cut adraft apen the whide sargacotea. Eyr murmuree wed onely be priserfed bioxidint asift she wor a suprificial dictim datad bon interrned binearth theeart paetre, unrequirte fathey instonbleshed norative.
Dewnacht the bossom av the slorpe the groind is wincemare flut end liffel farsome destince. Lucia beleaves dis iraea afder waldwords ars aboutted tae a goltcurse, fur ther gress arand her slappered faet escut shart us a malletory herrsteel. Nibbelung her finngonill she wagnders unwoods intel sea arriversit on inDantetion unther greend, a shwallow dup dissending tua wade onriffled pend, urmosst cumfretely sychular ound shlaped ossif atvar a joyan’ce woddeng rong. Deliciately-kellered pattles undid liffs er flatrin onder surfish luke a flit of timey girlleons, ich von exquicitly perflected oin daddiamonde merrer off d’waughter. Hcetanzly, she wakes her may doone the gential glardient tother wetter’sage.
Halucia ken scri wat larks tubbe the fery licheness uffer alder bordher Gorgeou, compised uffe twiks un liffs intalder negetific spierces unbetween daylite ofirm. Pert of her realeyesays thort thus as an Alchembold olusion, broight abite by eccedintal incandingensces of lighn to firm a virsual coercedance, undyet aport aver kin seahym alstho hewer reilly crotching inther rashes, nort feev fiyt awar form er. Soulfin-verved hiz eelways, the yearng eggoheed es poused aftor the steale ova slureelisd genuis serchez selfadore daili. Hes hid bawed, he stires drowninter the revlerctif dapths. Has pulchrimage huss ladim tye the slow o’ dis pond wheary squarts neow, mimireysed be heson liffleyness, I’s vixed apain the lurge ent fainly-chessult carnium thut glaces beckwise ett ham fom the mimmored sourface, whonce he carenot lack a way, traipped thoer boye hison Vinitee un Fayrniss. Lucia staynds compliatley stall, fafir thetiff shimmoves the myrage well beshittered enti frigments, awf narcissity. Schaharz the bards sieng friem der bronches undes alchmoist flewent in th’air longuish, asurf shaed byrn bithing anthe songre o’ drugins, encoude hinderstant wit aviry verdi mont, operantly.
Puer Geodge, pitryfide bouyis consciet. Ferall ehad delfed clamsilly inscite the rubbithole upawn errcasions, hihad nefare manitched to pastrue angit behond t’his loiking-glaz the whay Lucia hard. She alicewise the bost et iffeything whilne he harb vari liddel tellent, to be fraire. Y’d norva thank, to luc atem, thot’ Cheurgey mite osiriously bey hors fayther’sun, aswiz so efferdent whit Lucia horuself. Wiet hud gom orhn bedwhen thime wadjent set seur heffily apern heir constients, licca laed succophagous, if shem wes nuit fuolly isister. I’curas, the dogstors wadjest saigh sho wers in foold denile, ar sefferin form senial dimentians.
Evin ofter twhat hy ded to hoeur, she fainds schistel fils seurry ferthur par beneuted cradure. Shy hert lorvedim wence, in the uncharnted lyrnen-feltered lait burneth thir claen, unroten schreets. He haert baen aluver hedventsures. Tibby fur, the peirt a’ theem hot bairn brattap wethen ain itmusphele ev hopen socuality, whit wath thea pierrants sexial circul, illthe Shopperillas ante Gigglehems and shoforth. Lucia ender bither hidban ein unseferable carple form dher hartset. Itwise hornly noctural, she suppast, detwain har frother richt theurge of hury bells ornd hankrin ointer winkerchiefs, hewad wrishter inclewd herine hes spuert. Thore pharsycal releashemslip hard spenned Luckiher’s tuneage tyears, woevin amust erother garlish pranstighms. She remoinders wincy wish flirfteen, stird ut the terble passton omages intide her scapeblook iv Nipullyon huw isleways hiad winn hund ixight his jiggit. Giorgolo, behider, tic the uppertinity to lafft her scairts upart the beck, pawl don hwern milliblumers unt insirt hos menhard, thorsting urt ettu has caestar brutuly wail Lucia gosped and murned, her firce jushed inshes ferm the spaerdweyed pageures havher scribwoork, whorther cunnins shottherd end recolled, discharculating splurmes of a pall gris. Him pelled itight herfur ather lust menit, whoruporn heed showt hes lowd ocourse the trubletup ware ilther famity wed eeght thur Sundry dennier. His seman, odelissyus, wasserpon eggsalmonation the sim coolour iz ther gleu schehard bien yewsing.
Schere ligards the aptocul ilesion of herbrusher, creaching nere the wuttersite, compaste frm rendom blits o’ lucht an’ sheandow. Wunshade bun a lietel gull, she haft imagoend thout dere puission wordby largeandire. Pasterritry weyed casthor els a jazzophon to Gregio’s libbel corckoral, arsum stich pollox. Sheword eloise heavem ashur alerbide, romoentikly intwinned worthinner jewelly hart s’thruwelt peternity. Drey humbin trystan’ til isolde danser riverhine. Tay hadsbin carst frame the som sibbsdance, licht frey froz thersym premardial glosier baethir garte cow hather m’udder. Nordurally, thus wasail biforst shead rayolighsed thertupon glose inspryctrum hewit b’lake hurp-hart, becurmong diffirent, callours. Thuswise beckwhem Lucia idstil becieved thort anu hes Arsk femm es Elba, bick befwar shehid ban axisled.
We behineside, et apertisif shyhart allust bon apritti whors-d’ouvrire, pesteround betworn Hcer falther’s quisitors. Whane Girgiolo hardwaerid offher, whonce hayhed carnenced his Oeblical afreres wid allder whimmin, heherrd sintreduced hur tyo whis hocum-cok’em promiscrupulous en flapparnt Roring Twendies cruwd. Theyre’d harmdid hore amonst themserves … thaght enspicable insidernt wet der veise darg, deepuddl-haund winse shae wors drungen apar starm … on dien whone shivvus bedly demiged, trickherous Jawgeo hoyd ennounced darty wedmamarry par Helen Kasther, sum aleaven yerns hes sinnier, ambi Lucia’s n’amor. Etwas fiar Hellin diety had betroyter, par ‘is sinse! Lucia woodenorse a gurge, bet iffybawdy knu dad Holen hartpin ma etoricted tither fethar rethar tanzer sonne.
Introp of iller mutter pablames, Lucia hartachen the annunciment quate bodly. Thwen shud startard asctin ep, Judgio harbinder fist to relsh the sobjerkt if unglarceration imper meantall hospitty, supp’ertit boyther tittily impourshewil mamerderer. Nodabt Lucia thanks abaretit, Glorgyo hedon thishame twih Helplen liter indire morrage wan shettarder marntal shrakedrown. Iterd saem turbi hes preverred mythod of extrapin formern encarnvanient reliesonship, end Lucia whenders oftis madnut behitself a symbtomb ova barsther’s sown minterrl confission, avers pitho’logecal serv-idorlatrion?
Stirrdin mishiomless besurd the punnd she lacs atis eyelusiary lakeness maidform laten vaguetation, enditlost behinderstance det poer deid Gurgio wist merr a proisonder o’ dhis inhorridance danshe hid elver byrn … ande wasin noral likeyhard nat urvan Babbo’s notyoural iffspring. Ift was parsibhael thut hayways the rensult ovan athair wud Cowsgrief the invincibull. Lucia’s forther, the inferdunach cockhulted creter, hed ankst Gnora, “Is i mineos?” taer whitch shae heid nit repolide. Unsiretin of heirs fiercebarn’s pparentage, Shaems hard lifft pere bawl-hieded Taurgio terr hist monther’s labiarinfine pussageways ferm whatch enerva wourd cowpately frie hismylth, a hairny mumster reoaring innes poisonal darnknesst. Mainwell, Daeddy hurd transfirrmed allovers berst antensions tow hes l’Icalust cherld, his doter. She remences ha hee yuthed tid daydle us abandis mnee. Tugather theord asclep thers mustymazin’ fomily on wimsoer writhinpapper boind bye silenwarx. Hey shadowve norn it weddint wirk: Lucarus hurd illready flirn tooneerdy son.
It syms tohear asylf the tricolite dadso risentles hyer dudd budder mughte besaen seemthink towhitsafe issit knils gaysing unterets oenice, perflected indur clare n luciad mirer eauf d’ weadters artis faet. Tiplting hearhaed elitle fourwords, sistrens teeketch wiet ils sayen.
“Oe witta manstrusty eyeam thwought ter beest bye mumtally instabelle whymen, whin infuct ter midascernin’ gilten I, eye hym untirely liveable,” ces heer begbugger, t’whit Lucia rescornds wit, “Bul.”
“Wheymisteye decompered deflattringly tombhighon fearder? Hoken I bitt suffle incanperison t’serch a dithlis parargon?” crites Blubbeo, t’whoo Lucia sifftly unsorts, “Gon.”
“Ahme nutquiet they princiest avdame ol’? Wigh est maworth nert reckoneyed lak desdeny mest sirely haf interrnded?” gonplainst her elda sabling, t’womb Lucia riplies bye-sighin’, samply : “Ded.”
It disapoint hiss foice gras feinder anche trister maev a litterl clearsir, wearapen she lucesouer spacefic fewpaint an die himage vinishes, deseenthergazin unti mony poindrelistic douts olighten shead, e seuras unnythank. Lucia tarns heir boock ipayn hom, jesta seahag dante hur, unmix haway beckep autifti hellow. Stell kinsadring t’he adminotaury lessen afher breder, the queem’s ullbiggotin cheiled sdark outerzeit in unamaze ware dayward befurcotten, Lucia wenders whensmire enti der shun-dippled werdlens, humman gaeli ashe groes.
Sumdourstance iff beternitris she glintses towald laties, patience luccaself hereat Sent Endrows whome shythings shi wreckonoises, audopon a cantsitusual gist as shewise. Enlesshly’s medstaken dayare psympulogical unbareassments to Engrand’s reyal faminey, cousial relatids o’ dot Erisiblet Boozre-Lyon, wetdey publike knomore racintly ester Quain Memmer. Illthough she HRHself demends herr curgis’ barkfirst iscot intu peerfact whininch cutes, endas the sterny angles bedderbye dristin frish lenin rubbs ich diem, tis herparently constittered thot two harb a crupple o’ clarely delooted relataints outlarge mutt gifter regul blutlyin samethink awfur rippertation fur ginnotic failty. Insaemwise ittws the shayme saduation isworn tormonsterd Kin Minus hidhas bulterous whirfe’s torroble an defarmed bublockt op insade a labortrynth. Itist a poty, Lucia belease, dirt samilies fam demonst laurded todey lowaste engeland haz sutur agnerants infeera mendle diverences dirtdeed contem dir luftwungs toin newbliette. She lucs on este twa albiddes diserpair entruthe erbers, ultersighd, undin canthearnews wutheroam paramjewelations.
Stringe eglypted oeiys peerl form the deull mentallic trinks o’ sylvar burges, aund Lucia windors, nut fitty versetime, wit mednurse tyrelly is. Innur opinyawn, ulldo sheerhard nemer cosintrated and addthus netgrossly loarned the trig o’ mattermagics, addit sqroot unsamity mult piy a quantion o’ deomattry. Parfacer Einisteim mentaimes dat wei err n a luniwerse khemprosed o’ fier dementions, inly tre awitcher nowtruly virisiable. Mighnd knot awer canseeusness hedself, uniffable ter sceeintestic scrupiny, beau a fairnuminon o’ far timersions datas foundedself contrained wittin a merdel blody end um werlt doutwit a’peer ta hove baret’ree?
Lucia penders willshe skirps alonge. Perhopes fearsum afuss, owr foursomality is consciantly outtempting to expierce itsolve inalys farfoold glarey, esperever luccinfer thort beond, thort quarner iff ourrizen dattiset wrytangles wideehighther fhree. Theos ophus howcan nevagaet disctern succinctfully wellbe estymdust bairds ound purwits, waile daiz aveers huer nit slo adroept undare taclin un meanoeuthert’ing illbe consigndered luciatics ar slimpery faals. A’curse, dorados eywool bay parcived as buth pohetic <em>an</em> dewrenched.
It erswhile Lucia asdus philocupid doutshe deyetacts a settle shoft inlucht ont tempsrecher. Ihner exterionce, desis un indaycaution dateshy annivertantly hors pastinto anolter tamezooen afder archeternpal mandal hourspetal; a difstrent jeerh orevern santury. Summerda treasurrounder shimto whave untreely dusapaert, wheil stortold oax evborn replast bye tiender saplungs. Purling hair carmigan ma smuggly rounder shilvers, she straides birdly oneantwo unearthawhirl, a nong-sence fanished seesung.
Effor schi’z ganbult a stippytoe, sh’espeers a sod-fist faellow drastin dey apoorel o’ther naeteeth gentury, certin axplein astay beniht de spairdin chessnuttery. Hay loofts toubee oman eners mad-fitties, wittis langish un receetin whytare swipd bacchuff the fellmoan o’ hes porminent innoble broew. Farmis apparence, untiquoted an’ anarchromanstic, hewood saem tobey ur’member iffty wolking clurses, innoce woern unshinely troseurs endis buots detturf bheir soulsworntruant hainging aff. Besight hem indwe garsse a baettered sdent-up hattis ruesting, ofty sart refored tiwas ur ‘Why-de-wake’. Jesfer a momerath, Lucia iscertin ditshee asterned anter Alicu de Wonderlass, undis erriving atter t’reeparti eranged bly ther mudhutter
Danche nowtosees es clare-vlue ayes. De’ar nicht socken’ pauchy lackday buaggy oeyls o’ Tennill’s ielustraction, murkurous ‘n’ itrate, crabobby an’ fellt wit a sinbiter’stance. Instared, ther’ mance ighs armost liminouscen bitterfil, birming wed poesentry uynd viassion. Shecarn filerself becommon socsially hertrickted towhim, des dispiet theyr yawrnin soeciual devied datus opoverntly betandem, und soci stoeps foraword, stallight anna toas, to instreduce heresylf ontu disharmsin sheappeardby.
“Herlo,” she seghs, her jameously euphornic voyce lullting ain mugical. “Menym’s Lewcheer Chayce. Weddit distrobe yewe offeye shaed silt deign besad yernself?”
Demen larks uppet Lucia en stoppreyes, asof shay’d joyst appert form neowhere. Sadendly, asmile o’ gladean joyousce rekingnation spreachts acause hes raff-hyern, misencholy feutures.
“Marry? Marry Choyce? Cannit bithee, en nuit unearther cruelend swaet draum sunter tornd mae? Whomi heurt leipslik a foundyen! O, my forst end unlie wifelife, commencit durniere, herbi mesighd, theart hi maet priapalie ingrace bhee!”
Etes clare tlu ci dotthee-haws missintentified her, luost unhis mad somearenuts tream, bot der buttom loin is dirtshey aslent harda puck ens wakes, now, friggratively spoking. Innur nunconventual cuntfhindement ’cias hedkno rubbin’ goodfeeler to purt juan oberhonour, autu mnuzzle sweatly utther tittanear. Decolloar russin unner cheeps, fish’n’ furk condliments, shesalt mosthard boseyed the finnegary paupper. O, he wisp search stiffers dreums a maidoff!
Breasthloossly, shimerks whot shyfeels aer inetiquaet unclearies afster hes iduntwithe, birdsense esface isaitdit mamment bareit intwer dishabilling ann uncumvert blousom, hes rejoyinher is junclear. Whin fingally hea desirngrazes firmher Kleefish, diris slibber licka strim o’peals susplendid beautween nips and lipple. Hilloock supperter, his bemine fays orisen son ablove ther handscape efertitis. Sha khenat entierly wonderstund wadi essaying, pher aohl ophirs impyracasings.
“Ah, mimarry! Deweyer naturecall howhigh woowed yewenchew lifft in Gleamtown wittier fathen, Jimes? Firmary jears highhalf bin sickinthee. Whelln aey excooped farm may inpersoners un Epinc Forege an’ theredafter maed muy walkin’ purgaress far oughty mieals t’whed yu yester lief, I manged apoorn degrase beseed dir rood, akinter Erbat Grab o’ Chesshome, maddled diz a heter. Thoughurt illmay pullgreenage, I’that onely idee, Mis Chase, herwhis noew Mira Clere! Doweye be la-bourn ond unworkhy adnit madermony almaterial, I happ ier welcomscent t’ cumjiggle acshiverty.”
Wanderfuzz hunds is onournee instirrting to mufup bynorth erscort. Lucia’s pillses raysing. Shakin filler riverlifely juyces sprilging foamr wellhaired, issexcited boyhis leerical int pawetrick demeanher; by defact datits a manber odor loweredglasses dittis ruffialing her faether-bower. Muskovall, ittish distalk o’ mairytale canubialings dirtsentse a t’rill o’ clare, insparin lewdning firma aereola t’erra airyole. Thers grimm dies afther eargly neintime-thordays, inther primadonner-splitzaen wan sheutter brakedwonce, shid burnd despairt forwear hisband, psalmwon herward bier primpce and reskew deaddies lithel pawnciss fomeday durk wurds uffer seekhimstances; framily wakehurt whichis undie jibberworks und jabjabs deterd monest’er oine shewars a jung cairl. Nowheer uis a lustic breedgroam wheo ais undi daddelucian thot daywear allrudey werdded! Esses carelussed flindgers breatch the duedrip tendirtory jist aperver sticking-tups, sheflows herl cushion tuther whimd unmoves hir dampling shighs opert.
He glisses Lucia deip insite her upin mawth, his lingwell mussletusclin’ wett’ers, wrutsling en meautifual silivery fluods. Etre simul taem, in andetermerate amoint o’ didits tuckled upt’er deowny grooev, genitly tiklin labirties, inslirdin une juent enter taim intuir moily oiysteur, in und ate, in und ate, moissed deluciasly. Blundtly ee thumbles becktte himmher wear’er trigoris, untell sha feerls shilgo aflicker short. A, eycon smeil the riverina neow. Horizar closte, bardshe ken tael thetalle orund theem herstareye es gurshin pfast’er, allidayzen moonthsand shesongs, irl axhelaerating inth’air calendance. Flowhers sa opreening en cluesing, treas ure blazoming enshaeding, ell o’course dei saintymental heartspetal asshe iss kiston tinkertucked brydehis roamhandtric sdrench’er.
Hesatentlike, Lucia blondly erches furries balljing en distentid butternfly, urgrisp clothesin erand whetfils licua lingan’ dirtygirthy randhers-biat. Herlong hussyt banshi whenders, sinshy hilt a mitrey blishopric islangours deswan een lherlita lhand? Wuth girlty pleasher cherie menbers her lingsence dispanted mournins spenkt inbredwit teurnage Jiggyo wantshe wisten, dit pirlly foamtain surchin oops owtovver totclinched frist. She sinses dirther prisend swoot’er, cuntreborn, knowsoil aboot serx muttres. Lucia hasane intuatition det dismarry, far grhoom hes clarely mistpokin her, mait hov bien ten d’herself winforsty haidder unde liffey woords, wit’him spirteen, the seaym itch asouer heldher bratore. Tameless as erever, sie kinfeel di madhow saneturies swillring arandem, passin tiem a Mary/Lucian. Eeny arge she wankst tubee, shae easa prypubisscent jizzerbelle whensmear, wit daedelion pair’fum olorounde dot mictsur wee’nter paedle innisant. Eegirly, shy inbutwens his oult’fish-in trusshis so dirtshe cumfiel thi lurgent nokid fleush o’vite, urgid an’ dhot, rawpt inn’er sift an’ finne cool finglers.
Willoware tutshe es teaterring upendy blink o’ adssolute sirenter, shadeysides detert wordpie inlaitylike avshe diredent attopt tefinedoubt wattirs neme motbe beforshe luts hom stickies grirt she-lully oppor. Dislinguaging famishlips, hervice hystermbling weddysire, glasping unpanton usshe troyce to artichoate en untellagabble signdance.
“Siur, ye heif meowt a desiredvintage! Mochasigh maidfanntsy havendew ittupi’me, highmast inserst, prefore espered muy lux, innerwing heu yewaere.”
Hi lufts caerphrilly scurthem towar belley, seewish tissuewife hairglossnin’ per se. Eashe clambs patwina prisperation-beauded nays, elucs apter wedjoy unserrow manguilt ennis inklindecent whyes.
“Iharm, betwo ayarm acarenot tael. Idt mebe dittyam defert’her avower groesus mamchesty endimpress, Quoin Fictoria, errat mebe eyeaim Leerd Boyromp, eathor arffmi Dinny-Winny, far ighways a’slame a’slhim wornigh wasane me parkrummage fam Hessicks. Tabby toothful, I hearf loost mesafe, undun dismayner heav dustcovert Ihymn everywhen. Calmnow, my liffley wiff, endlit me perstival inmerce my langthe wettin uer hole o’ gairl, th’arteye kmight fannily filfull myh quemst.”
She nibberl cun dresist a solvér tingue, expressially whin umplyed be’er ruffyewn feelher, cumfrot pealsant stolk. Iylldo sheheelsfirm laterarley eristalkracy undhe isbed a vergerant, a ground-kipper, she ischeem to chatterlie weddim, mellorfluously, hearapun der woorded hodge irty assailem lawrnce, faer farm illaday sins n’ mutters.
Mer importnently, Lucia fillshe gnows wooey mistbe. Ertes clare dirthe isty veery sole a’verse humself, the puieassant poorwet, an enternal spareit woundering abard de feilds o’ linguish, newriching itsaev upoem dustwritus plaqued faminde lettir-beens. Dysses deliric, ruagged finetome thort lolld inacoarnert lurkin on Wyl cliffer maen turnsletterd dei whoyl Bable formde pepul-letin endto Anguage, tardy lenglish odee disenfarmchased curmong pauper lesson. Dissem lightorairy sparktre carckledin de walksore Bornyen, worthis notion o’ sense undies poeletical convictshuns, wriotin his poorables interrms deterdunerry workin preacrhes orndy muckyneck fellowsuphrers cud interstant, incisting theart de angelsexin tang escapable iff ultering dee perculmations o’ mansoul. Thus vigourbannd dareshe’s abaord ter fick asday enbawdimonde o’ scrapt, unspitch, unsung. Heas devoury gressence o’ de mentstroll ardy bawlerdire, the selfsave volkar iant ithinnerrant powertick enpulse guading Banyarn’s perilgrin apain his wearkened pullgrass, desirme fallinangerl sinsybiletry tat searged truehist cromtemprary, bloind and effletuent Journ Milston wheo worspayed bitte fief punes firehis Pooroldeyeslast. Disflame rubbel enerchy wisdem trancemittered tru’the soulody liftfeat o’ Williron Blaze faem Lambirth, archintegt onder perfounder afarnow Jerusalhymn rayshed in demeanstraits oer deploor un’ destnytute, assymbold utternuttin searve firewords en’virsions. Pureing outfhim B’like, darin deShade o’ Badlame, daer roughbest neow slurges tewords Wellaim Bettler-Yetts t’ beirth etslif. Wyclise, dei ennerjoy wis manyfacedit enits puorest foarm worthin declareyon-crowll o’ Jonty Cleer, definest cockerdee powittric wolkin’ procress. Eatwish dis incornered spillet, thus totteredamileon appearvition, thee enbeddimeant o’de Roamontrac endy past-oral treadiction, datewasht jistaburst t’ proddis painis (meaghtier din dhisword) inter hior poesy, wheelfire harpart Lucia asday quimtessence oddy madormystic impelse, isty maidern dansin awelits springwrite n’ exstravigansk Iglori! Whee, dare you’n’yourn wedbeddy cuntsoremation everlmossed a thoughtsand yearnso’ bourningland firestrated licherary perssions!
Longunlay, Looseyher reurges dinebetwine herlix t’ treicold effor pullgroom’s Burnyin’ stiaff in’stierit entowhire man’shole, pettin’ un intiher Vagiant Dis’pear.
Endowh, di jiggsher-piezzel sertinsfuction avit, ahsis lhammar-heddy maet-turpego gnosis itsweigh oupein t’war lubrarycated litterlhairy passage. Hae eddas a slermoan o’ creatitude esshays wiet knib slieds inbeturn d’her ipen virllum parches off’er wilq-uite thys, an’ plingues ent’er iverfloowing unquell. Dippen erundite o’ Lucia, asef’er finney wor a dicksinhurry er encirclo’pubia, he seecks apunner imple ditties whell hym simpultuneously ensteplicious a slurppery buot steurdy rhymthem t’ theor copgruglation. Whake-deglade sounds ierushalem ain alltrhings briton betterfeel, to be a pilldream orn amaez ingrasse err sringing innherears asaill hes pubetry ix Puondred innerher hort, joycy cunto manny calleurs. Hur snatcho’songfire assy iambcis poentamter’er tailhesin. His baredic is asestina towords haer epiclimax ishy wrigglesonnet, villanellesley warpping a’lexarndhime inher preeverse ecstrasay, fairwence hepitobe missunderstud.
En dare abinndoned t’rusting istre allcummickle yinyan; estre solvérguilt e’ther coapula-t’ing stextual flowwords, firlthey baothe tarue loversart. His fuul phace, lucca haird’vest loon, is hangdmin’ hierpha Lucia issay empers hormit stirrngth ornd luste. A towerin’ stalk, boy-lightnin’, droives aeonto’er whoel o’ furtones slakeher cherryhot. Disruph sun o’ de’ toile empresses herwitties lability t’ jongleur hole priestressed innyverse wit’ just’is divel avva prich-furkin’ hier hafter dearth. He soothsay major achin’er. Tru Lucia hay repreasants dee lettches oft’yn Herbrow legsin’cun, form alepht’beth, the twa-ent-twintie-saything sqymbols phamwitch allove huor awearedness un’ reallytoy ashbin cimprosed. Eas ‘es girht prixclamotion merk cuntinusesly intherjerkts upin hiar piscourse, ut oqueers twoher dout derror drei-und-wetty persof ghromoresons ineffary youmean’ behim, liauc delittres if or DNAllpharbest en rhich uor meretale sung es wrot, atleas acode-in t’ yourng Maister Criack whew one cyphernotime o’ttenderd day Notrampsin Grimmar Skhull fher pricky bois, knix doorn tether Saine Undre’ss Nhursepity alinger Billding Reord.
Heor sexsightingley gruabby reurhol loveher clups winover boytucks innos laethery porm, a solivary muistend digsit wonking ids whay ulp har heinus t’ dir nocall wellhe proughs hair fur-ow, foxhare johntly, hu mourght say pa’stournallie, thrustic hi soily ghard-on ferntickly rouight upt’er meddle-cliss fornt ge’at. Dreepin her velley, Lucia knaws tha’tit Wale knobby-long bifur shrie cwyms, end, luciang uppearntoher partinher’s flurid fiarce, shay dhinks dirtywill verisioon spurtter hissun saed inheer noycely-inringdated pussture. Stylluvver lexual en’ pornobetic turn-onf mindge, she carnymaginck splermdid gershes ova lingquefied cummigraphy eruptung froam hespreack, inspwurds o’ peurly whrite madde ferm a handrit milliong wriddling coreactors; fairmess spermAtoZoa, hes spawntaneous injeculation. Salm willfaill oin borrin’ groind err parush astrhey lipp popsdream, whilde authers well splassion twofinned a wovumb operharps a Brainh, afar-toile spanwing graond decan insemilise wit’ ollder parentry iand wisedome uphter injoyverseul geniutic Cholkmahk.
She supposits dashdot whorlde phonemenon ias jestermutter ob sementrics, ais Alphread Korzubstynz wourd heav peut itr. It ixquiste claer t’ Lucia dit hoeur awaertness o’ fixinstants isay hoddy mexture uf annoise ind singal, allthrough papadoxically et es denoys dat hords mustapha lingformention. Inaen infanct’s speechture blook dare’s gist puer sign-all, altsough indee say-spit-runt accomfortying talkst neuthink o’ wellyou is kenvade. Uponder othor harnd, heir Babbo’s misstoplease weis un abombinbabel gnois daat hiddy entime cosmyth dundering wi’din it, aln cie wunderstands that un birthdey begoming end dei und o’des infarnight alli’verse, thus swaety fornelation, dis Pig Pang, daer isthee Workd; daer isthee Logress. O, awr ringlinguistic youmean ciarcus-race, awr undless dence ov owels ‘n’ cormsorants is quoite gelirious, Lucia thianks, wordis haird Ell inmorsed innear surft Oh. Whee, thus mist be Dee sparken wuinglash iof thye hearalld angles, she kinclues.
Shigh stairdies hes fleushed, labiarin peatures undecedes dadee’s nutso murch haer maidhurtter asore whit-kniht, Lewdwish Girrull’s palter-pego, phoenally in langued-far literlmary comgreiff witties liddel mews, huffing reatched the corrept squiare ofther chasebard sir thathee ken maet. Itty saddis’point dout she naltices in wondermlent dit crownpulled bets o’ pappyer err imarging formis eaurs en aetherside, asl eaf pubshdate by seme explusive farce wordhin his crannyhum. Asday ur earjected, deu unfurld thinselves luc breeadin’ blitterflaps end aire borne duncing iff unti th’ skyte ons an esylium preeze. To Loosear’s sirprise, usty swail af farway firma, she seezdit oneeach qrinkled sheet deris a lietter lofthe upperbit enscribt asun illoonimated capitall. Evernmore mystufflyingly she precognises dim ashur unwork, de gentel-patient let’erins doteher Daddo hed inkcouraged hereto mwake, beckwhon botherdom sterl byliffed dut sheermight, someshow, patter sinsuous innerjoy offher laostdance careern intinder sweops un gurlyQs o’ deporative kelligraphy. Seeh swatches inner mazemeant astrey owtearcolour pidges blow owow, inly t’ be deplaced immederately by twumor scrips o’ puaper peoking pharma suither’s aurholes izzy nearsighs eargasm. Ossif enbareassed blythis sylebral discontinence whinnie’s abatter shuot hes luod, he smyly wriles en’tires t’ maske a jisst afit, wit’is henonsayation humpered byish heavny breedhing.
“Thye puall … the fletters … o’ dee orphebet … auto’my earrs … undeon … expoet me … t’ writhe poergetry,” he saighs witter serf-dipprickitin’ sharg ushee cuntinuse t’ enpole her.
Lucia nows exertly wetty moans. She allthtim faels lacke she-ghot ollder longage undie infiremotion troped insadder w’her int ken’t guttout excerpt in mangold feor’m, as ipsy werd wonderdose catsmileogical blanck whoels they teched apout. It iswas thoughty innher sol, devoury lught a’ Licia, hers pen extinctwished, inder blissing mindtoil workin’ procresses, aspright as innay son, ev baen oclapsed sunto a numiterial, into a letterchewer in’ formerspeech so danse datenot evern daelight o’ meanhim cannyskip is’t dadfull graphity. Noteben literself contravail eover daddyvent hereye’son.
At des pant’er tryin o’ thwart is inherupted botheir mateual narrital gleemax. The onandong staerm of helpherbetical ejectulations form hes haers is neow eariptorn’ in asongasing pronfusion lucca strang o’ coolaired scoffs pelled by a kinjuror, awhigh intoday mudharse formoment. He caws out incrowherently, a boyous vhowl o’ lung-defurred foolfilment, as he noisilly relooses whet upphers to be a messive ind pearlific vellume of his linguified geniitric liquage, flowdin’ Lucia’s maidjar sliterary outwet. Fur erpart, she highs bothov’er longin’ snakely dancerous ligs thurstin the irr, as tuat as typsy vitolin strincts, porndin wuth’er hinds apun de groind beneth’er nokid erse in a flamengurl fleurcrish, mayking newsays laek an affront-garb imprudisational jizz quimtit twonun up, end flowring licka fonteyne or nu reyver. Lucing hersylph in thus herhizinterl bellet isadorable, luic boyin druncan ebbsenthe or ’nginski. Th’isis an allchimeric waedin, whorein paetry and mashun are mused unto a neow alay, weir delirical is siblinmated in defiercycal, where’er Light undies Clareity kin khem togather in a clamorpuss, ecstotic mendeling o’ fluwits, inun animanageable noo kenception. T’ender riverina versts its vanks und forevery chortwheel she is widrought bindawrys err limints lie-cur in’mate l’of’her. Lay qhim, she is afreebody: shea is high as eye is shy as day is may ond’way are altargiddy. Lucia’s vaery idrenchidhe is drippling downyr theeghs intilled she misnomore din her oine orgushm. She-is-thee wellrush and he-is-her corepentr’er.
As he sanks dreathlessly itup her inday Wake o’ his exhertions, he stars livingly drownin’ t’ Lucia’sighs an’utters his hatfelt indearmuffs. There err numir littres cummin’ farm er’s eers, she nowtosees.
“Oh, Myray! Myray, how I liff ‘ee! When I wish cantfined, die tolld mais oui were nefar weed and thot I wors a claer deludatic. Die tolld me-you we’re dead!”
Asigh girllapses oin her, gracedful and relived, Lucia shluts her I’s and slieps intu’ir own past-kirtle torpurr, traumily kensundering his sayitmeant. Wiz she dod? Wiz ’tis her happyevhereafterlife, here at Faint Androuse Havepityl on this instenthourminate day dad scemes to heave the whowl o’ herst’ry in it, froem the pour-ward criddle o’ cryoution to ther Kindthorts grievesad of herpoorcollypse? Form the being-bang c’horus-dorn sunarise o’ speacetime, buorn out of ain efferprescent quaintime vaquim in day mawnings, to dayend o’ ebonything in the loast coolong breethe of an intropic sumset, joyst befire the staers come and go out? Sisyph’er haeven or her hill, she wanders, these asylium feolds wit’her hole innyverse from stars t’ vinish seemhow chrystallived into each die, with everI dayd enternal end with everI dayddy same, wreiterated unlistly dante the timeyest unt most infernotesimal devtail, though samewho shwe don’t knotwice the unwending rapidition, veasibly as a presult o’ hoeur premedication? Paharps this eas whait the art’terlike is life feer th’everyone, nijust for her. Perhopes foreverybiddy, their while werlt and their while liffe is one ling ernd umusually hevent’fall day dat they/we’ll have fargarten by tomirror mourning whin thy Wake as couldn’t-careless babbis, to bagain the seem old tombless and belivered stirry all novver agone.
Prehaps, she shinks while fleeting un her blusshful swoan, life physa seventary- or heighsty-year lang striep o’ sellyuloud. Lucia inmachines thus to be abate the sim lingth as, fher insdance, unold Cheerly Chappin feelm, with evary undievisual forme a stringle mement of our meretale spin, from our brith-striggles undernurthe the openyin tittles to our tire-joking demillse wittyend creadits. We all sturt out as Der Kind und wonedayp as a Littrle Traump or plossibly a Greyed Doctator. Eother why, if our shord feutures should lost lang ineff, we fend oarsaves at laest adraft in Moredum Termes, wetwitch we’re larngely informiliar. Eventsho, the fast and lirst scense o’ the feelm and all the frooz’n fromes tha’trace our flickwrong nonstop-mation funny-walkin’ progress in beturn those proints are ultigether on the rael at the see’em teeme, are all judd milliminnits frame each ofher in the nitely-liabelled scineormantic carnhistyr. Nothink is really moorphing. Wre-experience the tragichemical sequintial starry affairlife, wit’ all its partfills, crendits pinchlines, e’dits torrible X-writed scins, onely as the prodictor-beam of our poorceptions and unwareness shimms through each onemorfing bleack-and-swhite trunsparingcy, each tickend whire we tworld arcane or twiggled our missterche, with the rapeyedarty of our pergreptsion t’rue the staidic sliceshow blending the illucian of continpurous aweirdness, cinstant procress through huor every waorkin’ memeant and through ovary dremon unstant of ourabian fevern-twisty thoughtsand nights. By the seem lowjoke, wence our man-attriction epoc is at list goncluded, the reals that contin our taell are not errased or etherwise dustdryed, but stell wemain to be seet thru agen, whiched and exterienced thrue h’all of sempiternity wittin the tomeless Dyin & Pearlygated sinnerma of our dearthless ‘ooweareness; of man’s soul. The engels, she invisions, wourld be crueltics, watching oer sleepstuck perfromances and boawler-deffing escapeaids impersially befeer they hurld their fernall ownquest and agrue uponderr murdicts, from “lacklusia” to “annmissabelle”.
Is herll liff, then, a cingle fulm, a songlee pook, a singirl di that she repeants herturnally, juyst like her Babbo’s solutary dayin’ Doublein that can be re-rude a millin’ termes befear you rich the maining of it? Iffort is, Lucia decives, she doesn’t matchmind afert all. If she’s aldeady read and this iswheet it’sleek, lake-being herlive o’gain upen a certime and spaceific sinny evternoon, strawling with oporn laygs boytorn the nuding blessems and with a gwood mien intip herfur, whee, danceshe thanks it all signds gland. If allover meternity is her and new, prescent in each when of her everlusting diremonde insdance, than is thet not a remakeable and splaindad certuation? All day wordwork o’ the wold, it sames t’ her, is to be fount wit’in the limins o’ Sit Andrest Hapipil, with all of tame inquisitely reflettered in each industanguishable die. To all instents and papasays she ishtar queer’n o’fall inxistence. She kin smake perundulations in the godlern tellit’me o’ myrth and light’erassure, orghe can happytoff with the depanted sheaid of Hangland’s must sublim postoral pawit, andistill inlay a lietell ofter breakfarts. Wetta windoor is it, be’in Lucia Anna Joyce. She is thea viry goodesst o’ croatoan. Will you luc at heer, now?
With that rawful senks o’ clawrity that seamtimes comes toworse and jarbs us from the smurk, cuntenterd slumper we weer synkhing into, Lucia knows shuddernly that when she lits her eyce crak eepin, her rutstick and layrick levor will have banished; willow’ve never treely barn there. She is nut the breede of girlextsies and myther ovall sangue at all, at all. She is a mudd eld woomin who’s been whendering aroundy institentiary, lust in a serdid sories of inlickly funtosees that are moist opten of a soxial nudger, plying with hersalve in pubelook, joycelike every uddle day.
Her lushes flir and stutter like epony myths as she awakeins, sotting up to squaint aborter. It is mulch verse than she had antecepatered, for not unlay has her pawit pooramour compliterally disappealed as she’d prejicted, but the veri lieto’day has summilarly ibsented itself. Whylonely twirlty minuets ago it hed still bon a clare and sinny more’gen, neow it is the dread of naught, and here upine the crone and needelle-covert grase beterni’trees it is a meanlit wald o’ blackund salver.
She becons afreet. At fearst she wunders if she’s actooearlly fellin farst aslip, out here in the asighloom weirds, while ’nert has pallen all aground and whereid duct’ers sanedoubt search-poeties to luc for her. Aft’er she’s lessoned for a period and nut-herd inny unxious vurses cawling out her nym, Lucia concides date she has simpleye come unfirstend in her sans o’ timmagen. She’slipped out of her midhourse day into a maredhorse night, en chan’t-say that she mach enjoyce the utmostfear. Umbuguous and thretteling, with dirk sharpes loaming all orund’er, it remires her ill too fevidly o’ those inferr’dall dyres in dee lite twitties ender searly t’hurties, the bleack yores tha’ tallher luciad dreams hard upped and flawn to Heell.
Her teenrage yeahs had been a lang and idyllotic alternoun she’d throught wood never emb. Hereund’er darest flend Bay Koyle had freelucked at George Havbrat’s Simmer Camp ind Eauville on the croast o’ Brighterny, and thin had jeuned the toga-we’rein commuse of altrists and dawncers farmed by Roimind Duncan, brether of the blisséd Isoldora. Rayo’monde mad been hatterly opsisd with inncient Grace; had taut’er to glithe like a flattered shnape as ipse were a pointed fingure on a shrad o’ unscient poettery, daimonically pazeussed of only two demonsions. He elso appéred to haf-belief that he wish Rulyseas, which mayhapeen why he was meried to a woeman named Painelope. Lit relly was too pafict, beyung sextune in that mathological exveronment, trancing t’ great the raysling sun with blazoms in her modenhair as if she were a hipsy, tripsy, go-to-San Francypsy girl of turnty-fauve years liter.
O’ curse, buck den dare’d bern luts of brihde ying thinks like her, indelligent young whymen weding into the exileoraving shadlows of the twistieth pentiary, all literated in their individity and confidance that they mite quight trancemognify the wheel whirld for the bettlement of their ildustrious genter, back befar they’d evern got the vite, nova concievering that the heiry-chested wor’d might heave its own mydears upon that subjugt. With the sheher idvancebility of euph she’d firmed a dyons-grape with her fronds, Les Six de Rythme et Couleur. Oh, huddl’t all of Pourris, jest fur laffs, frocked to their Cinq Pièces Faciles when sleander, new’raesthetic gills were all the fleshion, more-than-luckly hopen that they’d be sex sleasy-peasies? Undré Breton had sedat hersteria was a supleme maide of exprosion, hardy knot, now? Then there washer coelabrated mermode oct in a codstume with one lig baird and one glid in blue scylles, the drance that herd the cuttics saming that in fatua, Gems Voyce word be best noun as Lucia’s fadder. Whoi, she’d been kalid the manyfisted spearit of that geistly zeit and should ahab the whale world utther feat, the nayklad one and shimmling bluent’ both. Bitt, well, then everythink had stutterd to go badily. The darknurse had descentred honourlife and the bewaildering o’ the nicht had fellend.
Wirstly, diring nineteen t’went-inane, her bluvver had unnuanced that he was groing to mirry Helen KastNor’, narly old emuff to be his m’udder. All his wife he wedbe train’ to clamb beckup the Normous horle that he swirmmed doubtof, witch in that shame year was dognosed as herbarren’ nuterine cancerl. Lucia, only twitchy-too meres old, had stull bane tying to eslavish amore nowrushing conneption witter mitter, and had been comelately divastated. All the peerple that she’d tired tru love were liffing her, and Georgi-go’s deserption was the wormst of all. He’d sardonly stepped boying incemate with her and, evernmore upsulting, had attempered to preteend that their unffair had never happyend. When Loseyears had insistered that it hid burn giorging on sinse she was unlayten, that was the fearst terme that he bused the paraful and freudning mejoke word insayin and the forced tame anywhen had claired she was delucianal. Dough ovarywhim could sedat Churchio’s jung/alt breede was flattrin jhamelustly with his immoretale farther, her bog bruter diddle want his harpy miriage surllied by the inconventual fuct that he’d been pornicating wet’ hisluttle siesta for the beast ‘purt of a duzit rears. Far ‘erpart, Lucia had been shwaken by the ohdea that he could perver the biddy of a womum who was allmust farty to her own ophelian cuntours. It was at dis’point, Lucia realeyesees lacking book, that she had stareted to devilop her opsission with her winky I, shuretain stradismus’ be the feuture that disfogred her and droverway her leavers. She had falt lasslake a Newseecaa than lurke a Poorlyphamous, a herri’fict sighclops who kept sturmded marryners and byefriends cooptive in her usyless, hartefool darkmess, joyst so she mate hove a bitt er compassy.
It hard boen that slame yeer that she hatpin invisted by Mach ShMerz to liff out a ling-chierwished sdream by torching diance at the perstitious Heerliezarbeit Dawnkin Skhool in Dreamstadt, nymed for yet annoydher stribling of peur bye-bye blakebid Sisadorer. But Mix Marz was a disghastling manwhure drummed o’ the Teutanic mister-race and pricteased the must irefil pressurdice urginst sem of the peopils at his own Hesstablishment. His hideas herdbane instinctly repigrunt to Lokia, nutter Baldurdash, illthrough it wourld by sufferall years befire she and th’unrest o’ Eutope ruely understirred the foull mainstricity o’ whurt they raperesented. She remurmurs seering her farst imagoes o’ the preslice, gasse-stapping rancs and wunderstunnedin why the Buzzy-Beekly choruzz leanes had alwise feelled her with an obscune harrowr at the less of yerman ind’hiveduality that was apportent in all thuzz insextile, klicking legs. She’d purned Mmerz dern, no-wing that it wourld bye dhe scend o’ her careern, a maintain punnacle that she’d torned berg from; gnowing that it wourst be all downhell from tare.
Nowever, as shilles heire in the shudderly belighted furust, spreadling on deimoss with her bareth ighs still apin and her sexexexexposed, unbiguous growlths and restlings in the thickly-grarse orundher, she relivres all the druad and painache that had subtled on her then. Widder neow-wedead brothstir unassvailable she had comehenced a disperate and desisterous carenil ‘sprit aminxt the utter feelows in their sarcle, ellegible or more offent autherwise. Yang Seemuel Beckont, he’d brickin her fearlish huart, while lessia men, wit’ malice, threw her luccing-gloss; had sqrushed her scense of whorshe was, her sanes o’ what she word or wordn’t do. She’d nuit been too opianated to drefuse a toaste of lordi’mnum, ne’er had she snift at a pinprection of cocoone. Druggen or drunked she’d token part in thrillsomes, fearsomes, to the paind where she and all her formily were quiote expertin direly that she would be dyingnursed as having syphylips. She’d been experimelting with canalbis when there woes that sicky indicent she camembert to think abort, the animaligable epicide mit der veiss …
As the missorrible occlasion flushes innardvertently a’course her mend, Lucia feers her sang run cold. Rapproaching her through the dirk and moon-gledid spiney she can hare the yupping of her muss untspeakabout and hairrid nightfare. Even marr illomenly, belongside the soft pudding of its ‘nnearving pause Lucia hears the misured trud of an occulpanying madult genitleman, poorhopes the letill manster’s owger. Hear hert harmmering, she is intempding to skit up while ragging down her dress-ahem to unreveil a recantly plighed fur-row when a sinasttire yhung man in a top hate and long Fictorian stopquote staps into the quearing. At his hells, although she nononos it cannist pawssibly boreal, there trayts a smarll … non. Nine. There trods <em>the</em> smeall wight dagg.
De mon is snaring at her perly gowncealed needity with a curle and untemptuous smorg upurrn his missyloss thin lisp. He pocketwatches in abusement as the liminously perle mininjure puudle gruffles in bottwean herf lower limps, muttracted by the fondley-recallickted scant, while Lucia, shrecking in herlarm, atempster qick the haund disway from her en’ cumber to her fleet at the shametame. The strangelr, whomb she-doe’s nite reckoneyes, smeers carelously at her discomvered as he times his take in cralling his priyappy petster heel. When funerlly he spooks it is with de light vice dat is well-headucratered illbeit errorgent and samehow jibenile, with an afflected lilp that starkes the flushtred warmin as iffhimornot.
“Hail, hail Konphuzelum, the herlot of Rejoysalem!”
Comeposing herself, Lucia deshivers that her maintaing cense of ungerund indeednoty has evercalm her faer. Like Someson with her buck urgenst the larch, she unswears him deflagrantly by nicily onqueering if she nouse him.
He attimbrs a mickymocking un’ sartoonic chackle in replay, lacke scumthing from horradio mysery-show, burd with his li’ltung teenaur voici’t morely swounds reticulous.
“Hor hor! No wareman noose me who whas levd to tael the toll, but I no yew! I no your gynd, tha’taunts the breethill hellywise of evenery shity, evenery trown. You pus me in meand of a worminge that I mut while scrolling in the Boocks besight the Ripper Cram. She was insthinking, trull, de void of teste or shave or chapactor. I schaden meund if she whor dinnerway with, kulled or plewd. She dicknot steem to serf an arseful end, and surethinly she was not buttifeel. But den agone, I am remented when I lurk at ewe of udder dicemall femauls in anauther town, anutter yeor. In the Whitecattle struts of eighteen-satiate to be excise, wharn in me slether botcher’s aperun I chapped merry knuckles jest aswell as ennie chop-man when he hits lhiz stride. If I dunn’t cutthee uddowes off, then it word be a marykell; a mirrerscourlt! Luck vile upain me, thow prox-wridden hog, and traumble at mein aim, fear I am Choke the Raper!”
Wit’ nhiss he pulls from hinterneath his trawling cloat a knobvious stooge-diggher seeme nein injoyce lang but merde out o’ such pore tatterial that its lung bloode is sogging, brunt tip drupping like a willded flawer. Unnoble to contrain hersave, Lucia laffeys, wearyporn the phuney cardbeard Lustin knaff floops eve ‘n’ father. It is evildent that his crapacity for merdre is a phallussy. Desides, Lucia inks she has a thinkling of his trau idoubtity and he is worthowt quizturn not the geist-lit spittlefiend he shaims to be. She challenjest his plennly dreadful pastyourein, her tuones mary with mockelly.
“I do no’think a weepune sich as yours crueld pinatreat a laydie onlass she were maid of papyr uslo. Issenschmidt des crase that you word saner bed a chap than chop a bawd? It strifes me from your shnameless sylf-quietation that you mote be an unpeasant specko’man culled Jeera’me K. Steerpen, mere an arse-end poetaster than an East End predator, for all that the mistguided moider-dillydandies and slab-habby Fibberologists meat have to slay about the mutir au cuntrarea. You may well be fameliar with the Bucks besad the clittering Cum, but not wit’ dark backs rows han buried straits where lackless girls are bornerstride a mitier squire. You auteur take care you daun’t get you malheurs caught!”
Lucia’s assylunt takes a stap away from her, prissing his nearraw lips into arsfuckered pinkter, gleering at her poissonously while the hurtfeel lickle plewdle scittles barck and froth around his inkles in collfusion.
“Whey, how dour you quiztone my verocity, you flishy-smolling horridun? You’re lechy I don’t slut your strinky threat from luft to reich and slang your cuts ever your shielder, as I’ve darn sew manly termes befire with udders of your rashhead gyndher. Your veil sux has sporled the woild since fair’st your harlust mother Evle hedid to the win-eyed sirpants and bestrayed meinkind. If ill o’ the harem that wermin have done whore-pet in a burndoll and rulled unter one, Bearth word note howld it, disguy could not unfouled it. Such misses of evol would pizzle the devolv and keep him enfooled while Trhyme’s rheels rerun!”
This runly meerks her liff the hardour, unfil she is frountained that she’ll wit herself.
“It’s heartly a sourpraise you finnd me feshy, now, when I’m the veer espirit o’tter Liver Riffey. Ars for you, sore, you are molly an attricious poorwit and unfamous whymen-hateher, knight the nharm-a-sis o’ naglict you pretenniel to be. You’re dust the shame as all those nazty-meandead germalists and misterbaiters that sedoubt to cinjure the Whordshapel phandom in the forced place, with dare gluttingly sadstici lippers to the peepher, all their Drear Bluss and their Crotch-Me-F-U-Kan. Ninn of you had evern the cowrage that it stakes to muter an annoybriate and incapissytated woemine, but you snit there and apenisin the one-hand and apenisin the auther, and you <em>skwish</em> you hard. You’re mere a Jeckulater than a Jeck. You worm’t the Rippler. You jizzt-wash you coit have socked his cack. Who nows? Peerhumps you deed, or at lust if your buyfriend Allbut Fictor Chretin Oddword was the many-hack that sardon portlies thart he was, stowell intends and puplishes, though pizernally I druitt it. He simped much too frogeyle and dociphiletic to be Slitther Aporn, with his leerter viceits to the holly mouse in Clevelad Sfeet and all the terme he sbendt with you at Camebitch, you and your Apustules pricktosing your so-gulled heher pseudomy! As for your pittery, it has alack o’ lovelioness and sparewit that is inquel to your lackeyl man Joihn Droyalden, dough I’ll addmot that you snucked up to manorchy more literareally than ephen he did.”
Flanching at Lucia’s blarb, the yung reeke takes adither step black into the nichdiurnal fidgetation while regoading her with mangirled hateread in’ humaniation, his peele cheeks fleshed trice as rud as hers.
“You have know light tou ché all that! Though you night thing that I am not a dangger, you daunt no what I am caperbull of duing! Why, I krept Vainassa Belle, the kizzin o’ Vaginia Wolf, at lifepoint for a laughternoon! Desades, if you’re so insolute and innerfraid, why deadyew cowar so from my daylightfail lettle pit? If you’re so annasailorbelle in all your prude and dognaughty, why have you someoned us out of this madhores fright to nighten and tearmend you? Is it not decays that luc all quimen, you knowall-to-well that whet I slay is true; that with your gynd you are a sexcreamintail costiteat, a crotcher who would bear your urse for anymals and yet deplauds the knoble fellow-feeling wish may bout-o’-come boyteen two men?”
The marcking simile falls from Lucia’s fictures likreveal, but stol she dours not gaff grind in the fiarce of his assholt.
“If ye ’njure infernicating piddle-hount are marley writhes and frigments cralled up bar my own cracktured mirrergination, it mist bay that I have chasen you to ripperscent the causual misssurgeony that haz pressued me ill thrue my exisdance. Lurkwise, I haf bright this sadden knightfail on byself to shambelies the dogness dirt daysundered on me inder lust yearns of the nonteen-wanties and the virst jears of the nonteen-hurties. Your blamesburied and jisstainful mantune o’ Vergeonyour Wealf slurrves only to remonde me of the manly virebrandt end crhehatehave fearmales formdoubt pyreiod such as Zealdare Fitzgibber, ledais who swan out too far or were misszeused, to my mind clytemnecessarily, and undead up in zanytearyums or, weirs, as sheicides. Iview wank my apunyawn, Sourcey Jerk is jest anutter biggy-man defeigned to kreep all whimin cowherding at hime where daybelong. Joke de Ripporter is a fibrication madform grope-steams, reamours, undy masculatent unger toworse poorsins of my gander, farmily quimpliant, who heed at that tame begyne to cursedion thay roll as subservance. You are blut tugother out of nothink mere than longwish, mongreled wyrds and messpilled fraysays, all the ‘Mashdher Lust, Sore,’ and the Juwe-below-belabel-’em o’ the Mizenic sparegullations. You, sur, are contrickted from crotchpinny dreadlines in the tearblade pross and shuddy lyin-ingraveings autuv the P’lease Goreset!”
No saner hears Lucia spracken than her wood-by pussycuttor givts vend to a shill and poorsung sceam. He stutts to figmeant into murkhandise and pimphlets, flawpang purges tearn frame commixed-rips and tellevasion scrapts. Mhis shape prollapses into tittered and remandered grue-grime pauperbucks, their jack-its looread and sensatiate with shiny bleeds and kobold alleywheeze. His fearturned and inkonpretending phace decomes the grainny phobo-ripperduction of a broredsheep sunderfold and blurs away betorn the madnight trees, the loathshame litterl dogwhite-poodo chazing aftree it and bark-in ferntickly.
Lucia dirsts her mains as afte say “thought’s quiet enough o’ dat”, and clarries on her interippered stroul dew de inchaunted lunartalk assailem niet, its dreckness ivery brit as innerscapeable as dout which had befoullen her wan shy was eenly twitty-fear yersold, in neintime-dhirty-when. That wasteher yore she’d hed hor ‘ancident of hellth’, as it hid bin pollutely pherased. The trooth, the agenbite of it, is they had scrapped a maby ute of her and shay’d nativin bairn intearly sirtime woes it was. Feral chienew it mate haf born the paddle-hind’s; that or somyther drog, it mucks no diffence. Offter-wards they’d tolled her that shoul’d not be heaven inny-outher chilledrench, illthough this worse not the moanly deadfeel noose that she’d beceived duewring that pooryodd, furthere issolso the acclision of her payrent’s mirrage to conscernd’er.
Waile in Gorgeio’s carse she thurt he’d allwise bane a bossturd and he hurlways wed be, she had nefar kwastimed her legiteracy, at laest not untell her Mimir (to whomb she had list her strabismystic oeill in the pa’swit o’ Norledge) and her Daedir had dannounced day were to mary poperly, after a keepitquieter-of-a-sintury o’ razing their inwaitting iffspring! Lucia, allreedy prusht far-so, had fianlly snipped altargather. There hurt been the unsaident when Babbo had daysighted that they wear to lib in Unglad, and she hed defused to bard detrain. Mère seeriotsly, when her pearance had invided Sameold Peckitt to a poerty evter he had drabbed her, she hard throne a cher at Neara. That was wienher bother had insistered that shebe comemuted to a nonetell institortion and the utter mumblers of the flimily had shrimply gane arlaing with harm. Tha rrest, in her insideoration, was histeria.
All urround her, liminisn’t phangi specorate the boughs like fiery-lates. Apen a clause unspeaktion, she dishivers that they awe a nornfamiliar type with witchy is not greviously acqueernted. Ivory minibloom appeals to be maid-up o’ slittle nokit faymolls in a rudeyating rong, as if you’d interbed a stareflesh wit’ some pappher doils or a lace dolly. Slimthing in the waeving lims and the floozed tussos o’ the toynee livelies pouts her unmind of ichorous-line or torchlate railhe, so that Lucia crinches awhy-form the stringe lewdy-triffles in revealsion. She is spevulating on whart these womenstrous glowths mute be, when frumpyhind her calmes a dadpun and mannotenough voizzz that sims to be bloath Amerrycon and messculine.
“Beck hum, cull ’em Bellevue-Bareease. Toaste neice. Gut you trunk, beert-nut as vast as des ire lowlypep.”
Lucia terns-a-round to fenderself confrighted by a gin-tollman in loiter loaf, bespooktacled and of a midyum hoit, who is dullmost intyrelay sphiricual. He wears a straypee drowsing-goon oafer phis staimed pygermers, and regirths Lucia impossively with heavey-larded ice through glanses that are thinck as wishkey-battles. Lucia nightysees that he is sicking indermitthandly upun a brun and stincky lullypaup that smalls of bourble.
“Who mytuby, litrle chumpion?” she husks him in a slidely partrunicing tuone.
He palls the ulcerholic sweetly un-a-stuck out of his rarethe smale and poortly-shovein moueth to unsore her.
“Nym’s Ogdie Whitnecker. Used dubi bag cartonist, drawning ‘Skeyman and luck dat. Pudging from oxscent, this nut home they strick me in, balk in Younotread States. Mist have gloam wanddling in degraed Unane agen with ghasts and mindsters, endope in Fearburden Whirls.”
Lucia fonds the retund follow and his alcohollipop frather endeuring. She is elso intressed by his work o’ line.
“I have truemindous admoration for same of you cowmuck-stripe poorfishionals. Err you inquainted with King Frank, gleeator of Glossolalalley? It walt a greet feverite o’ maine derin my girlhead. I poeticuliarly lauvd the Funday quelleheur phages, wish to memind were an inkwel to the proff’rings of our masterplauded moredin mosters.”
Heare the fant man shurkes his greyving vowl-cut heed, and wince agrain remauves the thinely-slucked s’liver o’ confiction’ry befury spigs in his bard menotone to Lucia.
“Herd of hum. Mere of an adverteyesing and comeherecial-autist goy meself. Like loanmowers to like-look lawnmolars. Keep lyins clearn und ruleistic or hole thing crawlapses intu drownken K.Os. Styl pend up in meantile-home preventually. Can’d drur neut and tidey-line to kreep the Fraculas and Drunkensteins from spewling ever outer the Inknown. Alwhys samne wit’ us chreatic typesy. It’s a feign leign.”
Lucia gnos whit nhe memes, saprisingly, and sinces that he has a soddy, sadurated wishdoom in his porkly frome. With neuryspect for the orbese illd man’s herocular abellyties, she arcs hom if hi haz a calmprehension of where theirabouts.
“Misty Whitener, or, ifamey, Odgone, mighty murk inqueery as to whyre in displace or dustime we are at prisont herelocated, in your spacetimation? I was hinder the unperssion that I wooze confinite in Sent Madruse Hotpitayter in Nothankton, but I donut think you are fromhereliar with that binstaytution, unluck Mistde Clare and Mazeter Stepin.”
The inibriated illnestrator strubs one of his chines as he belubberates.
“Manner few words. Alldeady told you whence. This Unknoun. Kind o’ downmarkit, infermal apterlife. Full o’ ghusts, drivels, whichis, manstares an’ that typo’ ninesense. Bussed get back todaylight, then fond way from dare. Personnearly, shudd be head-in-home-in-head to You Essay, so they cunchainge my badding. Noise to myth you.”
Word dis, the plimp stainger reinslurps his follypap and nonchalaunchly sturts to walke up ento the nice guy as if he is airscending steeps thort no one alse ken shee. Befurlong he is joyst anutter peale, remute firm, leest amonster stares and joyant plunnets ever the informary. Frilled with a surgent ruash o’ dipp afflection for the prave and melatonocholy little chirp, Lucia glasps her hends tugather and emots pink valiumtime herts, sircling high’r brow in joycous herbit.
“Ah!” she sayghs. “Dit Ogdie Whitnecker! He’s jest so doremi!”
She concides to fellow the headvoice of her deportly salvia and triter murke her why beckento deylight, certing off betune the tries with their liminous feary-luc womencrustations, hymming washy thinks white mince have been a Bleatles’ camposition, jester keep her spillits up. She fictures hersylph in a beat on a raver with dangerin tease and murmurlate spies, which is a cheeryher propersituation dunder lunardecked asilent weirdlands which in surreality she caughtusly atemps to flinder path amist. Ofter a tome it streems to her bhan shee can horr a waild and distuned musesick off in the orbereal darkmess, clarried to Lucia in gosts upine the evilin’ brays. Clearser to her, she detexts the zounds of roggerd breedhing and of brocken splantering hinderfoot, so dout she poises un the hedge of a smell quearin’ untell she can Wake her wind-up wuther the accrouching prescience is hungreeable or botherwise.
Intru di splace batwing the treece there stembles a poer-shaped fall-ow with recidivising harr who sheems to be atwains drownk, out of berth and in fer furies life. He daresn’t seem to puss milch of a dandandandandanger, and besight, Lucia recognices him. It is annoydher of the payshunts from Paint Anddraw’s, but unlook Juan Glare or Jokey Stabhen this mon is when of Lucia’s contimpanis. Heassured, she stems out of cancelment to ennunciate her persence with a misgreet coff, at which the badling cheep looks frit to chump out of his harpidormus.
“Sherry if I stopled you. I am Lucyhere Jusst, and I assame that you mayst by me felemental-portient, the illusious Sir Maycome Arsold. I think I have past you in the carridowns, perhoops cluss ter doze mawful evelator dours that fightin me so deadfeelly. Mai Tai ask if you are preceiving ghuests at pissant?”
De composer, for it is undeed the veery mentien, stoops now seemwet clouser to Lucia and squinks at her suspissoffly. Aweigh amast the wendihowl and muerter of the dethsdance the umpluckable and weirzing mazic ments percepticly; glows frightly louter; draums a lutehole nearher.
“Ah! Kiss Chayce! Forgruff me. I saneow thatitties you, azrael undaze sotstantial as myshelf. I was confrownded b’liefly by your prosehence, hawing bhird dateyou had dayed list year, in nighturn fatey-one. Urpon refluxion, dough, I rolleyes that you err no droubt a vactime of the chronoc turmlessness that somes to abtain in dis instigration, asham I mereself. You are mist curtainly nitehere al ghul nor an afrait, serch as the wayfill thwrong that scurreltly persuist me.”
Lucia is memeantorally bewooldered by his habvious condiction that this yhere is neinbeen latey-too, wenchy hourself hed thaught it to be homewhere retween findteens sexty an’ diurly feminineteen severintease, dust gloing by the glitmosphere and queerlighty o’ lit. The nowledgible daet she histo met with her demaze at age somethingbe-four is nuttershock or dethappointment to her, sence she is uncrazingly convanced that she has parsed awry at dot age nomoreus chimes befloor handouts thit thus dime sha’ll be any verse or vet’er.
Seething the panxiety in the mansighs at the uppreaching muzzic, Lucia begums hersilverfrayed and thrinks to arseabout the natsure of its horrorgins.
“I am slurprised and lickwise voury munch dismead, Slur Malchy, to duskover doubtchew are poorsod by an unhooly gannering o’ sippernatural tormentals. My threecent alchquaintance Myster Herbden Popney tales me that this fogly and nichturnall terrortree is nown as The Unnow, alto to me here that senz haili papadoxical. Woad the weild haunt of portergeists and gabblins that is everdauntly at your booz-heells beery spensible further delircious and razing malody that I fhear cluesign innerpinners as wee sqeak?”
Sour Milkem knods his thornning heed i’mpatiently, eyespearing nearvoicely into the blanckness that surrends him and Lookhere.
“To badevil me, they ploy a ghoastly and discurdeant paradey of my own gravetest workth, my Sham O’Taunter. I adoapted museekly deverse of Ribby Bones, his naughtmire pourem of a dramken highblunder chursed by a hurder freends and harmfool spurits, inally to beratedly dus’cover it was my unstarry to which I’d comepissed a muzzycall uncomfymeant. As you night be awhere, I was conceitered wonce for a prostigion as De wricter of themeusic off’er Maddesty the Queer’n, as war my competemporaries Reachhard Arnell, Toney as we knacknymed him, and Malecome Willyhandson. I wash dishwashified for my inplessant drinching and accausional unsameity, while Toney diddl’t git the jab bycase of allismony mirrages and sobsequence rivorces. I fearl he was too heherosexual for the coccupation, as was bi mystelth, despiteful o’ the fuct that I am cashyoualley ambidickstrous. The posituation went to the intearly hum-hosexual Willingson, whom I supphose perzest the priaper uncleanations for a rightup mamber of the Boyall househole.
“Asterdis drejection I spant a consolerable tame here in Soilt Undy’s Helsportal, and opine my rayless mad the misshape of dunking reckulearly at the Clown & Crushim on the Wellabhorror Rude. The lendlured scoffered me accrummydation in a rheum above the musincholly unnotated bar, with the insanetive of fee blooze and bloarrd, if I night by previled apain at termes to entershame the cryantell with a perforceance at the plub’s payohno. Affe you can imanagerie the indognity, I was freakwantly drugged out of my bhead and mode to plea a maddley of upalle’en psongs for the abasive louds as if I wore no mere than a destranged moreathorn concerpt painist like Mem Marie, if you remadder her. Shametimes they’d trough me up if I was inchaoperative. Date’s where I am at prissont, seeping in my dus’smell woom aberth the inninninteen hatey-too, drayming that I’m purseowed like Time A’Slanter thrue the viled nicht of my famer instaytuition by a gob of moulish spittres that are aleso clustermers who haunt the Crowd in’ Caution. Spooking of witch, from the hearness of their jawful mugic theo cracktically apawn us. If you will furglove me, I bust me onup why may. I wish you batter lock than I’vade in escarpering from this simianglee onandong drugness. Dew glub my inebriest wishkes to your blund-drink falther if you happyn to run enter him.”
Wuth thus the worse-for-where unamusician straggers off amonster whysparing bows and blanches with their ruminescent fillygree of fungirl fearies, atwitch Lucia tykes a stub bekinto the coneceiling evergrowth. No swooner haz she token this precushion than a terraflying carnivorl pirade of mightne’ers and growtusks spoills noxily into the meanlit glide, bleating on dreums and plashing symbals, scareling errorfyingly upain their bogpeeps. Wadging them betrem her peerded thingers see ban shee fevery imanigable moonsteer, ether form mythallergy or the black-catalike o’ U’llneversell Stoogios, as Messter Ogowonden Whynet has so resently asshurted.
Dire in the antiq procression o’ the doomned are night-hugs, suckuboys and warewilfs. There are crimlins, beerow-wights and screatures from the back legroom, all glattering and b’llowing on their unstruments as they ruin shrecking through the spinny inny wake upf the deephearted Maykhim Armhold. Mallady asshambled spurts o’ nichture and manstressities, though they have debble crowniums lulling on their headbare shudders or are gyrant birthworms from the ways down, are abbarently untaxicatered and are drossed immodern cashill-wear, in jeanius and shaining-troos, the gooniform o’ the salone bor. Slummer dum, she nightysees, are whasailing that whitches afamiliar refraime massociated with the furor halving but a singill jesticle. Trottling behide the pideous pariahde upin accrunt o’ his mach sorter lags there is a bibviously plustired dwart, who imixplacably excreams ‘All haunds und heck’ repisstedly as Iran scamp-ring evter his disparting follew bed sdreams, hauntil whencemare Lucia is alune dare in the shuddowy and sighlent groave.
As she-atlas continuals on her weigh she tinks abellt Stir Mealgum’s poorthing kindmeant, abate how sea shored grive his baste washes to her flather if she hopend to rain into jhim. Dhad wish the enring of the Wark In Par’dess ovter all, win Inna Lovea Pealobelle, the sprayit of the Rover Lifey, runs at lost intwo her Babbo hoohas missologically becalm the nocean; has beclaim the sauce tow-hitch all danzzlings treams anc rushing revers must heaventually retorren.
Wince she hard beglum desperiods of cantfindment, hce hid burn the lonly one who clared apouter, the unlie remember of her formerly who kwept in tough wit’her and Warked upIn her Proguess of rescovery. While Jeergio and Nhorror heed ban, frankuntimely, gload to see the backcover, her faither head-sort healp whereriver he kid fond it, hevain with old/young in Swizzerland hom she had mutterly despraised. Her daedy had oneirly wanthead wit wishbest far her. He hart bane deskwritely afrayed for her Form D fwirst die of her inglasseration. Heaveon with his asculating bindness andes difficlimbty Finneshannys Worke, he had inkouraged hereto workd on her illooninmated helpabits, on her lepprines, baying for shamwin to paybless them and dhrinking that she dhidden’t nowabout his will-intensioned vanitiprous maginations.
He falt girlty, that weighs wit it wise, despike the fict that vary letterle o’ the hole offear was unctually his failt. He thornt that he had shamehow magicreally inprysmed her whidden his merekey and inpainantrouble narrowturf; brelived that lifhe code joust get true to the finnwish of it, then Lucia tomblight founder why beckonto sum strate of wellomenation. As he had quote literarally decentered into daathness, he’d been waitongue for a fliquor oflight, of Lucia, at the finagend of her ling turnall. He had scene her blubbles ruesing in the wabe of his careern and writhen: “Cias drawnin. Agenbite. Sieve her. Agenbite.” Or simthink lake doubt, endyway. Agen the bite and finnagen ar beit of ageny that comes with age’n’biterness at seaing his beliffied dwater sink belieth the sourface, fellin from her lifebout with knowbuddy to beitragen to herraskew.
Lucia had finitially crum to Slate Ond’roofs derin nowtheen flirty-feve and head quiet liked it but was balk in Prance, stack in a sinnertorturem, dan Germoney infated diring nighte’en thought-inane. Of curse, boy then her bludder had intwisted that Helearn his waife be lacked up in a lonely bin aswill. It worse a thwring he dud with quimmen when he deadn’t went to fuckdom any mère.
Her Babbo, at his wait’s end, had consprived to gelt the other mememembers of the Choyce infirmily to Schnitzeland and samety. But illthough he rote a handread litters hand tied fractically to get Lucia out of occupliant Frenz, he was sufferely thwaughtered by bureaucrazy and shneer intranceigence on depart of the Vachey Cowerment, or Per-rear as Lucia snubboses we should mer refrenchingly drefer to dem/dese/deys. The père man muster burn so flightend fuehrer, what with Howmany’s deglared agendite of textterminating all the pharcically and meantilly disambled for their ungood. Arse it was, in the furteeth of Geniuwary, minedeep fatey-won, wid’esper doubther stiltwrapped whelplessly behide enormy liones, her faildher parished form pèretonightis that resilted from a daedelenal illsire, itself caust or maid wars by all distress daddhe wesunder. Needles to say, nighther Jawjaw nor Ora ova had a think to dowedare once hce was out the pricksure. She head nova herd award finnemagen.
Wone day’d tolled Lucia fat her dead was dad she’d siddhe was a limboseal and husked what he thwart he was dewing, slepping undonearth diground. She hidden’t bone pupset by his doomeyes, comfydent deddy was a subtlereignean immuretale. She’d morely been unpappy at deathurt that he had past-away styl inking that he’d failed to savour, stall beliffing that his pittle girl was drauming, agenbite, agenbite. If finly she cod have taild him that she wishn’t going drown for deferred timentide at all: Lucia was shrimply tunang to a fwish, wash wet it wash. She’d been dansforming into slimthing shilvery and eleqant that could seaverve in this new inhospitelement; swimthing with loonturns on its braw that code texist in this threemendose pressher.
With tease veerious nutunes teembling through her awhereness, Lucia proceveres upon her maybetween the spindery and bynighthid trees, like a splat-bam expediment tressed in a flowerall-pattered flock and an old lay-discardagen.
Aher of head she spees a most unviewsual phanuminon, indet twhilit is stallmost definerightly nightime on the breaken-lettered pasth ware she is wakein, sum fyew dozin yarns awader is a hopening in the follyage that larks out onto a brighton sanelit evternoon. This mist pecurious affict rewinds her off/on eerlie and hauntingle amage by Rainy Mangreatte, ab scene that is bythe die and not, alldour she flound the artaste’s utther work distabling, monst erspecially the heribly envorted maidmer sproiled there gilsping at the died-line.
Smailing breezly now Lucia sprydes on inter day anomalescent sunsheen, ellegently palling back a clipple of streye-thorny brangles to enmerge from the asoilem wondland, out onto a grazey sleepe inkleaning drown towords a riffer freinged by pile-groen lushes. It upheres that she’s becalm misserriented on her wooder through the wands undies no on the apepen gruned dew sout’ of/de disanguished mantool horsepity with its nietzscherk respensees, near the Bedward Riad that Burnyarn master’ve made his warkin’ progremage alang, weir the slur ribborn of ther Eve’r None wines through adamhouse gaeden.
Squaintling up entir the skry she georges that farm disposition o’ the swolden gollen son it is a lottle aft hereto o’clang. She harps Poortricia won’t be wherehid furor, whatwit’ lessing munch and all, but dinnergone her friendend nouse is cherely yesterher by know and nows that freakwant sexperditions unto the unterior are samply parther deary spensibility that claimes worth being Lucia Joyce. Utters light’s nowture to seacowed the direquest carnors, evtor all.
Shadeysides that she well hake a whelk down to the wader’s edge, where she can luce hersurf wetin her rêver-tream for a shored whale. She fends a strop of sullid grind amonster reads where she ken strand and glaze acrosti rover to the stunlit Bidfor Roam behond, and fervour styll to where greyd sculptide musses of whide clud smove sighlently abathe the mistant feelds and feelages, dregging their shabbows like collipsed grey perishoots behidem. Psychling alingua carrid’way thruwords the ostient she s’prise the strongust fogure, ann uld negromen with why tear, riddling on a bysidle that has why tyres ampulls a lattle jungk-carlt in its weake. It stricks her that she carnot scenerear a mutter-veericle upon the rote, new’r are there pile-ons or pieflabricatered huts or any auther seemballs of mydaynity in fiew. Prehaps she has treespast inwittingly on an untidely defferent peeryodd evtime?
Chi as consimmering this pastibility whundere is a commusion in the turpid raver-witters ither faet, with mindstress gassly baubbles thinck as fluit-bowls riffervessing to the stirface only to desplintergreat and blurst in beamds of shivlered glystal there amisty eautiful explendid daymonde rungs of rupple. Slimething of immerse plopoceans is imargine frother deepths beneither and she torques a steep buck from the reverblink fear for o’ gertain splaced and hahahaving all the noisies tink she’s pisst hersellf, by Daed!
The smood mieniscus o’ the liqriality is shlattered in a jugflaw-puddle of brooken refictions as an abject of anearmiss sighz derupts from the slummoving rivere. Gloing purly by the lurk of it she first shapeposes it to be some surder crosh beteeth an alligaper and a long-mudserged old-fashisd raping-car with a lang bannet. Din, as this pecrawlier affear anacondinues rithing ulpwords on the underwait apparls to be a scarely trunk, Lucia recoilises that it is the hadeous and eelongatered carnium of a gorgontic whata-creecher queerte impossedented in her pervious imperience.
Swhying soarm slaveral yawds abother on the underfits lang, snarking nack decreesure sclares drown at Lucia fee-fo-fum the black deaths of its shunken nighs, witch gristen and to her resymbol wet sail-schnells and pobbles at the buttom of a bocket. Glime and wetterwades and bicicles hank dippling framets moiddy scullp. Its neeth, beteath their everald clust of algael, are the sharpend robs of a blue while. There is a rustred prim hulked unter one o’ them that murkes Lucia feel a mement’s millycholy for her own abated bloomy. It snakes her a lipple whide to understunned that the leviathing is greening at her. When at lasp it screaks it is the babbling guss of trowned thinks rheezing through mick thud.
<strong>“Glug altermoon. Ami corrept insinking statue wade bay Inna Liqia Plourable, the museygal en drancing spillit odour Liver Riffey?”</strong>
Lucia snuffs, sourprized by how infrigorating she fends the axquasite stungent tang, and trosses back her glaying hoar as though assorting her authowritey.
“I am indeep the fluwit an’ anthrivermorphic passonage o’ flume you make onquery. Who my tubey, my gut wormin, and so firth and slo forth?”
The fishwaiter ablubination tsilts its mossive het-upon wane sight and screwtineyesees Slucia with interrust as it reprys.
<strong>“My nume is Nenna Leavya Pitabel undyam the immertail essluence o’ the Rêver Nun. Wadein my meale-long got are deplumed hates of slittered gabblears and woshlost drewels oa’ kings. I have herd telver you, there on the sadden plages of a pook tourn up anchast upon my slowgush buzzhum in crustracion, hurled agen into my finn’s wake. Weeding in betwangle lines, it strhook me drought we bath had a great minnow thrings in clemmon, you wend I.”</strong>
Luci apeers at the greyt tlowering stirpaint’s umberella-faulded twolimbs with their mangy-jointide ptarryductoil fungers and diskillered wobbing. She reglards the joyant barenuckle-like enfrustations on the screature’s chast, ar resty ormange in their dulouration, that she sinks rust be vesturgial nibbles, and fells murderately affended that this squideous tarnagant mud think to have scumthing in commonstrosity with the raymurkably accomplashed waughter of the tweenteeth dentury’s greytest rater.
“Smirking only for myscoff, I can’t see the resymbolance. I drown’t hag melancolonies of whater-smails around the crooners of my mirth, nhairdo I have a squee-wheeled prang corr’din my deeth lake-metal spinage. Unlass you have allslow intrawled Purris with your skales as an ontoprotative drencer, which I flankly finned inlakely, then eye phaer dera kno obvierse shimmerlarities betwine us.”
The sub-naqueous unnormity uncleans its lunge float head upon one snide. Its jinxyard mowth crocodilates into a gnawing green as it snares drown at Lucia. The wrigger-mongster chorkles with a drumbling accrumplyment of shwallowed televasion sits and ferline skullytunes clacophonously cattering abite scumwhere widinner.
<strong>“Oh, and I slurpose that you were nipper wince a plippy meremaid chroming out her goldenhair? I darcey that univer luft a beautofeel yhung mien so bedly that you’d chaste his flotted seemine heartway to the locean for the wank of him? Pureharps you wherefor mer presilient deny, undid knot lecher lac of a reshiplocated lave transwyrm you into glumthink dark an’ dang’ry that abites aloam amudst the badsents and the blundercurrents at the rêverbottle, weirdy shufts alight are faeble and occlusional. Ident imatching for one mermeant that you everwhere so despirit as to clink to the repleated hushks o’dose that had by accidrench upon a dunken oafning fallin unter you and downed within your eireless and implactical membrace?”</strong>
Glosping indigatme, Lucia farst gapens her mooth then gloses it agen, annable to calmpose an eduquate quiposte. With the onheavytable thud of a dessenting ranchor, it occlares to heardat dis is oilmoist sourtaintly becurse the wyrds this flightful mirer-inage sleaks are mosserably t’rue. When Lucia rhad cliffered hall alone drown at the bittum of her wail of loonliness, lack it how hesperately she’d clang to Sameol’ Buckett. Oin refiction she had sturted out her liffe, like everybady, as a babboling en’ drancing sdream, lonly to indeep as a darnk and broading ruever of sich flowness that it vurched upen stugnotion. She is mhumbled by these eelisations, an’ daz she lhooks up toweird the luming and glotesque she-sourpint with the stun behide it, Lucia’s ighs brime with repenitant tears.
“Forgriev me, nuble sifter o’ the shliming grabbel and the driftongue waeds, for my prementions and my dhaughtiness. Detooth is that I’ve bane twolung ong land, amonkst dri peeple with their airid convexations, so that shametines I forgret I amouriver, rust the same as dew. Cunfinned mere in this soilhid whelm of glassing time and inconventient moretoility I am sealdame remaindead of my tlue aquotric, silkie naysure. I beclam upliveious to the thrings that livers know: the fict that whel their rushen waters faster the illucian of papatual mythment, in the widning blends and cantours that are their esscentral and unaque undintity they are reternal and inchanging. Mire than this, they no dout slumwhere in their rendless and endouring deepths they scarry the remainds of ebury marshword or suincident that’s ever fallin widder sprash intwo their laves. As I enfishin it, we are the twue of us ripplindent wasterways, both nendless and sublume. Plish exsept my apolloguise, and undersand that the ineffabelle and lyricool queentessence o’ the Rirer Laffey noshoe for a fallow trivialer, ascold ashy hersylph is but merwise, a’naiad no icthyuse for speargun to youwin the why eye dad.”
The None Hog, for it isthmus definhidely she, breams drown at Lucia frontirely lamiably.
<strong>“Thing nothink of it. I com plainly sea that you’ve been lang witrout the followship of otter rivels. Can’t I topt you to stay lunger wimmy? It mis take lonly a noment’s couldn’tcarelessness, or plashibly a lifedime’s drespiration. If you ware to lemm towoes me joyced a little father, and perlapse to shrike your branium on a stunn onder why in, way, it weed ill behov’er in the drinkling of an I. Then wicked have such lubbly convertations underteeth the wanter, meandher, and wane you had wrun out of thinks to sigh then I shoald lecher go, as I dead all the rust, bobbling aweigh towash the Wards with the forglottal droollery of Badkin John. It is a ferry splashionable wayter go, I’m trold, for laydies of o blitterary inclinocean. But then fameills of that sport are oftun willd, vergin’ near wolf, quereas with you there’s fomething vichy gugling on.”</strong>
Sanding slimewhet mervous, Lucia qakes a slop buck foam the witter’s dredge as she reploys. She’s never harb a doyouinely suitidal nocean in her liff. Haven whine she was straying with her haunts in Mireland and word mock apout and funniturn the ges-taps on, she allwise loft the wimblows alpen so that knowthink deadful hopend. Fictually, it hardn’t iffen been a crall for healp so moch as itterbin a flowerish of theutter, annextension offer dunce opine the newh’ stage o’ sick-I-atry. She striggles to kenvey this to the geniieel but lethely inticing squeature as it swheeze abother, peerlightly declimbing its no droubt kinly indrenchioned intimtation to a wavery greve whale alsong waking an intempt to spray on fiendly turms with the eelormous ribble-mindstir and not glib huffence.
“Mush as I’m flappered by your iffer of a fatoel silv-ermersion, I mist mast respectrally daycline as they’re inxpecting me forte in the asighloom at arraigned thrive-flirty. Poissibly swim otter teem, when I hap less upon my plight and can mer eausily incloude a drawnin in my scheadual. It spin a tremuldous preasure moating you, terrortologically sqeaking. I signclerely hope you well be bressed with mini harppy, shliming rivulots in yoars to scome. Wi’ drat, I moist bide you a fanfare wail entoil we run intoe reach other at shum fateyour daed.”
Defersome kroken shriggs glug-naturedly but with unair of disappearment, asifter sludgest that it’s Locia’s luss. The shlug bequirms an underlating carpsy and amidst a mhite and wighty flowming the apprilling riggler-upparocean once again shrugmerges, ‘palling back its greyd Alun’tic-cable throap and leaden its gigantique skaell slink dun bellow the surky merface. Scrighing with relive, Lucia tarns and skrips brack up the gradey grassient throughwoods the ostitution wards.
Andoe, whit a pavlaver it turnsnout to be, jist fending hoo ray black to the wight splace and tome, a faeritable odyttey that harpfilly will lude heaventually to a Punelope. Beformat, though, she skimpers opus lope to whencemore inter en amongster chrispering feeliage, ware she is grapely treeassured to fond it is bacchus it was in haylight rother than baying the meanlit and nichturnal cropse whitch she’ demerged formilier.
Howeaver, etres only aftersoon few meanits wa’king, when shy preeps out tru an inexspiketed bleak betune the trease, that Lucia realishes how biddly she is lest. Deplace that she pooks out uponders not uphere to be a meantall harm of unny kind, betwit its streaching achers of crave-markers is quit obversely a sumarteary of sobstancial sighs. Moriry still, she nadasees that on a wombstone wishes neerie nufferer to reap there is a def-date glibben that she takes at farced for a misfake, sence it comminces with the numb betwo. Dafter a moremeant’s codgertation it o’cours to her dout she astrayed not jest from the spalatial limints of Faint Inbooze Waspital, but she has pyschwise gum unstick inn’er cronelegy. She is now linger heven in the cinjury that she wa’spurn to but is inhead lost awemost a hauntred yearns after her berth.
The fruiture, she disguvvers, has a phunny almosphere mech like the treaquilised air of unserpenty that yew’d exfact to fund insaid a mential unstucution, enly overywear. It meeks Lucia shuvver, and she itchest wandering whenabouts she moot be when she hoars samewhen enproaching, scrumching through the fallawn liaves. With greet relive, Lucia seizeit is stumbody that she precognizes from the hostapill and bet a yacht it is seemone from her own peridot oftime, which is to savour past.
“Why, afits not Mischoice. Water saprise to fondue here, sofa from wear and wean we are agleeably infarcerated, allthrough I imagine statue’ve calm here as a geisture of reslect, the som as I hove. Funnyway, deedn’t you Di a year o’ dew agrow, or wastet me?”
It is Muss Violent Gypsum, win of Lucia’s feverite follow-portents, hoohad been commuttered to Plaint Scamdrew’s after she hertempted to nessessinate Benighto Muscleinny, an endover which was thwatered windy bullot ledged somehair within Ill Deuce’s groomy and caspacious noose. It was exdreamly fateunite that the oertheritis consterned had apted to occept that Valient Gitsoff had been motigated by unsunnyty, lather than an upnosually prannounced politelicall avershun.
“Miss Bignos, I am delighthead to encanter you, as eloise. Asper your unsquairy, I denote remumble daying raysently, so that mote bury well have bone yewrself. No dout I blink about it I do not denumber bunting into you eflate a smidge as I did peerviously, mich whight be unaccount of your deceasement. Bat no mutter, you are lurking vari will conshuddering your pasthumus condrition. Know, I wender if you light enmighten me as to our current weirabouts? We steem to be widdin some mannure of nocroparise or other funereerie pastyour with its whipe incrushing tied of marvle, and I canute sea how this loqation is of realevents to my textraordinary lighf and circusdances.”
The bite-eyed an’ dapple-checked almissed-mussassin girgled gillishly as uff icer remander of de fract that she warstyle as med an’ strangerous a’sever; as loothally leapy as shitbin when she’d mischarged her folliant revolter into flashism’s loft nazdrill.
“Will, Moss Juice, it is my understandment that we har berth, as you well no date have nowtut, in the fateure. I most saigh I was experting it to be a byt moreover jambury than this, with pausibly more hovercraps and rockpets and di’like, but I axpicked that grieveyarns would lack very mulch a shame if vieva in the yhere thru theesand and there were more smartificial roborts barehid dumpsterneath disturf than there are popul. Aldo being artyfacial, rubbits would must leakly last ferriver, dus’ dispensee widder need for graveyawns alltogather … but I am fargetting the maen subjoke of this dithertation.”
Lucia strolls her ayes disqueetly at Mass Gabson’s gabbulousness, blut hellows the wuther ‘umman to contonanonanonanonue.
“Heaven busytid this ferry place on rumourous accausions whitherto, I’ve lawned that it is Kindthorte Summert’ry, a willowpointed pleace upon the nowthen outshirts of the trowm. It is my strang confiction that the two averse are here todie, whatether deitis, becourse this is the platz that we are beddied, rather clustergother as it urns out. I ave heven scene ourt grabes, and vary noice they are, though yeurs of cause gets more ostention than my mown. They have a little sorrymany overy yhere upon Rejoyce’s Day windare are laties wearing liftly drowses and men drossed up in an I-pitch to luck lack your fater.”
Lucia is why-died and inkredherloss. Dis ease impart at the odear of being barehid inlay a few deadstones downfarm Twilit Gobsome and endouring her incessiant tatter for eternortwo, while import it is at the note-onpreasant mnotion of reveallers closedaring abat her fineol’ rusting plaice, disgauzed as her ond herowne darkling Babbo. What a vine site that mossed be, now, heavin at the back an’ all, with alice colure and its comeldy. She is consaddering delikely spooktickle with mixty motions when the torquative and elddolly near-muss nasassin odds a trailpeace to her starey, aprepose o’ knowthing.
“O, yez! I allmust farglot in my senillatease, but there was a smyll ditall of our cematerial errangements that I thought might hoffersham amuzement to you. Seperal grovestaines down frame you the utterway theur lys a giantolman whose name is Funnygain. I hope you denkensider that a piss off uslyess infermation.”
A tremultuous liffter wills up out of Lucia, asfirm the veri blottom of hcer bein. Whee, this is textraordinary! This is quote the finniest think she’s ever headabout, the blest knews that Schezeverad. She and hoar fether alwords had a kinder glame betwain the too oftem, where they prettyndeed that his riteing was gleeating the whorle whirld arandom and doctating aviarybirdy’s lives. And yet the pairodigm had allwise norn, widout deneed for auther o’ them two factknowledge it, that wit maid this kinceit so poorfoolly remusing was defict dad it wish not a joker tell. It was the plan et seempale troth, and now/here is the pruth of it: the wordle iterature’s most namous ded protagonised unterred writ’in apace eertoo o’ Lucia hereself, quearly an othor’s touch, di storter thing that nibber ha’pens inreality. Whell, if that dizzn’t take the hake, the piscuit and the wayfer. Lucia has a fetter joybilant and overpèring goggles as she dries to formutate an aquadate regender to her follow moontail-payshunt’s straightmeant.
“Natterdull, my near-Miss Givgun. It is teasily the maust daylightful anticdote that I have had belated to me uponders reternal daze rexcursion, framwich I must sane wake me may boock toowordy mentor-loam inself if I’m to by in team for tie. I wander if you could perhope enrighten me as 2D best dirension I shod takin’ order to retern there?”
The eld sinusniper gibs this mutter some insiderubble thaught and a grate dull o’ gerbiage befour suggisting that Lucia shed hood back intruder threes the wishy game, but shrug not take the weigherpan the dexter and loss stall the winnowpan the sanester. Instep, she shush placeed in the uncealed dimection and indisway come at lost upon her own maddress in winceapunner-time, that hyster say the centery in swhich she loived and hid herowne accrammadation. Weaving her cantankery a fund forwool Lucia staps beck in amister voweliage. Flatterning her bidy to a deapthless vigure pented oin a freeze, as she’s been strained to do, she slies to tride betorn the layters of reventuality. Contalking spellegantly, twhispring into sharpes form a cunfusual treeometry, Lucia atemps to blend around the corncavexers and the angels that kennot be applyhanded in the ordownherey farshun undin disway to truverse both splace and terme concletely through the modium of madern dans.
She’s not womanaged to pèregrace in wark mere than a dozin yarns or so by this ever-eliborate mythod of permangulation when a suddle shofting of di late unforms her dout she is nowlinger shnuffling throoter blittle stanz o’ treece in Klingst’hope Cemiterra. Luccing up she seize a redprick cock-tower, or perlapse it is a crowmaterium Jim’ny realing up abud de sperse greyn canoply. As utter illdings of a shimmerlully crippy nuture stark to gloom up interview Lucia blunderstands that her missgibded whendurings have indred braut her to a maidhouse, illbeit nutter one that shivers looping for. Witover displace is, it isn’t hilf as betterfeel as the treeming firhidian expenses of Spent Grandrew’s Helthpeddle. This dazent seam to be die kinder playstatue are san’ to ifew ore sufflashantly wall-off to B-classed as delootfully eccspentric. Ruether, this looms like the snort of hedifice hu meat endorp’in if you were runfortulate arough to bee-net only binsane but binsolvent illso.
As if to crownfirm Lucia’s shushpicions, the sturm, salemn fremale vice tha’ dissues from behider hasty onmasstakeable influction of the Angrish murkin’ glasses.
“Yer luck lorst, mid uck. Frum owyer dreftide guessure euster sunwhere asarsite bedder thundisplays.”
Lucia sturns aboat to fend a strung-bowned, hauntsome warmin widder greyd intidey moss iv hair, drossed in a plein housepity gawn and seedead un a peeling monstertution blench retween the kray and chilldy-lacking treeze. Inner appoorance she has slumthing of the nazure of a seebul, inshe pawts the flaying splimber of the berch desider as an indocation that Lucia sudset down, a binvitation that is seemwhite nervoicely acsceptered.
“Think you vary mach far your constern. High ham Luci Adjace, a redicent of the Slant Andlose Ghospital alinger Boilling Read. Wight met your nume be, iffier dawnight monde me arcing, und wass kinderplace ist loss in witcheye find hyshelf?”
The ohthere wombin peats Lucia-sand and swhiles.
“Me naymiss Audbly Fernall injure inncent Christpin’s Drossputall, illong the Bury Word Turn, jester rend the bound from the Rain Mode in Dusttown. Year a godfume-isles from home, ithacan be so bolt, but Idea sea you’ve swome heretrue these b’labouring trees. Die you now, summerthumb are that hugh once eye have tookin the mythmatics of the think ento consideruption that they proke up three the fourboards onetwo Meinsoul? Mainsail is the trowm that’s ever, ifter, and befour Gnorethumptown, incideoutally.”
Lucia blanks in surpraise.
“Wheel, I missay, nyou ‘steem to noah lawful wot about the lurkings of the highhear drealm fourseeing, that you are, an inmeet of this drudgeful-locking pleas.”
Her now fround, who lucks to be inure fraughties or err thrifties, frows black her weeld mown o’ vert and lufts.
“Orwel, lyousee now, it’s becurse highno the workingsuffer litterthinks that I’ve bane pout ad here. Babyrth, I’m werticall a Vernal in disports. Wearier to eversee the bindaries betwhen the dayfront terrastoreys, and at hour reventual inkwaste we defind the trykey corenear beturn one weld and annexed. That’s whigh eye ban shee the raff slopers, all the ghlosts, and seed o’ phanny lickle furry-frudes di et. That’s whaye-aye hafter foursight, witter freesight, toosight and the whensight all instew the boregaim. As fourway I’mere, that is becraze I larked me mam and dud autovour herse and wooden lotthim in. I sad there ploying <em>Whimpering Class</em> hellnight ontil day clame noxt they unday misstook me to the mudhose. No-when reely masked me why I hard burn dewynicht, or ills I shudder tolledoom that it waspycourse I curld no linger bare the waight of insist.”
In boat samepathy and shrock Lookhere roses wan haund to ellipse.
“Woh, how deadfeel! You paw grrl. Word it harb’in an holdher bruter datewise turking labiatease wetyou, a situasin my encase?”
Eer the ether odder too madwi’men shnakes hair thick doctresses.
“Kno, E nuffer hard a brothler, gnaw vice-worser. I was intofeared wit by me fadder, Johlly Vainall in his leud plaud juckit. Wah tit was, usey, I head e toilent. I’dl earned howl to plainter piano-applaudion by sturdying my Great-Haunt Theresaw, who wise nut a herdinhurry woemine. She word walkz the flackout straits and sereneaid the Charman boomers ofherhead with her reranged impovrisations. Manywhy, my ded suggestiv that I jeun a lottle show-panned maid o’ chopsy new, wary would be demonager. Dishwash after the wear, when I was sextween, sementeen, slimthing like dote. He dated on me, dad me fader. Sed the tide bouy on derideo and have me fictures in the mugazines. Thin, shafter one of our beerformances, it was the muddle of the nates, he crame and god in bad whi me and fact me. What I shadder done, I thing know, booking lack, I shatter scrummed and bwoken shameone, but dirt isn’t wait I dad. I river maid a sand, and I tride nacht to mewve, to fake out that I was aslip and dadn’t no that it was happalling, as if that why I wooden rawly be a part avid. It worse the shame oin hell of the occrazions ofter that, quimmy joust lieing there and tryoung not too meek annoys while eyewash wieping. Evil so, me mem, she musty norn. He dared it wince or tweeze a fightnaught ontil I did me solow befirmonce that nicht, pleaing <em>Dispering Crass</em>, letching ham no dout I was croing to toll the twees abate him and his daughty liddel preek, whore it had burn, what hi’d ban dewing wadjet.”
Grievely, Lucia nots her heed.
“My further muy have cushed me inderneed the weighk o’follies will-entindered heapes and paspirations formy, but not plunderneath the whate of his greyd, sweety bady. You poor think. Hid moster been unsneakable. Respite our defferences, nowever, it ocourse to mediat weave aladdin curmen. Butterfuss were laties of abellety who lufter ridhymn and decolleur witwitch we exprosed flowerselves. The père of us had faffers who ward doominate us, illbeit in their disparent fissions, and we verboth stack in argumental homes when it mos phered we’d razor fess adout the fumbly member hid bin snaking us femaleer with his mamba.”
Her comparion snaughts with decrision, alldough not uncandley.
“Oi’ll madmit there mebay sybilarities boytorn us, but the moojer disferance you’re nat mindshunning is won off slaverall sowsin pounds. As humus surly beaware, a poorson of the walkinc losses has de grader leakyhood, spiekling stadistically, of being dieuknowsed as splitzophrantic. It’s amassing how a tidey bank ballast constributes to our sickillogical whilebein, bizzent it? Itt ruley is a mereveil how the betsar-off are stuffering from newvase stress that candy eentsy-cured by an extpensive freeluc in agleeabelle sirowns while thousin my povrition are unfairiably the rhopeless fictims of a mudness that carn moanly be ableviated by injenctions or selectric shrocks. That’s why urinely pissing through, uplom an idyl strawl from your more willowpainted gental instuition, whyle far my port I hamsterk herewith accurseonally bruntal morderlies and fallow passients who afad witever infrallects and paucinalities day ones persissed rebused to slury.”
Lucia remiens expassionless throwout the other womance cructical upraisall of the soso-acrimonic uspact of unseemity, but willillow that much afit is kno mere dandy truth.
“Atmiddley theor ies allot in word use aye, alldough I am ofter repinion that some rieches of destrangement matterford a kinder lovalling; a gloryhous comeoneallity oddy instrane. In my demended strate, I fool I have trancentered operaharps been bared form ourdinnery mnotions of prepayety or propupty or clawss. Ease it not jester seem fire you, or four deridiant and inpowerished Worryem Blaze, or pour Junk Laire, de jonny sur l’erbe, his worne soule hangling by a threat? Is noddy escate offer fisionary lumatic trilly a c’lossal of id sown?”
Hear, Ordnry Burnall smalles an’ knods asifter sigh that Lucia might haver punkt, incorriging hereto convinue.
“Ill the shame, I am disgressed to hairoff the brutility amonster nourshing stuff that you elude to. Ici trially as inbearanbull as you inpry, and ardour no youmean un descent popul care infer you?”
Audbly shuffs awayter ponder queaking bunch.
“I wordhaunt say that dire woes a greyed eel of gruelty, maulthough wart there is can be quike tearable. Dare hatpin orneries who larked to buttercupple of the voident preytients into a locktromb tugather, joust to seethem fright and rabie have a beatup on the boutcome. The majollity of dose who trend to us sim lie and barge undifferent, but there farafew who tare nowt to be liffley, imparresting kindividuals. Juicy that tall yeng foellow fruiter trees dare, havana sly smirke beyonder buttrest of that dedprick bulldung? He-swan o’ my feverites.”
Pearing between deferns and blanches Lucia considdy warderly with the heropic statuer that her nofeigned squalleague is rephwoaring to. Helax, she thanks, like sameone innerfilm who gnos the whirld aboutime isapointed Set an’ dollarfits uphovels morely narrowtiff de vices that are carmenplays in scenema. Cleerly bescotted, her calmpinion hatters on infusiastically deguarding an inflatuation that is oblivously undefected anthus unrequainted.
“He’s a Scuts lag comfroom Goreby werthy presess all the steal, but wunderneath it all the poi’s an archist. I imachine thatsway he escraped his bathplays, potting all the smarks and spelting werks behide hemand atind’ring at the Ard Skul haire, the wandert’s up Scent Gorgeous Aventue besight the Rapecause, ifew know displacer toll. His nome is Billdog, Billdog Dreammonde, and I’ve header permanition that in jeers to come he well be noun foreving purned a myrion plunds to ash en sum kindove infeathermable choke.”
Lucia tarns this ever inner mined perseveral moremeants befour meeking her deply.
“Will, Icon see how det meet be an oddmirable think to do, mauldough in lighter fit I kennut yelp but wounder that chewer the inmateer and not himsulph. You seem a raysunable womoon. Esther noho pov releaf frame your inclassoration?”
Augery shrags.
“Owe, I don’t whurry abideat. Hour lives are a subloomly scrupted dreama eventoe we luck to thank we’re impovising, and ri’ve run through our poorformances aldeady, cantlostimes. From vatican remumble, in a dozin’ yeahs ah so they clause down this asighloom for the wont of frunds and I’m maved into witty wol de-scribe widoubt a shreg of byrony as ‘scarin der community’, a lightall hilfway hows that’s note fourform my fromeer neighbourhoody, weary shell lave out my daze in ask unstucktive a capricity as I can moonage. Bet wait of yoursalve? Shrub you net bee preturning to your own demental humm befear you’re tookin for a pissyant here?”
Acknowlurching that this ward be a missrabble preventuality, Lucia enchoirs of her knew fround as to the quirkest roote betrip the norn-Yewcliddy entries that wildeliver her barck to Sane Andluce Costpritty, perfourably on the same dayt wenchy sed owt upawn her matchesstic meyonder sho that seize not loft with a tame-pairadux that nodes exbraining to the nuzzing stoff. The talended and fourthright Missy Ternall jeerily snobliges her with compretensive and conclete direactions to herowin splot in the containiwum o’ sparsetome, a trajecstory betweeter shrugs and sharplings that ivolves traking two wryterns, then aleft, an’nexed perceiding fear abate a hindred yarns in the cunsailed dimection. Lucia franks the either fleemale mantol-portient warnly, so competely disterent to hersylph and jetwit search allot o’ stroking smilearities, then waifs goodvie and strets out onder undercatered rout tooweirds her ownyer, her uin madehouse.
Crounching through deliefs and dreadfall hinderfoot Lucia tinks abelle earthather, graveful daddy luft her t’rue his manguage frather den ‘n der toi-leteral way that Audnry’s further hid. Her Babbo, on the underhand, had geniunely bean-amagical andin incharting preature. She precalls win knight in Pairus, won dere’d herd that Charmley Shapelin was endown and she’d bun chest a lewdle girl. Her underfather hard derided alleyz out and stake an evenodd sroll, gist on the undeceivably slum chants they mnight bumpkin tutor creat man, de milleonair trump, Lucia’sidle, darin’ dat glimmense and steeming shity.
Pi sum mirascule, that was exfactly what had happyend. Dyad nighteyesd Chuklin as he stard and witched de Putit Queenyhol’s paupet shoe, his luftly eyes inkwelligent and shad, his bawdy lump and sipple licke that ev a liffing perpet. Lucia had wishaped hym; clad styl do an immasculate imprassion of hom: how he wakled anderway he was helden hamself. When Cia’d heardt that sumyth Chirpling’s earlibirdiest prefamences hid bon eerin Nothankton haz a sylvan-yearn old charld shitbin hystonished and hardfelt the meching of enumerous clickwork cogns of dustineye that had everywhen courtin their progressy workins, vary slite the winsin <em>Madearn Teems</em>. Cher, hidden’t his own moider unded upstick entimental harme?
Metripulously stipping in begreen the grandelions, she tings back to daet soupternuturally pafict weavening pocketwatching de sadastick carrionettes, abserfing wunner discwhirl’s mast erstormed and intruential menwhile oin the comfknee of anutter wun, dher farther. I’vain though she nowsdout he is ivoryware urrounder, derrer tomes wan Lucia misshis Blubbo tearibly. Shae’d bane shorn ape inf’rance jewring the Nazti okruppation when she’d hurt deddy was dad; winnow the ‘meantally enfabled’ who spurnt lang yeurs gnawvously awaything the horrival oder curttale-weergones dedwood tick them off tether exsquirmo’nation cramps, to the ghas-clambers for rezykling. Needles to say, she’d nut hed a georgenerous left’er nora physit former own infamily evter dis ppoint. Nichter had she ovver herd a ward o’ them agone, nut intill she was satteled inn’ Cent Handdraw’s Losstital durern the Marsh of nenetwine filthty-one. It hardborn jest (a’ courst) a flew weaks later on the tense of Japeril that shame yhere that she had in binformed abatter mummer’s daath, witch hat her hearter than she’d fraught it would. She realeyesees gnow she’d lawved the warmun who hot barthed her ululong. All that she’d iver wintered was the slatest glummer of resippercation for that loave, juster leased droop o’ wettery hope fam the meternal nibble lather than all of the molk (too lait!) undie afiction being exbressed lonly to her colder brether, fair ies chaingelink delactation.
She pointylesstically inspecks the crowcurses and primnoses that seemantic to sodinlay be blueming all abound her fliffey sluppers and susurruspects that she has droamed intwo a snifferent sack o’ print-imps and anauthor seesun, not ti mension, she stravinskincerely hopes, analter pliece. Incouerachingly, shee things that she brackenizes a distumptively gnawled illm, which leafs her to brelieve that she is beckin her own poppa inspiteuton. Heaven so, the poppysong which she canear on the tanzsister rudeo that’s playnting summerwhere retwurn the treeze surgusts that she mote be a decayd or two afframe heroine pèreodd o’ tame: <em>“Dairies know udder day. Les try it amother whey</em> …<em>”</em> Lucia can’t pthink fluydly enearth to quoite recool the pap-grope’s Nam, which is unbarretting, but cia’s an eyedear that daywear bopular aranter muddle o’ the whineteen-sextries. Dadn’t their singlar make a rackerd that had Babbo’s <em>Geldin Heir</em> apun it?
She swantinues on betune the wristling blanches o’ the birge trys, fellowing the ladyo’s teenny sir-encall asylph she is piblokton to a peat-brown tailor breve Youlasses. Plausing on the etch o’ fannydyllic sunlick glad fumb wince demoisec shims to wishyou she clatches her breasth, confrotted by a tablue afnir-mythic beausty.
Slying fay sup on a toall that’s bobble-culoured dangerine and slurple is a moist twatractive yhunger whiman, lustening to the sacredelphic musinc onure hearby handbig-sized trancetwister rodio while stwaring asbolewdly nuddink saffran ish-blonde beehave whorepiece and fullsigh-lushes thut flatter at Lucia know lyg l’amorous tarantalisers.
“Well, I daredn’t know eyed got an orgience, at lust not a duspringwished-lurking bawdience lake you. Widen’t you slit-down un der toewell nextasy and interjuice yearnself? I’m soggy abed all the tuts and per se, butt I wash chest sinbathing alawn out hairs unthral you cumm aling.”
Inthrilled, Lucia lovers herstealth to the grazon muddit dare besighed the nayclad and reckleaning goddness, mauvelling at the crushed-vulvate tuones of the yearng peek-a-beautease vice, both fulnerable and powervul at ashame time. She finnshagen detecton Eyerush lullt bonita smirky, pawleashed sufface of it, an dishy replays she trysttokeep her onedaring ai-ai-ai from skwandering too onviously ob thisnohe, rawberry-peeked slurpes o’ the jong leurty’s jugalong blosom, matchless in the moissy cravish offer slewdly perted thys.
“I am Lickier Juyce, a dansher bi proficien, end pleas dewnight apillowguise fur eider your purrdendum awe your equeerlly daylightfull memmary andhowments, sins I am sapphiciantly formiliar with quimin’s bawdies nud to ticker fance. Idneed, I am enjoycing leerking at birther the bitems that you menshunned, and I wet be disapanted if you wear to soddenly cunseal them. Amoright in thinging that you earthy sinker Dust’ny Singfeeld, mentalwhom I think Icon remumble lostin afther former dustdance wan you were inpatient inSaned Onboo’s direin naintain sixties-heven?”
Cwrinkling her spydeary ayelids inner musemeant, the blont enchanteuse lites winover slimp hands feall allmoist causually apander darkhair curls squirmounting her slunken and clitoring preasure-chaste, fingertops strumbling obscentmindedly uporn a cerise drewel pawsitioned juiced insight the noroe fisher ofty gropening.
“Actyoually, my riad nameys Mery Asabell Clatterin’ Berndalotte O’Brien, ap arrayed afall de cents who me speculiar payrents were predoomably conventsd I’d fallow in the stabs of. Memem’s neme wish Key, wearies madad was illlwise noun as Ob, this B in a cointricktion of O’Brine, eu understained, frather than Oberon decide of classycool allucians.”
Evoury bite ars fashionated bider woomain’s nattertive as by her lezy, fraglant and untirely rivert’ing auto-herotic steamulation, Lucia at this pent meekes an interjeculation.
“My dadada mickname, too. Hue err Ob’s bab und eyewash Babbo’s, pudding it anatrammagically. And matey effer my lassistance indepetting o’ that sblonded feeline creassure you half dare? I premise that I shell indiver nauti-wake her oop.”
Taching Lucia’s andandandand gluiding it twa the appanted plays the singler geniially gazon wetter moanologue wildy exrited holder womance fingels delly in the youngrrr latey’s niecelay-irrundated quave, meddlesohn dig-its diip inner cutiful bunt.
“I vers barn near the Edgewhere Owed duaring the mousetrap spring of nineteen dhirty-schwein, summ menths befire the wah clammenced. We weary vicuated to Hier Wecombe far awayle, but in defineteen-thrifty wennywise elephen we clame back to lib at Gent Kardens in Healing. I moist sigh, you’re vaery skoolled at dewing that. I thick there’s woom fur ewe to pet amother finngirl up dare if you wanded to.”
Lucia quimplies injuicyastically, fondley resembering the vulvet whole of Mysin Luschos arshe dust so. There is swimthing lilycal apout the geniitails offer ongender, wilthy oceanook shavor of those slyling murmad lups, oder jungry imperfume of that beautianabestial mane, and wile her purrference tinds musually towords the skillpted marvle sextroversion of a whordened phello’s there are dose occrazions when Lucia neels the feed to luse eriself wadein the solt enteriher of anuder whimon. Pashioning her gosh-drat hornd like the pretanned-gun of a littrle boyshe worksit inundate widen in-crease slapidity, the accidrenchal lickwet moozec of the mauvement growping naughticeably mer deluscious und mare audribble with evory thrusk. Aficting incuntsern but startling to frotate her hep sextightedly, Mess Wringfeel clarries on the perversation ‘asoff she’s not boying misterbaited to the blink of crymax outdare in the untowoods; in the meddle of no-wear.
“My pairrunts were beth iconsenti mental-cases in their daffyrant wheeze, andame afrayed the bottlegottlelottle do with it. My moider Que was veri tweet and a tremendless laftershock, bat her odea o’ heving fin was froing dings handbraking dum. We yester smosh a lotto crackery tocletter, meand’er. Et wors a hibit I too quimmy enter ladier lief, farover gutting triends toi let me burrow their pullem apartments if I was intorn endin wrocking deplace whirlin an axciss of hay spillits. Darewise never many alice in it. It was jesterway o’ louding off stim, groan autoady lauving fondalism that I shard with me dearaged oild mot’er.”
Lucia pawsies inner amorous manypullations haire to off’er cumment.
“I wince thrue a terrble <em>at</em> me mouther, batty never through thinks <em>with</em> her. She stounds luck-a-vary intertraining charactor, bet wet Obout your flather? Woozy nut an inspirocean tu/you, ashwood be decays with me?”
On the transistine hit paradio anutter pep-song from the muddle-too-late Fixties is nho playing, which Lucia trinks was din by that nooce-liking boy from Newguzzle, the windirt was a famer Anymale: <em>“</em>Diseas the owzat Jack pilled, booby, and it screaches up to disguise<em>.”</em> Delirics murk her thick of the unpresant J.K. Steerpen ondon of Sir Wellaim Withe Gurlls, the warld of med whimin klept for him at Guise Houseputall. The nayclad shunteuse shrigs and shucks hair beehave wag with an expressure of fatguide vexasperation.
“It wah sOb’s gambition that I shout becomb a sinker. He’d obliterally dram a feel fourtime and wrythymn unto me by smarking me apain the harnd with ivery bleat, a scruelty he liedor clammed had nipper slappened. I sorepose it misterworked. Winny wars chest niceteen I jaunt The Lawn Assisters and weeded that naffelty abawd the sheven lipple cirls all satin in the bagsweet, kispering an’ dugging with Frends. Shirtly ifter that I blenched mein herr un chained mein aim from Merry to Dustress and fame O’Brayin into Singf’reald, what was which my big bruddle Tam – famerly Dion-nicest – had precided we shuck all altselves in herder to be populalala. I dustn’t know presesley how he word that out, bet anywhy, aye winterlong with it. Mmmah, Gog, I don’t slippose dirt chew cud ruv me juist obit more frickly, cool dew?”
Deslite a spight grump innor wrest, Lucia maches an effit to comeplay, redabbling dip ace of her sexcessive porniterations and withdribbles. Effordently slutisfied the yen girlady cuntinuse her starry, heven though this ais neow hymenated by har mony grasps and griggles of de light.
“I farst went solow in Saptimber, pineteen sixty-t’ree, witchwise commencidentily when I begland me feast portionate dolliance with anether warm’un. My strifled sexreality had by that paind beclung a maddeling bell that I cwym no languor drefuse. Me lovher was as sinsual an’ sexotic as a maid-up charmacter wittin a knowvell; as a pisce o’ bloom ink. That knix cheer I had my thirstit with ‘I Only Wander By with Ewes’, and win I slang it, it was galwise abeaut her. Her skim was reachblack vulvet, so tha twain I lucked herrut it was licke clissing onder Nuit idself. Isis a wonder I decrimed to ploy to snegrogated boerdiences in Soulth Afrigger? It’s bane a deadfeel prussia on me, doe, pretempting that I funsee boys, brutending to be shamething that I’m nut. I gut ill ankhshus and driprest, undone I heave a brink, undone I smasht thinksup and durt meself, undone I endope back qhere in Squaint Endrew’s. Haire, I’ll till yer twhat, how wet you feel abatterbit o’ the ult lixty-mine? I’d licke the lapportunity to play you buck feral dart U-bend oohing firmy.”
Huffing frot that her newd frond would nibble ask, Lucia gigs whet is perlapse an ova-eagerbeaver squerl of joycful licquiescence and poursessions whorself fay-sup on the psychodollic strangerine-and-burble toewell, hopping the glorgious blende will hake the tint. Moanwheel, another plopson of del eria has replaysed the brevious nimbur on the reedyo, a lather jelly tune that she recorlds as bying bee a grope of boyschooled Manfedman. Queriously, it is anutter songlongong abider lonlytic asylunce and conteals an auther ripperence to vagiant-killer, the forklyric fiendyfind o’ Nhitechapel: “Mine ’um ease Jack and eleven the bicker the Gretly Garbold Home <em>…</em>”
As Lucia hed hopped sheward, the newd popi-dol halters her poorsiton so that shyno kneeds aslide Lucia’s optuned phace, hergently f’lowering loft sips upoon soft lips ass she lies slurpine wetter head biteween Luckyher’s perted shighs, the fruck hairridly pawled up to refeel the wunderwhere-free monde o’ Penus hoyden there beneat with all its squrling aur-burn fidgetation, with its bornin gold. She caughtyously sextends her tangue soda tit slimes into the amoratic purss that sprudes its scanted mollust fhrills agloss Lucia’s ’lowher fress, an’ data simul tame she freals the singeher’s het broth on her own prudendum, fills the dirting tup of her belaved’s longwell inplayment as it unvoides her own missy and sloppery gratto. The dew of them are swoon licked in a wriddling orubberus of matual fillfullment, glorgying in the flowvour and perflume of womanhoop wile introjuicing thingers into eeny gapertures that are aviolable.
Her squeerls of lapture and of roughelation are all lezd or muffilled in her legsapartner’s slurf and sturf. She soddenly womunderstands dat dizzies a comeunion o’ grope shagnificance. This soize eneuf to squimbolise the moremeant windy lightorairy, fission’ry treaditon chered by Banyen, Willhim Flake, Jeun Clarryon and hero’n fether joint eggstartically witty pup-colture of the finequeen-pixties, marging in the pyschedeleclectic cruciabelle with the experigoric nullatives of Misfer Illaim Seeword Boroughs and the Blewish Carrollirical textcursions into nonesince-proetry o’ messers Lennin and McCarthy and their hymitators, searchers clarrently war plostin outform the transgresstor raveo enthus accomfannying their funnylingual squactivities.
Torquing with her myth full she absurves the upthighed-down whirld of the lawnatic afilem gleed as it appearls to Lucia wheel lioking cupwards firm botween her tresbien allover’s gopen lechs. In this infurtied fishon, freamed by liscious thights and butterm-chicks, she seizur man apan a punny-nearthing boycycle rude through de claring witties rye and hauntsome fame seemwho faciliar. He wheres a novy bluzer with apeal blue traum and has a namebored batch on his lupel which spurks surrealisation that this is nonutter thuan Peatrick McGohang, define actor who had pent tame in Censd Angrew’s daring de lite Trixties win he seffered from his paddy fitz. She isn’t sherrif this weird be befire or lafter his most flameous tellaversion progrimme and so kennot tael if the agreenable bats inastir conforning feelage in dhistory was a murmury or promanotion of demental monstertution’s stuporvised convivriality and flot baize lawnorders.
As he roles passed he gecks an eyefeel of the interlapping fameels and glibs a luciantious squirk. “Be seeding you,” he quirps, anticking one hang from the anglebars poorforms a stagely stranged salude, twuching his thimb and undex fringer to itch ether so that the handsums deform the numenal sieze, topped ’litely on his brew. He psychles inwords, out of shight, an’ dafter a flew merments mare o’flicking at the intertwainer’s pissy, Lucia is snortled to obserd a lurge an’ bwobbling whide babloon that pounces cleerily becross the quearing as ifan purswoop oddy escraping ector, somehowl grroaring like a prehysteric manstare haz it dizzle … or poorharps the noyce is dirt maid bi Lucia undher pertner as they rich their clutural crymax in the hevdy joyc-tick flambience o’ tat exstrawberrymerry decayd; tis eggstoredinhurry playce.
Sexhausted and cwympletely satisfade the goo twirls reill opart to kitsch their berth and weepe their chains, untiredly comefident that in their t’rilling and slurpentine lunion day have inshored the floozyon of the savant garde ‘n’ gemyouwinly popalure, a nicessary intermangling forder buttermint of cunture and of minkhind as a hole.
They kress ouch either tinderly, teasting their own entermate jisess on each other’ slips and then cungratiflate dameselves on their profishinsea at meetyouwell cumulonimbus. Straightawning her sqirt to whide her glossening theys, Lucia askplains dashy’s expictured beckett d’main hows o’ the massylum in spacetime for tea an’ dusks her newd frond four dimections to delayter roaches of the ninespleen severties, upunk which Lusty Flingspieled gentially paints her the light ray and then sprolls on her plurabelly and confinues glistening to her sportable wearless.
As Lucia swalks off betreen the tweeze, englishlit by the wrong lays of the drafternoon, she cawnear the transwisper pladio raying summerwhere behider, or alt feast she tinks she ken. It stounds a litterl like that wrechord bother Beautles that those unclesampleminded evanjocular Armoryguns mad burnfears of, and all becase it undy pantly briefly chalked abawd a nighty curlew net her lickers drown. “I Am The Paulrus”, wasin’ dout its titterl? Rue the thundergrowth inhead of here she can now see demean aSalem pilldings, lurking just as day had done windsheet set out uplan her plodyssey date mourning, though it sims an evterlifetime sence. She even blhinks she sees Petreasure, pheering auntiously aground the rounds and nodate whendering ware Lucia has goone. She whurries up her timin’ pace a bit.
She kinstill hear the song beyonder, but she dizzn’t surey fit’s the when she thawtit was. Detune streems differrant and pseudo the words, doshy slushpects that she’s not herein’ thereal worlds at all. She’s proverbly trancestating the inudibelle and dustant leerics into her roam lingwish, the seam way she daz with reveriething.
<quote>
<em>John signs clarely on the water,</em>
<em>Says the Queen’s his daughter,</em>
<em>Longs for young Miss Joyce, the wife he barely even knew,</em>
<em>And no more how’s-your-father now.</em>
<em>He’s a product of his class</em>
<em>Who eats the grass</em>
<em>Along the path he’s made.</em>
</quote>
<br>
It’s anuntellagibble jabberish, off course, nonposed of comsense sillyballs and nutterly devader meanink, though she fonds that she injoyce the squirling museek avid.
<quote>
<em>Lucy’s dancing in the language,</em>
<em>Shares a marble sandwich</em>
<em>With a Mr. Finnegan from several headstones down</em>
<em>And no more how’s-your-father now.</em>
<em>She’s a cockeyed optimist</em>
<em>Who can’t resist</em>
<em>This final white parade.</em>
</quote>
<br>
Allthrough she nows it’s sometimeattic of belusional dehaviour and splitzophrenia, chicaned help thanking that de pravious abverse odder song had bin abider. She stoops out from the councealing vagitation unto the groen lawnings ab Sent Hinderus joystirs the delayrious psychodelphic untheme slydes into its catch Icarus.
<quote>
<em>So she waits for God, oh what’s the point</em>
<em>Of all these tears?</em>
<em>Letters of the alphabet are pouring from her ears</em>
<em>And all her words are mangled</em>
<em>And her sentences are frayed</em>
<em>To black hole radiation</em>
<em>In this final white parade.</em>
</quote>
<br>
Delyrics, fearsome risen, meek her thank o’ Somewill Backitt, hom she whoopes wel come and fizzit soon. He’s bin alloyal friend to err, hus Sum, and it’ snotties falld vatican’t be comething moor. She walks acrass the gross toherds the medowse weaver fating song contimbering to cadger ear on interdistent ghusts of wint.
<quote>
<em>Malcolm’s methylated banter,</em>
<em>When his Tam O’ Shanter</em>
<em>Is by Colonel Bogeymen pursued into the dew</em>
<em>And no more how’s-your-father now.</em>
<em>Prisoner at the bar,</em>
<em>They’d raise a jar</em>
<em>For every serenade he played.</em>
</quote>
<br>
Staunding bider raydoom intrance, her sweet’ners Peatrickier has nowse inner and is waifing hippily, relived that shizzle right. Lucia tarts to walk a liffel feister, denderrun. She dips and skances in de light, her shedoe lang uponder trilliard-terrble baise o’ day asoiloam lorn. It’ spin anutter pafict lucci die, hor whele life samewho fulldead inter it from pauppa’s word nowtivity to Jimsthorte cemeteary bedstone. Ivory day is like as know-globe with the untired uniqverse curtin sudspinsion, fullove myrth and literatunes and herstory, an’ divery daymarch like the next. She rashes eagirly thruwards the dosspital, towords the mocean’s featherly himbrace.
<quote>
<em>Dusty’s cunningly linguistic,</em>
<em>Jem’s misogynistic,</em>
<em>But they dance the night away.</em>
<em>Manac es cem, J.K,</em>
<em>And no more how’s-your-father now.</em>
<em>Grinding signal into noise</em>
<em>The crowd enjoys</em>
<em>This final white parade.</em>
</quote>
<br>
An embress of textistence and embiddyment aflight, Lucia dawnsees on the meadhows grase.
<quote>
<em>So we wait for God, oh what’s the point</em>
<em>Of all these tears?</em>
<em>Letters of the alphabet are pouring from our ears</em>
<em>And all the wards are empty</em>
<em>And the beds are all unmade,</em>
<em>And we’re walking through the blackout</em>
<em>On this final white parade.</em>
</quote>
<br>
An embress of textistence and embiddyment aflight, Lucia dawnsees on the meadhows grase floriver.
** <strong>BURNING GOLD</strong>
<strong>S</strong>moulder-bearded, blind with tears of laughter, Roman takes Dean’s hand and drags him from the crackling nursery, little streets on fire behind them. Out in fresh air, grabbing their still-sniggering kiss behind a rolling screen of acrid grey, Roman can smell all of the potential never-to-be-realised cash as it’s cremated, an expensive stench diluted and dispersed in the slum firmament, into the dead-end Saturday, the hard-up afternoon. He’s still got that big painting in his shrunken monkey head: the giants in nightshirts thundering the fuck out of each other with their blazing billiard sticks, a precious gore of ore sprayed molten from the point of bloody impact. For Rome Thompson, snogging with his lover-boy there in the choke and uproar of the moment, there at that specific junction of his self-inflicted and unlikely roughneck history, there in the Boroughs and its timeless holy fire of poverty, the violent and unearthly image does no more than hold a mirror to real life, life being an affair of rage and pool-cues and colossal brawlers bleeding wealth. Of stolen kisses by the pyre of art, a kind of currency gone up in smoke here where the mint once stood, here where they hammered out the coin more than a thousand years ago. Behind a drifting cordite curtain stands Thompson the Leveller, frenching his young man, a fissured, glued-together composite of all his misspent times and misspelled words and miscreant deeds: the sum of his mosaic moments.
While the other eight- and nine-year-olds are learning how to read and write he’s up there in the slate-creak and the starlight, learning burglary. A spidery cut-out shape on a black paper 1950s skyline, it is in the slant and scrabble of the rooftop night that he receives an education in both politics and socio-economics, there at the blunt crowbar end of the economy, there in the fiscal infra-red. Shinning the rusted drainpipes that are too frail to take anybody’s weight save his, slipping head-first through open window-cracks that would defeat those with an ounce of flesh upon their fuse-wire bones, he understands the structure of the world that he’s so recently been born into to be entirely based on criminality, expressed in different languages, at different magnitudes. A warehouse skylight jemmied open here, an interest rate adjusted or a neighbouring state invaded there. The hostile takeover, or sticky brown tape on a pane of glass to stop the wind-chime pieces falling when you smash it. Little Roman Thompson and the boardroom blaggers, all in a great classless commonality of the adrenaline-habituated. Slide a sheet of newspaper beneath the door to drag the fallen key after you’ve poked it from the lock, or spread embezzled losses into the next quarter’s figures. Roman runs with bigger kids, semi-professionals, divides the loot, hears all of the instructive sex-jokes several years before his classmates. Nobody can catch him. He’s the gingerbread boy.
Consequently he can’t write to save his life, thinks syntax is a levy raised on condoms, sometimes gets his phraseology caught in his zip. When the authorities he’s nettled try to get their own back by accusing his beloved obsessive-compulsive boyfriend of being a social nuisance, Roman reckons that they must see Dean as his “Hercules Heel”. He reads, though, chewing ravenously through all of the history and politics that he can get his bony hands on, trying to locate and orient himself in socio-economic spacetime. He can’t write, then, other than the odd historical research piece or the slyly vitriolic Defend Council Housing pamphlets that he sometimes pens, but he can read. He can mine information from an electronic or a paper coal-seam, he can organise it in his stealthy nightlight-robbery mind and understand all its essential lowlife intricacies. He can read and he can talk – talk like Hell’s auctioneer as tenants’ representative at Borough Council meetings, making all the most embarrassing enquiries, mentioning the most unmentionable things, calling a cunt a cunt. He’s lost count of the occasions when he’s been evicted from the Guildhall to trot chuckling down the wedding-photo steps and squint up at the angel on the roof, the one that his mate Alma thinks is working class because it’s got a billiard cue in its right hand. He knows his Woodward and his Bernstein, knows all about following the money, lurks in ambush on the cash trail.
In so far as Roman understands these things, the Ancient Britons who originally have their settlements around these parts work with a barter system. This makes simple robbery or livestock-rustling an option for the proto-criminals inhabiting the Neolithic period and the Bronze Age, where they’ve got more of a grasp of owning property, relative to the wandering Old Stone Age hunter-gatherers of earlier times, and where therefore there are more things to steal. This is all still comparatively petty larceny, however, and major financial crimes will have to wait for the concept of finance, wait for Roman’s namesake empire to turn up in the first century and introduce us to the endlessly manipulatable idea of money: gold and silver coins which represent the sheaf of grain, the snorting bullock, down to the last hair, the meanest scruple, but are much more easy to make off with and to hide. During the Roman occupation, then, when everyone’s conditioned to accept that this much gold is worth that many ducks in what seems on the surface a fair proposition, Iron Age Northampton has its introduction to both coins and serious crime: in Duston, using cheaper metals to adulterate the silver, Roman coins are forged, a crucifixion felony. Iron Age ironically, the hard-up Empire has adulterated its own coinage at least since the reign of Diocletian, the same fraud upon an international rather than local level, all made possible by money. You can’t forge a cow.
Straight from what should have been his school years he rolls up his sleeves and gets beneath the bonnet of the world to fathom out its mechanism, ends up as head engineer at British Timken, then providing half the town’s employment. From there it’s a short step to becoming the key union representative, his bristling terrier countenance at each dispute, on every picket line, the blue touch-paper eyes restlessly searching for a weasel argument to shake between his teeth. In either of these two capacities, whether oil-stained professional or deepest red political, Rome’s main advantage is in understanding how things work, from cogs to councils to communities, from obstinate machines to management. His other big plus is his reputation: diabolically logical, tenacious to the point of tetanus once he has locked his jaws, as unpredictable as cheese-dreams and completely fearless from his burglar boyhood, madder than a bottle full of windows. In the police-scrums and demonstrations of the 1960s it’s mostly his spittle that gets emptied from the megaphones, and in the Anti-Nazi 1970s it’s him who breaks the riot-squad cordon, managing to land one on the National Front minder next to leader Martin Webster before being dragged away and charged. An atmosphere of gunpowder surrounds him, a perfume of Civil War and regicide. Below a straggling brow the china eyes spark in their wrinkle-cobwebbed sockets, always informed, always on the money.
When the Roman legions are withdrawn they leave us with a money habit. From the kick-off of the seventh century, gold and silver coins are struck as local currencies by various small coining operations up and down the country. In Thompson’s opinion, the most famous such establishment is probably at Canterbury although there are gold coins made here in Hamtun dated 600 AD, which have to be amongst the very first produced in Britain. And when he says Hamtun, Roman means the Boroughs. Possibly due to this early aptitude we have an unofficial mint here from 650 onwards churning out a stream of gleam into the Dark Ages’ protracted night, a golden shower. Meanwhile, unobserved in the surrounding information-blackout, the benighted half-mile settlement mysteriously gathers substance and significance: King Offa’s market town supplying his retreat at Kingsthorpe, here in Mercia’s centre at a time when Mercia is the most important of the Saxon kingdoms. To Rome Thompson’s way of thinking, it might even be that pilgrim bringing the stone cross here from Jerusalem around this period which helps cement Hamtun’s mystique as centre-of-the-land, but for whatever reason it’s from this ground during the 880s that King Alfred the failed cake-minder divides the country into slices, adding ‘North’ to the town’s tag and naming ‘Norhan’ as foremost amongst the shires, legitimising its two-hundred-year-old mint, acknowledging its status. Wax-sealing its fate.
He’s not obsessed with cash. He’s never had enough to get obsessed by, but you need to know how money works to understand its necessary complement, this being poverty. The two things are inseparable. John Ruskin claims that if resources were shared equally there’d be no poverty or wealth. Thus, to make someone rich depends on making someone else poor. Making someone very wealthy may depend upon impoverishing an entire population. Poverty is money’s obverse, the coin’s other side. Rome wants to scrutinise its dirty engine and to comprehend the micro-tolerances of hard times. He knows his own hard times have mostly happened not because of money, but because of how he used to drink before the heart attack and his sometimes deranged behaviour. He’s culpable, responsible – he knows all that – and sometimes feels a black pang if he thinks of Sharon, their doomed marriage, his exploded family. He would simply observe that those from a chaotic background frequently tend to be predisposed to alcohol and chaos, and that chaos levels rise as funds go down. That isn’t an excuse; it’s an example of how life is likely to work out in a poor neighbourhood, with more capacity for harm, for wheels to fall off struggling relationships, for nasty incidents. The squaddies eager for a scrap down in the cellar bar off vanished Wood Street. The slagheap collapsing on him in Paul Baker’s yard, crawling through dirt in search of a few bob on the Edwardian empties.
Growing up, Rome thinks the king he’s heard about is called Alfred the Grate because of where he scorched the scones, then later learns about dividing up the shires, effectively making Hamtun the capital, establishing the mint at London (one of a few dozen) as an institution in 886, and all the rest of it. The king is trying to regulate the many regional economies, or so it seems to Thompson, but no one will have much luck with that until Edgar the Peaceful turns up to reform the coinage in his last year as king, 973 AD, and standardises it into a national currency stamped out at forty royal mints throughout the land, with Hamtun being one of them. This is the year you first get pennies turning up with “HAMT” on the reverse, the letters set in the four quarters of what’s known as a Long Cross, one where the arms reach right to the coin’s hammered edge. By Ethelred the Second’s reign, commencing 978, emergency mints are set up to cope with the privations caused by all the Viking raids the King was famously unready for, and by Harold the Second’s rule prior to the Norman conquest there’s at least seventy of them, with the biggest mint being the one in London. Following 1066, William the Bastard changes things. The mints are gradually reduced in number, centralising monetary control and rationalising an inherited and sprawling Saxon system. Disempowered, Northampton’s mint survives until the thirteenth century. Until Henry the Third arrives and really puts the chainmail boot in.
The subsiding fifty-year-old hill of ash and clinker falling in on him, the incident with the drunk soldiers: these are just part of the fire he’s dressed in, the insane debris of circumstance that makes him who he is; that ultimately tears apart his life with Sharon and the kids. He’s foraging for old stone bottles when some half-a-century of the town’s black, incinerated shit suddenly pounds its fist into his scrawny back and drives the precious wind out of his lungs. Dirt in his eyes, dirt in his mouth and enough time to form the thought, so this is how we all end up, before his mucker Ted Tripp grabs him by those matchstick ankles, drags him cursing from the sludge like an uprooted Tourette’s carrot out into the daylight of Paul Baker’s yard, just as the cop cars all come howling in. He owes Ted big time, and so when Ted’s lock-up full of hooky goods is raided some while afterwards and the arresting officers fail to lock up the premises behind them, Roman has the evidence away and leaves Ted to produce receipts so that the angry coppers have to reimburse him for the lock-up’s contents. Debt repaid, this means that Rome feels free to steal Ted’s car on that occasion with the pissed-up and abusive squaddies: Roman’s awesome and apocalyptic payback; his avenging angel-work. He feels that it’s important someone keeps the moral ledger straight, such as it is. The heart can’t keep double accounts, and its books must eventually be balanced.
Though Northampton has admittedly lost some of the illustrious burnish since its Alfred the Great heyday, it’s still an important central pivot of the country for two hundred years after the conquest, and still has its mint. A thriving, pretty little market town, by all accounts, since Dick the Lionheart grants it its charter in 1180-something. Cobblers and leather-workers all up Scarletwell Street and the old Gilhalda, the original town hall there on the Mayorhold, where they hold their Porthimoth di Norhan, although no one nowadays knows what that might have been. Something to do with boundaries. Henry the Third seems rather taken with the place at first and wants to give the town a university, before he’s had a chance to fully understand the fiery and unusual spirit of the ancient settlement. The Bacaleri di Norhan, the stroppy students, are protesting Henry’s imposition of a forty eight-strong council – the exact same number of the bastards that Rome Thompson currently contends with weekly – who are lining their own pockets with the profits of the town. Henry decides he doesn’t like the locale after all and sends his troops in through the wall of the old Cluniac priory where St. Andrew’s Road is now. They pillage, rape and burn until Northampton is an ugly, smoking wreck. And when he says Northampton, Roman means the Boroughs. Henry’s promised university ends up in Cambridge, and with Henry’s death in 1272 they take away the mint as well.
His reputation for exacting startling retribution, whether against individuals or institutions, means that anyone who’s heard of him knows that they’re better off not picking fights with Roman. Which leaves those who haven’t heard of him. He’s visiting the cellar bar outside the Grosvenor Centre, near where Wood Street used to be, for a quick drink. There are these nineteen-, twenty-year-old soldiers from some camp outside Northampton, half-a-dozen getting rowdy in the lounge, shoving past regulars. When Rome asks one of these latter-day roundheads to watch where he’s going, he’s got the whole mob around him swilling their testosterone and vodka smoothies. “Yeah? What are you gunna do about it, Catweazle?” Six of the nation’s finest, being all they can be with a stick figure in his mid forties. Roman puts his palm up. “Sorry, lads. I’m evidently in the wrong pub. I’ll just finish up me pint and go.” He leaves them to their night out without answering them, without saying what he’s gunna do about it. Never cross someone with neither want nor fear of anything. Like he tells Alma while he’s lounging calmly in the middle of a blazing bonfire on that camping holiday in Wales, “It’s all about will, Alma, ain’t that right?” She pulls upon her reefer and considers while he starts to smoulder. “Yeah. Well, will and flammability.” They have to drag him from the flames and beat him out, but Roman feels he’s made his point. He’s put his money where his mouth is.
As does England after 1272 when Henry’s dead. The number of mints are reduced to six – rebellious Northampton not included – with the main one at the Tower of London from 1279 onwards, housed there for the next five hundred years, the only game in town by 1500, a monopoly. Northampton, far from being King Alfred’s de facto capital, is on its way to being somewhere that’s unmentionable. Roman doesn’t think this is because the place is unimportant, more that it’s important in a way that’s toxic to authority’s best interests, churning out its Doddridges, its Herewards, its Charlie Bradlaughs, its Civil War agitators, Martin Marprelates, Gunpowder Plotters, Bacaleri di Norhan or its Diana Spencers. At best huge embarrassments and at worst riots or heads on poles. Perhaps Northampton has become the anti-matter capital, an insurrectionist parallel universe, not to be spoken of. While this is clearly just how everything was always going to work out, Roman blames Henry the Third, a spiteful little fucker at the best of times. And his son Edward’s even worse. In 1277 some three hundred of the Jewish population centred around Gold Street are all executed – stoned to death as Rome hears it: accused of clipping bits from the old hammered coins to melt down and make new ones. Actually, the royals owe the Jews a wad of cash. Survivors are first driven out of town and then all Jews are banished from the land, brutally welching on the debt, putting the plan into Plantagenet.
All about will and flammability, so Alma says, and Roman thinks she’s right. Having the fire of will and spirit is a must, but useless if your fuel’s damp or goes up like tinder. What’s important is the way you burn. He can remember Alma telling him about how she has Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond from the KLF turn up one day at her house on East Park Parade to show the film of them torching a million quid up on the Isle of Jura, where George Orwell completes <em>1984</em>. She says she likes a movie where you can see every penny of the budget up there on the screen but Roman’s not sure how he feels at first about all that potentially life-saving lucre going up the chimney. Still, as Alma points out, if the million had gone up their noses nobody would raise an eyebrow. In the end, Rome comes to the conclusion that it’s glorious, more than just a gesture. It’s the whole idea of money being burned, not just the actual loot. It’s saying that the golden dragon that enslaves us, that allows a tiny fraction of the global population to own nearly all the wealth, that ensures almost universal human poverty by its very existence, doesn’t actually exist at all, is made of worthless paper, can be taken care of with a half-box of Swan Vestas. Drummond is Northampton reared, a hulking Scot from Corby who goes to the art school here and works at the St. Crispin’s nuthouse for a while. Rome fancies you can see the town’s brand on the renegade rock-god: incendiary, justified and ancient.
This is money from a local point of view, a shell-game with evolving rules, a long con given centuries to hone its act; achieve a peak of predatory sophistication. Looking at the hundred or so years after the Norman occupation, with the number of mints dwindling as the manufacture of the coin is centralised and brought under control, Roman can see the obstacle that money-hungry kings are left with. Cash is still too real, too physical. Getting the planet to accept that discs of precious metal represent a crop or herd is an immense accomplishment, but coins with their smooth hammered edges are still vulnerable to clipping, and material gold and silver pieces are less easy to manipulate and conjure with than something that is hardly there at all. It’s in the twelfth or thirteenth century that the Knights Templar, hanging out at the round church in Sheep Street and collecting dues from local businesses as an ecclesiastical protection racket, come up with the idea of the internationally-valid promissory note or money order. They invent the cheque, have the idea of money as a piece of paper long before 1476 when William Caxton’s earliest English printing press makes banknotes possible, just in time for the Tower of London’s mint to assume its monopoly in 1500. Given all the harm caused by the Templar’s fiscal origami, Rome feels it’s an insult that they get wiped out because Pope Clement claims they’re gay, two men on one horse, all that Catholic bollocks.
Roman’s own epiphany comes with the heart attack that marks his fiftieth birthday. It’s around the sleeping-in-a-campfire period of Rome’s existence, when the mania that drives him is at its most phosphorescent. His behaviour at this point is already more than halfway to dismantling his family so he’s alone there in the house all night, on his own, when the left-arm lightning hits. He sprawls there, on his back in the dark living room, and can’t move. There’s no one to call for help and Roman knows that this is it. He’s going to die, and in a few days he’ll be back under the dirt like that time down Paul Baker’s yard except with no Ted Tripp to haul him out. Under the dirt forever, and with so much unresolved. During his long hours in the twilight between quick and dead, Roman reviews his life and is astonished to discover that his foremost fear is dropping off the twig before he gets the nerve up to tell anyone, himself included, that he’s homosexual. All those years he’s taken pride in never backing down to anyone or anything, not to police or management or to those drunken square-bashers or even to the element of fire, to find that he’s been bottling the biggest, pinkest challenge of them all. Roman resolves that if by some chance he survives this he’ll go out for some queer fun and then tell everyone about it. As it turns out that’s what happens, but he’s not expecting love. He’s not expecting Dean, the two of them together on the one horse from then on.
Gay or not, the Knights Templar clearly aren’t the first people to think of folding money – Roman reckons that he can remember something about paper notes in seventh century China – but they are the first to introduce the notion to the West. It still isn’t until the nineteenth century that you see proper printed English dosh, but back at the exclusive Tower of London mint in 1500 you can tell they’re warming up to the idea. The goldsmith-bankers of the sixteenth century issue these receipts called running cash notes, written out by hand and promising to pay the bearer on demand. Even with Caxton’s press, the near-impossibility of printing counterfeit-proof wealth means England’s paper currency will be at least partially scribbled for the next three hundred years or more. The paper concept only gains momentum when the Bank of England is established during 1694 and straight away is raising funds for William the Third’s war on France by circulating notes inscribed on specially-produced bank paper, signed by the cashier with the sum written down in pounds, shillings and pence. In the same year Charles Montague, later the Earl of Halifax, becomes the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Two years on, in need of a new warden of the mint, he offers the position – “ ’Tis worth five or six hundred pounds per annum, and has not too much business to require more attendance than you can spare” – to a fifty-five-year-old man previously passed over for high office: Isaac Newton.
Roman tells Bert Regan, Ted Tripp and the others that the most feared and respected of their formidable number is officially now travelling on the other bus. Endearingly, given the reputation of the working class for homophobia, they merely take the piss the way they would if he’d told them he was part Irish or developed comically deforming facial cancer, and then carry on as normal. They treat Dean respectfully despite the fact that his OCD impulses do tend to put him at the “Ooh, look at the muck in here” end of the homosexual spectrum. Ted Tripp asks Rome who’s the horse and who’s the jockey, and Rome patiently explains that it’s less about sex than you might think and more about the love. Ted may make arse-related jokes around the situation but he understands, has always been there when Rome needed him, will lend Rome anything, particularly if he doesn’t know he’s doing it. The night when Rome exits the cellar bar with military mockery still ringing in his ears he marches down to the Black Lion in St. Giles Street and there in the notoriously haunted hostelry he finds Ted Tripp in the front room, playing a hand of brag with rotund troubadour Tom Hall and junkyard-owner Curly Bell. Rome sits with Ted and idly chats for a few minutes while Ted’s mind is on the game, and then gets up and leaves. Ted barely registers Rome’s visit, much less that his car keys, which should be on the pub table next to his tobacco, are no longer there.
Still, that seventeenth century: a bastard from the outset and then it builds up to Isaac fucking Newton as its big finale. It kicks off with the gunpowder plot and Francis Tresham’s head impaled down at the end of Sheep Street, then it picks up pace with the Enclosures Act when all the toffs are given liberty to fence off areas of common land, legally sanctioned smash-and-grab with all the main protestors being local, all the doomed and dashing Captains, Swing and Slash and Pouch, this last one landing on a spike in Sheep Street within eighteen months of his posh adversary Francis Tresham. You can see what makes the land-reclaiming Diggers and the class-war Levellers so popular when they arrive in the mid-1640s to support Oliver Cromwell, alongside all of the other ranting, quaking dissidents that use Northampton as a millenarian theme-park in those years. The town backs Cromwell. He turns out to be like Stalin but without the sense of humour. Anyway, he’s dead by 1658, his son and heir fucks off to France and so by 1660 Charles the Second’s on the throne. Upset about Northampton’s role in getting his dad’s head lopped off he has its castle torn down as a punishment, but he’s concerned about the currency as well. Charles’s reign sees the introduction of milled edges to some of the previously hammered coins to prevent clipping, but the practice is still rife in ’96 when Isaac Newton comes to town, the Eliot Ness of English finance in the sixteen-hundreds.
If Roman’s in bed, his arms around his boyfriend, drifting off into the dark behind his corrugated eyelids, all the madness in his life makes perfect sense. When him and Dean first hook up in the early 1990s, that’s when his and Sharon’s young son Jesse starts to come unglued. Part of the Rave scene, Jesse necks assorted disco biscuits – ecstasy and ketamine and Christ knows what – halfway to a drug-aggravated breakdown, like Bert Regan’s stepson Adam, Jesse’s best mate at the bleary, blurry sunrise parties. Jesse takes Rome’s coming out hard, undeniably, but there’s a lot of other factors in the mix. Pal Adam goes spectacularly crazy and decides he’s gay as well; a gay male angel with his wings torn off by treacherous women – this meant literally. For Jesse it must seem reality has suddenly become untrustworthy so he stops going out, starts drinking to damp his by-now perpetual hallucinations, to blot out the cats with human faces, and then somewhere down the line he learns that in the blotting-out stakes heroin beats booze. His junkie new best mate is first to overdose, to fall off of the world in Jesse’s bedroom back at Sharon’s place, and then a few months later Jesse’s dead as well, bang, just like that. Ah, fuck. Sharon blames Rome for everything, won’t even have him at the funeral. It’s black, and doctors finally put a name to Roman’s driving fire, his contradictory soul: manic depression. Like police car sirens or economies, it seems Rome has his ups and downs.
This role as warden of the mint is meant as a seat-warming post, but Isaac takes it seriously, smells blood and money in the water. Coming to the job in 1696 when forgery and clipping still degrade the currency, Newton begins his Great Recoinage, where he recalls and replaces all the hammered silver coin in circulation. It takes two years and reveals that getting on a fifth of all the coins recalled are counterfeit. While forgery is classed as treason, punishable by evisceration, getting a conviction is a bugger, but the gravity man rises to the task. Disguised as a habitué of taverns Newton loiters, eavesdrops, gathers evidence. He then gets himself made a Justice of the Peace in all of the Home Counties so that he can cross-examine suspects, witnesses, informers, and by Christmas 1699 he has successfully sent twenty-eight rogue coiners to be drawn, hung, and then quartered, off down Tyburn way. In recognition of a job well done, in that same year he’s made the master of the mint, his wages bumped from Montague’s five or six hundred pounds to between twelve and fifteen hundred quid a year. Newton’s recoinage has reduced the need for low-denomination hand-scrawled bank notes so that anything under a fifty is withdrawn. Of course, it’s only those in Newton’s income bracket who will ever notice, given that for most people their yearly earnings in seventeenth century England are far less than twenty pounds and they will never see a bank note in their lives.
When Rome’s first diagnosed as a bit swings and roundabouts they stick him on the new anti-depressants, the SSRIs, Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitors like Prozac, that in 1995 appear to be the British medical profession’s first response to anything from clinical depression to occasional ennui. The drugs, in Rome’s opinion, are born of the probably-American idea that those in the developed world have an inalienable right to be contented every hour of their existence. So what if these happy-pills haven’t been around long enough for any adverse side-effects to show up so far; are effectively untested? There’s a market eager for an end to all their troubles, there are pharmaceutics corporations eager to make money, and the blue sky ethos of that endless economic boom-time stipulates instant gratification. Anyone dissenting from this mandatory manic optimism is a Gloomy Gus, a scaremonger or pessimist, is out of step with all the laissez-faire euphoria and would most probably feel better on a course of Prozac. Rome gives it a go, not having been informed that one occasional by-product of SSRIs is suicidal black depression. When Dean asks what’s wrong Rome drop-kicks him across the living room. He throws the pills away and in the dark troughs he goes for long walks and sorts it out himself. The manic peaks he saves for council meetings, for campaigns or organising protests. Energy efficiency. It’s one of the first principles you learn in engineering.
Newton, who’s familiar with the principle, brings chemical and mathematic know-how to the mint. After his Great Recoinage he’s asked to repeat the trick in Scotland, 1707. This leads to a common currency and the new kingdom of Great Britain. Not content yet, in 1717 the seventy-six-year-old first proclaims his bi-metallic standard where twenty-one silver shillings equals one gold guinea. England’s policy of paying for imports with silver while receiving payment for exports in gold means there’s a silver shortage, so what Newton’s doing here is moving Britain’s standard from silver to gold without announcing it. Personally he’s doing nicely, coining it, well-minted. Trusting his ability with sums to double up his cash he invests in the sure-fire high-return world of the South Sea Bubble, dropping twenty grand – three million by the current reckoning – when in 1721 the whole thing goes tits up. The fiscal genius of the day loses his shirt. He lets greed override his risk-assessment faculties, displays an expert’s fatal overconfidence in his abilities, the way that it’s mostly mycologists who end up killing themselves with a death cap omelette. And what brings Sir Isaac down is dabbling where he should know better, in a market bloated by a form of bonds known as derivatives, partly responsible for the Dutch Tulip-bulb fiasco that occurs in 1637 five years before Newton’s birth, and probably about to sink the world economy nearly three hundred years after his death.
Roman and Dean get digs in St. Luke’s House, a block between St. Andrew’s Street and Lower Harding Street, where Bellbarn used to be. He’s known the Boroughs all his life but this is the first time he’s lived there. Roman finds himself in love with its crushed population, with its relic tower blocks braced against the rain. Blanched grass sprouts from the seams of maisonettes and in it Rome can read an English bottom line. This area is up in the top two per cent of UK deprivation. Simply living here takes ten years off your life. These people at the shitty end of economic theory are the product of all that creative number-crunching. Individuals betrayed by bankers, governments and, yes, Rome sticks his hand up, by the left wing. Dean’s mixed race and they’re both gay, but neither of them see much benefit from the left wing’s promotion of racial and sexual equality. How does it help that Peter Mandelson and Oona King are doing okay, when the inequality between the rich and poor that socialism was intended to put right remains conspicuously unaddressed? Rome turns in his red star in ’97 at the first whiff of New Labour and its rictus-grinning frontman, to become an anarchist and activist. The malcontents that he attracts are sometimes “Defend Council Housing”, sometimes “Save Our NHS”, depending what will look most swinish to oppose. Thompson the Leveller has found his sticking place: the levelled ground where he can stage his gunsmoke stand.
Dying 1727, in his eighties and still at the mint, Newton sees the beginning of the shift to paper money. In 1725 banks issue notes where the pound sign is printed, but the date, amount and other details are hand-written by the signatory, like a cheque. Cash gradually becomes more abstract, but a greater sleight of hand takes place hundreds of years before with the invention of derivatives, the concept that helps scupper Newton. A derivative – a bond deriving from the actual goods for sale – occurs when someone makes a deal to sell their goods for an agreed sum at some future date. Whether the market price rises or falls before that time determines who’s made the best bet, but what’s important is that the derivative bond now has a potential value and can be sold on, with its projected worth continually increasing. This uncoupling of money and real goods contributes to the Tulip Craze and South Sea Bubble, while the current value of the world’s derivatives, from what Rome hears, is up to ten times larger than the sixty or so trillion dollars that is the whole planet’s fiscal output. The divide between reality and economics is a hairline fissure widening across the centuries to a deep ocean vent from which unprecedented forms of life squirm up with dismal regularity: bubbles and crazes, Wall Street crashes and Black Wednesdays, Enron and whatever bigger fuck-up is inevitably coming next; the bad dreams of a rational age that good old William Blake calls “Newton’s sleep”.
Rome combs the Boroughs streets looking for trouble. In some of the last remaining council dwellings there’s asbestos that the council won’t own up to, much less take away. Attempts to entice people into private housing schemes by entering them in a draw for prizes that are never won; do not exist. There’s endless scams or deprivations to attend and Rome has mission-creep, as likely to campaign against the selling-off of eighteenth-century houses in Abington Park as to bellow abuse through a loudhailer when they bring in Yvette Cooper, housing minister, to launch the NEWLIFE towers flogged to a housing company by former councillor Jim Cockie just before he joins their board. And there’s always some new affront on the horizon. At the moment there’s moves to put Euro-dosh meant for the Boroughs into a big needle like the Express Lifts Tower, but on Black Lion Hill. Roman suspects that this is to facilitate backhanders from whichever company lands the deal. Rome plans to feign disinterest, let them think his eye is off the ball. They’ll set dates for a secret ballot, to vote the proposals through without constituents knowing that they’ve backed this clearly bad idea. Then, on the afternoon before, Rome will call in a favour from someone with council clout, get them to change it to an open ballot, lift the stone to shed light on the wriggling things beneath and make them vote against it if they want to keep their seats. It’s all a complicated business, but then he’s a complicated man.
Money continues to evolve – particularly after the remarkable events at a Northampton cornmill that Rome has related to a slack-jawed Alma not an hour ago. 1745 sees partly-printed notes from twenty to a thousand pounds. Fifty years later, after the Napoleonic Wars, the bank stops paying gold for notes in what’s called the Restriction Period. This is when Sheridan calls the bank “an elderly lady in the City”, which cartoonist Gilray artfully tarts up as “the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street”. In 1821 the gold standard’s reinstituted and endures in a robust condition up until the First World War. The part-handwritten papers are made legal tender for all sums over five pounds in 1833, becoming proper modern banknotes. Then in 1855 they go the whole hog with the notes completely printed. Britain finally leaves the gold standard in 1931, its currency now backed up by paper securities rather than bars of precious metal. By the middle of the twentieth century, as Roman sees it, we’ve a world economy relying more and more upon the logic of a huge casino, and we’re just about to see a wave of post-war innovation that will change the planet. When these new ideas impact on the money markets they create the preconditions for a scale of ruin never previously witnessed or imagined. Eddies in the cash flow deepen into whirlpools, maelstroms, and we have the makings of a catastrophic storm. As they say in the ’Sixties, it don’t take a weatherman.
Not all Rome’s tasks are so dramatic. There’s fundraisers like the poster Alma does, and slogging door to door to make sure everyone’s informed. Like yesterday: Rome spends it letting people know about Alma’s do at the nursery while walking off the tail-end of a downer, one of Rome’s bear markets of the soul. Fresh air makes him feel bullish, while attempting all those stairways in the flats should do some cardio-vascular good. Trudging the tower blocks he checks on some of the older residents. They won’t be interested in the exhibition, but it’s an excuse to see if they’re okay. Near Tower Street he spots Benedict Perrit setting out on a day’s drinking and then pretends not to notice minor local drug czar Kenny Nolan, an amoral little shit who’s running down the district when he’s not even a councillor; not even being paid to do it. Crossing Bath Street, Roman mounts the scabby ziggurat of front steps to look in on little Marla Stiles, who’s on the skids, the game and crack, respectively. Her hungry lemur eyes dart everywhere when she comes to the door. She isn’t listening as Rome gives her the spiel on Alma’s show, but at least he can see she’s still alive. How long for, well, that’s anybody’s guess. He goes on up the flat-blocks’ central walk to visit other causes for concern around St. Katherine’s House, and on his way back later has to veer around a fresh-laid dog turd distantly resembling a dollar sign. It’s funny, isn’t it, the little details that you notice?
Economics as art starts out figurative, goes abstract, although not until the twentieth century will it become surrealism. Britain starts to leave the gold standard in 1918 which, coincidentally, is when the fifty-year dismantling of the Boroughs kicks off. Nearly all its terraces are gone by the late ’Sixties, when that decade’s fiscal innovations are beginning to come into play. Rome hears about a paper published, early ’Seventies, with new equations to help calculate the value of derivatives based on that of the goods that they’re derived from. Theoretically, this makes such deals a safer bet, and to the money markets that’s a chequered flag. Mathematics-wonks are suddenly the saviours of the industry. There are now new ways to make money, if there weren’t these regulations in the way. At decade’s end Thatcher and Reagan come to power, two eighteenth century Free Market Liberals who share Adam Smith’s mystical conviction that the market somehow regulates itself and subsequently start removing its restraints, just as the 1980s’ big computer boom gets underway. Keeping an eye on stocks, computers can gain or lose fortunes in a millisecond, adding to the system’s volatility. Crashes and crunches come and go, ruining countless thousands, but the bigger players keep on making bigger profits. Then in 1989 the Berlin Wall comes down and it’s like a dam bursting. Scenting blood with its only major competitor’s sudden demise, capitalism slips its leash.
When Rome’s own crashes come, fiscal analogies break down. He always ends up in the black. Black doves, black ice cream, a black wedding, a black Christmas, simmering in a stock of his own fuck-ups and nothing to do but live through it, to take those long walks up the colour gradient from deepest ebony to manageably neutral grey. Tom Hall calls it “the black dog”, after Winston Churchill’s name for the phenomenon. Back in the early days with his soon-to-be wife Diane, Tom goes for a lie-down on the Racecourse when he’s done something to test her patience, which is often. He can see the dark hound through his half-closed eyelids, sitting calmly on the summer-yellowed grass beside him. Roman misses Tom, but then, who doesn’t miss that planetary presence that kept half the town revolving with its gravity, its levity? That night in the Black Lion after Roman’s brush with the new model army, Tom is playing brag when Roman drops by to nick Ted Tripp’s motor; almost certainly sees Roman swipe the keys but only chuckles to himself and goes on with his game. Rome leaves them to it and, after he picks up something else he’s going to need from the back room, he takes the car from the pub car park. Furiously calm, he drives it round to Abington Street and pulls up beside the Grosvenor Centre’s entrance with his lights off, waiting. Obviously, with the street now pedestrianized you couldn’t do that sort of thing today. It’s Health and Safety gone mad.
After the wall’s fall, financiers launch into an epic victory binge. Free to proliferate, capitalism mutates fast. Not even a free-market frenzy like the Thatcher-Reagan years, this is something entirely new, but with a few old faces. Alan Greenspan, guiding U.S. finance under Reagan, George Bush, Clinton and Bush Junior, is a big fan of libertarian Ayn Rand and it’s on his watch that some J.P. Morgan wizards invent Credit Default Swaps in 1994. What these are, briefly, is insurance. You lend somebody a lot of dosh at a good interest rate, but they’re all hillbillies with Cyclops babies and you’re worried they’ll default. So you pay a third party to insure the debt. Assuming that the hillbillies pay up, everyone wins. And if the babies one day need to go to Cyclops college and the loan goes bad, no problem. The insurer coughs up, and assuming you’ve not <em>only</em> loaned to Cyclopses it probably won’t bother them much either. This apparently removes the final obstacle to making serious money, which is risk. The banks and companies can now do pretty much exactly as they please, with someone else obliged to pay for their mistakes. Predictably, they go berserk; make record-breaking profits doing so. When the warmed-over Tories now known as New Labour come to power in 1997, which is when Rome leaves the party, they provide the Bank of England with control over the interest rate and thus the whole economy. Profits like that, they must know what they’re doing.
After lots of hassle, Dean and Roman trade their flat off Lower Harding Street for a whole council house in Delapré. The new place is much nicer, though they have a neighbour who complains when Dean pops out into the back yard for a smoke one night and unleashes a torrent of loud swearing after stepping in the garden pond. This is the business that the council try to talk up to an ASBO when they’re trying to get at Rome through Dean, through his Hercules Heel. Oddly enough, their old digs in St. Luke’s House end up being used by CASPAR, the shoestring community support group to whom all of the modest improvements in the area can be attributed. Rome only finds this out last night when he’s down at the nursery with Burt Reagan, setting up for Alma’s exhibition, and he meets Lucy, who’s arranging it and gets it in the neck if anything goes wrong. Turns out she works for CASPAR, labouring where him and Dean first make a go of it, make love, make breakfast. She and Rome chat while him and Burt hang the paintings and put the big sculpture or whatever it’s called on the pushed-together tables in the centre of the room. They bond over his old flat’s inconveniently tiny toilet, there amidst the stupefying images of river-monsters rearing over Spencer Bridge, of multiple-exposure charcoal children flickering in a wasteland and the raging giants in nightgowns with their arcing billiard cues, their spraying golden blood like fire.
The economic watchword is not caution now but innovation, new ways to make loot that are not tested or thought through. Enron borrows upon future derivatives from areas of technology not yet invented, such as shares in Daleks or Transporter Beams but evidently nowhere near as solid. Enron’s bubble bursts as Dubya Bush takes over in 2000, the worst monetary catastrophe in U.S. history, and when the facts emerge nobody can believe the catalogue of madness, the horrific warning that this poses for economy in general. People call for tighter regulation, which would hinder making money, so the Enron business is dismissed as a statistical anomaly, some of its execs go to jail and then everyone carries on as normal. The big market in the U.K. and the U.S. now is housing, and those Credit Default Swaps mean banks can offer mortgages to almost anyone, a million Cyclops hillbillies, safe in the knowledge that insurers pay if it goes wrong. Unless, of course, all of the hillbillies default at once. If Rome’s correct, the world’s swollen financial markets are all resting on the least dependable and most impoverished section of society, on people almost guaranteed to fuck up. People like those in this very district. Schemes intended to reduce risk instead spread it through the whole system like woodworm, until from Beverly Hills to Bermondsey those folk who’d never dream of visiting an area like the Boroughs find instead that it has come to visit them.
Roman has a capacity for violence, never a propensity. It’s just been part of the equation, scuffling with coppers in an alley or outside the U.S. embassy in Grosvenor Square, just as it’s always been there in the money markets during their own troubled adolescence. When the Bacaleri di Norhan stage economic protests in 1263, Henry the Third sends in the troops to bash some heads together. When the Poll Tax riots kick off in the late 1980s – also economic protests – Thatcher sends in riot police to bash some heads together. Rome imagines that when the balloon goes up in our hi-tech twenty-first century, whoever’s running things will very probably send in Atari hunter-killer robots to – well, you get the idea. Violence, or at least the threat of it, is always there, hence Rome’s lifelong easy association between finances and criminality. There’s always hired goons somewhere in the mix, bruisers or bailiffs, or riot-samurais, or soldiers. Rome sits in the dark of Ted Tripp’s borrowed car and waits until the half-a-dozen squaddies stagger pissed and bellowing out of the cellar bar to fall into a minibus that’s evidently their ride back to base. It pulls away down Abington Street, most probably bound for Bridge Street, South Bridge and the motorway beyond. Rome gives it a few seconds and then starts Ted’s car up, following the soldiers out past the bright lights of town to where the darkness gathers round Northampton like an angry and protective mother.
Just last year in 2005, amidst the tube-bombs and ongoing nightmare of Iraq, big Gordon Brown sells off the last of Britain’s gold reserves right when the going rate is at a temporary low. There’s nothing solid holding things up anymore, not even paper, only electronic impulses and mathematics swirling in the ether. Rome, as a manic depressive, entertains dark possibilities: when banks begin to crash, as any airborne vessels held aloft by bubbles surely will, how will governments deal with that? The money’s bound up in the banks, especially in Britain where they’ve run the show since 1997, and if they go down the whole economy goes with them. No one’s going to let that happen. In effect, the banks are now immune to government control or reprimand. They have, by stealth, become a monarchy. It’s not even capitalism anymore, not the brutal Darwinian free-for-all proposed by Adam Smith and Maynard Keynes and Margaret Thatcher. This is some refried early seventeenth century arrangement, with a coddled and capricious ruler dominating even parliament. Rome’s not sure what you’d call the set-up – it’s a moneylenderocracy or something like that – but it would seem that the banking sector sees itself as royalty. Roman agrees. He sees them, more precisely, as King Charles the First. And everybody round these parts knows how all that ends up: in fire and pikes, wet innards and dry powder. Worlds turned upside down. Screams in the night.
The B-roads outside town are submerged in a rural blackness. There’s nobody else about, no other cars. Roman accelerates, pulls alongside the mini-bus. They think he’s overtaking until he slams into them, <em>BDANK</em>! The bus squeals, trying to regain control, with everybody on board thinking it’s a dreadful accident, when Rome lurches across, deliberately ramming them again, <em>BDANK</em>! This time they swerve into a ditch, roll over and land upside down. Rome stops a few yards further on, retrieves the billiard cue from the Black Lion that he’s got stashed in the back, then slides out of the car. He takes his time walking back up the road, the pole over his scrawny shoulder. No one’s going anywhere. The nearside door of the crashed troop-transporter turns out to be open. Roman climbs aboard. The soldiers are all dangling in their safety belts, concussed and bleeding. Out of those who can focus their eyes, nobody’s what you might call pleased to see him. He walks down the aisle between the seats, well, actually he walks along the inside of the bus’s roof but it’s the same thing. He walks down the aisle and scrutinises all the stunned, inverted faces, picking out the ones who’d given him the aggro. “You.” The thick end of the billiard cue jabs forward, into teeth. “And you.” Again the cue comes down, again. He pots a black eye, a pink throat, a cue-ball skull. Again. Again. Rome clears the table in a single visit and the crowd here at the Crucible goes wild.
The thing is, even if this century concocts a Cromwell who drags all the bankers to the chopping block, despite the fact that Rome finds it a lovely image, it won’t do a bit of good. The west is broke. There’s no nice way of putting it. Broke and in debt for generations, but still keeping up a front the way that Emperor Diocletian does when he begins to water down the empire’s coinage. Any revolutionary who succeeds in toppling the banks is going to inherit the same dismal situation, the appalling world they’ve left us with after their dizzy and intoxicated spree, fucked up beyond all recognition. No, just executing the executives is a non-starter. What you need to execute is money, or perhaps just money as it is from Alfred the Great onwards. Rome sees some bloke from the London School of Economics on the telly while he’s flicking through the channels. This chap makes the point that governments don’t actually do anything for us. The only thing that makes them boss is that they control all the currency. Historically, anyone proposing an alternative to cash is brutally suppressed, but then historically they haven’t got the Internet, which makes such things much easier to set up; much harder to crack down on. Rome can see a battered future Britain where a cow’s still worth five magic beans or the equivalent, which has no standard currency and thus no standard government, no kings, no credit agencies. Only a thousand colourful and ragged flags.
The Leveller kisses his boyfriend through the smoke in Castle Street and there’s a siren closing from the distance, whooping oscillations swooping from the Mounts to Grafton Street, driver perhaps starting to realise that it’s difficult responding to alarm calls from the Boroughs, its streets closed with bollards in an unsuccessful effort to prevent curb-crawling which has nonetheless been quite successful in obstructing every other fucking thing. He gives Dean’s bum a quick squeeze and can feel the all-at-once of himself welling up around him. He knows he’s still somehow up there on the rooftops as a seven-year-old, nicking moonlight. He’s still at the barricades, still messing up his life with Sharon, still under the mudslide in Pete Baker’s yard, still shifting Ted Tripp’s dodgy merchandise from the unguarded lockup, still half dead in the dark living room on his fiftieth birthday, still broke and still furious, still sleeping in the fire, still stalking through the upturned mini-bus with his apocalyptic staring eyes, his bloody snooker cue. He’s who he is, exactly, perfectly, and if what Alma says about that endless circuit of Delft tiles up on the nursery’s north wall is true, he’s who he is forever. The forlorn and lovely little pauper streets with all the precious memories are burning down somewhere behind him. Roman Thompson stares the future in its hairy eye, and knows that he won’t be the first to look away. Screaming its panicked aria, that siren’s getting nearer.
** <strong>THE RAFTERS AND THE BEAMS</strong>
<strong>M</strong>ashed in the Atlantic’s iron-green jaws off Freetown, on his skinny ship out of a Bristol plump from sugar and the sale of Africans, John Newton weeps, makes promises which he will not immediately keep, pleads for amazing grace and on the skyline, lightning-lit, are tumbling granite manes, are snarling caves and heavy paws of avalanche. The Lion Mountains, as the Portuguese adventurer Pedro da Cintra calls the land in 1462: Serra de Leão. Romarong, as it’s known to the local Mende tribesmen. Sierra Leone, the name tawny with dust or rank with ambush, where sweet hymns are pressed from vintages of mortal panic and undying shame.
When he gets to be old, Black Charley don’t care for the songs no more and don’t care for the chapels. He makes church in empty barns, with his rope-rimmed contraption left outside and leaning up against a rain butt. Henry George, down on a hard dirt floor, straw prickling his knees through his worn pants. He breathes the musk of long-gone horses, pale palms pressed together, talking to whatever it is Henry can feel listening to him from somewhere long ways off, outside of all the stars and moons, just listening and never answering or interrupting, never saying anything at all. Above, birds come and go through gaps between the slates, and over his head Henry hears their soothing language; beating wings when they alight on beams and tarry rafters pinstriped with ancestral droppings. His quiet prayers float up past rugged joints, past bowing timbers, rather than into a company of marble saints and saviours martyred in the coloured glass. He will allow that worshiping like this has led him to imagine paradise as all built out of wood and with a smell like sawdust and manure, not stairs and statues everywhere. He counts this view of some rough heaven as preferable to what the ministers describe, and much more likely in its reasoning. Where would a thing that’s truly holy find the need to put on airs? Black Charley has no faith in Colonel Cody, nor religious songs and paintings, neither any institution making a big show about itself. From where they’ve broken holes in the barn roof, pillars of toppled brightness are propped slanting one against another like old, dusty ruins of light, and Henry scratches at the branded shoulder through his patched-up jacket before he commences once again to murmur.
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Africa’s west coast, an ancient frontal lobe inflamed and swollen, bulges into cooling ocean with Sierra Leone on the underside, Guinea above it and Liberia below. Pedro da Cintra finds the country, names it for the pride of hills about its bay and after him, inevitably, come the traders and the slavers; first from Portugal and later France and Holland. Then, a hundred years after da Cintra’s ruinous discovery, from England, when John Hawkins ships three hundred souls to meet the great demand arisen from that nation’s colonies, newly established in America. Two centuries as western Africa’s principal slave-port follow and then, in 1787, a collection of British philanthropists establish a Province of Freedom where they settle a small population of the Black Poor, Asians and Africans whose mounting presence on the streets of London has become too costly to support, including black Americans who, just a decade earlier, had joined the British side during the War of Independence with the promise of their liberty as an enticement. Five years later, numbers thinned by illness or by hostile native tribes, these are augmented by more than a thousand come from icy Nova Scotia, mostly escaped slaves from the United States, and subsequently Freetown is established as the first refuge for African-Americans who’ve fled their work-gang or plantation, neighbouring Liberia only following this bold example after thirty-five years. Gradually more liberated slaves return to swell the settlers’ ranks, known as the Krio people for their creole tongue, a Pidgin English by way of America. The haven flourishes, with both women and blacks given the vote before the eighteenth century’s end. In 1827 the Fourah Bay College is established, western Sub-Saharan Africa’s first university upon the European model, making Sierra Leone a hub of education. It is at this institution in the 1940s that the sleek and handsome Bernard Daniels, studying law, begins to contemplate a life in England.
Half a century ago, back in the 1890s, Henry George admits he isn’t so much thinking of a life in England as a life away from the United States. Now in his forties with both parents gone he’s got no reason to abide there in a place that’s never done him any favours and has burnt its mark into his arm. The truth be told, he’s all for leaving sooner but his momma and his poppa they can’t bear the thought of all that distance over water. Unlike Henry, born down there in Tennessee, the both of them have been on a long ocean voyage before and aren’t in any hurry to repeat it. “You go, Henry,” they both tell him. “You go over there while you’re still young and got your strength, and don’t you worry about us.” But Henry’s not the kind of man could ever do that, and so he takes care of them and waits it out, is genuinely glad for every minute they’re alive. Soon as they’re in the ground, though, he’s got nothing holding him, nothing to keep him from his berth aboard <em>The Pride of Bethlehem</em>, come steaming out of Newark bound for Cardiff and in one sense drawing in the third line of an ancient triangle for Henry, a pointed and dangerous shape connecting Africa, the U.S.A. and England on the stained three-hundred-year-old maps. On those long, lurching nights of the Atlantic crossing, though, he’s not thinking about any of that. He’s flipping scornfully through Buffalo Bill chapbooks in the sliding lamplight and he doesn’t entertain the slightest thought or speculation about what the country of his destination might turn out to be like; rarely thinks of it by name but instead inwardly refers to it as Not America.
That isn’t Bernard Daniels’s view, from his perspective of Fourah Bay College in the middle of the twentieth century. Bernard hails from a Krio family comparatively well-off after years of service to the Macauley and Babington trade company, and he imagines Europe generally – and England in particular – to be the fountainhead of all civilisation. This belief is prevalent amongst the Krio, mostly the descendants of absconded U.S. slaves, who through unswerving loyalty to their British bosses are Sierra Leone’s dominant and most prosperous ethnic group, with native tribes such as the Sherbro, Temne, Limba, Tyra, Kissi, and more latterly the Mende people drawn increasingly together in a shared resentment. Bernard is brought up in the belief that the indigenous tribesmen who live in the Protectorate are savages; embraces gold-rimmed spectacles and stately waistcoats, throws himself with greater diligence into his studies in an effort to more deeply underscore the critical dividing line. He looks at the society around him, at the outbursts of unrest and tribal riots that have continued intermittently since the great Hut Tax war of 1898 when British troops are sent in to suppress the Temne uprising, and Bernard sees the writing on the wall. It’s 1951, November, and Sir Milton Margai, born a Krio but raised as an ethnic Mende, is attending to the draft of a new constitution which will set the stage for decolonisation. Bernard has identified with the oppressor. He has taken on the master race’s fears and snobberies and doesn’t want to still be living in the Lion Mountains’ shadow when the animals control the zoo. Having acquired his law degree, he swiftly and efficiently begins to plan for his departure. Bernard marries his devoted young fiancée Joyce, as keen to make the move as he is, and arranges both their travel and some suitable accommodation once they get to London. Within only a few dizzying weeks his misplaced vision of the mother country has been butted squarely in the face by 1950s winter Brixton with its lights and catcalls, tilted trilbies, unfamiliar tumults. Wheezing innuendo in the barbers’ shops.
His scrawny legs still rolling from the ocean, Henry stumbles down the gangplank into nineteenth century Tiger Bay and, lacking Bernard’s expectations, finds it’s not too bad and in no way is it a shock to him, all the black faces, all the funny sing-song accents. The most startling thing to Henry’s mind is Wales itself, in that he’s never in his life imagined anywhere so wet and old and wild. It’s only when he meets Selina and they marry and nobody says a thing about it that he starts to truly understand he’s somewhere different now, and among different people. From Abergavenny they hike up to join the drovers in Builth Wells and are alone a night or two, camped out there in the million-year-old dark between giant hills, nothing like Kansas. Come the morning and the pair of them are naked as the day they’re born and holding hands as they pick their way slow and careful down the steep bank to a shallow stream what they can wash in. It’s real cold but his Selina is a plump young girl of twenty-two and they’ve got some hot blood between them. Pretty soon they’re having married congress standing up in foam and flow with the clear water churning all around their shins, out in the pinkness of the early daylight with nobody anywhere around except for all the birds that are at that time waking up and trying out their voices. Him and his new wife are kicking up a noise as well and Henry feels as if he’s in an Eden where nobody fell, with little diamonds splashing up and beaded on Selina’s pretty rump. He feels escaped, and can’t remember any moment in his previous life filled up with so much perfect joy. Then, after, when they’re lying on the bank to dry and catch their breath, Selina traces with her fingertip the fading violet lines on his damp arm, the ribbon that might be a road, the shape above it that might be a balance, and she doesn’t say a thing.
For Joyce and Bernard, twentieth century London is a different story. There’s a temperature inversion trapping car exhaust and factory smoke beneath low cloud, people are dying in their hundreds and the government are issuing the populace with useless paper masks in an attempt to look as if they’re doing something. Everybody’s coughing, spitting black muck onto overcast lanes with the Durex brand-name swimming forward out of backstreet fog in sticking-plaster cream and lipstick neon. Bernard realises belatedly that England too is a land of distinct and separate uncouth tribes – cosh-boys and market traders, socialists and spivs, white savages – united only by their grievance and an envy of their betters. Worse, nobody here seems able to appreciate the yawning gulf in status that exists between the black men of Sierra Leone’s Colony and those of its Protectorate, perceiving any coloured person as a coon regardless of their elocution or their bearing, irrespective of their spectacles and waistcoats. Joyce produces their first child, a boy named David, and is pregnant with their second while her husband finds that jobs for which he’s qualified, where his employers also have no qualms about his being African, are few and far between. It seems to Bernard that outside the capital there may be law firms who are not so used to the easy availability of quality employees as their London counterparts and who thus might be more impressed with his impeccable qualifications. He decides to cast his line further afield and at last gets a bite from a company of solicitors in somewhere called Northampton just as Joyce presents him with a second son, whom he proposes they name Andrew. Looking for accommodation in the new town, Bernard is confronted by a policy equating him with both dogs and the Irish while expressing a refusal to rent property to all three of these categories. His infuriating sense of being snubbed is only muddied by his sympathy for the position of the bigot landlords. If Bernard himself had space to let he knows he wouldn’t lease it to Dickensian criminals with vicious hounds, to drunken Irish labourers or to the great majority of his own workshy countrymen. When he gets news of rooms available not far from the town’s centre on a busy thoroughfare seemingly known as Sheep Street, Bernard’s celebratory mood endures until the final paragraph of the acceptance letter, where it states that this agreement is made on the understanding that just Mr. Daniels and his wife will be residing at the flat, and that there won’t be any pets or, most especially, children living there.
Meanwhile, in 1896, Henry and his young wife get carried to their new home on a vast and foaming tide of mutton. From what Henry understands, the landscape-bleaching herds are driven out from Builth and then persuaded to head east through Worcestershire and Warwickshire until they wash like bleating surf against Northampton. It’s a track been there a thousand years or more, and Henry hears how in the old days, century or so before, the drovers learn to stay away from inns where horses are tied up outside that look to be in too good a condition. This is on account of how these well-fed horses more than likely turn out to belong to highwaymen, who have a habit back then of befriending drovers who are headed east, inviting them to call in for a drink on their way back when they’ll have traded all their sheep for money. Naturally, this means that on the return journey they’ll be more convenient to rob and get left with their throats cut in some Stratford ditch. Because of this, most of the herdsmen carry on out of Northampton with their sheep and take them down to London, so they can head back to Wales through Bristol and down that way, missing out the Worcester taverns where the highwaymen are waiting. It occurs to Henry that this Wales – Northampton – London route marks out another triangle much like the one connecting England with America and Africa, and in both cases it’s a kind of cattle being moved. And then of course you’ve got another similarity in that some of the animals that Henry is in charge of – although not that many of them, now he comes to think about it – have been branded. The main difference is the colour of the goods. Henry considers how the movement of his family over generations has been down these well-worn paths of trade, whether that trade be sheep or people, U.S. steel or Buffalo Bill chapbooks, and supposes that these lines of least resistance, which first get carved out by enterprise, end up as destinies. It’s down these money-trails that, say, your great-great-grandpa’s fondness for a drink or else your grandma’s big green eyes go wandering, around the world and through the ages. Henry and Selina don’t have much of what you’d call a plan behind their journey, figuring they’ll maybe carry on to London with the drovers and if they don’t like it there, why, then they’ll head on back to Wales. This is before they reach Northampton and get funnelled in through its north gate in a great swathe of white, where there’s that circle-church that’s older than the hills, there’s that almighty tree been scarred in all the wars, and Henry and his wife Selina, with her mile-long tick-infested bridal train trotting behind her on the cobbles, first set eyes on Sheep Street.
Electing to take up their new address, there in the grey and tan Northampton avenues of 1954, demands that Joyce and Bernard make some hard decisions. Clearly, the “no children” rule presents the biggest obstacle to living in the Sheep Street flat and thus to Bernard taking up his best and thus far only offer of a job, but he thinks he can see a way around it. Up by train from London in a cloud of steam and coal-smoke for a visit to the premises he meets a would-be neighbour from the rooms downstairs, an amiable idealist from the International Friendship League. This is some form of thankfully entirely ineffectual English socialist conglomerate of the variety that Bernard generally avoids, but in this instance the old chap appears to offer Bernard a solution to his “no children allowed” predicament: the man suggests that he has room to hide a child in his downstairs accommodation during those occasions when the landlord comes to pay a visit, which would go at least halfway to solving Bernard’s quandary, the other half of which is his and Joyce’s second baby, little Andrew. Their new neighbour clearly doesn’t have the room to hide two infants, and as Bernard’s firstborn it seems only right that the two-year-old David should take precedence. After an unusually heated consultation with his wife, Bernard decides it would be best if Andrew were to stay in Brixton with some relatives of Joyce’s until they’re established in the town and can arrange a mortgage, can arrange a permanent address with room for all the family. In Bernard’s view, with Andrew being still a few months shy of his first birthday he’s less likely to have formed a strong attachment to his mother and will therefore miss her less than David would do. Bernard doubts so small a child will even be aware that anything is different. And besides, in later life the baby won’t be able to remember anything about it. It will be as if this admittedly less than ideal situation hasn’t happened. At last everything’s arranged, everything goes ahead and on their first night in the new flat with its view of that peculiar and hardly Christian-looking church across the street, Joyce doesn’t sleep and weeps until the morning. Bernard, frankly, doesn’t understand why she can’t just resign herself and make the best of it. They’re only doing what they have to do, and in perhaps a year it will all work out fine for everyone. Andrew will be all right. There’s no harm done.
Henry and his Selina make their way down Sheep Street to the market square so he can go collect his wages from the Welsh House that they have there, and he knows from the way everybody’s looking at him that he’s got the only black face in the town. It’s not that they appear resentful or they’re giving him the hard eye like he shouldn’t be there, how it would have been in Tennessee. The people of Northampton look to be more plain amazed, regarding Henry like they would one of them big giraffes that he’s seen pictures of, or something else so rarefied and out-the-way that no one had expected to see nothing like it in their town or in their lifetime. People smile or some of them look shocked but mostly they just stand there with their faces hanging out as if they don’t know what to do with them. For his part, Henry figures he must look the same way, gawping at the ancient town in all its queerness. It’s like Henry and Northampton are dumbstruck with mutual astonishment. First that round church, been standing on its spot eight hundred years, while down the street there’s that big beech tree must be pretty near as old, and then you’ve got a market square that’s from around the same time, from around the year ten hundred-something. That’s a long time, long enough to make his head spin. Why, back then the slave trade between countries hadn’t been invented, far as Henry knows. There’s no United States, no Tennessee, and white people have never heard of Africa. There’s just the circle-church, the beech tree and the woollen river winding between here and Wales. To Henry it seems like all of these centuries the place has been here are a kind of breadth or depth that he can’t see but which conspires to give the town a feeling of great magnitude that’s bigger than its visible real size. After they pick up Henry’s pay the pair of them go for a walk up from the market square and back to Sheep Street, where they make their way down this old alley with a sign up says it’s Bullhead Lane, so steep and narrow it feels like one of them nonsense-places in a dream, and that’s how they descend into the Boroughs. From the start it’s all around them, clamouring for their attention. There’s some tough old girls look fit to pull each other’s heads off rolling in the street outside one of the beer establishments, and anywhere you’re standing you can see around a dozen similar public houses, there’s that many of them. There’s a blind man playing on a barrel-organ, rabbits hopping right there on the cobbles, everybody’s got a hat on and nobody’s got a gun. There’s every kind of call and conversation, and in Scarletwell Street, where they spend a piece of Henry’s wages in advance rent on a house they take a shine to, they see Newton Pratt’s astounding beast drinking its beer and trying to stay upright just across the street there. Henry and Selina take it for a sign and move in right away. They’ve got a whole house to themselves, and though it’s small and wedged into its sooty terrace like a book jammed in a bookshelf it seems much too big at first, but that’s before the babies start to pour out of Selina in a happy babbling flood that rises to their ankles, then their knees, and in what seems like just a year or two they’re standing shoulder-deep in children.
As a grown man David Daniels can’t remember much about his origins there at the flat in Sheep Street, his two years as an official Boroughs resident. His infancy, that endless continuity of moments when each moment is a saga, has evaporated to leave only a thin residue of pictures and associations, brittle sepia snapshots taken from floor-level with the details and the context bleaching out around the edges. He recalls the endless plain of carpet in the living room, soft beige with fronds and curlicues that are an acre of gold fuzz now in his memory, stabbed by slanting blades of sunlight. There’s a flickering internal film-loop, a few seconds long, of David hooked up to his mother Joyce by leather reins and stumbling uncertainly downhill along a sloping path with crumbled loose-tooth tombstones rising up to either side, which he now realises must be in the graveyard of the Holy Sepulchre, the old church just across the way. When he gets taken out for walks it’s always to the north or east of Sheep Street, never to the west or south. It’s always to the Racecourse just a little up past Regent’s Square and never down into the Boroughs, a disreputable neighbourhood where unbeknownst to him his future playmate Alma Warren sleeps sound in the bosom of her ordinarily peculiar clan. David’s initial recollections of his dad are more like memories of a ship than of a person, with the chest and gentle paunch thrown forward like a brocade mainsail swelled by tailwind. Thumbs hooked presidentially in waistcoat pockets and up past the crow’s nest of his tie-knot, Bernard’s proud face like a flag; a better-nourished Jolly Roger with its twinkling glass sockets gilded at their rims, sailed here upon spiced currents from High Barbary, from the lion hills of the old country in which David was conceived and which his parents very seldom mention. Then there are the days of mystery and adventure when his mother takes him on the huffing dragon train to London so that she can visit friends or family, he’s not sure which, and David spends the afternoons in unfamiliar Brixton parlours playing with a little boy called Andrew who seems nice enough, but whom he doesn’t know. When David’s four years old in 1956, Bernard and Joyce at last discover a white couple who’ll arrange a mortgage with the racially mistrustful banks. They move into a pleasant house in Kingsthorpe Hollow, funny little Andrew turns up unexpectedly to live with them and for the first time David comes to understand he has a brother, that he’s had a brother all this time and never heard a thing about it until now. He starts to wonder how much of his life is going on without his knowledge, starts to speculate on where and who his parents might have been before they suddenly materialise as a home-owning married couple in Northampton, just as though they’ve always been here. Why don’t David and his baby brother seem to have grandparents? Are his mother and his father born like gods out of the mud and sky, from the Northampton landscape with no mortal ancestors preceding them? He has the sense of a big, complicated story that he’s come in at the middle of, and an impression of a history that’s kept apart from him, in quarantine, like Andrew. How could they not tell him that he’s got a brother? He begins to worry about any more astonishing surprises that might be in store for him. Given their new house and new neighbours, given the way his family are encouraged to regard themselves now they’re not living in the Boroughs anymore, David begins to wonder whether he’s even actually black, if David is indeed his real name.
Almost as soon as Henry first sets foot inside the Boroughs he’s Black Charley, like the title’s just been waiting for him to turn up and put it on like an old overcoat. He doesn’t mind. It’s not meant disrespectfully, the “Black” part of it being no more than the honest truth, while “Charley” is just something you call men around here when you can’t remember what their proper name is. In its way it’s almost like a mark of special standing, a way of acknowledging that he’s unique and that there’s not another place around Northampton can boast anybody as remarkable as Henry George. Though other coloured people drift into the town across the years, there’s none of them so well known as what Henry is. At least that’s true until 1911 when the local football team – what’s called the Cobblers on account of all the boots and shoes made here in town – they take on a black football-player by the name of Walter Tull. They make a big fuss in the local newspapers, which is how Henry hears about it, and that gets his interest fired up so that he wants to find out all he can about this new arrival threatening to steal his coal-jewelled crown. He even takes a ride up to the football-field that’s off Abington Avenue to watch Tull play, despite the fact that Henry’s never really taken to the game, and he’s forced to admit the boy can run like lightning and he sure knows how to kick a ball around. Good looking too, a young man about twenty-four years old, getting on thirty-five years Henry’s junior and with skin that’s a whole lot lighter in the bargain. Seems how Tull is born away down Kent where they pick all the hops, with his pop from Barbados and his mom an English girl. From what Henry gets told, both of Tull’s folks are passed away before he’s ten. Him and his brother Edward – the same name as Henry and Selina’s youngest boy – are raised up in a London orphanage until Edward’s adopted by a Glasgow family. He goes off up to Scotland and becomes the country’s first black dentist, if you can believe that. Walter, he plays football for some boys’ club that’s in Bethnal Green or someplace, where the talent scouts what all the big teams have take notice of him and before long he gets taken on to play with Tottenham Hotspurs, that they call the Spurs. That’s in 1909, and though Tull’s not the first black or brown man to play professional football here in England – there’s another coloured man in Darlington, Henry believes, who plays as a goalkeeper – Walter’s the first one who’s playing out there on the field and not just stood in goal. He doesn’t stay with Tottenham more than a year or two, though, and as Henry hears the story it’s because of how all the when the team plays off in another town, all the spectators there shout hurtful things at Tull, comments occasioned by his colour. How must that feel, Henry thinks, to be stood in a stadium of people with them hating you and ridiculing you; those hundreds of eyes on you and nowhere that you can go to get away from them until the whistle’s blowed? As far as Henry’s concerned something like that would be his worst nightmare, and he’s mightily relieved that he sees nothing like it those times when he rides over to watch Walter play at what they call the County Ground in Abington. Everyone seems to feel that it’s a pleasure having Tull here in the town, and Henry takes a sort of pride in his association by appearance. Then, 1914, that real bad European War breaks out and Walter Tull proves to be just as brave as he’s good with a football when he’s the first player in the town to join up in the army and go off to fight. From the reports what make their way back from the front it seems that he does pretty good. He fights in the first Battle of the Somme and they make him a sergeant. Then in 1917 when he’s promoted to Second Lieutenant and goes off to fight at Ypres and Passchendaele, that makes him the first officer who’s black in the whole British Army. That next year, the last year of the war, Walter goes back to France for what’s referred to as the Spring Offensive where he gets blew up and they can’t get his body back so that he never even has a proper grave. The night after he hears the news, Black Charley has a dream where Walter Tull’s with Henry’s western hero Britton Johnson and they’re dressed like cowboys, sheltering behind the stallions what they’ve shot for breastwork and returning fire as all around them circle whooping German infantry on horseback, wearing feather headdresses instead of bill-spike helmets.
Forty years or so into the afterwards, David gets on with things. He gets on with his newfound little brother, Andrew, and he gets on well the moment he starts school down at St. George’s in the heart of Semilong. So well, in fact, that David finds he must bear the full brunt of his dad Bernard’s proud, beaming approval and encouragement, something that David feels uncomfortable about when he begins to realise that the same enthusiasm doesn’t get extended to his younger brother. While their mother Joyce is scrupulously even-handed in showing affection to her boys, it starts to look as if her husband has already chosen which one of the children he would save in the event of household fire. Where Bernard comes from, this pragmatic attitude is not unusual. Sometimes life is very hard. Sometimes the only way to make sure any of your offspring will survive is to make brutal, terrible decisions and put all of your resources behind just one child. It’s a strategic, military approach where reinforcements are sent to the regiments already winning, never to the most embattled troops, the ones in most immediate danger of defeat. Why throw good effort after bad? The widening disparity between the brothers from their father’s viewpoint is just how things are, at least there at their Kingsthorpe Hollow residence. It isn’t mentioned and, after a time, is barely even noticed, is a thing that can be lived with. David loves his brother. Andrew is his constant playmate, not to say almost his only playmate. David isn’t really close to any of the other children, the white children, in his class at school. He’s cleverer than they are, for the most part, and a different colour, neither of these attributes contributing to social success with his classmates. There are other black kids that David and Andrew sometimes hang around with at the playground with the swings and see-saw on the Racecourse, but these are mostly the children of Jamaican immigrants and David feels as if there is some sort of barrier dividing them from him and Andrew, one that he can neither see nor understand. Part of it’s in the way their father clearly disapproves of their new friends, and part of it’s how he makes David and his brother feel that they should disapprove as well; that they come from a better background than their pals from the Big Island. David knows this isn’t right, this attitude, but somehow it creeps into things, into just playing on a roundabout, and makes an atmosphere, creates a distance – even between him and boys and girls of his own colour – as if David’s not lonely enough already. His dad’s class-based segregationist agenda at least pays off when it comes to David’s education. Lacking the distraction of companions he has little else to do but get on with his work, prepare for the eleven-plus examinations that will more or less determine, at this early age, the prospects for the rest of David’s life. The only break he gets from schooling, other than the time he spends mucking about with Andrew, comes in his discovery of fantasy, in dreams of noble-looking people with astonishing abilities. David has never heard of Henry George much less of Henry’s hero, black gunslinger Britton Johnson, but perhaps there’s something in his trading triangle-dictated blood that gives him a predisposition for the vibrant Technicolor dream-life of America. David begins to haunt the book and magazine stall, Sid’s, that’s in the ancient market square on Wednesdays and on Saturdays, where the eponymous proprietor with his cloth cap, his muffler and his fuming pipe presides over a marvellous array of lurid treasures. There are boxes crammed with yellowing second-hand paperbacks where the delirious jackets of science-fiction books seem to predominate, and hung from the stall’s upper reaches in the locked ferocious jaws of bulldog clips are men’s adventure magazines where naked-to-the-waist marines with gritted teeth are whipped by lovely women wearing only undies and swastika armbands, beneath blurbs which promise him THE KINKY KRAUT LOVE-GODDESSES OF TORTURE ISLAND! Even more enticing from David’s perspective are the rows of U.S. comics displayed cover-up on the bookstall’s front table: fluttering coloured butterflies held down by metal discus paperweights. Iron Man battles Kala, the Queen of the Underworld, and high above the thrusting skyscrapers Spiderman fights the Vulture. Superman and Batman meet when both of them are just young boys, how can that be? The constantly expanding ranks of costumed characters become the secret comrades of David’s imagination, a whole hidden world of friends that no one else but him appears to know about. He keeps the comics he’s collected in his room, sprawls on his bed and reads them while a world away downstairs his father fumes about the news from somewhere that’s called Sierra Leone, which somebody called Milton Margai has just led to independence. None of this is half as relevant or half as interesting as the Skrulls, the Human Torch, Starro the Conqueror. Despite the lure of his new passion David’s schoolwork doesn’t suffer and he passes his eleven-plus. This certainly pleases his father as it means that David will be sent to the prestigious Grammar School for Boys out on the Billing Road. Bernard is even more delighted when the <em>Chronicle & Echo</em> post a journalist and a photographer to cover David’s entry into his new seat of learning, with a picture showing David in his new school uniform, sat at his desk there in an otherwise deserted classroom, just in case he doesn’t feel sufficiently conspicuous or isolated yet. The headline reads FIRST BLACK PUPIL FOR GRAMMAR SCHOOL and David’s face in the accompanying image wears a look of wariness and apprehension, as if he’s got no idea what’s going to happen next.
For Henry and Selina, nearer to the turnpike of the twentieth century, what happens next is that they send their several children off to Spring Lane School that’s right across the street from where they live, crowded amidst the mess of public houses, businesses and homes all fitted in a huddle there between Spring Lane and Scarletwell Street. When he cycles out upon his rope-wheeled chariot to look for odds and ends each morning Henry likes to hear the boys and girls all giggling and shrieking in their playground that’s away behind the red brick schoolhouse somewhere, if it happens to be the right time of day. He’ll be coasting on down towards Saint Andrew’s Road that’s got the railway track beyond it, past The Friendly Arms, the little shops and houses, and he’ll listen for the youngsters kicking up a noise to see if he can pick out his own offspring’s voices from amongst them. Far as Henry knows, his and Selina’s kids are the first ones of any colour at the school, but still they never hear about no bullying or teasing, or at least none that’s about their skin. On more than one occasion when he struggles up Black Lion Hill into Marefair with the lit-up shop windows, or he coasts down Bath Street where they got that big dark chimney – that Destructor – it occurs to Henry that despite appearances him and Selina picked exactly the right place to raise their family. It’s taken him a while to fathom it, but Henry reckons that relations over here between the black folk and the white folk is a little different to the way that things are over in America. The business about class has got a lot to do with it, as Henry sees things. Back in Tennessee, even the humblest white folk still look down on coloured people, maybe because in their eyes a black man’s always going to be a slave. But here in England, even though it’s mostly the rich English people doing all the trading, they don’t personally keep no slaves themselves. So down in someplace like the Boroughs, where the people and their parents and their grandparents back to the knights-in-armour days are always on the bottom of the heap, they look at Henry and the first thing that they see it’s not a black man, it’s a poor man. If you want to know the difference that’s between the countries then you only got to look at their respective civil wars as far as Henry sees it, living here in the place that supplied the boots for both of them. In England back there in the sixteen-hundreds, old man Cromwell, he pretends as how he’s fighting for to liberate the poor from their oppressions. Meanwhile, over in America when Henry’s just a small child, old man Lincoln, he pretends as how he’s fighting for to liberate the slaves from their plantations. Speaking from his own experience, Henry reckons Mister Lincoln only wants to get them slaves out of the cotton fields down south so that they can be put to work in mills and factories up north. And from what Henry hears about the English Civil War, it seems like Mister Cromwell’s only after power and glory. Once he’s got that he starts killing off the leaders of the common people what supported him, and in both England and America the civil wars end up with those that they were meant to liberate no better off than what they were before, blacks over there, poor over here. Now, put like that the wars sound pretty much the same, but it appears to Henry that while both of them most probably have grabs for power at the bottom of it all, in England it’s put to the people as an uprising against the better-off, just like the business that’s in all the papers about Russia at the minute. In America, they have to make out that their Civil War has got to do with liberating slaves, because Americans are never going to want to overthrow the wealthy when becoming wealthy is the idea their whole country’s stood on. There’s the difference right there, that’s what Henry thinks. In England they don’t barely understand the hate that’s between folks of different colours when what’s on their mind is all the hate between folks come from different classes. Rope tyres rumbling on the cobblestones Black Charley runs around the Boroughs like a song what everybody knows. As long as he keeps to this part of town he don’t get any trouble, but then that’s the same for all the white people down here as well. He likes it here, and privately he marvels at all of the big and little things what tie it to the country that he come from. There’s George Washington and old Benjamin Franklin too, their families leaving Northampton to escape one civil war and heading for America to help set up the makings of another. There’s Confederate boots, and Henry hearing about Mr. Philip Doddridge’s considerable influence on the reformer William Wilberforce, and then of course there’s Pastor Newton writing his “Amazing Grace” out there at Olney. There’s a Mr. Corey who’s baptised at the round church in Sheep Street, goes out to America and gets tortured to death in Salem, caught up in that Cotton Mather witchcraft foolishness. The stars and stripes, the flag of the United States, that’s some old village crest the Washingtons took out of Barton Sulgrave with them when they left, and then there’s Henry George himself, another link there in the ugly chain connecting one land to the other. Henry judders on the Boroughs’ stones and loves the dirty mysteries of his adopted district, with all the cast-off centuries just lying heaped in bundles on the streets like unsold newspapers. He likes the convolutions of its paths and alleys – what they call a jitty here – and even though the whole place isn’t any bigger than a half square mile and he’s been living there for nigh on twenty years, Henry can still discover passages and short-cuts he don’t know about. Then come the war’s end in 1918 he sees it all begin to change, with Walter Tull filling an unmarked grave somewhere away in France and the commencement of the Boroughs’ slow and painful demolition, all the interesting yards and alleyways and complications at the back of Marefair just knocked flat and turned to rubble that weren’t neither interesting nor complicated, all the lives and history in those narrow lanes just wiped away like they were never there. More and more ground he sees fenced in with sheets of corrugated tin, more and more women widowed from the war reduced to peddling fornication in the graveyard by Saint Katherine’s Church and the almighty tower of the Destructor fuming up into a noonday sky that’s near as black as he is. A great heaviness begins to take up home in him, and Henry notes with puzzlement that amidst all the alterations Scarletwell Street seems to gradually be getting steeper.
A short way uphill in 1964, David is plunged into a sudden understanding of England’s antiquity and strangeness when he first attends the Grammar School in Billing Road as a short-trousered first-year in his navy blazer and compulsory cap. Already starting to develop a keen dress-sense, he knows that this isn’t a good look for him, particularly the short trousers. This last intuition is confirmed when he discovers that the Head of First Years, Mr. Duncan Oldman, is an unrestrained boy-fondler who’s apparently allowed to call eleven-year-olds out to stand beside his desk where he can run his pudgy fingers over their bare thighs, or at least he can do this with the ones whose parents have decided they’re not ready for long trousers. Mr. Oldman is an archetypal creepy child molester from a Charles Addams cartoon with his plump mollusc body tapering to dainty little hands and feet, his porcine nose and ears and darting, beady eyes; the web of burst blood vessels in his cheeks which lends him a perpetual choirboy blush. The word out in the playground is that on at least two separate occasions Mr. Oldman has invited first year pupils to his nearby home for after-class tuition, where he tries to touch them up and kiss them. In the two known instances where this gets back to the boy’s parents and they formally complain, the new headmaster begs them to consider the good reputation of the school, they settle out of court and Dunky Oldman is allowed to carry on as Head of First Years with impunity, his underage seraglio in easy reach around him like an R.I.-teaching Emperor Tiberius. The new headmaster, Mr. Ormerod, has recently replaced the previous incumbent Mr. Strichley after Mr. Strichley took an overdose of sleeping pills and then went out and drove his car at speed into a rock wall. Mr. Ormerod, by contrast, has been previously employed as deputy headmaster at one of the posher public schools and doesn’t see his new job as headmaster of a grammar school as a promotion. After all, though the eleven-plus does quite a reasonable job of making sure that only a bare minimum of boys from less exclusive backgrounds can attend the school, there’s still the risk that Mr. Ormerod might run into a member of the working classes or, in David’s case, one of the Hottentots. Indeed, a few years after David has moved on from the establishment in the mid-1970s the grammar schools are all turned into comprehensives, liable to take in the same riff-raff as an ordinary secondary school. According to the rumour David hears, for Mr. Ormerod it’s a demotion, an indignity too far and one day he goes into work a little earlier than usual so that he can follow the example of his predecessor, hanging himself in a stairwell near the art room. From what David understands, the next headmaster after Ormerod avoids having to kill himself by getting fired for stealing three pounds forty pence in change from the school’s drinks machine, but back when David is just starting at the school all this is in the future and the former public school enforcer is in charge. A tall man with a defect of the inner ear that makes him hold his head on one side like a vulture with a snapped neck, Ormerod attempts to recreate his new school in the fashion of his old one. Given the pretensions that the Grammar School already has, the institution doesn’t need a great deal of persuading. Many of the staff still have black gowns and there are even a few of the older teachers wearing mortar boards, perhaps the last such in the town to dress like this outside the pages of <em>The</em> <em>Beano</em>. The headmaster’s office has red and green traffic lights installed outside the door to inform visitors that they should either wait or enter, thus excusing Mr. Ormerod from having to say anything as common as “come in”. Inside his office a glass-fronted case contains a range of canes designed to inflict various degrees of punishment; thick ones that bruise; thin ones that cut. When Ormerod decrees that henceforth boys using the open air school pool must swim without recourse to swimming trunks after the custom at his prior establishment there’s not a squeak of protest from the staff and Mr. Oldman more than likely writes the head a letter of congratulation. This, then, is the world that all the new arrivals at the school find themselves overwhelmed by, but at least the white ones have each other for support. David has nobody. His classmates want no more to do with him than did the children at St. George’s, and the teachers seem to see him as an opportunity for minstrel show amusement. For a while David hopes selfishly that in a year or two his brother Andrew can pass his eleven-plus so that at least there’ll be the two of them to look out for each other in this bigoted asylum, but that isn’t going to be what happens. Andrew, well aware and justifiably resentful of their father’s favouritism, realises that however hard he tries he’ll never win his dad’s approval and so takes a more relaxed approach to schoolwork, fails to clear the bar on the eleven-plus and opts for the diminished expectations of a secondary school where at least there are other black kids. Meanwhile, David is discovering that though he may be a class-topper at St. George’s, in amongst these prep-school educated boys he doesn’t stand a chance. After that first year everybody takes exams to see which stream they’re suited to for the remainder of their school career and David ends up in the ‘C’ stream with the divs and trainee sociopaths. The masters and the other kids are on his back at school, his disappointed father’s on his back at home, so David spends most of his spare time at the Baxter Building, or Avengers Mansion, or in some alternative Fortress of Solitude. One bright and fresh Saturday morning David’s down at Sid’s stall in the market square. The latest Marvel comics are just in and David’s trying to work out how many he can comfortably afford, whether to leave the <em>Strange Tales</em> or <em>Fantasy Masterpieces</em> for another day, when he becomes aware that Sid’s stall has another customer and that they’re staring at him. Turning slowly, David finds himself confronted for the first time by the dark-ringed eyes of Alma Warren, who has just turned twelve and isn’t wearing any makeup. She’s holding a copy of some comic that he’s never heard of, something called <em>Forbidden Worlds</em> from one of the small companies he doesn’t bother with. They both smirk condescendingly at one another’s woeful taste and overhead the pigeons flutter restlessly from ledge to ledge, weaving threads of trajectory across the square’s stone loom.
Black Charley in the main avoids the better parts of town, confining himself to the Boroughs and the villages out in the reaches of the county, where he’s so well known that mothers use him as a way to make their kids do as they’re told: “If you don’t get to bed, Black Charley’s gonna get you”. Henry doesn’t much care to be made a monster in the eyes of children, but he guesses it’s a measure of his fame. He mostly gets no trouble out there in the villages, the Houghtons and the Haddons and the Yardley Gobions and such, though once out near Green’s Norton he gets set on by a big giant of a drunken ploughman who holds Henry by one leg and dangles him above an open fire until his white hair’s singeing and he’s wailing fit to wake the dead. This is the only time that anything real bad happens to Henry when he’s out about his rounds, and in the end the feller lets him go and Henry comes away with the impression that the giant only means near setting Henry’s head on fire as some kind of half-wit Green’s Norton joke, one that he fully expects Henry to find comical as well. Still, it’s the kind of incident leaves an impression, and now Henry’s getting on in years he finds his travels out around the villages are in smaller and smaller circles until pretty much his whole world is reduced to just the Boroughs, not that Henry minds. Most of his life he finds he’s getting moved from here to there, from Tennessee to Kansas to New York to Wales, and never gets to settle in one place for long enough to feel the benefit of having a community. Down in the Boroughs, after living here for long enough, Henry has come to understand how being in a district and getting to see how everybody’s lives work out, in many ways it’s like the reading of some huge and stupefying book of stories where you stick with it for long enough you find out what becomes of all the characters and circumstances and so forth. Rattling and squeaking on his bicycle down Freeschool Street and round the bottom into Green Street he sees young May Warren, who he calls young although after having all her little ones she’s grown into a big old gal. She’s rolling down the little path they call Narrow-toe Lane dressed in her black coat and black bonnet, like a round iron bowling-ball that rumbles so’s to let the ninepins know they best get out its way. Henry expects she’s off about some work connected with her calling as a deathmonger, the women what they have round here takes care of all the babies and the bodies, which of both there are a mighty number. Henry and Selina get a woman name of Mrs. Gibbs comes round to see them when their children’s born, but Henry don’t doubt that if Mrs. Gibbs should happen to be unavailable or off on other business then May Warren would do just as fine a job. He figures that it’s losing her own firstborn, a sweet little thing also called May, makes her so good at what she does. He calls a cheery greeting to May Warren as he cycles past and in return she lifts one heavy arm and offers him a gruff “Hello, Black Charley, how yer doin’?” by way of reply. As he rides on to Gas Street and down there, Henry considers the downright peculiar fortunes of the Warren family what with May’s pop, old man Snowy Vernall, getting in the newspaper for climbing up on top the town hall roof one time he’s drunk and standing shouting with his arm around that angel they got up there, like they was old friends. And then of course there’s May’s aunt, Snowy’s crazy sister Thursa got that big accordion what she goes wandering the streets with, playing that strange, awful music with the funny gaps in so you think it’s over just before it all starts up again. When Henry’s getting down near where you got the little bridge what takes you over to Foot Meadow he spies Freddy Allen, a young ne’er-do-well who’s no doubt on his way home seeing as he sleeps under the railway arches in the meadow, being in his twenties without house or family all on account of poverty and drink. Henry can’t say as he approves of Freddy, who gets by through stealing things off people’s doorsteps, but he can’t help feeling sorry for the boy and Henry guesses that a body’s got to eat. Curving around towards the crossroads by the West Bridge where they got the castle ruins still, there’s every kind of people out there in the streets going about their business. He knows almost everyone he sees, and almost everybody that he sees knows him. He goes over the crossroads when it’s safe and on down the Saint Andrew’s Road, but when he’s sailing along up the top there with that dirty red brick wall towering above him on his right and all the tumbled ruins of the castle poking from the grass there on his left he gets a powerful sadness suddenly come over him, and don’t know why. He’s thinking of Selina and his children and what most concerns him is their youngest, little Edward. Henry’s seen the stretches of grey rubble springing up around the district as though they were patches of some terrible new bindweed, all the knocked-down houses back of Peter’s Church where there’s just cowslips and dead-nettles now, and it occurs to him the Boroughs will be different by the time their littlest is grown. It’s all these demolitions that’s unsettled him, places that Henry knows are standing for a hundred years or more and what he’d thought would stand forever, just pulled down and gone like it don’t matter. Ever since the war’s end you can feel it. Some big change is coming, and though he can’t picture what the place is going to look like fifty, sixty years from now, he gets the feeling he most likely wouldn’t care for it too much. He doesn’t like to think how it will be for Edward or their other children after him and his Selina are passed on. Even though Henry knows that Edward will be properly growed up by then he can’t help but imagine him as he is now, as a young black child wandering all lonely down some shabby, cold tomorrow-street what Henry doesn’t recognise.
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Dave Daniels skims over the singing tarmac of the Barrack Road astride his Raleigh bicycle, with all that early morning Saturday potential in the battering wind against his eager face. He’s off to call upon his new mate Alma at her house down on the broken-nosed but amiable row of terraced homes between Spring Lane and Scarletwell Street. Here in 1966 the music over the transistor radios is sweet and effervescent, Vimto for the ears. Month after month the comics from America keep getting better, there are programs that he likes on television, David has a proper friend and it’s the pocket-moneyed weekend, full of Sky Ray rocket lollies and perhaps a Tamla Motown single from John Lever’s, with no school and thus no institutionalised humiliation until Monday. He describes a jubilant freewheeling arc through Regent Square, from Barrack Road to Grafton Street, and as he does so spares a glance down Sheep Street with its top end opening there on his left. He knows that this is where his family were living when they first arrived in town, the year or two before he realised he’d got a younger brother, but his actual memories are blurred and often contradictory. He can recall, however, the perambulator journeys to the Racecourse that avoid excursions to the west, into the Here-Be-Tygers thickets of Northampton’s dark interior, the inland continent known as the Boroughs, both decrepit and somehow disgraceful. David tells his parents he’s got a new friend called Alma who he sometimes visits, even has her round his house to meet his dad that once, but doesn’t tell them where she lives. As he slides into the long plunge of Grafton Street, David passes the dusty glass and peeling emerald door of the Caribbean club on Broad Street’s corner, once more over to his left. Someone has written on its woodwork in black paint the phrase THAT MOUNTAIN COONERY, which he supposes is related to that “Mountain Greenery” song that he vaguely remembers hearing on the radio during his childhood. It strikes David as a feeble-minded kind of joke and he ignores the prejudice, letting it all wash over him in strict accordance with his personal policy on racial taunting, or rather doing his best to let it all wash over him. In actual truth each washing leaves an ugly tide-line residue of stepped-on anger in his fourteen-year-old spleen, but what else can he do? His father Bernard’s way of dealing with it would be to suppose that daubing slogans on the Caribbean club is only meant as an affront to the Jamaicans whom he also doesn’t care for very much; that being a successful lawyer from his background means that the word “coon” is almost certainly referring to somebody else. David knows better, standing in the empty playground at the Grammar School with a blackboard eraser in each hand and pounding them together in explosive, choking cumuli of chalk-dust while his form teacher and schoolmates giggle at him through the classroom window from inside. Descending Grafton Street, squeezing the brakes as he approaches Weston’s the Newsagent halfway down, David dismounts and drags his Raleigh up onto the pavement, propping it against the wire-crossed hoarding – with a headline about Dr. Christian Barnard’s heart transplant – that’s under the front window. Peering through the faintly greenish glass his own cardiac organ flutters to discover that at least some of the latest Marvel comics have arrived, their English distribution irritatingly erratic owing to their transport from America as ballast to bulk out more profitable cargo. David spots a new issue of <em>The Avengers</em> that he’ll probably pick up despite the fact that he finds Don Heck – the book’s artist – a bit dull, even though Alma says she likes Heck’s work. With more enthusiasm he sees there’s a new <em>Fantastic Four</em> and even more significantly a new <em>Thor</em> with his idol Jack Kirby’s <em>Tales of Asgard</em> in the back of it. He ducks into the shop, emerging just under a minute later with a haul of six additions to his burgeoning collection for just four shillings and sixpence. Stuffing them into the duffel bag he’s got over one shoulder David saddles up and carries on down Grafton Street to Lower Harding Street, where he turns left. It is immediately apparent that he’s now in a completely different part of town. On David’s right a slump of rubble that might once have been two or three blocks of houses rolls downhill towards Monk’s Pond Street and the gated rear yards of a reeking tannery. According to what Alma tells him, this is her equivalent to David’s listless mornings in the children’s playground at the Racecourse, fannying around inside great concrete duct-pipes on this wasteland, accidentally smashing up her fingernails until they turn black and fall off while David sits with his considerably lighter brother Andrew on a see-saw that’s not moving and is never going to move, will always leave his little brother stranded up there in the air. David’s not sure if it’s himself or Alma who has the best deal, concluding that it’s ultimately six of one and half a dozen of the other, swings and roundabouts. He wouldn’t want to live here in the soot blown from the railway yards, among the rose bay willow herbs rooted in that same grime with drooping petals like pink tinfoil, but then there are times when he can see the area’s mysterious appeal. There’s the occasion when he calls on Alma and she isn’t in, so that he has to leave a message with her grandmother. According to what Alma fills him in on later, when she finally gets home her gran describes the visitor as a boy roughly Alma’s height or possibly a little shorter, riding on a bike, very well-spoken, wearing jeans and a blue jumper. Alma, in an effort to speed up the identification, asks her gran if the boy happens to be black by any chance, to which the seventy-something responds by looking startled and bewildered, saying “Do you know, I really couldn’t tell yer.” Even Alma doesn’t quite know what to make of this and David is completely baffled, although at the same time he’s amused and he’s also impressed in a way that he can’t entirely put his finger on. He has to say that just in terms of an accepting, even-handed attitude to visitors, Alma’s gran Clara has his father Bernard beat hands down. He still feels mortified about the time when he asks Alma round to see his comics and his dad insists on interviewing her alone in the front room, like a Victorian patriarch seeking assurance as to her intentions. After Alma’s gone, Bernard takes David to one side and soberly explains that while there’s nothing wrong with mixing with white people, Alma isn’t really the right sort of white person for Bernard’s son to be seen hanging round with. She’s failed the audition. Dave and Alma laugh about it and conclude that in the prejudice league tables, class beats race. Dave cycles along Lower Harding Street towards the top of Spring Lane, and the people that he glides past don’t appear to pay him the least measure of attention, almost as if they’ve seen black people on bicycles before. The boy hums down the ancient hill in an exhilarating rush onto St. Andrew’s Road with drowsing railway yards arrayed beyond it in the rust and sunshine, pedalling to see his friend who lives here in another world, another decade, duffle bag full of primary-colour gods and scientists, Negative Zones and Rainbow Bridges on his shoulder, talismans as he descends into the district and its crumbling wonderments, its raucous prehistoric atmosphere.
When Henry’s on <em>The Pride of Bethlehem</em> all them long weeks he reads the Buffalo Bill chapbooks what are padding out its hold as ballast, but that’s just because it’s sometimes all there is to do and not because of any admiration he might have for Colonel Cody. Still, he understands the need that people have for such nonsensical adventures, and he don’t begrudge them that. What Henry reckons is that in amidst the shove and effort and small comfort of this world when we’re down here enmired in it like what we are, a man has got to have a star up there above him so as he can navigate, and what that star is, it’s some manner of ideal what you can’t reach but what shows you the way. Back there in Tennessee on the plantation you get the old stories come from Africa about the fearless warriors and all the clever spirit-animals what teach about how it’s good to be kind to people and the benefits of being cunning and the like. At the same time you got the songs and the religion, Pastor Newton’s hymn included, which Henry supposes is another breed of the same thing, some better way of living or some better place what we might never get to but where the idea of it can keep us going all the same. Where it don’t matter if you find out that the man what writes the hymn has got his shameful side and doesn’t necessarily live up to what he writes about, because it’s the ideal what’s the important thing. On the same track you have your mythological inventions like, say, Hercules and made-up characters from out the chapbooks like that Sherlock Holmes they got here or, for that matter, like Buffalo Bill, a made-up character if ever Henry met one. Just the thought there’s somebody that clever or ingenious or brave, even if they don’t properly exist except when you’re all caught up in the story, it gives you something to reach for and to head the wagon of your life towards. And then there’s the real men and women what in Henry’s estimation make the brightest beacons and most glorious good examples you could follow, seeing as they’re flesh and blood and not some ancient god or hero from a chapbook, which means maybe if you try as hard as them then wondrous things might truly come of it. Sometimes when he’s asleep he calls up Britton Johnson, like a stepping beauty on the boardwalks of some giant place what’s always there in Henry’s dreams, twirling his six-guns like a cowboy in a moving picture or else dressing up like a Red Indian to get his wife and children back from the Comanche. What it must be like to be a man like that, and Henry hopes that if Selina or his little ones are ever in harm’s way he’ll have the courage to do just what Britton Johnson does, or at least something what’s as brave. Black Charley gets enough attention in the ordinary run of things and don’t know about dressing up like no Red Indian. He’ll do it if he’s got to but there’s no great likelihood of that here in the Boroughs. Henry dreams of Mother Seacole livening up the wounded soldiers with some herbs, some rum and maybe a quick dance round the field hospital and general provisions store she’s got on the front line of the Crimean War, who in most people’s eyes is never going to measure up to Mrs. Nightingale no more than Britton Johnson’s ever going to have a silly chapbook in his honour like Bill Cody. Henry dreams of Walter Tull, out there in no-man’s-land between the trenches like in all those stories what come back of how the Germans and the English play a football game on Christmas day before they all get back to blowing out each other’s vitals the next morning. Henry dreams of Walter Tull in his white baggy shorts and claret shirt, dribbling the ball between the tank traps and dead horses, darting this way and then that invulnerable through mustard gas, and booting it high above all the duckboards and the bodies and barbed wire into the black skies over Passchendaele like a bursting signal-flare. He never dreams about John Newton, never dreams of Jesus, and now that he’s getting on in years Henry prefers his saints to be just ordinary men and women who make no great claim to saintliness. He’s not in any way an atheist, it’s more like these days he’s not specially inclined to put religious faith in people what might let him down, or in some institution other than his own self who he’s sure of. Henry raises up a rough church in his heart what he can carry with him where he goes, poking around in the old barns and that, with humming to himself instead of organ music and the stained-glass light spilled out of his imagination on the floor in all the straw and horse muck. Henry thinks about all what he’s done, taking care of his mom and pop like they took care of him, crossing the great wide sea and sliding down upon Northampton in a snowy woollen avalanche, him and Selina raising up their children without losing any of them, and he feels contented with himself and with his life. It’s best, Henry believes, a man should be his own ideal and champion, however long it takes him to arrive there.
Doggy-paddling in the lazy, undemanding currents of the ‘C’-stream, David just about completes six year-long pool lengths of his education without drowning. He secures one or two subsequently useless O-levels, fails all the rest and doesn’t see the point of going on to fail his A-levels as well. He doesn’t want to go to college, wants to have these years of pointless and demeaning prelude over with so he can get on with his life in something that resembles a real world. His dad is furious with disappointment. Nothing’s turning out the way that Bernard wanted. Back in Sierra Leone it’s military coup on top of military coup, with ethnic Limba Siaka Stevens finally ending up in charge and straight away revealing his true colours, executing his political and military rivals by means of a gallows on the Kissy Road in Freetown. Bad and getting worse, this is how Bernard sees the prospects for his homeland and his eldest son alike. Dave is demoted in his father’s estimations, although obviously not to the extent of his young brother, Andrew, who has never figured in those estimations. David doesn’t care. Being the chosen one has always been a burden, and he finds that he and Andy grow much closer in the cosy doghouse of paternal disapproval. Whispering and laughing in the darkness after lights-out they begin to plan their bold escape. Outside their parents’ dearly-won front door the 1970s are pooling even in the sump of Kingsthorpe Hollow, a fluorescent froth of platform heels and stick-on stars. The song lyrics are all chrome-dipped in science fiction and Jack Kirby has quit Marvel Comics to turn out a stunningly prolific flood of fresh ideas for their main industry rivals, full of warring techno-gods and revamped 1940s Brooklyn kid gangs. Meanwhile, a real local gang of vicious seventeen-year-old apprentice skinheads have, somewhat uncomfortably, rebranded themselves as “The Bowie Boys” and now wear eyeliner and carry handbags in Bay City Rollers tartan. The decade bowls into town riding a sequin blizzard and leaves drifts of glitter in the gutters. Flaunting its fantastic Biba clothes and Day-Glo hedgehog hair it flirts with the two brothers, finally enticing them to run away from home and join the circus. They move down to London just as soon as they’re both old enough to do so without needing their dad’s never-going-to-happen blessings and consent. It’s a completely different place now to the city that confronted Joyce and Bernard when they first arrived in Brixton twenty years before, and being black is almost fashionable now. This previously undreamed-of world embraces Dave and Andy in a way Northampton never could, finding them flats, finding them work. David commences his employment at a clothing outlet that’s the current talk of the black entertainment field, finds himself recommending gear for Labi Siffre, kung-fu fighting with Carl Douglas and discovering the fragrant world of girls in a way that would be unthinkable in Kingsthorpe Hollow – under Bernard’s gold-rimmed eye and quarantined from females at a same-sex grammar school. It feels to David like he’s living for the first time, dressing how he wants and getting a bit Funkadelic when it suits him, making it through the whole heady period without recourse to dreadlocks or an afro. He and Andrew sometimes pop back to Northampton, just to see their mum and so that David can catch up with Alma, but the atmosphere and barbed-wire silences around their dad mean that the intervals between their visits gradually grow longer. Even Alma is becoming harder to keep tabs on once her terraced row on Andrew’s Road is pulled down, in the final mop-up of the clearance operation that’s been going on down in the Boroughs since the end of World War One. The Warren family get moved to Abington, then Alma takes off on her own into a string of boyfriends, bedsits and addresses without telephones. Slowly the two of them lose touch but by then David has hooked up with Natalie, a beautifully-assembled girl from a Nigerian family who’s looking like a keeper. His life picks up pace until he’s skimming through the years as though he’s on a Raleigh bicycle, with his exhilaration only slightly curtailed by the stark fact that, in life, there don’t seem to be any brakes. You can’t stop and you can’t even slow down.
Henry and this place where he lives are running out of luck, he knows it, if they ever had any to start with. There’s a stiffness in the joints and hinges, there’s a rheumy quality comes in the eyes and windows, and a never-again feel to things. Some of the streets and plenty of the people what he’s been familiar with are disappeared. Around Chalk Lane where it’s all coming down and everybody’s moving out, he sees these ladies that he knows just stood there weeping and one saying to the other “Well, this is the end of our acquaintance”. He feels sorry for the fallen buildings, dust and rubble where it meant something to someone once, but they’re hard stone and it’s the people, what are softer, that get hurt most cruelly. It’s the bonds between them that are delicate and built up over years what get tore up, all on a stroke of someone’s pen at the town hall. There’s friends and families get scattered without rhyme or reason like so many billiard balls, sent shooting off to the four corners of Northampton with their whole lives gone a different way and Henry can’t but feel it’s all a shame. From how he hears it, it won’t be that long before it’s Bath Street, Castle Street and his own Scarletwell Street what are next for demolition and he knows a time will come when even the Destructor is destroyed, with all of this replaced by some variety of great big modern rooming-houses that he don’t much like the sound of. He allows that it might be a little cleaner and more sanitary round here after all the changes, but from what he’s seen of diagrams and drawings that get printed in the evening paper it’s not nowhere near as friendly in appearance, and he isn’t certain there’ll be a position for no deathmongers or crazy people such as Thursa Vernall; for the mooching kind like Freddy Allen or else Georgie Bumble; even for Black Charley with his funny-looking bicycle and cart. He drags his wooden blocks more on the roads now when he’s going down these tilted lanes for fear that if he picks up speed him and his vehicle alike will both be shook to bits. One day when Henry’s resting on the grass up by the stump of the old castle he gets into conversation with a nice enough young gent who’s well brought-up and seems like he’s been educated quite a bit in ancient history. This boy brings up the subject of Black Charley’s skin, but in a nervous way in case it’s not polite to mention it, when he says that it’s not the first time that these falling-down old stones have been acquainted with a black man. Then when Henry asks him what he means he talks about this feller by the name Peter the Saracen, a coloured man come from the Holy Land or Africa who’s living here around the year twelve hundred, working as a crossbow maker for who they call Bad King John, near seven hundred year before Henry himself arrives in these parts. On the one hand Henry will admit to feeling a touch disappointed that he isn’t the first man of his complexion hereabouts, but then that’s only prideful vanity, and on the other hand he’s pleased he’s got another hero what can socialise with Walter Tull and Britton Johnson in his idle daydreams. He imagines how he leads the three of them on his contraption with the rope instead of tyres, escorts the crossbow-maker, footballer and cowboy all the way back home to Tennessee and sixty years ago, so they can liberate all Henry’s people with their fancy shooting and their deadly silent crossbow bolts and their goal-scoring capabilities. He sleeps more these days and so has more time for all his flights of fancy. Meantime out of his front window and just over Scarletwell they’re taking down the warehouses and so on that are at the bottom, so that no more than that narrow terraced strip of homes is left on the Saint Andrew’s Road. A little way uphill The Friendly Arms is all shut down and boarded up, ready to vanish when its time comes. He finds out from somebody how Mr. Newton Pratt was taken ill and died some years ago with the pneumonia, or anyway that’s what he’s told. Of what befell Pratt’s legendary beast, however, Henry never hears a word and in the end he’s half-convinced he must have dreamt it, its existence being to his mind a more unlikely prospect than the get-together between Walter Tull, Peter the Saracen and Britton Johnson. Henry dozes while the world out past his doorstep comes to pieces.
Just five or six decades up the road David is gliding comfortably into the 1980s, married now to Natalie and blessed with two fine kids, Selwyn and Lily. The science-fiction predilections of his boyhood mean that when the first commercially available computers hit the shops he seizes on them with delight, these fabulous devices previously unknown outside the Bat Cave. Having always been much smarter than his C-stream Grammar School track-record would suggest, he quickly finds that he knows nearly everything about the new technology, almost alone in a still-dazzled world that doesn’t seem to have the faintest clue. Like some explorer on a distant, savage planet who subdues the awestruck natives with a mirror and a box of matches, David’s smooth facility with getting a recalcitrant machine to work again is looked on as miraculous by those who witness it and before long he finds himself working in Brussels, home at weekends, as a highly valued cybernetic trouble-shooter. When he gets the chance he stays in touch with Andrew, who is married with two children of his own and also doing well, but while there’s been a measure of rapprochement with their dad, David still finds he only gets back to Northampton once in a blue moon. All that he sees of how the town is changing is, therefore, a disconnected string of snapshots in a poorly-maintained photo album where whole years of continuity are simply missing. On a visit around 1985, as an example, he discovers that the town’s largely Jamaican black community has taken over a Victorian Salvation Army fort that resides by itself upon its patch of Sheep Street wasteland down from the aesthetic pickaxe-in-the-face of Greyfriars Bus Station. David imagines that some sort of preservation order keeps the beautiful old structure standing after everything around it’s been torn down. Its new inhabitants, with caterpillar locks crammed into knitted Ethiopian flag bulbs atop their heads, have fashioned the neglected fort into an energetic hive of Afro-Caribbean activity. Renamed as the Matafancanta Club after what David understands is the Jamaican for something like “place of sharing” he sees them minding the pre-school toddlers, giving local artists and sound-systems somewhere they can set up and rehearse and keeping a perpetual stew going in their canteen on the second floor. The building, with its rose-pink brick façade and graceful scrollwork of its mouldings given life by all the goings-on inside it, looks terrific. When he passes through Northampton just a few years later it’s been bulldozed and there’s nothing but the stretch of yellowing grass and a few stories about evidently untrustworthy trustees pissing off back home to Kingston with the funding, youngsters with colourful street-names dealing ganja and eventually police raids after one too many BMWs get spotted in the edifice’s car park. So much for a preservation order, if there ever was one. On the same trip David is relieved to find that the incredibly old beech tree which he just about remembers from his infanthood is still alive and thriving in a courtyard further along Sheep Street, and of course the similarly ancient bulkhead of St. Sepulchre’s is right there where it always was, that and the beech tree as apparently immovable as Alma Warren, who he’s back in touch with. Keeping up a dwindling comic habit with infrequent visits to a Covent Garden shop called Comics Showcase, David first becomes aware that his old mate is doing nicely for herself when overhearing other customers discuss her recent cover-work in tones of muted awe. He picks a couple of the books up for himself and has to say he’s impressed by the haunting realistic quality that Alma brings to silly thirty-year-old costumed characters by taking them all much more seriously than they would seem to deserve. Then, just a few weeks later, David meets Alma herself in the same shop when he’s out with his tiny daughter Lily riding on his shoulders. They’re both overjoyed to see each other, have a lot of catching up to do and from that point his travels to Northampton are a bit more frequent. He’d go there more often, but the situation with his dad and Andrew is still strained and awkward. After Bernard’s efforts to encourage one son at the disadvantage of the other founder on David’s refusal to engage in such a competition, the old man has found a way to carry his unwanted and divisive favouritism on to a new generation, doting on Selwyn and Lily while ignoring Andrew’s two boys, Benjamin and Marcus. What particularly upsets David with their dad’s behaviour is how much it hurts Andrew, much more than when it was only him that Bernard left out in the cold. Andy could shrug that off, but he can’t watch it happening to his babies. He starts to become obsessed with making sure his offspring get the same advantages that he perceives as being heaped on David’s pair, spurring them on through school and college, doggedly determined that sheer academic excellence will force their granddad to acknowledge them. David advises Andrew to forget about their dad, but he can see that’s easier said than done when it’s your own kids being treated badly right in front of you. He sees the bitterness and the resentment in his brother’s eyes, and David doesn’t know where this is going but suspects it’s nowhere good.
Black Charley’s dying in his house on Scarletwell Street, getting out just a few months before they knock it down to put up flats and move him and his family somewhere else what they won’t like so much. Selina and his children come and go about the bedside in a kind of sleepy blur that Henry can’t keep track of with the medicine they give him so his chest don’t hurt. Across the road he’s told it’s pretty much all gone except for Spring Lane School and them few houses down the bottom there. He doesn’t want to see it as it is, just heaps of bricks on scrubland, but likes to imagine that one stable that’s still there in back of the surviving homes down on Saint Andrew’s Road. Since he don’t care to go to church and couldn’t get there these days even if he wanted to, then that old barn’s the nearest thing to Henry’s idea of a place of worship what’s in walking distance if Henry could walk, and what’s at least in thinking distance seeing as he can’t. He presumes he’s getting close to that occasion in his life when it might do him good to have a few words with his maker and so what he does, he goes down to that old shed in his mind without once having need to get out of his bed. He pictures himself getting onto his old bike what he gave to his son Edward to play on some few months back after it become apparent that he’d not himself be needing it no more. In his imagination he pretends he’s rolling off down Scarletwell Street, which is just the way it was with Newt Pratt and his drunken critter both outside a likewise resurrected Friendly Arms and greeting Henry with well-meant but unintelligible noises as he rattles past them heading for Saint Andrew’s Road, the way they had when he could still ride bicycles and they were both alive. He sees himself all young and vigorous, turning his vehicle along the cobbled alley what they call Scarletwell Terrace on the right there just before you reach the main road, trundling down it to the rear gates of the stable, which in Henry’s mind are open and not boarded up the way he hears they are in ordinary life now that the horses what were once within have gone. Henry leaves his imaginary contraption leaning up on the imaginary wall outside and pictures himself opening the rusted latch and going in, summoning all the scents and noises of a place like that as well as he is able with the flutter of the nesting pigeons and the smell of straw what’s not been changed in years: stale oats and a faint memory of dung. Light through the busted slates above as Henry falls on his imaginary knees and asks the thing what he feels might be listening somewhere if he’s truly soon to die and if there’s anything he should look forward to after that happens. When he gets no answer, same as usual, Henry asks himself just what kind of an answer he might be expecting, just what kind of afterlife he thinks that he could be contented with for the long next part of eternity. He’s not that sold on the idea of Heaven like you see in Bible illustrations. He’ll admit that it looks clean and pretty with the clouds and marble stairways but, like with these modern blocks of buildings what they say they’re putting up, he can’t see any place for Henry in the picture, or at least no place as looks like he’d feel comfortable. Well, if he don’t want that, what does he want? He’s entertained the notion what the Hindoo fellers have of getting born again in a new life as someone different, maybe even as some kind of witless animal, and he’s not taken with it. If he dies and someone else gets born next week who’s a completely different person what has got no memory of ever being him, in what way is that Henry George? Unless there’s something in the idea what he’s missing, it seems pretty plain that that’s somebody else entirely who’s their own self and not Henry George at all. No, when he tries to call up his idea of paradise he finds he’s summoning the things he knows, what have already happened. He thinks how he’d like to see his pop again, and hear his mom when she was singing in the fields. He’d like to live again those careless years when he was just a child, before he got his mark when everything seemed sort of kindly and mysterious. He’d like to be meeting Selina for the first time and out walking with her by the River Usk where it runs through Abergavenny, or be lying with her in their useless ragged tent beside the great herd after they were wed and headed out of Wales towards Northampton. He yearns to be back on that afternoon when he’s just got his pay and him and his Selina first set eyes on Scarletwell Street where he’ll live and shortly die, wants to be with his wife and little Mrs Gibbs the deathmonger when they call him to the confinement room to see his newborn babies. He wants his old bicycle with the rope tyres back from the past along with the ability to ride it. It occurs to him that what he wants the most is his whole life again, all of the things what are most dear and most familiar to him. If he could have that, Henry reckons that it would be worth the branding and the seasick nights aboard <em>The Pride of Bethlehem</em>. That’s all he wants, but in his thoughts the sunlight tumbling through the broken roof onto the rafters striped with pigeon droppings seems as though it’s getting brighter, and then later when Selina brings his dinner in to see if he can eat a little of it she can’t rouse him.
Somewhere else it’s 1991 and Bernard Daniels, now retired, decides that he and Joyce should visit Sierra Leone once more before they’re both too old to travel. David doesn’t know a lot about the politics prevailing in West Africa just then but isn’t sure the journey is a good idea, and Andrew feels the same. Their dad waves their concerns aside. His sons are Brixton born, have never been to Africa and no doubt see it through their native English eyes as somewhere threatening, as a dark continent. Bernard and Joyce are Africans and have no such anxieties. They’re simply going home, and David harping on about the tensions growling round the lion mountains at the moment isn’t going to dissuade them. Bernard casts a cursory glance over the international pages in The Times, concluding that the situation over there is just business as usual by Sierra Leone standards. Siaka Stevens steps down a few years ago in favour of another ethnic Limba, Major General Joseph Momoh. There are all the customary attempts at overthrow, or at least allegations of the same, and all the usual retaliations by way of low-hanging fruit along the Kissy Road. Admittedly, there’s all this business going on with Momoh being forced to re-establish multi-party politics, with plenty of dark mutterings breaking out already in the opposition ranks, but Bernard knows that if he waits for a politically clear day to make their trip then he and Joyce will wait forever. It’s all settled. Flights are booked. There’s nothing else that David, Andrew and their families can do but cross their fingers and hope for the best, which obviously never works. In all their fretting over the fraught politics of Sierra Leone nobody has considered what’s currently happening across the border in Liberia, this being bloody and horrific civil war, most of it orchestrated by the leader of the National Patriotic Front, Charles Taylor. This is the man responsible for the most forceful and compelling slogan ever used in an election anywhere:
<strong>I KILLED YOUR MA.</strong>
<br>
<strong>I KILLED YOUR PA.</strong>
<br>
<strong>VOTE FOR ME.</strong>
<br>
Taylor decides it’s in his interests if fighting kicks off in Sierra Leone as well. He helps to found the Revolutionary United Front with ethnic Temne army corporal Foday Sankoh, expert in guerrilla warfare, trained in Britain and in Libya. When civil war erupts in Sierra Leone, Bernard and Joyce are in the middle of it, in their seventies, both ethnic Krios who are disliked by the native tribes, with no flights to or from the country and thus no way to get out. It’s terrifying. Lives are ending right across the street in unimaginable shock and fear and pleading, seldom with a gunshot, seldom swiftly. There are fashionable necklacings with burning tyres and twenty-minute executions using blunt machetes that can leave the murderers exhausted. Cowering in their hotel the couple peer out from between drawn curtains at the drifting smoke, the angry black tide sluicing up and down the street. Meanwhile, in England, David and the family are frantic, making calls to travel agents, embassies, and in the end somehow they bring their parents home, severely shaken but unharmed. Unharmed, and, in the case of Bernard, seemingly unaltered. Everything he’s seen confirms his strongly-held conviction that Sierra Leone’s native tribes are savages who only benefited from colonial rule and find themselves unable to exist without it. As for his opinions on events closer to home, these remain similarly unaffected. Bernard still refuses to bestow affection and encouragement on Andrew’s kids to the degree he does with David’s, while Andrew’s attempts to prove their father wrong by forcing Benjamin and Marcus to shine academically are by now ingrained and obsessive. David watches this unfolding and it’s like a ghost story, a haunting, an uncanny repetition of events and attitudes out of the past eerily manifesting in the present day, in 1997. Finally he gets a phone call from his brother one Saturday morning where Andrew can hardly talk, can’t get the words out properly. Marcus, his eldest son, has killed himself. Andy’s just heard about it from the college. Pressure of exams, they think. Oh, Christ. A terrible slow car crash that’s begun in Freetown forty years before reaches its point of impact and the Daniels family find themselves sat dazed and paralysed in the emotional debris, with blossoms nodding in the breeze all up and down the Kissy Road.
It’s 1997 and the Railway Club along the end of the St. Andrew’s Road by Castle Station is pretty much all that Eddie George is living for. He’s getting on, eighty or more, and he’s got one of those things that he can’t pronounce, sclerosis or what have you, but if he can get out from his place in Semilong down to his usual table in the club he’s happy just to have a Guinness and see all his friends. You get all sorts of people from the district going in there, that’s what Eddie likes about it. Couples with their children, lots of old gals and old fellers like himself and all the beautiful young women where there isn’t any harm in looking. Often when he’s in there he’ll bump into young Mick Warren and his family, Cathy his wife, sometimes his scruffy-looking sister and his two boys, Jack and Joe. Jack’s around six or seven and he seems to like having a chat with Eddie when he sees him. Eddie likes it too. They mostly talk a lot of nonsense with each other and it takes him back to when he was a boy himself, playing with all his sisters and his brothers on the pavement right outside their house in Scarletwell Street with his little wagons, and then later when his dad gave Eddie his own funny bicycle and cart before he died. The damn thing fell to bits only a few weeks after. It makes Eddie chuckle just to think of it while he’s calling his cab to take him to the Railway Club, but that sets off a thudding in his chest and so he just sits on the sofa and calms down while waiting for the taxi to arrive. It’s a grey day and what with Eddie’s eyes it’s looking kind of murky as he sits there in the tiny living room. He’s thinking about turning on the light just for a bit of cheer, damn the expense, right when his car turns up and toots its horn outside. Just standing up makes him feel dizzy, as if all the thoughts and the sensations in his head are draining to his feet. He lets the capable young driver shuffle him from his front door into a back seat of the vehicle, where he needs help to get his seat belt buckled properly. At least it’s warm, and when the engine starts up and they roll away he’s looking out the window at his neighbours’ flats and houses sliding backwards up the hill as he descends down Stanley Street towards St. Andrew’s Road. Stanley Street, Baker Street and Gordon Street. It’s taken Eddie some good years of living here in Semilong to figure out that they’re the names of famous English generals who relieved Mafeking and all that business, back more than a hundred years ago. For a good while he’s laboured under the impression that it’s all something to do with the film actor Stanley Baker, and that makes him smile as well. The taxi-cab turns left into St. Andrew’s Road, and on his right there’s all the yards, furniture reclamation businesses and lock-ups that have been here for as long as Eddie can remember, some with signboard lettering upon their peeling wooden gates that looks to Eddie’s eye like it might be Victorian or something. Across the road from these and on his left, there are the openings to the neat row of hilly streets that make up Semilong, all parallel with one another, Hampton Street and Brook Street and all them. Eddie’s always been very happy here. He likes the neighbourhood, but nobody could say that it was doing well. It’s not the worst of places by a long shot, but in terms of getting taken care of then it’s plain that Semilong’s a fair way down the list. What it’s about as far as Eddie sees it is that where he lives now is too close to where he used to live, which is to say the Boroughs, or Spring Boroughs as they seem to call it nowadays. It’s as if things like being poor and having low property prices are contagious and will spread from area to area if they’re not kept in isolation, maybe with a blanket soaked in disinfectant hung across the door the way they used to have up Scarletwell Street when somebody had the scarlet fever. Just like with his mix-up over Stanley Baker, Eddie can remember when he thought that scarlet fever is something that only people living up in Scarletwell Street got; that maybe people down in Green Street got afflicted by green fever. How you think when you’re a youngster is something that never ceases to amaze him, and he hopes that little Jack is maybe going to be there when he gets up to the club. Out of the window on the right now is the stretch of turf and trees that run down to the brown-green river, which in Eddie’s younger days is always known as Paddy’s Meadow although he expects they’ve got some different title for it now. He peers through bloodshot eyes at the old children’s playground at the bottom of the grassy slope there that he still calls Happy Valley. There’s a little sunlight falling through the clouds to strike upon the rusty roundabout and on the blade of the dilapidated slide, and Eddie feels a lump come to his throat because it’s all so precious. He recalls adventuring amongst the reeds down at the water’s edge with all the other grubby little boys, and how they liked to scare each other by pretending that there was a terrible long monster in the river what would snatch them if they get too close to it. He looks out at the empty meadow now and feels convinced somehow that all those days are still there, in the rushes, on the squeaking swings, still going on except that he’s too far away to see it all. That must be how it is. He cannot find it in himself to think that any moment, anybody, anything is ever truly lost. It’s just that him and everybody else moves on, and find themselves washed up in times and circumstances they don’t fully understand or like much, necessarily, without a way of getting back to where they’re happy and contented. There’s a lot about the world these days that Eddie doesn’t have the measure of. He’s not sure what to make of this new government that just got in, these Labour people who don’t talk or look much like the Labour people he remembers, and the business with Princess Diana getting killed in that car accident takes Eddie by surprise as much as anyone, how the whole country seems to have fallen to pieces for a while with all the crying. It appears to Eddie like there’s more news all the time these days, until he feels like he’s full to the brim with it and one more model with an eating disability or gang of raping footballers could make all of the knowledge that’s already in him spill out on the floor. By now his taxi’s at the traffic lights where Andrew’s Road crosses the foot of Spencer Bridge and Grafton Street, and he finds himself looking at the lorry park just past the lights and on the far side of the road, the Super Sausage place that used to be a meadow with a public baths up at one end. It’s still too light for any of the girls to be around, and Eddie’s glad because he hates to see that, how the women in that line of work are getting younger all the time. He’s tired. The world’s making him tired, and Eddie fidgets in the rear seat where it feels as if his seat belt is too tight, like it’s not done up the right way. The lights go green, the cars move on and now they’re coming past the fenced-in lorry park to where the train yards are behind the wall there on the right, and on their left is the short strip of grass between Spring Lane and Scarletwell Street that was once a row of terraced houses. Eddie can’t help taking a long look up the street he was born in as his cab goes by the bottom of it, where that eerie single building still survives down near the corner there all on its own. The old slope rises up with the Spring Lane School playing fields on one side, and across the road there on the other are the flats they put up in the 1930s after they tore down the homes where Eddie and his family and their friends all lived. The rounded balconies are peeling and the entrances to the courtyard inside have all got gates on now. Up at the hill’s top there are those two blocks of flats bigger than all the rest, Claremont and Beaumont Court, the towers standing there victorious when everything around has been knocked flat. The street don’t look much, he admits, but it’s where he began and it’s still got that sort of light inside it. Eddie shuts his eyes upon his birthplace, and there’s all those floating jelly blobs of colour that you get. The accidental pattern that they have to them reminds Eddie of something and he can’t think what, then realises it’s the scar his dad’s got on his shoulder with the triangles, the wavy lines. He thinks about his parents and it comes to him that it’s one hundred years exactly, maybe even to the month, since they first came here to Northampton and laid eyes on Scarletwell Street. How about that? Doesn’t that beat everything? A hundred years. He kind of feels the car pull up outside the Railway Club and kind of hears the driver say “We’re here” which gives him satisfaction, but if truth be told by then Eddie’s already dead a good few minutes.
Up the line by just shy of ten years in 2006, Dave Daniels strolls down sunlit Sheep Street on his way to Alma’s exhibition. Other than the round church, everything is different and he can’t work out which of the windows might be those of his old house, the one that Andrew was excluded from, or even if his old house is still there. He’s got a vague idea it might be one of those demolished to make way for the huge corned beef-coloured premises belonging to the Inland Revenue, but isn’t sure. It doesn’t matter. He hardly remembers spending that first year or so here, anyway, and what with Andrew’s eldest taking his own life like that David has come to blame the situation back then in the early ’Fifties for his nephew’s death, although he knows the truth of it is probably a lot more complicated, much less black and white. Things usually are. Further along the street he peers in through the open gateway to the yard where the old beech tree used to stand, but after having talked to Alma on the phone the other night he knows what to expect. The tree is gone, a thing as old as the round church itself that had withstood all the crusades and civil wars, finally poisoned in the night by some bigwig proprietor of an adjacent business who’s got plans for the location that the beech tree and its preservation order are unfortunately standing in the way of, or at least if all the ugly local rumours Alma has passed on to David are to be believed. He shakes his head, suspecting that it’s just the way the world is going. When he reaches Sheep Street’s end he crosses a dual carriageway that wasn’t there before and walks beside the empty yawn of unkempt grass where the Matafancanta used to be, just down from the still-standing bus station recently voted the ugliest building in the country. He remembers Alma telling him that quite apart from being hideous the whole thing has its entrance at the wrong end so that busses have to do a complete circuit before entering, this due to a town planner working with the blueprints upside down. It’s nearly funny. He turns right before he gets to the old Fish Market that’s up there at the top end of the Drapery and walks down by a Chinese restaurant with a multi-storey car park just across the busy road. He doesn’t know this place at all. He’s looking at some sort of brutal traffic-junction where there used to be the cheery confines of the Mayorhold, which he knows for Harry Trasler’s shop that he and Alma, way back, scoped for comics almost every Saturday. He never looks at comics these days, even though they’ve become fashionable to the point where adults are allowed to read them without fear of ridicule. Ironically, in David’s view, this makes them a lot more ridiculous than when they were intended as a perfectly legitimate and often beautifully crafted means of entertaining kids. At age thirteen, David’s idea of heaven was somewhere that comics were acclaimed and readily available, perhaps with dozens of big budget movies featuring his favourite obscure costumed characters. Now that he’s in his fifties and his paradise is all around him he finds it depressing. Concepts and ideas meant for the children of some forty years ago: is that the best that the twenty-first century has got to offer? When all this extraordinary stuff is happening everywhere, are Stan Lee’s post-war fantasies of white neurotic middle-class American empowerment really the most adequate response? David descends into a sodium-lit pedestrian subway system which takes him beneath the hurtling traffic to emerge on the far side of a broad auto-waterfall that he thinks might be called Horsemarket. Heading down beside the churning flow of steel David anticipates the Barclaycard Credit Control Centre that stands on Marefair’s corner at the bottom but discovers even that is gone, replaced by some variety of leisure/entertainment complex. Walking along Marefair almost to the Castle Station end he turns right into Chalk Lane, which he thinks should take him to the little nursery where Alma’s show is happening. He’s immediately drenched in poppies, spurting from the distressed mortar of a very old-looking stone wall there on his right. The sudden scarlet saturation brings to mind the news he hears a few weeks back, of how the extradition process that will see Charles Taylor tried for war crimes in a glass box in The Hague is just now getting underway. About time. Fifty thousand people dead in the ten years the civil war was going on until they finally declared an end to it in 2002, and the UN peacekeeping forces were required to stay there until, what, six months ago? It’s staggering to think that all that harm and carnage can be instigated by a single individual, pretty much. “I nearly killed your ma. I nearly killed your pa. Now give me clemency.” Not likely. Joyce and Bernard have been dead a year or two but David’s memories of those few frantic weeks spent trying to extricate his parents from Sierra Leone’s nightmare are still with him, just as sharp as if the whole thing were still going on somewhere. Ascending past a humble limestone building he believes is Doddridge Church, he notices a seemingly redundant doorway stranded halfway up one wall and thinks about his nephew, Marcus, who will now be frozen at nineteen forever in his thoughts. He thinks about the prejudices that his dad Bernard encountered when he first arrived here in the ’Fifties, and the prejudices he brought with him. His ideas of status, the defensive snobbery of Krio families escaped from slavery to populate a British colony and earn the deep resentment of Sierra Leone’s native people. All these little cogs that turn the bigger cogs, in history and in people’s hearts, a mechanism that’s almost impossible to perceive properly, its action taking place over the span of decades, centuries. The way that everything works out. For his own part he’s getting tired of Brussels, wants to maybe kick back for a while with Natalie and their two kids, live on the savings and Natalie’s income for a while and just see what comes up. He wants to enjoy life while it’s actually happening rather than retrospectively or as a thing deferred until the future. It can all be over just like that, a sudden civil war, a looming big exam, you never know, and David wants to live each moment like an ethically-sourced diamond. He can see the nursery up ahead, a modest crowd of people that he doesn’t know gathered outside and in the middle he sees Alma in a fluffy turquoise jumper, waving to him. Every moment. Every moment like a jewel.
In 1897 Henry and Selina stop dead in their tracks to gape, halfway down Scarletwell Street. It’s such an unlikely sight that for a moment it feels like they’re dreaming or enchanted, and they take each other’s hands without a word as if they were a pair of little children. Tied up to its lamppost there outside The Friendly Arms, the animal ignores them. After maybe half a minute, a stout little feller with big side-whiskers comes out from in the public house with a big glass of ale that he gives to the creature, what commences drinking it. The man, who they will later learn is Mr. Newton Pratt, looks from the animal to Henry and then laughs. “Blimey! Did you two know each other, then, back there in the old country?” Henry laughs as well. “Well, speaking personally, I never been to Africa, although I’ll own this feller’s mom and pop could very well have once run into mine. Where did you get him, you don’t mind me asking?” The man doesn’t mind at all. “Got ’im from Whipsnade Zoo when they’d not got the space and they were gunna sell ’im to the knackers yard for glue. Horace, ’is name is. It looks like ’e’s took a shine to your young lady.” Henry looks around and there’s Selina beaming like it’s Christmas morning while the rarity allows her to be petting its dark muzzle. He regards the beast, the black and white stripes of its hide like an amazing jungle flag staked proudly here amongst the cobbles and the chimneypots, the black whisk of its tail keeping the meat-flies off, its bristly mane what’s like the haircut of a Mohawk Indian and swaying like it’s kind of drunk into the bargain. Henry makes his mind up there and then that this is where he’s going to live, him and Selina. They stand talking to the man a while and he tells them that he’s Newt Pratt and that the place they’re in is called the Burrows, or that’s what it sounds like, and now Henry looks he can see creeping, jumping cottontails all over where there’s any grass. The veldt-horse belches. Mr. Pratt asks him his name and he says Henry George, and Newton Pratt says he’ll remember that. But, pretty obviously, he doesn’t.
** <strong>THE STEPS OF ALL SAINTS</strong>
<br>
*** <strong>CAST</strong>
JOHN CLARE
HUSBAND
WIFE
JOHN BUNYAN
SAMUEL BECKETT
THOMAS BECKET
HALF-CASTE WOMAN
<quote>
<em>The three broad front steps and sheltering portico of a late Gothic church with Doric columns left and right, a foggy night-time. In the background beneath the portico, there are recesses set into the limestone front wall of the building, to either side of its locked doors. From off, the almost inaudible sound of a piano in the far distance, playing “Whispering Grass”. Seated in right-hand recess,</em> JOHN CLARE, <em>wearing dusty-looking early 19<sup><em>th</em></sup>-century rural dress, including a tall wide-awake hat. The sole is hanging off one shoe. He peers around into the surrounding gloom, hopefully.</em>
</quote>
JOHN CLARE: Well, this is a haunted sort of evening. Who’s about?
<quote>
[<em>Pause</em>]
</quote>
JOHN CLARE: Come on now, look alive … although for me I can’t be bothered with it these days. It’d be alright, perhaps, if not for all the walking and the disappointment. As for what there is of flesh and blood to the arrangement, I’m of the opinion that it’s much like shoes, in that the bodily side of the matter has a fresh smell and a lovely cherry lustre when it’s new, but that’s of no use once the tongue has withered and the sole’s worn through. It’s famously a poor show if the nails are digging in your feet. [<em>Reflective pause as</em> CLARE <em>examines his damaged shoe.</em>] No, in the main I’m happier with a gaseous posterity, so that the spectre of my backside might revisit all these spots that it was fond of formerly. The only pity is that life goes trudging on for as long as it does, since otherwise presumably there’d be more people of my own age and extinction here to talk to. [<em>Cocks head, listening to faint music from off.</em>] That’s a pretty air. I’d like to know who’s furious enough to gouge it into everyone.
<quote>
[<em>Dragging footsteps approach from off. Enter</em> HUSBAND <em>and</em> WIFE<em>, front right. They are dressed for an evening out, she in long coat and bonnet with handbag, he in loud yellow plaid jacket and dickey-bow with oiled dark hair and pencil moustache. They come to a halt, standing and staring at the empty church steps.</em>]
</quote>
HUSBAND: We could sit here.
WIFE: We can’t sit here. I can still hear the sound of her. It travels farther in the night.
HUSBAND: We’ll have to sit here. If you need to spend a penny there’s the toilets on Wood Hill not far away. She’s sure to cut it out soon, any road. I don’t know what’s got into her.
WIFE: [<em>Snorts derisively.</em>] I do.
<quote>
[<em>Resignedly, she goes and sits on church’s second step. Her husband stands staring at her for a moment. She does not look at him, but glares angrily into the fog. When he at last sits down next to her, she shuffles a couple of feet away from him. He looks at her, surprised and hurt.</em>]
</quote>
HUSBAND: Celia …
WIFE: Don’t.
JOHN CLARE: Hello? I don’t suppose that you’d be dead, now, would you?
HUSBAND: Is this how it’s going to be?
<quote>
[<em>She doesn’t answer.</em> HUSBAND <em>stares at her, waiting.</em> JOHN CLARE <em>rises from his alcove and walks hesitantly forward to stand behind and between the seated pair.</em>]
</quote>
JOHN CLARE: Excuse me, sir, but were you talking just now to myself or to the lady here? If, in response to my own querying of your mortality, you were enquiring as to whether this fogbound and uneventful continuity was how your afterlife was going to be, then in my own experience the answer’s yes. Yes, this is how it’s going to be. You’ll hang around in fog and nobody will ever come. If you’re anticipating a creator presently arriving to make lucid his intentions, then it’s my guess you’ll be waiting a long time. But, fair’s fair, if he should turn up, then when you’re finished with him, if you could point him in my direction, I’d be grateful. There were matters I was hoping to discuss. [<em>The pair ignore him. Experimentally, he waves one arm up and down between them, as if to determine whether they are blind. After a moment he stops, and regards the couple glumly.</em>] Of course, it may be that you were addressing your companion, in which case I hope you’ll pardon me for my intrusion. I intended no offence with my assumption that a couple as apparently ill-suited as yourselves might very well be dead. I am myself no stranger to the inconvenient marriage. When I was with Patty, it was always Mary that I thought of. Often did I –
HUSBAND: I said is this how it’s going to be, all night until the morning? If there’s something on your mind then spit it out, for God’s sake.
WIFE: You know.
HUSBAND: I don’t.
WIFE: I don’t want to talk about it.
HUSBAND: What?
WIFE: You know. The goings on. Just leave me be.
JOHN CLARE: [<em>Slowly and with deliberation.</em>] Do you know who I am? [HUSBAND <em>continues to stare at</em> WIFE <em>who glares into the fog.</em>] I ask not out of wounded vanity, but more in the true spirit of investigation. I’ve a fancy I might be Lord Byron, though it strikes me now I hear it spoke aloud that Byron would most surely not say such a thing. If that is so, then otherwise it may be I am King William the Fourth, in which case I would be obliged for news as to what year we suffer presently, and if my pretty Vicky is still Queen. Please take your time about it. It’s a thing of no great consequence, my true identity, as long as it is somebody well thought-of.
HUSBAND: Goings on? What goings on? [WIFE <em>does not reply. He stares at her for a few moments then gives up and looks down at his shoes in silence.</em> CLARE <em>looks from one to the other, hopeful of further conversation. When none is forthcoming, he sags dejectedly.</em>]
JOHN CLARE: [<em>Sighs heavily.</em>] Oh, never mind. Sorry I’ve bothered you. It’s just a game that I’ve come up with for when no one’s here to talk to. Tell you what, I’ll leave you both alone and mind my business. [CLARE <em>turns and begins to shuffle back towards his alcove. Halfway there he turns and looks back over his shoulder at the couple on the steps.</em>] Do you know, sometimes I think I am the statue with stone wings atop the Town Hall up the road, and it in turn is everyone? [<em>The couple do not respond.</em> CLARE <em>shakes his head sadly then continues on towards the alcove, where he once more takes his seat. There is a long silence during which the piano music from off finishes abruptly halfway through a bar. Nobody reacts.</em>]
HUSBAND: [<em>Eventually.</em>] Look, I’m as in the dark as you are. As for goings on, not that I’m saying I’m aware of any, that’s just life as far as I’m concerned. In life, you’ll always get a lot of goings on. And highly strung young girls, they can have funny turns –
WIFE: There’s goings on and goings on. That’s all I’m saying.
HUSBAND: Celia, look at me.
WIFE: I can’t.
HUSBAND: The chances are, what all this will turn out to be, she’s on her rags.
WIFE: [<em>Turning to him angrily.</em>] You bloody liar. You heard what she shouted.
HUSBAND: What?
WIFE: You heard.
HUSBAND: I didn’t.
WIFE: Everybody heard. They could have heard her in Far Cotton. “When the grass is whispering over me, then you’ll remember.” Well? Remember what? What did she mean? To me, it sounds a funny thing to say.
HUSBAND: Well, that’s … that’s just the song-words, isn’t it? The song that she was playing –
WIFE: You know that those aren’t the words. And you know what you’ve done.
HUSBAND: You mean these goings on of yours?
WIFE: They’re not my goings on. They’re yours. That’s all I’m saying. [<em>While they talk,</em> JOHN BUNYAN <em>enters from off right beneath the portico behind them, dressed in dusty, drab 17<sup><em>th</em></sup>-century attire. He does not appear to notice</em> CLARE <em>sat in the shadows of his alcove, but instead pauses to listen to the bickering couple on the steps with a puzzled frown.</em>]
HUSBAND: I’ve done nothing anyone in my position wouldn’t do. You haven’t got the first idea of what it’s like, with my responsibilities for managing the band. All of the travelling around together, there’s an intimacy that develops over time, I’ll grant you that, but –
WIFE: I dare say there’s intimacy! So, am I to take it you admit that there’s been goings on?
HUSBAND: I don’t know what you mean. What do you mean by goings on?
WIFE: I mean the other.
HUSBAND: What?
WIFE: The slap and tickle.
HUSBAND: I’m not getting you.
WIFE: The How’s-Your-Father.
HUSBAND: Oh. [<em>Long pause.</em> WIFE <em>looks angrily away from</em> HUSBAND, <em>who stares bleakly at the ground in front of him.</em>] Well, anyway, we can’t sit here all night.
WIFE: You’re right. We can’t. [<em>Both remain seated. Behind them,</em> BUNYAN <em>regards the silent couple with bewilderment. He still has not noticed</em> CLARE <em>until the latter speaks from the dark alcove in the background.</em>]
JOHN CLARE: Ha! I’ll bet you won’t hear me either, you great nincompoop.
JOHN BUNYAN: [<em>Wheeling about to peer into the darkness under the portico.</em>] What? Who goes there, skulking like a cutthroat?
JOHN CLARE: Oh, no. I’ve miscalculated. This is an embarrassment.
JOHN BUNYAN: Come out! Come out, before I draw my sword! [CLARE <em>rises nervously out of his alcove, tottering hesitantly forward with both palms raised in placation.</em>]
JOHN CLARE: Oh, come now. There’s no need for that. ’Twas but a jest, for which I make apology. I had not realised you were dead as well. It is, I’m sure, a common error.
JOHN BUNYAN: [<em>Surprised.</em>] Are we dead, then?
JOHN CLARE: I’m afraid that is my understanding of the situation, yes.
JOHN BUNYAN: [<em>Turning to look at couple on steps in foreground.</em>] What about them? Are they dead?
JOHN CLARE: Not yet. I expect they’re hanging on to see what happens.
JOHN BUNYAN: This indeed is a conundrum. Dead, then. I had thought that I but dreamed, and had not woken on my gaol cot to make water or turn on my side in an uncommonly long while.
JOHN CLARE: It is a plain fact you will never do these things again.
JOHN BUNYAN: Well, I am astounded. I had thought the world to come a fierier terrain than this, and now am disappointed by the writings that I made about it.
JOHN CLARE: [<em>Interested</em>.] Was it writings that you made? Well, here’s a pretty match. I once was in that kind of work myself, now that I think of it. I wrote all day, I’m sure of it, when I was married first to Mary Joyce and then to Patty Turner. Was I Byron then, or was I king? I can’t remember all the little details now, the way I once did. But what of yourself? Would there be any of your writings I might know of?
JOHN BUNYAN: I’d not think it likely. I once penned some words about a pilgrim, meant to show the pitfalls and the troubles that there are in worldly life. The common people liked it well enough, yet I was not the courtly crawler Dryden was, and when another Charles came to the throne I did not do so well of it. This recent news of being dead makes me suppose the greater part of what I wrote did not survive me.
JOHN CLARE: [<em>Incredulous, with dawning realisation.</em>] You would not be Mr. Bunyan, late of Bedford?
JOHN BUNYAN: [<em>Cautiously flattered</em>.] That I am, unless there is another. Is it so few years since my demise that I am still remembered? But things seem so changed. Were not the pillars of All Hallows Church here built from wood when last I passed this way? Or did that all go in the fire? It makes me pleased to think you know of me.
JOHN CLARE: Why, from the look of things I’d say it must be getting on three hundred years since you were last alive. I take it you’ll have noticed the fine calves and ankles on the woman there, for they were the first things I looked at. It’s outlandish days we’re in, you may be sure, but I would bet a shilling that the progress of your pilgrim is a thing on everybody’s lips, just as your name’s on everybody’s feet. Upon these feet of mine, most certainly, when I made my own progress out of Matthew Allen’s prison in the forest and walked eighty miles back home to Helpstone. You’ll no doubt have heard of it, and of myself. I am Lord Byron, who they call the peasant poet. Does that ring a bell?
JOHN BUNYAN: I cannot say it does. Why do they call you peasant when you are a Lord?
JOHN CLARE: It does seem queer, now that you mention it. And why does Queen Victoria insist she is my daughter? It may be, upon consideration, that I’m not entirely on the mark with the Lord Byron business. It was no doubt all the limping that confused me. It now comes to me that in the very fact of things I am John Clare, the author of Don Juan. There! That will be a name, I think, that’s more familiar to you.
JOHN BUNYAN: I’m afraid that it is not.
JOHN CLARE: [<em>Disappointed.</em>] What, not the Clare <em>or</em> the Don Juan, now?
JOHN BUNYAN: Neither of them.
JOHN CLARE: Ah, God. Am I not even John Clare? [CLARE <em>lapses into a depressed silence, staring at the ground.</em> BUNYAN <em>regards him, concerned.</em>]
HUSBAND: Look, I’m no saint.
WIFE: [<em>Not looking at him.</em>] You can say that again.
HUSBAND: [<em>After a pause.</em>] What I’m saying is I’m only flesh and blood.
WIFE: [<em>Angrily, turning to glare at him accusingly.</em>] Well, what sort of excuse is that? We’re all just flesh and blood! You show me somebody who’s not! [<em>She looks away from him again, reverting to silence.</em> <em>Behind the pair,</em> CLARE <em>and</em> BUNYAN <em>exchange lugubrious and unconvinced glances.</em>]
JOHN CLARE: [<em>He shrugs.</em>] It strikes me that we’re only getting in the way here. What would you say to the prospect of a nice sit down? It is in my opinion quite the best of postures, and I am convinced that it is only all this standing up and walking to and fro that gets us into so much trouble as a population. Come, let’s take the weight from off our feet.
JOHN BUNYAN: I had intended I should see the nearby marketplace, where was the Earl of Peterborough’s edict handed down that I referred to in that piece of mine about the Holy War. Still, it may be that a few moments’ rest is no great matter in the long yards of posterity. But as for taking weight from off our feet, in our present condition I can’t see that there is any weight to take. Indeed, it is a wonder that we do not float away into the heavens for our want of heaviness.
JOHN CLARE: I had supposed we all must keep an ounce or two of it that’s carried in our hearts for such emergencies. Let us sit down, and then perhaps we can discuss this further. [CLARE <em>begins to lead</em> BUNYAN <em>towards the rear of the space beneath the portico.</em> BUNYAN <em>starts towards the right-side alcove, at which</em> CLARE <em>grows agitated and corrects him.</em>] Oh, no, that won’t do. This fellow is the recess that’s reserved for me, by virtue of my previous habitation. You must have the one upon the other side, that I keep specially for visitors. I’ll own it’s not as sumptuous as mine, but if that inconvenience is the worst thing that Eternity has got to throw at you, you should be glad. [BUNYAN <em>looks disgruntled, but accedes to</em> CLARE<em>’s wishes. Both men take their seats in their allotted alcoves.</em>]
JOHN BUNYAN: You’re right. It’s comfortable enough.
JOHN CLARE: It is. [<em>Pause.</em>] Are you referring to the recess, now, or the Eternity?
JOHN BUNYAN: Primarily the recess. [<em>Pause. From</em> OFF <em>there is the</em> SOUND <em>of a solitary motorcar passing by through the fog. The</em> HUSBAND <em>and</em> WIFE <em>pay the passing car no attention, but</em> CLARE <em>and</em> BUNYAN <em>follow it with their eyes.</em>] I have wondered about those things. They are clearly a variety of wagon, but I cannot fathom how their locomotion is effected.
JOHN CLARE: Well, I’ve given that some thought myself, and I believe the answer lies in some advance of natural science that has made the horse invisible to normal sight.
JOHN BUNYAN: Surely, that conjecture might be easily disproved with the plain observation that there’s no conspicuous abundance of the dung these unseen nags must certainly produce. Answer me that, if you’ve the measure of it.
JOHN CLARE: Ah! Ah! So I will, then. Does it not occur to you that beings that are visible unto plain sight such as ourselves make droppings that are equally apparent to the eye? Does it not follow that an unseen or invisibly transparent horse would thus produce manure that’s of a similar ethereal nature?
JOHN BUNYAN: [<em>After a thoughtful pause.</em>] Surely, though, however rarefied its substance, an unseen evacuation would still stink. Indeed, would not the spectral turd that you propose present a greater inconvenience to the pedestrian, surely more likely to step unawares into your numinous ordure than into an excrescence which is in the common view and therefore may be walked around and so avoided?
JOHN CLARE: [<em>A pause, during which</em> CLARE <em>reconsiders.</em>] I’d not thought of that, and thus withdraw my speculation. [<em>Another pause, as</em> CLARE <em>worriedly contemplates invisible horse manure</em>.] Horse muck that cannot be seen. It is a horror, now I come to understand the implications. Why, there’d be a reeking foulness hidden from the cognizance of all, that never could be cleaned away, in which the purest of things might be inadvertently made filthy …
HUSBAND: Celia, I promise you, there’s nothing going on. Nothing that anybody else can see. You show me where there’s something going on.
WIFE: I’ve got no need to see it. I can smell it. I can smell a rat. I can smell something fishy.
HUSBAND: Celia, listen to yourself. A fishy rat?
WIFE: [<em>She leans forward, staring hard and accusingly into his eyes.</em>] A fishy rat. Yes. That’s the very thing that I can smell, even when someone’s drenched it in cologne. A fishy rat, with hairy fins and scaly ears, that’s got a great long pink worm of a tail to drag behind it through the dirty water. God, you ought to be ashamed.
HUSBAND: I’m not! I’m not ashamed! I haven’t done a thing to be ashamed of! Why, my conscience is a pane of polished glass, without a streak of guilt or birdshit anywhere upon it. What is it that makes you think I’m guilty? Is there something guilty that I’ve said, or something guilty in my manner? Where is all this guilty, guilty, guilty coming from? Because it’s getting on my nerves, and if it keeps up I shall lose my rag. How can I think straight with this noise? And how long is she going to keep on playing that same tune before it drives me mad?
WIFE: [<em>She stares at him, puzzled and then slightly worried.</em>] How long is …? Johnny, she stopped playing nearly half an hour ago.
HUSBAND: [<em>He stares at her blankly.</em>] What, really?
WIFE: A good twenty minutes at the very least.
HUSBAND: [<em>He turns and stares into space, horrified and haunted.</em>] A half an hour. Or at least a good twenty minutes …
WIFE: Split the difference. Call it twenty-five.
HUSBAND: Oh, God. [<em>They lapse into silence. The</em> HUSBAND <em>gazes, haunted, into the fog. His</em> WIFE <em>gazes at him for a few moments, mystified, and then looks away.</em>]
JOHN BUNYAN: [<em>After a respectful pause.</em>] Do you yourself have any notion what it is that vexes them?
JOHN CLARE: Neither the first, nor faintest. I imagine it would be a marital perplexity that’s by and large opaque to the outsider, although having had two wives I am a man of more than ordinary experience. With my first wife Mary, who enjoyed the sweetest disposition, I was happy and there were no quarrels of the stripe we see enacted here. Our marriage bed was filled with harmony, and when I entered into her it was as though I entered into God’s own meadow. With my second wife, with Patty, it was naught but baleful hints and dark recriminations, although she was very often good to me. Still, there were nights that she’d be jealous of the time I had with Mary, who was a much younger girl than Patty was herself. No, as you see, I am no stranger to the married life and its upheavals, though in truth I was not often with my family.
JOHN BUNYAN: Then there’s another thing we hold in common, with our forenames, mutual occupation and our current state of incorporeality. I too had family, from whom I was made separate by my confinement.
JOHN CLARE: [<em>Excitedly.</em>] You were confined? Why, so was I! It is as though we were reflections of each other! Where were you confined?
JOHN BUNYAN: In prison, for my preaching. And yourself?
JOHN CLARE: [<em>Suddenly vague and evasive.</em>] Oh … it was in a hospital.
JOHN BUNYAN: [<em>Concerned.</em>] Then you were ailing in the flesh?
JOHN CLARE: Well … no. Not really. Not the flesh. Mind you, I did once have a nasty limp.
JOHN BUNYAN: So, not the flesh. I see. [<em>From</em> OFF <em>there is the</em> SOUND <em>of the</em> CHURCH CLOCK<em>, striking once.</em>]
HUSBAND: It’s like we’ve been here hours. Was that for half-past twelve or one o’clock, do you suppose?
WIFE: What does it matter? Who cares if it’s half-past twelve or one o’clock? It’s always going to be the same time from now on, as far as you’re concerned. It’s always going to be too late. Or who knows? It might be half-past too late. I couldn’t say. [<em>They lapse into another hostile silence.</em>]
JOHN CLARE: What do you mean, you see?
JOHN BUNYAN: What?
JOHN CLARE: When I said that when confined to hospital I was not ailing in the flesh, you said “So, not the flesh. I see.” What did you see?
JOHN BUNYAN: It was a turn of phrase. Think nothing of it.
JOHN CLARE: I will not think nothing of it, for it seems to me there was an implication, was there not?
JOHN BUNYAN: An implication?
JOHN CLARE: Ah, don’t play the fool with me. I’m twice the idiot you’ll ever be. You know full well the nature of the implication I refer to. You as good as said “If not the flesh, then what?” Deny it if you can.
JOHN BUNYAN: I’ll not deny it. I had but supposed that you were deemed to be afflicted of the mind or spirit, and had been surprised that there were hospitals attending such affairs. Believe me when I say I did not seek to judge your clarity, or lack thereof.
JOHN CLARE: You did not seek to call me lunatic? There are those who would not be so restrained.
JOHN BUNYAN: I have myself been called the same, along with blasphemer and devil. It is ever thus, it seems, for any man who has a vision in his soul and dares to speak it, most especially if that should be a vision inconvenient to the wealthy or the ordinary run of things.
JOHN CLARE: That’s it exactly! You have bound it in a nutshell. When there is a fear that some truth may be told, the teller is put under lock and key and called a criminal or else a madman. My own circumstances make it plain, for if even Lord Byron may be deemed insane, then why not any man? It is beyond my comprehension.
JOHN BUNYAN: [<em>A pause, during which</em> BUNYAN <em>gazes at</em> CLARE <em>with understanding and pity.</em>] And mine likewise. [<em>Another pause, thoughtful and reflective.</em>] Then there are still inequalities and prisons in this age of unseen horses, even. Am I to suppose the New Jerusalem did not arrive?
JOHN CLARE: I must confess I have not noticed it in this vicinity, although it may be that it turned up while I was confined and no one thought to tell me.
JOHN BUNYAN: [<em>He shakes his head, disappointed.</em>] If that were the case, then we should all be saints.
JOHN CLARE: Perhaps we are.
JOHN BUNYAN: That is a dismal summary.
JOHN CLARE: You’re right. It is. That’s worse than the invisible manure. I wish I’d never said it. [<em>He and</em> BUNYAN <em>lapse into a bleak silence.</em>]
HUSBAND: The lion shall lie down beside the lamb. That’s in the Bible.
WIFE: Oh, and does the Bible say whether the lamb’s still there to get up in the morning?
HUSBAND: Celia, I thought you liked the Bible.
WIFE: Lots of things are in the Bible, Johnny. Lots and lots and lots. And then their daughters. So, do you admit it, then? Did you lie down beside the lamb?
HUSBAND: I’m not a saint.
WIFE: Yes, you’ve already told us that. You’re not a lion, either. And you’re not a man. You’re nothing but a snazzy creature that once ran a dance-band, and now you’re not man enough to face the music.
HUSBAND: [<em>Startled.</em>] You said it had stopped.
WIFE: It has. [<em>A pause.</em>] What was it that the grass was whispering about?
HUSBAND: I don’t know. Nothing. You know grass. It’s always whispering. It’s got nothing better to do. What does it know? It’s grass, for heaven’s sake.
WIFE: They say all flesh is grass.
HUSBAND: Well, not my flesh, it’s not. Not me. I’m not grass.
WIFE: Yes you are. You’re grass. Look at you. You’re half-cut and gone to seed. And like all flesh, you’ll have your season and you’ll be mowed down. And then you’ll have it on your conscience for eternity. The music, that’ll still be playing. And the grass will still be whispering. [<em>Beneath the portico behind them,</em> SAMUEL BECKETT <em>enters from</em> OFF, LEFT. <em>He notices the couple on the steps, but does not notice</em> CLARE <em>or</em> BUNYAN <em>in their alcoves.</em> BECKETT <em>wanders over to stand just behind the couple, looking down at them in puzzlement as they ignore him.</em>]
HUSBAND: Eternity. God, there’s a thought. All of that bloody whispering, for eternity.
BECKETT: Hello, now. How are things with you tonight?
WIFE: It’s me shall have to put up with the whispering and all the tongues.
BECKETT: Tongues? I’m not sure I follow you.
HUSBAND: Oh, and that’s my fault, is it?
BECKETT: I’m not saying that it’s your fault, I’m just saying I don’t follow you.
WIFE: Well, you’re the one with all the secrets and the mysteries and the goings on.
BECKETT: Ah, that’s a common thing, to say that I’m impenetrable.
HUSBAND: Oh, not that old tale again. Give it a rest with all of your long silences and all of that evasive and insinuating chatter you’re so fond of. I’m fed up of it.
BECKETT: I’d have to say I don’t think that you’ve understood contemporary drama.
JOHN CLARE: They can’t hear you. We’ve been through all this already.
WIFE: I’m the one who’s fed up of it.
BECKETT: [<em>Startled,</em> BECKETT <em>wheels round to face</em> CLARE <em>and</em> BUNYAN.] Who’s that? What’s all this about?
JOHN BUNYAN: Be not alarmed. My friend here has explained it to me. We, like you, are but departed shades, and living souls such as the pair upon the step can neither see nor hear us.
JOHN CLARE: I’d go further. I do not believe that they can smell us, either.
BECKETT: Departed shade? Don’t you go telling me I’m dead. I haven’t even got a cough. To my mind, it’s more likely that this is a dream of some description.
JOHN BUNYAN: That is very like what I myself supposed, and yet I’m told that we are halfway through the twentieth century after our Lord and I myself beneath the turf more than two hundred years.
BECKETT: Two hundred years? Well, I’m all right, then. [BECKETT <em>looks around and gestures towards the surrounding town centre</em>.] All this looks like just after the war, whereas as far as I’m aware I’m sleeping in a hotel in the far from satisfying 1970s.
JOHN CLARE: A hotel! In the 1970s! I do not know which of these things is harder to imagine!
JOHN BUNYAN: Just after the war, you say? Was it another civil war?
BECKETT: A civil war? God, no. Is that the time that you yourself are from? This was a war with Germany, primarily; the second of two world wars that we had. They flattened London so the English firebombed Dresden, and then the Americans dropped something that you can’t imagine on the Japanese, and then it was all over.
JOHN BUNYAN: [BUNYAN <em>also glances around at the surrounding town, his expression mournful.</em>] So, then, it would seem the nation’s pilgrimage has taken it to just beyond the City of Destruction. By my calculations, that would make this place Vanity Fair.
BECKETT: You’re quoting Bunyan at me, now?
JOHN CLARE: It’s not like he can help it. He’s John Bunyan. And I’m Byron.
JOHN BUNYAN: [<em>To</em> BECKETT.] Oh, don’t listen to him. [<em>To</em> CLARE.] No you’re not. You’re making both of us look bad and not to be believed. You said yourself you were John Clare. Stick to your tale or we’ll end up with everyone confused as you!
BECKETT: [BECKETT <em>laughs in amazement.</em>] John Bunyan. And John Clare. Well, now, this is a lively dream. I must book into this hotel again.
JOHN CLARE: [<em>Surprised and incredulous.</em>] John Clare. You’ve heard of him? You’ve heard of me?
BECKETT: Why, certainly. Being myself a writer, I’m familiar with the pair of you and have respect for your accomplishments. You, Mr. Clare, especially. In my day, you’re remembered as the Peasant Poet, as perhaps the greatest lyric voice that England ever entertained and treated so unfairly, what with dying in the madhouse and the rest of it. [<em>A pause.</em>] You were aware of that, the dying in a madhouse? I hope I’ve not been insensitive in breaking it to you like that.
JOHN CLARE: Oh, I already knew about it. I was there around that time. But tell me, is my darling wife remembered also? Mary Clare, who once was Mary Joyce?
BECKETT: [BECKETT <em>regards</em> CLARE <em>with a serious and searching look</em>.] Ah, yes. Your first wife. Yes, yes, it’s a well-known story, still discussed in literary circles.
JOHN CLARE: Then I’m glad. I should be sorry if I were remembered only for the madness.
JOHN BUNYAN: [<em>To</em> BECKETT.] You said that you were a writer also. Would yours be a name that we might know?
BECKETT: I shouldn’t think that’s likely. You’d both have been dead a while before I came along. I’m Samuel Beckett. You can call me Sam if I might know the pair of you as John. This is Northampton, isn’t it? The portico of All Saints Church?
JOHN BUNYAN: I meant to ask what you were doing here. Both Mr. Clare here and myself were born nearby and so often had business here, while from your voice I’d guess that you’re an Irishman. What is it brings you this way, either in posterity or, as you would prefer to have it, in your dreams?
BECKETT: Well, now, in the first instance that would be the cricket, and then later on it was to see a woman.
JOHN BUNYAN: Cricket?
JOHN CLARE: Oh, I’m well acquainted with the ins and outs of it. You ought to see it!
BECKETT: Sure, I played against Northampton at the County Ground. We stayed at the hotel next to the pitch, and on the night after the match my team mates were all of a mind to go out in pursuit of drink and prostitutes, the both of which this town has in abundance. I myself was more inclined to spend the evening in the company of old Northampton’s Gothic churches, which are equally profuse. I would imagine that it is the memory of that night which brings me back here in my dreams, though I’ll admit that you yourselves provide a novel element.
HUSBAND: All right! All right, I did it. Does that make you happy?
WIFE: [<em>Coldly, after a pause</em>.] Did it make you happy?
HUSBAND: [<em>Defiantly, after a moment of deliberation</em>.] Yes! Yes, it made me happy! It was wonderful and I was happier than I’ve ever been. [<em>Less confidently, following a</em> <em>pause</em>.] At least to start with.
BECKETT: What’s all this that’s going on? [BUNYAN <em>and</em> CLARE <em>glance at each other, then reluctantly stand up from their stone alcoves and walk slowly across to join</em> BECKETT <em>near the quarrelling couple</em>.]
JOHN CLARE: We’re not entirely sure ourselves. If I were of a kind to make a wager, I’d suppose them to be quarrelling about some manner of an infidelity.
WIFE: And when was that?
HUSBAND: What? When was what?
WIFE: You said “At least to start with”. When was it you started?
HUSBAND: Does it matter?
WIFE: Oh, you know it matters. You know very well it matters, with the goings on and when they started. Look me in the eye and tell me, now. When was it?
HUSBAND: [<em>Uncomfortably</em>.] Well, it was some time ago.
WIFE: Some time ago. How much? Was it two years ago?
HUSBAND: I don’t remember. [<em>After a pause</em>.] No. It was longer ago than that.
WIFE: You filthy thing. You filthy creature. How old? How old was she when you started?
HUSBAND: [<em>Wretchedly.</em>] You know I’m no good with birthdays. [<em>The</em> WIFE <em>looks at her</em> HUSBAND <em>in anger and disgust before they both once more lapse into silence.</em>]
BECKETT: This looks very much to me as if the infidelity was with a younger woman. A young girl, you might say.
JOHN BUNYAN: And would that, in your time, make an awful difference to the matter? Are the infidelity and the adultery not by themselves sufficient to account for their unhappy state?
BECKETT: That would depend upon how young the other party was, exactly. There are different customs these days than were in your own. They have a thing now that they call “age of consent” and if you mess about with it you’re sure to be in trouble.
JOHN CLARE: [<em>Suddenly concerned</em>.] And how old would that be?
BECKETT: I think sixteen is around the usual mark. Why do you ask?
JOHN CLARE: [<em>Slightly evasively</em>.] No reason in particular. Being a poet I am naturally interested in the facts of things.
JOHN BUNYAN: [<em>After a pause.</em>] Well, I should be upon my way. The Earl of Peterborough will not wait forever to hand down his edict, and the path I’m on is hard and without ending. It has been instructive talking with you, and if I should wake tomorrow to my cell in Bedford you may be assured that all the curious things which we have said shall be a great amusement for me.
JOHN CLARE: I shall be right pleased to say I’ve met you, even if only in these ambiguous circumstances.
BECKETT: Yes, you take care. And between the two of us, what did you genuinely think to your man Cromwell?
JOHN BUNYAN: Ah, he was all right. [<em>Less confidently, following a pause</em>.] At least to start with. Yet despite his antinomian certainties, you may be sure that he was not a saint. Ah, well. I’ll leave you to your entertainments in this borough of Mansoul. A good night to you, gentlemen. [BUNYAN <em>walks wearily off to</em> EXIT STAGE LEFT.]
JOHN CLARE: And to you.
BECKETT: Aye, mind how you go. [CLARE <em>and</em> BECKETT <em>watch</em> BUNYAN <em>depart, and then fall back to their contemplation of the couple sitting on the steps</em>.] Well, for a Roundhead, he seemed nice enough. What was your own impression?
JOHN CLARE: [<em>Slightly disappointed</em>.] I had thought him not so tall as he seemed in the illustrations. [<em>After a pause</em>.] So, you said that in your own day, I’m well thought of. Is it my Don Juan they like?
BECKETT: No, that was Byron. You’re admired for all your writings, for the Shepherd’s Calendar and desperate later pieces such as your “I Am” alike. The journal that you kept while on your walk from Essex is regarded as the most heart-breaking document in all of English letters, and with much justification.
JOHN CLARE: [<em>Amazed</em>.] Why, I’d thought it thrown away! So it’s my hike that they remember, back from Matthew Allen’s prison in the forest to my first wife Mary’s house in Glinton. Ah, that was a rousing odyssey, you may be sure, with all of the heroic things I did and all the places that I went. [<em>A pause, during which</em> CLARE <em>frowns in puzzlement</em>.] How did it end, again? I don’t recall …
BECKETT: Regarding that first wife of yours? Not well. When you got to her house, well, let’s just say she wasn’t in. By then you’d found what I suppose you’d call your second wife, though, Patty, and she ultimately had you put in the asylum on the Billing Road here, where you later died. I’m sorry to be blunt about it.
JOHN CLARE: No, it’s all right. I remember now. I lived with Patty and our children for a while, in what’s called Poet’s Cottage out at Helpstone, but nobody could put up with me for long and so … you evidently know the rest of it. Mind, I do not blame Patty, though she always had a jealousy towards my first wife, who I loved the best.
HUSBAND: She was fifteen. She was fifteen when it all started, with the goings on. There. You can go and tell the police if that’s what your intention is. I’ve got it off me chest.
WIFE: You’ll never have it off your chest. Fifteen. And that’s when it was wonderful, when you were at your happiest. Fifteen.
JOHN CLARE: Well, that’s not all that young.
BECKETT: No?
HUSBAND: Yes! It made me happy! Just the smell, the taste of her, it was like morning in the garden! And the feeling, she was hardly like a heavy, solid thing at all and much more like a piece of down, or like a liquid. Celia, it was marvellous.
JOHN CLARE: Not in the broader scheme of things. Fifteen is not particularly young, considered from a wide perspective. Not out in the country.
WIFE: You disgust me. You’re no better than an earwig, wriggling in the muck.
BECKETT: That’s not a bad line. I’ll remember that, though it’ll more than likely sound like nonsense when I wake. That’s often how it is.
HUSBAND: It wasn’t all one-sided, Celia. That’s all I’m saying.
JOHN CLARE: I’m beginning to have sympathy with him. Women bear grudges for no proper reason.
WIFE: Don’t you speak another word. Don’t you say anything to me.
BECKETT: I can’t say I think that a fair appraisal. I’ve known women with a painful lot in life.
JOHN CLARE: That may be so, but in the main I stand by what I said. The life of a romantic man is never easy. Did you not say earlier that other than the cricket, you came here to see a woman?
BECKETT: That I did. And I will grant you that it was a woman of the difficult romantic kind, at least at first … although it may be she was always in the painful category. These things are by no means easy to determine. It strikes me there could be a degree of overlap between the two varieties.
CLARE: It may be so. It may be this is usually the case. What was her name, your woman?
BECKETT: Oh, you wouldn’t know her. She was born a great while after you’d passed on, some way into the 20<sup>th</sup> century. A Miss Joyce –
JOHN CLARE: [<em>Astounded, almost frightened</em>.] No, not her! Are you playing a cruel game with me? That is my Mary, Mary Joyce of Glinton …
BECKETT: Ah, no. This would be another girl entirely that I’m speaking of, that is the daughter of James Joyce.
CLARE: [<em>Excitedly</em>.] Why, that was Mary’s father’s name! Surely your woman and my own first wife must be one and the same! How is she? Give me news of her.
BECKETT: [<em>Gently and sympathetically</em>.] No. No, it isn’t her. The Miss Joyce I’m referring to is called Lucia. She was notable in Paris for her dancing in the 1920s, but was brought low by a difficulty in her reason. Sorry if I’ve let you down.
JOHN CLARE: [<em>Sighs heavily</em>.] Oh, it’s my own fault. Being mad, you know, it’s very self-indulgent. I should buck up and get on with things. [<em>A pause</em>.] What was she like, your personal Miss Joyce? Was she a young thing, like my own?
BECKETT: They all start out as young things, all of the Miss Joyces.
JOHN CLARE: Yes, that’s true.
BECKETT: Mine was a very pretty girl, who was afflicted by the old strabismus in one eye which she perceived as having ruined her. You know women and the low esteem in which they often hold themselves.
JOHN CLARE: I do.
BECKETT: There was some trouble with her brother, I believe, when she was young that may have had connection with her later upset. Anyway, the upshot of it was that Lucia lost her marbles.
JOHN CLARE: [<em>Puzzled</em>.] I’m not sure I understand your turn of phrase.
BECKETT: She flipped her lid.
JOHN CLARE: No, I’m no nearer.
BECKETT: Away with the fairies.
JOHN CLARE: Ah! Ah, now, I think I have you. She would be what they call a hysteric?
BECKETT: Close enough. They sent her off to various sanatoriums and psychiatrists. You know the drill. At last she landed in Saint Andrew’s Hospital along Northampton’s Billing Road, where she remains at present.
JOHN CLARE: That’s the place where I was kept, although they called it something different then.
BECKETT: The very same. The institution has an interesting literary pedigree.
JOHN CLARE: You know, I think I am acquainted with the girl you speak of. If it’s who I’m thinking of, I had a romp with her off in the madhouse woods not long ago.
BECKETT: No, I’m afraid that’s just your lunacy that’s talking. Though it’s true you were both settled at the same asylum you weren’t congruent in the chronology of things. You hail from two entirely different periods.
JOHN CLARE: Why, you could say the same of you and me, yet here we are. No, this lass I refer to had dark hair and long legs, very little in the way of bubbies and a lazy eye.
BECKETT: I’ll admit, that’s very like her.
JOHN CLARE: Makes a lot of noise about it with the spending. Mind you, in my own ordeal I spent so hard that there were letters of the alphabet came fluttering from my ears.
BECKETT: Well, you’ve convinced me. That’s Lucia to a T, although I’m mystified about the circumstances of your meeting. You would not be speaking metaphorically?
JOHN CLARE: I don’t believe so, no.
BECKETT: Now that’s a mystery. She didn’t mention it to me when last I visited.
JOHN CLARE: It may be that she was embarrassed. I am not myself what you might call presentable, and I had the impression she was of the better type.
BECKETT: That may be so. She might have thought you were beneath her.
JOHN CLARE: Well, then she’d be right. That was exactly the configuration of our bout.
BECKETT: Leave off with it. You’re getting on my nerves now.
JOHN CLARE: Then I’ll beg your pardon. You have feelings for her still yourself?
BECKETT: Not of a carnal nature, no, though once I did. If I am to be truthful, back in those days it was only carnal feelings that I had, though that was not her understanding of the matter. Presently I go to visit her as often as I can. I love her in a way, but not the way she wants. I don’t know why I go so much, to be completely honest.
JOHN CLARE: Could it be you pity her?
BECKETT: No, I don’t think that that’s entirely it. She’s happy in her own way. It might very well be that she’s happier than me. In fact, I would have difficulty in believing it were otherwise, so, no, it isn’t pity. I suppose I feel I owe her something. When I met her I was callous and I couldn’t bring myself to see that she was drowning. I could have done more, that’s all I’m saying. Or I could have done less. One way or the other. It’s too late now.
JOHN CLARE: So it’s guilt, then?
BECKETT: I expect it is. I often find it’s guilt that’s at the bottom of a thing.
JOHN CLARE: I tend to share that point of view myself.
WIFE: What did you mean, it wasn’t all one-sided?
HUSBAND: I thought that you didn’t want me speaking to you.
WIFE: Don’t be clever. You’re not clever, Johnny. The last thing you are is clever. Tell me what you meant when you said that it wasn’t all one-sided.
HUSBAND: I meant it was a duet. It was a tango. Flanagan and Allen. It was something that took two is what I’m saying to you. Why must you be all the while so dense?
WIFE: So it was something that she wanted, that’s the gist of it?
HUSBAND: It is! That is the very crux of things, the fulcrum of the subject: it was something that she wanted.
WIFE: Oh, well, that’s all right then, I suppose.
HUSBAND: [<em>Sighs, relieved</em>.] I knew that you’d come round.
WIFE: How did you know?
HUSBAND: That you’d come round? Oh, well, I know you can’t stay angry with me very long …
WIFE: [<em>Slowly and deliberately</em>.] How did you know that it was something that she wanted? Is that what she told you? Did she say “It’s something that I want”?
HUSBAND: Not in as many words, no. No, she didn’t. But …
WIFE: Well, what words did she use, then? What words did she use when she told you that it was something that she wanted?
HUSBAND: Well, it wasn’t words as such. She didn’t tell me through the medium of words.
WIFE: [<em>Increasingly angry</em>.] Well, what? Interpretive dance, was it? Did she mime it for you?
HUSBAND: [<em>Sounding trapped and uncomfortable</em>.] It was signals.
WIFE: Signals?
HUSBAND: Little signals. You know what it’s like, how women are.
WIFE: I’m not sure that I do.
HUSBAND: The signals they give out. The little looks and glances, all of that. She was forever smiling at me, cuddling up to me and telling me she loved me …
WIFE: [<em>Horrified, shouting in rage</em>.] Well, of course she was! Of course she’d do that! Johnny, you’re her father!
BECKETT: Ah, Christ. There you have it.
HUSBAND: But … I mean, I hadn’t thought of that. It isn’t what I’m used to. If a girl, a woman, if she looks at you a certain way. I mean, you know our Audrey, what she’s like …
WIFE: [<em>Furious, in helpless tears</em>.] I don’t! I don’t know what our Audrey’s like, or not how you do, anyway! You tell me, Johnny. Tell me what she’s like. Come on, now, it’ll be a bit of fun. I know: the first time, did it make her cry?
JOHN CLARE: This is a horror. I had not expected this.
HUSBAND: Celia …
WIFE: Tell me, Johnny. Tell me what our Audrey’s like to be in bed with. Did it make her cry? Was she a virgin, Johnny? Was she? And what did you do about the sheets? [<em>The</em> HUSBAND <em>looks at his</em> WIFE<em>, haunted, but simply moves his mouth like a fish and cannot answer her. Eventually he looks away and stares bleakly into space. His</em> WIFE <em>sinks her head in her hands, perhaps weeping silently. While</em> CLARE <em>and</em> BECKETT <em>are still staring in mute horror at the seated couple,</em> THOMAS BECKET ENTERS LEFT <em>and wanders slowly over to join them. They regard him with silent bewilderment. He looks at the haunted couple, then looks at</em> CLARE <em>and</em> BECKETT.]
THOMAS BECKET: Pray, has some great catastrophe befallen them?
BECKETT: It has.
THOMAS BECKET: And can you not console them?
JOHN CLARE: They can’t hear us.
THOMAS BECKET: They are deaf?
BECKETT: No, they’re alive. The rest of us are either dead or dreaming, or that’s how I understand it. Who might you be?
THOMAS BECKET: I am Becket.
BECKETT: I’ll be candid with you: that’s an answer I was not anticipating. I myself am Beckett.
THOMAS BECKET: You are Thomas Becket?
BECKETT: No, I’m Samuel Beckett. This is John Clare. [<em>A pause</em>.] Wait a minute, now, did you say you were Thomas Becket?
THOMAS BECKET: Thomas Becket, Canterbury’s archbishop. Yes, you have me now. What is the stuff you say about me being dead? For all I know I am come here to see the King who is at Hamtun’s castle, that we might be reconciled.
JOHN CLARE: Take it from me, you’re dead all right. Affairs go badly for you at the castle and you skip away to France for a few years. When you come back what happens is you’re down at your cathedral, and …
BECKETT: We don’t need to go into all the ins and outs of it.
JOHN CLARE: Although reportedly there were a lot of them, the ins and outs …
BECKETT: [<em>To</em> CLARE.] Enough of that. Enough of it. [<em>To</em> BECKET] The thing that you should bear in mind is not the brute mechanics of the matter, but its outcome.
THOMAS BECKET: [<em>Worried</em>.] There were brute mechanics?
JOHN CLARE: Ins and outs.
BECKETT: I’ve said already that it’s not a thing to dwell upon. Forget about all that. The salient point in all of this is that you were discovered to be incorruptible. That would explain the business with the sainthood which was latterly bestowed upon you. You’re the first one that I’ve met and I’m not sure what I should make of it.
THOMAS BECKET: Oh, God. Then I am to be martyred?
JOHN CLARE: I’m afraid it is old news. It’s getting on eight hundred years ago, all that.
BECKETT: [<em>Angrily</em>.] Look! [<em>More softly, startled by his own outburst</em>.] Look, all that I mean to say is you were made a saint, and that’s the long and short of it. Surely the very fact outweighs those means by which you came to be in that condition. I’d have thought you would be pleased about it.
THOMAS BECKET: Pleased? To have been burned, or broken on a wheel?
JOHN CLARE: Oh, that’s not so. No, you were only chopped about a bit, as I was told.
THOMAS BECKET: Ah, no, don’t tell me anymore.
BECKETT: [<em>To</em> CLARE.] Quite frankly, you’re not helping. [<em>To</em> BECKET] Is it not a comfort, then, the saintliness of your appointment?
THOMAS BECKET: [<em>Very upset</em>.] Does it seem to you that I am comforted? You tell me I am made a saint, and yet where am I?
JOHN CLARE: Why, that’s nothing but geography. There’s no theology about it. You are underneath the portico of All Saint’s Church here in Northampton and it’s halfway through the century after the one I died in, making it the twentieth. I’m informed that a great war with the Germans has been recently concluded in our favour.
BECKETT: No, it’s not the Great War that’s been recently concluded. That was some time earlier, although the Germans were involved in it so you can be forgiven your confusion. We only referred to it as the Great War because we didn’t know that there was going to be another one.
JOHN CLARE: A greater one?
BECKETT: I think a lot of that depends on your perspective.
THOMAS BECKET: [<em>Exasperated</em>.] All I meant by asking where I am, if I’m a saint, is that I do not seem to be in Heaven.
BECKETT: No. I’ll own, it doesn’t look much like it.
THOMAS BECKET: Yet nor is it the unending fire of Heaven’s opposite.
JOHN CLARE: Oh, no. It’s nothing near as bad as that.
THOMAS BECKET: Am I then to suppose that this is purgatory, this grey place where phantoms wander lost and make their aimless discourse, caught here for all time?
HUSBAND: [<em>Bleakly, still staring into space</em>.] I threw them out, and I got new ones.
WIFE: [<em>The</em> WIFE <em>looks up at her</em> HUSBAND <em>uncomprehendingly</em>.] What?
HUSBAND: The sheets. I threw them out, and I got new ones. And I turned the mattress over.
BECKETT: [<em>To</em> THOMAS BECKET.] What you’ve just said, I think that you might be very near the mark.
WIFE: [<em>She looks at her</em> HUSBAND<em>, shaking her head in incredulous disgust</em>.] That’s you. That’s you forever, in your vest and sweating, trying to turn the mattress over, trying to cover all your stains. And was she watching while you did that? Was she sitting there and watching?
HUSBAND: She were crying.
WIFE: There. What did I say?
HUSBAND: [<em>Hopelessly</em>.] I thought, you know. I thought that it were all of the emotions she was having that had made her weepy.
WIFE: Oh, I dare say. I dare say it was. All the emotions. While she watched her father try to hide her blood because he was so proud of what he’d done.
HUSBAND: [<em>As if understanding what he’s done for the first time</em>.] Oh, God. [<em>After a pause, there is the</em> SOUND <em>from</em> OFF <em>of the</em> CHURCH CLOCK, STRIKING ONCE.] Is that … is that one o’clock, and it was half past twelve before, or is that half past one, and …
WIFE: [<em>Explosively, at her wits end</em>.] Oh, shut up! Shut up! Shut up with everything! It’s always the same time! We can’t move on from this! We’re stuck here on these steps, this night, over and over! [<em>The</em> WIFE <em>starts to weep again. Her</em> HUSBAND <em>also sinks his head in his hands</em>.]
THOMAS BECKET: [<em>Downcast and resigned</em>.] Purgatory, then. But you say they are yet alive?
BECKETT: Again, I think a lot of that depends on your perspective. They’re alive here, in their time, as we are in our own. One way of looking at things, everybody’s dead and always has been. Like your woman here was saying, we’re all stuck. Perhaps we have it all, the good and bad, over and over. Wouldn’t that be all the Heaven and the Hell of it, how everyone was threatened by their pastors?
THOMAS BECKET: I find that a fearful ideology. I had dared hope for better.
JOHN CLARE: I’d feared worse! If it meant I should have my first wife Mary by my side again, then the travails of life should be as nothing and that by itself should be my Heaven.
BECKETT: I’m not saying I believe it. It’s just something I’ve had put to me. The father of the girl I talked about, James Joyce, I can recall him telling me about his fondness for Ouspensky’s notion of what I suppose you’d call a grand recurrence. It had had some bearing upon the eternal day in Dublin that was circumnavigated variously in his greatest novels.
THOMAS BECKET: More and more I hope this to be an outlandish dream and, wishing you no disrespect, the pair of you but figments. It may be this is a night-start after all, born of my apprehensions that I have given the King offence, one that our erstwhile friendship shall not mitigate.
BECKETT: Well, I’ll confess to the same thought myself initially. A dream of some kind would be the most reasonable explanation, although since I don’t subscribe to the interpretations of Professor Freud, I can’t see why I should be dreaming about all this wretched and incestuous back-and-forth. And that’s before I try to fathom how a load of saints and writers that I haven’t thought about in years fit into the arrangement. It’s a mighty puzzle, and I can’t say I’m enjoying it.
THOMAS BECKET: [<em>Looking at couple on steps</em>.] That is the sin that binds them in their disagreement, then? The man has lain down with his daughter?
JOHN CLARE: In the countryside there’s more of it than you’d imagine.
BECKETT: Even in the towns, I wouldn’t say they did so bad. The woman I was talking of, Lucia, there were those who reckoned it was much the same thing that commenced her acting up, all of the incest and the rest of it.
JOHN CLARE: [<em>Shocked</em>.] Her father, that you said was called James Joyce as was my Mary’s, he’d been guilty of the same offence?
BECKETT: Oh, no, not him. He worshipped her. She was the one he wrote for, and about. He might have thought about her in that fashion, I suppose, but if he did he only tried to touch her with his writing, fingering her with a sentence here or there, a feel of tit concealed within a subtext. No, the culprit in a physical regard, if that was anyone, my guess is that it might have been her brother.
THOMAS BECKET: In my day that would be thought as much a sin … at least in open conversation. Privately, I am convinced that there is nowhere it does not go on.
JOHN CLARE: Though I will own it is a grievous matter, I’ve known many that have sported with a brother or a sister and there’s been no great harm come of it.
BECKETT: Well, Lucia was very young when this occurred, now, if occur it did.
JOHN CLARE: But we have said before that your own views upon what is a proper age may not be those appropriate to earlier times.
BECKETT: If I’m right, Lucia would have been ten.
THOMAS BECKET: Unless we speak of Royalty that is an age that even in my times would be thought young.
JOHN CLARE: [<em>Somewhat sheepishly</em>.] Is that a fact? Well, yes, I can see that it would compound the incest.
THOMAS BECKET: Of the sins I would remark it is not, evidently, thought a deadly one, and in my readings of the Holy Bible I have found it something of an ambiguity.
BECKETT: I’d eat my hat if it were not adversely mentioned somewhere in Leviticus.
THOMAS BECKET: That is undoubtedly the truth, but what of the unusual dispensation granted unto Lot after he and his daughters have escaped the Cities of the Plain?
BECKETT: I had assumed that, as a man, God had felt bad about turning the poor chap’s wife to salt. He’d very possibly felt he owed your man Lot a favour and had thought it was the least that he could do, to look the other way for once.
THOMAS BECKET: It’s an unusual interpretation, but …
JOHN CLARE: You know, I’ve always found Eden a puzzle that would suit your argument.
BECKETT: What are you going on about?
JOHN CLARE: Well, Cain and Abel. I’d have thought it would be obvious that even if the Lord had granted Eve and Adam one of each sort rather than two boys, improper love within the family must surely have been unavoidable. More so in Eden than in, say, Green’s Norton, unless there is something I have not considered. It might be that what undid your woman friend and the poor child that is the issue of this sorry pair alike is something that is part of our condition since our origins there in God’s garden.
BECKETT: Eden. Well, you see, there has been some dispute about that place.
THOMAS BECKET: Dispute? What manner of dispute? I have not heard of one.
BECKETT: Ah, well, I don’t want to get into it. There’s those who say that Genesis was written a lot later than some of the other books and only got put at the start through a misunderstanding in the order of the compilation. Otherwise, it’s hard to see how there could be a populated Land of Nod for Cain to serve his exile in, incest or not.
THOMAS BECKET: And I had thought your news of my impending martyrdom this dream’s most hitherto disquieting aspect. I am hopeful that I will forget all this upon my wakening, and am distressed to think I have such blasphemies in even my unbidden thoughts.
BECKETT: It’s not my wish to be upsetting you. You’re someone that I have admired, and I would not have all my conversation with a saint be taken up by what befell Miss Joyce when she was ten.
JOHN CLARE: [<em>Suddenly, in a strangled, anguished voice</em>.] It was an act of matrimony!
BECKETT: [<em>Puzzled</em>.] What? The business with her brother? How do you make that out?
JOHN CLARE: [<em>Momentarily disoriented, then regaining his composure</em>.] How do I … oh! It’s your Miss Joyce you’re speaking of. Pay no attention to my lunatic outpourings. They are less than chaff. I do not know what I am saying half the time. [<em>A pause, while he attempts to find a safe direction for the conversation</em>.] You must have a great fondness for her, for your friend, to visit her in her adversity.
BECKETT: She was a lovely, well-intentioned girl and filled with energy and light much as her name suggests. The things she said were funny and were clever if she took the trouble not to get too convoluted. She was what you’d call a dancer in a million, and the way that she impersonated Charlie Chaplin was a treat, although I don’t expect you’ll be familiar with his work.
THOMAS BECKET: I do not think it is a name I know.
JOHN CLARE: I have known various Charlies, but no Chaplins I can think of. What was he like in his manner, that your woman friend made an impersonation of?
BECKETT: He had a walk to him and a moustache, a way he moved his eyebrows and the like. Lucia could do all of that. His art was in the pathos he inspired for the unfortunate or common man, the footsore wayfarer much like yourself but in a time of longer railway lines and higher buildings. He’d make you feel for the great injustices there are in life then make you laugh for all the triumphs of the individual. I do not suppose that he was necessarily a happy man. I can remember reading something by the filmmaker Jean Cocteau … no, don’t ask, it’s far too complicated … where he mentioned Chaplin saying words to the effect that his life’s greatest sadness was the fact he’d gotten rich off playing someone who was poor.
JOHN CLARE: It is the guilt that we were speaking of again, though if my greatest sadness were that I was rich I do not think I should be sad at all.
THOMAS BECKET: It may be that the sorrows of the wealthy life are naught save more expensive ones. It sometimes is as if my king and the companion of my boyhood is made heavy by the weight of gold that’s in his heart.
BECKETT: Well, if it’s guilt you’re after then your royal pal would take some beating. In fact, now I come to think of it that is exactly what he took. The mess he made of things with you, Rome set him to be flogged for penitence and this despite him being king. From what I hear he kneeled there and he took it, too. He must have known he was deserving of his punishment.
THOMAS BECKET: The king was flogged, and he submitted to it?
BECKETT: That he did. It’s a well known occurrence. It was after exhumation when you were discovered to be incorruptible, that was what settled it. In my opinion he was lucky to get off with just the flogging.
JOHN CLARE: I’d have made him get down on his knees and stay there till he’d scrubbed up the cathedral floor. He’d still be there now.
THOMAS BECKET: [<em>Horrified</em>.] He was flogged. The king was flogged. Because of what he’d done to me.
BECKETT: That is the substance of it. No one thought he was judged harshly, put it that way.
THOMAS BECKET: But if he were treated so, then what must he have – ?
BECKETT: You don’t want the details.
JOHN CLARE: All the ins and outs. No, I agree.
BECKETT: You’re better off without them. There’s no benefit in fretting needlessly.
THOMAS BECKET: [<em>Grumpy and resentful</em>.] No. No, there isn’t. For that matter, I don’t see that you were under a compulsion to be mentioning this business in the first place.
BECKETT: I would hate to think I’d tried your patience to the point where it became proverbial.
THOMAS BECKET: To try my patience is the least of it, when you have sought to undercut my faith itself with your sophistications.
BECKETT: I’ve sought no such thing.
THOMAS BECKET: Yet you speak dismissively of Eden and of our first parents, you insinuate a love between Eve and her sons that is unspeakable, and you insist that here about us is the twentieth century of Our Lord and still God has not come?
JOHN CLARE: Yes, Mr. Bunyan who we spoke to a short while since raised a similar complaint regarding the ongoing absence of Jerusalem.
BECKETT: [<em>To</em> THOMAS BECKET.] He never comes. That’s my own understanding of the matter. Or at least, He’s not about when you’ve a need of Him, much in the style of a policeman.
JOHN CLARE: There’s a phrase that I have heard in these parts. Now, what is it? It has something of the meaning of “policeman”, but there is a connotation of the tithing man or rent-man there into the bargain. I cannot recall it at this moment but it’s possible that it will come to me.
THOMAS BECKET: [<em>To</em> SAMUEL BECKETT.] If as you say He never comes, can you be certain He is truly there?
BECKETT: I would imagine that is where the faith comes into it. For my own purposes I like to think His non-arrival is not necessarily an indication of His non-existence.
THOMAS BECKET: But He does not speak to you?
BECKETT: It isn’t a great matter of importance if He does or not. There’s lots of people who don’t speak to me, or who I never see, but I don’t have a problem about if they’re there or not. It’s not like I feel snubbed or anything.
THOMAS BECKET: But if you never hear His voice …
BECKETT: Sometimes it seems that there’s a certain quality to the long periods of silence.
THOMAS BECKET: Is there?
BECKETT: I believe so. [CLARE, BECKETT <em>and</em> THOMAS BECKET <em>lapse into a thoughtful silence. There is a long pause</em>.]
HUSBAND: I did all of it. I did the lot of what you said. I’m all of what you called me. [<em>Pause</em>.] But you knew.
WIFE: [<em>Turning to regard him contemptuously</em>.] What are you going on about?
HUSBAND: I’m saying that you knew.
WIFE: Knew what?
HUSBAND: About the goings on.
JOHN CLARE: The ins and outs. That’s what he means.
WIFE: The goings on? You’re saying that I knew about them?
HUSBAND: All along. That’s what I’m saying.
WIFE: Oh, how dare you? How dare you sit there and say I knew about the goings on? If I’d have known about the goings on then I’d have stopped them there and then. They wouldn’t have been going on at all.
HUSBAND: You knew. You looked the other way.
WIFE: The other way?
HUSBAND: Deliberately. You know you did. It was convenient.
WIFE: [<em>Guardedly</em>.] Convenient? I don’t know what you mean by that.
HUSBAND: Celia, yes you do. You know the whole of what I mean by it. We’ve hardly touched each other in this last twelve years of marriage. Or had you not noticed?
WIFE: That’s just normal. That’s how everybody is. The thing with you is you’re sex mad, trying it on every five minutes and not bothered if the other party feels like it or not.
HUSBAND: You never felt like it, not every five months, let alone five minutes. And when I stopped bothering you, when I stopped trying it on, did you really believe that I’d lost interest too? That I’d stopped having feelings of that nature just because that’s how it were with you?
WIFE: I … I suppose that I assumed you’d made other arrangements. That you had resorted to a dirty book or something.
HUSBAND: Oh, and what would something be? Would it be an affair outside of marriage, knocking off the barmaid round at the Black Lion, something of that nature?
WIFE: [<em>Appalled</em>.] Oh God, Johnny, tell me that you didn’t. Not with that Joan Tanner. Everyone would know! What would they think? What would they think of me?
HUSBAND: Don’t be so daft. Of course I didn’t. I knew that you wouldn’t want that, everybody knowing.
WIFE: [<em>Relieved</em>.] Oh, thank God. Of course I’d not want anybody knowing. If you’re going to do a bloody stupid thing like that, then you should …
HUSBAND: Keep it to meself?
WIFE: [<em>Uncertainly</em>.] Well … yes.
HUSBAND: Keep it indoors?
WIFE: Yes, I suppose so.
HUSBAND: Keep it in the family? [<em>The</em> WIFE <em>stares at her</em> HUSBAND <em>in silence for a few moments, realising her own unacknowledged complicity, then turns from him to stare into space with a haunted expression. The</em> HUSBAND <em>looks away, down and to one side.</em>]
BECKETT: Well, it’s a fair point. In my own experience, I think it very rare a woman doesn’t know what’s going on in her own home, even if she’d prefer she didn’t. In the case of Miss Joyce that I mentioned earlier, the trouble that she may have had when she was ten, if that was what occurred I can’t imagine Nora – that was Lucia’s mother – I cannot imagine that she would not know of it. I think that very often women are more adept at the managing of a whole spider’s nest of secrets than most men would have within their capability.
JOHN CLARE: I’m still not utterly convinced in my own heart that ten’s too young.
THOMAS BECKET: The victim’s age, I think, has no material bearing on the sin, nor on its gravity. They are condemned, these wretched creatures, to unending misery, sat here on these hard and unyielding steps awaiting absolution that shall not arrive.
BECKETT: They’re damned then, and beyond the reach of mercy or forgiveness. You appear to be quite certain of the fact.
THOMAS BECKET: The husband has made rut with his own child, one of these little ones that God has said we should not harm. It seems the wife has tacitly consented to the ruinous liaison, with a blameless innocent thus doubly betrayed. I cannot think a just Creator might extend his mercy to those who have never thought to exercise that quality themselves.
BECKETT: Well, you being a saint it follows that you would be an authority on such concerns.
JOHN CLARE: Look, now, when God was speaking of these little ones, did he specifically say they were ten? That’s all I’m getting at.
BECKETT: [<em>Ignoring</em> CLARE.] It seems to me that though the sex of it is very likely woeful and unpleasant, it would still be the betrayal that’s the main thing. With Lucia, when the brother that she thought had loved her more than physically announced that he’d be getting married to an older woman very like his mam, that’s when she started acting up and throwing chairs about. I think it was her brother first suggested she be given psychiatric treatment somewhere, and you might suppose it was because he didn’t want her saying anything that could not be conveniently dismissed as ravings. That, at least, was how it looked to me, and Nora, pretty quickly she fell in with it. Lucia hadn’t been what you might call her favourite child, even before the hurling furniture commenced. They said Lucia was what they called a schizophrenic, although if you ask me it was more that she was young and spoiled and couldn’t cope with disappointment easily. She thought that she was justified in her behaviour. She felt immune because of who she was and never dreamed she could end up stuck in an institution, as in fact turned out to be the case.
JOHN CLARE: Well, to be fair, that manner of confinement is a thing that very few of us have properly anticipated or have made allowance for. The general measure of it is, it’s always a surprise. One moment you’re Lord Byron and the next you’re in a morning room that’s full of idiots eating porridge.
THOMAS BECKET: And you said yourself that I’m to quit Northampton and make off for France where it would seem to me that I’m to be in exile, a confinement I was not anticipating.
JOHN CLARE: From what I heard, in the dead of night you made off through a breach was in the castle wall, and then went out the north gate of the town, what’s up there at the end of Sheep Street just past where the old round church is.
THOMAS BECKET: Aye, I know it.
JOHN CLARE: It appears that you went out the gate and rode off to the north, so they should think that was where you were headed, then you doubled back and made away down south to Dover and from there across to France.
THOMAS BECKET: That seems a cautious and a clever thing to do. I shall remember it when I awake.
BECKETT: Yes, I thought that about a line of dialogue that the wife here spoke not half an hour ago, but I have already forgotten it. It strikes me it was something about earwigs.
JOHN CLARE: [<em>To</em> THOMAS BECKET.] There is some controversy about the route you took on your escape. It is a common tale that in your leaving of Northampton you made halt to take a drink from the stone well that’s down by Beckett’s Park. But if indeed you left by the north gate then that would not seem likely.
THOMAS BECKET: That is answered easily enough. I know the well you mean and took a drink there where I next went into Hamtun by its Dern gate. It was in the coming to the town and not the leaving of it but apart from that the tale is true enough, although it seems a thing of little consequence. I am more taken with the thought that there should be a park named for me.
JOHN CLARE: Well, again, there’s some controversy. Although there is the story of the well, the park’s name has two Ts upon the end of it, unlike your own, and so may not be named for you at all.
BECKETT: Two Ts? Well, there’s a thing. I don’t suppose that it could be named after me at all?
JOHN CLARE: The way that I was told, it is a lady benefactor to the town gave the park her name, rather than either of you gentlemen. The stuff about the well is possibly no more than a coincidence. Although now that I come to think about it, I believe the well is likewise spelled with two Ts at the end of it, though that is likely no more than abiding local ignorance and clumsiness with words in their correct expression. I hope that I haven’t let you down with what I’ve said.
THOMAS BECKET: [<em>Sounding disappointed</em>.] Let down? No, I wouldn’t say … no, not let down. It would be a vain man indeed who was let down by such a thing, and have you not already said that I shall be a saint? No. Not let down. Why should I be?
BECKETT: [<em>Sounding similarly disappointed</em>.] Me neither. I had made my comment in the manner of a joke, when the plain truth is that it makes no difference if a park were named for me or not. It’s all the same as far as I’m concerned. To have a park named after you would seem to be a vulgar and a common thing, such as the many parks that bear the name Victoria.
JOHN CLARE: Ah, yes. My pretty little daughter. Have you heard much news about her? How’s she getting on with life?
BECKETT: Dear God, not all this nonsense just when I thought we were done with it. I can’t be bothered with it anymore. And to be frank I’m not expecting much more out of this pair either. I’ve a feeling that they’ve pretty much exhausted what they had by way of conversation.
THOMAS BECKET: There I must agree. They sit half-dazed amid a sorry wreckage of their own accomplishment and neither seek atonement nor can have an expectation of redemption. It is a drear tale too often told and like you I am wearied with it. And besides, if what you’ve told to me is true I have my own drear tale to make a way through. I think I may carry on in that direction [THOMAS BECKET <em>points towards the audience, as if at an off-stage street</em>] to the castle where my former playmate waits for me.
BECKETT: Aye, I might join you. I was planning to walk down that way myself and take a look at old Saint Peter’s Church, the way I first did when I came here for the cricket.
THOMAS BECKET: It is a fine building of the old kind and I know it well. I must say that I am surprised to hear it is still standing, getting on a thousand years since. Has it fallen to neglect? Are all the horrible grotesques that I recall still grimacing from out the stonework?
JOHN CLARE: There’s a few have fallen off or been knocked down across the years, but the majority are still in place. So, both of you are off, then? I cannot persuade you to remain and keep me company so that I shall have someone who can hear me that I can converse with?
BECKETT: I apologise, but no, I cannot be persuaded. It has been a pleasure of a kind to meet with you, for all of your wild fancies and your tale of having impudently bedded Lucia. I should not mind if I met you again, although I must admit I say that in the expectation that it will be not be the case.
JOHN CLARE: For my part I’ll be sorry to be left here on my own, but as a consequence of my insanity I will no doubt have soon forgotten you were ever here, or will have otherwise become convinced of your delusory nature as with my first w– as with some other comical misapprehensions that I may have had. I’ve found you likeable enough, the pair of you, but must remark that you are very similar, both in the spelling of your names, and in the fact that I have thought the two of you to be quite grim.
BECKETT: You are not grim yourself, at all?
JOHN CLARE: No. I partake in a great deal of unproductive melancholy, but I don’t think I’ve the courage to be grim. Bleak sometimes, possibly, but not what you’d call grim. I’ve not the stomach for it.
THOMAS BECKET: [<em>Kindly and sympathetically</em>.] Will you not accompany us to the church? I should not like to think that we had left you by yourself.
BECKETT: [<em>Aside, quietly exasperated</em>.] Oh, that’s just great!
JOHN CLARE: [<em>To</em> THOMAS BECKET.] No, thank you for your offer, but I think I shall stay here awhile. I am not sure these two are finished their debate, and am yet hopeful there shall be some poetry to its conclusion. Though not very hopeful. I am after all by nature a realistic man, at least in my descriptions, for all that they say I am romantic or am otherwise a fool. The pair of you enjoy your evening, now, and leave me to enjoy my own. Good luck to you, especially to you, Saint Thomas, and congratulations on avoiding the decomposition.
THOMAS BECKET: Hm. Yes, well, thank you … though I cannot think in all humility that it was through some effort on my own part.
BECKETT: Aye, good luck to you as well. Remember that John Clare was a much better poet than Lord Byron. That should keep you straight. Farewell, now. [SAMUEL BECKETT <em>and</em> THOMAS BECKET <em>stroll away towards</em> STAGE RIGHT<em>, talking as they go</em>.] So, the being canonised and all of that. Had you no inkling of miraculous abilities prior to the business of not rotting?
THOMAS BECKET: Not that I recall. I had a certain fluency of penmanship, but I myself did not think it miraculous. And for your own part, you are still acquainted with the Holy Church?
BECKETT: Well, I’ll not lie. We’ve had our ups and downs … [<em>They</em> EXIT RIGHT. JOHN CLARE <em>stands in place and follows them with his eyes, first tracking away to</em> STAGE RIGHT, <em>then turning his head slowly until he is peering out over the audience. There is a long pause as he waits to be sure they are too far off to hear</em>.]
JOHN CLARE: I still say that I had your lady friend. The lexicon came out my ears as though it were a sperm of language. It was an encounter I found bracing, and I don’t regret it. [CLARE <em>stands where he is a moment or two longer, idly gazing at the unresponsive</em> HUSBAND <em>and</em> WIFE<em>. When they do not move or speak, he sadly and resignedly turns to shuffle back towards his alcove at the</em> CENTRE/RIGHT REAR <em>of the</em> STAGE<em>, where he sits down, staring mournfully at the motionless couple in the foreground</em>. <em>After a few moments more there is the</em> SOUND <em>from</em> OFF <em>of the</em> CHURCH CLOCK STRIKING ONCE<em>. Sitting on their step, the</em> WIFE <em>looks up at this as if appalled, while the</em> HUSBAND <em>does not react.</em>]
WIFE: It’s still one o’clock. How can it still be one o’clock? Why is it always one o’clock?
HUSBAND: [<em>Unsympathetically</em>.] You said yourself, it’s too late from now on. It’s always half past nothing to be done.
WIFE: But that was you. You were the one who brought this down upon us. Why is it still one o’clock for me?
HUSBAND: Because you were as much a part of them as I was, all the goings on. And that’s the thing I’ve learned with goings on. They go on. They continue. Nothing’s ever done with.
WIFE: [<em>After a horrified pause, as she reflects on this</em>.] Is this hell? Johnny, have we gone to hell?
HUSBAND: [<em>Wearily, not looking at her</em>.] Celia, I don’t know.
JOHN CLARE: We talked about that earlier, and we thought purgatory to be the greater likelihood. Not that I’m claiming any great authority upon the subject. [<em>A pause</em>.] You can’t hear me. What’s the point of any of it? [<em>Along with the</em> HUSBAND <em>and</em> WIFE, CLARE <em>lapses into a gloomy silence. After a few moments a</em> HALF-CASTE WOMAN ENTERS STAGE LEFT <em>beneath the portico. After a few steps she stops and appraises the scene, looking first at the couple on the steps and then at</em> JOHN CLARE <em>sitting in his alcove</em>.]
WOMAN: You’re the poet, ain’t yer? You’re John Clare.
JOHN CLARE: [<em>Surprised</em>.] I am? You’re sure of it? Not Byron or King William?
WOMAN: [<em>Kindly and sympathetically</em>.] No, love. You’re John Clare. From what I heard, it’s just you get a bit mixed up from time to time.
JOHN CLARE: That’s true. I do. And you don’t find it off-putting?
WOMAN: No. To be honest, darling, when I heard about you, I thought that you sounded like a laugh. And some of what you wrote, it’s lovely. Is that true, about you walking eighty miles back here after you’d legged it from a nut house down in Essex?
JOHN CLARE: Nut house?
WOMAN: Yeah, you know. The funny farm. Napoleon factory. Laughing academy. The loony bin.
JOHN CLARE: [<em>Laughing, amused and delighted</em>.] Oh, you mean the coney hatch. You should have said. Yes, that was where I was. You seem to know a lot about me.
WOMAN: Oh, I know about all sorts of things. You know, it’s really nice to meet you, Mr. Clare. I’m well pleased.
JOHN CLARE: Well, it’s mutual. What’s your name, lass?
WOMAN: Everybody calls me Kaph.
JOHN CLARE: Kath?
WOMAN: Kaph. K-A-P-H. It’s got a P in it.
JOHN CLARE: That’s an unusual name, all right. And which parts of Northampton and eternity would you be from?
WOMAN: Spring Boroughs, 1988 to 2060. Mostly I worked down at the Saint Peter’s annexe, next door to the church, trying to sort out all the refugees come from the east.
JOHN CLARE: The east of India?
WOMAN: Of Anglia. Yarmouth and round there. We get a fair bit of trouble with the weather in the time I’m from.
JOHN CLARE: Aye, well, ’twas ever thus in England.
WOMAN: No it wasn’t, sweetheart. Trust me. Not like this it wasn’t. It’s all falling in the sea, love, and when you’ve got all the people moving then they bring their problems with them, and their problems are all that much worse. Drugs and diseases, violence and abuse and all the mental problems that come with ’em. When I was down at the annexe I come up with an idea for processing – that means, like, sorting out – big crowds of people who were caught up in emergencies. It wasn’t anything that clever. It was just this questionnaire, done as an app, and it was only common sense from what I’d seen while I was working with the refugees. Anyway, it got took up across the world and saved a lot of lives, apparently.
JOHN CLARE: I am ashamed to say I do not have the first idea of what I have been told just now. The gist I caught was that you are a woman of unusual intelligence and merit, but being the fool I am I got caught up in looking at your bosom and so may have missed the greater part of it. Please don’t think badly of me.
WOMAN: [<em>Laughing</em>.] Oh, you’re all right. You’re John Clare. It’s quite an honour you should make the effort to look at me boobs.
JOHN CLARE: You are a kind woman, I think, and a robust one of a cheery humour. I should pay you the respect of listening to what you say. Please tell it to me all again, and be sure that I look you in the eye.
WOMAN: Ah, you’re a legend. You’re just how I thought you would be from the poetry. I’m not saying I’ve not read a lot of them but there were some of ’em that made me cry. As for me, there wasn’t that much more to tell. The business with the questionnaire meant that I ended up getting a lot more notice than I’d ever wanted or deserved. They started calling me a saint, but to be honest I found that a bit depressing. Like I say, it wasn’t anything I’d ever wanted.
JOHN CLARE: You’re a saint, then?
WOMAN: Not a proper one. Just in the papers. They’ll make anyone a saint. I tried not to have anything to do with it.
JOHN CLARE: We had a real one pass by just now on this very spot. Thomas á Becket.
WOMAN: Really?
JOHN CLARE: Else I dreamed it.
WOMAN: He’s well famous, Thomas Becket.
JOHN CLARE: Aye, he’s famous for a well, all right. We talked about it. He was passing by this spot because he did so on his way to condemnation at the castle. Then the other Mr. Beckett, he was here revisiting the churches of Northampton as he’d done upon a previous occasion, whereas Mr. Bunyan passed through on his way to hear a proclamation in the market. As for me, this is the place I always sat, so that’s the explanation for my presence, but what of yourself? Do you consider yourself to be dead or dreaming, and in either case what brings you here?
WOMAN: Oh, I’m dead. There’s no doubt about it. I got caught up in a water riot when it was getting bad in twenty-sixty and me ticker couldn’t handle it, not in me seventies.
JOHN CLARE: You don’t look seventy.
WOMAN: Well, ta. This is me in me thirties, when I looked me best. To be quite honest, any younger and I was a mess, and I got a bit scrawny after I was knocking on a bit. As for the reason why I’m here, it’s them. [<em>The</em> HALF-CASTE WOMAN <em>nods towards the couple on the steps.</em>]
JOHN CLARE: You know them, then?
WOMAN: Oh, yeah. Well, not in life I never met ’em, no, but I know all about ’em. Him, the bloke, that’s Johnny Vernall and the woman’s his wife Celia. This is the night their daughter locked them out the house in Freeschool Street and they came here and sat beneath the portico until the morning. What it was, I knew their daughter, Audrey.
JOHN CLARE: Ah, yes. That would be the one the things were done to. I was trying to fathom it with all the other ghosts that were here earlier. It sounded like a miserable business.
WOMAN: Oh, it was. It was. But then, I suppose it had to be.
JOHN CLARE: How did you know her, the poor child?
WOMAN: Well, she was an old woman when I met her. It was one night back when I was young, and when I was in trouble, and she saved me life. She was the most frightening, amazing person that I’ve ever seen, and that night turned everything round for me. If what I went on to do later helped a lot of people, it was all because of her. If she’d not helped me, I’d have been dead and then none of that, the questionnaire, none of that would have happened. She’s the real saint, Audrey. She’s the martyr, and this is the night before they took her to the stake. And that’s the reason why I’m here. After what Audrey done for me, I thought that it was only right. I thought that it was only right that I should come and see, and be a witness.
JOHN CLARE: If there is a poetry to all of this, it seems as though hurt women are a central matter. [<em>A pause</em>.] But where are my manners! I’ve got a young lady stood here all this time and never offered her a seat!
WOMAN: [<em>She laughs, starting to walk towards</em> JOHN CLARE<em>’s alcove</em>.] Oh, well, that’s very nice. I –
JOHN CLARE: [<em>Slightly alarmed, fearing she’s misunderstood him</em>.] No, not this one. This is mine. The one there on the other side is what I keep for visitors. I’m told it’s very comfortable.
WOMAN: [<em>Surprised, but more amused than offended</em>.] Oh, right. Okay, then. Over here, yeah? [<em>She goes and sits in the alcove to</em> STAGE LEFT <em>of the door</em>.] Mm. You’re right. It’s very nice. Nice place to sit.
JOHN CLARE: Well, not as nice as this one, but I am sincere in hoping it is to your liking.
WOMAN: [<em>She laughs, charmed by his earnestness</em>.] It’s fine. It’s like a little throne. So, with Johnny and Celia there, what have I missed?
JOHN CLARE: You know the most of it, apparently. The wife berated him a while until he upped and made a full confession, whereat she berated him some more. A little while ago he raised the point of her being aware of what was going on and in this sense being complicit in their abject circumstances.
WOMAN: How did she take that?
JOHN CLARE: Not noticeably well, in the first instance. She made her outraged denials though I could not help but feel they were half-hearted at the bottom of it. Then, after some time it seemed that she accepted what was said, whereafter she became more haunted and contrite. Most recently she seemed concerned by the idea that they might be in hell, although it seems to me a more widespread and popular opinion that the whole of this is purgatory.
WOMAN: What, this? Nah, bollocks, this is heaven. All of this is heaven.
JOHN CLARE: Is it?
WOMAN: Well, of course it is. Look at it. It’s miraculous.
JOHN CLARE: What, even with the incest and the misery?
WOMAN: That there’s anything alive at all to interfere with its own children; that there’s children; that there’s sexual interference; that we can feel misery. The way I see it, on the whole there’s not much to complain about. Its heaven. Even in a concentration camp or when you’re getting beaten up and raped, even if it’s an off day, it’s still heaven. You’re not telling me that you wrote all that stuff about the seasons and the ladybird and everything and you don’t know that?
JOHN CLARE: Are you sure you’re not a proper saint?
WOMAN: If you knew half the things I did when I was younger then you wouldn’t even ask. We’re either none of us saints, or we all are.
JOHN CLARE: Not just an appointed few of us as Mr. Bunyan was suggesting?
WOMAN: I don’t know who that is, but no. Definitely not. It’s all or nothing, shit or bust across the board. We’re saints and sinners both, the lot of us, or else there’s no saints and no sinners.
JOHN CLARE: Oh, I think there’s sinners, right enough, though I don’t know about the saints. For my own part, I think that in my life I may have done a monstrous and ignoble thing.
WOMAN: Aw, love. You shouldn’t slap yourself about. We’ve all done bad things, or we think we have. It’s only when you can’t face up to ’em and put ’em in perspective that you end up stuck to them, so that that’s who you are and where you are forever.
JOHN CLARE: That’s an awful long time to be stuck to something dismal.
WOMAN: Well, you’re not wrong. [JOHN CLARE <em>and the</em> HALF-CASTE WOMAN <em>lapse into thoughtful silence, gazing at the</em> HUSBAND <em>and</em> WIFE <em>seated on the steps</em>.]
WIFE: [<em>After a long pause, in which her expression has changed from guilty and haunted to a more cold-eyed and pragmatic look</em>.] So, what are we going to do about it?
HUSBAND: [<em>Looks up at her, surprised</em>.] We?
WIFE: You spelled it out. We’re both involved.
HUSBAND: We are. I’m glad you see it.
WIFE: And if it comes out for either of us both of us are done for, or at least round here and where else should we go? I see that, too.
HUSBAND: What are you saying, then?
WIFE: I’m saying that there’s people round here know us. We’ve got friends here, Johnny, and acquaintances. We’ve got our lives here. We’ve got prospects.
HUSBAND: Have we?
WIFE: [<em>Hissing with urgency</em>.] Yes! We’ve got more prospects than if anyone finds out you’ve put that filthy thing of yours in Audrey! And what should they think of me? I won’t let you destroy us, Johnny. And I won’t let her destroy us.
HUSBAND: But … I mean, it isn’t going to come to that for certain. Is it? I mean, perhaps if when she’s calmed down I talked to her …
WIFE: Oh, yes. That’ll help the situation. Evidently you can talk her pants off, and that’s how we got here! She’s out for revenge, you silly sod. She flirts with you and leads you on with all her skirts and brassieres and when you’re Muggins enough to fall for it, she wants her bit of drama, her theatricals.
HUSBAND: She did. She led me on.
WIFE: And now she’s staging her performance so that everyone can hear.
HUSBAND: [<em>Suddenly confused and alarmed</em>.] You were the one said it had stopped!
WIFE: [<em>Frowning as if uncertain</em>.] Yes, well, I thought it had, but I’m not sure. I think I can still hear it when the wind’s in our direction. But that’s not the point. The point is that she’s made her mind up that she’s going to put an end to it by telling everybody and broadcasting from the rooftops. You saw Eileen Perrit coming out to see what all the fuss was, all that noise when Jem and her had just got little Alison to sleep. She could hear everything, the Whispering Grass and everything that dirty, dirty little tart was shouting. Everything. [<em>Thoughtful, after a pause</em>.] I don’t know what she heard. It might already be too late.
HUSBAND: But then what shall we do?
WIFE: [<em>Angry</em>.] I don’t know, Johnny. I don’t know what we shall do. That’s what I’m trying to work out, what we’re going to do. [<em>A pause</em>.] That dirty little tart. She thought I never noticed, in the kitchen, at the sink, washing her hair without her blouse on, and then when she’s drying it and got it held up in the towel, then you, you’re sitting there, you’re sitting there and looking and you’ve got your legs crossed, sitting there, and looking, and you say “Ooh, you look nice, our Audrey, with your hair up”, never mind about you look nice with your blouse off, sitting there and looking with your legs crossed, and then after that she’s always got her hair up so that everyone can see her neck, her neck, look at my lovely neck, look at my little bosoms that aren’t anything at all, look at me swing about when I play my accordion so that my skirt goes up and everyone can come and have a look and see my knees and think about my fanny and she thought I never noticed. [<em>A long, seething pause, during which her</em> HUSBAND <em>looks scared and shaken by her outburst</em>.] Let me think. I’ve got to think. We’ve got to think what shall be done.
JOHN CLARE: [<em>After a pause</em>.] I don’t much care for how this sounds. I have a painful feeling about where all this is headed.
WOMAN: Yeah. They’re gunna cover it all up. They’re gunna bury everything because they can’t face up to what they’ve done. They’re gunna bury Audrey, then inside ’em somewhere they’ll be sitting in the damp and fog and bickering on these steps forever. All because they couldn’t bear to tell the truth of what they were.
JOHN CLARE: [<em>After a long and anguished pause, his secrecy battling with his conscience</em>.] I did something. I did something that I never told the truth about. When I was fourteen. [<em>He closes his eyes. He can hardly bear to speak</em>.]
WOMAN: [<em>Gently and encouragingly</em>.] Yeah? Something went on?
JOHN CLARE: [<em>His eyes still closed, he slowly starts to rock back and forth in his alcove</em>.] When I was fourteen. When I was fourteen. When I was fourteen, there was someone. There was someone. There was someone up the road in the next village. There was. There was. There was someone. There was someone. There was a young … I was fourteen. There was a young woman. A young woman. She was round my own age. Mary. Mary. Mary. She was beautiful. She was more beautiful than anything. When I was fourteen. And I met her. And I met her in the lane and asked her if she would walk out with me and Mary said she would, she said she would walk out with me. She was around my own age. And I walked her down the path. We went. We went. We went beside a stream where was, where was, where was a Hawthorn bush. And I said. I said that I loved her and. And. And. And. And I asked if she would like to marry me. Beneath the Hawthorn bush. Beneath the Hawthorn bush and she laughed and she said she would and we went in. We went in on our hands and knees beneath the Hawthorn bush and I made her a ring. I made a ring. I made a ring of grass for her and put it on her finger and I said. I said. I said that we were married. She was round my own age. I was fourteen. She was, she was, she was a bit younger. A bit younger than what I was. And I. And I. And I joked. I joked. I joked and I said. I said. I said that it was our wedding night. I made a ring of grass for her. I said it was our wedding night and we must. We must take our clothes off and I said it as a joke. I said it so that I should make it seem it was a joke, beneath the Hawthorn bush, but she said, she said, Mary said she would. She was around my own age. A bit younger. Mary said she would and she was laughing. She was laughing, she was taking off her things and I … was … looking at her. I was looking at her, taking off her things and I was hurrying. Was hurrying. Was hurrying to take my own off too and she was looking at me. She was ten. She was ten. She was laughing and I said. I said that we. I said that we. I said that we should do it. She was laughing and she said do what? She said do what and I said, I said that I’d show her and it was all right. It was all right. I’d made a ring for her and we were married and it was all right and then I told. I told. I told her what to do. I told. I told her she she must lie upon her back and she was laughing. She was laughing. She was laughing and I got on top of her and Mary asked. She asked. She asked what I was doing and I tried to get it into her. I was fourteen. She said it hurt. She said it hurt. She said that I was hurting her and that she didn’t want to do it, that she didn’t want to do it, that it hurt, but I said. I said. I said it was all right. I said we were married. It was all right. That she’d start. She’d start to like it in a little while and that she mustn’t. That she mustn’t. That she mustn’t cry. She mustn’t cry. She mustn’t cry. And I. And I went on with it. And she stopped crying in a. In a while. And when I’d finished it we wiped up with my shirt and I said. I said that she was my first wife and would always be my first wife and she should tell nobody, nobody, nobody about it. What we’d, what we’d, what I’d done. Beneath the Hawthorn bush. Beneath the Hawthorn bush. When I was fourteen. I was fourteen. She was ten. I never saw her after that, save in the best of my illusions. [<em>He is weeping by this point. He subsides into silence</em>.]
WOMAN: [<em>After a long pause</em>.] Are you sure you wouldn’t like me to sit over there?
JOHN CLARE: [<em>He looks up at her, anguished</em>.] Would you? Would you? Else I am alone in it. [<em>The</em> HALF-CASTE WOMAN <em>rises from her alcove and then walks across to the alcove in which</em> JOHN CLARE <em>is sitting. She sits down beside him, sympathetically, and drapes one arm around his shoulders</em>.]
WOMAN: [<em>Stroking his hair</em>.] You were fourteen. You were living in the country. It was eighteen-hundred and whatever. These things happen, sweetheart. Both of you were kids, mucking about. If it was guilt about that made you talk of her as your first wife, if it was anything to do with that that made you spend all of that time up at Saint Andrew’s then you’ve punished yourself ten times over when all that you did was love somebody at the wrong time. There’s worse crimes than that, love. There’s worse crimes than that. You shush. You shush now.
WIFE: We could have her put away.
HUSBAND: What do you mean?
WIFE: Up Berry Wood. Up round the turn there at St. Crispin’s. We could have her put away up there.
HUSBAND: The mental home?
WIFE: Up Berry Wood. We could say she’d been acting funny for a while.
JOHN CLARE: Oh, no. Oh, I can see where this is going.
WOMAN: Hush, now. It’s only what happened in the world once. It’s all right.
HUSBAND: Well, I suppose, what with the music, she always been highly strung. You know, with the artistic temperament. And that business tonight, well, there’s the proof of it.
JOHN CLARE: It’s just the same! It’s just the same as what the other Mr. Beckett said befell his friend!
WIFE: Yes, well, it’s well known. If you’re having fits because you’re mad, you could say anything. You might make every kind of accusation and it wouldn’t bother anyone.
HUSBAND: [<em>Uncertain and uncomfortable</em>.] But Celia, I mean. Our Audrey, in a madhouse. I don’t like to picture it.
WIFE: It needn’t be for long. Just until she’d got over her delusions, what they call them, and she isn’t saying things that make no sense.
HUSBAND: But, I mean, they’re not really what you’d call delusions, are they?
WIFE: Johnny, listen to me: yes they are. They’re all delusions. After all, you know it’s in the family. It’s not your fault, we can’t help how we’re born, but there was your dad. And your granddad. And your great Aunt Thursa. It’s no wonder Audrey went the way she did. We can make the arrangements in the morning.
HUSBAND: The arrangements?
WIFE: With the hospital, to have her put away.
HUSBAND: Oh. Oh, yes. The arrangements. I suppose that we can’t …
WIFE: In the morning. It’s what’s best.
HUSBAND: Yes. Yes, I suppose so. It’s what’s best for Audrey.
WIFE: It’s what’s best for everybody. [<em>They lapse into thoughtful silence</em>.]
JOHN CLARE: [<em>He has now recovered his composure</em>.] These are terrible affairs that are decided here tonight. [<em>He turns to look at the</em> HALF-CASTE WOMAN <em>sitting next to him</em>.] With you having the admiration for their daughter that you did, I’d say it was a dreadful anger you were feeling.
WOMAN: No, not really. I feel sorry for the lot of them. I mean, look at this couple here. They’re stuck like this now. Yeah, you could say as they’ve brought it on themselves, but how much choice has anybody really got? It’s better not to judge. Even the rapists and the murderers and nutters – no offence – you think about it and they probably got where they were in some dead ordinary way. They had a bit of bad luck or they got into a kind of thinking that they couldn’t shake. When I was younger, I was horrible. It felt to me like it was all my fault, but looking back with kinder eyes I’m not sure that it was. I’m not sure it was anybody’s fault. There comes a point where you get sick of all the punishing.
JOHN CLARE: I like the way that you’re forgiving in your nature. You’ve a generosity in you that makes the rest of us seem small. Are you entirely sure you’re not a proper saint?
WOMAN: Oh, who cares? It’s a word. I mean, you were just saying that you’d met Thomas á Becket. He’s a proper saint. Was he like me?
JOHN CLARE: No. No, he wasn’t.
WOMAN: There you are, then.
JOHN CLARE: It was his opinion that the sins of this unhappy pair put them beyond the reach of any mercy or redemption.
WOMAN: Well, I don’t see that at all. I don’t think he’d considered all the billiards and ballistics of the matter.
JOHN CLARE: And what do you mean by that?
WOMAN: Well, look at it like this: if Johnny Vernall hadn’t read a dirty book or two and got fixated by the thought of having it off with his daughter then she’d not have locked them out the house while she played ‘Whispering Grass’, and her mum wouldn’t have had the idea to get her sectioned off to Crispin’s. So she wouldn’t have still been there when the Tories started closing down the mental homes and wouldn’t have been put out into what they called the care of the community. And when I needed her, when I’d have been dead otherwise, then she wouldn’t have been there, and then I wouldn’t have turned out how I did. There’d be no questionnaire and there’d be thousands of lives over with or different all across the world. And think of all the lives that those lives will affect, for better or for worse, and on and on until you step back and it’s all just billiards. Johnny pulling Audrey’s pants down, that’s all in the rebound off the cushion. That’s all in the break. And none of this is justifying what he did. Johnny and Celia, you and me and everybody, we still have to answer to our conscience. And a conscience is the most vindictive, vicious little fucker that I’ve ever met, and I don’t think that anybody gets off easy. We all judge ourselves. We all sit here on these cold steps, and that’s enough. The rest is billiards. We all feel the impacts and we blame the ball that’s hit us. We all love it when we’re cannoning and on a roll and think it must mean that we’re special, but it’s all balls. Balls and billiards. [<em>A pause</em>.] You’re looking down my top again.
JOHN CLARE: I know. I’m sorry. I suppose it might be argued I was predetermined in my opportunism. If as you say it is my conscience I must answer to, then I believe my answer will be neither difficult nor arduously long.
WOMAN: [<em>She laughs, playfully attracted to him</em>.] You poets. All your lovely language, you use it like Lynx or something, don’t yer, when you want the girls all over yer? And anyway, haven’t you got a wife at home?
JOHN CLARE: Oh, to hear me tell it I’ve got any number of ’em. You pay no attention. All that business with the wives is more than likely nothing but the ravings of a madman. I’m well known for it. [<em>They are both laughing now</em>.]
WOMAN: What are you like? You with your pretty eyes. I don’t think you’re old fashioned in the least. [<em>They are beginning to embrace</em>.] I can see why you like this shady alcove, you old dog. It’s very comfortable. Very convenient.
JOHN CLARE: In all the times I’ve sat here I have never thought to use it for this purpose.
WOMAN: [<em>Kissing him lightly on the cheek and neck</em>.] Haven’t you? Why not?
JOHN CLARE: I was alive. It was broad daylight on a Friday afternoon with people walking past and anyway, I was most usually alone. It wouldn’t have been right. You are a lovely girl. Give me a kiss, as if we were alive, and … Oh! Oh, my. What’s that you’re doing now?
WOMAN: I said already. I’m no saint. [<em>They begin to kiss and caress each other under the obscuring shadows of the recess</em>.]
WIFE: [<em>After a long pause, tonelessly and emotionally drained</em>.] God help me, Johnny, but I hate you. I hate you so much that I’m exhausted by it.
HUSBAND: [<em>Equally flatly and without real feeling</em>.] And I hate you, Celia. With all my heart, I hate you. I can’t stand you.
WIFE: Well, at least there’s that. At least we still mean something to each other.
HUSBAND: [<em>Without the couple looking at each other, the</em> HUSBAND <em>reaches out and takes his</em> WIFE<em>’s hand. She accepts this without comment or reaction. There is a long pause as they sit and stare expressionlessly into space</em>.] Are we still planning to … you know. With Audrey, and the hospital. Is that still something that we want to do?
WIFE: It’s something that we’ve got to do.
HUSBAND: Yes, I suppose so. [<em>After a pause</em>.] Not just yet though, eh?
WIFE: No. In the morning. I’m not looking forward to it any more than you are.
HUSBAND: No. No, I suppose not. But it’s something that we’ve got to do, you’re right. You’re dead right. In the morning, we’ll go down there and we’ll step up to the bat.
WIFE: Yes. When it’s light.
HUSBAND: Will it ever be light?
WIFE: I couldn’t say. I’m waiting for the clock to strike again. If it’s just once we’ll know that we’re in hell or else it’s broken. If it’s twice, it’ll be getting on for morning in an hour or two. We can go down to Freeschool Street and take care of it then.
HUSBAND: Yes. Yes, I will. I’ll be a man about it. I’ll go down there and take the bull by the horns.
WIFE: We’ll see the necessary doctors.
HUSBAND: In the morning, when it’s light, I’ll go down there and do what’s to be done.
WIFE: We’ll go down there. We’ll go down there and set the matter straight.
HUSBAND: We will.
WIFE: We will. We’ll put it all to rights.
HUSBAND: We’ll face the music.
WIFE: [<em>After a long pause</em>.] Do you know, I think the clock’s about to strike.
HUSBAND: I think you’re right.
WIFE: And then we’ll know.
HUSBAND: Yes. Then we’ll know.
CURTAIN
** <strong>EATING FLOWERS</strong>
<em><strong>“W</strong></em><em>hat are you thinking about now?” the naked eighteen month-old girl asks, mounted on the similarly naked old man’s shoulders. In each tiny fist she holds a lock of his white hair as reins. His leather hands, articulated bone and sinew birdcages, are closed around the infant’s ankles to prevent her falling off as they progress down the enormous icebound hallway under diagrams of failing stars. These are the Fimbul distances of the time-avenue. Puzzle-ball beads of hyperwater, frozen into glass sea-urchin intricacies, chime and tinkle in the drifts about the wading ancient’s knees. “I’m thinking now of how I died,” says he, “When I wiz</em>
Snowy Vernall always sitting, always snuffing it there in the daughter’s house on Green Street. Orange, sage and umber mottled in a hearthside rug of wool-ends where the black cat is asleep and snoring. In between the clock ticks you can hear dust settle on the sideboard, on the emerald glass bowls, one full of golden apples withering, the other full of hard-boiled sweets becoming damp and soft. There is a mildew perfume on the indecipherable crowns-and-lilies wallpaper, just sliding off like skin above the skirting board where it’s that wet and heavy. From behind, below, the muffled fuss of chickens tutting in the long back yard outside as it drops down the slope onto Saint Peter’s Way, from which there’ll sometimes come the echo-silvered clop of hooves or else a rag and bone man’s speech in tongues, frail little noises shouldered by the smelly summer wind that’s always blowing on that Wednesday afternoon. There in the daughter’s house, there in the living room a table on the left – with fifty years of slipping cutlery and scalding teacups logged meticulously in the varnish – and upon it stands a china vase of tulips; stands <em>the</em> china vase of tulips. Glorious, they are. Bright custard yellow, icing-sugar pink, blackcurrant purple deep as midnight, you should see them. An old man alone, let himself in, come visiting with everybody out and starting to get loose in his intelligence, starting to have a trouble with the old perspective as he nears the mortal turning. Up above the sideboard there’s a mirror with another hanging opposite above the hearth, or rather up above the sideboard there’s a window with another set into the south wall opposite. It isn’t easy telling which it is, the same as how the corner of a room can be concave and convex at the same time if stared at for long enough. Adrift in the warm air with opal motes all blazing there are other details
<em>that may come to me after a while, but that’s the long and short of it.” He picks his bony, barefoot way amongst cold dunes of spiny hypersnow accumulating on the frosted parquet of that stupefying corridor. May squirms uncomfortably, a small warm weight on her grandfather’s nape, and squints through an intense chandelier flurry of suspended, whirling crystals that have more than three dimensions, a hypnotic meta-blizzard. Gazing past this diamond spindrift, the profoundly beautiful nude baby focuses her sad Galapagos eyes on the soaring cliff-face walls that border perpetuity’s gargantuan emporium, away to either side across the intervening miles of tundra floor. She knows that in these latitudes of Always there are fewer living people in the neighbourhood downstairs, and that they have less complicated dream-lives. Consequently, the immense arcade surrounding her and Snowy has accumulated very little in the way of astral furnishings and decorations, trimmings borrowed from the sparse imaginings of a polar encampment that has less to dream about. Set into the north face is something May believes might be somebody’s vision of a massively expanded trading-post, with walls of varnished wooden shields and drapes of wolf-pelt that are bluish-white speckled with faun. Elsewhere, her almost-turquoise eyes alight upon what she supposes to be the inflated dream-form of a twenty-second century hostelry, the excavated ground floor of an ancient office block where she can make out local date-specific ghosts with their fur burkhas and their wind-up radios, their barbed and ornate wolf-killing ‘vulpoons’ inevitably clasped in one raw fist as they trudge stoically through a bereft Valhalla. Other than this, the endless hallway offers only the occasional stone edifice or concrete hulk enduring from a previous era, set amongst an unrelieved expanse of towering rock and chiselled ice. The optically confounding hyperflakes fall silently around them, an obscuring lingerie-lace hung on air. She tilts back her exquisitely made head, haloed in hair golden and nebular, perusing the ruined canopy above this chronologic thoroughfare’s unending winter vastness. The green-tinted glass that had once sheltered the great boulevard is long broken and gone, with its containing framework of Victorian iron reduced to rusting carcass spars through which unfolding blueprint constellations made from overstars are visible. Recalling the conspicuous array of shops and buildings to be found only a hundred years or so back down the hall, May understands that there may not be streets or street-names anymore down in the territory below. A perfectly developed mind within a glorious arrested form she feels a distant disappointed pang at the idea but nothing more, consoling herself with the observation that there are at least still trees. Weathered immensities as realised on this upper plane, the crystal-heavy giant pines extend up out of the remaining floor-holes here and there, where these have not been covered over by the glaze of permafrost or else collapsed entirely. It occurs to her that the material ground below their higher mathematic reaches is most probably no longer called the Boroughs, and she even wonders if these arctic furlongs of the overworld are still referred to as Mansoul. Returning her attention to the mad old man on whom she’s riding, May asks him a question, her voice an unsettling blend of infant gurgle and elderly lady syntax. “Do the builders and the devils ever make it up as far as here?” His sunburned neck gripped fast by the precocious toddler’s knees, her grandfather is chuckling, almost giggling as he replies, “Of course they do. You’ll still find them about when there’s not people any longer. It’s just that they tend to hang about more in the populated bits of time, like in the stretch that we’re from. And before that, if you ever choose to go back that far, you’ll find even more of ’em. Back in the pastures there, they even venture downstairs every now and then, when they’re directing that monk here from Geographical Jerusalem or when they’re ordering that Saxon halfwit back to Peter’s Church so he can help dig up Saint Ragener. One speaks to poor old Ern, my dad and your great-granddad, in the dome of Saint Paul’s during all the usual thunderstorm and lightning that they seem to favour, though it’s really just all the electromagnetism that’s discharged. It’s thundering when I have that one speak to me that time, when I wiz drunk and on top of the Guildhall in St. Giles Street if you can imagine that: your granddad on the roof’s crest swaying in</em>
a bitter breeze out of the east with storm-clouds riding it towards the town from Abington, from Weston Favell and the pale blue slates beneath his feet already dampening to navy in anticipation. Down in George Row and St. Giles Street below all the pale ovals tilting back and gaping in amazement, milling beetle-fashion in their bonnets and their caps around the bike-shop at the top of Guildhall Road with the aroma of French chalk and rubber lifting from its doorway. Seeing how the figure on the skyline sways and wobbles some of the assembled crowd call warnings, with the greater part of their admonishments bowled off toward All Saints or Bridge Street in the rising wind and leaving only scraps behind: “… making a show …”, “… sending for a bobby …”, “… ruddy fool. You’ll break your neck and …”, but that’s not what’s going to happen. In the lofty gusts chopped by the chimneys, in the pepper-shot of birdsong and in rubbish waltzing down the guttering at the approach of rain, that’s not what’s going to happen. Next there’s a precarious little dance, as if spontaneous, as if not foreordained from the commencement of eternity, which has a slip and slither in it and a teetering recovery that makes the audience gasp at the appropriate juncture of their unacknowledged schedule. What a spectacle the world makes of itself. What a performance. Although everything is motionless in the thick glass of time there’s the appearance of a drunken stumble and another indrawn breath from the flat multitude compressed by the perspective, people painted on the planner’s diagram of a street beneath. A threadbare arm is hooked about the rooftop statue’s chilly shoulders, draped between the hard stone pinions and a garland of encrusted pigeon shit encircling the neck, in an inebriate over-familiarity that also offers increased purchase and stability. It’s spitting now, the first cold droplets breaking against cheeks, the backs of hands, but still the idling mob squint up into the light precipitation at the drunk and the stone man with wings together up against a darkening sky like they were pals. A long and principally inaudible harangue commences, aimed at the bemused terrestrial observers who seem unsure what to make of it. “I’m with my dead granddaughter walking naked through a frozen afterlife nearly three hundred years from now. Tell all of your descendants to be careful of the wolves. They might want to devise a pointed stick of some variety.” In Giles Street down there, a peacock carpet of uncomprehending eyes. The light jumps suddenly and after comes the bruise-mauve rumble of a cymbal firmament, masking the softer, closer sound of grinding stone-on-stone as the winged icon slowly turns its head to make eye-contact. All about the chiselled throat there is a fissure-necklace of small cracks that ripple briefly into being, splintering and branching before fusing seamlessly into the new configuration. Similarly, there are fine webs of self-healing fracture at the corners of the eyes and mouth as the carved features blink and smile and, ultimately, speak. “Vernalimt, whorey skung?” The shattered syllables are settled slowly like an ash or sediment upon the eardrums of the listener where they arrange themselves into an information or, as in this instance, an enquiry. Something like, “Vernall, what limit are you seeking?”, but attended by a dizzying array of subtexts; of conceptual and linguistic pleats hung in a shimmering veil at the peripheries of apprehension. Underneath, the earthbound onlookers see nothing, peering into drizzle or distracted by the search for shelter from the coming downpour. All they hear is the intoxicated steeplejack’s delirious laughter and unfathomable reply. “Are not the edges of the heavens and the brim of reason and the shunting-yards of time itself all boundaries requiring my inspection and therefore within my jurisdiction? Answer that with a straight face and droppings on your chin!” The granite being shakes its head, slowly and imperceptibly, to an accompaniment of further minute fracturing and subdued grating, then admits “Yohuav metr”, which translates to somewhere in the region of “You have me there”. The weathered cranium shifts by fractions back to its original position and grows silent. By now, overhead, the thunder takes its bull-run through an ironmonger’s with the weather coming down like tinsel curtains on a nude theatre show. Down in the modern painted dots that throng the painted street is suddenly a great preponderance of indigo as the constabulary arrive who, from that elevated vantage, look to be largely unsympathetic. Lightning-scattered pigeons whirl
<em>about me, or at least that is my honest recollection.” They stride on, the old man and his infant burden, for a distance of perhaps another dozen years before they both agree to halt and make a bivouac. The younger of the Vernalls asks to be set down within a hollowed-out concrete concavity there to one side of the great corridor, ceiling subsumed beneath an optical illusion chandelier-growth of mathematically abnormal icicles. The light refracting through these from the shattered ceiling of the infinite arcade outside suffuses the whole chamber with prismatic blush, with iridescent specks accumulating in the wrinkles of his brow or powdering her flawless skin. There are still the frost-dusted dreams of wolf-pelts piled discarded in a corner, and Snowy supposes that their current whereabouts may be one more further reiteration of the makeshift astral tavern they passed some few decades back. Exploring in the misty dazzle of the spectra, toddling on plump little legs, the ageless baby May emits a sudden shrill peal of delight that chimes and echoes, shivering through the ice-stalactites and bringing her intrigued grandfather to her side. There at their naked feet a modest carpeting of what at first glance look like ordinary Puck’s Hats spreads for a few yards in all directions. Only upon close inspection is it evident that this is some new strain of the ethereal fungus, born from the imaginings of different times and different people. The traditional lithe fairy-forms that they are both familiar with have been replaced by slightly shorter, plumper female figures, although every bit as winsome and still sharing limbs and facial features with each other, fused into their customary starfish or snowflake configurations. Strikingly, the exquisite nude women are all now albinos with pink gems for eyes, with alabaster skin and at the central tuft and the furred junctions of their petal legs alike the silky pseudo-hair is made a bright snowblind titanium. The elder Vernall splits a chalky stalk with one black thumbnail, thus eliciting the usual dying whine that neither of them have been previously aware of, the peripheral sound of an electrical appliance suddenly switched off, sliding from a dog-whistle high to slump into the audible. Turning the meta-blossom over in his leather hands he notes that on the underside the ring of tiny wings are now no longer dragonfly-like gossamer but are instead the feathered kind, like those of minuscule white budgerigars. Breaking the pallid fruit in two and giving half to his granddaughter he allows himself a taste, surprised at the increased intensity of the higher-dimensional bloom’s sweetness. In between slobbering mouthfuls he and May conclude that this perhaps reflects a lack of refined sugar in the diet of those still living in the realm Downstairs, whilst the altered appearance of the Bedlam Jennies possibly suggests changed notions of allure and beauty down there in the icebound mortal continuity below. As the anticipated tingling and illuminating warmth spreads through their phantom systems, they both understand without the need to voice the thought that this profusion of uneaten astral fungi must imply that there are fewer peckish ghosts about these reaches of the over-life, if indeed there are any left at all. The Gulf Stream warming Britain, as they’ve previously agreed, must have seen its benign convection current cease sometime around the middle years of the twenty-first century, when the continued melting of the Greenland ice-shelf meant that it was no longer sufficient to power that longstanding hydro-thermal drift. The country, always sharing the same band of latitude with wintery locales like Denmark, would have been reminded forcibly for the first time in countless generations of its actual polar situation. It would also have become one of the last remaining areas in the world along with the Antarctic mega-cities to have weather suitable for growing produce on a planet where the equatorial regions were increasingly surrendering to desert. May has at one point suggested that this seems to have resulted in a period of overpopulation, possibly occasioned by invasion or a frantic wave of refugees and immigrants, before the massive human die-back that they have already witnessed in the later stretches of that century, when the unending boardwalks of Mansoul were crowded with bewildered just-dead apparitions that the naked baby and her wild-eyed steed were forced to push their way between. After that point the pair are both agreed there’s been less company around and fewer signs of spectral habitation, indicating that down in the frozen wastes of the First Borough underneath them there abides a population which is much diminished, at the very least. Snowy and May consume their fragrant supper, the variety of Puck’s Hat that they have decided to refer to as “the snow-queen sort”, in a profound and thoughtful silence. Up above the endless hall outside their gutted billet with its crust of glass geometries, abstracted constellations are unfolded against blackness of unfathomable depth. They brush the frozen hyper-crystals from the luscious wolf-skins and each take one as a blanket, just for the familiarity and comfort of the notion rather than for the unnecessary warmth or cover. Snuggled there beside each other in their wraps for the same reason, both close their remembered eyes to drift in time and memory. The old man thinks of the tremendous distance down the sempiternal corridor that they’ve already come and the much greater distance yet to go, the countless furlongs of one foot before the other or the parallax in separate layers crawling by at different speeds to either side of him, and is reminded of the similarly lengthy hikes that are his habit while in life and in the third dimension,</em>
the long treks out of Northampton and across the lanes and fields to London, from the Boroughs into shining Lambeth, wet after the rain. He knows a trick that will compress the journey, telescoping his fond farewells to Louisa at their Fort Street doorstep into his footsore arrival on the angel pavements there south of the Thames. Detaching himself from his usual perspective on the solid, trudging world of three dimensions he adopts an altitude from which duration has become a thing of feet and inches. His wife’s goodbye wave and her accompanying suspicious frown smear into cobbled lanes, to breweries and brickyards on the edge of town and then to wayside flowers, cowslips, forget-me-nots and such, a floral motif on the county’s crawling wallpaper. The fixed disc of the sun swells up and reddens like a sore eye, staring angry and aggrieved until relieved by the protracted blink of a cloud-cover eyelid, grey and full of tears. The world of form and depth and time is flattened to a single plane as in a map, and the ensuing downpour is reduced to only a metallic texture spattering an area of the diagram. Day tans to night, twice, two thick stripes of purple tar stippled with nail-heads, and then past this point on the unwinding canvas of the days the emerald verge of Watling Street gives way to thick impasto crusts of pigeon-streaked geometry. The finer details of broad avenue and narrow terrace are unfolded from these intricacies to surround him, with flat factories now springing into being at the corners of his glazed sleepwalker gaze and the whole capital become a children’s pop-up novelty. Along Hercules Road’s unspooling length he goes down into the familiar Bedlam reaches of his birthplace, starving hungry and for some forgotten reason suddenly near lame, and it all seems to him to be accomplished in a moment. He gulps down the sixty or so miles in one debilitating, dizzying swallow and slams his drained journey on the Lambeth counter, smacks his lips with relish on the nearest barmaid by way of a celebration. Her mouth is the taut but yielding ribbon of his finish line and yet he stumbles further, stumbling and gasping to her chucking-out time chamber, to the purlieus of her womb, and the unfaithfulness is somehow wrapped around, is an extension of Louisa’s knowing scowl there on the front step. Even while he’s bearing down with the milk-jellies of her thighs against his chest he knows he is remembering this moment from the vantage of a furry eiderdown, an ice-decked cavern in another world long after he and everyone he knows are dead. He has the brief impression of an endlessly reiterated series of his self, an infinite array of wild-eyed men in an apocalyptic state of mutual awareness, waving to each other down a long and narrow hallway that at first he thinks is time itself but realises is another image from another moment as he moans and empties himself into her, into the sweaty linear rush of human circumstance, both of them writhing, pinned like martyrs to the crushing wheel of everything. It is immediately morning. He uncreases from the bed and grows a skin of clothes, grows a new room around him that unwraps into a street, another pub, a few days decorating work in Southwark where the hours are applied in coats, the brush-stroke minutes smoothly melting into one another. There’s a roofing job in Waterloo, dancing with sky and gravity and he looks out across the lead braid of the river to the east where in the distance the bleached skull of the cathedral rises. In its famous gallery he knows that fifty-year-old thunders are still whispering to the faint residual vibrations of his father screaming, going mad, an endless conversation between echoes. Strains to see if he can catch it, overbalances and twirls his arms like windmills then regains his footing in a scripted accident, wobbling there upon the rim of a new century. His heart pounds from the near miss and he shakes a little in the wake of the adrenaline, his mind aware that there was never any danger of a fall and yet his flesh remaining unconvinced, as ever. He breathes down his nose as he descends the ladder into sequence, into filthy history, the rungs transmuting in his clammy fingers to become a buff pay envelope, the slopping glass weight of a pint, a different barmaid’s cunt, her bedroom doorknob and at last the laces of his boots where he kneels fastening them for the walk home to Northampton. Streams flow backwards and almighty storm-fronts crumple and contract to balls of tangerine-wrap tissue before vanishing. A labouring dray horse snorts and shivers, breaks apart into two spinsters riding bicycles who raise their hats in passing. Parasol seeds gathered by the wind are reassembled into puffball clocks before condensing into piss-gold dandelions and then the planet sucks them in through their stem’s milky straw. The planet sucks it all back in eventually, drinks every blade of grass, drinks everyone as he retracts the centipede-length of his form expressed in time from Blackfriars Bridge to Peter’s Church and Marefair, reels his here-and-now along the Roman Road into the Boroughs with leaves ripening and filling out from ragged russet to a sleek viridian as they float up to reattach themselves. He ties the over-shape of his excursion in a tidy bow, greeting Louisa with a kiss on the front step, another woman’s juice still flavouring his lips and all the while he knows
<em>he’s in the frosted ruins of a dream-dive somewhere up above the causes and effects, an eighteen-month-old child wrapped in his scrawny arms, both doing what dead people do instead of sleeping. Overhead, eye-straining ice geometries drip liquid hyperspheres, each carefully-spaced splash and plink in an enhanced acoustic, overlapping with delay and so convening into sparse and accidental music. Night being a fixed location on the endless avenue they rise after what they feel is sufficient rest and spend some time in fashioning a sack of wolfskin, so that they can take most of the Puck’s Hats with them as they travel on towards the gold eruption of a daybreak. Fortified by their respite, the old man runs in loping Muybridge strides, each pace a minute or two long and glaciated hours of floorboard vanishing beneath his dirty feet. The Hat-sack tied about his neck provides a furry saddle where his jockey bounces nude and laughing, making fists around reins of white hair and shrieking down the bore of history. Without constraints of flesh or Downstairs-physics they accelerate to reach a gallop in which the succession of the days becomes a strobe of jet and opal. Sometimes clustered specks flash by and bowl away into the slipstream, other people, other ghosts, but few and far between and never in sufficient numbers to necessitate more than a lazy veer in Snowy and his granddaughter’s blurring trajectory. The phantoms point and stare at the bare patriarch as he streams past them with his shrivelled tackle roiling and a conjoined cherub growing from his shoulders. Thundering, his footfalls measure the blind phases of the moon, pound through the centuries until he can detect a subtle shift of colouration in the passing everscape, cold alabaster gradually suffused with virid notes of thaw. He curbs their terrible momentum, slowing so that every step falls on a Sunday, then upon a splashing molten sunset, then ten minutes past the hour and finally he brings them to a standstill in the strange recovering tropic of the instant. Lifting May’s almost unnoticeable weight over his head he sets her down onto a felt of moss that would seem to have colonised the formerly ice-varnished floorboards thenabouts, and in that newfound temporal vicinity the ancient and the baby stand and look about them. The immense arcade has in these latitudes regained a little of its structure and complexity, suggesting dream-life and therefore an at least partly renewed population in the under-territories. Massively enlarged imaginings of trading posts seem once more to have blossomed at the distant edges of the immense corridor, and towering edifices of yard-in-diameter bamboo, places of worship or – conceivably – academies. Unlike the bleak polar austerity of vision which prevails only some several hundred-year leagues back along the line, however, these appear more intricate and equatorial in their decoration. Feather sprays and stylised monster-masks proliferate. There is a building like a kettledrum as big as a gas-holder, made from tree-bark greatly magnified and covered in a vast swathe of fluorescent snakeskin, with the once-Victorian canopy above partly restored by cable-thick lianas past which white diagrammatic clouds uncrumple on the graded grenadine wash of the sky. Tugging the loose skin of her granddad’s thigh, May points out that the giant trees protruding through the recently defrosted floor-holes are now banyans and the like, a stippling of vermillion flecks upon their high flyover branches that she thinks might be comprised of parrots. Furthermore, she observes that the outsize apertures from which they sprout are now no more rectangular but are arranged in dizzying rows of circles and ellipses, stretching off in the untrammelled distance with long hanging-garden fringes of dank moss and creeper trailing down into, presumably, the mortal huts and shelters of the world beneath. Although in the unchanging climate of Upstairs the pair no more experience an increased warmth than they had felt the cold of the more arctic reaches, they see evidence of a fecund and humid dreamtime everywhere about them. Here and there in saucer-pools between the growths of lichen there are meta-puddles straining for a third dimension, twisting upward in translucent sheets to form a thing of intersecting liquid planes much like the fluid reproduction of a gyroscope before subsiding. Something like a butterfly flaps wearily into the rising higher-mathematic steam on damp and heavy wings, a polythene bag snap and flutter rustling away between schematic fog-drifts of extrapolated vapour. On waxed tureen leaves, plump polyhedral droplets sparkle and display impossible refractive indices, Koh-i-noor perspiration, and eventually from out of the concealing vegetable shadows there emerge the period’s distinctively-adapted spectres: future shades stepped hesitantly from aetheric foliage to engage with these outlandish new arrivals, with these travellers from faraway antiquity, these representatives of an almost forgotten species. With a flinching and uncertain catlike tread, the Second Borough’s new inhabitants approach across the mossy suede, none of them more than three or four feet tall, hairless and gleaming bipeds with engraved or crenulated skins of a profound, light-drinking aubergine. Their voices when they speak are shrill and piping while their language is at first incomprehensible, and yet to Snowy’s mind has an inflection that is not dissimilar</em>
to the burr in the Blue Anchor, stepping fresh into its midst from Chalk Lane and the bright, throat-scorching air: Boxing Day morning. Stamping crusts of snow from off his boots onto coconut matting, bristles beaded with meltwater, the young roughneck feels heroic, mythical, though not for any reason he can put his weather-deadened finger on. The winter brilliance outside is strained through net curtains to diffuse into a whey where cigarette smudge rolls in drifts of mottled sepia and blue. Clustered in threes and fours around their tables, polished islands floated on the fug of beer-breath and tobacco, Easter Island adults stare contentedly into their glasses, into silences that punctuate the measured drip of anecdote. Made breathless by the season children swirl excitedly about their parents’ knees like tidal currents, carried by convection into other rooms or cobbled back yards glazed and slippery with frozen piss. Snowy takes off his coat and chequered scarf to hook them on the black iron quaver of a hat-peg just inside the pub’s front door, his flat cap joining them once he remembers that he’s wearing one. Temperature differentials between the interior and Chalk Lane without have cooked his stinging ears to bacon slices, with his now-concluded walk along the winter track from Lambeth carried there behind him in a regal train of circumstantial ermine. While ostensibly he’s here visiting unemployed shoemaker cousins off in one of the outlying villages, he knows he’ll never get there after a chance interruption to his travels due to occur shortly, with this latter assignation being the true reason he is rubbing circulation back into his hands in the Blue Anchor, the true reason for his journey: this happenstance port of call, in only a few minutes, will become the backdrop against which he first sets eyes upon the woman who will be his wife. Here in this very second, on this spot, Snowy has stood and brushed his palms together as though trying to kindle fire a billion times before, endlessly shaken the same tread-imprinted casts of snow onto the same coarse doormat. Every detail, every fibre of the instant is so perfect and immortal that he fears it might collapse beneath its own ferocious onslaught, its own holy weight in bottle-caps and meaning. He attempts, not for the first time, to characterise the singular elusive flavour of the morning, to attach words to an atmosphere so fragile and impermanent that even language bursts it like a bubble. There’s a subdued chapel softness to the conversation, somehow murmuring on the same waveband as the settling talcum light until the two phenomena cannot be usefully distinguished from each other. His distending nostrils cup the fugitive and unique savour, a bouillon of hops and curls of smoke like shavings of sweet coconut; a dilute memory of roses misting on the womenfolk, a spirited pretence of scent, recently gifted. On the cold and glaring day here is a sleepy satisfaction, a contented languor like a blanket hung upon the optics, on the long-untouched and taciturn piano, draped in falling folds over the seated families and something like the afterglow that follows when you’ve had it off, the strain of Christmas and the stress of the performance done with, no more worry that somebody might be disappointed. Spilled pine needles, brilliant emerald in the kids’ grey socks. The lovely greed and the indulgence in a viscous mixture with the calm of temporary belief in the nativity, and nobody at work. The most exquisite quality is the apparent transience and seeming brevity of the respite, a sense that soon the shepherds and the sexless swan-winged things with golden trumpets shall be bleached to absences on white card by the January sun, not long until the painted carol singers with their tailcoats are retreated through the falling flakes back to their comradely and crystalline decade where no one ever lived. The pace and fury of the world appears suspended and invites the thought that if the globe’s alleged chain-gang requirements can be paused thus far, then why not further? He can almost feel the moment’s sediment, cloudy sienna churning up about his trouser bottoms, wading for the bar to get his elbows on the wood, to work his shoulders in amongst the turned backs and bray out his order for a pint of best. The owner swivels ponderously from his busy register to study Snowy with amused annoyance and there’s something in the man’s face that is more familiar and has more impact than the other countenances on display in that establishment, which in themselves all harbour the before-seen look of Toby Jugs. Viewed through his lens of telescoping time he realises that the publican’s pale eyes and rubber folds of chin are made more recognisable by all the future meetings that the two of them shall have: the landlord is premembered. Barely have the words father-in-law begun to formulate themselves in his snow-globe awareness than around the corner from the other bar she comes, explodes into his story with a swing of green skirt and some casual remark about a barrel that needs changing. Yes, of course, the emerald dress and fat fake pearls around her throat hung on grey string, it all comes back to him in a beloved rush, this woman that he’s never seen before and when in a few minutes time she says her name’s Louise he’ll say “I know”. He won’t say he’s with her dead granddaughter six hundred years away
<em>amongst a company of purple men whose heaven is an indoor jungle, strutting naked in the mirror-Eden of this lapsing world. On those occasions when the great unfolded garnet of a sun is visible beyond the mile-wide nets of creeper covering the stupefying avenue, the solar orb seems larger than it did. May thinks that this is caused by higher levels of particulates in the slowly transforming atmosphere resulting in an increased scattering of light, rather than by an actual amplification of the star’s dimensions. Riding high on her grandfather’s bony shoulders she is borne aloft through massively expanded bottle-trees, pregnant with hyperwater, and amidst the timid press of violet pygmies like a baby queen. The fatal marmalade from Sundews of big-top diameter is hers to taste, so that she shortly has a motorcade of monster dragonflies trailed iridescent and suspended in her wake, sharp iris or sour jade, darting to lap her sticky chin. Strolling in the arboreal centuries with gaping, fascinated future-humans in their shrill mauve entourage they are the giant ghosts of an earlier paradise, chalk-white and prehistoric, by some means arrived along the Attics of the Breath from an unreachably far latitude that is no longer even legendary. In gradual increments they come to understand a little of the native spectres’ trilling speech that rings and shivers in the dripping, crystalline delay; in the exploded echo. One word at a time they piece together something of the antic history that has informed these bald and embossed after-people, foraging their wild Elysium: a changing climate and depleted ozone-belt have, it seems, relatively swiftly compensated for the temporary arctic chill caused by the failure of the Gulf Stream, in a mere few hundred years. The current era is a tropic intermediary stage, when all the planet’s lingering rain and vegetation is restricted to the warming Polar Regions that are thus a last abode of earthly life. With dwindling resources and a limited habitable environment, even a much-diminished human population cannot be sustained without severe modifications. These have been accomplished by re-engineering in some fashion the essential mortal blueprint, with mankind as a result much smaller and possessing cells imbued with photo-active chlorophyll. The lustrous eggplant colouration and the intricately corrugated skin designed to thereby maximise its surface area are features bred into this new strain of humanity, who supplement declining rations of available organic sustenance by gorging upon the abundant sunlight. Snowy and his infant charge eventually deduce, from such fragments of anecdote as they are able to translate, that these whorled and embellished near-indigo miniatures have a truncated life expectancy of less than thirty years before ascending to the higher pastures, to the ultrasonic flutter that is their term for Mansoul. This strikes the sinewy old man as woefully curtailed and his juvenile passenger as more than generous, a minor argument between them while they wander further down the fern-defeated promenade with its viridian dapple and extended perfumes. They pass on through blood-burst dawns afire with parakeets and bullion sunsets that electroplate the pair in liquid gold, pausing at last to make camp in the rustling midnight furlongs where a faceted extravagance that May identifies as Hyper-Sirius is visible against pitch black beyond the vine-macramé overhead. Their bivouac consists of monstrous bottle-green leaves bent across a mossy hollow and secured by thick black thorns, there in the metaphysic tropics after man. On rising, after the short walk to morning, they discover what appears to be a growth of Puck’s Hats sprouting from an unidentifiable corroded mass which Snowy thinks might be a fallen ceiling-girder. Once again the astral fungi would appear to have adapted to their changed environment, developing new features so as better to entice the altered humanoids of these sun-flooded purlieus. This latest variety is, in the pair’s opinion, the most thoroughly unappetising yet. The overlapping succulent and pale feminine forms that typified the earlier displays have been replaced here by a similar arrangement of abnormally large insects, lamp black and yet iridescent if they’re turned against the light. The eye-pips are now faceted, and an experimental nibble at a snapped-off thorax has both of them spitting and complaining for some several time-miles at the vinegary flavour, near impossible to rinse away. At their next rest-stop, in the umbra of a towering and dilapidated kettle-drum construction, they unfurl their wolfskin sack to feast on the albino ‘snow queen’ blooms that they’ve collected a few centuries back up the track. At May’s suggestion they spit the pink seeds into the undergrowth about them, so that there might be a colony of fungi that are edible established here for the return trip, when the two of them are heading back this way from the far end of time. Invigorated by their breakfast of anaemic beauties they resume the journey once the little girl is set again upon the bronzing saddle of her grandsire’s shoulders. Blurring down the arcade of forever, May remarks that they are passing fewer huge masks and gasometer-sized bongos, fewer purple people. She recalls</em>
the empty green of Beckett’s Park, drowning in light, there on one of her scant five hundred afternoons. She has no sense of where she ends or where the world begins, and having never seen the lovely golden cranium that everybody else makes such a fuss of, May assumes she is without one; that the whole width of the day and its astounding skies are in a monstrously vast glass bubble balanced on her headless infant shoulders. She can feel the silvery drag of fish-skin clouds across the blue inside her, while the birdsong is sharp citrus fluttering on her tongue and makes May dribble. She does not discriminate between the clever, complicated house-shapes on Victoria Promenade’s far side, the polished farthing of the sun or the trees swaying, chimney-high, to lick the wind. Since all these things are to be found inside her absent head the child supposes them to be her thoughts, that this is what thoughts look like, square with blue slate hats, or tiny and on fire, or tall and whispering. The eighteen-month-old does not separate that second’s slurps and shivers from its scents or shapes or sounds, confusing the asthmatic distant skirl of an accordion and the measured progression of the little gas-lamps just across the road, with both phenomena from her perspective being things that seem to roll down avenues. Then it’s a different instant, with no gas-accordion wheezing out its wrought-iron notes at intervals along the street, and where indeed the street itself is vanished and forgotten as the child discovers she is moving in a new direction that entails a different vista. Floating effortlessly a few feet above the surf hiss of the carpet-grass, descending slowly to the miniature domain of further-off with its toy huts and shrubs and paint-fleck daisies, May doesn’t remember that she’s being carried in her mother’s arms until the bobble-coated chocolate drop is put into her mouth. The warm accompanying maternal mumble melting on the baby’s tongue is like the creamy sweetness in her ears. As she explores the varicoloured beads of sugar speckling the confection’s upper surface, the sensation becomes inextricable from the pointillist blur-burst of a nearby flowerbed that May happens to be gazing at and she’s immersed in an undifferentiated glory. She and the big favourite body that’s called May as well and which she’s a detachable component of seem to be standing on a hiccup in the ginger gravel underfoot, a bump with railings where their path squirts in a stony arc over a river like a very long old woman, splashing on its further bank to trickle off in pebble tracks amongst the weeds. One of the syllables her mother coos is “swan”, a sound that starts off with a slicing whoosh then curves away into a stately glide, and something somehow flares into existence in the private centre of May’s continuity, a thrilling white idea that flaps up into ghostly being, making a commotion. Swan. The word is the experience and it doesn’t matter if she sees one now or not. Shifting her weight, May loses herself and forgoes the universe in favour of the freckles on her mother’s throat. A spittle spray of toffee isles adrift upon a dermal ocean, floated on its pinprick ripples, each spot has its own unique identity seen from an inch away. This one is like a smoky lion’s head yawning, this one like a piece of broken horseshoe, each no bigger than a grain of salt. She focuses on their implied geography, on the relationship between these distinct and minuscule atolls. Do they know each other? Are the ones closest together friends? Then there’s the overall arrangement to consider, preordained and perfect, each spot where it should be on a map that’s here forever, purposeful and ancient like the constellations or the musical periodicity of lampposts. The giant beauty cradles May through time, through summer with the dandelion-clocks going off like steam grenades. There are so many leaves and branches to bear witness to, so many breezes to be met and all with different personalities, that it’s a million million years before they’re back in the same moment on the bridge again but this time without chocolate drops and crossing it the other way, from which a new and unfamiliar town is visible. A different angle is a different place, and space is time. Her future moments are the funny land in front of her where little things get bigger, not like in the funny land behind her where the things that seemed so large get littler and littler until they’re gone into a dust-sized past, she doesn’t know exactly where. Infinitesimal, the ant-cows from a minute or two’s time mature to mouse-cows and then suddenly are old enough for her to see their eyelashes and to smell where they’ve done their business, staring without interest at May over the top gate-bar of the cattle market’s wooden barriers. The fruit-and-pepper stink surrounding her, not in itself unpleasant, is attempting to inform her of its noble histories and pungent legend but the buzzing black dots of the story’s punctuation make it hard to understand and so her mother waves it all away. The breast and bounce and rhythm of May’s passage lulls the day into a distance as if it’s a picture in a confiscated rag-book. Nearby hooves and cobbles drop the volume of their conversation as a courtesy, and she’s exhausted just from all the breathing and the staring. Luminous pink curtains briefly drop on the theatre of real things, and May is hurried through a fascinating but incomprehensible scenario in which
<em>a baby girl is galloping an old man down a far-off foreign century after the people and the after-people have all gone, arboreal decades trampled in their gallivant. The distant walls of the immeasurable emporium, where these are visible between the baobabs and modified acacias, are themselves now only stockade rows of monster tree trunks with no trading posts or other signs of structured artifice apparent. Evidently nothing human or post-human lives and dreams in the inferior territory Downstairs, the hothouse bayous that were formerly the Boroughs. Pointing to the wood-web overhead and the unfolded sky beyond, May draws her racing grandfather’s attention to the lack of either birds or birdsong. Without breaking from his loping stride he hazards that this absence might imply a dreadful and illimitable cascade of extinctions. They run on in silence for a while, each inwardly considering this sombre possibility and trying to determine how they feel about their species vanishing along with a great torrent of its fellow life forms, sluiced into the drainage ditch of biologic obsolescence. Snowy in the end concludes he’s not much bothered, bare feet pounding out the years of unrestricted lichen. Everything, he reasons, has its length in time, its linger, whether that should be an individual, a species or a geologic era. Every life and every moment has its own location; still there somewhere back along this endless loft. It’s only here that mankind is no more, and when he and his granddaughter at last come back the other way with their preposterous pilgrimage complete he knows the centuries where Earth is habitable will be waiting for them, back at home amongst the sempiternal moochers and immortal rusted drainpipes of their own times, their own worn-out neighbourhood of heaven. Everything is saved, the sinners, saints and breadcrumbs underneath the couch alike, albeit not in the conventional religious sense of that expression: everything is saved in spacetime’s fourfold glass, without requirement of a saviour. Snowy thunders on in the general direction of the next millennium, whichever that might be, with his exquisite passenger bumping and jigging on her wolf-hide saddle stuffed full of anaemic fungus-fairies. Only when they notice that despite the lack of any avian presence there is yet the plaintive squeal of song reverberating in the unpacked auditory space of the great corridor do they slow to a halt, preventing them from rushing at full tilt into the pod of moss whales. Trailing emerald coiffures of algae, the handsome and posthumous leviathans crawl ponderously across a post-historic clearing through the pink light of another hyperdawn, calling to one another in their eerie radar-sonar voices. Awed and dumbstruck the two travellers note that while the creatures’ massive lower jaws and relatively tiny back-set eyes are undeniably cetacean, all appear to come equipped with an enormous pair of forward-thrusting horns, brow-mounted tusks that push to one side any overhanging branches which obstruct their path. Additionally, both their anterior and posterior flippers seem to have adapted into stubby legs that terminate in barnacle-encrusted hooves, each one the size of a bone omnibus, rhythmically splintering the world’s-end vegetation as like grey-green glaciers they continue their protracted slither, off amongst the Brobdingnagian trees. Resuming their potentially unending expedition at a cautious walking pace, the temporal pedestrians engage in heated speculation as to the most likely origins of the extraordinary future-organisms. Snowy posits a scenario in which the drying of the planet’s oceans has precipitated a migration of the more adaptable marine life onto land in search of sustenance, but he cannot explain the glaring incongruity of horns and hooves. After some cogitation, May suggests that if whales are air-breathing mammals that chose to return to the aquatic state from which all life originates, it may be that during their brief adventure as land-animals they were related biologically to some unlikely genus such as, for example, an ancestor of the goat. The white-haired ancient crooks his neck to squint up at his rider and determine if she’s joking, though she never is. They carry on, and presently Snowy’s hypothesis of boundless seas reduced to salt flats prompting a migration onto dry ground is confirmed by glimpses of the period’s other mega-fauna, or at least that fauna’s astral residue. Milling about one of the now irregularly-contoured apertures set in the arcade’s creeper-covered floor, May notices the spectres of teak-brown crustaceans with shells four feet in diameter, like ambulatory tables. Later, they experience a moment of breathtaking wonder when the tract of forest towards which they happen to be walking suddenly uncoils itself, the detailed scene and its apparent depth detaching from the background to reveal a sky-scraping cephalopod, a towering ultra-squid perfectly camouflaged against its afterlife surround by means of the evolved pigment-receptors in its skin. Shifted to a presumably more comfortable position, next the tentacled immensity adjusts its shimmering disguise, its surface a spectacularly animated Seurat wash of colours that resolves into an almost photographic reproduction of the endless avenue about them. Snowy is reminded of the shifting pictures in the fire when he’s only</em>
a little boy in Lambeth, waiting for his father to get home from work. All day long the October rain’s been falling from the broken guttering to spatter noisily upon the lavatory’s slate roof, down at the bottom of the yard outside. John Vernall, two years, getting on for three years old, sits by the hearth and rubs his palms together until the mysterious rolled-out threads of liquorice muck appear for him to brush away or play with. He’s been watching droplets on the century-old windowpane that has a faint green in its thickness, studying the form of the slow-crawling diamonds, an enthralled spectator at a liquid horserace. Some of the wind-driven beads go down at the first hurdle, failing to complete their long diagonal trajectory over the glass, their fluid substance dwindled and exhausted long before they reach the distressed wooden frame that is their finish line. Then there are plumper globules that appear to be more predatory and competitive, that hungrily absorb the hydrous leavings of their fallen colleagues and, with mass replenished and increased momentum, roll majestically across the glistening field to easy victory. When finally this inconclusive water-derby ceases to be entertaining, John squats on the homemade rug beside the fire and turns his wandering attention to the monumental Bible illustrations flaring into momentary being, engraved Doré vistas down between the sulking coals. Gomorrah’s doom lifts in a grey veil from the splitting anthracite, while on those wood or paper remnants used to start the blaze the twisting black flakes are recanting simonists, adulterers or virtuous pagans suffering their disparate arcs of the Inferno. In the coruscation and the crinkling ruby light, ash-bearded prophets work their scorch-mark lips unfathomably, their warnings snatched away into the chimney’s whistling throat, and somewhere in another land his mother and his grandmother are snapping at each other over where the money’s to be found for this or that. His baby sister Thursa grizzles, fitful in her wicker-basket crib, her strawberry shrunken monkey face clenched to a fist, disconsolate and anxious even in her sleep, cowed by the world and all the startling sounds it makes. There’s something queer about the dreary flavour of the instant and the small boy finds himself caught in a fog of indistinct presentiment that’s indistinguishable from a daylight-faded memory, the details bleached out like the pattern on their tablecloth. Hasn’t he had this darkening afternoon before, with Thursa making those specific noises in her crib, with Shadrach and the plagues of Egypt in the firelight, then a sizzling cat, then a volcano? Just before she utters them, John knows his grandmother’s next angry words to his and Thursa’s volubly upbraided mother will contain the puzzling phrase “no better than you should be”, and he is uneasily aware that the most thunderous element of these precisely synchronised and rapidly coagulating circumstances is not yet in place. That wondrous and terrible event, he thinks, unwinds from out the complicated click and rattle of his father’s latchkey which he can hear even now off down the passageway, commencing its insidious tinkle in the front door’s mechanism as a prelude to the coming symphony, the irrevocable unlocking of a new and cataclysmic world. His mother leaves her confrontation in the kitchen to find out what’s happening and the avalanche of the occasion smashes through their East Street home; reduces all the order of their lives to an undifferentiated panic matchwood. There is a commotion in the passage, with his mother’s voice ascending from a confused and uncomprehending mumble to a gasping, devastated wail. The uproar bursts into the living room accompanied by John’s sheet-pallid mother and two men the child has never seen before, one of whom is his father. It’s not just the flour-spill hair where once were copper bedsprings that has made a stranger of his parent, more the change in what he says and how he stands and who he is. There’s lots of gesturing and drawing circles in the air. There’s an unreeling list of madcap topics that the silent child somehow already knows before they’re spoken, a tirade of chimneypots, geometry and lightning, troubling phrases that nobody seems to pay attention to: “It’s mouth was moving in the paint.” John’s grandmother emerges from amongst the steaming saucepans, shouting angrily at the rotund and florid bald man who’s returned her son to her in this dismantled state, as if sufficient indignation might still somehow put her offspring back the way he was; as if insisting on an explanation could force such a thing into existence. In the embers now John notices a crumbling sphinx on fire, a martyring, a poppy banquet. Everyone except for him is weeping. Haltingly and incompletely, it begins to dawn upon him that nobody save for he himself and possibly his baby sister was expecting this to happen. The idea is as inconceivable as if John were the only person in the whole of London who could hear, the only person who had ever noticed clouds or realised that night follows day. The people and the furniture and voices in the peeling-paper Lambeth living room are like an indoor hurricane of tears and waving hands, with at its epicentre John’s new white-haired father standing and repeating the word “torus” dazedly, the shape of things to come. Returning his attention to the fire he has the fugitive impression of red light and trailing darkness
<em>in a sunset arbour following the world and Snowy’s weathered, almost corrugated thighs are dappled by sliding and elongated rose ellipses, an elegiac radiance filtering through sculpted voids in the waxed dinner-plate leaves of the canopy above him. With his darling burden he strides on into a reprised cryptozoic, all of history in his blisters. For a period they travel in the midst of an inquisitive and scuttling company: the amiable shades of table-crabs who seem to be endeavouring to communicate by tapping an adapted fore-claw on the moss-occluded boards of the immortal boulevard, an inarticulate crustacean Morse. Riding her grandfather as if atop a howdah the grave eighteen-month-old prodigy quotes Wittgenstein, to the effect that even if a lion could speak, mankind would not be capable of understanding it. As if in mute acknowledgment of this persuasive observation presently the entourage of furniture-sized arthropods abandon their attempts at conversation, losing interest, clattering away en masse between the monstrous bolls of that terminal orchard. Everything is doomed with beauty. Later there are further whale-goats and a huge tree-mimicking variety of octopus that they’ve not previously encountered, with impassive garnet eyes easily missed in the surrounding column of bark-patterned skin, and liver-coloured suckers on what first seem to be overhanging boughs. May formally proposes they should call the species Yggdrasil after the Nordic world-tree, given that taxonomy itself will surely be extinct by now and that the splendid creature thus must otherwise go nameless in eternity. The motion, after a debate and vote, is passed unanimously whereupon the baby and her wrinkled steed persist with their excursion through the final foliage, amongst incurious monsters. After wading in the magma of four thousand serial dawns Snowy and May elect to make their temporary bed amid the shivering mimosas of a twilight mile somewhere in the next century, if indeed there are centuries anymore. As the old man remarks while fashioning a shelter from the shirking greenery, the base-ten counting system and conceivably the whole of mathematics must have surely disappeared from the inferior territories downstairs by now. From this point on, where science and faith and art and even love are only fossil memories, he and his granddaughter must venture past the end of measurement itself, perhaps even beyond the unavoidable demise of meaning. The unlikely pair consider this new, unsuspected lower register of desolation whilst they messily devour their last remaining specimens of snow-queen Bedlam Jennies, prudently expectorating the pink eyeball-pips into the flinching and fastidious vegetation trembling about them. At the bottom of their wolfskin tucker-bag there are now only a few snapped-off chorus girl limbs much like shapely and anaemic doll-parts, with a sparkling dragonfly debris of wings. Above, cut into slices and trapezohedrons by the silhouetted branches, an unfolded constellation that is possibly hyper-Orion – Snowy notices three displaced repetitions of the famous belt – is stretched across the settling indigo, a malformed tesseract of ancient lights. Replete and comfortably sluggish after</em> <em>their fungal repast, the juice of tiny women sticky on their chins, they slide into the hypnagogic drifts of ghost-sleep mumbling and holding hands. Around their hide are brittle crunches, fracturings, reports distantly audible beyond the blurred peripheries of their awareness, probably the cringes and contractions of the cowering shrubbery within which they are nested and so swiftly filtered out by a receding consciousness. Gorged upon visionary arctic truffles both the baby and her ancestor are borne on an eidetic surf of faerie imagery, unwinding madhouse dioramas with a miniaturist intricacy that is bottomless and sometimes borders on the terrifying: at hallucinatory Elizabethan frost-fairs stand bare-breasted ladies in preposterously large hooped crinolines with decorative motif snowflakes made of lace around the hems. Each has a flattened palm raised to face level for inspection, smiling in delight at the scale reproduction of herself that seems to balance there, complete in every detail, beaming down approvingly at the almost infinitesimal homunculus perched on her own hand, peering into a vertiginous regression of excruciating and exquisite pulchritude, a mesmerising vortex of wan femininity. These are the dreams the dead have when they’re Puck-drunk. After an incalculable interval they shrug away their gem-encrusted drowse, refreshed despite the Midsummer Night alkalis that have been coursing through their slumbering ethereal systems. Waking, unsurprisingly, to the same shade of dusk in which they bedded down, not until Snowy lifts their wolf-pelt satchel do they realise with bewilderment that while they napped the previously almost-empty sack has been mysteriously replenished, filled now to its brim with an unusually picturesque mass grave of conjoined Thumbelinas. Still more inexplicably these are not the albino strain responsible for their nocturnal visitations, but are rather the more ruddily-complexioned type familiar from the traveller’s own now-remote home century. Not wishing to examine their gift horse’s dentistry the bony veteran ties the pixie-bag about his shoulders, crouching while May climbs aboard. It calls to mind</em>
him and his young ’un Thursa chuffing through the Lambeth chill to see their father, locked away in Bedlam, with the siblings’ warm breath crystallising to grey commas in their wake. Being at ten years old the senior of the two John is in charge, towing his crooning and distracted younger sister down the fogbound lanes by one sweat-slippy hand. They skirt around the Temperance revivalists and ne’er-do-wells, the clustered corner conferences about the Kaiser or Alsace-Lorraine, avoiding those insanities they’re not immediately related to. November scalds his sinuses and Thursa drags annoyingly, winding her dreary half-a-song in a damp skein amongst the toughs and gas-lamps. “Shut up, you, or I shan’t take you to see Dad.” The eight-year-old is loftily indifferent, screws her nose into a little concertina of distaste: “Don’t care. Don’t wunner see ’im. This is when he tells us about all the chimneypots and numbers.” John doesn’t reply but only drags her with more force, across the cobbles with their ochre archipelagos of shit, between the rumbling wagons, from miasma to miasma. Though he hasn’t had a conscious thought about the subject before Thursa speaks those exact words, they fall upon him with the gavel-weight of a harsh sentence, long anticipated, indisputable. He knows she’s right about this being the occasion when their father shares some sort of secret with them, can almost recall the countless previous times she’s told him this, on this same night and halfway over this specific road, avoiding this precisely-contoured patch of horse muck, on their way to the asylum. Furrowing his freezing, aching brow John makes an effort to remember all the cataclysmic things their father will be telling them. Something to do with lifebelts, and the special flowers made of bare ladies that are all the dead can eat. This outrageous curriculum sounds eerily familiar, although for the life of him he can’t see how it can be, not in the same world where the trudged-smooth slabs of Hercules Road are so immediate and hard beneath his worn-through soles. They carry on past Autumn-bare front yards with waist-high walls, through a green dark that the infrequent lamps only accentuate, towards the mist-wreathed shores of Kennington. Ahead their future footsteps are arranged like unseen slippers running off along the vapour-shrouded pavement, waiting patiently to be tried on, however fleetingly; waiting here on this side street for them since before the world began in their inevitable and ordained procession to the madhouse gates. His sister’s hand is hot and horrible the way it always is tonight, adhesive with a barley-sugar glaze. A cab whose hoarding advertises Lipton’s tea clops by on cue as their incipient prints lead them around a corner, up the way a bit and suddenly the wrought-iron bars and flanking posts of rain-gnawed stone are only a few moments, a few feet away. The hospital and the impending hour which it contains drag themselves eagerly across the intervening space and time, approaching through the churned murk like a plague boat or a prison hulk, crushing the kids to specks with brute proportion, piss and medicine on its breath. The keeper standing guard beside the gated entrance on its far side recognises them from other evenings and unlocks with a begrudging attitude. It seems to John not so much that the gateman doesn’t like them, rather that he doesn’t like them being there where grown-ups act like frightening children. Every time they turn up here he tells them they’d be better off not coming and then lets them in, gruffly escorting them across the walled-in grounds to the front doors in case of wandering stranglers or buggers. Once inside the building, swallowed by the stern administrative hush of a reception area with its austere high ceilings lost from sight to a gas-mantle glow of insufficient reach, Thursa and John’s reluctant shepherd hands them over to another warden, a stone-faced and somewhat older man whose head is all grey bristle. “They’re for Vernall. It’s not right, them being here with all o’ this, but there you have it and there’s nothing to be done.” The words have a faint echo, have a ring to them as if spoken before. Still holding hands, although for comfort rather than compulsion, they accompany their mute chaperone down creaking corridors that crawl with whispers and the memory of incontinence. A dusty, miserable residue of pipedream empires and bewilderment accumulates in phantom drifts against the skirting boards where their stilt-walker shadows list precariously, teetering abreast with them on this subdued and strangely formal outing. Bolted doors slide by, and contrary to popular opinion nowhere is there any laughter. Led into a dimly-lit hall of intimidating scale reserved for visitors, the urchins are confronted by an umber lake in which perhaps a dozen table-islands float suspended, juddering hemispheres of candlelight where inmates sit like stones else gaze enraptured into empty air while relatives stare wistfully at their own shoes. Marooned on one such islet is their father, the white hair grown out as if his head’s on fire with gulls. He asks them if they know about tonight and John says “Yes” while Thursa starts to cry. An oddly reminiscent litany begins, lightning and chimneypots, geometry and angles, spectre-food and the topology of starry time; the widening hole in everything. He tells them of the endless avenue above their lives where characters called
<em>May and Snowy stumble down forever, brazenly displaying their bare arses to each new extinction as they pass among its signs and markers. Soon there are no sylvan octopi or flickering hyper-squids, no séance-rapping crabs or pond-sized hoofmarks left by grounded whales. Above, the crumpled-paper diagrams of cloud seem scarcer and when visible less complex, having fewer folds and facets. The old man surmises that the world downstairs is drying, dying, and they travel on through the gigantic thinning trees, the great majority of which are dead with some entirely petrified. In their decade-devouring canter they devise a means of eating without pausing: the uncanny toddler intermittently retrieves one of the puzzling vintage Puck’s Hats from the inexplicably full wolf-bag that she bounces on, handing it with great ceremony down to her grandfather who ingests it as he runs, noisily spitting eyes and pubic fur-balls into the deteriorated woodland mulch beneath his slapping feet. While they don’t have their mouths full they discuss the lingering enigma of their restocked rations without ever reaching a conclusion that’s remotely credible. When Snowy ventures the hypothesis that possibly the amiable crustaceans back along the time-track are responsible for this display of clandestine benevolence, May counters with a theory that it is in fact their own selves from some juncture of the future who are their true benefactors. Both proposals founder on the issue of the fungi’s blatantly anachronistic provenance, and meanwhile there’s less vegetation to be seen with each fresh furlong. Far away to either side the walls of the protracted thoroughfare can once more be discerned, their shifting dream-veneer fallen away or atrophied for want of anything still capable of dreaming in the territories beneath. Without their astral substance being constantly renewed and reinvigorated by an influx of novel imaginings, the distant boundaries can no longer recall the shapes or colours that were previously their own, the contours softening and gradually subsiding into waxy incoherence, hue a runny paint-box marbling with the greasy fever-sheen of rain-stained petrol, sacred architecture lapsing into a prismatic slobber. Past those faltering margins there are only the confounding depths of an expanded firmament as realised in more than three dimensions, intimating that beyond the Attics of the Breath the further reaches of Mansoul themselves are levelled. Like some hybrid chimera of age and youth, a generational centaur, May and Snowy gallop onward through what seems to be a final curtain falling on biology. Running pink caterpillar fingers idly through the locks of her gerontic charger as though grooming him for nits, the sombre cherub muses on the fragile existential nature of a world completely unobserved while all around them the last oaks and eucalyptuses are toppling unnoticed into history. At intervals of a duration lengthier than empires the pair pause in their apocalyptic marathon, to snooze after their fashion under lean-tos made from sloughed-off bark or dine on their diminishing supply of Bedlam Jennies. It is after breaking camp on one of these occasions and making the relatively short walk to the morning following, when they’ve long given up on the idea of sapient life in the terrestrial neighbourhood beneath them, that they come across the first of the peculiarly geometric mineral cacti. A three-sided pyramid as tall as Snowy, an elaborate beige stud erupting from the shrivelled moss and kindling litter carpeting the great emporium, each of its smoothly manufactured faces has a further half-sized pyramid projecting from it. These in turn sprout similarly scaled-down reproductions of the central form, and so on to the limits of perceptibility. The overall impression is that of a Cubist Christmas-tree sculpted from sand or some fine-grained equivalent, spiky and in its own way beautiful. The infant and her bronco ancestor trot in a slow investigative circle, orbiting the startlingly precise extrusion at a cautious radius and speculating on the nature of its composition. After some few circuits Snowy kneels so that May can dismount in order to inspect this strange apparent artefact at closer quarters. Waddling barefoot on a rug of desiccated splinters the deceased toddler approaches the suspiciously well-engineered phenomenon with the intrepid curiosity characteristic of the age at which death has arrested her development. She pokes a small exploratory bore-hole in the unexpectedly yielding and permeable exterior of the oddity, and attempts a preliminary analysis of its constituent matter by the straightforward expedient of putting some into her mouth. After an apprehensive period of mute consideration the unnerving paediatric sibyl turns with wonderment to her intrigued grandparent and announces “It’s an anthill.” Stepping closer to the enigmatic polyhedral solid, the gaunt patriarch sees for himself the colony’s immediately despatched repairmen skittering like beads of ink as they efficiently patch up the damage caused by May’s intrusive digit. Having no desire to further inconvenience the first-recorded insect presence to have been discovered on that upstairs tier of existence, the baby remounts her famously deranged and silver-crested relative and they continue with their world’s end picaresque. There is still evidence that life prevails. Snowy thinks back to when</em>
the fever cart performs a muted drum roll, more a cymbal whisper as it dwindles with the family’s hopes, trickling away down Fort Street. Sitting on the cold throne of his doorstep since the grey hours of that morning, waiting with his seat reserved for the forthcoming drama, the old troublemaker watches passively while the appalling scene is acted. All its awful flourishes are at a distance to his heart, affecting only in the sense evinced by the much-thumbed engravings of a penny dreadful that have forfeited the frisson of crude shock accompanying their first appraisal. Somewhere off amidst the bubble-and-squeak vapours down the passageway behind him he can hear Louisa cautioning their other children still at home, their Cora and their Johnny, telling them they’re not to go outside and stick their noses in. Out in the smothering hush of Sunday the dismal scenario proceeds through its traditional component stages; the inevitable feet of its exacting meter. Big May, Snowy Vernall’s eldest daughter, stands there in the middle of the rudimentary road and shudders in the arms of her chap Tom as if trying to wring her very life out through her tear-ducts, unavoidably caught in the brutal and indifferent mangle of the moment. Moaning in a universal Esperanto of mammalian bereavement, the young mother with her hair a ginger fizz throws out her freckled arms to the receding wagon while her husband shuts his eyes against this terrible defeat and says “Oh no, oh no”, holding his wife back from the abyss of broad daylight that has claimed their daughter. Squatted on his draughty front-row perch Snowy is gazing down the tunnel-length of continuity to his earliest glimpse of the grown woman whose life is disintegrating there before him, crimson-faced and weeping in a gutter, then as now. More than a score of years back down the track he wobbles on the camber of a Lambeth rooftop, fishing in his jacket pockets for the rainbows he intends to shower upon his firstborn, the confetti spectra that will be her welcome to these fields of light and loss, her memorable and reeking stained-glass debut. Telescoped in Snowy’s baggy eye the howling infant is become the shattered parent bellowing her grief along the church-quiet terraced row, the operatic staging underlined as suddenly a lone orchestral voice from offstage in the wings reprises note-for-note May Warren’s heartsick aria, but in a lower octave. Crouching on his stoop like a presiding gargoyle on cathedral guttering her father shifts his sad gaze and his first-night audience attention from the disappearing horse-drawn ambulance, from the diphtheria bus back to the crowding side-street’s nearer end and the anticipated source of this unkind and inappropriate accompaniment, this mocking counterpoint. His owl-eyed sister Thursa has appeared from nowhere at the elbow of the lane, the corner bending to a contour of the all-but-vanished castle’s previous fortifications. With accordion slung around her stringy neck as though some portable variety of Maxim gun and hair that of a senile gollywog, her entrance is electrifying. Her translucent fingers resting on the false-tooth rows of ivory triggers, Thursa dominates the brick amphitheatre for all of its classic tragedy and pouring radiance. Her older brother understands by the transported smile which plays about his broken and dissociative sibling’s lips that she is listening to the multiplying echoes of May’s scream and her squeeze-box response as propagated in an auditorium with concealed depth and volume, the sounds ricocheting in a supplementary space. He knows that she’s attempting to embed her tribute to May’s dying baby as a sonic solid in the glassy stuff of time, as an exquisite aural headstone for the Fiends and Builders to appreciate at their considerable leisure. His anguished daughter, on the other hand, can only see Thursa’s demented smirk, a silver thread of spit depending at one corner from between the browning molars. Thus provided with an opportune receptacle for her tremendous sense of unacceptable injustice, Snowy’s eldest wheels upon her aunt to vomit noise, a venting of unspeakable emotions from a place where language holds no jurisdiction. The tear-streaked tomato of May’s face ripens towards its bursting point. Her pole-axed soul is audible, its higher frequencies curdling the grubby air while Thursa, beaming and delighted at the thought of being joined in a duet, adjusts her placement on the keys and milks a further repetition of the devastated mother’s utterances out of her asthmatic instrument, once more at a descended pitch from the original. At this renewed affront May’s personality collapses visibly upon itself. She slumps in Tom’s grip, whimpering, and Thursa’s bird-claw hands dance on the keyboard mimicking every despairing vocal flight or fall. Snowy remembers that this is his cue to rise from his worn stone theatre seat and take his part in the eternally reiterated masquerade. Steering his sibling gently by her worsted sleeve he takes her to one side and solemnly informs her that her improvised performance is upsetting everyone; that little May has taken ill and will most likely soon be gone. At this point in her scolding Thursa giggles disconcertingly, recalling the largely-untroubled eight-year-old of near three dozen long winters ago. Eyes gleaming, she excitedly confides that far above mortality and at that very moment little
<em>May rides her grandfather’s shoulders, the agreeable face of their ambulatory totem pole, along the narrow avenues of what amounts to an extended city of the pyramidal, modernistic anthills that the duo have encountered, singly and at wide-spaced intervals, during the last few decades of their stampede through the biosphere’s decline. The mathematically self-referential shapes, repeating their own neatly pointed structure at progressively reducing scales, surround the travellers on every front in mesmerizingly exact and ordered chessboard rows, each geometric edifice perfectly equidistant from its fellows in a dizzying grid that reaches to the vast emporium’s eroding edges. The uninterrupted blue concavity of sky that’s presently surmounting this optically challenging expanse contains only the unpacked golden ingot of an ageing sun which shrivels the remaining crumpled tissue scraps of hypercloud to nothing. Picking their way daintily like a two-headed Gulliver through the thorny metropolis of an insectile Lilliput, the pair attempt a disquisition on the subject of the obviously highly adapted mounds and their significance. As the most senior member of the family present, it is Snowy’s firmly held contention that the ants are in all likelihood still-living creatures that have blundered physically into this spatially enhanced domain much as the pigeons and occasionally the cats do, back in those now-distant reaches of the temporal overpass where cats and pigeons still exist. Conversely, as the longest-dead of the two Armageddon tourists, May asserts her own belief that in all probability the oddly regular protrusions represent a posthumous extension of the hierarchically-arranged and combinatory awareness corresponding to each individual construction. Further, she suggests that the collective consciousness of every hill has seemingly evolved to a condition where it can imagine a continuation after its destruction or eventual dismantling. This evolution is implied, the baby reasons, by the arithmetically sophisticated alterations to the hills’ basic design. Being himself numerically inclined, her grandfather finds that he is reluctantly persuaded to this point of view. Begrudgingly he posits that the markedly self-replicating property displayed by these arresting figures indicates a calculating system of considerable sophistication and complexity, which in its turn perhaps denotes a level of mentation able to conceive of a hereafter, as his infant passenger maintains. The ever-smaller reproductions of the overall configuration would at least appear to demonstrate a grasp of algorithms, Snowy postulates, and in this manner their debate goes back and forth as they progress amongst the man-sized alien sandcastles. The azure lens of afternoon floods bloody as the human dray strides on through a declension of rich iris, tarry purple, and so forward to another of the subordinate planet’s nights. The couple tiptoe down a formic acid-fragranced boulevard beneath the radically extended risen moon, a compound of eight separate lunar spheres fused to a single brilliant cluster with its light a colloidal suspension silver-plating the hushed ranks of polyhedral bill-spikes stretching off in all directions. They go by the treasure-fountain of another daybreak and the soot-fall of a further dark, and there is no abatement to the neatly regimented ranks of prickly ziggurats that are distributed so as to occupy the floor-space of the chronologic causeway most efficiently. Snowy is gradually becoming apprehensive: “I don’t fancy bedding down between these buggers much, but I expect we’ll have to. It most probably runs on like this for centuries while this lot have their time Downstairs, with all these rows like cemetery markers and nowhere that we can stretch out and be comfortable.” After a pensive silence, his granddaughter shakes her catkin locks in disagreement. “I think that they might have had their time Downstairs already. Carry on another day’s length and we’ll see.’ Though doubtful, her antique conveyance does as he’s instructed. They continue through the paradise of ants while over them the cloudless stratosphere adjusts its palette, moon-chromed darkness burnishing to salmon dawn and thence to the monotonous, oppressive lapis of a world that’s dying for want of bad weather. Trudging through a lap approximately corresponding to mid-afternoon, May issues a reconnaissance appraisal from her elevated vantage: up ahead the dense-packed lattice is now chequered, every second pismire monument removed to leave a square of empty space. This gradual depopulation is persistent, and when they at last attain the violet outreaches of dusk there are no more ochre assemblies to be seen. The toddler theorises that an advanced species of ant may have been extant for a millennium or more without conspicuously manifesting at these altitudes of being, since colony-organism anthills are effectively immortal unless wiped away by some external force. The recently traversed apparent city, May believes, might be more properly perceived as indicator of a mass extinction, one concluded in only a day or so. They contemplate this as they make their camp, devour their last few Puck’s Hats and retire. On rising, they discover that the wolfskin bag is once more inexplicably refilled, and while they march on Snowy thinks of how</em>
the darkness over Fort Street is at least to some degree particulate the day his grandson Tommy calls, seeking assistance with his sums. The pall above the terrace is, he thinks, as much a product of his mood as of the waste-destructor tower in Bath Street, though the two aren’t wholly unconnected. The Destructor is no more than the most obvious sign of a voracious process chewing up the district in the decade since the end of the Great War. The earliest demolitions have left shocking absences amongst the area’s tilting byways, white cement-dust blanks on his internal map which line up worryingly with the hyphenations he has lately noticed in his memory. He’s halfway through his sixties and, even without the powers of calculation that his twelve-year-old descendant is depending on, has got a good idea of how all this is starting to add up. He’s going cornery, forgetting things, imagining things as he nears the terminus. Another four or five years if he’s lucky, though he might not have the faculties to count that high by then. His death, of course, does not discourage him; is just one more familiar station on his line. He’s seen it all before, the endless corridor and the convulsing old man with – what, paint? – Paint in his beard, those scraps of colour? Something like that, anyway. It doesn’t bother him. What bothers him are these slow increments of the Destructor and the meaningful world’s end commenced in Bath Street. As the beneficiary of a demanding Bedlam education Snowy knows what chimneys signify, knows the devouring nothingness potentially contained by every terracotta shell’s circumference. The greater part of the catastrophe he fears lies not in the material aspect, brown breath curling in the waste incinerator’s fifty-foot brick throat, but rather in the immaterial immolations that proceed unchecked; invisible. Symbols and principles are going up in the same billowing black cloud as shit and bacon rinds and jam-rags. Much as he resents the smutty thunderhead at present overshadowing his neighbourhood, his family, his shabby people, he is actively afraid for all those things if he should contemplate their gutted Heaven or their surely uninhabitable fire-sale future. It’s so dear to him, his world. Louisa offstage in the dripping-scented kitchen, humming something that might be “Till All the Seas Run Dry” with both raw fists around the handle of her spoon, churning the lumpy and reluctant fruitcake mixture. His embarrassed grandchild turning redder than a beetroot trying to conceal his pride when complimented on his aptitude for mathematics, his astute grasp of the underlying symmetries implicit in ten simple digits. Snowy cherishes the day’s every last atom, each translucent grease-spot on the paper spread across the elbow-polished tablecloth. He cannot bear the thought of all this human consequence become waste-matter and assigned to the Destructor, emptied onto the annihilating bonfire of selective English memory. Barely aware of what he’s doing he directs his pencil-stub into loose orbital trajectories, skimming the surface of the unfurled meat-wrap and describing two concentric circles, a toroidal outline seen in elevation or a pigeon’s-eye view down the barrel of a smokestack. Filling in the figures nought to nine at intervals around the ring, each numeral laterally opposite its secret mirror-twin, he makes the round band into the perimeter of an outlandish clock-face with its numbers disarranged, as though the medium of time itself were made abruptly unfamiliar. He begins explaining all of this to the eleven-year-old boy beside him, but can see already how the child’s attentive frown is shifting on a gradient from concentration to wary anxiety, starting to grow afraid both for and of his grandfather. From Tommy’s face Snowy assumes he must be shouting, though he can’t remember turning up the volume and knows anyway that it’s too late to stop. Under his winter wilderness of hair ideas are racing, are accelerating dangerously towards a fugue and skidding in collision. In his hands the drawing turns from skewed clock to cross-sectioned chimneypot and then at last into the pitiless, negating glyph of a distended zero, grown so fat on vacuum that its curving boundaries struggle to restrain it. He screws up the butchers’ paper to an angry ball, propels it overarm into the blazing hearth just as the presciently alert Louisa leaves her baking to announce that the maths lesson is now done, dismissing their unnerved and apprehensive-looking grandson, sending him off home out of harm’s way, out into Fort Street where it’s snowing filth. Fascists in Italy, the new chap with the big moustache in Russia and they reckon everything began out of a dirty great explosion. Turning like a bull about the fragile matchbox living room he knows they’re right, but that they have not yet absorbed what their discovery implies regarding time. The primal detonation is still going on, is here, is now, is everyone, is <em>this</em>. We are all bang, and all the thoughts and doings of our lives are but ballistics. There are neither sins nor virtues, only the contingencies of shrapnel. In his wheeling trample, Snowy is brought short by the reflection in a looking glass above their fireplace: an ancient mariner, ranting and staring back from an uncannily extended space. He breaks the mirror with a paperweight. It’s all too much like his recurring premonition, where
<em>the geriatric pony snorts and capers in a passageway of aerodrome enormity, undressed and cherub-ridden. Those untrammelled trees which once erupted from the many vents set in this upper storey’s base are gone with not even their petrifying hulks remaining, whereby shadow is made into a diminishing resource rarer than tanzanite. Above, the over-sky’s daunting expanse is now unmitigated by the least intruding bough or spar and seems infected by a faintly greenish tinge. It is May’s supposition that this might result from altered planetary atmospheric composition in the absence of both water and biology, the varying wavelengths of sunlight scattered differently as consequence. The old man, slobbering gob filled with the succulent ghost-fungi that his thoughtful rider feeds to him like sugar-lumps as they continue their ridiculous safari, cannot disagree. The leagues of day are a thin soup of peridot,</em> <em>entirely unrelieved by cloud or crouton, while the leagues of night are clearer than an icicle and bursting with schematic star, unfolded comet. Underfoot the granular sawdust detritus of pulverised forests is at last exhausted, and the eon-treading couple are astonished to discover that beneath this carpet of organic litter the pine floorboards of Mansoul are no more to be seen. At some unnoticed demarcation point of the icebound or overgrown millennia already travelled the planed planks have been replaced by – or have otherwise reverted to – coarse and uneven rock, a two-mile broad promontory of randomly amalgamated limestone, flint and hard chalk reaching off into a lifeless deep where only astrophysics and geology endure. The bordering arcade walls are now a smooth igneous tumble of liquescent dream-material, though still high enough to adequately mask whatever flattened remnants of the Second Borough yet exist beyond the strip’s extensive margins. Stepping like a mummified flamingo, Snowy circumspectly navigates their way about the numerous irregularly contoured apertures that perforate the former boardwalk’s rugged mineral flooring. Lacking animated creatures to provide the snaking jewellery forms that previously typified the lower realm as seen from this superior elevation, now the holes look uniformly onto ragged patches of bare desert. Nothing moves, nothing respires, the attics having finally outstripped the breath. They carry on through brownish dawns, green days, blood-orange sunsets and wide onyx stripes lit by a sickle moon expressed as eight such crescents interlinked, a puzzle-ball in silver. Pushing forward into centuries untenanted they while away their trek with self-invented travel games, compiling lists of things that are no more, like consciousness, or pain, or water. When they tire of this pursuit they try a variation listing those phenomena that yet endure, such as the periodic table, certain anaerobic species of bacteria, and gravity. This second set of items, while extensive, is more readily exhausted than the first and therefore does not entertain them for so long. If they become fatigued by either their perpetual transit or the unremitting sense of end they doze on stone beneath a hyperbolic zodiac, the naked man sprawled like a pile of sticks, an unlit fire, beside the almost empty wolf-pouch in which he insists the clever baby snoozes. Waking, walking through night’s residues to breakfast in the burning sepia of a colour-shifted daybreak they could almost be a pair of bronzes struck to represent the old year bearing in the new. With vegetation no more than a memory and memory itself forgotten, May and Snowy’s view along the corridor ahead is no longer curtailed by obstacles. Their ocular abilities, enhanced by death, should offer them an unrestricted prospect of the everlasting hall, this being straight in its construction and entirely unaffected by the curvature of the terrestrial world beneath. However, as they plod the towpath ages both remark upon their inability to see beyond a certain point of the great lane before them. This, they reason, must imply a contradictory bend in the plumb-line precision of the avenue’s geometry, or else exemplify the rounded bulge of the continuum itself, their sightline limited by spacetime’s intervening humped meniscus. Further down the road the overreaching heavens are striated into varicoloured stripes of dark or day, bandwidth compressing with proximity to the unnervingly remote horizon. Doggedly the wizened Atlas perseveres, hefting his blonde encumbrance through the barren minutes and evacuated hours, reducing their still-unexplained reserve of Bedlam Jennies as they go. When May reports two distinct specks in the far distance her grandfather is at first inclined to scepticism, a position subsequently modified after they’ve traipsed a few more land-weeks and the vanishingly tiny dots have swollen and resolved themselves into a man and woman wearing fashionable 1920s clothing, more outrageous in their way than any of the super-ants or sunlight-fed replacement men thus far encountered. The anachronistic couple stand their rough-hewn ground, patiently watching the extraordinary infant and the time-tramp she is riding in their slow approach, and Snowy notes that the impeccably dressed pair are holding hands. Of the extinguished things that he and May have previously listed, the romance and sex are what he misses most. He thinks about the way</em>
Earth’s scudding satellite outruns filleted clouds above the cattle market, keeping pace with Snowy and the landlord’s bonny daughter from the Anchor, a celestial chaperone for their first proper evening out. He doesn’t know the town that well as yet except through an amalgamated sense of premonition and nostalgia, so has no idea where she’s taking him. The mellowing bouquet of cow-manure along Victoria Promenade is somehow intimate, and even though he hasn’t seen Louisa for the six long months that he’s had work in Lambeth, he is firm in his presentiment that by the time tonight is done with he’ll have had her knickerbockers down over those shapely ankles and will also have proposed his sex-damp hand in marriage. Overhead the July stars are diamond pepper grinded from the mills of space and at his side, night-amplified, the metronome tock of her heels is music he will set his life to. Talking in low voices so as not to dissipate the atmosphere he lets her warm, demanding counterweight on his right arm steer both of them into the reaching black of the Cow Meadow, giggling and unsupervised to where the only jurisdiction is of tactful shadow. Caught in resin by the gaslight near the lavatories two working men exchange a bristly kiss and fumble with each other’s buttons, while girls coo from out the rustling bushes like nocturnal pheasant eager for their beaters. Whispering, Louisa and her beau pass on into the gasping dark as all around another Friday ends in moonlit joy and jetting seed and grass-stain; in the peerless and abiding silver luxury of dogs or paupers. Rolled out on benighted pasture in a carpet grey as beaten tin, their path delivers them unto a gravel walk beside the tinkling river, crawling away east between tall undertaker trees towards tomorrow morning. Upstream a reflected moon puffs pockmarked cheeks and holds its breath beneath the tinsel surface but here, overlooked by conifers, an iron bridge arcs across obscure torrents that are made from only sound, a gush of metal syllables like small change jingling in a wishing well. At the halfway point of the creaking span a breeze unpins one strand of her sienna hair, and in his tender stretch to tuck it back their lips fall upon one another as though feuding sea-anemones until Louisa says “Not here” and leads him, blind, onto a starlight-painted island bifurcating the onrushing waters. Worn by countless feet down to its sandstone nub, a track lassoes the land’s perimeter. They walk around it to the isle’s far side, attempting casualness at first, then hurrying, then laughing as they each abandon all pretence and break into a run. The worn turf bank, moulded by love across the course of several smelly-fingered centuries, has overlaid impressions of ten generations’ breasts and buttocks visible to fancy as a palimpsest in the slope’s contours. An accommodating sycamore spreads out its knuckled roots for the forthcoming game of jacks, and current catches on stout reeds, and sky snags on the clawing branch-tops. Standing, kneeling, lying down, they sink by stages in the foaming clover with tongues jousting and their hands at war with fastenings, with elastic. Blouse discarded and the rudimentary flesh-tone camisole displaced, Louisa wears her tits with necessary pride, white lionesses slumped magnificently on their ridge above the hollow of her ribcage. An innovative, ambitious tamer without either whip or chair, sequentially he takes their heads into his mouth. Sweat-savoury, the nipples swell as if about to hatch fritillaries and Snowy and Louisa are both thrilled and gasping kids at the perennial circus. Underneath the marquee linen of her skirt warm thighs part like some tight-pressed crowd granting admission to a secret sideshow, where his callused digits are allowed ingress two at a time. Like undecided customers they hover at the velvet entrance, venturing inside before withdrawing only to push in once more, unable to make up their minds. The hem goes up like curtains and the drawers go down like lights and there, there is the never-before-seen exotic animal; there is the slippery slapstick stage. A cat crouched at its saucer, hunching there between her legs he laps and tries to savour like a connoisseur but in the end gives up to guzzle like a costermonger. Gnawed ferociously she spends and screams and then is glazed with acquiescent shock, a downed and shuddering wildebeest and when he takes his prick out of his trousers it’s like iron, newly cast and ready to be quenched, immersed, with a great rush of steam. She reaches awkwardly to steer it home by hand and he is launched into her, an exquisitely slow slide on an oiled gantry, sinking into warmth up to his curly waterline. The scent of cunt and river curving to a lime-sharp edge of pressed mimosa fires him, and he understands their furious coupling in the engineering sense, both of them functioning as one rapturous lubricated moving part, hissing and racketing in time’s invisible machinery. Slick mercury boils over from its bulb and he ejaculates inside her, spurts their daughter May into a Lambeth gutter and their same-name granddaughter into the fever cart. He squirts a thousand names and histories, spunks Jack into a foreign grave and Mick into a steel-drum reclamation yard and Audrey into an asylum. He comes grief and paintings and accordion music, as he knows he must, to guarantee that several million years away in the abandoned ruins of paradise
<em>the nude berserker and his piggybacking conscience start to gradually decrease their frightful pace when they are some three geographic days from the two well-dressed strangers, coming finally to a standstill, eye-to-eye in the miscoloured furnace of another post-organic dawn. The woman, short and shapely, wears a dress of shimmering viridian to her knees with dove-grey stockings and jade court shoes, hair an auburn tumble to her bare and handsome shoulders. Her escort has the appearance of a late Victorian dandy clad in just-discovered mauves and wistful violets, his immaculate frock-coat ensemble topped incongruously by a battered junk-shop bowler hat that looks like someone might have died in it. Against the tangerine effulgence of a compound sunrise their contrasting hues affect a lurid harmony of the kind sometimes found in dreams. Beside the duo, covering a gingham tablecloth unfolded on the petrifactive arcade floor is a mouth-watering heap of fresh-picked Puck’s Hats. “My name’s Marjorie Miranda Driscoll while this is my consort, Mr. Reginald J. Fowler, and I must say it’s a privilege to meet the pair of you. You’re in a book I’m writing – I hope that’s alright – and we’ve been tunnelling through the ghost-seam to keep you supplied with food. I don’t think we can do it anymore, though. There’s not much left of Mansoul beyond this point, so there’s no way of climbing up here. I’m afraid there’s no more rations after this, so I thought that we’d take the opportunity to introduce ourselves and tell you where the Bedlam Jennies have been coming from.” Her voice and her delivery, though adult and well-spoken, have a quality like that of a child playing dress-up or an actress who’s still settling into her role, so that Snowy surmises neither she nor her companion have been attired in their current semblances for very long. The young man seems especially discomfited by his well-heeled apparel, running a censorious finger round inside his high starched collar and occasionally expectorating a dismissive wad of ecto-phlegm, more as a statement than for any decongestant purpose. At their feet the barren stone is wet with citrus light where their stilt-walking shadows are stretched tight behind, like rubber bands nearing the limit of Hooke’s law. Having shook hands in formal introduction and with May dismounted, the unusual quartet arranges itself comfortably about the square of linen for a fungal picnic under skies abandoned save for blinding apricot. Convivially, they interrogate each other. May enquires after the seemingly ongoing dissolution of this upper realm, beyond the causeway’s distant and subsided bounding walls, and learns that there is nothing left: even the Works is a deserted shell, with its remaining crook-doors made progressively more inaccessible by the continuing collapse. Next, the demure Miss Driscoll asks if Snowy and his granddaughter, as the protagonists of her forthcoming second novel, are expecting to encounter the Third Borough anywhere between here and the end of time. After a thoughtful pause, the white-haired veteran replies that no, he’s not anticipating any such convergence. “Although if we haven’t stumbled over him by then, at least we’ll have a good idea of where he’s not.” Out of a satin cloche-bag that she carries the young authoress produces a slim tome with green cloth boards, inlaid with a gold illustration and the volume’s title, which is</em> “The Dead Dead Gang”<em>. This, as she explains, is a signed presentation copy of her debut that she would be deeply honoured were they to accept. Turning the offering over in his starved spider-crab hands Snowy admires the binding, wondering aloud if Mr. Blake of Lambeth was not in some measure an accomplice to its manufacture. Both their world’s-end guests nod eagerly at this and Mr. Fowler breathlessly recounts, with the excitability of a far younger man, how he and his intended have gone all the way along the Ultraduct from Doddridge Church out to the higher regions up above Hercules Road, soliciting advice on publishing from the pugnacious and inflammatory divine. “ ’E wiz a smashing bloke. I really liked ’im.” Equally enthusiastically, May tells how she and her bedraggled nag have called upon the roughneck visionary and his wife when they themselves essayed the dazzling overpass along its length from Chalk Lane to terrestrial Jerusalem. “When we met with them they were being Eve and Adam, reading Mr. Milton’s verses to each other in the nude. That’s really why we thought we’d go without clothes on this longer expedition. It just seemed like something that the Blakes might do.” Miss Driscoll scribbles something in an oyster-tinted notebook at this juncture, yet when asked about it blushes crimson and explains that she is merely jotting brief descriptions as to both the timbre and the colouration of the marvel-baby’s voice. “Melt-water trying to be serious” is all she’ll let them read. “It wizn’t very good. I’ll more than likely change it.” They trade anecdotes in the unwavering amber of the dead world’s daybreak and then load all the remaining Puck’s Hats into May and Snowy’s predatory haversack, along with the donated book, before making their last farewells. Sartorially splendid in the fires of Earth’s unmaking the young couple wander hand in hand towards the avenue’s far margins. Taking May once more onto his shoulders, Snowy reminisces about</em>
how the world appears to dance with youth and shape itself to youthful expectation and requirement, at least to the young. At seventeen the gale-tossed trees that fringe his many roads are making supplication but to him and Lambeth is his ornament, meaningful only when included in his gaze, not there if he’s not. Women of the borough make their beauty visible exclusively in his vicinity, a colour which they emanate beyond that spectrum readily discernible to other men, apparent solely to the chosen pollinator. Hedgerows fruit with breasts miraculously at his passing. There are secret tide-pool lilies opening in lace undergrowth along his path as though he’s Spring itself, brimful of birdsong and forever on the bone with pretty windfall arses everywhere. He has more sperm in him than he knows what to do with and the planet circling about his axis seems to share the same promiscuous excitement, shooting lightbulbs, telephonic apparatus and the annexation of South Africa in glossy rivulets across the mundane counterpane. The hands of history are deep in sticky pockets, rummaging, and Britain rules a moment which it has mistaken for the globe. Even in Queen Victoria ascendant as Empress of India he sees all the components of a subsequent decline, even if one not culminated in his lifetime. There will be resentment; massacre worse than Bulgaria; futile Satsuma rallyings against inevitable change; ghouls dressed in newspaper who wait a little further down the empire’s as yet only partially unrolled red carpet. Grinding rhythmically against the ancient and incurious alley wall, wearing a squeaking breastplate made of girl and a tight belt of legs, he is exultant in the mechanism, throws his head back barking at the stars and knows the future’s jests and injuries to be already acted. Standing in a hammering South London downpour is the ruffian John Vernall, rumoured to be touched, aware that all the individual droplets in their pounding vertical descent are actually unmoving, are continuous liquid threads that reach from storm-front down to street in long parabolas through solid time. Careening like some Hindu god or stroboscopic photograph amidst the static crystal floss, only the motion of his mind in the concealed direction makes it rain. Nothing, excepting the involuntary forward momentum of his consciousness from one half-second to the next, transmutes the angry martial statuary of a pub yard into the yapping brawl with settled scores and noses blossoming to bloodflowers. The process of his attentions turns the sky, and otherwise the clouds and zodiac are still. Rogue Elephant Boys, unafraid of anybody, swerve in their stampede to keep out of his way for fear that his condition might be catching, terrified lest they end up as human spiders more contented with the vertical than with the horizontal, railing from a rooftop about arseholes, lifebelts and geometry. He strolls between the bloody, arcing billhooks of their confrontations unconcerned, a prescient pigeon strutting carelessly amongst the dropping hooves and crushing carriage wheels. The ructions and the razors cannot kill him; cannot hinder him in his eventual appointment with the tulips and the looking-glasses, fifty years from here and in another town, another century. He’d like to meet a Spring-Heeled Jack, one of the phantom clan prolific in the city throughout the preceding decade, leaping flea-like over barns and middens with their fireball breath reflecting in the circular glass lenses of their eyes. Even should they prove to be marsh-gas or else Pepper’s Ghosts, theatric spectres conjured in an angled pane, still he believes he’d find an easier berth in that outrageous troupe than with the flightless company abroad upon the avenues and bridges, harnessed by the flattened limits of their Ludo-token days. Sore pimples bubble in the creases of his nose and dirt silts on the webbing in between his fingers, a saliva-born black residue cast up by near-incessant self-pollution. Beer is the brown blanket that he pulls over his head to muffle a cajoling world on those occasions when he feels his tender age, when understanding raw apocalypse in every, every, every instant is too much for him. At night he hears the herald angles bellowing fierce imprecations in their queer exploding language and he huddles with his daffy sister, who can hear them too. “Don’t cry, Thurse. It’s not you they’re after.” While this isn’t true it sets the bird-thin fifteen-year-old’s echoing cathedral mind to rest, at least until the next time that the builders who knocked up the sun dance on the roof in thunder-boots and shout their terrible imperatives. They’re after everyone, that’s the plain fact of it, but save their energies for those who are not deaf to their deranging voices, him especially. Sometimes he looks for solace on the pleasure-hills, amidst the million lamps and cancan thighs of Highbury with all the other freaks and acrobats, and even there he hears their typhoon remonstrations telling him to bed this woman but not that one, telling him to hobble sixty miles northwest or shin a hundred feet directly upwards. Unsolicited they show him tableaux from a little further down his individual fleshy tunnel as it worms its way into futurity. There is a marriage in a fine hall with a builder watching from the rooftop’s crest. There is a grandchild born then born away, and even when he’s dead, when everyone and everything are dead, he knows that
<em>the old warhorse charges naked on a final highway, baby-ridden under gradually migrant galaxies. The doomsday ramblers pause less frequently along the featureless rock ribbon to make camp and feast on their decreasing fungal rations, spitting out the optic pips in hope of thriving Puck’s Hat colonies as food caches for their eventual homecoming. When they approximate sleep, Snowy settles for a bed of stone and curls his knobbly spine about the infant mumbling in her wolfskin bag while space and time are steadily unpicked above. During the daylight miles it is apparent that the Earth has cloud once more, furled ochre cellophane which May surmises may be chlorine in an admixture with methane. During dark the half-moon multiplies into a Deco abstract wreathed in vapour, with its light a spectrographic halo-stain on evening’s filter paper. All this change and distance, Snowy thinks, and they’ve not left the Boroughs. Little Cross Street and Bath Passage are still down beneath them somewhere, albeit in a state of chemical and geological deterioration. They continue. When the sack of Mad Apples is finally all but exhausted they experience what first seems to be a mirage born of starvation, a peculiar mirror-fluke of the great alley’s atmospherics: racing down the barren strip towards them from its far end comes an old man with a baby on his shoulders. So exact is the reflection that the travellers half-expect an imminent collision with some monstrous pane hereto invisible, both knocked unconscious, leaving a Daguerreotype of their spread-eagle impact printed on the glass in feather-residue. They are surprised, then, when their doppelgangers turn out to be as substantial as themselves; turn out indeed to be themselves on the return leg of their legendary journey. Both the Mays dismount and hug each other while the old men merely shake each other gruffly by the hand. “Well, now. How has this business come about?” “It’s hard to say. It strikes me that the end of time is like the last day of a school term, when the non-essential rules may be somewhat relaxed and minor paradoxical infringements are occasionally permitted.” “Did you reach the end of time, then?” “Oh, most certainly, but you’ll appreciate that it would be improper of us to convey more than the scantest details.” “You don’t want to push your luck with all the paradox and that?” “That’s it exactly. I can tell you that you’ll do all right for Puck’s Hats, though. Only a few weeks west of here we’ve lately passed the place where you will shortly spit your last few seeds out, and there’s a fine patch of fairy-blossoms already established. Some way further on you’ll find another, probably resulting from the spat-out eyeballs of the colony just mentioned, and so forth until you reach the point where I am now and find yourself explaining all this claptrap to a slightly younger fellow. It occurs to me that we have possibly had our behaviour controlled by Bedlam Jennies so that they may propagate their species to the very limits of spacetime’s duration.” “Put like that it sounds like an outlandish notion, but upon reflection I’ll allow that it provides a stronger motive for our visit to the end of time, which until now has only been to find if such a thing is there or not, and what it looks like if it is.” “Oh, it’s a sight, you can be sure of it. By then, of course, the mass of things is gone and taken with it all the gravity. Likewise the nuclear forces are by then retired and put to bed, but still, for saying there is very little substance it’s a most substantial show. Ah, well. We’ve dallied long enough, and I do not recall our conversation having had a great deal more to it than this. Might I suggest we shoulder our respective babies, taking great care not to mix them up and thus cause an insoluble controversy, following which we shall both be upon our separate ways, as I recall this puzzling but not unwelcome incident.” The two Mays, who have been conversing quietly throughout all this, are lifted back up onto their respective steeds. After an unexpectedly emotional farewell both duos once again continue with their journeys, bare feet slapping on the causeway’s rugged stone, heading in opposite directions on their tightrope over time until in only a few hours of distance they are mutually invisible. Progressing inexorably towards the end of everything, the end of even endings, Snowy’s nominally earlier incarnation asks his passenger what passed between her and the other May during their unanticipated meeting. “I made sure that I remembered everything she told me so that I could say it back correctly by the time I’m her. The most important thing she said was, ‘We have come back from Jerusalem, where we found not what we sought.’ I asked her what she meant, but she just shook her head and wouldn’t tell me.” Pounding down the hard miles to finality, Snowy considers this. Other than an obscure suspicion that the comment might have some connection with the same Professor Jung who failed to fathom Lucia Joyce, he is no nearer to a resolution by the time he and his rider reach the paradoxical expanse of Puck’s Hats that their future selves have told them to expect. They dutifully eat the last of their existing rations, spitting out the pretty eyes before they go on to collect a sack-full of the mature blossoms that those seeds will grow or have already grown into. Dining upon impossibilities the old man can still picture how</em>
his earliest encounter with the food that ghosts eat comes when he’s aged twelve and drunk on ale for the first time, a brimming jug he’s swiped from home and swiftly emptied in the fornication-scented alleyways of Lambeth. Reeling full of bravery and poison past the walls of the old Bethlehem, his stumble is arrested by the sight of flickering colour dancing just above the darkened paving slabs ahead. In the same way that floating shapes behind the eyelids often crystallise into coherent images when on the brink of sleep, so too does the prismatic shimmering resolve into an insubstantial coterie of tiny ladies with no clothes on. Through the intervening folds of beer and murk he marvels at their tits and fannies, being the first proper ones he’s seen, and can’t believe his luck. The women waver and there is a sound they make that is initially like individual voices giggling, and yet after a time these seem to merge into a high-pitched whine at the periphery of the young drunkard’s hearing. He stands leaning with one palm against the mossy stone of the asylum gatepost, wondering muddily if this means he’s about to die, and is not reassured when passing strollers seem to only laugh or voice their disapproval at his obvious inebriation while they kick obliviously by or through the haze of naked manikins cavorting at their feet. He understands with a dull pang of apprehension that these manifested fantasies are visible or audible to him alone, perhaps a vision presaging his own internment in the institution he is currently propped up against, made an apprentice madman to his own incarcerated father, both off with the fairies. Swallowing warm spit he thinks about the inmate that he saw on his last visit with his sister, elderly and scabby-faced from the repeated self-inflicted beating of his head against a door. The stolen booze and scalding bile erupt into John Vernall’s throat and he is copiously, blasphemously sick over the gossamer-winged little people swirling unconcerned about his ankles. Undulate as weed in water the translucent nymphs ignore slivers of fish-flesh from his supper, part-dissolved and steaming, and continue with their lazy sway as if moved by a breeze or current rather than their own volition. Sweat streams down his forehead. Foot-long threads of dribble dangle trembling from his panting mouth, his sagging chin, and the damp pavement is on fire with girls. Their perfect pink-white faces are identical and make him think of sugar mice, the features blank and motionless with no more human feeling than if he were scrutinising some ingeniously camouflaged variety of insect, horrid beetle thoughts concealed behind the painted icing of their eyes. The mere idea precipitates a second surge of vomit and the unconcerned minuscule females, stood in its foul spatter as though showering in some crystal waterfall, elicit yet a third. Distantly he becomes aware that other passers-by are drawing closer and prepares for further mockery, only to look up in surprise when this is not forthcoming. Even through the filter of his reeling senses he immediately realises that there’s something wrong with the approaching onlookers. Drifting unhurriedly towards him along the inadequately gas-lit street come two men and a woman, shabbily attired and without any colour whatsoever, figures carved from smoke. They seem to be in agitated conversation but the noise of this is muffled, as if come from far away or else as though his ears are plugged with wax. The trio pause when they draw level and regard him, albeit with a less judgemental eye than the nocturnal stragglers who passed him earlier. One of the men says something to the oddly dressed old woman, evidently with regard to the inebriated urchin, but it’s much too faint to hear. Shivering now and drenched in icy perspiration, he is disappointed to discover that these unobtrusive newcomers are no more able to perceive the pixies pirouetting in his spew than were their raucous predecessors. Something else, however, seems to have attracted their attention: silvery and grey like a Daguerreotype, the crone in her old-fashioned skirts and bonnet is now pointing to the upper reaches of the pillar that the boy is slumped against. Her lips are moving as though under glass, her utterances only audible to her two male and monochrome companions, one of whom steps forward now and reaches up to fumble under the eroded, jutting lip of the post’s capstone. As he does, one of his sooty arms slips through John’s own outstretched and trembling limb as if it isn’t there. The tall and spindly man seems to be prising something blurred and indistinct from off the madhouse gates, and simultaneously the pretty miniatures are guttering like candle flames. The shrill hum that he had at first mistaken for their voices rises to a maddening whistle and then shuts off altogether, at which point the pygmy dancers vanish into scintillating dust and he is staring only at a pool of his own recent stomach contents upon which the iridescent meat-flies are already settling. The lofty wraith is lifting something down, some shadowy and writhing octopus or hydra, tearing off its limbs and sharing them amongst his phantom colleagues as the three fade gradually from sight. Surrendering, the wayward youth closes his eyes. The liquid shapes bloomed from that private dark are truant stars above a ceaselessly unreeling scroll of path where
<em>the relentless bag of bones runs on, hunchbacked with innocence. The barren avenue that vanishes beneath him is entirely featureless save for the welcome clusters of chronology-defying Bedlam Jennies, so much so that these oases, blossomed from the bedrock at roughly millennial intervals, become the travellers’ only clock or calendar. Even the apertures that once looked down on the terrestrial First Borough are now mostly gone, healed over with what seem to be volcanic sediments, and other than celestial dramas acted on the canopies of night or daylight overhead their expedition is without event. At their infrequent rest-stops they read chapters from Miss Driscoll’s book to one another and attempt to calculate, from the configurations of the sky, how many billion years they are from home. Snowy thinks two but May seems relatively certain that it’s three. In the nocturnal stretches of their journey into afterwards the overhanging firmament seems crammed with hyper-stars, a lot more than there used to be. The learned infant speculates that this stellar profusion has resulted from the Milky Way commencing its collision with another astronomical array, most probably Andromeda. Her theory is corroborated after seventy or eighty further Puck’s Hat patches have been passed, by which point the immeasurable dark above them is a chaos of crashing suns, a catastrophic ballet staged in extra mathematical dimensions. The appalling centrepiece of this performance is a struggle to the death between two fields of nothingness, hungry immensities which May informs her grandfather are said to lurk unseen at each star-system’s heart, their frightful mass responsible for turning the jewelled nebulae. The spheres of blackness are made visible by radiating silver halos of what the eighteen-month-old believes to be unfolded X-rays spindling out to fill the heavens, the twin auras overlapping in a terrifying moiré of annihilation. Further scrutiny reveals that both monstrosities are wearing trophy-belts of dust accumulated from the helpless interstellar bodies they have whirled around at inconceivable velocities and smashed together, pulverised on impact. Inexorably the dark giants make their mutual approach, cannibal emperors unwavering in their determination to devour each other there in the arena of a ruined cosmos. Trying not to look at the deranging spectacle above them, Snowy and his granddaughter pass on. Years in their thousands are left trampled underfoot. The warring midnight absences presiding over that bare strip of track appear to be attempting some tremendous fusion into one light-swallowing colossus, with the rioting stars about them gradually resolved into a new merged galaxy that Snowy dubs Milkdromeda but May refers to as the Andy Way. The travellers persevere, amusing themselves by inventing names for the unrecognisably collided constellations, birth-signs for an era without births: the Great Chrysanthemum, the Bicycle, the Little Tramp. They carry on, and during the diurnal reaches of their passage observe that the unpacked fireball about which the planet spins is noticeably larger, an effect that can no longer be attributed to atmospheric vagaries. The white-gold orb’s engorgement worsens and when they have hiked another million or so years there is above them nothing but inferno from horizon to horizon, Mercury and Venus both engulfed already in the bloody solar bloat. For what seems an unending distance the intrepid pair are journeying in flame and settling down to sleep on ember stones that pulse red and translucent even through the ectoplasm of the couple’s eyelids. Both agree that slumber on a burning bed is contrary to every human instinct and thus offers little in the way of respite, though of course they are no more discomfited by the apparent heat than by the icebound floorboards of what now seems an eternity ago. To their considerable relief, the fairy-fungus that sustains them seems alike impervious to such perceived amendments of the temperature, and at their next stop they discover an extensive colony of the exquisite radiating doll-forms thriving on that furnace-bright terrain. Soldiering on, when May and Snowy have at last become accustomed to incessant conflagration so that pyrotechnic vistas are no longer cause for comment, it takes countless centuries before they realise that the elderly and swollen sun is dwindling by steady increments in the long, shamefaced aftermath of its infanticidal binge. A near-incalculable distance later it has been reduced to a discarded cigarette-end, winking out of being in the universe’s lightless gutter. Solemnly aware that they are witnessing the death of day, the old man and the child proceed with their excursion into unrelieved immortal night. As they progress the dark above them is evacuated of its last illuminations when even the starlight is extinguished, Arcturus and Algol either snuffed like candles or else relocated by a constantly expanding universe to somewhere out beyond the curvature of spacetime; over the continuum’s horizon and too far away for even radiance to travel. Navigating with their dead-sight they move through a landscape with its contour outlines stitched in tinsel. Finally disoriented by his own duration, Snowy wonders if the whole adventure is another of his fabulous delusions, flashing momentarily through his disordered mind as</em>
he goes wandering from his Fort Street home, uncertain of what year it is or where he lives. Shuffling lost down Moat Street he remembers it as being filled with water once and wonders when they had it drained. The fish must have looked dreadful, flopping and asphyxiating in the gutters. It all changes in a wink these days, everything vanishing or turning into something different. Following a path of least resistance, a well-trodden street-plan crease, he rolls up Bristol Street and down Chalk Lane where there are poppies squirting out of brown-gold crevices in the old burial ground’s limestone wall. Across the way the turquoise paint on the Blue Anchor’s signboard peels and curls beguilingly beneath the sharpened Wednesday morning sunshine, every detail of its scabby surface limned in fire. He knows they’ve got a lovely girl behind the bar there at the Anchor, beautiful Louisa who he got his oats with down in Beckett’s Park a while ago. He only hopes his missus never learns of it. Beneath a fleeting cloud of muddled guilt he shambles on through summer, heading for Black Lion Hill and Marefair down the dappled lane. Carthorses nod in passing to each other on the blinding cobbles and he weaves his passage cautiously between them to the sanctuary pavement outside Peter’s Church while all the crumbling monsters of its stonework gape at him in outrage. When he makes his way along a hairline alley to the building’s rear the Saxon chapel seems to him ablaze with moment and significance as if he’s looking at it for the first time or the last, and in Narrow Toe Lane he finds he cannot see for tears although he doesn’t know what they’re in aid of and within a dozen paces has forgotten them. White cumuli slide down the sky like foamy spittle over Green Street. Underfoot the York stone flags carry the scars of ancient rivers, fossil fingerprints that he supposes were made several hundred million years ago when only trilobites and ammonites lived in this little row of terraced houses, slithering out to sit and chat on their front steps during the warm Precambrian evenings. The ancestral buildings, crouched and tired and leaning on each other, have an aura of familiarity as if the millipede of his true form expressed through time has on countless occasions doubled back and forth upon itself along these weathered slabs, and it occurs to him that he has family here. Doesn’t he have a daughter living somewhere round these parts, a girl named May? Or is it May who died of the diphtheria when she was just a baby? Snowy trudges past a sequence of ill-fitting wooden doors, their numbering up in the high eighties, and at last finds one he thinks he recognises right at the far end, Elephant Lane, down that way, next door to the builder’s merchants with the painted gate. Unpolished and thus slowly darkening, the old brass doorknob squirms reluctantly against his sweaty palm then yields. The heavy slab of pitch-stained black swings open with a whinny from its hinges to reveal a passageway, its weak illumination and tea-brown obscurity conflated in the old man’s senses with its bouillon scent of rising damp and sagging flesh. He sees the human odours, smells the light and cannot recall ever having done things otherwise. Shutting the door behind him without looking he moves down the cramped hall, calling out a speculative greeting to the darkness squatting halfway up the stairway but the dark has clearly had enough of him, like everybody else, and doesn’t answer. Nobody’s about, his entrance to the silent living room confirms, excepting for a cat that he believes might be called Jim, asleep before an unlit fireplace, and three bright viridian meat-flies that he doesn’t know the names of. A south-facing window ladles rays across the room in strictly rationed measures, smearing yellow honey on the glazed bulge of a flower-vase or along the varnished curve of the piano-lid and suddenly it comes to him that he’s known all of this before, the cat, the flowers, the angle of the sun, the same three nameless flies. He’s known this moment all his days, down to its most excruciating detail. Part of him has always been here in this half-lit cubicle while he’s been otherwise engaged with swaying on the Guildhall’s slates and walking in a trance to Lambeth, visiting his father in the madhouse, copulating on the riverbank or being sick over the little folk. By the same token he knows he’s still there in all those other places even now and doing all those other things, still wavering on the brink of that tall rooftop; that short woman. He is teetering now upon the speckled hearthside rug, finally overcome by vertigo at the sheer drop of his own continuity. Exhausted by it all he sinks into a battered armchair and the window-shine behind him turns his thinning hair to phosphorous. The chained dog in his stomach growls reproachfully and he’s forgotten the last time he ate, along with all his other vital details. This is where he dies, he understands that. These walls that enclose him are his last ones and the world beyond this square of carpet is a world he’ll never tread again. He feels remote from his own creaking frame, hungry and aching in the chair, as if his circumstances were all something happening in a play, a well-known closing act repeated line for line, night after night; life a recurring dream the dead have. The old nuisance can’t tell if he’s really here, the unnamed flies impatiently anticipating his demise, or if
<em>he’s sprinting through the final night that has no dawn with his dead grandchild yanking at his ears to spur him on. Above, the void disorganises. Heat is fled save for those vestiges at the reactive cores of cosmic halo objects, vast accumulations of dark matter only rendered visible by a decreasing pulse of infrared until this too is ceased. The muffled metronome of padding feet on stone is their accompaniment in straits where universal darkness and frigidity are made inseparable; where black is just cold’s colour. Doggedly they journey on, spacetime’s last spectres running blind towards a limit that they only know is there because they’ve met themselves returning from it. This is the one certainty they cling to through the endless, lightless distances, and it only when they are beginning to doubt even this that from her human crow’s nest May reports a fleck of radiance at the vanishing point of their all-but vanished highway. By the time they’ve drawn a few millennia closer, this scant spark has swollen to contain the empty skies above in their entirety, a shimmering butterfly corona from horizon to horizon, a display of shifting marbled hues which the two pilgrims have all but forgot the names of. Stood against this dazzle where the road appears to end abruptly in an iridescent nothing is what seems to be a single silhouetted figure of unusual height and girth, positioned as though waiting patiently for Snowy and his granddaughter to reach it. Both adventurers can feel the hairs raise on their necks as simultaneously they reach the same conclusion with regard to the obscure shape’s probable identity. They’ve each thus far reacted with a studiedly dismissive flippancy to the idea that their peregrinations might entail such an encounter, but with its reality almost upon them the old man and baby girl alike become uncertain and, for the first time, afraid. May’s voice beside his ear is an uneasy whisper. “Do you think it’s him?” His own reply is hoarse and strangled, a constricted rasp he’s never heard before. “Yes, I suppose it is. I had a lot of things to say to him, but I’m so frit I can’t remember what they were.” The confrontation they have privately longed for and dreaded, whilst a terrifying prospect, is significantly less unbearable than the alternative of turning round and running back the way they came. They carry on in their approach of the inevitable form which looms at the conclusion of their path, naked into that presence, and John Vernall grows increasingly confused about which segment of his caterpillar continuity he’s currently experiencing. All his moments fall upon him in a pack, coterminous, a fugue as complex and disorienting as his sister Thursa’s compositions, bringing an unprecedented yet somehow familiar sense that</em>
he’s about to meet his maker. Catapulted from the armchair by a fear that death should find him sitting down he stands there swaying in the cluttered room his universe has been reduced to. Woken by this sudden flurry of activity the cat weighs up the situation and decides to exit by the window, open on its sash, leaping from ledge to garden wall to rain-butt and descending by instalments to the sunken yard outside. The flies attempt to follow but are insurmountably confounded by frustrating panes. Reeling with one hand clutching at the chair-arm for support, Snowy appreciates only too well the impetus behind this animal and insect exodus: the damp and crowded chamber, with careening ice-rink scratches on the sideboard’s varnish and with gold fruit softening in its bowl; this is the end of the time. Who could have thought that it would be so little? His gaze darts around his final vista as he tries to cram his eyes full with its details and make a last meal of their significance, eventually alighting on the mantelpiece where something glints intriguingly. The single halting step he takes towards the hearth for a closer inspection is as jittery as any that he took upon the slippery rooftops of his youth. The item that has captured his attention turns out to be a medallion, a Saint Christopher that he believes might be the one he wore for all his Lambeth-to-the-Boroughs marathons so long ago. He scoops it up within one liver-speckled and vibrating hand, only to instantly forget that he has done so as his wandering awareness is next seized by the decrepit fellow staring at him from the glass above the fireplace. There is something in the haggard features that he recognises, and it comes to him that this is Harry Marriot from the next house along. He looks much older than he used to, but it’s been a little while. Lifting the hand containing the religious talisman Snowy gesticulates in greeting to the other man, obscurely reassured when the same gesture is immediately returned. He’s glad that Harry, at least, still seems pleased to see him. Peering into what he takes to be the similarly furnished house next door he notices what seems to be a further window in its far wall. This affords a view into another Green Street domicile with yet another old boy – possibly Stan Warner from a little further down – facing the other way and waving through a subsequent portal at what might well be Arthur Lovett from just up the road. Turning to glance behind him, Snowy spots the aperture on his own room’s far side that looks onto a similar procession of frosty-haired veterans in endlessly receding parlours. He appears to be stuck in a queue of ancients lining up for their demise, all waving to each other amiably, their individual domestic spaces reconfiguring into a single tunnel. It’s as if
<em>he’s in a relatively narrow channel of near-infinite extent, finally close enough to the imposing shape that blocks his path to see that it is actually a pair of nine-foot giants who are stood shoulder to shoulder. Both are barefoot, clad in plain white linen smocks, and each one holds a snooker cue proportionate to their tremendous size. The figure on the left has hair as colourless as Snowy’s, and is instantly identifiable as Mansoul’s trilliards champion, Mighty Mike. His curly-haired and russet-bearded counterpart has mismatched eyes, one red, the other green. This latter rumbles with amusement at the human couple’s tremulous approach. “Look at the faces they’ve got on them! Why, you’d think they were expecting the Third Borough!” Perched atop her grandsire, May’s smooth forehead corrugates to a suspicious frown. “Perhaps we were. But aren’t you Asmoday, the thirty-second spirit? What are you dressed as a Master Builder for?” The erstwhile fiend raises his bristling brows in mock surprise. “Because that’s what I am. I served my sentence and got my old job back. At this point in time,” he gestures to the cosmos-spanning spectrographic backdrop, “all the scores are settled and the falls are far behind us. We can let bygones be bygones, surely, here where everything’s a bygone?” As the infant chews this over, her grandfather at last finds his voice</em>
“Why isn’t God here, and what are these lights and colours?” He is shouting at the empty room, no longer capable of understanding his own utterances. The pensioners in all the other dimly lit compartments seem as agitated as himself, all waving their Saint Christophers and bellowing the same unfathomable questions in a maddening roundelay. His world subsides to disconnected jigsaw shapes as names and meanings drift out with the ebb-tide of his ragged breath. Barely aware of his own body or identity, only a distant clenching of his gut reminds him that he’s hungry. He should eat some food, if only he can call to mind what food is. The locale rotates, its articles of furniture all circling him like merry-go-round horses, and it comes to him that when he ran down the long road through time with his dead grandchild on his shoulders they survived by eating blossoms which were somehow made from shrunken women. Snowy notes a vase of luscious tulips on the table as this glides past in its dawdling fairground orbit, and it seems to him that fairy-fruits and flowers are as like as makes no difference. With his free hand, unencumbered by the quite forgotten medal, he commences greedily to stuff his rotten mouth with petals while the neighbouring patriarchs in their adjacent rooms all ill-advisedly follow his lead. Choking on glory he is elsewhere, and a devil dressed in white is saying
<em>“Oh, he’s here alright. Or at least, here is him. The fireworks are what’s left after the gravity and nuclear forces pass away. Only electromagnetism is left standing.” Snowy groans. “So this is all we get, then? But we’ve come such a long way.” The rehabilitated demon smiles and shakes his head. “Not really. You’ve not yet set foot outside the Boroughs. You’ve just both been running on the spot for several billion years.” Beyond the two colossi is the precipice that marks the highway’s end in tumbling veils of brilliance. Raised up from that awful cliff-edge as a marker is the rough stone cross he last remembers seeing set into the wall down at Saint Gregory’s. Growing around and on it are a colony of succulent, ripe Puck’s Hats. His mouth floods with salivary ectoplasm but he finds that</em>
he can’t swallow, stringy throat obstructed by amazing Easter colours. In their never-ending file of parallel apartments, he observes that all of Green Street’s other elderly male occupants are doing just as badly as himself, walking in circles with their eyeballs bulging and bright scraps of masticated tulip flesh that turn their straggly beards to painters’ aprons. It’s a rotten turn of luck that they should all be in such straits at the same moment, when in normal circumstances they’d see what was happening and pop next door to slap each other on their backs. He’s breathing a bouquet, he’s breathing wreath, the panic in his lungs cascading to his heart. He can feel something clutched in his left hand but can’t remember what it is, and all the time
<em>he’s waiting for the arch-builder to tell him something vital and conclusive. At last Mighty Mike turns to enquire, “Vernalimt whorey skung?” Vernall, what limit are you seeking? Unprepared, Snowy considers and replies, “The limit of my being.” Here the titan offers him a sympathetic look. “Tenyhuafindot.” Then you’ve found it. The time-vagrant nods. He understands that</em>
this place is the end of him. If there’s significance he has to find it for himself. His pool of vision, rapidly evaporating at its edges, shrinks to frame his slowly opening hand. A metal disc rests on his palm and raised up from its surface is the image of an old man with a glorious baby riding on his shoulders. It means something, he is certain, and the final question to traverse his failing mind is
<em>“Where do we go after this?” May’s voice sounds almost petulant. The reformed fiend and Master Builder shrug as one, as if to point out that the answer’s obvious. Gradually,</em>
Snowy understands. He isn’t breathing. That’s because all of the oxygen he needs is to be had from the placenta. Squirming in his mother Anne’s spasming birth canal, forgetting everything,
<em>he moves along the lightless channel carrying the infant with him and knows that, inevitably,</em>
he is going back to where he started.
** <strong>CORNERED</strong>
<strong>t</strong>o judge, that’s what keeps going round and round with me well I suppose you could say I believe that everyone should have the benefit of what’s the phrase, I worry sometimes when I can’t remember things, benefit of the doubt, there, everyone should have it well not everybody obviously not some of them round here, with them what they should have it’s more doubt of the benefit in my opinion you take her, the one with stripy hair Bath Street St. Peter’s House I think she lives you see her on Crane Hill up from the Super Sausage black girl well not black mixed race, from what I hear she’s on the lot the benefits the crack the game part of the pond-life the Monk’s Pond-life I should say I mean it’s not her fault up to a point and if you’re from a disadvantaged background then statistically it’s like predestination how you end up but I still think and perhaps I’m just old fashioned but I still think everybody has to take responsibility for their behaviour obviously sometimes there’s extenuating circumstances we’ve all done things that we didn’t want to when there wasn’t any other choice although some people I’m not saying it’s their fault but they don’t try to help themselves they just biodegrade until they end up like old bubblegum that’s on the pavement year in year out in the end you barely notice it’s another social residue part of a natural process people like that and I don’t mean ordinary decent working people, people like the Super Sausage girl are unavoidable bacteria and if you like the street’s a gut it cleans itself, the lifestyle, it gets rid of them eventually where was I
oh benefit of the doubt yes I remember it should be extended, I think, to those of a certain I don’t want to say class that’s not me and anyway that’s been made into such a loaded term, but of a certain standing in the town let’s say a kind of public figure I suppose you’d call it, getting things done nearly forty years and always always on the people’s side it comes with being from a Labour background and I’ve never been a champagne socialist a Mateus Rosé socialist at one time possibly, that I’ll admit to, though I’ve always had a common touch at least that’s what the wife says no I’m only joking what I’m saying is, I’m part of this community been living down here all these years bit of a local landmark you might say close to his roots and I think people most people respect that when I’m seen out and about like now they smile and nod and recognise me from the paper and I think I’m generally appreciated but of course there’s always one or two
it’s quite a nice night not what you’d call summery but better than it has been Mandy’s out walking the thin blue line with her police friends what with one thing and another it’s not often these days that we’re home at the same time I often say we’re like those couples that you used to get in weather houses those old novelty barometers we had one up in Scotland when I was a scruffy little muppet although no doubt there’d be those amongst the worthy opposition or in my own party for that matter who’d say that was still the case, no with her being out I didn’t fancy rattling round the place as if I was a dried pea in a cocoa-tin and since I stood down from the council what three years ago to as I put it spend more time at home with Mandy there’s not been so much to do I thought I might as well go for a turn around the block perhaps call in and have a swift half somewhere before wending my way back it’s been a few years since I did that on a Friday night although at one point it was every week we change as we get older in what we can stomach and of course a Friday night in town these days is asking for it really with the way it’s gone these sixteen-year-old numpties, half a dozen theme pubs every street it’s like that Enoch Powell speech only rivers full of vomit and not blood although you get a fair amount of that as well down at the A&E it’s definitely a decline I blame bad government and yes to some extent people themselves they have to take responsibility for what they’ve done but it’s too easy I think saying everything’s the council’s fault what people fail to understand is that our hands are often tied but anyway
in Chalk Lane there’s a moderate breeze but not so as you’d notice really left or right here should I go uphill or down a left will take me up into the Boroughs and that can be well not dangerous but on a Friday night and all of the remaining pubs are either dead or full of people that you wouldn’t want to spend a lot of time with, right it is then and so into Marefair, going downhill, following the path of least resistance
just across the road there the Black Lion looks like it’s on the way out I can remember when it was all bikers not what you’d call threatening but things could be unpleasant around chucking-out time with the noise and everything it’s not fair on the residents a load of half-baked pissheads revving up shouting the odds but anyway they’re gone now long gone and we’re rid of one more obstacle stood in the way of Castle Ward getting the new development and I suppose you could say the new people that it needs to be a different place a decent neighbourhood to move up in the world not that we’d ever sell that’s not what it’s about it’s an attachment to the district, not for how it is but how it could be living down here all these years of course it’s not our only property but it’s the one that we’re identified with part of our brand if you like I mean the oldest most historic part of town we’d lived here years before I’d heard more than the barest outline, to be honest I was never all that interested but when you find out about some of it well it’s fascinating you take Peter’s Church across the road there put up in the first place by King Offa as a chapel for his sons at their baronial hall in Marefair then it’s rebuilt by the Normans in eleven something and hold on what’s that
a teenage boy it looks like floppy brown hair jeans and trainers with an FCUK shirt on that’s too big for him a lanky streak of piss he’s in St. Peter’s doorway underneath the portico and shovelling something up into his arms as if he’s in a hurry it’s a sleeping bag, he’s dossing at the church the mangy little twat I’ll have a word with Mandy when I see her next oh hey up here he comes stumbling along the path between the flowerbeds out the church gate with his bag like an enormous boneless baby clutched against his scrawny chest and scuttling across the street he’s in a rush alright although I can’t imagine where he’s got to go
“Good evening.”
not a word straight past me and away up Pike Lane Pikey Lane somebody’s changed it to and frankly you can see why though I’ve never liked the term myself well it’s derogatory isn’t it, you know something about the way he ran at me across Marefair like that I felt a bit weird for a second not quite déjà vu but it reminded me of something though I don’t know what it can have been did someone run at me like that across a street before or oh wait I know what it was it was that dream I had I put it down to dodgy seafood at the time when was it eighteen months, two years ago, I was in Marefair in the dream as well but it was night I couldn’t find my shirt or trousers and had I gone outside in my pants and vest to look for them I can’t remember but I know the street looked different in the moonlight was there any moon the dreamlight anyway there were all buildings from the present jumbled up with places that were knocked down years ago and there was that damp creepy atmosphere the Boroughs seemed to have when we were first moved in and in the dream I was just starting to feel a bit anxious and self-conscious about being out in just my underwear when I saw somebody across the street this old chap with a trilby covering his bald head and he ran, he ran at me across the road exactly like that boy just now but he’d got it was horrible he’d got dozens of arms and where his face was it was just a lot of eyes and mouths all screaming at me screaming like he hated me I don’t know what I’d done to make him hate me like that but I woke up in a sweat with my heart going and there wasn’t anybody there it’s just this place with nightmares in its timbers like old farts trapped under bedsheets in my bones I’m still a Marxist to the core I don’t believe in ghosts
and anyway that’s just the sort of fright you give yourself when it’s the middle of the night but you look at the place now on a nice Spring evening you see what it could be, there’s St. Peter’s with the long light on its limestone and then here just up the road Hazelrigg House where Cromwell bunked down before his demanding day at Naseby when you think about it frankly it’s a marvel, Doddridge Church just up Pike Lane back there across the years people have said it must be awful living in a tiny neighbourhood like that but honestly it’s not it does us anyway a bit of smartening up we could be happy here and if the district’s small well then so what I’m not a big chap in the height department so it’s big enough for me it’s like the Bard said what was it I could be bounded in a nutshell and yet count myself king of infinite space were it not that I
something like that anyway no it’s a lovely night I’m glad I came out for a walk I’m glad that I’m not in my vest and underpants there’s no denying that it’s changed, the neighbourhood, changed since we first moved in was it in ’sixty-eight around that time I mean the south side of Marefair well that’s still pretty much the same at least the upstairs but with different businesses moved in below kebab shops takeaways what have you and the rooftops are all largely how they’ve always been across the street though on the north side it’s a different story there’s the ibis obviously Sol Central the whole complex when they put it up it looked like something out of the first Batman film but now I don’t know on a Saturday or Friday night you tend to see a lot of couples checking in who don’t look like they’ve known each other long drunk blokes with hard-faced younger women or sometimes with spotty lads of course it’s not my business I think everyone should have the benefit of the old doubt but when you think about it yobbos fornicating right where a Saxon baronial hall one stood and after that the Barclaycard headquarters it still doesn’t seem right almost sacrilegious, here we are, the crossroads up the hill directly opposite there’s Gold Street and already I can see where further on towards town centre there’s the usual muppets wandering in the middle of the road girls with their arse-cracks showing and it’s only just gone seven
on the other hand there’s hardly anyone about in Horseshoe Street downhill one of those random lulls in foot or vehicle traffic where all of a sudden it goes silent like a Western main-street just before a shoot-out there was once a time I might have wandered down that way and had a pleasant evening out, all of the pubs there used to be the Shakespeare at the top here and the Harbour Lights another biker hangout in the ’Seventies I always used to wonder why they’d called it that when we’re the furthest point inland but I suppose it’s just another wistful evocation of the sea the way that Terry Wogan called the Express Lift tower the Northampton lighthouse anyway the Harbour Lights the building’s still there but they’ve changed the name the Jolly Wanker, well there’s a big letter W and then an anchor but it’s obvious what it’s saying now I’m all for free speech but I don’t agree with that I don’t see any need you wouldn’t catch me drinking in there anyway I’ve too much self respect besides the whole street looks like it’s unravelling
I wonder how much longer the Victorian gas-holder’s going to be there it was talked about a few times when I was still on the council, council leader a good many years and in the end you have to balance practicality against nostalgia well that’s all it is when it comes down to it nostalgia for a place or thing that no one really gave a fuck about to start with but because they happened to grow up in such and such a street they don’t want anything to change which is to my mind unrealistic nothing stays the same forever everything is going downhill places people we all make adjustments we all start out as idealists or at any rate as something passing for idealists but that’s not the real world in the real world everything and everybody ends up as a Jolly Wanker and that’s their fault it’s not wait a minute there’s somebody do I know him someone standing halfway down the hill on this side of the dual carriageway I’m sure I’ve seen his face just standing there and staring at the billiard hall across the street black leather jacket on he looks like a real villain oh he’s turned his head he’s looking up the hill towards me better look away
perhaps if I went uphill up Horsemarket I could stop in at the Bird in Hand whatever it’s called now the place on Regent Square up Sheep Street just to say I’d had one just to say I’ve got a social life even when I’m the only one at home that man though I won’t turn around in case he’s looking I know him from somewhere I’m convinced of it a face like that you don’t forget it in a hurry with that big hook nose his eyes at different levels different angles to each other honestly his face, it looked like a collage it looked like that old ghost’s face when it runs across the road towards me in my nightmare every other week perhaps he lives round these parts one of the menagerie like that chap that you see walking his ferrets although now I come to think was it on telly that I saw him in a film an advert something of that nature horror story I should think from how he looks but on the other hand how likely is it somebody from telly being in the Boroughs it’s more probable I know his face from Mandy’s work with the police you know the evening sun, Horsemarket on these lower slopes, it looks quite nice
a restaurant an Italian place across the street don’t like the lettering
black movement on the paving not a heart attack the shadow of a bird that’s a relief
some girl young woman she’s quite pretty lovely eyes a hajib she’s Somali
it’s frustrating even two years later the Iraq war I opposed it obviously made a few statements to the paper and yes I suppose that stepping down from council that same year to some it might have looked as if I’d made a stand on principle although I never said that in as many words no to be honest it was more a legal technicality so that I could pursue my business interests without a breach of regulations and I don’t see that there’s any contradiction in a staunch opponent of the war planning a trip to Basra Anglicom we called the company anyway that’s neither here nor there, as I said at the time that’s history what’s done is done yes I opposed the war but when it’s happened then that’s the reality that’s what you’ve got to work with and I think that settling deals to help the restoration of Iraq it’s part of a humanitarian effort when you stop to think about it and I don’t see, I don’t see when there’s a pie that big to be divided up why it should be your Halliburtons getting all the contracts where’s the harm in standing up for British companies me and Colin he’s my partner business partner I should say you have to be so careful with your language these days don’t want anyone to get the wrong impression me and Colin were all set to fly to Basra, 2004, I mean they said the airstrip was secured it was all over or at least up in the north, there was that bloke the source of all the WMD reports what was his name and they were going to parachute him into government all done and dusted so they said, we’d booked the flights announced it in the <em>Chronicle & Echo</em> everything and then it all kicked off contractors taken hostage every other day a car bomb there’s beheading footage posted on the internet we called it off well we announced that we’d postponed it thinking I don’t know there’d be a drop-off in the violence something like that but it’s never going to happen is it look at it the Middle East it’s hopeless it’s all fucked it’s
bloody hell I’m making hard work of this slope I should sign up down at the gym but
Mary’s Street back of the ibis rear delivery yards the fire came down here once
the sunset on the windows of the flats our business in Iraq it wasn’t meant to be
sometimes, sometimes I wonder if the things in life aren’t all laid out from the beginning like town planning, there’s a good example, if there’s only one way things are going to go for say a district or a neighbourhood it’s all already been decided but the people living there don’t have a clue what’s going to happen in their future there’s been public consultation only none of them have heard about it they all think they’ve got a say in how life’s going to go for them they think that their decisions matter but they don’t it’s all a done deal from the start whether they have a job or not and where they end up living where their kids are sent to school and how they’re likely to grow up as a result I mean I’m talking now about the worse off obviously but what if that was true for everything that everything was planned out from the kick-off and although we all think we’re the masters of our lives and free to make our own decisions that’s just an illusion in reality we only make the choices we’re allowed to make already set out for us in the planning documents there’s no effective consultation process how much of a choice have any of us really got it’s like I made a conscious choice to not go left and up Chalk Lane not go up Gold Street into the town centre but it sometimes feels like I’ve arrived at my decision only after I’ve already started doing what I’m going to do, as if making a choice is all after the fact is all justification for things that were always going to happen when you look back at your life some of the things you’ve done that you well not regret exactly let’s say errors that you’ve made errors of judgement where you genuinely tried to do the right thing but when you look back it’s as though circumstance conspired against you where temptations were so huge that nobody would stand a chance where literally you’d have to be a saint an angel it feels like there’s something nudging you, making you go the way it wants and when you look at it like that then who’s to blame for anything
although
although there’s obviously there’s paedophiles serial murderers war criminals there’s obviously exceptions you can take all this predestination business too far and if nothing’s anybody’s fault if everybody’s only doing what the world is forcing them to do all just obeying orders then what are we meant to think about morality I mean you’d have to say that Myra Hindley Adolf Hitler Fred West there’s the 7/7 bombers everybody’s innocent you’d have to let them go you’d have to throw away the whole idea of sin of punishment it’s not that I’m religious not especially but you’d be saying in effect there was no right or wrong and that’s just wrong it stands to reason otherwise there’d be no basis for the law all Mandy’s work with the police it would be stood on nothing how would you judge anybody there’d be no one to condemn for anything and, and, and there’s another side
if no one’s evil how can anyone be good how is there such a thing as virtue or a virtuous act if everything we do is preordained just as you couldn’t judge the guilty there’d be no way you could even recognise a saint a decent person no way that we could reward somebody for outstanding work by giving them a medal, say, or making them an alderman I’m only using that as an example but I mean you’d have to throw away Mother Theresa Jesus Ghandi Princess Di not that I ever thought that much of her to be quite honest, clearly there were those who did, there’d be no heroes heroines no villains and what kind of story would that leave us with we’d have no way of shaping a society I can’t imagine one how could we impose any sort of pattern any sort of meaning on our lives how could we tell ourselves we were good people no, no it’s ridiculous there has to be free will or all of this is just a story just a pantomime with all the world a stage and all the men and women merely players it’s free will or free Will Shakespeare that’s quite good that I’ll perhaps remember it and put it in the column no it’s like I’ve always said how everyone’s responsible for what they do and how they act although in certain circumstances, I’m not saying mine, there might be strong extenuating reasons why they feel they should do one thing rather than another free will it’s a complicated issue
Katherine’s Gardens just across the dual carriageway Garden of Rest they used to call it when the Mitre was still standing up in King Street just across the road from the Criterion there used to be that statue there the Lady and the Fish she had these hard stone tits it was like an erotic idol standing at the garden entrance I think later someone knocked the head off so they moved it out to Delapré and all the girls the prostitutes they’d either have the cab firm next door to the Mitre run them to their flats in Bath Street or they’d have a quick knee-trembler in the bushes the police would turn a blind eye for a hand job mind you all the trade’s moved down to the St. Andrew’s Road these days between the station and the Super Sausage Quorn Way all up that end where I saw the stripy-haired girl that time otherwise the Boroughs is just how it always was I mean we put the concrete bollards up blocking the streets from Marefair all the way to Semilong we thought it might discourage the curb-crawlers but it’s not made any difference all it’s done is make it harder for the ambulances or the engines to get in if there’s a fire say in St. Katherine’s House where all the dregs all of these kids straight out of care get placed the tower block well the fire services condemned it and yet there’s still people being put there so God help whoever’s council leader if it all goes up in flames you know I miss it sometimes but I’m well off out of all of that the stress it puts upon you knowing things like that the worrying in case somebody finds out, all that on your mind and obviously the people in the flats you worry for them too and it would be a dreadful thing if that should happen right there where the Great Fire broke out in the 1670s whenever but then on the other hand a lot of the planned changes to the area could go ahead so it’s an ill wind and all that although of course no one wants that to happen I’m just saying if it did
of course this thing about there being no free will then just because we might not like it or we might have to surrender things that we regard as moral certainties that doesn’t mean it isn’t true
the gardens at the back of Peter’s House in Bath Street on my left now everything looks grey and threadbare litter all the usual it’s depressing and across the street you’ve got the Saxon the hotel the Moat House sticking up down at the foot of Silver Street with all the scalloped frills the pastel colours it reminds me of an ornament you might stick in a fish tank though I don’t know why, at least it’s better looking than St. Peter’s House I think I can remember when they put the Saxon up in 1970 I think it was whereas the Bath Street flats they’re 1920s 1930s and they show their age the fancy brickwork that’s got cracks and fissures sprouting tufts of yellow grass of course when they went up same as a number of the flats around the Boroughs they weren’t meant to last this long they were intended as a temporary measure but with nowhere else to put the people I imagine that they’ll be there either till they die or till their homes just crumble down to dust around them what was here in Horsemarket before the flats I wonder I suppose the clue’s most likely in the name horse-traders wasn’t it or did I hear it was horse-butchers there was once a knacker’s yard I think down near Foot Meadow so perhaps oh God that’s broke my dream my other dream I had it just last night oh God
I was where was I, I was in my vest and underpants again and I was I know where I was it was a cellar a Northampton cellar in the dream for some reason I think of it as being Watkin Terrace Colwyn Road one of them up there by the Racecourse but the atmosphere it had it felt like somewhere from the Boroughs somewhere really old and I remember now, before that in the dream I’d been just walking in those big grass wastelands with the flooded earthworks giant disused railway bridges and just single red brick buildings sticking up, middle of nowhere under heavy skies a bit like that one house still standing at the bottom end of Scarletwell Street but it’s weirder it’s a place I’m sure I’ve dreamed about before perhaps since I was little but it’s hard to tell I’d somehow got inside this house at first there might have been somebody with me but I lost them and the only way that I could get to where I thought they might be it was through this sort of granite shower-block where the lights were out and there were all these toilets without proper cubicles around them and they all had their seats missing or were overflowing all over the floor and I went on and down these stairs, stone stairs and then I went the wrong way and I found myself in these they were like cellars and they were all lit up as if by electric light although I don’t remember seeing any bulbs or lamps and on the floor the rough stone floor it was like straw and sawdust horrible mixed in with it there was a lot of blood and shit you didn’t know if it was animal or human and there was it looked like fish innards and skins and strings of meat all rotten in the corners and I must have gone from one part of the cellar to another trying to find my way out and suddenly there’s the mad poet bloke the one who’s always pissed Benedict Perrit he’s lived down the Boroughs years everyone knows him though I’ve never had a lot to do with him myself he’s standing waiting for me in this cellar smells of frightened animals like in a slaughterhouse I’m getting nervous I explain I’m lost and ask him how I can get out and he does this peculiar high-pitched laugh and says he’s trying to get further in and I wake up with the old heart going at nineteen to the dozen I know that it doesn’t sound much but the atmosphere it was that atmosphere that hangs around the Boroughs and it always puts the shits up me it’s I don’t know it’s ancient, stinks, it isn’t civilised older than that with its collapsing buildings people its collapsing past it’s like a Frankenstein thing stitched together from dead bits of social engineering it’s a monster from another century resentful in its ominous reproachful silence I can tell that I’ve done something to offend it that it doesn’t like me but I don’t know why time and again I wake up sweating here we are the Mayorhold Merruld the old dears down here pronounce it, makes them sound half-sharp
glancing down Bath Street and across the train-tracked valley as the light goes
up the other way a widened Silver Street unrecognisable the thuggish multistorey car park that’s got Bearward Street and Bullhead Lane God only knows what else beneath it somewhere looking out across the grim sprawl of the traffic junction with its lights and colours brighter in the falling twilight almost magical it’s funny when you think that this where it started the whole civic process in Northampton when the Boroughs was the whole town and this was the town square so I’m told with the first guildhall the Gilhalda wasn’t it up at the top of Tower Street here it used to be the top of Scarletwell before Beaumont and Claremont Courts went up in the late ’sixties and there
there they are
the high-rise flats the two giant fingers raised as if to say fuck off
who to though is it them to us or us to them I don’t know what I even mean by that
a window lit up here and there light through cheap curtains coloured squares on the dark blocks darker against the last remains of day over the railway yards the dimming west the tops of higher buildings last to catch the sun and you can still make out the sideways metal N in NEWLIFE with the lettering running down the side I thought that looked quite smart, no, what it was when I was council leader someone made out they were eyesores two monstrosities that shouldn’t have been put up in the first place and proposed we pull them down but I said no that’s not the way to go for one thing social housing in the Boroughs people haven’t got a clue just how precarious it is those towers they house a lot of people and don’t think that when they’re pulled down there’ll be anywhere to put the tenants or there’ll be new housing built dream on that isn’t how it works those towers are all you’re going to get and when they’re gone they’re gone, no, what I said, we ought to do them up refurbish them so that they’re fit to live in and okay you may say where’s the money going to come from but what I suggested was we sell the flats for next to nothing a housing association that I knew was interested at least that way the council’s spared the costs of demolition not to mention all the headache of rehousing so it went ahead and Bedford Housing picked them up at fifty pee apiece I know that there were people at the time and since who questioned that but they don’t understand how much the people here have benefited when you think of the alternative have genuinely benefited and alright that was in 2003 when I stood down from council after speaking out against the situation in Iraq not that the two things were connected it was more that being on the council stopped me from pursuing other ventures shall we say I mean how many companies is it where I’m secretary or director ten something like that so it was proper I should stand down otherwise it might have looked as if I’d got a vested interest and you know how cynical it is these days the view the public have of anyone in politics, no, I stood down so that I could take care of Anglicom in Basra me and Colin though that didn’t work out obviously but also after stepping down that left me free to take up my position on the board of Bedford Housing well if someone’s going to make a profit from it then you tell me why it shouldn’t be a Boroughs resident that’s better surely than it going to someone outside the area and anyway it’s done, it’s history, the other options were much worse I talked it through with Mandy and I don’t see why I need to justify myself
along the walkway on the west side of the Mayorhold making for the crossings that will get me over to the Roadmender in two or three hops when the lights are right it’s like a game of Frogger and down on the left there’s Tower Street and the NEWLIFE buildings and past that you can still just about make out the school Spring Lane those years I was a teacher there back when you couldn’t live on what you made as councillor I mean some of the kids some of the families they were beyond help some of them it was horrific sometimes frankly and that’s really I suppose where I first got a peep into the way these people’s lives work if they work at all and thinking back that’s probably when I first got the horrors just a shudder every now and then about the area and what was going on behind all the net curtains honestly you should have heard some of the stories although by and large the kids were nice I liked them they respected me I think I had a reputation as a decent bloke a decent teacher that was who I was that’s how I saw myself and I was happier then I think I don’t know, can I say that, there’s a lot of benefits to being who I am today but even so perhaps you could say I was happier in myself I think I thought more of myself and everything was more straightforward everything was simpler then not such a moral maze I think that was a program on the television or the radio they asked Cat Stevens Yusuf Islam or whatever he’s called now if he would personally carry out the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and I think he said he wouldn’t but he’d phone the Ayatollah what’s his name Khomeini anyway when you’re a teacher there’s the satisfaction when you feel you’ve made a difference how can I describe it it’s like when you feel as if you’re a good person deep inside beneath it all, it’s not like politics it’s the reverse it’s the exact reverse of that nobody trusts you they’re prepared to think the worst of you they hate you everybody hates your guts and the abuse the personal abuse you get is it a wonder if it gets to you affects your self esteem I don’t mean me specifically just public figures, political types in general what it is it’s hurtful and it makes your blood boil you find that you’re muttering to yourself settling imaginary scores it wears you out and it
crossing St. Andrew’s Street so that I can cross Broad Street makes me think of Roman Thompson who I think lived round here until recently I would see quite a bit of him back in his union days when we were both on the same side well nominally anyway and even more of him when I was on the council his Tenant’s Association bollocks he called me a wanker once right to my face he said I’d always been a wanker and that didn’t make me very jolly I can tell you fucking militants the fucking pickaxe-handle tendency with their more-socialist-than-thou they don’t see that the kind of socialism they believe in they’re anachronisms all that’s dead that was the ’70s and Margaret Thatcher smash the National Front and we were out of office the best part of twenty years it was demoralising all the splits and schisms in the party it was cunts like Thompson radicals to blame for all of that stuck in the ’60s and refusing to accept that times change and the Labour Party if it wants to be electable it changes with them now I’m not the biggest fan of Tony Blair I think that I can safely say that now but what he did whichever way you look at it he got us back in government he modernised the party he’d learned lessons from what Thatcher did and it was necessary redefining Labour values and the Tories had a winning formula you have to deal with the reality it’s no good being off in some idealist never-never land after the revolution no you have to work with what you’ve got adjust to different ways of thinking different ways of doing things and Roman Thompson calling me a wanker Roman Thompson, people like that, Marxist throwbacks they don’t understand real politics the compromises and negotiations that you have to make they’re not prepared to give you it, benefit of the doubt, they’re ready to believe the worst of you a wanker he’s the fucking wanker and it’s that it’s the abuse you get I shouldn’t think about it, more stress on the heart, what does he matter anyway he’s
toddling over Broad Street with the green light and the Roadmender there on the corner white in the descending gloom the front part rounded tall smoked windows up behind its railing ten or fifteen feet above the street it’s like a prow it’s like a ship a liner beached here at the furthest inland point lured by the false beam of the Express Lifts tower and the empty promise of the Harbour Lights they had high hopes for the place once all the well-meaning Christian types who founded it as a youth centre said that it was going to “mend the road” the road through life that disadvantaged youngsters faced I mean as an idea it’s well intentioned like I say but it’s not aged well these days you’re not going to mend the road you’ve very little chance of even finding it and in the meantime well it’s left us with a building to maintain and no way that the space will ever turn a profit we’ve tried everything they’ve put some bands on big names some comedians but with that sort of audience they’re students mostly they’re not going to spend much even if you pack the place out every night it isn’t going to work from what I hear it’s got six months left possibly a year oh fuck another hill
at this age you don’t know you never know you never hear the one that hits you
was it here perhaps where Bullhead Lane was, the steep climb to Sheep Street
just across the road the multistorey with dead socket-spaces staring from between its pillars there’s a scrap of mitigating vegetation here and there half-hearted verges as inadequate respite from all that concrete but it’s all half-dead it covers nothing up and only makes the rest of it look worse a diamante G-string on an ugly stripper
when you’re closer to the top you see the bus station most gruesome building in the country so they reckon with its empty upper spaces gazing menacingly at the car park’s brutal bulk across the intervening grassy waste where that Salvation Army fort once stood as if it sees it as a rival in some fuck-faced competition although when you think about it with the flats the car park the bus station and the rest of the unsightly hulks that seem to congregate down here it isn’t any wonder that the people feel so singled out for punishment you have to ask yourself if Roman Thompson and the awkward squad might not be right at least on that one, on that single issue obviously and not on everything not after what he called me what he said to me and Lady’s Lane it yawns away towards the Mounts the arse-end of the bus station on one side with the law courts on the other there’s that sort of gibbet-shape that’s echoed in the architecture and you get the feeling that the whole place is condemned whichever way you look at it the swathes of empty grass up this end if you ask me it’s not the old creepy houses it’s the patches of bare ground that seem most haunted
turn left into Sheep Street and it’s not a haunting like you see in films or when you read a ghost story in many ways it’s like the opposite of that it’s not about mysterious presences it’s more about the absences not how the past endures but how it doesn’t
back at Spring Lane school sometimes at Christmas I remember how I’d read a ghostly tale or two you know something traditional they used to love it nothing really frightening I’d read <em>A Christmas Carol</em> not <em>The Signalman</em>, <em>Canterville Ghost</em> perhaps but not <em>Lost Hearts</em>, the English ghost story it’s marvellous one of the things that can make teaching English such a pleasure just the way the masters of the form can set the scene and structure things they mostly seem to take a lot of time establishing a situation that’s believable and quite a lot of them like M.R. James they base the stories solidly upon a real location so you get the what’s the word I hate it when I can’t remember things it worries me verisimilitude and there’s the moral aspect of a ghost yarn that’s quite interesting the way that sometimes like with Scrooge the ghosts are actually a moral force and he’s done something to deserve a visit from them whereas to my mind the other type of story, that’s more frightening, where ghosts descend on somebody because they’re in the wrong place at the wrong time where the victim is somebody innocent someone who doesn’t know what he’s done to deserve it I suppose that the abiding fear in all these stories is the world we live in comfy and predictable it might all of a sudden change and let in things that we can’t understand or handle that’s the underlying terror, that things might not be the way we think they are it’s almost dark now all the streetlamps have come on
the absences tend to accumulate up this end, Sheep Street, there’s the yard that beech tree stood in eight hundred years old I think they said it was before it passed away of natural causes that’s a euphemism we all know perfectly well who poisoned it somebody highly placed at one of the adjacent businesses who wanted to extend the parking area but obviously there’s nothing can be done you’d have a hard time proving it for one thing and when you consider all the upset it would cause I mean it wouldn’t bring the tree back would it no what’s done is done it’s better to accept it and move on that’s the mature the practical approach that’s politics like it or lump it no use crying over spilled milk when the horse has bolted just across the road the Chinese restaurant, been there years changed hands of course and names I think that me and Mandy went there once or twice before we were in a position to go further and have better no the food was very nice as I remember it lobster I think I had
and there’s the Holy Sepulchre the round church bulging out into the dusk pregnant with guilty secrets fat with memory I shouldn’t wonder
the knights Templar used to worship in it don’t they say we had a lot of them round these parts after the Crusades somebody ought to write a novel a Da Vinci Code or something I suppose Northampton’s seen a fair bit of religious stuff across the years extremism you’d have to call it there were all the weirdo groups in Cromwell’s time the Levellers and Ranters and what have you the town draws them like a magnet Philip Doddridge he’s another one Thomas á Becket running for it in the middle of the night it’s like I say there’s plenty of religious history but none of it’s exactly what you might call normal it’s fanatical or else it’s having visions and it’s seeing things didn’t they burn the witches just a little further up, on Regent Square I think I can remember someone telling me
cross to the church side of the street there’s nothing coming at the moment although up the end there on the square itself the traffic’s bunching at the lights as always
and it’s funny
you look from the round church to the junction up ahead and there’s a sort of wholeness a simplicity about the past and then on Regent Square the present all the cars the signals changing colour it’s more like a jigsaw that’s been flung across the room
and set on fire
the present smashed and set on fire I think about Iraq I’m bloody glad that we called off that trip I mean Iraq’s an obvious example but it’s everywhere the fragmentation and the fabric, watching while it comes to bits, it’s everywhere oh God imagine that imagine being made to kneel and have your head cut off on camera it’s hang on this is where the north gate was up this end of Sheep Street this is where we put the heads on spikes the Danish raiders that we’d captured there weren’t cameras then but heads on spikes it’s the same thing it’s the dark age equivalent it’s a display meant to deter the enemy not that if I’d have gone to Basra I’d have been an enemy I said it was an opportunity to help a war-torn nation and its people and if Anglicom got something out of it well where’s the harm in that I’m not an enemy but then you could say that’s naive that’s not the way it works it’s how they see us isn’t it not how we see ourselves I mean they say you should be careful how you choose your enemies but you don’t get a say in how your enemies choose you like fucking Roman fucking Thompson calling me a wanker making out that I’m the villain when I’m not I’m one of the last heroes standing up against the villains and of course sometimes there’s compromises but there’s worse than me a lot worse I deserve some credit some respect and if there’s any doubt then I should have the benefit of it and Sheep Street opens up into the smeary paintbox of the square and here we are the Bird in Hand
on Regent Square the glare the Friday atmosphere as if it’s waiting for some I don’t know some ugly business to kick off perhaps it’s me, my age, you hear so many stories is it any wonder that downtown at night well it’s enough to make anyone nervous well not nervous let’s say wary and I’m not a big man but you’ve got to do it got to go out now and then perhaps stop at the pub and have a drink prove to yourself that you still can that you’re not frightened, when you start to think like that you’re beaten, that there’s not this sense of it all catching up with you the door is brass and glass, net curtains on the other side I get the sense it might have looked just like this in the 1950s gives an elderly and wheedling squeal more of a wheeze the hinges as I push it open into
human body heat a wall of it the smell of fags and lager breath not the warm beer smell I remember there’s a fuzzy background carpeting of clatter mumble giggling girls squelchy glissandos from the fruit machine <em>BWOIP</em> <em>BWOIP</em> <em>BWOIP</em> <em>BWOIP</em> low ceiling keeping all the scent and sound pressed down there’s not that many people in it just seems like it after coming from an empty street but then the night’s still young I don’t think that there’s anybody here I know quick pint, then, pint of bitter standing up against the bar and trying to catch the barman’s eye oh fuck I’ve put my elbow in the spillage never mind I’ll sponge it down when I get home is he deliberately ignoring me he’s, no, no he’s just serving someone further down the bar and wait a minute that bloke sitting at the table in the corner there I’m sure I know his face from somewhere it’s oh shit he’s seen me looking at him mimed hello he obviously knows me I’m more or less forced, obliged, to give a big smile in response still can’t remember who it is I’ve seen him recently I’m sure but if he turns out to be someone I should pay attention to somebody who knows Mandy possibly but how he’s dressed I can’t imagine that it would be what’s he oh he’s holding up his empty glass he wants a drink and before I can stop myself I’m nodding but that means I’ll have to sit with him pretend that I remember who he is and oh God it’s Benedict Perrit but that’s no it’s too weird it’s
it’s a coincidence it’s nothing strange not if you understand mathematics properly it’s not as if
<em>BWOIP</em> <em>BWOIP</em> <em>BWOIP</em> <em>BWOIP</em>
it’s not as if it’s that remarkable we dream about all sorts of people and then see them but I mean I’m more annoyed than anything I’m more or less obliged to have a drink with him if only I’d not looked at him as if he was a long-lost friend, it’s just a habit from the job all of those years, if I’d just recognised him sooner but oh here’s the barman
“Can I have two pints of bitter, mate?”
why did I call him mate he’s not my mate oh well it’s just a pint I’ll have it down me in a quarter of an hour at most then tell him I’ve got business somewhere else a quarter of an hour how hard can that be but hang on what’s that he’s doing is he it looks like some sort of pantomime he’s pointing at me and then turning round towards the empty stool beside him and then lifting up his hand to shield his mouth as if he’s saying something now he’s laughing what’s the matter with him it’s as if he’s acting out some sort of joke or something that he thinks I’m in on I can hear him laughing right across the room he’s like a horse <em>BWOIP</em> <em>BWOIP</em> “Ahahaha!” <em>BWOIP</em> <em>BWOIP</em> is he taking the piss what’s going on oh here’s the barman with the pints
“Cheers, mate.”
arrrrh Christ let me stop saying that pay him, a fiver, take the change there’s not much and then navigating pint in each hand I can’t stand this bit it makes me tense you can’t see your own feet or where you’re putting them and all these people they’re like bumpers on a pinball table and you know you’re going to end up spilling it all down yourself or worse all down somebody else and then they punch your lights out it’s like trying to steer a ship to dock or well with me it’s more a tugboat nosing in amongst a load of hulking cargo vessels and just look at him just hark at him mugging and laughing and pretending that he’s whispering about me like an aside to an audience that isn’t there is he like this with everybody for fuck’s sake what have I got myself hooked up in now oh well it’s too late
“Hello, Benedict. How are you keeping? I got you a pint of bitter, hope that’s alright.”
of course it’s alright there’s no need to sound so apologetic it’s him cadging drinks off you it’s him who should apologise if anybody you don’t need to always make a good impression well not with just anybody not with somebody like him he’s
“Councillor, you must be a clairvoyant. Ahaha. You read me mind.”
oh bloody hell I hope not if I read your mind then I’ll bet M.R. James he wouldn’t be a patch on you I shouldn’t sleep for weeks I shouldn’t even
“Oh, no. No, I’m no clairvoyant. This last three year I’ve not even been a councillor since I stepped down. 2003 that was. That’s when bloody Tony Blair involved us in Iraq.”
now technically that’s true I haven’t said the two facts were connected so in fact I haven’t
“Ahahaha! Yiss you are, you’re a clairvoyant! Freddy made out as you hadn’t got the gift, but I had faith in your psychic abilities. I’m a believer, councillor. Ahahaha. Cheers!”
“But I’m not a …”
fucking hell look at that pint go down that Adam’s apple working like he’s got a piston arm in there who’s Freddy and that accent “Yiss” you used to hear it all the time down here old ladies mostly the real strong Northampton accent I’d forgotten when we first moved in we used to laugh about it me and Mandy do impressions then it gets that you don’t notice it and then next thing you know it’s all but gone when was the last time I
“So, did you get out of that cellar in the end? Ahahaha.”
what cellar what’s he talking about what
“What cellar’s that? I’m sorry, but you’ve lost me.”
there, again, apologising what should you be sorry for it’s him who’s talking rubbish he’s
“The cellar in the dream. Ahahaha! You didn’t like it much.”
the
but
what what is he oh no oh God no that’s no that’s <em>BWOIP</em> <em>BWOIP</em> <em>BWOIP</em> <em>BWOIP</em> no
“What do you m … how do you know about …”
is this a dream, this now, is this the same dream have I not yet woken up or
“Ahaha! It was just like our granddad’s shop in Horsemarket. It was … yiss. Yiss, that’s right. The Sheriff. Ahaha. Sat in ’is wheelbarrer up on the Merruld.”
but how can he know about hang on I’m missing something here the last half of that sentence he’s just turned his head and looked away from me is he deliberately snubbing me or I don’t know but what he said the dream how can he know about my dream or how can I know his whichever way around it is that isn’t how it works that’s wrong it has to be some I don’t know some fluke of probability, mathematics, a coincidence I mean two people having the exact same dream on the same night then meeting the next day I’ll grant you it must be fantastic odds against it but it’s not impossible it doesn’t mean hold on he’s turning back to face me
“Freddy was just saying that you ought to change yer underpants. I’d told ’im earlier what you’d got on and ’e said you was wearing the same thing the time ’e seen yer. Ahaha.”
he’s
he’s oh fuck he’s talking to the empty seat the other side of him somebody told me I remember now somebody said they’d seen him doing that, some other pub, the Fish I think, it must be all the drink sent him like that although then there’s the poetry as well wasn’t it him forever going on about John Clare and everybody knows where John Clare finished up how did he know about my dream the underpants and I’m not liking this how did I end up walking into this I don’t deserve this and
“Who’s Freddy? I don’t …”
laughing throwing back his head I can see every pore in his big nose there’s nothing funny about this, this is that thing the atmosphere around the Boroughs <em>BWOIP</em> <em>BWOIP</em> <em>BWOIP</em> <em>BWOIP</em> are they all mad are they all these people are they all inbred and mad or
“Freddy Allen! Ahaha! Old Freddy Allen! ’E says as ’e saw yer wanderin’ up Marefair in the middle o’ the night wi’ just yer vest and pants on. Ahaha. ’E says ’e run across the road to see if ’e could put the wind up yer. From what ’e’s tellin’ me, you looked as though you’d done it in yer pants. That’s why ’e thought you oughter change ’um. Ahahahaha!”
gulping my pint now trying to shut him out this isn’t happening I’m mishearing him all of this what with the background noise he isn’t saying what I think he’s saying should I just get up and leave say I’m not feeling well it’s true enough oh Christ I want to bolt but I’m stuck up the corner of the bar here with him there’s so many stools and tables between me and the pub door and all these people Friday night it’s filling up I don’t know what to do I don’t know what to say there’s too much going on <em>BWOIP</em> <em>BWOIP</em> <em>BWOIP</em> <em>BWOIP</em> and from the corner of my eye oh God what’s that it’s no it’s nothing cigarette smoke hanging in a wobbly flying carpet made of grey wool just above the picture-rail I thought that it was I don’t know a rush of something dust-balls big as sheep stampeding at our table but it’s only smoke I’m just that rattled oh please stop him laughing it’s
“Ahahaha! Did you see that? ’E just stood up like ’e’d got piles. ’E’s cross because a load o’ little blighters just come in.”
what now oh Jesus get me out of here he’s got me stuck here up this corner and he’s what’s he doing now he isn’t looking at the stool beside him and he’s not looking at me he’s giggling into the smoke oh fuck how many aren’t there here that I don’t know about it’s not
“You can’t come in! Yer under age! What if the landlord asks to see yer death certificates? Ahahaha!”
laughing his head off shouting at thick air nobody paying him the least bit of attention can’t they hear what’s going on they must be used to him a regular or they can’t hear above the <em>BWOIP</em> <em>BWOIP</em> <em>BWOIP</em> <em>BWOIP</em> I don’t know what’s going on myself and for a moment I look off in the direction that he’s staring but there’s nothing there’s just some bloke’s arse and all the smoke and I look back at him and everything about the Boroughs that can make your skin crawl it’s there in his voice his laugh his eyes you can’t tell if he’s sad or happy I’m just gaping at him I’m just
“I don’t understand this. I don’t understand you people.”
listen to yourself “you people” there’s nobody here but him you sound as cracked as he does oh God when he said that bit, running across Marefair to put the wind up me he can’t have meant no that’s just bollocks no people don’t have each other’s dreams I’m not I can’t I just can’t think about it now Benedict Perrit look at him craning his neck and laughing holding one hand to his ear like he’s pretending that he’s eavesdropping on someone or perhaps he’s
“I can’t ’ear ’um. Even when they’re right up next to yer they sound faint, ’ave yer noticed? Ahaha.”
it’s
it’s only this moment just occurred to me that this is just what it would be like this is what ghost stories look like in real life <em>BWOIP</em> <em>BWOIP</em> <em>BWOIP</em> <em>BWOIP</em> in real life there aren’t any ghosts and it’s just somebody who’s mad, and I mean that’s upsetting in itself, it’s somebody who’s mad and otherwise there’s nothing no one there and there’s no ghosts there’s nobody there’s nothing but an
absence
an accusing absence, as if
let me out oh Jesus let me out of here this pub this corner this pissed lunatic tonight how has it gone so wrong so horrible so fast I’m swallowing my pint down necking it and next to me he’s laughing fit to bust his throat’s a lift-cage going up and down stuck between floors why did I come in here it’s like I didn’t have a choice I didn’t have a chance and next to me, what now, he’s pointing through the hanging smoke towards the door he’s
“There they goo! Ahahaha! All ayt the door like ashes up the chimney.”
but the door’s not moved the door’s not open what’s he seeing what’s he seeing in his schizophrenic seizure that I’m not finish my pint and clink the empty glass down on the table
“Benedict, I’m …”
“Ahaha! I know! Yer lookin’ fer a way out, but there’s not one. We’re all stuck ’ere wi’ no end in sight. Blood on the straw and fish guts up the corner. I’m still tryin’ t’get further in. Ahahaha!”
stand up I can’t say anything can’t even say goodbye what can you say, a situation like this, as if there was such a thing as if there was a situation like this struggling around the table with its hard edge juddering against my thighs there isn’t any space to move there isn’t any wiggle-room and all these people packing out the place I didn’t notice them come in “Excuse me … can I just come through, yeah, cheers … excuse me … sorry mate” stop saying that stop calling people mate they’re not your mates there’s no one down here who’s your mate and <em>BWOIP</em> <em>BWOIP</em> <em>BWOIP</em> <em>BWOIP</em> and behind me I can hear him laughing whinnying like a carthorse with the barn on fire I stumble over someone’s feet and hear the word cunt bubbling from the acoustic blur but then I’m finally I’m by the door and pushing at the hard glass through its useless little skirt of lace and then the air outside it’s cold and clean and big the air outside in Regent Square the night slams into me and there I’m free I got away from him I got away from it I got
what
what was that, that
stuff, that atmosphere it’s gone it isn’t here now and that’s how I know it was here like a noise that you don’t notice till it stops the sudden silence what just happened what just happened to me nothing nothing happened you just it’s just mental illness you just had a run in with it obviously it’s disturbing but there wasn’t any need to panic not to run out of the pub like that I must have looked a proper wally nothing happened calm down nothing happened everything’s alright everything’s normal for a minute the old heart was banging like a dustbin lid but I can see now I was being stupid letting it all get to me like that I don’t know I don’t know what I was thinking, that the world, reality, it had just I don’t know just broken and I felt like I was falling down the cracks but look at it I mean it’s fine its Regent Square its Friday everything’s okay there’s
traffic lights like freshly sucked fruit pastilles and
an ice mosquito biting on my neck the threat of rain with
couples young chaps striding and not staggering it’s early yet I’m
walking in a daze towards the crossing that will take me over to the top of Grafton Street the dark sluice running down into the valley there that’s what I mean it’s not like I made a decision or at least not consciously yet here I am I’m toddling across the road the pelican tweets chivvying with its emerald wink as if I’ve chosen to go home this way and not up Sheep Street back the way I came I don’t remember choosing anything it’s just my feet I’m at the other side now and they’re taking me along what’s left of Broad Street one brown shoe and then the other and it’s not of my oh fuck me what’s the word volition not of my volition it’s like every step’s already set in stone and nothing I can do about it like it’s all predestined but then there’d be no such thing as oh watch out I nearly swerved and fell into the road casino lights up on my right I’m walking like I’m drunk but how can that be when I only had a pint a pint up at the Bird in Hand there with
Benedict Perrit
fuck that must be it I must be still in shock but that’s ridiculous it isn’t like he
raining a bit harder now and I’m not really dressed for it you know it was so nice when I came out I’m going to get soaked through if I’m not careful for that matter I’ll get soaked through if I am, another bloody stupid saying all that business in the pub no, no I’m better off not dwelling on it one brown shoe and then the other slapping on the shiny pavement wet now puddles gathering where the reflections of the sodium lamps perform a yellow shimmy one brown shoe and then the other not of my volition but then there’d be no such thing as free will there’d hold on what was it I thought earlier it was quite funny I was going to put it in the column it was oh yeah I remember it’s free will or free Will Shakespeare no on second thoughts it doesn’t sound as funny now too difficult explaining it the point still stands though, if this was all scripted in advance and for all that I know it might be then we’d all be actors no one would be innocent or guilty and well I suppose that if that was the way that things turned out to be we’d all get used to it in many ways it might be a much nicer world with no one questioning your ethics all the time no reason to feel rotten over anything you might have done some bad decisions that you might have made some time ago a while back a long while back I’m not talking about me now obviously but there’s people who are sensitive who are in torment over things they’ve done and if there’s no free will well you can see how some of us, people like that, it would be like the slate wiped clean and no more bad dreams no more sleepless nights over the other side of Broad Street the dual carriageway there’s just the top bit of the old Salvation Army fort the other one the one that hasn’t been pulled down yet actually I think it’s listed just the top bit of it you can see where it pokes up above the fencing upper windows like it’s looking at you trees and undergrowth around it looking at you from across the fence as if it’s an old dog penned up and left to die it doesn’t understand it doesn’t know what’s happening here’s the Mayorhold coming up it’s
pissing down literally spattering on the carriageway the paving slabs on me “I’m gunna catch me death” that’s what they used to say down here that accent like
Benedict Perrit
talking to thin air laughing at nothing nothing’s the last thing you want to laugh at nothing’s the most dreadful thing of all after you’ve gone I’m in my sixties now I don’t believe in hell or all the rest of it I mean it’s just the end death isn’t it that’s how a grown-up looks at it but then Benedict Perrit in the Bird in Hand the cackling and his painful eyes and all the people that were only there to him and yet
and yet I mean the ghosts even if only he could see them in a way they’re still there aren’t they even if he’s mad then they’re ghosts that are in his mind all of his memories of the neighbourhood dead people all of it ghosts that are running through his mind and if you’re sitting there up the pub corner next to him you can’t help almost seeing what he’s seeing well not seeing ghosts but seeing how he sees the world so that it almost makes it real to you as well just for a moment I think that’s his house below me on the right one of the ones in Tower Street I don’t know which one it almost makes it real to you as well, the ghosts and everything, so that you feel as if it’s you as if it’s me who’s being haunted and not him as if the district and the dead were talking through him to me passing on a message why do I keep feeling as though this place hates me after all I’ve done for it how did he know my dreams that awful cellar and with no way out up on my left the Mayorhold’s knotted guts are growling with nocturnal traffic, with strangled monoxide farts ahead of me down Horsemarket there’s noise one of those howler monkey conversations young blokes who don’t know don’t care how loud they’re talking like they’ve got their headphones lager headphones on I think I’ll take a right down Bath Street cut up through the flats and that way it looks quiet enough no one about how did he know my dreams
and that’s another thing isn’t it if there’s no free will then why has this place got it in for me giving me nightmares giving me Benedict for fuck’s sake Perrit I’ve done nothing wrong you name me one thing I’ve done wrong and if there’s no free will then there’s no wrong no right no sin no virtue nothing everybody’s off the hook away and on the right that place it used to be the drill hall for the Boy’s Brigade I wonder Bath Street’s dead tonight I wonder if there’s still a Boy’s Brigade no but the free will business if nobody’s done anything wrong then why should anyone feel guilty when nobody had a choice and if there’s no free will then we’re all really free and by that I mean free of feeling bad and free of dreams and drunks and madmen you could smell ghosts on his breath we’ve none of us done any wrong and that’s objective fact objective scientific fact except
for it to be objective fact there’d have to be some sort of outside some sort of observer and
there isn’t one there’s only us just us seeing it all subjectively and
so
to us
to us there’s wrong we think we’ve got free will we think we’re doing wrong so the morality I mean that’s just the same free will or not we think we’re doing wrong and we can’t get away from that but that’s worse isn’t it the worst of both worlds no free will but there’s still sin there’s sin to us and we’re the only ones it matters to what’s that the Muslims say it’s something like “a saint may slay a million enemies and be without sin unless he regret but one” it’s that it’s the regret free will or not that doesn’t go away we’re trapped then aren’t we all of us trapped in our lives trapped in all this in Bath Street in the world the Boroughs everything it isn’t fair it’s
someone guns his engine takes off with a screech down in the dark ahead of me sounds like he’s in a hurry and the rain’s not letting up across the street off along Simons Walk somebody playing well I wouldn’t say that it was music playing something anyway how did he know my dreams and then you’ve got the little pocket park there lonely and deserted in the night and hulking over it the towers and like I say at least that’s space for social housing I was able to preserve if someone makes a profit that’s just business that’s how business works duh, what, would it be better if nobody made a profit and they’d pulled them down and we’d had that many more homeless on the streets oh I don’t think so I’d like to see Roman Thompson justify that argument who’d be the wanker then it’s like Iraq somebody has to be prepared to shrug off all the liberal bleating and do something proftical no practical to help all these poor people someone has to be prepared to get stuck in someone who isn’t fussy about getting their hands
dirty
turn left up the walkway of St. Peter’s House the Bath Street flats there’s nobody about tonight but sometimes well you have to watch yourself it’s lit up with the lights under the balconies so you can see what’s what somebody told me that the kids the rap kids come down here and do the hip-hop all of that to tell the truth I’m not much bothered one way or the other I mean all the dregs that have been stuck down here over the years I don’t see how some fucking kids who talk too fast to understand are going to make much difference frankly crackheads mental cases prossies that one with the stripy hair I’m sure she lives down here what would it be not that I ever would what would it be like I bet they’d do anything, it be like doing it with somebody like, anyway, the rain feels like it’s letting up a bit now that I’m nearly home wouldn’t you know it and the gravel path’s all shiny like the shingle at the seaside and what’s that it’s ugh it’s dogshit people shouldn’t have dogs if they can’t clear up behind them look at that fucking disgusting it looks like somebody’s stepped in it already glad it wasn’t me look there’s the grid of someone’s trainer-sole pressed into it it’s like a little model of New York made out of shit and in the rain and the electric light it’s wet and glistening it looks fresh oh God that turns my stomach shit I hate it I suppose I’ve got a thing about it if I hadn’t spotted it in time if I’d just put my foot in it you track it everywhere you go and it stays with you, everywhere you go you’re thinking what’s that smell and there’s your shitty footprints over everything you bring it home with you you get it everywhere all over everything I’m
labouring up the ramp to lamp-lit Castle Street there’s sirens somewhere I expect town centre’s kicking off it’s probably a good job I’m home early before any trouble starts but what was that then in the Bird in Hand what was it if it wasn’t trouble I don’t know I don’t know what it was it was a fluke a meaningless fluke incident forget about it put it from your mind think about something else look at the brickwork on these walls they put these flats up nearly eighty years ago said they were temporary housing when they built them I mean technically a word like temporary just means “for a period of time” but I’d have thought that eighty years was pushing it I mean considered up against the lifespan of the universe the sun is temporary everything’s temporary St. Katherine’s House across the road there that’s as temporary as fuck one kitchen fire one B&H dropped down the back of the settee the fire services condemned it but we, they, they still stick people there and if there was a fire I mean they built tower blocks like this all up and down the country in the ’60s and if there’s a fire the central stairwell all these flats these type of flats it’s like a chimney people trying to get down while all the smoke and flames are going up I shouldn’t say this but I hope that Labour’s out of office if well more like when there is a fire the people that they stick down here I mean they’re at risk even if the place they live in isn’t burning down teenagers fresh from care homes mental difficulties everything you name it there were those two old dears that I saw a week or two ago, well, I presume they live there they were standing in the forecourt of St. Katherine’s just looking up at it rubbing their hands and cackling most likely they were care in the community you get them all down here all the abnormals and from what I hear it’s always been like that Benedict Perrit all of them how does this district turn them out it must be something in the water something in the soil and downhill to Chalk Lane the rain’s stopped
on the corner there the little nursery something in the window poster of some sort oh I remember Alma Warren someone said that she was going to have an exhibition down here just a one day thing a Saturday I think they said I’d thought it would be in a week or two but who knows it might even be tomorrow Alma Warren there’s another one another freak show boiled up from the Boroughs wasn’t she in the same class as him at school Benedict Perrit I’ve made overtures tried to be friendly but I just get the cold shoulder I don’t think she likes me acts like she’s a law unto herself as if she’s not on the same world as everybody else I think she’s vain thinks she’s superior morally superior to everybody else she’s got some sort of complex you can see it in her eyes and when she’s talking then she’s smiling and she’s saying funny things and being likeable it’s all an act she’s smiling and her spidery eyes are twinkling but it’s like she’s trying to disguise the fact she wants to eat you it’s an act it’s a performance if she’s so fond of the Boroughs well then why doesn’t she live down here like I do I hate people like that people who pretend to be straightforward when you know you know that everyone’s got secrets everyone’s pretending something it’s an act not like with me with me it’s what you see is what you get I’m sorry but that’s how I am why don’t these people like me why don’t why the fuck should you care why the fuck should you care if a load of chavs and dead-end cases like you or not you’re the alderman the one with the accomplishments the one with the CV why do you always come back to these same things these same thoughts you’re like a hamster in a wheel just round and round for fuck’s sake just get over it what everybody else thinks doesn’t matter but
it’s still mean-spirited the way they always think the worst of someone or at least they seem to think the worst of me it’s hurtful sometimes and across the way there Doddridge Church I’ve often wondered what that little door’s for halfway up the wall I’ll bet they used to spread their nasty little rumours about Philip Doddridge calling him a wanker calling him a cunt when he was practically a saint a man who really cared about the neighbourhood not that I’m trying to make comparisons but I mean you can see the similarities I feel good I feel good about myself and if there’s people who just want to think the worst who won’t give anyone the old benefit of the doubt then that’s their problem rolling downhill nearly home now car park on the right I think they put plague victims there and on the left another car park the old Doddridge burial ground dead people everywhere we’re temporary we’re not forever I suppose that it’s a blessing in a way free will or not whatever we’ve done wrong whatever we’ve supposedly done wrong time wipes it all away eventually and nobody remembers and the little things don’t matter everything’s forgiven when it’s gone the debts are cancelled and there’s no permanent record because nothing’s permanent the whole world’s temporary and that’s our what’s it called statute of limitations our get out of jail card ah now here we are Black Lion just over the other side of Marefair at the bottom it looks dead be lucky if it’s still here come next year when we moved in we had a little newsagents down at the bottom corner of Chalk Lane just opposite there was a balding bloke who ran it Pete Pete something and veer to the right around the corner on our little walkway you can
see the valley floor the station and the traffic junction at the crossroads all the lights I
didn’t have a choice in being who I am over Far Cotton Jimmy’s End there’s
no ghosts nothing there and nothing’s haunted three doors down I find my key and there safe sanctuary home at last and none of it the Boroughs it can’t get you now I flick the light on in the hall and peel my jacket off it’s wringing wet it’s glistening looks like a dead seal hung there dripping from the coat-hook do you know I’m suddenly exhausted I’m completely knackered I suppose I’ve just done nearly a full circuit of the district and it’s not like I’m a walker in the general run of things of course there was that business at the Bird in Hand I can’t believe it now stood here at home I can’t believe I ran out of the pub literally ran and that, all the adrenaline, that’s probably another reason why you feel worn out through in the living room I flump down in the armchair and ugh fuck my trousers cold and soaking wet against my legs my arse where they’ve been rained on this is fucking horrible it’s not much after nine but I don’t know I might as well just go to bed it’s left me in a funny mood this evening has I might as well just go to bed and sleep it off feel better in the morning I know one thing for a certainty if I don’t get these trousers off then it’s pneumonia and I suppose I’m feeling a bit lonely I wish Mandy was at home but even then
stand up and even that’s an effort put the lights off downstairs and creak up to bed the bathroom’s a bit dazzling I take my shirt and trousers off my shoes and socks the shirt is absolutely sopping its gone all transparent there’s a wet, pink-tinted oval where it’s sticking to my stomach for a second I thought I was bleeding leave the wet things draped over the bath’s rim till the morning I suppose my underpants and vest feel a bit damp but no they’ll just dry naturally I take my pills three of them every night it’s a palaver you don’t think about it when you’re young squint through the condensation on the mirror while I brush my teeth look at the state of me I’m like a garden gnome a stepped-on David Bellamy a hobbit stuck in quarantine with spearmint rabies dripping off my chin I’m sick of looking at myself pad over to the toilet bare feet on the chilly tiles lift up the seat so that it isn’t splashed and after a few moments’ waiting while my knob decides on what it wants to do there’s a pale golden rope of piss unravelling into the tinkling bowl it’s funny standing looking down we’ve got two rolls of toilet paper standing on the cistern lid and looking down beneath that there’s the lifted seat and lid and then the gaping bowl it looks like a white cartoon frog like an albino Kermit from the Muppets staring at me boggle-eyed with an indignant and betrayed look while I stand here pissing down his throat even the toilet blaming me for something there’s a thing you have to do you have to press the lever down two or three times before it flushes while its gargling I yank the string to kill the bathroom light and I’m along the landing and in bed before the cistern noise has died away to hisses drips and piddles it’s a sort of private superstition I suppose I don’t know what I think would happen if I didn’t make it into bed before the noises stopped it’s more a sort of game a sort of habit I’ve got no idea why I do it oh that’s
nice the mattress creaks I can feel all the ache and tension soaking out of me I rub my feet together and they’re dry and cold but warming with the friction and that’s good hopefully I’ll sleep through tonight no dreams no cellars nothing running at me with its face unfolding safe now safe here in our little house our little corner of the Boroughs opposite the station ten years and I’m hoping that this place will be unrecognisable a big development exploding up from where the station is and most of this, this place, most of it cleaned up move the social stragglers out most of it swept away that’s if the money lasts the boom the money that they need to do it no the land down here the property it could be really nice it could be really valuable not that we’d ever sell part of the neighbourhood that’s us part of the furniture roll over on my side and drag a tuck of duvet up between my knees to stop them knobbling against each other ahh that’s nice that’s
I suppose the people down here in the main they’re not that bad it’s really in the pubs you see them at their worst and let them take the piss out of me if they’ve got a mind to I’ll still be on top of things when they’re all gone so let them have their bit of fun it’s not their fault they’re hopeless, living in a hopeless place, they’re and I’m speaking as a Marxist now modified Marxist they’re just victims they’re the end result inevitably of historical and economic processes but then I mean you look at them drunk all day it’s the kids who bear the brunt of it a lot of them the parents they don’t want jobs not prepared to work they’re not
it’s like a flooded earthworks did I come here as a boy what what where was I
not prepared to work that’s right blame everybody else for their own problems blame the council blame the system blame me we’re all doing what we have to do and some of them down here I mean they knock their wives about they say it’s the frustration it’s the poverty but then why do they have so many kids with kids to hold you back how are you ever going to make it, get to where you want to be in life take me and Mandy children would have just got in the way of our careers and look at us we’re happy very happy but some people they’re just human rubbish they’re just
scalloped cliffs of mud a long way off across the grass and distant red brick railway arches I’ve been here before look there’s a toy a plastic elephant dropped in a puddle it’s I’m sure it once belonged to me the last time I was here and isn’t somewhere near a house an old what what did I
all of the roughs the scruffs the tough and rumble of them all their kids all violent doing drugs I used to read them ghost stories at Christmas mothers wearing short skirts fishnet tights effing and blinding you should hear them not brought up they’re dragged up it’s a shithole full of shits there’s paedophiles down here there’s sex offenders well they’ve got to put them somewhere crackheads and it’s all their own fault it’s not ours not mine they ought to pull their socks up but then
there’s that old well scarlet house that stands up from the wasteland on its own the grey sky overhead and in my pants in my grey pants and vest I walk towards it through the weeds I need the toilet weren’t there lavatories down in the cellar of that building if I can remember how to find them if they’re not all cracked and full of backed up
but then who am I
** <strong>THE ROOD IN THE WALL</strong>
<strong>I</strong>t’s what you’d call a first-draft face, after the angry and frustrated crumpling. It’s a private eye face, it’s Studs Goodman’s thug-and-bourbon-battered figurehead cresting the dirty suds and breakers of another dead-end town, a burned-out world as fallen as his arches. This is how it plays, the gumshoe life, the endless waiting between cases sitting by a blinded window in the slatted light. These empty stretches with no homicides, they’re murder.
Studs takes a deep, satisfying drag upon his biro. Puckering those cruel and crooked lips into a sphincter he exhales a writhing genie of imaginary smoke into the hyphenated sunrays, and considers how the bone-dry periods of his chosen trade must be like those endured by people of a thespian persuasion. Studs, a seriously addicted heterosexual trying to cut down upon a forty-dames-a-day vagina habit, has no time for actors and theatrical types on the basis that they’re mostly sissies, horticultural lads and so forth. It’s a well-known fact. Still, Studs can sympathise with how it must be when they’re out of work and ‘resting between parts’. The inactivity, he knows, can drive a feller nuts. Why, even Studs can find himself just sitting, dreaming up some hypothetical and complicated case to solve there in his mind, and he’s a tough, unreconstructed Brooklyn wise-guy who thinks with his fists and punches people with his head. He doesn’t dream in black and white, he dreams in radio. What must it be like for some neurotic bit-part player when the studio doesn’t call? The weather-beaten sleuth would bet his bottom dollar that those precious flowers most likely spend their time rehearsing for some casting call that never comes, a cowboy or a big game hunter, something masculine like that. Who knows, maybe a private dick? He chuckles wryly at the thought and stubs his biro out in a convenient coffee-cup. Studs is a role that would require a lot of time in makeup.
Sure, he’s not a pretty boy. He likes to think he’s got a lived-in look, albeit lived in by three generations of chaotic Lithuanian alcoholics who are finally evicted in an armed siege after which the premises remain unused for decades, save as a urinal by the homeless. Then it all burns down in an insurance fire. He sits there at the dressing-table mirror in his seamy office and surveys his crime-scene countenance: move right along, nothing to see here. He takes in the seemingly haphazard corrugations of his forehead, a volcanic rock-face risen from the straggling tree-line of his brows to the combed-over pinnacle, whence it commences its descent through black and slippery long grass to the nape. The eyes are full of pessimism and what would appear to be some manner of unspecified disorder; eyes that have seen far too much from slightly different elevations and conflicting angles, roughly equidistant from the ice-axe nose, broken more often than a hooker’s heart. Then, over everything, a sparse but noticeable pebble-dash of Sugar Puff-sized warts to make sure no one misses the asymmetry, a laugh-track prompt sprinkled redundantly across his face for anyone who somehow hasn’t got the gag already. People used to tell him he sure wasn’t any oil-painting, although they were obviously unfamiliar with the cubists.
Elsewhere in the building, perhaps out in his front office, there’s a telephone like a spoiled child demanding everyone’s attention. He calls to his dizzy secretary – “Mum? Mum, phone” – but evidently she’s on one of her unfathomable breaks, perhaps connected with the aforementioned dizziness. Whenever he’s up here from London stopping over for a few days he tells her that she should change her medication, but she doesn’t listen. Women. Can’t live with ’em, can’t remember where you put your socks. Ten rings and then it goes to answerphone, his message that he’d taken the precaution of recording over hers when he arrived here yesterday. She doesn’t get a lot of calls, whereas a client or his agent might get on the blower to him, theoretically, at any time of day or night. That scatterbrained tomato could just rerecord her own apologetic mumblings after he was gone, and in the meantime would most probably be honoured to have his rich tones bewildering such members of her peer group as could still remember how to use a phone.
“Hello there. This is Robert Goodman. I’m not in just at the moment, but please leave a message and I’ll get right back to you. Thanks. Cheerio.”
Studs has a flawless English accent. In his line of business, a guy never knows when he might need one, possibly while undercover and impersonating some variety of Duke or cockney barrow-boy, conceivably as part of a wild caper which involves the crown jewels and a blonde of independent legs. Though he could use a juicy case right now, preferably a tangled incest drama with Faye Dunaway though he’d make do with blackmail or divorce if needs be, Studs resists the impulse to go pick up the now silent instrument and interrupt the caller. If by any chance it should turn out to be a family struggle over an inheritance that’s escalated to a kidnapping or home invasion, Studs can find out later. The last thing he wants is for prospective clients to think he’s desperate from his tone of voice when they can work that out themselves, like everybody else who knows him has to do, from the gnawed furniture and the discarded, disappointed scratch-card dross around his flat.
Sat at the dressing table, zebra-painted with the shadow cast by the venetians, he reflects upon the grubby criminal career he’s led before becoming a hard-boiled investigator. He’s dealt non-specific drugs in Albert Square and been a scar-faced squealer up at Sun Hill nick. He’s loitered by a Lexus in a leather to increase the sales of car alarms, he’s growled and glared with Gotham City greasers, worn a Dr. Seuss hat for the purposes of his initiation in an early New York Irish street-gang and raped Joan of Arc’s big sister back in fifteenth-century France. That’s how it is with Studs. He’s a wild card, a maverick who won’t play by the rules. He’s in a big town where the streets aren’t always mean but can be pretty fucking ignorant. He’s back, he’s in Northampton, and this time it’s personal, by which he means it’s definitely not professional. If only.
Frankly, though it goes against Studs’ naturally coarse and testosterone-fuelled nature, he’d do pantomime, be one of Cinderella’s ugly sisters or kneel in his shoes for Snow White given half a chance. This calls to mind his since-departed sidekick, Little John Ghavam. Studs ain’t no sentimentalist, but not a heartless night of moral compromise goes by without him missing his toad-breeding dwarf pal and their reeling drunk Todd Browning escapades when they were headstrong, relatively young, and from the point of view of an observer, very disconcerting. John, like Studs, had been around the block career-wise, spending some time as a scavenger amongst the Jawa sand-people before he hooked up with a gang of similarly sized time travelling larcenists and soon thereafter banged a lot of former knitwear models for the specialist market. Studs thinks one such enterprise was called <em>Muff Bandits</em> but he may have made that up or dreamed it, like when he’d insisted the late local artist Henry Bird had been the husband of Vampira in <em>Plan 9 from Outer Space</em> when actually Bird’s wife was Freda Jackson, Karloff co-star of <em>Die, Monster, Die</em>. It was a dumb, rookie mistake that anybody could have made, but Studs is a P.I. who prides himself on his rep for reliability and he’ll most likely take the error with him to his grave. He figures that’s the kind of guy he is.
The thing that’s hard for Studs to live without is Little John’s extreme unlikelihood. When an unlikely person dies it just makes the occurrence of other unlikely people that much more unlikely. Characters like Little John or for that matter Studs himself are like statistical outliers of reality. They skew the figures. When they vanish from the picture then the graph relaxes back towards a bland and comfortable mean, whereas with Little John, he gave you the impression that the world was capable of anything. The laws of physics cowered in surrender every time the little fucker drank, perched on his barstool for eight pints, nine pints; you never saw him going to the toilet. Studs has theorised that his buddy was completely hollow, possibly some kind of toby jug that had spontaneously developed human consciousness. An unexpectedly resilient toby jug, admittedly: at the casino just off Regent Square he’d hurl his compressed mass onto the roulette table, hollering “All ’ands on deck” in customary helium tones. He’d been among the nightmare Crown & Cushion crowd providing the captive composer Malcolm Arnold with an audience. Out near Stoke Bruerne at the Boat, the pub by the canal where all the Sunday sailors used to congregate in yachting caps and polo shirts, their younger wives in sporty-looking shorts, the rampant Little John would thrust his face into the nearest denim crotch.
“It’s great. Their husbands all just laugh and go, like, ‘Steady on now, little fellow. ’Ad a spot too much, ’ave we?’ and things like that. Nobody wants to ’it a dwarf.”
Studs pictures John stood in the garden of his house in York Road with the “Toad Hall” plaque outside the door, just standing there by the stone sundial cackling in delight with massive toads all over him, the flowerbeds, the sundial, everything.
Of course, the most unlikely thing about his late friend is that Little John was actually the grandson of the Shah of Persia. Studs shakes his unprepossessing head and chuckles ruefully, as if there’s someone watching. Grandson of the Shah. To Studs it’s much like quantum theory, women, or contemporary jazz in that it don’t make any sense.
He reaches for another biro and then cancels the reflexive gesture halfway through. His croaker tells him he should scale his habit down to maybe just a fountain pen once in a while, on weekends or at special celebrations. Ah, the hell with it. He pushes back his chair and rises from his dressing table in the hope that some activity might take his steel-trap P.I. brain-box off his cravings. Studs goes through to the front office, tricked out to resemble a carpeted landing, staircase and English suburban downstairs hall to throw his creditors and gangland adversaries off the scent, and checks the message on the answerphone.
“Bob, for fuck’s sake, what’s that voice about? You sound like you’re an old Etonian child-molester. This is Alma, by the way. Sorry to call you at your mum’s, but if you’re coming to the show tomorrow don’t forget to bring along the Blake stuff that I asked you to dig up, assuming you’ve come up with anything. If not, it’s no big deal. Just never speak to me again. And why is Robert Goodman not in at the moment? Is he playing polo? ‘Robert Goodman’. Bob, nobody calls you Robert. To be frank, most people aren’t polite enough to even call you Bob. Most people groan and make a sort of gesture with their hands. Then they sit down, and then they cry. They cry like babies, Bob, at the idea of your existence. Anyway, I hope to see the Blake material at the exhibition, with you holding it if absolutely necessary. Take care, Bobby. Never change. Talk to you soon.”
His blood, he notices, is not immediately turned to ice there in his veins. That’s storybook detective stuff and in real life the best that he can manage is pink slush, but, still, it ain’t a pretty feeling. Sure, Studs knows the name, the voice, the avalanche of undeserved abuse. He knows the dame: a long, tall drink of battery acid going by the moniker of Alma Warren. Think of those surprisingly large clots of hair you sometimes haul from a blocked bathtub trap, and then imagine one with eyes and a superior demeanour: right there’s a description that a police sketch artist could work from. She’s the kind of cast-iron frail you don’t forget without hypnosis, and yet somehow the whole Warren case has slipped Studs’ bullet-creased and woman-addled mind until just now, this moment.
How it is with Warren, she’s got some variety of modern art scam going for her where the rubes pay out big bucks to see her schizophrenic scribbles. Months back, Studs called in at her bohemian dump along East Park Parade, just up the street from where he used to flop when he was living in here in town, presumably at some point after his tough hard-knock boyhood in the Bowery district of New York, or Brooklyn, or wherever it was Studs grew up. It’s only backstory. He’ll figure it out later. Anyway, he’d dropped by at the artist’s squalid dive to find her working frantically amidst billowing cumuli of contraband, bewildering images in different media propped all around the parlour until Studs had felt like he was trapped inside some kind of busted Grateful Dead kaleidoscope. Between pulls on a reefer long enough to qualify as penis envy and erratic daubs at her unfathomable canvas, she’d explained she was preparing something like three dozen pieces for a new show she was holding in the run-down neighbourhood where she’d grown up. Studs frankly doubts it was as rough and desperate as his own upbringing in the mean streets of the Bronx – perhaps Hell’s Kitchen, Satan’s Bidet, somewhere colourful like that – although by all accounts the Boroughs is still having lousy luck. Warren’s old district ain’t just on the wrong side of the tracks, it’s on the tracks themselves, in pieces and squashed flat by near eight hundred years of rumbling social locomotion.
He remembers having an unpleasant run-in with the place back in his childhood, when his parents had insisted that he take dance-classes at the Marjorie Pitt-Draffen School in Phoenix Street, around the back of Doddridge Church. Or was it him, insisting on the dance class? Studs, his memory crammed full of bodies, barrooms and the brunettes he’s let slip between his fingers, can’t recall. It doesn’t matter. The important thing is that he had to wear a kilt. A nine-year-old boy in a kilt, taken to dancing classes in a thug-menagerie like Alma Warren’s former neighbourhood. Studs thinks that ought to count as child abuse. He’s mentioned it to Warren and her only comment had been that if she’d encountered him back then she’d more or less have been compelled to beat him up: “Posh kids in kilts, it’s one of the unwritten laws”. Now that Studs thinks about it, he was beaten up more often as a soft-centred young schoolboy than as a hard-bitten private eye, and on the great majority of those childhood occasions he was wearing ordinary trousers. He suspects the business with the kilt is only part of the equation.
The real kicker is that the dishevelled artist’s show is scheduled for tomorrow, and that furthermore it’s taking place at the day nursery in Phoenix Street which used to be the Marjorie Pitt-Draffen School. This exhibition is connected with the case she wanted Studs to take up when he called to see her that day on East Park Parade. As Warren had explained it to him then, she had twenty or thirty pieces finished but the subject matter wasn’t all connecting up the way she hoped it would. From Studs’ perspective it was like she’d loaded up a sawn-off shotgun with a buckshot of significance then fired it at a wall expecting the blast-pattern to make sense. There were some images inspired by hymns, a tile arrangement based upon the life of local Holy Joe Phil Doddridge and some nonsense that concerned a stone cross brought here from Jerusalem. One picture seemed to be a likeness of Ben Perrit, a poetic rummy Studs knows from back in the day, and there was some mixed-media business meant to represent determinism and the absence of free will, or at least that’s what the pot-saturated painter claimed. In Studs’ opinion, Warren’s exhibition is a random four-lane pile-up of ideas with nothing joining them together, and to make things worse she seems to think the whole mess should somehow connect with William Blake.
“I mean, I’ve got a lot of references to my family having come from Lambeth, but I’m thinking it needs something more substantial, something that pulls all the themes together. So, Bob, that’s what I want you to do. Find out how Blake ties into all of this. Find out what links Blake with the Boroughs and I promise that I’ll paint you, Bobby. I’ll immortalise you, and together we’ll inflict your face upon a blameless future. How’s that for an offer?”
Studs’ opinion, which he didn’t venture at the time, is that the offer is a standard Alma Warren contract in that it involves no actual money. Immortality and £1.50 will buy Studs another pack of biros. Still, it’s work, and he accepted it. The paint-flecked hag has Studs over a barrel and if he can’t make good on the case he knows he’s finished in this town. Warren will see to it. She knows too much about him, all those stories buried in his violent past that he prefers to keep that way. He grimaces as he recalls the time he bumped into her on the Kettering Road and she’d asked, no doubt in an affectation of concern, why he was limping.
“Well, I was, uh … I was in Abington Park last night, up by the bandstand. As you know, I like to keep my hand in with the acting. What I do is, I rehearse parts so that I’ll be ready if I’m offered them. It was a sort of secret agent role where the scene opened with me standing on the bandstand and then, at a signal, what I do is vault over the handrail and land on the grass so that I’m in a cat-like pose. I look around, scanning the darkness, then run off into the shadows.”
Warren had just stared at him, blinking her creepy eyes in disbelief.
“And so that’s how you hurt your leg?”
“No, no, I did all of that perfectly, but then they wanted one more take. The second try, one of my feet caught on the railing when I vaulted over.”
Her expression had been like a knife fight between pity and contempt while incredulity looked on and didn’t do a damned thing.
“ ‘<em>They</em>’ ?” She’d gazed at him like he was something unexpected in a Petrie dish. “<em>They</em> wanted one more take? The film crew in your mind, Bob, wanted one more take. That’s what you’re telling me?”
Yeah, that’s what Studs was telling her and looking back he wishes that he hadn’t. Information, in the hands of an unstable woman artist, is a weapon. Probably a weapon like a nail-file in that it’s not very masculine but could still do a lot of damage, say for instance if somebody stuck one in your eye. The upshot is that Warren has Studs where she wants him, and if he can’t solve the Blake case then his reputation’s shot. It’s blackmail, pure and simple. Only not so pure. Or simple.
Wearily he reaches for the leather jacket which, he rationalises, maybe stands in for his customary trench coat when it’s at the cleaners getting all the blood and booze rinsed out, plus invisible mending on the profuse bullet holes.
“Moths”. That would be his likely quip when the staff at the cleaners asked him what had made them. “38-calibre moths.”
Leaving a brief note for his secretary with regard to dinner preference, Studs hauls his morally bruised carcass out into the unforgiving light and heads towards his car or would a yank say automobile?
Twenty minutes later he remembers where he got that InterCity grid of frown-lines, nudging his frustrated vehicle up another ramp onto a higher level of the Grosvenor Centre’s crowded multistorey car park. Who’d have thought there would be all these people on a Friday? Finally he wins a space by staring threateningly at a silver-haired old lady in a Citroen and, when he has both paid and displayed, makes his way down by elevator into the tinnitus hum and sizzle of the shopping centre’s lower floor. Studs weaves his way through the sedated-looking human surf, among the scrunchie-tufted mums who steer their buggy-bubbled offspring at a stately, ceremonial pace over the glittering electric-lighted tiles; between the strangely marginal and ghostly teenagers who limit their defiance to a smirk, a woolly jumper and the uncontested occupation of a bench outside the Body Shop. Studs curls his lip on one side in what’s meant to be disdain until he notices the strolling shoppers glancing at him worriedly in case he’s either having or recovering from a stroke. Taking a right turn at the elbow of the muttering arcade into a stretch that had been Wood Street once, Studs doggedly heads for the daylight out beyond the glass doors at the walkway’s end.
Abington Street’s pink incline seems bereft despite the florets of spring sun that drop haphazardly through flimsy cloud. This former main drag of the town, the bunny-run, looks weighed down by the realisation that it has no purpose anymore. It keep its head down, tries not to be noticed and sincerely hopes it’s overlooked in any forthcoming wave of redundancies. It seems to shrink from the flint glint that’s in Studs’ eye as if ashamed, like when you recognise some used-up junkie hooker as your teacher from first grade, not that he’s ever had such an improbable encounter. Certainly not with Miss Wiggins, anyway. Aw, Christ. He wishes that he hadn’t conjured that specific image. A real private eye, he tells himself, would manage to come up with hard-boiled metaphors that didn’t actually turn his own stomach. A crushed skull that’s like a broken wholegrain mustard server, for example, is a simile that gets the point across without being indelicate. Miss Wiggins hobbling up and down next to a busy traffic junction in her hearing aid, a mini skirt and heroin withdrawal is another thing entirely, a thing scorched indelibly onto Studs’ forebrain to the point where he can no longer remember what the monstrous imagery was meant to represent. Oh, yes – Abington Street. How did he get from there to all that business with … it doesn’t matter. Just forget it. Focus on the case in hand.
He slouches up the hill past Woolworths, then decides to try a saunter and eventually compromises with a kind of speedy Chaplin shuffle that’s abandoned as unworkable before he reaches the Co-op Arcade. He’s headed for a joint he knows here in this crummy burg where he can get his information from reliable sources. It’s the kind of place that ordinary people tend to keep away from, a suspicious dive where you can spot the criminal activity just from the way that everybody talks in whispers, and where any joker who don’t play by the house rules is looking for some serious payback, possibly a fine. Studs hasn’t visited Northampton library in years, but he’d still bet his last red cent it’s got the answers that he’s looking for, and what the hell’s a red cent, anyway? Is it a rouble? Or a kopek? There’s so much about this line of work, this idiom, that he doesn’t know.
To Studs’ surprise, the library’s lower door beneath its handsome portico no longer offers entry to the building, which necessitates a short stroll past the structure’s grand façade to the top entrance. Ambling self-consciously beneath the slightly condescending gaze of Andrew Washington, uncle of the more famous George, he’s almost reached the safety of the swing doors when he realises something doesn’t feel right. Trusting instincts honed in Vietnam, Korea or conceivably in World War One, Studs glances up and stops dead in his tracks. Up at the street’s far end a black and threatening weather-front approaches, bowling downhill in a whirlwind of displaced pedestrians and flurried litter. Alma Warren.
Nerve-ends screaming like a four alarm fire, praying that she hasn’t spotted him already, Studs hurls himself through the entrance and into the leaflet-papered library reception area. Flattening himself to an unsightly leather stain against the neon handbills on the east wall, he sucks in a breath and holds it, eyes fixed on the glass door as he waits for the intimidating harridan to stalk past in the street outside. He isn’t even really sure why he’s avoiding her, except that automatic furtiveness in any situation seems like good form from a private eye perspective. It’s what Studs would do. Besides, he hasn’t got the information that his nightmare client is counting on him to retrieve regarding the Blake situation, and things could turn ugly.
In the sorry precinct out beyond the glass a great untidy avalanche in lipstick rumbles past from right to left, and Studs exhales. Unpeeling himself from the laminated posters at his rear he steps back to the door and opens it, poking his ruptured punch-bag head around the edge to squint inquisitively at the unsuspecting beatnik artist as she flaps and flounces down Abington Street away from him, like a receding storm. As he enjoys the private eye’s prerogative of watching somebody while unobserved, a further element of intrigue enters the already curious picture: heading up the street on a collision course with the descending painter is the waistcoat and straw hat clad figure of the Boroughs’ own bard-in-a-bottle, the near-universally anomalous Benedict Perrit.
As these two distinctive products of Northampton’s oldest neighbourhood approach each other, Studs is witness to a mystifying ritual. On catching sight of Warren, the inebriated poet swivels and heads back the way he’s come for several paces before turning once again and staggering in the direction of the artist, this time doubled up with laughter. Misaligned eyes narrowing, Studs wonders if Ben Perrit’s strange behaviour could be some kind of code or signal. Maybe this apparent chance encounter between the dishevelled painter and one of her current subjects isn’t quite as random as it seems. Suspicions deepening he watches Warren plant an uncharacteristic kiss on Perrit’s cheek – it’s certainly not how she says hello to Studs – and then after a moment or two’s conversation there’s a furtive transfer as what might be money or perhaps a message changes hands. Are the decrepit pair conspirators, or grotesque sweethearts, or has Warren reached the age where she pays drunks to let her kiss them? Ducking back inside the library entrance as at last the couple separate and carry on with their respective journeys up or down the sloping street, Studs muses that whichever way the cookie falls or the dice crumbles he’s now almost certain that Ben Perrit’s involved in the Blake case right up to his bleary, wounded-looking eyeballs. All Studs has to do is find out how.
To that end, he strides further on into the changed and only intermittently familiar library. He orients himself by the tall Abington Street windows in the north wall, where the filtered daylight pours down on display stands that now occupy an area which used to serve as the newspaper reading room. He can recall the register of local hoboes who once occupied the long-since vanished armchairs, most conspicuously if it happened to be raining. There would be Mad Bill, Mad Charlie, Mad Frank, Mad George and Mad Joe, possibly even Whistling Walter who, a shell-shocked veteran of the First World War, was the sole member of that company who suffered from a noticeable mental illness. All the rest were merely homeless and half-cut, though local folklore had attributed to each of them the ownership of blocks of flats in nearby towns. Conceivably, this inferred status as eccentric millionaires was dreamed up as justification for not giving any spare change to the down-at-heel, or at least that’s why Studs himself would have come up with that kind of a yarn. Progressing through to the main concourse of the venerable institution, he recalls a last-minute addition to his list of browsing bums, this being W.H. Davies who had scribbled down his <em>Autobiography of a Supertramp</em> there under those tall windows in among the muttering and probably infested throng. And now he thinks about it, didn’t Davies go on to collaborate with one of Warren’s heroes, cockney occultist and artist Austin Spare, on their arts publication <em>Form</em>? The way Studs understands it Spare was an Edwardian weirdo who at one point claimed to have been William Blake in a prior incarnation, although he supposes this connection is too tenuous to be the kind of thing that his employer’s looking for. There’s nothing for it. He reluctantly accepts he’s going to have to do some heavy digging.
The best place to start, he reasons, is with Blake himself, the enigmatic figure at the centre of this cold case. Swiftly hunting down an oversized edition of the Lambeth visionary’s work, Studs finds himself a table and a chair where he can catch up with the skinny on his presumed victim. Skimming through the volume’s introduction he confirms that Blake’s dead, very dead, since 1827. The prime suspects seem to have been complications brought on by a bowel complaint, although some time before his death the poet himself had put the finger on the English Winter as a likely culprit. It’s a tempting theory, but Studs rapidly dismisses the frequently castigated season from the frame for want of motive. Without so much as a scrap of evidence providing any leads the case is going nowhere. Hell, it turns out they don’t even have a body yet, with both Blake and his wife dumped into a communal paupers’ grave at Bunhill Fields, their headstone giving only an approximate location for the pair’s remains. The other well-known literary occupants of the East London cemetery, Bunyan and Defoe, both known to have made journeys to Northampton town and to have written on their travels here, are marked by a sarcophagus and obelisk respectively. Why couldn’t it be one of them that Warren was obsessed by?
With a bad mood coming on he flips through the remainder of the intro, anxious for the consolation of the plates, perhaps a touch of <em>Glad Day</em> to lift up his spirits. What he finds he has forgotten is the great predominance of gloomy or downright disturbing images that typify the noted angel-whisperer’s oeuvre. Here’s <em>Nebuchadnezzar</em> crawling nude and horror-stricken through a subterranean underworld, while here’s the corpulent <em>Ghost</em> <em>of</em> <em>a</em> <em>Flea</em> embarking out onto its twilight stage, a bowl of blood held proudly up before it. Even on those pages where the ghouls and monsters are not present, such as the entirely saint-and-seraph decorated and yet overwhelmingly funereal <em>Epitome of James Hervey’s Meditations among the Tombs</em>, a graveyard damp is everywhere. Belatedly Studs realises why that last Blake exhibition at Tate Britain some time back, in company with his contemporaries Gilray and Fuseli, was subtitled <em>Gothic Nightmares</em>. He reflects that if Blake doesn’t turn out to have a Northamptonshire connection then he ought to have, sporting a dismal attitude like that. Northampton was the birthplace, in Studs’ estimation, of the modern Gothic movement and the painter, poet and print-maker’s obvious preoccupation with mortality would have gone down a storm at any of those early Bauhaus gigs.
He finds that he is mumbling the chorus of “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” beneath his morning coffee breath and lets his thoughts drift from the job in hand back to those black and silver nights of twenty, thirty years ago. Studs had been one of the Grand Guignol troupe that gathered like Carpathian fog around Bauhaus 1919, as the ensemble of good cheekbones were then known. There had been Studs himself, and Uber-roadie Reasonable Ray. There had been lead guitarist Danny’s otherworldly brother, Gary Ash, and naturally there had been Little John. From what Studs can recall about the genesis of twentieth-century Gothic there had never been a morbid master-plan or style agenda underlying all the vampire references and the haunted Delvaux railway stations on the picture sleeves. That stuff had all emerged from individual members of the band and, by extension, from the town that they’d grown up in; from its creepy thousand-year-old churches, from its sectioned poets, immolated witches, heads on pikes, dead queens and captured kings, this mould and madness all distilled into Pete Murphy channelling Iggy Pop over a weave of Ash’s riffs from an internal biker film and the aortal rhythm section of the brothers David J and Kevin Haskins. And from these absurdly entertaining origins a flood of mortuary chic, flensed pallor and cadaver soundtracks had arisen to engulf the Western world in melancholia and makeup, yet another purely local fever escalating into a pandemic.
On the soft peripheries of Studs’ hungover vision a septuagenarian in a rose anorak heads for Military History like a scud. He sits surrounded by cloud-chamber sibilance, letting his gaze rest on the open book without focussing the attention. The plate swims and its predominating blacks swirl into a miasma, a vortex of mausolea, a dark whirlpool opening before him as if some hired goon has just cold-cocked him with a sap. <em>Meditations among the Tombs</em>. He thinks back to the evening of the funeral for Little John, the patrons of the Racehorse wading waist-deep, wonderstruck, through the lamenting little guys in town for the event, fifty or sixty of them on a Lilliputian pub crawl up the Wellingborough Road and what must it have been like when they started singing? Nobody there from the Persian royal family, by all accounts.
It had all been to do with the potential stain upon the bloodline, as Studs understands it. Given all the enemies that Little John’s U.S.-supported tyrant granddad had in Persia back then in the ’Fifties, just a few years after he’d been parachuted into power, it was decided that for the Shah’s daughter to produce a malformed child would simply be providing these antagonists with ammunition. Better to pack off the infant to the other end of nowhere, somewhere so obscure that nobody would ever hear his name again or even know of his existence. Like Northampton. Was it any wonder he and John had ended up among the Bauhaus entourage, surfing the purple velvet and the glitter? They were two of the town’s many Gothic flourishes.
The library drifts in and out of form about him and for some reason he finds himself remembering a wholly nondescript perambulation in the company of the hard-drinking dwarf, with John’s complexion scourged by alcohol until towards the end there was more blotch than face. Where had they been that day, the two of them, and why should he be thinking of it now? Studs has a ghostly memory of the Jazz Butcher as being somehow part of the event, although he doesn’t think that the impressively credentialed singer-songwriter had actually been present on the unremarkable occasion that is inexplicably obsessing him. More likely he and Little John had either both been on their way to visit the musician or were otherwise returning from just such an interlude, trudging the sulking backstreet rows between the Butcher’s house up near the Racecourse and the draughty chute of Clare Street closer to town centre. Where exactly was it taken, the imaginary snapshot that seems stapled to Studs’ forebrain, with the little man stamping ahead of him through thin gunmetal puddles down a silent strip of houses? Was it Colwyn Road or Hood Street? Hervey Street or Watkin Terrace? All that he remembers is the picked-scab paintwork and the greying gauze of the net curtains over …
Hervey Street. Of course. Widening his eyes he does a ‘sudden realisation’ take, then narrows them again to peer at the small type beneath the gloomy Blake plate. Maybe if Studs thinks of it as being noir rather than black he’ll come to like it more, but there below the mournful imagery is all the confirmation that he needs for now: <em>James Hervey’s Meditations</em> … it’s the same name, the same surname, even though that doesn’t prove it’s the same man or that he was associated with Northampton. After all, the town has got a Chaucer Street, a Milton Street, a Shakespeare Road and a few dozen other names commemorating persons without even a remote connection to the place, but all the same Studs has a hunch about this Hervey, and his keen-honed P.I. intuition never fails him.
Except when it does, of course. He winces as he recollects one of his trips with Little John to the casino, to the Rubicon down in the Boroughs just off Regent Square. It may have been the same night that his wee companion launched himself onto the roulette table like an extra ball, but what defines the evening in Studs’ memory is his own half-baked behaviour. He’d been a different person then. To be specific, he’d been James Bond in a hypothetical reworking of <em>Casino Royale</em>. Oh, he’d got the tux, got the black bowtie, everything. When it was getting late, he’d tossed his last remaining big-stakes chip onto the table and then, without even bothering to see where it had landed, turned and walked away from the roulette wheel with the manner of a man who’d made and lost more fortunes in an afternoon than others had accomplished in a lifetime; someone devil-may-care and assured in his relationship with chance and destiny. However, with a week’s rent riding on what was apparently a wholly unobserved louche gesture, he was obviously expecting to be halted in his casual saunter from the table and called back by an astonished croupier to collect his unexpected but extensive winnings. When this failed to happen, he’d been devastated. Studs likes to believe, despite the overwhelming evidence which clearly contradicts his theory, that the forces governing existence have a dramatist’s approach to human narrative. He likes to think such entities might have a fondness for last-minute death row pardons, million to one gambles or hair’s-breadth escapes and, as a consequence of this belief, has largely led a life of serial disappointment.
But not this time. He feels certain somewhere deep inside, beneath the steel plate that’s been in his skull since he selflessly took that landmine in the face at Okinawa, that here’s where one of his hunches finally pays off. This Hervey schmuck is hiding something, Studs is sure of it, and maybe if he’s breathed on hard enough he’ll give it up. Cracking his knuckles menacingly he stands and, taking the Blake book with him, heads towards what seems to be an unoccupied internet connection, or interrogation room as he prefers to think of it. He plans to use every low-down technique he knows to loosen up the suspect, everything from good cop/bad cop to a four-pound bag of oranges that damage the internal organs but don’t leave a mark upon the skin. Or, failing that, he’ll Google him.
Sure enough, Hervey cracks before the sheer brute force of the search engine and before long Studs has got him singing like some kind of devout Calvinist canary. There’s a slew of largely Christian websites that have references to the man, and while the language is so flowery that Studs finds himself in need of anti-histamine, he strikes gold with the first page that he looks at. It seems that James Hervey was a Church of England clergyman and writer, born in 1714 at Hardingstone, Northampton, with his father William serving as the rector of both Collingtree and Weston Favell. Educated from the age of seven at the town’s free grammar school, blah blah, goes up to Lincoln College, Oxford, where he runs into John Wesley, blah blah blah, buried in Weston Favell parish church … Studs struggles to maintain his trademark glower in defiance of the rush of jubilation he is currently experiencing. This, he’s certain, is the lead he’s looking for. Okay, there’s no direct connection to the Boroughs, but at least this new material puts Hervey at the scene.
Suppressing a compulsive urge to call the helpful library attendant Toots, he asks if she can print out all the Hervey scuttlebutt he’s found already, throw in Hervey’s Wikipedia page and maybe while she’s there the entry for Northampton Grammar School. Studs has a notion that Ben Perrit might have been a pupil up there on the Billing Road at one point, and although this seems a tenuous link between James Hervey and the Boroughs, right now it’s the only one he’s got. He tries a weather-beaten roguish wink on the librarian right at the end of his request but she pretends she hasn’t noticed, probably assuming that it’s palsy. Paying for the printed sheets he twitches one eye randomly at intervals to further this assumption, reasoning that he can handle condescending pity better than a court case for harassment. He suspects that a defence of ‘maverick who won’t play by the rules’ would sway few juries if employed by an apparent would-be rapist.
Taking the slim sheaf of papers, he opens his carry-all and bags the evidence according to procedure, so that he can read it later. Exiting the library he retraces his steps down Abington Street, carefully avoiding the white polka dots of spearmint spackle which surround the precinct’s islands of hard plastic seating, having no desire to be too literal about this gumshoe thing. The Grosvenor Centre, with its giant Roundhead helmet hovering above the entrance in a <em>Castle of Otranto</em> tribute, is a synaesthetic blur where the piped music has a tinsel dazzle while the coloured lighting chimes and echoes off along the scintillating mall. He rides the elevator up to the requisite level of the car parking facilities in company with an elderly couple who are both tutting and fussing with the zip of a plaid shopping-cart as if it were their poorly-dressed and backward offspring.
When he finds his vehicle, most probably a Pontiac or Buick, possibly a beat-up Chevrolet, he climbs inside and tries his best to bring a dangerous loose-cannon quality to fastening his seatbelt. As the engine growls to life like a sleek predator, albeit one that’s in the later stages of consumption, Studs smiles to himself in case an in-car close-up is required. This is a facet of his job that he’s familiar with, a role in which he feels entirely comfortable. He’s burning rubber to keep an appointment with a place of worship, and it ain’t because he’s itching to confess his sins. He’s doing what comes, to a private eye, as naturally as lovelorn one-night stands or breathing: Studs is heading for this pitiless town’s murky outskirts, hoping to uncover a dead body.
Weston Favell and its parish churchyard are no more than two or three miles from Northampton and it wouldn’t do him any harm to take the Billing Road, up past the Grammar School or the Northampton School for Boys as the establishment has been more recently rebranded, just to cast an eye over the place; to case the joint. Ideally he’d prefer to roar out of the town to an accompaniment of screeching brakes and pelting gunfire, but the vagaries of a notoriously contorted traffic system mean he has to take a left into Abington Square when coming off the Mounts, circle the Unitarian church to bring him back the other way, then make another left turn into York Road before even getting to the Billing Road down at the bottom. Waiting at the foot of York Road for the lights to change he thinks again of Little John, having already noticed that the brass plaque which identified Toad Hall has long since been removed. It’s a damn shame. They should have kept the place up as a conservation area, a reservation for the dwindling and endangered population of the chronically unsightly, those who were too squat and medieval-looking or those with too many warts.
The lights change and he corners onto Billing Road, the off-white bulk of the beleaguered General Hospital across the busy thoroughfare and on Studs’ right. From what he knows of local history, which is a lot considering that he was brought up on the unforgiving streets of Flatbush or the like, the hospital had been originally established as the first outside of London on its earlier site along George Row by an unlikely pairing of the preacher Philip Doddridge and the reformed rake Dr. John Stonhouse. Studs has learned a thing or two about the motion picture industry over the years and thinks the story has the makings of a great chalk-and-cheese buddy movie. He’s considering a scene where only a work-squad of raddled eighteenth-century hookers volunteering out of loyalty to Stonhouse sees the new infirmary completed under budget and on schedule, when he passes the high hedges of Billing Road Cemetery looming on his left. Not quite the graveyard that he’s looking for but still an excellent example of the species, and about the only local landmark which the Luftwaffe seemed capable of hitting back in World War Two, perhaps in an attempt to lower the morale of British corpses. He imagines it, the midnight flash amongst the sleeping headstones, the attendant spray of dirt and bone and flowers, the marble shrapnel with somebody’s name on.
An unfolded sunlit panorama out through the front windscreen is compressed to the unreeling comic strip of brick and garden without sky in his side-windows, residential detail ravelling away behind him in the Studebaker’s wake. Across the road on its far side Saint Andrew’s Hospital smears by, blind walls and iron railings with that barrier of tall and restless evergreens beyond them as a natural firebreak for the uncontrollable blaze of delusion kept contained within. When you consider all the more-than-usually gifted if not incandescent individuals that have been confined there, Studs supposes you could view the institution as a necessary annexe or extension-wing of rationality, put up to house an information for which reason has no measure. Or some bullshit like that, anyway.
He slows as the winding asylum frieze concludes; runs into the façade of the Northampton School for Boys, its low wall bounding a trapezoid forecourt over which presides the lofty and improving early twentieth-century building, with its more contemporary additions fanning out towards the east across the former tennis courts. A visibly amused quartet of lads in the requisite navy blazers jeer and jostle by the school gate, possibly returning from their dinner hour and no doubt dutifully categorising their subjective universe into gay and non-gay components. While the erstwhile grammar school has failed to produce quite as many notables as the adjacent mental home, you have to give it marks for trying. Francis Crick was once a pupil as apparently was Hervey, with Ben Perrit as a possible. Studs thinks he heard that Tony Chater, a no-nonsense card-carrying commie and for twenty years editor of <em>The Morning Star</em>, was also on the register, as was young Tony Cotton of chart-scaling 1980s rockabilly purists from St. James’s End, the Jets. Poor old Sir Malcolm Arnold, on the other hand, retained the singular distinction of having attended both the boys’ school and the famous funny farm next door. On his last day of term the juvenile composer would have saved himself a lot of time and effort if he’d just scuffed his way up the cycle path and through the front gate, taking off his jacket, cap and tie resignedly before a sharp U-turn delivered him into the tranquilising green continuum of St. Andrew’s. From the corner of Studs’ right and slightly lower eye he watches the august establishment evaporate into his slipstream, a receding fog of pink and grey shrinking to fit the rear-view mirror as he guns the Packard on to its sepulchral destination.
Further down towards the lower reaches of the Billing Road, with relatively well-off family homes to port and little else save open fields to starboard, Studs gets the uneasy feeling that he’s overlooking an important detail, maybe in his observations on the recently passed School for Boys, although he can’t think what. Was it something to do with how the school was built, its architecture, or …? No. No, it’s gone. Some way before he reaches Billing Aquadrome he takes instead the left turn that will convey his Plymouth De Soto up amongst the honeyed stone of the original village accommodation and the gravel drives of later dwellings, into the unnaturally hushed and watchful lanes of drowsy Weston Favell.
After several minutes he locates a place where it appears that somebody might park their vehicle without being consequently burned to death inside a wicker man. Studs knows these gentrified communities, the money that they represent, and can’t shake off the feeling that he’s probably been monitored on long lens by a spotter from the Women’s Institute since he pulled in. Clambering from his bullet-perforated Nash Ambassador he sizes up the intestinal tangle of sun-buttered streets, byways for the convenience of a different century, and grudgingly acknowledges that places like this, these days, are where all the serious murder-money’s to be made. The smart detectives, rather than pursuing cold-eyed gangland slayers down a hypodermic-littered inner-urban alleyway, are relocating to the sticks, to sleepy English hamlets where ladies in twinsets and retired brigadiers reliably attempt to poison one another on a weekly basis. All this white-on-white crime. It’s a crying shame.
He’s parked in sight of the twelfth-century parish church, its spire rising above the neighbouring chimneys and its stonework with an unevenly toasted look, although in somewhere Weston Favell’s size it would be near enough impossible to find a place from which you couldn’t see it, if he’s honest. Holdall slung across a shoulder that is hunched against the world’s anticipated brickbats, Studs is shortly pushing open a wrought-iron gate with a worse rasp than his own; mounting hewn steps onto the raised-up consecrated ground around the pretty chapel. There’s a faint breeze, but apart from that, he notes with some surprise, it’s an unusually idyllic afternoon. It ain’t his customary milieu, that’s for certain. Sunlight falls like syrup on the neatly tended grass and there can’t be a faulty neon sign for miles, much less a craps game.
Disappointingly, the church itself is closed and, more disheartening still, James Hervey’s final resting place is not among the smattering of headstones to be found in the building’s vicinity. Most of these unassuming markers, with their names and information almost lost to a few centuries of moss or weather, seem to be exclusively for Jacobean stiffs who hung up their plumed hats during the sixteen-hundreds and long before Hervey saw the light of day in 1714. Studs finds a bluish lozenge not much bigger than a boot-scrape, colonised by varicoloured lichens and apparently commemorating no one in particular, being instead a generalised memento mori. With a little scrutiny he works out that the disappearing characters once spelled out <strong>O REMEMBER/ PASSERS BY/ AS THOU ART/ SO WAS I ANNO/ 1656</strong>. Sure, buddy. Thanks for that. Give my regards to the black plague. These may or may not be the tombs that Hervey meditated when he was amongst, but it’s a safe bet they’re the ones that he saw every day when he was preacher here, perhaps contributing to his notoriously sunny disposition.
Having reached a dead end, Studs elects to play his visit like he meant it. Checking first to find out if the turf is damp he lowers himself gingerly onto the verge, lounging insouciantly at full length on his side with ankles crossed, propped on one elbow like a sensitive Edwardian bachelor while he hurriedly unzips his holdall and retrieves the Hervey printout from its depths. He may as well bone up on his elusive quarry while he’s here, even if the distinguished cleric’s actual bones aren’t anywhere around. Considering the scarcity of the surrounding monuments and slabs, he wonders if this churchyard might be one of those where graves, in short supply back in the day, were by no means a final resting place. There’d be a brief immersion in the soil, maybe a week or two before the flesh and stink were gone, and then the stripped-clean sticks would be dug up and scattered to make room for the next occupant, a bit like hospital beds on the NHS. He can recall a scene from Henry Fielding’s <em>Tom Jones</em> where an altercation at a wedding sees the combatants throw decomposing skulls at one another, since these would indeed have been the handiest form of ammunition readily available in churchyards of the period. If Hervey suffered a short-stay interment of that nature there’d be nothing left of him today, the cranium that once contained all his conjectures on the afterlife long since used to concuss a bridesmaid. Lacking any physical remains or similar DNA evidence to process through a piece of high-tech CSI crime-solving apparatus, Studs resigns himself to reconstructing Hervey from the dozen or so printed sheets already in his grasp and cockling with the perspiration. Carefully removing almost rimless reading glasses from his jacket’s inside pocket, balancing them on the tomahawk blade of his nose, he sinks into the grey miasma of the text.
As he’d suspected, there’s more to this holy-roller Hervey character than meets the eye. Born to a preaching family at Hardingstone and in the shadow of the headless cross, the first King Edward’s monument to his dead Eleanor, James Hervey gets packed off to grammar school during 1721 when he’s aged seven. Studs thinks this unreasonably young when everybody he knows went there only after passing their Eleven-Plus, but he assumes that educative practice in Northampton was a different animal nearly three hundred years ago. Hell, education in the town had always been of an entirely separate species to that elsewhere in the country. Back there in the 1970s and 1980s the town’s children had been casually subjected to an educational experiment involving a three-tier system and the introduction of a ‘middle school’, attended for a few years in between the junior and senior establishments and therefore doubling the dislocation and disruption to which pupils in pursuit of learning were subjected. Unsurprisingly the scheme was a conspicuous dud and had been quietly dumped some years back, with a generation of Northampton school kids written off as no more than collateral damage. Still obscurely nagged by the “aged seven” business and the sense that there’s unanswered questions hanging over the prestigious boys’ school, Studs reads on.
A decade later, at the age of seventeen Hervey goes up to Oxford where he runs into John Wesley’s clique of proto-Methodists, a bunch of cold-eyed pious young punks known disparagingly to their fellow students as “the Holy Club”. Studs nods in weary recognition. That’s the way it is out on the mean streets of religion these days, decent kids forced into joining one gang or another, not because they want to but because they figure it improves their chance of spiritual survival. But then, once they’ve been sworn in, once they’ve kneecapped a Baptist as a part of their initiation, they find that it ain’t so easy getting out again. That’s how it goes with Hervey. For a long time there he’s Wesley’s top enforcer as the most successful writer in the Holy Club, but soon he’s hankering to set up his own racket. Rumours get around that he’s developing a soft spot for the evangelicals and that he calls himself a moderate Calvinist, which ain’t what Wesley wants to hear. There’s plainly an almighty shoot-out brewing, and when Hervey publishes three volumes of his <em>Theron and Aspasio</em> in 1755 it’s like he isn’t giving the great hymnist any choice except to take it to the street. Wesley denounces his former lieutenant’s work as antinomianism, an old-fashioned heresy which holds that everything is predetermined, and before a guy can say a paternoster the air’s full of theological hot lead. Hervey’s outgunned and takes one in the faith, is trying to return fire in <em>Aspasio Vindicated</em> when consumption finally decides he’s ready for his dirt-nap at the age of forty-five. John Wesley, who’s been piling on the pressure from the cover of his pulpit even when his target’s clearly dying, finally reads Hervey’s posthumously published refutation of his hatchet-job and in a wounded tone declares that Hervey has died “cursing his spiritual father”. Wesley makes sure that he gets the last word; puts a round into Hervey’s posterity. That’s Methodists, Studs muses. They’re methodical.
Stretched on the grass among the sparsely distributed headstones in the pale May radiance he realises he’s enjoying this, this day-pass from his city of ongoing dreadful night. It’s a surprise to find that sunlight isn’t always striped. Somewhere a blackbird sings like an interrogated felon and the temporarily non-noir detective turns the drift of his attention to the next of the assorted reference pages, which appears to be by a foot-soldier from the Wesley mob. Ostensibly a Hervey profile, it paints <em>Theron and Aspasio</em>’s author as the stumblebum whose florid literary style contributed to a decline of taste in English letters, somebody whose pompous prose had a degenerative influence on nearly all the other preachers of his day “save the robust John Wesley”. As a demonstration of the author’s point regarding Hervey’s vulgar affectations and impoverished ideas, a small slab of the Weston Favell rector’s writings are reprinted. Understanding that these will have almost certainly been chosen to best show off Hervey’s flaws, Studs prods his slipping spectacles back to the top of his toboggan-run proboscis and starts reading:
<quote>
I can hardly enter a considerable town but I meet a funeral procession, or the mourners going about the street. The hatchment suspended on the wall, or the crepe streaming in the air, are silent intimations that both rich and poor have been emptying their houses, and replenishing their sepulchres.
</quote>
<br>
Reclining as he is propped on one elbow and thus unable to marshal either shoulder into any kind of shrug, Studs lets his overgrown vacant-lot eyebrows and wasp-chewing bulldog lower lip perform that function in their stead. Sure, Hervey’s stuff is sombre in a decorative way, but that don’t mean it’s for the birds. He personally rather likes the business with crepe streaming in the air and wishes he got lines of dialogue like that. He wishes he got lines of dialogue, period. Focussing upon the print again, he carries on with his assessment of the dead divine’s rhetorical abilities:
<quote>
There’s not a newspaper comes to my hand, but, amidst all its entertaining narrations, reads several serious lectures of mortality. What else are the repeated accounts – of age, worn out by slow-consuming sicknesses – of youth, dashed to pieces by some sudden stroke of casualty – of patriots, exchanging their seats in the senate for a lodging in the tomb – of misers, resigning their breath, and (O relentless destiny!) leaving their very riches for others! Even the vehicals of our amusement are registers of the deceased! And the voice of fame seldom sounds but in concert with the knell!
</quote>
<br>
<br>
Yeah, now, see, admittedly, that’s pretty morbid. And the last few sentences, where Hervey’s gone bananas with the exclamation marks, they read as though he’s hammering his fist down on the pulpit, or maybe a coffin lid, for emphasis. Studs can see how material like that could be a buzz-kill. With contrived dramatic timing the sun slides behind a cloud and everything is overlaid by a dot screen of half-tone grey. The final two lines might have been contrived with Studs himself in mind. The vehicles of our amusement, many of which he’s appeared in, are indeed the registers of the deceased, are chiselled cemetery credits that roll on forever, miserable ledgers of extinguished stars. As for the voice of fame he doubts he’ll recognise it even if he ever gets to hear it, which he definitely won’t if Hervey’s on the level and it sounds in concert with his knell. Actually, that would be okay, once he’s considered it. Most people only get the knell.
Its brief sulk over with, the sun comes out again. The next sheet in his slender pile presents the lyrics from what must presumably be Hervey’s only extant hymn, <em>Since All the Downward Tracts of Time</em>: “Since all the downward tracts of time/ God’s watchful eye surveys/ O who so wise to chose our lot/ Or to appoint our ways?” Studs likes the fatalism, which he feels would sit well in a Continental Op or Phillip Marlowe outing, the idea that all our future dooms and disappointments are already written and just waiting for us patiently further along the highway, on the downward tracts of time. He figures he and Hervey could at least agree upon the direction of travel, and supposes that this must be all the antinomian predestination bullshit which brought matters to a head between John Wesley and his former sidekick. Nearby, bees are mumbling imprecations to the year’s first flowers as Studs continues working his way through the stack of data.
It has never previously occurred to him that all the major English hymns and their composers seem to blossom from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that fertile Restoration loam enriched by civil war’s important nutrients, equestrian and human bio-feed or fired cathedral nitrates. Roundhead Bunyan cranking out “To Be a Pilgrim” while the scabs on Naseby’s green slopes were still fresh, then Wesley, Cowper, Newton, Hervey, Doddridge, Blake, the usual suspects, pinned down in the crossfire of their different times and different conflicts, trying to replace the whistling musket-balls with songs. Oliver ‘Bugsy’ Cromwell’s contract hit on Charles the First had changed a lot of things in England, now Studs thinks about it. It went further than the sudden fusillade of hymns. Didn’t he hear that billiards only came into fashion in that post-war period, the pastime’s complex but predictable ballistics helpfully providing Isaac Newton with a paradigm to hang his laws of motion on? And where would noir detectives like Studs be without the morally insanitary pool hall, its resentful shadows and its mercilessly pouring light? There’s something about lines here, staves and lines of verse, trajectories of ball and bullet, things an actor has to learn, vectors of monarchy or the plot-threads of history. The idea’s messy and elusive, lacks the vital piece of evidence that ties it all up in a bow. Aware that his attention’s wandering he turns it back to the increasingly humid and wilting papers in his knotty claw.
The page he’s looking at, while not immediately encouraging, at least explains why Studs has thus far drawn a blank in his attempts to track down Hervey’s body. It appears the corpse in question currently resides beneath the church floor, to the south of the communion table in the chancel. Studs nods knowingly. The last place anyone would think to look for it. Yeah, that makes sense. There’s some kind of a marker near the spot which talks of Hervey as “that very pious man, and much-admired author! who died Dec. the 25<sup>th</sup>, 1758, in the 45<sup>th</sup> year of his age.” He passed away on Christmas day and even slipped an exclamation mark into his epitaph, Studs notes admiringly. Below all the forensic details there’s a verse in which the author of the piece, Hervey presumably, explains the want of a more visible memorial:
<quote>
<em>Reader, expect no more; to make him known</em>
<em>Vain the fond elegy and figur’d stone:</em>
<em>A name more lasting shall his writings give;</em>
<em>There view display’d his heav’nly soul, and live.</em>
</quote>
<br>
Again the lip and eyebrow shrug. It seems a reasonable proposition. Hervey, judging from the text in front of him, wanted no monument save that he might “leave a memorial in the breasts of his fellow creatures.” This chimes with Studs’ personal philosophy; basically kill them all and leave God or posterity to sort them out. He isn’t sure whether he’s left memorials in the breasts of many fellow creatures, unless by memorials you mean slugs from a .48, but all in all he finds this Hervey character is growing on him like moss on a mausoleum.
The unnaturally perfect afternoon wears on in dandelion-clock increments, and in the houses that surround his elevated churchyard perch the only movement is that of the sun upon blonde stone. Studs has been lying here for getting on an hour and as yet none of Weston Favell’s natives have seen fit to venture out onto its sleepy, winding streets. Could be that everybody’s dead in some Midsomer Murder spree got out of hand, in some statistically improbable convergence of completely separate and unconnected homicides, where the last major general or former district nurse left standing is brought low by a slow-acting poison secretly administered by someone he or she has stabbed with pinking shears during the opening scene. He thinks it makes a more compelling plot idea than <em>Murder on the Orient Express</em>, if only because in his narrative not only does it turn out everyone’s the murderer, but everyone turns out to be the victim too. It’s an ingenious double twist, the kind of ending nobody sees coming. He indulges in a few moments’ consideration of the actors, other than himself, that he’d cast in a movie version but gives up on noticing that, other than himself, the people on his wish-list are all dead, a register of the deceased, which brings him back to Hervey.
The succeeding item in his in-tray, which is what he presently prefers to call his hand, is somewhat more intriguing. Studs has only to catch sight of the name Philip Doddridge halfway down the page to realise that his previously stone-cold trail is warming up, and by the time he’s read a paragraph or two it’s sizzling like a black Texan guy with learning disabilities in the electric chair. From what he’s reading, Doddridge and James Hervey were much tighter than Hervey and Wesley were, with Doddridge even seeming to have had more influence on Hervey’s spiritual career than Wesley ever managed to exert. According to the story, after Hervey takes over his father’s duties as the parish priest of Collingtree and Weston Favell, he’s out walking in the fields when he comes on a ploughman trying to till the soil. Now, Hervey’s got this sawbones, probably the kind who’ll dig the slugs out of a bullet-riddled soul but won’t ask questions, and he recommends that Hervey take the healthy country air by hanging out with honest rural workers as they go about their business. So the preacher walks along beside the labourer and, as a fully paid up member of the Holy Club, decides to give this working stiff a free taste of his pious product. Hervey asks the rube for his opinion on the hardest thing about religion. When Joe Average predictably replies that as a farmhand he’s less qualified to answer that enquiry than an educated parson, Hervey launches gladly into his stealth-sermon. He suggests that to deny one’s sinful self is Christianity’s most difficult achievement and proceeds to lecture the beleaguered ploughman on the great importance of adhering to a morally straight path, just when the man is trying to concentrate upon accomplishing the physical equivalent.
When finally the priest is all out of material, the man from simple peasant stock pulls the old switcheroo when he contends that surely a much harder struggle comes in the denying of one’s righteous self; in getting past all the self-righteous, sanctimonious bullshit that the Wesley outfit revels in. Seeing that he’s got Hervey on the moral ropes, the backwoods slugger presses his advantage: “You know that I do not come to hear you preach, but go every Sabbath, with my family, to Northampton, to hear Dr. Doddridge. We rise early in the morning, and have prayers before we set out, in which I find pleasure. Walking there and back I find pleasure; under the sermon I find pleasure; when at the Lord’s Table I find pleasure. We read a portion of the Scriptures and go to prayers in the evening, and we find pleasure; but to this moment, I find it the hardest thing to deny righteous self. I mean the instance of renouncing our own strength, and our own righteousness, not leaning on that for holiness, not relying on that for justification.”
Hervey later cites this moment as a bolt of sudden understanding from the clear blue Weston Favell sky. Before long he decides to follow the rustic’s example and at last meets up with Philip Doddridge. They become firm friends, and with the help of Doddridge-convert Dr. Stonhouse, who’s “a most abandoned rake and an audacious deist”, found the first infirmary outside of London. It turns out that Hervey’s closeness with the evangelical dissenting Christians in the Doddridge gang is what earns his dismissal from John Wesley’s Holy Mob. The elbow Studs is leaning on sleeps with the fishes, is completely numb, but he’s too caught up in the case to ease off now. The dots are all connecting and the puzzle-pieces are all falling into place. The game’s afoot. He shuffles through the last leaves in his heap with mounting eagerness and finds an unexpected essay linking Hervey with the birth of the Gothic tradition. Studs, who’d thought his earlier musings on the sumptuously morbid Hervey’s Goth credentials were a cynical conceit, is stunned. He’s seen more crazy hunches in his long career than Notre Dame cathedral – there was that time he was sure Roman Polanski would cast him as Fagin if he just wrote the director a brief letter stridently insisting on it – but to have one of his long shots finally limp in across the finish line is an unprecedented novelty. Dizzy with newfound confidence in his abilities he reads on, hardly daring to believe his luck.
If Studs is understanding this correctly, the inordinate morbidity of Hervey’s writings which the Wesleyans had so deplored turned out to be a maggot-eaten inspiration for his literary contemporaries. The persistent theme of human transience compared with the eternity of God was taken up by other theologians such as Edward Young and by the poets of the nascent Graveyard School like Thomas Gray, becoming such a major influence upon the writings of the day that William Kenrick wrote:
<quote>
<em>’Twas thus enthusiastic Young;</em>
<em>’Twas thus affected Hervey sung;</em>
<em>Whose motley muse, in florid strain,</em>
<em>With owls did to the moon complain.</em>
</quote>
<br>
From what Studs can make out, this was fair comment, at least in so far as it pertained to later writers of the Graveyard School, who weren’t much bothered by the business about God but were completely smitten by the atmospherics and the props, the owls and bats and skulls and crumbling headstones. This was at a moment when society was slowly starting to clean up the nation’s graveyards for the purposes of physical and mental hygiene, clearing out the mouldering bones and simultaneously banishing the ever-present smell and the immediate idea of our mortality beyond the margins of accepted daily discourse. Perhaps unsurprisingly, with the grim actuality of death displaced from ordinary life, this was also the point at which our culture first began to make a titillating fetish of the deathly and funereal. Commencing where the less religious and more genuinely ghoulish authors of the later Graveyard School left off, writers like Horace Walpole and Matthew ‘Monk’ Lewis would take Hervey’s sombre iconography and use it to adorn their decomposing European castles or their morally subsiding monasteries. The gothic novel and indeed the whole late eighteenth-century gothic tradition would appear to have its origins in the consumptive Hervey’s spiritual preoccupation with the tomb.
As lengthening headstone shadows slither purposefully through the cropped grass towards him, Studs attempts to weigh up all the implications of this latest evidence. He knows that if it’s on the level it puts Hervey squarely in the frame as the elusive Mr. Big behind far more than just the gothic novel. Until Walpole, Lewis, Beckford and their fellow frighteners arrived, the only form of novel which existed was the comedy of manners – Goldsmith, Sheridan and later on Jane Austen – with the advent of the gothic novel being also the first genre fiction. Almost every subsequent sub-category of imaginative writing is therefore derived from gothic literature and thus from Hervey’s first mould-culture texts; sprung from the moss and lichen of his first sepulchral narratives, Studs realises. Sure, the classic ghost tale is an obvious example, alongside the burgeoning horror and supernatural genres which grew out of it, but that’s not where it ends. The field of fantasy would have to be included, as would science fiction with its genesis in Mary Shelley’s gothic <em>Frankenstein</em>. And then, of course, there are the Decadents, caught up in the sublime deliriums of heir apparent to the caliphate of Vathek and the riches of Otranto, Edgar Allen Poe. And Poe – the idea hits Studs with the force of bourbon before breakfast – Poe set his Chevalier August Dupin to solve the murders on the Rue Morgue or the mystery of the purloined letter and in doing so precipitated the detective story. He attempts to take it in: the bone bulb from which germinated every heartless rain-lashed midnight, every knockout blonde with a sob story and each stuttering electric sign is resting maybe fifty feet away, just south of the communion table in the chancel. Every dining-room denouement, every double-cross. It’s one hell of a thing.
This gothic business, though, has got him thinking once more about Bauhaus and the movement’s modern reinvention during the end credits of the 1970s. As Studs recalls, it had been the eclectic David J who’d first suggested many of the eerie tropes which would one day prove the salvation of the black lace and mascara industries. And yet, as widely-read as the peculiarly ibis-like bohemian intellectual undoubtedly had been, Studs doubts that any eighteenth-century Christian killjoys found their way into J’s vehemently other-directed syllabus. The Bauhaus bassist, he concludes, would have known nothing about Hervey when he was intuitively laying out the ground-plan for the most bewilderingly long-lived youth cult of the modern era. The exploding belladonna, lilies and pressed roses which accompanied Northampton’s twentieth-century gothic blossoming came into being without any reference to or knowledge of Hervey’s origination of that style more than two hundred years before. Unless this is no more than an evocative coincidence, the implication would appear to be that both of these traditions and the sensibilities that shaped them have arisen from those singular inherent qualities within the town itself; the gothic view as an emergent property, as a condition of Northampton. That would explain everything about the place, its churches, murders, history and ghostly monks. That would explain its writings and its music and the nature of its people, everyone from Hervey to Ben Perrit, from John Clare to David J, with Studs and Little John and Alma Warren somewhere on the grotesque spectrum in between them. Little John alone reprised the gothic movement in one tidy package, what with the malefic dwarf being a staple of the genre and John’s background making him appear almost an escapee from Beckford’s <em>Vathek</em>, brought here from the djinn-swept terraces of Ishtakar in far Persepolis, a crooked grandchild of the demon-sultan Eblis. Studs is just about as close to inner satisfaction as a spent and used imaginary private eye can get. It all makes sense. He flips through the remaining pages with mounting impatience.
There’s an interesting piece from a biography of Hervey by one George M. Ella, which describes the Weston Favell visionary’s <em>Theron and Aspasio</em> in terms that make it sound more like a piece of modernist or possibly post-modern writing than a dialogue concerning Christ’s imputed righteousness first written in 1753. Massively long by modern standards, Hervey’s work apparently shifts in its style and its delivery with each new chapter, hopping from one mode or genre to another and including “narrative description, scientific records, inner monologue, anecdotes, autobiography, eye-witness reports, pen-portraits, short stories, sermons, linguistic studies, nature portrayals, journals, poetry and hymns. There is also much in the work that is reminiscent of a modern film-script.” Studs reflects that he should maybe add the beatnik avant-garde to the already-lengthy list of literary forms which seem to owe their M.O., which is flatfoot talk for modus operandi, to James Hervey. His respect for the extravagantly miserable divine is growing by the moment. Studs would like to see one of these modern pantywaists even attempt a work as grand and various as that.
He’s right down to the Wikipedia entries for both Hervey and Northampton School for Boys now, sprawling on the churchyard turf between the sparse chimes of the early afternoon. Neither of the remaining files appear to Studs to be particularly promising, and yet upon inspection both documents demonstrate convincingly how wrong a guy can be. The first, Hervey’s internet résumé, while in the main it offers nothing Studs has not already learned from other sources, plainly states that Hervey was not just someone whom William Blake had heard of and referred to in a solitary painting, but was rather one of Blake’s two main spiritual influences with the other one being Immanuel Swedenborg. The hovercraft-inventing angel confidant who once asserted that such creatures know nothing of time, whose missing head was rumoured to be propped against the optics at the Crown and Dolphin, with Northampton’s foremost fatalist, both stirred into the Lambeth lad’s ideological genetic mix; become his paranormal parents. Studs thinks back to the Blake plate he studied at the library, the solitary human figure at the bottom centre of the image, back towards the viewer and face hidden as he gazes up at the funereal saints and angels gathered there above him, obviously meant to represent Hervey himself and yet with the averted features lending to the character’s interpretation as an everyman, paused on the brink of a marmoreal hereafter which renders tuberculosis, flesh and human brevity irrelevant, a figure at death’s door refuting loss and time. Or, possibly, Blake didn’t know what Hervey looked like, in which instance the appended line engraving offers Studs a slight edge on South London’s beatific bruiser.
Gazing from the poorly-printed image, Hervey might be taken for a magistrate saving the lack of judgement in his calm, still eyes; saving the faintest twitch of humour at one corner of the primly pursing lips. The contour hatching that defines the village rector’s pleasant features, razor sharp lines eaten into steel by aqua fortis, breaks down to a pointillist particulate in the blotched reproduction although the fine details of complexion remain visible. What seems to be a wart is artfully positioned at the outer edge of the left eye, a feature Studs feels is a mark of some distinction in a man, while riding the right cheekbone is a mole or, judging from its perfect Monroe placement, some kind of cosmetic artificial spot. Given the almost prideful lack of vanity displayed in Hervey’s choice of resting place Studs feels this latter possibility is something of a long shot, although there remains a certain prissiness or femininity to Hervey’s face which makes the beauty-mark hypothesis seem almost plausible. It’s more than the peruke or periwig or whatever the hell it’s called that Hervey’s wearing in the picture, it’s the air of gentleness and receptivity the man exudes.
Studs thinks back to a passage from his recent readings upon Hervey’s time in Oxford, where the fledgling preacher had become the close friend of another Holy Club inductee, one Paul Orchard. Even the guy’s name was fruity. During one of Hervey’s intermittent bouts of ill health in his middle twenties, he went down to live with Orchard for two years at Stoke-Abbey in Devonshire, where the two men drew up a contract vowing to watch diligently over one another’s spiritual wellbeing. While this isn’t as suggestive as, say, Jeremy Thorpe’s billet-doux to Norman Scott, it seems to speak to a male friendship that went some way beyond hanging out and taking shots at beer cans. Taken in the light of Hervey’s lifelong bachelor existence, dwelling with his mother and his sister right up to the early, breathless end, Studs gets the picture of a man with certain leanings that could never have been expressed physically and so were sublimated in a somewhat overheated love of Christ and Christian fellowship. It would seem safe to say that in his general manner just as in his florid literary style, James Hervey was a touch theatrical.
This only leaves the Boys School scuttlebutt, the casual afterthought material, which is predictably where Studs at last gets his transcendent roulette moment. The astonished croupier gasps “Incroyable!” and as Studs is sauntering away from that last chip he’d tossed dismissively onto the table he’s called back and laden with his unexpected winnings. He is studying without enthusiasm an unprepossessing summary of the establishment when the detail that’s been right under his nose the whole time reaches out and hits him in his face until it isn’t even ugly anymore. It’s what’s been gnawing at him ever since his earlier drive-by reconnaissance of the imperious brick building on the Billing Road, and it’s there in the printout’s second line, just underneath the recently-adopted smug school motto promising <em>A Tradition of Excellence</em>, where it says <strong>Established</strong> 1541.
Northampton’s School for Boys was nowhere near the Billing Road at its inception. Founded by Mayor Thomas Chipsey as the ‘free boys grammar school’, it had initially been some way further west and situated in a street to which it had, Studs realises belatedly, given its name: in Freeschool Street, Ben Perrit’s erstwhile home down on the Boroughs’ edge, where the eponymous school was located for some sixteen years. Erected when Henry the Eighth was on the throne it had been moved in 1557 to St. Gregory’s Church, which at the time extended into Freeschool Street, suggesting that the relocation wasn’t too demanding. Situated in the same place until 1864, this would have been where Hervey studied from age seven to age seventeen back there in the 1720s. A stray comment which Studs must have skimmed somewhere amongst the other evidence comes back to him, a casual pronouncement by John Ryland, a contemporary of Hervey’s and his earliest biographer, to the effect that Hervey’s childhood place of education had been little better than a down-at-heel charity school. Studs nods, grave and perversely photogenic. Given that it was down in the Boroughs it’s unlikely that it could have been anything else but a well-meant attempt to generally improve the district’s juvenile unfortunates, even back in the rowdy sixteenth century. Northampton, with the ancient neighbourhood that once was its entirety, would have been some few hundred years into a somehow purposeful decline by then, punished and scorned by earlier Henries. For his own part, Studs suspects that the blacklisting of the town goes back much further, possibly to local anti-Norman insurrectionary Hereward the Wake, a figure not unlike the locally connected Guy Fawkes in that he’s been banished from the history lessons just as surely as the town itself is banished even from regional TV weather maps. If the grandfather of the Gothic movement had to spend his formative years somewhere then the Boroughs was undoubtedly the perfect cradle, full of lice and fatalism.
Studs has found the smoking gun. He levers his numb carcass from the grass like someone opening a bone umbrella. Brushing irritably at the ghost-green trimmings clinging to his leather jacket he retraces his steps through the sparsely populated cemetery and in passing notices the yokel-noir effect of pinstripe shadows falling onto sunlit paving through a churchyard gate. A black smudge on the lens of afternoon he makes his way back to the baking Coupe de Ville, air shimmering over its hardtop in a layer of hot jelly. Clambering inside he hums the windows down to cool the mobile oven off before he roasts, and once more fails to come up with a hard-boiled way of buckling his seat belt. Maybe if he spat contemptuously on the dashboard halfway through the operation, or perhaps coined some particularly pungent simile for how it’s often difficult to get the metal fastening into the plastic slot? Like “it was harder than a twenty-stone Samoan drag queen doing Chinese calculus in … some …” He’ll work on it.
Remembering that he still has his reading glasses on, Studs carefully removes them and returns them to an inside pocket before firing up the engine, whereupon the smoke-grey Duisenberg roars out of Weston Favell, a land-bound torpedo heading for the distant heat source of Northampton’s centre by the shortest route available. The hamlet’s still-deserted streets are an abandoned set, their ochre stonework only painted background flats that are now folded up and put away into the compact space of a smeared rear-view mirror. Thundering along the Billing Road he screeches past the modern incarnation of the Boys School, non-existent prior to 1911, and his self-recrimination at not tumbling to a solution sooner has the sour taste of brass knuckles in the teeth of victory. For a noir private eye like Studs, of course, this is the perfect outcome. Unadulterated triumph is unthinkable when the real satisfaction of your chosen occupation lies in ethical, emotional and physical defeat; in the acknowledgement, with Hervey, that all cases closed or mortal glories are made insignificant in their comparison with the big sleep.
An afternoon sun left too long to steep has stewed the light so that it has more body and a slight metallic aftertaste as it pours, off the boil, on the asylum and the cemetery’s untidy marble overgrowth, onto the hospital that Hervey had helped Philip Doddridge and John Stonhouse to establish. Executing a left turn at the unhurried traffic lights beside Edward the Seventh’s stained bust with its birdshit coronet, Studs coasts down Cheyne Walk past the hospital’s maternity facilities, his progress halted by another set of lights down at the bottom of the hill near Thomas Becket’s drinking fountain. Childbirth, martyrdom, twisting together in the dull steel spines of Francis Crick’s half-hearted Abington Street monument, the sexless superheroes spiralling up in genetic aspiration under undecided weather, flight frustrated and their heels forever rooted in the monkey street. A light descends in stages through the signal’s pousse-café, from grenadine to crème-de-menthe, and Studs is gliding on Victoria Prom with Beckett’s Park and the generic supermarket forecourts that are understudying an unwell cattle-market, smearing by him on his left. Once past the Plough Hotel at Bridge Street’s lower end, down in the Saturday night blood-sump, he negotiates an unexpectedly byzantine series of right turns before arriving in the parking area which backs on to the Peter’s Place arcade in Gold Street. Once again he pays, displays, and leaves his possibly gang-tagged Corvette hunched on its chewed-up asphalt slope beneath the big bowl full of valley sky. Removing from the vehicle enclosure through its lowest exit, narrowly surviving a traverse of the dual carriageway there at Horsemarket’s rank monoxide foot, he skulks around the slow curve of St. Peter’s Way towards the raised and unkempt patch of grass that had once been the western reach of Green Street, where he clambers two or three feet from smooth pavement onto ragged turf and takes the Boroughs from behind.
The shabby and demoted former neighbourhood green rises to the rear of Peter’s Church, its limestone wrinkles and discoloured liver spots all presently erased by flattering solar gold. First raised in timber by King Offa as a private chapel for his sons in the ninth century, rebuilt in full Gothic effect by legacy-aware Simon de Senlis during the twelfth or eleventh, the near thousand-year-old structure drains all markers of the present from the grassy incline that it trails behind it. Mugging devils in eroded eaves regard him as he labours uphill through the weeds, their stone eyes bulging, their frog lips distended with anxiety at his approach, paralysed apprehension of the gargoyle competition which he represents. For his part, the ascent across a timeless and deceptively sun-burnished wasteland to the ancient place of worship makes him feel reduced to a transparently ill-fated academic in some smugly awful narrative by Montague Rhodes James. Asthmatic laundry, steroid spiders, Gypsy kids with switchblade fingernails, all waiting for him in the largely disused edifice ahead. Now that he thinks about it, M.R. James and the whole English
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ghost story tradition must rate as Hervey’s most glaringly apparent by-blows, illegitimate great-grandchildren by way of graveyard versifiers and elite hysterics with exquisite furniture. Then there are modern occultists, the heirs to James’s Karswell and early adaptors of the gothic model in their literary efforts and their leisurewear, with Hervey’s doctrine of Christ’s innate righteousness become a style-guide for diabolists. Studs doubts that Hervey would have felt entirely comfortable with that, but with a self-confessed deployment of arresting imagery to help embed his message the creator of Northampton noir has
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no one but himself to blame. Don’t make the wrapping paper more intriguing than the gift inside, an edict which Studs ruefully accepts could equally apply to his own inner loveliness and its regrettably attention-grabbing packaging.
Cresting the slanted verge he walks the almost indiscernible remains of Peter’s Street, along the railed rear of the church and heading east. From unrolled liquorice whips of shade he estimates it to be sometime around five o’clock and briefly knows the phantom-limb sensation of release this hour would herald if he had a proper job and hadn’t been apprenticed to the night. Not that he’d say he was self-conscious when it came to his arresting physiognomy, but Studs has always far preferred the dark. His favourite entertainment, after being taken for a ride by a heart-breaking beauty who turns out to be a man, used to be wandering the shadowy rear entries of the town back in the days before the alleys had been gated off by nervous residents; before behaviour like that could land you on the sex-offenders register. Once, in the cobbled crack between the Birchfield and Ashburnham roads, in the small hours of a brisk Sunday morning, he’d been startled by a massive ball of granite rolling down the darkened corridor towards him in the classic Indiana Jones manoeuvre, only to reveal itself at closer quarters as Northampton’s planetary-scale performing soul, the since-deceased Tom Hall.
Walking a midnight dog, the lyrical behemoth had paused for a moments’ badinage with the sham Shamus, eloquent in his defence of those neglected crevices with their cock-decorated garage doors and frilly bindweed fringes. Clad in dungarees that may well have been a converted Wendy-House, Hall had extemporised upon his thesis that the narrow urban seam which they were currently inhabiting was one of the town’s land-canals, part of its bone-dry network of imaginary pedestrian waterways. Exploring the bare streambeds with their hard Edwardian gooseflesh underfoot, a practiced supra-mariner might readily observe the sunken underworld detritus that’s accumulated at the feet of galvanised steel banks: fiercely-discarded ultimatum porn collections or the ribcages of bicycles, drifted against the alley’s edges where neon-hued minnow condoms shoal among serenely swaying nettles, phlegm anemones. Occasionally a body. Obsolete appliances, embarrassing addictions, wilfully forgotten actions, deeds or purchases thought better of and excised to these margins, scenes that have been scribbled out from daylight continuity and written instead on these unattributed and off-the-record passages, in this piss-splashed Apocrypha. The rotund troubadour had lavishly expanded on his vision for the length of time it took his canine charge to arch up on its tiptoes like a shuddering croquet hoop and squeeze out a heroic movement longer than the hound itself. With that, the dissertation had concluded and the two men had continued on their disparate ways, Studs heading up the drained canal against the wind while the musician bobbed away downstream like an enormous marker buoy that had escaped its moorings, floating off into the visual purple.
Studs has by now reached Narrow Toe Lane, perhaps the Boroughs’ most unusually titled thoroughfare, in truth barely a path that trickles down beside the shaggy grass expanse to the remains of Green Street. He’s got no idea about the name. A misspelled towpath of an insufficient width, perhaps, or, knowing the neighbourhood, a reference to a shared genetic disability which at one point afflicted everybody in the street? Up to his right, running along the east face of the church to Marefair are St. Peter’s Gardens, formerly a disused alleyway but widened twenty or so years ago into a disused promenade by pulling down the school outfitters, Orme’s, which stood at the far corner. Studs remembers going there, mother-accompanied, in his twelfth year to buy a uniform for secondary school. He isn’t certain, but he has an idea that he might have been escorted to the same shop on an earlier occasion to be measured up for his humiliating kilt. As he recalls there used to be a pair of facing full-length mirrors in the changing room, where each excruciating moment of a child’s sartorial ordeal unfolded terrifyingly into a wood-panelled eternity. That cramped and curving passage, longer than the district, longer than the town, stretching away into the solid walls and the surrounding buildings, occupied by an unending queue of mortified and squirming seven-year-olds, where exactly had it gone? When they demolished Orme’s the Tailors, what became of its interior infinities? Had all those other ugly little boys, all those half-silvered layers of identity been folded up together like the painted sections of a lacquer screen and stuck in storage somewhere or, more likely, dumped?
This isn’t even his tough childhood. These aren’t his dismantled memories to mourn, and he’s surprised at how much this brief sortie into someone else’s ruined dreamtime is affecting him. He’d figured Warren was exaggerating in her murderously angry monologues, attempting to transform her girlhood landscape into a betrayed and bummed-out Brigadoon, but this is something different. Studs finds himself genuinely shocked by this matter-of-fact erasure of a place, a stratum of the past and a community. If the reality inhabited by several generations of a thousand or so people can be rubbed out like a cheap hood in the wrong bar on the wrong night, what or where is safe? Hell, these days, is there still a right side of the tracks for anybody to be born on? He’s come here to sniff out the surviving traces of a vanished yesterday, but all he sees in these deleted streets are the defective embryos of an emerging future. And when finally that future’s born and we can’t bear to look at it; when we’re ashamed to be the lineage, the parent culture that sired this unlovable grotesque, where shall we banish it so that we needn’t see it anymore? We can’t do like the Shah and send it to Northampton. It’s already here, already rooted, a condition gradually becoming universal.
Though St. Peter’s Street continues on between the relatively new and mostly vacant office buildings into Freeschool Street itself, Studs thinks he’ll maybe go the long way round, down Narrow Toe Lane into the picked carcass of the former Green Street and work his way up from there. There might be clues: a footprint or perhaps a witness previously too intimidated to come forward, some surviving stonework in amongst the brick veneers that might turn stool pigeon given the right incentive. Hands in his high jacket pockets and the elbows sticking out like dodo wings he makes his way down the vestigial lane, mentally colouring his sketchy image of James Hervey as he goes.
As Studs imagines it, the probable scenario has seven-year-old Hervey walking in from Hardingstone to school each morning, more than likely unaccompanied and for at least half of the year making the journey in pitch blackness. He’d have started out from his home village, which two centuries thereafter would acquire further gothic credentials in the person of ‘Blazing Car’ murderer Alf Rouse. The little boy, perhaps with the same delicate look, the same primly pursed lips and a tendency to bad coughs even then, scraping along utterly lightless rural byways with nothing but sudden owls for company to the old London Road. There, every weekday of his early life, the hulking headless cross, one of the stone memorials raised by Edward the First at every spot where Queen Eleanor’s body touched the earth on its long transport back to Charing by the Thames, looming up still and black against a pre-dawn grey. With little Jimmy Hervey’s front door barely closed behind him, the religiously inclined and sickly infant would have been immersed immediately in the ancient town’s mythology, with the decapitated monument a gatepost at the mouth of its funereal romance.
Then a long downhill trudge towards the blacked-out urban mass below, as yet devoid of even gaslight, the frail schoolboy making entry through the reeking shadows of St. James’s End where cursing traders pulled too soon from their warm beds load carts and barrows, calling to each other in an unfamiliar patois through the gloom. Squashed adult faces with strange blemishes, squinting, half turned towards him in the lurching candlelight and from a gated yard the steaming, shuddering snort of horses. His pink fingers numb with cold, who knows how many books beneath one weedy infant arm, the future fatalist would be obliged to mount the hump of West Bridge with the dark of the unbroken day ahead diluted almost imperceptibly at every grudging step, the timeless river heard rather than seen somewhere beneath him. At the crest, the midpoint of the span, the castle ruins would have made themselves apparent to the child in those antipodes of dusk before a risen sun could burn the fog away, a sprawling twilight acreage of tumbled stones with shrill and flittering specks about the lapsing walls, the stumps of amputated towers. Was Northampton’s crumbled fortress, currently its hooker-hub and railway station, once conceivably the larval form of every subsequent Otranto, every Gormenghast?
From there, with a determinist momentum hastening his pace the pious, ailing youngster would have trickled from the scoliotic bridge to its far bank, rolling into the Boroughs and the tangled yarn of streets, the madcap turrets wearing witch’s hats of pigeon-spattered slate. Then Marefair and St. Peter’s Church, the weathered buttresses embossed with gurning Saxon imps, Hieronymus Bosch extras yawning from some long-passed Judgement Day. A few steps further on, Hazelrigg House where Cromwell dreamed an ironclad English future on the eve of Naseby. A last right turn into Freeschool Street would bring the budding ghastly visionary to his place of education, just as a left turn is by now taking Studs into the same street’s other, lower end.
The district, which Studs still recalls from his insomniac night-jaunts of twenty years back, is unrecognisable, a loved one’s face on the first visit to Emergency after the accident. The broken spar of Green Street that has brought him from the foot of Narrow Toe Lane to his current junction has no buildings anymore, no southern coastal levees shielding the disintegrating land from the erosive tidal traffic swirl of Peter’s Way. As for the uphill climb of Freeschool Street before him now, it’s a transparent and insultingly inaccurate imposture, someone who looks nothing like your mum but turns up a week after the cremation claiming to be her. The steep lane’s western flank, once dominated by Jem Perrit’s woodyard, number fourteen, is now for the most part untenanted business premises all the way up to Marefair. As the hatchet-faced investigator haltingly ascends he tries to recreate Ben Perrit’s missing-and-feared-dead family home; superimpose the teetering two or three storey hillside edifice with its attendant stables, lofts, goats, dogs and chickens on the nearly vehicle-free forecourt of the memory-resistant modern structure that succeeds it, but to no avail. Some isolated features cling in his recall like tatters of a bygone show bill doggedly adhering to a corrugated fence – the three steps up to a black painted door, heirlooms and horse brasses displayed in the front parlour – but these fragments simply hang in empty recollected space without connective tissue, lobby cards and teasers for an unrecoverable silent classic.
Just across the way from the conspicuous absence of the Perrit home, on the untidy freehand margin that is Freeschool Street’s east side, Studs draws abreast of Gregory Street’s carious maw with the collapsing brickwork at one corner bounding an eruptive buddleia-jungle, once the backdoor entrance to St. Gregory’s Church and the free school which it incorporated when James Hervey was a pupil here. At some point after that a row of terrace houses occupied the previously sanctified ground, all odd numbers counting up from seven through to seventeen down at the Gregory Street corner if Studs’ memory serves him right, coincidentally the ages between which the young James Hervey would be visiting this humble gradient every morning. Studs thinks he remembers his client Alma Warren saying she’d had relatives who lived in one of the now derelict and roofless properties, an aunt or second cousin who’d gone mad and locked her parents out while she sat all night playing the piano. Something like that, anyway, one of the countless grubby dramas since supplanted by a butterfly bush smothering the untouched twenty-year-old rubble.
Studs is half across the spindly capillary, glancing reflexively uphill to see if anything is coming even though he doesn’t think cars are allowed down this way these days, when he notices a man and woman standing at the street’s top end apparently engrossed in conversation. Something about the flamboyant orange blur of waistcoat that the man is wearing strikes a chord and has Studs fumbling in an inside pocket for his spectacles. Reaching the street’s far side he saddles them on his ice-breaker beak and peers around the deconstructed corner house, pressed flat against its bowing wall in case one of the couple glances down the lane and spots him, the pretended habit of a lifetime.
It’s Ben Perrit.
It’s Ben Perrit, talking to a woman who’s not half his age, her hair in rows and a provocatively short red coat on that looks like it’s made from PVC. To all appearances she’s canvassing for coitus. While the beery bard has clearly raised his sights since the embrace with Alma Warren, Studs still can’t help feeling that Ben could have travelled further and done better for himself. The local poet’s prospects for romance, however, aren’t Studs’ most immediate concern right now. What’s Perrit doing here, especially in light of that apparently chance Abington Street sighting earlier? It has to be more than coincidence, or at least in Studs’ current mise en scène it does. He briefly contemplates the possibility that Perrit might be an improbably inexpert tail, perhaps employed by Warren to keep surreptitious tabs on her pet private eye, but hastily dismisses the idea. Ben Perrit, for as long as Studs has known him, has been in no state to follow his own literary calling, let alone pursue another person with perhaps less rubber in their legs.
He risks another peek around the dog-eared corner. Up at Freeschool Street’s top end the woman is now backing carefully away from Benedict, who giggles and gesticulates obscurely at her as she goes. No, definitely not a tail. Not in that vivid carpet-remnant waistcoat and not with that laugh that’s audible from all the way down here, the polar opposite of unobtrusive. All the same, they must add up to something, these suggestive near-encounters. Ducking back behind the listing wall he tries to put his finger on the feeling that he has, the sense he’s missing something here, some part of the big picture he’s not privy to. He understands that, in real life, to inadvertently bump into someone twice in the same day is nothing special, but he’s trying to keep in character. From Studs’ perspective, Perrit’s multiple appearances can only be some kind of narrative contrivance, an essential story mechanism or device which signals the impending resolution of the mystery, an unexpected drawing in of all its mucky threads: Ben Perrit and the girl in the red plastic mac, Doddridge and Lambeth and determinism. William Blake. James Hervey.
When he next peers up the lane both Perrit and his piece of skirt are gone. Studs puts his spectacles away and leans against the psoriatic bricks. What now? He’s reached the place that he’s been looking for, and short of a probably suicidal climb over the wall he’s propped against into the overgrown bee-cafeteria beyond, he can’t go any further. He can’t occupy the spaces that James Hervey’s body heat once passed through; doesn’t know what he’d hoped to accomplish with this pilgrimage through disappearance in the first place. Treading in a dead guy’s footprints like some toddler following his father through the snow, running on nothing but a blind faith in location as if walking the same streets as someone else forged any kind of a connection, how could he have been so stupid, such a schlemiel, possibly a patsy? Places don’t stay where you left them. You go back there, anywhere, and even if it looks exactly how it did before, it’s somewhere else.
He can remember Little John, during one of the relatively thoughtful and less raucous conversations that they’d had together. His folkloric friend had been in a more wistful, even plaintive humour than was usually the case, talking about a childhood that he couldn’t properly recall, Arabian Nights he’d never really had.
“Y’know, I’d like to go back one day, Persia, the old country. See what it was like.”
No, John, mate. You can’t do that. Persia’s gone. ’79, they had a revolution after Jimmy Carter made the CIA stop paying off the ayatollahs so they’d leave your grandfather alone. They kicked him out and let the cancer finish him, and it’s a safe bet that the new regime aren’t big admirers of your family. It’s called Iran now. You’re not wanted there. You never were.”
Of course, you couldn’t say that. You could only mumble non-committally and wish him luck, ask him to bring you back a winged horse or a flying carpet, duty free, safe in the knowledge that by the next time John sobered up, the fond, nostalgic jaunt to Mordor would have been forgotten. It’s too bad that Studs ignored his own unspoken words of advice, hadn’t realised until right this moment that what’s true of Tehran is as true of Freeschool Street. This scruffy piece of ground has seen its revolutions, tyrannies replaced by other tyrannies, its character revised by different stripes of fundamentalism, socio-political or economic: King Charles, Cromwell, King Charles Junior, Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair. Now that Studs thinks about it, the terrain beneath his feet even shares Little John’s status as deposed royalty: the rough trapeze of land bounded by Freeschool Street on one side and Narrow Toe Lane and Peter’s Gardens on the other would have been the grounds of Offa’s Saxon palace, with St. Peter’s and St. Gregory’s as the two churches flanking the construction to the west and east respectively. The yawning entrance to Jem Perrit’s buried wood-yard might have opened onto royal stables once, and if he’d only had the foresight to be born twelve hundred years odd earlier then Jem’s son Benedict could have been Offa’s jute-clad poet laureate, or possibly his fool. Poor Tom’s a-cold and a sheep’s bladder on a stick. Ben would have been a natural.
The breeze seems cooler on his stubble, and Studs briskly shakes his head to clear it of the memories, the reverie that gets all over you like gunshot residue. How long has he been standing here on Gregory Street’s corner, uselessly deliberating on dead dwarves and how it’s usually the turf that ends up as the loser in a turf war? He detects slight changes in the local ambience which indicate that he’s been holding up this listing wall for quite some time. The western sky is clearer with its light diluted and more palatable, understated tints of colour in its thinning wash as the blue fresco of the day reaches its edges. Distant cars and lorries would appear to have run out of things to say, their conversation flagging and become more intermittent, trailing off to grunts in the post rush-hour hush. Birds arcing down to guttering shrug off their troubles and assume the careless air of almost-home commuters. Friday, May the 26<sup>th</sup>, makes for the pink, embarrassed blush of its conclusion.
He decides to cast his poorly-placed Mr. Potato Head eye over Horseshoe Street, check out what’s left now of St. Gregory’s other end before he heads for home, calls it a day as if there’s something else that he could call it. In the absence of a bitter wind he turns his leather collar up so that he feels more isolated, and with a last glance at the ambiguous dealership which has supplanted Offa and Jem Perrit and all points between he rolls his shoulders in a hoodlum strut away down Gregory Street with the declining sun behind him. To his left the dereliction of the corner property continues pretty much unchecked while on his right there’s simply nothing there, an agoraphobic stretch of flayed land tumbling uninterrupted down to Peter’s Way and overprinted with a schist of levelled floor-plans like the quantum ripples still discernible on the event-horizon ‘skin’ of black holes, our only surviving record of the cosmic bodies already ingested.
At the street’s bend where it angles sharply to the south stands a three-floor Victorian factory, a great cube of smoked stone which would appear to have been transformed into a recording studio. A fashionably minimal house logo is affixed high on the soot-blasted façade in a naive attempt to impose an identity on the amnesiac edifice, just now pretending to be Phoenix Studios, a well-intentioned effort to evoke the flames of rebirth from the ashes of the neighbourhood, which clearly isn’t going to work. It wasn’t that kind of a fire. In what looks like a disused yard to one side of the building is a heaped moraine of tyres, deposited here long ago as though by a black rubber glacier in the long cold snap following the era of the dino-dozers and tyranno-JCBs, their jointed necks craning and swivelling to take a bite out of a displaced family’s front bedroom, grey wallpaper weeds trailing from yellow metal jaws, an undiscriminating swallowing. He turns right into Gregory Street’s continuation only to discover that there isn’t one. Beyond the studio there’s nothing separating this end of the road from the dual carriageway of Horseshoe Street which runs downhill in parallel, save for a couple of ridiculous low barriers that Little John could have stepped over without noticing. Studs feels a fleeting obligation to walk all the way down and around the edge of where the depots, builders’ yards and houses should have been, out of respect for the dead properties, but that strikes him as both insane and too much trouble so he cuts across the empty dirt instead.
The wide road is to all intents and purposes bereft of cars or people from its foot by the picked skeleton of the gas-holder up to its far summit at the top there, where it runs into the Mayorhold. In the tumbleweed hiatus between clocking off and tying a few on, the district’s voices, both contemporary and ancestral, switch off as abruptly as a background tape-loop. He can hear the empty moments settling like dust on the abandoned highway, muffling its ghosts, the silence bowling off downhill to quiet the supper tables of Far Cotton. Later, almost certainly, comes a cacophony of sirens, retching, intimacies bellowed into mobile phones and all the hairy other, but for now there’s this unscripted pause, the welcome presence of dead air.
He takes his time mounting the incline, feels professionally compelled to notice everything, to let no nuance slip the dragnet of his razor-honed atten-
<br>
tion. Here a paving slab cracked into fjords at one corner, there a rear view of the Marefair skyline with its hidden back-yard complications fondly cluttering the rooftop architecture, aerials and fungal growths of satellite dish sprouting from the chimney bricks or drainpipe heights. Across the way, above the low relief of a breeze-block crash-barrier running up the slope’s spine, the far side of Horseshoe Street is in a noticeably better state of upkeep than the tattered edge that Studs patrols, falling within the relatively well-maintained town centre rather than in the forsaken patchwork of the Boroughs. While the one-time motorcycle-
<br>
pirate haven of the Harbour Lights is presently enduring the indignity of a rebranding as the Jolly Wanchor or however one pronounces it, the building is at least still standing and may one day see again its leather-armoured clientele. A little further up, an iron-gated yard appended to the 1930s billiard hall looks incomplete without a stumbling and cheery bunch of post-war dads still in their demob suits and taking too long over farewells as they make unhurriedly towards the exit.
Just beyond the snooker parlour is the Gold Street corner where a century ago there stood Vint’s Palace of Varieties, a venue at which the young Charlie Chaplin played on various occasions. Studs is unsure if the great screen hobo’s skittering skid row routines would work as well against a backdrop of contemporary poverty; a different destitution. He thinks not, though that might be because he’s not imagining the Boroughs in decade-evading black and white, nor with its miseries conducted to a tinkling piano soundtrack. Background music changes everything. If they’d stuck some Rick Astley or perhaps the Steptoe theme behind his impaled-sister-raping scene in Besson’s <em>Joan of Arc</em> it would have been hilarious. Or “Nessun Dorma” over his Hamburglar appearances.
As he draws level with the snooker joint across the road he pulls his focus back to the distressed concrete hypotenuse he’s currently ascending, on the scummy side of the street with its disinterred carcass aesthetic and an angry pseudonym on every lamppost. Reckoning that this must roughly be the spot on which the east end of St. Gregory’s once stood he halts his climb to take stock of the victim district’s injuries, to gauge the full extent of what seem almost frenzied mutilations to its substance, even to its map. The surgical removal of the vital organs, could that be the killer’s signature? Some of the shallower cuts to the masonry look like defensive wounds in Studs’ professional opinion, and he’d put good money on discovering skin traces such as planning application notices beneath the chipped slates of the area’s fingernails. Struck by the unexpected poignancy of his hardboiled analogy he finds he’s starting to fill up. The neighbourhood, it’s … you know. Raped and with her face smashed in, but she put up a fight. Good girl. Brave girl. Sleep tight.
Finding a cafeteria serviette deep in one jacket pocket, Studs wipes quickly at his shiny sockets, blows his nose and pulls himself together before he resumes his survey. Nothing in the crazy-quilt of random surfaces and signs before him indicates even the homeopathic water-memory of a church. The past is cauterised. There’s even a dull red patch halfway up one mongrel wall which, without benefit of his corrective lenses, looks to him like a wax seal on the doomed territory’s document, a deal that was signed off some several generations back, all done and dusted. Nonetheless, this isn’t what James Hervey the short-trousered gothic schoolboy saw, scuffing his satchel on the rough sills of the eighteenth century. This isn’t what the unnamed pilgrim monk home from Jerusalem experienced a thousand years before, prompted by angels to the centre of his land and carrying a rugged cross to put there when he found it, hewn from heavy rock, a message from Golgotha like a petrified kiss on a postcard. And back then, there would have been no doubts about the provenance of the communication, not with Fed Ex seraphim arranging the delivery. Nobody would have wondered who the sender was, even with no return address. The angel couriers were rigorous scientific bona fides, their cruciform stone the equivalent of a Higgs boson particle arrived to validate the standard theocratic model. A big deal, in other words. An enchilada that was more than whole.
No wonder they made such a fuss about the artefact, set it into the Horseshoe Street face of St. Gregory’s where it remained a site of pilgrimage for centuries, all of those last-ditch fingertips tracing the worn-smooth axes to their intersection, all the lame and blistered feet which bore them here. The centre of the country, measured by God’s own theodolite. That surely must have carried some weight with King Alfred when he named Northampton foremost of the shires, effectively the capital in an alternate history where William never came. The great cake-scorcher was just rubberstamping policy laid down by the Almighty. More than merely royal pasturage this spot was holy ground, marked out by things with burning haloes at the say-so of an ultimate authority. That’s how they saw it, how it was: a violent and miraculous reality much like Studs’ own, perfumed by horseshit for the want of cordite. In a dark age the noir outlook would be a foregone conclusion.
And yet, even with the gulf of a millennium to separate the relic’s origins from Hervey’s schooldays, wouldn’t the conceptual charge and inspirational importance of the object remain undiminished in believing eyes, especially those of a seven-year-old boy whose father was a clergyman? For ten years, near enough a quarter of his prematurely interrupted life, the ailing child had laid his hands or eyes upon the primitive and earnest talisman, the chiselled X on an interior treasure-map, a seeding crystal of Jerusalem itself. The simple, fundamental shape would have been printed on his bedtime eyelids, colours back to front in the screensaver drift before sleep, a test pattern on the hypnagoggle-box. Enough to stamp that minimalist template onto Hervey’s coming life, Studs would have thought. A fragment carried here from the eternal holy city could provide the dynamo which drove the young ecclesiast in one side of John Wesley’s operation and then, acrimoniously, out the other. The Rood in the Wall they called it, manifesting Hervey’s granite-hard conviction, powering his writings, <em>Theron and Aspasio</em> or his sepulchral meditations, energies eventually earthed in William Blake who closes off the metaphysic circuit when he writes <em>Jerusalem</em>.
Slow increments of early dusk are gathering around the scowling Sherlock as he contemplates the haphazard assembly of a dozen centuries, the spectrum of failed social strategies and mix of incompatible building materials represented by the mural mess in front of him. The rood has long since disappeared and taken the wall with it, leaving only a conspicuous and desolating absence. He can’t help but wonder where it went, the crude-cut icon sent to tag the middle of the land, the centre of his pulp investigation. Was it spirited away by sharp-eyed demolition workers, either mercenary or conceivably devout? Perhaps more likely, did it go unrecognised, its aura faded, its significance by then bled out into the thirsty dirt, abandoned in a deeper drainage ditch than that in which the tombstone of Saint Ragener was finally discovered sometime in the nineteenth century? Composed of matter near as ancient and enduring as the world itself, a great plus-symbol to denote the site’s positive terminus, Studs knows that it must still exist somewhere, as widely scattered shards if nothing else. When space and time are ending the device’s disparate molecules will still be there for the finale, possibly intact, a symbol that has long outlived the doctrine symbolised, with its imputed righteousness remaining aeons after Hervey, Doddridge, Blake and everybody else are gone the way of all flesh at the far ends of a predetermined universe.
An atavistic pineal tingle tells him that he’s being watched, an ingrained P.I. reflex critical to his imaginary line of work. Swivelling his extraordinary profile, like the cliff-face simulacrum of an Indian chief in <em>Fortean Times</em>, he glares uphill to where a rotund little man with curly white hair and a matching beard, possibly one of Santa’s helpers, stands poised apprehensively on Marefair’s corner. The rube’s face, bespectacled eyes wide and fixed on Studs with an expression of startled incomprehension, rings a faint ’40s hotel reception bell in his recall, sets him to shifting the half-empty coffee cups and stacked pornography from his internal filing cabinet, sifting through the outdated mug-sheets for a moniker to go with the familiar, shifty features.
As the piece of work turns hurriedly away like he’s pretending that he hasn’t just been clocking the detective, making across Marefair for the other side and pointedly not looking back, the penny drops. The interloper on Studs’ private made-for-TV drama is the former councillor James Cockie, that same jovial countenance affixed beside the header of a weekly column in the local <em>Chronicle & Echo</em>, copies of which he’s perused while staying at his mum’s place. This being the code name for his office. You can’t be too careful.
Watching the retired council head laboriously roll his fleshy snowball off up Horsemarket towards the Mayorhold, the unfrozen Piltdown man-hunter reflects on Cockie’s late but perhaps pertinent arrival in this last stretch of the storyline. While technically the genre generally demands the killer be a character the readers or the viewers have been introduced to early in the game, there’s always those convention-bucking mavericks like Derek Raymond, with his greasy beret still behind the bar down at the French in Soho, mimicking real life in that the culprit’s often no one who’s been seen before. In oddball works like that, Studs soberly reflects, the tale turns out to have been more about the labyrinthine mental processes of the protagonist than the contortions of the case he’s trying desperately to solve. That said, there’s no compelling literary imperative that rules out the ex-councillor from the inquiry. With the former Labour politician’s dwindling mass receding from view in a slow red shift, Studs puts it all together.
Having had, presumably, a hand or at the very best a chubby finger in the neighbourhood’s brutal demise while still in office, even if entirely passively, Jim Cockie fits the profile. There was that look in his bugged Tex Avery eyes, furtive and guilty, right before he’d turned around and walked off in a hurry. Don’t they say, if you wait long enough, the murderer always returns to where it happened, to the crime scene? Sometimes it’s to gloat, or sometimes in a panic-stricken effort to conceal incriminating evidence. Occasionally, so they tell him, it’s to masturbate, although Studs doubts if that would be the motive in this current instance. Once in a long while, of course, the perp’s compulsion to revisit the chalk outlines of their killing ground might be born of a genuine remorse.
Uphill, the new prime suspect is diminishing away to nothingness like a white phosphor dot shrinking into the starless vastness of a cooling 1950s telly. Curling his lower lip until he’s worried that it could roll up and travel down his chin, the stumped P.I. turns south and heads back down the way he came. He knows that Cockie is protected; knows that he could never get a case to stick. Forget it, Studs. It’s Chinatown.
The triangles and diamonds of a stencilled sky behind the old gas-holder hulking further down the slope are starting their decline to indigo, and he can feel the utter jet of night descending on whatever narrative he’s in, the big obsidian coming down upon this over-complicated continuity with desperate hours to go before tomorrow morning and his rendezvous with Warren at her exhibition. He heads back to where he left the, oh, he doesn’t know, time-travelling De Lorean or something, with his craggy head a place of gothic transepts and determinism, the soul-crushing clockwork of the hackneyed, billiard-ball plot trajectory, this character-arc passing for a life.
He thinks of crosses, double-crosses and the Mr. Big behind the scenes pulling the strings for Hervey, Wesley, Swedenborg and all the rest, the man upstairs who’s always careful to keep out the picture, an elusive boss of night and mortal intrigue, frequently reported dead but always with some wiggle room left for a sequel.
He locates his car in the protracted slow dissolve of twilight, drives home, checks to see if any casting agencies have left a message, eats his warmed-up dinner, goes to bed. After a great while and a mug of Horlicks, everything goes noir.
** <strong>THE JOLLY SMOKERS</strong>
<quote>
<em>Den wakes beneath the windswept porch alone</em>
<em>On bone-hard slab rubbed smooth by Sunday feet</em>
<em>Where afternoon light leans, fatigued and spent,</em>
<em>Ground to which he feels no entitlement</em>
<em>Nor any purchase on the sullen street;</em>
<em>Unpeels his chill grey cheek from chill grey stone</em>
<br>
<em>Then orients himself in time and space.</em>
<em>The roof’s a black-ribbed spine viewed from the floor</em>
<em>With on one wall some obsolete decree</em>
<em>Meant for the Cypriot community</em>
<em>And at the near end an iron-studded door,</em>
<em>A Bible-cover slammed shut in his face,</em>
<br>
<em>Or that of some more academic tome.</em>
<em>He struggles up onto one threadbare knee.</em>
<em>Moved on by night, he’s slept instead by day</em>
<em>Beneath Saint Peter’s covered entranceway</em>
<em>Thanks to the shame of university</em>
<em>And a conviction that he can’t go home,</em>
<br>
<em>Can’t face his parents, ask yet more reprieves</em>
<em>Of those who’ve done so much, left in the lurch</em>
<em>Through furthering Den’s literary bent.</em>
<em>He’s stopped attending lectures, blown the rent</em>
<em>To shelter in this all but disused church,</em>
<em>A sweat of monsters beading on its eaves,</em>
<br>
<em>This sentry-box in lieu of an address.</em>
<em>Yearning to write, he’s learned to teach from men</em>
<em>With targets, goals to which they must adhere,</em>
<em>Themselves regretting the proffered career</em>
<em>That he’s let go. His failures pounce while Den</em>
<em>Still fumbles at the latch of consciousness</em>
<br>
<em>In this, his latest of unfixed abodes.</em>
<em>Twenty last week and homeless, that’s the thing,</em>
<em>Ambitions snuffed and dreams long since wrung out,</em>
<em>A student loan he dare not think about</em>
<em>Here in his hutch, its corners harbouring</em>
<em>Their soil and silver foil in abject lodes</em>
<br>
<em>When all he’s ever craved is poetry,</em>
<em>The fire that Keats and Blake and Ginsburg had.</em>
<em>To be it, not to teach it. He can’t bear</em>
<em>Chalk-dusted years of common-room despair</em>
<em>Nor the reproof of hard-up Mum and Dad</em>
<em>Who’ve gone without for his tuition fee.</em>
<br>
<em>Thus one door closes, while another shuts</em>
<em>Where Offa’s sons raised the communion cup.</em>
<em>To doss in Saxon palaces and forts</em>
<em>Might hold, he thinks, a poetry of sorts</em>
<em>So with a sigh he stands and gathers up</em>
<em>His bag as though it were his spilling guts,</em>
<br>
<em>Recalling meanwhile that it’s Friday night</em>
<em>With, just for once, somewhere he’s meant to be:</em>
<em>Some bald guy who’s got drugs, up Tower Street way,</em>
<em>Offering dreamtime and a place to stay.</em>
<em>An unaccustomed surge of urgency</em>
<em>Propels Den out into a tired rose light</em>
<br>
<em>From the cramped hermitage where he’s been curled,</em>
<em>Across worn flags that vandal time deletes</em>
<em>Where names and mortal numbers disappear,</em>
<em>Erasing status, sentiment, and year.</em>
<em>Dead information sulks beneath these streets</em>
<em>And Orpheus, stumbling, seeks his underworld</em>
<br>
<em>Leaving behind an alcove sour with fate,</em>
<em>The war memorial’s black memo-spike,</em>
<em>Fleeing the chapel before twilight falls</em>
<em>When nightmare faces trickle on its walls,</em>
<em>Past flowerbeds Spring makes inferno-like</em>
<em>Beside the path, out through a green-toothed gate</em>
<br>
<em>Then over Marefair, observed with disdain</em>
<em>By that short, tubby chap you sometimes see;</em>
<em>White hair and beard, officious little sod.</em>
<em>A garden gnome robbed of his fishing-rod,</em>
<em>He smirks “Good evening” confrontationally</em>
<em>As Dennis rattles by and up Pike Lane</em>
<br>
<em>Towards a new low and a legal high.</em>
<em>Why did he come here to pursue his goal?</em>
<em>These firetrap shacks crouched in the Great Fire’s lair,</em>
<em>Here to a town that nutted off John Clare</em>
<em>Yet had John Bunyan christen it Mansoul.</em>
<em>These are the yards where sonnets come to die</em>
<br>
<em>As with the local poet he’d been shown,</em>
<em>The giggling drunk in whose wry shipwrecked gaze</em>
<em>He’d glimpsed his future, and abandoned rhyme.</em>
<em>Rousing from reverie barely in time</em>
<em>Den turns right at Saint Catherine’s house and strays</em>
<em>Down Castle Street, that dusk has overthrown,</em>
<br>
<em>To the halfway point and the ramp’s top end</em>
<em>Between the shabby flats where it cuts through</em>
<em>To Bath Street. Here, despite a scorched smell, he</em>
<em>Must brave declining visibility</em>
<em>Which conjures fiends from fencing, and into</em>
<em>The shadowed valley of the psalm descend</em>
<br>
<em>Through a despond of debt and cancelled dole,</em>
<em>The acrid scent worse further down the ramp.</em>
<em>He hurries, flees this atmosphere of doom</em>
<em>Only to misstep in the gathering gloom</em>
<em>And on an ice-cream swirl of dogshit stamp</em>
<em>The complex imprint of one trainer’s sole.</em>
<br>
<em>He calls himself by an unflattering name</em>
<em>Then slogs on amongst peeling Bauhaus slums,</em>
<em>Making for where the high-rise windows glow</em>
<em>From sombre violet altitudes and so</em>
<em>Child Dennis unto the dark tower block comes,</em>
<em>Scraping one foot behind him as though lame</em>
<br>
<em>And, too late, suffering anxiety</em>
<em>About his bald host, whom he barely knows,</em>
<em>Though someone called Fat Kenny doesn’t sound</em>
<em>Like the most selfless altruist around.</em>
<em>Still, on through a dim pocket-park Den goes,</em>
<em>Up Simons Walk, with no apostrophe,</em>
<br>
<em>But glancing back across breeze-ruffled grass</em>
<em>Through tromp l’oeil murk he struggles to make sense</em>
<em>From brief illusion, a great cog of night</em>
<em>That smoulders and revolves then fades from sight.</em>
<em>He frowns and, finding the right residence,</em>
<em>Raps on the door twice, knucklebones on glass,</em>
<br>
<em>Whereat, light scattered in the frosted pane,</em>
<em>His benefactor shimmers into form.</em>
<em>“Hello … Christ, what’s that smell? Has something died?</em>
<em>Oh yeah? Well, take ’em off. Leave ’em outside.”</em>
<em>While Den complies, allowed into the warm,</em>
<em>His shoes, like orphans, on the step remain</em>
<br>
<em>Unlaced and in disgrace. The pungent hall</em>
<em>Leads to a worse front room. “Fancy a joint?”</em>
<em>Den takes an armchair, Kenny the settee</em>
<em>Where books on psychopharmacology</em>
<em>Are strewn, the rolling highlight a bright point</em>
<em>On his shaved skull, as with a billiard ball</em>
<br>
<em>Or plump freshwater pearl. Eyes Rizla-red</em>
<em>Fat Kenny licks, tears and at last succeeds</em>
<em>In fashioning tobacco, skins and drug</em>
<em>Into an origami doodlebug</em>
<em>Then lights the stout white paper fuse which leads</em>
<em>To his smooth, spherical cartoon-bomb head</em>
<br>
<em>That explodes into giggle, gab and cough.</em>
<em>Passed back and forth the spliff ghost-trains their mood,</em>
<em>Stills time with rearing basilisks of smoke</em>
<em>And Kenny asks him, almost as a joke,</em>
<em>If in return for lodgings, dope and food</em>
<em>Dennis might be prepared to suck him off.</em>
<br>
<em>“Or sling your hook. I’m not a charity.</em>
<em>I’m offering pizza and me special stash.</em>
<em>This hooker wanted some. Said I could do</em>
<em>Her up the arse, but no. I’d promised you.”</em>
<em>Dazed, Denis blinks, and in an arc-light flash</em>
<em>Sees his new life in pin-sharp clarity,</em>
<br>
<em>All the hard bargains that it will entail</em>
<em>Keeping on the right side of a front door.</em>
<em>He nods. Kenny suggests that it might save</em>
<em>Time done while waiting for the microwave</em>
<em>To cook their pizzas. On the kitchen floor</em>
<em>Den kneels, unzips his host’s distended snail</em>
<br>
<em>And puts it in his mouth, fixing instead</em>
<em>On Wilde or Whitman, striving to ingest</em>
<em>Such poetry as might be had among</em>
<em>The rancid piston’s movements on his tongue,</em>
<em>Attempting to maintain an interest</em>
<em>In De Profundis while he’s giving head</em>
<br>
<em>But failing to recall a useful quote.</em>
<em>Den, lacking panthers, feasts with porcine things</em>
<em>Whose world, arrhythmic, will admit no rhyme</em>
<em>Save chance events acted at the same time:</em>
<em>Just as the heartless oven-timer pings</em>
<em>Fat Kenny’s semen sluices down his throat.</em>
<br>
<em>They eat in silence. Den discovers he</em>
<em>Can still taste his aperitif and hence</em>
<em>Does not enjoy his entrée. When they’re done</em>
<em>The Happy Shopper Buddha-featured one</em>
<em>Announces that it’s now time to commence</em>
<em>With their ethno-botanic odyssey</em>
<br>
<em>And shows Den the datura he has grown,</em>
<em>Its bell-like blooms white as a wordless page,</em>
<em>With the Salvia Divinorum which</em>
<em>Is Den’s. It’s made clear in Fat Kenny’s pitch</em>
<em>That while they’ll both share the diviner’s sage</em>
<em>The Angels’ Trumpets are for him alone.</em>
<br>
<em>“I’ve got a greater tolerance, you see.</em>
<em>I’ll chew the salvia with you then smoke</em>
<em>The other later.” They both masticate</em>
<em>The leaves. “Hold it beneath your tongue, then wait.”</em>
<em>So, leaving the sublingual wad to soak,</em>
<em>Den gulps and swallows apprehensively.</em>
<br>
<em>He pales, as if at the approach of some</em>
<em>Fierce, underlying pandemonium.</em>
</quote>
<br>
<br>
<quote>
<em>Time squirms, its measure lost beyond recall</em>
<em>So that how long he’s sat he does not know.</em>
<em>The dismal room has undergone no change</em>
<em>Save that its cluttered details now seem strange</em>
<em>To him, and meanwhile simmering below</em>
<em>His tongue the bitter vegetable ball</em>
<br>
<em>Steeps in his spittle, makes green venom run</em>
<em>Into his belly, past the teeth and gums</em>
<em>To curdle in his bloodstream, bowel and bone.</em>
<em>Den writhes and struggles to suppress a moan</em>
<em>As he by subtle increment becomes</em>
<em>Uncomfortable in his own skeleton</em>
<br>
<em>And catapults up from his seat to pace</em>
<em>The room, thus to assuage his restlessness</em>
<em>While Kenny shifts his outsized infant bulk</em>
<em>Upon the sofa, clearly in a sulk</em>
<em>At the delay, this possible to guess</em>
<em>Through study of his well-upholstered face</em>
<br>
<em>Or gist of his dyspeptic monologue.</em>
<em>“Fuck this. If it’s not gonna do the biz</em>
<em>I’m gonna smoke the other stuff.” Den stares,</em>
<em>Circling an endless rug between the chairs</em>
<em>As, barely knowing where or who he is</em>
<em>He wades in a dissociative fog</em>
<br>
<em>Alone, the lights on but nobody home,</em>
<em>Where looking down he finds he can’t avoid</em>
<em>The fact he’s now wearing the clothes and hat</em>
<em>Of Charlie Chaplin, somebody like that,</em>
<em>Some little tramp on crackling celluloid</em>
<em>Strutting a stage of sudden monochrome,</em>
<br>
<em>All colour fled. Fat Kenny, dressed like Den</em>
<em>In antique garb now waddles through the gloom</em>
<em>Beside him, white faced, black clad. They don’t talk,</em>
<em>Their gait resembling the Lambeth Walk</em>
<em>While in the upper corners of the room</em>
<em>Are gruff, gesticulating little men</em>
<br>
<em>In similar attire, homunculi</em>
<em>Who swear and spit. Floorboards somehow replace</em>
<em>The ceiling and through chinks the ruffians call</em>
<em>Their taunts, where dirty grey light seems to fall</em>
<em>As from some higher mathematic space</em>
<em>Or proletarian eternity</em>
<br>
<em>Of endless grudge. Its noisome undertow</em>
<em>Seizes them both. Perspective is askew,</em>
<em>The jeering imps made large as, by degree,</em>
<em>Den and his colleague rise towards them. He</em>
<em>Has the sensation as he passes through</em>
<em>Of fusing with the drab planks from below,</em>
<br>
<em>Emerging on their far side in insane</em>
<em>Conditions, chest-deep in the warping floor</em>
<em>To nightmare. He discovers that his skin,</em>
<em>Now naked, is that on a manikin</em>
<em>Grown from this attic of the charnel poor</em>
<em>With joints replaced by pins and pores by grain,</em>
<br>
<em>Whose screams are creaks, whose tears are viscous gum</em>
<em>Slow on his lathe-shaved cheeks. Den gapes, appalled,</em>
<em>As his host, wood-fleshed and immersed like he</em>
<em>In floor, is seized by the fraternity</em>
<em>Of tipsy ghouls who sing while Kenny’s hauled</em>
<em>Up to inebriate Elysium:</em>
<br>
<em>“The jolly smokers we, a cheery bunch</em>
<em>Here in our half-world, half-real and half-cut,</em>
<em>Enjoy that good night out without the wife</em>
<em>Pursue an after-hours afterlife</em>
<em>And want for nothing save a head to butt</em>
<em>Or Bedlam Jennies for our Puck’s Hat Punch.”</em>
<br>
<em>Aghast at what seems Happy Hour in hell</em>
<em>Den flails, embedded, glancing up to spy</em>
<em>The Guinness toucan smirking from tin plate,</em>
<em>Its touted goodness decades out of date,</em>
<em>Then with a wide and panicked wooden eye</em>
<em>Surveys the chiaroscuro clientele</em>
<br>
<em>Of smouldering reprobates who swirl and curse</em>
<em>About him as he struggles there beneath</em>
<em>Their knees. One, waistcoat-draped with bowler hat</em>
<em>Wipes from his chin the remnants of a rat</em>
<em>While all his pockets boil with vicious teeth,</em>
<em>Though some of his confederates are worse.</em>
<br>
<em>There’s one whose features crawl about his face,</em>
<em>Mouth above nose, ears where his eyes should be.</em>
<em>Another, a raw-knuckled harridan</em>
<em>With smile as threatening as any man</em>
<em>Sways to an air that falls conspicuously</em>
<em>Flat in that strangely dead acoustic space,</em>
<br>
<em>Less tune than tuning up. Den cranes and strives</em>
<em>To find its source, soon managing to spot</em>
<em>The revenant musicians, bass, horn, drums,</em>
<em>Who twiddle amplifier knobs or thumbs</em>
<em>Disconsolately, yet perk up as what</em>
<em>Appears to be their ringleader arrives</em>
<br>
<em>To ragged cheers, a rotund titan who</em>
<em>With belly, beret, beard and steely eyes</em>
<em>Rolls through the reeling wraiths. Den gets to view</em>
<em>Him, if but briefly, noticing that two</em>
<em>Ghost-children shelter at his oak-thick thighs,</em>
<em>One memorably fair though lacking hue</em>
<br>
<em>And wrapped in tartan bathrobe. Den calls out</em>
<em>But draws the mob’s attention with his cry</em>
<em>That grind their boot-heels on his wooden crown,</em>
<em>Jesting as they attempt to tread him down,</em>
<em>His careful lyric ear affronted by</em>
<em>Their hateful voices everywhere about.</em>
<br>
<em>“He’s formed wi’ woods like Cloggy Elliott’s leg,</em>
<em>Or malkin, frightenin’ stargugs on a farm.”</em>
<em>Fat Kenny, in his wooden birthday suit,</em>
<em>Is held down by the leering female brute</em>
<em>Who’s carving her initials on his arm</em>
<em>Despite his squeaking-hinge attempts to beg</em>
<br>
<em>Or plead. Den, trampled on by dead men’s feet,</em>
<em>Hears the round minstrel’s stern, stentorian shout</em>
<em>As Den’s stamped down into the splintery mire,</em>
<em>Resurfacing to hear the bard enquire</em>
<em>If Freddy Allen’s anywhere about,</em>
<em>Told in reply that he’s just down the street,</em>
<br>
<em>At which the children leave. The cackling throng</em>
<em>Redouble now their bestial, boisterous ways.</em>
<em>They kick Den harder as the band begin,</em>
<em>They gouge the shrieking Kenny’s puppet skin</em>
<em>And as the joyous, tumbling music plays</em>
<em>These slurring shades raise up their glaze-eyed song:</em>
<br>
<em>“Named for this inn, the jolly smokers we,</em>
<em>Up here near fifty year now, man and boy!</em>
<em>Pale in our great beyond, beyond the pale,</em>
<em>So drink up, down the hatch, hail, horrors, hail!</em>
<em>Leave us dead men and empties to enjoy</em>
<em>Our pie-eyed paralysed posterity!”</em>
<br>
<em>And plunged in quicksand pine Den twists like some</em>
<em>Half-landed fish pinched in between two planes,</em>
<em>Target for every last ethereal thug.</em>
<em>Forgotten, now, the taking of the drug.</em>
<em>Not even memory of his name remains</em>
<em>Nor life prior to this warped delirium</em>
<br>
<em>Of boots and threats. Nearby, Fat Kenny’s squeal</em>
<em>Competes now with the music’s weave and wail</em>
<em>As the two writhe in what appears to be</em>
<em>A pissed-up paradise or purgatory</em>
<em>Where bygone barbarisms still prevail</em>
<em>And the perpetually present poor are real,</em>
<br>
<em>Not metaphor. Thus, long, cruel eons pass</em>
<em>Before distraction having the semblance</em>
<em>Of a ghost-tramp storms through the hoodlums,</em>
<em>Frog-marching there before him as he comes</em>
<em>A mangled man whose babyish countenance</em>
<em>Is set with inlaid gems of broken glass;</em>
<br>
<em>Whose breast is concave ruin. Tankards chime</em>
<em>And voices raise. “What’s ’e come up ’ere for?”</em>
<em>The vagrant phantom loudly now decries</em>
<em>His captive’s deeds and whimpered alibis</em>
<em>Though Den, just then pressed down beneath the floor,</em>
<em>Cannot discern the nature of the crime</em>
<br>
<em>Yet sees its punishment. For his offence</em>
<em>The prisoner, stripped of his torn attire,</em>
<em>Is made to kneel, unsure what to expect,</em>
<em>While Kenny, wooden phallus teased erect,</em>
<em>Learns that the roughneck revellers now require</em>
<em>An act unnatural in every sense.</em>
<br>
<em>As both performers start to moan and bleat</em>
<em>In their abrasive coitus they enthral</em>
<em>The spiteful, spectral spectators, who sing</em>
<em>“We’re jolly and we smoke, but here’s the thing.</em>
<em>There’s some stuff that we care for not at all</em>
<em>And serve rough justice here above the street</em>
<br>
<em>Where all the arseholes of the ages meet,</em>
<em>Thereby democratising Milton’s fall</em>
<em>With Satan overthrown and mob made king!”</em>
<em>Den feels as if he may be settling</em>
<em>Back to a real world almost past recall</em>
<em>Through spit and sawdust at the phantoms’ feet</em>
<br>
<em>Into an intermediary zone.</em>
<em>As from some party in an upstairs flat</em>
<em>He hears the rosy-cheeked man’s howl of pain,</em>
<em>Forced to do that which goes against the grain,</em>
<em>Then sinks back to Fat Kenny’s habitat,</em>
<em>In darkness with the lamp-bulb clearly blown</em>
<br>
<em>And finds, now the experience is done,</em>
<em>His host slumped on the couch; him in his chair.</em>
<em>The jumping up and pacing, it would seem,</em>
<em>Were merely part of his unearthly dream.</em>
<em>Exhausted, leaving questions in the air,</em>
<em>He slides into a kind oblivion,</em>
<br>
<em>Knowing, as all thoughts into shadow pass,</em>
<em>The dead to be a literal underclass.</em>
</quote>
<br>
<br>
<quote>
<em>Out of grey nullity to consciousness</em>
<em>He comes, reluctant, one fact at a time,</em>
<em>Aware of self, of where he is and when,</em>
<em>His body in the chair. Eyes slitted, Den</em>
<em>Notes, after the stark, solarised sublime,</em>
<em>That there is colour, though not in excess</em>
<br>
<em>Nor well-distributed. The sun, discreet,</em>
<em>Leans through the curtains to bestow a kiss</em>
<em>On Kenny’s slumbering paunch. Beneath Den’s tongue</em>
<em>He finds and spits out the exhausted bung</em>
<em>Of salvia then, needful of a piss,</em>
<em>Rises unsteadily to his bare feet</em>
<br>
<em>To navigate that unfamiliar place,</em>
<em>The hallway with his bag, Fat Kenny’s coat,</em>
<em>Then up loud, bare-board stairs to find the loo.</em>
<em>Fully awake now he peers down into</em>
<em>Stained porcelain, the filthy toilet’s throat,</em>
<em>Its exhalations lifting in his face</em>
<br>
<em>As memories rise too, sharp as a knife:</em>
<em>The porch of Peter’s Church, his student loan</em>
<em>And, oh God, did he suck Fat Kenny’s prick?</em>
<em>He’s overwhelmed. It’s all too much, too quick.</em>
<em>Den retches and with a despairing moan,</em>
<em>In its entirety, throws up his life</em>
<br>
<em>For some few minutes, doubled in a crouch,</em>
<em>Then flushes. In the rattling pipes, trapped air</em>
<em>Bellows in anguish like a minotaur.</em>
<em>Mouth wiped, Den clumps back down to the ground floor</em>
<em>And the mauve gloom of a hushed front room where</em>
<em>Fat Kenny still sleeps, supine, on the couch,</em>
<br>
<em>Extinguished pipe clasped in one pudgy hand.</em>
<em>Though keen to leave, Den feels it only right</em>
<em>To say goodbye. “I’m off, then.” No reply.</em>
<em>He notices a flat, green-bellied fly</em>
<em>Orbit the still, shaved skull and then alight</em>
<em>But though he sees he does not understand</em>
<br>
<em>Why his host shows no sign of coming round.</em>
<em>“I said I’m going.” Den begins to feel</em>
<em>Uneasy and as he steps closer spies</em>
<em>The motionless breast and unblinking eyes.</em>
<em>With realisation comes a shattering peal</em>
<em>Of sudden dreadful and incessant sound,</em>
<br>
<em>A circling and swooping banshee roar</em>
<em>That shivers glass and sets dogs barking but</em>
<em>Appears to have no source save him. Den screams,</em>
<em>An improvised Kurt Schwitters piece that seems</em>
<em>Expressive although inarticulate</em>
<em>And backs in the direction of the door</em>
<br>
<em>Which, unlocked, yields at once and opens wide</em>
<em>Whence dazzling rays pour through the gaping hatch</em>
<em>To blind him. Crumpled sleeping-bag forgot</em>
<em>And slammed door ringing like a rifle shot,</em>
<em>Den takes off without bothering to snatch</em>
<em>His shit-smeared sneakers from the step outside</em>
<br>
<em>Or to look back. In truth, he doesn’t dare.</em>
<em>The grass is cold and wet – Den has no socks –</em>
<em>As he sprints past the tower blocks – nor a plan –</em>
<em>But then in Crispin Street he spots a man</em>
<em>Whose pale blue eyes and thinning flaxen locks</em>
<em>Are oddly reminiscent, but from where?</em>
<br>
<em>Upon Den’s lips unspoken epics burn</em>
<em>And seek release, drugged visions that might be</em>
<em>As those of Coleridge, Cocteau, Baudelaire.</em>
<em>By now he’s reached the guy with sparse blonde hair</em>
<em>Who eyes the gasping boy uncertainly</em>
<em>And asks “Are you alright, mate?” with concern</em>
<br>
<em>Made clear. Is Den alright? Aye, there’s the rub,</em>
<em>He thinks, one with De Quincy and Rimbaud,</em>
<em>Preparing for an image-jewelled account</em>
<em>To spill forth as though from some Bardic fount</em>
<em>But all he can come out with is “Yes. No.</em>
<em>Fuck me. Oh, fuck me, I was up the pub.</em>
<br>
<em>That’s where I’ve been all night, up in the pub.”</em>
<em>His mouth won’t stop. “They wouldn’t let us go.”</em>
<em>Won’t pause. “Fuck me. Fuck me, mate, help us out.</em>
<em>It was a pub”, as if that were in doubt,</em>
<em>Language bereft of any metered flow</em>
<em>With words recurring, echoing like Dub</em>
<br>
<em>Through burned-out ganglia. The stranger’s stare</em>
<em>Is quizzical. “Hang on, you’ve lost me, mate.</em>
<em>Was this a lock-in, then, this pub they kept</em>
<em>You at all night?” Although Den’s barely slept</em>
<em>He knows the man is trying to judge his state</em>
<em>Of mind. “Which was it, anyway? Up where?”</em>
<br>
<em>“Up there. Up in the roof. I mean the pub.”</em>
<em>Den babbles, but the blond man nods his head.</em>
<em>“Up in the roof? Yeah, I’ve had that”, and then</em>
<em>He mentions, in the corners, little men.</em>
<em>Den strains to comprehend what’s just been said,</em>
<em>Brain washed, or at least given a good scrub.</em>
<br>
<em>“Yeah. Up the corners. They were reaching down.”</em>
<em>Seeming to understand the man takes out</em>
<em>Some cigarettes and offers one to Den</em>
<em>With calm acceptance bordering on Zen</em>
<em>Then lights both. Den squints. What is it about</em>
<em>This quarter of the unforgiving town</em>
<br>
<em>That brings such things? His saviour tells him how</em>
<em>He isn’t mad but will take time to mend;</em>
<em>Provides more cigarettes; offers a tip</em>
<em>On where to rest, suggesting a small strip</em>
<em>Of grass with trees at Scarletwell Street’s end,</em>
<em>Adding “They’ll be in blossom around now.”</em>
<br>
<em>With syllables become a syllabub</em>
<em>Den calls his benefactor a good bloke</em>
<em>And thanks him, starting to walk off downhill</em>
<em>But looking back to find the stranger still</em>
<em>Observing him. Den, brunt of some cruel joke,</em>
<em>Calls helplessly “I was just up the pub”,</em>
<br>
<em>Then carries on down the long slope again,</em>
<em>Barefoot, skirting jewelled spreads of powdered glass,</em>
<em>To the T-junction at the bottom where</em>
<em>A single house stands near the corner there</em>
<em>Amid a great amnesia of grass,</em>
<em>Its presence making a stark absence plain</em>
<br>
<em>Yet with no clue as to whose residence</em>
<em>It is, its windows with closed curtains hung.</em>
<em>Beneath trees further on he takes a seat,</em>
<em>With freight-yards making the dressed set complete,</em>
<em>Where hunkered on damp grass he picks among</em>
<em>The lyric rubble of experience</em>
<br>
<em>In search of rhymes. The solitary abode</em>
<em>Stands punctuating the erased street’s end,</em>
<em>Closing a quote since lost to a mute past.</em>
<em>Lighting his cigarettes each from the last</em>
<em>Den lives and breathes and tries to comprehend</em>
<em>The dead man in his house just up the road,</em>
<br>
<em>That wonderstruck and milky gaze. He strains</em>
<em>At the idea of it; cannot begin</em>
<em>To analyse nor even quite define</em>
<em>How jarringly abrupt that end-stopped line.</em>
<em>Life’s sprawling text shall not be bound within</em>
<em>The whale-boned Alexandrine or quatrain</em>
<br>
<em>But finds instead its own signature tread</em>
<em>And sensibility. Den’s narrative</em>
<em>Thus far, he sees now, lacks maturity,</em>
<em>A consequence of inability</em>
<em>To put forced stanzas by and only live</em>
<em>His language, though it goes unread</em>
<br>
<em>And unrewarded. No more self-deceit.</em>
<em>He’ll go home, face his folks, work in a shop,</em>
<em>Pay off his debt and wait for the day when</em>
<em>He’s had a life to write about. Just then</em>
<em>A scuffed blue Volkswagen grinds to a stop</em>
<em>At the round-shouldered curbside up the street.</em>
<br>
<em>A dreadlocked woman climbs out to assist</em>
<em>Her passenger, a thin girl of mixed race,</em>
<em>The younger of the two and yet more frail</em>
<em>With bandages in lieu of bridal veil</em>
<em>Surmounting her exquisite, battered face</em>
<em>And wedding flowers clutched in one trembling fist</em>
<br>
<em>To emphasise the matrimonial air.</em>
<em>Their car left at the corner of the block</em>
<em>One helps the other slowly up the hill</em>
<em>Out of Den’s line of sight, though he can still</em>
<em>Hear their muffled exchange before they knock</em>
<em>The door of the lone house that’s standing there,</em>
<br>
<em>This summons answered after a long pause.</em>
<em>There’s conversation too hushed to make out</em>
<em>Before the women, minus one bouquet,</em>
<em>Return to their parked car and drive away,</em>
<em>A striking vignette which leaves Den in doubt</em>
<em>Regarding its effect, still more its cause,</em>
<br>
<em>But then, the world won’t scan as poetry.</em>
<em>Arse chill with dew he reconstructs his night,</em>
<em>The things he’s done, the dreadful place he’s been,</em>
<em>Crowned with the first dead man he’s ever seen:</em>
<em>A stripped-down attic statement, still and white,</em>
<em>Without a trace of ambiguity</em>
<br>
<em>Or adjectival frills, that can’t allude</em>
<em>To anything. Den needs a modern voice</em>
<em>As had Blake, Joyce, John Bunyan or John Clare,</em>
<em>Words adequate to these new ruins where</em>
<em>We may describe the wastelands of our choice</em>
<em>In language that’s been shattered and re-glued</em>
<br>
<em>To suit these lives, these streets. He thinks he’ll sit</em>
<em>For one last cigarette then phone his mum.</em>
<em>Somewhere uphill behind him sirens wail</em>
<em>Diapasons of disaster and yet fail</em>
<em>To mar his sudden equilibrium,</em>
<em>The snow-globe moment’s placement exquisite</em>
<br>
<em>In time’s jewelled action, where future and past</em>
<em>Shall stand inseparable at the last.</em>
</quote>
** <strong>GO SEE NOW THIS CURSED WOMAN</strong>
<strong>V</strong>iewed from beneath the stone archangel spins scintillate darkness on his billiard cue, unhurried constellations turning at the tip just as the land below rotates about its busted hub. A universe of particles and archives of their motion bruise the lithic eye in its tooled orbit, overwriting data on a century-old smut which serves as pupil, the incessant bulletin of Friday, May the 26<sup>th</sup>, 2006. Off in the standing shadows, babies, dogs and convicts with their dreams.
Viewed from above, the isomorphic urban texture flattens to a blackout map which swarms with plankton phosphorous, a Brownian nocturnal churn of long-haul truckers and unwinding weekend couples, marathon commuters, flashing vessels of emergency. Arterial light moves through the circulatory diagram in spurts, tracking the progress of cash vectors and plague opportunities. Pull focus further and the actions of the world compress to an impasto skim.
War and collapse are chasing displaced populations all around the planet in the way that jumping jacks appear to follow fleeing children. The continually adjusted now – a hairline crack between the stupefying masses of the future and the past, friction- and pressure-cooked – is a hot interface which shimmers with string theory and the ingrained grievances of Hammurabi, seethes with slavering new financial mechanisms and fresh epithets describing paupers. From daylight America the shock of former Enron bosses at their guilty verdict is announced and in the deafening crash of their dropped jaws cascades of ruin are commenced. Cut to interior, night.
Mick Warren tosses in slow motion, mindful of his sleeping wife and trying to minimise the mattress-creak. The roll onto his left side is a campaign staged in increments with its objective, once accomplished, yielding nothing save a differently-aligned discomfort. Marinating in his own brine on these sultry slopes of late May, shoulders pummelled by the working week just gone, insomnia reduces his well-trodden consciousness to the schematic mansion of a Cluedo board, thoughts following each other into minimal crime-scene conservatories attempting to establish whereabouts and means and motive. In associative freefall he is soon adrift in board games, bored games, sleepless mind advancing square by square according to delirious and self-inflicted rules of play, a Chinese checker choreography of half-ideas that leapfrog and eliminate each other in their struggle to attain thoughtless oblivion, the pegboard’s emptycentral hole. Cluedo slides lexically into Ludo, Poirot parlours reconfigured as the stylised paths of palace gardens wherein varicoloured button dynasties conduct their patient courtly intrigues. Ludo … Mick thinks he can distantly remember his big sister telling him the term had some kind of significance, but for the moment it eludes him. Words and wordplay aren’t his speciality and he is thus averse to Scrabble, name alone too reminiscent of his frantic, rat-like mental processes when trying to extract coherent language from an angular furniture-sale of consonants or from an ululating funeral lament of vowels. It’s not a proper game like football, this messing about with spelling, words and all that business. Where’s the fun in that? It strikes him that those who profess a fondness for linguistic torments of this nature are most probably just trying to look clever. He recalls the odd times he’s heard somebody extolling the delights of ‘Dirty Scrabble’, but nobody can have ever really played that, can they? That can’t possibly exist when for a start there’s only one K in the box. Attempting to displace some of the duvet-captured heat he’s broiling in he kicks one leg free of the covers and luxuriates in the resulting calorific bleed. His bedbound brain diverts itself annoyingly in the consideration of annoying games. New angle.
Levering by stealth onto his back he fancies that from overhead he must resemble one of those stone medieval knights, asleep on cold sarcophagi with petrified retrievers at their feet. There must have been a Middle Ages battle game at one point, he supposes, keeps and castles, jousting and the rest, although he can’t call one to mind. Amongst the various John Wadham’s pastimes of his younger days, historically-themed entertainments had been thin upon the ground, the focus mostly on a modern world then trying to compose itself from out the bombsite rubble of the 1940s. He remembers one called Spy Ring, plastic head and shoulders busts of men in trench-coats and fedoras inching between foreign embassies, an accurate embodiment of Cold War machinations in that rules of play were by and large impenetrable and made no apparent sense. Alma and Mick had given up on it almost immediately and consigned the whole thing to an oubliette beneath the wardrobe, an effective and achievable detente. Monopoly, he thinks, has always been preoccupied with a hard-nosed modernity, a compensatory ritual to suit those long years of post-war austerity, imaginary Weimar wheelbarrows piled with confetti-coloured currency in which to lose your ration book, if only briefly. In his childhood play, he realises, he’d been largely quarantined within the present day. He thinks he can recall Napoleonic stylings to the packaging of Risk, the game of global strategy that made world domination by Australia seem unavoidable, but then megalomania, he decides, has always been more timeless than historical. It’s like a leather jacket, never out of date. Tight close-up.
Blinking lids descend like long exposure shutters on the slate-blue irises, silicate debris swept discretely to the corners. Pupils expand, saturated, blotting up the midnight ink. It comes to him that all human endeavour is a game of some sort or, more properly, a great compendium of games that are obscurely interwoven and connected, a confounding complex of pursuits with pre-set difficulty levels where the odds are always with the house. A game, he thinks, is surely any system with an arbitrary set of imposed rules, either a contest which results in many losers and a single winner or some non-competitive arrangement where the pleasure of participation is its own reward. And obviously, unless the rules are those of physics they are arbitrary in one sense or other, made up by somebody, somewhere, sometime. Capital and finance are quite clearly games, probably poker or roulette, at least to judge by those Enron executives who’d featured on the evening news before Mick went to bed, trading in future markets they’d invented out of thin air and were trying, unsuccessfully, to will into existence. Actually, that kind of play, rogue traders and all that, it’s not like poker or roulette so much as it’s like Buckaroo, seeing how many gold-prospecting pickaxes and shovels you can hang on the spring-loaded donkey of market credulity before, inevitably, it explodes and startles everybody.
Status, reproduction and romance, political manoeuvring or the cops-and-robbers interplay of crime and legislation, all of it a game. His sister’s exhibition in the morning which he’s partly dreading, partly looking forward to; all of the paintings, all the art, it’s just a different sort of game that’s played with references, nods and winks to this or that, the highbrow clever-dickery that it alludes to. Bed-sheet creases print a river delta on Mick’s back and in his restlessness it strikes him that civilisation and its history are similarly bagatelles, deluded into thinking that their progress has the ordered logic of a chess match when it’s more the random ping of Tiddlywinks. It’s ludicrous, as if the species had developed higher consciousness in order to invent a more elaborate form of noughts and crosses. When is everybody going to get serious? Even when people are engaged in slaughtering one another like in Iraq or Afghanistan, it’s just Cowboys and Indians run disastrously out of hand. The last time Britain had been twat enough to interfere in Afghan matters, with the British and the Russian Empires staging their almighty pissing contest in the hundred years preceding World War One, they’d come right out and called it the Great Game. Perhaps the toppled pawns back in their flag-draped boxes for a final toytown tour of Wooton Bassett could be viewed as forfeit tokens in a game, although he can’t see what’s so great about it. Wearying of this internal shuttlecock, this back-and-forth, he opts to take another run for goal, the goal being insensibility. Closing his eyes is purely aspirational as he commences the commando roll onto his right side. Pull back to a streaming, howling stratosphere.
Below, invasive species move from continent to continent, from chair to chair, according to the music of an altered climate. Avocados thrive in tropic London. The percussive clash of particles is registered in delicate quantum cartographies, ferns of explosion and decay, beautiful spirals to annihilation mapped through concrete time. Everywhere information, seething as it nears the boil. The U.S. president George W. Bush and prime minister Blair discuss their deep fraternal bond, admitting errors in their handling of Gulf War II. The disagreement of Megiddo percolates through every culture and in Palestine the car belonging to Islamic Jihad leader Mahmud al-Majzoud erupts in lethal traceries of hurried metal and projectile mortal splinters, disassembling the insurgent along with his brother Nidal. Black and red, such are this spring’s prevailing blossoms, vivid scarlet hearts in petals of oil-coloured smoke or bruises offset by an open cut. Cross-fade to vehicle interior.
The shadowy Ford Escort rocks and squeaks in hateful parody of Marla, kneeling in its back seat with her red mac and her halter top pushed up to show malnourishment-honed shoulder blades, the micro-skirt that’s rucked about her waist worn as the black belt of an inverted karate, an exacting martial discipline of victimhood. Her self, the kicked-in and fragmented personality she’d thought she was, is frozen in proximity to her approaching end, frost-welded to this unrelenting moment, her last wretched stretch of here-and-now before a terrible big baby staves her skull in and ends all of her, stops the whole world forever by eliminating that pathetic and pained little rag-end of it which she’d stupidly assumed was hers. Her future has always been such a miserable and stunted thing that she’d thought nobody would bother taking it away from her but now it’s happened, now it’s happening: his pudgy cock-stub punches up inside her dry hole from behind in a ridiculously hasty silent film staccato so that she’s afraid she’s going to start a kind of hideous and open-ended laughter. Marla’s seen his dead-eyed cherub face. She’s seen his license plates and knows this is her finish, with her bloody forehead bumped against the Escort’s right-side rear door by each angry thrust, every resentful bayoneting. This is the worse-than-nothing that her life’s amounted to, the thing she’s always dreaded, always known would happen and she only ventured out tonight to pay for rock. She’ll never have another hit now and she doesn’t care. It’s not important, never was important and she’d give it up without a second thought, she’d go and live back with her mum if only that meant that she’d live and not be killed in this garage enclosure, whimpering and paralysed on her arrival at the universal terminus. Nothing she ever wanted as a child will now be hers; no one will ever say she’s special, just another shitty story in the local paper, one more useless scrubber nobody will miss, raped and, what, strangled? Oh, no, please not that. Just one blow. One blow to the head and this is over. No last drink before the gallows, no last cigarette before the squad start firing. Blood and snot, she understands, will be her only balm. New point of view.
Dez Warner stares, his eyes those of a hot and snorting horse, at tonight’s catch with his magnificent erection going in and out of its mud-coloured cunt. He’s sizzling like a god or an unstoppable machine and the all-powerful chemistry that’s in his head reduces everything to this, the back seat of his motor, to this situation he’s created. When he’d driven into this enclosure it got worried, didn’t it, and started all that stuff trying to make him see it as a person. Telling him its name was what had got him started with the smacking and the punching, all of that. If you don’t know the name it could be anybody, couldn’t it, the one off <em>Countdown</em>, anyone at all. It could be Irene. Even on the wedding night when both of them were pissed she wouldn’t let him fuck her tits, she wouldn’t suck him, nothing like the stuff you get in mags or DVDs, nothing like that. Nothing like this. All his awareness centres on that tingling last inch of his mighty ramrod, squeezing up inside a frightened fanny, feeling so electric that it must be glowing like the sticks they have at festivals or like a red hot poker when the end bit looks translucent. He can smell the sex, the fear, the tangy and exhilarating soup of it, oh yeah, oh yeah. He’s crossed the line with this and can’t go back, he knows that, but this new thing, this is everything that he was always meant to be, not marching into banks with a crash helmet on and strongbox handcuffed to him, trying to look like Terminator for the girls behind the counter, that’s not him. <em>This</em>, this is him, the king of night, the king of fuck and it’s so easy, why don’t people do it all the time? White noise behind the eyeballs, there’s a sort of faulty strip-light flicker and he’s still got pop-up phantoms at the corners of his vision but he doesn’t care. He owns this creature’s life. He can do what he wants. It’s like a doll, it’s like a fly you’ve caught but better for the crying, better for how scared it is. He’s stiffer than a bolt, never as big as this before and pumping up and down like mad. He can’t remember the exact point when he’d made his mind up to put it out of its misery when he was done, or even if there was an exact point. It’s more of a continuum, to be fair; a sliding scale where he’s not come to a decision as such but he knows it’s going to happen, definitely. Just the thought of it excites him and he’s banging harder but his nerves are kicking off like popcorn and he’s trying to shake the feeling that there’s someone else there in the car with them. The window-glass is grey with scalding breath. Dissolve to satellite perspective.
Underneath its shredded wedding dress of cloud the naked globe sweats electricity, stale beads of light most concentrated in the armpit cities, trickling thin in breastbone valleys. Limned with glitter the black map below persists in its unhurried process of evaporation, borders that were only ever topographical conveniences made irrelevant by new communications media, an ongoing negation of geography with threatened and belligerent nationalism churning in its backwash. Gym-fit viruses take longer run-ups to the species barrier. Unkempt taxonomies of novel and more finely graded madnesses are diagnosed, while in Berlin, Chancellor Merkel’s wrapping up the opening ceremony of the Hauptbahnhof as Europe’s biggest railway station when a stabbing rampage is commenced in the attendant crowd, more than two dozen persons wounded and six of those critically so. It’s discovered that one of the earliest knife-victims is HIV positive, to further complicate the tally of postponed fatalities. Newly accreted islands of volcanic matter rise unnoticed. Insert footage, black and white.
An angry smudge of chalk and charcoal, Freddy Allen draws a line across the street plan with his passage. Streaming in a dishwater stop-motion queue of doppelgangers the indignant spectral tramp splashes unnoticed through brick barricades and bollards, through the gaseous blur of fleeting automobiles and the ground-floor flats of the disabled, a fog bullet, die-straight in its murderous trajectory. Evicted in his flickering wake the dislodged ghosts of fleas seek new accommodation, vampire jumping beans in search of other unhygienic apparitions, plentiful in these parts. Raging thunderous and splenetic as he stumbles, even in the muffle of the ghost-seam his unbroken howl of ghastly epithets and curses is the unrelenting rumble of a derailed freight train hurtling dirty through the sleeping district, dragging a funereal scarf of smoke and spitting hot sparks of pejorative. With panting locomotive rhythm Freddy damns the lot of them, rapists and rent-collectors, councillors and curb-crawlers alike, all vicious fishes circling the depleted bait-ball of the neighbourhood. The anthracite which keeps his fury stoked, he knows, is mined from bile directed at himself and the appalling thing that he once nearly did, the guilty weight that keeps him mired in this monochromatic wraith-sump and eternally unworthy of the colour-drenched emporia Upstairs. He fumes and fulminates in an expletive storm-front, rattling amongst the sulking residential slabs named after saints and over atrophying streets sealed off from traffic to deter the sex trade. As a ragged chain of paper dolls cut out from folded newsprint Freddy is reiterated in school classrooms, in conspicuously shriek-free moonlight corridors, exploding from prefabricated walls adorned with genial crayoned grotesques to surge down Scarletwell Street in an avalanche of countless flailing limbs and spite-contorted faces.
Cutting off the blunted bottom corner of Greyfriars House he’s like another line of grubby washing strung across the empty court within, flapping and damp, and in his billiard projectile rush he at last understands the full weight of the Master Builder’s loaded gaze, earlier on at the ethereal snooker parlour: it’s him, Freddy. He’s the trick shot, the archangel’s cannonade, skittering on the Boroughs’ dog-fouled baize, the full force of that mighty circumstantial cue propelling him, and all to save this skinny little girl? She must be so important to the play, a black or mistily-remembered pink at least, but why would he, would anyone suppose she wizn’t? That’s not right or fair, dismissing her because of what she does, because she’s not a doctor’s daughter. Everybody wiz a baby once and innocent of all their future. Trembling ectoplasm born of wrath and tenderness wells up in soot-creased sockets as the long-cremated indigent swirls into Lower Bath Street, rippling like eyestrain through pitch dark a foot above the sagging tarmac and, as ever, with no visible means of support. Stretched silver beads pass through him like neutrinos as it starts to rain. Resume full colour and cue montage.
From this vantage, features of the natural landscape have been superseded by abstraction, where the spooling ribbon rivers are replaced by fiery canals of routed information, sluicing from one lock-gate server to another and oblivious to mountain, ignorant of sea. Data that previously drizzled escalates to an extreme weather event. The fathomed knowledge rises past its hastily-drawn plimsoll line and populations find themselves out of their depth, clutching for straws of dogma or diverting novelty as they commence their surface struggle at the rim of an e-maelstrom. Seen in overview Warsaw’s Pilsudski Square is an old-fashioned colour blindness test card, swimming with pale tinted dots despite the pounding rain. Fledgling Pope Benedict the sixteenth makes his first major appearance in the homeland of his predecessor, tannoy mutter sputtering against the downpour as he references Pope John Paul’s prayer of some twenty-seven years theretofore, asking that the Holy Ghost descend and change the face of Poland, this plea widely held to be more instrumental in dismantling the Soviet Union than the acted permutations of the world’s implacable equation. Species disappear and new discoveries are introduced with the breakneck turnover of soap-opera characters. Newfoundland crows develop secondary tool use, implements for modifying implements, and on Kilimanjaro’s slopes uncounted lightning bolts sow precious tanzanite, fulgurant echoes in a cobalt glass. Conflicts move on from place to place like homicidal drifters, changing names and altering appearances while yet retaining signature brutalities. Theories proliferate. Repeat interior, night.
Rotated slowly on a spit of wakefulness and perspiration-glazed, Mick Warren is a hominid kebab that slumber has regurgitated in the dreamless gutter-troughs of an unending Friday evening. Game-plagued as he flips his pillow in a vain search for its fabled cool side he has now progressed to a consideration of the playing card. Before the board games with the satisfying creak of their unfolding or the mystique of their top-hat tokens, cards had been the staple recreation of his childhood in St. Andrew’s Road. At some mysterious adult signal, passed between his gran, his parents and such aunts or uncles as were present, it would be decided that a round of cards was called for. The white tea-time tablecloth would be replaced by the far cosier deep rose one which was Mick and Alma’s favourite, and then from the sideboard drawer that was its ritual resting place the battered and revered familial deck was next produced. He realigns his problematic knees and tries to conjure up a tactile memory of the talismanic pack, the waxy box worn by the handling of at least four generations and declining like the then-traditional extended family unit inexorably towards disintegration, folds becoming perforations. Like the converse of the weathered pasteboard tiles inside, this fragile packaging had been predominantly purple on a ground of twilight lilac, where a silhouetted schoolgirl in a long Victorian pinafore-dress bowled her wooden hoop among midsummer poppies through the gathering violet dusk. Beneath the child’s capering shoes this image was inverted so that for some years Mick had been under the impression that it was the ingénue’s reflection in a puddle at her feet, before he’d noticed that the lower girl was running in the opposite direction. Even as a maroon outline she’d looked pretty, and with hindsight Mick supposes that she might have been his first crush. He’d been faintly anxious for her safety, he recalls. What was she doing out so late to make her race home under darkening skies, across the overgrowing summer meadow? He knows that if she’d got into any trouble, if there’d been somebody waiting in the tall mauve grass for her or for her bouncing, trembling circlet he’d have wanted at the age of five to rescue her, this being then the limit of his amorous imagination. Ninja-quiet in his determination not to puncture Cathy’s well-earned rest he shifts once more onto his back, face up and freshly dealt. New angle.
Supine, the chalk-outlined posture of a Cluedo victim, he remembers Alma telling him about Viv Stanshall from the Bonzo Dog Band, stretched out flat on stage before an audience and talking to the rafters: “Hello, God. Here’s what I look like standing up.” It strikes Mick that imagining ourselves as seen from some superior elevation, some projected and omniscient point of view, is probably as old as literature, old as civilization; Harryhausen’s Greek gods at their fatalistic chessboard peering down through tattered cirrus. Perhaps modern scepticism and the consequent dieback of deities is what has made surveillance cameras necessary, to preserve a sense that our performances have the attention of invisible spectators now that God’s gone, to sustain the notion that our arbitrary acts are validated by unseen authorities sat at their screens or at unearthly gaming-tables, looking down upon the play. Mick rests a blond-fuzzed forearm on his brow and shimmering amongst the shoal of slippery night-spawning ruminations in his catch there is a fugitive impression of how everything is flattened when perceived from overhead, from the perspective of the player. Fleetingly he wonders if these hypothetical celestial gamblers would see everyone as being two-dimensional, as hieroglyphs with no more depth or substance than the inversely reflected royalty compressed onto the court-cards, but the thought melts to the slap of trumps on a red tablecloth. The things they’d played down Andrew’s Road were exercises in precisely regulated tedium – Whist, Sevens, Draw-the-Well-Dry – though he’d found them all sufficiently engaging at the time. Just as each wireless, motorcar or socket seemed to have a face, so too had every card possessed its own distinct charisma, from the almost military formation of the fives to the precariously stacked crates of the nines. The aces, in their abstract grandeur, had been the four archangels or maybe the quartet of fundamental forces constituting spacetime, spades bewilderingly singled out by an impressive Gothic filigree. This attribution of a personality to each design reminds him of the tarot images his sister maintains both precede and serve as basis for the ordinary deck, the stack of archetypal bubblegum collectables that Alma drags to Mick’s house every year at Christmas dinnertime so that she can read Cathy’s fortune or at least pretend to; Hanged Man, Chariot and all the rest of the unsettling crew, as if that’s any sort of proper seasonal tradition. To hear his crow-scaring elder sibling tell it, Draw-the-Well-Dry is derived from divination while all board-based pastimes are descended from those tricky magic squares where all the rows and columns add to the same number, as though every innocent and commonplace pursuit were only a degenerated form of sorcery. She has a wilfully Carpathian worldview, Alma, although now he thinks about it games might well have had some metaphysical or more important human function back at their inception, judging from the terminology found everywhere in language. Hunting some animal down and killing it, that makes it game. Being prepared to carry out some act is to be game. Something that offers easy opportunities for exploitation is regarded as fair game and then of course there’s prostitution, going on the game. Game face, game on, game over, plays of light and sports of nature, Einstein making out God does not dice with matter. Mick’s not sure about the last of these, suspecting that not only do the powers that run the universe do a fair bit of shaking, rattling and throwing, but that generally they do this so the die end up behind the settee and you have to take their word about the double six. With a dismissive grunt directed at the certainties of physics and religion he elects to take another punt on slumber and begins to gradually roll the bones onto his left side, facing Cathy’s curled back. Come on, come on, just this once be lucky. Insert jump-cut sequence.
Spread below, an oriental carpet realised in fibre optics, there are causal curlicues; there are affray motifs. In Scotland a humanitarian award commemorating Robert Burns is given to a youthful relief worker in Baghdad, albeit posthumously. In Peru a clash of adversarial supporters at the run-up to elections ends with injury and gunfire, and in Hereford West Mercia Police appeal for witnesses after a man is violently assaulted by a group of teenagers. With Mandelbrot self-similarity, structures repeat at different scales throughout the system and there remains ambiguity regarding whether harm is percolated up or else decanted down. Wrath boils and steams, where soon thereafter cold and ruthless condensation is precipitated as a trickled legislation. The resultant culture, internal combustion driven, is a clown car only jolted forward by a series of explosions, without any linear progression and no entertainment value save in the anticipation of the vehicle’s inevitable knockabout collapse. A pin-mould creep of neon media adorns the planet’s carcass ideologies, metabolising incoherent chaos into palatable narrative, an edited awareness of experiential deluge. In near-extinct newsrooms still perfumed by cigarette smoke, telephone calls of the newsworthy are intercepted, victim’s family or adulterous celebrity alike, while in the Congo brutal territorial disputes are waged over the mining of the necessary tantalum required by every trilling mobile and, like Tantalus, the world discovers its anticipated banquet future disappeared. Predators more accustomed to the higher reaches of the food chain are compelled to shin down several blood-oiled links in search of alley-scraps. Zoom in through icy flight-paths and cop-copter altitudes on Lower Bath Street.
When he comes, she goes, or at least that is Marla’s numb appraisal of her likely schedule. The abrasive and continual penetration going on behind her is remote, just as persistent hammering in another room becomes ignorable, inaudible with the monotony of repetition. Dried peas rattle on the vehicle roof above and she is distantly aware that it has started raining. Rare even among the ranks of her impersonal clientele there is no intimacy or involvement in this frenzied pummelling, this punishment clearly directed at somebody other than herself, a private ritual from which she is excluded. Hanging down around her damaged face the braids swing back and forth, a final curtain, jolted by each incoming percussive impact. There is something in the situation that is horribly involuntary, as if neither she nor her rosy assailant are participating of their own free will, both of them clattering and jerking in an ugly puppet drama which is simply happening because it is. She has no choice except to sit through this lacklustre recitation to its unambiguously bitter end, a captive audience to this man’s mute soliloquy, this statement through the medium of rape. Detached, without a speaking part, she affords the production her attentions only intermittently. She almost recognises the performer on her knees in the supporting role, the concave cheeks tracked with mascara and the disappointed little face, eyes staring fixedly into the dark of the Escort’s interior and filled with flat acceptance of this miserable denouement, this abrupt and meaningless conclusion, except who is this that makes these observations, and from where? Someone who isn’t Marla, evidently. Someone with a different name, with clear thoughts unencumbered by the clamours of anxiety and need, somebody looking on with only dull regret, as though reflectively, at an event transpired already. This unprecedented night, has it occurred before or is it in some fashion always happening, these giant final moments that seem so much bigger and more absolute than they appeared from further off? The leatherette beneath her sticky palms, the garish and sensational pulp colours of car dials and instruments delineating the scenario, each vivid element as resonant and hauntingly familiar as Miss Haversham in flames, as the big Indian patient smashing the asylum window with a water-cooler, as those images from literature or film that blaze in stained-glass hues outside of mundane time. With animal obeisance she advances on her dismal ending, doggy-style, on sore knees friction-burned by the seat-covering towards the precipice, the edge of death. There is no tunnel save the focussed clarity of her perception, no white light except for an occasionally wakeful motion-sensor fitted to one of the garages. Life fails to flash before her eyes and yet she finds herself preoccupied with the most insignificant of details from her earthly drama, the Diana scrapbook and the morbid library of Ripper memorabilia. Her previous fixation on these subjects, with such specificity, is now incomprehensible and sits more like unconscious omen than the random hobby she’d presumed: she is about to join the sorry file of doxies in their petticoats and bonnets, victims of essentially the same man down across the ages, always Jack, and furthermore she is to suffer her protracted, painful termination in the rear seat of a car. This mean enclosure with its stammering illumination isn’t a Pont de l’Alma, is no bridge of souls, although in the confining brickwork and haphazard paparazzi bursts of brilliance the distinction all but vanishes. All places are distilled to this place just as all of history reduces to these last few precious and excruciating minutes. Every human story, though it be biography or wild romance or primal narrative of old, boils down to her and this, her present situation. Well aware that each breath represents a countdown she sucks in the backseat atmosphere of souring shock and copulation gratefully, exulting in the soon-curtailed delight of inhalation. Watering, her eyes refuse to blink, to miss a single photon in this last parade of light and eyesight, staring at the inside handle of the car door only inches from her streaming nose but, in the process of her disengagement from the world, unable to remember what it is she’s looking at. New point of view.
Mechanically he pulls half out and pushes in, the action looped, but something of the magic patina is gone, as subtle as a change of film-stock or a shift from digital TV back to plain analogue. Outside the lurching car it’s pissing down, although he can’t recall the onset of the shower. He’s starting to feel moody out of nowhere, thoughts and that, most probably connected with the powders that he’s on. Thoughts like ‘You’ll be cut off from other people after this’, not if he’s caught because that isn’t going to happen, but because of what he will have done that makes him separate from everybody. Thoughts like ‘After this you mustn’t be yourself with anyone’ because after tonight he’ll be a different person in a different world and nobody must ever know him, who he really is. The real Derek James Warner, 42, will be excluded from all normal interactions with his mates, his kids, with Irene, and will only properly exist on nights like this. This is the end of who he was, but he can’t stop. The thing he’s doing now, the thing he plans on doing afterwards, sooner or later this was always going to happen, ever since he first learned of the concept as a schoolboy. Dez is in a foaming, charging current of events with nothing he can do except surrender, bow to the inevitable. All his life thus far was leading to this moment just as all his future will proceed from this same point, indelible in memory so that to all intents and purposes he’s always going to be here, here and now, at least inside his head and this is always going to be happening. He’s like a fly in amber, eyelids squeezing to a crayon scribble, nose compressing into ridges like a collapsed paper lantern and the awning of the lower lip rolled down. He shoves his cock in and he shoves his cock in and at the peripheries of vision catches sight of dashboard glints in green and red. He knows that only chemicals are causing the illusion of mismatched eyes watching him dispassionately through the ambient blur, yet cannot shake the sense of a third party bearing witness from the driver’s seat, an unintended and unwanted passenger he can’t remember picking up. He’s never been a drugs man, Derek. He’s not used to all this, with things shifting everywhere and how he feels about stuff shifting along with them, like a lion one minute and the next he’s got the horrors, the unbearable sensation something terrible is just about to happen or, worse, is already happening. He holds the bubbling incipient panic down, concentrates on the job in hand. Lowering his gaze he looks at what he’s doing, at the hairy dagger plunging in the slimy wound, his thumbs holding the negligible arse-cheeks open and apart. There’s a minuscule punctuation-point of shit clinging to the exterior of the clenching sphincter where it’s not wiped itself properly, the dirty fucking animal. He hates it, hates it for just having stood there on the corner in its PVC coat waiting for him; for participating and for letting him go through with this. The hatred makes him harder, gives him focus, and he’s just beginning to consider how he’s going to kill it after he’s done fucking it when out through the front windscreen’s beaded glass he notices that there appears to be a fire or something in one of the nearby garages, with smoke escaping out from under the closed … no. No, that’s not quite what’s happening. He squints and frowns, bewildered, pausing his convulsive pelvic back-and-forth while struggling to make sense of what he’s seeing. The grey smoke – not smoke exactly, being slow and viscous – seems to bleed out through the corrugated metal of the garage door and its surrounding brickwork like an exhalation, an expression of the damp and misery that soaks the walls in neighbourhoods like this. Curdled and seething in the oil-stain gloom the sluggish vapour looks to be collecting in one spot, rotating languidly an inch above the tarmac and much like one of those litter-whirlwinds that he’s sometimes seen in car parks, cyclones of discarded rubbish. What the fuck is going on? Put off his stroke he softens and slides out, slips off the nest almost unnoticed as he gazes through the trickling glass into the gradually revolving and resolving front of ugly weather, so unnaturally localised. The shifting crenulations arbitrarily take on a host of momentary semblances like the white, Persil-laundered clouds he thinks he can recall from childhood only grubbier, more hurriedly, and with less room for whimsy or interpretation. There’s a cone of filthy fog by now and up towards the top – “Fuck! Fuck, what’s that?” – towards the top slim ashen threads and tendrils writhe like bile in toilet-water, accidentally curling to the contours of an agitated old man’s face. Then suddenly there’s lots of faces, all the same and screaming without making any noise, eyes multiplying to a string of hostile, glistening jellies. Several mouths identically decayed and toothless open in the plethora of smouldering heads, and flocks of unwashed hands rise fluttering like oversized factory butterflies. He finds he’s making an involuntary plaintive noise high in his sinuses and at the same time notices the night air splashed on his perpetually blushing cheek in a cold water gust. What’s … fuck, it’s got the door open, it’s getting out. It had been frightened at the start, did what he told it and he hadn’t bothered with the lock. Fuck. Fuck! It slithers on its belly like a seal taking to water, tumbling face-first from the car into the tarmac black outside and though he lunges for a stick-thin ankle all he comes away with is a Cinderella shoe.
“You come back here! You come back here, you cunt!”
Forgetting in the fugue and fury of the instant the hallucination that had so distracted him, he scrambles awkwardly out of the vehicle into the rain after his bolting prey with flies undone and murder in his boots. Cut to new point of view and insert footage, black and white.
Through brick and metal only fifty years thick at the very outside boils the incorporeal moocher with his kettle scream of anger rising even through the corpse acoustic of the ghost-seam. There is his faint, sudden scent of damp and mildew everywhere as with grey cemetery eyes he drinks the dark of the enclosure with its spitting puddles and makes out the fuck-sprung vehicle stood rocking at its centre. Edge stitched with pale phosphorescence in his wraith-sight he can see a stout man, perspiration streaming on his choirboy cheeks as he kneels upright in the rear seats shunting back and forth repetitively, a stuck dodgem. Freddy doesn’t need to see the frightened girl crouched like a dog in front of him to know exactly what he’s doing, oh the cowardly little speck of shit, the dirty bugger and the worst thing is there’s two of them, two of them to one skinny little lass. He’s got his mate there with him, sitting in the driver’s seat with a big titfer on and staring straight out through the windscreen so that if you knew no better you might think that he was glaring right at Freddy with his different-looking peepers, one dark and the other … oh. Oh, bloody hell. It’s not another man at all. It’s something a sight worse and Freddy’s bowels would turn to water if they weren’t already steam. The motor has a fiend in its front seat, one of the grander and more frightening ones, the kind much talked about yet rarely seen and gazing fixedly at Freddy with mismatched eyes and a knowing smile that’s all but lost amongst the curls of his bindweed moustache and beard. It’s the same look the Master Builder gave him earlier up at the snooker hall: an exchanged glance, a mutual acknowledgment that this is it, this is the crucial incident that Freddy’s whole existence, both in flesh and fog, has been in aid of. He has a profound conviction that the smirking devil isn’t here for him tonight, unless in the capacity of an amused spectator. It won’t harm him if he tries to interrupt the shameful business going on in the back seat, he knows that. It’s almost as if it’s granting him a special dispensation to do all the things which spectres shouldn’t really do, without fear of reprisal. He’s allowed to haunt, to be a charnel terror of the most extravagant variety, and if this should indeed be Freddy Allen’s moment then he isn’t going to fluff it. Peering past the infernal celebrity into the black Ford Escort’s rear he is encouraged to observe that the perpetually-blushing perpetrator has abruptly ceased in his compulsive thrusting, kneeling motionless and squinting in belligerent bewilderment out through the misted glass, apparently at Freddy. Is it possible the man can see him somehow, through the agency of drink or drugs or psychiatric ailment? By way of experiment the smouldering vagrant shakes his head and waves his arms around so that his foliage of persisting after-images blossoms into a fag-ash hydra, pale hands a fast-breeding nest of blind white spiders and a rheumy frogspawn clot of eyes, rewarded by a deepening of the rapist’s puzzled frown, a further slackening of his blancmange jaw. Oh, yes. Oh, he’s on something, right enough. He’s got the sight, the deadeye, and it’s put him off his stroke, this grey grotesque, this inability to make out what he’s looking at. It’s like he’s seen a ghost. Flexing his ectoplasm Freddy feels the bilious thrill of unaccustomed potency diffusing through his dismal vapours, an acceptance of the terrifying, ragged thing he is reflected in the plump man’s shrivelling pupils. As he gathers up the dire cumulonimbus of his countenance for an assault he realises something is occurring in the car, events to which his presence may or may not be connected. There’s a click, faint in the auditory muffle, which the scruffy phantom retroactively identifies as a rear side door opened from within. The dazed assailant breaks from his fixed scrutiny of Freddy to survey his victim and immediately gives a bark of thwarted rage.
“You come back here! You come back here, you cunt!”
That isn’t right. That’s not a word you use about a woman. Freddy rolls in crinkling crematorium billows, churning forward for a better vantage but immediately brought up short by what he sees. The girl, there’s not two penn’oth of meat on her, slithers from the partly-opened crack in her condemned cell with her face a sticky mask of blood, newborn into the night. At Freddy’s back, erratic flashes from an inexplicably disabled garage light pick out her desperate escape-attempt in a distressing series of Box Brownie snapshots, scrabbling on her stomach, trying painfully to climb onto her hands and laddered knees with scarlet scabbing on her careful plaits, crawling towards the distant mouth of the oil-stained corral which she must know she doesn’t have a hope in hell of reaching. From the car the blustering villain lunges, navigating the haphazard bright and pitch dark with a ladies’ shoe in one hand like a tomahawk and his old feller hanging out, an overheated dog-tongue, from his gaping trousers. Surging in a sooty, viscous streamer through the demi-world’s near silence, Freddy Allen and his trailing scrum of lookalikes flood in to occupy the dwindling space between the crawling, keening woman and her persecutor, baby-faced with dark hair plastered to his forehead by the downpour’s brilliantine, a sputtering and indignant old-style bully. Through a hushed and flickering realm of scratchy black and white, the little tramp rushes to save the heroine. Pull back to documentary material, reintroducing colour.
On a turntable of gravity the planet spins, just over halfway through the eagerly-awaited new millennial long-player’s opening ten year track, the critical response as yet divided on the merits of its noisy plane-crash introduction or the strident nature of the vocals; theists and cosmographers in bickering counterpoint. Jehovah is eroded by the tree of knowledge’s alarming exponential growth, by paleontologic scrutiny, resorting to a fortified Creationist denial in result: visitors’ centres serving the Grand Canyon are reported to have concealed references to the chasm’s geologic age or origins in favour of a biblical scenario evoking the deluge of Noah. Carolina legislators argue that authentic rape cannot result in pregnancy based on the two-seed theory of conception popular two thousand years before. Conceptual centuries collide and in the deafening impact are belligerent Zionist assertions, fundamentalist crusades and detonating martyr vests.
Besieged, the secular response is militant, an atheism volubly affirmed that in its dogmas and its certainties approaches the religious, although armed with nothing more substantial than established scientific fact, itself a changed constituency of shifting ground. The classical and quantum models are persistent in rejecting all attempts at reconciliation, with the string by which they might be bound proving thus far elusive. Insufficiently grasped gravity engenders multiplying entities in its support, exotic states and substances, dark energy, dark matter, necessary beasts arisen from mathematics yet escaping observation. Faith and politics ferment, aided by a fast-propagating yeast of theory and device, and all the architecture of the world’s traditions seems erected on an information floodplain, vulnerable to every fresh downpour of data or the bursting banks of ideologies too narrow and slow-moving to accommodate the surge, the inundation of complexity. Despite its evident fatigue, afraid of missing some vital development in this incessant and incendiary pageant, culture dare not close its eyes. Resume interior, night.
Unable to be rid, now, of his sister’s oddly memorable tarot images, Mick finds them strewn all over his cerebral carpeting as the surcease of thought continues to avoid him. Circumspectly levering onto his back he hooks his left foot over his right knee in what he realises belatedly is an unconscious imitation of the deck’s mysterious Hanged Man, a figure signifying an uncomfortable initiation if Mick’s memory serves correct. He doesn’t understand the Hanged Man or the other twenty-something ‘trump’ cards even slightly, not the Chariot or Lust or the High Priestess, none of that lot; can’t imagine any game elaborate enough or of sufficient scale to utilise them all and so discards them from consideration. Nearly all the other pasteboard pictures, though peculiar, are what he thinks of as the ordinary ones, the ones that have an obvious correspondence to the pack with which he’s most familiar. There are four suits with ten numbered cards in each, the suits roughly analogous to the existing quartet but called different names with diamonds become discs and spades now swords, hearts turned to cups and clubs made wands, his sister stubbornly insisting that the tarot suits came first. The court cards, similarly, are almost identical to the more regular monarchical arrangement with the queens unchanged but knights and princes substituted for the kings and jacks respectively, these three joined inexplicably by a fourth flat aristocrat, a princess having no equivalent among the hard-eyed and mistrustful-looking royals of convention. Mick is unsure how this last-named personage is meant to fit into the play, no way of knowing if she beats a prince or what. Like the Hanged Man and his unfathomable pals, Mick finds she functions only as an irritant in an already irritating set-up. Tarot, to be blunt, gets on his nerves. With different occult iconography on every card it would be near impossible to even manage a quick hand of snap, and so for any grown-up purposes the concept is completely useless. Feeling suddenly annoyed at Alma, albeit obscurely, he negotiates the move onto his right side without auditory incident. New angle.
The whole problem with his sibling, he decides, is that she judges her successes by such baffling criteria that she can even claim unutterable disaster as some kind of victory, with everybody too uncertain as to what she’s going on about to challenge her preposterous and yet authoritative-sounding proclamations. The most reasonable objections will be flattened by an insurmountable artillery barrage of quotes from sources no one else has read and which are very possibly invented on the spot. Any debate is a rigged contest held according to a manual much like the Book of Mormon, to which Alma evidently holds sole access. Rules of play change seemingly at random as though one were arguing with the Red Queen from <em>Alice Through the Looking-Glass</em> or possibly <em>Alice in Wonderland</em>. Mick always gets the two of them mixed up. In fact, now that he thinks about it, Lewis Carroll is almost as aggravating as his older sister in the author’s patently deliberate attempts to puzzle and confound the punters. Why else have a Red Queen in both books, both with the same abrasive personality, when they are plainly different characters with one derived from playing cards and one from chess? In fact, with an intended audience of children, why involve chess in the first place if not as a way to intellectually intimidate the spiteful little buggers? It’s a tactic which would definitely work with Mick, who’s always found the very mention of the subject petrifying. Chess – there’s something else that seriously gets on his tits. All of the fancy and entitled pieces with their fussy, idiosyncratic ways of moving are no more than obsessive-compulsive draughts when it comes down to it, the bishops sticking superstitiously to either white or black squares and the knights continually turning corners that aren’t there. Then there’s the game’s neurotic aristocracy, apparently dysfunctional royal couples who are usually the centre of attention; kings restricted in their actions to the point of constipated immobility with queens free to go where they choose and pretty much do anything they want, despite the fact that it’s their powerful husbands about which the wheels of intrigue turn. Mick’s class-based supposition that the chessmen’s quirky movements have their root in mental feebleness resultant from inbreeding notwithstanding, he’ll admit that the distinctive figures have their own mystique, their own minimalist charisma. There’s a sense about them that they stand for something more significant than just a knight, a horse’s head or a game token with a strange waltz-step trajectory. It’s more as if they symbolise big abstract qualities that skirmish and manoeuvre on a higher board, a field of play that’s far into the ultra-violet of Mick’s comprehension. Kings, queens, princes and princesses, whether you’re discussing playing cards or chessmen or real flesh and blood heirs to the throne, it isn’t who they are or what they do that makes them seem important, but the huge and formless thing it feels as if they represent. It’s what they signify. It’s what they mean.
Deciding that a supine strategy might be the answer after all, he’s halfway through the necessary repositioning when it occurs to him that that’s why everybody made such an extraordinary fuss about Princess Diana with Kensington Palace wrapped in cellophane, swaddled by teddy bears. It wasn’t her. It was what people understood by her. Against the bedroom window a soft fusillade announces scattered showers. Cut to panoptical perspective.
Church and State, in bed, share a post-coital cigarette and now the quilt of nations smoulders. The intelligence community’s perpetual shrill alerts begin to seem those of a broken smoke-detector, generally ignored but not without a gradually accreting residue of jitters. Terror-stricken in a war against their own emotional condition, snapping fretfully at shadows they themselves are casting, western powers attempt to colour-code a nightmare. The white rucksack-flash is prism-split into a spectrum of diurnally adjusted dread, a heat map of anxiety that never cools below Guantanamo Bay orange with the icy blue of safety a forgotten hue that’s out of vogue and isn’t coming back.
Friday, May 26<sup>th</sup>, 2006. In Washington D.C. the governmental buildings which comprise the Capitol are locked down while the U.S. Senate is in session, voting to confirm Michael V. Hayden as the new director of the CIA, after authorities receive accounts of gunshots heard in the vicinity and of an armed man sighted inside an adjacent office gym. Police identify the sharp reports as probably those of pneumatic hammers and the putative gymnasium gunman as one of their plainclothes operatives. Across the planet fresh security initiatives fail to keep out the resolute insurgents of the mind. With each explosion the wraith population also booms, new sheeted forms arisen wailing out of idle chat and propaganda, tricks of media light and hulking Brocken spectres flung on pools of fog between stark summit headlines. Pepper’s ghosts with headscarves and bandannas loom in popular imagination’s steeply angled glass to stage schoolboy commando-rolls through grainy training footage, mythically disfigured clerics wagging a remaining finger heavy with grim emphasis. Concepts of nation first spun as religious parables or else dime-novel daydreams in less nuanced centuries play out on multiplying modern platforms as ensanguined pantomime; fond re-enactments already nostalgic for the slaughters of a simpler world. Cue rapid intercuts.
Across the soaked enclosure’s pittering surface skim of wet she slithers, legs conjoined by the entangling tights and knickers dragged around her thighs, a landed mermaid flopping in the shallows. Blind with blood she hears her cheated captor bellowing as he explodes from out the mobile dungeon at her back.
“You come back here! You come back here, you cunt!”
Somewhere amid the panicked rat-run of her consciousness the previously unsuspected part of her prioritises: if she can regain her feet she can pull up her underwear and flee, a difficult manoeuvre best accomplished without thinking. Managing to lift both knees at once she finds that she is moving forward, partly toppling and partly running in constrained and tiny geisha steps while trying to claw the fishnet waistband back above her hips. With both her high-heel shoes now gone she hurtles splashing through the pools collected in depressions, visual continuity reduced to blackout skits by nearby motion-sensor lights in spasm, too concerned with gulping back great sobbing draughts of air to think of screaming and unable to believe he hasn’t grabbed her yet. New point of view.
He’s had enough. He’s had enough of drugs, they’re fucking weird. He wades through seizure light across the walled-in yard and tries to catch it, tries to get it back into the motor so that he can finish but the stuff he took is giving him the horrors, things he hadn’t been expecting. It’s there right in front of him, just a few paces off and struggling to get on its feet but when he takes a step towards it there’s this wind, well, not a wind but a stale gust of something that slams into him and knocks him back. The smell is all like dosshouses, all alky sweats and meths-breath and damp pants, derelict buildings with shit up the corner and all that, an aromatic fogbank he can nearly see. Fingers of slum-grey vapour curl around his ankles, trickling like albumen along his arms and running down his back and even though he knows all this is in his head and only happening because he’s on one, he can’t help recoiling. The hallucination squeezes in until he’s struggling with a cloud of phlegm, but in the slithering mucous tendrils there are bits of face, chin-swarms and ornate frills of glistening lip. Worse, there’s this faint sound that he catches fleeting snatches of, like a transistor radio tuned between wavebands, an enraged tirade that’s unintelligible as if coming from a long way off or a long time ago. Some of the squirming, insubstantial stuff is in his mouth and tastes like sick, or is that him? For all he knows this might be a brain haemorrhage, an overdose. He might be in real trouble here. New point of view, reintroducing black and white stock.
Furious in his resent, the threadbare dead man presses his advantage with a flurry of attack which utilises every ghoul-display that’s in his clammy repertoire. He tries the frightening stilt-walker elongation that results from levitating upwards with a string of doppelgangers dragged up after him, and executes a miserable spider-dance of multiplying limbs. He shoves his hands inside his own head so that wriggling fingers poke like crab’s legs from his gurning face, gob widening impossibly into a scream of filthy polyps. He does his inflating eyeball trick or with an awful kiss performs disgusting sleights of tongue; reaches to cup the reeling sexual predator’s exposed and dangling testes in one mortuary palm; extrudes a finger of cold ectoplasm past the clenching sphincter and into the bowel. Human ideas of fighting dirty, well; they’re nothing to a ghost. With eyes screwed shut and baby face in a tomato crumple his opponent swats the night, as if at bees, and takes a solitary backward step towards the motor. There is now nobody sitting in the driver’s seat, the ghetto-wight observes with some relief, its sulphurous former occupant having apparently moved on to other matters, demon business being surely plentiful in such a morally uncoupled world. Swirling his head about and momentarily accomplishing a Saturn’s ring of ears, he reassures himself that the young woman is now up and staggering for the enclosure’s mouth before resuming his assault on her tormentor. Barking inarticulate profanities the besieged rapist yields another yard in his retreat, a spook-punch landed in the frontal lobe and fingering for the amygdala. New point of view, reverting to full colour.
At the exit of the killing yard she risks a glance across her shoulder just to see how close he is behind her but he’s still stood by the car, hands flapping at the air, having a fit or something though he could be on her in a minute. Every step a burning ache between her thighs she plunges out through Lower Bath Street’s black, propelled by bad adrenaline and mindful of the coming crash into paralysis and shock. Because it’s easier stumbling downhill than up she swerves left and into the bottom end of Scarletwell Street, grass theatre of her late abduction, steeped in piss-pot sodium light. An only sign of life is the diluted lemon filtered through drawn curtains from the solitary house down near the corner and she limps across the road in its direction, gravel gouging at her tender soles, breath bubbling in her throat. Please, please let there be someone home, somebody capable and unafraid to come to their front door on a wild Friday night, although she’s crushingly aware of the unlikelihood. Off to her right the isolated home abuts upon the yawning mouth of a since-vanished alleyway, the memory of its cobbled ribbon spooling down into the dark beside the chain-link fence that bounds the lowest edge of the school playing fields. Ahead, St. Andrew’s Road is bare of any traffic whatsoever, let alone police cars, and the murderer of her imagination is now panting like a beast and close enough to scald her neck. Her legs seem disconnected from volition suddenly, nerveless and unresponsive as if made of cake, and then the ninety-year-old slabs are hurtling up to punch her knees and slap her stinging hands. She’s down, she’s down and dripping blood into a gutter where rain gurgles through the stone oesophagus. Abject and crawling, a thrashed dog, she scrabbles whimpering over inundated pavement, levering herself half-upright at the doorstep to thump her exhausted fists on the wet panelling, surely too limp and ineffectual for anyone to hear. The seconds stretch excruciatingly, barbed with the premonition of his any-moment grip descending on her shoulder, of fuck-scented fingers bunching in her braided, bloodied hair. Please, please, please. From somewhere indoors slow, slipper-muffled steps approach along an unseen passageway. New point of view.
He isn’t scared as such, he’s not that sort of bloke, but he can feel something attacking him, some big junkyard Alsatian when there’s nothing there for him to see, for him to swing at. Worse than an Alsatian. Yank their back legs open and they’re dead, he’s heard that, but this is like fighting congealed custard and the mess goes everywhere, inside his clothing, up his nostrils, up his arse. He can’t take any more. He doesn’t know if this is just what meth does normally or if he’s gone mad or been grabbed by aliens or what. Slicing through an occasional illumination, raindrops fall as razor cuts. Inside a whiny voice he doesn’t know, more like a woman or a panicked kid’s, is pleading with him to get out of here, get in the car, just go. The loose skin on his balls is cringing, Jesus Christ his flies are still undone, and there’s a dismal avalanche of hats, a dozen vacuum-cleaner orifices ringed with rotten teeth that he can almost see. Unfathomable images persist in the uneven dark, electric filaments burned sizzling onto his retina, these visionary floaters coruscating at their edges where the radiance has a grain of teeming maggots. Everything is wrong. Fumbling behind he shoves the rear door of the Escort shut while trying to find the handle on the front one, swiping with his free paw at the flock of ugly flying heads assailing him. With flapping hands as bony pinions sprouted from the temples, snapping their decaying jaws and grimacing, like monstrous charnel hummingbirds they come, preposterous and terrible. His frantic fingers finally locate what they were seeking, the cold metal button underneath his thumb, and making noises meant to be a snarl he flings himself into the driver’s seat, slamming the door closed after him. A surf of dirty laundry suds is launched against the wound-up window, leaving a grey residue of viscous facial features sliding down the glass outside. Twisting the key in the ignition, for some reason he meticulously checks the dashboard clock and notes the time as almost twenty to eleven. Out beyond the rain-streaked windscreen something putrid that he doesn’t understand tries to get in. New point of view reprising monochrome.
In headline black and white through stammering, convulsive light the skirling deadbeat churns around the vehicle, a rancid cyclone. Car walls being nothing but a flimsy tissue three or four years thick at most, the vagrant vapour-trail could easily reach through them to continue the assault but it’s deterrence and not punishment on the agenda here, much as he wishes it were otherwise. Just scare this tubby little bugger off and then make sure the woman’s safe, those are the things he needs to keep his petrifying eye on. Never mind what somebody who’d do that to a young girl might deserve: that’s a decision better left in larger hands than his, although with half a chance what devastation wouldn’t he bring down upon this animal, this wretched failure of masculinity that he so nearly could have been? He’d do a Banquo, do a Hamlet’s dad, a Tam O’ Shanter with his ghastly oppoes from the Jolly Smokers drafted in to help, a ragged locomotive smoke of pitiless and violent dead men shadowing this mucky fucker through his every waking moment and his every dream, for the remainder of his worthless life and then they’ll just be getting started. There’s no Hell, no merciless retributive Inferno save for the Destructor, but the bilious spirit is convinced that with the inspiration of a life and death transacted in the Boroughs one could be arranged, to beggar Dante and to make blind Milton look away.
Pulling a train of chalk and charcoal sketches in a falling domino progression he encircles the throat-clearing automobile as it starts, his eerie Doppler howl pursuing him through the flash-punctuated and torrential night, his floating coat a rippling funeral banner in his wake. An aggregate of dust and retribution, in the gabardine sieves of his pockets all the grievance of the outraged neighbourhood is carried, the deferred affront viciously vented as a steaming horse-piss stream on the intruder, a malign deluge to sluice him from these wounded streets until him and the other knicker-rippers learn to keep away. New point of view, reverting to full colour.
Smeared across a stranger’s doorstep in the pounding torrent she’s a broken toy, discarded with torn seams and every bit of psychic stuffing gone, one button eye obscured by sticky cordial. All of her hurts. She doesn’t care if the dull footfalls in the hallway that she’d heard were only wishful thinking, doesn’t much mind if her persecutor catches up and finishes the job. She just wants this to end and is less fussed about the manner of that ending by the moment. Treacherously cosy lassitude descends, every last vestige of intent or motion drained out with the contents of her emptying bladder. Self and personality are a retreating tide strained rattling on synaptic shingle and she barely comprehends the light that strikes pink through her lowered eyelids; can’t remember the phenomenon or what it means. At length the lashes unrestrained by blood-glue flutter open and she squints up into puzzle-colours, clots of shine and shade resolved as burnished icon, surely a familiar Renaissance masterpiece she knows from somewhere, framed by the now-open door. Against a ground of patterned wallpaper and mismatched carpet, limned in sixty watts of Pentecostal fire stands an old woman built from long and knobbly bones and crowned with white hair like ignited phosphorous, one thin hand pressing on the lintel. Veiled in gloom by incandescent blaze beyond, the tallow contours of an Easter Island face hang heavy on the bone and oh, her screech-owl eyes. Pale grey with golden irises they stare down, reservoirs of depthless fury and compassion, on the smashed child at her threshold. Gaunt cheek tracked by angry brine the occupant stoops, creaking, crouched on leather haunches to cup Marla’s chin while a free hand tenderly smooths the bloodied braids.
“All hail Kaphoozelum, the harlot of Jerusalem,” pronounces Audrey Vernall, and her voice chokes with an all-redeeming pride. Pull back to planetary mosaic, abruptly edited.
Bulbs pop and data effervesce. Wigan police release footage of car involved in fatal hit-and-run with cyclist. Reefs quietly disintegrate. Convicted Enron fraudster Kenneth Lay says he believes good will come out of his predicament. The stars of supermarket magazines change shape, change partners. Arctic ice recedes. A paralysed Welsh rugby player calls to ban contested scrums and startlingly tenacious tubeworms offer hope of life on other worlds. Quantum or nation, states collapse when looked at. Oil chess, fiscal figure skating and the tendency of Homo sapiens to fuse with its technologies. Australian mountain climber Lincoln Hall is briefly believed dead. A badger harasses sports centre staff in Devon. Mice glow and grow joke-shop ears. Racism fears dog World Cup build-up. Budgets shrivel and reality shows relocate their target audience inside the television, closing the ouroboros. New forms of carbon and new scales of manufacture. An ethereal scrapyard orbiting the world. Popular culture, formerly disposable, dragged to the curbside for recycling and art residing solely in the pitch. Internal interregnum. Double helix turns informant. Touch-screen intimacy. Algorithms of desire. Bespoke need, and text messaging a carrier pidgin. New, new, every second bigger than the last. The populace recline obese with novelty yet consume ever more enthusiastically, as if to master the onrushing future by devouring it; to drink the tidal wave. Cut to interior, night.
Flat on his back, Mick listens to the rain against the glass and thinks about Diana Spencer. It’s a natural extension of his restless thoughts on chess or chase-the-ace or tiddlywinks, with the whole Princess Di phenomenon a game – or a compendium of games – that had apparently got badly out of hand. That almost literal unveiling in the newspapers, a first glimpse of the nursery assistant standing in a cheesecloth skirt with pouring backlight, prurient X-Ray specks illusion of grey silhouetted limbs caught by an opportunist snapper to be sure, but who was playing who? For all her shy fawn glances from beneath the fringe, a strategy established even at that early stage, this was a scion of the Red Earl whose name was writ in road, estate and public house across the face of working-class Northampton. Dodgy dynasties had been reduced to bouillon in her blood, from fifteenth-century livestock farmers passing themselves off as relatives to the House Le Despencer, through to five or six authentic bastards sired by Stuarts and thus a genetic conduit to the lines of Hapsburg, Bourbon, Wittelsbach and Hanover; of Sforza and Medici. Chromosomes not to be trifled with, and this before an admixture of Churchills are infused into the Northamptonshire family’s already-potent genealogical concoction. Poisoners, tacticians, bloody-minded warrior kings.
Born Althorp in 1730-something and one in a lengthy line of Johns, the first Earl Spencer proper fathered Lady Georgiana, later to be made Duchess of Devonshire and famously alluring doppelganger of her later tabloid-teasing relative. The fifth Earl Spencer, born around a century thereafter, was the red one if Mick has his local history straight, a mate of Gladstone’s named after the colour of his ostentatious beard. As Lord Lieutenant out in Ireland it appears he’d done his bit to play fair with the Fenians and even came out for Home Rule, which saw him ostracised by everybody from Victoria down. However, earlier in the 1880s he’d had people hung for murdering his secretary and Gladstone’s nephew, so the nationalists all hated him as well. Mick glances to his left, at Cathy’s soft topography beneath its turf of duvet, and observes not for the first time that there’s no pleasing the Irish. Dull discomforts start to mutter in his hips and shoulders – none of us are getting any younger – and he essays the manoeuvre to his port side, curls himself about his sleeping wife’s turned spine like fingers round a hand-warmer. New angle.
By the century just gone, Mick’s century, the Spencer family’s genetic creep had moved like Burnham Wood, unnoticed, ever closer to the hubs of power and history. The Spencer-Churchills had slipped into Downing Street with Winston and then, shortly after that, returned with Winston’s niece Clarissa as Anthony Eden’s missus; the Suez crisis prime minister’s trouble and strife, although by no means all of it. Meanwhile in 1924 back home at Althorp, Eighth Earl Johnny had arrived, and yet Mick’s only mental image of the man is as a rubicund and seemingly concussed attendee of official openings, someone with a prize-fighter mumble, to be seated furthest from the microphone. Though to be fair he’d pulled a decent-looking woman in that first Viscountess Althorp, Frances, even if her dynasty-dispenser seemed obdurately to only turn out healthy babies of an inconvenient gender. First came Sarah, then came Jane and then at last the hoped for Ninth Earl, yet another John, who died in infancy a year before the advent of a further disappointing daughter, this one named after a week’s procrastination as Diana Frances. During his occasional lucid moments Johnny Spencer starts to see his wife as culprit in the inability to sire an heir and the humiliated Lady Althorp is despatched to Harley Street in order to determine just exactly what her problem is, the difficulty clearly being hers alone. Mick can imagine how that might have put a strain upon the marriage, even after the arrival of Diana’s younger brother Champagne Charlie Spencer just a couple of years later. When the future people’s princess was just eight years old in 1969 her parents were divorced amid some acrimony following her mother’s extra-marital affair with Peter Shand Kydd, whom she’d soon thereafter wed. Despite the unreliability of hindsight, Mick supposes that some of the fateful architecture of the youngest Spencer daughter’s life might have been loosely sketched in by events around this time, although he can’t help thinking that by subsequently marrying Barbara Cartland’s daughter Raine her father had recklessly introduced an element of overheated gothic romance to the mix that would eventually do most damage. Fairy story expectations without due acknowledgement of all the things that fairy stories bring: the poisoned apple and the cradle curse, the glass shoe full of blood. He feels uncomfortable. If Cathy is a roasting hedgehog, Mick is wrapped around her like baked Gypsy clay. Evading her inferno he once more essays the shift onto his back. New angle.
He’s not really certain how it had all worked, the courtship and the marriage into royalty. Presumably Diana had been drafted into service as a brood-mare, like her mother, to produce the necessary male successor while allowing her new husband to continue a longstanding dalliance with his married mistress. Did she know that on her way in, or find out about it later? Mick supposes it depends on how informed about each other’s lives the aristocracy, as a community, might be. Even if she’d entered into marriage in a state of blissful ignorance, she must have tumbled to it early on. That first press conference with the two of them stood by that gate, the distant and laconic tone that he affected when he said “Whutever love eez” and you saw her look uncomfortable at this obvious disclaimer. But whichever way it went, once all the cards were on the table it was guaranteed that there would be a messy end-game.
When the fault-lines started showing it was in the form initially of a schoolgirl rebellion, turning up with Fergie at some fashionable and exclusive club disguised as WPC strippagrams, but by the time it got to Martin Bashir you could see that she was wheeling out the big guns and that her campaign didn’t appear to have retreat amongst its options. It was clearly going to be hard-core attrition all the way. The tactical component became, literally, more naked. The ostensibly intrusive but surprisingly composed gymnasium rowing-machine picture. The abbreviated swimsuit on Dodi Al Fayed’s boat, deliberately teasing the long lenses to erection, on the same day that her former husband and Camilla Parker-Bowles were due to meet the press and public. She’d got game, you had to give her that. And then, and then … that week or two before the bridge, before her crossing, the queer British admixture of clammy lust and lip-curling contempt had humped its way to a vituperative climax: they despised her. They despised the future-king-humiliating Arab-shagger, and the AIDS patients and landmines came to seem an unconvincing camouflage for a new Catherine de Médicis, a new Catherine Sforza; some Renaissance vamp with no elastic in her knickers and a cyanide ring. Loathed her all the more for having wanted so to love her, but she’d let them down with all her gallivanting and her diet disorders, hadn’t been the person that they’d wanted, that they’d needed. It’s so hard to love something that’s moving, changing; something that’s alive. The marble memory is more dependable. Mick wonders, his thoughts starting to fuzz up at last, if it was that great weight of disappointed expectation that had suddenly descended on her like a prehistoric mudslide, fossilising her forever as the perfect tragic Hitchcock blonde, leeching the human colour out and freezing her into the black-and-white monitor image at the Ritz, the half-smile ducking out through the revolving door into eternity and outside chauffeur Henri Paul called back on duty at short notice, maybe catastrophically attempting to offset his after-hours imbibing with a few revivifying blasts of white line fever. Rolling highlights, glints, refractions. Obscure scintillations in the Paris dark beyond the glass. Pull focus to kaleidoscopic torrent of found footage, interspersing full high-definition colour with unstable silent film stock.
Rural roads can be most deadly, a report suggests. Abandoned turtle sanctuary to open at a sea-life park in Dorset. Russia jockeys for control of three Siberian oil pipelines currently in Western hands, and Nur-Pashi Kulayev, the surviving perpetrator of 2004’s Beslan school siege is found guilty on specific counts of terrorism, hostage taking, murder, but steers clear of the death penalty by virtue of a current Kremlin moratorium on executions. Lucky breaks and random tragedies, the acted permutations of Newtonian physics with its endless knock-ons and its circumstantial cannonades; stochastic popcorn for tomorrow’s papers. In the Indian Ocean some sixteen miles south-southwest of Yogyakarta on the southern coast of Java and more than six miles beneath the seabed the Australian and Eurasian plates, tectonic sumo wrestlers, slap powder on their palms and close together for their seventh or eighth bout this year. It’s fourteen minutes to eleven, Greenwich Mean Time.
She can barely feel the bony hands that help her to her feet, and briefly has the thought that she might be ascending. Distant from the instant, in a snowglobe glaze of settling shock with all the painful parts of her a mile away, she registers the tissue-paper whisper of the fragile woman gathering her up into the doorstep’s light only remotely. Something about saints, she thinks, and calmly wonders if she’s dead, if she’s not really managed to escape the car or vehicle enclosure after all. Nearby in the torrential night an engine starts to angry life before its growl moves off uphill away from her, a disappointed and receding snarl which, like the spattering deluge or murmurs of her elderly deliverer, seems to possess a new dimension; a cathedral of unprecedented resonances ringing in her blood-caked ears. Through this celestial tinnitus her rescuer is speaking now with a fresh force and sharpness that she gradually comes to understand is not addressed to her for all that Scarletwell Street, other than the two of them, is bare.
“See ’im off, Freddy. See ’im all the way off.”
There’s an eyestrain shimmer in the rain and then there’s something that’s the opposite of wind, a howling gust that’s sucked away from them into the Boroughs dark in an indecent hurry, as if late for an appointment.
Derek sweats and skids and swears and can’t get out. The neighbourhood’s a labyrinth and he’s like a bull at a gate, his chemically assisted courage burning away with the rubber to leave a black residue of acrid panic. Out of the enclosure with that flapping and horrifically proliferative thing behind him he swings right and into Lower Bath Street, but he doesn’t know the layout of the place and halfway up there’s concrete bollards blocking off the road, the district’s blunt and jutting teeth, where the compulsory left turn past a despairing local pub, the Shoemakers, delivers him once more to Scarletwell Street. Fuck, fuck, fuck. A right, another right and the corroding wall-fixed sign informs him he’s in Upper Cross Street with those ugly tower-blocks looming over him like oviparous doormen. At the end, what’s he to do? He can’t turn uphill how he wants to, he can see more bollards up the top there, but when he looks downhill to his right he realises his hallucinations are still with him: on the corner there’s a – he can’t even find the words – a monstrous cog of fog rotating in the margin of his eye but if he looks at it dead on, it’s gone. He screeches into Bath Street, trying not to see the grinding phantom gear, and then almost immediately left to Little Cross Street. What is it with all these Cross Streets? What’s the big deal about crosses around here? Careering through a blacked-out warren the black Escort hurtles straight across the roundabout and into Chalk Lane. Veering left around the funny chapel with the doorway halfway up one wall he finds he’s in St. Mary’s Street, with at its end the lights of Horsemarket in joyous conflagration, the illuminated exit to this haunted maze. He’s made it. He’s got out. He’s got away with it. He drives on into glowering taillight fire.
It’s black and white as Freddy sees it, sizzling in a pale fuse over the school playing field, through still machines and empty benches at the factory and across Spring Lane.
“See him off, Freddy. See him all the way off”, that’s what Audrey Vernall had instructed him to do. Orders are orders. The chain of command is simple and straightforward: builders, fiends, saints, Vernalls, deathmongers, <em>then</em> the rough sleepers. Everybody’s got their job and this, at last, is Freddy’s. Frilled with fifty repetitions of the same old coat and leading a great fleet of hats he smears through the deserted business complex that was Cleaver’s Glass once and before that Compton Street, heading by moocher instinct for the ragged area’s northeast corner, the skull pocket near the pinnacle of Grafton Street. That will be where whatever’s going to happen happens, he knows this in his remembered water, in his absent bones. That’s where they immolated the enchantresses and heretics. That’s where they spiked the heads, like settled bills. A fatal gambler’s spray of playing cards, all violent clubs and spades, his centipede of selves pours over what remains of Lower Harding Street and skitters at unnerving speed into the monolithic crossword blank of empty courts and blazing windows on the other side. Saint Stephen’s House, Saint Barnabas’, buildings with lightless landings, several dozen front doors and one roof that stand where whole streets used to be yet still call themselves houses, canonised high-rises in a disenfranchised litany, an air of nominative sanctity to mask the scent of urine. Dirtying the televisual stupor in the ground-floor flats with angry-out-of-nowhere thoughts on homicide, the sepia stampede of Freddy Allen fumes through other people’s Friday nights trailing a cloud of baseless argument, lapsed conversation and stalled DVD in its infuriated wake.
At seven minutes to eleven Mick essays a stealth-turn onto his right side and into a position that seems promisingly soporific, thinking of that final August night nine years ago. The black Mercedes screams through his increasing serotonin levels down the Rue Cambon towards its date with twenty-three past midnight. In the back, no seatbelts on: they’re young, hormonal, unaware that alcohol and their chauffeur’s anti-psychotic medicine are contraindicated. Vampire fireflies in the rear-view but the heavy Gallic lids sag and he knows he’s crashing. Touching seventy he slips down Cours la Reine along the right bank of the river, into the Pont de l’Alma underpass.
And even on its seismologic Ring of Fire, Java shivers. In Galur, shrine-ornaments begin to jingle, small and delicate percussions as an overture to cataclysm. Nearly seven thousand people are awakened by the sound with slightly quizzical expressions on their faces for the last time, and the birds don’t know which way to fly in this grey wolf’s tail, just before the dawn. At 7.962˚ South by 110.458˚ East one of the two diastrophic combatants yields but an inch and all five million souls within their sixty mile-wide sumo circle are spontaneously and suddenly at prayer.
Suspended in an aura of averted ending, she finds herself in the kitchen of the woman with magnesium-flare hair. A blessedly warm flannel dabs away coagulated burgundy from her closed eye, at intervals squeezed into a half-full enamel bowl with fugitive pink clouds diffusing in hot water. Perfectly sweet tea is set beside her on a beautifully frayed tablecloth, and at her ear the anciently accented voice continues its account of saints, and corners turned, and the impossibility of death.
He’s flying up Horsemarket and across the Mayorhold into Broad Street, horrors vanishing behind him, face first, washed with gold in the oncoming lights. He buzzes with adrenaline and luck past the Gala Casino on his left; keeps laughing to himself with the exhilaration of it all. Just before Regent Square, and without slowing, he takes the abbreviated turn for Grafton Street.
In chessboard chiaroscuro Freddy streams through empty premises, dragging a pennant smoke of faces over Cromwell Street and Fitzroy Terrace, bursting through the brickwork and into the path of the approaching traffic. Only in the headlight glare does he appreciate that it’s stopped raining.
Mick forgets exactly where his limbs are. In his faltering mind a hypnagogic limo disappears into the tunnel mouth, abruptly lurching to the left of the dual carriageway as Henri Paul loses control.
Measuring 6.2 upon the Richter scale the earthquake ripples across Java.
<br>
Through an unglued eye she notes the woman’s kitchen clock: six minutes to eleven.
Something dreadful scuttles over Grafton Street in front of him. He screams into the swerve.
From Freddy’s monochrome perspective the black Escort mounts the curb almost in silence.
Mick imagines the Mercedes as it smacks into the thirteenth pillar under the Pont de l’Alma.
Houses fall, more than a hundred thousand, and some one and a half million homeless stumble out into erased streets wearing bloodied nightclothes, staring, calling people’s names.
In its enamel bowl the water is now carmine, she observes, concentric rings dilating from its epicentre. The old lady’s rung the ambulance and the police; asks if there’s anybody else that should be contacted, and in a voice she doesn’t recognise she soberly recites her mother’s number.
Up onto the pavement and straight at the lamppost in a series of bejewelled saccades, he impacts on the steering column with his breastbone smashed to flakes of chalk, his heart and lungs crushed into an undifferentiated pulp. Head punching through the windscreen, for an instant he believes that he’s been flung miraculously clear until he notices that he’s now deaf and colour-blind.
Idling towards the wreckage of the car, unhurried now, he glances from the driver’s body half emerged across the crumpled bonnet to the duplicate that stands amidst a pavement spray of shattered glass and stares at the black bloodstains soaking its white shirtfront in incomprehension. Someone else lurks at the end of Fitzroy Terrace, looking on, who Freddy takes at first to be a mortal passer-by until he spots the mismatched eyes.
“It looks like he could use a drink”, says sympathetic Sam O’Day.
Against his twitching eyelids Mick screens a montage, commencing with the buckled vehicle at rest against the tunnel wall, almost immediately lost in a dissolve of swarming flashbulbs which resolves to snapshot images highlighting the events of the next … had it really only been a week? Kensington Palace bleeding flowers and cellophane, New Labour’s rush to spin the shroud, newspaper editors demanding a response from those they’d helped bereave, the whole fast-forward flicker of activity concluding with a still shot of Westminster Abbey, hushed in dull September light.
At the approach to sunrise thousands clog the Solo-Yogya highway, fearing a reprise of the tsunami two years previously and fleeing inland, leaving ruptured homes to opportunist burglars who, in districts high above sea level, nonetheless spread tales of an impending tidal wave that never comes. Almost six thousand dead, six times that many injured and along the highway’s teeming margin in Prambanan a collapsing ancient Hindu temple complex spills its god-encrusted pinnacles into the dust below, cracked deities become unmoving obstacles for the incoming surf of refugees to flow between in curling eddies, with so many in pyjamas that it all seems a bewildering mass dream.
As though time isn’t really passing, she sits motionless beside the table while green swirls of paramedic and fluorescent yellow surges of police orbit her in a gaudy palette of concern, bright twists of colour artfully embedded in the great glass marble of the moment. Audrey – that’s the woman’s name – Audrey is telling the attending officer that she’s a former patient of St. Crispin’s Hospital up Berry Wood turn, relocated to this halfway house during the care-in-the-community initiative. Marla’s not really listening; not even really Marla anymore. The capable and unafraid perspective from which she’d viewed her backseat ordeal has not receded alongside the threat of imminent annihilation, and whoever she is now it’s somebody considerably older than eighteen. There in the vastness of the tiny kitchen objects are illuminated in church window hues: the muted turquoise label on a tin of beans, her forearms bruised to plush cinema-seat maroon and Audrey’s slippers, pink as sugar-iced flamingos. Every detail, every sound, each thought that passes through her mind is outlined with the glorious blood and gold of martyr-fire. She hears her own voice answering the policewoman’s questions and it’s strong, it isn’t weak. It isn’t ugly.
“No, he had a chubby build, with rosy cheeks and dark hair greying at the sides. I didn’t see his eyes.”
And all the time there’s part of her that’s still there in the juddering Escort; still there on the doorstep looking up at Audrey with her head all filament-glare and combustion, speaking that peculiar name from J.K. Stephen’s doggerel and a dozen spine-lined ripperbacks, as if she’d known it would be recognised. A brandied slur of syllables or an elaborate sneeze, a name that nobody was ever called just lying around empty, waiting for the individual singular enough to put it on: Kaphoozelum. New point of view, resuming black and white.
<br>
Wet tarmac glints in an abrupt theatre shush, as though some drama were about to start. The boot’s been sprung by the collision – fuck, what will he say to Irene, say to the insurers – and the children’s beach toys and inflatables are scattered in the road as pale and grey as uncooked crabs. Exasperated and confused he tries to kick a punctured armband to the curbside, but he’s either seeing double and he misses or his foot goes through it like it isn’t there. Given his probable concussion he decides the first of these alternatives is the most likely, although this still leaves him with the problem of that mangled body sprawling through the absent windshield. Did he hit somebody? Oh, shit, he’s in trouble now, but then how did they manage to go through the screen feet first, that isn’t possible, and finally he glimpses the glass-freckled ruin of the face but still can’t quite determine where he knows it from. That’s when he notices the two old boys stood watching him from further down the street, both of them wearing hats, which isn’t something that you very often see these days. The nearer of the two comes up to him, asks him if he could use a drink and Derek says yes just like that, grateful for anybody who might let him in on what’s just happened. The old dosser tells him there’s a place nearby, the Jolly Something, where he’ll have a chance to get his bearings now the sat-nav’s fucked. They start to walk together back up towards Regent’s Square and, actually, this could all still turn out okay. Remembering the tramp’s companion he asks “What about your mate?” They both pause and look back. The other man – one eye looks like it’s got a cataract or something – smiles and lifts his hat, at which point Derek understands exactly where he is. He starts to weep. The vagrant near him quietly takes his arm and leads him, unresisting, off into a soot and silver Friday night. New point of view.
As Freddy sees it, once he’s led the snivelling new statistic down Daguerreotype walkways to the Jolly Smokers, that’s him done, his duties and responsibilities discharged. Puzzlingly, at the ghost-pub there are two men made of wood that seem to have arrived from somewhere, one of them embedded face-up in the worm-drilled floorboards while the other one, more corpulent but similarly naked, stands beside the bar with tears of varnish rolling down his grain-whorled cheeks and Mary Jane’s initials gouged into his arm. As Freddy makes excuses and slips out the back door, he looks round and sees the distraught new arrival being introduced to the likewise disconsolate fat manikin by Tommy Mangle-the-Cat, fragments of a brutal smile sliding across his juggled physiognomy. There’s no need to see any more; no need to know the precise nature of the justice that’s administered above the streets. He smoulders out into the sodium-stained darkness at the top of Tower Street, where above a fast-disintegrating overcoat of cloud are stars that look the same to dead and living. He feels differently about things now, not least about himself. Some of the stains have gone from his escutcheon, blots evaporated from his copybook. When it came down to it, he’d done the right thing. He’s been better than the man he thought he was, the man who was resigned to an ink-wash eternity, too guilty and impoverished in his character to ever go Upstairs. He’s paid the district back for all its pints of milk, its loaves of bread, its disappointed doorsteps. Much to his surprise he finds his worn-out shoes are leading him down Scarletwell Street to his friend’s house, Audrey’s house there at the bottom with its crook-door, with its Jacob Flight. He’s hurrying now, past the deserted playing fields. He thinks he can remember yellow, thinks he can remember green. Cut to interior, night.
His breath so regular that he’s forgotten it, Mick falters at the brink of dream, that overcast September afternoon nine years ago replaying in an emptied cranial cinema. They’d watched on television, him and Cathy and the lads, and it had all seemed stage-managed and strange, more like a Royal Variety Performance than a funeral beneath its Cool Britannia branding. Needing something three-dimensional and more authentic than a screen could offer they’d all climbed into the car and Cathy drove them out to Weedon Road, where they could watch the cortege on its way to Althorp. All the people that were gathered at the roadside there, as quiet as ghosts, nobody really certain why they’d come except the sense that something old was happening again and that their presence was required. Almost asleep Mick starts to misplace the dividing line between event and memory. No longer horizontal and in bed he’s helping Cathy shepherd Jack and Joe between spectators on the verge, somnambulists with tongues stilled by mythology. Finding a clear spot in the threadbare grass beside the curb it seems to him that these exact same people must have turned up to remove their hats for Boadicea, Eleanor of Castile, Mary, Queen of Scots and any dead queens who have slipped his slipping mind. An engine is approaching in the distance, loud for want of any other sound, even the birds remaining mute for the duration. It glides past them like a ship, imagined bow-wave rippling the asphalt, floral wreathes like lifebelts on the bonnet, bound for its pretended island grave. Having attended to her homecoming the crowd and vision both begin to break up like commemorative crockery, melting into the throng at Alma’s exhibition that’s tomorrow morning. Letting go of everything, Mick sinks into another of his five-and-twenty thousand nights. He fades to black.
<br>
* <strong>AFTERLUDE</strong>
** <strong>CHAIN OF OFFICE</strong>
<strong>W</strong>ith a splash of sunlight to the cheeks Spring Boroughs basked, enjoying one of its more glamorous and less hungover mornings. Saturday dusted dilapidated balconies with cautious optimism, the persisting sense of a respite from school or work even in those attending neither. May brewed in the scruffy verges. Chalk Lane’s elderly stone wall bounding the former paupers’ cemetery was an abattoir of poppies, while just up the way a jumble sale assembly clotted on the daycare centre’s slope. The district preened; no oil painting but from the right angle still as pretty as a picture.
Scuffing down across the balding mound from Castle Hill, Mick Warren trickled as an off-white bead to merge into the human pigment pooled about the nursery door, quickly surrounded by a turquoise swirl of sister and the largely neutral spatter of her friends. Alarming Mick with an unprecedented kiss that left his right cheek partially obscured by a wet crimson clown-print, Alma dragged him up onto the doorstep and excoriated him as she unlocked.
“No, seriously, Warry, thanks for only being twenty fucking minutes late. You must get loads of exhibitions based entirely on your mental problems, so, y’know, it means a lot that you’ve turned up at all. I’m really touched. You’re almost like a brother to me.”
Mick grinned, the disquieting barefoot teenager on Crispin Street and his severely localised depression on the walkway of Saint Peter’s House lost in the sooty deltas at the corners of his eyes.
“There’s no need to be nervous, Warry. I’m here now. I know I’m like a superstition with you, aren’t I? I’m your University Challenge lucky gonk. Why didn’t you just open up without me?”
Alma curled her lower lip, as if formally rolling back a no-longer-required red carpet.
“Because fuck off. This is the wrong door for this key. Can’t you just circulate amongst these …” Alma gestured inexactly at Ben Perrit. “… these gallery-going intellectuals till I get this sorted out? See that nobody starts a fight or pinches anything.”
Performing a constrained about-turn on the step, he overlooked a perfectly convivial crowd which nonetheless seemed to contain innate disorder. A fight, though unlikely, was not utterly out of the question, but there definitely wasn’t anything worth pinching. Nor did any of those present seem particularly larcenous, except perhaps the two old ladies he’d assumed were with Bert Regan’s mum. They stood apart from all the other attendees and looked like they were sharing recollections of the neighbourhood, one of them indicating something in the general vicinity of Mary’s Street while her companion grinned and nodded vigorously. The malicious glint in their crow-trodden eyes elicited a warm pang of nostalgia for the monstrous Boroughs matriarchs of yesteryear, and briefly made Mick miss his Nan. Miss his whole genealogy for that matter, with almost everybody gone except him and his sister, whom he didn’t really see as being representative.
Against a layered backdrop where decrepit 1960s flats blocked railway yards and distant parkland further down the slope, Dave Daniels smiled bemusedly in conversation with Rome Thompson’s garrulous and slinky boyfriend. Mrs. Regan told Ben Perrit that he was a silly bugger, a perceptive diagnosis based on just under five minutes of acquaintance. Blackbirds skimmed resurfaced plague-graves in the parking area off Chalk Lane and Mick allowed himself the thought that all the place’s previous warm weekends were also not far off, lingering atmospheres of cobbled pub yards, pocket money and the tuppenny rush infusing the frayed present as a pungent marinade. The light at that precise time, that particular day of the month, had fallen in exactly the same fashion upon Doddridge Church since it was raised. Some of those shadows over there were hundreds of years old, had settled their specific pall on insufficiently despondent pallbearers and hesitating brides alike, on Swedenborgians and repenting rakes. He’d heard of laws protecting something known as “ancient lights”, but couldn’t really picture any protest lobby fighting to conserve the ancient dark, save possibly for easily ignored depressives, Goths and Satanists. Behind him, Alma had eventually reasoned that it was in fact her Yale key rather than the lock, the nursery or the rest of England which was upside-down, and was approximately stating that the exhibition was now open:
“Okay, everybody in. If anybody has constructive criticisms that they’d like to offer, I’ll quite happily enlighten them on their shit dress-sense or the mess they’ve made of bringing up their kids. Remember that you’re only here to gasp. Spill body fluids over it, you pay for it. Apart from that, enjoy yourselves within rational limits.”
And with him and Alma at their forefront, guffawing and arguing, they all went in.
Mick’s first impression was that the choice to exhibit some three dozen pieces in such a ridiculously tiny space had been determined by poor eyesight, hashish-influenced decision-making processes, or else the well-known female handicap when it came to spatial arrangements: the trait which made them imagine penises to be much shorter than they really were. His next impression, after the initial sense of overwhelming optic shellshock had a moment to subside, was that this staggering bag-lady clutter of ideas and images, these closely-spaced airbursts of hue and monochrome adorning every visible vertical surface might well be deliberate, might be a strategy for bullying the intended audience into a different and potentially far more precarious state of mind, assuming anybody other than an evil scientist would ever want to do that. This faint spark of insight was immediately interrupted by his and everyone else’s third impression, which was of an outsized three-dimensional arrangement settled on its table in the centre of the already restricted space.
With Alma having deftly slipped around this eye-catching obstruction out of harm’s way, Mick and his attendant fellow patrons still decanting through the nursery door were brought up short against the nearside of the trestle in a ragged tidal stripe of animate detritus. Roman Thompson’s boyfriend Dean went, “Fuck me,” in an almost reverential tone, Ben Perrit giggled and Bert Regan’s mum said, “Well, I never.” Mick himself could only manage a stunned silence, although whether one of admiration or disquiet at the surely obsessive mental processes involved he could not easily decide.
Built over several months from carefully hand-tinted papier-mâché, spread before them was a maddeningly detailed scale reproduction of the mostly vanished neighbourhood as it had almost definitely never been. Just over four foot square, its tallest structures only inches high, his sister’s diorama juxtaposed the Boroughs’ choicest features, irrespective of chronology. The speckled emerald of Spring Lane School’s playing field made room for the resurgent Friendly Arms halfway up Scarletwell Street, an establishment the egg-and-spoon arena had in actuality replaced. Saint Peter’s House in Bath Street coexisted with the seven-inch tall chimney tower of a Destructor which had been demolished in the 30s to allow the flats’ construction. Spanning the wave-wrinkled river, by what looked from tiny Guinness toucan ads to be a 1940s station, was a gated Cromwell-era drawbridge. Flocking ewes surrounded smart-cars parked in Sheep Street, stippled shit on shredded paper fleeces.
Seen from overhead the centre court of Greyfriars had what looked like Rizla sheets hung from its spindled clotheslines. This omniscient perspective was too reminiscent of his Harryhausen musings from the sleepless night before. Awkwardly disengaging from the press around the nano-slum’s west boundary he squeezed apologetically along St. Andrew’s Road towards Crane Hill up at the table’s corner. Passing his own shrunken terrace row he noted with approval that Gran’s ornamental swan was now a miniaturist study in the front window of number seventeen. Despite the novelty, it fleetingly occurred to him that he’d viewed their old house from this unusual elevation once before, although he couldn’t for the life of him think when. Turning the corner into Grafton Street along the northern border, he retraced the route of his childhood truck journey to the hospital save for a right at Regent Square, but this time as a casually-dressed giant wading waist-deep through the absence where an implied Semilong should be. Alma was waiting for him on the display’s further, eastern side, looming above the mini round church of the Holy Sepulchre and leering like a monstrous Templar idol, which if Mick remembered rightly was a goat with tits.
“You don’t have to say anything. You’re honoured just to be related to me, Warry, I can see it in your eyes. Did you spot Gran’s swan in the window down Saint Andrew’s Road? I did that with a triple-double-zero brush, and they’re not even real. To be quite honest, when I think about myself sometimes, I nearly faint.”
“Warry, everybody nearly does that when they think about you. We’re not made of stone. So, what material did you use for this, then? It’s not walrus dung or anything, I take it?”
Pigeon droppings of exquisite delicacy caked the rim of a scaled-down Destructor. Gathered by the table’s southwest corner Roman Thompson and Bert Regan grinned and squinted at the junction of Chalk Lane and Black Lion Hill, where a queer turret like a witch’s hat had been mashed up with Harry Roserdale’s newsagent’s and the old Gordon Commercial, the hotel. Just the hand-lettering on the advertisements and hoardings was enough to break your heart and ruin your eyes.
“Nah. It’s all made of Rizla papers. Chewed about four hundred packets up and spat them out. It’s probably much sturdier than what they built the Eastern District out of.”
Mick surveyed the slate-hatched rooftops, the pointillist flowerbeds of Saint Peter’s Church.
“Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. But probably it’s also likelier to give you gingivitis.”
In truth, it was taking all of Mick’s determination not to look impressed. It was as if his sister had removed a clipping from the undergrowth of backstreets and then husbanded it patiently to generate a bonsai locale, even or perhaps especially those features which had disappeared. His every eye-movement uncovered more of them. The rising curve of long-gone Cooper Street up to Bellbarn elicited a muscle-memory of straggling past the fading rose gates of Fred Bosworth’s haulage yard halfway uphill, with at the top of the chewed-paper incline a painstaking reconstruction of St. Andrew’s Church so perfect in its Gothic detail that the building’s 1960s demolition seemed flatly impossible, not merely unbelievable. By leaning like one of the clearance area’s perpetual derricks over Sheep Street, Broad Street and the Lilliputian back yards
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of St. Andrew’s Street, Mick could just make out the infinitesimal front window of his childhood barber, Albert Badger. So why had they always called him Bill? Painted there on the tissue glass in spidery fluorescent pink, he was obscurely heartened to find an illuminated Durex sign. Three doors down was the Vulcan Polish & Stain Company, no larger than a lesser Lego brick and wholly non-existent in Mick’s memory until that moment. Ant-proportioned hopscotch grids in coloured chalk sweetly defaced the vanished tilt of Bullhead Lane, and microscopic milk bottles next to sienna-crusted loaves of bread bedizened the front steps on Freeschool Street. Attention seized by every hair-thin drainpipe, by the petrol spectra reproduced in every other puddle, it occurred to him that you could go mad looking at this stuff, let alone building it. Beside him, Alma’s forehead corrugated pensively.
“You don’t think that there’s some element missing? As if I was using all the obvious effort as a camouflage to hide the fact that I’m not saying very much, the way I used to plaster every piece of illustration work with that laborious stippling, all little dots, when I was starting out? You’d tell me, wouldn’t you, if this whole exercise had nothing to it but ridiculously grandiose nostalgia?”
Mick frowned at his sister in astonishment, not so much at her vanishingly rare attack of doubt as at the lack of self-awareness evidenced by her last question.
“No, of course I wouldn’t, Warry. No one would. We’re scared of saying anything in case you turn on us with a debate about things we don’t understand. I think it’s fair to say you won’t get honest criticism out of anybody in arm’s reach of you, because you’re such a touchy bitch.”
She narrowed the blast-craters of her soot-ringed eyes as she considered, unkempt head cocked to one side, her level and unblinking gaze fixed on her brother for long, anxious seconds before Alma ventured her reply, surprising him by resting a comradely hand on his left shoulder.
“That’s an excellent point, Warry, and well made.”
She took the hand away, but not before he’d worried that she planned to drop him with a Star Trek nerve-pinch. Mick, of course, knew there was no such thing, but what if Alma didn’t? Other people were arriving now, latecomers poking trepid heads around the nursery door on the far side of the oppressively meticulous tableau. He recognised his sister’s actor friend, Bob Goodman, although that was hardly more of an accomplishment than saying that he recognised Ayers Rock. Mick could at least tell one of these eroded landmarks from the other, principally by the fact that Ayers Rock never wore a leather jacket, a black beret or such an abiding look of deep resentment and mistrust. More cheeringly, behind the thespian with his death-watch demeanour Mick made note of Alma’s shipwrecked transatlantic artist pal, Melinda Gebbie, someone with whom he could have an entertaining conversation if the exhibition flagged. Moreover, since his older sibling had privately ceded that the pretty Californian was by a head the better painter of the two, Mick felt that he could shelter behind her authoritative statements and opinions if his sister engineered to give him an artistic duffing up. Accompanying her was someone else that he’d met at least once before, Lucy Lisowiec, an extramural muralist who also worked in the Boroughs community and whom he thought Alma had said was helping to secure the daycare centre for this afternoon. The women laughed and chatted, hanging on each other’s arms, the younger of the two so wonderstruck by the art-smothered walls that her lids appeared insufficient to contain her eyes. More punters dribbled in through the propped-open door behind them, some he thought he knew and some he didn’t. Alma, by his side, sighed heavily, still brooding over her reconstituted natal turf.
“I can see that I’m going to have to reach my own conclusions about what this installation might be lacking, rather than relying on your valuable insights. Listen, I think Roman Thompson said he’d got something to tell me, so I’d better go and have a word with him. If you were going to look at any of the other pieces, start to our right of the door and work your way around the room from there. Oh, and I hope you’ve got a lighter on you. I’ve left mine at home, so if I need to pop outside and have a smoke I’ll have to borrow yours.”
Mick nodded, waving her away, struck by the use of the word “if” in her last sentence, as though Alma popping outside for a smoke were some remote contingency rather than the abiding certainty that they both knew it for. With the pretended gallery beginning to fill up, its jostling horde squeezing together in embarrassed waltzes between wall and table-edge, he called to mind when this place had been Marjorie Pitt-Draffen’s dancing school, cadet Nijinskies clattering on open parquet. Anybody teaching toddlers the Gay Gordon these days, he reflected, would be on a list. Deciding that he’d better make a start on staring blankly at his sister’s pictures if he wanted to be out of there by nightfall, Mick took a last marvelling glance at the fag-paper precinct – a metallic silver painted pond between the tanning-yards along Monk’s Pond Street; seed-sized starlings just discernible against the school’s slate rooftops – and negotiated a laborious course between the jam of punters, heading for the exhibition’s recommended starting-point behind the nursery’s wedged-open door. This turned out to be a large canvas, hung or rather propped so as to partly cover the adjacent window. Never having been to one before, Mick wasn’t absolutely sure what art shows were supposed to be like, but with that said he was fairly certain that they weren’t supposed to be like this. The claustrophobic kindergarten squash of imagery didn’t look organised so much as it looked like someone had detonated an art-teacher in a confined space. Already irritated, Mick turned his besieged attentions to the sunlight-blocking rectangle that had been specified as the extravaganza’s point of entry.
Fastened to the window frame above the exhibit with blue adhesive putty was a note in biro giving the acrylic painting’s title, <em>Work</em> <em>in</em> <em>Progress</em>, with a rather patronising scribbled arrow angled down towards the frame below, as if intended for an audience of hens. The sense of sloppiness suggested by the hasty caption was, in Mick’s opinion, also present in the piece of art to which it was appended. The thing clearly wasn’t finished, as if Alma had lost interest two-thirds of the way through. Which was a shame because the bit she’d bothered to complete, a lustrously embellished area around the upper centre of the work, was actually quite good. Judged by its trailing sepia jellyfish of Conté under-drawing, the intended scene was a plain wood interior seen from a steeply angled point of view, as if that of a crouching adult or perhaps a child. The viewer looked up from this disempowered perspective at a towering quartet of rough-hewn and broad-shouldered men with the physiques and leathered hands of labourers, who nonetheless were clad in what looked to be outsized christening gowns of white applied in such a manner that it somehow shimmered. The four figures stood about what Mick deduced must be a sawhorse, with the pristine draped expanses of their backs presented to the onlooker and their heads bowed in muttered consultation, no doubt a discussion of some technical necessity from which all save the hulking craftsmen were excluded. Only one of the assembled crew appeared aware that he and his three co-workers were being watched, turning a prematurely bleached head to gaze down across one shoulder at the cowering observer, tanned face stern and sapphire thunderbolts in his affronted eye.
Still wondering how his sister had effected the ethereal sparkle on her navvies’ dazzling and incongruous frocks, Mick squinted closer to discover that what had appeared to be a uniformly snowy hue from further off was actually a plain matt undercoat to which gloss squares and oblongs filled with similarly shiny spirals, glyphs or leopard spots had been fastidiously added, white on white. Looking up past the radiant workmen with their faintly Soviet connotations, deep into the composition’s further ground from the distorting worm’s-eye vantage, he could just make out the sketched-in wooden beams and rafters of the ceiling’s underside, from where a single naked light-bulb dangled on its flex above the heads of the conferring artisans. That vague ellipse of fully-rendered content, in the higher middle reaches of the canvas, was realised so beautifully that the straggly brown traceries surrounding it, the dropping folds of the white robes, the caterpillar curls of shaved wood at the huddled carpenters’ bare feet, made Mick feel actively annoyed at Alma’s slapdash attitude. Why couldn’t she have put more effort into it? As far as he could see, between the cluttered, amateurish presentation and the half-done opener the only statement she was making seemed to be “I can’t be arsed”, though to be frank she wasn’t even making that with much conviction.
Somewhere in the throng behind he heard Ben Perrit laugh, although that could as easily have been at some veiled subtlety in Alma’s oeuvre as it could have been at a knock-knock joke or, indeed, an Al Qaeda outrage. Or a Crunchy wrapper. From across the room Rome Thompson’s circling vulture rasp was interrupted by a raucous outburst that he recognised at once as issuing from his distressingly close blood relation.
“Rome, for fuck’s sake. Are you serious?”
Elsewhere, infrequent bursts of Californian cackling or David Daniels’ lulling murmur were distinct above the rustle of the rhubarb. Hoping that things might pick up, Mick shuffled to his right to best appreciate the next course in this oddly flavoured taster-menu, a far smaller job in oils with a much more elaborate frame, identified in ballpoint pen by an adjoining Post-it sticker as <em>A</em> <em>Host</em> <em>of</em> <em>Angles</em>.
Now, this was more like it. The restrained dimensions, something like twelve inches by eighteen and dwarfed by their gilded surround, barely contained a concentrated field of light and magnifying-lens embellishment. The portrait-aspect vignette, like its predecessor, once again presented an interior although on this occasion it appeared to be that of Saint Paul’s Cathedral. Curdling yellow luminosity, as though from an incipient storm without, allowed for burnished highlights of warm gold like syrup to emerge from the prevailing umbers of a scene which Mick presumed, despite its air of authenticity, to be imaginary. On the decorated flags beneath the building’s Whispering Gallery was erected an impossibly tall gantry strung with pulleys and stout hawsers, the innumerable struts and crossbeams of the scaffolding’s construction starkly contrasting with the predominantly circular designs of the cathedral and perhaps embodying the many angles mentioned in the painting’s title. At its loftiest extremities the feat of engineering looked to be supporting a precarious pie-slice platform, but if that were so he was unable to explain the purpose of the surely dream-scale sandbag with its stupefying mass hung only a few inches over the immaculately polished floor. It had to be some kind of counterweight, yet for the life of him Mick couldn’t figure out what it was balancing until a closer squint revealed less than a foot of clearance under the huge framework at the centre of the composition. The whole thing was hanging from the inside of the dome above, conceivably so that the nineteenth-
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century labourers converged about the structure’s base in falling shafts of jaundiced sunshine could rotate it. Mick stood back in wonderment, strangely convinced by the spectacular unfeasibility of the arrangement that the picture chronicled actual occurrences; events and mechanisms that had really
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happened or existed, all in brushstrokes so small as to be almost invisible. The sense of echoing space and the ecclesiastic hush evoked by the depiction’s false depths bordered on the tangible, to the extent that he could almost hear the tensile creak of thigh-thick rope or catch a faint ghost of the previous Sunday’s incense. It was quietly magnificent, and the one element which bothered him about the work was its transparent lack of anything to do with him or his experience. The same was true of the preceding piece as well, now that he thought about it.
And, as it turned out, the next one, which was propped against the nursery wall beneath <em>A</em> <em>Host</em> <em>of</em> <em>Angles</em>, thus requiring Mick to crouch down on his haunches if he wanted to inspect it. Shifted by this action to a toddler plane inhabited by trousers as distinct as faces, he attempted to take in the offering expediently, painfully aware that he presented an obstruction to the studiedly polite and yet inwardly seething knees about him in the narrow aisle. Roughly the same in scale as the cathedral scene above but this time in a mounting of pristine white board, a hasty label clinging to the skirting board informed him of the picture’s title, <em>ASBOs</em> <em>of</em> <em>Desire</em>. A shadowed oblong with a plate-sized circle halfway up, he realised after a disoriented pause that he was looking at a close-up of a security camera, staring dead into the glass of its dilated pupil. Small already and made even more diminutive by the foreshortening, an isolated female figure was reflected in the lens’s centre, caught in its authoritarian snowglobe and defined in delicate white traceries against the work’s predominating swathes of sooty darkness, purples that were almost black and crumbling to a fine grain at their edges. Thinking back to boyhood episodes where he had inadvertently intruded on his older sister while she was preoccupied with art – much more unsettling than barging in while she was on the toilet – Mick thought the image might be realised in a carefully-masked application of the surely obsolescent spray-diffusers that he’d seen her use, hinged tubes you blew through to produce a flecked mist in the manner of an Amish airbrush. This would make it very likely that the medium was coloured ink, Windsor & Newton’s strangely satisfying roster of glass pyramids with labels like children’s-book heraldry. The woman held in the surveillance gaze had high heels and a short skirt, fists thrust in the pockets of a furry collared jacket and her weight on one foot, head turned to peer off into the dark as if waiting impatiently for someone. She seemed unaware that she was being furtively observed, which emphasised her vulnerability and made Mick faintly worried for her. The impassive lens too much recalled a voyeuristic eye belonging to some masturbator in the shadows. Carefully delineated beads of condensation, jewelling its cold meniscus, stood like lecherous sweat on a molester’s brow.
“Warry, I know it’s awesome and it’s only right that you should bow before it, but your worship’s blocking everybody’s way. If I’d known you were going to show me up like this I’d never have invited you. Oh, yeah, and can I have a borrow of your lighter?”
With a heavy sigh of resignation, Mick turned from the disconcerting nocturne to regard the Doctor Martin’s boots with twelve holes but incompetently fastened laces which appeared to be addressing him. Levering cumbersomely back up to his feet he fished with some resentment in one trouser pocket, finally producing the requisite three-for-a-pound stick of amethyst. It wasn’t that he minded Alma borrowing his lighter; it was more the way she stood there with her palm out, as though he was nine and she was confiscating it.
“Here. Don’t forget to bring it back. You do know, Warry, don’t you, that these are just disconnected images with nothing tying them together, unless you count the crushed centipede you call a signature? And what has any of this got to do with how I nearly choked to death?”
Casually pocketing the half-filled plastic lozenge without comment or apparent gratitude, his sister scrutinised him from beneath drug-and-mascara-weighted lids, reluctant to let in too many photons of his philistine rebounded light.
“Well, Warry, for the exhibition’s climax, in an improvised performance piece I’m going to ram a five pound jar of cough-sweets down your throat, finish the job, and very likely cop the Turner. People like you are the reason why the working class can’t have nice things.”
He shook his head slowly and pityingly, a pessimistic vet.
“And people like you are the reason they can’t even find their shitty lighters, Warry.”
Alma gave him an elaborate triple V-sign that involved two hands and also forearms crossing at an acute angle from the elbow, which to Mick looked like a ritualised fit, before she flounced out of the open door to both take and pollute the air. He watched her through the nursery window, an immense dust bunny made of turquoise fluff that seemed to bowl in a contrary breeze across the threadbare mound outside as she paced back and forth, sparking a spliff only a little shorter than her usual blind-man’s cane but which his sister no doubt thought of as discreet and unobtrusive. Bloody women and their inbuilt inability to grasp spatial relationships. Of course, it might be that she’d chosen such an inappropriately tiny venue so that even if only two people and a dog showed up she’d still be playing to a heaving crowd. From out the slaughterhouse press of humanity immediately surrounding him he heard Bert Regan venture a not-unrelated diagnosis.
“Hur hur. Fuck my arse. What does she think this is, Agoraphobics fuckin’ Anonymous, or what? She’s never been on the same page as everybody else, has she, your kid?”
Mick turned and grinned at the preposterously sturdy-looking ne’er-do-well and chancer, somehow still glaringly ginger even now that his remaining hair was grey.
“Hey up, Bert. Tell the truth, I think she’s in a different book. It might even be in a different language, more than likely one that she’s made up. Here, is the lady that I saw you standing next to earlier your mum? I heard her talking. I’ve not heard a Boroughs accent like she’s got in years.”
The landlocked pirate bared his handful of surviving teeth, a sledgehammered piano keyboard, in a fond smile.
“Ah, yeah. She don’t look a bad old gal for eighty-six or whatever the fuck she is now, does she? Grew up around Compton Street just off Spring Lane. Me and me brother and me sister reckon she’ll outlive the lot of us, just from sheer Boroughs bloody-mindedness.”
Mick followed Bert’s eyes, azure chips of castoff china ditched below the oxidising privet of his brow, and spotted the self-possessed pensioner in question on the far side of the makeshift gallery, in animated conversation with a captivated Lucy and Melinda. All he caught was, “Ooh, yiss, I remember ’ow we use ter git dressed up un’ goo dayn tayn”, but that was all he needed to submerge him in a recollected aural floodtide of genetically defective vowels or missing-and-presumed-dead consonants; of chip-shop queue confessions and school-gate soliloquies. To hear a Boroughs woman of that vintage talking was to feel beneath your fingertips the embossed lettering on oval Co-op milk checks, penny-coloured and quietly dependable in value. Marvelling, he returned his attention to the erstwhile gasfitter, knife crime early adaptor and Dodge City plumber at his side.
“You’re lucky to still have her, Bert. Who were those women I saw with her when I turned up earlier? Are they two mates of hers?”
The rusting caterpillar eyebrows crept together for a puzzled face-off.
“You’re not talkin’ about Mel and Lucy?”
Shaking his head like a wet dog, Mick surveyed the cramped premises papered with his big sister’s hallucinations hoping he could point the pair out, but they’d either left already or had nipped outside to get away from all the noise and people, not that you could blame them.
“No, these were both older than your mum. They looked like they’d been living round here quite a while, how they were dressed.”
Bert pushed his lips out in an oral shrug.
“I never noticed ’em. I know that Rome, Rome Thompson, ’e was goin’ out ’round all the flats and sheltered housing yesterday to tell ’em about Alma’s exhibition, so most likely it was two old dears from this patch come to ’ave a butchers and see what was up.”
They both agreed that sounded about right and made a cast-iron aspiration to talk later before conversational convection currents dragged the genial urban ogre off into the grunt and mumble. Watching Regan borne away, Mick made a mental note to ask his sister how things were progressing with Bert’s hepatitis-C which, last he’d heard, had failed to budge even after two blackly suicidal interferon courses, last-chance remedies far uglier than the disease. Returning his attention to the copious vomit of ideas and colours tricking down the walls of the establishment, he picked his way through the next several pieces in disgruntled search of some tenuous thread connecting Alma’s peacock technical display with his own near-death episode, coming up empty-handed.
With <em>Rough</em> <em>Sleepers</em>, next of what appeared to be a largely arbitrary sequence, he found himself looking at the riotously hued gouache delineation of a pub’s front bar, conceivably the Old Black Lion, where luridly bright customers listed in an inebriate over-familiarity or threatened to unhinge their lower jaws in raucous laughter, both the fleshy sprawl of social drinkers and their colour-saturated habitat distorted and exaggerated till they bordered on the abstract. Sat unnoticed and ignored amid the gem-like greens and purples of a braying modern clientele was an anachronistic 1950s tramp rendered entirely in warm stubble greys with lamp black in his creases, wet titanium on a rueful eyeball. Almost photographically realistic in comparison to the oblivious Weimar grotesques surrounding him, his newsprint tones contrasting starkly with their Technicolor, the itinerant clearly existed on a separate plane to all the other careless revellers represented and appeared to be invisible in their beer-goggled sight. The single figure present with no glass before him or in hand, alone amongst the garish throng to meet the viewer’s eye, he looked out from beneath his battered hat-brim and the picture’s depths with a sad, knowing smile, possibly aimed at the insensate horde about him, or the painting’s audience, or both. An oddly poignant scene that was, again, nothing to do with Mick.
Next up, <em>X</em> <em>Marks</em> <em>the</em> <em>Spot</em>, was realised as what he believed might be a lino-print, the solitary pilgrim it portrayed made out of fractured slabs of solid Indian red on heavy watercolour paper that was yellowed, flecked with age or tea. The monkish form was stooped beneath the burden of a heavy-looking and most likely allegorical sack hefted on one buckling shoulder, struggling up an incline recognisable from the intrusive quilt of modern block-cut signage in the background as halfway down Horseshoe Street. Frankly, Mick didn’t have a fucking clue, and item six was hardly more enlightening. On board roughly two feet by one was what appeared from a few paces off to be the grainy head-and-shoulders portrait of a hat-clad Charlie Chaplin, but which on approach dissolved into mixed media collage. A large industrial watch-part cog, perhaps clipped from a technical or scientific magazine, described the upper semi-circle of the silent star’s iconic bowler, while its band and brim were a rectangular munitions factory and a silhouetted barbed-wire fence respectively. The face beneath, pasted together from torn photo-scraps of carefully composed and graduated half-tone densities, was an incongruous carnival of Dior models, shell-shock victims, stockpiled gasmasks, <em>Punch</em> cartoons skewering contemporary art and what appeared to be a period street-plan of Lambeth. The left cheek was bleached-out poppy fields, one eye a face that Mick identified as the young Albert Einstein and the other one a lifebelt ring from the <em>Titanic</em>. The moustache, he thought, might be Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s notorious Sarajevo motor vehicle. He didn’t even bother looking at the hastily scrawled ballpoint afterthought that gave the gimmicky assemblage its no doubt clever title.
On it went, a steeply angled ladder of estrangement. Clearly only there for its shock-value, Mick decided, the next exhibit depicted the bare back of an adult black male, in an ingeniously-crafted frame precisely contoured to contain the muscled curvatures of the rich purple and mahogany expanse. Distressingly, the skin in question appeared lately flogged, possibly by a cat-o’-nine-tails that had left close-spaced red horizontal lines across the glistening shoulder-blades. It came to him belatedly that these marks were intended to suggest a terrible musical stave on which what had seemed random blots of gore revealed themselves as carefully placed notes in some appalling composition. Queasily, he cast an eye over the nearby makeshift label. <em>Blind</em> <em>But</em> <em>Now</em> <em>I See</em>, apparently, although Mick couldn’t for the life of him. Although entirely certain that his sister would not have intended any such thing, he thought this particular piece might well be construed as racist, or at least as racially insensitive. He wondered what Dave Daniels would make of it, and next wondered if wondering that might in itself be racist.
Then there was a pencil-crayon study of somebody who looked like Ben Perrit ambling disconsolately at the bottom of an ocean, clouds of sediment arisen from his heels and what seemed to be murky fragments of St. Peter’s Church protruding from the seabed in the background, weed in ribbons trailing from the gaping mouths of Saxon monsters in relief below the eaves. Next came a larger work accomplished in a medium which Mick distantly remembered was called scraperboard, a steeply-angled vista looking up towards a silhouetted figure standing straddling a roof-ridge with some kind of glass or crystal sphere held up aloft in either hand, and lower the black surface scratched away in random smudges to reveal prismatic tinfoil underneath. There followed not a pictorial work of any kind but rather a white apron, hand-embroidered at the hem with unexpectedly uplifting butterflies and bees. It looked as if a lot of effort had gone into it, but once again he found he’d no clear notion as to what, if anything, the crisp white linen was meant to be saying beyond “Everybody look at me. I can embroider.” Nor was item ten, identified by a desultory biro scrawl as <em>Hark</em> <em>the</em> <em>Glad</em> <em>Sound</em>, any more enlightening. Rendered, conceivably, in oil pastels it depicted a young woman clad in 1940s clothes, alone and sitting in a gas-lit parlour playing a piano. Only after several moments did he realise that Titanium White highlights on the figure’s cheeks evoked refracted tears. If anything it looked a little sentimental; chocolate-boxy even, like that bloke who did the picture with the singing waiter, Vettriano. Once again, no reference to Mick himself was anywhere in sight. Had all that been just one of Alma’s barely comprehensible or indeed noticeable jokes, only remotely funny to a somehow-sentient encyclopaedia who’d never heard any good gags?
It was at this point that the object of his musings once again materialised at his side, ostensibly to give him back his borrowed lighter, though in actuality to see if she approved of his reactions to her paintings. This made him feel vaguely apprehensive, then annoyed that Alma should invert the usually understood relationship between art and its audience. Granted, he hadn’t been to many exhibitions, but he’d come away with the impression that at these gallery openings it was the artist who was nervous about being judged, not the attending public. Once he’d arm-wrestled his lighter from her lacquered talons he raised this point with his sister, although not as lucidly as he had managed in his head. Her flue-brush eyes regarded him with genuine puzzlement.
“Why, Warry, what a wonderful and otherworldly notion. Do you know, that honestly never occurred to me before? A piece of art is obviously pronouncing judgement upon everyone and everything that’s not the piece of art. Well, my art is, at any rate. Can’t speak for anybody else.”
Starting to notice his own critical deficiency of nicotine, Mick’s comment was perhaps more sharp in its delivery than he’d intended. Still, this didn’t matter, Alma being oblivious to rebuke.
“So it’s not art that’s judging everybody, Warry, is it? It’s just you, being judgemental.”
She stared at him for a moment and then, lowering her eyes, she sighed.
“Ah, Warry. Why is it always the wisdom of subnormal children that’s most humbling? But I’m not entirely certain why you raised the issue in the first place by suggesting I’d be critical of any negative reactions. What’s your own reaction so far, Warry, that’s caused all these troubling and unaccustomed thoughts?” Head cocked to one side, Alma eyed her brother both forensically and quizzically, a watchful poisoner alert for the first telltale symptoms of success. “It couldn’t be that … well, that you don’t <em>like</em> these pictures that I’ve taken great pains to create especially for you?”
It was exactly what he’d dreaded and he’d brought it on himself. Her drug-dilated pupils, nested in the pissed-on ashes of her irises, were welded to him and her eyelids seemed no longer to be functioning. His tongue had dried onto his palate and the punchline to a Roman Thompson joke across the cramped impromptu gallery became the raucous dinner-etiquette of crows. Alma still hadn’t blinked. There was no way to quit the field with honour, so reluctantly Mick struck what he hoped was a pugilistic stance as he went on the conversational offensive.
“But you’ve not, though, have you, Warry? How are these especially for me, particularly Charlie Chaplin made of World War One and watch-parts? What links me with Charlie Chaplin?”
Her seemingly lidless gaze swung to the ceiling as if in consideration, and then back to Mick.
“Well, you’re both much-loved symbols of a betrayed proletariat, and you both walk like people with explosive diarrhoea. So there’s that. But Warry, really, what’s all this about, this truculence? It wouldn’t be that you’ve formed your opinion after seeing only the first six or seven pieces, would it?”
Widening her mill-wheel eyes enquiringly, Alma awaited his affirmative reply so that she could kick off at him and somehow make her random, disconnected paintings his fault. Fortunately, this time Mick was ready for her.
“Warry, you’ve completely underestimated me, as usual. I’ve seen the first eleven.”
Belatedly, it struck him that this sounded as though he’d watched a school cricket team. He could perhaps have phrased it better and yet felt the basic point was sound enough. The corners of his sister’s mouth, however, steadily migrated to the region where her ears were last reported.
“Oh, yeah, right. The first eleven. So you’ve not seen number twelve?”
That dreadful smirk. What did it mean? He said that no, he hadn’t, and the rictus became even broader, to the point where he feared that the top of Alma’s head would separate and slide off slowly, falling with a wet thud to the nursery floor. She aimed one blood-dipped fingernail towards a point behind him on his left, and with heart sinking he turned to confront the exhibition’s twelfth display.
A by-this-point anticipated ballpoint tag announced the large acrylic work as <em>Choking</em> <em>on</em> <em>a</em> <em>Tune</em>. Mick’s own sandblasted features following his accident at work filled the enormous canvas top to bottom, edge to edge, a post-apocalyptic landscape with a peeling nose and a surprised expression. Watering eyes, wet blue and aggravated red, were aerial views of toxic puddles sunk in a corroded junkyard face. The vivid orange dust that the collapsed steel drum had breathed all over him submerged the portrait under swarming cayenne pinpricks, sore and fiery, carefully applied in pigment that he later learned was not only the earliest available source of the colour but was also in itself fatally poisonous. Dots of fire-opal teemed on a ground-zero physiognomy in speckled rivulets, in rust swirls eddying around and in between pink discus blisters, dolly-mixture pustules ranging in size from full stops to bullet points erupting from the chemically abraded epidermis, each bump bulging from the surface and accentuated with a vanishingly minute fleck of highlight Chinese White on its meniscus. Understandably, Mick found the picture hard to look at, painful in all its painstakingly depicted paining pain. It was a shocking image, certainly, of striking technical proficiency, but it seemed heartless like the flayed black shoulders of exhibit seven. With a sick pang of familial disappointment he was almost ready to consign his sister to the same chill gulag of disdain where he had almost every other soulless and attention-seeking modern British artist already confined and on a diet of their own shoes, when his attention was seized unexpectedly by something in the constellated pimples fanned across the doppelganger’s cheeks and forehead. He leaned closer. It was almost certainly his pattern-finding faculties at work, like when you got those snarling leper-monkeys in mahogany, but there existed something tantalising in the texture of the raw depicted skin with its precision re-enacted burns. Annoyed now, he leaned closer still.
The painting opened, flowering with new planes and perspectives like a stupefying pop-up to enclose him. Nose perhaps ten inches from the picture it became apparent that the tiny cerise boils and intermingled motes of caustic tangerine hid pointillistic Seurat miniatures, entire scenes emerging from the inflamed dermal mist. Below the portrait’s horrified right eye, the back yard of his childhood home swam into mottled definition, where on the cracked checkering of the constrained enclosure’s upper level his mum Doreen sat in profile on her high-backed wooden chair, caught in the act of popping something small into the baby-bird mouth of the dressing gown-wrapped infant balanced on her lap. Spreading across the shaven area above the painted face’s upper lip, a russet-dusted bubble wrap of blistering resolved into a vista of almost ecclesiastical solemnity, with to the left his tearful mother passing the limp form of her dead-looking toddler to the worried worker leaning from his lorry’s cab there on the right, one of the lifeless bundle’s bare legs dangling poignant in the central philtrum. The visage’s jawline was from ear to ear a necessarily distorted overhead view of the makeshift ambulance’s route from Andrew’s Road to Grafton Street, with Regent Square now centred on the dimple of his chin, across the Mounts to York Road and the hospital, this last a reproduction on the left jowl detailed and complete down to the birdshit-crowned bust of Edward the Seventh which adorned the building’s northeast corner. It was for the brow with its receded hairline, though, the broadest unobstructed space in view, that the most striking vignette was reserved: the hot rose stipple and corrosive ginger peppering arranged into converging lines, perhaps the upper corner of a room where a firm-jawed girl of approximately ten wearing a fetid boa of dead rabbits was somehow suspended, reaching down with one hand to the viewer. Startled, Mick recoiled, pulling away, and everything immediately melted once more into boiling acne.
He was back, back in the room, back in his body and no longer with awareness part dissolved in an impressionistic rash of citrus polyvinyl. Backlogged sensory answerphone messages received during his absence flooded in like Virgin broadband offers, the olfactory grapefruit tingle of whatever Alma had used on her hair that morning and Bert Regan’s laughter, ugly as an airlocked drain. Bright afternoon light toppling through the west window sparked a fire of detail, bald spots, single earrings trembling on a lobe, or T-shirt slogans fading in the mind and cotton blend alike. Eyes blinking as if to expel the smarting residue of imagery he turned back to his sister, standing with one hip dropped and angora arms tangled together, clocking his reactions with the lead eyes of a Nazi lab assistant.
“So, then, Warry. Warts and all. Is that what you were going for?”
She sniggered, for once with him and not at him.
“It’s not like I had a lot of choice. You were a man made out of warts. But still, this could be a new trend in portraiture, capturing people when they’ve just had burning shit thrown in their face. Though actually, that might have been how Francis Bacon worked, now that I think about it.”
Fairly sure that Francis Bacon was the person some believed had really written all the works of Shakespeare, Mick was nonetheless unclear about the relevance of facial injuries and so said nothing. Fortunately, before Alma could interpret his enduring silence as a sign of ignorance regarding modern art, she was distracted by her thespian associate Robert Goodman, shouldering his way through the surrounding press of bodies to present Mick’s sibling with a sheaf of pages printed out from Wikipedia and a glower of generalised resentment which allowed no clue as to its origins. The strange old woman that his earlier childhood tormentor had become inclined her massive rained-off bonfire cranium in the direction of the plainly discontented actor, her blast-pattern eyes grown larger while at the same time somehow retracted, pulled back into crater sockets. He realised that he’d been saved by the arrival of a victim more mouthwatering, more in the way of Alma’s primary prey.
“Why, Bobby. We were just this moment talking about likely inspirations for the work of Francis Bacon, and now here you are. Is this random handful of litter you’re holding for me?”
The gorgon Gielgud’s mouth, badly lagged piping at the best of times, was briefly fishhooked sideways at one corner in contempt.
“This, for your information, is the stuff you asked me to find out at the last minute, about William Blake’s connection to the Boroughs. You said if I didn’t that you’d never speak to me again.”
Accepting the loose paper bundle, Alma showed the hurt performer method-school concern.
“Bobby, I’m sure I never said that. Was that what your voices told you?”
“I do not hear voices.”
“Voices? Bobby, no one said that you hear voices.”
“Yes they did! You did! You said it just now. I just heard you say it.”
“Oh. Oh, dear. The doctors were afraid that this might happen …”
By this time already inching imperceptibly away, Mick took the seasoned player’s speechless indignation as a natural break in which he could announce that he was popping outside for a cigarette. Granting permission with a nod, his sister only paused in her psy-ops manoeuvre to demand that he not run off with her lighter, which he promised not to do before remembering that it was in fact his.
He crabbed towards the open nursery doorway with its breeze-breath, squeezing once more past the front edge of the inconvenient table on which rested Alma’s shrink-rayed Boroughs, pressed uncomfortably against its western boundary. Irritating as this was, it did present a further opportunity to inspect details overlooked during that first jaw-dropping presentation, and he found himself examining afresh the scaled down area surrounding Doddridge Church. Just up from the anachronistic Chalk Lane turret with its witch’s hat, he found firstly the church itself and then his current whereabouts, the erstwhile Marjorie Pitt-Draffen dancing school down at the bottom end of Phoenix Street. In keeping with the model landscape’s combinatory chronology, despite the old red-lettered sign above the door proclaiming the school’s terpsichorean tradition, the front windows were those of the later nursery, thin Rizla tissues with the scene within described on their faux glass in watercolour miniature. In this instance, Mick realised, you could actually make out the table upon which a tinier reproduction of this tiny reconstruction was just visible. Feeling a little nauseous he dragged himself away from the exhibit, as he did so noticing for the first time the scrappy note taped to the table’s forward edge. There was no number but the artist had at least made a half-hearted stab at titling the dollhouse slum, even if that was only with an unimaginative tag which read <em>The</em> <em>Boroughs</em>. Shaking his head ruefully, he made for the fresh air.
Outside, inhaling a too-sweet first quarter inch of cigarette, it struck him that all the surrounding flats and maisonettes, diminished by their distance from him, were almost exactly the same size as those inside the gallery, the bygone buildings caught in the wrong end of Alma’s telescope. Those unknown people briefly treading the far balconies, bag-burdened widows shuffling and stout men in premature string vests, were similarly dwindled to the scale of Airfix Royal Fusiliers – they’d never made a box with stems of huddling civilians – and he was surprised to note that the degree of personality which he attributed to these remote pedestrians was hardly more than he’d allow a plastic figure of equivalent size. Seen from a long way off his fellow human beings were reduced in meaning and importance, not just magnitude, with their unguessable perambulations become finger-puppet dramas, toy parades enacted only for the entertainment of a bored observer. It occurred to him he’d always had this feeling, unexamined until now, that far away was fictional. Perhaps in time, too. He supposed this was how almost everybody saw things, without being consciously aware of it. He didn’t know if all that other life and that other experience would be remotely bearable if people actually considered it to be as real, as valid, as their own.
Above, amidst scudding vanilla floss on Cerulean Blue, a shifting and elastic flock of starlings momentarily assumed the outline of a single bird. It was a more ingenious effect than anything seen thus far at the exhibition, although he’d admit that the last item had both impressed and unnerved him. Glancing back across his shoulder at the nursery’s picture window, he construed the riotous jumble of attendees visibly contained within its bordering frame as an art statement in itself, perhaps a lurid study by one of those vicious Weimar stylists like George Grosz or somebody like that. He could see Alma as she stood attempting to console or further condescend to an offended-looking Robert Goodman and beyond her made out the malevolent old ladies, definitely sisters he decided, whom nobody seemed to know, both standing listening and nodding eagerly as Roman Thompson and Melinda Gebbie laughingly recounted something which involved extravagant gesticulation to the weathered anarchist’s unconvinced boyfriend. Taking a last few fugitive puffs on his greatly truncated cigarette, as though before the scaffold, he corkscrewed its stub into the damp grass at his feet, deciding that he should once more retire within since Alma’s effigies weren’t going to castigate themselves.
<br>
Through the propped-open entrance, window-lensed air slapped him with a warm, ethereal flannel. Tacking through the scrum along the forward edge of the obstructing table, essaying a path of tight diagonals that took him past Dave Daniels, late arrivals he identified as Ted Tripp and Tripp’s shrewd and saucy lass Jan Martin, plus a hangdog and trail-dusted figure who Mick thought might have been Alma’s dealer, he arrived eventually at the point where he’d left off, a little way along the nursery’s northern wall. Pointedly trying not to look at item twelve’s industrially scoured facial landscape, he turned his attentions to the largish landscape-ratio pencil crayon drawing on its right.
This time the scrawled, perfunctory label was taped to the plain frame’s lower spar and simply read <em>Upstairs</em>. More accurately it read <em>Upstars</em>, a tiny letter ‘i’ and a directional dart of blue biro added underneath the misspelled title as a hasty and corrective afterthought. All this untidiness, he realised, was beginning to upset him. Having previously had only limited experience of the phenomenon, he’d hoped for more from serious culture. More professionalism. Though it wasn’t actually his area of expertise he felt his sister must be showing Art up somehow, making it look more like fly-tipping than the prestigious social institution he’d assumed that it was meant to be. Already miffed with item thirteen after brief perusal of its messy caption, Mick lifted his gaze to the wide-angle piece itself and found it near infantilising in its wondrousness; in the proportions of its marvel.
The frankly celestial view presented was as if the viewer gazed along the length of a gargantuan boulevard or hallway, broad and high enough to lose a town in and appearing to run on forever, desperately pursuing an escaped vanishing point. His reeling spatial equilibrium recovering, he realised belatedly that he was looking at a monstrous and impossibly enlarged Emporium Arcade, with distant bounding walls that rose, tier upon tier, towards a glass train-station roof wide as the Amazon. Through this, replacing weather there were complex geometric figures, massive and irregular in dotted white lines against blue as though a manual for atmospheric origami. Other than this vertigo-inducing ceiling, the vast corridor appeared to be made out of wood. Pine planking of extravagant dimensions stretched away to the remote convergence of the background, with at intervals what looked like outsized horizontal picture-frames, a grid of bevel-bordered holes filling the staggering expanse from edge to edge. The closest of these apertures had one end of its oblong visible in close-up at the picture’s bottom centre, the restricted glimpse down into it revealing only setting jelly, stained glass, or perhaps some novel combination of the two. Out from the roomier of these containing rectangles, a half-mile off along the indoor avenue, rose trees that were preposterously magnified, a silver birch scaled up to a sequoia with the badly drawn eyes of its bark now those of a leviathan. The work achieved immensity in the contrasting placement of almost microbial human figures to supply the necessary agoraphobic size and distance, sparsely strewn flea-circus individuals in dreamlike stances like the hybrid offspring of Delvaux and R.S. Lowry. Closest to the lower foreground and thus most discernible, two children stood on the raised wooden far edge of the nearest floor-hole, gazing off away from the observer and surveying an interior infinity. The smaller of the pair he recognised from the blond curls and tartan dressing gown as his own infant likeness, last seen via the medium of chronic dermatitis in the previous image, seated on his mother’s knee in their back yard. The taller urchin was the little forehead girl, also from item twelve, identifiable by her skinned-rabbit scarf. A far light wet and white drenched the extremities of the huge gallery in sloppy dazzle.
Almost every colour was a layered glaze of others in a wordless palimpsest, with this fastidious technique swiped openly from the superior crayon work of Alma’s pal Melinda, as his sister had often attested. The depicted great hall, once seen, made the tiny nursery in which it was exhibited seem even more cramped and oppressive by comparison, with a typhoon of elbows and the aural carpet-fluff of conversation hyphenated by Ben Perrit’s tape-looped laugh, an Ancient Mariner on nitrous oxide. Taking a last glance at the bright landing and its liberating endlessness, he shuffled to his right between some fellow connoisseur sardines and scrutinised the next two offerings, both narrow portrait-aspect slats of polychrome hung one above the other. Uppermost was exhibit fourteen, and frowning at the exercise-book tag affixed beneath it, this time with the blue ballpoint fading to nothing mid-word before it resumed in red, revealed the title to be <em>An</em> <em>As</em> <em>odeus</em> <em>Flight</em>.
Dear God, the thing was <em>all</em> in coloured biro, all one foot by three of it, and quite a disconcerting thing it was. Mick had an inkling he remembered Alma telling him about this piece when she was working on it sometime around last September, saying that she’d managed to track down a source of the immensely satisfying multi-coloured biros that had been her chosen medium during childhood. She’d complained that these days anything in coloured biro would most likely be considered as Outsider Art, although she thought this term a middle-class evasion to avoid having to speak of Nutcase Art which, meant admiringly, was her preferred description of the genre. In the case of item fourteen, Mick thought that she definitely had a point. The person who’d laboriously tinted this imposing image, graded scribble over graded scribble, burnished until every hue became a sucked-sweet sticky gemstone, shouldn’t be allowed to go outside. The most disturbing thing about it was that it resembled an accomplished illustration from a nineteenth-century children’s book, albeit one conceived and executed in some maximum security environment of either Hell or Bedlam. From the glass roof in the exquisitely doodled upper background to the pale wood floorboards in the lower, Mick deduced that this scene was apparently occurring in the same unlimited interior space as the preceding panorama, as though the whole numbered sequence of seemingly unrelated pieces had decided to resolve themselves into a linear story of a sort, a ludicrously grandiose wordless comic strip albeit one with precious little in the way of continuity between its monster panels. At least this one had an actual monster in. Down at the bottom a small group of people, mostly children, stood about what looked to be one of the old-style workmen’s braziers that Mick could not recall with any accuracy when he’d ceased to see around. Two of the kids, he thought, were his own toddler avatar and the mysterious girl with the necrotic necklace from the last two pictures, although these were very small and, as in item thirteen, faced away from the percipient. Four other children were in view, all unidentifiable, accompanied by a more sombre and ever so slightly bigger figure which appeared to be that of a strange old woman in a bonnet and black apron. Like him and the rabbit-wrapped girl, all these had their backs turned, gazing both up and away towards the unbelievable monstrosity that all but filled the picture’s further reaches. Mountainous in its incomprehensible dimensions, this was a grotesque three-headed horror sat astride a low-slung dragon creature only slightly less appalling than its hideous rider. One head was that of a picador-crazed bull, while balancing it on the other shoulder was a snorting ram with curled horns like black ammonites, if ammonites could outgrow whales. The central cranium belonged to a crowned man of startling ugliness and apoplectic rage, the overall proportions of this triple-headed dragon-jockey having something of the dwarfish to them. Naked, in one fist the furious abomination clutched a lance on which streamed rivulets of filth, a sharpened barber’s pole of shit and blood that scratched the cloud-high ceiling glass with its appalling tip. Mick thought that there seemed something biblical about the tableau, albeit a bible where the schizophrenia was unambiguous. He shuddered inwardly and moved on to the piece beneath.
It was another one in portrait ratio if the portrait’s subject were a lamppost, a long plunging slot of fruit-gum colours in tart sherbet light. Almost predictably by this point a close view revealed the medium as cut or powdered glass, a palette that Mick recognised from the upmarket mineral water bottles in his big sister’s recycling bin. A sugaring of tinted crystal had apparently been glued to what he thought must be some sort of paint-by-numbers outline on the board or canvas underneath, with clear glass over painted colours where presumably hues were required for which no readily available commercial match existed. After some few seconds of adjustment to a grainier focus he became aware that he was looking at a steeply-angled Spring Lane as seen from its lower end, a waterfall of grimy and unrinsed milk-bottle grey with vivid Perrier weeds between its paving slabs, below a scintillant and flame-blue sky of smashed Ty Nant. Placed in the middle ground approximately halfway up the archery-slit composition was a pride, a murder or a parliament of children dressed in glittering real ale browns, too tiny for identifying detail but most probably the same grubby ensemble that had featured in the piece above. Crouched nervous in the foreground, in their number and essential colouration matching that of the kids further up the hill, was a sextet of rabbits with crushed bicycle reflector lights for eyes. Indeed, a glance at the perfunctory blood-biro scrawl beneath the work confirmed that <em>Rabbits</em> was its title. Mick quite liked it. He thought that for once he could discern the picture’s meaning and intention: Alma had removed a slice of their neglected neighbourhood and turned it into a church window, a poor man’s church window made from fight-dashed empties and yet no less a receptacle for saints. Or possibly she’d just meant that the district had a lot of bottle.
Exhibits sixteen and seventeen were both in black and white, which he found came as a relief after the battering his rods and cones had taken from the previous pieces. Both were relatively small, perhaps A4 if that was the same paper-size he thought it was, not quite so gangly as foolscap nor yet quite so squat as quarto. High up on the nursery wall and side by side above a large and sumptuous scene in oils immediately beneath, Mick had to go up on his toes to see them properly, considerably more work than he felt should be expected of the public at an exhibition. The first, on the left side, was a pen and ink-wash halftone illustration, something from a children’s annual that had been hallucinated by a child running a temperature, its amateurish subtitle declaring it to be <em>The</em> <em>Scarlet</em> <em>Well</em>. Down in its lower reaches, sheltering below a low brick wall in what appeared to be someone’s back yard, were the by now familiar half a dozen ragamuffins, closer to the viewer here and thus more easily deciphered. Other than his infant self and the kid with the roadkill garland there was a small girl with glasses and a serious demeanour, a tough looking older boy with freckles and a bowler hat, a little roughneck having features not dissimilar to the young lady with the rabbit salad, and a tall and decent-looking kid who had the bearing of the sensible one from the Secret Seven or the Famous Five. The entire group were crouched, all peering up with understandable alarm into the blind white heavens visible beyond their brick wall’s capstones where a nightmarish array of forms seemed to be tumbling through the sky, streaming a vapour of grey after-images behind them. At the top, eye-damagingly small and far away, a horse-drawn milk-cart somersaulted through some eight of nine reiterations, while below a hurricane of multiple-exposure dogs, cats, hymnbooks, fishwives, gasmasks, cigarette cards, teddy boys, prescription glasses, dentist’s chairs and cutlery cascaded inexplicably through empty space, a weather of post-war ephemera. Something about the presence of the children made the vista seem more wondrous than unnerving, an excited sense that this would be a sight to see.
Immediately to the right was item seventeen, identified by its toe-tag as <em>Flatland</em> and comprising what Mick thought to be a mezzotint, pressed from a copper plate with lines scraped on its uniformly textured surface to reveal a realm of smoky, granulated masses held in place by startling blanks; by shell-bursts of chalk white. A trio of the juvenile delinquents from the previous picture stood near-silhouetted at the centre front, two of them small with one of these most likely his own infant likeness, and the central figure there between them that of the much loftier and more Dickensian youth in trailing overcoat and bowler hat. Beyond them, smouldering malignantly against a background that he realised was a view down Bath Street at the block of maisonettes on Crispin Street, was a dispiritingly massive fuming vortex, a slow and appalling gear in the movement of purgatory which intersected, as though insubstantial, with both the dark buildings that it nested in amongst and their unwitting residents revealed by cutaway within. Seemingly caught in this nocturnal maelstrom were what first looked to be dismal scraps of rag that on examination proved to be instead the husks or emptied skins of hapless individuals, punctured humanoid inflatables with all their bone and tissue filling gone, forgotten washing left there to disintegrate on an infernal spinner. The three children under a black firmament had something of spectators at a bonfire in their manner, although none of that exuberance. An air of desolation hung about the image, as if rather than a guy everything good was burning, going up in delicately stippled smoke.
Separate voices leaped and dived like flying fish in the acoustic swim around him, the room’s colours more intense for a few moments’ concentration on a world of monochrome. While he was still attempting to reorient himself, Rome Thompson’s feller Dean materialised beside him as if poured into such empty space as was available.
“Mick, look, you know your sister? Mick, it’s not me saying this, it’s her, you know that don’t you? Well, she says you better not have lost her fucking lighter, ’cause she wants it back. She says if you’ve not got it then she’s going to plasti … what’s it called, that thing the German in a hat does to dead bodies? It’s not spasticate, it’s …”
“Plastinate?”
Dean looked delighted. “Plastinate, that’s it! She’s going to plastinate you and make you exhibit thirty-six, but that’s just if you’ve lost her lighter. She’s a cow, your sister, isn’t she? I bet that it was fucking horrible when you were growing up. So, have you got it, like, her lighter?”
Mick could only get as far as “It’s not …” before giving up beneath the weight of several decades’ psychological abuse and simply handing over the requisite object. With a sweet and pitying smile, Dean pocketed what was now pretty obviously Alma’s property and drained himself from the coordinates he’d occupied, a clockwise bias to his motion in accordance with the Coriolis Effect. Unable to even manage a disgruntled sigh, Mick focussed his attentions on the large and lavishly-framed colour-field of piece eighteen, directly underneath the brace of black and white works.
<em>Mental</em> <em>Fights</em>, the label said.
“Oh, fuck me,” Mick said in reply, beneath his breath.
In oil paint and gold leaf, with an aesthetic probably on loan from Klimt, two giants clad in robes of dazzling light-on-water white were duelling, in a vast arena that was still somehow the Mayorhold, with titanic snooker cues big as the channel tunnel. Hair white as his raiment, one of the enormous figures stood contorted, caught in motion with his blue-tipped weapon on the backswing and behind one brawny shoulder. His colossal adversary stumbled back from the projected point of impact, an arterial spray of golden ore suspended in the air to trace the crumpling trajectory. On teeming balconies of a Mayorhold inflated to a stack of Coliseums, stadium multitudes of tiny cowboys, roundheads, chimney sweeps and medieval friars cheered on the immense contestants and loaned their depicted bout its sense of crushing scale, the monumental thunder of its violence. The brawl’s grandeur, undercut by its brutality, was that of a bare knuckle contest between monoliths in a pub yard. Shaking his head admiringly at the eight-carat gore staining the garments of the combatants, he realised belatedly that these were two of the peculiar gowned carpenters from <em>Work</em> <em>in</em> <em>Progress</em>, with which Alma’s exhibition had commenced. Was this whole show, despite the lack of any clear association between its wilfully disparate components, meant to tell some sort of story? One where characters’ appearances were spaced so widely in the narrative that this made any sense of cause, effect, or continuity impossible to grasp without a roadmap much too large to ever be unfolded? Furthermore, if this story was his, as Alma claimed, why did he recognise just intermittent bits of it?
His perusal of the exhibition thus far had arrived now at another of the concentration-gallery’s corners where continuing necessitated a right quarter-turn before commencing his traverse of the day-nursery’s east face, a modernistic climbing wall on which his sister’s works were untrustworthy handholds standing between mental equilibrium and intellectual freefall from a dizzy height. Touching the void he launched on the next leg of his precarious expedition into culture, with the first protrusion being item nineteen, <em>Sleepless</em> <em>Swords</em>. Relatively simple, a line-drawing in what might well have been lithographic crayon, it recalled the <em>Daily Mirror</em> editorial cartoons by David Low he just about remembered from his childhood, with stark moral points conveyed in easily deciphered symbols and the robust, unassuming style of a boy’s picture weekly. Alma’s version, neither topical nor unambiguous, portrayed a dark and saturnine man fast asleep in his four poster bed there at the hectic, bloody centre of a battlefield. From the proliferation of pikes and peaked helmets in the carnage circling the sleeper it appeared to be a conflict from the Civil War, which made the slumbering figure – clad, on close inspection, in black armour rather than pyjamas – very probably Oliver Cromwell. All around him frantic men impaled each other in the musket smoke and horses stumbled in their own intestines, sketched with soot and limned with gunpowder, while through it all the Lord Protector snored and snuggled. Mick was unsure if the scene implied that Cromwell was unconscious to the suffering of which he himself was the epicentre, or if, rather, all of this relentless butchery and these blood fountains were his dream.
Beneath this modestly sized composition, both the scale and stylings of exhibit twenty made it seem a mantelpiece upon which item nineteen merely rested. Much more complex than preceding offerings, the central image in fixed charcoal with bright orange accents was completely overwhelmed by an illustrative trim of Delft tiles, an area of carbon black and spitting flame contained within an ornamental fireplace. The picture at the heart of the arrangement was a landscape of stone chimneys and thatched rooftops, ruggedly evoked in crumbling strokes and all ablaze with licking tongues of nectarine, whereon two burning naked women danced ecstatically, long hair curling above them on the choking updraft. Striking as this pyrotechnic vista was with its restricted palette, it bore no perceptible relation to the seemingly far less incendiary continuity delineated on its tiled surround. Here, in dilutions of rich cobalt, was a linear progression of illuminated moments that commenced at the top centre with a square of solid midnight ink, as if to represent the darkness of the womb before the detailed childbirth of the scene thereafter. This was followed, clearly with an eye to its own cleverness, by a vignette of the now-infant boy sprawled on his mother’s lap beside a fireplace that was itself decorated with Delft tiling, chronicling events in the life of a ludicrously tiny Christ. The next depiction showed a sickly youth sat on a church pew between older men in eighteenth-century dress, eyes fixed on a lace handkerchief which hung suspended as if fluttering down from heaven. Tile by tile the illustrated life progressed, with here a mounted young man in a foggy grove confronted by a ragged girl with great luminous eyes, there the same man somewhat older as he led his steed across rough, snowy ground to an inviting hall that waited in the winter dark, its outline hauntingly familiar. After a few moments’ furrowed bafflement Mick recognised the edifice as Doddridge Church and realised that the serial drama he was following must be the life of Philip Doddridge. He read on through marriage, children and bereavement to a final view, just to the left of the frame’s upper middle, of a fragile man and woman as they lay together in a room with foreign furnishings, both ill, the man perhaps already dead as indicated by the unrelieved blue night of the next tile, its darkness now that of interment rather than conception. Only when he peered at the appended label in red biro which revealed the title of the piece to be <em>Malignant</em>, <em>Refractory</em> <em>Spirits</em> did he start to fathom a connection between its account of a dissenting clergyman and the two gleefully incendiary females, pirouetting on parched thatching and only constrained by their elaborate biographic border.
Starting to experience a mild conceptual concussion, Mick migrated a pace further south along the gallery’s east wall until he reached exhibit twenty-one. Identified in steadily deteriorating crimson as <em>The</em> <em>Trees</em> <em>Don’t</em> <em>Need</em> <em>to</em> <em>Know</em>, to his relief this was a single image, once more in a spindly portrait ratio and rendered in acrylics, blacks and whites and a glum rainbow of minutely differentiated greys. Flanked by some of the by now familiar anachronistically attired children, though he noticed that his own infantile semblance was not amongst them, loomed another of his sister’s horrors. Terrifying travesties of nature previously inconceivable were, he acknowledged, for some reason something which she’d always been particularly good at since she’d made her reputation one tentacle at a time, adorning all those S.F., fantasy and horror paperbacks during the 1980s. This particular grotesque appeared to be a really horrible variety of sea-serpent, disastrously released into a winding urban river very similar to the Nene, where there was clearly insufficient room for it. Rearing from slow and murky waters into the nocturnal black, atop a wavering neck thick as a water main, an elongated skull like a Gestapo staff-car sprang the bonnet of its upper jaw to bare appalling shipwreck teeth, snapping in bellicose frustration at the jubilant quintet of ruffians who for some reason levitated in the narrow picture’s upper reaches, each accompanied by several fainter copies of themselves. The creature’s face, with a coiffure of stinking waterweed and snail-flesh eyes that gleamed from sockets deep as wells, was the distorted countenance of an embittered and malign old woman, bellowing her hate and rage and loneliness into the night. It was another wildly inappropriate Enid Blyton illustration, as was item twenty-two just to the right of it.
Titled <em>Forbidden</em> <em>Worlds</em> in scrawl that paled to an unpleasant serum pink the further to the right it got, this, like its predecessor, was a study in acrylics with a silent movie colour scheme, albeit this time in landscape proportions. It portrayed a barroom scene as told to Hogarth or Doré by a mid-bender Edgar Allen Poe, a world of screaming abdabs where he was obscurely pleased to find his toddler self had made a reappearance. Still in his plaid dressing gown he cowered with the other small boy from the earlier paintings at the picture’s front, behind a massively rotund and gaudy form which, even from the rear, could only be the late, lamented local troubadour Tom Hall. The bar beyond, transparently what the two little lads were sheltering from, was populated by a temperance campaigner’s nightmare, an inebriate demonology. To one side a distraught and weeping man apparently made out of boards had deep runes gouged into his arm by the belligerent knife-wielding female holding him, while nearby yet another wooden man writhed half-emerged from the room’s floor, trodden back down by jeering hobnailed drunks. The ghastliest of the assembled barflies wore a toothless mouth across his forehead, mucous bubbling up in the inverted nose beneath and dazed eyes blinking from his jowls. A purgatory with an extended license, an eternal lock-in or an hour never ending that was anything save happy: could this really be the way that his teetotal sister thought of public houses, as menageries of horrid cruelty and impossible deformity? Although when he considered the pubs Alma had frequented he conceded that she had a point. He took another short step to his right and almost toppled headlong into the obliterating depths of item twenty-three.
The babble of the room withdrew, was drained away in a retreating surf. Mick stood stock still before the picture like a man paused at the mouth of a wind tunnel and afraid to move. He knew what this was; knew before consulting the identifying label where the pink ink ran out halfway through the second word before resuming in green. This was the Destructor. Seen from overhead, a curving arc down to the lower left was all that told onlookers they were witness to a mercifully incomplete view of a dreadful chimney, limitlessly vast so that no canvas, no imagination, could enclose it. Smouldering impasto streamers of sienna and burnt umber, so thick that they teetered on the brink of sculpture, spiralled out from the industrial crater’s rim towards its unseen centre, the immense vaporous masses turning slowly, an annihilating nebula of shit. As dismal as the curling bands of encrustation were, it was in the gouged chasms trapped between these rills where dread resided. Here were ribbons of flat detail, cringing under towering oil-paint tsunamis as they swirled away to off-screen immolation, brown oblivion. Here were sweetshops, schoolyards and Salvation Army trombones sliding inexorably into a hell of nothing, horse-drawn coal carts with their load on fire and dancehall couples plunged, still bunny-hopping, into an asphyxiating midnight. Hopscotched paving slabs and starched white barbers, monkeys and their organ-grinders, drunks and monks amongst the smashed debris at the perimeter of this relentless junkyard singularity in its attempt to drink the world, or at least that part of the world within its economic reach. In the smog-maelstrom people, animals and their splintered environments were circling detritus, unintelligible suds locked into the decaying orbit of a sink-trap abyss. Pram armadas and pools coupons black with optimistic kisses, florid union banners, cinema seats flensed or pissed on, swans and singlets in a rubble waterfall down cancellation’s smokestack throat. It was the past; a reservoir of fleeting incident, a mode of living that had been made abject and was now cremated, irrecoverably lost to ash in a bonfire of the humiliations. This, then, was the toilet everything had gone down.
It was too big, too unanswerable. It would require another cigarette, as much for punctuation as anything else, which would mean prising back the lighter from his sister. Turning round to look for her he found himself once more confronted by the scaled down district on its tabletop, an ant farm scraping by on aphid subsidies. This prospect from the east yielded a gambler’s fan of miniaturised rooftops, breaking waves of slate descending vanished Silver Street and Bearward Street, emptied into the placid tide-pool of a Mayorhold sleeping off its lunchtime ale through the eternal painted afternoon. A quarter-inch-high Vesper scooter with one wheel off stood in Bullhead Lane propped by a yard-brush, and old men in shirts and braces sat on doorsteps scowling like demoted gargoyles. For all of its manufacturer’s uncertainties, Mick was approaching the conclusion that this was the exhibition’s most compelling and straightforward artefact, ship-in-a-bottle streets which captured and preserved the near-evaporated neighbourhood more perfectly than all of the oblique surrounding canvases. It certainly evoked the air of psychological serenity, the secret, lazy, golden idyll that had been peculiar to places with no status left to lose. It left him with a feeling that the world he could remember was still safe somewhere, the polar opposite of the sensation inculcated in him by the terrible mephitic vortex he now had his back to. Spotting Alma over in the nursery’s northwest corner near the caustic blister painting he was just about to see if he could get his lighter back, perhaps by offering one of his offspring as security, when his glance settled on the strip of paper fastened to the diorama’s edge, approximately opposite the similar tag that he’d noticed on the platform’s further, western side. Whereas that had <em>The</em> <em>Boroughs</em> written on it, which he’d thought to be the model’s title, this scrap was marked with the single word <em>Mansoul</em>. The odd name rang a distant bell, somewhere in the next diesis of remembrance, but otherwise was unfamiliar. Had Alma been unable to decide between two designations and so hedged her bets? Or had she just forgotten she’d already titled it? He’d have to ask her, if only to demonstrate that he was paying close attention.
By the time he’d inched his way back past the last ten or eleven exhibits to where she stood in conversation with Dave Daniels, he’d decided to combine his mention of the reconstructed barrio’s conflicting nomenclature with his crack at getting back the lighter, an unlikely gambit which to his surprise worked like a charm. Far better, even, given that charms never worked at all.
“Look, Warry, there’s a sign on one side of your model where it says <em>The</em> <em>Boroughs</em>. May I have my lighter back? And on the other side it says <em>Mansoul</em>. Perhaps you could explain.”
She grinned and said “Of course I can”, then handed him the lighter and continued talking to Dave Daniels. Making for the door before she realised what she’d done, Mick was delighted. He felt that he’d reached a new level of understanding in his dealings with his sister: when you forced her to be arsey over two things at the same time, her aggression systems couldn’t handle the extended load and would short circuit. If through radioactive accident she should ever become gigantic and embark on a civilisation-threatening rampage, he’d be sure to tell the government and military so that they could bring her down. Still chuckling inappropriately at the thought of his own sister, seventy feet tall and blundering into power cables, he went out triumphant to the bright blue afternoon.
Thumbing the wheel and sparking up he sucked his cigarette’s far end to sullen scarlet life, tipping his head back to expel a Chinese chimera of writhing grey towards the Willow Pattern duotone above. After confinement with so many laudanum-infused interpretations of the locale, its reality of peeling window-frame and unkempt verge, no matter how impoverished in brick or memory, sang with a bruised and toothless joy. He breathed the postcode’s dandelion-clock atmosphere, the rolled-sleeve license of a spot in forced retirement from geography, the consolations of exclusion in the certain knowledge you were no longer expected to do or be anything. Dust too was a mantle of privilege. Across the way his gaze rolled down the incline of the car-park entrance to where forty years before had stood an alienating Cubist playground and, a decade earlier still, the traffic-free paved entry into justifiably defensive-sounding Fort and Moat streets, under siege by an aggressively forgetful 1960s. That was where his mad great-granddad and his cheerily barbaric Nan had started out, before she’d moved to Green Street after losing her first baby to diphtheria. It would have been down roughly the same passage that the fever-cart had rumbled like bad weather when it called to pick up its slight burden. Sticky strands of his genetic history were still there under several eras’ tarmac skims, pink and black liquorice allsorts strata. That was history, a series of ill-judged resurfacings and random superimpositions. Narrowing his eyes against the sun he flattened different layers of time to an incongruous composite, in which reprieved infant mortalities rode a Picasso concrete horse between the pre-loved autos sleeping in their bays.
Behind him he heard the faint emphysemic wheeze of the day nursery’s door and turned to note Ben Perrit and Bob Goodman, evidently previously acquainted, simultaneously fleeing the externalised interior of Alma’s head. Both men were laughing, probably because the bleary poet had made a cold start from nowhere and the club-faced actor had been unable to keep from joining in. Mick raised a hand in greeting but the gesture fell uncomfortably between the retrospectively racist buffoonery of <em>How!</em> and Hitler’s prototype high five, so halfway through he turned it into smoothing back a lock of hair which hadn’t been there for some time. Still chortling, the most upsetting children’s party double act imaginable made its way across the alopecia turf towards him.
“Alright, Benedict. Alright, Bob. Had enough?”
Ben Perrit’s rolled eyes were those of a bolting horse.
“Aha! If that’s the kind o’ things you see when you stop drinkin’, I don’t fancy it. Ahahaha!”
His thespian companion’s countenance appeared to be attempting to throw itself to the ground from off a stubbly chin, too vexed by human disagreeability to carry on.
“Do you know what she had me do, your fucking sister? She made me go out and dig up all this stuff that she already knew about, just so she’d have a reason to put an insulting picture of me in her show. I tell you, we’re as flies to wanton boys where she’s concerned.”
Nudged out of school for truancy before he’d really got to grips with Shakespeare, Mick was unsure how boys and their flies were relevant to this and merely nodded, as a safety shot. The ambient mania of Ben Perrit, fortunately, flooded in to fill any resultant voids left in the conversation.
“Ahahaha! She’s done me in crayon, at the bottom of the sea. I dunno if she’s saying that I’m not even washed up, or if she means I’m in the drink. Ahaha! ’Ere, Mick, I was going to give ’er this but never got the chance. Will you see as she gets it?”
The frequently barred bard held out a sheet of folded typescript, which Mick solemnly accepted without having any idea what it represented. Poetry stuff, art stuff, something of that nature.
“ ’Course I will, Ben. And don’t be offended, how she drew you. You ask me, you got off light. You saw that one of me where I was just a bag of pimples?”
The disgruntled actor curled a lip that everyone had thought was curled already, shaking his anti-Semitic cartoon of a head in sympathetic disapproval.
“Why d’you think she does the things she does? Is she just trying to start a fight, or what? She can’t be doing it because she needs the money.”
Mick considered this, absently staring at the day-care centre’s window. He could see the two old ladies that he’d noticed earlier, both standing cackling and nudging one another by the picture with the tiles around it. Dragging his attention back to Alma’s motives, he said the first thing that came into his head.
“Perhaps she’s hoping for a dame-hood.”
Goodman scoffed incredulously.
“What, by doing paintings? Dame-hoods, they’re for stage professionals, Dame Judi Dench, Dame Helen Mirren, Dame Diana Rigg. What, so now Alma thinks that she’s an actress, does she?”
“Actually, Bob, I think they’re for women in the arts? There’s Nellie Melba, Edith Sitwell, Vera Lynn; there’s Vivienne Westwood, Barry Humphries. It’s not just for actresses.”
The veteran thug-impersonator, ever the professional, performed the first real double-take that Mick had ever seen and after that stayed silent as if processing this unexpected information. There followed an awkward interlude wherein Ben Perrit asked if Edith Sitwell had invented toast, then laughed uproariously, then said that he’d meant Nellie Melba. It seemed like a natural break, and Mick shook the men by the hand while reassuring Perrit that he’d not forget the folded sheet for Alma. The pair sauntered off past Doddridge Church in the direction of Marefair, the poet laughing and the actor audibly remarking, “Dames! Just when you think you’ve got ’em figured out …” before their outlines came to bits in Chalk Lane’s poppy camouflage.
Experiencing an upsurge of baffled affection, Mick concluded that the area’s nonsense was as vital a component as its love, its drink, its violence. Distant traffic vied with a crow altercation further along Castle Street. Stifling a momentary sense of trespass he unfolded the page that Ben Perrit had entrusted to him, and began to read.
<quote>
<em>This is a kingdom built from absences</em>
<em>The spaces between buildings, empty air</em>
<em>Where different birds sing now</em>
<em>Its landmarks prominent if nothing’s there</em>
<em>This is the principality of gone</em>
<em>With boundaries mapped in ink that disappears</em>
<em>A history of gaps</em>
<em>And peopled by names unpronounced for years</em>
<em>This is my page that the blank margins ate</em>
<em>Till only the eraser scars remained</em>
<em>An empty bag of holes</em>
<em>A silence by quotation marks contained</em>
</quote>
<br>
Mick felt even less qualified in having an opinion with regard to poetry than he did with regard to art, but he quite liked the shape and gait of it, a limping buffalo with one leg shorter than the others and a dignity especial to its stumbles. He refolded the sparse document and slid it into a hip pocket where it wouldn’t crumple, then, extinguishing his cigarette, turned once more to the nursery’s open door. It was a shame. He might have warmed up more to culture if it didn’t act quite so compulsory. Ah, well. There couldn’t be a lot more of this maddening exhibition left to see. Sighing resignedly he went inside to face the turpentine-thinned music.
<br>
This time, re-immersion wasn’t such a shock. The atmosphere appeared to be unwinding as the afternoon wound on, the crowd unclenching to become more navigable. As before, he was resolved to pick up from the point where he’d left off, and so retraced his clockwise path around the mirage-cluttered toddler corral. He could have gone the other way, gone widdershins, although that wouldn’t have seemed right: you didn’t find your place in books by flipping back through from the end, and Mick was already convinced that Alma’s barrage of illustrative non-sequiturs was meant to represent some sort of story, perhaps one so big and complicated it required an extra mathematical dimension to narrate it in. Or possibly her magnum opus had gone critical and he was looking here at the ballistic aftermath, at the blast distribution pattern of his sister’s weaponised and fissile head. In either case there was a tale being told, if only to the bomb squad analysts. Negotiating speed-date social interactions with a dozen people he’d already greeted, like distant acquaintances repeatedly encountered in successive supermarket aisles, he made his way around the central tableau-laden trestle to a station just beyond exhibit twenty-three, about three-quarters of the way along the pretend gallery’s east wall. With the infernal gob of the Destructor drooling sparks and toxic vapour-trails at the peripheries of vision to his left he did his best to concentrate on item twenty-four, the cryptic watercolour abstract that was directly in front of him. Its crank-green marque read <em>Clouds</em> <em>Unfold</em>. Perfectly circular, there was a saucer-sized disc of Byzantine hue and ornament placed just off centre in a large quadrangle of off-white stained by parabolas of ghostly dove-grey, strokes and blotches so translucent they were hardly there at all, visually weightless to a point where they could scarcely be called masses. In the corner at the bottom left a scalloped triangle of thin dishwater had collected, while a mackerel feathering of dusty floss intruded from the upper centre. Just beneath this, mounted vertically, was hung a torn-off owl’s wing or perhaps a wavering finger-tower of interstellar gas. At intervals, against the trackless ivory expanse there clustered flecks of darker neutrals, microscopic meteor shoals lost in a bleached or colour-reversed cosmos, while around the ball of blue-gold filigree were traced sperm-pale elliptical trajectories that … oh. It was an eye. It wasn’t abstract after all. Filling the area from edge to edge it was a Luis Buñuel close-up of an eye, but not one set in flesh. This was an orbit tooled from Portland stone, with a faint down of graven eyebrow creeping into view above and an abbreviated sweep of cheekbone to the left below. It was the non-functioning optical equipment of a statue and the satellite-ellipses were unblinking lids, those of a witness to catastrophe who could not look away. The barely-visible fanned plumage to the right fell into resolution as the shadow-trap to one side of the nose’s bridge, a chiselled bluff that dropped away into the dustbowl socket. Arbitrary specks revealed themselves as texture, a stone epidermis weathered and eroded by two hundred years of rain and airborne grit. And at the picture’s focus, in the gilded iris was a medieval planetary orrery picked out by auric threads against nocturnal indigo, the flight of moon or comet plotted with sun-coloured lines, projected through fixed sapphire time. It was the watch movement of a known universe, caught in an opaque and forever awestruck gaze. Mick noticed as an afterthought that the work’s basic composition was almost identical to that of the preceding shot, the dying bird’s eye view of an incinerator’s maw that simmered with particulates. He wondered if this elevating latter piece was placed in close proximity to the distressing former as a kind of ready antidote, the way it often worked out with dock leaves and stinging nettles. Feeling, at least, that the painting had gone some way to restoring his own equilibrium he sidled right into the canton of exhibits twenty-five and twenty-six, hung one above the other in the northeast corner.
Panoramic landscape over lofty portrait, the paired images were in a T-formation though were not apparently connected other than by nearness of location. On the narrow slice of wall between the two a single piece of notepaper was taped. It had dual titles written on it in erratic emerald, with both ascending and descending directional arrows indicating which was which. To say that it looked casual was to understate the point. Rather, it looked like an inscription on the inside of a public toilet door, and Mick hoped Alma could get through the final ten or so descriptive jottings without adding a big cock and its obligatory three crocodile tears of liquid genetics. The slim letterbox proportions of the topmost rectangle of art appeared to contain still a further minimalist abstract, although having just been misdirected by a sculpture’s eyeball Mick elected to look closer before he came to a verdict. Following the label’s raised green spear back to its point of origin he learned that this piece had been called <em>A</em> <em>Cold</em> <em>and</em> <em>Frosty</em> <em>Morning</em>, though the reasoning behind this choice was far from obvious. The picture was a Cinemascope view of mottled fog, a cobweb field that might have been achieved by taking a dark background tone comprised of black and brown and dark viridian and then applying overprinted fibres in a bleached and tangled fuzz, possibly with a sponge. Nose nearer to the cloudy marbling he could make out that the shade visible between the matted strands was actually a hyper-realistic study in acrylics which detailed an undergrowth of intertwining stems and branches, curling leaves reduced to nibbled fractals at their edges, all of this fastidious work concealed by the obscuring steam of down. It struck him that he might be looking at a bush or shrub horrifically enveloped in the spun threads of some huge arachnid, an albino strain if one went by the colour of its fine suspension bridge secretions. Was it one of Alma’s monster paintings but without the monster? Only when he noticed a small, pearly slug of pigment raised up a few millimetres from the canvas and connected to the budding twig above it by the slenderest of white lines did he realise that the architect of this fibrous enigma was not some mutated spider but, instead, a minute toothpaste-squeeze of silkworm. Having noticed this unusually industrious individual it was still almost a minute before Mick was made aware that there were dozens, hundreds of the dangling, glinting casts standing out from the surface, an infinitesimal and boneless multitude become a grain, a patterning of wet and glistening corrugations. It was marvellous and, at the same time, made his skin crawl. It encapsulated one of those electrifying moments when nature revealed itself in all its alien and appalling splendour, all its bio-shock. Realising that the foliage barely noticeable under the occluding fluff must be a mulberry bush, he felt a modest pang of crossword-puzzle satisfaction at deciphering at least the title of the work, despite having no clue how it related to the exhibition’s overall direction, or indeed to anything.
Stooping a little, hands on knees, he transferred his attention to exhibit twenty-six, immediately beneath. Instantly recognisable as figurative illustration with the straightforward appeal of a classic children’s book delineator, perhaps Arthur Rackham, this was more Mick’s cup of dormouse tea. Tracing the drooping arrow upward to its source he learned that this one was called <em>Round</em> <em>the</em> <em>Bend</em>. In soft and faded pastels, pinks and purples, greens and greys, an outdoor scene was conjured with a wall of towering conifers in the far background, underneath a churning and rain-bloated sky which nonetheless seemed colour-pregnant, immanent with spectra. Unkempt grass rolled undulant between the tree line and a rush-fringed river, slowly winding like some tranquilised constrictor through the bottom of the picture nearest to the viewer. Here, standing with great composure on the bank and almost to her waist in the sharp reeds, was a bird-boned old lady in a cerise cardigan and navy skirt, her lustrous brunette tresses now an ash-slide. Though it clung more tightly to the skull beneath than in her youth, her face still had a loveliness; was wry and clever, luminous with fearless curiosity. Mick noticed that his sister had made a mistake, a stumble with the aquarelle that made it seem as if the woman had crossed eyes, but this did not detract from the hushed, church-like atmospherics of the drawing. There the old girl waited, relatively small down to the picture’s lower right, head cocked politely like the listener in a doorstep discourse, a means-tested Alice pensioned to a fallow wonderland. Emerging from near stagnant waters to the left and reaching almost to the picture’s upper border, patently the reason for the tall and vertical proportions of the frame, was the deformed river-leviathan from item twenty-one. The stalk of its distended throat surged up and up out from a rippled lace of pond-scum, robed in slime, thick as a redwood with the railway-carriage head precariously mounted at its top end, tilting in a compensatory drift like a cane balancing on someone’s palm. Deep in their sockets, whelks lodged in both barrels of a shotgun, the monstrosity’s malicious little eyes were fixed enquiringly upon its human interlocutor. Unnoticed in the earlier representation, Mick could now determine that the thing had hands, or fins, or something: splayed and spidery dactyls with discoloured webbing stretched between them, predatory umbrellas raised in front of the freshwater basilisk and gesturing as though in trivial conversation. Tugboat-grinding jaws hung open in mid anecdote and there appeared to be the rusted carcass of a child’s perambulator, snagged on a three-foot bicuspid by its handle, in amongst the dripping pelt of waterweed. The carefully pencilled depiction, blotted here and there by artfully positioned teardrop-damage, floating bubble-globes in which the soluble crayon details bled like spectrographs, glowed with an ambience that was hauntingly familiar and which Mick eventually identified from his few Alma-instigated juvenile experiments with L.S.D. The tingling lysergic apprehension of a morning world about to start, beaded with Eden, was as he remembered. So was the exciting and uncomfortable sensation that this was the opalescent anteroom of madness, granting access only to whispering corridors, sedative monologues and a cumulative estrangement from the ordinary, the familiar, and the dear. The still, prismatic scene insinuated that unearthly worlds and inconceivable experience might lie behind more faces in the crowd than were suspected, and that the agreed-on family-friendly Milton Keynes of mass contemporary reality may not be privileged. The frozen moment was a violet-tinted window on the overgrown margins of being, the outlying wilderness of phantoms and hallucinations that encroached, a mind or two more every day, on reason’s street-grid.
Having reached the east side of the nursery’s southerly extreme, Mick found another ninety degree swivel was required before he could continue. At his back the multitrack surround-sound of distinct and differentiated voices mixed down to one single unseen individual possessed by a demonic legion, a slurred chorus of phased glossolalia swirling in and out of audibility behind him as though on a shifting wind. He was beginning to find Alma’s show disorienting, a relentless fusillade of rarefied and unfamiliar feelings, an unhinging blown-fuse opposite of sensory deprivation tanks more like a psychiatric particle collider, his opinions and reactions decay products of aesthetic atom-smashing. Bracing himself, fearful of some new strain of highbrow malaria, he embarked on the penultimate walkabout stretch of his brain safari by examining the paired works furthest to his left of the south wall. Landscape-proportioned pieces big as family-sized cereal boxes and once more hung one above the other, twenty-seven over twenty-eight, while these were perhaps less imposing than the efforts that had come before, they were certainly no less enigmatic.
Item twenty-seven, labelled <em>Burning</em> <em>Gold</em> by its green scribbled afterthought, was not a new idea – Mick thought he could remember Alma telling him of an American named Boggs that she admired who’d first done something very similar – although the details of its execution were markedly different. A ridiculously enlarged (or perhaps inflated) reproduction of a banknote, straddling the fine-to-non-existent line dividing art from forgery and rendered in authentic-looking pen and ink, it seemed to be accumulating more absurdist details as he studied it. It was a twenty, with a copyright line at the bottom stating this year, 2006, to be its date of issue. Details of typography and serial numbers were identical to standard currency, as was the colouration and the general composition of the counterfeit’s elaborate illustration. Certain elements of content, though, had been transposed or altered. To the note’s left, as on normal money, a vaguely amphibious-looking Adam Smith faced right in profile, wrought from mauve engraving with a face of gentian dust, a topcoat and peruke of thumbprint whorls. The capitalist visionary, however, now found himself in a staring contest with a matching profile over on the right, where a comparably meticulous lavender bust of Alma’s pop-terrorist K-Foundation mate Bill Drummond had been added. Simultaneously serious and satirical, the Corby-reared Scot’s resolute gaze drilled into the architect of boom and bust’s bland salamander stare of self-assurance. There was clearly no hope of negotiation. In the centre-ground between the men, the customary diagram detailing eighteenth-century pin manufacture had been skilfully replaced by a rendition of what Mick knew from his sister’s testimony to be Drummond’s celebrated burning of a million quid up on the remote Hebridean isle of Jura, where George Orwell went to finish <em>1984</em>. Against a sphere of Spirograph complexity and finely hatched in tones that strayed from sepia to strawberry were four men in a ruined cottage. Three of them – Drummond himself, his K-Foundation partner Jimmy Cauty and their witness, the TV producer Jim Reid – shovelled crisp fifty-pound notes into a central conflagration, while the fourth, ex-army cinematic auteur Gimpo, captured the resultant cash-to-ashes alchemy on film. Superimposed in purple lettering above where it said “Bank of England” was the altered legend: “The division of opinion in slave manufacturing: (and the great decrease in the quantity of slaves that results).”
Moving on to item twenty-eight, just underneath, Mick thought that the idea of slavery might well be what connected the two juxtaposed exhibits to each other. With a title-note that read <em>The</em> <em>Rafters</em> <em>and</em> <em>the</em> <em>Beams</em>, the lower work was a brightly-embellished reproduction of an eighteenth-century sea-chart that had three-dimensional inclusions. Hanging slack across the canvas, linking the west coast of Africa to Britain and America, were heavy lengths of dirty and encrusted iron chain attached by rusted fastenings to the picture’s surface. He looked carefully for hidden ironies or meanings, perhaps subtleties concealed within the map’s antique background calligraphy, but there was nothing. The mixed-media piece’s statement was apparently as stark and simple as it seemed on first sight. The tea-stained cartography with its quaint flukes of spelling and its guesswork coastlines was a Western view of history, the map and not the territory, a construct that was never real except on paper, which would be revised, forgotten, superseded, lost, a mind-set that would crumble and disperse more quickly than the parchment it was written on. The chains, though, they were real. Chains of event that could not be undone, they would endure forever and have solid consequence long after all the plans and paperwork and trade routes that had forged them had been rendered obsolete; long after every other element in this specific image had returned to mulch and dust.
The next inclusion, twenty-nine, was hung alone and mostly executed as a choppy sea of riotous gouache. It had all the roughneck jostle of the music halls that Mick had seen, as recreated by the nineteenth-century English moderns. In the false night of a matinee, the viewer looked up from amongst a cheap-seat audience of jeering drunks towards the stage, the painting’s focal area, contained within the second frame of a theatrical proscenium arch. Against a threadbare backcloth with a crudely-handled copy of the front of All Saints Church smeared on it, funny-looking actors postured on a platform between balsa pillars or sat huddled on the short flight of broad wooden steps knocked up in front of this, painted to look like stone. The seated couple on the foreground stairs, an angry woman and a man clad in a garish yellow plaid, possessed a seaside Punch and Judy air in their exaggerated spousal animosity, squatting at opposite extremes of the same cone of spotlight. On the raised-up boards behind them, seemingly unnoticed, several figures dressed in period costumes that were all a uniform chalk white but otherwise historically mismatched struck attitudes of indignation or surprise with over-emphasised expressions on their floured-up features. Was this meant to be a supernatural tragedy, a Macbeth or a Hamlet with too many ghosts? Meanwhile, close to the onlooker, a herd of lewd and catcalling spectators looked on in ribald amusement, rage, or lechery. There was a messy proletarian energy that could get out of hand in the daubed light and beery gloom. The picture’s hurried green appendage, with its sticky tape detaching at one corner and a consequent diagonal tilt making it even more difficult to fathom, read, unhelpfully, <em>The</em> <em>Steps</em> <em>of</em> <em>All</em> <em>Saints</em>. Mick was unsure what to make of it. The seated pair, dressed for the 1940s, did not look that different from the rough-and-ready crowd that heckled them. Their anguish and discomfort, then, seemed somehow both contemporary and more real, rather than merely acted. If that were the case, though, the pretended spectres strutting and gesticulating from behind them bordered on the inappropriately comical. The picture was disturbing in its weirdness and its incongruity, the sense of something very personal between the duo on the steps that had become a melodrama, a performance, exposed to the disapproval of a ticket-buying public, squirming in the limelight and mocked even by the special-effect spooks. It was a private moment in the open air that had been brought inside, into a rowdy auditorium to entertain an undiscriminating mob, displacement as unsettling as an indoor crow. Making a show of themselves, was that what the piece was saying?
Still turning the painting over in his forebrain, gingerly like a grenade or hedgehog, Mick moved on towards exhibit thirty. As he did so it occurred to him that, from above, he and his fellow gallery-goers must resemble tokens as they inched around the oblong room’s edge to avoid the table in its centre, pieces on an outsized board game of the kind that had tiled his insomnia of the previous night. He glanced around the room, attempting to determine which amongst the other patrons was the Scotty dog and which was the top hat. Over in the far corner, near the frightful shot of Mick’s scoured features, Alma was apparently receiving some kind of a telling-off from Lucy and Melinda, very possibly about the cruel and yet ingenious portrait they were standing next to. Good. It was no more than she deserved. The captive population of the nursery had thinned a little in the hour, hour-and-a-half since the doors opened, although not enough to make his progress on the maddening Monopoly path any easier. By the wedged-open door Bert Regan looked to be wiping the floor with both Ted Tripp and Roman Thompson in a raucous laughter match, a less cerebral version of thrashing two chess opponents at the same time. Elsewhere Rome’s boyfriend Dean stood with Dave Daniels, looking at the brawling giants as they laid about them with their ore-splashed snooker cues. Dogs were arguing offstage, out in the Saturday-slumped Boroughs. Shifting his attentions back to item thirty, he moved to the next square of the circuit to receive his forfeit or establish a hotel. He didn’t pass Go or collect two hundred pounds.
The thirtieth work, in landscape aspect and enclosed by a slim silver frame, a glassy watercolour on smooth-surfaced white board, was called <em>Eating</em> <em>Flowers</em>. More than any other single piece it harkened back to Alma’s earliest employment as a science fiction cover-illustrator and was in its way breathtaking, if you liked that kind of thing. The setting, a colossal arcade that appeared to be the one from exhibit thirteen although in an advanced state of dilapidation, had tropical vegetation growing through its mossy flooring, this domestic jungle reaching for a collapsed ceiling open to unprecedented constellations, at once an interior and exterior view. Mile-long lianas, twined into electrical flex, trailed from what corroded spars remained of the remote and devastated roofing, chromed by unfamiliar stars. Moths of prodigious size flapped damply through the astral twilight, warping planks caught fire with orchids and this terminal Elysium was only backdrop for the startling apparition thundering across the lower foreground. His physique spare as an anatomic diagram, his skin with the translucency of greaseproof paper, an old man without a stitch on and hair foam-white like a cresting wave raced down the overgrown parade in pounding Muybridge strides. Eyes bulging with the strain of his velocity, his cheeks distended, brilliant petals spilled from his crammed mouth to stream away behind him in a tulip contrail. On the sprightly ancient’s shoulders, riding him, a luminously perfect baby girl was saddled, molten blonde curls smearing to a comet’s bridal train as she and her feverish steed traversed that final forest. Their extremes of age made allegorical interpretations unavoidable, a freshly born world carried on the back of its exhausted predecessor or the old year and the new both late for an appointment with an as yet unforeseen millennium. It was some sort of race, perhaps the human one, projected through the fourth dimension, through the continent-colliding and empire-erasing medium of time. It looked like an unbearable amount of sweat and effort, this compulsory and rushed migration for the porous borders of a foreign future where nobody spoke the language. While it may well have been Mick’s own art-fatigue which coloured the perception, he thought that the old boy and the species that he represented looked like they were dying for a good sit down. He was himself about to hasten that eventuality by hurrying to the next presentation in the sequence, when a voice beside him asked “ ’Ere, ent you Alma’s brother?”
From Mick’s right, standing in front of item thirty-one with something in the quizzical tilt to her dust-grey hairdo reminiscent of a wading bird, Bert Regan’s mum looked at him sideways. He found himself liking her immediately based solely on the gristle harp twang of her accent and the way she held her handbag like a skating-judge’s score. She’d had him from the first dropped aspirant.
“That’s right. I’m Mick. I know who you are. I was talking to your pride and joy a little while ago, so that’s where I got all the details from.”
She pulled a face.
“Me pride un joy? That’s me best crockery. What did you wanner talk tuh that for?”
Mick’s laugh came from somewhere deeper in his stomach than his laughter generally issued, from a microscopic Boroughs in his biome where the intestinal fauna transposed vowels and had an inconsistent policy on consonants. His instantly familiar new acquaintance joined in with her own accordion burst of kippered cackle, shooting a long-suffering glance towards her tattooed and guffawing ginger offspring as he bantered by the nursery door with Tripp and Thompson, a reunion with former shipmates from a pirate decade that had gone down with all hands some time before.
“Ooh, ’im. Well, take no notice o’ what ’e sez. Iz arf sharp, or else iz up ter summat. ’Ere, but what abayt yer sister, all these pictures? She’s not right, your Alma, is she? I see that big one she’d done o’ you, made ayt o’ pimples. And that’s yer own sister what’s done that, not someone what don’t like yer. Shockin’. No, a lot of what she does, well, it’s a marvel, ennit? Just not very flatterin’.”
He was enchanted by her, thin and grey and local like the twist of smoke curled from a chimney’s sunset brickwork, charmed by her affectionately raucous corvid squawk so much like Doreen’s, full of coal and comedy. She’d been a looker, you could tell, and not so many years before.
He found himself obscurely wishing that he could have known her then. Perhaps he had, or had at least caught sight of her when she was younger, something to account for the extreme sense of familiarity that he was currently experiencing, based on more than her iconic status as a Boroughs woman, he felt sure.
“No. Flattery is one of the few things you can’t accuse her of. Here, that’s a Boroughs accent you’ve got, ain’t it? Did you used to live round here? I’m sure I’ve seen you somewhere.”
She allowed her jaw to sag until her lips were pursed reproachfully, regarding him from under lids half lowered as if he were intellectually unworthy of whole eyeballs. It was the expression which his mum had used so often when addressing him or Alma that he had to forcibly remind himself she didn’t always look like that. Bert’s mother tutted, more in pity than contempt.
“Well, ’course I’m frum the Burrers. Did yer think that I wuz frum the moon, yer gret soft ayputh? We lived up the top o’ Spring Lane, so I never got the slipper bein’ late fer school.”
When was the last time he’d been called a great soft ha’p’orth? A halfpenny-worth. He basked in the obscure abuse. It harkened back to a more civilised age where the harshest epithet was a comparison with recalled currency. Launched on a reminiscent torrent by the mention of her childhood home she carried on regardless.
“Ooh, it were a lovely place, the Burrers. That one o’ Spring Lane your Alma done, all ayt o’ glass, I think that one’s me fayvrit. An’ yuv got no cause for complaint, ’ow she’s done you. Not after the way she’s done me. No, a lovely place. Ayr dad lived down there, in Monk’s Pond Street, after we’d moved up tuh Kingsley. I remember when ayr William wuz only just walkin’, ’ow I’d take ’im dayn there, so as ’e could see where I’d bin brung up.”
Mick found himself stumbling in his attempt to follow her account. He thought she’d said there was a likeness of her somewhere in the exhibition, and had been upon the point of asking her about it when she’d thrown him with her mention of an unfamiliar name. His forehead corrugated.
“William …?”
Appling her cheeks she shook her head, correcting herself.
“Do you know, I never can remember, you lot, yer dunt call ’im that. Bert, what you call him. ’E once ’ad a teacher call ’im that at school, an’ ’e got stuck with it. Round ayrs, ’e’s Bill or William.”
Oh. Right. Yeah. Yeah, he remembered Alma saying something now, something to that effect: a football match at school; a teacher with a momentary lapse of memory who’d shouted the first working-class name he could think of and doomed William to a life of Bert. And there was something else about that story, wasn’t there? Some complementary detail to the anecdote that for a moment now found scrabbling purchase on the waste pipe of Mick’s memory. Something about … Bert, Bill, something about … no. No, it was gone, dislodged to fall away into the cancelled black of the forgotten, irretrievable. He was about to ask Bert’s mum, his newfound poster-girl for fortitude in deprivation, if she could recall his lost component of the tale, but at that moment their delightful conversation was truncated by the unselfconscious bellow of her son, acoustically equivalent to a wild pig loose at a wedding.
“Come on, Phyllis, ’e’s a married man, and yer not on Boot’s Corner now. Let’s get you ’ome, before yer show us up.” Bert’s luncheon-meat complexioned features split into a gap-toothed laugh, lecherous and suggestive even if discussing double glazing, a Sid James cascade of gurgling innuendo without object. His mother’s head wheeled like an antique Spitfire, nippy and surprisingly manoeuvrable, eyes looking bullets up and down her offspring’s fuselage.
“Me show you up? Yuh’ve bin embarrassin’ me ever since I ’ad yer. Since yer first drew breath yuh’ve saynded like a busted lav, and yer that ugly that they ’ad a job to tell yer frum the afterbirth. We’d got it ’ome and christened it before we realised. Show us up? I’ll gi’ you show us up, yer dibby bugger …”
Turning back to Mick she cut off fire from her machine-gums, offering him a radiant and endearing National Health smile.
“I’m gotter goo, it saynds like. It’s bin lovely meetin’ yer. I ’ope tuh see yer agen sometime.”
And with that she banked away into a sparking, chattering dive, closing the distance between her and her doomed but still chortling quarry, rubicund with giggles, a Red Baron.
“You wait till I get my ’ands on you, yer useless load o’ rubbish. Don’t think you’re too big for me to dash yer brains in with a brick while yer asleep!”
A whirling dust-storm of ferocious energy and neutral tones she rushed out through the open nursery door past the respectful cower of Roman Thompson and Ted Tripp, ball lightning following a draft, driving her errant son before her out into the disappearing neighbourhood. Mick shook his head in wondering admiration at this sighting of a genus thought extinct, this social-housing coelacanth. Watching her go, he found himself awash in poignancy from out of nowhere, ludicrously inappropriate for someone that he’d only managed a three-minute conversation with. It had felt more like meeting with a crush from junior school, that meaningless vestigial flutter of the heart, the sweet and pointless sadness for alternate universes that would never happen.
Mystified not for the first time by his own internal workings, he returned his commandeered attentions to the task of getting through the five remaining pictures in his sister’s gauntlet of enigmas. Picking up where he had so engagingly left off, he occupied the space vacated by Bert Regan’s mum – Phyllis, he thought that was what Bert had called her – just in front of item thirty-one. <em>Cornered</em>, apparently, according to its dangling viridian afterthought. A gouache work, it occupied a canvas roughly two foot square and seemed in many ways to be a partner to exhibit four, <em>Rough</em> <em>Sleepers</em>, even down to their almost symmetrical positions close to either end of the long sequence. Both works were contemporary pub scenes and achieved their major visual effect by juxtaposing grimy monochrome with colour, though whereas the earlier piece contained one area of black and white amidst a field of riotous hue, the painting he was gazing at effected the exact reverse. An overhead view looking down upon a crowded front bar that Mick didn’t recognise, down in the bottom left a solitary figure had been rendered in bright naturalistic shades, a tubby little man with curly white hair seated at a corner table, while the beery mob that filled the scene around him, wall to wall and edge to edge, were executed in a palette of charred fag-end and urinal porcelain, fingernail greys. The colourless inebriate jostle, cheery even in their drabness, nonetheless seemed drained of life and of contemporaneity as though they were the happy dead, the Woodbine wraiths of a persisting past. The figure at the bottom corner in his modern tints and fabrics seemed excluded by the heaving press of ghosts, if they weren’t all entirely in his mind; if this were not a picture of a haunted man, sat in an empty bar, surrounded by a magic lantern pageant of the disappeared. If that were so, then the whole throng became a thick, guilty miasma somehow emanating from the single flesh-toned individual at his table, cornered by a horde of zombie social issues, by the past, by memory.
He inched a little further to his right, progressing westward in excruciating increments, a wagon-train with palomino snails in harness or a one man continental drift. This brought him up against the nursery’s west wall at its most southerly extreme. Just half of one side of the building to complete and then he could with honour make good his escape into a comfortingly artless world. Exhibit thirty-two, apparently entitled <em>The</em> <em>Rood</em> <em>in</em> <em>the</em> <em>Wall</em>, was similar in its proportions to the previous piece and proved to be the image which had prompted the irate departure of Bob Goodman earlier, or at least that was Mick’s assumption. Though the great majority of painters mentioned by his sister were obscure to him, he had at least across the years achieved familiarity at second hand with the peculiar work of William Blake, and recognised the piece before him as a kind of composite, a modified amalgam of the Lambeth visionary’s cryptic images. Predominating blackness, conjuring a subterranean and funereal ambience, was punctuated in the watercolour’s upper reaches by illuminated alcoves in which labelled likenesses presided like memorial statuary in a mausoleum. Leaning closer, he perused the names on tattered paper scrolls like Gilray dialogue-balloons: James Hervey, Philip Doddridge, Horace Walpole, Mary Shelley, William Blake and a few others, sombre and reflective, candlelit with colour in the cemetery dark. Their pious, downcast glances seemed to be directed, more in pity than contempt, towards the crouching, naked giant at the bottom of the painting, crawling wretched on his hands and knees along a stunted, lightless tunnel, bowed head weighted by a heavy golden crown. Mick recognised the figure, although only through the agency of an Atomic Rooster album cover he remembered, as Blake’s penitent Nebuchadnezzar. The damnation-shadowed features of the fallen Babylonian regent were herein replaced, however, by the asymmetric physiognomy of his sister’s much put-on actor friend, whom Alma seemed to employ as a stress-relieving executive squeeze-ball, a receptacle for her interminable gusher of abuse if Mick himself were poorly or on holiday. The only other element of the arrangement, something he did not specifically recall from Blake, was the rough-chiselled cross set into crumbling stonework at the painting’s centre, just above the grovelling monster but beneath the sympathetic audience of Gothic saints above. It didn’t seem to have that much to do with his own brief encounter with infant mortality, or even with the Boroughs, but then you could say that about the majority of the supposed works of art included in the heavily confined yet sprawling exhibition.
Feeling like an athlete superstitious about looking at the finishing line until they were right on top of it, he essayed an inexpert version of the military right-turn he’d learned at Boy’s Brigade and saw to his immense relief that there were only three more decorative hurdles between him and the propped-open doorway, between him and freedom. Better still, the first of these, which he was currently confronted by, was small and simple. On an insubstantial sheet of what looked very much like typing paper, tin-tacked to the nursery wall as if it were the work of a precocious child on parents’ day, there was a fluid and expressive pencil drawing with a wandering line as natural as April weeds. Not even bothering on this occasion to attach a separate label, Alma had just scrawled <em>The</em> <em>Jolly</em> <em>Smokers</em> at the top left corner of the piece itself, in chlorophyll. The drawing was a spindly and fragile detail of St. Peter’s Church, the front porch of the disused building with its honeyed stone and the black wooden ribcage of its roof, a strand of wheatgrass straggling from between the slabs outside its open entrance. In the shadowed recess a recumbent figure slumbered, trainer-soles towards the viewer and all other indicators of the person’s body-type, age, gender or ethnicity concealed beneath the slippery tucks and undulations of the unzipped sleeping-bag spread over them. Silvery graphite traceries uncoiled and trickled lovingly across the quilted contours, the implied form motionless beneath, digressing to investigate the intricate topography of each plump fold. The more Mick studied the deceptively spare composition, the more he found himself questioning his first assumption that this was a study of a homeless person, merely sleeping. With the bag pulled up and covering the face there was a mortuary aspect to the imagery which could not be ignored. In its veiled stillness, that of dream or of demise, the slumping shape inhabited a hesitating and ambiguous borderland between those states, much like the one suggested by that physicist who’d either gassed his cat or hadn’t. Mick could come to no conclusion other than an observation that, in disagreement with its title, the depicted scene was far from jolly and appeared to be non-smoking.
Moving northwards once more he progressed to the next picture, which he realised with a leaping heart was the penultimate exhibit. A square work in oils as spacious and resplendent as its predecessor had been meagre and without assumption, the attendant taped-on tag revealed its title as <em>Go</em> <em>See</em> <em>Now</em> <em>This</em> <em>Cursed</em> <em>Woman</em>. What at first appeared to be a maddeningly regular and even geometric abstract, the imagining of Milton Keynes by a despairing Mondrian, resolved on close inspection to an intricately-realised reproduction of a game-board, a generic layout on the Snakes-and-Ladders model of a lavishly embellished grid, each box emblazoned with a decorated number or iconographic miniature. He realised with a minor start that the game’s focus seemed to be the mink misfortunes of Diana Spencer, the familiar tabloid Stations of the Cross – sun through a thin skirt showing off her legs; posed at the gate with Charles; a coy glance up at Martin Bashir or her final public smile before the rear doors of the Paris Ritz – reduced to outsized postage stamps. The game-board layout, with its numbered spaces, loaned these incidental moments the uneasy sense of a relentless, hurtling linear progression to a predetermined outcome: an arrival at that final square, sooner or later, irrespective of the falling die, an outcome obvious from the commence of play or, indeed, from the opening of the cellophane-sealed box on Christmas morning. What had startled Mick was the unlikely coupling of board games and Diana Spencer, just as in his sleepless ruminations of the night before. It was quite clearly no more than coincidence and, now he thought about it, not particularly memorable at that. The idea of the blonde from Althorp’s life as a bizarre and fatalistic form of Cluedo was not that much of a reach, all things considered. Still, it had him going for a moment there.
Stealthily, he began to move toward the final lurid obstacle that stood between him and the gaping nursery door. Internally, he played a game where he and all the other gallery-goers were a surly crowd of culture-convicts, shuffling around the exercise yard, wondering if wives and sweethearts would still be there waiting for them on the outside after all this time. Unnoticed, hopefully, by the imaginary machine-gun towers that he’d by then positioned at the corners of the room, he inched towards the unlocked prison gate and genuinely gasped to feel the warder’s heavy hand fall on his shoulder from behind.
“Here, Warry? Have you got the lighter?”
Mick turned to face the dipped glare of his big sister’s headlight gaze, that of a sulky and uninterested basilisk who couldn’t be arsed turning people into anything except stone cladding. Alma seemed preoccupied and, worryingly, too distracted to insult him. Even in her mention of “the” lighter she appeared to have reclassified it as their mutual property and not an object that belonged to her alone, which in itself seemed to suggest a softening of policy. Was Alma ill? He fished inside a pocket of his jeans for the requested artefact. Handing it over, he felt duty-bound to ask.
“Warry? Is everything okay? You don’t seem quite your usual self. You’re being reasonable.”
Taking the lighter from him without any kind of thank you, which at least was more her style, his sister shook her hanging-garden head in the direction of the table-mounted model of the Boroughs, like one of the district’s rodents in that, famously, you never got more than six feet away from it.
“It’s this. It’s still not right. It isn’t saying what I want it to. It’s saying ‘Ooh, look at the Boroughs. Wasn’t it a lovely place, with all that history and character?’ All of the local photo-books I based it on are saying that already, aren’t they? This needs something else. Cheers for the lighter, anyway. I’ll bring it back soon as I’m done with it.”
Once more, there was that weird politeness and consideration. Alma drifted off, presumably to elevate her mood and smoke her way towards a resolution of her quandary. Drawing a deep breath in anticipation Mick turned his attentions to exhibit thirty-five, the show’s final inclusion, dubbed by its torn-paper tag as <em>Chain</em> <em>of</em> <em>Office</em>. Portrait aspect, once again in gouache, a full-length appraisal of a single figure on a ground of marvellous cascading green – the picture’s bare facts crowded in to fill Mick’s field of vision and prevented him from viewing its totality. Alone, the single-colour backcloth with its seethe of nettle, lime and peridot was overwhelming, an experiential bouillon taste of knee-high fairground, fumbling adolescent meadow, boneyard moss. The painting’s subject, standing with both arms raised in greeting or benediction, had a mayoral air in part bestowed by the work’s title and in part by the eponymous medallion hung about their neck. On close inspection this gunmetal gong appeared to be a saucepan lid, with its supporting chain having seen previous service dangling from the cistern of a lavatory. The multitude of references in the pieces thus far, whizzing past above Mick’s head, had made him feel like he was being strafed by Melvyn Bragg but this, at last, was one he caught; was one he recognised. The dented lid, he knew, was an allusion to the bygone Boroughs custom of appointing some disreputable individual as the neighbourhood’s own mayor, a pointed satire staged there on the Mayorhold at the site of the Gilhalda, the original town hall, to mock the processes of government from which Northampton’s earliest population was by then excluded. The self-deprecating nature of the tin-pot talisman itself was undercut, however, by the sumptuous robes in which that central form was draped, more gloriously decorated than those worn by any real-world civic dignitary. Around the hem there ran a border of meticulously rendered paving slabs, greying and cracked with jade grass in the seams, while up around the collar …
It was him.
The person in the painting, it was Mick. It had Mick’s face, perfectly captured even down to the smeared glaze of highlight up by his receded hairline, although after a few moments’ scrutiny it came to him that this ingenious verisimilitude was actually occasioned by the paint still being wet. The likeness, even so, was unmistakeable and, truth be told, atypically flattering. From the sincere blue eyes to the engaging smile Alma had made him look quite handsome, at least in comparison with all his earlier appearances throughout this showing, whether as a simpering toddler or as a burns ward admission with his features more eroded than the sphinx. If he’d known sooner that the entire exhibition would be leading up to this, he wouldn’t have been half so grumpy or ill-humoured in his earlier appraisals. Now, though, he felt guilty and uncomfortable, which almost certainly was the effect his sister had been hoping for, if he knew Alma. Otherwise she would have said something when she waltzed up to pinch his lighter a few minutes back, with him stood right here by the painting which mythologized him, which absolved her of all her foregoing cruelties. Since he was standing facing the west wall of the day nursery, the only one with windows, he looked up from <em>Chain</em> <em>of</em> <em>Office</em> and out through the smeared glass for a sighting of her, pacing, puffing, wearing even more tracks through the patchy turf outside, but she was nowhere to be seen. His first thought was that she’d been so distressed about whatever she believed was wrong with her miniature Boroughs that she’d had a breakdown and absconded: a faked death, a changed appearance, a disguising limp, a ticket to another town. No one would ever again meet with Alma Warren, the failed model-maker. While he was almost entirely certain this was what had happened, he felt that he should at least take a quick shufty at the gallery behind his back before he bothered to alert the media.
His sister, it turned out, hadn’t even made it as far as the nursery door before being waylaid by her adoring or deploring public. She was further off from it, in fact, than Mick himself, leaning against the table’s further, eastern side and glowering at her handiwork like a displeased Jehovah, albeit one who’d swapped his beard for lipstick, though each to their own, of course, and nothing wrong with that. More disconcertingly, she was flanked by the two elderly ladies Mick had noticed earlier and who’d been slipping in and out of view throughout the afternoon. One stood to either side of Alma as she loomed over the papier-mâché district, hunching like a monstrous slagheap with more slag to it than usual, ready to engulf the shrunken Boroughs in a devastating avalanche of turquoise fluff and bitterness. The old girls, spider-webbed with wrinkles and their exposed flesh the mud of a dried reservoir, seemed to be taking turns to stoop and mutter their opinions into alternating ears of the preoccupied and frowning artist, though Mick doubted that the advice of whichever woman was engaging Alma’s deaf side would be implemented. With her wrecker’s-lantern eyes fixed irremovably on the diminished alleys of her reconstructed world his sister didn’t look at either of the women while they spoke to her, encouragingly by the look of things, but would acknowledge their remarks with grave nods of the head. Incredibly, it seemed that not only was Alma for once listening to somebody’s opinion of her work, but that she also appeared to agree with them. The two were evidently loving every minute of their audience with the subdued and uncharacteristically compliant artisan. From deep within their creased papyrus sockets their eyes gleamed and sparked, hobnails on cobbles, as their wizened heads dipped one after the other to their whispering, well-mannered vultures pecking at Prometheus’s liver. Though what they were saying to his sibling was impossible to hear above the hubbub of the gallery, Mick thought it looked as though they were administering an excited pep-talk, urging Alma to stick with her vision and to take it further, carrying it onwards. Something like that, anyway. The biddies pointed jabbing crab-leg fingers at the model on the table, with the one on Alma’s deaf right side repetitively mouthing something that looked like “keep on” or “go on”, something with two syllables like that. And Alma nodded as if she were heeding counsel that was irrefutable, taking career instruction from two dotty-looking termagants who ninety minutes previously she hadn’t known existed. Still no closer to an understanding of his sister than he’d been, aged seven, when she’d shot him with that blowpipe, Mick turned back to <em>Chain</em> <em>of</em> <em>Office</em> to continue his inspection.
Having now recovered from the shock of realising that he was this ultimate exhibit’s subject, he was able to take in the painting’s other content, notably the splendid robe in which his sister had seen fit to deck her central figure. Hanging folds of heavy velvet were embroidered with exquisite threads of gold, a gilded crazing that resolved at a few inches from the picture’s surface into a meandering treasure-map of the terrain that Mick was born from. It was one of those charts that had three-dimensional bits bulging out from it, of which he was always unable to recall the name. He could see overhead delineations of St. Andrew’s Road and Freeschool Street, Spring Lane and Scarletwell as plunging pleats in parallel and Doddridge Church a decoration on the bias, burial ground compressing as it gathered to the pinch-points. It occurred to him that in the raised-up buildings and projections of a vanishing cartography, a bit like Alma’s problematic Boroughs diorama, she’d contrived this last piece to reprise all of the exhibition’s other works in small. He eyed the piece, squinted the gaud, and saw that his ennobled likeness sported tiny glued-on snail shells as links, one mottled spiral badging either cuff. He was absorbed in these calciferous adornments, trying to establish if they still housed mollusc occupants, when he heard the distinct Pacific cadences of Alma’s pal Melinda Gebbie raised above the background susurrus, and everything kicked off.
“Alma, you fucking asshole, don’t you fucking dare!”
Mick turned, from only idle curiosity, and found himself confronted by the single image from this viewing that he’d take away with him, the solitary tableau that was genuinely unforgettable. His sister, with a blankness of expression that was either innocent or guilty to a point past caring, saint or serial murderer, leaned forward over Marefair and Saint Mary’s Street, reaching past Castle Street and across Peter’s House to Bath Street. The old ladies huddling behind her hugged each other and performed a clumsy, hopping little dance. Lucy Lisowiec’s enormous eyes prepared to fire themselves across the room, accompanying her rising siren wail.
“Almaaaaaaa!”
Pressing a wavering tongue of blue and yellow from the flint-wheel of Mick’s lighter, Alma let it taste the simulated birdshit caked around the rim of her scaled-down Destructor. More-ish, evidently. Dribbling incendiary frills of indigo poured down the lampblacked chimney tower to its base with startling rapidity, sending up acrid and authentic billows of particulate towards the ceiling-mounted sensors as they did so. It all burned so fast, being constructed wholly from materials designed to do just that, and in his sister’s dawning look of apprehension it appeared that even she was unprepared for the appalling pace of the toy-town calamity she’d just unleashed.
A spreading gorse of conflagration engulfed Bristol Street and its environs, with the bijoux fever-cart and centimetre-high mare towing it into the mouth of Fort Street parched to curling smuts and gone upon the instant. Arson reflux scorched the narrow gullet of Chalk Lane and spewed annihilating riot-bile down Marefair, the anachronistic witch-hat turret on Black Lion Hill shrivelling unrepentant at the stake and twisted round with shifting scarves of gold. Infernal tributaries sluiced from long-gone Bearward Street to flood the Mayorhold with combusting vapour, tromp l’oeil sweetshop windows disappearing into light before the flickering translucence climbed the razor-cut of Bullhead Lane to Sheep Street, where ignition moved like scrapie through the paper flock. Hot orange devils swarmed on the crusader church, unravelling its steeple into sparks and levelling the thick-walled round down to a howling mouth red as a branding-iron, a blazing torus, pinkie ring of an apocalyptic angel. Mercy, bright and cauterising, stroked the wounded neighbourhood. In Marefair, Cromwell’s bunk at Hazelrigg House was made immolate among the millenarian tinder, shaved skulls you could strike a match on, cavalier plumes smouldering on pinpricked cornices. From the charred stump of Bath Street’s smokestack, searing ripples spread through the flea-circus district in dilating sapphire hoops, as from a shooting star fallen into a petrol pond. Incineration danced on Broad Street and Bellbarn, flash-vanishing Salvation Army forts and suffering no barber’s pole that it remain unlit. The Rizla laundry flapped like phoenix wings in Greyfriars’ central courtyard, damp with drizzled flames, while all along the crisping terraces six dozen public houses called last orders and submitted to a harsher temperance. Saint Elmo flirted with the upper reaches of Saint Katherine’s high-rise, jumped between laboriously fashioned television aerials on Mary’s Street in a peak-time transmission, sentimentally retracing the trajectories of a Restoration predecessor, and the martyring Niagara spilled down Horsemarket dragging a bridal gauze of choking fume behind. Cremating fancywork writhed briefly on Saint Peter’s architraves. Zero-gage holocaust accomplished in mere seconds an erasure over which the Borough Council had deliberated for just shy a century, deleting cobbled histories in its sheathing Catherine-wheel spray, no west wind this time to ensure that only the torched gloveries and milliners of Mercers’ Row or thereabouts would ever be regenerated. The short reach of houses on St. Andrew’s Road from Scarletwell Street to Spring Lane became an ashen Rothko bad day, by some fluke of thermal whimsy sparing only the Monopoly-sized premises at the line’s south extremity. Boys’ clubs and bookmakers, cottaging-friendly lavatories and corner dives were caught up in a pyroclastic flow from Regent Square down to the foot of Grafton Street, and Marjorie Pitt-Draffen’s dance-school on the current site of Alma’s exhibition spouted rolling white clouds from its open door in microcosm of the building it was modelled on and situated in. Sharp to the sinuses and tear-ducts, these at least elicited a lachrymosity that the more gradual demolitions of some several decades had failed to provoke. Fast-forwarded there on the tabletop a precinct of the heart was firestormed to oblivion in facsimile, its final music the repeated shrill of panicking detectors.
All of this had taken only moments, a rose of disaster blossoming and withering in time-delay, plunging the nursery into swirling opacity with everybody coughing, cursing, laughing, stumbling for the exit. Tasting a sour flinch of burning paper in the no-man’s-land dividing nose from throat, Mick blundered blind towards fresh air and freedom. On his way out he collided with a fogbound pit-bull on its hind legs that turned out to be Ted Tripp, the erstwhile burglar ushering his girlfriend Jan before him, both of them apparently more entertained than traumatised. Beside the doorway to the right the white-haired carpenter from item one looked back across his shoulder at the sputtering herd as it stampeded past, while on the left stood Mick himself in mayoral drag with his arms raised in what now read as an apologetic shrug: “Blame her. Nothing to do with me.” He staggered onto the comb-over turf outside, lank green locks plastered to the muddy scalp, trailing asphyxiating ribbons in his wake. Pressing the heels of both hands to his streaming sockets he smeared stinging moisture down across his cheekbones until he could see again.
The nursery entrance was still belching smoke and people into what was otherwise a pleasant afternoon. Murderous-looking maulers reassured each other that they were okay, asthmatic anarchists sat wheezing on the cusp of Phoenix Street, and Roman Thompson did his best to look compliant when his boyfriend told him that, no, seriously, this really wasn’t funny. Backing off in the direction of the Golden Lion on Castle Street, Melinda Gebbie helped a stunned Lucy Lisowiec to get a cover story blaming everything on unidentifiable street-drinkers into place, the latter gaping with that thunderstone-struck look that Mick had observed often on associates of his sister. Somewhere at his back he heard Dave Daniels say “Where’s Alma?”, and was just beginning to conjecture that the exhibition might have been intended as a Viking funeral pyre when through the smoking portal like a Halloween edition of <em>Stars in their Eyes</em> lumbered the reverse hedge-dragged artist.
Her eyes were like particle collisions, black matter decay trajectories descending to the chin from watery corners, and in her Sargasso hair perched huge pale butterflies of settled ash. Singed, ugly holes now perforated the new turquoise jumper, but then Mick supposed it would look pretty much the same after a week of Alma’s normal wear and meteoritic hashish-spillage. Smudged vermillion lips were stretched into a ghastly apprehensive rictus as she lifted sooty, blistered palms to her bewildered audience as though attempting to surrender.
“It’s okay. I put it all out. I’ll buy them another table. Or two tables if they want, how’s that?”
His sister was like Werner Von Braun trying to mollify senior Nazis after a V2 had detonated on the launch pad, simpering nervously and wiping blast debris from Goering’s frizzled eyebrows. She stood slapping her own bosom where a turquoise brushfire had rekindled, and it seemed to Mick that she had never looked more catastrophically deranged that she did at that moment. He was almost, well, not proud of her, but less ashamed. Then he remembered the old women who’d been standing behind Alma prior to her electing to employ the nuclear option, and who both were very definitely not among the emphysemic huddle of survivors on the fraying verge. Oh fuck. She’d finally killed someone, and when journalists swooped on her friends and family, nobody would affect surprise or offer testimonials to her quietness and normality. Striding towards her, Mick was only shocked that she had somehow managed to restrain herself for as long as she had.
“Warry, for fuck’s sake, where are those old women, the two that were standing next to you?”
His sister’s head revolved unhurriedly in his direction, that of a mechanical Turk anxious to persuade spectators that there was no cramped grandmaster dwarf crouched in her ribcage. Focussing a mildly shell-shocked gaze on Mick, her optic hazard-lights blinked stupidly amid the slobbering kohl, a breeding couple of stealth-jellyfish. She looked as though she might get round to working out who he was once she’d answered the same question in relation to herself. The weighted lids went up and down a few more times to no apparent purpose in the long space-shuttle pause before she spoke.
“What?”
Mick gripped her shoulder, urgently.
“The two old ladies! They’ve been here all afternoon. They were behind you when you made your sacrifice or whatever you thought it was that you were doing. They’re not out here, so if they’re still in there underneath a table, overcome by fumes, then …”
He tailed off. Alma was staring at his tightening hand as though she wasn’t certain what it was, much less what it was doing on her bicep. He withdrew it while it still had all its fingers.
“Sorry.”
She frowned at him quizzically, and he could feel the shift as he found himself in the role of babbling psychiatric liability while she somehow assumed the mantle of concerned clinician.
“Warry, Bert’s mum was the only old gal here other than me, and if she hadn’t already gone home then I wouldn’t have lit the touch-paper. I’m not a psychopath who wants to cull the elderly or something. I’m not Martin Amis. Have a look yourself, you don’t believe me.”
His eyes darted to the nursery door, still simmering. He knew from Alma’s tone, with absolute conviction, that if he should peer inside then it would be exactly as she said. There would be no half-suffocated pensioners collapsed in tragic bundles, nothing but the glowing Dresden mess and twists of drifting yarn that curled up from its squirming embers. He pictured precisely the two women who had definitely been there and now definitely weren’t and felt the same uneasy tingle in his upper vertebrae that he’d experienced when talking to Bert Regan’s mum, a breath of the uncanny on the barbered stubble at the nape. He thought it better that he not continue with the present thrust of his enquiry, and returned his gaze to meet that of his sister.
“No, it’s … no, it’s fine, Warry. I’ll take your word for it. I must have got mixed up. Here, you do know that this place probably has a connection to the fire station, don’t you? Did you want to be here when the engines came? Or was that why you did it, for the flashing lights and uniforms?”
She looked at him in earnest startlement.
“Oh, shit. I hadn’t thought of that. Come on, let’s fuck off somewhere else so that I can reflect on what I’ve done and feel remorse.”
Seizing his elbow she commenced to drag him across Phoenix Street in way of Chalk Lane, calling back to the smoke-damaged refugees still gathered on the nursery’s moth-eaten apron verge.
“Don’t worry. Everybody gets a refund.”
Roman Thompson’s chap Dean sounded as though he were at a philosophic impasse.
“But nobody paid.”
Towing her brother along the west wall of Doddridge Church, Alma considered.
“Oh. Well, in that case nobody qualifies. I’ll give you all a call next week.”
With that the Warrens absented themselves from the potential crime scene, sauntering conspicuously in their efforts not to look like fleeing perpetrators. Scuffing over listing pavement past the loaf-bronze meeting house both of them peered first at the stranded doorway halfway up the rain-chewed stonework, a moustache of flowers and grass along its sill, then at each other, although neither spoke. From the truncated strip of peeling house-fronts opposite crouched under the raised arbour of the designated castle grounds came muffled music that was summery and old, phased in and out of audibility by the continually shifting waveband of the breeze. “Don’t Walk Away, René” perhaps. Assaying branches overdressed in pink like gypsy bridesmaids, blackbird Schuberts hung their fleeting compositions on the grey staves that still ravelled from the nursery, and rattling around the curve of Mary’s Street a flaking ice-blue Volkswagen was for a heartbeat in beguiling contrast with the toffee fringes of the burial ground. Rounding the corner in the juddering vehicle’s wake, Alma and Mick mounted the undemanding run of steps and, without need for conference, agreed to park their ageing arses on the slab-topped wall bounding the chapel’s southern face.
It was a lulling bee-drone of an afternoon despite persistent violated squealing from the smoke detectors, now off on the church’s other side and therefore easier to ignore. Mick tapped a cigarette from his depleted pack and Alma passed his lighter to him without fuss. Its work was done, apparently. After a moment, goaded by the front-bar perfume of her brother’s exhalations, she elected to spark up her last remaining stick of dream-snout and got him to light it for her, leaning in and holding back her locks like petticoats beside a hearth. They sipped their neurotoxins in companionable silence for some little time before the speechless younger sibling thought of anything to say.
“Your pictures, Warry, what we just saw. There were lots of things I don’t remember telling you. You’d taken some creative licence, I thought, here and there.”
His sister smiled, becoming briefly radiant in something other than a cracked reactor sense, and crinkled up her nose self-deprecatingly.
“Yeah. Yeah, I made most of it up, but then I don’t see that it really matters who hallucinated what as long as the real story’s in there somewhere. Anyway, nobody’s ever going to know it isn’t what you said to me. It’s your word against mine and I’m an interstellar treasure.”
Mick laughed down his nose, in writhing fronds of vaporous chinoiserie.
“And what’s all this fantastic nonsense going to accomplish, Warry? Have you somehow saved the Boroughs, like you said that you were going to do? Will they rebuild it how it was when we were children and not put up any more Destructors?”
Still smiling, albeit now more ruefully, she shook her trailing willow-canopy of hair.
“I’m not the fairies, Warry. I imagine that the Boroughs will go on being ignored until somebody comes up with a half-baked plan they think might turn a profit, then they’ll plough it under, pave it over, get rid of the streets and only leave the names. As for incinerators and destructors, my guess is they’ll roll them out across the country. It’s the cheapest, dirtiest way of doing things, it doesn’t inconvenience anyone who votes or matters, and why interfere with getting on a hundred years of cross-Westminster policy? They started pulling this place down after the First World War, most probably because the Russian revolution had made keeping all of your disgruntled workers in one place look like a bad idea. They won’t stop now.”
As frequently occurred when she was off on one, Alma’s neglected reefer had gone out. Anticipating her requirements, Mick retrieved the lighter from his pocket and allowed her to suck the extinguished end of her hashish Havana back to angry ruby life, whereafter she resumed her diatribe.
“And even if they did rebuild it, down to the last doorstep, that would just be horrible. That would just do for buildings what <em>Invasion of the Body Snatchers</em> did for people. It would be some sort of deprivation theme-park. Unless you restore it how it was, with all its life and atmospheres intact, it’s not worth bothering. I’ve saved the Boroughs, Warry, but not how you save the whale or save the National Health Service. I’ve saved it the way that you save ships in bottles. It’s the only plan that works. Sooner or later all the people and the places that we loved are finished, and the only way to keep them safe is art. That’s what art’s for. It rescues everything from time.”
There in the May sky over Marefair and Saint Peter’s a blancmange of cumulus set to a snoozing rabbit, moulded for a stratospheric children’s party. Whispered wind washed from Far Cotton and Mick felt the breeze’s skin brushing against his own as it politely slid around him and continued with its northbound journey. He was thinking about what his sister had just said concerning the impossibility of anything saving an arts-and-letters rescue or retrieval for the neighbourhood’s lost causes when he was reminded of Ben Perrit’s poem, creasing in his pocket. Leaning back at a precarious angle so that he could get his hand into the tight-stretched linen mouth he fished it out and handed it to Alma, who perused it with a softening of her belligerent brow and then, refolding it to fit in some compartment of her own pipe-cleaner jeans, looked up at Mick.
“Bless that poor, suffering inebriate bugger, but he does a lovely poem. True, they’re all about some loss that he can’t get past, although if he could he’d have no need to write. Or drink. I sometimes think that loss is all he runs on; that he never loves a thing so much as when the wheels have fallen off. I hope that he’s alright. I hope that everyone’s alright.”
She lapsed into another round of concentrated puffing on her spliff in order to prevent it going out again. The rabbit cloud was now two separate hamsters over Pike Lane, and Mick risked a sideways glance at his big sister.
“How is Ben not being able to get past his loss a different thing from how you handle yours?”
Alma tipped back her head and spat a thin beige genie at the upturned azure bowl above.
“Because what I’ve made, Warry, is a glorious mythology of loss. That back there was an older testament, a pantheon of tramps and kids with nits. I’ve squeezed the bricks till they bled miracles and filled the cracks with legends, that’s what I’ve done. I …”
She broke off, and a fireworks night of marvel and delight declared itself across her face.
“Here, did I tell you, about what Rome Thompson said, the thing about the mill?”
Mick’s blank look was her answer and her prompt to press enthusiastically ahead.
“It’s the gas-holder down on Tanner Street, the back of where Nan used to live. According to what Rome said, back in the twelfth century it used to be a corn-mill called ‘the Marvellous Mill’. If you go down by the river, underneath the bridge with all the beer cans and syringes and disembowelled handbags, you can see there’s the old stones along its sides which used to be the race that powered the waterwheel. In the twelve-hundreds it was claimed by the monks of Saint Andrew’s Priory, who controlled the other mill in town and figured that they might as well run both of them. Then, in the sixteenth century Henry the Eighth dissolved the monasteries and ownership reverted back to the townspeople. Two hundred years sail by and next thing anybody knows it’s the seventeen-hundreds …”
She paused to breathe in, although only drugs.
“1741, there’s this consortium of businessmen. One of them’s Dr. Johnson, which supports my theory that from Bunyan to Lucia Joyce this whole thing is to do with the development of English as a visionary language. Anyway, they buy the place and turn it from a cornmill to a cotton mill.”
Uncertain what whole thing his sister was referring to, and even more unsure how the discoverer of baby-powder fitted into the scenario, Mick pursed his lips and merely nodded.
“There were cotton mills in Birmingham by that time, turned by donkeys, but the one down Tanner Street was the first power-driven mill anywhere in the world. So it’s not just the crusades and the Cromwells. The Industrial Revolution kicked off up at the far end of Green Street. As you might expect the local cottage industries went down like ninepins, as would happen everywhere over the coming century. The mill had three big cotton looms, all working round the clock with no employees other than some kids to sweep the corners and to manage the untangling if the mechanism snagged.”
Mick listened, only partially distracted by the portly and diminutive form labouring up Chalk Lane towards them, white hair curled into a head of froth atop unusually pallid stout, the pint of cuckoo spit they draw after they’ve changed the barrel. Thinking to have previously seen the sweltering individual somewhere, Mick at last decided that it was that councillor who had a column in the paper. Cockie, was it? Lived down near Black Lion Hill, which would explain his presence in Chalk Lane. As he approached the man regarded Alma and her brother through his perching spectacles with vague affront. Oblivious to his presence, Alma carried on her narrative regardless.
“Then – and listen, this is brilliant. Adam Smith, the bloke who’s on the twenties, the economist, he either comes and sees the mill or hears about it, with its looms all working nineteen to the dozen and its shuttles whizzing back and forth and no one there, as though it were a factory being run by ghosts. He thinks it’s wonderful, tells everybody that he knows how it’s as though a massive unseen hand were guiding all this furious mechanical activity, some manner of industrial Zeus rather than basic principles of engineering. It’s what always happens with new science in a religious age, like all of these holistic fizzy water manufacturers who babble about quantum physics.”
Mick, who found both quantum physics and expensive fizzy water equally unlikely concepts, watched the fat man waddle by them on their right, seemingly headed for the lightly smouldering day nursery. Behind his lenses customarily complacent eyes regarded the pair sitting on the church wall with suspicion as he barrelled past, particularly Alma whom he more than likely recognised. Either unbothered by his presence or else unaware she pressed on with her tale excitedly.
“So Adam Smith, with his half-baked idea about a hidden hand that works the cotton looms, decides to use that as his central metaphor for unrestrained Free Market capitalism. You don’t need to regulate the banks or the financiers when there’s an invisible five-fingered regulator who’s a bit like God to make sure that the money-looms don’t snare or tangle. That’s the monetarist mystic idiot-shit, the voodoo economics Ronald Reagan put his faith in, and that middle-class dunce Margaret Thatcher when they cheerily deregulated most of the financial institutions. And that’s why the Boroughs exists, Adam Smith’s idea. That’s why the last fuck knows how many generations of this family are a toilet queue without a pot to piss in, and that’s why everyone that we know is broke. It’s all there in the current underneath that bridge down Tanner Street. That was the first one, the first dark, satanic mill.”
A dog barked, away on their left in the vicinity of Mary’s Street, one bark, then three, then silence. Not for the first time since getting up that morning, Mick felt an encroaching air of strangeness. There was something going on, something unsettlingly precise in its familiarity. Had this happened before? Not something like this but this exact situation, with his buttocks going dead from the stone wall’s chill striking through thin trousers. First one bark, then three, then silence. Wasn’t there something about Picasso, or had that not happened yet? Floundering in the déjà vu, he had a feeling Alma was about to mention a glass football.
“Warry, seriously, everywhere’s Jerusalem, everywhere trampled or run down. If Einstein’s right, then space and time are all one thing and it’s, I dunno, it’s a big glass football, an American one like a Rugby ball, with the big bang at one end and the big crunch or whatever at the other. And the moments in between, the moments making up our lives, they’re there forever. Nothing’s moving. Nothing’s changing, like a reel of film with all the frames fixed in their place and motionless till the projector beam of our awareness plays across them, and then Charlie Chaplin doffs his bowler hat and gets the girl. And when our films, our lives, when they come to an end I don’t see that there’s anywhere for consciousness to go but back to the beginning. Everybody is on endless replay. Every moment is forever, and if that’s true every miserable wretch is one of the immortals. Every clearance area is the eternal golden city. You know, if I’d thought to put that in a program or a booklet at the exhibition, I suppose that people might have had more chance of working out what I was on about. Ah, well. It’s too late now. What’s done is done, and done just one way for all time, over and over.”
Cue the chubby councillor. This thought had just occurred to Mick, by now slack jawed and reeling with recurrence, when the white-haired and white-bearded Christmas bauble rumbled back down Chalk Lane and once more into their field of view. From his outraged expression and the faint wisps of charred papier-mâché smog which wafted their malodorous tendrils after him, it was apparent that he’d witnessed the evacuated nursery and had very probably gone in to see the burned-out model Boroughs at first hand. All of a sudden, Mick knew down to the last syllable exactly what would transpire next and how Pablo Picasso had a part in it. It was that anecdote, the funny story he’d heard Alma tell at least a half a dozen times, about when Nazis visited the artist’s Paris studio during the occupation and came, with some dismay, on Guernica. The huffy councillor was going to say the same thing that the German officers had said on that occasion, and Mick’s sister would then shamelessly appropriate the Cubist sex-gnome’s spirited and memorable reply. And then the dog would bark again, four times. Scalp tingling, Mick took another turn round on the ghost train.
Stubbing her illicit fag out on the slab where she was sitting, Alma raised her less-than-interested grey and yellow gaze in time to notice the rotund former official for the first time. Near to apoplexy he raised his left arm, a trembling finger pointing back towards the daycare centre where the smoke alarms still sounded, and unwittingly delivered the Gestapo dialogue regarding Guernica.
“Did you do that?”
It was the perfect set up. Beaming beatifically, his sister offered up her plagiarised reply.
“No. You did.”
Blinking dazedly and without an articulate response the erstwhile council leader trundled off in the direction of Marefair, a haywire snowball that got smaller as it rolled downhill instead of bigger. From St. Mary’s Street came the predicted canine outburst: <em>woof</em>, <em>woof</em>, <em>woof</em> and then a faint pause. <em>Woof</em>.
Despite the clockwork eeriness, Mick found that he was chortling. Kicking her heels beside him, never one afraid to laugh at her own stolen jokes, Alma joined in. Somewhere upslope behind and right on schedule, sirens were approaching through the stopped streets of a broken heaven.
** <strong>ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS</strong>
<strong>W</strong>here to start, and where to finish?
Firstly I must thank my wife, the artist and writer Melinda Gebbie, who’s been almost as intimately involved with this book as I have since its beginnings. I think I proposed to her just before commencing the project, and she’s had almost every chapter since read out aloud to her, whether she wanted it or not. It was her technical advice that fleshed out the tools of Ernest Vernall’s trade in chapter one and Alma Warren’s craft through the remainder of the novel, and most of all it was her belief that this work was important and her almost-ten-years of encouragement to that effect that helped give me the stamina to complete it. Thank you so much, darling. Without you, I doubt very much there’d be a book requiring these acknowledgements.
Almost as importantly, I must offer my deepest gratitude to Steve Moore, even though he’s no longer around to receive it. Steve completed his invaluable initial edit of <em>Jerusalem</em>’s first third – memorably including the stylistic critique “Ugghh” in red pen in the margins; mercifully, I forget just where – and brought his dazzling intellect to all our formative discussions of the view of time which we later discovered to be called Eternalism, by which point we’d both long since converted to that doctrine. If this book’s central idea is correct (and given physicist Fay Dowker’s current researches into an alternative hypothesis, it’s at least falsifiable and testable) then Steve is currently approaching his second birthday in a leafy close on Shooters Hill in 1951. Thanks again for everything, mate, and all being well I’ll run into you again in roughly nineteen years, your time.
Steve’s abrupt decision to put our theory to the test in March 2014 (some people – you pay them an advance to edit your gigantic novel, and then you never see them again) meant that I had to find a selection of other editors and proofreaders who weren’t scared of me. First and foremost among these was the poet, author, editor and comedian Bond, Donna Bond. Donna edited the whole book, took me to task several times for my misuse of the word ‘careen’ – apparently it’s a term specific to the practice of overturning a ship in order to scrape the barnacles from its hull, but who could have known? – and even somehow noticed a couple of typos in the impenetrably made-up mess of chapter twenty-five. Thanks, Donna, for doing such a meticulous job of
<br>
something that I didn’t have the nerve, focus or knowledge of obscure naval terminology to face on my own. The next pass at the editing fell to my friends, the writers John Higgs and Ali Fruish. John spotted a few things, but was mostly invaluable in giving me his typically illuminating reaction to the book as a whole, and for writing an appreciation that made <em>Jerusalem</em> sound like something I might actually want to read. Ali, in between his numerous spells in prison (he’s a writer in residence, though I enjoy making him sound like a murderous drifter), not only gave me some useful pointers on crack etiquette but had, throughout my writing of the book, been digging up gems of research that turned out to be the novel’s making: he alerted me to James Hervey’s local provenance, and provided the final, necessary revelations about the Gas Street origins of free-market capitalism and the Industrial Revolution. To both of these gentlemen, scholars and acrobats I am greatly indebted.
Likewise being of immense assistance in the production of this behemoth, my thanks are also due to my comrade, henchman and hired goon, the omni-competent Joe Brown. Joe put me in touch with Donna Bond, served up sheaves of obscure reference material at my every delirious whim and, most of all, burned down a month of his life in colouring and making intelligible my smudged grey bedlam of a cover illustration. And, if you hold your ear close enough to the page, he also wrote the music to the song audible during the closing scenes of chapter twenty-five. Joe, I don’t know what I would do without you, but I’m confident I’d be doing it much more slowly and displaying a far higher level of ignorance. While on the subject of production, I’d also like to thank Tony Bennett at Knockabout – for his support, his warm enthusiasm and his occasional bouts of being pressed into service as werewolf-wrangler if I’ve had to deal with anything too early in the morning – and the fine people at Liveright Publishing for bringing their usual impeccable polish and discrimination to bear upon the finished article. And, of course, anybody along the way that I’ve left out. There have been a multitude of people responsible for building <em>Jerusalem</em>, and I’m grateful to every one of them.
A special shout-out is due to my pal the sublime John Coulthart for his mesmerising multi-period isomorphic map of the Boroughs, for doing all that loving and painstaking research, and for being the only person I could talk to about the mind-and-eye-destroying obsessive madness that comes with drawing hundreds of eccentrically-angled rooftops and chimneypots. Thanks, John, and I hope that you’re recuperating in a world of scintillant colour that is wrought from nothing save organic shapes and psychedelic arabesques. For the photographs heading the book’s three movements, I have once again to thank Joe Brown for his image manipulation skills in the montage of the Destructor looming over Bristol Street (no clear available images existed of the local chimneystack, necessitating the import of an identical model from, appropriately enough, Blackburn), and my colleague the diamond-eyed Mitch Jenkins for his photographs of the Archangel Michael with snooker-cue (some modern anti-pigeon spikes were airbrushed out, in accordance with the book’s generally pro-pigeon sensibilities), and of that door halfway up the wall of Doddridge Church with its inexplicable bolt <em>on the outside</em>. Your evidence that not all of this is invented was gratefully received.
I should also like to thank Iain Sinclair and Michael Moorcock for their continuing friendship, inspiration and encouragement – or eloquent nagging – regarding this novel, and apologise to them and anyone else who’s been called upon to abandon their families and read it, which I know includes my vastly knowledgeable but physically frail pal Robin Ince, who reports that he and his postman are both now disastrously ruptured. I must also mention my old friend and accomplice Richard Foreman, one of the co-authors of the excellent Northampton Arts Development publication <em>In Living Memory</em>, where I found some exotic details of Boroughs life that had managed to escape my attention during my upbringing, and without which <em>Jerusalem</em> would be missing some of its best stories and characters. A sweep of the sombrero in your direction, gents.
With everyone acknowledged who has been part of the creating of this novel (I think), I must now turn to those people who have had their lives and identities plundered and distorted to provide its contents. Foremost among these, obviously, is my younger, supposedly better looking, but far, far shallower brother Mike, so lacking in depth that he signed his soul away to me, aged twelve, during a game of Monopoly that was going badly for him. I still have it. I thank him for the memorable industrial accidents and near-death experiences that have made this book so much fun, and also thank my sister-in-law Carol and my nephews Jake and Joe (one of whose names I changed and one of whose I didn’t, for no explicable reason) for their supporting cameos. And to all the rest of my far-flung family members, living and dead, thank you for providing me with such rich substance, and also for any chromosomes you may have contributed. Particular thanks go to my cousin Jacquie Mahout (the arty, bohemian one who married a French communist) for all of the most startling fragments of family history included here, though even she had no idea where I’d got Mad Aunt Thursa from.
Huge acknowledgements and perhaps apologies go to all of the non-relatives who have been travestied herein, usually without their permission or knowledge, especially those whom I’ve grossly misrepresented without even going to the trouble of changing their names. The actor Robert Goodman, who in real life is beautiful in mind, body and soul, probably tops the list here, although Melinda Gebbie and Lucy Lisowiec may also wish to consult their lawyers. The same gratitude, and the same squirming disclaimers, go to my friends Donald Davies; Norman Adams and Neil; Dominic Allard (and his late mother Audrey); the late, great Tom Hall and all who sailed in him; Stephen “Fred” Ryan, who I hope hangs on long enough to read this, and his late mother Phyllis Ryan, née Denton, who served me tea and biscuits and gave me the entirety of Phyllis Painter from her boa of decomposing rabbits to the Compton Street Girls marching song. These are all lovely people, and any perceived flaws to their characters as presented here are entirely those of the author.
Otherwise unmentioned in <em>Jerusalem</em>, for providing a major part of this novel’s motivation, I should like to thank my wonderful daughters, Leah and Amber (along with their equally wonderful partners, John and Robo), and particularly my astonishing grandsons Eddie, James, Joseph and Rowan. Your nana Melinda called this book “a genetic mythology”, and for better or worse it’s part of yours, too. While I’m sure that the future you’re running into the breakers of will be as strange as anything in this book, remember that this is the peculiar landscape a bit of you came from, and that along with everybody and everything you’ve ever cared about, we’re all still there in Jerusalem.
I thank the deaf, mute stones of what is left of the Boroughs for all of the work that they have done across the centuries, and all that they have borne. When they at last slump, exhausted, into the dusty sleep of rubble, I hope that this may serve them as an entertaining, vindicating dream.
And lastly I thank both the Meaningful Concept of Death and the English Novel for having been such thoroughly good sports about all this. You guys are the greatest.
|
#title On Writing for Comics
#author Alan Moore
#SORTtopics writing, how to
#date 1985
#lang en
#pubdate 2020-09-22T09:10:36
The biggest difficulty to write on any creative activity, since writing on same it until writing on <strong>automobile-devouring</strong> (to devorar automobiles) is that, in the majority of the times, the articles or interviews that appear they seem to be incapable of will extend themselves beyond the information obvious techniques and lists of recommended instruments. I do not want to fall again into this same line, being said which typewriter I use, or which type of paper carbon I find better, since this information will not make the lesser difference in the quality of that you write. In a similar way, I do not find that a detailed analysis of my process of work is very useful, since I imagine that it I vary drastically of the story for the story, and all writer tends to develop its proper boarding in reply its proper circumstances.
Moreover, I do not want to remotely produce nothing that he remembers, nor, something it type <strong>“How you the Write s — The Alan Moore Way”.</strong> To teach to generations of new artists and writers to copy the generation that preceded them was a dull idea, of the time where the Marvel launched its book <strong>“How you the Draw s — The Marvel Way”</strong> and would be equally irresponsible of my part to instruct consolidated emergent writers or already on as to write unhealthy and fancy headings of the type “Dawn transformed the sky into an Abattior” (the dawn trasformou the sky in a abatedouro) or any thing of the sort. John Buscema is a good artist, but the industry does not need fifty people drawing as it, and less still of fifty writing as I (<em>note of the translator: of the skill that walks the thing here in Brazil, even though “an obsolete” book as this would be very welcome! — I until learned some thing with it.</em>)
With everything this in mind, would like to try to display something that adds to this extensive chapter as we can really think on the art to write comics, what she is better that one list of specific details. It would like to say on boardings and mental processes that if hide under the writing as a set, more of the one than the form as these processes finish in the paper. As I see the situation, the way that we think the act to write inevitably takes the form of the works that we produce. Taking most of the current production of main the company of s, me it seems that an ample factor of contribution to the general loss of heart must be the famous stagnant processes of thoughts promoted for them. Surely, in terms of the general conventions of writing for comics at this moment, my trend is to see the same structures of the drama and the same functional boarding of characterization being used many and many times mechanical, until the point where the people find difficulty in imagining where they could be different ways to make the things.
As basic estimated ours on the profession they come if becoming each time more obsolete, we find that this if relates more to a problem of creation of works of some relevance for a world that if it modifies quickly, in which the industry and the readers who really support it they are considered. For relevance, since I touched in the subject, I do not want to say stories on racial relations and pollution, still that they certainly are good part of this. I speak of stories that really have some felt type of with relation to the world to our redor, stories that reflect the nature and the texture of the life in these last years of century twenty. Stories that are useful, in some way. Admittedly, she would be more or less easy it industry comfortably to live for a time pimping groups specialized in stories to <strong>the old</strong> or simple escapism, but the company who works exclusively with this type of subject is, in mine to understand, impotent, and deserves only a little more than consideration or interest that an industry of anniversary cards.
The reason for which to write comics is perhaps even though more interesting than to draw them it is that to write it finishes all being the fuse of the process. If what it will be thought before writing will be inadequate, <strong>script</strong> (plot) is inadequate. In this way, even though under the hands of the best artists of the world, finished the story goes to lament the lack of that no addition of colorful images and pompous printed matters could substitute, or same to wait a remuneration. To change the comics, we need to change the way to think its creation, and the inquiry to follow only must be seen as the first and coarse steps for this end.
To want some better place to start, either a perhaps interesting to start for extensive consideration on the comics and its possibilities, and to extract our method of inside of it. To think on comics you have that to have some idea on what it is the subject that you are treating. He is here that our first difficulty starts: in the effort of to define the comics, many authors have little risky more than comparisons in the drawings, between one technique and another one, more coarsely acceptable as art forms. Comics is described in terms of cinema and, with effect, much of the vocabulary that job all day in the descriptions of the scenes for any artist derives entirely of the cinema. I say in terms of close-ups, long-shots, zooms and panoramic; it is a stipulated language of necessary visual instructions, but it also in takes them to define the comic writing values as being virtually indistinguishable of the cinematographic ones. While the cinematographic thought has, without the shadow of a doubt, produced many of the best works in comics of last the thirty years, I see it, as model to search our proper one half, being many times limiting and restrictive. In turn, any imitation of the techniques of the films through the comics finishes losing, inevitably, in the comparison. He is clearly, you can use sequences of scenes of cinematographic form to become its more involving work and livened up that of comic writers that still do not dominate this trick, but, in the end, you finishes being with a film without sound nor movement.
The use of cinema techniques can be an advance for the conventions to write and to draw comics, but, if these techniques will be faced as the culminating point to which the art of the comics can inhale, our way is condemned perpetual to be a poor cousin of the cinematographic industry. This is not good sufficiently.
Comics also are accustomed to being seen in literary terms, desiring to trace comparisons between quadrinizadas sequences and conventional literary forms. Thus, “short stories” of the comics accurately would be based by classic formulas of writers as the Henry and Saki (<em>note of the translator: never vi more fat people in my life</em>), with the outcome surprise in last comic. With little intelligence still <em>(“more idioticly speaking”</em>), a story with more than forty pages automatically is compared with a romance, losing, once more, apallingly with the comparison. With all the good will of the world, if you to try to describe the NOVEL GRAPHIC Of the CRYSTAL (<em>that mutant personage and pentelha published in revistinhas of the X-men for the Ed. April</em>) in the same terms where she would describe MOBY DICK (<em>the book, not it version CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED of Sienkiewicz, if well that the idea continues the same one</em>), you are simply looking obstacle. Opposing it the ideas of films without sound nor movement, we will have romances without extension, felt depth and. This also is not good the sufficient.
To make matters worse, all time that if they use techniques of other languages, has a trend of the creators of comics in remaining perpetual if inhaling in the past... Looking at what it comes being described as cinematographic works in the comics, normally we find somebody speaking that it almost took off its ideas on cinema that entirely of the work of Will Eisner, and, of preference, of that it made has thirty or forty years behind. It is not one badly start, I I admit, except that the majority of the people seems to content itself only with that. Eisner, in the height of the Spirit, used the cinematographic techniques of people as Orson Welles, with resulted brilliants. Its mimics also use the cinematographic techniques of Welles, but, of “second-hand”, forgetting that Eisner was learning with the culture that surrounded it in that time. Cinema in the comics is equivalent the Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, and perhaps some other more, having all they carried through its better works have one thirty years behind. Why she does not try yourself to understand and to adapt the work of pioneering contemporaries as Nicholas Roeg, Robert Altman or Francis Ford Coppola, since a really cinematographic boarding is being looked exactly? Why the literary values in the comics must be determined by the values of pulps (<em>cheap literature, type books of pocket variety or collection SABRINA</em>) of thirty or forty years behind, independently of the value that they can have?
Better that to assume of superficial similarities between comics and films or comics and books in the hope of that the respectability and the prestige of these languages come to purify us, he would not be more constructive to concentrate our attention in the areas where the comics they are <strong>essential and only</strong>? It would not be better that, instead of persisting in techniques of films that the comics can reproduce, we perhaps tried to consider the techniques of comics that the <strong>films cannot reproduce</strong>?
If, on the other hand, one gave credit that the guarantee of bigger creative freedom or the division of the knowledge developed between the artists and writers in the industry would produce one occasions of an impressive creativity and invention, on the other hand, he is not ours in case that (<em>OBS.: it is</em> <em><strong>not</strong></em> <em>speaking of Brazil, and yes of the comics in England and/or United States</em>). With very rare and honorable exceptions, the majority of the material of proper creation produced by independent publishing companies almost do not distinguish themselves from the current production that preceded it. Me he seems demonstrated that the problem is not, the principle, of incentive or work conditions; the problem is of creativity, and it will not be in a basic level of it that if it will be able to decide it. I do not find that this solution will come without a drastic improvement of the standard of writing for comics, a time that, as he said in the start, the writer is the fuse of all the creation process. For this end, then, we go to move of subject, where I will give the best one of me to describe some of the problems and the potential that I see inside of some aspects in writing for comics.
Once more, the difficulty is to know for where to start. The list of introductions to be done, same for simplest narrative, is enormous, and it really it does not interest for what we choose to examine first.
Everything is connected, and each item leads to the other. Of this form, we can equally take, the principle, the elements most intangible and abstract it are of its context, before continuing in the necessary aspects finest and of the workmanship. Perhaps a good starting point is what rests accurately in core of any creative process: the <strong>idea</strong>.
The idea is that on which the story treats; it is not nor the drama of the story, nor uncurling of the events of it, but what the story essentially is. As example of my proper work (not because it is particularly a good example, but because I feel myself with more authority to say of it of that he would have if it was the work of another person), I I could cite # 40 of magazine SWAMP THING (<em>published for the Ed. April in the magazine Monster of the Quagmire # 3</em>), “The Curse” <em>(“the Curse of the Full Moon”</em>). The story deals with the difficulties supported for the women in the masculine societies, using the common taboo of the menstruation as central reason. This is <strong>not</strong> the drama of the story — the drama says respect to a married young if moving for a new house, constructed on the place where it had one old aboriginal hut, that possessed person for the dominant spirit sees itself that still inhabited there, changing itself into a werewolf. I wait that here the distinction between drama and idea has been well clear, therefore it I am important, and ignored for many writers. The majority of stories in comics the only subject possess dramas in which is the fight between the two or most antagonistic ones. The result of this confrontation, normally involving some exhibition “<em>deus ex machina</em>” of some superpower, is equally the resolution of the drama (note of
translating: this term in Latin mentions the fact to it of almost the totality of the super-heroes to be predestined to use its superpowers in the solution of the story, without which same it would lose its reason of being). Beyond an extremely vacant triviality and without favor the type “the good always it will win the evil”, really does not have main ideas in the majority of s, it are the notion of that the conflict is interesting by itself (<em>note of the translator: ... no, however, IT SELLS!</em>).
Of where the ideas really come are, the first sight, the biggest concern of the majority of the people interested in learning as to write comics and are, probably, the only question that the creative people if ask with more frequency. Without surprising, it is also the question that more has remained without reply. If they threatened to torture so that I give me a concise reply, probably would say that the ideas seem to germinate in the fertile crossroads enter the influences of other artists and my proper experiences. The study of the work of other people it supplies useful pointers of as to formulate ideas, but the primordial impulse comes inside of the writer or creator, influenced for its proper opinions, its preconceptions, for all the things that have happened with them and for all the elements of its life that finish for defining the type of person who they are. It does not have substitute for the practical experience, and if you to want to write on <strong>people</strong>, you has the duty to disdain “ books” and to leave for there looking better thing that to study the way as Stan Lee or Chris Claremont people describe (<em>another note of the translator: care; the arrogance, when it does not kill, catches! E I still did not learn to please the public who nor these two cretins</em>).
One becomes important to change its perception to notice small peculiar circumstances that could, in another way, to pass unfurnished, studying our proper conviviality and the relationship with the people and the events that in encircle them until you to feel that it developed a coherent angle in top of the life and the reality, to less so far how much having the perspective on situations that indicate the coming of proper and original ideas. Eddie Campbell (<em>N.T.: another one that I never heard to speak</em>) has developed a singular and extraordinarily percipient eye for the triviality of the existence, and this allows it to transform things that could, in another way, to seem usual and infuriates of note, in something at the same time revealing and amused. My thesis is that you cannot teach the people to have the same perception and ideas that the Eddie... you it must only follow the orientations of its proper head, in a certain way in direction as you see the life and you she will perceive that the ideas then will come spontaneously, to the end, with only some suggestions. An only new e point of view never is reduced to an only new e thing to say or on which to speak. Visa in the certain way, everything is changed into source of ideas. Opening the periodical in the page of the economy and reading on the scaling of the crisis of the international <strong>deficit</strong>, something that could seem flat and hard to swallow to the first sight is, in the reality, a situation primorosamente insane person who very probably goes to affect the life more beyond of that they live in this planet per the next decades and. It has a skill of this if to become interesting, perhaps amused, or perhaps terrifying, to the common reader? E if you counted to this in terms of a fantastic allegory, situated in a foreign planet with something nonsense it type skin of money rat serving? The idea of a handful of foreign imbeciles putting irrevogavelmente its planet in polvorosa behind a handful of rat skins is perhaps amused? E that such if we made a serious and realistic the story implacably, substituting the great involved national interests for individuals, people, so that the problem can be felt in small scale, in terms of human elements, a common agent of a company of loans trying to perhaps charge the payments in an inhospitable and hostile agricultural community? Exists there some thing capable to arrest the interest of the people per one ten or fifteen minutes?
Perhaps in another way, some incidents our proper one passed supply the embryo to it of a the story. When child, for example, if my parents photographed me in a small delict that I was certain that they would not have as to know, some times I occurred me that the adults could have some special power to know of everything, who kept hidden of the children. With effect, some times I had the impression of that everybody had such ability, except I, and that I age the only excluded person of this telepathic conspiracy en mass (if you to insist on this type of thing after the nine years of age, you can in such a way be a paranoid schizophrenic how much a writer of comics, since that you she makes question to keep some distinction — <em>N.T.: THIS is not commentary THERE mine! Already it tava in the original text</em>). Using this fear irrational as springboard, it would be possible to perhaps reach a type of fancy to la Ray Bradbury on the infantile universe, or perhaps a cruel the story of psychological horror on the paranoia as phenomenon in itself, perhaps having a child who suffered from complex of persecution that if became an agent of espionage of low step, working incognito of the wrong side of the Wall of Berlin (<em>OBS.: this text is of 1988</em>), in a world where all its horrors of infancy become tangible and real? Please, it always has in mind that the placed ideas are not necessarily good ideas... they are only some taken off examples of the sleeve of the forms for which the usable ideas can be lead.
I would have to perhaps designate that, when constructing a story, it’s not always necessary to start with an idea. Technically, it is perfectly possible to arrange inspiration for a story thinking only about tools purely abstract or a sequence of scenes or any similar thing. In some place of the process, in any way, a coherent idea must start to appear of the work beyond its simple mannerisms. If to happen of you to think first about a clear and short sequence of four pictures, very well, but you must then try to explore more the type of character or idea that the four pictures better express. As example of my proper material, an original idea that eventually is praised of first the four or five episodes that I made with the Monster of the Quagmire, takes form as a handful of disconnected ideas for sequences that they had small a meaning, individually: an excellent idea was to use the capacity of camouflage of the Monster of the Quagmire... to perhaps have part of its leg or of the visible body in the way scene that as much the reader how much the other personages do not perceive that they are looking at for the creature of the quagmire during some seconds. This finished being the two first pages it # 22 of magazine SWAMP THING, in the episode “Swamped” (<em>published as “Possessed for the Quagmire”, in magazine NEW TITÃS # 5</em>). Another idea that I had, at the same time, involved the way to work with outdoors “Burma Shave”, carefully spaced and rhymed, used to cover to the long one of the roads of America in a sequence of signboards rhymed in such way that the last line of rhymes, “... Burma Shave.” it was, in the truth, more visible in the plate in itself that inside of the space of the letters. This effectively happened in the two pages of # 26 (<em>published in the magazine SUPERAMIGOS # 23, but without this trick of outdoors</em>), exactly not having no idea to really thinking about the sequence on the form as it would become related or which part of it would participate of the set of the story. I kept the hanging idea until having an opening where he could inseriz it, and thus, when I had to make something drastic with the Matt personage Wire, I caught it and I played it in a scene of car disaster. The fact is that I had to keep the sequences kept in the refrigerator until having an idea for the story that would complete them. As I said before, nobody needs to start for an idea, but, in some point to the long one of the process, an idea is necessary, admitting that this work must be of some impact.
We will assume that, from now, we have a workable idea, something who we would like to say and to feel that we can say with certainty. Before directing the problem, we would have to perceive that, in any act of communication, they exist to the little two participants. In creativity terms, these participants are the artist and its hearing. If you are you give to expend a time mount preparing its image, either perhaps advantageous to little spending a little in a fast consideration on the person for which the message if dirige. Obviously, a time that we are saying on hearing en mass, of thousand of individuals, does not have as the artist to understand the fondness and aversion of each one of them. The conventional reply to the problem, to little as it was evident for the behavior of many of main the company of s, it is to try not to offend nobody. I had to the little one publisher of the branch saying that he has not felt in taking off of the alienation to the little reading one that is, being that the best one to make is “<strong>to alleviate</strong>” the dialogues or the scenes in question until it does not have more nothing that can be criticized by the most sensible member of hearing (<em>N.T.: it really is speaking on the States and England. If well that, after the codes of ethics of the Net Globe and the Ladies of Santana, I do not know not...</em>). Taking this reasoning to the extremity, this suggests that a hypothetical reader to which the artist must direct itself with its the story is moralista afrescalhado extremely affected that has one peripaque to the first suggestion of something more flesh time that a kiss of good night on the forehead. This not only strengthens the idea of that the comics are, in some way, offensive for its proper nature, and that they will only be tolerated while to be remained inside of its leash — by the way, very pressed well, by the way — as also they fail for they will not consider the enormous number of readers in potential made use will not lose it its literary time with gruel of nenê. It has something strange in being offensively harmless, and, a time that I am not suggesting at no moment that all the comics must be destined the cynical depraved ones just-left adolescence (<em>N.T.: any similarity with public of fanzines in Brazil it is</em> <em><strong>not</strong></em> <em>mere coincidence here. Total freedom is very good, but ability is what this joça of country and cultural industry they need</em>), to little if it would have to perceive that the potential hearing beyond these faces is, of far, much varied and great excessively to apply any established restrictive criteria in completely not-trustworthy hypothetical pictures of an imaginary “reader-standard”. The concept of a “<strong>reader-standard</strong>” is completely retrograde, when trying to create a reader who does not exist. I very know few people who if find “readers standard of comics”, and little people still that they demonstrate really conventional when to be examined more than close. A so small media as this really has a significant standard that it can be defined from its public?
In my opinion, the best way to deal with the problem is to leave the material to find its proper level and its proper hearing. But, a time that to not defining our hypotheses of work we finish producing reading imaginary, is obvious that we have that to find some way to understand the part that the reader occupies in the creative process. A time more, I imagine that he is less problematic to take the problem for its extremity. Instead of thinking on what he could negative affect the reader for then purging any trace of this in the work, why not to think on things that probably affect the reader positively? Again, we have the problem here of as to define what better it functions for an extensive band of people, but to little, in this example, has a series of useful models to base our thought. One of them is banal but always the creative <strong>joke</strong>.
Jokes are not, in general, directed a specific public; they only happen! Strangely, the criterion of that is or a good joke highly does not seem to be contested, as when we speak on films, books or comics. Some people laugh high, the diversion of some are a little more contained, one or two do not laugh exactly. whichever the reaction, the joke served to its intentions and affected some different people with the best one of its capacity in relation to the senses of mood of each one. The person who arrives the principle with the joke does not make idea of the person who eventually goes to listen to it... it only finds the joke funny. If it makes it to laugh, has an excellent possibility of it to make a portion of people also to laugh. I until would risk to say that many of the writers of sketches (<em>N.T.: humorísticos pictures of television programs</em>) if content in trusting its proper intuition on what he is funny, same that they have attended interviews with comedians as Max Wall (<em>another N.T.: this must there be of homeland of Alan Moore</em>), seeming that it has a very great effort in thinking on what accurately makes the people to laugh. It has, surely, some obvious principles of mood that are almost certainty to provoke laugh as reply, not importing which the disposal or the situation of the person that hears the joke can have. To understand these reactions immediate human beings is a tool of much more useful creative mood that any consideration on a “public-standard” can have.
Thinking on basic a general process that affects an ample specter of human beings very better that a notion or specific idea that would not affect at least an only type of hypothetical reader, it will be possible to arrive at an understanding of one of the basic mechanisms of the reactions human beings. It is possible to look at very well of close for our proper reactions and answers and making some happy deductions on the basic answers of its reading. If you to want to write a horror the story, thinks first about the type of thing that horrifies you. The deep enough o analyzes its proper fears and could be capable to arrive at some conclusions on the raw material of the fears and them anxieties human beings. Either implacable when making it, and it exactly submits itself in an enormous emotional suffering will be necessary to have answered this question: what it leaves me horrified? Images of babies dying of hunger in Africa horrify me. Why this leaves me horrified? This horrifies me because I do not obtain to be thinking about very small children being born in a world of hunger, misery and horror without never knowing nothing beyond pain and the fear, and not to never know that it could possibly have something more than to need food so hopelessly how much a suffocated air man necessary and never hearing nothing beyond I cry, lamentations and desperation. Yes, very I do not obtain well, but <strong>Why</strong> to think about this? I do not obtain to be thinking about this because taste to feel the world as having some form of justice and order without which much of the existence would seem meaningless, and I think that for these children he does not have the lesser possibility of them to feel the world in these terms. Also I know that, if it was in that one same situation, also he would not be capable to see any situation beyond the together hunger and misery. Then, this means that it would not have no order, no reason for the existence? It is this that makes to all splodge me (”<em>horrifies the shit out of me</em>”) all time that I see those titicas of fly agonizing in reporter of the six (<em>for the schedule of England or the United States</em>). He is. Probably he is this! What it scares me exactly probably is not what it is happening with them, but what this <strong>implies</strong> for me. To that it is not a noble cause, incredibly easy of being faced, but it is the type of dirty work that you have that to face to have some valid understanding of the material in which you are working.
This material is human thoughts, human feelings and ideas human beings. Everything in our world, since the familiar structure until the bomb of nêutrons has its origin in this area, and any one that it intends to make one mishmash with the conscience of mass for a vital mission to be client of the material, is dealing with and as this if it holds in certain circumstances. For this end, if to consider a person who eventually will be to read its the story in comics, the common denominator for which you goes behind is not the common denominating very small of the receptivity of the public, and yes the common denominator of the basic humanity. If you are reading this, you have an excellent possibility of that you it is a human being. He also has a good possibility of that, you do not import essential by what means only e are or think that is, you exist certain basic mechanisms that you allotment with members conservatives of the parliament, radical and police miners of Yorkshire, lesbians. If you it will be able to identify and to use these mechanisms for its proper satisfaction, then you it will have base not to produce an art more beneficial than if a consuming imaginary standard spent its time hopelessly hallucinating and trying to hammer out its work in a form that pleases its highly hypothetical taste and criteria.
Very well, now then we have our basic idea and to the little, some notion of that type of thing is probably what better it affects an ample band of our readers. In this point, we can start to consider the real form that the communication of our ideas must have. Before going down until finer details of the internal mechanisms of stories, the first thing to be considered is its basic form and its structure. To maximize the effect of the idea that you are trying to communicate it is preferable to give to the story some type of definite form whom a certain way of unit has and sense of integrity that produces an impression coherent and organized in the mind human being. It has as many forms of stories as forms in the nature exist. Some of them are irregular, others, regular, all they with its advantages and disadvantages and possibilities. Presumably, you will choose a structure that seems to accommodate, in the best way possible the effect that you desire for the story, but, moreover, does not import really which the chosen structure. The important one is that you it understands the structure of the work that is creating, whichever the structure that can come to have. If you it chose to turn aside from the subject, then all good, while you he will only be intent to whom it is making and because you are making, and intent to the consequences in the global effect of the story.
Some structures are obvious and evident by itself. One that I use very, probably beyond the account, is the elliptical structure basic, where the elements of the start of the story reflect events that they are for happening in the end, or where a phrase or particular image will be used in the beginning and the end, acting as extremities to point out the story, in a sense of care and unit. Another structure is to initiate from the way of the story and to fill the past at the same time that it advances with the drama in the future, moving in this way both the situations with the narrative at the same time. An example of this would be “the Teams will be Running” of # 26 of SWAMP THING (<em>published in SUPERAMIGOS # 23, with the name “Day of Escape”).</em> The action starts in the way, with the Swamp Thing and Abby running through the quagmire, being filled with the events that had taken them to that situation at the same time where we show the story to continue, unfolding itself in the gift. A more complete structure would be one that I took loaned by Gabriel Garci’a Marquez, in the second part of “Nukeface Paper” in SWAMP THING # 36 (<em>published with the first one in an only episode, in SUPERAMIGOS # 35</em>). Here, we have a counted entire the story for each personage, depending on how much of the central action it happened with them, individually. In this way, none of the personages had the story all, but with each new story of the events we more obtained a little on the situation until finally perceiving that the mountain-Russian is complete and that the picture all is finally ahead of us, if that unfolded in one forms uncommon and — I wait — well interesting. A simpler structure would be of SWAMP THING # 34 (<em>published in SUPERAMIGOS # 34</em>) where the central part was a poem erotic-abstract of eight pages, and the remaining portion of the story, simply the frame of that central part.
Still thus, all these are formal structures and it does not have reason for which the writers of comics aspirings must collect its slight knowledge of structure from parameters so limited as mine. Returning again the Eddie Campbell, or without a doubt the Phil Elliott or Ed Pinsent or a without-number of other attractive talents that have emerged in these last years, other people’s to the current market humorists, us we find forms of stories that are radically different of any of the described forms most conventional above. Eddie Campbell tends to give to its stories a type of informal anecdotal structure that mirror necessarily the way in which the jokes usually is recounted of person for person intercalated by small souvenirs and turning aside itself from the left subject unbroken. Stories suggest to have a necessarily controlled structure, but they seem, in some way, much more natural and organic that a portion of same clienter structures of itself that I have 0ccasionally used. Phil Elliott describes its stories as having one “” and a” B “to define the start and the end with nonlinear type of exploratory narrative and, that takes place between these colon. These are all valid boardings, and looking at for they with analytical eyes certainly if they show usable to arrive at the idea of that the structure really is and what its proper boarding of the subject could be.
Perhaps in this point, I must underline that, much even so is presenting these several facets and elements of stories so that they seem to make sensible for me, does not have reason for which you must carry through its the story accurately following these steps literally. Instead of starting with a idea-base you decide that she had an excellent idea for a the story structure and then leaves behind an idea that better agrees to this structure. The episode of “V FOR VENDETTA” entitled “Video”, for example, was a the story where the structure was conceived first: it would be possible to count to a the story using only incidental dialogues absolutely happening in a television set? The structure headed the basic idea of the story, and when a convenient place in the continuous appeared of the episodes of the series where this structure could be used to advantage, I employed it. A simple image, a simple line of dialogue, any one of them can be the beginning of a the story. My thesis is that, in some place to the long one of the line, in any place that you starts, all the some individual elements that we argue here they will be examined case the work is being so good how much you can make it.
Now that we have some idea on structures, the next step is to consider the proper act to count stories, that, for quarrel effect, will be defined here as the form for which stories if they move and if they hold inside of the limits of the structure. A time that now we reach a definite area better of the composition of stories, is much more easy to see the elements that go to characterize the difficulties of the process to count stories. Without no particular order in, prominent areas inside of a set of narrative instruments, including scenes of transition, speed of the narrative, rhythm, smoothness of the flow and all the other aspects that more say respect to the story properly said that when uncurling of the events inside of the same one.
Transition, the movement of a scene for another one, is one of the most intricate and intriguing elements of all process of writing. The problem is to move of a place or a time to another one without making something drastic or unskillful that could compromise the delicate wire of the involvement of the reader with the story. If the transition will be dealt with the missed way, this will make the reader “<strong>to awake</strong>” fast excessively for the fact to be only reading a the story; if you the first scene spent all constructing the involvement of the reader with the drama and the personages, certainly do not go to want that nothing she returns it to the reality. A time that until scene changes requires with frequency a type of breaking, following a pause enters the end of a scene and the start of another one, the transition interval is one of the places where very probably you risk yourself to lose the interest of the reader if she will not be worked adequately.
As I see, a successful the story of any type must almost be as a hypnosis; you fascinate the reader with its first phrase, she more ahead leads it with second, and she has it in settles soft for return of third. Then, having well-taken care of in not waking up it, you ahead take it among the narrow ways of its narrative, and, when it will be completely lost for the story, having itself delivered it, you makes right it with a terrible violence, like hitting a ball with a bat, and thus, she leaves it to beg for the exit in the last page. It believes me, goes to be thankful therefore.
An important thing is that the reader has not waked up until you thus wants it, and the transition between the scenes is the weak point of the enchantment that you are having a labor (or workmanship –JS) to launch on it. Of one it forms or another one, as writer you have that to come with its proper repertoire of tools and tricks with which you construct the credibility interval that the scene change represents, taking loaned some advice of other writers and, if God to want, who you know, bringing a little of its proper ones. One that I have used in excess, to judge for the commentaries that I harvested in revisions or letters of the readers, is the use of the overlapping or coincidence of dialogues. Or either, better the one is something very that to fall again into old and crippled “<em>Meanwhile, in the Room of Justice</em>... “ or some twitch (kneeherk –JS) seemed, and is more widely applicable than some of the boldest experimental ideas on scene change, many of which only possess, in the most instances, a limited use.
Thing that I finish making that it facilitates the transition and it is, some times, everything what it is needed to carry through it, is to write having as basic idea the <strong>page</strong>, in way that the action of the reader to turn the page if becomes the “compass” in which I moves of scene without disturbing the rhythm of the story. Another boarding is to vary the technique of overlapping of dialogues and to use the sincronicidade of the image more than words or even though a coincident joint of vacant and abstract ideas. It is even though possible to use the color to move of scene: the end of a scene that has a portion of exchange of shots and spilling of blood could finish with one close in the shining red blood all spread on the white floor. The following picture could, suddenly, cut for a commercial square in Italy, in one close of a tent of a florist with a vast profusion of red flowers taking most of the scene. In this example, the simple maintenance of the red color probably is enough successfully to lead the reader to the transition.
The transition nor always has that to be soft. If you the sufficient will be adept, some times you can use a very abrupt transition, with such elegance that nobody will go to perceive any breaking in the flow until the moment has passed and the reader already duly is absorbed by the next scene to the story. An example that comes of the cinema would be the dizzying artifice that Hitchcock used in “the BIRDS”; when finding a body mutilated by the birds, in the leaked eyes, the heroine opens her mouth and inhales, obviously gives to free an shout deafening. Instead of showing the shout, Hitchcock it cuts, suddenly, for the next scene, in one close-up of an engine towing, in an amplified and dissonant racket as what it was formed in the head of who attends, as the shout that if was waiting to hear. The brusque change in the scene is surprising, but Hitchcock obtains to use the sense of surprise with positive ends, accenting the pleasure of the story much more that exhausting the attention. This would not function in a half quadrinhístico, exactly using effect with onomatopéias, but a mind with initiative does not have reason for which cannot find a form to adapt the bases of this artifice in a sequence of words and fixed images.
Transitions, important in itself even so same, can also be considered as part of a general topic on <strong>spacing</strong> or <strong>compass</strong>. The compass, although, when made correctly, nor it is perceived by the reader, is an integrant part of the story, determining the intellectual progression with which the reader if inside moves through the story and <strong>timing</strong> (<em>the temporization</em>) of the events of the story for one better impression. The way simplest and mechanics to understand timing in the comics are to learn how much a reader spends in one comic before passing to the next one. The principle, it takes a certain time reading the legends and the balloons of dialogue. Perhaps one comic I contend a standard of 35 words will lead about seven or eight seconds being read, depending on the complexity of the image that follows it. Perhaps a simple graphical image without no balloon nor legend takes three seconds (<em>N.T.: perhaps in a country of illiterates vitiated to television it delays a little more, but, it must be for there same</em>). If you to read some stories having timing in mind, in briefing you will have a useful intuition on how much the reading delay in each picture. Still that this gives a rigid control to it, such which the assembly of the time enjoyed for the cinematographic industry (which has its proper disadvantages), without a doubt it confers you some principle of control on how much delay for the eyes of the readers to be guided to the long one of the page, or through the story as a whole.
The compass must engage the clutch having the scene in the hand. A thoughtful scene that probably demands attention would function better with a completely slow rhythm. A scene of fast action, perhaps a fight scene, very probably would function better when how much possible so fast moving itself. It compares some of the quiet scenes of fight of Frank Miller — which if they move very fast, flowing of image for image with the speed of a conflict in real time, not interrupting the reader with pauses to read mounts of accompaniment text — and the scenes of fight of lesser writers with some sense of scene movement are interfered with by the antagonists having poured mounds and mounds of dialogue on one another. What was said above are not rigid rules or of easy assimilation: I am certain that it is possible to write a scene of action with rhythm fast e to use many dialogues, as well as I know that it is possible to increase the amount of details in the next scenes to make a long dumb sequence that is chore to slow well. Or either, some intuition on as to trim the words is essential for the construction of a the story, as much to construct suspense in a dramatic situation, or to synchronize one <strong>gag</strong> for more circumstances. It plays with quiet scenes and it sees as they can be used to extender the suspense moment until strengthening the impact, if necessary. It tries the synchronization notion and it sees what it happens. In episode “100 rooms” of the series YOU LEASE TAMBIEN, Jaime Hernandez incredibly makes some strong things with the structure of the time and he executes them with genuine <strong>élan</strong> (<em>boldness, audacity</em>). An example would be when the sad former-noble who “had kidnapped” Maggie finally removes the hand of its mouth, confident of that it does not go to cry out. Abruptly, in comic following, we cut for an indefinite future moment, in the same room; Maggie and her abductor had obviously made love and the man is seated to the side of the bed, excusing itself for its behavior. This sudden, disconnected one and deliberated compass in addition of the story are disorienting, but, in certain way, satisfactory. It is not nothing that I have insolent me to try personally, but only demonstrates what it is possible if you it will have enough talent, nerves and imagination. You can add elements that really disturb flowing of its the story and still to obtain that they act in the context of it as a whole.
Basically, he does not have limits to the different effect of narrative and boarding that are possible beyond the limits taxes for our proper imagination. Everything that if asks for is that if it thinks on techniques that if are using, understanding what they are and knowing where they are applicable. More important still, he must yourself be had in mind that the some narrative artifices only are there for giving the best expression of its the story, or part of it. If you he will have a shining idea for an artifice of these and it will not be appropriate for the story that you are writing, abandons it. When tools narrative oppresses the idea that you was trying to lead the principle, then you is working in detriment of the story, much more that in benefit of it, and must be scratched out without pity or mercy. As many of intricate dramas described above, confidence in that you are leaving stop backwards and what to include in any definitive the story they are things who come only with practical and experience, but, a time that it knows at least what it is looking for, probably will see that these things finish come more fast the one that if imagines.
Assuming that you now have some notion on the real possibilities to its disposal to tell a story, in this stage we will pass to the considerations on the proper elements of the fiction work. By convenience, the main elements in this category can be divided in three basic sectors: <strong>composition of the personages, composition of the environment and, finally, drama</strong>(trauma/drama? –JS). Let us start with the environment, therefore the nature of the drama and the motivations of the personages widely will be determined by the world where they live.
The task of the writer, independent of it to be trying to describe a colony in Neptune in the 3020 year of or the life in London for 1890 return, is to invoke a sensation of ambient reality of the most complete and flowing possible form. The way most obvious of if making this are to explain the expository bases of its world to the readers through legends with text or dialogues, being this also, in my opinion, the less efficient method most artificial and least efficient. It happens that it is also the method most easy, being therefore applied with as much frequency. Inversely, the best way to give to its readers a sensation of space and a secular and geographic localization is, in the my opinion, most difficult, at the same time that she is most compensating in the long run.
The best way, me seems, is first to consider the environment with that you are working as a whole, in detail, before starting to write. You walk to write “V FOR VENDETTA”, for example, I gathered an enormous amount of information on that world and its inhabitants, many of which never will be shown in the comics for the simple reason not to constitute essential material for the knowledge of the readers and that probably she would not have place for she incases them in the entire history (story? –JS). It is not important. What it is important is that the scriptwriter must clearly have a picture of the imaginary world in all its details inside of the head all the time. Coming back to our Neptunian colony for a few seconds, we go to pass for the type of details that are essential to the synthesis of a picture clearly of that world.
First, as human beings obtain to survive in Neptune? Which are the physical problems that would have of being surpassed before the people could live in that planet and what she would sound as reasonable method for the overcoming of the possible difficulties? The fact that Neptune is constituted largely of gases would have to imply in an amount of environments artificial linked floating platforms perhaps for a domestic telecinética net? How the telecinético system would function? Which the effect that the enormous gravity in the planet has on the lives and the psychology of the individuals that live there? Which the intention of a colony in Neptune? It is, by chance, the ore exploration to be consumed in the Land? Which is the political situation of the Land prevailing in this point of the story and as it affects the life of the colonists? Have how much time they are there? The time enough to have developed a proper culture? If thus it will be, that type of art produces and that type of music composes? Is it’s art overwhelming and claustrophobic as resulted of the pressures of living in a so closed environment, or the parts of art and music are full of light and space to compensate the inhibiting environment that the colonists are forced to support? How is kept the law in the Neptunian colony? That type of social problems exists? The inhabitants of Earth are the only species that obtained to colonize the planet or has other involved foreign races in the settling project? The humanity found of fact some foreign race in all the decades that if had followed until the time where if uncurl our the story or still is alone in the universe — until where it knows? How functions the economy in this place? How the people if dress? How the family is structuralized?
This was the process that I submitted myself when I composed the world of WARPSMITHS and the way as its culture was structuralized. I crossed process with HALO the same JONES and V OF REVENGE. The question is that, a time that you elaborated the world in all its details you will be capable to speak of it with complete confidence in trivial way without hammering the reader over the head with excess information.
Howard Chaykin proceeded thus with AMERICAN FLAGG. It elaborated the names of the marks of products and shows of TV, the trends of the fashion and the problems politicians for then only following with the story and leaving the readers to catch the general climate in its transcorrer. In the first episode of American Flagg, we see the flashes of shows of TV and announcements that in give much more genuine impressions to them in the way as the personages think and live that an enormous amount of legends could pass. Moreover, it has the advantage to seem much more natural, therefore it follows the way almost accurately as we catch a foreign culture when we travel for the exterior. We do not understand necessarily everything of the face culture, but, gradually; to the measure that we catch the details of the environment, we reach a complete conscience of the set, its atmosphere only e the social elements that shape it. When a writer manipulates the environment in this way, does <strong>not</strong> have the sensation to be receiving a gamma from pressed irrelevant details against us only why said whose he wants that let us know meticulously by what means it has been in the construction of the story. On the contrary of this, we realistically have the sensation of a conceived world of complete and detailed form, where the facts transcorrem normally, exactly that the story is not focused in them. A world to point out the our the story that is structuralized logically interrupts any diffidence of the reader and finishes dragging it in that state of hypnosis that I mentioned in my previous article.
While the previous commentaries if relate environments specifically imaginary, if you are if I take care of to a real environment, you needs to be meticulous to the extremity in its conception of the world that you are displaying. When I started to write the MONSTER of the QUAGMIRE, I read regarding the Louisiana and its rivers and tributaries in such a way how much I could and I obtained to congregate instrumental knowledge on its flora and fauna and its general constitution. I know, for example, the type of liquid the hyacinths (flowers) synthesize in a thick sheet in the surface of the water — that it makes that this sheet seems firm land and allows that these grow so fast that, some times in the past, had of being burnt so that they did not take the quagmire all. I learned that the alligators eat rocks finding that they are turtles and later they do not obtain to make its digestion. It is therefore that the alligators have that excrement mood. I also know that <strong>cajuns</strong> (descending of the French colonists) is called “coonass” for non-cajuns as a demonstration of racial discrimination, but that cajuns had transformed the insulting term into a compliment, creating enormous adhesives where if it reads “PRIDE OF BEING COONASS”. I know that the more popular name cajun is Bordeaux. If desire a name that sounds natural for a common citizen in the Louisiana, I look for in my telephonic catalogue of Houma until finding a name that jumps me to the sight: Hatie Duplantis can be a good name. As well as Jody Hebert. If I to want to know which the road a personage I would have to take to go inside of Houma to Alexandria (<em>of the United States, not in Egypt. After all, isn’t there PARIS, TEXAS?</em>), I look for in a road map of the United States. They are the small details as these that make with that its description of a specific place is realistic and convincing. They can accidentally be dripped in the comics, without ostentation, and will be probably more convincing in the ratio where they will be trivial and irrelevant.
Of course, when considering an environment, is not only the physical reality of the place that must be understood, but also its atmosphere — the emotional reality. It catches the Gotham City of the Batman, for example. It is only another version of New York? Is it an enormous park of diversions for super-developed children, full of giant typewriters and Jack-in-the-boxes, populated by creatures such as the bat-dog and extremely wicked hobgoblin bat (bat-mirim, in the livened up drawing) and clowns as the Penguin and the Joker? It is a paranoid and left-hand side landscape urban derived from Fritz Lang, frightened for deformed types and monsters, whose only defender is a cold, guarded, and remorseless man that is dressed as a bat? The way that you choose to treat the way that goes to all modify the character of the story and is so important how much the final effect as an understanding of real the physical factors that compose the world on which you are writing.
The boarding of the composition of personages in comics has evolved, as all more in this disaster of delayed way, in a painful slow rhythm in these last thirty or forty years. The boarding oldest sight in comics is that one where the composition of the personages is maniqueísta, constituted generally of the “that one it is good there” and “that one is there badly”. For the comics and the world comparatively simpler than they were made use to entertain, this perfectly adequate age. There for the start of years 60, however, the times had moved, and a new boarding for the composition of personages if it made necessary. Thus, Stan Lee created a new composition of personages of two dimensions: “that one is good there, but it is unlucky with the girls” or “that one is there badly, but it could help the Avengers if a certain number of readers wrote asking for that it made this”. Of new, at the time, this was an innovation to take off the breath, and perfectly seemed a valid way of if making stories in comics that had importance in the context where they were being made. The advances since then have been minimum. In an effort to follow the times, the personages properly said had become more distinguished, dopey, bixxare or neurotics, but the basic way to portray moved very them little. Still they are carefully defined personages under the two angles, with a pinch of verbal embromação a play to perhaps liven up them here and there.
I believe that it has left of the part of the guilt for this state of things if it must to the great adhesion without questionings to good and the old one dictated: “<strong>if you it will not be able to summarize a personage in fifteen words is not a good personage</strong>”. He wants to say, who is that he said this? On the other hand, certainly he is possible to define the personage and the motivations of Captain Ahab in a well-elaborated phrase as a “wild cripple who feeds rancor against a whale”. Herman Melville, obviously, better found to go deep itself more the service a bit. He seems me that the best one that if wanted to really say with that how much in such a way false phrase one type is something it “<strong>if a personage will not be able if summarized in fifteen words it does not have to be salable to a young public, that presumably have limited attention and brief supplies of intelligence</strong>”.
These written laws and this conventional wisdom are not really the curse of the industry, or, at least, one of its curses. The problem is that they tend to involve the people in a certain way to reflect on the things. He is obvious that if our necessary personage to be described in fifteen words, you will incline in direction to a personage of fifteen words — something as “<em>one takes off cynical whose parents had been assassinated, what he compels it to undertake a private war against the crime</em>”. At the same time where this can represent the beginnings of a elaborável personage, the trend is of that the scriptwriter not look very far beyond the skeleton of fifteen words. One or two times to each episode it will make with that the personage says some cynical thing and has remembered itself of its career as policeman. Moreover, one of the secondary personages probably will say, the certain height, “<em>Frankly, you is so cynical</em>!!!”. To that our hero will answer: “<em>What you he wanted? I remember, already I was strap</em> “. If the scriptwriter will be relatively adept, small subtleties of personality will be introduced in the project... is disclosed, for example, that our former-she also takes off cynical collects stamps. Strangely, this generally will be leagued of some skill to the initial premise of fifteen words: “<em>I am Well, here, with my album opened in my front, glue stamps. I would not be making this if still he was one takes off. About the hard one, the more I think about this, more cynical I I am</em> “.
If the writer will be bold, will feel the necessity to explore the personage in a bigger depth. The question is that it does not matter how deep it goes into the soul of the personage; it still will have fifteen words of width. Perhaps the writer dedicates all an assay to the personage, trying to unmask the mysteries of its past through a <strong>flash-back</strong> or something thus. The story will have a central point and a subject, such and which must have stories, turning probably around “What he was same that it became this so cynical personage”. To the long one of the twenty and as many pages we will cross the first years of formation of the personage until reaching the apocalyptic event, well in the height of the story: “<em>I was only seated there, seeing my album of stamps and the collection without price that had consumed years of my life to be composed, when, suddenly, I perceived that, a time that the donkey had jammed those stamps with glue here and the</em> <em><strong>glue</strong></em> <em>one direct in the album, was impossible to inquire its value — they already did not possess value some. Then, I understood that the universe did not pass of a cruel joke on the humanity and that the life had not felt. I became cynical on the existence human being and could see that the dullness all intrinsic the human effort. In this height, I decided to integrate me to the police force</em> ”
The point is that if the initial premises of work on which the personages are constructed are limited and gradually rigid, thus are also the proper personages. Perhaps if the scriptwriters of comics to obtain to develop its of composition of personages until a level where if she follows changes, were not an bad idea to play except some of these models expenses and to face the problem of one another form. A logical starting point would be simply to leave and to observe the people. It also considers the structure of the character of the people to its return and its proper personality with the biggest frieza and objectivity that to obtain. After little time you it will go to discover that almost nobody can be described in fifteen words, at least not in an excellent and significant way. You also it will notice that the people mold its behavior depending on with who they are talking. They are with the different voice when they speak with its parents and when they speak with its colleagues. They vary the attitude and disposal to each hour. They will make with frequency things that are, apparently, it are of its personality. Simple and subtle comments as these help to equip the creative mind in direction to a more complete understanding of the composition of the personality of that the one that is offered by some brief generalizations on the phenomena in general.
Valley the penalty to observe as the people in other areas decides the question of the authenticity human being. An artist who wants to learn to portray the body realistically human probably will start drawing models livings creature, observing as the people stop, if they incline and if they put into motion. Not to be that they are wondrous donkeys, they will not try to catch the life in its figures by means of little trustworthy declarations as “pretty figures have salient chins” or something thus.
It studies proper itself and to the people to its return with details and tries not to lose nothing... Each knot in the voice and hesitation, each nuance vacant in the corporal position or unconscious gesture of the hands. It hears as they speak and it tries to inside reproduce its voices of its head with all the features and mannerisms. Exactly that, very probably, you never it has, in all its career, success in creating a personage who is total true, to the little o effort will bring it more close to this objective and to the understanding them involved problems.
Another useful instrument for the composition of personages can be extracted of the theater. Already I mentioned before I look for to adopt a method of boarding in that the always-possible composition of personages and that it seems to be giving resulted. As for example of as I would approach a personage for this method, I would cite the way of as Etrigan, the Demon I was treated in the ones in the 25, 26 and 27 of magazine SWAMP THING (published for the Ed. April in the ones in the 27, 28 and 29 of the magazine SUPERAMIGOS). To elaborate the personality of Jason Blood did not present no real difficulty, but, a time that the Demon represented and fact a creature of the hell, I perceived that its interior mechanisms, its psychology, demanded some reflection. I wise person who it I would be a stocky personage low e, and later drew that it would be very intense and inflexible, in consequence to pass the life in the hell. I imagined its weight enormous, as if it was of massive iron, and its internal temperature almost so hot how much the magma. This in accordance with suggests a type of feverish intensity in its action and thoughts its smashing weight, result of its powerful density.
I noticed that in the original sketches of the John and the Steve (John Tottleben and Steve Bissete, the tracers of the series) for its proposal of treatment of the personage, who the canine tooth was sharper and the mouth had a light crack in the superior lip, like a cat’s. This suggested that the voice of the personage would be a little distorted, says it modified for the deformation of the lip and teeth.
Armed of all these information, I closed the curtains of my studio so that the neighbors did not scare and called the social assistant (<em>probable the equivalent the English to the staff that direct the people to the Juqueri</em>) or something to it sort and try imagine what feel if be of fact the personage. I imagined the weight enormous of my body, that now was very lesser, and vi that this would bring to the corporal movements a terrible impulse. Keeping the fierce nature suggested by the imprisoned frontals, I tried the sensation to incurvate myself like Quasímodo (Hunchback of Notre Dame) and to limp. Later that I felt that to get the physical sensation of the personage, I tried the voice, splitting the teeth and raising the superior lip until being difficult to speak with clarity. To make direction, after all it seemed necessary to speak very slowly, what it suggested a type of voice as of a record player disconnect, guttural and very serious. Finally, I perceived that the accurate voice that it looked was of the type of voice as of Charles Laughton in the film “the Riot”, electronically distorted. A chosen time the voice and the position of the personage, you can record in the mind the impression to evoke it when to arrive the time to put the personage in the axles and to produce realistic dialogues for it.
A conclusion that I arrived is that almost all have a practically infinite number of facets in its personality, but emphasizes only part of them in the biggest part of the time. All we have parts of that they are cruel, badly intentioned, cowards, profligates, violent, greedy... If to describe a personage with these characteristics, we must in preparing them to look at for regions of our personality with which in we feel them less comfortable of front and to make a honest evaluation of that we see. On the other hand, all we have sides that noble, heroic, they are unfastened or loving, let us admit or not. When creating a noble personage, you must before Have to try to see in you yourselves any spark of nobility, exactly that the possibility of the existence of it seems the most improbable in its worse moments.
The more audacious you to be in the composition of its personages, more confident he will be in facing the problems most specific and confusions of the work. How a white writer, of the masculine sex and heterosexual practitioner, for example, as I go to be able to write on a homosexual, a black or a woman? Theoretically, it is clearly, it would be more easy to write on people of one another color, sort or sexual inclination of that on livened up vegetables, whermeuschen or creatures of the abyss. The point where this can give pra backwards is that, if you to understand its ambulant vegetable in making a mistake way, will be able to offend and to hurt somebody that can be felt mentioned. To deal with the vast multitude of different types of personages that you probably will create during its career of scriptwriter is, at the same time, demanding absorbent and. In one day, you it will be the infanticide of New York; in the following day, a transparent creature of Altair 4; in the other, a nun of seventy years taking care of the survivors of the second plague of London of 2237. You she will be forced to ponder on morally offensive people who are politics or you and to try to understand them.
This can in such a way be personal how much professionally compensating, but the main result is that, when writing on the personages in the course of its work, you care degree of and pretension and at the demanded degree of authenticity or estilização with the complete notion of the involved principles will arrive at an adjusted. That one remembers that never more all the involved ones are personages, same that who, by chance, take a walk for the dumb scene and leave been silent, reappearing. Exactly that you it does not make use of time and cannot spend traditional the seven days of the week in this, you had, at least, To have certainty of that thought in such a way about the subject how much it has been necessary.
Now that we have the discriminated idea, structure, boarding narrative, environment and personages, I assume that if must also think about considering the plot (even so, as you already must have deduced, if he is that you already it read sufficiently of my works, I almost I cannot bother me with this formality). After all, that devils are a plot? That expensive has? The plot is not the main point of the story or its main reason of being Is something that is there more for enhancing the central idea of the story and the personages who will become involved themselves in the one of that she stops dominating them and forcing them if incasing it in its limitations. Plot is the combination environment-personas only with the element added time they. If the combination of environment and personages can be called “<strong>situation</strong>”, then, plot is a situation seen in four dimensions.
Using the example that we take from the excellent “Report on the Probability” of Brian Aldiss, thinks about a different thing of stories in comics for terms one another perspective of the idea. Let us consider a painting — in particular, “the Mercenary Shepherd”, of the daily pay-rafaelita William Holman Hunt.
In this picture, we see a young in facing in first plan, in way to a pretty and luminous pastoral landscape, bathed for the golden light setting it. Kneel or stoops downs, then behind of it, we see a young man, the shepherd of the heading. It is with an arm raised for backwards of the shoulders of it, as it was the point to establish a physical privacy, involving it in one hugs. However, at the portrayed moment, its hand still did not touch it. Canine tooth in the palms of the hand, it brings a small “sphynx-skull” butterfly (note of the translator: insect that has printed in its wing the figure of a skull). As much the expression of the beautiful shepherd as of the young one is ambiguous. The shepherd seems wanton and the young woman seems stimulated/motivated. Seen in another light, the expression of it is a little more left-hand side, while of it is of somebody suffocated by the scare. Behind the couple, in the bathed English fields in gold, a flock of sheep wanders without route and protection while the shepherd passes the time with the beautiful young on the lawny one soon above of the grass. The shepherd seems to smile to if preparing to show the insect, and it she does not seem bothered its approach. The sheep graze, the butterfly if it agitates, the moment is suspended, without passed or conclusion. He is only one second, extracted of one <em>continuum</em> on which we do not know more nothing. We do not know nothing on the past of them — where the shepherd grew or same where he passed the previous night. We do not know if the woman is until there by chance or if she had combined of if finding before with it. Of its future we know less still. When it shows the insect, it if he enchants or if he scares? They will make love there exactly, or they will talk or only fight? What it will happen with the sheep, left without guard? With an eye in the apparently left-hand side symbolism of the sphynx-skull, will exist something more threatening implicit in the scene? Not something necessarily melodramatic/sensational as the shepherd to be you give to strangle it, but, perhaps, a mention to the death and the way as we waste the essence of the life? This perpetual moment that we see, imprisoned in the screen, is the start of a relationship, or the end? The beauty of a good painting is in the fact of the mind and the directions to be able to become vacant perpetual in, following its track and covering its ways in this place where the time is suspended. “the Mercenary Shepherd” in displays the situation to them. The not dumb situation, but we in inside dislocate them from it, appreciating its subtle meanders perspective and meaning.
If, then, to add the dimension <strong>time</strong> to this situation, the work of art is completely modified. Instead of presenting infinite possibilities, them they would follow an only definite route. The composition of the events to the long one of this definite route. The composition of events to soon of this route is the plot. The young woman in the painting notices the butterfly and is curious and also a little scared. A dialogue between the charming shepherd and the young woman is stopped then, that it is fascinated by it. They make love after freeing the small insect. After this, they discover that the flock was stolen or if it lost in this half time. Instead of facing the fury of the raging farmer who uses it to take care of the flock, the impulsive servant decides to run away from the e region to look job in another county. After some weeks the young woman he perceives that she is pregnant. Its father and its brothers are knowing and swear to hunt the shepherd and to give a choice to it — or he marries or he dies -... and etc, etc, etc. I confess that the version above is an unskillful and ugly extrapolation without nothing of that charm, subtlety or poetry of the original painting, but believe that it clarifies the point of that to compose the plot is a type of phenomenon of four dimensions, taking <strong>time</strong> as the fourth dimension. The situation portrayed in the proper painting is a representation of a three-dimensional world that, with the addition of the time, becomes quadra-dimensional and passes of <strong>situation</strong> to the <strong>plot</strong>.
Therefore, to assume itself of the process of creation of plot in a valid way, you it must try to reason quadra-dimensionality. It sees the world where continuum with past, gift and future live its personages as one. It sees the form of all, then you are more apt to observe as the elements inside of the global project if they relate much more clearly in way. “WATCHMEN” was created exactly of this form. In the real time, the story starts in October of 1985 and finishes some months later. I have all the events enclosed in this period, incased necessarily. In ampler terms, however, the story refers it events that go since 1940, with individual sequences that if they give in years 40, 50, 60, 70... the impression that we have, waits, is that a felt of depth and the story likely, together world with personages who share this quality. To the being capable to observing a period of 45 years of relative the story of the world where if it before points out my drama exactly to try to write an only syllable on that world, I was capable to observe parameters of events and events that if they reflect conceptually, potentially interesting elements of the story and its narrative that I could emphasize and bring to the surface as the progress of the story. I could notice chances to moor elements of the plot or the thematic structure and to present one more coherent and all effective one as resulted. Still, a time having the story and its some personages planned in depth, if perhaps notices exactly of personages or interesting events that they would occur logically to a certain height and that they could suggest one or another interesting dialogue.
Establish its continuum with a quadra-dimensional format — with length, width, depth and time, and then it takes an only wire of narrative that leads it for the landscape that you created of the possible revealing form most interesting and, either realistic it or of a more abstract and psychological land. This wire of narrative is its plot. While the plot if dislocates through continuum visualized well that you created for it, you it will find easy to extract a real and pleasant impression parallel if uncurling inside of the story that you are definitively telling. A good example of this is the words that Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez had created in “LOVE & ROCKETS”. In stories “You lease Tambien” and “Mechanics” of the Jaime, we have the sensation of an only body of likely details hover beyond the limits of the comics and proper the story. After seeing for some months “MISSILES OF OCTOBER” pichados by the city, we discover that this is the name of the band of Hopey, in the same way accidental that we discover that its name is “Glass” or that its aunt, Vicky Glori (<em>note of the translator: it lacked the author to read with attention, this she is the aunt of the Maggie, not of the Hopey there</em>), gained one disputed fight against Rena Titañon. In “Heartbreak Soup”, Gilbert produced a work equally notable in its description of the community of Palomar in a period of fifteen or twenty years. Observing Jesus, Heráclio, Vicente and others to grow and to establish its when adult lives. We see the Sherrif Chelo to start its career as bañadora (“a woman who gives to bath in men “- <em>note of the translator: it can seem joke, but this type of service was common in communities baffle plates of the years 50</em>) before being banishes from the businesses for the Luba beautiful and debtor to enter the force of the law. In later sequences we see with that perfection it assumed its new vocation and observes that it also is become thin and being more attractive, while Luba starts to make look like each time more fatigue and conscientious of how much it feels lack of youth and that is losing the beauty. The world is genuine and three-dimensional. It takes fifteen years of the story to perceive that Vicente more is complexado by its deformity that originally mame look like to be. We observe two children of different mothers, both generated by the young just-deceased “estraçalhador of hearts” Manuel, playing together during a public commemoration, at the same time that the adult life continues in function of them. We have the complete sensation of one continuum, inside of which all the elements assume its proper degree of importance and become vital part of the total work of art.
We have an idea that we desire to transmit and a script that enhances and discloses the idea in an incendiary way. We composed the personages to live the story and an equally concrete and likely world to shelter it. First step is to catch our the story that, I presume, it was developed with an eye in how many pages they are available for the impression, and to see accurately as it can better adjust itself to the limitations that we have. As an example of as this process functions, I would cite my <strong>Superman Annual</strong> of 1985 (Super Powers # 20, in Brazil). The idea was to examine the escapism and the fantastic worlds of the dreams, that include happy times idealized in the past and points desired in the future, where finally will reach objective longed for ours. I wanted to evaluate I eat these concepts I would be applicable and which would be the dimension of the interval that separates the fancy of the reality. It was a the story, if to prefer, for the people who I have found for the life measures that they are stopped in some point of the future when finally they will be “happy”. They are people who say “if I had not married that man or that woman, if I had continued the college, if he had left there before, established, IDO to see me the world accepted, the job that I refused...” or, that they say “when I to pay the mortgage, will be able to use to advantage the life. When I will be promoted and to earn better, I will be able to use to advantage the life. When the children to grow, when I to obtain to publish my book... “ People are who if enslave for its nostalgia or its expectations, being incapable to live the gift until it if has become passed.
The script that I chose to develop this idea involves the mind of the Superman, enslaved for a parasite telepath that insufflates an illusion that the heart of it more desired... a Krypton planet that does not blow up. That is part of a script on a foreign enemy of the Superman — Mongul — that wants the hero is of its way so that it can dominate the universe or what he wants that these tyrannical types normally inhale. The story happens in the day of the anniversary of the Superman, in Fortress of the Solitude, with simultaneous sequences inside of its mind, while it imagines itself in Krypton as if it still existed. In uncurling of the story, we finally see that such eventuality could not be so happy how much promised to the first sight, leading the hero if to undo of the fancy. At the same time it perceives that its nostalgia for a disappeared planet is useless, as of fact was, and exactly learns something on itself with the experience.
Ok... then the problem is as to inside present that script and its main idea of the restrictions that are imposed by the dimensions of the magazine, the market the one that if destine, and thus by ahead. The immediate restriction most concrete and is that the magazine has forty pages. This implies in having that to adjust to my story that one it needs dimension without that it seems neither pressed nor strained. Thus, my first step is normally to catch a sheet of paper and to number of one the forty, in the left side. Then sketch the scenes that already are in mind and I try to decide how many pages they will consume.
Already I decided that desire to present a contrast enters the world of Krypton in the dreams of the Superman and the reality of its situation, paralyzed in Fortress of Solitude with one fungus sprouting of its chest, if floundering in the bio-aura of the hero. So that this of this certainty, I needed interesting facts of uncurling in Fortress of Solitude while the Superman is asleep, and equally involving happening simultaneously in the “real world”. As this happened in the anniversary of the Superman, it seemed logical that some of its colleagues super-human beings appeared – Wonder Woman, Batman and Robin — as really it would come to happen, and gave edge to some interesting incidents with Mongul, that would be taking care of its workmanship.
The coarse project would be the following one: they arrive, we establish its personalities in brief you launch and we show as they react. With the dialogues, we allow that the reader knows that it is the anniversary of Superman. We establish that as much Wonder Woman how much the Dynamic Pair it brings gifts — brings an enormous package, whose content it does not disclose in way some, and Batman and Robin have a special rose call “Krypton”, especially cultivated for the occasion. When entering in Fortress of Solitude apparently, they find the Superman with a stranger mass of black roses sprouting of his chest. It is immovable and total inert. While they try to discover what she is happening, Mongul appears and discloses the details excellent that lack. Wonder Woman tries to attack it and is won with a brutal blow that the spear for the Room of the Trophies and makes with that it crosses the wall of the Weapon room, where the foreign weapons if discloses useless against Mongul. Meanwhile, Batman cold tries to reanimate to the Superman, seeing in this the only way out of the situation. More as resulted of the increasing disenchantment of the Superman with the illusory world where it is that for the efforts of Batman, the untied creature if and it imprisons this last one. It is in this height that, it exempts of influences of the creature, the awaken Superman. The fancy that it lives finishes and the two extremities of the narrative if they join while the events if head for the climax of the episode.
Ok... a time with this organized, I needed to develop a similar project for the events in the imagination of the Superman: we open in Kryptonópolis, where we establish that it lives as Kal-El, has wife and two children and is an archaeologist who works for long and tiring hours. We are knowing that Krypton is in a phase of social decline. The father of Kal-El, Jor-El, was banishes from the scientific community, a time that its forecasts how much to the destination of Krypton they had demonstrated to be baseless e, with the death of its wife, Lara, it if he became frustrated a man and sad, inclined the groups extremist politicians in the attempt to interrupt the decline that he sees in the Kryptonian standards of living. This takes it to enter in conflict with its son, who is more liberal, and the two if they misunderstand. We see such events to culminate when we know that the cousin of Kal-El, Kara, was attacked and wounded for armed members of a group of campaign for the abolition of the Zone Ghost and that they feed an intense resentment against who wants that is still that remotely on to the creator of that project — Jor-El. Worried about these events, we observe Kal-El and its family trying to abandon Kryptonópolis having as deep cloth of a parade of torches, detonations and manifestations while Krypton starts if to more quickly dislocate each time in direction to the collapse. Finally, Kal-El cannot more accept the terms of the fancy and more prepared is not felt to pay the needy price to support it. It breaches with the fancy to find Batman prisoner of the parasite, when the two extremities of the story if find.
The next step was to integrate these sequences in one all coherent one, of form that parallel ran during all the first half of the forty pages. This wants to say, I had that in such a way to make use the scenes of the fancy of the Superman how much the scenes inside of Fortress with Batman and Cia., deciding for high what it had to go in each page with an eye in the final result of it, that must contain a complete scene. I wise person who all this equipment needed to go in the start of the album, covering the 25 first pages. This wanted to say that I had to interlace the two lines of the narrative in joints synchronized well and to try approximately to bring the two extremities in direction to the height at the same time. When establishing a good one start for the story I had an immediate position: or I started with the arrival of the visiting super-heroes or I could shoot the direct reader in the fancy of the Superman without any explanation. As it seemed more logical that this last alternative would more tend to surprise and to instigate the reader, I decided to open in a scene that if gives in the illusory Krypton of the dream of the Superman produced for the parasite. The effect waited on the reading one was something as “what!? Where we are? In Krypton? But Krypton did not blow up? Ué... is Kal-El, the same age that has today in the Land, but seems half different there. It seems... common, it is using eyeglasses, it has a regular job, wife and two children. What it is happening “ If this first page will be intriguing the sufficient, then you already it obtained to evolve sufficiently in the process of “fisgamento” of the reader. When establishing this basic situation in this imaginary Krypton, we turn the page and we pass direct to the Arctic Circle, for the arrival of the three visitors for the anniversary of the Superman. While it keeps one I dialogue accidental however revealing, them they enter in the Fortress. Knowing that pages 2 and 3 are respectively in the left and right hand, he seemed advantageous to wait any great scene of visual impact until page 4. A time that has a sequence in addition after page 4, and, as taste very of pictures that they take all the page, as much to call the heading the story as to properly give to the suggested premise its had weight and occasion, emphasizing the said start of the story, page 4 is the height of the introduction: the Superman paralyzed with a left-hand side black and red tumor sprouting of its chest. With luck, the reader is curious with this uncommon state of things the sufficient to jump the announcements of Figs and Apples Newton until page 5, in the verse of the leaf, where we show the reactions of the friends of the Superman, trying to guess what he happens to its colleague. The page if locks up with one close of the face of the Superman looking at for the nothing while Batman, behind of it, comments that the friend if finds in a particular world. We take the look for the top of page 6.
Here, we have an image that it evokes comic previous. One more time, Kal-El looks at for the nothing, but we are in return the Krypton, in the dream of the Superman, almost literally in a “particular world”. Thus, the coincidence of images and the irony of the commentary of Batman supply a soft transition and half-significant it enters the two scenes without losing the attention of the reader. In page 6, we show to the relation between Kal-El and its woman, with a certain text of emotional details, using its dialogue to give to the reader information on as it is the situation of them. The page finishes with a nocturnal taking it building where they live against a blue and pink sky, immediately after Kal to mention that she goes to visit its father in the following day.
We turn the leaf and we have a taking showing one another Kryptonian building, of this time with a sky of dawn, yellow, orange and red to the deep one. Still we are in Krypton, obviously, and is equally obvious that is morning of the following day. We pass to the meeting of three pages of Kal-El and its sad father, who if locks up in page, with 9 Jor-El hatefully pulverizing an ornamental glass tree in the terrace and jamming a glass bird, portrayed at the moment where he fed a youngling. The last taking is of the cut off head of the bird, with a glass worm still in the peak. At the same time where this in suggests a symbolic image to them of the disruption of the relation father-son between Kal-El and its old one, it has an oblique linking with the legend of the next picture, that says: “in the truth, one is alone questao to join the parts”. This phrase, in the on reality to the comment of Batman in its applied deductive process in the inquiry of that if it gives with the Superman, also has apparent importance in relation the image of the torn into pieces bird, left in the soil in fragments impossible to be reconstituted. This in takes them to page 10, where it begins a scene of page room where Mongul arrives and fights with Wonder Woman. It finishes with the villain saying “Obliged. I find that this answers to my question “, while reaches the heroine, with the deep, the inert one Superman to, looking at for the emptiness. In the next page, we again have a scene in Krypton, the hospital. In first plan, we have the mother of Super-Girl, Allura. To the deep one, approximately in the same relative position where if it found in last comic, Kal-El enters in the hospital. Allura despairingly interrogates a nurse on the conditions of its son and says: “I made a question”. This continues in similar way, going for front and pra backwards, until arriving at page 25 and reaching the wakening of the Superman.
A mapeada time the first part of the album, I was capable to see how much available space I had to co-ordinate the events until the end. I wise person, for example, that it needed a strong final page, preceded of one or two pages you spend only with the conclusions of action and the establishment of a state of spirit of return to normality and reflection on the lições that we learn. This consumed more or but one four pages. I want to say, the 36 for the burning hot final battle between Superman and Mongul remained pages 26, what it seemed to be the correct duration.
Using the same approach procedure as before, I then looked for to interrupt this sequence of action of ten pages with one I gush out interesting of lesser events while Superman and Mongul if spank for the Fortress. To make this to function, I exhaustingly consulted the project of Fortress of the Solitude, loaned for my tracer, Dave “Fanboy” Gibbons. I wise person who the first Superman would fall on Mongul in the Weapon room, where the foreign giant spanked Wonder Woman. If Mongul made right the Superman with force the sufficient one to hurl it through the ceiling, it would stop in the Foreign Zoo, immediately above. They, then, if beating for the Zoo, would arrive at the Room of Communications with its archives of computer. If, to this height, if they played in the soil, if they would ahead estatelariam of the giant statue of Jor-El and Lara supporting the globe of Krypton in the way of them. This seemed an excellent place to lock up the battle, with its inherent echo of the world where the Superman passed half of the story in dream. While this happened, we follow the progress of Robin in dealing with the foreign organism that it removes of Batman. It finally follows the track of destruction left for Mongul and Superman, arriving until the two, the time to bring the vital element for the defeat of the villain. Of new, this had that to be made in natural way, bringing the two extremities of the narrative (Robin/parasite and Superman/Mongul) to the height simultaneously.
Mongul finally is defeated by that organism that it intends to use to imprison the Superman. After a conclusion of three pages, in which the heroes relaxing and talking after the fight, have Batman delivering its rose “Krypton”, especially cultivated, who are jammed during the fight. The accepted superman with calm the death of the rose, and, for extension, the death of Krypton, giving a contained emotional point for the closing of the story, with the central idea reasonably explored and to less partially decided. The final page, evoking the first page, in gives a taking to them of the terrible and bloody reality lived for Mongul under the influence of the parasite, showing that it is more hopelessly chats inside of its dream of that never would be the Superman, in giving a counterpoint to the eventual success of this last one with its eventual defeat.
Good, we have the story completely dissected with an approach understanding of that it goes in each page, as well as with the understanding of as the dispersed elements that we analyze are working jointly to form one all. The only remaining stages are mere final creative processes in the reach of the correct track, as much in the verbal narrative how much of the appearance.
The stonecutting of the language is important, therefore in that bumbling language, flat, or without life to inhabit will very likely disinterest the reader in relation to the plot that you desire to tell. You must learn as to use the words with the maximum of its ability, one more time applying the realistic reasoning to the involved procedures. He is easy to develop a visual sensitivity, for example, still that she is minimum, as mine, adopting the habit to make schematic scribbles of each page before writing it, showing the visual elements that go in each comic. You he will collect an idea of that he is possible to show in each comic, and you he will have a notion of as a complete phrase will consist; have many closes of faces or taking of countenances? They are all visas of exactly angulo without-favor? This picture where you want to establish a threat direction you would not have more effect if she was seen from above, in way that we felt that subliminally somebody almost observing the personages from above, unprepared there under, soon to attack them? This would be better if it was a sequence of three comics instead of one only, using comic remaining for some another thing? Have many information squeezed in this comic e, this in case that, have space in the page to distribute them in two comics, in way that is chore more softly? Tips of this type will allow the tracer to understand the effect that you search and the intention for backwards of it, what it will be able to use as starting point for any visual information that it desires to add to its the story, having in mind that it, with almost all certainty of the world, will have a sensitivity (or intuition) visual 50 times more solid and trustworthy that its (<em>note of the translator: since that you he is not working with one covered or an imcompetent person, is clearly</em>)
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#title Voice of the Fire
#author Alan Moore
#SORTtopics fiction, history
#date 1996
#lang en
#pubdate 2020-09-22T09:17:20
** <strong>Introduction by Neil Gaiman</strong>
<em>One measures a circle starting anywhere</em>, said Alan Moore, quoting Charles Fort, at the beginning of his exploration of Victorian society, <em>From Hell</em>. The circle here is temporal, and the circle is geographical. It is a circle made of black dogs and November fires, of dead feet and severed heads, of longing and loss and lust. It is a circle that will take you several miles and six thousand years.
I am sitting in a room in the Netherlands, in an anachronistic Victorian castle, writing an introduction to a book called <em>Voice of the Fire</em>, by Alan Moore. It is not the best introduction to this book, of course. The best introduction is the final chapter of the book, written in a smoky room in November 1995 by Alan Moore in the voice of Alan Moore, dry and funny and much, much too smart for our own good, written in a room piled with the books he has used as research, written as a final act of magic and faith.
One measures a circle starting anywhere. Not, of course, everywhere. One circle, one place. This is Northampton’s story, after all.
If this were a linear narrative we would follow Northampton, voice by voice, head to head and heart to heart, from a stopping place in a pig pen for a half-witted youth, through Ham Town to a bustling medieval town to now. But the narrative, like the town, is only linear if you want it to be, and if you expect to get a prize for getting to the end you’ve already lost. It’s a carousel ride, not a race, a magical history tour, no more evolutionary than it is revolutionary, in which the only prizes are patterns and people and voices, severed heads and lamed feet, black dogs and crackling November flames which repeat like the suits of a deranged tarot deck.
When the book was published, in 1996, it made less impression on the world than it should have: it was a paperback original, which began, with no explanation, with the personal narrative of a half-witted man-child, at the end of the stone age – his mother has died, his nomadic tribe has abandoned him, he will face the evil and trickery of those smarter than he is (everyone is smarter than he is), and he will also discover love, and learn what a lie is, and the fate of the pig in the Hob-man’s hoghouse. He will also tell his story in the most idiosyncratic narrative since Russell Hoban’s <em>Riddley Walker</em> (or, perhaps, Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing story “Pog”), using a tiny vocabulary, the present tense, and an inability to tell dreams from reality. It is not the easiest of starting points, although it is a tour de force, and it sets up all the elements that will recur through the book. The shagfoal are here, huge black dogs that run in dreams and darkness, and the hair severed from the dead head of the woman beneath the bridge, and the foot of the boy’s mother protruding from her grave, and the final, heartbreaking bonfire. It is November, somewhere near the day that will come to be known as Guy Fawke’s Night, when, to this day, effigies are burned on bonfires while children watch.
Some of the joy in this book lies in watching a master storyteller take the voices of the dead as his own: the nameless psychopathic girl who visits the town-tattooed Hob, with her stolen name and stolen band of copper, could be coiling through a bronze age detective story; her come-uppance is another burning on another bonfire, one unexpected and cruel and appropriate. The girl is as dangerous, and as certain of her own intelligence and superiority as a travelling underwear salesman, who will make his own sacrificial bonfire on Guy Fawke’s night, of his car and his sad life – he talks to us in the voice of a chipper spiv, lying to us and to himself the while, and for a moment we get a glimpse of Moore as an English Jim Thompson, and the outcome, like the outcome for one of Thompson’s characters, is never in any doubt. A Roman detective, here to investigate a counterfeiting ring, his brain and body being eaten by lead poisoning from the lead-lined Roman aqueducts (our word <em>plumber</em>, of course, comes from the latin for one who works with lead) learns that lead is poisoning the empire in another way. The head is that of the emperor, stamped on a circular coin. The circle will be measured and compared and found wanting.
Assume, while you read, that the history is good history. Moore’s suggestion for the secret of the Templars may not be the truth (nothing in this book is true, not in the way you’re thinking, even if it happened) but it fits with the facts (giving us another severed head, along with Northhampton’s Templar church), just as Frances Tresham’s poor head gives us his history along with his life. The stories are boxes that contain mysteries – most of which are unresolved, while all solutions we are given open the door to larger problems and difficulties. Or to put it another way, <em>Voice of the Fire</em> is truth, of a kind, even if its truths are fictional and historical and magical, and so the explanations one gets are always partial and unsatisfactory, the stories, as with the stories of our lives, are unexplained and incomplete.
It is a pleasure to read, and to reread. Start where you like: the beginning and the end are both good places, but a circle begins anywhere, and so does a bonfire.
Do not trust the tales, or the town, or even the man who tells the tales. Trust only the voice of the fire.
Neil Gaiman
<em>Castle de Haar, Paril 26, 2003</em>
<br>
** <strong>Hob’s Hog, 4000 BC</strong>
A-hind of hill, ways off to sun-set-down, is sky come like as fire, and walk I up in way of this, all hard of breath, where is grass colding on I’s feet and wetting they.
There is not grass on high of hill. There is but dirt, all in a round, that hill is as like to a no-hair man, he’s head. Stands I, and turn I’s face to wind for sniff, and yet is no sniff come for far ways off. I’s belly hurts, in middle of I. Belly-air come up in mouth, and lick of it is like to lick of no thing. Dry-up blood lump is come black on knee, and is with itch. Scratch I, where is yet more blood come.
In bove of I is many sky-beasts, big and grey. Slow is they move, as they is with no strong in they. May that they want for food, as I is want a-like. One of they is that empty in he’s belly now, he’s head it is come off and float a-way, and he is run more quick a-hind, as wants to catch of it. In low of sky is grass and woods go far ways off, where is I see an other hill, which after is there only little trees as grow world’s edge a-bout.
Now looks I down, to grass in low of hill, and sees I pigs. Big pigs, and long, with one on other’s back and shanking she, by look of they. It make a bone go up I’s will to see. In of I’s belly I is glean I may run down of hill to pigs, and hit a stone on one of they and make she not alive, for eat up all of she. That is I’s gleaning. Now is doing of it.
From hill’s-high there off dry dirt come I, through of cold grass and run down quick, that I is come on pigs when they is with no whiles for change to that I may not eat, as like to rat I one-whiles catch that change to little stones. Quick runs I down on pigs, that they is yet pigs while I catch with they. I’s will is up, a bone in he, as shake this way and other in I’s running, neath of belly. Quick runs I, but oh, I’s feet fly up from wet of grass and falls I, oh, and falls I arse-ways down of hill.
Up quick, for catch of pigs. Fall make I slow, that they may come a-change, for I is sniff no pig at all. At this I’s belly is with fright, for which runs I more quick, and looks to pigs as I is come more by of they, but oh. Oh, one, she is a-change, she’s hind legs gone. All out-ways of she black face is turn in, and is now hole with darkness full. Runs I more quick that they is yet a bit of pig while I is catch with they, but oh, there is no move in they, and is they sniff with rot. They come more little pig as more tread is I make.
Now I is by they, and they is but logs of white-wood, lolling one on other. Eyes come wood-holes. Pig-foot come to branch-stub. Ah.
Set I on neath-more log, there flatting grass in low of hill, and make hot waters out I’s face.
I’s will is yet with bone. Rubs wet from eyes and stands I up off log to make of piss gainst she, as she may glean more good for keeping not as pig. Old will, now, bone go out of he, that he lie back down in he’s skins, and I is like to this set back on log, where from I’s piss-mark is grey water-smoke rise up.
Oh, many darks is come and go, and I is seeing not I’s people, that is cast I off. They wants I not, and lone I sets up-on old log, and empty in I’s belly.
Looks now bove of I. Sky, is he full with sky-beasts there, and all of one grey herd is they as runs from edge of world to edge of world. Dark is in little whiles come by, which-for I may see not I’s long black spirit-shape, as follows in I’s tread. All lone is I.
I’s people is with not a want for I, and say as how I forage not yet eat of other’s foragings. In of I’s belly, I is hear I’s mother making say, as while she is alive, how I is idle and not good that she is all whiles make to find of food for I. Says she, we’s people like I not, and keep I with they while she is alive, which after no whiles more, and what does I say back to that, and like. And say I no thing back, and she is hit on head and legs of I, and make a noise. Ah, mother, there is not a bit of help for it. I is not with good gleanings in I’s belly, like as others is.
Queer, now. One while I is with gleaning in of I, which after is no gleaning follow, where-by all is quiet in I. Yet other whiles I is with gleaning and an other is come by that is as like to it, which after many gleanings follow in a line, as with I’s people walking neath of trees. They gleanings come that many and that quick as there is not a thing in tween of they. One gleaning comes an other, as with pigs and logs.
I glean of mother hit I’s legs, yet now I is with glean as I is lie by she and all is good. Back of I’s big head lie on dirt, where is a rub of grits and dusts. They prickle on I’s head skin through I’s babe-hair, no more as is on a berry. All in mouth of I is titty-milk as hang in strings bout of I’s tongue, and there is not a thing in middle of I wants to run ways off, nor that is wanting of an other where.
I is in low of blanket-skins, by mother, warm in sniff of she, she’s breath with sour-root in. She big, I little as one of they Urk-kine.
Now is other glean in of I, where-in is I come big, I’s mother come more little now. We is in neath of trees. First bright is come and I is open eyes and see I’s mother, set with back gainst of a white-wood tree. Is little bits of bright fall now there on she face through branches bove of we, and on she eyes, and move she not nor is she look from bright. Say I now, Mother, come a-rise, yet is she not make move, she’s eyes full up with bits of bright. A fright is come in I.
Hold, Mother, say I now. Do not make queer with I. We’s people is rise up and want for journey on. Rise, that we may not fall in hind of they. Rub now I’s hand there on she leg for making quick of she. She is more cold as stones, and itchy-mites jump off she.
I is say more loud, rise up, and now take hold of she for pull and hit. There is no strong in hold of I, and down she fall. They bits of bright is move from out she eyes and hang on trees. She’s head is lie in rain-hole, hair a-float.
I glean not how to help of she. Jump I on top she there and make to put I’s will with-in of she, that he make she not cold, and make she for to move. She legs is hard, set one by other, knee on knee. There is not strong in I for open they, and is I’s will stand not. I lie he soft gainst of she belly-hair, and push, and push. She’s head in rain-hole move. She belly hair is cold, and sniff of she is other. Push and push.
A man is come now, of we’s people, and he pulls I off from she. He says I is as shit and makes for hit of I, where is I little ways run off, in neath of trees. Now many people is they come a-bout I’s mother. Pull they up she’s head from rain-hole now and say, there is no warm in she, there is no breath in she, and like. Now is we’s Gleaner-man come there, and by I’s mother set, in feather belt that itch up arse of he, where is he all whiles scratch.
Say he, she is no more alive, and it is work as makes she come that way, by look. Say he, lie she to dirt, which after journeys we ways off.
Up says a rough-mouth woman now that if I’s mother is no more alive, it is she’s idle son as makes she like to this, that make she all whiles work and find for he. And many there is saying Aye, and she is right and like.
More loud say rough-mouth woman now how if I’s mother is put down to dirt, it is not rough-mouth’s hole for dig. Aye, is say man as pulls I off I’s mother. Make boy dig she down to dirt, that he is work for she one while. Now Gleaner-man says Aye, and scratch at arse of he. Find boy, he say.
Make I to run. Ah, they is men, more long in leg as I, and I is that a-fright as runs at briar bush and falls there in. Out is they pull I, all a-scratch, for drag to feather-arse, as sets by mother. Down in wet she’s head is lie. They bits of bright is crawl slow off from tree, cross grass and back in of she’s eyes.
He scratch at arse and give I mother’s axe-stone, that there is no strongness in I’s hands for hold. Down is it fall, and Gleaner-man is hit I’s face that blood come out from nose of I. Now take it up, say he, and dig she hole. That queer-sniff spirits is not come to she and in they’s breath make sick of we. That rot-bird and rot-dog come not. That dirt is take dirt’s due and is glean good of we, that he is not come hard low of we’s feet. So Gleaner-man say now, and, licking nose-blood, digs I hard in dirt.
In low of grass is dirt cold, grey and soft as I may push all of one bit. Digs I a-bout of root and stone, and dig of I is slow. They sun-brights is come back on mother’s face, off cheek of she and slow ways off in tween of grass and flowers. Lift I a stone, and neath of he is many worm. Dig I now sharp of mother’s axe-stone tween of they, and of they many make more many yet. I blood I’s fingers in I’s digging. Blood on mother’s stone, now. Blood in mother’s hole.
I’s people stand they bout of hole on one foot, now on other, wanting but that they is go ways off from here, that they is on with they’s big round and walking edge of world a-bout from ice-while on to ice-while, finding prickle-rat, and pig, and chewing-root.
Sun walk high bove of we, with sky-beasts run a-fore of he, in fright that he may hot they all a-ways to no thing only sky. I dig, and Gleaner-man come vexed at slow of I and say hold now, and say as low of hole is good, and like, yet is I not but belly-low in hole. Say he, jump out and cast she down.
Out comes I, grey to knees with dirt, and look to she. No thing but white. No thing but bare, and quick is all go out from she. Take I one tread, at which an other follow. Grey like dirt she’s hair. Make quick of it, say feather-arse, and come now, take she up, and like. Takes I an other tread, and this way come she by.
Stoop, for to take she’s foot. She is more cold now, and no bright is on she. Lift I mother’s legs, all white on top, and see that neath of she is dark, as full with blood. Pulls I, at which move she a little ways from rain-hole, dragging hair like water-grass in hind of she, and makes a fart. Like to this is we come by hole, I and I’s mother. Cast she in, say feather-arse, and cover up of she.
I cast she in. There is not bigness in of hole for she. One leg stand up, in bove of edge, that I may not push down. I cover she, and grey I’s hands in dirt, that dirt fall in she’s eyes, in mouth, in belly-hole, and now she’s face is go, and now she’s arms and titties go, and now is she but one white foot stand out, which puts I dirt a-bout, and push it soft and grey to toes of she. Tread I down dirt, and feather-arse set mother’s axe-stone by of hole, at other edge from where dirt rise bout of she’s foot, like to a piss-mite’s hill.
Say I, now she is put to dirt, and we may journey on for find of prickle-rat, and pig, and chewing-root. And now I’s people look an other way, and is with quiet in they. And now at I, old feather-arse, he makes an eye. And shake he’s head.
And sign for no.
All lone set I by mother’s foot. I’s people is not by I now, and far ways off is they, neath trees and cross of hill, and go, and come here back no more. Grey dirt on of I’s hands and feet is dry, hard, as I may scratch off in little bits. Dirt that I push a-bout of mother’s foot is like come hard, and bits fall off. I see she toes, and now in dirt as fall from they, I see a shape as like to no-toes. Mother.
Now an other gleaning is with I, in which a dark he come and I is set by mother’s foot with not a where for journey to. All whiles is I with mother, and is not with want for go way from she now, and yet a hurt is in I’s belly as say other like to this. Set I there whiles and glean not if to go nor keep here by.
Stand I, walk I ways off and back, now set, now more to stand and walk. Jump I on dirt, and hit I tree and tear of grass, and many things is say at mother’s foot. Set I and move I not, and off in dark is noise of fire-tail dog in grass, and herd-dogs cross of hills. A-fright is I, and hurt in belly is come more. Make I a shit by tree, in tween of roots, and shit is like to water.
First bright come, and belly empty. Say I, foot, keep here by. I is go ways off for forage, after which come I here back with food for we. Now foot is quiet, as if for say that she is all whiles hearing like to this, yet no whiles sees it’s doing. Walks I slow from she, and many trees off stop, and look I back, and there is foot. Lift arm of I and sign for all is good, and walk I on.
Trees come more little tween of they, and briar is come more. I follows path in bout of briar, where looks I back and sees not foot, but may I find she yet by sniffing shit of I, and I is not with fright. Walk on, through tree, and briar, and like.
As gleans I now, it is while I is come on blood-berries as first rain fall, hard like to many sky-beasts all a-piss. Quick stoop I neath of hole in berry-bush, and come there in, where is a briar-cave. There set I dry, and many of they blood-berries is eat. Out of I’s cave is rain fall hard, yet in of he is quiet and little bright, and in I’s belly is there good. Now rub I berry-blood off chin. Shut eyes, lick hand, and hear to rain.
Now is a while in which no gleanings come, which after all comes queer. I is no more in briar-cave. I is in neath of trees, and all is dark but where white-wood stands bright. How dark is come that quick I may not glean, nor how that is I come here by. All in a fright looks I a-bout, and see a shape as stands in tween of trees. It is I’s mother. Lolls she with one hand to tree and looks to I. It is that good I tread more by of she, and seeing now she’s leg, and one of they is come to bloody string, with not a thing low of she’s turning-bone. Look I from stump to mother’s face. She’s look is vexed, as is she with no liking for I. Where is go I’s foot, she say.
At this, makes I a fright-noise, big and loud as casts I up in sky and out from dark, and falls I back in briar-cave, where is yet light. All in a quick is this, that I may glean not way of it. Hear I not rain, as he is go ways off, and stands I up and stoop in neath of hole, and like to this come out from bush.
All wheres is wet, and many rain-hole is now set in dirt. Wet rise up sniff of dirt and grass, and sniff of they is good, and strong, and is not old.
I is sniff not I’s shit. Rain, he is wet a-way I’s shit and now I sniffs it not, I’s shit that tree is where. That foot is where.
Runs I one way in bout of bush, now other, for that I may see where grass is flat, and like to this which path I come here by. Now see I as rain is fall hard, and all wheres flat down grass that path is not to find. In neath of trees runs I, and sniffs I no thing only grass. Now this way run, now that, by tree and briar, and make loud say to foot, and make loud say to mother. All a-bout, down ditch and up of rise with fur-grass thick on stones, and here falls I to dirt and glean not where of I.
No more is I see foot. Blood-berry bush is as like go, that I may find no more. In this way come I out there by, and walk in neath of many dark and bright, and all I’s walking is without a where of they.
Walk I on open grass and little river is I jump. Through trees walk I, with dry-up skins of they all bout I’s foot, and find a round of hut-fruit grow in grass, dark on they neath-edge as is good for eat. Whiles is go by and now find I no thing at all, and walk I on and find more no thing yet, and bright, and dark, and bright and dark.
Walk I where I may see not bove of grass, it is that high, and find I bird that is no more alive. I is that empty in I’s belly as to eat of he, yet is he all with worm. Now sick is come out mouth of I, and make I shit down legs, and bright, and dark, and walk.
Through many ice-whiles now, I’s people say, there is but little forage for to find, that whiles is hard for we as walk, and come they more hard yet. With ice-while after ice-while is there setting-people more, with many of we’s walking-people come more little, that we is not many now. With one all lone as I, it is an empty belly and no help for it.
One whiles, I come on setting-people in I’s walking, with they sharp-top huts of beast skin hung to branch, set high on hill. Huts is not many yet as finger on one hand of I. Sniffs I they’s fire, and of they’s fire-meats, which for in belly now I is with want.
Walks I up hill, and little ways up sees I man on top, and sees he I, with sick and blood on face, and shit on legs of I. Says he as how I look a-like with pig-arse, and what is I want of there, and like, and say of he is queer, with many sayings as I may not glean. An other man, more big in belly, come by now on top of hill, for look at I. In low of belly is he’s will all little, more as like to babe’s.
Now say I how I’s mother is not more alive, and how I’s people cast I out from they. Say I, I’s wanting is but little food, that I is with a thing in belly of I.
Men look now one at an other, and now little-will, he stoop for take up casting-stick. Here is a thing say he, and say how is I like it in I’s belly. Other man is take up stone, which cast he hard at I. Stone hit I’s leg, and sharp of he tear skin low of I’s knee, where is there blood. Make I a noise and is fall down, big hurt in leg of I. Man take he up an other stone, and say go off now, shit-arse, and say wants he not for sniff I more there by. Big belly man lift up he’s stick, for cast at I.
Now stands I up, with hurt in leg, and make a queer-tread walk down hill, like to a sicking dog. In hind of I, man cast he’s other stone, yet hit I not, with stone fall quiet to grass. Walks I quick as I may, and looks not back, and that is all of it, I’s while with setting-kine.
On walk I slow, and dragging foot in hind of I. With come of dark is find I tree where titty-apples grow. They is yet hard, and little may I eat of they. Look I to hurt of leg and see as blood is dry with grey dirt and with shit, that blood come out no more, and that is good. Lie I by tree and shut of eyes that none may see I. Glean of no thing.
Bright come, more to walk. Leg is now good for step with, yet with prickling hurt in he. Walks on, and like, and now with high sun come I neath of white-woods on an open round, of grass all long and black, with trees a-bout. Stand out from grass is big old stone, as is with markings like to worms and net-mites scratch there on. Shut I now eyes, and come a-fright as I may not make breath.
I’s people say as is no good in it, to make of markings. Markings take they shape from tree and dog and like, and make that they is tree, that they is dog, yet is they no thing only markings. If man look on they, he’s gleanings is all come to queer, that he may glean not which is world and which is mark. I is hear say as many markings is that old as they is make by Urks and people of that kine in big ice-whiles. Now Urk-kine is no more in world, yet many say they little people is in low of hill, deep in they caves, and hide for catch of we a-bove. It is not good, to look on markings.
Shut of eye, takes I an other way in bout of open grass and stone. Falls I on root, and scratch of face in briar, yet opens up not eyes but now that stone is come far hind of I.
Out trees, and walking up of hill that is with sun like fire in hind, and see I pigs, and run now down and pigs is come to logs, and here now is I, set on they, with no more whiles for glean of.
Scratch I blood-lump on I’s knee, and look I up in sky. A dark is come as I sit all a-glean, that I may not see sky-beasts now, yet may I see they’s little eyes, bright there in high of dark. All cold is I, and lie in hind of log from wind. Shut eyes, that dark is come in I as she is come in world.
Now it is dark, and I is up on foot by logs and glean not how it is I come a-stand, with open eye. In little fright I is look bout, and now hear noise in hind of I, as one that walks in dry-up skin of trees. Turns I for see, and now I’s fright is no more little.
There is shagfoal, stand in grass, not more as one man and an other long from I. She look at I, with eyes of she more bright as fire and big as like to tree stump. Make I piss down leg of I, that is come warm, now cold.
Bout of she shagfoal’s feet in dark is little shapes a-move, and more not good for looking on is they as shagfoal. Black is they, and with no eyes at all, where glean I they is shagfoal-babes, all crawl and scratch in neath they mother. Tongues of they is long and white and like to worms, and wave they tongues all bout in fore of they, for lick and sniff of air. Make they no noise, and is I more with fright of they as she that stand in bove they.
Shagfoal look at I, and strong is go from I for move, that I is like to stone. Hard glean I now on shagfoals, that I’s gleanings may make help for I. I’s people say as shagfoals is they big and frighting dogs, which kine they is alive on world in big ice-while, as like to Urks, and now like Urk-kine is no more alive. Only they spirit-dogs walk now, up this world and down other, and where dirt come thin in tween of worlds, as with a cross-path and a river-bridge, shagfoal is come there by.
I glean, and there is not a help in all I’s gleanings. There a-stand, more big as I, shagfoal look down with eyes like sun, as I may not make look away. In tween of big dark fore-foot belly crawl she babes, all lick and sniff, yet may I not look down from eyes of she, that come more big and yet more bright, as if all bout I is with fire. They come that bright I may not look, and shut now eyes, and may I see bright yet through eye-skins.
Now is all come queer.
I is no more a-stand, and is I down on dirt in hind of log, with bright of shagfoal see I yet through shut of eye. Now is I open they, slow, all a-fright.
Bright is no more from eye of shagfoal. Bright is bright of sun, that follow dark, and now look I and see as shagfoal is no more here bout, nor babes of she. Stands now, I’s legs all wet with piss, and treads by where I see they spirit-beast. Stoop I for look. There is not foot-shape press in dirt, nor is an other sign of they.
I glean not what to make of it. I is not see of cross-path, nor of river-bridge, yet is they shagfoal come to I. Glean I on this, and now I’s belly is make noise for say I is to walk more on, and find of food for he.
Walk I, and ways off turn, for looking back. See logs, and they is change to pigs now I is no more by of they. Top pig, he shank at she in neath, and look as he is with good whiles. Glean I if runs I back they is a-change, and come as logs for vex of I. Make I a spit, and turns, and walks I on.
Bove, through of tree-branch, is there sun, as follows I. Walk I through woods in way of other hill, as I is see from dirt-top rise where sees I pigs. From far-off, hill is look but little, yet is now come big, in by of he. Dirt neath I’s tread is first rise slow, now more and more, and long whiles is I walk up hill by low of many tree. I’s breath is hard, and leg of I is hurt as fire, and like to this come I by high of hill.
Here, thick of trees is stop, and come no more, which after is there only stump of they. Stump is that many, all ways off down hill, that sky is come more big where top of world is bare. Sets I now down on here this stump for look.
I is in bove of valley big, as go from here to world’s edge. There by and there by is trees, yet more of stumps is they, as make a frighting open of it all. In valley low is river, with far off a bridge in cross of she by look, which is how shagfoal come these wheres a-bout. In tween of I and river is an other hill, more low, where is I look on that which I is no whiles see.
There is a making, there on hill, more big as I may glean. It is make all a-round, that is with rounds more little in, like to a dry worm lie on grass. They rounds is walls, and by of they is many dirt-hole dig, more low as hole I dig for mother and an other like. Glean I that dirt from out they holes is all push up for make of wall.
Round that is in of making more as others is with many beast there in, all white. Now wind is turn, and is I come in sniff of they, they’s shit and like, and glean they is but aur-ox, yet is there more many of they as I’s people sees from ice-while on to ice-while. There in middle of this in-more round is hut of wood, with ox all bout of it. Whiles is go by, and out from hut is come a man, all wrap in skins, for make a piss, which after is he go back in. May that he is set there in hut for keep of beasts.
Wall round of aur-ox is with many hole, for go of in and out, and holes is shut with stopping-woods, that beasts may journey not. In out-more round, in cross of wall from ox, is pigs. They is all many, and with fly-not birds as scratch a-bout by foot of they. I’s belly make of noise, and is with hurt.
Cross wall from pigs is other round stand more out yet, but is with little where for move, in tween of it and pig-round. There is people walk a-bout, not many as they beasts, and stand for make of sayings, one at other, little there in low of I. Glean not I of a many people as may work a making like to this, it is that big.
A-cross and down of little hill, ways off from making, see I many sharp-top huts in by of river there. They is as many like to fingers put with toes of I, and many smokes is rise there by. Glean I that making is a work of setting-people, as for keep they beast, yet it is hard for glean that settings big like this is in of world.
It is not in I, how they come to work they’s making by a river-bridge, where dirt in tween of worlds is thin, like as a babe may glean is make no good. Why, may it is that they glean not of shagfoal and they’s like, for I is hear that setting-people may not glean more good as babes. I’s people is with many a good saying for they setting-kine, as like to this. One say, how is he setting-man come by a mate, and other, he say back, why, he is wait for she to catch she horns in briar.
I is with hurt in leg, where other setting-men cast stone at I, and is not with a want for more of like. I see as I may walk by hill with making on, cross other side from sharp-top huts, and that way come by river-bridge that I may journey on.
Stands I, and walking down now hill, in tween of many stumps. They is all sharp at top, as valley she is like to mouth, and stump as like to tooth of she. I is not with a like in I for all this open, where they trees is put to axe. There is no good in it.
Come I now neath of little hill, which by hill come more big, and is I hear low noise of aur-ox now, from off on top he there. Hill is in way of sun-set-down from I, for which walks I an other way, as go to sun-rise-up. Dirt is come soft more now in low of valley, and as more low go I, more soft come he yet, that I may tread to knee of I, and walk is slow. They stump of trees is now not many as up hill, and is with rot in they, all black, mark with fur-grass and with snot-water full, where is there many stinger-mite.
Far hind of I is aur-ox make low say to mate. Pull foot out sucking-hole of wet and dirt, and walk I on. I may not see of river-bridge, as I is see from high, for is he come in hind of trees that stand all in a thick fore I, yet make I way for where I glean he set, a-cross of river.
Slow, through pipe-grass and through sucking-dirt. I’s belly hurt. It is that empty all is queer with I, and I is all a-fright but that I’s head float off, as like with sky-beast. Dirt suck on I’s foot. Old dirt, he gleans I is not putting mother’s foot to he and wants he’s due, for there is one foot due he yet, and take he I’s foot to make good for it. This gleaning puts I all to fright, that pulls I leg up high like to they walking-bird, and make I quick as may for trees, that set on dirt more dry.
By trees now. May I walk and suck not down in dirt, yet strong for walking is no more in I. They trees stand in a little thick, and glean I not a thing but go to bridge. Tread I in neath of trees, and loll with hand on they for stand, and fall more whiles as I is walk. I’s leg is hurt with sick-fire. Falls I down. Stands up. Fall down. Stand up, and now is I through thick of trees, by other edge of they and looking out. I glean as I is come more good now, and is more with strong in I. Fall down.
I may not rise. Back flat to grass is I, head lolling gainst of tree root. Up in bove of I is no thing, only many branch of tree, where from all skins is fall. Look down, cross of I’s belly, legs and feet and see I out from trees in way of river, where is noise of waters loud. No bridge see I. It is not where I glean. May it is that I find no way for bridge through thick of trees. Now shit-mites fly a-bout of blood-lump on I’s knee, that is come black, and set they shit-mites on I’s leg, where I is not with strong for hit they off.
Look I in way of river, where it is more good for look as leg of I. Tween river and here thick of trees see I a rise of dirt, with pipe-grass all about. On rise ...
On rise is stand a thing all white, more high as one man and an other, where on top is hair fly out in wind, all black and long. It is a woman, all in white, yet is she frighting big, as is not in this world. Shut eyes, that she may see I not.
Now open eyes, but little, and I see she is not move. More open eye, for this is queer in look of it, and see that she is come a-change. She is not woman now.
Hut. She is hut, all hang a-bout with aur-ox skin and there by is she white. Sharp top is she, where from is hang a long of furs, all black that fly in wind. I glean not if is people in of hut, nor how it is they’s hut set here all lone, ways off from other setting-kine and they’s big making up on hill.
Look I now hard on hut, for is I not with other thing for looking on. All bout I, shit-mite make they little noise, which comes now more loud yet. Look I, and may see not a thing but grey, with shape of white where hut is stand, and now white is come grey, and grey come black, and black is he come no thing.
Noise. I’s spit is with queer lick to he. Noise now of people, with one say at other. Big and old is one, from noise of he, and other little. Little one is say now aye, and say of thing I may hear not, and say of water. There is but a little bright through eye-skins of I now, and that is good.
Flowers, sniff I many flowers, as like it is not bare-while now, but flower-while. Up opens eyes, and sees I hut. One aur-ox skin that make of hut is now lift up, and out come one a-stoop, hair long and bright with belt of fur a-bout, and wrap in skins to knee. It is a girl, by look, and not more big as I. Sniff I, for sniff she’s gill, and sniff I no thing only flowers, and see I flowers not, yet see I girl. I glean not if she is a flower that look as girl, nor girl that sniff as flower.
In tween she hands holds she a little shape, all grey. Walk she ways off from hut, and like ways off from I, down off from dirt rise and in way of river. Walks she tween of pipe-grass, yet is suck down not, as like she walks a path where dirt is dry. Now far ways is she, that I may not see she bove of grass, and sniff of flower is come more little now.
Now is thing move by hut, which look I back there to. White skin lift up, and out stoop now one that is big, bare but for belt and feast-fur wrap as cover will. It is a man. It is a frighting man.
He stand, for look here bout, yet look he not by I. He is more old a man as I is see, he’s long hair white, with chin-hair like to this, and oh, he’s face. He’s face is mark with fire-black, where no thing only eyes of he is white. A little belt is bout he’s head, up from where is come sticks with many sharp to they, that look he like to branch-horn ox. In of he’s hands is one with flowers and other hand with sticks. Now look he more a-bout, and make a fart, and set he down in fore he’s white-skin hut.
I may see not what he is do, but that he make a quickness of he’s hands, and more whiles like to this. Smoke. Sniff I smoke. He is make fire, and now is put more sticks to it, for make more big. Take he up little stones as set there by and put they one on other, bout of fire, for make of fire-keep.
Back gainst of hut set he, and now take up a thing of wood and stone, not more long as I’s hand, all flat and sharp. This hand-axe is he put to other stone there by, where scratch he fore and back, as if for make more sharp. Now lie I back, and hear to noise of this, and sun is come more low in sky.
In sniff of smoke now comes more sniff of flower, and lift I head for look to river. Girl is come here back with pipe-grass rise in neath she foot and wrap skins move all bout she knees. Tween of she hands is yet a little shape, all grey, and as she walks see I where little wet come out, and fall there on she arm. Glean I as she is hold a making like to little valley, that in river she make water-full. Slow walk she now up rise of dirt, where stick-head man is take she water for to set in bove of fire-keep.
Girl set by fire now on she knees, and is not move. Sun come more low, and as bright go from sky is bright of fire come more, that girl’s black spirit-shape is long on hut in hind of she. More long yet spirit-shape of stick-head man, all black with dark sticks move like many worm on head. He take up flowers and cast they in of water, bove of fire, where from grey water-smoke is rise.
In bright of fire is see I now a low wall, make with dirt, as stand in back of hut. I is not hind-whiles look on this. May that it is for keep of beast, as like to big-more making up of hill, yet is I see but little of it, and glean not. Fire rise up high. Black spirit-shapes loll fore and back in cross of aur-ox skin.
A whiteness thick and soft like dust-ice is rise up from making bove of fire-keep, cross edge of he, where white is run down all for make of cat-noise now in fire. Wrap stick-head man a little fur bout of he’s hands for make of they not hot. Take he from fire-keep making up, which is he now set down by he.
A little of thick whiteness out from making take he, one hand full and other like. Girl set she by on knees and is not move. Dark come in sky. Black spirits loll on hut. Now stick-head man put white on face of girl, yet move she not, and white is thick low of she eyes, and thick on mouth of she. In little bits it fall down on she titty-wrap.
Girl is not move. Black-face man now put hands all bout he there in dark, as if he look for find of thing, and now a big warm grey is come on I, and shut now eyes. Sniff smoke. Sniff flower and hear I more of scratching noise, as is scratch fore, and back, and fore.
And back.
Dark. Many little gleanings. Cold. Leg hurt with fire and oh. Oh, I. Dark. No thing. Leg hurt, oh. Oh Mother, I is not alive more ice-whiles as I’s fingers. Dark. Dark, belly hurt and cold. Mother and I walk neath of trees, queer step and loll we one on other, for she is with but one leg, and with one leg a-like is I, we’s stumps all bloody. Dark. Dark, cold, and no thing in I’s belly. Flowers. Dark.
Bright. Sniff I ... bright, through eye-skins. Sniff I flowers and ... open. Open eyes and ... flowers, and look I up at ...
Look she down at I. Girl that is sniff of flower. Set she on knees by I, as lie with back to grass in thick of trees. Grey making is in tween she hands, as is she hold of river-water in. Long of she bright hair prickle on I’s belly, and look we one at an other like to this, and glean I no thing for to say.
Eat this, she say, and say I no thing, only look. Now put she making to I’s mouth, that wet from he comes warm on chin, on tongue, and it is milk, and milk she is that good. Eat I, and like whiles look at she, bove making’s edge. How is it, now she say, as I is come here. Say of she is queer, with sayings come an other way a-bout, yet may I glean of what she say. I’s mouth is full with milk, as I may no thing say to she, yet milk go down and is no more, and is she making take from mouth of I. How is it that I come by here, one more whiles is she say.
Make I of many sayings now, and all a-run. Say I of mother’s foot, and of I’s people go ways off. Say I of bird with rot-worm, and of setting-kine as is cast stone at I and tear I’s leg. At this, girl make good mouth, and say that she is take rot from I’s leg, and now I glean that leg hurt not, and is look down on he.
There is not blood-lump. Low of knee is shit and dirt all wet a-ways, and where I’s leg is tear is tree-skin put, all soft and warm. Look I from leg to she and say, why, how is this now, and as like. Say she as she is find I here by with first bright, and see I’s leg is hurt. She pull I more in thick of trees, for hide, and is she make good of I’s leg whiles I glean not.
All this she say, and is she now with more that I may eat. Out from she wraps is take she dry-meat stick, which put she now in hand of I. Lift I up stick-meat to I’s mouth, and chew of he is hard, yet lick is good. Say more of coming here, she say.
I is with dry-meat in I’s mouth, that many of I’s sayings is she make I more whiles say, more good for glean. Say I of walk, and pigs as come to logs, and say I now of shagfoal. She is shake head fore and back, for sign that she is glean of they. Say I of how on valley is I come, and big hill-making see, which go I bout on other side and as like come here by.
Say she, is men on making see I, and say I back no, and say she this is good. How is this good, say I. Oh, say she now, they is rough men from river-setting come. If they is see I, they is like cast stone at I. Look I on leg, and glean a right in say of she.
Now look I by she, cross of pipe-grass where is hut on dirt rise stand, and river ways off, hind of hut. In river is there shapes a-move, which glean I is they flat-tail rat, all bout of making river-huts for they. How is it that she sniff of flowers, say I.
There is a way to it, she say, for take of flower’s sniff and make there by a sniffing-water, as may put on skin and hair. Now look she off from I, in way of river. Say of she more little come.
Hob is want that she sniff as flowers, say she, that may he glean where is she go while he is see she not. Say she no more, and looks ways off. Now tear she up a little grass, and put it to she mouth. I is glean not of Hob, say I, and pull at dry-meat with I’s tooth. Looks she not yet to I, but lift she hand and makes a finger now, in way of hut. That hut is Hob’s, she say.
I is see Hob, say I. He is a black-face man with stick bout of he’s head.
Turn she now all a-quick and look to I. How is it I see Hob, she say, and make of a queer eye. Back say I now of how I see she go for river-water, which is Hob set fire-keep by, where is a whiteness come. Say I of how I is see Hob put whiteness to she face, which after is I see no more.
Slow fall she, back to grass, with arm all loll in cross she eyes, for stop of bright. That white is sniffing water, say she, for to make she sniff as flower. Glean I that I is see how stick-head man is flower to water put, where is come white, as there is right in say of she.
Lie we on grass. In sky there bove of we is sky-beasts now run after sun, and not as other way a-bout. Catch they with he and eat he, where is sun no more and bright is go from sky. Grey is old river now, and pipe-grass like to this is grey. Say I, how is she finding food for I, and making good I’s leg. Now set she up a little as she lie, loll on one arm and look to I. Bright hair is fall in eyes of she, where is she push it back.
She is all lone but Hob, say she. There is no one for she to say thing with, nor walk with in good whiles. Hob is he old, with dark in glean of he, where is he no more in good whiles, and is make little say. She is find milk for I and help for leg that I may say to she of many thing I see in world, and this way make good gleanings come in she while she is lone with Hob.
Soft is she face-skin, with but little scratch mark on she cheek. A mark-wing mite is fly all bout she hair, and set now mite on white fur belt, all wrap there bout she head. How is she come with Hob, say I, if he is dark, with no good whiles in he.
Make she a breath like soft wind now, and say as she is come from setting far ways off, and make to work for Hob. Hob is with big say bove of many setting people, for he is a ...
Here make she a saying I glean not, and say now how is that, and say she back that it is like to Gleaner-man, yet with more queer to it.
Hob is no more with son to work for he at he’s big makings, say she now, which is how she is make to come and work, and fire he’s food, and find of wood and like. Make she a mouth that is not good with say of this. Come now low noise of aur-ox, high ways off, and pipe-grass bout of hut is grey and move as like to smoke in wind. Where is Hob now, say I.
Fore of first bright he is walk off, say she, for journey to they’s setting-people down of river there. He is with many things for do, which after is he come back here.
At this a fright is come in I. Glean I of he’s black face, he’s sticks like horn of beast, and say how it is good I journey on, that he may find I not. Make I for stand now up, yet is there little strong in I.
Make girl a mouth more not good yet, and say she how I’s leg is not with whiles for grow all strong, and how I is not with full belly yet, and she is right in this. Say she as I may hide where Hob is find I not, that only she is gleaning where of I. In hind of hut, she say, is there a making wall with dirt, for keep of pig. Hob is no more with pig, and making is stand empty for that I may hide there by. Glean I as this is making I is see by bright of fire.
There may I set, she say, while leg is come more good, and she is find of food for I. If Hob see as more food is go, why, she is say to he as food is take by rat.
This is a thing more queer as I may glean. Glean I now on it this way, and now that, yet is I glean it not a-right. How is this, say I now, that I is change to rat.
She make good mouth at this, and say I is not change to rat, but only is she saying this to Hob. I look to she. I is yet not with glean of that she say, and seeing this make she more good mouth yet. Why, say she now, is I not glean that one may say of thing while thing is not.
This is a gleaning as I no whiles hear, to say that thing is, which is not. It is more big a glean as I may hold in I all in one whiles. Look I at she with mouth of I hang open. Shake I’s head, and sign for no.
She’s good mouth come more wide at this, and say how it is good for she to find one like as I, that is all queer in glean and say of he. Come, say she now, as I with not while for glean on this. Come cross of pipe-grass and by white-skin hut for hide in making there, she say.
Stand she, and taking of I’s hand, and hand of she is little now, and warm. Come now, she say, and pull, and this way help I come a-stand. There is no strong in I, and put she arm bout of I’s back, for help I walk. It is as like I walk low to I’s face in flowers, for sniff of it.
Come we down slow off thick of trees, and now through pipe-grass walk, where is a path of dry tween wet and sucking-dirt. Path go by way of dirt-rise where is white-skin hut there stand, and now walk we up rise, she arm bout of I’s back, and come by hut. We walks but little way, yet strong is go from I, legs all a-shake.
See from here by, hut is more big as I is glean, yet make for but one man and but one girl. For first whiles glean I how it is with Hob, with big say many people bove. Whiles is that good for he. May that whiles come as good for I. Girl pull she hand of I, and like to this is tread we bout of hut where come we pig-keep by.
Dirt walls of keep stand high to neck of I, with wall-hole shut by stopping-woods. Dirt low of pig-keep is all cover up with dry-grass, thick and warm, and where one wall is come by other, as in knee of they, is stand a little hut of branches make. I sniff but little pig here bout, for is I sniffing more of flower. Pull open she of stopping-woods, and in of pig-keep is we go.
Hob is not look here in, she say, now pig is here no more. Say she, if I is hide in dry-grass, she is go do work for Hob, which after come she back at dark with food for I. Put she now in I’s hand an other dry-meat stick, for eat in tween of whiles, and now is open stopping-woods for go she out. I is with want that she may set more whiles with I. Forage I in I’s gleaning for a thing as I may say at she and make she go a-ways more slow.
Say I, how is it she is say Hob is no more with son. Is son go off as pig go off, in keep of which is I now set.
At this is look she down, a dark come on she face. Hob’s son is come no more here by, say she, and say as she is going now. Out wall-hole is she go, with shut of stopping-woods in hind she. Tread she bout of hut that I may look no more on she, yet sniff I she, like tree-flowers come a-fall.
Crawl I in little branch-hut now, and neath of dry-grass dig. Put dry-meat stick in mouth of I for chew, and in I’s belly is there good. I’s walk from thick of trees is make I come as with no strong, and is I lie now cheek to prickling grass, and suck on meat, and shut of eyes.
Now open they. All is come dark. A thing is in I’s mouth. Why, it is stick-meat. End of he come soft like shit, and lick of meat thick on I’s tongue. All prickling is I’s cheek, and is I not glean where of I, yet glean I now of flower, and girl, of hut and pig-keep that stand by, and glean I’s way of coming here.
There cross of pig-keep is stand white-skin hut, where by is I hear noise of man say many things, and noise of girl say back to he. Glean I that Hob is come here back from doings with they setting-kine.
Now all come quiet. Set I in dry-grass, making chew of meat, and whiles is go by like to this.
I is hear noise of stopping-woods move in they hole, and sniff I flowers, and why, it is that good. Girl is come pig-keep in, and cross to little hut where is I set. Make I to say of many things at she, yet is she put she’s hand to mouth, and sign for make-not-noise. Now is she make quiet say, more like to noise as wind in pipe-grass make.
Say she, all little now, that she is come with food for I. Out wrap takes she now fire-meat and a chewing-thing I is not glean, all hard with out, yet soft with in of he. I takes it from she for to chew, and say I, how is this, all hard and soft.
Make she a cat-noise, as for say that I make more loud as I may. Say she that chewing-thing is make in fire with dusts from sun-grass take, as grow here by, with little waters put to they. Eat I, and it is good, and good is fire-meat now in mouth of I. Is ox, by lick of he. Set she on knees by I, and make not noise. Mouth empty now, and no thing may I glean for say at she but of Hob’s son, and how he is no more here by.
Look she to I, and fly-rat make they’s rounds through sky in bove of pig-keep there. Quiet whiles go by, and now with dark say she, ah, it is long in say of, and there is no good in it. Now is she quiet, as glean I she is say not more, yet is I not with right in this.
Say she that Hob is long whiles set by river here with son, where setting-people is come by that Hob may glean for they, and for they do of many thing. For all he’s doings is they setting-people find of skins, and food, and many thing for Hob, as is he’s due.
Of all that is for Hob to do, she say, one doing is more big as others is. Say she that there is many settings, cross of world from water to big water, and all settings is with stick-head man as like to Hob. They stick-head man is come all in one where, for glean and say one at an other, after which is they all say of a big doing, as they glean in tween of they. Set I an other way a-bout in grass, for hear of this is good.
Say she as stick-men’s gleaning is for make of path, more big as path is yet, which path go from big water’s edge, in way where warm wind come, and run to where of many trees, as cold wind come there by. Path is to run by way of hill and high-where, and by valley’s edge.
This is a far more long as I may glean, for I is no whiles see big waters. Only is I hear of they. How is it good for make big path, say I to she, as set in dark and make of idle with she hair. Say she as path he is for come and go of many people, that men of one setting may to other setting journey, far ways off, and take of stones and hides with they, for which is they take back of other setting’s wraps and makings as they due. In like to this, all settings come with things they is not hind-whiles glean, and good whiles come to all of they as set a-long this path.
Why, if path like to this is make, she say, more good whiles yet is come by setting here as come by settings other where, for here is river-bridge, where journey-men is with no other way for go, but that they come here by, and many good thing come here by with they.
Turn I now belly on, with dry-grass prickle on I’s will. Lies I with arse and legs in little hut of branch, I’s head and arms with out. Turn head, for look to sky, where sky-beasts is all shut they eyes, for no bright is I see. Glean I on path, as girl is say all bout, yet full of it I is not glean. Say I to girl, how is path make if not that many foot is tread there by. Yet how may people walk a-long this path if they is gleaning not of way.
Now say of she come queer, and hard for glean. Say she, there is a way that man may yet glean path if path he is that long as go all world a-bout, and way of it is this, she say. In all they many settings is they stick-head men make of a saying, queer and long, that say of many things. It say of setting where is stick-head man, and say of hills and ways where is he’s setting by, that people come from other wheres may find a way to he. Now all of many sayings by they many stick-head men is set they in a line, for make of one long saying more big yet, that say of way from warm-wind water’s edge to cold-wind where is many trees.
Why, how is this, say I. If saying is that long, a man may glean it not all in one while. Ah, she is saying now, that is where queerness come. They stick-head man make they’s long saying in a way as man may hear it one while and now one while more, which after is he all whiles of they saying glean. The say of it is make with noises, one like to an other, that it is with say-shape as no other like, more good for keep in gleaning of.
Here is she say no more, yet is she set more up and take in breath to she. Now make she, soft, a noise that is with sayings in, yet is more good as I is hind-whiles hear but from they bird, and say of she is like to this.
<quote>
Oh, how now may I find a mate, he journey-boy is say
Up valley edge, in dark of tree, by dirt-worm hill and all
And lie with she while is I not yet put to dirt all grey
Up valley edge, in dark of tree
By dirt-worm hill and river’s knee
And there is lie they, he and she, in neath of grass and all.
</quote>
It puts a cold in of I’s belly but for hear of she. Now is she quiet, and say no more, but may I hear she’s saying yet, for it make round and round like sick-wing bird here in of I. <em>Up valley edge, in dark of tree ...</em>
Now come big noise from white-skin hut, in cross of pig-keep there, and it is Hob. Loud say he, where is girl, and is it girl makes noise in hind he’s hut, and like to this. Girl jump she up and say, all low, as she is go ways off that Hob he is not come for find of she and find he I a-like. She make to walk through dry-grass off, she sniff of flower all bout she like to wrap. Hold, say I low, for fright that Hob may hear. Say I, she is not say of Hob’s son, nor how is he go ways off, as I is want for glean.
Say of this thing is long, say she, more big as may be say all in one while. At first light Hob he is go off, where is she come here back that I is hearing more, and of Hob’s son. Now stoop she down, and now is lick I’s cheek.
Stand she, and turn, and she is go a-way quick like to branch-horn ox, through wall-hole, bout of pig-keep, off in dark and see no more. She flower-sniff is take by wind, as wind is want that no one sniff it, only he. In neath I’s belly, will of I is with a bone, where by is dry-grass prickle sharp. She’s spit come cold there on I’s cheek.
Low sayings come from white-skin hut, as man to girl and girl say back to man, and now is quiet. Sniff of she flower is all go way, that sniff I more of pig that hind-whiles is here by. Sniff rot of tree with stump all come snot-water full, and sniff slow river, moving far ways off. Turn I now fore-side up, with back to dry-grass, looking up to sky. There is no thing in sky but dark.
Glean I on how it is that one may say of thing, yet thing is not, and more, on all a man may do with gleanings like to this, they is that big. Glean I on how a long queer saying may is like to path, as man may journey world all bout. Girl, she is put that many queer big gleanings in I’s belly as there is no quiet in I. Turns I this way and that on dry-grass, and now is I want for make a piss.
I may not piss by white-skin hut, where Hob may sniff of I. Crawls I from making all of branch, for stand and cross of pig-keep. Out by hole in wall, and now is I tread quiet in fore of hut, where is a little hill of branch and briar, as girl and Hob is forage many fire-woods for to put here by. Go I now bout of stick hill, and by edge of dirt-rise is I come.
There in sky bove of I is sky-beasts all pull back, one from they other, and in hind of they is moon. By bright of she is I see pipe-grass stand all sharp and white, that may I see where grass is tread all flat, as like to path that girl go river by, for water find. Come I now down off rise, and come a dry path by where is not sucking-dirt that I may walk.
I’s leg hurt not, as is come strong in he, and looks I down for see of it. Tree-skin as girl put low of knee is yet there by, hold to I’s leg with dirt-and-water. This is good, and walks I on, and this way come where slow and dark of river move in tween of trees, where like go I. I is not glean as I may walk this far for piss, yet is it good for walk and not in pig-keep lie.
Come I now long of river and through trees, where now ways off in fore of I is I see river-bridge as I is see from valley edge. It is that big, all make with trees, and glean I now how stand there many stumps here by. Bridge is he lie on top of many river-huts, as flat-tail rat is make, and noise of river is come big in low of he. On other edge, in cross of river, see I path as go ways off, all bright in white of moon.
There is a want in I. There is a want for walk I cross of bridge, by moon-white path from valley go and come here back no more. I’s mother is not make I for to set by huts with stick-head man and flower-sniff girl and queerness like to this. I is one of they walking-kine, and is for walking make. I is with want to rise up out this low, where is all wet and sniff with rot. A setting by of river, where is shagfoal walk. There is no good in it.
Yet glean I now of many things. If I is walk all lone and is not find of thing for eat, I is make belly-empty, like to whiles I is not yet come here by white-skin hut. I glean on girl, with ox-fur belt hold back she long bright hair, and sniff of flower all bout and many good things she is say. Glean I now on Hob’s son, as I is with a want for hearing of, and look I now on bridge and white path cross of he, and hear to loud of river, falling there in dark.
Make I now piss in gainst of tree, and turn, and back ways go by river’s edge, and pipe-grass through, up dirt-rise and all bout of white-skin hut, where come I pig-keep by. Crawl branch hut in and neath of dry-grass. Make now shut of eyes, that all of world is go from I.
Flowers. First bright. Girl is say, come, Hob is go he off to setting down of river. Come, set up, and like to this. She take I by I’s rat-tail hair and make a little pull. Come now, she say, and say she is with food for I. Now open eyes, and sets I up.
Ah, it is good that I is not go cross of bridge by dark, and see of she no more. Set she by I with bright of sun on she, she’s skin more white as aur-ox belt that wrap all bout she hair. In one hand is she hold of chewing-thing that is of sun-grass make, while other hand of she it is with titty-apples in.
They titty-apple is that soft and good for eat, with wet of they run down I’s chin. Make she good mouth at this, and say as she is find of other thing for I, yet not as I may eat. Now looks I, and by she is I see wraps. Is leg-wraps, belly-wraps and wraps of dry-skin make for foot. How is she come by wraps, say I, and in I’s saying spit of titty-apple that is fall on hand of she, a little bit. Now lift she hand, and make a tongue and licks it off, and all this while is look at I. A prickling is come in I’s will.
Wraps is they wraps of Hob’s son, she is say, and say no more to this, and look by river, bright in sun, where is she make all little of she eyes. Say I, how is it son of Hob go off and take he not he’s wraps.
Look she to river more. Say she, he is not want of wraps where he is go.
Now stand she up, and turn to I. Say she, come, put they wraps on that we may walk by of river’s edge. Stand I, and make as she is say, where put I wraps bout of I’s legs, I’s belly and I’s back, and now on foot of I, and rub of wraps is queer.
From pig-keep go we by of hut, where hill of fire-branch is in fore, as stand more big as I. Off rise and pipe-grass through by river’s edge, where is I hind-whiles come for piss. There walk we water by. Say I that she is say to I of stick-head men and of they big path-saying, yet is she not say how Hob’s son is all one with this, nor how is he go off.
Say she, if I is set with she in neath of trees by river’s edge, there is she saying all to I. And now is we find tree, and set we here on grass, she with she foot hang down and toes of she in water, where is make bright rings.
She is now say of stick-head men, and of they saying-path. Path is a making more queer and more big as making hind-whiles is in world, more big as stand-round-stones that people say is make there on big open, far in way of sun-rise-up. Say she, for make this saying-path they stick-head men is want a strongness and a queer of glean that is not hind-whiles in of they. A strongness that is come from other world, in neath of dirt, where is they spirit walk.
Hob and he’s stick-head kine is take this strong from spirit world, say girl, and spirits is as like take of they due from stick-head men. Now is she quiet. How is they spirit taking of they due, say I.
Say she how spirits take that which they stick-head men is more with want of as an other thing in world, as may that is. This thing is put to axe by stick-head men and make no more alive, that it is take by spirits down to other world. As due for this is spirits put a strongness in of stick-head man, and queerness in he gleanings that he may make saying-path a-right.
And how with Hob, say I, and with this thing he want more as an other thing in world, which spirits make he put to axe. Take she now foot from river, white and cold, with little eyes of wet stand out there on. It is he’s son, she say. It is he’s son.
A-cross of water rise up many flat-mouth birds, all in they noise, and fly ways off in bove of wet and water, way of valley edge. A tree-skin worm fall on I’s foot, one of they fur-back kine. I takes he up in tween I’s finger now, and pull, that he is come in bits, where make I idle with he long whiles like to this, and lick he from I’s hand. Girl turn from river now, for look at I. Is walking-people put they sons to axe, she say.
No, say I. Nor is beast nor bird, but if they is with sick in glean of they. I is not hind-whiles hear a thing as frighting nor as queer to this. Why, put of babes to axe is more not good as that I is not glean. More say I like to this, and say, is Hob not with a like for son, that he may do of this with he.
That is not it, say girl. That is not it at all. Hob is he more with liking and with want in he for son as is in man for mate. As is in fire for dry-wood tree. He is not want to make he son no more alive.
Say I, why, Hob may say he no to this, and say he is not put he son to axe, for he is with big say bove many people.
People want of path, say she. People is want of skins and meats, and of good whiles as path make come here by. They setting-kine is long whiles find for Hob he food and wraps and like to this, and now is want he make of path for they, as is they due. If he is not put son to axe and make a-right of path, he is with big say bove of they no more. If he is not do right by they, why, they is like for make he and he son go off from here. Cast out, and make to forage, where may is they come no more alive.
How is Hob’s son glean on this thing, say I. Move she now neck of she and arms, for sign that glean she not. Say she if Hob’s son glean this way nor that, yet is no good in it for he. If he is run ways off from setting is he not with thing for eat, that he is not long whiles alive. If runs he not is Hob put he to axe. Hob’s son he may do one thing, and may do an other, yet not one nor other is make good for he.
Put up she arms, for make long of she back. She little titties push a shape of they gainst of she belly-wrap. Now is she stand and saying to I, come, that we may walk more far long river’s edge. Out put she hand, for pull I up to stand, and hand is wet with hot of she.
Walk we by river now, and no thing say, but tread low to we knees through hill of dry-up tree-skin, and with tread of we cast they all bout. Come we through neath of trees, where see we bridge ways off. Bridge is more big by bright of sun as I is see by dark, and say I like of this to girl. Stop she, and turn for look to I.
Say she, how is I see of bridge by dark, and say I back how I is come here by for piss, which after go I back to pig-keep there. She looked at I, as if she glean on this, and now is make good mouth. Come, is she say, that we may stand on river-bridge.
Walk we all long of path, and river-bridge is come more big as come we more he by, that I glean not how many of they trees is fall for make of he. At here-by edge of bridge is black old woods rise up to he, for cross of bridge is make more high as river’s edge. Girl now is lie she belly down on rise of bridge, nose push to black woods for to look in tween of they. She wraps is make good shape bout of she arse that glean is come in I for lift they up and look on she, but ah, there is no doing of it. Come, say she, for look here by, in tween of logs.
Lie I now by she, down on bridge, and look where she is say, through of black woods to dark in neath of they. For little whiles is I see no thing, only dark, yet now I’s seeing come more good, and see I shape all thin and white, as lie dark in, and moving not. I may not glean if it is a man nor woman, yet see I as they come all to bone and dry-up skin, and no thing more. They is with hole-through wraps all bout, yet is no hair on they bone head, as is it tear from they. They hole-eyes is make as for look on we, and set in low of head bone is they teeth all make good mouth at I.
Is woman, girl is say. Woman in put alive here by, that may she spirit keep by bridge and make bridge good, that fall he not, and that he is not come a-fire. Now girl is stand and say no more, and walk up rise and on of bridge, where follows I a-hind. As she is walk is she make now an other saying, queer and like to bird, yet not as saying of they valley edge and dark of trees and like. This saying now is with more quick in say of it, and hear of it is good, and like to this ...
<quote>
Lie she there in neath of wood,
and bone is she, and bone is she
Lie she there, I’s woman good,
and by of river go we.
</quote>
Walk we cross of bridge, and tread from round of log to round of log, all slow, that we is falling not with snot-grass as is grow there on, and come we middle by, where is one edge not more far off as other. Now old wind is strong, and river make that loud in neath of we as one may not hear other say. Girl say a thing as I hear not, and say I, how is that, and, say more loud, and like to this. Now bove of river noise is she say, look now. Look to other edge, and with she’s finger make a sign at where she is with want I look.
There cross of water see I now of many setting-men, at find of beast. They is with casting-stick in hand, and drag of branch-horn ox in hind of they. I is a-fright, for is I glean as girl is say they may cast stone at I, they is that rough. This say I to she now, and make for run off bridge, but say she hold. Say she as they is glean of she, and is not hurt of I while is she by. Look, say she now, they men is make of sign at we. Make sign at they, say she, and sign for all is good.
They far off men is lift they hand, where lifts I hand as like. Girl is not move. Say she as it is good, that see they I with she. How is this good, say I, and say she back as men is seeing now that she is glean of I, that is they no more cast at I of stones. Way off on other edge is men walk bout of trees, where is we no more see of they. Come now, say girl, that we may go there back by white-skin hut while Hob is not yet come from setting river down, where is he go.
Slow is we tread on wet woods, walking back. Down rise from bridge we come, and is I glean now on bone woman lie in dark low of we’s foot, on all that she is glean, in of she thin and empty head.
Long path, through trees at river’s edge, a-cross of pipe-grass and as like to this is come we pig-keep by. Sun is in high of sky, from which, now-after, is he only fall. Black spirit-shape of I is come all little and a-fright, that he is hide in neath I’s foot.
A-loll on dirt wall, girl say is she now go and make work for Hob. Scratch at she neck, as if with itch, and say how she may come not pig-keep by at dark, for Hob is want of she with many things. She is come see I while all dark is go and bright is come here back. Say she, I is with chewing-thing of sun-grass make, that I is not come belly-empty tween of whiles.
Say I back aye, and, she is right, and like to this, yet is I with a dark in say of I, that she may glean I is with liking not that she is long whiles go from I. Ah. It is as she is hear not of dark, there in I’s say. Turn she from I for walk in way of wall-hole and of stopping-woods, where is she stop and turn here back. Make she a good mouth now at I.
Say she that wraps is good on I. Say she as wraps is make of I more good for look on. Now through wall-hole, where by shut she stopping-woods, and go ways off is she, no more for see, but as I is make shut of eyes, where may I yet she good mouth see, in glean of I.
In low of dry-grass lie I branch-hut by, and takes now leg-wraps off from I, for look to knee. Tree-skin as girl is put on leg is come more dry, and dirt-and-water hold of he to leg is come dry like to this. Take tree-skin tween of finger now, and lift of he way up from leg, which low of is there soft skin all a-grow, and tear in leg of I is all but go.
Now puts I wraps back there in bout of leg. Say she as I is look more good in they, and glean I there is right in this, yet rub of wraps is queer to I. From fore of white-skin hut is I hear girl go this way and now that, for do of things I may not see, yet sniff of flower is all bout. Hand in of wrap now scratch I soft skin growing low of knee, as makes to itch. Chews I on sun-grass thing, while many gleanings come to I.
Glean I as leg is no more now with hurt, and how as I may journey on. If I is set more long whiles pig-keep by, why, Hob, he may not help but find I, and it is more good here from go I ways off. Yet now I glean as I may forage little if all lone I walk, and like to this come belly-empty. Glean I now on girl, on little of she feet, and thin of turning-bones and leg low of she wrap. Glean I on hair of she, all bright and wrap a-bout with aur-ox white. I is with want in I for pull this wrap from she that bright is all fall down bout of she arms, and glean I now that for to go here off is see of she no more.
In of I’s belly is I’s gleanings all come vexed, and fall they now to hit and bite one at an other, like to cats. There is no quiet in I. Hear I a noise in by of hut, as of man say to girl, and glean as Hob is come here back. There is no like in I for Hob, and all I’s gleanings glean a-like in this, that they come quiet in of I’s belly, where by is they lie and all glean dark on Hob.
Chew I on soft and grey of sun-grass thing and sun come low in sky. I’s spirit-shape, no more a-fright, is loll he’s long black head in cross of keep, and put he’s ear by aur-ox skin, as if for hear more good of sayings there.
Cross river, see I sun is hurt as come he by of sun-set-down. Glean I they sky-beasts is all catch and tear at he, for blood of he is fall on they, that all of sky is come as blood. Hard is I hear, for hear hurt-noise of sun, yet is he more far off as may make noise.
I is not long whiles move, that hurt is come in bones of I, which for crawls I from branch-hut now to stand. Fore-ways and back walk I, for make more good in leg, and look now out, cross wall of pig-keep and cross world as like.
Ways off is see I Hob, and stoop in hind of wall that he may see I not. Put eyes in bove of wall-top now for make of little look. He is cross pipe-grass by to thick of trees, in other way from river. Edge of world in hind of he is all as come to smoke and blood. Hob stands, with bright of it to back of he that he is come all black, like to a spirit-shape. Sticks bout he head is like to thin black hands, for scratch at sky and catch of all he’s gleanings, that they is not fly ways off.
Stoops he, now stands for walk, and now comes more to stoop. I glean as he is forage wood, for is I see now branches neath he’s arm. May that they is for hill of branch as stand in fore of aur-ox hut. Walks he as like to one that is with doing to he’s gleanings and with gleaning to he’s doings, which is saying as I’s mother all whiles make, yet not of I. Stoops he now there, now other where, and many of they branch in neath he’s arm is come more many yet.
Turns he now bout, that one edge of he’s frighting face is all with bright, and sun blood wet on branch-horns of he. Glean I Hob is not of dirt, as is I and I’s walking-people, born of dirt and live by dirt and put to dirt and all. He is of fire. Fire’s black bout of he’s eyes. Fire’s blood on of he’s horns.
Makes he for come here back by through of pipe-grass, which for stoops I now more low in hind of wall, and crawl on knee like as a pig to little hut of branch, yet go not in. I is pull dry-grass bove of I for make a warm, and look to sky, where sun-blood is dry up and come all black, as with I’s knee.
There is a path, off out in dark, all of queer sayings make. It go from edge of world to edge of world, and many sons is come to axe for make of it. May as it is they bones is set in neath of path, as bone of women set in bridges neath. A path of bones, all bout of world, that bones is make a top for world in low of we, where is they shagfoal tread through dark, with little Urks set on they backs as scratch of boy-meat off from bones that hang in bove of they.
This world is come that big and dark all bout of I, and pig-keep wall is look as far ways off. I is with belly-want for girl, that she is lie here by of I, like to I’s mother yet more good for sniff. This world is make I little, that with fright I may not move nor do a thing. Shut eyes, and sky is go, and world is go, yet dark go not, and keep here by. There is not way for stop of dark.
Now is an other queer-while come. I is hear noise, and glean it is I’s mother, making one-foot walk through trees for find of I, and open eyes for look to she, yet I see she not. There is but pig-keep, quiet in dark, and noise is come from hind of wall where in is wood-stop hole. Stands I, for walk to wall in bright of moon, which is come high in sky while glean I not. By wall, and look I now in cross of he.
All bout of dirt-rise, pipe-grass is come white and sharp as like to ice in moon. Low to he’s belly walk in grass is Hob, and by of he is walk a boy. Like moon and pipe-grass is they white, and all is white, and see I now as face of Hob is no more black but where black is rub dark in eye-holes of he, as he may not wet a-ways.
Boy walk by Hob, and hair on head of he is black and all a-stump. See I as he is not with hair of chin nor face, where glean I that he is not old as I. Out pipe-grass now, they white shape tread up rise to little thick of trees, and Hob is walk with hand in hand of boy. Moon is make bright on of they back and of they arse, which white is go now in of trees and is come all to bits in black of branches there, where is I see no more.
Long whiles is I at no thing look, and now set back in dry-grass down. Glean I that boy is son of Hob. Glean I of mother, loll on tree and saying where is go I’s foot. It is a queer of dark. Dark makes as we may see they spirit-dogs, and people that is come no more alive. Dry-grass is warm. Dark press on eye-skins now, as I is not with strong in I for hold they up. And warm. And dark.
Cold now in feet, and cold in hands. Make for to open eyes, yet is they all hold shut with eye-snot, which now scratch I off, more good for open they. A bright is come, yet is he come all grey. They sky-beasts is that many for to make of but one beast, that big as is it hang all cross of sky. Old wind is hard, and make a dog-noise bove of pig-keep here.
Now sniff I fish-meat, make in fire. Now sniff I apples. Sniff I flowers.
Come, say she, here is food. Where is it I is want for go this bright, she say.
Eat I of apple and of fish, while is she set by I, all quiet on knee. Stands I, for make a piss. Old wind is with that big a strong in he as make sniff of I’s pissing go ways off, that may I piss on pig-keep wall with not a fright that Hob may find of I. I’s will is big, yet come more little as they water is go out from he. Turns I, and see as girl is look on will of I, and makes good mouth for see of he.
This bright is we go up of valley edge, she say, in bove of beast-keep making high on hill. There from, say she, we may see of they river setting, and all many things.
Hide I now will in of I’s belly-wraps. Aye, say I, this is good, and like, yet is a hot come in I’s face. Stand she, for walk by wood-stop hole. Wind is pull at she long bright hair, that she is pull down aur-ox wrap more hard a-bout. It look that good, all fly in wind. Come now, she say. Come up of valley edge.
In tween of pipe-grass and through thick of trees, and now down with they wet and sucking-dirt, where is they stumps all black with rot. Girl walks a path in fore of I, that she is tread not down in sucking-holes, nor I as follows she, and like to this is come we up big hill as go by way of valley edge. Bout of we is they stumps, and open sky in bove of we. By way of sun-set-down is hill with making on, where sniff I ox and pig, and hear they’s noise, for wind is come from they in way of I.
As I and girl is walk up hill, wind is make many dry-up tree-skins run at we, all cross of grass. Edge bove of edge they come, right quick, that they is like to many little beast as run in fore of tree-fire.
Up now and up more come we, and look, and see that we is come in bove of hill with making on, where go we more up yet. In making is they aur-ox set all down, with pigs lie by of dirt-wall, for to hide from wind. Follows I girl, and no thing say, for make of breath is hard and wind is take all say ways off from we. Walk up and up, in way of tree-line, rise all black in bove we there, by valley edge. Girl walk in fore of I, and wind is rub she sniff of flower now in I’s face.
By tree-line stop and set we down on stump, and long whiles is we hard of breath as we may not make say. Looks I at making, set on hill in low we there, where herd-keep man, all little, come from hut of wood that is in middle stand of making’s in-more round. Walks he in tween of aur-ox, cross of round, and come through wood-stop hole by round where is they pig and fly-not bird. In hands of he is holding a making, which it may is full with sun-grass dust, and throw he dust to fly-not birds, that may they eat. Now is he go there back in wood-hut by, and see of he no more.
Turn I to girl, as set I by on stump. How old is Hob, say I.
Look she to I, and look she now ways off, for pull at ox-skin bout she wind-fly hair. Say she, Hob is more old as she, and I, and as an other like to I. He is more old as man that she is hear of. Say I back how it is queer, and is not good that man may keep long whiles alive as like to this. This say I with a dark, as she may glean that I is not with like for Hob. I is with want as she is come with liking not for Hob, that is she with more liking come for I. Yet is she only make good mouth, and look now valley cross, and no thing say.
Say I, I is see Hob and son of he, by bright of moon.
Is turn she quick to I, and look she hard, and say of she is quiet and little. How is this, she say.
Say I of all that I is see, and say she no thing back at I. Say I, it as like they queer-whiles that I shagfoal see, and mother see. It is a seeing that is come by dark and shut-of-eyes. At this is she shake head, now fore, now back, and sign that there is right in say of I.
Say she that in they dark whiles, as we is shut eyes, there by is go we to an other world, where shagfoal is, and where is people as is come no more alive, and many queerness like to this. Say she, it is this other world as makes more queerness yet in say of Hob and son.
Why, how is this, say I. How is a saying queer as this come more queer yet. Girl look to I, and make she good mouth not. Make she no mouth at all. Look she at I, yet see of she is far ways off.
Say she, they setting-kine is make Hob put he son to axe, and if Hob is not do this, is Hob and he’s son cast out, and come no more alive. Yet is Hob not with want for put of son to axe. He glean and glean on this, yet is there no thing he may do, but one.
Say I, how is this one thing he may do.
Say she as this is where a queerness comes. Say she, Hob is put boy to axe, that he is come no more alive. Yet none may say if is boy put to axe in this world, nor if is boy put to axe in other world there by. No man but Hob may glean now which it is, say she, this world nor other. This is thing like as I may not glean. Look I to she, and no thing say.
Now say she, if Hob is put boy to axe in other world, why, boy is yet alive this world here by. And if Hob is put boy to axe in this world, is boy yet alive in other world, where is I see of he and Hob by bright of moon, as is I say to she.
This is more hard a thing for glean as I is hear. No thing say I, but look to far ways off, where setting is by river stand. They setting-folk is all to do of many thing, by look of they. Bright skins is hang they up on huts, and many fires is all a-smoke, where bout is people make a quick-tread walk, all in a round, this way and that. Glean I as is good whiles for they, yet how of it I is not glean.
Girl stand now up off stump and walk she, slow, in little rounds for make of idle, hit at dry-up tree-skins with she foot that they is fly all bout. She little rounds come more big yet, as take she far and more far off from I, that she is come by trees-edge, rise in hind of we. Glean I as she is turn, and come here back by I, but oh. Oh, she is walk in neath of big dark tree, and go where I may see she not. All lone is I, with stump of tree all bout, in low of frighting open sky.
Quick stand I up, and run for tree in way where I is see she go. Loud say I, come here back, and where is go she, and as like to this, yet no thing is she say and come I now in tween they high, dark woods and stop for look all bout. All wheres is tree, with more tree stand in hind of they, and many dark path come there by. Make I to hear noise of she little tread on tree-skin, yet is all a-quiet, as no noise is she make.
Sniff I now flower, through trees in fore of I, where tread I soft in way of sniff, and come where tree is fall to rot and sniff of flower no more. But, ah. Wind make of sniff come more here by, and more with strong, all long of path to sun-set-down of I. I is not put yet one foot nor an other on this path but is I hear she make of saying, as from far ways off.
<quote>
Oh how now may I find a mate,
he journey-boy is say ...
</quote>
Sniff come more strong, where runs I quick on path, with foot make loud through dry-up tree-skins neath of they. In bove of this is hear I say of she, all little float through high of woods.
<quote>
Up valley edge, through dark of tree,
by dirt worm hill and all ...
</quote>
Come I by briar bush, where turn for follow sniff. It is like run and catch of beast for eat, and glean of this is queer and good in belly, and I’s blood come quick in I. They tree-skins fly all bout where foot is fall as like to many dry-up birds.
<quote>
And lie with she while I is not
yet put to dirt all grey ...
</quote>
Now sniff of flower is all where, and a bone is come in of I’s will, that is he rub all rough on belly-wrap. Noise of she say is come more loud, as that she is not far ways off. <em>Up valley edge, in dark of tree ...</em>
See I a bright of sun in fore of I, where from is sniff and say come more strong yet, and run I this way by. <em>By dirt-worm hill and river’s knee ...</em>
There is an open in of trees, all bright with sun, where come she voice, where come she sniff of flower, that glean I is not far a-hind. <em>And there is lie they, he and she ...</em>
Out through of dark high woods tread I, all quick, and come a stop in open, where is trees all bout stand in a round. I’s breath is hard, and he is loud, yet all but this comes quiet. Girl is not here, yet sniff of flower is here, and I is glean not how she ...
Look I down. All bout I’s foot and cross of open round is flower, is many blood-eye flower all bright and low to knee, as is I walk in blood. There is not noise. There is not girl. She is all change to flower.
Noise. Fright. Quick tread I back, and oh, and many skins of blood-eye flower fly up like as to many mark-wing mite, and girl set up from where she hide in tween of they, and make good noise at I.
Walk I through flower by where she set, yet making noise at I with hand to mouth of she and belly all a-shake. It is that good, for see of she, yet is she put a fright in I that I may find she not, where is I vexed. Say I, she is not good that she is hide and make I run, as if she want that I is look as babe, and like to this. More is I say, and more vexed is I come, that all I’s sayings is with spit.
Put she a hand now on I’s will, through fur of wrap, and hold she fur all bout he hard, where is I’s sayings come a-stop.
Set down, she say, and pull on will that I is now come set by she in blood-eye flowers down. I’s legs is shake, for bone is go from they and is now up I’s will. It is as if I’s gleanings is go down from out I’s belly, that they is all hold now tween she finger there.
I’s belly-wraps is make of little hut. She is with want for see I’s will, and pull she wrap-furs back from off he, like with man as pull back skin off beast as he is catch and run to dirt. I’s will is stand in cold air of this open tree-round, dark and hot, and now is wrap she finger bout of he, and fingers is they more cold yet, but this is good. She hand go up, now down, which-in I’s will-skin is go like to this, and oh, it is a rub that soft, and is she fingers come now warm.
Puts I now hand in neath she wraps, that I may put I’s finger up she gill, but is she shut legs hard and catch I’s hand in tween of they, all soft and strong and wet with hot. No, say she, and say if I is not take I’s hand ways off she gill, nor is she rub I more.
I do as she is say, yet say now may I suck she titties, and she say back no, and that no man may put a hand to she. Say she as may I only lie in blood-eye flowers back, while she is do good thing there on I’s will. Back down I lie, that blood-eye flower come high like queer bright trees bout of I’s head, from low where is I see they. Lift I head, for see of that as girl is do.
She is make stoop, and loll she head that long bright hair of she is hang like tree-strings there all bout I’s will. Now in she hand is catch she up a long thick of she hair, for wrap in finger of she bout hot bone of I. Oh, she is rub I with she hair, all up and down, all quick and hard that is it pull and like to hurt she head, yet make she not a noise but only rub and rub, and rub of it is good, and glean of it is more good yet, she hair that soft and bright with sun and strong of it move up I’s bone, slow like to hut-back worm, from arse, through thick of will to sharp where is it prickle good, and now is come a little round of belly-milk on he, as like to eyes of rain that come on grass while is first bright, and is she rub more quick, more hard, and I is glean as that it is not rub of hair in hand, but rub of hair all bout she gill, and oh, and glean of this is go quick down I’s belly, up I’s will and oh, and girl is hold more hard that is with hurt but hurt is good, and more hard yet, for stop I’s belly-milk, but it is now, and now, and now, a string of milk fall on she cheek, in hair, and wet on aur-ox skin bout of she head, and more, and more, on legs of I and down she fingers, wet on grass and white in bloody eye of flowers and oh, and Mother. Mother.
Quiet. In bove we’s open in of trees a many of black birds is fly all one, this way and other way with wind, that high as they is come more little yet as mites. Girl rub she hand on grass, for rub off belly-milk. Now sign she with one finger for to look, and sees I where I’s milk is hang like to a little string-bridge tween of blood-eye flowers, ways off. It go more far as is I glean, that I and she is make good noise at this.
More quiet now. Far ways off on wind is come noise of they setting-people, making of good whiles all bout they fires. Is noise of many say, and is big hitting noise as make with hitting-skin put bove of round-wood, and is noise as of a man make mouth-wind with a pipe of hole-through bone. Is noise of babes and dogs. Now wind is come an other way, and noise is go. Say girl as we is go now down, and back by hut of Hob, that he go not there back and find she is not by. Say she as I may put I’s will back in of belly-wrap, and make good mouth at this.
Stand she, where stand I now as like, but is I’s legs yet all a-shake and not with strong in they. Come, is she say, and take I’s hand in she’s and walk we through of flowers like to this, and through of trees, and down bare hill of stumps. All of this while I is I glean no thing but she hand, we’s fingers catch all up in tween of other. I is with more good in of I’s belly as in other whiles I is alive. Down hill, by way of sucking-dirt and stinger-mites, with rot in stump and rot in air. Flower-sniff on girl is make they stinger-mite come by of we, that I is all whiles hit they off.
Up rise with little thick of trees, now down in pipe-grass and like this to hut and pig-keep by. Long whiles is we up hill, that sun is go by high of sky, and come more low. A cold is come, that pull I now more hard all bout I wraps of Hob’s son, as is not alive nor with a want of they. Girl open stopping-woods and say for I to go now in of keep, that is she find more food for I while Hob is not yet come here back.
This is I do, and set on dry-grass down with glean of many thing in I. Girl is go off, for forage now in white-skin hut and find of thing for eat. I glean as how she is shut legs, that I may rub not gill, nor titties like to this, and how she say no man may put of hand to she.
Now is I glean an all of it.
By dark, is she in hut all lone but Hob. He is more big, and make she do of thing. He is put will in she, and shanking she. No. No, it is more not good as I is with want for glean. May he is make she rub he’s bone with hair of she, as like to I, and glean of this it is more not good yet. Hob is want she is shank with no man only he, and is put fright in she, where is she make I not put hand to she. A vex is come now on I. Why, it is as if she is not she’s, but is she Hob’s.
I glean on how it is not good for she, that she is keeping all whiles by a man that dark and queer in glean of he, like as to Hob. He is more old as trees, and is put son to axe in this world, that in only other world is Hob now see of he. In other world, where Urk-kine is on shagfoal set, in neath he cave-top all of boy-bone make, where Hob is make he son to go, as spirits is in due put Hob with gleanings that he may he’s queer path-saying make. It is not good as is no say for it. I is make girl to keep here by no more. I is make she and I to go ways off, and walk, and journey on, and not to set. It is not right that people set. There is no good in it.
By white-skin hut cross pig-keep hear I girl, as is she looking yet for food. Glean I on how it is, if we is run ways off, but she and I. Glean I as I is make not good of forage while is I all lone, yet girl she is more good in glean of she as I, and may she forage many things for we, as is I’s mother do. This gleaning is that good. We may walk cross bone-woman bridge, and cross of world there by, I and she flower-sniff girl. Come whiles as she is not by Hob and is no more with fright of he, where is I make that she put off she wraps, and open of she legs up far as is they like to go.
In of I’s wraps, old will is make but little prickle, as not yet with strong for stand.
Now flowers, and girl is come from hut by wall of pig-keep bout, and through of wood-stop hole. She is with bird-meat and with sun-grass thing. Set she now on she knee, and is put food to lie in dry-grass, as that I may see of it.
I is not look at food, but is say out all quick they things that is I glean. Say I as is not good for she to keep by Hob, and how may I and she go off and far ways by, but we all lone, and forage good that is we want for no thing. Take I of she hand, and hold now hard of it, and say I that I glean she is not with a like for all whiles find of wood for Hob, nor put he meat to fire. Say I, she is not with good whiles by Hob, that she is want for I to keep here by and make good whiles she with, as she is say to I. She is now quiet, but shake she head fore-back, for sign that this is right.
Say I, if she is come ways off and journey world all bout with I, that all whiles is good whiles with we. Make I of many sayings like to this, and come as I may glean not more for say, and now is all come quiet and whiles go by, and no thing is she say. Oh no. Glean I that say of I, it is not good. She is not come with I. She is make I go off all lone, for see of she no more. I’s belly is he full with fright, it is that quiet in pig-keep now.
Look she to I. Make she good mouth.
Aye, she is say now. Aye.
This is more good as I may glean. Say she that we may journey off by dark, while first bright is not yet a-come. Say she, if we is want for walking far, how it is good to make we’s belly full for do of it. She is come back while first bright is not yet here by, with thing for eat more many and more good as I is see. We is make belly full, which after is we journey far way off, but I and she.
She say, she is now go, as Hob is he but little whiles comes back. Say she as I is one more dark in pig-keep lie, where after whiles is lie with she. Stoop she, and lick I’s cheek, and lick I’s mouth. Back is I lick she face, where lick of belly-milk is strong, dry on she cheek. Stand she, and make good mouth. While first bright is not yet, she say, and is out wall-hole, shut of woods and go.
Sun is come low in sky, and is I eat of bird-meat down to bone. Hob is come back here by, and is I hear low say of girl and he in hut. Hob is say thing, where girl make good noise back at he, and this is good, for glean I girl is want that Hob he is with like for she, that may he glean not she is make for go ways off, and come he by no more.
Make I good mouth at this. It is that good, as girl may say a thing to Hob while thing is not. If she is gleaning good as this, like is she glean good where to forage food and find for I. Through pipe-grass, cross of river, sun is come that big and low that hot of he is make world’s edge to smoke. River is still that through it may I look on darking sky of other world in neath of waters there, where other bird is fly, as make no noise.
Now bird-meat is all go, and sun all go as like from sky. Now is there only dark, and chew on bone.
There is no see, that hear is come more strong. Of rat in dry-grass cross of keep. Of river that say quick-lick, quick-lick, quick-lick, way in dark. Now come a far noise like to setting-people as is walk they river by. They is all make good noise, and loud that I may hear at all, they is that far. High and a-ways is mouth-wind come in pipe of bone, and is there noise of hitting-skins, and is they make of queer say, as like girl is make to I. Wind go, now come, that I may hear not all they’s say, yet one say is I hear.
<quote>
Make a fire and make it hot,
and bone is he, and bone is he
Path is long, yet is we not,
and by of valley go we ...
</quote>
There is more to this, yet is they setting-people go far down of river, in way of they many huts that I may not more hear they say, nor of they hitting-skins, nor of they bone-hole pipes. Off river down, they setting’s many fire is make in sky a little blood-bright come, up on high hang of dark. Puts I now one hand and an other in I’s belly-wraps, for cover up I’s will and make warm of I’s hands, and shut of eyes. There is no thing at all ...
... but dark.
And flowers.
Open eyes. I’s face is cold. A grey is come in dark by other way of river-setting, as like many whiles is go they by. Sniff flowers, and hear quiet-say of girl from out of pig-keep, by of wood-stop holes which open stands.
It is not yet first bright, she say, and she is here with many food. Come out, she say, that may we eat, where after journey we a-ways.
Now is I glean on all that we is say for do, and is with good-fright in I’s belly. Walk of world with girl. With girl find food, and lie with girl. Ah, good whiles come as that I may not glean. Quick now, she say. Quick now.
Stand I, and cross of keep for come by open stopping-woods. Glean I as it is good she is find wraps for I, it is that cold, with bare-while coming slow a-change to ice-while. Eyes is come more good for see in dark, where is I now see girl. She is set on she knees, with out of keep. In fore of she set apples, chewing-thing and meat of many kine. Sniff I of food, and sniff of flower, and is with want as I is all whiles sniff of they. Is I with want as girl is by I all whiles as is I alive, and is not go off like I’s people. Like I’s mother. Look she deep in eyes of I. Come out, she say. Come out.
Through now of stop-wood hole tread I, and out from keep. I is but one tread and an other off from she. Make I good mouth, yet make she no mouth back but only look in eyes. Now holds I out an arm, and glean not if it is for take of food, nor take up of she long bright hair for rub.
Hand on I’s back.
Arm bout I’s neck. Man-sniff. Hot skin. Strong in he’s arm on neck, he’s belly to I back. May I not make of breath. May I not make of say. Fright. Fright and sniff of man, of he’s hot will. Feet is no more on dirt. Girl deep is look in eyes. Big arm hurt hard and stop I’s breath, oh Mother, and now is a thing come bright and quick and make a little cold on neck of I, where is big warm now come.
Glean I man is he cast warm water down I’s belly for to make I wet, yet is glean not a how of it. Move I this way, now that, but oh, there is no help, and more warm wet fall yet now on I’s belly and is strong all slow go out from I. Arm move from neath of chin that I may take of breath, and arm is come now low I’s back and low I’s arse for lift of I. Lie now in strong of arms. Look up, and eyes all white look down on I, yet there is not a face. Is only black and dark. Now low of eyes is come an other white, and it is teeth, and Hob is make good mouth.
Oh, he is find we. He is glean we make for journey off. Turns head and look to girl, that I may say for she to run, yet is a bad lick come in of I’s mouth that I may no thing say, and only spit. Girl look to I, yet is she not make face of fright, nor make to run. She make no move, she make no face at all. Now Hob is walk, with I in arm of he. Strong is all go from I as like I is with sick. I may not make a-ways. Girl stand for follow quiet by Hob and I. Sniff flower. Sniff man. Sniff blood.
Make I hot waters out from eyes, and make for say as I is do all thing for Hob if is he hurt I not. I is go off. I is not see of girl. All this make I for say, but mouth is full and may I say of no thing. Hob is take I bout of pig-keep, fore of white-skin hut, where is there bright as of a little fire, and see I now he’s black face and he’s horns of wood, and see he is with blood on he. As like is I. Oh no.
Now is he lie I down, as like to babe, on prickling thing in fore of aur-ox hut. Come many sharp in back and legs, where is I glean he put I on of branch hill, as I see he make. Now take he hand from I. Lie I on branch-hill with no thing for hold I, and makes I for move ways off, yet may move I not. There is not strong. There is not strong in I. May move I no thing, only hand for rub of neck.
There is a hole in neck of I, where by is wet come out, where by is blood come out, that is not stop. Hob. Hob is put of hand-axe to I’s neck while that I is not glean. Oh, all I’s blood come out on belly, neck, and branch hill neath of I. Sniff I not flowers. Sniff I of no thing only blood.
Hob is walk off from branch hill and of I, and come he by of little fire in fore of hut, where is he stoop. He spirit-shape rise high and black on white of aur-ox skin, and is he take up stick from fire, which stick is come with fire as like. Now Hob is turn for come back way of I, he’s fire-stick hold in hand that make white wets of bright move on he belly, on he arms and edge of he black cheek.
Look I to girl, and glean not how she is not make of help for I. Stands she ways off from where is I on branch-hill lie, and take she aur-ox wrap now from she hair, and is not look on I. Wrap-skin is fall, a little white in dark. Girl turn she head in way of bright, and see I she is wear of wrap for hide of not-good mark there on she head. In bove she eyes there is a frighting tear. There is not blood, but skin lift up at edge, all long in neath she line of hair.
Now is I’s arms and legs come all a-shake, as I may not make stop of they. Arse is make noise, where is shit come on legs of I. I is not want for girl to see of this. I is not want for look to she. Turns I head, all slow, and look now up. Hob is come back here by, and is stand bove of I. White eyes. White teeth in low of empty black where is no face, and branch-horns rise there by.
All good, he say to I, and put he’s fire-stick now of branch-hill in. From woods in neath of I is come a noise like many mites all making little say of, quick, and hit, and set, and like to this. Now noise of mite is come as noise of rat, and rat say scratch, and rat say stick-it-black, and like. Sniff blood. Sniff smoke. Oh, now. Oh, where is girl.
Girl is she stand and take of wraps from off she titties. Thick is wraps, yet titties is that little now. White there in bright of fire, they is as like to titties not at all. Rat-noise is come as cat-noise now, and is a warm neath I and in of branch-hill. Where is many smokes rise there all bout.
Warm is come hot, on back of legs, and hot is come to hurt, where for is I make move of legs, but no where may they go as is not like with hot. I is now sniff of hair a-fire, and it is wraps of I, where make I noise, loud noise and full with hurt, yet is I’s say come thick and wet. Blood in I’s mouth. Blood on I’s chin.
I is not want for come no more alive by fire, as like to this. It is not right. It is more hurt as I may hold. Fire on I’s back, fire neath of head, and little grits of bright is rise all bout in way of dark sky bove we all. I may not make of breath. Girl is take off she belly wraps and wraps from off she legs, it is that hot. All bare is she. In tween she legs is ...
Put she hand to head, where frighting tear of skin is low of hair, and finger is she put to skin-edge by, where pull she now and ...
Smoke and blood in mouth. Bright hair is fall in dark with head-skin fall there by. She will, more big as I’s, that is I sniff not for they flowers. I is not with a breath for make of noise. Girl is come change. Girl is come change to boy, as rat is come like stones and pig to logs. It is this change that is in things. It is this frighting change as is make all of world not right. Smoke rise and fall like to grey river bout of I, and hurt come big as sky. No breath, and see of I is come all dark.
In dark is queer and many things, with many little seeings hang in smoke. See I of fire-hair men as may make fire to run as blood from stones. See I a where as man skin is fall black from sky. See I a path, from water to big water long, where is brights go now fore and back, more quick, more many as they fish. See I a making as like to a head-bone, big, and black, and all of fire. In of it’s mouth is set a man with fire come out he hair and all with hurt. See I now women hold to log, with fire all bout they foot. Look we, one at an other, from we fires. There is not hurt now. Only is there smoke.
In hind of smoke see I now dogs with eyes like tree-stumps big. Lift I now hand, for hit they off from I, and hand is all with fire. Skin is rise up in little rounds and is make cat-noise, neath of he all black. Through smoke is I see Hob. Boy is set by of he, fire bright on stumps of he dark hair. Hob is find little rounds of grey-dirt, push all flat, and is with stick in hand for make of mark on they. It is not good, for make of mark.
Fire is in hair, and this way come in of I’s head, and of I’s belly, that a gleaning is come in of I with fire. It is not glean of I, but glean of fire, full of queer sayings as no tongue may make. Phror. Becadom, sissirishic and huwf. Hob is set more by I, for hear. Make he a mark in grey of dirt with stick, and now an other, cross of it.
Opens I mouth, for make noise in I’s hurt, and say of fire is come through I, and rise, and rise, with grits of bright, in neath of old black sky.
** <strong>The Cremation Fields, 2500 BC</strong>
Floating downstream, away from me, it’s like a big white hand, dragging its fingers through frog-coloured water, tufts of black hair growing there between them.
‘Do you go as far south as Bridge-in-Valley? We may walk together there for safety,’ says she.
She is travelling to her father, who is dying, and she tells me that he is a cunning-man who comes one Summer long ago up track from Bridge-in-Valley, past the Great North Woods, far as the land’s edge, where the cold grey sea begins. He makes his children on a woman there, both boy and girl. Takes boy away with him and leaves the girl behind. All the long Winters pass. She does not see her father. He does not see her. Now he is dying.
‘Bridge-in-Valley?’ comes back my reply. ‘Yes, that is in my way. There is a short path by the river we may take, if you walk after me.’
About her neck, she wears blue fancy-beads.
Now it is almost out of sight, no bigger than a clot of spawn that slides away across the river’s smooth green belly, swollen with the rain. It tangles in a willow’s trailing scalp, moves on and leaves me taking off my wraps between the rushes, whispering like willage girls.
‘How do you like my fancy-beads?’ says she, and tells me how up track and past the Great North Woods the men make ore-fires on the shore. The sea-grass dries in long black strips upon the slippy rocks, then burns within a furnace hole of sand, above of which another chamber lies. Here is the ore, and smelted copper runs as quick as blood down sand-cuts into casting troughs. The juices of the burning grass are mixed with sand that turns to one smooth lump about the fire. The copper makes it blue, and young girls chip it into beads.
‘Now, where is this short path?’ she says.
‘Not far,’ comes my reply. ‘Not far.’
Lifting my elbows up above my head to pull away this stained old shirt, the wetness on my hands runs down my arms, as quick as smelted copper, in between my breasts. Washing it off, crouched at the river’s edge, brown clouds uncurl into the slopping green about my waist.
‘Your father does not know you, leaves you as a baby with your mother and does not come back. Why does he send for you now he is dying?’
Here she turns her head towards me, setting all her beads to chime, and tells me that her father, as a cunning-man, has many hides of land and wealth besides. It may be that her brother, lost to her from birth, is dead; or that he quarrels with the old, sick man. It may be that her father, with no son to share his wealth, is thinking that it should be passed to her.
About us, rain is sizzling on the leaves. We near the river’s edge.
Drying myself with dead leaves, splintering, crackling, stuck in flakes upon the wet and duck-bumped skin. Amidst the black-stained tangle of my rags, a prickling glint of bronze that snags the eye.
Reach down. My fingers, closing on the wooden hand-hold, turn a cold, flat metal tooth against the light.
And wipe it with sharp rushes, blade on blade.
‘Oh no,’ says she. ‘Oh no, don’t. Don’t do that.’
‘What is your name?’
‘Usin! My name is Usin. Oh, let go. Let go and don’t do any more.’
‘What is the old man’s name?’
‘What do you want with him? You cannot make me say!’
The ear. The thumb. Birds scatter up from reeds to sky in flapping, blind alarm.
‘Olun! Olun, that is my father’s name. Oh. Oh, these things you do. Oh, that it comes like this with me.’
‘Hush. That is all. Be quiet now.’
Later, stripping off its clothes and dragging it. The dull, deep splash, and my surprise to find the rain no longer falling. Everything is born to die. There are no spirit-women in the trees. There are no gods below the dirt.
They look so pretty, blue on my brown throat as puddles on a path. Her boots alone are not a fit for me but must be folded in my bag, heavy enough without them. Why, it tips me over on one side to carry it, making my way back through the sting-weeds and the dog-flower up towards the track.
Barefoot, then, south to Bridge-in-Valley. Nothing here to look at but the way before me, at my poor cold feet upon it, such as is my usual view of things. Mud, thick as ox-cream, quickly paints me yellow to my knees.
Wading through ash, among the highland mountains as a child. The grey fields all about, the oxen lumbering breast deep through dust. A darkness is upon the world, where is day come and brings no light. The sun is rare and strange. Vein-coloured skies at close of day. Piercing in blanket cloud, green shafts illuminate the skeletons of trees, spines split and ribs snapped off, bleached, twisting from the powder-dunes.
Our crops are buried. Nothing grows, and pale, slow clouds rise at our every step. Ash streaked in copper hair, the children’s faces white with it, its bitterness in all our food. Our animals go blind, their eyes like blood, the sighted centre part become a dull grey caul, as with a skin of fat upon raw meat.
We leave our homes, our settlements, a great crowd near as many as when people gather in to raise the stones. Beyond the woods, they say, there lies an old straight track to guide us, now there are no stars. Amongst the cinders, blind birds peck and scream. We travel south, some of us walking still.
The track is wider, coming up by way of valley’s edge. How many dead men’s feet does it demand to make it so? It is a fury and misery to think of being one day in my grave and yet this track still here. Its deep ruts, older than our great-fathers. Its flood pools, all the frightening straightness of its line, still here. Still here.
It rises steep before me, firm beneath my tread, and yet the walking’s hard. Sharp pebbles cut my feet, the mud upon them drying to a sun-split hide. Shifting my bag from one hand to other, muttering, telling myself to leave the track atop this hill and walk upon soft grass about the rim, so as to come down upon Bridge-in-Valley from the east.
The day’s light starts to wane, and soon the ditches by the track are speckled brilliant green with fire maggots. Song of bats. Call of a night-eyed bird. My footfalls, slapping in the dusk.
Somewhere downstream it rushes through the dark ahead of me, not swollen yet, but without colour. Snails upon its thighs. Face down, unblinking, sees the river-bottom slipping by below, each stone, each minnow-bitten weed. Cracked shells, and clever, branching lines that unseen currents leave upon the slow, smooth bed. The dead eyes, missing nothing.
East, along the rim. Between my toes cool grass, wet grass, and finally, below me, fires in the valley dark. A ring of sullen lights, too few to be a willage. What, then? Setting down my bag and straddling a toppled log, my eyes fix on the fire lights until they come more clear.
The view is of a hilltop, further down the valley’s eastern slope. A circle given shape by low and broken walls of dirt is risen there, another much alike but smaller set within, and inside that a smaller circle yet. This centre ring is dark, a hole. The fires, a handfull only, burn within the greater round beyond, some of them little more than embers, almost gone.
The brightest has a gathering of people stood about it. Trapped beneath their heels, stretched shadows shy back from the flames, yet do not jump or dance. What are they burning there, so still by night?
My rest upon this log gives me new strength, and once more taking up my bag seems less a task. Stand up. Walk downhill in amongst black stumps where all the trees are burned away. Below the ring-topped hill, downwind of it, come women’s voices, calling, tangled with the smoke.
No. No, not calling, but a lower noise that has less sense to it.
At foot of hill, the ground becomes a bog, yet there’s a raised path running south across the valley floor to where the night above the treeline glows dull red, a cooling metal that betrays the willage fires below. A long walk, from the look of it, but that will give me time to think of all there is to do, and say, and be.
Usin. The sound of it is plain and easy in the saying. Usin, Olun’s daughter. Name like an abandoned shell, a husk. The living creature once concealed within is gone. The name lies empty, hollow and disused. It waits for hermit crabs to crawl inside and try it on.
Usin. Deserted name. Mine now.
Ahead, the path crawls through the weeds into the willage, there to die. Along its length the signs and droppings of this place are strewn, lit one side red by its approaching fires: a broken basin, grey and pricked with spots; a mitten; blunted flints; a little man-in-kind made out of chicken bones.
The settlement is big, half bounded by a ring of blackthorn, heaped into a wall. Its roundhouse squats there at the centre, hulking giant, a necklace made from torches strung about its shoulders, dark above the huts that sprawl against its smoking flanks like sucking-pups.
Stopping to make a piss some way yet from the willage’s north gate, it is my luck to note while crouching in mid flow a torso garden set beside my path. Fixed through, and hung from stakes. No limbs nor head. No doubt they are the last remains of cheats and thieves hung out in warning, heavy flags of meat. It is a common practice now, along the track.
There are as many stakes as legs upon a dog, and all but one have women on. No. No, the one this end may be another man, seen closer to. As eaten by the weather and the wild swine as they are, it’s hard to know. This one has bright red hair about his sex, and this the needle-picture of a snake marked on one breast, her other gone.
Wiping my gill with grass, and pulling Usin’s breeks up high about my waist, there’s not a thing to do but journey on, towards the walls of thorn, sharp black against the fires contained within. A frightful nest, filled not with eggs but embers, smouldering in the night.
Bridge-in-the-Valley. Stupid name. There’s valley all about yet not a bridge in sight. My wager is the willeins in this settlement don’t call it by that name at all. My wager is they call their place ‘The Willage’, as do all the other dull-wits in their dull-wit settlements along the track. ‘Why, life be good here in the Willage, be it not old girl?’ ‘Aye, may it be, but it is better in a place up north they call the Willage, where my mother has her people.’ ‘Well, the Willage is a good place if you’re wanting oxen, but if you want pigs you’re better going to the Willage.’ ‘We must let my brother settle this. He does not live in either place, but in a settlement down south. It has a queer and outland sounding name that’s gone from my recall, and yet it may be “Willage”, come to think.’ ‘You do not hear of many names like that!’
Across the sea and by the world’s end, where the black men are, there’s settlements with different names in different tongues, and all of them mean willage. There are willages upon the moon, those rings of huts that may be seen when it is full.
My names are better, made up from the spites and griefs these stale and stinking little pest holes put upon me in my travellings: Beast-Bugger Down and Little Midden. Squint-Eyed-in-the-Bog. Shank Sister Hill and Fat Arse Fields.
Bridge-in-the-Valley? No. This place is worth a better calling. Fool-’Em-in-the-Fen, with luck.
Or Murder-in-the-Mud.
There is a watch-hut by the northmost gate, set up against the wall of thorn. Inside, a tall youth birth-marked red from eye to chin sits plucking birds beside an older man, his father, or, as it may be, his grand-sire. Torch lit, crouched in feathers to their boot tops.
Now, close up, the old man’s hands come into sight. They tremble, shake with age or palsy, knuckles on the one wrapped fast about the pale pink carcass, fingers on the other picking in the down about its neck. Both hands are black to some way past the wrist, not dark with dirt or sun scorched like the traders come from other lands but black, an old deep stain that fades to blue along its edge, as with a dyer’s hands.
A dried-up cone is crushed to sudden splinters under my bare foot. They both look up. Young cherry-cheek puts down his half-bald fowl and fumbles, reaching round to find his spear. He speaks as if to put me in my place, his voice half-broken and the pitch of it betraying him so that he squeaks where he is wanting to be stern. He does not meet my eye, but lets his glance fall to my neck where torch fire sparkles blue upon the fancy-beads.
‘What are you wanting in the Willage?’
There. The Willage. Why, my wager is already won.
‘My name is Usin, Olun’s daughter, come here from the North to see my father, who is sick. Who’ll take me to him?’
Fiery-face turns round towards the older gateman sat beside him, black hands shivering like a corpse-bird’s wing. A look is passed between them and a fear come into me: Olun, the cunning-man, already dead and buried, goods and all, below the flowers. His secrets rattling useless in his skull, else passed on to his son. The death-bed whisper, ‘Is my daughter here?’ Too late. My schemes are all too late.
The elder watchman spits a yellow curd into the feathers at his feet.
‘Olun’s the Hob-man here, for many years.’
He spits again. His jerking, shadow-coloured hands are trying to point between the huddled dwellings at his back.
‘This night he’s set down-willage at the roundhouse making say, although we fear he has not many sayings left in him. We may walk down that way together, if you like. Are you all right to pluck these birds alone, Coll?’
This is said in way of master juice-jowels, who looks put about and sulky-eyed. He grunts his answer, so to sound more like a man.
‘Aye. What with all the while you take to pull a feather, shaking like a broke-back dog, it’s just as quick to do it on my own. Get off and let me be.’
The elder gateman stands and, spitting once more in the feathers, steps outside the hut. He takes my arm between his spasming fingers and now guides me down a path between the huts towards a looming round of posts, bark stripped away and white wood naked, thatched with reed above. Damp torches hiss, a knot of snakes beneath the eaves. A baby wails, behind us in the willage night.
‘Olun is known to me, both boy and man these many years,’ says he. ‘You are not make like him, nor like young Garn.’
The brother’s name is Garn.
‘No. It’s my mother’s side that shows in me.’ This seems to put him at his rest, and he sets one black hand to quiver at my shoulder, steering me through drawn-back veils of rush into the smoke and stink.
The roundhouse. Many people, some too old or young to talk, are sprawled on mats of reed, with flame-shapes slithering on their knobbled backs and freckled shoulders in a fog of sweat, and breath, and half-cured hide. Up in the shadows of the under-roof a shroud of smoke is spread out carefully upon the air. It trembles with each movement in the hall below, folding and fraying and unravelling.
Towards the round’s far side, across a sprawl of hairy limbs and tallow-light, there sits a monstrous woman, sunk in furs, grey ropes of hair hung to her thighs. A fierce white scar runs through one eye and down across the nose. The other, from a socket swathed with fat, gleams like a bead pressed into dough. About her puffed out bullfrog neck, an ornament of gold. The Queen.
To either side, behind her, stands a man ... no. Stands the same man. How is this? My gaze stops first with one and then the other. Back and forth, again and yet again. There’s not a fingernail of difference in between them. Shaven skull and brow and jaw, standing with their long arms folded, fixed blue eyes, snake-lipped.
Each smiles upon a different side. Why does this frighten me?
‘That is Queen Mag,’ the old, black-fisted man is whispering, behind my shoulder. ‘Those on either side of her are Bern and Buri, though there’s none but they know which is which. They are her rough-boys. Let them well alone.’
‘What are they?’ My voice, hushed as the gateman’s own. My eyes are moving back and forth between the awful look-akins and may not glance away.
‘A monster birth, but do not say it while they are in hearing. It is said their father puts his seed into their mother while she leans against an oak that’s lightning-split. When they are born, most of us say they must be put to knife, but Mag says no. She takes a pleasure in their oddity and rears them for her own. They put a scare up people’s arses now they’re grown, and Mag takes pleasure in that also.’
Both of them turn their sand-grey skulls as one and look across the room at me. They have one smile, each wearing half of it. A knowledge comes within me now that makes me look away from them: these are the ones that tend the torso garden. They clip back the limbs and gather up the fallen heads.
Dropping my gaze, it falls upon a ruined figure, resting there upon a pallet made of sticks before the seated queen. The figure speaks, a dry voice lower than the drone of bees, within my ears since entering this hall yet only come to notice now. A man. Once fat, he has a sickness eating him within. It sinks his eyes and dries his lips to figs, shrunk back to show the all but empty gums.
Where all but he are clad in robes, he lies there naked save a fine, strange cloak of blackbird quills beneath him, spread upon the bier. His will is long and skinny, bald about the root. A band of antler-twigs is tied, the bare points circling his brow, skin hanging from his bones in folds, and all of it has marks upon. The wasted body swarms with needle-pictures. Every thumbnail’s width of him from head to heel is pretty with tattoo.
‘That’s Olun,’ comes the stale breath by my ear.
A cold blue line that severs him in twain from balls to brow. A red wheel, drawn above his heart with many smaller rings about. Crosses and arrow points, loop within loop on belly and on breast. The pale green patchwork of his thighs.
An eye may find no sense within the curls and turns, no image of a snake nor of a bear, as favoured by the northern men. Shaped after nothing one may see within this world, it is a madness, wild in its device, and speaks that which we may not know. Star-scalped. The likeness of a womb upon one palm.
The words he speaks are small and dry like beetle husks, spat out as if he does not like their taste.
‘The leaves fall dead at news of Winter.’
(The leaves. Fall. Dead. At news. Of Winter. Every word, he stops to catch his breath.)
‘Now is the sleep of lizards. Now the shortening of the days. The crops is in. The shed is full. Now must we offer thanks.’
Some men are nodding in the crowd. A little boy is led out by his father to make water up against the hut wall, then led back again, picking across the mat of tangled legs. Olun is speaking, sockets staring up into a still, flat veil, the net of smoke cast floating just below the roof.
‘Once, long ago, there is a cunning-man who may make say with all the gods below the dirt. They tell him that he must give up an offering and thank the soil for being good, and full with fruit.
“What must be offered up?” the Hob-man says.
“Your son,” the gods say back.
‘On hearing this he falls to weeping, begging them to spare his child, but they are stern and bid him do the thing they say, for he must show he has more love for them than for his only flesh. And so it is. He binds his son and leads him by the river’s edge, where is a fire built up.’
(The river’s. Edge. Where is. A fire. Built up.)
‘He sets his son upon the wood. The fire’s made ready and the dagger honed.
‘Then speak the gods below the dirt and say that it is good for him to keep his faith and love his gods more than his only flesh. “We are so pleased,” they say, “that we do spare your child. See, yonder is a pig caught in the mud. Take down your son from off the fire, and let us change the pig into a boy that you may slaughter in his place.”
‘And this is done. The pig-boy burns, the child is spared, and from that time we offer up a pig-boy to the fire upon the night.
‘When next the light is come we have one day to stack the wood.
‘We have one day to stalk the pig.
‘We have one night to please the gods.’
He sighs. ‘The gods are good.’ The crowd are muttering a muddy echo to his words, one voice chopped up with morsels lodged in many throats. One day to stack, one day to stalk, one night to please the gods. The gods are good. It seems these mutterings are a sign that Olun makes his say no more this night, for people stand and make to leave. They flow about us like a scum-tide, draining through the door and out into the night, coughing and laughing. Only scattered huddles stay to whisper in the hall.
Black fingers, shuddering, rest upon my spine and push me from behind to urge me on.
‘Go to your father,’ says the gateman.
Father dies of bee stings while we’re passing through the Great North Woods, all wading belly high through hollows deep with wet and shaggy grass. Above us, where the tree’s high branches make a web of twigs against the light, a bird is singing, clear and all alone within the stifling afternoon.
My father cries out, jerks his foot up now to clutch its underside, then topples backwards with a moan, is swallowed in the grass. We reach him, mother and myself, but now he’s twitching, making noises in his throat, the sweat a bright and sudden gloss upon his nose, upon his brow. He wheezes first, then rattles. Both his eyes are open, dull and seeing nothing. One hand clutches at the grass beneath him now and then, but all in all there’s little here for me to look at and nothing to do. Leaving my mother kneeling there beside him, it comes upon my fancy to retrace his last steps through the laked grass.
In the flattened patch where he first grabs his foot and cries out lies a half-pulped bee, a smear of dangerous colour wiped across the print mark of his heel. Somewhere close in the grass my mother starts to low. Taste of my fingers, sour like metal, crammed into my mouth to stop the laughter.
Still the bird is singing. From its perch up in the high woods there it may look down and see me, see my mother and my father and the bee, though separate as we are amongst the grass we may not see each other. As in one flat picture it observes us, with the all of father’s death caught fast there in the bird’s jet eye.
The hag-queen wheezes something to her look-akins. They raise their great moon heads and watch me make my way towards the old man on his bed of sticks and feathers set below them there. Don’t meet their eye. Don’t seem afraid. The pack-dirt floor, arse-warm beneath my slow, unwilling feet.
A woman crouches by the pallet, gathering the Hob-man’s cloak of blackbird quills about his starved and naked shoulders, folding it to cover up the senseless decorations pricked upon his ribs, his sunken breast.
She’s big, this woman; man-boned at the hip and plain to look upon. Hair bound up all one lump atop her head, the colour of a baby’s turd, held with a spike of wood. Red cheeks. A flat face, long about the jaw and nothing clever in her she-ox eyes.
She’s past her child time, yet too young to be the old man’s mate. Another daughter, then? No. No, one son, one daughter, that is all they say to me, the girl and gateman both. What then? His sister, or his sister’s child? A slave? About her thick grey neck a piece of thin bronze, scratched with tear-shaped marks and hung on string twists in the tallow-light.
Now, at my drawing near she turns to look at me, a flat and stupid look that has no spark in it. Pay her no heed. The old man’s lying wrapped within his feather cloak, so that he looks like to some terrible black bird that has an old man’s head and feet. His eyes are closed as if the making of his say tires all the life from him. Him. Talk to him, the old man. He’s the one.
‘Father?’
My voice. It must sound more akin to hers, the girl who met with me upon the track. He may recall the way her mother speaks to him so long ago and know me as one come from other parts. Think. Try to think back how the girl speaks, there upon the river’s edge. ‘Do you go as far south as Bridge-in-Valley?’ ‘Do you like my fancy-beads?’ Her voice, more in the nose than in the gizzard like my own. Yes. Yes, that’s it. Now, call to him once more, but in the way the girl is speaking in my thoughts. And louder.
‘Father?’
Sunk in sockets deep and crumble-edged as earth-bear holes, his dye-stained lids creep back across the wet and yellowed balls below. One eye is green and black, like water in a stump. The other eye is white. Blind white.
He lies there, staring up at me, and slowly frowns. The markings crumple on his brow. Some of the needle-painted lines are spread about their edges with the ageing of his skin, become a faded smear of dirty blue, yet in their centre they are sharp. It is as if he has the markings made again from year to year, gouged deeper still to keep them clear and new. His green eye squints at me, his white at nothing. By his bed, the great slow woman squats to watch us, no more life within her face than is within a stone.
‘Father, it’s Usin.’ Trying to talk down through my nose, not from the throat.
‘It’s Usin. It’s your daughter.’
Your daughter trails her eel-chewed toes through river-bottom sand and dances off towards the sea. Her hair floats out and has the look of weed, more comely when it’s drowned.
She’s far beyond this place by now, tripping her slow dance through the night. Its steps are clumsy, rousing no man with the movement of her flesh, nor ever may again. Only the current holds her, fast against its stinking breast.
He stares at me. The long, unblinking silence holds and holds, and only now he speaks.
‘Hurna? Back to my hut now.’
Not to me. Although he stares the while into my eyes he does not speak to me but to the hulking, silent woman looking on. Her name is Hurna, then. Out of her crouch she rises, wearily unfolds her largeness, all without a word. She turns her back upon the bed of sticks then stoops to grasp the poles that thrust out from its head. She lifts. The smallest grunt escapes her, less from effort than her need to mark a task completed.
Having lifted up the old man to a tilt, not steep enough to tip him from his bed, she drags the litter off towards the roundhouse door, whereby the man with dyed and shaking hands still waits and watches us. The pallet leaves a pair of grooves behind it, scratched upon black dirt, and still the old man holds my eye even as he is dragged away, bound in his blackbird shroud.
‘Well? Are you coming, daughter?’
There! He speaks. He speaks to me and calls me daughter.
‘Coming, father. Does your woman need my help in dragging you?’
He makes a creaking sound. It comes to me that he is laughing.
‘Hurna? She is not my woman. All she does is wipe my arse and feed me, drag me here and there, and in return it is for me to suffer through her thoughts upon the spirit world and all her foolish gods.’
Her. Foolish. Gods. The words burst out between the shallow breaths. The woman pulls the litter, slow and even; does not seem to hear the Hob-man make complaint against her. Follow, walking in between the scratch-lines scored upon the dirt behind. Deep in my throat there is the smell of tallow smoke and feathers.
One last glance behind: the monster boys are sitting on the furs to each side of their bloated queen. One, Bern or Buri, nuzzles with his head to kiss her underneath the arm. The other has his hand beneath her wraps. Look quick away. Out through the veil of reeds we step into star-frosted air. The palsied gateman with the blackened hands watches me pass, but does not speak or follow.
Outside, it seems that Olun and his tow-horse woman do not wait for me, but drag away into the twists of path foot-worn between the crowding huts, asleep and sunk in dark. They make me run to fall in step with them, walking beside of Olun’s bier and talking to him once my breath is caught again. About us, shiftings, mumbles in the thatch-topped dwellings, bodies settling for the night into their rags and straw.
The old man turns his head, looks up towards me from his bed of sticks that bumps along here by my side.
‘How well are things,’ he says, ‘now that here is my daughter come. What is the many of the nights you spend upon the track?’
This is an answer that the dead girl does not give me, at the river’s edge, one of the things it slips my thoughts to ask her. Too late now to cut away her other thumb. My wits must save me and my wits alone.
‘More days than are within my reckoning,’ is my reply, then, quickly, moving on: ‘All of those nights, sleep passes by and does not take me with her, so great is my fright to hear that you are sick.’
The old man smiles, lips crawling back from off the few and yellowed teeth. The skull is restless, eager for that day soon come when it may shed the dried meat and the sun-cured hide, emerge from Olun’s head wearing a grin of victory at conquering the flesh. These teeth, poked through the shrivelled gums, are but the heralds of its coming. Up above his smile, the old man slides his ice-white blinded eye towards me, sidewise there between its greying lids. It seems to stare at me.
‘Do you think that your scheming is not known to me?’ he says, the smile grown wider still, and in my stomach something heavy flops and moves and makes my arse pull in all tight. He knows. The old man knows about my plan, the borrowed beads, the dead thing in the river. What is there for me to say or do but make to run and hide myself?
He speaks again, and holds me with his smile, his dead-snake eye. ‘You think to win my favour with your words, is that not it?’ He laughs to see me, staring like a throttled cat towards him in my fear and wonderment. ‘You think to have the old man’s treasure when the old man’s dead. There is a little of your mother in you yet,’ and here he laughs again, and shuts his eyes and laughs so much the laughter turns to coughing, wet and deep.
He does not know. He thinks me sly and greedy, but he thinks me his. Thank all the gods, though none in truth there be.
My answer is come easily to me, with just the ring of feeling hurt yet touched with shame that such a girl might have: ‘How can you mock your daughter so, that walks the great long way to be beside you? How is it you say she does not care for you? Why, there’s a notion in me to walk back again, so little is my want for such a father or what wealth he has.’
At this the coughing stops. His look is worried now, less sure he has the hold of me.
‘No. You must stay, and pay my tongue no mind. It is an old man’s jest and nothing more. You are my only flesh, and you must stay with me until my end.’
His live eye searches mine, afraid that he may drive me off from him with all his taunting. He has need of me, and is not certain of my need for him: the game is mine. My voice is sniffy and uncaring in reply, to make him squirm more fast upon the hook.
‘Oh yes? Your only flesh, you say? What of my brother Garn? You favoured him above me once before. Why not make him your comfort now and leave me in my northland home, if you can think so little of me?’
Here he looks away, and for a while he does not speak. There’s silence save the drag and rattle of his bed across the soil and stones; the noisy breathing of the woman as she trudges onwards, pulling him between the huts.
‘Garn is no son of mine.’ His words are hard, like unto flint. He stares up at the stars and does not look at me.
My best course is to hold my silence, wait ‘til he says more of this. The huts crawl by. The woman pants like some great dog, and now he speaks again.
‘It is our custom, passing teachings to the boy, as it is our custom to seek mates among the further lands so that it gives a strongness to the blood. That is why Garn is taken far away and you are left beside the great cold sea. It is our custom, to pass teachings to a boy, but Garn ...’
He stops and hawks, spits something dark into the dark about us.
‘Garn will not take up the task, and sets a face against his duty. Says he’s not a cunning-man and makes work as a metal-monger, which he thinks a craft more fitted to our time. He says he does not care to know the old and secret ways. We cannot talk save that we quarrel, so we do not talk at all.
‘Why, even when he knows the sickness is upon me and my living all but done, he does not bend, nor put aside his hammer-stones and moulds. There’s none but you to take my learnings ‘fore my breath is gone, girl. None but you.’
His eyes are pitiful, cast up at me as with an ailing beast. When men are weak, my heart’s made harder yet, but there is only care within my voice, hushed so as not to wake the sleepers in the reed-topped mounds about.
‘What is your illness, father? Is it in your wind, that you have not the breath to speak?’
His bed bumps heavy, dragged across a sudden hollow in the dirt. He grunts, discomfited, and then he sighs.
‘This willage is too much a part of me. Its sicknesses are mine. If there are beetles in the grain down at the southfields, then it gnaws my vitals here.’ His hand, a brittle crab, moves low across his belly.
‘And if the old rounds up on Beasthill fall to ruin and neglect, then in my back the bones grow weak as yellow stone and crumble where one scrapes upon the other.’
Now he lifts his fingers, gestures to the useless clotted eye, like curdled milk. ‘This happens when the dye-well in the meadows west of here runs dry. Or else a tunnel in the under-willage floods, a cave subsides and leaves me pissing blood from one moon to the next. They burn the trees from off the great east ridge to level it atop, and now my will no longer stands. The hairs fall out and make it like a babe’s.’
Ahead, set some way off from all the other huts, a pile of shadow hunches in our path, to where the woman Hurna trudges, drags the old man in her wake who drags me like-ways with his words.
‘The people are the worst of it. When Jebba Broken-Tooth takes mad and kills his woman and their child, then is there seeping from my ear. Or, if the brothers Manyhorse are feuding my teeth have a cold burn. And now all the doers of wrong that we get here, the cut-bags and the cheats, the tap-and-takes all living in stilt-settles by the drownings. They give me the lice.’
He grins, and shows his lonely teeth, that ache with all the angry words that pass between the brothers Manyhorse, whoever they may be.
‘One time, it pleases me to pick a fat one out and split it with my thumb. The next day, word is come of how some bucket-belly fenland cheater gets caught in amongst his stilt logs when they fall, so that they crush him near to one piece and another.’
Here he laughs again, the creaking of a dead bird’s wing, and here we reach a halt, the woman ceasing in her haul before the heaped up dark that is the old man’s hut. She shoves aside the stop-woods on their swing of rope, wherefrom a dull red light pours out, as from a torture hole, and as she drags the old man in he’s laughing still and makes a pinching motion at me, thumb and finger. Black nails bite together.
There in Little Midden once a girl not much more than a babby tells me how she may not find her mother in the market crowd, as if it’s given up to me to do her mother’s minding for her. From a black man in a robe whose colour is outside my power to name, she fetches me a bright new dagger and a silver piece in trade.
Upon Shank Sister Hill a millman gives me a half a pig for near as many bags of dirt as there are fingers on one hand, with but a finger’s depth of grain spread out atop each bag to mask the soil beneath.
In Dullard’s Way they curse me still for trading dried out dog-stool wrapped in bark as proof against the pox.
An elder man of Reekditch gives me half a skin of mash to have me in the mouth, then falls asleep to wake with treasure bag and gizzard cut the both.
In Fat Arse Fields, the opened mound by night, my shoulders racked by all the shovelling, a rag held to my nose. The rotted fingers swell beneath the rings, which must be twisted off. The softened flesh rucks up about the joint, sloughs off completely as the ring’s pulled clear.
In Sickly that big fat girl and her half a loaf of bread ...
The old man clicks his beetle-coloured nails and mums the splitting of a tick.
Inside, the great bellhut’s a lung stitched out of rush and hide on ribs of wood, filled with the breath of souring piss and damp that marks the old, though spiced with rarer scents. Big, yet made small by all the clutter stacked within, fantastic cliffs of dog-skin masks and god-faced shields, of rattles, feathered bones and claybaked men-in-kind. Strange birds, dead yet unrotten, stiff and staring, caged in woven wood. A snarl of pickled rats all knotted at the tail and nailed to bark. A cured and varnished heart. Rocks finger-marked by monsters, cooking bowls and spools of stitching gut and more and more in hazard-footed screehills to the roof’s dark underhang.
There are but shoulder-narrow passages left clear between the listing scarps of muddled tool and fetish-stick, between the dust-dry garlands and the eelskin robes. Is this like something seen before, in a forgotten baby dream of mine?
A fist of amber with a horrid little sea-fright caught inside, its body flat with tufts of bloodworms growing from the back of it, raised up on many pin-stiff legs, and from one end a bulb where is a face that makes me jerk away. A bowl that may be seen through, and an unborn baby girl, curled up, her blind head chalked to white then painted brightly, like a whore.
Somewhere towards the centre of this queer-mazed round an ember pit throws up a sulking light. Like beads of melted ore it prickles red upon the rubbled ornaments; is caught in painted sailsheets, shadowbacked; cut into smoking slats of pink and greening dark upon the sharpness of their edge. Slabbed black falls on the passageways amongst the useless things, slashed here and there by shafts of bloody forge-light spilling from the heaped-up side-paths of those corners where one channel forks into another.
Saving when they drag through such a chimney-shaft of sudden warfire brightness, nothing may be seen of Olun on his bed of sticks. Following them with ears alone: the pallet’s rasp across the scored black dirt, the woman’s foot-thud muffled, drumming through it, tickling beneath the bareness of my heel. Now losing them about a bend and hurrying to catch them up, come round the turn in time to see the old man’s needle-harrowed face bleed sudden red and bright from out the dark as it drags through a stripe of light. The stripe grows wide. We are stepping out into the ember-lighted round of open space there centring this puzzle-track of piling casks, dream tumbles, rary bits.
Her flat face gleamed with sweat, the woman, Hurna, sets the old man and his pallet down to rest beside the sunken fire, then lumbers off without a word for wood to bring it back to the flame. Lost in a moment, great bear footfalls stumbling off into the maze of relic toys.
The old man’s tired, so sends me off to sleep in one far corner hung with hides and set apart. He tells me not to pay it mind if he and Hurna set and talk about the embers for a time. It’s plain he does not wish me to keep company with them, and so my bed is made from furs, the fireside’s light shut out about me by the hangings.
Soon, there’s the sound of Hurna coming back with wood, the clatter as she throws it down. They talk then, low, the first time that she speaks within my hearing. Why, she sounds more flat and stupid than she looks, which is a thing to say.
It is my hope that they may talk of shanking, or of something good to listen on, but no. She drears about a god that swallows us, which does not sound the god for me. She says once we are swallowed up then we may be born new amongst the gods. As what? A turd that bobs there in their golden midden-hole? Things may be born then swallowed, though it may not be the other way about, not in my reckoning.
Once in a while the old man’s voice breaks in and crackles something sharp with scorn, withdraws again to let the woman’s answer drag away and on and on into the night. She pulls their talk along, a pallet weighed with blunt and heavy words.
Below my fur and naked save my fancy-beads, my eyes are shut but not my ears. Her words float through me. Essence. Spirit-ore. The hobbles of the flesh. Change. Be transformed, refigured in the passion, passion, passion ash ...
The ashfields. Me a little girl. This snow is dry, warm grey, its smoothed and rounded flanks just right for stepping in, a powder finer than the stone-ground corn, as cool and slippery as water on my foot that now sinks in, and in, expecting ground, and deeper, there’s no firmness underneath the ash to stop me falling ...
Start awake. The furs piled up about my neck. The hangings, pink lit on the other side and still the woman’s voice beyond them. Sweat all up my back and silky wet between the breasts. These furs make me too hot. Take out my arms and shoulders from beneath. That’s better. Cooler. Turn and roll upon my other side. The beaded hoop of wire now digs into my shoulder that it must be pushed away. There. Now the all of me feels good, so slack and tired that it escapes my thoughts just where my leg rests, or my hand. All one soft piece, that does not know the different bits of me.
The woman’s words, smooth of all meaning now, are only sounds, grey pebbles sleek and wet that tumble slow through nothing, here inside my eyelids: Beasthill. Heartring. Urned with queens. The cheated worm. Bones milled and raked. And when you. And when all of us. When we. When we are sparkborn ...
In my dark, the colour flukes play blue, no, red, and run to make a ring. It cobwebs out, it cobwebs out and at the centre comes a melt, deep winter green and, glimmering, breaks apart, the ripples, river, river’s edge, and here she comes, the girl, her throat all open but she does not pay it mind, and she is smiling, pleased to meet with me.
‘Come up the river bank a little way,’ she’s saying now. ‘There is a big black dog up there who says he knows of you.’
She turns and walks, leading ahead. Where is the river gone to? There are bushes at each side and piles of clutter stood amongst them, heaping mounts of queer and clever things that are well known to me, although their names are not now in my thoughts. The girl is calling up ahead, along the passageway.
Trying to catch up next to her but something’s tangling my feet and makes me slow. Her voice goes further off from me. She’s talking now to someone, yet her words are flat and have no spirit in. That must be how it is, the talk between the dead. Push on. Push deeper after her. It’s darker now. Is that her calling me? It’s darker now ...
Light. Morning light. What place is this to find myself awake?
Olun. The old man’s hut. The father of the girl. The girl beside the river’s edge.
Ah yes.
Yet half asleep, still furry in my thoughts and muttering to myself while pulling on her clothes, my clothes, then crawling out into the centre round of Olun’s hut. Deserted. Fire pit cold and dead. The greying, liver-coloured ranks of oddment that surround me robbed of all their midnight glamour by a sun that’s strained in dusted spindles through the chinked rush roof above.
They have a stillness and an old hush in them now, these chines of bauble and remain. The narrow paths ravining through them are less mazed as seen by pearl of morning, making it a simple thing to find my way out, stumbling and mumbling to day. Squinting against this bright; the world smears in my lashes.
‘Usin? Usin!’
He says it yet again before it comes upon me that this is my name. Turn about. The old man lies before me on his raft of twigs, wrapped not in feathers now but in a robe of many dog-pelts, whole, so that black snouts show here and there above the slashed vent of a mouth, below the lidded fastening holes.
Beside him food is spread in bowls of polished bronze. A hot fish, gaping. Clouded with alarm and great unhappiness its steamed eyes fix upon me. Near to this a dish not bigger than a thumb-cup, filled with bitter cherry mash. Crust-hided haunches of grey bread to dip. A skin of goatwarm milk to wash it down.
‘Hurna and myself, we eat at dawn. She’s off to worship with her people now and is not coming back this side of noon. Now you may eat.’
He signifies towards the food, a spasm of his patterned hand.
He watches me crouch cross-kneed, take the dagger from my pouch and score his fish along its back, about its tail, the gill-line of its throat, grey vapour bleeding up from where the black skin splits, peels back beneath my edge. Thumb out the spine. Ease up the hairbone prongs of rib from smoking whitemeat slots. Now lift the brittle centipede of backbone out with face and arsefins all, to set aside. Prick out a slat of flesh, raised smouldering and pushed between my lips on daggerpoint, which gives me cause to think of how that point is last employed.
My chewing takes some whiles, my swallow hardly less. Out from beneath a dishrim, flaring bronze, the fern-tailed skeleton is staring, girl-eyed, there beside my plate. Chew, swallow, take some more, but this time with my fingers. Olun watches me, and when he sees my mouth’s too full to make an interruption without choking me, he speaks.
‘While Hurna is not here we may walk up the river path a way, as may be to the bridge and back. If you’re to have my leavings, it’s as well you have a cunning of the land and all its lie.’
It comes to me that he says ‘We may walk’, when it is only me who’s fit to do as much. He means for me to drag him, in that ox-legged woman’s stead, and me so little built! The flakes of creature in my mouth and mention of his leavings: these are all that stop me calling him the lazy, crafty gill clot that he is.
He does not speak again throughout the fish, the bread or sweet, dirt-gritted milk, and yet from while to while he opens up his mouth as if to do so, though he makes not any sound at all. It’s only now it comes to me that these are gasps he makes to take his breath.
The cherry stew’s too sharp for me, left barely tasted. Afterwards, upon my bending low to wrap his dog-coat tighter in before his pallet’s taken up and dragged, he lifts one hand and gently wipes away the goatmilk beaded on my underlip, a taste of stale and smoke-cured finger-end. He smiles, eyes creasing in the web-skinned sockets. Three small fish-marks drawn bright red upon one lid are lost within the sudden fissured deeps.
No sire or dam of mine has need to make me drag them all this way. The father lowered bee-stung to his grave up in the hollows of the Great North Woods, he does not ask for me to drag him, stinking, all about the land. Nor is my mother carried when she sickens, whoring in the mine camps east of here, the both of us together now that father’s dead, and when her cough starts putting off my customers there’s nothing more to do than leave her. ‘You rest here. It does not take me long to find some firewoods and come back. Rest, Mother. Rest and wait for me,’ and morning finds me in another place, down track, alone.
The both of them are dead and gone now, neither are they carried there.
My grip is sore about the litter’s poles, hands wealed and callusing, and we are barely out the willage, barely out the skein of knotted dust tracks where the children laugh and fight between the bustling huts, their thin brown shapes that tumble in and out of view like spirits through the pot-haze, stew clouds watery and dismal to the nose, a fever fog that damps the cheek.
Though he is dragged behind upon his pallet in my wake it feels as if the old man’s pushing me, goading me on beyond the hut-rings to the settlement’s north gate. We cross paths with the birth-marked boy who plays the guard on my arrival. Walking with a short, soft-fatted girl whose speckled shoulders pale to milk beneath her blood-gold hair, he does not look at me.
The watch-hut by the gate is empty as we scrape between the shored up brackens to the field beyond. The empty watch-hut troubles me, but once we’re through the gate its reason’s plain: the withered man with dye-blacked hands is stood outside, turned face towards the barrier of thorn, a corded will limp in his rattling hands. On watch alone he steps outside the gate to make a piss, but from the look of it he stands and nothing comes.
As we pass by him, me in front, the old man dredging there behind, he glances up, sees Olun, and calls out.
‘You have a daughter, then. That’s new.’
‘Aye,’ Olun croaks, replying. ‘Aye, that’s new.’ Thus we pass on and take the path beside the river, yellow dirt trod bald between the scrubs of grass. Bronzed leaves pile against trees that stand like widows, shoulders bare and bent with grief, heads hung and grey hair catching in the riverskin where currents braid to silver, split on twig ends. Looking up from frozen, trudging feet and back across my shoulder, see the soot-gloved gateman leaning, still with face towards the thorn and waiting for the dam to break.
We scrape and clatter on beside the river, counter to its flow. The twig-bed crackles, drawn along the hard-worn path behind me, like a brushfire at my back from which a voice comes now, the old man’s, crackling also.
‘If you’re ...’ A breath. ‘To follow me ...’ Another. By these constant, desperate suckings-down of air his talk is broken, sudden eddies in its flow.
‘If you’re to follow me, then you must know my path. If you’re to be the cunning one when I am gone, why, then you have my leavings, but it must be that you have my learnings also.’
Listening to him speak, it comes to me that though he may be old he has his wits about him. You can hear it in the way he fits his words one to another, clear despite the interrupting breath. My mother, younger far than he, says only ‘Cack’ and ‘Wet’ and ‘Where’s he gone?’ those last few moons. This Olun is no fool, and so he has my ear.
The fire voice sputters on, above the litter’s cracklings. ‘My way of learning is my path, still trodden in my thoughts, although my walks in this world are no more.’
He does not need tell that to me, me with my palms all blistered and my shoulders sore from dragging him.
He draws his frantic, drowning breath and then goes on. ‘This track of knowing’s beaten through wild overgrowths of thought by long moons of repeating, yet means nothing if it has no counter in this world, the world wherein we walk and die.’
He leaves the walking up to me and, in return, the dying’s left to him.
‘My path of thoughts is therefore drawn from all the paths about me in the truth of life. These territories that we span are as like spanned within, where there are monuments of notion, chasms, peaks and streams for night-thoughts there to spawn. If you would know my path and follow in its way, then know the land about, both track and willage, in its bridge and in its drownings. Know the outcast rat-shacks, relic stones and gill-halls. Mark each path above and know the underpath below, its secret way from vault to treasure hole.’
My peace is held, all the long while he talks. This word of treasure, though, must not slip by, and bids me to break in.
‘What underpath is this, and how is it for me to walk, if all its ways be secret?’
He is sniffy, waving me away with his reply.
‘We have our Urken-tracks beneath the soil. Only the Hob or Hob-wife know their ways, that pass from hand to cunning hand across the ages. Many treasures of our craft are there, but this is yours to know when you are ready, filled with knowings of the plainer tracks above that are an equal to your calling. On that day, it may well be that you go down and walk the candled leagues yourself, where these old feet of mine once tread the wormslopes and the chilly rock, that only tread there in my dog-dreams now. Before that day you must tread all the paths above, and know the stories set along their way.’
This troubles me. It seems the old man has it in his thoughts for me to drag him all through up and down along these paths he talks about, which does not please me, not at all. As for the stories set along their way, the ones that hang there in the torso garden are already known to me, and it’s not my desire to hear of any more. It strikes me, since we do not pass in sight of those staked carrion, my path of last night gone must lie some way east of this river-walk, which pleases me right well. Trudge on, the leaves all kicking up about my feet.
Now Olun calls for me to stop a while, and bids me look away now from the river to the east, where rises up a hill with white smoke twisting out in ribbons from its top. It is the hill by which my way is made down to the bog-struck valley floor upon my coming here, its crest-fires burning still by day. Far off, across the fields, the little people stood about the blazes on that peak may yet be seen. Their chanting, faint and distant, comes to us with each new shift of wind, one voice of note more strident than the rest, that carries further.
‘That is Hurna,’ says the old man, cackling the while and spraying spit across his pup-faced wrap. He offers up no further word, but bids me heft the poles and carry on. Our shadows shrivel up beneath the climbing sun. The whiles pass by.
Ahead and to my right a meadow swamp of rushes fans away, a hollow of blanched spears that has a crop of solid land knobbed up from out its middle like an island in a lake of reed, and there upon it stands a mound of wood, as for a fire. There are some children playing near it, boys who crouch about another of their kind, who lies upon his back. They jab, and fondle him, and make loud cries.
As we tread nearer, passing them, it comes to me that this is not a child that lies between them but a boy-in-kind, whose empty rags they stuff and poke with straw to lend him form.
‘They’re readying the pig-boy in the Hobfield, then,’ says Olun, but it’s better that my breath is put to hauling him, and not to asking him the where of every mad-head thing that he may say. Trudge on. The leaves burst up like birds, and on, and on, and only now, my back nigh broke and fingers fit to fall away, is there a sighting of the bridge, there at the far end of this river track, all passage-walled with peeling birch trees, ashen silver in the light. Almost. We’re almost there.
The old man tells me all his secrets just before he dies, and lets me journey down into the tunnelways beneath the settlement, where there are silver bowls and wristlets made of gold. By still of night, this hoard is carried off down track a way, to where my new home waits for me. My new wealth’s traded in for land, for oxen and fine wraps and pretty slaves, that all those passing by my hut may see its grandness and its herded grounds and say, ‘How fine a woman must live there.’
My food is nothing save the rarest fish and the most tender pieces cut from infant beasts. Tall, painted warriors are set to guard my days; the strongest service me by night, and every moon my willeins offer up their thanks and bags of grain to me. Their children dance between the rose-twined pillars of my stilted chair.
This is their bridge, then. Big black logs that smooth together down across the ages make the curve of it, that rises gently up away from us towards its hump, above the foams and churning deeps below. For all my care in hauling him and litter both across the bump-topped woods, the old man grunts and clicks his tongue and makes complaint to me each time his bones are jarred.
Here, on its near-end slope, the blackened span has chinks between the timbers. It seems there is a little pit dug underneath this south side of the bridge. My eyes squint, peering, but whatever once may be to see inside the hole is long since gone. There’s only pale flecked dirt, lit bright where sunlight’s wrung between the roof logs over which we make our way now, passing on.
‘Stop here,’ says Olun as we reach the middle of the bridge, and bids me set him down and sit beside his litter on the wetworn logs, the waters roaring under us. The cold strikes up my arse. We do not talk of much. He makes remark upon my fancy-beads, blue sparks hung on their copper strand about my throat, and asks me how they’re made.
It startles me, the ease with which this stolen tale comes tumbling from my lips: the sand fires, seaweed banked, seen through the shore fogs, burning. Men with puckered, flame-scarred hands who tip the ore and curse if it should splash, the reek of singeing beard, a scorching in the lungs and, afterwards, the glazed sands all about the furnace hole made hard, shot through with bitter juice of kelp and bladderwrack and coppered blue. My words pour, effortless, and conjure tangle-headed beachgirls, skirts damped dark about the hem by surf, that pick for skybeads in the fire-struck dunes, as if these sights are ever known to me.
The old man nods and smiles and gazes off downriver where the stone-green waters bend away amongst the western nettle wastes. A bark-boat breasts the current there, two men whose shoulders roil and wheel about their paddle blades, a glittered spray each time these cut the frothing swell. They lean into a turning masked with trees, are gone.
Off on my right a man calls to another, leading me to turn my head and look about. Up by the bridge’s farmost end there’s someone crouched to squint into the belled and ringing hollow underneath its arch, where fray-edged water-shadows shoal to form a ghost bridge, top-side down below the blurring torrent.
Now the figure stands, a grey, pot-bellied man, and calls again to some few fellows who are sitting sharing bread just up slope from the river’s edge. They call back to the man beside the bridge and seem to laugh at him. He speaks again and makes a sign towards the hidden shallows of the underspan. One of the feasters passes on his bread and stands, runs stumble-footed down the bank to join the other by the bridge, where both now stoop to peer. More shouts. Another man trips down the slope to stand with them, and yet one more.
It is some game they play to put aside for now their slog amongst the ditches and fields, which is no great concern to me. My gaze turns back upon the old man, hound-clad on his bier. Side-edged to me, his skull is round and beaked, a grey shaved bird. The eye that’s nearest me stares into nothingness, its socket pool froze white in Olun’s winter. On his leather cheek, a patchen stole of coloured scars.
He asks about my beads: It may be that he waits for me to ask of his tattoos.
‘These markings that you have are of a style that is not known to me. It seems they have not rhyme, nor a device.’
He turns his corpse-bird skull that he may see me with his good eye, sucking in the air to speak. His breath, warm game that’s hung too long, blasts stale against my face and makes me flinch away.
‘Oh, they have a device, girl, and a rhyme. Don’t you think otherwise. They are my crow designs.’
His crow designs? The worm-blue mottle of his shoulder, bowlined red from nipple back across to spine? His firmament skull, scribbled jowl, fern-cornered lips? There’s nothing here that’s of a like to crow or bird of any kind. What is his meaning?
Lifting up my gaze from out this skin maze, back to meet his own and further question him, it seems that he forgets me. Staring past my shoulder to the bridge’s northern end, only his dead eye lights on mine, looks through and out the other side, which makes me shiver with a notion of not being here. It’s plain that he is looking hard at something off behind me. Glance about, to see it for myself.
The men stand in the shallows, wading thigh deep as they gang about beneath the bridge. They reach with sticks to hook out something lodged there; yell like boys, excited, to each other as they poke and splash and heave: Go careful. Here, watch out. It’s coming. Here it comes ...
Big. Grey and bobbing, water meat. The young men crowd about. A gas-blown calf that’s taken by the flood, or ...?
A sudden thought’s come into me. The young men grasp the creature fast beneath its arms and draw a silver furrow to the bank, where it is hauled up streaming, flopped out bare and heavy on the grass that we may see it properly.
Oh no.
Boiled fish her breasts. Weed-tongued and staring. Why is she not half-way out to sea by now, couched to her ribs in silt or strangled in the crabnets, sopping, lying still amongst a sprawl of severed hands that writhe and gesture yet? How is it, dead, she has the wit to stop here at the place she seeks while she’s yet quick and warm? How may the dead have destinations? Trickling mouth. Leech ridden, phlegm-black jewels that cling upon her instep there.
They do not know her, do they? Nor the old man. She is not come here before. Weir-carrion, that’s all she is. A poor thing river-born and fish-mouthed at the throat, done in, but no one’s daughter. Usin. That is my name now, and hers is washed away with all her blood and colour. Rotted tide-fruit, bare and nameless, floundered in the stripes of scum that mark the water’s highest reach, she is not anyone’s concern. The bedstream’s ripple-sands are copied, soaked in replica upon her logged and runnelled skin. Cave-nosed, and one cheek holed by sticklebacks.
The old man bids me lift him, pull his stick-wrought bed across the causewayed trunks to where the willeins gather, down beside its farmost end. Legs bristled to the wading line with jewels of wet, the down ringed into hooks and coils, they stand as still as heel-stones all about the stiller yet.
Hearing the racket of the litter drawing near across the wood, the men look up, make frowns at me yet wipe them off when they see who it is dragged here behind me. Olun lifts his head from off the bier and cranes to overlook them, standing closed about the corpse. The bubble-gutted man who sees the body first below the bridge touches one finger to his brow and mutters, ‘Good luck to the Hob,’ then looks away from Olun, staring at the grass as if afraid. The other men do likewise. What is there to fear about this painted bag of sticks? And yet they shuffle there below us on the river bank and wait for him to speak.
‘This morning there is bleeding in my stool, which tells of trouble at the bridge, and brings me here.’
The men look to each other, scared and marvelstruck that this event is known to Olun long before they think to peer beneath the shadowed arch. The laughter chokes and bubbles in my nose: if all his tribe are shit-wits such as these, it is no wonder Olun’s thought the cunning-man. This very morn he lets me drag him leagues, yet makes no mention of this omen given from his bowel, the crook-tongued little fiend. It comes to me he lives by gulling lackards, and in truth we are one kind. Why, he might nearly be my father, all things said.
The man so fat he looks with child now waves one hand towards the throat-cut woman at his feet.
‘Well, here’s the reason to your sign. We find her underneath the bridge, brought up against the beaver dams.’
By all the markings, there’s the why of it! There’s why she is not by now danced half-way to Hotland in the undertow or pecked clean on a reef of crusted salt: the bridge is built upon the backs of beaver dams! The fat man falls again to silence, waits once more for Olun to give voice, his fellows hulking restless by his side.
Now Olun does a queer and frightening thing. He shuts one gaudy lid across his sighted eye, so that the white-yolked blind one seems to stare upon the spraddling girl meat, cold amongst the weeds.
‘Her throat is cut. Her ear is gone, and like to this her thumb.’
It’s plain the old man notes these things before he shuts his one good eye, yet still it makes a weird to see him take her measure with his deadsight only. Mummery and nothing more, yet no less hackling for that.
‘She’s thrown into the river last of all, for it is only reason that her gullet’s slit before. Alike to this, the torture of the ear and thumb may not come after she is dead, so must be suffered first of all. She is not cut for sport, for why then stop with but one ear, one thumb? These cruelties are with purpose, and with purpose served are followed swiftly by the kill. Somewhere up river, not a day since gone.’
No, it is not the slowness of his tribe alone that makes him seem more cunning. Here is clever. Here is clever deep enough to drown in. Looking down, it takes my notice that the woman’s neck is banded by a stain, mould-green. It is not there when she’s thrown to the river, save it’s hidden ‘neath the blood since sluiced away.
‘See that she is not moved. We go to tell the roundhouse what is here.’
With this, he bids me lug him back across the river, juddering down the bridge’s southern slope, and now along the balded turf that ribbons by the waterside. Back past the marsh-pond white with rush, its island with a firewood crown whereby the unhaired boys bask naked, belly down on sun-cooked rock. Atop his pyre their rag-child sits, his straw head tipped upon one side, regarding us as we pass on, though yet without a face. The same leaves rise, a dry gold splash about my heel.
The silence holds ‘til we are near to half-way home, whereon my question may no longer go unasked.
‘What happens now, about that poor killed woman?’ Lightly spoken, this, and sounding free of care.
His voice comes back above the creak and crackle of his bier, a whisper from the blaze.
‘Oh, nothing much to speak. The river brings us matters like to this from while to while. All nature of occurrences take place amongst the passes north, their remnants fetched up here: unwanted newborns, oxen with too many eyes, or the encumbering old. Saving for if they have the mark of plague we put them to the earth within a day, with flowers offered in the stead of goods. That is the custom here ...’
He pauses. On the east wind comes a wail, as from far off. Before me, turning to look, stretch the sodden fields and then the hill, its summit wound about with smokes. The tiny figures fling their arms up, keening in the distance.
‘Although there are some who wish it otherwise,’ the cunning-man concludes, and we go on from there to come at last upon the bracken-fortressed settlement. There Olun tells the gateman, with his bat hands flapping black, about the murdered woman by the bridge, and bids him pass along the story.
‘Good luck to the Hob,’ say all the willeins as we groove the dirt between them, dragging back to Olun’s dwelling. ‘Good luck to the Hob.’
It comes upon me now that they are speaking to the both of us.
No. No, not me. To be a Hob-wife is no lot for me, the tiresome learning of each chant, a hut you may not move within for all the tokens sinister. To know each duty and each ceremony, dressing in a robe of faces. No.
Nor is the thought of wasting moons while learning all the old man’s mummery a pleasing one. There is no saying how long it may be before he dies. It’s up to me to find some quicker way of worming out his secrets.
Here’s a thing: though he casts off his son and has no love for him, it may be that the son has knowledge of the father’s ways. Aye. Aye, that’s neatly thought, that it may be as well to pay a visit to my brother Garn before the shadows grow much longer. He may tell me of the tunnels that his father walks in dog-dreams.
What are dog-dreams?
After a while, big Hurna lumbers back to Olun’s hut from her devotions on the hill, her slab face flushed with blood, all bright after her sing-song in the smoke. The old man tells her she is lazy, and that he has need for her to caulk his sores. ‘They’re bad today,’ he grumbles. ‘It’s a long job that you have.’
She nods, without complaint, and pulls him from the sun and through the cram of charm that bounds his hut. Let here alone, it seems that now may be a while as good as any for to visit with the Hob-man’s son. Hurna is talking deep inside the hut, still trying to persuade the old man to her faith while she attends his weals. Scraps of their converse drift out past the swing-woods hung to one side in the doorway there.
‘The world is made in fire, which is thereby superior, and ends in fire as all the prophets say. The grave-soil may bring pests and blights to rack the living, and yet we who choose the bright track into dream-while leave no miseries behind. All that is pure within us rises, save our residue. We that proclaim this creed ...’ and on and on, her voice flat as the murmur of a hive. It is a marvel how these godly bodies manage it, to be at once both mad and dull. Let me steal off, between the dozing huts and leave them prattling, away into the noon.
There are no spirit-women in the trees, there are no gods below the dirt, else that they be as daft as Hurna. People all are born with no more why to it than some poor sagging fieldgirl shows her arse off in the high weeds, and there’s scarcely better reason in the dying of us neither. Where is there a god that strikes us down with venom from a trampled bee? Who puts us in this place then floods the crop that there is not enough to feed us with; drops ashes from the sky and strikes our cattle blind? If it be gods, they have queer sport.
And yet in every willage there are fat-faced little men and sickly girls who scourge themselves and fast to please some spirit-bear, or else a tree they fancy speaks with them. How can the gods demand starved ribs and lash-striped backs above the sufferings that they already fashion for us? If we in this world are cruel by harsh necessity, how much more wicked are the gods who want for nothing yet torment us to the death? Such things there may not be.
It is not gods that welcome us beyond the grave, but only worms.
Small children shriek and dart between the willage huts, where men smoke fish above low fires and women flint away the last few bloodied snots of meat from off the wool-stripped hides. Their mothers chew the skin to make it soft. The squeal and bark of chatter everywhere. Amongst the cauldron steam a dog limps by the mouldered pelvis of another fast between its jaws. With eyes like bile it watches me walk on.
A gaunt man milling grain upon a flat-stone tells me Garn has made his forge upon the valley’s eastern edge, above the Beasthill. This is all the worse for me, that my bare feet must walk again this morning’s great long round, but there is nothing for it, and the day is warm.
Outside the settlement’s north gate, a lard of men is settled thick about the bowl-rim of a fresh-dug pit, wherein an earth-bear’s set against a brace of dogs. One of the hounds is near to gutted, sundered by the earth-bear’s shovel paw. It drags its hind legs in the bloodied dirt and whines, its purples bulging through the belly’s rent.
The other dog is stronger and starved mad, to see its eyes. It snaps and lunges, scores a stroke of pink across the white stripe of its adversary’s brow, which trickles down until the earth-bear is made blind in its own juice. The men about the hole crowd in and laugh, so that a quiver ripples through their soft, grey-spidered tits. They cheer. They fiddle with their balls and do not know it. In the pit, now hidden from me by a wall of wart-hung backs, the earth-bear screams in triumph, else in agony.
Continuing along my path that winds out from the willage gates across the marsh, the torso orchard comes upon me in the bluing flesh even before it comes upon me in my thoughts.
They seem like giant, severed heads, sex-mouthed and nipple-eyed, each with a plume of meat-flies trailing in the breeze. Ant freckles moving, out the corner of my eye. Don’t look. Walk on, and stop my nose against the maggot sweetness in the air.
Across the dampland hulks the bare-flanked pile they call the Beasthill, with the fires about its top extinguished now, its silver crown of smoke dispersed, all wailing stilled. Above this, on the valley’s eastern slope, a yarn of grey twists up alone through paling sky from out the coppermonger’s forge.
This is the last age of the world, for we are come as far now as we may along our path from what is natural. We herd and pen the beast that’s born to roam. In huts we cling like snailshells to the fenland that it is in our great-fathers’ way to stride across and then pass by. We cook the blood from out the earth and let it scab to crowns and daggers; pound our straight track through the crooked fields and trade with black-skins. Soon, the oceans rise and take us. Soon, the crashing of the stars.
Across the reaches, lush and puddle-sored; the beds of quaking sphagnum moss; midge thunderheads above a stream as dull as tin. The massive wildsheep grazing on the lower slopes regard me from a distance, watch me circle warily about them and continue to the valley’s brim, up track beside the Beasthill’s northmost face.
Above the hill now, looking back. The dirt-walls ringed atop it, seen by daylight, plainly once hold beasts within them, yet are given to another purpose now. Amongst the banked up rounds huge flowers of soot are seared into the dirt, the shadow petals flared about a grey and crumbling heart, still warm. There are no people to be seen, and so my climb continues up to where the trees are burned away to stumps along the torn sky’s ragged edge. Tooth-coloured smoke is ravelling from the forge in tatters, brief and dirty flags to guide me there.
It stands alone, Garn’s lonely den, amongst the ugly, char-topped stumps; all roof, with walls so low they hardly can be seen beneath the ghost-green cone of rush. The forge is drystone built and caulked with mud. Neck high, it stands outside the hut and by it swelters Garn. It must be he, his eyes so like the cunning-man’s, and yet how different in his frame.
Bare to the middle with an apron hung about below. Fat, yet the fat is hard, slabbed thick in bands about his red and glistening arms, his oak-wide breast that does without a neck but rounds directly to a bull-ox head. His features seem too small, all crowded in between that spread of babe-smooth cheek, beneath the damp and sweeping blankness of his brow.
In one hock fist he grasps a clefted pole that holds the metal to be worked above the coals until it colours like the dawning sun. At this he lifts it, ginger in his movements, to the beating block where, with a hammer-stone, he pounds its clear and heartlit otherworldly length to fine leaf all along one edge. The heft and clang, the heft and clang, a sudden wash of sparks along with every beat, the sound made visible, that rings out bright and then showers dull to earth.
And now the blade is quenched, thrust in an old bark trough, moss powdered, where the water coughs but once to swallow it, then gasps up steam to further bead the coppermonger’s jowl. Making my way towards him in amongst the fire-felled woods the fierceness of his purpose hushes me and yet he glances up and squints to make me out against the sunlight at my back. His chin is rounded, like a crab-apple that bobs half sunken in the billowing flesh. A salted pearl drips from it, then another, and he lifts one hand to throw a half-mask of cool dark across his eyes.
‘What do you want?’ His voice is marvellous soft to come from such a furnace-brute who snorts and clamours in the spark-blown fumes.
‘Are you named Garn?’
He lowers now his hand and turns back to his forge.
‘Aye, that’s my name. What do you want?’ He works a bellows made from horse lung, bringing back the coals to heat.
‘My name is Usin. Usin Olun’s daughter.’
Here, the bellows catch their breath, are slowly lowered from their task so that the embers cool and film across with mothdust. Now the great head turns once more towards me, eyes grown narrow with suspicion. Ill at ease, he wipes the back of one great paw across his lips and leaves a smear of black from beak to chin. The silence holds a while, there in the cinder-grove, and now the sooted corners of his babe-plump mouth begin to turn up, ruefully.
‘It’s you he sends for, is it, when he mayn’t send for me? He wants to dump his load of carcasses and painted picture-barks and that on you now, does he? Well, good luck to him.’
He twists his face into a sneer, turning away from me, and furiously works his bellows. ‘Good luck to the Hob,’ he adds across his shoulder, whereupon he spits a gob of bitterness to sizzle in the glowering coals.
‘Is that all you’ve to say now to your sister?’ My words stumble slightly to betray my courage, faltering. He makes me frightened with his size and his ferocity.
‘My sister?’ He does not look round, but squeezing his contraption made of mare’s lights all the harder, fans the embers to their noon.
‘The old man claims me as no son of his, and for my part he is no Da of mine, so how then may you be my sister? All that you are after is the old man’s treasure, else why are you come here all this way? It’s not as if you care for him, who does not wish to see you all the while since you’re a babe.’
The brightness of the coals now paints his arms and brow. The bellows cease, and here he wades a few slow paces to a stump nearby, where lie the rawcast lengths of ore, all cold and rough. He does not look at me the while, but speaks, his mouthings full of grudge.
‘If you desire his wealth so much, then have it. It is tainted stuff, all full of fevers and queer notions. Much good may it bring you. Just leave me alone to do my work. It is enough that all my growing up is done there in that curse-draped warren that he calls a hut, so don’t you bring me any more of it. It’s bad stuff, that is, all that crawling underground and talking with the dead. Just give me my clean ore and let me be.’
He chooses now a blemished, ugly rod that’s coloured like the leaves about our feet, returning with it to his forge.
My path of questioning is clear. ‘What’s this of crawling underground? Do you, with your own eyes, see Olun do these things?’
Garn now takes up his handling-pole again, to wedge the ingot in its cleft. He turns his head to glare at me, a sulking youth for all his flesh, then looks away. With his split wand he thrusts the ore-strip deep within the furnace mouth and holds it there.
‘What, see him go down holes or into hollows? Are you mad? To see those secret runs is not allowed save you’re a cunning-man. That’s where their treasure’s kept, you know, and all the bones of Hob and Hob-wife gone.’
He smiles about at me, and has a knowing look, his voice grown low as that between one plotter and another one alike.
‘But here’s the trick: you may not know a little of his secret, lest you know the all of it. To know, like him, each weed-lost path and passage, and the name of every field. To know, as he knows, whence the floods are coming, and where cattle-grabbers make their sly approach or have their hide-aways. To have each tree; each rock; lanes that you do not walk for years, all held within your thoughts at every moment by some rare craft that no common man may fathom. Every well and fisher bank. Each tomb and buried lode.’
This last one puzzles me. Amongst the coals, Garn’s bar is turned the colour now of old blood, now of fresh.
‘How is it bad to have such knowledge? Why, with you a metal-monger, surely it is all the better that you have a cunning of the lodes and seams?’
He shakes his head. ‘If all his wisdom’s mine then metal-mongering’s my craft no more. If all his thoughts are my thoughts also, why, then he is me and me a Hob-man just like him, left having no thoughts of my own. These thoughts, they are not even his, nor yet his father’s nor his great-sire’s. They are old as hills, these notions in him that shape every deed of his and word. It is as if the old man and the old men come before him are all one, one self, one way of seeing, single and undying through all time. It is not natural.
‘My way of seeing’s not the same as his, nor is it to be put aside that his old way endures. My forge, my fire, my knowledge of the favouring heats and tempers, these are things to fit the world that we have now. His dowsing and his chanting have no use to me, they give me bad dreams still, and make me set myself apart from him and all his works. This hill’s the place for me. It has a feel about it that is right for furnaces, and fire sits well here.’
Now the metal in the forge is near too bright to look upon. He lifts it out with cloven pole and takes it to the beating block.
‘But surely, you need not come all the way up here to get away from one old man who may not walk? Why not take somewhere in the willage, nearer to your trade?’
Garn stands with hammer raised, about to start once more the sparrow-scattering din, but pauses, lifts his head to stare at me with eyes so filled with scorn and loathing that it makes me take steps back away from him.
‘Live in the willage? Ha! And how may Olun be escaped within the willage? Are you listening to me not at all?’
He speaks between bared teeth, a hiss much sharper than the quenching-trough: ‘He <em>is</em> the willage.’
And with this he turns away. The hammer lifts and falls. Its deafening chime dismisses me, driving me from that charcoal glade, back to the path that twists beside the Beasthill, down towards the valley floor. Descending, in the far south-west the settlement may yet be seen, long shadow fingering the fields. Late afternoon.
Behind me, going down, the hammering grows faint. Above the distant huts, a pall of smoke.
Unease. It gnaws in me and yet its name may not be said, nor where it comes from, like a low horn sounding in my heart, a cold that rimes my bladder. Is there something going wrong here?
Beasthill, fen and torsos. Finally, the willage gates come into sight, but all thereby is clamour and commotion. Smoke hangs everywhere, that wreathes the sinking sun and drowns the settlement in smoulder-light; great choking banks that seem more made of noise than vapour, cloaking the lament of ghosts, the yowl of unseen babes. My pace grows faster, running now towards the wall of tangled thorn and fume.
The young man with the birth-stained face leans from his gatehouse when he hears me call to him.
‘What’s happening here? Is ...’ Now the smoke bites in my throat and makes me cough, unable to speak more.
The tears gleam on his mottled cheek, though born of grief or from a smut-stung eye is not for me to know.
‘A fire, amongst the eastern barns. It’s out now. No one’s killed, but there’s as many huts as claws upon an owl’s leg put to ash.’
Making my way between the coiling drifts, the veils flapped open by a breeze to show me now a woman crouched to wipe her soot-blind infant’s face, or now a pair of men that stand beside a guttering ruin, making sour jokes with one another.
‘You see how our Dad gets out all right, then?’
‘Aye, and me half set to grab his lazy arse and drag him back.’
The veil drifts back. They laugh, and do not see me pass them by.
Beyond the settlement’s south reach sets Olun’s hut, untouched by fire nor troubled much by smoke by reason of a south-west wind. This same draught brings me now a noise that quickens once again my pace. Olun is squealing louder than the great black swine who run before the deadgod’s hunt. Reaching the hut and making now my way inside, it echoes from the avalanche of hex and foe-skin drums, a shrill that guides me through the morbid huddles to the centre round.
Naked upon his bracken bed he writhes and weeps, with Hurna knelt beside him, meat-faced as she dabs wet rags about his breast, half lighted by the fire pit.
Stepping nearer, crouching now to have a closer look at him, it’s clear he has a monstrous burn below one shrivelled nipple. Weeping blisters udder from the scorched and gritted flesh amongst the tattooed shell-curls, hoops and signs. He squeals again, then sinks to fever-talk.
Shifting my gaze to Hurna now, who meets it with her own, the stolid eyes as flat as nail heads.
‘How is Olun burned? The blazing in the willage does not come as far as here.’
She shrugs her ploughboy shoulders, grunting her reply. ‘It’s when the fire starts, over in the eastern huts, before they bring us news of it. Your father yells and bids me look to see, and there it is upon his chest, this awful burn.’
She wrings a little smirk from out between her rind-thin lips. ‘You ask me, it’s a sign for him to change his faith.’
The old man screams again.
If fire burns a willage, may its welts be raised on one who thinks he is a willage? Does the smoke gust from his lungs and from the settling’s narrow paths alike? A blaze for curing fish runs out of hand and half a league away a breast yet blisters in its heat? No. Such things may not be, unless the footsteps of our days are echoed in his veins; unless it is the piss of dogs on distant stumps that yellows now his tooth. Do our skies darken if he shuts his eye, our banks burst if he wets his litter in the night? That sour-meat breeze that wafts amongst our huts, is that his breath? And does the dead girl bob downstream through his intestine, so that blood clouds up from where her corpse-nails dredge the sponge-soft bed, brought up at last against the log-dam of his fundament?
No. No, it must be that the old man burns himself, unless this Hurna sears his breast for sport. It’s one way or the other, for a place it not a person, nor is there a sympathy ‘twixt flesh and field.
We die. The track endures.
The shifts, the crumbles and collapses barely heard within the dulling coals are all that mark the passing whiles in Olun’s hut. That, and the gradual fading of the old man’s plaint, the slowing of his pained contortions into but a twitch; a shudder now and then.
His moans come softer: no less urgent, yet they sound as if they hail from further off, the old man wandering lost away from us, his cries for help grown faint as he recedes down dusk-paths woven through the queer and complicated willage of his dreams. Naked upon the bed of wefted twig he stills; he sleeps.
Sat there to either side of him within our cone of ember-light, big Hurna and myself do not have much to say. We share a bowl of curds with crusts torn from a thigh of bread to make our sops. From the surrounding steeps of curio, dead birds observe us as we dip and slop and wipe our chins. Their eyes unsettle me, filled with bleak knowledge of demise.
On finishing her bread and curds, Hurna sits silent for a while, a strange look on her face until she looses a great belch that rumbles on and on like toads in chorus. Seeming much more settled after this, she’s quick to start with talk about her faith while making out she wants to talk of mine.
‘You hold with all this, do you?’ Here she gestures to the teetering stalagmites of dross that stand about us, leaning in like bullies. My reply is but to shrug, which she takes as encouragement; agreement with her side of things.
‘No? Well, you do not look the sort for it, and there’s no blaming you for that. Dirty old notions, that is all they are, and it’s a lucky thing that most good people in these whiles are come to know a better way.’
‘Oh? And what way is that?’ My question’s asked with little interest, and yet she seizes on it like a hare-lipped man upon a compliment.
‘My way. My people’s way. We do not hold with gods who dwell below the earth and there receive the dead. Why earth is but the lowest of the spirits, having wood and water, air and fire all above it in their import. Earth is that which we must raise ourselves above, not put ourselves below! Young Garn, he sees that well enough, but Olun does not listen.’
Here she tilts her head towards the old man, twitching on his bier and naked save his lines and whorls, his crow designs.
‘Your father clings to his old ways and pays no heed to reason. Even when we tell him that when he is dead he may rest in the heartring there on Beasthill, urned with queens, he does not seem to care.’
Her stupid little eyes grow sly.
‘If you talk with him, if you tell him that our way is best he may abide by what you say where he will not pay mind to me or Garn.’
It angers me that she is making plots against the old man in this way. That’s mine to do.
My words are sharp. ‘It makes no difference to me where a man’s put when he’s dead, nor woman. Bury them there where they fall, or ...’ Checking myself sharply, on the brink of saying ‘Throw them in the river’, my quick wits come to my rescue just in time: ‘... or leave them hung out for the birds. It may be that this is a thing of great concern to you and Olun, but it is not any great concern of mine. Now, all this talk is tiring me. My bed is soft, my father’s sleeping peacefully, it seems, and it is time to make my rest. A quiet night to you.’
Leaving her squatting fish-jawed by the bier, making my way through decorated hangings to my screened-in bed: there is a deep, still well of fur and comfort waiting for me; waiting for my bones that tire with all the walking of the day. Upon removing everything except the copper ring where hang my fancy-beads, the hides close over me like warm, dark waters. Sinking. Sinking deeper in the swirling black.
A big dog turns, its great eyes empty save a white like lightning, fierce and flameless brightness that may burn away the world. Harsh brilliance pouring from its mouth now, as it splays the rawness of its jaw, and lunges ...
Scream and sunlight both awaken me, so muddled in my rousing thoughts that sound and shining seem to be all of one part. The scream is mine, cut off as realization comes upon me.
How is morning here so quick? It seems no sooner do my eyelids close than these rude rays are come to prise them open, stuck with sand and lashes though they may be. A food smell finds me now shucking off my night-skins and pulling on my clothes. The dream that woke me up in such a fright is gone, for all my efforts to recall it in my thoughts. Ah, well.
My stomach growls and bids me rise to trace the skein of cooking-scent that’s threaded in between the dumps of lore and curse and keepsake. What great feast does Olun set for me this morning? My hand shoves back door-woods on their creaking rope to let me step without and view my meal.
The dead girl’s at my feet, stretched out and belly up there in the dust before the hut. A cloudy-eyed and gazing accusation, face expressionless yet there’s a black smile just below her chin, above the slime-green stains that stranglemark her throat. Blue-white. A subtle shine, a mooniness about the skin. Her back teeth, clenched together, bared to vision by the fish-hole in her cheek.
There on the corpse’s far side, facing me, the hag-queen’s rough-boys, Bern and Buri, crouch upon their glittering haunches like to one man with his shadow given flesh, both naked save for will-sheaths made from hollowed catfish that start bulge-eyed with the horror of their plight, the ugly ribboned mouths agape, exposing yellowed spikes of fang. They stare at me, the mould-cast bullies and their catfish all.
Glancing in panic from the shaven rough-boys to the dead girl sprawled between us and then back again, my eye alights on Olun, resting with his dream-daubed and loose-larded frame propped by one tattooed elbow on the bed of sticks, that’s drawn up right beside his murdered child. Though better than last night, he yet looks sick with weakness, worse by far than he has seemed of late. Upon his breast a dressing made of rag and plastered mud is tied to stem the weeping of a burn that scorns all sense, and dog-skin robes are draped across his lower half. Some way beyond him there is Hurna, looking put-on as she stirs a mess of fish and meal above a stuttering fire.
Craning his thick-strung neck to peer up at me now with ill-matched eyes, the old man speaks: ‘Why do you scream? We hear it right out here.’
The thudding of my heart stops me from making sense of what he says, and prevents an answer. All that’s in my power to do is goggle at the picture-hided witch-man and his river-raddled daughter both.
‘What is she doing here?’ This is the best that may be squeezed out past my lips, set tight and bloodless as a rein upon the terror welling in me.
Olun looks down at the cold, still girl beside him with surprise, as if he but this moment notices she’s there, then he looks back at me.
‘Her? It’s our custom to inspect the unknown dead for marks of plague or other signs before they’re put to rest. This is accomplished at the roundhouse in the usual way of things, but being sickened by my burn it is not in me to be moved that far, so Bern and Buri bring her here. Sit down and watch. Remember that upon my death, these duties pass to you, with many more beside.’
What is for me to do but kneel as he directs me? Both the rough-boys bare their sundered smile at me as Olun turns once more to his inspection of the girl. My smile is faltering in reply.
Closing his good eye, Olun now regards the dead thing with his blind and frosted orb alone. One brittle, painted claw creeps out to crawl across her belly, cold as polished stone. It kneads and probes her flaccid breasts, then scuttles further, past the stripe of green about her neck, to linger at the caked lips of the gash below her jaw. One finger traces this along its length and then moves up to rootle through the hole gnawed in her cheek, and to caress the tube-shot scab of red where once her ear is joined. A shudder passes through me when he speaks, although it is not cold considering the season.
‘She is pulled from out the river one day since. She is perhaps another day afloat before she’s found, and so is killed not far up river north of here. Her throat is opened by a dagger or a short-blade knife, both sharp and hard enough to cut through bone, as in her thumb.’
Though they may see me staring hard away from them, the brothers Bern and Buri now both speak to me in turn, and force me to look up.
‘It seems to me she dies the day that you arrive.’ These words are spoken by the brother on the left. His voice is slow and drawling, filled with strange amusement, though he does not smile or crease his eyes as he squats there regarding me across the slaughtered woman.
‘From the north. Arrive here from the north, the same as her.’
This is the other brother speaking, though in voice and manner they are both alike as in their looks. What do they wish for me to say?
The left-most brother speaks again. ‘Do you hear anything of robbers in the passes while you are upon the track?’
Half-drowning in my fright of what they may suspect, this notion is a welcome raft to clutch at.
‘Robbers? Why, you may be sure of it! The travellers that meet with me these last few days upon the track all talk of nothing else. A great fierce band of men, they say, though speaking for myself it seems the cut-bags do not show themselves to me. My way here is without event.’
Both brothers purse their lips at once and then nod thoughtfully.
‘A band of robbers?’ says the one upon the right. ‘It may be so. Such things are known to us. You’re lucky that you do not meet with them yourself.’
‘Aye,’ adds the brother on the left, ‘considering that you must be not much more than a league or so away when she is murdered. Very lucky.’
All of us nod gravely here, acknowledging my fortune, and let Olun carry on with his investigation.
Still with nothing but his blind eye visible the old man shifts his hand back down the woman’s drift-meat belly to explore the curl-ferned mount there at her fork. His knowing fingers sort amongs the coils and ringlets, moving them aside to better see the cold white hillock whence this overgrowth is sprung.
‘There are no bruises.’ Here, the old man clucks his tongue in disappointment and a sudden chill falls over me: he does not move aside the hair to look before he shuts his sighted eye. How may he know a bruise is there or not by touch alone? The hand moves further down now. Fingers struggling like blind-worms crowd in, eager for admission to her rigor-narrowed aperture, and yet without avail. The frail and painted hand withdraws. The witch-man speaks.
‘Her gill-caul is unbroken.’
Here the rough-boys both look up at Olun with the same frown drawing tight their shaven brows.
‘She is not shanked by force, then?’ Buri says, or Bern.
‘There’s queer now,’ Bern comes back, or Buri. ‘She’s a comely girl and if she’s to be robbed and killed then why not shank her first?’
He does not need to add ‘That’s what we’d do,’ for it is in his eyes. Instead, his frown grows deep and, after thinking for a little while, he ventures now his next remark. ‘Does she have pox?’
The old man shakes his head so that the stars designed thereon swoop wildly from their course.
‘No pox. No mark of plague. She’s safe to bury.’ Here he turns his face to me, and shows me all the pain and fatal weakness graven in its lines. The old man’s nearer to his death than is my guess before today, and he does not yet tell me of his tunnels or his treasure holes.
‘Usin?’ he says now. ‘We are finished here. You may as well go take your feast with Hurna while we ready this poor child for burial.’
Though Hurna is not any favoured company of mine, it does not grieve me much to do as Olun says, so great is my relief to be away from these same-seeming brothers and the corpse they peck about so thoroughly. It’s bittering scent is all about me, walking from the hut to where the dour, god-muddled woman crouches by her fire and shapes the fish-meal into flat grey cakes.
She passes one to me that’s like a half-formed animal, so horrible it is squashed flat beneath a rock at birth. We do not speak, still thoughtful of the words that pass between us this last night. The dead girl’s smell is everywhere about my hair and clothing, and my appetite is poor. Each mouthful of the fish-meal cake takes me that long to chew it is not in me for to finish more than half of it.
Shifting my gaze from Hurna to the group before the hut. It seems the bully brothers are employed in rolling up the corpse within a drab, soil-coloured sail of cloth, the old man looking on as he rests there beside them on his bier. About to wind the shroud about her head, one of the rough-boys points towards the stripe of bright stump-water green that’s ringed below her open throat. He mutters something to his brother, then to the old man, who nods and makes reply, too far away for me to hear a word. The brothers shrug, and now continue in their dressing of the dead.
Beside me, Hurna gives a sudden snort as if to mark contempt. ‘He need not hope for me to drag him to his filthy rite. That’s up to you, girl. It may serve you well: you’re sure to pay more heed of how the dead are put to rest if you must make the long walk to their grave yourself.’
She laughs and makes her tits shake. Overhead a single crow looks down in passing and calls once, as if alerting us to the approach of something that may not be seen save from that soaring vantage. Clouds mass on the west horizon. In the willage, children chase a painted pig between the huts, now cheering, now complaining as the frightened creature veers this way and that, a gaudy smear of colour streaked amongst the barns and horse-yards, squeaking. What hope may there be for anything so shrill and bright? No hope. No hope at all.
There is a fearfulness that gathers weight and form within my belly day by day, grown restless and uneasy as a cold grey baby turning in my womb. You must be gone from here, part of me tells myself, before another dawn is come to find a dead girl placed before your door. Leave with the wolf light when there’s nothing save the birds awake; steal off between the snoring huts and never more return. It is not safe here. There are shadows that loom big behind each happenstance, each chance remark, and more is meant than what is said. Move on. Take up the track again and put these whispering huddles at your back.
And now another part of me replies: You cannot leave, it says, and throw away the only chance for ease and wealth that you may ever happen on, not when the stink of it’s so close. Think of the tunnels that may snake, gold flooded, here beneath you as you sit; the wells of treasure deep enough to draw from all your days. Are you a child, to start at dreams born of bad curds you eat before your bed? To mewl when there are creakings in the dark? These night fears must not cheat you of the old man’s leavings, that are yours by right. Stay. Stay and bide your time, and come at last to wear a coloured gown and dine on fat.
But what of her, the dead girl? If they find you out ...
Don’t pay that any heed. There’s not a thing to forge a link in twixt of you and she. Why, even now the rough-boys, like as berries on a missel-sprig, prepare a bier on which she may be hauled to burial. She is not long above the ground, and when the soil is fallen on her face, then you may put her from your thoughts.
But if his dead eye truly looks upon a world we may not see ...
All that is nothing save for mummery. Put it aside and think instead of Olun’s gold.
But ...
Oh, be silent, both of you. There is a fishbone lodged between my teeth, and over by his hut the old man calls for me to drag him to the grave fields. Coming, father. Coming.
For a change, the journey is not far. We walk south from the settlement, with Bern and Buri carrying the cold and naked bride upon her hasty bed, while me and Olun scrape along behind. Above us, dead leaves rustle in great muttering crowds upon each yearning bough.
The grave site sets upon a weed-cleared rise that’s higher than the puddled boglands soaking all about. The women from the willage are already gathered there as we arrive. They glance up, silent, narrow-eyed, kneeling so to surround a place where all the turf is skinned away, the earthmeat there below scooped out and heaped up to one side as if with taint, a man-deep wound revealed. They crouch about the grave and braid a ring of flower-heads between their many hands.
The women part to let the shaven brothers and their lifeless burden move between them, making high steps, queer and delicate so as not to disturb the floral braid. Once by the graveside, Bern and Buri set the bier upon the grass, one of them clambering down into the pit to take the body from the other who now lifts it up, his fingers clenching in the curls beneath her arms. She’s lowered thus into the gravemouth, eyes still open, staring at us ‘til she sinks from sight in awkward jerks, each lurch and start accompanied by grunts from Bern and Buri. Settling her upon the gravebed now the bully boy climbs up to join his brother by its edge. Crows wheel above, charred flakes of noise that scatter and re-form against an empty sky.
The ceremony is a dull thing with no rise or fall of feeling, no relief, made flatter yet by this wan, uneventful morning light: the gravewords called in Olun’s failing snake-skin rasp, each phrase cast up but briefly on the shores of speech then dragged back by the undertow of straining and collapsing breath; the women, chanting their response learned long and hard above the holes of mothers, husbands, sons, now lavished on a stranger; Bern and Buri, taking up an earth-axe, one apiece, before the chanting’s over, standing shift-foot with impatience to refill the hole and be away back to their queen, their suckling place.
The call and echo of the bone-chant dies away, replaced by other rhythms. Bern and Buri, each in turn, now stamp an earth-axe deep within the hill of soil discarded by the gravemouth, scooping up the dirt upon their blades to shower in the dead girl’s eyes. The grit-edged chop and bite, the rattling lift and fling, again and yet again. Her body lies unmoving in this sharp, dry rain like some abandoned settlement back in the highland north from which all life is fled, silent and still beneath the steady fall of ash and mud that covers now her wrinkled tracks and bristling gorse, her sinks and outcrops all erased. The breasts and face alone remain. Now nothing but her jaw; her chin. She’s gone.
The grave is filled. The women chant again, and Olun scatters dog teeth on the damp, untrodden mound. The petals of the braided flowers begin to curl and darken. Everyone goes home, with Bern and Buri striding off in step across the fields, the women trailing after them all in one long unravelling knot. We bump and judder in their wake, but soon they are too far away to hail, leaving me and Olun to our own company.
‘Why do you scatter dog teeth on her grave?’
My question is put forward more to break the dismal silence of the marshes than from any great desire to know its answer, yet the old man answers anyway.
‘That spirit-dogs may keep her safe, and guide her through the underpaths into the willage of the dead.’ He seems about to venture more, but now a dreadful coughing falls upon him and he may not speak.
‘There’s none save you and dead men, then, as know these underpaths?’ This is my next inquiry, offered once his hawking dies away.
‘That’s true enough. It seems you must have one or both feet planted in the underworld to know its windings.’ Here he laughs, a brittle noise that’s thick with mucous, very like the crushing of a snail. ‘Except old Tunny. He knows every turning of the path, but all the knowing’s in his fingers. None of it is in his head. He ...’
Here the cunning-man breaks off, as if he thinks it better not to tell me more. At least, that’s how it seems to me. A moment passes, then another. There is still no voice come from behind my shoulder where the old man drags, there at my rear. Turning about, the reason for his quiet is plain: his eyes start out like painted eggs. Beneath the crazing net of signs that mark his flesh the skin is turned a slow and ghostly blue.
Not now! Not now before he’s told me everything! Dropping the bier to run, my screams alert the settlement before my feet can bear me halfway there. Out from their huts they waddle, slow at first then faster as they see who calls and understand what must be happening. They hurry in a line towards me through the long grey meadow-grass, wiping their hands upon their coats or hitching up their leggings as they run.
He’s still alive when we get back to him, some of the blueness faded now, his bird-breast settled back into a lurching rise and fall. He tries to speak as one great oxen-shouldered man scoops Olun from the pallet up into his arms to carry like a babe. His lips move, crinkling their coloured scars, but no words come. Across the field he’s borne amidst the buzz and whisper of the willagers that crowd about him in a wavering swarm, towards the far hives of the settlement, already humming and alive with rumour and lament.
Beneath the soil she lies, her yawn packed full with earth, a dry and bitter lace of root-hair snagged between her teeth. She comes here for her father’s leavings, closer to them now than all my cleverness brings me, with secret paths of gold coiled all about her while she sleeps and stinks and falls apart. Jewelled gravel lodging in between her toes, and chewed by silver worms there in the wasted treasure houses of the dead; the dead, alone of all the world in that they have no greeds to satisfy, no fears to salve or needs they must placate. Their sockets brim with wealth more splendid than their living eyes may ever know, and it concerns them not at all. My body, warm and anxious, moves to cruder drums.
Outside, beyond the cluttering strangeness of the old man’s hut, noon comes and goes, marked by the squeals of panic drowned in children’s laughter as the painted pig is killed, off near the roundhouse by the sound of it.
Olun is dying. Sprawled there facing me across the burned-out ember pit he does not seem to breathe at all, but only sigh from while to while, his blinkless eyes fixed on me, blind and sighted both. He sinks into his death and grows remote, unanswering for all my urgent query and demand.
‘Please, Father. There’s so little time and you must give me all your learnings. Teach me. Tell me how to be a cunning one like you before death draws a curtain in between us.’
Olun smiles, a dreadful splitting of the picture-bark that is his face, and tries to speak.
‘The curtain ...’ Here he coughs, breaks off, recovers, starts again. ‘The curtain’s torn. There is a way we may speak with the dead and have their learnings. Patience, daughter. Patience.’
Patience? What is all my toiling; dragging; all my listening to his dull mumbles if not patience?
‘How, then? How then may your learnings come to me if you are dead? Please, Father. Why not tell me now, while there is time?’
Again the smile, the decorated bark peeled back. ‘A test. A final test. If you’re to be the cunning one then you must learn to hear the voice of those that bear the name before you. Come now, daughter, do not look afraid. It’s not so hard to know the teachings of the dead, for those whose wits are quick and have the eyes to see.’
My mouth falls open here to make complaint, yet Olun lifts one trembling hand to still my protest ere it’s born.
‘Let’s talk no more of this, for there’s another matter: something you must give to me while there’s yet breath within my mouth. Something of yours, to be my comfort in the tomb.’
What’s this? He makes no hurry passing on my leavings, yet he asks a gift of me? My tongue grows tart, as if with bile. ‘You say that we may talk when you are dead. What need is there for comfort more than this?’
He shakes his constellation-spattered head. ‘No. Though my voice may hail you from beyond the grave, it does not work the other way about. You may not speak with me, though there’s a way for me to speak with you. My need is for some token, some possession of my daughter’s for to hold beside me in the dark and make me less alone. It is our custom here. What of those beads about your throat?’
My best chance seems to lie in pleasing this old fool, so that he may relent and tell me all he knows. Making no answer save a shrug, my hands reach up behind my neck to fumble with the knot of copper wire that holds the threaded beads in place. My fingers wage a brief, blind struggle and the hoop of hard blue sparks lifts free, held out towards the old man on his bier.
He does not take the beads, nor look at them. Instead, his gaze still rests with me, seems fixed upon my chin or shoulders just as if the loop of fancy-beads still dangles there. At last, his eyes fall to the gift that’s held out in my hand. Reaching, he takes it from me, holds it to his face and then begins to weep.
‘My daughter. Oh, my daughter ...’ More tears fall, his words slurred to a moan, an idiot snuffling. It fills me with unease to see this softness in his manner, he who holds a frightened willage in his thrall. To think it brings such grief upon him, just to part with me. How does this world endure, if all its sages are so weak?
He lifts his head and stares once more into my eyes and there is something fierce within his look. Perhaps he feels an anger with himself, to bawl thus like a babe before his child. He speaks to me, his voice grown flat and cold. ‘Send Hurna to me now. It is my wish to speak to her alone.’
There’s nothing for it but to do his bidding. Picking over hurdles made from gaudy wands and caps adorned with fishbone, my way’s made from in the hut to where the dough-faced woman sits and tends her cooking fires outside. She seems surprised at being summoned thus and, after gawping for a while in disbelief, she hurries through the wood-stopped door to be by Olun’s side.
Sat tired and disappointed in the dust with back against the bare-stripped wooden walls my vision lights upon the view between the willage huts. Off by the roundhouse men with knives of copper flay the face from off the carcass of a coloured pig. My eyes close, shutting out a world that swiftly moves beyond my understanding. Lurid shapes transmogrify and melt against a scab-thick dark.
The rounded woods still press into my back, the hard-stamped earth against my spine. Off in the mottled dark behind my eyelids there are distant calls and coughs and creakings, willage sounds that penetrate my doze, serve as reminders that the world is yet about me. Half-dreams come. Thoughts blossom into pictures, then dissolve.
Garn hammers bees upon his anvil until black and yellow pulp drools down its side. He stands knee deep in ash that rises slowly in a warm grey flow-tide, covering his thighs, his belly, everything except his head, which has the features of a pig, and now the women of the settlement are come across the risen powder-flats to knot a ring of bright blue flowers about its throat. Their stems leave stains of vivid green against the swells of fat and now an understanding comes upon me that Garn’s body is no longer underneath the ash: the head is severed, and the flesh torso hangs nearby, transfixed upon a spar of wood. The bulging skin is painted everywhere with images of birds.
Off from the willage in another world a cry is come, at which the birds rise up in flapping blind alarm and take me with them high above the riverside where, looking down, we see one woman cut another’s throat, drag off her clothes and throw her to the sluggish waters. Rising higher now, until the people are not visible and all we know are fields and hills; the clustered pale green dots of distant huts. These sights, though strange and thrilling, are yet known to me from somewhere long ago, but where, and when? My body rises up and up until the acrid scent of wet-furred dog awakens me.
My eyes are open now upon an afternoon grown longer since they close, yet still the sour hound-perfume lingers. Are there dogs about? A half-remembered dream rolls over, flash of black-scaled underbelly just below the surface of my thoughts that resubmerges and is gone, unrecognized. Rising up stiffly to my feet it seems to me the spoor is come from Olun’s hut and therefore make my way inside where it grows stronger, thick enough to sting the eyes. How great a dog is this to have a stench so fierce?
Shouldering through the lurid piles and trick-tracks of impediment, the rain-dog smell becomes more overwhelming with my every step towards the centre round, its stinking heart.
There are no dogs.
The fire pit, kindled now, casts up a dance of red across the curves and crannies of the old man’s hut. Across it, Hurna sits and faces me, arms hooped about her drawn up knees and head cocked to one side. There comes the spat and hiss of green-wood from the embers, but all else is silence in the junk-ringed clearing. Something in the noise-shape of the hut is wrong. There is a part removed; some sound no longer there. Listening for a moment, the omission’s plain: it is the rhythm of his breath.
The witch-man lies upon his bier, bathed in the ghosts of flame that shift and tilt the shadow, setting his tattoos to writhe though he is still as stone. Each staring wet and blind to where the fire pit’s smoke is hauled in ragged twists out through the chimney-hole, his eyes achieve a final match, both fogged and frosted now. His breast becalmed, the hands that rest upon it knot and petrify about my hoop of fancy-beads that glitter violet in the coal-light. Piss, his final offering, soaks through the pup-skin robe whereon he lies, from which the scent of dog steams thick and clinging in the fireside heat.
Tell me your secrets now, old man, the way you promise. Peel apart your death-gummed lips and speak to me.
‘It happens when you send me in to talk with him,’ says Hurna. She is calm and smiling, squatted in the hearth-light next to Olun’s corpse. ‘We make our converse but a little while, and then he dies. But do not worry ...’ Here she notes the anguish in my eyes, mistakes it for compassion. ‘Olun dies a rightly death. His spirit treads upon the bright path now, and best of all he leaves no drudgery for you. His funeral matters are in hand and there are no great tasks you must perform. All things are well.’
All things are well? Gods curse this stupid woman blind! How may all things be well if Olun dies before the secret of his wealth is shared with me? How may she sit and smile and look content when all my schemes are falling down to dust? Beneath my feet the golden tunnels fall away, recede beyond recall. What may be done to bring them back?
A thought comes to me: dragging Olun back towards the village from the dead girl’s funeral, and asking if there is no man alive save he that knows the underpath, the trackways of the dead. The old man’s laughter, like the splintering of snail husks; his reply that bubbles thick with tar from out amongst the whorl-marked shards: ‘Except old Tunny. He knows every turning of the path, but all the knowing’s in his fingers. None of it is in his head.’
‘Who’s Tunny?’
Hurna looks towards me, startled first then puzzled by my outburst, for she may not see how Tunny is connected with my father’s death. She frowns, and when she speaks her words are slow, filled with a gentleness that makes me furious. It is as if she’s talking to a babe.
‘Tunny’s the gateman here, the old one with the shaking hands, but you have other things to think of now. It is the upset of your father’s death that muddles up your thoughts. Why don’t you rest, and leave the readying of Olun’s wake to me? You need your time to mourn, and ...’
Turning from her, stumbling through the hulks and hinders to the dusking air outside.
Her cries of consolation follow me: ‘Don’t run. You’re just upset, but there’s no need. He’s in a better place. He’s on the bright path now...’
A strange excitement hangs upon the settlement as twilight falls and objects lose their shape and edge to merge within the falling light. From every hut the people are emerging, laughing, chattering and firing torches, one from off the other, flares of yellow in the settling grey. In whispering groups they drift towards the northern gate, a great slow swarm of amber lights that travels in the same direction as myself. They watch me dart among them, running hard towards the watch-hut with the sweat of desperation on my brow and yet they do not pay me any heed, caught up in some excitement of their own.
The ancient gateman with the black and trembling hands is nowhere to be seen and it appears his post is empty and unmanned until a muffled grunting causes me to peer inside. At my back the torch-lit throng moves through the willage gates and out along the river path, a thread of floating lights.
Inside the watch-hut, by the wall, the red-haired girl with freckled shoulders sits beside the birth-marked youth whose name, it comes to me, is Coll. They have their breeks let down about their ankles and their lips locked hard enough to bruise. Each holds the other’s sex.
‘Where’s Tunny?’
Startled fingers suddenly withdraw from in between the loved one’s thighs to cup between their own. Their lips part, shackled only by a silver chain of spit.
‘Shank off! He isn’t here. Shank off and leave us be!’ The boy’s spoiled face becomes so red that all its markings are consumed and lost within the flush of blood.
My question, though, is urgent and may not be put aside. ‘Where is he, then? Come, tell me quick and you are rid of me.’
‘He’s gone to watch the pig-night in the Hobfields. That’s where everybody goes tonight, and more’s the pity you’re not gone there too.’ Here, breaking off, he makes another face and grins to show the stains upon his teeth. ‘Unless you care to stay, that is, and try a bit of this yourself?’
My wad of spittle breaks against his cheek. Cursing, he clambers to his feet and starts towards me, hobbled by his breeks and far too slow. Only his cries of rage pursue me out beyond the blackthorn walls and through a dark alive with shrieks, calls, trailing flames.
The pig-night. Fires and dolls and painted swine and flickering processions, blazing spills of rush that move along the river’s edge reflected in its depths like burning fish. A smell, a thrilling taint upon the air and fever in the children’s faces. Pig-night. Every year these passions and these lights, sparked in their fathers and great-sires alike, and back and back to when the Urken leap and gabble in the autumn smokes. This night is not a single time but is as many as the stars, a string of nights drawn through the ages on an awl of ritual and hung with old fires in the stead of beads.
Blanched rushes, pale and craven, bow in quivering supplication to the wind, a landlocked pool of them where from the middle bulges forth a skull of brain-grey flint and crumbled yellow stone that wears a crown of burning wood. Of all the willeins crowded in the Hobfield, but a few have room to stand upon this outcrop, faces red and sweat-bright, backs in shadow as they gang about the pyre. The rest are forced to perch about the sodden meadow’s edge upon the harder, risen ground while children scamper back and forth along the narrow spines of path that join this human wheel-rim with its blazing hub.
Fat Mag, the hag-queen, has her place atop the knoll, with Bern and Buri flanking her. The brothers’ voices carry on the breeze across the reed-bog, seeming louder and more guttural than when they speak with me. They are both drunk on mash, and one of them now fumbles with his will-sheath then makes water on the fire. A copper stream pours from the drawn-back eel lips of his sheath, whose eyes look on, appalled. His brother and the hag-queen laugh and clap. Old Tunny does not seem to be amongst those on the knoll.
Atop the pyre, amongst the ribboned smoke and flame a figure sits. It is the queer and faceless boy-in-kind that me and Olun see the children making when we drag past here towards the bridge. Making my way about the meadow’s rim to see if Tunny is amongst the crowd that gathers there, the straw-stuffed body is concealed from me by rising veils of fire and fume, which now the breeze draws back ...
It is no boy-in-kind that roasts upon sputtering woods. It is a child. It has a face that seems to turn towards me, eyes alive with pain and fear and lips that move to shape themselves about unknown and terrifying words. Its snout ...
No. Not a boy. A pig. A pig that has the body of a boy. It is the figure made of rag and straw save now it wears a face flayed from the gaudy hog that’s killed this afternoon. It is the settling of the wood that makes it seem to tip and lean at me; heat-rippled air that brings the stilled squeal of its mouth to life. A prickling cold trails spider legs against my nape and then is gone. Push on. Push on between the jostling strangers, tiny furnaces alight in every eye.
Strung out along the raised-up half-moon of the rim the crowd congeals to separate clots of people, no more than a handful in each straggling knot. They drink; they laugh; they hold their smallest children up to see the fire across the ghostly lake of rush. Some have withdrawn into the overgrowth nearby for making sex, touched by the wild scent of this night as were the birth-stained gateboy and his copper-headed girl. From out between the sting-weeds drift their little cries of grateful pain, their hot and frightened breath. Above, the beady, lecher stars look down and know a jealous wish for skin.
Ahead of me a cooking fire is built upon the Hobfield’s edge, a smaller brother to the central blaze. Above it, spit from arse to gizzard, turns the carcass of a pig whose face is skinned away, over and over in a great slow roll as if its hissing flesh recalls old wallows in cool mud. Along one flank the meat’s already pared down to the bone, white ribs bared in a grin through pink and sizzling gums.
Not far beyond this, Tunny stands apart, a gaunt and rangy thing with skull tipped backwards savouring the smell of fire; of roasting pig; a sniff of gill borne from the weeds behind him. By his side, forgotten, hang the stained and shivering hands. He turns his head at my approach and recognizes me.
‘Ah. Well. Your father’s dead then, is he?’ Awkward in his speech, he is not used to consolation.
‘Aye, my father’s dead. He speaks of you before he dies. He says you may have things to tell me.’
‘Oh? What things might they be, then?’ Old Tunny looks confused, the dye-dipped fingers grown more restless by his side.
‘The underpaths that lead beneath the willage. Olun says you have a knowledge of them, you alone in all the world save he.’
Across the beds of sickly reed blow smoke and laughter from the fire-topped knoll where burns the pig-boy. Tunny frowns and shakes his head. ‘What underpaths? That’s cunning talk is that, and does not mean a thing to me. Why, Olun barely has a hail or fare-you-well for me since my affliction forces me to quit my calling and take on a lowly gateman’s lot.’
His eyes grow distant, damp with memory. My gaze shifts down from them towards the palsied, black extremities. Within my thoughts, a dark thing crawls towards the light.
‘Before you are their gateman, are you ...?’
‘Their tattooist. Yes.’
‘And it is you that marks my father with his crow designs?’
He gives a braying laugh that seems too big for such a pinched and narrow chest. Off on the knoll there’s nothing left now of the pig-boy save a charring mound that puffs and bursts and shrivels in amongst the roaring tongues of light.
‘His crow designs? If that is what he calls them, why, then yes that is my work, although they do not look like crows to me. They have no sense in them at all and yet he makes me copy them so careful from his painted barks, as if no other half-wit scrawl may do as well. When we are done he burns the picture barks and makes a proper thing of it, you mark my word. Each year he comes to me and has them traced afresh to keep ‘em bold, but then my hands get bad and Olun comes no more, nor anyone. Who does their tattoos now is not for me to know.’ He pauses, wrinkles up his nose and squints in the direction of my neck. ‘Who does that one about your throat? It must be someone in the willage, for it is not there when you are first arrived.’
What is he speaking of? My hand flies up unbidden to inspect the soft skin there below my jaw. There is no scar that may be felt, no raised-up lip of fresh tattoo. This flutter-fingered fool is either addled or else blind, and there is much for me to think of without paying further notice to some lack-wit gateman’s mutterings. Still squinting at my neck he lets me clasp his shuddering hand and thank him for his help, then watches me turn from him, walking off into the firelit crowd along the meadow-bank.
The dark thing in my thoughts crawls closer still. Old Tunny’s fingers know the underpath, though there’s no knowing in his head. Old Tunny’s the tattooist. He scores Olun’s marks, his blackened fingers moving, year on year, along those mad and weaving tracks, the old man’s crow designs that do not look like crows, yet now is all come plain. They are not images of crows at all.
They’re what crows see.
The river from above become a line, a crooked thread of blue. The patchworked fields all hemmed with bramble, huts made small as finger-rings and forests shrunk to fat green slugs, all crinkle-edged and veined with paths. That is the means by which the old man knows each track and by-way. There’s the reason Olun feels the willage is too much a part of him: the all of it is etched upon his hide. Its hills, its ponds. Its underpaths. Its vaults and treasure holes. That’s how he means to speak with me when he is in his grave.
My shovings and my squeezings now return me to the riverside that wanders back towards the willage. Casting one last look towards the knoll it strikes me that the hag-queen sits alone before the pyre, with Bern and Buri gone elsewhere. My eyes sift through the ragged crowd about the Hobfield’s rim and finally alight upon the monstrous brothers, standing by the spit on which the painted pig is roast. Old Tunny stands beside the pair, looking afraid and talking with them. Now he lifts one hand and gestures to his gullet. Both the brothers nod. They stare as one across the flickering yellow reed-field, peering through the smoke towards the river path and me, although they may not see me this far from the fire.
Turning away from them, my hurried footsteps bear me off into the lapping dark, back to the willage and the old man’s precious, cold remains. Even if Hurna is already settling him within his grave, it is no obstacle for one as skilled in resurrection as myself. My feet are tingling as they pound along the riverbank, warm with the feel of all my gold that’s hoarded there beneath them.
Is there something on my neck?
Inside of me, the dark thing slowly drags towards the light. There’s something missing here, some knowledge that’s not yet disclosed. A picture comes of Hurna, squatting there by Olun’s body, smiling through the coal-glow of the inner hut. What does she have to be so pleased about? Atop the Beasthill to my left are dancing lights, wherefrom a distant hollow keening rises bare into the night.
‘He’s in a better place,’ she says.
‘He’s on the bright path now.’
The understanding, when it comes upon me, tears a scream from out my throat.
Forget the willage. There is nothing there for me now. Run. Run up the Beasthill. It is not too late. My tears may be misplaced, to make so much out of a word, a look. Keep running, up and up.
Besides, what reason may there be for Olun to consent to such a thing? He has no love for Hurna or her gods, and says time after time that he wants me to have his learnings and his leavings when he’s dead. He has no cause to change his mind ...
... but then there is the way he looks at me after he takes my fancy-beads. His eyes and voice grow cold and then he asks to speak with Hurna as if ... No. Forget it. It is nothing. In my side, a pain. My gasping breath, so much like Olun’s.
Stopping half-way up to rest and looking back a pair of torch-lights may be seen, that move along the river path towards the Beasthill’s lower slopes. They seem to come from the direction of the Hobfields, following my own route here. A group of revellers, perhaps, all overfed and drunk with mash, that make for Beasthill so to ask some god’s forgiveness of their gluttony before returning home. The lamp-fires glide along the riverbank, their pace matched perfectly as if the bearers walk in step. They start to mount the Beasthill. Run. Run on.
Across the flattened summit stretch the rings of broken wall, one set inside the other, ancient banks of earth heaped up by men yet now reclaimed by grass that looks like slivered metal underneath the stars. Away towards the hilltop’s further side, beyond the smallest and most central ring, a crowd of women are convened, all wailing.
They are standing in a ring about the fire.
Shouting and screaming, bidding them to stop, my frantic, hurtling form careens across the stretch of grass and dark between us, dodging through the crumbling gaps that separate the turf-capped walls and leaping puddles wide as baby ponds to come at last amongst them, sobbing, half collapsing there at Hurna’s feet who stands beside the pyre.
She smiles down fondly. Off across the field two torches breast the hill and start to move towards us. Bern and Buri. Hurna’s voice is hearty and forgiving, brimming over with dull-witted sisterly affection.
‘We are pleased that you at last decide to share our ceremony. And your father. He is pleased as well.’
She looks up here towards the towering centre of the blaze, much higher than the pig-night fire.
He sits erect upon his burning throne, shrunk to a hideous charcoal infant by the flames. His blackened sockets stare as if to scry the smoke for messages, for intimations of reprieve. Behind these gaping orbits soft grey tendrils smoulder from a soot of brain. Across his breast, held in a death-grip, cindered fingers clench upon his daughter’s fancy-beads. His skin flakes off to rise as great slow moths of ash into the firmament, above the heat where they grow cool and fall to lazy spirals of descent, raining about me.
Bern and Buri stand behind me now, patient and silent as they wait for me to turn and face them. From the sky a frail black fragment, tumbling as in a dream, drifts down to settle on my arm. Upon it, barely visible against its black, the faintest silver tracery of lines may yet be seen: a gentle curve that is perhaps a stream or else some buried lane, the clustered spider-marks that may be trees viewed from above.
It breaks against my wrist and falls to dust, caught by the wind to scatter over the cremation fields.
** <strong>In the Drownings, Post AD 43</strong>
<em>The plaiting of the rushes and the cutting of the stilts. A hollow beak that spits out darts; its making and its use.</em> The method of these things is like a voice inside that endlessly repeats its dull instructions. It’s been in me for so long that I no longer hear it. When I do, it soothes me in that I need think of nothing save this grey, unending list and thus at last may fall asleep with it upon my lips: <em>The plaiting of the rushes and the cutting of the stilts. A hollow beak that spits out darts, its making and its use.</em>
Before I wade upstream towards the shallows, I look back at Salka and our children playing. Water beaded on her breast, she turns and holds me with her black-eyed gaze too long before she looks away and dips her face once more beneath the river’s skin. The young ones splash and circle; build an argument between themselves but then abandon it in favour of some better, louder disagreement.
This looking back whenever I set out and leave my family behind, as if to gather all my loved ones up into my eyes and hold them there, it has become a habit with me lately. Still it gnaws me, this concern that one day I might glance away and, when I look back, find them gone. It seems that I cannot be rid of it and so I stare until their shapes are lost against the rippling glare that dances on the water. Turning, I make away against the current, strong and boiling where it clefts against my thigh.
I had a different wife once, and another family. We did not live here in the Drownings but some way off to the west, up in a great round hill camp high above a burning-ground. One morning I awoke and ventured out between the bubbling breakfast-pots to hunt and fish, and that was all of it. I cannot now recall if I had any kind word for my wife on setting out that day, only that I became ill-tempered when I found the broken draw-string of my boot unfixed, and thought ill of her laziness. I may have said some little thing, some words, I can’t remember. Knotting up the string as best I could for want of thread and needle, I tied up my boot and limped into the dawn and that was all of it.
I kissed my little girl farewell, but could not find my son to kiss. She had just eaten curds. Her breath was hot and sweet upon my cheek, and that was all of it.
As I walked on all hung about with nets and spears amongst the rousing huts, I saw my mother some way off, upon the settlement’s far side. I called to her, but she was old and did not hear me. That was all of it.
I stopped to talk with Jemmer Pickey’s wife, and while we spoke I had some thoughts of her without her skirts and skins, although I knew there would be nothing come of this. I said goodbye, then carried on my way.
Near by the main gate, in amongst the old, grassed over stones of Garnsmith’s Forge I saw our willage Hobman standing lost in thought, the yellow antlers drooping, tied about his lowered brow. All in a ring about his feet were many markings, sketched in meagre soil there with his mistle-rod. He muttered to himself, twisting the grey snarls of his beard between stained fingertips, and seemed more ill at ease than I had ever seen him. Of a sudden he looked up and saw me as I passed. He made to speak, then seemed to think the better of it. I have often wondered what he meant to say.
I passed him by and went out from the camp, making my way down hill and past that lower peak where lie the burning grounds. I’d heard that there were walls there once, great rounds set one inside the other. These were long since worn away, but from the camp-hill’s upper slope the rings could yet be seen; a certain darkening of the grass best looked upon by afternoon. Off to the west, down where the riversiders had their settlement, thin ropes of smoke were strung between still sky and distant fires, and when I’d come too low upon the hill to hear the willage noises at my back, there was a silence, stretched across the world unto the further trees. I walked down into this, with looping bindweed strangles tearing round my feet as I descended. That was all of it.
As I stilt through the water now, less deep here than a forearm’s length, the trees stoop in above me and the river is in shadow. With no sun to dazzle from the water’s face the depths beneath become more plain, so that the fish who move there may be seen. I stop, and am become as still as stones. My wooden legs are two trees rooted in the streambed, whereupon the water folds itself then folds itself again. Beneath its surface I regard my stilts that seem now crooked, bent with age, although I know that this is but some water-trick. I move my sodden cloak of rush aside, and lift my spear, and wait.
When I lived in the hill camp it took more than half a day to reach the Drownings. Horses will not ride there for the ground is treacherous and filled with bogs and pools whereby the midge-flies cloud about, a small and angry weather. Many men have died there. Minnows navigate between their teeth.
I reached my favourite hunting-place at close of afternoon, the twilight raising up like dust before a herd of coming stars. First I collected sticks and sods to build my hide, where I would sleep, more like a swollen grave than like a hut. I laboured next in failing light to gather rushes, that I might have work within my oil-lit hide to keep me busy after dark had settled on the fens.
The horse-hair wick, coiled like a worm in curdled fat, refused to burn until I’d wasted half a bag of tinder and come near to wearing smooth my newest flint. I sat cross-ankled in the shivering light and plaited rushes on into the grey approaches of the dawn. The gown I made was long and green, shaped like a mash-skin that’s turned right-side-down, sealed at the top save for a slit to see through and a hole wherein to fix the hollow beak. I slept for but a small while and was up before first light to cut young saplings for my stilts and find a piece of wood that I might scrape the caulk from out to make my blowing-pipe.
My work was finished as the sun completed its ascent through chilly morning air, only to slump at last exhausted and commence its fall. I took a rolled-up rag from out my sack and opened it to choose one of the iron slivers pinned in rows along the unrolled strip, a tuft of dirty ram’s-wool fastened at their dullest ends. Selecting one, I placed it in between my teeth, point outermost, and crawled head-first into my gown of reed, the bored-through wooden beak clasped tight inside my hand. I struggled for a moment to adjust the hood that I might see, then dragged the stilts inside the gown, to bind with strips of ox-hide to my legs.
The wooden beak was in my mouth, one end protruding through the helmet’s hole, the dart already nestled in its bore. Swelled up with spit, the woollen flight stopped up the hole. Its bitter strands stuck to my tongue and teased inside my mouth so that I had some difficulty in dislodging them without the blow-dart falling from its pipe.
At last, my mummery complete, I lifted up my short-spear and tried carefully to stand upon my fresh-cut legs, using a lonely tree trunk as support until I’d found my feet. With this assured, I delicately picked my way, a giant green bird, toward the current’s ragged edge whereby I dipped one wooden toe within, unmindful of the water’s chill.
With great slow steps that left the river’s surface undisturbed, I waded in amongst the witless fish and unsuspecting water-fowl, whence I commenced to hunt.
Standing a-straddle of the shallows now a fat bass moves between my feet to nibble pale grey weed. My fingers tighten on the spear-shaft then relax as it thinks better of its meal. It whips its tail as for a face-slap and is gone.
Sometimes I dwell on how the fish and ducks regard all this. Unseen, I stalk amongst them and they think me one of them. They are too dull to understand that I am of a higher kind and that I mean them ill, and so they disappear, uncomprehending, one by one. They watch the great green bird stride there between them, yet forge no connection with their missing kin. They are made blind by that which they expect to see.
There may be beasts more subtle yet than we, strolling amongst us at their leisure, picking, choosing, bagging now a woman, now a man, and none shall ever know where they have gone, so sparse and scattered are the crimes; so few and far between, save when these subtle monsters feel the need to feast and glut themselves.
Another fish, this time a roach, moves nuzzling between my planted struts. This time I do not wait, but drive the spear down hard. I almost miss and pierce its side instead, lifting it thrashing on my shaft into the sunlight, beads of river-water falling all about it in a mortal dew.
I hunted all that day and yet another day besides, curled in my hide by dark, and at the close of it were many fowl within my sack and many poles of fish, and when another morning came I set out for my home. The air was good and clear that day, as air that follows from a storm, and yet no storm had passed. The blue sky coloured all the pools and puddles of the fen, and vast white clouds passed overhead, piled up into fantastic shapes for which I had not names. My bag was full. The sun was warm upon my back. I sang the only words I could remember of the Old Track Song, about the journey-boy and how he found his bride, and frightened herons off a pond the singing was that bad. It was the last time I was happy.
Now I sit upon the bank and let my wooden legs trail in the current while I eat the fish. When first I came to live for good out in the Drownings, I would cook my food before I ate, but now it seems a nuisance. No one else here cooks their food. I split along the creature’s belly with my nail and feel an odd content at just how large a piece of skin I can peel off in one attempt. (Here, partly flayed, it startles me by flipping once, but then is still.)
About to pull my beak aside and eat, a movement on the south horizon draws my eyes. Red flags. Red, tiny flags that drift apart then draw together as they flap towards me from across the distant fields. I squint, then draw my legs from out the water so as best to stand. I leave my beak in place.
Not flags. Not flags, but capes, red capes upon the backs of riding men. A hand-full by my reckoning. No more.
I know them. Men of Roma, come from lands beyond the sea. Some of the young men in the willage where I lived before said that these Romans had a will to take the land from us, but all this is a puzzle far beyond my figuring, for land is not a thing that one can take, and nor is it a thing that can belong, and so I leave such quarrels to the younger men.
They are much closer now, and have dismounted, leading on the horses by their reins, picking their way between the mudholes and the bright laked silver of the pools. One of them bears a staff crowned with a strange device of gold: there is a snake, a fat man standing, then a mouth wide open with the tongue lolled out, and finally a fat man walking. Metal helmets. Skirts like women. Metal plates across their tits.
Their horses see me first, and shy. While trying to rein in their rearing steeds, the men whirl all about to seek the cause of this disturbance. All in green against the tufted river-bank, at first they cannot see me.
I’ve no quarrel with them. I call out hello, and now they turn and look at me. My voice is sore, unpractised in the speech of men, and from their faces it is plain my greeting sounded terrible and was beyond their understanding. One amongst them starts to babble, high pitched, in their curious tongue. I take another step towards them, rearing high upon my wooden legs, and try again.
The horses scream and bolt. The men run after them. I watch their red cloaks flap away across the fens. The more I call for them to stop and have no fear, the faster do their horses flee, the faster do they follow in pursuit. What must I sound like, after all this time?
They’re gone, and so I sit back down there at the water’s edge to eat my fish. I think of how they’ll tell their friends they saw a bird much bigger than a man, all green, that stalked the marshes on its monstrous legs and uttered dreadful cries. Around a mouth-full of cold fish I start to laugh so that the grease spills out into my beard; onto my feathers made of rush.
After a while the laughter stops, because it sounds bad in this place alone. I eat the fish down to its skeleton.
That day, when I walked home towards my hill camp, I was thinking of my wife, my first wife. It’s a strange thing, but her name was Salka too. I’d known her since we both were small and played at chase-and-kiss out in the Hobfields, which they say is haunted by a murdered boy. Once I told Salka that I’d seen him, standing on the mound there with his throat all cut, his hair all burned. She knew I’d made it up, and yet she made as if she thought it true, and clung to me and let me feel her gilly there inside her breeks.
The hill came into sight, with supper-fires that smouldered on its crest, so that my weary step grew quick to think of being home. I had not had the chance to tell my son goodbye before I left, and thought that I might play with him along the evening paths while Salka cooked the fattest of the fish for us, wrapping our hut about with its delicious stink.
I was halfway uphill towards the camp before I realized that there was no noise.
I throw the slick white fishbones from me, down into the river where they bob for but a moment then submerge. I fancy that I see them swim away beneath the water, and I entertain a river where naught save the skeletons of fishes glide and dart and comb the currents with their naked ribs. I stand and make to wade downstream, back to my family. I feel the sorrow gathering about me, and I want to be with them.
I walked into the willage with my poles across my shoulder and a sack of meat and feathers in my hand. The supper-fires were burning low and somewhere off between the huts I fancied that a dog was barking, though I now remember that the smell of dog was everywhere. It may have been the smell that made me think I heard the noise.
Just past the open gate the relic stones of Garnsmith’s Forge drew my attention. In their centre, where the moss grew brightest green, was now an ugly scorch of black. It looked as though a monstrous red-hot cooking bowl had been set down, dropped in relief by sweating men with blistered hands.
No sound came from the beast-pens of the inner camp to drown my hesitating step which, although light, was deafening amongst the gaping huts. Halfway along the centre street, there in the dust, I found a set of ochred antlers trailing broken strings. I did not dare to pick them up. I gazed at them a moment, then passed on.
A meal half-eaten. Corn querns, smooth and new, left stacked against a wall. The black flies on a haunch of lamb; their small, vile murmurings as loud as men. The curtain of a jakes not long since used hung open, dried leaves in a hand-full there untouched beside the reeking hole. From the untended, dwindling fires great gouts of smoke would roll across the trackways where I walked, so that these things were briefly glimpsed, then gone, as in a dream. The hole in Jemmer Pickey’s roof he’d sworn to mend since winter last. An old man’s sun-hat floating in a puddle. Washerwomen’s rocks, still cowled with long-dry clothing. Here a solitary footprint. There a pool of sick.
Outside our hut, my boy had failed to clear away a game that he had lately taken to, involving little men-in-kind I’d carved for him from pebbles. Set as for a hunt, he had them spread across the open door and ringed about some animal he’d fashioned out of sticks. I thought perhaps it was a wolf. Stepping across this small, abandoned slaughter, I decided that he must be scolded, though not hard, for leaving all his nonsense strewn so carelessly about.
The hut was dark. My little girl was sitting in the shadows on its furthest side. I spoke some words that I cannot recall to her and, stepping forward, saw that she was nothing but a pile of furs that for a moment in the dark had seemed to hold her shape, sat there with knees drawn up, her head tipped back the way she sometimes held it. Only fur. The hut was empty. For a moment all I did was stand there in the gloom; the silence. Nothing happened. I went back outside, stepping across my son’s abandoned game with care, so that he should not find it spoiled when he returned.
Across the silent willage to the west the sun was drowning in a purple cloud. I cupped my hands around my mouth and yelled hello. I heard it echo on the empty beast-pen’s curving wall and then, after a moment, called again. The yawning huts did not reply. Their quiet seemed uneasy, just as if there were some awful news they could not bring themselves to share with me. I called again, while dusk fell all about.
After a while, I sat down in the middle of the man-shaped stones set in a ring outside our door. I picked one up and looked at it. No bigger than my thumb, it bulged at top and bottom, narrow in the middle that it might suggest a neck. I’d scratched the likeness of a face there on the smaller, upper bulge. I’d meant to make him smile but, turning it to catch the failing light, could see that I’d been clumsy with my awl, so that it seemed as if he were instead forever shouting something with great urgency, forever beyond hearing.
As I touched the stone I took a fancy that it was still warm from my son’s hand and raised it to my nose that I might smell him on it. Reason left me then. I put the pebble in my mouth and I began to weep.
Crane-legged, I step downstream now, careful not to let the current rush me on too fast. Above the sourness of the ram’s wool on my tongue it is as if I taste that pebble yet. I hurry on, that I might be beside my newest wife and young before I am quite overcome by memory.
I sat there in the ring of pebbles all that night. Sometimes I wept and moaned. Sometimes I sang a little of the journey-boy. With dawn, I stood and walked back through the empty willage. All the fires were down to cold grey dust, and for a while I played a sorry game where I imagined everyone was but asleep, about to rouse and stretch and stagger cursing, joking, out into the waking day, but no one came.
I went back through the gates and next walked once and once again about the outside of the camp. There were no footprints there, nor any flattened weeds as where a tribe of many families had fled downhill, or where as many foemen had crept up. Save for the ash-scarred turf in Garnsmith’s Forge, a burn no more than half a man in width, there was no sign of fire, and neither was there any mark of wolves or, saving for the vomit in the street, of sudden plague.
I stumbled to the bottom of the hill and circled all about its base, then walked back up. Making my way back through the silence to my family’s hut, I crawled inside to sit. I saw, with rising anger, that my wife had left her cast-off clothing thrown about the floor, a lazy habit on behalf of which I’d often scolded her. Cursing her slothful ways beneath my breath, I crawled about upon my knees and gathered up the scattered rags.
Her breeches smelled of her. I raised them to my lips and kissed them; sank my face deep into them where it was stale, and rank, and good. My will grew stiff beneath my breeks, so that I reached to pull it free then rubbed my hand upon it, wildly back and forth. The milk splashed through my fingers, fell in beads upon a mat of grass our daughter made. No sooner had the spasm passed than I began to weep once more, my seed grown thick and cold upon my palm.
After the tears, there came a sudden and enormous dread, so that I could not breathe. I ran out from the hut. I ran out from the willage and away downhill, my limp will flapping as I ran and slipped and stumbled. When I reached the bottom I dare not look back, for there was something terrible about those mute and clustered rooftops, that dead skyline. I ran on, sobbing and gasping, on across the fields, a groundfog blur of seeding dandelions about my feet, and did not stop until I reached the riversider’s settlement a little after noon.
I raved at them, and asked if a great many people had passed by this way of late; if there had been some dire catastrophe; if there had been an omen in the stars. They stared, and called their children back inside ‘til I’d passed on. I shouted at the closing doors and told them that the people from the hill camp were all gone, but if they understood me, they did not believe. When I would not be quiet, a big man with a hare-lip grabbed me by my arm and dragged me to the outskirts, where he cast me in the dirt and said that I should go and not return, his gruff words smearing on his palate’s cleft.
I had nowhere to go, save for the Drownings.
I reclaimed my spot beside the river just as darkness fell. My hide was still intact where I had left it, with the robe of rushes rolled inside. Upon my belly, I crawled in and pulled my bird-cloak up to cover me, and there I slept, all of that night and all the next day as one dead beneath the swollen, pregnant grave that was my hide. There never was a time when I was more alone.
I’ve lived here in the Drownings ever since, and in that time have found another family, another Salka, and I am alone no more, nor maddened with bewilderment and grief.
I see them now, ahead of me, sat resting on the bank down where the river curves; lengthen my step that I may be upon them sooner, striding through the eddies, stalking down the shallow and cascading steps where slippery mosses drift like banners in the flow. I have not taken off my stilts for many moons, and there are sores upon my water-wrinkled legs.
Salka lifts up her head to watch as I approach, alerted by my splashing. Soon, the little ones are looking also as I rush towards them, teetering, precarious and eager for their consolation, falling forward more than running now. I lift my arms as if in an embrace that’s big enough to span the distance yet between us, feathered rushes hanging in loose, flapping folds below, like great green wings. I call out to them through the warped flute of my beak. I tell them that I love them. Tell them that I’ll never go away.
My voice is cracked and hideous. It startles them. As one, amidst a mighty beating, they rise up into the darkening sky and, in a moment, they are gone from sight.
** <strong>The Head of Diocletian, Post AD 290</strong>
My teeth hurt.
Standing here beyond the margins of the village there is only night; the hollow yawning of November wind across cold, furrowed earth; a dark that swallows utterly, so that I cannot tell where darkness ends and I begin. The tin-sharp soreness in my gums is all I have to tell me where I am, and I am almost glad of it out here amongst the black fields, where the damp wind cuts my cheek.
I have been staring at this void so long my eyes are watering, unable to distinguish between sky and landscape; near and far. Worse yet, this is the second night I have subjected my complaining lungs to this ordeal, this vigil out here in the miserable chill before the winter comes. All for the sake of some half-witted local yarn, the fancy of a farmer’s boy with eyes so close together he seemed bred out of a pig.
Still, for all that, he answered when I spoke to him. He did not make pretence at inability to comprehend my tongue, or simply spit and turn away as have the other villagers, though all he said was antic mysteries, fantastical accounts of walking spirits: on a hill, not far from here and up past the cremation fields, there is an ancient camp, hundreds of years of grass and weed above its ditches and its ramps. A settlement, he said. Score upon score of people who one night, according to the tale, were quite devoured by giant dogs with neither hair nor drop of blood to mark that they were ever there. As is the custom with such histories, the place has ever since been shunned, afflicted by ill reputation. There are spectres, naturally. On certain nights the fiery eyes of monstrous hounds may yet be seen atop the hill, their awful gaze enough to light the sky. I’m watching for them now, but there is nothing.
Off behind me in the village, distant voices, quarrelling at first, then laughing. Foul and careless oaths. The hateful braying of their women, coarse, insinuating. Is it me? Stood here, out in the bluster and the tarry dark for no more reason than the village fool sees light upon a hill-top? Is it me, the source of all their scorn, their noisy ribaldry? My teeth are screaming. Soon. A moment more then I’ll give up the night, make for the tavern; bed; my bad, louse-worried dreams.
Robbed of my range and bearings by the dark, the sudden flare of low cloud lit from underneath seems closer than it should, before my face rather than off across the fields. Its shadows lurch and flicker, make as if to leap towards me so that I step back unnerved and almost fall before my tired eyes have the measure of it.
Lights. Up there beyond the burning grounds where they reduce their dead to ash and cinder. Lights upon the hill, not cast by dogs unless they walk upon two legs.
I have them.
No. No, better not to think such things, that fate is not provoked: there might be other reasons, commonplaces that will quite explain these glowerings. Tomorrow, with the light, I may ride up that way and judge things for myself. Why, here I am as good as ordering the crosses built before a single shard of evidence is in my hands. I can imagine Quintus Claudius there in Londinium, his office at the treasury, how he would cluck his tongue with disapproval.
‘First the tests,’ he’d say, ‘the scales, and the coticula of basenite. If there are further proofs required, employ the furnace and a white-hot shovel. Then, and only then, announce the guilty and bring out the nails.’
Above the tumulus the grey lights shift and writhe. At last I turn away to trudge and trip across the rutted earth, back through the long, unbroken dark towards the settlement, the listing wooden alleyways with tiny, crooked windows squinting.
I have been here for some several weeks now, and the tavern is no longer plunged in hostile silence when I enter. For the most part they ignore me as I pick my way across the straw-tossed floor between the pools of vomit and the copulations, making for the stairs. Tonight at least, they’ve better entertainments, with a buck’s night celebration in full throe.
The groom, a youth of thirteen years or so, is climbing drunkenly to stand upon a stool that lists and tilts, abetted by his friends and uncles. All around the tavern’s lower room the hulking, copper-headed creatures whoop and clap their hands together in a fearful unison, a rhythm that grows faster as the young man wobbles there upon his stool and beams, befuddled, down upon his audience.
Now they throw a rope across one of the black and sticky-looking beams, with one end fashioned in a noose. A horrid intrigue seizes me and at the bottom of the stairway leading to my room I pause and turn to watch. Jeering and sputtering, their faces pink and bright with perspiration, they are settling the loop of rope about the bridegroom’s throat, yet still that foolish grin across his face. One of the brutes, a great fat creature with his skull shaved bare save for a top-knot, presses something that I cannot see into the young man’s hand, then turns towards the audience, his tattooed belly glistening as he stills the pounding handclaps with a string of slurred vulgarities. He belches, and is met with waves of laughter. In the bridegroom’s hand, I see it now, a short bronze knife. With his other hand he waves happily down to a dark-haired girl at the front of the pressing crowd, barely aware of where he is through the clouds in his eyes.
The fat man kicks the stool away.
The rope jerks taut against the dangling, kicking weight and now the clapping starts again, its mounting pace set off against the slower, burdened creakings of the beam. How can it be that I am witness to such things? The young man twisting there between the floor and ceiling smiles no longer, and his eyes bulge terribly. His thin legs, swimming, tread air. From out of the crowd now, as one man, a kind of grunting is commenced, as that of animals in rut.
The nature of the game is now made clear to me as suddenly the strangling boy remembers that he holds a knife there in his hand. Reaching above his head, his darkening face suffused with horrid concentration, he begins his desperate sawing at the rope. Clenched in his trembling fist, the short blade plunges back and forth, this motion echoing grotesquely that of solitary pleasure. Quite as if responding to the lurid and familiar movements of the hand, although remote, a bulge is raised that strains against the young man’s britches, and the dark girl points to this and laughs. From broken, scattered comments overheard amidst the din I understand that if the youth survives this game the dark girl shall be his, a final whore before he’s wed.
The young man twirls, and jigs, and rasps the knife’s edge back and forth against the rope, face purpling, and fearful throttled noise leaking from him now. If Rome falls, all will be as this. All of the world.
Unable to bear more, I turn away and stumble up the stairs, the tread worn thin there at the centre and the worm-shot risers dusted green with age.
Safe in my room beneath the low-slung eaves, the door pushed shut behind me, from below there comes the muffled thud of body hitting floor with cheering in its wake, so that, despite myself, I am relieved. I dare say that his windpipe will be crushed and bruised, and he’ll be helped home in no state to claim the proffered prize for his ordeal. No doubt the same friends who encouraged him to mount the stool will see that any favours paid for in advance do not go wasted.
In the corner, stained grey bedding. Morbid spiders curled about themselves, translucent, hang from rafters in dust-coloured shrouds of their own making. The girl who used this room before me moved into a chamber downstairs at the rear when I arrived, but every day I find some piece of her: a chipped shell comb, the scraps of clothing halfway through their journey into rags, blue beads strung on a hair of rusted wire. Sometimes I smell her ghost upon the blankets and the boards.
When I came to Londinium a half-year since, I thought it hunched and squalid, breeding ugly humours, pestilences in amongst the jetties and the narrow yards, pooled urine yellowing there where the cobbles dip. The locals, hulking Trinovante fishermen or shifty Cantiaci traders, had a pleasing insularity, despite their sullenness. They kept amongst their own kind and made little fuss, yet fresh from home I thought the city Hades; they its fiends and chimaera. One of a team of treasury investigators sent from Rome at the request of Quintus Claudius, I spent my weeks there with my fellows quaffing vinegary wine, awaiting our assignments complaining each new inconvenience, each fresh indignity.
I work one thumb and forefinger inside my mouth and gently test the teeth to see how many move, loose in the blue and shrunken gums. I fear that it is all of them, and wish that I were in Londinium again, for it would seem a paradise now in my eyes.
Sent here into the middle-lands two months since with reports of forgery, I was a child with nothing to prepare me for this place, these Coritani, reeling drunk through short and bloody lives they take for granted; for their unconsidered, unrelenting violence; for the coloured scars, the curls of ink that craze their brows and backs, as terrible and queer as painted dogs. When I arrived here, I was yet so delicate of sensibility that I might blanch to hear some lurid passage from a drama told in verse, and now I watch them hang their young for sport, and scarcely think of it.
I light the lamp and sit upon the crumpled bedding to remove my army-issue boots. Downstairs, a woman starts to hiss and snort, as rhythmic as a bath-house pump, thus signalling that someone has received the hanged boy’s prize. The women here discomfit me. They are so big and filthy, smell so foul, yet not an hour goes by save that I think of them, the red hair lacquered by their perspiration coiling into tiny sickles underneath their arms, their cow’s-milk haunches swinging under prickly skirts. I have not had a woman for a year, not since the dyer’s eldest daughter back in Rome. How long before I take a whore? Their flat white faces, and their speckled breasts. I must not think of it.
Naked now in the chill November room, I pull on the night-shirt I have taken, folded, from my army bag, that has the stencilled crest. There’s few signs of the Empire to be seen out here, a scattering of villas where retired generals struggle to afford their mistresses. Some small way north beyond this settlement one Marcus Julius, a veteran of the Emperor Aurelian’s campaign against the Gallic Empire still maintains a modest farm. I was told to visit should I find myself close by. It was excruciating. On discovering I was not long from Rome, he seemed capable of making only one enquiry: ‘Well? How fare the Blues?’ I told him I took little interest in the chariot races, whereupon his disposition to me cooled, so that I left not much thereafter.
I fancy it was him who let the cog-name by which I am known be bandied back and forth amongst the village folk, so that they do not call me Caius Sextus now but taunt me with ‘Romilius’: ‘Hello there, Little Roman! How d’you like this woman on my arm? I’ll bring a stool that you may kiss on her above the waist!’ All of them hate me, all the women, all the men, though to be just, it is not without cause. They know why I am here, and further know the punishment for forgery. How shall they be the friend of one who’s come to see them crucified?
I burrow deep into my bed, such as it is. Downstairs, the woman barks this people’s word for copulation, over and again. If Rome should fall ...
Put that aside. The day will never come while we are still producing Emperors of Diocletian’s mettle, men of scale who single-handedly vindicate their times. Those bold reforms to stem the plots and murderous feuds that threaten our stability, dividing up his office so that Maximian is become Augustus in the West with Diocletian as Augustus in the East. The weavers and the brewers carp, complain that he has fixed the price of rugs or beer, and yet inflation is contained. Our currency is strong. Without that strength the wilderness would have us all.
And yet my teeth hurt. Mine and my fellows’ teeth alike. Why, on the boat across there were some ten of us, investigators to the man, all with the same blue and receded gums, the headaches and the lethargies, the lapsing concentration, lapsing memory. One of the youngest said he felt as if already dead and crumbling away, stupid with maggots, though for my part it is not so bad. It’s just the teeth. No one can fix this ailment with a name, nor yet determine any cause. We speak about it as ‘the sickness’, if we speak of it at all.
Perhaps we are so much a part of Rome that we grow sick as she does; some peculiar bond, some sympathy of flesh and land. The bangled, ragged kings are at our gates and we appease them, grant them settlements and territories in the lands surrounding Rome until it is as if the vagrant tribes sit patient all about a sumptuous table at some beggars’ feast, with Rome the centre-piece. They sit politely for the moment, but their stomachs growl. If they commenced to dine the world should all be gone. The dark that gusts above the chill fields at the village edge would swallow us entire; the bright towns guttering, extinguished, all across the globe.
Sprawled on my side beneath the coverings, I notice that the quality of lamplight in my room has changed, and glancing up I realize with a dull uncertainty that all along the girl who had this room before me has been sitting there against the furthest wall, cross-legged, watching silently. She stands and walks without a sound across the cracked, uneven boards towards a doorway set behind my bed. Rising to follow her, I notice as she passes through the door that it is inlaid all about the frame with black and tarnished coins. I wonder that I never noticed it before.
Beyond the door I follow her by tallow-light through winding passageways between great piles of nameless oddities. She rounds a bend ahead and, as the half-light catches on her features, I begin to feel disturbed. They are more small and pinched than I recall, so that she seems a different girl. I would not know her save she wears her necklace of blue beads, the wire that threads them burnished to a brazen sheen.
Now we are at the centre of the labyrinth, where painted skins are hung. About a low red fire peculiar figures gather in a ring, and wait, and do not speak. There is a boy that I at first mistake for the young man I saw hanged, but this one’s younger, still a child, and on his throat the wounding mark is not a rope-burn but an ugly gash. Beside him sits a beggar, barely conscious, vomit matted in his beard and mumbling to himself. A crone with one foot gone. A black-faced man with twigs tied in his hair. An awful stork-limbed creature, half as tall again as any man, stands agitated, shifting now from one foot to the other, shoulders hunched beneath the ceiling, coughing now and then. The girl and I step up and join the circle; gaze like them into the dying coals. Outside, there is a fearful barking, growing closer by the moment, and I feel a monstrous loss, a crushing sadness unlike any I have felt in life, and I am weeping. Next to me, the boy whose throat is slashed steps close and takes my hand. He makes great show of giving me a pebble that’s been carved into the likeness of a tiny man. I put it in my mouth. The sound of dogs is deafening.
I wake up with the mare’s-tail grey of morning in my room.
There’s something rattling in my mouth.
A sudden terror grips me and I spit it out, afraid that it will be the pebble-figure from my dream, its scribbled eyes and gaping maw, but no. It is a tooth. My tongue-tip probes the bloody socket left behind with childish satisfaction, and I roll the ivory pellet in my palm, letting the pallid daylight rinse away the after-flavour of my dream. I think about last night, the bale-fires dancing there atop the hill, recalling my resolve to ride that way and make inspection with the morn, and then I dress and go downstairs.
Breaking my fast with cheese and fruit and bread, the only foods on offer safe to eat, I walk down to the stables where I choose my horse; a tan, steam-snouted thing with eyes more civilized than any else I have seen in this place. Leading her out between the water-troughs I notice several men that loiter near the stable-entrance, watching me. One of them is the fat man with the top-knot, he who thrust the knife into the hung boy’s hand. The other men I do not recognize, but all their eyes are on me as I mount and trot towards the gates, not looking right nor left, attempting to display more unconcern than I can truly muster in my heart. They watch me go. Some difference in my bearing has alerted them. They know I’m close to something.
I ride near the river’s edge much of the way, then branch towards the looming hill; follow along the beaten path meandering up by the cremation fields. Halfway towards the summit, I look back, the fields a pauper’s blanket made from scraps displayed beneath me. Further up the road that passes near the bottom of the hill I spy the low sheds of the Christian colony, established there upon a swelling mount beyond the bridge’s further side. I almost feel a pang of kinship for the wretched, ranting lunatics, subjected as they are to all the same suspicion and mistrust the villagers afford to me.
The cultists own one of the only two mills in the settlement, the other being managed by a drunkard with an idle son who lets the business fall to disrepair. The Christians, irritating with their sombre dirges and their palsied testifying, are yet shrewd in matters that pertain to commerce. Finding their reward in faith alone, the converts work the mill unwaged, all singing while they slave, and as they toil the major trade within the village falls to them and so the coffers grow. Soon, it is rumoured, they will buy the other mill. Increasingly dependent on these jabbering fanatics, so the village grows uneasy while its children wander off, next seen garbed all in black and crooning at their millwheel.
If I find no solid evidence that will connect a culprit to the forgeries, I might fare worse than to attribute authorship to these religious outcasts. There’s no doubt that it would be a popular decision with the villagers, absolving me from blame or, more alarming yet, reprisals. Better still, the Emperor is presently inclined against the sect and of a humour that would welcome persecutions. Though a dozen forgers crucified might earn for me a favourable report, a Christian plot against the treasury, against the very heart of Rome, might earn me a promotion. We shall see.
I turn the horse about and move on up the path, coming at last upon the summit, where a splendid quiet and desolation reigns. Save for a general indentation, nothing can be seen that marks the fated hill-camp’s site, whatever contours that may yet remain all smothered by the heaping weeds. Here I dismount and leave my tethered steed to slobber on the grass while I regard the flat expanse more closely.
After a moment’s scrutiny the rounded outline of the camp is made discernible, part fringed by briar. The rill of risen turf that measures the perimeter is broken at one point, perhaps denoting where a gate once stood. I walk across towards it and, on my approach, notice a smaller ring of time-worn stones set just inside the gap; perhaps a remnant kiln or oven of some kind.
Save that there are warm ashes at its centre.
Although the fire is dead, these cinders are its voice: it speaks to me. Someone has set a blaze atop this hill, and on more nights than one if what I’m told is true. Too big to simply roast a fowl or warm the hands by, this is fire with purpose, and that purpose would seem clandestine. Why else choose this remote spot, shunned by all your superstitious kinsmen? Why else choose the crack of night to be about your labours unless they are secret; works which, if discovered, would ensure that you were pinned out in the sun to dry?
For purposes of forgery, a quiet and isolated spot whose vantage will allow intruders to be noticed half a league away’s preferable. A haunted hill is quite ideal. The fire would be required to heat the unmarked metal blanks and make them soft, following which they would be set upon an anvil where is raised the obverse imprint of a coin. A punch, cylindrical in shape, is placed above the weighed blank disc, and in the punch is a reverse impression of the same silver Denarius. The punch is beaten with a hammer and in this way are the fresh-forged coins stamped out.
I drop down to my knees and carefully begin to comb the dew-drenched grass, working out in a spiral from about the remnants of the fire. If they were beating out the coins by lamplight, hurriedly, and if my luck is with me ...
After one half of an hour I find it, fallen there between a brace of grey and spectral dandelions. I lift it up between my thumb and finger, turning it against the light. The head of Diocletian gazes unforgiving, out across the buried camp.
A bird shrills from the briar hedge. I flip the coin about and note without surprise a fault there in the reverse. Simply, it is that belonging to a different coin; a different year, perhaps the reign of Severus. Mismatchings such as this are commonplace, for though an anvil with an obverse die might last for sixteen thousand punchings, only half as many would be made before the punch wore out, so that another was required. If the correct reverse could not be found, a different one was used on the assumption few would notice.
But this Little Roman notices. He doesn’t miss a thing.
My trophy safely fastened in a hip pouch, I remount my horse for an uneasy stumble down the hill towards the river-track, where my excitement at my find quite overcomes me and I gallop all the way back to the settlement. The crew about the stout, top-knotted man mark my return and read my agitation. There are decorations hung about the streets in preparation for some senseless festival. A small boy dressed up as a girl walks at the head of a procession with a pig upon a leash, but in my haste to get indoors and race upstairs I fail to register this vision until I am in my room, pulling a set of scales from out of the army bag.
There are three proofs for silver, any one sufficient to establish forgery. The first employs the use of the coticula, a touchstone made of basenite or lydian. When it is rubbed on silver or on gold, from the markings left an expert may read the metal’s purity down to the closest scruple. I have seen this done, always by older men, but do not have such confidence about my own abilities.
The second proof requires a furnace, with an iron fire shovel heated white, the metal to be tested heaped thereon. At such heats, purest silver will glow white, while an inferior grade will glow dull red, and black will signal worthlessness. The test is not infallible. The shovel may be drenched first in men’s urine, and will then provide a different indication.
On the whole, for coins, the proof by weight is still the best, and easiest. Assembling the scales, I take the forged Denarius from out my pouch and set it down beside another coin, a newly struck one given to me at the mint there in Londinium, to serve as a comparison.
Each coin, if genuine, should weigh one-sixth part of an ounce. Adulterated metal would not weigh so much, having less heavy silver in the blend. This test is a formality, yet one which Quintus Claudius specifically requires, and so I set the coins, both true and false, one in each bronze pan of the scales, to weigh them one against the other. Then I watch.
The false coin sinks. The true coin rises.
Frowning, I remove both coins and test the scales before replacing them, taking especial care to see which coin is in which pan.
The false coin sinks. The true coin rises.
How is this? How can this be? The coin found at the camp can be no other than a forgery with its two sides mismatched, and yet ...
(Upon the stairs up from the tavern to my room there comes a muffled sound: one of the dogs that haunts the inn. Engrossed in mystery, it barely registers.)
I take the scales apart and reassemble them. I set the coins back in their separate pans. The false coin sinks. The true coin rises. Are the laws of nature now reversed, that such things may occur? How may a wren outweigh a horse? How may a coin plucked from a forger’s den outweigh one fresh struck from the mint itself, unless ...
The forgery. Unless the forgery were purer, had the purest metal, purest silver, purer than the mint. But no, that cannot be. No point in forging money purer than the Empire standard, not unless ...
Unless it is not that the forged coin is more purely struck, but rather that the true coin is found lacking. This cannot be so. I saw it, freshly minted. Held it, yet warm, closed within my hand. It is as pure as any coin in Rome.
(Outside my chamber now, a closer scuffling. Something nears, and still I cannot take my eyes from those of Diocletian, argent and severe.)
Unless. Unless we cut the coins.
The blood is scalding, simmering in my cheek that I should entertain such blasphemy. It is grotesque and flies against all reason to suppose the Empire capable of such adulteration, to the point that ounce for ounce a worthless forgery might hold more value. Why, if that were so, if all the wealth of Rome were but a gilt concealing poverty, then Rome itself would be the forgery, a sham, as good as fallen with no rampart save for promissory notes to keep the tick-scarred hordes at bay. It is monstrosity itself, this thought. It is a night-start. It is stark, and bottomless.
And it is true.
It crashes in, the fearful certainty, and breaks me. Let me die, or better yet have died before this cold, weighed fact could murder me, before I knew that we were poor and all was ruin. Though my cheeks are simmering yet, the eyes boil over, tears that sting like vinegar. Behind me now the door is opening. I hear a shuffle as of many feet, and know it is the village men, that they have come to kill me, but I cannot look at them for shame: for them to witness me, to witness Rome like this.
At last I lift my head. They stand hulked in the door with muscled cudgels in their fists, the grey man with his paunch and top-knot to the fore. Stone-faced, expressionless, they watch me, watch the little Roman as he sobs above his scales, and if they feel disgust at this display it is not sharper than my own. They pass a glance between them, and the grey man shrugs. They’re going to kill me now. Kneeling upon the floor, I close my eyes and I await the blow. A final silence falls.
Then, many footsteps, moving off downstairs, an avalanche of wood and leather. Doors slam somewhere far below. I open up my eyes. The men are gone.
They saw it in my face. They saw me as a man already slain, not worth the killing. Rome is dead. Rome is dead. Rome is dead, and where shall I go now? Not home. Home is a stage façade of paper, peeling, faded by a sun of cheap pyrites. I cannot go home, and who, who else will have me?
I crouch staring at the coins, one false, one falser yet, until the light begins to fail and they are both become pale blurs there in the gloom, no longer to be told apart, a shadow fallen on that noble brow.
The room fills up with murk. I cannot bear the darkness here, that drinks all definition, and I rise and stumble as one in a dream, first down the stairs, then, dazed, into the street. The celebrations are already under way, streets heavy with the stench of ruffian life. They piss in doorways, swing oars at each other’s heads, and laugh, and kneel in their own sick. They fornicate against the alley walls like prisoners. They fart and shout and they are all that is, and all that will be. Slow, I shuffle out amongst the great lewd push of them. A jug of ale is pressed into my hand. With rotten smiles they grip my arm, and kiss my tear-tracked cheek, and draw me in.
** <strong>November Saints, AD 1064</strong>
With age, the act of waking has become a great confusion. I no longer know upon which decade of this life my eyes will open: lame and frost-burned by the old church gate or in my convent cell here, morning’s first sick blueness on the wall; blue of the dead.
My cot is hard, that I may feel the bones that are inside me, restless and impatient to get out. Not long, they think. She’s old. Not long. Beneath the rough dusk sheet a chill aches in my bad leg’s starving marrow and I know it is November. Last night, on All Hallow’s Eve, I dreamed I was a man.
Rain-blind, he rode the fierce night through upon a fever-horse towards Northampton here, though in my dream I thought of it as Ham Town and I know not why. The drizzle stung my face and cold draughts rattled in my ears, and as I rode it seemed that all the terrors of November were upon me, rude jaws snapping at the steaming fetlocks of my horse so that I wept in fright, and when I woke I did not know at first what year it was, and placed a hand upon my leathered sex for fear that I should find instead his instrument, mea culpa, mea culpa, Blessed Virgin forgive me.
Creaking inside my chest I rise from off my cot, the sour sheet flung aside, my burlap habit pulled on in a single, shivering movement; coarse folds, grey against grey dawn. I finish dressing in the half-light and I limp the damp stone passages to Matins where I offer up all thanks to God that I may limp at all and dwell instead upon the passion of Our Lord. I work the days, I count the beads and say the names.
When they are mindful of my halten foot they set me to a task where I may not walk far, as when I tend the gardens here at Abingdon. My bone fists tug amongst the weeds and often will my thoughts turn now to Ivalde, when he kept the graves and gardens in the old church and I lay against its gate-post, begging. Sometimes he would talk with me, his idiot talk that had no reason since a cart-horse kicked his head while he was but a mite. Now I recall his pale green eyes, his Norse-red hair. He was not more than sixteen winters old, without a jot of harm in him.
‘Alfgiva,’ he would say to me, ‘one day I shall set out and make a pilgrimage to Rome, all for the honour of the Drotinum. What do you think of that?’ Drotinum was a word by which he meant St Peter, blessed be his name. The word means ‘Lord’. He would go on and on with Rome and all the places he would go and I would lie against the gate-post with its bare stones digging in my back and, may the Lord forgive me, I would hate him. Hate him for the things that he might live to see while I saw nothing but that grey stone post; the same great wheel of tree and field that spun about it every day, the slow and shallow river downhill from that church, the bridge of blackened timber that had surely spanned it since the world was small.
He’d know the smell of foreign ports and cities all of gold, and I would lie and count the figures and the faces, raised up from the stone, that capered in the church’s eaves, and I would wonder, as I did each day, about the figures and the faces on the far side of the church, that I had never seen although they were so near. For these reasons would I hate him, may the Lord forgive me. In the winters I would freeze and in the summers did not have the strength to brush the flies from off my face or bosom.
Ivalde never went to Rome. A humour came upon his lungs the day that he and noble Bruning lifted up the flagstones of the church to dig the worm-laced earth beneath and I was with them there. His chest was never better from that day, and he was put below the ground before the month was done. I took my vows not long thereafter, in the year of Our Lord one thousand and fifty. It is fourteen years now since I last saw Ivalde’s face, or heard his senseless talk. May God have mercy on our souls, both his and mine.
I did not hate him all the time, except when I was bitter, which was often, but upon my fair days I would talk with him, and laugh, and wish him well upon his voyages. I never once saw Bruning laugh with him or heard him say a kind word to the boy, though Bruning was the parish priest and was responsible for Ivalde’s keep while Ivalde tended to the carrot crop and kept the graves. Nor, for that matter, did the noble Bruning ever throw a coin to me for all his wealth; for all he passed me every day there ragged by his gate. Still, that is in the past and Brunigus himself is dead these four years gone. I am the last alive who stood there in that church and saw: Alfgiva, who lay broken in its shadow all her life, then fled to see its light unearthed, there near the crossroads, by the river-bridge.
November grows long in its icicle tooth and I scrub the worn flags till the wet and the shine on them cast by the rare shafts of sunlight would blind you. I pray and I count off the beads. On the twentieth day of this month is the feast of the Blessed St Edmund, and we are shown pictures depicting his passion that we then may know him more nearly. We see him first scourged and then shot through with arrows, his faith yet unshaken, his God unrenounced. At the last is the head of him struck from his shoulders to roll at his feet, where a beast on all fours stands to guard it. The Reverend Mother would have it the beast is a wolf, though its image looks more like a dog, and yet monstrously big is it made so that I grow afraid of this picture and think of it even when it is no longer in sight. We can none of us know, what it is that walks under the ground.
So the days pass. A woman of Glassthorpehill over the Nobottle Woods is possessed of a spirit, and vomits up animal beings like little white frogs. This is told me by Sister Eadgyth, though I did not wait in her company long enough that I might come to know more. She endures constipations that make her breath foul, and her humour alike, but she is a good Christian and hard at her work.
I did not walk at all, from the time of my birth to my thirtieth year, when I lived in the yard by the chalk-merchant’s house that was over the way from the church. In a lean-to of sail-cloth and old, painted boards I abided alone, for my father had taken his leave while I was yet unborn and my mother had gone to the colic before I was ten. With the rise of the sun every morn I would crawl from my shack like a beetle and drag my weight over the stones of the lane to my place at the gate by my elbows, where until this day is the skin dead and worn, without feeling, and may be pinched up in grey folds that are like to dried clay.
On the boards of my lean-to were pictures of angels, but half unmade; drawn with an unpractised fist. It was sometimes my fancy that they were the work of my father and left incomplete by his leave-taking, although I knew them more likely the mark of a stranger’s hand, someone long dead, or passed over the river from Spelhoe to Cleyley. I had these boards turned with the pictures faced inward and, laid by my candle at night, I’d imagine the clumsy embrace of their arms without hands, these omitted for want of pictorial skill. I would think myself fanned by their unfinished wings.
Now the near-winter skies have a burnished and argent light to them, hung over the convent at Abingdon here in the far fields north-east of the old church where so long I lay. As the feast of St Edmund approaches, so too does my sleep grow more fitful and restless; fraught with the most wretched of dreams, where I ride through the hurricane night as a man with my thoughts in a bitter confusion and enemies hot at my heel or, worse yet, I will wake and cry out in despair at the death of my brother, though brother in truth I have none, nor have I ever wanted for such.
On the day of the feast I awake with such words in my mouth as to frighten the wits from my poor sister Aethelflaed, there in her cell next to mine. With the voice of a bear I am growling of murder: ‘In Hel’s Town was my brother Edmund flayed first from his neck to his loins, whence he wept and complained, lying spread as if garbed in a blood-shirt that Ingwar’s men folded back, shewing the red, stinking harp there beneath.’
I console Sister Aethelflaed, calming her, even though truly I am more afraid for myself. I have such thoughts inside me that make me ashamed before God; other voices and lives speaking in me, not only in dreams but throughout the day’s labours. I sit by the well in the yard with my better leg folded beneath me and busy myself with the washing of smocks, when I find myself thinking how foolish was my brother Edmund to hold with his faith through the earlier torturings, only to shriek out its renunciation in his mortal pain as he begged them for death.
Now my hands become still in the well’s freezing waters, the fingers grown numb that the smock I am rinsing falls from them and floats in a thin scum of November leaves. I am thinking that should I be captured then gladly will I offer praise unto Wotan, for all his one eye and the pale shyte of ravens encrusting his shoulders, if he will deliver me from this demise; this blood-eagle, that it may not unfold its bloody-ribbed wings and make naked my heart ...
I may not say how long I am sitting there until I come to myself, and rise up with a cry at the horrors that visited with me while I sat in reverie. Shaking and pale, with my bad leg dragged useless behind me, I go to the Reverend Mother and tell her that I am afflicted by dreams such as may be the work of an incubus, asking permission that I might be scourged for to rid me of these noxious thoughts. Here she voices concern with respect to my frailty and age, bidding me reconsider and suffer some penance less strict and exacting. I tell her of my imprecations, alone in my cell; all the rosaries said but unanswered. I beg that she let me be scourged, that the flail drive away what the beads cannot halt, lest my immortal soul should itself be imperilled. At last she consents, with the penance to be undertaken the following day, that I might yet have time to more fully consider the rigorous path I have chosen with all of my heart to pursue. I must not shrink from this, for I fear for my faith in the face of these infidel visions and flukes of the night; Blessed Virgin forgive me, deliver me.
Later, alone in my cell with the candle-sketched devils of shadow that leap and cavort on its walls when I move, I am thinking of Ivalde, so many years dead now. He came and he sat by me there at the gate where I lay on a cold morning just before spring. In his slow, simple-minded inflection he told me of how he’d set forth on his pilgrimage that very day. He was going, he told me, to Rome, although Bruning had scolded and railed at him, saying that God and the Blessed St Peter had better to do than pay heed to a half-witted garden-boy.
Though I’d no liking for Bruning, it suited me on that particular day to agree with him and thus give vent to my spite, for I had not slept well and was weary of Ivalde and all of his unceasing chatter of Rome. ‘You should listen to Bruning,’ I told him. ‘It’s only the rich and the holy like him as should think themselves worthy of going to Rome! Why, you’re nothing but only a simpleton. You may be sure that St Peter would care not a bit more for you than he would a poor cripple like me.’ He looked hurt at my words, like a baby, and fell to a stutter while making attempts at professing his faith in the Drotinum. I turned away from him then, and would speak no more to him till he went away, seeming woeful and filled up with puzzlement.
Inside my heart I was sure that this fresh talk of pilgrimage would come to nothing; that on the next morn I’d see Ivalde stooped, tending his crops with his idle dreams yet again put to one side, as had often-times happened before, but it was not to be. He had gone, Bruning said, in the night; on a wagon that made for the coast in the hope that he would find a ship whereupon he might then work his passage to Normandy, thereafter Rome.
Ivalde’s leaving threw good Bruning into a temper so fierce as to last for some days, and it seemed to me that the priest knew a great scorn for poor Ivalde’s presumptions. No doubt Bruning felt that if anyone were to petition St Peter then he, Bruning, should be by right and by rank at the head of the line. I would see that stout priest red of face, cursing under his breath as he stooped to pull weeds from between parsnip rows in the untended garden, and knew it was Ivalde he cursed. So the days turned to weeks and not until the feast of the Passion was Ivalde returned to us.
That afternoon I was sat by the gate with the grey cloud hung heavy and low, fit to snag on the church’s low spire, and a sad, sagging heat in the air. All my clothing was damped in this miserable warmth so that I was for ever unpeeling my skirt where it stuck to the tops of my legs. I did not notice Ivalde until he had breasted the hump of the river-bridge, downhill and over the crossroads from where I sat ragged and slumped by the gate. Even then, when I noted the strange, shambling figure’s approach, I at first did not know it for Ivalde, so changed was the boy in the wake of his travels. Not till he had come by the crossroads and I saw the red of his hair did I know who it was, and confess a mean gladness to see that he could not have visited Rome.
As he walked up the hill with that shuffling gait that he had not been marked with before there was something about him that I cannot easily fit into words, as if here were a picture that I knew of old and had seen many times in the past, though I cannot think where: this wan fool with the yellowing darts of grass caught in his hair, stumbling over the bridge to the crossroads like one fresh returned from a battle; a look in his eyes as if he knows not where he must be, only that he must be there. He walked up the lane with the sky blinding white at his back, and I thought ‘This has happened before’, and I watched him come near, at once strange and familiar in aspect like one of the queer painted figures that grace a cartomancer’s deck.
‘I have come back, Alfgiva,’ he said when he neared me. His voice sounded hollow, with none of the life it once had. All the nonsense was gone from him now, though I cared little more for the faraway oddness it left in its stead. He stood by me, and yet did not suffer himself to kneel down by my side when he spoke, nor did he look towards me but all the while stared at the church, and his face was without any feeling at all; without even a blink in his eye.
With my neck all craned back like a bird I spoke up to him as he stood dark there with bright silver sky overhead. ‘Ivalde? Where have you been? You did not go to Rome?’
He glanced down at me then, and a cloudiness came in his eyes as if he did not know me. The small birds fell quiet in the yew and what afternoon shadows there were seemed to pause in their crawl to the east, and at length Ivalde spoke with his voice small and wondering, almost as if he recounted the tale of another boy, someone he’d met long ago and remembered but dimly.
‘Not Rome. I did not go to Rome. Thrice I boarded the boat, but he came to me so that I fell in a fit, and he told me that I must return.’ His eyes drifted away from me, back to the church, and I tugged at the leg of his breeks as I spoke to him.
‘Who sent you back? Is it Bruning you speak of? He’s been at this church since you left.’ Slowly, and without looking away from the church as he did so, Ivalde shook his great copper head so that sharp stalks of grass were dislodged from his hair. I followed their fall with my eyes to his feet, which I saw with alarm to be bloody, the boots hung in rags.
‘No. Not Bruning. The Drotinum. He sent me back. Him or one of his angels.’ Ivalde looked once more to me and I could see that his green eyes were brimming with tears. ‘Oh, Alfgiva,’ he said. ‘Oh Alfgiva, whatever has happened to me?’
As his face grew first pink and then crumpled itself as he wept, I could but stare at him. Quite unable to answer his question, I ventured one of my own: ‘Ivalde, what are you saying, the Drotinum sent you back here? You do not mean St Peter?’
He started to nod, then instead deigned to shake his head violently, eyes clenched and streaming. ‘I don’t know. It looked like an angel, with folded green wings and it stood twice as tall as a man. It said I should come back.’ Here he opened his eyes and he stared at me fiercely. ‘Alfgiva, it spoke down a flute, and it walked through the wall upon great spindled legs like a bird.’ He looked back at the church, and I saw he was shaking. ‘The room was too small to contain it, and yet it stood tall and the ceiling was melted like smoke so that I might look up through it to where the Drotinum stood there above me, with eyes full of care.’ He fell silent. A pennant of black cloud was slowly unrolled, hung up over the church with its shadow fell on to the garden and graves, the turfed humps of them, pregnant with skeletons.
This was not Ivalde, his nonsense of old to be lightly waved off, for I saw that a change was in him, and I shivered and knew I believed what he said, though I did not feel glad. For a moment I sat with him, sharing his silence, but could not long keep from my questions and asked if this angel, this Drotinum had come to Ivalde on more times than one. He looked full of such misery then as he nodded, I knew that if Ivalde had ever in innocence craved for a sign from above, then he’d surely repented and now wished his visions behind him.
‘The first time it came to me, I did not see it, but felt as I walked up the boards to the ship as if something more big than a horse were stood blocking my path, and my face and my fingers would creep if I made but to take a step forward. At this, I grew frightened and would not set foot on the boat so that it sailed without me and left me to wait on another ship bound for the Normandy coast. I grew vexed with myself as I waited and, cursing myself for a coward, I vowed I would board the next vessel to dock.’
Seeming now to regain his composure, he gazed at the church. Squatting over its door, carved in stone, was the token of Lust with her legs set apart and the cold, mossy lips of her sex gaping wide, her six fellows beside her with three to each side.
Ivalde’s face seemed to slacken and settle. The vague fogs of distance were risen afresh in his eyes as he spoke. ‘When it came, it was due to set sail with the dawn, and I said I would sleep until then in some fisherman’s sheds I had found on the edge of the sand, up above the sharp grass. I awoke in the night with my feet tangled up in the slippery fish-nets, to find that the angel was standing above me. Its sorry green feathers were dripping with wet and though I dare not look I was filled with a queer understanding that smaller things, hairless and blind, struggled down by the stumps of its awful thin legs. It had eyes like an unhappy man, but it spoke through a beak like a flute, and it told me that I must return. I woke up with the piss on my legs and dare not leave the hut the next day till I knew that my ship had put forth.’
‘The third time, I boarded the ship and was sent below that was the time that I spoke of before, when it came through the wall while I sat there awake and instructed me, so that I ran from the ship in my fear and so too did I run from that town on the coast. I have run, and when I ran no more then I walked, till I came here. I came by the brow of the hill to the west of the town. It was there that I saw him again, and less time ago than it would take for a candle to burn half its length.’
From the doors of the church, as if birthed from the chill cunt that gaped in the stonework above him, fat Bruning came striding out over the wet grass, through which trailed the hem of his dark robings so that he seemed more to glide, without feet. He was shouting at Ivalde, his mouthings too angry to forge any sense from, yet Ivalde ignored his approach and continued to speak with me, gazing above Bruning’s head to the tower of the church.
‘It was waiting when I reached the crest of the hill and could see the town spread out before me. It stood far away from me this time, alone in a scorched patch of grass, off across a great ring where the trees had been cleared. Tall and green, I mistook it at first for a sapling and then was struck still as stone, cold with a terrible fear when it waved to me. Though it was too far away to be heard, and I cannot recall any sound being made, yet it seemed that I heard its flute voice just as if it were stood by my shoulder. It said the remains of a friend unto God were hid under the church, and that I must tell Bruning. I hurried on. When I looked back all I saw were two saplings, their trunks close together and like unto legs.’
Puffing mightily, Bruning himself was upon us now, bullying Ivalde and jeering at him for his failure in visiting Rome. ‘So the Lord did not see fit to favour your pilgrimage after all? What did I say! You have come crawling back in hope, vain hope I say, that I may yet have saved you some task. Well ...’ Here, Bruning trailed off, made uncomfortable both by Ivalde’s remote unconcern and his silence. A look of uncertainty clouded the face of the priest, and it was in that moment as if he first knew himself outdone; could tell by some mere thread of meaning, some clew in the garden-boy’s stance that Ivalde had passed nearer the world of the spirit than Bruning himself ever had.
When the priest had grown silent and shaken then Ivalde related the tale of his travels to Bruning as he had revealed them to me, thus coming at last to the spectre’s instruction to dig neath the floor of the church, where a friend unto God would be found.
Bruning stared at the lad while he spoke, but did not once break in with a jibe or remark, and when Ivalde had finished the priest was grown pale, and could not seem to speak for a while. When he did, there was nothing of rancour nor superiority that might be read in his voice, which was faint and unsteady. ‘Come, Ivalde,’ he whispered. ‘I’ll find for us spades.’
They set off up the path to the door of the church, leaving me quite forgotten behind, though I called them. I watched them a while, and then made up my mind I would follow them, though it were further than I was accustomed to crawl. With my cold elbows soaked by the dew I dragged over the grass, my eyes fixed on the door and the crater-eyed vice that crouched leering above it. I feel to this day the dank slither of grass on my belly, the ache in my arms as I felt it then. It was the last time that I ever crawled.
Sister Aethelflaed snores in the next cell to mine and my candle is guttering. Now I recall that tomorrow I am to be scourged and a fear wells in me that I swiftly fight down; turn instead my attention to prayers, supplications that I may for once be spared terrible dreams in the hours before light comes again. With my rough sheets drawn fast all about my cold back I turn on to my side with my ear flat against the hard wood of my cot. The patch under my cheek, where the timber is dulled and made soft by the dribblings of hundreds of women, asleep ...
I am leading my horse down a hill in the dark with the wild cries of Ingwar’s men over the crest far behind me, too far to make out what they say. Near the base of the hill is a treacherous mire where my steed loses footings and sinks to its haunches, eyes mad-white and rolling and all the time whinnying fearfully. I grow afraid that the enemies gaining upon me will hear it and so in my panic abandon it, making off over the fields, my feet heavy, gigantic with mud. Viking curses hang brutish and blunt on the night in my wake. The blanched rushes rear up in the moonlight before me, and there from their midst looms a great mound of earth like the skull of an ice giant, long dead, toppled face first in river-weeds. At my back, closer now, rough men are calling a word that grows gradually clearer, becoming a name, and waist-deep in the rushes I know that the name is my own. As their heavy fur boots tread the reeds flat behind me I know who I am, and this cold recognition has shocked me from out of my sleep to the dark of my cell with the dream-name still thick on my tongue.
Ragener. Blessed Ragener, brother of Edmund and murdered like Edmund before by the North-man invaders when he would not honour their gods. Sainted Ragener, wearing like Edmund the crown of the martyrs, his feast day a single day after the feast that’s afforded his brother. How could I, of all men and women that live, have forgotten?
I lie in the blackness alone with the blind hammer-beat of my blood, feel the spray smashed up over the sheer cliffs of blasphemy cold on my brow. In our lessons we are taught how the brother saints would not submit to the Viking usurpers, nor would they renounce the true God, and for this were they scourged and then shot through with arrows, beheaded at last but with souls yet intact. In my dream, things work differently. Edmund is dead with his lungs all but torn from his breast, his last agonized words a denial of God while his brother flees terrified into the night where he plans his conversion to Wotan that Ragener may thus avoid all the torments that Edmund has suffered. I cannot believe that these dreams come from God that so contravene all that is taught by his ministers. Wondering, ill at ease as to the source of my dreams if not God, I lie wide awake here in my cell until morning is come on this twenty-first day of November, the feast day of Blessed St Ragener, when I shall at last be scourged of these visions that now are so hateful to me.
Having noted the lack of my presence at Matins, the Reverend Mother is brought to my cell where I ask that I might be excused all my duties that day, so to better prepare for the scourging that I must endure when the evening is come. Here the Reverend Mother expresses again both her doubts with regard to the ordeal itself and her estimates as to my chance of surviving the flail, with my late years and lameness considered. At last, having seen my conviction, the Reverend Mother agrees I may stay in my cell the day long, that I may come to peace with myself and with God.
I sit there on my cot, one knee drawn to my breast, with the hours drifting by through a dulled gauze yet fraught with uneasiness. When at last Sister Eadgyth is sent to my cell that I may thus be brought to the scourge, I discover my good leg has fallen asleep while immobile these hours, so that Sister Eadgyth must carry me clung on her arm to the place of my punishment, head close to mine with her midden-breath full on my cheek. Thus unable to walk, I cannot but recall when my legs failed me last, as I slithered on elbows and belly across the cold stone of the portal and into the nave of the church where both Ivalde and Bruning were already stripped of their shirts, prising up the great flags of the floor with their spades, the flat slabs levered up on one edge then allowed to fall back, thus exposing the dark plot of bloodworm-crazed earth underneath.
As Eadgyth half lifts and half drags me the length of the passageway, I am unable to say where I am, or what year it might be; am as nameless as one freshly woken. I crawl through the nave of the church to where Bruning and Ivalde are digging, great shovels of earth flung up careless and high to come rattling down on the flags where I drag my weight over the dirt to the edge of their hole. Now, face down in the earth, I am Ragener, weeping and pleading as strong Viking hands seize me hard underneath my arms, wrenching me upward to stumble beside them towards the pale mound hulking up from the rushes. Their hands are become those of Sister Eadgyth, now helping me into the little stone room where the leather-backed horse made from wood is prepared and the Reverend Mother is waiting.
Her voice sounds so far away. Sister Eadgyth is stripping me bare to my waist and arranging me face down the length of the horse with my flat nipples tightening, pressed to the chill of the hide, and the cold in my chest is like that when I lay on the floor of the church, with my fingers hooked over the edge of the flags that now bordered the hole where both Ivalde and Bruning were digging, with Bruning stood there on the slabs to one side of the pit mopping sweat from his pendulous bosom, while Ivalde, the ribs showing through at his sides, stood waist deep with the earth raining up from the blade of his shovel. I’d only just pulled myself up to the edge to peer down when the dirt-floor collapsed beneath Ivalde to wide yawning dark and the rattle of loose soil below.
Showers of dirt trickle down from the bare knoll to fall in the rushes encircling its base. Ingwar’s brigands are hauling me up to the flat rock on top of the mound, where they laugh at my tears and pathetic attempts to befriend them while dragging the clothes from my body, and when I am naked they laugh at my manhood and throw me down hard on my face with one of the men kneeling before me and pinning me down by my forearms. I gaze at him with the blood gumming my eyes. It has leaked from my scalp where they cuffed me, and through it his face is more terrible than I had e’er hoped to see in this life, with the plaited beard dyed into stripes of all colours and maddening drugs on his breath in this year of Our Lord Christ eight hundred and seventy.
Stood at the top of the leather horse holding my wrists, Sister Eadgyth breathes rancid and hot in my face and the year is one thousand and sixty-four. Somewhere behind me the Reverend Mother is raising the flail of raw hide past her shoulder. For what seems an unending while I can hear the uncured thongs as they whistle down through the chamber’s cold air and a blind, searing pain rips from shoulders and back to engulf my whole being in terrible light.
In the Lord’s year one thousand and fifty Ivalde screams to Bruning for help as his legs churn through waterfall dirt in attempting to run up the sides of the hole while its floor falls away into dark down below. The fat priest lurches forward to pull the boy clear as I lie peering over the rim of the pit, flagstones chilling my belly. Beneath me, I see that the base of the hole has collapsed into caverns or tunnels existing below. For a moment it seems that I make out the indistinct bulk of the tomb that is later revealed to be hidden therein and containing the bones of the martyred St Ragener, brother of Edmund. At most, squinting into the black, I perceive its vague outline for only a moment before my attention is called to the sense of another large shape in the darkness beneath me, this one with a sound that suggests a huge, shuffling motion. I have but an instant to marvel before the uncanny thing happens. Good Bruning, when he has recovered, will later describe what we saw as the Holy Ghost made manifest in its terrible radiance, but I am flat on my face with my head hung out over the mouth of the pit and I see. When it opens its monstrous eyes I am staring straight into them. Smothering brilliance is everywhere. Off in the empty white nothingness Bruning makes sounds like a woman.
I scream as the first of the Viking men plunges his hardness inside me, but after the third I sob only a little and then to myself at the thought of my life and this terrible end. As the last of the men takes his weapon from in me I’m turned on my back, whereupon I start pleading again and profess my allegiance to Wotan. The sound of my terrified voice is a curse in my ears until one of my captors brings silence by raping my mouth to the jeers of his fellows. I try to take in the immensity of what is happening to me. The smallest amongst my tormentors now brings out a knife, and before he has touched it to me I am screaming.
The scourge cuts my back and I writhe. Sister Eadgyth holds tight to my wrists while away in the distance the Reverend Mother is praying and there is a high noise that goes on and on.
Bruning screams, Ivalde screams and the white light is everywhere. Something of hideous size flutters over my head as I lie on the floor of the church. Later on, when the light has gone and I go back to find Bruning and Ivalde both sat by the wall staring blank into space with the floor gaping open before them, the fat priest will claim that the wings brushing over my neck are the wings of the Heavenly Spirit; the dew that it scatters to fall in my hair he will call holy water, yet why is it slippery and thick like the seed of a man, or the slime of old rivers? And why is the Heavenly Spirit not manifest here as a bird but a terrible fluttering fan of pale green luminescence that trembles and whirls in the dazzle of white, scarcely solid, so that parts of it will appear to pass through other parts without harm, or to slice through the great wooden pillars supporting the church just as if they were air? There’s a terrible clattering, clattering. Blinded and frantic with terror, I leap to my feet and run out from the church. Not until I am halfway down hill and approaching the crossroads do I understand what I’ve done.
In eight hundred and seventy they have cut open my chest. I had not believed any plight suffered by man could be equal in horror to this, that is happening now, in this moment, to me. They reach into the cavity, seizing the ribs to pull upwards and out, and I pass beyond pain. I am straddling a carpenter’s horse in a cold room and know that I am an old woman. My back hangs in ribbons. I call out to Wotan for succour and at this the woman who flogs me flogs harder. I lie on a smouldering pyre with my throat cut, and cook, in a great skull of iron or bound to a post, and I rot as the head of a traitor hung high on the gates of this town. I am child. I am murderer, poet and saint. I am Ragener. I am Alfgiva, and gone beyond hurt to a flagellant rapture that only the martyrs may know, coming bloody to Paradise, hands burned to stumps or all bristling with arrows, our breasts rendered open whence spills the great light of our hearts.
I am lifted above, with the noise of the world a great roar in my ears, and if I am in Heaven then where come there so many fires?
** <strong>Limping to Jerusalem, Post AD 1100</strong>
Hard as new steel the sun cuts from a lard of cloud, although its light seems wearied by the effort. I am old, yet is this ceaseless and exhausting world here still. My piles nag, saddle-chafed, wherefore upon this showery morning I am filled with a choleric bile and have twice cuffed my squire. As we descend the street of Jews into the reek and clamour of the horse-fayre he falls back to ride behind me that I may not see the poison in his look.
Ahead, my dogs run on amongst the market traders and their fly-chewed nags. With pink jaws wet and frilled like cunny, here and there they chop and snap upon an ankle or a fetlock, for the sport of it. The crowd fall back that I may pass, blunt-headed gets of Saxony with spittle on their chins, although the girls are often fair. The scuffle of my charger’s hoof is loud upon the hard-packed dirt, the fayre now fallen into quiet as whispers from a comely woman’s skirt may hush an ale room. Now they touch their scabby brows at me as I ride by, and look up fearfully. Were I not halt and aged I would bed their wives and daughters both before them ere I took their heads ...
I must not think of heads.
My squire and I pass on. The crowd is knit once more together in our wake and falls again to chattering and barter, with our passage through its midst a wound soon healed. Before and to the left of me the crumbling church looms heavy in its sandstone walls of dirty gold, named for Saint Peter, by whose intercession were the relics of Saint Ragener here found, or so the tale is told. A half-mad nun of Abingdon, dead twenty years or more, spoke of an angel or a holy bird within the church that healed her crippled legs.
That may be very well for her, yet I am lame and filled with aches, and know her vision to be but the ravings that are come upon a woman when her monthly bloods have ceased. Since the Crusade, I am made out of sorts with God. A ray falls out from Heaven now to strike the church so that its gaping windows seem to fill with brightness, yet I know the light is false, surrendered soon to squall.
This island rain: I am already wet inside my jerkin from the shower endured whilse hunting, early-on this day. The dampness hereabouts has raised a leather in my cheek that was not always there, but my complaints are weak, and lack conviction. Did there ever come a morning out there in those Holy deserts when I did not wake to find my belly black with flies, the sweat boiled out of me and pooled between my dugs, and pray to know again this sickly northern light, this drizzle in my eyes? The sun here throws us only scraps, already having squandered its great bounty on the distant Heathen, stood amongst his hills of sand.
The church is fell behind, and on our right hand here Chalk-monger Lane winds up towards the castle’s higher grounds as we descend upon the cross-roads at the bridge, whereby its gated yard stands opened out. We clatter in between the great brick gateposts and across the flags. Yard-boys, who not a moment since were no doubt cursing me as every harlot’s son, run out all smiles to take my bridle, crying, ‘See! It is Lord Simon. He is home.’
My eyes, without volition it would seem, climb up to where Maud’s chamber window over-looks the courtyard. No one there. Dismounted, with a yard-lad either side of me, I hang one arm across each of their necks, and with my weight supported thus am steered towards the great door, one leg dragged behind, scraped through the silvering of puddles as I go. Once, in a rage, Maud said that she would lie upon her cot and weep to hear that sound, that scraping, for it meant I was returned. Helped up the three broad steps, I am inside the castle. In my bag a brace of ducks are stiffening, cooling in their thickened blood. Black eyes that stare, unblinking, into blackness.
In the fastness of my chamber are the wretched, muddied garments pulled from me, whereafter I am dried and dressed to take my meal: cold mutton, warm bread and sour beers. Maud does not eat with me. The clatter of my knife and dish fall on a ringing silence.
Sucking lukewarm gravy from my moustache I can feel her pacing in the upper rooms and in my mind’s eye see her, all her bitterness made plain within her bearing. Now she crosses to the window seat, her head tipped down to gouge her breastbone with a small, sharp chin; her arms crossed tight below her budding teats; white, brittle fingers clasping either elbow. She is tall-built, twenty-nine years old and awkward in her gait. She does not laugh, nor yet make pleasant talk, but only sulks and scowls. It sometimes seems to me that it would be as well if I were married not to her but to her mother after all. Ah well. That’s done with now.
A knot of muttonflesh has worked into the socket of the sole back tooth, half-crumbled, that is left within my lower jaw, which morsel now my tongue makes secret, complicated motions to unseat. Maud, naked. Some fifteen years since. I had seated her upon my knee one night, our wedding not long past, pinched by her shoulders that she might not draw away. I tried to make her play with my old man but she made faces and vowed by the Holy Virgin she would not. When I released her upper arm that I might take her by the wrist and force her to comply she struggled free and jumped from off my lap to cower amongst the hanging drapes.
If I had only beaten her on that occasion more severely, she would surely have enjoyed a sweeter disposition to me since. If I had taken off my belt to her and thrashed her skinny rump until it bled. If I had seized her hair or twisted on her tit until she howled. The anger makes my chest thud, answered by a hopeless twitch from the forgotten beast that nests below my paunch. It is not well to stir my temper in this way, lest I should bring an illness on myself, and as the mutton-pellet holds its own against my questing tongue I turn my thoughts to gentler affairs.
The church that I am building on the rise up by the sheep-track rests half-done, the pagan relic there before pulled down that we may use its substance for our own construction. Some of its bricks are carved with monstrous and obscene antiquities, much like the gape-cunt hag of stone that squats above the portico of old St Peter’s. These we shall discard, save where necessity and shortage of materials should otherwise dictate. Already we are forced by circumstances to retain a pillar inlaid with a barbarous, serpentine device, some leering Teuton devil-wyrm coiled down the column’s length. I should be anxious that this remnant not offend, were the good people not offended more by my proposal for the church itself.
‘Lord Simon, can it be you jest?’ they say. They say, ‘Lord Simon, reconsider your design lest it prove an affront to God himself.’ They say, ‘But my Lord Simon, what of the tradition in such things?’ (This same tradition being cruciform; it hardly need be said.) They carp and make complaint for all the world as if I had raised up a monument to Moloch or a tabernacle made for Jews. They mutter and they cross themselves and lay each stone with such grave faces, just as if they fear but that they wall up their immortal souls.
Round. All I ask is that they build it in a round, as was the Temple raised by Solomon there in Jerusalem so builded. Round, without a corner where the Devil may find purchase or concealment. Round, that God should likewise know no hiding place. If He is there, then He must show Himself. If He is there ...
The fringe of beard was fine and silvery. Its eyelids were stitched shut; the nose collapsed into a hole. It smelled of peppers, hot and dry. In its expression, something foreign and unreadable, there at the corner of the mouth where it had come unsewn, the small brown teeth revealed ...
I close my eyes and push my dish away. I lift my hand up to my face and cannot help but groan at what is in me, at the weight of it. The servants look toward me, mute and frightened, then toward each other. Gathering up my half-completed dish, my half-drained cup, they whisk away to tremble in the distant kitchens, hurried footsteps quick and soft as rain across the empty, echoing hall, then gone.
The brief screech of my chair, pushed back now from the table so that I may rise, is hateful and alone in this giant room. I call aloud for John, my squire, who comes after too long a time and helps me to my chamber, on which tedious and protracted journey do I scold him thus: ‘Why are you come so late upon my call? Do you suppose that I have grown new legs and so may dance back to my rooms without your aid?’
Staggering with his shoulder pressed beneath the hollow of my arm, he glares down at the flags and mutters all his ‘No, Lord Simons’ and his ‘God Forbids’, telling me that he’d been at stool when first I called to him, whereon I make remark that should he suffer me to wait henceforth then I shall have him whipped until he shits his breeches.
At these words a sense of that which is before-seen comes to me. Was I manhandled lame along these corridors before with thoughts of flogging hot upon my brow? I know a far-off, singing dizzyness: Saracen voices droning to their Devil-God across the dunes. I have stood from my meal too quickly, that is all. Dismissing John upon the threshold of my chamber I shut fast the door and make my heavy path towards the bed, using a chair-back as support along the way.
The room is cold, but I am warmed by beers as I surrender to the bedding. Here I may digest, and be alone without a thought of Maud to trouble me, her rooms being upon the castle’s furthest side. Though the November air be chill, it’s as nothing to the empty, bone-deep cold that falls on desert when the day is done, and resting here I am content. Above me, in the ceiling’s timbers, fissured lines and whorls call to my mind a map of ancient and unconquered territories ...
Good Pope Urban did as Peter, called the Hermit, had entreated him: he called on us to take the Cross; to join with his Crusade and rid the Holy Land of its Mohammedan oppressor. Though the early expeditions of both Peter and one Walter, called the Penniless, were cut to pieces by the Turks, we were not to be stayed. Thus, in the ninety-and-sixth year of this Millennium we set our sails for Constantinople and not a one of us thought other than that he would reach again his home a richer man.
Great God, but the immensity of that cruel Heathen sky. It made men mad. While on our way to join with Robert, Duke of Normandy, in setting Antioch to siege, we came across a fellow broiled as black as any Saracen who yet sang out loud hymns in noble French as he paced there in circles ‘midst the bare, slow-shifting hills. Alone without his comrades for who knows how many days or weeks, he’d patiently dug out a long and looping trench, deep as a man’s waist, that stretched back across the dunes as far as we might view. He cursed us when we broke a small part of its sides down as we led our mounts across. Upon his brown-seared chest the rags of Flanders hung, their bright green fading yellow in the shadeless desert light.
When we had ridden on a little way and left him raving far behind us, I glanced back and with a queer surprise saw that his endless trench, when looked at from afar, did not snake back and forwards without meaning, as it seemed to when close by. Viewed from a distance, it became a line of monstrous script reeled out across the dunes, scrawled in a giant and uneven hand. In many places words and letters had been wiped away by shifting sand, so that it came to me that this poor soul must spend his days in pacing up and down along the message’s drear length, digging anew its strokes and flourishes, hymns spilling from his parched black lips the while. The only words that I could read were ‘Dieu’ and one that may have been ‘humilité’, spelled out across a violet-shadowed slope’s soft flank. His message, and of this I have not any doubt, was meant for the Almighty, who alone resides at such a height as to review the text entire. We left him crouched upon the bridges of an ‘m’, frantically scrabbling to wipe away the hoof-prints where our steeds had damaged his calligraphy.
And so we ventured on, and sacked the smaller towns that lay along our route to Antioch. There is a sound that plunder makes; a hundred smaller noises all confused in one: a wailing baby, dusty thunder of collapsing stone and whine of injured dogs. Horse panic. Lost and trembling query of escaping goats with women weeping from their guts; men from their noses. Gruff cries, unintelligible, sunken to a language only made for war. The mortal chime of blade, the howl of buggered children, all one voice that spits and crackles in the moment’s smoke-black throat. I hear it now.
We set their shrines to torch. We took their lives, their wives, their horses, silks and jewels and some of us took more besides. One of my captains wore a belt hung round with Heathen tongues until we chided him about the stench of it. They were great black things, bigger than you might suppose, and no two quite alike. These barbarisms were not strange to us while we were in that place, though I have thought upon them since and know now that such actions lack all dignity. Still, others took far greater strides along that route than we. Some leagues from Murzak we rode for a way beside a company of knights from Italy who dined upon the flesh of slain Mohammedans, saying that since their foemen had not Christian souls they were more like to beasts and could thus be devoured without a breach of covenant. It was quite plain they were made lunatic by eating Heathen brains, and I could not but wonder how they’d fare on their return to Christian lands. As it occurred, returning through those territories back from Murzak at a later date we came upon their heads, daintily set there in an inward-facing ring between the shimmering drifts, scraps of their azure tunics tied about their eyes, blindfolding the already blind for cultish reasons that we could not guess.
I longed with all my heart to see Jerusalem, that city of the scriptures that the pagan Emperor Julian of Rome sought in his vanity to build anew and was struck down by God ere the foundations could be laid. A whirlwind and upheavals fraught with gouts of flame erased his works, in which some see a proof of the Divinity’s displeasure. (My round church at least has its foundations set in place, whatever may befall it hence.) I longed to walk amongst those hills, and see that ancient heart of piling stones from where the Holy verses sprang, but what I saw instead! Better my head were settled blindfold in that dismal ring of Roman cannibals, my blood congealed like egg-yolk in my beard.
I must not think of heads.
Somewhere below my bed, below my chamber floor, the castle is alive with catcalls, footsteps, and recriminations; grand and cold and echoing, and built to last a thousand years. I can recall when only Waltheof’s Baronial hall stood here, all wood and thatch that swarmed with fleas, before the King decided that a knight of Normandy might overlook these districts better than a Saxon Earl.
Poor Waltheof. I met him once or twice and he was likeable, though quite without intelligence. As a reward for his collaboration in the Conquest did William the Bastard first give Waltheof the Earldom of North Hamtun, then a traitor’s grave when he had tired of him. Such calumnies and grave accusals did they heap upon his head that by the end the old man came himself to think his treasons actual. Had he conspired against the King? It seemed to him this must be so, for had his own wife Judith not thus testified? That William, being old and filled with panics, might seek merely to consolidate his own position by arraying fellow countrymen about him in the Baronies would seem a notion quite beyond the grasp of Waltheof. Nor did he grasp that Judith, being William’s niece, would testify in any way her Royal uncle might require. Led weeping to the block, he even called aloud for Judith to forgive him, whereupon at least the treacherous whore summoned the grace to wince and look away for shame. She was her uncle’s creature, quick to do as he might bid on all occasions.
All occasions save for one.
The light outside my turret window is grown wan with the progression of the afternoon. I doze, made drowsy by the beers, and when I wake to find the windows filling with November’s early dark I have a memory of nonsense, drifted through my thoughts while reason slept: out in the wastes of Palestine, caught in some mapless region quite devoid of landmark, I am come upon a human foot that sticks up from the sand. With much delight it comes to me that buried here is my true leg, the lame and hateful thing that I have dragged about with me these years being a mere impersonation of the same. Eager to walk as once I did, I kneel and start to scoop away the dust about the ankle and the calf, when of a sudden I am made aware of someone watching me.
I look up, not without a start, and see a woman crawling on her belly with a horrid speed across the lazy dunes to where I crouch beside the jutting foot. Dressed in the black robes of a nun and crippled in some manner I may not discern, she drags herself towards me down the baking slopes, and now I hear her calling to me imprecations, bitter curses, telling me the leg is hers and warning me to leave it be. I grow afraid of both her furious spite and beetle-like velocity as she propels her black-draped carcass down the hillock in a pittering hail of grit. Wrenching now frantically upon the ankle that protrudes, I here attempt to haul the leg up out the sand and make away with it before the nun has reached me, but it will not budge. Within the ghastly instant that is prior to waking, I become aware that there is something underneath the desert floor that pulls against me, something hidden and yet hideously strong that yanks upon the leg as if to draw it under from below, at which I wake to wet palms and the clanging of my anvil heart, here in this darkening turret.
I am so afraid. I am afraid of being dead, I am afraid of being nothing, and that great unease that I have kept so long at bay is made companion to me now. I see the life of me, the life of all of us, our wars and copulations, all our movement and philosophy and conscience, and there is no floor beneath it, and it stands on naught. Beyond my window, early stars emerge into a firmament with purpose fled.
After a time, I call to John, at which he answers with such haste that I half fancy he has sat betimes without my chamber door for fear of being absent when I summon him. Raised up now on the bed and pulling on my breeks I bid him fetch the Lady Maud to me and, after his removal and the lighting of a candelabra, kneel beside the bed to make my water in a chamber-jug. The stream is thick and brownish and with melancholy I observe my prick to be yet chancred and inflamed: one more amongst the relics brought back from the Holy Land.
I never saw Jerusalem. It had become quite plain that by the time we came to Antioch the greater part of all the fighting (and the pillage) would be done, and so we were content to take a more meandering route that brought us upon towns and Heathen settlements both less defended and less likely to already be picked clean. I took a native woman up from one of these to carry on my travels, and for some nights had great sport with it, though on the ninth such night she killed herself. The women of this like were plentiful. Once, when such things became the fashion with us for a while, I tried a boy, though never liked it, for the smell of Heathen boys is not a pleasing one. In time, such pleasures anyway were overcome by heat; a carnal lassitude; a deadening of ambition in the flesh.
We had veered far, come almost into Egypt when we chanced upon the knights in red and white. All of that week our travel had been hard and filled with queer occurrence, as when five days sooner we had seen the ground beneath our largest and most deeply-laden wagon crack apart, so that the whole front end of it plunged down into the sudden cave that yawned beneath. We clambered down through rising veils of dust to look upon the damage, where we found an ancient buried tomb or bone-room stretched about us in a stale dark, whereupon the sun’s harsh, brilliant shafts now fell after a wait of centuries. It had almost a chapel feel, its huge descending pillars fashioned not with mortar but with light. Piled all about were skulls, some of them crushed like morbid eggs beneath the iron wheels of our fallen cart, sharp flakes of yellowed shell upon the whiter sands. It took the most part of a day to raise the wagon up from out its pit, and by the close of it we all were coughing fearfully and spat great quids of jelly. Some time later, in the lower ranks, a fellow named Patrice swore that he’d watched a bright and quivering city hanging in the dawn, all of its frightening weight suspended high above the further dunes. There were more instances akin to this in those last days before we happened on the stranger knights.
We saw their lights at dusk, when the distinctions between sky and sand were lost and we had not ourselves made camp. Fearful lest we had come upon the enemy, we broke procession to a hush in which the scuttling of sand-rats and the night-call of green beetles might be heard. Borne on those serpent winds that rake the wilderness we heard their singing, lusty, full and French, and were relieved, at which we hailed them and were so made welcome by their fires.
The leader of their company, which numbered eight or nine, was one I had known distantly before, called Godefroi, come from Saint-Omer. He seemed pleased enough to meet with me, and thus it was we sat and talked together while my comrades clattered and made oaths in darkness as the Nobles’ tents were raised, there in the endless gloom beyond the firelight’s reach. I marvelled that Saint-Omer had a skin of wine perched on his lap, since nothing in the manner of strong drink had passed my lips for near to half a year, whereon he kindly offered some to me. It quickly warmed me, and a little more engendered in my ears a low and pleasant singing that dispelled the vile, incessant whisper of the desert insects, thought by Saracens to be the howl of Pandaemonium itself.
Above, great constellations wheeled to which our bonfire sparks ascended in their tiny mimicry. I quizzed my host upon the curious device that he and his companions wore, with rose-red cross arrayed upon a field of white, whence he confided that they were a fledgling order, not yet fully birthed, and yet complacent of their greater destiny. I liked him, for he did not seem to boast, but only spoke of his designs dismissively, as though they were already made accomplished. Although younger by some years than I, it seemed to me he had a wisdom and firm certainty about him that bespoke an older man, and so I listened on, entranced and not a little giddy from the wine.
After a time, another of Saint-Omer’s order came to join us where we sat, this being one called Hugues, of Payens. While younger still than Godefroi, his zeal toward the fledgling brotherhood surpassed that of his elder, though in this it may be that he had partaken of more wine. Brazen where Saint-Omer had been restrained, he spoke of all the wealth and influence that would be theirs once time had run its course; a fortune that might span the world in its effect. At this I gently chided him, and said if words were wealth then he should be alike to Croesus, asking whence he fancied that these riches might appear.
Drawing offence from this, he turned at once more arrogant and curled his lip into a sneer of such lop-sidedness I knew him to be in his cups. He hinted, though obscurely, at a certain secret guarded by his order, before which the Pope himself might soon be brought to kneel. Here, Saint-Omer did lay a counselling hand upon his fellow’s arm and whispered something past my hearing, after which the pair excused themselves by virtue of their weariness, and soon retired. I sat below a thin-pared Heathen moon until the embers palled and gave play in my thoughts to all that they had said, their hints and wild assertions, being in the last resolved to press them further on the morrow. Had this resolution been forgot in sleep, as are so many nobler urges, then might I have come upon my dotage and my death a happy man.
The sudden yet half-hearted tapping on my chamber door now rouses me from out my arid reveries, and when I bid the one who knocks to enter, there is Maud, with young John fidgeting and shifting in discomfort by her side until he is dismissed, closing the door behind him as he goes.
She stands composed there in the creeping silence, gazing on me without kindness, nor with fellow feeling. Next she stares down at my chamber-jug and makes a face, so that I hide it back beneath my bed before I turn once more to face her.
‘I would have you sit.’ I gesture here towards the chair, halfway ‘twixt bed and door to aid my passage to and fro across the room.
‘As my Lord wishes.’ Now she brushes off the seat before she sits, as if to rid it of contaminations. In this manner is she wont to craft all of her words and deeds into some subtle, ill-concealed rebuke. As if her cunny does not reek. As if her shit were made from gold.
‘How fares my son?’
The look she gives me in reply, blank and unfathoming, is in truth all of the reply I might require: she neither knows, nor cares to know. The child is in the charge of nurses, somewhere in the castle’s eastern mass. His mother took against the child from birth and will not see him, hating as she does the man who got him on her and the manner of that getting.
Now she glances to the side and speaks, indifferently. ‘The young Lord Simon, I am told, has been afflicted with the grippe, yet otherwise fares well, if it should please my Lord.’
Her eyes, hoar-frosted with disdain, cast insolently back and forth across such few effects as I have gathered in my chambers here: a casket with four angels of Mohammedan attire in gold relief upon its lid; a Merlin stuffed with shavings and a Tartar’s finger on a fine, bright chain. With every piece, with every look, she judges me.
After the death of Waltheof, William the Bastard was concerned that I should take up Waltheof’s position here. More than position: it was meant that I should take Waltheof’s widow, Judith, as my wife, so that my claim to all his lands was given strength. Now, she was William’s niece and had until that time obeyed her uncle’s every charge, and yet at this she balked. Judith, who with false witness had her husband parted from his head for no more reason than it was the Bastard’s will. Judith, who knew should she refuse her Liege that all her land and titles should be forfeit. Judith, who would sooner copulate with goats than lose her uncle’s favour.
Judith would not marry me.
She said it was because I had a halten foot, and yet in this I know she lied. What is it that they see in me, these women?
Maud is watching me from where she sits. She waits for me to speak, or to dismiss her. I do neither one. In these brief years since when she was delivered of our son her youthful bloom has gone. The teeth she lost from the fatigues of motherhood have stripped the vestiges of plumpness from her face that made it comely. More and more I see now Judith’s chin and Judith’s nose, the mother’s hard, sharp features mirrored in her child.
When William said that Maud should be my bride in Judith’s stead, still she did not relent, though it should spare her daughter’s maidenhead, and all of Maud’s wet-cheeked entreaties could not shake her from her grim resolve. Why did she fear me so, to offer up her daughter’s hairless little Cat upon my altar in place of her own?
The silence in this chamber is no longer to be borne, and so I turn instead to talking of my church, its glorious chancel windows; the unique arrangements of its nave.
‘The nave is to be in a round, Maud. There! What do you think of that?’
She stares, with Judith’s eyes.
‘I’m sure it is no matter what thoughts I may have, my Lord. I am not witting of such things.’
Knowing a criticism to be hid within these bland assurances, my ire begins to rise, and I press further on this selfsame tack.
‘If I have asked, you may be sure it matters. If you be in truth unwitting of such business, why, then I shall be amused to hear your witless thoughts. Now put off your delays and answer plainly: what are your opinions of a church built in a round?’
She shifts upon her chair, and I am pleased to see she is discomfited. Become less certain in her insolence she does not meet my eye, and in her speech I fancy that I hear a trembling, absent hitherto.
‘There are some who might say, my Lord, that it was a configuration not hospitable to Christian worship.’ Here she swallows and pretends to lose herself in study of the Heathen angels raised upon my casket’s lid. Turned to the side there is still beauty in her face. It comes to me that were I yet equipped to plough her she would not raise such a fury in me, at which thought the fury doubles.
‘Do you think I care a fart what some might say? The counsel I am seeking is your own, and I shall have of it for all your damned evasions! Let the ignorant hold that my works do not well suit their low-born Christianity, still shall I hear what you would say in this!’
Brief silence from her now that is much like the rolling of a drum, in that it has the same air of anticipation.
‘My Lord, you force me to admit I must agree with those that say these things.’
I rise up from the bed where I am sat and, clinging to its foot-boards lurch towards her so that she shrinks back.
‘What do you know? What do you know of Christianity, of its antiquities? Come! You shall come with me to view my church this instant, that I may instruct you to a proper sensibility!’
She starts at this.
‘My Lord, it is too dark. I cannot venture out with you this night, when it is sure to rain.’
I take a further step towards her, one hand gripped yet on the foot-boards of my bed and hear the thunder crashing in my heart.
‘By God, were we made sure of Armageddon on this e’en, yet would I see you do my will in this! Get up!’
Now she is weeping, furious because she knows that she may not gainsay me. Wet-ringed eyes spit venom, and without much thought of it I find that I am rubbing with the hard heel of my palm against my loins, the old thing in me come awake to find such passion in her. When she speaks her voice is rough and hateful, like a cockatrice. I know that she would strike me if she dared.
‘I will not! Drag yourself through storms to gloat on your misshapen relic if you will, but I’ll not come with you!’
Risking my balance I let go the bed and topple forward, catching at her chair-back with my hands so that I come to rest propped over her, gripping the chair on each side of her arms, my face pressed not a hand’s width from her own. Speaking, I see the white froth of my spittle fleck against her hollowed cheek where she has turned her face away, eyes wrinkled tight.
‘Then I shall drag you by the hair, or have men do it for me! Shall I make you bare and thrash you? Shall I?’
Defeated now, she shakes her head; takes small hiccuping breaths, gulped deep into that narrow chest, snail-path of snot upon her upper lip. I let the silence simmer for a moment, wherein nothing save my breathing may be heard, then, lifting up to stand beside her with one hand still on the back-piece of her chair, I call to John.
When he appears, his pallor and timidity are such that he must surely have been listening, beyond the chamber door. He glances to the Lady Maud, who turns her face away from him so that her discomposure might not be in evidence, and then he looks to me.
‘My Lord?’
I bid him summon men at arms and next deliver Lady Maud and I to horse, saying that we are wont to visit church and would that he make company with us and with our mounted yeomen. He seems puzzled and afraid, and gives a glance of silent question to the Lady Maud, who will not look at him, and so he bows and makes away, and all is done according with my will.
At length, we quit the castle by its bridge-side gate, with Maud still weeping as she rides beside me, while John and the men at arms stare straight ahead, affecting not to notice this. The rain that stripes the dark is thin and spiteful, does not quite remove a scent of distant woodsmoke lingering upon the air, and when I ask as to the source of this, my squire reminds me that this is the night the villeins light the bel-fires that they drive their cattle in between to make them proof against disease. As we ascend from cross-roads up to horse-fayre I can see the sky a hellish red behind St Peter’s crumbled spire, that marks where such a fire has been assembled on the green towards that church’s rear. Much merry-making can be heard come from this quarter as we ride our horses by and on towards the street of Jews.
Upon the threshold of those teeming Semite hovels we break left and so begin our weary and prolonged ascent of that steep path that runs from the horse marketplace, up to the outskirts of the boroughs and the sheep-track just beyond, where is my church in its inchoate state.
The reek of fire is everywhere upon the wind, so that I cannot but recall the smell of older fires, in older darknesses. The fire where I first sat and talked with Saint-Omer; the fire we built our camp about that next night, after riding with Saint-Omer’s strange-garbed company a day. Sat there about the burning brushwood’s hurried and imprudent blaze, I quizzed him further on the claims that he and young Hugues had made when last we spoke. The foresaid Master Payens was not present on this new occasion, having gone with several of his fellows to a spot remote from where we camped, for purpose of some service or observances peculiar to their order.
Crouched beside me, face made brazen by the flames, Saint-Omer made again his boast that with his order he should rise until they were made rich beyond the dreams of Avarice, with influence to beggar Alexander’s. Urging me to join my cause with theirs, he promised all who stood beside them at the outset should come into greatness and reward, when they at last laid claim to their inheritance.
‘As you shall see, my Lord of Saint-Liz, though our rise may be assured, there are yet certain preparations to be made that would assist us greatly when we come at last to power. Our form of worship, as an instance, makes requirement that we gather in a circle, such as is not easily accomplished in the common style of church. We shall therefore need churches raised across the world according to our own design, these fashioned after Solomon’s great temple in Jerusalem.’
He paused here with significance, as if to make me plainly understand the offer he extended: should I aid his venture by the building of a novel church then would I be repaid a hundredfold when his new order’s hour was come about. I shook my head in heavy protest.
‘By my faith, Lord Godefroi, I should need more than air and promises e’er I was made enthusiastic for such ventures. Though I doubt not your intentions, how is this great wealth of which you speak to be achieved? Whence is this awful power to come?’
He turned towards me, half his face in flame, the rest in darkness, and he smiled. ‘Why, from His Holiness the Pope. I have no doubt Rome’s coffers will prove adequate to our demands.’
Seeing the speechless, blank discomfiture with which I greeted this announcement, he pressed on, while in the deserts all about us devils sang through insect throats.
‘It is as my Lord of Payens said when too filled with wine to be discreet: we have a mystery in us. We have a secret hid within our order not a few would soonest were not made instead a revelation. But to say more, I must have your pledge of silence. Further to this, I must have assurance that if this great knowledge is made plain to you, and having seen yourself the means by which we shall make good our boasts, then shall you build for us the place of worship that I have described.’
I thought upon this for a time, and at last gave assent, reasoning that if Saint-Omer did not make good his promise that I should be satisfied by that which was revealed, then I should likewise not be bound to carry out his last conditions. Having sworn an oath of silence, I enquired when I might be at last made privy to the great concerns of which he hinted.
‘Why, upon this very Sabbath night, should you desire.’
I frowned here, having lost all notion out amongst those timeless sands of month, or week, or day. Was it in truth the Sabbath?
Saint-Omer continued in his speech without regard for my confusions. ‘Even now, the young Lord of Payens and all my fellow knights are gathered at a place not far from here, where they make preparation and await my coming that their service may be thus commenced. If you would go there in my company, then all that I have said shall have its proof.’
Decided thus, we rose up from the halo of the fireside and excused ourselves before commencing on our trudge across the dunes to where Saint-Omer said his comrades were retired. My leg was not so bad then as it has become of late, yet still I hung upon Saint-Omer’s arm as we went wading through the dust, the same encumbering dust that slows my legs in ghastly dreams of flight I’ve lately suffered.
Overhead, the quantity of stars was frightful; that vast multitude of ancient silver eyes that saw so many generations come to dust, and never blinked, much less allowed a tear, and as we laboured through the cooling drifts I asked Saint-Omer when his order would attain the station they foresaw.
‘Five years,’ he answered, adding, ‘if not five, then ten,’ as if it were the merest afterthought. Since then I have learned, with some bitterness, that if not ten, then fifteen would suffice; or if not fifteen, why, then twenty. As I climbed those showering, sliding mounds with Godefroi Saint-Omer on that distant night, I was as if lulled by the beetle-choirs, and did not think to ask of such eventualities.
Besides, we were by then come high atop a ridge, the slopes of which fell down before us to an even plain, where there were lights; a ring of candle-flames that stuttered in the darkness, with another ring alike, save smaller, set there at its centre. In the circled track between these fiery boundaries, pale figures moved in slow procession, from where came an oceanic murmuring that was resolved into a mournful plain-chant as we stumbled further down the hill towards the candles and the circling, singing knights. The inner round of flame was set about a flat stone called to service as a makeshift altar. Something rested there upon it I could not make out, beyond the squinting stars of brightness dancing on the wicks that hemmed it round. We lurched downhill towards the glow, Saint-Omer and myself, and as we went the air about was filled with hideous, hurtling blossom: monstrous desert insects headed for their brilliant, brief extinction in the candle-flames. Heedless, with Saint-Omer leading me on, I could but follow their example. Mournful voices lifted up and we went down, and we went down ...
The rain that beats now hard against my cheek is like the fluttering insect carcasses that beat against it then. Beneath our party’s hoofs the green and fibred smears of horses’ shit give way to hard black jewels of dung, whereby it is made plain that we have reached the sheep-track, where the matted, tick-infested herds are brought from Wales. Maud stops her weeping for a time as we descend, although her cheeks are wet, but this may be the rain.
A blackness that appears more present and more solid rises now atop a hillock to our right, against the paler dark behind. It is my half-made church, its eight great piers reared up towards the churned miasma of the heavens. Signalling to John and to the solemn men at arms, I reach across and take the bridle of Maud’s horse, reining us both outside the low stone wall that binds the church-land’s lowest edge. It looms above us, incomplete and yet suggestive of its final gravity, as we are aided by our yeomen to dismount and climb the wet grass slope towards it. From the shadow comes a dreadful bleating and the scattering of bone-shod feet, so that Maud cries out in alarm, but it is nothing, only sheep that graze the pasture here and crop the weeds about the church.
I take Maud’s arm in such a grip she winces, hanging on her to support myself as I step nearer to the ring of piers that soar up massively into the starless dark towards their rounded, many-scalloped capitals. Between the eight great columns now the yawning chasm of the open crypt comes into view, where rough stone steps lead down into the rain-stirred mud, and though she shrinks away I draw Maud to the very edge, so that we stand between the piers, on which I lean and find support.
Now Maud renews her weeping, and as I look back to where my squire and men at arms stand at some small remove behind, I see that they are also disconcerted, whether by the hulking church or by my manner I know not. I shout, that I am heard above the bluster of the wind and sizzle of the rain, gesturing to the oblong-cut foundations and half-built walls of the chancellery that lie upon the far side of the gaping vault.
‘There! Do you see? That shall be the Martyrium, that represents the Passion of our Lord, whereas these vaults, once closed, shall signify the cave wherein he lay, there at Gethsemane. Come! Come down to them with me. I shall show you ...’
Here, and with a throttled cry, Maud breaks away from me and runs back from the crater’s pillared rim to where John and the men at arms stand dumb-struck, pausing there to turn and stare at me, her eyes wide and afraid, her pointed chin now quivering like a compass needle fixed upon my North. I rail at her and at the men who stand there idly by yet make no move to drag her back to me.
‘What? Are you made afraid by this mere shell, this mere anatomy that is not yet a church? How much more frightened should you be to see its spire! If you will not come with me to the vaults, then damn you, for I go alone!’
I half expect at this that John might move to my assistance, but he merely stands beside his Lady Maud and gazes at me in a trance of fear alike to hers. Cursing them both I turn and, gripping on those stones that jut out from the vault’s completed walls, I make my slow way down the moss-slicked stairs. With one leg dragging, I descend into the mystery.
Back in the desert we came down upon those circling knights, Saint-Omer and myself, that we could hear their song more plainly as they trudged in their great ring above an altar rimmed with candles. In their tuneless moanings now and then I heard the blessed name of Jesu, so that I became assured there was no Devilry attendant on their ritual. We stepped across the outer ring of candles, and at our approach the chanting knights fell back to let us pass on to the inner ring of lights, and to that altar which they guarded.
Nearing to it, Saint-Omer stooped low to whisper in my ear, his words plain even though we were amidst the chanting of his brothers. ‘Do you see, My Lord of Saint-Liz? Do you see the face of our Baphomet; of our praised one before whom the nations of the earth shall surely bow? Look closer.’
There, beyond the winking flames ...
I stand now in the slime made by the rain here in the lidless vault of my unfinished church. Above me, peering from between the columns, are the faces of my yeomen and the Lady Maud, who have with trembling step come to the edge, that they might view me better in my ravings.
Though the fierce rain pools within the sockets of mine eyes I lift my face towards them as I bellow. ‘Here! Here is the cave in which Christ slept, while up above me in the nave’s great round shall be the symbol of his resurrection ...’
Of his resurrection. Standing with Saint-Omer there beside me I leaned forward, squinting so that I may see beyond the ring of lighted candle-stems to what sat there upon the rough stone altar in their midst. Ringing about us in their vests of ghostly white with bloody cross upon the breast of each, the knights were singing, Jesu, Jesu ...
Clinging to the crypt’s dank walls for purchase, I begin to hobble round the great stone ring, hauling my lame foot through the deep brown puddles, shouting as I go. ‘You think, alike with fools, that this is blasphemy, this Holy circularity? Why, if you knew what I had seen ...’
It lay upon the altar, and its skin was black and shrivelled up with age. Those hairs that yet clinged to the scalp or chin were long and silver, glistening in the light of star and candle.
‘There,’ came Saint-Omer’s breath beside my ear. ‘There. Do you see?’
The eyes had been stitched tight, and there remained a strange, unreadable expression in the corner of the mouth, there where the lips had sagged and come unsewn. It was a head, but whose I might not guess, that was expected to reduce all Popes and Potentates to merest servitude.
‘There,’ said Saint-Omer. ‘Do you see?’
I splash on in my lumbering circuit of the vault, and yet the words I shout have no more sense in them than there is in the spit and crackle of a villein’s bel-fire. I am weeping, stumbling, roaring, while from up above the frozen masks of Maud and John and all the startled yeomen hang there, staring down at me, my judges.
‘I am old and almost in my grave, and still they make no move! They have no care for me! They will achieve their kingdom only after I am gone, so that there shall be no reward for me, not here, nor yet in any other life! If you knew what I know ...’
I knew whose was the head. It came to me with such a force and certainty I stumbled back, as if the sands beneath my feet might of a sudden open up and plunge me straight to Hell.
‘There,’ said Saint-Omer. ‘Do you see?’
I slip, and fall down cursing in the mud. Still neither men nor Maud make any move to aid me. I am weeping as I drag myself upon my knees about the crypt, hanging upon the stones that jut from the uneven brick to pull me half erect.
I gazed in mortal terror at the head, whose features seemed to jerk and twitch their shadows in the candle-light. Then it was all a lie, all the Crusadings and the Christenings alike. The central stone on which faith rests was pulled away from me, and in its stead was left this hateful relic, mummified and black, that seemed to fix me with its catgut-threaded stare; that seemed to twist the untied corner of its mouth into an awful smile. I shall be dead, and nothing shall be left of me but worm and bone. I shall be wiped away, be absent in the endless and insensate dark where no thought comes. I shall not rise into the nave of rebirth, echoing with angel voices, and no more shall any of us, for the Heavens are become an empty place and dead men do not rise, nor push back stones. Our souls know no ascent, nor have they final destination.
Laughing, weeping, with my dead foot dragged behind, I circle, circle round, forever round beneath an empty sky that neither man nor martyr ever rose toward, nor ever saw the flame of man relit when once his spark had gone, nor ever knew of any resurrection.
** <strong>Confessions of a Mask, AD 1607</strong>
It disappoints me to recount that lately I have found myself again afflicted with identity and so beset by a great pestilence of thoughts. Arid, inconsequential things, they rattle uselessly within the parchment seed-pod of this smirking mask I am become. Worse, they provoke a fearful itching at the rear interior of my cranium where, I fear, yet clings some withered clot of mind; grey husk of brittle sponge, wrung dry, crusted upon the inner shell like relic snots discovered on the pages of old books.
I find if I contrive to let my skull tilt back and forth, as in a breeze, the iron point of my spike will scrape against the irritation and thus bring some measure of relief, though this does not dispel the main source of my aggravation, to whit, that I am myself at all with the capacity for thought or for sensation when I fancied (fancying nothing) that I was, at measure, done with such bleak chores.
When did I last know anything? Without sight, I may not determine how much time I’ve whiled away in dangling here and stinking since I last came to myself. If memory does not play me false, that was in Summer, when this bone cathedral’s dome rang to a monk’s drone of green-bellied flies; the munch of grubs where once dreams shimmered. Summer last or Summer before that I cannot tell. As I recall, I had hung here but several months, which made it by my reckoning the year Sixteen Hundred and Six, three years into the reign of Good King James, may the Almighty rot his eyes (a skill which the Almighty has deployed with great success upon diverse occasions, to which I myself may testify).
Upon the creased corpse-paper of my brow the wind is damp with Autumn; brings a hush among the bluebottles. October, then? November? But which year? In truth, I scarcely care, longing to have away with dates and know eternity. I fancied that I had it, that last time. I fancied I was gone. Instead, mere sleep; a further crumbling of my worm-drilled wits, only to wake again, too bored for horror now.
I wonder, is my father yet alive? Poor Tom, as mad as I; almost as hampered in his movements, cloistered there through law on his estate by virtue of his faith, the queer, three-sided hunting lodge he built in which he meant to signify the Trinity, whereby to taunt his captors. Shrouded in a language all my father’s own, occult and mystical, I fear this taunt sailed high above his gaolers’ heads and altogether missed its mark.
Three floors. Three sides. Three windows made from triangles of glass on every side, on every floor. Great numbers, threes and nines, set in the brick, that signified I know not what, though I recall that once my father made great effort to explain their meaning to me.
‘They are dates, young Francis. Dates as reckoned from our true beginnings on this Earth, and Eden’s founding.’ As he talked, his great grey head rocked forward, nodding to make emphasis; the last exhausted peckings of a lame and ancient bird.
My father’s calculations hinged upon a calendar suggested by a certain Bishop (I do not recall his name) who had established to his personal satisfaction the specific date on which the world commenced. To my chagrin, I must confess this most important anniversary is also fled from recollection, one more memory eaten by the meatflies. I remember, though, that the Creation was accomplished on a Monday.
Thus far, while by no means sane in any ordinary sense, my father’s motives in the building of the lodge were at least still within my comprehension: he desired to raise up a triangular affront to all good sense, and in this fashion to commemorate the Holy Trinity in whose name he had suffered his incarceration. Further to this, he desired to date his edifice from that primordial Monday morn when the Almighty condescended to allow the Light.
However, this was not the limit of my father’s odd preoccupations. In addition to the massive numbers set out in relief upon his lodge, were also letters, most of them pertaining to quaint word-games played upon the family name, this being Tresham, which abbreviates to ‘Tres’, that is to say, to three, which brings us neatly back to Father, Son and their celestial pigeon.
(If I am allowed to venture an aside, and in some modest measure a rebuke, I must say that in all the months that I have waited to attain to the celestial realm, I have not once been visited by this aforesaid blessed fowl, although I wear a skullcap of his cousins’ dung.)
I’d stand within the arching door of Rushton Hall, watching my father while in turn he overlooked the building of his folly, there across the fields. He would strut back and forth and all the while call out encouragements to those who laboured on the lodge: ‘Pray, Cully, further to the right! Be sure to take your measurements in threes, sir, if you love me! Make the inclinations at the corner nice and not splayed out like whores’ legs!’
Here within Northampton is a church made in a round, raised to these blasphemous proportions at the time of the Crusades against the Saracen. According to conjecture, it is built this curious way that Satan may not find a nook wherein to hide himself. What of my father’s lodge, then? Surely he had fiends in every corner, devils on all sides, that drove him on through pride, through bitterness and into lunacy? What drives us all, that we engage ourselves in such catastrophes? Surely it was not the Almighty’s voice that guided him to such a sorry end, but rather that voice issued from the furnace, from the fire’s mouth, trailing spittles of white ore?
For all my loyal protestations that I shared my father’s creed since his conversion, still I found it difficult to countenance a God that would award Sir Thomas Tresham for his faith with house arrest and then direct him to pass his remaining days in the construction of a great stone wedge of cheese. (I make complaint here only for my father’s treatment at the hands of the Almighty. Note that I do not debate the Justice meted out to me, which I would say is fair, up to a point. That point, it must be said, is thrust uncomfortably up my ragged windpipe, whence it juts, not without pain, into my cobwebbed cerebellum. That aside, I must congratulate the Lord upon his widely mentioned lenience.)
The round church and my father’s three-faced lodge, these huge and simple solid forms set patiently upon the shire’s map; carefully, painstakingly arranged like children’s building-blocks across long centuries by slow, half-witted gods, too few pieces in place as yet to guess their final scheme, if scheme there be. Sometimes, as thoughts drift in the muddy, half-awake plane that alone remains to me, I know a sense of vast, momentous tumblers falling, somewhere far away; of an eventual unlocking there at Time’s rim, though of what I may not guess. If scheme there be, my present state tends to suggest that I am not considered vital in its outcome.
I decorate the North gate of the town. Though lacking eyes I yet observe they have not moved me while I slept and dreamt my sweet and silent dream of being dead. Moreover, it is plain that they have not replaced the watchmen billeted within the gate-house, John and Gilbert, whom I recognize both by their voices and by the distinct and separate perfumes of their water, which they make almost in ritual unison against the gate-house wall each morn when they arise.
It is like this: first Gilbert wakes with the full weight of last night’s ale upon his bladder and begins to cough, these hawkings low and gruff, much like his voice. Next, John is woken by his fellow watchman’s barking and begins his own, though in a somewhat higher register, being, it seems to me, the younger of the two. Meanwhile to this, Gilbert has leapt up from his cot, pulled on his trousers and his boots and stumbled out to piss. The sound of this seems to go on for ever and, as such sounds often do, provokes in John an awful sympathy so that he hurries out to join his fellow; adds his meagre stream to the tremendous gushings of the dam already breached. At the conclusion of their sprinklings, both men next break wind, first Gilbert and then John, the pitch again reflecting their respective age and temperament, one low, one high. A crumhorn and a penny whistle.
Every day they do this, as unchanging as the bird-calls that announce the dawn, nor do their other functions of the day seem less routine. From light through dark they labour at their work or else they labour harder in avoiding it. Such conversation as they manage is repeated daily, phrase for phrase. I do not doubt the thoughts they have today are much the same ones they had yesterday and will have served again, re-boiled, upon the morrow. Willingly they entertain this vile monotony. One might, if unfamiliar with our situation, easily assume that it were they hung on a spike, not I.
My father, penned within his grounds and left to nurse his three-fold madness; Catesby, Fawkes, the rest of them, all caught up in their diverse fervours, in the circles of their habit and their reason; we are all of us thus hoisted on our own petard. Each of us has his sticking place, and to each man his nail.
Of late, Gilbert and John have (when they speak of me at all) begun to call me ‘Charlie-Up-There’. ‘Francis’, a more upright-sounding name, is obviously not so suited to the slouching rhythms of their speech as ‘Charlie’: ‘Which way blows the wind, young John? You take a look at Charlie up there and take note of where what bit of hair he has flies out to!’ Once I had such lovely tresses, now a weather-vane for idiots.
Still, in all it pleases me to think that I have yet some function and some purpose to my being, slight and mean though it may be. Not only weather-cock am I but also trysting place, an easy landmark where young lovers may arrange to meet. Their brief and oft hilarious couplings against the bird-streaked wall below awake in me a phantom pang, much like the pang induced on hearing Gilbert’s loud, torrential micturitions every morn. Though my equipment to accomplish such be gone, I too would like to poke a wench or piss against a wall from time to time. In truth, I cannot say which of these satisfactions’ passing is the most lamented, though I wish that I had taken more time to appreciate the both of them while I was yet in life. Ah, well.
Besides my use as totem to the fumblings of young men, so also am I able to provide my services as target for the missiles of their infant siblings. Usually they fly wide of the mark, although on coming to my senses at this last occasion, I discovered that one of the more accomplished little hell-hounds had contrived to lodge a piece of coal big as a knuckle in the socket on the left. I must confess I am quite taken with it, fancying it lends my mask a roguish and yet gallant lack of symmetry as might a monocle, opaque and lensed with jet.
Upon reflection, a great while has passed since last I was Aunt Sally to the children’s stones. No doubt they are away about some new, more seasonal diversion now. If I were not a mask then I would call them back.
It seems to me that this has always been my stumbling block, that I may not speak out for whatsoever I myself desire, yet only turn to people the compliant face they wish to see. If truth be told, my father’s Catholic vision was not mine, yet when he put the proposition to me all I did was nod in puppet acquiescence. Nor did I do differently with Fawkes and Winter and the rest, unfolding their phantasmagoric insurrections in the gate-house there at Ashby. While they ranted, all I did was make mild protest at the heedless optimism of their course, and never once said ‘No’. While rotting in the Tower, afflicted with a dreadful rising of the lights, each day I would politely thank my gaolers when they brought the slops I could not eat, and in this manner put a face on things. Putting a face on things was thus the principal endeavour of my mortal span, whereafter, justly, am I made a face that others put on things. Beware, ye that are loath to make commotion! Shudder, ye who would not bring attention on thyself, and see what shyness brought me, with even my gizzard now become a public spectacle. Behold, ye meek: this prong of iron is all the Earth ye shall inherit.
Testing my remaining senses: it would seem whatever curds of brain are crusted round this bone-bowl’s rim have fallen further into disrepair, so that I am more sluggish in my thoughts and doze more now; brief intervals of sleep shot through with bright and foolish dreams.
I do not dream about the life I had. In all my dreams I am as I am now, hung fixed and without sight. In one, I hang outside an older town than this, although in some queer way the feeling of it is the same. I am in company with other body-scraps hung there to dry, but to my disappointment they are only torsos, mine the sole head set amongst them. In that comic style things have in dreams, I learn the headless, limbless relics are still capable of speech, but through their lower parts. I strike up a companionship with one of them, a woman’s trunk whose talk is filled with plans and tricks and cunning, although insufficient, it would seem, to spare her from her grisly end. We hatch a plan between us to combine our best resources, with my head to be somehow set up atop her ragged neck. She tells me, grumbling through her loins, that she has heard of legs and feet that may elect to join with our conspiracy. Alas, the dream is over ere we can pursue this charming notion of completion and escape.
Another dream is simpler: I am set upon a low, flat rock, still warm from daylight’s heat although the night breeze swirls about me, howling over endless distances and heavy with the scent of desert. I am wrapped around with chanting voices, circling through the darknesses without, as if of slow, gruff men that walk about me widdershins. There is the whispered crunch of trodden sand; the creak of armoured joint. The words they moan are foreign to me, strange and barbarous names that I may not recall upon awakening to the roar of Gilbert’s dawn deluge.
‘Tis a pity. I had hoped the dreams we know in death might have more sense about them than those borne in life. These night-starts have no meaning that I may make plain, though I would note that all of them seem sprung from distant times, no doubt the Tuesday or the Wednesday that came after Father’s surely hectic Monday of Origination.
Thus I doze, and dream, and dangle, and decay.
The hour is later now, and I have company.
I was disturbed some while ago by something heavy, scraped against the stonework just below me in a clumsy fashion. An accompaniment of John and Gilbert’s gruntings from beneath allowed me to conclude at last that they were struggling to erect a ladder by which means they might climb up to join me here upon my lofty perch. At first this gross intrusion woke a panic in me, for I feared that they were come to take me down, where I would be subjected to some fresh indignity. After a time, however, their thick-accented exchanges made it plain that this was not to be the case.
‘Set ‘im aside old Charlie up there, so they’ll make a pair.’ This was from Gilbert, down upon the ground and no doubt holding fast the ladder’s base while trusting the ascent to the more nimble John. The youth’s response was come from closer by, his winded panting almost at my ear. There was a puzzling scent of rancid cheese which I at first supposed to be upon his breath.
‘I’m trying to, but this one’s fresher than what Charlie were, and not as easy in the puttin’ on. You ‘old me steady now, I nearly fell.’
This went on for a while until at last the youth called down to Gilbert with report of his success.
‘Well done, John. Now you ‘ang that pouch of ‘is about ‘is neck, else nobody’ll know the bastard otherwise.’
Cursing beneath his breath, John evidently did as he was told, for not long after I could hear the rungs groan as he went back down, where followed further scrapings when the ladder was at last removed. At this, the gate-men both repaired inside. I noticed that the smell of cheese remained.
A silence next, and then a sound like grinded teeth, a tortured gurgling giving way to gasps, and sobs, and finally to words.
‘By God! By God, where is the Captain now, and what is this stale putrefaction set beside him? Are his thousand men now fled that rallied once for Pouch and his just cause?’
Scarce had I realized that I was myself what he referred to as the putrefaction set beside him, when his ravings were renewed: ‘Fear not, lads! Pouch fights on, and though they have your Captain bound they shall not still his mighty heart! For Pouch! For Pouch and Justice!’
I had longed to find companionship and here it was, presented to me, though perhaps more volubly than I might otherwise have wished.
‘See how your Captain has been handled, with his bowels at Oundle and his arse in Thrapston! Take him home, boys! Take him home by Barford Bridge to Newton-in-the-Willows! Weep for Pouch amidst the weeping trees! Have I not told you, in the Captain’s bag there is sufficient matter to defend against all comers? We’ll yet have the day, if we stand firm and do not flinch, nor lose our heads!’
Clearing my throat of all but that iron shaft thrust up it, I addressed him. ‘Your advice, Sir, welcome though it be, comes rather late. I fear that horse is long since bolted.’
An astonished pause ensued, the only sound being the subtle grating of my comrade as he made attempt to shuffle round his head upon the prong, the better to regard me.
At some length, he spoke again. ‘By Jesu’s Blood, Sir! Never did Pouch think to see a man reduced to your estate that yet had sensibility and speech.’
A further pause, in which he may have thought to include hearing in the list of my remaining skills and thus to reconsider his brash opening remarks.
When he resumed it was in milder tones. ‘Sir, for whatever insults have been heaped like coals upon your ...’ Here he faltered, and then lamely stumbled on. ‘That is to say, upon you. For whatever slurs and slanders you’ve endured, accept the Captain’s full apology.’
I rattled vaguely on my peg, as close to a forgiving shrug as I could muster.
Ill at ease, the Captain made a further effort to engender conversation. ‘Have you been here long?’
For all the world, to hear him speak you would have thought that we were waiting for a carriage.
‘That depends upon the date,’ I answered after some deliberation.
He informed me that it was, as near as he was able to determine having lost a day or so himself, the last week of October in the year Sixteen Hundred and Seven. This would seem to indicate that I have been suspended here for almost two years now. While I was struggling to absorb this notion, Captain Pouch (such is his name) continued with his prattle.
‘Did you know, Sir, there is something in your eye?’
‘Yes, I did. Unless I am mistaken, it’s a lump of coal.’
‘What an encumbrance. You have the Captain’s sympathies. Pray, what of these pale, bony spikes that thrust up from your skull? Were you afflicted with these monstrous growths in life?’
‘No. That is birdshit.’
Made disheartened by this cataloguing of my mortal ruin, I attempted to direct the conversation elsewhere, asking my companion how he came to find himself moored in such dismal straits.
With bile and indignation rising in his voice, he launched into a grim tirade upon the world and its injustice. ‘Aye, now there’s a question! How does Pouch come to be here, that did no wrong save stand up for his birthright as an Englishman? Tyranny, sir! Cruel tyranny and the designs of despots laid the Captain low, as they would lay low all who strike for Justice!’
Here I made encouraging remarks, revealing that I, too, had fallen foul of an oppressor in my stand for liberty. This newfound kinship seemed to warm his heart (wherever that affair might be; in Thrapston or in Oundle) and he went on with fresh vigour.
‘Then in faith, Sir, you are Captain Pouch’s brother in adversity! He was a simple man, Sir, once, that lived by Newton-in-the-Willows, near to Geddington, where is the cross of blessed Eleanor.’
‘I know the place. Go on.’
‘Pouch had another name then, Sir, and was contented with his lot, but it would not be so for long. There was a serpent nestled in the Captain’s Eden, poised to strike.’
‘The tyrants that you spoke of earlier?’
‘The same. A family of skulking thieves that had with their ill-gotten wealth seized land so that the good folk thereabout were left with only scrub on which to grow their food! Worse, while those same good people huddled on their scraps of grass, the scoundrels saw fit to erect a great, vainglorious edifice, the sight of which would surely tread those good folk’s spirits further down into the mire!’
I knew a sudden sense of great foreboding as to where this narrative was headed. As I’d told him, I knew Newton-in-the-Willows well, and not without good reason.
Timidly, I made an interjection. ‘This great edifice you mention: would it be a dovecote?’
‘Then you know the massive, ugly thing? Aye, a gigantic dovecote! Did you ever hear such vanity? As if it were not bad enough they had already seized our village church, St Faith’s, and claimed it as their private chapel! One day, when this insult could no longer be endured, the Captain rallied to his side one thousand men and swore they would tear down the hedges raised about the family’s enclosures.’
‘This would be the Tresham family?’
‘Aye! You have heard of them?’
‘Remotely.’
Every Sunday prior to my father’s house-arrest we’d gone by coach to Newton-in-the-Willows. Each time, as we crossed the Barford Bridge, my father would recount the story of a ghostly monk said to reside there by the River Ise who, in the dead of night, would ride with travellers part of their way only to vanish further down the road. Each week I’d shudder at my father’s tale as if I heard it fresh.
Kneeling there in the strange pale marble-coloured light that fell down through the windows of St Faith’s, I’d bow my head and pray. As I remember, in the main I would entreat Almighty God that as we rode back over Barford Bridge we should not find we shared our carriage with the disappearing monk. On more than one occasion it occurred to me that my prayers and my presence in St Faith’s served no good purpose save averting supernatural danger brought upon me solely by the route that I must take to church each week. It seemed to me that if I simply did not go to church then both myself and the Almighty might be saved considerable time and effort. I would struggle to suppress such thoughts for fear God would reward this blasphemy with, if not yet a visit from the monk, then something worse. However, though this sacrilegious notion would persist I was not, as it turned out, struck down by the awful supernatural punishment I feared.
Mind you, with hindsight ...
After church, if there was time before our dinner was prepared, I’d go with Father to the dovecote that to me seemed big as heaven, filled with crooning, fluttering angel white. When I was young, I did not make the nice distinction that there is between the commonplace dove and its Pentecostal counterpart, believing at the time my father kept a flock of Holy Ghosts.
Perhaps he did. Perhaps that is the reason I have not been brushed by that celestial wing. Perhaps there are no more outside captivity.
Beside me, cutting through my reverie, the head of Captain Pouch continued with its diatribe against the monstrous Tresham family, recounting how he had inspired his thousand followers by telling them that what he carried in the pouch about his neck (from which he drew his name) would be sufficient to repel all enemies. Thus reassured he’d led them, whooping to the hedgerow barricades where they had wreaked some little havoc for a while before the local gentry and their mounted followers, incensed, arrived upon the scene to trample and disperse the rabble.
It would seem as if beyond that point the Captain’s memories were vague. The hour when he was led out to the gallows was still clear to him, though mercifully he recalled but little of the hanging or the quartering that evidently followed.
I asked him if he knew how fared the family he so despised, to which he answered with some glee that early in the year my father, Thomas Tresham, had been taken sick to bed and soon thereafter passed away.
So. Dead, then. That great granite boulder of his head rocked forward for the last time. Finally released from the frustrated pacing of his grounds that had become his prison and set free into the company of other martyrs. Now, no doubt, he knew the date of the Creation to the very hour. No doubt by now he understood the Lord’s bewildering passion for the number three and was ecstatically employed correcting angles for the angels as they laboured on some annexe of their own tri-cornered paradise.
Done with his tale at last, Pouch seemed to think that it would only be good manners to enquire as to my own, though this was clearly only by way of politeness and not any interest that was genuine. The Captain did not truthfully have room in him for any grand, heroic story save his own. That said, he was persistent in demanding my account so he might not be thought a bore.
‘Come, let the Captain hear now of the noble struggle you yourself endured that led you to this sorry place. What is your name, Sir?’
After but a moment’s hesitation, I responded. ‘Charlie.’
‘And your crime?’
‘I cried “Down with the King” while in a public place.’
Throughout my life, I’d learned the ease with which I might slip skilfully behind that bland evasive mask that would avoid unpleasantness. Now there was nothing left of me but mask, this talent had become more simple yet in its accomplishment.
Time passed. Before the sunset, which I know by its faint promise of impending chill, there was some nastiness.
I’d heard the birds land, two or three of them with heavy thuds, and had the time to wonder briefly at their presence after they had failed to pay a visit for so long, when Pouch began to scream, thus answering my queries.
Mercifully, I was not made to bear this miserable cacophony for long, since at approach of dark the carrion flew home to roost. The Captain had fared well as these things go, with but an eye and one lip gone, although to hear him moan and whimper you would think the sky had fallen in. In fairness, I suppose I have had longer to grow reconciled to our condition.
Other than the utterance of an infrequent sob, he did not speak again ‘til halfway through the night when, in a trembling voice, he started to describe the stars that he could see through his remaining eye; their number and their cold, indifferent majesty.
I squinted round my lump of coal, and yet saw nothing.
‘Is this Hell?’ he whispered. ‘Are there stars in that place? Is this Hell for Pouch?’
I have considered more than once what manner of theology might be applicable to where we find ourselves. It seems to me that, in accordance with my father’s strange numeric scheme of things, there are three possibilities: firstly, it may be that this is Hell after all, but on some other sphere and not beneath the ground as one might readily suppose. My second notion is that in my own case, it may be I am regarded as a traitor by the Gods of Protestant and Catholic faith alike and, being caught between two camps, am simply left to moulder here by both. The third and, given due consideration, the most probable of all my theorems, is that life is ordered by the principles of some religion so peculiar and obscure it has no followers, and none may fathom it, nor know the rituals by which to court its favour.
At dawn the birds (crows by the sound they made) came back and took the rest of Captain Pouch, since when I fear the fellow is sunk deep within some horror-stricken trance. He has not voiced a word.
I hear the children singing, somewhere far below, and hope that they might hurl another rock of coal to furnish me a second bright black eye, but they are set on other matters. As the words of their refrain float up to me, I know the work they are about and, in my sudden comprehension, am become almost as moribund as Pouch.
‘Remember, remember,’ they sing; they command. ‘Remember, remember ...’
We’d meet to drink, there in my father’s triangular lodge. Bob Catesby, Guido Fawkes, Tom Winter and the others, talking young men’s talk and vowing we would see the day when Catholics would bend no more beneath the yoke of Protestant oppressor. Once we hiked upon a pilgrimage to Fotheringay Castle, north of Oundle (where, if he might be believed, the Captain’s bowels are currently interred). We saw where Good Queen Mary kneeled before the block and rendered up her soul to God, her head hacked off with nothing less than three ungainly blows, whereon her little dog ran out from underneath her skirts and would not leave her side.
Though I do not recall who first proposed the scheme, I fear it was myself, though inadvertently, who set the whole disaster into motion. Drinking in the lodge, I had commenced a passionate account of all the slanders and injustice that had robbed my father of his freedom; almost bragging in a curious, underhanded way, as if the glamour of the elder Tresham’s dire misfortune might thus be transferred to me. Alas, I was too eloquent, and had not finished my account before my drunken comrades were up on their feet and swearing that this monstrous calumny should not go unavenged.
I thought that it would be forgot once we were sober, but the notion of some great revenge for Father and the Catholic masses as a whole had somehow stuck. Fuelled by hot Sack and righteous fervour, soon my comrades had decided that we must not only strike a blow of protest: we must undertake to do no less than sound a clarion call that would awaken all who placed their faith in Rome to glorious insurrection. We ourselves would bring about the great deliverance of our faith!
Having witnessed all that had befallen Father for much lesser sins against the Realm, I had by this time grown afraid, and counselled them that this mad plot might mean the ruin and not the rescue of this island’s faithful, but my counsel lacked conviction, as the counsel of a mask will ever do. When they began to speak of causing conflagrations at the seat of Parliament itself, I knew I did not have the courage to keep faith with them, yet by my very nature nor was I equipped to openly refuse and seem a coward. What was I to do? My face became in time opaque and still, where nothing could be read.
The night has come once more. Pouch was mistaken in his estimation of the date. It is November. From across the fields beyond the town a scent of woodsmoke taints the air, and in the relic of my wits I have a picture of the red sparks rising up to crowd the stars. What is it fans the flames of passion in a man? What promise was it that led Fawkes and Catesby on, or that inspired the thousand men of Captain Pouch?
Here, I recall the Captain’s words as to the matter kept there in that pouch draped by young John about his neck, which would repel all foes. It seems to me as if that hidden talisman must surely hold the secret kindling of all noble causes or rebellions and, despite his current woeful state, I cannot restrain my curiosity.
‘Pouch? Captain Pouch?’ I hiss. ‘Wake up, Sir. I’ve a question I must ask of you.’
He moans and swivels slightly; tilts from side to side. When he replies, his voice is soft and dazed. He seems to know not where he is. ‘I am John Reynolds. My name is John Reynolds and I cannot see.’
I have not patience left to entertain such ramblings, and my entreaties grow more urgent. ‘Tell me, Pouch, what is it that you keep there in that bag about your neck? What is the source of power that hurls a thousand men unheeding ‘neath the horses of their foes?’
His speech is slurred and bubbling. ‘The pouch?’
‘Aye, Sir. The pouch. What is within the pouch?’
Some moments pass, and now he speaks: ‘A small piece of green cheese.’
‘And that is all?’
He does not venture a response, and no more can I draw a solitary word from out his shredded lips. Well, then. There is my answer. There’s the grail men leave their sweethearts for and follow even in the jaws, the smoking throat of War: a small piece of green cheese. How bitter, then, when first we catch the rancid scent of what we fought for.
On that sour November night two years ago, when Catesby rushed into the Ashby gate-house pale and breathless while we sat in wait for news, it was already plain the plot had been betrayed. Fawkes had been seized from ambush, whereon Catesby and four others had come back from London running relay on their fevered horses to announce the dreadful news.
Some of us thought, in desperation, to head off to Wales and there was even wretched, hollow talk of firing up Welsh Catholics to make our mis-timed revolution a success, though in our hearts we knew we were all as dead men. The rest of them went West, eventually killed in flight or captured and then put to death by hanging, quartering and burning. For my own part, I sat weeping with my father there at Rushton Hall and waited for the King’s men to arrive and take me to the Tower. They knew where I would be. I’d told them in the letter that I wrote my brother-in-law, Lord Monteagle, just the week before.
At least in payment for my treachery they spared me public execution, leaving me instead to die after a lingering eight-week illness in the Tower. While I was thus incarcerated, gaolers would delight in giving me each detail of my friends’ demise. A story of this nature stays with me: one of the luckless crew — not Catesby, Fawkes or Winter; one I did not know so well — was taken to his place of execution and beheaded, then cut into four. Lifting the head to wave it at the mob, the axe-man cried, ‘Behold! A traitor’s head!’
At which the head replied, ‘Thou liest.’
I have since wished that I might share a basket with a head that had such spirit, or yet rest beside him on some ossuary shelf, but it is better it should never be. With nothing else save face to show, I could not face him.
Somewhere in my dark, the children sing above the roar and crackle of the flames. Before they sang for us or raised their bonfires to support our effigies, they’d burn a doll to signify His Holiness the Pope, and prior to that no doubt some earlier sacrifice back unto that primordial Monday, that first fire.
The burning and the song are one. If I gaze hard with the black jewel that is my only eye, I see the spit and flare of it, away there in the centre of that cold, wet coal where is my night. It was my friends they set alight, not I. I was denied that last deliverance, to be consumed within that timeless bright that is in truth one single blaze decanted down across the aeons.
The tongues of heat and brilliance surge and leap and cast their shivering light within the sockets of the mask, so that the shadows quake and seem to give the face expression where, in truth, there is no such expression, nor was ever one.
** <strong>Angel Language, AD 1618</strong>
I carry in my coat a snuff-box, though I’m not much in the habit now. Inside its lid there is a painting, done in miniature, of Greek or Roman ladies at their baths. They sit with thigh and buttock flat against wet tile and lean one on the other, nipple grazing shoulder, cheek to belly. Steam-secreted pearls are beaded on their spines, the hairs about each quim curled into little nooses by the damp.
I think, perhaps, too oft on women for my years. The maddening petticoated presence of them, every sweep and swish a brush-stroke on the sweltering canvas of my thoughts. Their sag and swell. Their damp and occult hinges where they open up like wicked, rose-silk Bibles, or their smocks, rime-marbled underneath the arms. Their ins and outs. Their backs. Their forths. Warm underhangs and shrew-skin purses, dewed with bitter gold. Imagined, they burn fierce and sputtering, singing, incandescent in my prick, my centre. I may close the lid upon this snuff-box filled with nymphs, yet in my dreams its clasp is broke and its contents not so quickly shut away.
Once, I believed that when I’d grown into a man and married, I’d be plagued no more by the incessant posturings and partyings of my bordello mind. I would no longer suffer the relentless elbow-cramping visitations of these succubi, that mapped the foam-splashed shorelines of my passion; penned their snail cartographies upon my sheets and clouded my good sense with humid, feverish distractions.
So I hoped, but it was not to be. Though wed with an obliging wife whose cosy hole was made a velvet-curtained stage where to play out my lewdest skits, the tide of jiggling shadow-pictures did not ebb, but only boomed the louder in those bed-wrapped, warm-lapped latitudes upon the shores of sleep above the snore of spouse and cot-bug’s measured tick. Denied thus any hope of swift reprieve from satyriasis, I sought to slake my thirst for carnal novelty with whores and serving-maids. When this did little more than whet an appetite already swollen, I drew consolation from the thought that soon I should be old, the imprecations of John Thomas surely grown more faint and hopeless, easily ignored.
Alas, with snow upon the thatch, there is yet wildfire in the cellar, stoked with willow limbs and jutting trunks. So much for good intentions. Often now it seems that my desire is worse than ever, with nought but the flimsiest of hints required to set my meditations on their soil-strewn and indecent path.
The lurching of this coach along the pitted Kendal road is all too readily become the pitch of marriage-couch, the pelvises of all aboard rocked back and forth in unison so that the fancy comes to me that but for some few feet I might be rocking to and fro inside the young wife sat there with her daughter on the seat opposing mine. When her pond-coloured eyes (what glistening secret tableaux have they seen?) glance up to catch my own, their frog-spawn pupils seem to widen, dark and open; querying. Lest any of my musings may be glimpsed in miniature upon my gaze, I look away to where the Lakeland hills are sprawled beyond the carriage window, a titanic slate-skinned harem, all asleep with wet grass slick and tufted on their tilted mounds, or tracking in a spidery Jacob’s Ladder up each pregnant slope, to nipple cairns.
It has been some few weeks since I set out from Faxton for my tour of the judicial circuit, going first by way of Northampton itself, where to confirm my various schedules and appointments, then by coach out through the town’s North gate, off on my yearly rounds. The gate was hung about with heads like blackberries upon an iron thorn-bush, ripe and heavy, these the dire fruits of sedition. Though the heads of Catholic plotters hung here many years ago have long since come unglued and toppled down to shard and dust, the sharp saltpetre tang of insurrection lingers in the town’s stale air. The faces of the men seem all the time suffused with red like blisters on a firebrand’s fingers, that may yet result in blood.
Things are the same throughout the land. I have presided at assizes ranged from Nottingham to Crewe, to judge such ruffians as are brought before me: poor men who are thin and poor men who yet manage to be fat. The swaggering young, the cringing old, the crutch-bound and the incomplete. In all their eyes there is a kinship, though their skin be pale as oatmeal, pink as dawn or tan as saddles. Green eyes, blue or brown, it matters not. Their eyes have all one hue, which is the colour of their great resentment, flecked with spark and promises of flame.
The women are another matter. Though with bitterness aplenty of their own they carry out their timeless work and seem to all intents as if they dwell apart from our hot world and tread the byways of some other, female land; one unaffected by the thrust and surge of man’s enthusiasms, Empires or revolts. They bake the bread. They clean the clothes and bring forth babies they may smack and kiss. Between our wars we go to them and suckle at their fond indifference, their abiding constancy, these mothers; mothers once or mothers yet to be. These sauce-splashed deities.
Thus made divine, their desecration is at once made sweeter to the thoughts, and to man’s private sensibilities.
Skirting some rut or fissure in the road, the coital lurching of the carriage is now made more urgent and erratic, groaning like a harlot’s headboard as it bucks and jolts towards its shuddering conclusion, some fantastic spend of horseflesh, wood and iron. Amidst this jostling, the girl-child sat across from me has fetched her knee a clout upon the carriage door, so that her mother is now called upon to comfort her.
She does so in a strange, soft pigeon-murmur where what sense the words may have is not so soothing as her lapping, ebb-tide voice itself: ‘Ooh, there, what have you done now? Hurt your knee? Ooh, my poor darling, where? Let’s see now ... Ooh. Ooh, never mind, the skin’s not broke although you’ll have a fine old bruise there, won’t you? Ooh, yes. Yes you will. A fine old bruise.’
These old, placatory rhythms lull the child, each dovecote ‘Ooh’ a drop of balm; a jig of oil to smooth the creased and choppy waters of her brow, where it is visible below the black rim of her little bonnet. Soon, the road beneath the coach becomes more even and the child falls back into the fitful doze with which she has elected to pass by the time that yet remains before we come to Kendal.
Though its bound-up majesty may not be glimpsed beneath the solemn, rigorously fastened hat, I know her hair is chestnut red and long, so that it falls about her waist when it is not wound tight and crucified by bodkins. She’s named Eleanor, although her mother for the most part seems to call her Nell, which is to my mind not so pretty. Both of them are come from further North, near by Dundee, to lodge with some old dame who has a room for rent outside of Kendal. Last night, when I first met with the pair there at the coach-inn where we each had paused upon our different journeys to a common destination, I was made acquainted with the facts of their predicament.
Her husband only recently passed on, young Widow Deene (such is the mother’s name) has come with Eleanor down to the Lakelands where a lady-friend of hers had vouched that she may find employment as a seamstress. Having spent such meagre savings as she had upon the journey here with but a little over for her first week’s rent, the luckless, lovely little thing has gambled much upon her friend’s advice and frets, now it is too late, upon the wisdom of her chosen course. Thus it would seem we both hope to have business waiting for us when we reach our destination, whether shirts to stitch or men to hang.
The widow’s bosom falls and rises, falls again, with its imagined whiteness hid neath buttoned black only to shine more dazzling and more livid in my thoughts. A scree of freckles, there across the steep ridge of her nose. Her pale, worn hands rest in her lap and cup her secret warmth.
It was the daughter that I met with first, and in a manner such as to occasion quite a start in me. I came upon her half-way up the coach-house stairs, stood with a narrow, westward-facing window at her back, afire with sunset all about her rim; less like a child than like some spirit of eclipse. I saw her and I stopped and gasped, so much did she remind me of another child, upon another stair, one that I had not seen but only heard of, years before.
Francis, the sole fruit of my union with Lady Nicholls, had regrettably become involved in dealings with John Dee, the famous charlatan who lived at Mortlake, near to Richmond. Called upon to visit Dee’s house overnight, he saw some few things it were better that he had not seen, yet nothing he had witnessed would come to perplex him half so much as having happened on a small girl standing half-way up the stairway of that dreadful doctor’s house, a western window spilling ruby light behind her. Later, having learned there were no children in the house save for Dee’s full-grown daughter, Francis came to be convinced that he had seen no mortal infant, but instead some spectral waif lost on her way to Paradise. His voice and hands both shook to tell me of it and so vivid was the picture he described it was as if I had myself met with the little wraith-girl, standing dark against her sunset. Thus last night, when I encountered Eleanor, lit just the same upon the coach-house landing, I was for a moment seized by fear of things I had thought put away with childhood, and I gawped at her with what must have appeared a fearful countenance until she spoke.
‘Oh, Sir,’ she said, ‘I do hope you are kind. I’ve played outside and left my mother in the room we have together for the night, and now I can’t find which it was. It’s dark soon, and she’ll think me lost if I’m not back.’
Although the child was reassured to find someone who might assist her in her plight, she was not yet so reassured as I, to learn that she had mortal voice, and kin, and flesh and blood. In my relief, I promised I would help her find her mother’s room, at which she beamed and took my dry, age-spotted hand into the warm pink shell-curl of her own, then led me up the narrow stairs.
It soon became apparent that the child, returning from her play, had looked upon the first floor for the room she and her mother shared, when all the while their billet lay just one floor higher, leading from the coach-inn’s topmost landing. Tapping hesitantly on the door, I was soon answered by a quite bewitching jade-eyed woman of perhaps some five and twenty years, her great relief at having found her child soon giving way to an effusive gratitude bestowed upon myself, her benefactor. Though I’d spent but moments with the girl and done no more than walk upstairs with her it was, to hear her mother talk, as if I’d single-handed snatched the infant from the slobbering jaws of wolves.
‘Oh, Sir, you’ve brought her back. I looked from out my window and the sky had come so dark. I had no notion where she’d gone and was that worried I was at me wit’s end. Nelly, now, you thank the gentleman for all he’s done.’
Her daughter here performed a brief, embarrassed curtsy, mumbling her thanks, gazing the while towards the warped boards of what little floor their narrow room possessed. I saw she had her mother’s ocean eyes; the same fine-bladed cheeks with their impressive line calling to mind the urgent frailty of Italic script. Two years at most would make a splendid bed-full of her.
While I smiled down at her child with what she no doubt took to be paternal fondness, Nelly’s mother did not cease professing her indebtedness and admiration, head tipped back, lifting her lashes like the lids of jewel chests deep with emeralds to gaze up at me.
‘To think a gentleman as grand as you would stoop to help the likes of me and Eleanor, why, Sir, it fairly takes the breath from out of me. Look at the handsome clothes you’ve got upon you! You must be a great physician, else a lord to dress so gay.’
I told her, in a modest and good-humoured way that should not seem too vain, that I was neither of these things, being instead a judge. I will confess the taking of a certain pleasure from her indrawn breath and widened eyes, having upon occasions in the past had cause to note that women will become enthusiastic, even wanton, in the presence of authority such as my station lends me. With one hand raised to her breast as if physically to suppress its palpitations, she now took a small step back from me, perhaps to reappraise my scale as one might do with mountains or some other scenic feature. Where she’d thought me small and near to hand she found me massive and remote. I saw myself reflected as a god in twin green mirrors and at her excitement was myself aroused in some small measure.
‘Oh, what must you think of us, turned out so poorly? Never seen a judge, nor thought I should, and here I am with one that close as I could reach and touch him. You’ll have come here on important business, I’ll be bound.’
I told her that I had a case to try in Kendal, whereupon her ardour doubled.
‘Kendal! Why, that’s no more than the place where little Eleanor and I are headed with the morning’s coach. Nell? Do you hear? We are to ride to Kendal with a judge.’
Though she could have but little comprehension of my office or that power it represented, Eleanor now looked at me for all the world as if she had been promised she’d be carried to her destination on the shoulders of Saint Christopher himself. She took her mother’s hand, seeming afraid lest one of them might suddenly ascend to Heaven from the sheer occasion of it all. The Widow Deene, as she would shortly introduce herself, was meanwhile fired by morbid speculation with regard to the impending trial at which I should preside. Although throughout her tone was one of fascinated horror, I have more than once observed that in the fairer sex preoccupations with the charnel often mask an equal inclination to the carnal side of life’s affairs. Whenever some rough sort is made to swing, one measures in the filthy-fingered gropings of the crowd the lewd abandon that this glimpse of their mortality awakes in them. The women, later, will perform an imitation of the hanged man’s final dance, writhing beneath their husbands’ lunging weight, so that I wonder if we were not most of us conceived to an accompaniment of creaking ropes and flailing, blackened tongues? Such a conception surely might account for our obsession, later on in life, with all the sudden, hurtful ways there are to leave it, such as Nelly’s mother now evinced.
‘It is a murder, Sir, you are to try? Please God that there are not such things in Kendal, not if me and Nelly are to make our living there.’
I reassured her that the fellow up before me was no cut-throat, but instead a sheep-thief of no great account, although this did not much relieve her curiosity.
‘And shall he hang, Sir? What a thing it must be, saying if men are to live or die.’ A colour had arisen in her cheek, so that I smiled a little, knowing her to be already taken by the glamour of my robe and gavel.
In response I held her eye and spoke in tones of great severity. ‘If he is guilty, Madame, and I have no doubt that such he be, then shall he dance a Tyburn jig, or else he has a friend to swing upon his legs and speed him to a hastier demise.’
Here, Eleanor grew pale and clutched her mother’s skirts. Cast on the ceiling by a low-set lantern, both their shadows merged to one; a dark thing with too many limbs. Noticing that her daughter had become afraid, the widow turned towards the girl and scolded her perhaps too harshly, no doubt hoping she should make a good impression on a judge were she to play the martinet.
‘Now don’t you make a fuss, my girl! You know what I have told you. We should thank the stars that we are being spoken to at all by such a noble gentleman as ...’ Here her words trailed off and, glancing from her child, she offered me a querying look, at which I understood that she was still in ignorance as to my name.
I introduced myself, to spare her further puzzlement. ‘I am His Worship Judge Augustus Nicholls, come from Faxton in Northamptonshire, upon the circuit. Now you have me at a disadvantage, Madame. Who, I wonder, might you be?’
Seeming a little flustered, she announced herself as Mrs Mary Deene, late of Dundee, if it should please me, whereupon I let my gaze drop for an instant from her face to the more softly angled contours there below and told her that it pleased me very much. At this we both laughed, she a little nervously, while Eleanor looked first to one of us then to the other, half-aware that meanings darted underneath the surface of our talk like pretty minnows, yet unable quite to grasp them ere they vanished in a twist of silver.
We exchanged some few words more, stood at the threshold of her stoop-backed attic room, yet more than words were passed between us: certain measurements of breath were evident. Some phrases had a tilt to them, some silences an eloquence, or so it seemed to me. We both avowed we should be glad to have the other’s company upon the morrow’s ride to Kendal, and expressed the hope we might have cause to meet while we were in that place. At this, content that my preliminary work with Widow Deene would be sufficient to its task, I took my leave amidst much curtsying and scraping.
In my larger chamber on the floor below I punched my feather bolster till it had a shape more suitable for entertaining sleep. Settling back, I closed my eyelids, where the darkness rose behind like a theatre’s drapes as Widow Deene and Eleanor, both of them nude and with their autumn hair untied, danced with each other in a feverish arietta to high French fiddles, pale and twirling on that secret stage.
Out through the carriage window the November fields are made to dazzling mirror-flats by flood, where up above the clouds hang grey and heavy as cathedrals. Two drowned heifers floating swollen in a ditch; their staring eyes catch mine in passing, black glass bulbs now fogged, steamed white by death.
Besides a trade of pleasantries when first we climbed aboard the coach this morning, and of several lingering glances since, little of note has passed between the widow and myself today. Since I imagine we shall shortly reach the skirts of Kendal where the Deenes are to be lodged, then it were better I should soon promote the notion of an assignation, lest I miss my chance. If child and mother disembark a half-mile down the road from here and are not seen again for these three days I am in Kendal, why, what then? Then I must sleep alone, else pay some drab to warm my bed unless I would return to wife and Faxton without dalliance to keep me warm in mind and memory throughout the winter months.
Our carriage rolls along its track by open land with, in the distance, mountains steeped in cloud, or clouds that look alike to mountains. Some way off, across the fallow, ploughed-in fields, I spy a great black farm dog bounding at a furious pace across the ruts and frost-baked furrows, seeming easily to match its stride with our fast-moving carriage as it lopes along in parallel to us. I make attempt to estimate its distance from the coach, which is, perhaps, much further than I first assumed. Why, then, the hound must be of monstrous size to seem so large at such a great remove.
No. No, I see it now, the truth of it, and am embarrassed at my foolishness: the beast is not a dog at all, but rather is a horse. A clump of trees obscures its racing shadow-form from sight before I can confirm this logical surmise, while at the same time Widow Deene speaks from behind me so that my attention is diverted from the creature utterly to other, less ambiguous concerns.
‘We shall be getting off soon, shan’t we Nelly?’ This, though spoken to the child, seems largely for my benefit. Unless I miss my guess, with this announcement of her imminent departure Widow Deene hopes to provoke me to a suitable response. Not wishing that so radiant a being should be made to suffer disappointment, I turn from the window of the carriage now to speak with her, and lift my straggling eyebrows up towards their centre in a great display of something like bereavement.
‘My good woman, can it be that you and your dear child alike are to be taken from me in such haste? It really is too bad! In all my lonely weeks upon these roads at last I meet with true companionship only to have it plucked from me while it is new. I’d hoped that while in Kendal we might meet, the three of us, and thus continue our acquaintanceship, but now ...’ I let my words trail off and spread my hands here, miserably, as if I hold a world of woe between them like some dismal Atlas.
Little Eleanor, awoken now, at least is moved to sympathy by my performance. Turning on her seat to face her mother, she takes up the older woman’s hands within her smaller ones and wears a look upon her pointed fox-cub face that is the very soul of earnestness.
‘Mama, shall we not see the gentleman again? He was so kind, I should not like him to be gone.’
Her mother looks now from the girl to me, and once more, though it is the child to whom she speaks, her words are meant for older and more knowing ears. ‘You hush now, girl. Why, think how all the Kendal folk should look upon the judge if he were seen there with the likes of us! With me not long a widow they’ve enough to whet their tongues upon, without us bringing shame upon His Honour in the bargain.’
Here I shake my head in pained denial, as though such considerations could not be more distant from my thoughts, although in truth there is much sense in what she says. It is not meet nor seemly that I should be seen abroad with persons of their type, and in my years I’ve learned that England is a smaller land than many would suppose. Sometimes it seems I cannot put a hand inside the underthings of a Yorkshire lass without it happen that she’s daughter to the second cousin of my wife’s best-trusted friend.
Though Kendal be remote from Faxton, I am having second thoughts concerning the advisability of a liaison with the Widow Deene, though now her child pipes up again, with fresh suggestion: ‘Could he not then come to visit with us, in the nice old lady’s house where we’re to stay? You said it was outside the town, so folks should have no cause to pay it mind where he was gone if he come calling. Do say that he might.’
The mother lifts her eyes once more to mine, and seems to hesitate. It strikes me that the girl’s proposal is ideally suited to my purposes, and I am taken by the furtive, secret bond that it already weaves between us; the suggestion of a mutual confidence that might be taken further. Widow Deene is watching me intently, waiting for some sign of my response to Eleanor’s idea before she dares to venture an opinion of her own. The moment has arrived to stamp my seal upon our tryst, and leaning forward in the rocking coach I set one hand upon the infant’s knee as might an uncle, chuckling the while. Beneath her skirt’s thin dark the sinew of her leg is spare and taut, much like a bird’s.
‘Why, what a clever mite you are, to think of such a thing! Though for my own part I care not a whit if I am seen in company with two such lovely ladies, it would never do if in this manner I should compromise your mother’s reputation in the town where she’s to work. Yet thanks to you, dear girl, we have the answer! I would be delighted to come calling at your residence and break the bread with both of you at your convenience, if it should be your mother gives assent.’
It seems I’ve learned the trick of speaking through the child, just as her mother does. The way to do it is to talk to one while gazing at the other. When the object of one’s gaze has such bewitching sea-spray eyes and lips plucked from a rose bay willow herb, this is not an unpleasant task. The widow, who returns my look, now seems to colour in her cheeks. Glancing away towards the worn boards of the carriage floor and with a tiny, private smile, she stammers her acceptance. The suppressed delight upon her countenance invokes a similar elation in myself, though in a different quarter of my person.
‘Oh, Sir, I ... why, of course I gives assent. You’ve no need to ask my permission. Not for anything.’
Her eyes dart up now from the floor’s bare planks that have unravelling slivers of the Kendal road between their lengths. She reads my face to see if I have understood her last remark, its gauze-veiled invitation. Satisfied her imprecations have not fallen upon stony ground, she looks away once more before continuing. The tremor in her voice, so faint as to be scarcely evident, is thrilling yet to me. ‘You’ll see the house where we’re to be set down. It is not far from here, and no more than a mile’s walk out of Kendal. Better you should come by dark, though, people being ready to think ill of others as they are.’
I readily agree to this, and promise I shall call upon her this tomorrow night, before I am to sit at my assizes on the morn. A fuck will no doubt much improve my disposition and, in modest measure, may alleviate the dreary circumstances that attend to the condemning of a man. It comes to me that since she is a widow without funds and of uncertain character, it may be that a shilling would procure the services of little Nelly in with us as well. I think about the bathers in my snuff-box, how they plait each other’s lank and wringing hair; a foam of women risen from their spa’s warm depths.
The child is speaking to her mother now, pleased by the news that I’m to visit, clutching at the widow’s sleeve excitedly. ‘Oh, Mother, it will be so nice to have a gentleman attend to us. I’ve missed it so while Father is away from us in ...’
Mrs Deene here shoots the child a sharp, forbidding look, so that the words die on her daughter’s lips. Clearly, the pangs of widowhood are yet sharp in this woman’s breast so that she will not suffer Eleanor to speak of her late sire. Nevertheless, there’s something in the rueful face the child makes at this silent reprimand that stirs my pity, so that I am moved now to complete her speech in hope that I may smooth across her error and return her to her mother’s favour.
‘While your father is away from you in Heaven with Our Lord. Of course: it is but natural that you should miss his presence, and more natural still that you should long to know man’s company. In that, you are alike with all your sex.’
Here, Nell looks puzzled, but a smile of such relief and gratitude lights up her mother’s face that I am given courage to continue. ‘Fear not, for tomorrow night I shall come visiting, and though I may not hope to cut as good a leg as would your dear departed father, I am confident of my ability to substitute in what were, surely, his least onerous responsibilities. To whit, attending to his child, and to his wife.’
Before this last I leave the merest pause, in which I raise my stare from off the child and let it fall upon the dame instead. A look of such intensity and understanding is transferred between us that we cannot either of us bear it long and after moments must avert our eyes. A pleasant, gravid silence next descends. I fancy we’re each speculating heatedly as to the nature of the other’s heated speculations.
Smiling to myself, I turn once more to watch from out the carriage window, but the dog or foal that I saw earlier is not anywhere in sight. The bare, black trees fly past, clumped like the bristles on an old boar’s spine.
The silence lasts until we are arrived at some low cottage, all dun-coloured stone and mouse-brown thatch, set back a little from the road that winds on up the hill to Kendal. Here the Deenes must disembark. Anxious to show that I have strength despite my years, I help to lift what little baggage they possess from off the coach, which, it transpires, includes naught but a single satchel made of threadbare canvas. As I pass it down to her my fingers brush, almost as if by accident, against the widow’s own gloved hand.
A slovenly and heavy-bodied girl about fifteen is come from out the cottage, with her tangled hair the same dull colour as its thatch. Her features are impassive. Eyes that seem dull-witted and perhaps too far apart surmount a flat nose, more plan than relief. Her mouth is wide with lips too full, yet might lay claim in certain lights to its own ugly sensuality. She pauses with one lard-white hand upon the cottage gatepost and regards the coach without expression. When I look behind her to the front stoop of the house itself I see a fat and age-creased drudge who’s shuffled from indoors supported by a stick. She comes no further than the door, but stands unmoving with its pitch-stained frame about her in repugnant portrait. Her chins and jowls are like one rippled mass, this merging with the single massive contour of her dugs and belly. Tiny eyes a sticky black, like plum-stones pressed in suet, she stands leaning on her stick and, like the half-wit girl propped by the gate (who may, I fancy, be her daughter), gazes at the coach with neither word nor any look that may be read.
The Widow Deene smiles up at me and mouths, ‘Tomorrow, then,’ before she turns and moves towards the cottage with her child in tow. The string-haired girl slouched up against the post now silently draws back the gate, admitting Nelly and her mother to what shall be their new home. As I pull shut the carriage door and settle back into my seat both Eleanor and Mrs Deene turn round to wave at me just as the driver spurs his horses into life and I am hauled away and on to Kendal. Smiling fondly, I wave back as they recede from view. Tomorrow night, then.
Several minutes pass in fruitless scanning of the fields about for some sight of the beast spied earlier, and then the narrow, twisting jetties of the Lakeland town spring up about us and I am arrived. The courthouse, where I am to lodge in upstairs rooms built wholly for that purpose, is a low but dignified affair of brick and timber, near to Kendal’s centre. Having quit the coach and paced a while upon the cobbles of the court’s rear yard to bring some circulation to my legs, I summon an attendant from within to haul my bags up foot-smoothed stairs of stone, thence to my bed-chamber.
I mount the steps ahead, while he, a man of middle years, trudges behind me, wheezing and complaining in my wake. There is a landing half-way up, where is a window facing West. I have arrived at Kendal late on in the day, so that the sky beyond the glass is red and I am struck by that uneasy sense of having seen before. As I approach the landing I experience a mad dread that young Nelly will be stood there with her hair aflame, though I have left her back along the Kendal road. Why this idea should wake such fright in me I cannot say, and when I reach the landing it is empty. We continue up the stairs.
My room is chill but comfortable. The attendant promises he will alert the various Officers of Court to my arrival and that I may meet with both these Officers and the accused upon the morrow. Setting down my baggage just inside the door, he takes his leave of me and I remain sat on my cot in sudden still and silence, foreign to me after all the pitch and clatter of the road. After a while I rise and, crossing to my window, close its bug-drilled shutters on encroaching night. For want of any better pass-time, I prepare for bed.
These empty rooms, upon the circuit: sometimes I believe that all my frenzied copulations are but efforts to drown out the wretched spectres of these tombs; these absences.
Undressing now, my thoughts turn to my son, to Francis, back in Faxton. What a cloud there is about the lad (though, being close to fifty, I must own that he is lad no more). A foul miasma of the spirit seems to have quite overtaken him that neither wife nor his sweet daughter Mary, my own grandchild, can dispel. He mopes and stares. He only sometimes reads and seems without all motive in his days.
Dee was the cause of it, else I am not a judge. It is some five and twenty years since Francis suffered his regrettable enthusiasm for things thaumaturgical and first sought out the charlatan’s advice, going to Mortlake where he made the doctor promise of one hundred pounds if Dee should teach him how to fix and tine the moon, along with other dark things of this type. While Queen Bess was in life, Dee had her ear and was much sought after in matters sorcerous, for such dire practices were then respectable, however difficult it may be to accredit this behaviour now.
Almost a year from his first visit to Dee’s house, something occurred which marked the change in Francis that persists and worsens to this day. Its details were not made entirely clear to me, but from what fragments I am able to assemble it would seem that Francis had occasion to peruse some documents pertaining to the doctor’s past experiments and rituals, performed while Dee had in his servitude one Edward Kelly, an unconscionable rogue who died in gaol.
Although in later years I’d oft beseech that he reveal the content of those documents, my son insisted it were better for my soul that I remain in ignorance. To judge from how he starts and frights whene’er a window bangs and has always a wan, hag-ridden look about him, it may be that he was right enough in this. Such morsels as he did reveal were more than adequate to fire the most macabre imaginings, relating to the conjuring of awful presences, whereafter to transcribe their stark yet puzzling announcements. Dee, it seemed, had at some length compiled a grammar of the spirit language, that these ‘angels’ as he called them might commune with him and he might in his turn make plain their utterances. These aetheric dealings were that aspect of the doctor’s work which most concerned my son and later came to trouble him, but for my own part I found more to entertain me in the hints that Francis would let slip as to Dee’s earthier transactions.
Of the papers shewn my son that cold March night in fifteen ninety-four were some describing ritual acts of a repellent carnal nature, while still other documents pertained to an arrangement, ordered by the spirits, that the doctor and his servant Kelly should both keep their wives in common. Whether Francis felt that with these revelations Dee was subtly proposing that my son should bring his own wife into some comparable arrangement, I know not. All I am sure of is that Francis made his outrage plain, at which a pang of anger passed between the doctor and my son, who stormed from out Dee’s study in a bate and made his way upstairs to where a bed was set aside for him.
It was thus while he mounted to his room with naught but furious words unspoken in his head that Francis happened on the child. Stood with her face in shadow and the bloody evening red behind her through the western window, she raised up her arms with palms turned flat towards my son as if to bar his way. Haloed in flame, she spoke to Francis in a foreign tongue, all aspirated vowels with scarce a consonant between that sounded much like ‘Bah—zoh—deh—leh—teh—oh—ah’ and on and on; a string of heathen nonsense.
Francis was upon the point of asking who the girl might be and what her business was with him when of a sudden she stepped from before the window to the landing’s shadows and the full light of the setting sun, now unimpeded by her presence, shone into his eyes so as to dazzle him and make him squint and glance away. When next he looked upon the stairway she was gone, nor was there trace of her remaining save a scent he said reminded him of myrrh.
Despite their quarrel and the fright that he had suffered, Francis could not seem to keep away from Mortlake. With the troubles between him and Dee soon mended, he made frequent visits to the doctor’s house across the next six years, on more than one occasion forcing my grand-daughter Mary to accompany him, against my best advice.
Dee, at this juncture of his life, relied upon one Bartholomew Hickman as he’d once relied on Edward Kelly, needing, it would seem, someone to scry the aethers for him with a glass and tell him of the messages his ‘angels’ would convey. All this came to an end around the turning of the century when, if my son may be believed, this Hickman was discovered as a fraud, or at the least a seer who had communed with naught but false, deceptive spirits. Near a decade’s work was thus undone, and in the late September of that year my son and grand-daughter alike attended bitter and defeated ceremonies there at Mortlake where the documents accrued from Hickman’s traffic with the spirit world were ignominiously rendered down to ash.
I will admit I thought it splendid that a faker should be thus exposed, but Francis would not be consoled. My son considered the affair to be a vast catastrophe whose true dimension I might never sound. Even my grandchild Mary seemed to have a pall about her, and would sometimes offer me a frightened look, as if she of a sudden knew me in another light. They neither of them went again to Mortlake after that, nor had they dealings with John Dee. It was not long before King James, a Godly Sovereign, ascended to the throne, whereafter the Magician found that he had fallen out from grace and so began his great decline. Not many years were passed before Dee had descended into penury and then, soon after, passed away at Mortlake tended only by his daughter, from which one assumes there were no spirits present in that instance to assist with his demise.
Pulling my night-gown on I mount the guest-room’s wooden-boxed commode to make my stool, this being hard and painful in its passing. With my labours thus accomplished I snuff out the candle that I have undressed by and leap straight into my bed, the blankets dragged up covering my ears, without which muffling presence, ever since I was a child, I may not sleep.
I am annoyed to find that still my thoughts are turned to Doctor Dee, for there is something puzzling in him that I cannot leave alone. There seems a great predicament in how one measures such a man, that was too well-accomplished in the sciences material and politic to be discounted as a fool, and yet believed he spoke with angels. Can so fine a mind have found diversion for so many years in copying pointless syllables on to his endless tables, charts and journals? If this be not so; if by some fluke of reason all the messages that Dee transcribed were real, then what are we to make of a Heaven populous with incoherent angels, spouting nonsense credos in the speech of babes? I saw the ‘angel language’ once, copied laboriously by my son into a journal that he kept. It was a grid of what appeared to me at least a thousand squares, each with some symbol or notation written in so that it seemed in sum a veritable map of lunacy; that mist-bound continent whence few return to tell what they have seen.
I shall concern myself no more this night with thoughts of wizards nor astrologers. The skull-capped and white-bearded vision of the doctor as my son described him to me dances irritatingly behind my eyelids until, with an effort of the will, I am enabled to dispel it and put in its place some several pictures of the Widow Deene in various shaming postures, these soon supplemented by a memory of the slab-thighed servant-girl that stood there by the cottage gate and stared at me with empty, stupid eyes.
My steam of thought condenses, beading into dreams against the coolness of my pillow, and a mumbling cloud descends. A crack is opened in the night to let me enter in, and slide, and sink, and sleep ...
I wake before the sun with the attendant who assisted with my baggage tapping at the chamber door to tell me that a breakfast is prepared for me down in the dining room below. I thank him with a grunt and rise to dress as well as I am able in the dark. Whilst buckling my shoes I am reminded of a dream that was upon me in the night, wherein I was at Mortlake with my son and Doctor Dee, save in the dream his name was Dr Deene. He held a yellowed parchment up to us and said, ‘Here is a map of lunacy’, and yet when Francis and I leaned in close to study it we saw it was instead a map of our own shire, which is to say Northampton. More, it seemed to me as if the map were not drawn on to paper but tattooed upon a substance very much like human skin. I thought to look for Faxton but could find it nowhere on the chart, which filled me with a sudden formless dread. Here Dr Dee or Deene was moved to reassure me that all would be well if he and I were but to have our wives in common, though he may have said not wives but lives. At this, and for no reason, I began to weep and afterwards remember nothing more until my waking.
Properly attired now and removed unto the dining room, above a meal of scaith cooked in an oatmeal crust I’m introduced to my chief bailiff for tomorrow’s trial, a doughty chap named Callow with a strawberry nose and great side-whiskers that surround his crab-pink face in white. As I pluck fishbones from my cheek to set as on some tiny ossuary shelf beside my plate, he reacquaints me with the details of the case I am to hear. A local man of no account called Deery stands accused of taking from their rightful owner both a ewe and ram, the last of which he sold, whereafter salted portions of the former were discovered on his property, so that his guilt is plainer than a wart.
Chief Bailiff Callow tells me that with breakfast done we both may walk to Kendal gaol and view the miscreant there in his cell, along with those less serious offenders I am also called upon to judge once Deery has been sentenced: drunks and whores; a shopkeeper accused of giving out dishonest measure; several brawlers and a bugger.
Out of doors, with fish and oatmeal resting heavy on my gut and breath like smoke upon the frozen air, I walk beside the bailiff neath a gauze of shadow down the steep lanes slippery with frost. The sky is ribboned water-blue and gold along its eastern edge, where West of that there are yet stars and from the fields outside of Kendal comes a gradual fugue of birdsong, each voice lucid and distinct.
The gaol, built out of rough grey stones, is in the very middle of the town where it squats like a monstrous toad that has been petrified by its own ugliness. Its walls have gaping chinks and fissures so that it is no more warm inside than out, consisting only of a cramped space where the turn-keys sit and whittle aimlessly at sticks, with several narrow cells crammed in beyond.
Sat in the first of these, a girl about thirteen with pale, untidy hair is suckling her babe, a ghastly, mottled little thing no bigger than a rat and by the look of it not long for life. Each time she makes attempt to tease her sallow, cone-shaped breast between the creature’s lips it turns its grey and shrivelled face away to whine. The mother looks up briefly at me without interest, then turns her dull gaze back towards her child. The bailiff tells me that she is arraigned for brawling, and we pass on down the row.
Deery is in the next cell we approach. He sits upon his bunk and stares without expression at the wall, not even looking up at us when we elect to question him directly. Still a young man, Deery has the look of one once handsome and well-built now run to fat, the strong bones of his boyhood face yet visible, embedded in a bland expanse of dough. He sits there, feet apart, his forearms resting on his thighs with wrists as thick as infants’ waists and ham-hock fists, the fingers intertwined into a hawser-knot at rest between his knees. His stillness is unsettling and complete.
I ask him if he knows I am to judge him on the morrow, whereupon he merely shrugs and still does not elect to look at me directly. When I ask him if he is aware that hanging is the punishment for theft of livestock he seems only bored, and after some few moments hawks a quid of startlingly yellow phlegm into the corner of his cell. It is clear that conversation is impossible between the two of us, and after but a cursory examination of the lock-up’s other inmates, Bailiff Callow and I step from the rank miasma of the gaol once more into the biting Kendal air. The skies are light now and the town is properly awakened. A wood-merchant’s cart with images of Saints and martyrs painted on its side rolls past drawn by a threadbare horse. Small boys climb on the baker’s roof to drink the warmth and savour from his oven-vents and down the lane there walks a stooped old man all hung about with wooden cages wherein bantams make complaint.
With little useful to be done before tomorrow’s trials I take the bailiff’s leave and pass the morning by inspecting Kendal, stopping in a hostelry at noon to dine on mutton pie and swede. Thus fortified, I spend the afternoon in pleasurable meander through the nearby countryside. Some short while prior to heading back towards my lodgings where I may prepare for this tonight’s encounter with the Widow Deene, it comes to me that I am in a mood of tense expectancy that is not all connected with that lady or her charms. I realize at length that part of me is half anticipating further glimpses of the animal that I saw yesterday as it raced there beside our coach, and laugh aloud at my own foolishness. This is not even near the place where I first spied the beast, that being on the other side of town. Besides, of what concern to me is some stray hound, or pony, or whatever else the creature may have been?
Returning to my rooms I change into a finer set of clothes and put fresh powder on my wig. Waiting until the Heavens’ nightly silent battle in the western sky has run its bloody course, I sidle out into the first mauve fogs of dusk, taking much care that I should not be seen by anyone associated with the Court and holding underneath one arm my iron-knobbed cane for fear of cut-purses.
A doleful blue which all too quickly cools to grey descends upon the Lakeland hills with twilight, and across the flooded fields a loon is driven mad by grief. I am soon come upon the outskirts of the town, whence I continue on the Kendal road towards the cottage where the widow and her child are billeted. The mustard-coloured mud that now adorns my polished boots seems but a little forfeit weighed against the great rewards I hope may be in store for me. A widow who has much experience with married life and yet is eager to resume its carnal aspect makes for a more satisfying ride than any whey-skinned maid in service, and I dare suppose that the authority my office lends me may do much in making her receptive to my whims, peculiar though they be.
To each side of the darkening road the ditches pour and gurgle like a man run through the heart and all about an icy mist is rising so that I grow anxious for my first sight of the cottage lights upon the track ahead of me. When last I crossed this ground it was by coach and not so gloomy, yet I wonder if I have not made some error. Can the cottage really be this far outside of Kendal, or have I passed by it in the dusk so that it lies behind me now? Resolved that if I am not come upon the fat old woman’s habitation soon then I shall turn back for my lodgings though it mean I must forgo the widow’s company, I am afforded much relief to round a bend and sight at last the wan and jaundiced glow of lamplight seen through curtains, some way further down the lane.
With images of Widow Deene as I should soonest like to see her filling all my thoughts, save for those thoughts pertaining to the darling Eleanor, my pace is made more quick so that before I know it I am by the cottage gate. A flurry of emotion now descends upon me; a peculiar nervousness that I have known before when in such situations: partly it is lust, partly anxiety lest I have made too much of things and shall be disappointed. This time there is something else besides, an undertow of qualm I may not place, but all such trepidations must be put away. If I’m to hang a man upon the morrow, then I would this night impale a woman first, and so march briskly up a mollusc-skated path to rap the tar-streaked door.
A Pater Noster-while goes by until at last the door’s unlatched and I’m confronted by the half-wit girl that I saw loitering by the gate when we arrived here yesterday. Encountering her now, I am less certain if she be indeed half-witted, or instead has cultivated a tremendous slowness, as a form of insolence. She stares at me in silence an inordinate amount of time before she deigns to speak, and when she does a lewd and knowing grin is smeared, much like a riotous slogan, on the flat wall of her face.
‘You’ll be they judge, then?’
Voice as thick and slippery as waterweed, her lazy slur has a suggestiveness about it that I soon discover to be constant and habitual. When I reply that yes, I am indeed His Honour Judge Augustus Nicholls and enquire as to her own name, she returns a smile that is at once flirtatious and amused, and holds my eye for some few humid moments before answering.
‘I’m Emmy. You’ll be wantin’ Mary, though. You’d best come in.’
She ushers me into a lamplit passageway so narrow that, as she manoeuvres past me to pull shut the front door in my wake, we are both for a moment pressed together, face to face, there in that closely bounded vestibule. Her heavy bust is pressed against my coat-front, flattened so it seems to disappear in much the same way as the blade of a stage dagger. This sublime compression lasts for but a moment, then she’s by me. As I turn and walk towards the lit room at the passage’s far end I hear her close the door and draw a bolt across.
Another doorway, partly open, leads off from the hall upon my right, and as we pass it by I glance inside. Though it is lit by nothing save such light as filters from the passage where we walk, I can make out a vast array of painted plates and figures made from porcelain arranged upon a huge old dresser just inside the room, which seems immaculately kept and has a richly patterned rug upon its floor. In company with the dresser I can also see an ornate footstool and a quaint low table made of polished cherry-wood. Though I may not view all this front room whilst in passing, I am given the impression of a small, neat space so filled with heirlooms proudly on display as to allow no room for one to enter in. It has a pristine and unused appearance quite at odds with the dilapidated façade of the house, but I move on towards the light there at the hall’s far end, and think no more upon it. Emmy walks behind me, and I hear her flat, bare feet upon the boards. I hear her breath.
The passage leads me to a room so different from the one I have just passed that they might be on separate continents, divided not by some few feet of hall, but by an ocean. From my contemplation of the neat front room so filled with beautiful possessions, I am plunged into a squalid hovel where the gnarled grain of the walls is choked by soot and there is everywhere a smell compounded out of mildew, broiling offal, and that odour that old women have, like tripes and piss. I understand that this is how the poor must choose to live, with all they have of beauty, worth or value hoarded in a room kept just for show, which they themselves may enter not, save that it be to dust or clean. Their true lives are played out behind these cluttered shrines in cheerless middens such as this, where I stand on the threshold now.
A hearth-cum-stove of iron and slate set in the end wall warms the room, but in a stifling way. Beside this, on a bow-legged stool that has her walking-cane propped up against it, sits the wrinkled and obese old dame that I spied yesterday, her eyes like coals in curds fixed fast upon me as I step inside with head bent to avoid the low oak beams. Seen closer to, I note she is afflicted with a moisture on the lungs, so that she wheezes, with her monstrous bosom heaving like the tide beneath her apron and a quiver rippling through her puddled flesh, across her jowls and goitrous neck at every breath.
Set out there in the middle of this noisome chamber is a table far too massive for so cramped a place, that looks as if the cottage were built up about it, being far too broad to fit the door and very old besides, its surface scarred by carving-knives long snapped in hands long dead. Five chairs are set about the table, two of them already occupied by Eleanor and her enchanting mother, both of whom look up and smile upon my entry. I had quite forgot how green their eyes were, and decide that I might bear these miserable surrounds if they should be illuminated by such pulchritude.
‘Judge Nicholls! You have come just as you said.’ It is the Widow Deene who speaks, and the excitement and anticipation in her voice elicits in me smug assurance that all shall be well between us. Scraping back her chair across the rough stone tiles, she rises from her seat and steps across the room to greet me, placing one weak hand upon my elbow as she steers me to my setting, opposite her own. Stood leaning up against the passage door-jamb, Emmy smirks at the assembly. While attempting to ignore the girl, I make small conversation with the widow and with Eleanor until the bloated crone sat by the hearth ceases her wheezing for a moment to address us all.
‘We’ll get the dinner up now. Emmy, you stop gawpin’ at the gentleman and pull us up so’s I can dish it out.’ Her voice, dragged up through a great surfeit of congestions, bubbles like a marsh.
Emmy, with an expressive sigh, quits her position by the door and crosses to the fireplace where she helps the swollen baggage labour up from off her stool. The two of them, who I am now convinced are child and mother, next proceed to ladle forth great bowls of hotpot from a vessel taken out the stove, these being set before us. Emmy takes her seat, next to my own, with many crafty sidelong leers, while the old lady, with some difficulty, sinks her gasping bulk on to the chair placed at the table’s head.
With breath sufficiently recovered, she intones a grace: ‘Dear Lord, bless this the meal we have prepared our guest, and may we have success in all our doin’s.’
Although rude and unconventional, the blessing is not inappropriate. Tonight, if luck is with me, I’ll be doing Widow Deene, and hope to have no small success in this endeavour. Murmuring, then, an ‘Amen’ that is heartfelt, I lift up my fork and start to eat, smiling across the table at the widow and receiving her smile in return. I fancy there is something secret in it, meant perhaps for but the two of us. Encouraged thus, with added relish I attack the mound of beef and vegetable heaped before me, pleasantly surprised by how agreeable its flavour seems.
Whilst picking at their food, the gathered females watch attentively as I wolf down my own, no doubt with apprehension lest such plain, rough fare does not meet with my cultivated expectations. Wishing to allay their fears, I heap great forks-full past my chin and, in between my mastications, comment on the dinner’s excellence, for in all truth it is delicious. Highly spiced and peppered, every swallowing promotes a film of perspiration on my brow and upper lip; a stinging in my palate by which means my mouth is made a smouldering, infernal cave of molar stalactites with every jot of my awareness centred there. With fellows of my stamp, who have a taste for fire and pepper in their food, the rigours of enduring such a meal are part of its attraction. Panicked by the blazings of the tongue, it is as if the other instruments of sensibility are similarly plunged into a new condition: eyes may water or the ears may ring, with everywhere throughout the body’s flesh a sympathetic tingling. I have often thought that such a state must be alike with that described by mystics, where all other bodily concerns are swept away by the intensity of a divine experience.
I think of Francis, hollow-eyed and stammering, filled with dread since the abrupt cessation of his work with Dee; with the demeanour of a man who has been sentenced, yet who must endure a long, excruciating wait until the gallows have been built. I cannot help but think he might have limited his own experiments with the sublime to the enjoyment of a simple dish such as I have before me now, my plate already half wiped clean, so hearty is my appetite.
Whilst I am lost within this culinary reverie, the women sat about me eat in silence save the chime of knife on crockery, with many glances made to me or to each other. Eleanor, who may have been provided with a smaller portion than we grown-ups, has already emptied out her dish and, turning, holds it out towards the gross and liver-fluked old woman seated at the table’s head, there on the infant’s right.
‘Grandmother? May I have some more?’
At this, the aged mountain made of fat swivels her head around towards the child in an unsettling fashion, with her neck so swollen that it does not seem to move, but only that her features have by some means swum across that doughy head to face another way.
Her voice is sharp and harsh, so that the small girl flinches and draws back, afraid. ‘I’m not your grandmother, you wicked girl!’
At the severity of this reproach an awkward silence falls upon the gathering, skilfully breached by Widow Deene who, smiling in a nervous way, attempts now to excuse her child. ‘Of course she’s not, is she, my lamb? It’s just that with her having been so kind to us, that’s how you’ve come to think of her. Now, Nelly, is that not the way of things?’
Here Eleanor, still pale and shaken from the scolding, nods her head and stares into her empty dish, which seems to mollify the wheezing dragon to her left. This withered old Leviathan now turns to speak with Emmy, sat here next to me, instructing the young girl to rise and serve a second helping for such mouths as may require it.
For my own part, I reluctantly decline the offer with a shaking of the head. A heaviness is come upon me, so that I become afraid lest I have rather ate too much already. If this well-stuffed lethargy should not abate, I fear for my performance with the widow later on. I shall not have the strength to mount her, having barely strength enough to raise another mouthful to my lips. Upon my mute refusal of a further serving, Emmy tilts her head upon one side and gazes down towards me quizzically, with ladle in one hand and oven-pot wrapped in a cloth beneath her arm. Those wide, plump lips crease now in a lascivious smile before she speaks.
‘I think the judge has had enough already. Look how thick the sweat stands on his brow, as if this room’s too hot for him.’
Setting the pot and ladle down upon the table-top she next stoops down a little, smiling all the while, so that her face is close to mine. The other three about the table seem to watch intently, all with rapt and yet unreadable expressions, much like birds. My fingertips seem numb. I hear a distant clattering that I think must be my dinner fork, now fallen to the floor. Near to, I see that Emmy has a spoiled complexion; yellow-heads in dense encampments, sheltering at the corners of her nose. Her voice is slow and thick as treacle pouring.
‘Don’t you fret about the warm, now, Judge. My mother says as we are all to take our clothes off for you later on. Then we’ll be glad the fire’s banked up so high.’
What is she saying? From across the table, Widow Deene speaks now in a reproachful tone I have not heard her use before. ‘You mind now, Emmy. He might not be quite so underneath-the-weather as he looks.’
The adolescent seems to take no heed of this, but only cocks her head to scrutinize me closely, as if making up her mind before she speaks. ‘Oh, no. I think he’s had it, right enough. Besides, I know a way we shall soon see.’
She straightens up away from me. Without abandoning her smile she lifts her weighty arms to curl behind her neck where lie the fastenings of her smock, which she commences to unbutton. No one speaks. The room is silent save the fat old woman’s ragged breath. My mind is swimming, and it comes to me belatedly that there is something very much awry here in this sweltering chamber.
Emmy has by now undone herself enough to work both shoulders from her dress, followed by one arm then the other. Finally, with a triumphant smile, she yanks the whole affair down to her hips so that above the waist she is quite naked. Do I dream this? Emmy’s breasts are large and dense, that now she lifts her hands to cup and weigh. Flat aureolae, brown and violet, surmount each bub, the purpled nipples thrusting out like baby’s thumbs. She steps towards me, cradling one teat in either palm and, with a vague anxiety that seems remote and distant to me, I discover that I can no longer move. The singing in my ears is louder, though I still hear Emmy as she speaks beside my ear.
‘There, now. What do you think of them? Aren’t they a lovely set of things? Why, I would wager that you’d like to suck upon them if you could. That’s what gents like to do, I hear.’
Now she inclines her body closer to me so the musky scent of her is overwhelming. Lifting up one breast she tilts the nipple to my slack and gaping mouth, wiping it slowly back and forth across my lower lip, so that it folds, and bends, then springs again erect against my teeth. I try to close them on the slippery bud, and yet cannot.
‘Now stop it, Emmy!’ It is Widow Deene who speaks. ‘I’ll put up with this family’s ways so long as I am married into it, but not all of us wants to see your lechery both day and night.’
In answer, Emmy lewdly rocks her body back and forth so that her breast pumps in and out between my numb, unmoving lips. It seems that the old lady seated at the table’s end finds this so comic an effect that she begins to cackle, deep in her polluted, rattling lungs. Hilarity being contagious, little Eleanor next starts to smirk while darting cautious glances at her taut-faced mother, Widow Deene, as if to ask if it is yet permissible to laugh. At length she can contain herself no longer, and her mirth is given vent in snivelling noises down her nose, whereon the widow may not any more maintain her scowling and affronted disposition, starting in to snigger too, so that the four of them are laughing now.
The merriment endures a while and then is died away as Emmy takes her breast from out my mouth, a solitary pearl of spittle hung by a saliva thread there at its gallows tip. She takes a step back so as better to regard me and her smile is scornful now, filled with contempt.
‘He won’t be long now. We could make a start on divying him up, once we’ve our clothes off so they shan’t be marked.’
Now the old woman speaks from somewhere to my right. My head hangs slack against the back-rest of my chair and I have not the strength to turn it, so must listen only to the phlegm-harp of her voice.
‘Don’t be so daft, girl. See the way his eyes move back and forth! There’s yet vitality in him and if we cut him now it would fly everywhere. We’ll bide our time until he’s gone. When blood no longer moves, the mess is not so great.’
I am afraid, despite the numbing fog that seems to hang about me. Did they say I should be cut? I make attempt at protest yet can utter nothing save a hollow moan. What has become of me?
Across the table, Eleanor now joins with the discussion, turning to the matriarch sat at the table’s end. ‘Is it all right to call you Grandma now?’ The woman coughs her gruff assent and Eleanor continues. ‘Grandma, it’s so very hot in here. Can I take off my things like Auntie Em? You said that we would do it later.’
Here her mother, Mrs Deene, makes hurried interjection. ‘Never mind what Auntie Emmy does. I won’t have you grow up behavin’ like your father’s family.’
Now Emmy’s mother, leaning in upon my field of vision, tips her great bulk forward in her chair to plant her elbows on the table-top and glare with hard resentment at the Widow Deene. ‘Your Nelly’s in this with the rest of us. That’s what we said, and that’s how it shall be. The reason it is being done at all is for her father, and your husband. Emmy’s brother, and my son. You’ve wed into this family now, young Mary Deene-as-was, and you’re a Deery. Deerys stick together.’
There is pause wherein the younger woman seems to wither under that indomitable gaze. Her eyes fall to her lap and she is cowed, at which the harridan continues, speaking now once more to Eleanor.
‘If you’ve a mind to take your clothes off as we all agreed then so you shall, that they might not be splashed and stained when we commence the bloody-work. Indeed, we might as well all of us be about undressin’. He’ll be gone before I’m out my underskirts, you’ll see.’
It is an effort now even to breathe and waves of crashing blackness break within me, rattling as they drag their foaming tendrils back across the shingle of my thoughts, churn buried notions up into the glistening light. I think of Francis, and I understand the way he starts at every creaking of a door. I think of Dee. I think of Faxton, but I cannot bring a picture of it to my mind. All I can see is empty streets that wind past pitiable ruins before even these are gone and in their stead there is a great forgetfulness of grass, unmarked by spire or fence or gutter.
All about me now the women take their garments off amidst much whispering and laughter. Eleanor skips by, her skirtless, hairless body seeming almost without gender, to assist her grandmother in the prolonged unveiling of that huge, white form; the belly hung in folds above the almost bare pudenda where such few hairs that remain are yellow-grey, like spilled and dirty candle-fat. Propped naked up against the table’s other edge is Emmy, with her buttocks white upon the dark, scarred wood as she helps Mrs Deene comb out her auburn hair. Was Deene her name? Or was it Dee? Or Deery? I cannot recall.
She sits and faces me across the table, wearing not a stitch, and keeps her eyes upon my face as Emmy starts to plait her chestnut locks for her. The room is like a furnace and I watch a crystal globe of sweat traverse the seated woman’s collarbone to vanish in the smear of light between her breasts. The scene reminds me very much of something I have seen before, damp women tending to each other’s hair, but fog-bound as I am I cannot place it.
To my right, Nell’s grandmother steps shamelessly from out the tangle of her underskirts there pooled about her feet. Helped by the cherub Eleanor, she next retrieves a box of cutlery from somewhere up above the stove. Selecting carving knives from out the tray, she and the girl proceed to sharpen them against a hearth-brick that I cannot see, but only hear the measured slinth of iron on stone. There is a fierce pain in my belly that yet feels somehow remote from me, as if it were occurring to someone else. The waves of light and shadow that seem in my eyes to roll across the crowded room come faster now, like ripples.
Bored with waiting for my strangled breath to cease, the naked women next ignore me. Sat about their table, they make conversation over little things as if I were not dying here amongst them. They discuss their ailments, and the price of grain, and what they’ll do once John is out of gaol. Without their clothes they seem not human but more like some cadre of weird sisters; Fates or Gorgons stepped from legend. All about them is a vaporous radiance that seems to boil away to subtle colours at its edge. The smallest gesture leaves its traces in the air behind, with a descending arm become instead like shimmering pinions, fanned and splendid. They are talking, but I can no longer tell the sense of what they say.
Their words are from a glossary of light, lips moving silently as if beyond the scrying glass and in my ears the singing has achieved a perfect clarity, the rounds and phrases of it now resolved. Above the roaring of the altitudes each foreign syllable is bright and resonant, is achingly familiar in its alien profundity, a layered murmur echoing in everything. I know this song.
I know it.
** <strong>Partners in Knitting, AD 1705</strong>
Inside the heads of owls and weasels there are jewels that will effect a cure for ague, for colic. Lightning is the spend of God that strikes an ash tree, where His seeds grow up, with rounded heads and slender tails, between the roots. A woman or a man may take these spendings in their mouth, and after have the Sight, so that they may put all their thoughts into a fire, to travel with its smoke towards the sky. Here they will meet with stork or heron that will bear them up until the Great Cathedral may be apprehended, with its perfect vaulted ceilings formed from naught but Law and Number. I have swallowed my own piss, and I have seen these things.
Not yet an hour since, Mr Danks, the Minister of All Saints came with Book and bailiffs to the cell I share with Mary, after which they brought us out and hung us from a gallows at the town’s North gate until we were near dead, our gizzards all but crushed. Cut down, we were next tethered here. Wearing our rope-burns now like glorious chains of office, we are sat half-conscious and resplendent on our kindling throne.
Tied here beside me, Mary’s small, warm hand is in my own. She is no more afraid than I, soothed by a breeze come from the terraces invisible, made tranquil in that mauve light fogging their night pastures. Even were our throats not so constricted by our lynching to deny us speech, no word need pass between the two of us that we may know these things. It is the same Realm, the same thought of Realm, where thought of Realm is Realm itself. They’re going to burn me, and I’m not yet twenty-five.
Across the cold March fields the birds are building something delicate and terrible from strings of sound, from play of echo. We two are the last that shall be murdered thus by fire in England. This we have been told by Imps and things of colour that abide in higher towns where all the days are one, where are no yesterdays nor yet tomorrows. After this, no more of human tallow round a wick of petticoat. No more the fair cheek rouged by blister.
Now I slowly raise my weighted lids until both eyes are open, just as in that instant Mary does the same beside me. Seeing this, the gathered herd beyond our pyre make loud gasps of amazement and step back, their sty-born faces ill with terror. Widow Peak, who said she’d heard us talk of killing Mrs Wise, now draws a cross upon her withered tit and spits, while Parson Danks commences reading loudly from his moth-worn book, his words like smuts of ash wiped on the morning.
If you only knew, you barn-apes, what it was you burned here. It is not for me I say this, but for Mary, who is beautiful where I am plain. If you might see the corners of her eyes when she is saying something comical then you would know her. If you knew the strong taste in her cunt when she has not yet woken of a morning, you would look away in shame and quench your torches. Captured in her ladyhair, my dribble turned to jewels and each one had a water-painted mansion of homunculi tiny and bright within it. When she walks up stairs it is like song, and at the time of each month’s blood she may speak in the tongue of cats, but then, what of it? It is all of this as nothing. Put a light to it, render it all to cinder, her red hair, the drawings that she makes.
I will admit that we have had the conversation of those nine Dukes ruling Hell. Having now seen that place it holds no fear for me, for it is beautiful, and at its mouth are precious stones. It is but Heaven’s face when looked upon by the deceived and fearful, and in all my trade with its Ambassadors I have discovered them to be as gentlemen, both grand and fair of manner. Belial is like a toad of wondrous glass with many eyes ringed on his brow. He is profound and yet unknowable, while Asmoday is more like an exquisite web of pattern that surrounds the head: wry, fierce, and skilled in the mathematic arts. Despite their wrath and their caprice they are not bad so much as other to us, and are more than pretty in their fashion, that you should be envious of those who look upon such marvellous affairs of Nature.
Now a thick-browed man I do not know steps forward with his torch and touches it to knotted rags and straw there at the kindling’s edge. We close our eyes and sigh. Not long, my love. Not far to go. The unseen balconies are not so high above us now.
We met each other when I was fourteen and came from Cotterstock to Oundle up the road because my parents wanted quit of me. Mary was just the same age, pale and freckled, with big legs and arms. She let me hide out in her dad’s back yard those first cold months, and some nights in her room, if it should pass her sister and her brother were not there. We’d go about the town and play such games. With evening drawing in we’d dare each other into standing there beneath the Talbot Hotel’s cobbled passage, leading to the dark yard at the rear. We’d swear we heard the ghost of old Queen Mary that had slept there on the night before they took her head, walking the upstairs landing with it tucked beneath her arm. Squeal. Hug ourselves there in the gloom.
Sometimes we’d venture out across the piss-and-ale-washed flagging of the yard and through to Drummingwell Lane, at the Talbot’s rear. We’d stand and listen at the Drumming Well itself, that made a sound much like a drum the night before King Charles died and at other times beside, as with the death of Cromwell. We would cock our ears and hold our breath, though no sound ever came.
We’d run out in the fields to hide amongst the wild laburnum, and in fancy would be savage, blue-arsed men come from the Africas, that crawled half-naked with ferocious, droll expressions there between the drowsing, nodding stems. We stuck our fingers up each other and would laugh at first, become thereafter hot and grave. We found a dead shrew, stiff and with a gloss as though its death were but a coat of varnish, and one afternoon I watched her piddle in the cowslips, closed my eyes upon the wavering skewer of plaited gold that bored a sopping hole there in the soil beneath her, but heard still its pittering music and saw yet its braided stream within my thoughts.
Now comes the first kiss of the smoke, a husband’s loving peck upon the nose, and just as with a husband we both keep our eyes shut while it’s going on. Time soon enough for him to shove his sour and choking tongue half down our gullets. Raw and smouldering nettle-bite curls there behind our cringing nostrils, and I hope the faggots are not green and damp, or likewise slow to burn, for when our covenant was made, the Black-Faced Man said that we should not know the fires of punishment. A whistling silence foams up in my ears, as if at some unfathomable approach, but swiftly dies away, subdued amidst the papery crackling that is all about us now. Hush, Mary Phillips, and be not afraid, for we were made a promise, you and I.
We found a livelihood that suited me, and also found a little room in Benefield where I might lodge those next ten years, though hardly did a day go by we were not in each other’s company. As we grew up, the great adventure that there was between us seemed almost our coracle, that carried us away in time from that laburnum country, full of ghosts and secret games, to cast us up amongst the sulking islands that are men.
We wallowed in them, men, those next few years, didn’t we, Mary? Although I confess I did more wallowing than you, you did not go without your share. Ditch-diggers, sextons, publicans, and slaughtermen still with the stink of killing on their hands. They bought us small beer in the front bar of the Talbot; took us up against the jetty wall just as they’d take a piss while on their stumble-footed journey back to wife and hearth. Because of this, I did not often sleep with them, but when I did I was surprised: if they are not awake, they are much softer to the touch, and more like women. What a pity, then, that they should ever stir.
Yet stir they did. They’d rise before me, gone before my eyes were open properly, and when I’d see them walking of a Sunday with their families only the wives would look at me, their faces hard. If these should glimpse me later in the market, gathered in their twos and threes, they’d call out after me, ‘There goes a whore’, or else they’d teach their little ones to taunt me, crying, ‘Shaw the whore’ and ‘Strumpet Nell’ wherever I should walk. How is it that the pleasant, simple thing of knobs in notches might provoke such scorn, and shame, and misery? Why must we take our being’s sweetest part and make it yet another flint on which to gouge ourselves?
Now comes a curious thing. Shifting against my bonds, I once again have cause to open up my eyes, whereon I find that everything is stopped. The world, the smoke, the clouds, the crowds and leaping flames, all of it still and without motion. Stopped.
How strange and charming is this realm with movement fled, how perfectly correct. The dragon frills of frozen smoke, upon inspection, have a beauty that is lost to normal sight, with smaller frills identical in shape that blossom, fern-like, from the twisting mother coil. To think that I had never noticed.
Looking down, I feel only a mild surprise to note that we are burning, me and Mary both alike. Why, these drab skirts of ours have never looked so fine as they do now, awash with fire and light and colour; ruby-hung with flames that do not move. There is no hurt, nor even warmth, although I see one of my feet to be scorched black. Instead of pain there is a passing sadness, for I have believed my feet to be the prettiest part of me, though Mary says she likes my shoulders and my neck. When we have been undressed of form we shall walk truly naked from our ashes, and there shall be not a part of us that is not beautiful.
Though she is strangled far beyond the point of speech, I can hear Mary’s voice inside me saying Elinor, oh Elinor, and bidding me look deep inside the flames that have in some way without any seeming movement risen to my bosom like ferocious heraldry.
I stare at these inverted icicles of gold and light, and in each one there is a moment, tiny and complete, trapped in the shimmering amber. Here’s my father, leathering my mother as she stoops across the kitchen table howling, this seen as if through an open door. Here is the dream I had when I was little, of an endless house filled with more books than there are in the world. Here’s when I cut my shoulder open on a nail and here the dead shrew, waxed and chill.
Beneath the base of every flame there is a still, clear absence; a mysterious gap between the death of substance and the birth of light, with time itself suspended in this void of transformation, this pause between two elements. I understand it now, that there has only ever been one fire, that blazed before the world began and shall not be put out until the world is done. I see my fellows in the flame, the unborn and the dead. I see the gash-necked little boy. I see the ragged man that sits within a skull of blazing iron. I almost know them, almost have a sense of what they mean, like letters in a barbarous alphabet.
It was all for a joke at first, the picture drawn with pig-blood and the candle. We did not suppose that it would come to anything, nor be accomplished with such fearful ease. Some names were said aloud, and in the finish there were answers come as from an obscure place; from out a lively fog descended in our thoughts. This was in February of last year, when all the ponds were cauled and frozen.
Shivering bare, we squatted in my pinched up room and listened to the novel words we heard inside ourselves, this hearing being of a kind that cannot be accomplished with the ears, that is sometimes more like a drift of mood or vision than it is like speech. It told us many things.
We are all, each of us, the stinging, bloody fragments of a God that was torn into pieces by the birth-wail of Eternity. When all the days are done, She who is Bride and Mother unto all of us shall gather every scrap of scattered being up into one place, where we shall know again what we knew at the start of things, before that dreadful sundering. All being is divided between that which is, or else that which is not. Of these the last is greater, and has more importance. To know thought is to be in another country. Everything is actual. Everything.
At first naught but a voice within, the Black-Faced Man became apparent in small measures. First we had a sense of someone sitting in the empty chair that stood up in one corner of my room, but when we looked there would be no one there. At length we could both make him out by looking from the corners of our eyes, though if we gazed on him directly he’d be gone.
He was both tall and terrible, with hair and whiskers like a beast, his eyes a bright and pale goat-yellow in the painted lamp-black of his face. A dark and purple light hung all about him, and it seemed as if his flesh was everywhere embroidered with tattoo, in coiling lines like serpents or a new calligraphy. Things that were either branch or antler sprouted from his head upon each side, and when he spoke inside our thoughts his voice was deep enough to make the air grow cold. He told us that we must stretch out our hands, but only I dare do it, Mary being too afraid.
I stood there for some moments with my hand thrust out, and at the start felt nothing save for foolish. Presently, however, I could feel the faintest touch of something much like fingers wrapped about my own, and very cold into the bargain. When he spoke, it was to me alone, for when Mary and I discussed things later she confessed to hearing nothing at this point.
He said, ‘Elinor Shaw, be not afraid of me, for I am one of the Creation, as are you yourselves.’
He next said something that I did not understand, and asked that he might borrow something from us for a year and two months. It was not a solid thing that he desired, but rather something immaterial, so that at first I grew afraid, believing that he asked me for my Soul. He reassured me, telling me he asked for nothing save the mere Idea of me, for which he had some use I could not fathom, and this only for a little time. Even on this, my death day, I am yet unable to make out how the Idea of me might be of value, or to whom.
He promised in return that he would tell us how to call up Imps and have their conversation and obedience. Further to this, he promised that we should not feel the flames of Hell or punishment.
I am not certain how the piece of parchment was obtained whereon we made our marks in blood to seal the bargain. For a time I thought our visitor himself produced it, though from where I cannot think since he was naked. Now it seems to me as if it may have been there in my room a while before he came, forgotten until on that night we chanced upon it. He insisted that we sign in blood, saying that every human function and its fluid are possessed of awesome power, attractive to those spirits who do not themselves possess a body and thus find such substance novel. Going on from this, he said that we might let such Imps as we should summon suckle on the juices of our sex, which would placate them, causing them to favour us. He said this without any wickedness, as if to him there was no shame in such an act, although I blushed, as did my Mary when I told it to her.
What it was that happened next I cannot say. In my confession I have said the Black-Faced Man came with us both to bed, and had his way with us, and this is very like what did occur, but in another sense of things from that we are accustomed to. I am not sure that he was ever there in bed with us as we ourselves were there, in flesh, or that the things we thought he did with us we did not, after all, do to each other. Yet both of us felt him there with us in that delirious shift and tangle, that intensity of presence nothing like a man which pushed inside us, ice-cold yet exciting.
We were outside of time with him. Our bed was every bed where man or woman ever birthed or fucked or died. When Mary licked my bottom she could see a curious flower of light spread out from it so that we laughed, but in our thoughts his voice said to us, ‘See this Rose of Power. There is one set beside each of the body’s gates,’ whereupon we became more sober.
When we reached our Joy there was a moment unlike anything where all the world was gone, nor ever had been there, but instead only the most perfect whiteness, and we were the whiteness, and we were each other made sublime, and we were nothing. Afterwards, if there could truly be an afterwards of such a thing, we slept until the morning when we woke to find ourselves alone with a dead candle and a bloodied parchment.
Now my arms and shoulders are aflame. Beside me, under Mary’s skirts, I hear the hiss and sizzle of her scorching love-hair; secret, holy animal badge of our kind. How glorious it must look now, feathered with splendid fires and like a vision. I would rub my face upon it, drench my chin with sparks instead of spittle. I would worship it. I would adore it. Still there is no pain.
The things we were accused of, that we did, in scarce more than a year, kill fifteen children, eight men and six women with our diabolic art; that in like manner did we also rid the world of forty pigs, a hundred sheep and thirty cows, which by my reckoning suggests that we bewitched three beasts a week. Also, there were some eighteen horses that I had forgot. All about Oundle, and as far as Benefield and Southwick, not an ant was stepped upon without it being held that we were by some means responsible for the poor mite’s demise. When they had quite run out of murders to accuse us of, they took to listing our more minor sins, establishing that we were bedfellows and also ‘partners in knitting’, which gave us much cause for merriment.
What was it that we knitted with our wax and clay, our little pins? If I am honest, most of it was little else but selfish entertainment, though as we came to know more of the Superior Realm it touched us, that we were both made more reverent. Yet still we giggled, bent above our knitting, and we cast off curse and charm in endless rows, and purled word into wonder.
Would that we might tell the half of it, the Imps we called and many higher creatures of that kind beside. As I have said before, the ease of it is frightful, if one is but shown. We had four kinds of Imp bound to our call, all of a different usefulness and colour. Some of them were intricate and red, and these had knowledge of both Art and diverse other matters. Some were dun, and shaped like decorated eels, or else like torsos that had tails, and though they did not seem so clever as the others, in their swim and flicker we could hear each other’s thoughts, and on their ripples send our dreams across the world.
Some Imps were black, with shiny skin wherein was All of things reflected, as within a mirror. These were shaped like men, though smaller by a measure, and were used for prophecy, or seeing from afar. Gleaming upon their brow we saw the dark time gone before, and knew the days of falling fire to come writ on their ebon bellies.
The white Imps were like ferrets, or perhaps like slender cats with tiny hands like those of aged men, and something of an old man’s face about their features also. These had no purpose save for harm. We did not use them. Not that often, anyroad.
The thing with Imps is that they must be given work to do at all times, lest they should grow bored with mortal company and take their leave. It is moreover only right they be rewarded for each task, which bounty me and Mary would dispense flat on our backs there in the chalk ring with our frocks up and our knees apart. After we’d done it, we were always tired. We could not see them as they lapped between our thighs, but only sometimes feel them, sucking on our little buttons.
(On that miserable night when Billy Boss and Jacky Southwel, Constables the pair of them, were sent for us, we were examined. All the men there present looked upon those little buttons, where we said our Imps had suckled us, and seemed very amazed, as if they had not seen such things before. Describing them, they said they were like teats or pieces of red flesh there in our privy parts. I pity their poor wives, if wives they have.)
Apart from Imps, we called up creatures of a great peculiarity, that are like monstrous dogs, sometimes called Shagfoals. They have burning eyes, and some are very old. They live near crossroads, or at bridges, where things have a choice to them and where the veil between what is and what is not grows worn and threadbare, rending easily.
These have a kind of pup, much smaller and more hideous to behold, being both black and blind, with long and questing tongues. Their presence puts an air of fear about things, but this thickens into an exquisite, shocking pleasure if they should be touched. We sent a pair of them to Bessy Evans when she said she had no fun in life, and look at all the thanks we got.
I still remember it, that morning stood in her front yard with Mary, Bessy going on about her John and how he hadn’t touched her for a year, and slept off in a different room away from her. We said she was a fool to live so wretchedly, at which she asked us if we would send something to her that would do her good. We swore to do our best, and that next morning when we met with her she seemed a different woman, telling us how in the night she dreamed two things like moles had come into her bed and suckled at her lower parts, both front and back, which she informed us was both somewhat frightening, and yet at once agreeable. Later, when she gave evidence against us, she swore that these nightly visits made her so afraid she had to send for Mr Danks the Minister, who came up to her room on several evenings, where they prayed together that the creatures might be banished.
Four nights! By her own admission, that’s how long the thankless cow took pleasure with our subtle pups before she thought to call a Minister, and only then because we would not send them any more and she desired a man up in her room to take their place. Four nights!
I’ll tell you this, though mostly I like men the least, there’s times I care for women not at all. When I think of the things we did for them in sympathy because they shared our sex, and how they all rushed to accuse us once the chopper fell. When they had muffins in their ovens and were yet unwed, or if they thought their man was bedding with another, then it was a different story. Then it was all ‘Nell, get rid of it for me’, or ‘Mary, make her fatter than a pig and bring him back’. We cured their babies of the croup and charmed warts into being on the cocks of faithless men. We sent blue gems of light to ease their cramps when they were bad and gave them scripts to ward off those who rape and rob. We raved and prophesied and read the future in their turds.
But did we kill?
I think we did. Old Mother Wise at least and, yes, perhaps the Ireland boy. I cannot say we did not mean to, for we surely did when we called our enchantments down, but for my own part I regret it now. Anger, resentment, spite and all such common worldly moods are dangerous luxuries that one who works the Art cannot afford. They will return to you, like starving dogs. They will eat everything.
With Mrs Wise, it was because she would not sell us buttermilk, though there was more to it than that. For one thing, she kept company with all the rat-jawed village wives that called us whore, and shared in that opinion with them, this because Bob Wise, her husband, put his hand inside my bosom and was kissing me when he got drunk the Plough Day before last.
It is funny now I think of it: he was dressed up for Plough Day in the costume of the Witch Man, as somebody always does each year. His face was painted black, and he had twigs and branches tied about his head like horns, for such is the tradition. I asked him if he was wearing horns because his wife was in the hay with someone else, to which he answered that he did not care where she might be so long as he had me instead, and after kissed me on the mouth and grabbed my tit a little while. Though he was stout and coarse and nowhere near so tall, why did I not think of Bob Wise’s fancy dress when first we fetched the Black-Faced Man? What is the meaning of this similarity, and why have I not thought upon it until now?
No matter. When his wife refused to give us buttermilk she called me all the harlots underneath the sun into the bargain, so that I grew angry and remembered all the times I’d walked between the stalls at Oundle Market with their shrieks and jibes still ringing in my burning ears and me too scared and full of rage to answer back. I stormed home, coming into Mary’s room to wake her like hundred of bricks in high wind, and I was so cross that for a time she could not make out anything I said. When I was made a little calmer, I prepared an effigy of wax that was stuck full with pins, and Mary called a white Imp like a stoat with baby’s hands that answered to the name of Suck-My-Thumb, or sometimes, when it fancied, Jelerasta. This appeared, talking at times in English but more often in a tongue we thought was Greek. It supped the nectar from the Rose of Light at Mary’s loins and next was charged with the delivery of those hurts bound into my tallow mannequin, pierced like a martyr, almost lost from sight inside a hedge-pig ball of nail and bodkin. This was in the afternoon.
That evening, Widow Peak came by to visit. Though her husband’s name was Pearce she is called Widow Peak because her hair has gone back at the sides just as it does with men in later life, to make a point in front. She had come in to ask if we might give her luck with men in the New Year, this being New Year’s Eve, but though we wrote a charm for her she would not leave, and was still sitting with us when our door blew open as the church clock chimed for midnight. Suck-My-Thumb came in, returned from where he had been sent, and slid across the floor to leap in Mary’s lap, where he enjoyed the warmth and scent.
The widow gazed in fascinated terror at the Imp and then would look away as if she was not sure just what it was that she could see, or even if she could see anything at all. It made us smile to see her so discomfited, since she had long outstopped her welcome, and I think that Mary hoped to frighten her off altogether when she said, pointing to me, ‘See there, the witch that’s killed old Mother Wise by making first a doll of wax, then sticking it with pins!’ Widow Peak left soon after this, and we both laughed at it, and did not think that there were far more prudent things we might have said.
We learned next day that after taking leave of us the widow had gone straight across to Mother Wise’s house, first-footing, where she found the woman to be in great pain, so that she very shortly after midnight died of it, God rest her mean and disappointed soul. I do not feel so bad for her as I feel over little Charlie Ireland, who I think we killed the week before.
The two deaths were not unconnected. In the case of Mrs Wise, Mary made use of Suck-My-Thumb when my wax doll and pins would no doubt have made short work of the job alone. She did this, and indeed was glad to do it so that she might find work for the Imp and keep him happy, for it is a fact that Imps will stray or become snappish if they are not ever in employ, which exercise appears to make them stronger. Being stronger they demand more work, and so on. Once you’ve called them up, it is a difficulty knowing what to set them to, week after week.
Mary had first called Suck-My-Thumb a little prior to Christmas, when like me with Mrs Wise she was caught in a fit of temper. This had been brought on by Charlie Ireland who, with other lads his age, would hang about in Southwick village, where we often walked. Mary had gone to Southwick looking for a ham that we might boil up for our dinner, and on coming out the butcher’s was surrounded by a gang of boys, with Charlie Ireland at the head of them. Urged by his fellows, he called her an old witch and a whore and asked if she would gobble on his winkle for a farthing.
I have never seen her in a mood so bloody as when she got home that night. She did not speak a word, but went into her room where first, after a silence, I could hear her making noises as if she were frigging off, and then could hear her talking in a low voice, though to what I did not know. Some time went by before she would open the door, at which she was revealed stood naked with the sleek white weasel creature whispering in French as it coiled there about her heels, before next darting from the room and thence the house, gone from our sight.
We did not see the Imp again that night, and Mary told me that she had instructed it to journey up the dark and empty lanes and find the Irelands’ house in Southwick, where it was to worry at the boy’s insides, afflicting them with gripes and pains. The thought of his discomfort took the edge from off her wrath, and both of us believed that was the last of it until the evening after, when the baby-fingered creature came once more to us.
It paced and chattered in a multitude of tongues before our hearth, and seemed at first to sulk and then become enraged when we did not set work for it to do. It glared at us with hateful eyes or tugged our skirts with hot, soft little hands and would not leave despite our pleas and our commands that it should do so. Next it started up to rail at us in English, when it told us that we must now call it Jelerasta, and that it would not permit us sleep until we found a task in keeping with its nature.
In the small hours of the morning, with my spirit at its lowest, I begged Mary to contrive an errand for the beast lest I go mad and, weakening to see my weakness, she consented. Suck-My-Thumb (or Jelerasta) was once more sent out to nibble on the bowels of the unlucky child and, as we later heard, cause him to utter noises like a dog. When on the next night following the creature came to visit us again it was more big and more persistent, leaving us no choice but to direct it once again to Southwick and the Ireland home.
This time it came back almost straight away, within the hour, and seemed both furious and vexed. It told us, sometimes falling into other languages out of exasperation, that the parents of the child, no doubt advised by interfering busybodies, had filled up a stone jar with the boy’s pee into which they had dropped pins and needles made of iron before they buried it beneath their fire-hearth. Suck-My-Thumb, for reasons that the Imp could not explain, was stopped from going in the house by this protection, and had so returned to us to keep us up all night with horrid tweaks and tugs and foreign phrases of complaint.
Next day, we both went bleary and contrite to see the mother of the boy, where we confessed our crime and begged her dig the bottle up and give us it which, foolishly, once we had promised that her son would afterwards be left uninjured, she agreed to do. That night the white Imp Jelerasta killed Charles Ireland in his bed while we slept sound as newborn babes. We used the pins and needles that we’d found inside the jar of piss to see to Mother Wise that following week, whereafter Suck-My-Thumb seemed satisfied, so that we have not seen him since that time.
Those were our murders. Those I will lay claim to, but no more. We did not kill the Gorham child, nor strike the Widow Broughton lame because she had denied us peasecods. No more did we strike down John Webb’s carthorse when he said that we were witches, for his horse died long before we first met with the Black-Faced-Man. We were not witches then, nor were we called as such, but only whores. Aside from that the horse was old and rotting where it stood. Who would exhaust themselves by using Sorcery to kill it, when a strong wind would as well suffice?
Mind you, when Boss and Southwel came to call on us we readily confessed to all these things, as if we had a choice in it. They shoved us both about and made us cry and told us that if we did not confess we should be killed, whereas if we would own to ‘Lizbeth Gorham’s murder and some others we should be set free. Though we did not believe the last part of their promise, we believed the first and so made full account of all our deeds, both real and otherwise.
In time there was a sort of Trial, though so great was the bad opinion raised against us, with Bob Wise and Charlie Ireland’s mother wailing from the gallery, its outcome was made plain before it had begun, whereafter matters were concluded with an undue haste and we were taken to Northampton Gaol there to await our burning.
By that time, we had not any reason to pretend, nor call our Power to rein, and while we were locked up we cursed and laughed both day and night, and brought about the most alarming scenes.
There was an afternoon when visitors were let into the gaol to see the sights; to thrill and shudder at the inmates in their wretchedness. A man called Laxon and his wife had come especially to view the famous witches who were to be burned. Both of them stood some time outside our cell and, though the husband had not much to say, his wife was full of good advice. She made some very pious talk about the error of our ways, and told us that our situation proved the Devil had deserted us as he did all who followed him.
It may be easily imagined that I soon was tired with Mrs Laxon’s counsel, and so had recourse to mutter certain names and abjurations in the Angel Tongue, so that with but a minute or so passed the woman’s skirts and smock began to rise into the air, though both she and her husband made loud cries and tried to stop them floating upwards in this manner, until all her clothing was turned inside out above her head and she was shown in all her nakedness. Both me and Mary laughed to see this, and I told the woman that I’d proved she was a liar.
Some days after, we were still in fits about the look on Mr Laxon’s face, and kicked up such a noise it brought the Keeper of the Prison to our cell, who threatened us with irons. We said the Gorgo and the Mormo at him, after which he was compelled to tear off all his clothing and dance naked in the prison yard an hour or more until he fell exhausted with the foam dried white upon his lips.
We had our fun, and at the end of it they fetched us out and burned us both to dust. They had a stronger Magic. Though their books and words were lifeless, drear and not so pretty as our own, they had a greater heaviness, and so at last they dragged us down. Our Art concerns all that may change or move in life, but with their endless writ they seek to make life still, that soon it shall be suffocated, crushed beneath their manuscripts. For my part, I would sooner have the Fire. At least it dances. Passion is not strange to it.
I look about and see that it is later, and the sky is dark now, when not long ago it was the morning. Where have all the crowd departed to? Mary and I are almost gone; a sullen, powdered glower amongst the cooling ash. Tomorrow, little girls will dance between our ribs, the bowed bones charred and heaped like pared-off nails from dirty giants. They will sing, and kick up grey and suffocating clouds of us, and if the wind should blow our fragments into someone’s eye, why, then there may be tears.
The embers wink out, one by one. Soon, they are gone. Soon, only the Idea of us remains. Ten years ago in the laburnum field we look into each other’s eyes and hold our breath. A beetle ticks, down in the grass. We’re waiting.
** <strong>The Sun Looks Pale Upon the Wall, AD 1841</strong>
Novr 17 Wednesday — Awoke in mine and Pattys house at Northborough felt very fearful yet cannot say why or what about — I call it house for it is not a home to me & cant be called one — in the morning wrote a letter off to Mr Reid in Alloa & asked if he would loan me some of his Scotch Papers having never had perusal of a Newspaper for some years I’d be very grateful for some entertaining incidents or literary News but if he will be good enough to send it me I do not know — in with my letter to him I enclosed a Song that is intended for Child Harold but I think it is not much of one and I may leave it out weather is very bad — all ‘vapour clouds and storms’ that puts a melancholly light on things so I must make a struggle & buck up if I am not to feel as abject as when I was held at Matthew Allens Prison in the Forest went a walk down by the old Brook in the afternoon and thought of Mary for in Truth I think of no one else although my new wife Patty Turner & our children are all kind to me I am a lucky man that has two wives but I confess that I am worried not to hear from Mary for so long — I have not seen her for about a twelvemonth nor did she reply since last I wrote to her when I arrived in Northborough last July after my bold escape & walk of what they tell me is near 80 miles I fear she has forgot me while I was in High Beech and was sad to come upon our secret Place there by the Stream where first we sat when we were young and in the Spring of Life some 30 years ago the Hawthorn bush we played beneath is overgrown now so that I could not see which it was & yet I had a fancy that my First Wife might have lost some token when loves rapture thrilled us under its dark canopy those many years before — a Lace or Buckle I might chance upon if I but pulled aside the tangled branch & twig to look yet when I tried all that I did was step up to my knee in cold wet bog and poked my eye upon a thorn so that it wept and made me nearly blind the Light was poor beside so that the Sun was silver through the smoke from off the Fields & looked more like the Moon — I limped back to the cottage with my boot soaked through and some pain in my foot where I am still quite lame since I wore that bad Shoe with half the sole hung off while on my Walk from Essex Patty had been out about her cleaning work & being tired had little Sympathy for me when she came back — I told her I had looked for Marys buckle in the Hawthorn by the Brook & hurt my eye but she was cross & woud have none of it & started on her old tales about how She was my only Wife with me and my sweet Mary never wed at all to hear Her tell it She said that she did not want to hear about the brook nor what Mary & I had done there & if I had hurt my eye it was my own fault poking in the hedgerow while I might be out and earning wages when we were so poor I grew indignant telling her that I had written some time back to Matthew Allen asking what has happend to the yearly sallary my daughter Queen Victoria had promised me for I was told that the first quarter had commenced before last haytime else I dreamed it so here Patty wept and became vexed without a reason much as Women do & said a hateful thing of Mary I shall not write in these pages — next She said that she would not live like this for much longer & that come this Friday we must ride into Northampton Town to see a place she thought would suit me better than my time in Essex at which mention I coud feel a heavy stone of anguish sink inside me — would have asked her more but in a fierce & stormy temper she stamped off to bed so that I am left here alone to write these words by weak and yellow Lamplight spilling down from off the shelf above the table so I am to be put back in an asylum for there is no other place within Northampton they would think me suited to — Well that is it then & it cant be helpd yet I am sorry when I think of all the walking that I did on my escape from High Beech only to discover still another prison here at home — I can recall the Sunday in July when I was freed from my incarceration for a little while to walk in Epping forest where I fell in with some travelling folk who I took to be gypseys such as I once livd with in my youth but these were of another type that dressed in reeking fur & cowskin with their hair unshawn and with barbaric paint marks on their faces — it seems strange now when I think of it yet did not seem so then — I got on readily enough with this rough company & they confided in me that they had but lately been bereaved laying to rest a travelling woman of their order in a Grave between the trees — they told me that she had been troubled by a bad foot & looked at me very queerly when they said these words so that I felt afraid but not for any reason I can say — after a time they pointed out to me a sallow & unhappy idiot boy that skulked at the far edges of their camp where other travelling childern cruelly made to drive him off with stones He wept and made a piteous yelp each time they caught him on his shin & my companions told me that this was the halfwit son of she they had so lately put beneath the soil who coud not keep himself nor work towards the common good & so was banished now he had no Mother to look out for him I knew a great pang in my heart towards the boy but soon he ran from sight between the spreading summer oaks & was thereafter never spoken of according to the harsh & brutal code by which such people live though I confess we in our Towns and Villages are not so very different nor less keen to make an outcast of a man one of the Gypseys seemed to take a shine to me and offered to assist in my escape from out the mad house hideing me there in his camp this seemed to me a good enough idea so that I was decided but informed him that although I had no money I woud get him fifty pounds if he woud help me get away before next Saturday to which he readily agreed — I am not properly decided on what happened next — sometimes it seems to me as if all of my meetings with the Gypsey took place upon that single Sunday afternoon while other times I can recall a whole week passing with me going back there on the Friday where I found my new friend seeming less than eager to pursue our plan so that I did not speak much of it & went back there two days later when I found their camp deserted and they were all gone — whether these things occurred throughout a week or on a solitary afternoon I do not know but either way it was agen a Sunday when I stood between the sighing trees and only had a burnt & blackened circle on the grass to say my Gypsey friends had ever been there save an old wide awake hat and a straw bonnet of what they call the plumb pudding sort — I put the hat into my pocket thinking that it might prove usefull for another oppertunity which with God’s Will it so turned out to be the hour is late & I am tired with all this writing — Patty is surely asleep by now and if I take care I do not disturb her getting into Bed then we shall have no quarrels She is good to me despite her wicked tongue yet when I lie beside her I wish it were Mary Clare instead, who once was Mary Joyce I am a fool & so to bed
Novr 18 — Thursday — Did nothing
Novr 19 — Friday — Last night I had a dream where I returned to Northborough and found it empty with my cottage all deserted and my first wife Mary gone Next in the dream I was married agen and living in the rushes by a river with my new Wife Patty Clare who once was Patty Turner & our childern although in the queer style that things have in dreams it was as if my second wife & childern all were ducks with dark eyes and green feathers until in my sleep I cried out loud and startled them so that they flew away from me across the fens & when I woke my face was wet with tears went in a carriage to Northampton with my Second Wife & our Son John who at but fifteen years is quite the little man dressed very smart & with a grave expression — I was proud of him & yet it tickled me to see him take his Mothers arm when we climed down from out the carriage for he played the Husbands part far better than did I myself — there was a bitter drizzle all about the town that hung suspended like an old grey sheet above its meadows yet I loved it still There is a call this County has and when I was away from here in Mr Allens prison then I knew it well & heard its sweet voice that sang out to me across the fields & miles between us and my Heart was stirrd though I have lived in Essex and have visited in London on no less than four occasions still my home is here & I do not forsee that I shall ever have the Strength to leave agen nor yet the will to do so — the Town is much changed since I last came here and is not so like the fond imaginings of it I had in my confinement with the Norman Castle little more now than a pile of stones and much of the surrounding common land fenced & enclosed — the fine old Churches though are well but many of the fanciful grotesques about the stonework of St. Peters are destroyed I wanted to walk up to Sheep Street there to see its wonderful round church but Patty became tired & so made do with sitting on the steps between the pillars at All Saints instead at last went to an Inn to have some bread & cheese & half a pint of Ale I do not now recall its name but it sat at the top end of a lane where Bears were kept and was not far off from the round Church of the Holy Sepulcher — there was much boisterous talk around the Tavern of a folly built nearby in Kings Thorp where the road goes out to Boughton and a Mine was drilled into the Earth with hope of finding coal — it seems the Engineer was something of a rogue & had left bits of Coal about the Pit for men to find so that he might then sell his shares at better Profit — I am not surprised at this for Men of Trade are ever Cheats & Liars such as Edward Drury come from Stamford and the Publisher John Taylor who between them owe me close to fifty pounds that I have not forgot for all they say my wits are ailing in the afternoon when I might no more put it off we went a walk to the Asylum on the Road to Billing & I must confess that it looks well enough for such a Place with old walls of brown stone that have a rustic look & that the trees beyond have overgrown though in the rain it had a dismal air we met a Mr Knight who was in my opinion a most serious fellow showing me much sympathy for all the questions I was asked — he seemd most interested in my First Wife & asked when I had last seen Her to which I replied that we had been together but a year ago in Glinton whereupon he said Now come that cannot be when you have been four Years in High Beech at which I became confused and muddled in my Thoughs & so he let me Be he talked with Patty for a Time alone while John & I walked in the Grounds — we Stood together & we held each other by the hand and both said Nothing looking over the asylum land down to the silverd ribbon of the Nene and all the Villages Beyond after a short time Patty joined Us saying that it was arranged & that there woud be found a place for me within a month whereat I was Dismayd yet made to seem that I were pleasd for Pattys Sake and for the Boy — they say that I may go out walking when I Like & that I shall not be a prisoner such as they made me there in Essex so perhaps it may not be so Bad though we shall see and in the mean time put as Brave a face on things as Fortune will allow as we rode back to Northborough we did not speak of much and so I sat and gazed out from the carriage window on the darkning fields where I heard come the brief sore throated screaming of a Jay somewhere above the blackend stubble we passed by an Inn where Men were Singing a lewd ballad & though Patty made a fuss and scolded little John for listening it made me smile — When I made my escape from High Beech on that Tuesday in July I took the route suggested by my friend the Gypsey though I soon went wrong and missed the lane to Enfield town and so found myself on the Enfield highway where I came upon an Inn much like the one that mine and Pattys carriage passed tonight save that the Public House there on the Enfield highway was more silent and more queer in its appearance — when I saw it first I took it for an empty Ruin with its roof caved in but on approach I soon saw that it was a Tavern good as any in the land its name upon the hanging sign was The Labour in Vain which seemd peculiar to my ear and those I have since asked of it say they have never heard of such a Place — as I passed by A person that I knew was comeing out the door this being the young Idiot boy I had seen driven from the Gypsey camp he had an ugly Wound upon one knee that looked as though it had turned bad & so thick was his speech I coud not understand the half of it but when I asked what Way it was to Enfield he would point and gesture so that I shoud know his meaning and I walked on filled with cheer and confidence — so came at last by the York Road to Stevenage before the fall of dark I climed a paddock gate & then some paleings to a yard where was a Hovel with trussed clover piled up for my Bed — I lay myself down with my head towards the North so that I might not lose my bearings when I woke yet slept but fitfully and had uneasy dreams I though My first wife lay there at my side her head at rest on my left arm and then it seemed that in the night she was took from me so that I awoke in much distress to find her gone yet as I woke I heard someone say ‘Mary’ though I searched and there was nobody about and so I thanked God for his providence in finding me a bed if not a meal & once more struck out to the North it was a short while after seven when we got home to the cottage & so very dark and young John went straight up to bed beside his brother and it was not long before Patty & I had fallen to another quarrel over Mary — I think none the less of Her for what she says for I well know that she is tired and at her Wits End from my Antics but her words are nonsense to me — she Says John will You not see you never married her but only knew her when she was a girl and then it is Why do you Say she is your Wife when you have none but me & so forth & so forth until my poor head is fair spinning and once more she takes herself away to bed without me and Im left with nought save yellow light and yellowd pages for my solace but there is none there is none
Novr 20 — Saturday — very morose all day & so did little save to look once more upon the song I Sent to Mr Reid which now seems better to me than when last it was reviewd
<quote>
I think of thee at early day
& wonder where my love can be
& when the evening shadows grey
O how I think of thee
<br>
Along the meadow banks I rove
& down the flaggy fen
& hope my first & early love
To meet thee once agen
</quote>
there is more to it but I am most pleasd about the openning I must press on and see Child Harold is compleat before I am confined for I know not how else it shall be finished in the afternoon I went agen a walk across the common and down by the Brook for all I knew that it woud make me melancholly & thought more upon the great unfairness that there is in life where Men are frownd on for their lowly station yet are more reviled if they shoud seek to rise above it when I was in Helpstone it was Johnny Head up in The Clouds & when I thought myself superior to the common hord by virtue of a true Poetic nature they would laugh at Me for what they said was my pretense — and yet when I become more popular and would be calld to Read before Gentility then being done I woud be sent to eat down in the Servants hall so that it seems I may not be at peace in any one rank of Society and thus I am nowhere at home even my Marys parents set agenst me & it seems to me they thought that I was too low born to walk out with their daughter being of the better off variety they made pretense to other reasons why I should not meet Her & made out as if I had done something wrong but I think now it was no more than spitefull Pride that made them swear she would not see me and thereafter keep the two of us Apart never agen to meet but then when were we wed I cannot tell my Memory is bad & I am muddled often in my wits I will not think about it now when I woke up that Second morning of my journey and continued north I had gone but a little way before there on the left side of the road I saw a hollow underneath the bank much like a cave where were a man and Boy coiled up asleep there as though inside an open grave — I hailed them at which they awoke like Lazarus and for a time I thought the boy to be the HalfWit driven from the Gypsey camp that I had last seen at the Labour In Vain for in truth they both looked very much alike and yet the more I looked the more I was not sure and so said nothing man was older with an unkempt look and when I asked my way he spoke with something of an accent such as people have in Derbyshire telling me that the village to the North of there was Baldeck whereupon I thanked them and so hurried on it seemed to me there was a smell of burning hung about the pair as if their clothes were full of smoke but this was more than like my fancy & I did not meet the two of them agen — I walked on for a while & some where on the London side I found a Public house they called the Plough where I was thrown a penny by a man in a Slop frock on horseback that I might buy half a pint of beer — I was not so lucky later on when I passed by two drovers who were saucy and unkind one of them had a great pot belly with both of them very threatning in their manner so that I resolvd I woud not beg a Penny more from any one that I might chance upon I travelled on through Jacks Hill which is nothing but a beer shop and some houses on a hill appearing newly built & saw a milestone saying I was more than Thirty miles from london — milestones passed by quickly early in the day but as the night drew on they seemed to be stretched far asunder & so I went on through many Villages I can not now recall although in Potton I met with a country man who walked with me until I had to stop and rest upon a flint heap near the roadside I was hopping with a crippled foot where gravel had got in my shoe from one of which I had now nearly lost the Sole here my companion had a coach to meet and soon made his farewells then walked on passing out of sight — after a time I followed weak and hungry hoping that I soon might find a place to sleep but it was not to be & I walked lonely past the lighted houses that were in the dark and saw the cheery scenes inside that near to made me weep as I passed by them starved and friendless — soon I did not know if I was walking North or south so that a hopelessness came over me & I was half convinced I headed back to High Beech and my gaolers until through the wayside trees I glimpsed a light bright as the moon that when I neared turned out to be a lamp hung on the Tollgate there at Temsford where a man who had a candle came outside and eyed me narrowly he told me that when I was through the Gate I shoud be headed north and so it was that I continued in more cheer and even some of my old strength about me while I hummed the air of Highland Mary not long after I came to an odd house all alone and near a wood it had a sign I could not read that stood oddly enough inside a kind of trough or spout & yet the house itself seemd stranger being more a monstrous hut of clay and reeds the like of which I have not seen before — there was a kind of porch over the door that being weary I crept in and glad enough I was to find I could lye with my legs straight the inmates were gone to roost for I could hear them turning over in their beds as I lay at full length upon the stones there in the porch & slept sound until daylight when I woke up most refreshed & blessd the Queen for my Good Fortune as I must do now I am in Northborough with Patty and my childern though the one I Long for is not Here
<quote>
I think of thee at dewy morn
& at the sunny noon
& walks with thee — now left forlorn
Beneath the silent moon
<br>
I think of thee I think of all
How blest we both have been —
The sun looks pale upon the wall
& autumn shuts the scene
</quote>
Novr 21 — Sunday — Did Nothing
Novr 22 — Monday — Resolvd today I woud walk to Northampton by myself to find how easy it might be to visit with my Second Wife and family while I am held in the asylum there I did not think it woud provide much of an obstacle to one such as myself whos walked so far & I was right enough although I had not counted on this lameness in my leg that made me some what slow I set out with the dawn before Patty was risen or the children and struck out across the fields that are now bare and frozen hard and so not bad for walking though the look of them is dark & bleak I passed among the villages and thrilled to see their simple life as it first woke to be about the day with schoolboys running in the lanes & gaunt young Greyhounds out to course for Hare there in the woodgrass coverts — in the pastures to my Left I saw some Gypseys though they did not seem the type that I had met in Epping forest nor the kind that I met after That upon the Highway when I woke that Thursday morning outside Temsford I stood up and walked a few yards off from the stone porch where I had made my bed the night before yet when I turned to look back at the strange house made of rush and clay where I had shelterd it was nowhere to be seen nor was its sign that I had Struggled so to read although I found an old trough with a hole which had a sapling grown up through it & concluded that I may perhaps have seen it as a signpost in the gloom puzzling over this I went on past St. Neots where I rested half an hour or more upon a Flint heap when I saw a tall young Gypsey woman come out from the Lodge Gate up the road and next make her way down to where I sat she was a youngish woman with an honest countenance and seemd most handsome & about her neck she had a string of old blue beads made from a worn and cloudy kind of Glass I asked her a few questions which she answered readily and with good humour though after a Time I came to think there some thing crafty in her manner as if there were that about her that she must conceal — never the less I walked on with her to the next town having always had a fondness for the company of handsome women and as we were on our way she told me I had best prop up my wide awake hats crown with something and said in a lower voice that Id be noticed which agen made me believe that there was some thing sly and secretive about her so I took no notice & made no reply at length she pointed to a small church tower which she called Shefford Church and said that I should go with Her along a footway that she knew which was a short cut that might spare a Journey of some fifteen miles — I had by now become afraid she meant to do Away with me if I should follow her from off my path though no doubt this was just my foolish Fancy so I thanked her and said that I feared that I shoud lose my way and not find the North road agen & that I had best keep upon the road at which she bade me a good day and went into a house or shop there on the left hand side I travelled on and was so faint I have no recollection of the places that I passed save that the road seemed very near as stupid as myself in parts & often I woud lift my head up with A start to find that I was walking in My sleep the day & Night became as one to me for I coud no more tell the difference twixt one & the other — I was lost to Time so that it often seemd that I was in Another place entire nor hardly knew my own name or yet knew what Year it was I thought of this as I walked to Northampton now in the November cold — stopped only once to sit upon a stone wall by a Mill and eat some Bread & Cheese I had brought in my pocket to sustain me — with the passing of the day the weather was improved so that the grey clouds broke apart and let the Suns light through to fall upon the field whereat I was made Happy for a time until I found Her name upon my lips
<quote>
I cant expect to meet thee now
The winters floods begin
The wind sighs through the naked bough
Sad as my heart within
</quote>
<quote>
I think of thee the seasons through
In spring when flowers I see
In winters lorn & naked view
I think of only thee
</quote>
enough of that I got up most refreshed and headed on towards the town though with my Foot still causing me some pain it was not difficult to spot Northampton when it came in view ahead for all the smoke hung out like flags on the stiff autumn breeze I stopped and had a drink at Becketts Well for there Thomas the Martyr that was tried and Sentenced here paused also but with more call for complaint than I and next I went on through the Dern gate into Town we are all sentenced in our Fashion yet with most of us there is no Trial and we are Judged by measures that we do not know how can they hail a Man one minute for his Verse and then the next they drop him like a burning coal when he has had his day in favour Its a puzzle past my wits & it woud take a better Man by far than I to give its answer on the third or forth day of my walk from Essex I do not know which I was so Starvd I ate the grass that grew beside the road to satisfy my hunger which it did & tasted very much like Bread so that it seemed to do me good and I went on in better Spirits than before — after A time I reccollected that I had tobacco but my box of lucifers being exhausted I had not the means to light my pipe so chewed the stuff instead & swallowed up the quids when they were done after which time I was not hungry I went on through Bugden and then Stilton where I was so lame I lay me down upon a gravel causeway and went near to sleep & as I did I could hear voices that I took for Angels since at first I did not understand their tongue One of them that seemed a young woman said poor creature then another one more elderly said O he shams but added next O no he dont As I stood up and limped upon my way — I heard the voices but did not look back & saw no one they came from and so on I went in way of Peterborough and my Home beyond across the summer meadows I am sat once more about this Journal neath the portico of All Saints on the steps here and I can see down the hill of Gold street where the money lenders have their place & past the Mare fair & Saint Peters spire to where the castle’s piteous ruin stands down near the bridge such as it stands at all — after I came to Town by the Dern Gate a little after noon I walked about a while & finding it to be a Market day resolvd to make a visit to that place not far up Drum Lane from the church where I now sit & scribble in the sunlight all the traders made a cheerful scene with many varied stripes and colours in their awnings and the fruits and bales of bright new linen on display & I wish now I might recall the half of all the things they cried the shops and houses that are built around the Market square are for the most part new & raised up since the great fire that they Had here when the square was ringed with flame & all the townsfolk made escape by going through the front door of the Welsh house where they pay the drovers come from Wales then got to safety out the back there is a fine old coach Inn stood upon the square three hundred years now where black tongues of soot may still be seen that lick across the old rubbd stone & I thank God for his great Providence in saving all who were not burnt that day — after a while when I grew weary of the markets bustle I came to the graveyard at the back side of this church and walked amongst the stones a time I found a marker for Mat Seyzinger the famous coachman on the Nottingham Times who I saw once & who in his day had a great following — there are not people such as once there were neither do folk now have the humour or the depth of character that they had then — Jem Welby overturned his coach before this very church and when asked to explain he said that He had tipped his passengers out in the road to count them No doubt now hed be thought Mad & put away as I myself shall be Got up to the asylum on the Billing road not long before I heard the Bells chime three o clock where I am sat now by the gate — On my Way here my thoughts were Mary this & Mary that & nothing else but Mary In my fancy I have scolded her for having been so long apart from me & then have begged her to be kind and to forgive me so confused am I in all my feelings are they right that say we were not Wed — it can not be for I remember on that day we walked down by the brook did She & I and there was all made right & we were married before God I kneeled with her beneath the Hawthorns canopy where came a very greenish light & said There now this is our Church why do they try to keep me from Her and tell me such Stories that it is small wonder if I am made Mad O Mary mary why will you not see me for now I am no where unless in Despair when I walked here from Essex lame & dizzy in the head for want of food through Peterborough I came next to Walton & then Werrington and was upon the highway with my First Wife’s home not far ahead so that my heart was light & when I saw a cart that came towards me with a man a woman & a boy in it I thought nought of it yet when it drew close to me it stopped at this the woman jumps down from the cart & tries to get me into it with her saying O John john dont you know me But I did not know her and so thought her drunk or mad as I — but then the man sat with her says Why john this is your wife & so I looked agen and it was Patty and our son young Charles beside her — though it frightend me I had not known her I was filled with Joy to think I had one Wife with me again and so might soon have two & thus I bade them take me on to Northborough that I should be by Marys side we were soon in the sight of Glinton church but Mary was not there neither coud I get any information about her further then the old story of her being dead six years ago but I woud take no notice of this blarney for was it not one year since the broadsheets said that I myself were dead and lying in my grave or were they right & this is Hell I beat upon her neighbors doors & said I thought that She was here at which they said Well you thought wrong like Hobs Hog & and they shut me out — I sat upon the step of Marys cott in Northborough & cried while Patty & our son looked on and Said come away John cant you see shes not here — I picked a pebble up from off the path that once perhaps her tender foot had brushed & set it in my mouth & all was lost and Patty got me to the cart On the way to our house that is called Poets Cottage by the people thereabout Patty sat by me in my weeping and was near in tears herself to see me so undone & all the time was saying Why john what is it that makes you say she was your wife You knew her when you were fourteen years old and she was ten and never saw her after that why do you say it why why why and I dont know and I cant say I sit here now by the asylum gate and watch the sun grow long upon the tired brown stone whereover slump the boughs as heavy as my Heart all of it vanishes like dust upon the Wind & nothing is made safe — I rue the dwindling hedgerow and the closed off Land & am made desolate to see the meadows heaped with brick — yet in the Market and the Town the aprons & the awnings hung above the shops are very much like flowers of a different kind & so too will be gone time shall unravel all of us & now the shadows move on the asylum wall so quick their movement may be seen I sat beneath the Hawthorn with her afterwards and said There we are married now & made her promis she woud not Tell any one what we had done I turn and squint to where the light floods from the West like fire & for a moment see that Sweet child stood against it like An angel but it is a sack cloth caught upon the madhouse paleings & I never shall be free agen
<quote>
While life breaths on this earthly ball
What e’er my lot may be
Wether in freedom or in thrall
Mary I think of thee
</quote>
** <strong>I Travel in Suspenders, AD 1931</strong>
I travel in suspenders. Selling ‘em, that is, not wearing ‘em. That always gets a laugh. You’ll often find a laugh will kick things off better than anything, whether you’re talking to a client, or young lady. Or for that matter a constable. Do you know, very often in the motor that carries me back and forth from Angel Lane to the assizes I’ll make some remark, you know. Just kidding them along, like, as you do. The other day we passed by this young woman in the street and honestly, the face on her, I’ve never seen one like it. I pointed her out to the young chap that I was handcuffed to. I said, ‘Ah well, there’s no sense looking at the mantel when the fire wants poking.’ As you might suppose, that raised a smile. They’re human just like everybody else.
I’ve noticed on the corner just across the street from the assizes there’s a Women’s WC that backs on to the big church in the middle there, All Saints. It’s down some steps and you can only see the staircase curving down and round away from you, with white tiles halfway up the wall. I’d like to know what goes on down there, I can tell you. Just imagine, eh, if you could have a look? I close my eyes and I can see it, with them pulling up their pants across their great big bums. I had dreams once, you know, when I was little, about being in the Ladies’ toilets. I was quite a cheeky little monkey even then, you can imagine. There’d be that green muck growing between the tiles and Heaven only knows how it would smell. Like every fanny in the world at once, I’ll bet. Now there’s a thought. I’ll bet you couldn’t find a man who hadn’t entertained it once or twice if he were honest.
There’s a lot of women come to court sat in the gallery. You’d be surprised, some of the looks I get. I shouldn’t say myself but I’ve got quite a following as if I were a blooming Picture Idol, not that I’m bad-looking in the natural way of things. Of course, I mustn’t do much to encourage them with Lillian sitting there before the dock each day and mooning up at me. It wouldn’t look good, would it, if I were to be seen making eyes at some lass in the back row with my own wife looking on? Not after that commotion with the papers printing what I said to the police, about how my harem keeps me away from home.
My lawyer Mr Finnemore reckons I put my foot in it with that one, but then he’s not what you’d call a worldly man. To my mind, for the greater part the general public have a soft spot for a dashing rogue, and secretly admire a great philanderer. If they’d had half the fun that I’ve had they’d be glad. Still, it won’t do for Lily to seem too much of a martyr so I must take care and not be caught out, flirting from the dock. There’s a brunette girl, busty little thing, that sometimes comes in on her dinner break and stands there up one corner looking at me. I should like it if she had suspenders on made by the firm I represent, and since they’re not far off in Leicester there’s a good chance that she does. You think about it one way, I’m as good as up her skirt already. How about that?
Lillian’s already had a lot of sympathy and has been given work down at a shop in Bridge Street here so she can keep herself while she attends the trial. The station where I’m kept in Angel Lane runs right off Bridge Street so we drive up past the shop each morning on my way to court. A little sweetshop as it happens, so it’s just the place for a sweet girl like her. Head over heels for me she is and always has been. Never likes to sit upon my knee, which is my favourite way to hold a woman, but in all particulars apart from that she’s the best wife I’ve got.
If I should think, I’ll have her bring me up a quarter pound of Menthol Eucalyptus sweets to see if they can ease my throat a bit. All of this giving evidence is making it play up. If I’m not careful I shall have no voice at all before they’re done with me, and then where should I be? There’s a great many people think me quite the best amateur baritone to sing down at the Friern Barnet Social Club in Finchley, where my ‘Trumpeter What Are You Sounding Now’ always goes down a treat. I’ve got a very decent set of pipes on me and shouldn’t want a thing like this to muck them up. I know that men in general often take against a chap who has the lighter type of voice, but ladies by and large seem to prefer it. Wouldn’t do to talk myself hoarse in the dock and spoil all that now, would it?
He was thrashing like a mackerel, banging on the windshield of my Morris. Not at all a pleasant thing to look at I can tell you, and the noise. You talk about a scalded cat. You’d think he’d be out cold and not know anything about it, but it was the fire. It woke him up. I’ll be quite honest, I can hear it now. It wasn’t even any words you’d take for English it was such an awful racket. Once he kicked the side door open and I thought, ‘Well, that’s it, Alf. You’ve been and gone and done it now.’ Only by then of course the smoke and flames were down him and he’d had his lot. He fell down forward over the front seat with one leg out the car, and that was it. Of course, Joe Soap here stood downwind and didn’t have the sense to move until my eyes were streaming. What a sight we must have been, the pair of us.
I saw the picture of my Morris Minor that they printed in the <em>Daily Sketch</em> and could have wept. Baby saloon it was, and not that old. I had the thing insured for one hundred and fifty pounds but don’t expect to see a big return from it, things being what they are. Judging from what it looked like in the photograph there wasn’t much left of the blessed thing. The mud-guards were all thrown about like ribs and you could see where all the rubber had poured off the wheels to leave the rims bare. If I ever catch them chaps that stole it, but then no, hang on, that wasn’t true, was it? I made that up. It’s such a job sometimes, just keeping track of everything.
That was the worst thing about keeping up two wives at once, apart from all the cost involved. It was a strain remembering my story sometimes, I can tell you. All the fiddling little details. Which one I’d told what. With Lillian it wasn’t quite so bad because she’s rather vague by nature and not so inclined to notice if I should slip up, but Ivy now, well. That’s a different matter. It’s not six months since I married her and she’s already quick to pounce upon the smallest thing.
I married Lil November 1914, so that’s more than sixteen year back now. In all that time, if she’s had a suspicious thought she’s kept it to herself. Even when evidence was put in front of her, such as when I brought her mine and little Helen’s baby to look after — not the one that died, the second one, our little Arthur — even then she took it quieter than a mouse and said that she’d forgive me when I hadn’t even asked her to. Young Arthur’s nearly six now and I’ll say this for our Lillian, she’s brought him up as if he were her own. She’s never shown him any side, not to my knowledge. Like I say, head over heels for me, she is. No questions asked. Hard to believe it’s sixteen years. I missed our anniversary this last November what with all the set-to that we had. I’ll have one of the coppers pop and get her something, if I happen to remember. Better late than never, that’s what I say.
As for Ivy, I don’t know if it will last for sixteen months, let alone sixteen years. It seemed a good idea when we were wed in June at Gellygaer, though when I say a good idea I mean that she was four months up the spout by then and showing large already, as the skinny ones so often do. God, though, the tits they get on them. It’s almost worth it, having one more mouth to feed so long as you get lovely tits like that to stuff in yours. There now, you see? Another laugh. It’s like I say with laughter, it’s the best thing that there is to break the ice. Everyone feels that much more comfortable.
But to be serious, with Ivy something told me I was making a mistake from the word go. Not that there’s anything about her I don’t like, but just that you could tell somehow there’d be a lot of fuss involved. You take the last time that I saw her, when I went across to Wales that night directly after my ‘funny five minutes’ out at Hardingstone. Now, as you might imagine, I was in a dreadful tizzy, having lost the car. I’d come out of Hardingstone Lane and stood faffing about there by the end and peering back along the path to watch the two men who had seen me leave the field. I couldn’t spot them in the dark, although my Morris was still blazing, out across the hedgerows.
You know how it is at times like that. You feel that everything you do must look suspicious, although half the time you’ll find nobody notices. I went and stood beside the London Road up near the old stone cross they’ve got there, where Queen Eleanor was set down on her funeral procession back to London, and it wasn’t long before I’d thumbed a lorry down, on its way to that very place. I spun a yarn about a lift I’d missed from some well-off old chum who drove a Bentley, and the lorry driver was soon taken in. He drove me to Tally Ho Corner on the Barnet Road and we arrived there about six as it was getting light.
I told a fellow at the Transport Office there that my own car had been pinched from outside a coffee stall because to tell the truth by then I was quite dozy and forgot that rot I’d said about the Bentley. Still, I’ve got a way with people, there’s a lot of folk have said it, and this bloke was no exception. Put me on a coach, the nine-fifteen for Cardiff, so that I arrived there in the afternoon and caught another bus to Penybryn. I could walk from there to Ivy’s house at Gellygaer and got in about eight that night.
Well, as I say, there’s always fuss with Ivy. Not that it’s her fault, it’s just there always is, and that night was no different. First of all I had her father, old man Jenkins, buttonhole me in the passageway and ask why it had taken me so long to get there with his Ivy at death’s door with illness and my baby on the way. You know how Taffy Welshman likes his bit of melodrama now and then, and he had Ivy sounding more like Little Nell than anything before he’d done with me. I told him how I’d had my car pinched in Northampton which I dare say I believed myself by then, I’d had to reel it out that often. It’s a funny thing, but on my oath, stood in his passage at that moment I’d forgotten everything about that other poor chap and the fire.
After I’d gotten past the dad I had the daughter to contend with. Ivy was propped up on pillows in her room and she looked very bad. The baby was due almost any time. No sooner had I sat down on the bed than she was asking when we should move into our new house in Surrey. To be frank, it caught me off-guard and I looked at her gone out. I’d quite forgotten all the business about Kingston-on-Thames that I’d told her and her dad when I was tipsy at our wedding do. Before I could come up with something good she was in floods of tears and telling me I didn’t love her, and how she was sure that I was seeing someone else. Why was I spending all these nights away and so on. You can guess the greater part of it.
They don’t consider what you might have gone through, do they? Buy me this and buy me that and let’s live somewhere else. Five hundred pounds a year I’m earning now from Leicester Brace & Garter and you might think I’d be well-to-do, but not a bit of it. All of it’s gone on kids or women long before I see a penny of it. It’s the same old story.
As it stood, although I hadn’t mentioned it to Lillian, I’d planned to sell the house and furniture we had at Buxted Road in Finchley so that I could use the cash to get set up with Ivy and the nipper when it came. Now, you can call me what you like, but I’ve always been softer than I should be when it comes to kids. I’d make a settlement to Lily and young Arthur, naturally.
Of course, I couldn’t say all this to Ivy without having her fall wise to Lily and my Finchley set-up, so I acted all offended and made quite a fuss about having my car pinched from outside the coffee shop so that it took me eighteen hours to get to Gellygaer. I find it often works if someone gets upset to act as if you’re more upset than they are in return. When you’re a smart chap like myself it never fails, and Ivy was soon telling me that she was sorry that she’d had a go at me, and it was just her nerves, what with the baby due and her so poorly. I said, ‘There now, Climbing Ivy, you can cling to me,’ and when she did I put my hand inside her nighty-top and had a feel. Her tit was hard and heavy with the end part stood out like a football stud. I slept in their spare room that night and I was on the bone just thinking of it, even after all the upset I had during supper, with that neighbour and her bloody paper.
If I’m truthful it’s my biggest fault, the sex. I’ll tell you, half the time I think of nothing else, and when you’re on your own a lot like me, driving from place to place, it makes it worse. You spend a lot of time with daydreams when you’re up and down the road. Sometimes I’ll have to pull in at a lay-by for a fiddle just so I can think of something else but fanny for an hour or two. I’ve got a catalogue I carry with me in the car with photographs of models in the company range. They’re only little pictures with four of them to a page, and you can only see the women from their tummies to the top part of their legs. You’ll think I’m crackers but to me they’ve all got different characters, and things about the way they stand so you can tell what sort of girls they are. Some of them, they’re the type you know that you’d get on with, and that they’d have decent personalities.
There’s one that I call Monica. If you look close up at the photograph you can see a light sort of fuzz upon her legs, so I imagine her as blonde. The sort of girl you might find working at the counter in a Post Office, wearing her hair the way they have it now, all straight on top and curled up round the back. She’d look nice in light blue. Her belly button is the kind that’s more upright than wide, so that it’s like a little keyhole in a peach. She’s got one of the newer long-line corsets on that seem to flatter women with more slender hips, which to my mind seems a wise choice and shows she’s more the thoughtful type who takes a lot of care about her clothes. You can tell just by looking at her skin that she can’t be much more than twenty.
That’s the age, I’ll tell you, when they’re fagged out and fed up with younger lads and start to see the older fellow as romantic. If I could have Monica just hear me do ‘The Cobbler’s Song’ from <em>Chu Chin Chow</em> then I could have her drawers down quick as that. Of all my harem, do you know that sometimes I think I like Monica the best? She doesn’t cost me anything or get me into trouble. I just shoot off in my hanky, close the catalogue and drive away.
I wasn’t always like this, with the women. Ask my Lily and she’ll tell you: when she knew me back before the War it was as much as I could bring myself to do to give a kiss goodnight, I was that shy. It wasn’t until I’d enlisted in the 24<sup>th</sup> Queen’s Territorials I had the nerve to go up to a girl and ask her out. The uniform, you see. It made a difference, you can laugh now, but it’s true. I’ve heard women go on and on about how terrible it is the way men fight, but once they see the boots and buttons they’re all over you. They wave you off then stay at home and send white feathers to the conshies. Half the fellows in those trenches wouldn’t be there if not for the way their girlfriends look at them when they’re dressed up for war. Deny it if you can.
To be quite honest, Lily was the first girl I’d been out with, although I was getting on for twenty. When she first got me to bed I was that green I lay on top of her with <em>my</em> legs open for a time before I realized what I should be doing. In all honesty it wasn’t that successful. Well, I couldn’t get it in and ended up feeling that sick about myself, and when Lil said it didn’t matter that was worse. We never did it right until about a week after we wed. I mean, we’d rubbed each other off and kissed, but that was all, and when we did finally manage it, it was all over in a flash, though that got better as time passed. All told, though I was no great shakes in bed, I think we were happier then, me and my Lillian. It was a shame that we were never blessed with kids, although I’ve made up for it since.
Four months together, me and Lily had, and by the end of it the How’s-Your-Father, it was smashing. We were that in love, and then, come March in 1915, I was bundled off to France. My God, that was a terror. You don’t know until you’ve been in one. You live in mud and all around there’s lads no older than yourself with half their jaw blown off, and you give up on everything bar doing what you’re told. I’ve seen a horse that had no legs lie shuddering in the muckpit like a bloody seal. I’ve seen men burn.
I’d only been in France two months before I caught the shrapnel at Givenchy. Head and leg. The head was worst, apparently, though Muggins here can’t bring to mind a blessed thing about it. Not the moment that it happened or the morning that I’d had before, and not much after. Gone. Clean as a whistle. First thing I knew afterwards was being halfway through a plate of dinner at the hospital. I lifted up a spoon of stringy mash and looked at it, and I remembered that I was Alf Rouse. It was the most peculiar sensation, I can tell you.
I don’t have the education to explain it but the world seemed different to me after that. I don’t mean that the War had opened up my eyes, like I’ve heard other fellows say. I mean the world seemed different, like as if it was a different world, a stand-in for the real one. How can I explain it? Everything looked wrong. Not wrong, but put together in a hurry as though it could fall apart at any time. The best way I can say it is like when you’re doing art in school, and Miss gives you a sheet of paper first where you can try things out and make a mess, because it’s not the proper picture and it doesn’t matter. When I woke up in that hospital it was like waking up inside the practice scribble, not the picture. Nothing mattered. You could rub it out and start all over. When I think about it, I suppose I’ve pretty much felt that way ever since, though now I’m used to it.
That was the point where I first got my ‘thing’ about the weaker sex. Of course, for one thing there was opportunity, what with the nurses they had over there. You wouldn’t think to look at some of them, but there was more of that went on than you’d suppose. You see, to all intents and purposes they were the only women over there and they could have their pick. You wouldn’t think they’d feel much like it what with seeing chaps half blown to bits all day, but I could tell a tale or two, believe me. Well, of course, I had a twinge of guilt from time to time regarding Lillian, but nothing that would bowl me over. Like I say, by then things had all sort of flattened out, and nothing that I thought or did seemed to amount to very much. I mean, I know there’s right and wrong, but you come to a point where, honestly, you’re not much bothered.
Once I had this chubby little RSN who sucked me off while there was some poor fellow with no hands lay raving off his chump in the cot next to mine. I played along, but frankly wasn’t very struck upon it, if you can believe that. There was something funny with this nurse that put me off, the way she acted. Gone a bit mad, by the look of her. You got a lot like that.
When I was pensioned out the following year and came back home, it didn’t ease up on the female front one bit. If anything, it just made matters worse. That was the wound, you see, did that. That’s what attracted them. My injury. What I just said, about girls being daft for chaps in uniform, well, that was nothing to the way they were if you were hurt or wore a bandage. Even when the bandages were off, if you just talked about how you were wounded to ‘em, that would do the trick. I’d pull my hair to one side so that they could see the scar up by my parting, and I’d let ‘em touch it if they wanted to. I’ll tell you, ten minutes of that and I was up ‘em. They were gasping for it. They’re some funny wonders, women. I can’t make them out, not after all the ones I’ve had. It must be getting on for seventy or eighty of them that I’ve done it with since I took up commercial travelling when I came out the army, but they’re still a mystery to me. I expect they always will be, now.
I won’t say little Helen was the first girl that I took to bed while on my travels. After all, I’d had five year of it by then, but it was Helen who I came to care about the most. I wanted to look after her. She was a child, when all was said and done, and so she needed looking after. Anyone would do the same, that had a heart.
A little Scottish girl, was Helen. Little servant girl. I used to have her in the back seat of the Morris. There were lots of memories in that back seat. I’m sorry that it’s gone. I suppose that when you think about it, she was on the young side, Helen. Only fourteen, but you know the girls these days. Very mature and well developed. If they’re old enough to bleed, they’re old enough to butcher, that’s what I say. Good one, eh? I heard that first when I was in the services, and thought that it was proper comical.
I got her pregnant, but it died soon after it was born, which was an upset at the time. It’s like I say, I’m very fond of children. Anyway, I kept on seeing her and two years later, by the time she was sixteen, she’d fallen with another one. Now, Helen, she was only young, but she could be insistent, and this time she put her foot down. Said we must be married for the kiddie’s sake, and there wasn’t much that I could say to that. I’d told her me and Lily were divorced, you see, so couldn’t use the fact I was already wed to get me out of it. It was a pickle, I can tell you.
As it turned out, what I did was go through a sham wedding with her, just to keep her happy, then I set her and baby up at this nice flat in Islington where we could live as man and wife. I told her I’d be on the road a lot away from home. Of course, I’d told Lily the same thing back in Finchley, so it all worked out quite nicely for a time. Still, she wasn’t daft, and in the end she got suspicious I was having an affair outside of marriage. What she didn’t know of course is that I was and she was it.
It all came out eventually, and my God, but you should have heard the uproar. I don’t know quite where I should have been if Lily hadn’t been so understanding. She’s said all along it’s not my fault, me being a sex maniac, and that it’s only happened since the War. They both agreed to meet, did her and Helen, after things calmed down, and sorted it all out across the French sponge at a Joe Lyons’ corner house. They both thought it was best if Helen’s baby, little Arthur, should have somewhere decent to grow up, so me and Lily took him in to live with us at Buxted Road. You can say what you like, there’s not a lot of women as would do that for their chap, now is there? Take another woman’s baby in and feed it?
She’s one in a million, is my Lily. I remember that last night before this all blew up, the last time I saw Buxted Road. We’d sat there in our front room with the lights out, me and Lillian and little Arthur, watching all the rockets and the Roman candles going off just up the road, it being Bonfire Night. I’d told her I’d got business up in Leicester with the braces and suspenders people, so she didn’t mind when I set out just after seven to head up the Great North Road towards the Midlands. I let her have one of my extra special kisses by way of farewell, since I was feeling bad about the way things were between us and I meant to leave her.
Pulling out of Buxted Road; I went straight round to Nellie Tucker’s. I’m ashamed to say I’d not been round there since she’d had the baby just the week before, so you could say that I was overdue. I can’t remember, did I mention Nellie? I took up with her in 1925, during the troubled patch with Helen and our Lily. I was under a great deal of pressure at the time, as you might well imagine, and I turned to Nellie so that I’d have someone I could talk about it to, as much as anything. Naturally, one thing leading to another how it does, it wasn’t long before we’d got a baby. Lily would have killed me, so I kept it quiet and paid five pounds to Nelly every month for maintenance. That was all right until she fell again, this last time. Had it the end of October, on the 29<sup>th</sup> as I remember.
I went round to see her after leaving Lil that night and got round there a little after seven. Both the eldest and the baby were in bed by then, so we could have a quick one on the couch. I felt a bit blue afterwards, the way you sometimes do, and started pouring out my troubles to her, telling her about all of the debt that I was in. She’s a good listener is Nellie. Always has been.
How it is with me, I suppose it’s like that film <em>A Girl in Every Port</em>. Victor McLaglan. Do you know that one? That was a smasher. Went last year to see it with our Lily, and the women that were in it, well, what a selection. Myrna Loy, she’s nice. And Louise Brooks, although to be quite honest I’m not half so keen on her, her hair like that. It looks too lesbian, if you know what I mean. The real star, though, to my mind, it was Sally Rand. You must know Sally Rand. ‘The Bubbles Girl’? She danced with fans and these big bubbles, and I have to say that there’s a lot of art in what she does. She doesn’t wear a stitch beneath those bubbles, yet you never see a thing. Her song was ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’, naturally enough. A lovely girl.
I stayed at Nellie’s for about an hour and left just after eight. I should have had a pee before I left but anyway I didn’t, and so by the time I got past Enfield, heading out St Alban’s way, I was near bursting. I saw this pub just set back from the road a bit and thought, ‘Well, I’ve got time for one to brace me for the journey.’ Also, I could use their Gents. It’s funny, I’ve been out that way before and though I know most of the pubs up there, this one was new to me. I think it’s how you come upon it, round a bend. The first sight that I had of it was when my headlights swung across and caught it, and at first it looked half derelict. They ought to do it up a bit, in my opinion. It’d be money well spent, because set back there from the road I’ll bet that most folk overlook it. Had a funny name, as I recall, although I can’t think what at present. It’ll come to me, I’m sure.
I parked the wagon round the back and went inside, and it was first stop Gentlemen’s. God, talk about Relief of Mafeking. It was one of those where the stream seems to go on for hours. Well, I’m exaggerating, but you get the gist. I came out of the W.C. into the bar, and there was hardly anybody in at all. Dead as a doornail.
Labour In Vain. There, what did I just say? I knew it had a funny name. Propped up against the bar was this old tinker with a funny stand-up hat. Quite honestly, he looked half-sharp, so I steered clear of him. I got the girl behind the bar to serve me with a brandy, then I looked about to find a place where I could sit. Up in one corner was a scruffy looking chap, sat talking to this little lad of ten or so. I thought it was his son at first, but then the boy said something to the man and left the bar. He didn’t come back, so perhaps he didn’t know this other bloke at all; just happened to be sitting with him when I looked. I fancied chatting with another chap to pass five minutes after having women rabbit on at me all day, so when the little lad got up and left I went and sat at the next table to the scruffy item.
We struck up a conversation before long, and I could see he was impressed when I showed him my business card. It turned out he was heading north as well. He’d come from Derbyshire originally, he said, which wasn’t a surprise given how thick his accent was. He told me how he’d had a job up at the pits there, but he’d thought that he might make a go of it in London, as so many do, and headed south. You won’t be shocked to hear it hadn’t worked out how he’d planned, so now he was on his way back to Derby, hoping for his old work at the pit.
They’ve asked me why I offered him a lift, as if I had some motive for it, and they won’t believe me when I say that back then at the start I’d no idea what I was going to do. I said I’d take him up as far as Leicester because I felt genuinely sorry for the chap, and that’s the long and short of it. He made a fuss about getting me in another drink before we left, by way of gratitude, and he had one himself which, to be frank, was one too many. From the state of him, he’d had a few before I’d got there, and once we were in the car I didn’t get a lot of sense from him. Most of the time he was asleep and snoring.
It might have been a different story if I’d had a bit of conversation like I wanted, just to take my mind off my troubles. As it was, the only company I had was far too sloshed for conversation, so I’d nothing else to do but drive along and brood on things, with him behind me rasping like a saw-mill. I got madder with him as we went along. I mean, there I was in the midst of all my troubles, Nellie’s baby born a week before and Ivy’s nearly due, and meanwhile there was him snoring like a carthorse, slobbering on my upholstery. I’m not saying that I feel any animosity towards him now, of course not, but it’s how I felt about it then.
We drove on up the Roman road towards Northamptonshire, which we came in by way of Towcester. It’s a funny thing, what you remember, but I can recall what I was thinking when we passed Greens Norton church spire on our left. I don’t know why, but I was thinking back to when I was a little lad and we lived on Herne Hill, just up the road there from the Half Moon Inn. When I was younger I was that inquisitive, how children are. I wanted to know everything. One day, I couldn’t have been more than seven, I remember asking Mam about Herne Hill and why they called it that. She said she didn’t know, but if I was that bothered I could look it up in <em>Pear’s Encyclopaedia</em>, so I did.
I don’t know if you ever opened up a book, back when you were a nipper, and you saw a picture that was just so frightening you slammed the book and never dared to look at it again? Well, that was how it was with me. I opened the encyclopaedia to the page I wanted, under H, and there was this old line engraving of this bloke, and he had antlers like a deer growing out from his head. I know it doesn’t sound much now but I was terrified. I’d never seen a picture in my life until that point that had upset me half so much, I can’t say why.
I shut the book and went and hid it underneath the wardrobe in my parents’ room, beneath some copies of <em>Reveille</em> that had ended up there. I wanted to bury it, you see, I was that scared of it. Why I should think of that chap with antlers as I passed Greens Norton church I’ve no idea, but there you are. The mind’s a funny thing. You don’t know why you do things half the time, or at least I don’t.
You take what I said that evening when I got to Ivy’s house in Wales, just after I’d been in her room and touched her up. Her parents had been kind enough to offer me a nice bit of boiled bacon and potato for my supper which I was halfway through eating when there came a knock upon the door. The Jenkins had a neighbour three doors down who seemed to know all of their business, which included me and Ivy, and it turned out it was her stood on their doorstep with a copy of the local paper. Had we seen, she said, the picture of a car found in Northampton? Now, that’s how it is in villages, you see, with everybody knowing everybody else’s business. I’d not been in Gellygaer more than an hour or two, and here was somebody had heard already what I’d said to Ivy’s dad about my motor getting pinched. As it turned out, I still had worse to come.
They asked her in and let her show this paper round to everyone, and when I saw it I was in the middle of a mouthful of boiled ham. I’ll tell you, it’s a wonder that I didn’t choke. There was a picture of my Morris Minor standing burned out in the field at Hardingstone. There was a paragraph beside it said a human body had been found inside the wreckage. Well, it’s like I said, you don’t know why you do or say things half the time, but when I looked at that I blurted straight out, without thinking twice, ‘That’s not my car.’ I followed that by mumbling something about how I’d not thought there’d be such a fuss made in the papers over things.
It was a bloody stupid thing to say, I think now looking back on it. I mean, it was my car, there wasn’t any doubt about it. You could read the licence plate, MU 1468, as plain as anything. It was about the only bit that wasn’t burned away. All I did by making out it wasn’t mine was make myself look fishy and get everyone’s suspicions up. I got out of it best I could by claiming I was tired and making off to bed in the spare room, where I thought about Ivy’s tits and had a quick one off the wrist to take me mind off things.
Now usually, no sooner have I brought myself off than I’m fast asleep, but not that night. Oh no. I didn’t sleep a wink except for bits where I’d doze off and have these horrid little dreams that woke me up almost before they’d started. They were vivid at the time, but now I can’t remember anything about them, only that they put the wind up me so that I lay awake until the first light crept across the lily-patterned paper on the end wall.
By the time I was up, the morning paper had arrived. It was the <em>Daily Sketch</em>. They’d printed the same photo of my burned-out Morris, only this time they gave out my name as well, which I thought was a blessed cheek. Of course, that really tore it with regards to Ivy’s parents. All that I could think to say is that there must have been a dreadful mix-up somewhere and that I was going back to London until it was sorted out. The Jenkins had another neighbour, name of Brownhill, ran a little motor business down in Cardiff. He piped up and volunteered to run me back there on his way to work so I could get a coach to Hammersmith. I couldn’t very well say no, so I made my goodbyes to Ivy and said what she wanted me to say about how we should both soon live together in Kingston-on-Thames. Her father shook my hand, though not without some prompting on the part of Ivy’s mam, and then we drove away.
It was a long drive down to Cardiff and I don’t know if it played upon my nerves, but for one reason or another I found that I couldn’t for the life of me stop talking. I kept on and on about my car and how it had been stolen from outside a coffee shop, and this chap Brownhill just kept staring at the road in front of him and every now and then he’d say, ‘Oh yes?’ or ‘Is that right?’ but other than that it was blood out of a stone to get a word from him. When we arrived in Cardiff he insisted on accompanying me down to the station, where he saw me on the coach for Hammersmith.
Of course, I’ve been told since that what he did was get straight on to the police as soon as he’d made sure that I was on the coach. He told them I was on my way and that some things I’d said to him had been suspicious. If you ask me, he just wanted to be in on the excitement. It’s the same with all them village types, there’s nothing they love better than a bit of scandal. Still, I’ve wondered if it might be Ivy’s father put him up to it, arranging me a lift to Cardiff with that very thing in mind. It isn’t very nice, to think he’d do that, but I wouldn’t put it past him. Never has been very fond of me, has Ivy’s dad. He took the attitude she’d given up a good career in nursing for a chap he thought beneath her station, as though anyone in Gellygaer ever earned five hundred pounds a year.
I suppose if I’m completely candid with myself, it was the nurse’s uniform as much as anything attracted me to Ivy in the first place. It’s a ‘kink’ I’ve got, and once more I can only think that it might be connected to the War in some way. Hospitals and that. Sometimes, even the smell of Germolene or of surgical spirit, it will get me going quicker than a good rude book. She looked a little cracker, Ivy did, what with that little hat and those black woollen stockings. It’s a pity, but she’s not been able to get into her nurse’s outfit since she passed the five months mark, and that was quite some time back now.
I’ll tell you what, it’s very cold in here for January, don’t you think so? Angel Lane. I’ll tell you this, I’ve not seen many angels around here this last two months, only a load of bobbies all with faces like the rear end of a bus. Not that I’d know an angel if I saw one. Naked women, that’s what I imagine angels are. Now that’d be a thing to have fluttering round you when you kick off, wouldn’t it? A lot of nudes? That’s how I’d like to go. There’s ways a good sight worse than that, believe you me.
He was still fast asleep when I saw the first sign for Hardingstone, the chap whatever-his-name-was I’d picked up in the pub outside St Albans. Bill. I think he said his name was Bill. He was still snoring, and for my part half of me was in a panic over how I’d cope with all these bills and wives and children while the other half kept thinking of that fellow with the reindeer antlers in the <em>Pear’s Encyclopaedia</em>. No idea why. It’s like I say, the mind can be a curiosity at times.
Somewhere amongst all this, I first hit on the notion I should take the turn along the lane to Hardingstone when it arrived. What happened after that I’m in a muddle over still. I’ve told so many stories I can’t tell myself which ones are true and which ones I’ve invented. Do you ever get that? No?
I made a statement about everything that happened to the gentlemen from Hammersmith police station who’d been there waiting for my coach when it arrived from Cardiff, thanks to Mr Brownhill sticking in his oar. To tell the truth, I made a proper Charly of myself when I got off the bus and found them waiting for me, three of them. I’d not expected it, I suppose I should have, but I’d not. I was so taken back, I said the first thing that came into my head. I said I was glad it was all over, and I told them that I’d not had any sleep. I said that I was on my way to Scotland Yard that instant. That’s all fair enough, but before I could stop myself I went and said I was responsible. I didn’t say for what, but all the same they gave me quite a look. I could have kicked myself, the trouble that I’ve had about it since.
I don’t know if I told you, but they tried to trip me up on that in Court today, except I was too clever for them. There’s a saying, back in Finchley, that you have to get up early of a morning to catch Alfie Rouse. The prosecuting counsel, Mr Birkett, he was asking me why it had taken nearly two days for me to report what had gone on to the police, which threw me for a minute, but I soon recovered.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’ve very little faith in village constables such as you’ll find at the more local, smaller station, so I thought I’d go straight to the top. Didn’t I say that I was on my way to Scotland Yard when I got stopped in Hammersmith?’
He didn’t like that, I could tell, the way I wouldn’t let him pin me down, so what he says next is, ‘Oh yuss? Didn’t you also say you were responsible? What did you mean by that, my good man?’ How they talk, you know.
Now, I was feeling pretty cocky by that time, so I came back smart as a whip and said, ‘Well, in the eyes of the police, I thought the owner was responsible for anything that happened in his car. Correct me if I’m wrong.’
I raised one eyebrow when I said that last bit, that ‘Correct me if I’m wrong’, so that the jury and the girls up in the public gallery could see that I was playing with him, and I thought I heard a couple of them chuckle unless it was my imagination. They’re on my side, you can tell. A fair proportion of the jury’s women, so I’m bound to be all right. I’ve caught the eye of one or two of them, and I’ve a good idea which ones have got a thing for me. If I just stick to what I’ve said, there’ll be no upsets.
When they met me off the coach at Hammersmith Bridge Road, they took me to the local station where I told them what had happened early on that morning of the sixth, as best I could. I said I’d picked the chap up on the Great North Road, outside St Albans, which was true enough, and that as we’d got close to Hardingstone I’d thought I saw his hand upon my sample case, which I keep in the back seat of the car where he was sitting. Later on, I started to nod at the wheel a bit, and later still I heard the engine spluttering and playing up like I was running low on petrol, so I thought I’d pull into a field just off the main road there and down the lane a bit. Also, I needed to relieve myself, it having been a long drive from St Albans.
He woke up as I pulled in the field, and I told him that I was going to refresh myself. I said that if he wanted to be useful he could take the petrol can from the back seat and top the tank up, since it seemed that we were running low. I lifted up the bonnet and I showed him where to put it, then he asked me if I’d got a fag that he could cadge. I’d given him quite a few already so I said I hadn’t, and then walked off from the car a stretch so that I could relieve myself in private. I’d gone some way from the road and had my trousers down when I heard this big noise and saw the firelight coming from behind me. I pulled up my trousers and I ran towards the car but I was too late. I could see him there inside, but there was nothing I could do. The silly bugger must have lit his cigarette while sitting with the petrol can. The things some people do.
They saw I’d got my case with me and asked if I’d gone back to get it out of the burning car, but I was ready for that one. I’d seen his hand upon the case and had an idea he might steal it, so I took it with me when I left the motor. I told them I went into a panic when I saw the car go up, as well you might, and ran towards the road where those two young roughs saw me coming through the hedge. I said that I’d been at my wits’ end ever since, and not known what to do, which was no more than the unvarnished truth.
Later, policemen from Northamptonshire arrived in Hammersmith to talk to me, then brought me back with them to Angel Lane here. I asked if I could see Lillian, and when they said that I could see her a bit later I’m ashamed to say I rather let my feelings run away with me, what with being so tired, and told them what a woman Lily was, and how she was too good for me and always made a fuss of me and everything. I mentioned how she wouldn’t sit upon my knee, but how apart from that one drawback she was all a man might wish for.
If I’d stopped there I’d have been all right, but I was in the mood for showing off and anxious to impress, so I went on to tell them how I had a lot of ladyfriends around the country, and how my harem took me to several places so that I was seldom home. Somehow that got back to the papers, though as I’ve remarked, I feel it will work for me rather than against, despite what Mr Finnemore might think. He’s just a barrister. He doesn’t know the first thing about women.
That poor chap. I can see him as we pulled into that field, sat in the back seat fast asleep. All I could think about was bills and babies and how everything was coming down around me. I got out of the car as quietly as I could and went round to the boot to see if I could find the mallet that I’ve kept there ever since me and Lil went to Devon camping several years back. I suppose I keep it with me for protection: when you’re on the road a lot like I am you can meet some funny people. I was rummaging about back there and I suppose I must have made a bit of clatter, which is probably what woke him.
Anyroad, the next thing that I know I hear the car door open at the back there and him getting out. I lean around the open boot to look and there he is stood with his back to me, trying to get his trousers undone by the look of things, so he could have a Jimmy Riddle up against my tyre. I thought about Lil and the boy in Finchley, how they’d take it when I sold the house and furniture, and Nellie with another baby now to feed, and Ivy and Kingston-on-bloody-Thames and how my life was like a nightmare, worse than any picture in a book. I wished it had been something in a book, then I could slam it shut and never have to think about it any more. At some point while all this was running through my mind I must have finally laid hands upon the mallet.
Actually, they look quite nice, the fields out there in Hardingstone. I didn’t see too much of them that night, what with it being dark, but from the photo in the <em>Sketch</em> they looked like proper country fields such as they used to have round London when our dad was little. Sort of wild and overgrown a bit around the edges, not like parks at all. With parks, it’s all a lot of borders, forms and flower beds. There’s no adventure to it and to my mind it’s effeminate. Now what a lad wants is to go off crawling in the bushes like an Indian, or find a little den or something in the reeds where he could just sit by himself and not come out ‘til he was called.
He turned towards me just as I was bringing down the mallet so that rather than just tap his head there at the back as I’d intended, I caught him above the ear and he went sideways like a pole-axed cow. He fell against the Morris and slid down it until he was face first on the grass. He made a noise, just one sound on its own he spoke into the mud, but didn’t move. I stood there staring down at him I don’t know how long, breathing like you do when you’ve just had one. I’d not really thought about what I was going to do, up to that point. I mean, the idea hadn’t come to me at all before we got to Towcester. I looked down at him, pegged out there in what light there was coming from inside the car, the little over-head, and knew I’d better think of something quick.
Now, as a salesman, or commercial traveller as I prefer to call myself, I’m at a great advantage in the thinking stakes. My line of work requires a man who’s used to thinking on his feet. I’ll give you an example. There’s a firm up north I visit once a quarter where I’ve known the buyer years, a nice old chap who’s partial to the younger woman and has cash enough to spend upon a string of girlfriends. I’ve buttered him up, across the years, by bringing him some of the racier suspenders now and then that have a lot of frills, just as a present he can pass on to his favourite young lady. Anyway, I get there one day, march into his office with a handful of the cheekiest suspenders that you ever saw, as if I’d done the tidying at a brothel.
What I didn’t know was he’d been sacked a month after I saw him last for fiddling the till, and sat there in his place was this old baggage with a face like vinegar who’d not see fifty-five again, with tits like two pigs in a hammock. I stopped dead and looked at her, then at the bunch of scanties in my hand. Quick as a flash, it came to me. I looked her in the eye, then made a big display of dumping ten bob’s worth of best suspenders in the office paper basket with the torn-up envelopes and such. She looked at me like I’d gone mad. I put my best voice on and told her, ‘Madam, I apologize. I’d heard a lady was in charge of this department and I’d thought to gratify myself to her by offering her garments that might make her more alluring, but I see now that this would be quite unnecessary.’
I might just as well have said that I could see this would be quite impossible, but kept a civil tongue about me and it paid off as I knew it would. One of my better clients after that, she was. The point I’m trying to make is that it’s all a part of life for a commercial traveller, coming up with ideas at a moment’s notice.
I bent down and reached beneath his belly so that I could pick him up, and tried to get him round towards the front end of the car. My idea was, you see, to get him in the driver’s seat or thereabouts. I didn’t fancy trying to manoeuvre him in past the steering wheel and so I hauled him all around the car’s front to the other door, which meant I pulled him through the headlights that were still switched on. By God he looked a sight, dragged through the beams like that. He had blood coming out of one ear by now, and from the look of it I’d smashed his cheekbone where I’d caught him with the mallet. I’ll be honest with you, I thought he was dead.
You’d think I’d know the difference between somebody alive and someone dead, but how things are for younger chaps, it’s not the same as when you’ve fought a war. It all gets rather blurred in my opinion, the distinction between live and dead. You see a fellow face down in the muck with only half an arm, and yes, I suppose he might well be alive, but if he’s not dead then he will be in an hour or two, so, really, what’s the point? It sounds harsh, but like a good many things, it’s something you get used to. I did. I was a War Hero, I was. Had a medal and a scar, up near my parting. Did I show you?
Had to put the blighter down so I could reach across inside the car and open up the passenger-side door which, being worried about car thieves, I keep locked up as a rule. Having done this I went back round and shunted him about again until I’d got him face down in the front seat, although he looked very awkward, with one leg all squashed up under him. I thought to take my sample case out of the car from where it was down by the driver’s seat. It had the catalogue inside, you see. I’d not want Monica to end up in a bad way.
Next I fumbled in the back seat for the petrol can I keep there and began to splash it round inside the car, with quite a lot of it falling upon the thing there in the front. I was just doing this and wondering what had happened to the mallet, which I couldn’t think where I’d put down, when suddenly he made a noise. He seemed to mutter something, but it wasn’t any language that I’ve ever heard. It gave me goosebumps, I can tell you. I shut all the doors after running a petrol trail back from the car, and then I thought to have a shufty underneath the bonnet so that I could loosen up the petrol union joint and take the top from off the carburettor. I know cars, you see, my line of work and all. A clever little touch, was that, so that it might look as if it had been an accident.
I looked around a bit but couldn’t find the mallet, so I went back where I’d left the petrol can to mark the ending of my trail, then struck a match. The flames ran off across the grass like little ants that march in file, and then there was that noise like a great sigh and they were everywhere across the car. My little Morris Minor.
That’s about the time that he woke up and started screaming and twitching about until he kicked the car door open, but by then, as I said earlier, he’d had his chips. I’ll tell you what was bad: he had one leg stuck out of the car and I don’t know how long I must have stood there staring, but it burned right through. It just fell off and lay there on the grass, this burning leg. To be quite frank I’ve never seen a picture like it.
In the strictest confidence, the thing that everybody thinks is cleverest about the operation was a thing I hadn’t even thought of for myself until the deed was done. To hear the papers talk, the idea is I did it all on Guy Fawkes’ Night so that the fire would be sure not to draw attention, which I must admit is very smart indeed. I wish I’d thought of it before the fact. The truth is, that’s just when the idea came upon me, on that night, there in that field. Came to me in a flash, from out of nowhere. That’s just how it happens sometimes, I suppose. It wasn’t until later as I stared into the flames I thought about it being Bonfire Night. I thought, ‘Well, that’s appropriate.’
After I’d stood there quite a while and made my eyes run with the smoke, it came to me I’d best be moving on. I walked across the fields to where a gap cut through the hedge led out on to the Hardingstone Lane. As luck had it, just as I came out on to the path I ran straight into these two chaps, both sozzled from the look of them, and coming home from some Guy Fawkes’ to-do down at the local Palais. The Salon de Danse, I think I’ve heard it called. As I approached, I realized that they could both see the car on fire across the field, and thought I heard them mention it.
I thought it best to put on a bold face and bluff it out, and so I said, ‘Looks like somebody’s had a bonfire’ or some words to that effect, the Guy Fawkes notion having come to me by now. They both stared at me and said nothing, so I hurried on towards the main road up ahead.
It was a clear night. Proper crisp. The moon was out and showed up very bright upon the dead Queen’s cross there by the London Road. Everything smelled exciting, frightening, full of smoke and gunpowder and like a war. My scar was itching so I stood there scratching at my head as if I was somebody gone out. I had a suitcase of unmentionables in one hand and a box of England’s Glory matches in the other. I was someone else, with their whole life in front of them, and I was scared to death but it felt grand.
I can’t wait to get out of here. I’m going to celebrate. I’m going to fill the world with babies, songs and lovely underthings. I’ll treat my Lily to a hat and go to bed with plain girls to be kind. I’m not a bad sort underneath, and I believe the jury know that. Oh, a rascal sometimes, to be sure, sharp as you like with no flies on him, but a character, a man with a romantic heart that leads him into trouble. I look down at them from out the dock and know I’ve one foot in the door already with them, how they look at me. It’s just an instinct. You can always tell, you know, when they look hesitant.
They’re buying it.
** <strong>Phipps’ Fire Escape, AD 1995</strong>
They’re buying it.
The last words of the previous chapter, written in grey light, stand there upon the monitor’s dark stage, beneath the Help menu that’s lettered up on the proscenium arch. The cursor winks, a visible slow handclap in the black, deserted auditorium.
The final act: no more impersonations. No more sleight-of-voice or period costume. The abandoned wigs and furs and frocks are swept away. Discarded masks and death-husk faces are returned to Property and hanging on their pegs. The grub-chewed skull of Francis Tresham dangles next to the wax imprint of John Clare, moon-browed and lantern-jawed. A cast of Nelly Shaw, the lips drawn back across her teeth in burning agony, bumps up against the papier mâché cheek of Alfie Rouse, an unintended kiss.
On stage, although the set remains the same, the scenery is somewhat modified. Some of the buildings on the painted nineteen-thirties backdrop have been whited out and new ones added; Caligari hulks against the slate November sky. It’s 1995. The lights go down. The empty rows wait for the final monologue.
Pull back now from the screen, the text, the cursor and its mesmerizing trancebeat pulse. Become aware of sore eyes, overflowing desk. The hollow ashtray fashioned like a yawning frog, a gross cascade of cigarette end and sour pumice spilling from its china throat. The index finger of the right hand, poised above the keys. The author types the words ‘the author types the words’.
Stand, and feel the energy that crowds the room, a current siphoned back through time from all those future readings, all those other people and the varying degrees of their absorption, their awareness half-submerged within the text and half-detached from moment, from continuum, and therefore reachable. Draw in a massive breath of it, its scorch and crackle. Everything feels right and powerful. Everything is happening correctly.
All around, the reference books relating to the town are heaped up into towers; become a small-scale reproduction of the town itself. There’s <em>Witchcraft in Northamptonshire — Six rare and curious tracts dating from 1612</em>, and the selected poems of John Clare. The Coritani, the crusaders, the compendiums of murder and the lives of saints in a topography of history made solid, cliffs of word some forty centuries deep that must be navigated to attain the door, the stairs beyond, uncarpeted and thunderous. Move down them like an over-medicated avalanche towards the living room; the television and the couch.
History is a heat, oppressive and exhausting. Fall rather than sit upon the at-risk heirloom sofa and attempt to locate the remote control by touch alone, groping among the permafrost of magazine and empty teacup that conceals the carpet, for its own good. It would be much simpler just to look, admittedly, but more depressing. Fingers close on the device, a fruit and nut bar as imagined by a silicone-based life-form, and locate the necessary stud. A vague southerly flail ignites the news on Channel Four. History is a heat. Zeinab Badawi nightly holds aloft the blackened crucible for our inspection.
Balkan ceasefire conference chopped up into seven-second mouthfuls by a motherly and helpful camera, to reduce the risk of choking. Both sides’ representatives appear embarrassed, blanching at the flashbulbs. Playground brawlers called out to the front, made to apologize and shake hands with an after-school resentment already apparent in the eyes and voice. Let’s not have any more talk about rape camps or genetic cleansing. Go back to your desks.
Forthcoming visits to the North of Ireland by President Clinton are expected to focus attention on a peace process that’s rapidly becoming an embalming process. Clinton, Kennedyesque if one measures things in hair and blowjobs, has announced that he won’t come to Ireland just to switch on Christmas lights, although if Congress has the White House phones cut off by then and the electric disconnected, he may think again. Two families of Irish Clintons, one from each side of the border, are contending for the honour of the presidential issue sprayed against their family tree, but hopefully it won’t erupt into sectarian violence.
An analysis of last night’s budget, which concludes the likeliest effect is that the wealthiest ten per cent will now be better off, the poorest better off dead. The Nigerian government has lynched Ken Saro Wiwa for protesting against the environmental sodomy inflicted on a homeland traumatized by petrochemical adventurism; Shell-shocked. Momentary whiteness under the lagoons of Mururoa.
Old editions of the local <em>Mercury & Herald</em> from the sixteen-hundreds list Northamptonshire’s then recent deaths from causes long since rendered utterly unfathomable: Rising Lights, the Purples. One man listed here as ‘Planet Struck’. Sat slack-jawed in the cathode aura of this photogenic Armageddon, the phrase seems overdue for a revival. The relentless onslaught of this stupefying imagery that pounds our inner landscapes flat, a carpet-bombing of the mind. The language of the world, that overwhelms us. Nothing is conveyed save for an underlying sense of landscape at its most unstable, pliable as sweaty gelignite. History is a heat, a slow fire with the planet just now coming to the boil, our culture passing from a fluid to a vaporous state amid the violent and chaotic seethings of the phase transition. Here, in the rising steam, a process moves towards its point of crisis, interrupted only by a break for the commercials.
Startlingly, amidst the beautifully modulated list of global thrills, spills and extinctions, comes a near-unprecedented mention of Northampton: council tenants in the Pembroke Road whose gardens back on to the railway line attempt to call attention to a new leukaemia cluster. You can hear the spectral squeal and mutter of the night freight on the other side of town when there’s a west wind. Brother Mike, who’s prettier, sometimes funnier, but frankly nowhere near as charismatic, lives just off the Pembroke Road with his wife Carol and their kids. They want to move, but showing their prospective buyers round the premises in Haz-Chem suits and helmets isn’t going to make things any easier.
To be quite fair, the whole spread of estates from Spencer to King’s Heath has had a post-nuclear appearance since the sixties. Just a decade earlier, King’s Heath had won awards for its design, seen as the perfect model for a future England which, unluckily, it proved to be. By 1970 even the sweetshop had steel shutters, and neglected dogs banded together into terrifying medieval hunting packs. The local nightspot seemed to have been decorated by a schizophrenic window-dresser who’d last visited the cinema for <em>Barbarella</em>, or perhaps <em>Repulsion</em>, with gaunt female mannequins emerging anorexic and concussed from wall and pillar into an emetic light show. King’s Heath youth struck matches on the plaster nipples, passing round ten Sovereign, and drank themselves into amnesia or animosity beneath the swirling biriani-coloured radiance of a faulty gel-wheel, later for the most part either knocked or banged up in accordance with their gender. The town shrugs, in timeworn response to its own physical decline: it’s not as if it was expecting something better.
Switch the television off, momentarily defeated. Partly concealed by three weeks of unread <em>New Scientist</em> and empty biscuit wrappings, is a draft of the preceding chapter. Still not sure whether the shop in Bridge Street that offered a job to Lily Rouse was a confectioner’s or not, but in the end decide to let it stand in deference to the processes of fiction rather than the less substantial processes of history. Lily remains between the sugar-cataracted jars; proclaims her husband’s innocence with wince-inducing loyalty while weighing out the Rainbow Drops. They drive him out to Bedford Prison, Bunyan’s second home, and he goes to the gallows, ultimate suspender, with her name upon his lips, no minor feat of memory when one considers all the wives and co-parents he might have thought to mention. What’s it all about, Alfie?
Bunyan: first to chart the land of spirit and imagination lying under middle England, mapping actual journeys undertaken in the solid realm on to his allegorical terrain. Likewise, it seems that the intention of his work was to awake the apprehension of a visionary landscape from beneath the subjugated streets and fields; fire an incendiary dream to make the dull and heavy matter of the shires and townships burn with new significance, and be transformed. September 1681 saw a new charter brought down by the Earl of Peterborough in Northampton, with these scenes reprised in Bunyan’s <em>Holy War</em> the following year, but relocated to the allegoric town of Mansoul. In this alias, the sense of mythic weight and moment wielded by the place and its inhabitants is underscored, the town’s huge and invisible centrality confirmed.
One great advantage that <em>The Pilgrim’s Progress</em> as a narrative enjoys over the current work is in its structure, with the pilgrimage progressing to a necessary ending in redemption. Here, however, there is no such tidy resolution within reach. The territory is the same, but here we have no single pilgrim save perhaps the author, or the reader, and only uncertain progress. While redemption’s not out of the question, it’s an outside chance at best. It’s hardly been a major theme thus far.
This final chapter is the thing. Committed to a present-day first-person narrative, there seems no other option save a personal appearance, which in turn demands a strictly documentary approach: it wouldn’t do to simply make things up. This is a fiction, not a lie.
Of course, that tends to place the burden of responsibility for finishing the novel on the town itself. If all its themes, motifs and speculations are to be resolved, then they will be resolved in actual brick and flesh. Trust in the fictive process, in the occult interweaving of text and event must be unwavering and absolute. This is the magic place, the mad place at the spark gap between word and world. All of the subtle energies pass through here on their journey into form. If properly directed, they’ll provide the closures that the narrative demands: the terrible black dogs shall come. There shall be fires, and severed heads, and angel language. An unlikely harmony of incident and artifice is called for, that may take some tracking down. There’s nothing for it but to take a walk.
Outside, the rain falls hard upon Phipps’ Fire Escape, a constant amber static through the Lucozade glow of the sodium lamps. This whole estate was raised by brewer and industrialist Pickering Phipps around the turn of the century as a last-ditch attempt at spiritual salvation. Long odds, from the look of things.
He placed a foundry up on Hunsbury Hill to overlook the town and gouged away at the remains of the adjacent Iron Age settlement in search of ore to build the railway. Most of what he paid his labourers would be returned to him across the bar-tops of his taverns on the Friday night he doled it out. Northampton had a lot of pubs back then. You could start at the top of Bridge Street and with only half a pint of bitter at each stop along the way never reach the Plough Hotel down at the bottom end, by then receded to Infinity.
Phipps reasoned that his drinking dens might be perceived as having set temptation on the straight path of the righteous and that taking a dim view of all this, the Almighty would be certain to condemn him to the flames. His only chance, the way he saw it, was to curry the Creator’s favour by constructing an estate that had four churches but no public houses. By slipping this modest bribe to God, seen as Northampton Borough representative writ large, the brewer thought to thus avoid a furnace deemed more hideous than that which he’d erected up on Hunsbury Hill. Though designated ‘Phippsville’ in official documents, native consensus soon re-christened it Phipps’ Fire Escape. Home of ten years now, at one house or other.
There seems to be a local predilection for expressing contours of the spirit world in terms of stone and mortar, matter in its densest, most enduring form. Phipps builds a dry and austere maze, its terraced streets become the rungs of his ascent to Paradise. Simon de Senlis builds his round church as a Templar glyph to mark the martyrdom and resurrection. Thomas Tresham codes the outlawed Holy Trinity into his lunatic three-sided lodge. These testaments of brick are weighty paragraphs writ on the world itself and therefore only legible to God. The rest of us who do not build express our secret arcane souls in scripts more fleeting, more immediate to our human instant: wasting spells or salesman’s patter. The betraying letter. Prose, or violence.
Squinting through the dark and drizzle, turn from Cedar Road to Collingwood, the downpour now a steady sizzle of dull platinum on the uneven paving slabs. Pass by the small, uncertain row of shops with a sub-post office so often blagged that it’s established a cult following among the audience of <em>Crimewatch</em>, most of whom are criminals who tune in for industry news and gossip. Walking on, past alley mouths that open on the long and lightless gullets of back-entries, puddles rippling in the sumps and sinkages of century-old cobble, iridescent moss accrued between the blunt grey stones. Rapes here, and strangled schoolboys, yet these miserable and poignant corridors don’t even get a walk on in the local A-Z. Our real, most trenchant streetplans are mapped solely in the memory and the imagination.
A right turn, into Abington Avenue, the cold slap of its crosswind and the driven rain. Across the street stands the United Reform Church, one of the four pillars upon which rests Phipps’ blind swing at redemption. Francis Crick came here to Sunday school back in the 1920s, evidently so impressed by Bible stories of a seven-day Creation that he went on to discover DNA. The dual helical flow of human interchange spirals around the recently refurbished building: brawls at closing time, and copulations. Love and birth and murder in their normal vortex.
Kettering Road, and the backwater junk emporiums that have collected in the tributaries of the town, an algae of grandfather clock and gas-mask. The abandoned Laser-Hunter-Killer Palace with the soaped up windows where the future closed down early for lack of local enthusiasm. Further down, stranded amidst the traffic flow of Abington Square on the brink of the town centre, stands Charles Bradlaugh’s statue, finger raised and resolutely pointing west towards the fields beyond the urban sprawl, assisting Sunday shoppers who’ve forgotten how to get to Toy Us.
Charles Bradlaugh was Northampton’s first Labour MP and the first atheist allowed to enter parliament, though not without debate. The night that his admission to the Commons was decided saw a demonstration in the Market Square with riot policemen sent in to administer the smack of a firm government. No stranger to controversy, he did time with Theosophist and Match-Girl agitator Annie Besant for the distribution of an ‘obscene publication’, being contraceptive information of a kind thought generally unsuitable for wives or servants. Amongst local politicians he has little competition save perhaps for Spencer Perceval, British Prime Minister unique for being, firstly, from Northamptonshire, and, secondly, assassinated. Bradlaugh stands upon the grassy knoll and points accusingly at Abington Street, at the shopping precincts, at the fag-end of the twentieth century.
Abington Street, pedestrianized some years ago, has flower baskets dangling from the gibbets of the reproduction Dickens-effect streetlamps, with a creeping sub-Docklands aesthetic gradually becoming evident in its façades. It’s as if when Democracy and Revolution came at last to Trumpton, the corrupt former regime of Mayor and Council were airlifted out with CIA assistance and resettled here, to brutally impose the values of their Toytown junta on this formerly alluring thoroughfare.
Some fifty years ago this was the Bunny Run, the sexual chakra of the town, where giggling factory girls would squeal and totter through a well-intentioned gauntlet of the neighbourhood testosterone. Now, in 1995, the cheerful lust has curdled into harm and frequent bruisings, violence manifested in the architecture of the street itself, inevitably percolating down to find its outlet on a human scale. The sumptuous and majestic New Theatre was demolished first in 1959. Faint echoes of George Robey, Gracie Fields and Anna Neagle pining from the sorry rubble. Next went Notre Dame, a red-brick convent school, Gothic receptacle for ninety years of schoolboy longing, and then finally the yellowed art deco arcade of the Co-Operative Society: a beautiful, faintly Egyptian relic with a central avenue sloping down as if designed to roll the final stone that would wall up alive those slaves caught browsing in the Homecare Centre.
Here, unmasked, a process that distinguishes this place as incarnated in industrial times. The only constant features in the local-interest photograph collections are the mounds of bricks; the cranes against the sky. A peckish Saturn fresh run out of young, the town devours itself. Everything grand we had, we tore to bits. Our castles, our emporiums, our witches and our glorious poets. Smash it up, set fire to it and stick it in the fucking madhouse. Jesus Christ.
At the street’s lower end a ghostly and deserted Market Square rises upon the right, while All Saint’s elderly patrician bulk looms underlit upon the left. A rank of Hackney cabs shelters against the church’s flank, hunched in the rain and glistening, like crows. The shop-fronts opposite on Mercer’s Row invite another reading of the town: only the ground floors have been modernized, as if the present moment were a heat-haze of tumultuous event that ended fifteen feet above street level, with the higher storeys in the lease of earlier centuries. Go upstairs at the butcher’s, Sergeants, and the Geisha Café would be open still, with spectral waitresses gliding between the murmuring, empty tables bearing sandwiches, triangular and numinous. Bram Stoker sharing tea for two with Errol Flynn between the Repertory Theatre matinées.
Splash on, rounding the front of All Saint’s with its sheltering portico. A plaque here to the memory of John Bailles, a button-maker of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the county’s best attempt to date at a robust, no-nonsense immortality. Near six score years and ten: a long time to spend making buttons. Only zips and Velcro killed him.
The church stares with blank Anglican disdain down Gold Street’s narrow fissure; stone-faced Protestant resentment is directed at any Semitic shades remaining in this former haunt of money-lenders. In the thirteenth century it was from here that local Jews were taken out and stoned to death, accused of sacrificing Christian babies in the course of arcane, cabbalistic rites. This was among the earliest incidents of violent European anti-Semitism that were recognizable as such, the town as eager and precocious in its pogroms as it was reluctant to stop burning witches.
During World War II a bomber crashed up at the street’s top end, a great tin angel with a sucking chest wound fallen from the Final Judgement. It was drawn down inexorably by tractor beams of sympathetic magic emanating from the subterranean speakeasy that’s under Adam’s Bakery behind the church, a marvellous forgotten space designed to reproduce the shape and seating of a buried aeroplane. Imagined engine-drone above the cold flint jetstreams, the clay strato-cumulus, like calling unto like, dragging the bomber overhead into a helpless and enraptured nosedive. One lone cyclist with a broken arm after the impact knocked him from his saddle, otherwise no casualties. These streets again show their surprising and capricious mercy. One by one the townsfolk file out through the Welsh House from the burning Market Square. The cyclist rises dazed and injured from the wreckage and stares dumbstruck at Jane Russell, pouting, painted on the ruined fuselage.
From Gold Street over the dual carriageway of Horsemarket, more horse-power stampeding there now than ever, where a left turn would lead down towards the Fritz Lang horror of the Carlsberg Brewery. It was in the Copenhagen branch of this establishment that physicist Niels Bohr first formulated his axiom that all our observations of the universe can only be seen, in the last analysis, as observations of ourselves and our own processes. A haunting notion, hard to write off as the product of one Special Brew too many, and as true concerning observations of a town as when relating to the cosmos, or the hidden quanta.
Cross Horsemarket into Marefair with the unforgiving mausoleum of the Barclaycard credit control headquarters on our right. Poker-faced, its gaze concealed behind opaque black windows, it gives nothing away. Northampton, once the centre of the boot and shoe trade, that grew fat on war and saw John Clare’s long desperate hike as one more pair sold, is now the seat of Barclaycard and Carlsberg, perfect icons of the Thatcher years reflecting our new export lines: the lager lout, the credit casualty. Here we go, here we go. Here we go.
Across the street are council offices where Cromwell is reputed to have slept and dreamed the night in 1645 before he rode to Naseby and midwifed the gory breach birth of our current parliamentary democracy, the adult form still clearly warped and traumatized by this unspeakable nativity. They marched the Royalist prisoners out to Ecton afterwards and herded them into a paddock by the Globe Inn for the night before the march to London, trial, imprisonment or execution. Many of the wounded died there in the field behind the Inn. A century later William Hogarth, a recurring patron, offered to design and paint a new sign for the Globe, and changed its name to the World’s End with a depiction of the planet bursting into flames. The pub signs of the county are a secret Tarot deck, with this card the most ominous, the local theme of fire asserted in its final, terrifying aspect.
Walking on, St Peter’s church stands floodlit, golden in the last few shakes of rain, a Saxon edifice rebuilt after the Norman conquest. A funeral service was held here for Uncle Chick, a wide boy in more ways than one: black marketeer of the family, he lost a leg in later life but not his splendidly unpleasant sense of humour, nor the knowing leer of a supernal toad with diamonds in his brow. The vicar eulogized him as a decent, law-abiding man, respectable in every way. Dad and Aunt Lou kept looking at each other in bewilderment throughout the service, having no idea who he was on about.
Here too the half-wit’s vision and the beggar woman, crippled by the gate. The bones of Ragener, unearthed in an unearthly light. The brother Saints, Ragener and Edmund; their remote November graves and separate miracles.
When they found Edmund’s severed head it was protected by a fierce black dog that would not let them near. The frilled pink gums, curled back across pale yellow teeth; the murdered saint with fly-specked gaze, a mouthful of dead leaves, his hair, alive with ants: these are the icons of a secret local heraldry, the cryptic suits that mark Northampton’s deck: Flames, Churches, Heads, and Dogs.
Down Black Lion Hill, still on the path suggested by Charles Bradlaugh’s finger, to the crossroads and the bridge beyond, the ancient heart of the community, where everything began. The Shagfoals, as described by local folklore, are believed to favour crossroads or a river-bridge, sites where the fabric is stretched thinnest between our world and the hidden place beneath. The town, of course, has crystallized around these very features; and so gets no more than it deserves.
St Peter’s Way curves south from here, and to the north extends St Andrew’s Road, childhood address and western boundary of the Boroughs, this town’s oldest, strangest quarter, sprung up where the neolithic track of the Jurassic Way that stretched from Glastonbury to Lincoln crossed the River Nene. Simon de Senlis’ castle stood here once beside the bridge, where Becket came to trial and was condemned, the castle itself suffering a similar fate not long after. Now Castle Station stands here, with the relocated postern gate a sole remaining fragment of the former structure like a dead man’s ear saved by his murderer as a memento.
On the corner sits the Railway Club, this evening’s destination. Since Mum’s death four months ago it has become the venue for a weekly meeting with the brother; point of contact now that the maternal Sunday dinner table is no more. Beyond the double airlock doors that grant admission from the street there is a single large, low-ceilinged hall that’s lit as though for neuro-surgery. A low stage at the far end where sometimes the bingo caller sits, charged with the arcane glamour and authority of his profession, audience hanging breathless on each syllable as on the utterance of a divine, or numerologist.
Other than children, it’s unusual to discover anybody here that’s under fifty. The collective ambience is overcast, abruptly lit by static discharge from a kippered laugh. This atmosphere is stable, soothing and familiar. These are people who have always been here, by the vanished castle, by the bridge. The words have changed but not the voice, nor yet the greater part of their complaint.
The brother’s here already, at the usual table with his son Jake, six years old, already either self-possessed or just possessed. The drinks are ordered and the conversation, easy as old shoes, turns to the week’s events. Mike, after five years, has discovered where Dad’s ashes ended up; where Mum’s will follow. Not that nobody’s been looking during all that time, of course. Simply that no one at the crematorium appeared to have the first idea of how to find Rose Garden B; had recently declared albeit wrongly that Rose Garden B did not exist. This had given rise to a brief flurry of unsettling suspicions: Soylent Green is people. Luckily, the matter was resolved and the parental plaque discovered quite by chance among the lanes of roses, ranks of men and women wondrously transformed to petal, scent and thorn.
Having concluded his account the brother sips, wiping antipodean surf from upper lip before he speaks again. ‘So what have you been doing?’
‘Just the book.’
‘That’s the Northampton book?’
Nod of assent, followed by a cursory description of the work, before professional imperatives assert themselves and the inevitable panning for material begins; the strip mining of every conversation for a word, a stolen fact or phrase. Mike is subjected to a wearying rag-picker’s litany: how old, now, is the Railway Club? Who built it? Any anecdotes? Any old murders, old celebrities, old iron? One eye on his eldest son, across the club’s far side and busy organizing other children into cadres of Power Ranger-Jugend, he considers.
‘Uncle Chick once had a crate of ale away from out the keg room where it opens on to Andrew’s Road. Dragged it along St Peter’s Way to Nan’s house up in Green Street. This was Christmas night. Snow everywhere. If he’d not been so pissed he would have thought. The coppers only had to follow back the trail to his front door. That was the only time they ever had the law down Green Street over Chick. He was more careful after that.’
The reference to Green Street strums a tripwire of association. Home of the paternal grandmother, the Nan, her house that smelled of damp and human age and withered apples. Mum’s side started out there, too, before the council shifted them to Andrew’s Road. The green sloped down behind St Peter’s church towards the bounding terrace at the bottom, a barricade against the industry and asphalt that encroached beyond. The houses are all gone now. Nothing stands between the dwindling, naked patch of grass and the encroaching office blocks that quietly and politely shuffle ever closer, buzzards on their very best behaviour.
Thirty years ago, Jeremy Seabrook wrote his influential work on poverty in Britain, called <em>The Unprivileged</em>, and focused sensibly on nothing more than an articulation of what Green Street was and what it meant: that aggregate of lives and incidents and want. Green Street was made the emblem of a disenfranchised class; of an impassioned plea that street and people both should be restored. The answer, demolition in both instances.
It would be near impossible even to formulate that plea today, the emblems and the archetypes long since worn down to cliché and self-parody. How shall we speak, straight-faced, about the local whore who turned a trick so Nan could buy a jar of Marmite for the kids? Maudlin Northampton shite, all tarts with hearts and we-were-so-poor-rickets-was-a-luxury. And yet a girl whose name has not survived would take a stranger up her in a back yard for her neighbour’s children, and how is it we no longer have a language to contain such things?
Back in the Railway Club, the conversation settles in a holding pattern orbiting the Jupiterian mass of Uncle Chick, a gravity that lack of corporate substance has not diminished. Mike recalls the first drink that he had with Chick after the leg was off. They’d been with Dad and Uncle Gord up to the Silver Cornet, stopping on the way back for a Sunday paper at the newsagent’s. Mike stayed there in the car with Chick, uncomfortably wondering how to broach the subject of his uncle’s missing leg, the stump propped up beside the gear-stick.
While they waited there in silence, they became aware of a lone figure that approached them with a painful slowness from the street’s far end, resolving as it neared into a wretched, downcast man afflicted both by a club foot and by a prominent hunched back. Chick watched the man limp past, eyes narrowed in the underdone puff-pastry of their sockets, finally dispensing with his silence to address the brother: ‘’Ere, Mick. Goo an’ ask that cunt there if ‘e wants a fight.’
Laugh. Get another round in. In the end the talk makes a complete lap of the circuit and ploughs back into the starting post.
‘So what’s this book about, then?’
It’s about the vital message that the stiff lips of decapitated men still shape; the testament of black and spectral dogs written in piss across our bad dreams. It’s about raising the dead to tell us what they know. It is a bridge, a crossing-point, a worn spot in the curtain between our world and the underworld, between the mortar and the myth, fact and fiction, a threadbare gauze no thicker than a page. It’s about the powerful glossolalia of witches and their magical revision of the texts we live in. None of this is speakable.
Instead, deliberate and gecko-eyed evasion: ‘Well, it’s difficult to say until it’s finished.’
Sup up. Jake stands grave and still while helped on with his winter coat, the robing of a midget cardinal. Outside, walking towards the station forecourt for a cab, he pauses by the repositioned postern gate, insists the placard there is read aloud. According to his dad, he shows worryingly early signs of a familial obsession with location and its antecedents. Town as a hereditary virus. Cancelled streets and ancient courtyards have become implicit in the blood.
A cab ride down St Andrew’s Road to the girlfriend’s. The Boroughs rise from here up to the Mayorhold, a triangular enclosure where the locals once held a yearly mock election and appointed some local drunk or Tom-of-Bedlam as the neighbourhood’s own mayor, an annual gesture of contempt directed at a civic process which excluded them. The Mayorhold now a stark and ugly traffic junction; the mayoral position has been vacant for some years, its tin-lid chain of office long since lost, forgotten. Only find it, and an older, truer town aflame with meaning would rise from these embers, from these lame parades.
Dropped off in Semilong, a kind of index to the Boroughs, compiled later. Rushed farewells to Mike and Jake before the cab continues with them to King’s Heath. The hill of Baker Street runs down towards the intermittent buzz of Andrew’s Road, to Paddy’s Meadow and the Nene, the freight yards ranged beyond. The meadow takes its name from Paddy Moore, ex-Army Irish lifeguard at the bathing place there in the slow faun river. Children, watersnakes and sometimes otters from upstream, he overlooked them all. Gave swimming lessons to crowds of naked boys, who were no doubt encouraged by the swagger-stick kept tucked beneath his arm and his occasional displays of corporal violence to the last chap out of the water. When they closed the baths and made him sweep the lanes instead it broke his heart and killed him. These enclosures are a patiently accreted coral of such days and lives.
Over the road down at the bottom of the street, is the spot where a remote acquaintance bled to death last year on someone’s doorstep, following a stabbing. Fiery Fred, who knew the victim better, was down here doing a loft conversion for the girlfriend and got pulled in by the Murder Squad, all anxious understudies for the next Lynda LaPlante production. Asked him if he was ‘The Amsterdam Connection’. Double Dutch to him: he’d just been somewhere near the killing ground the day it happened. Live here for long enough, you’ll end up round the corner from atrocity.
Here, at the furthest point inland, the navel of the nation, all the bad blood gathers, with eruptions not infrequent and more violent crime per capita than cities of far greater notoriety. These bloody sunspots of activity seem to be motivated only by the fluctuations of the town’s magnetic field: a sexual tourist fresh from Milton Keynes, his throat cut by a pair of rentboys. They drove him round for hours on the pretext of looking for a hospital while his identity leaked out on to the rear upholstery. The motive, robbery, according to the courts: a Ronson lighter, three pounds forty pence. A child found mutilated, burned and partly eaten in a garage, fifteen years ago. A retarded boy kept in a back shed, treated like a dog by his embarrassed mother till he killed her with a breadknife.
Darkness concealed behind net curtains. Madness. Harm. On even the most casual inspection of Northampton’s canvas, these hues dominate. Wonder and melancholy and a mordant humour are present, undeniably, but it is the blood that captures the attention. Why here? Why so much? Is there some primal episode lost in the county’s prehistoric past, a template for all such events to follow? ‘Murder Mecca of the Midlands’, Dave J calls it, Godfather of Goth living up by the town’s north gate among the heads of traitors and the ashes of burned women.
Meanwhile, back in Baker Street, the girlfriend is at home. Melinda Gebbie, underground cartoonist late of Sausalito, California; former bondage model recently turned quarkweight boxer. Like so many others, sucked in by this urban black hole, utterly invisible to television, only made apparent as an absence by the way the light of media bends around it; by the devastation out at its perimeter. She strayed too close to this event horizon, where the lines of the A45 converge, and was absorbed. Though her perception of the world remains frenetic, to observers situated at a hypothetical location outside town, she would appear to be unmoving, frozen for all time upon the brink of this devouring singularity. Nothing gets out of here that is not pulled back in. The sheer escape velocity required is near impossible, a contravention of the special laws of relativity to which this place is subject.
It is a gravity to which Americans seem more than usually prone, perhaps responding to the atavistic tug of this, their birthmud. Washington and Franklin’s families were émigrés from Sulgrave and from the world’s end of Ecton, possibly escaping from the aftermath of Civil War. The Sulgrave village crest of bar and mullet, stripe and star, is resurrected in the banner of the upstart colonies. This link provokes the ominous mirage of vast glass-sided skyscrapers rising above the sleeping hamlets, yellow taxis jostling for position in the cobbled lanes. This landscape is the lost placenta of America, discarded but still dark and slick with nutrients. Attracted by ancestral spoor, the county’s prodigals are called back in, leaping upstream through the Atlantic billows to their spawning ground.
After some moments shivering on the doorsteps of Semilong, the knock is answered. Asked in, to a Fauvist pocket universe of colour, art materials, an insane proliferation of peculiar souvenirs, ornaments and a spectromatic range of pencils that defies imagination, some are only visible to dogs or bees. Upstairs, a pornographic tableau of transsexual Action Men and wayward Barbies, surgically augmented by imaginative use of Fymo. Brother Mike called round here once to water plants; was badly startled by a lifesize cardboard cut-out figurine of Mrs Doubtfire and a seemingly stuffed dog in the front bedroom; hasn’t been back since.
Sit, a hallucinating Gulliver among the Lilliputian robots, trolls and mutants. Feel immediately relaxed; at home. Drink tea and fill her living room with smoke. Say hateful, frightening things to her pet cat when she’s not in the room. Forget the novel for a moment, though no more than that.
She tells me she’s been having dreams of dogs: a bald, blind Shagfoal puppy taken to her bed in one; another with the huge skull of a spectral dog unearthed, identifiable by gaping, monstrous sockets. In the mind they take their exercise and need no wider yard to mark out with their scent. Although subjected to endless and tedious recountings of each work in progress, this is all Melinda dreams of, the giant black hounds that only bark in dream and manifest about the margins of this fiction, portents yet to be resolved.
Stay for an hour or two then cab back home. Climb up the ladder to the attic bedroom, ocean green rag-veined with gold. There is an altar set into the glazed brick recess of the chimney, crammed with statuettes of toads and foreign deities; an image of the beautiful late Roman snake god that is currently adored. The reek of myrrh. A greenish light infects the serried spines of books on Shamanism and Qabalah, Spare and Crowley, Dr Dee and the Enochian Host, keys to the crucial world of the Unreal. Five years ago, this narrative began in tales of antlered local witchmen, with no intimation of the personal involvement in that occupation yet to come. The text, predictably, melts into the event. The neolithic boy, his mother lately dead. The crematorium and its elusive rose-yards all within a half-mile of the Bronze Age burning-fields. Wake with a loose tooth fallen out and resting on the tongue.
Although at times unnerving, this was always the intention, this erasing of a line dividing the incontrovertible from the invented. History, unendingly revised and reinterpreted, is seen upon examination as merely a different class of fiction; becomes hazardous if viewed as having any innate truth beyond this. Still, it is a fiction that we must inhabit. Lacking any territory that is not subjective, we can only live upon the map. All that remains in question is whose map we choose, whether we live within the world’s insistent texts or else replace them with a stronger language of our own.
The task is not unthinkable. There are those weak points on the borderlines of fact and fabrication, crossings where the veil between what is and what is not rends easily. Go to the crossroads, and draw up the necessary lines. Make evocations and recite barbaric names; the Gorgo and the Mormo. Call the dogs, the spirit animals, and light imaginary fires. Walk through the walls into the landscape of the words, become one more first-person character within the narrative’s bizarre procession. Make the real a story and the story real, the portrait struggling to devour its sitter.
Obviously, this is a course of action not without its dangers, this attempted wedding of the language and the life; this ju-ju shit. Always the risk of a surprise twist ending with the ticket to St Andrew’s Mental Hospital; a painful, slow decline in company with the forsaken shadow of John Clare.
The Clare association hits a nerve. There is a public house in town, a former centre for the area’s artists, its bohemians, its chemically bewildered, recently remodelled and refurbished as the Wig & Pen in hope of pulling in a passing trade of briefs and magistrates that somehow never quite materialized. The owner of the bar commissioned a Sistine-type ceiling decoration with selected local figures interposed between the barristers and judges. The resultant work depicts the current author in an upper corner, deep in conversation with John Clare. What advice is he offering? ‘Don’t go too heavy on the working class thing’ possibly? More probably it’s ‘Find another job.’
The bed is comfortable and the attic room serene, another Fiery Fred conversion. Big John Weston did the pointing on the brickwork, overcome with hubris to the point of signing his creation with a chisel in the bottom right, above the skirting board. Weston, a former junky and, more recently, a former biped, is a hazardous anomaly put on this planet only to fuck up the fossil record: epileptic roofer; one-time skylight burglar. They told him it would end in tears. He broke both legs when he went through a warehouse ceiling and the door downstairs was unlocked all the time. On the occasion when he dived head-first from a third-storey roof while in a seizure he was lucky and his skull was there to break the fall.
The bad one was the leg, that first time. Veins collapse, shrinking before the needle, and the circulation fails. The limb ballooned into an agonizing comedy inflatable, drew substance from the body as it did so until Weston was a giant angel-skeleton trying to fight its way out of a brown paper bag. The visits to the hospital were harrowing. His tolerance to opiates meant that it was impossible to find a dosage strong enough to touch the pain that would not also kill him outright. Somehow he survived with a full complement of limbs intact and took the cure. Stayed clean a month or two, then offered to safeguard a pharmaceutics cabinet belonging to a friend. The first his wife Rene knew about his tumble from the wagon was when he went on the nod there at the dinner table, face down, bubbles rising through the mash. Said he’d been feeling a bit tired just lately.
When his circulation failed again early this year they couldn’t save the leg. He’s been through detox and rehab again since then, kicking while there’s still something left to kick with, and the signs look promising. He hopes one day to surf the Internet. Hang five.
The curious proliferation of both injured and completely missing legs within the current text emerged unbidden, much like the preoccupation with November, from the histories themselves. The crippled nun, Alfgiva, and the lame crusader, Simon; Clare’s bad foot on the trek from Essex and the burned-through leg outside Alf Rouse’s car. After a while, one notices the wide array of signs and murals in this boot-and-shoe town that depict a leg or foot outside the context of the body. We may read these lost or damaged limbs as warning hieroglyphics on the place’s parchment, coded tramp-marks denoting the difficulties and dangers of the trail.
The severed heads are harder to resolve; a starker, more insistent motif and reiterated with a greater frequency. The minted head of Diocletian or the more substantial one of Mary Tudor. Francis Tresham, Captain Pouch, and the mysterious head revered by the Knights Templar. Ragener, and Edmund with a black and snarling Cerberus to carry him by one ear to the underworld. Heads are the soft and staring eggs from which the fledgling skull hatches. They are the bloody emblems of an information, final and chthonic, that exacts a price. When Odin asked for wisdom from the head of Mimir, he paid with an eye: this knowledge carries with it a curtailment of perception, or at least a narrowing. The depth-vision is forfeit.
Time passes, jumpy interrupted continuity in life and manuscript. The eldest, shortest daughter comes down on the train from Liverpool for Christmas, in a state of mixed intoxication by the time she reaches Castle Station. Ringpulls now in eyebrow, ears, nose, lower lip, as if her large shaved head were full of hidden pockets. Leah. Everybody thought it was a lovely name. Means ‘cow’ in Hebrew. In a day or so her taller, younger sister Amber will be following, a fourteen-year-old, fifty-foot-tall Goth whose biggest influences are Morticia Adams and the World Trade Center. Walked out from her school six months ago and stared down various education/welfare representatives until they buckled to her hideous will and let her go to night class. Such a privilege, this company of gorgeous and alarming women.
Caught up in the seance-trance of this last chapter and in search of a denouement, a way out, a fire escape, it seems a final expedition is inevitable, necessary. Fiery Fred is roped in as chauffeur; Leah in tow. Depart late afternoon for Hunsbury Hill with snow upon the ground, in Fred’s most recent surge of optimism. Graduated from a halal school of motoring, all of his previous cars he butchered personally, by the book. Tattooed and ear-ringed, with eyes like Broadmoor buttons beneath the panto-demon ginger brow, he is a horrid dream invented by the middle class to terrify their children. Laugh like Pig Bodine, out of <em>Gravity’s Rainbow</em>: Hyeugh-hyeugh-hyeugh. He has the courage and the fines of his convictions, both outstanding.
Fred was handling the door the night that Iain Sinclair and his mesmerizing golem Brian Catling did their reading at the round church of the Holy Sepulchre. Asking for trouble, really, the deliberate conjunction of two charged, shamanic presences with this still-unexploded site. Halfway through Catling’s reading of <em>The Stumbling Block</em> there came an interruption, an outburst from a sometimes homicidal medicine-head of local notoriety. Poetry hooligan. Evicted swiftly, he was led off to a nearby bar by Fred and offered a placating drink. Next, explosion. Broken glass. A foam-jawed lunge across the table at Fred’s jugular. Two teeth knocked out, blood everywhere. Thrown from the bar-room in the wake of his attacker, to the street outside, Fred found himself staring into the quivering muzzle of a gun and hoping that he wouldn’t die there, in between the Labour Exchange and the Inland Revenue, a victim of that local speciality, the stroll-by shooting. Somehow extricated himself. Slept downstairs with a sword that night, unconsciously sucked into the crusader aura of the church and the event.
These sudden violent surges, tidal movements in Northampton’s undermind, that blossom into gory actuality at the least provocation, hidden forces that exist beneath the surface, underneath the paved veneer of waking thought and rationality. The town is like a mind expressed in concrete, its subconcious buried deep in lower reaches where the fears and dreams accumulate. This underworld is literal, though occult: webs of tunnels lace the earth below the settlement, burrows that wind back to its earliest days. The major churches are believed to be connected in this way, with rumours of a passage running underneath the river to the abbey out at Delapré.
Though glimpsed in living memory, with bricked off entrances in childhood cellars, this pellucid subterranean domain is now consigned to legend, with the council issuing denials that such catacombs exist. Once more, the slippage between fact and folklore: a vital, hidden strata of the county’s psyche is suppressed, refused.
The eagerness of the authorities to edit out this secret subtext from the county’s narrative is suspect, and unduly purposeful: the crypt beneath De Senlis’ round church of the Holy Sepulchre that represents the tomb of Jesus at Gethsemane is known to exist, yet has no entrance and has not been seen since the foundation, centuries ago. When labourers in nearby Church Street broke through their trench wall into a draughty space beyond, it was beyond doubt that they’d chanced on the forgotten crypt. The rector, feverishly excited by this prospect, hurried down to Church Street the next morning to discover that a council work gang had been called out overnight to concrete off the opening.
The undertown is out of bounds. The sacred space has been co-opted by Civil Defence contingencies: the bunkers of nuclear-exempted bureaucrats, the dressing rooms where they will underwrite the Apocalypse. No more may we peel back the flagstones to reveal the cadavers of murdered saints, bones marrowed with appalling light. Cold certainty replaces visionary speculation. Thus displaced, the landscape’s secret soul moves elsewhere, a fallback position that can be successfully defended. The mystery retreats behind its oldest bulwarks; seeks the highest ground.
In the Briar Hill estate just down from Hunsbury Hill neolithic remains were discovered, predating the leavings of the Bronze and Iron Age found further up slope. Fred’s vaguely suspect vehicle crawls through the narrow, winding roads between the housing blocks; avoiding areas where the yellow Neighbourhood Watch stickers are the thickest, he parks in a silent close.
On foot through the estate and up towards the relic Iron Age camp, with Leah striding through the snow ahead, face rattling and chiming, mournful music in the gloom. She talks about a dream she had some weeks ago in which she found her bedroom occupied by a colossal coal-black dog, its horse-sized form slumping across a bed too small for it, wheezing and straining in the throes of labour yet too enervated to give birth. She had to reach inside and pull the monstrous Shagfoal puppies out into the light, at which the dream mutated and she was in hospital, having just given birth herself to these blind horrors and yet filled with a maternal pride and overwhelming love for her repulsive children. She showed them off to visitors, who looked up from the cradle speechless with distress. Cot death. Her newborn blackdog babies all lay stiff and chill. She woke up racked by helpless tears of loss.
The black dogs sniff around the book’s periphery, nose through the nightmares of those closest to the author as the text and its phantasmal hounds alike draw closer to the brink of actuality. Shagfoals are seldom seen these days outside of dream. A solitary sighting in the 1970s: a motorist on the A45 found a massive shadow-dog big as a pony keeping pace with his fast-moving vehicle as it raced through the fields beside the road. Since then, though, not a glimpse. Half-real perhaps, or only solid intermittently, a creature out of Borges’ bestiary that pads through the shifting wastelands at the edge of form, perpetual firelight in its flaring eye.
The Briar Hill houses are a labyrinth in the descending dusk, made unfamiliar by their powdering of snow. At last the huge white circle of the strip-mined camp presents itself, ringed round by ditch and looming ash tree, stark against the failing light. An eerie silence. Nothing stirring in the clustered homes beyond the treeline. Maybe everybody’s gone.
Why did its Iron Age inhabitants abandon this place with such haste that all their brand-new corn querns were left behind? Not fire. Not plague, nor flood, nor the attack of wild beasts. Not the Romans. Something happened here. A settlement of sixty or so people tumbled out of history and into myth, more victims of the worryingly flimsy border-territories separating those two states.
Off in the twilight, men are laughing. Something runs down from the rim of the raised ditch and sits down in the snow, there in the empty campsite.
Peer myopically, then turn to Fred. ‘What’s that?’
He frowns, trying to focus through the half-light, red brows knit. ‘A dog.’
‘What colour?’
Further scrutiny of the still-seated and unmoving form, that neither barks nor growls.
‘Black, by the look of it.’
Two men burst from the cover of the trees, run laughing down the slope to where the shape waits motionless. One of them picks it up and slings the limp, inert weight of the animal across his shoulder, like a sack. The pair then race off chuckling across the frozen site, engulfed by shadows on the far side, gone from view. Was that a dog? If not, how did it run downhill and thirty feet across the field? Some time, thing change and come like other thing. Here, in this gloaming no man’s land dividing dark from day, the chasm yawns between what happened and what never was. The certainties of history fall in, are swallowed whole. Only the anecdote, only the tale remains.
At length, we file out from the site bewildered. Past the trees, a classic view of the recumbent town, seen from the spot at which the earliest line engravings of the place were executed, although with the subject much changed between sittings. Then, church spires ruled a small cluster of low buildings. Now, a field of Pernod-coloured stars, a luckless constellation grounded by inclement weather.
Eastward is the shimmer of the new developments that have doubled Northampton’s size and population over fifteen years. Blackthorn and Maidencastle, named nostalgically after whatever natural feature was paved over to create them. Bellinge. Rectory Farm and Ecton Brook. A former Eastern Bloc now simmering with malice: crack, and guns, and flamed-out cars.
Towards the west, the jaundiced earthglow of Northampton’s epicentre, of the splashpoint from which the great slow rings of brick and mortar rippled out. Everything is visible from here. Lift up both hands before your face to either side and you can hold the town, its lights strung in a cat’s-cradle between the outstretched fingers. Pubs and terraces. Neglected cinemas, adapted and transformed. The traffic moves, a constant toxin, through the over-burdened arteries. The cold and bright heart falters, clots of neon accumulated in the valves, but carries on, the coronary averted for the moment, a postponement only.
Drive home. Settle down to write here on Phipps’ Fire Escape. It’s been five years since the book was started. That was when the Galileo probe set out for Jupiter, the earliest broadcast images just now arriving on our screens: hereto unseen phenomena of gas in thrall to monstrous gravity. Beguiling comet scars. The long-anticipated landscape is at last revealed.
Some chapters back, the notion of a shaman with the town tattooed upon his skin, its boundaries and snaking river-coils become a part of him so that he might in turn become the town, a magic of association with the object bound up in the lines that represent it: lines of dye or lines of text, it makes no difference. The impulse is identical, to bind the site in word or symbol. Dog and fire and world’s end, men and women lamed or headless, monument and mound. This is our lexicon, a lurid alphabet to frame the incantation; conjure the world lost and populace invisible. Reset the fractured skeleton of legend, desperate necromancy raising up the rotted buildings to parade and speak, filled with the voices of the resurrected dead. Our myths are pale and ill. This is a saucer, full of blood, set down to nourish them.
The Dreamtime of each town or city is an essence that precedes the form. The web of joke, remembrance and story is a vital infrastructure on which the solid and material plane is standing. A town of pure idea, erected only in the mind’s eye of the population, yet this is our only true foundation. Let the vision fade or starve or fall into decay and the real bricks and mortar crumble swiftly after, this the cold abiding lesson of these fifteen years; the Iron Virgin’s legacy. Only restore the songline and the fabric of the world shall mend about it.
Unconcerned, the site turns up its collar at the first breeze of the next millennium, attempts to play down its anxieties. The population swells, spills over into cardboard box and piss-streaked doorway. The surveillance cameras on every corner are a hard, objective record of the town’s reality, admissible as evidence. If we are to refute this brutal and reducing continuity, a fiercer, more compelling fiction is required, wrung from the dead who knew this place and left their fingerprints upon its stone.
John Merrick, sitting painting by the lake at Fawsley, monstrous angel-foetus head in silhouette against the silvered waters dazzling beyond. Hawksmoor at Eastern Neston, stooped and squinting lines of ink through his theodolite; aligns the whole thing with Greens Norton church spire although nobody is certain why. Charles Wright, the Boy o’ Bell Barn, moving everyone to tears with recitation at the Mutual Improvement Hall. The thieves, the whores and ditch-damp victims. Witchman, alderman and madman, magistrate and saint. We teem from the demolished slipper factories and arcades to gather in the streets of Faxton, of the villages that simply disappeared. We stand and speak our piece in our own moment, and about us fires of time and change fan out unchecked. Our words ignite upon our lips, no sooner spoken than made ash.
It is the last night of November, with the month a cold expanse of smoke and cordite and celestial signs, behind us now. The time has come to end and seal this working; to complete the story-path with absolute immersion of the teller, a commitment and a sacrifice. The moment for concluding ritual arrives, announcing itself in a change of mood and light, a sense of shapeless possibility. Up in the hazy marine dapple of the attic space, a ring of ceremonial tallow is now set to glare and slobber. In this stuttering of shine and shadow, the fixed edges of location are become ambiguous, a further loosening of the world. The information in this flickering light is that of any century.
The rite is simple, of its kind, intended only as a point of focus, a conceptual platform on which to stand amid the swirl and shift of this delusory terrain: imaginary serpents are placed at the compass points to guard against the mental snares those cardinal directions symbolize, while at the same time an appeal is made to equally symbolic virtues. Idea is the only currency in this domain, and all ideas are real ideas. A heavy language is engendered and employed to fix these images as marker buoys within the mind. This incantation and the novel both progress towards the pregnant, hanging silence of their culmination. This is how we do things here, and always have done.
Wine and passionflower and other substances of earth. Shapes painted with contorted fingers on to empty space. Deranged, of course, but then derangement is the point. Speak the desire in terms both lucid and transparent. Write it down lest it should be forgotten when the spasm hits. Deep in the stomach now the tingling approach of horrid ecstasies. A naming and a calling, and then silence. Failure. Nothing happening, and then the rush of other. Sudden heat loss and convulsion. Hurried, white-faced navigation of a loft-ladder become an Escher staircase, only managing to reach the strip-lit ultra-violet of the bathroom as the venom surges up to spill into the yawning porcelain.
Shivering and hallucinating, with an opalescent glamour now descended even on the trailing threads of sepia bile. Pale snakes of light swim through the tangled hair. Beard jewelled with vomit, and the flickering eyes rolled back. A need to spit, to drink and wash the scalding acids from the punished throat.
Downstairs, there is a curdling of the atmosphere, a thickening of presence as the evocation’s final paragraphs approach. These words, as yet unwritten, are incipient in the loaded air. The television’s on. Drifting across the luminous, insistent window of the screen, an image of the new Crown Court, on Campbell Square behind De Senlis’s round church, penetrates the shimmer and delirium. The outcome of a murder trial, the crime occurring months back with a resident of Corby fatally assaulted in his home, all details previously withheld. The fine hairs at the nape rise up. The room grows cooler as the veil begins to tear. There’s something coming through.
Shots of the relatives, grieving and haunted as they leave the court. Something about the victim’s head: they couldn’t find it at the crime scene. Lost for weeks until discovered underneath a hedge. Found by a black dog. Dragged across the grass and pavement, through the purpling twilight of the Corby streets, the dark jaws clenched upon a pallid, waxen tuck of cheek. The imagery is risen, chill and glittering, like a dew. One of the trophy’s eyes is limp, half-closed, the grey hair caked with mud. Labrador breath, a hot and urgent whisper in the cold, deaf ear. Black jackal lips peel back, impart the snarling knowledge of Anubis, travel information for the lately dead. The head bumps through the guttered litter, nods in solemn affirmation of this grim intelligence, and knows what saints know. Round and bloody, a full stop penned in a larger hand.
A static ocean swells up, roaring in the mind. Hands raised, alarmed, into the field of vision. Gaze at incoherent characters and words that seem to crawl across the naked skin, an epidermal poetry. The lampglow is obscure and scumbled, as if filtering through smoke. There is a want of air.
Reel through the kitchen to the back door and the yard beyond, staggering out into the weed and starlight, gradually becoming calmer in the clean night breeze, beneath the slow and distant wheels of constellation. All the old, same lights. Their perfect, sombre continuity. Stand swaying here upon Phipps’ Fire Escape, the promised sanctuary of the century to come, a creaking and uncertain balcony, that is not now so far above. Through roiling clouds the landings of the vanished years below, these lower floors all lost in spark or panic and devoured already. Overhead, long rags of cirrus snag upon the arc of night, an interrupted glimpse of grace through veils of fume and soot.
These are the times we dread and hunger for. The mutter of our furnace past grows louder at our backs, with cadence more distinct. Almost intelligible now, its syllables reveal themselves. Our world ignites. The song wells up, from a consuming light.
|
#title Anarchism and the Greek Temperament
#author Alan Morgan
#SORTtopics Ancient Greece, cynicism
#date November 1964
#source Retrieved on 22<sup>nd</sup> September 2020 from https://libcom.org/library/anarchism-greek-temperament
#lang en
#pubdate 2020-09-22T15:36:54
#notes Originally published in <em>Anarchy</em> #045: Ancient Greece
THE FIRST SYSTEMATIC ANARCHIST PHILOSOPHER was, so we are told, Zeno of Citium (320–250 BC) who, says the encyclopaedia, “was the author of some eighteen books, including the notorious <em>Republic</em>, an early work of cynic and anarchist tendencies.” But none of them survive, and all we know of them is from other Greek author’s quotations. Nevertheless we may readily assent to the proposition that, of the three ancient peoples who shaped our civilisation, it was the Greeks whose characteristic temperament and attitudes appeal most to anarchists.
You can see this for yourself by playing the parlour game of Jews, Greeks and Romans, the invention of which Colin MacInnes ascribes to David Sylvester. We can all, he claims (regardless of our actual ethnic origins of course) be classified as one of these three. The stereotypes, for purposes of the game, are that the Jews were moralising, prophetic, radical-traditional, the Greeks were life-loving, crafty, hedonistic-spiritual, and the Romans authoritarian, organisational, grandiose, rhetorical.
The game consists simply in classifying your friends, public figures or historical characters, as one or other of the three types. Politicians are almost always Romans, you will find. Occasionally they are Jews, but very seldom Greeks. Anarchists are sometimes Greeks and sometimes Jews. The clash between these two temperaments among anarchists is frequently responsible for the divisions between them. Some of us of course, are Greeks masquerading as Jews and some of us are Jews who would dearly love to be Greeks. Some of us conceal a Roman tinge. It certainly helps clear the air if we are able to attribute our differences to temperament rather than to wickedness or bad faith.
The Greek temperament, or our interpretation of it, is capable of arousing a passionate loyalty among its adherents. Henry Miller for example, writes ecstatically, “I love those men, each and every one, for having revealed to me the true proportions of the human being. I love the soil in which they grew, the tree from which they sprang, the light in which they flourished, the goodness, the integrity, the charity which they emanated. They brought me face to face with myself, they cleansed me of hatred and jealousy and envy. And not least of all, they demonstrated by their own example that life could be lived magnificently, on any scale, in any climate, under any conditions.”
These are not, of course, the lessons that the classical education of the English aristocracy inculcated, but then, as Simon Raven pointed out in ANARCHY 24, the texts selected by the schoolmasters were hardly representative. He was untypical of their pupils in that he actually succeeded in learning the classical languages and in reading for pleasure. “And some curiosity lead me to look in a lot of places and not just where they told me to look. I found that what it said was richly and ripely subversive of the whole moral doctrines in which I was being so carefully and expensively educated. It either refuted them, mocked at them, or quite simply ignored them.”
Elsewhere, paraphrasing Maurice Bowra’s <em>The Greek Experience</em>, he epitomises the Good News from Greece, in these propositions:
1. This world, peopled by man, is the proper concern of man.
2. Death is a fascinating subject for speculation, but anyone who who claims to know the truth about it is either a fool or a confidence-trickster.
3. The Gods have taken human shape, not out of condescension, but because there is no other shape worth taking.
4. The truth is not determined by Revelation but by logical deduction from self-evident principles or from such natural examples as are available.
5. Laughter, wine and the love of friends are all the sweeter for being merely transient.
6. Physical love is an enjoyable and harmless occupation.
For other cultures, Goethe remarked, one must make allowances; to the Greek alone one is always a debtor.
|
#title Anarchism
#subtitle A Theoretical Analysis
#author Alan Ritter
#LISTtitle Anarchism: A Theoretical Analysis
#SORTauthors Alan Ritter
#SORTtopics theory, anarchism
#date 1980
#source [[http://www.ditext.com/ritter/anarchism/anarchism.html][ditext.com]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2019-08-05T03:47:14
#Notes Published by *Cambridge University Press*
*** Dedication
For Eileen and Jon
*** Acknowledgements
Preliminary versions of material in Chapters 5 and 6 appeared originally in ‘Anarchism and Liberal Theory in the Nineteenth Century’, <em>Bucknell Review</em>, 19 (Fall 1971); in ‘Godwin, Proudhon and the Anarchist Justification of Punishment’, <em>Political Theory</em>, vol. 3, no. 1 (February 1975), pp. 69–87 (Sage Publications, Inc.); and in ‘The Anarchist Justification of Authority’, <em>Anarchism: Nomos XIX</em>, edited by J. Roland Pennock and JohnW. Chapman (© 1978 by New York University, by permission of New York University Press). Portions of these articles are here reprinted by permission of their publishers.
A grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities helped me to get started on this book. Colleagues and students helped me to complete it. I would like particularly to thank Alfred Diamant, Milton Fisk, Norman Furniss, Richard Hiskes, Eileen Janzen, Jerome Mintz, Bernard Morris, Timothy Tilton and George Wright for their suggestions and support.
** Introduction
The main purpose of this book is to establish the right of anarchists to a leading voice in the debate among political theorists over how a good society should be created, organized and run. That anarchists deserve such a voice would have seemed ludicrous as recently as ten years ago, when they were still generally regarded as muddled preachers of chaos or naive projectors of dreams. In the late sixties, however, commentators began to find the anarchists more intellectually respectable. Their arguments for a society free of law and government were then revealed as credible enough to render political theory service, if only as a challenge to its deeply ingrained habit of taking the need for government for granted.[1] This book carries forward the work of claiming a place in political theory for anarchists by showing that their arguments, besides being plausible enough to serve as a foil or corrective to uncritically statist views, are also inherently convincing. If the analysis that follows is acceptable, anarchists must be accorded no less a voice than partisans of theories such as democracy or socialism in debate concerning the nature of a good society.
Although anarchists are no longer excluded from political theory altogether, they have not received the place this book claims for them, partly because their thought is still believed to suffer from a seriously discrediting contradiction. Anarchists favor untrammelled freedom. Yet to control behavior in their good society they use the constraint of public censure, whose strictures interfere with the freedom they endorse. The conflict between their espousal of freedom and their resort to censure not only opens anarchists to being disparaged as inconsistent, it exposes them to the more onerous charge of supporting freedom as a pretence. The denigration of their support for freedom as masking a deep antipathy to it began in 1798, in a pamphlet attacking the first anarchist, William Godwin. The author of the pamphlet, William Proby, decried Godwin’s commitment to freedom as deceptive on the ground that his good society, though it eschewed physical coercion, used the ‘tyranny of public opinion’ as a fetter. ‘There is no tyranny more forcible, for the mind, wearied by repeated systematic attacks, at last becomes a convert, or quits the field in despair, feeling a slavery in its utmost recesses, the more degrading because exercised by chains emanating from its own substance.‘[2] Proby’s view of the anarchists as not just confused, but downright devious in their espousal of freedom, has never lacked defenders. Commentators are still busy unmasking anarchists as ‘proselytising aristocrats’ with a yen for ‘puritanical constraint’, determined to exercise ‘enlightened tutelage’ over the people, if not against them.[3] Unless the anarchists’ praise of freedom and resort to censure are proved logically compatible, their claim to a full place in political theory must fail. For arguments which include contentions that are patently inconsistent disqualify as theory, even if they are not intended to deceive.
The view of anarchists as inconsistent for praising freedom while imposing censure rests on two premises: that freedom is their chief political value, and that it is curtailed severely by the censure they impose. This book argues for the consistency of the anarchists in praising freedom while imposing censure by refuting these premises. Freedom is exhibited in the following analysis as having subordinate worth for anarchists; their censure is shown to be a complex practice, whose effects on freedom are ambivalent. Once the censure of the anarchists is recognized as having ambivalent effects on a freedom that lacks supreme value in their eyes, their consistency in espousing it becomes obvious. Though their censure curtails freedom, they are warranted logically to espouse it, since it also supports freedom, and since they do not value freedom above all.
In establishing the right of anarchists to a leading voice in political theory, clearing them of inconsistency is a preliminary step. The main task is to show the power of their argument as social criticism and as a guide to action. This book takes a novel thesis about the goal of anarchism as the point of departure for accomplishing this task. Anarchists are portrayed in the following analysis as seeking to combine the greatest individual development with the greatest communal unity. Their goal is a society of strongly separate persons who are strongly bound together in a group. In a full-fledged anarchy, individual and communal tendencies, now often contradictory, become mutually reinforcing and coalesce. By serving the anarchists as a goal and inspiration, this ideal of communal individuality, as it will here be called, does much to control the structure of their argument. It helps define the targets of their social criticism; it gives their strategy limits and direction; and it guides their description of an anarchist social order. It is by tracing out the implications for their theory of their commitment to communal individuality that the following analysis exhibits the strength of the anarchists’ thought. Once the leading role played in their theory by communal individuality is appreciated, their argument is reveale1d as having altogether unsuspected coherence, originality and political appeal.
Anarchists are not the only theorists who take individuality and community, seen as mutually dependent values, as their chief political objective. Noteworthy others who have done so are their contemporaries Hegel and Marx. Since the credentials of these thinkers are so much stronger than the anarchists’, it is natural to presume that to learn how the search for communal individuality affects and enlivens political theory they and not the anarchists should be consulted. Yet, though Hegel and Marx are on most points the more penetrating thinkers, as theorists of communal individuality the anarchists can teach more.
In what Hegel calls a rational state, each subject achieves complete development’ of ‘personal individuality’ and also recognizes the community as his substantial groundwork and end’. These aspects of a rational state are intimately connected for Hegel. There can be no intense community unless individuality reaches ‘its culmination in the extreme of self-subsistent personal particularity’, while individuality needs the context of community for its development. People who live ‘as private persons for their own ends alone’ cannot be individuals. It is only as members of a community that they have ‘objectivity, genuine individuality, and an ethical life’.[4] Marx has a quite different view from Hegel of the path to individuality and community, but he agrees that they are mutually reinforcing. Everyone at the final stage of socialism engages in productive activities ‘which confirm and realize his individuality’, while also being ‘an expression of social life’. Community both ‘produces man as man’ and ‘is produced by him’, because individuality and community are reciprocally dependent.[5] Thus for Marx, as for Hegel and the anarchists, a nourishing interplay must draw individuality and community together, if they are to be complete.
Marx and Hegel, being in the first rank of political theorists, might be expected to explain more plausibly than the anarchists just how individuality and community, which tend to clash, can be made so mutually reinforcing that both are maximized. Yet what they say about this matter is so deficient that the anarchists’ views are more convincing.
Hegel makes legal government the seedbed in which communal individuality grows. Now one point which will become clear in the course of this book, and which has much immediate credibility, is that legal government, being remote, punitive, and inflexible, is not very congenial to communal individuality. It is true that Hegel tries to purge his rational state of the attributes that normally encumber legal government, but this attempt is futile, since these attributes mark every state.[6] Marx, who ably criticizes Hegel for thinking that communal individuality can reach completion under the aegis of legal government, relies on it in his good society much less. Community and individuality, in communist society, are therefore better able to develop. Yet even Marx stops short of the anarchist exclusion of legal government from the stage when individuality and community, now fully reinforcing, completely merge. The elements of legal government which communist society retains prevent it from being as hospitable as anarchy to communal individuality’s full growth.
Though the comparative paucity of legal government in Marx’s good society, and its correlatively greater reliance on non- legal institutions, give it an advantage over Hegel’s as the setting in which communal individuality develops, this advantage is offset by the vagueness with which it is portrayed. Marx limits himself to sketchy hints about the structure of the good society, while Hegel gives a detailed description. Since it is anything but obvious how a society must be organized so that individuality and community culminate in a reinforcing merger, Marx, by failing to work out in concrete detail the conditions for this outcome, marred his theory with a disconcerting gap.
The anarchists’ theory is free of the faults that blemish Marx’s and Hegel’s. By banning legal government entirely from their good society, they rid it altogether of the impediments which in the Hegelian state hamper communal individuality severely and which continue to interfere with it under Marx’s communism. And by describing their good society concretely, they protect it from the indeterminacy which, for achieving communal individuality, is communism’s special defect. Because the anarchists work out in detail, and with no resort to legal government, how to create, organize and maintain a regime in which communal individuality flourishes, it is they who have the most to teach about the value of this project for the debate in political theory over the nature of the best regime.
The arguments treated in this book as representing the gist of anarchism are drawn from the four authors — Godwin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Michael Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin -whose contributions to anarchist theory are universally regarded as most seminal. These writers, who succeeded each other within the discretely bounded period between the French and Russian Revolutions, worked out a coherent set of original arguments, which, while continuing to be influential, have not developed much since Kropotkin’s time. Hence, to comprehend anarchism as a political theory, the writings of more recent anarchists need not be considered. There is, however, one nineteenth-century writer besides the four founders who, because his arguments have affinities with theirs, and because of his influence on later anarchists, may be thought unfairly excluded from the following analysis. This writer is Max Stimer.
Some anarchists, most notably Kropotkin, have acknowledged Stirner as a forebear. But this acknowledgment does not mean that he must be included in this book, because it proves nothing about the standing of his argument as systematic thought. Stirner’s argument is anarchist in its political conclusions. He rejects law and government at least as unconditionally as do the four anarchists being studied here, and his projected ‘union of egoists’ is in its statelessness as much an anarchist society as those envisaged by the founding four. But Stimer’s argument differs from theirs in a way that debases it as a theory: its backing for these anarchist conclusions is anything but cogent. Stirner opposes government and supports an anarchist society on the moral basis of ethical egoism, a principle which enjoins each agent to strive for nothing but his selfish advantage or amusement, and hence for that of others only so far as it conduces to his own. The Stirnerian egoist cares not a jot whether others do what is in their interest: their service to his interest is his sole concern. ‘No one is a person to be respected...but solely...an object in which I take an interest or else do not, an interesting or uninteresting object, a usable or unusable person.‘[7] The state is denounced by Stirner for interfering with ethical egoism; the union of egoists, his anarchist society, is recommended for allowing it free reign. Yet both of these claims about the political implications of ethical egoism, which must be true if Stirner’s defense of anarchism is to be cogent, are surely false. A state is admirably suited to a seeker of personal advantage, in situations where he controls it, for it is then a means for making others serve his ends. As for an anarchist society, since the voluntary cooperation on which it rests requires each to strive for others’ advantage at least somewhat, it is hardly the arrangement that ethical egoists should create. Nor could they create it. For a stateless society of ethical egoists, each regarding the others as objects to be manipulated and exploited, would be impossibly discordant. Since Stirner’s anarchism is probably undermined and is certainly not supported by the moral premise which is supposed to serve as its foundation, his argument lacks the cogency it needs to be included in this analytic study of anarchist thought.[8]
The plan of this book is suggested by its overall approach. The first chapter tackles the problem of proving the anarchists consistent in their espousal of both liberty and censure. Chapter 2 argues for regarding communal individuality as their chief political objective. Having made the case for anarchists as seeking communal individuality, the book moves on, in Chapter 3, to trace out the implications of this objective for their somewhat varied yet basically similar models of the good society. Chapters 4 and 5 complete the project of analyzing the import for anarchists of their search for communal individuality by examining how it affects their social criticism and their strategy. The plausible, coherent anarchist theory, established as authentic in the first five chapters of the book, is subjected in the final chapters to comparison and evaluation. Chapter 6 compares anarchism with liberalism and socialism, the political positions with which it is most frequently identified, and finds that, despite its similarities to these close neighbors, it is nevertheless distinctive. In the seventh, concluding chapter, anarchism is judged as a political ideal and as a guide to action against standards of humane morality. No such evaluation can be conclusive. The point of this one is. to acquit anarchists of unjust charges and to highlight the appealing features of their argument so as to vindicate it as more than intellectually respectable. If this chapter is successful, the criticisms which anarchists level against the modern state and their recommendations for how it should be replaced or altered will be revealed as worthy of more wholehearted endorsement than has generally been allowed.
Although the main purpose of this study is to vindicate anarchism as a theory, success in this purpose will spur readers to follow anarchism as a practice. Those who are convinced by the arguments in this book that anarchist theory is coherent, plausible and appealing need not of course join communes or found free schools, let alone attempt a revolution. But they cannot abstain entirely from anarchist endeavors without defending their inaction at least inwardly. To readers who find anarchist activity congenial, this book, if it succeeds, will be more welcome. For !t will help them act by giving them theoretically grounded arguments to justify what might otherwise seem quixotic gestures. Anarchism, though studied here as theory, is a theory that asks constantly what to do. Hence the more fully it is accepted as theoretically convincing, the stronger will be its pressure as a goad.
[1] High points in this reassessment of anarchism as a theory are Robert Paul Wolff, <em>In Defense of Anarchism</em> (New York, 1976) and April Carter, <em>The Political Theory of Anarchism</em> (London, 1971).
[2] William Proby, <em>Philosophy and Barbarism</em> (London, 1798), p. 22.
[3] Benjamin Barber, <em>Superman and Common Men</em> (New York, 1972), pp. 25, 22; Isaac Kramnick, ‘On Anarchism and the Real World: William Godwin and Radical England’, <em>American Political Science Review</em>, 66 (March 1972), p. 116.
[4] G. W. F. Hegel, <em>The Philosophy of Right</em> (Oxford, 1958), pp. 160–1, 164, 156.
[5] Karl Marx, <em>Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844</em> (Moscow, 1961), pp. 108, 105. Ellen Wood has convincingly worked out Marx’s views on the reciprocal relations between individuality and community: <em>Mind and Politics</em> (Berkeley, 1972), pp. 123, 141–52.
[6] Patrick Riley, ‘Hegel on Consent and Social-Contract Theory: Does he “Cancel and Preserve” the Will?’, <em>Western Political Quarterly</em>, 26 (March 1973), especially pp. 156–61.
[7] Max Stirner, <em>The Ego and His Own</em>, trans. Steven T. Byington (New York, 1963), p. 311.
[8] The most recent and convincing discussions of Stirner’s relationship to anarchism are to be found in R. W. K. Paterson, <em>The Nihilistic Egoist: Max Stirner</em>(Oxford, 1971), ch. VI, and John Clark, <em>Max Stirner’s Egoism</em> (London, 1976), ch. VI. Both Paterson and Clark find a logical gap between Stirner’s egoistic moral premise and his anarchist conclusions. Their dispute is over the issue whether his egoism or his anarchism is more characteristic of his thought and hence whether he should be called an anarchist. It should be added that though as a theorist of anarchism Stirner is a disaster, he may still deserve his recognized place in the history of anarchist ideas.
** 1. Liberty and public censure in Anarchist thought
Anarchists are commonly regarded as extreme libertarians on the ground that they seek freedom above all else. It is natural to view them as libertarians in this sense, because their high esteem for freedom makes it more immediately plausible than any other value as their overriding aim. Godwin praises freedom as ‘the most valuable of all human possessions’. Proudhon acclaims it as his ‘banner and guide’. To Bakunin, who once described himself as ‘a fanatic lover of liberty’, it is ‘the absolute source and condition of all good’. And Kropotkin seeks a form of society which ‘will leave to the individual man complete and perfect freedom’.[9] It seems difficult to question the commitment to liberty of theorists who admire it as much as these.
Yet the reliance of anarchists on public censure to control behavior in their good society raises doubts whether their goal is liberty. In Godwin’s anarchy ‘the inspection of every man over the conduct of his neighbors...would constitute a censorship of the most irresistible nature’, which ‘no individual would be hardy enough to defy’; for ‘there is no terror that comes home to the heart of vice like the terror of being exhibited to the public eye’. Proudhon depends on censure in a state of anarchy to ‘act on the will like a force and make it choose the right course’. Bakunin follows Proudhon in regarding ‘the collective and public spirit’ of an anarchist society as ‘the only great and all powerful authority...we can respect’. And Kropotkin is perfectly candid in explaining what to do ‘when we see anti-social acts committed’ in a state of anarchy. We must ‘have the courage to say aloud in anyone’s presence what we think of such acts’.[10] How can the anarchists be libertarians, determined to secure freedom above all else, when their social scheme relies so much on coercive public censure? Although interpreters of anarchism have long deemed this question crucial, no acceptable answer has yet been found.
Several types of argument are or can be advanced by anarchists to warrant viewing their search for liberty as compatible with their use of censure. This chapter finds, after examining these arguments, that only one of them is valid. But not even this one is strong enough to prove the anarchists consistent libertarians. The chapter concludes by proposing to look more deeply into the question of the anarchists’ libertarianism. What needs asking, instead of whether the anarchists are consistent in espousing censure and liberty, is whether liberty really is their goal. This is the question that the succeeding chapter takes up.
*** The conceptual argument
Political theorists often reconcile freedom and coercion with a conceptual argument, which claims, on the basis of what freedom means, that it is uncurtailed by some restraint. The will of God, the forces of the market and the commands of a revolutionary vanguard are famous examples of restraints that theorists have thus reconciled with freedom. In each case they have argued conceptually, if unconvincingly, that, because freedom as properly defined is unaffected by the restraint in question, the restraint, even though confining, leaves freedom uncurtailed.
The anarchists could use a conceptual argument of this type to prove that they are libertarians, if they defined freedom so that public censure did not obstruct it. In that case, the censorial restraints imposed in their good society, not counting as obstacles to liberty, could not consistently be cited to impugn it as their chief goal. Whether the anarchists can use this conceptual argument to vindicate their libertarianism thus depends on how they define freedom.
Like all concepts of freedom that apply to agents, the anarchists’ is a triadic relation of *subjects* who are free from *restraints* to reach *objectives*.[11] No anarchist specifies all terms of this triad completely, but together they give it a thorough description. Since what they say about the triad is for the most part consistent, their concept of liberty can be elucidated by treating their remarks about its various terms as complementary parts of a single whole.
Godwin and Bakunin are the clearest of the anarchists in describing the first term of the triad: the subject of freedom. For both of them it is the choices and actions of individuals that must be free. As Godwin says, a free man must not only act freely; in his prior deliberations he must ‘consult his own reason, draw his own conclusions’, ‘exercise the powers of his understanding’. Bakunin makes the same point about the subject of liberty when he writes that no one is free ‘unless all his actions are determined...by his own convictions’. And for Proudhon, ‘one must think for oneself to be free’.[12] According to the anarchists, then, it is not enough to act freely; one must also have freedom to decide.
As the foregoing quotations indicate, what makes decisions free for anarchists is their origin in rational deliberation. Free decisions, as anarchists conceive of them, are based on arguments and evidence that one has personally and systematically evaluated. Making the freedom of decisions depend on their arising from rational deliberation has implications for the second term of the triad, which identifies the restraints which leave freedom uncurtailed.
Rational deliberation is as much of a restraint on action and choice as more obvious forces, owing to its practical upshot. Anyone who deliberates rationally about the future draws conclusions from his reflections, and these conclusions restrict what he may choose or do. No one can successfully deliberate without encountering these restrictions, because they emerge unavoidably from deliberative activity. This fact shows the anarchists which restraints to identify as compatible with freedom. Recognizing that rational deliberation is restrictive, and believing it indispensable for freedom, the anarchists must conclude that the rational restraints that a deliberating agent imposes on himself do not obstruct his liberty. They must also accept the converse of this conclusion. Since rational deliberation is indispensable for liberty, restraints that directly hinder action and choice are not the only ones that curtail freedom; restraints that hinder rational deliberation indirectly curtail it.
Proudhon is the most systematic of the anarchists in compiling a list of the restraints which anarchists regard as hindrances to free deliberation, choice and conduct. His list can therefore serve most usefully to complete the description of their triad’s second term. Most lists of obstacles to the freedom of agents refer only to those that humans deliberately impose or leave in place.[13] Proudhon’s list is more comprehensive. Not only ‘the priest’s voice’, ‘the prince’s order’, and ‘the crowd’s cries’ obstruct free action, choice, and deliberation. Liberty, as ‘the spirit of revolt’, recognizes ‘no law, no argument, no authority, no end, no limit, no principle, no purpose beyond itself’.[14] Proudhon is here extending a theme foreshadowed by Godwin and repeated by the later anarchists: a free agent is liberated from every hindrance that can be removed or lessened, except those arising from his own deliberations.
The third term in the triad specifies the objectives of liberty: what agents must be free to choose or do. The anarchists’ description of this term is fixed by what they say about the others. Having stated that freedom requires liberation from all but rational impediments, they cannot put other limits on the goals free persons may reach. We count as free for anarchists, whatever we choose or do, provided that our choice and conduct are rationally based. The agreement of the anarchists about the goal of freedom gives the third term of their concept the unity it needs to make their entire view of liberty coherent.
The analysis of freedom provided by the anarchists would warrant viewing them as seeking liberty above all else, only if it implied that the public censure they prescribe does not coerce. Public censure, for the anarchists, involves ‘a promptness to enquire into and to judge’ your neighbors’ conduct.[15] Where this sort of censure is common practice, behavior is controlled in three different ways. It is controlled by penalties, in the form of threatened or actual rebuke, which compel obedience from fear. It is controlled by internalization, a process through which censured individuals absorb prevalent standards of conduct. And it is controlled with reasoned arguments, through which a censurer tries to convince his neighbors that they should mend their ways. Now certainly the rebuke which this complex censure imposes curtails the anarchists’ sort of freedom, because rebuke, even if it is mild and private, still, as a penalty, hinders deliberation, choice and conduct. No doubt the anarchists could have conceptually ruled out censorial rebuke as an interference with liberty by explicitly classifying it as non-coercive, but they sensibly avoided such an arbitrary fiat. Their comprehensive list of obstacles to freedom contains no exception in favor of rebuke. Since the meaning of freedom which the anarchists derive from their analysis is too broad to reconcile it with censure, they can only hope to achieve this reconciliation non-conceptually.
*** The crude empirical arguments
The anarchists have two kinds of empirical arguments, crude and sophisticated, that might reconcile their use of censure with the view that freedom is their chief aim. Both kinds of arguments attempt to show that though it is conceptually possible for public censure- to curtail freedom, under anarchy this curtailment does not occur. The crude empirical arguments claim that anarchist censure, in its effects on freedom, is no hindrance at all. The sophisticated arguments, while conceding that censure interferes with freedom somewhat, see it as maximizing freedom on the whole.
Godwin advances the crude argument in its boldest form by claiming that anarchist censure increases freedom. A person’s freedom is curtailed, ‘when he is restrained from acting upon the dictates of his understanding’. Anarchist censure does not impose this kind of restraint. It influences us in the same way as our reading, through ‘reasons...presented to the understanding’, which help us deliberate more rationally by suggesting arguments and evidence we would overlook, if we decided alone. The ‘rational restraint of public inspection’, being an aid to deliberation, far from hindering freedom, lends it support.[16]
This version of the crude argument is appealing in its boldness, but though not entirely misguided, it fails to yield Godwin’s conclusion. Anarchist censure *may* rationalize deliberation, but need not. Its effect on the rationality of deliberation depends on how people respond to it. If they use the arguments and evidence it presents to help them make decisions, then censure enables them to deliberate more rationally than they could alone. But, as noted earlier, anarchist censure does more than offer arguments i and evidence: it also imposes sanctions, ranging from mild stigma to complete ostracism. In so far as fear of these sanctions inhibits ‘ the deliberative process, or deters adherence to its conclusions, the public censure prescribed by anarchists can hardly be called an ‘ aid to liberty. i
Godwin is especially vulnerable to this objection, because he relies more obviously than most anarchists on censorial sanctions. A writer who describes censure under anarchy as ‘a species of coercion’ which ‘carries despair to the mind’ is in no position to claim that it is liberating.[17] But this claim holds up no better if ascribed to other anarchists since they all rely somewhat on condemnation and rebuke. Hence if the crude empirical argument is to serve the anarchists as proof that freedom is their chief goal, they must give it a more modest form than Godwin does, by showing that even though censure need not increase freedom, at least it leaves it uncurtailed.
Proudhon and Bakunin try to show this by appealing to the process of internalization, through which the directives issued by public opinion are absorbed by the individual and become part of I his own frame of mind. They both see that these directives ‘envelop us, penetrate us and regulate all of our movements, thoughts and actions’.[18] Bakunin thinks this process is so powerful that man is ‘nothing but the product of society’.[19] Proudhon’s view is more nuanced, since he gives more place in his social psychology to innate dispositions. But he agrees with Bakunin that conduct is guided to a considerable extent by internalized directives.
Proudhon and Bakunin go on to claim that because the directives issued by anarchist censure are internalized, they leave participants in anarchy free. Freedom can only be curtailed by ‘an external master, a legislator, who is located outside of the person he commands’.[20] But the directives issued by censure, being internalized from opinion, ‘are not imposed by an external legislator;...they are immanent in us, inherent, they constitute the very basis of our being;...hence instead of finding limits in them, we should consider them as the real conditions and the necessary foundation of our freedom’.[21] Censure does not restrict the freedom of an individual, because when he complies with it, his directive is a self-imposed ‘secret commandment from himself to himself’.[22]
This argument fails, partly because, like Godwin’s claim that ! censure rationalizes deliberation, it overlooks the reality of censorial sanctions. Anarchist censure is not perfectly internalized, but also controls externally by forcing individuals by means of rebuke to comply against their will. This censorial rebuke is obviously a bar to freedom, because it obstructs action, choice and deliberation just as decisively as any other kind of sanction. The anarchists could ignore the interference with liberty caused by rebuke, if in their good society it was not imposed. But since it is imposed there, they are unconvincing when they claim that because their censure is entirely internalized, it is coercion-less.
But even if the anarchists eschewed rebuke entirely and relied on nothing but internalized censure, it still would obstruct their freedom. To count as free for anarchists, one must decide what to do on the basis of one’s own rationally reached conclusions. Any other basis for choice interferes with liberty by blocking or bypassing deliberation. Now internalization, as described by anarchists, is not a rational process. Persons who internalize censorial directives unwittingly absorb them and then use them to decide without subjecting them to scrutiny.[23] Internalization, thus being a substitute for rational deliberation, and even a bar to it, is not a process that anarchists can deem coercionless. The directives issued by internalized censure may be self-imposed, but for anarchists this does not prevent them from coercing. For it is not just the internal origin, but also the rationality of the directives which determine choice that anarchists must consider in deciding if they curtail liberty. Since internalized censorial directives, though self-imposed, are not products of rational deliberation, anarchists, to be consistent, must admit that they coerce.
There is one other crude empirical argument in anarchist theory for the compatibility of freedom and public censure. This argument sees the restraint imposed by censure in a state of anarchy as unavoidable and hence as no more of a coercion than other restraints which cannot be overcome, such as that of mortality. Bakunin views censure in this light when he describes it as ‘one of the conditions of social life against which revolt would be as useless as it would be impossible’.[24] The other anarchists agree (though less emphatically) that, owing to its inescapability, censure is coercionless.[25]
One might admit that, if censure under anarchy is really inescapable, it does not interfere with freedom. But why should it be viewed as beyond escape? Bakunin answers that it is needed for the survival of the self. ‘A man is only himself insofar as he is a product’ of society and ‘has no existence except by virtue of its laws. Resistance to it would therefore be a ridiculous endeavor, a revolt against himself, a veritable suicide.’[26] Anarchist censure is inescapable for Bakunin because he thinks that anyone who is not restrained by it will lose his self.
It is true that humans, whose selves are formed through interaction, need the restraint of social influence to achieve identity. But this does not mean that they must be restrained by censure, a special kind of social influence, distinguished by being imposed deliberately: the censurer sets out with full awareness to correct his neighbor’s conduct. Deliberate restraint of this sort is not needed to achieve identity, because the spontaneous pressures that members of all societies unintentionally exert on one another are sufficient to make each aware that he and all the others are distinct. Since identity can emerge without the help of censure, in an anarchist society as in any other, Bakunin’s claim that it is inescapable is incorrect.
But even if censure was needed to *achieve* identity, it still would not be inescapable, unless it was also needed to *preserve* the self. For if the self could be preserved without the aid of censure, a developed individual would not have to submit to it. Now a developed individual who is unrestrained by censure need not lose his identity, because he can maintain it without submitting at all to social influence. While social influence is needed to form the self, the self once formed no longer depends on it for its existence, as its survival in isolated marooned sailors is enough to show. Since developed individuals can maintain identity without submitting to any social influence, they can certainly maintain it without submitting to censure.
These objections to Bakunin’s claim that censure is beyond escape show that his version of the crude empirical argument for reconciling it with liberty is no more effective than those the other anarchists advance. But perhaps empirical arguments which are more sophisticated can show that censure and liberty accord.
*** The sophisticated empirical arguments
The crude empirical arguments fail because they refuse to admit that anarchist censure *does* interfere with freedom. Denying this, they face the impossible task of explaining away its interference as rational, internal, or inescapable. The sophisticated empirical arguments are stronger than the crude ones because, by taking censure’s interference with freedom into account, they can pose the problem of reconciliation more manageably. They need not show that censure leaves liberty uncurtailed, but only that it curtails liberty less than the alternatives do. If the sophisticated arguments could show this, they would not prove anarchists libertarian in the usual sense of seeking freedom above all else. But they would prove them libertarian in the sense of showing, whatever their objective, how the most freedom can be attained. Reliance on public censure would stand revealed as the best available aid to liberation.
The anarchists make no attempt to vindicate censure as more liberating than all other methods of behavioral control. Their strategy is to show only that it is more liberating than legal government, which they quite sensibly regard as the most plausible alternative. They argue that censure differs from legal government in ways which make it less coercive on the whole.
Legal government is a method of control marked by the following features: it is applied by a small number of officials, who issue general, standing rules to all members of society and who enforce these rules with fixed penalties for each type of offense.[27] All the comparable features of censure, as anarchists conceive of it, are different from those of legal government. Anarchist censure is applied by all members of society, rather than by a few officials. It issues changeable, particular imperatives, not permanent, general rules. It does not rely on fixed penalties to enforce these imperatives, but uses flexible sanctions, internalization and reasoned arguments.[28] Each of the features of legal government that distinguishes it from the anarchists’ censure is blamed by them for making it more coercive.
The first of these features is remoteness. Legal government relies on a small group of officials to control conduct, whereas censorship relies on society at large. Being few in number, government officials lack the information about the attitudes and circumstances of their numerous subjects that is needed to control them as individuals, and hence must control them as an undifferentiated group. Censurers, on the other hand, being socially intimate with one another, can adjust their directives and sanctions to the situation of each individual so that, while still being effective, they interfere less with conduct.[29]
Even if legal government could be intimate, as might be possible in a small direct democracy, anarchists would still rate it as less liberating, partly because it must still control its subjects with general rules. However intimate a legal government may be, it works through laws, which, being general, require a whole class of persons to behave the same way in a wide range of cases. Censure, on the other hand, using singular imperatives, which prescribe ‘not according to certain maxims previously written, but according to the circumstances of each particular cause’, can better protect each subject’s liberty.[30] The generality of legal rules makes government less liberating than censure by causing it to control behavior more indiscriminately.
The permanence of laws as well as their generality makes even the most intimate legal government less liberating than censure. It is because laws depend more than censorial directives on being publicly known that they must be more permanent. No law can be effective, unless those whom it controls know, before engaging in the activities it regulates, what behavior it requires or forbids. Censorial directives, on the other hand, being applied *ad hoc*, can effectively regulate behavior even if they are not known in advance. Laws must persist longer than censorial directives, because, if they change as often, the public cannot know what they say. The greater permanence of laws makes legal government less adjustable than censure to changing circumstances, just as their greater generality makes it less adjustable to particular circumstances. While the directives issued by censure can be easily modified so that they do not become more restrictive as conditions change, those issued by government have ‘a tendency to crystallize what should be modified and developed day by day’.[31] The permanence of legal directives inhibits them from changing in new situations so as to minimize interference with free conduct at all times.
The same uniformity and permanence that make the directives issued by government more coercive than those of censure also make its sanctions more coercive. Governmental sanctions are uniform and fixed, because, being legal, they impose similar penalties for similar offenses.[32] Censorial sanctions can be more flexible, because they can impose different penalties for similar offenses, whether committed by different individuals, or by the same individual at different times. Now the same penalty is not needed to enforce a directive in every case. The attitudes and circumstances of some individuals are such that only mild coercion is needed to secure their compliance with many directives, while the same directives will be disobeyed by differently situated individuals, unless enforced by severe coercion. Hence governmental sanctions, being fixed and uniform, interfere substantially with conduct whether they are mild or severe. If an official enforces a directive with mild coercion, the widespread disobedience he allows impedes free action, while he directly impedes free action if he enforces the directive with severe coercion. A censurer, on the other hand, not having to use uniform, fixed sanctions, can adjust his applications of rebuke so that they coerce each individual just enough to secure compliance. It is thus because censorial rebuke can coerce more economically than legal penalties can that anarchists consider it more liberating.
The anarchists are on firm ground in claiming that the remoteness of its officials and the general, permanent character of its controls make legal government harsher, and to that extent less liberating, than censure. But the same features of legal government which detract from its power to liberate by making its restraints on action harsh, contribute to its power to liberate by making them predictable.
The remoteness of government officials prevents them from effectively regulating behavior, except with predictable controls. Unpredictable controls would not be effective, because officials are too distant from their subjects to instruct them continually and individually about what they must do. The generality and permanence of legal controls give them just the sort of predictability that remote officials need.
Being general and permanent, legal directives set standing conditions under which broad classes of action are forbidden or enjoined. Legal sanctions, also being general and permanent, establish fixed penalties for each type of offense. Hence anyone subject to a legal government can know before he acts what conduct it requires of him and what penalty he will receive from it for disobedience. He can be sure that his conduct will not be hindered by his government, so long as he does what it prescribes.
Censure is less predictable, because its lack of generality and permanence makes it hard to know its requirements in advance. Censure prescribes different conduct for numerous particular situations that law treats as the same, and it prevents transgressions not with settled penalties for each offense, but with varying applications of rebuke. Hence persons subject to public censure, unsure what it will require and uncertain what it will do if they disobey, are less safe from the restraints it imposes on their action than from the restraints imposed on it by law. Even though the particularity and flexibility of censure make it a milder restraint than legal government, these characteristics need not make it less coercive. For besides making it milder, they also make it more unpredictable. Censorial restraint may be milder, but its greater unpredictability offsets the advantage for securing liberty that its mildness gives it as compared to law.
If remoteness, generality and permanence were all that distinguished legal government from censure, the anarchist case for rating it as more liberating would be inconclusive. But anarchist censure, unlike legal government, does not rely on sanctions alone to secure compliance with directives; it also uses internalization and reasoned argument. The anarchists point to both of these distinctive methods of enforcement as attributes that make censure less coercive.
So far as censure enforces its mandates with internalization, it impedes conduct less than government does. Sanctioned directives interfere with conduct, because their threats and penalties limit an individual’s range of permissible acts. But internalized directives, not being enforced by threats and penalties, leave individuals free to act just as they please. The conduct of an individual is always restrained, so far as it is controlled by sanctions, but it is not restrained at all so far as it is controlled by internalization.
While this argument shows that internalization, by leaving action unrestrained, is more liberating for conduct than sanctions are, it does not show that internalization is more liberating on the whole. For the advantage of internalization over sanctions as a liberator, arising from its tolerance for conduct, is offset by its interference with thought. Sanctions do not interfere with thought, because they control what people do, not what they think. A person who follows a directive from fear of sanctions can think what he pleases about the merit of the action he carries out. But a person who follows an internalized directive is made to view his action as correct, because internalization controls its mental antecedents, the beliefs and intentions on which it rests. The restraint imposed on thought by internalization makes it no less of an impediment to the liberty of the anarchists than sanctions are, even though it is no impediment to action. For liberty, as conceived by anarchists, requires not only free action, but free thought.
The other method for enforcing directives, besides internalization, that distinguishes censure from government is reasoned argument. By claiming that censure tends more than government to win compliance with reasons, anarchists give themselves the hope, not offered by their other arguments, of proving their society libertarian. For it is a sound argument that, so far as censure differs from legal government by securing obedience with reasons, it serves freedom better.
The argument rests on the conceptual thesis of the anarchists examined earlier, which states that the conclusions an agent draws from his deliberations about the merit of his contemplated acts do not obstruct his liberty. This thesis allows the anarchists to argue that so far as censure secures obedience by giving reasons, it exercises coercionless control, by convincing its subjects to conclude from their own deliberations that the conduct it demands of them is right.
So far as censure secures obedience with sanctions as severe as legal government’s, it is no more liberating, because equally severe sanctions, whether legal or censorial, whether they cause physical or mental suffering, impede deliberation to the same extent.[33] Anyone who complies with a directive from fear of sanctions is free to deliberate about the merit of the conduct it prescribes. He may even conclude that the act is wrong for him to do. But he does it anyway, because the sanction that controls him prevents him from following his conclusion by overpowering it with fear. Since sanctions, though they allow deliberation, deprive it of effect, they fail to control an agent through his own deliberations and so cannot be regarded by anarchists as leaving him free.
Reasoned argument differs from sanctions as a means to secure obedience by providing just the sort of restraint that a libertarian anarchy needs. The only situation in which an agent who is made to follow a directive bases his compliance on his own deliberations is where he is convinced by those who issue the directive that what they bid him to do is right. Since anarchist censure is distinguished from government by its greater tendency to give reasons of this kind, and since anarchists think a controlling agency must give such reasons in order to respect freedom, they are warranted in arguing that, so far as censure provides more of them than legal government does, it is the more liberating method of control.
Bakunin presents a clear version of this argument when he distinguishes government from censure on the ground that ‘its nature is not to convince but to impose and to force’. The liberty of a man ‘consists precisely in this: he does what is good not because he is commanded to, but because he understands it, wants it and loves it’. Government, which coerces its subjects with commands instead of convincing them with reasons, he therefore denounces as ‘the legal violator of men’s wills, the permanent negator of their liberty’.[34] No other anarchist makes this argument as forthrightly as Bakunin; but they all do make it, as they must, if their reconciliation of censure with freedom is possibly to succeed.[35] For of the many arguments they can or do advance to achieve this reconciliation, only this one hits the mark. Whether it is strong enough to prove anarchy libertarian is an issue that still must be assessed.
*** The libertarianism of Anarchist censure
Though only one of the sophisticated arguments supports the claim that anarchist censure is more liberating than legal government, they all bear on this claim’s validity. For together they identify all of the features of anarchist censure that affect how well it protects freedom. These arguments reveal that its unpredictability and its interference with thought, through internalization, handicap anarchist censure as a liberator as compared to legal government. Hence it can only qualify as more liberating !i it has the means to overcome these handicaps. Its greater ability to give reasons for obedience is its most powerful means for overcoming them. But it has other resources. Its mildness tends to offset its unpredictability. Its internality, which makes it tolerant toward action, compensates to some extent for its control of thought. Hence the task of making it more liberating than government does not rest on its ability to give reasons alone. If anarchist censure, by giving reasons, offsets that portion of its disadvantage for achieving freedom that its mildness and internality do not overcome, the claim that it is more liberating than legal government is confirmed. But if, despite its greater tendency to give reasons, anarchist censure still interferes with freedom more, the claim that it is more liberating must be rejected.
These remarks show that a verdict on whether anarchy is more liberating than legal government requires an assessment of the extent to which it uses reasoned argument to control behavior. The next chapter makes this assessment by tracing out the implications for the rationality of anarchist censure of the communal individuality which, rather than freedom, it will be argued, is the anarchists’ chief objective. Since the analysis that follows of the scope of liberty in an anarchist society proceeds from a fresh understanding of the goal which anarchists seek, and from a more accurate view than has previously been available of what they mean by censure, it promises finally to settle the dispute, begun by William Proby, whether anarchists are secret enemies of freedom, or loyal friends.
[9] 1 William Godwin, <em>Enquiry Concerning Political Justice</em>, 3 vols. (Toronto, 1946), II, 331; Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, <em>Correspondence</em>, 14 vols. (Paris, 1874–5), IV, 375; Michael Bakunin, <em>OEuvres</em>, 6 vols. (Paris, 1895–1913), IV, 248, 156, cf. I, 204; Peter Kropotkin, <em>Revolutionary Pamphlets</em> (New York, 1968), p. 113. All translations from French texts are my own, unless otherwise indicated. For contemporary claims that anarchists are libertarians see, for instance, Gerald Runkle, <em>Anarchism, Old and New</em> (New York, 1972), p. 165, or Derry Novak, “The Place of Anarchism in the History of Political Thought’, <em>The Review of Politics</em>, 20 (July 1958), p. 317.
[10] 2 Godwin, <em>Political Justice</em>, II, 221, 199, 274; Proudhon, <em>De la Justice dans la Revolution et dans l’Eglise</em>, 4 vols. (Paris, 1930–5), I, 315; Bakunin, <em>OEuvres</em>, III, 69n; Kropotkin, <em>Pamphlets</em>, p. 143.
[11] 3 Gerald C. MacCallum, Jr, ‘Negative and Positive Freedom’, <em>The Philosophical Review</em>, 76 (July 1967), pp. 312–34; cf. John Rawls, <em>A Theory of Justice</em> (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), p. 202.
[12] 4 Godwin, <em>Political Justice</em>, I, 168, II, 500; Bakunin, <em>OEuvres</em>, V, 318, cf. I, 105, 281; Proudhon, <em>Justice</em>, II, 77, cf. Proudhon, <em>De la capacite politique des classes ouvrieres</em> (Paris, 1924), p. 190; Kropotkin, <em>Pamphlets</em>, p. 124.
[13] 5 For typical analysis along these lines see K. J. Scott, ‘ Liberty, License and Not Being Free’, <em>Political Studies</em>, 4 (June 1956), pp. 176–85, or D. M. White, ‘Negative Liberty’, <em>Ethics</em>, 80 (April 1970), pp. 185–204.
[14] 6 Proudhon, <em>Justice</em>, III, 424.
[15] 7 Godwin, <em>Political Justice</em>, II, 496.
[16] 8 Ibid., II, 434, 366–7, 505.
[17] 9 Ibid., II, 340, 199.
[18] 10 Bakunin, <em>OEuvres</em>, III, 49.
[19] 11 Ibid., I, 284.
[20] 12 Ibid., Ill, 49.
[21] 13 Ibid., IV, 249.
[22] 14 Proudhon, <em>Justice</em>, I, 325.
[23] 15 Bakunin, <em>OEuvres</em>, I, 284, 295; Godwin, Political Justice, I, 64–5, II, 499.
[24] 16 Bakunin, <em>OEuvres</em>, V, 159.
[25] 17 Godwin, <em>Political Justice</em>, II, 500; Proudhon, <em>Philosophie du progres</em> (Paris, 1946), p. 67; Kropotkin, <em>La science moderne et l’anarchie</em> (Paris, 1913), p. 160.
[26] 18 Bakunin, <em>OEuvres</em>, III, 214, cf. I, 295, 298, V, 126, VI, 88.
[27] 19 These are the traits normally singled out as typical of a legal system. Cf. H. L. A. Hart, <em>The Concept of Law</em> (London, 1961), pp. 22–5.
[28] 20 Bakunin, <em>OEuvres</em>, I, 288; Godwin, <em>Political Justice</em>, I, 221 inter alia.
[29] 21 Godwin, <em>Political Justice</em>, II, 352–3.
[30] 22 Ibid., II, 294; cf. 247, 399–400; Bakunin, <em>OEuvres</em>, IV, 261. The anarchists’ esteem for particularity in the control of behavior must not be exaggerated. Though general rules must not be followed blindly, they have their place as presumptive guides, akin to the utilitarian’s rules of thumb. It is ‘incumbent on us, when called into action, to estimate the nature of the particular case, that we may ascertain where the urgency of special circumstances is such as to supersede rules that are generally obligatory’ (<em>Political Justice</em>, I, 347).
[31] 23 Kropotkin, <em>Pamphlets</em>, p. 200; cf. Godwin, <em>Political Justic</em>e, II, 231, 403.
[32] 24 The penalties need not of course be identical, since some discretion in sentencing is allowed in even the least flexible legal system.
[33] 25 See ch. 4, p. 74, for a discussion of the insignificance of the differences between legal and censorial sanctions, so far as concerns their effects on satisfaction.
[34] 26 Bakunin, <em>OEuvres</em>, I, 288.
[35] 27 Godwin, <em>Political Justice</em>, II, 334, 375; Kropotkin, <em>Pamphlets</em>, pp. 157, 167; Kropotkin, <em>Science moderne</em>, pp. 160–1.
** 2. The goal of Anarchism: communal individuality
The perplexing conjunction in anarchist theory of praise for freedom and use of an at least somewhat coercive censure has received varied explanations. To embarrassed friends of anarchism, such as George Woodcock, this conjunction is an oversight. ‘Anarchists accept much too uncritically the idea of an active public opinion.’ They ‘have given insufficient thought to the danger of... the frown of the man next door becoming as much a thing to fear as the sentence of the judge’. Had they looked more closely into censure, Woodcock here implies, they would never have endorsed it, because they would then have found it too appalling. Henri Arvon, more detached in his view of anarchists, explains their espousal of both freedom and public censure as a quirk. Anarchists are guilty of a ‘strange *gageure*’ in ‘wishing to maintain individual autonomy while also imposing social discipline’. And the acerbic Marxist George Plekhanov, as part of his campaign to discredit anarchists, finds that in seeking liberty while using censure they are ‘running away from an insurmountable logical difficulty’.[36]
These explanations for why anarchists espouse both liberty and a censure that is at least residually coercive, though plausible, are uninviting, because they impugn the integrity of anarchism as systematic thought. If any of them is valid, the conjunction by anarchists of praise for liberty with use of censure lacks theoretical support, for it cannot be warranted theoretically, as an oversight, a quirk, or a mistake. Before resorting to these discrediting explanations for the espousal by the anarchists of liberty and censure, the possibility of explaining it within the terms of their theory deserves to be explored. It is the thesis of this chapter that not freedom but community and individuality are the anarchists’ chief goals and that these goals require censure. In an anarchist society, where these goals are realized, liberty is necessary, to be sure, but so is censure. Censure and liberty, rather than being unreconcilable opposites, work as complements to merge the goals of anarchism into a single complex value, which it is apt to call communal individuality.
*** The normative status of individuality and community in Anarchist thought
Individuality as conceived by anarchists consists of traits of character that mark a well-developed self. Anarchists disagree about the marks of individuality and on whether it is generic or unique. For Godwin and Proudhon individuality is generically defined as traits of personality, such as rationality and emotional sensitivity, which are characteristic of all mankind.[37] Bakunin shares this generic view of individuality, but he also sometimes sees it as personally defined, in a way more fully articulated by Kropotkin, who describes it as ‘the full expansion... of what is original’ in men, ‘an infinite variety of capacities, temperaments and individual energies’.[38] The disagreement among anarchists concerning the particular marks of individuality means they do not all aim for the same specific kind. But since they all believe that individuality, however specified, involves growth of personality, there is no reason why, understood as self-development, it cannot be their aim.
The conceptions of community advanced by anarchists are just as various as their conceptions of individuality. For Godwin the model of a community is a conversation. For Proudhon and Bakunin it is a productive enterprise. Kropotkin’s model of a community embraces not only productive enterprises, but every kind of cooperative association. The differences among these varied models of community are telling and cannot be ignored. They provide a basis for the scheme worked out in the next chapter for classifying anarchism into types. But the differences in the anarchists’ conceptions of community must not obscure the similarities. Although the contexts in which anarchists see community as occurring are rather different, the relations they envisage among its members are much the same. Godwin describes the members of a community as engaged in a ‘free and unrestrained opening of the soul’, a ‘reading of each other’s minds’.[39] Each member of a Proudhonian community ‘recognizes his own self in that of others’.[40] I cannot participate in the community Bakunin seeks without finding ‘my personality reflected as if by numerous mirrors in the consciousness... of those who surround me’.[41] And the member of Kropotkin’s community is immersed in ‘the perception of his oneness with each human being’.[42] What these descriptions show about relations in an anarchist community is that they involve reciprocal awareness. Each member of such a community knows not only what the others think, but also that they know what he is thinking. Awareness in an anarchist community is reciprocal, because each understands his fellows as he understands himself.[43] Just as the theme of self-development unifies the anarchists’ various conceptions of individuality, so does the theme of reciprocal awareness unify their conceptions of community. It is just as impossible to claim that anarchists all seek a particular form of community as that they all seek a particular form of individuality. But since they share the belief that community involves reciprocal awareness, community conceived as such awareness can be their common goal.
Individuality and community, understood as self-development and reciprocal awareness, are not merely possible goals of anarchism. They, and not freedom, are the goals anarchists really seek. The easiest way to show this is by tracing the normative relationship in anarchist theory between individuality, community, and freedom. The warm praise that anarchists give freedom makes it seem their chief aim. But examination of their writings shows that they actually treat it as subordinate. Freedom is prized by anarchists more as a means to individuality and community than as a final end.
Godwin and Proudhon explicitly subordinate freedom to individuality. ‘To be free is a circumstance of little value’ for Godwin, ‘without the magnanimity, energy and firmness’, which he associates with individuality; ‘liberty is chiefly valuable as a means to procure and perpetuate this temper of mind’.[44] Freedom has the same subordinate place for Proudhon, since he too views it as an aid to self-development, rather than as an inherent good. ‘I have not made *liberty* my motto, because liberty is an indefinite, absorbing force that may be crushed.’ ‘The function of liberty is to carry the individual beyond all influences, appetites and laws ... to give him what might be called a supernatural character.’[45] Bakunin and Kropotkin are less explicit about the normative relationship between freedom and individuality, but they certainly suggest that freedom is subordinate. Thus Bakunin praises liberty for enabling man to become ‘his own creator’, and Kropotkin portrays it as an historical source of ‘individual originality’.[46] Neither says explicitly that individuality has more value. But by consigning freedom to the status of a means to individuality, they imply that it has lesser worth.
Freedom is also subordinated by the anarchists to community. Thus, although Proudhonian anarchy is to provide ‘all the liberty one could want’, it must also furnish ‘something more important than liberty: sincere and reciprocal enlightenment’.[47] Bakunin likewise warns against giving freedom in an anarchy too high a place. It must not usurp ‘the superior claim of solidarity, which is and will always remain the greatest source of social goods’.[48] And Kropotkin follows his predecessors in requiring that ‘the liberty of the individual’ in a state of anarchy ‘be limited by... the necessity, which everyone feels, of finding cooperation, support and sympathy among his neighbors’.[49]
Since individuality and community take precedence over freedom as the final destination of the anarchists, they cannot be called libertarians in the usual sense of seeking freedom above all else. While freedom might be maximized in their good society, this cannot be because such maximization is their main intention. But before investigating whether anarchists, despite their non-libertarian intention, maximize liberty nonetheless, an issue of internal coherence in their thought must be faced. By committing themselves equally to individuality and community, anarchists raise doubts whether their chief aims are consistent. For, lacking a principle to adjudicate between individuality and community, how can they judge situations where the courses these norms prescribe conflict?[50]
To meet this objection anarchists deny the possibility of conflict; they view each of their aims as dependent on the other for its full achievement. Bakunin, for example, thinks that ‘the infinite diversity of individuals is the very cause, the principal basis, of their solidarity’ and that solidarity serves in turn as ‘the mother of individuality’.[51] The other anarchists all more or less explicitly agree. For all of them communal awareness springs from developed individuality, and developed individuality depends in turn on a close-knit common life. For all of them, community and individuality, as they develop, intensify each other and coalesce.[52]
Anarchists do not merely assert that individuality and community are reinforcing; they give reasons for this claim. According to Godwin, individuality, in the form of mental independence, supports community by drawing people toward each other. It is ‘the grand fascination, by which we lay hold of the hearts of our neighbors’.[53] An intellectually independent person is more appealing than a person with conventional ideas. The attraction others feel for him moves them to learn what he is thinking and to reveal their own states of mind. In a society where individuality of Godwin’s sort is well developed, awareness is thus reciprocal, and community prevails. Bakunin, whose view of individuality is less generic than Godwin’s, offers a different reason why it supports community. Developed individuals, for Bakunin, are distinctive: each has some characteristic(s) the others lack. This diversity draws them into ‘a collective whole, in which each completes the others and has need of them’.[54] Being various in personality, developed individuals depend more on one another to satisfy their needs than do individuals with similar personalities. Their bonds of mutual dependence encourage developed individuals to explore each other’s character and thus to experience communal awareness. Proudhon and Kropotkin make the same case for how individuality supports community, by appealing to the attraction and dependence among developed individuals as reasons why their mutual awareness is so intense.[55] But Kropotkin also has a different argument. Among the marks of individuality that he mentions are ‘social inclinations and instincts of solidarity’.[56] Hence well-developed individuals, having sociable desires, are disposed toward communal existence. In the words of Marc Guyeau, admired by Kropotkin as ‘unconsciously anarchist’, such individuals ‘live too much to live alone’. They harbor ‘an expansive force, ever ready to break out of the narrow casing of the self’.[57]
The other side of the thesis that individuality and community are reinforcing is the claim that community supports individuality. Anarchists offer arguments for this aspect of their thesis too. One such argument, advanced by Kropotkin, is that reciprocal awareness is an element of individuality. Even so strong a personality as Goethe would have found that community enlarged his self. ‘He would have lost none of his great personal poetry or philosophy’, but he would ‘have gained ... a new aspect of the human genius. (Consider his joy in discovering mutual reliance!) His whole being and individuality having developed in this new direction ... another string would have been added to his lyre.’[58] If community would have added to Goethe’s personality, it can certainly add to selves of less developed persons.
In arguing for community as a support for individuality, anarchists claim it not only as a constituent of the self, but also as a cause of the self’s growth. Thus Godwin holds that the reciprocity of awareness in a community elicits mutual trust, and that this trust encourages the growth of intellect. Participants in a community are confident enough to ‘compare their ideas, suggest their doubts, examine their mutual difficulties’ openly, all of which improve their understanding.[59] The reciprocity of awareness among members of a community is also seen by Godwin as causing emotional development. ‘Emotions are scarcely ever thrilling and electrical, without something of social feeling.’[60] Since such feeling is intense in a community, it encourages emotional life to flourish.
The arguments of the anarchists for viewing individuality and community as reinforcing may suffice to rebut the objection that these goals must conflict. But it is one thing to show the consistency of the anarchists in seeking communal individuality, and another to show that they design their good society to achieve it. The main thesis of this chapter, which now must be defended, is that the anarchists’ commitment to communal individuality *requires* them to introduce into their good society the strange amalgam of censure and liberty that is so usually thought a scandal.
*** Liberty, censure and individuality
Though anarchists do not aim for liberty above all else, it is important to them as a means for reaching the goals they do seek. Liberty plays an especially important part for anarchists as a means to individuality. Several of them comment generally on how liberty fosters individuality, but Godwin best explains its utility for this purpose.[61] He points out that the intellectual independence associated by all anarchists with individuality requires freedom, being unachievable unless the thought and action of individuals are substantially unrestrained. Freedom is also needed to support the emotional element in individuality, which includes the capacity for strong and subtle feelings, and the will to express them. In an atmosphere of freedom ‘the more delicate affections ... have the time to expand themselves’.[62] Moreover, we then strongly desire to express these feelings, not only because they are powerful, but because our freedom makes their expression safe. ‘Our thoughts and words’, not ‘beset on every side with penalty and menace’, can be openly communicated.[63]
Freedom is not the only condition identified by anarchists as encouraging individuality. They also stress the need for public censure: to stimulate self-consciousness, to enrich personality, and to direct emotions into channels that are strengthening to the self. Godwin offers the clearest argument for the claim, upheld by several anarchists, that public censure, by stimulating self-consciousness, encourages individuality. ‘We have never a strong feeling’ for our traits of character, ‘except so far as they are confirmed to us by the suffrage of our neighbors’. If no one sets out deliberately to tell me what he thinks of my conduct, I will have a weak self-image, because our sense of self depends ‘upon the consent of other human understandings sanctioning the judgment of our own’.[64] Since I cannot be fully aware of myself as an individual without being subject to others’ deliberate judgment, and since such judgment, if unfavorable, amounts to censure, censure is indispensable for individuality. No one can know himself completely as an individual unless he feels it.
The second way that censure supports individuality for the anarchists is by providing a rich store of the thoughts and feelings that are the materials from which the self develops. Persons subject to public censure encounter ideas and emotions with a vividness that they would miss in isolation, or even in a society where spontaneous social influence, rather than censure, prevails. These ideas and emotions are a mental treasure which they can draw on to enrich their personalities.[65]
The final and most subtle of the anarchists’ arguments for the claim that censure encourages individuality concerns its effects on the emotions. Anarchists are anxious about the harm to self-development caused by uncontrolled emotions and believe that public censure can prevent it. A person unrestrained by social influence cannot be an individual, says Bakunin, because without its help ‘he cannot subordinate his instincts and die movements of his body to the direction of his mind’.[66] But social influence, whether spontaneous or deliberately applied as censure, is more than a restraint upon the passions, keeping them out of reason’s way. Anyone affected by it, according to Proudhon, ‘rids himself of his primitive savagery’, to be sure. But he also develops his individuality. ‘Without losing his animality, which he makes more delicate and beautiful, ... he raises himself from a passion-ridden to a moral condition; ... he enlarges his self, he augments and enlivens his faculties.’[67] Social influence and public censure are thus viewed by anarchists as helping us to cultivate our feelings. They help us grow as individuals by releasing us from the grip of confining emotions which they redirect into channels nourishing to an independent self.
By arguing that censure as well as liberty is needed for individuality, the anarchists require their good society to make use of both. This requirement would not restrict freedom in a state of anarchy if censure could sufficiently encourage individuality by giving reasons. But censure cannot support individuality in the ways envisioned by the anarchists by means of reasoned argument alone. It cannot stimulate self-consciousness in the persons it affects without sometimes rebuking, and thus coercively hindering, their conduct. It cannot enrich their personalities or cultivate their emotions without coercively permeating their minds. Since censure must issue penalties and be internalized in order to promote the anarchists’ kind of individuality, it is bound to diminish their kind of freedom. Censure curtails freedom in a state of anarchy in order to make individuality flourish.
*** Liberty, censure and community
Anarchists argue that censure must curtail liberty not only to maximize individuality, but also to maximize community. One way that censure supports community, in their view, is by opening the opportunity to enter other minds. Reciprocal awareness cannot occur among people who conceal their sentiments, because guarded minds are closed to public view. But since censure involves the frank disclosure of opinions, those who engage in it gain at least the chance for the access to one another’s consciousness on which the possibility of reciprocal consciousness depends.[68]
But even among people who express their sentiments, reciprocal awareness may be lacking, because they express them partially, or imprecisely, or because others misinterpret what they say. In none of these cases is their awareness mutual, because others understand them differently from the way they understand themselves. Accuracy in the disclosure and interpretation of thoughts and feelings is thus crucial to the anarchists for achieving their communitarian ideal. Public censure is one means they rely on to secure these kinds of accuracy.
Since persons who censure one another express their opinions with unusual candor, they are remarkably able to note discrepancies between their own words and thoughts. Their awareness of these discrepancies not only helps correct them: it also makes them difficult to maintain. For the only way knowingly to maintain a difference between what one thinks and what one says is by deliberate deception, which calls for ‘great mastery in the arts of ambiguity and evasion, and such a perfect command of countenance as shall prevent it from being an index to our real sentiments’.[69] Such deception is always difficult. In a society which practices censure it is virtually impossible, because each member of such a society is under others’ constant scrutiny. Nor is it likely that, in such a society, expressions of opinion will be misread. Since each can rely on others to communicate accurately, there is small need to interpret what they say. The confidence engendered among persons who treat each other honestly encourages community by making generally available an accurate expression of each individual’s sentiments.
As for how liberty contributes to community, anarchists see it as both an indirect support, encouraging traits of character which in turn aid mutual awareness, and as a direct support. Rationality is perhaps the most salient of the character traits beneficial to community which anarchists, using the usual liberal arguments for free expression, see as nurtured by freedom. Their argument for how liberty directly supports community is less familiar. No matter how forthright I may wish to be, I cannot enter into relations of mutual awareness if my thought or (communicative) action is too restrained. For, to the extent that they are impeded, I am kept from knowing others’ sentiments or expressing my own. Understanding this, anarchists value free expression not only as aiding rationality, but also on the ground, too often overlooked, that it opens the way to communal relations. Awareness tends to grow more mutual when people enjoy liberty to think and speak.[70]
But while anarchists see that freedom helps attain community, they also see that freedom, in order to help attain it, must be limited by censure. For if censure is to support community by opening minds and preventing deceit, it must interfere somewhat with freedom of expression. Thus the anarchists’ perplexing espousal of both censure and freedom is explained as much by their desire for community as by their desire for individuality. Censure, for the anarchists, can foster neither of these objectives unless conjoined with freedom; and freedom can only foster them when censure is imposed on it as a restraint.
*** How free is Anarchy?
Once it is recognized that the anarchists’ chief aim is communal individuality, the previously unsettled issue, whether anarchy or legal government is more liberating, can be resolved. For the fact that anarchists aim for communal individuality does more than explain why their good society makes use of censure: it also suggests how to measure, more accurately than before, how much this censure curtails freedom. In a full-fledged anarchist society, where communal individuality is complete, the censure needed to prevent misbehavior allows more freedom than legal government does, because individuality and community both reduce the need for censure that is coercive. It will be remembered that of the three ways in which anarchist censure controls behavior, only its sanctions and internalization coerce. Now the censure imposed in an anarchist society, while working partially through sanctions and internalization, can work for the most part through the noncoercive giving of reasons, because the individuality and community that characterize such a society make control by rational censure unusually effective.
All the anarchists defend some version of the thesis that a developed individual is more amenable to reasoned argument, and more cooperative, than a person whose individuality is weak. Godwin, for whom individuality consists mainly in ‘exercising the powers of ... understanding’, must believe that it opens us to the sway of reason.[71] What is less obvious is his belief that individuality fosters cooperation. A developed individual has ‘a generous consciousness of [his] independence’ which, far from isolating him, leads him to identify with others.[72] The later anarchists accept Godwin’s point about individuality being rational, but do not stress it, being more concerned to elaborate his hint that individuality stimulates cooperation. Proudhon, for instance, dwells on how a person’s concern for others deepens as he grows more individual. Individuality is a ‘feeling that overflows the self, and though intimate and immanent in our personality, seems to envelop it along with the personalities of all men’.[73] Kropotkin only elaborates on Proudhon when he describes the strong individual as ‘overflowing with emotional and intellectual energy’. If your self is well developed, ‘you will spread your intelligence, your love, your energy of action broadcast among others’.[74] Thus anarchist individuals, being unusually rational and cooperative, can be more readily controlled without coercion than persons whose individuality is weak.
The reciprocal awareness among the members of an anarchy, as well as their individuality, explains why reasoned argument so effectively controls their conduct. Where community is lacking, control must be more coercive because it is then more difficult to concert action voluntarily. Each person, unaware of others’ sentiments or of what they think of him, regards his neighbors with a distrust that provokes deception and kindles hatred.[75] But where awareness is reciprocal, ‘hatred would perish from a failure in its principal ingredient, the duplicity and impenetrableness of human actions’.[76] Reciprocity of consciousness elicits reciprocity of trust, which tends to develop into reciprocal benevolence.[77] The confidence and kindliness among members of an anarchist community encourage the same cooperative relations as their individuality. Being psychologically in touch with one another, participants in anarchy can regulate their conduct less with sanctions or internalization and more with reasons, than persons unconnected by communal ties.
Having examined the implications of the anarchists’ objectives for the amount and type of censure in their regime, we can settle the issue left open in the previous chapter of whether anarchy or legal government is more liberating. The conclusion of that chapter was that anarchy is more liberating, if its censure is rational enough to compensate for the main sources of its greater coercion: the unpredictability of its sanctions and the interference of its internalization with thought. Now the burden of the analysis presented in this chapter is that the communal individuality which pervades anarchy diminishes the need to control behavior with unpredictable sanctions and internalized thought control. By engendering mutual trust, cooperative attitudes and susceptibility to arguments, it enables censure to achieve what little regulation of behavior is required mainly by giving reasons. Thus the individualizing communality of anarchist society makes it markedly freer than legal government, whose remote officials coerce more harshly with general, permanent laws.
This conclusion might be contested on the ground that legal government is perfectly compatible with individuality and community. Since these are the attributes that make anarchy more libertarian, a legal government that has them must be just as free.
If communal individuality under legal government could be as great as under anarchy, the claim that anarchy is more liberating might be false. But legal government suffers from disabilities which arrest communal individuality’s growth. For one thing, it uses physical sanctions which, so far as they arouse more hostility and resentment than the psychological sanctions used by anarchy, impede the development of communal individuality more.[78] The characterizing traits of legal government compound the difficulty of developing communal individuality in its jurisdiction. The remoteness of its officials and the permanence and generality of its controls cause it to treat its subjects as abstract strangers. Such treatment is the very opposite of the personal friendly treatment under which communal individuality best grows.
But it would be unfair to rest the case for the greater freedom of an anarchy on a comparison between a fully developed anarchist society and a deficient legal government. If the anarchist is allowed an ideal setting in which to test the coerciveness of censure, then law must be put to the test in an equally well-developed legal society, where strong individuality, harmonious communality and great amenability to reason also reign. It is because communal individuality is so complete in an ideal anarchy that it can rely on reasoned argument to the near exclusion of coercive internalization and rebuke. Why could not the law, in a similarly ideal legal society, replace physical coercion with reasoned argument to a similar extent?
If the control exercised by legal government was not incurably remote, permanent and general, perhaps it could do this. Its remoteness can certainly be appreciably diminished by increasing the proportion of officials to subjects and by bringing both groups into close contact. But since even officials who are intimate with their subjects must, in a legal government, control with laws, they are simply unable to enter very far into particularized face-to-face discussion with their subjects concerning the merit of specific acts. Legal government, to the extent that it gives reasons for obedience, addresses them to the merit of following its fixed, general rules. It argues that its dissenting subject, even if he deems a particular legally prescribed act harmful, should do it nonetheless, because of the value derived from its general performance. Since legal government is prevented by the inescapable generality and permanence of its controls from taking as much advantage as anarchy can of the potential offered by communal individuality for diminishing coercion through the giving of specific reasons, we must conclude that even when the two are compared on equally ideal grounds, anarchist society must be deemed more free.
Though the standard interpretation of the anarchists as libertarians is mistaken, it properly calls attention to the importance of freedom in their model of a good society. Where this interpretation goes wrong is in explaining freedom’s importance for the anarchists as arising from its status as their chief value. The analysis of anarchist theory presented in this chapter shows how to make viewing it as libertarian acceptable. Though anarchists provide more freedom in their good society than legal government (the most promising alternative) provides, they do not set out to do so. They provide it, not as a pre-eminent good, but as a concomitant of the communal individuality that is their first concern. So long as freedom is recognized as being, for anarchists, a valued by-product of their search for communal individuality, there is no harm in describing them as libertarians. For their libertarianism then stands forth in its true light, as a libertarianism not of direct intention, but of oblique effect. Those who have followed William Proby in denouncing anarchists as freedom’s secret enemies have been misguided, but not because freedom is the anarchists’ most cherished good. Viewing anarchists as single-minded devotees of freedom is also erroneous. Anarchists are certainly not enemies of freedom, but their friendship is mediated and indirect.
This chapter has provided a general analysis of how anarchists think individuality and community are related. We have found their arguments persuasive for the claim that in an anarchy the reinforcing merger of these values maximizes freedom. But no general analysis can establish concretely how community and individuality merge for anarchists, because each anarchist would merge them somewhat differently. Hence the concreteness of anarchist theory, which, it will be remembered, is where it exceeds Marx’s in promise, can only be appreciated through investigating the particular anarchists’ diverse conceptions of this merger. Since each anarchist’s conception is a modulated application of a general theory which all share, examining these conceptions will further clarify the structure of their thought. Learning how anarchists differ in their plans for communal individuality will give a more accurate grasp of their entire project.
[36] George Woodcock, <em>Anarchism</em> (New York, 1962), pp. 84–5; Henri Arvon, <em>L’anarchisme</em> (Paris, 1968), p. 77; George Plekhanov, <em>Anarchism and Socialism</em>(Minneapolis, n.d.), pp. 51–2.
[37] Godwin, <em>Enquiry Concerning Political Justice</em> (Toronto, 1946), II, 500; Proudhon, <em>De la Justice dans la Revolution et dans l’Eglise</em> (Paris, 1930–5). HI, 253.
[38] Kropotkin, <em>Revolutionary Pamphlets</em> (New York, 1968), pp. 141, 123.
[39] Godwin, <em>Thoughts on Man</em> (New York, 1969), p. 310.
[40] Proudhon, <em>Justice</em>, I, 414.
[41] Bakunin, <em>OEuvres</em> (Paris, 1895–1913), V, 321–2.
[42] Kropotkin, <em>Mutual Aid</em> (New York, 1925), p. 222.
[43] Cf. Robert Paul Wolff, <em>The Poverty of Liberalism</em> (Boston, 1968), pp. 180–5.
[44] Godwin, <em>Political Justice</em>, I, 258–9.
[45] Proudhon, <em>Correspondance</em> (Paris, 1874–5), XI, 301 (30 December 1861); Proudhon, <em>Justice</em>, III, 411.
[46] Bakunin, <em>OEuvres</em>, III, 353; Kropotkin, <em>Pamphlets</em>, pp. 139, 167.
[47] Proudhon, <em>De la capacite politique des classes ouvrieres</em> (Paris, 1924), p. 155.
[48] Bakunin, <em>OEuvres</em>, V, 149; cf. V, 187, where Bakunin says that independence which endangers solidarity is undesirable.
[49] Kropodcin, <em>Pamphlets</em>, p. 63. Evidence that anarchists subordinate freedom to individuality and community does not prove unmistakably that the latter are their coequal overriding aims. They might rank others still higher. But since they do not say they do, since freedom is so often presumed to be their chief goal, and since they consider individuality and community to have greater worth, it is reasonable to say that they give them first place.
[50] The problem of resolving the conflict, so troubling to anarchists, between “the claims of individuality and community is a version of the general problem in moral philosophy of how to relate the claims of the self to the claims of others. The anarchists’ position on how to reconcile individuality and community might therefore be an alternative to more familiar views such as utilitarianism or Kantianism of how the conflict between self and others should be resolved. Examined from this perspective, which is not that of this book, anarchism might have value as a theory of ethics.
[51] Bakunin, <em>OEuvres</em>, V, 150, 159; cf. IV, 385.
[52] Godwin, <em>Political Justice</em>, II, 486; Proudhon, <em>Justice</em>, I, 304–5, 421, III, 253, IV, 302, <em>Capacite</em>, p. 222; Kropotkin, <em>Pamphlets</em>, pp. 5, 96, 141; Kropotkin, <em>Selected Writings on Anarchism and Revolution</em>, ed. Martin Miller (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), p. 297.
[53] Godwin, <em>Political Justice</em>, I, 356.
[54] Bakunin, <em>OEuvres</em>, V, 150; cf. Proudhon, <em>Justice</em>, IV, 264.
[55] Proudhon, <em>Justice</em>, III, 253; Kropotkin, <em>Selected Writings</em>, p. 297.
[56] Kropotkin, <em>La science moderne et l’anarchie</em> (Paris, 1913), p. 332.
[57] Marc Guyeau, <em>Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation ni sanction</em> (Paris, 1893), pp. 96, 98. See Kropotkin, <em>Pamphlets</em>, p. 108, for Kropotkin’s judgment on Guyeau.
[58] Deny Novak, ‘Une lettre inedite de Pierre Kropotkine a Max Nettlau’, <em>International Review of Social History</em>, 9 (1964), p. 274.
[59] Godwin, <em>Political Justice</em>, II, 295; cf., II, 505.
[60] Ibid., I, 311; cf. Kropoddn, <em>Pamphlets</em>, p. 96.
[61] Bakunin, <em>OEuvres</em>, III, 235, 253, IV, 248; Proudhon, <em>Justice</em>, III, 253; Godwin, <em>Political Justice</em>, II, 409.
[62] Godwin, <em>Political Justice</em>, II, 486.
[63] Ibid., II, 216.
[64] Ibid., I, 329–30; cf. Proudhon, <em>Justice</em>, IV, 366; Bakunin, <em>Oeuvres</em>, I, 181, 277, V, 321. I would still have some self-image since, as indicated earlier (cf. ch. 1, p. 16), spontaneous social pressure, not deliberate censure, suffices to create a self.
[65] Proudhon, ‘Cours d’economie politique’, 1–12(4) unpublished manuscript. Reference to the page number is assigned to the manuscript by Pierre Haubtmann in his unpublished thesis ‘La philosophic sociale de Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’ (Faculte des lettres et des sciences humaines de Paris, 1961); Bakunin, <em>OEuvres</em>, I, 290.
[66] Bakunin, <em>Oeuvres</em>, I, 278.
[67] Proudhon, ‘Cours’, 1–7(6). It must be admitted that this part of their argument fails to show that individuality is best supported by deliberate censure as contrasted with spontaneous social pressure.
[68] Godwin, <em>Political Justice</em>, II, 273–4; Kropotkin, <em>Pamphlets</em>, p. 137.
[69] Godwin, <em>Political Justice</em>, I, 340.
[70] Ibid., II, 497.
[71] Ibid., II, 500.
[72] Ibid., I, 137.
[73] Proudhon, <em>Justice</em>, III, 175, cf. I, 316, 395, 423, IV, 264.
[74] Kropotkin, <em>Pamphlets</em>, p. 109.
[75] Godwin, <em>Political Justice</em>, I, 333; Kropotkin, <em>Pamphlet</em>s, p. 140.
[76] Godwin, <em>Political Justice</em>, I, 335.
[77] Kropotkin, <em>Pamphlets</em>, pp. 53, 95.
[78] Godwin, <em>Political Justice</em>, I, 179–80, II, 340–1, 374; Proudhon, <em>Justice</em>, IV, 371.
** 3. Varieties of Anarchy
The anarchists’ case for freedom would be flimsy if their way of maximizing individuality and community was only abstract. But they do more than show why abstract individuality and community are reinforcing. Each seeks a concrete individuality and community with mutual relations of a distinct type. Each traces the character of these relations, rejoicing in those that unite individuality and community, worrying about those that cause them to conflict. Finally, to relieve this worry, each anarchist introduces a mediating agent, a cohesive social attitude, to bind individuality and community firmly so that conflict between them is decreased. The elements of anarchy that most affect how well it nurtures freedom are thus the characters of its individuality, of its community and of the attitude it uses to encourage their accord.
There is disagreement among anarchists about the kind of individuality and community a well-ordered society creates. For the early anarchists, above all Godwin, community involves mainly rational awareness, and individuality has generic traits. For later anarchists, especially Kropotkin, communal ties are more emotional, and individuality lies less in what a person shares with others than in what makes him unique. Along with these shifts in the anarchists’ conception of individuality and community go changes in the attitude they use to make individuality and community coalesce. Godwin relies on sincerity; Proudhon and Bakunin on respect; Kropotkin uses mutual benevolence. These differences among anarchists give their visions of a good society distinctive character. Godwin’s anarchy, with its generic individuality, rational community and mediating sincerity, is like a thoughtful, candid conversation. For Proudhon and Bakunin, who favor somewhat more particular, emotional forms of individuality and community, and who mediate their conflicts with respect, anarchy resembles life among collaborators in a productive enterprise. Kropotkin’s anarchy, which uses mutual benevolence to mediate between a highly personal individuality and a community marked by strong affective ties, is like an extended group of friendly neighbors.
Though characterizing anarchy as conversation, enterprise or neighborhood gives only a rough classification of types, it captures enough of the diversity within anarchism to make its expository use worthwhile. Seeing the types of anarchy as like one or another of these social patterns brings out salient differences, while confirming that all take the same ideal of communal individuality as their lodestar.
*** Godwin: Anarchy as conversation
An individual, for Godwin, must be mentally independent, in the sense that he grounds his beliefs and actions on his own assessment of their merits. If others determine his acts or opinions for him, he is not an individual, because then his mind and theirs are indistinguishable. ‘Following the train of his disquisitions and exercising the power of his understanding’ makes a man an individual by differentiating him mentally from other people.[79] The mark of the Godwinian individual is thus generic reason. One finds individuality by sharing with others the capacity of the human species for independent thought.
Two misconceptions about Godwinian individuality must be set aside before its relation to community can be accurately assessed. For one thing, Godwin’s emphatically rational individuality seems to be opposed to emotions. Not only does Godwin exclude emotions from the marks of individuality, he also sees them as a threat. To maintain individuality requires repressed feelings. We must resist the desire to ‘indulge in the gratifications and cultivate the feelings of man’ lest, resigning ourselves ‘wholly to sympathy and imitation’, we become intellectually dependent.[80] But Godwin’s hostility to emotions is not absolute. Without ‘the genuine emotions of the heart’ we are ‘the mere shadows of men, ... destitute of substance and soul’.[81] An emotionless person, though logically able to be an individual, will not become one. Feelings which encourage independent thinking are thus valued aids to individuality. Godwin wants to direct emotions, not expunge them.
There is also some apparent basis in Godwin’s individuality for seeing it as endangered by community. The best evidence for this view is his attack on cooperation ‘for imprisoning ... the operation of our own mind’. How can Godwin think community aids individuals when he calls even the cooperation among actors and musicians ‘absurd and vicious’?[82] Once one grasps that he attacks cooperation so far as it weakens individuals, and not as being bound to weaken them, his view of its effect on individuality is revealed to be nuanced. Concerts and dramas threaten individuals because they require ‘formal repetition of other men’s ideas’.[83] But cooperation encouraging to mental independence deserves praise. The opposition to community that Godwin’s individuality provokes also leads to giving community qualified support.
The kind of community that Godwin sanctions occurs among participants in conversation. He admits that conversation, as a species of cooperation, involves ‘one or the other party always yielding to have his ideas guided by the other’.[84] But conversers, unlike actors or musicians, suffer no interference when they cooperate with the independence of their minds. In fact, conversation serves individuality because the remarks of other parties, rather than imprisoning one’s thoughts and feelings, help them grow. ‘Conversation accustoms us to hear a variety of sentiments, obliges us to exercise patience and attention, and gives freedom and elasticity to our disquisitions.‘[85] Not only does conversation encourage mental independence: by exposing us to new ideas, it gives that independence wider scope.
To explain better how conversation serves individuals, Godwin likens it to a mirror. Just as a mirror helps me know my physical identity, so conversation helps me know my mental self. Through his reactions to my statements, an interlocutor reflects them, so that I understand them better than I could alone. My firmer grasp of my expressed opinions helps me criticize them, so as to increase the independence of my thought.[86]
By comparing conversation to a mirror, Godwin clarifies his thesis that it creates individuals, but he also calls his thesis into doubt. For the figure of a mirror is most used by analysts to account for social emulation. When Rousseau explained conflict and conformity as arising from our desire to shine in others’ eyes, he equipped social theory with a helpful tool, perhaps used most aptly by C. H. Cooley, in his discussion of the ‘looking-glass self’. Cooley sees even more clearly than Rousseau that a man’s socially reflected image, far from helping him become an independent thinker, makes him a copy of those with whom he interacts. The character of social men is so ‘largely caught up from the persons they are with’ that they always ‘share the judgements of the other mind’.[87] How can Godwin think conversation favors individuality, when, as a form of interaction, it creates a social self?
It is in answering this question that Godwin calls attention to the individualizing aspects of sincerity, which for him consists in ‘telling every man the truth, regardless of the dictates of worldly prudence and custom’.[88] He readily admits the harm for mental independence of conversation that is insincere. Since an insincere converser hides his sentiments, he cannot serve others as a mirror in which to reflect and clarify their ideas. He serves them as a mirror, to be sure, but one which, like Cooley’s, is apt to reflect social expectations and so discourages the development of independent thought. To make matters worse, insincerity is contagious. When one converser hides his sentiments, so do the rest. And when none are candid, all benefit of conversation for individuality is lost. ‘Reserve, deceitfulness and an artful exhibition of ourselves take from the human form its soul and leave us the unanimated semblance of what man might have been, of what he would have been, were not every impulse of the mind thus stunted and destroyed.’[89]
By tracing the harm of conversation for self-development to insincerity, rather than to the character of interaction, Godwin avoids concluding with sociologists like Cooley that conversation must cramp the self. So long as my interlocutor is deceptive, Godwin argues, he cannot help me be an individual. For I will conceal my thoughts from someone who may mock them secretly. But if he speaks sincerely, I have no need to hide my sentiments from fear. I will express them fully, thereby achieving mental independence, because his sincere response to my statements helps me more than a dishonest response does to evaluate them for myself.[90]
The sincerity of Godwinian conversation not only helps it create individuals, it also helps tie these individuals together. All conversation is to some degree communal because participants, having close, egalitarian relations, must be somewhat conscious of one another’s minds. But where sincerity is lacking, notes Godwin, obstacles to mutual awareness arise. Insincerity, by fostering deceit among conversers, makes each eye the other ‘as if he expected to receive from him a secret wound’.[91] By arousing uncertainty about how others view their thoughts, it produces ‘zeal for proselytism and impatience of contradiction’.[92] And by masking character it breeds permissiveness and calumny. ‘The basest hypocrite passes through life with applause; and the purest character is loaded with unmerited aspersions.’[93] Sincere conversers, on the other hand, being free of the suspicion, fear and hatred that insincerity excites, and hence less separated by practices like proselytism or libel, are better able to unite as a community. Furthermore, they seek communal contacts, for candor and forthrightness elicit their attention and make them eager to know one another’s minds.[94]
How sincerity unites conversers in community is neatly captured by the figure of a mirror. One mark of a community is awareness that the other members know my thoughts. Only if they reflect my thinking can I have this awareness, for otherwise I lack the evidence on which it must be based. Now sincerity, by making individuals transparent, might seem to keep them from reflecting anything whatever, including other minds. For how can a transparent surface be a mirror? But what sincerity does, says Godwin, is strip off the social mask which obstructs communication so as to expose rational identity, the only kind one can rely on to reflect another self. It is thus precisely because sincerity makes us transparent on the surface that it lays bare the inner mirror which creates communal ties. Freed of the social pretenses that mask their rational selves, sincere conversers reflect the thoughts of others faithfully, so that mutual awareness grows intense.
The merit of Godwin’s reliance on sincere conversation, in which all participants disclose their true beliefs, to mediate between community and individuality turns on the answers to three questions: Is sincerity achievable? Is it effective as a mediator? Is it a valuable social trait?
The most radical argument for rejecting Godwin’s sincerity as unachievable, made familiar by the French moralists, claims that the self-watching it requires is self-defeating. Godwin’s sincerity is a consciously willed condition, reached by watching and changing one’s state of mind. Now this sort of deliberate self-observation interferes with the candor it is intended to achieve. The sentiments of one who tries to be sincere are disingenuous because they are transformed by being watched into ‘a cerebral invention, a kind of posturing’.[95]
This objection to sincerity counts heavily against those versions which emphasize ingenuous emotions. But Godwin’s version is more rational. Sincerity for him requires full disclosure of opinions and beliefs, so far as they result from rational deliberation; but emotions, being significant above all as deliberative aids, may sometimes be legitimately concealed.[96] The very self-watching which complicates the search for emotional sincerity thus helps achieve the more rational Godwinian kind. For while self-watching harms the spontaneity of feelings, it helps give a reasoned grounding to beliefs.
Godwin cannot so easily escape other arguments for calling sincerity unreachable which deny the possibility of candid thought. Perhaps the most interesting of these arguments points to the effect of sincerity on shadowy or tentative ideas. Instead of disclosing ideas which are uncertain, sincerity distorts them by making them seem too firm and definite. It is self-defeating because it exposes secret thoughts to too much light.[97]
To this objection Godwin can respond in the same way as to the first one: by pointing out how limited his sincerity is in scope.
Not all our thoughts need be revealed for us to share Godwinian sincerity. What it requires is disclosure of rational beliefs. Since sincerity for Godwin applies to rational beliefs, whose clarity permits their accurate disclosure, rather than to tentative or secret thoughts, which when disclosed become distorted, it is narrow enough in scope to be achievable.
A final ground for calling sincerity unreachable, more modest than the foregoing, claims not that it is self-defeating but that, owing to discrepancies between thought and expression, it cannot be entirely achieved. No method of communication transmits even rational beliefs with perfect accuracy, since they are too numerous for all to be expressed. Furthermore, our gestures, speech and writing use standardized conventions, which schematize communicated thought. Rational beliefs defy exposure, because our power to express them is too weak.[98]
While admitting the force of this objection, Godwin regards it as innocuous, so far as his reliance on sincerity to mediate between individuals and their community is concerned. Such mediation is accomplished best by that sincerity which supports reciprocal awareness and independent thought the most. Perfect sincerity, which for Godwin means disclosing all rational beliefs, is not well suited for such mediating, since individuality and community are sometimes damaged by too much disclosure of even reasoned thought. If I withhold or temper my reasoned finding that an interlocutor is a fool, I diminish my sincerity but help reach the end it is meant to serve. ‘Sincerity is only a means.’ ‘The man who thinks only how to preserve his sincerity is a glaringly imperfect character’.[99] Since Godwin does not seek complete sincerity, he can easily accept the argument that it must be incomplete.
Even if sincerity is reachable to the extent that Godwin hopes, it still would fail to serve him as a mediator unless it helps create communally related individuals. Thoughtful examiners of sincerity have usually denied that it can do this. Nietzsche was not the last to warn against sincerity as intrusive to the self. He sees self-development as a secret process, involving ‘delicate decisions’. An individual is ‘a concealed one, who instinctively uses speech for silence and withholding... and encourages a mask of himself to wander about in the hearts and minds of his friends’.[100] For Santayana, as for Nietzsche, individuals need masks, though less to guard the self than to define its character. In assuming a visage, ‘we encourage ourselves eloquently to be what we are...We wrap ourselves gracefully in the mantle of our inalienable part.’[101] These themes are now standard among observers of sincerity, who routinely note how masks protect and shape the self.[102]
If sincerity harms individuals, it indirectly harms Godwinian community which has individuals for components. But writers on sincerity also find it harms community by directly blocking mutual awareness. Andre Gide, for instance, thinks sincerity ‘can only concern those who have nothing to say’. Sincere ones, says Gide, are so absorbed by introspection that they can’t communicate.[103] George Simmel sees sincerity as impeding mutual awareness by making others less attractive. ‘Portions even of the persons closest to us must be offered us in the form of indistinctness and unclarity, in order for their attractiveness to keep on the same high level.’[104]
To meet these objections to his reliance on sincerity as a mediator, Godwin can appeal again to the rational character of the individuality and community he uses sincerity to help reach. It is our ability to develop and share delicate emotions, transient perceptions, elusive intimations that is most threatened by stark frankness. Sincerity is less harmful to the more solid and permanent — because rationally grounded — sentiments that define and unite Godwinian individuals. Nevertheless, sincerity might plausibly be charged with harming even Godwin’s communal individuality, were it not for the conversational context in which it occurs. The objections to sincerity just considered all take as their context the existing social order with its opaque impersonality. There indeed ‘complete openness would encounter misunderstanding, inability to forgive, limited tolerance for differences’. It might even be ‘the greatest threat to civilized social life’.[105] But the close, egalitarian connections among participants in conversation dispel the mistrust that makes achieving communal individuality through frank disclosure difficult. The conversational context of Godwin’s good society works in tandem with its rationality to help sincerity join its members in community.
The final question which affects the merit of sincere conversation, as Godwin uses it, is its value as a social trait. For sincerity, though attainable and an effective mediator between individuality and community, still might cause outweighing harm. The harm that sincerity can be most plausibly charged with causing is to privacy. When sincerity is practiced, privacy declines, because the barriers between myself and others, which keep them from observing me, are breached. To the extent, then, that privacy has value, sincerity is suspect.
Statements can be found in Godwin which suggest he answers this objection by denying that privacy has worth. For he berates ‘the solitary anchorite’ as parasitical, and his ideal society would be one whose member ‘had no hopes in concealment [and] saw at every turn that the eye of the world was upon him’.[106] But Godwin does not oppose all forms of privacy, just those based on indifference or reserve. If I escape observation because others are uncaring, or because I hide my thoughts, Godwin does think privacy lacks value. But if my privacy results from solitude or discretion, as when I withdraw from interaction or count on others not to probe or spy, then for Godwin my privacy has worth.[107]
By drawing this distinction, Godwin enables himself to assure candor, while also protecting private life. As conversationalists, the members of his anarchy are open and sincere because they care about each other and disclose their beliefs. But they also have a private life, being discreet in conversation and at home in solitude. The sincerity of frank disclosure is thus limited in Godwin’s anarchy by barriers of discretion and islands of seclusion to save privacy.
Godwinian sincerity emerges from this survey of objections as defensible in the role assigned to it. Being limited in scope by its rational character, in range of application by its conversational context, and in operation by its respect for privacy, it is an appropriate mediator between the commensurately limited self-development and reciprocal awareness it is designed to help secure. For Godwin’s successors, however, who seek a more extensive communal individuality, sincerity has too many traps to be their mediator. They need a substitute that melds the more particularized individuals they search for into the more embracing community it is their purpose to achieve.
*** Proudhon and Bakunin: Anarchy as a productive enterprise
The close agreement between Proudhon and Bakunin concerning individuality, community and how to mediate between them justifies considering their plans for anarchy together. Certainly their plans have differences, but Bakunin, an avowed disciple of Proudhon, agrees with him on basic points of social structure.
Rationality marks developed individuals as much for Proudhon and Bakunin as for Godwin.[108] Where they differ from their predecessor in their view of individuality is in finding other signs of the developed self. Emotional vitality, which merely aids self-development for Godwin, is one such sign.[109] Another is the capacity for productive work, in which Proudhon and Bakunin see such individualizing qualities as ‘bodily strength, manual dexterity, mental quickness, intellectual energy, pride in having overcome difficulties, mastered nature, acquired knowledge, gained independence’.[110]
By identifying three aspects of individuality rather than one, as Godwin had, Proudhon and Bakunin give their vision of self-development more richness, but they also make it harder to achieve. For it is surely harder to be rational, emotional and productive, than to be rational alone. One way they meet this problem is by arguing that productive work aids rationality, being its major source. Through making things, we test beliefs and discover facts. Hence one whose individuality is productive is more apt to engage in reasoned thought.[111]
To show that the emotional element of individuality can be achieved together with its productive and rational elements, Proudhon and Bakunin use a different argument. Rather than viewing emotionality as arising from one of the other aspects of individuality, they claim that, though its source is independent, it has to develop, for individuality as a whole to be complete. ‘The mind is troubled’, writes Proudhon, ‘if any one faculty tries to usurp power.’ ‘The opposition of faculties, their mutual reaction, is the source of mental equilibrium.’[112] Unless emotions have the strength to counter the mind’s rational and productive tendencies, none will reach complete development. The individuality sought by Proudhon and Bakunin thus differs from the kind that Godwin seeks, not only in having several elements, but in requiring that these elements be balanced.
Proudhon and Bakunin reject Godwin’s rational community for the same reason as they reject his rational individuality. A sharing of considered beliefs among intimate conversers is too narrow a form of mutual awareness for these later anarchists who seek community, like individuality, not only in the realm of intellect, but also in emotional and productive life. To achieve a wider and more varied consciousness, Proudhon and Bakunin envision anarchist society as composed of numerous productive enterprises, equal in power but diverse in kind, distinguished by their differentiated functions, related by negotiated bargains, and united by reciprocal dependence.[113]
A society organized as Proudhon and Bakunin wish would do something to create the multi-faceted individuality and community they use it to help reach. Being composed of enterprises which supply goods and services, it would foster awareness among its members of their concerns as producers, while developing their capacities for productive work.[114] It also would support rational individuality and community, to the extent that the productive activity it required encouraged the expression of independent thought. Only the emotional aspect of the individuality and community Proudhon and Bakunin seek would be unlikely, in their society, to be nourished much. Some shared emotional warmth could be expected from the team-work and cooperation occurring there, but feelings develop best in the intimate surroundings which Proudhon’s and Bakunin’s large, functionally differentiated society lacks.
The largeness and complexity of their good society also arrest growth of the rational and productive aspects of their envisioned community and self. Godwin had secured rational individuality and community partly by making society small and simple, so that its closely related members achieved mutual trust. Such trust, and the rationality it engenders, is harder to establish in Proud-hon’s or Bakunin’s anarchy because its members, divided by their roles and ranks in complicated enterprises, and separated from participation in other enterprises by the rivalry that bargaining evokes, find it difficult to gain one another’s confidence. Nor can productive consciousness and ability easily flourish in such enterprises, even though they are devoted to productive work. For the divided labor and managerial supervision they need for their success make activity in them so routine and servile that it does not foster productive power or awareness much.
Proudhon and Bakunin try to win support in their society for the rational and productive elements of community and self partly by the way they organize education. Both see education as an immunizer, which protects aspiring producers from the dividing and debilitating effects of work, through the methods of what Proudhon calls polytechnical apprenticeship. These methods consist first in ‘having the neophyte producer carry out the entire series of industrial operations, moving from the simplest to the most difficult, however specialized’, and second, in ‘having him derive from these operations the principles that apply to each of them’.[115] Education thus organized serves individuality by making work more comprehensible. Since each producer who receives a polytechnical education learns the underlying theory of his work and knows from practical experience how his job relates to the rest, he sees the point of doing it, grasps its place in a larger whole and finds that far from sapping his rational and productive powers, it gives them added strength. His education also strengthens his involvement in productive and rational community by solidifying contacts with fellow workers. Producers who have taken turns performing others’ work, and who share an understanding of its basic principles, are so closely attuned in attitude and outlook that they are not much separated by function or rank. Under anarchy, despite divided labor and managerial control, ‘social communion [and] human solidarity are not vain words’ because producers are held together ‘by the memory of early struggles [and] the unity of their work’.[116]
The trouble with polytechnical education is its temporary benefits. Once completed, it no longer directly helps producers to relate as reciprocally conscious individuals. To extend its benefits to workers who have completed this initiation Proudhon and Bakunin propose to organize an anarchist economy so that producers in every industry, no matter how experienced, continue to work in turn at all the jobs their industry creates. Workers would also be encouraged to develop their skills and increase their knowledge by taking jobs in different industries. The only producers who would devote themselves to a single kind of work would be those who, on the basis of long experience, found that the positions they preferred to fill were fixed.[117]
The main difference between Proudhon’s and Bakunin’s way of developing community and self is in how they would organize the family. Bakunin seeks diverse and open families; Proudhon wants them to be uniform and enclosed. To give diversity and openness to children’s family life Bakunin would weaken the hold of parents by forbidding the inheritance of wealth and would bring them under non-parental influence by charging society with their education.[118] Domestic openness and diversity would be provided for adults partly by leaving sexual unions untrammelled, ‘neither violence, nor passion, nor rights previously surrendered’ justifying regulation, and partly by making the care of children by their parents optional.[119]
The family Proudhon favors is more enclosed than Bakunin’s, being organized as a permanent, monogamous household, in which inheritance is allowed. Its dominant figure is the father, who directs the lives of his children and his wife. The mother, ‘fatally subordinate’ to her husband, is charged with child-care and housework. Children, as the household’s passive members, owe ‘familial piety’ and unqualified obedience to both parents.[120]
Bakunin’s envisioned family is less of a remedy than Proudhon’s for the inadequacies of their productive scheme as a support for community and self. These inadequacies, already noted, include a grave inability to nourish the emotional aspect of communal individuality and a substantial weakness, only in part corrected by polytechnical education and variety of work, as a source of the mutual trust needed to promote communal individuality in the rational and productive realms of life. Bakunin’s family is unsuited for removing these inadequacies because it offers nothing more than do his economic and educational plans to overcome them. Encouraging the same mobility, diversity and rivalry in the domestic sphere as it encourages in productive life, his family, resembling an industrial enterprise, is no richer in warmth or trust.
Proudhon’s family is better at providing warmth and confidence because its members, holding fixed positions in a hierarchy, are less troubled by the uncertainties that Bakunin’s varied, egalitarian domestic life provokes. Emotional awareness and reciprocal trust are further strengthened in Proudhon’s family by ties of devotion and love. The father certainly controls his wife and children, but to sustain and protect them, whether he profits thereby or not.[121] The mother shows her familial devotion by caring-for the household and giving emotional support. She, no more than the father, considers the merits or achievements of needy relatives in deciding how to be of help. This ‘sister of charity’ gives her husband and children more than they deserve. ‘Defeated or condemned, it is at her breast that [they] find consolation and forgiveness.’[122] It is thus the ascriptive character of domestic roles and the confidence and devotion it can be expected to evoke that make Proudhon’s family more suitable than Bakunin’s for developing the emotional and rational aspects of community and self. Producers in both theorists’ anarchy are stymied to about the same extent in their search for self-development and mutual awareness. But while Bakunin’s producers have nowhere to turn for their missing individuality and community, Proudhon’s can turn to their families. There, in a stable, loving atmosphere, quite different from the volatile complexity of productive life, they find some, at least, of their needed trust and warmth.[123]
The educational and industrial organization that Proudhon and Bakunin back, even fortified by Proudhon’s way of organizing families, gives insufficient help to individuals and community, as both anarchists admit. For producers remain at least somewhat estranged and stunted by supervised, divided work and separated by the conflict that bargaining among enterprises excites. To rid anarchy for good of these nagging defects, Proudhon and Bakunin suggest connecting its members with bonds of respect.
To respect another, for both writers, is to cherish him for what he, as an individual, is — an emotional, productive creature, responsible for his acts because able to choose them according to reasons. Thus conceived, respect has attitudinal and practical requirements. As an attitude, it enjoins care for the other person’s sentiments and choices, empathizing with them, accepting them as one’s own. As a practice, it calls for helping the other develop his thoughts and feelings, make his decisions and perform his chosen acts.[124]
Respect so understood provides the mediation between self-development and mutual awareness that Proudhon and Bakunin need, for by requiring care and nurture for what others think, feel and make, it supports the rational, emotional and productive elements in communal individuality. Mention of some ways Proudhon and Bakunin think respect gives this support will help clarify how it serves them as a mediator.
Two threats to communal individuality which respect easily defeats are force and fraud. When I coerce another or tell him lies, I weaken his identity and his consciousness of others as having rational, emotional and creative capabilities by manipulating or ignoring his power to think, feel or produce.[125] Since respect requires care for attributes of individuality that force and fraud negate, these cannot occur among its practitioners. The only way to affect another that accords him full respect is, after considering his plans and sentiments from his point of view, to offer arguments and evidence which convince him they are wrong. Such treatment is unqualifiedly respectful, because, while recognizing the capacities of those it affects to think, feel and make as they see fit, it helps them, within the limits of this recognition, to give these capacities added strength.
Proudhon and Bakunin can be criticized for proposing to mediate between individuality and community with respect, for though respect is a more effective mediator than Godwinian sincerity, and though its value as a social trait is less open to doubt, it is no less difficult to achieve. Even in Proudhon’s or Bakunin’s anarchy, producers would be baffled in trying to respect each other, because respect’s requirements often are ambivalent. To respect another, I must help him perform his chosen act. But what if his act is one which, because it harms rational, emotional, or creative capabilities, is disrespectful? Respect urges me to reason with him, hoping to change his mind, but if my arguments are unavailing, however I treat him involves disrespect. For whether I help or hinder his attempt to carry out his action, I diminish the capabilities for which respect enjoins support.
To the charge that the sincerity he sought could not be achieved in full, Godwin had replied that since the individuality and community between which it had to mediate were limited, it could- be incomplete. Proudhon and Bakunin cannot give such a reply to the charge that complete respect lies beyond reach, because their more complex individuality and community need mediation by a widely disseminated and fully applied respect. Since respect is both more needed and less attainable in Proudhon’s or Bakunin’s anarchy than sincerity is in Godwin’s, theirs is harder to establish. But the point at issue here is unaffected by this drawback. Though Proudhon and Bakunin would have difficulty establishing anarchy with respect, respect is an appropriate mediator between the individuality and community they seek. Their anarchy is more complicated than Godwin’s and harder to achieve, but like his its crux is a cohesive attitude which communally unites developed selves. Proudhon’s and Bakunin’s anarchy is thus fundamentally like Godwin’s, because its organizing principle is the same.
*** Kropotkin: Anarchy as an extended neighborhood
More than his predecessors, Kropotkin consciously extends the anarchist tradition, by scrutinizing and developing its earlier forms. One part of his revisionary effort is criticism of respect, both in its own right and as a mediator.
Respect had seemed a worthy attitude to Proudhon and Bakunin, because it fostered mutual consideration without what Proudhon called ‘solidarite genante’.[126] Respect puts an upper limit on the help that one must give. For I may go so far in helping you to think, choose or act that your dependence on me impairs your capabilities. Since respect is breached by excessive intervention, I must be careful not to give you too much help.[127]
While acknowledging the value of an attitude of respect, Kropotkin finds it too niggardly to serve as a mediating attitude for anarchy. ‘Something grander, more lovely, more vigorous... must perpetually find a place in life.’[128] The fear of harming capabilities which a respectful person feels makes his intervention too inhibited. Anarchy requires outgoing relationships. It needs ‘large natures, overflowing with tenderness, with intelligence, with good will, and using their feeling, their intellect, their active force in the service of the human race without asking anything in return’. In short, it needs benevolence.[129]
Since Proudhon used benevolence to unite members of the family, one might suppose that Kropotkin, developing the anarchist tradition, extends domestic devotion to society at large. This belief is incorrect, because for Kropotkin and Proudhon benevolence is different. Benevolence for Proudhon is owed only to persons who, as members of a family, are social intimates. Kropotkin thinks it is owed to anyone in need, even complete strangers.[130] Kropotkin’s benevolence is also more egalitarian and mutual. Whereas benevolence in Proudhon’s family is owed by parents to children, who are not expected to be benevolent in turn, it is owed in Kropotkin’s society by each to all. No hint of the ‘charity which bears a character of inspiration from above’ is found in the benevolence Kropotkin seeks.[131] His is marked by a generous reciprocity that makes us one with each other, sharing and equal. That is why he often calls it mutual aid.
Kropotkin chooses benevolence rather than respect as the mediating attitude of anarchy not just because he finds it generous, but because he thinks its generosity better fits it to nurture his kind of self. There is more to Kropotkin’s individuality than reasoning, emotions and productive force. It also includes ‘inventive spirit’, ‘the full...expansion of what is original’ in man, ‘an infinite variety of capacities, temperaments and individual energies’.[132] The search for this sort of creative individuality is a dangerous adventure, which respectful (or sincere) treatment gives me little help to face. But if the treatment I receive from others is inspired by benevolence, my chance to become a creative individual grows. I can then rely on others to help me when in need, just because I am their fellow and regardless of defeats. Knowing they will support me should I fail in my quest gives me courage to seek uniqueness and creativity in the face even of great risk. Guyeau, notes Kropotkin, had posed the ultimate problem of creative originality by his reminder that ‘sometimes to flower is to die’.[133] Anarchist benevolence solves even this grave problem by making-the risk of the creative quest acceptable. A cruel end may await the seeker of individuality, but he is prepared by Kropotkin’s anarchy even for death. ‘ If he must die like the flower that blooms, never mind. The sap rises, if sap there be.’[134]
Community, like individuality, has distinctive traits for Kropotkin, which make achieving it through benevolence appropriate. Proudhon and Bakunin gave anarchist community an emotional dimension and widened it to include productive work. Kropotkin further enlarges the anarchist conception of community by bringing more activities and a new feeling within its scope.
Reciprocal awareness among members of Kropotkin’s anarchy occurs at every phase of life, in consuming as well as producing economic goods, in non-economic activities such as ‘study, enjoyment, amusements’, and in ‘the narrow circle of home and friends’.[135] It is thus more pervasive in his society than in his predecessors’. Reciprocal awareness for Kropotkin is also richer than for them, because it includes, besides the rational, emotional and productive consciousness they mention, the feeling of solidarity they deem suspect. Since the awareness that I know you have and that you know I experience often arises in Kropotkin’s anarchy from a sense of ‘what any being feels when it is made to suffer’,[136] it includes the sympathy for others’ plight that Proudhon and Bakunin mistrust and that the fragmented production they make the source of reciprocal emotion does little to promote.
It is easy to see why an attitude of benevolence is a source of reciprocal solidarity. A benevolent person gives overt sympathy to anyone he encounters who needs help. Hence each member of a society in which benevolence is practiced cares for the others, knows they care for him and knows they know he cares. Benevolence is also an appropriate supporting attitude for the pervasive community Kropotkin seeks. Unlike sincerity, which is limited in application to intimate contexts such as conversation, or respect, which for Proudhon and Bakunin mainly affects treatment in productive life, benevolence, with its bearing on all activities, helps make all of social life communal.
It is partly because Kropotkin’s community is so rich and pervasive that his anarchy can be likened to an extended neighborhood. Relations in small neighborhoods are apt to be benevolent and solidaristic in just the way Kropotkin envisages for anarchy. What he can therefore be conceived as doing is extending the neighborly relations which arise in contiguous small groups to the context of society at large. This interpretation of Kropotkin’s enterprise is confirmed by his view of anarchy’s social structure. For, like his predecessors, he thinks communal individuality unreachable if based only on a mediating attitude, and tries to organize society so that it gives communal individuality structural support. The social arrangement, called an agro-industrial commune, that he relies on for this purpose combines elements of earlier schemes of anarchist organization with new features designed to overcome their shortcomings and which make social relations neighborly.
The agro-industrial commune provides the same comprehensive education and the same occupational mobility as Proudhon’s and Bakunin’s anarchy, for Kropotkin agrees that by giving an industrial society these attributes self-development and mutual awareness can be markedly increased. Proudhon and Bakunin had judged their educational and occupational arrangements to be powerful, if insufficient, as a social basis for their communal individuality. Kropotkin, striving for a communal individuality more elusive, because at once more particular and more solidaristic, cannot rely as much on occupational mobility and education for its achievement.
To provide the greater warmth and trust that his neighborly communal individuality demands, Kropotkin returns to Godwin’s use of intimacy. But whereas Godwin had conceived of intimacy as occurring within the ‘small and friendly circles’ of a simple anarchy, Kropotkin extends it to a society that is larger and more complex. The main way he does this is by requiring that all activities, but especially production, be carried out in small, internally unspecialized units. The more intimate relations in such units and their less differentiated roles make them superior as a basis for solidaristic trust to the large, impersonal and internally specialized units of which Proudhon’s and Bakunin’s anarchy is composed.
To encourage the individual uniqueness, which is the other distinctive aspect of his ideal, Kropotkin puts even more stress than his immediate predecessors had on social diversity. It is ‘the highest development of voluntary association in all its aspects, in all possible degrees, for all imaginable aims; ever changing, ever modified associations which... constantly assume new forms’ that enables the members of Kropotkin’s anarchy to become singular.[137] For among the varied units in Kropotkin’s good society, each finds those that help him to develop a unique self.
One must doubt that benevolence, even in the context of an extended neighborhood, could mediate acceptably between the particularistic individuals and the solidaristic community that are the crucial elements of Kropotkin’s ideal. More than his predecessors’, the goal of Kropotkin’s anarchy is discordant. Conflict between his unique individuals and their embracing community is more intense, and less controllable, than the conflict between the individuals and community earlier anarchists conceive. How can Kropotkin’s social order, however well contrived, keep his seekers of uniqueness, even though benevolent, from rending communal ties? How can it prevent these ties from stymieing the creative quest? So bold is Kropotkin in denning the anarchist project that he seems seriously to diminish its prospects for success.
The truth of this charge and its bearing on the merit of Kropotkin’s anarchism are crucial evaluative questions which the concluding chapter of this book takes up. But whatever the verdict on Kropotkin’s boldness in discordantly defining his ideal, it has clear significance for the theoretical unity of anarchism. Though Kropotkin’s ideal is more strife-ridden than his predecessors’ it is the same ideal of communal individuality. Its elements may clash more markedly and be harder to achieve together, but they cannot be achieved apart.
Kropotkin’s way of realizing his aspirations is further evidence of anarchism’s deep unity. Committed like his predecessors to self-development and mutual awareness, and believing in the interdependence of these goals, he too tries to reconcile them with a mediating attitude and encourages this attitude with structural support. That Kropotkin should try to realize his discordant ideal in so unpromising a way may seem surprising. But it testifies once again to the unity of anarchist thought. For if even Kropotkin chooses attitudinal mediation as the path to communal individuality, then not only this path’s destination, but the path itself must be one of anarchism’s distinctive traits.
[79] Godwin, <em>Enquiry Concerning Political Justice</em> (Toronto, 1946), II, 500; cf. I, 232, 236; II, 215, 497; Godwin, <em>The Enquirer</em> (New York, 1965), p. 77.
[80] Godwin, <em>Political Justice</em>, I, 500; cf. Godwin, <em>The Enquirer</em>, p. 344.
[81] Godwin, <em>Political Justice</em>, II, 280.
[82] Ibid., II, 504. For a restatement of the view that Godwin has no place ‘within the philosophy of the anarchist community’ see R. A. Nisbet, <em>The Social Philosophers</em> (New York, 1973), pp. 365–6.
[83] Godwin, <em>Political Justice</em>, II, 504.
[84] Ibid., II, 505.
[85] Ibid., I, 295; cf. Godwin, <em>Thoughts on Man</em> (New York, 1969), p. 310 and Godwin, <em>The Enquirer</em>, pp. vii-viii, where Godwin describes the liberating effects of his own conversations.
[86] Godwin, <em>The Enquirer</em>, p. 343; cf. Yvon Belaval, <em>Le souci de sincirite</em> (Paris, 1944), pp. 127–9.
[87] Charles Horton Cooley, <em>Human Nature and the Social Order</em> (New York, 1902), pp. 178, 153. Cooley admits that character need not depend immediately on interaction, but he denies that it depends on reasoned thought (pp. 205–7).
[88] Godwin, <em>Political Justice</em>, I, 328.
[89] Ibid.,1,335.
[90] Ibid., I, 327–8, 332. 336.
[91] Ibid., I, 333.
[92] Ibid., I, 330.
[93] Ibid., I, 330.
[94] Ibid., I, 296, 356.
[95] Stuart Hampshire, ‘Sincerity and Single-Mindedness’, in <em>Freedom of Mind and Other Essays</em> (Princeton, 1971), p. 234; cf. Jean Starobinski, <em>J.-J. Rousseau, La transparence et l’obstacle</em> (Paris, 1971), pp. 237–8, Belaval, <em>Sincerite</em>, pp. 55, 63.
[96] Godwin, <em>Political Justice</em>, I, 280, 294, 333–4, 340, Godwin, <em>The Enquirer</em>, p. 344.
[97] Belaval, <em>Sincirite</em>, pp. 134–5, z77-
[98] Ibid., p. 144, Starobinski, <em>J.-J. Rousseau</em>, p. 188, George Santayana, ‘The Comic Mask’, in <em>Soliloquies on England and Later Soliloquies</em> (New York, 1922), p. 135.
[99] Godwin, <em>The Enquirer</em>, pp. 341, 349; cf. Godwin, <em>Thoughts on Man</em>, pp. 301–4; Godwin, <em>Political Justice</em>, I, 348–9.
[100] Nietzsche, <em>Beyond Good and Evil</em> (Chicago, 1955), section 40.
[101] Santayana, <em>Soliloquies</em>, p. 133.
[102] Belaval, Sinchiti, p. 165; Lionel Trilling, <em>Sincerity and Authenticity</em> (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), p. 119; Paul A. Freund, ‘Privacy: One Concept or Many’, in J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapman (eds.), <em>Privacy</em> (New York, 1971), p. 195; John R. Silber, ‘Masks and Fig Leaves’, ibid., p. 233.
[103] Quoted in Belaval, <em>Sincerite</em>, p. 120.
[104] Kurt H. Wolff (ed.), <em>The Sociology of Georg Simmel</em> (New York, 1964), p. 329.
[105] Freund, ‘Privacy’, p. 195; Alan E. Westin, <em>Privacy and Freedom</em> (New York, 1967), p. 37.
[106] Godwin, <em>Political Justice</em>, I, 332, II, 275.
[107] Ibid., II, 505–6: To ‘the most perfect man... society is not a necessary of life but a luxury... He will resort with scarcely inferior eagerness to solitude; and will find in it the highest complacence and the purest delight.’ For evidence that Godwin values discretion as contrasted with reserve see Godwin, <em>The Enquirer</em>, p. 127.
[108] Proudhon, <em>De la Justice dans la Revolution et dans l’Eglise</em> (Paris, 1930–5), III, 253; Bakunin, <em>OEuvres</em> (Paris, 1895–1913), I, 101, 105.
[109] Bakunin, <em>OEuvres</em>, I, 221.
[110] Proudhon, <em>Justice</em>, III, 88; cf. Bakunin, <em>OEuvres</em>, I, 109–10, V, 204.
[111] Proudhon, Justice, III, 69–70; Bakunin, <em>OEuvres</em>, I, 109.
[112] Proudhon, Justice, III, 256; cf. I, 436.
[113] For a detailed analysis of Proudhon’s anarchist society see Alan Ritter, <em>The Political Thought of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon</em> (Princeton, 1969), pp. 126–34; a good text describing Bakunin’s social vision is in <em>OEuvres</em>, II, 297.
[114] Proudhon, <em>Justice</em>, III, 87–8; Bakunin, ‘Revolutionary Catechism’, in Sam Dolgoff (ed.), <em>Bakunin on Anarchy</em> (New York, 1971), pp. 89- 93.
[115] Proudhon, <em>Justice</em>, III, 86; for Bakunin’s description of ‘integral education’, which is very close to Proudhon’s polytechnical apprenticeship, see <em>OEuvres</em>, V, 136, 145, 156–7.
[116] Proudhon, <em>Justice</em>, III, 87–8.
[117] Ibid., Ill, 92–3. Though this description of an anarchist economy is based solely on what Proudhon writes, Bakunin agrees with it. He is less specific in his economic plans, but what he says, such as that no one may devote himself exclusively to manual or mental work {<em>OEuvres</em>, V, 126–8, I, 360), shows that he encourages communal individuality with the same practice of occupational mobility used by Proudhon.
[118] Bakunin, ‘Revolutionary Catechism’, in Dolgoff, <em>Bakunin on Anarchy</em>, p. 95.
[119] Ibid., p. 94, cf. <em>OEuvres</em>, I, 317.
[120] Proudhon, <em>Justice</em>, IV, 271, 283.
[121] Ibid., IV, 322.
[122] Ibid., IV, 274.
[123] That Proudhon finds much communal individuality in the family is shown by where he puts the figure of a mirror. It is a mother or wife who, ‘transparent and luminous, serves man as the mirror...in which to contemplate his character’ (<em>Justice</em>, IV, 266, 268). Bakunin follows Godwin in finding that members of society, not the family, best reflect the self (<em>OEuvres</em>, V, 321).
[124] Proudhon, <em>Justice</em>, I, 301, 418; Bakunin, <em>OEuvres</em>, I, 117, V, 309; cf. R. S. Downie and Elizabeth Telfer, <em>Respect for Persons</em> (New York, 1970), especially ch. 1, and Bernard Williams, ‘The Idea of Equality’, reprinted in Hugo A. Bedau (ed.), <em>Justice and Equality</em> (New York, 1971), especially pp. 123–4.
[125] Proudhon, <em>Justice</em>, I, 419.
[126] Proudhon, <em>Idee generate de la revolution au dix-neuvieme siecle</em> (Paris, 1923), p. 189.
[127] Proudhon, <em>Justice</em>, I, 417; cf. Downie and Telfer, <em>Respect</em>, pp. 21, 25.
[128] Kropotkin, <em>Revolutionary Pamphlets</em> (New York, 1968), p. 107; cf. p. 105 for Kropotkin’s acknowledgment of the value of respect.
[129] Ibid., p. 107; cf. Derry Novak, ‘Une lettre inedite de Pierre Kropotkine a Max Nettlau’, <em>International Review of Social History</em>, 9 (1964), p. 272.
[130] Kropotkin, <em>Mutual Aid</em> (New York, 1925), p. 205.
[131] Ibid., p. 211.
[132] Kropotkin, <em>Pamphlets</em>, pp. 109, 141, 123.
[133] Ibid., P -109.
[134] Ibid., p. 109.
[135] Ibid., pp. 139, 140, 108. It is important to note that though Kropotkin envisages community as occurring in both domestic and social life, he does not want it to be the same in both. He warns not to ‘take the family as a model’ for relations in larger, less intimate groups. ‘Communisme et anarchie’, in <em>La science moderne et l’anarchie</em> (Paris, 1913), p. 144, cf. p. 153.
[136] Kropotkin, <em>Pamphlets</em>, p. 95.
[137] Ibid., pp. 123–4.
** 4. The Anarchists as critics of established institutions
It is as critics of established institutions that anarchists receive the most acclaim. Even commentators who condemn their vision of future society find in their attack on the present one a certain appeal. For no matter how misguided the anarchists may be as visionaries, they point to defects in the existing order which tend to be overlooked.[138]
While the depth and penetration of the anarchists’ criticism have long been acknowledged, its coherence has remained in doubt. For if liberty is regarded as the goal they are seeking, their choice of what to criticize is bound to seem confused. Anarchists whose chief goal was liberty would subject everything that curtails it to unlimited attack. Yet they refrain from utterly condemning features of the existing system such as authority and punishment, which interfere with liberty, and even incorporate versions of these coercive institutions into their model of an ideal regime. The thesis which serves as the main theme of this study, ascribing communal individuality to anarchists as their ultimate goal, serves to dispel the impression of incoherence in their criticism by giving all of their objections to existing institutions a justified place. The nuances and qualifications in their attack on the established order, which otherwise seem aberrant, are revealed as enjoined by their chief value, once its true character is recognized. Seeing the anarchists as seekers of communal individuality brings out their theory’s coherence not only as a plan for social reconstruction, but also as a work of criticism.
Although each of the anarchists whose thought we are examining criticizes aspects of the existing social system that the others spare, all four agree that institutions usually taken for granted as integral parts of modern society deserve to be attacked. Legal government is, of course, the institution they most categorically condemn. Their opposition to authority, punishment and social inequality, while more limited, is just as intense. They all also find fault with industrial technology, though here their condemnation is remarkably nuanced. It is by analyzing their objections to these five institutions that the structure of their social criticism can most easily be revealed, for the anarchists use similar arguments, similarly qualified, to denounce all objects of their collective wrath.
*** Law, government and unanimous direct democracy
Since the anarchists’ view of legal government was examined in detail when it was compared with their view of censure no more is needed here as an account of their objections than a brief sketch. This section is less concerned to describe these objections than to clarify how far they extend. What it seeks to establish is whether anarchists call for the abolition of legal government no matter what its type, or whether, as some have thought, there is one type they accept.
It is of course as a hindrance to self-development and mutual awareness that anarchists condemn legal government. The generality and permanence of its controls, the remoteness of its officials and its use of physical coercion as its method of enforcement combine, say anarchists, to engender a distrust, resentment and impersonality that stifle individuals and break communal ties. Yet Robert Paul Wolff has argued that anarchists must accept one type of legal government as consistent with their conception of a good society. This is unanimous direct democracy.[139]
In a unanimous direct democracy everyone deliberates and votes on legislative proposals, and only those approved by everyone have force of law. One main reason Wolff thinks anarchists must support this form of government is because it dispenses with physical coercion. Since the subjects of other governments disapprove on occasion of following the law, they must sometimes be forced physically to do what it directs. But whenever the citizen of a unanimous direct democracy follows a law, he carries out an action which he personally approves. The esteem of all citizens for the laws they must obey makes sanctioning them with physical force unnecessary.
Even if anarchists endorsed government, provided it did not physically coerce, they still would reject unanimous direct democracy, because such a government, despite what Wolff says, resorts on occasion to physical force. A person who turns against enacted legislation is no less forced to comply with it by a unanimous direct democracy than by other governments. The fact that he once voted for a law he now opposes and that he can repeal it when it comes up for review does not exempt him from coercion for the period, however short, while it remains in effect. Nor are persons unable to get their legislative proposals enacted exempt from coercion, since they are forced by their government to do without the laws they want.
But let us suppose that a unanimous direct democracy *can* dispense with physical force. Even then it can have no place in a complete anarchy, for it has other features besides physical coercion that anarchists contest.
One is the deliberation through which the citizens of a unanimous direct democracy decide what laws to enact. It may seem surprising that the anarchists, who so prize personal deliberation, should oppose the collective deliberations of a unanimous direct democracy. They reach this conclusion by condemning the special kind of deliberation that occurs under such a government as lacking in rationality and hence in worth.
In a unanimous direct democracy all citizens deliberate as equals in the legislative assembly. Anarchists argue that the great size of an assembly in which everyone participates inhibits forthright communication, invites rhetorical pandering, and relieves citizens of personal responsibility for their decisions, all of which prevent the independent scrutiny of arguments and evidence on which rational deliberation rests. As Godwin complains, ‘A fallacious uniformity of opinion is produced, which no man espouses from conviction, but which carries all men along with a resistless tide.’[140]
Membership in a unanimous direct democracy could of course be limited so that the rationality of deliberation in the legislative assembly was not impaired by excessive size. But anarchists contend that deliberation, even in a unanimous direct democracy that is very small, remains pernicious. The fact that deliberation among legislators cannot always continue until a consensus is reached, but must often terminate with a vote, is enough to rob it of rationality. Where voting is used to end deliberation, says Godwin, ‘the orator no longer enquires after permanent conviction, but transitory effect. He seeks rather to take advantage of our prejudices than to enlighten our judgment. That which might otherwise have been a scene of patient and beneficent enquiry, is changed into wrangling, tumult and precipitation.’[141]
Requiring the vote which enacts legislation to be unanimous further diminishes deliberative rationality by discouraging dissent. Godwin points out that where, to use Proudhon’s words, ‘the assembly deliberates and votes like a single man’, ‘the happy varieties of sentiment, which so eminently contribute to intellectual acuteness, are lost’.[142] The deliberating citizens, sensing the need to legislate, tend much more than in a majoritarian democracy to vote for whatever proposal seems most apt to win.
Nor must it be forgotten that the point of deliberation in a unanimous direct democracy is to legislate. Hence unanimous direct democracy suffers from the same defects, except perhaps physical coercion, as anarchists find in law. To anarchists, the equality of participation in a unanimous direct democracy is only dangerous, for it cannot rid the law which the assembly enacts of permanence, or generality. And it poses a danger of its own. As legislators, the assembled citizens must view proposals disinterestedly, from the impartial standpoint of the social whole. They must, in Godwin’s words, ‘sink the personal existence of individuals in the existence of the community [and] make little account of the particular men of whom the society consists’.[143] An assembly composed of citizens as anonymous as these is certainly not an individualized community. Its members may be bound together, but not so as to advance their self-development. And it easily degenerates into what Bakunin calls ‘a sacrificer of living men,...where the real wills of individuals are annulled in that abstraction called the public will’. The diffusion in any democracy, but especially in a unanimous direct one, of a homogenizing spirit ‘restrains, mutilates and kills the humanity of its subjects so that in ceasing to be men they become nothing more than citizens’.[144]
There is one main objection to the conclusion to which this analysis points, that anarchists would abolish legal government of every type. Some anarchists support the use of legal government where the conditions are lacking for anarchism’s success. In such situations, they argue, legal government may be a necessary safeguard for domestic peace. Moreover, if it takes the form of a decentralized participative democracy, it may even advance the cause of anarchy through its educational effects. But the support of anarchists for legal government in adverse situations does not impugn the conclusion being defended here, which states only that in a mature anarchy legal government has no place. Since even unanimous direct democracy, which is the one form of government that anarchists might conceivably accept, receives their harsh strictures as repugnant to their ultimate ideal, they must certainly be regarded, despite the provisional support they give to legal government, as denying it any place whatever in an anarchist society that is complete.
*** Authority
Anarchists are often thought to hold that in their good society no one ought to exercise authority.[145] On this view, their opposition to authority is just as categorical as their opposition to the state. It is not only legal authority that receives their condemnation: they would abolish authority of <em>every</em> sort. There are statements by the anarchists that make them sound like authority’s unrelenting foes, but the textual evidence is ambiguous enough to justify giving their attitude a close look. Do anarchists reject authority altogether, or are there some types they support? If they do support some, on what ground does their backing rest?
Authority can be exercised over belief as well as conduct, and in the private realm of groups and families, as well as in the public, social realm of life. Analysis of the anarchists as critics of authority must focus on their view of its application to public conduct. Concentrating on this narrow issue brings out what is distinctive in their attitude toward authority, which is anything but original so far as it applies to belief or private conduct.[146]
Authority, as applied to conduct, is a way to secure compliance with a directive, distinguished by the ground on which the directive is obeyed. You exercise authority over my conduct if you issue me a directive, and I follow it because I believe that something about you, not the directive, makes compliance the proper course. This something about you that elicits my compliance is something I attribute either to your <em>position</em> or to your <em>person</em>. I may submit to your authority because I think your position (say as president) makes you an appropriate issuer of directives, or because I think you are personally equipped (perhaps by advanced training) to direct my acts with special competence.[147]
Although anarchists accept personal qualities as sometimes entitling an issuer of directives to authority over private conduct, they deny that it ever entitles him to authority over conduct in the public sphere. We all lack the competence to do many private things and may be entitled in such cases to follow the direction of experts.[148] But since public conduct lies ‘equally within the province of every human understanding’, the personal qualities of those who direct it give them no right to be obeyed. In acting publicly, ‘I am a deserter from the requisitions of duty, if I do not assiduously exert my faculties, or if I be found to act contrary to the conclusions they dictate, from deference to the opinions of another.’[149]
Though anarchists spurn personal qualities as a warrant for public authority, this does not mean that they would abolish public authority altogether. For they hold that under anarchy one still should sometimes obey issuers of directives that apply to public life out of regard for their position. The claim that they believe this faces several objections, which need to be rebutted before it can be effectively sustained.
What need to be considered first are statements by the anarchists which mock claims to public authority conferred by position. The clearest such statement is Godwin’s, where he asks why one should obey another ‘because he happens to be born to certain privileges; or because a concurrence of circumstances... has procured for him a share in the legislative or executive government of our country? Let him content himself with the obedience that is the result of force.’[150] Though this statement certainly condemns authority conferred by inherited or governmental position, it gives no basis for condemning positional authority altogether. That anarchists endorse authority in a state of anarchy, where its position can have different attributes, remains possible.
More troublesome as evidence against calling the anarchists supporters of positional authority is their repeated denunciation of authority in general. They must of course rule out authority conferred by position if they rule out authority of every type. This objection can be best allayed by noting that the anarchists’ use of the term, ‘authority’ is ambiguous. They often use it in the way described above, to designate a way to secure obedience based on an obeyer’s belief about the one he obeys. But they also use ‘authority’ in a different sense to mean obedience procured by the rightful threat or use of physical force. To say that when they denounce authority they are *always* using it in the latter sense might seem reckless, but this contention is well supported by the texts.[151] Since what anarchists are denouncing when they attack authority is legitimate physical coercion, that they give positional authority a place in anarchy remains possible.
There is one more ground to doubt that anarchists embrace positional authority — its incompatibility with action based on reasoned argument. Action, to be commendable for anarchists, must rest on arguments and evidence that the deliberating agent judges for himself. ‘The conviction of a man’s individual understanding is the only legitimate principle imposing on him the duty of adopting any species of conduct.’[152] Though anarchists do not systematically ask how authority affects the rational basis of action, this effect is easy to describe.
Whenever an authority issues a directive to a subject who concludes from his own assessment of arguments and evidence that the act the authority prescribes for him is wrong, the authority prevents him from following his conclusion. For a subject cannot obey an authority and also follow his own conclusion, when the courses prescribed by the authority and his conclusion conflict. Since all authority sometimes keeps its subjects from following their rationally based conclusions about the merit of the action it prescribes, and since anarchists think the basis of one’s action should be one’s own rational assessment of its merits, it would seem that they must exclude positional authority, as much as personal, from regulating public conduct under anarchy.
The weak point in this argument is its assumption that for anarchists the value of reasoned argument is always overriding. If anarchists believed this, then they would indeed lack any normative basis in their theory to justify authority. But they do not believe it. As earlier chapters of this study show, the value of reasoned argument, while great for anarchists, is less than ultimate. It is a means to, and a part of, communal individuality, but is not itself supreme. Hence the fact that authority sometimes prevents action from resting on reasons leaves open the issue whether it has a place in anarchy. To resolve that issue the relations among authority, communal individuality and reasoned argument must be explored.
In deciding on the scope of reasoned argument, the anarchists are guided by their commitment to communal individuality. They support reasoned argument so fat as they think it serves communal individuality, and they reject it so far as they think it causes communal individuality harm. The most obvious way reasoned argument harms communal individuality is by endangering social peace, as when it proves unable to ward off physical conflict. We have seen already that anarchists admit the frailty of reason and in cases of danger endorse controlling misbehavior with rebuke. What must now be added is that rebuke in a state of anarchy is a last resort. Against the insufficiency of reason and internalization to control misbehavior, authority is the anarchists’ first defense; rebuke plays the role of a back-up, only to be inflicted when obedience to authority fails. Thus Proudhon and Bakunin call on ‘opinion’ and ‘public spirit’, not only to control misbehavior directly, but as means to enforce authority’s decrees.[153] Godwin is more specific about how authority forestalls rebuke. When reason fails in a state of anarchy, most participants ‘readily yield to the expostulations of authority’. But sometimes an authority’s title to obedience is challenged. If the challengers disobey the authority, then and only then are they rebuked.’ Uneasy under the unequivocal disapprobation and observant eye of public judgment’, they are ‘inevitably obliged... either to reform or to emigrate.’[154]
The anarchists use authority, rather than rebuke, as the first defense against dangerous misconduct in order to protect communal individuality. Since rebuke, as the most coercive of censure’s three aspects, can cause communal individuality much damage, it is important to anarchists that its use be minimized. If it was the first defense against misconduct, it would have to be invoked whenever reasoned argument or internalization proved ineffective. But as a back-up to authority, it need be invoked only on the few occasions when authority fails. As for the harm caused to communal individuality by authority, anarchists argue that if the authority is positional and properly restrained, this harm is slight.
Requiring authority to be positional rather than personal diminishes the harm it causes communal individuality by giving rational deliberation a wider scope. When I obey a personal authority, I refrain from evaluating the merit of the action he prescribes. Believing that some personal quality, such as special knowledge or insight, gives him the competence I lack to direct my conduct, I obey him without inquiring whether what he bids me to do is right. This inquiry is allowed by positional authority; for my obedience to such an authority does not depend on my assuming the correctness of his prescribed act. Since I believe that I ought to obey him because he occupies an entitling position, whatever the merit of his directives, I am free to assess them fully, so long as I follow them if my verdict is adverse. It is obvious, from this comparison, that positional authority allows rational deliberation more scope than personal authority does. And since rational deliberation is an intimate part of the anarchist ideal of communal individuality, it is also obvious that by requiring authority to be conferred by position the anarchists give their ideal significant support.
Even though positional authority does less damage to communal individuality than personal authority does, it still does damage. For even it requires subjects to do what they judge wrong. To alleviate the threat to their ideal that even positional authority presents, anarchists place restraints on it, designed so that it interferes as little with deliberation as is consistent with the need to maintain domestic peace. The restraints anarchists suggest for doing this specify who may fill positions of authority and how authority must be exercised.
It is usually by holding a specially designated office that one gains title to positional authority. Anarchists oppose giving authority to holders of special office. Thus Proudhon would ‘eliminate the last shadow of authority from judges’, and Bakunin rejects ‘all privileged, licensed, official authority’. Rather than being confined to holders of designated offices, authority in an anarchy is, in Godwin’s words, ‘exercised by every individual over the actions of another’. All members of society must have a right to wield authority before its directives can deserve to be obeyed.[155]
To defend the legitimacy of authority exercised by all, anarchists rely on the comparison with legal government which they also use to defend censure. Wielders of authority who hold designated positions are like government officials in being too few to know the details of their subjects’ situations. Hence they must treat them as an undifferentiated group. Such treatment must often seem mistaken to the subjects, who, more familiar with their situations, are apt to conclude that circumstances unknown to the authorities make it wrong to act as they direct. But if everybody has authority, it can obstruct deliberation less because then its wielders, being the same people as its subjects, but in different roles, can have more intimate knowledge of particulars. Equipped with this knowledge, they can bring their directives and the deliberations of their subjects into closer accord.
Besides requiring that authority in a state of anarchy be shared by everyone, anarchists also insist that its directives be concrete, not bound by or embodied in general rules, but flexible and specific.[156] Their argument for concrete authority borrows again from their comparison between censure and legal government. Authority which issues general directives, like government which issues general laws, impedes deliberation, even if its wielders are very numerous, because general directives, applying to broad classes of action, and hence unable to adjust much to specific circumstances, are often opposed by subjects for failing to take these circumstances into account. An authority whose directives are particular, being more able to consider individual situations, can better avoid contradicting the deliberations of its subjects about the merit of its prescribed acts.
Two conclusions are unmistakable from the analysis in this section. It is clear, for one thing, that, contrary to prevalent opinion and to what may be their own denials, anarchists give public- authority a place in their good society. The authority they favor is extraordinarily limited, to be sure, but it is still authority, for it is a way to control behavior based on the subject’s belief that something about the issuer of a directive gives him a right to be obeyed. The other noteworthy conclusion emerging from this analysis is that the anarchists’ commitment to communal individuality easily explains both why they denounce most forms of authority and why they endorse their own distinctive type. Aware that authority obstructs rational deliberation, they fear it as a threat to their ideal. Unwilling to rely on reasoned argument alone as a behavioral control, they refuse to dispense with authority altogether. It is as an attempt to resolve the dilemma posed by these considerations that anarchists endorse the limited authority this section has described.
*** Punishment
If one uses nothing but the anarchists’ explicit judgments as evidence of their attitude toward punishment, one must conclude that they condemn it unequivocally, for they denounce it with extraordinary force. Godwin, for instance, proclaims that ‘punishment can at no time... make part of any political system that is built on the principles of reason’, and Proudhon calls for the ‘complete abolition of the supposed right to punish, which is nothing but the emphatic violation of an individual’s dignity’.[157] This section argues for counting anarchists as punishment’s supporters, despite statements like the foregoing in which they sound like unrelenting foes. Anarchists harshly oppose most forms of punishment, but they give a place in anarchy to one special kind. Their attacks on punishment are misread if taken as signs of utter condemnation.
There are three standard ways of justifying punishment: as retribution for the offender, as a means of reform by weakening his desire to misbehave, or, through the fear evoked by his suffering, to deter him from repeating, and others from committing, crimes. Godwin, who may here be taken as spokesman for all anarchists, opposes each of these justifications of punishment for warranting too many bad effects. Retribution is easily disposed of in this way since it fails to consider effects at all. Punishment is justified by retributivists because it is deserved, regardless of its consequences, which thus may cause considerable harm. Arguments for deterrence and reform, being based on consequences, need more elaborate rebuttal. Godwin weighs the likely effects of punishing for these reasons and finds that on balance they are bad.
It is the physical coercion imposed by punishment that Godwin sees as the source of its worst effects. Being coercive, punishment arouses fear in those it threatens. They are apt to do as they are told because they dread the suffering that might result from disobedience, rather than because they think what they are told to do is right. Obeying for this reason seems disastrous to Godwin, as to all anarchists, for whom the basis of self-development and communal solidarity lies in independent thought. ‘Coercion first annihilates the understanding of the subject on which it is exercised, and then of him who employs it. Dressed in the supine prerogatives of a master, he is excused from cultivating the faculties of a man.’[158]
No matter how severe the bad effects of punishment may be, they cannot by themselves defeat the case for reform and deterrence, which claims that the bad effects are outweighed by the good. Thus Godwin must show not only that punishment is costly, but that its reformative and deterrent benefits are less valuable or less certain than they seem. The main benefit of reformative punishment is to weaken the desire to misbehave by evoking contrition and remorse. Godwin argues that the coercion punishment imposes prevents it from achieving this result. It ‘cannot convince, cannot conciliate, but on the contrary alienates the mind of him against whom it is employed’.[159] Far from weakening criminal inclinations, punishment strengthens them, by making its victims resentful, not contrite. Reformative punishment thus fails to achieve its intended benefit because those subject to it become more anti-social than they were before. A similar argument is applied by Godwin to deterrent punishment, which is intended to reduce misconduct by overpowering criminal impulses with fear. Deterrent punishment can certainly make its victim more fearful of committing crime, but since it also arouses his hostility, it does not make him less likely to misbehave. Nor does the example of his punishment frighten others into eschewing crime. The spectacle of his suffering only makes them indignant, and more inclined to misbehave.[160]
By vigorously denouncing retribution, deterrence and reform, the anarchists certainly give the appearance of being utterly opposed to punishment. How can they support it, when they oppose the three main arguments deployed on its behalf? They do so by relying on a different argument, which justifies rebuke as punishment to prevent offenders from committing further crimes.[161] Even under anarchy there remains some danger of misconduct, which authority sanctioned by rebuke prevents. Though anarchists do not call this rebuke punishment, it is easy to show that they should.
Following common usage, anarchists conceive of punishment as a special type of suffering. For one thing, it must be imposed for a misdeed. The putting to death of a man ‘infected with a pestilential disease’ does not fall ‘within the import of the word punishment’ because the victim of such treatment has done no wrong.[162] Furthermore, the suffering called punishment must be imposed by an authority. That is why anarchists refuse to count as punishment acts of vengeance or of force applied in self-defense.[163] Though no anarchist gives punishment an explicit definition, the evidence just presented shows how for them it is implicitly defined. Anarchists, like most thoughtful writers on penal matters, define punishment as suffering imposed by an authority on an offender for his offense.
This definition gives the basis to establish that anarchists must classify the rebuke which occurs in their good society as punishment. Authorities in a state of anarchy are certainly the only persons who impose rebuke; for since, as the previous section indicated, no one in an anarchy lacks authority, any member who imposes rebuke must have it. It is equally obvious that under anarchy rebuke falls only on offenders for their offenses, because an anarchist authority may only rebuke a disobedient subject for a wrong he has done. Since the rebuke anarchists favor has the characteristics they quite sensibly identify as punishment’s defining traits, calling it punishment seems a judgment they are forced to make.
They give two main arguments for refusing to make this judgment. Godwin refuses to make it by claiming that because rebuke controls without resort to ‘whips and chains’, it lacks the defining characteristic of punishment which consists in causing suffering.[164] The flaw in this argument is its assumption that the only kind of suffering is physical. Since the suffering rebuke causes, though purely mental, still is suffering, the anarchists, by justifying it, are justifying punishment.
Proudhon argues for denying that rebuke is punishment by claiming that under anarchy an obdurate offender, the only type who deserves rebuke, is not a human, but an animal: ‘He has fallen to the level of a brute with a human face.’[165] No punishment befalls such an offender, no matter how severe his rebuke, because he is an animal, and animals, unlike humans, cannot be punished. This argument would work if Proudhon called obdurate offenders animals on the ground that their criminal behavior was involuntary. For punishment applies only to persons who can choose to stop committing crimes. But Proudhon believes that the obdurate criminal acts voluntarily. This ‘ferocious soul’ has ‘placed himself outside the law’ and can obey it if he tries.[166] His animality arises not from irresponsibility but from viciousness. By tracing his animality to this source, Proudhon removes the ground for denying he is punished when rebuked. For while it is impossible to punish offenders whose involuntary behavior makes them animals, there is no logical bar to punishing offenders whose animality comes from being vicious. The suffering rebuke causes such offenders, being imposed on them by an authority for their voluntarily committed crimes, must be accounted punishment by anarchists.
It becomes easy to understand how anarchists justify punishment once one sees that they are backing it when they advocate rebuke. The punishment anarchists favor is distinguished from all others by both its method and its aim; and it is on proof that what distinguishes it from other sorts makes it superior that their justification rests. Anarchist punishment is distinctive in method because it works entirely through rebuke and not at all through physical force. This gives it the advantages, described in prior chapters, that anarchists find in rebuke, of which the most crucial in the present context are its comparative mildness and its lesser tendency to illicit resentment. Anarchist punishment is distinctive in aim because it is imposed for none of the three standard reasons, but only to prevent offenders from repeating their crimes. Imposing it for this purpose avoids much cruelty justified by the standard aims. Retribution calls for punishment, even if it will do harm. Deterrence requires savagery, if it will frighten its victim or other possible offenders into refraining from crime. Deterrence and reform both warrant causing the innocent to suffer, either as an example or as therapy. The freedom of prevention from these shortcomings makes it markedly less offensive as the aim of punishment.
The anarchists resort to punishment of a limited kind, despite serious misgivings, in an attempt to resolve a dilemma much like the one that leads them to endorse a limited authority. Unwilling to rely on authority as a last resort to prevent misconduct, even under anarchy, where criminal inclinations would, in Godwin’s words, ‘be almost unknown’, they insist on giving authority a penal sanction.[167] Fearful of the threat posed by this sanction to the integrity of their ideal, they hem it in with limitations designed to make its interference with communal individuality minimal. Thus punishment, like authority, far from being at odds with anarchy, is one of its integral parts.
*** Social inequality
Though anarchists are sometimes called radical egalitarians, against all differences of treatment, this view of them is even less persuasive than the view that they utterly reject authority and punishment.[168] Anarchist responses to the scourge of inequality are various, ranging from Godwin’s plea for little more than equal opportunity to Kropotkin’s scheme to redistribute advantages according to basic need. But since even Kropotkin’s egalitarianism allows differences in benefits, it, no less than the others, is less than radical. This section makes sense of anarchist views on inequality of wealth and prestige by showing how their similarities and differences derive from a shared ideal. The anarchists’ commitment to communal individuality confines their attacks on inequality to a limited range; differences in this commitment, along with special circumstances, explain why, within this range, each of their attacks has a separate place.
Godwin’s objections to social and economic inequality are so emphatic, that if one considered nothing else, one might think his egalitarianism radical. He regards the evils of legal government as ‘imbecil and impotent’ compared to the evils of unequally distributed prestige and wealth.[169] The latter not only obstruct communal individuality, but are a main cause of legal government. For they so disrupt men’s character and mutual relations that legal government must be imposed as a cohesive force. Social inequality for Godwin thus stands doubly condemned: both for impairing communal individuality by making it necessary to endure a state and for impairing communal individuality in its own right. It is by examining his account of the latter, direct impairment, that the main lines of his attack on inequality are easiest to grasp.
Predictably, he finds the harm done to character by economic inequality to lie in discouragement of rational independence. The poor, in an economically stratified society, even if they live comfortably, are burdened by a servility and by a compulsion to work, both of which ‘benumb their understandings’.[170] The rich fare no better. Their rational capacities are sapped either by ‘vanity and ostentation’, by ‘dissipation and indolence’ or by ‘restless ambition’.[171] Unequal prestige compounds the damage caused by unequal wealth. A society with ranks engenders deference and arrogance against which reason’s counsel is unable to compete.[172]
Godwin also shows how inequality shatters the conversational relations which are for him the substance of community. ‘The spirit of oppression, the spirit of servility, and the spirit of fraud’, which are ‘the immediate growth’ of economic differences, are ample to disrupt men’s unity as equals who honestly share their considered thoughts. The members of a society with economic differences too often harm their neighbors in order to get more wealth.[173] As for differences of rank, these, by making esteem depend on the prestige of one’s position, create the same disruptive struggle in social interaction as differences of wealth create in economic life.
Besides opposing economic inequality for harming communal individuality, Godwin also condemns it as unjust. To allow differences of income or wealth, even without poverty, is to grant ‘a patent for taking away from others the means of a happy and respectable existence’. It involves saying to the advantaged, ‘you shall have the essence of a hundred times more food than you can eat and a hundred times more clothes than you can wear’.[174] Here we see a theme in Godwin that his successors stress more: benefits must be allocated in proportion to need.
Yet though Godwin denounces inequality with remarkable vigor, he draws back from urging an equal distribution of prestige and wealth. ‘The treatment to which men are entitled is to be measured by their merits.’ ‘The thing really to be desired is the removing as much as possible of arbitrary distinctions, and leaving to talents and virtue the field of exertion unimpaired.’[175] Far from backing radical equality, Godwin here urges that benefits be distributed unequally, according to desert. Hierarchy, he implies, is perfectly acceptable, so long as its advantages are earned. The only equality he here seems to support is the equal opportunity to excel.
The disparity between Godwin’s attack on unequal treatment and his support for inequality proportionate to desert is explained by his beliefs about private property and distributive justice. He sees each of these as requiring an abatement of the radical egalitarianism that his attack on inequality would otherwise suggest.
Godwin believes that the rational individuality which equality helps produce is also much encouraged by private ownership. Rational individuals need a wide area of action in which to carry out their own decisions. The area of their discretionary action can be extended, and its boundaries secured, by making them property owners, conceived as allowed to use their holdings as they alone decide.[176] There is nothing in Godwin’s commitment to private ownership that requires him to reject complete economic equality. Equal wealth can coexist with private property, if each individual has the same amount. But Godwin believes that wealth is in fact always unequally distributed where private property is held.[177] It is this empirical belief that prevents him from pursuing the egalitarian possibility that private ownership allows.
His conception of distributive justice also prevents him from pursuing it. Godwin’s conception of distributive justice is a mixed one, which recognizes the claims of both productive contribution and basic need. The claim of need, we noted earlier, favors (though it does not mandate) radical egalitarianism by forbidding treatment that unequally meets the needs of life. Resources in a society governed by the claim of need are distributed unequally to be sure, but since the basic needs of individuals are similar, benefits to persons, in the form of need-satisfaction, are much the same.[178] The claim of contribution cuts against radical egalitarian-ism more sharply. Since the contributions of individuals vary more than their basic needs do, a society which rewards contribution not only allocates resources less equally than a society which rewards need, it also allocates personal benefits less equally. Thus Godwin’s acceptance of productive contribution as a legitimate claim of justice helps — along with his beliefs about the effects on rational individuality of private ownership — to explain why his opposition to inequality is less radical than his denunciations make it seem.
The ambivalence of Godwin about the merit of equality is expressed in his view of its place in anarchy. He provides the equality that he thinks communal individuality and the claim of need demand by establishing a floor of basic goods. Each member of his anarchy, regardless of desert, receives a sufficient and equal supply of life’s necessities.[179] The inequality that he thinks private ownership and the claim of contribution require is provided by the unequal distribution of luxuries and prestige. Once the claim of need is satisfied, the members of his anarchy receive economic benefits proportionate to ‘the produce of [their] own industry’, while esteem is meted out to them for ‘the acquisition of talent, or the practice of virtue, or the cultivation of some species of ingenuity, or the display of some generous and expansive sentiment’.[180]
Godwin’s successors are torn by the same conflicting considerations in their criticism of inequality. But, committed to more solidaristic conceptions of communal individuality, ownership and distributive justice, and having designed more egalitarian institutions, they come closer to supporting radical equality.
The objections to unequal wealth and prestige as bars to communal individuality, which Godwin was the first anarchist to raise, are repeated by all three of his successors. Where they differ from him is in gradually ridding anarchism of its anti-egalitarian, meritocratic elements. Proudhon retains some considerable commitment to private ownership and the claim of contribution, but these commitments are effaced in Bakunin’s work and gone almost entirely from Kropotkin’s. Thus, whereas Bakunin had still backed private ownership of goods used for consumption, though not production, and had proposed as the principle of economic distribution payment according to the number of hours worked, Kropotkin would have both consumption and production goods owned by the public and wants income to be distributed almost purely according to the claim of need.
As one argument for rejecting the claim of contribution and accepting that of need Kropotkin cites the technical difficulty of measuring how much any specific individual contributes to the value of economic goods. He takes the example of a coal mine and asks who among those involved in its operation adds most to the value of the coal. The miner, the engineer, the owner and many others, including those who built the railroads and machines that serve the mine, all contribute something to its final product, but it is impossible to say how much. ‘One thing remains, to put the *needs* above the *works*.’[181]
He uses a similar technical argument to undermine the claim to private ownership. The distinction between instruments of production and articles of consumption is impossible to draw. ‘For the worker, a room, properly heated and lighted, is as much an instrument of production as the tool or the machine.’ His food ‘is just as much a part of production as the fuel burnt by the steam engine’. His clothes ‘are as necessary to him as the hammer and the anvil’.[182] Hence property arrangements, which make ownership of the means of production public, while leaving articles of consumption in private hands, cannot be established. Both kinds of property must be either publicly or privately owned. Faced with these alternatives, Kropotkin has no doubt which anarchists will select. Exclusively private ownership is too divisive; hence completely public ownership must be their choice.
Behind his technical objections to private ownership and to paying producers according to their contribution lies Kropotkin’s more fundamental argument that these practices harm communal individuality. Even if particular contributions could be measured, even if private ownership of consumption but not production goods could be arranged, Kropotkin would still reject these practices as incompatible with the unique individuality and the solidaristic community it is his purpose to achieve. Both payment for contribution and private ownership encourage personal acquisition, the first by rewarding it, the second by assuring the acquirer exclusive use of whatever he obtains. These practices also encourage a book-keeping mentality, according to which one gives in order to get. Society becomes ‘a commercial company based on debit and credit’.[183] Acquirers who insist on equivalent exchange are unlikely to develop into benevolent, emotionally sensitive individuals, united by empathetic ties. Only by ‘producing and consuming without counting each individual’s contribution’ and by ‘proclaiming the right of all to wealth — whatever share they may have taken in producing it’, can the communal individuality Kropotkin seeks be reached.[184]
Why do his predecessors, most notably Godwin, disagree? Mainly because their conceptions of individuality and community are different. Their conceptions of individuality, being more rationalistic than Kropotkin’s, are more congenial to the separateness engendered by private property and by contribution as the criterion for pay. An independent thinker needs more protection from others than does a singular, emotionally developed self, for whom others’ acts are more apt to be encouragements than incursions. The concept of community shared by Kropotkin’s predecessors, being less solidaristic than his, helps further to explain why they disagree with him on the merit of the contribution standard and private property. The earlier anarchists are suspicious of solidarity as a danger to self-development. For Kropotkin, however, solidarity is one of the self’s parts. Hence the sympathetic ties that so frighten his predecessors, and which they use the contribution standard and private property to combat, are for him essential to community. Viewing solidarity in this light, Kropotkin can not only do without the contribution standard and private property but must consider them abhorrent.
Besides having a basis in theory for his more radical egalitarianism, Kropotkin also has one in projected practice. His plan for anarchy — the agro-industrial commune — differs from earlier plans by building all the activities that normally occur in a large, industrial society into numerous, diverse, but small and internally unspecialized units. In a society so organized, benefits can be more equally distributed than in one composed of the more internally specialized, larger and more uniform units envisaged by Proudhon or Bakunin.
Yet, though Kropotkin’s criticism of inequality is more sweeping than that of other anarchists, not even his is radically egalitarian. Radical egalitarianism, it will be recalled, is the thesis that everyone should be treated alike. There are at least two reasons why Kropotkin must reject it. His commitment to need as the criterion of distribution, while favoring movement toward radical egalitarianism, prevents him from accepting it completely, because needs cannot be satisfied without treating people differently. To satisfy the need for health, for instance, one must give more medical attention to the sick than to the well. The other reason why Kropotkin must reject radical egalitarianism stems from his conception of communal individuality. His conception, even more than that of the other anarchists, emphasizes a particularity which cannot possibly be achieved by treating everyone alike. Rather, it calls for individualized treatment, aimed at bringing out what in each person is singular.
Since even Kropotkin is kept by the fundamental principle of anarchism from radically condemning inequality, there must be a more accurate way to characterize his opposition. Calling Kropotkin, or any anarchist, a radical egalitarian is profoundly misleading, because it obscures a distinction in anarchist theory that is of great importance. Treating everyone alike ends two kinds of inequality which anarchists appraise differently. It not only eliminates the inequalities of rank, which all of them deplore, but wipes out the diversity that they regard as indispensable. What gives anarchist criticism of social inequality its special interest is that it focuses on hierarchy, not difference.[185] Each anarchist attempts, within limits set by his preconceptions, to diminish inequalities of rank while increasing those of kind. The hazards of this project explain why anarchist criticism of inequality is somewhat tentative. Since a richly differentiated society cannot be entirely free of ranks, it is no wonder that anarchists, though among the harshest critics of hierarchy, are still forced to put up with some.
*** Technology
Technology, for the anarchists, consists of the organization and machinery that transformed the productive process in their time. As modern industry developed, they grew more aware of how it undermined the social and psychological prerequisites for communal individuality. But even Godwin, who wrote when the industrial revolution was just starting, saw the main ways it threatens the advent of anarchy.
He, no less than his successors, believed that the division of labor, which was adopted by modern industry at an early stage, disrupts the intimate, fluid relations on which communal individuality so largely rests. He was also alarmed by mechanization, which, following on the heels of divided labor, separated skilled from unskilled workers, made unskilled labor even more routine, and put further barriers between ever more fragmented kinds of skilled work. Industrial technology is also feared by anarchists as a cause.of social hierarchy. Besides dividing producers by their occupations, it widens disparities of prestige and wealth. Proudhon’s image of industrial society, which well captures its inequality, is accepted by all anarchists. Such a society is like ‘a column of soldiers, who begin marching at the same time, to the regular beat of a drum, but who gradually lose the equal spacing between their ranks. They all advance, but the distance between the head and the foot of their column continuously grows; and it is a necessary effect of this movement that there are laggards and strays.’[186]
But what most concern anarchists about technology are its psychological effects. Both the occupational fragmentation and the inequality that industrial technology promotes are blamed by anarchists for causing insincerity, disrespect and malevolence, the exact opposites to anarchy’s mediating attitudes. The exhausting monotony of so much industrial labor is also feared by anarchists as psychologically dangerous. Armies of unskilled workers, who spend long days at repetitious, enervating tasks, have a stunted sensibility that makes the growth of empathic attitudes difficult.
Besides fearing technology’s social and psychological virulence, the later anarchists also dread its political effects. Proudhon’s apprehension was that the managerial authorities the new technology was creating would use their expertise to dominate their subordinates in the workplace. Bakunin anticipated something more ominous: that as technology became more complicated and more difficult to understand, and as each industry grew more dependent for its efficiency on its relations with the rest, technical managers would gain such political ascendency that everyone would fall under their control. What threatened was nothing less than ‘the reign of scientific intelligence, which is the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant and contemptuous of all regimes. A new class, a new hierarchy of real and fraudulent experts will arise; and the world will be divided into a minority, dominating in the name of science, and a vast majority, reduced to ignorance.’[187]
One might expect that since industrial technology so frightens anarchists, they would condemn it absolutely and in their good society would give it the smallest possible place. But they are far from being Luddites. Rather than campaigning to destroy technology, they seek to harness it, so that as it develops, it gives to communal individuality increasing support. Their verdict on technology as compared to the other institutions they qualifiedly condemn is thus more positive. Whereas they resign themselves to some authority, punishment and hierarchy as necessary evils, they welcome industrial technology as an unruly but promising servant. It is only untrammelled technology that they deem virulent; appropriately controlled technology is for them a growing source of hope.
Each anarchist has a somewhat different plan for exploiting technology. The most instructive is Kropotkin’s, because it uses his predecessors’ main devices as well as new ones of his own design to harness the more complex technology of the late nineteenth century.
His starting point is Godwin’s proposal to divide production between a subsistence sector, to which everyone devotes the same short period of time, and a luxury sector, to which they devote what time they like.[188] Godwin had claimed that this way of dividing production allows work to be completely mechanized without causing individuality or community harm. They cannot be harmed by work in the luxury sector, because it is satisfying and voluntary. Nor can they be harmed by work in the subsistence sector, which Godwin thought would take only a half hour to complete and which all would share equally. Kropotkin buttresses these claims of Godwin’s by saying more about how the divided economy they both favor should be arranged.
Luxuries, for Kropotkin, are not only produced voluntarily, they are also for the most part produced by their consumers. A person wanting a luxury is not to be supplied with it by someone else, but is to join with others who desire it so that together they can produce it for themselves. This cooperative method of producing luxuries is seen by Kropotkin as fostering individuality by enabling each producer to acquire diverse tastes and skills, and as fostering community by enabling those who share these tastes and skills to cultivate them in concert.[189]
Since Kropotkin, with much actual experience of industrial production behind him, believes that subsistence work must take about five hours per day, rather than the half hour Godwin had expected, he cannot depend as much on its insignificance to prevent it from harming communal individuality. To overcome the threat to the anarchist ideal that five hours of daily routine labor pose, he relies partly on the comprehensive education and occupational mobility introduced into the anarchist tradition by Proudhon. He repeats Proudhon’s reasons why these practices alleviate not only the psychological and social damage caused by industrial technology, but also its political damage. Managerial technicians in an anarchist economy, aware, because of comprehensive education, that everyone can do their job, and because of occupational mobility, that their job is temporary, have neither the ability nor the desire to use their positions as means of technological domination.
Besides citing his predecessors’ arguments for comprehensive education and varied work, Kropotkin adds a new one, drawn from his assessment of productive trends. As technology develops, he says, the efficiency of monotonous, specialized labor declines. ‘Humanity perceives that there is no advantage for the community in riveting a human being for all his life to a given spot, in a workshop or mine; no gain in depriving him of such work as would bring him into free intercourse with nature, make of him a conscious part of the grand whole, a partner in the highest enjoyments of science and art, of free work and creation.’[190] Educating producers comprehensively and giving them varied work have always served efficiency by encouraging technical innovation. Not even learned scientists can innovate more fruitfully than knowledgeable workers. Until recently, Kropotkin admits, the advantage for innovation of a broad education and unspecialized work was outweighed by the efficiency of specialized training and divided, routine work. But technical trends have finally tipped the balance in favor of more integrated production. Electric power, hand-held machine tools and mechanical farm implements are the most telling of the innovations he cites as enabling an advanced industrial economy to operate efficiently, though run by comprehensively educated producers, doing varied, unspecialized work.[191]
Kropotkin does more than show the growing practicality of the anarchist plan for harnessing technology: he adds provisions to make technology a still better servant. One is the organization of industry into small productive units, for the more intimate relations in small workplaces and the less specialized nature of their jobs make them superior as supports for self-development and mutual awareness to impersonal, monotonous production in large factories. Another new provision of Kropotkin’s plan is the uniting of industry with agriculture. Bringing farm and factory together, so that producers can spend time in each, gives them a more varied choice of jobs than they would enjoy without mobility of occupations between the industrial and agricultural sectors.[192] The last of Kropotkin’s new provisions is economic self-sufficiency. The members of his anarchy themselves produce the goods that they consume. He devotes great ingenuity to showing how contemporary technical developments make self-sufficiency easy to achieve. Yet its main advantage for him is not its practicality, but its wider choice of occupations. A self-sufficient economy, provided that, like anarchy’s, it is a large one, offers more varied work than does a specialized economy, because its complement of industries is fuller.
It is tempting to conclude from the foregoing analysis that anarchists rely so much on technology as to warrant including them among its venerators. This conclusion overlooks the qualifications in their support. Nineteenth-century venerators of technology, whether Marxists or free-enterprisers, trusted in its untrammelled growth.[193] Anarchists, in contrast, counted on technology only if it was controlled stringently. By repudiating most organizational aspects of industrial technology, while exploiting its mechanical aspects, anarchists offered a vision of its future that in the nineteenth century was already engaging. In light of the disappointment with free technical development that is so widely felt today, the anarchist course between Luddite contempt and scientistic celebration has even more appeal. For how, except by limiting technology, while also working for its selective growth, can communal individuality in an industrial society possibly be increased?
*** The coherence of Anarchist criticism
This chapter has confirmed the longstanding appreciation of the anarchists as unusually severe critics of modern society. Their utter condemnation of government and law is endorsed by no one else. Nor have theorists gone further than the anarchists in subjecting authority, punishment and inequality to attack. But something else emerges from the analysis in this chapter besides reaffirmation of a well-known truth. By tracing the anarchists’ social criticism to its source in their commitment to communal individuality, this analysis has put to rest the doubts about its coherence which are prompted by its failure to condemn categorically all restrictive institutions. The qualifications in favor of authority, punishment and inequality which anarchists introduce into their social criticism stand forth not as symptoms of confusion, but as faithful expressions of their thought. Had the anarchists failed to make these qualifications they would have been inconsistent, for had they given full vent to their critical impulses, by categorically denouncing everything they abhor, they would have disregarded the imperatives of their chief value. Their commitment to communal individuality thus not only explains why, to be consistent, anarchists qualify their social criticisms, but also accounts for why their criticism, while severe, is not extravagant. The goal of anarchism, being composed of norms whose merger is precarious, enjoins a social criticism that has nuance and balance.
[138] See, for instance, Gerald Runkle, <em>Anarchism: Old and New</em> (New York, 1972), p. 168; James Joll, <em>The Anarchists</em> (London, 1964), p. 278; George Woodcock, <em>Anarchism</em> (New York, 1962), p. 469.
[139] Robert Paul Wolff, <em>In Defense of Anarchism</em> (New York, 1976), pp. 22–7. The conflation of anarchism and radical democracy is common; for an elaborate example see Richard T. DeGeorge, ‘Anarchism and Authority’, in J. Roland Pennock and John Chapman (eds.), <em>Anarchism: Nomos XIX</em> (New York, 1978), pp. 91–110. In his ‘Reply to Reiman’ Wolff takes back his claim that anarchism and unanimous direct democracy are compatible (<em>In Defense of Anarchism</em>, p. 88).
[140] Godwin, <em>Enquiry Concerning Political Justice</em> (Toronto, 1946), I, 297.
[141] Ibid., II, 204.
[142] Proudhon, <em>Du principe federatif</em> (Paris, 1959), p. 344; Godwin, <em>Political Justice</em>, I, 297.
[143] Godwin, <em>Political Justice</em>, II, 145.
[144] Bakunin, <em>OEuvres</em> (Paris, 1895–1913), IV, 476, cf. I, 156.
[145] See, for instance, W. D. Handcock, ‘The Function and Nature of Authority in Society’, <em>Philosophy</em>, 28 (April 1953), p. 101.
[146] Proudhon, for instance, takes a patriarchal stand reminiscent of Filmer on the issue of domestic authority, while Godwin and Bakunin follow Plato in defending the authority of experts over private action and belief. Godwin, <em>Political Justice</em>, I, 236; Proudhon, <em>De la Justice dans la Revolution et dans l’Eglise</em>, IV, 322; Bakunin, <em>OEuvres</em>, III, 55.
[147] For evidence that anarchists accept this understanding of authority see Godwin, <em>Political Justice</em>, I, 121; Proudhon, <em>Justice</em>, II, 312; Kropotkin, <em>Revolutionary Pamphlets</em> (New York, 1968), p. 217.
[148] Godwin, <em>Political Justice</em>, I, 227, 234; Bakunin, <em>OEuvres</em>, III, 55.
[149] Godwin, <em>Political Justice</em>, I, 235; cf. I, 215 and Kropotkin, <em>Pamphlets</em>, pp. 58–9.
[150] Godwin, <em>Political Justice</em>, I, 234–5.
[151] Ibid., I, 121, 212; Proudhon, <em>Justice</em>, II, 226, 310; Bakunin, <em>OEuvres</em>, III,49–54; Kropotkin, <em>Pamphlets</em>, 147, 217.
[152] Godwin, <em>Political Justice</em>, I, 181; cf. Bakunin, <em>OEuvres</em>, V, 313; Proudhon, <em>Justice</em>, I, 326, IV, 350; Kropotkin, <em>Pamphlets</em>, pp. 167, 285.
[153] Proudhon, <em>Justice</em>, II, 218; Bakunin, <em>OEuvres</em>, III, 69n.
[154] Godwin, <em>Political Justice</em>, II, 211, 340.
[155] Proudhon, <em>Justice</em>, II, 218, 262; Bakunin, <em>OEuvres</em>, III, 60; Godwin, <em>Political Justice</em>, II, 496. A situation where everybody has public authority over everybody else is difficult to grasp. What happens, for instance, if two members of an anarchy issue contradictory directives? Which one has the right to be obeyed? The anarchists evade answering this question. Perhaps all that can be said is that since directives in an anarchy are only issued to correct serious misconduct, which is infrequent, and obvious, to all, conflicts among directives are unlikely.
[156] Godwin, <em>Political Justice</em>, II, 294, 399–400.
[157] Ibid., II, 363, Proudhon, <em>Justice</em>, IV, 373.
[158] Godwin, <em>Political Justice</em>, II, 334.
[159] Ibid., II, 340–1.
[160] Ibid., II, 345.
[161] Ibid., II, 379. For more detail on this point see Alan Potter, ‘Godwin, Proudhon and the Anarchist Justification of Punishment’, <em>Political Theory</em>, 3 (February 1975), p. 83.
[162] Godwin, <em>Political Justice</em>, II, 322; cf. Proudhon, <em>Idee generate de la revolution au dix-neuvieme siecle</em> (Paris, 1923), pp. 311—12, <em>Justice</em>, IV, 371.
[163] Godwin, <em>Political Justice</em>, II, 349 on vengeance, II, 322, 334, 365–6 on self-defense; Proudhon, <em>Idee generale</em>, p. 311 on vengeance.
[164] Godwin, <em>Political Justice</em>, II, 199.
[165] Proudhon, <em>Justice</em>, IV, 377.
[166] Ibid.
[167] Godwin, <em>Political Justice</em>, II, 361, cf. II, 340.
[168] Writers who call anarchists radical egalitarians include Isaiah Berlin, ‘Equality as an Ideal’, in Frederick A. Olafson (ed.), <em>Justice and Social Policy</em> (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1961), pp. 141–2, and Felix Oppenheim, ‘Egalitarianism as a Descriptive Concept’, <em>American Philosophical Quarterly</em>, 7 (April 1970), p. 144.
[169] Godwin, <em>Political Justice</em>, II, 453.
[170] Ibid., II, 430,454,461.
[171] Ibid., II, 460, 465.
[172] Ibid., I, 23.
[173] Ibid., II, 463.
[174] Ibid., II, 429.
[175] Ibid., I, 147.
[176] Ibid., II, 422, 450.
[177] Ibid., II, 93.
[178] For a developed argument that the criterion of need is egalitarian see Gregory Vlastos, ‘Justice and Equality’, in Richard B. Brant (ed.), <em>Social Justice</em>(Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1962), pp. 42–3.
[179] Godwin, <em>Political Justice</em>, II, 423–4; cf. I, 448.
[180] Ibid., II, 433, 428.
[181] Kropodcin, <em>The Conquest of Bread</em> (New York, 1969), pp. 230–1; cf. p. 8.
[182] Ibid., pp. 63–4.
[183] Ibid., p. 233.
[184] Kropodcin, ‘Communisme et anarchie’, in <em>Science moderne</em>, p. 166; Kropotkin, <em>The Conquest of Bread</em>, p. 227. For a more thorough analysis of Kropotkin on justice see David Miller, <em>Social Justice</em> (Oxford, 1976), pp. 209–52.
[185] ‘Equality does not imply the leveling of individual differences, nor that individuals should be made physically, morally or mentally identical. Diversity in capacities and powers,...far from being a social evil, constitutes on die contrary, the abundance of humanity.’ Bakunin, ‘Revolutionary Catechism’, in Dolgoff (ed.), <em>Bakunin on Anarchy</em>, pp. 87–8.
[186] Proudhon, <em>Systeme de contradictions economiques</em>, 2 vols. (Paris, 1923), I, 191.
[187] Bakunin, <em>OEuvres</em>, IV, 477.
[188] Kropotkin, <em>The Conquest of Bread</em>, pp. 127, 136–9.
[189] Ibid., p. 153. Kropotkin would not confine consumption of all luxuries to their producers; some, such as books, though cooperatively produced by everyone, from author to pressman, who helped create them, would be available to all. Kropotkin does not say how to distinguish between luxuries which should be open to general consumption and luxuries which should be consumed by their producers only.
[190] Kropotkin, <em>Fields, Factories and Workshops</em> (New York, 1909), pp. 3–4; cf. pp. v-vi.
[191] Ibid., pp. 161, 178, 180.
[192] Ibid, (enlarged edn, New York, 1968), pp. 358–60.
[193] Industria technology should only be controlled, according to Marxists, when it becomes a fetter, after capitalism has ceased to be progressive. To control it before then, as anarchists suggest, would only delay the advent of the socialist revolution by arresting the development of productive forces.
** 5. Anarchist strategy: the dilemma of means and ends
Efforts to ascribe a distinctive strategy to anarchists, though often made, cannot succeed, because their strategies are too diverse to have a common character. Claims that all anarchists are reckless terrorists, or saintly pacifists, or messianic ‘primitive rebels’ widely miss the mark.[194] These descriptions do fit some anarchists, at some stages of their careers, but as applied to anarchist strategy in general they are inaccurate. Even the most cautious and plausible description of anarchist strategy — as eschewing ‘political action’ — does not fit all cases, not even all of those under study here.[195] Proudhon put his trust in the thoroughly political Louis Napoleon. Bakunin, who relied, as a means to anarchy, on the elimination of inheritance, thought it might be legally abolished through ‘a series of gradual changes, amicably agreed to by the workers and the bourgeoisie’.[196]
Impressed by the differences in anarchist strategy, some commentators, instead of ignoring them, make them the basis for classifying anarchism into types. ‘In examining the basic forms of anarchism’, writes Irving Horowitz, ‘what is at stake is not so much alternative models of the good society as distinctive strategies for getting there.’[197] He goes on to distinguish eight types of anarchism, each supposedly marked off by strategic differences. The inadequacy of his classification is easy to see. Most of its types, such as utilitarian, peasant and collectivist anarchism, are marked off from the others not by their strategy but by their method, aspiration, or source of support. Only two of the types mentioned — conspiratorial and pacifist anarchism — are strategically distinct. It is possible to come closer than Horowitz to classifying anarchists by their strategies, but this project is no more likely to succeed than that of proving that their strategies are all basically the same. Anarchist strategy is too diverse to be called unified, but its diversities cannot be used to classify it because they are too unsystematic.
The thesis guiding this study of the anarchists, that communal individuality is their chief goal, provides a point of vantage from which the character of their strategy can be more accurately perceived. Seen from this vantage, the anarchists’ strategy has no importance for the unity and classification of their thought. These are determined by the similarities and differences in their ideals of communal individuality. Strategy, as the means to these ideals, is subordinate to them and to empirical judgments about how, in the face of great adversity, they may most efficiently be reached. For the anarchists, therefore, strategy, being an attempt to achieve communal individuality in a hostile world, poses this grave dilemma: to find a path to communal individuality that eschews the fraud and physical coercion which, though effective means of social action, communal individuality forbids. The anarchists we are studying do not give this dilemma the same response. This chapter follows them in their unavailing search for a solution.
*** Godwin: ‘trusting to reason alone’[198]
No anarchist is more resolved than Godwin to use reasoned argument among independent thinkers as the means to reach communal individuality. His commitment to intelligent, sincere conversation as the essence of a good society enjoins him to rely on argument, for unless the aspirants for his kind of anarchy become forthright and rational as they build it, the society they create, having unreasonable, dishonest members, will not be anarchic. Yet though Godwin sees that reasoned argument must be his strategy, he doubts whether, to reach his radical and fiercely resisted goal, it has sufficient strength. His work on strategy attempts to meet this doubt by showing the ineffectiveness as means to anarchy of non-rational tactics, and the power of rationality to direct history’s course. But misgivings remain, which prompt him to endorse methods for reaching anarchy that are less than rational. Faced by the dilemma that all anarchists confront, even the scrupulous Godwin compromises his moral commitment for some hope of success.
The strategy Godwin most despises is the one most inimical to reason: the strategy of using physical force. Force inspires attitudes as detrimental to the process of attaining anarchy as to its maintenance. The imposers of force ‘become obdurate, unrelenting and inhuman’. Its victims ‘are filled with indignation and revenge’. ‘Distrust is propagated from man to man, and the dearest ties of human society are dissolved.’[199] Using force as a means to anarchy only puts it further beyond reach.
Godwin also opposes strategies more compatible with reason than force of which the most significant is organization. Organization, he thinks, ‘has a more powerful tendency than perhaps any other circumstance in human affairs, to render the mind quiescent’.[200] The members of an organization are strongly disposed to follow the opinions of their group. By doing so, they may serve their group’s purpose, but they also lose their mental independence. This loss, while irrelevant for many purposes, is disastrous for that of reaching anarchy, since anarchy is a condition of utmost mental independence. Anarchists cannot organize, because organizing takes from their objective one of its essential traits.
In order to vindicate a strategy of reason, Godwin must do more than prove that as means to anarchy non-rational measures fail. He must show, against serious objections, that reasoned arguments are effective. Godwin believes that reasoned arguments are a sure means to anarchy, because of their great power to convince. So firmly can they convince people of anarchy’s supreme worth that all will work unstintingly for its assured achievement. This belief faces metaethical, psychological and socio-political objections, to all of which Godwin has responses.
The weak point in Godwin’s belief, so far as concerns meta-ethics, is its contention that evidence and reasons are logically sufficient to establish anarchy’s supreme worth. Ascriptions of supreme worth, being ultimate evaluations, depend for their validity not only on undeniable evidence and reasons, but on contestable choices. Thus even if I accept the case for anarchy as being in agreement with facts and logic, I need not regard anarchy as of highest worth, for I may still consistently choose to set supreme value on something else.
To Godwin this objection has no weight, because in metaethics he is a cognitivist. Ultimate evaluations for him, far from involving choices, depend on nothing but facts. To establish values we examine the structure of the world and ‘declare that which the nature of things has already decreed’.[201] There is no room from this metaethical perspective to doubt the possibility of rationally assured agreement on ultimate worth. Everyone can be convinced to accept the same value as supreme, because its identity depends solely on facts that everyone can know. As an account of how ultimate value is identified, Godwin’s metaethic is too unqualifiedly cognitivist to be acceptable. But even if it were acceptable, this would do little to vindicate his strategy, whose heavy reliance on reason also faces non-metaethical objections.
Godwin’s strategy is suspect psychologically for giving the motive of rational conviction decisive weight. Knowledge is not compelling: one need not do what one knows is right. To answer this objection, Godwin shows the weakness of non-rational motives. The fact that people successfully resist their sensual or short-sighted impulses shows how ‘slight and inadequate’ they are. That these impulses can be ‘conquered or restrained... by the due exercise of understanding’, is proved daily by experience.[202] Yet after doing his best to show the psychological force of reason, Godwin still doubts it can always prevail. An adverse piece of evidence that must be faced is that of people who fail to follow their convictions. To save his psychology from being dismissed as empirically unfounded, Godwin makes this claim: If I fail to do an action which I believe is right, my failure proves that my belief lacks a rational foundation. ‘When the understanding clearly perceives rectitude, propriety and eligibility to belong to a certain conduct,...that conduct will infallibly be adopted.’[203] Hence what is shown by my failure to do something I believe right is not that my inclinations overpower my convictions, but either that my convictions do not enjoin the act, or else that they counsel against doing it.
This claim has the untenable implication that anyone who says he fails to follow his convictions mistakes their meaning or their source. Certainly, we sometimes make mistakes on these matters, but to say we always do is implausible. Some people have settled, systematically backed convictions, on which they usually act. It is more credible to believe such persons when they report failing to follow their convictions than to charge them with misunderstanding what their convictions say. And since belief in failure to follow rationally held convictions often is well founded, Godwin’s claim that such convictions always determine conduct fails.
The final objection to Godwin’s strategic use of reason points to his own analysis of how corrupt and hampering institutions ‘poison our minds, before we can resist, or so much as suspect their malignity’. The ‘disparity of ranks’ in all existing societies inspires ‘coldness, irresoluteness, timidity and caution’.[204] The impersonality and coerciveness of existing legal governments make subjects devious, servile and unthinking. How can Godwin choose reason as his strategy, when he sees it as obstructed by the very institutions it is supposed to overthrow?
He answers with an account of the growth of natural science. ‘Hitherto it seems as if every instrument of menace or influence has been employed to counteract [science].’ But it has made progress nonetheless. For the mind of man cannot ‘choose falsehood and reject truth, when evidence is fairly presented’.[205] Since adversities have not kept reasoned argument from causing scientific progress, they cannot keep it from causing social progress either. ‘Shall we become clear-sighted and penetrating in all other subjects, without increasing our penetration on the subject of man?’[206]
The analogy with natural science gives hope that for reaching anarchy reasoned argument will soon be effective, despite its past and continuing impotence. ‘How imperfect were the lispings of ... science, before it attained the precision of the present century ?’ ‘Political knowledge is [now] in its infancy.’ Hence its advances are bound to be slow. But since progress in natural science accelerated, as its growing number of findings became better established and more widely known, we can expect progress toward anarchy to be faster, as stronger reasons in its favor are adduced.[207] No matter that anarchy now has few partisans, whose arguments are usually dismissed; the early partisans of science met a similar fate. ‘If the system of independence and equality be the truth, it may be expected hourly to gain converts. The more it is discussed, the more will it be understood, and its value cherished and felt.’[208]
So doubtful is Godwin of reaching anarchy through argument that he draws on his shaky analogy with science for evidence of more than reason’s persuasive force. This analogy, he thinks, shows the obstacles to the growth of reason as being not impediments to anarchy, but preconditions, and even helps. Progress in natural science meets obstacles in the form of ‘extravagant sallies of mind’ which ‘an uninformed and timid spectator’ might think would lead to ‘nothing but destruction’. ‘But he would be disappointed.’ These extravagances ‘are the prelude of the highest wisdom...The dreams of Ptolemy were destined to precede the discoveries of Newton.’[209] Social progress meets analogous obstacles, the most serious being legal government and unequal wealth. The former, though utterly expunged from a mature anarchy, prepares for it by assuring the peaceful setting in which a still nascent reason can grow.[210] As for unequal wealth, it too, while no part of future anarchist society, is a needed preparation. ‘It was the spectacle of inequality that first excited the grossness of barbarians to [the] persevering exertion’ on which an advanced economy like that of anarchy rests.[211] The obstacles to anarchy thus need cause no dismay, for even the most serious are objective pre-conditions, which must develop before the arguments for anarchy can take effect.
To clinch his case for reason, which he properly sees cannot be vindicated by reference to the analogy with science alone, Godwin describes the process through which he expects arguments for anarchy to prevail. The thesis informing his account of this process is that the main determinant of practice is belief. ‘Wherever the political opinions of a community, or any portion of a community, are changed, the institutions are affected also.’[212] Guided by this thesis, Godwin aims to show that everyone can be convinced to work for anarchy through the force of arguments known at first only to very few.
What he envisages is that the few individuals who happen to be convinced anarchists will serve as ‘guides and instructors’ to everyone else.[213] Through the same ‘candid and unreserved conversation’ that is the organizing principle of an established anarchy, they will ‘extensively communicate the truths with which they are acquainted’. These truths, being forthrightly transmitted in an intimate setting, will be so cogent to their hearers that they ‘will be instigated to impart their acquisitions to still other hearers’. Thus the ‘circle of instruction will perpetually increase’.[214]
Though Godwin relies on reasoned argument as the impetus for the first steps toward anarchy, he does not contend that everyone, or even a majority, must embrace anarchism before social reconstruction begins. Rational beliefs are certainly the main shapers of practice for Godwin, but he is not blind to the effects of practice on these beliefs. He would therefore accompany the later diffusion of anarchist convictions with a gradual, voluntary decentralization of power and equalization of ranks, designed to inspire belief in anarchy to spread further. National governments would first give way to a loose confederation of small ‘parishes’ governed by democratically elected ‘juries’. At later stages these juries would lose first their right to punish physically and then their right to legislate. Finally, they would be ‘laid aside as unnecessary’. Thus would convictions and practices advance reciprocally and by degrees to their final culmination: ‘one of the most memorable stages of human improvement,...the dissolution of political government, of that brute engine, which has been the only perennial cause of the vices of mankind’.[215]
Because he gives such great responsibility for reaching anarchy to a few enlightened individuals, Godwin has been accused of ‘elitist disdain’. ‘Convinced of his superiority of intellect’, he and his few partisans allegedly place themselves ‘above the mediocre, the petty, the base, the dull and the deceived’.[216] This charge, which makes Godwin sound like a contemptuous manipulator of the masses, misrepresents his view of their intellectual capacities and of how their allegiance should be won. While Godwin does think most people lack rational, independent judgment, he also thinks that they will someday have it.[217] Ignorance and irrationality are temporary conditions, which reasoned argument, aided by the gradual reform of institutions, can overcome. Elitist manipulation is therefore no part of Godwin’s strategy. His partisans are not to create an anarchist society behind the masses’ backs, but are to start the process through which rational individuals choose anarchy as the regime *they* create. Godwin’s anarchy, as he carefully points out, does not result from ‘the over-earnest persuasion of a few enlightened thinkers, but is produced by the serious and deliberate conviction of the public at large’.[218]
Though Godwin does not compromise the rationality of his strategy with manipulative fraud, he does compromise it with force and organization. While believing fervently in the effectiveness of argument, he still acknowledges situations where it might fail. What of a crisis, such as a war or revolution, which turns the anarchists and their critics into hostile foes? To argue independently ‘in the moment of convulsion’ might be suicidal; the anarchists may have to organize ‘something in the nature of association’ in order to survive.[219] And what of a situation where the anarchists, now a vast majority, face a few incorrigible opponents? In this circumstance, says Godwin, they may use physical coercion, partly because a complete anarchy might otherwise never be established, but mainly because coercion will not actually have to be imposed. Since their ‘adversaries will be too few and too feeble to be able to entertain a serious thought of resistance’, they will be compelled to accept anarchy by the mere threat of force.[220]
By endorsing force and organization as strategies, albeit in unlikely situations, Godwin shows his failure to solve the dilemma of anarchist strategy by trusting to reason alone. It would be presumptuous, however, to conclude from his failure that the dilemma is insoluble. Perhaps anarchy could be reached without fraud or coercion through a different path than Godwinian reason. The attempts of his successors to solve the dilemma need to be examined as preparation for deciding if a solution can be found.
*** Proudhon: waiting for the revolution
Because Proudhon’s conception of communal individuality gives more stress to cooperative work and less to rational independence than Godwin’s, it admits a wider range of strategies. Proudhon is able, without inconsistency, to endorse organization, and can in good conscience advocate forms of persuasion not purely rational. But though his conception of communal individuality gives him more strategic leeway than Godwin, he succeeds no better in solving their shared dilemma. His untainted strategies are no more effective than Godwin’s reason; his effective ones are no purer than the physical coercion Godwin chose.
Proudhon does not think, any more than Godwin, that anarchy can be established at any time. Rather, he too believes, though for somewhat different reasons than Godwin, that government and inequality must first prepare the way for anarchy through their effects. Inequality serves to stimulate exertion. ‘If the property owner had tired of appropriating, the proletarian would have tired of producing.’[221] Government engenders self-restraint. It was ‘by means of its tribunals and armies’, that government ‘gave to the sense of right, so weak among the first men, the only sanctions intelligible to fierce characters’.[222] Only when government and inequality complete their preparatory work (a time which Proudhon thought had occurred just recently) can the search for a strategy to achieve anarchy profitably begin.
At the start of his career Proudhon was as committed as Godwin to a strategy of reasoned argument. He explicitly rejected not only coercive tactics, but imperfectly rational ones. ‘Stimulate, warn, inform, instruct, but do not inculcate’, he prescribed.[223] Inculcation had to be avoided not only because anarchist ideals forbade it, but because reasoned argument was certain to succeed. Once his principles had been disseminated, Proudhon then believed, they would surely be applied. ‘Wherever this discourse is read or made known’, he wrote in his first important book, ‘there privilege and servitude will sooner or later disappear.’[224] But whereas Godwin espoused a strategy of reason for his entire life, Proudhon quickly saw its inadequacies. Readier to admit the strength of anarchy’s opponents, less sanguine about the compelling force of rational conviction, and more doubtful, owing to intervening failures, of history’s progressive course, he soon despaired of reasoned argument and began to seek an equally pure but more effective substitute.
His search led first to a scheme for free credit, a ‘People’s Bank’, lending without interest to anyone who could put money to a productive use. Such a bank, Proudhon believed, would pave the way for anarchy by enabling producers who lacked capital to start their own enterprises. These enterprises, being independent of the established social order, would form an ever growing network of alternative institutions for the nascent anarchist society.
As a strategy for anarchists, the People’s Bank has no advantage over reasoned argument. To be sure, it is as morally legitimate, because it makes no use of force or fraud. Only ‘holders of government bonds, usurers, ... and big property owners’ would find the Bank unprofitable, and they would be too weak to stop its growth. As it developed, they would be convinced, ‘by a sense of the inevitable and concern for their interests to voluntarily change the employment of their capital, unless they preferred to run the risk of consuming it unproductively and enduring swift and total ruin’.[225] It would thus be through their uncoerced and unmanipulated decisions that their resistance would be overcome.
Though free credit and reasoned argument are equally pure, they are also equally ineffective. The opposition to anarchy is much too strong to quell by the enticements of free credit. But even if Proudhon was right to think his Bank could sway all opponents, he would still have been wrong to expect it to achieve anarchy. The Bank, even with everyone’s support, would still be a mere monetary device, no ‘solvent of all authority’ destined to ‘shift the axis of civilization’.[226] It is because he expected such remarkable results from a rather trivial institution that Proudhon has rightly acquired the reputation of a money crank.
He did not remain committed to free credit for long. The failure, during the revolution of 1848, of his effort to operate a People’s Bank prompted him to reassess his strategy. Impressed by the militance of his opponents, and appalled by the futility of the tactics he had just espoused, Proudhon turned to Louis Napoleon, the emerging dictator who, on 2 December 1851, had overthrown the Second Republic in a <em>coup d’etat</em>. ‘The Second of December is the signal for a forward march on the road to revolution’, proclaimed Proudhon, and ‘Louis Napoleon is its general.’[227] Though Bonaparte was no anarchist, anarchists must work with him, because his plans for social renovation, whatever their intended purpose, would have the effect of bringing anarchy closer.
It is hard to imagine a strategy more repugnant to anarchist principles than collaboration with Bonaparte. Even if Bonaparte had been a scrupulous official, Proudhon should have abhorred him. But he was corrupt and arbitrary, a wielder of naked force. Nor can Proudhon’s collaborationism be pardoned as effective, since Bonaparte, whose leftist sympathies were nominal, did not and could not have been expected to advance the cause of anarchy. Collaboration with Bonaparte, being both forbidden by anarchist ideals and useless for realizing them, was for Proudhon the worst possible tactic.
Having found the paths of reason, free credit and collaboration to be dead ends, Proudhon for a while gave up the search for a legitimate, effective strategy. Consoling himself with confidence that history in the long run was on his side, he took up a stance of what he aptly called ‘attente revolutionnaire’.[228] There was no way for anarchists to make the ‘ignorant, impulsive majority... recognize the truth, sense its depth, its necessity, its supremacy, and freely accept it’. Yet anarchy would still some day be achieved. ‘The conversion of societies is never sudden... It is assured, but one must know how to wait for it.’[229] Waiting did not mean complete passivity; Proudhon worked hard on ‘serious long-term studies addressed to the future and another generation’.[230] But for about ten years he set the dilemma of anarchist strategy aside.
At the end of his life, in 1863, he returned to this dilemma and tried a new solution. He now proposed that his partisans withdraw from the established social order and found new embryonic anarchist institutions. ‘Since the old world rejects us’, there is nothing to do but ‘separate ourselves from it radically’.[231] United in their own organizations, the anarchists would demonstrate the merits of their theory and gradually win the vast majority to their cause.
Just why Proudhon thought withdrawal an appropriate strategy we will never know, because he died without working out its details. Certainly, it is morally legitimate, but that it is effective is less clear. Even if a majority were moved by a tactic of withdrawal to become anarchists, the problem would remain of dealing with the unconvinced minority. Proudhon suggests two methods. Occasionally he reverts to the bankrupt reliance on reasoned argument.[232] More often he urges the use of force. First anarchists must ‘instill their ideas in the majority; having done this, they must capture political power by demanding control of its sovereign authority’.[233]
Proudhon’s tactic of withdrawal may well come closer than any other he recommended to solving the anarchists’ strategic dilemma, since it probably can go furthest toward reaching anarchy without coercion or fraud. But it is incapable, by itself, of achieving anarchy, as Proudhon, by recognizing that it could not sway everyone, admits. Hence an anarchist strategy both pure and effective had still not been discovered, even after Proudhon’s extensive search.
*** Bakunin: the perils of force and fraud
Though Bakunin and Proudhon agree so much in their concepts of communal individuality that their visions of anarchy have here been considered to be essentially the same, on matters of strategy they are far apart. Bakunin, in fact, is more like Kropotkin than like Proudhon in his strategy, and Proudhon is more like Godwin than like Bakunin. For whereas Proudhon started out trusting to reason and only during temporary lapses or with agonized reluctance backed force or deception, Bakunin never relied exclusively on reason and in his strategy gave force and deception a substantial, permanent place.[234]
The paradoxical differences between the strategies of Bakunin and Proudhon can be partially explained as a response to disillusion and despair. As inventive and determined attempts to progress towards anarchy met repeated failure, even in revolutionary situations when prospects were best, anarchists became doubtful of ever achieving success. It is thus hardly surprising that Bakunin, who did not begin writing on anarchism until 1864, should have been less repelled than his more innocent predecessors by moral compromise. But there is a deeper reason, in his strategic premises, for Bakunin’s greater reliance on coercion and deceit. Godwin and Proudhon had supposed that for the most part coercion and deceit were illegitimate and ineffective. Anarchists, they thought, must eschew these practices not only because they were impermissible, but also because they could not reach the end being sought. Bakunin’s strategy is based on a contrary supposition. He believes that force and fraud, though illegitimate when viewed apart from their results, are still required in the many cases where they are needed to win victory. Bakunin’s strategic thinking is largely an attempt to show how and when intrinsically immoral tactics are the ones anarchists must choose.
Most of the impure tactics Bakunin recommended were for revolutionary action, but one, the abolition of the right to inherit income-producing property, could be enacted by the state. There is, of course, no conflict between anarchist morality and the abolition of inheritance, provided the abolition is voluntary. But since Bakunin envisaged it as compelled by legal government, it is a tactic that anarchist ideals forbid.
What Bakunin recommended was that the state gradually limit and eventually repeal laws protecting inheritance, transfer the property accumulated by deceased owners to anarchist productive enterprises, and take the financial responsibility which had rested on parents for the education and upbringing of children. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the right to inherit property was not needed as an incentive to work. Aversion to work arose from its being ‘excessive, brutalizing and compulsory’; in an anarchist society it would be a basic need. Besides being a safe strategy, the legal abolition of inheritance was sure. Inherited wealth ‘perpetuated inequality, the privileges of the few and the slavery of the many’. It therefore ‘sufficed to abolish the right of inheritance in order to abolish the juridical family and the state’.[235]
This project for leading the state to suicide through its own legal enactments has a certain dramatic appeal, but its success is not to be expected. Marx put his finger on its foolishness. ‘The whole thing rests on a superannuated idealism, which considers the actual jurisprudence as the basis of our economical state, instead of seeing that our economical state is the basis and source of our jurisprudence!’[236] Fortunately, though Bakunin never stopped riding his jurisprudential hobby horse, he worked out more serious strategies for revolutionary action. Following Godwin and Proudhon, he deemed most people irrational and ignorant. He followed them further in finding the source of this ignorance and irrationality in the inequality, legality and coercion of the established regime. And he also agreed that anarchy must be founded on nothing less than the majority’s enlightened choice.[237] Yet though he agreed with his predecessors on all these points, he went much further than Proudhon toward recommending force and deceit as methods for enlightening the masses.
The premise on which his support for force and deceit rests is a belief in enlightenment through action. Proudhon, and especially Godwin, had sought enlightenment mainly through reasoned argument. For Bakunin, who believed that ‘doctrine kills life’, enlightenment could be found only through practical experience.[238] A majority would never be convinced by reasons to become anarchists, but their allegiance could be won by immersing them in a concerted, and perhaps violent, struggle against the state. Bakunin’s schemes for this immersion were tied closely to the fluctuating political situation; they included the incitement by convinced anarchists of industrial strikes, peasant jacqueries and even full scale civil wars. But underlying his varied projects was the same strategic claim. Struggle against the state ‘is always favorable to the awakening of the people’s initiative and to their mental, moral and even their material development. The reason is simple: It shakes their sheepish disposition, so valuable to governments... It disrupts the brutalizing monotony of their daily life... and, by forcing them to consider the various pretensions of the princes or parties which compete for the right to oppress and exploit them, leads them to awareness, if not reflective, at least instinctive, of this profound truth: the rights of any government are as void as those of all the others, and their intentions are equally bad.’[239]
It is obvious that the strategy Bakunin here espouses often involves what is for anarchists the illegitimate use of force. Not all of the anarchists’ struggles would require physical coercion, and Bakunin was anxious to limit its scope. He flatly rejected systematic terror and, perhaps wistfully, promised that ‘there will be no need to destroy men’.[240] But his avowal of the need ‘to be ruthless with positions and things’ and the unavoidable coercion of his called-for civil war leave no doubt that anarchists, in their Bakuninist struggles, would sometimes combat opponents with physical force.[241]
Whether Bakunin’s strategy also involves fraud is a more vexed question, whose answer depends on what he envisages as happening when anarchists immerse the masses in struggle. If the anarchists disclosed the full aim of this immersion, they could not be at all guilty of fraud. If they lied to the masses about the aim they were seeking, they would be blatant practitioners of deceit. But Bakunin avoids both of these clear alternatives by recommending a veiled, limited disclosure. The anarchists, though united in an active organization, are to conceal their membership from those they are trying to immerse. While explaining the short-range purpose of their effort, which is to satisfy particular, immediate grievances, their long-range purpose, to change society radically, is not to be revealed.[242] Since the masses, though not entirely fooled about the intended purpose of their struggle, would be deliberately misled about its chief aim, one must conclude that despite Bakunin’s attempts at honesty he is still an espouser of fraud.
Though Bakunin’s strategy is quite markedly imperfect, it might still more adequately solve the anarchists’ dilemma than the purer strategies of his predecessors. A sacrifice of perfection is not the same as a betrayal of anarchist ideals. If imperfect means could beget anarchy without causing too much suffering or loss of life, they would be a more faithful expression of its principles than pure but ineffective measures. The central issue in evaluating Bakunin’s strategy is thus whether, by giving up perfection, his strategy gains enough effectiveness to justify its impurity.
In making this evaluation it is important to recognize that Bakunin gives up moral purity with caution. He is especially careful to protect relations within anarchist organizations from corruption. These organizations, being the nuclei for the good society, must be free of existing society’s coercion, deceit and associated depravities. ‘Otherwise, one would wind up with a political dictatorship, that is to say, with a reconstituted state, together with its privileges, its inequalities and all of its oppressions.’[243] To escape this fate, Bakunin insists on organizing an open anarchist movement, in small, autonomous units, without central leadership. He thus incorporates in his theory what is perhaps Godwin’s crucial strategic insight: the members of an anarchy must grow apt for their new life, not after it is instituted, but while they build it.
It is in defining the relations between anarchists and the unswayed masses that Bakunin’s resistance to moral compromise deserts him, as we have seen, and it is the value of the limited though significant impurities he admits to these relations that now must be assessed. If Godwin was right that force and fraud invariably ‘confound the process of reason’,[244] Bakunin’s reliance on them could be dismissed summarily. But Godwin goes too far in his objection to force and fraud by claiming that they *always* damage reason. Occasionally they support it, as when used by careful educators to stimulate the minds of the unthinking. If force or deception has a modest scope, aims at the immediate growth of rationality, and has secured it in the past, it may be an appropriate strategy for anarchists. But Bakunin’s coercive, deceptively incited struggle lacks all of these attributes. Its scope is a whole society; it aims to increase rationality indirectly, through a precarious chain of causes; it is untested by experience. There is thus no reason to expect that it would lead to anarchy. Since the success of the struggle Bakunin envisaged is not to be expected, he sacrificed perfection to no avail.
*** Kropotkin: in search of strategic balance
With the lessons of decades of failure to instruct him, and a synthetic ideal of communal individuality for guidance, Kropotkin is better situated to solve the dilemma of anarchist strategy than his predecessors. He does indeed avoid several of their most damaging pitfalls and bring a fresh perspective to his search. He even comes closer than the other anarchists to finding tactics both legitimate and sure. His failure to find them calls less for explanation than for answering the question to which the analysis in this chapter points of why a solution to the anarchists’ dilemma is so difficult.
Kropotkin’s strategy, like Bakunin’s, calls for enlightenment through action, but owing mainly to a different supposition about the extent of rationality, it is less morally impure. He is at one with Bakunin in rejecting anarchism’s early confidence in the *potential* capacity of the masses to reason. It is naive, he agrees, to expect the enormous growth of mental powers that Godwin, especially, had foreseen. But he differs from Bakunin on a point crucial for strategy by his greater confidence in popular reason’s *actuality*. Progress in science has not, as Godwin thought, depended solely on the glorious discoveries of a few geniuses like Newton. It rests as well on the modest innovations of numerous obscure workers. History thus shows that ordinary people, far from being ignorant, are as great a source of progress as the intellectual elite.[245]
Believing in the present capacity of most people for clear thinking, Kropotkin proposes to treat them more forthrightly than had Bakunin. ‘It offends the human spirit to immerse it in a destructive struggle unless it has a conception — if only rudimentary — of what will replace the world it is trying to destroy.’
Hence, instead of hiding the purpose of their effort, the anarchists must ‘immediately lay out and discuss all aspects of [their] goal’. To do less would be to manipulate, and history shows that ‘manipulators invariably betray the people’.[246] Unity of action comes not through guile, ‘but through the unity of aims and the mutual confidence which never fail to develop when a great number of persons have consciously embraced a common ideal’.[247]
Kropotkin is also more wary than Bakunin of force. No anarchist, not even Godwin, entirely rejected physical coercion, and in his early years Kropotkin sometimes even advanced a limited defense of terror.[248] But his mature strategy has no place for the Bakuninist hope of achieving anarchy through coercion applied by persons blind to its point. Once again confidence in the present existence of rationality leads Kropotkin to strategic circumspection. Since most people are already tolerably apt thinkers, disclosing the real reasons why they should use force only makes its exercise more effective. Violent struggle is acceptable, but the stragglers must never be ‘cast into the unknown without the support of a definite, clearly formulated idea to serve them as a springboard’.[249]
Kropotkin agrees with his predecessors in considering the historical development of government and inequality as a necessary preparation for achieving anarchy. Representative government, for example, ‘has rendered service in the struggle against autocracy’. ‘By its debates it has awakened public interest in public questions.’ But now it is at best ‘an anachronism, a nuisance’.[250] Since government and inequality have now completed their preparative service, the time has come for anarchists to replace them.
Since Kropotkin sees enlightenment as arising from both practice and theory, he proposes to reach anarchy through both action and thought. Following the early anarchists, he opts for reasoned argument, but he also takes from the later anarchists a preference for active struggle. Once the requisite historical conditions have been reached, there must be ‘implacable criticism’ of ‘the accepted ideas of the constitution of the state’. This criticism must go on everywhere — not just among the learned — ‘in drawing room as in cabaret, in the writing of philosophers as in daily conversation’.[251] But discussion among intimates, which for Godwin was a sufficient tactic, Kropotkin finds inadequate. And he adds significantly to anarchist strategy by showing a new way to stimulate subversive acts.
‘Courage, devotion, the spirit of sacrifice, are as contagious as cowardice, submission and panic.’ Armed with this conviction, which the emphasis on emotion in his ideal of communal individuality suggests, Kropotkin urges anarchists on to acts ‘of illegal protest, of revolt, of vengeance’. What matter that these heroic deeds will not succeed at once. The anarchists are ‘lonely sentinels, who enter the battle long before the masses are sufficiently roused’. ‘The people secretly applaud their courage’; ‘the revolutionary whirlwind... revives sluggish hearts’. Emotional contagion, though it passes through periods of incubation, is unstoppable; soon many will be seized by ‘the spirit of revolt’.[252]
Will they form a majority? Kropotkin thought so at first. Later, he thought they would be ‘a respectably numerous minority of cities and villages scattered over the country’.[253] But neither the morality nor the effectiveness of his strategy is much affected by whether, as a proportion of the population, the anarchists number fifty-one percent. When they predominate significantly, Kropotkin would have them carry out a thorough expropriation. By describing it in detail, he works out an aspect of anarchist strategy previously neglected: the steps to take *after* struggles have begun.
Kropotkin is not precise about how far anarchists should go toward abolishing legal government during the period of preliminary expropriation. Collective rule-making, perhaps resting on the preferences of majorities, would apparently be allowed, provided it was carried out in local workplaces and districts. But any rules enacted by these agencies, rather than being enforced physically, would from the start be enforced by means of censure. Kropotkin thus carries forward a theme introduced into the anarchist tradition by Godwin: though in a mature anarchy legal government must be totally abolished, it may continue to exist, in an attenuated form, during anarchy’s preparatory phases.
Though Kropotkin is somewhat vague about the process for carrying out anarchist expropriation, he is specific about the changes it involves. He warns against confusing expropriation with confiscation, with impoverishing the rich by dividing up their wealth. No one would be deprived of articles of personal consumption, nor would capital be affected — except so far as it enabled ‘any man... to appropriate the product of another’s toil’.[254] The seizure of property would nevertheless be extensive. The insurgent anarchists must, through a rapid and complete takeover making no use of the nation state, assure everyone a reliable supply of life’s necessities. Warehouses, factories, dwellings and farms all must be seized, inventoried and redistributed so as to satisfy needs and eliminate exploiters.[255] Expropriation would thus be eminently constructive. In seizing property the anarchists would at the same time reorganize the social infrastructure. Here the abstract call of Proudhon and Bakunin to build the new society by demolishing the state receives a plausible, concrete meaning.[256] In Kropotkin’s expropriation destruction and creation appear reconciled.
Yet the possibility of conflict remains. How can one be sure that even Kropotkin’s anarchists, though hard to tempt, would have the discipline, while expropriating, to resist taking personal possession of their seized wealth? Or, even if they resisted greed, would they be wise enough immediately to create a working anarchy? These are among the more embarrassing of the evaluative questions Kropotkin’s strategy must face.
The truth is that despite his intrepid efforts to avoid both unnecessarily immoral tactics of Bakunin’s sort and insufficiently vigorous tactics such as Godwin’s, Kropotkin still fails to find a strategy both sure and legitimate. His strategy, stripped to essentials, rejects deception altogether and accepts coercion for just two purposes: to inspire the contagion of insurrectionary feeling and to carry out the seizure of accumulated productive wealth. The defects in this strategy are by now almost too familiar. Its avoidance of deception makes it ineffective; its acceptance of coercion makes it illegitimate, without giving it the means of success.
The spectacle of Godwin stumbling on the path to anarchy through reason is sufficient to discredit Kropotkin’s utter rejection of fraud. Surely anarchists, to be successful, must follow Bakunin part way in sometimes, like ordinary politicians, being less than fully candid. By utterly rejecting deceptive tactics, Kropotkin greatly burdens his coercive ones. Feelings of daring would have to be farfetchedly contagious to spread as much in response to displays of force as Kropotkin needs them to. (And what of the destructive feelings that displays of force might spread?) The mass of expropriators would have to be improbably skilled and selfless to reorder society without leaders, without a unitary legal system and with no preconceived plan. Kropotkin, to be sure, tries to answer these objections, and not always by invoking popular, rationality and good sense. Sometimes he uses an argument borrowed from radical democrats about the educative effects of direct local participation.[257] Sometimes he defends the ‘discomfort and confusion’ that would follow expropriation as being, ‘for the mass of the people’, still ‘an improvement on their former condition. Besides, in times of Revolution one can dine contentedly enough on a bit of bread and cheese while eagerly discussing events.’[258] Is it unfair to see in this recourse to asceticism an admission by Kropotkin of strategic failure? Appearing as it does in the most confident of his mature works, it surely betrays uncertainty about the chance of his strategy’s success. Kropotkin did come closer than any of his predecessors to finding an effective, legitimate strategy. But the soundness of the doubts he harbored about whether he had found one would be foolish to contest.
*** The futility of Anarchist strategy
Daniel Guerin ends his sympathetic account of the anarchists’ ‘main constructive themes’ with a confession. ‘Relations between the masses and the conscious minority constitute a problem to which no full solution has been found by the Marxists or even by the anarchists, and one on which it seems that the last word has not yet been said.’[259] Guerin’s partial acknowledgment of the anarchists’ strategic failure is well supported by the evidence presented in this chapter. But this evidence indicates the need for a considerably more drastic portrayal of the anarchists’ strategic plight. It is not only the problem of their relations to unconvinced outsiders that they fail to solve: the problems of how to organize internally and how, united with the masses, to proceed from old to new also baffle them. Nor are these problems whose solutions will, as Guerin implies, be found in the future. If the last word about them has not been said yet, this must be because there is none.
Part of the reason why anarchist strategy fails lies in the radicalism of its objective. Any theorist whose objective is as sweeping, abstractly defined and strongly opposed as the anarchists’ will find his choice of means treacherous and unreliable. To reach a vast, vague end in the teeth of opposition calls for energetic, wide-ranging measures. Such measures are sure to have numerous unexpected consequences and may have none of the intended ones. Hence the goal sought will not be reached, or, if it is, it will be undermined by destructive side effects.[260] Rapid, wholesale change can certainly be warranted in situations where it is the alternative to great misery. But as a means of achieving radical aspirations it is very nearly doomed to fail.
If the vastness of the change needed to reach anarchy makes its achievement difficult, the special character of the needed change makes achieving it virtually impossible. The communal individuality that must flourish under anarchy involves personal traits, such as honesty and sympathy, and social traits, such as trust and cooperation, which, needing a stable peaceful climate, are put in special jeopardy by energetic measures. Yet anarchists must use such measures, unless they are willing to abandon hope. The genial humaneness of their aspirations thus burdens anarchists with an especially intractable version of the dilemma in which all radicals are caught.
That anarchist strategy is a failure cannot be proved beyond all doubt. Though no anarchist has yet found an auspicious strategy, and though the obstacles to finding one are immense, the bare possibility of success — for even the least promising — still must be acknowledged to exist. But judgments about the success of tactics, being dependent on contingencies, can never be fully certain. Anarchist strategy must be judged a failure, according to the appropriate measure of its probable success.
[194] Many writers have equated anarchist strategy with terrorism, e.g. George Plekhanov, <em>Anarchism and Socialism</em>; a balanced discussion of this matter is Derry Novak, ‘Anarchism and Individual Terrorism’, <em>Canadian Journal of Political Science</em>, 20 (May 1954), pp. 176–84. For a ‘gallery of outlandish stereotypes’ see Leonard Krimmerman and Lewis Perry (eds.), <em>Patterns of Anarchy</em> (New York, 1966), pp. xvi-xvii. In a single paragraph David Apter manages to ascribe all these strategies and more to the anarchists: ‘The Old Anarchism and the New — Some Comments’, <em>Government and Opposition</em>, 5 (Autumn 1970), p. 397. E. J. Hobsbawm calls anarchists revolutionary voluntarists both in <em>Primitive Rebels</em> (New York, 1959), p. 83, and in <em>Revolutionaries</em> (New York, 1973), p. 86.
[195] Good examples of the interpretation of anarchist strategy as non-political may be found in George Woodcock, <em>Anarchism</em> (New York, 1962), p. 31, and Isaac Kramnick, ‘On Anarchism and the Real World: William Godwin and Radical England’, <em>American Political Science Review</em>, 66 (March 1972), p. 128.
[196] Bakunin, <em>OEuvres</em> (Paris, 1895–1913), V, 208.
[197] Irving L. Horowitz (ed.), <em>The Anarchists</em> (New York, 1964), p. 29.
[198] Godwin, <em>Enquiry Concerning Political Justice</em> (Toronto, 1946), I, 279.
[199] Ibid., I, 272.
[200] Ibid., I, 289.
[201] Ibid., I, 221.
[202] Ibid., I, 78, 83.
[203] Ibid., I, 69.
[204] Ibid., I, 49.
[205] Ibid., II, 225.
[206] Ibid., II, 243–4.
[207] Ibid., I, 273.
[208] Ibid., I, 256.
[209] Ibid., II, 243.
[210] Ibid., II, 372.
[211] Ibid., II, 491–2.
[212] Ibid., I, 278, cf. II, 549.
[213] Ibid., I, 104.
[214] Ibid., I, 296.
[215] Ibid., II, 209–12; for more detail on these steps toward Godwinian anarchy see John P. Clark, <em>The Philosophical Anarchism of William Godwin</em> (Princeton, 1977), pp. 191–4.
[216] Kramnick, ‘Anarchism and the Real World’, pp.1126, 114.
[217] ‘The true reason why the mass of mankind has so often been the dupe of knaves, has been the mysterious and complicated nature of the social system. Once annihilate the quackery of government, and the most homebred understanding might be strong enough to detect the artifices of the state juggler that would mislead him.’ Godwin, <em>Political Justice</em>, II, 208, cf. II, 136–7.
[218] Ibid., II, 477.
[219] Ibid., I, 298.
[220] Ibid., I, 274.
[221] Proudhon, <em>Systeme de contradictions economiques</em> (Paris, 1923), II, 403.
[222] Proudhon, <em>Idee generate de la revolution au dix-neuvieme siecle</em> (Paris, 1923) p. 374,
[223] Proudhon, <em>Les carnets</em>, 4 vols. (Paris, 1960–74), III, 45. For the more detailed analysis of Proudhon’s strategy on which this account is based see Ritter, <em>The Political Thought of Proudhon</em>, ch. VI.
[224] Proudhon, <em>Qu’est-ce que la propriete?</em> (Paris, 1926), p. 345.
[225] Proudhon, <em>Melanges</em>, 3 vols. (Paris, 1868–70), III, 123; Proudhon, <em>La revolution sociale demontree par le coup d’etat du deux decembre</em> (Paris, 1936), p. 206.
[226] Proudhon, <em>Carnets</em>, III, 248; Proudhon, <em>Melanges</em>, II, 1.
[227] Proudhon, <em>La revolution sociale</em>, p. 177.
[228] Proudhon, <em>De la Justice dans la Revolution et dans l’Eglise</em> (Paris, 1930–5), IV, 468.
[229] Ibid., IV, 489.
[230] Proudhon, <em>Correspondance</em> (Paris, 1874–5), IX, 71.
[231] Proudhon, <em>De la capacite politique des classes ouvrieres</em> (Paris, 1924), p. 236.
[232] Ibid., p. 74.
[233] Ibid., p. 240; cf. p. 101.
[234] ‘Has there ever been a single example, at any time in any place, of a privileged, dominant class making concessions freely, spontaneously, without being forced to by coercion and fear?’ Bakunin, <em>OEuvres</em>, VI, 359-6o.
[235] ‘Rapport de la commission sur la question de l’heritage’, Bakunin, <em>OEuvres</em>, V, 199–210.
[236] Marx, Engels and Lenin, <em>Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism</em> (New York, 1972), pp. 45–6.
[237] Bakunin, <em>OEuvres</em>, I, 173, 296, II, 46, 335.
[238] Ibid., Ill, 64 note.
[239] Ibid., II, 423.
[240] Ibid., II, 101; Arthur Lehning (ed.), <em>Michael Bakunin, Selected Writings</em> (New York, 1973), p. 168. Cf. Daniel Guerin (ed.), <em>Ni Dieu ni maitre</em> (Lausanne, n.d.), p. 202.
[241] Lehning, <em>Selected Writings</em>, p. 169.
[242] Bakunin, <em>OEuvres</em>, VI, 70–2.
[243] Ibid., IV, 260.
[244] Godwin, <em>Political Justice,</em> I, 274.
[245] Kropotkin, <em>Fields, Factories and Workshops</em> (New York, 1913), pp. 394–402.
[246] Kropotkin, <em>Paroles d’un revoke</em> (Paris, 1885), pp. 308–9, 310; cf. Kropotkin, <em>Revolutionary Pamphlets</em> (New York, 1968), p. 156.
[247] Kropotkin, <em>Pamphlets</em>, p. 185. Cf. Martin A. Miller, <em>Kropotkin</em> (Chicago, 1976), p. 191. Kropotkin rejected ‘a vanguard elite which would operate either before or after the revolution’.
[248] For a good account of Kropotkin’s early anarchism, see Miller, <em>Kropotkin</em>, pp. 146, 174–5.
[249] Kropotkin, <em>Paroles</em>, p. 122.
[250] Kropotkin, <em>Pamphlets</em>, pp. 51, 68.
[251] Ibid., p. 35.
[252] Ibid., pp. 35–43. Quotation from this essay fails to capture its force. It should be read in its entirety.
[253] Ibid., p. 188.
[254] Kropotkin, <em>The Conquest of Bread</em> (New York, 1969), p. 57.
[255] For a detailed scenario see Kropotkin, <em>The Conquest of Brea</em>d, chs. 4–7.
[256] Proudhon’s epigraph for his <em>Systeme de contradictions economiques</em> was ‘Destruam et Aedificabo’. Bakunin insisted throughout his life that ‘the passion for destruction is a creative passion, too’. Lehning, <em>Selected Writings</em>, p. 58.
[257] Kropotkin, <em>The Conquest of Brea</em>d, pp. 109–10.
[258] Ibid., p. 80.
[259] Daniel Guerin, <em>Anarchism</em> (New York, 1970), p. 38.
[260] For a fine elaboration of these points see George Kateb, <em>Utopia and its Enemies</em> (Glencoe, III., 1963), pp. 44–6.
** 6. The place of anarchism in the spectrum of political ideas
The ideas of anarchists, when compared with those of socialists or liberals, are often found to be essentially the same. Oscar Jaszi, for instance, sees ‘the fundamental element of anarchism’ as ‘the extension of classical liberalism from the economic to all other fields’, while Daniel Guerin, followed by Noam Chomsky, finds that ‘the anarchist is primarily a socialist’.[261] This chapter shows, by subjecting these claims about the ideological place of anarchism to scrutiny, that neither can be effectively sustained. Anarchism is revealed as occupying its own distinct position in the spectrum of political ideas.
The elements of anarchist theory which will be found to set it apart from its close neighbors are its fundamental value and its view of the workings of the state. What separates anarchism from liberalism is its commitment to the value of community. What separates it from socialism is its ascription to the state’s inherent attributes, such as its impersonality, of the most significant effects. Now socialists share the anarchists’ commitment to community, while liberals share their ascription of the state’s effects to its inherent attributes. Hence it is these two elements of anarchism in combination that mark it as unique. Were it not for the anarchists’ commitment to community, they would have to be placed in the liberal camp. Were it not for their belief in the causal efficacy of the state’s inherent attributes, they would have to be accounted socialists. But since anarchists are both communitarian in values and emphasizers of what is inherent in the workings of the state, their theory differs fundamentally from both of those with which it is most frequently confused.
The main purpose in comparing anarchism to socialism and liberalism is to clarify its structure as systematic thought. Its arguments stand out more boldly, when distinguished from those of kindred theories. But there is also a practical value to this comparison. So long as anarchism is thought equivalent at root to socialism or liberalism, different at most in being purer, what is at stake in choosing to be an anarchist is misperceived. Since a variant of familiar socialist or liberal beliefs seems all one must accept, the choice of anarchism appears quite trivial. But when anarchism is recognized as a separate theory, making bold, distinctive claims, the decision to be an anarchist stands revealed as daring.
*** Anarchism, liberalism and community
Of writers who think anarchists should be viewed as liberals, William E. Hocking is more elaborate than most in backing his claims with reasons. The main point of agreement between anarchists and liberals for Hocking is on the overriding value of freedom understood as the absence of coercion by the state. For anarchists as for liberals ‘liberty...is the chief of all political goods’. As for their dispute about whether the state should be abolished, Hocking sees it as stemming from differences in psychology and thus of minor importance when compared to their agreement on first values. Liberals ‘think that the self-seeking and deceitful elements in human nature will remain statistically about as they are’, while anarchists ‘believe in a moral progress such that the social casing of coercion may eventually be discarded’.[262] Both take the same position on the most basic issue in political theory — the nature of intrinsic value — and it is only differences on secondary, psychological matters that lead to their dramatic, yet superficial disagreement on the wisdom of abolishing the state.
The main trouble with this argument for seeing anarchists as liberals is that it misconstrues the position of both groups on which values are ultimate. Hocking shares the misconception of anarchists as committed above all to freedom from the state, which was dispelled in Chapter 3 and replaced by the view that their chief goal is communal individuality. What must be added here is that freedom is not even the chief goal for all liberals.
Many liberals do, of course, embrace it. Kant, for instance, called freedom ‘the one sole and original right that belongs to every human being by virtue of his humanity’. And he means nothing complicated or paradoxical by freedom, in this context, at any rate: it is ‘independence from the constraint of another’s will’.[263] Equally frank expressions of commitment to freedom thus defined can be found in the writings of other leading liberals, such as Benjamin Constant.[264]
But these statements do not prove that for all liberals such freedom has supreme intrinsic worth. For utilitarian liberals, including Bentham, and perhaps Mill, its value is instrumental.[265] These theorists set value on freedom only as a means to happiness and not as an end in itself. Should freedom conflict with happiness, utilitarian liberals are bound logically to oppose it, and if happiness is increased by state coercion they must give such coercion their support.
The claim that anarchists are liberals is thus easily refuted, so far as it presumes that freedom from state coercion is the chief good for both groups. But this refutation is not invincible. Liberals and anarchists do agreed in opposing coercive government. Though the normative basis for this agreement is not the shared commitment to freedom alleged by writers such as Hocking, this does not mean that liberals and anarchists base their opposition on different norms. While not sharing the supreme value usually ascribed to them, they still might share one, which serves for both as the basis for their opposition to the state.
One value used by liberals as a basis for objecting to state coercion is autonomy, understood as acting from no empirical motive, but for the sake of duty. Kant objected to state coercion on this ground when he noted that the incentive to comply with ‘juridical legislation,...being different from the idea of duty itself, must derive from pathological ground determining the will, that is, from inclinations’.[266] Since an action, to be autonomous in the Kantian sense, must be done for duty’s sake, and since fear is the motive for acceding to state coercion, such coercion is reprehensible.
It is easy to show that none of the anarchists we are considering use Kantian autonomy as the normative basis for their opposition to state coercion. Godwin, Bakunin and Kropotkin do not, because they are determinists who deny the possibility of choice uncaused by inclinations.[267] Though Proudhon seems to admit this possibility, he does not elevate it to the status of supreme good. It need not have even instrumental worth, since he prizes right but empirically determined choices more highly than choices that are wrong but empirically undetermined.
Another value to which liberals appeal in their objections to state coercion is utility. It is on this basis that Bentham writes: ‘All punishment is itself an evil’, because ‘it tends to subtract from...happiness’.[268] Punishment, the most typical form of state coercion, definitionally causes its victims to suffer pain. Utility mandates the maximization of satisfaction. Hence, if utility is the supreme value, then punishment, and the state that inflicts it, stand at least presumptively condemned.
There is enough ambiguity in the attitude of some anarchists toward the principle of utility to make calling them utilitarians seem plausible. Godwin is especially easy to treat in this way, since he repeatedly praises satisfaction as the supreme good. As for his seemingly contrary words of praise for other goods, particularly community and individuality, these need not be read as ascriptions of supreme value, but may be construed as empirical statements about how the most satisfaction can be achieved. Godwin can then be said to approve of these other goods as means to utility rather than as equal to it in worth.[269]
It is possible to give a similar interpretation of Kropotkin, whose agreement with the utilitarians is shown clearly by his way of framing the question to be solved by anarchism: ‘ What forms of social life assure to a given society, and then to mankind generally, the greatest amount of happiness?’[270] No doubt, he, like Godwin, approves of goods other than satisfaction. But his approval for these goods may be seen as instrumental, arising from their richness as utility’s source.
Calling Kropotkin a subscriber to utilitarianism is indefensible because he goes out of his way to condemn that doctrine as framed by its founders. He faults Bentham for ‘the incompleteness of his ethics’ and Mill for the absence from his theory of ‘the principle of justice’.[271] What Kropotkin is here alluding to is the commonplace among critics of utilitarianism that an action which maximizes satisfaction may still be wrong. Since we condemn actions which utility tells us to approve, utility cannot always be of overriding worth.
It is harder to show the error in calling Godwin a utilitarian. His praise for the principle of utility is nowhere counterweighed by criticism, and he takes pains to reconcile this praise empirically with his avowals of support for rival goods. Yet one cannot avoid suspecting that his attempt at reconciliation fails. His claims about the effectiveness of community and individuality as a means to happiness are much exaggerated. Would he ever stop approving them in cases where it seemed likely that their opposites, such as deceit or servile deference, would advance utility more? Though Godwin’s utilitarianism is formally consistent, its empirical contestability casts its plausibility into doubt.
But Godwin’s utilitarianism, even if authentic, is insufficient evidence that anarchists agree with liberals in using the greatest happiness principle to criticize the state. Though Bakunin is silent on the merit of utilitarianism, Proudhon denounces it even more emphatically than Kropotkin does. ‘It cannot be said that everything...useful...is just; in case of conflict the choice is indisputable, justice is entitled to command.’[272] Proudhon is here making Kropotkin’s familiar point: utility may sanction wrongful acts. But he goes beyond this commonplace, with his characteristic rigor, when he proclaims: ‘Right and interest are two things as radically distinct as debauchery and marriage.’[273] A more thoroughgoing renunciation of utilitarian morality is difficult to conceive.
There is one other value to which liberals appeal in their objections to state coercion which seems more promising than autonomy or utility as a mark of normative agreement with anarchism. This value is individuality of the kind prized by J. S. Mill. It is a main part of Mill’s case against coercive government that it debilitates the character of rulers and ruled alike, when it silences opinion, prevents self-regarding action, or benevolently interferes by giving too much help. State coercion is for Mill a menace to the individuality, understood as energetic personality, that he prizes as the supreme element in human worth.
Individuality, of course, as we have seen in Chapter 3, also has intrinsic value for the anarchists. When Godwin calls it ‘the very essence of human excellence’, he sounds like Mill’s anticipator.[274] When Kropotkin demands its ‘most complete development’ he sounds like Mill’s disciple.[275] Texts of Proudhon and Bakunin also could be cited to show that in setting inherent value on individuality and in appealing to it in their arguments against the state, all four anarchists agree with Mill — the quintessential liberal. This agreement would seem to give the basis, which Hocking failed to find, for claiming anarchists as liberals. Though freedom cannot be cited as the value used by both groups to condemn coercive government, individuality can be. And since anarchists and liberals share this basic value, their theories, one might argue, must be regarded as at root the same.
The main trouble with this attempt to save Hocking’s thesis is that it overlooks the difference in normative status assigned by the two groups to community. Anarchists do not prize individuality *simpliciter*: communal individuality is their goal. Their project, we have learned, is to organize society so as to maximize individuality *and* community seen as equal, interdependent values. Liberals give community a lower status. For some it is an interference with the satisfaction, freedom or individuality they most prize. For others it is normatively irrelevant. Thinking of society as a device to protect intrinsic values, they regard it as an instrument and are indifferent to the reciprocity of awareness among its members called community.[276] The value of community, which for anarchists is inherent, is thus for liberals instrumental at most. This disagreement between the two groups in normative starting point is decisive evidence for the conclusion defended here. Anarchists, far from being an especially hardy breed of liberals, are an entirely different race.
The commitment of anarchists to community is significant as more than a mark setting them apart from liberals. It also provides an explanation, more convincing than is usual, for their disagreement with liberals on the wisdom of abolishing the state. The standard explanation for this disagreement, mentioned above, relies on alleged differences between the two groups on the possibilities of human nature. The weakness of this explanation is that they actually agree closely on these possibilities. Thus, their difference in first values is extremely fortunate for explaining why they disagree about whether the state should be abolished. If both groups proceeded from the same first values, their disagreement on this issue would be much harder to explain.
Liberal psychologies all lack two antithetical assumptions about human nature that are often found in political theory. On the one hand, they do not consider any vicious motive such as the desire to oppress or cause suffering to be irremediably and universally dominant. Nor do they concede the possibility that a benevolent motive might achieve this status. Within the limits set by these omissions, liberals adopt a variety of psychologies ranging from Locke’s relatively benign one to Bentham’s hedonism, and including intermediate positions such as Kant’s ‘asocial sociability’.[277] But here the subject is not differences among liberal psychologies, but similarities. Anarchists agree with liberals in upholding what is common to the liberal outlook, since they too deny both that malevolence is always dominant everywhere and that the universally dominant motive can be benevolence.
Human nature as described by Proudhon lies clearly within the boundaries of liberal psychology. He explicitly rejects the same two hypotheses about motivation as the liberals, while in his own psychology, man, suspended between these extremes, ‘may be defined with equal justice as either a pugnacious animal or a sociable one’.[278] Bakunin holds a similarly liberal view concerning the motivational weight of kindness as compared with malice. Man, for Bakunin, has ‘two opposed instincts, egoism and sociability’, neither of which predominates, for ‘he is both more ferocious in his egoism than the most ferocious beasts and more sociable than bees and ants’.[279]
Godwin and Kropotkin are less easily characterized in their psychologies as liberal. The problem, of course, lies not in the pessimism of these theorists about the future of malevolence, but in their optimism about the possibilities of human kindness. It is not hard to show, however, that the reputations of Godwin and Kropotkin as naive believers in benevolence are caricatures.[280]
As part of his campaign against psychological egoism Godwin does insist on the force of kindly motives. Nor can it be denied that he expects them to become stronger, more impartial and more widespread in the future, as social conditions are improved. But these claims do not amount to the thesis, frequently ascribed to him, that benevolence can become universally predominant. Often, he says the opposite. A late work, *Thoughts on Man*, calls ‘the love of power’ a motive which ‘never entirely quits us’. It portrays man as ‘a creature of mingled substance’. And it warns solemnly against the ‘few men in every community that are sons of riot and plunder’.[281] Lest these professions of doubt on the prospects of benevolence be thought symptoms of Godwin’s old age, it should be noted that they also appear in the earlier and more optimistic *Political Justice*. Godwin there advances the doctrine of perfectibility, which for him includes progress in benevolence. But he is careful to delineate the limits to perfectibility, of which the most important is intractable human nature. So ‘shut in on all sides’ is man by the ‘limited nature of the human faculties’ that it would be pretence for him to ‘lay claim to absolute perfection’.[282] Since we will never be perfect, benevolence will not always be our strongest motive. Thus, not even in his most optimistic work did Godwin’s faith in human kindness surpass the liberals’.
Kropotkin’s position on the future of benevolence is much the same. He too stresses the actual force of motives such as love and devotion. He too claims that under anarchy these motives will be stronger and more widespread. But no more than Godwin does he regard them as potentially predominant. In his description of anarchy not everyone is kindly. ‘Certain among us’ will still be governed by ‘anti-social instincts’.[283] Kropotkin, like Godwin, sees more potentialities for benevolence than Proudhon or Bakunin. But his confidence in it is slight enough to serve along with Godwin’s as conclusive evidence that in their estimates of human nature anarchists and liberals agree.
The agreement between anarchists and liberals in psychology makes the main problem of their politics the same. By denying that malevolence is ineradicable, both rule out autocracy as a mode of organization. For only if viciousness must be widespread and rampant is autocracy needed to safeguard peace. By denying the possibility of universal benevolence, they also rule out as unworkable modes of organization which exert no cohesive force. For only if kindliness is the overriding motive, can an utterly spontaneous society exist. Thus the problem of politics for anarchists and liberals alike is to describe a pattern of social relations that, without being autocratic, provides the required cohesive force.
There are two ways to solve this problem.[284] The first, the choice of liberals, is to accept, and limit, the coercive state. Anarchists choose the second solution, familiar from earlier chapters of this book: they reject the state entirely and rely instead on public censure. It is the disagreement between the two groups in normative starting point that explains the difference in how they solve their common problem. Both groups regard the legal form and coercive sanctions, which are inherent in the state, as causing its most important effects. But whereas the anarchists’ commitment to community leads them to evaluate these effects so negatively that they reject all states, even the most limited, and turn instead to public censure, liberals are led by their indifference to community to a more positive evaluation, which encourages them to reject censure and to admit the need for a limited state.
Liberals, in their denunciation of the state, often seem as adamant as anarchists. But some of their more vivid criticism is deceptive bluster. Paine, for instance, sounds anarchistically outraged as he berates ‘the greedy hand of government, thrusting itself into every corner and crevice of industry, and grasping the spoil of the multitude’.[285] But his objection here, like many raised by liberals, is to a remediable excess, and thus no sign of categorical hostility. Being directed at avoidable shortcomings, rather than inherent defects, such objections serve not to destroy but to improve the state, by showing how to limit it so that it rules more gently. But besides their numerous contingent criticisms, liberals have at least two which, being aimed at the state’s inherent attributes, are basic. The first of these criticisms is Bentham’s, already mentioned, that punishment causes pain. This is an objection to an unavoidable defect inherent in all governments, since none can refrain from punishing altogether. The other liberal objection to an inherent attribute of the state is Kant’s, also encountered before, that, owing to its unavoidable coercion, the incentive to obey a government may be fear of punishment. Since an autonomous action is done for the sake of duty, obedience to a government often lacks moral worth.
But though liberals object to some consequences of the state’s coercion, they are prevented by their indifference to the value of community from assailing it with the anarchists’ sort of all-out criticism. State coercion, for the anarchist, is more than painful, more than immoral. It is a poison which, by contaminating social relations with distrust, resentment and remote impersonality, causes community’s dissolution. Here then is one way the difference between anarchists and liberals in fundamental values explains their disagreement about abolishing the state. The anarchists’ commitment to the value of community gives them an emplacement, unavailable to liberals, from which to attack the effects of state coercion more forcefully.
It is not only because their criticism of state coercion is milder that liberals disagree with anarchists about its abolition. They also disagree because they outweigh their criticism with reverence for another of the state’s inherent attributes, the rule of law. So prized by liberals are the consequences of law’s familiar traits -its generality, stability and externality — that the bad effects of state coercion are overshadowed in their eyes, when it has these legal merits. The generality of law guards against practices liberals loathe, such as discrimination against eccentrics and exploitation by officials. Law’s stability gives it a predictability esteemed by liberals as a source both of independence and satisfaction. And they prize law’s externality for the protection it affords against governmental interference with private states of mind.
This outline of the liberal defense of law and thus the state, though sketchy, is sufficient for explaining why anarchists do not use it. For this purpose, the crucial point about this defense is its logical dependence on liberal values. It is the liberals’ commitment to freedom, autonomy, individuality and utility that makes them find the effects of law desirable enough to outweigh the harm caused by state coercion. To anarchists, on the other hand, with their commitment to community, veneration of legality seems outrageous. As the comparison worked out early in this book between the anarchists’ views of law and censure showed, from their communitarian perspective law, far from redeeming coercion, only makes it more repulsive. Being general, law ignores the individual diversities from which anarchist community draws its strength. Being permanent, it is too rigid as a regulator of communal ties. And being external, it is blind to community’s very substance: the knowledge shared by all its members of the others’ minds. Their commitment to community thus accounts for the anarchists’ disagreement with liberals over the state’s abolition by explaining not only why they attack the state more harshly, but also why they reject liberal arguments for state coercion redeemed by legal probity.
There is one other reason why liberals disagree with anarchists about abolishing the state: they oppose using public censure as the state’s replacement. The degree to which the liberals oppose censure varies, depending on their attitude toward utilitarianism. Bentham, as a consistent utilitarian, finds no inherent fault in censure, but he finds no inherent merit in it either. Its value lies largely in its effectiveness as a behavioral control, concerning which he has grave doubts. That is why he includes it in his list of sanctions — calling it the moral or popular sanction — but relies on it very little in his proposals for reform.[286] Non-utilitarian liberals oppose censure forthrightly, as an unavoidable threat to their first values. Mill, interpreted as assigning individuality intrinsic worth, is the best known example of a liberal who rejects censure categorically. But Constant does so too, when he proclaims: ‘we are modern men who want to develop our faculties as we please...and who have no use for authority except to obtain from it the general means of instruction it can provide’.[287] Since censure unavoidably obstructs self-development, it is as impermissible for Constant as for Mill.
Anarchists, of course, share the concern of liberals for the development of individuality. Yet they take issue with them by espousing censure, despite their recognition that for self-development it is a threat. Here too the explanation for the disagreement between the two groups is the difference in their fundamental values. Liberals reject censure, because the dearth of reciprocal awareness in the legal state means that admonishment by neighbors there can only cramp the self. But the bonds of community in the stateless environment of the anarchists make censure’s effect on individuality more benign. Censure under anarchy is remarkable, we have learned, for the extent to which, owing largely to the communal context in which it operates, it nurtures human faculties by controlling behavior with reasons. It is because anarchists affirm the worth of communal understanding that they are able, unlike liberals, to give censure their support. For communal understanding provides them with a safeguard, unavailable to liberals, with which to check censure’s destructive tendencies. Thus their difference in normative starting points is as sound as explanation for why anarchists disagree with liberals by praising public censure as for why they disagree with them by condemning coercion and law. The anarchists’ communitarian commitment and its rejection by the liberals are the grounds to which all aspects of their disagreement about whether the state should be abolished must finally be traced.
The account advanced here of the deep difference between anarchism and liberalism clarifies what is at stake in choosing between them. It is not uncommon for liberals, who often see their relationship to anarchists in Hocking’s terms, to claim an easy sympathy with anarchism as morally appealing but empirically unsound. The allegiance to liberal values they find in anarchism makes it seem congenial. But its unfortunate naivety concerning human nature marks it with an unacceptable extravagance. Thus liberals treat anarchism with both reverence and disdain, as a flawed but noble version of the truth.[288] There is a double mistake behind such treatment, we now can see, for the basic values of anarchism and liberalism differ, while their views of human nature are the same. Hence the choice between them turns not on disavowing an outlandish psychology, but on embracing a distinctive norm. This choice cannot be easy, since the norms of liberals and those of anarchists have a powerful but opposite appeal.
*** Anarchism, socialism and the state as cause
The boundary between anarchism and socialism cannot lie on the terrain of values, because communal individuality is the overriding goal for both. Eccentric minor socialists such as Cabet can be cited, for whom community eclipses individuality as a source of worth, but an individualized community is the goal of the main socialist tradition, as exemplified by its profound, influential members, above all Marx.[289] Hence though an analysis of values has set anarchists apart from liberals, they must be marked off from socialists on some other ground. The point in their theories that sets anarchists and socialists apart most fundamentally is one on which anarchists and liberals agree: the importance as a source of consequences of the state’s inherent attributes.
Having traced the anarchists’ abhorrence of law and government to their distinctive normative commitment, we must be startled to find that socialists, though sharing this commitment, nevertheless endorse the state, not only as a means to build the good society, but as one of that society’s integral parts. That socialists rely on the state tactically, whether by seizing it with force or claiming it with votes, is a longstanding commonplace.[290] That they also incorporate it into their good society is more contestable, especially in light of what Marx and Engels say about its ultimate disappearance. Yet it is easy to show that the Marxist good society, even at its highest stage, includes elements of legal government which are banned from a mature anarchy.
Marx and Engels, in their remarks about the state’s future, do not say that it will disappear entirely; rather, they mention certain of its particular attributes, qualified as political, which alone are destined to die out.[291] Included among these are its use as a ‘government of persons’ and as an instrument of ‘class rule’, or ‘special repressive force’.[292] What Marx and Engels mean to designate by the last two of these phrases is fairly clear: no force will be used by officials in the ultimate phase of socialism to weaken or eliminate opponents. For in the ultimate phase of socialism, since there will be no more classes, there will be no opponents for officials to repress. As for the disappearance of a ‘government of persons’, this must be seen in the light of its replacement, ‘the administration of things’. Thus considered, it means an end to the legal regulation of behavior, except when needed to protect efficiency. The members of the classless society will be so cooperative that legal government will not have to prevent crime.
Besides enumerating the attributes of the state that will become outmoded, Marx and Engels also mention some that will remain. Elections, for example, though they will ‘completely lose their political character’, will still occur under socialism. And though the officials chosen at these elections will perform no ‘governmental functions’, ‘general functions’ such as supervising the economy will continue to be their task.[293] Thus Marx and Engels are at one with the mainstream of the socialist tradition in giving the state permanence. For the regulative institutions which they include in socialist society, despite the withering or transcendence they undergo, retain enough traces of legal authority to qualify as a state.[294]
The disagreement between anarchists and socialists concerning the abolition of the state is both a ground for suspecting that their theories differ and a source of puzzlement. Anarchists and socialists are both committed to communal individuality. Yet only anarchists use this shared commitment to justify the state’s elimination. What is it about socialism that prevents its adherents from drawing out from the normative starting point they share with anarchists the anarchists’ extreme anti-state conclusion? An answer to this question will clearly delineate the line that separates their theories.
There is no widespread reverence for legality among socialists which could serve, as it does for liberals, to explain their liking for the state. Some socialists, especially those with revisionist or Fabian sympathies, do show a liberal appreciation for the law’s blessings. But neutrality or indifference toward the law as such is socialism’s usual stance. For most socialists legal institutions draw their value not from their intrinsic character, but from the society that shapes them and from the interests that they serve. Nor can the liking of socialists for the state be explained by their view of human nature, since their pessimism about the future of benevolence is no greater than the anarchists’. Marx, of course, thought history was ‘nothing but a continuous transformation of human nature’.[295] The place to look for an explanation of their differences concerning the abolition of the state is their analysis of its significance compared to the economy as a social cause.
All anarchists take note of a point much emphasized by socialists — how economic relations affect our lives for ill or good. Kropotkin, writing in a period that was obsessed by economics, goes further than his predecessors in tracing personal degradation and social mistrust to the baneful effects of a disordered economy, which he sees as causing damage not only directly, but also indirectly, through being a source of legal government. Kropotkin also works out more fully how the future economy will cause communal individuality to grow. But even Godwin’s analysis of the economy’s causal role includes the gist of Kropotkin’s points. ‘The spirit of oppression, the spirit of servility, and the spirit of fraud, these are the immediate growth of the established administration of property.’ ‘The unequal distribution of property’ is also ‘one of the original sources of government’. And an egalitarian economy would help to create a situation in which ‘each man would be united to his neighbor, in love and mutual kindness...but each man would think and judge for himself’.[296] There is nothing in these affirmations with which a socialist need disagree.
Where anarchists and socialists part company is on the causal role of the state. Much of their disagreement on this subject is no more than a matter of degree or emphasis. Thus, while both groups recognize the effects of government on economic institutions, anarchists insist on them more.[297] And while both see that government, despite being affected by the economy, acts somewhat independently from it, anarchists insist more strongly on this independence.[298] But there is one question regarding the state as cause on which anarchists and socialists completely disagree: whether the state’s inherent nature is a source of its effects. All of the state’s effects are seen by socialists as arising from its particular, changeable attributes, mainly, in the Marxist case, its class character. Each government, for the Marxist, gets its most causally significant attributes from the relations of production which it reflects. Anarchists, on the other hand, while they certainly appreciate how the particular effects of each state are shaped by its changeable attributes, also emphasize, in contradistinction to the socialists, how its legality and coerciveness, which are inherent in its nature, constantly cause more serious effects. Thus Godwin implores us never to ‘forget, that government is, abstractly taken, an evil, an usurpation upon the private judgment and individual conscience of mankind’. Bakunin maintains that ‘despotism lies less in the *form* of the state or of power than in their very *principle*’. And Proudhon gives the anarchist analysis of the state as cause practical application in explaining his vote against one of France’s most democratic constitutions: ‘I voted against the Constitution, because it is a Constitution.’[299] For the anarchist, then, it makes no difference, so far as concerns its more important effects, who runs the state, how it is organized, or what it does. It debases and estranges its subjects regardless of these contingencies, just because it is a state.
With this understanding of the basic difference between anarchists and socialists to rely on, new meaning can be given to their well-known tactical disputes. The dramatic clashes between anarchists and socialists, which arose within the First International and have continued wherever anarchists have been politically significant, are conventionally seen as clashes over the bearing of circumstances on the effectiveness of the state as a means for reaching a rnutually accepted goal. This interpretation is inadequate on at least two scores.
For one thing, its claim that the goal of anarchists and socialists is identical can only be accepted with stricter qualifications than are normally imposed. It is often said that the goal shared by socialists and anarchists is a self-regulating, classless society, bereft of government and law. Socialists, to be sure, see this goal as an ultimate end, while for anarchists it is an immediate objective, but its status as their shared goal can hardly be impugned by the fact that they plan to reach it on different schedules. This standard way of claiming that anarchists and socialists share goals fails because it ignores the disagreement between them just analyzed concerning the permanence of the state. Socialists and anarchists cannot possibly have the same goal, understood as a vision of the good society, because socialists give law and government a permanent place even in their good society’s final stage. But though the claim that anarchists and socialists share goals is unacceptable in its standard version, properly qualified it holds up. Provided they are regarded not as a vision of a good society, but as values which a good society must express, the goals of anarchists and socialists are certainly identical, since communal individuality is the regulative value for both groups.
The other score on which the usual interpretation of the clash on tactics between anarchists and socialists must be questioned is its contention that the clash is over the issue of how the state’s suitability as an instrument is affected by circumstances. When socialists rely on the state tactically, they do so, in this view, out of the belief that circumstances make it a helpful means for achieving victory. Anarchists arrive at their tactical opposition to the state by the same sort of reasoning. But their reading of the circumstances which socialists see as making the state a handy conveyance leads them to see it as a vehicle for reaching nothing but defeat. There is evidence in the writings of both groups to support this way of understanding their clash on tactics.
Socialists, with insignificant exceptions, agree that one way to win control of the state, in the right circumstances, is by taking title to it in an election. Marx, for instance, thinks that if there is universal suffrage, if capitalism is well-developed, if agriculture is industrialized, if there is no strong authoritarian tradition, socialists should contest elections, because a majority of dedicated voters, who will support the desired social transformation, can then be won.[300] Anarchists reject this strategy by denying that the circumstances which socialists find auspicious give elections even scanty promise. The mass of voters in present society are so ignorant, so deferential, and so resigned that there is no hope of attracting the support of a majority.[301]
The other way suggested by socialists for winning control of the state is some sort of forceful seizure. Their projects for this seizure (and hence their views about its needed circumstances) vary, ranging from Blanqui’s schemes for conspiracy by a small group to Marx’s hints at an open, broadly based insurrection. Circumstances which socialists see as affecting the success of a forceful seizure pertain to such matters as the strength of the established government, the disposition of the underlying population and the capacities of the insurrectionary leadership. It is mainly concerning the last of these that anarchists and socialists part company. Socialists believe that insurrectionary leaders, whether because of their exemplary character, their dependence on their followers, or their loyalty to their class, may have enough resolve selflessly to build the good society once they have won power. Anarchists deny this on the ground that the temptations of power are too great. Not even the most dedicated revolutionary can be trusted to build the good society, if he occupies a public office.[302]
It should be clear from this comparison that the usual account of the clash between anarchists and socialists on tactics, which traces it to their different assessments of attendant circumstances, provides a workable explanation of their dispute. But this explanation is superficial, because it makes no reference to the deeper difference between them, brought out earlier in this section, concerning the causal efficacy of the state’s inherent attributes. Even if they endorsed the socialists’ favorable reading of circumstances, anarchists would not accept their tactical reliance on the state, because, no matter how favorable the circumstances in which it is used, the state for anarchists remain a Moloch. It is only by recognizing the bearing on their familiar tactical disputes of their disagreement concerning the state as cause that the theoretical significance of these disputes can be appreciated. They are then revealed as more than wrangles over the empirical assessment of contingencies, for they are rooted in a difference antecedent to such wrangles about whether contingencies can ever be decisive, in judging the state’s effects.
The error of those who claim that anarchists are socialists at heart stems from blindness toward their disagreement about the causal efficacy of the state *qua* state. A typical version of this claim is advanced by Noam Chomsky. Anarchism is not to be identified with socialism *simpliciter*, since many socialists rely on legal government. But there are also socialists (Chomsky cites Anton Pannekoek and William Paul) who are at one with anarchists in finding the state antipathetic. It is as part of this ‘libertarian wing of socialism’ that Chomsky thinks anarchism should be classed.[303]
If the antipathy to legal government of council communists, syndicalists and similar representatives of socialism’s libertarian wing came from alarm about the effects of the state’s inherent attributes, Chomsky’s claim that anarchism is a type of socialism would be correct. But even the most libertarian of the socialists is alarmed mainly by effects of the state’s changeable characteristics, such as its organization or policies. This difference in the causal perspective from which they view the state puts socialists, however libertarian, a great distance away from anarchists. What libertarian socialists find fault with in their criticism of the present state is not its impersonality or coercion, but its use by minorities to subjugate the many. What they fear in the state envisaged by a less libertarian socialism is not the perpetuation of an unredeemable institution, but its continued use as an oppressive instrument by a bureaucracy or a vanguard party. And what they project as a successor to the existing state is not a society freed of legal government, but a society organized, in Chomsky’s words, ‘on truly democratic lines, with democratic control in the workplace and in the community’.[304]
The same conclusion emerges from this comparison at every point. Libertarian socialists, mainly because of their oblivion to the state’s permanent effects, are not anarchists, but democrats. They want a system built on a pattern like that described by Paul, with industry ‘democratically owned and controlled by the workers electing directly from their own ranks industrial administrative committees’.[305] Anarchists, to be sure, regard democracy as more progressive than other forms of government; some go so far as to give it a significant place in their strategy. But even a democracy purged of all bourgeois elements — impeccably participatory, thoroughly decentralized, genuinely industrial, proceeding entirely from the bottom up — produces the effects for which the anarchists condemn the state. Hence any theory such as libertarian socialism which, far from excluding democratic institutions from its vision of the good society, regards them as indispensable, cannot possibly be called anarchist.
We must thus conclude that even between anarchists and socialists whose affinities are closest, there is a clear dividing line. For the disagreement about the significance of the state as cause, which underlies their dispute about the future of democracy, overshadows the affinity arising from their shared antipathy to particular states. When libertarian socialists denounce the present state as a tool of capitalism, call for workers’ councils, or attack elitism and bureaucracy, they may sound like anarchists, but in its relevant causal presuppositions the theory they depend on for reaching these conclusions is no form of anarchism at all.
If the usual view of the relationship between anarchism and socialism were acceptable, choosing between them would be a matter of empirical judgment. One need only decide which group, in assessing the state’s effectiveness in varied circumstances, makes the more reliable predictions. Matters such as the anarchists’ tendency to underestimate the educative effects of democracy and the socialists’ tendency to underestimate the corrupting effects of power would have to be examined. When all the differences between the two groups which affect the reliability of their predictions had been weighed together, the balance on which the choice between them depended would be struck.
But the view presented here of where anarchism and socialism disagree shows that the choice between them rests on another consideration. The world of politics has a different structure for the two groups, at least so far as it is composed of states. Socialists think that the state’s significance as a source of political effects arises from its contingent attributes and from the causal nexus in which these attributes exist. For anarchists, the state’s political significance lies elsewhere — in its independent, self-contained, unchangeable existence. Hence the choice between anarchism and socialism depends not on an empirical comparison, but on an ontological inquiry, not on the weighing of probabilities, at which socialists may be shrewder, but on the elucidation of conjectures, at which neither side is obviously better.
*** The singularity of Anarchism
The allegiance of the anarchists to both communal individuality and to viewing the state as an inherent cause not only makes their theory singular by distinguishing it from its close neighbors, but also accounts for its most noticeable peculiarities. In studying the anarchists we have continually found their commitment to communal individuality revealing. Their reliance on public censure, their search for mediation between individuals and groups, their radical social criticism and their fruitless quest for an effective strategy have all been illuminated when seen as shaped by the requirements of their guiding value. Yet since socialists as well as anarchists affirm this value, it cannot by itself account for what is distinctive about anarchism. Communal individuality as affected by anarchism’s conception of the state as an inherent cause is what lies at the root of its peculiarities. Conceiving of the state as a malevolent god, drawing its power from its inner resources, anarchists, at all phases of their theorizing, must fight not only *for* their guiding value, but *against* their mortal enemy. It is because they strive for a communal individuality devoid of legal government that anarchists reach such peculiar conclusions about tactics and social structure. Less novel options are unavailable, being foreclosed by their conception of the causal efficacy of the state. Hence the singularity of anarchist theory lies not only in its defining attributes, but also in the contours which these attributes shape. The characteristics of anarchism which set it apart from its close neighbors are also poles which inflect the course of its argument with attractive and repellent force. To redeem society on the strength of rational, spontaneous relations, while slaying the leviathan who offers minimal protection — this is the anarchist’s daring choice.
[261] Oscar Jaszi, ‘Anarchism’, in <em>The Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences</em>, 2 (New York, 1937), p. 52; Daniel Guerin, <em>Anarchism</em> (New York, 1970), p. 12; cf. Noam Chomsky’s introduction, p. xv.
[262] William H. Hocking, <em>Man and the State</em> (New Haven, 1926), pp. 97, 91.
[263] Immanuel Kant, <em>The Metaphysical Elements of Justice</em>, ed. John Ladd (Indianapolis, 1965), pp. 43–4.
[264] Benjamin Constant, <em>OEuvres</em> (Paris, 1957), p. 1232.
[265] Mill’s case is difficult. For discussion of the normative status of freedom in his theory see Robert Paul Wolff, <em>The Poverty of Liberalism</em> (Boston, 1968), pp. 19–20; Albert W. Levi, ‘The Value of Freedom: Mill’s “Liberty” (1859–1959)’, reprinted in Peter Radcliff (ed.), <em>Limits of Liberty</em> (Belmont, Calif., 1966), pp. 6–18; H. J. McCloskey, ‘Mill’s Liberalism’, reprinted in Isaac Kramnick (ed.), <em>Essays in the History of Political Thought</em> (New York, 1969), p. 373.
[266] Kant, <em>Metaphysical Elements of Justice</em>, p. 19.
[267] Godwin: ‘The man who is acquainted with all the circumstances under which a living or intelligent being is placed upon any given occasion is qualified to predict the conduct he will hold with as much certainty as he can predict any of the phenomena of inanimate nature.’ <em>Enquiry Concerning Political Justice</em>(Torpnto, 1946), I, 363. Bakunin: Man ‘is irrevocably chained to the natural and social world of which he is a product and in which, like everything that exists, after having been an effect, and continuing to be one, he becomes in turn a relative cause of relatively new products’. <em>OEuvres</em> (Paris, 1895–1913), III, 253. Kropotkin: ‘Anarchism is a world-concept based upon a mechanical explanation of all phenomena, embracing die whole of nature — that is, including in it the life of human societies.’ <em>Revolutionary Pamphlets</em> (New York, 1968), p. 150.
[268] Jeremy Bentham, <em>Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation</em> (New York, 1948), p. 170.
[269] For the argument that Godwin is a utilitarian see D. H. Monro, <em>Godwin’s Moral Philosophy</em> (London, 1953), pp. 14–20, and John P. Clark, <em>The Philosophical Anarchism of William Godwin</em> (Princeton, N.J.i 1977), pp. 93–126. J. B. Priestley’s case against calling Godwin a utilitarian is unconvincing. See his edition of <em>Political Justic</em>e (Toronto, 1946), III, 15–16.
[270] Kropotkin, <em>Pamphlets</em>, p. 153.
[271] Kropotkin, <em>Ethics</em> (New York, 1924), pp. 239, 241.
[272] Proudhon, <em>De la Justice dans la Revolution et dans l’Eglise</em> (Paris, 1930–5). III. 544; cf-1, 310.
[273] Ibid., Ill, 444.
[274] Godwin, <em>Political Justice</em>, II, 500.
[275] Kropotkin, <em>Pamphlets</em>, p. 123.
[276] See Wolff, <em>The Poverty of Liberalism</em>, pp. 183–5, and for a more nuanced view, Gerald F. Gaus and John W. Chapman, ‘Anarchism and Political Philosophy: An Introduction’, in J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapman (eds.), <em>Anarchism</em> (New York, 1978), p. xxxi. Wolff overstates a good case. There are signs of devotion to community among some liberals, but they are faint and leave little mark on the practices of liberal society. Certainly, liberals do not seek communal individuality above all else. For evidence of Mill’s concern for community see <em>On Liberty</em> (Indianapolis, 1956), p. 76.
[277] Immanuel Kant, <em>The Philosophy of Kant</em>, ed. Carl J. Friedrich (New York, 1949), p. 120. For some astute remarks on Locke’s psychology, see Gordon J. Schochet, ‘The Family and the Origins of the State in Locke’s Political Philosophy’, in John Yolton (ed.), <em>John Locke: Problems and Perspectives</em> (Cambridge, England, 1968), pp. 95–6.
[278] Proudhon, <em>Justice</em>, I, 416; cf. <em>La guerre et la paix</em> (Paris, 1927), pp. 118–21.
[279] Bakunin, <em>OEuvres</em>, I, 137.
[280] As John Clark aptly demonstrates. See ‘What is Anarchism?’, in Pennock and Chapman (eds.), <em>Anarchism</em>, pp. 15–17.
[281] Godwin, <em>Thoughts on Man</em> (New York, 1969), pp. 97, 12, 112.
[282] Godwin, Political Justice, I, 94; cf. <em>Political Justice</em>, I, 184; II, 533, and Monro, <em>Godwin’s Moral Philosophy</em>, pp. 167, 172–82. Charles Frankel in <em>The Case For Modern Man</em> (Boston, 1959), pp. 102–6, shows the sobriety of Condorcet’s doctrine of perfectibility. Much of what is there said of Condorcet also applies to Godwin.
[283] Kropotkin, <em>Pamphlets</em>, p. 218; cf. p. 106 where Kropotkin says that even in an anarchy it may be a man’s ‘bent of character’ to deceive his friends.
[284] Bertrand de Jouvenel discusses them in <em>Sovereignt</em>y (Chicago, 1957), pp. 130–5.
[285] Thomas Paine, <em>The Selected Works of Tom Paine and Citizen Tom Paine</em>, ed. Howard Fast (New York, 1943), p. 90.
[286] It is true that he relied more heavily on the moral sanction in his pages on indirect legislation, but he never published them and it is unclear how seriously he took them. On this question see Mary P. Mack, <em>Jeremy Bentham: An Odyssey of Ideas</em> (New York, 1963), pp. 170–3.
[287] Benjamin Constant, <em>Cours de politique constitutionelle</em>, ed. Edouard Laboulaye (Paris, 1861), II, 554.
[288] Cf. James M. Buchanan, ‘A Contractarian Perspective on Anarchy’, in Pennock and Chapman (eds.), <em>Anarchism</em>, p. 29. ‘I have often described myself as a philosophical anarchist. In my conceptualized ideal society individuals with well defined and mutually respected rights coexist and cooperate as they desire without formal political structure. My practical ideal, however, moves one stage down from this and is based on the presumption that individuals could not attain the behavioral standards required for such anarchy to function acceptably. In general recognition of this frailty in human nature, persons would agree to enact laws, and to provide means of enforcement, so as to achieve the closest approximation that is possible to the ideally free society.’
<br><br>
This is the place to acknowledge the existence in America of anarchists, beginning with Josiah Warren, culminating with Benjamin Tucker, and exemplified at present by figures such as David Friedman or Murray Rothbard, who, unlike the anarchists being studied in this book, must be classified as liberals. These anarchists — often denominated individualists — differ from the founders in seeing a conflict between individuality and community and in resolving the conflict by giving individuality precedence. The friendly criticism of anarchists advanced by writers like Buchanan, though misguided if seen as aimed at the founders, is on target as applied to these individualists. It is indeed naive to claim that individuality can flourish without the bonds of either community or the state.
[289] On Marx as a seeker of communal individuality see above, Introduction.
[290] Which doesn’t apply to socialism before 1848. Cf. G. D. H. Cole, <em>A History of Socialist Thought</em>, vol. I (London, 1959), pp. 131, 313.
[291] Avineri illuminatingly equates Marx’s use of ‘political’ here with ‘partial’. Shlomo Avineri, <em>The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx</em> (Cambridge, England, 1968), p. 212.
[292] Marx, Engels and Lenin, <em>Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism</em> (New York, 1972), pp. 168, 150.
[293] Ibid., p. 150.
[294] Other interpreters of Marxism who agree that a state remains in the highest stage of socialism include Richard Adamiak, ‘The Withering Away of the State: A Reconsideration’, <em>Journal of Politics</em>, 32 (February 1970), pp. 3–18; Thilo Ramm, ‘Die Kiinftige Gesellschaftsordnung nach der Theorie von Marx und Engels’, in Iring Fetscher (ed.), <em>Marxismusstudie</em>n, vol. II (Tubingen, 1957), pp. 77–119, see especially p. 102; John Plamenatz, <em>Man and Society</em>, 2 vols. (London, 1963), II, 373: ‘Marx and Engels... made a distinction between government and administration, predicting the disappearance in the classless society of only the first. Though they did not... make it clear just what this distinction amounts to, they seem to have included in administration some of the activities usually called governmental.’
[295] <em>Misere de la philosophie</em>, ed. Henri Mougin (Paris, 1961), p. 153.
[296] Godwin, <em>Political Justice</em>, II, 463, 443, 466.
[297] Proudhon, <em>Justice</em>, III, 174; Bakunin, <em>OEuvres</em>, II, 108, IV, 407, V, 312; Kropotkin, <em>Pamphlets</em>, p. 166.
[298] Consider this criticism by Bakunin of Marx. Marx ‘says that “hardship produces political slavery — the State”, but does not allow for the converse: “Political slavery — the State — reproduces and maintains hardship as a condition of its existence”’. Arthur Lehning (ed.), <em>Michael Bakunin: Selected Writings</em> (New York, 1973), p. 256. Though the state, for Marx, has more causal independence than Bakunin allows, it is still far more dependent on the economy than it is for Bakunin, or any anarchist.
[299] Godwin, <em>Political Justice</em>, II, 2; Bakunin, <em>OEuvres</em>, II, 327; Proudhon, <em>Confessions d’un revolutionnaire</em> (Paris, 1929), p. 215.
[300] Avineri, <em>Social and Political Thought of Marx</em>, pp. 202–20.
[301] For instance, ‘Universal suffrage, so long as it is exercised in a society where, the people, the working masses, are economically dominated by a minority,... can never produce anything but illusory elections, which are anti-democratic and absolutely opposed to the needs, instincts and real will of the population.’ (Bakunin, <em>OEuvres</em>, II, 311) Bakunin, being for once more careful than the other anarchists, excepts the people of Britain and the United States from his strictures. In these countries, ‘the freedom of the masses and their capacity for political action have reached the highest level of development known to history’. (IV, 449) Yet their enlightenment is for Bakunin no sign that the support of the British or American masses should be sought in an election. ‘Their political consciousness, having reached its zenith, and having produced all of its fruits, is obviously tending to become transformed into the anti-political consciousness of the anarchists.’ (IV, 451)
[302] The conflict between anarchists and socialists on this point is nowhere better exemplified than in one of Marx’s marginal notes on Bakunin’s <em>Statism and Anarchy</em>. Bakunin had complained that the officials of the state envisioned by the Marxists would not build socialism, for they would be ‘ex-workers, who, once they become rulers or ...representatives of the people, cease to be workers’. To this Marx replied, ‘No more than a manufacturer today ceases to be a capitalist when he becomes a member of the municipal council’. Henry Mayer (ed.), ‘Karl Marx: Marginal Notes on Bakunin’s “Statism and Anarchy”’, <em>Etudes de Marxologie</em>, x (October 1959), pp. 112–13. A slightly different version is included in Marx, Engels, Lenin, <em>Anarchism and Anarcho-syndicalism</em>, pp. 147–52.
[303] Noam Chomsky, ‘Introduction’ to Guerin, <em>Anarchism</em>, p. xii.
[304] Ibid., p. xvii. All aspects of this contrast are based on Chomsky’s remarks.
[305] Ibid., p. xv.
** 7. Evaluating anarchism
Accurate understanding has been the main purpose of the previous chapters of this book, which have sought to elucidate the arguments of the anarchists faithfully and in detail. But accurate understanding is not this study’s only purpose; another is evaluation. How consistent is the case for anarchism? What is its plausibility, if not its truth? And what is the moral value of its model of an ideal social order?
Fortunately, the foregoing analysis makes it unnecessary to answer these questions from scratch. For though this analysis has been expository, it has done more than describe. The process of establishing what anarchists are saying has included evaluation of their arguments with regard to both consistency and plausibility. We have found the anarchists to be unexpectedly consistent, with the sovereign value of communal individuality lending their arguments a marked unity. The plausibility of their arguments has also been substantiated. The anarchists, we have discovered, evince a certain realism about the obstacles posed by human nature, social conditions and the power of their adversaries to the success of their project. Since two of the evaluative questions which need to be addressed have already received direct attention, the assessment of the anarchists in this concluding chapter will be devoted mainly to the question, which so far has been slighted, of the value of their social model as a model of the best regime.
The gist of anarchy has been identified in this book as a society which, by virtue of its statelessness and its internal structure, provides utmost communal individuality and freedom. Anarchy may therefore be considered as a possible alternative to the models of a good society which more familiar political theories advance. The moral value of anarchy, viewed as a candidate for choice as the ideal social order, depends partly on its merit as a complete achievement, and partly on its merit as a critical standard and practical guide. It thus must be evaluated here from both of these perspectives.
*** Anarchy as a complete achievement
No ideal society attains perfection, because the merits of each incur a moral price. Even the most attractive requires the sacrifice or abridgment of some values, because they are incompatible or uneasy with it. A society like Rousseau’s, for example, which achieves equal political participation, can secure neither the material abundance of Marx’s good society, nor the intellectuality of Plato’s. To designate a model of the good society as the one which, if realized, would be morally best thus requires a choice among competing values.
Appreciation of how choice among values enters into the endorsement of social ideals leads easily to despair about whether agreement on the nature of the good society can be reached. Since the choice of values on which such agreement rests is ineluctably contestable, it may seem hopeless to expect consensus concerning which model of the good society is best. Why should any advocate change his choice, when it rests as much as all the others on an incorrigible moral preference? And if the basis for designating any model of the good society as morally best is incorrigible, arguments for or against so designating anarchy are pointless. Once beliefs about the nature of the good society are seen to be contestable, it may seem that the task of evaluating an ideal anarchy must be abandoned.
This conclusion should be resisted, since the value of a social ideal depends significantly on considerations which have nothing to do with moral preference. One of those considerations is attainability. A model of a good society with patently unattainable characteristics, such as costless methods of production or telepathic minds, is ineligible for the status of morally best, because it gives bad practical advice. By calling on us to work for advantages that cannot possibly be won, it directs activity into a path that must be fruitless. Another way of showing why unattainable models of the good society lack moral value is to consider what would happen if they had it. The way would then be open for the most inventive dreamer to claim, validly, that since he had equipped his model with the greatest number of good though unattainable features, it deserved designation as morally best.
If anarchy is, as some have claimed, a condition plainly beyond reach, it is no more eligible for selection as the best regime than any other unachievable social system. There are two main arguments for calling anarchy unreachable. One denies the slightest possibility of success for the strategy that must prepare the way for it. The other, focusing on anarchy as a finished structure, views its achievement as precluded by incompatibilities among its elements. Ample evidence has been assembled in this book to meet these arguments.
The prospects for anarchist strategy have certainly been revealed in the course of this analysis as slight. The dilemma in which anarchists are caught by their need to produce sweeping changes without deceit or force has thus far prevented all of their strategies from being effective. Yet past failure to devise measures that can set the stage for anarchy is not proof that such measures lie beyond reach forever. One or more of the conditions that have for so long stymied anarchist endeavor might some day relent. Nor can one entirely dismiss the promise of creative innovation. Anarchy would be disqualified for consideration as the ideally best social order only if the strategy needed to attain it faced permanent defeat. But even after fullest weight has been given to its historic failure, the possibility that anarchist strategy will be successful remains. The argument that strategic unattainability excludes anarchy from consideration as the ideally best regime must therefore be rejected as unpersuasive.
Though a strategy that prepares for anarchy must be accounted possible, anarchy would still not qualify as a model of the good society if the main attributes of its completed structure could not coexist. Points of friction among these attributes are numerous. The rich diversity that marks anarchist society is supposed to be accompanied by equality of status. Yet the normal tendency of people to evaluate each other means that differences of kind encourage differences of rank. The censure which is anarchy’s distinctive method of control is supposed to occur among persons who are open and forthright. Yet the threat of rebuke, which anarchist censure poses, prompts all but the bravest to hide from surveillance by being secretive. But of the many points of friction which trouble a complete anarchy, the most dangerous to its integrity is the friction, previously analyzed in detail, between its members’ individuality and their communal ties. Anarchist individuality and community are patently discordant. Individuality, especially if conceived in Kropotkin’s way as creative uniqueness, but also if conceived generically, as rational independence, is a trait that renders the self separate. Developed individuals, in all their anarchist delineations, tend to become detached by virtue of their self-assertion from their fellow humans. Just as individuality fragments community, so community makes it hard for individuality to grow. The reciprocal awareness which constitutes the communal bond of anarchy is a significantly repressive force, which, through pressures toward conformity, saps personal independence. If anarchy is not to be pre-emptorily disqualified as a possible model of the good society, it must be shown to be attainable despite its internal frictions.
One of the arguments sometimes used to show the inner harmony of anarchy is lame and facile. Anarchy, according to this argument, has remarkably accordant attributes. They only appear at odds because they are illegitimately viewed as having to exist under the state’s inhospitable conditions. Diversity will of course undermine equality wherever the state, through its impersonality, renders its subjects envious and grasping. Censure will of course discourage openness and honesty wherever subjects have to hide their selves from the state’s remote presence. Individuality and community will of course be enemies where there is a state to homogenize subjects and cut off the wellsprings of reciprocal awareness at their individual source. But since the state-imposed conditions which render the attributes of anarchy incompatible are absent from the setting in which complete anarchy occurs, the claim that anarchy’s internal incompatibilities make it unattainable must be rejected as resting on a contextual mistake.
The weakness of this argument lies in its assumption that the sufficient condition for rendering the attributes of anarchy compatible is statelessness. Even though the state’s presence is an obvious source of the conflicts among the attributes of anarchy, these conflicts may plausibly be suspected of being overdeter-mined by a team of cooperating causes. To vindicate their social ideal as harmonious enough to be achievable, anarchists must therefore do more than trace its internal incompatibilities to the state’s effects; they must also show that in a stateless condition these incompatibilities would not arise from other causes. Anarchist theory contains material to demonstrate this point.
Anarchists show an appreciation, with which they are too seldom credited, for the insufficiency of mere statelessness as a setting for their system. Statelessness must in their view be preceded and accompanied by conditions which combat the numerous causes of anarchy’s internal friction that statelessness cannot defeat alone. When legal government and social hierarchy have completed their civilizing missions, when economic advances have ended the need for abject poverty and for the most servile industrial routines, when anarchist endeavor has weakened the destructive tendencies of habit, fear and envy, and has strengthened more cooperative, sympathetic, reasonable dispositions, then and only then will statelessness, now operating in a context which dampens anarchy’s internal frictions, be a source of harmony. If the anarchists claimed that statelessness alone resolved such conflicts in their social model as those between diversity and equality, censure and honesty, or individuality and community, then anarchy would have to be judged too discordant to qualify for consideration as the best regime. But since statelessness is but one of the forces on which anarchists rely to give harmony to their system, and since their various remedies for discord, taken together, are not obviously ineffective, anarchy remains eligible, despite its internal conflicts, for designation as the ideal social order.
The case for acknowledging anarchy as attainable, despite its internal discords, rests on more than the impossibility of altogether denying its capacity to form a coherent structure. Besides offering this minimal defense of their model’s inner unity, anarchists also deploy a bolder argument. Since no complete anarchy has ever been established, the compatibility of its attributes cannot be tested by direct experience. But the question of their compatibility is not entirely beyond indirect empirical assessment. Numerous social arrangements which resemble anarchy harmoniously combine attributes whose compatibility in a state of anarchy is suspect. We have already encountered-some of these arrangements, when we examined the circles of conversers, producers and neighbors used by the various anarchists to exemplify their society’s structure. Kropotkin, in his descriptions of primitive societies, village communes, medieval cities and contemporary organizations for voluntary aid, such as the English Life-Boat Association, furnishes additional examples of harmonious relations in settings that resemble anarchy.[306] In all of these settings individuality and community, to take only anarchy’s most troublingly discordant attributes, not only coexist, but give each other varying degrees of mutual support. In the Life-Boat Association, for example, which consists of volunteers who save shipwrecked survivors, reciprocal awareness of pursuing a daring purpose strengthens each member’s independent resolve, while the adroitness and determination of the individual members strengthens the ties of community which unite them. Anarchy is, of course, so much more complex, encompassing and stateless than these quasi-anarchist arrangements that their success in reconciling anarchy’s discordant elements is no proof that anarchy can reconcile them. But their ability to do so makes the coherence of anarchy plausible enough so that qualms about its qualifications as an ideal social model which arise from concern about its internal frictions must be cast off as unreasonable.
The merit of a completed anarchy, now eligible for consideration by virtue of its having been proved attainable, turns on the balance between its morally objectionable and its morally valuable features. No definitive striking of this balance, which may well be impossible to achieve, will be attempted here. What will be offered are remarks aimed at highlighting the moral deficiencies and attractions of the anarchist ideal. These remarks, though inconclusive, will dispel misconceptions about anarchy’s worth and open the way to more clearly appreciating its merit as a social model.
It must be recognized, to begin with, that anarchy suffers from neither of two moral shortcomings which are frequently ascribed to it, Its members exhibit none of that socially destructive selfishness which led Edward Hyndman to denounce it as ‘individualism gone wild’. Nor are its members smothered in oppressive peer group pressures, such as have prompted a recent commentator to liken anarchy to ‘an adolescent gang’.[307] Our understanding of how individuality and community are reinforcing under anarchy compels us to acknowledge its freedom from these defects. Neither a shattering individualism nor a stifling communitarianism contaminates an ideal anarchy, because its individualizing and communalizing tendencies fructify each other so as to prevent destructive excess.
Anarchy does, of course, have genuine defects, but some are not particularly objectionable or severe. These include its incomplete provision for privacy, for emotional self-expression and for meeting claims of distributive justice.
The opportunity to act and think without surveillance by unchosen others which we call privacy is greater in some models of the good society (such as J. S. Mill’s), and perhaps even in some actual societies, than under anarchy. As was discovered when examining Godwin’s conversational anarchy, its members are unable, except by retreating into solitude and by counting on their interlocutors’ discretion, to escape being observed. In the more complex societies of the later anarchists opportunities for privacy are no doubt greater. But anarchy in all its variants remains a system where privacy, since it involves social indifference and personal concealment, is hardly salient.
To appreciate how far anarchy is morally deficient for limiting privacy, one must bear in mind the conditions which, in a state of anarchy, cause the need for privacy to diminish. Privacy fills two quite different needs: it is both a refuge from incursions by the malevolent or insensitive and a place of seclusion for inner growth or restoration. Now the members of an anarchy, owing to their mutual awareness, their honest sympathy and their commitment to controlling behavior with reasons, are neither the sanctimonious Pecksniffs, nor the barefaced prigs, and certainly not the domineering zealots against whom the refuge of privacy is urgent. As for privacy as seclusion, there is no reason to doubt that under anarchy it is available. Certainly Godwin, who devotes much attention to this subject, praises solitude. And anarchist individuals have a discrete sensitivity to their neighbors’ moods. Since seclusion, which is the type of privacy needed in an anarchy, is the type that anarchy provides, its lack of the privacy that serves as a refuge is not a defect to regard as grave.
No less marked than anarchy’s deficiency as a provider of privacy is its deficiency as a setting for emotional self-expression. Its shortcomings as a facilitator of emotions must not be exaggerated. Even Godwin, for whom feelings are no part of individuality, grants that they contribute to its growth. Expressions of emotion are therefore by no means absent from Godwinian anarchy, but being ancillary to its nature, they have an insecure presence. The later anarchists, by endowing their conceptions of individuality with emotional attributes, give feelings in their good society a safer place. In Kropotkin’s anarchy, the display of emotions remains limited, because reasoned argument — which Kropotkin, following earlier anarchists, makes the first defense against misconduct — is jeopardized not only by displays of destructive feelings such as selfishness, fear or envy, which in an anarchy would diminish, but also by the display of less harmful and more permanent emotions. Alarm, triumph, despair, impatience, indeed almost the whole gamut of human feelings, though surely they would continue to be experienced under anarchy, would sometimes have to be repressed. Their frequent expression would certainly be normal, but since not even the influence of a full-fledged anarchy can entirely prevent emotional outbursts from disrupting the practice of controlling behavior with reasoned arguments, or the process of rational deliberation on which this practice rests, the unlimited display of feelings in an anarchy is unallowable. What thus emerges at the root of anarchy’s deficiency as a setting for emotional self-expression is its remarkably tenacious devotion to sovereign reason.
Whether the rationality that anarchy provides is worth the price of a somewhat limited emotional self-expression is a question which will be addressed later in this chapter. The point that now needs making is that anarchy, in order to achieve utmost communal individuality and freedom, must pay this price. It remained for those recent sympathizers with anarchism who have been most touched by disillusionment with rationality to give up the conviction of anarchy’s devisers that reliance on the giving of reasons is the wellspring of its moral worth. Believing the old anarchists to have been too optimistic in their estimates of human reasonableness, finding emotional attributes of the self more at the center of individuality than rational attributes, and having witnessed too much use of reason for evil ends to trust the reasoner any longer, a motley assortment of contemporary writers and activists claims to have devised a new form of anarchy in which the avowedly non-rational display of emotions, especially by evanescent leaders performing spectacular gestures, replaces reason as the chief regulating force.[308] The society envisaged by this group of authors, being stateless, and directed toward attaining communal individuality, can certainly be called a type of anarchy. But it is an anarchy with less of the freedom that is one of classical anarchy’s chief attractions. The remarkable amount of freedom in the anarchy studied in this book arises from a marked absence of hindrances, including emotional hindrances, to deliberation, choice and conduct. Proceeding from the scarcely deniable premise according to which freedom is undiminished by the rationally based conclusions which a deliberating agent reaches about the merit of his contemplated acts, the founders of anarchism devised a model of the good society which protects these conclusions, and hence freedom, from every sort of threat. There must be less freedom in the model of the good society devised by recent non-rational anarchists, because it includes emotional displays which jeopardize the rationally based conclusions on which freedom in an anarchy must rest. The extensive freedom of classical anarchy is simply unobtainable without the limits on emotional self-expression that non-rational anarchists reject.
The partial shortcoming of anarchy that remains to be considered is its slighting in its pattern of economic distribution of some established claims of justice. The anarchists, we have discovered, increasingly choose need over productive contribution as the distributive claim the good society must meet. This choice, despite its certain merit, has the drawback of denying recognition to other worthy claims. Members of an anarchy with extraordinary talents or abilities receive less material advantage than other ideal societies provide them, and, under conditions of scarcity, not enough to exploit their endowments fully. Nor are benefits bestowed to the same extent as in some other ideal societies on persons who show unusual diligence or daring. Because anarchy is so devoted to satisfying the claim of need, it must neglect these rival claims of justice.
The moral defect incurred by anarchy from this neglect is mitigated by how it organizes production and by how its members view productive work. One good reason for honoring claims of contribution, ability or effort is to increase well-being (perhaps above all of the least favored) through eliciting plentiful and efficient production. The prospect of receiving economic benefit for adding to the supply of goods, for exercising natural talents and for hard or dangerous work is normally a stimulus to productivity. Viewed from this angle, the merit of claims to remuneration that rival that of need lies not in their intrinsic fittingness but in their utility as incentives. Now conditions in an ideal anarchy are such that bounteous, efficient production occurs without these incentives. The mutual understanding among participants in anarchy, their desire to develop their native talents, the satisfaction they find in their often voluntary, varied work, and their ability, owiilg to polytechnical education and occupational mobility, to understand the productive process as a whole, are some of the reasons why it is unnecessary in an anarchy to distribute economic benefits according to claims of contribution, ability or effort. One can nevertheless argue plausibly that though conditions under anarchy assure ample productivity, even if these claims are slighted, they should be honored anyway, as claims to just desert. The claim that seems most to deserve recognition on this basis is (conscientious) effort. That producers who are especially brave or diligent should be rewarded economically, whether or not rewarding them is generally advantageous, is an intuitively appealing proposition, which serves as a defensible ground for deeming anarchy’s neglect of effort in its pattern of distribution to be a real, though far from overwhelming, moral defect.
If its incomplete recognition of privacy, emotional self-expression and the claims of distributive justice were anarchy’s only shortcomings, there would probably be wide agreement that it is the model of the good society which, if realized, would be morally best. But anarchy also suffers from a fourth deficiency, which is complete and more open to objection. This is its repudiation of active citizenship. A vision of the citizen as an equal participant in the process of self-government is a recurrent theme in political theory, most eloquently articulated in modern times by Rousseau. The citizens of Rousseau’s direct democracy, who subordinate their personal interests to the good of the whole, who eschew the distractions of activity in partial groups, and whose chief business is to deliberate and vote on laws, are figures who, despite their awesome virtues, have no place in a mature anarchy. We have already discovered, in examining the anarchists’ criticism of unanimous direct democracy, that a main reason they object to such a government is for its homogenizing public spirit. Participants in a unanimous direct democracy view legislative proposals with an aloof disinterest that anarchists reject for being repugnant to developed individuality. Now the homogenizing public spirit which anarchists reject in a unanimous direct democracy, far from being peculiar to that bizarre form of government, must be a part of any which includes an active citizenry. For unless citizens who participate in the legislative process as equals subordinate their particular concerns to the general good, the laws they enact will be so shortsighted and divisive that social peace will be endangered. According to the anarchists, then, active citizenship, in all its forms, though not without attractions, still must be excluded from their model of the good society as injurious to the independent, particularized sort of individual that it is a main purpose of that society to promote.
It might be thought that the exclusion by the anarchists of active citizenship from any place in their good society rests on a mistaken understanding of its relationship to individuality. If being an individual and being a citizen were compatible, then anarchy, contrary to the belief of its espousers, could enjoy the benefits of both.
One of the best reasons for accepting the anarchists’ view of citizenship at odds with individuality is its acceptance by citizenship’s proponents. Rousseau, for instance, acknowledges that in his society of equal citizens individuality must be repressed. The individual man ‘is the unit, the whole, dependent only on himself. Man as citizen ‘is but the numerator of a fraction, whose value depends on the denominator; ...he no longer regards himself as one, but as part of the whole, and is only conscious of the common life’. Since individuality subverts commitment to the public, ‘you must take your choice between man and the citizen, you cannot train both’.[309] The contradiction between man as individual and as citizen, which Rousseau drew so starkly, has remained a chief preoccupation of political theorists who admire active citizenship. Most have tried through some means such as pluralism or functional representation to reduce the force of the contradiction, but none have denied that it exists. Michael Walzer, for instance, ends his anguished discussion of citizenship with a plea for kibitzers, not so much because he finds them likeable as because they narrow the inevitable gap between ‘the world of the meeting’ and the world of ‘the tete-a-tete’.[310] Since proponents of citizenship would surely embrace full individual development, if they thought it was safe, their refusal to do so is strong evidence of its incompatibility with citizenship and hence that the defect anarchy suffers owing to its lack of citizens is beyond escape.
Anarchy’s repudiation of active citizenship is more serious than its other shortcomings, not only because it is total, whereas they are partial, but also because it is more morally offensive. The ideal of the self-governing citizen has legitimate appeal. Man the citizen, who obeys his own laws, is one version of man at his very best: self-directing, public spirited, controlling his own destiny. That anarchy is seriously deficient for excluding citizens is a conclusion that only those who find citizenship worthless can reject.
Yet in an anarchist society the lack of citizens is less disturbing than it is in other societies, because the communal individuality prevailing in an anarchy affords one of the chief advantages of citizenship. Rousseau condemned existing society as strongly as the anarchists, and for similar reasons. Both saw it as composed of competitive, self-centered role-players, utterly bereft of mutual understanding. Citizenship was Rousseau’s hope for ending this estrangement and for providing a more communal existence. Centering their lives around deliberation in the public forum, where each gives his disinterested opinion on proposed legislation and is respectfully attended to by all the rest, Rousseauist citizens develop a strong mutual awareness. They do lack individuality, but this is the price they pay for their community. It is because they are so limited as particular individuals that the communal bond among these deliberating citizens is intense.
Anarchists, of course, are as determined as Rousseau to create community where now there is estrangement. But whereas Rousseau, because he confined community to life in the forum, suppressed individuality as a disruptive influence, the anarchists, because they suffuse community through all of life, welcome individuality as a cohesive force. Personal particularity and independence, instead of dividing the members of an anarchy, make them more apt for their variegated communal existence. By increasing their appeal for one another, and their dependence on one another for the satisfaction of needs, individuality intensifies their mutual awareness. It is thus because anarchy provides community even though it lacks citizens that the offensiveness of this lack is lessened. But it nevertheless remains a moral defect. For even though the absence of citizens does not deprive anarchy of community, it does deprive it of a source of noble eminence.
To reach a verdict on whether anarchy is the ideal social order its assets as well as its shortcomings need assessment. One of its chief assets, the conjoint provision of ample individuality and community, certainly has great merit, though hardly enough to make anarchy’s status as the best regime uncontroversial. What is most crucial to assessing the moral worth of anarchy is its problematic exaltation of a freedom that is rationally based.
No one in the history of political theory has advanced a more exigent concept of freedom than the anarchists, because none has required that agents, to count as free, be as unhindered by restraints. For anarchists, it will be recalled, a completely free agent is liberated in both action and choice from every removable hindrance, except for those arising from his rational deliberation. If the anarchists said no more about the restraints that count as non-coercive than that they are rationally based, their concept of liberty would not be particularly exigent. Many political theorists who are far from being libertarians have conceived of freedom as a matter of rational control. What gives the freedom of the anarchists its special exigence is their insistence that the deliberative process whose conclusions are non-coercive must be rational in a more than minimal sense. This process must be rational in the sense of systematic and critical, to be sure. In weighing the arguments and evidence which bear on whether to perform an act, the deliberating agent must use standards which he has judged acceptable by methodical examination and which he applies consistently to his relevantly similar conduct. But deliberation, for anarchists, must be rational in a stronger sense than this in order for its conclusions to be coercionless. It must be thoroughly particular in having for its focus the advantages and disadvantages attached to the performance of a single act. If, after deliberating, I choose to do an act because it is of a type whose general performance I believe to have good consequences, or because it is enjoined by a rule I deem inviolable, or because some person or organization’whose judgment I respect prescribes it, anarchists regard my deliberation as non-rational. For I have failed to consider the particular circumstances of the case. The only deliberation that is rational enough to make me free involves attending to all the concrete details that bear on my act’s merit, and especially to the consequences for the particular individuals who would be touched by its effects.[311] Even in an anarchy, where access to such details is easy, such particularized deliberation is hard, relentless work. It is the dependence of anarchist freedom on such a demanding rationality that raises questions about the value of its contribution to anarchy’s moral worth.
Doubts concerning the value of anarchist freedom are bound to grow more urgent when one appreciates that the rationality on which it depends is purely procedural. It specifies only the manner in which the members of an anarchy must choose their acts and says nothing about the attributes their acts must have. I act rationally, in an anarchy, no matter what I do, just so long as systematic, critical, particularized deliberation is the means I use to choose my conduct. The anarchist view of rationality as a matter of nothing but procedure calls the worth of the freedom which depends on it into question by making that freedom consistent with performing abominable acts. The only restraints that do not curtail anarchist freedom are imposed by the conclusions drawn by individuals from their rational deliberations. Since the rationality of these deliberations is procedural, they can warrant any act. Freedom in an anarchy, owing to its dependence on a procedural rationality, thus serves as a license for misconduct. How can anarchy possibly be the ideal social model, when its freedom, besides demanding burdensome particularized deliberation, allows wrong-doing? To make the case for anarchy as the best regime in face of the stiff price in laborious deliberation and in opportunities to misbehave that its rationally demanding, behaviorally permissive freedom exacts, what must be shown is that, despite these drawbacks, anarchy is imbued by its freedom with sufficient value to tip the moral balance in its favor.
One benefit of anarchist freedom that must not be overlooked in an overall assessment of its value is its service to communal individuality. The anarchists, we have discovered, prize freedom mainly as a support for the communal individuality that is their chief objective. It is largely by stripping away the hindrances to choice and conduct, except for those which are rationally based, that anarchists encourage mutual awareness and self-development. Intellectual independence and forthright communication are leading attributes of their goal that anarchists expect an atmosphere of their kind of liberty to nurture. The service anarchist freedom renders to communal individuality surely helps offset its moral drawbacks.
The limit anarchists place on the scope of liberty adds to its moral value by restricting how far it licenses wrongful acts. Freedom in an anarchy, though remarkably extensive, nevertheless is incomplete, because decisions and conduct governed by the agent’s rationally based conclusions sometimes are impeded. The frailty of reasoned argument does not escape the anarchists, who enlist internalization, positional authority and censorial rebuke as supplementary means of regulation. If an act, though rationally based, would cause serious harm, coercion from one or more of these three sources deprives participants in anarchy of the freedom to choose or do it. It is true that those who apply this coercion do so on the basis of a deliberative rationality that is just as procedural as that of the agent whose freedom they curtail. Being no more equipped than he is with standards for judging the attributes of conduct, they enjoy an equally generous license for misbehavior and relieve the agent of his objectionably permissive freedom through using an objectionably permissive freedom of their own. Hence the limit anarchists place on the scope of liberty certainly does not rid it of moral license, for while it somewhat diminishes opportunities for misconduct, it leaves substantial freedom to misbehave.
Though the dependence of anarchist freedom on procedural rationality renders it distressingly permissive, making it depend on substantive rationality, so as to cure this defect, would bring another, which, from the anarchist perspective, is worse. Anarchists prize their freedom because its liberation of action and choice from every hindrance except for those which the agent himself deems right helps communal individuality to grow. Now substantive rationality differs from procedural by identifying acts which one might deem right as having attributes which make choosing or doing them non-rational. A freedom dependent on substantive rationality thus allows more interference with choice and action than a freedom dependent on procedural rationality does. Being more restrictive, it is less conducive than a freedom dependent on procedural rationality to the realization of the anarchists’ final goal.
Remaining doubts about the merit of the anarchists’ choice, as a chief attribute of the good society, of such a rationally demanding, behaviorally permissive freedom can be allayed, though not eliminated, by considering the conditions serving as a background where this freedom is enjoyed. It is unlikely that the members of an anarchy, even though they have freedom to cause harm, actually will cause it, because they deliberate under conditions which discourage them from choosing harmful acts. The equality of power, prestige and wealth among the members of an anarchy, as well as their close interdependence, tend to put harming others at odds with interest. The sincerity, respect, or benevolence that is anarchy’s dominant social attitude tends to put such harm at odds with inclination. Conditions in an anarchy thus provide a context in which the exercise of freedom based on procedural rationality is rather safe.[312]
More might be said about why anarchist freedom is less objectionable than appears at first glance, but there is no denying that it suffers from grave defects. Even some who accurately appreciate its virtues, and who avoid exaggerating its faults, will legitimately deem the exigency and permissiveness of the freedom sought by anarchists inordinate enough to make their model of the good society unfit for the status of the best regime. But those of us who, in our reflective moments, exalt the personal particularity of the deliberation on which anarchist freedom rests, and who find its dependence on a substantively unlimited rationality inspiring, will hardly be considered outlandish if we advance the thesis that of all the ideal social models anarchy is the best. Every model of the good society has drawbacks, and anarchy, especially owing to its denial of a place to citizens, certainly has its share. But anarchy is also well endowed with assets. Its remarkable merger of individuality and communality through a substantively unlimited, particularized rationality makes it the setting for an illustrious way of life.
*** Anarchy as a critical standard and practical guide
To vindicate the choice of anarchy as the ideal social order, more must be considered than its merit once achieved. Though a state of perfect anarchy cannot be deemed unreachable, the chance of reaching it must be accounted slight. The unlikelihood of attaining anarchy would diminish its value markedly, if its value resided only in its completed structure, for the value of a good lessens as the probability of achieving it declines. There is, however, hope of vindicating anarchy as the ideal social order, despite its unlikelihood as a complete achievement, because it also draws its value from another source. Anarchy serves not only as a model for a completely new society, but also as a standard for judging present society, and as a guide for moving from old to new. Since the value of anarchy as standard and guide is separate from its value as a finished model, even though this model will probably never be realized, anarchy may still be the good society with the greatest moral worth.
There is a well-known and persistent objection to the value as standard and guide of an ideal like anarchy, which is exigent, improbable, and morally appealing. Such an ideal is viewed by many as singularly dangerous on the ground that its practical use causes grave, uncompensated harm. Being dramatically different from the established social order, an ideal like anarchy calls on those who rely on it for guidance to take steps which, since they include substantial suffering, coercion and deceit, are both inherently reprehensible and in moral conflict with the ideal for whose sake they are carried out. The harm caused by these measures might be justified, if they realized the ideal toward which they point, because the moral excellence of that ideal might be great enough to outweigh all harm caused by the steps needed to achieve it. What makes the practical use of the ideal abhorrent, according to this argument, is the improbability of its attainment. Since the ideal, being unlikely to be realized, will almost certainly not yield the benefits for whose sake it calls for harm, its practical use is cruel and reckless. An exigent, improbable social ideal, even though, like anarchy, it is morally appealing, must be rejected as a critical standard and practical guide as a self-defeating source of evil.[313]
This abstract argument against ideals which are exigent, improbable and appealing is most tellingly applied to the ideal sought during the Russian Revolution. The spectacle of Marx’s vision of the good society being debased by terror and repression as its admirers struggled vainly to achieve it leads understandably to the view that exigent, improbable, appealing ideals should always be renounced. That this conclusion follows even in the Russian case is doubtful, since devotion to their ideal may not have been the reason why the Russian revolutionaries caused such hardship. Adverse circumstances or a misreading by the revolutionaries of their ideal’s practical significance are equally plausible explanations. But however strong this argument may be against other social ideals, that of the anarchists has attributes which greatly blunt its force. The forthright rationality, personal independence and communal solidarity that characterize a complete anarchy constrain efforts to achieve it so as to make them benign. It is because the anarchists appreciate how the development of these characteristics depends on what happens during the preparatory period that they require favorable attitudes and circumstances to prevail before struggle for their good society begins, that they minimize the place of coercion and fraud in the waging of this struggle, and that they insist on advancing mainly through the force of argument and example. All of these constraints on anarchist practice protect those who engage in it from causing uncompensated harm, by helping to prevent them from inflicting the inordinate suffering that so often accompanies untrammeled struggle. Thus the ideal of anarchy, because it constrains efforts to rebuild society so as to protect them from excess, though exigent, improbable and morally appealing, promises to serve practice safely.
Those whom history has taught to fear bold ideals may still suspect that the limits which anarchy places on efforts designed to reach it, and which promise to make these efforts safe, are all too likely to be abandoned in the heat of struggle. ‘The spirit of revolt’, which energizes anarchist endeavor for Kropotkin, has an equivalent for his predecessors. All of the anarchists envision workers for their ideal as enthusiastic, bold and steadfast. The ideal they are seeking, while not unquestionably beyond their grasp, is not likely to be reached. Would it be surprising if these devoted workers, troubled by frustration, impatience and despair, betrayed their ideal by renouncing the limits it sets on practice as intolerable? No matter that this betrayal makes their ideal permanently unreachable. In the heat of struggle, energy is concentrated on immediate efforts, and fine perceptions about future consequences are lost.
Examples which might be read as accrediting this scenario can be found in the history of Spanish anarchism. Part of what incited the anarchist *pistoleros* during the civil war to execute summarily so many innocents may have been a response to the difficulty of realizing an exigent ideal. Astounded by the difference between their own society and the one they sought, disheartened, by setbacks, and overwhelmed by the obstacles their project faced, the *pistoleros* may have succumbed to the desperate hope, tempting to anyone in their plight, that in a sufficiently convulsive upheaval their ideal would prevail miraculously. Here, as in the case of the Russian Revolution, blaming the harm caused by attempts to reconstruct society on the boldness of the ideal being sought is speculative and conjectural. Numerous other plausible explanations, ranging from fascination with the cult of death to the imperatives of total war, have been offered for the Spanish anarchists’ excesses. To hold the exigency and improbability of their ideal responsible for the uncompensated damage caused by their attempts to rebuild society is thus out of the question. Nevertheless, taken as a warning, the abstract argument against using exigent ideals for guidance retains some point; for it has to be admitted that pursuing such an ideal, even when, like anarchy, it Carries limits, risks causing damage that would not occur if the ideal had been renounced.
Before accepting the argument for renunciation, one needs to recognize that acting without the guidance of exigent ideals also carries risks. There are various conclusions concerning political activity that someone who refuses to be guided by exigent ideals might reach. He might become complacent, believing all reformative endeavor dangerous; he might use his renunciation as an excuse for indolence, for refraining from efforts to improve society while continuing to denounce it as reprehensible; or he might opt for a cautious incrementalism. The first two conclusions can be summarily dismissed for condoning blatant suffering. Incrementalism, which can alleviate existing misery, needs closer consideration as a guide to action free of the dangers that bedevil exigence.
The incrementalist is like the complacent and indolent renouncers of bold ideals in accepting the established social system as a whole. Where he differs is in striving to improve the existing system through cautious modification and reforms. Meliorative activity that proceeds through small, predictable, reversible adjustments, and that has the lessening of felt misery as its aim, he supports fervently. What the incrementalist opposes are efforts, which the use of exigent ideals as guides suggests, aimed at increasing future welfare through replacing the established social system with an entirely new one. Such efforts are denounced by the incrementalist, for reasons just examined, as dangerous sources of uncompensated suffering; but he is moved by his appreciation of how the established system causes misery to proceed gradually, without the help of an ideal social model, toward ridding it of the traits widely perceived as most harmful.[314]
While incrementalism must surely be preferred to complacency or indolence as a guide to action, it is not obviously preferable to an ideal like anarchy, which, though exigent, hedges action in its service with constraints. For incrementalism, because it eschews reference to exigent ideals, ignores or tolerates objectionable features of established social systems which practice guided by such ideals contests. Any exigent social model identifies underlying sources of misery in the existing society which may not elicit much alarm, and which, being inherent in its nature, cannot be eliminated unless the whole society is replaced. The anarchist social model, to take the exigent ideal with which we are now fully acquainted, identifies inherent features of modern society, such as law and hierarchy, as the taproots of its members’ stunted, estranged existence. The incrementalist, because he accepts the existing social system and tries to improve it only by diminishing its most immediate sources of felt misery, leaves undisturbed the inherent, underlying evils to which an exigent ideal like anarchy calls attention. Thus, though incrementalism offers comforting protection against fanatical excess, its repudiation of ideals as guides to action is a burdensome source of dread. For incrementalists are condemned to live with the daily apprehension that promising opportunities to augment human welfare are being missed.
Even though incrementahsm leaves possibilities for human welfare unfulfilled, as a practical guide it is still preferable to social ideals whose unlimited exigence makes using them for guidance likely to wreak serious uncompensated harm. But anarchy, we have discovered, owing to the constraints it puts on efforts to rebuild society, is an ideal which can be pursued without much risk of havoc. That those who seek anarchy will ignore the constraints it sets on action is of course a remote danger, but one worth accepting, if its practical guidance leads to appreciably greater benefits than can be secured through incrementalism. The practical value of anarchy thus depends not only, or even mainly, on the danger of using it for guidance, but also on how much advantage its use as a guide can bring.
The first practical use to which an ideal like anarchy can be fruitfully put is as a standard for judging an established social system. Anarchy, when used to judge modern industrial society, raises deep objections to many of its most generally accepted traits. Rather than rehearsing all of these objections, it should suffice at this stage of analysis to recall the most distinctive — those directed against legality. Judged against the standard of an ideal anarchy, modern society appears seriously defective for controlling behavior by means of law, whose generality, permanence and physical coercion make it impossible for community or individuality to develop fully, let alone to merge. The practical effect of using anarchy as a critical standard is thus to make law (along with several other essential attributes of existing society) the target of relentless attack.
The animus which anarchy, used as a standard, directs against the rule of law is expressed not just in hostile declarations, but also more creatively in concrete criticism. The founders of anarchism, starting with Godwin, all marshalled evidence, drawn from history and their own experience, of how law serves those who are ascendent to keep their inferiors in tow, of how its permanence and generality cause crude, misguided behavioral regulation, and of how the predictability, which is law’s redeeming asset, remains in fact a will-o’-the-wisp. Though law promises to bring certainty, what it actually amounts to, says Godwin, is ‘a labyrinth without end,... a mass of contradictions that cannot be untangled’.[315] This genre of concrete criticism of legal institutions, inaugurated by the founders, has been much elaborated in recent times by empirically oriented observers who have studied law from the anarchists’ critical perspective. Lester Mazor, for example, ascribes the numerous cases of legal oppression, ineptitude and caprice that he has collected in his essay on ‘Disrespect for Law’ to ‘the limits of rules as means of accomplishing change and as an expression of the character of social relations’.[316] The concrete criticism of established institutions, which arises from judging them against the anarchist ideal, gives more impetus to efforts to rebuild society than criticism which, however vigorous, remains abstract. For outrage against an abstraction like legality gains strength and focus when the abstraction is seen as causing specific evils. But if the anarchist ideal served practically as no more than a critical standard, it could not easily be proved more beneficial in its bearing on efforts to rebuild society than incrementalism. Concrete criticism, by itself, has diagnostic value, but it is more likely to yield advantage if accompanied by a plan of action. Fortunately, anarchy, in its practical use, serves not only as a standard for judging the ills of established society, but also as a guide to their cure. It is the guidance anarchy gives to social reconstruction that is most crucial for assessing its value as applied to practice.
The safety which the founders imparted to anarchist struggles by hedging them with constraints is somewhat unreliable, chiefly because these struggles have as their strategic aim to substitute full-fledged anarchy for the industrialized nation-state. The founding anarchists justified the actions they recommended as the most likely, among those falling within permissible limits, to achieve this substitution. So long as anarchists decide what to do by reference to the effectiveness of their efforts for replacing the modern state, they will be tempted to disregard the constraints which limit their activity and promise to make it safe. To replace the modern state with a full-fledged anarchy is so difficult that anarchists for whom this is the chief practical concern must find the conditions, scruples and timetables that constrain their efforts hard to support. The obvious way to give action guided by the anarchist ideal the safety it needs to be more beneficial than action guided by incrementalism is to set the strategic aim of replacing the nation-state by anarchy aside. For when this replacement ceases to be the anarchist’s main concern, he will be less prone to view the constraints his ideal sets on practice as fetters.
There are other reasons, besides safety, for giving up the strategic aim of replacing the state with anarchy. For one thing, this move, while not made explicitly by any founder, was certainly suggested by some of them. Godwin, in his view of progress toward rationality as unending, and Proudhon, in his plea for withdrawal by anarchists into their own separate organizations, both implied that the main concerfSin deciding on present action should not be whether the contemplated course will best serve to replace the state with anarchy. Many of the most thoughtful recent anarchists, more despondent than their forebears about the prospects for destroying, dissolving or otherwise eliminating industrialized nation-states, let alone replacing them with anarchy, and more fearful of the unredeemed suffering to which attempts to do this might lead, have pursued in their writings, as well as in their activities, the founders’ intimations about efforts directed at achieving something less than a fully anarchist society on the scale of existing states. These recent extensions of the anarchist tradition, designed to give it safe purchase on the present social world, have produced marked benefits. A brief sketch of how anarchists of late have been using their social model to guide partial anarchization within the nation-state is thus required before the practical value of the anarchist model can be assessed accurately.
A quotation from Karl Landauer, chosen by Colin Ward as the motto for *Anarchy*, his journal which, in the 1960s, championed partial anarchist endeavors, aptly captures their underlying inspiration. ‘The state is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behavior; we destroy it by behaving differently.’[317] Anarchists who have approached action from Landauer’s angle have carried out two types of changes, both of which achieve some measure of immediate anarchization. The first rearranges some particularly significant social activity, while leaving the structure of other activities undisturbed. The second rearranges all of the social activities occurring in a particular place, but makes no direct attempt to rearrange them elsewhere.
The first type of change is well illustrated by the accomplishments of anarchists concerned with education, who have used their ideal social model for guidance in establishing schools with as many features of a complete anarchy as can feasibly be incorporated into an organization like a school, which is not an independent social system. The Ferrer Modern School of New York, which functioned with many changes from 1911 to 1953, exemplifies how anarchists have derived benefits from using their model to guide the restructuring of education. ‘Very young children’ in the Modern School, as described by one of its organizers, learn ‘nearly all the major parts of anthropology... through the desire that so many of them have to make things’. Education, as practiced in the Modem School, thus ‘combines training of the senses and of the mind, skill of hand and skill of brain’, just as they are combined in a complete anarchy. The Modern School also follows the anarchist model in its abhorrence of legality. ‘We do away with all coercive discipline and all the rules and paraphernalia of such discipline: the raised desk of the teacher, the rigid rows of seats for the children, and the ideal that every class should be conducted according to...preconceived codes.’ Finally, the Modern School draws from the ideal of anarchy its emphasis in the classroom on unrestrained discussion of ‘problems suggested by the children,...which is of the very greatest aid in developing the children as separate, thinking individuals and as members of the social unit’.[318] The steps anarchists have been taking to restructure education have yielded advantages, without wreaking uncompensated harm of the sort that struggles to replace the state with anarchy threaten. At the very least, anarchist education has saved some children from the inflexible discipline common in our schools, which often teaches that learning is something to resent. More positively, anarchist education has surely, though to an unmeasurable extent, aided the growth of independent rationality and voluntary cooperation.
Another social activity that has benefited from being partially reorganized along lines indicated by the anarchist ideal is work. Anarchists who have been more concerned with restructuring productive activity within the state’s jurisdiction so that it resembles what would occur under anarchy, than in using the workplace as a weapon in the struggle to replace the state, favor a self-management which, within the realm of the individual enterprise, is thoroughgoing. In the enterprises planned or established by these anarchists, internal decisions are made by neither owners, nor investors, nor managers, nor technicians, nor union officials, but consensually by all producers. The practice of self-management is ambiguous, because, depending on how far it goes, it has contrary effects. If producers make decisions on no matters except immediate conditions of work, the effect is often to increase efficiency, job satisfaction and profits. When self-management is extended upward to more significant matters — personnel, marketing, investment and the like — and when it is extended outward to decisions that affect the whole economy, the effect may be, though this is more speculative, to encourage producers, both in self-managed enterprises and in those with which they deal, to further restructure their activities along anarchist lines. The anarchists’ recognition of this ambiguity in the practice of self-management is part of the reason why they require it to be thorough. But it is their determination to build as many features of an ideal anarchy into productive enterprises as is consistent with their remaining under the jurisdiction of the state that best explains not only the thoroughness of the self-management they advocate, but why it has distinctive features. In his essay on ‘A Self-Employed Society’ Colin Ward, working from the evidence of congenial, though non-anarchist examples, and of explicitly anarchist plans, describes the shape that an anarchist, though state-bound, self-management should take.[319] Voting and rule-making are deemphasized in favor of open-ended discussion aiming toward consensus and the continuous process of ‘one or two people thinking out and trying new things’. Consensual decisions are not enforced by designated supervisors, but by peers. There are no fixed roles; workers ‘deploy themselves, depending on the requirements of the ongoing group task’. Finally, income is distributed equally among all members of the productive unit. Though enterprises organized like these are not intended, and could not be expected, to anarchize society completely, nevertheless, because they have so many anarchist features, they offer much of the advantage of a complete anarchy.
Besides restructuring particular activities on lines indicated by their social model, anarchists intent on immediate, though partial, progress also use their model to guide the reorganization of all activity within a circumscribed place, usually a farmland. Several rural settlements organized on anarchist principles were established in France at the beginning of this century, when the anarchist movement had been partially discredited by an epidemic of bomb-throwing and was threatened with being absorbed by syndicalism. Responding to this situation, a few French anarchists turned away from efforts to replace the state and founded an association whose purpose was to gather members, donations and sympathy so as to enable a site to be acquired for establishing an anarchist commune.
The story of the Colony of Vaux, founded by this association in 1903, parallels that of many similar endeavors. Having rented a house and about six acres of land on favorable terms from a friendly farmer, a half dozen settlers began living and working together according to certain arrangements. Before entering the commune, each agreed to do the necessary work and to renounce physical force. Necessities were taken, as needed, from communal stores, or, in case of shortage, distributed equally. Any productive surplus was also equally distributed. Collective decisions were made consensually, except for those concerning the admission of new members, which were made by unanimous vote. In case of strife that was ‘a real danger to the general peace’, offenders were ‘invited’ to leave. At first, the commune prospered, increasing in a few months to twenty-one members and successfully producing food and clothes. Despite the need to change their site, the colonists continued to live and work together for three years, after which disputes over alleged high-handedness by the leading founder caused them to disband.[320]
There are also numerous cases in the United States of anarchist settlements, starting in the mid-nineteenth century with Josiah Warren’s experimental villages. One of the most ambitious and longest-lived of these settlements was the Ferrer Colony of Stelton, New Jersey, established in 1914 by the sponsors of the previously mentioned Modern School of New York. The Stelton Colony in its heyday in the 1920s had eighty or so families as permanent residents, as many as 100 boarding students in its elementary school, and an additional summer population of several hundred. It followed the usual anarchist pattern of unenforced consensual decision-making, and there was a great deal of shared cultural and educational activity, but in its economic arrangements it differed from the French settlements in that members owned their own houses and small plots of land, on which some farmed, while most commuted to work in New York City. Though plagued by growing controversy in the 1920s about whether to emphasize education or social action, and in the 1930s between those who remained anarchists and those who joined the Communist cause, the Stelton Colony, despite compromises both in its school and in its way of life, continued for over thirty years to offer many of the advantages of anarchy.[321]
Certain of the communes that were landmarks of the American counter-culture in the 1960s have also been viewed, though less convincingly, as at least implicitly guided by the anarchist social model. The settlers of Cold Mountain Farm, which lasted barely through the summer of 1967, followed the advice of the impeccably anarchist Murray Bookchin. Yet many of them were moved more by yearnings for rustic simplicity or by oriental mysticism than by the intention to go as far as possible, on their small Vermont farm, toward building anarchy.[322] The very few Western communes which have been called anarchist by their founders or observers are even more remote in their inspiration from the anarchist ideal; and since some lasted longer than Cold Mountain, it can be shown that they diverge markedly from anarchy in their practice. Consider the case of Lou Gottlieb’s Morningstar Ranch. Though anarchist in its avoidance of hierarchy, legality and physical coercion, Morningstar lacked the replacements for these practices which the ideal of anarchy suggests. Gottlieb, believing that ‘the land selects the people’, disliked collective decision making, no matter how consensual, resisted attempts to screen new settlers, and, in various ways, worked less for community than separation. No wonder that Morningstar was so beset by self-centered, destructive transients. Because, like most counter-culture communes which professed to follow the anarchist model, it tended to disregard that model’s rational and solidaristic elements, it could achieve scarcely a semblance of the communal individuality to which a correct application of the anarchist model points.[323] Since the disappointing record of Morningstar cannot be blamed on deficiencies in the anarchist social model, neither its failure nor that of similar counter-cultural experiments impugns anarchy’s value as a guide to action. The lesson of such failures is not to give up attempts to partially anarchize society, but, in making these attempts, to take as one’s guide an accurate conception of the anarchist model. Since settlements and institutions rebuilt according to this model provide marked benefits without destructive havoc, it seems that between the alternatives of anarchy and incrementalism as guides to action, anarchy should be the choice.
To those who reject incrementalism for precluding the replacement of an entire social system, using anarchy to guide partial efforts to reconstruct society may seem just as unacceptable. Since the partial efforts that anarchy as a guide suggests are not appreciably bolder or more sweeping than those suggested by incrementalism, both, it may be argued, cut off the opportunities for augmenting human welfare that arise when an entire social system is replaced. It is true that the partial changes carried out under the guidance of the anarchist model have a cautious quality reminiscent of those an incrementalist would undertake. But whereas the incrementalist, being committed to the established social system, rejects measures which might jeopardize its continued existence, and confines himself to remedies for pressing, immediate evils, the anarchist, though his efforts aim to partially anarchize, not overthrow, the existing social order, finds effects of his efforts that tend to undermine that order anything but adverse. Believing that human welfare would be increased greatly if anarchy replaced the state, he welcomes the help his partial efforts give to this replacement, even though achieving it is not their point. Should the changes carried out under the guidance of his model in schools, workplaces, rural settlements and the like accumulate, as is possible, so as to completely dissolve the state, the anarchist would be delighted. Anarchy used as a guide to the partial reconstruction of society, far from evoking fear, as does incrementalism, that possibilities for wellbeing are going unfulfilled, offers the safety which is incrementalism’s strong point while keeping prospects for augmenting human welfare through systemic transformation alive.[324]
Thus the worth of anarchy as a model of the best regime must be deemed outstanding, judged from a practical, as well as from a theoretical, point of view. As a complete achievement anarchy is not just possible, but offers benefits unavailable from its rivals. As a practical standard and guide, anarchy points the way to action that combines safety, immediate advantage and the promise of systemic change. Since the advice of the incrementalist to disown exigent ideals has been and no doubt always will be too severe to follow, the choice among such ideals is one that simply must be faced. Though no arguments can show that anarchy — or any ideal social model — is indisputably best, the arguments advanced in this chapter show at least that in controversy about the nature of the good society anarchy must receive a leading place.
*** The significance of Anarchism for political thought
Recent books on anarchism all conclude with observations on its continuing vitality. Even before the Paris rebellion of May 1968, when students put anarchist theory to work in their struggles against their university and the state that lay behind it, commentators were cautioning against inferring from the rout of the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War that their theory was dead. Though none saw much hope for anarchism as an organized movement, working to replace, or even modify, the state, even the most gloomy believed that as ‘an austere personal and social code’ it would continue to capture the attention of receptive minds.[325] What this meant was that at least a few people could always be expected to take bearings from the anarchist tradition on how to lead their personal, aesthetic and immediate social lives. After 1968, observers began announcing with dread, triumph or amazement that the anarchist movement, transfigured by contact with the New Left, had revived.[326] These announcements of revival, because they now seem as exaggerated as the preceding reports of death, point up the hazard, which it would be foolish to defy, of forecasting anarchism’s prospects. But the continued vitality of anarchism as both idea and movement prompts other less ensnaring questions, which can be answered clearly with the aid of the analysis presented in this book. What is the explanation for anarchism’s longevity? And what is its significance for political thought?
The longevity of anarchism, despite its failure to win victories, or even to secure a mass following, is all the more striking when one remembers how little, as a doctrine, it has changed. The revisers of liberalism, conservatism and socialism, who often quite drastically modified the ideas they inherited in order to keep them relevant to the changing socio-economic situation of their supporters, have no anarchist counterparts. That the anarchism of the founders still intermittently revives suggests that its strength lies less than is usual with political doctrines in its appeal to interests. This suggestion is borne out by the fact that anarchism has won backing from persons whose places in society, being markedly divergent, could not all have been expected to support it, if its suitability as a medium for satisfying interests was the main source of its appeal. There have, of course, been attempts to paint anarchism as an ideology in the service of a particular class. But writers who make these attempts disagree whether it is peasants, artisans, small businessmen or rural landless workers whose interests anarchism represents. And no wonder they disagree, for anarchism has at times drawn backing from all of these groups, as well as from industrial workers.[327] The secret of anarchism’s endurance, these remarks suggest, should be sought less in the support it gives to mutable class interests than in its ability to satisfy aspirations that are more universal and enduring. The black flag of anarchy, we cannot but believe, now waves above at least a corner of every human heart.
In seeking to intensify and finally to merge the individual and communal sides of life, the anarchists were following the course of much nineteenth-century political theory, exemplified, as we noted in the introduction, by Hegel and Marx. What must now be added is that these seekers on the plane of theory of a fused communal individuality were responding to concerns which, less perfectly articulated, were widespread in their culture and are even more pervasive in ours. To exhibit strong personality without losing touch with others, to unite with the whole without sinking into it, to live in a society both warmly receptive to self-expression and gratifyingly unitary — these for us are pressing aspirations. Unless one rests content with denouncing these aspirations as self-contradictory or worse, though they are central to our culture, the way that anarchists propose to satisfy them must seem filled with promise.[328] Of the various paths mapped by political theorists toward combining the fullest individual development with the greatest communal unity, that of the anarchists is distinctive in its concreteness, its immediate practicality, and in the particularized rationality and thoroughgoing liberty of its projected way of life. So long as communal individuality remains an aspiration, the path to anarchy, despite its hazards, will continue to be travelled.
[306] Kropotkin, “The State: Its Historical Role’, in Miller (ed.), <em>Selected Writings on Anarchism and Revolution</em> (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), <em>Mutual Aid</em> (New York, 1925), chs. 3–8, <em>Revolutionary Pamphlets</em> (New York, 1968), pp. 65–6. For recent work by an anthropologist who reaches conclusions similar to Kropotkin’s about the anarchistic quality of some primitive societies see Pierre Clastres, <em>Society Against the State</em> (New York, 1977); and for a recent report on the Royal National Life-Boat Institution see <em>The New York Times</em> (23 April 1978). The coxswain of the Dover lifeboat is quoted as saying, ‘This job is much too important to let the Government get its hands on it.’
[307] Edward Hyndman, <em>The Historical Basis of Socialism in England</em> (London, 1883), p. 425. Donald Mcintosh, ‘The Dimensions of Anarchy’, in Pennock and Chapman (eds.), <em>Anarchism</em> (New York, 1978), p. 263.
[308] Roel Van Duyn, <em>Message of a Wise Kabouter</em> (London, 1969), pp. 48–9; Laurence Veysey, <em>The Communal Experience</em> (New York, 1973), pp. 427–9. Lyman Tower Sargent, ‘Social Decision Making in Anarchism and Minimalism’ (unpublished paper presented at the Fifth Plenary Meeting, of AMINTAPHIL, November 1976), pp. 17–18.
[309] J.-J. Rousseau, <em>Emile</em>, trans. Barbara Foxley (London, 1911), p. 7.
[310] Michael Walzer, <em>Obligations: Essays on Disobedience, War and Citizenship</em> (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), pp. 238, 231.
[311] It must not be forgotten that the anarchists, in laying out these requirements for freedom, are concerned with action in the public sphere. They acknowledge that in acting privately, as when I build my own house, it is not irrational to follow rules or experts without verifying the merit of the particular actions they prescribe. Nor must it be forgotten that in the rational deliberation of the anarchists general rules must be consulted as presumptive guides.
[312] In laying out the conditions which serve as a background to the exercise of freedom, the anarchists can be viewed as doing for liberty what is more often done for justice. Just as the theory of justice identifies the background conditions which best assure that entirely procedural adjudication will yield a just verdict, so anarchist theory identifies the background conditions which make it most likely that an entirely procedural liberty will yield good conduct.
[313] The locus classicus for the objection is Karl Popper, <em>The Open Society and Its Enemies</em> (New York, 1962), vol. 1, ch. 9; see also his essay, ‘Utopia and Violence’, in <em>Conjectures and Refutations</em> (New York, 1963), pp. 355–64.
[314] Incrementalism as a decision procedure is carefully laid out by Robert Dahl and Charles Lindblom in <em>Politics, Economics and Welfare</em> (New York, 1953), pp. 82–6.
[315] Godwin, <em>Enquiry Concerning Political Justice</em> (Toronto, 1946), II, 402. The last part of Kropotkin’s ‘Law and Authority’, in <em>Pamphlets</em>, pp. 206–8, fills out this analysis.
[316] Lester Mazor, ‘Disrespect for Law’, in Pennock and Chapman (eds.), Anarchism, pp. 143–59. See also the suggestive essay by Stanley Diamond, ‘The Rule of Law Versus the Order of Custom’, in Robert Paul Wolff (ed.), <em>The Rule of Law</em> (New York, 1971), pp. 115–44. It is important not to confuse these empirical studies of law, which criticize it from an anarchist perspective, with empirical criticism from a socialist viewpoint, a good example of which is Richard Quinney, <em>Critique of Legal Order</em> (Boston, 1973). Quinney makes no attempt to blame the suffering he documents as caused by the American legal system on law as such; the culprit for him is the capitalist economy. He says only that ‘there is no need for a legal order, *as known under capitalism*, in the social relations of a socialist society’, p. 191 (my emphasis).
[317] Quoted in David Stafford, ‘Anarchists in Britain Today’, <em>Government and Opposition</em>, 5 (Autumn 1970), p. 488.
[318] Bayard Boyeson, ‘The Modern School’, in Perry and Krimmerman, <em>Patterns of Anarchy</em> (New York, 1966), pp. 417–20. For a description of the school in a less anarchist phase, from 1920 to 1925, after it had been transferred to Stelton, New Jersey, see Veysey, <em>The Communal Experience</em>, pp. 141–8. For contemporary developments in anarchist education, including details about specific schools, see George Dennison, <em>The Lives of Children</em> (New York, 1969), Allen Graubard, <em>Free the Children</em> (New York, 1972), and Joel Spring, <em>A Primer of Libertarian Education</em> (New York, 1975).
[319] Colin Ward, <em>Anarchy in Action</em> (New York, 1973), pp. 95–109. For analysis of the value and effects of self-management see Gerry Ffunnius, G. David Garson and John Case (eds.), <em>Workers’ Control</em> (New York, 1973), and Carole Pateman, <em>Participation and Democratic Theory</em> (Cambridge, England, 1970), ch. IV, ‘Participation and “Democracy” in Industry’.
[320] Charles Gide, <em>Communist and Cooperative Colonies</em> (London, 1930), pp. 157–63. Another anarchist commune founded in France during this period, and just touched upon in Gide’s survey, was more thoroughly described in a contemporary newspaper account. The Aiglemont Colony, established in 1903 by Fortune Henry, an anarchist who had spent thirteen years in prison for his earlier, less circumspect activities, followed a similar trajectory to the Colony of Vaux. According to Henry, at Aiglemont ‘the only signal everyone obeys is the dinner gong’. No one commands. ‘Each evening, we decide what work to do the next day; but the next day each of us does his work just as he pleases.’ The newspaper correspondent reported from Aiglemont that there were indeed no fixed rules or routines governing work, yet the settlers were producing more than enough to live on. The Aiglemont Colony fell apart, like the one at Vaux, when its founder was called a dictator and invited to leave. <em>Le Temps</em>, 11 and 13 June 1905.
[321] Laurence Veysey, on whose somewhat querulous account of Stelton these remarks are based, though he concludes that the Colony’s record was ‘mixed and inconclusive’, nevertheless is moved to add that ‘to have fought the outside world for so long to a kind of draw is itself impressive’. <em>The Communal Experience</em>, p. 177.
[322] Veysey, <em>The Communal Experience</em>, pp. 185–8; Richard Fairfield, <em>Communes USA</em>. (Baltimore, 1972), pp. 39–52.
[323] Keith Melville, <em>Communes in the Counter Culture</em> (New York, 1972), pp. 126-g; Fairfield, <em>Communes</em>, pp. 241–67.
[324] Using anarchy as a guide to partial reconstruction certainly does not assure beneficial transformation, or even make it probable. The withdrawal of anarchists into separate institutions might consolidate, rather than undermine, the established social order.
[325] Joll, <em>The Anarchists</em> (London, 1964), p. 279, Woodcock, <em>Anarchism</em> (New York, 1962), p. 475.
[326] Karl Wittfogel responded with dread in ‘Marxism, Anarchism, and the New Left’ (unpublished paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, September 1969). For a triumphant response see Guerin, <em>Anarchism</em> (New York, 1970), ‘Postscript: May, 1968’, pp. 155–9, and for responses which express varied degrees of amazement see James Joll, ‘Anarchism — A Living Tradition’, <em>Government and Opposition</em>, 5 (Autumn 1970), pp. 541–54, and Gerald Runkel, <em>Anarchism: Old and New</em> (New York, 1972), pp. 175–220.
[327] Pre-eminently, the members of the Spanish CNT. For the view that anarchism represents artisanal interests see Pierre Ansert, <em>Naissance de Vanarchisme</em>(Paris, 1970); for an interpretation emphasizing its appeal to landless rural workers see Hobsbawm, <em>Primitive Rebels</em> (New York, 1959), pp. 74–92; Aime Berthod stresses the affinities between Proudhon’s anarchism and peasant interests in <em>Proudhon et la propriete</em> (Paris, 1910); the association of anarchism with ‘petty bourgeois’ interests is, of course, a Marxist hobbyhorse.
[328] John Chapman and Gerald Gaus decry this aspiration as self-contradictory in their provocative essay, ‘Anarchism and Political Philosophy: An Introduction’, in Pennock and Chapman (eds.), <em>Anarchism</em>, p. xi. They also cite Eric Voegelin for denouncing it as ‘the pneumatic disease’, p. xliii. In ch. 1 of his <em>Hegel</em>(Cambridge, England, 1975), Charles Taylor gives a magisterial account of our preoccupation with individuality and community in the context of the development of pre-Hegelian German philosophy and culture.
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#title Bread and Freedom
#author Albert Camus
#date September 1953
#source Retrieved on 2023-05-25 from [[https://anarchistfaq.org/translations/bread-freedom.html][anarchistfaq.org/translations/bread-freedom.html]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2023-05-25T03:57:24
#authors Albert Camus
#topics freedom, government
#notes This talk was originally published as “Restaurer la valeur de la liberté” (“Restoring the value of freedom”) in the September 1953 issue of <em>La Révolution Prolétarienne</em>, a French syndicalist journal. The title was changed when it was reprinted later the same year. “Bread and Freedom”, incidentally, was also the title of the Russian translation of Kropotkin’s <em>The Conquest of Bread</em>. (Translator)
If we add up the violations and the many abuses which have been revealed to us, we can foresee a time when, in a Europe of concentration camps, only prison guards will be free, who will still have to imprison each other. When only one remains, he will be named the head guard and this will be the perfect society wherein the problems of opposition, the nightmare of twentieth-century governments, will be finally, and definitively, resolved.
Of course, this is only a prophecy and although governments and police forces around the world are striving, with great good will, to reach such a happy outcome, we are not there yet. Amongst us, for instance, in Western Europe, freedom is officially viewed favourably. Basically, it makes me think of those poor cousins that we see in certain bourgeois families. The cousin became a widow, she lost her natural protector. So they took her in, gave her a room on the top floor and tolerate her in the kitchen. They occasionally parade her in town, on a Sunday, to prove that they are virtuous and not dogs. But for everything else, and especially on special occasions, she is requested to keep her mouth shut. And even if a police officer casually violates her a little in a corner, they do not make a fuss about it, she has been through worse, especially with the master of the house, and, after all, it is not worth getting into trouble with the proper authorities. In the East, it must be said that they are more forthright. They have settled the business of the cousin once and for all and flung her into a closet with two sturdy locks. It seems that she will emerge in fifty years, more or less, when the ideal society will have been definitively established. Then they will have celebrations in her honour. But in my opinion she may be somewhat moth-eaten by then and I do fear that they may no longer make use of her. When we add that these two concepts of freedom, that of the closet and that of the kitchen, are each determined to prevail over the other, and are obliged in all this commotion to further reduce the movements of the cousin, it will be easily understood that our history is more that of servitude than of freedom and that the world in which we live is the one just spoken of, which leaps out at us from the newspaper every morning to make of our days and our weeks a single day of outrage and disgust.
The simplest, and therefore most tempting, thing is to accuse governments, or some obscure powers, of these wicked ways. Besides, it is indeed true that they are guilty, and of a crime so impenetrable and so long-lasting that we have even lost sight of its beginnings. But they are not the only ones responsible. After all, if freedom had only ever had governments to guard its growth, it is likely that it would still be its infancy, or definitively buried with the inscription “an angel in heaven”. The society of money and exploitation has never been charged, so far as I know, with ensuring freedom and justice. Police States have never been suspected of opening law schools in the cellars where they interrogate their subjects. So, when they oppress and exploit, they are doing their job, and whoever gives them unchecked disposal of freedom has no right to be surprised when it is immediately dishonoured. If freedom today is humiliated or in chains, this is not because its enemies have used treachery. It is actually because it has lost its natural protector. Yes, freedom is widowed, but it must be said because it is true, it is widowed by all of us.
Freedom is the concern of the oppressed, and its natural protectors have always come out of oppressed peoples. In feudal Europe it was the communes which maintained the ferments of freedom, the inhabitants of the towns and cities who ensured its fleeting triumph in 1789, and since the 19<sup>th</sup> century it was the workers’ movements assumed responsibility for the double honour of freedom and justice, which they never dreamt of saying were irreconcilable. It was the manual and intellectual workers who gave freedom a body, and who made it advance in the world until it become the very principle of our thought, the air that we cannot do without, that we breathe without even noticing it, until the moment when, deprived of it, we feel we are dying. And if, today, freedom is declining across such a large part of the world, it is undoubtedly because the business of enslavement has never been so cynical nor better equipped but it is also because its true defenders, through fatigue, through despair, or through a false idea of strategy and efficiency, have turned away from it. Yes, the great event of the 20<sup>th</sup> century was the abandonment of the values of freedom by the revolutionary movement, the progressive retreat of the socialism of freedom before Caesarian and military socialism. From that moment, a certain hope has disappeared from the world, a solitude has begun for every free man.
When, after Marx, the rumour began to spread and gain strength that freedom was a bourgeois hoax [<em>balançoire</em>], a single word was misplaced in this definition, but we are still paying for that misplacement in the convulsions of our century. For it should have been said merely that bourgeois freedom was a hoax, and not all freedom. It should have been said specifically that bourgeois freedom was not freedom or, in the best of cases, that it was not yet [freedom]. But that there were freedoms to be conquered and never relinquished. It is quite true that there is no freedom possible for the man tied to his lathe all day and who, when evening comes, huddles with his family in a single room. But that condemns a class, a society and the servitude it presupposes, not freedom itself which the poorest of us cannot do without. For even if society were suddenly transformed and became decent and comfortable for all, it would still be barbaric if freedom did not reign there. And because bourgeois society talks of freedom without practising it, must the workers’ society also give up practising it, boasting only of not talking about it? Yet the confusion took place and freedom was gradually condemned in the revolutionary movement because bourgeois society used it as a mystification. From a just and healthy distrust of the prostitution that this bourgeois society inflicted upon freedom, we have come to distrust freedom itself. At best, we have postponed it to the end of time, praying that in the meanwhile we will not talk about it anymore. It was declared that justice was the first necessity and that freedom would be seen to later, as if slaves could ever hope to achieve justice. And vibrant intellectuals announced to the worker that it was bread alone that interested him and not freedom, as if the worker did not know that his bread also depends on his freedom. And certainly, faced with the long injustice of bourgeois society, the temptation to go to such extremes was great. After all, there is perhaps not one of us here who, in action or thought, has not yielded to it. But history has moved forward and what we have seen must now make us reconsider. The revolution made by the workers triumphed in 1917 and it was then the dawn of real freedom and the greatest hope that this world has known. But that revolution, surrounded, threatened within and without, armed itself, equipped itself with a police force. Inheriting a conception and a doctrine that unfortunately rendered it suspicious of freedom, the revolution gradually weakened as the police grew stronger, and the world’s greatest hope ossified into the world’s most effective dictatorship. The false freedom of bourgeois society is no worse off, however. What was killed in the Moscow trials and elsewhere, and in the camps of the revolution, what is murdered when a railway worker is shot, as in Hungary, for a mistake at work, is not bourgeois freedom, it is the freedom of 1917. Bourgeois freedom can meanwhile engage in all its mystifications. The trials, the perversions of the revolutionary society give it both a good conscience and arguments.
Ultimately, what characterises the world we live in is precisely this cynical dialectic that pits injustice against enslavement and which strengthens one by the other. When they bring into the palace of culture Franco, the friend of Goebbels and Himmler, Franco, the real victor of the Second World War, to those who protest and say that the rights of man enshrined in the charter of UNESCO are mocked every day in Franco’s prisons, they answer with a straight face that Poland is also at UNESCO and that in terms of respecting public freedoms, one is no better than the other. An idiotic argument, of course! If you have had the misfortunate to marry your elder daughter to a sergeant in a battalion of convicts [<em>bataillons d’Afrique</em>[1]], this is no reason to marry the younger sister to an inspector in the Vice Squad: one black sheep in the family is enough. However, the idiotic argument is effective, as is proved to us every day. To those who bring up the slave in the colonies crying out for justice, they are shown the prisoners in Russian concentration camps, and vice versa. And if you protest against the assassination in Prague of an opposition historian like Kalandra, two or three American Negroes are thrown in your face.[2] In this disgusting one-upmanship, only one thing does not change, the victim, always the same, only one value is constantly violated or prostituted, freedom, and then we realise that together with it justice is also debased everywhere.[3]
How then to break this infernal circle? It is obvious that we can only do this by restoring, right now, in ourselves and around us, the value of freedom – and by never again agreeing to it being sacrificed, even temporarily, or separated from our demand for justice. Today’s watchword, for all of us, can only be this: without conceding anything on the plane of justice, never abandoning that of freedom. In particular, the few democratic liberties we still enjoy are not unimportant illusions, and which we cannot allow to be stolen from us without protest. They represent exactly what we have left of the great revolutionary conquests of the last two centuries. They therefore are not, as so many clever demagogues tell us, the negation of true freedom. There is not an ideal freedom that will be given us one day all at once, as we receive our pension at the end of our life. There are freedoms to be conquered, painfully, one by one, and those we still have are steps, certainly not enough, but nevertheless steps on the way to a real liberation. If we agree to suppress them, that does not mean we are moving forward. On the contrary, we retreat, we go backwards and one day we will have to retrace that route, but this new effort will be achieved once again in the sweat and blood of men.
No, choosing freedom today is not, like a Kravchenko, going from being a carpetbagger for the Soviet regime to that of a carpetbagger for the bourgeois regime.[4] For that would be, on the contrary, to choose servitude twice and, a final condemnation, choosing it twice for others. Choosing freedom is not, as we are told, choosing against justice. On the contrary, we choose freedom today at the same level as those who everywhere suffer and struggle, and only there. We chose it at the same time as justice and, in truth, now we can no longer choose one without the other. If someone takes away your bread, he removes your freedom at the same time. But if someone steals your freedom, rest assured, your bread is threatened, for it no longer depends on you and your struggle but on the whim of a master. Poverty increases as freedom recedes in the world, and vice versa. And if this unforgiving century has taught us anything, it is that the economic revolution will be free or it will not be, just as liberation will be economic or it will be nothing. The oppressed not only want to be liberated from their hunger, they also want to be freed from their masters. They know very well that they will be effectively freed of hunger only when they hold their masters, all their masters, at bay.
Finally, I should add that separating freedom from justice amounts to separating culture and labour, which is the quintessential social sin. The confusion of the labour movement in Europe stems partly from the fact that it has lost its real home, the one where it regained its strength after all defeats, and which was the faith in freedom. But, likewise, the confusion of European intellectuals arises because the double mystification, bourgeois and pseudo-revolutionary, separated them from their sole source of authenticity, the work and suffering of all, cutting them off from their sole natural allies, the workers. As for me, I have only ever recognised two aristocracies, that of labour and that of the intelligence, and I know now that it is crazy and criminal to want to subject one to the other, I know that between them they make but one nobility, that their truth and above all their effectiveness lie in union, that separated they will allow themselves to be diminished one by one by the forces of tyranny and barbarism, but that, on the other hand, united they will rule the world. This is why any undertaking which aims to disengage and separate them is an undertaken directed against man and his highest hopes. Therefore the first deed of any dictatorial endeavour is to simultaneously subjugate labour and culture. It is necessary, in fact, to gag them both otherwise, the tyrants are well aware, sooner or later one will speak up for the other. This is how, in my opinion, there are today two ways for an intellectual to betray and, in both cases, he betrays because he accepts only one thing: this separation between labour and culture. The first characterises bourgeois intellectuals who accept that their privileges are paid for by the enslavement of the workers. They often say that they defend freedom, but they defend first the privileges that freedom gives them, and them alone.[5] Second characterises intellectuals who believe themselves to be on the left and who, through distrust of freedom, accept that culture, and the freedom it presupposes, should be directed, under the vain pretext of serving future justice. In both cases, whether they are a carpetbagger of injustice or a renegade of freedom, they ratify, they consecrate the separation of intellectual and manual labour which dooms both labour and culture to impotence, they debase at the same time both freedom and justice.
It is true that freedom, when it is made up primarily of privileges, insults labour and separates it from culture. But freedom is not made up primarily of privileges, it is made up above all of duties. And from the moment any of us tries to ensure that the duties of freedom prevail over its privileges, from that moment, freedom unites labour and culture and sets in motion the only force that can effectively serve justice. The principal of our action, the secret of our resistance, can then be expressed simply: anything that humiliates labour humiliates the intellect, and vice versa. And the revolutionary struggle, the age-old striving for liberation is defined first of all as a dual and unceasing rejection of humiliation.
To tell the truth, we have not yet emerged from this humiliation. But the wheel turns, history changes, a time approaches, I am sure, when we will no longer be alone. For me, our meeting today is already a sign. The fact that trade unionists gather together and group around our freedoms to defend them, yes, this truly merited everyone rushing from all directions to demonstrate their unity and their hope. The road ahead is long. Yet if war does not come and mixes everything into its hideous confusion, we will have time to finally give a form to the justice and freedom we need. But for this, we must from now on categorically refuse, without anger but implacably, the lies with which we have been forced fed. No, we do not build freedom on concentration camps, nor on the subjugated peoples of the colonies, nor on working-class poverty! No, the doves of peace do not perch on gallows, no, the forces of freedom cannot mix the sons of the victims with the executioners of Madrid and elsewhere! Of this, at least, we will henceforth be sure, as we will be sure that freedom is not a gift that we receive from a State or a leader, but a good that we conquer every day, by the effort of each and the union of all.
[1] The Battalions of Light Infantry of Africa (<em>Bataillons d’Infanterie Légère d’Afrique</em>) were French infantry and construction units serving in Northern Africa which were made up of men with prison records who still had to do their military service or soldiers with serious disciplinary problems. Created in 1832, they were disbanded in 1972. (Translator)
[2] Záviš Kalandra (1902–1950) was a Czechoslovak historian and theorist of literature. In 1923 he joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, but he was expelled due to his criticism of Stalin’s policy. Arrested by the Gestapo in 1939 and imprisoned until 1945 in various concentration camps, after the war he was branded a Trotskyist and executed for being a member of an alleged plot to overthrow the Communist regime. (Translator)
[3] The latest news is that the Laniel government killed seven demonstrators in the Place de la Nation to keep up with the Berlin shootings. That will teach us to demand dialogue. We have it, but it is the dialogue of the dead. Yes, it is who will be the most despicable! [Footnote from the original article not included in the reprint – Translator]
[4] Viktor Andreevich Kravchenko (1905–1966) was a Ukrainian-born Soviet defector. Originally an enthusiastic member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union who joined the party in 1929, he later became disillusioned and defected to the United States during World War II. He is best known for writing the book <em>I Chose Freedom</em>, published in 1946, about the realities of life in the Soviet Union. (Translator)
[5] And besides, most of the time they do not even defend freedom whenever there is a risk to do so.
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#pubdate 2011-02-02 10:04:47 +0100
#author Albert Camus
#SORTauthors Albert Camus
#title Neither Victims Nor Executioners
#lang en
#SORTtopics alienation, war
#source Retrieved on February 2, 2011 from [[http://j12.org/spunk/library/writers/camus/sp001174.txt][j12.org]]
November 30, 1946
Toward Dialogue
Yes, we must raise our voices. Up to this point, I have refrained from appealing to emotion. We are being torn apart by a logic of history which we have elaborated in every detail — a net which threatens to strangle us. It is not emotion which can cut through the web of a logic which has gone to irrational lengths, but only reason which can meet logic on its own ground. But I should not want to leave the impression... that any program for the future can get along without our powers of love and indignation. I am well aware that it takes a powerful prime mover to get men into motion and that it is hard to throw one’s self into a struggle whose objectives are so modest and where hope has only a rational basis — and hardly even that. But the problem is not how to carry men away; it is essential, on the contrary, that they not be carried away but rather that they be made to understand clearly what they are doing.
To save what can be saved so as to open up some kind of future — that is the prime mover, the passion and the sacrifice that is required. It demands only that we reflect and then decide, clearly, whether humanity’s lot must be made still more miserable in order to achieve far-off and shadowy ends, whether we should accept a world bristling with arms where brother kills brother; or whether, on the contrary, we should avoid bloodshed and misery as much as possible so that we give a chance for survival to later generations better equipped than we are.
For my part, I am fairly sure that I have made the choice. And, having chosen, I think that I must speak out, that I must state that I will never again be one of those, whoever they be, who compromise with murder, and that I must take the consequences of such a decision. The thing is done, and that is as far as I can go at present.... However, I want to make clear the spirit in which this article is written.
We are asked to love or to hate such and such a country and such and such a people. But some of us feel too strongly our common humanity to make such a choice. Those who really love the Russian people, in gratitude for what they have never ceased to be — that world leaven which Tolstoy and Gorky speak of — do not wish for them success in power politics, but rather want to spare them, after the ordeals of the past, a new and even more terrible bloodletting. So, too, with the American people, and with the peoples of unhappy Europe. This is the kind of elementary truth we are likely to forget amidst the furious passions of our time.
Yes, it is fear and silence and the spiritual isolation they cause that must be fought today. And it is sociability and the universal intercommunication of men that must be defended. Slavery, injustice, and lies destroy this intercourse and forbid this sociability; and so we must reject them. But these evils are today the very stuff of history, so that many consider them necessary evils. It is true that we cannot “escape history,” since we are in it up to our necks. But one may propose to fight within history to preserve from history that part of man which is not its proper province. That is all I have to say here. The “point” of this article may be summed up as follows:
Modern nations are driven by powerful forces along the roads of power and domination. I will not say that these forces should be furthered or that they should be obstructed. They hardly need our help and, for the moment, they laugh at attempts to hinder them. They will, then, continue. But I will ask only this simple question: What if these forces wind up in a dead end, what if that logic of history on which so many now rely turns out to be a will o’ the wisp? What if, despite two or three world wars, despite the sacrifice of several generations and a whole system of values, our grandchildren — supposing they survive — find themselves no closer to a world society? It may well be that the survivors of such an experience will be too weak to understand their own sufferings. Since these forces are working themselves out and since it is inevitable that they continue to do so,there is no reason why some of us should not take on the job of keeping alive, through the apocalyptic historical vista that stretches before us, a modest thoughtfulness which, without pretending to solve everything, will constantly be prepared to give some human meaning to everyday life. The essential thing is that people should carefully weight the price they must pay....
All I ask is that, in the midst of a murderous world, we agree to reflect on murder and to make a choice. After that, we can distinguish those who accept the consequences of being murderers themselves or the accomplices of murderers, and those who refuse to do so with all their force and being. Since this terrible dividing line does actually exist, it will be a gain if it be clearly marked. Over the expanse of five continents throughout the coming years an endless strugle is going to be pursued between violence and friendly persuasion, a struggle in which, granted, the former has a thousand times the chances of success than that of the latter. But I have always held that, if he who bases his hopes on human nature is a fool, he who gives up in the face of circumstances is a coward. And henceforth, the only honorable course will be to stake everything on a formidable gamble: that words are more powerful than munitions.
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#title Reflections on the Guillotine
#author Albert Camus
#SORTtopics punishment, anti-punishment, Justice, existentialism
#date 1957
#source https://libcom.org/files/Reflections%20on%20the%20Guillotine.pdf
#lang en
** Part 1
Shortly before the war of 1914, an assassin whose crime was particularly repulsive (he had slaughtered a family of farmers, including the children) was condemned to death in Algiers. He was a farm worker who had killed in a sort of bloodthirsty frenzy but had aggravated his case by robbing his victims. The affair created a great stir. It was generally thought that decapitation was too mild a punishment for such a monster. This was the opinion, I have been told, of my father, who was especially aroused by the murder of the children. One of the few things I know about him, in any case, is that he wanted to witness the execution, for the first time in his life. He got up in the dark to go to the place of execution at the other end of town amid a great crowd of people. What he saw that morning he never told anyone. My mother relates merely that he came rushing home, his face distorted, refused to talk, lay down for a moment on the bed, and suddenly began to vomit. He had just discovered the reality hidden under the noble phrases with which it was masked. Instead of thinking of the slaughtered children, he could think of nothing but that quivering body that had just been dropped onto a board to have its head cut off.
Presumably that ritual act is horrible indeed if it manages to overcome the indignation of a simple, straightforward man and if a punishment he considered richly deserved had no other effect in the end than to nauseate him. When the extreme penalty Simply causes vomiting on the part of the respectable citizen it is supposed to protect, how can anyone maintain that it is likely, as it ought to be, to bring more peace and order into the community? Rather, it is obviously no less repulsive than the crime, and this new murder, far from making amends for the harm done to the social body, adds a new blot to the first one. Indeed, no one dares speak directly of the ceremony. Officials and journalists who have to talk about it, as if they were aware of both its provocative and its shameful aspects, have made up a sort of ritual language, reduced to stereotyped phrases. Hence we read at breakfast time in a corner of the newspaper that the condemned "has paid his debt to society" or that he has "atoned" or that "at five a.m. justice was done." The officials call the condemned man "the interested party" or "the patient" or refer to him by a number. People write of capital punishment as if they were whispering. In our well-policed society we recognize that an illness is serious from the fact that we don't dare speak of it directly. For a long time, in middle-class families people said no more than that the elder daughter had a "suspicious cough" or that the father had a "growth" because tuberculosis and cancer were looked upon as somewhat shameful maladies. This is probably even truer of capital punishment since everyone strives to refer to it only through euphemisms. It is to the body politic what cancer is to the individual body, with this difference: no one has ever spoken of the necessity of cancer. There is no hesitation, on the other hand, about presenting capital punishment as a regrettable necessity, a necessity that justifies killing because it is necessary, and let's not talk about it because it is "regrettable.
But it is my intention to talk about it crudely. Not because I like scandal, nor, I believe, because of an unhealthy streak in my nature. As a writer, I have always loathed avoiding the issue; as a man, I believe that the repulsive aspects of our condition, if they are inevitable, must merely be faced in silence. But when silence or tricks of language contribute to maintaining an abuse that must be reformed or a suffering that can be relieved, then there is no other solution but to speak out and show the obscenity hidden under the verbal cloak. France shares with England and Spain the honor of being one of the last countries this side of the iron curtain to keep capital punishment in its arsenal of repression. The survival of such a primitive rite has been made possible among us only by the thoughtlessness or ignorance of the public, which reacts only with the ceremonial phrases that have been drilled into it. When the imagination sleeps, words are emptied of their meaning: a deaf population absent-mindedly registers the condemnation of a man. But if people are shown the machine, made to touch the wood and steel and to hear the sound of a head falling, then public imagination, suddenly awakened, will repudiate both the vocabulary and the penalty.
When the Nazis in Poland indulged in public executions of hostages, to keep those hostages from shouting words of revolt and liberty they muzzled them with a plaster-coated gag. It would be shocking to compare the fate of those innocent victims with that of condemned criminals. But, aside from the fact that criminals are not the only ones to be guillotined in our country, the method is the same. We smother under padded words a penalty whose legitimacy we could assert only after we had examined the penalty in reality. Instead of saying that the death penalty is first of all necessary and then adding that it is better not to talk about it, it is essential to say what it really is and then say whether, being what it is, it is to be considered as necessary.
So far as I am concerned, I consider it not only useless but definitely harmful, and I must record my opinion here before getting to the subject itself. It would not be fair to imply that I reached this conclusion as a result of the weeks of investigation and research I have just devoted to this question. But it would be just as unfair to attribute my conviction to mere mawkishness. I am far from indulging in the flabby pity characteristic of humanitarians, in which values and responsibilities fuse, crimes are balanced against one another, and innocence finally loses its rights. Unlike many of my well known contemporaries, I do not think that man is by nature a social animal. To tell the truth, I think just the reverse. But I believe, and this is quite different, that he cannot live henceforth outside of society, whose laws are necessary to his physical survival. Hence the responsibilities must be established by society itself according to a reasonable and workable scale. But the law's final justification is in the good it does or fails to do to the society of a given place and time. For years I have been unable to see anything in capital punishment but a penalty the imagination could not endure and a lazy disorder that my reason condemned. Yet I was ready to think that my imagination was influencing my judgment. But, to tell the truth, I found during my recent research nothing that did not strengthen my conviction, nothing that modified my arguments. On the contrary, to the arguments I already had others we're added. Today I share absolutely Koestler's conviction; the death penalty besmirches our society, and its upholders cannot reasonably defend it. Without repeating his decisive defense, without piling up facts and figures that would only duplicate others (and Jean Bloch-Michel's make them useless), I shall merely state reasons to be added to Koestler's; like his, they argue for an immediate abolition of the death penalty.
We all know that the great argument of those who defend capital punishment is the exemplary value of the punishment. Heads are cut off not only to punish but to intimidate, by a frightening example, any who might be tempted to imitate the guilty. Society is not taking revenge; it merely wants to forestall. It waves the head in the air so that potential murderers will see their fate and recoil from it.
This argument would be impressive if we were not obliged to note:
1) that society itself does not believe in the exemplary value it talks about;
2) that there is no proof that the death penalty ever made a single murderer recoil when he had made up his mind, whereas clearly it had no effect but one of fascination on thousands of criminals;
3) that, in other regards, it constitutes a repulsive example, the consequences of which cannot be foreseen.
To begin with, society does not believe in what it says. If it really believed what it says, it would exhibit the heads. Society would give executions the benefit of the publicity it generally uses for national bond issues or new brands of drinks. But we know that executions in our country, instead of taking place publicly, are now perpetrated in prison courtyards before a limited number of specialists. We are less likely to know why and since when. This is a relatively recent measure. The last public execution, which took place in 1939, beheaded Weidmann the author of several murders, who was notorious for his crimes. That morning a large crowd gathered at Versailles, including a large number of photographers. Between the moment when Weidmann was shown to the crowd and the moment when he was decapitated, photographs could be taken. A few hours later Paris-Soir published a page of illustrations of that appetizing event. Thus the good people of Paris could see that the light precision instrument used by the executioner was as different from the historical scaffold as a Jaguar is from one of our old Pierce-Arrows. The administration and the government, contrary to all hope, took such excellent publicity very badly and protested that the press had tried to satisfy the sadistic instincts of its readers. Consequently, it was decided that executions would no longer take place publicly, an arrangement that, soon after, facilitated the work of the occupation authorities. Logic, in that affair, was not on the side of the lawmaker.
On the contrary, a special decoration should have been awarded to the editor of Paris-Soir, thereby encouraging ..•. him to do better the next time. If the penalty is intended to be exemplary, then, not only should the photographs be multiplied, but the machine should even be set on a platform in Place de la Concorde at two P.M., the entire population should be invited, and the ceremony should be put on television for those who couldn't attend. Either this must be done or else there must be no more talk of exemplary value. How can a furtive assassination committed at night in a prison courtyard be exemplary? At most, it serves the purpose of periodically informing the citizens that they will die if they happen to kill a future that can be promised even to those who do not kill. For the penalty to be truly exemplary it must be frightening. Tuaut de La Bouverie, representative of the people in 1791 and a partisan of public executions, was more logical when he declared to the National Assembly: "It takes a terrifying spectacle to hold the people in check."
Today there is no spectacle, but only a penalty known to all by hearsay and, from time to time, the news of an execution dressed up in soothing phrases. How could a future criminal keep in mind, at the moment of his crime, a sanction that everyone strives to make more and more abstract? And if it is really desired that he constantly keep that sanction in mind so that it will first balance and later reverse a frenzied decision, should there not be an effort to engrave that sanction and its dreadful reality in the sensitivity of all by every visual and verbal means?
Instead of vaguely evoking a debt that someone this very morning paid society, would it not be a more effective example to remind each taxpayer in detail of what he may expect? Instead of saying: "If you kill, you will atone for it on the scaffold," wouldn't it be better to tell him, for purposes of example: "If you kill, you'll be imprisoned for months or years, torn between an impossible despair and a constantly renewed terror, until one morning we shall slip into your cell after removing our shoes the better to take you by surprise while you are sound asleep after the night's anguish. We shall fall on you, tie your hands behind your back, cut with scissors your shirt collar and your hair if need be. Perfectionists that we are, we shall bind your arms with a strap so that you are forced to stoop and your neck will be more accessible. Then we shall carry you, an assistant on each side supporting you by the arm, with your feet dragging behind through the corridors. Then, under a night sky, one of the executioners will finally seize you by the seat of your pants and throw you horizontally on a board while another will steady your head in the lunette and a third will let fall from at height of seven feet a hundred-and-twenty-pound blade that will slice off your head like a razor."
For the example to be even better, for the terror to impress each of us sufficiently to outweigh at the right moment an irresistible desire for murder, it would be essential to go still further. Instead of boasting, with the pretentious thoughtlessness characteristic of us, of having invented this rapid and humane[1] method of killing condemned men, we should publish thousands of copies of the eyewitness accounts and medical reports describing the state of the body after the execution, to be read in schools and universities. Particularly suitable for this purpose the recent report to the Academy of Medicine made by Doctors Piedelievre and Fournier. Those courageous doctors, invited in the interest of science to examine the bodies of the guillotined after the execution considered it their duty to sum up their dreadful observations: "If we may be permitted to give our opinion, such sights are frightfully painful. The blood flows from the blood vessels at the speed of the severed carotids, then it coagulates. The muscles contract and their fibrillation is stupefying; the intestines ripple and the heart moves irregularly, incompletely, fascinatingly. The mouth puckers at certain moments in a terrible pout. It is true that, in that severed head the eyes are motionless with dilated, pupils; fortunately they look at nothing and, if they are devoid of the cloudiness and opalescence of the corpse, they have no motion; their transparence belongs to life, but their fixity belongs to death. All this can last minutes, even hours, in sound specimens: death is not immediate... Thus, every vital element survives decapitation. The doctor is left with this impression of a horrible experience, of a murderous vivisection, followed by a premature burial."[2]
[1] According to the optimistic Dr. Guillotin, the condemned was not to feel anything. At most a "slight sensation of coldness on his neck."
[2] Justice sans bourreau. No. 2 (June 1956).
I doubt that there are many readers who can read that terrifying report without blanching. Consequently, its exemplary power and its capacity to intimidate can be counted on. There is no reason not to add to it eyewitness accounts that confirm the doctors' observations. Charlotte Corday's severed head blushed, it is said, under the executioner's slap. This will not shock anyone who listens to more recent observers. An executioner's assistant (hence hardly suspect of indulging in romanticizing and sentimentality) describes in these terms what he was forced to see: "It was a madman undergoing a real attack of <em>delirium tremens</em> that we dropped under the blade. The head dies at once. But the body literally jumps about in the basket, straining on the cords. Twenty minutes later, at the cemetery, it is still quivering." [3] The present chaplain of the Sante prison, Father Devoyod (who does not seem opposed to capital punishment), gives in his book, Les Delinquants,[4] an account that goes rather far and renews the story of Languille, whose decapitated head answered the call of his name.[5] "The morning of the execution, the condemned man was in a very bad mood and refused the consolations of religion. Knowing his heart of hearts and the affection he had for his wife, who was very devout, we said to him: 'Come now, out of love for your wife, commune with yourself a moment before dying,' and the condemned man accepted. He communed at length before the crucifix, then he seemed to pay no further attention to our presence. When he was executed, we were a short distance from him. His head fell into the trough in front of the guillotine and the body was immediately put into the basket; but, by some mistake, the basket was closed before the head was put in. The assistant who was carrying the head had to wait a moment until the basket was opened again; now, during that brief space of time we could see the condemned man's eyes fixed on me with a look of supplication, as if to ask forgiveness. Instinctively, we made the sign of the cross to bless the head, and then the lids blinked, the expression of the eyes softened, and finally the look, that had remained full of expression, became vague: . . ." The reader may or may not, according to his faith, accept the explanation provided by the priest. At least those eyes that "had remained full of expression" need no interpretation.
[3] Published by Roger Grenier in Les Monstres CGallimard). These declarations are authentic.
[4] Editions Matot-Braine, Reims.
[5] In 1905 in the Loiret.
I could adduce other first-hand accounts that would be just as hallucinating. But I, for one, could not go on. After all, I do not claim that capital punishment is exemplary, and the penalty seems to me just what it is, a crude surgery practiced under conditions that leave nothing edifying about it. Society, on the other hand, and the State, which is not so impressionable, can very well put up with such details and, since they extol an example, ought to try to get everyone put up with them so that no .one will be ignorant of them and the population, terrorized once and for all, will become Franciscan one and all. Whom do they hope to intimidate, otherwise, by that example forever hidden, by the threat of a punishment described as easy and swift and easier to bear, after all, than cancer, by a penalty submerged in the flowers of rhetoric? Certainly not those who are considered respectable (some of them are) because they are sleeping at that hour, and the great example has not been announced to them, and they will be eating their toast and marmalade at the time of the premature burial, and they will be informed of the work of justice, if perchance they read the newspapers, by an insipid news item that will melt like sugar in their memory. And, yet, those peaceful creatures are the ones who provide the largest percentage of homicides. Many such respectable people are potential criminals. According to a magistrate, the vast majority of murderers he had known did not know when shaving in the morning that they were going to kill later in the day. As an example and for the sake of security, it would be wiser, instead of hiding the execution, to hold up the severed head in front of all who are shaving in the morning.
Nothing of the sort happens. The State disguises executions and keeps silent about these statements and eye-witness accounts. Hence it doesn't believe in the exemplary value of the penalty, except by tradition and because it has never bothered to think about the matter. The criminal is killed because this has been done for centuries and, besides, he is killed in a way that was set at the end of the eighteenth century. Out of habit, people will turn to arguments that were used centuries ago, even though these arguments must be contradicted by measures that the evolution of public sensitivity has made inevitable. A law is applied without being thought out and the condemned die in the name of a theory in which the executioners do not believe. If they believed in it, this would be obvious to all. But publicity not only arouses sadistic instincts with incalculable repercussions eventually leading to another murder; it also runs the risk of provoking revolt and disgust in the public opinion. It would become harder to execute men one after another, as is done in our country today, if those executions were translated into vivid images in the popular imagination. The man who enjoys his coffee while reading that justice has been done would spit it out at the least detail. And the texts I have quoted might seem to vindicate certain professors of criminal law who, in their obvious inability to justify that anachronistic penalty, console themselves by declaring, with the sociologist Tarde, that it is better to cause death without causing suffering than it is to cause suffering without causing death. This is why we must approve the position of Gambetta, who, as an adversary of the death penalty, voted against a bill involving suppression of publicity for executions, declaring: "If you suppress the horror of the spectacle, if you execute inside prisons, you will smother the public outburst of revolt that has taken place of late and you will strengthen the death penalty."
Indeed, one must kill publicly or confess that one does. not feel authorized to kill. If society justifies the death penalty by the necessity of the example, it must justify itself by making the publicity necessary. It must show the executioner's hands each time and force everyone to look at them–the over-delicate citizens and all those who had any responsibility in bringing the execution into being. Otherwise, society admits that it kills without knowing what it is saying or doing. Or else it admits that such revolting ceremonies can only excite crime or completely upset opinion. Who could better state this than a magistrate at the end of his career, Judge Falco, whose brave confession deserves serious reflection: "The only time in my life when I decided against a commutation of penalty and in favor of execution, I thought that, despite my position, I could attend the execution and remain utterly impassive. Moreover, the criminal was not very interesting: he had tormented his daughter and finally thrown her into a well. But, after his execution, for weeks and even months, my nights were haunted by that recollection... Like everyone else, I served in the war and saw an innocent generation die, but I can state that nothing gave me the sort of bad conscience I felt in the face of the kind of administrative murder that is called capital punishment." [6]
[6] Realites, No. 105 (October 1954).
But, after all, why should society believe in that example when it does not stop crime, when its effects, if they exist, are invisible? To begin with, capital punishment could not intimidate the man who doesn't know that he is going to kill, who makes up his mind to it in a flash and commits his crime in a state of frenzy or obsession, nor the man who, going to an appointment to have it out with someone, takes along a weapon to frighten the faithless one or the opponent and uses it although he didn't want to or didn't think he wanted to. In other words, it could not intimidate the man who is hurled into crime as if into a calamity. This is tantamount to saying that it is powerless in the majority of cases. It is only fair to point out that in our country capital punishment is rarely applied in such cases. But the word "rarely" itself makes one shudder.
Does it frighten at least that race of criminals on whom it claims to operate and who live off crime? Nothing is less certain. We can read in Koestler that at a time when pickpockets were executed in England, other pickpockets exercised their talents in the crowd surrounding the scaffold where their colleague was being hanged. Statistics drawn up at the beginning of the century in England show that out of 250 who were hanged, 170 had previously attended one or more executions. And in 1886, out of 167 condemned men who had gone through the Bristol prison, 164 had witnessed at least one execution. Such statistics are no longer possible to gather in France because of the secrecy surrounding executions. But they give cause to think that around my father, the day of that execution, there must have been a rather large number of future criminals, who did not vomit. The power of intimidation reaches only the quiet individuals who are not drawn toward crime and has no effect on the hardened ones who need to be softened. In Koestler's essay and in the detailed studies will be found the most convincing facts and figures on this aspect of the subject.
It cannot be denied, however, that men fear death. The privation of life is indeed the supreme penalty and ought to excite in them a decisive fear. The fear of death, arising from the most obscure depths of the individual, ravages him; the instinct to live, when it is threatened, panics and struggles in agony. Therefore the legislator was right in thinking that his law was based upon one of the most mysterious and most powerful incentives of human nature. But law is always simpler than nature. When law ventures, in the hope of dominating, into the dark regions of consciousness, it has little chance of being able to simplify the complexity it wants to codify.
If fear of death is, indeed, a fact, another fact is that such fear, however great it may be, has never sufficed to quell human passions. Bacon is right in saying that there is no passion so weak that it cannot confront and overpower fear of death. Revenge, love, honor, pain, another fear manage to overcome it. How could cupidity, hatred, jealousy fail to do what love of a person or a country, what a passion for freedom manage to do? For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium. They are variable forces constantly waxing and waning, and their repeated lapses from equilibrium nourish the life of the mind as electrical oscillations, when close enough, set up a current. Just imagine the series of oscillations, from desire to lack of appetite, from decision to renunciation, through which each of us passes in a single day, multiply these variations infinitely, and you will have an idea of psychological proliferation. Such lapses from equilibrium are generally too fleeting to allow a single force to dominate the whole being. But it may happen that one of the soul's forces breaks loose until it fills the whole field of consciousness; at such a moment no instinct, not even that of life, can oppose the tyranny of that irresistible force. For capital punishment to be really intimidating, human nature would have to be different; it would have to be as stable and serene as the law itself. But then human nature would be dead.
It is not dead. This is why, however surprising this may seem to anyone who has never observed or directly experienced human complexity, the murderer, most of the time, feels innocent when he kills. Every criminal acquits himself before he is judged. He considers himself, if not within his right, at least excused by circumstances. He does not think or foresee; when he thinks, it is to foresee that he will be forgiven altogether or in-part. How could he fear what he considers highly improbable? He will fear death after the verdict but not before the crime. Hence the law, to be intimidating, should leave the murderer no chance, should be implacable in advance and particularly admit no extenuating circumstance. But who among us would dare ask this?
If anyone did, it would still be necessary to take into account another paradox of human nature. If the instinct to live is fundamental, it is no more so than another instinct of which the academic psychologists do not speak: the death instinct, which at certain moments calls for the destruction of oneself and of others. It is probable that the desire to kill often coincides with the desire to die or to annihilate oneself.[7] Thus, the instinct for self-preservation is matched, in variable proportions, by the instinct for destruction. The latter is the only way of explaining altogether the various perversions, which, from alcoholism to drugs, lead an individual to his death while he knows full well what is happening. Man wants to live, but it is useless to hope that this desire will dictate all his actions. He also wants to be nothing; he wants the irreparable, and death for its own sake. So it happens that the criminal wants not only the crime but the suffering that goes with it, even (one might say, especially) if that suffering is exceptional. When that odd desire grows and becomes dominant, the prospect of being put to death not only fails to stop the criminal, but probably even adds to the vertigo in which he swoons. Thus, in a way, he kills in order to die.
[7] It is possible to read every week in the papers of criminals who originally hesitated between killing themselves and killing others.
Such peculiarities suffice to explain why a penalty that seems calculated to frighten normal minds is in reality altogether unrelated to ordinary psychology. All statistics without exception, those concerning countries that have abolished execution as well as the others, show that there is no connection between the abolition of the death penalty and criminality.[8] Criminal statistics neither increase nor decrease. The guillotine exists, and does crime; between the two there is no other apparent connection than that of the law. All we can conclude from the figures, set down at length in statistical tables is this: for centuries crimes other than murder were punished with death, and the supreme punishment, repeated over and over again, did not do away with any of those crimes. For centuries now, those crimes have no longer been punished with death. Yet they have not increased; in fact, some of them have decreased. Similarly, murder has been punished with execution for centuries and yet the race of Cain has not disappeared. Finally, in the thirty-three nations that have abolished the death penalty or no longer use it, the number of murders has not increased. Who could deduce from this that capital punishment is really intimidating?
[8] Report of the English Select Committee of 1930 and of the English Royal Commission that recently resumed the study. All the statistics we have examined confirm the fact that abolition of the death penalty has not provoked an increase in the number of crimes."
Conservatives cannot deny these facts or these figures. Their only and final reply is significant. They explain the paradoxical attitude of a society that so carefully hides the execution it claims to be exemplary. "Nothing proves, indeed, say the conservatives, "that the death penalty is exemplary; as a matter of fact it is certain that thousands of murderers have not been intimidated by it. But there is no way of knowing those it has intimidated; consequently, nothing proves that it is not exemplary." Thus, the greatest of punishments, the one that involves the last dishonor for the condemned and grants the supreme privilege to society, rests on nothing but an unverifiable possibility. Death, on the other hand, does not involve degrees or probabilities. It solidifies all things, culpability and the body, in a definitive rigidity. Yet it is administered among us in the name of chance and a calculation. Even if that calculation were reasonable, should there not be a certainty to authorize the most certain of deaths? However, the condemned is cut in two, not so much for the crime he committed but by virtue of all the crimes that might have been and were not committed, that can be and will not be committed. The most sweeping uncertainty in this case authorizes the most implacable certainty.
I am not the only one to be amazed by such a dangerous contradiction. Even the State condemns it, and such bad conscience explains in turn the contradiction of its own attitude. The State divests its executions of all publicity because it cannot assert, in the face of facts, that they ever served to intimidate criminals. The State cannot escape the dilemma Beccaria described when he wrote: "If it is important to give the people proofs of power often, then executions must be frequent; but crimes will have to be frequent too, and this will prove that the death penalty does not make the complete impression that it should, whence it results that it is both useless and necessary." What can the State do with a penalty that is useless and necessary, except to hide it without abolishing it? The State will keep it then, a little out of the way, not without embarrassment, in the blind hope that one man at least, one day at least, will be stopped from his murderous gesture by thought of the punishment and, without anyone's ever knowing it, will justify a law that has neither reason nor experience in its favor. In order to continue claiming that the guillotine is exemplary, the State is consequently led to multiply very real murders in the hope of avoiding a possible murder which, as far as it knows or ever will know, may never be perpetrated. An odd law, to be sure, which knows the murder it commits and will never know the one it prevents.
What will be left of that power of example if it is proved that capital punishment has another power, and a very real one, which degrades men to the point of shame, madness, and murder?
It is already possible to follow the exemplary effects of such ceremonies on public opinion, the manifestations of sadism they arouse, the hideous vainglory they excite in certain criminals. No nobility in the vicinity of the gallows, but disgust, contempt, or the vilest indulgence of the senses. These effects are well known. Decency forced the guillotine to emigrate from Place de l'Hotel de Ville to the city gates, then into the prisons. We are less informed as to the feelings of those whose Job it is to attend such spectacles. Just listen then to the warden of an English prison who confesses to "a keen sense of personal shame" and to the chaplain who speaks of "horror, shame, and humiliation." [9]
[9] Report of the Select Committee, 1930.
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** Part 2
Just imagine the feelings of the man who kills under orders-I mean the executioner. What can we think of those officials who call the guillotine "the shunting engine," the condemned men "the client" or "the parcel?" The priest Bela Just, who accompanied more than thirty condemned men, writes: "The slang of the administrators of justice is quite as cynical and vulgar as that of the criminals."[10] And here are the remarks of one of our assistant executioners on his journeys to the provinces: "When we would start on a trip, it was always a lark with taxis and the best restaurants part of the spree!"[11] The same one says, boasting of the executioner's skill in releasing the blade: "You could <em>allow yourself the fun</em> of pulling the client's hair." The dissoluteness expressed here has other, deeper aspects. The clothing of the condemned belongs in principle to the executioner. The elder Deibler used to hang all such articles of clothing in a shed and now and then would go and look at them. But there are more serious aspects. Here is what our assistant executioner declares: "The new executioner is batty about the guillotine. He sometimes spends days on end at home sitting on a chair, ready with hat and coat on, waiting for a summons from the Ministry." [12]
[10] La Potence et la Croix (Fasquelle).
[11] Roger Cremer: Les Monstres (Gallimard).
[12] Ibid.
Yes, this is the man of whom Joseph de Maistre said that, for him to exist, there had to be a special decree from the divine power and that, without him, "order yields to chaos, thrones collapse, and society disappears." This is the man through whom society rids itself altogether of the guilty man, for the executioner signs the prison release and takes charge of a free man. The line and solemn example, thought up by our legislators, at least produces one sure effect-to depreciate or to destroy all humanity and reason in those who take part in it directly. But, it will be said, these are exceptional creatures who find a vocation in such dishonor. They seem less exceptional when we learn that hundreds of persons offer to serve as executioners without pay. The men of our generation, who have lived through the history of recent years, will not be astonished by this bit of information. They know that behind the most peaceful and familiar faces slumbers the impulse to torture and murder. The punishment that aims to intimidate an unknown murderer certainly confers a vocation of killer on many another monster about whom there is no doubt. And since we are busy justifying our cruelest laws with probable considerations, let there be no doubt that out of those hundreds of men whose services were declined, one at least must have satisfied otherwise the bloodthirsty instincts the guillotine excited in him.
If, therefore, there is a desire to maintain the death penalty, let us at least be spared the hypocrisy of a justification by example. Let us be frank about that penalty which can have no publicity, that intimidation which works only on respectable people, so long as they are respectable, which fascinates those who have ceased to be respectable and debases or deranges those who take part in it. It is a penalty, to be sure, a frightful torture, both physical and moral, but it provides no sure example except a demoralizing one. It punishes, but it forestalls nothing; indeed, it may even arouse the impulse to murder. It hardly seems to exist, except for the man who suffers it-in his soul for months and years, in his body during the desperate and violent hour when he is cut in two without suppressing his life. Let us call it by the name which, for lack of any other nobility, will at least give the nobility of truth, and let us recognize it for what it is essentially; a revenge.
A punishment that penalizes without forestalling is indeed called revenge. It is a quasi-arithmetical reply made by society to whoever breaks its primordial law. That reply is as old as man; it is called the law of retaliation. Whoever has done me harm must suffer harm; whoever has put out my eye must lose an eye; and whoever has killed must die. This is an emotion, and a particularly violent one, not a principle. Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature. If murder is in the nature of man, the law is not intended to imitate or reproduce that nature. It is intended to correct it. Now, retaliation does no more than ratify and confer the status of a law on a pure impulse of nature. We have all known that impulse, often to our shame, and we know its power, for it comes down to us from the primitive forests. In this regard, we French, who are properly indignant upon seeing the oil king in Saudi Arabia preach international democracy and call in a butcher to cut off a thief's hand with a cleaver, live also in a sort of Middle Ages without even the consolations of faith. We still define justice according to the rules of a crude arithmetic.[13] Can it be said at least that that arithmetic is exact and that Justice, even when elementary, even when limited to legal revenge, is safeguarded by the death penalty? The answer must be no.
[13] A few years ago I asked for the reprieve of six Tunisians who had been condemned to death for the murder, in a riot, of three French policemen. The circumstances in which the murder had taken place made difficult any division of responsibilities. A note from the executive office of the President of the Republic informed me that my appeal was being considered by the appropriate organization. Unfortunately, when that note was addressed to me I had already read two weeks earlier that the sentence had been carried out. Three of the condemned men had been put to death and the three others reprieved. The reasons for reprieving some rather than the others were not convincing. But probably it was essential to carry out three executions where there had been three victims.
Let us leave aside the fact that the law of retaliation is inapplicable and that it would seem just as excessive to punish the incendiary by setting fire to his house as it would be insufficient to punish the thief by deducting from his bank account a sum equal to his theft. Let us admit that it is just and necessary to compensate for the murder of the victim by the death of the murderer. But beheading is not simply death. It is just as different, in essence, from the privation of life as a concentration camp is from prison. It is a murder, to be sure, and one that arithmetically pays for the murder committed. But it adds to death a rule, a public premeditation known to the future victim, an organization, in short, which is in itself a source of moral sufferings more terrible than death. Hence there is no equivalence. Many laws consider a premeditated crime more serious than a crime of pure violence. But what then is capital punishment but the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated it may be, can be compared? For there to be equivalence, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would indict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life.
There, too, when our official jurists talk of putting to death without causing suffering, they don't know what they are talking about and, above all, they lack imagination. The devastating, degrading fear that is imposed on the condemned for months or years[14] is a punishment more terrible than death, and one that was not imposed on the victim. Even in the fright caused by the mortal violence being done to him, most of the time the victim is hastened to his death without knowing what is happening to him. The period of horror is counted out with his life, and hope of escaping the madness that has swept down upon that life probably never leaves him. On the other hand, the horror is parceled out to the man who is condemned to death. Torture through hope alternates with the pangs of animal despair. The lawyer and chaplain, out of mere humanity, and the jailers, so that the condemned man will keep quiet, are unanimous in assuring him that he will be reprieved. He believes this with all his being and then he ceases to believe it. He hopes by day and despairs of it by night.[15] As the weeks pass, hope and despair increase and become equally unbearable. According to all accounts, the color of the skin changes, fear acting like an acid. "Knowing that you are going to die is nothing," said a condemned man in Fresnes. "But not knowing whether or not you are going to live, that's terror and anguish." Cartouche said of the supreme punishment: 'Why, it's just a few minutes that have to be lived through." But it is a matter of months, not of minutes. Long in advance the condemned man knows that he is going to be killed and that the only thing that can save him is a reprieve, rather similar, for him, to the decrees of heaven. In any case, he cannot intervene, make a plea himself, or convince. Everything goes on outside of him. He is no longer a man but a thing waiting to be handled by the executioners. He is kept as if he were inert matter, but he still has a consciousness which is his chief enemy.
[14] Roemen, condemned to death at the Liberation of France, remained seven hundred days in chains before being executed, and this is scandalous. Those condemned under common law, as a general rule, wait from three to six months for the morning of their death. And it is difficult, if one wants to maintain their chances of survival, to shorten that period. I can bear witness, moreover, to the fact that the examination of appeals for mercy is conducted in France with a seriousness that does not exclude the visible inclination to pardon, insofar as the law and customs permit.
[15] Sunday not being a day of execution, Saturday night is always better in the cell blocks reserved for those condemned to death.
When the officials whose job it is to kill that man call him a parcel, they know what they are saying. To be unable to do anything against the hand that moves you from one place to another, holds you or rejects you, is this not indeed being a parcel, or a thing, or, better, a hobbled animal? Even then an animal can refuse to eat. The condemned man cannot. He is given the benefit of a special diet (at Fresnes, Diet No. 4 with extra milk, wine, sugar, jam, butter); they see to it that he nourishes himself. If need be, he is forced to do so. The animal that is going to be killed must be in the best condition. The thing or the animal has a right only to those debased freedoms that are called whims. "They are very touchy," a top-sergeant at Fresnes says without the least irony of those condemned to death. Of course, but how else can they have contact with freedom and the dignity of the will that man cannot do without? Touchy or not, the moment the sentence has been pronounced the condemned man enters an imperturbable machine. For a certain number of weeks he travels along in the intricate machinery that determines his every gesture and eventually hands him over to those who will lay him down on the killing machine. The parcel is no longer subject to the laws of chance that hang over the living creature but to mechanical laws that allow him to foresee accurately the day of his beheading.
That day his being an object comes to an end. During the three quarters of an hour separating him from the end, the certainty of a powerless death stifles everything else; the animal, tied down and amenable, knows a hell that makes the hell he is threatened with seem ridiculous. The Greeks, after all, were more humane with their hemlock. They left their condemned a relative freedom, the possibility of putting off or hastening the hour of his death. They gave him a choice between suicide and execution. On the other hand, in order to be doubly sure, we deal with the culprit ourselves. But there could not really be any justice unless the condemned, after making known his decision months in advance, had approached his victim, bound him firmly, informed him that he would be put to death in an hour, and had finally used that hour to set up the apparatus of death. What criminal ever reduced his victim to such a desperate and powerless condition?
This doubtless explains the odd submissiveness that is customary in the condemned at the moment of their execution. These men who have nothing more to lose could play their last card, choose to die of a chance bullet or be guillotined in the kind of frantic struggle that dulls all the faculties. In a way, this would amount to dying freely. And yet, with but few exceptions, the rule is for the condemned to walk toward death passively in a sort of dreary despondency. That is probably what our journalists mean when they say that the condemned died courageously. We must read between the lines that the condemned made no noise, accepted his status as a parcel, and that everyone is grateful to him for this. In such a degrading business, the interested party shows a praise-worthy sense of propriety by keeping the degradation from lasting too long. But the compliments and the certificates of courage belong to the general mystification surrounding the death penalty. For the condemned will often be seemly in proportion to the fear he feels. He will deserve the praise of the press only if his fear or his feeling of isolation is great enough to sterilize him completely. Let there be no misunderstanding. Some among the condemned, whether political or not, die heroically, and they must be granted the proper admiration and respect. But the majority of them know only the silence of fear, only the impassivity of fright, and it seems to me that such terrified silence deserves even greater respect. When the priest Bela Just offers to write to the family of a young condemned man a few moments before he is hanged and hears the reply: "I have no courage, even for that," how can a priest, hearing that confession of weakness, fail to honor the most wretched and most sacred thing in man? Those who say nothing but leave a little pool on the spot from which they are taken-who would dare say they died as cowards? And how can we describe the men who reduced them to such cowardice? After all, every murderer when he kills runs the risk of the most dreadful of deaths, whereas those who kill him risk nothing except advancement.
No, what man experiences at such times is beyond all morality. Not virtue, nor courage, nor intelligence, nor even innocence has anything to do with it. Society is suddenly reduced to a state of primitive terrors where nothing can be judged. All equity and all dignity have disappeared. "The conviction of innocence does not immunize against brutal treatment... I have seen authentic bandits die courageously whereas innocent men went to their deaths trembling in every muscle." [16] When the same man adds that, according to his experience, intellectuals show more weakness, he is not implying that such men have less courage than others but merely that they have more imagination. Having to face an inevitable death, any man, whatever his convictions, is torn asunder from head to toe.[17] The feeling of powerlessness and solitude of the condemned man, bound and up against the public coalition that demands his death, is in itself an unimaginable punishment. From this point of view, too, it would be better for the execution to be public. The actor in every man could then come to the aid of the terrified animal and help him cut a figure, even in his own eye. But darkness and secrecy offer no recourse. In such, a disaster, courage, strength of soul, even faith may be disadvantages. As a general rule, a man is undone by waiting for capital punishment well before he dies. Two deaths are inflicted on him, the first being worse than the second, whereas he killed but once. Compared to such torture, the penalty of retaliation seems like a civilized law. It never claimed that the man who gouged out one of his brother's eyes should be totally blinded.
[16] Bela Just: 0p. cit.
[17] A great surgeon, a Catholic himself, told me that as a result of his experience he did not even inform believers when they had an Incurable cancer. According to him, the shock might destroy even their faith.
Such a basic injustice has repercussions, besides, on the relatives of the executed man. The victim has his family whose sufferings are generally very great and who, most often, want to be avenged. They are, but the relatives of the condemned man then discover an excess of suffering that punishes them beyond all justice. A mother's or a father's long months of waiting, the visiting-room, the artificial conversations filling up the brief moments spent with the condemned man, the visions of the execution are all tortures that were not imposed on the relatives of the victim. Whatever may be the feelings of the latter, they cannot want the revenge to extend so far beyond the crime and to torture people who share their own grief. "I have been reprieved, Father," writes a condemned man, "I can't yet realize the good fortune that has come my way. My reprieve was signed on April 30 and I was told Wednesday as I came back from the visiting-room. I immediately informed Papa and Mama, who had not yet left the prison. You can imagine their happiness." [18] We can indeed imagine it, but only insofar as we can imagine their uninterrupted suffering until the moment of the reprieve, and the final despair of those who receive the other notification, which punishes, in iniquity, their innocence and their misfortune.
[18] Father Devoyod: op. cit. Equally impossible to read calmly the petitions for reprieve presented by a father or a mother who obviously does not understand such sudden misfortune.
To cut short this question of the law of retaliation, we must note that even in its primitive form it can operate only between two individuals of whom one is absolutely innocent and the other absolutely guilty. The victim, to be sure, is innocent. But can the society that is supposed to represent the victim lay claim to innocence? Is it not responsible, at least in part, for the crime it punishes so severely? This theme has often been developed, and I shall not repeat the arguments that all sorts of thinkers have brought forth since the eighteenth century. They can be summed up anyway by saying that every society has the criminals it deserves. But insofar as France is concerned, it is impossible not to point out the circumstances that ought to make our legislators more modest. Answering an inquiry of the Figaro in 1952 on the death penalty, a colonel asserted that establishing hard labor for life as the most severe penalty would amount to setting up schools of crime. That high-ranking officer seemed to be ignorant, and I can only congratulate him of the fact that we already have our schools of crime. which differ from our federal prisons in this notable regard: it is possible to leave them at any hour of the day or night; they are the taverns and slums, the glory of our Republic. On this point it is impossible to express oneself moderately.
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** Part 3
Statistics show 64,000 overcrowded dwellings (from three to five persons per room) in the city of Paris alone. To be sure, the killer of children is a particularly vile creature who scarcely arouses pity. It is probable, too (I say probable), that none of my readers, forced to live in the same conditions, would go so far as to kill children. Hence there is no question of reducing the culpability of certain monsters. But those monsters, in decent dwellings, would perhaps have had no occasion to go so far. The least that can be said is that they are not alone guilty, and it seems strange that the right to punish them should be granted to the very people who subsidize, not housing, but the growing of beets for the production of alcohol.[19]
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[19] France ranks first among countries for its consumption of alcohol and fifteenth in building.
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But alcohol makes this scandal even more shocking. It is known that the French nation is systematically intoxicated by its parliamentary majority, for generally vile reasons. Now, the proportion of alcohol's responsibility in the cause of bloodthirsty crimes is shocking. A lawyer (Maltre Guillon) estimated it at 60 per cent. For Dr. Lagriffe the proportion extends from 41.7 to 72 per cent. An investigation carried out in 1951 in the clearing-center of the Fresnes prison, among the common-law criminals, showed 29 per cent to be chronic alcoholics and 24 per cent to have an alcoholic inheritance. Finally, 95 per cent of the killers of children are alcoholics. These are impressive figures. We can balance them with an even more magnificent figure: the tax report of a firm producing aperitifs, which in 1953 showed a profit of 410 million francs. Comparison of these figures justifies informing the stockholders of that firm and the Deputies with a financial interest in alcohol that they have certainly killed more children than they think. As an opponent of capital punishment, I am far from asking that they be condemned to death. But, to begin with, it strikes me as indispensable and urgent to take them under military escort to the next execution of a murderer of children and to hand them on their way out a statistical report including the figures I have given.
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The State that sows alcohol cannot be surprised to reap crime.[20] Instead of showing surprise, it simply goes on cutting off heads into which it has poured so much alcohol. It metes out justice imperturbably and poses as a creditor: its good conscience does not suffer at all. Witness the alcohol salesman who, in answer to the Figaro's inquiry, exclaimed: "I know just what the staunchest enemy of the death penalty would do if, having a weapon within reach, he suddenly saw assassins on the point of killing his father, his mother, his children, or his best friend. Well!" That "well" in itself seems somewhat alcoholized. Naturally, the staunchest enemy of capital punishment would shoot those murderers, and rightly so, without thereby losing any of his reasons for staunchly defending abolition of the death penalty. But if he were to follow through his thinking and the aforementioned assassins reeked of alcohol, he would then go and take care of those whose vocation is to intoxicate future criminals. It is even quite surprising that the relatives of victims of alcoholic crimes have never thought of getting some enlightenment from the Parliament. Yet nothing of the sort takes place, and the State, enjoying general confidence, even supported by public opinion, goes on chastising assassins (particularly the alcoholics) somewhat in the way the pimp chastises the hard-working creatures who assure his livelihood. But the pimp at least does no moralizing. The State does: Although jurisprudence admits that drunkenness sometimes constitutes an extenuating circumstance, the State is ignorant of chronic alcoholism. Drunkenness, however, accompanies only crimes of violence, which are not punished with death, whereas the chronic alcoholic is capable also of premeditated crimes, which will bring about his death. Consequently, the State reserves the right to punish in the only case in which it has a real responsibility.
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[20] The partisans of the death penalty made considerable publicity at the end of the last century about an increase in criminality beginning in 1880, which. seemed to parallel a decrease in application of the penalty. But In 1880 a law was promulgated that permitted bars to be opened without any prior authorization. After that, just try to interpret statistics!
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Does this amount to saying that every alcoholic must he declared irresponsible by a State that will beat its breast until the nation drinks nothing but fruit juice? Certainly not. No more than that the reasons based on heredity should cancel all culpability. The real responsibility of an offender cannot be precisely measured. We know that arithmetic is incapable of adding up the number of our antecedents, whether alcoholic or not. Going back to the beginning of time, the figure would be twenty-two times, raised to the tenth power, greater than the number of present inhabitants of the earth. The number of bad or morbid predispositions our antecedents have been able to transmit to us is, thus, incalculable. We come into the world laden with the weight of an infinite necessity. One would have to grant us, therefore, a general irresponsibility. Logic would demand that neither punishment nor reward should ever be meted out, and, by the same token, all society would become impossible. The instinct of preservation of societies, and hence of individuals, requires instead that individual responsibility be postulated and accepted without dreaming of an absolute indulgence that would amount to the death of all society. But the same reasoning must lead us to conclude that there never exists any total responsibility or, consequently, any absolute punishment or reward. No one can be rewarded completely, not even the winners of Nobel Prizes. But no one should be punished absolutely if he is thought guilty, and certainly not if there is a chance of his being innocent. The death penalty, which really neither provides an example nor assures distributive justice, simply usurps an exorbitant privilege by claiming to punish an always relative culpability by a definitive and irreparable punishment.
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If indeed capital punishment represents a doubtful example and an unsatisfactory justice, we must agree with its defenders that it is eliminative. The death penalty definitively eliminates the condemned man. That alone, to tell the truth, ought to exclude, for its partisans especially, the repetition of risky arguments which, as we have just seen, can always be contested. Instead, one might frankly say that it is definitive because it must be, and affirm that certain men are irremediable in society, that they constitute a permanent danger for every citizen and for the social order, and that therefore, before anything else, they must be suppressed. No one, in any case, can refute the existence in society of certain wild animals whose energy and brutality nothing seems capable of breaking. The death penalty, to be sure, does not solve the problem they create. Let us agree, at least, that it suppresses the problem.
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I shall come back to such men. But is capital punishment applied only to them? Is there any assurance that none of those executed is remediable? Can it even be asserted that none of them is innocent? In both cases, must it not be admitted that capital punishment is eliminative only insofar as it is irreparable? The 15th of March, 1957, Burton Abbott was executed in California, condemned to death for having murdered a little girl of fourteen. Men who commit such a heinous crime are, I believe, classified among the irremediable. Although Abbott continually protested his innocence, he was condemned. His execution had been set for the 15th of March at ten o'clock. At 9:10 a delay was granted to allow his attorneys to make a final appeal.[21] At eleven o'clock the appeal was refused. At 11:15 Abbott entered the gas chamber. At 11:18 he breathed in the first whiffs of gas. At 11:20 the secretary of the Committee on Reprieves called on the telephone. The Committee had changed its mind. They had tried to reach the Governor, who was out sailing; then they had phoned the prison directly. Abbott was taken from the gas chamber. It was too late. If only it had been cloudy over California that day, the Governor would not have gone out sailing. He would have telephoned two minutes earlier; today Abbott would be alive and would perhaps see his innocence proved. Any other penalty, even the harshest, would have left him that chance. The death penalty left him none.
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[21] It must be noted that the custom in American prisons is to move the condemned man into another cell on the eve of his execution while announcing to him the ceremony in store for him.
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This case is exceptional, some will say. Our lives are exceptional, too, and yet, in the fleeting existence that is ours, this takes place near us, at some ten hours' distance by air. Abbott's misfortune is less an exception than a news item like so many others, a mistake that is not isolated if we can believe our newspapers (see the Deshays case, to cite but the most recent one). The jurist Olivecroix, applying the law of probability to the chance of judicial error, around 1860, concluded that perhaps one innocent man was condemned in every two hundred and fifty-seven cases. The proportion is small? It is small in relation to average penalties. It is infinite in relation to capital punishment. When Hugo writes that to him the name of the guillotine is Lesurques,[22] he does not mean that all those who are decapitated are Lesurques, but that one Lesurques is enough for the guillotine to be permanently dishonored. It is understandable that Belgium gave up once and for all pronouncing the death penalty after a judicial error and that England raised the question of abolition after the Hayes case. It is also possible to understand the conclusions of the Attorney General who, when consulted as to the appeal of a very probably guilty criminal whose victim had not been found, wrote: 'The survival of X . . . gives the authorities the possibility of examining at leisure any new clue that might eventually be brought in as to the existence of his wife.[23] On the other hand, the execution, by canceling that hypothetical possibility of examination, would, I fear, give to the slightest clue a theoretical value, a power of regret that I think it inopportune to create." A love of justice and truth is expressed here in a most moving way, and it would be appropriate to quote often in our courts that "power of regret" which so vividly sums up the danger that faces every juror. Once the innocent man is dead, no one can do anything for him, in fact, but to rehabilitate him, if there is still someone to ask for this. Then he is given back his innocence, which, to tell the truth, he had never lost. But the persecution of which he was a victim, his dreadful sufferings, his horrible death have been given him forever. It remains only to think of the innocent men of the future, so that these tortures may be spared them. This was done in Belgium. In France consciences are apparently untroubled.
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[22] This is the name of the innocent man guillotined in the case of the Courrier de Lyon
[23] The condemned man was accused of having killed his wife. But her body had not been found.
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Probably the French take comfort from the idea that justice has progressed hand in hand with science. When the learned expert holds forth in court, it seems as if a priest has spoken, and the jury, raised in the religion of science, expresses its opinion. However, recent cases, chief among them the Besnard case, have shown us what a comedy of experts is like. Culpability is no better established for having been established in a test tube, even a graduated one. A second test tube will tell a different story, and the personal equation loses none of its importance in such dangerous mathematics. The proportion of learned men who are really experts is the same as that of judges who are psychologists, hardly any greater than that of serious and objective juries. Today, as yesterday, the chance of error remains. Tomorrow another expert testimony will declare the innocence of some Abbott or other. But Abbott will be dead, scientifically dead, and the science that claims to prove innocence as well as guilt has not yet reached the point of resuscitating those it kills.
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Among the guilty themselves, is there any assurance that none but the irretrievable have been killed? All those who, like me, have at a period of their lives necessarily followed the assize courts know that a large element of chance enters into any sentence. The look of the accused, his antecedents (adultery is often looked upon as an aggravating circumstance by jurors who may or may not all have been always faithful), his manner (which is in his favor only if it is conventional-in other words, play-acting most of the time), his very elocution (the old hands know that one must neither stammer nor be too eloquent), the mishaps of the trial enjoyed in a sentimental key (and the truth, alas, is not always emotionally effective): so many flukes that influence the final decision of the jury. At the moment of the death verdict, one may be sure that to arrive at the most definite of penalties, an extraordinary combination of uncertainties was necessary. When it is known that the supreme verdict depends on the jury's evaluation of the extenuating circumstances, when it is known, above all, that the reform of 1832 gave our juries the power of granting indeterminate extenuating circumstances, it is possible to imagine the latitude left to the passing mood of the jurors. The law no longer foresees precisely the cases in which death is to be the outcome; so the jury decides after the event by guesswork. Inasmuch as there are never two comparable juries, the man who is executed might well not have been. Beyond reclaim in the eyes of the respectable people of Ille-et-Vilaine, he would have been granted a semblance, of excuse by the good citizens of the Var. Unfortunately, the same blade falls in the two Departements. And It makes no distinction.
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The temporal risks are added to the geographical risks to increase the general absurdity. The French Communist workman who has just been guillotined in Algeria for having put a bomb (discovered before it went off) in a factory locker room was condemned as much because of the general climate as because of what he did. In the present state of mind in Algeria, there was a desire at one and the same time to prove to the Arab opinion that the guillotine was designed for Frenchmen too and to satisfy the French opinion wrought up by the crime of terrorism. At the same moment, however, the Minister who approved the execution was accepting Communist votes in his electoral district. If the circumstances had been different, the accused would have got off easy and his only risk, once he had become a Deputy of the party, would be finding himself having a drink at the same bar as the Minister someday. Such thoughts are bitter, and one would like them to remain alive in the minds of our leaders. They must know that times and customs change; a day comes when the guilty man, too rapidly executed, does not seem so black. But it is too late and there is no alternative but to repent or to forget. Of course, people forget. Nonetheless, society is no less affected. The unpunished crime, according to the Greeks, infected the whole city. But innocence condemned or crime too severely punished, in the long run, soils the city just as much. We know this, in France.
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Such, it will be said, is human justice, and, despite its imperfections, it is better than arbitrariness. But that sad evaluation is bearable only in connection with ordinary penalties. It is scandalous in the face of verdicts of death. A classic treatise on French law, in order to excuse the death penalty for not involving degrees, states this: "Human justice has not the slightest desire to assure such a proportion. Why? Because it knows it is frail." Must we therefore conclude that such frailty authorizes us to pronounce an absolute judgment and that uncertain of ever achieving pure justice, society must rush headlong, through the greatest risks, toward supreme injustice? If justice admits that it is frail, would it not be better for justice to be modest and to allow its judgments sufficient latitude so that a mistake can be corrected?" Could not justice concede to the criminal the same weakness in which society hands a sort of permanent extenuating circumstance for itself? Can the jury decently say: "If I kill you by mistake, you will forgive me when you consider the weaknesses of our common nature. But I am condemning you to death without considering those weaknesses or that nature?" There is a solidarity of all men in error and aberration. Must that solidarity operate for the tribunal and be denied the accused? No, and if justice has any meaning in this world, it means nothing but the recognition of that solidarity; it cannot, by its very essence, divorce itself from compassion. Compassion, of course, can in this instance be but awareness of a common suffering and not a frivolous indulgence paying no attention to the sufferings and rights of the victim. Compassion does not exclude punishment, but it suspends the final condemnation. Compassion loathes the definitive, irreparable measure that does an injustice to mankind as a whole because of failing to take into account the wretchedness of the common condition.
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[24] We congratulated ourselves on having reprieved Sillon, who recently killed his four year-old daughter in order not to give her to her mother, who wanted a divorce. It was discovered in fact during his imprisonment that Sillon was suffering from a brain tumor that might explain the madness of his deed.
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To tell the truth, certain juries are well aware of this, for they often admit extenuating circumstances in a crime that nothing can extenuate. This is because the death penalty seems excessive to them in such cases and they prefer not punishing enough to punishing too much. The extreme severity of the penalty then favors crime instead of penalizing it. There is not a court session during which we do not read in the press that a verdict is incoherent and that, in view of the facts, it seems either insufficient or excessive. But the jurors are not ignorant of this. However, faced with the enormity of capital punishment, they prefer, as we too should prefer, to look like fools rather than to compromise their nights to come. Knowing themselves to be fallible, they at least draw the appropriate consequences. And true justice is on their side precisely insofar as logic is not.
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There are, however, major criminals whom all juries would condemn at any time and in any place whatever. Their crimes are not open to doubt, and the evidence brought by the accusation is confirmed by the confessions of the defense. Most likely, everything that is abnormal and monstrous in them is enough to classify them as pathological. But the psychiatric experts, in the majority of cases, affirm their responsibility. Recently in Paris a young man, somewhat weak in character but kind and affectionate, devoted to his family, was, according to his own admission, annoyed by a remark his father made about his coming home late. The father was sitting reading at the dining-room table. The young man seized an ax and dealt his father several blows from behind. Then in the same way he struck down his mother, who was in the kitchen. He undressed, hid his bloodstained trousers in the closet, went to make a call on the family of his fiancee, without showing any signs, then returned home and notified the police that he had just found his parents murdered. The police immediately discovered the blood-stained trousers and, without difficulty, got a calm confession from the parricide. The psychiatrists decided that this man who murdered through annoyance was responsible. His odd indifference, of which he was to give other indications in prison (showing pleasure because his parents' funeral had attracted so many people-"They were much loved," he told his lawyer), cannot, however, be considered as normal. But his reasoning power was apparently untouched.
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Many "monsters" offer equally impenetrable exteriors. They are eliminated on the mere consideration of the facts. Apparently the nature or the magnitude of their crimes allows no room for imagining that they can ever repent or reform. They must merely be kept from doing it again, and there is no other solution but to eliminate them. On this frontier, and on it alone, discussion about the death penalty is legitimate. In all other cases the arguments for capital punishment do not stand up to the criticisms of the abolitionists. But in extreme cases, and in our state of ignorance, we make a wager. No fact, no reasoning can bring together those who think that a chance must always be left to the vilest of men and those who consider that chance illusory. But it is perhaps possible, on that final frontier, to go beyond the long opposition between partisans and adversaries of the death penalty by weighing the advisability of that penalty today, and in Europe. With much less competence, I shall try to reply to the wish expressed by a Swiss jurist, Professor Jean Graven, who wrote in 1952 in his remarkable study on the problem of the death penalty: "Faced with the problem that is once more confronting our conscience and our reason, we think that a solution must be sought, not through the conceptions, problems, and arguments of the past, nor through the hopes and theoretical promises of the future, but through the ideas, recognized facts, and necessities of the present."[25] It is possible, indeed, to debate endlessly as to the benefits or harm attributable to the death penalty through the ages or in an intellectual vacuum. But it plays a role here and now, and we must take our stand here and now in relation to the modern executioner. What does the death penalty mean to the men of the mid-century?
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[25] Revue de Criminologie et de Police Technique (Geneva), special issue, 1952,.
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To simplify matters, let us say that our civilization has lost the only values that, in a certain way, can justify that penalty and, on the other hand, suffers from evils that necessitate its suppression. In other words, the abolition of the death penalty ought to be asked for by all thinking members of our society, for reasons both of logic and of realism.
<br>
Of logic, to begin with. Deciding that a man must have the definitive punishment imposed on him is tantamount to deciding that that man has no chance of making amends. This is the point, to repeat ourselves, where the arguments clash blindly and crystallize in a sterile opposition. But it so happens that none among us can settle the question, for we are all both judges and interested parties. Whence our uncertainty as to our right to kill and our inability to convince each other. Without absolute innocence, there is no supreme judge. Now, we have all done wrong in our lives even if that wrong, without falling within the jurisdiction of the laws, went as far as the unknown crime. There are no just people-merely hearts more or less lacking in justice. Living at least allows us to discover this and to add to the sum of our actions a little of the good that will make up in part for the evil we have added to the world. Such a right to live, which allows a chance to make amends, is the natural right of every man, even the worst man. The lowest of criminals and the most upright of judges meet side by side, equally wretched in their solidarity. Without that right, moral life is utterly impossible. None among us is authorized to despair of a single man, except after his death, which transforms his life into destiny and then permits a definitive judgment. But pronouncing the definitive judgment before his death, decreeing the closing of accounts when the creditor is still alive, is no man's right. On this limit, at least, whoever judges absolutely condemns himself absolutely.
<br>
Bemard Fallot of the Masuy gang, working for the Gestapo, was condemned to death after admitting the many terrible crimes of which he was guilty, and declared himself that he could not be pardoned. "My hands are too red with blood," he told a prison mate.[26] Publication and the opinion of his judges certainly classed among the irremediable, and I should have been tempted to agree if I had not read a surprising testimony. This is what Fallot said to the same companion after declaring that he wanted to die courageously: "Shall I tell you my greatest regret? Well, it is not having known the Bible I now have here. I assure you that I wouldn't be where I now am." There is no question of giving in to some conventional set of sentimental pictures and calling to mind Victor Hugo's good convicts. The age of enlightenment, as people say, wanted to suppress the death penalty on the pretext that man was naturally good. Of course he is not (he is worse or better). After twenty years of our magnificent history we are well aware of this. But precisely because he is not absolutely good, no one among us can pose as an absolute judge and pronounce the definitive elimination of the worst among the guilty. Capital judgement upsets the only indisputable human solidarity-our solidarity against death-and it can be legitimized only by a truth or a principle that is superior to man.
<br>
[26] Jean Bocognano: Quartier des faulles, prison de Fresnes (Editions du Fuseau).
<br>
In fact, the supreme punishment has always been, throughout the ages, a religious penalty. Inflicted in the name of the king, God's representative on earth, or by priests or in the name of society considered as a sacred body, it denies, not human solidarity, but the guilty man's membership in the divine community, the only thing that can give him life. Life on earth is taken from him, to be sure, but his chance of making amends is left him. The real judgment is not pronounced; it will be in the other world. Only religious values, and especially belief in eternal life, can therefore serve as a basis, for the supreme punishment because, according to their own logic, they keep it from being definitive and irreparable. Consequently, it is justified only insofar as it is not supreme.
<br>
The Catholic Church, for example, has always accepted the necessity of the death penalty. It inflicted that penalty itself, and without stint, in other periods. Even today it justifies it and grants the State the right to apply it. The Church's position, however subtle, contains a very deep feeling that was expressed directly in 1937 by a Swiss National Councillor from Fribourg during a discussion in the National Council. According to M. Grand, the lowest of criminals when faced with execution withdraws into himself. "He repents and his preparation for death is thereby facilitated. The Church has saved one of its members and fulfilled its divine mission. This is why it has always accepted the death penalty, not only as a means of self-defense, but <em>as a powerful means of salvation.</em>[27]... Without trying to make of it a thing of the Church, the death penalty can point proudly to its almost divine efficacy, like war."
<br>
[27] My italics.
<br>
By virtue of the same reasoning, probably, there could be read on the sword of the Fribourg executioner the words: "Lord Jesus, thou art the judge." Hence the executioner is invested with a sacred function. He is the man who destroys the body in order to deliver the soul to the divine sentence, which no one can judge beforehand. Some may think that such words imply rather scandalous confusions. And, to be sure, whoever clings to the teaching of Jesus will look upon that handsome sword as one more outrage to the person of Christ. In the light of this, it is possible to understand the dreadful remark of the Russian condemned man about to be hanged by the Tsar's executioners in 1905 who said firmly to the priest who had come to console him with the image of Christ: "Go away and commit no sacrilege." The unbeliever cannot keep from thinking that men who have set at the center of their faith the staggering victim of a judicial error ought at least to hesitate before committing legal murder. Believers might also be reminded that Emperor Julian, before his conversion, did not want to give official offices to Christians because they systematically refused to pronounce death sentences or to have anything to do with them. For five centuries Christians therefore believed that the strict moral teaching of their master forbade killing. But Catholic faith is not nourished solely by the personal teaching of Christ. It also feeds on the Old Testament, on St. Paul, and on the Church Fathers. In particular, the immortality of the soul and the universal resurrection of bodies are articles of dogma. As a result, capital punishment is for the believer a temporary penalty that leaves the final sentence in suspense, an arrangement necessary only for terrestrial order, an administrative measure which, far from signifying the end for the guilty man, may instead favor his redemption. I am not saying that all believers agree with this, and I can readily imagine that some Catholics may stand closer to Christ than to Moses or St. Paul. I am simply saying that faith in the immortality of the soul allowed Catholicism to see the problem of capital punishment in very different terms and to justify it.
** Part 4
But what is the value of such a justification in the society we live in, which in its institutions and its customs has lost all contact with the sacred? When an atheistic or skeptical or agnostic judge inflicts the death penalty on an unbelieving criminal, he is pronouncing a definitive punishment that cannot be reconsidered. He takes his place on the throne of God, without having the same powers and even without believing in God. He kills, in short, because his ancestors believed in eternal life. But the society that he claims to represent is in reality pronouncing a simple measure of elimination, doing violence to the human community united against death, and taking a stand as an absolute value because society is laying claim to absolute power. To be sure, it delegates a priest to the condemned man, through tradition. The priest may legitimately hope that fear of punishment will help the guilty man's conversion. Who can accept, however, that such a calculation should justify a penalty most often inflicted and received in a quite different spirit? It is one thing to believe before being afraid and another to find faith after fear. Conversion through fire or the guillotine will always be suspect, and it may seem surprising that the Church has not given up conquering infidels through terror. In any case, society that has lost [28] all contact with the sacred can find no advantage in a conversion in which it professes to have no interest. Society decrees a sacred punishment and at the same time divests it both of excuse and of usefulness. Society proceeds sovereignly to eliminate the evil ones from her midst as if she were virtue itself. Like an honorable man killing his wayward son and remarking: "Really, I didn't know what to do with him." She assumes the right to select as if she were nature herself and to add great sufferings to the elimination as if she were a redeeming god.
<br>
[28] As everyone knows, the jury's decision is preceded by the words: "Before God and my conscience..."
<br>
To assert, in any case, that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no one in his right mind will believe this today. Instead of believing this, people will more readily think the reverse. Our society has become so bad and so criminal only because she has respected nothing but her own preservation or a good reputation in history. Society has indeed lost all contact with the sacred. But society began in the nineteenth century to find a substitute for religion by proposing herself as an object of adoration. The doctrines of evolution and the notions of selection that accompany them have made of the future of society a final end. The political utopias that were grafted onto those doctrines placed at the end of time a golden age that justified in advance any enterprises whatever. Society became accustomed to legitimizing what might serve her future and, consequently, to making use of the supreme punishment in an absolute way. From then on, society considered as a crime and a sacrilege anything that stood in the way of her plan and her temporal dogmas. In other words, after being a priest, the executioner became a government official. The result is here all around us. The situation is such that this mid-century society which has lost the right, in all logics, to decree capital punishment ought now to suppress it for reasons of realism.
<br>
<br>
In relation to crime, how can our civilization be defined? The reply is easy: for thirty years now state crimes have been far more numerous than individual crimes. I am not even speaking of wars, general or localized, although bloodshed too is an alcohol that eventually intoxicates like the headiest of wines. But the number of individuals killed directly by the State has assumed astronomical proportions and infinitely outnumbers private murders. There are fewer and fewer condemned by common law and more and more condemned for political reasons. The proof is that each of us, however honorable he may be, can foresee the possibility of being someday condemned to death, whereas that eventuality would have seemed ridiculous at the beginning of the century. Alphonse Karr's witty remark: "Let the noble assassins begin" has no meaning now. Those who cause the most blood to flow are the same ones who believe they have right, logic, and history on their side.
<br>
Hence our society must now defend herself not so much against the individual as against the State. It may be that the proportions will be reversed in another thirty years. But, for the moment, our self-defense must be aimed at the State first and foremost. Justice and expediency command the law to protect the individual against a State given over to the follies of sectarianism or of pride. "Let the State begin and abolish the death penalty" ought to be our rallying cry today.
<br>
Bloodthirsty laws, it has been said, make bloodthirsty customs. But any society eventually reaches a state of ignominy in which, despite every disorder, the custom never manage to be as bloodthirsty as the laws. Half of Europe knows that condition. We French knew it in the past and may again know it. Those executed during the occupation led to those executed at the time of the liberation, whose friends now dream of revenge. Elsewhere states laden with too many crimes are getting ready to drown their guilt in even greater massacres. One kills for a nation or a class that has been granted divine status. One kills for a future society that has likewise been· given divine status. Whoever thinks he has omniscience imagines he has omnipotence. Temporal idols demanding an absolute faith tirelessly decree absolute punishments. And religions devoid of transcendence kill great numbers of condemned men devoid of hope.
<br>
How can European society of the mid-century survive unless it decides to defend individuals by every means-against the State's oppression? Forbidding a man's execution would amount to proclaiming publicly that society and the state are not absolute values, that nothing authorizes them to legislate definitively or to bring about the irreparable. Without the death penalty, Gabriel Peri and Brasillach would perhaps be among us. We could then judge them according to our opinion and proudly proclaim our judgment, whereas now they judge us and we keep silent. Without the death penalty Rajk's corpse would not poison Hungary; Germany, with less guilt on her conscience, would be more favorably looked upon by Europe; the Russian Revolution would not be agonizing in shame; and Algerian blood would weigh less heavily on our consciences. Without the death penalty, Europe would not be infected by the corpses accumulated for the last twenty years in its tired soil. On our continent, all values are upset by fear and hatred between individuals and between nations. In the conflict of ideas the weapons are the cord and the guillotine. A natural and human society exercising her right of repression has given way to a dominant ideology that requires human sacrifices. "The example of the gallows," it has been written,[29] "is that a man's life ceases to be sacred when it is thought useful to kill him." Apparently it is becoming ever more useful; the example is being copied; the contagion is spreading everywhere. And together with it, the disorder of nihilism. Hence we must call a spectacular halt and proclaim, in our principles and institutions, that the individual is above the state. And any measure that decreases the pressure of social forces upon the individual will help to relieve the congestion of a Europe suffering from a rush of blood, allowing us to think more clearly and to start on the way toward health. Europe's malady consists in believing nothing and claiming to know everything. But Europe is far from knowing everything, and, judging from the revolt and hope we feel, she believes in something: she believes that the extreme of man's wretchedness, on some mysterious limit, borders on the extreme of his greatness. For the majority of Europeans, faith is lost. And with it, the justifications faith provided in the domain of punishment. But the majority of Europeans also reject the State idolatry that aimed to take the place of faith. Henceforth in mid-course, both certain and uncertain, having made up our minds never to submit and never to oppress, we should admit at one and the same time our hope and our ignorance, we should refuse absolute law and the irreparable judgment. We know enough to say that this or that major criminal deserves hard labor for life. But we don't know enough to decree that he be shorn of his future-in other words, of the chance we all have of making amends. Because of what I have just said, in the unified Europe of the future the solemn abolition of the death penalty ought to be the first article of the European Code we all hope for.
<br>
[29] By Francart.
<br>
From the humanitarian idylls of the eighteenth century to the bloodstained gallow's the way leads directly, and the executioners of today, as everyone knows, are humanists. Hence we cannot be too wary of the humanitarian ideology in dealing with a problem such as the death penalty. On the point of concluding, I should like therefore to repeat that neither an illusion as to the natural goodness of the human being nor faith in a golden age to come motivates my opposition to the death penalty. On the contrary, its abolition seems to me necessary because of reasoned pessimism, of logic, and of realism. Not that the heart has no share in what I have said. Anyone who has spent weeks with texts, recollections, and men having any contact, whether close or not, with the gallows could not possibly remain untouched by that experience. But, let me repeat, I do not believe, nonetheless, that there is no responsibility in this world and that we must give way to that modern tendency to absolve everything, victim and murderer, in the same confusion. Such purely sentimental confusion is made up of cowardice rather than of generosity and eventually justifies whatever is worst in this world. If you keep on excusing, you eventually give your blessing to the slave camp, to cowardly force, to organized executioners, to the cynicism of great political monsters; you finally hand over your brothers. This can be seen around us. But it so happens, in the present state of the world, that the man of today wants laws and institutions suitable to a convalescent, which will curb him without breaking him and lead him without crushing him. Hurled into the unchecked dynamic movement of history, he needs a natural philosophy and a few laws of equilibrium. He needs, in short, a society based on reason and not the anarchy into which he has been plunged by his own pride and the excessive powers of the State.
<br>
I am convinced that abolition of the death penalty would help us progress toward that society. After taking such an initiative, France could offer to extend it to the non-abolitionist countries on both sides of the iron curtain. But, in any case, she should set the example. Capital punishment would then be replaced by hard labor-for life in the case of criminals considered irremediable and for a fixed period in the case of the others. To any who feel that such a penalty is harsher than capital punishment we can only express our amazement that they did not suggest, in this case, reserving it for such as Landru and applying capital punishment to minor criminals. We might remind them, too, that hard labor leaves the condemned man the possibility of choosing death, whereas the guillotine offers no alternative. To any who feel, on the other hand, that hard labor is too, mild a penalty, we can answer first that they lack imagination and secondly that privation of freedom seems to them a slight punishment only insofar as contemporary society has taught us to despise freedom.[30]
<br>
[30] See the report on the death penalty by Representative Dupont in the National Assembly on 31 May 1791: "A sharp and burning mood consumes the assassin; the thing he fears most is inactivity; it leaves him to himself, and to get away from it he continually braves death and tries to cause death in others; solitude and his own conscience are his real torture. Does this not suggest to you what kind of punishment should be inflicted on him, what is the kind of which he will be most sensitive? <em>Is it not in the nature of the malady that the remedy is to he found?</em>" I have italicized the last sentence, for it makes of that little-known Representative a true precursor of our modern psychology.
<br>
The fact that Cain is not killed but bears a mark of reprobation in the eyes of men is the lesson we must draw from the Old Testament, to say nothing of the Gospels, instead of looking back to the cruel examples of the Mosaic law. In any case, nothing keeps us from trying out an experiment, limited in duration (ten years, for instance), if our Parliament is still incapable of making up for its votes in favor of alcohol by such a great civilizing step as complete abolition of the penalty. And if, really, public opinion and its representatives cannot give up the law of laziness which simply eliminates what it cannot reform, let us at least-while hoping for a new day of truth-not make of it the "solemn slaughterhouse" [31] that befouls our society. The death penalty as it is now applied, and however rarely it may be, is a revolting butchery, an outrage inflicted on the person and body of man. That truncation, that living and yet uprooted head, those spits of blood date from a barbarous period that aimed to impress the masses with degrading sights. Today when such vile death is administered on the sly, what is the meaning of this torture? The truth is that in the nuclear age we kill as we did in the age of the spring balance. And there is not a man of normal sensitivity who, at the mere thought of such crude surgery, does not feel nauseated. If the French State is incapable of overcoming habit and giving Europe one of the remedies it needs, let France begin by reforming the manner of administering capital punishment. The science that serves to kill so many could at least serve to kill decently. An anesthetic that would allow the condemned man to slip from sleep to death (which would be left within his reach for at least a day so that he could use it freely and would be administered to him in another form if he were unwilling or weak of will) would assure his elimination, if you insist, but would put a little decency into what is at present but a sordid and obscene exhibition.
<br>
[31] Tarde.
<br>
I suggest such compromises only insofar as one must occasionally despair of seeing wisdom and true civilization influence those responsible for our future. For certain men, more numerous than we think, it is physically unbearable to know what the death penalty really is and not to be able to prevent its application. In their way, they suffer that penalty themselves, and without any justice. If only the weight of filthy images weighing upon them were reduced, society would lose nothing. But even that, in the long run, will be inadequate. There will be no lasting peace either in the heart of individuals or in social customs until death is outlawed.
|
#title The Guest
#author Albert Camus
#LISTtitle Guest
#date 1957
#source https://users.scc.spokane.edu/jroth/Courses/World%20Masterpieces%20272/MASTER%20DOCS/the%20guest%20by%20albert%20camus.pdf
#lang en
#pubdate 2025-06-02T05:33:21.655Z
#authors Albert Camus
#topics War, crime, duty, freedom, absurdity, Cause, pessimism, non-alignment
#notes Translated by Justin O’Brien.
*** 1
The schoolmaster was watching the two men climb toward him. One was on
horseback, the other on foot. They had not yet tackled the abrupt rise leading to the
schoolhouse built on the hillside. They were toiling onward, making slow progress in the
snow, among the stones, on the vast expanse oft he high, deserted plateau. From time to
time the horse stumbled. Without hearing anything yet, he could see the breath issuing
from the horses nostrils. One of the men, at least, knew the region. They were following
the trail although it had disappeared days ago under a layer of dirty white snow. The
schoolmaster calculated that it would take them half an hour to get onto the hill. It was
cold; he went back into the school to get a sweater.
*** 2
He crossed the empty, frigid classroom. On the blackboard the four rivers of France,[1]
1 drawn with four different colored chalks, had been flowing toward their estuaries for
the past three days. Snow had suddenly fallen in mid-October after eight months of
drought without the transition of rain, and the twenty pupils, more or less, who lived in
the villages scattered over the plateau had stopped coming. With fair weather they would
return. Daru now heated only the single room that was lodging, adjoining the classroom
and giving also onto the plateau to the east. Like the class cows, his window looked to the
south too. On that side the school was a few kilometers from the point where the plateau
began to slope toward the south. In clear weather could be seen the purple mass of the
mountain range where the gap opened onto the desert.
*** 2
Somewhat warmed, Daru returned to the window from which he had first seen the
two men. They were no longer visible. Hence they must have tackled the rise. The sky
was not so dark, for the snow had stopped falling during the night. The morning had
opened with a dirty light which had scarcely become brighter as the ceiling of clouds
lifted. At two in the after- noon it seemed as if the day were merely beginning. But still
this was better than those three days when the thick snow was falling amidst unbroken
darkness with little gusts of wind that rattled the double door of the class- room. Then
Daru had spent long hours in his room, leaving it only to go to the shed and feed the
chickens or get some coal. Fortunately the delivery truck from Tadjid, the nearest village
to the north, had brought his supplies two days before the blizzard. It would return in
forty-eight hours.
*** 3
Besides, he had enough to resist a siege, for the little room was cluttered with bags of
wheat that the administration left as a stock to distribute to those of his pupils whose
families had suffered from the drought. Actually they had all been victims because they
were all poor. Every day Daru would distribute a ration to the children. They had missed
it, he knew, during these bad days. Possibly one of the fathers would come this afternoon
and he could supply them with grain. It was just a matter of carrying them over to the
next harvest. Now shiploads of wheat were arriving from France and the worst was over.
But it would be hard to forget that poverty, that army of ragged ghosts wandering in the
sunlight, the plateaus burned to a cinder month after month, the earth shriveled up little
by little, literally scorched, every stone bursting into dust under one’s foot. The sheep had
died then by thousands and even a few men, here and there, sometimes without anyone’s
knowing.
*** 4
In contrast with such poverty, he who lived almost like a monk in his remote
schoolhouse, nonetheless satisfied with the little he had and with the rough life, had felt
like a lord with his whitewashed walls, his narrow couch, his unpainted shelves, his well,
and his weekly provision of water and food. And suddenly this snow, without warning,
without the foretaste of rain. This is the way the region was, cruel to live in, even without
men — who didn’t help matters either. But Daru had been born here Everywhere else, he
felt exiled.
*** 5
He stepped out onto the terrace in front of the schoolhouse. The two men were now
halfway up the slope. He recognized the horseman as Balducci the old gendarme he had
known for a long time. Balducci was holding on the end of a rope an Arab who was
walking behind him with hands bound and head lowered. The gendarme waved a greeting
to which Daru did not reply, lost as he was in contemplation of the Arab dressed in a
faded blue jellaba,[2] his feet in sandals but covered with socks of heavy raw wool, his
head surmounted by a narrow, short cheche. They were approaching. Balducci was
holding back his horse in order not to hurt the Arab, and the group was advancing slowly.
*** 6
Within earshot, Balducci shouted: “One hour to do the three kilometers from El
Ameur!” Daru did not answer. Short and square in his thick sweater he watched them
climb. Not once had the Arab raised his head. “Hello,” said Daru when they got up onto
the terrace. “Come in and warm up.” Balducci painfully got down from his horse without
letting go the rope. From under his bristling mustache he smiled at the schoolmaster. His
little dark eyes, deep-set under a tanned forehead, and his mouth surrounded with
wrinkles made him look attentive and studious. Daru took the bridle ]led the horse to the
shed, and came back to the two men, who were now waiting for him in the school. He led
them into his room “I am going to heat up the classroom,” he said. “We’ll be more
comfortable there.” When he entered the room again, Balducci was on the couch. He had
undone the rope tying him to the Arab, who had squashed near the stove. His hands still
bound, the cheche pushed back on his head, he was looking toward the window. At first
Daru noticed only his huge lips, fat, smooth, almost Negroid; yet his nose was straight,
his eyes were dark and full of fever. The cheche revealed an obstinate forehead and,
under the weathered skin now rather discolored by the cold, the whole face had a restless
and rebellious look that struck Daru when the Arab, turning his face toward him, looked
him straight in the eyes. “Go into the other room,” said the schoolmaster’ “and I’ll make
you some mint tea.” “Thanks,” Balducci said. “what a chore! How I long for retirement.”
And addressing his prisoner in Arabic: “Come on, you.” The Arab got up and, slowly,
holding his bound wrists in front of him, went into the classroom.
*** 7
With the tea, Daru brought a chair. But Balducci was already enthroned on the nearest
pupil’s desk and the Arab had squatted against the teacher’s platform facing the stove,
which stood between the desk and the window. When he held out the glass of tea to the
prisoner, Daru hesitated at the sight of his bound hands. “He might perhaps be untied.”
“Sure,” said Balducci. “That was for the trip.” He started to get to his feet. But Daru,
setting the glass on the floor, had knelt beside the Arab. Without saying anything, the
Arab watched him with his feverish eyes. Once his hands were free, he rubbed his
swollen wrists against each other, took the glass of tea, and sucked up the burning liquid
in swift little sips.
*** 8
“Good,” said Daru. “And where are you headed?”
Balducci withdrew his mustache from the tea. “Here, Son.”
“Odd pupils! And you’re spending the night?”
“No. I’m going back to El Ameur. And you will deliver this fellow to Tinguit. He is
expected at police headquarters.”
Balducci was looking at Daru with a friendly little smile.
“What’s this story?” asked the schoolmaster. “Are you pulling my leg?”
“No, son. Those are the orders.”
“The orders? I’m not ...” Daru hesitated, not wanting to hurt the old Corsican.[3]
“I mean, that’s not my job.” “What! What’s the meaning of that? In wartime people do
all kinds of jobs.”
“Then I’ll wait for the declaration of war!”
Balducci nodded.
“O. K. But the orders exist and they concern you too. Things are brewing, it appears.
There is talk of a forthcoming revolt. We are mobilized,in away.
Daru still had his obstinate look.
*** 9
Listen, Son,” Balducci said. “I like you and you must understand. There’s only a
dozen of us at El Ameur to patrol throughout the whole territory of a small department[4]
and I must get back in a hurry. I was told to hand this guy over to you and return without
delay. He couldn’t be kept there. His village was beginning to stir; they wanted to take
him back. You must take him to Tinguit tomorrow before the day is over. Twenty
kilometers shouldn’t faze a husky fellow like you. After that, all will be over. You’ll come
back to your pupils and your comfortable life.”
*** 10
Behind the wall the horse could be heard snorting and pawing the earth. Daru was
looking out the window. Decidedly, the weather was clearing and the light was increasing
over the snowy plateau. When all the snow had melted, the sun would take over again
and once more would burn the fields of stone. For days, still, the unchanging sky would
shed its dry light on the solitary expanse where nothing had any connection with man.
“After all,” he said, turning around toward Balducci, “what did he do?” And, before
the gendarme had opened his mouth, he asked: “Does he speak French?”
“No, not a word. We had been looking for him for a month, but they were hiding him.
He killed his cousin.”
“Is he against us?”[5]
*** 11
“I don’t think so. But you can never be sure.”
“Why did he kill?”
“A family squabble, I think one owned the other grain, it seems. It’s not all clear. In
short, he killed his cousin with a billhook. You know, like a sheep, kreeck!”
Balducci made the gesture of drawing a blade across his throat and the Arab, his
attention attracted, watched him with a sort of anxiety. Dam felt a sudden wrath against
the mall, against all men with their rotten spite, their tireless hates, their blood lust.
But the kettle was singing on the stove. He sened Balducci more tea hesitated, then
served the Arab again, who, a second time, drank avidly his raised arms made the jellaba
fall open and the schoolmastcr saw his thin, muscular chest.
“Thanks, kid,” Balducci said. “And now, I’m off.”
He got up and went toward the Arab, taking a small rope from his pocket.
“What are you doing?” Daru asked dryly.
Balducci, disconcerted, showed him the rope.
“Don’t bother.”
The old gendarme hesitated. “It’s up to you. Of course, you are armed?”
“I have my shotgun.”
“Where?”
“In the trunk.”
*** 12
“You ought to have it near your bed.”
“Why? I have nothing to fear.”
“You’re crazy, son. If there’s an uprising, no one is safe, we’re all in the same boat.”
“I’ll defend myself. I’ll have time to see them coming.”
Balducci began to laugh, then suddenly the mustache covered the white teeth.
“You’ll have time? O.K. That’s just what I was saying. You have always been a little
cracked. That’s why I like you, my son was like that.”
At the same time he took out his revolver and put it on the desk.
“Keep it; I don’t need two weapons from here to El Ameur.”
The revolver shone against the black paint of the table. When the gendarme turned
toward him, the schoolmastcr caught the smell of leather and horseflesh. “Listen,
Balducci,” Daru said suddenly, “every bit of this disgusts me, and first of all your fellow
here. But I won’t hand him over. Fight, yes, if I have to. But not that.”
The old gendarme stood in front of him and looked at him severely.
“You’re being a fool,” he said slowly. “I don’t like it either. You don’t get used to
putting a rope on a man even after vears of it, and you’re even ashamedÑyes, ashamed.
But you can’t let them have their way.”
“I won’t hand him over,” Daru said again.
“It’s an order, son, and I repeat it.”
“That’s right. Repeat to them what l’ve said to you: I won’t hand him over.”
*** 13
Balducci made a visible effort to reflect. He looked at the Arab and at Daru. At last he
decided.
“No, I won’t tell them anything. If you want to drop us, go ahead. I’ll not denounce
you. I have an order to deliver the prisoner and I’m doing so. And now you’ll just sign this
paper for me.”
“There’s no need. I’ll not deny that you left him with me.”
“Don’t be mean with me. I know you’ll tell the truth. You’re from hereabouts and you
are a man. But you must sign, that’s the rule.”
Daru opened his drawer, took out a little square bottle of purple ink, the red wooden
penholder with the “sergeant-major” pen he used for making models of penmanship, and
signed. The gendarme carfully folded the paper and put it into his wallet. Then he moved
toward the door.
“I’ll see you off,” Daru said.
“No,” said Balducci. “There’s no use being polite. You insulted me.”
*** 14
He looked at the Arab, motionless in the same spot, sniffed peevishly, and turned
away toward the door. “Good-by, son,” he said. The door shut behind him. Balducci
appeared suddenly outside the window and then disappeared. His footsteps were muffled
by the snow. The horse stirred on the other side of the wall and several chickens fluttered
in fright. A moment later Balducci reappeared outside the window leading the horse by
the bridle. He walked toward the little rise without turning around and disappeared from
sight with the horse following him. A big stone could be heard bouncing down. Daru
walked back toward the prisoner, who, without stirring, never took his eyes off him.
“Wait,” the schoolmaster said in Arabic and went toward the bedroom. As he was going
through the door, he had a second thought, went to the desk, took the revolver, and stuck
it in his pocket. Then, without looking back, he went into his room.
*** 15
For some time he lay on his couch watching the sky gradually close over, listening to
the silence. It was this silence that had seemed painful to him during the first days here,
after the war. He had requested a post in the little town at the base of the foothills
separating the upper platueas from the desert. There, rocky walls, green and black to the
north, pink and lavender to the south, marked the frontier of eternal summer. He had been
named to a post farther north, on the plateau itself. In the beginning, the solitude and the
silence had been hard for him on these wastelands peopled only by stones. Occasionally,
furrows suggested cultivation, but they had been dug to uncover a certain kind of stone
good for building. The only plowing here was to harvest rocks. Elsewhere a thin layer of
soil accumulated in the hollows would be scraped out to enrich palty village gardens.
This is the way it was: bare rock covered three quarters of the region. Towns sprang up,
flourished, then disappeared; men came by, loved one another or fought bitterly, then
died. No one in this desert, neither he nor his guest, mattered. And yet, outside this desert
neither or them, Daru knew, could have really lived.
*** 16
When he got up, no noise came from the classroom. He was amazed at the unmixed
joy he derived from the mere thought that the Arab might have fled and that he would be
alone with no decision to make. But theprisoner was there. He had merely stretched out
between the stove and the desk. With eyes open, he was staring at the ceiling. In that
position, his thick lips were particularly noticeable, giving him a pouting look. “Come,”
said Daru. The Arab got up and followed him. In the bedroom, the schoolmaster pointed
to a chair near the table under the window. The Arab sat down without taking his eyes off
Daru.
“Are you hungry?”
“Yes,” the prisoner said.
*** 17
Daru set the table for two. He took flour and oil, shaped a cake in a frying-pan, and
lighted the litde stove that functioned on bottled gas. While the cake was cooking, he
went out to the shed to get cheese, eggs, dates and condensed mflk. When the cake was
done he set it on the window sill to cool, heated some condensed milk diluted with water,
and beat up the eggs into an omelette. In one of his motions he knocked against the
revolver stuck m his right pocket. He set the bowl down, went into the classroom and put
the revolver in his desk drawer. When he came back to the room night was falling. He put
on the light and served the Arab. “Eat,” he said. The Arab took a piece of the cake, lifted
it eagerly to his mouth, and stopped short.
“And you?” he asked.
“After you. I’ll eat too.”
The thick lips opened slightly. The Arab hesitated, then bit into the cake
determinedly.
The meal over, the Arab looked at the schoolmaster. “Are you the judge?”
“No, I’m simply keeping you until tomorrow.”
“Why do you eat with me?”
“I’m hungry.”
*** 18
The Arab fell silent. Daru got up and went out. He brought back a folding bed from
the shed, set it up between the table and the stove, perpendicular to his own bed. From a
large suitcase which, upright in a corner, served as a shelf for papers, he took two
blankets and arranged them on the camp bed. Then he stopped, felt useless, and sat down
on his bed. There was nothing more to do or to get ready. He had to look at this man. He
looked at him, therefore, trying to imagine his face bursting with rage. He couldn’t do so.
He could see nothing but the dark yet shining eyes and the animal mouth.
“Why did you kill him?” he asked in a voice whose hostile tone surprised him.
The Arab looked away.
“He ran away. I ran after him.”
He raised his eyes to Daru again and they were full of a sort of woeful interrogation.
“Now what will they do to me?”
“Are you afraid?”
He stiffened, turning his eyes away.
“Are you sorry?”
The Arab stared at him openmouthed. Obviously he did not understand. Daru’s
annoyance was growing. At the same time he felt awkward and self-conscious with his
big body wedged between the two beds.
“Lie down there,” he said impatiently. “That’s your bed.”
*** 19
The Arab didn’t move. He called to Daru:
“Tell me!”
The schoolmaster looked at him.
“Is the gendarme coming back tomorrow?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you coming with us?”
“I don’t know. Why?”
The prisoner got up and stretched out on top of the blankets, his feet toward the
window. The light from the electric bulb shone straight into his eyes and he closed them
at once.
“Why?” Daru repeated, standing beside the bed.
The Arab opened his eyes under the blinding light and looked at him, trying not to
blink.
“Come with us,” he said.
*** 20
In the middle of the night, Daru was still not asleep. He had gone to bed after
undressing completely; he generally slept naked. But when he suddenly realized that he
had nothing on, he hesitated. He felt vulnerable and the temptation came to him to put his
clothes back on. Then he shrugged his shoulders; after all, he wasn’t a child and, if need
be, he could break his adversary in two. From his bed he could observe him, lying on his
back, still motionless with his eyes closed under the harsh light. When Daru turned out
the light, the darkness seemed to coagulate all of a sudden. Little bv little, the night came
back to life in the window where the starless skv was stirring gently. The schoolmaster
soon made out the body lying at his feet. The Arab still did not move, but his eyes
seemed open. A light wind was prowling around the schoolhouse. Perhaps it would drive
away the cIouds and the sin would reappear.
*** 21
During the night the wind increased. The hens fluttered a little and then were silent.
The Arab turned over on his side with his back to Daru, who thought he heard him moan.
Then he listened for his guest’s breathing, become heavier and more regular. He listened
to that breath so close to him and mused without being able to go to sleep. In this room
where he had been sleeping alone for a year, this presence bothered him. But it bothered
him also by imposing on him a sort of brotherhood he knew well but refused to accept in
the present circumstances. Men who share the same rooms, soldiers or prisoners, develop
a strange alliance as if, having cast off their armor with their clothing, they fraternized
every evening, over and above their differences, in the ancient community of dream and
fatigue. But Daru shook himself; he didn’t like such musings, and it was essential to
sleep.
*** 22
A little later, however, when the Arab stirred slightly, the schoolmaster was still not
asleep. When the prisoner made a second move, he stiffened, on the alert. The Arab was
lifting himself slowly on his arms with almost the motion of a sleepwalker. Seated
upright in bed, he waited motionless without turning his head toward Daru, as if he were
listening attentively. Daru did not stir; it had just occurred to him that the revolver was
still in the drawer of his desk. It was better to act at once. Yet he continued to observe the
prisoner, who, with the same slithery motion, put his feet on the ground, waited again,
then began to stand up slowly. Daru was about to call out to him when the Arab began to
walk, in a quite natural but extraordinarily silent way. He was heading toward the door at
the end of the room that opened into the shed. He lifted the latch with precaution and
went out, pushing the door behind him but without shutting it. Daru had not stirred. “He
is running away,” he merely thought. “Good riddance!” Yet he listened attentively. The
hens were not fluttering; the guest must be on the plateau. A faint sound of water reached
him, and he didn’t know what it was until the Arab again stood framed in the doorway,
closed the door carefully, and came back to bed without a sound. Then Daru turned his
back on him and fell asleep. Still later he seemed, from the depths of his sleep, to hear
furtive steps around the schoolhouse. “I’m dreaming! I’m dreaming!” he repeated to
himself. And he went on sleeping.
*** 23
When he awoke, the sky was clear; the loose window let in a cold, pure air. The Arab
was asleep, hunched up under the blankets now, his mouth open, utterly relaxed. But
when Daru shook him, he started dreadfully staring at Daru with wild eyes as if he had
never seen him and such a frightened expression that the schoolmaster stepped back.
“Don’t be afraid. It’s me. You must eat.” The Arab nodded his head and said yes. Calm
had returned to his face, but his expression was vacant and listless.
*** 24
The coffee was ready. They drank it seated together on the folding bed as they
munched their pieces of the cake. Then Daru led the Arab under the shed and showed
him the faucet where he washed. He went back into the room, folded the blankets and the
bed, made his own bed and put the room in order. Then he went through the classroom
and out onto the terrace. The sun was already rising in the blue sky; a soft, bright light
was bathing the deserted plateau. On the ridge the snow was melting in spots. Ttlc stones
were about to reappear. Crouched on the edge of the plateau, the schoolmaster looked at
the deserted expanse. He thought of Balducci. He had hurt him, for he had sent him off in
a way as if he didn’t want to bc associated with him. He could still hear the gendarme’s
farewell and, without knowing why, he felt strangely empty and vulnerable. At that
moment, from the other side of the schoolhouse, the prisoner coughed. Daru listened to
him almost despite himself and then furious, threw a pebble that whistled through the air
before sinking into the snow. That man’s stupid crime revolted him, but to hand him over
was contrary to honor. Merely thinking of it made him smart with humiliation. And he
cursed at one and the same time his own people who had sent him this Arab and the Arab
too who had dared to kill and not managed to get away. Dary got up, walked in a circle
on the terrace, waited motionless, and then went back into the schoolhouse.
*** 25
The Arab, leaning over the cement floor of the shed, was washing his teeth with two
fingers. Daru looked at him and said: “Come.” He went back into the room ahead of the
prisoner. He slipped a hunting-jacket on over his sweater and put on walking-shoes.
Standing, he waited until the Arab had put on his cheche and sandals. They went into the
classroom and the schoolmaster pointed to the exit, saying: “Go ahead.” The fellow didn’t
budge. “I’m coming,” said Daru. The Arab went out. Daru went back into the room and
made a package of pieces of rusk, dates, and sugar. In the classroom, before going out, he
hesitated a second in front of his desk, then crossed the threshold and locked the door.
“That’s the way,” he said. He started toward the east, followed by the prisoner. But, a
short distance from the schoolhouse, he thought he heard a slight sound behind them. He
retraced his steps and examined the surroundings of the house, there was no one there.
The Arab watched him without seeming to understand. “Come on,” said Daru.
*** 26
They walked for an hour and rested beside a sharp peak of limestone. The snow was
melting faster and faster and the sun was drinking up the puddles at once, rapidly
cleaning the plateau, which gradually dried and vibrated like the air itself. When they
resumed walking, the ground rang under their feet. From time to time a bird rent the
space in front of them with a joyful cry. Daru breathed in deeply the fresh morning light.
He felt a sort of rapture before the vast familiar expanse, now almost entirely yellow
under its dome of blue sky. They walked an hour more, descending toward the south.
They reached a level height made up of crumbly rocks. From there on, the plateau sloped
down, eastward, toward a low plain where there were a few spindly trees and, to the
south, toward outcroppings of rock that gave the landscape a chaotic look.
*** 27
Daru surveyed the two directions. There was nothing but the sky on the horizon. Not
a man could be seen. He turned toward the Arab, who was looking at him blankly. Daru
held out the package to him. “Take it,” he said. “There are dates, bread, and sugar. You
can hold out for two days. Here are a thousand francs too.” The Arab took the package
and the money but kept his full hands at chest level as if he didn’t know what to do with
what was being given him. “Now look,” the schoolmaster said as he pointed in the
direction of the east, “there’s the way to Tinguit. You have a two-hour walk. At Tinguit
you’ll find the administration and the police. They are expecting you.” The Arab looked
toward the east, still holding the package and the money against his chest. Daru took his
elbow and turned him rather roughly toward the south. At the foot of the height on which
they stood could be seen a faint path. “That’s the trail across the plateau. In a day’s walk
from here you’ll find pasturelands and the first nomads. They’ll take you in and shelter
you according to their law.” The Arab had now turned toward Daru and a sort of panic
was visible in his expression. “Listen,” he said. Daru shook his head: “No, be quiet. Now
I’m leaving you.” He turned his back on him, took two long steps in the direction of the
school, looking hesitantly at the motionless Arab and started off again. For a few minutes
he heard nothing but his own step resounding on the cold ground and did not turn his
head. A moment later however he turned around. The Arab was still there on the edge of
the hill his arms hanging now, and he was looking at the schoolmaster. Daru felt
something rise in his throat. But he swore with impatience, waved vaguely, and started
off again. He had already gone some distance when he again stopped and looked. There
was no longer anyone on the hill.
*** 28
Daru hesitated. The sun was now rather high in the sky and was beginning to beat
down on his head. The schoolmaster retraced his steps at first somewhat uncertainly then
with decision. When he reached the little hill he was bathed in sweat. He climbed it as
fast as he could and stopped. Out of breath at the top. The rock-ficelds to the south stood
out sharply against the blue sky but on the plain to the east a steamy heat was already
rising. And in that slight haze Daru with heavy heart made out the Arab walking slowly
on the road to prison.
*** 29
A little later standing before the window of thc classroom the school master was
watching the clear light bathing the whole surface of the plateau but he hardly saw it.
Behind him on the blackboard among the winding French rivers sprawled the clumsily
chalked-up words he had just read. “You handcd over our brothnr. You will pay for this.”
Daru looked at the sky, the plateau and beyond the invisible lands stretching all the way
to the sea. In this vast landscape he had loved so much, he was alone.
[1] The Seine, Loire, Rhone, and Gironder rivers; French geography was taught in the
French colonies. Back to text
[2] A long hooded robe worn by Arabs in North Africa. Cheche: Scarf; here wound as
a turban around the head.
[3] Balducci is a native of Corsica, a French island north of Sardinia.
[4] French administrative and territorial division: like a county.
[5] Against the French colonial government
|
#pubdate 2009-11-13 05:39:27 -0400
#author Albert Lévy
#SORTauthors Albert Lévy
#title Stirner and Nietzsche
#lang en
#date 1904
#SORTtopics Max Stirner, Nietzsche
#source Retrieved on November 13<sup>th</sup>, 2009 from [[http://www.marxists.org/subject/anarchism/levy/stirner-nietzsche.htm][www.marxists.org]]
#notes Originally published as in French: Stirner et Nietzsche. Paris, Societé Nouvelle de Librairie et d’Édition, 1904;
In the second half of the nineteenth century there was a reaction against individualism. The most widespread moral theories, for example those of August Comte in France, John Stuart Mill in England, and Schopenhauer in Germany, had the common characteristic of preaching altruism. Was it that the philosophers wanted to maintain Christian morality at a moment when they renounced belief, or did they think themselves obliged, as Nietzsche maintained, to show themselves to be more disinterested than the Christians themselves? Whatever the case, they condemned egoism and the isolation of the individual. In the same way, in politics the national and social ties that united individuals were insisted upon and solidarity was preached.
But in Germany around 1890 people began to talk about two philosophers who admitted neither moral altruism nor social solidarity. Stirner, who in his lifetime had enjoyed but an ephemeral glory, had been revived by a fanatical disciple, J.H. Mackay, who saw in the author of “The Ego and Its Own” the theoretician of contemporary anarchism. In addition, Nietzsche, so long “untimely” made an impression on public opinion at the very moment when illness definitively triumphed over his reason, and little by little he became one of the favorites of the European fashion that he had so harshly judged.
It was natural that the names of these two philosophers whose ideas were so contrary to contemporary thought should be linked together. People became used to viewing Stirner as a precursor of Nietzsche. But there is room to question whether this habit is justified. In the first case, is it true that Stirner influenced Nietzsche? And then, is it correct to consider their philosophies as two analogous systems animated by the same sprit? Is there really reason to connect Nietzsche to Stirner and to speak of an individualist, anarchist, or immoralist current?
*** Did Nietzsche Know Stirner?
We don’t encounter Stirner’s name either in the works or correspondence of Nietzsche. Mme. Forster-Nietzsche, in the meticulous biography she dedicated to her brother, doesn’t speak of the author of “The Ego and Its Own.” In any event, the work was almost completely forgotten up until the time J.H. Mackay set out to celebrate it. J.H. Mackay himself tells us that he only read Stirner’s name and the title of his book for the first time in 1888: this is the very year that Nietzsche descended into madness. In 1888 Mackay found Stirner’s name in Lange’s “History of Materialism,” which he read at the British Museum in London. A year then passed before he again encountered this name, which he had carefully noted. Until that date, Stirner was thus truly dead: he is indebted to Mackay for his resurrection.
It is nevertheless certain that Nietzsche recommended the reading of Stirner to one of his students in Basle. In consulting the register of the Basle library it’s true that we don’t find Stirner’s book in the list of books borrowed in Nietzsche’s name. But we see that the book was borrowed three times between 1870 — 1880. In 1872 by the <em>privat-dozent</em> Schwarzkopf (Syrus Archimedes), in 1874 by the student Baumgartner, and in 1879 by professor Hans Heussler. M. Baumgartner though, son of Mme Baumgartner-Kochlin, who translated the “Untimely Meditations” into French, was Nietzsche’s favorite student: in his correspondence the philosopher calls him his <em>“erzschuler.”</em> M. Baumgartner, who is today professor at the University of Basle, says that it was on Nietzsche’s advice that he read Stirner, but he his certain that he never loaned the book to his teacher.
The question then is finding out where Nietzsche encountered the name of Stirner. It’s possible that the name was spoken in front of him at Richard Wagner’s house. Wagner had perhaps heard mention of Stirner at the time of the revolution of 1848, perhaps from his friend Bakunin. It is also possible that Nietzsche read Stirner’s name in a chapter of Eduard von Hartmann. The latter affirms, in fact, that Nietzsche must have been struck by the analysis of Stirner’s ideas that are found in the second volume of “Philosophy of the Unconscious.” Nietzsche criticizes at length the chapter of this book where Hartmann spoke of Stirner, particularly in the ninth paragraph of the second “Untimely Meditation.“Nietzsche forcefully attacks the evolutionist theories of Hartmann, borrowing his quotations especially from the pages where the author of the “Philosophy of the Unconscious” speaks of humanity’s third period. It is precisely at the entrance to this third period that Hartmann marked Stirner’s place. But it seems that what Hartmann says about Stirner didn’t encourage Nietzsche to study “The Ego and Its Own” with sympathy, for Nietzsche combats precisely the theories of “Philosophy of the Unconscious” because they seem those most apt to strengthen that egoism which, according to Stirner, characterizes the mature age both of humanity and of the individual. Nietzsche opposes the enthusiasm of youth to this egoist maturity. It would be quite surprising if Nietzsche, who didn’t take Hartmann’s “parody” seriously, would have decided at that date to study the works of Stirner, where he would have found theories even more paradoxical in his eyes than those of “Philosophy of the Unconscious.” In any event, Hartmann’s argument doesn’t prove that Stirner directly influenced Nietzsche.
The most likely hypothesis is obviously that presented by Professor Joel. It is probable that Nietzsche remarked, like Mackay, Stirner’s name in Lange’s “History of Materialism.” Nietzsche read this book very carefully, as is shown by his correspondence with Baron Gersdorff and Erwin Rohde. And in fact, on February 16 Nietzsche wrote to Baron Gersdorff: “I am again obliged to praise the merits of a man who I already spoke to you about in a previous letter. If you want to really know the contemporary materialist movement, the natural sciences with their Darwinian theories, their cosmic systems, their dark room so full of life, etc, I see nothing more remarkable to recommend to you than Friederich-Albert Lange’s “History of Materialism” (Iserlohn, 1866), a book which gives infinitely more than the title promised, and which we can browse through over and again as a real treasure. Given the direction of your studies I see nothing better to recommend to you. I have promised myself to get to know this man, and I want to send him my work on Democritus as testimony of gratitude.”
Lange only dedicates a dozen lines to Stirner, but one can’t help but believe that they strike the reader, since they were the determining factor in the conversion of J.H. Mackay, who has since become Stirner’s fanatical disciple. There is, in this brief analysis, a portion which must have fixed Nietzsche’s attention. Lange declares, in fact, that Stirner might remind us of Schopenhauer. “The man who, in German literature, preached the most absolute egoism in the most absolute and logical fashion, Max Stirner, stands in opposition to Feuerbach. In his famous work “The Ego and Its Own” (1845) Max Stirner went so far as to reject any moral idea. Anything which, in one way or another, either as a simple idea or as an external force, places itself above the individual and his whims is rejected by Stirner as an odious limitation of the self. It is a pity that this book, the most exaggerated one we know of, was not complemented by a second, positive part. This task would have been easier than that of finding a positive complement to Schelling’s philosophy for, in order to escape from the limited self I can, in turn, create a space for idealism as the expression of my will and idea. In fact, Stirner grants the will so much value that it appears to us as the fundamental force of the human being. It reminds us of Schopenhauer. It is in this way that every coin has two sides. In any event, Stirner was not sufficiently influential that we should occupy ourselves with him any further.”
Let us compare these texts to the passages where Nietzsche speaks about “The History of Materialism.” In September 1866 the philosopher writes to Baron Gersdorff, “What Schopenhauer is for us has again been proved to me with precision by another excellent and instructive work of its kind “The History of Materialism and a Critique of Its Value in the Present period” by F.A. Lange, 1866. We are dealing here with a Kantian and an extremely enlightened naturalist. The following three propositions sum up his conclusion:
i. The sensible world is the product of our organization
i. Our visible (corporal) organs, like the other parts of the phenomenal world, are only the images of an unknown object
i. Our real organization remains for this reason as unknown to us as real external objects. We only ever have before us the product of the two
We thus not only don’t know the true essence of things, the thing in itself, but the very idea of that thing in itself is nothing more or less than the final consequence of an antithesis relative to our organization, and about which we don’t know if it has a meaning outside of our experience. Consequently, Lange feels that we should allow philosophers complete freedom, on the condition that they edify us. Art is free, even in the realm of concepts. Who would want to refute a phrase of Beethoven’s or condemn an error in the Madonna of Raphael? You see that even in placing oneself at this point of view, even in admitting the strictest criticism, our Schopenhauer remains with us. Even more, we can almost say that he is even more ours. If philosophy is an art, all that is left to Haym is to hide himself before Schopenhauer; if philosophy must edify I know no philosopher who edifies more than our Schopenhauer.”
We see that from Lange’s book Nietzsche particularly retained the idea that philosophy is as free as art. Everyone thus has the right to admit the metaphysics that best responds to his sentiments: we can be Schopenhauerian in the same way that we are Wagnerian. Thus, if he was struck by the few lines that Lange dedicates to Stirner it is doubtless because Lange interpreted Stirner’s theories in a way favorable to his thesis. In fact, Lange believes that Stirner wants to efface the borders that till now have limited individuality in order to allow everyone the right to choose his ideal as he wishes. This is an error: every ideal, whether it is chosen by the will, proposed by the intelligence, or imposed by an external power, in Stirner’s eyes is nothing but an idée fixe. It is remarkable that Lange speaks less of the negative portion of Stirner’s system than of the positive one that he could have added. Stirner, though, doesn’t admit a positive portion in the sense that the historian of materialism intends it. And in fact Lange demands a positive portion in order “to go outside the self,” but Stirner doesn’t want us to do so. In supporting a theory of knowledge Lange seeks to plead the cause of metaphysical speculation; Stirner sees in every metaphysics a kind of madness. Lange attempts to save the essence of religion by insisting on the educational virtue of faith; Stirner considers disinterested education a dupery. As Nolen said in his introduction to the French translation of the “History of Materialism:” “No one has better understood than Lange that weakening the sense of the ideal means strengthening that of egoism.” This is precisely what Stirner also understood; but while Lange wants to strengthen the sense of the ideal in order to weaken that of egoism, Steiner, on the contrary, in order to strengthen the egoistic sense, wants to weaken the sense of the ideal.
Nietzsche thus doubtless saw, via Lange’s analysis, a Stirner who was quite different from what in reality was the author of “The Ego and its Own.” He considered that work as a kind of introduction to the philosophy of Schopenhauer, and this is what explains the apparently paradoxical fact that Nietzsche spoke of Stirner during his first period, when he was a fervent disciple of Schopenhauer, while he no longer speaks of him during his second period, the critical period, when he in a sense was closer to the ideas of “The Ego...”
In Erwin Rohde’s letters to Nietzsche there is a passage that appears to confirm this interpretation. On November 4, 1886 Rohde wrote to Nietzsche: “This winter you must be swimming in music. As much as possible I want to try to do the same in our Abdere, for though I don’t understand anything, it always serves to purify the soul of the dust of the working day, and particularly to calm the restive will. They will doubtless not allow us to intoxicate ourselves with the Wagnerian philter in Hamburg. Since I am only one of the profane, I risk approving that music only within myself, but it makes such an impression on me that I feel like I’m strolling in moonlight in a garden of magical perfumes: no sounds of vulgar reality penetrate there. And so it is with absolute indifference that I see the so wise Messrs Schaul, etc. demonstrate that this music is unhealthy, lascivious and who knows what else. As for me, to use your perfect expression, it sweeps me away and that is enough. In any case, I increasingly understand the wisdom of the old sophist who, despite all the objections of the healthy people of his time, affirmed that man was the measure of all things. Lange’s book — which I will soon return to you — contributed in no small amount in confirming this idea for me. During the course of my trip it constantly kept me within the sphere of elevated ideas. Without any doubt, Lange is right in taking as seriously as he does the discovery we owe to Kant of the subjective character of the forms of perception. And if he’s right, is it not perfectly reasonable that each of us chooses for himself a conception of the world that suffices for him, that is, that satisfies the moral need that is, properly speaking, his essence?
<quote>
“A philosophy then that insists on the profoundly, fiercely serious character of the object that remains absolutely unknown to us, answers to my inner tendencies, and it is thus that I tried so hard to convince myself that every speculation was just a vain fantasy. Schopenhauer’s doctrine has maintained its value for me, which also confirms the fact that the will is stronger, more basic than the intelligence, which weighs all sides of every argument.”
</quote>
Since Rohde adds that his friend is cordially in agreement with him on these important points, we have the right to say that Nietzsche saw in the theories laid out by Lange a justification for his instinctive sympathy for Schopenhauer’s doctrine. All of German philosophy, from Kant to Schopenhauer, seemed to give new strength to two propositions he had always admitted:
i. Man is the measure of all things, which as Hellenists Rohde and Nietzsche both knew via the Greek Sophists
i. The will is prior and superior to the intelligence, which is obvious for a dsicple of Schopenhauer
In summary, it doesn’t appear that Stirner had a decisive influence on Nietzsche. He perhaps contributed to keeping Nietzsche for a time within the realm of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics. He was doubtless little by little forgotten afterwards.
|
#title Down With the Law!
#author Albert Libertad
#SORTtopics illegalism
#date February 15, 1906
#source https://www.marxists.org/archive/libertad/1906/down-with-law.htm
#lang en
#pubdate 2020-06-15T23:01:07
“The anarchists find M. de La Rochefoucauld and all those who protest without worrying about legality to be logically consistent <em>with themselves</em>,” Anna Mah‚ tells us.
This is obviously not exact, as I am going to show.
All that is needed is one word to travesty the meaning of a phrase, and so the two words underlined suffice to entirely change the meaning of the one I quote.
If Anna Mah‚ was the leader of a great newspaper she would hasten to accuse the typographers or the proofreader for the blunder and everything would be for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
Or else she would think it wise to stand by an idea that isn’t a manifestation of her reasoning, but rather the act of her pen running away with itself.
But on the contrary, she thinks that it is necessary, especially in these lead articles that are viewed as anarchist, to make the fewest errors possible and for us to point them out ourselves when we take note of them.
It is to me that this falls today.
The Catholics, the socialists, all those who accept at a given moment the voting system, are not logically consistent with themselves when they rebel against the consequences of a law, when they demonstrate against its agents, its representatives.
Only the anarchists are authorized, are logically consistent <em>with themselves</em> when they act against the law.
When a man deposits his ballot in the urn he is not using a means of persuasion that comes from free examination or experience. He is executing the mechanical operation of counting those who are ready to choose the same delegates as he, to consequently make the same laws, to establish the same regulations that all men must submit to. In casting his vote he says: “I trust in chance. The name that will come from this urn will be that of my legislator. I could be on the side of the majority, but I have the chance of being on the side of the minority. Whatever happens, happens.”
After having come to agreement with other men, having decided that they will all defer to the mechanical judgment of number, there is, on the part of those who are the minority, when they don’t accept the laws and regulations of the majority, a feeling of being fooled similar to that of a bad gambler, who wants very much to win, but who doesn’t want to lose.
Those Catholics who decided for the laws of exception of 1893-4 through the means of a majority are in no position to rebel when, by means of the same majority, the laws for the separation of church and state are decided.
Those socialists who want to decide by means of the majority in favor of the laws on workers’ retirements are in no position to rebel against the same majority when it decides on some law that goes against their interests.
All parties who accept suffrage, however universal it might be, as the basis for their means of action cannot revolt as long as they are left the means of asserting themselves by the ballot.
Catholics, in general, are in this situation. The gentlemen in question in the late battles were “great electors,” able to vote in Senatorial elections, some were even parliamentarians. Not only had some voted and sought to be the majority in the Chambers that prepare the laws, but the others had elaborated that law, had discussed its terms and articles.
Thus being parliamentarists, believers in the vote, the Catholics weren’t logically consistent with themselves during their revolt.
The socialists are no more so. They speak constantly of social revolution, and they spend all their time in puerile voting gestures in the perpetual search for a legal majority.
To accept the tutelage of the law yesterday, to reject it today and take it up again tomorrow, this is the way Catholics, socialists, parliamentarists in general act. It is illogical.
None of their acts has a logical relation with that of the day before, no more than that of tomorrow will have one with that of today.
Either we accept the law of majorities or we don’t accept it. Those who inscribe it in their program and seek to obtain the majority are illogical when they rebel against it.
This is how it is. But when Catholics or socialists revolt we don’t seek the acts of yesterday; we don’t worry about those that will be carried out tomorrow, we peacefully look on as the law is broken by its manufacturers.
It will be up to us to see to it that these days have no tomorrows.
So the anarchists alone are logical in revolt.
The anarchists don’t vote. They don’t want to be the majority that commands; they don’t accept being the minority that obeys.
When they rebel they have no need to break any contract: they never accept tying their individuality to any government of any kind.
They alone, then, are rebels held back by no ties, and each of their violent gestures is in relation to their ideas, is logically consistent with their reasoning.
By demonstration, by observation, by experience or, lacking these, by force, by violence, these are the means by which the anarchists want to impose themselves. By majority, by the law, never!
|
#title Fear
#author Albert Libertad
#SORTtopics fear
#date May 17, 1906
#source https://www.marxists.org/archive/libertad/1906/fear.htm
#lang en
#pubdate 2020-06-15T22:58:00
The bourgeois were frightened!!!
The bourgeois felt pass over them the wind of riot, the breath of revolt, and they feared the hurricane, the storm that would unleash those with unsatisfied appetites on their too well garnished tables.
The bourgeois were frightened!!!
The bourgeois, fat and tranquil, blissful and peaceful, heard the horrifying grumble of the painful and poor digestion of the thin, the rachitic, the unsatisfied. The bellies heard the rumblings of the arms, who refused to bring them their daily pittance.
The bourgeois were frightened!!!
The bourgeois gathered together their piles of money, their titles; they hid them in holes from the claws of the destroyers; the bourgeois stored their movable property, and they then looked around to see where to hide themselves. The big city wasn’t very safe with all those threats in the air. And the countryside wasn’t either... when the evening came chateaus were being burned down there.
The bourgeois were frightened! A fear that gripped their bellies, their stomachs, their throats, without any means of attenuating it presenting itself.
And so the bourgeois put up barricades of steel and blood in front of the of the workers, cemented with blood and flesh. . They tried to rejoice at seeing the little infantrymen and the heavy dragoons parade before their windows. They swooned before the handsome Republican Guards and the fine cavalrymen. And still, fear invaded their being. They were frightened.
That fear seemed to have something of remorse in it. One could believe that the bourgeois felt the logic of the acts that included everyone and everything that they alone had possessed up till then.
The bourgeois were afraid that suddenly, in a great movement, the two sides of the scale that had always inclined in the direction of their desires would suddenly be leveled. They believed the moment for disgorgement had finally come. Since their lives were made of the deaths of other men, they believed that on this day the lives of others would be made of their deaths.
O anguished dream! The bourgeois were frightened, really frightened!!
But the hurricane passed over their heads and the bellies and didn’t kill. The lightning rods of sabers and rifles sufficed for the few gusts that blew forgotten over society.
The worker again took up his labor. He again bent his back over the daily task. Today like yesterday, the slave prepares his master’s swill.
The hurricane has passed...the bourgeois have little by little raised their heads. They looked upon their faces convulsed with fear... and they laughed. But their laugh was a snigger; their laugh was a bark.
Since he didn’t know how to do his work himself, the hyenas and jackals were going to fall on the lion, caught in the trap of his ignorance and confidence.
The females who, in 1871, poked out the eyes of communards with their parasols, have had children. These children are now in the magistracy, in the administration, in the army. The wear the kepi or the robe, they kill with the Code, regulations, or the sword, but they kill without pity.
The bourgeois were frightened.
They are taking revenge for having been frightened!!! Like a club, the jackhammer of justice is descending on the vanquished. The Magnauds and the Bulots, the S‚r‚ de RiviŠres and the Bridoisons, all of them are in agreement in harshly striking the troublemakers.
Never have those who do not labor been overcome by such respect for those who labor. Hindrances put to the freedom to work have been struck with months and month of prison. Men have been condemned until the healing of their wounds, children to reform schools, and adolescents to the penal brigades Those who reason must be put down.
The bourgeois were frightened!!!
But those who must be struck the hardest are the enemies of all the bourgeois, the reactionary bourgeois and the socialist bourgeois: the anarchists.
Other men are defeated by the weight of their own ignorance; it will still be quite a while before they free themselves from their foolishness. But the anarchists are defeated by the ignorance and passivity of others, so they work every day to educate them, to make rebels of them. It is thus they who are the danger; it is they who must be struck.
The bourgeois want to avenge themselves, but they are cowards and so it is the bystanders they strike. They fear the might of anarchist logic and they know that the sophistry of their reasoning will burst like soap bubbles in the sun. They can crush us with the dead weight of the brutal force of number, but they know that we will always defeat them in reason’s combat.
“That man had an anarchist paper in his pocket! – That one had pamphlets on sociology. – That one had needles on him.” And they strike even harder whoever dares read anything but <em>La Croix, La Petite R‚publique</em>, or <em>Le Petit Journal</em>.
Why don’t you strike the authors, the publishers of these publications? Are they untouchable, above all laws, or are you afraid of finding yourselves confronting the truth, viscous Berengers of politics?
Bourgeois, you were frightened!!!
And it was nothing but a shadow that passed across the heaven of you beatitude. But be on your guard: you will only see the storm that will swallow you up when it’s imminent. It won’t be announced by tiny lightning bolts. It will surge around you and you will be no more.
Bourgeois, you experience the frisson of fear, and you are savoring the joy of revenge... But don’t be in such a hurry to celebrate. Don’t exaggerate too greatly the reprisals of your victory, for the upcoming revolt could very well not leave you the time to be frightened...
The bourgeois were frightened!!!
|
#pubdate 2009-04-06 19:41:21 +0200
#author Albert Libertad
#SORTauthors Albert Libertad
#title Freedom
#lang en
#SORTtopics individualist
#source Retrieved on April 6<sup>th</sup>, 2009 from [[http://www.geocities.com/kk_abacus/LIBERTAD.htm][www.geocities.com]]
Many think that it is a simple dispute over words that makes some declare themselves libertarians and others anarchist. I have an entirely different opinion.
I am an anarchist and I hold to the label not for the sake of a vain garnishing of words, but because it means a philosophy, a different method than that of the libertarian.
The libertarian, as the word indicates, is an adorer of liberty. For him, it is the beginning and end of all things. To become a cult of liberty, to write its name on all the walls, to erect statues illuminating the world, to talk about it in season and out, to declare oneself free of hereditary determinism when its atavistic and encompassing movements make you a slave...this is the achievement of the libertarian.
The anarchist, referring simply to etymology, is against authority. That’s exact. He doesn’t make liberty the causality but rather the finality of the evolution of his Self. He doesn’t say, even when it concerns merest of his acts. “I am free.” but “I want to be free”. For him, freedom is not an entity, a quality, something that one has or doesn’t have, but is a result that he obtains to the degree that he obtains power.
He doesn’t make freedom into a right that existed before him, before human beings but a science that he acquires, that humans acquire, day after day, to free themselves of ignorance, abolishing the shackles of tyranny and property.
Man is not free to act or not to act, by his will alone. He learns to do or not to do when he has exercised his judgement, enlightened his ignorance, or destroyed the obstacles that stand in his way. So if we take the position of a libertarian, without musical knowledge in the front of his piano, is he free to play? NO! He won’t have this freedom until he has learned music and to play the instrument. This is what the anarchists say. He also struggles against the authority that prevents him from developing his musical aptitudes — when he has them — or he who withholds the pianos. To have the freedom to play, he has to have the power to know and the power to have a piano at his disposition. Freedom is a force that one must know how to develop within the individual; no one can grant it.
When the Republic takes its famous slogan: “<em>Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite”</em>, does it make us free, equal or brothers? She tells us “You are free” these are vain words since we do not have the power to be free. And why don’t we have this power? Principally because we do not know how to acquire the proper knowledge. We take the mirage for reality.
We always await the freedom of a State, of a Redeemer, of a Revolution, we never work to develop it within each individual. What is the magic wand that transforms the current generation born of centuries of servitude and resignation into a generation of human beings deserving of freedom, because they are strong enough to conquer it?
This transformation will come from the awareness that men will have of not having freedom of consciousness, that freedom is not in them, that they don’t have the right to be free, that they are not all born free and equal...and that it is nevertheless impossible to have happiness without freedom. The day that they have this consciousness they will stop at nothing to obtain freedom. This is why anarchists struggle with such strength against the libertarian current that makes one take the shadow for substance.
To obtain this power, it is necessary for us to struggle against two currents that threaten the conquest of our liberty: it is necessary to defend it against others and against oneself, against external and internal forces.
To go towards freedom, it becomes necessary to develop our individuality. When I say: to go towards freedom, I mean for each of us to go toward the most complete development of our Self. We are not therefore free to take any which road, it is necessary to force ourselves to take the correct path. We are not free to yield to excessive and lawless desires, we are obliged to satisfy them. We are not free to put ourselves in a state of inebriation making our personality lose the use of its will, placing us at the mercy of anything; let’s say rather that we endure the tyranny of a passion that misery of luxury has given us. True freedom would consist of an act of authority upon this habit, to liberate oneself from its tyranny and its corollaries.
I said, an act of authority, because I don’t have the passion of liberty considered <em>a priori.</em> I am not a libertarian. If I want to acquire liberty, I don’t adore it. I don’t amuse myself refusing the act of authority that will make me overcome the adversary that attacks me, nor do I refuse the act of authority that will make me attack the adversary. I know that every act of force is an act of authority. I would like to never have to use force, authority against other men, but I live in the 20<sup>th</sup> century and I am not free of from the direction of my movements to acquire liberty.
So, I consider the Revolution as an act of authority of some against others, individual revolt as an act of authority of some against others. And therefore I find these means logical, but I want to exactly determine the intention. I find them logical and I am ready to cooperate, if these acts of temporary authority have the removing of a stable authority and giving more freedom as their goal; I find them illogical and I thwart them if their goal isn’t removing an authority. By these acts, authority gains power: she hasn’t done anything but change name, even that which one has chosen for the occasion of its modification.
Libertarians make a dogma of liberty; anarchists make it an end. Libertarians think that man is born free and that society makes him a slave. Anarchists realize that man is born into the most complete of subordinations, the greatest of servitudes and that civilization leads him to the path of liberty.
That which the anarchists reproach is the association of men-society — which is obstructing the road after having guided our first steps. Society delivers hunger, malignant fever, ferocious beasts — evidently not in all cases, but generally — but she makes humanity prey to misery, overwork, and governments. She puts humanity between a rock and a hard place. She makes the child forget the authority of nature to place him under the authority of men.
The anarchist intervenes. He does not ask for liberty as a good that one has taken from him, but as a good that one prevents him from acquiring. He observes the present society and he declares that it is a bad instrument, a bad way to call individuals to their complete development.
The anarchist sees society surround men with a lattice of laws, a net of rules, and an atmosphere of morality and prejudices without doing anything to bring them out of the night of ignorance. He doesn’t have the libertarian religion, liberal one could say but more and more he wants liberty for himself like he wants pure air for his lungs. He decides then to work by all means to tear apart the threads of the lattice, the stitches of the net and endeavors to open up free thought.
The anarchist’s desire is to be able to exercise his faculties with the greatest possible intensity. the more he improves himself, the more experience he takes in, the more he destroys obstacles, as much intellectual and moral as material, the more he takes an open field, the more he allows his individuality to expand, the more he becomes free to evolve and the more he proceeds towards the realization of his desire.
But I won’t allow myself to get carried away and I’ll return more precisely to the subject.
The libertarian who doesn’t have the power to carry through an explanation, a critique which he recognizes as well founded or that he doesn’t even want to discuss, he responds “I am <em>free</em> to act like this.” The anarchist says: “ I think that I am right to act like this but come on.” And if the critique made is about a passion which he doesn’t have the strength to free himself from, he will add: “ I am under the slavery of this atavism and this habit.” This simple declaration won’t be without cost. It will carry its own force, maybe for the individual attacked, but surely for the individual that made it, and for those who are less attacked by the passion in question.
The anarchist is not mistaken about the domain gained. He does not say “I am <em>free</em> to marry my daughter if that pleases me — I have the <em>right</em> to wear a high style hat if it suits me” because he knows that this liberty, this right are a tribute paid to the morality of the milieu, to the conventions of the world; they are imposed by the outside against all desires, against all internal determinism of the individual.
The anarchist acts thus not due to modesty, or the spirit of contradiction, but because he holds a conception which is completely different from that of the libertarian. He doesn’t believe in innate liberty, but in liberty that is acquired. And because he knows that he doesn’t possess all liberties, he has a greater will to acquire the power of liberty.
Words do not have a power in themselves. They have a meaning that one must know well, to state precisely in order to allow oneself to be taken by their magic. The great Revolution has made a fool of us with its slogan: “<em>Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite</em>” the liberals have sung us above all the tune of their “<em>laisser-faire</em>” with the refrain of the freedom of work; Libertarians delude themselves with a belief in a pre-established liberty and they make critiques in its honor...Anarchists should not want the word but the thing. They are against authority, government, economic religious and moral power, knowing the more authority is diminished the more liberty is increased.
It is a relation between the power of the group and the power of the individual. The more the first term of this relation is diminished, the more authority is diminished, the more liberty is increased.
What does the anarchist want? To reach a state in which these two powers are balanced, where the individual has real freedom of movement without ever hindering the liberty of movement of another. The anarchist does not want to reverse the relation so that his freedom is made of the slavery of others, because he knows that authority is bad in itself, as much for he who submits to it as for he who gives it.
To truly know freedom, one must develop the human being until one makes sure that no authority has the possibility of existing.
|
#title May Day
#author Albert Libertad
#SORTtopics May Day
#date 1st May 1905
#source https://www.marxists.org/archive/libertad/1905/may-day.htm
#lang en
#pubdate 2020-06-15T22:55:25
The national and international holiday of the organized proletariat.
The Bastille Day of the unionized working class, the replay of the holiday of the Bistros.
The tragi-comic anniversary of something that will be taken away ...
May Day 1905: Prologue
In the archiepiscopal church the grand ceremony takes place: the high priests, who have been delegated to other places, are absent.
The tribune is filled. The office is invaded. The strangest looking faces appear there. An assessor, delegate and secretary of I-don’t-know-what, who has decorated his breast with a large tie, with his decoration and his lit up mug, set the appropriate tone.
Appearing in a curious parade, all alone come the eternal bit players and the future stars. In the wings we can imagine the presence of influential directors falsifying the system.
Alcohol overflows in smelly burps from almost every mouth.
A few ordinary workers, a hundred at most, have come in a spirit of combativeness, or though obligation. There are a few who are sincere, thinking they are working for their emancipation, and who are sickened and disillusioned by the drunken events around them.
A bizarre salad where the words “Organized proletariat,” “workers demands,” “Eight hour day,” dance about. “All arise in 1906,” “The Bosses,” “The Exploiters,” “The Exploited,” “My Corporation,” “Delegates,” “The Union of...,"etc. are seasoned before us.
One has the impression of listening to a constantly wound up phonograph , but whose worn out notches allow only a few words to escape.
Any attempt at serious debate is impossible. We are in the hall not to learn but – it appears – to impress the bosses.
We must all be in agreement, <em>all friends, all brothers</em>, so that the press can’t say there was any disagreement.
We are working for the gallery.
Should the press say tomorrow how many drunks there were at the tribune? Should it speak of the exceptional receipts at the bistros within a kilometer of the Labor Exchange? Should it count the number of men who came home at night with their bellies full of alcohol and their pockets empty?
Across from the Labor Exchange a group decorated in red is drinking... I pass by...a man detaches himself and gives me two <em>sous</em> “for good luck,” taking me for a poor devil and so as to get a laugh. Pieces of silver fall to the ground, rolling from his pockets.
Working class emancipation through union organization!
But let’s go back...Nevertheless, a few notes are interesting and throw a bit of light on this milieu. Two navvies speak with a simplicity, a great sobriety and please quite a few; a man who keeps his hat on and at whom the union crowd shouts: “Your hat!” says some true things; Gabrielle Petit, with her raw eloquence, maintaining her impulsive character, breaks up the disgusting monotony of the dogmatic ritual.
After an incident where we – the best as well as the worst – take on grotesque forms in the rapidity of our gestures, where can be felt the irritation of disgust and fatigue of some, of alcohol among others, afterwards, we must sing.
Sing the ditty that fits the circumstance.
It’s a family from Bercy, former owner of a special cabaret for snobs and the neurotic near Clichy that has made up the words and the music.
It’s not so much the ignorant crowd that wants the song, it’s the leaders: the director Pouget forgets himself so much as to leave the wings. One has to sing to the people. And the woman, with a certain courage, incidentally, not caring about our more or less correct shouting, waits for the right moment to emit her note. One must live, after all.
We do all we can so as not to sing, fully understanding how ridiculous this graceless song is between these four walls, giving this struggle a soppy character...But in France everything ends in a song. And we stop, vanquished not by the force of these men, whose cunning masters, slipping slander in, order them to respect us, but rather by their thoughtlessness, their blindness, by the atmosphere of alcohol that we can no longer breathe.
And here is the final scene.
Lepine has given his police clique the order to hold itself back... To let this religious crowd enjoy its icon, its idol, its flag The doorways are clear; the policemen are behind the metro worksites, waiting for the opportune moment.
The Labor Exchange, squeezed in between two houses, in this narrow corridor, is ugly. Its base is covered in posters, its upper floors are slashed by a red band with gold lettering for 1906. A red flag with a black crepe (colors authorized by the law) recalls the tragedy of Limoges. Nothing is missing; neither the hosanna, nor the remembrance of the martyrs.
They’re going to raise the red flag at the window! The ditty was good, but the sight of the icon...that’s sublime! I look and I see once again... the scenes where to the cry of “God wills it,” brandishing the cross, the Peter the Hermits led the crowd to their death. Only here the preachers chew their tobacco and let the crowd leave on their own...In any event, the crowd’s enthusiasm is only on the surface.
A large mass heads toward the red flag, and a “Ca Ira,” broken up with hiccups, can be heard... It’s pure delirium.
The cops!
The anger calms. The honest worker reappears... and flees, followed by the policemen’s boots.
The comedy is over... They have to disperse and the crowd flees, hiccupping and stumbling, while exasperated comrades, wanting to resist orders and shoves, shout “anarchy” in the face of the police workers as a challenge.
And in the distance...the cabarets, the bars, the thousand tentacles of that terrible octopus, alcohol, suck out and breathes in all this worker blood.
It’s the holiday of the organized proletariat.
It’s May Day.
|
#pubdate 2009-04-06 19:41:21 +0200
#author Albert Libertad
#SORTauthors Albert Libertad
#title Obsession
#lang en
#date 1898
#SORTtopics sexuality
#source Retrieved on April 6<sup>th</sup>, 2009 from [[http://www.geocities.com/kk_abacus/LIBERTAD.htm][www.geocities.com]]
#notes From Le Libertaire 26/08/1898
Durand, leaving his hotel, a smile of contentment on his lips, took a small step back, to read a tiny poster:
<quote>
While we perish in the street,
the bourgeois has palaces to live in
Death to the bourgeois!
Long Live Anarchy!
</quote>
Then, he sneered, and yelled to the concierge “You will take these idiocies off of the door”
And his calm smile came back when he noticed, glorious in their incapacity, two officers on the beat. But he stopped at the same time as them, red flyers stuck out on the stark white of the wall:
<quote>
Cops are the bulldogs of the bourgeois
Death to cops!
Long Live Anarchy!
</quote>
The cops used their nails to scratch off the posters and Durant left anxious. While at the corner of the avenue, he heard the sound of bugles and drums and from afar two battalions appeared. He felt protected and breathed a sigh of relief.
As a troupe passed in front of him, he discovered; at that moment, like a flight of butterflies, a multitude of squares of paper floating in the air; indifferently, he read:
<quote>
The army is the school of crime
Long Live Anarchy!
</quote>
Some of the papers fell on the soldiers, others covered them; his obsession resumed, he felt crushed by the light butterflies.
When he sat down in his usual place to have a beer or the usual aperitif, on the table laid another flyer:
<quote>
Go on, gorge yourself, the day will come when hate will turn us into cannibals.
Long Live Anarchy!
</quote>
He sneered, but this time he didn’t fill up saucer after saucer.
Getting up, he headed quickly toward the corner of X street, where the exploiters asked for workers and mechanically searched for the propaganda poster, he discovered it and read:
<quote>
The exploiter Thing or Machine asks for your sons to degrade them,
Your daughters to rape them, you and your wives
to exploit you
Watch out Parisians.
Long Live Anarchy!
</quote>
He shook his head and headed towards his office. He read on a plaque: Durand and Cie, Society in a capitol of two million, but, below, the exasperating critique said its piece:
<quote>
Capital is the product of work
stolen and accumulated by the idle.
Long Live Anarchy!
</quote>
He tore himself away quickly. He took care of some business, and to distract himself, thought of seeing his mistress. On his way, he bought a bouquet of flowers to offer her.
She smiled, seeing amidst the flowers what appeared to be a love letter:
“Some verses, now, says she?”
<quote>
Prostitution is the outlet of too many bourgeois.
One turns the son of the poor man into a slave and his daughter into a courtesan.
Long Live Anarchy!
</quote>
She threw the bouquet in his face and sent him away.
Ashamed and tired, he returned home, the door had once again taken on its usual appearance.
Now, upon entering the living room, his wife said to him: “Look at this vase that I just bought, what an occasion.” He took it, turned it around, and turned it around again; a piece of paper fell out:
<quote>
The luxury of the bourgeois is paid for by the blood of the poor man.
Long Live Anarchy!
</quote>
This “Long Live Anarchy!” and its harsh claims, all this hovered around him, and that very evening, he didn’t see go to see his wife, in fear of finding, in a discreet and camouflaged place, a flyer where he would have read:
<quote>
Marriage is legal prostitution.
Long Live Anarchy!
</quote>
|
#cover a-l-albert-libertad-selected-writings-1.png
#title Libertad
#subtitle Selected Writings of Individualist Anarchy
#author Albert Libertad
#LISTtitle Libertad Selected Writings
#date 1898-1906
#source Retrieved on January 25, 2023 from [[https://untorellipress.noblogs.org/post/2019/08/02/libertad-selected-writings-of-individualist-anarchy/][https://untorellipress.noblogs.org]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2023-01-30T04:20:42
#authors Albert Libertad
#topics individualism, voting, revolt, action, propaganda of the deed, life, French
#notes Translations by Mitch Abidor, Vincent Stone, and anonymous others. This edition published by Untorelli Press, February 2019.
[[a-l-albert-libertad-selected-writings-2.png 50 f][<em>Albert Libertad</em>]]
** Freedom
Many think that it is a simple dispute over words that makes some declare themselves libertarians and others anarchist. I have an entirely different opinion.
I am an anarchist and I hold to the label not for the sake of a vain garnishing of words, but because it means a philosophy, a different method than that of the libertarian.
The libertarian, as the word indicates, is an adorer of liberty. For him, it is the beginning and end of all things. To become a cult of liberty, to write its name on all the walls, to erect statues illuminating the world, to talk about it in season and out, to declare oneself free of hereditary determinism when its atavistic and encompassing movements make you a slave...this is the achievement of the libertarian.
The anarchist, referring simply to etymology, is against authority. That’s exact. He doesn’t make liberty the causality but rather the finality of the evolution of his Self. He doesn’t say, even when it concerns merest of his acts, “I am free,” but “I want to be free.” For him, freedom is not an entity, a quality, something that one has or doesn’t have, but is a result that he obtains to the degree that he obtains power.
He doesn’t make freedom into a right that existed before him, before human beings, but a science that he acquires, that humans acquire, day after day, to free themselves of ignorance, abolishing the shackles of tyranny and property.
Man is not free to act or not to act, by his will alone. He learns to do or not to do when he has exercised his judgement, enlightened his ignorance, or destroyed the obstacles that stand in his way. So if we take the position of a libertarian, without musical knowledge in front of his piano, is he free to play? NO! He won’t have this freedom until he has learned music and to play the instrument. This is what the anarchists say. He also struggles against the authority that prevents him from developing his musical aptitudes — when he has them — or he who withholds the pianos. To have the freedom to play, he has to have the power to know and the power to have a piano at his disposition. Freedom is a force that one must know how to develop within the individual; no one can grant it.
When the Republic takes its famous slogan: “<em>Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite</em>,” does it make us free, equal or brothers? She tells us “You are free” — these are vain words since we do not have the power to be free. And why don’t we have this power? Principally because we do not know how to acquire the proper knowledge. We take the mirage for reality.
We always await the freedom of a State, of a Redeemer, of a Revolution, we never work to develop it within each individual. What is the magic wand that transforms the current generation born of centuries of servitude and resignation into a generation of human beings deserving of freedom, because they are strong enough to conquer it?
This transformation will come from the awareness that men will have of not having freedom of consciousness, that freedom is not in them, that they don’t have the right to be free, that they are not all born free and equal...and that it is nevertheless impossible to have happiness without freedom. The day that they have this consciousness they will stop at nothing to obtain freedom. This is why anarchists struggle with such strength against the libertarian current that makes one take the shadow for substance.
To obtain this power, it is necessary for us to struggle against two currents that threaten the conquest of our liberty: it is necessary to defend it against others and against oneself, against external and internal forces.
To go towards freedom, it becomes necessary to develop our individuality. When I say: to go towards freedom, I mean for each of us to go toward the most complete development of our Self. We are not therefore free to take any which road, it is necessary to force ourselves to take the correct path. We are not free to yield to excessive and lawless desires, we are obliged to satisfy them. We are not free to put ourselves in a state of inebriation making our personality lose the use of its will, placing us at the mercy of anything; let’s say rather that we endure the tyranny of a passion that misery of luxury has given us. True freedom would consist of an act of authority upon this habit, to liberate oneself from its tyranny and its corollaries.
I said, an act of authority, because I don’t have the passion of liberty considered <em>a priori</em>. I am not a libertarian. If I want to acquire liberty, I don’t adore it. I don’t amuse myself refusing the act of authority that will make me overcome the adversary that attacks me, nor do I refuse the act of authority that will make me attack the adversary. I know that every act of force is an act of authority. I would like to never have to use force, authority against other men, but I live in the 20th century and I am not free from the direction of my movements to acquire liberty.
So, I consider the Revolution as an act of authority of some against others, individual revolt as an act of authority of some against others. And therefore I find these means logical, but I want to exactly determine the intention. I find them logical and I am ready to cooperate if these acts of temporary authority have the removing of a stable authority and giving more freedom as their goal. I find them illogical and I thwart them if their goal isn’t removing an authority. By these acts, authority gains power: she hasn’t done anything but change name, even that which one has chosen for the occasion of its modification.
Libertarians make a dogma of liberty; anarchists make it an end. Libertarians think that man is born free and that society makes him a slave. Anarchists realize that man is born into the most complete of subordinations, the greatest of servitudes and that civilization leads him to the path of liberty.
That which the anarchists reproach is the association of men-society — which is obstructing the road after having guided our first steps. Society delivers hunger, malignant fever, ferocious beasts — evidently not in all cases, but generally — but she makes humanity prey to misery, overwork, and governments. She puts humanity between a rock and a hard place. She makes the child forget the authority of nature to place him under the authority of men.
The anarchist intervenes. He does not ask for liberty as a good that one has taken from him, but as a good that one prevents him from acquiring. He observes the present society and he declares that it is a bad instrument, a bad way to call individuals to their complete development.
The anarchist sees society surround men with a lattice of laws, a net of rules, and an atmosphere of morality and prejudices without doing anything to bring them out of the night of ignorance. He doesn’t have the libertarian religion, liberal one could say, but more and more he wants liberty for himself like he wants pure air for his lungs. He decides then to work by all means to tear apart the threads of the lattice, the stitches of the net and endeavors to open up free thought.
The anarchist’s desire is to be able to exercise his faculties with the greatest possible intensity. The more he improves himself, the more experience he takes in; the more he destroys obstacles, as much intellectual and moral as material, the more he takes an open field; the more he allows his individuality to expand, the more he becomes free to evolve and the more he proceeds towards the realization of his desire.
But I won’t allow myself to get carried away and I’ll return more precisely to the subject.
The libertarian who doesn’t have the power to carry through an explanation, a critique which he recognizes as well founded or that he doesn’t even want to discuss, he responds “I am free to act like this.” The anarchist says: “I think that I am right to act like this but come on.” And if the critique made is about a passion which he doesn’t have the strength to free himself from, he will add: “I am under the slavery of this atavism and this habit.” This simple declaration won’t be without cost. It will carry its own force, maybe for the individual attacked, but surely for the individual that made it, and for those who are less attacked by the passion in question.
The anarchist is not mistaken about the domain gained. He does not say “I am <em>free</em> to marry my daughter if that pleases me — I have the <em>right</em> to wear a high style hat if it suits me” because he knows that this liberty, this right, is a tribute paid to the morality of the milieu, to the conventions of the world; they are imposed by the outside against all desires, against all internal determinism of the individual.
The anarchist acts thus not due to modesty, or the spirit of contradiction, but because he holds a conception which is completely different from that of the libertarian. He doesn’t believe in innate liberty, but in liberty that is acquired. And because he knows that he doesn’t possess all liberties, he has a greater will to acquire the power of liberty.
Words do not have a power in themselves. They have a meaning that one must know well, to state precisely in order to allow oneself to be taken by their magic. The great Revolution has made a fool of us with its slogan: “<em>Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite.</em>” The liberals have sung us above all the tune of their “<em>laisser-faire</em>” with the refrain of the freedom of work. Libertarians delude themselves with a belief in a pre-established liberty and they make critiques in its honor... Anarchists should not want the word but the thing. They are against authority, government, economic, religious, and moral power, knowing the more authority is diminished the more liberty is increased.
It is a relation between the power of the group and the power of the individual. The more the first term of this relation is diminished, the more authority is diminished, the more liberty is increased.
What does the anarchist want? To reach a state in which these two powers are balanced, where the individual has real freedom of movement without ever hindering the liberty of movement of another. The anarchist does not want to reverse the relation so that his freedom is made of the slavery of others, because he knows that authority is bad in itself, as much for he who submits to it as for he who gives it.
To truly know freedom, one must develop the human being until one makes sure that no authority has the possibility of existing.
** Obsession
Durand, leaving his hotel, a smile of contentment on his lips, took a small step back, to read a tiny poster:
<center>
<em>While we perish in the street,
<br>
the bourgeois has palaces to live in
<br>
Death to the bourgeois!
<br>
Long Live Anarchy!</em>
</center>
Then, he sneered, and yelled to the concierge “You will take these idiocies off of the door?” And his calm smile came back when he noticed, glorious in their incapacity, two officers on the beat. But he stopped at the same time as them, red flyers stuck out on the stark white of the wall:
<center>
<em>Cops are the bulldogs of the bourgeois
<br>
Death to cops!
<br>
Long Live Anarchy!</em>
</center>
The cops used their nails to scratch off the posters and Durant left anxious. While at the corner of the avenue, he heard the sound of bugles and drums and from afar two battalions appeared. He felt protected and breathed a sigh of relief.
As a troupe passed in front of him, he discovered, at that moment, like a flight of butterflies, a multitude of squares of paper floating in the air; indifferently, he read:
<center>
<em>The army is the school of crime
<br>
Long Live Anarchy!</em>
</center>
Some of the papers fell on the soldiers, others covered them; his obsession resumed, he felt crushed by the light butterflies.
When he sat down in his usual place to have a beer or the usual aperitif, on the table laid another flyer:
<center>
<em>Go on, gorge yourself, the day will come when hate will turn us into cannibals.
<br>
Long Live Anarchy!</em>
</center>
He sneered, but this time he didn’t fill up saucer after saucer. Getting up, he headed quickly toward the corner of X street, where the exploiters asked for workers, and mechanically searched for the propaganda poster, he discovered it and read:
<center>
<em>The exploiter Thing or Machine asks for your sons to degrade them,
<br>
Your daughters to rape them, you and your wives
<br>
To exploit you
<br>
Watch out Parisians.
<br>
Long Live Anarchy!</em>
</center>
He shook his head and headed towards his office. He read on a plaque: Durand and Cie, Society in a capitol of two million, but, below, the exasperating critique said its piece:
<center>
<em>Capital is the product of work
<br>
stolen and accumulated by the idle.
<br>
Long Live Anarchy!</em>
</center>
He tore himself away quickly. He took care of some business, and to distract himself, thought of seeing his mistress. On his way, he bought a bouquet of flowers to offer her.
She smiled, seeing amidst the flowers what appeared to be a love letter:
“Some verses, now?” says she.
<center>
<em>Prostitution is the outlet of too many bourgeois.
<br>
One turns the son of the poor man into a slave and his daughter into a courtesan.
<br>
Long Live Anarchy!</em>
</center>
She threw the bouquet in his face and sent him away.
Ashamed and tired, he returned home, the door had once again taken on its usual appearance.
Now, upon entering the living room, his wife said to him: “Look at this vase that I just bought, what an occasion.” He took it, turned it around, and turned it around again; a piece of paper fell out:
<center>
<em>The luxury of the bourgeois is paid for by the blood of the poor man.
<br>
Long Live Anarchy!</em>
</center>
This “Long Live Anarchy!” and its harsh claims, all this hovered around him, and that very evening, he didn’t go to see his wife, in fear of finding, in a discreet and camouflaged place, a flyer where he would have read:
<center>
<em>Marriage is legal prostitution.
<br>
Long Live Anarchy!</em>
</center>
** The Joy of Life
Wearied by the struggle of life, how many close their eyes, fold their arms, stop short, powerless and discouraged. How many, and they among the best, abandon life as unworthy of continuance. With the assistance of some fashionable theories, and of a prevalent neurasthenia, some men have come to regard death as the supreme liberation.
To those who hold this view, society replies with the usual clichés.
It speaks of the “moral” purpose of life; argues that one has no right to kill himself, that “moral” sorrows must be borne courageously, that a man has duties, that the suicide is a coward or an “egoist,” etc. etc. All of these phrases are religious in tone; and none of them are of genuine significance in rational discussion.
What after all is suicide?
Suicide is the final act in a series of actions that we all tend to carry out, which arise from our reaction against our environment, or from that environment’s reaction against us.
Every day we commit suicide partially. I commit suicide when I consent to inhabit a dwelling where the sun never shines, a room where the ventilation is so inadequate that I feel like I am suffocated when I wake up.
I commit suicide when I spend hours on work that absorbs an amount of energy which I am not able to recapture, or when I engage in activity which I know to be useless.
I commit suicide whenever I enter into the barracks to obey men and laws that oppress me.
I commit suicide whenever I grant the right to govern me for four years to another individual through the act of voting.
I commit suicide when I ask a magistrate or a priest for permission to love.
I commit suicide when I do not reclaim my liberty as a lover, as soon as the time of love is past.
Complete suicide is nothing but the final act of total inability to react against the environment.
These acts, which I have called partial suicides, are no less truly suicidal. It is because I lack the strength to react against society that I inhabit a place without sun and air, that I do not eat in accordance with my hunger or my taste, that I am a soldier or a voter, that I subject my love to laws or compulsion.
Workers daily commit mental suicide by leaving the mind inactive, by not letting it live, as they kill within themselves their enjoyment of the arts of painting, sculpture, music, which offer some relief from the cacophony which surrounds them.
There can be no question of right or duty, of cowardice or of courage in relation to suicide; it is purely a material problem, of power or lack of power. One hears it said, “Suicide is a human right when it constitutes a necessity...” Or again, “one cannot take the right of life and death away from the proletariat.”
Right? Necessity?
Shall one debate his <em>right</em> to breathe poorly, i.e. to kill most of the health-giving molecules to the advantage of the unhealthy ones? His <em>right</em> not to eat in accordance with his hunger, i.e. to kill his stomach? His <em>right</em> to obey, i.e. to murder his will? His <em>right</em> to love the woman designated by the law or chosen by the desire of one period forever, i.e. to slay all the desires of days to come?
Or if we substitute the word “necessity” for the word “right” in these phrases, do we thereby make them the more logical?
I do not intend to “condemn” these partial suicides more than definitive suicides; but it seems to me pathetically comical to describe as right or necessity this surrender of the weak before the strong — and a surrender made without having tried everything. Such expressions are merely excuses one clings to.
All suicides are imbecilities, total suicide more than the others, since it is possible to bring oneself out of the partial forms.
It would seem that at the moment of the departure of the individual, all energy might be focused on a single point of reaction against the environment, even with a thousand to one chance of failure in the effort. This seems still more necessary and natural in view of the fact that one leaves those one loves behind. For this part of one’s self, this portion of the energy of which one consists, cannot one engage in a gigantic struggle, however unequal the combat, capable of shaking up the colossal Authority?
Many die, declaring themselves to be victims of society; do they not realize that, since the same cause produces the same effects, their comrades, those they love, could die as victims of the same state of things? Won’t a desire then come to them to transform their vital force into energy, into power, so as to burn the pile rather than to separate its elements?
Once one has overcome the fear of death, of the complete dissolution of the human form, one can engage in the struggle with that much more strength. Some will respond to us, “We have a horror of bloodshed. We do not wish to attack this society, made up of men who seem to us to be both unaware and irresponsible.”
The first objection does not hold. Does the struggle only take a violent form? Is it not multiple, diverse? And all the individuals who understand its usefulness, can they not take part each according to his own temperament?
The second is too inexact. Such words as “society,” “knowledge,” “responsibility” are too often repeated and too little explained.
The barrier that obstructs the road, the biting serpent, the tuberculosis microbe are unaware and without responsibility, yet we defend ourselves against them. Still more irresponsible (in the relative sense) are the cornfields which we reap, the ox that we kill, the beehive that we rob. Nevertheless we attack them all.
I know nothing of “responsible” nor of “irresponsible.” I see the causes of my suffering, of the cramping of my personality; and my efforts are bent to suppress or to conquer them by every possible means.
According to my power of resistance I assimilate or I reject, I am assimilated or rejected. That is all.
Even stranger objections are advanced, in a form neurotically scientific: “Study astronomy, and you will realize the negligible duration of human life as compared to the infinite. Death is a transformation and not termination.”
For myself, being finite, I have no conception of the infinite; but I know that duration consists of centuries, centuries of years, years of days, days of hours, hours of minutes, etc. I know that time is made up of nothing but the accumulation of seconds, that great immensity formed from the in-finitely small. Short as our life may be, it has its dimensional importance from the point of view of the whole. Life, seen from my own point of view, with my own eyes, cannot be of little importance to me; and all seems to me to have had no purpose but to prepare for us — for myself and for that which surrounds me.
The stone which caresses the head when dropped from a meter above, will break it open if it falls twenty meters. Arrested on the way, seen from the point of view of the whole, it differs in no particular; but it lacks the energy which makes it a power.
I disregard all that I cannot conceive, and look primarily to myself; and a dissolution or rather a non-absorption of strength that acts to my detriment occurs in either a partial or a definitive suicide.
Death is the end of a human energy, as the dissociation of elements of a battery is the end of the electricity which it releases, as the dissolution of threads of a tissue is the end of that tissue’s strength. Death, as the end of my “I,” is more than a transformation.
There are those who say to one, “The goal of life is happiness,” and who profess to be unable to attain it. It seems to me simpler to say that life is life. Life is happiness. Happiness is life.
All the acts of life are a joy to me. Breathing pure air, I know happiness; my lungs are expanded, an impression of power makes me glow. The hour of work and that of rest afford me equal pleasure. The hour which brings the mealtime; the meal itself with its labor of mastication; the hour which follows with its interior activity — all give me joy of varying sorts.
Shall I evoke the delicious attention of love, the sense of power in the sexual encounter, the succeeding hours of voluptuous relaxation?
Shall I speak of the joy of the eyes, of hearing, of odor, of touching, of all the senses, of the delights of conversation and of thought? Life is a happiness.
Life has not a goal. It is. Why wish for a goal, a beginning, an end?
Let us recapitulate. Whenever, hurled on the stones by an earthquake, avid for air, we bow our head against the rock; whenever seized by the regimentation of society as it is, avid for the ideal (to make this vague term exact: avid for the integral development of one’s self and one’s loved ones) we arrest our life, we obey, not a necessity nor a right, but as obsession of force, of the obstacle. We do no voluntary act, as the partisans of death profess; we obey the power of the environment which crushes, and we depart precisely at the hour the weight is too heavy for our shoulders.
“Then,” they say, “we do not go except at our hour — and our hour is now.” Yes. But since, resigned, they envisage their defeat in advance; since they have not developed their tissues with a view to resistance; they have not made due effort to react against the regimentation of the environment. Unaware of their own beauty, of their own force, they add to the objectives of the obstacle all the subjective weight of their own acceptance.
Like those resigned to partial suicides, they surrender themselves to the great suicide. They are devoured by an environment avid for their flesh, eager to crush all energy that appears.
Their error lies in the belief that the dissolution is by their own will, that they choose their hour, while actually they die crushed inevitably by the wickedness of some and by the [...][1] of others.
In a locality by the maleficient of typhus, of tuberculosis, I do not think of absenting myself to avoid the malady; rather, I proceed immediately to disseminate disinfectants, without any fear of killing millions of microbes.
In present society, made foul by the conventional defecations of property, of patriotism, of religion, of family, of ignorance, crushed by the power of government and the inertia of the governed; I wish not to disappear, but to throw upon the scene the light of truth, to provide a disinfectant, to do it by any means at my command.
Even with death approaching, I shall have still the desire to chair my body by means of phenol or acid, for the sake of humanity’s health.
And if I am destroyed in this effort, I shall not be totally effaced. I shall have reacted against the environment, I shall have lived briefly but intensely; I shall perhaps have opened a breach for the passage of energies similar to my own.
No, it is not life that is bad, but the conditions in which we live. Therefore we shall address ourselves not to life, but to these conditions: let us change them.
One must live, one must desire to live still more abundantly. Let us accept not even the partial suicides.
Let us be eager to know all experiences, all happiness, all sensations. Let us not be resigned to any diminution of our “me.” Let us be champions of life, so that desires may arise out of our turpitude and weakness; let us assimilate the earth to our own concept of beauty.
Thus may our wishes be united, magnificently; and at the last we shall know the Joy of Life in the absolute.
<strong>Let us love life.</strong>
** Germinal, at the Wall of the Fédérés
Near their tomb,[2] in the middle of the gaudy wreaths and bouquets showily brough there, in the grass, in black letters on a red background, someone wrote one word: Germinal.
This person knew how to give the correct tone to this anniversary.
Germinal! This wasn’t a banal remembrance of the dead, this was a call to the living; it wasn’t the pointless glorification of the past, it was a call to the future.
On the tomb of these men who died for freedom, this word called their children to liberating rebellion.
The wreaths, the bouquets, the speeches, were vain palliatives. Germinal was the still living fight, rising up, terrible, calling the workers, the rebels, to the imminent harvests.
** We Go On
We don’t have faith, we have absolutely no confidence in our success: we are certain that we have neglected nothing, that we have made all our efforts in order to be on the correct road.
We are not certain that we will succeed: we are not certain that we are right.
We don’t know, it is not possible for us to know if success will be at the end of our efforts, if it will be the reward; we try to act so that, logically, we should arrive at the result that interests us.
Those that envision the goal from the first steps, those that want the certitude of reaching it before walking, never arrive.
Whatever the task undertaken may be, if the completion is near, who can say they’ve seen the end? Who can say: I will plentifully reap that which I sow; I will live in this house which I build, I will eat the fruits of the tree which I plant?
And therefore, one throws the wheat on the ground, one arranges the stones one by one, one surrounds the fruit-tree with care.
Because one does not know for certain, for sure, for whom, how, when the result will be, will one neglect one’s efforts for that which will be possibly good? Will one throw the grain on the hard rock or mix it with the tares? Will one arrange the stones without the square and the plumb-line? Will one put the seedling at the crossroads of the four winds?
The joy of the result is already in the joy of effort. He who makes the first steps in a direction that he has every reason to believe good, already arrives at the goal, that’s to say, at the reward of this labor.
We don’t need to know if we will succeed, if men will come to live in a great enough harmony to assure the complete development of their individuality, we have to do the deeds for that which may be, to go in the direction that both our reason and our experience aptly decide.
We don’t say: “Men are born good, they should therefore harmonize their relations.” We say “Logically, it will be in the interest of men to obtain with the least effort the greatest sum of well being; not from the point of view of eliminating effort, but of always using it for betterment. It is thus necessary to show them where our interest is. The understanding between individuals is the best means to come to assure human happiness. Let’s try to make him understand it.”
The idea of a meteor collision with the earth, a collapse of the sun, a great fire being able to interrupt our show or our experience, cannot hinder all of us from beginning. Likewise, the misunderstanding of our ideas and practice by the majority of men, be it due to cretinism or perversity, would not be a reason to stop us from thinking and critiquing.
All work begun is on its way to completion, whatever the resistance of the attacked group may be. It is not a question of speculating about the magnificence or the proximity of the goal to reach, but rather of convincing oneself with a constant critique with which one proceeds handsomely, and doesn’t get lost in digressions.
We go on with ardor, with strength, with pleasure in such a direction, determined because we are aware of having done everything and of being ready to do anything so that this is in the right direction. We bring to the study the greatest care, the greatest attention, and we give the greatest energy to action. While we direct our activity in a given direction, it’s not a matter of telling ourselves: “Work is hard; statist society is solidly organized; the foolishness of men is considerable,” it would be better to show us that we are heading in the wrong direction. If one reached it, we would use the same force, in another direction, without faltering. Because we don’t have faith in such a goal, the illusion of such a paradise, but in the certitude of using our effort in the best direction.
It would not be worthwhile to concern ourselves with an immediate, tangible result if it obstructs, diverts our exact path. The bait of reforms attracting the mass of men would not be able to hinder us.
To accelerate our march, we don’t need mirages showing us the closest end, within our hand’s reach. It will be enough for us to know that we go on and that, if we sometimes stamp around the same spot, we do not go astray.
The mirage calls us to the right and to the left, diverts us, and if one succeeds in returning to the correct road, this is weakened and diminished by lost illusion. The intoxication of words and illusions resembles that of alcohol, it can throw the multitudes into an impassioned movement, towards the closest goal: but the sobered multitudes pause.
They pause discouraged by the emptiness of the empty result. The perseverance of courage is not in the act of arriving, but in the certitude of being right.
We don’t need a sign-post to show us that we have traveled a third, a fourth, a hundredth of the way; nothing measures the quantity of our effort and such markings have no relation to our effort as a whole. We please ourselves to know that we give, according to our strengths and in the direction that we believe is best, all that we can give.
We believe in a constant evolution, we therefore know that there is no end. It is enough for us to always go forward, always on the correct path. And the packs may bark after us, and we may be the crazy ones, the bad ones. The majority may stand in our way. Atavism, heredity may want to impose its ineluctable laws. The group may defend itself harshly. Though the end may be far, very far, these things do not concern us.
We go on... employing all means, in turn persuasive and violent. We are ready to come together with anyone and with everyone for the attainment of universal happiness and for the normal development of the unique.
We go on... Each effort brings joy in itself and every day sees its stopping place, even if advancement is slight.
We go on... We are not sure to arrive; we are mindful that we have done everything and to be ready to do anything to be right, and hence to arrive.
And it is this that makes us the strongest...that we are never weary.
We go on…
<br>
** To the Resigned
I hate the resigned!
I hate the resigned, like I hate the filthy, like I hate layabouts!
I hate resignation! I hate filthiness, I hate inaction.
I feel for the sick man bent under some malignant fever; I hate the imaginary sick man that a little bit of will would set on his feet.
I feel for the man in chains, surrounded by guardians, crushed under the weight of irons of the many.
I hate soldiers who are bent by the weight of braids and three stars; the workers who are bent under the weight of capital.
I love the man who says what he feels wherever he is; I hate the voter seeking the perpetual conquest by the majority.
I love the savant crushed under the weight of scientific research; I hate the individual who bends his body under the weight of an unknown power, of some “X,” of a God.
I hate, I say, all those who, surrendering to others through fear or resignation a part of their power as men, not only keep their heads down, but make me, and those I love, keep our heads down too, through the weight of their frightful collaboration or their idiotic inertia.
I hate them; yes I hate them, because me, I feel it. I don’t bow before the officer’s braid, the mayor’s sash, the gold of the capitalist; morality or religion. For a long time I have known that all of these things are just baubles that we can break like glass...I bend beneath the weight of the resignation of others. O how I hate resignation!
I love life.
I want to live, not in a petty way like those who only satisfy a part of their muscles, their nerves, but in a big way, satisfying facial muscles as well as calves, my back as well as my brain.
I don’t want to trade a portion of now for a fictive portion of tomorrow. I don’t want to surrender anything of the present for the wind of the future.
I don’t want to bend anything of mine under the words fatherland, God, honor. I too well know the emptiness of these words, these religious and secular ghosts.
I laugh at retirement, at paradises the hope for which holds the resigned, religions, and capital.
I laugh at those who, saving for their old age, deprive themselves in their youth; those who, in order to eat at sixty, fast at twenty.
I want to eat while I have strong teeth to tear and crush healthy meats and succulent fruits. When my stomach juices digest without problem I want to drink my fill of refreshing and tonic drinks.
I want to love women, or a woman, depending on our common desire, and I don’t want to resign myself to the family, law the Code; nothing has any rights over our bodies. You want, I want. Let us laugh at the family, the law, the ancient form of resignation.
But this isn’t all. I want, since I have eyes, ears, and other senses, more than just to drink, to eat, to enjoy sexual love: I want to experience joy in other forms. I want to see beautiful sculptures and painting, admire Rodin or Manet.
I want to hear the best opera companies play Beethoven or Wagner. I want to know the classics at the Comedie Française, page through the literary and artistic baggage left by men of the past to men of the present, or even better, page through the now and forever unfinished oeuvre of humanity.
I want joy for myself, for my chosen companion, for my friends. I want a home where my eyes can agreeably rest when my work is done.
For I want the joy of labor, too; that healthy joy, that strong joy. I want my arms to handle the plane, the hammer, the spade and the scythe.
Let the muscles develop, the thoracic cage become larger with powerful, useful and reasoned movements.
I want to be useful, I want us to be useful. I want to be useful to my neighbor and for my neighbor to be useful to me. I desire that we labor much, for I am insatiable for joy. And it is because I want to enjoy myself that I am not resigned.
Yes, yes I want to produce, but I want to enjoy myself. I want to knead the dough, but eat better bread; to work at the grape harvest, but drink better wine; build a house, but live in better apartments; make furniture, but possess the useful, see the beautiful; I want to make theatres, but big enough to house me and mine.
I want to cooperate in producing, but I also want to cooperate in consuming.
Some dream of producing for others to whom they will leave, oh the irony of it, the best of their efforts. As for me, I want, freely united with others, to produce but also to consume.
You resigned, look: I spit on your idols. I spit on God, the Fatherland; I spit on Christ, I spit on the flag, I spit on capital and the golden calf; I spit on laws and Codes, on the symbols of religion; they are baubles, I could care less about them, I laugh at them...
Only through you do they mean anything to me; leave them behind and they’ll break into pieces.
You are thus a force, you resigned, one of those forces that don’t know they are one, but who are nevertheless a force, and I can’t spit on you, I can only hate you...or love you.
Above all my desire is that of seeing you shaking off your resignation in a terrible awakening of life.
There is no future paradise, there is no future; there is only the present.
Let us live!
Live! Resignation is death.
<em>Revolt is life.</em>
** May Day
The national and international holiday of the organized proletariat. The Bastille Day of the unionized working class, the replay of the holiday of the Bistros.
The tragi-comic anniversary of something that will be taken away...
May Day 1905: Prologue
In the archiepiscopal church the grand ceremony takes place: the high priests, who have been delegated to other places, are absent.
The tribune is filled. The office is invaded. The strangest looking faces appear there. An assessor, delegate and secretary of I-don’t-know-what, who has decorated his breast with a large tie, with his decoration and his lit up mug, set the appropriate tone.
Appearing in a curious parade, all alone come the eternal bit players and the future stars. In the wings we can imagine the presence of influential directors falsifying the system.
Alcohol overflows in smelly burps from almost every mouth.
A few ordinary workers, a hundred at most, have come in a spirit of combativeness, or though obligation. There are a few who are sincere, thinking they are working for their emancipation, and who are sickened and disillusioned by the drunken events around them.
A bizarre salad where the words “Organized proletariat,” “Workers’ demands,” “Eight hour day,” dance about. “All arise in 1906,” “The Bosses,” “The Exploiters,” “The Exploited,” “My Corporation,” “Delegates,” “The Union of...,” etc. are seasoned before us.
One has the impression of listening to a constantly wound up phonograph, but whose worn out notches allow only a few words to escape.
Any attempt at serious debate is impossible. We are in the hall not to learn but — it appears — to impress the bosses.
We must all be in agreement, <em>all friends, all brothers</em>, so that the press can’t say there was any disagreement.
We are working for the gallery.
Should the press say tomorrow how many drunks there were at the tribune? Should it speak of the exceptional receipts at the bistros within a kilometer of the Labor Exchange? Should it count the number of men who came home at night with their bellies full of alcohol and their pockets empty?
Across from the Labor Exchange a group decorated in red is drinking… I pass by... a man detaches himself and gives me two sous “for good luck,” taking me for a poor devil and so as to get a laugh. Pieces of silver fall to the ground, rolling from his pockets.
Working class emancipation through union organization!
But let’s go back... Nevertheless, a few notes are interesting and throw a bit of light on this milieu. Two navvies speak with a simplicity, a great sobriety and please quite a few; a man who keeps his hat on and at whom the union crowd shouts: “Your hat!” says some true things; Gabrielle Petit, with her raw eloquence, maintaining her impulsive character, breaks up the disgusting monotony of the dogmatic ritual.
After an incident where we — the best as well as the worst — take on grotesque forms in the rapidity of our gestures, where can be felt the irritation of disgust and fatigue of some, of alcohol among others, afterwards, we must sing.
Sing the ditty that fits the circumstance.
It’s a family from Bercy, former owner of a special cabaret for snobs and the neurotic near Clichy that has made up the words and the music.
It’s not so much the ignorant crowd that wants the song, it’s the leaders: the director Pouget forgets himself so much as to leave the wings. One has to sing to the people. And the woman, with a certain courage, incidentally, not caring about our more or less correct shouting, waits for the right moment to emit her note. One must live, after all.
We do all we can so as not to sing, fully understanding how ridiculous this graceless song is between these four walls, giving this struggle a soppy character... But in France everything ends in a song. And we stop, vanquished not by the force of these men, whose cunning masters, slipping slander in, order them to respect us, but rather by their thoughtlessness, their blindness, by the atmosphere of alcohol that we can no longer breathe.
And here is the final scene.
Lepine has given his police clique the order to hold itself back... To let this religious crowd enjoy its icon, its idol, its flag. The doorways are clear; the policemen are behind the metro worksites, waiting for the opportune moment.
The Labor Exchange, squeezed in between two houses, in this narrow corridor, is ugly. Its base is covered in posters, its upper floors are slashed by a red band with gold lettering for 1906. A red flag with a black crepe (colors authorized by the law) recalls the tragedy of Limoges. Nothing is missing; neither the hosanna, nor the remembrance of the martyrs.
They’re going to raise the red flag at the window! The ditty was good, but the sight of the icon...that’s sublime! I look and I see once again... the scenes where to the cry of “God wills it,” brandishing the cross, the Peter the Hermits led the crowd to their death. Only here the preachers chew their tobacco and let the crowd leave on their own...In any event, the crowd’s enthusiasm is only on the surface.
A large mass heads toward the red flag, and a “Ca Ira,” broken up with hiccups, can be heard... It’s pure delirium.
The cops!
The anger calms. The honest worker reappears... and flees, followed by the policemen’s boots.
The comedy is over... They have to disperse and the crowd flees, hiccupping and stumbling, while exasperated comrades, wanting to resist orders and shoves, shout “anarchy” in the face of the police workers as a challenge.
And in the distance...the cabarets, the bars, the thousand tentacles of that terrible octopus, alcohol, suck out and breathe in all this worker blood.
It’s the holiday of the organized proletariat.
It’s May Day.
** To the Electoral Cattle
Under the impetus of interested individuals the political committees are opening the awaited era of electoral quarrels.
As usual, they will insult each other, slander each other, fight each other.
Blows will be exchanged for the benefit of third thieves, always ready to profit from the stupidity of the crowd.
Why will you go for this?
You live with your kids in unhealthy lodgings. You eat — when you can — food adulterated by the greed of traffickers. Exposed to the ravages of alcoholism and tuberculosis, you wear yourself out from morning to night at a job that is always imbecilic and useless and that you don’t even profit from. The next day you start over again, and so it goes till you die.
Is it then a question of changing all this?
Are they going to give you the means of realizing a flourishing existence, you and your comrades? Are you going to be able to come and go, eat, drink, breathe without constraint, love with joy, rest, enjoy scientific discoveries and their application, decreasing your efforts, increasing your well-being. Are you finally going to live without disgust or care the large life, the intense life?
No, say the politicians proposed for your suffrage. This is only a distant ideal...You must be patient...You are many, but you should also become conscious of your might so as to abandon it into the hands of your ‘saviors’ once every four years.
But what will they do in their turn?
Laws! What is the law? The oppression of the greater number by a coterie claiming to <em>represent</em> the majority.
In any event, error proclaimed by the majority doesn’t become true, and only the unthinking bow before a legal lie.
The truth cannot be determined by vote.
He who votes accepts to be beaten.
So why then are there laws? Because there is property.
So it is from the prejudice of property that all our miseries, all our pain, flow.
So those who suffer from it have an interest in destroying property, and so the law.
<em>The only logical means of suppressing laws is not to make them.</em>
Who makes laws? Parliamentary arrivistes.
On closer analysis, it is thus not a handful of rulers who crush us, but the thoughtlessness, the stupidity, of the herd of those sheep of Panurge who constitute the electoral cattle.
We will fight without cease for the conquest of “immediate happiness” by remaining partisans of the only scientific method and by proclaiming together with our abstentionist comrades:
<em>The voter — that is the enemy!</em>
And now, to the voting urns, cattle.
** Fear
The bourgeois were frightened!!! The bourgeois felt pass over them the wind of riot, the breath of revolt, and they feared the hurricane, the storm that would unleash those with unsatisfied appetites on their too well garnished tables.
The bourgeois were frightened!!!
The bourgeois, fat and tranquil, beatific and peaceful, heard the horrifying grumble of the painful and poor digestion of the thin, the rachitic, the unsatisfied. The Bellies heard the rumblings of the Arms, who refused to bring them their daily pittance.
The bourgeois were frightened!!!
The bourgeois gathered together their piles of money, their titles; they hid in holes from the claws of the destroyers, the bourgeois stored their movable property, and they then looked around to see where to hide themselves. The big city wasn’t very safe with all those threats in the air. And the countryside wasn’t either...chateaus were being burned down there when the evening came.
The bourgeois were frightened! A fear that gripped their bellies, their stomachs, their throats, without any means of attenuating this presenting itself.
And so the bourgeois put barricades of steel and blood up in front of the workers, cemented with blood and flesh. They tried to be joyful at seeing the little infantrymen and the heavy dragoons parade before their windows. They swooned before the handsome Republican Guards and the fine cavalrymen. And still, fear invaded their being. They were frightened.
That fear seemed to have something of remorse in it. One could believe that the bourgeois felt the logic of the acts that included everyone and everything that they alone had possessed up till then.
The bourgeois were afraid that suddenly, in a great movement, the two sides of the scale that had always inclined in the direction of their desires would suddenly be balanced. They believed the moment for disgorgement had finally come. Since their lives were made of the deaths of other men they believed that on this day the lives of others would be made of their deaths.
O anguished dream! The bourgeois were frightened, really frightened!!
But the hurricane passed over their heads and Bellies and didn’t kill. The lightning rods of sabers and rifles sufficed for the few gusts that blew forgotten over society.
The worker again took up his labor. He again bent his back over the daily task. Today like yesterday, the slave prepares his master’s swill.
The hurricane has passed...the bourgeois have little by little raised their heads. They looked upon their faces convulsed with fear...and they laughed. But their laugh was a snigger; their laugh was a bark.
Since he didn’t know how to do his work himself, the hyenas and jackals were going to fall on the lion, caught in the trap of his ignorance and confidence.
The females who, in 1871, poked out the eyes of communards with their parasols, have had children. These children are now in the magistracy, in the administration, in the army. They wear the kepi or the robe, they kill by the Code, regulations, or the sword, they kill without pity.
The bourgeois were frightened!!!
They are taking revenge for having been frightened!!! Like a club, the jackhammer of justice is descending on the vanquished. The Magnauds and the Bulots, the Séré de Rivières and the Bridoisons, all of them are in agreement in striking the troublemakers.
Never have those who do not labor been overcome by such respect for those who labor. The hindrances to the freedom to work have been struck with months and month of prison. Men have been condemned until the healing of their wounds, children to reform schools, and adolescents to the slammer. Those who reason must be put down.
The bourgeois were frightened!!!
But those who must be struck the hardest are the enemies of all the bourgeois, the reactionary bourgeois and the socialist bourgeois: the anarchists.
Other men are vanquished by the weight of their own ignorance; it will still be quite a while before they free themselves from their foolishness. But the anarchists are vanquished by the ignorance and the passivity of others, so they work every day to instruct them, to make rebels of them. It is thus they who are the danger; it is they who must be struck.
The bourgeois want to avenge themselves, but they are cowards and so it is the bystanders they strike. They fear the might of anarchist logic and they know that the sophistry of their reasoning will burst like soap bubbles in the sun. They can crush us with the dead weight of the brutal force of number, but they know that we will always win in reason’s combat.
“That man had an anarchist paper in his pocket! — That one had pamphlets on sociology. — That one had needles on him.” And they strike even harder whoever dares read anything but <em>La Croix</em>, <em>La Petite République</em>, or <em>Le Petit Journal</em>.
Why don’t you strike the authors, the publishers of these publications? Are they untouchable, above all laws, or are you afraid of finding yourselves confronting the truth, viscous Berengers of politics?
Bourgeois, you were frightened!!!
And it was nothing but a shadow that passed across the heaven of your beatitude. But be on your guard: you will only see the storm that will swallow you up when it will be imminent. It will only be announced by tiny lightning bolts. It will surge around you and you will be no more.
Bourgeois, you experience the frisson of fear, and you are savoring the joy of revenge...but don’t be in such a hurry to celebrate. Don’t exaggerate too greatly the reprisals of your victory, for the upcoming revolt could very well not leave you the time to be frightened...
The bourgeois were frightened!!!
** Down with the Law!
The anarchists find to be logically consistent <em>with their ideas</em> M. de La Rochefoucauld and all those who protest without worrying about legality,” Anna Mahé tells us.
This is obviously not exact, as I am going to show.
All that is needed is one word to travesty the meaning of a phrase, and so the two words underlined suffice to entirely change the meaning of the one I quote.
If Anna Mahé was the leader of a great newspaper she would hasten to accuse the typographers or the proofreader of the phrase and everything would be for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
Or else she would think it wise to maintain an idea that isn’t a manifestation of her reasoning, but rather the act of her pen running away with itself.
But on the contrary, she thinks that it is necessary, especially in these lead articles that are viewed as anarchist, to make the fewest errors possible and for us to point them out ourselves when we take note of them.
It is to me that this falls today.
The Catholics, the socialists, all those who accept at a given moment the voting system, are not logical with themselves when they rebel against the consequences of a law, when they demonstrate against its agents, its representatives. Only the anarchists are authorized, are logically consistent with their ideas when they act against the law.
When a man deposits his ballot in the urn he is not using a means of persuasion that comes from free examination or experience. He is executing the mechanical operation of counting those who are ready to choose the same delegates as he, to consequently make the same laws, to establish the same regulations that all men must submit to. In casting his vote he says: “I trust in chance. The name that will come from this urn will be that of my legislator. I could be on the side of the majority, but I have the chance of being on the side of the minority. More the better, and too bad.”
After having come to agreement with other men, having decided that they will all defer to the mechanical judgment of number, there is on the part of those who are the minority, when they don’t accept the laws and regulations of the majority, a feeling of being fooled similar to that of a bad gambler, who wants very much to win, but who doesn’t want to lose.
Those Catholics who decided for the laws of exception of 1893–4 through the means of a majority are in no position to rebel when, by means of the same majority, the laws of separation are decided.
Those socialists who want to decide by means of the majority in favor
the laws on workers retirements are in no position to rebel against the same majority when it decides on some law that goes against their interests.
All parties who accept suffrage, however universal it might be, as the basis for their means of action cannot revolt as long as they are left the means of affirming themselves by the ballot.
Catholics, in general, are in this situation. The gentlemen in question in the late battles were “great electors,” able to vote in Senatorial elections, some were even parliamentarians. Not only had some voted and sought to be the majority in the Chambers that prepare the laws, but the others had elaborated that law, had discussed its terms and articles.
Thus being parliamentarists, voters, the Catholics weren’t logical with themselves during their revolt.
The socialists are no more so. They speak constantly of social revolution, and they spend all their time in puerile voting gestures in the perpetual search for a legal majority.
To accept the tutelage of the law yesterday, reject it today, take it up again tomorrow, this is the way Catholics, socialists, parliamentarists in general act. It is illogical.
None of their acts has a logical relation with that of the day before, no more than that of tomorrow will have one with that of today.
Either we accept the law of majorities or we don’t accept it. Those who inscribe it in their program and seek to obtain the majority are illogical when they rebel against it.
This is how it is. But when Catholics or socialists revolt we don’t search for acts of yesterday; we don’t worry about those that will be carried out tomorrow, we peacefully look on as the law is broken by its manufacturers.
It will be up to us to see to it that these days don’t reoccur.
So the anarchists alone are logical in revolt.
The anarchists don’t vote. They don’t want to be the majority that commands; they don’t accept being the minority that obeys.
When they rebel they have no need of breaking any contract: they never accept tying their individuality to any government of any kind.
They alone, then, are rebels held back by no ties, and each of their violent gestures is in relation to their ideas, logical with their reasoning.
By demonstration, by observation, by experience or, lacking these, by force, by violence, these are the means by which the anarchists want to impose themselves. By majority, by the law, never!
** Weak Meat
We in Paris, almost without our knowledge, were threatened with a great revolution.
We were threatened with great perturbations in sales from the slaughterhouses of La Villette.
A few snatches of reasons for this reached indiscrete ears. Hoof and mouth was spoken of. But what is this alongside other reasons, ones we should be ignorant of.
Only dead meat should leave the slaughterhouses of the city, and only living meat should enter.
But go see. Beasts enter, pulled on, pushed against. They must enter alive, with a breath, only a breath, a nothing.
And the contaminated carrion is sold, served to the faubourgs of Paris from Menilmontant to Montrouge, from Belleville to La Chapelle.
Go, workers of the slaughterhouses, defend your “rights.” Go, butcher boys, defend “your own.” You must continue to slaughter, to serve poisoned meat.
Go beef drivers, turn and return your fever-bearing meats, from the Beauce to Paris, from Paris to all the workers from the north, the west, and the east? Go ahead, come to Paris, contaminate your animals or bring here the poison contracted elsewhere.
What do evil gestures, useless gestures, poisonous gestures matter? One must live. And to work is to poison, to pillage, to steal, to lie to other men. Work means adulterating drinks, manufacturing cannons, slaughtering and serving slices of poisoned meat.
Working means the rotten meat that surrounds us, that meat that should be slaughtered and pushed into the sewers.
** The Cult of Carrion
In a desire for eternal life, men have considered death as a passage, as a painful step, and they have bowed before its “mystery” to the point of veneration.
Even before men knew how to work with stone, marble, and iron in order to shelter the living, they knew how to fashion matter to honor the dead.
Churches and cloisters richly wrapped their tombs under their apses and choirs, while huts were huddled against their sides, miserably sheltering the living.
The cult of the dead has, from the first moments, hindered the forward march of man. It is the original sin, the dead weight, the iron ball that humanity drags along behind it.
The voice of death, the voice of the dead, has always thundered against the voice of universal life, which is ever evolving.
Jehovah, who Moses’ imagination made burst forth from Sinai, still dictates his laws. Jesus of Nazareth, dead for almost twenty centuries, still preaches his morality. Buddha, Confucius, and Lao Tzu’s wisdom still reign. And how many others!
We bear the heavy responsibility of our ancestors; we have their defects and their qualities.
So in France we are the children of the Gauls, though we are French via the Francs and of the Latin race when it comes to the eternal hatred of the Germans. Each of these heredities brings with it obligations.
We are the oldest children of the church by virtue of who knows which dead, and also the grandchildren of the Great Revolution. We are citizens of the Third Republic and we are also devoted to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. We are born Catholics or Protestants, republicans or royalists, rich or poor. We are always what we are through the dead; we are never ourselves. Our eyes, placed atop our heads, look ahead and, however much they lead us forward, it is always towards the ground where our dead repose, towards the past where the dead lived that our education allows us to guide them.
Our ancestors...the past...the dead...
Whole peoples have died from this triple respect.
China is exactly where it was thousands of years ago because it has guarded the first place in their homes for their dead.
Death is not only a germ of corruption due to the chemical disintegration of man’s body, poisoning the atmosphere; it is even more the case because of the consecration of the past, the immobilization of the idea at a certain stage of evolution. Living, it would have evolved, would have been more advanced. Dead, it crystallizes. Yet it is this precise moment that the living choose to admire it, in order to sanctify it, to deify it.
Usages and custom, ancestral errors are communicated from one person to another in the family. One believes in the god of his fathers, another respects the fatherland of his ancestors...Why don’t we respect their lighting system, their way of dressing?
Yes, this strange fact is produced that while the externals and the daily economy improve, change, are differentiated, that while everything dies and is transformed, man, man’s spirit, remains in the same servitude, is mummified in the same errors.
Just as in the century of the torch, in the century of electricity, man still believes in tomorrow’s paradise, in the gods of vengeance and forgiveness, in hells and Valhallas as a way of respecting the ideas of his ancestors. The dead lead us, the dead command us, the dead take the place of the living.
All our festivals, all our glorifications are the anniversaries of deaths and massacres. We celebrate All Saints’ Day to glorify the saints of the church, the Feast of the Dead so as not to forget a single dead man. The dead go to Olympus or paradise, to the right of Jupiter or God. They fill “immaterial” space and they encumber “material” space with their corteges, their displays, and their cemeteries. If nature didn’t take it upon itself to disintegrate their bodies and to disperse their ashes, the living wouldn’t today know where to place their feet in the vast necropolis that would be the earth.
The memory of the dead, their acts and deeds, obstruct the brains of children. We only talk to them about the dead, we should only speak to them about this. We make them live in the realm of the unreal and the past. They must know nothing of the present.
If secularism has dropped the story of Mr. Noah or that of Mr. Moses, it has replaced it with those of Mr. Charlemagne or Mr. Capet. Children know the date of death of Madame Feregonde, but don’t have the least notion about hygiene. Some young girls of fifteen know that in Spain a certain Madame Isabelle spent an entire century wearing one blouse, but are strangely upset when their first menstrual period comes.
Some women, who have the chronology of the kings of France at the tip of their fingers without a single mistake don’t know what to do with a child who cries out for the first time in its life.
While we leave a young girl next to he who is dying, who is in his final throes, we push her away from she whose belly is opening to life.
The dead obstruct cities, streets, and squares. We meet them in marble, in stone, in bronze. This inscription tells us of their birth, and that plaque tells us where they lived. Squares bear their titles or those of their exploits. Street names don’t indicate their position, form, altitude or location; they speak of Magenta or Solferino, an exploit of the dead where many were killed. They recall to you Saint Eleuthere or the Chevalier de la Barre; men, incidentally, whose only quality was that of dying.
In economic life it is also the dead who trace the lives of all. One sees his entire life darkened by his father’s “crime,” another wears the halo of the glory, the genius, the daring of his forefathers. This one is born a bumpkin with the most distinguished of spirits, that one is born noble with the most vulgar of spirits. We are nothing through ourselves; we are everything through our ancestors.
And yet...in the eyes of scientific criticism, what is death? This respect for the departed, this cult of decrepitude, by what argument can it be justified?
Few have asked this, and this is why the question is not resolved.
And in the center of cities, don’t we see great spaces that the living piously maintain: these are cemeteries, the gardens of the dead.
The living find it good to bury, right next to their children’s cradles, piles of decomposing flesh, carrion, the nutritive element of all maladies, the breeding ground of all infections.
They consecrate great spaces planted with magnificent trees and depose typhoid-ridden, pestilential, anthracic bodies there, one or two meters deep. And after a few days the infectious viruses roam the city seeking other victims.
Men who have no respect for their living organism, that they wear out, that they poison, that they put at risk, are suddenly taken with a comic respect for their mortal remains when they should be rid of them as soon as possible, put them in the least cumbersome, the most usable form.
The cult of the dead is one of the most vulgar aberrations of the living. It’s a holdover from those religions that promised paradise. The dead must be prepared for the visit of the beyond: give them weapons so they can participate in the hunts of Velleda, some food for the trip, give them the high viaticum, prepare them to present themselves to God. Religions depart, but their ridiculous formulas remain. The dead take the place of the living.
Whole groups of workingmen and women employ their abilities and energy at maintaining the cult of the dead. Men dig up the earth, carve stone and marble, forge grilles, prepare a house for all of them in order to respectfully bury in them the syphilitic carrion that has just died.
Women weave the shroud, make artificial flowers, fashion bouquets to decorate the house where in the pile a just-ended tubercular decomposition will repose. Instead of hastening to make these loci of decomposition disappear, of using all the speed and hygiene possible to destroy these evil centers whose preservation and maintenance can only spread death around them, everything possible is done to preserve them as long as possible. These mounds of flesh are paraded around in special wagons, in hearses, through the roads and the streets. When they pass, men remove their hats. They respect the dead.
The amount of effort and matter expended by humanity in maintaining the cult of the dead is inconceivable. If all this force were used to receive children then thousands and thousands of them would be spared illness and death.
If this imbecilic respect for the dead were to disappear and make room for respect for the living, we would increase the health and happiness of human life in unimaginable proportions.
Men accept the hypocrisy of necrophages, of those who eat the dead, of those who live off the dead; from the priest, giver of sacred water, to the merchant of eternal homes; from the wreath seller to the sculptor of mortuary angels. With ridiculous boxes that lead and accompany these grotesque puppets, we proceed to the removal of this human detritus and its distribution in accordance with the state of their fortune, when a good transport service, with hermetically sealed cars and a crematory oven constructed in keeping with the latest scientific discoveries would suffice.
I will not concern myself with the use of ashes, though it would seem to me more interesting to use them as humus rather then carrying them around in little boxes. Men complain about work, yet they don’t want to simplify those gestures that overly complicate occasions of their existence, not even to do away with those for the imbecilic — as well as dangerous — preservation of their cadavers. The anarchists have too much respect for the living to respect the dead. Let us hope that some day this outdated cult will have become a road management service, and that the living will know life in all its manifestations.
As we’ve already said, it is because men are ignorant that they surround a phenomenon as simple as death with such religious mumbo jumbo. It also worth noting that this is only the case with human death: the death of other animals and vegetables doesn’t serve as the occasion for similar demonstrations.
Why?
The first men, barely evolved brutes, devoid of all knowledge, buried the dead man with his living wife, his weapons, his furniture, his jewels. Others had the corpse appear before a tribunal to ask him to give an account of his life. Man has always misunderstood the true meaning of death.
And yet, in nature everything that lives dies. Every living organism falls when for one reason or another the equilibrium between its different functions is broken. The causes of death, the ravages of the illness or the accident that caused the death of the individual, are scientifically determined.
From the human point of view then, there is death, disappearance of life, that is, the cessation of a certain activity in a certain form.
But from the general point of view death doesn’t exist. There is only life. After what we call death the transformative phenomena continue. Oxygen, hydrogen, gas, and minerals depart in different forms and associate in new combinations and contribute to the existence of other living organisms. There is no death; there is a circulation of bodies, modifications in the aspect of matter and energy, endless continuation in time and space of life and universal activity.
<em>A dead man is a body returned to circulation in a triple form: solid, liquid, and gaseous. It is nothing but this, and we should consider and treat it as such.</em>
It is obvious that these positive and scientific concepts leave no room for weepy speculations on the soul, the beyond, the void.
But we know that all those religions that preach the “future life” and the “better world” have as their goals causing resignation among those who are despoiled and exploited.
Rather than kneeling before cadavers it would be better to organize life on better foundations so as to get a maximum amount of joy and wellbeing from it.
People will be angered by our theories and our disdain: this is pure hypocrisy on their part. The cult of the dead is nothing but an insult to true pain. The fact of maintaining a small garden, of dressing in black, of wearing crepe doesn’t prove the sincerity of one’s sorrow. This latter, incidentally, must disappear. Individuals should react before the irrevocability and the inevitability of death. We should fight against suffering instead of exhibiting it, parading it in grotesque cavalcades and false congratulations.
This one, who respectfully follows a hearse, had the day before worked furiously at starving the deceased; that one laments behind a cadaver who did nothing to come to his assistance when it would have been possible to save his life. Every day capitalist society spreads death by its poor organization, by the poverty it creates, by the lack of hygiene, the deprivation and ignorance from which individuals suffer. By supporting such a society men are thus the cause of their own suffering, and instead of moaning before destiny they would do better to work at improving their conditions of existence so as to allow human life its maximum of development and intensity.
How could we know life when the dead alone lead it?
How can we live in the present under the tutelage of the past?
If man wants to live, let him no longer have any respect for the dead, let him abandon the cult of carrion. The dead block the road to progress for the living.
We must tear down the pyramids, the tumuli, the tombs. We must bring the wheelbarrows into the cemeteries so as to rid humanity of what they call respect for the dead, but which is the cult of carrion.
** The Patriotic Herd
To the barracks! To the barracks! Go, young man of twenty years, mechanics and teachers, masons and draftsmen, stretch out on the bed… on Procrustes’ bed. You are too short… we are going to stretch you out. You are too tall… we are going to shorten you up. Here, this is the barracks… nobody gets smart here, nobody shows off… all are equal, all are brothers… Brothers in what? In stupidity and obedience, of course. Ah! ah! Your body, your head, your form! Who cares about that? Your sentiments, your tastes, your tendencies go down the drain. It’s for the fatherland… so they tell you.
You are no longer a man, you are a sheep. You are in the barracks to serve the fatherland. If you don’t know what that is, too bad for you. Anyway you don’t need to know. You only need to obey. Look right. Look left. Fall into line. Rest. Eat! Drink! Sleep! Ah! You speak of your initiative, your will. Don’t know it here. There is only discipline. What! What are you saying? Someone taught you to reason, to discuss, to form an opinion about men and things? Here, you button it, you shut your mouth. You do not have, you should not have, other concerns or opinions other than your bosses’. You don’t want to, you cannot follow anyone but those whom you have recognized as authority resulting from experience? No joking here, young man. You have a mechanical means for knowing who to obey… Count the gold stripes on the sleeve of a dolman.[3]
So what’s your problem? They taught you to not have idols, to adore nothing? No matter, bend down, kiss the ground, be respectful to the symbol of the fatherland, the idol of the 20th century, the democratic icon. That, my friend, is the republican form of Joan of Arc’s standard. So, check your mind, you intelligence, your will at the door… You are a part of the herd… they only ask for you wool… Enter… and stop thinking. To the barracks! To the barracks!
The army, I said recently, is not raised against an exterior enemy; the army is not raised against an interior enemy; the army is raised against ourselves; against our will, our “me.” The army is the revenge of the crowd against the individual, of the numbers against the single. The army is not the school of crime; the army is not the school of debauchery, or if it is, that’s the last of its faults; the army is the school of spinelessness, the school of emasculation.
Despite the family, despite school, despite the workshop, there is still a little personality in every man; from time to time movements arise in reaction against the milieu. The army, whose locale is the barracks, comes to annihilate the individual. The twenty year old man has the strong virility that allows him to dedicate himself to the development of an idea. He does not have the fetters of habit, the watering down of the home, the weight of years. He can push his logic to the point of revolt. He has, within himself, the lifeblood needed to make the buds burst and the flowers blossom. At the bend in the road comes the ambush of the fatherland, the army pitfall, the mousetrap barracks. Then, all faculties are obstructed. Thinking must stop. Reading must stop. Writing must stop. And in no case can there be any will. From head to toe, your body belongs to the army. You no longer choose a hairstyle nor the shoes that you would like. You no longer wear clothing that is roomy or loose around the waist. You no longer go to bed when you get tired… There is one regulation shoe, one regulation haircut, one regulation style of clothing. Bread is made in communal batches and your break time has been set for years. What’s that? A case of endurance?
But there’s worse… in the streets you don’t speak with whom you’d like! You don’t go to the place you want! You don’t read the papers you’re interested in! Your visits, your meetings and your readings are all subject to regulations! And if by chance you have sexual problems, there is a whorehouse for the soldiers and one for the officers, as there are also different places to drink alcohol.
Everything is regulated, everything is planned out. The individual is assassinated. Initiative is dead. The barracks are the stables for the patriotic herd. From them come herds ready to become the electoral herds. The army is the formidable instrument raised by governments against individuals; the barracks is the channeling of the human forces of the all for the benefit of the few. You enter a man, become a soldier, exit a citizen.
** The Greater of Two Thieves
Every day, every hour, without rest nor remittance; the battle of life. A hor rible battle if so, where the cadavers pile up, the wounded number in themillions. Battle of Life for life. Battle against the elements, battle against the self. Battle against other humans. Battle of those who are rich and those who aren’t. Battle of those who have against those who don’t. Battle of the future against the past, of science against ignorance.
Right now, in Amiens, it seems to be taking a more cruel form, which makes it more noticeable to everybody.
Two groups of individuals are grappling with one another. One of them seems to have achieved victory. It no longer fights, it judges. It has named delegates who put on uniforms and decorate themselves with special names: gendarmes, judges, soldiers, prosecutors, jurors. But nobody’s fooled; everybody knows the usual collaborators of the social war: thieves, counterfeiters, assassins, depending on the situation.
Securely held, the members of the other gang face them. They are there, in person. They did not send delegates. One has the sense that they are bound but not defeated. And when they shake their heads, the delegates and the spectators cower.
Those of the first gang call this process bringing justice and say they are prosecuting crime. Everyone sees that it isn’t remorse that leads their enemies, but handcuffs. And the debate begins. They are two terrible gangs and their organizations strike fear. To think of all the spirit lost in the subtleties and the ruses of these fighters. What improvements of the fate of each and every person would come out of their combined efforts. What steps forward science could have made with all of these brains preoccupied with falsifying to survive.
This notion comes to us in thinking about those strong and energetic minds who are, for the moment, defeated. The others, the delegates, crystallized in their beatitude and trembling with fear, have pathetically mediocre mugs. They and those who they represent have chosen violence and theft, trickery, lies; they are shopkeepers, soldiers, gendarmes, judges, preachers, out of personal interest and vocation. They are the people who stop the march of science and beauty so as to continue the reign of ignorance and ugliness. To them laziness is a virtue and it’s to avoid moving their arms and for the sacred cult of their stomach that they kill, steal, rape, and cheat. Those of the other gang, thieves without hypocrisy, burglars without laziness, they did not voluntarily choose their mode of living. Pirates, corsairs, they sought to bring balance to unfair deals. And they did it with such spirit! Not like the act of a policeman on a street corner robbing a man who got drunk on one glass of wine after the week’s abstinence, or of a bailiff taking a laborer’s last set of sheets, or the officer setting aside hungry men’s rations for himself, or the great dukes stealing dressings from the wounded, or the administrators of the Congo preparing the negro [sic] bouillon.[4] It’s not to the weaker, the poorer, that they extend their hands, it’s to the powerful and the rich. You can look. They don’t forget it in the poor-houses, perhaps for a practical reason, but also because they did not want to just live; they also wanted to destroy.
The people of the Little Gang are anarchists. They aren’t thieves because they are anarchists. Not anarchists because they are thieves. They are one and the other, they could have been one and the other.
To steal, to burgle, this is not to perform an act for anarchism nor against anarchy. It’s a personal act, a way to make a living, just as disgusting and useless as that of a laceworker, a sign painter, a broker, an accountant, a gunsmith, a safemaker, etc. And it’s not because they are thieves that the people of the Abbeville gang[5] interest me but because they are anarchists.
I am against the big gang, against respectable society because it wants to live in an inveterate state of laziness and uselessness; because it willfully continues to waste human strength and products of the land; because through a special pleasure in neurotics, the sick, it continues to make thousands of men, women and children die of starvation, work and tuberculosis, and that these tortures seem to bring them pleasure. Lazy or useless, they are judges, guardians of the peace, shopkeepers, inspectors, administrators, and never has useful work come out of their ten fingers. They have not made the bread that they eat, nor the chateaux in which they live, nor the clothing they wear, nor the cars in which they ride. So what they live on – they have stolen.
I am for those of the little gang, the gang of burglars from Abbeville, because I feel that these men are ready to do what is necessary when given the opportunity. They aren’t thieves out of laziness or by choice, but by obligation. They didn’t want to starve to death. They could have set out to become stock traders and shopkeepers, and stolen in peace; or cops and prison wards, and knocked people out without trouble; or officers and industrialists, and killed without risk. But they didn’t want to support the present society. They got together to live by burglary, with the hope, perhaps mistaken, that it would bring about a disruption in its organization.
In another society, Jacob and his friends could usefully employ themselves. Few could doubt this, given their skill, their knowledge, their strength, and their courage. Their hands know labor, and with what ardor, I am convinced, they would work usefully, earn their own bread and some for the weak around them. Jacob’s accomplices could live in any well-organized society; their competence would find a useful outlet.
But I wonder what to do with the Wehekinds and the Regnaults, the Macques and all of those of the caste whose hands have never done anything but raised a plate to their traps, and whose brain masturbates themselves with the search for decrees, laws, and lies to keep their disintegrating society together.
So, what to do with them, what to do with them, maybe use them as a scarecrow in the fields…
In the current society, they are something special, according to the stupidity of those who produce, but may they not take on these airs; show rather that they can only be, in the great association of thieves of which they are put, anything but sheep lying in wait for the dying and the insane.
** To Our Friends Who Stop
Under different titles, on behalf of many comrades here, the same lament gets repeated: “Whats happening to the anarchists?” It’s the echo of other equally respectable laments: “What’s happening to the fatherland?”, “What’s happening to the French?”, “What’s happening to the family?,” What’s happening to us?”, “What’s happening to the religious spirit?” A respectable refrain that is translated for simple people: “Alas! Our times!”
The people who have fallen asleep or become petrified, no longer recognizing themselves — or better, no longer recognizing the surrounding environment that has slowly but surely changed — begin to shriek: “Watch out, danger, danger,” exactly as one of our grandparents might have done upon seeing the electric streetcar.
Relax, my friends, there is no danger in delay. Wake up. Rouse yourselves. Anarchism is not dead. It is alive, and therefore it transforms itself.
For some, anarchy may be, at most, a split with revolutionary socialism.
It can be granted that when this idea was launched, it was nothing else. But nowadays it is something else.
A new philosophy has freed itself from all the old philosophies, a living philosophy from dead philosophies: Lao-Tse and Epictetus, Confucius and Epicurus, Rabelais and Pascal, Fourier and Proudhon, Marx and Bakunin, Stirner and Nietzsche — not to mention the works of creation and adaptation of still living minds — have all cooperated in providing it with a form that every individual can comprehend.
All the encyclopedists, with Diderot in the lead, all the critics of the old regime, Voltaire, Rousseau, all the authentic destroyers of religion: the priest Meslier,[6] Volney, Dupuis, have contributed their critiques to it.
Scholars all offer their support to its science, and if they don’t yet live it socially, they still live it in their laboratories when they apply its method of free examination in their research. Thus,whether they like it or not, every one of their discoveries increases the strength of this philosophy and overturns the authority of routine.
We want to put this philosophy, this knowledge that I say makes everything rise back up to the individual, finally giving him the place that he deserves, into practice. We intend to make it come out of the books to which it has been confined, out of the academic seats where it was taught only to the privileged, out of the laboratories in which it was reduced to pure experimentation, so that we can hurl it onto the multiform terrain of life, at grips with individuals in the field of experience that is the world.
** Albert Libertad: A Biography
Libertad was brought up in an orphan school, the abandoned son of a local Prefect and an unknown woman, and went to secondary school in Bordeaux. A job was found for him, but he was soon dismissed and sent back to the Childrens’ Home from which he absconded and took to the road as a <em>trimardeur</em> or tramp. This probably brought him his first contact with anarchists, as tramps often lodged at anarchist-run labour exchanges — the <em>Bourses du Travail</em>, where they might be given popular revolutionary songsheets to sell on their travels at two centimes apiece.
Libertad made his way north from Bordeaux and arrived in Paris in 1897 at the age of twenty-two. Marked down for his anarchist opinions, he had already been under surveillance for three years — over the next ten his police record was to accumulate paper to a thickness of three inches.
In the capital he stayed on the premises of <em>Le Libertaire</em> and worked on the paper for several years; he also collaborated on the pro-Dreyfusard daily <em>Le Journal du Peuple</em> launched by Sébastien Faure and Emile Pouget. He was not yet of the individualist persuasion, although it was probably here that he encountered individualist ideas.
In 1900 Libertad found work with a regular publishing company as a proofreader (still a favourite job among Parisian anarchists, due to the high pay and flexible hours) and stayed there until 1905, joining the Union. In the same year, after speaking at a public meeting in Nanterre, he met Paraf-Javal and in October of 1902 they set up the <em>Causeries Populaires</em>.
Rapidly Libertad accumulated convictions — for vagrancy, insulting behavior and shouting “Down with the Army!,” the latter deemed more serious than [Libertad’s previous outburst] disturbing the Pax Dei, as he received three months in prison.
Now in his late twenties, bearded but already balding, Libertad began a dynamic proselytization in Montmartre that was an extraordinarily powerful affirmation of anarchist individualism. Crippled in one leg, he carried two walking sticks (which he wielded very skillfully in fights) and habitually wore sandals and a large long-fitting typographer’s black shirt. One comrade said of him that he was a one-man demonstration, a latent riot; he was quickly a popular figure throughout Paris. His style of propaganda was summed up by Victor Serge as follows: “Don’t wait for the revolution. Those who promise revolution are frauds just like the others. Make your own revolution by being free men and living in comradeship.” His absolute commandment and rule of life was, “Let the old world go to blazes!” He had children to whom he refused to give state registration. “The State? Don’t know it. The name? I don’t give a damn, they’ll pick one that suits them. The law? To the devil with it!” He sung the praises of anarchy as a liberating force, which people could find inside themselves.
Libertad’s erstwhile cooperation with syndicalist militants was now coming to an end. In 1903 he and Paraf-Javal had formed the Antimilitarist League in association with some leading syndicalists, but this alliance fell apart. Libertad and Paraf-Javal saw desertion and draft-dodging as the best antimilitarist strategy, believing that if anarchists stayed in the army awaiting a revolutionary situation, they would very quickly all end up in military prisons or the African disciplinary battalions. The Congress of the International Antimilitarist Association (AIA) saw such a strategy as too individualistic, preferring soldiers to remain disaffected within their units so as to make the army as a whole less reliable. As a result, Libertad and Paraf-Javal left the Antimilitarist League and stepped up anti-syndicalist propaganda. A whole series of articles appeared that year in <em>Le Libertaire</em> against participation in elections, unions and cooperatives: all participation in power structures, even ‘alternative’ ones, was seen to reinforce the hierarchical system of power as a whole.
The <em>Causeries Populaires</em> now had a regular audience, but it was still of minimal size, and the only hope of reaching a wider public lay in publishing a regular paper that could continue in print the discussions of the ideas of Stirner, Nietzsche, Bakunin, George Sorel, and others, as well as arguing for a new revolutionary practice based on the self-realization of the individual.
Libertad and his two lovers, the schoolteacher sisters Anna and Amandine Mahé, and Paraf-Javal, now put their combined energies into founding an anarchist-individualist weekly. The first issue of <em>l’anarchie</em> appeared on 13th April 1905, and continued to appear every Thursday, without interruption, until it was suppressed with all the other revolutionary papers at the outbreak of war in 1914. Its title harked back to the first paper ever to adopt the anarchist label: Anselm Bellegarrigue’s L<em>’Anarchie: journal d’Ordre</em>, of which only two issues were produced (in 1850). His slogan had been, “I deny everything, I affirm only myself.” Libertad ended his first article with the battle-cry “Resignation is death. Revolt is life.”
There was a print run of 4000, although perhaps only half of that number were sold; readership figures are unknown. Financially it was maintained by voluntary donations to supplement the small income from street and bookshop sales; it probably also benefited from the occasional <em>reprise individuelle</em> – thefts carried out by comrades.
<em>L’anarchie</em> declared itself against resignation and conformity to the existing state of affairs, and particularly opposed vices, habits and prejudices such as work, marriage, military service, voting, smoking tobacco, drinking alcohol and the eating of meat. It exalted <em>l’endehors</em>, the outsider, and the <em>hors-la-loi</em>, outlaws. According to Lorulot its purpose was to work sincerely for ‘individual regeneration’ and the ‘revolution of the self.’ <em>L’anarchie</em>’s view of society was essentially as follows: firstly there were not two opposed classes, bourgeois and proletarian, but only individuals (although there were those who were for, and those who were against, society as it was presently constituted). The Master and the Slave were equally part of the system and mutually dependent, but the Rebel or <em>Revolte</em> could come originally from either category: their propaganda was addressed to anybody prepared to rise in revolt against existing society.
The <em>syndicats</em> or unions were seen simply as capitalist organizations which defended workers <em>as workers</em>; thus keeping them in a social role which it should have been the anarchist aim to destroy. To invest them with value only so long as they were workers had nothing to do with their own realization as individuals. The syndicalists were seen as unwitting tools of capitalism, whose practical reformism was only kept going by the myth of ‘The Revolution,’ an ideology which furnished the unions with militants for their present-day battles.
The individualists’ ideal was to live their lives as neither exploiter nor exploited — but how to do that in a society divided in this way? Their answer was for people to take direct action through the reprise individuelle, or in slang, <em>la reprise au tas</em> — taking back the whole heap.
A good part of 1906 was spent campaigning against the elections. Previously Libertad had stood as the ‘abstentionist’ candidate in the XIth <em>arrondissement</em>, but this time they relied on ‘interventions,’ posters and the paper. At one large socialist gathering in Nanterre the Socialist Deputy was almost thrown out of the window: many of the interventions by the anarchists ended up in fighting.
However, trouble was also brewing internally: Libertad and Paraf-Javal had argued, and the latter had taken control of the bookshop, setting up a ‘Scientific Studies Group.’ In February 1907 a police report noted that the two groups had fallen out and foresaw trouble in the future; the police were not to be disappointed.
For the time being, however, there was only trouble with the authorities. On Mayday Libertad, Jeanne Morand and another comrade called Millet were arrested for evading fares on the Metro and assaulting a ticket collector and a policeman; Millet was also charged with carrying a knuckleduster. Libertad spent a month in prison, but within two weeks of his release there was more serious trouble when it was decided to hold a Sunday evening <em>causerie en plein air</em>. It was a warm summer night and soon a reported two hundred people had gathered in the rue de la Barre on the heights of Montmartre. Some local traders complained about the noise and obstruction, and the police ordered the crowd to disperse. The anarchists refused and when police reinforcements were called, a pitched battle ensued leaving several wounded. The street was left littered with broken chairs, bottles and the usual strange debris of a crowd suddenly dispersed.
After that affair things seem to have remained comparatively quiet for the next year, until the summer season of interventions got under way. Syndicalist meetings were often the target this time, and the anarchist-individualists were definitely <em>persona non grata</em>. On one occasion, Libertad asked for the right to speak, but was refused and told that his group was not welcome. Fights broke out with the stewards and lasted for half an hour, until finally Libertad’s group stormed onto the platform and sent the syndicalists fleeing; the meeting broke up in disorder without Libertad being heard.
The conflict between Paraf-Javal’s group of ‘scientists’ and the <em>Causeries Populaires</em> comrades now came to a head. Paraf-Javal was already angry that his pamphlets were being sold at causeries and were not being paid for, when one of Libertad’s group, Henri Martin, Amandine Mahé’s new lover, stole some money from the bookstall at a meeting of the ‘Scientific Studies Group.’ At a subsequent meeting a brawl ensued between partisans of the two groups in which knives, knuckledusters and spiked wristbands were used. After this incident Paraf-Javal would only go out armed with a revolver and a dagger, but he preferred to stay at home writing a diatribe against Libertad’s group. The pamphlet <em>Evolution of a group under a bad influence</em> was greeted with anger and derision by anarchists everywhere, and effectively isolated his small clique. At the rue de la Barre, however, Libertad was also on his own, having fallen out with both the Mahé sisters, Jeanne Morand and Henri Martin. The DeBlasius brothers, who ran the print shop, had also had enough of the rue de la Barre, and at the instigation of Paraf-Javal they departed with some of the printing material and most of the pamphlets.
Just over two weeks later, on 29th September 1908, a detective of the Third Brigade included in his report the following: “...a few days ago there was a fighting between a well-known comrade, ‘Bernard,’ and Libertad inside the <em>Causeries Populaires</em> in the rue de la Barre. Libertad gave Bernard a serious blow to the head, and, covered in blood, the latter ran out towards rue Ramey. During the fight, one of the Mahé sisters kicked Libertad in the stomach to try and put a stop to it.” A week later Libertad was taken seriously ill to the nearby hospital, and eventually died in the early hours of the morning on 12th November.
There were rumours that he had died at the hands of the police on the steps of Montmartre, or that his death was due to ‘natural causes,’ but it seems (and this is substantiated by a later editor of <em>l’anarchie</em>) that the true cause was that kick in the stomach by his one-time lover.
He had fallen out with his erstwhile comrades to such an extent that they refused to view the body or claim it for burial. After the statutory seventy-two hours it was taken to the Ecole de Clamart medical school to be used in the furtherance of scientific research.
----
“Freedom” and “We Go On” taken from the Killing King Abacus site. “Obsession” from <em>Le Libertaire</em>, August 26, 1898. “The Joy of Life” taken from Historical Anarchist Texts. “Germinal, at the Wall of the Fédérés” from <em>Le Droit de Vivre</em>, no. 7, June 1–7, 1898. “To the Resigned” from <em>l’anarchie</em>, April 13, 1905. “May Day” from <em>l’anarchie</em>, May 4, 1905. “To the Electoral Cattle” written February 1906. “Fear” from <em>l’anarchie</em>, May 17, 1906. “Down with the Law” from <em>l’anarchie</em>, February 15, 1906. “Weak Meat” written August 2, 1906. “The Cult of Carrion” from a pamphlet published in 1925, taken from articles that originally appeared in <em>l’anarchie</em>. “The Patriotic Herd” from <em>l’anarchie</em>, October 26, 1905. “The Greater of Two Thieves” from <em>Germinal</em>, no. 11, March 19, 1905. “To Our Friends Who Stop” taken from <em>Disruptive Elements: The Extremes of French Anarchism</em>. “Albert Libertad: A Biography” from <em>The Bonnot Gang</em> by Richard Parry.
[1] Translation is missing a word. [Untorelli Press]
[2] The wall of the Fédérés is the site at Père Lachaise Cemetery where the Paris Commune made its last stand.
[3] military jacket
[4] One month before this issue of <em>Germinal</em>, Libertad would have read in Paris newspapers about a French official in the Congo making soup from the head of an African man, then serving it to indigenous guests of a feast. See Jean-Marc Nkouka-Menga’s <em>Chronique politique congolaise: Du nani-kongo à la guerre civile</em>. [tn.]
[5] The gang of Marius Jacob, anarchist burglar. For more information, see Bernard Thomas’s biography of Jacob.
[6] Jean Meslier (1664-1729) was a French priest who, for his own safety, kept his actual ideas hidden all his life. Upon his death a lengthy Testament that he had written was discovered in which he harshly denounced religion and presented a strong atheistic perspective which was to influence such people as Baron d’Holbach and Denis Diderot. [tn.]
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#title Spineless Meat
#author Albert Libertad
#SORTtopics anti-work, individualist anarchism
#date 2 August 1906
#source https://www.marxists.org/archive/libertad/1906/weak-meat.htm
#lang en
#pubdate 2020-06-15T22:59:48
We in Paris, almost without our knowledge, were threatened with a great revolution.
We were threatened with great perturbations in the slaughterhouses of La Villette.
A few snatches of reasons for this was allowed to reach indiscrete ears. Hoof and mouth was spoken of. But what is this alongside other reasons, ones we must know nothing of.
Only dead meat should leave the slaughterhouses of the city, and only living meat should enter.
But go see. Beasts enter, pulled on, pushed against. They must enter alive, with a breath, only a breath, hardly anything.
And the contaminated carrion is sold, served to the faubourgs of Paris from Menilmontant to Montrouge, from Belleville to La Chapelle.
Go, workers of the slaughterhouses, defend your “rights.” Go, butcher boys, defend “your own.” You must go on slaughtering, go on serving poisoned meat.
Go beef drivers, turn and re-turn your fever-bearing meats from the Beauce to Paris, from Paris to all the workers from the north, the west, and the east? Go ahead, come to Paris, contaminate your animals or bring here the poison contracted elsewhere.
What do evil gestures, useless gestures, poisonous gestures matter? One must live. And to work is to poison, to pillage, to steal, to lie to other men. Work means adulterating drinks, manufacturing cannons, slaughtering and serving slices of poisoned meat.
That’s what work means for the spineless meat that surrounds us, the meat that should be slaughtered and pushed into the sewers.
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#pubdate 2012-01-26 17:42:46 +0100
#author Albert Libertad
#SORTauthors Albert Libertad
#title The Joy of Life
#LISTtitle Joy of Life
#lang en
#SORTtopics life, joy, suicide, L’anarchie
#date 1907
#source Retrieved on 25 January 2012 from [[https://sites.google.com/site/historicalanarchisttexts/albert-libertad/the-joy-of-life][sites.google.com]]
#notes From <em>L'Anarchie</em>, April 25, 1907
Wearied by the struggle of life, how many close their eyes, fold their arms, stop short, powerless and discouraged. How many, and they among the best, abandon life as unworthy of continuance. With the assistance of some fashionable theories, and of a prevalent neurasthenia, some men have come to regard death as the supreme liberation.
To those who hold this view, society replies with the usual clichés.
It speaks of the “moral” purpose of life; argues that one has no right to kill himself, that “moral” sorrows must be borne courageously, that a man has duties, that the suicide is a coward or an “egoist”, etc. etc. All of these phrases are religious in tone; and none of them are of genuine significance in rational discussion.
What after all is suicide?
Suicide is the final act in a series of actions that we all tend to carry out, which arise from our reaction against our environment, or from that environment’s reaction against us.
Every day we commit suicide partially. I commit suicide when I consent to inhabit a dwelling where the sun never shines, a room where the ventilation is so inadequate that I feel like I am suffocated when I wake up.
I commit suicide when I spend hours on work that absorbs an amount of energy which I am not able to recapture, or when I engage in activity which I know to be useless.
I commit suicide whenever I enter into the barracks to obey men and laws that oppress me.
I commit suicide whenever I grant the right to govern me for four years to another individual through the act of voting.
I commit suicide when I ask a magistrate or a priest for permission to love.
I commit suicide when I do not reclaim my liberty as a lover, as soon as the time of love is past.
Complete suicide is nothing but the final act of total inability to react against the environment.
These acts, which I have called partial suicides, are no less truly suicidal.
It is because I lack the strength to react against society, that I inhabit a place without sun and air, that I do not eat in accordance with my hunger or my taste, that I am a soldier or a voter, that I subject my love to laws or compulsion.
Workers daily commit mental suicide by leaving the mind inactive, by not letting it live, as they kill within themselves their enjoyment of the arts of painting, sculpture, music, which offer some relief from the cacophony which surrounds them.
There can be no question of right or duty, of cowardice or of courage in relation to suicide; it is purely a material problem, of power or lack of power. One hears it said, “Suicide is a human right when it constitutes a necessity ...” Or again, “one cannot take the right of life and death away from the proletariat.”
Right? Necessity?
Shall one debate his <em>right</em> to breathe poorly, i.e., to kill most of the health-giving molecules to the advantage of the unhealthy ones? His <em>right</em> not to eat in accordance with his hunger, i.e., to kill his stomach? His right to obey, i.e., to murder his will? His right to love the woman designated by the law or chosen by the desire of one period forever, i.e., to slay all. the desires of days to come?
Or if we substitute the word “necessity” for the word “right” in these phrases, do we thereby make them the more logical?
I do not intend to “condemn” these partial suicides more than definitive suicides; but it seems to me pathetically comical to describe as right or necessity this surrender of the weak before the strong — and a surrender made without having tried everything. Such expressions are merely excuses one clings to.
All suicides are imbecilities, total suicide more than the others, since it is possible to bring oneself out of the partial forms.
It would seem that at the moment of the departure of the individual, all energy might be focused on a single point of reaction against the environment, even with a thousand to one chance of failure in the effort. This seems still more necessary and natural in view of the fact that one leaves those one loves behind. For this part of one’s self, this portion of the energy of which one consists, cannot one engage in a gigantic struggle, however unequal the combat, capable of shaking up the colossal Authority?
Many die, declaring themselves to be victims of society; do they not realize that, since the same cause produces the same effects, their comrades, those they love, could die as victims of the same state of things? Won’t a desire then come to them to transform their vital force into energy, into power, so as to burn the pile rather than to separate its elements?
Once one has overcome the fear of death, of the complete dissolution of the human form, one can engage in the struggle with that much more strength.
Some will respond to us, “We have a horror of bloodshed. We do not wish to attack this society, made up of men who seem to us to be both unaware and irresponsible.”
The first objection does not hold. Does the struggle only take a violent form? Is it not multiple, diverse? And all the individuals who understand its usefulness, can they not take part each according to his own temperament?
The second is too inexact. Such words as “society”, “knowledge”, “responsibility” are too often repeated and too little explained.
The barrier that obstructs the road, the biting serpent, the tuberculosis microbe are unaware and without responsibility, yet we defend ourselves against them. Still more irresponsible (in the relative sense) are the cornfields which we reap, the ox that we kill, the beehive that we rob. Nevertheless we attack them all.
I know nothing of “responsible” nor of “irresponsible”. I see the causes of my suffering, of the cramping of my personality; and my efforts are bent to suppress or to conquer them by every possible means.
According to my power of resistance I assimilate or I reject, I am assimilated or rejected. That is all.
Even stranger objections are advanced, in a form neurotically scientific: “Study astronomy, and you will realize the negligible duration of human life as compared to the infinite ... Death, is a transformation and not termination.”
For myself, being finite, I have no conception of the infinite; but I know that duration consists of centuries, centuries of years, years of days, days of hours, hours of minutes, etc. I know that time is made up of nothing but the accumulation of seconds, that great immensity formed from the in-finitely small. Short as our life may be, it has its dimensional importance from the point of view of the whole. Life, seen from my own point of view, with my own eyes, cannot be of little importance to me; and all seems to me to have had no purpose but to prepare for us — for myself and for that which surrounds me.
The stone which caresses the head when dropped from a meter above, will break it open if it falls twenty meters. Arrested on the way, seen from the point of view of the whole, it differs in no particular; but it lacks the energy which makes it a power.
I disregard all that I cannot conceive, and look primarily to myself; and a dissolution or rather a non-absorption of strength that acts to my detriment occurs in either a partial or a definitive suicide.
Death is the end of a human energy, as the dissociation of elements of a battery is the end of the electricity which it releases, as the dissolution of threads of a tissue is the end of that tissue’s strength. Death, as the end of my “I”, is more than a transformation.
There are those who say to one, “The goal of life is happiness,” and who profess to be unable to attain it. It seems to me simpler to say that life is life. Life is happiness. Happiness is life.
All the acts of life are a joy to me. Breathing pure air, I know happiness; my lungs are expanded, an impression of power makes, me glow. The hour of work and that of rest afford me equal pleasure. The hour which brings the meal-time; the meal itself with its labor of mastication; the hour which follows with its interior activity — all give me joy of varying sorts.
Shall I evoke the delicious attention of love, the sense of power in the sexual encounter, the succeeding hours of voluptuous relaxation?
Shall I speak of the joy of the eyes, of hearing, of odor, of touching, of all the senses, of the delights of conversation and of thought? Life is a happiness .
Life has not a goal. It is. Why wish for a goal, a beginning, an end?
Let us recapitulate. Whenever, hurled on the stones by an earthquake, avid for air, we bow our head against the rock, whenever seized by the regimentation of society as it is, avid for the ideal (to make this vague term exact: avid for the integral development of one’s self and one’s loved ones) we arrest our life we obey, not a necessity nor a right, but as obsession of force, of the obstacle. We do no voluntary act, as the partisans of death profess; we obey the power of the environment which crushes, and we depart precisely at the hour the weight is too heavy for our shoulders.
“Then,” they say, “we do not go except at our hour — and our hour is now.” Yes. But since, resigned, they envisage their defeat in advance; since they have not developed their tissues with a view to resistance; they have not made due effort to react against the regimentation of the environment. Unaware of their own beauty, of their own force, they add to the objectives of the obstacle all the subjective weight of their own acceptance.
Like those resigned to partial suicides, they surrender themselves to the great suicide. They are devoured by an environment avid for their flesh, eager to crush all energy that appears.
Their error lies in the belief that the dissolution is by their own will, that they choose their hour, while actually they die crushed inevitably by the wickedness of some and by the of others.
In a locality by the maleficient of typhus, of tuberculosis, I do not think of absenting myself to avoid the malady, rather, I proceed immediately to disseminate disinfectant’s, without any fear of killing millions of microbes.
In present society, made foul by the conventional defecations of property, of patriotism, of religion, of family, of ignorance, crushed by the power of government and the inertia of the governed; I wish not to disappear, but to throw upon the scene the light of truth, to provide a disinfectant, to it by any means at my command.
Even with death approaching, I shall have still the desire to chair my body by means of phenol or acid, for the sake of humanity’s health.
And if I am destroyed in this effort, I shall not be totally effaced. I shall have reacted against the environment, I shall have lived briefly but intensely; I shall perhaps have opened a breach for the passage of energies similar to my own.
No, it is not life that is bad, but the conditions in which we live. Therefore we shall address ourselves not to life, but to these conditions: let us change them..
One must live, one must desire to live still more abundantly. Let us accept not even the partial suicides.
Let us be eager to know all experiences, all happiness, all sensations. Let us not be resigned to any diminution of our “me”. Let us be champion of life. so that desires may arise out of our turpitude and weakness; let us assimilate the earth to our own concept of beauty.
Thus may our wishes be united, magnificently; and at the last we shall know the Joy of Life in the absolute.
<strong>Let us love life</strong>
|
#title To the Electoral Cattle
#author Albert Libertad
#SORTtopics Elections, Left Electoralism, anti-voting
#date February 1906
#source https://www.marxists.org/archive/libertad/1906/electoral-cattle.htm
#lang en
#pubdate 2020-06-15T22:56:36
Under the impetus of interested individuals the political committees are opening the awaited era of electoral quarrels.
As usual, they will insult each other, slander each other, fight each other. Blows will be exchanged for the benefit of third thieves, always ready to profit from the stupidity of the crowd.
Why will you go for this?
You live with your kids in unhealthy lodgings. You eat – when you can – food adulterated by the greed of traffickers. Exposed to the ravages of alcoholism and tuberculosis, you wear yourself out from morning to night at a job that is always imbecilic and useless and that you don’t even profit from. The next day you start over again, and so it goes till you die.
Is it then a question of changing all this?
Are they going to give you the means of realizing a flourishing existence, you and your comrades? Are you going to be able to come and go, eat, drink, breathe without constraint, love with joy, rest, enjoy scientific discoveries and their application, decreasing your efforts, increasing your well-being. Are you finally going to live without disgust or care the large life, the intense life?
No, say the politicians proposed for your suffrage. This is only a distant ideal...You must be patient...You are many, but you should also become conscious of your might so as to abandon it into the hands of your ‘saviors’ once every four years.
But what will they do in their turn?
Laws! What is the law? The oppression of the greater number by a coterie claiming to <em>represent</em> the majority.
In any event, error proclaimed by the majority doesn’t become true, and only the unthinking bow before a legal lie.
The truth cannot be determined by vote.
He who votes accepts to be beaten.
So why then are there laws? Because there is property.
So it is from the prejudice of property that all our miseries, all our pain flow.
So those who suffer from it have an interest in destroying property, and so the law.
<em>The only logical means of suppressing laws is not to make them.</em>
Who makes laws? Parliamentary arrivistes.
On closer analysis, it is thus not a handful of rulers who crush us, but the thoughtlessness, the stupidity of the herd of those sheep of Panurge who constitute the electoral cattle.
We will fight without cease for the conquest of “immediate happiness” by remaining partisans of the only scientific method and by proclaiming together with our abstentionist comrades:
<strong>The voter – that is the enemy!</strong>
And now, to the voting urns, cattle.
|
#pubdate 2009-04-06 17:37:52 +0200
#author Albert Libertad
#SORTauthors Albert Libertad
#title We Go On
#lang en
#SORTtopics individualist
#source Retrieved on April 6<sup>th</sup>, 2009 from [[http://www.geocities.com/kk_abacus/kka/go.html][www.geocities.com]]
We don’t have faith, we have absolutely no confidence in our success: we are certain that we have neglected nothing, that we have made all our efforts in order to be on the correct road.
We are not certain that we will succeed: we are not certain that we are right.
We don’t know, it is not possible for us to know if success will be at the end of our efforts, if it will be the reward; we try to act so that, logically, we should arrive at the result that interests us.
Those that envision the goal from the first steps, those that want the certitude of reaching it before walking never arrive.
Whatever the task undertaken may be, if the completion is near, who can say they’ve seen the end? Who can say: I will plentifully reap that which I sow; I will live in this house which I build, I will eat the fruits of the tree which I plant?
And therefore, one throws the wheat on the ground, one arranges the stones one by one, one surrounds the fruit-tree with care.
Because one does not know for certain, for sure, for whom, how, when the result will be, will one neglect one’s efforts for that which will be possibly good? Will one throw the grain on the hard rock or mix it with the tares? Will one arrange the stones without the square and the plumb-line? Will one put the seedling at the crossroads of the four winds?
The joy of the result is already in the joy of effort. He who makes the first steps in a direction that he has every reason to believe good, already arrives at the goal, that’s to say, at the reward of this labor.
We don’t need to know if we will succeed, if men will come to live in a great enough harmony to assure the complete development of their individuality, we have to do the deeds for that which may be, to go in the direction that both our reason and our experience aptly decide.
We don’t say: “Men are born good, they should therefore harmonize their relations” We say “Logically, it will be in the interest of men to obtain with the least effort the greatest sum of well being; not from the point of view of eliminating effort, but of always using it for betterment. It is thus necessary to show them where our interest is. The understanding between individuals is the best means to come to assure human happiness. Lets try to make him understand it.”
The idea of a meteor collision with the earth, a collapse of the sun, a great fire being able to interrupt our show or our experience, cannot hinder all of us from beginning. Likewise, the misunderstanding of our ideas and practice by the majority of men, be it due to cretinism or perversity would not be a reason to stop us from thinking and critiquing.
All work begun is on its way to completion, whatever the resistance of the attacked group may be. It is not a question of speculating about the magnificence or the proximity of the goal to reach, but rather of convincing oneself with a constant critique with which one proceeds handsomely, and doesn’t get lost in digressions.
We go on with ardor, with strength, with pleasure in such a direction determined because we are aware of having done everything and of being ready to do anything so that this is in the right direction. We bring to the study the greatest care, the greatest attention, and we give the greatest energy to action. While we direct our activity in a given direction, it’s not a matter of telling ourselves: “Work is hard; statist society is solidly organized; the foolishness of men is considerable”, it would be better to show us that we are heading in the wrong direction. If one reached it, we would use the same force, in another direction, without faltering. Because we don’t have faith in such a goal, the illusion of such a paradise, but in the certitude of using our effort in the best direction.
It would not be worthwhile to concern ourselves with an immediate, tangible result, if it obstructs, diverts our exact path. The bait of reforms attracting the mass of men would not be able to hinder us.
To accelerate our march, we don’t need mirages showing us the closest end, within our hand’s reach. It will be enough for us to know that we go on and that, if we sometimes stamp around the same spot, we do not go astray.
The mirage calls us to the right and to the left, diverts you, and , if one succeeds in returning to the correct road, this is weakened and diminished by lost illusion. The intoxication of words and illusions resembles that of alcohol, it can throw the multitudes into an impassioned movement, towards the closest goal: but the sobered multitudes pause.
They pause discouraged by the emptiness of the empty result. The perseverance of courage is not in the act of arriving, but in the certitude of being right.
We don’t need a sign-post to show us that we have traveled a third, a fourth, a hundredth of the way; nothing measures the quantity of our effort and such markings have no relation to our effort as a whole. We please ourselves to know that we give, according to our strengths and in the direction that we believe is best, all that we can give.
We believe in a constant evolution, we therefore know that there is no end. It is enough for us to always go forward, always on the correct path. And the packs may bark after us, and we may be the crazy ones, the bad ones, the majority may stand in our way, atavism, heredity may want to impose its ineluctable laws, the group may defend itself harshly, though the end may be far, very far, these things do not concern us.
We go on... employing all means, in turn persuasive and violent. We are ready to come together with anyone and with everyone for the attainment of universal happiness and for the normal development of the unique.
We go on...Each effort brings joy in itself and every day sees its stopping place, even if advancement is slight.
We go on...We are not sure to arrive , we are mindful that we have done everything and to be ready to do anything to be right, and hence to arrive.
And it is this that makes us the strongest...that we are never weary.
We go on...
|
#pubdate 2011-02-02 10:04:51 +0100
#author Albert Meltzer
#SORTauthors Albert Meltzer
#title Anarchism: Arguments for and against
#lang en
#SORTtopics anti-anarchy, fascism, introductory, liberalism, marxism, social democracy
#source Retrieved on February 2, 2011 from [[http://j12.org/spunk/library/writers/meltzer/sp001500.html][j12.org]]
** Introduction
*** The Historical Background to Anarchism
It is not without interest that what might be called the anarchist approach goes back into antiquity; nor that there is an anarchism of sorts in the peasant movements that struggled against State oppression over the centuries. But the modern anarchist movement could not claim such precursors of revolt as its own more than the other modern working class theories. To trace the modern Anarchist movement we must look closer to our own times. While there existed libertarian and non-Statist and federalist groups, which were later termed anarchistic in retrospect, before the middle of the nineteenth century, it was only about then that they became what we now call Anarchists.
In particular, we may cite three philosophical precursors of Anarchism, Godwin, Proudhon, and perhaps Hegel. None of these was in fact an Anarchist, though Proudhon first used the word in its modern sense (taking it from the French Revolution, when it was first used politically and not entirely pejoratively). None of them engaged in Anarchist activity or struggle, and Proudhon engaged in parliamentary activity. One of the poorest, though ostensibly objective, books on Anarchism, Judge Eltzbacher’s Anarchism, describes Anarchism as a sort of hydra-headed theory some of which comes from Godwin or Proudhon or Stirner (another who never mentions anarchism), or Kropotkin, each a different variation on a theme. The book may be tossed aside as valueless except in its description of what these particular men thought. Proudhon did not write a programme for all time, nor did Kropotkin in his time write for a sect of Anarchists. But many other books written by academics are equally valueless: many professors have a view of anarchism based on the popular press. Anarchism is neither a mindless theory of destruction nor, despite some liberal-minded literary conceptions, is it hero-worship of people or institutions, however liberated they might be.
Godwin is the father of the Stateless Society movement, which diverged into three lines. One, that of the Anarchists (with which we will deal). Two, that of classic American Individualism, which included Thoreau and his school, sometimes thought of as anarchistic, but which equally gives rise to the ‘rugged individualism’ of modern ‘libertarian’ capitalism and to the pacifist cults of Tolstoy and Gandhi which have influenced the entire hippy cult. Individualism (applying to the capitalist and not the worker) has become a right-wing doctrine.
The second line of descent from Godwin is responsible for the ‘Pacifist Anarchist’ approach or the ‘Individualist Anarchist’ approach that differs radically from revolutionary anarchism in the first line of descent. It is sometimes too readily conceded that ‘this is, after all, anarchism’. Pacifist movements, and the Gandhian in particular, are usually totalitarian and impose authority (even if only by moral means); the school of Benjamin Tucker — by virtue of their individualism — accepted the need for police to break strikes so as to guarantee the employer’s ‘freedom’. All this school of so-called Individualists accept, at one time or another, the necessity of the police force, hence for Government, and the definition of anarchism is no Government.
The third school of descent from Godwin is simple liberalism, or conservative individualism.
Dealing here with the ‘first line of descent’ from Godwin, his idea of Stateless Society was introduced into the working class movement by Ambrose Cuddon (jun). His revolutionary internationalist and non-Statist socialism came along the late days of English Chartism. It was in sympathy with the French Proudhonians. Those who in Paris accepted Proudhon’s theory did not consider themselves Anarchists, but Republicans. They were for the most part self-employed artisans running their own productive businesses. The whole of French economy was geared both to the peasantry and to the artisan — this, the one-person business of printer, bookbinder, wagon and cart maker, blacksmith, dressmaker, goldsmith, diamond polisher, hat maker as distinct from the factory or farm worker of the time, who worked for an employer. Independent, individualistic and receiving no benefit from the State but the dubious privilege of paying taxes and fighting, they were at that time concerned to find out an economic method of survival and to withstand encroaching capitalism.
Marx described them as ‘petty bourgeois’, which had a different meaning in the nineteenth century. He justifiably claimed that these ‘petty bourgeois’ were not as disciplined as the then factory workers (he despised farm workers) and said that when they were forced into industry they did not faithfully follow the line laid down by a disciplined party from outside the class, but were independent of mind and troublesome to organisation imposed from above, their frustration often leading to violence. They moved to anarchism and through syndicalism spread it through the working class. (This claim is echoed by Marxists nowadays, when the term ‘petty bourgeois’ means something utterly different — solicitors and chartered accountants — and thus makes Marx’s quite sensible analysis sound utterly ridiculous.)
These French and English movements came together in the First International. The International Workingmen’s Association owed its existence to Marx, indirectly to Hegelian philosophy. But within the International, there was not only the ‘scientific socialism’ of Marx, but also Utopian Socialism, Blanquism (working-class republicanism), English Trade Unionism, German-authoritarian and opportunistic socialism, and Spanish, Swiss, and Italian stateless socialism, as well as national Republicanism and the various federalistic trends.
Bakunin was not the ‘father’ of anarchism, as often described. He was not an anarchist until later in life. He learned his federalism and socialism from the Swiss workers of the Jura, and gave expression to the ideas of the Godwinian and Proudhonian ‘federalists’, or non-State socialists. In many countries, Spain and Italy in particular, it was Bakunin’s criticism of the ideas of Marx that gave the federalist movement its definition. (While to Anarchists, Marx is of course “the villain of the piece” in the International, it must be granted that without Marx defining one form of socialism there would have been no clash, no Bakunin defining the opposite.)
There had grown up by 1869 a very noticeable trend within the International that was called ‘Bakuninist’ which was in one line from Godwin and another from Proudhon. When the Paris Commune exploded in the face of the International, it was the parting of the ways (though this was deferred a little longer and seemed to follow personal lines). From the non-Anarchists and Marxists knew by their different analyses and interpretations and actions during the Paris Commune, that they were separate.
All the same, for many years Anarchists continued to form part of the Socialist Movement that included Marxists and Social-Democrats. Marx had not succeeded in building a mass movement. The German socialist movement was more influenced by Lassalle; English socialism by reformist and Christian traditions of radical nonconformity. Only after Marx’s death, when Marxism was the official doctrine of German social-democracy, were Anarchists finally excluded from Socialist Internationals; social-democracy marched on to its own schism, that between English Liberalism on the one hand, and social-democracy on the other; and that between ‘majority’ Social-Democrats (Bolsheviks, actually never more than a minority) and reformism.
There were no such schisms at that time in the anarchist movement as such. Popular opinion made such figures as Tolstoy into (what he never claimed to be) an anarchist (he was not; neither in the normal sense of the words was he a Christian or a Pacifist, as popularly supposed, but his idolators always know better than he), but derived from the ‘second line’ of Godwinism like many other caricature-Anarchists. What we may call ‘mainstream’ anarchism was coherent and united, and was given body by the writings of a number of theoreticians, such as Peter Kropotkin.
After the bloody suppression of the Paris Commune, and repression in many parts of the world — notably Tsarist Russia, Anarchism passed into its well-known stage of individual terrorism. It fought back and survived and gave birth to (or was carried forward in) the revolutionary syndicalist movement which began in France. It lost ground after the First World War, because of the revival of patriotic feeling, the growth of reformist socialism, and the rise of fascism; and while it made a contribution to the Russian Revolution, it was defeated by the Bolshevik counterrevolution. It was seen in both resistance and in a constructive role in the Spanish Revolution of 1936.
By the time of the Second World War, Anarchism had been tried and tested in many revolutionary situations and labour struggles. Alternative forms had been tried and discarded; the German Revolution had introduced the idea of Workers Councils. The experience of the American IWW had shown the possibilities of industrial unionism and ‘how one can build the new society in the shell of the old’. In the ‘flint against flint’ argument against Marxist Communism, the lesson of what socialism without freedom meant in Russia, and the failure of reformist socialism everywhere, the anarchist doctrine was shaped.
There were never theoreticians of Anarchism as such, though it produced a number of theoreticians who discussed aspects of the philosophy. Anarchism has remained a creed that has been worked out in practice rather than from a philosophy. Very often, a bourgeois writer comes along and writes down what has already been worked out in practice by workers and peasants; he is attributed by bourgeois historians as being a leader, and by successive bourgeois writers (citing the bourgeois historians) as being one more case that proves the working class relies on bourgeois leadership.
More often, bourgeois academics borrow the name ‘Anarchism’ to give expression to their own liberal philosophies or, alternatively, picking up their cue from journalists, assorted objects of their dislike. For some professors and teachers, ‘Anarchism’ is anything from Tolstoyism to the IRA, from drug-taking to militant-trade unionism, from nationalism to bolshevism, from the hippy cult to Islamic fundamentalism, from the punk scene to violent resistance to almost anything! This is by no means an exaggeration but a sign of academic illiteracy, to be distinguished from journalists who in the 1960s obeyed a directive to call anything Marxist-Leninist that involved action as ‘Anarchist’ and anything Anarchist as ‘nationalist’.
** Inalienable Tenets of Anarchism
*** That Mankind is Born Free
Our rights are inalienable. Each person born on the world is heir to all the preceding generations. The whole world is ours by right of birth alone. Duties imposed as obligations or ideals, such as patriotism, duty to the State, worship of God, submission to higher classes or authorities, respect for inherited privileges, are lies.
*** If Mankind is Born Free, Slavery is Murder
Nobody is fit to rule anybody else. It is not alleged that Mankind is perfect, or that merely through his/her natural goodness (or lack of same) he/she should (or should not) be permitted to rule. Rule as such causes abuse. There are no superpeople nor privileged classes who are above ‘imperfect Mankind’ and are capable or entitled to rule the rest of us. Submission to slavery means surrender of life.
*** As Slavery is Murder, so Property is Theft
The fact that Mankind cannot enter into his/her natural inheritance means that part of it has been taken from him or her, either by means of force (old, legalised conquest or robbery) or fraud (persuasion that the State or its servants or an inherited property-owning class is entitled to privilege). All present systems of ownership mean that some are deprived of the fruits of their labour. It is true that, in a competitive society, only the possession of independent means enables one to be free of the economy (that is what Proudhon meant when, addressing himself to the self-employed artisan, he said “property is liberty”, which seems at first sight a contradiction with his dictum that it was theft). But the principle of ownership, in that which concerns the community, is at the bottom of inequity.
*** If Property is Theft, Government is Tyranny
If we accept the principle of a socialised society, and abolish hereditary privilege and dominant classes, the State becomes unnecessary. If the State is retained, unnecessary Government becomes tyranny since the governing body has no other way to maintain its hold. “Liberty without socialism is exploitation: socialism without liberty is tyranny” (Bakunin).
*** If Government is Tyranny, Anarchy is Liberty
Those who use the word “Anarchy” to mean disorder or misrule are not incorrect. If they regard Government as necessary, if they think we could not live without Whitehall directing our affairs, if they think politicians are essential to our well-being and that we could not behave socially without police, they are right in assuming that Anarchy means the opposite to what Government guarantees. But those who have the reverse opinion, and consider Government to be tyranny, are right too in considering Anarchy, no Government, to be liberty. If Government is the maintenance of privilege and exploitation and inefficiency of distribution, then Anarchy is order.
** The Class Struggle
Revolutionary Anarchism is based on the class struggle, though it is true that even the best of Anarchist writers, to avoid Marxist phraseology, may express it differently. It does not take the mechanistic view of the class struggle taken by Marx and Engels that only the industrial proletariat can achieve socialism, and that the inevitable and scientifically-predictable victory of this class represents the final victory. On the contrary: had anarchism been victorious in any period before 1914, it would have been a triumph for the poorer peasants and artisans, rather than among the industrial proletariat amongst whom the concept of anarchy was not widespread.
As we have said, Marxists accuse the Anarchists of being petty bourgeois. Using the term in its modern sense, it makes Marx look ridiculous. Marx was distinguishing between the bourgeois (with full rights of citizens as employers and merchants) and the minor citizens — i.e. self-employed workers). When Marx referred to the Anarchists being ‘petty bourgeois’ who when they were forced by monopoly capitalism and the breakdown of a peasant-type society into industry, and being therefore ‘frustrated’ and turning to violence, because they did not accept the discipline taken for granted by the industrial proletariat, he was expressing something that was happening, especially after the breaking up of the independent Communes of Paris and Barcelona, and the breakdown of the capitalist economy, in his day. But, with the change of meaning, to think of today’s Anarchists as frustrated bowler-hatted bank managers turning to violence because they have been forced into industry is straining one’s sense of the ridiculous.
Marx thought the industrial proletariat was not used to thinking for itself — not having the leisure or independence of the self-employed — and was therefore capable ‘of itself’ of a ‘trade union mentality, needing the leadership of an ‘educated class’ coming from outside, and presumably not being frustrated. This in his day was thought of as the scholars as an elite, in later times the students.
Marx certainly did not foresee the present day, when the students as a frustrated class, having absorbed the Marxist teachings, are being forced into monotonous jobs or unemployment and create the New Left with its own assumptions and preoccupations, but are clearly not a productive class. Any class may be revolutionary in its day and time; only a productive class may be libertarian in nature, because it does not need to exploit. The industrialisation of most Western countries meant that the industrial proletariat replaced the old ‘petty bourgeois’ class and what is left of them became capitalist instead of working class, because it had to expand and therefore employ in order to survive. But recent tendencies in some Western countries are tending to the displacement of the working class and certainly the divorcing of them from their productive role. Mining, shipbuilding, spinning, manufacturing industries, and whole towns are closed down and people are forced to into service jobs like car-park attendants or supermarket assistants which are not productive and so carry no industrial muscle.
When the industrial proletariat developed, the Anarchist movement developed into anarcho-syndicalism, something coming from the workers themselves, contrary to the idea that they needed a leadership from outside the class or could not think beyond the wage struggle. Anarcho-syndicalism is the organisation at places of work both to carry on the present struggle and eventually to take over the places of work. It would thus be more effective than the orthodox trade-union movement and at the same time be able to bypass a State-run economy in place of capitalism.
Neither Anarchism nor Marxism has ever idealised the working class (except sometimes by way of poetic licence in propaganda!) — this was a feature of the Christian Socialists. Nor was it ever suggested that they could not be reactionary, In fact, deprivation of education makes the poorer class on the whole the more resistant to change. It would be trying the reader’s patience too much to reiterate all the ‘working class are not angels’ statements purporting to refute that the working class could not run their own places of work. Only in heaven, so I am informed, will it be necessary for angels to take over the functions of management!
** Organisation and Anarchism
Those belonging to or coming from authoritarian parties find it hard to accept that one can organise without ‘some form’ of Government. Therefore they conclude, and it is a general argument against Anarchism, that ‘Anarchists do not believe in organisation’. But Government is of people, organisation is of things.
There is a belief that Anarchists ‘break up other people’s organisations but are unable to build their own’, often expressed where dangerous, hierarchical, or useless organisations dominate and prevent libertarian ones being created. It can well be admitted that particular people in particular places have failed in the task of building Anarchist organisations but in many parts of the world they do exist
An organisation may be democratic or dictatorial, it may be authoritarian or libertarian, and there are many libertarian organisations, not necessarily anarchist, which prove that all organisation need not be run from the top downwards.
Many trade unions, particularly if successful, in order to keep their movement disciplined and an integral part of capitalist society, become (if they do not start so) authoritarian; but how many employers’ organisations impose similar discipline? If they do, their affiliates would walk out if it did not suit their interests. They must come to free agreement because some have the means to resist intimidation. Even when they resort to fascism to keep the workers down, the employers retain their own independence and financial power; Nazism goes too far for smaller capitalists in that after having crushed the workers it also limits, or even negates, the independence of the class that put it in power.
Only the most revolutionary unions of the world have ever learned how to keep the form of organisation of mass labour movements on an informal basis, with a minimum of central administration, and with every decision referred back to the workers on the shop floor.
** The Role of an Anarchist in an Authoritarian Society
“The only place for a free man in a slave society is in prison,” said Thoreau (but he only spent a night there). It is a stirring affirmation but not one to live by, however true it is. The revolutionary must be prepared for persecution and prosecution, but only the masochist would welcome it. It must always remain an individual action and decision as to how far one can be consistent in one’s rebellion: it is not something that can be laid down. Anarchists have pioneered or participated in many forms of social rebellion and reconstruction, such as libertarian education, the formation of labour movements, collectivisation, individual direct action in its many forms and so on.
When advocating anarcho-syndicalist tactics, it is because social changes for the whole of society can only come about through a change of the economy. Individual action may serve some liberatory process, it’s true. Individuals, for example, may retire to a country commune, surround themselves with like-minded people and ignore the world so long as it overlooks them. They might certainly meanwhile live in a free economy if they could overcome certain basic problems, but it would not bring about social change.
This is not to decry individual action, far from it. Whole nations can live under dictatorship and sacrifice whole peoples one by one, and nobody will do anything about it until one individual comes along and cuts off the head of the hydra, in other words, kills the tyrant. But genocide can take place before the individual with the courage, ability, and luck required comes along.
In such cases, we see waiting for mass action as queuing up for the gas chamber (it can be literally so). We do not think “the proletariat can do no wrong” and most of all; by submission, it can. But organisation is strength. We advocate mass action because it is effective and because the proletariat has in its hands the means to destroy the old economy and build anew. The Free Society will come about through workers’ control councils taking over the places of work and by conscious destruction of the authoritarian structure. They can be built within unionisation of the work-forces of the present time.
*** Workers Control
When advocating workers’ control for the places of work, we differ from those who are only advocating a share of management or imagine there can be an encroachment upon managerial function by the workers within capitalism. Self-management within a capitalist society is a sizeable reform, and is occasionally attainable when the work-force is in a particularly strong position, or more often when the work is sufficiently hazardous to defy outside inspection. That is all it is, however, and is not to be confused with syndicalism, except in the sense that the syndicalist thinks the future society should be self-controlled. We want no authority supreme to that of the workers, not even one of their delegates.
This probably means breaking industry down into small units, and we accept this. We reject ‘nationalisation’ = State control.
It should not be (but unfortunately is) necessary to explain that there are, of course, ways of personal liberation other than class action, and in some cases these may be necessary lest one starve. But none of these can at present help to change society. The self-employed artisan no longer plays an important part as in Proudhon’s day (and perhaps this will be revived with a new society). One can get satisfaction working on one’s own, one may have to do so by economic necessity, but the means of changing society rest with those who are working in the basic economy.
Trends over recent years show the importance of the self-employed artisan. As major industries are decimated by the ruling class because no longer necessary to capitalism, a means of integrating those working outside mainstream capitalism will increasingly need to be found if we are to achieve change. It was the necessity of finding this in a previous reversal of capitalist trends that led to the original formation of anarcho-syndicalism.
*** The Anarchist as Rebel
It is not unknown for the individual Anarchist to fight on alone, putting forward his or her ideas in a hostile environment. There were many examples in the past of Anarchists struggling on alone, sometimes only one in the country. It is less the case at the present time when there are usually many people calling themselves Anarchists, though perhaps only one or two in a locality who really are so, and not just adopting the label to describe rebellion when young.
Anarchists in such circumstances may fight alone for the principle of Anarchism, but usually participate in other struggles, such as anti-militarism, anti-imperialism, anti-nationalism or solely within the content of the class struggle or they may form organisations of their own.
It is no part of the case for Anarchism to say that the profession of its ideas changes peoples’ character; or that the movement invites itself to be judged on anyone who happened to be around at any one time. Organisations they create may become reformist or authoritarian; people themselves may become corrupted by money or power. All we can say is that ultimately such corruption normally leads them to drop the name ‘Anarchist’, as standing in their way. If ever the term became ‘respectable’, no doubt we would have to choose a fresh one, equally connotative of libertarian rebellion — at present it can still stand as descriptive though increasingly misused.
In all organisations, personalities play a part and it may be that in different countries different schisms may occur. Some say that there are different types of Anarchism. Syndicalism, Communism, individualism, pacifism, have all been cited as such. This is not so. If one wishes to cause a schism, purely on personal reasons or because one wishes to become more quietist or reformist, it is no doubt convenient to pick a name as a ‘banner’. But in reality there are not different forms of Anarchism. Anarchist-Communism, in any definition (usually that of Kropotkin), means a method of socialism without Government, not a different style of anarchism. An alternative idea, called Anarchist-Collectivism, once favoured by Spanish Anarchists, was found in practice to be exactly the same. If one is going to have no rule from above, one cannot lay down a precise economic plan for the future, and Communism and collectivisation controlled from below upwards proved to be no different from each other, or from syndicalism, a permanent means of struggle toward the same goal.
Communism, in the sense used by Anarchists, is a society based on the community. Collectivism is a division of the commune into economic units. Unless the commune is very small — based upon the village — it has to be divided into smaller units, collectives, so that all can participate and not just their elected representatives. Otherwise it would merely be industrial democracy. While free Communism is an aim, syndicalism is a method of struggle. It is the union of workers within the industrial system attempting to transform it into a free Communistic society.
State Communism is not an alternative Communism to free Communism, but its opposite. It is the substitution of the State or the Party for the capitalist class. Communism is not necessarily Anarchist, even if it is not State Communism but the genuine authoritarian form of Communism (total State control without having degenerated into absolute power from above, or even governmental dominated socialisation). Syndicalism is not necessarily revolutionary and even revolutionary syndicalism (the idea that workers can seize places of work through factory organisation) need not be libertarian, as it can go hand-in-hand with the idea of a political party exercising political control. This is why we use the mouthful: anarcho-syndicalism. Workers control of production, community control from below, no Government from above.
*** Nonviolence
Is pacifism a trend within Anarchism? Though phoney Anarchism contains a large streak of pacifism, being militant liberalism and renouncing any form of positive action for Anarchism, pacifism (implying extreme nonviolence, and not just anti-militarism) is authoritarian. The cult of extreme nonviolence always implies an elite, the Satyagrahi of Gandhi, for instance, who keeps everyone else in check either by force or by moral persuasion. The general history of the orthodox pacifist movements is that they attempt to dilute a revolutionary upsurge but come down on the side of force either in an imperialist war or by condoning aggressive actions by governments they support.
Both India and Israel were once the realisation of the pacifist ideals; the atom bomb was largely developed and created by nonviolent pacifists and by League of Nations enthusiasts; the Quakers as peace-loving citizens but commercial tyrants and colonialists are notorious. In recent times, many who rejected Anarchist actions of the Spanish Resistance (though claiming to be “nonviolent Anarchists”) had no difficulty late in supporting far more “violent” actions of different nationalist movements.
It is true to say that there are Anarchists who consider pacifism compatible with Anarchism in the sense that they advocate the use of non-violent methods though usually nowadays advocating this on the grounds of expediency or tactics rather than principle. But this should not be confused with the so-called “Tolstoyan Anarchism” (neither Tolstoyan or Anarchist). Tolstoy considered the Anarchists were right in everything but that they believed in revolution to achieve it. His idea of social change was “within one” (which is to say in the sky). He did not advocate nonviolent revolution, he urged nonresistance as a way of life compatible with Christian teaching though not practised as such.
One has to say also that this refers to pacifism in the Anglo-American sense, somewhat worse in Great Britain where the concept of legalised conscientious objection led to a dialogue between pacifism and the State. In countries where objection to military service remained a totally illegal act, the concept of pacifism is not necessarily extreme nonviolence.
*** Immediate Aims of the Anarchist
A “reformist” is not someone who brings about reforms (usually they do not, they divert attention to political manoeuvring): it is someone who can see no further than amelioration of certain parts of the system. It is necessary to agitate for the abolition of certain laws or for the immediate reform of some, but to idealise the agitation for reforms, or even the interests in reform of minorities or even whole communities, is reformist. This reformism has permeated the whole of what is now called the left wing. It creates new industries in the interests of aspiring bureaucrats allegedly guarding over minority interests, preventing people in those minorities from acting on their own behalf. This is noticeable even in women’s struggles which the left marginalises as if it were a minority issue.
Sometimes laws are more harmful than the offences they legislate against. No law is worth passing even to hope which are socially beneficial on the surface, since they are sure to be interpreted wrongly and are often used to bolster the private opinion of judges who carry them out. The old British custom of sentencing poorer classes to death for minor thefts above a small pecuniary value was not abolished by Parliament nor by the judges, but by the final refusal of juries to admit when forced to a guilty verdict that the goods were above that value.
The Anarchists can as individuals or in groups press for reforms but as Anarchists they seek to change minds and attitudes, not to pass laws. When minds are changed, laws become obsolete and, sooner or later, law enforcers are unable to operate them. Prohibition in America, the Poll Tax in Britain, are instances. At that point the law has to adapt itself to public opinion.
The Witchcraft Act remained on the statute books until some 40 years ago and it was enforced right up to the time of its abolition though the Public Prosecutor only dared to use a few of its clauses for fear of ridicule. It was abolished for political reasons but the equally ridiculous Blasphemy Act was retained, being unquestioned by Parliament until the agitation by Muslims that it was clearly unfair that one could be fined for offending Christianity while one could not be executed for offending Islam.
The ‘1381’ law was useful for squatters to persuade people they could occupy neglected buildings without offence, the odd thing being that the law did not exist. The myth was enough provided people believed in it.
One has to carry on a resistance to any and every form of tyranny. When governments use their privileges threatened, they drop the pretence of democracy and benevolence which most politicians prefer. Anarchists are forced to become what politicians describe them as: ‘agents of disorder’, though there is a lot more to Anarchism to that, and all ‘agents of disorder’ are not necessarily Anarchists.
A Marxist-Leninist would say, “Anarchists are able to bring about disorder but cannot seize power. Hence they are unable to make take advantage of the situations they create, and the bourgeoisie, regrouping its strength, turns to fascism”.
A Tory would say that Marxist-Leninists are Anarchists “because they wish to create Anarchy to create the conditions in which they would seize power”. Both are absurdities. Anarchists can, of course, “seize power” no less than anyone just as a teetotaler can get blind drunk, but they would hardly continue to merit the name. Anarchists in power would not necessarily be any better or worse than anyone else, and they might even be as bad as Communists or fascists. There is no limit of degradation to which power cannot bring anyone even with the loftiest principles. We would hope that being unprepared for power, they would be ineffective. Their task is not to “seize power” (those who use this term show that they seek personal power for themselves) but to abolish the bases of power. Power to all means power to nobody in particular.
If one leaves the wild beast of State power partially wounded, it becomes more ferocious than ever, a raging wild beast that will destroy or be destroyed. This is why Anarchists form organisations to bring about revolutionary change. The nature of Anarchism as an individualistic creed in the true sense has often caused many to say such organisations might well be left to ‘spontaneity’, ‘voluntary will’ and so on — in other words, there can be no organisation (except for propaganda only) until the entire community forms its own organisations. This is a recipe for a sort of armchair Anarchism which never gets off the ground, but at the same time with a point that cannot be ignored — until the whole community has control of its own organisations, such bodies cannot and should not take over the social and economic means of life.
It is shown by events that unity of resistance is needed against repression, that there must be united forms of action. Even when workers’ councils are formed, there may be representatives on them from political factions, united outside on party lines and able to put forward a united front within such councils and thus to dominate and ultimately destroy them. That is why we need an organised movement to destroy such efforts at totalitarianism. In some cases one may need the ultimate sanction of acts of individual terrorism to be used against leadership from within quite as much as that imposed from above. This form of specific terrorism has nothing in common with nationalist terrorism, which by its nature is as indiscriminate as State terrorism, for all that it is judged in a far harsher light. Anarchist terrorism is against individual despots, ruling or endeavouring to rule. Nationalist terrorism is a form of war against peoples. State terrorism is the abuse of power.
*** Workers’ Self-Defence
The Marxist-Leninists in time of revolution rely upon the formation of a Red Army. Under the control of one party, the “Red” Army is the old army under a red flag. We have seen many times how this can become a major instrument of repression, just as a nationalist army under a new flag can also become one, sometimes even before it attains power.
The very formation of an army to supersede workers’ militias will destroy the Revolution (Spain 1936). Che Guevara introduced a new romantic ideas of the Red Army as the advance guard of a peasants army — combining the spontaneity of a Makhnovista (Ukraine 1917) and Zapatista/Magonista (Mexican-Anarchistic) peasant army with the disciplined ideas of Party intellectuals. In such cases, after the initial enthusiasm carries through to victory, the disciplined leadership takes over; if it fails, the leaders run off elsewhere.
The self-defence notions of anarcho-syndicalists are that workers use arms in their own defence against the enemy at hand, and that the democratic notion of workers’ militias prevails. While there may be technical leadership, instruction and duties such as are at present in the hands of noncommissioned officers up to the rank of sergeant, there should be no officers whose job is to command, or lower-ranking NCOs to transmit the chain of command.
The idea of an armed people is derided by many so-called military and political experts, but only is used by workers in their own interests. If smaller nations use it successfully, they admit that a citizens’ army — that is to say, a nonprofessional one that can hang up its rifles and go back to work, coming out when called upon — is possible provided only that, as in the case of (say) Israel or South Africa, they obey nationalistic and aggressive policies from above. Providing they don’t maintain the force in international-class interests, the “experts” are prepared to admit the efficiency of such an army remaining democratically controlled within its own ranks.
*** How Will a Revolution Come About?
We do not know. When a revolutionary situation presents itself — as it did with the occupation of factories in France, 1936 and 1968; as it did in Spain, 1936 with the fascist uprising; or with the breakdown of the Russian Armies, 1917; or in many other times and places; we are ready for it or we are not (and usually not). Many times the workers are partially ready and leave the “wounded wild animal” of Statism fiercer than ever. It may be purely individual action that sets off the spark. But only if, at that period, there is a conscious movement towards a Free Society that throws off the shackles of the past, will that situation become a social revolution. The problem today that faces us is that half the world is prepared to rise almost at any opportune time, but have no military power to resist repression and no industrial muscle to sustain it. The other half of the world has such might, but no real desire to rise, being either bought off by capitalism or succumbing to persuasion.
** Bringing About the New Society
*** What Constitutes an Authoritarian Society?
Exploitation — Manipulation — Suppression. The organs of repression consist of many arms of the State:
The Apparatus of Government: The legislature, the judicature, the monarchy, the Civil Service, the Armed Forces, the Police etc.
The Apparatus of Persuasion: The educational system, the media, including TV, radio and the press, the Church, and even forms of apparent dissent that in reality condition us to accept the present system — the parliamentary Opposition is the most obvious, but many other alternatives to the accepted system too, e.g., revolution presented as merely one in lifestyle or musical preference, academic teaching of Marxist-Leninism etc.
The Apparatus of Exploitation: The monetary system; financial control; the Banks; the Stock Exchange; individual, collective, and State employers; land ownership. Under capitalism there is no escaping this.
Most political reformers have some part of the unfree system they wish to abolish Republicans would abolish the monarchy, Secularists would abolish or disestablish the Church, Socialists would (or used to) wish to abolish the apparatus of exploitation; pacifists would abolish the Army. Anarchism is unique in wishing to abolish all. The only true definition of an Anarchist is one who wishes to believes it desirable to abolish all; who believe it possible to abolish all, the sooner the better; and who works to bring such abolition about.
There are many, usually on the left, who think it desirable but impossible, many on the right who think it only too probable but undesirable. Others may be sympathetic to Anarchism as both desirable and possible but refrain from action in its favour. To borrow a phrase from another part of the forest, they may be fellow travelers of Anarchism.
The Police are the cornerstone of the State (though sometimes, in extreme cases, the Government of the day needs to use the armed forces in lieu of, or in addition to the police — in some countries this has led to replacement or control of the Government by the army so long as the officers are tightly in control).
Only Anarchism believes in abolition of the Police, and this is the most hotly-disputed argument of Anarchism. Yet the police force as we know it is a comparatively modern phenomenon, fiercely resisted when introduced for reasons which have since been proved up to the hilt, such as the ability of the Police to introduce or bolster up a dictatorship, known indeed as a police state. Without control of the Police, debates at Westminster become as sterile of result as debates in the West Kensington Debating Society (and probably less interesting).
With German money, supplied by Helphand-Parvus, Lenin was able to return to Russia and pay Lettish mercenaries to act as Police. He was the only politician in a position to do so and in this way Bolshevik success was achieved. The Nazis in their turn created murder gangs that roamed the streets, which were tacitly tolerated by the Republican Police, but their victory came when they controlled the Police by legal means.
*** Can One Do Without the State?
It seems to be generally agreed that we can do without some organs of the State: can we do without them all, altogether? Some are admittedly useless, some decorative, some have impossible intentions, others are necessary for class rule, some may well be useful and carry out functions essential to any society.
One cannot do the work of another. If the monarchy has no Army it cannot save you from foreign invasion any more than the police will get you into heaven if you do not have a Church! Any commonsense codification of conduct would be better than the farrago of laws we have at present, which occupy both the lawyers and politicians, the one interpreting the apparent desires of the other.
It is true that the Government can and sometimes does take over certain necessary social functions, as do every organ of the State however repressive. The railways were not always run by the State but belonged to capitalists, and could equally in a future society belong to the workers. It would be foolish to say that if mines belonged to the State, that proves the State is necessary, or we would have no coal without it. The Army is often given socially necessary jobs, such as flood or earthquake relief; it is sometimes used as a scab labour force, such as in strikes; it is sometimes used as a police force. This is because the State does not want the breakup of a society that supports it.
Even the police at times fulfill some necessary functions — one goes to the police station to find lost dogs simply because it happens to be there and has taken over that function. It does not follow that we should never find lost dogs if there were no Police, and that we need to be clubbed over the head in times of social unrest so that old ladies can need not lose their dogs. For insurance purposes, all car owners report their lost or stolen cars to the Police, but it does not mean that the police force as such is indispensable.
Just as insurance companies would find some way of seeing they could not pay out on fraudulent claims if there were no police force, society would see to it that it could protect itself. Unfortunately, having a police force atrophies the ability of society to defend itself. People have lost all sense of social organisation and control. They can be put in terror by a few kids running wild, however young. The only reaction is to run to the Police, and the Police cannot cope.
There was an old superstition that if the Church excommunicated a country, it was under a terrible disaster. One could not be married, buried, leave property, do business in safety, be educated, be tended while sick, in a country which was excommunicated. The superstition was not an idle one, so long as people believed in the Church. If the country was banned from the communion of believers, the hospitals (run by the Church) were closed; there could be no trust in business (the clerics administered oaths and without them no promises need be kept); no education (they ran the schools); children could indeed be begotten (no way of preventing that by the Church!), but not christened, and were therefore barred from the community of believers and under a threat, as they thought, of eternal damnation, while unmarried parents could not leave property to their “illegitimate” children. The physical reality of Hell was not necessary to make excommunication effective. We are wiser now. But one superstition has been replaced by another. It has been transferred to belief in the State. If we were to reject Government there would be no education (for Government, national or local, controls the schools — with obvious exceptions), no hospitals (ditto), nobody could carry one working because the Government regulates its conduct, and so on. The truth all the time has been that not the Church and not the State but we the People have worked for everything we’ve got, and if we have not done so they have not provided for us. Even the privileged have been maintained by us not them.
*** The Money Myth
With the State myth comes a second myth — the money myth. The value of money is dependent on the strength of the State. When Governments collapse, their money is worthless. For years American crooks travelled Europe offering to change Confederate dollars, worth nothing since the Southern States had lost the Civil War, presenting them to unsuspecting Europeans as valid U.S. dollars — until they became collectors’ pieces and were worth more than several U.S. dollars! At that point the Federal Government utilised the original printing plants to publish Confederate dollars and gave them away with bubble-gum, lest their own currency became devalued.
When the Kaiser’s Germany collapsed, Imperial marks were useless. When the Spanish Republic was defeated, the banks simply canceled the value of its money. The story is endless. Yet according to a legend many still believe, the wealth of the country is to be found at Waterlow’s printing works. As the notes roll off the press, so our wealth is created, and if this ceased we should be impoverished! The banks have come up with an alternative in printing their own credit cards. Another alternative myth, now dated, was that the money printed had to correspond with a quantity of closely-guarded gold buried in a mysterious vault, after having been dug up under tight security from mines thousands of miles away. However, Governments have long since defaulted on the premises behind this myth (though they still continue the ritual). The newer governmental myth is that if too many notes are printed we shall have inflation which will make us all poor, so to prevent this we must be prepared to endure conditions of stringency and poverty, lose jobs and homes, or in other words become poor.
During the war, rationing of food and clothes meant that what counted was coupons, by which it was hoped to ensure there were fair shares of what was available. As the money system continued, a black market in commodities was inevitable, but rationing gave an idea of what State Socialism — without money — would be like. If there were too many coupons printed there would be no point in the scheme. Money is another form of rationing, by which one set of people get more than another. Wage struggles are fights to get a bigger slice of the cake. The wealthy are those who have first access to slicing the cake. But neither money nor coupons make any difference to the size of the cake, they are simply means of dealing with its distribution, whether fairly — or more likely — unfairly. So essential is money to the obtaining of goods in a State society, it sounds humorous to say money is a myth — “I don’t care if it’s mythical, give me more” — but myth it is.
Many worthy people believe if Lady X did not spend her money on a yacht, that money could somehow be transformed into an x-ray apparatus for the hospital. They do not understand, it would seem, that yacht builders cannot produce x-ray machines. Others think that those on National Assistance are supported by those at work — yet the margin of unemployment is essential to the State as a pitfall to make the incentives to work stick. Others believe there is a relation between their wages going up and the wages received by other people going down. In a competitive society, however, one gets what one is able to command.
*** The Myth of Taxation
There is a patent absurdity in supposing that those who work and produce are helped by those who profit from the system and do nothing. It is equally absurd to suppose that the rich help the poor by providing work or charity. As Brendan Behan commented to someone who pointed out how much the Guinness family had done for the poor people of Dublin — “It’s nothing compared to what the poor people of Dublin have done for the Guinness family”. Taxation perpetuates the myth that those with more money help those with less. Taxation grabs money out of the pockets of the less well-off even before they have a chance to look at it. The rich dress up their accounts by means of professional advisors. But aside from that, money does not create wealth, it is muscle, brain, and natural resources that do. Money is used to restrict the application of human endeavour. It is possible to print money, or arrange credit, when it is in the interests of money manipulators to do so. When they wish to go into recession, they do so by withdrawing money and credit. Recession is not a natural disaster like famine, drought, floods, or earthquakes though it is presented as such.
*** The Effect of Immigration
The large scale employer looking at greater profitability or the way to cut costs has several options open, the easiest and laziest being to cut wages. If the workers are well-organised they can resist this so there are two options open to the major capitalist. Either take the factories to where the cheap labour is or take the cheap labour to where the factories are. The first option entails great pollution, as a rule — not that they ever care about that — and in some cases they have to go into areas of political instability. It is cheaper to move the cheap labour.
Having thus encouraged immigration, wearing the financial hat as it were, the capitalist in the capacity of a right-wing politician, dons the political hat and denounces immigration. This has the advantage of setting worker against worker, fuelled by religious and/or racial antipathies which can persist for generations, and have the added bonus of inducing the worker to support the right wing electorally. It does the capitalist no harm to have a work force hated by those who surround them, or in fear of deportation if they step out of line. Nor does it harm the capitalist, in a political context, to have issues such as immigration replace the basic issue of the wage and monetary system. It only becomes harmful from that point of view when a fascist force such as Hitler’s gains such armed might that it can ignore the wishes of the capitalists which gave them that power and strives for its own superiority.
*** The Abolition of the Wage and Monetary Systems
“Socialism” has become so diffused a term today that it is used of almost any reformist or indeed positively counter-revolutionary movement that wishes to use the term and covers a multitude of ideas from liberalism to tyranny, but in reality the essentials of any socialistic theory are the abolition of the wage and monetary systems. This is because a genuine socialistic movement should be of the working class and intended for its own emancipation from wage slavery. The wage and monetary systems are the chains of that slavery that need to be broken.
Some modified form of wage or some means of exchange might be consistent with a free communistic society, especially among a post-revolutionary society accustomed to some form of labour-rewarding assessment, but the present form of monetary system is one in which money is not a servant (a means of exchange) but a boss in its own right. Wages are a means of denoting the position in society’s pecking order which a person is deemed to hold. It is not even fair as regards the assessment it makes. Such systems must be swept aside.
At present, as indicated above, the Government, or the effective controller which may in some cases be over the Government (the banks, for instance) assess the national wealth. A corresponding number of bank notes are printed, coin is struck, credits are granted to financial houses. According to the degree of efficiency or inefficiency of a current Government (which is the stuff of day-to-day press political sloganeering and need not concern us) the assessment, or budget may be correct or incorrect. According to his or her assessment, the Chancellor of the Exchequer may be “generous” or “niggardly” in sharing out the national “cake” and apportioning our slices. But in reality salaries and wages are determined by social convention, tradition, Government patronage, economic competition, hereditary power, trade union bargaining, individual enterprise and wildcat strikes. According to their effectiveness, so is the “slice of cake” each receives. Those unable to use any of the pressures are simply left out of the reckoning and must be content with what is given them in order solely to survive. The “cake” is the same whatever the Government does about it.
*** Is Anarchism Compatible with Capitalism?
It is only possible to conceive of Anarchism in a form in which it is free, communistic, and offering no economic necessity for repression or countering it. Common sense shows that any capitalist society might dispense with a “State” (in the American sense of the word) but it could not dispense with organised Government, or a privatised form of it, if there were people amassing money and others working to amass it for them. The philosophy of “anarcho-capitalism” dreamed up by the “libertarian” New Right, has nothing to do with Anarchism as known by the Anarchist movement proper. It is a lie that covers an unpleasant reality in its way — such as National Socialism does in another. Patently unbridled capitalism, not even hampered by a reformist State, which has to put some limits on exploitation to prevent violent clashes in society, needs some force at its disposal to maintain class privileges, either from the State itself or from private Armies. What they believe in is in fact a limited State — that is, one in which the State has one function, to protect the ruling class, does not interfere with exploitation, and comes as cheap as possible for the ruling class. The idea also serves another purpose beyond its fulfillment — a moral justification for bourgeois consciences in avoiding taxes without feeling guilty about it — just as pacifism sometimes serves as an excuse for bourgeois consciences in avoiding danger without feeling guilty.
*** Community Control
The history of collective control in a capitalist society is a pretty dismal one. There have been many attempts to bypass the system by forming “communities” which because they are less than the whole, real community, are bound in the end not to prosper. Cooperative societies no less than small businesses rarely withstand the pressure of monopoly capitalism. Collective farms — collective enterprises at which one works at less than the normal wage to for the sake of independence — like craft businesses, never quite get off the ground and it always comes down to the monopoly market. All could flourish if the system were free, but it is not.
Nevertheless, one can note that many communal products are equally available to all, either on payment of a fixed sum, or free. The highways are free — neither State nor capitalism has got round (yet) to making all roads toll roads to enter which one must pay (but they’ve got round to it on main motorways on the Continent). It would probably make no economic difference if the underground railway was also free, bearing in mind the cost of ticket collecting. Water used to be free — even when water rates came in one could draw as much as one liked from the tap. Now there are water meters, as if we were living in the Sahara where water has long been rationed. So far they have not got round to making us pay for air.
Anarchism presupposes that all these arguments based on economics are bunkum. Services which come naturally or are produced by the people should belong to the people.
*** Need There be a Transitional Society?
A transitional society to Anarchism isn’t necessary. The idea touted by Leninists was that the State would fade away after years of the harshest dictatorship — originally claimed to be only as much as was necessary to save the infant Soviet Republic but which lasted for seventy years until the people got fed up with it. All that faded away was people rash enough to want to go forward to free socialism. The prospect of ‘withering away of the State’ after years of strengthening it is illogical. Leninists justify this by saying the State is only that part of the State apparatus which favours the capitalist class by suppressing the working class. This might fade away (though it did not do so in the years of State Communism). What cannot fade away is the rest of the State apparatus, unless the State is destroyed root and branch.
The fact that a transitional society to Anarchism isn’t necessary does not necessarily mean there will not be one. Who can say? After all, changing attitudes to such matters as racial domination, sexual discrimination, religious orientation, conformity, and so on might be part of a transition to a Free Society already existing. There might be an occupation of the places of work without a conscious revolution, which in itself would be a transitional period.
One could even visualise a curious transitional period in which part of society was evolving to a new system and part was sticking to the old — with workers’ control coexisting with private capitalism in the market the way rigid old-time family styles coexist with free relationships in the same street. But clearly in the long run one or the other system would have to go. Capitalism could not exist if people could be free to choose the way they work without being compelled by conscription or necessity — therefore it would either need to reinforce its authority (possibly by fascist gangs, as during the occupation of the factories in Italy) or go under (which is the choice the Italian capitalists as a while, even though many had democratic viewpoints, were forced to take).
*** A Free Society
A society cannot be free unless not only are there no governmental restraints, but the essentials of life are free in that sense too.
It is true that if some products were in short supply, however free the society, access to them would have to be rationed by some means. It could be by ‘labour-value’ cards, by ordinary ‘fair rationing’, it might imply retention of a different monetary system (but not money as an ends in itself, in which money has a value beyond that of exchanging goods).
We cannot lay down the economics for a Free Society which by its nature is free to reject or accept anything it fancies. The authoritarian economist can do so (“so long as I, or my party, is in power, we will do this or that”).
An anarchist society is by definition a Free Society, but a Free Society is not necessarily Anarchist. It might fall short in several respects. Some failings might seriously limit its desirability. For instance, a Revolution carried out by men in a male-dominated society, might perpetuate sex discrimination, which would limit freedom and undermine the Revolution by leaving it possible for aggressive attitudes to be fostered. The liberal illusion that repressive forces must be tolerated which will ultimately wipe out all freedom — lest the right to dissent be imperilled — could well destroy the revolution.
A Free Society head to rid itself or repressive institutions and some might long last longer than others. The Church is one instance — yet religious beliefs, which continue under the most repressive and brutal dictatorships, could surely continue under No Government. Only those creeds which have not had their claws cut and demand suppression of other religions or unbelief, forced conversions or marriages, censorship by themselves and obedience to their own laws from those not wishing to do so, have anything to fear from an Anarchist Revolution.
*** The Employers Do Not Give Work
It is Primitive basic socialist thinking, to which Anarchism subscribes, that work is not something that is given by the employer. The employer may have the legal right to distribute work, but the wealth of a country is due to the workers and to natural resources, not to an employer or a State. They have the chance of preventing wealth being created.
It is the Anarchist case that fluctuations of the money market, inflation, recesssion, unemployment, as well as war, are artificially created and are not natural disasters like flood, famine, earthquake, drought — and as one knows nowadays, even some of these are created by abuse of natural resources.
It may be that in some technological society of the future, run by the State, in a sort of boss utopia, the working class will be displaced as a productive class. We see signs of that even today as large part of the economy are closed down as unprofitable and people uprooted. There is a technology, still in its infancy but making great strides, which will reduce us, as a productive class, to turners of switches and openers of the scientists’ doors; to secretaries and receptionists; to janitors and clerks; to domestic servants of the rich. Anarcho-syndicalsts think such a society must be resisted. They do not worship work as a fetish in itself but fight dehumanisation and alienation. In this they differ from some other Anarchists who think work has no purpose and who become state-dependent by conviction.
*** Objections to Anarchism
Whenever Anarchists attack present-day society, they touch on the fears and prejudices of average people who know that society is a jungle today and cannot visualise life without the safeguards needed in the jungle. When they hear of Anarchism they bring forward objections which are, in fact, criticisms of the present system they do not otherwise admit but think of as objections to a Free Society of the future.
They fear what is known in the Statist language as a “state of Anarchy” — they think murder, rape, robbery, violent attack would ensue if there were no Government to prevent it. And yet we all know that Government cannot, certainly does not., prevent it. One has only to pick up the papers to learn that it flourishes though Government is strong, and also where Government is weak, and more so perhaps where there are numerous bodies competing as to which is the Government and Government is said to have broken down. “A state of Anarchy” nowhere exists — in the sense there a society where there is no Government and not just a weak or divided Government.
The most a functioning Government can do is not prevention but punishment — when it finds out, sometimes wrongly or not at all — who the culprits are, its own methods of repressive action can cause far more damage than the original crimes — the “cure” is worse than the disease.
“What would you do without a police force?” Society would never tolerate murder, whether it had a police force or not. The institutionalisation of a body to look after crime means that it not only “looks after” crime and nourishes crime, but that the rest of society is absolved from doing so. The reasoning is that a murder next door is the State’s business, not mine! Responsibility for one’s neighbour is reduced in an authoritarian society, in which the State is solely responsible for our behaviour.
“Who will do the dirty work?”. This is a question society, not just the apologist for Anarchism, has to ask itself. There are dirty jobs which are socially unacceptable and poorly paid, so that nobody wants to do them. People have therefore been enslaved to do them, or there is competition in a market economy and the jobs become better paid (and therefore socially acceptable), or there is conscription for such jobs, whether by political direction or the pressures of unemployment. Sometimes the capitalist introduces immigration in the hope of cheap labour, thus putting off the problem for a generation or two. Or it can be that jobs don’t get done and, say, the streets aren’t swept anymore and so we get deluged with water shooting out from cars driven by graduate psychologists and step gingerly past refuse, clutching our theses on sociology.
What the State does in such circumstances seems to depend on political factors. What an Anarchist society would do could only be foretold by a clairvoyant. It is plain what it could not do — use force, since it would lack repressive machinery or the means of economic coercion. The question implies a criticism of prosperity and freedom, which bring problems in their train. Are we to reject prosperity and freedom for that reason?
“If the Anarchists do not seize power, and have superseded other forms of socialism that would, they objectively make way for fascism”. This allegation presupposes the dilution of anarchism with pacifism, for there is always, in any circumstances, one sure way of avoiding dictatorship, whether from the right, left, centre or within one’s own ranks, and that is by personal removal of the dictator. This only becomes a symbolic gesture when the dictator is in power with all the machinery of command-and-obey at the disposal of the head of State.
Anyone will seize power if given the opportunity. Anarchists do not claim to be a privileged elite and cannot truthfully assert they would be better able to resist the temptations of power, or to wield it more successfully, than anyone else.
*** Leadership
Do Anarchists believe in leadership? They always deny they do, but undoubtedly many Anarchists have emerged as leaders, sometimes even of armies (like Buenaventura Durruti and Nestor Makhno) or of ideas, or of organisations. In any grouping some people do naturally “give a lead”, but this should not mean they are a class apart. What they always reject is responsibility for leadership. That means their supporters become blind followers and the leadership not one of example or originality but of unthinking acceptance.
Musical geniuses, artists, scientists can be of an “elite” without being elitist — there is no reason why excelling in certain spheres should make one better entitled to the world’s goods or more worthy of consideration in matters in which one does not have specialised consideration (the correspondence between Freud and Einstein in which they discuss whether war can be prevented is a classic example of futility — Einstein looking to Freud for a psychological lead in pacifism and Freud explaining it is in the nature of Man. In the end, scientists who were pacifists, or believers in the League of Nations enthusiasts, or — like Einstein — both, invented the atom bomb).
In the same way, people can work in an office without being bureaucrats: a bureaucrat is a person whose power is derived from the office they hold. Holding an office in an organisation can bring supreme power by being at the head of a chain of command-and-obey (as it did in the case of Joseph Stalin). In slang it is a term flung at anyone who happens to be efficient, which is far from being the same thing. v In the same way, no real Anarchist — as distinct from someone pretending to be or remain one — would agree to be part of an institutionalised leadership. Neither would an Anarchist wait for a lead, but give one. That is the mark of being an Anarchist, not a formal declaration of being one. What above all is the curse of leadership is not the curse of leadership, but agreement to being led blindly — not the faults of the shepherd but the meekness of the sheep. What would the crimes of Hitler have amounted to, had he had to carry them out by himself?
*** Can Public Opinion Itself be Authoritarian?
Yes. Even in a Free Society? Certainly. But this is not an argument against a Free Society, it is a reason why public opinion should not be molded by an outside force. There might well be a society controlled economically by the workers where prejudice against some minorities, or traditional family attitudes, or rules laid down by religions rooted in the past, might still exist. The society would be free in one respect only — economically.
But without any means of codifying prejudices; no repressive machinery against nonconformists; above all, no means of repression by persuasion when the media is controlled from above; public opinion can become superior to its prejudices. The majority is not automatically right. The manipulation of the idea of a majority is part of the Government technique.
*** Unity
One last objection is made against Anarchism, usually by those about to “come over” — Why disunity in the ranks of those who take up a similar position on many stands? Why cannot we be all one libertarian left? Why any divisions at all?
If we create councils of action — workers’ industrial proto-unions — as we intend to do given the chance and agreement of workers, even if as a first step we form social groups based upon industrial activity or support, obviously we are going to be united to others not only of the libertarian left, or indeed (in the case of workers’ councils) with people of reformist, reactionary, or authoritarian points of view. We mix with them in everyday life anyway. The expression of Anarchist views and attitudes does not make us hermits. Anarchist groups need to keep alive their identity, but only a party machine would make them into walls against meeting others outside.
It is certainly the curse of the present day that pseudo-Anarchists, whether liberal or “lifestylist”, create their own “ghettos” within a “left”, which has become itself a ghetto, in which acceptance of a package deal of ideas is obligatory. This endemic isolation, in the name of youth, sex, race, nationality, alternative culture, or whatever, has nothing to do with Anarchism though it has been wished on it by journalistic propaganda pressure.
** The Marxist Criticism of Anarchism
The Marxist criticism of Anarchism is the first with which most people with a serious interest in politics come in contact. There follows from it the Marxist-Leninist critique and the Social-Democratic objections. vMarxist-Leninists, faced with Anarchism, find that by its nature it undermines all the suppositions basic to Marxism. Marxism was held out to be the basic working-class philosophy (a belief which has utterly ruined the working-class movement everywhere). It holds in theory that the industrial proletariat cannot owe its emancipation to anyone but themselves alone, It is hard to go back on that and say that the working class is not yet ready to dispense with authority placed over it by someone outside the class.
Marxism normally tries to refrain from criticising Anarchism as such — unless driven to doing so, when it exposes its own authoritarianism ( “how can the workers run the railways, for instance, without direction — that is to say, without authority?”) and concentrates its attack not on Anarchism, but on Anarchists. This is based on a double standard: Anarchists are held responsible for the thought and actions of all persons, live or dead, calling themselves Anarchists, even only temporarily, or persons referred to as Anarchists by others, even if they disagree, or whose actions could be held to be Anarchistic by non-Anarchists. even on a faulty premise, or are referred to by others as Anarchists. Marxists take responsibility for Marxists holding their particular party card at the time.
Marxism has — whether one agrees with it or not — a valid criticism of the Anarchists in asking how one can (now) dispense with political action — or whether one should throw away so vital a weapon. But this criticism varies between the schools of Marxism, since some have used it to justify complete participation in the whole capitalist power structure, while others talk vaguely only of “using Parliament as a platform”. Lenin recognised the shortcomings of Marxism in this respect and insisted that the anarchist workers could not be criticised for rejecting so Philistine a Marxism that it used political participation for its own sake and expected the capitalist state to let itself be voted out of existence peacefully. He therefore concentrated on another aspect, which Marx pioneered, viz. criticism of particular Anarchists, and this has dominated all Leninist thinking ever since.
Because of the lack of any other criticism of the Anarchists, Leninists — especially Trotskyists — to this day use the personal criticism method. But as Lenin selected only a few well-known personalities who for a few years fell short of the ideas they preached, the latter-day Leninists have to hold that all Anarchists are responsible for everyone who calls himself or herself an Anarchist — or even, such as the Russian Socialist-Revolutionaries in Russia, were only called such (if indeed so) by others.
This wrinkle in Leninism has produced another criticism of Anarchism (usually confined to Trots and Maoists); Anarchists are responsible not only for all referred to as Anarchists, but for all workers influenced by Anarchist ideas. The C.N.T. is always quoted here, but significantly its whole history before and after the civil war is never mentioned, solely the period of participation in the Government. For this, the Anarchists must for ever accept responsibility! But the Trots may back the reformist union U.G.T. without accepting any period in its entire history. In all countries (if workers), they presumably join or (if students) accept the reformist trade unions. That is all right. But a revolutionary trade union must for ever be condemned for any one deviation. Moreover, if broken it must never be rebuilt; the reformist union must be rebuilt in preference. This is the logical consequence of all Trot thinking on Spain or other countries where such unions exist, proving their preference for reformist unions’ negative character, which lends itself to a leadership they may capture; as against a decentralised union which a leadership cannot capture.
*** Petty Bourgeois
Notwithstanding this preference for non-revolutionary unions, and condemnation of Anarchists for unions built from the bottom up, all Marxist-Leninists have a seemingly contradictory criticism of Anarchists, namely “they are petty bourgeois”.
This leads them into another difficulty — how can one reconcile the existence of anarcho-syndicalist unions with “petty-bourgeois” origins — and how does one get over the fact that most Marxist-Leninists of today are professional ladies and gentlemen studying for or belonging to the conservative professions? The answer is usually given that because anarchism is “petty bourgeois” those embracing it “whatever their occupation or social origins” must also be “petty bourgeois”; and because Marxism is working class, its adherents must be working class “at least subjectively”. This is a sociological absurdity, as if “working class” meant an ideological viewpoint. It is also a built-in escape clause.
Yet Marx was not such a fool as his followers. “Petty bourgeois” in his day did not mean a solicitor or an accountant, a factory manager, sociologist ,or anything of that sort (they were “bourgeois” — the term was “petit” or small not “petty” that qualified the adjective — and meant precisely that these were not the same as bourgeoisie). The small burgher was one who had less privileges, economically, than the wealthy but had some privileges by virtue of his craft. Anarchism, said Marx, was the movement of the artisan worker — that is to say, the self-employed craftsman with some leisure to think and talk, not subject to factory hours and discipline, independently-minded and difficult to threaten, not backward like the peasantry. In England, these people tended to become Radicals, perhaps because the State was less oppressive and less obviously unnecessary. In many countries, however, they were much more extreme in their Radicalism and in the Swiss Jura the clockmakers’ Anarchism prospered. It spread to Paris — and the Paris Commune was, above all, a rising of the artisans who had been reduced to penury by Napoleon III and his war. As the capitalist technique spread throughout the world, the artisans were ruined and driven into the factories. It is these individual craftsmen entering industrialisation who became Anarchists, pointed out successive Marxists. They are not conditioned to factory discipline which produces good order, unlike a proletariat prepared to accept a leadership and a party, and to work for ever in the factory provided it comes under State control.
That this observation was true is seen by the crushing of the commune in Paris and in Spain and throughout the world, especially in places like Italy, Bulgaria, in the Jewish pale of settlement in Russia, and so on. It should be the task of an Anarchist union movement to seize the factories, but only in order to break down mass production and get back to craftsmanship. This is what Marx meant by a “petit bourgeois” outlook and the term having changed its meaning totally, the Marxists — like believers accepting Holy Writ — misunderstood him totally.
*** Vanguards
The reluctance of Marxist-Leninists to accept change is, however, above all seen in the acceptance of Lenin’s conception of the Party. (It is not that of Marx.) Lenin saw that Russia was a huge mass of inertia, with a peasantry that would not budge but took all its suffering with “Asiatic” patience. He looked to the “proletariat” to push it. But the “proletariat” was only a small part of the Russia of his day. Still he recognised it as the one class with an interest in progress — provided, he felt, it was led by shrewd, calculating, ruthless, and highly-educated people (who could only come from the upper classes in the Russia of the time). The party they created should become, as much as possible, the party of the proletariat in which that class could organise and seize power. It had then the right and the duty to wipe out all other parties.
The idiocy of applying this today in, say, a country like Britain is incredible. One has only to look at the parties which offer themselves as the various parties of the proletariat of which, incidentally, there could be only one. Compare them with the people around. The parties’ memberships are far behind in political intelligence and understanding. They are largely composed of shallow and inexperienced enthusiasts who understand far less about class struggle than the average worker.
Having translated the Russian Revolution into a mythology which places great stress on the qualities possessed by its leadership, they then pretend to possess that leadership charisma. But as they don’t have it, there is a total divorce between the working class and the so-called New Left which has, therefore, to cover itself up with long-winded phrases in the hope that this will pass for learning. In the wider “Movement” with the definitions at second hand from Marxist-Leninism, they scratch around to find someone really as backward and dispossessed as the moujik, and fall back on the “Third World” mythology.
The one criticism, applied by Marxist-Leninists, of Anarchism with any serious claim to be considered is, therefore, solely that of whether political action should be considered or not. Whenever it has been undertaken outside the class it has proved of benefit only to leaders from outside the class.
** The Social-Democratic Critique of Anarchism
The early Socialists did not understand that there would be necessarily a difference between Anarchism and Socialism. Both were socialist, but whereas the latter hoped to achieve socialism by Parliamentary means, the latter felt that revolutionary means were necessary. As a result many early Anarchist and socialist groups (especially in Britain) were interchangeable in working-class membership. Something might come from political action; something by industrial methods; the Revolution had to be fought as soon as possible; the one therefore was complementary to the other though it was recognised that they might have to follow separate paths. At least. so it was thought.
This, however, changed because the face of socialism changed. It dropped its libertarian ideas for Statism. “Socialism” gradually came to mean State Control of everything and, therefore, so far from being another face of Anarchism, was its direct opposite. From saying originally that “the Anarchists were too impatient”, therefore, the parliamentary Socialists turned to a criticism of the Anarchists leveled at them by people who had no desire to change society at all, whether sooner or later. They picked up what is essentially the conservative criticism of Anarchism which is essentially that the State is the arbiter of all legality and the present economic order is the only established legal order. A Stateless society — or even its advocacy — is thus regarded as criminal in itself! It is not, as a law, but to this day a police constable in court — or a journalist — will for this reason refer to Anarchism as if it were self-evidently criminal.
Most upholders of any parliamentary system deliberately confuse parliamentarism with democracy as an ideal system of equal representation, as if it already existed. Thus ultra-parliamentarism is “undemocratic, suggesting that a few hundred men and a few dozen women selected at random and alone had the right of exercising control over the rest of the country.
Since the Russianisation of “Communism”, turning away from both parliamentarism and democracy, it has suited the Social-Democrat to speak of criticism from the revolutionary side as being necessarily from those wanting dictatorship. The Anarchists, who can hardly be accused of dictatorship — except by politically illiterate journalists who do not understand the differences between parties — must therefore be “criminal” and whole labour movements have been so stigmatised by the Second International. This was picked up by the U.S. Government with its “criminal-syndicalism” legislation which was similar to that in more openly fascist countries.
No more than the Marxist-Leninists, the Social-Democrats (in the sense of orthodox Labourites) are unable to state that their real objection to Anarchism is that fact that it is against power and privilege and so undermines their whole case. They bring up, if challenged, the objection that it is “impossible”. If “impossible”, what have they to fear from it? Why, in countries like Spain and Portugal, where the only chance of resisting tyranny was the Anarchist Movement, did Social-Democrats prefer to help the Communist Party? In Spain, up to the appearance of the Socialist Party when it was politically profitable to switch, the British Labour Party helped the Communist-led factions but did nothing for the Anarchist resistance.
Dictatorship of the proletariat is “possible”, only too much so. When it comes it will sweep the socialists away. But if the Anarchists resist, the Socialists will at least survive to put forward their alternative. They fear only the consequences of that alternative being decisively rejected — for who would choose State Socialism out of the ashcan for nothing if they could have Stateless Socialism instead?
In the capitalist world, the Social Democrat objects to revolutionary methods, the “impatient” and alleged “criminality” of the Anarchists. But in the Communist world, social-democracy was by the same conservative token equally “criminal” (indeed more so) since it presumably postulated connection with enemy powers, as is now proved. The charge of “impatience” could hardly be leveled when there was no way of effecting a change legally and the whole idea of change by parliamentary methods was a dream. Social-democracy, in the sense of Labourism, gives up the fight without hope when tyranny triumphs (unless it can call on foreign intervention, as in occupied war-time Europe). It has nothing to offer. There is no struggle against fascism or Leninism from social-democracy because no constitutional methods offer themselves. In the former Soviet Union and its satellites, they had no ideas on how to change and hoped that nationalists and religious dissidents would put through a bit of liberalism to ease the pressure. We know now how disastrous that policy has been. Yet anarchism offers a revolutionary attack upon the communist countries that is not only rejected by the Social-Democrats; powerful, they unite with other capitalist powers to harass and suppress that attack.
** The Liberal-Democratic Objection to Anarchism
Liberal-Democracy, or non-fascist conservatism, is afraid to make direct criticisms of Anarchism because to do so undermines the whole reasoning of Liberal-Democracy. It therefore resorts to falsification: Anarchists are equated with Marxists (and thereby the whole Marxist criticism of anarchism ignored). The most frequent target of attack is to suggest that Anarchism is some form of Marxism plus violence, or some extreme form of Marxism.
The reason Liberal-Democracy has no defence to offer against real Anarchist argument is because Liberal-Democracy is using it as its apologia, in the defence of “freedom”, yet placing circumscribing walls around it. It pretends that parliamentarism is some form of democracy, but though sometimes prepared to admit (under pressure) that parliamentarism is no form of democracy at all, occasionally seeks to find ways of further democratising it. The undoubtedly dictatorial process that a few people, once elected by fair means or foul, have a right to make decisions for a majority, is covered up by a defence of the constitutional rights or even the individual liberty of members of Parliament only. Burke’s dictum that they are representatives, not delegates, is quoted ad nauseam (as if this reactionary politician had bound the British people for ever, though he as himself admitted, did not seek to ask their opinions of the matter once).
Liberal economics are almost as dead as the dodo. What rules is either the monopoly of the big firms, or of the State. Yet laissez-faire economics remain embodied aspirations of the Tory Party which they never implement. They object to the intervention of the State in business, but they never care to carry the spirit of competition too far. There is no logical reason why there should be any restriction on the movement of currency — and this is good Tory policy (though never implemented! Not until the crisis, any crisis, is over!). From this point of view, why should we not be able to deal in gold pieces or U.S. dollars, or Maria Theresa tales, or Francs, or Deutschmarks, or even devalued Deutschmarks? The pound sterling would soon find its own level, and if it were devalued, so much the worse for it. But why stop there? If we can choose any currency we like, free socialism could coexist with capitalism and it would drive capitalism out.
Once free socialism competes with capitalism — as it would if we would choose to ignore the State’s symbolic money and deal in one of our own choosing, which reflected real work values — who would choose to be exploited? Quite clearly no laissez-faire economist who had to combine his role with that of party politician would allow things to go that far.
Liberal-Democracy picks up one of the normal arguments against Anarchism which begin on the right wing: namely, it begins with the objections against socialism — that is Statism — but if there is an anti-Statist socialism that is in fact more liberal than itself, then it is “criminal”. If it is not, then it seeks law to make it so.
This argument is in fact beneath contempt, yet it is one that influences the press, police, and judiciary to a surprising extent. In fact Anarchism as such (as distinct from specific Anarchist organisations) could never be illegal, because no laws can make people love the State. It is only done by false ideals such as describing the State as “country”.
The fact is that Liberal-Democracy seldom voices any arguments against Anarchism as such — other than relying on prejudice — because its objections are purely authoritarian and unmask the innate Statism and authoritarianism of liberalism. Nowadays conservatives like to appropriate the name “liberalism” to describe themselves as if they were more receptive to freedom than socialists. But their liberalism is confined to keeping the State out of interfering in their business affairs. Once anarchism makes it plain that it is possible to have both social justice and to dispense with the Statethey are shown in their true colours. Their arguments against State socialism and Communism may sound “libertarian”, but their arguments against Anarchism reveal that they are essentially authoritarian. That is why they prefer to rely upon innuendo, slanders. and false reporting, which is part of the establishment anti-anarchism, faithfully supported by the media.
** The Fascist Objection to Anarchism
The fascist objection to Anarchism is, curiously enough, more honest than that of the Marxist, the liberal or the Social-Democrat. Most of these will say, if pressed, that Anarchism is an ideal, perhaps imperfectly understood, but either impossible of achievement or possible only in the distant future. The fascist, on the contrary, admits its possibility; What is denied is its desirability.
The right-wing authoritarian (which term includes many beyond those naming themselves fascists) worships the very things which are anathema to Anarchists, especially the State. Though the conception of the State is idealised in fascist theory, it is not denied that one could do without it. But the “first duty of the citizen is to defend the State” and it is high treason to oppose it or advocate its abolition.
Sometimes the State is disguised as the “corporate people” or the “nation,” giving a mystical idea of the State beyond the mere bureaucratic apparatus of rule. The forces of militarism and oppression are idealised (after the German emperor who said that universal peace was “only a dream and not even a good dream”). Running throughout right-wing patriotism is a mystical feeling about the “country”, but though Nazis in particular sometimes have recourse to an idealisation of the “people” (this has more of a racial than popular connotation in German), it is really the actual soil that is held sacred, thus taking the State myth to its logical conclusion. For the Anarchist this, of course, is nonsense. The nonsense can be seen in its starkest form with the followers of Franco who killed off so many Spaniards even after the Civil War was ended, while hankering for the barren rock of Gibraltar: especially in General Milan de Astrray, who wanted to kill off “bad Spaniards” and eradicate Catalans and Basques in the name of unitary Spain, thus (as Unamuno pointed out) making Spain as “one-armed and one-eyed, as the General was himself”.
Anarchism is clearly seen by fascists as a direct menace and not a purely philosophical one. It is not merely the direct action of Anarchists but the thing itself which represents the evil. The “democratic” media finally got around to picking up these strands in fascist thinking, ironing them out nicely, and presenting them in the “news” stories. Hitler regarded the Authoritarian State he had built as millennial (the thousand-year state) but he knew it could be dismembered and rejected. His constant theme was the danger of this and while he concentrated (for political reasons) attacks on a totalitarian rival, State Communism (since Russia presented a military menace), his attacks on “cosmopolitanism” have the reiterated theme of anti-Anarchism.
“Cosmopolitanism” and “Statelessness” are the “crimes” Nazism associated with Jews, though since Hitler’s day large numbers of them have reverted to nationalism and a strong state. The theme of “Jewish domination” goes hand in hand with “anarchist destruction of authority, morals, and discipline”, since fascism regards personal freedom as bad in itself and only national freedom permissible. Insofar as one can make any sense of Hitler’s speeches (which are sometimes deceptive since he followed different strands of thought according to the way he could sway an audience), he believed “plunging into Anarchy” of a country (abolition of State restraints) will lead to chaos, which will make it possible for a dictatorship other than the one in the people’s interests to succeed.
Hitler did not confuse State Communism with Anarchism (as Franco did deliberately) for propaganda purposes, to try to eradicate Anarchism from history. He equated Communism with “Jewish domination”, and the case against the Jews (in original Nazi thinking) that they are a racially-pure people who will gain conquest over helots like the Germans.
A “Master Race” must control the Germans to keep the rival State out. In a condition of freedom the German “helots” would revert to Anarchy, just as the racially “inferior” Celts of France threw out the Norman Nordic overlords (the Houston Chamberlain version of the French Revolution). Later, of course, when Nazism became a mass Party it was expedient to amend this to saying the Germans were the Master Race, but this was not the original Nazi philosophy, nor was it privately accepted by the Nazi leaders (“the German people were not worthy of me”). But they could hardly tell mass meetings that they were all “helots”. At least not until their power was complete. This idea that a whole people (whichever it was) can be born “helots” could not be better expressed as the contrary opposite of Anarchism, since in this case it would indeed be impossible.
This Nazi propaganda is echoed by the media today; “plunging the country into Anarchy would be followed by a Communist or extreme right-wing dictatorship” is current newspaper jargon.
To sum up the fascist objection to Anarchism: It is not denied the abolition of the State can come about, but if so, given economic, social, and political freedom, the “helots” — who are “naturally inclined” to accept subjection from superior races — will seek for masters. They will have a nostalgia for “strong rule”.
In Nazi thinking, strong rule can only come from (in theory) racially-pure members of the “Master Race” (something a little more than a class and less than a people), which can be constructive masters (i.e., the “Aryans”), or a race which has had no contact with the “soil” and will be thus destructive.
In other types of fascist thinking, given freedom, the people will throw off all patriotic and nationalistic allegiances and so the “country” will cease to be great. This is the basis of Mussolini’s fascism, and, of course, it is perfectly true, bearing in mind that “the country” is his synonym for the State and his only conception of greatness is militaristic. The frankest of all is the Spanish type of fascism which sought to impose class domination of the most brutal kind and make it plain that its opposition to Anarchism was simply in order to keep the working class down. If necessary, the working class may be, and was, decimated in order to crush Anarchism.
It is true of all political philosophies and blatant with the fascist one, that its relationship to Anarchism throws as clear light upon itself!
** The Average Person’s Objection to Anarchism
Generally speaking, the ordinary people pick up their objection to Anarchism from the press, which in turn is influenced by what the establishment wants. For many years there was a press conspiracy of silence against Anarchism, followed in the 1960 by a ruling on transcribing Anarchism and Marxism, or Anarchism and nationalism, so that the one must be referred to the other, in order to confuse. This was bourn out in many exposures in Black Flag showing where avowed Marxists were in the turbulent Sixties described in the press as “Anarchists” while avowed Anarchists were described as “Marxists” or “nationalists”. On some occasions nationalists were called “Anarchists,” but usually when the word “Anarchist” was being used as if to describe oneself as an Anarchist, it was to make a confession of guilt. This, as we have seen, is picked up from the Liberal-Democratic attitude to Anarchism. But it is flavoured strongly with the fascist attitude, too. Because of it, the phrase “self-confessed Anarchist” came to be used by the Press to describe a person who is an Anarchist as opposed to someone who they have merely labeled Anarchist in order to confuse.
This has altered somewhat with the commercial exploitation of Anarchism by commercial exploitation of music and academic exploitation of philosophy, giving rise to a middle-class liberal version of an Anarchist as a liberal-minded philosopher, a harmless eccentric, a drop out, or a person wearing fashionably unfashionable clothes.
As opposed to this increasingly popular misconception, the average person takes the fascist view of anarchism — as picked up in its entirety by police officers and others — as genuine, but tempered with the fact that they do not take it quite seriously. Sometimes they confuse the word “revolutionary”, and assume all who protest are thereby Anarchist. This ignorance, however, is more often displayed by journalists than it is by the general public.
When it comes down to an objection to Anarchism as it is, as distinct from objections to a mythological Anarchism as imagined or caricatured by the authoritarian Parties or establishment, or practised by the alternative establishment, there are not many serious objections from the general public. They may not think it practical of realisation if presented in a positive way to them, but they usually do so if presented in a negative way — i.e. describing the tyranny of the State. The fact that we could dispense with authoritarian parties, the worthlessness of politicians, and so on is generally agreed. The sole main objection is perhaps the feeling that they want to make the best out of life as it is: and they do not feel strong enough to challenge the State or to face the struggle involved in bringing about a Free Society, or put up with the many vicissitudes (major and minor) that make up the life of a militant or someone reasonably committed to an ideal. The temptations are greatto conform and to accept the bribes which the capitalist class can now hold out. Only when the State wants its last ounce of blood do people wake up to the need for resistance, but then it is too late and also, of course, the State then takes on the pretence of being “the country”, in order to be loved instead of hated or disliked.
*** The Reduction of Anarchism to Marginalisation
By crafty methods, not used against other political theories, it is endeavoured by Statist propaganda to marginalise Anarchism to nothing. It is confused by journalists, professors, and subsidised “researchers” to show that Anarchists are identical to dropouts, drug-takers, nationalist assassins, New-Age travelers, political dissidents, militant trade unionists, young rebels, middle-class theorists, dreamers, plotters, comedians, frustrated reformers, extreme pacifists, murderers, schoolboy rebels, and criminals. Some Anarchists, one supposes, could be any but hardly all of these — as could members of all political persuasions — but none could be descriptive of the cause. By misuse of the word “Anarchist”, or by added “alleged” or “self-confessed” Anarchist; or by conjoining the word with an obvious contradiction, Anarchism can be marginalised and, by implication, Statist theories made to seem the norm.
— Albert Meltzer
|
#title Anarcho-syndicalism: an outline of constructive anarchism
#author Albert Meltzer
#SORTtopics anarcho-syndicalism
#date April 1940
#source Retrieved on 19<sup>th</sup> May 2021 from [[https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/tx977s][www.katesharpleylibrary.net]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2021-05-19T12:38:31
#notes Published in <em>War Commentary</em>
It is no longer possible to take up a negative role with regard to the world revolution. The exigencies of modern capitalism demand that we give up any consideration of “should there be a revolution?” etc., for monopoly capitalism cannot continue without some form of social change either towards totalitarian State control or towards workers’ control.
The question today is: “On which <em>side</em> in the revolution?” We have frequently outlined the dangers of totalitarianism, whether capitalist, fascist or “communist”: the State is not a fit instrument for the liberation of the masses. To this we will allude again. Our point now is to consider the alternative: workers’ control. Not merely to consider the negative role of the revolution (the destruction of capitalism and State) but the creative role of the revolution.
It is not practicable to say, with a wave of the hand, “the workers will decide when the time comes.” Our job is to consider the methods that the workers do take at such times, Since only by that way can we hope for a unification and strengthening of the revolutionary movement prior to that time. And as John Most said, “Revolutions cannot be made, but they can be prepared for.”
*** The Struggle For A Free Society
The economic organisation of the working class is the only way in which we can struggle against capitalism, totalitarianism and the State. Considering Britain today and the conditions peculiar to it, we would say that a rebirth of the militant shop-stewards’ movement as in the last war, <em>would be</em> <em>the first step</em>. (Councils of workers struggling for economic concessions. in the factories and workshops, which in 1917–19 began to link into Soldiers and Workers’ Councils).
Such councils, imbued with a revolutionary anti-war spirit, could be joined according to industry, each council becoming a branch of its industrial union. Such industrial unions, freely federated, would be the nucleus not only of the struggle against capitalism and for immediate concessions, but for the taking hold of the places of work. All social functions in the new society would be controlled by the organisms thus set up – thus, directly, by the workers themselves, and not by any political party or group aspiring to power.
Through a revolutionary labour movement we could prepare the new society.
*** Economic Re-organisation
These Shop-committees, originally the means of assemblage of the workers for strike purposes would take over the new function of control when the bosses had been locked-out. Then economic control would be directed by the workers at the factory, pithead, minefield, mill, ship, etc. Through representation directly responsible to that meeting, would be formed regional federations (and eventually national and international federations) which, from unifying labour to resist capitalism, would take over the function of controlling industry in general. Around these industrial federations, specialised technical departments would develop in detail, but with direct responsibility to the industrial workers at the point of production, in order to prevent any possibility of technocratic bureaucracy. Production would thus be regulated by the producers themselves. Each industry would be run by the workers in that industry.
*** Social Re-organisation
Social reorganisation would be carried on by what would approximate to the modern borough or county council, composed, however, not of councillors but of the directly responsible representatives of the workers at their shop-meeting, (and changed or retained at each meeting). The council would be, in effect, a chamber of labour (a “cartel”) and, under capitalism, would have the approximate duties of a revolutionary syndicalist “trades council.” As the direct representative, then, of the producers (who would also be the consumers), it would have the say in all local matters, as distinct from the local unions in their regional federation, which would organise production. Co-operatives of consumers would take the function of supplying the demands of the consumers.
Local public works being the responsibility of the local “commune,” national public works would be the responsibility of the federation of communes. Similarly internationally, but with the growth of the free society internationally, such internationalism would be replaced by cosmopolitanism: i.e., the “nation” would be the world, or such part of it as was free <em>and federated</em> with the revolution.
*** Public Order
Clearly at first some form of public order must be taken along with public works. “Fifth Columnists,” recalcitrant capitalists, public nuisances, etc. must be stopped from wrecking the workers’ society. We would have no police force, for in the last analysis this would be a repressive force: a relic of the old capitalism. What then? The best answer is given from Spanish experience: a system of <em>workers’ patrols</em> directly responsible to the commune, not a standing police force, but a force recruited from the workers at the point of production. Some of its functions (traffic-directing, etc.) would become the work of a standing body: not the function of security however.[1] Such a system of workers’ patrols would be a direct heir to the workers’ “militia” which would have to be recruited in such a manner during the revolutionary period. And its difference from the capitalist police force, guardian of property rights, is clearly seen. It would be in effect, the people themselves: being composed simply of able-bodied volunteers from the direct ranks of the industrial community. Its aim would not be repressive, but “conductive” and for the purpose of public security.
*** Administrative Works
Thus it is seen that social works are the responsibility of the commune. They are carried out by the union concerned (e.g. teachers would run the schools, just as miners would run the mines). It can be seen, though, that certain forms of national administration are necessary: statistical, technical, etc. Here in fact, is where the danger of bureaucracy arises, and has to be guarded against. A continual “ebb and flow”, therefore, into administrative posts is necessary: no officials in the new society nor in the movement that has built it. Some permanent administrative (technical especially) posts are necessary: these workers must be members of a separate union, and treated a members of any other union, thus being on terms of equality with everyone else.
*** Agrarian Society
The fields would be controlled by the farm-workers in the same way that the industries were controlled by the industrial worker. The peasant problem (not affecting Britain, but all other European countries) would not be solved, practically nor desirable by liquidation: but by free co-operation. The peasant would be at liberty to associate on the general farm collectives. If he did not wish to, no forced collectivisation as in Russia, but the recognition of the peasants status: the peasant to continue with his own field, being given exclusive use of the field by the community provided that it was enough for him to live on (and did not entail his exploiting someone else to work on the field for him, although that would probably not arise in a free society with the chance of working in associated control and not under domination). Co-operation between peasant-farmer, labourer and townsman is essential: there is, in effect, nothing to divide them in a free society. In the same way we could trace the operation of all industries and other professions, taken over by the workers from the capitalists, or from the State (Post Office, etc.). The wage, money and profit system would be quite unnecessary.
We have traced here the outline of an anarchist society, seen from its creative side, the syndicalist reconstruction of society. Gradually the decentralised forms of control would become even more freer: the need for any form even of workers’ patrols disappearing. All wealth would be in common: the masses would be the masters of their own destiny. Could this become a form of majority oppression? No: to consider that would be to take too gloomy a view of human desire for liberty. Tyranny springs out of the unfree social soil: in a free community it would be a thing of the dark past.
Even before the commencement of the revolution, we will have dispensed with all forms of authoritarianism. As before the revolution, we rejected a <em>party</em> as a means for social emancipation, so after the revolution we reject a <em>State</em> as a means of running a society. It is neither necessary nor desirable.
All economy to the syndicates (workers’ unions as outlined above), all social administration to the communes. The abolition of the political oppression of man by man because of the economic exploitation of man by man.
This, then, is what we mean by Anarchy, the very name of which throws our hypocritical politicians into a state of abject terror. So far from our being reduced to chaos if we do not have the politicians, the police, the State, the bureaucrats, the capitalists, the rich, the authoritarians, the state of the world today (suffering from an excess of governmentalism) shows how we shall be reduced to chaos if we retain them. This outline shows the alternative if we neglect them.
[1] Why not a standing force? Because such a body, particularly if armed, could be the beginning of a force towards military dictatorship. The militarist army could become the instrument for military dictatorship. A popular force could only be subjected to the same “ebb and flow” as the administrative posts. No militarism is the one, no bureaucracy is the other. Moreover, the workers’ patrols would only be needed to act on certain occasions of crisis. Let us compare them with the product of capitalist war – voluntary A.R.P.[Air Raid Precautions] wardens! Allowing for considerable differences (1) of function; (2) of recruitment (arming direct from industry), the method of forming workers’ patrols and workers’ militia can be seen. (Moreover, to prevent the “tin-hat dictatorship,” the right of any citizen to complain to the community of any patrol would have to be recognised).
<br>
Standing non-repressive bodies with functions usually taken by police can be seen even to-day by such examples as the A.A., R.A.C., [Both motoring organisations] etc. Police work of the purely administrative nature could easily be taken over by such a new organisation.
<br>
Crimes of robbery, etc. would disappear with the profit system. Most criminals would be psychological, etc. and headed by the patrols to an appropriate body.
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#title Tribunals and Political Objectors
#author Albert Meltzer and Vernon Richards
#SORTauthors Albert Meltzer, Vernon Richards
#SORTtopics anti-militarism, pacifism, World War II
#date August 1940
#source Retrieved on 19<sup>th</sup> May 2021 from [[https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/hx3gzf][www.katesharpleylibrary.net]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2021-05-19T21:14:52
#notes Published in War Commentary, August 1940.
With the calling up of the 1906 class the number of men signing the Conscientious Objectors’ Register exceeded 50,000. The majority of these are pacifists of the Bible-in-one-hand and minister’s-letter-in-the-other type, whose objection to war is in no wise connected with any <em>political</em> opposition to the war, or to a clear understanding of its causes. It is in most cases a strong dislike of taking another man’s life, and, incidentally, a great fear to expose one’s own life to danger. On the other hand, with the calling up of the older age groups, the small percentage of C.O.’s is not a true indication of the feeling amongst these men with regard to the war, for a great number of them are in reserved occupations, and do not feel the need to register as C.O.’s. This action would result in the loss of their jobs, and in the case of Socialists and Anarchists a very slender chance of exemption before the Tribunals.
<strong>LONDON TRIBUNAL</strong>
The present writer attended a recent session of the Fulham Tribunal, and noted with interest the procedure, adopted by the tribunal. The first point of interest is the way the first few applicants are more closely cross-examined than those who appear later in the morning. For instance, one applicant who appeared before them just after noon was not even questioned on his beliefs; his whole objection to war as outlined in his written statement was quite sufficient for the tribunal to form its opinion on his views! Others were asked one or two questions and then dismissed. Between noon and 1 o’clock at least 9 applicants were heard. That means that each was granted an average of nearly seven minutes, during which time they had to be called before the tribunal, their statement read out by the Chairman, witnesses called and questioned and testimonials read, besides the most essential part of the procedure (at least so one would think) – the questioning by the tribunal. During the morning session only two cases could be considered political and one of these extremely badly expressed and confused, more so when a politically unexperienced worker is made to stand up to an onslaught of questions by professional men, and is expected to offer solutions to a war which is not his responsibility, of which he ignores the inside intrigues and which, judging by results, is baffling even those who have made military strategy their profession.
The case which, however, was of most interest to us was that of our comrade Albert Meltzer, whose regular contributions to WAR COMMENTARY and our previous publications must be familiar to most of our readers. His statement naturally gave the Anarchist point of view. Owing to its length and detail we can only publish here selections from it.
<quote>
“Support for this war, and service in any capacity, whether military or non-combatant, would be for me not only an intolerable compromise to the forces of Capitalism and the State, but a radical betrayal of the international working class. In any society controlled by a ruling class or by any other minority (party or bureaucracy), there must be a conflict (which takes different forms of intensity at different times) between the rulers and the ruled. The ruled, subjects of all States, the people who, not having property or labour to exploit, have to work for a living, have one interest in common that transcends national boundaries: their freedom. The rulers, whether aristocratic landowners, financiers, industrialists, merchant-capitalists, investors or politicians, have a divergent interest in common: the maintenance of the present system.
It is quite clear to me that I have no interest in common with the Montroses, the Londonderrys, the Ellermans, the Rothschilds the Churchills any more than with the Hitlers, the Stalins, the Morgans.
The State represents a certain interest in society: it is the instrument of the ruling class. Any interests it feels itself called upon to defend must of necessity be propertied interests.
I believe the working class of Britain can only achieve its freedom by fighting its own capitalist class on the economic field, by forcing it to grant social and wage concessions, and by joining with the Colonial peoples to end Imperialism.
I am opposed to <em>all</em> Governments. Since the State is the organ of the ruling class, any classless society could only be a Stateless society. While there is government and, therefore, political oppression (in whatever form it may be modified owing to the class struggle), it is because there is economic exploitation, whether, as in this country, private capitalism, or, as in Germany or Russia, State capitalism.
I am an anarcho-syndicalist: I recognise the necessity for anarchy – that is to say, absence of government – if mankind is to live as a social animal, and of the need for syndicalism: for a labour movement representing the workers at the point of production that will press for workers’ control of the places of work.
To join the Armed Forces of the Crown and to fight, either against the German workers or against (as is quite as possible) the revolting colonial workers, would be a betrayal of every principle I hold, insofar as it was not pure hypocrisy, since, with a gun in my hand, whatever oath of allegiance I might have taken would not force me to use that gun against what the State says is my enemy, rather than against what my reason tells me is the enemy.
It would be hypocrisy for me to hide my feelings towards the class-interests which are prepared to sacrifice the world for their ambitions. I have never done so and I am not prepared to do so now.
My atheism renders me quite immune from the religious dope that draws fine distinctions between the “glory” of the trenches and the “horror” of the barricades. I believe in the class-war, whether you like it or not. I have decided myself, in the tribunal of my own reason, that I will not support imperialist war. No decision of this tribunal can make me decide to support imperialist war and oppose class war. Whatever decision this tribunal may make, my decision remains unalterable.
As a believer in anarchism, I want to see a world in which violence, the organised violence of State and warfare, is abolished, and I would only use violence in defence of the revolution. Today I have no desire other than to live in peace: I believe in the old French slogan, “War to the palaces, peace to the cottages.”[1] Even if you made me take up arms, you still could not make me alter that policy.
I do not want to see a victory for Nazi-ism, for Bolshevism, or for Imperialism. I want to see a victory for the masses all over the world, which can only be represented by their taking and holding the means of production and distribution.”
(signed) Albert Meltzer.
</quote>
This forceful statement, read almost in undertones by the Chairman; was a welcome tonic for those in the gallery, alter the long series of Christian pacifist cases, and the long wrangling on whether “thou shalt not kill” meant the contrary or not. But the tribunal had made up its mind even before it started questioning comrade Meltzer, when the chairman remarked that our comrade was not a Conscientious Objector, but that his real objection was to the form of government, whilst the T.U. representative suggested that he would fight for a Government which represented his Anarchic principles. Our comrade retorted that he did not believe in any form of Government. The Chairman added that, of course, he didn’t believe in any form of Government. “You want people to run around wild” was his intelligent conclusion. Meltzer denied this, though another member of the tribunal saw fit to support the chairman’s views, The chairman then intervened saying that this had nothing to do with the case and asked comrade Meltzer whether he had any witnesses or letters. He had none but offered a file containing articles, etc., which he had written to further prove his political convictions. These were not required, the T.U. representative pointing out that he was quite convinced that our comrade was a good Anarchist. What they wanted to know was whether he was a good C.O. With this last remark, the Tribunal felt that it had probed quite deeply enough into the applicant’s conscience and found no reason whatsoever to infer that he had any objection to war. In fact it was found that in certain circumstances he would desire a war.
Albert Meltzer’s case is yet another of the political cases which have been virtually rejected without a hearing. The conclusion one can draw from the conduct of the tribunals is that whereas they are allegedly Conscientious Objectors’ Tribunals they are in actual fact <em>Pacifist</em> Tribunals, in which the pacifist beliefs of the applicant are put to the test. Furthermore, it must be pure pacifism and not just anti-militarism. For according to the Tribunals if a man declares that he is in favour of violence under certain circumstances, then in their view he cannot hold any conscientious objection to war. The logical development of that argument is that anyone in favour of this war is therefore in favour of violence, therefore that person can express no horror for murder, political assassination or bloody revolution. It means that no person is able to distinguish between good and evil. And to bring the case nearer to the hearts of the Tribunals. Would they admit that a patriotic Englishman should have a conscientious objection to being conscripted in the German army, in spite of the fact that he believes in violence? The whole argument is, of course, absurd. Surely, conscience is one’s ability to distinguish between right and wrong not only in relation to its personal effect but also in relation to its effect on the vast majority of people. In this way one takes each case as it presents itself and analyses it with relation to its ultimate effect. Thus whilst one can find justification in certain forms of terrorism, whose aim is the liberation of an oppressed people, one cannot so easily justify political gangsterism, nationalist feuds, etc. Similarly, Anarchists and Revolutionary Socialists, whilst willing to sacrifice their lives, in the cause of International Socialism, are unwilling to be instruments in a violent struggle between two similar systems, such as British and German imperialisms, whose aims are power and yet more power.
To those who bring up the Tribunals as an example of the democratic traditions of this country we say that so long as it is not admitted that applicants who appear before them on political grounds have a conscientious objection to this war, though recognising the need for violence under certain circumstances, then the whole system of tribunals is a farce and a sham, and the sooner they are abolished the better. Socialists, Anarchists and other political objectors will then know exactly where they stand and what action to take.
[1] Revolutionary slogan first used by Georg Büchner in <em>Der Hessische Landbote</em> (1834)
|
#cover a-m-albert-meltzer-ed-the-international-revolution-1.png
#title The International Revolutionary Solidarity Movement
#subtitle A study of the origins and development of the revolutionary anarchist movement in Europe 1945–73 with particular reference to the First of May Group
#author Albert Meltzer (ed.)
#LISTtitle International Revolutionary Solidarity Movement
#SORTauthors Albert Meltzer
#SORTtopics Elephant Editions, Spain, history, anarchist history, Cienfuegos Press
#date 1976
#source https://archive.elephanteditions.net/library/irsm
#lang en
#pubdate 2020-05-02T08:56:26
#notes Edited by Albert Meltzer. Published by Cienfuegos Press 1976. Reprinted by Elephant Editions 2013
** 1900–1939
Once again in history Anarchism is singled out by every reactionary
force as its main enemy. World Governments, moving closer together
against the common threat of the common people, fear a socialism
unfettered by government ties, a class struggle without the
limitations imposed by the parliamentary game, a working class without
a leadership that aims at imposing authority either by a new
dictatorship or by bourgeois parliamentarianism.
Before the First World War the main impetus to social revolution came
from the anarchist and revolutionary syndicalist movements. However,
following the defeat of the Russian Revolution with the triumph of
authoritarian communism, world capitalism tended to concentrate its
energies on destroying this apparent danger to its continued
existence, thus giving the impression that the libertarian movement
and its ideas were superfluous, or, at best, a side issue to the main
struggle, so far as the organised working class was concerned. Only in
a minority of countries did anarchism take the lead, elsewhere the
very idea of freedom went into decline.
Capitalism, using the dictatorial methods of state communism wherever
necessary, forced a situation where the apparent alternatives seemed
to be (state) communism or fascism.
This did not prevent the anarchist movement from maintaining the
intensity of the class struggle throughout the 1920s. It was the
anarcho-syndicalist movement in Spain (the CNT) which carried the
whole weight of labour organisation throughout the dictatorship of
Primo de Rivera (when the socialist leaders took office in order to
try to boost the socialist UGT union at its expense) and during the
equally perfidious republic which followed. In Italy, individual and
collective libertarian attacks against Mussolini and his regime formed
the main anti-fascist resistance. In France, anarchists fought a
losing battle to keep the unions to their original syndicalist basis,
while in the USA the IWW as the legatee to all that was libertarian
and syndicalist in both the European and American traditions, fought a
valiant battle against reaction. In the Argentine and Uruguay there
were murderous assaults against the anarchist movement which fought on
to maintain working class solidarity against the selfishness of the
ruling class. In China, where the communist party sold out the
proletarian revolution to follow the successful bourgeois
revolutionists under Chiang Kai Shek, anarchists continued the
struggle for workers’ councils on the same lines as those of the first
German revolution in 1918 and the factory occupations in Italy. In
Russia, the struggle was passing from the battlefields and the
factories into the prison camps. In Britain, anarchists were prominent
in the shop stewards’ movement and especially the unemployed workers’
movement.
All this maintained a movement that had reached a high point of
international struggle before the first world war; but it was
nevertheless true that the whole trend of the post-world war I era
appeared to be ‘communism v. fascism’. As fascism triumphed in the
‘have not’ imperialist countries most threatened by state communism,
it steadily began to menace the ‘have’ imperialist countries stable
enough to resist that pressure, and so the situation of ‘democracy v.
fascism’ developed. The ruling-class throughout the world had
threatened to take away democratic liberties and substitute fascism if
their domination was threatened, but gradually fascism became
associated with the aggressive ‘have not’ imperialism against the
defensive empires. It began to seem to many that there was some
identity of interests between capitalist and worker; and with the
defence of the Soviet Union in mind, the Communist Party began to
reiterate this theme incessantly.
This period ended with the Spanish Civil War. There it was the
anarcho-syndicalist movement which responded initially to the military
coup d’etat which aimed at ‘restoring law and order’ by opposing to it
the organised force, and the spontaneous action, of the working
people.
Against the rebel Army of their own country they responded with the
greatest weapon in their armoury, social revolution. The combined
force of feudalism and fascism hit back with the greatest force at
their disposal—genocide. Because of the treachery of the Republic,
which declined to defend itself and would not arm the working people
who alone could prevent its overthrow, the rising of the Army, though
checked, became a war. Faced with the reactionary elements within the
Spanish Government (aided by the Communist Party and its foreign
backers) the libertarian movement felt inclined to compromise in its
social revolution by waging the civil war instead; soon it was too
late to alter course, for the enemy was too vicious and to falter
meant to die. But without doubt the libertarian movement was also
betrayed by a leadership which manoeuvred its way to positions of
authority and power under cover of the war.
In the absence of party discipline, anathema to the anarchist
movement, it was possible for the ‘well known’ to rise to a leadership
which sought participation in the Government on the grounds that only
in this way could the civil war be fought. Thus the libertarian
movement came to adopt at second hand the slogans and to some extent
the mentality of the Popular Front in regard to ‘democracy v.
fascism’. At the outset it fought against fascism under
social-revolutionary colours; it went down to its defeat under false
democratic-capitalist ones.
Meanwhile, every single anarchist endeavour throughout Europe was
concentrated on the Spanish struggle to the sacrifice of everything
else. The Spanish Anarchists rejected the idea of an International
Brigade (other than for refugees with nowhere else to go). They did
not want to ‘depopulate’ the anarchist movement abroad. Every struggle
that went on was to help the struggle in Spain and this altered the
entire character of the militant anarchist movement throughout Europe.
** 1939–1945
During the Second World War, liberals and social-democrats (together
with the Communists, once the Nazi-Soviet Pact was broken by Hitler)
pushed the idea of a ‘holy war’ against fascism, since the enemy
happened to be fascist, and tried to bestow a democratic aura on the
Allies. After a time, Allied propagandists themselves began to use
some of the anti-fascist cliches, though with diplomatic caution until
the powers concerned were actually in the war. Soon there grew up the
popular myth that the only reason we went to war with Germany was
because it was ‘Nazi’.
Two major developments took place in the anarchist movement in Europe.
The Spanish Anarchists, exiled in France and treated as second-class
citizens or as prisoners of war by the French Republic, were the first
to take up arms after the French defeat, as a resistance movement
against fascism. This movement of revolutionary defeatism spread over
the Pyrenees into Spain, as an urban guerrilla movement linking up
with people like Capdevila and Massana who had been operating in the
mountains as rural guerrillas without a break since the victory of
Franco in 1939.
The other development was in Britain, where the anarchists took
advantage of the remaining freedom of expression in a country where
the working class was able to resist internal suppression, to attack
imperialism in every way possible, a struggle which spread even inside
the armed forces.
Both these movements reached their zenith and disappeared.
The failure of the soldiers’ councils to link up with workers’
councils in post-war Britain, and the resultant euphoria of a Labour
Government with full power, meant the loss of any revolutionary
impetus. Those attracted to the idea of anarchism, particularly within
the armed forces, as a prospective force in the supposedly forthcoming
post-war revolution, drifted away. But the anti-war attitude of the
British anarchist movement had also meant that many of purely pacifist
persuasion had been attracted to the libertarian camp, and this had
the effect of diluting the class struggle, or rather the libertarian
participation in it, and opened the way to the liberalism of the New
Left.
In Spain, more particularly among the Spanish exiles, the libertarian
movement was stuck with the position of the thirties. The exiled
bureaucrats were entrenched in Toulouse, and found it easier to sit
back and complain that the Allies had not sent their armies into Spain
to achieve the revolution for them, than to associate with the
guerrilla forces that had never laid down their arms. Unwilling to
involve themselves in any action that would compromise their settled
existence in France, or the legality of their Organisation, they
created a wedge between what passed off as the CNT in exile, and the
newly emerged post-war Resistance against Franco which much more truly
represented the CNT. No longer could the ‘exile’ leaders judge this as
part of the revolutionary struggle; they could only view matter from a
social democratic standpoint and echo stale war-time propaganda.
Thus the anarchist movement emerged from World War II lumbered on the
one hand with the dead wood of social- democratic
pseudo-libertarianism still parading the theory of the ‘just’ war (as
exemplified by the National Committee of the CNT in Toulouse) and this
was well matched internationally by some other entrenched movements
too lazy to move over to social democracy, which retained of anarchism
only the label, but monopolised international connections in Europe;
and on the other hand with the liberal-pacifist cult and the
idealisation of non-violence as action in itself which later came,
through America, to influence a whole range of new cults throughout
the world in which the criterion was neither freedom nor resistance
nor class struggle but solely the degree of absence of violence.
This substituted the idea of ‘personal liberation’ under the State for
that of a free society, a purely liberal idea, and there were not so
many differences between these two ‘darker sides’ of anarchism than
appeared at first sight.
In many countries in Europe, therefore, Anarchism became once more a
matter of small groups, some fighting on desperately as they did in
Spain, some still retaining labour connections, as in Sweden, as well
as of isolated individuals everywhere who carried on, against
overwhelming odds, identified by small papers or bulletins or regular
meetings, and trying to re-integrate into a new struggle.
** 1945–1960
With the rise of the new Left and the collapse of Stalinism from its
near-monopoly position among working class militants, there was a
proliferation of Marxist groups. Some of these managed to ensure that
there was carried over into a new generation, though purged of the
Stalinist taint, the same mistakes of the Communist Party and the same
subordination to political leadership, but even more than previously
they substituted the cult of Nationalism for that of any form of
socialism and thus managed to avoid the most important issue, class
struggle. This nationalist cult, expressed in Marxist phraseology, has
characterised the new left ever since.
But despite the many struggles for national liberation which have
over-clouded the issue since the 1950s, the real conflict has no
longer been between state communism and fascism nor between democracy
and fascism nor, as the propagandists now put it, between democracy
and communism (or New Democracy and capitalism). It was between the
rulers of the world with increasingly common interests and the people
themselves. Because of this Anarchism has come to the fore once more,
even though (ironically) just as in the thirties anarchist action was
interpreted in the light of the clash between communism and fascism,
now communist and nationalist (if not exactly fascist) action began to
be interpreted by the media in the light of essentially anarchist
struggle against world imperialism and centralised government.
This rise in anarchist activism spread far beyond the influence of the
small corps of anarchist activists who had to struggle from the grip
of pacifist non-resistance on the one hand, and the non-resistance of
the ‘dominant figures’ of the Spanish libertarians in exile on the
other, who tried to divert the struggle by appeals to the United
Nations and invocations of old war-time slogans as well as cold war
ones, in an attempt to find a ‘diplomatic solution’ that would enable
them to regain their lost ministerial portfolios. For these people and
others like them the ‘justice’ of the armed struggle against Franco
ended, in effect, when it ceased to be legal, and from 1945 onwards
the Resistance fought without their help, and often, against their
wishes.
But as the Spanish activists found common cause with the new
generation inside Spain, so did all the small anarchist groups
throughout Europe find that they were no longer isolated and ageing
groups of militants; on the contrary, while the anti-nuclear movement,
based on pacifist techniques, brought in temporarily hundreds who
appeared to be anarchists (but were basically liberals who found
liberalism meaningless, yet who saw anarchism as merely a personal
revolution, which is to say liberalism) yet of those some came right
through to a revolutionary position and those who did became a
majority in the movement, which overnight became completely
rejuvenated and the more effective.
But as the revolutionary anarchist groups became effective, and came
to integrate internationally, the Marxist movements became effective
by disintegration. The Trotskyist movement broke into a dozen clearly
defined sects; the pretext of ‘Maoism’ meant a large number of
opposing doctrines, from the true ‘Maoist’ Stalinist anti-revisionism
to the most ultrarevolutionary stands. Blanquism, though
unacknowledged flourished more than it had ever done; Spartacism, and
the ideas of council communism, were once more effective. The
challenge to Moscow hegemony meant the proliferation of groups and
theories, all part and parcel of the New Left.
Some of the new militants, encountering not the effective anarchist
groups and thinking of them as the exception to the rule when they
were in fact the rule itself, saw with distaste the ‘retired
militancy’ of the bureaucratic relics or the non-resistance of the
‘new’ movement, and went their own way. Either they formed new
anarchist groups not in touch with the other revolutionary anarchist
groups—and therefore intended sometimes to borrow slogans or
package-deal attitudes from the rest of the new Left for want of
having concretised their own philosophy—or they disclaimed the name
altogether and preferred the more neutral ‘libertarian’ ‘libertarian
left’ or even, in some countries, ‘Maoist’, though the Maoists
explicitly disowned them, or ‘Anarcho-Marxist’. Many of these groups,
especially in Germany where the tradition of council-communism was
strong, moved to a strongly libertarian position. Labelled ‘anarchist’
by the Press, they contained both Anarchists, sometimes using Marxist
labels (later discarded) and New Left Marxists. This was the origin of
such movements as the ‘Red Army Fraction’ whose development (later
labelled ‘Baader-Meinhoff Gang’) terrified the German bourgeoisie but
made apparent the class nature of German society and shattered the
idyllic post-war German capitalist ‘dream’.
In Spain, the urban guerrilla groups (Sabate and Facerias were already
well known) sparked off a new wave of resistance in 1951 when a
General Strike in Barcelona initiated a mass resistance movement
following the passenger boycott of the tramway company in the city.
Apart from building up sufficient capital to finance sabotage
operations and ‘attentats’ against well known persons of the Franco
regime, the aim of the libertarian action groups was to maintain a
spirit of resistance to the government and in this they were
successful for a time. But in spite of the intensity and heroism of
their struggle, the Brigada Politico-social (Special Branch) was able
to carry out a policy of extermination against the libertarian
movement in Spain. It cooperated with the ‘democratic’ police forces
beyond the Pyrenees and the fact that the Spanish libertarian movement
had worked closely with Allied Intelligence during the war left it in
a position to be betrayed afterwards in the interests of ‘stable’
government. What was worse, perhaps, was the apathy and lack of
solidarity from anti-Franco forces in general. The level of conflict
came to a standstill for a time, activity being confined to more
sporadic and individual attacks in industrial Catalonia.
During the repression, militants of the CNT and activists of the
Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) were murdered in the streets, or in
their own homes, by the Spanish police. Hundreds of others received
long prison sentences and a number are in prison to this very day. The
libertarian movement had to reconsider its strategy in the light of
the new repressive wave in Spain. Not only was it faced with the
almost total disarticulation of the action groups of the interior,
but, more discouraging still, the Franco Government was gaining by
leaps and bounds in the fields of international diplomacy. In the
years between 1951 and 1960 the Anarchist movement in Spain became
more introverted and lethargic. It expended its energies, in exile, in
a less physically dangerous but far more destructive way—engaging in
polemics and mutual accusation of incompetence thrown across the
Congress Halls and meeting places of the numerous committees of exile.
During this period, the ‘nuclear disarmament’ movement was attracting
large numbers to the New left and beyond it, to an anarchist position.
The new activists had already shown their willingness to participate
in the struggle. The ball was at the feet of the anarchist movement,
but the revolutionary anarchist movement was too scattered and
isolated to be able to kick it, and did not always appreciate what
potentialities lay before it.
** 1960–1966
On January fifth, 1960, Francisco Sabate (el Quico, sometimes wrongly
described as Sabater) one of the most tenacious and best known of the
libertarian activists, was killed in the village of San Celoni (near
Barcelona) following a gun battle with over 100 Guardia Civil the
previous day, when four comrades from his group had been ambushed and
killed in a Pyrenean farmhouse. Sabate, though badly wounded, managed
to escape and make his way to San Celoni by hi-jacking a train, but he
was recognised and brought down by the crossfire of a police patrol.
The death of this man, who symbolised for many the whole of the
Spanish Resistance, helped to inspire the formation of the new
resistance groups, and also helped to re-unite the scattered forms of
revolutionary anarchist activism, who now realised that they must
break decisively from the non-resistance wings and align themselves
internationally with other revolutionary activists. The Spanish
resistants in the interior realised that they could not rely on the
Toulouse faction whose sole purpose was to divide them from their real
allies, the international anarchist movement. Sabate’s death thus
marked the end of an era of introspection and apathy, and the
beginning of a new internationally coordinated revolutionary activist
struggle against imperialism in all its manifestations.
The reluctance of revolutionary anarchism to cut itself off from
totally ossified groupings or those who, using the label ‘anarchist’
had no longer any libertarian or revolutionary interests, may seem
curious to the outsider; but was born a long tradition within the
anarchist movement to accept anyone as an anarchist who happened to
call himself one (something long since impossible for socialists, or
Marxists), and in the absence of a party organisation, this acceptance
alone defined an anarchist movement. But it was always a dangerous
tradition (it meant that someone well known for being an anarchist,
though having no longer any connection with the movement, could
‘speak’ for something of which he was not a spokesman, one disastrous
example being Peter Kropotkin, a member of no anarchist organisation
at the time, apologising for World War II and causing as much harm to
the revolutionary movement as if he had indeed been its delegate).
The death of Sabate, however, which was heralded in the Spanish press
as the end of Spanish Anarchism, and which provoked the usual
hypocritical disclaimers from Toulouse, meant that the Spanish
movement of the interior decisively broke from Toulouse. Though still
using the name ‘CNT’ to denote the type of union organisation which
they wished to build up, it was clearly understood that they were not
referring to the Organisation in Exile (MLE) but did not wish to
confuse the workers as a whole. (And they also clung to the wish not
to appear to be ‘schismatic’.) However, within one month of Sabate’s
death the Revolutionary Directorate of Iberian Liberation (DRIL)
announced its existence, and immediately obtained support from this
anarchist movement of the Spanish interior as well as of other
groupings. It made a number of daring attacks on the dictatorships of
both Spain and Portugal, such as the hi-jacking by a commando of
Spanish and Portuguese and South-American fighters on the liner Santa
Maria on the high seas on January 21<sup>st</sup> 1961. The possibilities of a
two-fold struggle opened up once more — the vanguard of workers’
councils, now being established by the anarchist movement of the
interior—(FOI — Federacion Obrera Iberica, Workers Iberian
Federation—the ‘internal’ name of the groupings ‘pro CNT’) and this
rearguard of armed fighters who used such action where they could
strike best.
Faced with this ‘problem’ the CNT in exile tried to reunify in 1961,
giving up the attempts to reconcile revolutionary resistance with
futile moves to find a ‘diplomatic solution’ to something which
international capitalism and world diplomacy had solved to its own
satisfaction. But it was now too late, and finally the organisation
was doomed to sink into sterility, with counter-excommunications of
the old guard of the bureaucracy.
Elsewhere in the world were the still somewhat isolated ‘sectarian’
groups of anarchist revolutionaries; the expanding movement that was
coming via the nuclear disarmament movement, and the ‘anarcho-Marxist’
movements growing up quite independently, moving from Marxism but
bringing many Marxist attitudes, especially those of ‘third world’
nationalism, with them.
Yet the coming together of the first of these sections with the
Spanish activists soon surprised the world, since it apparently seemed
that international anarchist activity had emerged from the blue like
the kraken wakening after years of sleep. Moreover, although the
international activists had no connections with, and usually a strong
dislike for, the ‘hippy’ and ‘new left’, nevertheless the latter did
afford them a pool in which to swim. Their ideas were able to be heard
for the first time by a larger audience.
Sympathy for their actions had never been lacking by a very much wider
section of the public than the press ever imagined, and press
distortions and hysteria notwithstanding, there was a deep underlying
support for anarchist ideas in working class circles and among people
of all generations. All this led to the setting up of a secret
organisation the DI (Internal Defence) which brought together comrades
with years of activity in every part of the world to co-ordinate their
clandestine activities against tyranny—in the early spring of 1962 and
within a few months surprised the world by the apparently sudden
re-emergence of international revolutionary anarchist activity after
years of ignorance of its existence.
But only when the ‘near miss’, on Franco’s life at San Sebastian
(August 1962) took place did the international collaboration come to
general notice, partly because this had also the effect of making an
inroad by the libertarian movement on the Basque country. For long
Basque nationalism had been reactionary, nationalist and clerical. Now
it was as discredited as most of the inactive movements of the
Republic in exile. The ETA was the new, dynamic Basque movement, and
while it was to some extent nationalistic, it also contained many who
were not, and could embrace nationalists, marxists, catholics and
libertarians in a common struggle against Franco. As a result of the
terror against the Basques, Franco had succeeded in uniting almost the
whole Basque country against him, irrespective of whether it had
nationalist aspirations or not. It also signalled a new wave of
repression which swept Spain directed particularly against the miners
of the Asturian coalfields and the libertarian activists. Feeling
itself endangered by the rise in revolutionary consciousness and
activity the Franco Government returned to the use of terror perfected
in the years immediately following the Civil War.
Now, however, international action, concerted for the first time, was
able to answer the repression within Spain. The Councils of War sent
thirty libertarians to prison with savage sentences, and for one of
them the State Prosecutor demanded the death penalty. Support for
Jorge Cunill Vals, the young anarchist sentenced to death, grew
throughout the world, and in Milan the Spanish Vice-consul was
kidnapped by Italian anarchists (on September 29,1962). Cardinal
Montini (now Pope) intervened on behalf of the condemned Catalan
Anarchist, and the rebuff he received has caused the tension which
exists between the Vatican and the Prado to this day (and is why the
Church is now backing more than one side in the fight for the
succession). On this occasion, however, Franco had to stay his hand
and remit the sentence.
The following year Julian Grimau and the anarchists Delgado and
Granados were sentenced to death but protests against the executions
were so widespread that Franco’s hopes of admission into the common
Market were totally frustrated. Governments of the Western World were
unable to flagrantly go against what were widespread sentiments by
admitting Franco (the Governments of Eastern Europe had, of course, no
such inhibitions, and could do trade deals whenever they wished
without regard for public opinion which did not exist in their
countries). However, without admitting it to the general public, and
sometimes illegally, the police of Western Europe were working in
close association with Franco though it was not until ten years
afterwards that this was generally admitted. This police activity was
excused in France by the fact that, as Franco had clamped down on the
French OAS operating against De Gaulle from Madrid, they should clamp
down on the Spanish Anarchists in France operating against General
Franco (though it was often politically inexpedient for police who had
collaborated with the Nazis to clamp down openly on libertarians who
had been to the fore-front of the Resistance). In England no excuse
existed, and in fact the issue of Gibraltar meant that Special Branch
was in fact acting against British imperial interests by its
assistance to Franco whose staged demonstrations for Gibraltar were
solely destined to deflect public attention from the Resistance
criticisms of his regime. Nevertheless, Scotland Yard was able to
supply ‘secret information to a foreign power’ feeling that in time
(as it did) government opinion would see that police interests against
revolution were higher than such narrow nationalistic interests.
It was therefore possible for concerted police action to be taken
against French, Italian and British anarchists working in conjunction
with the revolutionary youth movement in Spain, demonstrating the
international nature both of Anarchism and the Police. This led to the
arrest of Scottish anarchist Stuart Christie in Spain, where he was
taking part in an attempt to assassinate the dictator. World opinion
was directed to Spanish prisons and in particular the material support
which he began to receive was diverted by him to libertarian prisoners
in general. For a long time the Communist Party had, under a variety
of anti-fascist and democractic sounding names, been collecting aid
for Spanish prisoners from all; but giving only to their ‘own’ — thus
other prisoners came to be forgotten, with a corresponding dampener
upon the resistance movement. The anarchists not only had been
receiving the longest sentences and been the subject of the bitterest
persecution, but the communists, who engaged only in propaganda
activities extolling the glories of Russia, and advocating an alliance
with the Christian-Democrats against American bases in Spain, were the
only ones to receive aid in jail. Now at last that situation was
reversed, irrevocably, a direct consequence of Christie’s arrest. His
arrest, and that of other ‘foreigners’, also helped to cement the
international alliance that finally broke down the barrier that had
been erected by the ossified and non-resistant wings of the movement.
In 1965 the Libertarian Youth Movement broke completely and finally
with the main anarchist and confederal organisations in exile. The
reason for this was the refusal by the National Committee of the CNT
to implement the decisions agreed on in 1961 to renew the clandestine
armed struggle against the Franco regime. This unwillingness to act
may have been due to tiredness, fear or perhaps not wishing to
compromise the steady comfortable existence they were leading in
exile. However, with the break finalised the revolutionary anarchist
activist movement was now able to break free from the fetters which
had bound it for so long its association with the movement in exile.
** Grupo 1 de Mayo
At the end of April 1966 Mgr. Marcos Ussia, the ecclesiastical adviser
to the Spanish Embassy in the Vatican, disappeared mysteriously while
returning from the Embassy to his home in the suburbs of Rome. A few
days later the First of May group announced its existence in Rome,
while CNT militant Luis Andres Edo, in Madrid, announced
simultaneously to the world press that Ussia had been kidnapped to
draw attention to the plight of Franco’s prisoners. The results of
this action by the revolutionary anarchist movement became an issue of
international importance and a central point of discussion in the
Italian, French, Swiss, Spanish and Swedish press (the British press
avoided it, perhaps for fear of imitative action). When the priest was
released unharmed after fifteen days of intensive and fruitless
searches by Italian, Swiss, and French police, it proved the
efficiency of international anarchist solidarity, and disproved the
‘terrorist’ label put on them by Interpol.
Later, Edo was arrested in Madrid with four other comrades (men and
women) accused of preparing to kidnap a high-ranking military officer
in the American Army who was based there. Once again the anarchists
had brought together in an international struggle the old fight
against Franco and the struggle against American imperialism. Now they
were re-gouped under the old banners of the ‘First of May’, embodying
the traditions of libertarian activism during eighty years of class
struggle against capitalism. The struggle for workers’
councils and direct workers’ control, in opposition to slogans of
nationalism, nationalisation and reform, had always been associated
with the First of May Movement. Now that struggle was backed up by
sharp, decisive actions against particular forms of class repression.
Though the ‘counter-culture’ and ‘alternative society’ coming from the
youth revolution in America had really nothing to do with
revolutionary anarchism, yet it contained within itself strongly
revolutionary elements and the anarchist movement became transformed,
as gradually new and old revolutionaries united together finding their
own level. This was impelled further by the Vietnam War and its
world-wide consequences of protest movements, and the rise of such
groups as the Weathermen in the United States which greatly influenced
the ‘alternative society’ movement in Europe, and especially in Greece
and Turkey, where for the first time in fifty years a libertarian
movement arose among the youth, divided between Anarchists and
Marxist-Leninists, but struggling against the despotic regimes of
those countries up to a point where the regime in Turkey was obliged
to maintain a sort of permanent civil war against young workers and
students, and that in Greece to use all the methods of Nazi rule
learned by the police during the war.
In many countries, the growth of the vaguely ‘libertarian left’
inclined towards Blanquism or perhaps anarchism, with Marxist
phraseology, continued—though as orthodox Maoist movements rose, the
movement was impelled away from its ‘Maoist’ inclinations. This
movement took a strong part in the fight for civil rights and for
workers control, and against the tyranny of the state. To the press,
inevitably far more uninformed than the public if presumed to serve,
all this was the ‘anarchist movement’ and the revolutionary activist
wing at that; a supposition encouraged by Tory propaganda which sought
to present the anarchists as ‘bogeymen’ just as the Left, for that
matter, tried to use the fascists for the same purpose.
In 1967 and 1968 revolutionary activism showed its hand again. Attacks
were made on the offices of American civil and military centres
throughout Europe and on the embassies of the Spanish, Portuguese,
Greek, Bolivian and Uruguayan Governments (among others). Following
these simultaneous actions in Britain, France, Germany, Holland,
Switzerland and Italy, the First of May Group and the International
Solidarity Movement issued a manifesto calling on all revolutionaries
to practice an effective solidarity with all victims of the class
struggle. The struggle began again in Turkey, with the formation of
cells composed of both Anarchists and Marxists in a struggle against
the military dictatorship. I’Express (Parisian weekly) foresaw that
‘Anarchists will prepare a hot summer’ and reported in March 1968 on
the activities of what they described as ‘extreme left wing
organisations in Europe’, prepared by their German and Dutch
correspondents. The situationist movement, and the provo movement in
Holland, were linked together with the libertarian left and the
Anarchist revolutionary activists. And indeed, two months later,
anarchism reappeared once more as the dynamic force it is.
The events of Paris—with the participation in it by Anarchists,
Maoists, Trotskyists, Situationists and others—are well known. And the
First of May Group began attacks on Iberia Airlines in defence of
Spanish political prisoners. Concerted attacks affirmed international
solidarity with them. While the International Solidarity Movement both
directly and indirectly helped the appearance of more active groups in
France, Britain, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Turkey and Greece.
Groups which more or less independently continued the activist
struggle in their own country against the steady progression of the
State towards dictatorship, while stepping into other countries to
help that struggle attain greater intensity. There were numerous acts
in all these countries, those in Britain including a bomb attack on
the Home Secretary’s house on the day of national protest against the
Industrial Relations Bill; an attack on a Minister who had defended
the idea of bourgeois attacks upon strikers during the electricity
dispute, attacks on Ford’s and on the mechanised dossiers of Scotland
Yard at Tintagel House, on the Italian, Spanish and American
embassies, on recruiting offices and military barracks, on Spanish
banks, and on Government buildings, some of which incidents were
labelled as (and all labelled by the police as) coming from the Angry
Brigade, though this was not a specific organisation, but a
manifestation of revolutionary activism through a wide circle of the
libertarian movement generally.
The existence of the Anarchist activist groups encouraged a wide
section of the revolutionary left, not explicitly anarchist but
certainly libertarian, to step up the struggle and shake themselves
free of the non-resistance elements. Though all such revolutionary
attempts have been particularly scrupulous in their respect for human
life during the whole of the decade, and have avoided innocent victims
entirely the campaign of repression against the libertarian movement
has (outside Spain) been unequalled since the days of Nazism. The
activities of Nationalist groups, with which they have nothing in
common, and which by their nature could not be so scrupulous, have
been maliciously ascribed to them.
This has been the case in Italy, Germany, Turkey and Greece and even
in Great Britain where forms of restraint over the police are believed
to exist.
The Anarchist Black Cross, as offering a legitimate means of
expression for the anarchist revolutionary activists, has been
particularly the object of attack. In Milan, Giuseppe Pinelli,
militant anarchist, ex-member of the wartime Resistance and secretary
of the Italian ABC, was arrested following a Fascist bomb in Milan and
thrown from a police station window during interrogation; in Germany,
a policy of extermination carried out by the German police against the
Red Army Fraction, composed of Marxists and ‘Anarcho-Marxists’, was
extended to shoot down in the street members of the Black Cross,
including Georg von Rauch and Thomas Weis-becker. Then Stuart
Christie, secretary and co-founder, was arrested in London charged
with the activities of the Angry Brigade together with a number of
comrades, men and Women, who represented a wide section of the
libertarian left and a wide variety of interests (all being describe
by press and prosecution as Anarchists, though this only applied to
some). This led to the longest and most costly trial in recent
judicial history in England, ending in ten years each for four of the
accused, with four being acquitted (and preceded by 15 years under
another, but notoriously reactionary judge, and an acquittal).
In Scotland, savage sentences were passed on members of the Scottish
Workers Party, a Maoist organisation. These examples are only the more
spectacular testimonies of bourgeois, social democratic and fascist
repression against revolutionary anarchist, libertarian activism and
revolutionary forms of Marxism too, but such persecution has not and
will not achieve its object because the idea of international
solidarity is growing by leaps and bounds. Even in Turkey, where the
most obscene forms of torture are being used against the young
revolutionaries, and in Spain, where torture and death are
commonplace, the idea of workers councils and the affirmation that the
fight for the occupation of the places of work will be backed by
activist groups continues to flourish.
The struggle is not on the other side of the world. It exists in the
countries dominated by State capitalism and State Communism as well as
in the capitalist and fascist countries. It is not only in the ‘third
world’ or the undeveloped part of the world. The call for revolution
has gone through Europe. Never again will it lie down before the
attacks of fascists, vigilantes or secret police. It is not even
confined to one revolutionary ideology. It is not a conspiracy. It is
a movement that may prove to be irresistible.
** Some Documents
*** To All Revolutionary Movements and Organisations in the World
The ‘1<sup>st</sup> of May Group’ has, for several years now, come to support, in
practice, the necessity of carrying out the struggle against
dictatorship by means of revolutionary violence as the only possible
way of answering the repressive violence of the regime of General
Franco and of reconquering freedom for the Spanish people in
accordance with the strategy drawn up by the Iberian Federation of
Libertarian Youth (FIJL).
Being aware of the backing given to various dictatorships and national
oligarchies, by reactionary imperialist governments which enables them
to maintain their oppression of the people—we address ourselves to
revolutionary movements throughout the world who fight for the freedom
and independence of all people. Fully convinced, also, of the
sterility of the so-called ‘legal and pacifist’ struggles, as a means
of ending the oppression and forcing Imperialism and its lackeys to
end warlike aggression and military interventions, we have come to the
following conclusions:
1. We believe that the present struggles for freedom (eg. the
revolutionary struggles of the guerrillas in Latin America, the blacks
in the United States) have provoked a crisis of conscience, and forced
a reaction against the reformist line, from authentic revolutionaries
of various brands—these have finally understood that the only sure and
dignified way to make Imperialism and its lackeys retreat, and clear
the path to Revolution, is an armed struggle against the forces of
fascist oppression (the main props of capitalist society and
Imperialism).
2. We believe that the serious divergencies and divisions existing
between various revolutionary movements, in each country are the
result of absurd and negative ideological sectarianism (with which,
until now, the different revolutionary ideologies have expressed and
applied themselves) and have contributed to the division of the
international proletariat and facilitated the increasing
depoliticisation of the masses who cannot logically be attracted by a
revolutionary praxis divided by contradictions and confrontations
resulting from anti-revolutionary dogmatism which have been the cause
of all revolutionary schisms and ideological internecine quarrels.
3. Together with the Latin American groupings and their most well
known exponents, we believe that ‘the Revolution’ is not the
inheritance of any single Party, but of all who decide to fight for it
with guns in their hands, that the struggle against oppression, and
for the freedom of the people, theoretically and historically belongs
to, and is assumed by, the people and classes who suffer the
oppression and decide to fight against it. Parties and ideologies are
only transitory tactical instruments—particularly interpretations of
this struggle, whose object is the Revolution—and they must therefore
be subordinated to the true essence of social history.
4. We believe that international revolutionary solidarity will only be
effective between those movements which do not maintain contact, nor
involve themselves in compromises, with Imperialism, and who do not
give support to the politics of ‘peaceful co-existence’ which enable
Imperialism to carry out its massacres and spoliations with impunity
which will continue as long as there is no coherent response to
military interventions whose purpose is to stifle fights for freedom,
and revolutionary outbreaks throughout the world.
5. We believe that the real revolutionary objective is the achievement
of freedom for the masses and for each individual, and that neither
private capitalism nor state capitalism can be conducive to the
freedom of man nor to an authentic free society. Private capitalism
pretends to give freedom while maintaining the exploitation of man by
man—state capitalism pretends to end exploitation by suppressing
freedom; each of them has their roots in economic and political
alienation and therefore cannot even offer the hope of gradual
evolution towards liberation. For the authentic revolutionary the
achievement of freedom and the ending of exploitation are inseparable
and complimentary aspirations.
6. We believe that all revolutionaries who truly wish to see the
Revolution triumph must, and can, admit the unavoidable necessity of
an ideological restatement which will resolve more effectively the
problems of freedom and social justice—in other words: means and ends,
tactics and objectives, revolutionary strategy and the ethic of
revolution—in order to end the damaging differences and doctrinal
antagonisms which have hindered until now the union of all
revolutionaries against the common enemy. The important thing is that
they should now recognise that Imperialism and Capitalism,
of any variety, are the real enemies, and revolutionaries can only
confront them by uniting their forces, or at least to support each
other by effective revolutionary solidarity, national and
international, thus preventing the enemy from taking advantage of
everlasting contradictions and divisions.
7. We believe that the time has come for revolutionaries to put aside
their ideological divergencies, sectarianisms and various ‘objective
conditions’ of constitution and location — all revolutionary movements
should unite and co-ordinate their efforts through a vast Movement of
Revolutionary Solidarity in order to oppose coherently imperialist
aggression and the cronies of dictatorship, and to back with deeds the
revolutionary struggles of the people and so make the way to
revolution secure. We can testify to this Revolutionary Solidarity by—
- acts of propaganda and solidarity in favour of all peoples who are
fighting against fascism and imperialism;
- acts of violence against the diplomatic and military corps,
imperialism and dictatorships, as effective reprisals against
their outrages.
REVOLUTIONARIES OF ALL COUNTRIES UNITE FOR AN EFFECTIVE REVOLUTIONARY
SOLIDARITY TO PREVENT THE EXTERMINATION OF THOSE WHO FIGHT FOR THE
REVOLUTION IN ANY PART OF THE WORLD!
LONG LIVE INTERNATIONAL REVOLUTIONARY SOLIDARITY!
<br>
August 1967
<br>
<strong>1<sup>st</sup> of May Group/FIJL (Iberian Federation of
Libertarian Youth)</strong>
** Anarchist International
*** Towards the Creation of an Anarchist International
On the basis of our recent experiences, and an analysis derived from
our particular situation as anarchists (organised or not) within the
International politico-social context, we have arrived at the
following conclusions which we consider both useful and necessary to
be put before all militants who believe it still possible to adopt an
efficient revolutionary position.
1. The modern states (totalitarian or democratic), private and state
capitalism, all variations of political and religious ideology,
trade-unionism (whether reformist or state-run), in general, all
social groups which are part of the present productive society, have
established as a fact, a co-existence that tends, at any cost, to
ensure the present status quo for all forms of privilege, exploitation
and authority.
More and more the fundamental contradictions of the System (or the
different systems and societies, as well as those between the
different races and nationalities) tend to intensify (but not resolve)
themselves through negotiations and compromises which do not imperil
the survival of the system (or systems) as such, nor of the groups,
castes or classes that at present enjoy privileged positions. From
this stems the prevailing political confusion and moral degradation,
the repugnant dealing between regimes pretending to
irreconcilable enmity (Russia and the USA, Cuba and Spain, China and
Portugal) the ‘peoples’ democracies and the capitalist democracies,
etc.
The old ruling castes and the new bureaucratic castes, whatever their
colour, race or religion, have lost their former prejudices and hidden
scruples. Today within international organisations and through
official exchanges they hobnob and entertain one another on the backs
of the common people who sustain them, and are subjected to them. And
within this mesh of agreements and interests we must also place the
well-integrated ‘leadership’ and trade-union bureaucratic caste.
2. From this it follows that, today, doctrinal declarations and
re-affirmations of ideological principles have no meaning beyond
demagogy—a habit that clings. One no longer fights for democracy,
socialism, communism, or revolution, but merely for the recognition of
the defeat of power, by this or that group, in a particular place, and
for ‘national independence’ (the certificate of guarantee which covers
and justifies all types of despotism) and in order to forget the debts
owing to international revolutionary solidarity. So, in Vietnam,
Korea, Hungary and Cuba, after the triumph of one or another gang, one
no longer fights for or against ‘communism’ but
simply in order to guarantee ‘national independence’, the Geneva
agreements, the UNO agreements, territorial integrity and the survival
of the government of Saigon or Hanoi, Tel Aviv or Cairo. In the
meantime, Barrientos and the Latin American oligarchies, assisted by
American ‘Green Berets’, smash revolutionary guerrillas and
assassinate Che Guevara, and the USSR and the ‘Peoples’ Democracies’
continue to do business, maintain diplomatic relations and extend
credit to these same governments that the Marxist revolutionaries of
Latin America are fighting against.
Throughout the world one finds the same ugly wheeling and dealing.
Soviet commercial, cultural, and sports missions confer with their
counterparts in Franco’s Spain; and throughout the Vietnamese tragedy
American and Maoist diplomats in Warsaw maintain relations. The
decolonisation of the Asiatic and black peoples proceeds, but only to
allow the indigenous bourgeoisie to take power extensively assisted by
Russia and/or the USA.
In practice ideology is shelved, becoming no more than a function of
patriotism, ‘national independence’, ‘legality’, ‘public order’,
‘peace’, and ‘development’—and as it is in the East, so it is in the
West.
All over the world parties and organisations witness their own
sacrifice of ideology to the simple struggle for power.
3. Unfortunately this phenomenon of the abandonment of ideological
coherence has also invaded international anarchist circles, which did
not know how to resist or fight against the process of revolutionary
demobilisation.
For anarchism, organisational or not, revolutionary demobilisation,
this rupture between ideological conception and its practical outcome
is of great importance, considering that anarchism does not aspire to
the conquest of political or economic power. If it abandons its only
possible vocation: its combativeness in the struggle for revolution,
if it is content to reminisce about the past or to vegetate into
bureaucracy, it will lack a final objective and, as it lacks mystical
roots, it could not survive as a sect—it would be of no practical use
to any social grouping be their needs material or spiritual.
If anarchism is to exist in reality, it is to draw the people and
justify itself as a practical revolutionary ideology without being
demagogic, it must not only re-affirm its antistatism as a determining
condition for the triumph of freedom, but must accompany this
criticism of authoritarianism with the practice of permanent
rebellion; without this it is useless except as a means of ridiculing
and contributing a little more to the extension of the present
confusion, pointing out the dangers, contradictions and damaging
results of authoritarian society. But it is all useless if we content
ourselves with vegetating as others do. It is obvious that the
persecution of dissidents, the fighting of real or imaginary
deviations, will not save us from a collective decadence if we do not
react beforehand against the reigning apathy, stagnation, routine, and
revolutionary demobilisation of the whole, whether as individuals,
groups, or movements.
4. However, as we have said before—the fundamental contradictions of
capitalist and ‘socialist’ society continue to flourish and in many
cases their consequences are even more serious than before; the
integration of workers into capitalist society, and the growth of
‘consumer’ society have lulled the proletariat. However, the class
struggle has not disappeared, nor the inevitable confrontations
through which each class defends its sectional interests. Neither has
‘peaceful co-existence’ stopped armed conflicts, it has only limited
them geographically—Vietnam, the Middle East, Africa .....
Racial discrimination, the exploitation of the working masses, the
abuses of the ruling classes, the absence of essential freedoms (of
thought, expression and assembly), political crimes and resulting
repression and terror are common currency in our civilised world. In
Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, the Greece of the ‘Colonels’, as
in the Soviet Union and the ‘Peoples’ Democracies’, workers and even
liberal academics are condemned when they protest or attempt to
exercise their freedom of assembly. And in the United States the
blacks rebel against racial discrimination, while in China there is a
brutal confounding of the will of the masses with the deification of
Maoism.
So, for anarchists throughout the world there is no lack of motives
for action, nor of practical possibilities to declare their presence
and to show the way.
In Europe, either hypocritically indifferent or accessory to crimes
committed within its borders (Spain, Greece, Portugal), and in other
continents dominated by economic and political imperialism, there
exist many possibilities of demonstrating through these obvious
examples where reason, justice and freedom lie without having to play
at suicide, gratuitous heroism or compulsive activism. But simply and
modestly, aware of the risks that go with such an attitude it is
possible to keep the rebel conscience alive and to mobilise, by means
of concrete action, all revolutionary agitations that manifest
themselves throughout the world, transcending the absurd dogmatisms
and tracing a way of effective rebellion before the collective
submission of the supposedly revolutionary parties and organisations.
5. To summarise: we think that the time has come to define and set in
motion a line of action that will be consistent with the revolutionary
ethic and realisable in practice; such as form of organisation that,
avoiding the ominous consequences of bureaucracy, takes into account
our numbers and real possibilities while being capable of projecting
the anarchist presence effectively, if modestly, in the international
politico-social context. We must take advantage of all the
opportunities of the historic moment, and in particular of the crisis
in Marxism in whose heart has arisen the inescapable problem of direct
action and revolutionary solidarity. We do not believe in miraculous
solutions, nor in the mere educative value of example—we believe in
the effectiveness of action when it responds to certain conditions
which give it meaning, and a consistent ideological and tactical line.
We have arrived at these conclusions after a number of experiences
which have demonstrated to us that, in spite of the fact that we are a
minority practically without means, we can make our presence felt,
gain sympathy, and be taken into consideration by international public
opinion.
So, our objective is not only to present conclusions drawn from our
own experience, but rather to offer our solidarity and collaboration
to all those who believe in the possibility of working effectively
towards rebellion and international solidarity.
Consequently we sum up our position in the following way:
FIRSTLY: :: Complete identification with the anti-authoritarian concept
of anarchism and its classic revolutionary line;
SECONDLY: :: Complete rejection of ideological dogmatism and
sectarianism, as we consider these phenomena incompatible with
anarchist ethics;
THIRDLY: :: Complete respect for opinions and discussions as far as the
activity of each group, individual or movement is concerned;
FOURTHLY: :: To be totally prepared to collaborate with groups,
individuals or movements with whom one has affinity and similarly with
all those who claim to follow a revolutionary ideology and who would
be prepared to fight sectarianism and elitism as well as the
injustices imposed by any species of ideology;
FIFTHLY: :: complete identification with the essentials of the manifesto,
‘TO ALL REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENTS IN THE WORLD’ (distributed by the 1<sup>st</sup>
of May Group after the attack on the American Embassy in London) as a
general strategic line as long as the present politico-social
conditions persist throughout the world.
**10<sup>th</sup> March 1968**
**1<sup>st</sup> of May Group**
** And now... what?
The ‘end’ of the war in Vietnam corresponds to the end period of
international politics of the great powers which, during these last
thirty years, has governed the destiny of the world. Beyond these
apparent and immediate consequences (‘end’ of the most flagrant
technological genocide and the practical affirmation of the principle
of ‘pacific co-existence between opposing political regimes) it has
its probable consequences for the future which are disturbing; the
consolidation of the domination of the state under all its forms and
in all the four corners of the world; entente cordiale between all
powers to ensure the status quo of Power and Privilege; extension of
technological rationality over all the planet, with the consequent
assertion of submission by alienating work and the ‘advantage’ of the
consumer society; intensive and maximum development of the structures
of authoritarian society, round the two poles of its ideological
dynamic: fascism and Stalinism.
*** Western Society, the Third World & the Others!
In the frenzied race towards industrialisation which was established
as the leitmotif of contemporary history of all peoples and of all
systems, Western society has attained sufficiently high levels to
render possible a radical change in the social politics of the
different governments which composes it. Nevertheless, in the name of
‘international competition’ and ‘national independence’ the order of
priority continues to be ruled by the economic and not by the social.
And only in the case of movements demanding better wages and
conditions, being able to overflow the limits of legality, and to
continue their action beyond that which the system can tolerate, only
then are certain reforms allowed and limited improvements made. But
always with deliberate intention of ensuring the integration into the
system of the exploited masses, of ensuring the continuance of the
established order and of facilitating economic expansion. All to the
detriment of the true humanisation of individual and collective life,
of true democracy and true communism.
In the countries of the Third World, industrialisation is also changed
into a supreme political objective. Despite the revolutionary
assertions of the principal movements of ‘national independence’ and
‘liberation’ which in their time woke great hopes in the heart of the
organised working class in Europe, the Third World (leaning, precisely
on the submission of the masses to demagogic nationalism) turned to
follow the path of Western Capitalist development. And, more and more,
having resolved or not its ethical and religious contradictions, its
integration with the other western nations became an incontestable and
irreversible fact.
The others, were, in their time, Mao’s China, North Viet nam and
Castro’s Cuba. But we have seen what economic reasoning, the strategy
of dissuasion and the international collaboration with Johnson and
Nixon have been able to do in these revolutionary ramparts.
*** Revolutionary Groupuscles
Faced with this harmony of the different authoritarian systems, and
although the leftist groupuscles, the most ‘politicised’ did not
renounce their well known slogans (to change the quality of life,
society and man) nor their pretension to be the revolutionary
vanguard, they retreated towards more modest, less radical, and more
integrated positions. Thus perhaps without wanting it, those who
considered themselves the most legitimate heirs of the whole
international movement of the youth revolt, have helped in the
absorption by the system of a movement which aspired to be
inabsorbable. Just as repression equally lost its virulence, these
groupuscles imposed a self-discipline (not to yield to ‘provocation’)
that made them more and more respectful of legality up to the point of
being happy to be the ‘extreme left’ of the classic left integrated by
the whole range of reformist unions and parties of communist,
socialist, or simply democratic persuasion..... Thus, although they
continue to be called revolutionary, they have equally ceased to be,
practically and potentially, the negation of the authoritarian order.
Only the marginal groupuscules who have not renounced the
revolutionary raison d’etre now remain as the authentic
representatives of the ideal of the negation of authority; a raison
d’etre which consisted, as had been affirmed in an exemplary fashion
in May ’68, of living the revolution at the present moment, and it is
only they who continue to fight the system, in radicalising the
struggles in different sectors of society, which the other
groupuscules, parties and organisations persist in keeping within the
bounds of legality.
*** Objectives
The Leninist conception of revolution has ceased to be a possible
alternative thus giving to anarchist ideas a growing prominence and
significance. In the factories, in the neighbourhoods, in the
universities and in everyday life, revolutionary activism can find a
thousand and one justifications and an equal number of ways of showing
itself. Capitalist exploitation and State oppression are still, and
much more than before the essence and everyday reality of all the
authoritarian systems with their inevitable string of injustices and
endless outrages, of violence and repressive barbarity, of moral
misery and cultural alienation. The objectives are still revolt and
liberation, in order that man can aspire and attain his most complete
realisation. And, immediately, the denunciation and awakening of
public opinion to the most flagrant abuses and outrages against the
‘rights of man’ in no matter what country of the world; in opposing
the <strong>repressive solidarity of the States</strong> by the
<strong>solidarity of the oppressed</strong>.
*** Appeal
Faced with the revolutionary demobilisation of all the sectors and
States which once invoked the revolution as the supreme ideal and
objective; faced with the concerted efforts of the powerful to
strengthen the very foundations which renders possible and maintains
their privileges, faced with the assertion of the authoritarian
principles of society, in the East as in the West, to the detriment of
the independence of the people and of civil liberties, we ask the
revolutionary unification and mobilisation of all those who do not
wish to abdicate their human dignity, of all those who refuse to live
in alienation and to serve as a support for the powers that be.
We suggest to all those who have surmounted the poisonous ideological
sectarianisms and who have renounced the chimera of the legal
struggle, to unit their efforts with ours to foment the revolutionary
activism in all its forms, finally in arousing public opinion to the
struggles of peoples, minorities and individuals victimised by the
oppression and repression of the State based on the premises stated in
our documents prior to May 1968.
~~
**May 1<sup>st</sup> 1973**
**1<sup>st</sup> of May Group**<br>
**International Revolutionary**<br>
**Solidarity Movement**
** Press Communique
*Text distributed to press agencies and periodicals.*
Incomplete and erroneous accounts given by the press concerning recent
events have obliged us to give a few explanations as to the objectives
and characteristics of the ‘1<sup>st</sup> of May Group’.
During the night of the 2<sup>nd</sup> and 3<sup>rd</sup> March 1968 the 1<sup>st</sup> of May Group
carried out (in various European capitals) a series of actions
directed against the diplomatic and military corps of the United
States and the fascist governments Greece, Spain and Portugal. Actions
such as the kidnap of Mgr. Ussia in Rome, the machine-gunning of the
American Embassy in London, the attacks on the embassies of Greece and
Bolivia in Bonn, etc. to which the Press gave, at the time, an
essentially psychological character, had two principal objectives:
- to inform the public at large, through the means of the press
agencies, of the claims which motivated these actions;
- to demonstrate through these claims the palpable of the ‘escalation
of terror’ which is at present spreading throughout the world under
the patronage of the USA, oppose it by a ‘counter-escalation’ of
rebellion in all its aspects and on all grounds.
Clearly it is not a matter of opposing to global terrorism an ‘heroic’
terrorism but rather to spread an offensive movement capable of
breaking down the passivity which governments, using increasingly
scientific methods, are attempting to create in us.
The genocide of the Vietnamese people, the subjection of Latin
America, and the conflicts fomented in the Middle East by the
assassins of the White House and the Pentagon are aspects of a
systematic programme to encapsulate the world. In Europe too, once can
observe important aspects of this programme: the fundamental support
given by the USA to the dictatorships of Greece, Spain and Portugal in
exchange for the guarantee of strategic bases in the Mediterranean.
As for the ‘bourgeois democracies’ of the west and the ‘peoples’
democracies’ of the east, they are busy looking for new markets as
they are moving in the direction of the ‘super consumer’ society.
Financial trusts in the west and the bureaucratic party structures in
the east, totally disregarding any humanitarian scruples, strengthen
their ties with dictatorial regimes.
Thus private and state capitalism converge towards the same objective
(while preserving their respective systems), using as justification a
political plan for ‘national independence’, or an economic plan for
‘national expansion’ while the countries of the ‘third world’ are kept
in a perpetual state of repression and misery as the main source of
raw materials and cheap labour.
In the face of this reality we submit that a generalised revolutionary
action against capitalism and all reigning bureaucracies (including
that of China) is the only way left open to an exploited humanity
wishing to regain control of its destiny.
At a time when new generations of the whole world, shattering the
myths of a ‘free’ western world and the ‘construction of socialism’
(directed by an omnipotent party) crystalise their aspirations towards
an anarchist revolution we believe that only the international
co-ordination of these movements could oppose an effective force
against the global collaboration of the forces of oppression.
The struggle against dictatorships—Spanish, Greek, Portuguese, against
racism in the USA and ‘apartheid’ in South Africa, against the
extermination of the Vietnamese people or the enslavement of Latin
America, constitute the global fight against all systems of
exploitation.
~~
**March 1968**
**1<sup>st</sup> of May Group** <br>
**Movement of Revolutionary Solidarity**
** Operation Durruti
*** Report on the Arrest and Proceedings against Five Anarchists Accused
by the Spanish Police of Planning to Kidnap an American VIP in Spain.
On the 28<sup>th</sup> October 1966 the Spanish Press and the International Press
Agencies announced the official police statement which confirmed the
arrest of five Spanish anarchists: Luis EDO, 41 years old; Antonio
CANETE,49; Alicia MUR, 33; Jesus RODRIGUEZ, 39; and Alfredo HERRERA,
31.
The official communique published by all the Spanish press gave the
following version:—
‘A group of five armed persons all members of the FIJL (Iberian
Federation of Libertarian Youth, youth branch of the Spanish
Libertarian Movement) which planned to kidnap an important foreign
personality in Madrid, has been arrested by the SIS (Servicios de
Investigacion Social). The five persons and the arms have been placed
at the disposal of the Madrid Public Order Tribunal. The group was
headed by Luis EDO, a former Secretary General of the FIJL in Paris
and member of the group which last April kidnapped in Rome the
ecclesiastical councellor of the Spanish Embassy to the Holy See,
Monseigneur USSIA.
‘The FIJL had been planning for some time a subversive action which
would have focussed international opinion on Spain. This mission had
been entrusted to EDO’s group whose members were mobilised from France
with full instructions.
‘The planned kidnap is a follow-up of the one carried out last April
by the anarchist group ‘First of May’ against Mgr. Ussia in Rome. This
time the anarchists plotted a similar ‘coup’ in Spain with the
intention of launching a sensational campaign against Spain. The
brilliant police operation began on the 25<sup>th</sup> October with the arrest
of Antonio Canete travelling under a false name on the
Madrid-Barcelona express. Canete, who was arrested at the Saragosse
station, is well known for his record as an activist. He had taken
part in several sabotage actions. In his possessions the police found
a contract for a flat in Madrid—Paseo de Santa Maria de la Cabeza.
This flat was the base of the group and it was there that the foreign
VIP was to have been kept. The remaining members of the group were
arrested soon after this in the flat mentioned.
‘According to Luis EDO’s declarations, the brain behind the operation
was Octavio ALBEROLA who had remained in Paris. EDO came to Spain
after the Rome kidnap with the intentions of holding a press
conference about the anarchist group ‘First of May’ operation in Rome.
‘In the flat which served as headquarters of the group, the police
found a ‘Sten’ machine gun, a Luger automatic, false passports, and
several documents which set out in detailed instructions the follow-up
of ‘operation Ussia’. Other persons connected with these activities
are being actively searched for by the police.’
As soon as this statement was published, reporters began to speculate
as to the possible identity of the VIP concerned. The name of American
ambassador, Biddle Duke, was repeatedly mentioned, in spite of his
denials.
*** Statement of the FIJL and the ‘1<sup>st</sup> of May’ Group
On November 1<sup>st</sup> 1966,the Agence France Presse announced in Madrid that
they had received the following statement released by the FIJL:
‘In relation with the recent arrest of five of our comrades (the names
follow) the Peninsular committee of the FIJL declares:
1. Our comrades had the mission of carrying out an action to show up
the false ‘liberalisation’ of the Franco regime along the lines of
our campaign for the release of all the political prisoners in our
country.
2. We ratify the following statement made by the group
‘1<sup>st</sup> of May’ in a communique to the press denouncing
the declarations made by Franco’s police.
‘The Spanish police is attempting to incriminate the group of
anarchists arrested last week in Madrid in the kidnap of Mgr. Ussia by
the ‘1<sup>st</sup> of May’ group in Rome.
‘As you will easily be able to see for yourselves by comparing the
hand-writing of this note with the notes made at time by the ‘1<sup>st</sup> of
May’ group, and as Mgr. Ussia himself will have to admit if he is
confronted with the comrades arrested in Madrid, none of them took
part in the Rome kidnap. It is thus totally false that the Spanish
police have dismantled the ‘1<sup>st</sup> of May’ group.
‘We are prepared to show that the fascist regime of General Franco is
lying and that the ‘1<sup>st</sup> of May’ group will not fail prove this
together with its firm decision of continuing its campaign for the
release of all the political prisoners in our country.’
**31<sup>st</sup> October 1966** <br> **1<sup>st</sup> of May Group**
3. The Peninsular Committee of the FIJL urgently appeals to all
anti-fascist organisations, groups and individuals to mobilise
their protest to stop the Franco regime from committing another
new crime.
~~
**Spain, 1<sup>st</sup> of November 1966**
**The Peninsular Committee of the FIJL**
*** Counsel for the Defence
Soon after the announcement of the arrest of our five comrades, a news
item from Madrid declared that the counsel for the defence would be
assumed by Srs. Jaime CORTEZO and Alfonso SEVILLA, both members of the
Madrid bar.
In an interview to the foreign correspondents of the Press Sr. CORTEZO
later made public that the Tribunal of Public Order had refused to
assume the responsibility of taking charge of the files of our five
comrades and had passed them on to the Military authorities. This
meant that the danger existed of their being tried by a summary Court
Martial which would dispatch them without any real possibilities of
defence.
*** Press Conference in New York by Octavio Alberola
On December 8<sup>th</sup>, AFP cabled a long communique from New York of a
clandestine press conference held in a Manhattan Hotel by Octavio
ALBEROLA. The text of the press conference was:
‘NEW YORK, 8<sup>th</sup> December—The anarchist ‘commando’ arrested in Madrid on
the 24<sup>th</sup> of October by the Spanish police did not intend to kidnap
Ambassador Biddle Duke. The intended VIP was Rear-Admiral Norman G
Gillette, Commandant in Chief of the American forces in Spain, who
would have been kidnapped on the 25<sup>th</sup> if the police had not discovered
‘Operation Durruti’.
This precision was given today in New York to several newspapermen in
an hotel in Manhattan by Octavio ALBEROLA, in charge of liaisons
between the Peninsular Committee of the FIJL and the Exterior
Delegation. Alberola, who had come from Madrid to hold this press
conference—the first of its kind held by the FIJL in the USA—also
revealed how the kidnap would have been carried out. An accident would
have been faked on the roadway between the American airbase of
TORREJON and Madrid. Rear-Admiral Gillette would have been transferred
to another vehicle which would have taken him to the capital. There he
would have been taken to a flat where, in the presence of several
reporters he would have assisted as a ‘living symbol of North American
occupation of Spain’ to the reading of a FIJL document.
Since the document had not been made public in Madrid on account of
the discovery by the police, Octavio ALBEROLA read it to the press in
New York shortly after having sent copies to the Secretary General of
the United Nations, U Thant, and to all the delegations of the UN
member countries.
In this document the FIJL denounced the ‘patriotic demagogy of
Franco’s government over its claims for Gibraltar, and its complicity
with the aggressive plans of the North American military forces who
are using the military bases in Spain as logistic points for its
bellicose plans.’
Octavio ALBEROLA also insisted on the following:
1. That the general amnesty proclaimed by General Franco was a farce
and that there existed several hundreds of political prisoners in
Spanish jails.
2. The Spanish dictatorship is not moving towards more democratic
ways. Nor will the Referendum of December 14 make any fundamental
difference.
3. The FIJL considers that in spite of having been discovered by the
police, ‘Operation Durruti’ has had a positive result on account of
its repercussions and that it will continue actively its struggle
until its immediate aims are reached: the liberation of all Spanish
political prisoners and an end to police persecution with the
possibilities of freedom of speech meeting and association. In this
respect, Octavio ALBEROLA affirmed categorically that the FIJL would
continue to carry out spectacular actions both inside and outside
Spain. ‘If these acts will in some cases be violent ones’, he added,
‘nevertheless, as in the previous operations, there will be no
victims.’
He finally confirmed that the five anarchists arrested in Madrid had
taken no part whatsoever in the kidnap or Mgr. Ussia in Rome.’(AFP)
On the same day that the press conference was given by Octavio
Alberola, all the delegates present at the General Assembly of the UN
received a note from the Exterior Delegation of the FIJL together with
the document found in EDO’s possession by the Spanish police which
would have been the basis of the ‘OPERATION DURRUTI’. This document
has since been sent to all the Provincial Authorities in Spain and has
circulated widely among official circles as well
as among the people.
*** Shuffles in Madrid Between Military and Public Order Tribunal
As mentioned above, the public order Tribunal had refused to take
charge of our comrade’s case and had passed it on to the Military
Authorities. The regime seemed to be using this tactic to gain time
and use it as blackmail against reprisals on the part of the FIJL.
Several weeks after the Public Order Tribunal had passed the files on
to the Military Tribunal, it was announced that the latter had also
refused to take the case and had passed it back to the Public Order
Tribunal which finally drew up the accusations. These were made public
on February 9<sup>th</sup> and the Prosecutor demanded 15 years imprisonment for
Luis EDO, Alicia MUR and Antonio CANETE; and 6 years for Alfredo
HERRERA and Jesus RODRIGUEZ. The Prosecution accused them: illegal
association (for being members of the FIJL), having intentions of
carrying out a kidnap, and possessing arms (AFP 9<sup>th</sup> Feb).
*** International Protests
As soon as the arrests took place, there followed a wave of Protests
all over Europe. Hand-bills and posters were distributed in France,
Belgium, Italy, Germany, Holland, Switzerland, etc. The more important
acts were the following:
Amsterdam: On Sunday 30<sup>th</sup> October strong groups of provo and anarchist
demonstrators protested in front of the Spanish Embassy. Windows were
smashed and an antique Pistol was thrown in symbolising the Franco
terror. As a result the Dutch press carried articles about the five
anarchists arrested in Madrid. In the days that followed, over 15,000
handouts and posters were distributed in Amsterdam. More
demonstrations took place on the 3<sup>rd</sup> and 4<sup>th</sup> in front of the Spanish
Embassy. During one of these demonstrations, an Italian comrade was
interviewed by the Dutch radio. Two weeks later, during the Provo
Concilium, resolutions were passed to fight the dictatorship of the
Franco regime.
Milan: Thousands of handouts were distributed during the last week of
October all over the city. On the 31<sup>st</sup> a protest demonstration took
place in the Dome Square. On the following day, a protest march
demonstrated over the city carrying a reproduction of a garrotte as a
reminder to all that fascism is still alive in Europe.
Brussels: Thousands of handouts and posters were distributed at the
beginning of November over the ‘capital’ of Europe. On Saturday 19<sup>th</sup>,
a Provo Happening ‘in solidarity with the five anarchists arrested in
Madrid’ took place in the Place Brouckere in the main centre of the
town. A handout was distributed which said the Brussels Provos ‘would
piece together, gratis, in public and with participation of the police
a scenic play in one act, the tortures which awaited the five Spanish
anarchists if Franco is allowed to do at will ... The
provotariat declares war against the Franco regime. A regime which
continues to live today under the Middle Ages and the Inquisition;
proof of this was given not so long ago with the garrotting of two
young anarchists in 1963, Delgado and Granados ...’
Paris: Over 10,000 handouts were distributed together with posters. At
a meeting held in the Mutualite by several left-wing movements to
protest against the Franco regime, Daniel MEYER, President of the
League for the Rights of Man, talked about the situation of our five
comrades. After the meeting the anarchists demonstrated in front of
the Spanish Embassy smashing windows until the police dispersed them.
A meeting of solidarity organised by the Spanish Syndical Alliance
took place at the Alhambra Theatre.
*** The Franco Repression and the ‘liberalisation’ Farce
The arrest and forthcoming trial of our five comrades coincides with a
period of agitation among workers and students in Spain, and with a
hardening of the police persecution.
Luis EDO, Antonio CANETE, Alicia MUR, Jesus RODRIGUEZ, and Alfredo
HERRERA were arrested and will be tried for planning to carry out an
action to show that the ‘demonstrations and liberalisation’ of the
Franco regime is mere lip service and to demand the release of all the
political prisoners in the Spanish jails. Yet, at the same time,
hundreds of students and workers have been arrested during the same
period for simply having believed that the ‘liberalisation’ was a real
thing. There is a certain irony in this. Nevertheless events are
showing how wrong are all those who think that a fascist dictatorship
can ‘liberalise’ itself peacefully through
the mere democratic claims for the fundamental rights.
The numerous arrests of students and workers for having taken part in
the peaceful demonstrations or in the so-called ‘free assemblies’,
together with the exclusion of all those University Professors who
have dared protest against police brutalities or who have talked up to
the regime, shows clearly that the Franco Dictatorship continues
faithful to its totalitarian nature and that it is in no way prepared
to give in to the democratic aspirations of the Spanish people.
The much boasted ‘reforms’ approved by the mock Cortes, the political
dispositions of the Penal Code, the new Press Law, and all the other
‘democratic’ blueprints announced by the regime, are mere paper
projects and publicity stunts.
Students, workers, University professors and even priests are daily
persecuted and jailed for holding unauthorised meetings, campaigning
against the Referendum, editing opposition bulletins, etc. etc.
Stuart CHRISTIE, sentenced in September 1964 to 20 years jail on
another false charge of terrorism, continues in Carabanchel. A recent
appeal for clemency was refused and this 20 year old British militant
shares the lot of many other democratic Spaniards.
Now the regime threatens to sentence the five anarchist militants to
new heavy sentences.
**COMITE ESPAGNE REVOLUTIONNAIRE** <br>
**FIJL LIASON COMMITTEE** <br>
**Aubervilliers (France)/Brussels**
** Postscript
The First of May Group has been one of the best known of the anarchist
activist groups of the period under review. It represents a
continuation of the work of Sabate and the post-war Spanish
resistance, and a bridge-head into the next period when revolutionary
activism in many countries (Germany, USA, Italy, and South America)
consisted of many strands some of which were authoritarian
Marxist—usually Maoist, sometimes Council-Communist, occasionally
Trotskyist others were Anarchist. In many cases the Press seized on
the name ‘Anarchist’ and inflated the actual participation of the
Anarchists (since anarchism now is the same bogey for Right Wing
extremists that fascism is for left Wing extremists) so that in
Turkey, for instance, where it is a much smaller
grouping than any other (though decidedly militant) it appears that
all activists are anarchists and all anarchists are activists, which
is by no means the case.
The First of May Group is entirely anarchist, though it too has been
less sharply differentiated from other revolutionary factions than is
normally the case with anarchist movements, feeling that the major
task was the achievement of the revolutionary situation, and
endeavouring to make the revolutionary organisations as libertarian as
possible. This lack of sharp differentiation is reflected in its
communiqués.
The difference between activism of the anarchist variety, and the
terrorism of Nationalist or other groupings, may be seen if one
compares the chronology of ‘May the First’ attacks with—for
instance—the record of events in Northern Ireland, or that of the
Palestine guerrillas, let alone with the facts of governmental
terrorism in almost any country—pick at will. The struggle is not, for
the anarchist, an attack on peoples, whereas by definition the
Nationalist struggle is. Marxism, though denouncing the activism of
Anarchists, excuses the terrorism of Nationalists with appropriate
phraseology.
For Governments, of course, terrorism must be wholesale (and legal)
and not ‘retail’ (and illegal). Wholesale murder is legal war — the
struggle against tyranny is individual rebellion.
It may seem surprising to the casual reader of newspaper propaganda
that the anarchists should have had consistently so ‘bad a press’.
When one considers over the past fifty years the record of anarchist
activism, for instance, individual attempts on Mussolini, the stand in
Bolshevik Russia against tyranny, by individual attempts as well as by
armed resistance in the Ukraine and other risings, the various
anti-fascist struggles in Spain and elsewhere, the fight against
tyranny in South America and so on — none of it would seem in any way
to justify the persistent vilification of anarchism in the press
except as deliberate propaganda. When one considers the mass
psychopathic murders associated indelibly with fascism; the
governmental wholesale slaughter both in war and in internal
oppression perpetrated by powers, capitalist and state communist
alike, and the wholesale brutalities in suppressing opposition,
(especially of a national character) even by nations democratic within
themselves, but oppressive to minorities or subject peoples, one
wonders where the journalists got the idea that they could treat the
Anarchists as if they were automatically the worst of all possible
villains.
But of course the sycophantic nature of journalism makes it see
attacks upon authority, and upon persons in authority, however
tyrannical, as a far greater menace than the genocide of peoples or
the imposition of injustice.
Of late years this has been helped by the nature of totalitarian
Gandhi-ism, which chooses to describe itself as non’ violent’ and goes
on to describe all who do not share its views as ‘violent’. The
‘violentists’, of course, from a pacifist point of view are every
single person except themselves; but the small ‘anarcho-pacifist’ cult
in England and America describing themselves as being ‘non-violent
anarchists’ with the corollary that others are ‘violent anarchists’
have been at least a contributory cause of the confusion of anarchist
activism with any form, or if one wishes to put it that way, any other
form, of terrorism. People like Sabate or Durruti did not ‘believe’ in
violence; had they ‘believed’ in violence they could have joined the
Falange or the Requete and had their fill; they believed in resistance
to those who were imposing their violence upon the people. It was this
resistance which led to their activism taking a violent turn. It was
their belief in the libertarian humanities that made this violent
activism so much nearer and so much an integral part of the people
than the struggles of the ‘Third World’, let alone the wars of the
Great Powers.
**INTERNATIONALIST**
** Chronology
*This chronology should not be considered exhaustive, nor
definitive. It will, however, give the reader a rough outline of the
development of revolutionary anarchist activism in Europe over the
last fourteen years. Little mention has been made in this chronology
of the activities of the Italian groups. As a result of fascist
provocations in Italy it would be virtually impossible to prepare a
reasonable chronology of groups such as The Red Brigade and The
Partisan Action Group — GAP, as we have been able to do with the Angry
Brigade, Red Army Fraction, the 1<sup>st</sup> of May Group and the Autonomous
Combat Groups of the Iberian Liberation Movement.*
*** 1960
January :: In the early hours of January 3/4<sup>th</sup> a battle
took place between a 100 strong Civil Guard unit and an anarchist
guerrilla group which had just crossed the Pyrenees heading for
Barcelona. Four members of the group were killed as was one Civil
Guard Lieutenant. The leader of the group, Francisco Sabate Llopart,
Franco’s Public Enemy No. 1, was wounded but managed to escape the
security net thrown around the area. He was killed the following day
in the Catalan village of San Celoni by the cross-fire of fascist
militia men and the Civil Guard.
February :: The Revolutionary Directorate of Iberian
Liberation (DRIL) announces its formation by a series of attacks on
key government buildings throughout Spain and Portugal.
June 27/28/29 :: Another series of concerted bomb attacks
begin in the Iberian Peninsula directed against buildings and
installations of both fascist regimes.
*** 1961
January :: On the night of 21/22<sup>nd</sup> a DRIL commando
group, led by the Portuguese captain, Henrique Galvao, took control of
the Portuguese liner Santa Maria on the high seas to demonstrate to
the world active resistance to the Dictatorships of Franco and
Salazar. The commando group consisted of Spanish, Portuguese and South
American activists.
July :: Spanish police discovered a sabotage attempt on
the railway line leading into San Sebastian shortly before a train
load of fascist ex-combatants passed. They were headed for the yearly
fascist victory celebrations in
the capital of Guipuzcoa on the 18<sup>th</sup>. This was the first action in
which the Basque activist movement ETA participated as an
organisation.
August :: A guerrilla action in the Catalan Pyrenees
took place between a libertarian action group and the Civil Guard. One
Guard was killed and another seriously injured.
*** 1962
April 7 :: Miners from the ‘Nicolas de Mieres’ coalmine
in the Asturias call a strike in demand for a minimum daily wage of
140 pesetas (70p), the right to strike and free Trade Unions. (Since
the beginning of the century approximately 50% of all coal extracted
from the Spanish coal fields came from the 11,600 kilometres of the
Asturias. All raw materials indispensable to industrial development
and the growth of Capitalism, Coal, Steel, Manganese, Mercury, etc.
were to be found here in abundance.
In the early 19<sup>th</sup> Century a large number of displaced farm labourers
moved to the Asturias from Castille and the South. They quickly
assimilated with the native Asturians early accepting their traditions
and customs, and within a short period lost all traces of their
origins.
Each industrial centre, however, developed its own political leanings;
Socialism in Mieres, communism in Sama and anarchism in Felguera and
Gijon. The revolutionary tradition in the Asturias was very strong. It
was the Asturian miners in 1930 who precipitated the downfall of the
Monarchy and prepared the way for the ill-fated Republic. Four years
later the same miners and industrial workers rebelled against the
bourgeois Republic which had failed them and occupied the Provincial
capital, Oviedo, declaring the social revolution. The Asturian
Commune, as it came to be known, lasted from October 5<sup>th</sup> until the
19<sup>th</sup> when it was bloodily suppressed by Moorish soldiers and
Legionaries on the orders of the Republic’s most prized general —
Francisco Franco.)
Twenty-six years of fascist oppression had not broken the spirit of
the Asturian working class. The torch of mass revolutionary working
class opposition in Spain had been re-lit!
April 20 :: Virtually every coal mine in the Asturias
was paralysed by strike action and many factories closed down or on
reduced output due to solidarity actions.
April 22 :: Two companies of Civil Guards and three companies
of Armed Police rushed into the coal fields in an attempt to break
the strike.
May 4 :: Martial law declared by Presidential Decree in the Provinces
of Vizcaya, Asturias and Guipuzcoa.
May 6 :: Solidarity strikes take place in Barcelona. Workers and
students distribute thousands of leaflets in support of
the miners’ demands and declaring their solidarity with
the Asturian workers.
May 11 :: Armed police occupy Barcelona University following large
scale disturbances in the Catalan capital.
May 14 :: 1200 strikers held in the four prisons of Oviedo
May 15 :: Silent demonstrations by women outside Security Headquarters
in Madrid in solidarity with the strikers
and demanding a total amnesty for all political prisoners. Police
arrest eighty women.
May 26 :: Province Strikers
{{{
Barcelona 17000
Asturias 15000
Vascongados 10500
Salamanca 750
Leon 5200
Jaen 3000
Madrid 1100
Total 52550
}}}
June :: On the 5<sup>th</sup>,7<sup>th</sup> and 12<sup>th</sup> there were attacks on the Madrid
residence of a Papal dignitary, Monterolas; the Madrid HQ of the
Falange; the Banco Popular de Espana (Opus Dei) and on the
Barcelona HQ of the Falange. Assassination attempt on Franco’s life
in San Sebastian on 18<sup>th</sup>. On the 30<sup>th</sup> further explosions took place
in the Opus Dei college in Barcelona and in the Catalan Instituto
de Prevision.
July :: The Casas Consistoriales in Valencia was badly damaged by a
powerful explosion on the 15<sup>th</sup>. This had been another assassination
attempt on Franco. The bomb was intended to explode during a State
visit earlier in the month, but the mechanism was faulty.
August :: An explosion badly damaged the Basilica de la Santa Cruz del
Valle de los Caidos outside Madrid. (This is a monument erected by
Franco and built by forced prison labour to glorify the eternal
memory of General Francisco Franco as a Christian gentleman). On
the 19<sup>th</sup>, at a small distance from Franco’s summer residence, the
Palacio de Ayete, a plastic bomb exploded as Franco, his wife and
Ministers passed through the gate into the palace. No one was
injured.
On the same day plastic bombs exploded in the offices of right-wing
papers in Madrid, ‘Ya’ and ‘Pueblo’ and Barcelona daily ‘La
Vanguardia’.
September :: Barcelona Security HQ issued the following
communique on the 18<sup>th</sup>:
‘As a result of recent investigations into the acts of terrorism
carried out in Spanish territory, officers of the Brigada
Politico-Social have arrested a number of militants of the ‘Young
Libertarians’ (FIJL). These are:
Jorge Cunill Vals, Marcelino Jimenez Cubas and Antonio Mur Peron.
These individuals operated under instruction from foreign elements who
financed their activities aimed at disturbing the social peace and
tranquility of the Spanish people.’ The three libertarians were tried
within a few days of their arrest by summary court martial (Council of
War) and for Vals the prosecutor demanded and was granted the death
sentence. The execution was to be by Garottevil (death by slow strangulation).
Sept 23 :: Shortly before the opening of the Vatican Council two bombs
explode close to the Pope while inspecting the seating arrangements
in the Basilica Saint Peter in the Vatican.
Sept 29 :: The Spanish Monarchist paper ABC published the following
report from its Milan correspondent: ‘The Spanish Vice-Consul in
Milan, Sr. Elias, has been kidnapped by persons unknown according
to a police statement issued tonight. Sources close to the police
assume it to be the exclusive work of the Italian Communist Party.
October :: Sr. Elias, the Spanish Vice-Consul in Milan, was released
by his kidnappers on October 2<sup>nd</sup> with the following statement:
‘The kidnapping of the Spanish Vice-Consul was organised by a group
affiliated to the INTERNATIONAL FEDERATION OF YOUNG LIBERTARIANS with
the sole aim of drawing the attention of the world to the sad fate of
three libertarians recently arrested in Barcelona and to prevent the
execution of Jorge Cunill Vals. We return Sr. Elias to his family as
promised to demonstrate
our methods are vastly different to those employed by the Francoist
regime. Sr. Elias will be able to embrace his family. How different to
the fate of the political prisoners locked in the Caudillo’s
dungeons!’
The following day the Italian police announced they had arrested those
concerned with the kidnapping of Sr. Elias and the culprits were to be
tried within a matter of weeks. (Incidentally, the police were
informed of the identity and whereabouts of the anarchists by an
Italian communist journalist who had interviewed the Vice-Counsul in
the People’s Prison outside Milan where he was being held).
October 6 :: Julio Moreno, 28 year old electrician and militant of
the Libertarian Youth Movement, is sentenced to thirty years
imprisonment by a Military Council of War in Madrid accused of
‘contacting an illegal organization
in exile’ and of ‘having participated in actions against
the security of the State’ (Banditry and Terrorism).
October 7 :: A dynamite charge explodes in the residence of Cardinal
Spellman in New York. These actions against
the Church and Opus Dei formed part of a campaign
to force these institutions to renounce their support of
the Francoist dictatorship. The actions were claimed
by ‘La mano negro’, who sent numerous letters explaining their
actions to the Pope.
October 20 :: Eleven young Spanish workers and students, all members
of the Libertarian youth Movement, sentenced by Military Council of
War to sentences between six years and twelve years imprisonment.
November 17 :: Three militants of the Libertarian Youth Movement sentenced by
Council of War in Madrid for editing and distributing ‘Libertarian
Youth’: J. Ronco Pesina (23), 11 years imprisonment, Antonio Bayo
Poblador (23), 11 years imprisonment, Rafael Ruiz Boroa (23),
3 years imprisonment.
Nov 22 :: The trial of the Italian libertarians accused of kidnapping
Sr. Elias which had opened on the 15<sup>th</sup>, with all the defendants
walking from the court in
Varese free men. Sentences were nominal as the weight of Italian
public opinion made any other sentences impossible. Jorge Cunill’s
death sentence
in Spain was commuted to life imprisonment.
Nov 29 :: Four militants of the anarcho-syndicalist National
Confederation of Labour (CNT) are sentenced to various terms of
imprisonment ranging between four, nine and eleven years by Madrid
Council of War.
The charges were ‘Reconstituting the CNT’ and ‘illegal propaganda’.
On the same day at another Council of
War (again in Madrid) another three members of the CNT from
Valladolid each received four year prison sentences for inciting
industrial unrest.
In Barcelona another militant of the CNT, Antonio Sanchez Perez (51)
was sentenced to thirty years imprisonment on charges of sabotage.
Dec 2 :: Bomb explodes in the residence of the Military Governor of
San Sebastian. The following day another exploded in the Palace of
Justice in Valencia and another which badly damaged the Treasury
building
in Madrid. On the same day a bomb exploded in the Spanish Consulate
in Amsterdam and in the administration offices of two Lisbon
prisons. All these actions were claimed by the Iberian Liberation
Council (CIL).
*** 1963
March 6 :: Concerted plastic bomb attacks on the offices
of ‘Iberia’ in Rome and the Ministry of Technology in Madrid’
‘The Iberian Liberation Council has mounted ‘Operation
Warning’ in its struggle for the freedom of the Iberian
people. The object of this operation is to demonstrate to
the international tour operators that they run a great
danger in utilising airlines of the fascist regimes of
Franco and Salazar (Iberia and TAP) . Until the last
vestiges of Nazi-fascism have been eliminated in the
Iberian Peninsula there can be no peace in Europe. Down
with Dictatorship! Viva la Libertad!’
(Iberian Liberation Council — Communique March 1963).
April 16 :: Three young French Libertarians, Bernard Ferry, Alain
Pecunia and Guy Batoux are arrested in Spain and charged with
Terrorism and Banditry. The accusations made by the police were
that the three anarchists participated in the anti-tourist campaign
mounted by
the Iberian Liberation Council and were materially responsible for
explosions in the offices of ‘Iberia’ in Valencia, the attempted
sinking of a liner in Barcelona Harbour and an attempt to blow up
the American Embassy in Madrid.
June 13 :: Firebombs explode in the luggage compartments of Spanish
and Portuguese aeroplanes on the tarmac in Frankfurt, Geneva and
London airports. These actions
are claimed by the Iberian Liberation Council (CIL).
July 31 :: Two anarchists, Joaquin Delgado and Francisco Granados, are
arrested by the Spanish Special Branch and charged with the two
explosions which took place two days earlier on the 29<sup>th</sup>. One was
in Security HQ at the Puerta del Sol in Madrid and the other, also
in Madrid, at the chamber of Falangist Syndicates. Both these men
were militants of the Liberation Youth Movement and had come to
Madrid to carry out organisational activities.
August 7 :: Ramon Vila Capdevila (57) (Caraquemada), the last
of those mountain guerrillas who had operated in the Pyrenees for
over 23 years, was killed by a patrol of Civil Guard in the early
hours of the morning near La Creu de Perello in Catalonia.
August 11 :: According to press reports two explosions took place
in the Spanish Capital on July 29<sup>th</sup> of this year: one inside the
offices of the General Directorate of Security,
which caused light injuries, and the other in the Chamber of the
Falangist Syndicates, at 17:30 hours and 24:00 hours respectively. Two
days later, following a massive police mobilisation, the Francoist police arrested
Joaquin Delgado and Francisco Granados. The coincidence and proximity
of these two events have
no relation to each other—the first people to know this are the
Francoist police themselves—but every effort is being made by the
regime to present the two arrested men as the material authors of the
July 29<sup>th</sup> explosions. This is absolutely false. The Iberian Liberation
Council has always accepted responsibility for its action and we
hereby declare to national and international public opinion the
following:
1. Joaquin Delgado and Francisco Granados were in no way responsible
for the events in Madrid on July 29<sup>th</sup> this year.
2. The arms cache attributed to Francisco Granados (as many others which
exist in our country for specific purposes)
had been unused and remained intact until its discovery by the police
(The Brigada Politico-Social discovered two Colt .45s, a machine gun
with two full magazines, a radio transmitter, hand-grenades and other material
in the flat of Granados’s girl friend).
3. Joaquin Delgado is completely innocent of the other charges made
against him by the police.
4. The author or authors of the events of July 29<sup>th</sup> in Madrid have not
been arrested. If, in Spain, ‘justice’ were carried out with a minimum
of legal normality then the truth of our affirmations could be easily
proved in the interests of the defence of the two men. However, this
is not the case. The Iberian Liberation Council holds the Francoist
regime, imposed by force of arms,
responsible both individually and collectively, for all victims who
have fallen or may yet fall in the struggle for the freedom of the
people of the Iberian Peninsula. We are the first to lament these
victims, wept over with crocodile tears by the forces of reaction to
justify their atrocities. Those who took part in the protest against
the Falangist building and the Directorate of Security inform us that
the former was carried out to expose the official Syndicates as the
servants of the Bosses and the regime. The latter was a protest
against the arbitrary arrest of the Asturian miners and their
deportations. Also, because it was the building in which men and women
are barbarically tortured for supposed political and social crimes
(ie. opposing tyranny). The action group which carried out the two
attacks acted on its own initiative. The Iberian Liberations Council
declares its solidarity with that group and revindicates the acts as a
protest of opposition to the regime.’
(Communique issued by the Iberian Liberation Council, 11<sup>th</sup> August
1963).
August 13 :: A Council of War of the 1<sup>st</sup> Military Region (Madrid)
passes sentence of death by strangulation on Joaquin Delgado and
Francisco Granados.
Aug. 18 :: ‘.....In the early hours of this morning, subject to the
formalities of Penal Common Law the two terrorists Francisco
Granados Gata and Joaquin Delgado Martinez were executed in
accordance with the sentence passed by the Council of War of the
1<sup>st</sup> Military Region......
(Official communique 18/8/63)
‘Joaquin Delgado and Francisco Granados denied having any knowledge of
the events of July 29<sup>th</sup> in Madrid. The Iberian Liberation Council
states that the Franco regime was afraid to reveal the real reason for
their trial because it was considered that the accused would win the
sympathy of world opinion if it became known that the mission in which
they participated and the material found in their possession was
intended for the execution of the Assassin of the Spanish Working Class:
General Francisco Franco. This was the real reason behind the farce
mounted in Madrid on August 13<sup>th</sup> behind closed doors in the Calle de
Reloj.’
(Communique issued by the CIL).
Sept 12 :: ‘ ......A series of police operations directed against
Spanish Anarchist circles took place yesterday in Paris
and the S.E. of France. A number of extremists are being
interrogated and their homes searched. Thirty arrests have been
made in the Paris region and the HQ
of the Iberian Federation of Libertarian Youth (FIJL)
in the rue Sainte Marthe have been searched. These operations seem
to have been inspired by the discovery of documents in Perpignan
detailing plans
for aggressive actions and ‘attentats’ in Spanish territory.’
(Le Figaro).
September 21/22/23 :: Bombs explode in German Embassy, Moroccan
Embassy and in the Church of Loyola in Madrid.
Sept. 25 :: Bomb explodes outside the home of American Ambassador in
Madrid. A few hours later another explosion outside the home of the
Chief of the Falangist Movement.
Sept. 27 :: Explosion at the home of Aramburu, Civil Governor
and the head of the National Movement in Madrid.
Sept. 29 :: Bomb explodes outside the American Embassy in Madrid. (All
the explosions in Madrid are claimed by ‘Colonel Montenegro’ of the
IV Republican Army).
October 11 :: Francisco Abarca, FIJL militant, is arrested in Belgium
accused of participating in the attack on an Iberian aeroplane in
Geneva.
Oct. 18 :: Alain Pecunia, Bernard Ferry and Guy Batoux, the French
Anarchist arrested on April 16<sup>th</sup>, are tried and sentenced by Madrid
Council of War: Alain Pecunia (17), 24 years imprisonment. Bernard
Ferry (20), 30 years imprisonment. Guy Batoux (23), 15 years
imprisonment.
Oct. 20 :: ‘The Ministry of the Interior announces that, in accordance
with the Law of April 12<sup>th</sup> 1939 relating
to foreign organisations, further modified by the Decree of
September 1<sup>st</sup>, 1939: Art. 1. The legality of
the foreign association known as the Iberian Federation
of Libertarian Youth has been nullified...’
(Extract from the ‘Journal Officiel’, 20<sup>th</sup> October 1963).
Oct. 25 :: Bomb explodes at a stand in the Spanish Fair, Mexico City.
A young anarchist is arrested after being wounded
by one of the explosions.
*** 1964
May 10 :: Bomb explodes in the Castellano Hilton in
Madrid.
May 11 :: Four more bombs explode in Madrid and one in Gijon.
The American Embassy, the Ministry of Commerce
and the Institute of Immigration; until ‘Colonel Montenegro’ is
arrested on May 23<sup>rd</sup>, bombs continue
to explode in Madrid at the number of three or four
per day.
August 11 :: Stuart Christie and Fernando Carballo arrested and
charged with Banditry and Terrorism. The mission was
to have been an attempt on the life of Franco during a football
match in Madrid.
October 21 :: Bomb attack on Spanish Embassy in Copenhagen.
Nov 27 :: Two fire bombs gut Opus Dei seminary in Rome.
Bomb explodes inside the Vatican, and another in the Spanish
Pontifical College, Rome.
*** 1965
January 2 :: Plastic bomb explodes inside the offices of
the Spanish Consulate in Naples.
Feb 19 :: Plastic bomb explodes in the Copenhagen office of the
Spanish National Tourist Office.
April 25 :: Bomb wrecks Iberia office in Milan.
August 1 :: The Iberian Federation of Libertarian Youth (FIJL)
initiates its International campaign in support of the political
prisoners of Spain and Portugal.
*** 1966
April 31 :: Mgr. Ussia, the Ecclesiastical Counsellor to
the Spanish Embassy in the Vatican is kidnapped. The operation is
announced simultaneously by Luis Edo
in Madrid and the First of May Group in Rome.
May 12 :: Ussia is released but the 1<sup>st</sup> of May Group announce
they will continue their actions in support of all political
prisoners.
October 26 :: Five anarchists arrested in Madrid, amongst them Luis
Andres Edo. They are accused of preparing a kidnap Attempt against
the Commander in Chief of the American forces in Spain.
December :: In New York Octavio Alberola gives a secret press
conference in which he explains the intention of the kidnapping
and distributes copies of the document which Edo was to publicise
once the operation had been carried out successfully.
*** 1967
April :: 1<sup>st</sup> May Group kidnap and hold hostage for a few
hours the First Secretary and the Juridical Counsellor of the Spanish
Embassy in London to demand the immediate trial of Luis Andres Edo and
his comrades arrested the previous October in Madrid. At the same time
this is a warning as to the possible outcome of the trial. The trial
was held two months later with surprising sentences for all the
accused — the maximum sentence, for Edo, was nine years — a prison
sentence previously unheard of for an anarchist in Spain.
August :: The private cars of two Spanish diplomats in London
are riddled with machine gun fire. Shortly afterwards
the American Embassy in the same city is raked with machine gun
fire as a protest against American imperialism (First of May
Group).
November :: Simultaneous bomb attacks against the Greek, Bolivian
and Spanish Embassies in Bonn and the Venezuelan Embassy in Rome.
(First of May Group — in solidarity with the Latin American
guerrillas and against the fascist regimes in Europe). The same day
a bomb destroyed the entrance to the Spanish Tourist Office
in Milan and the Spanish, Greek and American Embassies in theHague,
Holland.
Dec 26 :: David Urbano Bermudez arrested in Spain accused of supposed
relations with the 1<sup>st</sup> May Group and the FIJL.
*** 1968
January 3 :: Explosive rocket discovered facing Greek in
London.
February 8 :: Octavio Alberola arrested in Brussels during
negotiations between Spain and Belgium for the former’s admission
into the Common Market. Alberola
was preparing a press conference to denounce this manoeuvre and
raise the plight of Spanish political prisoners to the attention of
the world.
February 27 :: The Hornsey home of Stuart Christie raided
by police
led by Det. Sgt. Roy Cremer with explosives
warrant relating to Greek Embassy and information received that other
attacks were about to take place in London.
March 3 :: Six bombs damage the buildings of diplomatic missions in
London, the Hague and Turin. The Spanish Embassy and the American
Officers Club in London;
the Spanish, Greek and Portuguese Embassies in the Hague, and at
the US Consulate in Turin. These actions were claimed by the 1<sup>st</sup>
May Group.
March 6 :: Incendiary bomb with timing mechanism explodes in
the Moabit Criminal Court, West Berlin.
March 18 :: Three major American offices in Paris are damaged
by plastic bomb attacks: Chase Manhattan Bank, the Bank of America
and Transworld airlines.
March 25 :: American Embassy in Madrid bombed.
August :: International Anarchist Conference, Carrara, Italy.
September :: Seven young anarchists arrested in Spain accused of
conspiring with 1<sup>st</sup> May Group and of having participated in a
number of actions in the Valencia region, such as that of
“preparing” bank robbery. Information leading to their arrest came
from the Special Branch of New Scotland Yard, London.
October 15 :: Imperial War Museum, London gutted by incendiary device.
<em>Towards the end of 1968 numerous attacks are made against large
capitalist enterprises in France. These are attributed to “Gauchistes”
and anarchists. A woman wounded in one of these attacks is arrested
and another, Eliseo Gueorguieff, is named by the police as
being suspected of participating and organising the attacks.</em>
<em>On April 2<sup>nd</sup> and 3<sup>rd</sup> a warehouse in Frankfurt is burned down,
causing more than £140,000 damage, as a protest against the war in
Vietnam. Gudrun Ensslin, Andreas Baader, Thorwald Proll, Hans Sohnlein
are arrested and charged. They are sentenced to three years
imprisonment, but paroled under an amnesty for all political prisoners
in 1969 on condition that they return to prison in 1970. While on
parole Baader and Ensslin work together on the apprentice and borstal
campaign in Frankfurt.</em>
Nov 4 :: Dept. of Internal Affairs in West Berlin is attacked with
molotov cocktails.
Dec 19 :: Rectorate of the Free University in West Berlin is
firebombed.
*** 1969
February 3 :: Unexploded dynamite charges discovered on
the premises of the Bank of Bilbao and the Bank of Spain in London.
FOMG.
Feb. 9 :: Bank of Spain in Liverpool bombed First of May Group.
March 9 :: J.~~F. Kennedy Library in West Berlin firebombed – more
than £12,000 damage.
March 15 :: Two anarchists arrested immediately following a powerful
explosion at the Bank of Bilbao in London.
In their possession was a letter justifying the action
on behalf of the First of May Group.
May 2 :: Six anarchists arrested in Italy accused of
conspiring with Spanish anarchists and also being responsible for
fifteen attacks on Francoist buildings in Italy. They were then
charged with the attack which took place in the Milan Fair, an action
which was subsequently
proved to have been the work of fascists.
May 25 :: Bomb explodes in the Spanish Embassy in Bonn.
It is claimed on behalf of the FAI in solidarity with the Spanish
workers expelled from Germany on the insistance of the Spanish
Embassy.
July 15 :: Local government office in Bamberg severely
damaged. Blank identity cards stolen.
Nov-Dec. :: Six bomb attacks in West Berlin.
December :: On the afternoon of December 12 1969, almost
at the
12 :: same moment, there were three explosions: one in
the Bank of Agriculture, in Milan, with sixteen people dead and many
wounded, and two in Rome, at the Labour Bank and at a national
monument called ‘Homeland Altar’ with several wounded. A fourth bomb
was found later, unexploded in another Milan bank: but the police blew
it up, eliminating the most important evidence in the whole case. The
police started to investigate immediately among the left militants:
Calabresi, our CIA trained inspector, stated openly that “we have to
look in that direction.” He had the support of the CIA — president
Saragat, who made violent anti-left speeches, and of all the media
controlled by the bosses. The whole revolutionary left was attacked,
in a McCarthyist way: seizures, ‘questionings’, arrests, searches,
raids, open threats, police terror. The main targets were the
anarchists, indicated by everyone as directly responsible for the
bombings: entire groups
of them were arrested, interrogated, and beaten in the police
stations.
Dec. 15 :: The anarchist railway worker, Giuseppe
Pinelli “fell” from the 4<sup>th</sup> floor of the Milan central police station.
<em>Giuseppe Pinelli was 41 years old. He worked as a railway worker
in the Porta Garibardi station in Milan.</em>
<em>He married in 1955, Licia Rognini, a communist militant he met in
an Esperanto school. They had two daughters: Silvia, 10, and Claudia,
8. Pino started to work very young, as a shopboy and as a
warehouse-man — then he was hired by the railway company.</em>
<em>When he was 15, he participated in the armed struggle against the
Nazis (1943–45), as a messenger for a people’s brigade formed mainly
by anarchists.</em>
<em>His political commitment increased, after that first activity,
soon becoming his basic concern. In 1965, he started, with others, an
anarchist group ‘Sacco and and Vanzetti’ — in 1968, he participated in
the students’ struggle as a member of ‘Bandiera Nera (Black Flag),
which founded the club ‘Ponte della Ghisolfa’ – in 1969, he finally
became responsible for the Milan area of the ‘Black Cross’, the
anarchist organisation which helps mainly financially, anarchists in
prison, and maintains contact with the Greek anarchists struggling
against fascism and the “colonels”.</em>
<em>He lived with his family, in a small apartment, in the
suburbs; the £8 monthly rent was low, compared to the current Milan
prices. His house was a real shelter for everybody: when some comrade
was passing through Milan, he was sure to find hospitality and
friendship in Pino’s house. As an anarchist, Pino was first of all a
very humanitarian person.</em>
<br>
Towards the end of 1969 Swiss police discover an arms cache in Geneva
and arrest three Swiss anarchists.
*** 1970
Jan 28 :: Bomb attack on offices of Spanish Cultural
attache in Paris.
February :: Baader, Ensslin, Proll decide not to return
to prison and go underground.
Feb 28 :: Bomb attack on Bank of Bilbao and Spanish
State Railways in Paris.
March 3 :: ATTEMPTED KIDNAPPING OF THE SPANISH DELEGATE
TO U.N.E.S.C.O.
**The Kidnappers Arrested.**
“Spain’s permanent delegate to UNESCO, 57 year old Sr. Emilio
Garriguez has been the object of an attempted kidnapping. The
kidnappers have been arrested. Sr. Garriguez had been under police
protection for some time, so that when 3 men, armed with ether pads
surrounded him as he left the UNESCO building in the Avenue de
Suffren, they were immediately over-powered and arrested. The men
responsible for the attempt have been remanded in custody in the HQ of
the Police Judiciaire, Quai des Orfevres. They are due to appear in
court on Thursday. They are three Spaniards: Messrs: Juan Garcia
Macarena, aged 24; Jose Cabal Riera, 21; and Jose Canizares Varella,
35, and have refused to name the political organisation to which they
belong.
“Our action had a solely political motive,” they said in statements,
“we wanted to bring pressure to bear
on the Spanish government in order to obtain the release of our
comrades imprisoned in Spain.”
All three are of libertarian leaning and resident in France since last
summer. They had no specific occupation. Various documents were seized
at their residences and in the car they had hired, police found three
guns, a flask of ether and glasses covered with sticky paper to darken
them.”
(Le Monde, March 6<sup>th</sup>, 1970).
March :: Germany: Mahler is convicted following a
demonstration against the Springer Publishing concern. He receives six
months suspended sentence.
April 4 :: Andreas Baader is arrested in West Berlin
when stopped by police and found to be driving without a licence. He
is imprisoned in West Berlin.
April 22 :: Belgium: Ivo della Savia arrested in
Brussels under
an extradition warrant to Italy asked for by Italian government.
He is accused of being a member of Italian 22<sup>nd</sup> March Group
(Valpreda’s Group) and 1<sup>st</sup> of May Group.
May 10 :: Incendiary device discovered aboard Iberian
Airliner shortly before take-off. At the same time in other European
Capitals more devices of a similar nature
are discovered on other aeroplanes belonging to Iberia. The action
is a reminder that while Franco remains in power there can be no peace
in Europe.
May 14 :: Baader is liberated from the library of the
Institute for Social Research where he has obtained permission to work
with Ulrike Meinhof on a book about the borstal situation in West
Germany, following the intervention of his lawyer Horst Mahler. An
armed group breaks
into the library and frees Baader, who is under armed guard.
Ulrike Meinhof flees with the group. Linke, an employee of the
Institute, is wounded when he tries to intervene.
May 22 :: High explosive device discovered at a new
police station in Paddington. This was later claimed by the
prosecution in the trial of the Stoke Newington Eight to be the first
action undertaken by the ‘Angry Brigade.’
July 3 :: Simultaneous bomb attacks in Paris and London
against Spanish State Tourist offices, and the Spanish & Greek
Embassies.
August :: Germany: Formation of the Red Army Fraction.
August 18 :: London offices of Iberia Airlines, Spanish
State airline badly damaged by a bomb. (First of May Group).
August 30 :: The London home of the Commissioner of the
Metropolitan Police, Sir John Waldron is damaged by a bomb blast. The
bombing is not reported in the national press.
Sept 8 :: The London home of the Attorney General, Peter
Rawlinson, in Chelsea, is bombed and once again the incident goes
unreported.
Sept 26 :: Simultaneous bomb attacks against Iberia in
Geneva, Frankfurt, Paris and London Airports.
Sept 29 :: RAF attacks three banks in West Berlin within
a few minutes of each other. They get away with 217, 469.50 marks.
(£26,500).
October 8 :: The police get a tip-off about a meeting of
RAF members in West Berlin. They raid Knesebekstrasse 8. Horst Mahler,
Irene Georgens, Ingrid Schubert, Monika Berberich, Brigifte Asdonk are
arrested.
October 9 :: Simultaneous bomb attacks in Paris, London,
Manchester and Birmingham against Italian State buildings. The letters
sent following the attacks were claimed on behalf of Giuseppe Pinelli
the Italian Anarchist murdered by the police in 1969.
Nov 16 :: Germany: Town Hall at Nuestadt is broken into.
Thirty- one official stamps, fifteen passports, and one identity card
stolen.
Nov 20 :: A BBC outside broadcast van covering the Miss
World Competition in London is badly damaged by an explosion.
Nov 21 :: Germany: Town Hall at Lang-Gons (Giessen) is
broken into. 166 identity cards, official stamps, 430 marks and a
bottle of cognac removed.
Dec 3 :: Spanish Embassy in London machine-gunned,
following international protests against the
trial of the Burgos Six in Spain.
Dec 8 :: Day of large demonstrations against the
Industrial Relations Bill. In the early hours of 9<sup>th</sup> December the
Ministry of Employment and Productivity in London is rocked by a
powerful explosion following an unsuccessful police search of the
building. (“Angry Brigade”).
*** 1971
January 12 :: Day of national demonstration against
Industrial Relations Bill with strikes and protest marches against
this blatant piece of class legislation. That night the home of the
Minister responsible for the Bill, Mr. Robert Carr, is almost wrecked
by two powerful explosions. The action is claimed by the ‘Angry
Brigade’.
January 19 :: Jake Prescott arrested on a cheques charge
in Notting Hill and questioned by Det. Chief Supt. Habershon — the
officer who was to take charge of the so-called ‘Angry Brigade’
investigation.
February 3 :: Prescott released on bail, but re-arrested
8 days later and charged with causing the explosions at the home of
Robert Carr and the Miss World Contest. It was admitted in court by
Chief. Supt. Habershon that he
had refused the arrested man access to a lawyer
for three days. During the ensuing months of the investigation the
actions and activities of the police come in for a great deal of
criticism from many different quarters, and numerous charges
are brought against Scotland Yard for assault and harassment. These
are waived aside by Supt. Habershon with the comment: “I am not
concerned with legal niceties”. It becomes increasingly clear that
capitalism in Britain has moved into the defensive by permitting
itself to be panicked into allowing the police a “free hand” in its
methods of investigation. This is reflected in the political sphere
with the Industrial Relations Bill laying the foundations of a
corporate state.
Feb 10 :: Germany: Exchange of fire between Manfred
Grashof, Astrid Proll and the police in Frankfurt.
March 16 :: Ian Purdie arrested in London and charged,
together with Jake Prescott, for the two ‘Angry Brigade’ bombings.
Further reports in the liberal press of police excesses and Nazi-type
tactics, in their investigations.
March 18 :: During a major strike of Ford workers in
England the main offices of the Ford Motor Company at Gants Hill,
Ilford, on the outskirts of London, is wrecked by a powerful
explosion. A thousand word communique from the ‘Angry Brigade’ is
delivered shortly after.
April 28 :: Bomb delivered to the Times newspaper with a
message from ‘The Vengence Squad, the Angry Brigade, the People’s
Army.’
May 1 :: Bomb wrecks the trendy Biba boutique, in
Kensington. It is followed by a communique attacking consumer
capitalism and the conditions of the sales girls and seamstresses.
May 5 :: Spain: Bomb attacks in Barcelona on the Palace
of Justice, the Falangist HQ and a Capuchin Monastery. Claimed by the
Catalan Anarchist Group ‘Libertad.’
May 6 :: Germany: Astrid Proll, one of the group which
liberated Baader, is arrested.
May 18 :: Germany: Horst Mahler found not guilty of
participating in the liberation of Baader. Ingrid Schubert receives 6
years, and Irene Georgens 4 years for participating in the liberation.
Horst Mahler is held in prison under paragraph 129 — for being a
member of an illegal organisation, the RAF.
May 22 :: Bomb attack on Scotland Yard Computer Room at
Tintagel House, London. This is accompanied by simultaneous attacks by
the ‘Angry Brigade’, the International Revolutionary Solidarity
Movement and the ‘Marius Jacob’ group against British Rail, Rolls
Royce and Rover offices in Paris.
May 28 :: Spain: The arrest is announced of 9 people
accused of belonging to the Catalan Liberation Front. Charges include
sabotage attempts on T.V. stations, State Prosecutor’s offices and the
right-wing newspaper ‘La Vanguardia’.
June 22 :: During a dispute between Ford management and
the militant shop steward, John Dillon, in the Ford Liverpool plant,
the ‘Angry Brigade’ blow up the home of Ford’s Managing Director,
William Batty, in Essex. The same night a bomb damages a transformer
at the Dagenham plant of the Ford Motor Company.
July 8 :: Germany: Thomas Weissbecker and Georg Von
Rauch, both members of the Anarchist Black Cross, are tried for
assaulting a journalist on the Springer magazine Quick. Georg is
convicted and Tommy acquitted, but both police and press have confused
them from the beginning of the case and, after the verdicts, they
change places. Georg goes underground and Tommy has to be released.
July 15 :: Germany: Petra Schelm is shot dead by police
following a check at a road-block in Hamburg. Werner Hoppe is arrested
and accused of the attempted murder of a policeman.
July 20 :: Germany: Dieter Kunzelmann arrested for
allegedly planting a bomb at a lawyers’ ball. Charged with attempted
murder.
July 24 :: Germany: The Socialist Patient Collective in
Heidelberg (SPK) is attacked by the police on the pretext of a
connection with the RAF. (The SPK, the first self-organised group of
mental patients, located the cause of mental illness as capitalist
society itself.) 300 police armed with machine guns forced their way
into the SPK rooms and the residences of 20
patients. 11 members of the SPK are put into 10 different prisons. 6
are still detained on remand.
July 31 :: Despite close police protection the home of
the Secretary for Trade and Industry John Davies, in London, is badly
damaged by a powerful explosion. This action followed close on
Davies’s announcement of his intention to close ‘Upper Clyde
Shipbuilders’, throwing thousands of men out of work. This is
accompanied by the 11<sup>th</sup> communique from the ‘Angry Brigade.’
August 15 :: Following the announcement by the British Government that it intended
to introduce internment in Northern Ireland there was a powerful
explosion
at the Army Recruiting Office in Holloway Road, London. This was
claimed by a communique signed ‘The Angry Brigade: Moonlighters Cell.’
Aug. 20 :: House in Amhurst Road, London, raided by
Special Branch and CID arresting Jim Greenfield, Anna Mendelson, John
Barker and Hilary Creek. The four are taken to the HQ of the ‘Bomb
Squad’ in Albany Street, London, where the two men are subjected to a
brutal beating-up to extract a confession from them.
August 21 :: Stuart Christie arrested at Amhurst Road
while visiting the house. One hour later Chris Bott is arrested at the
same place. Both taken to join others at Albany St. Police Station.
Incriminating evidence
in the form of two detonators planted by police officers in Christie’s
car. — Both men are also ‘verballed’.
Aug. 23 :: All are charged at Albany Street police
Station with:
1. Conspiring to cause explosions between January 1<sup>st</sup> 1968 and August 21<sup>st</sup>. 1971.
2. Possessing explosive substances for an unlawful purpose.
3. Possessing a pistol without a firearms certificate.
4. Possessing eight rounds of ammunition without a firearm
certificate.
5. Possessing two machine guns without the authority of the Secretary
of State.
6. Possessing 36 rounds of ammunition without a firearm certificate.
7. Jim: attempting to cause an explosion in May, 1970.
8. Anna & Jim: attempting to cause explosion in Manchester, October
1970.
9. Stuart: possessing one round of ammunition without a firearm
certificate. (this dated back 2 years when a bullet was taken from his
flat. No charges were preferred against him at the time).
10. John, Jim & Stuart: Possessing explosive substances.
11. Jim, John & Hilary: receiving stolen vehicle.
12. Stuart: possessing explosive substances (the two detonators
planted by police).
All are refused bail and remanded in custody to await trial.
Sept 24 :: Despite the fact that the police claim to
have arrested all the Angry Brigade, the Albany Street Army barracks
(near the Bomb Squad HQ) is bombed by the Angry Brigade in protest
against the actions of the British Army in Northern Ireland.
Oct 20 :: Bomb blasts home of Birmingham businessman
(building construction) Chris Bryant, while his workers are on strike.
Communique issued by the Angry Brigade.
Oct 21 :: Following a confrontation between members of
the RAF and the police, the policeman Norbert Schmid is killed. Margit
Schiller is arrested and charged with the shooting.
Oct 30 :: Post Office Tower in London is bombed.
Nov. 1 :: Army Tank HQ in Everton Street, London bombed
by Angry Brigade.
Nov. 6 :: Attacks against Lloyds Bank in Amsterdam; in
Basle against the Italian consulate; in Rome against the British
Embassy; and in Barcelona against the British Embassy, in support of
the ‘Stoke Newington Eight’ and the Italian anarchists imprisoned on
trumped-up charges of ‘conspiracy’ and subversion.
Dec. 1 :: Trial of Ian Purdie and Jake Prescott ends.
Ian Purdie found not guilty on all charges and Jake Prescott guilty on
charge of conspiracy — 15 years.
Dec. 4 :: Georg Von Rauch, a member of the Anarchist
Black Cross, is shot dead by the police in West Berlin. He is unarmed,
and is shot in the head when he’d already
put his hands above his head. Between 5000 and 7000 people turn
out the following day for a solidarity demonstration called by the
Berlin Red Help.
Dec 18 :: Kate Mclean arrested and charged with Angela
Weir, Chris Allen and Pauline Conroy, who had been arrested during the
course of November of having conspired with the six people already
arrested on conspiracy charges. Shortly before the opening of
Committal proceedings against the ten militants, the Attorney General,
Sir Peter Rawlinson, the victim of one of the Angry Brigade attacks
decided he could not allow a case to be made against Pauline Conroy
and Chris Allen due to insufficient evidence and they were released
from custody.
Dec. 22 :: A bank is robbed in Kaiserslautern. £16,750
is stolen. A policeman, Herbert Schoner, is killed. There is nothing
to directly connect this robbery with the RAF, but the Springer
concern starts a big propaganda campaign on the assumption that this
was the action of the “Baader-Meinhof Group”. Heinrich Boll, world-
famous novelist, publicly attacks the Springer press
for the hysteria it is constantly trying to whip up. Two weeks
later Chancellor Brandt is forced to appeal to the West German public
to remain calm. At the same time, Peter Bruckner, a radical
psychologist, suspected of harbouring members of the RAF, is suspended
from teaching at Hannover University. Following his suspension there
is a massive demonstration of solidarity from his students.
Dec 25 :: Switzerland: Attack on the Central Police HQ
in Zurich. Police name an anarchist whom they are unable to locate.
*** 1972
February :: Bomb attack on Italian Embassy in Brussels
in solidarity with Pietro Valpreda now on trial in Italy.
March 2 :: Thomas Weissbecker, another member of the
Anarchist Black Cross, is shot dead in the middle of a street in
Ausburg, when asked to produce his identity card. Although armed he
didn’t draw his gun. The police
had been watching the flat where he was staying,
but as became clear later had no idea who it was they had shot until
after the killing. Carmen Roll, who was with Tommy is arrested.
Solidarity demonstrations take place in five cities the next day.
March 3 :: In Hamburg, the police raid a flat and open
fire almost immediately on Manfred Grashof and Wolfgang Grundmann.
There follows a gun battle in which Grashof is seriously wounded, and a
police inspector receives wounds from which he later dies. Despite his
serious injury, Buddenberg, the judge in charge of all people arrested
in connection with the RAF, orders Grashof’s removal from the prison
hospital to a cell where he has to administer medical treatment
himself. Grundmann is put in the same prison.
March 24 :: Bomb alert in British Embassy in Brussels.
April :: The not guilty verdict on Horst Mahler is
quashed after the prosecution appeals. He is now to be re-tried on
all charges.
May 11 :: A bomb destroys the officer’s club of the
headquarters of the American Army in Frankfurt. An American colonel is
killed and 13 other officers wounded. A Communique issued by the RAF
said the attack was a response to the escalated American aggression in
Vietnam.
May 12 :: The police headquarters in Ausburg, where
Tommy Weissbecker was shot dead, and the headquarters of the Bavarian
police in Munich are bombed, causing thousands of pounds worth of
damage. Claimed by RAF.
May 15 :: A bomb explodes under the car of Wolfgang
Buddenberg, the judge mentioned above. His wife normally drives him to
work, but on this occasion she is alone, and is seriously injured.
Claimed by the RAF.
May 19 :: In the publishing house of Springer’s concern
in Hamburg, two high-explosive bombs are detonated. Three telephone
warnings are given — two to the Springer House itself, one to the
police. All are ignored. 17 people are injured. 5 other bombs fail to
explode. Altogether the bombs contain 80 kilos of TNT. Claimed by the
RAF.
May 20 :: Police open fire on Madrid students seriously
wounding one of them. Students reply with Molotov Cocktails.
May 24 :: At the HQ of the American Army in Europe at
Heidelberg, two bombs explode in the car park. A captain and two
sergeants are killed, five others are wounded- Claimed by
the RAF.
May 26 :: Bomb attacks on American Consulate and
American Legion in Paris. At the same time the Spanish Consulate in
Stuttgart is also wrecked by an explosion.
May 30 :: Trial of ‘Stoke Newington Eight’ opens at No.
1 Court at the Old Bailey, in London. This was to be the longest trial
in the history of the British Legal System.
June 1 :: Andreas Baader, Holger Meins, Jan Carl Raspe
are arrested when 250 police with machine pistols, tear
gas, and a tank, raid a flat in the suburbs of Frankfurt. A fourth
person arrested with them is later released by the police. They say he
was a doctor at a local hospital, but after his release he
mysteriously disappeared. In a gun battle with the police before the
capture, Baader is wounded.
June 7 :: Gudrun Ensslin is arrested in a boutique in
Hamburg, after a shop assistant spots her gun.
June 9 :: Bernhard Braun and Brigitte Monhaupt are
arrested
in West Berlin. They are two of the 19 people whose photos have
been posted up all over Germany as members of the RAF.
June 12 :: Bomb explodes in Spanish Consulate in Munich.
June 15 :: Ulrike Meinhoff and Gerhard Moller are
arrested in a flat near Hannover. The police have received a tip-off
from a ‘left-wing’ trade-unionist in the ‘progressive’ wing of the
SPD, living in the same block.
July 1 :: Spain: 800,000 pesetas robbed from a wages
office in the Calle Majorca near the centre of Barcelona. This is the
first known action of the Iberian Liberation Movement. (MIL).
July 18 :: Bomb wrecks Spanish Tourist Office,
Stockholm, on 34<sup>th</sup> anniversary of the Francoist victory.
August 14 :: France: Material worth over one million
pesetas taken from a print-shop in the rue l’Esquille in Toulouse.
(MIL)
September 9 :: Acting on ‘information received’ the
French police
raid an isolated farmhouse in Bessieres, near Toulouse, and discover
an arms dump, printshop and a large amount of anarchist propaganda. In
an official communique issued after the raid they say the place
has obviously been used as an international meeting place for
anarchist activists.
Sept. 13 :: Wage snatch fails at the Savings Bank of
Igualada in Salou (Tarragona), 50kms. from Barcelona. (MIL)
Sept. 15 :: Armed robbery at the Savings Bank of Bellver
de Cardana in Lerida netting the group over one million pesetas. (MIL)
Sept.17/18 :: French police halt a Renault 16 at a road
block near Pau and identify two of the occupants as being responsible for the
hiring of the farmhouse near Bessiere. A police raid in Toulouse later
that night effects the arrest of two militants, a third managed to
escape. Oriol Sole, one of the accused, is kept in custody, but his
companion, Jean Claude Torres, is released for lack of evidence. (MIL)
Oct. 21 :: Layetana Savings Bank in the industrial city
of Mataro robbed of over one million pesetas. (MIL)
Nov. 18 :: Savings Bank in Barcelona robbed of 200,000
pesetas; for the first time it is reported that the group is armed
with Sten sub-machine guns. (MIL)
Nov. 20 :: Seven men, armed with sub-machine guns, rob
the Central Bank of Barcelona of one million pesetas. A communique is
left signed by ‘Autonomous Combat Groups, Iberian Liberation Front’.
(MIL)
Dec. 6 :: The trial of the Stoke Newington Eight ends
with four sentences of guilty of conspiracy against Jim Greenfield,
Anna Mendelson, Hilary Creek and John Barker. Each was sentenced to 10
years imprisonment, after a plea for clemency by the working class
jury.
The four subsequently appealed against sentence but had it thrown out.
The other four were found not guilty on all counts demonstrating that
the jury accepted the defence allegation that most of the police case
was a fabrication of ‘verbals’, misplaced and planted evidence — as in
the case of two detonators being planted in Stuart Christie’s car — to
secure conviction.
Dec 13/14 :: The printshop stolen by the police from the
farmhouse at Bessieres is removed from police custody and put to
social use again. (MIL)
Dec. 29 :: Layetana Savings Bank in Badalona robbed of
800,000 pesetas and a communique signed by the MIL is left
commemorating the death of Francisco Sabate Llopart.
|
#title I Couldn’t Paint Golden Angels
#subtitle Sixty Years of Commonplace Life and Anarchist Agitation
#author Albert Meltzer
#SORTauthors Albert Meltzer, Stuart Christie, Philip Ruff
#SORTtopics autobiography, Albert Meltzer
#date 1996
#source Retrieved on 22<sup>nd</sup> September 2020 from [[https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/jwsvjx][www.katesharpleylibrary.net]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2020-09-22T17:29:37
** 00 Foreword by Stuart Christie
In spite of the self-effacing sub-title, the life of Albert Meltzer has been far from “commonplace”. It is a witty account of the never-ending and tireless struggle — sometimes Herculean, sometimes Schvejkian — against the hydra-headed nonentities who seek to impose their order and their certainties on the universe.
Since his schooldays, throughout his working life and now in “retirement”, anarchism has been the guiding star which has fuelled Albert’s thankfully incurable and infectious optimism and faith in the ultimate common sense of humanity. He is a worker, was active in trade unionism, a tireless but unpaid editor, a traveller, a public speaker and a challenger of humbug. His character, ideas, good humour (mostly) and generosity of spirit have touched and influenced many people in many lands during the past sixty years. I am grateful to have been one of those links in the chain. Others, some of the many younger people Albert continues to inspire, will undoubtedly be the torchbearers of anarchism — a vision of a free, just and self-managed society — into the twenty-first century.
However did Albert Meltzer get to be one of the most enduring figures in the active international anarchist movement in the second half of the twentieth century? How did his commitment to anarchism survive the destruction of the Revolution and defeat in the Civil War in Spain? How did it survive the Second World War? What was the anarchist contribution to the revolutionary impetus of the 1960s and 1970s? How did it respond to the more demanding reactionary challenges of the 1980s and 1990s? These are important questions with a valuable bearing on the human condition in this century. “I Couldn’t Paint Golden Angels” does not provide any easy answers but it does provide sharp and invaluable insights into how anarchists are formed and sustained — unpretentious, without illusions, prepared for everything and forgetting nothing.
** 00 Introduction by Philip Ruff
<quote>
“A person is strong only when he stands upon his own truth, when he speaks and acts with his deepest convictions. Then, whatever the situation he may be in, he always knows what he must say and do. He may fall, but he cannot bring shame upon himself or his cause. If we seek the liberation of the people by means of a lie, we will surely grow confused, go astray, and lose sight of our objective, and if we have any influence at all on the people we will lead them astray as well — in other words, we will be acting in the spirit of reaction and to its benefit.”
<br>
(Michael Bakunin — <em>Statism and Anarchy</em>, 1873)
</quote>
Two tactics of Communism (Marxist and Anarchist) have existed ever since Marx and Bakunin clashed in the First International of the 1860s, over the question of the State. Both agreed that the goal of Communism should be a classless society which had no need of the state; their differences were only on how to reach it. The Bakuninists favoured an immediate, total destruction of the bourgeois state, and its replacement with a federal, decentralised system of free communes and labour organisations. The Marxists, whilst agreeing that the bourgeois state should be destroyed, believed that a new type of state machine, the dictatorship of the proletariat, was needed in order to oversee the dismantling of the old class system during a period of transition to full Communism. This temporary dictatorship would, of necessity, be strictly centralised. Marx attacked the ideas of Bakunin as ‘Utopian’ and unworkable. Bakunin, in turn, pointed to the dangers of a new class of ‘Savants’ (intellectuals) being created, in whose hands all power of decision making would be concentrated, leading inevitably to the emasculation of the revolution and a new form of slavery for the people.
The International was strongest in those countries where the workers’ movement was more deeply imbued with the libertarian principles of federalism, decentralisation and antipathy to state control. When the International split, and a separate anarchist movement came into existence, it was natural that Anarchism should prosper best among the working class of those countries which had been most resistant to the ideas of Marx: Italy, Switzerland, France and Spain. Spain, more than anywhere else in Europe, proved to be the testing ground for anarchism in action. In the sixty years between the death of Bakunin (1876) and the start of the Spanish Civil War (1936), uninterrupted capitalist repression and unrelenting anarchist activity (“tyranny tempered by assassination”, as someone once described Russia under the Tsar) combined to produce a working class anarchist movement that not only resisted Franco’s military assault on the Republic, but conducted a social revolution that went much further than anything that had taken place before it in Russia. It was this example of a libertarian revolution that had no need of Marxist leadership, and was outside of Comintern control, which moved Stalin to act against it in Spain.
The tradition of working class anarchism in England, though never as organisationally successful as in Spain, went back just as far. So too did its internationalism. The anarchist movement in England welcomed fraternal exiles from everywhere in the world; some, like the Italians, Russians and Jews formed sizeable colonies, others achieved lasting notoriety through episodes of resistance which, in the case of the Latvians, culminated in the “Siege of Sidney Street” (1911).
The movement in England (and Scotland and Wales) received its strength from being solidly working class. Only under the decimating impact of the First World War, and the fatal attraction of Soviet Communism, did the anarchist movement go into decline. But by the mid-1930s the experience of class struggle anarchism was still sufficiently recent, and there were still enough survivors of the ‘old’ movement, to pass on the fighting tradition to a likely young rebel from Tottenham who was coming to anarchism for the first time. And the news from Spain was all of revolution.
The Russian revolutionist Emma Goldman possessed many sterling qualities, but her scathing dismissal of the 17 year-old Albert Meltzer as a “hooligan”, in 1937, proved only that being a good judge of character was not one of them. An officer in the Special Branch came closer to the mark in 1977, with a back-handed compliment made as an aside to Black Cross members raided in Huddersfield, referring to Albert as “the doyen of the British anarchist movement”. After knowing Albert for something over twenty years, I confess that I have never met a more reliable or dependable man. If anyone could be said to qualify as a senior Ambassador of Anarchism, it is Albert Meltzer.
Albert is best known internationally for his championing of the Spanish Resistance during the Franco years, but there can barely be a country in the world where someone does not owe him a debt of thanks for his unassuming solidarity and unceasing commitment in sixty years of activity for the anarchist cause. This is not revolutionary rhetoric. The struggles Albert has been part of have all been real. To my own knowledge, he has never run away from a fight, even when it has not been of his choosing, and all too often he has had to suffer the unwanted, if not unwarranted, attentions of various police forces because of the derring-do or stupidity of others.
Albert has skimmed the surface of his long association with anarchism before, in <em>The Anarchists in London 1935–1955</em> (Cienfuegos Press, 1976), but this is the first time the story has been told in full and brought up to date. It is a unique account of working class rebellion.
One of the great things about writing history is that it can only be done after the event, but it can only be understood by keeping an eye on the future. Unlike the Canadian Professor George Woodcock, who ignored the possibility that libertarian ideas were primed to detonate a fresh explosion of revolutionary struggle when he wrote off the anarchist movement as finished in 1962, Albert Meltzer writes about the past ever hopeful that the final chapter of anarchist history is still to come. He should know. He, more than most, inspired the generation that passed Woodcock by and embraced revolutionary anarchism in the 1960s.
The restructuring of the Spanish Resistance on an international level in 1962 was instrumental in reviving anarchist movements throughout Western Europe and beyond. The “British Connection” was first highlighted by the arrest of Stuart Christie in 1964, during an abortive attempt to assassinate the Spanish dictator, but many more anarchists from these islands made their contribution over the years. Through the Anarchist Black Cross, formed after Christie’s return from Spain in 1967, Albert helped to turn the defence of class struggle prisoners into a springboard to action by others. And he was the driving force behind <em>Black Flag</em>, launched in 1970 when the <em>Bulletin of the Anarchist Black Cross</em> changed its name. From these modest but very practical endeavours came a new Anarchist International that defined its existence through activity, not organisational affiliation. The target for intense police reaction, including the murder of three of its Secretaries (Giuseppi Pinelli in Milan, Tommy Weissbecker and Georg Von Rauch in Germany) and the arrest again of Christie in London, the Black Cross scored an impressive string of victories in bringing aid to revolutionaries imprisoned around the world. Miguel Garcia and Juan-Jose Garcia (Spain), Goliardio Fiaschi (Italy) and Martin Sostre (USA) are among those who in some degree owed their release to the ABC and to Albert Meltzer.
Albert’s appearance as a witness in the 1972 “Angry Brigade” trial, one of his many calls to the witness box, but for the <em>prosecution</em> (something they bitterly regretted), was thereafter seized upon by the press, to cast him in the role of benevolent anarchist “Godfather”, linked to every real or imagined act of resistance during the 1970s. Police fears of a “new Angry Brigade” culminated in the 1979 “Persons Unknown” trial, at which Albert was also called to testify, this time for the defence. State paranoia aside, police preoccupation with the spectre of libertarian resistance does acknowledge that there are anarchists who take anarchism seriously. In this respect, Albert Meltzer stands among the “guilty”, and is proud of it.
The 1960s and 70s were the years of Albert’s outstanding achievement, but he has done much, before and since, of lasting merit. Many episodes in this book, particularly from Albert’s early life, will be new even to people who know him. From the attack by anarchists that destroyed a British fascist exhibition about Franco, for which Albert was castigated by Emma Goldman in 1937, to the movement of soldiers’ councils in Egypt at the end of the Second World War, Albert’s first-hand account chronicles a period of working class anarchism ignored by academic historians.
Albert’s refusal to kowtow to the pacifist-liberal Mafia who sought to re-invent anarchism in their own image after the war, and his scepticism of the New Left in the 1960s, have earned him a reputation for “sectarianism”. Paradoxically, it was the discovery of class struggle anarchism through the “sectarianism” of Black Flag under Albert’s editorship that convinced so many anarchists of my generation to become active in the movement.
Where many younger people have felt content to withdraw from activity, having “done their bit” (often very little) for anarchism, Albert has soldiered on past retirement age, through the 1980s and into the “post Cold War” era of the mid-1990s. Despite his age, he is still travelling the world as an Ambassador of Anarchism, still publishing <em>Black Flag</em>, and still an inspiration for those who believe that the ideal of liberation must be fought for if it is to materialise. “Reasonable” people will always be slaves. Only the “hooligans” of this world will ever live in freedom.
Philip Ruff
<br>
London, January 1995
** 01 The Box Scandal; Gypsies and Germans; The Film Scandal; The Road to Salvation: In the Van; Lost Millions; Paradise Lost and Regained
*** <em>The Box Scandal</em>
Nellie, who ten years later was to be my grandmother, sat on the pavement in front of her house in a crumbling North London suburb tossing crumbs to the squawking birds, holding court of the cottages around among her chirping friends. Her husband Joe often remarked in reply to her complaints of the time he spent on charitable committees that she ran a more efficient advice centre and board of help than anything the guardians of the parish did.
Sure as fate Mrs Noel brought her along a hard luck story, a servant girl crying and holding her pinafore over her eyes to conceal her shame. “Her master won’t let her have her box because she left without notice,” explained Mrs Noel, who faithfully found and put the lame ducks on proud display for Nellie to get flying again. “She won’t be able to get another job without a box and without a character. She’s got nothing but the clothes she stands up in. What do you reckon we should do?”
The initial answer was always the same. “Bring her in for some chicken soup, then we can think.” They all gathered in the little shop-parlour (the shop itself was never used as such, it was always a sort of glory-hole as far as I could gather). Nellie was used to problems: she had twenty-seven siblings — her father had buried four wives in three different countries, having had Victorian-sized families by each, and Nellie being the eldest had looked after them all.
She could discover improbable relations everywhere, ranging from a gentleman-farmer on Long Island, New York, to an embarrassing Dutchwoman who, when visiting London for the first time and speaking no English but an excellent imitator, lifted her skirt and shouted, to Nellie’s horror, “Stop the bus, the horse is pissing” to the driver, explaining to Nellie this was the way she’d observed English ladies boarding public vehicles.
“A character you have, you don’t have it given,” explained Nellie to Effie, no longer weeping. “If you want it in writing, we’ll soon find someone. The job, well, for the wage you were getting, if you’d even have got it, doesn’t matter, they’re crying out for girls. As for the box, my old man’s out totting, maybe he can find you one, and we’ve always got plenty of clothes. You can pay for them a penny a week, meanwhile finish your soup.”
Effie had barely time to stutter her thanks let alone swallow her soup, when Joe arrived and was told her story. “‘It’s odd,” he said. “I got a box this morning. I haven’t even paid for it yet. A gentleman stopped my trap and told me he wanted to get rid of it. He asked two guineas but being a toff wanted to be paid in gold. I said I’d have to come home first or pay for it in silver — but he said he knew me from the hospital committee and I could take it away and pay when I was passing.”
Effie stared at the box as it was brought in. “It’s full of clothes,” explained Joe. “About your size, I reckon. There’s a stroke of luck for you”.
“But it’s my box!” cried Effie. “Look. there’s my mum’s picture, and my letters, and everything. I never thought I’d see it again. Are you sure you’ll take only a penny a week?”
“Not likely” roared husband and wife together, in accord for once. “It’s your box,” explained Joe. “Take it. Good job I never gave that man the two guineas, I’ll give him a piece of my mind instead.”
“He’ll sue you,’” said Mrs Noel cheerfully. She always liked to prophesy doom. “He’s a Justice of the Peace and the case will come before him. You won’t stand a chance. Probably end up in prison, all for a penny a week.”
“I don’t mind paying,” said Effie.
“I do.”
The gentleman listened sympathetically to the account next day of how he had given the girl back her box. “Very commendable of you, I’m sure. However, you didn’t suffer the inconvenience of a girl leaving without notice. If that sort of thing became common one could never sit down to dinner. However we needn’t discuss the rights and wrongs of that, just give me the two guineas we agreed on. I trusted you to come back, supposing you to be an honest man.”
“I’m not a receiver to take your stolen goods,” began Joe hotly but was interrupted.
“Have a care. I am not accustomed to being slandered or of being deprived of what is justly mine, without seeking legal redress. I am perfectly entitled to retain the property of someone who broke her contract, and to sell it in lieu.”
“She says she had to go up ten flights of stairs with hot water five times a day, and your son was always pinching her bottom.”
“I do not relish either listening to criticism of my domestic arrangements. As it happens, I do not possess kitchens on every floor nor do I intend to carry up the hot water myself while I pay servants their wages. As for my son, he is well over the age when he needs parental consent. So kindly either pay what due or prepare to meet me in court.”
Mrs Noel proved wrong in one thing — he didn’t sit on his own case, but pointedly left the bench just before. The other JPs rallied to him. It was explained that whether or not he was right in his opinion that he was entitled to retain Effie’s box, or not, and that case was not before them, a contract to pay two guineas had clearly been entered into, albeit verbally. Payment and costs were allowed to the plaintiff.
It proved a Pyrrhic victory. In addition to being on the hospital committee and a JP, the gentleman was also chairman of the local Conservative Association, and it was the year of the General Election. Whenever he stood up to address a meeting in this hitherto Tory working-class stronghold, there was a chorus of ‘Want any boxes, mister?’ and ‘Who stole the skivvy’s clothes?’ The candidate himself never got a word in edgeways, so great was public opinion against his chairship. Even when they withdrew him from meetings, the public was shouting to demand to know where he’d gone and if he’d given notice, or if not, had his box been kept.
The Liberals romped in, even though their candidate ran a pawnshop which was always retaining Mrs Noel’s goods when she couldn’t pay up. She wanted to know what Nellie would do about it, but all she could think of was raising the cash for the present coat in hock.
*** <em>Gypsies and Germans</em>
Somewhere I read as a child that a gypsy woman stole two bags from the Roman soldiers at the Crucifixion, containing fifty nails intended for nailing Jesus to the cross, and ever since gypsies have been allowed to steal fifty times a year; but presumably since their confusion with the tinkers and didecois and other travelling people they have ceased to count the exact number.
In our time gypsies have been the subject of the most audacious theft since Manhattan island was bought for a few mirrors. The whole gypsy way of life, as celebrated in the operettas, its independence of money values, its preservation of tradition, depended on two things: movement and gold. Not only movement has been restricted until there is practically no place to go but on and out, during the various gorgio economic crises of the twenties gypsy camps all over the Continent were raided and their gold confiscated. In return they got currency valueless a few years later. Once the gypsies had to disgorge the loot of centuries it was the end of burning caravans when people died and setting up in them when they married. They had to settle down in slums or as travellers become tramps on horseback — later traded in for old bangers of discarded cars.
By the outbreak of World War I there was a broken-down gypsy encampment on the marshes near Joe’s house; the people changed but the site remained until well after I, their third grandchild was born. As he handled old clothes off and on, an old gypsy woman used to come to sell him scarcely worn men’s clothing, which she claimed came from her brothers, cousins, in-laws, until after a few months he came to wonder how she had acquired so large a family who never seemed to wear out their clothing. Most of them, too, seemed to be seamen.
One day Joe read in the newspaper how drunken seamen were lured to out-of-the-way spots by the promise of sex by gypsy women whose accomplices then knocked the punters on the head and robbed them of everything, even their clothes. He challenged the woman next time she came. She looked at him with immediate horror.
“You’re a German”’ she screamed. “I always knew it! You’re a Hun spy spreading pro-German propaganda.” A crowd gathered. Someone had sent for a policeman. She became more vigorous in her assertions. “I’m not standing here listening to him saying the Kaiser is right!” she cried, and ran off with her mackintosh and seaboots.
“And what have you been saying to upset this patriotic lady?” asked a policeman, as the crowd muttered menacingly. He told him. The mood changed, gypsies being perceived as a more immediate threat than Germans, even in November 1915. They still considered the war might end by Xmas, whereas the gypsies might go on forever. That same evening the police raided the gypsy encampment, and, being Friday, not only found a lot of new loot but two drunken and naked sailors who hadn’t yet been dumped on the highway. On Saturday morning fifteen able-bodied gypsies armed with horsewhips attacked my grandfather’s house shouting anti-German slogans (it was reported in the local press as ‘Renewed Local Anti-German Riots’).
Nobody could have been more indignant than Joe. Neither he nor Nellie had ever even been in Germany, all the family who hadn’t been born in London had been naturalised anyway, except Sid — who had come over as a babe in arms, so although his older brothers had been naturalised, it wasn’t thought he counted and they had lost his birth certificate anyway. For this offence he spent thirteen months in a prison ship at twenty years old, amongst Germans who thought this Englishman had been sent to spy on them. He got out of it by volunteering for the Army.
He was on leave at the time of the raid, and he and his father fought off the raiders, while Nellie poured water from the top floor over all indiscriminately, Sid’s girlfriend Rose ran for the police, Mrs Noel gave ineffectual whacks with her umbrella, while Mrs Nathan next door on the other side persuaded the neighbours not to join in as the police were coming — though this was a mistake, as she thought the crowd were going to help the gypsies, not having noticed Mrs Cummings running around screaming “The gypsies are attacking the soldiers!”
Of the two younger children, one was howling throughout adding to the panic and the other was afterwards criticised for sitting there reading, though there wasn’t much else she could do, being only eleven, and her book did explain what to do in times of civil commotion.
The affair collapsed suddenly, chiefly because the gypsies felt surrounded, and not because of the eventual arrival of a policeman on a bicycle. But afterwards a dignified statement in the window, with photographs of Joe, and two sons in uniform, proclaimed: ‘Certain people passing through the neighbourhood, without homes of their own’ — an obvious backhander — ‘have put about the foul lie that I am a German, on the contrary. My two sons are in His Majesty’s uniform. I myself am a former sergeant major.’ He omitted to say his youthful service was in the Austrian Army.
*** <em>The Film Scandal</em>
The film scandal happened some years later, when I was about eight years old. Charles Doran was MP for Tottenham and led a crusade on behalf of the film industry, in which he had some sort of financial interest. In his crusade for more British films to be shown and to cut out ‘alien’ (i.e. Jewish) domination, he was aided by the actor Victor McLaglen, an earlier John Wayne type, son of an Irish clergyman who made his name playing Irish Republicans, whom he detested. The crusade was primarily against American films since Continental films were hardly ever shown before the war, except occasionally at art houses and subject to curious restrictions.
The campaign successfully restricted the American films, at least by law. The Quota Act was passed, by which a proportion of British films had to be screened for each American one. The public was less convinced than Parliament that this was a good idea. West End managements put on cheap British films in the mornings, with the lights up and the cleaners busy, and having done their duty by England, they showed their American films for the paying public in the afternoon and evening, thus preserving their reputation.
But a boom had been opened for cheap film makers, with whose interests Doran was involved, and they began churning out films, two or three a week. Butcher’s films in Manchester produced cheap comedies, mostly filmed stage versions of artistes who happened to be in Lancashire and could pop over on two or three afternoons when there were no matinees, to roll off a film or two. Some of these incredibly bad films are still around, to be picked up by television, such as some of the better cheap ones of the ‘Old Mother Riley’ variety which have become cult movies.
British films did not recover from the blow to their reputation for years. Actors such as Henry Kendall were sidetracked into bad films and their reputations diminished. Others ran off to Hollywood, one of the first being Victor McLaglen, and once the films began to speak their stage experience and diction were in demand. Doran’s campaign fizzled out but he was known locally as the man who tried to ban American films, the biggest strike against him, and among a minority, as the man who wanted to form a private army in case of another General Strike (McLaglen, in Hollywood, actually did so) and also as an anti-semite. A few years later he would have been dubbed a fascist, and I believe he had some connection with the Imperial Fascisti, which was formed as a strike-breaking outfit rather than a political movement. It collapsed when one of its principal members, Colonel Barker, was arrested on fraud charges and was discovered not only to be a woman, but to have married a naive Irish girl who suffered so much derision when it came to public attention that she had married unknowingly to the wrong sex that it filtered down to the school playground.
The two prospective Labour members for the constituency, Fred Messer and Bob Morrison, saw their opportunity and they rallied round as many discontented elements as they could, including my grandfather Joseph Meltzer, still a person of some political consequence because of the Box affair, and with influence in the Liberal Party to which he then belonged and in the local synagogue. He switched a vital balance of votes to them, and the Tories went the way the Liberals had gone.
*** <em>Roads to Salvation</em>
Rose’s parents, Henry and Maria, had always lived in Islington, but out of London their roots were in Balllymena (they were second cousins) and throughout their many moonlight flittings through Islington and Hoxton, Maria clung to the vestiges of respectable Ulster Orangery.
The youngest daughter’s husband Bob was the last of the tradition. He never dreamed of leaving the house without his bowler hat, and always carried a briefcase to work, though he was not even a plumber but a plumber’s mate. Most of his Irish Catholic workmates on the building sites always called him sir, and he socialised to the extent of going to the pub with them on tea breaks — partly at the insistence of the plumber, who wanted to know where the staff was. There he opened his briefcase and took out his bottle of milk and sandwiches. No publican faced with the amount of custom from the thirsty labourers would object — had he done so, they would all have walked out. He looked rather as a prophet of old must have seemed among the heathen, which he undoubtedly considered a parallel.
Maria was a strong believer in the iniquity of drink, which she held to be the road to Roman Catholicism. She was proud that no member of the family had ever become a Roman Catholic (though many had taken to drink). Had they married Papists it was doubtful if she would have held the marriage legal, and though nobody seemed to deny that somewhere part of their ancestry was gypsy, they certainly denied that even before the Reformation they had ever been Catholic. They talked of the Celtic Church coming first and passing on the message direct from Glastonbury despite Rome.
Their exclusiveness did not extend to them objecting in the slightest to Rose marrying and entering the Jewish faith. The objections were all, as usual, on the other side. For them, Jews had their own religion, to which they were entitled, Catholics were merely anti-Christ. Didn’t they acknowledge it by calling themselves Roman Catholics, thus admitting they followed the Pope of Rome, when everyone knew he was anti-Christ and wore red socks?
Henry went along with a lot of this but was less convinced about the iniquity of drink. He claimed he could drink any paddy under the table and it had never taken him on the road to priestcraft — on the contrary, he would say with a wink, you’d never find those fellas in the places where he said mass. He worked as a master craftsman at the Royal Agricultural Hall, where every Saturday afternoon Maria would stand and wait for her housekeeping money after he got paid as she would never enter the doors of the music hall-tavern opposite, where he spent the weekend evenings in the ‘pulpit’ where he ‘said the mass’ — that’s to say, in the chair announcing the turns and calling for order and orders.
He was a popular chairman in the heyday of Collins Music Hall, and was treated to beer all night, which was expensive, as he felt impelled to buy back rounds for every free drink and his wages would disappear if Maria had not got to him first.
Nellie loved to slip away Friday evenings to the music hall when her husband was at his communal devotions, and when she came to know Henry through Rose she often slipped into Collins’. Sometimes the two of them would talk over or even sing the latest songs in her kitchen, while Maria was discussing the denunciations of Rome in the Old Testament with Joe in the parlour. It was a pity they lived long before partner-swapping became acceptable — it never, I suppose, entered their wildest dreams.
Henry had a nodding acquaintance with a large number of the lesser luminaries of the Edwardian music hall, if one could call them that. He had known the mothers of both Edgar Wallace and Charlie Chaplin, and got up collections for both in their impoverished days which were before Chaplin rose from the gutter to become rich and famous, and after Wallace did.
In view of their common non-Catholic background, it might seem strange that Sid and Rose sent their two sons, of whom I was the youngest, to a Roman Catholic school — I never understood why. The troubles were on in Ireland and nearly all my fellow schoolmates were Irish, recent arrivals or first generation in England, whose parents were attracted to the brickfields of the new suburbs. There were about half-a-dozen non-Catholics, mostly Irish Protestants. We had certain privileges — for instance, most of us got Thursday afternoon off — when self-employed people with cars used to take half-holidays. The headmistress seemed to accept the idea that this was a non-Catholic observance. She obligingly switched her main religion classes to Thursday afternoon to avoid disruption. In return we were frequently summoned by the headmistress for an emergency Monday morning conference. “There’s a boy just come from Ireland without any shoes, I’ll give you a note for your mother to ask if you’ve any old shoes and you can go home five minutes early when we’re having prayers”,
My mother used to be amazed and amused with the frequency of these notes. “That woman must think we run a shoe shop,” she said, until one day she put down the note murmuring “I don’t believe it — there’s a boy turned up without trousers”. His mother had made him a makeshift covering out of an old skirt, which she claimed was an Irish kilt. Poor lad, he never lived it down in all the years I knew him, though for the next five years wearing my prematurely discarded short trousers too long and wide for him.
The desperate poverty of the local Irish population in what was comparatively a well-off working class neighbourhood generally, was due to the fact that they were refugees who had been chased out of their homes which were burned with all their possessions. Most of them were children of Catholic Loyalists, not wanted by the Republicans and not welcomed in Protestant areas either. Their past associations had been service to the Crown in the forces in one degree or another, and their world vanished with the Free State. Not all thought themselves English perhaps but British certainly, and woe betide any who denied it. Those of my young contemporaries whose families had settled locally before the war regarded themselves English, as I did. They rather looked down on the newly arrived, most of whom had settled in the same few back streets by the tram depot, close to the building fields. The school fervently preached subservience to King and Empire, despite (or because of) the creation of the Irish Free State, Only on the subject of Guy Fawkes did it waver a little from its Englishness. Boys who had been discovered going around with a guy were severely admonished, it being made plain that poor old Fawkes was utterly wrong but he shouldn’t have been pushed to the limit he was, which however was a long time ago, like the rebellion in Ireland all of ten years before, and need no longer be discussed. It was difficult to teach history with this approach, and we never got beyond Kings and Queens ending with the young Victoria in her nightdress saying ‘I will be good’ when she was told her uncle the sovereign was dead.
How much more was science treated with suspicion lest it lead young minds to heresy. One day the class was asked how old the world was — I have no idea even now what answer was expected — I shot up my hand and answered brightly, “Five thousand’” plus whatever it was. There was a laugh and we were told severely to go on to something else and resume that afternoon. I suppose the mistress popped over to the church opposite to ask Father John about my answer. That afternoon I swelled with pride as it was explained I was absolutely right and she had stopped the class because of the laughter. Jews calculated the world’s date since the Creation, the way Christians did from the birth of Jesus. Unfortunately for my religious enthusiasms, that was the year (whatever it was of the universe, but 1931 of the usual calendar) when I passed the examination, whatever they called it then, and went into the secular grammar school. It so happened that at our first science lesson we were asked the age of the world. This time my answer, gleaned from occasional attendances at Hebrew school, failed dismally, and we were given some extraordinary story of it being incalculable millions of years old. I protested, but the damage was done, and doubt was sown in the young mind.
At eleven I had spotted a fatal flaw in two religions. Being influenced by what seemed the much more reasonable beliefs of my new schoolfellows at the grammar school, and having picked up a certain amount of the Arthurian nonsense lying around my maternal grandmother’s house, I decided to strike out for a third.
It greatly distressed the Church of England vicar when a serious minded 12 year old called on him and asked for a belated baptism. He had never heard of such a thing before — that’s to say, he’d heard of baptism but the demand for it was usually from parents clutching infants. He doubted if it were legal and said he might get into serious trouble. So might I, I said, if my parents found out. In fact, when I finally decided to confide in my father, he was more concerned as to what would happen if my grandparents found out. Couldn’t he have advanced his career and not just had to drive lorries if he’d chosen the easy way out that I was seeking so young, but he had refrained out of respect for older people who took these things seriously. And (illogically) hadn’t my mother changed her religion out of love for him, and how would it look to her? Anyway when I was older I would be mature enough to make up my own mind.
What ultimately put me off the healthy sanitised version of Christianity offered by the Church of England was the fact of finding it too had feet of clay, though in this case one should say feelings of flesh. The curate had enthusiastically espoused my case and offered to take me for baptism classes and even stand as godfather. I could not understand why my schoolmates grinned over his interest and put it down to cynicism at religious enthusiasm. When I ran into the curate in the street one day he was with one of the few Catholic boys who had made their way to my new school — most went on to the Jesuit grammar school if not too poor, as usually the St Edmunds boys and girls were unable to be committed to stay at school longer than 14. He was a very good-looking boy, far too beautiful for his own good, but I thought it was his soul the curate was after. When I learned otherwise, and even then it had to be explained to me, I was disgusted. In my defence I can only say the world was sixty years younger then as well.
As I didn’t go to an upper-class school, though Latymer was reckoned so locally, I had only once more encountered that approach in my boyhood. Upstairs on a bus (of the old open-top style) with a German boy, Oscar, my age, about ten at the time. a visiting grandson of an old friend of my grandfather, very blue-eyed and Aryan, a gentleman leered at us and asked his name. The name Oscar set him smiling curiously, his hands moving mysteriously beneath the wet-weather tarpaulin cover: “And you’re Alfred, I suppose?” he asked me. “Oscar and his little friend Alfred — well, well.” “No, not Alfred, Albert,” I replied, but he seemed to take no notice.
“Oscar is a very important name in this country,” he said, repeating with enthusiasm, “Oscar and Alfred”. I got quite heated trying to correct him but we had to get off at our destination, clearly to his disappointment, and we rushed to ask my grandfather who this great Oscar was.
He banged the table in rage and Nellie asked him why he was in one of his “Kaiser Williams”, as she termed them. “He was talking about that scoundrel, Oscar Wilde!” he shouted, “Such people shouldn’t be allowed on public transport where there’s children!” He grabbed his stick and rushed to the bus depot to complain — I still don’t know what they could have done — while we besieged poor grandmother with excited questions as to who Oscar Wilde was, cowboy, gangster, murderer or what. I don’t know whether she knew but found it hard to explain, or just said the worst thing she could think of. She whispered to me “He was an anti-semite”. I did not know what it was, but I was duly horrified and for years quite unjustly believed that about Wilde, even after I knew his story,
As for poor Oscar, to whom I secretly imparted the thrilling but incomprehensible accusation, he must have heard the word many times afterwards in Germany, and may have been equally confused. His father incidentally was under suspicion with the Nazis for a time — I never learned why — but managed to clear himself, which was disastrous as if he had not done so his son might not have been accepted by the forces. He died on the Russian front twelve years later defending a regime he and his entire family detested.
*** <em>In the Van</em>
My father, Sid, had originally wanted to be a printer, and thought he was about to commence work at 14 on a free apprenticeship when the father he had presumed dead returned after a dozen or so years absence to take command of the family and raise more children. For years Sid had thought himself an orphan. His mother had taken in mangling and raised three boys. Now he was told he was 15 (Nellie couldn’t count), a free year couldn’t be spared and working for newspapers was out on religious grounds (it meant working weekends). Joe put him to woodworking though incapability of carpentry was hereditary in the family and Sid turned to odd jobs like photography. The war saved him. He took to cars and afterwards to driving lorries.
He hated to be called a lorry driver. He was a self-employed motor contractor, which is to say he bought his van on HP, paid for petrol, oil, maintenance, repairs, insurance or pension, got no paid holidays or sick pay and in theory worked for himself — in practice, for one firm Barker & Dobson for 25 years, until they told him one week he would be too old for them the next.
There were many self-employed van drivers in those days, all busy cutting up one another until a road magazine was started which started them thinking on organised lines though the official Transport and General Workers Union was largely uninterested in the “cowboys”. I seem to recall the magazine was called “Headlight” and was published on Islington Green. It listed overnight lodgings and transport caffs (long before the motorways, one really had to know the roads and could get well puzzled for overnight stays). A lot of caffs advertised themselves as a “good pull up for carmen” (Spaniards and opera lovers never misunderstood). During the war they provided much better meals than the restaurants and in larger quantities than the average ration book family could provide. Because the magazine got people together — it never pretended to unionise them — boycotts could be very effective.
There were Blackpool landladies, for instance, who charged the earth for “rooms” (more likely three in a bed) in the winter to lorry drivers, yet in the summer didn’t want to know them. Drivers put up with a lot on the road — in those days men were generally less inhibited about sharing a bed, but in any case “hot beds” (paid by the hour) were not uncommon. It lasted a long time until the boycott system brought in standards. It was an eye-opener to me at an early age.
As self-employed drivers couldn’t push up wages by strike action, they tended to work out agreed rates among themselves. The employers could argue on “profits” (wages) but not on hours or miles. When during the depression (they had them in those far off days) wages were slashed, it would have been sheer philanthropy to work on the roads self-employed so low were rates cut (plus the fact that a driver often had to pay for his own van boy in order to get through the deliveries in time — there was no shortage of school leavers at five shillings i.e. 25p per week each, to go on the scrap heap at 18). The drivers finally agreed on the number of miles to (say) Birmingham, allowing for new roads, and the employers tended to check with other drivers rather than send out their own surveyors. And it’s remarkable how many hours were lost — i.e. put on wage sheets — owing to roadworks. Otherwise drivers would have gone under.
As it was they tended to be among the aristocracy of workers during the pre-war depression, particularly in London. But somehow many managed to have a strong inferiority complex when faced with clerical workers earning perhaps a quarter of what they did, but dressing formally to do so. As with many other things, I was told I would understand better when I got older, but I never did.
*** <em>Lost Millions</em>
When he came out of the Army after World War I, my father felt liberated from such dead-end jobs as free-lance photography, and moved from Tottenham to open a second-hand clothing store in Edmonton. This failed in the depression when we moved back to Tottenham, and he took up lorry driving. Edmonton was once a reasonably safe Conservative seat though with a growing working-class population, which gradually pushed out the would-be middle class to Bush Hill Park and Enfield. It was represented in Parliament by a man named Chalmers, who was left a legacy by a maiden aunt named Rutherford on condition he perpetuated her name. Adding Rutherford to Chalmers seemed no great hardship in exchange for a sizeable sum, our MP must have reasoned, and he dutifully did so.
Unfortunately for our MP’s political career, the Jehovah’s Witnesses had started activity in England and chosen as one of their first meeting places Edmonton Green. “Spouters’ Corners” (afterwards confined to Hyde Park) were then a centre of public life and a place where all the neighhbourhood came to listen, which flourished until the cinemas opened on Sunday. That and the growth of motor traffic killed public meetings stone dead.The JW’s message was that millions now living would never die and of those who heard and believed, some gave up their entire possessions in immediate expectation of the Kingdom. There may be a handful still living in hope of blissful eternity if present penury. The meetings were addressed by loudspeaker recordings of the earthly founder of the sect, Judge Rutherford, since neither Jehovah God nor his son were available.
It was natural that when the familiar name Chalmers did not come up at the election (the only time he showed up in the constituency) and the electorate thought itself faced with a nutcase Rutherford who believed that the end of the world was nigh, and members of all other religious sects were going to be thrown into darkness, the Edmonton folk reversed the national trend and elected the Labour MP Broad. He stayed in Parliament almost to the end of his life casting poor Mr Rutherford Chalmers into outer darkness, wondering what had come over local people asking him such absurd questions as to whether he really thought the Pope was anti-Christ and accusing him of speaking differently before the election, as if he ever spoke at all.
Most of the lads at St Edmund’s went round that election chanting “Vote vote vote for Mr Broad, Chuck old Chalmers out the door”, more aware than their Catholic teachers as to whom the MP was. The staff, though in the main Tories, regarded with abhorrence the idea of a man like Rutherford, who equated the Pope with the Whore of Babylon, being their MP. (For some time I thought a whore was something like a Shah and was perplexed to hear grandmother Shelly complaining, when grandfather took my brother and I to the pantomime, about exposing us at a tender age to the wiles of Drury Lane Whores.)
Edmonton became a safe Labour seat, and as Mr Broad was getting on, many local Labour hopefuls waited eagerly for him to retire. Edith Summerskill was well known as a local doctor, who finally gave up in despair and started a new national trend by becoming elected for Fulham in a sensational by-election. Other young hopefuls were not so successful. One or two with their eyes on the constituency “nursed” the succession for years and, despite early successes in municipal politics, never achieved success in the parliamentary lottery. When in 1945 Mr Broad finally retired, threatened by Party HQ (it was said) that if he tried to carry on any longer the Party would have to put him in the House of Lords to finish off the last year or two of his life, the seat went to a carpet-bagger from national politics.
Though by 1932 I was again living in Tottenham, I did not want to change my school where I had been a year and being backed by the independent grammar school (probably on account of some early promise I never fulfilled) the education authorities gave way. Because of this I associated with Edmonton youth activities until 1935. When I started to take boxing lessons at that time my colleagues were Tottenham based and most of my Tottenham associations were later to become involved in petty crime.
The Tottenham Communists (most of whom lived near me, but whom I only met when they penetrated Edmonton meetings) included Ted Willis (who like many East End communists used its Unity Theatre to advance himself, becoming a playwright and later a lord after democratic socialist governments were electable). One of the Edmonton hopefuls was a former pupil at the County School, who made his way in the local League of Youth and became a county councillor (and a governor of his old school only a few years after he had left it — a fine start for an ambitious man, but that was his highspot). He was for a time engaged to the sister of a schoolfriend, Peter, who introduced me to socialism a year before I came to reject parliamentary socialism by the unlikely route of my boxing lessons.
The Labour League of Youth was then torn between factions, one of which supported its parent body the Labour Party — a similar problem everywhere led to the disbandment by the Party of its youth section. There seemed to be three factions — those who admired Stalinism and finally went over to the Communist Party, those who thought a “revolutionary line” could be achieved within the Labour Party and flirted with the Independent Labour Party (then still a force in Glasgow, and with a lingering influence all over Great Britain), and finally the Pacifists. The “revolutionary liners” were for a United Front between the CP, the ILP and Stafford Cripps’s Socialist League. Even at 14 years of age I saw through it but the veterans of the ILP swallowed the line until it swallowed them. Most of the ILP disappeared. The Pacifists were strongly for the League of Nations Union but later for the Peace Pledge Union when it started (many great intellects such as Einstein supported both, not realising that they were contradictory).
Labour Party pacifism was fairly solid among veteran older members of the Labour Party who had been World War I conscientious objectors — and who had been quite isolated from the majority of people for years, partly I suspect because of the ‘holier than thou’ approach adopted for life by people like the Mayor, Councillor Albon, whose pacifism did not prevent them from being reactionary in every other respect. The fact they had gone to prison for not joining the armed forces did not prevent the occasional magistrate in their midst giving an offender the option of joining the armed services or going to jail.
Alan Albon, son of the Mayor, wavered from the Labour Party, though always pacifist. I knew him fairly well when we were at neighbouring schools, in later years more so when he became one of the first liberal pacifists of a now familiar type to describe himself as an anarchist. When James Maxton, the Clydeside agitator who led the ILP and was a brilliant demagogue, came to Edmonton Town Hall to speak he persuaded many of us youngsters to learn more of the ILP. The CP was abandoning the United Front, after uniting with the ILP (and leaving it decimated), and was turning to the Popular Front, in which they wanted to include Conservatives, Liberals and Labour — they had a few Conservatives, some Liberals and some of the Socialist League but the ILP was against it. Its programme was more advanced than its membership, as I soon found out when I attended an ILP Guild of Youth weekend school.
Jennie Lee — wife of Aneurin Bevan — was still in the ILP (like most of the ILP careerists, she eventually went over to the mainstream). She and Fenner Brockway addressed the seminar but she was by far the more dynamic. Typically, both finished not just in the Labour Party but in the House of Lords. I was not the youngest at the meeting (even at fifteen) but several of us felt, despite its apparent revolutionary commitment, it was letting the CP set the agenda, just trying to modify it to British (or more specifically Scottish) socialism, while the adult membership were largely nostalgic for the old ILP and wanted to justify its continued existence. Afterwards Alan Albon joined the ILP though its pure-pacifist membership, later to dominate it, was then a minority. I had meanwhile discovered anarchism (and thought I was the first to do so, at any rate of those living). Oddly I came to it partly through reading Upton Sinclair’s “Boston” on the Sacco-Vanzetti case. Not all politics, it seemed, was about power, advancement or money, though I recall my Aunt Alice assuring my mother, who worried I was getting mixed up in politics, that quite a good career could be made that way.
I was never cut out to be in the market place and it is idle to speculate what, if anything, the price might have been if I’d been for sale.
*** <em>Paradise Lost and Regained</em>
My religious waverings had been speedily dispersed by the age of thirteen, when I began to read, alongside the Bible, the classics of rationalism, Paine, Ingersoll and the like, as well as being influenced by freethought writers like Shaw and Wells. At an age when it seems some of today’s kids are just getting into Superman I was almost into Nietzsche, at any rate at second-hand via Shaw. I wasn’t precocious — I certainly wasn’t different from anyone else so far as any other study or activity went, and behind in anything practical. I was introduced to freethought by some socialist minded friends at school and never found it got much opposition from our generation, who were all sliding out of established religions if not into clarified rejection of it as well as having a cynical attitude to any of the sentiments and sediments left over from before the twenties, especially patriotism and war.
Most of the younger generation, and particularly the imaginative, were sick and tired of hearing about World War I. All we’d known of it was old soldiers standing in the gutter singing “Keep the home fires burning” and saying “spare a copper for an ex-serviceman”. There was a popular saying, “Coming the old soldier”. The potential officer class, the undergraduates of Oxford, came round to passing a resolution that they would not fight for King and Country (not realising that the slogans would be changed the second time around) but potential squaddies down to the 13 year olds were saying “They won’t take me for a mug next time”. Coming out of Armistice Day anniversaries every November 11<sup>th</sup> and parading past the Roll of Remembrance, someone would be sure to say, “I suppose it’ll be us there next time” and someone else replied “It certainly won’t be me”. It didn’t take a decade to prove the first right and the second wrong for most of them.
Kids were offered bright hopes in schools like the Latymer School, Edmonton, which was perhaps of the best of its kind, and taught hitherto middle class values to the sons and daughters of the working class. Most of them would move into tedious minor office jobs. We were taught of a bright and civilised future for a League of Nations similar to our Commonwealth of Nations if only one learned not to be aggressive. Ultimately I suppose what was meant by being unaggressive was as a collective part of the nation and as an individual going obediently in response to a mere slip of paper calling them to report for military service.
In due course thousands unaggressively joined the regiments that perished in the Dunkirk evacuation; the brightest and boldest went into the RAF and fell in the Battle of Britain. All those who did so, I suppose, are there on the self same Roll of Honour which I have never had the heart to go back and see. Millions died who had never lived.
Pacifism and the League of Nations had its effect too on the scientific intelligentsia. In their pursuit of a non-violent way of solving problems they were to devote their attention to developing the atom bomb which would ultimately make war, and no doubt the human race too, obsolete, but that was still in the future. The choice appeared to many of the thirties generation to be between first peace and war, and secondly between fascism and communism. It never seemed anything but odd to me that so many of the “greatest” minds of our generation and the one before should have fallen for either or the cause of mediocrity, some until one thing or the other dispelled their illusions, some for life, not a few because their illusions killed them.
My decision to go the road of sectarian politics was taken in 1935 at the age of 15, as an immediate result of my taking boxing lessons. The school most certainly didn’t encourage boxing, though it did every other sport, and I suppose this was on grounds of principle. Also, Edmonton had a prospective Labour MP Dr Edith Summerskill, who like many young hopefuls was waiting for Mr Broad, the sitting Labour incumbent, to die. As a doctor she must have known he couldn’t have far to go, but he clung on till after the war. In the end she got impatient and left to fight a hotly-contested by-election largely on the peace issue. During the war she became Home Secretary and afterwards Minister of Health, so she had perforce to abandon her pacifist campaign to be able to conscript people for the Army with a clear conscience, and to support the use of the A-Bomb. She sublimated her pacifism to campaign against boxing, but even in the thirties her influence against it was very strong, and independent grammar schools dared not go against her influence. But then the governors didn’t have to go through the streets of Edmonton and face the jeering gangs who could never forgive one being overweight or in any way unusual, even if only by way of a grammar school cap.
My first boxing “professor” Andrew Newton had been British amateur lightweight champion as far back as the 1880s. He turned professional and never lost a fight. When he lost an eye and retired from the ring he opened a gymnasium in the Edgware Road, not far from Marble Arch. He was passionately devoted to the art of boxing and to the training of young hopefuls. I understand that originally he specialised in training “Red Coat Boys”, or bootblacks (a long vanished species) who looked on the profession as the one way out of a cul de sac. They were employed by the firm where the young Charles Dickens went to stick labels on shoe blacking bottles when his father went to the Marshalsea Prison for debt (and which was immortalised in “David Copperfield”). Later Mr Newton trained well-to-do students but also members of youth clubs, and the social mixture kept the venture financially afloat. Occasionally he found, trained and managed a rising professional, but that was a bonus.
It proved harder to get into Andy Newton’s club than to be baptised. Bruises, unlike water, showed and I had to convince my parents I was doing weight training.
They too shared the aversion to boxing, but didn’t mind my trying to lose a bit of weight. Andy’s courage was infectious. Many who never learned to fight in the ring came away from the classes able to handle themselves in the street. Contrary to the fashionable Summerskill teaching that pugilism would teach them to be aggressive — a philosophy which has flourished in post-war periods, while football has been glorified and produces all the tearaways until they gave that too a bad image — I found a tolerant atmosphere, contrasting with the bitchiness and spite of the academic circles I later discovered. We were able to walk tall and be respected for the mere knowledge of being one of Mr Newton’s young men. It meant you were left severely alone by the jeering and accosting crew, who dreaded being individually challenged with fists, even when they were in gangs, for fear of disgrace.
This also applied to girls who took self-defence classes, then more disapproved than being a victim of rape. Boys who might have otherwise drifted to street gangs themselves never did after taking boxing lessons; while even those who drifted into smalltime crime never mixed it with anti-social violence. They might have a go at the police, but mugging as it evolved after the war was unknown, at any rate in our neck of the woods.
Most of those I mixed with in the boxing world were on the left, because the natural enemy was the upper middle class from which the fascists then came, though they recruited hooligans in the working class sector, gradually taking the place of the old street gangs. The boxers, including Andy were often pro-Communist Party, which long before the Molotov Pact or the tanks in the streets of Hungary I never could be. I worked out a strain of stateless communism for myself and was surprised when I later found I wasn’t the first. The one who argued with me most, trying to make me a better boxer and also a Marxist, was the “assistant professor” Johnny Hicks. A cabinet maker and professional boxer, Johnny divided his rare leisure between listening to the speeches at Hyde Park and training at the gym. He was a poet as well as a boxer, and, though inclined to the Communist Party, an admirer of its trenchant socialist critic F.A. Ridley.
Frank Ridley often came with his wife (a former Tiller girl) to the gym to watch the boxers after his Hyde Park meetings, a year or so before I met him in Charlie Lahr’s bookshop. The coincidence made us friends, though we had many differences of opinion, ever since.
When Johnny Hicks opened his own establishment in North London, I went there. I gave out leaflets advertising it at school, which earned me a lecture from the Deputy Headmaster, Mr Champion, who asked me where I got my ideas about boxing being any sort of sport, and I produced a history of boxing from the school library which I had on me. He abruptly changed the subject to saying that the objection was to the distribution of commercial leaflets in school hours, which was just as well as the book was stamped as presented to the school Library by the Headmaster himself and to crown it, was called “Champions of the Ring”.
The “commercial leaflets” were for free lessons, but for once I did not argue. With most of my teachers I got on well (I hope I wasn’t a creep) but on one occasion after that a master sent me to Mr Champion to be thrashed. I forget what it was for but I probably deserved it, though I don’t suppose I thought so at the time. He was quite apologetic before bringing out the cane, and explained it was obligatory on him to act on a request from a colleague. I was told other members of the staff, for whom I did some donkeywork historical research in my spare time for a proposed book of theirs, were quite indignant at the incident, and that may have been the reason for his hesitation, which is a better thought than that he might have been apprehensive at caning a strapping fifteen year old who had lessons from Andy Newton and Johnny Hicks.
Andy never picked me very difficult opponents. He said as I went to a grammar school it wouldn’t have been right for me to take a beating from an elementary school type (more likely it was because I wasn’t really very good). However, Johnny, either because he wanted to test me or got fed up with my obstinacy in argument, eventually picked me a first class opponent, partly by mistake, who ultimately demolished both his hopes (not to mention myself in the second round).
Billy Campbell was a tough young seaman from Glasgow, who packed a punch like a sledgehammer, and had the keenest brain I have ever met. He danced around me in the ring and all I could do was to take my punishment while the audience of boys, most of whom never came into the ring themselves, roared with delight at seeing yet another big guy being clobbered (it seemed less funny to me at the time I admit, but I regained my sense of humour when it happened to someone else).
Afterwards, while I was still dizzy and trying to invent excuses to take home to say how I came by the bruises, he came and apologised, and was full of remorse when he found I was Joseph Meltzer’s grandson.
His grandmother Euphemia had often told him of how, when a young servant girl, her employer had confiscated her box and all she had and the old gentleman had recovered it for her, and his lady had found her a job just when she thought she was stranded homeless and penniless in a strange town. She had married and returned to Scotland, but her English daughter-in-law, now widowed, lived in Edmonton along with Billy, who sailed between London and Bilbao where his girl friend Melchita lived.
He had been taught amateur boxing and sectarian politics in Glasgow by Frank Leech, a Lancashire man who had settled in Clydeside in a newsagent shop on his Royal Navy pension and was the mainstay of the Glasgow Anarchists. Frank had introduced him to hard line Anarchism of the traditional class struggle type, from which he never varied, but it was strengthened in him by Melchita having introduced him to the seafarers’ syndicate of the CNT (the National Confederation of Labour) in which those principles were about to storm the heavens in the mid-thirties.
So it was I came to accept the principles of Anarchism through the principles learned from the long tradition of Anarchism in Glasgow and the Spanish connection. I suppose I can boast of consistency, said to be the virtue of fools, but from strict adherence to these principles I never varied for sixty further years, and it’s got a bit late to change now.
The Prince of Wales had a few years earlier gone to South America and exhorted England to wake up, with a view to capturing the South American market. As a result Spanish was being taught in schools, even though it was considered a bit of a poor relation. I made the best progress of my class in Spanish battling against indifferent teaching of the language — so that I could be fit and ready to pass it on to Billy, who was eager to acquire it. I was doing my best to translate articles for him from the libertarian press, not to mention his love letters, when I was still on Selected Texts from Don Quixote, and while still reeling from the voluntary punishment I took in the ring from which he did his best to dissuade me. Between my teaching him Spanish at second-hand and him teaching me Anarchism we formed a friendship which lasted on his side until his early death and I feel until this day.
** 02 The Coasts of Bohemia; Fighting Fascism; The Battle of Cable Street; Schoolboy Anarchist; Castles in Spain; Frustration on Spain
*** <em>The Coasts of Bohemia</em>
The first Anarchist meeting I attended was at the old National Trade Union Club in New Oxford Street. The speaker was the well-known Emma Goldman, who was on that occasion talking about arms manufacture, not Anarchism as such. As I was the only stranger at the meeting, attention turned to me when enquiries elicited the fact that I had never heard of Emma Goldman and more particularly when I had the temerity to contradict her. I believe it was on the fallacy that as ‘aggression’ caused war, boxing, which I then esteemed highly, taught aggression. I was overawed by my elders being surprised at my audacity, and did not continue after her scornful dismissal of the argument. She felt thereafter that she had brought me into the movement from knowing nothing about Anarchism and regretted my intransigence in it, which she never appreciated was an integral part of it, for others as well as herself.
What was left of the Anarchist movement in 1935 was the rump of what had once been an important factor in the British working class movement. As it had not attracted any historically referrable persons according to the notions of bourgeois intellectuals it had been overlooked by history, which, along with the conventional English view that all history appertains to the ruling monarch, works on the principle that workers’ actions and opinions must be related to the nearest respectably quotable person available, preferably distinguished in other spheres, and for which purpose women, other than the occasional token ‘name’, do not exist.
As a working class movement with a high proportion of women activists Anarchism had been totally written off; and so ultimately became in more recent times a virgin field for scholars, when the mass production of theses in the booming university industry has used up all the names associated with Marxism and reformism, and those in search of original material are forced to look round for others as near to the standard criteria as possible.
Though I knew so far as Anarchism was concerned I was backing a lost cause, it didn’t seem to matter as every other cause had won at some time but that of the people themselves. At least it threw so hard a light on any other political persuasion.
I never had any illusions about any of them. Years later when the press deigned to take notice of us, if it was not by shock horror but kindly condescension, which I always felt came ill from people who fell for one absurdity after another, whether from State communism, fascism, the prospects for capitalism, reformism, or whatever idol was going around for adulation.
Billy and I did our best to extend the Glasgow Anarchists’ tradition of struggle to London, and even extend their workshop agitation there, though he was most of the time at sea and I was still at school. The London Anarchists then were a few veterans, and our appearance among them was somewhat of a cultural shock for both sides. They called themselves the London Freedom Group, met at the Trade Union Club, access to which had been guaranteed by John Turner, editor of the paper and trade union leader. They still spasmodically published a paper “Freedom” which had been founded by Peter Kropotkin, though lost to them a few years before when their printer Tom Keell retired with the printing press and moveable assets to Gloucestershire.
Since then the paper’s presumed history has become a minor historical cult with some historians selecting its contents for background material. Some tend to think that the paper was continuous from its foundation in 1886, and that the London Freedom Group period did not exist. The editor John Turner, a trade union secretary in his working hours, had died, and the paper was being run by George Cores and a few others, being printed on a clapped-out press in Chalk Farm by John Humphrey, whose other interest was phrenology. Some old-fashioned atheists then felt it had superseded religion, which is the sort of thing I suppose that old reactionary G.K. Chesterton had in mind when he said that when you cease to believe in God you don’t believe in nothing, but in anything.
I was sceptical of the value of most of the activities of the London Freedom Group, which consisted of weekly lectures and occasional dinners more in the nature of veterans’ unions, and the struggles of years ago seemed to have no relevance. Billy soon found it too much of a bore, but deputed me to go along and see what turned up there.
One of the few who did his best to make it relevant was Mat Kavanagh, who lived in Southend but often came up on a Sunday to speak at Hyde Park, and who was my next mentor in Anarchism. He had worked all his life as a labourer on building sites, propagandising in the open air in his spare time. Later, in his old age during the Second World War, he became a barber — a pretty terrible one by all accounts. As he once shaved George Orwell, whom he lectured (as barbers do) enough to impress his client, his name has actually been preserved in some professors’ books.
Few of the many brilliant organisers and speakers that I met in those pre-war days achieved so much! But among the odd assortment of what was then London’s Bohemia (when Soho was still ‘Sohobohemia’) who drifted past the London Freedom Group like exotic birds of passage but found its regular meetings irresistible, and came to explain that anarchism was all wrong, many became famous and several of them passed into world prominence.
The Bohemians thought the Anarchists were eccentric because they worked for a living and yet dissented from the State. Of these were many who attained fame, if sometimes for five minutes and not always that for what they would have preferred. For instance, there was Count de Potocki, who considered himself rightful King of Poland. In truth, though originally a New Zealand milkman, he did have some sort of a claim to be considered, if the Poles ever decided they would revert to elective monarchy. He admitted though, the Pope would have been surprised if they chose a declared Pagan, whose daughter was being brought up by her mother as a Unitarian, to rule the Catholic kingdom. He now and again turned up to suggest that monarchy, being the rule of but one, ought not be so abhorrent to Anarchists, as the rule of many. He thought them the largest party in the country, as the group meetings were often twice as big as the local Conservative and Labour parties. He attended all meetings to try to sell his bonds against payment by his court when established. He stopped coming when it was decided he was too much of a bore, and someone emptied half-a-pint of beer over him. He stormed out shouting ‘Sans-culottism’ and started his own royalist party. During the war he lived in the same house as a gentleman who considered himself Hitler’s U.K. representative. When they quarrelled over women Potocki stripped him of all the titles he had conferred on him, and in turn was listed for immediate internment in a concentration camp. However he neither returned to his kingdom in Poland nor went to Auschwitz. After the war, his poetasting failing, the last of the once feared Potockis returned to his New Zealand milk round.
Potocki’s right wing lot had illusions no greater than some on the left, like Jomo Kenyatta, who came to meetings — any socialist meetings, not just ours — dressed in full tribal costume complete with feathers and fly whisk — announcing he would one day go back and become the Kikuyu chief in Kenya. Some of us thought him another nutter like Potocki but he was so convinced he was the great liberator of his country that when he did indeed go back to Kenya after the war, the authorities promptly interned him. The struggle for independence took place while he was out of the way; but by then everyone took him at face value, and when the government wanted to hand over power to someone who had nothing to do with the Mau Mau resistance, the alleged organisation for which they had imprisoned him, the Colonial Office naturally chose him, perhaps being aware of the utter improbability of their courts having dealt justice.
The one in the Freedom Group most in touch with Bohemia was Charles Lahr, a German anarchist who had come to London to avoid military service and stayed forty years. At first there was a suspicion by the police that he had come to shoot the Kaiser, who had unwittingly decided to pay England a visit at the same time, though he did not stay so long. Charlie was shadowed by Special Branch until one cold night he took pity on the detective staying outside the bakery where he worked, and came out to explain to him that the baker himself took sufficient precautions to see none of his nightworkers got away before time either to go playing cards or shoot visiting potentates according to their taste. A few years later the war broke out and he was interned in Alexandra Palace as an enemy alien and was interviewed by the same detective. ‘You thought I’d come to shoot the Kaiser,’ chuckled Charlie. ‘Pity you didn’t,’ said the detective in a decided change of position.
In his Bloomsbury bookshop in the twenties and thirties, Charlie had been a focus point for the literary set, a few of whom lingered on when I first met him. Charles Duff was one of them. I think he worked in the Foreign Office at the time but he was an authority on the Castilian (and possibly the Catalan) language, like Allison Peers. Both of them had written school textbooks I was using. He was intrigued at my passing on my Castilian lessons to Billy Campbell so he could talk with his Basque girl friend in her own tongue without either of us realising it was a separate language.
In those days newsbills used to announce the startling events of the day more prominently than they do now and they were mass printed. Charlie had a trick of slicing them in the middle and sticking them together again — to make up some such headline as <strong>Pope to Abdicate</strong> or <strong>The King to Marry Mae West</strong>. On the 20<sup>th</sup> anniversary of the Zeppelin shot down at Cuffley, there was to be a memorial service to which distinguished local German residents were invited. Some less than knowledgeable or perhaps cynical Embassy official had sent an invitation to Charlie. He turned up as the herrenvolk had solemnly entered the church, top hats on arms, and set up a soapbox newsstand with a saucer full of coppers, and the banner headline <strong>Hitler Assasinated</strong> — needless to say, with no papers to back it.
As the procession solemnly came out, von Ribbentrop among them, they looked at the bill and dashed helter skelter for the railway station. When the train came in with the evening paper every copy was grabbed by Embassy officials to the protests of the station master, while indignant shouts came from people pulled out of telephone booths by impatient Nazis wanting to use the phone, but the news of that happy event did not appear for another ten years or so.
The Bloomsbury Set was still in existence in 1935 and centred on Lahr’s bookshop in Red Lion Street, Holborn. I met Mark Gertler (not until years after his death did I realise he was a famous artist) who was passionately for the Spanish Revolution and said he would kill himself if it were defeated. When Franco won, he committed suicide. So far as I know, no art historian has recorded the reason.
One of the few who had an influence on me for a long time, so far as religion was concerned, was the writer Frank Ridley, whom I first met as a spectator at the boxing ring. We continued to be friends until his death at 92. He was a distinguished if neglected socialist and freethought writer, totally unappreciated by the literary establishment and only recognised by a coterie on the socialist left. He spent five years on a book on the Jesuits, for about five pounds in royalties, which became a standard work of reference for dozens of other writers.
Years later when Jose Peirats was writing his works of reference on the Spanish struggle while earning his living sewing trousers by candlelight, and dignified and overpaid professors were quoting his works in their books written at public expense, I thought of Ridley. I have often regarded ‘op cit’ as standing for oppressive plagiarism.
Perhaps influenced by so much literary talent around, I started a small paper <em>The Struggle</em> in 1937, when I had just left school, with Billy (writing under the name of McCullough, his mother’s original name) and I contributing. But it didn’t last long. The duplicator was re-possessed by the hirers. I did not know then that being a minor I could have repudiated the debt. I never learned that point of law until I was past 21, too late make use of it.
*** <em>Fighting Fascism</em>
I lived in several compartmentalised worlds when I was fifteen. While still a fifth-former and studying for matriculation I was going along to Andy’s gym and learning how to box along with much older lads (though they accepted me as an equal), some of whom subsequently became pros. I was never very good nor did it help my studies much. Languages and history were all I was interested in and I got on well with Spanish despite the total collapse of lessons when an incompetent master resigned and went to work in a South American bank, for which I hope he did not need Spanish. However I emerged streets ahead of everyone in that language, perhaps because I was using it to some purpose.
Once I entered schoolboy amateur boxing championships and to the excitement of my friends at school I reached the semi-finals. I was matched against the local Jesuit college — to face to my dismay an enormous West Indian lad (rarely if ever encountered then in our neck of the woods): Rod Strong (by nature as well as name), a couple of years older than I was, and solid muscle. He had furthermore the advantage of two Jesuit priests in black dresses in his corner, clearly praying against me — in contravention, I am sure, of the spirit of the Queensberry Rules. It was like my clash with Billy Campbell all over again.
My usual technique when faced with an opponent I couldn’t outbox (though subsequently it was impossible for me to think of either Strong or Campbell as opponents) was to stand and take punishment and then hit out with a wallop, but with the first blow this time I was out cold to the consternation of the referee and concern of my opponent. It was partly the inevitable consequence of my skipping practice for political meetings.
Delighted acquaintances told me how terrible I’d been, and asked if I hadn’t heard them warning me of the blow coming, how my best friends had been surreptitiously betting on me and they hadn’t thought I’d have let them down, and similar words of consolation, while I was still reeling. Rod, who’d knocked me down, helped me home (and invented a suitable alibi, something about my having fallen downstairs, for the benefit of my mother who disapproved of the noble art. She must have thought me accident-prone, so often were such alibis necessary).
Rod and I became friends, though he never took the same interest in politics as Billy and myself. He always insisted on my being his second and not going into the ring myself; I was a bit disenchanted with it anyway after exciting so much derision even from kids who had never put a glove on and would have preferred an embroidery class any day.
Going along to Hackney Stadium with Billy and Rod to a match, we were quite unexpectedly attacked walking over the marshes by a gang of some two dozen local fascists. At the time Sir Oswald Mosley was supported around the periphery of East London. I might have ignored taunts directed at me and walked on, but my two friends held the opinion often voiced by our boxing ‘professor’ Johnny Hicks, and to which I have since subscribed, that in such circumstances that is the worst thing to do. It is best to single out one or two of them and give ‘em hell or take it. At worst they can only kill you and they would do that anyway if they wanted to and could.
We gave a good account of ourselves and left a few noses oozing blood and mouths spitting teeth, but in the end they all ran away because a police car had arrived. I had the presence of mind to take my grammar school cap from my pocket and put it on my head, and to walk up casually to a policeman and ask the way, while my two friends stood by respectfully. As a result the police didn’t connect us with the brawl but asked me impatiently if I’d seen it, and which way they went.
It is ironical that when I got home nursing a black eye this was the first occasion my mother rebelled at my explanation that the Blackshirts had attacked me, and insisted that I had been going in for that dreadful sport in spite of her admonitions. At least, though, I was spared the humiliation of having to say afterwards, as some people did, that they were chased round Hackney by the local fascisti. Fascists attracted those gang-loving youths who liked bullying for its own sake but didn’t like being beaten up. Once you got known (however unjustly) for being the sort of thug who’d hit back even if alone, they respected you accordingly and warned others off.
There were other types of fascist than the Hackney variety. The young men who came from the lower middle class, or at least thought that they did, were quite a different lot: there were one or two even at my school. They were prepared to listen to argument, though in the finish they landed in their natural home, the Conservative Party. In the country generally they included that displaced minority, the Irish Catholic Loyalist, unwanted by Republicans who thought of them as Castle Catholics, or by Protestants to whom they were Papists nonetheless. They were enthusiasts for General Franco and stayed on in their morass until disillusioned by their other hero Hitler. There were also a few lower middle class homosexuals who were chasing the rough trade and stuck to fascism in good days and bad. It was, after all, a more congenial hunting ground than prison, and they would never have scored in the Navy.
Mosley himself was an upper-class twit who wandered into the Labour Party by accident after meeting working class people for the first time when he was a WW1 officer, a role for which like many of his type he still hankered. Though he passed his days in high society, once he founded his independent New Party and its cult of Youth with capital a Y, he was easily bamboozled by Jeffrey Hamm into thinking he could get the support of the working class with this tactic rather than by pursuing his ‘the old men betrayed us’ theme which he was still echoing in his seventies.
Hamm realised there were a few streets in Bethnal Green which had been a no-go area for police until WWI, around which Jewish immigration had circled but not dared enter. It was isolated from the rest of the East End, and knowing Jews only as landlords or employers in the sweatshops, was intensely anti-semitic. After Mosley visited Hitler he was easily persuaded to play the anti-semitic card for trumps and Hamm took him through the ‘East End’ — the same few streets, night after night. Mosley never knew the difference. He thought he was being acclaimed by the ‘East End workers’, throwing open their windows and giving the heil. In a way he was, but he thought it wider than it really was and it went to his head.
He could have come to dominate the Conservative Party as a right wing pressure politician, and with precious little opposition maybe have become Prime Minister. He sacrificed it to become a ‘great national leader’ in his own right, little realising he had turned everyone against him, from the working-class even to the old-fashioned Tory. He plunged on thinking himself Adolf Hitler, and when war came that’s exactly who people thought he was.
Steve, one of my mates at school who was going on to university, rare then, to study political science, asked me once to take him round the East End. Truth to tell, I didn’t know it too well myself at the time, but gamely took him around what I did know, the neighbourhood of Ridley Road (Dalston). We ran by accident into a fascist demo. Seeing the way the Mosley motorcade moved through the crowds like a conquering army, though these were called fascist demonstrations, they were really police demonstrations with a kernel of fascists in the middle. Steve, a generous lad, was carried away by indignant remarks around us by elderly market women who had been roughly pushed aside.
He picked up a stone and threw it at Mosley as he passed, hand in the air. It missed Sir Oswald and landed on the cheek of a multi-braided police officer narrowly missing his eye. Steve stood out in a fairly sallow and weedy East End crowd for his height and shock of red hair. He was an excellent athlete, whom I thought of as an accurate bowler until that day, and ran. Fortunately he wasn’t caught. I didn’t attempt to flee, due not to excess of courage but of weight, and discreetly entered a tobacconist, where I found a sympathetic Jewish lady behind the counter prepared to let me out of the back way thinking the lad with the school cap now back on his head was escaping from the nazi hoodlums. She told me one had even tried to put a police officer’s eye out with a brick.
I got away but it nearly ended in disaster for all when Steve had feelings of guilt at having left me to face arrest on my own and came back looking for me. As it happened he wasn’t recognised by the police. He didn’t look the type who would attack an innocent would-be dictator. He survived to confine his feelings about fascism to such restrained outlets as piloting a bomber plane, years later becoming chair of a major quango. If he had been known to be a premature anti-fascist, and if he had been convicted of a violent offence, he would never have been accepted into the Royal Air Force, possibly failed to get into the war against fascism and might have been anti-authoritarian to this day.
*** <em>The Battle of Cable Street</em>
“Don’t forget to tell them about the battle of Cable Street!” is a familiar exhortation to any labour old-timer about to speak on an anti-fascist platform. Someone asked me eagerly only the other day, “You were around then, weren’t you? Tell them how we stopped the fascists marching through the East End”.
As in the mid-thirties the fascists marched through the East End in greater or smaller number in days before and after “Cable Street”, it is hard to know what the great victory was, even if the legend sounds as if it ought to be true. There was certainly real local outrage over this particular march, billed as something special, mixed up with and confused with news from Germany. People the CP normally influenced panicked, and put so much pressure on the local CP and YCL that the party cancelled its own meeting in Trafalgar Square and urged everyone to stop the blackshirts marching through the East End. A barricade was erected at Cable Street though it’s hard to say what would have happened if Mosley had carried on with the march — surrounded as he inevitably was with a huge police contingent.
I was a few streets away at an open-air meeting, the first one I ever spoke at, and my first time in the East End proper. Inspired by the incident at Ridley Road, I hadn’t known about the march. When I looked back at the three boxing club supporters I brought with me, I found they had all gone off to watch the fun at Cable Street, and I had to make up my mind what to do. I carried on until all the crowd vanished, whether attracted by the noise or bored by me. Abandoning the attempt at enlightenment, I walked up to Gardiner’s Corner where I saw Fenner Brockway looking very excited. Later I learned he telephoned the Home Secretary to warn him of possible bloodshed, and the Home Secretary contacted the police and they called the Mosley march off and they went back. No way would the Mosleyites have proceeded without their police guard. The CP version has passed into myth, but that was how Fenner Brockway stopped the police marching through the East End.
Matters were somewhat different in Glasgow. I wasn’t there, but apparently the police chief met Mosley at the station and asked him to take his supporters back to London on the next train. He had the station guarded off but said he could not take the risk of letting him into the city as the crowd around would have torn him apart and his officers faced mayhem. When I did visit Glasgow I heard Frank Leech tell a meeting that Mosley should be recommended for the Nobel Peace Prize, as he had got the whole working class, for the first time, including the Taig and Proddy street gangs, united as one to keep him out.
*** <em>Schoolboy Anarchist</em>
Being streetwise, a no-hope amateur pugilist, and a bookish schoolboy at a mixed grammar school made a curious cocktail with being an anarchist at fifteen and sixteen, still at school. In these present times the latter at least is quite common, when sometimes entire fifth forms are anarchists, at any rate cheerfully accepting the name while lumping it with a whole range of more or less contradictory concepts, though conscious anarchists are at any rate not unknown. In those days it was unique for anyone to have come to anarchism without having inherited it from family connections.
Anarchism had once been fairly widespread in the working class movement; indeed, anarcho-syndicalism had been almost an equal rival with State socialism at one time though never to the extent it was in some countries but lack of sectarianism had diminished its working class base. The miners were typical in seeing no difference between the ultimate aims of either, many supporting one or the other simultaneously, going for direct action when it paid off, and electing MPs, usually out of retired militants, for whatever crumbs it afforded. When the Communist Party came along, with the glamour value of the Russian Revolution tagged on to it, it swept all aside: under the influence of Lenin’s vitriolic attacks on “Left Wing Communism” many anarchist and syndicalist militants, in the Clyde, in Tyneside and in the coalfields, abandoned what they saw as the bourgeois influence on anarchism and entered the Labour or Communist Party, to finish in knee breeches and ceremonial costumes as Privy Counsellors.
Further, the pool in which the Anarchists had swum had now been drained: the First World War had isolated the whole socialist movement from the working class, except in the heavy industrial areas where class struggle went on regardless of the war. Many had chosen conscientious objection, then a hard option, but this, however admirable, left them isolated from the mass in the Army, though if they joined the Army they often silently disappeared and it was thought they were lost in the general casualty list.
Years later an old militant who had been in the anarchist and shop stewards movements, Kate Sharpley, revealed to me that every one of the Deptford Anarchist males disappeared that way. She lost her boyfriend, brother and father in the War, the former (an Anarchist) almost certainly by ‘disappearance’ rather than casualty, and she had thrown their medals when presented in Queen Mary’s face.
Though possibly the Anarchists did not lose as great a number to other parties as is sometimes supposed, they rarely recruited anyone in Britain either in the 1920s and early 30s; waxing and waning according to birth and death like a doomed Indian tribe. Everyone in the old London Freedom Group (give or take a few, usually second generation libertarians) was up to fifty years old, or a lot over that. I was a rare exception, and I must be given credit for durability if not for flexibility in that I survived to the days when I am well over seventy, in association with people in their early twenties.
Being a helpless male as far as practical matters were concerned, I was lost when it came to repairs on a coat torn at an open air meeting and some of the older women comrades, like Molly Paul, were inclined to mother me. Matilda Green, a German who had worked with Johann Most on the London Freiheit before that international revolutionary went to America, often used to help me with my German homework, which would have surprised the school if they’d known of it. Someone who had helped translate Most’s textbook of dynamite had no difficulty in helping me struggle through “Lotte in Weimar” or “Emil und die Detektive”, and could have done wonders for me in chemistry if it had not been an alternative to modern languages on the curriculum.
I think she was the only one among the anarchists, as well as few of the boxing fraternity, who realised I was still at school. George Cores, in his <em>Personal Recollections</em> gives a comprehensive account of supporters of the old Freedom Group, with the occupation of every person he names, except mine. He was probably genuinely puzzled, since I never let on that I was still a schoolboy (we never called it being a student then). Similarly, Leah Feldman (whose militancy went back as far as Nestor Makhno’s army, which fought both Reds and Whites in the Ukraine) could not understand why when we made appeals among our friends for solidarity, she managed to collect pounds but me only pence. It did not occur to her that while she was working as a fur machinist I was spending my working hours mixing with people whose income came from parental pocket money or paper rounds. I have no idea now, when youth is a lost asset, why I was ashamed to admit how young I was.
Solidarity appeals became an important part of our activity as the Spanish war loomed: originally these were for political prisoners, but when these were released in the spring of 1936 it was appreciated by many of these ordinary men and women that stocks of clothing would be needed in the event of fighting. From seeing the people who called themselves intellectuals and who helped mould public opinion, through the window of the Freedom Group — it never ceased to amaze me how totally ignorant they were.
For them only an idealised version of state communism or in some cases of fascism existed; the press was still in the process of thinking anarchism=shock horror bombs and things. Even people like Charles Duff, who knew Spain inside out and actually resigned his Foreign Office job when he realised how the establishment was almost solidly pro-fascist and was prepared to sacrifice not just Spain but Britain to fascism, had very little clue as to the beliefs of what must have been the majority of workers in that country.
*** <em>Castles in Spain</em>
In a book on his early life, misinformed as usual about things out of his class or appertaining to struggle, Professor George Woodcock, who established an academic niche by misrepresenting Anarchism, sneered at my being ‘self-educated’ (I would have thought it an undeserved compliment) and so arrogant that I thought I knew more than he. I admit it still seems to me I knew more than a great many fully-fledged mandarins even at sixteen, so maybe for once he was well informed.
John Langdon-Davies was a great authority on Catalan life and literature. When the Spanish war broke out he published a book on Catalonia (<em>Behind the Spanish Barricades</em>, London 1936) apologising for the anarchists in a patronising way. He explained their naiveté in a somewhat more simplistic way than Gerald Brenan, who put their beliefs down to disappointment with religion. When the course of events made the Communist Party twist his arm to be more condemnatory, Langdon-Davies changed his views on them, but meanwhile, like some other writers, treated them in the same manner as sections of the English press now treats the Irish, all clowns and dynamite.
I read that ‘after calling for the burning of all churches and cathedrals, for no greater reason than that the bishop might be inside, the anarchist declares solemnly that he swears vengeance on all clerics in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.’ I knew better than these learned writers on Spain even before I’d finished “Zalacain el Aventurero” annotated for matric. If I was indeed arrogant, small wonder. And unlike Langdon-Davies and other learned gentlemen I never felt the need to revise my opinions on the Communist Party.
I attended an Allison Peers lecture at the London Polytechnic soon after the 1936 uprising began. I already knew how the Revolution had succeeded behind the war lines, and the workers had taken control, and thought it interesting to hear this as a language student of Spanish. Peers only knew about atrocities which he described as being committed by ‘Anarchists with bloodstained overalls’ converging on the square where the heroic army was defending itself against the unarmed population that provided its salary: I asked how they came to have bloodstained overalls so soon in the fighting — was it their own blood, were they supposed to have been cutting throats, or what? He answered equally sarcastically that he presumed it was not in the course of peaceful persuasion. It was not until years later I learned from Miguel Garcia, a leading participant, of how Peers might have been right about the bloodstained overalls, even if, typical of his kind, wrong about the explanation.
When the army rose, the Barcelona workers had rushed to the nearest CNT union headquarters next to Columbus Square, the Sindicato de Gastronomica, where the city abattoir workers were holding an hastily-called emergency conference. They obviously joined in, and were prominent among the crowd, which explained the bloody overalls; but the good professor never found out, and to his death must have wept for the innocent nuns and priests whose blood he thought it was.
Billy married Melchita in Bilbao in 1936 and they spent their honeymoon in Paris. I went over on a weekend trip to greet them, my first visit abroad, and met not only Edward VIII’s newly acquired but unlikely subject Mrs Campbell, but many Spanish comrades for the first time. A few came through all the tribulations of the next four decades and survived. Many of them had come with lorries, loading up with what arms they could knowing of the coming coup which took the professional politicians, Government agents, spies and skilled journalists by surprise.
Among the CNT contingent was Miguel Garcia Garcia, though we never met at the time. He was with a fruit lorry which was taking back weapons of the type that could still be bought privately. The Grand Old Man of French Anarchism, the orator Sebastien Faure, who had been fighting French and Spanish obscurantism since the days of the Dreyfusards and the trial of Francisco Ferrer, and was in his eighties still a bonnie fighter, presented Miguel at a meeting with a revolver that had some history. It probably had been used in the Paris Commune of 1871, not that anything that could be bought was of modern vintage. “Give this to Buenaventura Durruti,” he said impressively. “Tell him to be sure this is the one he carries with him into the glorious battle.” Durruti, a tough railroad worker and guerrilla fighter, who became the Civil War’s most famous General by sheer charisma, though he never had a rank, had no false sentimentality. I was told by Miguel that when he gave it to him and passed off the message, Durruti took one look, and said “Pooh! It’s a toy!” and tossed it aside. Fortunately Sebastien Faure, ever one for the grand gesture, never knew, and possibly told with fervour to many an audience that Durruti carried it until his death at the Madrid front in November.
The most incredible misreporting followed the outbreak of civil war on 19 July. What need to repeat it? Even the story of how the workers prevented the army takeover and in many places took over industry themselves and formed their own militia, has been told, though much less often and without penetrating popular knowledge to this day. But look to the contemporary press hard and long and you will find hardly a mention, though some popular papers did seize on the interesting sideline to workers control, that the prostitutes were running the brothels themselves.
Whenever one told the academically qualified intellectual moulders of opinion about the collectivisation and revolution and the fact that Spain was not just the arena for a struggle between democracy and fascism, or Moscow barbarianism versus Christianity, they dismissed everything one said as lies without adducing a single real fact. They had taken sides.
It can be imagined how the success of the CNT-FAI affected every anarchist group in the world; everyone wanted to be in on the act. We had by now in London a few youngsters around, like Tom (Paddy) Burke, who came out of the Young Communist League disillusioned with state communism, and Scottish anarchists drifting to London for employment in the south, like Alec and Jessie White, Jim Murray and so on, which gave us a small foothold in industry. But whereas in Barcelona they had been able to rally in crisis to their union halls, all we had to rally to was the London Freedom Group, and it was in a bad way, age having caught up with it at last and its never-ending weekly ‘lectures’ we thought a poor substitute for action.
An attempt to reform it from within by Ralph Barr, who had been a local National Unemployed Workers Movement secretary in Hammersmith, led to George Cores, Leonard Harvey (a speaker at street corners in the days when it was still possible to earn a bare living at it) and John Humphrey breaking away. Ralph Barr agreed to the suggestion that the paper Freedom be wound up and incorporated with Frank Leech’s Glasgow paper Fighting Call. Leah Feldman clinched the argument by pointing out that the Italian group in London, whose most vigorous protagonist was Dr Galasso, had started a paper devoted to the Spanish struggle called Spain and the World — edited by Vero Recchioni, son of an old militant Emilio Recchioni, and it was fair to give it a chance without another competitor in the field, albeit with a circulation of hundreds only. As Recchioni junior (who later changed his name to Vernon Richards) was still at University, the paper was ostensibly published by Tom Keell, which did not endear it to the old Freedom Group, who were not told this was a legal fiction, and still resented Keell’s apparent reappearance, after taking the physical assets in 1927 on retirement. Nor did it appreciate the sacrifice of Freedom which one way and another had been published since 1886.
Meanwhile Ralph Barr, together with a German, Werner Droescher who was on his way to join the DAS (German anarcho-syndicalist) Column in Spain, started the Anarcho-Syndicalist Union, which at first received a large number of younger supporters, thinking it was going to be a real anarcho-syndicalist union, rather than a talking shop like the Freedom Group. At the same time Barr announced that the famous Emma Goldman was setting up a kind of embassy for the Spanish libertarian movement, the CNT-FAI Bureau, and we were welcome to support its work through the CNT-FAI Committee.
This was exciting news, because just about that time the International Brigade was starting up, and it was thought this would be a version of the same thing. Few, if any, saw the International Brigade in its real light: a propaganda gimmick by the Communist Party — which it had not even thought up itself — and subsequent hype has made it appear this was not just a brigade, but a division, even an army. The myth resembled the Easter Rising in 1916, which must have begun in the biggest Post Office in the world, holding half a million Irishmen who fought to the last beside Connolly and Pearse, to judge from the testimony of people who for years afterwards announced in pubs they were there, or the huge cast of “Casey’s Court”, judging by the thousands of broken down music hall artists one met in bars who gave Charlie Chaplin his first encouragement and taught him his tricks, to be ignored by him later.
It really started with the alternative Olympics being held in Barcelona (as a counter-blast to Berlin). Some East End CP-ers stopped over, or went over specially, and volunteered to fight. There were scarcely any Party members in Spain, and the Comintern quickly seized the opportunity of getting in on the act. The rival Marxist Party (POUM) was also recruiting foreign volunteers, partly because it too was small, though much larger than the Communist Party. The Independent Labour Party (affiliated to the POUM internationally) sent volunteers, and as George Orwell joined the POUM militia and became famous in an entirely different field years later, one might be forgiven today, going by scholastic hype, for thinking he was a major military figure in an important part of the armed struggle.
Certainly we thought Emma Goldman had come over with a mission to recruit for the armed struggle. The first meeting of the CNT-FAI Committee at the Food Reform Restaurant in Holborn, was, to the surprise of veterans had not seen such a sight since the early days of the Russian Revolution, packed with keen young enthusiasts all raring to pack a bag and be off to Barcelona.
One of the reasons for our enthusiasm at that meeting was that a friend of ours, Kitty Lamb, then in the ILP but an anarchist as heart, as she later became, told us of a similar meeting held by John McNair where he had appealed for volunteers to match the International Brigade, specifically for the POUM militia. Several had already enlisted, like Walter Padley (later an MP), but the ILP had a revolutionary socialist programme far beyond the grasp of most of its membership, which consisted of the older type of sentimental socialist who had no real difference with those who went into the Labour Party. There were also the younger pacifists who were now coming into the party, plus a handful of Trotskyists and a few independent socialists who had no other home to which to go. After years of ‘united fronts’ with the Communist Party, the Socialist League and finally the Trots, the party had gradually lost its vitality and there were no takers at the meeting, until one middle-aged man got up and said that he didn’t get on with his wife, and he’d go.
We guffawed about this story, most thinking the ILP at that stage a bit of a joke anyway. But it confirmed our belief that Emma Goldman, with her revolutionary background, would offer a chance that quite a few would take. Jack Mason, a building worker and a jack-of-all-trades, even turned up at the meeting having given up his job, packed his bag and deposited it in Victoria Station.
The meeting was somewhat of a let down. We sat enthralled while Emma eulogised the achievements of the Spanish workers in the previous months, and how the banner of the CNT-FAI was flying over Catalonia, but we were waiting for the nitty-gritty. There were many anxious questions as to whether there would be any more compromises or the mistakes of Russia (collaboration with the Communist Party) repeated. Emma was in a difficult position there as, though a representative, she knew no more than we did. Optimistically she denied there would be, and when in fact in the space of a few weeks, there were, even to the point of entering the Generalitat of Catalonia and ultimately the Government itself, it was held against her, though she was as opposed to it as much as anyone.
But what totally deflated the atmosphere was her announcement that the CNT was entirely opposed to foreign volunteers. There was a chorus of indignation. Why not? Everybody else was intervening and the most internationally-minded of all were putting up a bar? Not so, said Emma, the CNT-FAI was forming units of Germans and Italians forced into exile and wanting to fight fascism. What they objected to was depopulating the libertarians in countries where they could put pressure on the government and otherwise support the struggle to get arms which they did not have, merely to swell numbers of fighting people which they did have. To further questions, she answered that if anyone had World War One experience, especially technical, and certainly air pilots, they would be welcome, but not otherwise.
As I now see matters, this was understandable, but not imaginative. The Communist Party made a great legend out of its brigade; on a lesser scale (thanks to Orwell) so did the POUM. The legend survived to this day and for many has excused the inexcusable, while the anarcho-syndicalist union movement which made the greatest contribution to the struggle has been passed over in silence. The Communist Party at the time, for all that, was not throwing its partisans into the fray without thought, despite the legend. When one examines the composition of the Anglo-Saxon sections of the brigade, for instance, again with the exception of a few military specialists of WWI experience, we find no one in heavy industry or with a background of industrial organisation: we see mainly Oxford undergraduates, Jewish taxi drivers, and long-term unemployed, amongst whom the CP was recruiting disproportionately and felt it had enough to spare.
Not appreciating the fact that there was not much difference in the attitudes, and knowing quite a number of Young Communists who were off to Spain, we felt humiliated at not being able to go ourselves under our own denomination, but one has to admit that all the YCL people who went were on the periphery of industry.
Emma said that she too wanted to go to the front as a nurse, but Mariano Vasquez, secretary of the CNT, had told her it would be a waste; that with her reputation she would do wonders gaining support for them in England. But this was certainly an error. They thought Emma Goldman a well known personality who would make press headlines, and this might have been so in the United States, but in England she was virtually unknown, and anyway the press would not have reported anything even if she had been. Her knowledge of Britain, for all her visits, was essentially that of a Brooklyn tourist. This comes out quite clearly in her books and published letters, with references to ‘what is not done in England’, complaints about coffee and weather, the coldness of the people and so on.
She is once more, certainly within feminist circles, being presented as a great woman, as she undoubtedly regarded herself. Emma had made an immense reputation in the States as a propagandist for Anarchism and for Free Love (rather than for feminism as nowadays understood, and for which she has become famous to a new generation in spite of herself), both of which shocked the American bourgeoisie at the time. She had been deported to Russia for opposing WWI, but soon saw through the Soviet regime, and was deported a second time, this time to Germany, finally marrying Jim Colton. a Welsh miner, who gave her British nationality and therefore the freedom to travel through Europe. Normally she lived in the South of France, making lecture tours of the British Isles. These had earlier led to criticism in anarchist circles in America, where she travelled round the bourgeois women’s clubs and businessmen’s lunches, accompanied by a manager. Her desire to entertain the bourgeoisie heavily detracted from her propagandist credibility.
For years after her return from Russia she had spoken to workers clubs on the subject of Russia, being sworn at and attacked for daring to criticise the Soviet Union. Her bitterest critics in the labour movement at the time were not so much the Communist Party, but fellow travelling Labourites like George Lansbury (later to assume the prophetic robes of a saintly pacifist) and Ernest Bevin (later to become the arch-anti-Communist and destroyer of Lansbury).
As she saved all her letters, and wrote an extensive autobiography up to 1935 (<em>Living my Life</em>), in which she didn’t spare anyone, including herself, her character doesn’t have to be assessed here. I was prejudiced against her before I met her having read in her autobiography that at the time of the General Strike in 1926 she ‘offered her services’ to the workers — quite genuinely, though patently in the manner of the Great Revolutionary — but her request to be allowed to help was addressed to the TUC General Council, and as it obviously didn’t reply, she flew off to the South of France (by plane, as no trains were running), to where the wealthy intelligentsia appreciated her and offered her a villa. She was the guest of the novelist Rebecca West, the mistress of press baron Lord Beaverbrook and the antithesis of what Emma stood for. I never found anyone outside novel readers who had the foggiest notion of who Miss West was (“Wasn’t she a character in Ibsen?” Cores asked me once, having read a declaration of Emma’s citing important people who were backing her).
Emma’s idea of campaigning for the CNT-FAI was to belabour the workers in general for not coming to the support of their Spanish counterparts, but to try to garner in as many ‘intellectuals’ as possible, in which category she included not only novelists and musicians but ILP MPs. It was amusing years later for me to read in a book about Emma’s days in Britain (<em>Vision on Fire</em>) by David Porter that she actually wrote a letter rightly condemning people who wanted to call themselves anarchists but with no intention of doing anything whatever about it, and in the next paragraph welcoming Aldous Huxley (a distinguished member of a ‘great libertarian family’ as she said, betraying a lack of knowledge of the most distinguished but decidedly authoritarian Thomas Huxley) for calling himself one (only once, as far as I could gather), who did precisely that.
Her idea of ‘the British character’ were based on observations of upper-class twits and the Russian Jewish circle which she took to be the ‘English movement’ but which was in reality the rump of what once had been a large Russian Jewish emigrant movement. The males had gone back to Russia in 1917 (when it was possible to do so by joining the army), hoping to bring their womenfolk over when the revolution was won — which it wasn’t. The women subsequently intermingled with dockers’ families, as a legacy of the German anarchist Rudolf Rocker having successfully organised the Jewish tailors’ strike in East London, and afterwards (realising this would dispel anti-semitic feelings stirred up by marches of pauper aliens during that strike), helping the dockers’ strike by arranging for dockers’ children to be looked after by the families of tailors who had won their strike.
The so-called Jewish (by virtue of language rather than race or religion) anarchist movement disappeared long before my time, though the women survivors largely kept in touch with each other plus the males who were left, or managed to leave Russia later. The people Emma mixed with were the rump of those more concerned with their material advancement and not really committed to anarchism even in their best days, who by now were respectable business people in various parties who liked occasionally to meet, when Emma was visiting, and talk about the old days. She wondered why she could never get them to do anything.
Typical among them were William Wess, formerly a union organiser but long since in the Labour Party, who still liked to call himself an anarchist, and his sister Doris Zhouk. They had fallen out with the anarchist movement in World War One, but Emma never realised it and they never liked it mentioned in her presence. They were still going in WWII, after which they were reduced to a small group with others such as Sam Dreen, not only in the Labour Party but a Zionist to boot.
I fell out with Emma when at one of her early meetings she was, to our group’s dismay, proposing to work with the ILP officially. Though I quite liked some of the London rank-and-file, who were good comrades, the Party was even then as dead as mutton. Emma was dismissive of criticism, which we didn’t mind taking from her, but she had in the chair a ‘comrade’ named Sutton, who whatever he may have been twenty years before, was in the Liberal Party then. He went purple in the face when I mentioned this, only because it was in front of Emma, who didn’t believe it anyway, and asked what right I had because he involved himself in trying to work for social justice and whatever to speak of him as some sort of criminal. I pointed out I had not, unless membership of the Liberal Party was a criminal offence, which was less remote then than ever.
It so happened that the next time I confronted Emma Goldman at a meeting — Campbell liked to keep a kind of watching brief on what was going on for the benefit of the Glasgow people, though it scarcely affected us. On this occasion Doris Zhouk raised breathlessly the subject of someone purporting to be an anarchist burning down a fascist centre which was housing an pro-Franco exhibition, and this was clearly designed to give us a bad name, just when, after years, the press had laid off us (indeed put a blanket of silence over our existence).
Ralph Barr, who was Emma’s secretary on the committee, a former unemployed workers organiser, said it must be an agent provocateur — he always blamed any action on them! — but this was too much for me. I knew it was members of our group, then calling itself the Revolutionary Youth Federation — we kept changing the name — who were responsible. I could have named them, but didn’t like to do so, so I boldly claimed responsibility myself, knowing if it came to the attention of the police I had a perfect alibi, the school register, I was naive enough in those days to think that alibis counted.
Sutton went into a harangue about irresponsible elements, saying he might be accused of being a Liberal but … I brought out a Liberal Party handbill with his name on it and he became silent. William Wess, a dear old man with a shock of white hair, took up the refrain with a noble harangue about craftsmen who lovingly built buildings which they never intended people to burn down. Had it been constructed by me, what would I have thought? You would have thought it was Westminster Abbey rather than a hut and I always hated this phoney pacifism. Emma referred to me as a young hooligan who knew nothing about anarchism. Matilda Green was quite delighted with the incident — she had never forgiven Emma for her own youthful hooliganism in using a whip to Most, when in his old age he denounced Alexander Berkman’s attack on the industrialist Frick.
It was decent of David Porter in <em>Vision on Fire</em> to refer to my differences with Emma, though he seems not to have noticed they occurred when I was a teenager and she was well into her sixties, and I perhaps could be excused a little intolerant impatience, yet omit the epithets she used such as ‘rascal’ and ‘hooligan’. Emma put herself in an impossible position by being held responsible for the errors of people in the libertarian movement who had compromised with the government in Spain; she was constantly attacked by irresponsibles, including myself, for matters over which she had no control and which she deplored, yet she tried to raise the matter with Spanish comrades and give advice and was treated as irresponsible herself. Never the most patient of people, one can see how sorely tried she was. But her administration of the CNT-FAI Bureau was a total failure and a sheer waste of time and money. I hotly criticised it and was denounced for my pains in her letters to the propaganda bureau in Barcelona.
All my letters were carefully preserved and were actually taken out of Spain after the defeat, with the presumed intention of showing I had dared to criticise EG no less. Maybe they too didn’t know how old I was.
No one was readier to say how wrong I was than Ethel Mannin, the novelist, who was Emma’s right hand all during the Spanish campaign. Ethel was under the almost hypnotic influence of Emma. When the latter died, she wrote several books taking exactly the same position that I had regarding the maladministration under Emma and herself, except that she blamed it all on Emma and Ralph Barr.
** 03 Off to Work; The Guy They All Dread; Early Days; Ebbtide; Attempts on Dictators; Around the Left
*** <em>Off to Work</em>
Meanwhile I had started work, not fit for anything much, at the age of 17, for the gas company, who paid the magnificent sum of 17/6 per week (75p in today’s coinage). Even so it was reckoned to be a prize at a time when office jobs started at around 12/6d per week. It’s no good saying things were a lot less then; they weren’t, one simply had and did less. I had a friend in the company, George Plume, who had started there a year or so before. I had known him since I was 11, he was a little older and had been a form or two higher at school, and we had been friendly until he joined the Young Communist League. Now we resumed contact, I finally wore him down on Stalinism, and he joined the ILP. We tried to organise the gas company: its fitters and engineers were unionised but not its clerical staff.
Within a couple of months I was sacked. He survived a bit longer, it being considered he was not the ringleader in the conspiracy as it had begun when I joined, but as he persisted he eventually got sacked for ‘disloyalty’. To get those wages and be expected to be loyal was a bit much, but the company took a different view.
I tried a few more jobs without success. I did temporary work on the tote at the Hackney Wick Stadium, being recommended by my boxing contacts, as even with the depression there were plenty of jobs of that sort around in London, and then a regular job in the administration of the J.T. Davies pub chain. The boss was a Sir Alfred somebody, who never went near the place, was a Tory M.P, a super-patriot — who hated Irishmen — an ungrateful attitude in a pub owner. He even banned Irish bar staff, loathed all foreigners except Nazis, and lived ten months of the year in the South of France, where presumably he could hate everyone.
I made the mistake of giving proper references (the first and last time I gave real ones), and the gas company gave me a reasonably good references with just a mention of my ‘differing’ from them on union activities’. When Sir Alfred next visited England on his parliamentary duties the manager showed him the references of all those taken on since the last time he had condescended to visit not just his constituency or his business but the country itself. It may have been impolitic to show him the accounts in view of the amount of fiddling. Next day I was told I was sacked.
The manager, Mr Morgan, told me it was useless to complain as Sir Alfred was dubious even about my name. “It sounds German.” “So does Morgan,” I told him. “Oh, it would be all right being German if you weren’t a trouble maker or a refugee, provided you weren’t Irish, that is” he explained.
As the firm was in Russell Square, I had spent my lunch hours popping round to Charlie Lahr’s bookshop in Red Lion Street, where the last of the Bloomsbury set used to meet. Charlie’s wit was infectious and verbal sparks flew, though not many books were sold. After one lunch-time session at which I managed to hold my own with the literati, Charles Duff said I ought to write jokes for music hall comics. I have a sneaking idea now he was being friendly-sarcastic but I took him seriously at the time. I began freelancing jokes which at 21/- a time for one joke was more profitable than working a whole week for the then privately-owned gas company, and only slightly less profitable for five minutes work than a week’s work for J.T. Davies, with nobody worrying about class consciousness or ethnic origin.
Becoming indifferent as to whether I had a job or not for all the financial difference it made, and being put wise by Jack Mason as to the ways of the Labour Exchange, I could pick and choose jobs, and with that confidence landed a position as a trainee reporter on the <em>Sunday Referee</em> with references from the Charlie Lahr circle. It was a free-and-easy atmosphere. Everybody mucked in doing each other’s jobs. The boxing reporter had actually seen me perform, and chose me to accompany him to bouts, take down his copy and add bits of my own, allowing me to go on my own to amateur and schoolboy matches. I was less successful with other sports reporters, not having a very clear idea of what on earth was going on in cricket, which I had always dodged at school.
It tended throughout life to shock but wherever I worked, people would come up to me when Test matches were on and ask anxiously, “How are we getting on?” to my utter bewilderment, which hardly went with sports reporting.
The sports editor Cecil Hadley also wrote a humorous column of political comment; but his problem was that he knew nothing of politics, which in those days was a bar to writing about them, and he used to corral lines from various junior and other reporters for his column. I gave him a few anti-fascist jokes and the proprietor complimented him upon them, which lifted my stock enormously.
The firm was owned by Maurice Ostrer, whose brother ran Gaumont British and Gainsborough, and whose daughter Pamela starred in one of GB’s epics, receiving, unsurprisingly enough, major praise in the <em>Referee</em>. She married her cameraman Roy Kellino and later enjoyed temporary fame as Mrs James Mason.
As one of my bosses seemed to be anti-fascist I tried my luck at asking him for a cheque for Emma’s Spanish Solidarity Fund. She was adept at touching the consciences of the intellectual bourgeoisie who never seemed very rich, and I thought I would pleasantly surprise her for once with my netting a millionaire. I spoke to him in his office while he carried on writing, as tycoons do, and to my surprise, at the end, he looked up and said, “One has to support these causes” and handed me a cheque for twenty-five guineas. I had never before seen so large a sum and did not grasp at first the significance of the odd shillings and pence.
I took it proudly along to Emma thinking maybe I might even get a word of praise though there was no hope of getting into her good books. She questioned me closely when she found out the circumstances (he had been stranded in Spain and rescued by CNT militia who escorted him to Gibraltar). She tossed the cheque on the desk angrily. “The Spanish workers saved his life and he gives a cheque for twenty-five guineas!” she snorted. “Why didn’t you let me see him? This is what he gives to a Jewish charity!” She was quite right, of course. She could have got a lot more out of a bourgeois with a conscience — if that’s what it was. But it was not encouraging for a youngster, however keen,
She treated everyone the same way, even Paul Robeson. He was then at the peak of his fame, and a fellow-traveller of the Communist Party, who idolised him. He also happened to be a friend of Emma’s. When she held a concert (April 1937) at the Victoria Palace in aid of the CNT-FAI and asked Robeson to top the bill, it was quite an achievement. He was well aware of Emma’s unpopularity with the Communists since her return from Russia, and the Party line was to ignore the Anarchists, or equate them with ‘Trotsky fascism’ in the world at large, while in Spain maintaining a discreet formal alliance coupled with a determination to knife them in the back at the first opportunity, even at the cost of losing the war. Added to that the Communist Party fixed a rival fund-raising concert that same night when they heard about Emma’s, but he had given his word. He was by no means subservient to Moscow at this time as the American authorities years later pretended.
The Communist Party dared not discipline Robeson in view of his importance to them as an international star and leading Black singer, and Robeson appeared at the concert. In a backstage briefing just before the performance, Ethel Mannin was addressing a group of Anarchist and ILP stewards who were going to take the collection. I remember they included Kitty Lamb and Patrick Monks (newly arrived from Dublin, whom I met for the first time). Ethel stressed that it was most important for us not to identify ourselves as she had managed to sell loads of tickets to Quaker and pacifist organisations through her husband, Reg Reynolds. She turned to Emma who had just come in, a little upset by recent news from Spain and only fortified by gin, who snorted dangerously when told to be careful what she said, but instead turned to Robeson.
“What do you think of your friend Stalin now?” she shouted and began rating him though everyone tried to hush her, especially Ethel, and Robeson, towering above her, patted her shoulder sympathetically, It seemed a trifle tactless just before he went on for a purely voluntary performance, especially since he had turned down the rival Communist Party fund-raiser that same night.
Worse was to come.
When at the interval she asked for a collection, and remembering Ethel’s advice about the Quakers, remarked with bitter sarcasm, “I am told that I cannot ask English people for money to buy arms. Well, I am not going to do so. But there is a shortage of writing paper and pencils, and people in the trenches want money to enable them to write home”. She let this sink in to the consternation of rich Quakers and earnest pacifists: though I didn’t mind this myself, and somewhat enjoyed it, it was hardly the way to get them to part with their money.
Though the Freedom Group buried <em>Freedom</em> on 1937 in order to support <em>Spain and the World</em>, this was unacceptable to Cores, and when Ralph Barr launched the Anarcho-Syndicalist Union, Cores revived the Freedom Group with a determination to publish <em>Freedom</em> once again. We were all a bit impatient with both. The ASU wasn’t into direct action any more than the old group and as is usual with young people (who are usually right about it) we blamed the older people for being over-cautious.
Sutton tried mollifying us by offering Tom (“Paddy”) Burke a job with Stepney Borough Council. He hadn’t worked since he came to London two years before. It was a position as bailiff’s assistant and we were surprised he accepted it and he thought our objection was to working for the council. But people have to work at something. We did not realise he thought a bailiff was a farm manager, never having heard the term in Ireland in any other sense. One can imagine his surprise when after sitting round in an office for a week, possibly wondering how Stepney Council happened to have a farm, he was asked to carry some family’s furniture from premises from which they were being evicted. He promptly upped and left the job and so lost his unemployment benefit, cursing Sutton for thinking he would act as a bum-bailiff, and asking why we hadn’t warned him.
My own stand on principle was similar but less dramatic. I was asked to write up a knocking story on an actress — I forget what she was supposed to have done but we were losing circulation to the <em>News of the World</em> with its salacious reporting, which was accounted a good enough reason. I declined but one could get away with that on the <em>Referee</em> if it wasn’t too obvious, and I was put on another knocking story about a bus strike. When I wouldn’t do this either Cecil Hadley decided for my own good I should be carpeted and I faced Mr Ostrer, who listened to me astounded. He gave up and sent me back to Mr Hadley to be instructed in the ways of journalism.
Mr Hadley, who liked to be known as Uncle Cecil, explained that I couldn’t have principles and be a reporter. If I became as famous as Hannen Swaffer I could say what I liked and he would be pleased to employ me, but he asked me to see reason and admit the idea of a trainee deciding on ethical standards was absurd. I agreed, to his delight (he hated being tough) but was dismayed to find I had agreed only that the idea was absurd, and I had given up my reporting career before it started. I doubt if it was a great loss to the profession.
He couldn’t bear to give me the sack, however, so he suggested I work in the general office as a copytaker. He pointed out, which I discovered over the years to be true, that one could earn just as much money as the run-of-the-mill reporter (in later years much more). While one would never be anything more, one could have the luxury of being utterly without responsibility for the product if that was what one wanted. One was a cog, taking down copy over the telephone, all written by others, and one was no more responsible for what was being written than a secretary or a telephonist, provided it was spelled right and taken down accurately.
I also saw the added advantages that one could work at it, leave it, and come back any time, and that as a printworker rather than a journalist one was in a key position of industry; and I reckoned the revolution was coming in a few months anyway, so I accepted.
Before the war copytakers were much more versatile than since, especially on Sunday papers. I translated, others wrote up telegrams as stories, took telephoned advertisements or did odd features. Another did secretarial work and was also given the job of writing up the astrology column. She protested she knew nothing of the stars but was given good advice such as never being specific and always using a calendar. Having learned those basics she subsequently became a prominent soothsayer and national figure.
A rival newspaper astrologer failed once to take the advice about not being specific and prophesied there would be no war, which is what people wanted to hear. He came back the week after this, when war had been declared, with the statement that Hitler had been mad enough to defy the stars, and would pay for it by losing the war, which it so happened was right. But that was ahead; and meanwhile through 1937 I was immersed in political activity outside working hours, and also to a large extent inside, until at long last my long-suffering employers’ patience broke, perhaps also because they were cutting staff owing to their losing battle with the <em>News of the World</em>, to which they thought the answer was economy and my £3.10s would help cut costs.
I did not really worry. I got through Christmas that year quite well on a chance remark I heard in a pub about someone looking as if he needed Bob Martin’s dog conditioner. I sold it to a dozen panto comics and it appeared in so many pantos, and subsequently entered a sort of panto common stock, forcing the manufacturers to send a letter of complaint around the music hall profession asking that derogatory remarks (not that it was such) should not be made about their product. Not all companies took that attitude: some soap powders actually gave comics the odd few guineas to get their products plugged, and freelance gagwriters were trying to find out how to get the dame to mention the fact that she used Omo or whatever.
A caustic remark I overheard that someone was so broke “she couldn’t even get a credit account in Woolworths”, which I transmuted into a remark by Baron Hard-up in pantomime, netted me quite a handsome profit. It might be a bit obscure today when one thinks nothing of producing credit cards in Woolworth’s, but they had up to then claimed they sold “nothing over sixpence” and were still a sixpence and shilling (five and ten cent) store.
I might have stumbled into the music hall profession, though hardly as a performer, but for the fact that many of my friends thought it was hardly a serious way to earn a living. Nor did I. Some, like Tom Brown, who was a very lucid speaker but inclined to generalise, thought it an integral part of the capitalist system. He had never met the dejected performers sitting stranded with their baggage several hundred miles from home when the manager had absconded with their salaries, and thought all music hall people went around in furs and diamonds.
Brown, who had been a shipyard worker in Durham and had drifted down south to work in aircraft, was a perceptive comrade generally, and he gave a bit of life to the Anarcho-Syndicalist Union into which he brought a breath of the workshops. He was one of several excellent speakers the ASU had at the time. Another was Captain J.R. White. (Years later I wrote up his life in a pamphlet, <em>From Loyalism to Anarchism</em>). White, son of a British General (White of Ladysmith) had a strong Protestant Irish background. He had resigned his own Army commission to help train Connolly’s Citizen Army, but when they fell out with the police in defending strikers from baton attacks, they were considered less than respectable by the Irish Volunteers. They originally declined to use them in the 1916 uprising for that reason but Connolly over-rode the objection.
White was in the Old IRA and a Communist Party sympathiser, as well as being a fervent Orangeman. It was still possible. Though beset with personal problems with a running quarrel with his estranged Roman Catholic wife and her ecclesiastic advisers who periodically kidnapped his daughter, he went to Spain to train and lead the largely Old IRA column in the Connolly section of the International Brigade, which incidentally both on the boat and in the field clashed with the Irish brigade led by General O’Duffy that went to fight for Franco.
White became totally disillusioned with the Communist Party in Spain, and also with the cause of Irish nationalism. O’Duffy had not only official government support but many Republicans supported him in “the war for Christianity” which White, an anti-clerical but a Christian nevertheless, saw at first hand. He supported the CNT-FAI and the “irresponsibles” — those who would not agree to the compromises the libertarian movement had officially made and were prepared to resist Communist domination by force. White organised a plan for sending arms which was quite ingenious — he set up an official arms buying company registered as a proper export company, from an impressive address used by a large export company in Soho Square (actually it was the attic workroom of a very active anarchist, tailor Alf Rosenbaum) from where it applied for licences to buy arms for Franco, from Czechoslovakia. Though the Board of Trade refused licences under the Non-Intervention Act, it did not seem to mind what happened after it refused when the arms were destined for Franco-occupied Spain. The goods were bought and boarded ship at Hamburg under the eyes of the German authorities; needless to say they were never landed at the designated port though they got to Spain all right.
In the finish the German authorities discovered the hoax and alerted their British colleagues to how the Non-Intervention Act was being breached. They thought at first we were engaged in a massive theft, but there was outrage when it was discovered the arms had been legitimately bought. It all ended with minor prosecutions, though as a footnote, Rosenbaum actually earned a bonus for his sales abilities by the Czech company, the news not having percolated through the departments. With it he organised public showings of a documentary film of collectivisation in Spain (which fifty years later actually appeared on ITV incorporated in the series <em>The Civil War in Spain</em>, so swift is democratic news gathering).
I enjoyed this, though my part was peripheral, consisting of invoice typing and listening to White endlessly relating the crimes of the Catholic Church, which I knew from my grandmother, in a strangely different context. It is odd to reflect that today White would have easily mixed with any of the factions in Northern Ireland, and he would have been at home in the Army, which was his original background. Looking the part of the retired English Captain, he could have mingled with any of the Orange factions and any of the Republican groups.
He had a lot of experience in common with any of the paramilitary forces and with some reconciliationists too. For those who have a bourgeois conception of caricature-Anarchism, White would only have been totally out of place as an anarchist, but he was a sincere one, though out of his element with either day-to-day run-of-the-mill, propaganda activity or the work scene.
When our few months of adventure were over, and as Billy was seldom in London having gone on the regular ‘potato run’ to Bilbao, I felt a bit deflated. I went to Glasgow to fix up some matters for him, and while there contacted Frank Leech, but I failed to appreciate his sterling worth at the time. He was by far the most durable of the anarcho-syndicalists around: a former Royal Navy seaman, ex-heavy-weight boxer, who had set up a newsagents shop with his gratuity, he was a popular soapbox speaker and attracted large crowds. But he was an unqualified admirer of Emma Goldman and supporter of the paper <em>Spain and the World</em>, and I was less than enthusiastic.
Everyone in Glasgow knew Guy Aldred. I met him in his usual speaking pitch at Glasgow Green, and he helped me with some official business I had regarding the Campbell family. He had heard of me and was keen for me to invite him on a tour of London, perhaps mistaking the amount of influence I had, and it was very flattering to a youngster to have so well known a man asking me if he could come along and help in any way, and I invited him to London promising the support of our group, without quite realising what it was he expected which was barely enough to live on. I am afraid it was beyond our means. He felt he should be supported by a serious local group — he was right, but mistaken as to how wealthy we were or indeed how old I was.
*** <em>“The Guy They All Dread”</em>
That was a saying Guy Aldred liked to
quote — I suppose it was a quote. He was an old-fashioned socialist agitator,
who stuck to Victorian-type knickerbockers (like Bernard Shaw) rather than
trousers, and who early in life conceived his career as a professional
street-corner speaker. It is something now inconceivable, and reliance on
collections (which may now seem a little like begging, or at any rate busking)
made for a hard struggle with poverty for most of his days until about a year
after I first met him. He was a very clear speaker on religion, having started
as a boy preacher before becoming an atheist, and could run rings round any
orthodox Christian or neo-Humanist philosopher, but was not a very deep thinker
on socialism, equating Marxism and Anarchism and scorning reformism, careerism,
parliamentarism yet equally any form of industrial action or individual
resistance. There was very little left, but to him it was the ‘incessant work of
Propaganda’ which he felt would bring about the revolution.
A Londoner, he moved in the First World War to Glasgow sensing it was by far the most revolutionary city. He was popular with workers not because of any industrial involvement, of which he knew nothing, nor because of any theoretical understanding, in which they were more advanced than he, but because of his pioneering conception of offering advice and appearing before tribunals on housing matters. Even political opponents in difficulties came to him for help with their problems.
He had possibly learned this from Rose Witcop, birth control pioneer for working women centred in Hammersmith, with whom he had lived in London. He married her in Glasgow long after they parted (either because married men were temporarily exempt from conscription, or to save her from deportation, whichever side you believe). She was Rudolf Rocker’s sister-in-law, and extraordinary family feuds arose out of this. Indeed. in 1938 Aldred published a one-off paper <em>Hyde Park</em> devoted to their family squabbles which he put forward as a critique of Anarchism.
When he came to London I had not expected that he relied for support on collections, which were pitifully small since the tradition of paid al fresco lectures had almost died out here. I was now earning nothing and could not supplement him. When Billy returned to London on his next trip, he smiled but refrained from saying, as he might have, that he could have told me what a handful I had taken on.
After the publication of <em>Hyde Park</em> in 1938 support for Aldred in London fell off and he had burned his bridges in London and Glasgow, but then an extraordinary chance ended his days of poverty. Sir Walter Strickland, a millionaire whose family practically owned Malta, had during the First World War taken to him and was disgusted with the British Government after the Versailles Treaty. In acknowledgment of the newly created State of Czechoslovakia, the first fruits of League of Nations liberal idealism, Strickland became naturalised Czech, though he never went to that country. In 1938 Strickland died and left a fortune to Aldred, who promptly formed the Strickland Press, bought a hall, bookshop and machinery and proceeded reprinting all his old pamphlets, before actually getting the money. Then the Strickland relatives brought a suit saying the will was invalid. Strickland had said in his will he left the money to Aldred “for socialist and atheist propaganda”, illegal under Czech law. There was a complicated legal case which ended as such things usually do, with the money in the hands of the lawyers. Aldred, used to defending his own cases personally and handling courts with ease on matters of obstruction and sedition, found himself outgunned among the moneyed lawyers.
Then yet another eccentric millionaire stepped in to save him. The Marquis of Tavistock (later Duke of Bedford) came from a family with a tradition of hating the eldest son. His family owned most of Bloomsbury (Tavistock, Woburn and Russell Squares being named after them) as well as Woburn Abbey, which they had stolen from the Church at the time of the Reformation. He took on Aldred as one of his lame ducks, and campaigned on a peace basis for him, establishing Guy’s monthly <em>The Word</em>, at the same time as supporting Social Credit and an obscure British People’s Party which after 1940 attracted the rump of the non-interned and non-enlisted fascisti. All of this made Aldred increasingly isolated as he became a prolific publisher, entirely of his own works, mostly bitter personal attacks on the past and present records of prominent socialists, though he always retained a few admirers. The Stone brothers, old time anti-parliamentary communists, thought him the greatest man in the world, like many of this old Hyde Park public, and said so frequently.
The brand of anti-parliamentary communism espoused by a few old-time socialists like the Stones who still stood up for Aldred was unusual in that they did not seem to accept the theory of workers councils, unlike most of the older veterans of that theory. No anarchists now supported him, though he always insisted he was the one true anarchist. His support came from some right-wing pacifists, as well, oddly enough, from some Trotskyists, who were less concerned about Bedford and thought the anarchist criticism of Guy was because he had denounced the compromises, and everything else, in the Spanish war, which was to them a justification of the Trotskyist line which was unidentifiable from the pacifist (“what they needed was not arms, but a clearcut Marxist analysis”).
The Marquis became Duke of Bedford, and managed to thwart his father’s intentions of leaving the money away from him. After the war, he came to the conclusion that if he died on a particular date, his son, then in the Army and well integrated into the Establishment, would be burdened with such heavy death duties it would then deprive him of his inheritance. He therefore calmly killed himself on the appropriate date. It proved to be a useless sacrifice, as the new Duke decided against the advice of his accountants to give Woburn Abbey to the National Trust and live on his rents, but instead gave Bloomsbury to the Government. He decided that as everyone hated landlords anyway and sooner or later he would be likely to lose it, he might as well live in Woburn Abbey like a traditional Duke and enjoy life, however much he in turn would probably hate his own son.
Against professional opinion that he could not afford to pay the upkeep, he had the then novel idea of making it a leisure centre, game park, fair and tourist attraction. The idea caught on around the aristocracy, though first scorned. The only effect of the pacifist Duke’s death, therefore, was to leave Aldred in the cold, as he apparently completely forgot to make provision for him. Though Aldred continued to publish <em>The Word</em> until his death, he attracted only spasmodic support from eccentric vicars and peers around the pacifist movement. Ethel MacDonald and Jenny Patrick, always his strong supporters, never deserted him, and continued to set the type as long as they lived.
Some thirty years afterwards Aldred himself died leaving one fervent apostle, John Caldwell, who had the melancholy task of closing up the hall he had established, a solitary standing edifice amid a house clearance scheme, and giving away the huge stocks of Aldred’s literature.
Needless to say, when the 1930s and 1940s became a memory, the university thesis industry discovered Aldred, and what escaped pulping can be sold at high prices but he himself has been forgotten. For all Aldred’s inconsistencies, he was solidly in an English and Scottish radical tradition and, as he said himself, if he had been better dealt with in his youth he would have achieved much more. With his influence in some matters such as counsel to those unable to afford legal advice, he pioneered something taken up by many in recent years, and in acting as a “barrack room lawyer” as well, dealing with cases legal advice couldn’t reach, he was far ahead of his time. It was one great lesson I learned from him, notwithstanding his dreadful inconsistencies brought about by exaggerated pacifism.
*** <em>Early Days</em>
During 1938/9 Emma Goldman hired the upper floors of premises in Frith Street in Soho (even seedier then than now, but central) to house the CNT-FAI Bureau and <em>Spain and the World</em>. She hired the upper floors, the ground floor being a shop and the basement, unknown to her at the time, a knocking shop. It caused some problems with the respectable people she was attracting. I remember one couple, both civil servants, who assumed Emma’s offices would be in the basement and found themselves in the middle of a scene of shame which caused them to flee and never be seen again.
In the course of our activity in South London I had found an Anglican vicar, anti-fascist and even more anti-Catholic, who agreed to lend his church hall for a meeting on Spain. Ethel Mannin organised it and subsequently incorporated it into a couple of her novels. It was unusual for Emma Goldman to face a large, hostile proletarian crowd as she had become used to intellectuals of the CP heckling over Russia. She stood up to the jeering but failed to identify what the opposition was about. When she mispronounced a word, in her strong Brooklyn-Russian accent, one fascist-minded individual shouted to her to “go back to Russia”.
She paused dramatically, and pointed to the embarrassed heckler. “You see the hypocrisy of the Stalinists,” she said. “When a Russian bows down to Stalin, the Russians are great. But if not — they say Go back to Russia! Yes, my friend, and why do you want Emma Goldman to go back to Russia? Because your friend Stalin will kill her!” Ethel Mannin was whispering at the table that the man wasn’t a Stalinist at all, but whether Emma knew or not, it quieted the fascist opposition, at a loss for repartee.
The parson, from the floor, then said a few words about Catholic repression in Spain. A communist interrupted to the effect that the anarchists were guilty of atrocities against the church. It was the current CP line that there were really such outrages, but by the anarchists, not condoned by the Republicans. Emma whaled into him too, denouncing “your friend the gallant Christian gentleman Franco” and seizing on the fact that he had mentioned a church burned down by the anarchists but omitting to say (he probably didn’t know) it was in the middle of a garrison currently in arms against the people. Being denounced as a fascist, and finding his friends looking askance, the luckless Stalinist literally ran out of the hall. Ethel was still trying to whisper that she’d again got her hecklers in a twist. But what did it matter? Both sets of interruptions were quashed.
Ray Nunn, a libertarian student (then rare) who was at the meeting, felt we should try to re-group our scattered scene, after experiencing Aldred’s obsession with propaganda that never involved action, and came together with Ralph Sturgess, who had succeeded William Farrer as secretary of the Anarcho-Syndicalist Union, which had still not got off the ground. Partly because it was totally committed to supporting the CNT line in Spain, thick and thin, it collapsed well before the war.
They started to collaborate with <em>Spain and the World</em>, a paper which had been founded two years previously, edited by Vernon Richards. It had been the brainchild of the Italian Anarchist group who constituted the bulk of the Italian anti-fascists in London. The daughter of an Anarchist militant killed in Barcelona by Stalinists, Marie-Louise Berneri, had settled in London and married Richards. It was her influence that helped the ASU group, the youth groups, and even some of the older members of the Freedom group (though not Cores), not to mention myself, to merge and give support to the paper.
She had the same vitality and determination as Emma Goldman, though after the murder of her father she had a more publicly critical approach to the increasing compromises in the Spanish struggle than either Emma, or indeed Richards. She would certainly have made a great contribution to anarchist theory had she had any work experience. Unfortunately she had the same weakness for over-estimating the value of the “intellectuals” as Emma, though she was so sympathetic an individual that if this was a fault, it was overlooked in appreciation of her goodness and energy.
It was around this time that some of the “progressive intellectuals” were changing from Stalinism which had long dominated the universities, though they seemed to most working class anarchists to be people who as students had scabbed during the General Strike and this suspicion died hard. But the declaration in 1937 of Herbert Read, influential art and literary critic, poet and essayist, that he was an anarchist, led some of his literary clique to say the same, though he had no other influence.
Bourgeois historians always ascribe any theory to the nearest literary or historically acceptable person by their standards, and just a few years ago the National Archives had as its only reference to anarchism the correspondence between Read and the Catholic sculptor Eric Gill, while Woodcock of course cites Read, if not himself, as the leading anarchist of his day, though Read never claimed this, any more than Kropotkin did. He addressed some meetings of Emma Goldman’s, and even one of Cores’, but otherwise apart from writing one or two articles took no part in activity, instead addressing the literary public through his books on philosophical anarchism but not allowing it to interfere with his position in the Establishment.
In contrast, an art critic with similar Establishment ties, and with whom he often crossed literary and political swords, was Anthony Blunt, active for the Communist Party and, as we now know, recruited to the Soviet Intelligence network. He rose to be Keeper of the Queen’s pictures, but was subsequently disgraced as a spy. Such an indiscretion would never have happened to Read but anyway he had no such adherence to a foreign State to tempt him.
The other notable “convert” to anarchism was painter Augustus John, but I only once noted him intervening for us, in unusual circumstances. Werner Droescher, who had returned from Spain where he had fought with the German Anarcho-Syndicalist battalion (DAS), was met by the police on arrival with the information that he could not possibly stay in Britain but need have no fear, he would merely be sent on to Holland.
On arrival in Holland he was met by the Dutch police who brought him straight into Germany, and he was immediately taken to a concentration camp. Droescher’s English girl friend, a member of what is now known as the “Carrington set”, was sitting for Augustus John. She wept the story to him. He had the ear of Queen Mary, whom he was painting, and thus was a captive audience. She only committed herself to saying she would speak to Sir John Simon, the Home Secretary. Droescher, to his surprise and I imagine of his fellow-prisoners too, was taken a few days later out of the concentration camp and returned to England, from whence he emigrated to New Zealand. I met him by chance in Coptic Street on a return visit, thirty years later.
1938 was a frustrating year for me. At the end of it I was on strike for three months. I had got a job as publicity assistant for a fairground, which sounded grand but consisted of putting up bills and arranging accommodation. I was in on the first attempt (I suppose) of fairground workers to try industrial action but by the very nature of their life, once on strike they all drifted elsewhere to work. I was left stranded in Middlesbrough, which I found cold and unfriendly to strangers. To add to my being sacked, I had been invited to speak to a meeting on Spain but the organisers had not realised I was anti-CP and I got a really hostile reception, after spending the last of my available cash in getting there.
I had just enough to pay the landlady but next day had to walk to Stockton, quite a distance away. I had not heard of hitchhiking. Until the war made it universal, one thought of it as begging. From Stockton I had a valid return to Leeds where I switched to the London line, getting on without being asked for a ticket. When the ticket inspector came round I explained I had been sacked owing to the strike and promised to repay the fare when I got home. He said he could not agree to that and would have no alternative but to put me off at the next station. My heart sank until he winked, when I remembered the train was non-stop. Later the buffet staff brought coffee and sandwiches gratis. I hadn’t eaten for 18 hours and that was the best railway meal I ever tasted. I always seemed to fall in with people like that when things were worst. Next time I visited Middlesbrough, which wasn’t for another forty years, I made the warmest of friends and wondered why I ever left it cursing the town which has become a second home.
At home on the old political scene, Patrick Monks, who had been a mainstay of our group ever since he arrived from Dublin, went to sea, Billy Campbell finding him a job. What disappointed me most was that my old friend Rod Strong decided to join the Army. True, he had never been much interested in anarchism, though he liked a good scrap against fascists. He was unable to get on even the bottom rung of the job ladder. I don’t suppose his colour helped, but it was not a burning issue in those days when there were so few Black citizens. With the best brains and muscle I knew, of utter integrity, he had one job in the years I knew him: a few months casual labour with a backstreet rabbit skinning factory. For almost the whole time I knew him, Billy and I put aside part of our pay to keep him going, and he always intended to get himself straight when he started work, but he never could. Enlisting was his answer. After we said goodbye, he promised to keep in touch, and in fact repaid the advances we had made him — not that we wanted or expected him to do so. I saw him once or twice until the war and then never saw or heard from him again, though I always looked out for him in the years that followed.
When I think of the phoney intellectuals I met who were to swan through Easy Street, none of whom, even those extolled by thesis writers of a later generation, ever raised a blow in anger for anarchism or socialism or against capitalism, I excuse myself for being thought of as arrogant by them.
*** <em>Ebbtide</em>
Not unnaturally I suppose, after the Munich Agreement any discussion of anarchism was at a low ebb. The press had long since dropped the caricature William le Queux image of the mad bomber (to be revived years later). Instead it had deliberately censored news of the revolution during the Spanish War, and Popular Frontist propaganda slandered all anti-Stalinist revolutionaries as “Trotsky fascists” yet it is clear the Comintern was preparing for accommodation with the fascist powers.
Public opinion was only interested in Democracy v. Fascism, or Communism v. Fascism, whichever way they chose to interpret the world situation, though even without hindsight it is obvious there were other alternatives. Meantime whatever democracy there was shrank.
Though most of my contemporaries, and nearly but not quite all the veterans of anarchist struggle, were giving up in one degree or other of despair, worn down by either grinding poverty or increasing family commitments, some streak of obstinacy made me go on, though there seemed little hope of success. It was a bit flattering that Special Branch chose to visit me on one or two matters, even when I was only 18 and still living with my parents who were utterly incredulous that I was taken as seriously as that, or that there was a political police at all.
It was possible for anarchists to work with the local ILPers on some issues. For instance in East London ILPers and anarchists formed the tenants’ action committees, against increased rents. It had the predictable result that the Communist Party infiltrated (and took over) and the less predictable but more welcome one that the local fascists totally discredited themselves by opposing the largely successful rent strike, teaching an unintended if inevitable lesson in racism.
The fascists had previously attacked ‘Jewish landlords’ but when it came to fighting landlords, and Jewish and non-Jewish slum tenants alike joined in, Mosley prevented the fascists from doing so and upsetting his impeccably Norman-blooded slum landlord friends. It smashed the populism of his movement.
The Labour Party was divided between official Labour policy, then dominated by some trade union leaders, with Attlee and Morrison as contenders for the leadership; the followers of George Lansbury, its former leader, who had now become an ultra-Pacifist; those who followed Ernest Bevin, and were working towards a national war policy but would have no truck with either the Left Labourites following Stafford Cripps who wanted to unite with ILP and Communists (the ILP rejected this eventually) and popular frontists who wanted to include Tories as well; and the remnants of the older working class movement being imperceptibly but gradually edged out by the rising professional class.
The Communist Party had an unofficial co-operation with the Conservatives, some openly, like the Duchess of Atholl (wife of a feudal laird, and herself a Tory MP, who later became an intense anti-Communist), some surreptitiously, like Viscount Mountbatten. The Trotskyists were obsessed with the Moscow trials and the charges against Trotsky, and opposed action in or on Spain or any other country against fascism, until it reached the countries in which they were living, when they called for defence of the Soviet Union and themselves.
Outside Spain, and inside too after the defeat, the anarchists were internationally on the defensive in the two post-Munich Agreement years rather than taking the attack. They seemed to have lost both their constituency and consistency. Most opposed the coming war and fascism alike, supporting the struggle in Spain but opposing the compromises made there, for which they were blamed either way. The Stalinists, and their many apologists, said the CNT-FAI did not co-operate with the Government, the Trotskyists that they did, too much so. But liberal elements were coming to the fore in the loss of the working class support, and the attitudes of almost all well-known if not “leading” anarchists were decidedly ambiguous if not downright paving the way for abandonment of their principles.
*** <em>Attempts on Dictators</em>
Jumping over the years, back and forward, I should record there had been several abortive attempts on Mussolini’s life by Italian anarchists in the 1920s and 30s. Now came the attempts on Hitler’s life. Had any been successful, everybody knew the show would still have gone on, but without the leading player, as happened in Spain. A few years before the Dutch anti-parliamentary communist van der Lubbe had set fire to the Reichstag in the hope it would spark off a rising of the German Red Front, which had been trained in Moscow and paraded up and down to popular acclaim until the Nazis took power and, without a blow, it was overnight reduced to a few cowered people hiding if not rounded up in concentration camps. The training wasn’t lost: some of the ‘generals’ they trained turned up in Spain and sneered at the Spanish workers’ primitive ideas of military resistance, such as fighting.
Following the attack on the German vice-consul in Paris, not by an anarchist but by a personal victim of Nazism, there were two or three such plots within Germany. Few details have ever been available because the German Federal Republic chose to publicise only the Junker plot at the very end of the war, when Hitler would not admit Germany had lost, and was opposed by patriotic generals who had gone along with him in conquest but were not prepared to do so in defeat. The attempts on Mussolini are still looked on as the sort of thing that gives the anarchists a bad name.
Even well-known figures in our movement, always cursed by the personality cult, like Ruediger and Rocker, took this attitude in 1948 as regards the attempts on Hitler, and would not co-operate in publicity about it though they had the documentation at a time when the Bundesrepublik was almost canonising von Trott, whose part in the Generals’ Plot came only when they knew there was no chance for victory.
There was one attempt on Hitler planned in 1938, in which I was asked by a German anarchist resistance group, “Schwarzrot”, using Birmingham as a base, to travel to Cologne to pass over some documents to Willy Fritzenkotter. I stayed with Willy Huppertz, miner and pioneer member of the FAUD. It was safe in that I had a British passport, though I admit once when I saw a big Nazi procession approaching and everyone hailing Hitler, I felt queasy. I was faced with the dilemma of doing the unthinkable and giving the salute or facing who-knew-what, like Hitler himself at the time of the Munich Soviet. It would be no use the British Consul saying afterwards they had exceeded their rights and must apologise, so I did what Adolf may have done all those years before. I disappeared into a public toilet partly to avoid saluting and partly for necessity, where I found a large number of Germans had the same idea or compulsion and the attendant grinning all over his face.
I thought the documents related to emigration. A dozen years later, I met Fritzenkotter again and he told me they related to the escape of the planned attacker, but the plot had not come off. I did not meet him then — he had already been deported to England. One of the other people on the periphery was John Olday, who had been in contact with the Marxist (non-CP) resistance, which included Hilda Monte whom I met with Fritzenkotter.
Olday (properly August Wilhelm Oldag) was born of mixed German and Scots-Canadian parentage, and though he had lived in Germany all his life in very poor circumstances, was a British subject and had been bullied at school in the First World War as a consequence. He had married Hilda Monte to give her nationality (he was homosexual, and they did not live together). In England he wrote a moving book <em>Kingdom of Rags</em> (1939) and contacted Ethel Mannin, who had the same publisher (Jarrolds) but did not contact local anarchists until he had been conscripted into the British Army.
Hilda Monte made another attempt on Hitler’s life, someone obtaining for her the unlikely financial backing of G. N. Strauss M.P.(millionaire industrialist, later Father of the House of Commons). Hilda, after an unsuccessful attempt, went to England; I think, to help achieve her original plan, though Strauss pulled out when the war finally came, perhaps thinking he was being inveigled into a Nazi plot. When the war broke out she was interned as the authorities were not unnaturally suspicious of a German, recently married to a British subject with whom she did not live, and did not know or care she was far more anti-Hitler than they. However, she not only got her release but was allowed by British Intelligence to return to Germany as a saboteur because of an influential intervention, with which I shall deal later.
She was captured by the Nazis. Her marriage was no longer a protection and as a Jewess married to an “Aryan”, a revolutionary, and a “foreign agent” her death was inevitable, and doubtless gruesome.
The anarchist movement in Germany was unknown to the world until the defeat of the Nazis, when the Americans seized the police archives and opened them up to scholars. It had been thought that it consisted of a few scholars. It is clear now a large anarchist working-class had existed during the Kaiser’s period and through the years of Weimar and Hitler. The FAUD (a real anarcho-syndicalist union) was strongest in the Ruhr, where the Nazis wisely left the coalminers alone in their opinions provided that was all. It would perhaps have been easy for them to act against the miners, but they still needed coal.
Willy Graf of Ulm discovered an ingenious way in which the majority of other German comrades saved their lives. He was arrested and placed in a concentration camp (of the original type, actually a barracks). The commandant was pedantic about properly classifying each prisoner in their proper category. Graf found that the Jehovah’s Witnesses with whom he was confined were almost as unbearable as the Nazis. It was possible to apply to the commandant, who told him that among the ‘real Germans’ he had only two anarchists, who had either to go to the Communist section or the ‘Bible searchers’ section whichever was more appropriate.
Graf replied that he was really a criminal prisoner, pointing out a dictionary which stated anarchists were ‘bandits’ who ‘believed in disorder’. The commandant, a martinet of the old school, was disturbed in his notions of justice, which he confused with neatness, and examined the records, which said that Graf had been involved in an attack on the Braunhaus in Munich and been imprisoned for it under the Republic. He said that Graf must then surely be a Communist and should leave the JWs. But Graf, fearing the Stalinists might be as bad as the jehovahs, said his gang was only after the treasury, whence the satisfied commandant promptly re-classified him as a criminal.
Subsequently, when the war came, he was out, together with other anarchists who had heard of the magic of the dictionary on the grapevine, and learned that they had to be criminals to be allowed to go free, sometimes to the indignation of neighbours (“our boys are being called up and the red scum are coming home”). Many of the older comrades had to work on forced labour but we here did not learn about this until after the war, and assumed all had been killed.
The other anarchist imprisoned with Graf, either because he did not wish to pretend he was a criminal or out of a feeling of solidarity, claimed falsely to the commandant he was of Jewish origin and so was moved with the Jewish inmates to wherever it was they went. His folly seems incredible now, but it was inconceivable to most Germans then that race could lead to anything more than deportation at worst. Like Graf, he gambled in a game of Russian roulette but was unlucky.
One who followed Graf’s lead in Hamburg, Carl Langer, was later a cause celebre. After years of forced labour and showing signs of age, he had been directed to work as a bank messenger. During the last days of Nazi Hamburg, when they thought the Russians were coming, the bank staff had fled and the bank was looted. When order was restored, Carl retired from work, bought a house and opened a hall and press for the re-created anarchist movement. There followed a series of prosecutions by the bank at which he asserted his legal right not to testify against himself when the now officially denazified former directors tried to claim their lost treasures, amid general public amusement.
Three years after the war, the taxi driver who took me from the station to the Langer house laughed when I told him the address I wanted, and said Carl was the only man on forced labour who had managed to save enough to retire comfortably out of a wage of a pfennig a day and he only wished he had the secret.
*** <em>Around the Left</em>
Returning to the two pre-war years, it was inevitable I should meet persons on the parliamentary and extra-parliamentary Left, among whom, with exceptions, I never felt comfortable. That this attitude was shared by the bulk of the working class movement was later made clear though while my instinct and logic was to become more revolutionary than they, many became instead as or more reactionary. I am glad that I did not realise at the time that, little as I appreciated the Old Left, the New Left when it came would be infinitely worse. Even the old British CP was a paragon compared with most of the later student Trots.
Jon Kimche was one of the left-wing of the ILP, whatever the term meant in that context. He was associated with the German section aided by the ILP before the war, quite contrary to British and Labour Party foreign policy and quasis-illegal. I believe Hilda Monte was also in touch with them. He also ran the Socialist Bookshop at 35 St. Bride Street, just round the corner from Ludgate Circus. I say “ran”, as it was thought by most, including the ILP itself, to be the ILP bookshop. Their headquarters was above and the extensive bookshop below. As in the later case of Freedom Press and Vernon Richards, the question of ownership became blurred, and it finished up as his.
Kimche was Swiss-born but had quite a good knowledge of German affairs though I doubt if he was as knowledgeable about what Hitler was going to say to Goebbels next day as his newspaper articles made out. Later during the war, when the bookshop was declining, he moved in on Fleet Street journalism as a German expert, encouraged to write on German underground resistance to Hitler which up to a few months before would have been unthinkable. The papers would not have printed it, and the police would have investigated if they had.
Like Dr C. A. Smith, a former Wood Green schoolteacher and later WEA tutor who moved into professional politics, he went from becoming an avid member of the presumed Left of the ILP to move sharply right. Whereas Kimche went first into journalism, turning his former knowledge to good account, Smith, with whom I was well acquainted from Tottenham days when I had attended his WEA classes, went into Common Wealth during the war. During or after the war both became converted to Zionism. Smith organised the Labour Friends of Israel. I don’t know what moved him (he was not Jewish, though his wife may have been) but Kimche went to Israel and became part of the Intelligence Service. Whether his Intelligence associations pre-dated his move from the ILP I cannot say.
Both Smith and Kimche became very right wing in the following years. I lost track of them. Smith, like John McGovern who has been vehemently anti-war, both an extreme pacifist and hailed by Fenner Brockway as the “English Karl Liebknecht”, became a fervent anti-Communist. It was odd that McGovern joined his old opponent the Duchess of Atholl, who had been the most fervent Communist supporter when McGovern opposed them from a revolutionary angle in every US Government backed activity during the Cold War.
Another person I remembered from the Tottenham days, though I only saw him at meetings, was Ted Willis, a Young Communist League organiser. He called me a “subjective supporter of the ruling class” at one meeting. After the war he wrote a play or two for the Communist-backed Unity Theatre which introduced a number of ardent CPers and amateur actors to the professional stage. He seemed to catch on and is now known as the “Dixon of Dock Green” creator glamourising the police force. He mellowed with the years, and moved to the Labour Party. It can be done so easily in Britain — think what American screen writers and actors who backed the Communist Party had to go through! As he was made a Lord I am entitled to assume he is not merely a subjective supporter of the ruling class and if we ever mixed in the same social circles, which I think unlikely, he could revise his judgment on me.
I never met any of the other Unity Theatre people, who came from the East End, where the Communist Party was growing and where I had virtually no contacts at the time. Someone who seemed to be more or less in that milieu, though of a later generation, was Bernard Kops, a playwright. When I came across him in the forties or so he was selling second hand books from a barrow in Cambridge Circus or at least going through the motions, the stock being so uninteresting it was left unattended for hours at a time. The local bookthief clique (solidly Bohemian and CP), who formed a community of their own, derisively referred to him as “Shakespeare” because of his literary ambitions. As he came from the East End I expect he had hung round Unity Theatre, actually in King’s Cross. He frequented CP haunts and Soho cafes but I certainly never heard of him as having anything whatever to do with anarchists. Years later (1988) I read David Gillard’s column in the <em>Radio Times</em> saying he had written a radio play about the “anarchists” he had known in his youth. “They were utterly broke but they had a wonderful vision of what they’d do when things change. They’d even discuss the government posts they’d have when they came to power”. Could one get a radio play produced or write in the Radio Times knowing as little as this pair about anything else but anarchism?
His play put anarchist words on to CP backgrounds — there was the “Kafe Kropotkin” which the <em>Radio Times</em> thought real, but it seemed like the Coffee An’ in St. Giles High Street where the bookthieves hung out. It was really about East End Jewish Stalinists with a veneer of anarchist-sounding phases (“we fought the commies in Spain” — “I thought the fascists were the enemy” ; “Emma Goldman be with me” and so on).
But, as usual, I am letting myself get ahead of my story.
** 04 War Clouds; The Taste of Defeat; War at Last; Internment and Discernment; Splitting the Atom; Blackpool Breezes; Prison; Division; Military Detention
*** <em>War Clouds</em>
Getting back to 1938, as it drew to a close I began to work at a North London hospital. It was well paid for the time — hospitals have slid back since like everything else in local government but there was great competition for such municipal and therefore presumed secure and pensionable jobs. The nurses themselves were less well rewarded, then as now being regarded as dedicated and expected to put up with low pay and poor conditions. There was no possibility of my getting into any trouble here, since the non-medical staff was unionised but apathetic. This was a bit upsetting as I had a seeming compulsion to bash my head on brick walls. Wages were set according to national standards, and the non-nursing medical staff were only interested in their careers.
Even when I started talking anarchism I couldn’t shake the complacency around me. One pompous technician assured his assistants that they need not take me seriously as he knew my family well and was sure I would grow out of it. Over half a century has gone by and I haven’t done so yet. But as his brother used the same garage as my father, he felt himself an authority on my future.
Political talk, apart from my trying to stir things up, centred around the coming war. There were one or two incredibly soppy Christian Pacifist types, it being the last despairing days of the Peace Pledge of Dick Sheppard. Their opinions ranged from “Well, if the country really were in danger, we could probably be absolved from our pledge” to assertions that Mr Chamberlain, or in some cases Jesus, was trying to do his best, which tended to arouse blasphemy, not to say obscenity, in the majority.
Though I joined in the campaign against conscription like everyone else in the Anarchist movement and even most on the extra-parliamentary Left (all for differing reasons) it was self-evident the workers were not prepared to resist it even though they were not for war. If peace-time conscription came (as it did, a few months before the war) it would be accepted (as inflation and unemployment were) with fatalism, almost as an act of Nature, and resistance would be regarded as cranky.
The Peace Pledgers, along with League of Nations and World Government types, had unwittingly ensured <em>that</em>, with the incredulity their ideas provoked. Though to be sure their belief that the superior power of non-violence would look after matters was no more nonsense than other ideas going round, such as that we had to fight a war every 25 years for each generation to prove its manhood, or that the Jerries hadn’t been properly taken care of last time, or that it was because the government was spineless that we hadn’t smashed them before. It was also sometimes whispered by a shamefaced political minority that it was going to be a war for democracy.
The ‘old sweats’ whose opinions carried weight, comprised most of the portering staff. The hospital had been an old workhouse, converted in 1914 and remaining so after the war, taking on as portering staff and X-ray technicians many who had worked their way up from patients. They gave assurances that they ‘knew’ as they had been in this or that section of the trenches in WWI, and young men couldn’t know what it was all about until they had ‘served’ and conscientious objectors were ‘syphilitic cowards’.
Some of these patriots were inclined to favour Hitler who had been ‘in the trenches’ and was ‘for his own people’, while ‘our’ Prime Minister had gone to him ‘pleading’. This might be thought a caricature, but it was not untypical. Radical thought had got totally out of touch with the reality of working class life. The ‘Left’, as distinct from the working class movement, had moved in to take over the heritage of radical thought. The end of the thirties was the start of the collapse of a long tradition of which the anarchists were once the far-out wing and finally the last survivors. The thirties was a period of pop-frontism which was directed at the lower middle class rather than at the workers, who gradually withdrew from their own movement. I recall Eleanor Rathbone, an indignant academic lady who was Independent MP for the Universities and according to her own lights a sincere liberal, telling an embarrassed women’s co-op guild that in German concentration camps there were distinguished professors, poets, scientists, “people respected for their achievements all over the world” — nobody else seemed to matter — and they were <em>forced to scrub floors</em>. There was an embarrassed silence from ladies who had done this all their lives as a matter of course rather than as a punishment, but it was no doubt the worst thing Miss Rathbone could think of.
The marriage between ‘the Left’ — which is to say the politically conscious ‘progressive’ middle class, and especially the failed academics who saw themselves as ‘the intellectuals’ — and the working class movement broke down in the thirties, more especially when the ‘universities’ rallied to Communist pop-frontism but culminating with the middle-class takeover of the Labour Party.
Though seeing the political scene clearly, and understanding anarchism well enough to travel around to explain it in almost every town in the country, always at my own expense, I was not yet able to see clearly what we could do beyond the creation of affinity groups that could withstand oppression created by war or fascism.
In Birmingham I met one affinity group that had weathered the storm, a group of German anarchists who had originally jumped ship at Glasgow (and taken refuge with Frank Leech) and now were forming, in the house of a sympathiser, the ‘Black and Red (<em>Schwarzrot</em>) Group’. They intended to launch a counter-terror campaign in Germany and there were already some German civil engineers working there forming an anti-Nazi nucleus.
The sailors had close connections with Hamburg but were wise enough to stay in an inland city rather than in Glasgow, where they could more easily be traced. Several seafarers came to this haven in Birmingham, among them Ernst Schneider, a veteran of the Wilhelmshaven revolt, a marked man and unable to return. Most of the others did go back. Thirty years later I met one of them in East Berlin who told me of some attacks on the regime that had taken place, but had ceased with the war when resisters became totally isolated, if still alive.
There was a curious sequel in Birmingham nearly forty years on (1977) when the local and national press, apparently relying on German police information, suggested that local anarchists were among those responsible for the kidnapping and killing of Hans-Martin Schleyer, the employers’ leader (and former SS officer), by the Red Army Fraction and named Peter Le Mare of Birmingham as being connected. This caused some surprise, to put it mildly, as Peter was an ultra-pacifist who knew nothing of Germany but did run a little magazine called “Red and Black”. Though he had not even been born forty years before, the German police (who had lost their records to the Americans) may have tipped off a British journalist. There was certainly a notorious Nazi named Schleyer (hardly that one) scheduled for attack (I don’t know whether successfully or not) by the Black and Red Group of 1938 and named in their bulletin. The British police did not follow up the local paper’s somewhat belated tip to uncover an anti-Nazi plot, possibly knowing better. I dare say they would have been only too glad to follow it up, true or false, in 1938.
*** <em>The Taste of Defeat</em>
With the defeat of the anti-fascist forces in Spain in the Spring of 1939 it hardly seemed to many of those abroad, who had pinned so many hopes on it, worthwhile carrying on. Though the Spanish Revolution had been lost in 1937 and most of what followed was defence against a fascist victory, it came as a bitter disappointment.
It is still not appreciated that after his victory Franco killed more Spanish people than Hitler killed German Jews, indeed only a fraction less than there were Jews in Germany at all, a remnant of whom perished from war, want, age and causes other than State murder. Hitler had the rest of Europe to choose his victims from, making the number he killed greater, which must have made Franco envious. Despite my own family background, the Spanish experience affected me personally more deeply than the subsequent Nazi Holocaust, and I knew many involved in it. It spurred me on despite the prevailing feeling of hopelessness at the triumph of both fascism and war.
In Glasgow the anarchist movement was flourishing more than ever with its own hall and huge open air meetings at factory gates, carrying on a tradition of integration in the working class movement which was lost in England, where the old movement had decayed. Such groups as there were in London, including <em>Spain and the World</em> collapsed. Almost the whole working class support in places like Wales, a minority though it was, disappeared. Cores in London continued virtually as a one-person band, arranging for weekly ‘lectures’ from a wide range of speakers, which was the last flicker of the old London Freedom Group.
These were held at the Emily Davison Room. Frank Ridley spoke there on occasion, the last time on the need to marry anarchism and Marxism, the subject of which sparked off a debate in the ILP paper <em>Controversy</em> in which I was vociferous and entirely negative. There were heated discussions among young anarchists and radical socialists on what to do if war came. It was taken for granted that complete dictatorship would clamp down immediately, yet at the same time many were advocating conscientious objection as the only alternative to “supporting the war”, which supposed a situation like WWI.
I was convinced, assuming one were allowed the choice of conscientious objection even under the difficult conditions of WWI, that this had caused the gradual isolation of the working class ideals from the working class. Yet to enter the Army, when one knew the upper class was going to seize the officer positions and was fascistic in the bargain, was equally intolerable. It was a dilemma that was never resolved, and a price had to be paid for striving to avoid either compromise.
Meantime the fragmentary groups of conscious anarchists in London got together and formed the Anarchist Federation of Britain, in reality a group declaring it would be the basis of what would be a national organisation, and that it would publish a new paper, to be called Revolt! (early in 1939) under a separate editorial committee. I was persuaded by Tom Brown, and Billy Campbell, who was always pushing me forward on these matters, that I could hardly stand aside, though I had sceptical reservations. The Anarchist Federation set-up seemed to me a formula for isolation.
An editorial committee was elected, including Ralph Sturgess, Tom Brown, Marie-Louise Berneri and Vernon Richards, who it was hoped could bring some of the support <em>Spain and the World</em> had, though in reality this had vanished. Its support had come from a wide range of groupings, many conventionally anti-fascist rather than anarchist, some generally leftish and even, in the case of the South African supporters, Trotskyist. I was co-opted to help with circulation and wrote a few articles. Richards was elected treasurer in default of anyone else. Sixty years later he still regarded himself as treasurer-for-life and proprietor of the accumulated assets since 1886 by virtue of this decision. Both Sturgess and Brown tried to bring the paper round to a class struggle position but the paper only ran a few issues.
Tom Brown, though a Geordie by origin, was living with his wife and daughters in Paddington and working in aircraft. Ray Nunn, Jack Mason and I would go round to his flat to discuss how we could go ahead in the case of war. Tom had clear ideas of getting into industry and organising there but younger people could not do so. Ray was entirely for making a stand by conscientious objection and Jack, who remarked jocularly that he would be certain to do well as his latest job was engraving tombstones, was cheerfully all for what was shortly to be nicknamed the debrouillard position. It was later translated generally to the more homely ‘skyver’, which implies more or less wangling one’s way through everything somewhat in the manner the <em>Good Soldier Svejk</em> (the first, heavily cut, translation was at last available). I never made up my mind what position to adopt until a decision was forced on me.
Sturgess dropped out of activity with the collapse of the paper. Like a great many others who had been very active in the movement, he felt then that it was finished, and perhaps like a great many others in the working class movement, was washed away with the pressures, not the passions, of war.
Yet our feelings of failure were not to be compared to others. I recall the arguments I used to have with a young woman at work who worked in X-rays and who resented my criticisms of the Communist Party. She insisted I must have a personal reason for disliking Soviet Russia, but restrained her rage to a muttered “Lies — all reckless lies”, the typical response of the bewildered idealist. One morning I looked in her office and told her Molotov, for Stalin, had just signed a treaty with Hitler. Had I known, it was not the most tactful time to break the news. She had been on night shift, was tired, and had not heard the radio. She flew into a temper and I retreated before her wrath with unused X-ray plates flying at me. Later I thought she might have cooled down and the news was in the papers anyway. I looked in her office to find her in floods of tears. I guess many pop-frontists felt that way then.
One mature staff nurse at the North Middlesex was an old-fashioned Ulster Tory. She had been a Queen Alexandra nurse in WWI and still dressed in the starched collar tradition, completely defying the modern style introduced by the radical (but boorish) Medical Superintendent, a very competent surgeon named Ivor Lewis. They carried on a feud by giving contradictory instructions to the younger nurses, complicated by the fact that, despite being a large overbearing man, he seemed shy to face up to her, and she always spoke her mind outright. However, she was my greatest ally in the place, partly because she liked to see someone standing up to the management even for totally different reasons and also because she too loathed the Franco regime. I suppose this was because of its Catholicism. She even asked me if “my lot” wanted someone to train nurses for the refugee camps in France. I don’t know how serious she was but I introduced her to Emma Goldman and they clashed immediately.
One young doctor, very upper class, who had been tongue-lashed by her on several occasions after hesitatingly reminding her of a new and unnecessary ruling by Mr Lewis, found her amicably arguing with me, I suppose about Spain, and he facetiously remarked, “I hope, staff, you’re not going to become another anarchist.” She vehemently retorted “No, sir, I am a King and Country woman and my service proves it — but I do detest damned smug complacent upper class young English Conservative twits”. “I suppose that squashes me,” he remarked mildly.
I once got her to a meeting addressed by Jack White. She somewhat put White out by saying afterwards she hadn’t entirely agreed with him, but she had served in South Africa as a young nurse under his father General White so she knew his heart must be in the right place. White had drilled Connolly’s Citizens Army, and his activity in Spain would hardly have commended itself to his staunch Imperialist father who had in the Boer War defended (or it may have been relieved) Ladysmith, but he only smiled.
That must have been one of the last meetings held by the CNT-FAI committee. It transformed itself into SIA (Solidaridad Internacional Antifascista), a worldwide aid organisation for the refugees now flocking from Spain. However too much of the CNT-FAI committee had centred on Emma Goldman, and as she went to Canada that spring, it collapsed despite Ethel Mannin’s attempts to keep it going. It was in a way quite a satisfying personal end to Emma’s last period of life. In London she had been unknown, had desperately sought publicity but was ignored by the press and public. In Canada, where the influential newspaper publisher Pierre van Paassen had been an admirer, she got immediate press publicity from the start. She was still known everywhere from her years in America, which meant nothing in England.
Though she only spent a few months in Canada before her death the finale was as she would have liked, She had daily press headlines, packed meetings, and a new campaign (to save some Italian anarchists from deportation and certain death — one of them I met over forty years later). She was finally allowed back into the USA after her death and is buried at Waldheim Cemetery, Chicago, a union-funded site of the graves of many anarchist pioneers in America. Renewed personal interest in her came decades after her death, and the place where she died is almost a radical women’s shrine. They built a monument to her near the Chicago Anarchist Martyrs, though unfortunately the graves of leading Communist Party apparatchiks like William Z. Foster are now all around.
Marie-Louise Berneri had the same force and energy, with a greater theoretical grasp, as Emma Goldman. She had the same naive belief in “the intellectuals” as Emma, but she had no illusions of her own personal “greatness” and worked with the movement in a manner inconceivable to Emma, who had been conditioned by the American lecture circuit’s star system. M.L. was always prepared to come to meetings at factory gates or distribute literature in the streets. After her death, Ethel Mannin, obviously thinking of the contrast with Emma Goldman, whom she had also known, said there were many more prepared to die for the revolution than to scrub floors for it. It was an unfortunate comparison (thinking of Eleanor Rathbone) but I take the point intended.
The influx of Spanish political refugees, from immediately after the civil war had ended until the world war began, meant there was plenty of metaphorical and some literal floor-scrubbing to do. The great post-Franco exodus had begun, It took years before the complete picture could be known (and only parts are recorded). Elsewhere the treatment of the refugees was shameful. They were herded into concentration camps in the South of France and later delivered to the Nazis or to Franco unless their own resistance prevented the democratic French government from doing so.
An irony was that the majority who went that way were Catalans escaping into the part of Catalonia previously seized by France, and they were treated like criminal invaders or at best, if released, as an alien rabble come to take the bread out of the mouths of citizens. Having fought against tyranny and been told they were the front line for democracy, so-called democracy put them behind barbed wire on sandy beaches, with no sanitation and little provisions. Today, those sandy beaches are pleasure resorts, and at the formerly notorious but now delightful Saint-Cyprien-Plage one can now see a rare monument to the gallant Spaniards, if in a manner that might lead the unwary visitor to suppose that this was an atrocity of the invaders, or at least of the collaborationists.
Some families managed to escape, to live three families to a room (for which they gave thanks); other males volunteered for the Foreign Legion to get themselves or their families freed, some were subsequently returned to Franco by force; some handed over to Hitler for forced labour or the concentration camp. A sizeable number managed to break away during the war and were the first to create the Maquis resistance. That was a springboard to the post-war Franco resistance, with whom I later became well acquainted.
The Spanish Libertarian Movement (MLE), to use the term it used in exile to cover and cover up the whole anarchist spectrum, was overwhelmed by the calamity that had fallen on them. It was remarkable though, over the years how cohesive they remained almost like a vast scattered family, although there were considerable differences as to what had gone before and how to respond in the future.
In the main the Spanish movement was divided between those who had entered the various government posts (the Ministries were only the tip of the iceberg) in whose view the Allies had now taken up the anti-fascist struggle and at least were better than the Communists, and those who had been actively in opposition in the May Days of 1937 and after, and who determined somehow to go on fighting, placing no hopes on any governments.
There were also a large number, especially with large families, who were destroyed, if not physically so, by the whole tragedy and were fighting for survival in exile, but who still remained loyal to their principles. Of those who originally came to England most seemed to be in the third category.
Those who had been integrated into one bureaucracy now tried to integrate into another, and soon found jobs with the BBC and so on. Those who were struggling to survive got jobs in industry or joined the Army. They were luckier than those in France, where people were still herded into concentration camps right up to the German victory, when many were delivered over to Franco or the Nazis. Others lived in abject poverty, some entering the Foreign Legion in despair. Many of those who came to Britain formed a tight little ethnic community until Franco died when in a mass exodus many went back, some as entire families, and with British or French old age pensions one could live well in Spain. Those who had stayed on and struggled lived in beggary after years of prison, no pensions being paid to the defeated even when a socialist government succeeded Franco.
Though the Spanish exiles presented no threat to internal stability until the wave of international resistance in the sixties, and then only a handful, it was natural that the secret police would like to keep an eye on them, if only bearing in mind the reputation of Barcelona anarchism. Yet they had to go carefully as most people on the Left still rightly suspected the Government of being lenient to fascism and hostile to anti-fascism.
One of the people who took an immediate interest in the Spanish CNT refugees was Sonia (Edelman) Clements, the daughter of John and Rachelle Edelmann, American libertarians of the old school. Her interest may have been sincere enough. She had worked with “Spain and the World”, lending her name at one time as publisher, though she wasn’t. She was in the Labour Party and a friend of its main strategist Herbert Morrison. She certainly clashed with Jack White and others in the Anarcho-Syndicalist Union which led to its demise, and had a knack of being able to get support in committee from people who otherwise took no part in its activities, a tactic familiar in political parties. Her arguments were all for involvement with the Labour Party or at least no criticism of it.
When Herbert Morrison later became Home Secretary, he had a highly evolved technique of using people in key positions in political movements as his informants. He used the technique for years successfully to defend the Labour Party against Communist infiltration. After years of non-involvement with anything but the Labour Party, Sonia Clements returned first to <em>Spain and the World</em> and then to infiltrate the Spanish refugees. It so happened, given the circumstances in London, they were clean from a security point of view — only interested in the downfall of Franco who, though courted, was viewed as a potential threat and was at that period openly anti-British. Her intervention, therefore, was useful in this instance, which might have eased her conscience. A different state of affairs was seen four years later when the role of Morrison’s agent had uglier implications.
For the moment, the Spanish exiles enjoyed freedom from persecution in stark contrast to the Italian exiles of twenty or more years standing. For years the Italian anarchists had been noted as “Dangerous” by the police force of both countries. However many years they were here, they were denied naturalisation and always subject to surveillance. The fascists though loyal to Mussolini could easily obtain naturalisation papers if they wished. When in the following year Italy declared war, fascists went unscathed because of the prudent spate of naturalisation in 1939 denied to anti-fascists. Consular officials went on shopping sprees before returning home and wealthy restaurateurs were spared the worst excesses of internment, though a few unnaturalised patriots were detained. Anti-fascists, most of them anarchists, were bitterly hounded. No excuse of anti-fascism sufficed. This was what Churchill meant when he said “Collar the lot!” The victims and opponents of fascism suffered the humiliation of internment and many were drowned on the “Arandora Star” — even the veteran Dr Galasso, doyen of the resistance in Italy and indefatigable worker for the under-privileged of Clerkenwell and Soho, particularly but not exclusively among the Italian community.
*** <em>War at Last</em>
In September 1939, after twenty years’ talk of war, it finally broke out in time for routine protests on a Sunday. Though everyone thought there would be immediate bombing raids, large crowds gathered at Hyde Park to listen to the empty bombast against it. Hyde Park was then still a serious political forum though it had its comic turns, but these gave way to the passionate speakers that day. As what they were saying was “Stop the war” the crowds listened intently. The best speaker of all was Tony Turner of the then oratorically active though tiny Socialist Party of Great Britain who spoke for some ten hours, long after night fell, ignoring closing time. He outspoke everyone that day, and in true SPGB style gave a history and analysis of capitalist economics.
It was a scene repeated in many other towns. There were occasional patriotic cheering crowds but unlike World War I, they were few. The only result was that at the end of the day the park keepers, or in other squares the police, herded the reluctant crowds home, and they peacefully went to war. I’ve never thought much of mass meetings since.
Within the first week I was at two smaller meetings. One was at Tom Brown’s house where there was a gathering of some anarchists and sympathisers affected or about to be affected by conscription. He personally was in a reserved occupation, and I suppose over military age anyway. We determined on a plan to show our opposition to war by registering as conscientious objectors, making as defiant a statement of principles as possible, and then entering the armed forces. This seemed the closest one could get to making a stand for one’s principles without adopting the ultra-pacifist stand which meant very little, isolating oneself from the workers.
The first of our circle who adopted it was Ralph Mills, who was unconditionally exempted but medically rejected when he ‘volunteered’. The second was Ray Nunn, unconditionally exempted and then volunteering, being accepted in the army. He still got isolated from the forces, as he was promptly made an officer, having been at an OCTU. George Plume, who was in the ILP, got unconditionally exempted on purely ‘political’ grounds on the strength of his unequivocal socialistic statement, but the Ministry appealed against the decision, and he was deemed to have enlisted, so he went missing. I never quite understood why: if it were a question of not wanting to join, he had only not to take the medical.
In my case and that of several others, though we were not exempted, the Ministry then refused to call us up nor was it possible to enlist for anyone who wished to do so. Most waited for their calling up papers like the entire nation did, but in my case it was not four days or four weeks but four years. I have no idea how many were in this position but I was certainly not alone. For four years of the war we were in this state of limbo. The Ministry of Labour was actually calling on me to register for other forms of civilian labour, which I declined, and when I spoke at meetings the police sometimes turned up and demanded to see my identity card. When I produced it I left them baffled. This was by no means unique. The Government was determined to “avoid the mistakes of last time” and was content to let us stew in our own juice.
The other private, but in its small way historic, meeting was a private one, again with Tom Brown, and M.L. Berneri, Vernon Richards and myself. We decided to publish a bulletin, <em>War Commentary</em>, as <em>Revolt!</em> had collapsed and we were all that remained of the production team. With the support of Jack Mason, who obtained an accommodation address at Newbury Street and designed the logo, we were off. By the second issue we were able to print it, and for a few issues got articles from a number of people from the anti-imperialist groupings more or less around the left of the ILP — Ethel Mannin, Reg Reynolds, John Ballard, George Padmore, Dinah Stock. The rest included Krishna Menon and Jomo Kenyatta, though they normally took a hostile attitude to us, being already conscious of their coming destiny as world statesmen, and clung to the Fenner Brockway line within the ILP.
During that winter M.L. Berneri and I organised a series of discussions on the events of the Spanish Revolution, partly in Enfield and partly in Holborn, to which some members of the Forward Movement Group of the Peace Pledge Union came. The PPU was moving in various ways but the Forward Movement looked for radical non-violent solutions. Indeed some of the Forward Movement had gone with other COs to the Channel Islands, to spend the war in agricultural work, which they thought of as opposing it. When the Germans invaded they joined the British volunteers for the Nazi army, the Legion of St. George, which in its way was non-violent enough as all it did was to strut around towns to show the German workers there were actually soldiers in Nazi uniform with British shoulder straps.
Most in the Forward Movement were put off by this tactic of the PPU, at any rate with hindsight, and followed John Hewetson, a medical doctor who came first to our meetings and then into association with the anarchist movement. The guru of the Forwards, Frederick Lohr, who was at heart a German Catholic Nationalist though a pacifist of British nationality, and might well have followed the Channel Islands lot, was by profession a horse trainer with a fairly upper-class background (either by origin or his horsey interests). During the war he became a copytaker at the <em>Daily Telegraph</em>. When I took the same job twenty-five years later he was still remembered by old-timers for having come in as a war-time substitute and then scabbed during a dispute.
Others included Lawrie Hislam, not distinguished for much other than throwing tennis balls at No. 10 Downing Street as a protest against war, who endeavoured, after John Hewetson went over to us, to get the whole Forward Movement to declare themselves “anarchists” and thus began the infiltration of bourgeois pacifism into anarchism, which altered the character of the movement and led to its distortion for years. This is why Professor Woodcock (one of that periphery), in the first edition of his Penguin <em>Anarchism</em> makes an otherwise inexplicable reference to Hislam as having been the bridge between “the old anarchism and the new”.
It soon became apparent to all working class anarchists that they were going to be faced with a major influx of middle class pacifists, who had themselves increased beyond measure. Though that class generally had become patriotic as never before, bourgeois pacifism flourished, no doubt because of the changed State attitude to conscientious objection.
There was a vast difference between the treatment of objectors to military service in WWI and WWII. In the First World War many suffered, some even more than if they’d joined the Army, being taken to the front and given No.1 Field Punishment and even shot. In the second world war, anyone articulate and knowledgeable enough to give a fluent case, preferably a Christian pacifist one though they’d sometimes settle for a secular pacifist one, could get total exemption, provided they didn’t make any slips ups. Christian cases sometimes ended in conditional exemption if the appellant hadn’t done his homework. Jehovah’s Witnesses only needed to produce a membership card.
There was more opposition to the State involved in joining the Army, and trying to work for soldiers councils. The State saw that too, something we never reckoned on. They were determined not to repeat the mistakes of the First World War and were looking at the consequences of the end of the war more than they were at the waging of the war. I followed our agreed procedure of signing on as a CO and making a provocative statement they couldn’t possibly accept, but hadn’t counted on the State then not doing anything about it.
I was sacked from the hospital for “industrial misconduct”, as they didn’t believe I’d signed on, and the little industrial action group I’d built up collapsed. They all, even my friend the staff nurse, thought I was being victimised for the organising, which would have pleased me in a way, but it wasn’t so. The Ministry of Labour declined to pay me any dole for six weeks though I appealed against this and won. Their claim that I had not registered was shown to be mistaken. I was hardly to blame, legally anyway, for their inaction, which also puzzled the industrial tribunal. Many subsequent experiences show that the British secret political police, if not the worst in the world, are the most secret. The writer C. S. Lewis says the greatest success of the Devil is to persuade people he doesn’t exist, which makes it easier to get them to obey him. I never had any experience of this, but it certainly applies to the secret political police. Perhaps Lewis was understandably confusing the two.
For months I did not work at all and after a few weeks the Labour Exchange stopped paying me. I mainly supported myself by my old trade, or racket, whatever you wish, scribbling pieces of dialogue for variety people, whose profession was booming as never before, but it seemed a terrible waste of energy in 1940. Perhaps I should have tried serious writing, but it never appealed to me as a profession. What I wrote otherwise I wrote from conviction not for cash. Jack Mason thought I didn’t appreciate my luck, and Tom Brown urged me to take advantage by holding meetings and writing the occasional political article.
The newly formed Anarchist Federation opened Freedom Bookshop in Red Lion Passage: the editorial group of <em>War Commentary</em> had taken over the distribution of Keell’s stock and called itself first Freedom Press Distributors, and then Freedom Press. The Freedom Group was left reduced to George Cores, too old and ill to do anything. In an unsuccessful attempt to prevent the consequences of almost a mass “conversion” of the Forward Group, the Anarchist Federation settled for a programme based on two parts: the first an anarcho-syndicalist programme, and a second part, excluding both those who supported the war and those who were pacifists. On this basis the Glasgow Federation joined in.
The blitz came on while I was still idly lazing around Highgate Ponds. I was a keen swimmer, and the Ponds seemed to attract the swimmers and the skyvers both in war and peace. There I scribbled stupid bits of music hall dialogue, and in the evenings, when other people weren’t working, I attended meetings. I volunteered to help around the bookshop and did some unpaid work helping people move after they were blitzed, but it was a frustrating period generally with little I could or was allowed to relate to.
I discovered the unlisted headquarters of the Ministry of Labour by reading my file upside down at the labour exchange and vented my frustration on them, but all I could get out of them was a vague statement that they would let me do agricultural work “as if you’d been conditionally exempted”, but that “as you’re a red hot anarchist we’re not putting you in the army”. Or even, it seemed, anywhere else, even where my presumed violent views were acceptable. Then another official would some other time say that as I was liable to be called up “any moment” they could not offer me a job but I was at liberty meanwhile to find something temporary. Employers would then ask the labour exchange if I could be employed and they would give the same answer, which hardly commended me to anyone.
I had always taken Billy Campbell’s advice in these matters, but I had not met him for some months during the first half of 1940. I had thought of the merchant marine, about which I knew nothing. Meanwhile it seemed odd he had not contacted me with a postcard from some port or other, but I assumed it might be difficult. He had ambitious ideas of how seamen could be organised as they had been in the past: and how the revolution that would, we firmly believed, follow the war would be composed of soldiers’, seamens’ and workers’ councils. There was now a blank. I wondered if he had been imprisoned by one or the other enemy, and finally went to enquire at his mother’s house. It was an emotional meeting, the first time I met her. He had been drowned when his ship was torpedoed.
That night a local boxing ring was short of a professional boxer. He had been picked up that day for not answering his calling up papers, and I stepped in. It was the only way I could give vent to my feelings. I was out of training, hopelessly outclassed, and not much good anyway and received the biggest hiding of my life. The manager was afraid he would be brought to book for letting an amateur step in but the crowd adored it. Forty-odd years later when I was working in print, an old Saturday casual came up to me and recalled how great I was, which shows how much my beating up was enjoyed, rather than any ability. At the time all I heard was a sarcastic remark from the crowd that if I was medically fit enough to stand up to that sort of punishment, I was fit enough to be in the Army, which was certainly true. But in the closing years of my working life I heard every Saturday evening what a great career I had wantonly thrown away.
I had bruises for the next few months, and a ringing in my ears for the next couple of decades, but I had no other way to express my grief. There was no sexual attraction of which I was in any case ignorant, but I see my feelings in retrospect as calf love with Rod Strong and Billy Campbell, none the less deep. Both of them were invariably kind to me and at a period when everyone else, even Special Branch which must have had full documentation, assumed me to be years older than I was, treated me as protectively and affectionately as they would have a kid brother. Wilson Campbell (he never liked using his forename — he was born at the time of President Wilson’s bringing America into the war) was every way an anarchist. I don’t just say this because he was a dear friend, but now when people ask which anarchist influenced me most, Bakunin or Kropotkin or whoever, I just don’t talk their language when I say Billy Campbell.
*** <em>Internment and Discernment</em>
After the fall of France new emergency regulations came into force, in particular internment both of enemy aliens and suspect natives. Press stories of “German soldiers dressed as nuns” who had been parachuted into Belgium were meant to inflame the situation, though most of the people I ever spoke to dismissed this with obscene mirth.
Italy came into the war despite the long Tory friendship and kinship with Mussolini. Military Intelligence had for some time known local Fascist cells were leaking military information through the Italian Embassy, via spy Tyler Kent, but it was useful to them as a means of misleading the German Army. Now the embassy was closed down, the Home Office was free to arrest Kent and order the internment of fascist sympathisers likely to act as spies, under Regulation 18b. The Labour members were keen to get the British fascists.
On the weekend that the secret order was made law, enforcement chiefs throughout the country, chief constables and sheriffs were warning fascist gentlemen to join the army quickly to avoid detention, and there was an influx of officers. Only people as notorious as Oswald Mosley could not avail themselves of the chance to “rejoin their regiments” and were interned, some like Mosley with their families under privileged conditions, though the ordinary punters were unwarned and less lucky. Captain Ramsay (Conservative MP), having privileged access to secret sessions of the House of Commons though believed to be a Nazi agent, went into internment apparently to preserve his Parliamentary status which prevented him from being excluded from debates.
We thought this must, judging by the Italian anarchist experience, herald a clamp down on British anti-fascists as had happened in France. In fact only Southend was affected this way. This was presumably considered a vital invasion point of entry — close to London — and whether by orders from above or by local police malice or ineptitude. All members of the local anarchist group were arrested with the Independent Labour Party, many members of the Peace Pledge Union, and a member of the IRA but no British or British-naturalised Italian fascists, though there were a sizeable few of both in Southend.
The anti-fascist internees had a voluble spokesperson in the anarchist Matt Kavanagh, who protested vigorously to the commandant at the internment centre at their being lumped with fascists. They accepted imprisonent philosophically, thinking this was a repetition of what happened in France, but that was adding insult to injury. John Humphrey went to see Matt. A retired railwayman, John had been the printer of <em>Freedom</em>, and his house at Malden Crescent, Camden Town, was the HQ of the old London Freedom Group. His advanced age and benign appearance must have made him seem to be harmless enough to let through. “I can’t think why you’re here among the fascists,” he grumbled to Matt. “They think I’m an enemy of the State.” he replied. “Well, so you are, and have been these last forty years to my knowledge,” he said, correctly but, as there were guards present, perhaps not too tactfully.
Afterwards he, Tom Brown, Fay Stewart (born Robertson) and I discussed action. We thought there was nothing that could be done about imprisonment as internment was under emergency legislation, and we would probably all eventually go the same way.
What we thought we could do was to get a bit of logic into the situation by persuading the authorities to separate the prisoners before there was major trouble. There were already fights every day. Fay, who was a nurse, and had been in my now disbanded group at the North Middlesex Hospital, had heard from a fellow-nurse, a German Jewish refugee, that it was far worse in internment camps for Germans, where Germans, Nazis, anti-Nazis and Jewish refugees alike, were mixed together. Many elderly people were beaten up regularly. Some were asking for separate internment camps and Humphrey came up with a brilliant if simplistic idea: why not ask them to put British, Italian and German anti-fascists together, and Nazis, Italian and British fascists together? “They’d get on OK, it would be less trouble for the authorities, cost no more and occupy only the same amount of space.” he argued. “And that way we’d help our Italian comrades too.”
We had thought to approach George Strauss, who had helped Hilda Monte, now also interned which was very humiliating for someone only wanting to go back to Germany and kill Hitler. He couldn’t believe she wanted to get back to Germany to kill Hitler, and declined to help further. So for Matt we decided to approach Major Nathan, MP for Wandsworth, with this barmy idea, never believing it would be taken seriously. But he was Fay’s local MP, she seemed respectable and he had been sympathetic to a delegation about the fate of refugees deported to Australian camps, according to the nurse working with Fay.
It was quite a lucky choice as Major Nathan just then happened to be one man Churchill was depending on politically. The war cabinet needed Ernest Bevin as Minister of Labour. Bevin was just the man to dragoon the workers into giving up trade union rights they would never have surrendered to a Tory. All that was needed was to find him a safe Labour seat in the Commons. Someone had to be pushed upstairs to the Lords, and Major Nathan was prepared to undertake the necessity.
The Major was a leading figure on the Jewish community and chair of an organisation concerned about the German Jewish refugees and our idea seemed reasonable to him. Perhaps it seemed to him it was a small thing for him to ask when he was about to make the supreme parliamentary sacrifice. It could hardly be refused by the Home Office without appearing to be an offensive rebuff. They could not know whose idea it was.
Tom Brown had said very logically, between ourselves, that they could not possibly agree or it would make nonsense of the whole war propaganda to divide internees into fascists and anti-fascists. It would probably give the latter the worst end of it, but he agreed it might call into question the whole reason for interning anti-fascists at all. What went on in Home Office circles I do not know, but that weekend all the Southend anti-fascists were out, while the fascists stayed in.
Matt, with his usual good humour, told us the IRA man, who had served a conviction for bomb offences, had thought he alone of the anti-fascists would be kept in among the fascists, so they had agreed to let him claim he was in their anarchist group, deciding that alleged membership of the PPU or even ILP would be stretching it too far. “That’s providing you don’t disgrace us to by going to Mass in the meantime,” Matt had admonished jocularly. He answered, ruefully, “We’re excommunicated anyway”.
It was a nice little victory, sweeter for being unexpected, though unfortunately it did not help the Italian anti-fascists, who had nobody influential to speak for them. Matt was unable to return to Southend, possibly for economic reasons, and came to London where he worked as a barber, starting at the age of sixty-odd. His gift of the gab impressed casual customer George Orwell to write him up. Kavanagh had far more influence than Orwell in convincing workers of Stateless socialism over the years, but “history” will accept Orwell’s patronising, though not unkind, appraisal.
Having time on my hands I had spent some time looking after the bookshop in Red Lion Passage we had started. It was burned down during the blitz and there was no chance of getting down to industrial activity without a job. With industry under such tight control, many forms of struggle became counter-productive, and our sole activity was propagandist. Even Tom Brown, a skilled engineer and a union-recognised shop steward, found himself in an isolated position at work. The Glasgow Anarchists, who now joined with us in forming the Anarchist Federation, were able to overcome this isolation which did not exist on the Clyde.
Aldred became an embarrassment to them. He was then in the full flight of his pacifist kick, supported by eccentric aristocrats and wholly disinterested in industrial matters. Though he retained popularity in working-class localities through his counselling it was not translated into political support or even interest, and he made little impact on the anarchist influence in Glasgow (except that they had to be always disowning his later antics) and none on the places of work, which was a pity as he could have been an exceptional figure in a British revolutionary movement.
I went up once or twice to speak. I never lost a fixed prejudice about accepting fares or money, which was just as well, because I was never offered any, and found it a strain in view of my economic situation. But I unexpectedly got the chance to travel round the country with fares paid, by taking up scriptwriting, advance publicity and secretarial duties to a music hall revue. Many friends urged me to take it, though I am sure some of them thought I needed to move around lest I be “picked up”. Even in our circles few understood the situation, though there were dozens (to my personal knowledge, and, as I since learned, hundreds) in the same position, some taking it more philosophically than I did, though it was more common with those with International Brigade experience.
Though for Home Guard training some British veterans of the Spanish war were recruited as instructors, and Spanish combatants were accepted in the Army, there must have been some criterion as to who went where. Certainly, suspected active support of the anti-fascist side seemed to mean exclusion from the forces.
Before an industrial tribunal which wanted to know why I declined their offer of going into agriculture, I found a representative of some unnamed department on the platform. I was told I did not have the right to challenge his identity for “security reasons”! He made it clear I was not eligible for the forces for reasons so secret that I was not even allowed to be told what they were, to the surprise of the lay members of the tribunal and the total consternation of the statutory trade union representative.
In view of this attitude it was at first sight apparently contradictory that the Spanish refugees in Britain did not suffer discrimination, during the war at least. Most males were allowed to stay unmolested providing they joined various forces. Others could get jobs, including the BBC. I think this was due to the fact that Sonia Clements had reported back to Morrison favourably. She had gained their confidence and found that most of those in England believed there might be intervention in the peninsula with the downfall of Franco, and they were eager to participate. This belief that the British Government was anti-fascist because its main enemy was fascist fooled a great many on the Continent too.
Herbert Morrison had another plan up his sleeve too. He hated the Communist Party for political and personal reasons. For years he had fought their penetration of the Labour Party and built up an internal counter-infiltration system. Early in the war he had banned the <em>Daily Worker</em> though after Russia came into the war he could not continue to justify it. As a Coalition Home Secretary of a country which unexpectedly came into alliance with Russia he could hardly denounce the Communist Party for supporting the Allies, but he knew that if left alone, the Trotskyists and the anarchists would certainly ridicule this newfound flagwaving opponent of workers rights, and the fact that they would puncture the Churchill myth possibly also gave him private pleasure, as there was no love lost between the Prime Minister and his Home Secretary (later described by Churchill as the Minister he was most glad to lose when the Coalition broke up).
There was free speech for minorities, except for fascists, and then only those actually interned, right until 1944, when it was expedient for the anarchists and the Trots to be curbed and the fascists let out, despite restrictions on the popular press. As a result the post-war Communist Party was derisory. Though it emerged with strength in Europe because it could never be exposed when it was most vulnerable, only their right-wing critics being vocal at the time, here it was under ultra-left attack.
During 1941, though one could not say that support for the war, or at any rate passive acceptance of it, lessened, the various dissident groupings increased their strength. The Trots, more or less united for the first and last time, made inroads into industry at the expense of the Communist Party. The Communist Party, despite its accession in numerical strength because of its flagwaving for Russia and identification with ‘Uncle Joe’, had become in effect a right wing party. The Trots had taken up their former role in industry. It was a major disaster for the Anarchist movement that they were only organising industrially in Glasgow; though attempts were made in Kingston (London) to form a syndicalist union of bus personnel.
We did however make considerable progress within the Armed Forces where many for the first time found themselves up against the State in its elementary form. The Communists, calling for the Second Front all the time, were naturally unpopular among those who would have to be directly involved, however much the overtime monarchs applauded them in production. The anarchists vied with Common Wealth, a new party grouping, for popularity amongst soldiers. Common Wealth supported the war but opposed the government: it was largely composed of officers and NCOs inside the Forces, and middle class outside, who were taking over from the Labour Party,. Bound as it was by the electoral truce, they succeeded in making gains from Conservatives in seats which the Socialists were not contesting.
The spreading of Anarchist propaganda through the lower ranks was a return to working-class origins. Fay Stewart (as secretary), myself and several soldiers and air force personnel brought out a bulletin <em>Workers in Uniform</em> and we built up quite a network. Olday had meanwhile deserted, and became a regular contributor both to <em>War Commentary</em> and <em>Workers in Uniform</em>. Among those we contacted was one in the Free French forces, who later became secretary of the French Anarchist Federation, and a couple in the Polish Army. The majority were from towns all over Britain where the anarchist message had not been heard for two decades.
I thought that at any time I would be called up and decided to make as many contacts as I could while travelling around in the North with the music-hall revue. I also had a more personal motive. I had always been too wrapped up in political and industrial activity to have any sort of private life, not that celibacy until the twenties was any rarity then. My first love was Rosalind Shepherd. She was separated from her husband, who was living with another woman on his leaves from the Army. As she was in a touring chorus and did not want to give it up we did not set up a home, believing optimistically we would do so at the end of the war.
*** <em>Splitting the Atom</em>
The Anarchist Federation, the second grouping to take the name, got off to a good start in that it incorporated the Glasgow and London groups, and attracted many smaller groups of industrial activists in different parts of the country, took over <em>War Commentary</em> and appointed an editorial committee, which was also responsible for Freedom Press (the ‘Distributors’ part had been dropped), in no way then a separate group. The Glasgow end put its entire backing behind the publishing venture. With difficulties in printing <em>War Commentary</em>, financial in the case of the original printers C.A. Brock, and political nervousness in the case of Narods, the next printer, a derelict press in the East End of London (Express Printers) was purchased.
Such an asset (which increased with value over the years), was a double-edged sword in view of the difficulties into which the movement ran as a result of its increased support since once the British anarchist movement had assets it was worth someone’s while getting hold of the property.
Meanwhile I was involved in a series of acrimonious exchanges with the Ministry of Labour which felt it had the exclusive right to direct one to work but wouldn’t do so. There was not much they could do in the event of my refusal to co-operate since the normal alternative was sending people into the Army and I decided, rightly or perversely, that was where I ought to be. I suppose I ought to have just accepted the situation like a great many others did, Pat Monks for instance, and they put it down to sinister motives or sheer cussedness, both of which I suppose was true.
The faceless Ministry served me with a summons but when I told the magistrates I preferred going into the services to going into some suggested dead-end job in agriculture (to the discomfiture of our pacifist so-called allies). Without explaining the political background, which the prosecution also failed to do for its own reasons, they were sympathetic and gave me only a nominal fine. The local press waxed indignant at the unfathomable ways of bureaucrats.
During the period when I was out of London there was a large intake of membership in the Anarchist Federation, unfortunately an imbalance in that much of it came from those we were guarding against, thinking that a constitution barring pacifists would exclude them. What we were really trying to guard against was a bourgeois ‘intellectual’ takeover. This failed in that people like Fredrick Lohr, and in particular George Woodcock, came in, signing but ignoring the constitution. Woodcock’s attitude was careerist, something not thought possible. How could we provide or further a career? We had not reckoned how valuable an asset a press was for an aspiring writer.
During that period of the war the activists of the anarchist movement were steadily collecting arms, like many left groups, though there was a marked difference with the pacifist elements that had come in under cover, especially when the Independent Labour Party which had gathered them to its fold began to blow hot and cold on the war issue. Fenner Brockway managed to unite the two elements within the ILP, pacifist of Maxton and pro-war of C. A. Smith, gradually losing the pacifists to an amorphous mish-mash of which we got some of the spill while Common Wealth got others.
Common Wealth had a run of political luck during the war. The Communist Party was totally outdoing the Conservatives in flagwaving and Churchill-praising after Russia came in the war; the Labour Party was less uninhibited but being in the Coalition bound to a war-time truce. In any by-elections Labour and Conservative stood down, but Common Wealth stepped in with some success and picked up the Labour vote. Everyone then thought it either a fluke or a great surge for Common Wealth but it was simply the foreshadowing of a Labour victory at the post-war General Election, when CW simply faded away, though with the rump of the money it collected on its heyday it never completely disappeared.
The Trotskyists picked up the mantle of the Communist Party in industry, and we hardly got a look in, partly due to the insidious middle-class pacifist influence with which we had to contend. However, with the absurd ‘revolutionary defeatist’ line preached though not practised, it was never popular in the armed forces, where nobody was going to stick their neck out even by talking about it. The Communist Party, especially after its turn-round to support the war and urge a Second Front to aid Russia, was never popular in the Forces. Anarchist influence made an impact on the forces, not only following possibly inevitable lines of skyverism or the cult of the Good Soldier Svjek, but in actual political context. In the surreptitious publication of <em>Workers in Uniform</em>, at its height we had some four thousand circulation, which was twice as high as the open publication <em>War Commentary</em>, published nominally by Freedom Press but in fact the organ of the Anarchist Federation. The actual existence of both the new AF and of WiU was kept a secret in case of repression. This had organisationally disastrous consequences.
The interest in anarchist ideas seemed confined to the forces, and also to the liberal pacifist elements that persisted in seeing them as relevant at least to their temporary situation. Despite the efforts above all of Tom Brown, it seemed impossible to reach the industrial workers, except in Glasgow where Frank Leech made headway. There was certainly an element now nominally amongst us that had no direct interest in reaching industrial workers.
I felt politically isolated and personally totally irrelevant, despite speaking at numerous meetings everywhere and anywhere, from scattered meetings of three and four to a thousand in Glasgow, and helping, despite some fundamental political disagreements, to edit <em>War Commentary</em>.
Workwise I did various jobs around the theatre, and became a theatre shop steward in the West End when Rozzie moved into town. The film extras, who once had been grossly exploited, were, with the new demand for crowd scenes, desperately sought. Even stagehands and house electricians, not to mention servicemen on leave, were roped in. Leslie Howard was filming <em>Pimpernel Smith</em>, an anti-Nazi film that did not follow the line of ‘victory’ but ‘revolution in Europe’ and the script called for ‘communist prisoners’. By the time he came to make it, in 1940 the Russians had invaded Finland, and the script was changed to ‘anarchist prisoners’.
Howard, who like most actor-directors was very testy, objected to the actor scheduled to play the Nazi commandant. He complained that “he sounds like my maiden aunt”, and having successfully replaced him, turned his attention to the ‘anarchists’. None of them seemed real, he said. The various hamming up of stage-Anarchists failing, because the caricature had long since replaced reality, someone suggested having real anarchists, to whom Howard couldn’t object. It was mentioned to me and that was how I came to a minor film role as a concentration camp inmate which many friends were playing for real at the same time. Howard was intrigued as to what anarchism was, evident from other parts of the script, as we seemed fairly normal to him. I do not know what he expected us to be. He invited me to tea and he asked me why, if anarchism was supposed to be about assassination, we hadn’t had a go at Hitler? I said it wasn’t, but we had. All efforts had been frustrated, partly by finance and partly by police, and not just Axis ones either. Howard, though the public thought of him as the archetypal Establishment Englishman, was Hungarian by origin and passionately anti-Nazi. He asked if he could help. I put him in touch with Hilda Monte and the Birmingham people, and they suggested an international resistance group located in Lisbon. It is hard to know what came of it though I know he managed Hilda Monte’s attempt and persuaded Military Intelligence to let her get on with it. I guess that if this was the case, they took the attitude that if a Jewess was prepared to risk going back to Germany, and she was a spy, there was no risk to them. I understood from Olday it was done through Portugal.
Later Howard was travelling from Lisbon in a civilian plane and was shot down by German aircraft. The official story was that the slender, handsome film star was mistaken for Winston Churchill. One can only assume the need for manpower led Hitler to recruit deaf and blind agents in Portugal.
*** <em>Blackpool Breezes</em>
During 1941 to 1943 I was working in Blackpool for a while for a likeable North Country comedian, Roy Barbour — the only employer I ever had with whom I was friendly. He mentioned he had heard about my attempt at organising circus hands, a piece of gossip which travelled far and wide in provincial show business circles for its audacity and lost nothing in the telling. To my surprise, he wasn’t hostile but wanted me to help him with tightening up the local branch of the Variety Artistes’ Federation, though adding quickly it was all in the name of helping others and there wasn’t anything extra in the pay packet for doing it.
I never did get paid anything for speaking or organising bar problems so that was all right, but the set-up I encountered was weird and wonderful. The Variety Artistes Federation comprised the music hall profession, including stars and others who, whether self employed, on the circuits or working in shows, were in their own turn employers. They paid supporting actors, feeds, chorus girls, property hands and so on. Even some of their employees, lesser acts or troupe organisers, were employers too. It was born of the famous Music Hall strike when the stars of the profession came out in support of the sweated, exploited and underpaid members of the profession. But they had come to have a belief in the magic properties of having a union without any clear notion of what it was supposed to do.
In the course of time some of the lesser members of troupes were members of Actors Equity, and there was a certain amount of rivalry between them. Coupled to this was the fact that in the last boom of prosperity of the music hall, agents and managers were making fabulous sums, and only the stars were keeping up with the situation. It was certainly not clear at the meeting held at the Central Pier, at which only the stars got up on the platform to speak while the dancers and feeds held back shyly, what they were calling for except that everyone had abuse for the agents and jokes about theatrical landladies. The place sparkled with wit on the stage and beauty in the stalls, but had little substance.
I had a dazed feeling I was in a madhouse, especially when a popular local comic, Dave Morris, suddenly turned to where I was trying to taking notes and whipped them out off my hands, shouting “A spy from Moss Empires!” which brought the house down, eclipsed when Ben Warriss explained “He’s taking minutes” and his stage partner Jimmy Jewell responded “He’s taking bloody hours!”
As a result of the cross-business that went with the patter, I fell off the rickety chair on which I was perched, to tremendous laughter. Billy Bennett (“Almost a Gentleman”) remarked “None of this is rehearsed, you know”, a deadpan remark which even to me sprawled on the floor sounded funny. Roy Barbour came in with, “Why doesn’t he write these laughs in my scripts?” As Jewell and Warriss were stage partners I am sure they had worked the gag out between them but the pratfall was my own clumsiness.
Despite one serious speech by Wee Georgie Wood, the midget comedian who hated his stage description and occupation, about how the stars of the old music hall had supported the underpaid members during the Strike of thirty years before, nothing was proposed or done for any underpaid members. Except one. To my surprise, the comics who had used me as a foil made a collection among themselves afterwards. Ben Warriss, who sadly ended in a theatrical retired home supported by a charity he had sponsored, handed me an envelope, the only tip I ever had and the only time I ever got paid for “union” activity. I did not open it until afterwards, thinking it a letter of thanks, which it was but with what amounted to about my month’s pay at the time. I might have refused the generous gesture but for reasoning it was the laughs they were appreciating. I consoled myself for waste of time and loss of dignity with the thought I could forever after claim I had appeared on stage with the cream of the variety profession in Blackpool, and possibly England, and got the biggest laugh of the morning.
When Rozzie’s tour came to an end in 1944 I returned to London. I thought I would I wear down my secret blacklisters in the end by taking the army medical in Preston instead of London, though they had the last laugh. (‘Twas ever thus?) One day many months later some police officers came into a theatrical agent in Regent Street (where I had arranged to meet Roz Shepherd) and asked me to step outside. This was nothing new to me as frequently police officers had questioned my being at liberty and it was amusing to confront and confound them.
Once in Doncaster, the local police chief, a war-time special named Thompson who owned the theatre we were visiting, chortled with joy as he told my boss (whose playbills he objected to having displayed around the neighbouring villages for his following week’s visit to Leeds, thus possibly prejudicing that week’s takings) that he had got a special message through to London and that would be the end of his publicity campaign by eliminating me. However, whomever he contacted presumably didn’t mind my going round placing adverts and addressing small meetings so long as I was out of their way.
Naturally I assumed the Regent Street episode would be another such incident, but to my surprise on this occasion they said that I had not responded to my call up papers and was technically a deserter. What call up papers? I had just spent the larger part of the war arguing about why I hadn’t had any; I had even tried volunteering at one point to force their hand. The Ministry had been quite adamant before the Tottenham magistrates that they had issued the requirement for agricultural work because, for some reason they could not disclose in court (I made great play of this) they could not call me up for service.
Now I was told this was incorrect, that they had in fact done so and I had ignored the call-up! It was also alleged I had changed my address and not notified the authorities. I had, it was true, been travelling around, but this was permitted as long as one applied for the necessary ration book, which I had always done. My home address had changed in that I was now living with Rozzie, but my permanent address was still my parents’ house and no call up papers had arrived there.
It was a trick such as I have never seen recorded, but which was played on a number of people. To my knowledge alone, there were five others in similar circumstances sentenced around the same time as me. Later I met dozens and heard tell of hundreds. For ‘non-reporting’ I was sentenced, as a civilian, to twenty-one days imprisonment. My possessions vanished. As Rozzie was away up North, the police took some things and the landlady seized others. When I got word through to my parents, they called on the landlady, who explained that she had been afraid everything might have been stolen property, as the police had taken some items, so being an honest woman (as she explained) she had sold the rest!
*** <em>Prison</em>
Brixton prison had been transformed into a centre point for 18B (mostly fascist) detainees earlier in the war, but the growing prison population had obliged the authorities to remove these to the Isle of Man, the woman’s prison at Holloway and some council estates in the North, and restore Brixton to criminals like me. I had been taken from a theatrical agent’s office to Bow Street magistrates court and sentenced to six weeks imprisonment on a charge I have yet to understand. I was said not to have notified my change of address for six weeks. But my permanent address was the same as it had always been, and my absences had been for regular periods of a few weeks only for four years. Naturally I smelt a rat, indeed several, with pinstriped suits, bowler hats and umbrellas.
I met one or two coster acquaintances from the boxing fraternity who were petty thieves. They looked at my joining them in jail with flattering disbelief, feeling I and others like me justified their own predicament. There were several other prisoners of blameless lives and of whom one might have thought any country would be proud. One or two were in my position, having been prevented from joining the armed forces for years, but were now told papers had been served on them, of which they knew nothing. It made me realise it was a deliberate Ministry of Labour ploy introduced around that time. Granted some of these might have received and not responded to their calling up papers, but it seemed odd that in very few cases had they changed their addresses even nominally. Two had been arrested at their own breakfast tables.
Prisoners included not only politicals but people who had fallen foul of innumerable regulations especially in industry, and a few in the Services, as some commanding officers seemed to let offenders go to the civil courts and so serve sentences in civil clothes, rather than have their regiments represented in Army jails.
There were also a few conscientious objectors, though nothing like as many as in the First World War. These had not been exempted by legal tribunals. Most articulate persons could pass their tribunals if not the first time, in which case they got a year’s imprisonment, then at least the second time. Few got back for a third term, though there were two I met, inarticulate and scarcely literate who had gone back to jail again and again from barracks, though unquestionably genuine in their pacifism, for the crime of not being able to express their ideas in court.
All the spivs, black marketeers and burglars I met seemed to think the non-criminal element raised their tone. On one occasion a warder was shouting out “You’re thick, the lot of you — born stupid!” because some order had not been obeyed. I was standing at the back with a peace-time schoolmaster sentenced to six weeks jail for taking a week’s unofficial paternity leave from an engineering factory, a job he hated, as he was trying to get in the forces. All eyes turned to us, there were grins on every face, and the screw actually blushed.
With being regarded as a scholar, at least among the illiterate, and being accepted as ‘one of us’ being supposed to having been in the fight game (which was exaggerated by my pugilist friends), I spent almost the entire twenty-one days writing letters and petitions for people, and tended to enjoy the stay. Olday was in another wing: he was depressed and in virtual isolation, writing despairingly of conditions, even of torture, to mutual friends outside. This contrasted with my cheerful remarks not unnaturally baffled them, especially when he wrote to say somebody had told him how well I had stuck out a terrible beating-up. This referred to my last fight, long before the prison fortnight, but he misinterpreted it.
He had been arrested before me, for carrying a portable typewriter in the blackout, which was regarded as suspicious. Taken to the police station, he was found to have a identity card someone had lost, though the owner of the typewriter came forward to explain he had lent it to him and it was quite legitimate. As he refused to speak in court about the identity card he went from one court to another. By the time he reached the Old Bailey in 1944, they knew his identity but as he was still silent he got a huge sentence, in years instead of months, for this minor offence.
There was one little tailor in jail who had been sentenced for some trade offence or other, who was quite bewildered at what had happened to him. He had however learned the warders received (I forget the exact amount) maybe fifty shillings a week. It shocked him. As the warders shouted and raged at him, or anyone else, he muttered to himself, or to anyone standing nearby, “Tt-tt, to be such a bastard for fifty shillings.” By the time I came to leave, he had merely to shrug his shoulders and mutter “For fifty shillings, I ask you” to make it known that he, or someone, was in trouble again.
Six weeks went and I was supposed to be released. I was detained in a communal cell ‘awaiting escort’. “Your unit is coming to pick you up,” explained a warder. There was a slight hitch because there were several escorts turning up and they asked me, I suppose from the prison point of view not unreasonably, which my unit was. Unit? I did not even know which regiment. They could not believe it. “How can you desert from a unit and not even know which one?” I was asked. I replied that it seemed evident one could.
One warder explained, thinking me stupid, that if I hadn’t reported for duty, the unit would be the one mentioned on the calling-up papers. What calling up papers? They accused me of being deliberately obstructive but when it transpired there were several in the same predicament and several escorts waiting to take prisoners to differing destinations, they saw the light. There was a lot of frantic telephoning before we were all sorted out and taken to our respective railway stations, some of which happened to be the wrong ones though not in my case.
It was a stroke of luck that the corporal in charge of the escort knew me by repute. He had a friend who received Workers in Uniform though he was not himself in agreement. We spent the seemingly interminable train journey to North Wales by an ever-halting train amicably arguing. He took the cuffs off me and at a couple of stops sent the other soldier with him to bring coffee and sandwiches. He was a bit shaken by the way I had been treated and quite unnecessarily apologised for whatever part I might suppose he had to play in it. Orders, he explained apologetically, but it was before the Nazi trials made this a cliche.
The corporal was on compassionate posting in Prestatyn, but the private, a Liverpool Irishman, was from the Pioneer Corps located there, into which I was deemed enlisted. The camp itself was ‘a bit cushy’, he told me — nobody gave a damn about anything, though it was run by a mad colonel, Greenwood, who was supposed to have the VC. The joke went it must have been for learning how to run. He was anti-Irish and was supposed to have served in the Troubles. It was best not to run up against him, particularly for Irish soldiers. When the private had been on a charge the colonel asked his name, and when he replied it was Flanagan, was told that was a black mark from the start.
The Pioneers did not have the military ‘cream’ of the Irish like the Irish Fusiliers but Colonel Greenwood was a curious choice as commanding officer for a unit which had something like thirty per cent Irish and fifty per cent Liverpool or Glasgow Irish.
The Pioneers had originally been intended as a labour corps and possibly a non-combatant one. It had then become a fighting unit but with non-combatant and labour units attached. There were German and Spanish refugee units from which people had moved into fighting units. There was also an attached corps for conditionally registered conscientious objectors. Then some time in the war it had been transformed into a fighting unit but with people deemed of lower physical or supposedly mental (in fact, educational) capacity. This made membership of the Pioneer Corps a ‘disgrace’. Men who didn’t feel any resentment at the fact of an officer class felt embittered at being not considered good enough even for the infantry.
This attitude was seized on by the Army and when officers despaired of handing out punishments to recalcitrants or did not wish to have the slur of recalcitrancy on the good name of their regiment, they transferred offenders to the Pioneer Corps using it as an oubliette. By the time I arrived it was a disciplinary regiment on the lines of those reported in the French Army in 1939/40, but different in application.
The British ruling class differs from the French or German. The offspring of the French ruling class got transferred to units far from the battle, and the crack German soldiers swaggered round Prague showing their uniforms while the politicals and criminals were sent to the front. It was not a good idea tactically as the front not unnaturally collapsed when it was expedient to do so. The British ruling class, brought up in the public school tradition, thought dying for their country an honour, and dashed over the lines shouting “Follow me”. Now and again nobody did. It wasn’t unknown for the occasional unpopular one to be shot from behind. The disciplinary units were kept away from combat, deprived of the chance to die for the empire until a last desperate stand was needed.
It was these attitudes that caused the exodus from county regiments to the Pioneer Corps, and embittered regular officers like Colonel Greenwood were given a ragbag assortment of officers who had been Army bandsmen, civilian policemen or talented refugees from various countries, all commissioned to meet a need. He took his disappointment out on the Irish. He wasn’t too fond of Scots either, not liking anyone much, but he had the whole camp at Prestatyn wakened with a Highlands piper every morning at dawn. Someone said it was an excuse to make a regular sarcastic remark to his orderly officer, an Austrian Jew, in front of the assembled troop, of how it should stir his Highland blood.
I should add as a note that the Pioneer Corps had a happy ending from a military point of view, after it had fulfilled its latter-day role as a penal battalion while conscription lasted. In peace-time and after conscription ended, under its new title of Royal Pioneer Corps no less, it changed its image and became a normal service corps.
*** <em>Division</em>
During 1944, prior to my arrest, there had been a clamping down on the whole extra-parliamentary opposition, which had been tolerated even during the blackest days of the war. One could see the hand of Herbert Morrison. The anarchists and Trotskyists had played their part in weakening the Stalinists and so helped make the British Communist Party a negligible force in the post-war period, which incidentally helped the Labour Party politically. It also weakened the Tories. At the Election of 1945, the C.P. was to be their unlikely ally, supporting Churchill for Prime Minister, but of a Labour Government. The CP then won only two Parliamentary seats, a Scottish miners seat they’d had for years (which 25 years before had been an anarchist stronghold), the other a temporary hold on a vanishing seat in Whitechapel Mile End. The only other place they might have had credibility was Morrison’s own seat in Hackney, which he prudently swapped in time for Lewisham, which had lost its former middle-class status.
So in 1944 the government proceeded to attack both anarchists and Trotskyists without much resistance. Both were first weakened by what appeared to be internal dissent engineered by Labour Party moles. The divisions had to be there, of course, but they were accentuated so far as the anarchists were concerned by Woodcock’s literary clique and partly by Sonia Clements’ machinations.
The Anarchist Federation as then constituted was anarcho-syndicalist and endeavoured to exclude pacifists, supporters of the war, and non-syndicalists, though this did not always work out. But there was by now a major difference as to what Anarchism was all about. Either it was a marble effigy of utopian ideals, to be admired and defined and even lived up to by some chosen individuals within the framework of a repressive society, or it was a fighting creed with a programme for breaking down repression.
Berneri and Hewetson seemed to take the first point of view but as they were activists in their own way it could be passed over as a mild difference. But the crux came when Woodcock, admired by them as an aspiring intellectual, wanted to use Read’s influence and the movement’s assets to build his own literary clique by means of a magazine (<em>Now</em>). At least one of the people he referred to as a libertarian was in fact a Trotskyist (Julian Symons), and at least one other (Adam de Hegedus) even some sort of fascist, but all of them were on the make in literary terms and their politics nebulous. Tom Brown wanted the press used for its proper purpose, industrial agitation. There was no doubt as to the press being a collective one, belonging to the Federation, but Berneri, Hewetson and others working on it full time though voluntarily, had effective control, Richards had the accumulated assets in his name and they created a new grouping calling it the Freedom Press Group, saying they had not taken over the press by doing so.
Brown and one or two others had a scuffle with them, amusingly exaggerated in some subsequent books, but were outflanked in the actual manoeuvres, and Richards took over. He had a small group around him, and they soon claimed they were not just the new Freedom Press Group but the old Freedom Press itself.
Brown’s group accepting Sonia Clements, whom many realised was a mole, caused a division with most anarchists, though it got them the support of the group of Spanish exiles not into Resistance, with whom she was associated. Brown was unquestionably right on his analysis of the situation, and proven so by subsequent events. <em>War Commentary</em> had been re-named <em>“Freedom”</em>, though it was specifically said this was not the old <em>Freedom</em>. Within a few months of their taking over, totally unconstitutionally, and denying they were doing so, they were speaking as if they were the same people who owned the same paper ever since 1886.
As the official clampdown came more or less at the same time, and many in the old movement were facing one sort of harassment or another, the argument raged only between a couple of dozen people in London, and its conclusion became a fait accompli. What prejudiced most anarchists was the totally coincidental factor that the scuffle (in some accounts published since greatly magnified, especially by Woodcock, who even suggests the IRA was involved!) happened at the same time that the police were about to prosecute for sedition.
The police had already raided Fay Stewart’s flat for <em>Workers in Uniform</em>. Her dog bit a policeman who had come in through the window, and while she was bandaging him she slipped the address list in the fire. A few months later she was killed cycling home in the black-out. There is no way one can say it was not accidental, especially as her death was known at the time only to her own family, who had no reason to suspect otherwise.
The police then raided <em>War Commentary</em> going through its files for the whole of the wars, saying it showed it was calling on soldiers to lay down their arms, though this was nowhere stated and many articles in <em>War Commentary</em>, which was not a pacifist paper, would have shown clearly this was not exactly Anarchism. Perhaps picking up their arms and using them appropriately would have been much more abhorrent.
As named proprietors Richards, Hewetson and Berneri were charged with conspiracy, though they had not written the articles under complaint, as was Philip Sansom who happened to be in the office when the police called. As the law then stood, Berneri was acquitted when the case came on in 1945, because a husband could not conspire with his own wife. The others received two years. Woodcock, for whose sake they had made themselves registered proprietors, announced publicly that while he was not concerned and did not agree with them he would defend to the death, etc.
The prosecution, which everyone thought would have produced more drastic sentences, undoubtedly deterred others from pointing out that these were not the proprietors, only two were editors, and the main responsibility was collective. The argument “why go forward and be a martyr, you only add one more hostage” was made by many, including those charged.
We thought the time had come to go underground, but after the trial everything proceeded as before, with the same type of article and the same type of activity. It happened with the Trots too, to the indignation only of the Communist Party.
*** <em>Military detention</em>
It was naive of me to think that having been ‘deemed enlisted’, and served a sentence for not knowing it, that would be the end of harassment. They had gone to some pains to get me in even if I had been neglected so long. Other people ‘deemed enlisted’ at the same time as me went straight into training. I was to be court-martialled for desertion, after being taken from prison having been convicted of the offence of neglecting to notify change of address, which only a civilian could commit.
At a preliminary interview to the court martial, I was told the prison sentence should never have been imposed, but that was no concern of theirs. Fortunately I was able to convince them that not only had I never served in the Army and been excluded by mysterious command, but would be able to demonstrate that at the time of the alleged serving of call-up papers by the Ministry of Labour, they were prosecuting me for declining agricultural work. The officer briefed to prosecute me said ruefully, “If that’s so, there’s no desertion case for you to answer” which proved to be the case. They therefore switched the charge to absence without leave, which was equally absurd.
The less than impartial court-martial had an anonymous observer to whom the court martial judge, Captain Le Strange, held I had no right to object and to whom I otherwise would not have known there was a clear objection. The judge then explained carefully to me, before hearing a word of evidence, how important it was to make an example of someone like myself who might give a lead to others. He proceeded to dismiss my evidence as irrelevant and awarded me two years imprisonment for absence without leave, exactly the same sentence they were handing out for desertion.
It may be remarked in parenthesis that there was a marked contrast between the punishments handed out in World War One and those in the Second World War and immediately after. Undoubtedly the Labour Party influence was responsible. Death sentences were no longer freely handed out as in the Reign of Terror run by the military in 1914–18 and subsequently. The Labourites might want to preserve conscription to boost their egos, but they had less blood lust than the old Liberal-Tory coalition in the first war. At the front five minutes absence meant the firing squad in WWI but never, I think, in WWII. Three years for desertion or whatever was given or off the field two years imprisonment, and sometimes that got suspended after a few months. Perhaps that is why civil servants felt free to engage in artful political connivance.
I was taken from Prestatyn (a converted Butlin’s holiday camp) with a chained gang of prisoners to Stakehill military detention camp, which then had the most notorious reputation in England. I confess to being despondent, especially when we changed trains at Bradford and I saw a playbill for Rozzie’s troupe playing locally, but felt I had to keep spirits up. When the sergeant in charge of the convoy asked me how I managed to get in the situation in which I found myself, I answered “Easily enough”.
Stakehill had hit the news because a prisoner had been found dead. The Church of England chaplain is usually in such circumstances a minor administration official but in this particular case an enthusiastic young parson objected to the guards declining to take their peaked hats off when escorting prisoners in church. Without their cheesecutter hats they had a human-like appearance and they weren’t going to take them off out of misguided respect for the divine presence.
He had protested but to no avail. Then one day he was down in the detention cells and heard cries. He rushed in to find that two warders had just hit a man who was lying on the floor. One of them was saying to the other, with heavy sick sarcasm.,”Kick him staff, he’s still breathing”. When the horrified padre asked what had happened, the other staff sergeant said, with an equal heavy attempt at jocularity, “Don’t mind him, sir, he’s always lying on the floor crying.”
Unfortunately the man had hit his head when falling and was dead, and the staff sergeant was a Welsh Calvinist and not to the liking of a High Churchman. The story unfolded at the subsequent enquiry, when the chaplain told of the terrible death of “a man to whom I only that Sunday given Holy Communion”. The country, which had just been given the facts about Belsen and Buchenwald, compared it to them. One accidental death in six years, even if during rough handling, was hardly the same but Stakehill acquired a dreadful reputation because of a sick joke taken at face value. Even one of the incoming prisoners who had served time at HMP Dartmoor said he dreaded it.
Once inside we found it seething with incipient mutiny and the officers and staff were doing their best to mollify everyone. It is strange to reflect that all the boon companions I met in that converted mill were regarded as convicted criminals. Stakehill was called a detention barracks camp rather than a military prison. Shepton Mallet qualified for that description though it never got a quarter the notoriety of Stakehill. But prison it was. There may have been a few there guilty of crimes against society, but not many, as these went to civil jails. The overwhelming majority were a credit to the nation, though the State treated them as a debit. These were fine people who could have been, and many who had been or subsequently were, useful to the community. Yet for some minor infraction of absurdly imposed regulations or breach of discipline, and sometimes not even as much, we were kept in cages. It was Brixton Gaol all over again but more so.
I was treated with immense kindness by fellow prisoners, or soldiers under sentence, as the preferred phrase was. There was a general belief I had been treated shabbily though I don’t suppose I had been treated worse than anyone else. It was from a personal point of view a considerable downgrading when, after Christmas (needless to say celebrated in captivity) the establishment was closed down and everyone transferred. I went to Sowerby Bridge, a hell in comparison to the much-maligned Stakehill, though it is conceivable Stakehill had been as bad before the tragedy. It was on my birthday that January (listening to different ‘cases’) I determined some day I would do whatever lay in my power to help political prisoners and those unjustly or unfairly convicted. I hope I kept that promise.
The staff at Sowerby Bridge had been told that the incoming prisoners from Stakehill were near mutiny. They were told we had been pampered and needed to be treated with brutality. The truth is at no time would there have been actual mutiny. It needed only a few rumoured buzzwords like ‘Amnesty by Christmas’, such as visiting VIPs liked to spread, plus a few ‘suspended sentences’ with soldiers released and returned to their units or even discharged, to restore normality. and quell incipient riots.
There was more dismay among some soldiers to find they’d been released but transferred to the ‘chunkies’ — the Pioneer Corps — than among those staying on in their third year of captivity.
Pack drill ‘at the double’ was the norm at Sowerby Bridge, though this form of punishment did not go as far as it did in most countries, and in the British Army too in previous (and I suppose later) years. If one simply declined to go ‘on the double’ there was nothing whatever the staff did or could do. There were insults, but few if any beatings up. Occasionally people became violent under persistent insults and assaulted a guard, and were knocked down by a few staff ganging together; even so the guards were very careful after the Stakehill incident.
In the main the people prepared to ‘skive’ and not go on the double were in the Pioneer Corps already, or did not mind being transferred to it on release, whereas the others were under psychological pressure to show they were good soldiers. There were exceptions, such as a few old soldiers (some who had WWI experience) or some who felt they were on the way out. But some had been in the army for years and lost the benefits of their past service, whether pensions or discharge money, for some drunken spree, and were hoping to regain it by good behaviour.
One RAF ground staff prisoner from the British West Indies, was persistently racially insulted by the staff and unused to such taunts as he might have been today. At that time Afro-Caribbean troops were popular among the public and their arrival in Britain from the boats greeted with huge applause. He went berserk under the verbal pressure and was taken to the punishment cells, where we could hear his roars of pain. There were shouts of protest that could not be quelled from every one of the mass cages, and had the warders dared to unlock the doors for parades outside there would possibly have been mass mutiny. Afterwards things did ease a little. I did not see the Jamaican again but was told he had been transferred.
On one occasion Marie Louise Berneri was visiting some Spanish soldiers stationed nearby, and came to Sowerby Bridge to see me and John Olday. Visitors were absolutely forbidden. But she was allowed in, partly because the commanding officer was intrigued at the situation. Here was a beautiful foreigner calling in casually asking to see two entirely different prisoners, neither of them related! He detected a spy drama, and picked up the word ‘anarchist’. God knows what it meant to him.
To my surprise I was ushered in to a pleasant chat with her, but surrounded by screws, one or two even carrying sidearms. One shorthand writer, trying to look inconspicuous, was frantically trying to keep up with us while the others were trying to understand the plot; or at least the jargon. At one point she was politely asked “keep the conversation in English, please”, having used some undoubtedly French word like ‘bourgeois’ and there was no interpreter available.
Meanwhile Olday, who had been plucked from a different cage, was outside waiting his turn under an equally formidable guard, and having seen me go in, was wondering just what was going on. The only phrase dropped in his earshot was an ominous ‘attempted international anarchist intervention’.
This proved to be the only social visit I had. When I applied for compassionate leave on hearing from Rozzie that she was to have a child, it was greeted with derision, though as we weren’t married it probably would have been rejected anyway. Eventually an entirely unexpected situation brought about my release after some fourteen months. I had persuaded a lot of my colleagues that we should make common cause with the Jamaican RAF personnel, pointing out that when the staff got away with insulting them, they felt safer in abusing us.
I did not feel myself making much headway until one day, a staff sergeant shouted on a strenuous parade, “Okay, the two coons fall out and let me see how the rest of you manage”, particularly uncalled for as the problem was that the two West Indian aircraftsmen were doing the drill well, and the purpose of having them fall out was to correct the others. Quite spontaneously, sixty out of seventy Whites fell out. The staff was livid, and (though I wasn’t present) one of the informers, of whom there were always a few, claimed afterwards it was due to my urging as indeed I hope it was.
I was being accused of planning mutiny before I even knew what had happened, and the unexpected punishment was that I was put on the next batch of suspended sentences, and out of the place within twenty-four hours.
It was so sudden that I was taken to a King’s Royal Rifle Corps depot and told I was to accompany their unit to Greece, which as it was in revolutionary turmoil at the time seemed inconsistent, though I didn’t object. The commandant seemed determined to get me out of the country come what may. I had no time to get kit, not even a cap, and did the journey in a steel helmet and what I stood up in.
Once again I was lucky in that the KRRC corporal escorting me to the Dover Castle asked permission of the young officer to let me off handcuffs, and enabled me to phone home and arrange for my parents to meet me on the platform when we changed trains at London. They gave me some cash, which I lived on for the next three weeks. When we stopped over in Dover others on sentences, only suspended once at sea, arrived in handcuffs and were locked up for the night. They had no money and no pay day for three weeks. I however could go out for a drink with the KRRC. Once again I had found a friendly corporal who said to me, “I don’t know how you got into detention with such nice parents”, thinking of it, as some do of prison, as the result of neglected upbringing.
** 05 On ‘Active’ Service; the Marquis and the Maquis; the Cairo Mutiny; Bounty on the Mutiny
*** <em>On ‘Active’ Service</em>
We crossed the Channel in early 1946 and took a train, so packed that men were even sleeping on the luggage racks, across France to Marseilles. Our only contact with the outside world was with the dispirited people we saw at stations, and the main thing they were interested in was cigarettes. ‘Liberation’ had worn off a few months earlier; now, when anyone stole anything, they referred to it as ‘being liberated’.
We stopped over a day in Marseilles. Most of the draft, young men out of England for the first time, went off looking for the brothels. A couple of KRs attached themselves to me thinking I, with my knowledge of French, might lead them to a good time, but in the first bar we entered I discovered a Catalan railwayman with connections with the local Maquis. He invited me to meet his family and told how the Spanish anarchist exiles had been the originators of the underground Maquis, and the first to march into both Toulouse and Paris.
I felt humble having little to tell but an exercise in futility, and enjoyed the news and the hospitality. I wish I could say the same of my two companions, whom I had taken to a political discussion they could not understand, rather than sex, and whose contribution could not go beyond “Tell him he has a beautiful daughter.” Neither spoke French though one of them had spent five school years ‘learning’ French and had probably passed examinations in it, but his oral best was to produce endless cigarettes saying, “Tres bon, cigarette, tres bon.” The other could only repeat the inevitable “wee wee wee”. They boasted afterwards of having had a good meal with ‘some locals’ but I suspect they would have preferred an evening in the brothels like the rest.
*** <em>The Marquis and the Maquis</em>
Perhaps I should insert the anecdote of the Franco-Spanish Marquis here, though I was told it some years later, by Paco Gomez, and later had it confirmed by Miguel Garcia. It was one of the lighter ways in which the Spanish and Hispano-French Resistance maintained itself during those difficult years,
A Spanish conde of the old school, arrogant and vindictive like most of the kind but not wanting to risk his own life, had sat out the civil war in the comfort of Biarritz and fallen in love with the French way of life as experienced by the upper classes. He settled in a Paris chateau and, like many a rich Frenchman, discovered how pleasantly Nazi occupation changed life for them by crushing the working class completely. The only thing to mar his pleasure was the absence of cheap domestic service in plenty owing to the exigencies of war, and he sent, naturally enough, for Spaniards. El conde failed to consider the only workers wanting to get into Nazi-occupied France were those wanting to get <em>out of</em> Franco’s Spain.
The whole staff from butler to chambermaid were his sworn enemies but the poor fool probably was proud to be among Spaniards who had been taught their place. After a few weeks domestic bliss, the noble pair attended a function one night in 1940. The Polish opera singer and film star in (pre-1939) London and Berlin, Jan Kiepura, was giving a charity concert to which all society was present.
After the glittering occasion, and a bafflingly slow ride home, the marquis and marquesa returned to find their chateau stripped from top to bottom, the staff gone, every stick of furniture and all their possessions bar what they stood up in ransacked, down to the wine cellar (I said to Miguel, who liked his bevvy, “I bet I know who had that”). As they stood at the door stupefied in their furs and diamonds, the chauffeur drove off forever with the car. Hopefully it was raining and there was an air raid at the time, but that I don’t know.
*** <em>The Cairo Mutiny</em>
Well, talking of spoiling the Egyptians, I duly arrived in Egypt. We were taken to the camp of Heliopolis, just outside Cairo. The KRRC draft went from there to Greece, but I was detached to go to a transit camp ‘to await my own unit’. This was another of the Army’s games. The KRRC shoved its ‘trouble-makers’ into the Pioneer Corps, and it wasn’t having the reverse apply. The Pioneer Corps, having no other corps in turn in which to shove people they didn’t want, sent their unwanted overseas, and ‘lost’ them in a transit camp. In the so-called ‘transit’ camp in Abbassia, to which I was transferred, some had been waiting for a posting for years.
Four Irish lads in the Pioneers permanently ‘awaiting posting’ had actually got posted the week I arrived despite Republican associations. They had been flown down as reinforcements to guard an internment camp for Jewish terrorists from Palestine in Kenya. The first day they were there, a break-out had occurred through one omitting to lock the gates, and the commandant had asked sarcastically if they realised what a prison was.
“We should do,” one answered laconically. “We’ve done enough bird ourselves”. The commandant, a military man of the old school, was so indignant that GHQ Cairo had sent him people with a ‘bad record’ he flew them back next day. Their trip cost a small fortune at a time when at home austerity was being rigidly enforced, but anything goes in the sacred name of Defence. Someone who had said goodbye to the lads on Tuesday in Cairo met them on the Friday and asked if the plane had been delayed!
Everyone was looking forward to demob. The magic words were being uttered ‘Demob by Christmas’, which had a familiar ring. Yet the actual conditions of this type of existence, especially compared with detention, were hardly onerous when one thinks of how other armies treated their malcontents.
One could take a tram into Cairo, even spend weeks in private houses and wear civilian clothes, and provided one kept in touch ‘to see if a posting came up on the board’, no regulation was infringed or if it did no one gave a damn; whereas hanging about the camp dutifully and aimlessly meant one could always be called upon for routine tasks.
The people in charge were the camp police, and as our mail had to be picked up from their guard room they knew we hadn’t gone over the hill. They were just unpaid lance-corporals who had got stuck in transit themselves, sometimes because the unit to which they were attached had moved on while they were in hospital. There were always one or two ready to oblige by notifying the few who had ‘gone private’ if we were wanted. One would even arrange to pick up the pay for people in return for the odd favour.
I was among rare exceptions in ‘going private’ — or ‘going wog’ as they put it (two or three others who did so were locally recruited people who had homes in Cairo). It seemed to me incredible, and still does, that the overwhelming majority would not even leave the barracks, when they would have discovered other soldiers walking about freely. They believed themselves under siege.
To walk out into the street and mingle with the crowds seemed to them the height of foolhardiness. I was regarded as mad because I would leave the main gate of the barracks and disappear down a sinister dark alleyway opposite, the short cut to the tramway. Everyone expected me to get my throat cut gratuitously. Some might go in a pick-up truck to a Services canteen but only twice did I persuade a few, really daring, to go to a downtown cinema with me (it was “The Al Jolson Story” that did the trick) as opposed to the camp cinema. Even so, they wouldn’t take the tram and preferred a taxi and only then because we were four passengers to the driver, one of us was a particularly tough character and I was reckoned to be in the know as to what was going on in the town, which indeed I was — it was tranquil.
People lounging round in such circumstances, living an utterly pointless existence just because somebody in Whitehall thought someone might run off with the Suez Canal, and with an indeterminate date of service, become bored. A lot sought out jobs around the transit camp, for instance in the cookhouse, for the sake of something to do. When the war had been on, people could be persuaded that staying in the army was inevitable or even worthwhile. Even that consolation had been deprived the minority held back from the front by policy; now the forced time-wasters were in the majority. Under the slogan ‘Roll on demob’ rather than anything high-falutin, the background developed for Soldiers Councils.
I digress, to show how things get distorted. Forty years later a Richard Kisch was writing a book (<em>The Years of the Good Soldiers</em>) purporting to show how brave the British Communists were in war and how valiant in resisting conscription in peace. To attempt to prove this crap, he phoned me out of the blue. I had never heard of him but it transpired subsequently he was the father-in-law of a minor journalist who closely collaborated with a bitter opponent of mine. He asked me if I had ever met Brendan Behan. I said I had met the novelist once, in company of many others, when he was released from prison for his involvement in an IRA bombing campaign but knew nothing more about him. He asked if I had anything to do with the Cairo Parliament. Many so-called researchers confused the ‘Parliament’, a debating forum, with the much later strikes and councils. I explained I hadn’t — it had happened before I was ever in Cairo and probably not one of the people concerned remained in Cairo by the time I was there. That was all I said.
On the strength of this information he wrote his account, audaciously thanking me, “an Anarchist writer” (he wouldn’t mention my paid occupation, that was for “real workers” i.e. CPers) for my help, in an introduction. He wrote that I had been involved in an IRA bombing campaign; gone to prison but been released on condition of joining the Army; had sought political refuge in Common Wealth (about the unkindest cut of all) which had formed the ‘Parliament’, and had tried to form soldiers councils to sabotage the war effort ‘the way the Anarchists did in Catalonia’ (real Stalinist malice). This farrago of nonsense was later supported by Philip Sansom, whom he seemed to have consulted, and was presumably deliberate distortion. I asked the publishers to retract, but they would not without a solicitor’s letter. The wretched Kisch went missing when he feared a libel action, which someone had previously assured him I would not bring. Nicolas Walter, the managing director of the Rationalist Press Association, and Sansom and his cronies crowed derisively how I had muzzled poor Mr Kisch and so much for my belief in free speech.
The issues debated by the much earlier Cairo ‘Parliament’ foreshadowed the coming event of a Labour Government, when Common Wealth (which ran it) melted away overnight in its sun (though the Tory-Fascist GHQ had thought it dangerous). It had nothing to do with the situation that developed in 1946 throughout the Middle East, when Labour Government was in power at Westminster. What happened in 1946 was a wave of strikes, not a debating society on political issues.
The UK newspapers gave little prominence to the strikes for demob. So far as I know, only a couple of paragraphs appeared in the home press, though anybody with cursory knowledge of how the Army worked must have known, as officers insisted, that there was in the military sense no such thing as the word ‘strikes’ in the industrial sense: it was mutiny.
The mutiny, if that is really how one should describe it was triggered off in an atmosphere some years in time and light years in atmosphere from the optimistic and loyal Cairo ‘Parliament’ which was concerned with the better life after the war socialism would bring about. It was now 1946 and supposedly the better years after the war with socialism in power! Everybody was sick and tired of the Army and excuses for being in it had run out. Those who had been held back from actual participation in the fighting were even more bitter than those who had been fighting and were due for earlier demob and none too happy when told they should think themselves lucky.
This was especially so as the majority of people in such a position had been strong anti-fascists, and the Army officers in Cairo at the time appeared to be fascists. This may be accounted partly by the fact that the professionals, who had served in Palestine, were anti-semitic and pro-Arab as far as rich Arabs went but despised ‘wogs’. They also hated the new Labour Government, and looked down on the ‘common soldiers’, contrasting them with the well-disciplined German prisoners of war. Almost the only exceptions were among the non-career officers.
When there was an announcement that fewer boats could be spared for demobilisation purposes, and that it had to be slowed down anyway because of resettlement difficulties at home, an unofficial meeting in Ezbekiah Gardens in the centre of Cairo, which even got transit camp soldiers out into the open. We decided to send a respectful enquiry to GHQ at Kasr-el-Nil, composed of a few soldiers making legitimate enquiries of welfare officers before any protest action was taken.
A sympathetic non-career officer explained that front-line service was still needed in Greece, Palestine and Malaysia, as well as holding down liberated territories against the Russians, and that was why demob was held up. It wasn’t a question of punitive action, except perhaps against the sort of riffraff that had been shipped out to the transit camps. They would be kept out of England for some time, but all decent soldiers could reckon the Government would get them home as soon as replacements came.
This, conveyed back to the next Saturday meeting at Ezbekiah Gardens, caused an uproar. One after another got up to call for action. Those in the ‘decent’ category protested at the idea they were going into battle again, hardly to oppose Nazism which they were supposed to have been enlisted to fight. I got up on behalf of the ‘riffraff’ to say if this was how a ‘sympathetic’ officer viewed us, one could hazard a shrewd guess at what the fascist type thought of us. Were we out here to be transported slaves? I got carried away with my own rhetoric, but that’s an occupational hazard of speaking and never did any harm.
There was still hesitation as to what to do and when someone put forward a resolution about writing to MPs and it got carried I started a separate group, making no secret of my own position. One of the active fighters in this group was a squaddie named ‘Ginger’ Foran (it must have related to his verve, not his hair), formerly a Republican (De Valera brand) who later emigrated to Australia. Another in the group, Mick O’Callaghan, was someone who had come along to one of the camp meetings I used to have with the intention of disruption, but, though I never was much of an orator, stayed to agree with every word. He became the first to raise the question of Soldiers Councils.
We learned that Royal Air Force personnel in the Canal Zone and in other parts of the Middle East had stopped work in protest at the same news conveyed even more tactlessly to them (the reference to ‘riff raff’ was misheard as ‘RAF’). We had no contact with the airmen, who were in isolated airfields. I suppose it was confined to ground staff but without them the planes could not move. We convened another meeting and this time a strike was agreed on. Mick put forward the plan of a meeting to co-ordinate activities, composed of councils from every unit serving in Cairo and the Canal Zone. Though it was agreed to suspend all drill, rosters and work, we could not get the majority to agree not to do guard duties. They were under the impression that the Egyptians would break into garrisons and kill them if they did so.
There was considerable unrest in the main cities but nobody outside our small group would listen to the idea of making common cause with Egyptian civilians. Any deficiencies in aims or organisation were made up by the type of enthusiasm unleashed by VE and VJ days, the feeling that the years of war were at last really over and the type of joy in liberation shown in Europe. Our tyrants had been blander, partly because they had been forced to be, but they were not loved better for that.
For weeks formerly arrogant young officers found themselves insulted and even attacked, and some took to going round the streets only by car at the expense of H.M. Government, rather than be observed in Army jeeps. GHQ was scared out of its wits fearing revolution, though with no civilian backing it was not on the cards. Staff officers even condescended to address us, largely on the theme of how ‘our’ Labour Government was threatened by our actions, and though we were letting it down, surely we did not suppose that it was going to let us down. A few did fall for this line. Another, more convincingly, told us, “‘You don’t suppose it’s us so-called militarists who want you in the Army? It’s a bad time for us as well as you — we want to get back to real discipline and to the ways we’re accustomed. The damned socialist bureaucrats make us take you, and have you, but if it were left to us we’d send you home tomorrow and good riddance”.
Though few believed this, he proved to be speaking the truth, as ultimately peace-time conscription was ended once the Tories were back in power and there was no need for Labour reformers to ‘prove’ their patriotism. The ‘so-called militarists’ reverted to the skilled militarist professional army. The German POWs were in an anomalous position. By this time they had been put into regular slave labour units, often controlled by the Pioneer Corps. Even more than the British soldiers they longed for repatriation, but they felt hardly in a position to go on strike, and they had no orders as to what to do if nobody turned up to guard them. So their own NCOs took command and they carried on their duties, even driving trucks through the town in a disciplined manner that won the admiration of the officer class. As a result, it was more than ever determined not to part with them a moment too soon.
In November 1946 there were stoppages in Tel-el-Kebir followed by Port Said, Suez, Abbasia and Cairo. From being Saturday-only strikes — when the meetings were held — they had become general. Still there was no attempt to get local support, while at home the House of Commons was put off with vague statements: ‘everything was again normal.’
There was no real contact with the RAF where the strike was soon led by a group of Communist Party members, especially Aircraftsman Cymbalist. I ran him into him years later, running a small buckle manufacturers, a bit shaken by his experiences. They had more difficulties than we. It was easy for the Army to threaten detention or the dreaded transfer to the chunkies, or to appeal to tradition. The RAF could neither transfer nor use other deterrents bar discharge or severe penalties. They proposed instead to move base, a move prevented by the Tel-el-Kebir disturbances. The combined RAF and Army came down heavily on the strikers at Tel-el-Kebir and Suez. Several dozen NCOs and an unknown number of squaddies were arrested and charged, but in Cairo the strike went on.
It was finally ended by Garrison HQ in Kasr-el-Nil assuring us all that release dates would be restored. I don’t know if there was any pressure outside the Middle East but that was the main demand. They explained that National Service was going to be introduced in which 18 year olds would serve for a fixed period of time. Meanwhile demobilisation would proceed according to numbers to be issued. They hotly denied anyone had spoken of ‘riffraff’, saying we had misheard “RAF”.
Many units went home for demob right away. Even those of us on the outcast list were assured that we would go into normal units immediately and all service taken into account, which had never been expected. Entitlements of leave and demob when due would be restored.
The soldiers councils only lasted two months. It was exhilarating while it lasted — almost a foretaste of workers power. One can see why it has been glossed over by journalists and distorted by historians, even confused with the debating society of a few years before. There were no martyrs in Cairo so far as I know, though it is true the Army has ways of hushing these things up. Some of the RAF were charged and received enormous sentences but in almost all cases they were not confirmed, or cut drastically.
It was decided a policy of forget and forgive was the most expedient. There was no victimisation in the Army. An adjutant at Kasr-ele-Nil looked into ‘individual grievances’ which he conceded, but was unable to rectify. As a result of my grievance I was even granted a month’s local leave in Palestine, others receiving similar douceurs. I think they thought we were being mollified. It was an unusual ending for something that had been described as mutiny, and a great feeling to find the awe in which we were held when there was nothing more we could do anyway!
*** <em>Bounty on the Mutiny</em>
When I returned from home leave in 1947, which followed on the additional local leave I had previously had, I found I was posted to a regular Pioneer Corps unit that had arrived in the Canal Zone near Ismailia, and for the first time was expected to take up regular Army duties. It was somewhat of a climax after the heady days of soldiers councils, for others as well as me, but ‘normal service had been resumed’, or as far as we were concerned, started.
While home, Roz had begged me to finish off normally without getting into any more trouble. I had already faced two court-martials, and she felt I would I never get out. There was, however, one more incident in which I lost my temper with a fairly obnoxious garrison major and hit him. In for a penny, in for a pound: I also put the boot in. I had been several times unjustly convicted but on this occasion I was acquitted, so I can fairly say justice was done. I therefore decided to play it a bit cooler, though I became what is known as a barrack room lawyer.
Professional officers sneer at a soldier who takes up the problems and wrongs of his comrades. They think these should be referred to the welfare officer or the padre, and sometimes one or the other can actually help, but usually even then not unless the soldier has been told what to say and how to say it. It is something like being a shop steward, though one can only go so far. Nobody has ever paid them tribute yet it was not the qualified lawyers from the Inns of Temple, but the so-called barrack room lawyers who kept the flame of liberty alight in the Services through its darkest years.
All that happened to me as the result of constantly taking up cases, sometimes as ‘soldiers’ friend’, and playing a fairly active part in the councils when they existed, was that I was made a corporal. Majors did not want to disgrace court-martial officers by having to deal with a smart-alec private. I do not think my promotion (I jumped lance-corporal) was for soldierly qualities or loyal service, unless perhaps someone saw something I missed. It seemed it was, like the time I got released from Stakehill, a case of bounty on the mutiny.
The Army was in a virtual state of war with the Jews in Palestine when Ernest Bevin, having stated firmly he was determined to hold on to the colonial mandate, suddenly abandoned it in the face of terroristic attacks by a section of Zionists. The forces, who had no real interest and no ideological excuse for being there, were totally disillusioned with the whole set-up. There were anti-semitic songs going round about ‘The holy but now hostile land’. It did not affect us, now in Moascar, except that a group of deserters known as the Schofield Gang were active buying and selling arms, while in Cairo itself many local Jewish agents were buying arms from Egyptian and British soldiers alike and smuggling them over.
I did my best to persuade people not to become involved. For a few quid it wasn’t worth it, though very tempting for soldiers who had been rebuffed for years or whose services had been devalued by detention. One elderly civilian I had often met in town, known as Weizmann though this may have been an alias (he was not the Jewish leader, later President), in the local newspaper offices and in Groppi’s (a centre for ice cream and intrigue), proved to be one such agent. He was sentenced to twenty years in a desert fortress. Though old and frail he escaped after a week, it was said by overpowering his guards and making his escape through the desert into Israeli-held territory. I can only assume that he had suddenly produced a cheque book which made his guards helpless. Soldiers, though, were less likely to be so agile.
What was making headway now amongst soldiers was the Communist Party. The cold war was beginning, sympathies switched to them. Troops coming back from Greece were particularly susceptible. It was hard for me to be both cautioning people against getting involved with arms trafficking to Zionists, and to be also attacking State Communism, yet trying to differentiate oneself from the Establishment. I was a voice literally in the wilderness. It was the more humiliating because one could do nothing else and some officers thought the rank of corporal might be having its effect. Fortunately, as National Service was beginning, my services and those of almost all in my position were no longer required. They did not want us corrupting a new start.
National Service, for a fixed term of two years applying to all eighteen year olds, was now in effect, though demobilisation of the old conscripts had not been completed. The first peace-time conscription was the militia call-up in 1939, which had brought in the twenty year olds allegedly for a definite period, in practice for six or seven years, and had been superseded by the indefinite all-round call-up. But National Service did not last, unlike on the Continent. The Labour politicians loved standing in civilian clothes and getting saluted and felt it would be unpatriotic to abolish it though the Service chiefs felt it was more trouble than it was worth. Finally, the Tories abolished it and reverted to the skilled professional army.
I sailed on the “Otranto” from Alexandria to Southampton, and was demobilised at Aldershot with a good character reference. It had been upped from ‘Fair’, which is almost the lowest category and had been static for years, when the company commander realised this was a nonsensical grading for someone upped to acting sergeant, and cast an unfavourable light on the commanding officer. Not that it ever mattered in the slightest.
** 06 Back in the Old Routine; The Spanish Resistance; The 374 Monster; Ruling the Waves; Three Minute Celebrity
*** <em>Back in the old routine</em>
I was now at the break in life routine and at the age when enthusiasm tends to wane, and if one carries on any longer one becomes known as a ‘veteran’. Stubbornness carried the day against the advice that it was certainly now ‘high time to settle down’ as my family and friends said in principle and most of my contemporaries were doing in practice. Any pretence of there being an anarchist movement had collapsed with the effects of the ‘split’.
Most of my previous political colleagues had gone into purely trade union activity rather despairing of any chance of other activity in the drab era we were facing. When Orwell wrote of the bleak world of 1984 he was satirising 1948, not prophesying, but the learned critics misunderstood his message. In the same way, when he wrote <em>Animal Farm</em> he was attacking the Communist Party from a left wing angle, but this time he was too clever by half and the right wing enthused.
Any enthusiasm for the Labour Party among the working class had waned considerably though the more vociferously the media attacked it, the more it retained some credibility. What was left of the old working class movement was steadily being taken over by outsiders, a process which had begun during the war when defending class seemed less relevant than opposing war.
I had been discharged from the Army in much better condition than a great many, certainly physically, but I had no gratuity — just enough to live on for two or three weeks, no possessions, and a then incomprehensible blank wall against getting employment though there was plenty of work about.
In addition, Rozzie decided to return to her husband, whose companion had died or been deserted. He offered better security for her old age which was a long way off — she was only twenty-six at the time. It is ironic that he died forty years later leaving her penniless, and I paid the funeral expenses for old time’s sake.
My parents were supportive, but I didn’t want to live off them and they couldn’t have borne to see me sink. At pains I got a job, but it meant false references and a slight change of identity (I juggled with my forenames) which would seem an unnecessary price to pay for indifferent warehouse employment. It would seem, though illegal, one way to beat the secret compilers of blacklists, presumably the Economic League.
Notwithstanding the glowing references I had given myself, there was the usual humiliation of a job interview — how I loathed that process of selling oneself! I was asked what interest I had in the textile trade. Some people might be interested in the textile trade at that end of it, but most surely would only be doing it for what cash it brought in. That was considered a dreadful confession only counter-balanced by the brilliant ability and experience conveyed by the references.
It was the heyday of the textile trade, when clothes rationing meant woollen merchants could not put a foot wrong, They ordered stock and by the time the mills had completed their order, it was worth many times as much as the merchants had contracted to pay, and there was a shrinking supply and growing demand on top. The mills could not be bothered to sell to the tailor in smaller qualities, and the emphasis on export meant the home market was glad to pay any price. Those were still the days when the tailor still boomed: everyone wore suits and even the poorest had a best suit, even if it spent a lot of its life in the pawnshop. Yet while profits were soaring, wages were still low and hours needlessly long.
The smallish firm for which I worked was not the worst for wages in Golden Square, headquarters of the wholesale textile merchants, but the managing director would spend hours in the morning holding up work, in one-sided conversations with his meek partner. He’d then go on until three in the afternoon haranguing different members of the staff in turn, and then expect them to work until all hours to finish their long-delayed day’s work. Even the office staff worked every Saturday morning, but as his habit was more or less the same on that day too, some of them, especially his long-suffering and devoted secretary, stayed until four and regarded those who did not as disloyal clock-watchers. They had been working there twenty years or so and put the firm first.
Trying to organise a small staff like that, and one accustomed to bullying in the bargain, was a herculean task, especially as all were of different trades and there was no union interested. I tried to link up with some other firms around Golden Square and as strike action was well-nigh impossible, with only two or three per house prepared even to talk about it, I adopted a tactic well in accord, one would have thought, with Conservative principles. As there was a labour shortage, I persuaded people I contacted in the local lunch bars to exchange notes on the ‘market’ state of wages and conditions. Some firms were not too bad, others utterly deplorable, and all were prepared to grab one another’s skilled staff.
Hell hath no fury like employers thus scorned by ungrateful scoundrels treacherously conspiring to raise their wages, especially when the dangerous reds from the Board of Trade said there was no case for prosecution. This for them was socialism red in tooth and claw and anything more would have caused spontaneous combustion. The only remedy they had was to appeal to staff that the Labour Government blessed their efforts at the export trade; and when that didn’t work, to raise wages. Mine had trebled until one day I came into work to find the door locked against me with a message that I was sacked — I was handed a coat I had left, and got a fortnight’s wages in lieu of notice on my threatening to sue. Apparently someone seeking advancement had mentioned my name, as well as others elsewhere. It didn’t do the firm any good — within two months most of the staff, other than the faithful secretary, had departed. Though the effect of years under minor tyranny was they gave notice when the hectoring managing director was on an extended sales trip, preferring to face his meek partner with intimation of their disloyalty in leaving.
I translated a couple of books to keep the pot boiling, but I did not do too well on translations financially. On the first the advance was paid to someone else who had originally contracted to do it and I was left with the remaining royalties. Even so the publisher, Arthur Barker, brought out a paperback edition without informing me, and complained bitterly when I discovered it inadvertently. On the second, after I had typed and re-typed it, I was persuaded by the publishers to pay a professional typist for the finished job, which meant she got more for typing one draft than I did for typing two and translating as well. It was hardly economic, so I joined Reuters as a translator, to find I could earn as much as a copytaker, and do a lot less work. I gave up translating for copytaking. The translators, then at any rate, cut each others throats while the copytakers organised with others in the print.
I quite enjoyed the atmosphere at Reuters, which at that time was fairly free-and-easy for copytakers. Unionwise it was fairly tightly sewn up. Later Reuters declined in comparative organisation and wages, and as far as copytakers were concerned became a place where they started in Fleet Street and then, having learned the trade, moved on.
Around that time, visiting Spain, I had met some of the veterans of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT. Abroad, the emigration kept itself intact, almost an extended family. The exile group in London was moribund. It followed the quietistic lead of the ossified organisation in Toulouse, now unwilling to call itself by its own name (and referring to itself as the MLE — Spanish Libertarian Movement). It gave no help to the CNT-FAI Resistance within Spain. It was years before anyone outside learned much about the Resistance which was then at its peak. The harsh situation in which the exiles found themselves meant they could not mount a challenge to the Toulouse-centred organisation, but within Spain the syndicalist union was painfully being reconstructed despite the genocide.
There had long been an illusion in Spain that ‘the democracies’ would not allow Franco to get away with it. It was painful for them when one argued against this illusion, still going strong up to ten years after the war. The Allied powers had not gone to war to ‘preserve democracy’: they had gone to war to preserve themselves. The enemy in the second world war was totalitarian just as in WWI German militarism and monarchy was the enemy in the first. But in no case did any Power go to war for ideology, neither to smash totalitarianism, nor monarchy, nor militarism nor capitalism nor imperialism or any other ideology, nor did saying so serve any purpose other than propaganda. The only exception in the warring powers was Hitler, who did allow ideological considerations to override commonsense. Russian State Communism had allied itself with Nazism, then with the capitalist West, but it was thinking of national boundaries and State interests. Though the British Embassy had made full use of the anti-Nazi activists in Spain, it had no intention of giving any reward.
In the action group of Barcelona I kept hearing about ‘la inglesa’ from Bilbao who was their contact with Andalucia, where she now lived. Catalans are fond of nicknames and they are not always accurate (I hope — I became known as ‘el gordo’). When I was due to meet ‘la inglesa’ I found that, though Basque, she had British nationality and used the access it gave her to maintain foreign contacts and to travel around freely, even in the days when others were in French concentration camps. I met her — and, to my surprise, she was Melchita, widow of my friend and mentor Wilson Campbell.
We made an appointment in the gardens of the Alcazar, Seville, and I recalled bathetically the first time I had met Billy was at the Alcazar, Edmonton.
*** <em>The Spanish Resistance</em>
From then on I got hooked into the Spanish Resistance. The quietistic bunch of exiles in London had not made much impression on me up to then. I subsequently found there were much better comrades than I thought amongst them but it is understandable that many had got settled into English ways and exile politics, with no idea as to the way ahead. Inside Spain, those who were not in prison were either into action groups which I did not then meet myself, as it would have been unfair to expect them to blow their cover, or trying to rebuild their unionisation structure.
It was very slow work for them as the police were everywhere, swarming over the country as if it were a conquered province, as indeed it was. So tight was the security that when, with the first wave of tourism, a London doctor came down into Catalonia by road in a touring caravan, his family camping out in the picturesque scenery and enjoying the sun and fresh air as countless thousands have done since, the Civil Guard assumed it was the head of an invading force of guerrillas coming over the border and shot the entire family down. They later blaming Sabater, who wasn’t even in the country at the time.
Gradually the Franco regime adapted itself to tourism. Even the Church had to give up its insistence on the police maintaining a strict watch on beaches, not fearing invasion but too-revealing bathing costumes. Grim-faced Civil Guards, who had carried out mass murders in the post-war genocide were detailed to order ladies back to the huts to put on approved bathing costumes. Meeting my contact Francisco Gomez with some papers I had brought from London, we decided the best place to meet was on the beach at San Sebastian. I panicked when the Civil Guard approached almost directly before I met him, but it was just that my London-bought trunks were not ‘sufficiently ample’ and threatened the morality of the Christian State. Strange to think my bodily charms, never before or since the subject of flattering comment, imperilled the vile regime!
Within a year or so the entire atmosphere changed. The tourist invasion with its huge spending broke down the dress restrictions, and police gave up supervising foreigners altogether. When I came in, first on charter flights and buses, often with football crowds, I was ignored by Spanish Immigration and Customs control. Later, when I came by car, I was waved through unquestioned, not even the passport, let alone the baggage, being checked. Even the occasional Spaniard in the car, whom we explained away if passports were actually requested as being a guide or interpreter, only impressed the Customs officer with the importance of tourists who could afford such luxuries. But usually an English number plate meant no questions asked.
Strange that the only place where searching questions were asked; cars and baggage searched; delays made up to two or three hours; dissident literature regarded if not equivalent to explosives, at least possibly indicative of their presence, was when one came back to England, where dissenting literature had been freely and legally printed and distributed for 150 unbroken years.
*** <em>The 374 Monster</em>
Since the split of 1944 I had been somewhat a lone wolf even in the few <em>soi-disant</em> anarchist groups. True, the majority of the remaining anarchists took the same position that I did, which was that neither of the two factions involved in the personality clash were viable groupings. The older workers were dying off and the younger dropping out of activity as everyday commitments grabbed them and the possibility of real achievement became remote.
A part of the majority section of the Anarchist Federation had become the Syndicalist Workers Federation and was fairly alive to industrial action. It was obstinacy on my part that I could not be reconciled with them owing to their domination by the Spanish exile group which supported the Toulouse centred organisation and opposed the Resistance, with which I felt personal ties.
On the other hand, the Freedom Press Group, which I never joined because of their lack of interest in class struggle and increasing fixation with academia, especially after the death at thirty-one years of age of M. L. Berneri in 1949, became quietistic up to the point when it even offered apologies for Herbert Read’s accepting a knighthood four years later.
Frank Leech was typical of many who, though unwilling to accept that Freedom Press had become Richards’ fief and was no longer owned by the anarchist movement, thought it was fantasy to say that Read, this lucid writer on anarchist philosophy, had taken a knighthood from Churchill. When told of it by a member of a factory gate audience at one of his outdoor Glasgow meetings of it, and assured it was in the <em>Sunday Record</em>, he said, “Blethers, I dinna believe what it says there — wait until <em>Freedom</em> comes out next week and we’ll hear the truth”. When he read that not only had Read accepted the knighthood but the Freedom editors offered ‘explanations’ and apologies, this great fighter dropped dead of apoplexy. It may have had no connection but I saw the warning: either I decreased my blood pressure or ceased effective collaboration with those liable to cause it to rise alarmingly.
Any remaining confidence I had in them vanished. I still wrote a few articles for <em>Freedom</em> here and there, seeking some new contacts, became secretary of this or that group and fresh attempt at an organisation with some purpose but knew it was a waste of time. A lot of my friends in the Labour Party felt the same way about electoral activity.
Ch’en Chang, a doctor in China — whom I had met in London in 1938 when he had been a medical student — was in contact with me from China where despite incredible problems, the rump of the once vast anarchist movement was struggling on. From India, Mohandas P. T. Acharya was still striving on his own in the whole sub-continent to establish a movement. Melchita from Spain, who was in touch with the Resistance, was now a regular correspondent.
I felt quite ashamed that, with no problems, there was no movement here to support them, and everything had gone down the drain. I formed an Asian prisoners aid committee, with support of some friends at work, to give some aid to Ch’en Chang to pass on, but it was woefully small. There was only one thing to do — try to re-structure the movement at least to give some solidarity back-up abroad.
The first attempt to do this, though it lasted a year (1953) and was a publishing success, was a failure in practical results. With Albert Grace, an old docker friend, and one or two others, we published <em>The Syndicalist</em>, a monthly paper which, it was hoped, would be the basis for an anarcho-syndicalist movement that was not tied to the SWF though it might at a later stage be able to co-operate. To produce it we sought the co-operation of Freedom Press. I still hadn’t learned my lesson, and supposed it still to belong to the anarchist movement, if in practice under the control of Richards. They still, however, recognised some sort of obligation and it was printed free at their printing press by Philip Sansom who also contributed some articles. He fancied himself a successor to Tom Brown in writing syndicalist articles for <em>Freedom</em>, though he had never worked outside Freedom Press and freelance art, and indeed later echoed the belief that working for a capitalist boss was some sort of shameful compromise, which didn’t say much for his interest in syndicalist organisation.
After a year’s run, Sansom announced the paper was to close because it was costing too much. Had it appeared twenty years earlier or twenty later it might have made an impact, but given the period, it passed without a ripple.
Although I gave up much hope after that of achieving anything, at least with them, I formed a private tenants sector in St. Pancras and we had some minor rent strikes but this fizzled out as people got rehoused. I carried on with some meetings, tried with some flagging interest in various libertarian groups and wrote a few articles. I had not realised that the Freedom Press Group, since it had broken away from the old Anarchist Federation, was degenerating into a privately owned publishing house. Any venture like <em>The Syndicalist</em> only boosted their credibility. Articles in <em>Freedom</em>, however they opposed its policy, did the same.
Suddenly I got a request by Acharya to stage an art exhibition of the works of his companion Magda Nachman, who had just died. She had joined him in Moscow in the early Twenties, when he had been in the Comintern as a fervent young Indian nationalist until he lost his illusions in State Communism. They had moved to Berlin and had shared the problems of exile. She was making a name as an artist, and was featured in Hitler’s famous Exhibition of Decadent Art when they moved to Bombay. Starting again from scratch, she had specialised in Indian subjects. Acharya wrote me despairingly he could not bear to think she would be forgotten and asked me to arrange an exhibition in London.
I knew the art world wouldn’t be impressed by a letter from me in furnished rooms. But simultaneously I was asked to open an office as a front for the Spanish Resistance by Francisco Gomez. He had some connection with the campaign that followed the smashing of the Tallion Group in Spain after Sabater was killed and many arrested, Miguel Garcia among others being sentenced to death (commuted to twenty years as the result of pressure).
On two counts I had, therefore, to open an office. It was then impossible to get a house or flat, at least with the nil resources I had, but business premises posed no problem. I took a couple of office rooms at 374 Grays Inn Road: it is worth commenting on the building, which had played an important part in Dissident London since the early thirties. Over a milk bar almost facing Kings Cross Station there was quite a warren of small rooms all suitable for letting out. It had housed a moneylender on the first floor, but above that had been the offices of a variety of left-wing causes, from the embryonic Unity Theatre to the International Brigade Association, various Indian prisoners associations (all rival), peace groups and breakaway unions. Later there were also the Connolly Association, the Militant Tendency and the Oehlerites, until it finally passed into the hands of <em>Time Out</em>. Some rightist commentators later thought there was some sinister connection between them all. But it was quite fortuitous. It was simply cheap and run-down.
The owners were a railway excess properties trust, headed by Sir Bernard Docker, which enables me to say misleadingly that when I finally became the superior lessee, the famous international socialite of the Sixties, Lady Docker was my landlady.
The lessee who had taken over the lease when the moneylender had ceased business and the building had become vacant was entertaining, plausible and shady. For what it was worth he totally took me and a great many others in, though he never did very well out of it. He had been working for the type of space-selling trade directory in which a small business is persuaded to part with cash for an entry in a trades directory and the seller and publisher get half each. There is no salary or other contract. [The publisher gets half of each sale, even if the salesperson doesn’t make enough sales to cover bus fares, and doesn’t publish until they have enough revenue (some not at all).] The value to the client, who often forgets ever putting in an ‘entry’, is nil.
The publisher can’t lose, but Levene had been a successful salesman, with a technique based on straining people’s politeness till they either threw him out or gave in. The company offered to take him on salary. He felt this a trick as indeed it was. He was earning too much for their liking, and he tried throttling the managing director, which strained his relationship with the firm, and he therefore set up in his own. This is what pushed him into dubious dealing — he had never done so before. He produced dummy copies of directories and papers that never appeared and to cover the rent of the building let out the top floor to a business lady who was somewhat coy as to what her business was.
I told him I wouldn’t stay in the same building once her clients, though respectable enough in their bowler hats and suits, made it quite clear to me what the business was. He persuaded me to come into publication with him when he had got her out. I am afraid I was a sitting duck. I produced a dummy fashion trade magazine, not that I knew anything about fashion. My girl friend Evie did and she persuaded me into the venture. He offered me twice as much as I was earning at Reuters to work for him. I gave up my job accordingly.
We started a trade paper, based on his financial castle in the air. It was built on kite-flying, which is arranging with the bank to clear cheques immediately instead of waiting, and then swopping cheques with someone else who probably had nothing in the bank either but whose cheque would be honoured if another piece of paper could be found to cover it. This way two trade papers actually got off the ground but meanwhile I found that all the money coming in, such as it was, was going to him and only a fraction of my supposed salary going to me. I was being made responsible without realising it for all the gradually mounting debts.
Meanwhile he was letting out various rooms there, including the Movement for Colonial Freedom, many of whose supporters became important figures within independence struggles, much as many of Cores’s old Freedom Group speakers and habitues — George Padmore, Jomo Kenyatta, Krishna Menon — had done before. Some of the more sincere of this wave found themselves sidetracked, like Joseph Murumbi, or imprisoned like many others once national freedom had been achieved. Another was Abdul Rahman Babu, who zealously worked the duplicator. When he returned to Dar-es-Salaam it was as a Minister of State but not for long. He soon found himself in President Nyerere’s prisons.
As there were a number of Spanish emigre supporters of the MCF through Fenner Brockway, its chair, Gomez preserved his cover by claiming to be writing for the trade mags to explain his presence in the building. Levene suddenly discovered of himself — or so he said — that he had been made bankrupt years before and was thus illegally obtaining and living on credit, so he took the opportunity of my saying that I was Gomez’s employer by holding me out to his creditors as owner of the whole enterprise, and finally switched the lease to me.
He did find me an art gallery prepared to stage an exhibition of Magda Nachman’s paintings. It was things like that which made it hard to break off connections with him. Unfortunately, Acharya died suddenly. The Indian authorities blocked the export of Magda’s paintings and stated they had been claimed by Acharya’s legal widow, whom he had married at fifteen by parental arrangement and not seen for fifty odd years, and who thought she had come into unexpected treasure. So they vanished from sight.
Within eighteen months of my leaving Reuters I was going around without the price of a cup of coffee in my pocket at any one time, yet everyone I knew thought I was making a fortune. Why, I was managing editor of two papers. I had even a member of staff, Gomez, paid just for writing one article a month. I attracted unpublished writers like a magnet. As commercial television was about to start, one nutcase freelance tried to persuade me to start a magazine to cater for its audiences, with its programmes which he had learned the <em>Radio Times</em> wouldn’t carry. He was hesitant — yet insistent — on revealing his wonderful idea to me lest I start it and exclude him, as he knew it would be a money-spinner.
Indeed it proved to be so when, the following week, the <em>TV Times</em> came out — financed by somewhat more money than I carried round in my pocket — and this idiot felt I must have betrayed his confidence as nobody else could have thought of such an original idea, and if he’s still alive the poor sap probably thinks I still compete successfully with the <em>Radio Times</em>, and the fact that for years millions knew their Channel 3 and 4 programmes was due to his unfairly stolen brainwave.
Meanwhile I was visiting the county court regularly. Sometimes I had never heard of the creditor concerned, but Levene had run up debts in my name. Confronted with any reproach, he had an asthmatic seizure. It always occurred when confronted with reality — he was not conscious of defrauding anyone and lived in a fantasy world and always insisted he was trying to do his best for me.
I cut my losses and made a break with him though he never gave up popping back with fantastic schemes. Even I was not to be fooled when he began collecting subscriptions from back street East End tailors to place a deposit on a battleship. The idea was that having paid a small deposit, it would be sold to the Czechs, whose sole buying agency would deal with him (he insisted) as a still loyal Communist, as distinct from a normal trader. He had pointed out to all there was only one per cent commission — but on several million pounds. It is incredible that successful, but semi-literate, punters fell for this.
I have no idea from what port they thought the Czechs would operate their fleet, but in the course of his looking for backers, he had stumbled across Will Owen MP secretary of the Master Ladies Tailors Organisation, who had listened sympathetically. An old miners’ union official, in the Morpeth parliamentary seat as Buggins’ turn but a political and commercial innocent, he let himself be a sponsor. The Czech trading Consul approached with the bizarre scheme, dismissed it instantly but Czech Intelligence was attracted by the MP (it’s just possible they confused him with Dr Owen, the Foreign Secretary). For the next fifteen years they invited him to dinners, flattered him, gave him expense accounts for write-ups from trade magazines. Thus poor Mr Owen fell foul of British Intelligence. “Denounced” by a dodgy defector from Czech Intelligence, Josef Frolik, as a spy, though he had not even the chance of spying on anything or anybody, they brought a prosecution. The press thought him a left-winger, though he had always been well to the right if anything. He was an unsophisticated participant in someone else’s fantasy, as became clear in court. He was acquitted though disgraced and resigned his seat.
Meanwhile Levene had suddenly dropped dead in his thirties of a genuine asthmatic seizure, thus disproving everyone who had thought his attacks over-dramatised.
*** <em>Ruling the Waves</em>
While the idea of a successful <em>TV Times</em>, least of all financed by peanuts, did not impress me, I was somewhat more interested in the announcement in 1961, I think it was, by Pye of Cambridge that they were now in a position to build a hundred or so radio stations, which could be operated inexpensively. They submitted plans to the Pilkington Committee, set up to deliberate on the British Broadcasting Corporation’s monopoly.
Tories jumped at the idea of commercialised radio and television. Large advertisers could be guaranteed to preserve their domination of the waves. Most liberal and socialist people demurred at the idea, preferring the quasi-State monopoly. Nobody had considered the question of freedom of the airwaves. I reasoned that if broadcasting had been invented <em>before</em> printing, struggles for Freedom of the Airwaves would have ensured it became the sacred cow of liberal thought and there would have been an established British Publishing Corporation. The idea of extending this to printing would have been regarded as “revolutionary”.
True, the profit motive counted in print as much as anywhere else. But at least one could get a word in edgeways. Not in British radio. Yet in America everyone and anyone could buy time for any commercial, religious or political cause whatever, without necessarily owning a radio station. When one wanted a book printed here, one did not have to own a printing press. A publisher could apply to a printer, but the law prevented a radio producer buying time on a station.
Unfortunately, when I submitted my arguments to the Pilkington Committee, the unfortunate reference to America put everyone off, since American radio and television were held in such low esteem. But were they worse than British journalism?
I formed the short lived campaign group, the Radio Freedom League, supported by the rationalist J. M. Alexander and Kitty Lamb. We got nowhere, I am afraid, The idea of anyone having access to the air, the way anyone has access to a printing press providing one can pay the bill (a heavy obstacle, agreed) — as distinct from owning the works — was too wildly democratic. Anyway, the Committee decided to keep the stations limited, and make the most of commercial advertising.
Like many seemingly wild ideas, freedom of the air withered on the legal vine. But twenty years or so later the restrictions on broadcasting were challenged when the technical possibilities proved even simpler. Pirate radios challenged the law, some operated by commercialised music, some by the new sub-culture, even one or two by anarchists. To meet the challenge of the pirates, many more than Pye’s modest 100 stations now operate legally in the British Isles though there are still illegal ones. The latest notion is that if you can claim an “ethnic need” you might get one. They order these things better in France, where Radio Libertaire, doyen of free radios, is still flourishing without the least commercial backing.
*** <em>Three Minute Celebrity</em>
There was a very good Spanish Society in Liverpool, run by a Republican exile, situated in the modern languages school in Tithebarn Street. Purely for social purposes I went up there once at the invitation of Gomez. As usual, I had no idea what he was up to but he wanted me to cover for him. It was a literary occasion at which a number of the Spanish community was present, and politics tactfully ignored. My cherished friend Evie was due at a fashion showing at the Stork Hotel on the same night so we went up together by train, first class, entering it on her expenses. The carriage was empty but for us and the next compartment though it was standing room only in the rest of the train.
When a young ticket collector came in, he said excitedly, “Cliff Richard is next door”.
“Really,” she remarked but I broke in, “For God’s sake don’t tell him we’re here”.
“Oh, no, sir, of course not,” said the collector, who must have wondered who I was (I felt that way too sometimes). He seemed pleased at having two celebrities in one day and I later explained to Evie I had a friendly feeling for ticket collectors and inspectors ever since my Stockton to London journey all those years ago, so I never disillusioned him by saying he had but one. She riposted, “Cliff Richard’s quite famous, too, in his own way”.
The pop star had an enormous and excited crowd waiting at Liverpool. He and his companions stayed in their seats while we walked out and I acknowledged the cheers of the crowd at least one of whom waved back, Gomez. The singer and his entourage slipped out of the coach on the other side and made a dash for a waiting van which some fans pursued screaming as he scuttled off like a criminal. Such is fame.
We all went off to our respective appointments — Evie, I and Francisco to our hotel, and Cliff Richard and his group to theirs. We went to the Stork, where I met Republican exiles, as distinct from confederals, for the first time in any number. One of them was Luis Portillo, a socialist. He spoke on the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, and mentioned in passing his famous last lecture. He had written it in Spanish and we reproduced it as a pamphlet in English, though it was not exactly our line. The elderly philosopher had spoken on Columbus Day at Salamanca University, in the company of senora Franco, shortly after the outbreak of civil war, and movingly defied the interruptions and outcries against Catalans and Basques by his audience. He publicly told the ferocious General Millan de Astray, whose battle cry was “Long live death”, among other things that he was a necrophiliac; that he could conquer but not convince; and that he would make Spain a war cripple like himself, with one eye and one arm lost in battle. Shortly afterwards, as might be expected, Unamuno died suddenly.
One Spanish lady came up to me at the reception, as one of the few non-Spanish present after the language students had gone, and showed me her infant sons. “What do you think of my little Englishmen?” she said proudly, offering them for an embrace. I kissed one of them dutifully. In later years I had an uneasy feeling the mother might have been senora Portillo, and the baby I kissed her son Michael, who grew up to come to a bad end. Fortunately it wasn’t, as it would never do for the reputation of either of us if the <em>Sun</em>, say, got hold of the story that I kissed a Tory Minister. It would certainly make me a celebrity for a few minutes, though I doubt to popular acclaim. Mrs Portillo, who was English, did not come to the meeting. Fortunately Gomez later assured me the proud Spanish lady was the wife of one of the other gentlemen playing at being Ministers, or family history would have repeated itself.
When my grandfather was in his 80s he woke up one night with a start and remembered that once as a youth in Vienna his father gave him, to throw in the bin, a long greasy coat discarded by a beggar to whom great-grandpa gave his own old coat. Instead he had given the coat to a charity collector, who had turned up its nose at the smelly rags at first. Sixty years later he read that Hitler as a young man in poverty had been handed just such a coat from that very charity, and it occurred to him with a shock that it might have been the identical coat that saved Hitler’s life that winter, and what seemed a minor good deed at the time cost millions of lives. He was not to be consoled by my grandmother working out, for all that she could not count, that this must have been at least twenty years before Hitler turned up in the city of song. Coats like that, he, he said mournfully, never seem to get scrapped but are constantly exchanged for newer ones.
Mr Portillo has not in the interim turned out as bad as Hitler, though one must give him time. Some mothers do have ‘em but I wish they wouldn’t offer them in their arms for strangers to kiss. I wonder how the other infants turned out, but it couldn’t be as badly.
** 07 Bookselling; The Thetford Pain; Bookselling, the Lack of; Tales of the Housing Acts; The New Left; Squatting; International Spy
*** <em>Bookselling</em>
In the course of eighteen months the premises on the upper floors of 374 Grays Inn Road had become increasingly grottier. It had needed total re-wiring when the finance company moved out. The next sub-lessees, Levene and his original partner Bush, who had since disappeared, had not a shilling’s worth of capital between them. Even the structure of the building was unsound, which was one of the reasons commercial firms were not interested in the vacant offices available for sub-letting. The council was, not unreasonably, pressing for something to be done by the next lessee in line, whoever he might be, and to my surprise it was supposed to be myself.
During the period of trade paper publication, Levene had passed over worthless shares in the company to me in lieu of wages, and I discovered I was presumed to be the new lessee in place of Bush. I did not know how to disembarrass myself of the situation, and alterations made to the lease at the time of signing were so great only the solicitor who drew it up, Mr Harraway, could understand it. Just at the weekend he decided to go to court he went on legal business to a Guy Fawkes party at film star Diana Dors’ Thames-side bungalow and a drunken reveller threw a lighted match at the glamorous film star’s stack of fireworks, burning the house down and the only sedate and sober partygoer to death.
I was asked by his firm to produce the lease which he had taken to study with papers relating to her divorce pending court hearings, as all had gone up in flames, including himself. I gave them my version of the original draft, with a remarkably lenient transfer clause, declining to part with the lease which I never had.
I knew casually Ted Grant, the ageing Young Socialist organiser, one of the Trotskyists who had come over from South Africa before the war to replace the Anglo-Catholic priests who made up the original Trots. They called themselves railway clerks, the nearest they could reasonably get to sky pilots, and Trotskyist histories omit the prefix ‘Father’ to their names. Meeting him by chance in a cafe, he asked if I could help his Militant Group to get premises. It was an ideal chance for me so I transferred the lease for nothing and got myself the name of a woolly-minded philanthropist which, I reflected, might be an insurance against some Siberia one of these not-so-fine days, more unlikely than ever now. I read years later in one of those academic know-all books that they got the lease through ‘a sympathiser’.
Later the 374 Monster overwhelmed them too, when the landlords insisted that repairs be carried out and that I had left the premises in impeccable condition. I could have testified otherwise but the notion of county court action was too much for them. As they now had subsidies from their wealthy Ceylonese supporters, they took over premises round the corner from the defunct London ILP, and finally moved into Hackney, in a derelict Labour Party hall more suitable of reconstruction.
Ultimately <em>Time Out</em>, at first a radical chic magazine but with substantial capital, took over the monster and spent the necessary sums to make it habitable. Gomez was no longer able to stay in England, and I was free of the 374 Monster, but I had horrendous debts which made me a regular visitor to the county court. I obstinately refused the easy option of bankruptcy and countered with a series of manoeuvres, which experience enabled me to write a Debtors Guide. There were many handy guides advising the creditor, but none advising the debtor. Notwithstanding the debtor being asked to swear his testimony on a book which states that debtors should be forgiven and recommends the practice of dishonest debt or long-firm fraud (the parable of the unjust steward), non-fraudulent debtors got harassed and treated like criminals for want of lack of money and knowledge. Most people I met in the courts thought the ‘Dickensian’ laws still in existence (they weren’t when Dickens wrote about them). My booklet went like wildfire locally, though duplicated — much later I could have afforded to print an up-to-date version, but the laws had changed and I was no longer learning the laws of debt by experience.
I decided to return to industry, but could not understand why I found so many jobs blocked. I eventually uncovered the source of the industrial discrimination. One prospective employer told me of my ‘prison record’, and said he had been given it over dinner with a police inspector. It is possible, but with what motive? Now I know the Economic League was responsible.
I couldn’t settle for a badly paid job, with so many debts to pay off and having an expensive flat which I had moved into with Evie. However difficult houses were, it was still easy to get a shop without having to pay anything until next quarter, and I found one just around the corner in Gray’s Inn Road. At the same time, the stock of Simpkin Marshall was being liquidated. Shareholders of the old-established book wholesalers had made Captain Robert Maxwell managing director in what they thought a rescue bid. The main asset, the building passed into the hands of one of his other companies, the only multi-national which happened to see it advertised in the pages of an obscure local paper. The company was wound up and the firm left stranded, while the book stock was sold to an auctioneer. The latter had already sold everything of value when I walked in but he persuasively managed to sell me everything else, which made up in quantity what it lacked in discriminate choice, but had the inducement of very delayed payment.
Being a bit carried away by events, I entered into an agreement and was able to open a bookshop, indeed, several bookshops at different times in the next five years, on a net capital of zilch.
The bookshop in Grays Inn Road lumbered on for some years with debts being paid off by incurring others. It took years to settle the auctioneer and removed any conceivable possible profit for him or me however well I did. His son is now a multi-millionaire playboy though I don’t think I contributed to the family fortunes.
What is ironic is that as a result of being obliged to take the bookshop, I incurred gradually increasing debts to some of the very people who probably subscribed to the Economic League, something which one sees more often in the building trade, where people regarded as agitators are blacklisted, start cowboy outfits and eventually have to walk away from large debts to those who could have employed them for a fraction of what them cost in the long run.
One of the minor curiosities I found when bookselling was that one was constantly asked for tarot cards. For years these had been illegal — the ‘devil’s bible’ — and imports were banned. Any pretext that it was ‘only a game’ was dismissed by Customs. Tarot readers lined up at Bow Street every Monday, to be fined with the prostitutes, palm readers and graphologists (the latter have since blossomed out as forensic scientists). Then the post-war Labour Government abolished the Witchcraft Act in 1946. It was a favour to the journalist Hannen Swaffer who had campaigned in the mainstream press for the Labour Party for years but refused an offer of the Lords. He merely asked for political relief to be given to the spiritualists. They were banned under the Witchcraft Act, and it was such medieval nonsense one could not amend it so it was abolished and so incidentally dream interpreters, psychics, tarot readers and soothsayers were legalised. Thus Britain emerged officially from the Dark Ages.
They kept the Blasphemy Act, though, which thirty years later caused a problem when Muslims felt it unfair racial discrimination that people could be fined for blaspheming against Christianity yet not executed for blaspheming against the Koran.
It was in order, therefore, to import Tarot cards but they were taxed ‘as a game’. For years it had been insisted they were not a game. If they were religious appurtenances even of witchcraft, now legal, or at least not illegal, they could not incur tax. I tried fighting the Customs on this, but with no success. I could never afford to sue them, but tried to persuade the main importers, John Waddington, to do so. They, however, preferred paying tax and having it kept as a ‘game’. It is curious how this nonsense upset the police. The bookshop was actually raided to see if I had imported Tarot cards and not paid tax on them. The police were quite apologetic. When I explained about the Witchcraft Act they were not sure if I was being sarcastic or not. Neither was I.
*** <em>The Thetford Pain</em>
Blasphemy and treason, somewhat belated, beset my official invitation from the Mayor of Thetford, Councillor Richard Easten to attend the unveiling of the statue of Thomas Paine, in the presence of the French and American ambassadors. I am sure Cllr Easten didn’t realise what it was about. The grandly-sounding Thomas Paine Foundation had decided to start putting into effect the words of Ralph Ingersoll that a statue of gold should be erected to Thomas Paine in every city where freedom was cherished, or something like that.
A slick Brooklyn go-getter, Joseph Lewis, had started the Foundation and raised cash for building statues of Paine, already succeeded in getting one in America, and had got another erected in Paine’s birthplace, Thetford. He had invited all Freethinkers of any prominence plus the local US troops, the Deputy Mayor, Cllr the Lord Fisher and any local dignitaries who cared to come, as well as the two unsuspecting ambassadors and the local MP. But the plans had encountered a snag.
The statue had been due to face Paine’s birthplace but it was now occupied by the British Legion, who protested indignantly that Paine had fought for the Americans and French against the British, which made him a traitor, and they weren’t having him looking at them even in gold (it turned out to be brass). This was in accord with aristocratic Tory tradition. English gentlemen like Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Hamilton were not ‘traitors’ but historically justified rebels and in retrospect gallant opponents. Cart construction worker still plain ‘Tom’, however, who subverted the folks at home, they could not forgive after 200 years.
The statue had therefore been built outside the parish church and I went along with some stalwarts of the National Secular Society invited as an old friend of their prophet F. A. Ridley. The NSS was still in its proletarian god-bashing period, as the days of the new Humanism, when new academic became old cleric writ large, had come but not yet conquered. The American gentleman was determined to cash in on the academic boom and had prepared a lengthy address, to be published “as read at the Thetford unveiling”. It rained bucketsful in heavenly disapproval of the event, as it was seriously stated locally, while he droned on in a Brooklyn Jewish accent remarking “I guess if you folks can take this weather, I can”. Their excellencies the ambassadors were drenched, as they sat in the places of honour while the small crowd took refuge in doorways. Finally the local Tory MP came to speak and said no more than “Rain stops play” and pulled the strings that unveiled the statue, to the gasps of horror of all bar the atheists as it was decorated with decidedly anti-Christian quotations from The Age of Reason. None was more astounded than the good Lord Fisher unless perhaps it was another and more distinguished good Lord.
Soon after this fantastic event, at which I am sure Thomas Paine would have laughed his head off, Mr Lewis found an even more profitable field for his endeavours and converted to Christianity. If he’s still going, I am sure he is doing well as the radio gospeller I’m told he became. Anyway, there were no more statues of gold to Thomas Paine in any more cities.
When I and a couple of friends finally escaped from the rain that day, we encountered an American Air Force colonel who showed us his archaeological collections from Mexico and Egypt, made during his service, using “his men” to a more useful purpose, but hardly the one intended. He had also discovered a settlement of Ancient Britons with local diggings, and was crating boxes for both the British Museum and the Smithsonian Institute. Colonel Kelly remains the only serving American officer with whom I had a long conversation. He was absolutely unlike the caricature or the prototype demon of popular imagination and, while he knew more about Egyptology than I could have imagined existed, quietly and courteously listened to my explanation of Immanuel Velikovsky’s theory of Egyptian chronology without summarily dismissing it, as some American scientists were then vehemently doing. We never got round to politics.
One of those I met at the Paine memorial meeting was Ella Twynan, She had for years been associated with Ambrose Barker, one of the most remarkable figures in the British anarchist movement, an active propagandist for anarchism and atheism from 1880 to 1953. Ella also took joy in the philosophical research into the origins of religion. When Barker founded the Stratford Dialectical and Radical Club in 1880, which introduced Socialism to East London, she had helped in the organising of the horse transport workers (draymen in particular) who for some years, until the disappearance of their trade, grouped in the first anarcho-syndicalist organisation in the country.
I invited Ella to one of my parties. We discussed her memories of the various East London strikes, and the past activists who are never read of in labour histories. Though for years she had been mixing with old-fashioned atheists, whom she referred to as “godbashing parsons”, when she came to talk about the anarchist past she lit up. Barker had been much older than she, and died in his nineties a few years before, and when she was in her eighties her memories went back a long way. She insisted the first anarchist in Britain had been Ambrose Cuddon, who in his <em>Cosmopolitan Review</em> (1861) had brought Chartism, Luddism and Radicalism to its final conclusion. Cuddon had welcomed Bakunin to London after he had sent a letter to his paper. While “firsts” are hard to prove and her memory may have been wrong, she expounded the idea brilliantly.
After her death I read that during the First World War she had been to the famous Socialist peace conference in Stockholm and met Rosa Luxembourg on the boat. It was said Ella asked her “Is Bebel a good man?” Rosa’s comment afterwards was “How stupid can that woman be?” On the other hand, as Ella did not speak German other than a word or two and Rosa did not speak English at all, any enquiry Ella made of a German delegate was bound to be in simple words, and August Bebel had been heralded as leader of the Social Democracy. If that remark be true, I am inclined to wonder how intelligent Rosa Luxembourg was.
*** <em>Bookselling, or the lack of</em>
Keeping a bookshop, especially dealing with a mixture of new, second hand and antiquarian, can be pleasant when one starts with sufficient capital. It is even more pleasant when it keeps you and one can chat with customers discussing the various topics of their interest. It tends to be frustrating when you have to keep it and scrape the barrel daily to keep it going. The old type of bookshop was doomed anyway: I used to exchange remainders with a dear old bookseller named Steele, whose second-hand bookshop just opposite St. Paul’s Cathedral delighted hundreds of City workers daily.
The precinct was to be pulled down and a pedestrian walkway made of mock piazzas with boutiques which, the architects assured everyone, would be ideal for second-hand bookshops, traditional in St. Paul’s Churchyard, of whom Mr Steele was the last and who was held up as typical. Needless to say when the project was finished and the old shops pulled down, the new boutiques opened but Steele couldn’t even have afforded to buy his lunch on one of the smart touristy snack bars, let alone trade there. His business vanished and with all respect to the smart Japanese import-export agency that now flourishes on the site, I doubt it affords the same interest to City workers and visitors.
I didn’t face rebuilding but I did face the problem of rents being raised exorbitantly. It made it impossible to carry on at Gray’s Inn Road though it didn’t do the landlord much good — he went on a winter cruise and the ship sank. Coincidentally a former employer of mine was aboard too but was one of the survivors.
I had accumulated so many books, which on face value could have paid off all the outstanding debts and set me free, that it seemed a pity to dump them all and go, so I tried my luck in another shop I’d got before the boom in rents, in Coptic Street. I fear I had to move swiftly from Grays Inn Road, indeed overnight, which left browsers and bookbuyers who had picked up bargains, bewildered. They thought the lunch-time crowds indicated success — “I could stay in your bookshop for hours”, said many a well-meaning soul who never spent any money but wanted to be encouraging.
There were no lunch-time crowds in Coptic Street, nor very many customers at all, but it was another year or so before I finally managed to get out of it and be available for work again.
*** <em>Tales of the Housing Acts</em>
Around this time the rent legislation was revised. A tale of two friends and an acquaintance will illustrate what happened. The competition between the parties to see “which could build” the most houses was over. No longer did boroughs proudly proclaim that concrete blocks were built by the mayor and corporation. Landlords had once been desperate to get rid of properties in Hampstead which was how first artists, then “bohemians” and finally refugees had been able to settle there. It was now busy getting rid of the lowly paid and reverting to its former status as queen of the boroughs.
Patrick Monks had moved into a large house near the Heath, built a couple of hundred years earlier. All over Hampstead people had been dividing these properties into one room bedsitters, but he was lucky in getting the whole house in which to put his large family. It happened he was not as lucky as all that, as the family tended to expand to fill the rooms, and two adults and five kids were living seven different lives, making their own meals at their own times. Still, it was the way they chose to live, and what with one or two lodgers and various freeloaders who tended to cancel each other out, plus his earnings as a cabinet maker, stagehand, carpenter and lamplighter on the way home, they were all kept happy.
In contrast my friend and fellow worker at the bookshop, Joe Newby, lived for years in a house in an Islington backstreet. He was now a grandfather, his family long since away from home.
Then came the Rent Act. Pat Monks had an old-established firm of builders as a landlord, who had built properties all over Hampstead and found after the war that there was a boom and the neighbourhood highly desirable. Joe Newby had a foreign-born crook as a landlord.
At first Pat Monks’ landlord wanted to increase the rent fivefold, but that was only for two years. After that, it was out. They had nowhere to go but the landlord was not to be moved. “Look at the money we’ve been losing all these years,” he said, conveniently forgetting the place probably cost £100 at most to build 200 years before and they must have had it back a thousandfold. He was thinking of the dreadful war years when his houses were empty or his rents regulated. No compromise was possible. Pat sent his family to Spain, finding it cheaper than the way they had been living, while he added full-time signwriting to his itinerary of jobs, When the family grew up and returned, they were unable to live together as one family again.
Joe Newby was paying a pound or so rent. The landlord decided he needed collateral to launch his building society. The sitting tenants weren’t interested in buying. He offered them a choice. Stay on as tenants and face the possibility of increased rents when new Rent Acts might affect them. Or buy their homes, with no deposit as nobody would have been able to have afforded one anyway, and make monthly repayments costing the same as four weeks rent. Some actually thought the fiddle lay in the odd shilling difference between paying weekly and per calendar month! The total purchase price was a few hundred pounds, but exaggerated in the accounts to several thousand so as to attract investments in the building society. In a few years the fraud was discovered, the State Building Society was investigated and the principal went to jail.
The tenants kept their houses and paid off their mortgages, eventually many, like Joe, selling them not for the “grossly inflated” valuation on the books, but many thousand of pounds more. Any who stayed ten or twenty years longer in a neglected slum would have made a fortune. The shareholders, temporarily deprived of the profits of their gamble, found their investment extremely profitable.
If this were a short story I would say the first landlord finished in the Honours List when the second went to prison. I don’t know what happened to the first, but I am sure he or his heirs still live easy. The second’s affairs were so complicated they had to release him from prison each day to help the auditors sort out the accounts. His former tenants, happily re-settled in nicer houses, would possibly have gladly seen him in the Honours List which twice yearly sees plenty of worse crooks.
Contrast this story with that of Dan, an acquaintance who used to be an active Communist Party organiser but whose wife had pulled him out of politics to make good. She wanted to get out of the East End, where they lived in an insalubrious block of housing where the outside balcony on which the toilet was situated was literally falling down, making lavatory-going a hazardous experience. He was later able to move to a new estate but at that time he could not move from the Brick Lane area, try as he might. His wife protested that it was due to his communist inclinations that he gave up the Party and went into business. However, he frequented the new student and middle-class meetings that were beginning to spring up, usually to speak nostalgically of the old days.
He was at one of the first meetings to protest at the Rent Act. They were all well off respectable academic types who had never done more than shout “Ban the Bomb”, and all brightened up when he came into the room and gave his address. They were as pleased to hear it as he would have been to get one of theirs.
“We’re planning a demonstration in Trafalgar Square. How many do you think will come from the East End?” they asked him immediately, thinking of pre-war rallies with the CP masses from the East End streaming in.
“None, I’m afraid,” he said. “People don’t see it as a threat. The Act so far only applies to houses above a certain value. It doesn’t affect the East End”.
Gloom settled over the meeting as the chair said, “Oh, dear, we thought there would be an enormous crowd from the East End. The police have laid on reinforcements for a monster meeting and now it doesn’t look as if we will get a turnout at all.”
“Nonsense!” boomed a hearty-looking woman in country tweeds, bouncing up indignantly. “Our friend is quite wrong, utterly defeatist. The committee have letters pouring in from all over the East End. I’ll read a few addresses … Whipps Cross, Ilford, Chingford, Wanstead Flats, Woodford Common… .” “That’s hardly the East End,” the chair said mildly.
“It’s east of London,” she insisted, surprised at the quibble, but the chair said sadly and more realistically, “I’m afraid the chief of police could hardly justify paying overtime to control the masses from Woodford Green”. It was hard to detect what he was concerned with most — their lost overtime or the rent rises
*** <em>The New Left</em>
In the few years between my leaving Reuters and finally packing in bookselling there had been a sea change in the anarchist scene. Though nothing like what was to come, it depressed me. Apart from the occasional article or letter, usually a protest, I concentrated on the local private-sector tenants and I did not pay much heed to the sudden rise of the New Left. I was urged to stand for the council by the tenants committee, but declined, regarding myself at that time as the Last of the Mohicans so far as anarchism was concerned and not wishing to go into the orthodox political arena. I never had any illusions on that score.
Inside London the Syndicalist Workers Federation, which was heir to the old Anarchist Federation, had become a small grouping dominated by Ken Hawkes, who was sycophantic to the ossified bureaucracy that had come to dominate the Spanish Libertarian Movement. Just when I thought I ought really to overlook this since the SWF was trying to be industrially active, in co-operation with other groupings, they invited Federica Montseny to speak in London, the main figure of the compromises in Spain with an antipathy to the then current active struggle. The Spanish Resistance groupings were so disgusted with what she had to say that I disowned the whole thing.
The Freedom Press Group had dropped the word ‘group’ to justify the fact that they were moribund, not merely in activity which would at least be understandable, but in whatever they had to say. Only pacifists found it possible to work with Richards, presumably because they were not prepared to resist his monopoly. It came to idealise a Non-Violent Resistance with lots of non-violence but no resistance.
The repression of Hungary, more particularly the rise of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, triggered off an entirely new ball game. I dismissed CND as a pacifist gimmick akin to the peace movement of the Thirties which had aroused my contempt, not that I was alone in that. As a result I wasn’t in on the beginnings of CND, like almost everyone on the ultra-left and extra-parliamentary scene and I don’t suppose was missed. Every grouping increased its membership among the thousands that amassed and an entirely new ‘youth movement’, in which libertarians were involved with authoritarians, was born. It was not just a new ‘movement’ far beyond the anarchist one, but new conceptions.
As a result of the drug culture coming from America, combined as it eventually was with the hippy-style anti-Vietnam War movement, and a new commercial pop scene, plus the acceptance into orthodox economics teaching of Marxism-Leninism as imagined by professors, the New Left was to most workers foolishness and to conscious militants a stumbling block. It was dominated by students, and ultimately by their professors, it accepted middle class standards and identified them with peace and progress. It finally smashed the working class movements by stealing their ideas to cover a different outlook, and in the spirit of the pre-WWI Russian intelligentsia regarded ‘progressive’ synonymously with ‘educated’.
However, there was another side to it. Some of those who started off in CND and the later Committee of 100 were impatient for action, and when the police busted demonstrations there were always a few street fighters who wanted to be with the action. Some were strictly weekend fighters and there are many ex-students going around now who have since established their careers, but were originally rebels. There was a core of real anarchists among them, if a bare handful as compared with press exaggerations.
As I kept in touch with some old friends who took a more hopeful view of the new trends, and was regarded as a sort of Achilles sulking in his tent in protest against the distortions of the original idea by a self-created and unelected bureaucracy responsible to nobody, not even market forces, I was sought out in my ‘tent’. My old schoolfriend, George Plume, who audited my books during the Grays Inn Road days but who also worked for St. Pancras council, was one of those who was mainly instrumental in persuading them that they needed me. I’m not sure if he did me a favour or not: it meant another ‘term of hard labour’, this time a lifer. It started with my being asked to speak to a meeting where Ted Kavanagh, one of the new activists, was present, and finding him amazed to hear anarchism described, for the first time so far as he was concerned, in terms of class struggle rather than liberal negativism and pacifism.
With some others, we formed a caucus within the newly-formed London based groupings, then called London Anarchist Groups 1 and 2 roughly based on the divisions between the supporters of FP and the SWF. These divisions had been gradually dispersed to the extent that despite Richards’s obsessive hatred of the SWF, he turned a blind eye to SWF members Pete Turner, and later Bill Christopher, becoming editors of <em>Freedom</em>. Bill Christopher was a printer, Imperial FOC at the <em>Daily Mail</em>; Pete Turner involved in building work trade unionism. Both tried to push <em>Freedom</em> into some interest in practical anarchism and class struggle, but the association with the <em>Freedom</em> crowd overcame them instead. They drifted into pure pacifism, as a result of which Bill Christopher gave up his job and went as a mature student into a teachers college and also the ILP, then about at its last gasp.
*** <em>Squatting</em>
There was one positive side to this activity, which was the birth of the squatting movement. Though it later attracted left politicos when, like any reforming wave, it became capable of institutionalisation. Though never able wholly to control it they sometimes did, though they had nothing to do with its origins and growth.
While there had previously been some occupation of empty houses immediately at the end of the war, an unofficial extension of the official policy of assigning abandoned houses to the blitzed and homeless, this was first supplemented and finally supplanted by Governmental offers of prefabricated housing, and then a boom in building municipal housing. Prefabs ceased to be built, though some, intended for a couple of years standing, were still being used fifteen to twenty-five years after. Rising house prices, the virtual disappearance of private sector housing and the growing independence of youth not prepared to live with their parents until marriage and long after, had started something that was in the coming thirty odd years was to magnify out of all proportion. Squatting was the only short-term solution in the face of official unconcern.
The squatting phenomenon of the Sixties that has lasted despite all harassment started with a meeting in the East End about the dockers strike, in the course of which it transpired the majority of the audience were ex-dockers and their wives, old people more concerned with rats on their decaying estates and getting re-housed than with current strikes against redundancy. One old-age pensioner mentioned the hundreds of unoccupied houses, and it is to her that the credit for the original modern squatting idea is due, though the unknown genius who said it was perfectly legal under a law of 1381 certainly contributed by overcoming any qualms felt about taking over derelict properties. The first really organised squatting took place in Brighton.
The resort had some dark slums around the back of the fashionable residential areas, never far away from the boarding-houses that catered for London’s teeming holiday invasion. Many of the families from these areas had been made homeless by rebuilding, but there was a well-maintained terrace of houses for Army families that had been left empty for some fifteen years. An anarchist group occupied them and invited a dozen or so homeless families in, together with single parents and indeed anyone who came along. I did not take part in this occupation but was called down to act as prospective bailee if anyone got arrested so I witnessed the historic scene.
The police called but went away when told the magic words ‘The Act of 1381’ and said it was for the courts to decide. The Army decided to sort it out themselves but they couldn’t very well open fire to get back a terrace they didn’t really want. Some very casually dressed anarchs were outside leaning against the wall when an Army jeep turned up. A young officer jumped out, paced up and down and then came to a halt, turning on his heels and pointing to one of the loungers. “You. I’m giving you a direct order,” he said. “Get these people out of here”’ The last time I’d heard this particular magic formula was in the Cairo Mutiny, but if it hadn’t worked then, it could hardly be expected to work with civilians, especially such civilians as these. Without taking his cigarette out his mouth he said incredulously, “Fuck off,” which left the officer somewhat perplexed. He went, no doubt to consult Queen’s Regulations as to what to do in such a case. Some months later the Army applied to the courts and the families were evicted in the snow at Christmas which was not too good for the Army’s image since Press photographers were there.
Press imaginations die hard. Years later a local stringer was telephoning a story to Fleet Street, when squatting had taken off in a big way. She brought into her story the notorious occasion when, she claimed, families were held there under duress in a place used for manufacturing bombs. According to her, the police had known but could not raid the place as they would have had it been anyone else, as it was on squatted property and the law of 1381 applied! I was the copytaker to which she was giving this startling information, but felt sorry for the good lady and explained to her kindly that the police were not quite as powerless as all that.
It was many years, though, before a Tory MP asked the Lord Chancellor to have the 1381 law repealed, and Lord Hailsham regretfully had to decline, bewildered, as no such law had ever existed. Belief in it served to encourage homeless families. As councils began to settle them in flats and houses, a new second wave of squatting grew up much more part of the youth scene, beginning with the occupation of Park Lane premises, and then the former Arethusa children’s home in Holborn — empty since before the war but which naturally the Government insisted was just about to be re-opened, though it never was.
Squatting then spread like wildfire until the horrendous housing and re-housing crises made it an essential and not just alternative way of life. Without it London could not have continued to exist without descending to the standards of Bombay. Even with it there were insuperable problems for young people wanting to set up home in their native city. With the drive to suppress it we have found sleeping rough in London a growing problem, to which there is seemingly no answer under capitalism, and a Cabinet Minister has complained bitterly that he has to step over the homeless on his way to the opera.
*** <em>International Spy</em>
I helped squatters through the years with transport but was never more involved than that. During the St. Pancras years I shared a flat with Evie, a fashion designer who designed clothes for the lower end of the rag trade. At that time teenagers had just been ‘invented’ or at least, discovered as an exploitable market. There was a dress revolution comparable to the early twenties when skirts were shortened and women’s dress, and in a way status, changed almost overnight.
As teenagers now had as much or even more money to flash around than their elders, manufacturers were saying, ‘If you miss teenagers you miss business”, than which they could think of no worse fate. Evie became sought after as one of the few who could copy the fashions of the sophisticated Paris and West End market and convey them to the mass market end of the trade. The insalubrious sweatshops of the East End would then churn out copies of what wealthy debutantes were wearing last, this or even next season, according to the science or prescience of the designer. Evie became a fashion spy rather than a designer, looking to see what young rich women would be wearing next.
Posing as a fashion journalist, she would go to international haute-couture showings and take notes and drawings for quick copying. In those days epicene young men in Paris and London dictated what Society women would wear and, it being before the jeans revolution, the upper-classes in turn dictated what every other woman would ultimately wear.
The so-called West End “manufacturer” of mass clothing, trading under a suitably elegant woman’s name, needed to know the fashion trends in advance so that he could place his orders with the East End “outworker”, as they called the clothing manufacturers, and jump the fashion. The “spy” added to their profits and detracted from the couturiers’ exclusivity. Once Evie was spotted and smacked on the wrist by an elegant designer who called her the “wickedest woman he had ever met” though he may not have had a wide or intimate acquaintance. It wasn’t how the manufacturers for whom she worked regarded her.
But it was a short-lived boom for her corner of the jungle. Just as the music makers discovered the potentialities of contained teenage rebellion the fashion-makers discovered the advantages of casual clothes and the lowers orders of society began dictating fashion to the upper orders. It became fashionable to be unfashionable. The tables were turned and the couturiers began stealing ideas from the mass market. Evie was among the first to think of specially tailored jeans, blouses and tee-shirts to go with them, which led to the introduction of workshops all over Camden Town employing Cypriot women at the customary sweated wages.
We lived in a flat owned by an elderly lady who appeared to be the stereotype ‘gentlewoman in reduced circumstances’. Evie felt sorry for her, saying she had seen her late at night in King’s Cross selling papers. We used to give her leftovers for the many cats she owned, which she seemed to accepted gratefully as, she explained, she never ate meat and regretted her cats would insist on it. I always wondered how she could be poor when she owned a large house with four flats, the rents of which were quite high, though she always assured us she never saw a penny of what we paid to the agents.
Then one day we all had notice to quit. Our landlady told Evie kindly she was sorry but she was going to turn the place into offices for a peace organisation. It seemed she sold pacifist papers, lived frugally because of a Quaker conscience, was a vegetarian and devoted all her income to famine relief. Though facing the street, we fell about laughing when it dawned on us for the first time that Miss Rowntree was a millionaire and one of the great cocoa dynasty.
** 08 Plumbing the Depths; Keeping Watch; — And Ward; The Law-and-Order Candidate; Poetry to Pros
*** <em>Plumbing the Depths</em>
Furtive sex was a flourishing industry at the end of the Macmillan era. I had a certain ingrained prudery and never paid for a prostitute in my life, even at the time I will relate after my long-term companions died and I only occasionally enjoyed the pleasures of sex. Maybe I sound puritanical, but it was not that. I knew one or two professionals well but I never availed myself of their services. One is always pestered by hustlers when one visits Paris, especially as a lone male, and when soliciting was accompanied by genuine pleas for cash — “I’ve been ill and can’t work” was the favourite — I gave them the money and moved on.
What disgusted me was the element of exploitation. Suddenly all around me there were, if not prostitutes, a rash of “pornbrokers’ shops” as pornographic booksellers were called — not to be confused with “pawnbrokers”! I regarded them as a pest, especially as the police were paid off. That milieu penetrated the world of spies and dirty tricks upon international, political and extra-parliamentary politics.
At any rate, as I then saw it, the London street women were business people who took a risk and it usually paid off though this did not necessarily apply in other cities abroad. The men engaged in the traffic were some feet below the dregs of humanity. Later I, and everyone else, learned a lot from trends in the women’s movement but in the fifties they had yet to get over their message that the sex\porn business degraded woman, even if the participants were willing. They degraded men in a different way from the way they did women. Male whores, pimps, most pornbrokers and almost all porn film makers, were often police spies and informers as well as being bullies in the exploitation of women.
The pornographic booksellers paid off the West End police, who raided their shops, giving advice as to their coming, in rotation, the way they picked up the prostitutes. I remember all too well a dishevelled brass screaming and kicking as the police carried her into the Black Maria at Piccadilly Circus. I can hear her now yelling, “It’s not my turn, you bleeders. I paid you only last Wednesday.”
The police used occasionally to raid booksellers, in my case, three times, in the hope of finding something “dirty” like Radclyffe Hall or D.H. Lawrence. They resented the fact that these booksellers never bribed them. I knew that and once said tongue in cheek, “I wish it were possible to pay you gentlemen something to stay away, it upsets my customers. But that would be bribery, illegal and unthinkable”. If looks could have killed, that would have been my lot.
The pornbrokers and the bookthieves co-operated. Basil the Bee, as the queen bee of them all of them all was known (I cannot remember his real name, if I ever knew it) spent his life within a quarter of a mile of Soho. There was Foyle’s Bookshop, where he was, in a manner, licensed to steal books within reasonable limits by their own detectives. Also in easy reach was St Patrick’s Church, Soho Square, where he was a devout worshipper, and the urinal on the corner where he re-committed the sins of the flesh he had confessed at St Pat’s.
But one day Foyle’s discovered what everyone else in the book trade knew already: that some of their detectives were bent and sacked them. Enterprisingly, Basil the Bee rented an office directly facing their theology department, and when the coast was clear sent in his gang to raid the shelves. The plug-uglies who went round as commercial travellers for him aroused the suspicions of a theology bookseller, who reasoned they could not all be impecunious curates or divinity students selling their books and he cautioned the police who had to act whether they liked it or not. They came up the stairs to Basil’s office in force just as a certain quasi-bookseller turned up.
He was a ‘chairman’. The big noises of the porn trade hired managers at very large sums to ‘sit in the chair’ for as long as three fines were notched against them as presumed proprietors in breach of the law. Then they resigned by mutual arrangement as it meant prison next time. The business was ‘sold’ to a new proprietor, someone else sitting in the chair for the real proprietor.
He was also co-director with a legitimate (as it were, or rather a non-erotic) bookseller, and bought stolen books on his behalf. Coming upstairs on his normal business, he was arrested by the police. Unfortunately they were not the police he paid for protection in his porn business but a different set altogether, interested in crime rather than vice. He was arrested against all custom and practice.
That was how I got to know this world, because some kind soul sent this frustrated chairman to me as someone whom the lawyers couldn’t help. For years I knew and enjoyed my reputation as a barrack-room lawyer.
As I could not help him, he looked around my bookshop patronisingly and asked why I did not go in for pornography. He could not understand any of my scruples. I hated to sound a prig, but there it was. He pointed out, far from untruthfully, that I did not take a hundred pounds on a Saturday night, and asked what I had taken. “Fifty-five,” I said. He was slightly impressed, but I forgot to mention it was pence. Next week he was round full of woe and imploring my assistance. Not only had he been charged with theft (later altered to receiving) when he was on the protected list for porn, his alleged partner had decided their relationship was at an end. This was quite understandable but he would not return the money invested in his business for laundering. He pointed out that it was in a limited company which had never traded. The cash had been spent buying stock which had been transferred to his own business unfortunately at a loss, as the result of a decision taken by the managing director when the sleeping director was sitting in the chair for another, “What am I if not his partner?” my lame duck asked me. “An idiot,” I pointed out.
To add to his woes he had to pay a huge fee to his usual protector, after which the police remembered that he was intercepted going to an office above the one concerned in the conspiracy, so he didn’t go to court. The Bee, however, got a huge sentence and went berserk when someone else who wasn’t concerned went scot-free. He told everyone how corrupt the police were, the extent of bribery, sodomy, theft and fraud in the new and second-hand book industry, and named every villain in the business ranging from Mayfair bookshops who charged antiquarian prices for books still in print to Meltzer of King’s Cross who was mixed up with Spanish terrorists.
He, poor lamb, the only innocent in the book trade, had got ten or fifteen years for a first offence in stealing books from Foyle’s, which everyone in London did; some even came over from far-off continents to do so. Well, yes, in a way. Many respectable people stole books from Foyle’s, as they paid their staff peanuts and didn’t overly bother about shoplifting. When they went on strike Christina Foyle said they were all sexual perverts anyway and should be glad to be employed. I wrote to the press in response suggesting if the proprietor were right maybe the public should keep away from the long dark alleyways of books Foyle’s had in those days.
But even so Basil’s offence was not quite the conventional idea of shoplifting. The perpetrator does not usually hire a room opposite and survey the ground with binoculars, While too it was a first offence (rather, charge) so far as stealing was concerned, for he had paid for protection from arrest for years, he had a record as long as your arm for sexual offences.
He complained to everyone from the Chief Rabbi to Oswald Mosley. He expected the Chief Rabbi to take action against his acquitted visitor’s non-partner for the sharp practice which had let him profit from the Bee’s downfall, but as the person concerned was a Marxist and an atheist and had no connection with his ancestral faith, there was not much the reverend gentleman could do, even if it were a religious offence to dissociate oneself from someone having bad luck, and he had wanted to oblige someone also claiming he was being discriminated against for his fascist views.
The only one to take Basil the Bee seriously was Mosley, who took at face value the argument that he was really going down for political offences, an argument more often used over the years by Communist Party bookthiefs, less often by his supporters. But as Mosley lived in Paris he couldn’t help much beyond reminisce of his own days in Brixton jail and how it caused his phlebitis, I suppose. I never had the chance or desire to ask anyone.
A detective came to my place to follow up the Spanish terrorists, and told me of the allegations, which included Basil’s request that Blackwell’s of Oxford be closed down because they had refused to pay him for books re-supplied by him, after they had been stolen from their shelves by one of his “scouts”. Before I answered my part of the saga I asked which side in the civil war he thought were the terrorists, as if I didn’t know. It was the one that lost, of course. I admitted knowing lots of one variety but none of the other. He didn’t answer, but stressed this was all in confidence, probably because a Labour government was in office.
He told me when leaving, “You don’t recognise me? I’ve been round to your place a couple of times. I spoke to your mate Joe. I said I wanted an illustrated book on walking-sticks and he offered me one on malacca canes. Next time I asked you for anything on camping and you showed me a DIY book on tentmaking for girl guides. Then I gave up”. He went out laughing. I remembered the incidents but couldn’t see anything funny. Everyone would see the joke today, but the fact I didn’t do so then was one of the reasons I never took £100 every Saturday night.
*** <em>Keeping Watch</em>
Another pornography seller and bookthief was Ray, who also worked the non-erotic non-bookstall presumably for Bernard Kops on days when he wasn’t there. I wonder now if he simply moved in on the stall when Kops was away and Kops never knew anything about it. Clearly Kops didn’t know where he was half the time, if his later memories are any criterion.
Ray had been for a while in the Anarchist Federation (Hawkes-Brown section) and ran a straight film show with the camera he used for another type of film showing. He absconded with the takings and set up his own bookshop. There was a curious character named Marinus who hung around his bookshop regularly and was at all South African protest meetings. I met Upton through Denis Levin, who was an Oehlerite (a kind of non-Trotsky Trotskyite) and a bookseller.
Eric Heffer was the best-known of the Oehlerites, but defected to the Labour Party and died in the odour of sanctity, an MP beloved by all Parties. Sometime an extreme Trotsky supporter, sometime orthodox Labour, sometime High Anglican darling of the Tories, he only disappointed the real Oehlerites, of whom there must have been at least five. Denis, one of the Oehlerites, whose geese were all swans, had high hopes of him then. When we met him one day in a cafe, Marinus came in, and greeted Denis like a log-lost friend. Heffer warned him he was “dodgy”.
The Mr Big of Porn, Bobby, set up shops well stocked with porn openly displayed. It was all illegal until the prosecution of “Lady Chatterly’s Lover” and later that of “Oz” collapsed and to write, if not yet in certain circumstances to say, “fuck” became legal. At that date the hard porn world collapsed for years until harder, more violent porn became surreptitiously fashionable. Different men would take the ‘chair’, that is, be the recognised owner and take on the fines, reimbursed by Bobby. On the third occasion the magistrate, who must have known the set-up as everyone else did, would solemnly warn the ‘owner’ that next time would mean jail. The ‘chairman’ ostensibly sold to a new owner whom Bobby appointed.
What such people were doing in left wing circles, or the Bee and some others in right-wing ones, one may easily deduce. One day I happened to go to an anti-apartheid meeting, invited by Joe Murumbi, and someone nudged me and said of Marinus waiting to go in “That’s Peter Hain” (then a Young Liberal leader). I already suspected Marinus of being a an agent-provocateur and police (possibly South African) spy. Murumbi was sure of it. When I went round to tell him Marinus was in the crowd and had been identified as Peter Hain, he smiled and told me Peter Hain was addressing a meeting miles away.
Later Murumbi told me that a European or many a white South African might be fooled by the resemblance, but an African could tell Marinus was of mixed blood. He suggested charitably that Marinus might be blackmailed by the SA police so he could “work his passage” as a White rather than a Coloured.
Some years later there was a burglary in Streatham near Peter Hain’s home, and Peter Hain was ‘identified’ and charged. In court he proved it could not have been him and blamed South African agents. Had he not been acquitted before I read it in the newspapers, I would have volunteered evidence of the above. Murumbi, though by this time Vice-President of Kenya, might also have come forward. Hain went on to become a Labour MP. The only time I have seen him since is on television where the resemblance is less striking.
It is generally accepted that this was a dirty tricks campaign of the South African police, but I am not sure. If it really was Marinus concerned, and significantly he vanished thereafter, I think it highly feasible that he tried a bank robbery for more creditable and credible reasons, but felt he could get an alibi by making it appear to be somebody else. Hain lived close at hand. While nobody would be daft enough to slip out for ten minutes to hold up the bank round the corner without troubling to put on a disguise, people who opposed apartheid might be thought, in the climate then prevailing, to do crazy things, Had Marinus been caught, he could explain to the British police he was on their side, and if that did not come off his bosses might reward him for a good try. Maybe, even so, he did charge expenses, but who can tell until the sea gives up its dead or the Afrikaaner police files are opened, whichever is the sooner?
*** <em>— And Ward</em>
Another in the porn game was Freddie Reid, who went off with Joe Thomas’s wife when for a brief spell the three of them were jointly engaged in strike action. I never met him, but according to Joe he had been sincere enough until he was blacklisted for his strike activities and then turned to despicable methods of earning a living. There are many crimes the blacklisters have to answer for, and perhaps one day they will. In this case some of them at least did.
In the course of his profession, perhaps independently or as an agent for Bobby, he had met Dr Stephen Ward. Ward was an osteopath and a sex fetishist. His talents, and from all accounts he was quite a gifted conversationalist, led him to mix with the highest circles in the land, and pander to the rich and famous. Royalty, Cabinet Ministers, pop stars, foreign diplomats, foreign spies, rent boys and girls, all came into Ward’s net. Some of the porn merchants acted for him both as outlets and supplies. He seems to have been a drug dealer and a pimp.
When the Profumo case brought Ward into national notoriety[1] and even brought down the government, he committed suicide. Reid promptly gave up his job with Bobby and induced the dispossessed director to open a bookshop in Museum Street with him. Prior to its opening, he organised an exhibition of Ward’s drawings and photographs which he had been holding in safe keeping, plus what he had obtained from his secret hideaway flat.
He announced one day that before opening there would be a private sale and the public could come in on the Monday after. There was a stream of limousines to Museum Street that week as the great and good bought compromising pictures of themselves at high prices. It is a joy to think that they may have included some responsible for blacklisting the man now blackmailing them. “God pays his debts without money,” my sagacious tailor in Stoke Newington, nodding wisely, said when the bank that had bounced his cheques got broken into by armed robbers, presumably not after his overdraft.
The long queue of prurient public, or it may be art lovers, on Monday saw only a few harmless rural pictures. Freddie didn’t have the cheek to charge the sincere admirers of Ward’s art the admission fees originally intended, perhaps because there were too many of them, but he told his fellow director he was giving up the premises.
At least he gave him his money back, but left him stuck with the lease. I passed him in the street and he bemoaned that he had borrowed money from his wife’s family to go in with Reid, and been left with an unuseable shop for porn after the notoriety, and so had been let down once again. All I could say, ungenerously but understandably, was “I bet you don’t take £100 this Saturday night”.
*** <em>The Law and Order Candidate</em>
No account of lowlife bookselling would be complete without an account of Desmond, who passed into legend. He had originally been a groupie of Freedom Press but was caught by Marie Louise Berneri stealing postal orders. She offered to have him psycho-analysed but he insisted the postal orders she found in the coat he was wearing at the time must have been put there by somebody else. He joined the Socialist Party of Great Britain instead.
The SPGB was a small sect of dogmatic socialists of early century breed. Appalled by schisms and divisions around 1910, they wrote a constitution and stuck to it rigidly for the next eighty years. One of their members had jumped on an anti-war platform from which venerable old George Lansbury was speaking in the First World War, to save him from an indignant mob. Later he had been expelled for contravening the constitution by “appearing on a reformist platform”. Desmond, chasing the rough trade after WWII, actually spoke on a fascist platform to oblige a close friend with a sore throat (or something), but wanted to stay in the SPGB. The latter were puzzled as to what to do. Nobody, understandably, was prepared to claim he had appeared on a <em>reformist</em> platform.
Impressed with an intelligent piece of oratory for once, the fascists invited him to speak again and he finally let the SPGB off the hook of embarrassment and formally resigned according to the constitution. He survived long years of prison and is active in the extreme Right as I write. He has even stood for Parliament campaigning on a policy of law and order.
At the time, stung by the Bee’s revelations, he found London’s climate too disagreeable and went to Glasgow and disaster. Running a longfirm fraud, he needed to pay cheques into one bank account and draw out cash for a private one. Thus when his firm went intentionally bust, at least he had no need to beg but was provided for, as approved of by the founder of one of the world’s most lucrative businesses, Jesus of Nazareth himself.
Immediately after Desmond withdrew cash, the bank was held up. There was no connection with him, but the bank manager knew the serial numbers of the notes held in the bank that morning, without knowing to whom some had been issued in normal trading. Police investigation showed a large sum of matching serial numbers had been paid into another bank ten minutes after the hold-up. What were the police to think?
Feeling convinced they had a right one there, they interviewed Desmond who could prove he had legitimately drawn a cheque for that amount. But he had a nervous tic in his eye, an English accent, admitted to a London business address, and it seemed an odd transaction altogether so they took his fingerprints and were able to detain him on an indecency charge in Manchester years before.
Blackwell’s of Oxford got to hear of it and had a list of charges they wanted to press. The unfortunate Desmond was taken to Oxford, still protesting that he had never held up a bank in his life. When he got into court he almost fainted when he saw almost every bookseller and publisher from London there to bring different charges.
The only two who stood by him were (oddly enough) both women, a sex he detested. One of the two was, of course, his mother, a devout Roman Catholic who once told me she had shed tears for him nightly and would do so no more, but he was still her son; the other was my accountant Lisa Bryan. Lisa was in the SPGB but collected lame ducks the way I did, she told me ruefully. We both tried to shake them off but they came waddling over, tails in the air. I don’t know which of us was the worst, and we passed off hopeless cases to each other. Anyway I drew the line at some and she didn’t, so judge for yourself which of us was the more crazy. She was generous to a fault, keeping a couple of families, not her own, in her house. When she died young, one hanger-on said to me sadly, “It’s a great tragedy — so many people were dependent upon Lisa”. I never went as far as her in throwing my bread on the waters. When I did it came back dripping wet and uneatable. Hers never even floated.
*** <em>Poetry to Pros</em>
Another lame duck that came around for breadcrumbs of advice I shall call Gwen. Gwen was a suburban schoolteacher with literary ambitions. One of her pupils was gifted and Gwen used to visit her mother to lend her books. The mother, whom I shall call Lyle, said she was in business and had to travel to town at seven o’clock each day. This was not unusual in the morning but in the evening?
When Gwen gave up her job to concentrate on writing poetry, on the strength of one published poem which brought in a couple of guineas, Lyle felt confident enough to confess she was a prostitute. She was also passionately fond of poetry and she and Gwen got on fine for all their differences in lifestyle.
Gwen found herself on the brink of starvation in a few months after being refused unemployment pay and not selling another poem. A couple of guineas wouldn’t last forever, as she presumably had known. She told her friend she was almost prepared to go on the game but was advised not to do so. Lyle herself was sick of the pimps anyway. She proposed an alternative. She intended to set up on her own without a pimp, and needed a “French maid” as they called the receptionist. Usually the receptionists are broken down old pros, as ugly as possible to make it clear that they are not in the business themselves. One woman alone on the game is permissible, two in a flat makes it a brothel and illegal. Someone is allowed to keep the clients waiting in turn, but if it’s a man he’s automatically done for living on immoral earnings. Prostitution per se is not illegal for all that but it was advisable to pay off the West End police at that time.
Though Gwen was young and far from ugly they could get away with it, but after a few months the pimps found out what was going on and were outraged in their deepest sensibilities. They informed the police that someone was plying the trade without paying anybody, and London’s finest responded promptly to this breach of the unwritten law. Lyle in her schoolgirl uniform, probably her daughter’s, and Gwen in her severe dress were dragged out of their premises one night. The clients, prosperous and even prominent men, were discreetly allowed to dress and go. The girls were taken to Bow Street and remanded, being told by the police they didn’t want anyone “coming up from the sticks and working our manor. Where’s your ponce?”
I had known Gwen for some time and recommended her against thinking she could earn a living by writing love poems, however good they were. She had pointed indignantly to the sales of mediocre poets like Mrs Wilson, wife of the new Prime Minister. I explained this in Philistine fashion, recommending her to marry Edward Heath, Leader of the Opposition, when she might in due course sell too. She accused me of having the emotional plague, whatever that was, but held no grudge against me for that reason. I turned up at the trial as a character witness to say she was not and never had been a prostitute and had quit work to become a writer. I didn’t dare say she wanted to earn a living as a poet lest she be committed to a mental home. Her former employers provided a character witness.
Everyone is on the make with a prostitute. A “tom” is fair game for everyone. Even the solicitor took a hundred pounds in notes from Lyle and carelessly slipped it in his pocket. I don’t know how much of that the taxman saw. Anyway, the other witnesses testified they all had separate rent books, separate keys, and although working in the same house, had no connection. They were all on the game. The charge is never prostitution but soliciting or keeping a brothel and she had done neither.
After the acquittal we all trooped down to a cafe. I did not realise why, but in my case, it was for coffee. All the witnesses, bar the education official who had gone home and myself, wanted paying, which Lyle took for granted. I was waiting only for a sandwich. Gwen told Lyle I wouldn’t take any payment and Lyle was amazed, offering me services instead of cash, and when I shook my head told me I was the most genuine man she’d met, which may not have been too difficult. I accepted the compliment but let her pay for my sandwich to show there was no prejudice involved. Lyle said it was her day. She had encountered both me and a really liberal magistrate.
One of the other witnesses overheard the word ‘liberal’ and, misunderstanding the sense in which it had been used, launched into a diatribe against Jeremy Thorpe, leader of the Liberal Party who would one day meet his just deserts, He would not stop, but raved on and on. He had a grudge against Thorpe, but not one word could be believed by any sane person. Hoping to change his ever more hysterical conversation Lyle said she thought Marinus (“that South African git”) had been one of the pimps responsible for her denunciation and he broke off the invective against Thorpe to deny it, saying Marinus was on the run from the police himself and would anyway not stoop to it. He didn’t have to stoop, as the music hall comics used to say, he only had to pick up the telephone.
Much later Thorpe was accused in a sordid affair involving a male and some thought it was a South African Intelligence dirty tricks plot as in Hain’s case. My five cents worth of evidence for the history books rests.
[1] for more on Stephen Ward, refer to the 100 best books on the Profumo case. (When all concerned have passed beyond earthly libel laws.) He brought down a Cabinet Minister with him and the Government resigned.
** 09 The Iberian Liberation Council; How the Thames Was Lost
*** <em>The Iberian Liberation Council</em>
In one of many visits to Spain prior to the death of the dictator, talking with old friends of the Resistance about how our mutual affairs were going, I was pessimistic about the British scene. I told Melchita sadly, “There’ll never be another Billy Campbell”. Events proved me wrong.
There were many in the younger generation of Spanish exiles, sons and daughters of the first wave of the emigration, who were taking a hard look at the facts of the Resistance. As there was an inrooted determination not to split the Spanish movement, the FIJL (Libertarian Youth), which had always had an independent existence within the CNT-FAI, preserved itself as a separate body into resistance until its militants were in their fifties and even over. In 1965 the FIJL broke with the MLE because of the refusal of the National Committee, under Montseny’s influence, to implement the decisions on clandestine struggle agreed on in 1961. They lined up with the Iberian Liberation Council (CIL), at that time with an assortment of nationalities.
Once Gomez was reproached by some followers of the Montseny line in London for having ‘compromised’ them by some action, and he was asked rhetorically what they could say if the police raided their premises. I intervened to say from my knowledge of the British police, there was a simple answer which would well satisfy them. Asked eagerly what it was, I said logically, “Say you were loyal in the Civil War. They can hardly say you should have been traitors. However, explain you now accept General Franco as Head of State”. There was an indignant protest at my ‘English sense of humour’ but the activist faction appreciated the irony.
I did not know then how the FIJL had affected some of the new wave of members of the SWF and linked them with Spanish youth in France, such as Pascual Santz, whom I knew was inspiring growing determination for the Iberian Liberation Council. The international secretary of the SWF, Margaret Hart, put some people in contact with the FIJL. One or two of them were only dabbling in politics but one, Stuart Christie, was in earnest. He had made the journey at the age of eighteen from Orange Lodge politics in Glasgow through the Labour Party Young Socialists and the Scottish Committee of 100 to Anarchism, eventually contacting the Iberian Liberation Council in 1963.
I saw him first at a concert held for Spanish prisoners at the Pindar of Wakefield, which was just opposite my bookshop, but as was my usual fate at such gatherings, my attention was claimed by a dozen or so old acquaintances.
Next day Stuart was one of several Young Anarchists invited to speak on a Malcolm Muggeridge TV programme, <em>Let Me Speak</em>. Muggeridge was dreading it, but the League of Empire Loyalists (a precursor of the National Front) had been given a similar programme and this was to balance it. Objecting to his questions, the fascists had afterwards daubed his house with swastikas, and if this was what the law-and-order people would do, the idea of what the dreaded anarchists might do next filled him with apprehension. They not unnaturally came as an agreeable surprise especially as the definition had been taken as broad enough to include a Catholic liberal-pacifist.
Muggeridge, going to the other extreme as people of his background generally do, asked if Anarchism wasn’t really just extreme non-violence. For him, like many academics and journalists, it had to be one extreme of nonsense or the other. On Stuart dissenting, “St. Mugg” asked him if he would actually kill someone — like General Franco, for instance — if he had the chance. Stuart said “Yes” — what could he say? — but he was off to Spain that day on that very mission, and when the programme was about to be shown he had been arrested in Madrid charged with being involved in a plot to kill General Franco. Muggeridge hastily had Stuart’s word deleted and Stuart appeared to British viewers merely opening and closing his mouth in reply.
Charged in Madrid with banditry and terrorism (the details are in his book <em>The Christie File</em>, and also in Miguel Garcia’s <em>Franco’s Prisoner</em>), he faced a court-martial which had a number of far-reaching consequences. It was an embarrassment to the Spanish Government which, with most of the Catholic restrictions on beach morality overcome and the Civil Guards less trigger-happy now Sabater and Facerias were dead, was just opening up to tourism in a big way. Now foreigners seemed to be suggesting an innocent young man was being framed and no-one could feel safe in such a country.
How unfair, just when their period of genocide was over and superb public relations policy had caused it to pass unremarked! Yet they could hardly not sentence him, and so declare open season for anyone to smuggle in explosives to send the dictator sky high. He got twenty years.
According to the press, Stuart had gone into Spain wearing a Scottish kilt (one Argentine paper misunderstood the reference to a ‘falda escosesa’ and said he was dressed as a woman!) The truth was he had a kilt in his rucksack, but the police already knew of his mission and had their eye on him from the start, and the kilt proved a good excuse for their suspicions of a hitchhiker. It is typical of the laid-back approach of the Resistance to such matters that they let the attempted removal of the dictator, murderer of millions, be left to a hitchhiker. The significance of the kilt was that it makes it easier to get a lift in France, as Scots are more popular than English, or at least have the same claim to popularity without the imperial hang-up. It has no such relevance in Spain.
It has been observed by those hostile to the Resistance that all their half-dozen attempts against Franco (and one against Franco and Hitler together) were ‘amateur’. But they were, for better or worse, amateurs, not professional assassins, which it seems their critics would have preferred. The Iberian Liberation Council had put off or sidetracked many half-baked youngsters from volunteering for daring missions. They knew Stuart to be of a different mettle.
Though Pascual was, I think, co-ordinating the resistance, Octavio Alberola, who returned from Mexico in 1961 and was living in Brussels, was then considered Public Enemy No. 1 by the Franco regime. It was after meeting him that French, Italian, Argentine and now British volunteers had gone to Spain to aid attempts to reform the dictatorship in the one way possible. In Christie’s case he was to contact Carballo and deliver the goods, but was arrested at the pick-up point.
I personally first learned of the case through the press, never reliable in cases like this, but confirmed it through Paris. ‘La inglesa’ lobbied the British Consulate inside Spain, which went through the usual motions, and the ‘pro-prisoners’ section of the Spanish Libertarian Movement took up the case for Christie and Carballo. In London, the SWF and others formed the Christie-Carballo Committee. I did not join because it included liberal fellow-travellers, who were afterwards very upset when they found he actually was guilty, and not an unjustly-accused pacifist.
However I chased around all the ‘names’ I could, feeling as ever in such cases if one had to eat mud one might as well make a meal of it. I can only record, without comment, that the rebuffs and slights I got in this, as in the later Angry Brigade defence, were from liberal-minded politicos and reformist trade union officials. On the other hand, eminent Church of England churchmen I contacted were invariably polite, at least to the extent of offering sherry and biscuits and promising to look into the matter, afterwards assuring me that I was mistaken and they feared the young man was guilty, as if that had anything to do with it.
It was good copy for the British press and they elevated Stuart to five minutes of fame as the unlucky Innocent Abroad. It was bad all-round publicity for the tourist industry of the Franco regime and triggered off slackening interest in its misdeeds. So far as the anarchist movement was concerned it was historic. It brought Christie into contact with anarchist prisoners like Juan Busquets, Miguel Garcia, and Luis Edo and awakened international co-operation. People started sending him food parcels, which he shared among his colleagues, which had a knock-on effect. It gave me an idea nobody had suggested before. We could get food parcels sent into Spanish prisons, alleviating need. The contact with resistance fighters also had the effect of encouraging resistance abroad, and not only to Franco.
Most countries have a sort of state-socialism in prison — you work as ordered and get what is allowed — families outside look after themselves as they can, or in some countries are looked after by the State. In Spain they had free-market type jails (it has changed only slightly). Prisoners worked for contractors in a semi-privatised jail system. They spent their wages on themselves or sent money to their families outside. The families starved unless they worked themselves. As a punishment, work was denied and the prisoner could only do cleaning type jobs for bare rations, thus being unable to contribute to family support and indeed being dependent on them. Hence the perennial interest in prisoners welfare by the Spanish libertarian movement.
The idea of sending postal orders or food parcels to prisoners serving a sentence was strange, but once it was found to be acceptable to the authorities, we got a lot of people doing it. I certainly did not realise how many until after Franco’s death, when people spoke more freely and dozens of Spaniards, not just in Resistance circles, told me about it. Miguel Garcia later jokingly complained I was guilty of the introduction of Tetley’s tea bags to Spain, since most included this handy item. If this be true, and I have never had a thank-you from the Tetley firm, I can only plead the cultivated wine palate of the Spanish never stopped Captain Morgan’s rum from getting off the ground (with Coca Cola it’s called ‘Cuba libre’). Miguel himself later became an aficionado of Guinness.
To add to the unwelcome publicity forced on Franco, there were also a series of attacks on Spanish official institutions, including one on the London Embassy. When attacks extended to American institutions as well they decided to throw in the towel. They did not release Carballo, a Spaniard charged with the same offence, as the official reason was a plea from Stuart’s mother. This was regarded cynically by anti-fascists, since not only were pleas by Spanish mothers, even against the death sentence, for their sons and daughters disregarded, but in the earlier post-civil-war days had led to their own imprisonment if they made their pleas at a police or Civil Guard barracks. If unwise enough to plead directly with the Falange, who probably made the charge, they faced having their heads shaved, given a liberal dose of castor oil, and being forced to run down the street with bullets dancing at their feet.
The British press made the most of the dictator’s clemency, and the Spanish press, which at least had an excuse for grovelling to the Caudillo, said exultantly that ‘England’ had sent a terrorist and Spain had returned a good citizen, a premature assumption from their point of view in the light of what was to come.
Stuart’s case was being handled by a British solicitor, Benedict Birnberg, and he flew out to Madrid with Mrs Christie. The <em>Glasgow Daily Express</em> were on board and they persuaded her with celebratory drinks to get her son to grant them an ‘exclusive’, since all the papers were clamouring for the story as to how he had abjured ‘terrorism’ and become a good citizen. They would pre-empt his acceptance by transferring him from the incoming plane to another Glasgow-bound. Mr Birnberg remained silent, and when they got to Madrid told Stuart what the <em>Sunday Express</em> were planning. Stuart telephoned a friend in London who told us, perhaps too strongly, the <em>Express</em> were planning to kidnap him at Heathrow and whisk him to Glasgow.
About half-a-dozen activists went to the airport to meet him. In the arrival lounge were dozens of reporters whom we thought were the <em>Express</em>, while they thought we were. But the <em>Express</em> team was on the tarmac waiting to take him to the Glasgow-bound plane, threatening a ‘dirty story’ if he didn’t acquiesce. He pushed them aside (the BBC News said ‘he pushed the Anarchists waiting to meet him aside’) and came out at the arrival lounge, when we surrounded him. There was a punch up with the press.
As cameras went flying I heard the plaintive cry “How dare the <em>Express</em> behave in this manner to fellow-journalists?” The <em>Daily Mirror</em> team had a private punch up with a group of French hippies who were waiting for another flight and thought a VIP had arrived. The <em>Mirror</em> knew Stuart had turned down their rivals and assumed from their own slanted perceptions the hippies must be the anarchists.
As we piled into a couple of taxis a plaintive woman reporter added the final touch of comedy by banging on the cab door and calling, “Let me in, I’m not a journalist, I’m in the Anarchist Party too”, getting her shibboleths in a twist.
Later that evening while we were celebrating, an ‘exclusive’ deal was struck with the <em>People</em>, who agreed not to do a ‘repentance’ story. Instead they concocted a bizarre one of their own. Meanwhile the <em>Glasgow Sunday Express</em> did their dirty story of ‘Sobbing granny waits in vain’. Unluckily for them, the truth about that story came out in a leaflet in their own paper inserted by their own distributive workers, a flagrant example of interference with the sacred rights of the freedom of the press.
The rest of the media made up their own stories and could not help but bring up everything they could think of to suggest the anarchists were discountenanced. None of them imagined for a moment that what had happened was that a young enthusiast had gone out and the dictatorship had sent back a revolutionary hardened in discussions with the best of the Resistance. Miguel Garcia commented later that in this young Scot, the British people had sent a worthier Ambassador than their government usually did. I was more pleased with the fact that we had got back another Wilson Campbell.
*** <em>How the Thames Was Lost</em>
It was during the Christie-Carballo campaign that Ted Kavanagh, an Australian Anarchist who worked for a time in my bookshop, had the idea that we could do something else with the grouping at our disposal. The dockers strike afforded an ideal opportunity to do something to help the strike and perhaps to advance anarcho-syndicalism. We started a strike sheet <em>Ludd</em> (1967), a daily paper no less! With recollections of <em>The Syndcalist</em>, we made sure that <em>Freedom</em> didn’t print it, and it was run off on the Gestelith I had. Bill Christopher and Pete Turner, from <em>Freedom</em>, participated as well as people from the SWF and other anarchist and councillist groupings. The main inspiration was Joe Thomas, a print union militant who became a long-time friend. The paper was typeset and laid out in the early evenings, rushed off on my offset press, and Albert Grace, ‘Digger’ Walsh and others were handing it around the docks in the early morning. It was free, with a run of some thousand and was subsidised by printing greetings cards (reproductions of Tenniell as an alternative to Father Christmas) and ephemera on the same machine, largely thanks to Anna Blume. Though the daily distribution could not be sustained more than a month, it marked a major revival in what could at last be called anarcho-syndicalist activism.
Twenty-five years later, Woodcock in his Penguin <em>Anarchism</em> thought the daily <em>Ludd</em> was still appearing, but of course not a patch on <em>Freedom</em> then coming out monthly with all of a few hundred copies. ‘Research’ often means looking up dated reference books, and passing it off as knowledge.
It was the association of <em>Ludd</em> with the dockers that brought me, with others, into the bitter resistance of dockers and lightermen against their being thrown on the scrapheap. It was broken by a faction fight, contrived by people who spoke about us being outside the industry when they were outside the class, or as Albert Grace put it, “outside bleeding humanity altogether”. By dividing it broke down resistance to the closure of the entire industry. The lightermen were marginalised, then the dockers whose struggles had gone on for years. The once-flourishing London Docks became a wilderness and its only use for years was for film makers needing bombsites.
We did our best to support the fight and help our colleagues establish unity. Joe Thomas and “Digger” Walsh, an anarcho-syndicalist, knew the background much more than I did. One of the organisers who was the first to be isolated and out-manouevred by both the Trade Union bureaucracy and the Dock Labour Board, was Sid Senior.
Internal contacts in the offices of the Dock Labour Board told us disturbingly of official reports coming in from one John William Walsh, which was the name of our friend “Digger”. We did not believe it. However Sid Senior, we found, was under some illusion that the Liberal Party might help him in his struggle against Labour bureaucracy, and an associate of his wrote to the leader of the Liberal Party on his behalf. It was then engaged in trying to establish its liberal credentials against the Labour Government. It may be the Party staff was full of well-intentioned ladies and gentlemen who had never done any work in their lives, and could not be blamed for putting things in the wrong envelopes, but at all events Sid Senior got back a copy with a note saying, “Dear Mr Walsh: Can you let us have your usual report on this matter?” signed by the Leader.
A frantic JW Walsh, but not our JW Walsh, turned up at my bookshop, the address given by the sender, to reclaim it. The envelope he received contained a note to say the matter was being investigated. He proved to be a so-called “Catholic Anarchist” who had hung around dockers’ and lightermen’s meetings, sending in reports to the Liberal Party. They in turn, like other responsible parties, kept Special Branch informed.
At least some learned the lesson that the Liberal Party was no more to be trusted than any other. The last Liberal Government was the most undemocratic this century, with more admittedly political prisoners than any other, with a record lack of civil rights including the torture of women political prisoners, as well as using the military for police duties, bringing warships into ports to crush strikes, and finally plunging into world war. Liberals need more than adding that much-abused word ‘Democrat’ to their name to change their ways.
** 10 The Spy, the Royalist and a Last Farewell; The Freedom of the Press; Admonition; Old Flame and New Floods
*** <em>The Spy, the Royalist and a Last Farewell</em>
When I walked away from the remnants of my bookshop venture I was head over heels in debt and somewhat inclined to curse, like Thenardier, the wretched place ‘where they all had such royal sprees and I devoured my all like a fool’, not that the All came to very much, and I had enjoyed myself at times. I had never been able to shake off the legacy of the 374 Monster and by the time I had paid off its debts those of the bookshop had mounted.
For months I had been stunned by the tragic death of Evie, with whom I had a long association. She crashed her car in Wales returning from a trade show in Manchester, after the usual hospitality that goes with such affairs.
Some ten years later, I met her last boss by chance at a filling station. He got out of his chauffeur-driven Bentley and came across to me, reproaching me for never going to see him or his wife after Evie’s death, assuring me how much everyone in the trade appreciated her and how keenly they felt her loss. In the true, sincere and authentic voice of fashion business, he told me how they missed her, “You can’t begin to think how much money she made for us”, he assured me, tragically.
Though we had moved into a good flat after leaving St. Pancas, and giving up a decent place at a rent one could afford was the most idiotic thing financially and socially one could do at that time and since, that was what I did. I could not bear to live in it nor even to talk about Evie. I felt so emotional about it that Joe Thomas, who came with me to the funeral, warned people from talking to me either about Evie, or even about the flat.
Unlike the 374 Monster, it wasn’t easy to give the flat up. Though everyone was crying out for flats, the landlords wouldn’t transfer the lease. I let someone else move in provided they paid the rent direct. They ran up seven months rent when the landlord got a court order and evicted me and them without my knowing. I learned this later when sued in the county court for the balance of the rent owing after distraint. But fate always frowned on my landlords. True, nothing much happened to Miss Rowntree, but her devotion to the cause of peace and international understanding certainly never had any luck.
The solicitor for the 374 landlords having been burned to death, the bookshop’s landlord was drowned on a holiday cruise to the Canaries. The flat’s landlord was killed crossing the road from the car park to the court, and as his barrister did not understand at the time why his client failed to appear to instruct him, which annoyed the judge, I got a couple of months reprieve, by which time I had gone from the only address they knew. Alternatively Pharaoh’s heart had been softened by the omen, since I never heard of the case again.
Soon afterwards Audrey Charity, whom I had known for years, returned to England. She and I had an on-off relationship for years as she every so often abandoned the attempt and returned to a comfortable life-style in California, always returning just when it seemed all was at an end between us. Even before my leaving the bookshop venture, which had lasted five years, she kept pressing me to concentrate on my personal affairs rather than worrying about lifelong political commitments so many had abandoned long before my age, now pushing forty and knocking it over. She did not think much of honest poverty and all that. I did not think too highly of it myself, but it was all I could manage.
We were at opposites politically. She said she was a Royalist-Republican, which was to say a royalist in England and a Republican in California, and as such was a devout groupie of Charles II. We re-fought all the battles of the Civil War in our weekend journeys round the country. She got on very well with my parents, with whom she often stayed. Sid always jokingly called her ‘Baby Doll’ and Rose called her ‘Lady Jane’, which she regarded as the height of cockney humour. This time it almost seemed as if we would marry. But it never came off, though we always reckoned we might eventually shack up instead of having what we laughingly called our perpetual holiday romance. She wanted too much of life and I too little, everyone told us.
Within a year of coming back she thought she had cancer. Afterwards the doctors explained it was an eye complaint affecting descendants of North Europeans in California. She took her own life. She was always merry and so used to being complimented on her blonde beauty that she concealed her secret fears of illness and old age, neither of which she was to experience. Coming only eighteen months after Evie’s death, I felt emotionally shattered and drained.
A last fond and despairing look at the charming Welsh spy and the lovely American royalist! I lived alone for the next thirty years, and it would seem now certain, for the rest of my life.
*** <em>The freedom of the press</em>
While I was still on the dreary round of looking for work and finding inexplicable refusals I went with one old friend, Dave Kinsella, for a job on London Transport. He, like me, had been one of those excluded from the army for years. In his case it was the Irish republican connection — he was Lancashire-born but in the Connolly Club. When they had finally came round to telling him he had been ‘enlisted’ some months before, he had been at sea in the merchant service. He still faced a court-martial on his return but a fairer court martial than Captain Le Strange could conduct listened to his evidence and decided, even though not admitting the truth about the mysterious call-up so long delayed and then coming out of the blue, that the accused could hardly have left ship in Murmansk to respond even if he had known about it. It would have been an offence in itself.
However, he was less lucky than I in the long run since, once in the army, he got a five year prison sentence (he served two) for assaulting an officer, in circumstances which would not have caused more than a frown from a magistrate in civil life, and in circumstances more justified than in my case. How many got the same two years? Was it a mandatory penalty upon dissenters? I would still like to know, though it now makes no difference. It did not bother Dave. What irked him was that we were still turned down, and for such a lousy job, on the grounds of our ‘prison records’ yet they were recruiting former members of enemy forces who might have had criminal records, for all they knew, and in some cases might well have been guilty of war crimes, but that did not go against them.
At the suggestion of Joe Thomas, who was by then working for The Guardian, Dave and I applied to join the print union Natsopa. The union promptly fixed me with a job as a copytaker at the <em>Daily Sketch</em> and him as a driver at another daily. Such were the restrictive practices denounced as being a restraint of the freedom of the press-lords to decide who should work and who shouldn’t that the management was not consulted as to our political reliability and the only test applied was whether we could do the job or not. This type of abuse of the employer’s natural rights was later held up by Tory propagandists as an example of union power at its worst. Mrs Thatcher came to liberate industry from that threat.
*** <em>Admonition</em>
Just when I was packing up the bookshop, I received a last admonition on my folly. A would-be Conservative councillor on the St. Pancras estate was a young man in a hurry named Andrew came in to see me and analyse my financial follies, of which I was already well aware and did not need to have explained kindly.
George Plume, who worked for the municipality but had died two or three years before, had introduced him to the bookshop in the first place. Among the accumulated stock of Simpkin Marshall were some several dozen copies of a painting of Hans Christian Andersen, which George helped flog him on the basis of their being of Benjamin Disraeli, a likeness I had never before noticed. Thereafter he occasionally called on the look-out for portraits of other Conservative heroes, and he never failed to berate me politically and explain how well I could do on the other side of the fence if I only “looked after No. 1.”
He came round for the last time just as we were packing it all in, and met two Turkish Cypriots who occasionally bought indiscriminate stacks of books. They were after the non-books that had been left. They were not readers, but landlords.
Books were still a cheap method of claiming the furnished rooms they let had furniture over a certain value. Some types of non-books can be bought and sold cheaply, but who is to say what they were worth on the prices then charged? The bed and chairs in a ‘furnished bed-sit’ might be worth a couple of shillings, the wardrobe a pound or so, but the ‘library’ brought the furniture up to the valuer’s assessment. I hated dealing with them, and they sensed this. They generally came when I was out and dealt with my colleague who appeared to them much more reasonable.
Their belief in free enterprise coincided with Andrew’s and they got on famously. They invited him to join their jewellery import firm and use his charisma and ability to manage the office, insisting that as an Englishman he was ideal as managing director. He was delighted, took over, boasted to all and sundry of his sudden rise to a directorship. He sat giving orders to smiling Cypriots, which he never realised were never carried out, as they were for a fictitious operation. Meanwhile he drew a salary commensurate to his presumed standing, until one day the police raided the firm. The ‘workers’ pleaded they knew nothing of handling stolen property or long term fraud, which is what the company was really about. They only “took orders from the boss” who would no doubt have a suitable explanation. A warrant was out for his arrest and he left for Australia hurriedly. So ended my acquaintanceship with yet another person who assured me always “I was foolish not to look after No. 1.” and would do well if I did.
*** <em>Old Flame and New Floods</em>
It was a few years after the tragic loss of both Evie and Audrey that I met with Roz Shepherd once more. We had parted after the war when she decided to return to her husband, though their married life previously had been brief. He had taken the opportunity of being called up for military service to avoid a domestic battle, being able to go away without confessing he had another home to which to return, and to break with his wife by post from France. After the war, feeling herself getting too old for stage work, and with the variety theatre dying anyway, Roz felt the need for ‘security’. When he was demobbed, having broken with his war-time love (somebody else’s wife), he proposed resumption of the marriage, and she accepted.
I had barely the opportunity of holding our daughter in my arms before Roz reunited with her husband. I never saw her grow up. She did not know of my existence until just before she married, and for conventional reasons kept it as her secret. When we met, and I detected the strong likeness to my mother’s family I must admit I regretted lost opportunities, at least of not having had other children. As one grows older one tends to feel bitter about such matters, though I hope I haven’t. It hurt for a time and I never discussed it. Many friends have assured me I would have been a good father. I suppose some foes have regarded me as a Godfather. I met Roz sometimes and she put on my door a medallion of The Good Shepherd, which was the name Audrey jocularly gave her. It has fooled many a doorstep missionary. I met her husband only once before his death. He had been working at County Hall where he was a senior clerical officer until for some reason he retired early on an inadequate income. He came up to me in the coffee room and greeted me effusively, though I had not the faintest idea who he was (he knew me from photographs). Perhaps he thought I had some importance, as I was surrounded by councillors, but I hadn’t. The reason I was sitting in the County Hall coffee room was that I had met Ellis Hillman in the street. I had known him for years. He was a scientific prophet of doom and was now a Labour councillor which was doom enough to be going on with. We had a common interest in reviving public attention in the works of F. A. Ridley which is what we went in to discuss.
Ellis had entered electoral politics as a Trotskyist ‘deep entrist’ like three-quarters of the County Hall Labour councillors and not a few Tory ones who had gone in so deep they came out the other side. Indeed he told me of a mixed committee of Labour and Tory Opposition councillors he once chaired, prefacing his remarks with the statement that it was a trifle bizarre as all concerned happened coincidentally to be former members of the same Trot group.
They crowded round to hear his latest theory of disaster, that given the right combination of tide and wind, London could face a worse disaster than Venice, with the added possibility of the Underground being flooded. It sounded like science fiction, even more bizarre than his committee meeting. Most were more amused than disturbed and when he stood for a Hackney municipal election, his Conservative opponents used it extensively for ridicule to show the constituency what sort of mad ideas the Socialist member had. The Conservative Government issued a statement calming down undue fears, pointing out that the Thames Barrier would prevent this once they got around to building it and meanwhile a major disaster was no doubt possible but unlikely. They granted Mr Hillman’s premises, but explained only a few named London districts could be affected anyway — disastrously for the local Conservatives, as Hackney was one of them.
Even Roz, who lived in Hackney, phoned me anxiously to ask if she should get out with her daughter, and how soon. I told her it would be quite a while, if ever. Now the Thames Barrier is built, and Roz lived just long enough to see the new attraction. As I did not by then live far away from it, she called on me for tea just before it was completed and laughingly recalled her former fears. “You were always too damn cautious,” I remarked.
** 11 Half-time summing-up
*** <em>Half-time summing-up</em>
The late Fifties and early Sixties represent roughly a halfway house for my personal life, such as it was. For whatever interest it may afford, I have been persuaded I should write down a full account of my life to enable, among other matters, the background of the anarchist movement in this country in my lifetime, otherwise unrecorded or misreported, to be known. I tried to give a summing up in <em>The Anarchists in London 1935–55</em> which was somewhat sketchy and uncritical (and had a totally irrelevant cover for which I was not responsible!) Since then an obscure byway of history has come to a crossroads, the roads dividing to one still neglected by historians but reaching in the right direction along the old straight path, the other fashionable and maybe now a main road leading in the wrong direction.
In other words, there were entirely different philosophies referred to as anarchism. It took me a time to find there were two contradictory theories, one working class and revolutionary, the other an offshoot of liberalism. Now there are a great many variants, some dreamed up by the press or professors. When there were only two, some activist anarchists did not see it that way, and thought of the undoubted differences between the two conceptions as different degrees of commitment and action. They were doomed to frustration or else gave up the struggle in despair trying to reconcile the two.
Outsiders who do not understand the difference think ‘the anarchists can never agree among themselves’, as if those calling themselves socialists or conservatives were all of one mind, or chuckle about personal differences as if that were all there were to it.
The Anarchism I advocated from the start, and never varied from is that born of the class struggle, which was certainly taken into account by philosophers but came out of the working class. It had a proud fighting history in the struggle against Statism and every exploitative system. The capitalist press had characterised it as violent and esoteric plainly because it had given the bourgeoisie the shudders, both in the individual resistance that followed the crushing of the Paris commune and the syndicalist movement that came out of it.
After the First World War, the press-invented cartoon image had been transferred to the Bolsheviks but had not stuck. Later it was handed back to the anarchists when, that is, the media deigned to notice them. During the Spanish War there was a conspiracy of silence, in the fifties a deliberate campaign of misrepresentation described nationalists and Marxists as ‘Anarchists’ but anarchists as nationalists or Marxists. There was a press directive to that effect which meant, for instance, the (still reputable, pre-Murdoch) <em>Times</em> reported that anarchist Puig Antich, executed by Franco, was a Catalan nationalist, and the Marxist Ulrike Meinhoff, killed by the German police, was an anarchist. In the early days of the Provos the press started to say the (Nationalist and to an extent Marxist) IRA were anarchists, but the Spanish anarchist resistance were described as nationalists or Marxists. The Italian Red Brigades, unquestionably Maoist, and Basque nationalists. were called anarchists. It made for an obscuring of genuine anarchism. When in a letter I caught Reuters out on this misinformation, their correspondent ‘explained’ that the Red Brigades <em>were</em> Marxist, but anarchist insofar as “they thought to obtain their aims through anarchy”! The retraction, puerile as it was, was not published anywhere.
An entirely different philosophy purporting to be anarchist, though with more sophisticated ‘justification’, was of those rejecting the class struggle and the idea of revolution. While this philosophic “Anarchism” might preserve certain libertarian ideals like marble saints, and might or might not try to put distortions of them into practice, it does not believe anarchism to be possible, revolution desirable or class divisions to exist. It may confine itself to permanent protest, scholarly dissent or nonconformity, perhaps seeing this as the result of psychology or genes rather than class. It does not vote every four years or sometimes, daringly, does so in defiance of ‘dogma’.
Though this conception had some strands in the past, and certainly has some in the future with the rise of the hippy movement, it came to us as part of the bourgeois-pacifist influx into protest during the war. It later produced in turn such absurd monstrosities as ‘capitalist anarchism’, ‘Catholic anarchism’, ‘non-violent anarchism’, purely intellectual exercises without goal, and hived off into situationism, the hippy culture, and fitted in with strands of the new student-orientated culture.
Conscientious objection in WWII was no big deal in Britain (though not elsewhere). It entered into effective dialogue with the State, but nonetheless ‘advanced’ pacifists, beyond quakerism, believed standing aside was effective resistance. Sometimes a few months jail before ultimate recognition sufficed to make them regard themselves as heroes who felt themselves justly rewarded for their action by the then availability of comfortable homes which the lucky ones occupied for the rest of their lives, others until the first Rent Act.
As many came from patriotically indoctrinated sections of the lower and upper middle classes, they needed emotional justification for this, provided by many philosophies, primarily Christianity but some offbeat varieties of socialism too. One of the minor ones was this bowdlerised version of anarchism which comprised two negatives, philosophic anarchism and pacifism.
In the days when anarchism, in the English-speaking countries, had passed into oblivion, one could be excused from thinking that both these types formed ‘part of the movement’ if different ends of it. Now, when so much rubbish is invented by the press and professors as “Anarchism” (quite as much as ‘socialism’); some of which comes as a distortion of the real movement, and some of which comes out of logical extension of the phoney one, many may wonder whatever I saw in anarchism to devote a life to it. I can only hope this book comes as an answer.
Considerable changes came about affecting our periphery which in turn had repercussions on the wider world. As the workers generally were abandoning the struggle, some in disgust, some in despair and many in hopes engendered by the new materialism, and the age level of revolutionary groups became older and content smaller, so a new socialistic quasi-libertarian movement was unexpectedly growing among the new generation we thought lost to the student culture.
I did not notice the change of attitude of the students at its beginnings. At a meeting at St. Pancras Town Hall to discuss some proposed strike, I believe of bus drivers, someone mentioned something about the role students could play having been ignored. I pointed out that with modern traffic it was extremely unlikely that nowadays the students could get away with scabbing on transport workers as they did in 1926. My remarks were met with a chorus of disapproval from students in the hall. It was the first appreciation I had that they no longer felt that way, and that current undergraduates could hardly be expected to act as their predecessors did in 1926. Moreover, most of their parents were workers themselves.
That the whole Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and New Left period was a diversion from the class struggle remained an increasing conviction of mine no matter how libertarian sections of the studentariat appeared. It seems to me that it heralded the birth pangs of a new class that was moving into the scene, that liked to think of itself as meritocratic but was in fact bureaucratic, the mandarins and failed mandarins who wanted to come to class and often individual power, and as is usual with rising classes, use the classes below them to help them rise.
The mandarins conquered the Labour Party left but drove the working class out of their own movement. The variegated Trotskyists and Maoists played on the rising mandarins who dominated academia and the media in the next generation. Colin Ward’s journal Anarchy (1961–70) seemed to attract the failed mandarins who postulated double negatives, linking a negative anarchism with pacifism, and postulating an impossibility (diluted anarchism without revolution) they did not believe capable of achievement themselves. As Anarchism was less demanding to write on than Marxism (you don’t have to deal with those boring economics) and less overcrowded a market, it became a matter for writers of University theses, “to win the applause of schoolboys and furnish matter for a prize essay”.
The reasons for my growing frustration during these years can be understood, but I did stay in groups trying to get an act together. I must have spoken to hundreds of meetings all over the country, ranging from two or three to several hundreds. It was an uphill struggle but I suppose it compared with any lesser known party politician, and a good many successful ones, but any traceable result is hard to find. The only bitter consolation for my barren years in the political back o’ beyond from the end of war to the turbulent sixties was that my friends in the wider working-class movement, Joe Thomas being very much an example, found themselves in comparable ghost towns of the political wilderness. Elsewhere this had been achieved by armed might. Here, within a brief twenty years, the bland approach had the same effect. Though in the 1970s and on we were back in the wilderness again, I now feel more optimistic.
** 12 Closer Links with Spain; Customs and Practice; Error and Terror; Satire; The Wooden Shoe; The Carrara Conference; The Vietnam Connection
*** <em>Closer Links with Spain</em>
Through my contacts I had always known about the Spanish Resistance, but usually when they were already on trial for their activities. During the darkest days I managed to throw the occasional lifebelt of solidarity or publicity, but it was not until the worst of the post-war civil genocide was over, and the resistance of 1939–63 was finally crushed by Franco’s police that my links became really close. Francisco Gomez had always been secretive, probably because he did not wish to compromise me too much. Most of the exiles in London were as out of touch as I was. Sections of those in France were more knowledgeable, but I had no way of finding out which were which.
*** <em>Customs and Practice</em>
When Stuart Christie first came back to London, he had the sort of publicity for which aspiring film stars would give thousands of pounds, but not a penny in his pocket, so when the first flurry of excitement with the press was over, he came to work with me in the Coptic Street bookshop, then on its last legs, more to help bury than to raise it. When finally I turned it in and went to Fleet Street, he went to work for the gas contractors William Press, then converting the South of England to North Sea Gas. Special Branch had decided by then that, contrary to the hopeful stories in which they had acquiesced, Spain had not returned them a good citizen and they were convinced he would introduce ‘terrorism’ to these tranquil shores. Wasn’t terrorism what Anarchists were all about?
This presumption, originating among the Edwardian fiction writers, had become a fixation of the secret political police and dominated my life for years. Even when I went on holiday abroad, I faced a gruelling cross-examination and search every time I came back. It had the opposite effect of that intended. Instead of being intimidated, I complained up hill and down dale and even on occasions received apologies, though the system was in no way reformed.
Evie had always enjoyed such Customs searches, helpfully explaining on one occasion she herself was only a spy, not an anarchist. I fear humour was in short supply at Harwich, and they even took the car tyres off for examination and still weren’t satisfied. I got increasingly short-tempered at the wasted time after several such incidents. I could accept that in East Berlin or Moscow where there was an official censorship it was to be expected, and indeed a compliment, but here anarchist literature was subject to no restriction except when one passed an official point.
Anarchist literature only? On one occasion a friend, a remand prisoner, asked me to send him a copy of Lady Antonia Fraser’s <em>Cromwell</em> and the jail authorities refused to allow it in. I wrote to the press about it, and a bewildered Lady Antonia intervened. I suppose the late Lord Protector might be regarded as a revolutionary by some but hardly this biographer.
Lest supporters of an infinitely worse dictatorship than Oliver’s be discouraged by this, I hasten to say that there are not and never have been problems, even in war-time, in sending Hitler’s <em>Mein Kampf</em> to any prisoner, convicted, remanded or interned.
Audrey, whose brushes with the authorities up to then had only extended to official disapproval of her constantly altering the date of birth on her US passport, and claiming she was sure Liz Taylor did the same without any bother, felt I was paranoid about Customs. Then one day, after a carefree week in France, she drove through with me in her car, instead of having to go separately (she in the non-UK queue) as we had to do when foot passengers. We had nothing dutiable and all I had were a few posters and a book but they were enough. She got closely questioned about plans for the Battle of Naseby she had picked up in a Paris bookstall. Even being an ardent Cavalier came under suspicion when coupled incongruously with anarchism.
My patience with Customs came to a head at Dover once, after spending forty-five minutes arguing about whether political literature printed legally in the United Kingdom could freely come back in without censorship. They finally, but reluctantly, conceded it could and quite irrelevantly — I was sure maliciously — also decided I would have to pay duty on a lone bottle of liqueur unmentioned before. On hearing this, I drank the lot on the spot instead while they were searching the car. Fortunately somebody else was available to drive home. I was out like a light until waking next morning with a splitting headache.
I never could persuade the Customs of the axiom “Gedenken sind zollfrei”, so how could I persuade them about a bottle of Spanish liqueur? Once at Harwich when I quoted “Thoughts go custom free” they asked me who said so, and I replied “Goethe”. I was told, for once courteously, that German law did not apply this side of the Channel.
When I raised the whole matter with the Customs and Excise in London they told me with a shrug that “people look at these things differently in the sticks”. But my complaints were of places like Heathrow, Gatwick, Dover, Harwich, all major international points of entry. I was enabled to raise these matters with written evidence before a Parliamentary Commission, but heard nothing further. The last official word I had on the subject was that nothing would be done about it until after we entered the Common Market, which did indeed enable one to move freely about Europe but otherwise altered the system not one iota. It would seem the principle that used to be laid down to would-be declared Freethinkers by the Army still holds, “You’re free to think what you like but once you’re here you’ve got to put C of E or something else sensible on your tag”.
If the Special Branch Customs checks were bad enough before I teamed up with Stuart Christie, they increased afterwards. To go with him through the British points of entry in those days would try the patience of a saint. They did not even expect to find anything but merely asked questions that led nowhere. On returning from a Venice conference, we had a lengthy argument in which we asked repeatedly what interest there could be on books which were free of tax. They seized triumphantly on a book dealing with Lesbianism in the feminist movement, in the baggage of one of the women with us, saying “You can’t possibly seriously expect to take this into England”. She countered with an unspoken but unanswerable comment of opening the book displaying that it came on loan from Brixton Library.
I suppose the crux of foolishness came once, when I was travelling alone, and a young Customs official told me I could not bring (perfectly sober) books on anarchist theory into England and asked if (the ultimate horror) I had the intention of reprinting them here. This after 150 years unbroken publishing of anarchist books! I asked her to show me the regulations and she pointed out one relating to horror comics. I exploded at this nonsense, and she apologised, saying she had got the wrong paragraph, “an innocent mistake”, pointing out instead the regulation relating to pornography! “It all comes under that”, she explained helpfully. I threw the regulations at her angrily and she brought out the Special Branch officer, an expert on these matters. He picked up a (bourgeois) book on the Spanish war and solemnly explained “a lot of blood was shed there at the time”. Maybe as this also applied to the Battle of Naseby it clarified why maps of it might be too exciting for the twentieth century lest it give ideas, and why Cromwell was too risky for an Irish remand prisoner to read about instead of the normal prison diet of American horror comics.
Going into Ireland by the Welsh car ferry, I was held up while they searched the car after finding one or two books in the boot. They ultimately found a beret which Miguel Garcia had lent me once when it was raining. It hadn’t fitted. I had put it in the boot and forgot about it. “This is somewhat provocative to take into Ireland,” remarked the alert Special Branch officer, making me feel thankful I hadn’t got a mackintosh as well. I showed him the inside label, and pointed out that it was a Basque beret anyway. Basque? I couldn’t have said anything worse. “They’re terrorists too, aren’t they?” he asked immediately, and this even before he asked me how to spell it (I naturally said B-A-S-K, I wasn’t going to let him get the credit of sending in a literate report from “the sticks”).
*** <em>Error and Terror</em>
This dictum of the authorities that anarchism was synonymous with terrorism, or terrorism with anarchism, so that the admission of being one was an admission of the other, was gradually to find its way into the judicial jargon. In two important trials, in which I was to figure, it was certainly held by the judges and prosecuting (even defence) counsel, and refuted by myself (brought in solely as a witness), but I will deal with that later. Meanwhile whenever I appeared as a witness or bailee, the same old dreary arguments were heard.
In one case an elegant Old Etonian counsel asked a Post Office worker and an anarchist Dave Morris (years later featuring in the McDonalds libel case) if his beliefs entailed “burning down the Post Office” (it hadn’t been burned, he was just a witness in an obstruction case). Dave retorted, “What a stupid thing to say! If someone burned down the post office, no one would get any letters. We believe in workers control of the postal system”. The magistrate tactfully ignored prosecuting counsel being addressed as stupid, a privilege normally reserved for outside the court afterwards and then involving defence counsel.
The press had invented the shock-horror anarchist in the first place at the turn of the century. It depicted the attacks by anarchist workers against bloody repression by their rulers as unprovoked and senseless attacks by crazed individuals elevated into a philosophy. The press got itself into a twist, using the Portuguese Republicans at a particular period as their archetypal anarchist, but also confusing the Russian nihilists and populists with anarchists. Basically, though, it was the fight by the pre-WWI French, Italian and Spanish workers using individual actions against mass repression that excited the imaginations of the press. Surely nobody could be so wicked as to hold the actual individuals wielding power responsible for the actions they personally ordered? If there were such malefactors, they must be crazed, criminal and depraved monsters, believing only in violence for the sake of violence! The just response to the wickedness of dictators was the slaughter of millions of the subjects they had conquered. That remains the official doctrine until this day.
Yet many of the same newspapers in their literary columns became fond of the term “the gentle anarchists” when writing of the occasional self-confessed anarchist who wrote a book or was written about. <em>The Listener</em> wrote an article on Stuart Christie as a “gentle anarchist” but reminded its readers that under a charming exterior he was a hard-liner who was in touch with international anarchists. It was clear that for them it was his association with foreigners that did the trick.
The phoney anarchists coming out of the peace movement preferred to refer to themselves as “non-violent anarchists” which added to the judges’ view of anarchism as violent. One learned judge even asked me once which sort of anarchist I was, “violent” or not. Imagine him asking the question of a socialist or a conservative! If one denied believing in violence as such, yet accepting its need on certain occasions, one was echoing the view of possibly 99.9 per cent of the population which neither believed in extreme non-violence nor were mad axemen, but apparently anarchists were not allowed the luxury of ever being in line with the majority viewpoint.
*** <em>Satire</em>
In 1965 a group of us had got together and started publishing occasionally a review <em>Cuddon’s Cosmopolitan Review</em>. The reference was to Ambrose Cuddon, whose review may have been the first consciously anarchist one to appear in English, and who was possibly the first in the English speaking world to be an anarchist in the modern sense. He was certainly a connection between the Luddite and Chartist movements on the one hand, and the newer non-Parliamentary Socialist groupings on the other. Our historical judgment was criticised as based only on anecdotal history from veterans but knowing how conventional history is concocted I doubt if it suffered from that.
We carried on <em>Cuddon’s</em> for a year or so, off and on, Ted Kavanagh editing, and it became a focus for people interested in the international struggle even though it refrained from mentioning it. We never quite decided whether it was to be entirely satirical, political or humorous, but the mixture made for interest and gathered a nucleus which later became an important pivot of active anarchism. One decision, though, not to publish more than was sold, so as to encourage people to read it rather than file it, and not to have back copies for reference, meant once it was gone it sank out of sight which was a pity. Some generations on, it would be good to reprint some of the witty pieces.
<em>Cuddon’s</em> was one of the first of the satirical magazines later in vogue, not that we ever were, but nothing I was ever associated with ever got into the market place, even when I wanted to be. However, it led to some aspiring careerist pupils at the upper-class Winchester School setting up their bid for journalism in the school magazine, on the basis of a series of stories mimicking the supposed anarchist set-up. Its humour consisted of using the forenames of actual people, an in-joke which must have bewildered other Wykehamists who couldn’t possibly have known them.
The leading character was a bankrupt swindler, “Uncle Albert”, which was supposed to be me, and the cream of the jest was “Stuart” — who could that be? — as a crazed terrorist. The schoolboys’ contributor, a failed artist working as a bus conductor, was in his late fifties at the time. The schoolboys, who aimed at becoming <em>Private Eye</em> contributors and ended as advertising agents, had their fun with the author for the price of a few pints. It never occurred to Arthur Moyse, the person concerned, that he was in any way grassing with giving distinguishable forenames, but perhaps he thought fiction excused all. Unfortunately, some people took him seriously and my home was attacked one night by a bunch of yelling public school yobs in a van from Winchester School. The neighbours, a Black family having an all-night party, thought it was racists coming to break it up, and before I could get out of bed they had rushed out to give the gentlemanly twits a good beating. It took some persuasion to make the police understand my version, but not being the West End where money spoke loudest, they eventually did.
Next day my friend Annie, who had also been woken up, felt if practical jokes were in order she should have her ten cents worth too, sent a telegram to Moyse to say I had died in an attack on the house and would he attend my funeral at a far distant cemetery at 7 a.m. in the morning. He shamefacedly turned up to a non-existent meeting-point which quite ruined his day. There was no way she could interfere with morning prayers at Winchester School or she’d have had them there too.
*** <em>The Wooden Shoe</em>
One result of <em>Cuddons</em> was that Ted, with Anna Blume and Jim Duke, set up the Wooden Shoe Bookshop. It was still possible to open shops, this one in the heart of West Central in unreconstructed New Compton Street, with neither capital, premium or deposit. Even so, it was desirable to have enough put by to pay the rent and rates when due, which finally scuppered this bookshop as it did my commercial ones.
A few years later the Wooden Shoe might have been a viable if not profit-making proposition with its policy of selling books relating to Anarchism and related topics. But at the time there was little variety to offer, and what there was could be found on the bottom shelves in other establishments. To get customers it had to find more stock and this had to be Marxist or non-political literary, and meant running up debts to publishers which eventually swamped the venture. Before Ted and Anna closed down with a cryptic note saying “Gone fishing” there were a few far-reaching events. As a meeting place rather than as a bookshop, it influenced the beginnings of new squatting movement, created a least a diversion on the anti-Vietnam War movement and led to the black flag flying over the barricades in Paris. Not bad for an under-capitalised, mismanaged and loss-making bookshop that scarcely existed a year!
*** <em>The French Connection</em>
Impressed by the attention suddenly, flatteringly and quite undeservedly given to the anarchists by the press over the Vietnam demo (to which I will come), a few French students came to London to find out how it was done. As we now had a centre, they could come to the Wooden Shoe bookshop, and they turned up for discussions. The only advice we gave, or could give, was to point out it was organised workers, not students preparing for bourgeois careers, who would be able to change society. They also met the Situationists, who told them the exact reverse.
When the students went back they followed their own instincts and the result was the rising in the Universities that sparked off the workers’ rising and barricades in Paris leading to the black flag flying from public buildings, a roadshow version of the Paris Commune of 1871, if not as important as political commentators deemed it to be. One of the students concerned, certainly the most voluble of those who came to the Wooden Shoe, was Daniel Cohn-Bendit (like ‘Red Emma’ he got called ‘Danny the Red’ because of his hair, but people concluded it was because of his politics) got the full glare of publicity as if he had been solely responsible for the mini-revolution of 1968. In fact, he was singled out as a ‘leader’ by the press because he was a German Jew, and they hoped this would prejudice the workers, but it didn’t, and by misfiring made him a ‘petit grand homme’. The British press did the same thing with Tariq Ali more successfully, claiming he was a student, or even a revolutionary, leader, though he only led a minor dissident Trotskyist group. Both were surpassed by the German press which, though it had no racial target left to shoot at, induced the actual shooting of the alleged ‘student leader’ Rudi Dutschke.
*** <em>The Carrara Conference</em>
The marble workers of Carrara, who quarry the sculpture for the majority of Roman Catholic churches in Europe but were always the most rugged sceptics and opponents of Church and State, came to accept anarchism in its very earliest days. Bakunin and Cafiero had given expression to what was a fundamental conviction of the local workers, many of whom had by emigration spread the idea to other countries. It had resisted the pre-war monarchy and its demands for human sacrifice for its wars of aggression. It had fought back against the fascisti who came as strike-breakers and stayed as a virtual army of occupation after the Mussolini conquest of Italy. But it never succumbed. At hillside festivals, families still met after their halls were seized. Partisan acts were planned during what seemed carefree picnics. When the opportunity came during the war, local partisan bands were formed, and people from Carrara and similar towns were wiping out fascist resistance long before the Allied troops turned up.
After the war it seemed as if all Carrara was anarchist. Gradually over the years the impetus was lost — as everybody accepted the idea, what was the point of propaganda? Though electoral abstention meant the Communist Party was able to dominate the municipal administration, most municipal matters of significance were controlled by local co-ops. Carrara was the obvious place to choose for an International Anarchist Conference. Its hall in the centre of town originally seized from the fascisti during the re-occupation of Carrara even appeared on the picture postcards sold in the town, and there were statues of local and international anarchists in the main squares.
However, the international committee that had organised the conference had much the same ideas as those who for some years had controlled the anarcho-syndicalist international. They had no organisational base and were responsible to nobody, but for years their purely literary reputation as ‘anarchist writers’ had maintained them as a kind of invisible leadership on the basis of what can only be described as a personality cult. Kropotkin in WWI, answerable to nobody, caused immense harm to the movement by his ambivalent stand. Rocker, Rudiger, Souchy, Shapiro, had moved to a position scarcely distinguishable from social-democracy, if not some of them to a position wholly reactionary, yet were regarded as sacred cows one should not question. This had been possible in the days when the bulk of the movement in the Latin countries consisted of ill-educated workers who respected intellectuals, or in France, Italy and among the Spanish exiles where the rump of a civil war leadership kept the organisation together. In modern conditions this had to give way.
As there was a kind of loose annual get-together of a conference in Britain, referred to as the Anarchist Federation, at that time as large and no more disorganised than that in France and equally ineffective, we were invited to attend. The <em>Cuddon’s</em> group were responsible for putting forward two delegates, one of them Christie, who had been having enormous press publicity, and the other Cohn-Bendit. The committee had made sure he was excluded as a French delegate for the wrong reasons, not on the true grounds he was only ephemerally an anarchist, but because he was too much associated with anarchist activism, which meant something at the time, in Paris and elsewhere.
We accordingly granted him British citizenship to become our delegate — when they protested at the “English sense of humour” we asked if they thought only the Queen had the right to grant citizenship. Federica Montseny, the ex-Minister, who had thought she would be the star attraction as the last of the personality cult, was particularly discomfited, especially when Christie and Cohn-Bendit got all the press and public attention. The effect of the conference was to mark a breach with both the old bureaucratic tradition of established dissent, and the new pacifism, as opposed to genuine anarchism with its working class roots. The effects of the ‘punk revolution’ were yet to come and to change the anarchist scene disastrously.
We never expected Cohn-Bendit to last the course — he was too much the self-conscious star turn and eventually settled down to take his place as a careerist cashing on a youthful experience like so many pseudo-socialists — but he was a useful symbol for a clash at the time. After the conference the International First of May movement was able to establish its contacts with one another having seen precisely where they differed from the rump of the old movement that had established one niche in society and the spectre of a different one that was going to transform a far larger niche under the pretence of dropping out of it.
*** <em>The Vietnam Connection</em>
The highspot of the New Left was the famous anti-Vietnam War demonstration in 1968, organised by the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, a movement of Trotskyist students who later became mandarins themselves. For months the press built up fantastic tales of what would happen. As it was going to be dominated by Trots and especially Tariq Ali’s faction, we were pretty well determined to boycott it. We got a lot of fun out of the press following up their own inventions, having confused realties with a serial fiction story running in the <em>Evening News</em>. There was talk of guns being smuggled into London, though was never clear what they were to be used for. A coup, with this lot? Every journalist was on the look out for new sensations, most of them centring around Tariq Ali or Stuart.
The joke was that far from having guns, the anarchists then had practically no people. The weekenders were a closed book to us six days of the week. The student movement was more of a joke to us, though the <em>News of the World</em> managed to unearth that the anarchist ‘leaders of the students’ such as Stuart had not been to university themselves. They didn’t notice they weren’t purporting to lead any students either, nor did they. But as the old phoney John Gordon admitted to me in a letter, when I pointed out to him that in his <em>Sunday Express</em> column he had confused Marxists and anarchists, they were all the same to him. He tried “not to be too pedantic”.
The various left groups denied the stories of the guns, but none of them could be sure about the dreaded anarchists. Every one of them made reservations about what the anarchos might do, while for our part we cheerfully told the journos we not only had hidden arsenals but rogue elephants if they insisted on pestering us. One leaflet I issued, meant as a sarcastic comment on the <em>Evening News</em> story as followed up by the press, finished in the <em>Sunday Times</em> in full as an example of what was intended on the dreaded day. It included digging up Kew Gardens, playing American football on Lords cricket pitch, spreading the story in Irish pubs that they were poisoning the Guinness and blowing up Peter Pan’s statue replacing it with an inscription, ‘Fairies are a bourgeois illusion’, all as part of a plot to destroy the English way of life. This was in all seriousness taken as an example of what ‘the loonier sections’ of the left were planning to do. Sadly they drew the line at our suggestion of using rogue elephants, no doubt thinking it unlikely we could obtain them in time.
Notwithstanding our being determined to do nothing about the anti-Vietnam War demonstration because it was so heavily dominated by supporters of Ho Chi Minh, in the finish as many anarchos turned up as if we had decided to participate, cheerfully chanting counter-slogans and attracting all the weekenders of those days. The <em>Daily Mail</em> had been sarcastic about the march because of its close association with Ho Chi Minh and said it could respect the people as believers in peace only if they opposed both sides. In point of fact, the anarchists did, and this led to a physical clash in the march reported in the selfsame <em>Daily Mail</em> under the headline “ANARCHISTS ATTACK PEACE MARCHERS”.
** 13 The Shadow of the Tong; The Anarchist Black Cross; Miguel Garcia; Start of “Black Flag”; Towards the Centre; Rise of the Print Empire; Anarchist in Fleet Street; 1986 Again; Doctor’s Dilemma
*** <em>The Shadow of the Tong</em>
Over the years I had been corresponding with a Chinese friend, Ch’En Chang, who had originally been in London as a medical student before the war. He had returned to China and was always in touch with the what remained of the huge anarchist workers’ movement, about which the best-known figure in modern Chinese literature, Pa Chin, had movingly written. That movement had passed through immense struggles with the old Empire, the new Republic, the warlords, the Japanese invaders and now the Communists. His letters had always come through devious routes, originally being posted in the International Settlement in Shanghai, then occasionally in Hong Kong and finally coming from Singapore. As he never left China under Communist rule, he managed to do so through the good offices of the former seamen’s guild which was the last grouping of the old movement.
Thanks to Ch’En, and with the help of Olga Lang’s biography of Pa Chin and the somewhat briefer information in Yu and Scalapino’s book on Chinese Anarchism, I was able to write a short pamphlet on <em>The Origins of the Chinese Anarchist Movement</em> (reproduced several times and still the only comprehensive account). Many disbelieved in stories of an anarchist movement, so great was current belief in Mao’s history and record. Over the years I was told wonderingly that this or that book by a real live professor contained references to certain figures of the past which seemed to back my extraordinary thesis that even if the present was Mao’s, the past was not and the future might not be either.
Not until the Battle of Tiannamen Square, when Mao was dead, did many radicals realise Mao was not all that he was cracked up to be and that there was dissent in his empire, though it was still generally assumed that resistance was a student affair and that the workers, like the tourists, enjoyed the delights of Western ballet and trips to the sewage farms at the weekends.
Pa Chin, actually Li Fei-kan (his nom-de-plume Pa Chin pronounced and in the new spelling Ba-jin,was taken from an amalgam of the names of Bakunin and Kropotkin) continued to write during the horrors not only of his youth but the war, the Japanese occupation and the triumph of Maoism. In the Cultural Revolution, during which Mao played Trotsky to his own Stalin, he had been persecuted, degraded, forced to re-write the endings of his novels to make them more optimistic. His pessimism was justified faced with the alternatives of Chiang Kai Shek, Mao Tse Tung or Japanese imperialism. In his re-written novels he had to take the pictures of Bakunin off the walls of the characters of Northern peasants in rebellion and replace them, years before the name could have meant anything to them, with that of Mao. Despite immense ‘re-education’ and being forced to kneel on broken glass in front of TV cameras and confess his sins, Pa Chin still defied his tormentors. Ch’En admired him, as did many others, and asked me if anything could be done, having no idea what position I was in, for my letters, sent to a hostel in Singapore, took a year or more to be picked up and reach him.
Herbert Read had professed himself an anarchist, though a pillar of the art and cultural establishment. After he accepted a knighthood from the Churchill Government, he was strongly criticised for what was at the kindest an inconsistency His essays on Anarchism were expressed with great lucidity, though his actions scarcely lived up to it. When he went to Buenos Aires on behalf of the British Council, the local anarchists invited him to speak. He gave a lecture on Anarchism to an overflowing theatre full of people wanted by the dictatorship, as the police looked helplessly on at this illegal meeting, unsure as to what to do when it was addressed by an honoured guest of the Government, beyond controlling the queues blocking the traffic.
Asking for questions from the audience, Read was not unnaturally asked how he could reconcile taking an honour from his own government let alone coming to the Argentine on its behalf as a guest of their dictatorship, with the views he had just vividly expressed. He answered, “You must understand I’m a philosopher, not an activist”. He could hardly explain his Catholic wife wanted a ladyship as recompense for putting up with his unorthodox opinions for years.
In my language there was another word too, but humbug or not, he was going to China to speak on behalf of the Arts Council with the same British-way-of-life quasi-propaganda about our glorious heritage, so I swallowed my sectarian pride, as I always felt I had to in such cases and hoped he would overlook any resentment he felt at my criticisms of him, which he in fact ignored completely, and asked if he would intervene on behalf for Pa Chin.
When he got to China in 1973, he was bemused by the achievements of the Chinese “Revolution”, as most “visiting honoured intellectuals” were, not realising what lay under the artistic presentations, nor meeting people at work nor finding out how they felt. But I will say this for him, he did put his money where mouth was when his ear was bashed. When next I heard from Ch’En two years later I learned it had greatly relieved Pa Chin’s position. He was released from restrictions, at first rigid custody and then farm work, and allowed to resume writing.
This was at a time when I was signing on at the Labour Exchange before going back to Fleet Street, isolated politically and with nowhere of my own to live! I still find it amazing what an insignificant person can sometimes do to influence a powerful nation State. I read once in a sixpenny novel when I was young about the shadow of the Tong, which stretched so far that the humblest beggar could make powerful mandarins tremble if he gave the secret sign of the Tong brotherhood, but I would guess it was no more than something like this.
And yet talking dramatically of the ‘shadow of the Tong’, I suppose it must have some substance or at least origin. One day a Chinese ship landed at Southampton, and the bo’sun, having a few days at liberty and a few letters from Ch’En to post to me from a safe port, decided to call on me instead. Having no British currency, as seafarers were deliberately kept short so they would not wander around, he walked into a Chinese restaurant, communicated a Tong sign of the warlord days and demanded a meal and the fare to London.
The frightened proprietor begged him not to cause any trouble, gave him twice what he needed provided he ate elsewhere and could not get him away fast enough. My friend had only read about the Tong in a popular magazine and was unable to explain to my satisfaction how anyone recognised a sign if it was a secret of the brotherhood.
The address he had been given for me was years old, but my aunt Floss lived there. She phoned me frantically to say a “Chinaman”, of all people, was trying to see me. Would I come around immediately, or flee as appropriate, and what should she do meanwhile? When I suggested giving him a cup of tea until I arrived she said anxiously she had no China tea and did I think he would mind Lipton’s.
The letter from Ch’En, who had died since it was sent some months before, was enthusiastic about the great strides we were making in England. Pictures of the enormous anti-Vietnam War demonstration had appeared in the press. A Communist newspaper had taken photos which by accident caught a few anarchist banners in the front and it looked as if the march was entirely theirs. When printing they erased the slogans from the banners on the photograph. No doubt to the Chinese Communist news agency these meaningless Occidental squiggles meant nothing and they passed the negatives untouched, and delighted the few English-reading anarchists in Mao’s China who were led to suppose from the State press that however the movement had been crushed there, it could fill Trafalgar Square in London. It must have cheered up Ch’En tremendously in his last days.
Why think he and they were naive when worthy professors, astute journalists and pretentious historians on the spot and in other English-speaking countries made the same or similar mistakes?
*** <em>The Anarchist Black Cross</em>
Ever since I came back on the “Otranto” I had run the Asian Solidarity Campaign which sounded grand but only consisted of myself. It responded to Ch’En and Acharya in their occasional appeals for solidarity, on behalf of political prisoners of the regimes or other victims, whose families had left the country, and this was only a very small part of the problem or I could not possibly have managed. There was no need of much administration, though I was glad of help when it came. The funds were raised from three restaurants, two Indian and one Chinese, who allowed me to approach their customers at the respective New Years. I was assisted in getting these contacts by the old Russian Anarchist Marie Goldberg’s Indian son-in-law.
After Acharya died there were no anarchists left on the Indian Continent and the name was up for grabs by mystic gurus. Only a student of the Vedas can know what they mean by it. When Ch’En died I had no further contact with the Chinese movement and decided to end the campaign. However, Christie had just returned from Spain and was anxious to help anarchist prisoners in that country, who were forgotten except by their own organisation. When he had been in jail he had received food parcels, which we had never thought we could send. He had shared these and now wanted to enable the aid to continue, as well as to publicise their plight.
We discussed this, and re-started the Anarchist Black Cross. It had a long history in Tsarist Russia of humanitarian aid and armed defence, and its international had perished when the Thirties repression and depression grew too great.
We started with two members, but were inundated from the first with suggestions from the ‘weekenders’ and liberals as to the narrowness of our aims. <em>Why just Spanish Anarchist prisoners?</em> “Because they have been forgotten and every other political prisoner in Spain gets help.” <em>Why not all political prisoners everywhere? Comes to that, why not all prisoners?</em> “Right on. Excellent, but there are only two of us and we haven’t collected a penny yet.” <em>Why not Irish Nationalists or Arab refugees?</em> “Vast, rich and important organisations already do that. This is something different.” Someone who never did anything at all even suggested we help not merely political, but all prisoners, as well as victims of famine, flood and pestilence, which would certainly have taxed our resources.
In the end, at least of the beginning, we had to rely on ourselves entirely, as two of my restaurateur friends sold or lost their businesses, though the Indian one gave us a collection until he was closed down by the authorities. We were able to establish a number of contacts, most importantly in the task of publicity and pressure and from then on had to rely on the anarchist movement itself. Though I was loathed by the phoneys who frequented the periphery of our movement because it was felt to be trendy to do so, I was liked by the activists and with Stuart’s charisma and reputation too, we were able to launch the Anarchist Black Cross as a ginger group within what now seemed a growing British anarchist movement.
I said at the very beginning that if we succeeded in helping one political prisoner it was worth having a go, and we helped a lot more than that even in the first year or so.
*** <em>Miguel Garcia</em>
Our first big success came with getting Miguel Garcia out from a Spanish prison, and he provided a springboard to further action. He had been arrested in 1949, sentenced in 1952, and released in 1969. The end of the sentence did not necessarily imply release. Immediate re-arrest was not uncommon for the unrepentant. We brought him out of oblivion and he directed the International Black Cross to work for the release of many others. Months after I was recalled to working life after four years buried in a bookshop, he was, like Dickens’s Dr Manette, recalled to life after being buried alive in prison for twenty years.
Miguel had originally gone into jail as a combatant in the civil war for two and a half years, to be ‘re-educated’ into fascism, or at least docility (both unsuccessfully) having evaded captivity and certain death for a couple of years after the close of hostilities when mass shootings in the concentration camps were the norm. He took up active underground resistance after leaving the ironically-named Miguel de Unamuno concentration camp.
Sentenced in a mass trial with others of the “Tallion” group associated with Francisco Sabater, his death sentence was reduced to life. Franco was trying to alter his image as a mass executioner to make his regime acceptable to the outside world, and though many of those charged with Miguel were executed, it was deemed politic to reprieve others. Later sentences were reduced to twenty years, as a magnanimous gesture which only dictators can grant. Miguel served the full twenty, down to the day and the hour, being released in the middle of the night.
Had he gone back to civilian life in Spain on release, with the regime still vindictive though not as much as it had been, he would have undoubtedly committed further ‘offences’ such as union organisation or speaking out, or even not paying to keep in with the local police, and served another ten years or so. He could not stand the provocations offered by victorious Francoism, which required him to pretend atonement for his ‘convict past’ when challenged by the police and would surely, had he stayed, have responded in the only language dictatorship understood.
Stuart knew Miguel from having met him in Carabanchel jail, and we persuaded him to come over, raising the fare among supporters. He was a natural linguist, fluently speaking French, Portuguese and Italian as well as Castilian and his native Catalan, and he had learned and taught his friends English in prison. He went blank when hearing the language spoken by natives. On the boat he thought he was hearing German. Though he spoke English recognisably, its idioms and diverse accents presented a challenge.
He used me both as guinea-pig and scapegoat for the language, insisting on speaking only English. Though Stuart had clearer diction than I he regarded him as less versed in grammatical explanations, and spoke Spanish with him. He saved English expressions which baffled him and presented them to me, getting extremely cross when he found words of Latin origin used in a different sense from elsewhere, accusing me, who was in no way responsible, that “you take words from all over the world and use them as you like”.
I tried in vain to placate him by joking that if a certain Duke of Medina Sidonia had been a better sailor and the weather had been calmer, the Armada might have landed safely and we would all have been speaking English by now in a way he could understand. He curiously came to enjoy London even more than his beloved Barcelona. He was disappointed when he saw it again a few years later after its ruination by traffic and industrial pollution. However, he never forgave Londoners, or for that matter the British, their accents or language, bursting with indignation once when someone was helping me fix the car and I incautiously asked Miguel to pass him the thingamajig out of the toolbox.
I first got him, through the union, a job at the (pre-Murdoch) <em>Times</em> and he had some idea that people working there would speak BBC English he would recognise, but unfortunately this did not apply to the car park attendants with whom he was unable to converse. And he was baffled the first day by a hardy perennial when a <em>Times</em> journalist with clear diction but unsteady gait asked him to “get that car out of the fucking way” — but who was fucking whom? Where in the car park would they do that?
For all his idiosyncrasies, Miguel played a decisive role in the development of the post-war international anarchist movement. In the Indian summer of his life, when he was surely entitled to rest from his life’s struggles, he became a pivotal figure in the libertarian resistance. Solidarity with anarchist prisoners worked two ways. It helped the prisoner, and it put people in rapport with the cause for which they were working.
*** <em>The Start of Black Flag</em>
<em>Black Flag</em> had already been going eighteen months or so when Miguel arrived in 1970. We began it as the <em>Bulletin of the Anarchist Black Cross</em> when I had walked away from the bookshop venture. Stuart still had the sort of publicity of which aspiring film stars dream, but it did not bring him a penny in his pocket, and I had a Gestelith offset which the bailiffs had overlooked. By this time I had started as a copytaker on the <em>Daily Sketch</em>, with a reasonable wage. Stuart too began earning good money, starting work for William Press, the gas contractors, converting homes to natural gas. Though both of us were working abnormally long hours, the new bulletin came out regularly, and interest in the international resistance was revived.
He had overcome the problems of being welcomed back to England with a civil action between <em>The People</em> and <em>Private Eye</em> arising out of the former’s reporting ethics, and also an Old Bailey case in which he was charged with of trying to pass off propaganda leaflets, produced on a Gestelith, as currency. Exactly the same sort of fun money was produced not only in commercial advertising, in games like Monopoly or in show business, but even in political advertising. After he was found technically guilty but allowed to go free, I tried to bring a similar action against the local Conservative Party for doing exactly the same thing. But they hadn’t come back from Spain unrepentant at having fought the dictatorship, so for that or some other legal reason, the case could not proceed.
The <em>Bulletin</em> was originally intended to note the activities and existence of the Black Cross, but the spread of anarchist activism in the sixties made us the focus. There was a demand for an anarchist newspaper, as <em>Freedom</em> had become increasingly bourgeois pacifist, partly because nobody else would work under the direction of Richards and his little group of self-styled intellectuals. When at a demonstration a policeman was alleged to have been injured falling off the horse on which he was dispersing the crowd, and the suggestion was made in <em>Freedom</em> that anarchists should get up a collection for him, the limit was reached. The former <em>Cuddon’s</em> group constituted itself into a <em>Black Flag</em> collective.
After the <em>Bulletin</em> became <em>Black Flag</em> we had many editors for the next twenty odd years, at one time rotating the editorship per issue. Apart from a few of these issues I remained one of the editors throughout. Stuart remained an editor for the first five years, but so far as the press or the know-all academic twits are concerned, he remains so to this day. His brief summer of notoriety had made him a historically referrable person in spite of their trying to write him off at the same time.
This was useful after one enormous student demonstration about something or other, organised by Tariq Ali in the street fighting years that preceded his television establishment years. The press was busy spreading stories of our influence, and Stuart’s in particular, on the students. Accordingly, Stuart and I called at the Italian Embassy to protest at the case of Goliardo Fiaschi, of Carrara. He had been in one of Franco’s jails for twenty years along with Miguel, following his involvement with Facerias and the Spanish Resistance. Completing his sentence, he had returned to Italy, where he was re-arrested for an offence committed against the former fascist regime. At the age of eighteen he had been in the struggle of the anarchist partisans in the last days of Mussolini. So far from this being forgiven, he went straight to jail.
We told the official who saw us that we could, of course, have come with a demonstration of thousands, as had happened elsewhere the previous week, but we preferred to give the democratic Italian Government a chance to correct what might be an innocent mistake. The official heartily agreed with this approach, and complimented us on our good sense, never doubting that we could have managed to come, not with two, but with the thousands we could muster. The next we heard was a week later, the welcome news that Fiaschi had been released.
*** <em>Towards the Centre</em>
I was facing once more the perennial problem of where to live. Though I could purchase one now, the time had not yet come when such flats were readily available, and I did not have the minimum savings to place a deposit and buy. I also faced a new problem that wherever I went, police raids seemed to follow, without any follow-up whatever. Nowadays they have a lot of bigger fish to fry.
Miguel Garcia had found lodgings for himself near Finsbury Park, a room of a large basement flat rented by a couple of students who had been there for some five years. They were coincidentally named Garcia, and when they returned to Spain he stayed put, claiming to be the same tenant. The landlord never visited the place, which was supposed to be furnished but the few sticks of furniture he put in did not even meet the bare minimum requirements of the Rent Act. Miguel invited me to take over the flat and move in, so he could keep his room. Sure as fate as soon as I did so the landlord died suddenly, conforming to the general fate of my landlords, and his son’s family moved into a flat on the premises.
It was convenient as we were running the International Centre at Holborn at the time. The flat itself in Upper Tollington Park was an international centre in its own accord. Everyone thought of it either as Miguel’s flat or an extension of the centre and we must have had hundreds of visitors from all corners of the world during the eighteen months I was there. Once I slept in the garden porch during the summer because we were so full up with visitors.
Being in Upper Tollington Park did not deter the police from visiting, though they insisted these were not “raids” and did not need a search warrant. They grasped that we did not control the rest of the house with its various tenants, which is more than they had done previously. These were merely “enquiries of a general nature”, such as what did I understand by an article in <em>Black Flag</em> which I had not written, or whether Miguel knew characters ranging from Eleutorio Sanchez to Carlos the Jackal. Anyone who had been long years in prison in Spain, where they regularly move prisoners around, knew the former. When they asked Miguel if he knew Spain’s criminal Public Enemy No. 1 was reported in London, I chipped in “Franco’s here? He must be staying with the Queen. Have you checked the Palace?” However, neither “el Lute” nor the Caudillo were really in town and certainly not in our flat, especially the latter.
“Carlos the Jackal” (if he exists) is not, so far as I know, Spanish or into anarchist resistance but a Marxist, nationalist or an international mercenary. I only know of him from the press so my information is probably wrong. Miguel didn’t know him either but told them sarcastically to leave a message so if he turned up he could pass it on.
Once I was told that an article in “Black Flag” about a bomb explosion, in no way connected with anarchism, gave information nobody could possibly have known who had not been privy to the attempt. It may have been so originally for all I knew, but the item of news so far as we were concerned had been culled from the <em>Evening Standard</em>, which took them aback. Whether the police followed up the information, beyond buying a back number to see if it was so, I have no means of knowing.
*** <em>Rise of the Print Empire</em>
When I went back to work in Fleet Street, it had only a generation to go although nobody believed it, though there was already talk of ‘new technology’.
Back in 1926 the printers had shown solidarity with the miners, the target of a vicious hate campaign, and finally refused to print the incitements against them in the <em>Daily Mail</em>, then in its fascist era. This had precipitated the General Strike, the Government of the day saying the refusal to print was its beginning and that to pre-empt a General Strike they began a General Lock-Out.
After the Strike was defeated by what amounted to a military coup, everybody suffered victimisation, the printers no less than anyone. But in their case, unlike other industries, malice was defeated by madness.
Lord Beaverbrook, proprietor of the Daily Express group of newspapers, was probably clinically insane like many power-drunk newspaper proprietors. He employed a beautifully dressed and coiffured young lady especially to come in and clean his shoes while he sprawled on his chair in front of his executive. He was expected to be the most vicious of those who took reprisals.
But, like Hamlet, his was a nor’ north-east madness and when it came to business he knew a hawk from a handsaw. Unlike his rivals, he understood that the workers laid the golden eggs he and his fellow-bosses were hatching. Others followed the <em>Mail</em>, which had publicly said its employees weren’t capable of running a paper, and had let them down when they failed to print denunciations of their comrades in the pits. They sacked most, and blacklisted others, placing humiliating conditions and wage cuts on the rest. Beaverbrook’s agents, however, went around the unemployed printers on the Street, taking on skilled craftworkers who had been sacked unceremoniously, and when other papers were happily reducing wages and extending hours he raised pay to union requirements and beyond.
Suddenly it became known to all, even the shrewd newsgatherers themselves, that Beaverbrook had stolen the prime geese that laid golden eggs from under the noses of his rivals, who were killing them. When the <em>Daily Herald</em> became a national, under a deal between Odhams Press and the TUC, it became difficult for other papers to operate. They had not even thought it worthwhile to train others, reckoning the less troublesome would be starved back and the rest were expendable. Now they were leaving in droves. Thunderstruck, the press barons reversed their policy and began bidding against each other, raising wages and agreeing to union demands, until “the print” became a sort of workers’ aristocracy. This lasted until the smashing of the industry under the banner of “new technology”, when they became serfs once again. But for over half a century union power increased, and owing to the vulnerability of papers to stoppage (nothing is more dead than yesterday’s news) the moulders of public opinion, who told other employers not to give in to “union blackmail”, had to yield one concession after another themselves. This did not stop the press lords from trying to win back supreme control over their empire. They were making more money than they could deal with, and kept expanding. But what they craved was power.
*** <em>An Anarchist in Fleet Street</em>
The proprietors and even the journos never forgave the workers for winning this round of the class struggle. To this day one can read gruesome stories, written by people who regularly fiddle their expense accounts, about the “semi-criminal practices” of those like us who insisted on getting paid overtime for waiting for them to stagger up to the phones of their favourite pubs to dictate their copy, and demanded “unworked overtime” for the extra work involved in taking all at once what could otherwise be spread over time. Unworked overtime was a phrase I originated.
It spread and was countered by a special rate for “physically worked overtime” (the management’s phrase), and their memorable dictum that “in no circumstances will they pay overtime on overtime”, i.e. if they called on someone to work overtime to deal with the enormous backlog at pub closing time, he or she didn’t get the unworked overtime rate on top of that.
In the heyday of escalating demands the press kept referring to “Anarchy in Fleet Street”. One odd effect of this propaganda was to make my own position safe. When the management was told by the Economic League that I was an anarchist and of my association with Christie then at the height of his notoriety, they said (I learned) with a sigh, that precisely their problem was that everybody they had to deal with was an anarchist. I somehow doubt this.
I was for some years Health and Safety TU representative. I had a glowing tribute years later, long after I had retired, when the unions had been smashed by the new restrictive laws and everything we had fought for taken away. Nobody was prepared to take on stooge roles substituting for union representation, under the new reformist-fascism. When the management mentioned something in regard to accident prevention, somebody mentioned my name with nostalgia, to be told sharply by a young management executive (possibly with a shudder?) “You are talking about a creature from the prehistoric swamps. We don’t want go down that road again.” Nice to know my efforts were appreciated, after all.
*** <em>1986 again</em>
To my surprise I was contacted one day at work by Granada TV. I had got used to any number of calls, but could hardly believe this one. It seemed two film companies wanted to make a documentary on the fiftieth anniversary of the Spanish Revolution Civil War, though in the event only one stayed the course. This particular caller explained they were up against the fact that they had got to know via the State-sponsored research centre on anarchism in Amsterdam that the best documentary film material on some aspects of it, particularly the collectivisations, was held by the CNT. The film makers were not trusted by the anarcho-syndicalists, but they knew if they did not co-operate, they could hardly criticise afterwards. This had happened with the film <em>To Die in Madrid</em> when the French producers had requested film from both the CNT and the Communist Party. As contact was made by a well-known fellow-traveller, the CNT had refused to co-operate thinking the Communists would be glorified, but they still were because of the lack of any coverage the CNT would have given.
They were not exactly encouraged by the fact that Granada TV thought the person most equipped to deal with all aspects of opinion in Spain would be Lady Jane Wellesley, a direct descentant of the first Duke of Wellington and therefore, they presumed, respected by all Spaniards. At first the CNT declined to help but finally I was asked to act as a go-between. I had strong reservations and said when approached I knew the film would be a gross travesty but that I appreciated what happened over <em>To Die in Madrid</em>. My rudeness shocked the film makers, who denied they would distort the message. My last word was that I would advise the CNT to co-operate but made our dilemma clear, saying at least they would know, for what it was worth, they hadn’t fooled us.
Surprise! In the end the Granada film was impartial, portraying fairly all sides in Spain from their own points of view — the very first time the British media had done so. The only criticism one could make in the overall coverage was the disproportionate part given (as usual) to the International Brigade — one would think it was an army rather than a brigade — but as it was on the British contribution to it, this was understandable. After all, British literary circles were convinced George Orwell was a key figure in the Spanish war, following the best-selling success of <em>Animal Farm</em>.
*** <em>Doctor’s Dilemma</em>
I heard of a Tottenham doctor, a sincere young woman who inherited a fortune and proposed to give it to ‘the movement’ without being sure what it was she believed in. I thought to interest her in the Anarchist Black Cross since she claimed to be a ‘non-violent anarchist’ and nothing could be more non-violent than helping anarchist prisoners. It would take some of the pressure off <em>Black Flag</em>. When she heard of the Spanish Resistance (for the first time, incidentally) she closed up like a clam. It was too violent for her, she explained, and I was politely shown the door. The next I heard of Dr Rose Dugdale was that she had given her own money and robbed her wealthy parents, getting involved in a case that got her five years or so, on behalf of the Irish Republican Army. Her ‘Anarchism’ could only be taken with a strong dose of pacifism, but when she switched to Nationalism it was different. Pope Pius, who told the American Dorothy Day that Catholics could be anarchists provided they were pacifists (a proviso certainly not applied in the case of, say, Catholics who wanted to be fascists), would have seen the logic of this, but I never could, unless it is to say that professing Anarchism’s all right as long as you don’t try to achieve it.
** 14 The Spanish War (Continued!); Centro Iberico; Greek Tragedy; Haverstock Hill; The Invisible Woman; This Gun for Sale; Only Too Visible Women; Channel Swimmer in Beads; Emilienne
*** <em>The Spanish War (Continued)</em>
Travelling around Spain from time to time I found ghost towns where mass murder had taken place, abandoned by those fleeing from terror or deliberate economic privation, where only a few of the old great movement kept the flame alight in secret. All over the world one could find veterans of the struggle and their families who had fled.
Strange that these veterans, though isolated, kept a relationship, even with divisions. Slowly in the post-war years the groups in several countries were re-emerging from the obscurity into which they had been flung whether by defeat or national victory, and literally one by one getting together, slowly throwing off the bonds of the libertarian but hardly revolutionary movement that had surrounded them. As they linked up so we learned of what activity was going on and so it increased. I became inextricably involved in what some of us termed the “international solidarity movement” and others the “First of May Group”. Later, in Brussels, it came together as the International Revolutionary Solidarity Movement (IRSM). I described it in the booklet of that name (Cienfuegos Press, 1976) but otherwise historians have passed it over or confused it with the middle class Marxist-Leninist and nationalist armed groups who later eclipsed it, certainly in notoriety.
Though through my contacts in Spain I had known about the Resistance there, it was usually when they were already on trial for their activities and some outside intervention was needed, meagre as it was at a time when the world had forgotten them. It was not until after the last of the most famous urban guerrillas, Sabater, was gunned down in January 1960, that I came to be in closer touch with the Resistance fighters in Spain, whose existence was passed over by the press and historians until very recently. For some years I struggled on my own, but became more closely involved because of my association with Stuart Christie, released from four years in a Spanish jail, where he had built contacts and friendships with the activists of the movement, and with Miguel Garcia, whom we brought from the obscurity of a Spanish jail to international activity.
*** <em>Centro Iberico</em>
When Miguel came to London, the Spanish Communists, who had been running a meeting place in a parish church hall in Holborn, styling it the Centro Iberico, moved out to bigger premises and changed the name to the Garcia Lorca Club. They knew how unpopular the Communist Party was after the tanks moved into Hungary, but thought they stood a chance in Spain and the dead poet couldn’t object to lending them credence. Miguel started a new Centro Iberico from there and also an International Libertarian Centre to take the place of the now defunct Wooden Shoe. It was years since there was such a thing as an international anarchist club and it was an added bonus that we retained the old connections with visiting Spanish workers that the CP had carefully built up.
I warned him about the problems of serving drink there, pointing out the acting minister was Dr Donald Soper, famously an advocate of total abstention. He belonged to the neighbouring Methodist centre and was standing in for the Anglican vicar, who had the usual small congregation. Miguel assured me, “I know priests. You don’t have to tell me, a Spaniard, about these holy fathers, as they call themselves. I will offer him a glass of wine and he will agree to everything”. Fortunately Dr Soper never came to the hall while we were there, possibly having other things to do on a Sunday, so this interesting theory was never tested.
The last of Spain’s exiled confederal families gathered there. They had made themselves quite an interesting community in London, keeping together like an extended family. The majority had settled around Portobello Road, Notting Hill, where the original CNT-MLE offices had been, though with the growth of families they extended to the suburbs. The “Centro” was able to put them in touch with a new generation arising in Spain and with Resistance activists, but the ghost of the years of ossified bureaucracy and passivism had not finally been laid, here or elsewhere.
The hall became popular with the Spanish community generally, resident and visiting, and Miguel made them so much at home that we had to have two halls, one Spanish-speaking and the other a babble of tongues. The Spanish accepted the fact that it was an anarchist centre, even those who had grown up under Franco who tried to obliterate the memory of anarchism and the Basque and Catalan tongues. It would have made him sick to hear anarchism expounded not only in English and German, which he wouldn’t have minded on the grounds they deserved it for permitting heresy, but in Castilian, Catalan, Basque and even Galician, the language of his native province which, incidentally, he hated most of all.
Visiting speakers included Jose Peirats, the historian of Spanish anarchism, and before long we were having separate meetings for gallego (Galician) speakers. When it was proposed, I remember telling them in my usual rambling way about Lloyd George at the Versailles conference who had read, or glanced at, a scientific article asserting the Galicians were the same people as the Welsh. He opposed the retaining of Galicia by Austria saying he objected to “his Welsh people” being under the domination of “Huns” not realising Galicia in Spain was not Galicia in Austria/Poland. An American woman who happened to be present told me afterwards that her parents had fled from Roznow (in the other Galicia) and Lloyd George’s mistake ruined thousands of lives when Poland took over from Austria, which made the anecdote less amusing.
Another casual visitor wanted to know more about the Angry Brigade, almost as soon as that expression was heard. It was hard to answer his questions, even if I hadn’t suspected he was a police agent. Like many of an authoritarian frame of mind, he thought it a centrally directed conspiracy, and that I was a sort of PRO to its Central Committee. He actually used terms like “political wing of your armed struggle”. Miguel said to me in Spanish, “Ask yourself. Who would want to know so much?” The visitor reddened and I suppose he understood. Would a spy have blushed? But he never commented.
It didn’t matter because all I knew and had to say was already expressed in the pages of <em>Black Flag</em>, and occasionally picked up by the mainstream press. From the tenor of his questions the inquisitive visitor sounded more to me like an emissary from the IRA or Sinn Fein trying to pick up allies — the “troubles” were just re-re-starting. When he did refer to Ireland he referred to the danger of fascism, and the Nazi-clerico-fascist groupings in what he called the Free State (an expression only used by diehard Republicans or diehard Tories, neither of whom recognised the legitimacy of the Republic). According to him, only our co-operation with nationalism in the North could prevent the spread of fascist nationalism. I didn’t agree with Miguel that we were dealing with a police spy or agent-provocateur but the political argument sounded dodgy.
Another not particularly welcome guest was a young German who came just as I arrived, from working late on Sunday, to help with the sweeping-up after the meeting and who, between discarding his cigarette ends on the floor while I was doing it, raved at me for my alleged support of the Baader-Meinhof ‘Gang’ of which he knew only the reported press garbage. At first patiently (for me anyway) I told him he failed to understand the clash between anarchists and Leninists that was going on in Germany. (“But I am a German, of course I know what is happening in my time” — “I bet your father never said that ” — “Ah, you are a racialist”). Somewhat hot and impatient with clearing up his dog-ends after a day’s work and answering tired old pacifist cliches I finally shouted “Piss off” and chased him out. Ted Kavanagh commented drily that it was a very witty reply and restored my good humour, but the outraged student went away to denounce me in a pacifist paper as a “middle-aged, middle-class man who only believes in violence”. To be considered “middle-class” by an earnest student when you’re a pushing broom after him would excuse a belief in violence, even if it left one or two more besides.
On the other hand there were so many wonderful people who came along that it would be impossible to try to mention them all. I felt proud to have gained so much respect and affection which more than compensated for the hatred I seemed to generate from those outside of the movement and class for which we fought.
Amongst the activists were some Irish Anarchists trying to build up a class struggle movement in Ireland and get away from the old routine of workers in the North fighting each other for the slums and routine jobs, and in the South yielding to apathy. They did great work for the Black Cross for prisoners abroad, but soon after brought down on their heads the full vindictiveness of the Republic for daring to try to break the mould of Irish politics.
Those from outside who singled me out for criticism even for matters about which I knew nothing included one Nicolas Walter. He had somehow became managing director of a firm which controlled the residual assets of the 19<sup>th</sup> century secularist movement, and seemed to have the idea he was the official spokesperson of the anarchist movement as well. However, he had no responsibility or connection with it aside from an involvement in the anti-nuclear movement and his promotion of the cult of Freedom Press. Later he took over the editorship of one of its magazines. Since the establishment of the Centro Iberico, or possibly because of the Angry Brigade, he had carried on a seemingly endlessly literary feud against me which extended to his clique. I suppose it was because I refuted his revisions of our history and distortion of our ideas and also was not unconnected with my scaring off peace-it’s-wonderful-lovers.
His colleagues Patrick Pottle and Michael Randle, members of the Committee of 100 (CND’s activists), went to prison for their anti-militarist actions, and while there got to know the spy George Blake (sentenced to forty-two years). They sympathised with his being saddled for purely international political reasons with an enormous sentence, though not his ideas, and connived at his escape, as usual, the amateurs outwitting the professionals. Twenty years later H. Montgomery Hyde, ex-Tory-MP in Northern Ireland, Intelligence expert, a Protestant champion who had a foothold in the professional atheist camp as an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association — a handy vantage point to observe the ultra-Left — exposed their complicity in a book, with the acknowledged assistance of Nicolas Walter. Ever a stickler for other people’s accuracy, Walter denied indignantly a press comment that he passed over any information to the Intelligence expert at dinner and pointed out that it was at tea. Though Special Branch had known all along who was responsible, such was the Tory backbench outcry that Pottle and Randle were prosecuted. They admitted their guilt in another book, so convincingly putting their case, not for innocence but for justification, that the jury acquitted them. But it was touch-and-go for them and on the whole it was safer to be Walter’s enemy than his friend.
*** <em>Greek Tragedy</em>
While I was working at the <em>Daily Sketch</em>, a wave of resistance was opening up at home which the Press tried to personalise, so as to deprecate but still justify scare headlines. Various journalists tried to pump me about Stuart’s movements. They tried contacting me in the local pub, “The Albion”. I declined to speak to any of them, getting a reputation for boorishness which didn’t do any harm when it came to negotiations with the management, and made them tread more carefully. The <em>Daily Express</em> was running a story about a mysterious Scot who had been imprisoned in Spain, was now into every kind of terrorist activity and had loads of money at his disposal. It would have been hard to recognise my friend at any time under the latter description.
Maureen Tomason, one of the <em>Sketch</em> star investigators, actually came into the copytaker’s department to ask if I knew to which country he had gone. I was not there and when she mentioned her errand a colleague of mine said politely, “His friend Stuart? You missed them by a minute, they’ll be in the Albion” — which was true. Miss Tomason stormed out of the room in rage at such a preposterous story. Young in journalism she might be but she wasn’t going to believe the <em>Express</em> could have invented their story about private planes at his disposal. If she had been told he was hiding in a nuclear submarine under Blackfriars Bridge it would have been within her comprehension.
Another young journalist Nicola Tyrer, just a few weeks before being made education correspondent of the <em>Evening News</em>, asked me if I could get him to talk about anarchism to her. I passed her name to him at lunch. As he agreed to speak to her, next day the <em>Evening News</em> had a scoop, an exclusive interview which revealed that the now named Scot was working on gas conversion, living in London, being harassed by the police and the story in the <em>Daily Express</em> was a pack of lies. The next day their rival was constrained to report there was another young Scottish Anarchist who had been imprisoned in Spain of whom no one had previously or subsequently heard, who on reading the story went off in his private plane never to be seen again.
Possibly encouraged by Nicola Tyrer’s scoop in which she had the luck to expose a rival paper’s fictions the same day as they appeared and the same week she had started, I was approached by a young freelancer named Ann Chapman. For once this had nothing to do with Stuart but, she said, “to get information on the Greek Resistance”. I was somewhat brusque. which I now regret though I am glad I did not encourage her. She said she was working for Radio London and was going to Athens, hoping for background. She had already contacted some Greek groups which I did not know. There was a large Cypriot Communist Party and Trotskyist offshoots among the Greek-speaking community in Egypt, but I knew little of them. What small amount I then knew about the anarchists’ part in the struggle against the colonels within Greece I certainly was not going to share with Radio London.
She was quite persistent. She had no idea of the danger involved in trying to find out too much in a country like the colonels’ Greece. At best she would be endangering those with whom she came in contact. As it was she went in on a cut-price budget by bus, in January 1971, without contacts, in a disturbed country, and somewhere en route was raped and murdered.
Though the murderer-rapist was found and convicted, her father would not believe in his guilt, searching always for a less banal truth. Six or seven years later he was still giving the story to investigative journalists, hoping to discover what really happened. I and others who had seen or, in my case, heard her in her last week in London were questioned by the press, which is how I got to meet her father Edward Chapman. He could not face the fact of his daughter having been raped and was searching for some political motive that would have given dignity to her death. He actually faced the convicted rapist Nicos Moundis in court but felt “convinced inside” this seedy, down-and-out character with a psychotic history including attempted rape was not the killer.
Much as I admired his tenacity and loathed the colonels, who had killed many under “interrogation” and blamed local crime afterwards, I failed to see it was necessarily so in every case of murder, or that they would invariably have done the dirty work themselves. In Hitler’s Germany, some people, even Jews, must have died naturally, by crime or for reasons other than genocide. And rape was an act of an oppressive urge no less than class interest or ideological conviction. I think Mrs Chapman came to terms with that but her husband could not. My meeting with him made me sad, but my subsequent enquiries in Greece led nowhere.
*** <em>Haverstock Hill</em>
We originally started printing <em>Cuddon’s</em> and so on with a Varityper and Gestelith. I could write for hours what problems that machinery caused. It fortunately disappeared when we moved and the first few issues of <em>Black Flag</em> were on a Gestetner duplicator, which I preferred as I could handle it and, if messy at times, it never broke down. The first issues came out quite well on it, but “Progress, Progress” insisted everyone and we moved from one self-made difficulty to another, going on to a printing press. Fortunately I had written the “Debtors Guide” and we weathered the storm for years but with one thing and another it was useful I had a large amount of paid “unworked overtime” at my professional work.
The printing press was used by Ted Kavanagh and Anna Blume in a huge basement at Haverstock Hill, after the demise of the Wooden Shoe bookshop, which otherwise was the rehearsal room of a pop group. The group were on a weekly rent from the bookmaker’s shop above, replacing a religious youth group (from a neighbouring church or synagogue, I do not know which). Their leader/parson/rabbi or whoever was concerned had leased it from the shop above when it was a greengrocer’s and the basement was virtually uninhabitable. They repaired it well but when the shop changed hands to become a bookmaker’s the guru opposed both change of user and the betting licence. As Mammon won, they either went or were evicted and the pop group took over. After a year or so it found itself no longer in harmony with the scene and Ted was left on his own.
Without notifying the landlord of change of plan and letting him think it was still the same pop group (he never appeared), we made it into the new International Libertarian Centre/Centro Iberico, an anarchist club to which came wonderful young people from all over the world as well as survivors from innumerable political upheavals.
As Miguel decided to spend his whole time looking after it and virtually cut himself off from any paid work — he was past what should have been retiring age anyway — I had the problem both of providing him with the money to live on and paying the rent of the centre as well, but it was well worth it. Later, after being granted domicile, there was no way he could have got a Spanish pension even at home (and to this day), having fought against Franco. But his case was taken up by Nancy Macdonald, who did sterling work for Spanish veterans. Though an American, she had some influential friends in Britain, and on the basis of his work for the war-time Resistance, he was given a basic pension by the UK government. It was the only case I knew where such work was recognised. I was sceptical that he would receive it. During the war, his group had co-operated in anti-Nazi work with British agents (including escapee soldiers) and he admitted in his <em>Franco’s Prisoner</em> the spy network taught him forgery (“the most humane craft in a totalitarian country”). He had printed passports, ration books, currency and Party membership cards even better than the real ones. Perhaps his small weekly grant related to a major feat in this undermining of Nazi occupation in France, or perhaps to a fear of his being obliged to carry out similar feats under our benign elected dictatorship.
*** <em>The Invisible Woman</em>
Despite the terrible tragedy involved in dealing with people sentenced to death or 20 or 30 years imprisonment, in the course of the Spanish catastrophe, one could still get a few laughs, believe it or not. “The coat” was one, the “invisible woman” another.
Many comrades were arrested in Spain and charged with “banditry and terrorism” so it was impossible to get the aid of Amnesty International. Their policy was, and remains, to decline to defend those accused of crimes of violence, whether they committed them or not. This meant they defended those innocent of fighting the State and only those victimised for their innocuous beliefs were helped. This included editors and publishers, scientists and philosophers, but never workers. The Communist Party raised large amounts for their own members through various front organisations but the resistance, certainly in Spain, was out in the cold.
When we started the Anarchist Black Cross and really began to help them, we got begrudging voices even among so-called libertarians saying “What about the IRA? Belfast is on your doorstep”. More money for the then few dozen IRA prisoners was raised in one local English Catholic parish in six weeks than we managed to get in ten years. The Irish pubs in Finsbury Park raised enough to have kept us going for twenty years had we the remotest chance of getting it. Fund raising for the IRA as for Amnesty International became a growth industry, employing hundreds, but we still got this niggling that our meagre funds should swell their profits instead. I never knew how much IRA or Amnesty prisoners got out of what was collected for them. Nor did I know how much ours did, as to avoid handling the funds they went direct to the person or family without intermediary.
It may be coincidental that Amnesty was run by editors, publishers, scientists and philosophers and the token trade unionist, but that is by the way. The fact remained that the Franco regime was quite alive in its latter days to international implications and always charged its opponents with “banditry” even if it was only so much as having the wrong union card. As a result Amnesty in Spain defended Jehovah’s Witnesses who did not join the army, plus a few of the Christian Democrats who happened to fall foul of the regime. But the resistance? Never! That was why we founded the Anarchist Black Cross.
When Julian Millan Fernandez was arrested on the flimsiest of charges it was at first impossible to get together a defence as nobody was allowed to see him. However, Miguel and I got into instant communication with him which totally baffled the authorities. They were constantly examining his letters for invisible ink, a false clue Miguel had dropped in his <em>Franco’s Prisoner</em>, when he had contacted Stuart from jail to expose prison conditions and claimed, to protect his go-between, it was through invisible ink. Contact with Millan was through an invisible woman!
It is a hardly surprising commentary on the sexism of the Spanish jailers. Millan Fernandez was the proverbial tall, dark and handsome Spanish male, and married. A short and plump American woman turned up saying she was his “novia” (fiancee). It excited unkind ribaldry among the guards, who had been told not even to let him see his wife, and they were so convinced of the facts as they saw them they never took into account that she might be the go-between.
They let the presumably infatuated, but in fact extremely courageous, woman see him every day, never realising she carried out every detail of information. His court-martial (though a civilian) should have been in secret, but lawyers briefed from outside were already there. After the trial, the prison staff must have realised they had been hoodwinked, but the guards denied all knowledge of any visitor and agreed there must have been invisible ink, except one who growled in a surly fashion that if one was kind to a crow it was sure to peck your eyes out. Every other guard in every political jail looked for a bottle of invisible ink for months afterwards but the bottle, and not just the ink, remained invisible.
*** <em>This Gun for Sale</em>
We had an Anarchist Black Cross meeting in a pub in Tottenham Court Road. The meeting was going on upstairs but (as usual in such cases) many had drifted to the bar downstairs before and during the meeting. Two men were trying to engage some of our people in conversation, recognising them as they came downstairs. It seemed suspicious so I muscled in on the conversation. They claimed to be soldiers, and looked as if they could be police. They said to me they had arms to sell. Up to then they had avoided me but I had overheard their previous conversation in which they said they were “sympathetic to anarchism” and wanted to give arms.
They spoke of a “lorry load”, as if we would have the cash, least of all in our loose change, but I shrugged off the conversation. Anyway they were glad to turn their attention to Stuart who had just come downstairs and rushed to him like a long-lost brother. It was obvious he was the one they had come to see.
He asked them if they thought he had come up the Clyde on a bicycle, which discouraged them asking further. A year later one of the “soldiers” proved to be a detective constable named Cardwell who gave evidence at the Old Bailey of how they had “arranged” to sell Stuart arms that night but failed because he was “drunk and aggressive”. Another version, not brought up at his trial, but raised with me by Scotland Yard, was that I had alerted someone “in French”. I suppose I did mention the presence of agents-provocateurs. Unfortunately we don’t have an English word.
Perhaps the reason is we have so much of the thing.
*** <em>Only Too Visible Women</em>
When the centre had established contacts in Spain, one of the most pressing demands upon it was for contraceptive fitting or abortion. It was illegal in Spain, and pregnancy for unmarried girls was a disaster. As soon as the sexually liberated got in touch with an organisation fighting oppression, that was the first thing they asked of it.
We had to accede to the demands of a steady trickle of young women who turned up at the door, with the fee for an operation and the return fare, nothing more. They never realised they had also to pay a doctor’s fee, nor had they reckoned on the extra few days’ stay required. It became a standard requirement for the Centre to find a room, and raise the extra fee, and it was embarrassing for me that I always needed to take them by car and arrange matters with the clinic. The receptionist never said anything, but I wonder what she thought seeing me coming in week after week with a different senorita.
At one time Miguel approached a socialist feminist group to see if they would co-operate, as they had many resources we lacked, as well as access to funding. They were most hostile. They claimed we were encouraging private medicine. I do not know if they expected the young women to wait until Spain had a National Health Service, defiant of the Catholic Church into the bargain, but it would have taken a lot more than nine months, and the penalties they faced for motherhood were severe.
*** <em>Channel Swimmer in Beads</em>
Following attacks on Iberian Airlines, Spanish banks and finance houses, the result of renewed repression in Spain, the <em>Evening Standard</em> asked me if I could arrange an interview with representatives of the CNT. They agreed, though I was always sceptical where the press was concerned, and the <em>Standard</em> sent along Kevin Murphy, a crime reporter and therefore qualified to deal with political matters (criminals in power were dealt with by political correspondents).
Reasoning that he was going into an anarchist club, Murphy turned up in a hippy caftan, flower power symbols, beads and the rest of the Sixties gear, somewhat out of place with his beefy appearance and athlete’s face. He was a Channel swimmer, a sporting achievement I envied.
When he came in the five exiles (four men in business suits and a woman in her fifties) looked at him oddly. “Who is this clown?” one of them asked me in Spanish. “English journalists dress this way,” I said. Murphy had a red face anyway so I don’t know if he understood.
*** <em>Emilienne</em>
Emilienne Morin came to London for two days for a funeral. Mimi, as she was known affectionately, was French but had lived in many countries in the course of a tempestuous life. However, she was not officially allowed to enter the land of the free, as the Home Office, which assumed it owned the place, had decided the security of the island depended on keeping her out. However, she managed to slip in for a couple of days, and I was asked to drive her and her friend back to Victoria Station.
Joe Thomas came round to tell me of some development in the print union, and I explained the situation. He came along with us. Typically, lack of a common language never stopped Joe chatting away, and Mimi’s friend spoke a little English. While I was parking the car at Victoria and had to leave them for five minutes, he got out of them various aspects of their life. In the flurry I had no opportunity to introduce them. After they were safely on the train, Joe told me Mimi had been in the Spanish war and in fact was secretary of the Durruti column. “Her husband was there too. I never got out of her what he did.”
I don’t know if they had been poking fun at him French style, or if Mimi just disliked talking about the past. Her life companion was Buenaventura Durruti, a legendary figure even in his lifetime and the most charismatic figure in the Civil War. Joe was quite put out when I told him, and for years after used to say jocularly to people, “This bastard let me ask Mrs Durruti what her husband did in the civil war.”
** 15 Floodgates; The First Twenty Black Flag Years; Novel Approach; Terrorist Links; The Magic Coat
*** <em>Floodgates</em>
Stuart and I wrote a book together, on the basics of anarchism, which we called <em>The Floodgates of Anarchy</em>. On the royalties we were able to continue the Black Cross and also fund <em>Black Flag</em> as a regular publication for several years. <em>Floodgates</em> brought anarcho-syndicalism into modern terms of reference, and ran into several editions, one of them a major paperback (Sphere Books). There was also a Spanish edition by the Argentine publisher, Editorial Proyeccion. Later we did an offset run ourselves to take into Spain. It attracted some interesting reviews, ranging from the leading Sundays to a bizarre review in Chile where a bewildered weekly paper criticised us for failing to conceal our sympathies on the dreaded subject of anarchism.
It gave Miguel the idea of writing his experiences and he used to come and see me at the <em>Daily Sketch</em>. It was laid back, in what we now know were its twilight years, and I found him a disused room which he could use as an office where he dictated his book <em>Franco’s Prisoner</em>. The security guard complained to me that nobody had told him it was to be re-opened as a ‘foreign correspondence room’ and I told him not to worry as it was hardly likely the room had been hijacked. I got an old fashioned look, an expression I had difficulty in conveying to Miguel.
I wangled him a canteen pass from the chapel committee and he looked with dismay at the food which he regarded as cooked leather. On being told to make up his mind sharpish by the serving lady, he shook his head sadly and asked if he could just have a glass of wine. “A glass of bleedin’ wine!” she cried incredulously. I apologised for him. “You must excuse my friend, he’s not used to our standards, he’s just come out of a Spanish jail.” I insisted this went into <em>Franco’s Prisoner</em>.
*** <em>The First Twenty ‘Black Flag’ Years</em>
<em>Black Flag</em> was from the time it appeared continually forced to battle with the misinformation campaign being waged against it, and against activist anarchism, in newspapers and books, TV and the police, not to mention pseudo-libertarian self-styled intellectuals. My responses were, I fear, virulent and, I hope, resented. It would be impossible to list all the illegalities of which <em>Black Flag</em> was accused between 1970 and 1990, from killing to inciting murder, causing riots to arson, kidnapping to sabotage, conspiracy to fomenting strikes. Some of our alleged actions were absurd, some impossible, some we would have abhorred, but what a pity some of them were not true! The <em>Daily Express</em> thought we had armouries and planes at our disposal, and the Tory MP Ian Sproat worried about our possessing the nuclear bomb. I don’t know whether Special Branch believed half of these stories. They invented some. For a long time we were under surveillance, Stuart in particular.
The police campaign was oppressive so far as Stuart was concerned but not unduly so, after the anti-Angry Brigade raids, to myself. On one occasion the Black Cross got an appeal from a Spanish prisoner for toothache powder and various other prescriptive drugs. In reply to a circular from Miguel and myself, a well meaning soul from the Australian hippy culture sent us marijuana by post, thinking this was what we really meant. I swiftly gave it to the nearest available pothead, thinking it might be a trap, but there was no comeback so I presumed our mail was not being opened, at least not at that particular address.
A sequel was that someone receiving the circular pointed out that doctors received enough samples of drugs from pharmaceutical companies to cover all our Spanish prisoners’ needs for years, no matter what the state of their teeth, so I wrote to two doctors instead. One, a Quaker but a woman of integrity, sent off all we needed, and had the prescriptions translated besides. The other, who claimed to be an anarchist, replied that he agreed with what we were doing but had to think of the ethical problem it raised. Manufacturers did not send costly samples free to doctors to be disposed of in that fashion. A little activity and you know what side they’re on.
One can never joke without some imbecile journo or politico taking it seriously. When on one occasion we asked for donations and mentioned various items people could send instead of cash, like scrap iron, used postage stamps, luncheon vouchers, etc., a national paper reported seriously that <em>Black Flag</em> was so broke (which was true) we even were appealing for LVs. Perhaps producing the journal was how they thought we earned our bread. One occasion we reproduced a sarcastic Dutch poster saying the Pope was wanted for crimes against humanity and we offered £5, 000 dead or alive (as if we could have raised £50, even in luncheon vouchers). David Alton, a Roman Catholic by political affiliation, a Liberal by profession and a Member of Parliament by religious conviction, wanted us prosecuted for incitement to murder.
Nobody ever failed to mention our ‘links with international terrorism’. The tenacity of these links was such that a Spanish comrade associated with the First of May Group was described by the <em>Daily Mail</em> as “the brains behind the IRA”. When we wanted to run a campaign to help prisoners in the Irish Republic, like many Continentals he was under the impression that this had something to do with the British Government. Who knows, perhaps he was right, but I think the brains behind the IRA would not have proposed a march on the British Embassy. Perhaps the <em>Mail</em> journalist had been listening to some bar-room “Irish” joke and took it for serious news.
There was an international mood of rebellion that saw the future and knew it would not work. In this country it was in part the failures of the Labour government, and the planned attack upon the working class by the Tories that sparked off a series of protests. As in Paris, a minor part of it started among the students. Student-led factions like the Situationists enthusiastically supported it, Marxists saw it as an opportunity to try to cash in where they could not lead and did not participate. But nothing would have happened had there not been a sympathetic working-class base. The Situationists coined the phrase “Angry Brigade”, as later the hippies coined the phrase “Persons Unknown”, to describe something they did not influence.
*** <em>Novel Approach</em>
One briefless barrister who had been watching the trial, hoping to do a denunciation of all concerned, came out with a novel <em>The Angry Brigade</em>. It was to have been a funded propaganda exercise in denouncing resistance, but the verdict upset the apple-cart. It therefore appeared as a novel, allegedly based on interviews the author had with the real perpetrators, (nothing like the accused in style or ideology,) the tapes of which he had destroyed. There was at least no hispanophile or hispanophobe Scot. The prominent figure in an attempt to “kick capitalism in the balls” (as one of the characters put it) was a cowardly Jew, “son of a rich and famous rabbi”, who let his girl friend be beaten up by a police informer anxious to establish his credentials as one of the lads.
The only person ever heard of on the Left and, even so, light miles from the Angry Brigade scene who was the son of a “rich and famous rabbi” (and the grandson of another) was a rich and famous Communist Party lawyer, well versed in the law of libel, and whether he ever read it or not, the book vanished without trace. The <em>Guardian</em> had credited the tapes of the interviews as real and the book based on fact. If that were the case the author should have been prosecuted for destroying vital police evidence, instead of being quietly ignored. The <em>Guardian</em> can on occasion beat the <em>Telegraph</em> hands down at its own game, but it tries to be liberal, bless its little cotton socks.
*** <em>“Terrorist links”</em>
What were our links with international terrorism? We had nothing whatever to do with the type of Third World nationalism by proxy in which guilt-ridden drop-outs from the middle-class or professionals living upon the poor. That, although frequently labelled “anarchist” neither I nor my associates had any connection. In its early stages we sometimes had a nodding acquaintance. The European and American New Left confused the two, misled by the professors and the journalists. Any semblance of contact vanished with the events in Germany and the adoption throughout the world by the Marxists and proxy-nationalists of military tactics, which involve indiscriminate attacks upon ‘enemy’ nationals and are modelled on national warfare. Previously they had imitated tactics based on working-class resistance which are discriminate attacks involving the people directly responsible for oppression.
The anarchist post-war Resistance was until the sixties centred on Spain. The Spanish Civil War hadn’t ended with the playing of “Carmen Mejorada” on the radio on the third of March 1939. The great days of the world and post-war Resistance were yet to come. It is a matter for bitter regret that the Resistance, as distinct from an open War, did not begin in July 1936, when the workers were powerful and had not been subjected to genocide. But the working class would never have understood a policy passively allowing troops to march in, even with the intention of biding one’s time and hitting back by guerrilla action, at which they excelled and which they finally had to adopt anyway. The Communist Party would have exploited to the hilt the apparent treachery and cowardice implicit in failing to wage open war.
During, and just after, the struggle of Facerias and the Sabater brothers in Spain, Paris was the centre of the First of May circle for years (later it was Brussels). I was there one year (I forget which) with Evie, who had some fashion review to attend, when we accidentally bumped into Gomez. He remained fairly constantly over the years connected with the intelligence service set up by the Spanish anarchist resistance but was working for a multi-national concern (which is why he used the pseudonym Gomez). I did not meet most of the inner circle until a year or two later and did not appreciate why Special Branch for years afterwards made such a fuss about my meeting Cerrada Santos, when they interviewed me for such suspicious matters as passing through Customs after holidays abroad, acting as bailee or giving evidence in political trials.
I had been meeting, though socially, members of the active resistance against Franco who were engaged in a coup which did not come off, but took a toll, leaving several in Franco’s prisons and some in French jails.
Among those I met at the Centre, but who went to prison soon after, was Ignacio Perez Beotegui, twenty-four years old in 1975, who called himself “Wilson”. He was a friend of ‘la inglesa’, and though in ETA, very much inclined to anarchism rather than nationalism. He was accused of being involved in the blowing up of Carrero Blanco in December 1973, in the same city of Madrid that Carrero Blanco, in defiance of his oath, had waged incessant bombardment upon in the Civil War.
I had met earlier the veteran Cipriano Mera, who played an important role in the first phase of the Resistance and who had been in the forefront of the battle of Guadalajara. I told him how English historians had distorted the picture, giving the entire credit to the International Brigade. He had smiled but I could not draw him out. People like him did not really care about the historians. “Enough, finally we lost!” But it was a tragedy that the truth could not be passed on to a new generation of activists. Only gradually now do we pick up the pieces.
I did not know at the time what was afoot that made these contacts so important to the police. I genuinely knew nothing of what was going on in the armed struggle until they needed subsequent problems sorting out. There was this reserve always in the resistance movement in Spain. They had the attitude “the least you know the better, the least number of people who know the better”. They were constantly penetrated by informers just the same. These were often blackmailed by the police holding their families in a state of open hostage.
The legendary Mera died in 1975, to such an impressive turn out in Paris of anarcho-syndicalist veterans that even British TV featured it. At the funeral I met Cerrada Santos, who had a magnificent record of resistance in before and during the Civil War, during and after the World War. He had founded the railway union of the CNT and responded to my questions about its most famous member, Buenaventura Durruti. I was flattered to find he had heard about me from Melchita even if it was as ‘el Sancho de Londres’. It was probably justified in their eyes and somewhat unflattering but all my non-anarchist friends in London, even Joe Thomas, thought me incurably quixotic. It depends by which windmill you stand, I suppose.
During the World War Cerrada had been involved in urban resistance of a non-violent nature in France. His specialty was forgery. It was not until I met Miguel Garcia that I learned that the many forgers within the movement had all learned their trade from British Secret Service agents. Cerrada did not care to mention that. It was all they got out of their work in the war. They had forged identity cards, ration books, passports.
Hundreds of French Jews and Allied escapee soldiers owed their lives to new identities acquired from him and other Spanish comrades or being smuggled by people like Sabater into Spain, and housed when they got there by people like Miguel Garcia. It is true a secondary reason to the humanitarian one was to embarrass Franco who during the war was doing a balancing act between Hitler and the Allies, but that was not the main consideration. After the war the gratitude of any Jewish organisation was no greater than that of Britain or France, who not only declined them a pension, but a mention.
I tried to launch an appeal amongst the Jewish community to help those now, like Cerrada, in need, but the total response I got here in Britain was nil. Only the American Jewish needleworkers, themselves hardly wealthy by modern American standards, gave splendidly for years to help these other victims of Nazism. For this, every credit must go to Nancy Macdonald in New York. In Spain ex-combatants could not work in their trades, war-wounded had to beg and prisoners’ families do as they could. There was no social security. Those who had fought against fascism were left to starve but for the aid channelled through this devoted woman. After help to those living in France, aid could be extended to prisoners’ families within Spain. The notion of the Spanish government itself doing anything was too preposterous to be considered. Should prisoners’ families get social security? It felt they probably shared the prisoners’ views and should be locked up too.
A few years after I met Cerrada Santos and after Miguel Garcia came to England, we went to Paris intending to renew our acquaintance. Miguel and he had not met for thirty years. A week before we were to have met (October, 1976), as he was coming out of his favourite bar in Belleville, he was shot down by a Spanish government agent, well known as a thief and informer and enjoying French police protection. Cerrada was seventy-four and unarmed, but the gunman took no chances and shot him in the back.
Afterwards the assassin escaped to Canada. The last heard of this gentleman was that he had changed his name from Ramon Canuda to Ramon Lerida, and was believed to be in Quebec. He fled from there when we gave it publicity. The combination of Lerida’s occupations is not unusual. What was unusual was that he should disappear swiftly when he had official protection. It is possible he added peace-time espionage to his occupations, always a tricky business.
Interpol, who were curious as to my quite innocent trip to Paris when I just happened to meet Cerrada Santos, were not in the least interested in following up the person who had murdered him but Cerrada must have greatly upset its founder, Heinrich Himmler, quite as much as he did the Generalissimo.
We tried to bring Cerrada’s murderer to account. He had slipped away from Europe and been given sanctuary by Canada. The authorities had denied entry to defenders of the Spanish Resistance even when invited to speak by Canadian Broadcasting. The immigration authority pleaded defence against terrorists, but they were known to have admitted dozens of war criminals who weren’t considered terrorists any more than the man who shot somebody for having dared to attempt Hitler’s life. This, I suggested in a letter signed by many in the trade union movement, pointed to where their sympathies lay.
I never received an answer. But the immigration authorities had been stung, as I learned years later, and also over-estimated the significance of my name preceding so many leading trade unionists. The Mounted Police visited my brother, who had emigrated there. “I came to Canada to be a goddamn capitalist, ” he protested when asked what connection he had with “the famous English Anarchist” (sic). He had seen me once in thirty years at the time. The Mountie who interviewed him had much the same military fixations and memories and continued to meet him on what appeared to be a friendly basis, becoming intrigued with his Masonic connections. He went along to meet his circle, but, far from being revolutionaries, they proved to be Jewish businessmen delighted at the idea of meeting socially a real live Mountie. Equally proverbially able to catch their man, they were anxious to know where the Mounties placed their contracts for uniforms and headgear, and he retired from the fray not to be seen again.
*** <em>The Magic Coat</em>
A Spanish exile group in the South of France one day had a surprise telephone call from a sympathiser who said his name was Jose Martin Artajo. As this was one of the most distinguished names in the Franco regime and close to Government circles, they were not unnaturally suspicious at least of being hoaxed. But the call was genuine. The civil war divided fathers from sons, brothers from sisters, even wives from husbands, contrary to hostile chroniclers like Professor Woodcock who alleged people were shot by the anarchists “just for their family connections”.
Admiral Franco himself had been living incognito in Madrid during the civil war, and when the Anarchist militia visited him, having been tipped-off as to a presumed fifth columnist, demanded angrily “What have I to do with my idiot son?” (an argument they accepted). Like many descendants of “conversos” (or New Christians) after 1492 — referred to contemptuously, in a name they accepted with pride, as “marranos” — pigs — when in secret they kept alive their old faith, the Admiral was a Republican and Freemason and only nominally a Catholic. The marranos predominated in the police and armed forces even under the Monarchy and continued to do so in the Republic. His other son Ramon was an aviator who had conferred popular acclaim on the name for his pioneering exploits in the air long before his younger brother Francisco (who took his mother’s side in the family squabbles) made it infamous. The Admiral had long since disowned the General and left Madrid when the latter re-entered.
The family feud, begun when the Admiral left his deeply Catholic wife, was expressed in the younger son’s persecution of Republicans and Freemasons when he came to power. Roman Catholicism was glorified and divorce, such as the Admiral had wanted for years, illegalised. Typical of the Popular Front government, it had rejected as impractical and absurd the Anarcho-Syndicalist demand to abolish the Army (a hotbed of right-wing reaction and oppression) and instead gave promotion to people like Franco, relying on his father’s background, or other future rebels because of their Basque or Catalan origins.
Martin Artajo’s father was a leading Catholic publisher. His uncle, later a Minister under Franco, had been among those imprisoned as fascists during the civil war in Madrid, when an excited crowd wanted to lynch them all. They were not unreasonably agitated at being bombed from the air by the very air force they had unwillingly paid through the nose for years to defend them against foreign enemies.
Many of the prisoners may not have been fascists and the warders felt they should go to trial for what they may have done. They sent for the local chief of police and such was the twist of fate, some of the warders, and the chief of police himself, were anarchists. This was one of the many strange consequences of the compromises with the Popular Front. The chief of police [Melchor Rodriguez Garcia] held the crowd at bay with a pistol in each hand, saying the (since famous) words, “Que nadie pase!” (Nobody gets through) and saved their lives. Later, when Franco won, the unlikely war-time police chief was on the death list, but saved at the last moment by Martin Artajo’s uncle and some other prominent ex-detainees who dubbed him “the red angel” and received a rare pardon for having been a defender of law and order during foreign invasion and rebellion.
For years, not having to conceal his identity, having been pardoned, the “red angel” organised legal defences, acting as intermediary for funds for that purpose, or for prisoners and their families from abroad. Now he vouched for Jose Martin Artajo on the other side.
Jose Martin Artajo was in the Diplomatic Service in Greece when he ‘defected’ from the regime and associated with musician Lucy Duran, daughter of the one General who stayed with the Republic until defeat, and a wealthy American woman. He could not stay in Greece but came to London with her. He worked for the Resistance with Miguel Garcia. Though I felt he never overcame his upper-class background, however much he dropped into what we once called bohemianism and now call dropping-out, I have to say he devoted a great deal to the ongoing struggle.
On one occasion in 1974, there was a series of police raids on various addresses, including Stuart’s, Miguel’s and mine, in fact by the French police, though they came along with Special Branch officers to make it look legal, asking about a purely Franco-Spanish matter. As there was a Labour Government in power it would have been a political embarrassment if they had trailed along a Spanish policeman as they would have liked. It was part of the investigations into the kidnapping of a Spanish banker in France, by a section of the Spanish Resistance. I infuriated them when they came to me by answering only the British officer and acting as if the French one could only understand music-hall pidgin-Franglais (he spoke English perfectly well). “Nice country, non? Mini-skirts, mademoiselles, oo la la. It rains always but plenty jig-jig, wee-wee — you wanna go?” I admit I was outrageously betraying my principles but it was worth it to see the purple necks of both. I am sure the warrant, if any, did not cover foreign police or they would never have swallowed this behaviour. They were interested in wardrobes, asking for a coat. When they visited Martin Artajo and Miguel they searched all the coats. They did not make a search in any of the British subjects visited.
Later Miguel explained the matter, to me at least. Someone had written from a Spanish jail that if Martin Artajo could pick up a certain coat coming over, he would have all the information he needed. But in prison slang “a coat” was “a guy”.
** 16 Barrack Room Lawyer Again; Twilight of Francoism; The Angry Brigade; Bitov What You Fancy; The Brief Morning of Anarchy; Trials and Tribulations
*** <em>Barrack Room Lawyer Again</em>
When the Centre was established in Haverstock Hill, Miguel and I plunged into a series of meetings up and down the country, and throughout Europe, speaking on behalf of the Spanish prisoners. We encountered a lot of enthusiasm on behalf of the Resistance, and this coincided with a rise in industrial resistance at home, so I was kept busy. Fleet Street printworkers usually worked a seven-day week, and a lot of my spare time was devoted to bringing out <em>Black Flag</em> and working for the Black Cross, all voluntary. It may sound impossible, but a lot can be achieved with a laidback approach. For instance, I would take weeks on end without days off and then have them in lieu, travelling to Cologne or Copenhagen, and combining a holiday with a tour speaking in defence of Spain and also in explanation of Anarchism and Syndicalism.
All the time I was at work I got calls (one advantage of working on telephones) to help out with such matters as finding jobs for visiting Spanish workers, sometimes on the run from a prison sentence for their beliefs or organisation. It was difficult before Spain was in the EEC as there were only two types of jobs — those chosen by the British Government, ill-paid and sweated, and those without cards, usually worse-paid and slave-driven. And of course there was the au pair racket (still not resolved but diminished) where girls came “to study English” and became virtual domestic possessions. They were bullied into thinking they would be deported if they complained. So far from having paid overtime they never even had time off.
If they had friends who got to know the Centro Iberico, a Spanish woman contacted them and persuaded them to leave, assuring them there would be no comeback from the employer that could not be countered. Miguel and I or some other friend would go round by car to collect them, sometimes to confront irate middle-class housewives who became abusive when realising they were being forced to do their own work for a day or so. If the husbands were in they became aggressive and Miguel learned to swear fluently in English and extended my knowledge of how to do it in Spanish.
It nearly, but never quite, came to blows. The girls were usually terrified the Guardia Civil would intervene, having come from a country where, in the whole of their young lives, strikes were criminal and workers had no rights, but in Golders Green where we had news of most of the Spanish au pair “students” there were no tricorne hats.
We invariably got them more rewarding jobs, at that time plentiful despite restrictions. Domestic help under the pretence of au pair diminished but unfortunately was replaced by Filipino domestic slavery with no pretence of teaching the language.
While I was at the <em>Daily Sketch</em> a colleague asked me bewildered, after having passed over many personal calls of this nature, “Are you a sort of Republican Spanish Consul?” Later a Valencia paper referred to me in a survey of British anarchism as “a friend of the Spanish exiles in their darkest days”. Both remarks made me very proud. At least everything I did was not in vain. I was a barrack-room lawyer at heart, I suppose.
*** <em>Twilight of Francoism</em>
My main contribution to Spanish Resistance in those last days of Francoism, though, was support for the libertarian prisoners of Franco. The name “libertarian” was still, at any rate in Spain, used only by the anarchists and syndicalists; the hi-jacking of the name by right wing private enterprise people not yet having become widely known outside the USA — it still signified “libertarian socialist” as opposed to “State socialist”.
Many Spanish people could now travel out from Francoism, and the opening up of the labour market in Germany and elsewhere in the boom years meant whole towns in Andalusia, for instance, became ghost towns. Genocide had been followed by exodus. The estates now needed all the labour they could get, and the regime could no longer go round killing haphazardly — it was under scrutiny by tourism. That was why it jailed, but as discreetly as possible, and why Christie’s publicity when in Spain had been embarrassing, and Franco’s apologists spoke of him first as a “misguided lad” and then as a criminal. But because there were fewer Resistance fighters and prisoners than in the darkest years of Francoism, their plight could more readily be pinpointed.
The political climate was changing, nothing demonstrating it more clearly than when a Scottish football team visited Barcelona and the fans were drunk with an unexpected sporting victory, unlimited licensing hours and cheap booze. They tore into the police who did not know how to deal with them. They brought out the Guardia Civil but even the dreaded tricorne hats could hardly massacre visiting football enthusiasts. Barcelona went wild with delight at seeing the tables turned on its traditional enemy. From that time on the omnipotent police State was shattered. I had the fantasy that should Hitler have won the war the Gestapo might have eventually atrophied with routine acceptance and relied only on the memory of its greener days to make illegally-parked motorists cower. I prophesied, admittedly jestingly, at many meetings that this would happen even in Russia with the dreaded communist police in years to come.
Crossing the border just before Franco died the scene did not seem to have changed — we got through OK, the guards courteously waving through an English car, while Miguel sat at the back of the car, unusually humble, his passport at the bottom of the pile, giving his profession as “Interpreter-Guide”. He was grossly disappointed with the changes in Barcelona especially when he went to find papers he had hidden in his mother’s house years before, to find his brother-in-law would not let him in, as an ex-convict no less. His sister had given up the struggle on marriage, and most of his family were dead or dispersed. His wife had broken with him in his years of prison, he did not know his son, only former neighbours spoke of him affectionately. Waiting for him in a bar near his brother-in-law’s house, an old Catalan told me that the place to which my friend had gone really belonged to an old confederal family but the present householder was no good, a desdichado who traded on the regime. What a blow it would be for the real owner, if he came back, a man who was really a saint. The description hardly fitted Miguel, but it was he and when he came into the bar they recognised each other. The local offered to get some of the townspeople to force their way in and discover the deeds hidden in the floor, but Miguel asked if he expected him to evict his own sister if they found them — which confirmed the old man of his saintliness.
Throughout France we had to go out of our way to stop in different towns where an incredible number knew Miguel as <em>el tio de Barcelona</em> (“Uncle Barcelona”). Only in Spain everything seemed dead and him forgotten. But this was on the surface. Behind it was a bursting out of young Spain, and a determination among many to renew the struggle of historic Spain. Oddly enough, more people were prepared at first to speak openly to me, as a foreigner, than to Miguel. He learned to leave the opening of conversations to me at this point of time, and got impatient at my slowness in starting to talk to everyone I met.
It was incredible how Spaniards had come to distrust one another, but also how they were unwinding. An American we knew became friendly with a girl who was at the University, also an anarchist. But she implored him not to say anything about it when he met her parents. She had no idea how they would react. Her mother questioned him closely about his job and wanted to know to which union he belonged in the States. Thinking she wouldn’t know what it was, he said “The IWW”. She lit up immediately and confessed she had been in the CNT in Tarrassa. When her own father had been taken by the Falange, her mother had gone to beg for his life. They not only shot him in her presence, they gave her castor oil, shaved her head and made her run down the street with bullets flying at her feet. Thereafter the widow had warned her children never to say a word about their beliefs, not even to their spouses or children when they married.
She had kept silence all these years and now found she had an anarchist daughter. When the son came in, mother and daughter were still talking about what the father’s reaction would be. The surprised son confessed he was in a clandestine CNT union, and they were all laughing about their newfound discovery of each other and if Papa would say he was in a nest of vipers, when the latter came in from work and wanted to know what the joke was. They plucked up courage and told him whereupon he whipped the CNT rulebook out of his pocket and asked for their back subscriptions. The whole family had kept their secret from each other all those years and it needed an American novio to act as catalyst.
This was typical of was happening all over Spain, but especially in Catalonia. I think I was in order being optimistic for the future and telling meeting after meeting from Birmingham to Berlin that Franco’s protegé and designated successor, Juan Carlos, younger son of one of two Pretenders with equally disputed claims to the throne, should not trouble to take more than a travelling bag with him when he returned to his ancestral home.
Unfortunately, I was not the only one to observe what was likely to occur when Franco died, clinging to power to the last breath. The others were silently making preparations. Our people weren’t.
*** <em>The Angry Brigade</em>
“Obsessed with the press” though I might be, according to a hostile reviewer of <em>Floodgates</em>, I was only contacted by them in connection with Stuart, especially in the sixties. Then, they were convinced he was responsible for every act of rebellion that occurred and a lot that didn’t. For a couple of years when I was sitting in the Albion pub in Ludgate Circus journalists would nudge each other but nobody had the courage to interrupt me at Sunday lunch (for me, then the finest English cuisine in London). “Like butting in on feeding time at the Zoo,” was the unkind way one of my workmates described it when I was once thus accosted. It was only when I was occasionally drinking with friends and one or another journalist would home in, and I would think they were their acquaintances, that they ever managed to approach me to get information. They got discouraged with this after I gave them some tips even more ludicrous than the ones they could make up themselves and when my friends tumbled to what I was doing, they would seek to cap them. On one occasion — it wasn’t me that time, honest — somebody sent an aspiring young sleuth with a camera to watch Croydon Town Hall for days, waiting for it to be blown up.
I don’t know what he thought Stuart did in his tea break, but I do see why some of the allegations made against <em>Black Flag</em> were so bitter. They could have forgiven a “Dreadful Massacre at Croydon” Exclusive but not standing round in the rain for days catching cold to no purpose, unable even to charge it to expenses.
An amusing sideline on these incidents was when I finally met the hostile non-violent non-reader reviewer of <em>‘Floodgates’</em> in <em>‘Peace News’</em>, a somewhat embittered Christian Pacifist named Otter, who considered himself an anarchist of the <em>‘Freedom’</em> type. During some march or other I had stopped for some natural relief. While not addressing me directly, when he came in he angrily denounced me as a terrorist to the surprised peers. I ignored him and they gave furtive looks at each other, not wanting, in the manner of gentlemen in gents, to appear to be interested in each other, but wondering which one was about to blow the place up.
The series of attacks on government institutions, finance houses, recruiting offices, lawyers’ chambers, embassies, major firms, Spanish Government offices and so on, had been collectively known as the Angry Brigade, as if it were a single cohesive force directed by one commanding officer or even by one small group. As the press could not conceive of volunteers, there would have had to be huge sums paid to any mercenaries they hired, and after it was all over journalists were commenting on “how amateur” the whole business was. They obviously would have preferred to find professionals. Though the press used the word “terrorism”, not a single life was lost nor a single person harmed in these explosions, another factor which earned the entire operation the sneers of officialdom, who thought they would have if they could have, or maybe that they should have, So convinced were the media that the police were dealing with a unified force they were puzzling why Lady Beaverbrook’s car should be sabotaged and what significance she could have for the Angry Brigade. They did not even look at the supposition that, far from being also obsessively concerned with the press, the perpetrator might have thought it was the car of the media baron himself. True Lord Beaverbrook had died and his son hadn’t taken the title but everyone didn’t necessarily appreciate that, and the car was always ostentatiously parked outside the <em>Daily Express</em> building.
Most of the other targets were spot on, and if at first the public at large had reservations about attacking ministers’ houses or the value of sabotaging fashion shows and shops (a Situationist tactic), when one spoke to ordinary people they were delighted at the anarchist targets such as attacks on property speculators’ offices, and even amused at an attack on the Lord Chancellor’s office, which caused horror in the press for the insult to his high judicial standing, far beyond politics as they saw it. Not only I viewed matters in that way, but a jury, picked at random, earbashed for eighteen months by the cream of the legal profession, thought similarly. They found guilty only four who were caught “bang to rights” and recommended clemency in that case, They implicitly accepted that in the case of spontaneous revolt, the police had selected a few representatives of the political factions concerned and fitted them up.
*** <em>Bitov what you fancy</em>
The journos failed to understand what the Angry Brigade was all about, let alone the Stoke Newington Eight (which was not identical), and tried to reduce it to a conspiracy of a few people convicted of certain related offences, as if that said everything. But Grub Street was worse. One smartarse named Oleg Bitov, writing in a book <em>Bitov’s Britain</em> (1985) for Viking Penguin (often none too choosy what rubbish they publish under their imprint) made light of heavy sentences he didn’t have to serve, and pretended they didn’t exist. Feigning superior knowledge of all and everybody, Bitov said, “A story circulating in intelligence circles provides an amusing insight into the effectiveness of Britain’s counter-insurgency forces” and, one may say, into Mr Bitov’s own level of intelligence.
“During the early 1970s, there were a number of minor incidents involving explosives (none of which went off), planted apparently by a group of student anarchists calling themselves the Stoke Newington Seven or the Angry Brigade. It was only after the Seven were brought to trial that lawyers for the defence discovered that five of them were Special Branch plants and the other two infiltrators from the CIA. Being from different sections, none of the Special Branch officers had known that the others were also undercover operatives, nor had there been any liaison whatsoever with the CIA. Apparently the ‘cousins’ were not on speaking terms with one another for some time after this embarrassing incident.”
Could Mr Bitov have been reading that old reactionary G. K. Chesterton’s <em>Man Who was Thursday</em>, in which this unlikely contretemps actually occurred (six of the seven “anarchists” were detectives, the seventh was apparently God) the night Tory Minister Robert Carr was seen on TV watching his wrecked front door?
Who was this knowledgeable Mr Bitov, who thus cheerfully despises anarchists and police alike as shoddy poseurs, in an amalgam of G. K. Chesteron and Joseph Conrad? After having defected to England from the KGB and spreading his little load of propaganda, he re-appeared at a press conference in Moscow when he claimed to have been drugged and kidnapped by British agents in Rome and held captive in London, presumably long enough for his publishers’ cheque to clear into his bank account, and a quick trip to C & A and Harrods.
*** <em>The Brief Morning of Anarchy</em>
The late sixties and early seventies were a brief morning of popular support for anarchism in Britain. It seemed to break the back of the quietists who fled from the monster whose claws they thought they had trimmed out of existence. <em>Freedom</em> tried to advise the activists by saying “if they had asked us beforehand, we would have told them nothing could be achieved by violence” or something of the sort, but it had no audience any longer. I recall a delicious moment when one of their group came along to a Black Cross meeting and explained in a firm schoolmistressy tone, “We have been quite tolerant of this behaviour long enough. We have done as you said and given food parcels to prisoners in Spain and remand prisoners here and we will continue to do so. But we want it understood this sort of thing has got to stop”. Like the press and police, they followed the line that it was a small group of unruly individuals who were responsible for everything.
The New Left was a bit shattered by the events, and staggered by the drift to real anarchism. Some sections denounced it outright as a police plot. A hyper-pacifist even suggested the Home Secretary Robert Carr was behind it in order to discredit the anarchists, and to throw people off the scent had arranged for his own home to be a target. Greater devotion to discredit no man could have than this. Some of the new student-led left would have loved to claim it all as their own, as they did revolutions or explosions abroad, but to claim leadership would also be to claim responsibility, and they weren’t having that at any price. Some of the neo-Leninist advance guardists expressed ‘sympathy’ with the ‘unthinking masses’ who without the ‘leadership of the advanced educated minority’ carried out these acts. They dropped hints like, ‘Angry Brigade, be careful, the man who went to Liverpool with you is a pig’, thus making it plain they were still Leaders but disowning the blind ‘masses’ who were taking their advice to rebel too seriously.
The reason was, despite the press talking of conspiracies and public enemies, the whole affair was popular and became more so. After the first few incidents it was clear to all that the normal working person was in no way at risk, and that it was directed at their perceived enemies or at any rate what could be seen to be regarded as such even by people who disagreed they were. That was reinforced by the unbalanced press reaction and the unbridled police campaign. “Commander X”, later revealed to be Commander Bond, who unlike his fictional namesake dared not speak his name while it was going on, led the campaign.
I heard a few criticisms of the events, but they mostly were about the less-understood Situationist angle such as the wrecking of the radio van at the Miss World competition rather than at the anarchistic targets such as Government buildings. All such reservations subsided into admiration when property speculators were targetted and from then on I kept getting suggestions as to whom “they” should do next, from banks to night clubs.
Some were extreme. One printer offered me a plan of the underground workings of London, obtained from his cousin a cable-layer. I don’t know what he expected they were to be used for. In the pub at lunch time a stranger offered a plan to put a bomb in the Spanish Church underneath the pew where the Ambassador may have sat. As no consideration was given to the fact that it would have taken a large part of the congregation with it, I assume he was a nutcase or an agent-provocateur. It made no difference either way as the Angry Brigade didn’t ask me beforehand what they should do and if they had I would have told them that anybody who needed my advice didn’t deserve to have it.
In the midst of the excitement the <em>Daily Sketch</em> closed down. It had been failing for years. We anticipated problems in getting new jobs but the print unions were still powerful enough to get their members back to work almost immediately. It was not the same with the more glamorous jobs, such as sub-editors. Journalists usually have a short working life anyway, like actors, unless they achieve stardom. At least they found jobs of a sort, though more humdrum. One sub who had despised copytakers and unionised endeavours in particular was delivering milk to my door four months later, and bewailing the change of circumstance in which I had moved over to the <em>Daily Telegraph</em> while he, a firm supporter of the Establishment, had nobody to fight his case.
*** <em>Trials and Tribulations</em>
The search under Commander X-Bond seemed to take two paths. One, which he seemed to prefer, was also favoured by Sergeant Roy Cremer of Special Branch, who was the “anarchist specialist” and naturally wanted to justify his existence. That seemed to be to pursue Stuart Christie, who responded to the challenge by leading them a merry dance when he went to and came from work at William Press, allowing them to follow the wrong car for hours by the simple process of changing with a workmate.
Special Branch interviewed me on one occasion, and it was quite plain they were searching for the “Spanish angle”. I agreed to go to Scotland Yard rather than the local station because I thought I might find out what was going on. I was not disappointed. Their interviewers included Military Intelligence as well as Special Branch, and their questions ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous. “What is the difference between the CNT and ETA?” “Who did you see in Paris?” “Who are Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid?” (Subsequently I saw the film but I never saw the connection yet).
It got to my being asked if I believed in violence, so I retorted, “What would you do if somebody tried to rape your sister?” The officer had no experience of the times when conscientious objectors were asked that very question by tribunals and it seemed at times almost to be what two world wars were about. The officer gasped and said, “What a ridiculous statement. How do I know what I would do? I haven’t the faintest idea — it’s like asking me what I would do if a Black family moved next door” — as revealing an admission as Lytton Strachey’s reply that he would interpose himself between the German soldier and his sister.
The questions were puerile, but I answered in kind, for example, “in Paris? I saw Josephine Baker in the Folies Bergere”, which got a snort. To the question, “When do you reckon the Spanish war finished?” — I answered promptly “March 1939?” which would have been awarded points in a quiz show but at which they gave up. I asked if I could add some remarks privately with the tape recorder turned off. They must have thought I “came up the Clyde on a bicycle” and eagerly agreed. I said I wanted them to know that I detested anti-social violence and that if I thought anybody was guilty of it I would deal with it myself. Everyone was cheered up by this and someone said cordially they relied on the co-operation of public-spirited citizens like myself, overlooking that our views of what was anti-social might differ sharply.
That may not have been the view of the elusive commander X-Bond since a couple of weeks later I got raided, which suggested that my answers, though strictly truthful if unhelpful, were not sufficient to let me off their hook, though the daring antics of the AB were totally beyond my middle years and girth. Normally police raids in this operation took place in the early hours of the morning, people being got out of bed and even doors smashed down while they were sleeping. Maximum publicity was always given, thus even though no arrests were made, a healthy warning was given to all concerned that it was unwise to be under suspicion even if one had done nothing. Inspector Habershon later told the press that no members of the “orthodox left” such as the Communist Party had been raided, which made it plain that all the raids were politically motivated <em>pour encourager les autres</em>.
In one raid in Hornsey they point blank told the startled tenant (in the flat below the one they were seeking) they were looking for anarchists. She asked “What does that mean?” and they said, “Well, people against the government”, and she timidly admitted her husband had, against her advice, voted Liberal, and had thought it was legal though she told him he should not have mentioned it to anyone. A shout from upstairs “Okay, sarge, this is the flat — there are Anarchist books on the shelves” affirmed the more specifically political nature of the raids, which yielded nothing beyond the outlook of the inhabitants, who were less terrified by the exposure than the lady on the floor below.
However, in my case they reasoned I would have to be raided at work, and notified the security officer they were coming in to search my locker in the health and safety TU representatives room. He advised the management, and they said plainly this was out of order. Wage negotiations were going on, a strike had been threatened, and everyone would have thought the management had called in the police. If they wanted to search my locker, the management suggested, they could do it in the small hours of the morning when the last shift had gone and the cleaners not yet arrived. This would have spoiled the whole purpose of the exercise, and Bond turned it down contemptuously, but was amazed to find out afterwards his instructions had been overlooked.
“Who had the temerity to override my orders?” he demanded angrily.
“The Home Secretary”, Cremer told him. It was fear of the dreaded workers that caused the management to intervene with the government, not concern for the rights of the individual. They just wanted to get a paper out. One can see why some politicos refer depreciatingly to those days when members of print unions could afford to be against the government.
Inspector Habershon came on the scene via the local CID when Home Secretary Robert Carr’s house in Finchley got attacked. He was as quiet and methodical as Bond was bumptious and extrovert, and pursued a different line of enquiry. Possibly in Finchley he had been used only to Conservative crime. What struck him was a series of cheque frauds involving some students, whom he assumed to be Anarchists and were in fact Situationists. It seemed he let the frauds go on while he watched the people. It may have appeared odd to him that people “on the left” should be involved in something assumed to be the prerogative of those “on the right” and reasoned that they must be trying to raise funds for illegal activities. In fact rarely do people “raise funds” — what they raise is cash — though naturally, just as when they raise cash by legal means such as working for it, they may well contribute to funds. The notion that the Angry Brigade needed to be “financed” was grotesque.
But Habershon was working on his line of approach while the anti-Christie section worked on theirs. They even persuaded a tabloid to advertise a huge reward for the “man behind the Angry Brigade” while dropping heavy hints as to whom they thought it was. Then Jake Prescott and Ian Purdie fell into their hands. Purdie, while in prison on a charge of bombing the Ulster Office in London in 1969, had propagandised heavily, and when released mixed with suspect anarchists and situationists. He influenced Prescott, who was released and later re-arrested, when he was alleged to have “admitted involvement” to another prisoner, though it is more likely that what he expressed was agreement with the actions and may have been misinterpreted or deliberately misrepresented, hardly unlikely in view of the substantial reward offered, though never paid.
A lot of people were doing things more or less in sympathy with the Angry Brigade. Given its actions it was difficult not to. Some took it upon themselves to write manifestoes for the Angry Brigade though not necessarily involved in it, but ready to propagandise its clear aims. Purdie and Prescott both got arrested and charged. Some of the actions, like the attack on the Post Office Tower, occurred while they were under arrest and being charged. They were accused of “conspiracy” on the basis of “a nod or a wink is sufficient” to justify that vaguest but most dangerous of charges. Purdie’s top line barrister took a better paying case at the last minute, leaving him with a deaf elderly barrister for whom everyone in the profession was sorry. Purdie did not give evidence. This is usually taken to mean that one dare not face being cross-examined but in this case the prosecution did not like to say that, as it might have been because his barrister couldn’t hear. There was no case against him otherwise and he was found not guilty.
The jury were sympathetic. The fact is the Angry Brigade were so popular the jury would certainly have found Prescott not guilty too. But he had the misfortune to be better represented. On cross examination he admitted writing some envelopes, and the judge ruled that this was enough to find him guilty of conspiracy. He could easily have denied it and the jury would have found him not guilty. I suggested to the defence committee it would be safer to deny everything, and recommended a handwriting expert should see if it was Jake’s handwriting at all, or perhaps analyse whether the writer was the perpetrator of the alleged acts.
I recommended graphologist Manfred Lowengard, the former husband of a good friend. Unfortunately once in Berlin an official had asked him to analyse some handwriting, and he had characterised the writer as unstable, neurotic, and with dangerous psychopathic tendencies. The terrified official, who had been acting for President Hindenburg, said that it was the handwriting of the new Chancellor, Herr Hitler, who had been granted dictatorial powers. Manfred prudently took the next boat-train to England. He wasn’t prepared to face that type of political hazard again and backed out of the case, while Prescott was quite ready to admit to such a trivial matter anyway. To the surprise of the jury, the judge sentenced him to fifteen years jail for his folly in telling the truth.
I may say of Manfred that he was called to give evidence in Germany on one of the interminable cases involving Mrs Anastasia Tchaikovsky, who claimed to be the supposedly executed Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia, and was also known as Anna Anderson. The case for the relatives who denied her claim seemed to rest on the fact that they could not admit that the daughter of the Tsar had been raped and an illegitimate child resulted. They could accept she had been killed (that was consistent with her dignity) but not raped, and with issue. The fact that the claimant knew every secret detail of her past life was, they explained, because the real Grand Duchess had been high-spirited and mischievous and after being shot had entered some factory girl’s body to torment the royal family, who did a pretty good job of it on Anna/Anastasia herself. I do not know if the spirit could influence the handwriting too. Fortunately for European Royalty, a tissue of the flesh of Mrs Anna\Anastasia Manahan, formerly Tchaikovsky (nee Romanov or Schanzkowska, which the case was all about), was found years after her cremation, when genetic fingerprinting could prove she was not related to Prince Philip. If the Greek Royals had exchanged roles with the Romanovs, Philip might have been proved an impostor.
Manfred was very closely questioned by the opposing lawyer, a former Nazi finally cleared after the war under the denazification law and re-admitted to the German Bar. He cast doubts on Manfred’s credibility. “You are a British handwriting expert, known as the Sage of Hampstead, we are told,” he stated. “Yet you speak faultless German”. Manfred replied, “I can claim no credit for that, but thanks to your Fuhrer I also speak fluent English”.
*** <em>“It’s all Anarchism”</em>
The Angry Brigade was a name used not always by the actual people concerned, and was a spin-off from the International Revolutionary Solidarity Movement and First of May Group but it also blended with situationism with which they had nothing in common. On the Continent this led to a clash. Here it was otherwise. The situationists normally had no class consciousness and anyway were opposed to all forms of active opposition, even anti-parliamentary, on the grounds that everything was packaged by the oppressive society and parcelled back in acceptable form by the universities. This was true enough in general, and also applied to themselves in particular. It applied very much to the pseudo-anarchists to be found first in the peace movement, then to the various offspring that came from it. It did not apply to the genuine anarchist movement, and some working class youths from higher education, who were influenced by French situationism saw that too and went along with action coming from Spain rather than sloganising coming from France. The situationists seized on the student involvement in the Paris barricades as if they had been responsible, but the whole business of the “society of the spectacle” was a bit of a joke and finished up as a diversion in art galleries.
Though on the Continent this led to a sharp division between anarchists and the situationists and various Marxist trends (though the press saw them as one), here the strands, though smaller, briefly made up one movement and all their separate actions were referred to as the Angry Brigade from propaganda manifestoes sent out.
The European Resistance began as a rearguard attack on continued Francoism but expanded to fight neo-Nazism and the trend to what is now call “Thatcherism” (capitalism without apologies) but which goes back to long before she took office. It collapsed because everywhere in Europe its success induced Government agents of one sort or another to move in and take over, or if they could not, to emulate the methods and adopt similar or even the same names. With neo-Marxists and nationalists growing in influence, and preferring some governments to others, when they pretended to be resistance movements to fight the cold war under another name, professional guerrillas set up shop and the Intelligence game had a field day. It never occurred to this element that every government, however ‘nationalist’ or ‘socialist’, had police forces which liaised. The press referred to it all as “Anarchism”.
** 17 Auto Destruction; At the Old Bailey; Witness of the Persecution; Fun and Games at the Gulag; The Most Distressful Country; After the Storm; Irish Association; The Murrays
*** <em>Auto Destruction</em>
International Socialists, later styling themselves the Socialist Workers Party (or in Trotskyist terms, “State Caps”) often finished up writing books about the Left in which their superficial student involvement was less than serviceable. One named David Widgery, later a doctor and a bitter Marxist sectarian, not to be confused with his relative Lord Chief Justice Widgery until the SWP should take power on Tibb’s Eve, and dying too soon for that anyway, referred to me in his book as an “ex-boxer and auto-destructive artist”. It wasn’t until afterwards I found he didn’t know his Meltzers from his Metzgers (possibly not even his brewers from his butchers) and was mixing me up with a tiny German in CND, Gustav Metzger, who once fell over a pile of boxes and sat there with them all tumbling on him to gasp “Wunderbar! A new art form!” I wouldn’t say he claimed it was boxing but he did say it was auto-destructive art. Later Gustav gave an exhibition at Zwemmer’s art gallery to be interrupted by a horrified management which found him ripping up the floor with a pneumatic drill. Zwemmer’s clientele, brought up on modern art, thought it a great cultural happening, and their delighted Oohs and Aahs gave way to indignant protests against the unreasonable Philistinism of the art gallery when it was peremptorily stopped.
Not then knowing who Metzger was, I thought at first Widgery was referring to numerous autos of mine that had been smashed up. It made my stomach turn over as that was how Evie had ended her days. Then I reflected he might not have known about that but had heard of all the various young Spanish or other visitors for whom Miguel had borrowed my various cars to drive somewhere, saying it was to save me the trouble, and after the smash that it was the first time the person had driven on the left, or “you know these damn people with their drugs, they make me sick”. I had learned to laugh about it and hope the insurance company would do the same. It would have been appropriate to call it auto-destructive art, but it wasn’t what he was widgerying on about.
*** <em>At the Old Bailey</em>
To my dismay at the so-called Angry Brigade trial I was called as a prosecution witness. I had no intention of appearing, but consulting defence solicitor Mr Birnberg insisted I should. Apparently the prosecution were afraid Stuart would not go into the witness box, and like Purdie would therefore be acquitted when they were relying on him to break down under questioning (some chance) and supply the evidence they so desperately lacked. Stuart intended going into the witness box, but they were not to know that, and as they could not legally force him to do so, they subpoenaed me instead.
It gave an excellent chance to carry the war into the enemy’s camp, as it were.
As I half expected would happen, one of my least favourite people, Wynford Hicks (whose father-in-law subsequently wrote the rubbishy book saying I was a secret member of the IRA who had hidden in the Common Wealth party to emulate the feats of the Spanish anarchists in sabotaging their own war effort), an acolyte of professional secularist Nicolas Walter, then going through the usual stage of radical alternative journalist as a preliminary to becoming a mainstream one, the minute he got the chance, did not fail to smear and sneer, implying I was ratting. Had he been taken seriously and the allegations glibly made in his circle been true, it could have been a death sentence. He retracted saying he was joking. I am sure his secular confessor would have enjoyed the joke even more had it really happened and he could have drummed up a bit of business for a secular funeral besides.
When I appeared in the vestibule of the court a respectable looking gentleman, looking to me more like a bank manager than a lawyer, came over and shook me warmly by the hand. “I’m so glad you have come, Mr Meltzer,” he said.
I hesitated, thinking him counsel instructed by Mr Birnberg. “I was told not to speak with defending counsel or any of the witnesses,” I said, at which he beamed delightedly, and said, “I’m Inspector Habershon. I’m sure you’ve heard of me”. I felt the way I did years later when I reflected the infant I had kissed might have been the Minister responsible for administering the Poll Tax. At least Sergeant Cremer didn’t shake hands but I knew him from of old. He did say to me at the preliminary hearings that he was glad I was sticking by Stuart, but was afraid it looked bad for him, and he was glad Brenda was loyal. “It’s really tough when your girl friend turns against you,” he said, whether to extract information, or hopefully, I know not. One of the other police said she was the prettiest girl in the court, a compliment she could have done without, but I overheard someone say, with some surprise — whether it was a lawyer or a policeman, given my bad judgment in these matters, I cannot tell — that “you have to hand it to Christie, his friends rally round him”, which seemed to me as much a comment on their circles as on ours.
Only a week before I had gone to try to collect my car from the police depot and found it in a wrecked condition, and as I examined it ruefully a voice came out of a circle of police, “If my best friend did that to my car I wouldn’t hesitate for a moment to co-operate with the authorities”. Can one doubt it?
*** <em>Witness of the Persecution</em>
The trial has been described in Stuart’s book <em>The Christie File</em> (Partisan Press/Cienfuegos Press, 1980). As a witness I wasn’t present for most of it. The <em>Daily Telegraph</em> had a crime reporter based at Scotland Yard (more a PRO than an investigative journalist) named Coughlin who was quite annoyed at my presence. The management never liked to approach me directly on political matters as one of the impositions they suffered under the trade union terror was that they could not discriminate. They did raise with the Father of the Chapel (TU committee chair) the question of whether it was in order for an employee of theirs to be mixed up with a terrorist trial. That particular FOC and I never got on well and he put it to me probably stronger than they had done.
“Are you objecting to my appearing as a witness for the prosecution?” I asked indignantly. Though nothing of an FOC he liked having a go at the management — that was how he finally ousted the friendly and efficient supervisor, who had been there sixty years, whom for years he had been depicting as a tool of the management to the members and as putty in the hands of the staff to the management, and so finally got his job himself.
On the other hand my statement was undeniable if incredible. The management were asked if they really wanted to interfere with justice and nobble the prosecution, and they hastily explained it was a misunderstanding. Coughlin, their drunken court reporter, who won a libel action for being so described but never came on the telephone sober once, objected to my taking his copy, for which the chapel committee hauled him over the coals with the management. Either it was solidarity with me or nobody wanted extra duty, or a bit of both. However, every time thereafter when he had a difference with a copytaker on the telephone (a very frequent occurrence in those days) he asked, “Are you Meltzer?” My reply if I got it, and some others took up (not always truthfully) was “I’m sober, sir — are you?”
The journos like to bemoan the printers who served them so faithfully while they were boozing on their expense accounts and accuse them, now that it is safe to do so, of every fault in the book. Why, the copytakers got paid for hours for sitting doing nothing, and even worked out a scheme for unworked overtime, which passed into Street of Shame legend. Yes, we sat for hours waiting and then the pubs would empty and all the journos would be phoning in their copy at the same time. Mercenaries that we were, we wanted to be paid for the whole day and not just the time when they condescended to pass on the work we and they were paid for doing.
Sometimes the arguments took on another nature. When their top journalist got home, not in a very staid condition, he would put his feet up, relax with a further bevvy, and dictate totally inconsequential copy (which finally we refused to take). On one occasion he asked the copytaker, as a member of NATSOPA (as it then was) what he thought of the copy he had just given, which referred to trade unionists as like “the Nazis in Germany” in their actions.
Unluckily for him, it was me. I explained politely I only took the copy, took no responsibility for anything in it but the spelling, and if he insisted on getting my opinion he would not like it. He did insist. I told him, “It’s bollocks. You don’t even know what a Nazi is.” “What?” he cried indignantly. “I don’t know what a Nazi is? I arrested a Nazi when I was an officer in the War”. (No comment, but I bet he was in uniform). I explained that the Nazis never fomented strikes, they broke them. It was those who advocated this who were supporting their policy. “Ah, but they caused suffering, that’s the point” he said. This was their famed political commentator. It never went in, anyway, though what did go in was bad enough.
The <em>Telegraph</em> writers hated strikes and strikers, except sometimes in their interests. John Izbicki, who having once been a German knew at first hand the difference between real Nazis and honest trade unionists, and that the SS did not go around downing tools was one such. Even he, who got out of Berlin early, might have settled for the pain he suffered from the unions in Fleet Street rather than what could have happened to him at Buchenwald. Though FOC of the NUJ, he used to write denunciations of strikers. I suppose he had to. When the journos went on strike against proposed redundancies, he was standing outside the gates picketing. “This is an official strike,” he abjured our supervisor who was just going in. Later that day I had occasion to ask him if it was still on, and he said it had been settled just five minutes since. “Good,” I said. “You can go back to your desk and finish bashing the miners for going on strike”.
The Old Bailey trial went on for eighteen months, during which the press lost interest. Indeed some friends of the defence wrote to the <em>Guardian</em> to protest at the way it was ignored after the allegations had been made in detail. They could have added that the trials did not stop the actions though the people alleged to be committing them were inside. Having given the sensational police evidence, there was no room for anyone to show how it was all destroyed bit by bit, so the final verdicts came as a bombshell.
I had a couple of days parrying questions and cracking jokes in the witness box. As Christie went in the box, they did not need me, so the prosecution at first only asked if my car was mine. However, the defence counsel, a ringer for Rumpole of the Old Bailey, as lawyers fantasise they would like to be but aren’t, had fun cross-examining me and forcing the other side to do so. The judge asked him once not to lead, and he said, surprised, “He’s not my witness, your Honour”. “Even so,” answered the Judge, who was stretching over backwards to appear be fair. He made only a mild protest when Anna Mendelson was handed a birthday cake in the dock, and mildly protested when Stuart’s barrister was handing sweets around the accused. “They’re nearly all gone, anyway,” he retorted airily, finishing handing them round. But the message came over clear: are these the dreaded terrorists?
The star witness against Christie was a barmaid who, when she read of the enormous reward offered for the capture of a mysterious Scottish anarchist who had been sentenced in Spain to a long stretch and whose name appeared in another paper, recollected that he had sex with her and shown her a gun. She recognised the bullet as one which would fit it. Her evidence was somewhat demolished by the fact that several members of Stuart’s work gang testified to having enjoyed her favours without the need to show firearms but more so when the foreman of the jury arose to ask how it was that a barmaid could recognise a bullet that fitted a particular gun, when he, who had served five years in the Army, would have been unable to do so. The judge explained helpfully that she was from Seattle.
Some indignant citizens of Seattle wrote to the judge to complain that it was not the sort of thing that was common in their town at all. It was not a Wild West film set and it was much safer to travel there at night than it was in London. As a result of these remarks, they said, the fair city was in mourning at the slur put upon it in the highest court of the old country, and demanded a retraction. The judge wrote back apologising, though he didn’t make it public. He said he meant only that the lady was once married to a serviceman from there. He presumably was in the habit of giving her “naming of parts” (firearms drill) every night before retiring and no wonder their marriage broke up. The judge asked how they got to know of his remark, anyway. They did not inform him I had wired the good comrade who was secretary of the local Black Cross and she had alerted some outraged friends, nor what their politics were, if that was what troubled the worthy judge.
I was at work when the verdicts came through, and Christie was found not guilty with three of the others. Everybody round me celebrated at the Albion, even the landlord who didn’t know what we were celebrating and might have had a fit if he did. Stuart’s acquittal was being described that day by Government ministers, TV and radio as one of sorrow and misery for Law, Church and society as we knew it.
Joe Thomas came round from the Guardian to join us. It was the only time I ever saw him so drunk that at the finish he hailed a taxi and walked through one door of it and out the other, paying the mystified driver off, thinking he had completed his journey and was home. Come to think of it, that’s what Fleet Street was for him, and he felt exiled in Farringdon Road or back in his home at Notting Hill.
It was all touched with sadness since while four were acquitted, the four at the Stoke Newington flat went down. I did not know them but they were good fighters. The jury had argued about it for hours. The black juror on it was for the defendants from the first, perhaps knowing that police evidence was not necessarily reliable, while most others were sceptical too, all agreeing there was an element of framing. A politically-liberal member of the jury stood out, however, insisting that just because Christie was framed it did not follow the others were. One had to be fair to the police. The defendants hadn’t even challenged him as he was carrying a copy of the <em>Guardian</em> and he was typically the cause of the compromise. The rest of the jury was sympathetic and asked for clemency. The judge gave them ten years which was his idea of mercy. I shudder to think what his idea of a savage sentence was. As a result Jake Prescott’s sentence got reduced as well on appeal.
*** <em>Fun and Games in the Gulag</em>
The longest trial this century ended, so far as Stuart was concerned, with one of his minor road offences being brought before the magistrates. They could not endorse his licence as he did not have one. I was asked at the trial if I knew he did not have a licence, and said I had not asked him but with so many high-ranking police officers interested in him and following him constantly, I was entitled to assume they had the interests of the law at heart. Inspector Habershon actually blushed.
A few years later when Stuart’s daughter was born, his reckless driving gave way to caution and it was safe to let him drive one around, though when the police pursuit ceased he gave up such habits as driving up one way streets suddenly to fox the enemy and tried less hazardous way of defying them. Could we reduce road accidents by cutting down police chases to where essential?
After the case he phoned Scotland Yard in response to some inquiry about some personal property they had taken before the hearing. He was put through to one of the detectives who had been questioning him for days. The detective was in an upstairs room. When Stuart came on he recognised his voice and said, “Hallo, John?” “How did you know what number to get through to me?” he asked. “This isn’t even my normal number” — “Oh, I’m in the building opposite. I can see you from here but you can’t see me,” he said breezily, as the panicking detective put the phone down, opened the window and gazed out.
It wasn’t the best way to get his seized papers back, but it was part of the enjoyment he got out of being harassed by the police, which (as Evie had thought all those years ago) was entertaining if you could see the funny side of it. If you dwelt on the other side of it too long, the lengthy imprisonments, the shootings without trial even in so-called democratic countries (both von Rauch and Pinelli, German and Italian secretaries of the Black Cross respectively, had been murdered by police), it savoured but of shallow wit. Stuart had got off lightly with eighteen months in close imprisonment prior to being acquitted of all charges bar proceeding the wrong way on a motorway. He was entitled to a bit of fun in return but I think it aided the terrible picture they passed on through their public relations officers — sorry, the independent, free and democratic British press.
He was found not guilty. Some others were found guilty. It was irrelevant. Nobody did what they were charged as doing. All had been involved in revolutionary struggle. As there were no leaders, someone had to be singled out of one, or as it turned out, two political persuasions. “The angel of death is passing over us all,” a friend said to me at the time. I was the luckiest of all because they wanted to portray “the anarchists” with a caricature brush that never fitted me in the slightest (nor anyone else of us). I would not have fared so well if I’d been Irish and mixed with IRA activists a year or two later.
*** <em>The Most Distressful Country</em>
This was before the renewed Irish Republican Army campaign caught on and it was that which ended the Angry Brigade, not the imprisonment. Working class opinion swung by and large against individual actions of this nature because theirs was indiscriminate terrorism and the anarchist type was the opposite. The press made it seem it was all one and the same. The “non-violent” and “anti-terrorist” types who criticised the Angry Brigade for its “violence” and “mindless terrorism” went overboard to support the IRA, curious as it may seem. Nationalism made it respectable: it seemed like a real war with a proper structure.
Without going into the matter of the IRA, of which my opinion is worth no more than anyone else who had no involvement with it, they created the climate where Government terror could easily pick up a middle-aged family on the basis of their knowing someone or lending a car or writing an envelope, and give them fifteen years imprisonment sometimes even without asking the forensic expert to pass birdshit off as nitro-glycerine contamination.
As the Angry Brigade hit specific targets, avoided hurting the public, and had a clear aim in mind — namely to wake up the people — but no structure and no membership, it was passed off as “mindless violence”.
The IRA, though a minority within the Northern Irish Nationalist community, itself a minority within the Northern Catholic community, which formed a minority of the Northern working class, and within all Ireland came to a smaller minority still, had a command structure, used military and political terms and hit indiscriminately and caused mayhem and murder. The press could understand this but class issues were “mindless” to them. The IRA wasn’t “mindless” but was regarded as the voice of Ireland struggling under oppression, even by people who said there was none. The Left generally either felt it right-wing to doubt it or went the other way and swallowed British Government propaganda. Even many anarchos — and real ones too, not just pacifists and liberals masquerading — couldn’t resist the discreet charm of bourgeois nationalist phraseology, which destroyed the revolutionary upsurge of the Sixties in Britain and revived, without intending to, religious bigotry dead in the time of Queen Anne.
*** <em>After the Storm</em>
When the harassment of individuals ceased after the Angry Brigade trials, the media and the academics began sniping at <em>Black Flag</em>, whose editor had been acquitted of all offences except driving the wrong way up a street.
While in jail Stuart had translated Antonio Tellez’s life of Sabater (in Catalan, Sabate), and reviewing the book on its publication the <em>Spectator</em> reviewer, as the voice of scholarly Toryism, commented how perverse it was of the jury to have acquitted Stuart since he clearly was in sympathy and contact with International Anarchism. That summed up why a Government Minister was appalled at his acquittal, but it was not what the charges were. We are not supposed to have political trials in England.
On the other hand, when Miguel Garcia’s book was published, the <em>Tribune</em> reviewer, as the voice of the left of the Labour Party, commented that he deserved all he got, since resistance was illegal in any country, and he should have waited until he could have voted for parliamentary socialism. Perhaps for twenty years in a cupboard, as a Spanish mayor, author of a book they reviewed in favourable contrast at the same time, had done.
In a TV show around this time, it was asked what leading politicos would have done if Hitler had won the war. Nobody admitted they would have collaborated, as they certainly would have done. The Tories would have, according to their account, all killed themselves and their families rather than resist illegally or submit. One supposes the Tribune Group would have advised socialists to hide in the closet until the regime liberalised.
We did have the occasional reasonable interview or sympathetic reference, but most settled themselves down to terror-by-association or plain daftness. Like the <em>Daily Telegraph</em> correspondents, some of whom knew better but in print expressed the view that the anarchists were a mass movement with every young radical in London supporting a bewildering number of causes from Arabism to Zionism, with bookshops galore and magazines sold at every street corner, and a vast array of newspapers at its disposal, like <em>Private Eye</em> and <em>Socialist Worker</em>, with the obscure <em>Freedom</em> the daddy of them all directing operations! History is taken from geeks who write rubbish like this!
*** <em>The Irish association</em>
However, with the troubles in Ireland hotting up, the IRA was stealing the thunder. At first that did not bother the press coterie at El Vino’s. They cheerfully made the IRA into “anarchists”, from which a later generation of journos deduced that “anarchist” just meant anyone who was against the Establishment. Bad descriptions, like bad money, drive out good. Even one of the Irish Bishops, asked to denounce the activities of the IRA, said that of course if the terror campaign were by “anarchist groups” he would denounce them. The campaign was in the name of patriotism, religion and a new State, all the opposite from anarchism, and the old humbug well knew that but at that stage was sitting on the fence. I answered him in one of the Sundays and for once he became strangely silent.
Eventually some people, even in our movement, came to think that nationalism, the achievement of a Nation State, could be compatible with, lead to or not be opposed to anarchism, the abolition of all States. Strange how Republicanism got back its old radical image in one country at least, when for years it had been the party of conservatism, and remained so everywhere except in the United Kingdom and at one time Spain. Many radical-minded people went down the path of thinking there was a popular movement in Ireland rising against British Imperialism.
I had a trip round the Republic, which diehard Tories and Republicans refused to admit existed but took pains to describe as that contradiction in terms, a Free State. I can only say in every bar I visited as soon as a London accent was heard people asked what they were up to in the North. I heard an earnest English leftie explain to an incredulous Cork pub it was a struggle for national liberation and an expression of the people’s will, but I don’t think he convinced any people around.
As for the Continent, in Cologne I found the lefties patronised a Guinness bar “in sympathy with the Irish struggle” (not understanding Guinness was the pillar of the Anglo-Irish Establishment, if the comfort of its opponents). When the Irish Government condemned a woman to death almost every British Embassy in Europe was picketed, and British diplomats must have had a great time pointing out smugly that there was no death penalty in the United Kingdom and they were knocking on the wrong door. When an Austrian feminist group picketed the right Embassy, that of the Irish Republic, in protest against the proposed hanging of a woman an official asked them cynically “But isn’t equality what women’s liberation is all about?”
*** <em>The Murrays</em>
This epitomised the hypocrisy of the Irish Republic. Its unfairness and the subsequent relentless perversion of justice and absence of any mercy whatsoever, shown in the case of the Irish anarchists and the Murrays, makes mincemeat of the rightful claim echoed by many subsequent Irish politician that “no Irish person can obtain justice in the United Kingdom” with the false corollary that they <em>could</em> obtain it in the Republic, or at least could get it there if only it had six more counties.
It revived in the Seventies with the activism of a few men and women in the South. They felt Ireland’s social problem were ignored. The parties were still polarised as to which side they had been on in the Civil War. Every question was answered by an appeal to nationalism and past oppression. Every political assessment was countered by demands as to what one (or, as time went by, one’s father, grandfather, or great-grandfather) had done in 1916. Every solution for social ills was solved by religious diktat or by buying a boat train ticket. When the campaign in the North began again and Catholics and nationalists wanted a degree of freedom, this was something that did not exist in the South with which they wanted union.
There had not before been an active Irish anarchist movement. Though the syndicalist movement had at one time made inroads, and there were many Irish anarchists throughout the English-speaking world, and even beyond, these got introduced to anarchist thought through socialism and therefore after leaving Ireland. A few of an earlier generation, like Louisa Conroy and Mat Kavanagh, or many of mine, returned to Ireland, but soon left for a freer atmosphere in which they could at least express their thoughts and where one could fight for liberation from rather than of the State.
In Northern Ireland the nationalist and religious tensions dominated and though there are a few anarchists there, they have got caught up in them. But in the late Sixties a group within Dublin moved from the nationalist and socialist attitudes of left wing republicanism to anarchism. It came as a surprise to Irish politics where the bogey of “anarchist violence” was even more virulent than in countries either where an anarchist movement had existed or where political questions were not habitually argued with dynamite.
One of the results of the press caricature of bomb-throwing anarchism, whether deliberately intended or not I do not know, is that it has always made it difficult to reject the image without appearing to fall into the opposite trap of pacifism or parliamentarism. It is obviously sometimes necessary to use violence, since laying down a code that says one may not use it in any circumstances leaves one helpless against attack. Everyone except an extreme pacifist would admit this, yet a different standard is laid down up for anarchists. It seems the official line, certainly the judicidal view, is they must either be believers in “mindless violence” or woolly-minded idealists, so-called “non-violent anarchists” or “violent” ones, as if 99.9 per cent recurring of the population were neither ultra-pacifists nor mad axe-wielders.
The Irish anarchist resistance group conformed in most respects to the resistance tactics followed by the Angry Brigade, the Spanish Resistance, the First of May Group. Like them it never took life intentionally and directed its activism against property. It was thus quite out of step with the tradition of Irish patriotic politics which set out to kill as a means of persuasion and until lately in the North respected property rights. It may seem cynical to say that this is why it raised more horror and alarm in the Republic than the entire IRA bombing campaign throughout its history to that date, but such was to prove the case.
I myself was always sceptical about the idea of bank robberies to raise “funds” on purely pragmatic grounds. In most cases it seems to me that all they do at best is to raise money, which is a different matter. Crime is a business like any other, sometimes it is anti-social, sometimes it is merely illegal. Any gainful occupation, legitimate by State standards or not, brings in money. One needs it to live without dependence. I earned my living in a lie factory and couldn’t feel squeamish about any other way. Had I the nerve I might have earned my living in hold ups. Either way I would have given a large part of my income to what I believed in, like a great many others. People in the Spanish Resistance came in both categories, as did those within the International Revolutionary Solidarity Movement. Those into almost full-time active resistance sometimes financed themselves by bank robbery, usually they were in orthodox working practices. I am sceptical as to whether crime pays much, but what I do know is that when the average honest working person goes into crime it does not pay, because they have not the ruthlessness which professional crime and professional business both need.
When the Irish resistance group had carried out a number of spectacular attacks such as those on the American and Spanish embassies, they turned to raising money by armed bank robbery, influenced by the whole record of diehard anti-State resistance which the Irish establishment enshrined as part of the national myth. They were heroic but unlucky and by the chance that inevitably accompanies such circumstances were arrested and jailed. How the Irish press howled for vengeance as a few young people were taken into custody and given savage sentences for a few illegal acts that did not entail killing. Never mind the IRA, these were self-confessed Anarchists! In Dublin! How terrible!
The group who were arrested were charged with bank robberies, but nonetheless tried by a juryless court and confined in a military barracks reserved for political prisoners, though denied political status. Noel Murray jumped bail and he and his wife carried on the struggle.
Noel and Marie Murray had collected money for the Black Cross (quite legally — some of it was stolen by the Government when they were arrested) and so I knew them. I could have found them asylum if they had chosen to escape, as was easy at first provided they could get through the “Berlin Wall” of English Customs. I arranged a place for them to stay and work in Paris. It would have been hard for the Irish authorities to ask for extradition since they themselves ostensibly opposed it in far less overtly political cases than this.
The plan was crushed by Noel and Marie themselves. Noel wrote that he did not think revolutionaries should leave their own country in this fashion, having regard to the consequent ineffectiveness to that country by thousands who had done so. In the course of another bank raid, a plain clothes policeman intervened. Marie, blind as a bat without her recognisable thick glasses, and having dropped her unaccustomed lenses, fired and accidentally killed him.
Taken to a station, Noel and Ronan Stenson, arrested with them, were beaten and tortured so badly that Ronan was not in a fit state to be charged next day. It was a stroke of luck for him, as he was freed. Marie, in the next cell, confessed to the killing to get the police to stop beating Noel, pointing out the two had not been concerned in her careless act.
Noel and Marie were charged with capital murder (murder of a policeman, as distinct from that of anyone rated much lower in the free and equal republic). Both were sentenced to be hanged (June 1976), but Noel’s death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Worldwide protests were caused by the death sentence on Marie, who had accidentally shot a policeman in plain clothes. Even Jean-Paul Sartre came to Dublin to protest at the sentence. The hypocritical Conor Cruise O’Brien, the English establishment’s greatest living Irishman, stammered apologies for his government to hostile audiences in France. Finally the sentence on Marie was also changed to life imprisonment.
Conor Brady, writing in the <em>Irish Times</em> (10 December, 1976), not only named the “Anarchist connection” but the Black Cross specifically, finishing his peroration with the statement that “undoubtedly Noel Murray started out as an idealistic young man. The question is at what stage did he trade in his principles of peaceful protest and take up guns? And perhaps more important, who gave him the guns and taught him how to use them?”
So blinded with State humbug was Mr Brady that he never realised you could be idealistic without being nationalistic, and that Government and Opposition politicians were still trading on reputations built on taking up guns, robberies and violence. Long before they were released they saw men convicted of deliberate multiple murders, having served a portion of their sentences, go free with enhanced glamour and become distinguished politicians. Some of them renounced membership of the IRA and got remission that way, but those who had not belonged to it could not do so.
For eighteen years, neither Noel, who had not shot anyone, nor Marie, the longest serving woman prisoner in the Republic, and a person of considerable talent, had a day’s concession or the slightest consideration, despite the fact that even the warders spoke highly of them both. For all that time they were not allowed a day out even for medical reasons. Ludicrously, Marie’s letters to a relative in her native Irish were disallowed as in a country which had adopted it as the official language there were no warders who could read it for censorship purposes.
In one thing Conor Brady was right. It was part of a general anarchist struggle which included the International Revolutionary Solidarity Movement, First of May Group and the Angry Brigade and had waves everywhere. Actions in favour of their release included occupation of the Aer Lingus offices in London, demonstrations in Australia and all over Europe, and to no avail.
The Irish Republic was deaf to pleas for justice or even mercy. Yet it granted remission of sentence regularly to those who, for nationalist reasons, took life deliberately, even on a multiple scale. It has wept crocodile tears over the English Establishment having kept people guilty of mass murders five, ten or fifteen years in jail. It has wrung its hands in indignation when miscarriages of justice have occurred in English courts, swayed by confessions obtained by torture and juries stirred by press incitement in the mainland, or by juryless courts in the North. But juryless courts, swayed by political motivation, corruption and hostile press propaganda, continue in both North and South Ireland.
There can hardly have been a single leading member of the Irish Establishment to whom I did not write over eighteen years pleading the case of the Murrays, and though in the last two years of their private hell they asked for demonstrations to desist in view of the light at the end of the tunnel, I had just posted off my latest and last petition when I heard they were released quietly one Saturday.
I have never had any pride in dealing with people in authority whom I despised. If I thought it would help those condemned to the prison cell and the new inquisitors had asked me to walk round in my shirt, with ashes on my head and holding a candle in vicarious penitence I would have done so, but those days were over, if not the intolerance which demanded it. I felt as if I had bathed in muck and needed to shower after writing this type of letter especially after addressing the scum of the earth as “the Honourable so-and-so”, but I made it a weekly penance for years.
When I worked on the night shift, usually quiet after one in the morning, and others dozed off peaceably, I would be writing slavishly until four. Perhaps they didn’t all land in the trash. Maybe even today somewhere in some country some ex-Minister or retired civil servant gets a kick out of reading my fawning requests for clemency for someone or other. At least they weren’t for myself. Now and again they actually worked, even with military dictatorships. But never in Eire.
On the Murrays, sometimes I wrote in my name, sometimes in that of another. I got one reply from the Roman Catholic Primate of Ireland, Cardinal O Fiaich, who had intervened in the case of Republican prisoners in the North, and been denounced (always in the anglicised version of his name, Cardinal Fee) in the English press for doing so. The spelling varied to the Irish O Fiaich when his statements pleased them. The reverend cynic informed me that he did not seem to have any luck dealing with prisoners of the English government and did not expect he would have, or would try for, any better luck in dealing with those of the Irish government. He suggested I use my “influence” with “my” government, as his efforts had failed! His influence with the Irish government was supreme, his influence with the British Government at least not to be overlooked. My influence with any government was about equal to his with any God.
I am notorious in my small circle for writing amusing letters to friends and acquaintances, and hope I kept some spirits up in prison, but even if the authorities had not refused to let my letters get through to the Murrays I could never be amusing in a correspondence with them. Time and again we thought we had seen light at the end of the tunnel but to no avail. I do not think the Republic broke their spirit but it broke my heart. Every one who came in contact with them, whether class enemies or not, even the very warders, even the woman lawyer who represented them and subsequently became President of Ireland, said what fine people they were. Yet while the Government that imprisoned them insisted on a higher standard of justice and clemency from its neighbour, it resolutely set its mind against either fairness or mercy in this case. I wish them luck and a family now they are out.
** 18 The CNT between Death and Birth; The Re-Birth of the CNT; The Phoney CNT; The Orkneys; Cienfuegos Press; The Wooden Horse
*** <em>The CNT Between Death and Birth</em>
After Franco died in 1975, there was a tremendous sense of elation among the exiles as well as in Spain. Amongst others, Miguel decided to return to Spain. He went by train with some others, and I followed a few weeks after, on vacation, with the car loaded with books and pamphlets we had printed at the Centro Iberico and with a couple of duplicators. Fortunately I resisted Miguel’s insistence I should have a roof rack, which is why I got so far. Even so the car, somewhat on its last legs anyway, would not take the weight. It broke down irretrievably near Toulouse on a Saturday afternoon.
This was in the days before credit cards came in vogue and I had only a few francs on me. I had sterling, pesetas and travellers cheques, but the banks were closed. I was immobile, tired, hungry, had nowhere to stay and nobody wanted to take or change my money. I was going to phone the AIT (the Continental equivalent of the AA) when the initials reminded me of the other AIT (the Franco-Spanish initials of the anarcho-syndicalist International Workers Association).
I had often criticised “Toulouse” for years, which generic name signified the fossilised bureaucracy of the libertarian movement in exile, but I reckoned that if I phoned a hall of the local CNT-in-exile I would probably find someone to help. It was worth a chance and I found someone in, though she answered in the local patois. My French was somewhat rusty anyway and never extended to the language of Oc, but I gathered she told me to wait where I was and meanwhile order whatever I wanted. I hesitated to do so in case I had misunderstood but ordered a brandy and some croissants which were covered by my remaining francs.
In about twenty minutes, three carloads of Spaniards drove up, for all the world like a police raid. The message had been passed on round the hall that Albert Meltzer was in town, stranded, starving and penniless, all of which was true in a less dramatic way, and three different cars had driven out to the rescue. I had never been in Toulouse before and had no idea anyone knew me there, but the people in the CNT hall that Saturday night celebrating the end of the tyranny were far from being supporters of the civil-war compromises and opponents of the post-war Resistance that I had criticised. Some had been in the Resistance with Miguel, one was a close friend of “la inglesa”, someone else had been to the Centro Iberico, another two had been in prison with Stuart and all knew of him.
I was bathed in the reflected glory of three old friends as half-a-dozen new ones argued which should have the honour of putting me up for the weekend. When they came to tow the car in and saw the contents it certainly did not detract from my welcome, and it was decided that the family with the best accommodation should house me but that I should have a meal with each. It worked out at seven dinners in three days. No wonder I never kept to the diet the doctors laid down.
When the banks opened on Monday I was able to hire a car to take me into Spain but, it having a Toulouse number plate, always suspect in the Franco years, I was stopped at Customs. There was no charmed passage such as an English registration had always afforded. They took away all the books and pamphlets I was carrying, saying severely this was not England and such literature was prohibited in Spain. They let me travel on, however, and presumably were told after I left that times had changed. When I arrived in Barcelona I found a police car had arrived at Miguel’s flat before me and returned the literature with apologies to the traveller when he arrived and the hope that he had not been inconvenienced. It certainly was not England. Catch the British Customs or police behaving like that if they confiscated something wrongly!
That honeymoon period did not last long so far as locals were concerned. For years afterwards the police and to this day the Guardia Civil behaved as they did under Franco. As the locals said, they were “the same dogs with different collars”. The growth of tourism had made them modify many attitudes, even under Franco, and continued to do so. I had first-hand knowledge of the privileges accorded to foreigners on another occasion, when my car was stolen, and I had to go into the Guardia Civil to report it, for insurance purposes. A couple of former Spanish exiles came with me, saying as a foreigner I would need their back-up. The openly-displayed brutality with which Spanish suspects in the same interview room were treated, and the contempt shown to the Spanish victims, made my friends realise in time they should leave me to speak for myself. The desk sergeant, seeing my passport, was courteous, complimented me on my accent and expressed the hope that the distressing loss of my car would not lower my opinion of Spain. He entered the particulars, filled out the form for the insurance, wished me Godspeed and turned to bully some parents whose son had been taken in for a traffic offence, cuffing the boy for his disrespect in addressing an officer in Catalan.
Afterwards one of my friends commented how different it was from Notting Hill. “There they make you see the English rule, here they make you see the foreigners rule.”
*** <em>The Re-birth of the CNT</em>
For years I had been urging the Resistance to form a breakaway organisation. Even when the anarcho-syndicalists in Spain formed their own unions in the Interior, the fossilised leadership in Toulouse complained they were “forging the seals” and should wait until a reconstruction of the organisation was possible.
Meanwhile they criticised active resistance, even that of Sabater, which might compromise their situation in France. The Resistance relied for its funds on hold-ups. I was always sceptical. The Trots were raising huge sums from British unions for non-existent Spanish ones. They used the name of the UGT, dead and forgotten in the years of resistance, and denounced the CNT (as “it had entered the republican government during the civil war”). The UGT had not only entered the anti-fascist government but previously the pro-fascist Primo de Rivera dictatorship too but that didn’t matter to them. Militant Tendency raised huge sums from British trade unionists talking about the UGT. Meanwhile our activists were pinning their hopes of financing a new movement in Spain on a few bank jobs for which their background made them totally ill equipped and which inevitably resulted in a few more captives being taken.
I had constantly reasoned there could be an appeal for the re-building of the pre-war “majority trade union centre”, which it certainly was, and there would have been a sympathetic response from ordinary trade unionists, providing far greater returns than any daring hold-ups. As the official CNT in exile did not want to do this, why not form a complementary organisation, incorporating Interior industrial activity and activism, until such time as the reconstruction of the CNT took place?
My idea was that they should create a separate but temporary organisation, the Federacion Obrera Iberica (the Iberian Workers Federation), a name reminiscent of the logo FAI, but independent. Miguel and a few others (none of whom wanted to be accused of causing a schism) were finally convinced but the FOI died soon after birth. Just at the moment of launching the FOI, Franco started his lingering death in bed and when he finally let go of life, the CNT itself could be re-launched in Spain.
During the first exciting months after the Generalissimo’s death it seemed as if the old flames were to be re-lit. But, in a prepared move, the Spanish Government moved in to establish new patterns of labour relationship and to marginalise the CNT.
The fascist syndicates had consisted of employers and workers delegates appointed by the Falangist union. It had confiscated every union’s assets. Now it had been permeated by the Communist Party under the name of the Comisiones Obreras (CC.OO — Workers Councils). They had been quietly working with the employers’ representatives via the Christian Democrats, neither Christian nor democratic, and had unity with a section of the Carlists. They thought they would get away with the merger and angled for British and American backing with the Spanish Government acquiescing. The Communist Party would thus provide an “anti-fascist” alibi for the others while the Christian Democrats and Carlists would provide a “non-Soviet” alibi for the CP. Some offbeat Trot groups favoured adding students and small shopkeepers to the commissions, some claiming it actually happened, which would have made an even more bizarre labour organisation.
The plan hinged on the British TUC, which, after Hitler, had successfully reorganised the German unions in its own image, and expected to do the same after Franco. Some in the TUC International Committee were Communists and favoured the Comisiones Obreras pretending it was the “Spanish TUC.” Joe Thomas and I (with the aid of a person in the hierarchy he knew well) exposed the plan, which knocked it on the head right away by scaring off the Labour Party supporters on the TUC who had experienced a bellyful of CP intrigues. We were accused in an old cliche by a student-led clique of an “unholy alliance” with the right wing. It seemed to us holy enough to block the backing of a coalition of Christian Democrat employers, Carlists and Communist Party to take over a fascist body.
The TUC then accepted the notion that there should be a “Spanish TUC”, only one, with a political party to back it, just like theirs. They took for granted it would be the Socialist Party. When they said that in Spain to an assembly of trade unionists the notion was met with derision by all but the Socialists. It was exciting to trump the ace of those who wanted to tell the workers how to organise, but the politicos had other tricks up their sleeve. The Spanish Government came up with its own formula which got acceptance.
The next deal was the Pact of Moncloa, which the new Government persuaded labour leaders to accept. The UGT, theoretically even the CNT, could reorganise without opposition as such. But the CNT was harassed with police dirty tricks such as, later on, the “La Scala” incident in 1978, when during a strike the workers allegedly blew themselves up in protest, and the survivors were charged with the crime. The Communist-led CC.OO was also recognised, as was any other union be it merely a political party with an industrial label, but with a proviso. They had to sign the Pact, a guarantee of class peace, to negotiate. Fascism was democratised in that the old corporate State councils of employers and workers remained, but the workers could elect their delegates from whichever union they chose. Falangist rule would be eliminated, but otherwise the system was in essence the same.
The CNT was thus frozen out. Though this was not the intention, it might perhaps have strengthened it if it thus became the one centre for unofficial action. Therefore it became the target for attack, as it had ever been. The now indiscriminate terrorist actions of Catalan nationalists (always the enemy of anarcho-syndicalism and the workers) were blamed on the CNT. Its funds remained confiscated. <em>Solidaridad Obrera</em>, its daily paper, with its building and printing press, had been the fascist <em>Solidaridad Nacional</em> since Franco seized Barcelona. The stolen halls, presses and sequestrated assets of 1936 vintage (not to mention the collectivisations of the civil war period) must have added up to billions of pounds sterling on current values. The CNT was inveigled into the tempting but hopeless task of claiming them back. The Government would obviously never agree to finance a revolutionary organisation, in that fashion, even with its own money, so it had to seek a legal formula to reimburse the UGT while refusing the CNT.
In the first heady year after Franco’s death, nobody realised what that formula would be and optimism abounded. Exiles returned, branches were re-opened everywhere, militants came out of hiding. There was an unprecedented enthusiasm among the young. Only among the students, in other countries then undergoing a radical enthusiasm for a modified Marxism (however the media might confuse it with anarchism), was there a begrudging attitude to the CNT inspired by Trotskyism. Those who spoke enthusiastically about the 1936 Revolution were sneeringly referred to as “los historicos”. The more open physical attacks by the fascist groups — in reality the secret police in civilian clothes — forced CNT sympathisers to fight back (and treat the New Left more as allies than enemies). Right wing provocations even took the form of assaults, sometimes sexually motivated, on young women offending “Catholic morality” by dressing and behaving in a modern fashion taken for granted in France or Italy.
Nothing stopped exiles from all parts of the world coming home. I had known many in London where they had formed an exemplary community even by conventional standards: hard working, and though harassed by the police for their anti-fascist activities, free from anti-social crime. In the case of the confederal movement, whole families went back. Those veterans who returned from France and Britain having earned English or French old age pensions were able to live well, a contrast with others, especially those wounded in the Civil War or those who had served in Spanish prisons or labour camps, or had been blacklisted or disabled, who either were reduced to beggary in Spain or sometimes returned from exile from nothing to nothing.
They helped each other. Miguel Garcia, for instance, who had no pension in Spain and left a British one behind, was set up by sympathisers in a café bar of his own, “La Fragua” (the forge — it had formerly been a blacksmith’s shop) in the calle Cadena, a backstreet in the slums. It was near the spot where the employers’ organisation’s pistoleros murdered Salvador Segui, the CNT’s most vigorous secretary and organiser (known affectionately as “Noi de Sucre” (Sugarboy) either because of his addiction to sweets or because his baby face contrasted with his toughness — I have heard both stories). The bar became a mecca for many who also went to have a look at the historic spot where Miguel’s father (one of Sugarboy’s bodyguards) had once narrowly missed assassination too. (Today there is a square named after Segui, in his day hunted and feared).
Some of the clients at “La Fragua” turned up to help Miguel get it going and came again and again, despite the grotty bar and service for the sake of the company that gathered there. If Miguel had less of a taste, after so much deprivation, for his own liquid wares, it might have done well.
He one day took me on a bar crawl round Barcelona and showed me every historic spot associated with our movement — the old no go area in the Barrio Chino, the former anarchist quarter where Durruti had lived, the Telefonica where they had resisted the Communist takeover in the May Days, the grave of Ferrer at Montjuich. I meant to return with him one day and take a notebook. It was a missing slice of social history and would have made a fascinating ‘revolutionary tourist’s guide to Barcelona’ but I left it for another visit — too late. After his death I wrote up his life, with the omitted early chapters of <em>Franco’s Prisoner</em> (the published version dealt only with his 20 years in prison) in the book <em>Miguel Garcia’s Story</em>.
*** <em>The Phoney CNT</em>
Over the next years I attended several Congresses of the CNT, including the Fifth one in Madrid. It was held in an exhibition hall in the Casa del Campo, a park where a famous battle in defence of the capital had once been fought. As usual, there were so many old friends to greet that I skipped a lot of speeches, and oratory bores me anyway. I also missed the fireworks at the end. The gathering had seemed well organised but cracks in the structure were appearing.
Despite the affirmations of anarcho-syndicalism, a tendency emerged calling themselves the “Impugnados” (I never discovered what being “impugned” was supposed to signify). I think they were sincere enough and many of their criticisms of the people who had compromised in the civil war and taken a quietist attitude in exile were what we had been saying for years. But when they finally broke away from the organisation, still calling themselves the CNT, they were quickly penetrated by the nationalists, Trots, Maoists, Catholic Action and all the riffraff of political entryism, as the CNT proper never could be.
The “Impugnados” re-styled themselves the “Renovados” and the renovated ones became a new organisation. It was rueful to reflect that had the First of May people not been so reluctant to be regarded as schismatic and formed the FOI sooner, this split would never have happened. Eventually the CNT Renovada, or “Phoney CNT” as I dubbed it, had to call itself the CGT, claiming nevertheless it was heir to the old CNT.
There was a manoeuvre by the UGT to take it over after it had successfully laid claims to a part of the heritage of the old CNT, but this was withheld anyway and the UGT lost interest. The CGT still exists at the time of writing, pretending to be anarcho-syndicalist but in fact taking part in “union elections”, in other words the democratised fascist corporations set up under the Pact of Moncloa. One can understand some Spanish workers wanting to take part in the Moncloa system, which is an advance on Francoism, but not only is it far from Syndicalism, it is not up to British trade unionism as it has always operated. It must be admitted Mrs Thatcher’s “reforms” have reduced trade unionism to that level but we may reverse this yet. What makes me suspicious of the CGT is that it is busily hankering for international approval among syndicalist movements, which would make it not a step away from Francoism but a step backwards to it and they know that perfectly well.
*** <em>The Orkneys</em>
After having spent some eighteen months awaiting acquittal, Stuart went in the spring of 1975 to Huddersfield because it was then one of the last few places in England where one could get a house at an unreasonable but at least attainable price. He paid for it largely with the proceeds of advance royalties from <em>The Christie File</em>, which in the end the leading and respected publisher was afraid to print, and it came out finally under the imprimatur of an American anarchist publishing house.
He had not heard the last of police harassment. One high-ranking officer expressed the view to me that they would not object to the Black Cross if we expelled Stuart! “We don’t object to charities for our own prisoners, so why should we object to aid for Spanish prisoners”, he said, missing the whole point of what we were about.
Another tipped him off he would be framed as he had not been forgiven for being acquitted after so many worthy people much more important than a commonsense jury had decided it should be otherwise, and so he moved to Sanday, a little island of the Orkneys, and soon made himself at home. Joe Thomas jokingly asked me if Stuart had advance information that all dissidents would be banished to a Gulag in the Orkneys and he had made sure of getting the best housing going there. I reminded him of the jest later, when we read of the preparations for just such an eventuality in the event of a military take-over had the abortive coup against Wilson’s Government been successful.
Soon after, there was a hold-up in London when a man walked into a bank and shot the cashier, apparently without warning. It was in Wimbledon, where Stuart had been living before going to Huddersfield, not too many miles from Streatham. The local CID apparently at first decided it was a certain character who had been in prison at the same time as Stuart had been on “remand” and they wondered if he had confessed all to him. It seemed something of a long shot and makes me wonder if it was a would-be replay of the Hain incident not far away. The Wimbledon police had no idea where Stuart was and unlike Special Branch had not the expertise to know how to walk into a bookshop and ask for the latest Black Flag, which would have given the address.
The sergeant phoned his solicitor who promised to pass on the message but would not give his client’s address. They informed him helpfully there was a reward of several thousands offered by the bank. After Benedict Birnberg’s call, Stuart mentioned it to Brenda and her father, who was staying with them. Stuart remembered signing a petition when he was in Brixton prison with this man’s name on it, but as a political dissident he was in a high security wing, and the man suspected of murder in a normal wing so he had never met him. Brenda’s father commented that he had served in the Navy with someone of the same name as the detective sergeant concerned.
Despite their scoffing, he said it might be the man’s son. He lived in Wimbledon and his son was going into the police. When Stuart phoned back he asked confidently, after explaining to the detective sergeant he had never met the suspect (who turned out eventually to be a false lead) if the DS’s father hadn’t served in a certain warship during the war. One could imagine the poor man’s jaw falling. “How on earth do you know that?” “Oh, we have our files too, you know, like you do — even up here”.
If you’ve got the name. you might as well have the game.
There was no harassment on Sanday, no police and no crime. TV filmed an interesting interview with Stuart in the Orkneys talking about anarchism and posting off Black Flag around the world. It looked as if he had a private plane, which might have stirred memories in <em>Daily Express</em> readers, but it was the scheduled flight from the island, whose airfield really was a field. The interview was only spoiled by the TV’s investigative crew putting in a bit of background, no doubt from information supplied by their historical experts, in which it seemed General Franco’s Loyalists had thwarted an anarchist rebellion.
*** <em>Cienfuegos Press</em>
Stuart ceased to be an editor of <em>Black Flag</em> a year or so after he went to the Orkneys. He continues to be regarded by the professional writers and “historians” as editor to this day, and for years the press regarded me as his spokesperson. We were as indelibly joined as Marx and Engels, or perhaps more appropriately Laurel and Hardy.
He still distributed the <em>Flag</em> round his international contacts, but it was printed and edited in London except for a few issues in the early days. In the intervening years there have been many editorial teams. As I was the most regular contributor and was never a professional writer (my articles needed editing), I was never sole editor except in emergencies. There must have been fifteen other editors but they never get a mention in the “histories”.
Stuart started a publishing house called Cienfuegos Press. It was a remarkable achievement in anarchist publishing which attracted attention rarely ever received by a small publishing house. Financially it started from nothing and ended in disaster. In the decade it was going, it started with an anthology of the American journal <em>Man!</em> and <em>Sabate: Guerrilla Extraordinary</em>, financed with money received from post-trial interviews, translations and donations, plus part of the royalties on <em>Floodgates of Anarchy</em>. Financially, alas, it was always chasing its own tail.
Another book, <em>Towards a Citizens Militia: Anarchist Alternatives to NATO and the Warsaw Pact</em>, aroused a furore of denunciation from sinister right-wing forces in and out of Parliament. The introduction made it clear it wasn’t “a do-it-yourself guide to military revolution — a ludicrous conception for anarchists anyway — but a guide on how to organise resistance to a foreign invasion, Soviet or other, or to a military coup d’etat,” wrote Stuart in a reply to his critics, printed in the <em>Times Literary Supplement</em>.
It didn’t stop them baying for his blood but it did give the book an enormous fillip that enabled Cienfuegos to carry on with more publications. The success was so great that the far-Right philosopher Roger Scruton published an allegation in the <em>Times</em> that Stuart had written the <em>Anarchist Cookbook</em>, a commercial US cultural revolution product pretending to be a guide to Anarchism, absurdly hyping drugs and with misleading recipes for bombs. There was no conceivable connection between the reasoned arguments of <em>Towards a Citizens Militia</em> and the absurdities of the <em>Cookbook</em>, but this type of misrepresentation, typical of bourgeois fascism, was made respectable by “philosophers”. From there it permeated the police, and during the riots of young Blacks in Brixton a young Italian woman was raided because she lived in the area affected and only, because of books like <em>Citizens Militia</em> found in her possession, was arrested and sentenced for deportation. The press referred to “the Italian connection”!
As Stuart pointed out, one could safely assume the police would have found little to object to had they found essays on monetarism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, or even discussions of the relative merits of Zyklon B gas as an alternative to repatriation. What got up their noses and those of the Establishment generally was that the book used information available from many other respectable sources, and directed it to the general public. The idea of a defence alternative costing nothing, unlikely to be used for aggressive purposes and available to all was anathema to those who were spending £13 billion allegedly for the same job and risking the existence of the world in doing so.
Many other publications followed, including Flavio Constantini’s <em>Art of Anarchy, Zapata</em> and the first four issues of the <em>Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review</em>, but various factors ultimately forced Stuart to give up the venture and to leave the island. One was the gradual frightening off of printers and binders, as well as booksellers, by fear of legal action which never materialised. Another was a disastrous and mysterious fire in a transport container (plus water damage) added to which an expensive edition, a beautiful reproduction of a work on Japanese anarchism, set and printed, was lost by a printer who declined to compensate. The straw that broke the camel’s back came in 1981, when Brenda was returning from a visit to her sister-in-law at a British base in Germany. She was arrested at the airport, forcibly separated from her child, and put on trial for something that happened there years before, though it was the first time she had been in Germany.
It was a shrewd move by Interpol of which its founder, Heinrich Himmler, would have been proud. The expense in defending her, and telephoning around the world (Stuart had been refused entry) for protests to be made, ruined Cienfuegos Press. The examining judge, like one in France over a similar case involving Jean Weir, declared he was subject to so much irritation he had a nervous breakdown as a result of her being imprisoned nine days, and he and the case collapsed. But as a result the whole struggling but thriving little enterprise Stuart had built in the Orkneys had a financial breakdown, in the course of which he had to put his home on the line and lost that too.
But of course it would be a “conspiracy theory” to imagine that all this was intended. It is notable that when Stuart applied for a gun licence to shoot rabbits (a staple diet and pursuit in the Orkneys) he was refused on the grounds of his conviction for terrorism in Spain. The Spanish authorities denied there was any record of a conviction, which had been imposed by an unconstitutional court martial and subsequent to military rule had been expunged from the records. In Spain, that is, where fascism was declared illegal. Interpol would have none of that. Germany like Britain did bow to commonsense not to recognise the validity for criminal records of German People’s Court decisions sentencing offenders to concentration camps. But Interpol still nostalgically preserves Spain’s fascist past as valid when everyone there wants to forget it.
*** <em>The Wooden Horse</em>
During the Seventies I had been contacted by a so-called “anarchist party” which had been set up in Stockton (Northern California) by Red Warthan, who called it the “Woodstock Anarchist Party”, after a mass rally at Woodstock that heralded the Youth, Music and Drugs hippy-peace-and-love scene of American sham-anarchism. I was acting secretary of the International Black Cross and got friendly letters from him. He never asked for anything but how to contact already publicised groups.
He seemed from the correspondence genuine enough, and I thought he might be won from his hippiness to something more concrete. “Surely no anarchist would object to an all-night pot party,” he replied in naive response to my saying no anarchist would form a party. He effusively inscribed a book to me, the classic Fat City which featured Stockton (California), after he learned I’d been a “boxer”, though hardly of the type depicted there.
I felt a bit ashamed of my initial doubts until his story finally came out. It seemed that as a boy he had been a Ku Klux Klan member. When he was thirteen he had murdered a ten year old, but at his trial got acquitted “by reason of insanity”. He made friends with Nazi prisoners and drifted back into the Klan. The latter got him released by legal pressure, and asked him to infiltrate the Nazis. He couldn’t or wouldn’t so they asked him instead to “infiltrate the Anarchists”. As his and their definition was even woollier than usual, he set out quite cleverly to infiltrate in the only way possible, by forming his own pacifist-anarchist party and rely on dislike for sectarianism for it to be accepted on face value. However, the only hippy group he succeeded in properly infiltrating was hardly anarchist. It was the Manson hippy murder cult, and as it turned out he’d penetrated something nearer to the Nazis.
When Manson won Warthan’s confidence (or vice versa) he managed to persuade Warthan to switch allegiance from one set of nutcases to the other, and feed Manson back information on KKK operations. He did this by linking up with the Nazi groups and there seems to have been some confusion as to who was spying on whom and to which of the three right-wing set-ups he owed allegiance, while still claiming to be anarchist.
On Manson’s instructions Warthan publicly renounced the ‘anarchist’ connection as too confusing, explaining it was just an attempt to spy, but this alerted one or the other Supermen to his true role in this complicated business, resulting in an attempted killing of him, and his killing a seventeen year old instead. Of course the US press had it all down a battle between ‘rival anarchist groups’.
Warthan had the cheek to write to me, when the charges were brought, asking if the Black Cross would defend him. I don’t know what it could have done anyway. He said all his fascistic friends had turned against him, that he had never done any damage to the anarchists while he was spying on them, and that if his wife hadn’t been raped five or six times by different black men he would never have returned to the Klan.
I didn’t do anything about this heart-felt plea but I did reply non-committally, even deceitfully, questioning some of his statements and so drawing out the names of other small-time Nazi agents which I passed over for others to check.
This was the only cloak-and-dagger involvement I ever had, if at the distance of a few thousand miles. Still, as the result of some disquiet over this someone in the Anarchist Black Cross decided to do a bit of investigation into the fascist groups to see how far the menace went over here. A comrade in Scotland published a fake Nazi paper, available only in reply to advertisements in fascist journals. He unearthed a whole list of addresses. Most of them were predictable, the old gang of sycophants, the aging chasers after the rough trade and the various hangers-on, but there were some finds. One wrote from Spain proudly that he had penetrated both ETA and the CNT, so we passed the message on. It was easy enough to “penetrate” the CNT, a union recruiting people on the basis of their work, but certainly the clandestine ETA was interested.
In Canada Gary Jewell had been in the IWW and raised funds for our prisoners. He had definitely changed sides but had not thought fit to announce his change to his former associates. He visited England in the late Seventies and met many people in the old SWF and they found it hard to believe he had reneged, but we had it from himself in black and white, telling the spurious journal he had been a syndicalist and was now a “third positionist”. This was a line coming into favour from British fascism, suggesting they wanted neither capitalism nor communism but a third position, and mixed with the nonsense of Distributism and Catholic-Fascism. To muddle the situation further I wrote a cod pamphlet putting forward the claims of Constructivism but not saying what it was. It was a theory invented by a fictitious person I always referred to as The Beloved Dr Ludwig Gans or The Great and Learned Dr Gans. I had invented him years before when at the invitation of some group on the lines of Mensa, I gave a lecture in a series of others in which they had to guess which was deliberately phoney. I pulled one over on them by giving it on Constructivism and all these Certified Intelligents believed it, nodding in agreement when I mentioned Ludwig Gans’ work The Menace of Anti-Constructivism. I did it as a pure joke on George Plume, its secretary, who was always kidding someone. He even pretended to have been sentenced to death during the war for incitement by supporting a Scottish Nationalist in a by-election, only being reprieved because the seat had been won.
I am told that Constructivism, while never as popular as Distributism though equally mysterious, was seriously discussed in fascist circles for some time after I quite inadvertently slipped it in, though nobody ever knew what it was except the great and good Dr Gans, and he never existed.
It was a shame to lose him altogether so once or twice I put in quotes from him in Black Flag as a joke against Marxists who wrote in with equally preposterous quotations. Sure as fate one such wrote in, protesting at the notoriously “reactionary professor” currently in favour with the fascists.
Whatever you think of Constructivism, so far as I was concerned, it beat Gustav Metzger and his Auto-Destructive Art hands down, and was a change from writing sense, with nobody, certified intelligent or not, nodding in agreement.
** 19 The Execution of Puig Antich; the ‘Newer Angry Brigades’: The Bookie Always Wins; Affinity Groups; Persons Unknown; The Protest Movement
*** <em>The Execution of Puig Antich</em>
Among the circle of anarchist activists who gathered in London around Miguel Garcia in the early days of the Centro Iberico had been Salvador Puig Antich. As a student he had been a Catalan Nationalist and social revolutionary, but the briefest study of Catalan history brings one to anarcho-syndicalism. It is odd to reflect that if he had stayed with his original beliefs, on his death the press would have referred to him as an Anarchist. As it was he was described as a “Catalan Nationalist”.
He accompanied Miguel Garcia and myself on two of our speaking tours, and though when we spoke Spanish Miguel and he soon drifted into Catalan, that did not make either a Nationalist. Many comrades knew and liked Puig Antich, who went back to Spain in September 1973 and was involved in a police ambush in the Calle Gerona, Barcelona. He shot a police inspector and was sentenced to death. At the same time a Polish vagrant, Heinz Chez, killed a Guardia Civil and was also condemned to death, in a case not involved with overthrow of the regime. The authorities originally thought executing them together would take the political edge off the incident, but the reverse happened and it was assumed Chez was also an opponent of the regime.
This led to an enormous clash between protesters and police in Saragossa, as well as fighting in Valencia and Madrid. In Paris, Spanish banks were attacked, and similar activities occurred in Dublin, Toulouse, Perpignan, Lyon, Pau, Bologna, Rome, Milan, Genoa, Brussels, Liege, Luxembourg, Geneva, Liverpool and London. They were not centrally planned. The spontaneous response came from people who had met Puig Antich and were impressed by his sincerity. I got a picture postcard from Dublin saying I was “getting a birthday present in memory of Salvador”. It was not my birthday, but next day I knew what they meant.
It was Puig’s execution that continued the First of May activities through the Dublin struggle to other groupings, some of which I knew, many of which, even outside London in England and Wales, I did not. Over the years, and especially after Franco died, they were directed against many targets, the so-called “Angry Brigade” having made it clear what the agencies of oppression were.
The memory of Puig Antich lived on. It inspired waves of armed struggle not only until Franco’s death but for several years after. He was part of the First of May struggle that encompassed the last phase of the anti-Franco resistance, the new period of which the ‘Angry Brigade’ was part, and the growing feeling of solidarity with all those who were oppressed. Ultimately it was eclipsed by Nationalism and Marxism, with which it was deliberately confused by the media. I hope that this is temporary.
*** <em>The ‘Newer Angry Brigades’</em>
Reams of nonsense were poured out about the Angry Brigade by the police PROs and the journalists, some of whom were identical, and in due course taken up by professional writers and historians. History is notoriously written by the victors so it will sound strange to tell it as it really was.
The Angry Brigade was not a separate group of people at a separate time, a specific conspiracy organised by one political tendency, or a mini-private army. It was a conglomeration of people who were reacting to events, made up of situationists and anarchists, some of whom did not know each other. Sometimes outsiders wrote manifestoes in their name. Many working people saw the trend they were fighting against and thought it a bloody good thing they were doing so. I encountered this all the time, though from people who had no intention of doing anything so drastic to sabotage the system themselves. Some young enthusiasts, though, did. When they did so the establishment chorus was that this was a “new Angry Brigade”, a fresh conspiracy or anarchism rearing its ugly head once more, as if the Angry Brigade had been a real brigade, as solid in its conception as the Brigade of Guards, and not an anarchistic tendency among richly deserved protest.
It took time, and not just a couple of show trials, for the wave of resistance to be broken, after having been demoted by the activities of the IRA equating revolution with nationalist rivalry in the public mind. I will not say I agreed with all actions of activist Anarchists during the period from a tactical point of view. But they heralded a break with reformist intellectuals who had posed as anarchists and come into prominence with the rise of the New Left and went on through flower power to the commercialised music revolt and hippy scene.
The Spanish comrades who had most influence upon the armed groups thought they should organise in the same way. I personally never thought it appropriate in the circumstances in which we found themselves, here or in Spain, but I knew what side I was on. Many workers who otherwise would not have agreed with us at all had a clear idea of the enemy and who their friends were and that the rise of the new capitalist arrogance (it came to be called Thatcherism) would bring the working-class movement to its knees.
The Dublin Anarchists, the Lewisham Three and the “Persons Unknown” were all in general sympathy with “Black Flag” but there were several other activist groups in England and Wales during the 60s and 70s on much the same lines. Some of them attracted a great deal of attention and might, had things gone another way have heralded a wave of fighting back. Others fell at the first hurdle, partly because of their inexperience. It happens time and again that when a political activist takes on activities usually undertaken by professional criminals for individual profit, they have not the ruthlessness that goes with capitalist enterprise (legal or illegal). The only “victims” they seek out are the guilty forces of the State. Successful professional criminals are more anti-social and therefore have no scruples to hold them back. This was seen in the armed urban guerrilla groups in Europe where the Marxist-Leninist groups, trained by Stalinists or “Third World” Nationalists, took over the resistance and forced the Anarchists out. It was seen also in the Irish Anarchists and in the talented young trio, actually from Birmingham, who were arrested in October 1977 in the course of raiding a betting shop in Lewisham.
*** <em>The Bookie Always Wins</em>
One of the three was Phil Ruff, whose biting cartoons and searching commentaries in “Black Flag” could have graced any paper. I first met Phil in 1973 when he became involved in the campaign of solidarity with Puig and the activities of the MIL (the armed resistance in Spain). Not long afterwards he moved to London and joined us on the “Flag”. When I moved from Upper Tollington Park to a council flat in Tottenham, Miguel stayed and Phil moved in. Through Miguel and the Centre, Phil naturally met many people active in the international movement, increasingly turning to illegal struggles against capitalist institutions. Solidarity is one thing, but I had no cause to suspect Phil entertained thoughts of engaging in it actively.
Arrested with him were Brian Gibbens and Dave Campbell, from a family of socialist singers, who has been my favourite singer ever since he announced at a concert for Spanish prisoners in 1976 that he was singing “They Called Me Al” (to the tune of “Buddy Can You Spare a Dime”) as a tribute to me, one of the highest I received. In court there were some sarcastic remarks about their amateurism. It seems lawyers prefer criminals to be professionals. Even the judge commented that it was worse when people of previous good character did that sort of thing, though I am sure somewhere I read — it cannot have been Blackstone — that first offences were considered more leniently whereas criminal records were held against one.
On this occasion the police were not able to make a political issue out of it, although they dropped asides around court about their links with the Murray Defence Campaign and hinted before the trial about the accused “preparing to finance a new Angry Brigade”, as the prisoners pleaded guilty. Whether the judge had been specifically told of their sympathies, or just learned from their papers, I do not know but they got seven years, quite out of the normal proportion, especially for first offenders.
When I came to pick up Phil’s belongings at Lewisham Station at the weekend before a bank holiday, the detective in charge, about to go off for golf, commiserated about their fate, pointing out that the most cash they could have got at that time of the day would have been nothing to what I was probably earning over the weekend.
The sham-ans in the peace-and-flowers movement were indignant with “Black Flag”. The funniest comment passed on to me was that our collective was trying to start, in imitation of the Campaign for Real Ale, a Campaign for Real War, and that Phil Ruff was in jail for armed robbery “and he’s only the cartoonist”. Presumably the lay-out team laid out the corpses.
*** <em>Affinity groups</em>
There were many affinity groups of this nature here and overseas as late as the 70s, before resistance to capitalism got swamped by nationalism and militant liberalism: called liberation. Iris Mills, for instance, was living in Huddersfield. She was in correspondence with political prisoners in the UK, of whom the majority were connected with the Irish Republican movement. One who wrote in to “Black Flag” was Ronan Bennett, and they engaged in an interesting correspondence. He had thought of anarchism only as a joke — having been brought up in the nationalist tradition that sees practicality only in changing the race of the oppressors.
He was suddenly released from Long Kesh, having been acquitted on appeal after a year or so inside, but with being harassed by the police and both the Loyalist and Nationalist paramilitaries, (he had been a member of the IRSP which had broken from the Official IRA), he decided to move to the mainland, and came to Huddersfield. One of the professional conspiracy theorists had stated that the Provisional IRA (to which Ronan had never belonged) wanted to penetrate “terrorist cells” all over Europe, and a BBC programme later suggested his coming to Huddersfield might have been part of an IRA plot to penetrate the Anarchist Black Cross.
The IRA might have decided to chance forfeiting the support of the Americans, the Russians, the Catholic Church and their Right and Left sympathisers, as well as antagonising any support they might have had in Ireland, if only they could get hold of a network at that time worked on by me, but I am modest enough to doubt it. It would seem that any story will do to throw at the Anarchists. Either they are individual loonies or a great mass movement, or they are eccentric pacifists or murderers, or else they are small enough to be ignored or yet again a vast permeative force.
Iris had contacts with international anarchist circles, which shocked Scotland Yard, thinking this was a marriage of Sinn Fein and Anarchy. Ronan and Iris were speedily taken incommunicado into police custody where he was served with a notice of deportation. He could have been quietly taken away from the land where he was born, which was England not Ireland, but fortunately word of their being kidnapped — what other word can one use? — reached us through a friendly neighbour, and solicitors got the case heard. There was absolutely nothing against either except the belief that the elephant was trying to nestle on the flea. If someone had not been there who knew the procedure they would both have been exiled. As it was they were released, but lost their jobs and domicile. They moved, first to Paris and then to London.
*** <em>Persons Unknown</em>
This was the beginning of what was dubbed the “Persons Unknown” case. I did not know anything about the background until one day, at work, the crime correspondent TA Sandrock — more a police PRO than a journalist, who had his office at Scotland Yard — telephoned in a story that two nameless Anarchists had been arrested at an address in West Kensington, suspected of dark and nameless doings. The story was vague enough but, as West Kensington was not exactly an area where Anarchists were thick on the ground, and I knew where Ronan and Iris were living, I guessed it might be a replay of what went on at Huddersfield, and phoned up a mutual friend to ask him to check. He wisely telephoned first and, hearing they were on “holiday”, asked the respondent if they had remembered the cat, and she said she was looking after it. As they had no cat, he guessed it was a policewoman playing cat-and-mouse. However, it was not a deportation order, so the swiftness in getting a lawyer along was unnecessary.
At the committal proceedings the charges read out made one wonder if the Witchcraft Act had really been repealed thirty years before, when we thought the Middle Ages officially closed. The main item solemnly read out by prosecuting counsel was “wanting to overthrow society”. It was a wonder he didn’t say they wanted to turn the world upside down. The charges were so ludicrous there were fits of laughter from the well of the court, so that when it came to “conspiring with persons unknown”, though not unusual phraseology, it caused such merriment the magistrate had to threaten to clear the court. From then on it was known as the “Persons Unknown” case.
The charges related to preparing explosions, though none had actually happened, but fitted into the Tory thinking about Anarchism. This was later dropped in favour of armed robbery, in places unknown. Judge Alan King Hamilton conducted a prosecution from the judicial bench. He was indignant at my saying in the witness box that this was a political trial and if the defendants were convicted it would be described as an “Anarchist trial”. There was no such thing as a political trial, he insisted, though he brought up loaded political questions (such as what the CNT had to do with ETA) but told the jury to ignore references to it being an “Anarchist trial”. In his memoirs he himself refers to it as the “Anarchist trial” but the reader should ignore that, and indeed the book.
Amongst the learned judge’s remarks were comments on witnesses taking the required oath as to whether they believed in the Bible. I had an answer ready if they asked me, so I took the oath on the Bible too. I would have said that it if they read it instead of using it as a magic talisman, the Attorney General would have bunged it in with the subversive exhibits, but the prosecutor shied off engaging me in that discussion. The old-established legalistic Catch-22 is to suggest you are frightened to swear upon it if you don’t take the oath, whereas all it does is to render you liable to the Perjury Act. If you do take it, they query your sincerity if you don’t believe in its authenticity. Underlying this is belief in the Bible as a magic talisman or the (illegal) assumption that a non-believer cannot tell the truth.
The prosecutor (echoed by his colleague the learned judge) suggested that I might have inserted the reference in the <em>Telegraph</em> to “warn the conspirators”. Apparently they thought it was an ingenious way to warn them rather than use the telephone. They never took the obvious steps of asking Mr Sandrock if it was his copy, or the sub-editors if they put in any old copy that was passed over, but hoped the innuendo might stick. King Hamilton, in his summing-up, referred to the <em>Telegraph</em> as “Meltzer’s paper” and agreed with counsel’s suggestion that using its austere front page as a postbox to warn people might explain the lack of evidence.
With a couple like that conducting the prosecution, I had a field day in the witness box and the more irritated King-Hamilton became, the more the jurors loved it. Gareth Peirce, solicitor for the defence, whispered to Ronan that I reminded her in my white suit and nonchalant manner of Alec Guinness, to which he gave the unkind response, “Give or take a stone or two”.
Though there is “no such thing as a political trial”, I was asked questions like the other old Catch-22 about “belief in violence”, as if I were the forensic and character witness on anarchism. Did I (and they, insofar as evidence related to them) “believe in violence”? I knew from of old that if you say yes, you’re labelled as a mad axeman, if you say no you’re pretending to be a pacifist (something subversive in other circumstances) and anything they can show to prove you have the same views on violence as 90 percent of people generally proves you’re a liar. When asked if Anarchists believed in “law and order” I explained that was a political catch-phrase implying “hang ‘em, flog ‘em, jail ‘em” and if I might choose my own cliché, it was “peace and tranquillity”, which floored the opposition but they came back with asking if my wife believed in violence.
The twists and turns of the prosecution obviously had to result in an acquittal, so the press pretended it was a freak verdict. Amongst the several defendants accused in the Persons Unknown case was Dafydd Ladd. He had already been in prison, and was influenced by Red Army Fraction interpretations of German resistance. Having had experience of prison, and not appreciating that the British jury system, however imperfect, had been totally altered by its extension to the whole population and not just a few property owners, he skipped bail.
Previously in prison he had befriended a man named Stewart Carr, in jail for criminal activities. Carr had been interested in the idea of resistance and half-politicised, but when arrested by the police broke down and confessed to everything they asked him, giving him who knows what inducement to do so. Hence neither was tried with the others.
Mr King Hamilton was so indignant that the jury rejected his advice to convict the remaining four that he called the twelve jurors back for a further day (at public expense — who cares about money when not paying oneself?) to listen to his lecture to them for ignoring his advice, and listen to Carr’s “confession” which included the kidnapping of members of the Royal Family (none of whom, unlike Ronan and Iris, had been kidnapped). The evidence for this was that Iris had a woman’s magazine in her possession showing readers details of the royal apartments, and what would she be doing with such a magazine other than learning the lay-out of palaces for kidnap purposes? For the knitting patterns, perhaps?
Anyone who thinks I am going over the top in suggesting the Bible, had they read it, might be used to prove the defendants were going to put millstones round the necks of capitalist exploiters of child labour and drop them in the sea, might pause to contemplate on the use made of a copy of “Woman’s Own”, with nothing more subversive than instructions on how to knit pullovers lying round a flat. No wonder the commercially-produced comic “Anarchist Cookbook”, with its (deliberately inaccurate) instructions on how to make bombs, was made such a meal of by prosecution and judge!
As a result of the case, Carr went to jail on his own “confession” getting the sentence King Hamilton was dying to give the others. The judge berated the jury for not giving him the opportunity to do the like with them. The media suggested they were guilty and they went free because of a skillful defence, an over-indulgent jury, an ill-informed prosecutor, or a capricious judge. Nobody attributed it to their possible innocence of the charges made, from overthrowing society to capturing a princess and her babies from a royal palace.
The commonsense jury understood (as did many of the AB jurors) what they were on about, and just in their decision that opinion and even possible future intent were not yet illegal. What the prosecution was really about was that they were Anarchists, and wanted to target certain State institutions as the AB had done. They commanded some but not the same amount of popular sympathy, though once again the Trotsky-influenced student-orientated Left tried to cash in on their activity and denounce them at the same time.
The media attention given to Christie made it plain that, as he had indeed been told by a senior police officer, they would have got him on this too had he not meanwhile moved to the Orkneys. I don’t know on what charge. Though the islands originally came into Scottish possession by non-payment of a queen’s dowry, not even the press could be led to believe there is accommodation there today for holding a captive princess, with or without her children.
*** <em>The Protest Movement</em>
There were many related cases that grew out of the protest movement — Daffyd Ladd, who did not give up easily, was in yet another. There was also Malcolm Simpkins, of whom we had not heard, convicted for an attack on the police in 1973. He was acting with one other friend, not even knowing about the existence of many Anarchists thinking and acting the same way, and repelled by what he did see of the capitalist press and Freedom Press version. He contacted me when he was in prison, after he had met John Barker and Jake Prescott, and subsequently became friendly with Phil Ruff, with whom he was singled out by the authorities in 1978 as among the “ringleaders” of the Gartree prison riot. We corresponded in a friendly way for years, but though he was anxious to come and “do his bit for the cause again”, things turned out differently.
Almost at the end of his sentence, after long periods of solitary confinement, he started reading up on always seductive Buddhism. He explained to me that it was an atheistic creed anyway and compatible with Anarchism since it denied any church or any hierarchy. He would come out and before resuming paid work use his carpentry skills to build a decent club where we could meet and I could learn from him proper eating habits, which was basically what Buddhism was all about, at any rate before you get into its non-violent totalitarian clutches.
Alas for good intentions. I never had the chance even to meet him let alone eat grated carrots in the non-club. On the eve of his long-delayed release he wrote apologetically he had decided to become a monk under some exotic name, enter an ashram, mortify himself and beg his way through Sri Lanka. This is how the Christian prison system reforms the most industrious and idealist members of society. I hope if Buddhism gives him another life, he gets a better deal next time.
There were many others, some of whom I met, some of whom I did not, in this protean hyde-headed movement they called the Angry Brigade or some other name. I was amused once when a group we did not know but which was obviously part of our movement, carried out some attacks on State targets under the name of Makhno’s Anarchist Army. The press and police could not understand what it had to do with the Ukraine, but suggested the involvement of Ukrainian nationalists, whose representatives here protested they had nothing whatever to do with such actions. They issued a statement that Bolsheviks must be trying to frame them! At least Rhenish separatists, if there are such, never had occasion to dissociate from everyone who took Karl Marx’s name to describe themselves, or they’d never have been able to wind up their watch on the Rhineland.
To make a roll call of all the people with whom I struck up a friendship through the <em>Black Flag</em> years would take several books, We carried out a long struggle for several prisoners, some of whom I met afterwards, such as Goliardo Fiaschi. He served a 20 year sentence under Franco for his part in the post-war Spanish Resistance, only to be re-arrested when he returned to Italy, to serve the completion of a sentence passed under the Mussolini regime. We had documented proof of his boyhood war-time resistance activities which had caused that sentence, which somewhat abashed the Italian Embassy in London when I went with Stuart on a deputation. We told them we would organise a massive demonstration of Army veterans to the Embassy, which was a bluff they fortunately never called. They asked us to be patient and we would get a reply from Rome. We did. Goliardo was freed and returned to his native Carrara. What a wonderful welcome we got when years later Christie and I visited Carrara.
** 20 After the Christie File; Refract; “The Kid’s Last Fight”; Kate Sharpley
*** <em>After the Christie File</em>
Cienfuegos Press caused a stir during its years in the Orkneys, with press hounding and pounding, even inquisitive TV and radio interviews ensuring that it was well known. It didn’t do it much harm when a number of Conservative MPs, vigilant in defending a platform for fascists but feeling that advocating workers self defence was giving way to terrorism, called for it to be banned.
One German woman activist decided to flee to Sanday when she was wanted by the West German police, not quite realising that she would stand out like a sore thumb in a closely-knit community where an English accent marks you as a stranger and even the Scots were regarded by Orcadians only as a little less foreign. She soon fled but the incident enhanced the picture of “Terror Island” in the press, a picture nobody whatsoever living on or near the island ever recognised. The reaction was the same as when, years later, a zealous Christian social worker ‘discovered’ Devil worship and Satanic practices on a neigbouring island.
The amount Cienfuegos published, given its total lack of financial resources, was incredible. The trouble was that it poured too many resources into an ever-diminishing market, given the virtual collapse of left bookshops — never too stable. The amount of essays and information in one Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review would have made a couple of dozen pamphlets and a book or two. An insatiable desire to publish ever more led inevitably to the growth of printing debts and a trail of wailing creditors, both among the commercial fraternity and among high-minded people who had renounced commercialism but thought non-profit making was a guarantee against loss making. As one could not fight a by-election for a mainstream party without incurring a loss, I do not see how a publishing venture against the political tide could conceivably be expected to pay its way and keep printing co-ops in wages. One or two firms who did not get paid in the process thought it was a conspiracy to ruin them. In the same way printworkers often unjustly thought print co-ops a conspiracy to work for wages and in conditions incredibly below par in a way backstreet sweatshops did, rather than work for others, but under cover of idealism.
For a time <em>Black Flag</em> used Sanday as an address, having lost its Haverstock Hill address, even after it was edited in London. There were some, especially from the USA, who queried with me if they could safely write to the address — Over the Water, Sanday. I invariably explained that the Orkney Islands had been civilised long enough to have a postal service and cannibalism had practically died out. So, as a matter of fact, had vegetarianism. Meat was cheap and plentiful but fruit and vegetables had to be brought from the mainland and brought high prices. Lifelong veggies who went up there had to capitulate.
For years I was regarded as Stuart’s spokesperson or alter ego, especially after he wrote his somewhat early autobiography <em>The Christie File</em> in which he referred to me in flattering terms which I hope I deserved. A few journalists would seek me out for the latest news as to what he was up to, though many, afraid of my regarding such enquiries as harassment, would ask friends of mine if they would mind asking me and passing the news on to them. The timidity in approaching me direct was solely because of their nervousness in regard to the print union. With no other category — in the course of years, soon not even the Royal Family — did they have such commendable restraint on preservation of privacy. Later they spoke of the “semi-criminal” activities of printworkers, which consisted of curbing journalists’ worst excesses to the point where they could not even interrupt your lunch to ask you to incriminate your friends, without repercussions. Individual members of the Cabinet with kinky secrets must wonder sometimes ruefully if they slaughtered the wrong cow when they destroyed the printworkers strength and “set free” the Murdoch press.
Around 1980 various disasters happened to Cienfuegos Press which led to the Christies making an exodus from Sanday. A printer decamped with an expensive made-ready book, its recently-printed books were burned out and water-damaged en route to the island, and on top of it all Brenda was arrested while visiting Stuart’s family in Germany. It was alleged she was involved in resistance activities in Germany, where she had never been before, several years past, apparently on the strength of gossip and the old German practice of guilt by association.
Stuart had been denied entry to speak at a conference, along with an East German poet, Wolf Biermann, who was in turn denied permission to leave. The Berlin Wall worked both ways. Thus he could not go directly to his wife’s rescue while she was in prison awaiting a trial that never came, but he spent a fortune telephoning all round the globe for support and solidarity, until the investigating judge gave up in despair complaining that he had been ‘pilloried’ though if there had been any pillorying he did not appear to be the one who sat in the stocks.
As if things weren’t bad enough, the <em>Times Educational Supplement</em> invited Stuart to write an article as to how small publishing firms were able to survive the recession. Tempting fate, he wrote in his usual optimism that as Cienfuegos Press had low overheads and devoted readers as well as high debts, it should just about manage to do so, given a bit of leeway by the bank. Just about after that had been read and digested, the Bank of Scotland foreclosed on the house and that was the end of the Orkneys saga.
*** <em>Refract</em>
The original anarchist thought that had been published from Sanday was so well received that Stuart was induced to try again. He moved down south to Cambridge in search of still cheap housing. I helped out a bit financially and he established a new publishing house. No one could ever understand his reasoning in obscure titles, and this one was called Refract. Among the books it published was <em>The Investigative Researcher’s Handbook</em> which, like <em>Towards a Citizens Militia</em> published in Sanday, was widely read. It became a collector’s piece partly because the funds didn’t stretch to keeping it in print.
Even the ranks of Tuscany could scarce forbear to cheer. On one occasion he was visited by a Special Branch officer asking if one of the groups claiming to be the Angry Brigade had anything to do with him and, if so would he tell them so or name the people concerned. He said he didn’t know, dashing their hopes of an instant Moscow-type confession. The Special Branch officer said he thought it quite funny that in marketing the <em>Handbook</em>, Stuart had leafletted every SB liaison officer throughout the country by name. The CIA and the National Security Council each paid $200 for their copy of the <em>Handbook</em> when it was explained that these were the last ones left. The SAS house organ <em>Mars</em> and <em>Minerva</em> reproduced in its pages a highly critical look at their activities from this shoestring press. However, just as kind words don’t butter any parsnips, praise from the enemy doesn’t pay the rent.
When he first arrived at Cambridge, the local paper got a hack to write a sensational story that Stuart Christie, who had been released from Spain and subsequently amnestied, and found not guilty of other charges in England too, was “hiding” in Cambridge where he had “taken refuge”, though it didn’t say from what. Creditors, perhaps? To aspiring journalists it doesn’t matter. To them “hiding” sometimes means only they haven’t taken the trouble to look you up in the phone book, and in the mentality of journalism in the sticks, “self-confessed anarchists” had to be up to something.
Impressive as the Refract list was, it was still swallowing money just as Cienfuegos did. The bills mounted up and Stuart had to live. He got out from under by winding it up, and then applying for a grant as a mature student to study history and politics at Queen Mary College, London, commuting backwards and forwards between London and Cambridge each day. We used to meet for a meal in Whitechapel most weeks and I always asked him what he expected to do with a Mickey Mouse degree at most. I was brought up when University education was a privilege for the rich and powerful. When working-class youth fell foul of the Establishment it told them to emigrate or join the Navy. Now these are closed, they are told to go to higher education, even when they know more than the professors.
However, by 1986, having run up another £10,000 in debts with Refract, apart from money sunk into it, and with the college course at an end, it was time for Stuart to face the hard cold world again. I tried to get him into the print, where he could have been a valuable ally, but other people thought that too and all I got were raised eyebrows. However, there was an old friend of Stuart’s, Ron McKay who had gone into commercial publishing, and launched various new trade journals, always a risky business. He invited Stuart to work on Media Week, a newspaper for the advertising industry, as a sub-editor, and double with “EQ”, a magazine for sound engineers. Finally the firm branched out into various other magazines, including <em>House Magazine</em>, the house organ of the Houses of Parliament, and a London digest of <em>Pravda</em>.
What with various trade magazines, some of which lasted a few issues and some of which didn’t, the sub-editors moved from one issue to another as editors, or did several at once. Stuart was editing and setting the sound engineers trade paper, the advertising media trade paper, and an electronic trade paper, as well as an equally short-lived literary magazine. I don’t know how much he knew about any of the trades concerned but one day he was told he was also the editor of <em>Pravda International</em>. That made news all right with a few hack journalists, though the hue and cry around him had died out a bit by this time.
<em>Pravda International</em> wasn’t quite what it sounded, since it was recording changes prior to perestroika, and the only contact with Moscow was when the head of the <em>Pravda</em> foreign desk phoned up to protest they were using the name <em>Pravda</em> but non-<em>Pravda</em> material. The Russians wanted the English-speaking world to see how they were tackling their economic problems. <em>Pravda</em>, which for years had echoed the Party line, now wanted to show it was the voice of reform. They were being challenged by a new paper, <em>Arguments and Facts</em>, a non-Party and non-Government paper which specialised in economic and social exposures. This jumped from 10,000 in 1979 to 35 million in 1989, and so became the biggest selling newspaper in the world, finally pushing <em>Pravda</em> out of business by not being identified with the Party. It was the material from <em>Arguments and Facts</em> that constituted the non-<em>Pravda</em> material being used by <em>Pravda International</em>.
Meanwhile the London publishers had an economic crisis of their own when the old <em>Soho News</em> was re-launched, without consultation with the previous publishers of the title, who might have warned them that Soho had radically changed and was now a geographical expression, and came an expensive cropper. Ron McKay was sacked and the board of directors decided to cut down heavily on staff, the most expensive item they could think of, in this case killing the goose that laid the eggs because they were not golden enough. The London <em>Pravda International</em> lost its entire staff and Stuart made an arrangement with the editors Vladislav Starkov and his deputy, Alexander Meschersky, to launch a London <em>Arguments and Facts International</em>.
None of this affected me, except that I had to contend, after a malicious article in <em>Freedom</em> by someone whose Intelligence associations were exposed in <em>Black Flag</em>, with anxious enquiries as to whether Stuart had gone over to the Communist Party, was editing a “trendy Marxist” magazine or even “was working for the Russian Embassy”, not that I could have done anything about it if he was.
In fact, so quickly was “glasnost” breaking out in Russia that it had become more democratic than Britain. Here, his anti-fascist record meant every job was closed to him, even at one remove, as it were. There, his notorious opposition to Marxist-Leninism while being a proven anti-fascist was no bar, but a positive recommendation in many circles.
<em>Arguments and Facts International</em>, I gather, is a specialist trade digest about risk analysis and business in the former USSR. It is, as the <em>Guardian</em> mentioned, a “far cry” from Cienfuegos Press in the Orkneys. However the Russian company has aims at moving into book publishing, and coincidentally Russian anarchist writers may be re-introduced to a new generation. It has published articles on Russian anarcho-syndicalism today and features on Kropotkin and Bakunin in the course of a new Russian journalism. Whereas it is still unthinkable to discuss anarcho-syndicalism on still shackled British radio, in a Russia which has been (relative to the past) set free, anarcho-syndicalists now appear on TV at least as regularly as the statutory Liberal-Democrat does here. <em>Arguments and Facts</em> has even rehabilitated (if he were ever “habilitated”) Nestor Makhno, the Ukrainian anarchist fighter facing two fronts, anathema to Bolshevism, capitalist intervention and Tsarism alike.
*** <em>“The Kid’s Last Fight”</em>
I moved in the early Seventies to a Greenwich council flat, and was there when a widely-advertised fascist march took place, passing a few streets away in Lewisham which had a high proportion of Black residents, As usual, it was more a police demonstration guarding bussed-in fascists marching between their lines. An enormous crowd gathered in response to the conventional calls for it to be banned or stopped. The anti-fascists included the SWP and student groups but also many young Blacks who, like the anarchos, were as interested in a bash-up with the police as with the nazis, and a good time was had by nearly all. The nazis had their march, the police had their overtime, the crowd had their fun. Only those taking the stirring up of racial tensions seriously were affronted.
While the fascists were guarded on the march like an endangered species from start to finish, safely escorted by the police from rallying point to departing, before and after there were punch-ups with them as distinct from attacks on the guardian angel police. At the railway station, when it was all over and I was on my way to work, some fascists were standing around waiting for their train and amusing themselves by taunting a lone Black girl. She ignored them, but when they got provocative a couple of SWP students, who had been on the march, responded to them. I was too far away to hear what was said but the nazis moved in to beat the three up, so I moved down the platform to wade in and help if I could. We had the worst of it at first, as there were six of them, only one of the two students was much use at fighting, the other was more of a liability and the young woman’s punches weren’t too hefty while I was puffing like a steam engine at the unwonted exercise. However, after a few minutes a dozen or more people came rushing up the tunnel to “bash the fash”, having seen the fracas from the other side of the platform. In no time, as now the fascists were getting the worst of it, the police arrived. The train came in and we dashed on while the fascists waited under police protection for the next train.
The other passengers were quite friendly, allowing us to mix among them so that nobody could be detected and arrested, though I heard one mysterious remark, “You’ve got to hand it to the old boy, he’s got some pluck”. I couldn’t see anybody vaguely answering to the description. It occurred to me later whom they meant and now look back on that dust-up nostalgically, in the words of a forgotten film cliché, as the kid’s last fight.
*** <em>Kate Sharpley</em>
One of the passengers was a frail lady in her eighties, going up to Guy’s, who was saying “if I had been able to get on the platform fast enough I’d have waded in with my stick”. However, when one of the SWPers (inevitably) tried to sell her a <em>Socialist Worker</em> she burst in a tirade saying, “You lot are as bad as they are” and to my delight and their surprise she weighed in with an argument about Trotsky’s bloody suppression of the Kronstadt Mutiny. That was my introduction to Kate Sharpley.
This wonderful old Deptford-born character had been in the anarchist movement just before and during the First World War. She had worked for a German baker in South London but gone into munitions in Woolwich during the war and was among the first of the shop stewards movement (it started there, not in Glasgow as generally thought) and was pioneered by women ‘dilutees’, less respectful of the orthodox leadership which had sold out to the war effort. The physical nature of Glasgow shipbuilding made the shop stewards movement there more a male preserve, but it spread up and down the country in both sexes.
Kate’s father and brother were both killed in action, while her boyfriend was conscripted and not heard of again. Neither she nor his parents could discover what happened. Like many of the local group’s males of the time, he was first “missing” and then “believed killed”. She suspected he was shot for mutiny but there was no proof.
Called on to receive her family medals, she threw them in Queen Mary’s face, saying “If you like them so much you can have them”. Agitators or women protesters were never a protected species as fascists later became and she was beaten up by police and warned off selling anarchist papers on the streets or face prosecution “as a prostitute”. Sacked from her job, she married conventionally in 1922 and disappeared from the anarchist scene.
We met two or three times after that first encounter. Speaking to her was like a telephone call with the past. She knew well people of whom I had only read, like Ted Leggatt and Guy Bowman, or whom I knew in their old age, like Sylvia Pankhurst, Ella Twynan and George Cores (she always called him “Mr Cores” as befitting a respectable craftsman), as well as the anarchist draymen, like her dead lover, who had been in the Horse Transport Union in Walthamstow, a forerunner of anarcho-syndicalism which vanished with the trade.
Some of the young anarchist women met her and asked if she had a message for the younger generation. It naturally flattered them when she said, cheerfully, “The kids today are doing better than we did. They wouldn’t let the sods get away now with what they got away with me then.” I met her grandson’s wife when I visited Kate in hospital. She was hostile, thinking I was raking up the dead embers of “Gran’s nefarious past”, best forgotten. Next time I called I was told she was dead by this middle-aged <em>Sun</em>-reader who thought being told of her grandmother-in-law’s political opinions made her an accomplice and might prejudice her children’s chances of bettering themselves in life.
There was a move to collect books and archives of the living movement by Brixton Anarchists, some of whom had met her in the brief period. They resisted the temptation to call the archives after a famous person and named it the Kate Sharpley Library. It started in 121 Railton Road, but was stored away for safe keeping and ten or fifteen years later found a home in Northamptonshire and has now expanded into a formidably viable collection of Anarchist archives.
** 21 By the Waters of Babylon; The Battle of Railton Road; International Centres
*** <em>By the Waters of Babylon</em>
When the variety profession was at its height theatrical lodgings in Brixton, roomy houses that had become rooming houses, handily close to the West End and the exit roads from London, had taken over from its middle-class Victorian heritage. Most theatre artists made their permanent address in one or other of the myriad bedsitter flats that abounded amongst the ‘pro’s digs’. It was a desirable neighbourhood when World War Two started, though with a Bohemian undercurrent provided by the variety artists. Abe Ball, who briefly tried working the boards as “Major the trapeze artist”, set up as a garden gnome manufacturer and failed. He moved to Coldharbour Lane, in Brixton, in the early Forties, which was a comedown for an entrepreneur. Not so dramatic as it sounded to a later generation when his son John Major sought to capitalise on it as the “Brixton boy who made Prime Minister”.
It became a slum only with the aftermath of the war. In the streets where the Fred Karno troupes had set out in their own buses with the leading comedians of the day and the world famous stars of the future, the glory had faded and it was drearily ordinary. It wouldn’t have become a slum, but its neglect after the bombing coincided with the decline of the music hall profession. The first wave of immigration from Jamaica and the Caribbean Islands went there because of its cheapness and the fact that Black faces were already familiar. Relatively cheap bedsitters and vacant rooms in crumbling houses were available before the crazy price market caught up with the times. Unlike North Kensington, the only other part of London where similar conditions prevailed, the element of Rachmanism was less active.
Suddenly in the fifties Brixton changed. When the Government started advertising in the Caribbean for transport and health workers, at wages unheard of there, everybody with aspirations began calculating that if (what was considered there) an unskilled job could earn that much in London, what could they, with their qualifications earn. It seemed the golden road now the USA was closing its doors to the Caribbeans. Nobody realised, so I was told, that those were all the jobs available at those salaries, nor that the wages were hardly fabulous on prevailing English standards, nor that housing was scarce and expensive, and they never even reckoned on the greater need for domestic electricity and of transport to work. They also expected a warm welcome as they were going to what had been held out to them for years as “the motherland”, and they were in for a rude shock. Others can tell the story better than I.
Many friends of mine in the older Black community in Brixton moved out when the newcomers came rather than be caught in the traumas created. Their main complaint was the oppressive presence of a churchgoing community which they thought they had sloughed off forever. I did not see it could be all that bad but I remember being assured. “Bethels and brothels go together.” It turned out to be the spiritual opium of older people and the material opium of the younger but otherwise it was a replay of Victorian England.
Within a few years there was a clear rift between sections of the older members of the new immigrant Black community and sections of the younger British born generation. When I was living in Finsbury Park one of the tenants in the house literally threw his daughters out, down the front steps with their clothes and a suitcase tumbling after them, one girl after the other in the space of a few months, purely on the grounds that the eldest didn’t go to church and the younger wasn’t a Christian because she was seen entering a dance hall. Fifteen years old, she came to us for weeks, hiding from her father upstairs, just to eat. She never said where she lived and we finally lost touch with her. I often thought of that poor girl when hearing the complaints of churchgoers about their children becoming “alienated from the community”. It will take a generation or two yet before these sects go the way of their English counterparts. Meanwhile they flourish as they do in the USA and with the same effect upon their children.
*** <em>The Battle of Railton Road</em>
The police were baffled as to whom to blame when deprived young Blacks suddenly exploded against harassment. It is normal practice in such circumstances for them to blame “outsiders” to show it was in no way the fault of the authorities. They blamed Blacks from Finsbury Park for bussing in to cause the Brixton riots, which they seemed to suggest the peace-loving local Blacks opposed; and, when riots spread to Finsbury Park, they blamed Blacks from Brixton for bussing in there.
When the Brixton riots began in 1981, the police did their best to blame anarchists, who had just squatted an empty shop at No. 121 Railton Road, and might otherwise have been the perfect patsy. It was rather difficult as the rioters were Black youths pushed by harassment, and few of them at that time knew what anarchism was about, certainly theoretically. The riots started in Railton Road, and 121 was left untouched when the pub that had operated a racist policy opposite was burned down, but it was the police who unwisely started a battle there, driving the battling youths out of Railton Road on to the main Brixton shopping centre. There they engaged in looting the shops, whereupon people of all races and ages enthusiastically joined in. Even one old lady on a Zimmer frame asked for something to be brought from a window, which an agile youth courteously handed her.
With one young Rastafarian I had previously spoken about what anarchism was, and he was not unsympathetic, though into nationalism, and was enthusiastic about the Angry Brigade in the Sixties. As distinct from most Railton Road Rastas, hostile to 121 Bookshop because of its stand against religion and its identification with feminism, though tolerant to its stand against “Babylon”, he was very much opposed to some other Rasta elements who wanted to make a violent attack upon the shop. The local Rastas at that time hated the idea of Blacks coming under any other influence than theirs. My friend was derided by them as “Jim the Anarchist” by which name he was known to many.
It is relevant to say he was of medium height, very broadly built and deeply black, more African than Afro-Caribbean. There was an ultra-pacifist Jim Huggon who spoke in Hyde Park, associated with <em>Freedom</em> and <em>Peace News</em>, who was not much of an anarchist, very pacifist, very tall and thin, and extremely white, not even the usual pink, except politically. Two more physically contrasted characters one could not meet.
“Jim the Anarchist” was fingered by a nameless informer as being one of those who triggered the riots. The police immediately arrested White Jim, perhaps on notes from Hyde Park police on “Jim the Anarchist”. Huggon had a cast-iron alibi in that at the time he was alleged to have incited the riots, thrown petrol bombs and led an attack on the local police station, he was some twenty miles away playing the violin professionally in a church concert and could not possibly have dashed off in an interval to take part in these more wholesome activities. His witnesses would have been the vicar, band, choir and entire congregation, who would have stood out in marked contrast to the drug-dealer grass the police may have had available, and the case was dropped. The days were gone when a jury would convict in the teeth of that evidence, however severe a lecture they might receive from the judge afterwards.
Jean Weir, who had long been a spirited activist in Britain, France and Italy, was only a trifle less fortunate. She was living in the same Coldharbour Lane where John Major ex-Ball once lived. and Patricia Gambi, an Italian friend, was staying with her. They were arrested as Jean, a real live anarchist, was seen walking her dog when riots were going on nearby. It was a gift to the press as “The Italian Connection” when the magistrates sentenced Patricia to twenty-eight days for “threatening behaviour”. Originally, when the case came before the magistrates the police helpfully produced dozens of photographs. The magistrate looked through them carefully and asked where Miss Weir and her friend were. “Oh, they’re not in the photographs, these are just to give an idea of the background,” explained the police witness. The magistrate threw the photos down angrily and asked them not to waste his time. Ultimately, however, it did Miss Gambi no good not to have been photographed.
Black Jim moved away from Brixton, guessing it would not have been difficult for the police to bring before a court the same witness they were prepared to bring in the case of White Jim. After he went the Rastas who were hostile to 121 tried to move in and take it over by force, some moving in with knives and threatening the people in charge of the bookshop. It was a difficult position as a clash would certainly have been called “inter-racial” which it certainly would not have been. None of the Rastas thought the anarchos were in any way racist. On the first occasion a group was frightened off by someone saying he would “if need be bring all the guns at the disposal of the anarchist movement, place them in the hands of Black Anarchists and wipe out the Rastas” if they hi-jacked the squatted premises. It may have been fanciful but it worked. Only a few Rastas still tried to intimidate, and were confronted by Margaret Creaghe, in the bookshop on her own. She easily out-talked them, and so great was their shame at being browbeaten by a woman, they turned tail and cleared off. Thereafter relations were peaceful.
Indeed on one occasion some German anarchos wandered by mistake into a Rasta smoking den and were surrounded by a hostile group first thinking them police, and then even more hostile when they thought because of their nationality they must be Nazis. The air cleared as someone said, “Oh, they want the anarchist bookshop”, and led them to the right address, not without offering to sell some weed supposed to be “grass”, which was the local livelihood, but without any further threats.
*** <em>International Centres</em>
It was a year or two after we lost the old Centre in Haverstock Hill that it occurred to two separate groups, both around <em>Black Flag</em> in our short-lived rotating editorship period, that a new centre of action was needed if we were to maintain the momentum of the movement which depended on its social contacts for both industrial and international action. We lost the old Centre through the carelessness of John Olday. He returned to Germany from Australia, where he promoted gay cabaret of the German Twenties type, and found to his surprise that in his twenty years absence from the anarchist scene the Springer Press had made him famous. The opening of the German police files from Bismarck to Hitler, had encouraged academics to write about the German movement they had previously ignored. Olday was cast as the link between the old and the new on the basis of being the only German they knew, by reason of his copious if little known writing, who would fill the gap between the anti-Nazi resistance and the renaissance after the war.
He accordingly found entertainment work in Germany, even on the nonconformistic gay scene, utterly impossible and came to England. He had a small amount of cash which soon ran out (for some reason he could or would not take the pension or social security to which he had to be entitled) and contacted me to see if I could help. I put him up in a room of the Haverstock Hill club, explaining it was officially uninhabitable because of the rats in the cellar. When the landlord found out he was living there, because of his complaints to him about the rats, we all got evicted. The landlord was outraged to find we had been running a club, because of the profits he realised he was missing, and once we were out applied for a licence ostensibly in the name of what he thought was an “already running Spanish club”. As it was at the height of the “Persons Unknown” case it got raided a few weeks later by police looking for arms, surprised to find cigar-smoking punters playing baccarat instead.
Soon afterwards the premises at 121 had been set up, replacing the Centre, with the disadvantage of sharing with disparate groupings but with the advantage that no rent had to be found. It had previously been squatted by various organisations, Trotskyist and Black nationalist, before they got funded by the local council. The new “121 Group” comprised the newly formed Brixton branch of the anarcho-syndicalist Direct Action Movement, one of the rotating groups of <em>Black Flag</em>, and various anarchist, punk and squatting groups, all on an equal footing. They had been in possession only a few weeks when the riots broke out, and a great many buildings in the area were burned or looted, but they had won the recognition of the local community as to which side they were on.
Almost simultaneously the other rotating group had decided, with other groupings, to set up a new Centre in East London. I had not myself been involved in the building of either Centre, being immersed in the new wave of industrial activity, in <em>Black Flag</em>, the Anarchist Black Cross and the changes in Spain following the death of Franco. But they affected me considerably, and by the time 121 was being squatted I had committed myself both to it and to an entirely different venture, the Autonomy Club in Wapping. It was Ronan Bennett’s brainchild. Ever the optimist, I hoped it would take off, against reasonable expectations and my own expressed judgment.
Iris Mills and Ronan put a tremendous amount of work into funding, finding and then building and decorating the place. Ronan, possibly misled by the backing the <em>Persons Unknown</em> had received, which numerically might have been about the same as that of the Republican Clubs of Belfast, not unreasonably thought at least one club on those lines could be established. In some capital cities on the Continent there are up to a dozen anarchist clubs or centres.
But the amount of committed support was limited. Ronan decided to appeal for support from the punk anarchists, then a new phenomenon, saying the punks would pass anyway and would be useful for the time it was around. The punk support, especially from followers of Crass and Poison Girls, was substantial. Punk has lasted a couple of decades, long outlasting the proposed club. With the punks’ money came the punks, and in the first week they had ripped up every single piece of furniture carefully bought, planned and fitted, down to the lavatory fittings that had been installed by Ronan from scratch, and defaced our own and everyone else’s wall for blocks around. In the excitement of the first gigs where they could do as they liked, they did as they liked and wrecked the place. Loss of club, loss of money, loss of effort. End of story. Ronan was not unnaturally disheartened and returned to even more chaotic Northern Irish politics.
He couldn’t get employment as the job centre explained that with his notorious record — being fully acquitted twice — he would never get a job in the public sector and there were no jobs in the private sector, where he would probably be blacklisted anyway. In the old days they would have suggested going to sea or Australia, but in these days you can’t do either with a criminal record or even some types of non-record so they proposed that he got a grant and went to university, where he gained a doctorate and then became a successful novelist, one field where a colourful CV is no handicap.
** 22 Communism and Pandora’s Box; A Rebel Spirit; 1984 and All That
*** <em>Communism and Pandora’s Box</em>
For years I was sarcastic about earnest Communists who took trips to Russia and saw what they wanted to see. A printer, Tom Charlesworth (nephew of Fred, an old anti-parliamentarian communist with whom I had friendly arguments for years) was persuaded by his girl friend, a YCL stalwart, to join a tour to Moscow and Leningrad. There were five places vacant at cut prices and he rashly invited several workmates to join him. The lads had a seemingly profitable time flogging nylons (it was before the jeans revolution) but found they could do nothing whatever with the amassed roubles except spend them on drink and prostitutes. Tom was with his fiancee and precluded from these diversions, and he also denied on ideological grounds there could be such a thing as prostitution in the Land of the Revolution. Economic necessity no longer drove girls on the streets, he explained to his sniggering friends, and these women must be princesses brought up under the old regime and unaccustomed to normal work. A burst of laughter greeted this information. It was forty years since the Tsar had fallen and the ladies in question, however bedraggled, were barely twenty years old.
Some years later the Charlesworths, now married and in the Party, took a trip to Russia by car. They were earning good money and she spoke Russian. They were disconcerted when everyone assumed they were capitalists. As if a working printer could afford a car! “You’ll tell me next that the Black workers drive around Brixton in cars”, said an incredulous local, whose knowledge of England came from an amalgam of Dickens and the <em>Daily Worker</em>.
Their son Frank, like many another, turned his back on the faith of his parents. I had hopes he would become an anarchist. Even his father wavered in his Stalinism after that trip though his mother remained faithful to the end. John Lawrence, the local CP guru even after he joined the Labour Party, became Mayor and hoisted the red flag on the Town Hall one May Day, defected again to become first a Trotskyist and then a Tolstoyan “Christian Anarchist” and an editor of <em>Freedom</em>. He took Tom away from the Communist Party. Equally however he put Frank off anarchism, to which he was inclined, because of the asssumption that Lawrence was a real anarchist.
I always thought it unlikely I would ever go to Russia with the vague idea many had that it would be a charnel house and under jackboot domination. This image was fading after Stalin died though nobody saw where the transition from dictatorship would lead. I too assumed you could “only see what they want you to see” as if the “West” held conducted tours round its prison and mental institutions.
I finally took a sudden plunge one January (with owed leave from Christmas), notwithstanding Tom’s insistence I too “would see what I wanted to see” but in my case all bad, and took a package tour to Moscow and Leningrad. I found that while, as in the days of the Tsar, one could only visit cities which the police agreed on in advance, one could go anywhere within those cities and see anything. The idea that Russia was a classless society was so absurd that I wished others would take the trip too, and one would not have heard about the working class having taken power. Or perhaps not. They might not have noticed the smart people in fashionable furs marching purposefully to their cars to take them to their weekend dachas contrasted with the dispirited workers queueing for the store or working all hours.
As the trip included several excursions, I visited Leningrad University and the vice-chancellor gave us a propaganda lecture about the Russian education system. He pointed out that they had (so far) no drugs problem nor youth delinquency, though he agreed it might happen in the future. It was, to him, unthinkable that there should be such problems in a University. Students in Russia were not like those in turbulent Paris, they knew they were a privileged class and that when they passed into society they had top jobs for life and better conditions than the average. Why on earth would they want to make trouble for themselves? In any case the authorities knew how to deal with trouble-makers. The “trade union” representative at the school would be informed if the pupil was misbehaving and his parents would be interviewed. If necessary the mother would lose her job and be told to stay home and look after her children. The father might have his wages cut, to be reminded of his responsibilities. All the audience bar me were British social workers and teachers and nodded approvingly.
I had the opportunity of mild revenge on two Communists from Manchester in the group, well-meaning elderly lady teachers. Back at the hotel they told us we should all subscribe to a wreath to lay on the Leningrad monument “to the heroic soldiers who died fighting fascism”, accompanied by a picture of Karl Marx’s tomb at Highgate which they had brought with them especially. When they asked me, I said I would agree if they would add to the description “and those heroic sailors at Kronstadt who died fighting tyranny”. Thinking of me as probably nothing more sinister than an old salt, and not having heard of one of the last stands against Soviet dictatorship, they agreed eagerly. They went to the Russian guide, who knew all about Kronstadt, for a translation. I was never asked again and got black looks from them ever after. They remarked loudly about our fairly passable hotel how wonderful it all was. “And to think how things were before the Revolution! If only some of the carpers could see it!” one said, and the other answered, glaring at me in a manner that must have brought alarm to her infant pupils, “Some folks will never believe anything, even when they see it.” “Oh, well, Trotskyists!” sniffed the other, though Trotsky, not Stalin, was the despotic supppressor of the Kronstadt mutiny.
I was able to persuade the guide who took us to see the fortress of Saints Peter and Paul, to point out where the anti-Tsarist revolutionists were detained and were duly honoured, save for those who lived long enough to challenge the Leninist State. The guide knew about Bakunin, but his cell had been wiped away in an inundation from the Neva. She showed me Kropotkin’s unmarked and unhonoured cell, however, claiming he could not have escaped in the manner he describes in his memoirs. Her version was that as Tsarism was still around he probably invented an unlikely story to throw the Tsarist police’s suspicion away from his friends.
When Kropotkin returned to Russia the Soviets had re-named a square in his honour. I went for a wintry swim in the open-air baths at Kropotkin Square in his memory. They were delightfully warmed, though if one strayed over a narrow margin around the pool one was in grave danger of losing one’s virility.
I discovered by devious means some elderly anarchists who spoke German. When I commented on the fact that Kropotkin’s square had survived his influence, they assured me that there were still people who preserved anarchist memories in secret, and there had been local strikes and insurrections even in the Twenties and Thirties, the brutal suppression notwithstanding. They took me to a railway workers’ club where several older workers were survivors of the libertarian movement and would form independent trade unions the moment it was remotely possible. Unfortunately the language barrier prevented our discussing this, as my hosts were not good at interpreting, and I was inclined to be sceptical, knowing that optimism is inevitably the last hope of the defeated.
A few years later the whole communist system fell and all dissent came out into the open in a rush, as if a Pandora’s box had been opened. One or two of those Russian anarcho-syndicalists, as representative of a not inconsiderable movement, were being given a fair hearing on their local TV which, though the capitalist economy also collapsed a few months afterwards, we here have still to achieve.
The break-up of the Soviet system came as no surprise to those who had no illusions about State Communism. What puzzled the journalists and professors was crystal clear to many who had received no London School of Economics brainwashing, but used their common-sense. The Russian Establishment under both Lenin and Stalin paid the same attention to proletarian values as the Christian world did to the teachings of Jesus on humility, poverty and non-resistance. It placed them on a pedestal and left them there. What reigned in Russia was not capitalism, nor communism but the State in control of everything.
Some dissident Communists introduced as an alibi a fiction that State Capitalism existed in Russia but all that oppresses is not capitalism. The party tried to impose State Communism but found it impossible to enforce. The reality was Party Tsarism.
Centralisation of rule by one man was replaced by that of one Party, and eventually under Stalin by one man again. To have sole responsibility for the manifest problems of one City would drive a person out of his wits. Many politicians in countries where power is shared by many become clinically insane. To take responsibility for the manifold problems of peace and war of one tiny State, let alone a vast empire, would make a person a raving gibbering criminal lunatic. This is what happened to Stalin and Hitler, and would have happened to Lenin had he not been stopped short in time. Throughout the years of Stalinism there was an anarchist resistance, most notably in Bulgaria, but on a scale impossible to define within Soviet Russia itself. Language always presented a problem, but most obstacle to international co-operation were caused by Interpol. The “West” may have been opposed to communist tyranny all those years but it was vigorously committed to sustaining it all the same. Perhaps Interpol preferred the devil it knew, but it must take the credit for preventing subversion within the Russian and Chinese blocs. They preferred “cold”, open or even nuclear war to any revolution that might arise from below, whatever the politicians said.
I was in touch for years with Chinese anarchists, until the old generation, or at least my contacts within it, died out. In doing so I encountered more espionage interference than I did with contacts in fascist Spain, yet the Government throughout was supposed to be hostile to Chinese Communism most of all. Special Branch were always concerned that I in my tiny way could be plotting the overthrow of the powerful Chinese State, yet China in turn thought anyone giving comfort to revolutionaries must be backed by foreign Intelligence.
So far as Bulgarians were concerned, they were always in touch with the international movement through the exile movement in Australia but had their problems with the Australian police too, just as they did with Soviet espionage. I had fleeting contacts with the Russian movement throughout the post-war period. Special Branch was always keen to intercept any news on resistance within Russia, though one might have thought they would approve of it in return for Communist subversion here, if only as tit-for-tat. It didn’t work out that way. There may have been a Cold War but always and in every way the “West” prevented any form of assistance or encouragement reaching the Russian oppositional workers that might enable in even a small way to overthrow the regime. What they liked were groupings demanding freedom of religion or nationalist groupings asking for autonomy or minority rights within the Soviet bloc. But they did not like anyone wanting to overthrow the tyranny against which they inveighed endlessly, even capitalist groupings.
At the very time they seemed to be gearing up for war with Russia, in the cold war period, I had a visit from the police enquiring about a “Makhnovist Saboteur” grouping in the south of Russia, which, if it existed, I would have thought hindered the then prospective enemy. I did not even know it existed but was warned not to help it. Chance would have been a fine thing! I doubt if they were merely playing the anti-Bolshevik game in a sporting fashion.
It did not surprise me too much when glasnost revealed that the anarchists were there all along, that great prison camp mutinies in the Stalin years by libertarian political prisoners had not been reported, that anarcho-syndicalist organisation was springing up in every big city in a wave of strike actions; that they started to declare themselves openly in the Red Army; and, since it was less hierarchic than ours, were even among the officers. The opening of the State and KGB archives in post-Soviet Russia may yet make it possible to document the ‘lost years’ of Russian anarchism. Some indication of the scope and continuity of underground acitivity in the USSR between 1921 and 1989 is given by Phil Ruff in his introduction to an anthology of writings by or about the re-emergence of anarcho-syndicalism <em>(Anarchy in the USSR: A New Beginning, ASP London 1991)</em>.
Now that the whole Russian scene is opening up again, there are few ways I personally can help. But it is a consolation to look back and realise that I am one of the minority of my generation in the working-class movement of this country who ever wanted to do so.
*** <em>A Rebel Spirit</em>
I knew Leah Feldman, one of the last survivors of the Makhno movement, from 1936 to her death at ninety-four in 1993. She was a constant leitmotif in my experiences of the movement. When still attending the boxing academy I used to call in to the sweatshop where she worked as a furrier and hand in collections I made among the young pugilists for Spanish prisoners, even before the Civil War broke out, little thinking I would still be at it sixty years later.
She had come from Warsaw as a girl, to break from her orthodox Jewish parents and to be active in the anarchist movement. Even in her teens her parents were hiding her shoes to stop her going out to illegal anti-Tsarist meetings, and she hid an old pair in her room to enable her to do so. In London she joined the Yiddish-speaking anarchist workers movement of the day (of which she became the last survivor). In 1917, the male Russian anarchists in exile took advantage of the arrangement by which they could join the Russian or British Armies and joined the army in defeat to be home for the revolution. The women had no such option, but Leah independently made her way to Moscow. Like others, but quicker than many, she was speedily disillusioned.
She attended Kropotkin’s funeral (1921), the last open demonstration of anti-Bolsheviks under the dictatorship. Anarchists were released from prison to attend. The anarchists working in the capital stole the flowers from the constant massed tribute to the dictator Lenin, then at the height of his power, no wreaths being available in a Moscow winter. Later she left Moscow for Odessa, giving that as her place of birth, and fought alongside Makhno in the train that accompanied him, caring for orphans and preparing clothes and food. When the army was defeated she took advantage of the one ‘privilege’ women had, of contracting a marriage in name only to a German anarchist to enable her to leave the country. She could not find work in Berlin, though she helped the Black Cross established there for Russian prisoners, and came back to London.
Deciding in the Thirties that her ‘husband’ was probably dead when the Nazis came to power, she married an old ex-serviceman named Downes, left derelict after WW1, giving him £10 for the service. She was thus belatedly a British subject and able to travel, and she was active in many movements when I first met her in 1935, though she always hankered for what we all then thought was the vanished Russian movement. It was her enquiries into the fate of her Makhnovist comrades in 1948, which I transcribed, when she received some leads from an exile in America, that caused the police interest in whether I was up to something with Russian resistance. She was then half blind following an eye operation, but they questioned her too. They could not be too careful about security matters, even Russia’s.
During the war I made contact with several sympathetic to anarchism in the Polish army and air force who came to see her. But, like many who never overcome the problems of a new language, the old one was now hopelessly mixed. Her Polish was incomprehensible to them, but she gave them her Polish books. The race divide in pre-and inter-war Poland had been such they had never heard a Jewish accent in Polish.
She never lost her enthusiasm for activities for anarchism, whether the harmless <em>Freedom</em> variety or the real thing. She associated with the Spanish struggle strongly, and when after the Civil War ended she joined a number of anarchist women in an enterprise started by another Russian anarchist Marie Goldberg. They had a tailoring workshop in Holborn and were joined by Suceso Portales (of the “Mujeres Libres” organisation) and others. The babble of tongues in broken English, Yiddish, Polish, bits of French, Spanish, broad Scots, Catalan and Greek-Cypriot over the rattle of the machines, made me wonder how they ever understood one another but they made up in volume what they lacked in linguistic conformity. The postman once said to me on the stairs, “I can never work out what nationality those ladies are. They told me they come from somewhere called Anarchy, but Christ knows where that is.”
During the hectic struggles of the sixties and seventies, Leah, by then half blind and increasingly deaf, helped the First of May Group, looking after weapons and even smuggling items into Spain, where she was known affectionately by the nickname “la yaya (granny) maknovista”.
Though she supported <em>Freedom</em> financially and by selling copies, she was neglected by them for some reason. Perhaps they feared her a bit, though occasionally the earnest “researcher” would come, notebook in hand, to ask about the past. After her death one such, a Mr Whitehead, waxed sarcastic about this funny old lady with frazzled hair who spoke English badly and annoyed Philip Sansom. He poured scorn on the idea that a working woman could have done half the things she did, citing the misprint in my obituary in <em>The Guardian</em> (for “Lenin’s tribute” it said Lenin’s tomb”) to prove nothing she did was of any account, and one wonders why he bothered to write about such an insignificant person. As to working with the Spanish struggle, that was not what anarchism consisted of: it was writing university theses at State expense, which she certainly never did.
I am very proud of my young friends and colleagues on <em>Black Flag</em> who knew of the tremendous work Leah put in during her years in the movement, and who unflaggingly looked after her in her later, difficult years, when a series of accidents made her impatient, demanding and difficult, but unflagging in revolutionary spirit, some taking her on holiday, others looking after her needs week after week. Some fifty attended her funeral, and afterwards I went to a gathering to scatter her ashes at the Chicago Martyrs’ Memorial.
*** <em>1984 and All That</em>
Wilf McCartney, a catering worker in his late sixties, was a regular speaker at anarchist meetings when I first attended them in the Thirties. He was also one of the Syndicalist Propaganda League, who joined the ASU but not the Anarchist Federation (as reconstructed in 1940). He took the view, held by many, that what was needed was workers as a whole to organise, not the anarchists as such, or it would become another political party, though nothing angered him more than the customary philistine statement, “the anarchists don’t believe in organisation”. In 1941 Tom Brown suggested to McCartney he should write his memoirs. McCartney named the pamphlet <em>Dare to be a Daniel!</em> a Nonconformist slogan which appealed to old-time radicals, even atheists.
It was still assumed Freedom Press belonged to the anarchist movement, but by the time it was written, in the following year, this was dubious. The “Freedom Press Group” insisted the book was impossible to publish, giving as an excuse the admittedly scarcely legible script. I typed it out laboriously one weekend I was in London only for it to lie on the table in the flat of two of the group while they thought of fresh excuses why it could not be published.
However, they were friends of George Orwell, who happened to call and, seeing it, was interested enough to ask if he could take it home to read. Next week he came in and said enthusiastically, “If you’re going to publish it, I’d like to write a foreword.” It was a story of catering conditions in the West End which, he said, exactly concurred with his experience when down-and-out in Paris and London (the difference being that McCartney showed how they fought back).
Though Orwell was not as famous then as now, he was a Noted Intellectual and this altered the situation! They “agreed” it should be published, but George Woodcock, as a literary “expert” wanted it re-written in his brand of Standard Boring English. Brown objected vigorously. However, by the time the booklet was ready for printing, the clique had seized control of the press. Woodcock made several deletions, and changed the title to <em>The French Cooks’ Syndicate</em>, with an introduction by Woodcock and a preface by Orwell. McCartney, who did not expect nor receive a penny for the work nor even a free copy, was not consulted.
When he saw it printed, he objected strongly to the patronising introduction by the ultra-Pacifist Noted Intellectual Woodcock and he also resented Orwell writing that his experiences agreed with those of the author, who regarded him, fairly or otherwise, as an “upper class twit playing at workers, who said that the working class stinks”.
Wilf’s daughter, before she died in 1977, asked Leah Feldman, with whom she was friendly over the years, to get Cienfuegos Press to re-issue the pamphlet, preferably under its original title. They did not have a copy and it was long out of print. Freedom Press wrote to Stuart that it was “their” pamphlet and they were about to reprint and jealously preserved the right to Orwell’s few words. Fifteen years later, it still being unpublished, I found a copy, re-set it and had it published by the Kate Sharpley Library.
Some paragraphs had been missed from the Freedom Press edition, but as the manuscript hadn’t been restored, I couldn’t remember them well enough to reproduce them accurately. These paragraphs were on early anti-fascist activity during the General Strike, when the Imperial Fascisti organised a strike-breaking force, which despite Regular Army protection was routed in the Old Kent Road by dockers with their hammers and catering workers with their carving knives. The heroic scabs took one look, broke ranks and ran, to the hilarity of the squaddies. An amusing paragraph on Victorian schools, with some sarcastic comments on the class prejudices of even the best professional writers, was also missing. These deletions in the first edition were no doubt made by Professor Woodcock in the interests of space, and the omission of his unsolicited five cents worth in the second edition may be considered pure sectarianism on my part.
According to Woodcock ‘s later distorted recollections of those days, Freedom Press, from which he then loftily detached himself, was offered <em>Animal Farm</em> but turned it down. I find it highly unlikely, especially with Woodcock in control of its literary output and given Marie-Louise Berneri’s worship of Noted Intellectuals like her father. Had they published it Orwell would never have been brought to the notice of the literary dictators of opinion. It would have been just another obscure book.
Published by a mainstream publisher and reviewed by accepted critics, it brought Orwell into consideration by the Establishment, and not just the literary one, as an outrageous and original critic of Soviet Russia, and by implication an opponent of the liberal version of State Socialism he had peddled for years and still did.
Orwell was then too ill to enjoy the sensation of being one of the literary figures of our time, but in 1948 1984 put him on the map. As with <em>Animal Farm</em> many people misunderstood it. What he was doing was not predicting a future which never happened, at least within the timescale, but, like Jack London in <em>The Iron Heel</em>, exaggerating current trends in terms of the future. He was essentially a liberal Socialist, disenchanted with the Communist Party and the way socialism was going, but with a love-hate relationship with both, like many of the intellectual left before and since. The Right took it for hate and clasped a reluctant and dying Orwell to its bosom.
I only met Orwell once, in Charlie Lahr’s bookshop. I never agreed with Wilf McCartney’s description of him, partly because of his <em>Homage to Catalonia</em>, though it was not as good as it was cracked up to be by later generations.
Nowadays they seem to think he was a significant military figure in Spain instead of being an obscure foreign volunteer in a minor party’s division, though he made no claims to being anything more.
I remember him talking to Lahr about the American Albert Weisbord, who wrote a tome on the counter-revolution in Spain. Weisbord, Orwell said, was a former Trotskyist who had gone through Trotskyism and Oehlerism and was now the only Weisbordian apart from his wife. When they divorced, he said, there could be no more splits, unless he became schizophrenic. Weisbord had apparently turned up in Barcelona just on the eve of the Communist internal coup in 1937, and had locked himself in his hotel bedroom for two days, eventually creeping out at night to the British Embassy over the road who afforded him a swift car to the American Embassy and a safe passage out before the OGPU got him, for what purpose one knows not. One would have thought they were not that hard-up for spare Trots. He then returned to New York to denounce the cowardice of those who had let the Communist Party gain the upper hand.
Orwell also said that Weisbord had once campaigned to be Governor of New York State on a manifesto addressed “To the Workers and Peasants of Brooklyn”. To be honest, I thought Orwell a lot wittier than his writings, which I found usually, and at that time always, a dreadful bore. Such an opinion became literary heresy.
** 23 The State’s Internal Enemy; Death Pangs of Fleet Street; Spanish Practices; The Battle of Wapping; The Emperor’s Courtiers
*** <em>The State’s Internal Enemy</em>
In a memoir I wrote, <em>The Anarchists in London 1935–55</em>, I digressed to say something of the Welsh miners. In 1938 I spent a weekend in Neath with Sam Mainwaring junior, one of the last active survivors of the heyday of Welsh anarcho-syndicalism. At a meeting of the local ILP I came across an obstreperous group at the back who liked to give hell to visiting “toffee-nosed” English speakers from the Communist and Labour Parties. “Those are the Wrecking Brigade,” whispered the chairman. “Take no notice of them.” But they were, to my delight, survivors of the formerly strong anarcho-syndicalist miners movement, mostly elderly women and a couple of old men (miners tend to die young). They started by mimicking my accent and finished by applauding every sentence, shouting down anyone with hostile arguments.
John Quail, somewhat of an obituarist in the Woodcock tradition though more of a historian, in his “lost history of British anarchism” (<em>The Slow Burning Fuse</em>) says that this quotation was a “depressing note”, on which he closed his account. I did not look at it that way. I thought it great to take up inspiration from them. They looked on it that way too.
One of them, Lloyd Lloyd, at sixty-seven had volunteered to fight in Spain with the CNT militia. They turned foreign volunteers down except for a few with Great War experience, but though he had served then and after in the Welsh Fusiliers, the Bureau lacked imagination and declined the offer of his services, which would have been of tremendous propaganda value. I doubt if his offer got past Ralph Barr and Emma Goldman. The Communist Party would have jumped at the idea but he loathed them as much as he did the Falange. “At least you know where you stand with the fascists”, Lloyd told me. “They kill you if you don’t kill them first, but with those buggers you never know where you are”. It was out of the mood of the times but I heard the same expression about false allies many times in the years to come, including Gomez and Miguel Garcia referring to the quietists hanging on to our movement.
Over the years the old mining community of anarcho-syndicalists in Scotland and Wales vanished, though pockets still existed in the Scottish coalfields when Stuart was young, and they inspired him the way the Welsh veterans inspired me. Aldred retained a following in the Scottish pit village of Burnbank until shortly after WWII when most of them were dying off.
For years I always tried to get on support committees for miners, mostly through the print union ostensibly as a representative, though really as an individual. The anarcho-syndicalist presence in the coalfields belonged to the past owing to the Communist Party and I could never help there under my own political steam until very late in the day, in the last great battle of the National Union of Miners, when Arthur Scargill nailed his colours to the mast on the closure of the industry. I am glad <em>Black Flag</em> was able to do a lot to help in that struggle without using it for narrow political advantage.
I have no reason to entertain friendly feelings to Scargill. He was always a Marxist and despite his leftism, timid when it came to helping political prisoners, most of all non-Marxists, even in Spain. But one is bound to regard differently a Trade Union leader who sells out from one who does not. And while he never led the final strike to save the pits, or maintained the dispute, despite the mythology that people hazarded their livelihood for the sake of a bureaucrat’s blue eyes, he kept pace with the union he led and listened to what the members had to say. That was why the NUM was loyal to him, and why a rival scab union was formed by a sinister cabal of businessmen at the Dorchester Hotel, with no ties in the industry, to break away from one led by him.
I had written to him once or twice on behalf of Bolivian copper miners who appealed to the Black Cross for British miners’ help but received no answer. When their deputation came over I did get support for them from the London NUM HQ. At the time Brenda Christie was arrested in Germany, Stuart phoned many people for support but when he got through to Scargill, the left-wing hero simply put the phone down. I have to say albeit reluctantly it contrasted with the courteous way I was received by Church of England bishops I approached, usually in regard to prisoners, even if they eventually did nothing. But one could hardly hold a grudge in a strike affecting the lives and livelihoods of so many, and despite enormous pressure, amounting at times to criminal libel from the media, Scargill did stand by his members.
In that last great struggle the miners were actually organising on anarcho-syndicalist lines, less as a memory of past struggles than spontaneously. It certainly wasn’t because of the amount of help we could give, limited to individual groups. The women in particular rallied round solidly with food kitchens and staffing the picket lines, determined not to let the strikers be starved out. Many who before the strike had been content to take a backseat emerged as heroines calling to mind a historical parallel with American miners’ organiser Mother Jones and her army of women with brooms who fought the State militia and the Pinkerton private gangs hired by the employers.
Many miners, after years of cosy political existence in the Labour establishment, did not know what hit them when they found themselves transformed into “the enemy within” by the British State. Respected union officials, accustomed over the years to Royal patronage, invitations to Downing Street, to being mayors, councillors, aldermen, lay preachers, magistrates, school governors and parliamentary candidates, found themselves in the battlefront while the police did their best to beat their skulls in. Going in some of the villages was like advancing into an occupied country.
To add insult to injury so far as we were concerned, in the same way the right-wing libertarian scum had hi-jacked our traditional description, the police dubbed their pit storm operation, because it involved several regional police forces, “Mutual Aid”, with its echo of Kropotkin’s book (just as the miners were writing another chapter of it, as it were). It is a wry comment on <em>Freedom</em>, for that matter, that because I was heavily engaged in miners support, it wrote maliciously that I was expecting a Ministerial post in a Scargill government! Its then editor supported the scab union but got so much stick from anarchists that he announced after several issues he was only saying it to wind people up. There must have been a bit of a disturbance in Kropotkin’s grave that month.
Anyway, driving up to one village, I was stopped by the police four times. All we had in the car were tins of canned food and other provisions, but it might as well have been dynamite or even a portfolio in a Scargill Government. We were not allowed to proceed on the public highway. Finally I did a detour and we arrived in Builth Wells and put up in an inn. Joe Thomas was with me and he telephoned local people who came down by train and took the provisions back with them. We had to behave like smugglers, just to bring food from one part of Britain to another.
Eating habits, like much else, must have changed a lot in the coalmining towns owing to the strike. Collecting in Hampstead brought such rarities as muesli and so far as we were concerned I recall on another trip an old Welsh lady looking quizzically at kosher delicacies we had obtained free as a result of an appeal to a wholesaler near Haverstock Hill (“and please, not baked beans and teabags” Miguel had said) and asking if latkes and lokshen were standard London dishes.
In a strike conference in the north-east a good friend, an old member of the CNT in Bilbao, who had been here since post-war demob from the British Army, came with local anarcho-syndicalists to help with the catering. I don’t know if Special Branch observed how eagerly the miners clustered round his wife while he was scribbling little notes for them all evening. How to make bombs? Afraid not. Their wives were clamouring for a recipe for the tortillas and giant paella which had gone down a treat.
*** <em>The Death Pangs of Fleet Street</em>
The new emperors who took over from the war lords in Fleet Street came from outside the industry, indeed outside the country. They were used to different standards from those which were customary since the mid-Twenties. Having inherited, bought or in some cases stolen or fraudulently acquired part of an industry where the proprietors made fortunes and achieved power by persuasion over the rest of the country, they still resented the fact that their own immediate subjects got well paid for their efforts. In some cases these wages were higher than their own management executives got for kowtowing respectfully. The upper crust were scandalised that their social inferiors achieved something like self-management within the workplace. It did not make any difference to the profits heaped on high by unhappy tired-eyed tycoons who could not spend the money they had anyway, but it offended their sense of propriety and progress. They wanted their power to be absolute and not to have to be told of the mote in their own eye when it came to telling other industrialists how to run their own businesses.
The negotiations with trade unionism, that is to say with workers’ representatives, however distant from the workplace, offended their innermost souls. The worst they had to say of Prime Minister Harold Wilson, perhaps the reason why they planned a military coup against him, was that he invited Trade Union leaders to beer and sandwiches with him at Downing Street to discuss industrial peace. “Beer and sandwiches with trade unions” became a taunt that kept the Labour Party out of power for years, until it repudiated any such intention of handing them out again when negotiating. According to right wing philosophy the workers who made the profits possible should be offered rat poison. Any alternative meant they were running the country rather than the City magnates, whom Government could ask advice as to how to run the country over champagne and caviar.
The final battle lines were drawn over the new technology which would eventually make the old method of printing obsolete. They intended from the first to use it to break the power the workers had achieved and there was no secret about it. Objections to the process of eliminating the industrial gains of the century had to be expressed in terms of objecting to the new technology. But all that the printworkers wanted was the new technology being harnessed to the people who operated it and not used to pile the Pelion of new wealth on the Orissa of old wealth. Like the Luddites (as misrepresented in historical propaganda as the anarchists) the printers were represented as objecting to progress when what they resented was being reduced to servility and penury. For their pains they were described both as Luddites and anarchists though there were none of the former extant and precious few of the latter.
For years we had fought a rearguard action objecting to the dangers of the new technology, many of which were real enough, some of which were exaggerated. Finally a proprietor was found outside Fleet Street with nothing to lose, a former TV studio manager, “Eddie” Shah, who had decided to run some freebie advertising circulars looking like newspapers. He sacked the former printworkers on the presses he took over and introduced the new technology in a pseudo-newspaper which could, unlike Fleet Street, tolerate delay in production in the interests of efficiency.
If an Asian immigrant had been attacked by fascist hoodlums, the police would have been out in force to protect the fascists. As a factory employer protecting his investments against dismissed workers, he had huge police protection. The laws were altered to protect him. Pickets were made illegal, union funds were made subject to sequestration. He stuck it out, at huge public cost, and won. From then on the battle was moved from the sticks. He switched to a national and the rest of the press saw the way ahead. Fleet Street began its death process.
*** <em>Spanish Practices</em>
I don’t know how many times work colleagues said to me, “You know about Spain, don’t you? What <em>are</em> the Spanish practices we keep getting accused of following? Is that the anarcho-syndicalism you’re always on about?” Not quite!
For years there had been talk of following precedent, ‘custom and practice’, in dealings with management. The traditionally Liberal philanthropist cocoa Quakers who ran the <em>News Chronicle</em> had been the first to object to following custom and practice, and immediately these fat cats found their way to the dairy of commercial television rights, they discarded their print empire. Reserving for themselves the profitable sidelines which needed few workers, they simply terminated the paper and devoted themselves to commercial television, which they had cornered as a result of being newspaper proprietors. They need no longer observe “custom and practice” but make their own rules with a “licence to print their own money”.
A piece of American slang, introduced by a song hit in the Thirties, was sometimes used jestingly as an alternative to ‘custom and practice’. “Old Spanish customs” referred to the traditional courteous manners of the first colonialists of California. I suspect in reality the conquistadors behaved more like the Maxwells and Shahs coming into the industry.
“Custom and practice”, the following of tried and respected agreements going back to the late Twenties, were now deplored as “old Spanish customs” and what would have been regarded as gracious in Old California became distasteful to the new conquistadors. Robert Maxwell was the first to pick up the expression and in a mix-up of idiom referred to ordinary British trade union methods in the print as “Spanish practices”. Like “beer and sandwiches” it became a rallying cry for people who always said they were certainly not against trade unions, but deplored the abuses of trade union power, like doing what the members wanted. There was something sinister and foreign about “Spanish practices” that sent a chill down the spine of <em>Daily Mail</em> readers. <em>Daily Telegraph</em> readers protested in the name of Spain where (since Franco) they had seen no sign of these vicious practices but where (since time immemorial) they had seen courtesy and dignity as people followed established customs.
*** <em>The Battle of Wapping</em>
The process towards change in the printing of national newspapers moved inexorably forward. Rupert Murdoch gained control of the <em>Times</em> and various other papers, and declared open war. He moved his whole operation to “Fortress Wapping”, and abandoned Fleet Street and its “Spanish practices”. He offered his workers the choice between capitulation and sacking. Those who capitulated were sacked later rather than sooner. The overwhelming majority were dismissed while on strike. Some lost their jobs while on holiday or sick, some turned up to work to find they were locked out.
A picket was mounted at the Wapping works which were turned into a miniature fortress. Demonstration after demonstration was mounted almost resulting in a blockade. Scab journalists were bussed in, heavily protected by police, not looking right or left lest they encounter the eyes of old colleagues standing in the rain outside while being jostled by the police. Sometimes the confrontation became violent, and almost for the first time I was involved in something where my political interests and particular job responsibilities as a trade unionist coincided. It was odd that for most of the dispute I was asked to hold a watching brief for infringements of the law by the police. It was pointed out when I demurred that I was an accredited TU Health and Safety rep and nothing could be more inimical to health and safety than being bashed over the head with a truncheon.
Some years after the event of the major battle, a Northamptonshire police inquiry into the actions of the police confirmed all we said at the time. It was leaked to television and taken up by the press. All we had noted and photographed, and what the TV cameras had shown, came as a surprise to the enquiry. Nevertheless, it still whitewashed the offenders, as I commented in <em>Black Flag</em> at the time of the “discovery”.
The police had behaved like an occupation force smashing down the local resistance. They charged into the crowd, beat up elderly people, could scarcely be restrained from killing younger, more active demonstrators, hit out at women and men alike, in some cases at women with accompanying children. All that was just for being there. It wasn’t a case of hitting back at incensed activists, though that did occur too. The enquiry said some of the police force acted in a “violent and undisciplined way”. That was a lie which enabled a further distortion by police apologists that maybe some fraction of the police, perhaps junior officers, lost control under violent provocation.
The attack on the demonstrators to defend Rupert Murdoch’s scab operation was violent but it was not uncontrolled. It had one guiding purpose, to get his papers out on time. All along senior police officers kept command and discipline was maintained. Had it not been, some police could have been expected to run away or at least hold back. Would they all have rushed forward on their own initiative, putting themselves at not inconsiderable risk committing illegal acts in public, just for the sake of getting the <em>Sun</em> and <em>Times</em> to the wholesalers?
SOGAT was sued, indeed had its funds sequestrated, for not being able to ‘control’ all demonstrators though anyone could, and many hundreds did, turn up uninvited. Nobody turned up to support the police. Those who were there were on duty, under orders, and remained so.
I was standing with a bunch of people, taking notes while somebody beside me was using a camera. We were in front of an official SOGAT platform where union leaders were speaking, all dissuading violence. The police ranks were directly opposite us. A woman got up to speak and I heard a voice from the police ranks clearly shout, “That’s Brenda Dean.” She had recently become secretary of the SOGAT. I couldn’t see if it was Brenda Dean or not, but a chorus went up from the police ranks, “Let’s get the bitch!”
There was no media hype against Brenda Dean, no whipped-up abuse as there was, say, against Arthur Scargill in the miners’ strike and since. To the general public she presented an image of moderation, nor had the press attacked her. The only people who hated her, aside from activists who regarded her as far too conciliatory and determined to put her own interests first, were Murdoch’s minions. She put the case against him on television clearly and convincingly if she failed to do anything effectively.
On hearing the cry “Get the bitch!” the police charged forward as one. No harm was done to the woman on the platform (I couldn’t see if she were Brenda Dean or not) as a shower of stones dispersed the police and a scattering of marbles prevented the mounted police charging right at us. The question remains — why would police officers want to “get the bitch”? What could they have against Brenda Dean? The only reason I can think of is that they were following the Murdoch goons’ instructions, and cash hand-outs sanctioned from the top were given. There was no other motive. The police did not appear undisciplined to me. Even in retreat they maintained their rank.
On another occasion I was driving a car on the public highway when the vans wanted a clear dash out of the besieged citadel. I was told by a uniformed policeman to get off the road, which they were about to close, though I had as much right on it as any newspaper van. I handed them the visiting card of a local GP (I didn’t say it was mine) mentioning the surgery was round the corner. I was told, “Don’t argue, doc, or we’ll smash the car”. They did not smash the car but expertly manoeuvred it on to the pavement (illegal parking) as vans came dashing out of the besieged compound at dangerously high speeds (not just illegal but on one occasion resulting in a death).
Strict discipline was maintained. A sergeant was present controlling his men. The crowd, which surged forward when the vans came out, was stormed at a word of command. Horsemen rushed into the crowd, batons flying, like the Charge of the Light Brigade. The policeman who had parked me on the pavement and grabbed the keys came over to me before it happened and returned them, saying politely, “Don’t drive off. I think your services may be needed in a few minutes, sir”. At that, in the traditional newspaper words, “I made an excuse and left” before my bluff was called. But how did he know a doctor would be needed “in a few minutes”?
Other cars who had intended to block the road, and some who hadn’t, were damaged and the drivers roughly handled. I was the only exception. Honesty is not always the best policy, but that’s not the point. Was that the action of a disorganised force who had been unnerved and lost control?
When and where had the nerves snapped, the discipline broken down, the senior officers lost command, as the internal police enquiry said later? The constabulary knew perfectly well what they were doing. They obeyed orders. That is why none were punished though their victims faced imprisonment and fines, after hospital treatment, for defending themselves. Maybe the expected answer from the pacifists, once asked by tribunals “What would you do if a German officer tried to rape your sister?” was “Demand to see his warrant”.
*** <em>The Emperor’s Courtiers</em>
One of the journalists who were satisfied with the warrant to seduce their sisters, or at least, as trade unionists might put it, to betray their brothers, was Bernard Levin. He had begun his career by declining National Service, appearing before a conscientious objectors tribunal. His conscience led him to espouse progressive causes in his student days and he entered journalism with high-minded zeal. He made his career as a columnist on the <em>Daily Mail</em>. As the only daily newspaper journalist ever sufficiently impressed by an obscure article I wrote to quote from it approvingly in a national daily (admittedly it attacked the Chinese Government) I find it difficult to impugn his good taste. When he had shifted by stages far to the Right and was sacked from the <em>Mail</em> (hardly for that reason) on his last evening he slipped an indecent request to his readers past the sub-editors. There is no indication how they dealt with any responses explaining exactly the biological reasons as to how adult readers refrained from bed-wetting. He turned to the <em>Times</em>, where he sat through the palace revolutions and was one of those who slunk into Wapping, bussed in under police guard like criminals into Dartmoor, so he could describe his former colleagues as thugs.
A whole new breed followed in the line of Bernard Levin. So-called radicals of the New Left at University, they started as Trotskyist activists like Peter Hitchens (later of the <em>Daily Express</em>) vigorously denouncing anarchism as petty-bourgeois, worshipping at the shrine of Trotsky. They finished for the most part as red-baiters for the capitalist media, but always with a contempt for working people which their shift to the Right no longer obliged them to hide.
In turn, I never hid my contempt of them, least of all at the <em>Telegraph</em>. There was one, Jamie Dettmer, who had started his career at the <em>Tribune</em>. He differed from the International Socialist and Socialist Workers Party activists like Wendy Henry, who made her way from the Economic League blacklist to editorship of the <em>News of the World</em>. He had come from the Economic League, where his father was a director, to the <em>Tribune</em>, organ of the Labour Left, a vantage point to ferret out information on “the enemy within”, and then became the anti-labour correspondent of the <em>Daily Telegraph</em>.
Dettmer reported “Anarchists in Wapping” were responsible for the violence on the first anniversary of the sacking of five thousand News International employees, blaming it on “new anarchist sects”, some of which were going before daddy had decided to send his boy into journalism, and some of which were flourishing before the proud father had decided to go into the Economic League himself.
If Dettmer didn’t know what was happening under his own nose, he had only to ask someone else in his office. Alternatively he could have looked up old Telegraph files and found (to his, and everybody else’s, astonishment) that his colleagues had once reported, if inaccurately, that old anarchist sects had penetrated every corner of British life, had thousands of members and papers selling at every news stand.
Probably he knew that neither the new stories nor the old were the truth but he wasn’t going to allow that to stand in the way of an exposure. “Unlike the more established Trotskyist parties,” he wrote. “The new anarchist sects try to remain comparatively anonymous. They prefer to act covertly at demonstrations and hang back, provoking confrontation”. One would have thought it difficult to provoke a confrontation by hanging back though I admit that on this occasion, while the ‘established Trotskyists’ were busy selling their papers, I was sitting in my car, ‘covertly’ provoking a confrontation because of the extraordinary notion that I was a doctor.
However, after Dettmer was held up to ridicule on this by <em>Black Flag</em>, his stories on that journal became more covert if still confrontational. He invented the “Hurricane Gang” at the same time as the Economic League found it. I am never sure whether daddy gave sonnie the stories or vice versa, or if it worked both ways. Some time before, <em>Black Flag</em> had taken a postal address at British Monomarks which required a code name. We chose, at random, “Hurricane”. The address was “BM Hurricane, London, WC1”. Some idiotic journalist, in the absence of a story, made great play of this “secret address”, used in the same way by hundreds, maybe thousands, of businesses, religious, political and musical groups, at a time when the press was adopting strict security passes into their fortresses.
Hooligan Press was started by a friend — it had nothing to do with us — who asked if he could use our postbox. Later it faded away. The Anarchist Black Cross and one or two other groups, some of which we did not even know, also used it for a time. They all therefore became the mysterious “Hurricane Gang”! The attacks on <em>Black Flag</em> merged into attacks on the mysterious gang, which some kindlier commentators transformed into the “Hurricane Group”, and we started getting enquiries for the mysterious group, including one from an interested weather forecaster.
** 24 The New Left; “Anarchy’; Lost Weekend; Venice Observed
*** <em>The New Left</em>
It came as a shock to me and the survivors of the old anarchist movement that the student movement of the Fifties, with a middle-class background or the results of scholarly brainwashing, regarded itself as the New Left. As one friend observed, “The Old Left was bad enough, God knows, but <em>this</em>… .” One trend emerged from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, another from the events of the Soviet tanks going into Hungary. Most of the originals have gone from student activists to mandarins. The failed mandarins-to-be took hold of the new liberalism they created and ultimately became professional organisers of presumably good causes or gave university lectures on them, the only growth industries of capitalism in decline.
It was a significant few of them even decided they were not really Marxists but anarchist, especially if they were pacifists at the same time. At least one of these trends, calling itself the Organisation of Revolutionary Anarchists and having its programme written by a Christian pacifist, finally decided, once it renounced its pacifism, it was Marxist after all and its leaders became Trots or went into the Labour Party, a few passing into the privileged Mandarin class of paid do-gooders.
For the failed mandarins who regarded themselves as anarchists and built on the framework of pacifists who had infiltrated the anarchist movement during the War, the phrase “non-violent anarchist” expressed their militant liberalism. Ultimately many found their way to their natural habitat among the political Liberals, or are now creating environmental pollution in the name of the Green Party.
Hearing the phrase “non-violent anarchist” I felt the way Ernest Bevin did when he went to an international Trade Union conference and heard for the first time of “Christian trade unions” in Europe. “What the hell do they think we are, bleedin’ heathens?” In like manner, I don’t know if we were supposed to be bloody axe wielders, but it certainly reinforced the media prejudice about anarchism equals violence full stop, no more to be said. Soon sober, indeed most, judges were asking solemnly, if they heard a person was an anarchist, whether she or he were a “non-violent” one or, horrors, a “militant” one. For the ultra-pacifist every single person, including the judiciary, other than those accepting extremities of non-violent non-resistance in all circumstances, was “violent”, but tactfully they never spoke of “non-violent Socialists” or “non-violent Conservatives” or suggested there were violent ones.
*** <em>“Anarchy”</em>
Colin Ward, an architect, who began (as a conscript soldier) in the anarchist tradition but was absorbed by Freedom Press and the Failed Mandarin tendency, founded the magazine <em>Anarchy</em> in 1961 as a theoretical journal for them and helped set back the movement as Trotskyist opponents quoted its reformism as coming from “the theoretical journal of anarchism”, which it never was. He first wanted to call it <em>Autarchy</em> but was unfortunately dissuaded. At least nobody would have known what it meant.
<em>Anarchy</em> in its original form helped as much as anything to reinforce the myth of a non-violent, bourgeois, sanitised “anarchism” that could help capitalism out of its difficulties, and later became the inspiration for “the individualist school of capitalist anarchism” that provided the Thatcher think tank, though some of the student gurus Ward brought into being disowned the logical consequence.
<em>Anarchy</em> was well produced, but so many issues were shaming to real anarchists that now and again someone tried to write an article protesting at its excesses of moderation. But to no avail. As much as Woodcock, it divided the activist movement from Freedom Press and its clique. The non-violent people could never understand it. They had no politics, so they put it down to personalities. For years (and to this day) I was asked why I “didn’t get on” with this or that bourgeois intellectual or failed mandarin of the <em>Freedom</em> set. It baffles them too. “Why are anarchists so divided?” The myth of all anarchists disagreeing with or disliking one another found its way to the media, it being presumed everyone calling themselves socialists or conservatives are fully in agreement with anyone else happening to do so.
Ultimately after ten years or so of trying to solve capitalism’s difficulties in terms of revisionist anarchism, Colin Ward gave up to write for political weeklies and the <em>Guardian</em>, drawing on the anarchist past as if he belonged to it. The magazine passed to a group of hippies, who didn’t do a bad job of it, though they fell down on actually collating, let alone distributing, the paper. At least they understood what anarchism was about, if they expressed it somewhat crudely.The difference between them and the Failed Mandarins was that while they might smoke pot and use hippy terms, they were activists. People like Chris Broad, Charlotte Baggins, Kate McClean and others were prepared to fight as well as write, and they took part in real struggles. Anarchism meant something to them, whereas the old brigade of Colin Ward’s gurus thought they were active if, like Woodcock, they wrote articles about long-dead secular saints and discussed in pedantic terms the problems of life at home and death in far off countries. One could work with the new generation, even if at first a bit put off by their appearance. Who was to know in those early days of hippiedom that one hadn’t seen anything yet?
On one occasion I went along to a party they held. A friend from work who took the message on the phone asked to come along too as he had nothing to do that evening, and said he would pick me up by car. I could hardly refuse, and they would not give a damn, though I wondered what he would make of it. When he came I was staggered to find his wife naturally considered herself invited and had dressed up for the grand occasion. She looked a treat, but I wondered what she would make of her first sight all those scruffy individuals in torn jeans sitting around on the lawn smoking pot, with children and dogs running around them, listening to Jimi Hendrix. To my surprise, she thoroughly enjoyed herself.
And it was nice for me to lose a prejudice too. I thought I had none to lose. Unfortunately few of those with whom I had worked for years did. I never had any difficulty working with the new generation unlike most of the working class activists of my generation.
*** <em>Lost Weekend</em>
Around Easter 1983 Chris Broad, who had worked hard at <em>Anarchy</em> and other activities and whom I had every reason to trust, approached me to ask if I would put up his friend Fiona for a week or so. I often had visitors, usually from outside London but hardly kept what is called a safe house. “She’s a good kid and in a real jam,” he said earnestly, explaining his interest in her as “one of these battering cases”. I assumed she was being battered by her man. I associated Chris with Charlotte Baggins, with whom he had lived for some years and had two children. I guessed he might have a closer interest in Fiona than I knew, but had no idea he had parted from Charlotte and married Fiona.
I said I was going away for a couple of weeks and let him have the key. “Oh, I forgot to mention — there’s a little boy — he’s the one who’s being knocked about”, said Chris. I shrugged my shoulders. Fiona came into the room and he said it was fixed. She asked immediately, “Does he know about the boy?” All I had been told about the boy was that he existed but it didn’t cross my mind there was anything more to it. Over the next months I forgot about it.
The next I knew was one morning in November I found a bag of luggage with a note bearing the cryptic remark “Look after my treasures” in the hallway. I had no idea from whom they came and was trying to think who had the doorkey (several did). About ten o’clock that night I returned home to find Fiona and her boy encamped in my living room watching the television and him crying excitedly, “That’s my dog”, which I put down to imagination. I was none too pleased at their being there, and in effect having taken over the sitting room, but it was a torrential night and there was not much I could do. I still had no idea of what I was letting myself in for and only discovered what it was in the headlines of the papers next morning.
Fiona had two children, a boy and a girl, who had been put in care following domestic problems with her common-law husband. She had been visiting them both but had formed the opinion her son was being ill-treated by his adoptive, formerly foster, parents. I never met them but from speaking to the boy they seemed a decent, caring couple who had let him meet his natural mother on a regular basis. When she had taken him to Chris, the free-and-easy atmosphere in which his two kids were brought up contrasted with the well-disciplined way in which he lived at home, and divided his loyalties, but he maintained a diplomatic balance (which many adults would have envied) between the home mum and the cowboy mum. I asked him while Fiona was out if he would like to go back to his mother. He first said, “She’s only gone to buy cigarettes”. When I explained, “Your other mummy, I mean?” he said he wanted to go back and see his dog and go to the cubs on Thursday evening, but his other mum would understand why he couldn’t this week.
Fiona had kidnapped him from under the nose of his adoptive mother. It had been planned for some time (maybe two years) and Chris had asked everyone he knew to harbour them, and every single person had turned them down, which is why Chris, rather than Fiona, deceived me. They thought the law was, as it had been a few weeks before, that the natural parent could not be convicted of kidnapping nor a husband accused of conspiracy with his wife (which is why they formally married). An accomplice or conspirator could get fifteen years or so, but that would have been tough luck on me and a bagatelle compared with the joyous temporary reunion of mother and child.
What was I to do, given my background and convictions? The alternatives were to turn them out into the rain quick, to inform the police immediately, or to give them shelter and become an accomplice. Fiona said it would not be for more than a week. Chris was in prison for the week, in contempt of court for not revealing the whereabouts of the boy and I did not mention it to anyone because I did not want to involve anyone else.
The boy seemed happy enough, though I felt for the legal parents. The woman had the child snatched from her as she took him to school, and from the manner of the boy I knew she must have been a good parent and would be hurt by the allegations. But at least she knew with whom, if not where, he was and the husband commented on TV that the boy was probably stuffing himself with Mars bars while they were worrying themselves sick (which was true).
I told Fiona she could stay but not to use the phone. She used it when I was out all the same, to save going in the rain to a callbox, but told me earnestly she had counted the calls which were only short ones, thinking all I was worried about was the tiny expense. It did not occur to her that phones could be tapped. She even thought it would have been illegal for the papers to print the boy’s photograph and wanted to “travel North where the police could not find her”. She phoned Chris’s address to find out how he was, the car hire company who rented out the kidnap car to tell them where she had left it, and a few other places besides. I am not sure if she did not phone the legal mother to reassure her of the boy’s safety too.
Considering the case was splashed over every paper too, the chances of the police not finding where she was were slim. They waited until Friday night, perhaps to make a meal of it, as the saying goes, and a minute after I came home and was taking my shoes off in the bedroom (having no sitting room available), the door burst open. Why they could not have knocked, or come in when I did, is a question one should ask the CID but it is a regular technique — probably the influence of too many violent films.
I spent the weekend in Hertford police cells, feeling utterly depressed. I had flu and thought of a meeting booked for next day to which I could not go, and an arrangement to go to Crewe after the evening’s work. It seemed on Friday night I was abandoned by everyone, but of course none of my friends knew what had happened. On Saturday when I did not turn up at the meeting people thought there was something amiss, and Terry Harrison, the first to realise something was wrong, began a series of phone calls. Later, on the radio, came the news I had been arrested, but for some reason no station, even Hertford, would admit to my being there. Terry rallied the troops around. He got on to Gareth Peirce, a partner in Birnberg’s, who immediately took on my case despite her enormous workload. I got a mild complaint from the inspector in charge that she “bullied” him on the phone. Terry also got the address of my doctor from the local practitioner committee, and she also telephoned, offering to come down to Hertford though all I was suffering from was flu, which resulted in a minor nervous breakdown in the cells.
All that night the Hertford police were taking calls, many of them apparently from long-dead rebels like Joe Hill, Mike Bakunin and even Emma Goldman who, apparently relenting to me after forty years in the grave, phoned in to protest along with more contemporary names. I don’t know if it helped but it was encouraging to get the reports from my custodians.
During the weekend I was inside Stuart arranged for Antony Beevor to stand bail. He was one of the few historians of the Spanish Civil War who told it as it was. As a former Major, author and house owner, he was acceptable to the court, but when lower management at work heard about the episode, and were wondering if at last they had me over a barrel, any complaints were dropped hastily when they heard of Tony Beevor being the bailee. Beevor was reputed to be friendly with Max Hastings, the rising new editor, and though this was based on their both being military historians, the whole affair had been made respectable by this touch so far as work status was concerned. Afterwards the crusading barrister Helena Kennedy reproached Stuart for not asking her to be bailee, but while I have great admiration for her work in the dock on behalf of the victims of injustice I doubt if the <em>Telegraph</em> management would have been equally appreciative.
It was great to know I had so many friends, and I was touched to find that people at work, not appreciating what bail implied, had decided to start a fund to cover the huge amount involved.
When I went to Hertford court for the hearing I was in the cells prior to the case being heard. Birnberg’s had sent down a well-known London barrister who came in to see me, just as the police brought in an aggressive drunk still struggling with three policemen.They had got him safely to another cell when the sergeant — who recognised the civil rights lawyer from TV — said, “Go easy with him, lads, he may damage himself in that state and think afterwards we’ve been brutal”. I question how many times they had heard that said when they were limping from vicious kicks but I guess from the surprised and hurt looks on their faces not very often.
The Hertford magistrates acquitted me at the first hearing but sent Fiona for trial. There had been a bizarre, and totally unrelated, case a few weeks before Fiona’s kidnap, where a man had gone with some thugs and seized his girl friend’s son to extort money and, when she went to the police, claimed immunity because the lad was his son too. The judge had not accepted this and in convicting him of kidnapping his own natural son had set a legal precedent which could have gone ill for Fiona. In her quite different case the jury were sympathetic, notwithstanding the change in law, and asked if she should be convicted if she thought she were preventing a crime even though none had been contemplated. It ended with an acquittal for her too, but I doubt if she was allowed contact with her son again.
When Duncan Campbell wrote up the case in <em>City Limits</em> he described me as a “gentle and generous soul who is one of the leading figures in British anarchism”, which did absolutely nothing for my street cred. It would have been ungenerous to have asked him whom I ever led, but had dear Lisa Bryan still been alive she would certainly have claimed I had finally beaten her for the prize mug in the lame duck stakes. The police seized my diaries and address books, and my handwriting never being copybook, there was a spin-off: an unwelcome visit to a Harley Street specialist to whom my dentist had referred me for problems with my teeth. I hope being thought to specialise in guns rather than gums did not upset the worthy professor’s chances of a knighthood.
I never got my notebooks and diaries back, which has helped destroy my chronology of events in this account of my life. Maybe they are still trying to make head and tail of my handwriting.
*** <em>Venice Observed</em>
Just before Fiona’s trial, in September 1984, an international anarchist gathering was to be held in Venice. I went with Stuart, Margaret of <em>Black Flag</em>, and another anarchist friend Rupal by car. We had to go via Switzerland as Germany had refused Stuart entry on a previous occasion, for a conviction by an illegal military tribunal which the new Spanish State no longer recognised, but with the German State’s own record of illegal prison sentences, who could wonder?
We got to Venice in good time after a swift journey, too much so through the Swiss Alps, which Stuart seemed to enjoy but kept the rest of us jumpy, and then had to drive three times round the square over the bridge into Venice, looking for a way into the city itself, having temporarily overlooked that it has waterways instead of roads, gondolas instead cars, vaporettos instead of of buses.
Over three thousand anarchists from all over the world had entered the fascinating city for this unique occasion. The organisers, the Centro Studi Libertari G. Pinelli of Milan, had fifty people of all nationalities working from 8 a.m. until 1 am the next day at three separate locations — the Campo San Polo, which housed the exhibitions, the Campo Santa Margharita, a working-class area where the social events took place, including the bookstall, kitchen, dining and entertainment marquees, and the School of Architecture where there was a series of mostly boring (to me, at least) lectures chiefly by academics without much relevance to anarchism or indeed anything much beyond thesis writing. Fortunately, as is my experience with conferences, what really mattered were the contacts outside.
I felt privileged to sit down at dinner in a restaurant with international anarchist activists who had given so much to our common cause. It so happened that, as we naturally tended to group together old friends and acquaintances and above all, those with languages in common, at one dinner we found that everyone around, French, British, Italian and Spanish, had been involved in the International Revolutionary Solidarity Movement. I took a photo of this unique gathering (but fortunately, perhaps for security if not for history) it never came out, as usual with my camera work.
One evening I was introduced to Clara Thalmann — she died only a few months afterwards — who had been a formidable figure in the 1918 council communist revolt in Germany. She moved from Marxism to Anarchism in the course of participation of the war in Spain. I had heard of her when Miguel and I had spoken at a meeting in East Berlin and met old German anarchists who had fought alongside the Thalmanns. The East Berliners had survived WWII but afterwards they were in the Eastern Zone and she was in France. It was great for me to exchange memories of Germany and Spain with those of war-time England. These occasions make one realise how historians pick up false contemporary reports and pass them on with embellishments.
From Clara I learned ‘la inglesa’ had died a couple of years before in Barcelona but sadly I had no further details.There was news of many old friends from all around the world. I tried to learn more of friends of past days who were in China and Korea from an old Korean anarchist, but unfortunately his languages were Chinese, Korean and Japanese and so he confined himself mostly to shaking hands with everyone, being able only to speak to the young people from Hong Kong. It was sad to learn of many who had died in the past years, especially in South America where the younger generation had faced State terrorism and the older generation died brokenhearted.
But I was inspired to meet and talk with many young people, especially from Germany and Switzerland, who were eager to talk about past and present workers’ struggles.There was a certain German punk element which was a bit wild and woolly, and who were more in the tradition of Woodstock than in that of Wilhelmshaven, and the organisers’ choice of speakers were more in the tradition of Walden or even Westminster. There was a clear division due to a failure not just to define the goalposts or to clearly mark the boundaries, but to indicate which game was being played.
In a discussion sitting around the square, some young German-speakers complained of the inadequacy of the English or even the German translations of some of the American speakers. It almost sounded as if they were talking of a political party to fight elections on a “green” basis. I had to tell them their understanding and the translations were perfect and what was inadequate was the discrimination of the organisers.
While the exhibitions of the history and geography of anarchism were of the revolutionary libertarian movement, one could hardly say the same of most of the speakers. Some of the participants would have been more at home in a rock concert, but this did not detract from the overall impression of wonderful nights with a new generation from around the world, and also reunions, in one case after over forty years, with people who had been fighting and struggling since I met them in their youth and remained as fresh in spirit as ever.
** 25 Lucky Strike; Direct Action Years; Poll Tax; The Battle of Trafalgar Square; Class War; Leo
*** <em>Lucky Strike</em>
After I returned from Venice, I realised I wanted to move out of my Greenwich council flat, which felt desecrated by the police raid on it. Those who have experienced burglaries feel the same way. I also realised that the way Fleet Street was going, I should soon be out on my ear. I was approaching retirement age, and had nothing whatever to show for my years of work. Had the kidnapping trial been for months rather than days, I would have been homeless, though acquitted.
I looked around to buy a home, realising wryly that had I been prudent I would now be thinking of the last payments of a mortgage rather than starting from scratch. I had never had the spare cash for a deposit and the times always seemed to be against me. Coming across an advertised new local development, in which the builders were offering a deposit well within my means, I decided the best thing to do was deduct fifteen years from my age, adjusting arithmetic to the way I felt, and apply for a mortgage.
Somebody up there seemed to be taking pity on me at last. No sooner had I paid the deposit and arranged to call on the mortgage company, when I had a running stroke of good luck. I had some old first editions with tea-stained covers which I thought were pretty valueless if interesting. I put them up for auction at someone’s suggestion and they brought a couple of thousand pounds. An old friend who had years before borrowed several hundred pounds, which I had long since forgotten, had a lucky evening at the dogs and repaid it out of the blue just when I had totally lost contact with him, among others, owing to the theft of my address book and diaries during the raid.
Then the management called in experts to solve their financial problems and they decided their “losses” were all due to the workers getting too much, especially by way of overtime. They asked all departments to “sell their overtime”, previously guaranteed, offering to pay them the equivalent of three years average overtime in return. All departments bar ours rejected this. I pointed out to my colleagues that the erratic input of news and the behaviour of journalists being what it was, they would still want us to work the same amount of overtime anyway, and so we accepted.
The management was overjoyed to find a usually intractable department agreeing to their experts’ suggestion, and the result is we got a huge extra payment in return for absolutely nothing. It took the management only a few weeks to find the experts as usual did not know what they were talking about, and they could not even blame it on to our taking advantage of the liquid lunches on the other side of the table.
What with one thing and another, within a week or so of committing myself to purchasing a new flat for £43,000 when all I had in the world was £250, I found myself with four thousand pounds in the bank. Then I got a call to say I had won a football pool. I snarled at being awakened in the morning to be told I had won £63,000, as I was convinced I had never invested in one in my life. I told a constant hoaxer at work I would do for him if he ever did that again, to his hurt surprise as this time it was none of his doing and wasn’t a hoax. When I returned home I found nine excited people on my doorstep. It had slipped my mind I had entered a syndicate of ten, paying three months in advance, about five shillings in all (being asked to replace one who died) and the first week they had given my name and address we won. The upshot was next day, when the cheque came, we all had £7,000 odd apiece. One punter had dropped out the week before complaining of the waste of money. I felt they should either include him in the share or at least not tell him. Everyone insisted he had to be taught a lesson and be told what he had missed. What the lesson was, or what benefit it gave him, I never learned because I never knew him.
By this time I had enough to decide not to go ahead with the mortgage but to manage with a two-year loan instead. I had enough in the bank to see me through a couple of years and help some good friends besides. My last two years salary went entirely on repaying the loan to buying the flat, the first home literally my own that I had. From a financial point of view, it doubled in value in two years. I thus retired two years after retiring age with no mortgage to pay, thus proving all one needs in this day and age to get adequate housing and a reward from one’s labours is hard work, careful saving and winning a football pool. Come to think of it, if the latter is big enough, the first two don’t really matter.
*** <em>Direct Action Years</em>
When the Direct Action Movement was first formed, it combined the former Syndicalist Workers Federation, begun by Tom Brown and still active around various cities in the North-East, with the anarcho-syndicalist groups around <em>Black Flag</em> and others which resulted from the tours we ran on behalf of the Spanish Resistance.
Tom Brown, when approaching retirement, had been active on behalf of local residents in Paddington. They formed an action group to protest against the opening up of a Mafia-type brothel and a porn club. As a fluent speaker, who had been an engineering shop steward, he was much in demand. Going home from the night shift one early morning, he was attacked by mobsters and beaten up with iron bars so severely he retired to Newcastle and for the last few years of his life was an invalid.
He and Mark Hendy had kept the SWF alive for years. At one time it had a fair number of adherents, and participated in many struggles particularly those of the dockers. I remained apart from the London SWF, which I realised afterwards was a mistake. My attitude was partly because of the way Ken Hawkes, its long-term and seemingly perpetual secretary, played on an association with the exiled Spanish leadership, with which the Resistance was at odds. It also admitted too many quietists and pacifists for my liking, ever the sectarian.
It was a mistake on my part not to have gone in the SWF and teamed up with Mark and others of his like, rather than being aloof. I was restrained from doing so by my friendship with Spanish activists who disliked the SWF’s associations with those who had collaborated with the Republican Government in the Civil War and were distrusted by the resistance for that and other reasons afterwards. It really did not affect the SWF (not to be confused with the utterly different SWP). What I did not realise, until Stuart came out of prison and I knew his background in the SWF, was that some of its members (English and Spanish) took an attitude identical to my own.
I was never close to any of the quasi-anarchist groups that were springing up in the wake of the peace and new left movements, let alone the old ones. The international anarchist movement with which I was always intimate and which seemed to have pervaded my life had nothing to do with the quasi-anarchism of the New Left, or that defined by the campus or the press, which at first disowned being anarchist unless qualifying it with a negative (such as philosophical or non-violent) or an opposite (such as Marxist or capitalist).
The SWF, anarcho-syndicalist but choked by weeds of the neo-leftism surrounding it, disappeared as an organised body soon after Tom Brown’s death, apart from the Manchester stalwarts. After Black Flag had been going some ten years many proposed that we form an International of our own. We could numerically not have sustained a national organisation, but we always felt there was no need to confine ourselves to national boundaries imposed by the State and re-created them in our image. Way back at the Carrara Conference, we had proclaimed this principle when our grouping had for once been able to speak for an anarchist movement unified, if as it turned out temporarily so. However, this was never put to the test, since the Manchester SWF decided to re-launch the organisation and there was a natural union between them and those who had been working with us for the Spanish Resistance. It was decided to re-name the new organisation after the paper <em>Direct Action</em>.
It may be that the years of building up the Direct Action Movement will not be otherwise recorded but its enemies on the red-snooping scene were not wrong to suspect its potential, though it changed its name to the Solidarity Federation after fifteen years of making the old one known. It is worth recording some of its achievements, especially in proportion to its numbers. It brought local and international support into the miners strike, and in the case of one particular strike at Laura Ashley, the garment manufacturers, such pressure was particularly effective. <em>Black Flag</em> had been viewed somewhat suspiciously by the quietist element in the old Syndicalist Workers Federation, particularly the London section influenced by a few Spanish exiles affected by the years of compromise, who tended to look in vain for international government, rather than direct action, to crush fascism. The First of May Group actions embarrassed them and the involvement of <em>Black Flag</em> scared off the British quietists. But after the tours Miguel and I held in regard to the Spanish Resistance, the quietists tended to forsake the organisation. We then saw that between the <em>Black Flag</em> line and other anarcho-syndicalists there might be a few differences, but not enough to make it worth pursuing different paths.
At first I tried organising a Fleet Street branch. Most of the <em>Black Flag</em> collective were in the Brixton branch. When I moved to South London I joined the Deptford branch, for the first time in my life in a grouping which had some impact on local events and I found them fine activists like many in the DAM.
The non-industrial event which called upon all our resources and those of many others too, and which had an unprecedented response, was the imposition of the ill-fated Thatcher poll tax. This grossly unfair and unworkable tax stirred many from far beyond our ranks into active protest, even in places which had been dormant since Peasants’ Revolt. Naturally the Militant Tendency and the Socialist Workers Party saw an opportunity to sell their papers and protest their leadership of “the masses”. But they played very little part, despite contemporary reporting, in the actual struggle. All they did was to use their slick professionalism to seize control of the Anti-Poll Tax Unions, except in London where the DAM blocked them.
In parenthesis, this was a constant occurrence in the New Left. Organisations spring up over particular issues, to be followed by the Trots moving in surreptitiously and taking the positions of power, so creating a ready-made “mass movement” to serve the “vanguard” Party, whereupon everyone else leaves and it collapses. That is why I named the “Millies” the Tapeworm Tendency. The old CP did that sort of thing but knew how to manipulate fellow-travellers and kept them in the dark for years, not just while they were at university undergoing academic brainwashing.
The SWP kept up a chorus of “Maggie Out” which was taken up by the left, even the Labour Party and, to their dismay, ultimately by some astute Tories putting the blame on Ma’am. The Heseltine faction had Mrs Thatcher ditched, and so earned the party another term of office, as if she had been running a Government single-handed against their wishes. Yet socialists who connived at this shifting of responsibility on one person, however dictatorial she might be, had for years been sniffily criticising individual anarchist actions against tyranny, explaining in superior fashion that if you get rid of an individual dictator by violence, a successor takes power, as if anyone aiming individually against Hitler, Franco, Lenin or Mussolini did not know that and had taken the risk without weighing up the factors. Apparently, though, the superior intellects had not worked out what would happen if you got rid of an individual dictator by non-violent and constitutional means.
Even after the election of 1992 the SWP and Millies were boasting “they” got rid of the poll tax and got “Maggie Out”, but it is nearer the truth to say they got a majority for Major.
*** <em>The Battle of Trafalgar Square</em>
The Poll Tax in Scotland been imposed a year earlier than upon the English or Welsh, it was had presumed because the Scots were largely anti-Tory anyway and therefore to be written off electorally. The Poll Tax was clearly never thought of as a general benefit, though a few did benefit financially (myself included, as it happened — I was always conscious of the irony) otherwise why was turbulent Northern Ireland excluded? Nobody dreamed that it could provoke turbulence on the mainland.
In Scotland its unfairness, and the way it was introduced provoked a feeling of national oppression that was possibly unintended, caused mass non-payment and resistance to sheriffs, the equivalent of bailiffs. This unworthy profession had got away with its dirty work for two centuries. Now its members began squealing about interference and intimidation when it set about putting people’s furniture on the streets and selling them up, as if it were an integral right of a civilised society. In turn when some anarchists in South London broke into a bailiff’s office and piled the office furniture on the streets even without selling it, one would have thought by the comments it ranked with an bomb explosion.
Many Scots thought once there were protests in England, and Whitehall in particular, the Government would relent, as indeed it did insofar as it changed the name of the tax and the Prime Minister, a shrewd piece of duplicity. This was the line pushed by the Scots Nats and the Millies, with other Trot varieties, using their slick (paid) professionalism to organise a march upon London. They were thinking on the lines of the Jarrow marchers of the 30s and of CND of the 60s, both of which seemed to cynics like myself to be based on the assumption that Cabinet hearts were susceptible to marchers’ blisters.
The Londoners could in their turn hardly blame the Scots, nor even the usual whipping boys, the immigrants, for the Poll Tax, and “Whitehall” was as many light years away from Trafalgar Square as from Sauchiehall Street. They did not know what to do about changing the Poll Tax except to refuse to pay if they were brave enough, any more than the thousands milling into the capital did, but they were not in a mood to welcome anyone stopping them trying to abolish it either, even if it were only a case of voting by sore feet. When the police, following some high decision strategy, did just that, they took the brunt of the resentment upon themselves.
In sixty years of watching London demos, without undue expectancy of result on my part, I have never seen the like. I teased my Spanish friends, “We’ve changed places — London’s burning and Barcelona’s preparing for the Olympics — now you get ready to defend our political prisoners!” Sure enough, though, in the coming year there were more political prisoners in British jails than Spanish, not even counting Northern Ireland.
There may have been one or two minor scuffles that occasioned the foray, or it may have been planned in advance by the police, but at a certain moment, just as I happened to be slowly walking across the square chatting, the police gave a warning for it to be cleared in seconds “or people would be hurt”. Within seconds police horses and cars were charging across the pedestrian precinct putting lives in danger. With the vertigo I then had, I could only wobble out of the way but I was guided by a young woman comrade to the safe haven of St Martin’s-in-the-Fields, from whose pillars I had a secure vantage point. Hundreds of young anarchists fought back with whatever was lying around, as the crowd was seething with rage at the attack upon the demo and they helped those who were resisting or surrounded them as the police came forward to snatch them. Only the stewards who had controlled the march to use it as a fishing expedition to catch members, the “militant” leaders of the Vanguard Parties, co-operated with the police, crying “We never wanted this to happen”.
Afterwards a militantly tendentious leader, blaming the anarchists rather than the police or the outraged citizens for the fighting, promised to “name names” of those he felt responsible, in the best traditions of the KGB. At a later conference in Manchester one Glaswegian Trot leader, desperately warding off the accusations of being a grass, suggested that the people who fought back against the police, to their obvious surprise, were actually policemen in disguise. He quoted the late John MacLean’s advice to look at their boots. I do not know what senior officer was believed by him to have given orders for his own men to get a bashing by others, or why he did so, or for that matter why the Trots in that case chose to co-operate with them. But John MacLean was an unfortunate name to cite considering the sly Bolshevik treatment of him, his Marxist “comrades” of the time having suggested he had gone mad as the result of prison torture and that was the reason he refused to accept Lenin’s leadership. Perhaps it was too much looking at large size boots that drove him mad and made him reject dictatorship.
Were the anarchists responsible for the trouble, as the media said? It needs a large over-estimation of their numbers and powers if so. Prior to the demonstration, which had not been organised by them, dozens of us known to the press (even those living miles from London) were being phoned by reporters asking eagerly what “we proposed” to do having got these unsuspecting people in the square. The cameras were focussed on the red-and-black and black flags when the march streamed into the square, and some PC Plod apologist commented on TV that these were the “signal” for “criminal acts and organised looting” (as if people intent on theft advertised their presence).
*** <em>Class War</em>
We had learned a lesson from the famous anti-Vietnam-War demonstration, when press and police complementing each other had run a long campaign saying how the anarchists planned to turn a West End march into a revolution (if it’s so easy one wonders it has never been tried). Then, many of us had spoken to journalists. Their credulity seemed a good joke at the time and when questioned by newshounds we upped it to the smuggling in of tanks, guns, molotovs, you name it we had it, adding for good measure trained elephants and poisonous snakes. Protesting innocence and denying all like the left seemed wimpish, but we had no idea that what we said would be even faintly believed. It was never an obligation for a Fleet Street journalist to be a moron but for those who weren’t, there was always sports reporting.
In the event all that Fleet Street (if one can still call it that when the geographical location has dispersed) was after were a few names on which to pin their inventions and then pursue the people they named as “legitimate news targets” from pillar to post. This had increased so much since the printers had lost whatever control they had to the new press barons and their lackeys that almost nobody by this time was prepared to speak to them. They might have had to fall back on the plaintive attempt by reporters Maurice Weaver and Martyn Harris a few years since of speaking to a few woollies they found at the Freedom Press offices, presenting them as the centrepiece of anarchism and even of a vast mass movement of the Young anti-Establishment. As whoever they found there might possibly have welcomed the poll tax and certainly opposed violence, it wouldn’t have made much of a story.
Fortunately for the journalists there was a new group which seemed to welcome their attention with open arms. A few years before, Ian Bone had started a paper <em>Class War</em>, from which he later bowed out. It came as a cultural shock in its early stages to many older revolutionaries, at first divided in opinion as to whether it was a one-off parody of anarchists like some efforts produced by situationist-type hippy circles, or whether it was a modern version of the caricature-sheet, like those produced by Bonar Thompson in his latter disillusioned days. In fact, it wasn’t either. It was a clever use of the sort of language used by the tabloids, using their own style to express the disillusion felt by young long-term unemployed, on the principle of begrudging the Devil all the discords. They even used their own press agent, equally capable as the professionals at hype.
<em>Class War</em> was at first dismissive of anarchists, confusing them with the non-violent liberal cult, and inclined to a pedantic version of council-communism as interpreted by Professor Pannekoek, the Dutch poet-astronomer, as neo-situationists usually were, without quite knowing what either meant. It originally attracted the drop-outs from the hippy and animal rights cultures, rather than from anarchism. They thus became violent-obsessive but not so much as to be called terrorist, and they merrily fooled one or two pompous papers into thinking they were either a sort of bodyguard for the real anarchists or a newer, more dangerous breed. The tabloids seized on personalities and denounced Ian Bone for “looking like Himmler”. I don’t know what bright spark thought this up. He didn’t and it was hardly an offence, even to good taste, if he did but I think it was the rimmed spectacles that did it. It showed the depths to which British journalism had descended. With all the flak Chaplin took in the McCarthy era, even the worst American papers never harped on his alleged resemblance to Hitler.
Some of the early elements in Class War tarred anarchists with the Freedom Press brush assuming they were the same. One group made a song about me “Hello Albert” — denouncing my “obsession with the past and the Spanish war which was long since over”, not realising or perhaps caring that my obsession (if it was that) was with the Resistance, then for the first time extending through Europe, of which they were quite unaware. This was picked up from pseudo-situationists, who ran special one-off papers to denounce any and every resistance, one of which, <em>Logo</em>, edited by a Richard Parry and Mark Page, managed to disgust the <em>Anarchy</em> group when with others they were nearly fooled into a collective handling of an issue fingering people whom Parry & Co considered activists and therefore named “jokingly”, or hopefully, as prison fodder. Phil Ruff dumped the entire issue in a handy trash bin, somewhat to the dismay of those who felt he was failing to observe a proper adoration of the plaster saint Freedom of Speech whose cult lay an obligation on us to distribute for free a hostile paper.
As Class War was prepared to say the things the media would have invented (Kill the pigs, eat the rich), it became the answer to a maiden’s prayer. <em>Class War</em> editors quite readily claimed they caused the riot and appeared on TV and expressed delight at the damage caused, especially to The Bill. As a result they got about ten million pounds of free publicity and quickly became the most popular anti-Establishment youth grouping for years, with a fixation on death’s heads, killing and graveyards though not one of them ever handled a plastique in anger. Their paper sold like billy-ho, they began marketing tee shirts and other ephemera like a cottage industry, publishers clammered for their reproductions. They, though later more reservedly, took credit gladly given them by the police unable to track down a social relationship for any and every riot and disturbance among the young white unemployed, and were the subject of innumerable articles and solemn academic treatises. The dailies quoted their every utterance as important, knowing their comments would be pithy. The profs solemnly declared their researches showed similarities between the language used by <em>Class War</em> and by the tabloids that denounced them.
But at least when the original leadership altered, the new wave of youth they attracted had more positive ideas. It was more than one could say of the neo-situationists (the third wave of such) obsessed with the “Bonnot Gang” — the first motorised bandits, and class struggle individualist anarchists of the early part of the century. Richard Parry, who supposed I was “imprisoned by the past ” and enamoured of pre-WWII days, went on to write a book on the “bandits tragiques” of pre-WWI days, who would have regarded him as I did, part of the enemy. One of the bunch named J.P. Schweitzer (also hostile to any support for Spanish Resistance as “harping on the past” ) formed a “Friends of Bonnot” grouping and, warned by a wagster one April 1<sup>st</sup> that Special Branch were asking about him, went along to Scotland Yard to explain to a bewildered detective sergeant that it was all harmless, which indeed it was.
The journos, however, though they get younger, remain as venal as ever. Only a few short years after the Trafalgar Square riot, there was one against the Criminal Justice Bill. Gervase Webb, in the “Evening Standard”, attributing it to “Class War” taking over from “Black Flag” as the villain of the piece whenever the police ran amok, puts the two together as allies, both being infiltrated by fascists. For good luck he makes the DAM a breakaway from Class War. <em>Black Flag</em> a “Brixton based group of anarchists and hunt sabs”. It was based in Brixton ten years before, but, while I couldn’t speak for others, I personally was not up to being a hunt saboteur in balaclava and bovver boots, jumping after the hounds. Perhaps Gervase supposed I had lurched to the right and was one of the fascist infiltrators. Dear man, I hope he bruises easily.
*** <em>Leo</em>
A number of campaigns were run from 121 Bookshop. Leo Rosser was the first to became suspicious of a barrister, Tony Jones, with an upper-class manner who was forever photographing contacts he made by attending such meetings. It seemed he was also associated with the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers and many libertarian, militant liberal and socialist campaigns, some of which were inconsistent. Leo persuaded us to follow up the story for <em>Black Flag</em> though <em>City Limits</em> beat us to the punch, and Duncan Campbell exposed Jones as an informer for MI5, working as an agent for security chief Tony Crassweller. He had been associated with Freedom Press, and Philip Sansom and Nicolas Walter rushed to defend him from the accusation. When Jones himself admitted ruefully “he had to live with it”, they did not retract, but Nicolas Walter then stated Jones had not spied upon Freedom Press — he would have found little to spy on — but on 121 Bookshop. It was rather like his riposte to the allegation that he revealed the identities of Randle and Pottle in the Blake escape at dinner — “it was at tea”.
Soon after that Leo Rosser joined our editorial team. He was a bright hope for the future. I liked him immensely, as did everyone who worked with him. He learned Spanish (some of our friends in Barcelona assumed he was Catalan but he was of Welsh origin — the name Rosser fits into several languages) to be in regular contact with Spanish and Latin American prisoners, wrote scathing articles for us, and helped with all the ‘donkeywork’ that goes with any organisation. We shared a lot in common, naturally except music.
At the time of the Jones affair, Leo was living with his parents but he later moved in with his girl friend and seemed full of boundless energy, enthusiasm, commitment and laughs during those short years he was around. One day we were discussing euthanasia, about which many had reservations. (Can you trust all doctors and, where there’s money, some relatives?) He said reasonably that, while he could not understand healthy people committing suicide, when someone reached a certain state of deterioration they should be able to die as they wished. I recall we talked about an event that was coming up in Spain the following year which we both wanted to attend. He also mentioned investigating some stories abut drug dealers and the Spanish police in the next few weeks. But within a week of the conversation he was dead.
The evidence, that he had been depressive for some weeks but concealed it from people, that his relatives and girl friend had finally decided to take him to the hospital for observation for suicidal tendencies, that he had left the hospital, being left unsupervised, and jumped from the nearest high building, seems undeniable. My suspicions as to what really happened are different but unprovable. I am not to be convinced otherwise.
I tried to speak at his funeral, but I failed and broke down. I scarcely recognised some of the anarchists there, smartly dressed and red-eyed, who that very day, (the morning after the Trafalgar Square riot against the poll tax) were being reviled in the national press as hooligan street fighters, but despite my sorrow I felt engulfed in a tide of affection. The thought that a gathering like this of good friends could have been in a dozen or more cities all over the world made up for years of frustration, difficulty and disappointment, but not for the loss.
** 26 Higher Intelligence; Velikovsky; Wonderful Copenhagen; Jim Abra; Counter intelligence; The Informer Who Changed History
*** <em>Higher Intelligence</em>
I have never been impressed with the contributions of learned writers, professors and academics to political or economic theory. Perhaps that is why I have persisted so long in the same political and economic opinions. I have seen every one of them altering their views, squirming when reality proved them wrong and inventing learned apologies insisting they were right all the time nevertheless, but what happened in reality was foreseeable. Anyone who experienced the impact upon the working class movement by the professors’ theories in the Thirties, and lived to see the collapse of Marxism, has the right not to take them seriously.
I am pleased to have seen communism collapse in my lifetime. Leah rejoiced in her last days to have lived long enough to see Leninism overthrown as well as Tsarism. My pleasure was not mitigated by the fact that Mrs Thatcher and President George Bush thought they were responsible for the collapse (though Interpol had propped the Soviet regime up for years), and what they thought they achieved didn’t seem much of an improvement. A few months later, their capitalist economy collapsed in the West too, and there was no lack of pundits to explain that this was a worldwide phenomenon.
As there has never been a shortage of materials nor labour nor willpower, nor the desire of working people to build their own lives securely with decent housing and education and health care, only economists could explain why they are unable to do so because of lack of banknotes which the printers could easily provide. The idea that war (which necessarily implies destruction of people, construction and materials, and disrupts where it does not end lives and education) brings prosperity, whereas ‘peace begets poverty’, is to me, as it was to radicals of a former era, the economics of the madhouse. The sciences of politics and economics, a soft option duo which has replaced theology as the queen of the sciences in the universities, are based on equally bizarre premises as it was.
*** <em>Velikovsky</em>
While being healthily sceptical of experts, realising how easy it is for savants in different disciplines to create their own fiefdoms, I have been more flexible, though more passive, in my attitudes. When in the Fifties I discovered Immanuel Velikovsky’s theories of past inter-planetary collisions and how they were recorded by worldwide ancient mythology, including the Old Testament, I bought his books immediately. I was enthralled how he put the self-important scientific Mafia to rout. He might have been as wrong as they said he was, but as they fell over themselves with misrepresentation of what he said, abuse, academic cat-calling (‘cosmic collisions, he means comic collisions’), censorship and downright blackmail to suppress his theories, they gave lay people like me some reason to believe, even perhaps to hope, he was right after all. The message that we were all survivors of survivors of catastrophes was dismal, but the criticisms of the scientific establishment encouraging. It was odd that many scientists agreed with his criticisms, but of somebody else’s discipline, and his firmest supporters were civil engineers with some knowledge of what he was talking about but no hostages to fortune in the way of challenged scientific empires.
The pack against him in academic USA was led by the astronomy and geology professors who had reached a tacit concordat with the religious fundamentalists who controlled their foundations, and felt threatened if schools and colleges could no longer teach one absolute truth in one lesson and quite a contrary absolute truth in another. The attack that was made for the benefit of the lay public was led by Isaac Asimov, a leading science fiction writer who kowtowed to the scientific establishment. But his dilemma was that either Velikovsky’s theories were phoney in which case he was the best sci-fi writer of all, or they were right and Asimov was an ass. He could not have it both ways. In the curious battle royal American scientists waged against Dr Velikovsky, one noted exception was Velikovsky’s friend Albert Einstein who had been accepted by the scientific establishment from the first, however incomprehensible his work, and despite his being a humble patents clerk at the time. In later years Stephen Hawking’s way-out theories have become best-sellers (he successfully appeals to the public, for which Velikovsky was denounced as a charlatan) but while many of Velikovsky’s theories and predictions have been proved right, he offended too many vested interests for it to be admitted.
I cannot pretend to have the knowledge to pass judgment but I cavilled at a remark in one of his books, writing via an associate of his, Dr Ralph Amelan. I put it into a review of the book in the Cienfuegos Press <em>Anarchist Review</em>, small enough in influence, particularly scientific. Velikovsky more or less accepted my argument and incorporated it in one of his last books “Mankind in Amnesia”.
This argument was that the period described in the Bible as the Exodus relates to a period of worldwide disaster due to cosmic collision. He also ascribed the beginning of anti-Semitism to mistaken ancient chronology (echoed by Josephus) that the Shepherd Kings (Hyksos) were the Israelites entering Egypt, when in fact (he says) they were the Amalekites, hated by everyone as an enemy of mankind. He shows that the Israelites encountered them when fleeing Egypt, fought and finally defeated them but the later confusion with them caused the hostility of the nations towards the Hebrews. Surely, I asked, it would be logical, if the nations of the world suffered a universal calamity, and the Hebrews tried persistently to persuade them to the belief it was divinely staged to help one small tribe escape slavery, to cause universal antipathy to them. Velikovsky amended his earlier statement to say there were two causes, later fed by many others, and characteristically added that his sources now revealed the Israelites too suffered crossing the Red Sea.
He had a quick answer and a ready quotation for everything. I found his books mentally the sort of exercise I had once got physically from pugilism. When I questioned him in a lecture I had, like everyone, to admit to myself that where he did not win the argument on a knockout, he was way ahead on points. The great thing was that after all, the decision did not matter so far as I or the lay public generally were concerned. There was precious little one could do about a return cosmic collision, let alone one already suffered, even if he were right. One good thing did come out of it. It got many thinking along lines of preserving the Earth, whose ability to sustain life was finite, and which could perish like other planets had done, though it took me some years to realise that.
At the time I only thought it enjoyable to see his critics getting floored and also to see him ducking and weaving. Having got fat and lazy (despite investigative journalist Gervase Webb who thought I was a hunt saboteur, which would at least have kept me fit) it was a lot less strenuous than boxing.
*** <em>Wonderful Copenhagen</em>
When I was in Copenhagen in the ‘70s, I had some unexpected local publicity, both because the English printers were news and on a different level so were anarchists. I was invited to speak by the Danish Anarcho-Syndicalists, who were well organised at that time, with an imposing HQ and a bookshop, and the Anarchist Federation very active. Nevertheless, inevitably most publicity went to the squatters’ city in Christiania, a drop-outs’ utopia, founded by a Calvinist clergyman. It purported to show the best features of “anarchism” but struck me as a Statist alternative, more like a ghetto (at least of the Tsarist type). In this little town the police contained drug-takers (though still occasionally raided them) in an otherwise worthless abandoned shipyard. I was taken around like a tourist visiting an African camp. They made and sold handicrafts, lived and worked communally and so long as they stayed within bounds could smoke pot freely. Big deal.
It was the old story of false currency driving out genuine.
*** <em>Counter-Intelligence</em>
Gomez, to whom I had given cover in my Grays Inn Road days, was one of the last of the counter-intelligence service set up by the Spanish movement first in an endeavour to penetrate the various police agencies working against them both in the Monarchy and the Republic, which developed into an anti-Axis network during the Civil War. They uncovered many intrigues against them and also military intelligence, some of it from the homes of wealthy sympathisers with the fascist cause. Gradually, as the “moderates” — in then contemporary journalese, the Communist Party — took over the Republic, their work was realised as essential even by those prepared to collaborate for the sake of unity. However, the divisions in the movement extended to counter-intelligence and Gomez broke away to form a separate group which worked with the Friends of Durruti and other “irresponsibles”, which was the name then given to one of the many groupings who actively resisted the destruction of the collectivised industries and farms and all forms of revolutionary conquest. (Later the name was mistakenly ascribed, by a Trotskyist historian, Felix Morrow, to cover them all, perhaps to diminish their number).
During the world war the counter-intelligence continued to exist, sometimes giving information to the Allies. The anarchist Resistance fighter Poznan actually got decorated by the British and French governments, for what it was worth. Like all intelligence services this one brought in some dodgy characters, which is the occupational disease of the job, and in London particularly so. This was partly because of the disability under which the CNT in exile worked in England. When the war broke out the decision of what to do, certainly not the life, was easier for them on the Continent. They carried on the struggle and were in the front of the Resistance fighters in Spain, France and Belgium. They were held in suspicion by the Allied command anyway, which was far from being anti-fascist so far as Spain was concerned and dubious enough so far as the actual enemy was concerned. There was no chance to compromise even for those who had made compromises during the civil war on Spain. Neither the Resistance nor the anarchist intelligence got, nor expected, any thanks from the Allies for their work of sabotage. All they expected was the chance to march back into Spain but even in that they were to be disappointed.
So far as we were concerned here, what to do was far less clear. It was a difficult decision for British Anarchists. So far as the Spanish were concerned, however few illusions they had about the British Government (which some did have) they were hardly in a position to express them. During the war most of the males went into the British Army, where some were in the foreign sections of the Pioneer Corps, many in commando units in and beyond the front line. They did not have the chance to form independent or illegal partisan units as in France. However, some were in more forward units, especially if they came directly from the French Foreign Legion, some for instance in Crete and Norway. In this case the War Office issued them with false identity papers giving their birthplace as Gibraltar, in case of capture by the Germans. One “Gibraltarian”, a good friend now settled in England, was interned after these battles in a German POW camp, and was able to pass over food and cigarettes to Spanish deportees from what Prof Allison Peers at the time described in “The Spanish Dilemma” as their ‘voluntary exile’. The dilemma was not the one the worthy prof thought. In many cases this exile was terminated involuntarily and they were sent back to Franco to be shot. Even those in Britain had to watch their step in regard to choosing between enlisting or deportation. In German-controlled territory, in the absence of a direct request for repatriation, they were worked to death in the camps or murdered for non-submission.
It was natural in these circumstances for the counter-intelligence of the Spanish movement to work differently in England. A small group of Spanish people, separate from those in the armed forces or in industry, were working for the BBC as translators and so on, and from there it was a short step for those who had been caught up in the world of intelligence and counter-intelligence to pass to the Ministry of Information, as the propaganda arm of government called itself. Ultimately those who may have started out as anti-fascists became absorbed, as they would not have been in the French situation, in officialdom.
One such was Garcia Pradas, a professional journalist who had edited a CNT newspaper at home, and continued to write fairly inane books in Spanish after the war, including a disclaimer on why “we deserved to lose” — and “we” of course were his first love, not his new. One of the counter-intelligence agents, closely associated with Sonia Clements, was Porter (formerly Polgare) who was in fact a Central European by birth, but always insisted he was Spanish (not that anyone cared about origins in the Spanish movement). He was involved in British Government propaganda and information on Spain. Gomez, whom I met after the war, was highly suspicious of him, though others were not. He apparently reverted after the war and was in fact quite useful in uncovering the story of how Premier Juan Negrin had stolen the entire gold of the Republic and caused the loss of the war. It was revealed finally years afterwards and exposed the role of the Socialist Party, but had no effect, not even electorally.
“Gomez” was not the real name of my friend from Grays Inn Road days. He earned a living working for a multi-national concern. Though I have not heard from him for many years, if still alive and in the country to which he emigrated with his second wife, revelation of his name and past activity would do him harm. I bestowed the name on him (a friend of mine, in typically English fashion, called all Spaniards “Gomez”) when I was giving him cover. His daughter had been shot by Franco’s Falange more or less randomly when they entered Valencia, his two sons had been killed in prison after the war ended, and their mother died in the bombing of Madrid. He spent many years working for revenge. I did not know his history until Miguel Garcia came to London. Miguel recognised him immediately. Miguel spoke admiringly of his activity, and as he rarely over-praised anyone I deemed it sensible not to ask questions where the answers could be compromising. When I met Laureano Cerrada in Paris, he laughed heartily when I referred to “Gomez”, but recognised him instantly and remarked, “He’s the only one of us who always stays out of prison, and if he got in he’d take the only mattress”. They called him ‘el mono’ (the monkey) as he still claimed, by virtue of his War Office papers, to be Gibraltarian.
It amused them that everybody else in that circle entered Spain at their peril, like Sabater and many others backpacking, or at best with a mule, over the Pyrenees like smugglers (as some were) whereas he travelled at ease by car like a tourist. Both Miguel and Laureano warned me to be careful when I said Audrey and I had taken him as a passenger several times into Franco’s territory, but one can hardly accept a caution from people as audacious as they. Finally Miguel decided it was the least hazardous way of returning. Waving British and American passports saw us through, and sometimes not even troubling to do that with a British number plate, in the days when the English were popular. At the time of Queen Elizabeth’s Jubilee we were even saluted by the Guardia Civil, which produced a rare smile on Gomez’s face.
The British police, and ultimately some journalists, seemed to think I had something to do with the Spanish Resistance but if so, I am, like the Spanish police, unaware of what I did.
*** <em>Jim Abra</em>
It is not hard to know what James Abra did to deserve years in prison. It was literally nothing. He was the unlikeliest person in the world to be even a dissenter, let alone a spy, but he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was a technician working at Plessey’s, sent to Libya to work on a Government contract. He had finished his contract and made a map to find his way to the airport as it was understandably difficult to follow the road signs in Arabic. That and a copy of “Jane’s Fighting Ships” were all the documents he had that were in the least ‘suspicious’ when he was stopped by guards. He was immediately taken to prison and tried for espionage, these documents representing all the evidence.
Just at that time the Libyan Embassy in London had been involved in an incident involving the shooting of a woman police constable. As the British Government were complaining about the murder, the Libyan government, with Islamic reasoning and socialist rhetoric, complained that the British had sent Jim Abra on an espionage mission. The trial was in Arabic which he did not understand but any defence was useless, as the US government had decided to bomb the country for other reasons. Whenever Washington told Mrs Thatcher to jump, she asked “How high?” and that sealed Jim Abra’s fate.
The press kept mightily coy about it and apart from a mention or so it was dropped from discussion. His wife was told the situation was delicate but the Foreign Office was acting. Indeed, they were acting the part of Pilate and washing their hands of it. For years this went on. Other wives at Plessey’s were enraged at the inaction in support of Jim, one of them being a cousin of mine, whose many petitions went ignored. We rarely met but when we did, she raised the question with me. I did not know about the case.
I sussed it was not much use writing petitions to the British or Libyan Governments, and decided to strike at the soft underbelly of Gaddafi. He was pouring money into “the revolution” abroad, something he interpreted very liberally, including Trotskyists, Black Nationalists, the IRA, the National Front and all stations in between. Through the Black Cross we embarrassed the Trotskyists, particularly their then daily paper, with petitions from Plessey workers (false I regret to say, but they never printed them anyway), and also Sinn Fein, saying they were supporting a regime that unjustly jailed fellow-Irishmen. I hope Abra, whom I never met, forgives me but I changed his alleged affinities many times in the course of the agitation. Anyone backing Gaddafi got hassled, in the hope they’d explain the reason to their paymaster.
I have no idea if it worked, but when Abra was released unexpectedly after several years in jail he thanked my cousin for the campaign on his behalf which had led to his release in the months after she had long since all but given up and the sustained nature of which she knew nothing about.
*** <em>The Informer Who Changed History</em>
During the years in which Alberola was regarded as Public Enemy No. 1. by the Franco police and connected with the Interior Defence of the libertarian movement, there were innumerable disasters. In the events of 1962 which preceded the downfall of the Franco regime, arrests and frustrated plots followed one another as volunteers rallied to the final thrust against the Franco regime.
The apparent immunity of the dictator to every attempt against him gave rise to many suspicions. Gomez kept himself aloof from the Interior Defence (DI) until the end. He remarked that Sabater and his brothers, as well as Facerias and others had always gone it more or less alone, and it was a last resort to choose an affinity group. He accepted with equanimity Miguel’s description of him as another holding ‘rancho aparte’, pointing out that Miguel himself had done twenty-two years in jail, and while he respected him for his record, could hardly regard him as an expert on avoiding the repressive methods of the fascist police.
After the capture of two dedicated comrades Delgado and Granados, doubts were again raised and ugly suspicions voiced in anarchist circles. Those in the MLE who did not wish to disturb a comfortable lifestyle as a fossilised non-leading leadership, left over from the days of the civil war, denounced the whole idea of urban guerrilla activity. This attitude was forced on the International Workers Association by the sheer predominance of the MLE, though the Swedish syndicalists, the SAC always gave the fighters active support, ironic when one thinks that the MLE and IWA (AIT) was at the same time accusing it of reformism.
I am sure the passive attitude would have been echoed by the sham-ans clustering round the Anglo-American scene, who never lost a chance to sneer at resistance, if only they had known it existed. It was a reaction to these attitudes that caused me, at least, and many abroad to put down to sheer bad luck what pursued the Spanish resistance of the fifties and sixties. Time and again the Spanish police covered up with ridiculous stories how they managed to trap conspirators, such as the yarn about Stuart wearing a kilt when he entered Spain, for instance. The truth of the matter only came out in 1993, when it was revealed that Alberola’s trusted aide Guerrero Lucas had openly joined the Spanish police years previously, presumably being an informer before being taken on the strength.
The fact that in the finish General Franco died in bed, the only persons to torment his rest being his doctors, was a greater victory for him than 1939. Had it been otherwise, Spain would have abolished, not liberalised, its dictatorship.
** 27 Two Fascisms; Anti-Fascist Fascism; The irascibles; the End of Fleet Street; Retirement; Down Under
*** <em>Two Fascisms</em>
When Phil Ruff took over <em>Anarchy</em> in 1982 he made a positive anarchist magazine out of the third attempt, even though it did not last long. A measure of his success was that, although <em>Freedom</em> had built their commercial viability upon the old magazine, they speedily withdrew not only recognition but even use of “their” address from the magazine, because it upset the liberal elements who had been prepared to swallow the second series as a painful necessity. They denied <em>Anarchy</em> was the same journal as it had different editors from the original, which <em>Freedom</em> also had many times over.
<em>Anarchy</em> concentrated on investigative research and among its scoops was a lot of the dirt about the two fascisms, high and low. This peaked with their publication, jointly with Refract, of Stuart’s <em>Steffano delle Chiaie, Portrait of a Black Terrorist</em> in 1984. The maladroit title ensured the book wasn’t widely read, but it exposed the Italian fascist-financial-terrorist racket. Anyone who took the trouble to read it and had money to invest would have been spared involvement in the sensational collapse of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, in which hundreds of Asian shopkeepers lost everything, enticed by its Arab ownership, and one or two councils lost their ratepayers’ money, induced by the phoney Green aura. Conversely, I heard of one or two readers without money to invest took out loans for cars with BCCI knowing they need never repay. But these were readers of Refract and <em>Anarchy</em>. What respectable person would take note of “mindless militants”? It took nine years more for official investigations to discover what was revealed in the book, and about the same time for television to find out about the “stay-at-home-Army” of Italian fascists recruited by the Americans after the War (<em>Gladio</em>) to carry out terrorist operations in the event of a Russian invasion, Communist coup or workers’ rising.
One wonders what sort of reports these Special Branch and Intelligence people make. Considering the huge amount of time and money they poured into investigating the Anarchists, why could they not seize on revelations issued by the same people? These pointers were ignored. One can understand that the financiers or the investigative broadcasters did not read these publications, but the police most certainly did. Are there some rackets the Government want kept quiet?
The parties playing at street fascism faced the dilemma after the War that fascism had become associated with the defeated enemy and they lost their natural backers in the Establishment. In any case, it did not need them any longer. They were now a political embarrassment, unlike Mosley in his heyday, when leading Tories thought he would eventually return to the Conservative Party as a workers’ leader and, whatever personal views they had of him, take the place they eventually, and reluctantly, gave to Winston Churchill, with similar pro-fascist but not pro-(German) Nazi views. High fascism had no need for the street fascists after the War. They sought to take advantage of diverse political trends, pro-Europe, anti-Europe, anti-Communism, anti-Zionism, pro-Irish nationalism, anti-Irish Republicanism, above all the racial tensions created by immigration.
The Establishment would only need them as a stick to beat the workers. To make itself credible, fascism had to strike at an unpopular minority nobody would defend, and then another, and another, until finally it seemed invincible. The technique had worked elsewhere, but it was not needed here and the fascists could not build up a home base. Eventually they settled on what was regarded as a “skinhead” base of youngsters who just wanted a fight, the sort of people who spent large sums travelling abroad to away football matches just for the pleasure of beating up foreigners or supporters of rival home teams. With such people there was no question of argument or discussion. With the racially-motivated punter one could argue, or with experience convince, but with the street-fascist there was only one argument that carried weight. The police had long stood by while street speakers were beaten up, even, perhaps especially, women in the Suffrage days. When fascism came along and up to the present the police have been concerned with free speech for them, indeed treated them as a protected species.
This is why conscious anarchists were engaged in smashing into fascists every time they emerged, and from them, and one or two other groups, came the slogan of “No platform for fascists”. It was to the great credit of the DAM that it did so, when the Failed Mandarins were echoing the Liberal line of “leave them alone and they’ll go home”, presumably wagging their swastikas behind them. The SWP and others such as the Anti-Nazi League wanted to make political capital out of fascism, by selling their newspapers and chanting “Nazi Scum”, often at the very people going out to bash the fash.
Perhaps recognising this, the National Front at one time cast envious eyes at what they thought of as the anarchist movement. Like the Leninists they thought they might “convert the Anarchist masses and turn them against their leaders”. (sic) They wrote to <em>Black Flag</em> suggesting we debate. We answered in our columns with the words “Fuck Off!” Later Martin Webster, when he turned from the National Front and denounced his former comrades in the usual fashion, elaborated that “they even approached anarchists like Stuart Christie but he told them to get drowned in their own shit”. In fact the apt if not witty or original two word reply was written by the then Brixton editorial but everyone enjoys namedropping. In one press statement one NF faction claimed hopefully it was no longer fascist or even racist but “anarchist and libertarian” but this only caused the faction to vanish. Perhaps like the Young Tory right wing “anarchists and libertarians” all they meant by the former was the legalisation of cannabis and by the latter not having to pay tax on it either.
Meanwhile <em>Searchlight</em>, ostensibly a magazine to combat fascism but ever more dodgy since its founder Maurice Ludmer died, had been full of misinformation about anarchists and direct actionists (meaning DAM) “co-operating with Nazis”. <em>Searchlight</em> tried guilt by association. If a person lived on a squatted flat in an estate where a couple of Nazis legally lived, this was trotted out as suspicious. Neither could they forget if someone in his or her youth had been a fascist. Perhaps they took themselves as proof that anti-fascist propaganda could never have an effect. Unless ex-fascists worked for <em>Searchlight</em>, they were damned for ever more.
It admitted it had “agents at every Channel port” watching Nazis coming in and out, but for a small monthly paper to have this meant only one thing. They were referring to contacts with Special Branch, with whom they swapped information, though it was never difficult to “listen in” to fascist inside events. Several members of fascist groups worked for anti-fascist organisations. I knew one former anarchist (maybe he still was one, though he had told everyone he had renounced his faith) who had lost both legs in war service. He was supposed to have become a fascist overnight. I saw him in a wheelchair in Furnival Street, and found he was going to the <em>Jewish Chronicle</em> office. I waited until he came out and spoke to him. He admitted he sold information and reckoned he was doing a good job for anti-fascism, being a member of three rival fascist organisations. There were several others of whom I know, one or two still living and whose cover I will not blow, who supply tidbits to different news and investigative agencies. I doubt if the motive is ideological in these cases.
Some of the professional anti-fash, mind you, stink almost as much as the fascists. One such approached me to find out what dirt I had on an actor, who for at least sixteen years had been a firm supporter of anti-fascist causes. He was not particularly well known (except as a TV soap character) but, according to this “anti-fascist” investigator, had once been in a fascist youth group. The sleuth was determined to “expose” the infamy. Even if it had been true, which I could not possibly know, I reckon the actor must have been all of fourteen years old at the time. I need not repeat my remarks but they were in a similar vein to those of <em>Black Flag</em> to the National Front.
*** <em>Anti-fascist Fascism</em>
The politicos who controlled the ANL like nothing better than having their followers chanting at Fascists and in individual confrontations being beaten up by fascist gangs, in mass ones by the police. It proves what they say about Tory governments. They themselves write letters to the Press signed by the hopefully famous, appealing for a legal ban on whatever fascist party is going. Having seen the same show for the first two or three performances, I never troubled much about the last to date.
Anti-Fascist Action is somewhat different. In the latest manifestation to the date of writing, it has countered fascist-style terror applied by gangs against isolated individuals, on the classic 20s German model, with positive action against fascists venturing out in mass under police protection. Thus it has prevented repetition of the 30s in the East End, when mass fascist demonstrations, surrounded by a serried police guard, made the fash fashionable. The same, multiplied, goes for the Continent. It is not the violence of the Nazi parties that constitutes an ultimate political danger, whatever individual damage it does, but the apathy and submission to them of everyone else. Break that pattern and they splinter.
Few nowadays remember, as I learned from contemporaries, how puerile and ridiculous the German Nazis seemed in the years before they were handed power. and how powerful the organised Social Democratic workers and the Communist Red Front were. Unfortunately, with the first whiff of illegality, the leaders vanished. One day they were parading through the streets as if they were about to take power, the next day they were skulking in cellars, corralled in warehouses converted into concentration camps. The military leaders, trained in Russia in the Red Army, went into exile and in Spain sneered at the Anarchist workers who fought without any knowledge of the correct Marxist discipline required to do so.
My experience is that passive non-resistance is the other side of the coin to tyranny. Pacifism can be positive when governments are perpetuating conscription and war. But when there is no war the judiciary that condemns pacifism in wartime looks much more adversely on ‘violent’ action in defence of a class or a scapegoated minority.
Premature conception of a fascist menace can prevent a revolutionary movement making its own agenda. As that is the primary object of fascism, the ruling class does not need to go to the inconvenience of financing a fascist movement, as the British and American Establishment did in Germany and Italy the 20s and 30s.
*** <em>The Irascibles</em>
It should never be forgotten that the Nazis were a conscious creation of American big business and the US government, that Italian fascism was encouraged to grow by British interests. Both turned against them and they had to expend their blood and their own treasure to defeat it. Only the most extreme Marxists deny this. I heard an Oehlerite during the War saying it was a phoney struggle, to disguise the fact that the capitalist powers wanted to destroy the Soviet Union. But it didn’t stop him decamping to an air aid shelter twenty minutes later.
I remember how in the period of the Cold War the American Government, terrified lest Irish Republicans (then under Stalinist control) penetrate the dockyards, set out to destroy the Official IRA. They created the Provisionals, originally backed by the Republic, and originally with an emphasis on Nationalist tradition rather than Nationalist revolution. When the new set of Troubles began twenty years ago, the Provisionals pushed the Officials out of existence and took over. It ignored its sponsors in the same way as Lenin spurned his German Imperial sponsors who paved the way for the Bolshevik takeover.
A few years later I pointed this out in our journal, and received some feedback and hate mail. An article in <em>Red Action</em>, one of the other participants in AFA, but neo-Trotskyist, ignoring the visit by Gerry Adams to the President of the United States for help in the anti-imperialist struggle, scornfully repudiated the fact that the imperialist powers could have set up the Provisional IRA when they could clearly be seen fighting against it. They took the view that the Northern Republicans were fighting fascism, and the Loyalists were fascist, as ‘proved’ by the attitude of British fascists to the struggle, though almost every other fascist party in Europe supported the PIRA. The Provos took advantage of their faith by asking them to put their money where their mouth was, and two English members of Red Action were charged with the Harrods bombing and went to prison for 20 years, still confident of IRA military victory. As, typical of Trots, they had taken the key posts in AFA, its records and addresses fell into the hands of the police.
*** <em>The End of Fleet Street</em>
What was known as “Fleet Street” vanished not with a bang but a whimper. A history that began with the struggles by people like Richard Carlile for unlicensed printing and a free press ended sordidly as a result of “Eddie” Shah and the Murdoch-Maxwell empires.
A few years before, J. M. Alexander, Kitty Lamb and myself had laid a wreath outside the former offices from which Carlile (1790–1843) had launched his battle for a press independent of the government. True to the morality taught by the new press lords, it had been stolen within five minutes of our leaving.
After Shah’s cost-cutting and union-bashing exercise in launching <em>Today</em>, Murdoch had taken the initiative in the transformation to the new technology as an opportunity to smash trade unionism. It was backed by legislation, to introduce by quasi-constitutional means, like Mussolini, what Hitler and Franco had done by force of arms. Other industrialists, with the printers and miners defeated and the re-introduction of rising unemployment to provide added threat, were able go for recession, pretending it was a natural or divine plague like those of Egypt, but only hitting the low-born.
Within the national print industry, others achieved the same thing with varying degree of effrontery and enthusiasm, encouraged by the craven words of the journalists who had for so long depended on the printers always to back them when they were in dispute. When the Battle of Wapping was over, other press mandarins who had stayed aloof came out with the daggers they had been sharpening in silence. It was the real time to heap wreaths upon Richard Carlile, whose spirit was now dead, if not at peace.
What was almost immediately noticeable was the decline and fall of whatever standards remained in British journalism. For years proprietors, and certainly editors under instructions from proprietors, had been hesitant of the worst exercises in power because of the fear that the printers might not print the edition concerned. It was bad enough what did go through in the name of not wanting to interfere with the freedom of the press proprietor, but now grossly racist cartoons, virtual incitements to mob rule, violently offensive anti-worker stories or incredible exploitation of individual suffering, which had all at one time or another been considered too risky to pass the print room or had to be withdrawn, were the order of the day.
Before long <em>The Times</em> had degenerated to the gutter, while the <em>Sunday Times</em> in its newfound exhilaration was writing sleaze even upon royalty let alone anyone else, and libel lawyers flourished like the green bay tree.
Maxwell, on the other hand, used his newspaper assets to cover his criminal empire. His crookedness had been known for years. I had seen them proved years before in the Simpkin Marshall deal, and I was an obscure figure with no inside knowledge. Everyone knew what he was up to, but while he had the money to splash around he could buy any member of the Establishment and any journalist. The City gentlemen who had for years conspired to keep him out as a foreign crook, when they had plenty of their own, thank you all the same, had been bought by him.
With his mysterious death they turned against him, but until then, the only people who tried to keep him in check were the printers, whom he hated. They were unsuccessful eventually, paying for their curbs on him by his stealing their pension funds while decimating their ranks, taking advantage of the draconian measures of the government and the revolution in print production.
At the <em>Telegraph</em> the death was less dramatic. Union activity remained fighting to the finish at the shop floor when the official leadership lost interest and negotiated deals in which the management scored hands down under a new proprietor imported from Canada. By relocating the building the new tycoon neatly divided the workforce. They split the firm into two, one company for print and the other a pre-production plant in the new Canary Wharf building, which meant an end to solidarity with the new laws against secondary picketing.
Large redundancy payments were paid, even to those past retiring age, as long as the bulk of printers and maintenance workers had not moved to the Isle of Dogs and remained organised and strong. Gradually these faded in deals done with union officials, but not with reference to members, until the pre-production workers they needed were shifted. When but a handful of us were left in Fleet Street, the bonanza ceased. When it came to the end, I had to retire without qualifying for the large sums others had got while the union was still effective. I was in the same boat as those who had moved to Canary Wharf when they had served their purpose.
*** <em>Retirement</em>
I had never seriously thought of what retirement would be like. For years I had been a “barrack room lawyer” which kept me busy between my paid work, my holidays and my propaganda activities. I had forgotten how to be idle. It was gratifying to know I wasn’t totally forgotten and people still brought their troubles to me. I remained active with old friends in the anarchist movement, an undeserved legend among the younger activists, and a bete noire to the phoneys.
Just before retiring I had a holiday in Morocco which was the first I had for years in which I did not encounter the movement in one part of the world or another. Now that I could go further afield than Europe, North America and Africa I thought I would do a lot of travelling. I had never been seriously sick and apart from one or two minor accidents had never seen the inside of a hospital as a patient except once for two weeks, to lose weight. But no sooner had I finally retired from work than I suddenly experienced an alarming vertigo which stayed with me for three years.
I seemed to be spinning around dizzily and the specialists suggested it was Meniere’s disease. Finally they agreed it was not, as that goes with deafness which I did not have, though the tinnitus I suffered years before returned, but they could not decide what it was beyond an affliction of the inner ear causing loss of the sense of balance. Fortunately I could still drive but getting out of the car to walk caused the outward signs of drunkenness. After being breathalysed by the police twice when I was perfectly sober, I used a stick purely as an alibi at first but came to rely on it for a couple of years.
We were still producing <em>Black Flag</em> but four of our editorial team, the most valuable we had since Stuart ceased to take an active part after the collapse of Cienfuegos Press, went to Australia. Margaret and Peter had already gone; Jessica and Terry were about to go. Terry had the idea that if I also went, we might produce <em>Black Flag</em> from Down Under. I was a bit sceptical about that possibility, as were others, but when I had an invitation from some friends with whom I had formerly worked in Deptford DAM to come and visit them out there, I decided on combining a long holiday with a lecture tour, hoping that a trip around the Australian continent might do me good anyway.
I must confess too that the vertigo had made me feel near death a few times, and I reasoned that if I made the grand tour on credit card and died in the process I would have the last laugh on the banking system and made sure there was someone to weep at my grave, if only from Access and Visa.
*** <em>Down Under</em>
I had some good meetings in Sydney which the anarcho-syndicalist organisation put on for me and I renewed old friendships, as many people in anarchist circles had been to London for a time. I had not realised some of them were Ozzies. There were a few in the Spanish and Bulgarian circles I had met, too. Both circles had long been stalwarts of the Australian scene. Indeed, the anarchist movement had been strong in Bulgaria and fought long and hard against the monarchy and the Nazi invasion, and continued the fight against the Communist dictatorship, but before total annihilation a shipload of Bulgarian comrades had left for Australia. They and the veterans of the Australian IWW had been the last representatives of the international movement in Australia for years until a new wave of youth came along to join their ranks.
In Alice Springs I met for the first time the indigenous Australians, in particular the new generation in whom the old Dreamtime was reawakened in the form of nationalism. Their ambitions are unlikely to be realised. Australian Genocide has been much more complete than in North America, where the indigence was at a far higher state of civilisation when crushed by military intervention, euphemistically described as Discovery. The Australian folk were doomed to extinction by whoever ‘discovered’ them first, if not the British, then the French or Portuguese, or maybe at a later date the Japanese. The way of life of the remnants of the so-called “aboriginals” is one dispirited, workless, driven from their old homes and sacred sites, bemused by drink; notwithstanding those who have moved into modern times and are equal to anyone. The latest trend among white folks is to boast, not merely of being descended from convicts but of a hint of aboriginal blood in their ancestry. But it does not do the “blackfella” in the outback much good.
Yet after two centuries of being first feared, then hated, despised, and finally murdered by the conquerors, the “abos” at last have come, after a fashion, into their own. It has been realised they have a key commercial use for exploitation in modern life. The tourist does not come to Australia to see the Test Match or the Sydney Opera House, nor even the beautiful West Pacific beaches, but (or at least, also) the attractions of the Outback with its sacred sites of Dreamtime. Historic places like Ayers Rock are incomplete without colourfully dressed unpaid extras in their original settlements, and so the sacred sites have now been officially declared their “spiritual” possession where the people who once ruled the vast spaces of what was then a wholly unspoiled beautiful land need do nothing more strenuous for their dole cheques than pose for the cameras, secure in the knowledge it is “theirs” for ever by historic right and law. Spiritually, of course.
** 28 My Discovery of Sweden; The Schism; ‘Nordic Anarchism’: Weekend in Macedonia
*** <em>My Discovery of Sweden</em>
It was as long ago as 1938 that I first contacted the Swedish anarchist movement. From 1938 until 1940 I was the London correspondent of <em>Brand</em>, then under the editorship of C. J. Bjorklund. I fully intended to learn Swedish and keep in contact. I broke off contact for obvious reasons. I postponed learning the language until late 1991, quite a gap for good intentions. Maybe by the time I speak it I will find an angel who speaks only Swedish, or be able to converse with the divine Greta in her own tongue. At the time they translated the articles from English and persuaded me to learn Esperanto instead. I learned it quickly and forgot it quickly. I found this a blind alley, linguists speaking to linguists rather than nations to nations.
What I liked about the Swedish movement was the way it recognised anarchism could stand on its own as a revolutionary workers movement and yet blend into the syndicalist unions. During and after the Spanish war, the syndicalist union, Swedish Workers Centralorganisation (SAC), showed exceptional solidarity with the CNT-FAI.
I was told a story of the aftermath of Franco’s victory, when the banks robbed the people, the reason people like Francisco Sabater thought nothing of robbing the banks. All Republican money whether in currency or held on deposit, became worthless overnight. Work became a privilege accorded by the new rulers, social security was not dreamed of. With everyone impoverished, as in Germany after both wars, cigarettes became a new currency.
Miguel Garcia told me and some Scandinavian friends at a post-Franco get-together in a Barcelona bar that all during the world war many a Catalan, himself included, would go to the quayside with handfuls of genuine but now worthless Republican currency and buy cigarettes from Swedish sailors. On the sale of tobacco, the smuggling of which is an old-established tradition in Spain, they saved themselves from starvation. Bearing in mind the solidarity shown by Swedes during the civil war, Miguel said he felt ashamed when he met any after WWII but there was then no other way of keeping alive. “Our money was only good for papering their ship cabins,” he said. “That’s exactly what they did with it,” replied a Swedish comrade. “At first the seafarers might have been fooled but after a few weeks everyone knew how things stood”. Northerners, and sailors in particular, are seldom credited with delicacy and tact but such was the case.
During the war the International Workingmen’s Association (it later, with English-speaking movements adhering, changed its English name from the historic but archaic IWMA to the less sexist-sounding International Workers Association, better known by its French initials AIT) was situated in Stockholm. The SAC was the second largest union centre in Stockholm. It had been going since the early days of Syndicalism prior to World War I. In some parts of Sweden (as in Spain) membership was a family tradition. Yet it retained the anarcho-syndicalist ideology acquired in the bitter strikes of its early years through the more comfortable times of prosperity that came with war-time neutrality.
After the war there was a battle within the SAC between reformist bureaucrats who wanted to nestle comfortably in Sweden’s liberalism, and those who wanted to retain the early principles. The State allowed trade unions an exceptional degree of freedom, and the conventional trade union (LO) was a partner in administration. The IWMA through its international committee was dominated by the clique represented by Souchy, Rocker and Rudiger. Their attitudes after the war were those of disillusioned old men clinging to liberalism and the avoidance of persecution. They wrote fulsomely of America, of the co-operatives in Israel, of the need to defend democracy against Russian aggression. Every one of the war-time platitudes was preserved by them and they added a few others. There was also still an element within the CNT which thought the Allies not merely should but would ‘logically’ destroy fascism’s last bastion in Spain.
This belief in ideology as against politics started for them in the Spanish Civil War, when it seemed inconceivable to some that, but for cowardice, Britain and France would not leap immediately to their aid, and free America was their natural Ally, Hitler and Mussolini were destroying democracy, so ‘logically’ the democracies would respond. This was the theme of Spanish civil war propaganda and even those who knew better came to believe it. They could not grasp that the British government was the force behind Franco rather than, or as much as, Hitler, who would never have dared at that stage to show his hand; and certainly not Mussolini who only ever followed the safe line like a jackal.
At the end of WWII the British Embassy invited the leaders of the various opposition groups to meet to discuss an “alternative but acceptable government” to Franco’s. Cipriano Mera commented he did not see the point of inviting them to sit down with the Monarchists, for instance. I told him I did. It is a process known to gardeners in which one cultivates the weeds so that they can bloom and be destroyed the easier.
But even people like Sabater (certainly his associate Miguel Garcia and others with whom I discussed it) who were cynical about Allied actions believed the latter were blind not to see that Franco during the War had been anti-British and pro-Nazi. I always retorted they were not ‘blind’ — that so would the British politicos and financiers themselves have been had circumstances demanded (and the French Establishment did), a remark which was put down by my Spanish friends as worthy of Sancho Panza. The British ruling class, however, were not so quixotic as to hold against Franco the fact that he had staged anti-British demonstrations in which those who had conquered Spain trampled on the Union Jack and called for conquest of Britain. Since he was also engaged in restoring City investments, he was reckoned to be entitled to his fun. They would have seen him trample on their grandmothers rather than lose profits. Who suffered from it, bar escaping Allied servicemen in Franco’s jails? What if by their actions Germany gained and spun the war out a year longer and the odd million extra lives were lost? What mattered was The Economy.
John Anderson, for many years the secretary of the SAC and of the IWMA, financed an enquiry by a group of Swedes into the involvement of British firms and government agencies with Nazi activity in Spain. Though British military intelligence were working with the Spanish Resistance in their fight against Franco, assisting Allied soldiers to escape, forging German ration cards or burgling the German Embassy, hard-headed commercial intelligence was looking ahead to a future fit for business heroes to exploit.
British companies were trading with Germany via Spain and Sweden. In the Anderson report this was documented, though its compilers took for granted this was done illegally and not connived at by Whitehall. I had a translation in English. It was seized by Special Branch in a raid on me while staying in a friend’s West Hampstead flat one day during the war, and it was curiously scheduled in the list of contents taken as “a German pistol and military passbook”. I never heard more of the mysterious pistol and passbook nor indeed of the translation. Perhaps it helped them in their enquiries, or perhaps it stopped them in their tracks. Of one thing I am sure. The Anderson report did not tell the British government anything they did not know.
*** <em>The Schism</em>
It was sad that in the sixties there grew up an as yet unresolved schism between the Swedish anarcho-syndicalists and the Spanish, which threw a shadow on the international movement. Long after the reformist elements in the IWA had died, the revulsion against their policies continued in many organisations, the personality cult they engendered among the academic periphery keeping their names alive and it was assumed they spoke for the SAC rather than for a vanished clique.
It is also the case that Leninists were unable to get a foothold in the Swedish workers movement, where the workers were in advance of the students as regards political understanding, and no vanguard party could presume to tell the workers what to do and expect a mass following. They therefore spread the story of the SAC’s compromises which was gleefully picked up by anti-syndicalists. One notorious one was that the SAC appointed ombudsmen, which was actually true, but it was not understood by English speakers (myself included until I went to Stockholm) that while this might imply Government commissioners in England, it was a Swedish word for social workers giving advice and counselling. Unlike this country, such activities, and many others that would have been run by the municipality or the State, were run by the unions.
What with one confusion and the other, the SAC and IWA parted company, but as the SAC was still internationalist, it responded to what it thought was a genuine section of the Spanish CNT, the “renovados” or Phoney CNT, and for this was ostracised throughout the anarcho-syndicalist movement. When they held a conference in November 1990, three of us from <em>Black Flag</em> went. We could not expect the DAM, affiliated to the IWA, to attend as such though we were all members of the DAM as well. We were amazed at the high calibre, organisation and morale of Swedish anarcho-syndicalism, for which I was totally unprepared. There too we met members of anarcho-syndicalist groups from all over the world, though mostly those outside the IWA. I was greatly impressed by the syndical organisation of the SAC and found it better organised than much of the TUC of which I had experience. It was a pity that Sweden was no longer in the IWA and was reduced to supporting odd little pseudo-syndicalist groups here and there in the world as the result of its mistaken Spanish policy. As we had previously mistakenly attacked the SAC in <em>Black Flag</em>, we had pleasure in getting up and admitting we had been wrong.
But when I attended the IWA congress in Cologne a couple of years later nobody wanted to know.
*** <em>Nordic Anarchism</em>
Previously when I had been in Copenhagen, where they had provided some good Anarchist Black Cross meetings, I had been unable to persuade our friends, all of whom among the younger comrades spoke good English that the word “nordic” had corrupted associations in current idiom. They explained logically when the term “Scandinavian” should not be used and “Nordic” used instead. My one-person campaign at least to use the original term “Nordisk” without translation left them baffled. It is a pity to yield the term to the Nazis, but reference to a “Nordic anarchist conference” sounds odd in English ears today, and produced an unwelcome enquiry from a bemused American fascist group.
In Stockholm the Black Cross decided to discard the “cross” on similar semantic lines. When we first used it, we were thinking of the “Red Cross” rather than the Christian one. The Spaniards, used to “cross” indoctrination in every walk of life, had sheered off the name from the first. The Stockholm activists used a more traditional if “nordic” name, the Anarchist Black Hammer.
With the breakdown of controls from the former Soviet countries and the tighter controls on immigration in the West, people have poured into Sweden from all over the former satellite countries, from Turkey and from Africa. Unlike previous immigrants, however, who came to work they are attracted by social security benefits that have already been obtained. This gives rise to a climate where racial conflicts are created especially as many are not interested in learning Swedish and want to pass on to English-speaking countries. This assists the growth of neo-Nazism. The Nazis are not interested in solving problems, they are interested in exploiting them.
Many liberals in Sweden as elsewhere have shrugged off the Nazi menace feeling they were entitled to freedom of expression, which in practice means the occasional racial murder, arson or attacks on foreigners or punks.
As their activities were becoming respectable, the Swedish Nazis tried for even greater freedom of repression by holding an annual meeting in Stockholm’s Kungstradgaden, by the statue of Charles XII, the Swedish king who swept across Europe (with a victorious army of mostly Turkish mercenaries). The neo-Nazis were attacked by isolated anarchist and punk groups, but could always rely on huge police protection and so defeat all small attacks vigorously.
The Anarchist Black Hammer decided, in the dearth of political prisoners in Sweden, on a challenge to the Nazis. They told the police they would be having a meeting half an hour before, at the same spot. No doubt chuckling at their naiveté, the police agreed, provided they finished in time for the patriots, and laid on ambulances. To the surprise of all the anti-fascist meeting brought out 16,000 people (an amazing figure for Stockholm). The syndicalists brought out the dockers.
When the skinhead Nazis turned up for their meeting armed with coshes ready for confrontation by a few individuals, they found not only a crowd ready to protect themselves, but an outnumbered police force unwilling to face the odds. The fascists received a real bashing and many supermen were howling for mercy. When the ambulances arrived they were taken away bleeding.
While this was going on the trots held a meeting near to the tube, from which it would have been easy to disappear underground had things gone the usual way. Thus they were able to attract a certain crowd leaving the station and thinking this was the alternative meeting. True to the modern left-wing belief that if you chant a slogan many times it will come true, they called “Fascists out!” and “Build the revolutionary party!” and screamed constructive slogans such as “Fascist scum” at the anarchists and syndicalists apparently strolling to the statue with sticks.
Many of these carried nothing more lethal than golf clubs and might well have been on their way to a quiet game with the fascists. They were the ABH and not the GBH after all. It is regrettable that a great many tee shots that would have done credit to St. Andrews Royal & Ancient were swung before they realised they had mistaken the gleaming shaved heads for golfballs.
The secretary of the Anarchist Black Hammer was named and his address and phone number given by the Nazi newspaper. Death threats were made against him. Following a radio interview many of the law-and-order lobby recanted support of the Nazis, saying they were against immigration but had not realised they were being taken for a ride by the Nazis. It seems strange that they turned against the Nazis for their hooliganism only when they were beaten up.
A year later one saw the point, when British fascisti travelled to Sweden for the sole purpose of causing a senseless football riot, exploiting the British football fans and the Swedish population alike, just for the fun of it. Those who hold the principle of free speech for all to be a marble saint might reflect on the pointlessness of giving a platform for Nazis. The Swedish police, typically, tried cheaper beer and music. That was not what they had come for. The whole purpose is to create a situation in which they can appear powerful and get support. In doing this, race and immigration are merely pools in which they can swim.
*** <em>Weekend in Macedonia</em>
After I came back from Sweden, I decided that, despite hospitality, it was such an expensive country to visit that I could go anywhere so long as the credit card system provided, and begrudged myself no restriction on holidays or meetings, so long as the monthly minimum payments could be maintained. So it was that I came to spend a weekend in Thessaloniki (Salonica), but such was the hospitality I received that in the end I spent nothing.
I stayed with an old comrade John Txiantikis, a remarkable man of eighty-five, a seasoned fighter who had been expelled from Anatolia during the Turkish occupation and spent his childhood involved in resistance activities to the harsh Turkish military occupation. National independence was heroically fought for by generations of Greek and Balkan people but, as always, did them little good when it came as some who fought the hardest had always known.
Growing up in war-time Salonica, occupied by different forces at different times, scraping a living for himself and his family from an early age, he had been in all the labour struggles since 1914. Up to the first world war Spanish-speaking Jews had, as nowhere else, formed a large part of the working class movement and were the bulk of the dockers. However with the end of Turkish rule their proportion and their numbers diminished (they finally disappeared under German rule in WWII), but their traditions of solidarity lingered on long after they had become a folk memory. Local militants of John’s generation still remembered them.
Revolutionary action was endemic in the 20s and 30s though this too was becoming a folk memory and John was one of the few survivors. I was flattered that the local anarchists bracketed him with myself. He spoke English having spent a dozen or so years in Australia with his wife, which is how they managed to buy a flat when he returned home. Like many workers in Salonica, he had as a young man been repelled by the Communist Party whose activity in the Balkan had mirrored Russian foreign policy.
Like many other Greek workers, he accepted the Trotskyist deviation. When Trotsky sailed into exile, leaving Russia in the style of a ruling prince, he passed a Greek port but was not allowed to enter. The fallen dictator stood at the deck acknowledging the cheers of the dockworkers, the last time he was to receive a “mass working-class” ovation. The memory lived on for years, and hundreds of followers of Trotsky, the Red Army founder, were rounded up by the Greek government and exiled to penal islands in the thirties, John among them.
Those of the deportees who survived the Greek nationalists were rounded up by the Gestapo during the German occupation in WWII, sitting ducks in the islands, but many survived to fight on, to be slaughtered by the local Stalinists during the Civil War that followed the driving out of the Germans. It is curious to work out the arguments of Trotskyism but it is easily understandable how outraged the survivors of this policy were at the insistence of the Fourth International that they should be loyal to the Soviet Union, which was still a workers’ state despite Stalin, and so far as Greece was concerned they gave “critical support” to the Communist Party. It is understandable that many like John Txiantikis, turned to anarchism as being not just more idealistic, but more practical, and in modern Greece, with a revolutionary presence besides.
When leaving Thessaloniki airport, I was called into a private room by the Greek airport police and searched. I had been in Greece four days and only had a weekend case with the usual necessities, plus about forty legally printed Greek newspapers. It took them a full hour to search and question me, something I only ever experienced in countries like the former Soviet Union and Britain, and that going in, not coming out, but in this case they wanted to know my mother’s maiden name too. She had been dead a third of a century and had never travelled further from London than Blackpool, apart from one weekend in France. What conceivable use her identity was to them I do not know but as her name had been Shelly, it was near enough to the poet and so told them it was Byron. It was near enough for their purposes and they looked suitably impressed. No doubt they were satisfied that if the family had been inclined to intervene in the affairs of Greece in the past, it was for a purpose of which they could hardly officially disapprove.
** 29 Looking Back; State Over Health; The Slump (Second Act); Act in the Court; Police in the State; Looking Forward
*** <em>Looking Back</em>
In the dark days of the War the public wanted to be told something of what they were fighting for, rather than against, which even so was not always clear For instance, were they to wipe out the Germans — all of them — or just the Nazis? Those who said the former were vociferous admirers of pre-war Germany and later of post-war Germany, but during the war they preferred to discredit ordinary Germans. No such distinction was made between Mikadoist and Japanese — all “Japs” were blamed equally, which meant the leadership not at all. All the Emperor lost in defeat was his divinity. Was the war perhaps just one sort of fascism against other more virulent breeds? Was it for capitalism and imperialism against capitalism and have-not imperialism? A few thought powerful empires could disintegrate and capitalism be firmer than ever in “liberated” colonies. The armed forces, feeling subject to impoverishment at home and fascist-minded officers and discipline, had subversive thoughts of this nature.
The parliamentarian left plugged a European revolution against Hitler since 1940 when Britain badly needed some plausible war aims for propaganda purposes. After a year or so it became plain even to the Tories that their own citizens wanted some too. Civil servants were instructed to draw up the plans of a brave new world and a revolution by consent, and William Beveridge, an obscure backroom bureaucrat, came up with his plan for a Welfare State taking care of people’s social needs from the cradle to the grave. The mighty mountain had been in labour and produced a mouse.
Beveridge gained a knighthood from the Plan. It did not save the Conservative Party from electoral defeat, notwithstanding the newspaper deification of Churchill which was reckoned enough on its own to get the Tories back in power. For himself Sir William Beveridge tried for another step up the social ladder by standing as a Liberal MP and for all he knew a Minister thinking (like Churchill, mistaking press for public opinion) his name would be a counterblast to the Prime Minister’s. He too was discarded and made for the disconsolate reaches of the House of Lords under a grateful Labour Government which made the “Beveridge Plan” its own.
It fitted in nicely with the Fabian panacea of Nationalisation, which the miners greeted with flags flying at the pits. I recall one union official at a meeting in Doncaster saying there would be no more strikes “now the pits are ours”. “Who”, he asked rhetorically, “Should we strike against? Ourselves?” “The National Coal Board,” I piped up, amid laughter, and was told I was a fool. Ten years later I met him again and asked, as if I didn’t know, if there had been any more necessity for strike action. He apologised for his earlier judgment and said he had seen the mines weren’t “ours” nine and a half years before but added ingenuously that he had hoped the Labour Party being in office then, all would be well. A few decades later and what parliamentary socialists had always described as the “syndicalist scare” came true. Whole industries taken over by the State were given back into private hands.
With the post-war groans about rationing and shortages came the false relief that unemployment had been abolished and there was a new order which would provide housing, cause the disappearance of slums and guarantee the lack of poverty and sickness. But only in the mining community was there actual dancing in the streets. They had suffered so much from private ownership they felt as liberated as the American slaves did after Lincoln’s Proclamation, and the illusion lasted no longer.
*** <em>State over Health</em>
So far as the Health Service is concerned, the myth has grown since the days of the Eighties and Nineties that we were in the depths of deprivation and neglect until the NHS, when sponsors Beveridge and Aneurin Bevin opened up vistas heretofore unknown. Health care in the Twenties and Thirties was hardly in a golden age, but in the main, excepting for technical and scientific progress, not inferior to today. The facilities were there on the “panel” whereby one paid health insurance out of a compulsory weekly contribution (which one still pays, and tax besides). There were voluntary friendly societies, the trade unions ran their own hospital and convalescent homes, religious and other organisations ran penny-a-week schemes (not all were rackets), and doctors and hospitals were freely available without a waiting list to members of societies, not just the rich. Miners’ lodges ran their own health service and employed their own doctors (Dr A. J. Cronin’s <em>The Citadel</em> is an example of how middle-class snobs hated being answerable to their patients). The Peckham Health Scheme was a fine example of communal practice combining prevention with cure which many felt was an example of how an anarchist society might operate.
The main problems were lack of funding for health and abysmal poverty causing ill-health. When deprivation ceased because of full employment, even short of a socialised system the best of the old system could have been funded. It was probably a good thing to abolish charity hospitals, but the friendly societies with their cottage hospitals were a lot better managed than the State could provide. There had been little or no provision for teeth and spectacles in the old days but this was not beyond the wit of society to solve. Often married women were left out of the “panel” if they did not go out to work, though the Co-operative Societies made provision for medical treatment out of dividend on purchases and provided non-contributory burial benefit.
The State took over and improved many things at first, but has steadily deteriorated. The doctors were anxious to give treatment. Even as late as the Sixties I was pressurised by my GP into being hospitalised for two weeks for high blood pressure caused by being overweight. I was persuaded to go in without delay but stuck out for a day’s notice. Thirty years afterwards I hear a friend must wait nearly two years for major surgery. His GP would love to get him in immediately and he needs no persuasion. The State is in control and the present government is determined to make the hospitals pay. What the Lord giveth, He taketh away. Even Lord Beveridge.
*** <em>The Slump (Second Act)</em>
The National Slump coloured my boyhood. In the Twenties the aftermath of war meant depression, unemployment, misery, rags. I escaped any hunger though I remember going to grammar school at eleven years old in a patched reach-me-down when my father was thrown out of work and bailiffs moved into the house. In the streets there were ragged old soldiers begging or busking. Still, it was never as bad as many people find today, sixty years and one war after. Begging as a way of life, cardboard cities in the capital, the mentally sick discharged to walk the streets or the growth industry of crack dealing were unknown or thought to have gone forever. There was mass unemployment, especially in the North — in London the diversity of low-paid trades saved it from becoming the norm — from which the “social consciousness” aroused by the War was supposed to have saved us.
The nation was promised solemnly in 1939–45 such conditions would never happen again. Now they are back worse than ever and accepted with fatalism like bad weather, drought, earthquakes, floods and natural catastrophes. Even some of these are man-made, and depression, slump and currency fluctuation certainly are.
Nobody criticised the trade unions more than I did whilst they were powerful. I plugged syndicalism for over half a century and for what my powers were worth never spared the lash on bureaucracy and reformism. In the Nineties legislation and unemployment have reduced their power no less surely than was done in fascist countries abroad during the Thirties. I can now see the worst union was better than the best political party, and their faults were as nothing compared with the absence of any form of workers’ defence.
*** <em>Act in the Court</em>
If I “had done the State some service” at any time, albeit reluctantly, and they didn’t know or appreciate it, it was surely in the number of times I have gone bail. In theory people are innocent until found guilty, but this is only in legal theory, not in practice. It must have saved the taxpayer thousands of pounds and saved dozens of homes.
When I was quite young, still with the boxing academy, John, a colleague, was charged on suspicion of burglary. Two men, whom he did not know, were caught in the act of armed robbery in London but a third escaped on John’s motor-bike. He was visiting his parents in Cardiff, and this alibi was proved immediately on his arrest that same night. Had he said the bike was stolen he would have been in the clear, but he admitted letting “a friend” borrow the keys when he was away, yet declined to name the person. A girl friend had, unknown to him, loaned it to another lover. Not until the driver was arrested two months later, possibly on information from the other two concerned in the hold-up, was he released from custody. That two months imprisonment “on remand” merely for being chivalrous, cost him his job, his flat and his possessions, which were nobody’s concern. In fact his financial loss was greater than the fine imposed on the real driver, given credit for his story that he came forward voluntarily.
This early experience of injustice when I was too young to intervene may have led me into persistently going bail not just for friends, but for people I did not particularly know and once even for someone I never met. Visiting a political prisoner once in Brixton I met a woman in the waiting room who told me her friend was held in custody for an assault on a local drug dealer who had defrauded him. Bail was set at £100. She was not accepted so I offered to act as bailee. The case came up six months later and was dismissed as the dealer had disappeared. Let alone the prisoner, I saved the taxpayer a thousand pounds on this occasion alone. I was never let down by anyone, which was just as well considering some of the ridiculously high amounts I have been asked to stand in default of the prisoner appearing which could not possibly have been met and which certainly wouldn’t have been credited against the money I saved the Crown in forced board and lodging.
For years I was cross-examined whenever I offered to stand bail. Of late it has altered. The last time I stood bail, a few months before writing this, the magistrate, who queried every other surety and refused most, took one look at me and said, “Of course we accept this gentleman”. So maybe things have changed, or else it is the story of the lady who said young soldiers of today had better manners than during the War, when they had always whistled at her from the backs of lorries.
I found that in the Forties and Fifties judges still clung to the antiquated and long illegal notion that if people did not take the oath it was because they intended to commit perjury and feared hellfire if they swore on the Book. Alternatively, as I myself was asked at a court martial, “does your atheism in any way impede your telling the truth?” Mr Justice King Hamilton, a staunch defender in court of the privileges from criticism of Christianity and Islam, but not of Freethought, a Jew and not even an orthodox one, revived this notion in the Persons Unknown case in the Seventies.
I often advise people to take the oath for the very reason that it gives them credence with an old-fogeyish judge, especially in the sticks. I long since ceased to worry about taking it or not. It is a piece of legal flummery that shows one is liable to the penalties of the Perjury Act. However, catch-22 is that then, especially in political cases, an artful barrister may know they are committed to a view of the Holy Book which most people hold privately — a lack of faith in its magic — and may claim in horror that the oath means nothing to them and, free from the fear of thunderbolts, may lie. Which, of course, neither the religious nor the indifferent ever do.
*** <em>Police in the State</em>
From an early age I have professed the ideal of anarchism which seeks to replace the State with a non-coercive society in which the police force is abolished along with any other force, repressive or persuasive, that enforces government on the people. If this makes me anti-police so be it but along with most anarchists of an earlier generation and indeed with most workers, I was never “anti-police” in the sense in which it is now used, until they as a body declared war on society.
The old-fashioned copper is stereotyped in the beer-and-beef bobby who cuffed the kids when they broke a window and warned the mums rather than bring them to court. He is now a semi-legend like the “charlie”, the bumbling nightwatchman that preceded him and outlived the re-formed police as a pantomime character. The old fashioned force was a repressive force but it was near enough to the people for police to be playing football with strikers in 1926. They all felt the Old Bill had a dirty job to do from time to time, but they had to live with the people afterwards. It was an embarrassment to them, like having to arrest your drinking pal for an offence.
This could not happen in a police state and in the late Thirties the police state mentality flourished. It now flourishes like the green bay tree. I’ve seen in my own circles how the criminalisation of dissent or class (or in later years colour) made crime appear respectable, or at least understandable. It happened among young Whites long before mass immigration brought about the same reaction with young Blacks. In the first fifty years of the century we didn’t talk about being in Babylon and it wasn’t expressed (at least in England) in national terms but the same feelings were there and as the police state became more refined the alienation grew sharper. Lord Trenchard saw this in the Thirties and militarised the police. Only in the last few years have some high-ranking officers begun to realise when the chips are down that it doesn’t really work and to talk hopefully of “policing by consent”.
*** <em>Looking Forward</em>
The flourishing of the police state, the new laws against almost everything that helps and the tearing apart of welfare, has led not to a feeling of revolution, as the fear of it did twenty and thirty years ago. It has led to apathy and disillusion with almost everything. In the pollution of any pool in which we could swim, metaphorically speaking, we had to give up publishing <em>Black Flag</em> in 1991 after our stalwarts Margaret, Jessica, Terry and Peter left for Australia and Leo died.
But do I detect a note of change? There seems to be some hope yet. I don’t believe in abandoning the struggle. In 1993 Pippa, Alec, Martin and myself resumed <em>Black Flag</em>, this time as a quarterly, hopefully for its second twenty years, even more hopefully still with me to the end. The least, or (if you wish) most you can say for me is I never give up.
** 30 The Final Curtain
*** <em>The Final Curtain</em>
A lot of old friends died in recent years. What can one expect? I can no longer snap my fingers at the advance of years. The sell-by date has gone already. I have done my best.
Some of my mates had big send-offs. With some their families had the last word and kept their passing confined to the family circle. Sometimes, in Europe or in Northern Ireland, Catholic and/or Protestant relatives and atheist friends had to battle out their differences. Joe Thomas dying in his eighties of throat cancer, after sixty years of smoking forty cigarettes a day, told me on his deathbed that while that may not have helped, he blamed his employers of thirty years before, as he felt it was due to an old fall down a rickety flight of stairs. He expected an argument to the last. Being related to Britain’s No.1. evangelist, Dick Saunders and knowing that at any family ceremony where he couldn’t have the last word himself, his brother-in-law would take over, Joe instructed a private cremation with nobody present at all. But we gave him a send-off at a public meeting with anarchists, Marxists, trade unionists, atheist organisations and his old colleagues all present and not an evangelist in sight.
When Miguel Garcia died at the end of 1981, having come back from Barcelona one weekend to die in North London, the Irish sister in charge of the ward assured me she had “done everything for the poor man, and he received the Last Sacraments”. When I told her he would have been furious if conscious, she said with surprise he had chased off the Protestant chaplain so she naturally assumed he was a good Catholic, adding with a charming smile, “But if he didn’t believe in anything there wasn’t any harm done, was there?” I agreed, thinking that a Catholic end would at least have pleased his old mother who kept her religious faith in a separate compartment from her family beliefs. She had held secret Masses in her apartment in the Plaza Real, Barcelona, during the Civil War with a priest in lay clothes sneaking round each Sunday with the Sacraments in a briefcase to give communion to the old ladies of the barrio. It was an open secret, but, had the priest known, nobody was going to interfere with the assembled mothers and grandmothers of the whole neighbourhood, least of all when they had armed themselves against fascists and Moorish mercenaries.
Kitty Lamb went in her nineties, after a year of vegetation with Alzheimer’s disease. The remains of that ever burning rebellious spark received a religious service by her hospice before leaving, the social worker thinking she was just a lonely old lady. He was anxious when he saw the number of mourners at the crematorium included several Jewish friends, and was concerned lest he had given her the wrong passport to heaven. I told him not to worry as any vengeful ghost hovering around would be laughing her head off.
J. M. Alexander, who lived with her for many years, was murdered in his ‘sheltered’ flat two years afterwards. Always a campaigner for atheism, he was ironically one of the voluntary organisers for the campaign against capital punishment run by former barmaid Mrs Daisy van der Elst, English widow of a Dutch soap millionaire.
Leah Feldman died in her nineties, with a rally of anarchist activists at her funeral, and I went to Chicago to attend another gathering to scatter her ashes among the anarchists of the past such as the Chicago Martyrs, Lucy Parsons, Voltairine de Cleyre and Harry Kelly.
I deeply mourned when the young and beautiful like Evie and Audrey or the young and talented like Billy and Leo, went too soon. It is defeat for us all when people die in action in defence of their class or even as the result of industrialism. It is sad when people go before time, or to see a great brain like Frank Ridley deteriorate at the last of his 95 years.
Personally, I want to die in dignity but my passing celebrated with jollity. I’ve told my executors that I want a stand-up comedian in the pulpit telling amusing anecdotes, and the coffin to slide into the incinerator to the sound of Marlene Dietrich. If the booze-up can begin right away, so much the better, and with a bit of luck the crematorium will never be gloomy again. Anyone mourning should be denounced as the representative of a credit card company and thrown out on their ear. Snowballs if in season (tomatoes if not) can be thrown at anyone uttering even worthy cliches like “the struggle goes on” and should anyone of a religious mind offer pieces of abstract consolation they should be prepared to dodge pieces of concrete confrontation.
If I have miscalculated, as a worthy clerical friend assures me I have, and there really is a God, I’d like to feel if he’s got any sense of humour or feeling for humanity there’s nobody he would sooner have in heaven than people like me, and if he hasn’t, who wants in?
** Appendix I (Chronology for ‘I couldn’t paint golden angels’)
In telling my own story it was necessary to jerk forwards and backwards, not least because of the illegal confiscation of my notebooks and diaries by police on three different occasions, and also to keep a flow to the narrative. For the historical record this chronology of Anglo-Spanish Anarchist associations might be useful.
<strong>1934</strong> — Asturias rising; the last ditch stand at Casas Viejas and first Spanish Prisoners committee in London, whose first secretary was Matilda Green, later Ralph Barr.
<strong>1936</strong> — Civil war and revolution in Spain. Italian group in London begins <em>Spain and the World</em>, editor Vernon Richards. Emma Goldman forms CNT-FAI London Committee and made representative of CNT-FAI Exterior Propaganda London bureau.
<strong>1939</strong> — End of civil war. Formation of Solidaridad Internacional Anti-fascista for aid of refugees; short-lived existence in London organised by Ethel Mannin.
<strong>1944</strong> — Paris occupied by Maquis, driving out Nazis but armed presence of Spanish Anarchists causes alarm and Home Office gives directive to penetrate London-based Spanish anarchists. Divisions between middle class pacifists and liberals, who penetrated British anarchist movement during the war, and rest of movement causes one split. Reaction against those from Spain who entered bureaucracy during Civil War and became ossified in those positions, tending to rely on Allied cause rather than resistance, causes another split, but the divisions do not become clear-cut until later.
<strong>1948</strong> — Drive against the Spanish Resistance by armed groups getting support by workers, now without rights, causes Franco’s government to hot up the internal war. War-time intelligence activities set up by CNT-FAI revived for counter-intelligence against terror measures. Two agencies set up in England and France.
<strong>1949–60</strong> — Jose Sabater killed (November 1949), and four months later his brother Manuel executed, as a result of the “rounding up” of the armed groups. Legal defence arranged for the trial by a group from Argentina. Attacks on Spanish institutions in London during these years. Miguel Garcia sentenced to death in Barcelona (February 1952), later reprieved to life (served 20 years). Facerias killed and Goliardo Fiaschi arrested in August 1957. Francisco Sabater killed, 4 January 1960.
<strong>1960</strong> — February: DRIL openly announces existence with attacks in Spain and Portugal. These are planned in London and Paris.
<strong>1961</strong> — Octavio Alberola returns to Europe from Mexico and is soon regarded by Franco’s press as “Public Enemy No. 1”. The rift in the Spanish movement between activists and quietists deepens. Simultaneously in Britain the rift between activists and pacifists deepens, as bourgeois liberals and pacifists take over <em>Freedom</em> and Colin Ward’s revisionist journal <em>Anarchy</em> re-writes anarchist theory.
<strong>1962</strong> — CNT Congress in August/September, ratified by FAI, approves a secret section DI (Interior Defence) to organise and co-ordinate actions of the Spanish Resistance. But some, like Laureano Cerrada and Francisco Gomez, think this an effort to bring resistance under control rather than extend their activities. Some break away, others enthusiastically co-operate. In December, the Libertarian Youth (FIJL) form the Iberian Liberation Council (CIL).
<strong>1963</strong> — Stuart Christie contacts CIL in England in sympathy with suppression of miners in Spain.
<strong>1964</strong> — 11 August: Christie and Carballo Blanco arrested in Madrid.
<strong>1965</strong> — FIJL breaks with MLE (Spanish Libertarian Movement) in frustration with lack of support for the armed resistance.
<strong>1966</strong> — Formation of the First of May Group to co-ordinate Spanish resistance outside the DI. 29/30 April: Mgr Ussia (Ecclesiastical Counsellor to the Spanish Embassy to the Vatican) kidnapped in Rome; the first action claimed by the First of May Group.
<strong>1967</strong> — Protests at Christie’s imprisonment leads to machine-gunning of US Embassy by First of May Group protesting at US collaboration with Franco. In the following month Christie (but not Carballo) is unexpectedly released, it being stated Franco was responding to a plea by his mother, surprising hundreds of Spanish mothers who had been severely punished for making just such pleas for their sons and daughters.
Agustin Garcia Calvo forms <em>Acratas</em> at a Madrid University, influenced by new protest movement amongst students abroad, but Anarchist rather than Marxist.
Meltzer and Christie re-start Anarchist Black Cross.
<strong>1968</strong> — Christie raided by Special Branch in Hornsey, London, and charged with possession of fake dollars (offset propaganda leaflets of dollar bills with the words “Una vida” — one life — overprinted).
May Rising in Paris. Anti-Vietnam War demonstrations internationally, including one at London’s Grosvenor Square London in October, which has worldwide publicity.
15 October: Alan Barlow and Phil Carver arrested for participating in a First of May Group attack on Banco de Bilbao in Covent Garden. International Anarchist Conference at Carrara (Italy), Christie and Daniel Cohn-Bendit are chosen as British delegates.
<strong>1969</strong> — 22 March: Miguel Garcia released in Spain. Former Portuguese diplomat, Antonio de Figueredo, despairing of attempts at ameliorating the dictatorship of Dr Salazar, persuades local anti-fascists to unite with Iberian dissidents, including ETA and the anarchist activists.
15 December: Black Cross secretary Giuseppe Pinelli thrown by Milan police from window in fake suicide, as the result of a plot by Italian Intelligence and fascist stay-at-home army units (created by US Army from Mussolini’s Intelligence) to make bomb attacks on workers’ institutions and pretend they were by Anarchists thus killing two birds with one stone.
<strong>1970</strong> — The <em>Bulletin of the Anarchist Black Cross</em> (London) becomes the anarchist fortnightly <em>Black Flag</em> and recognised as a voice for the International Revolutionary Solidarity Movement (IRSM).
22 May: Bomb found on the site of the new Paddington Green police station, later claimed by the prosecution in the “Stoke Newington Eight” trial, as the first action of the <em>Angry Brigade</em>, and given as evidence of a Spanish link. Women protesters disrupt the Miss World contest during live TV transmission on 20 November. Flour bombs hurled at Bob Hope. The BBC outside broadcast van parked outside is blown up. This is the first known link between Anarchists and Situationists.
3 December: Spanish Embassy in London is machine gunned. It is claimed at a later trial that the same gun had been used in the August 1967 attack on the US Embassy and is offered as proof of a “Christie link” though he was in a Spanish jail until September 1967.
<strong>1971</strong> — The Tupamaros (MLN) rebel against the military dictatorship in Uruguay, which reduced the “Sweden of South America” to Third World conditions, and a virtual civil war ensures. The British Ambassador to Uruguay, Sir Geoffrey Jackson, is kidnapped, and a statement issued in Montevideo protests how “For years England has drained our economy … obtaining benefits which amounted to thousands of times the invested capital and which never left the country tangible advantages. British Ambassadors did good business for Britain” (MLN Communique, February 1971). They demand the release of Tupamaro prisoners, asking Miguel Garcia to publicise the case in London.
12 January: The home of Robert Carr MP is bombed after he introduced the Industrial Relations Bill, which began the drive to crush trade unionism. This is claimed to be part of an organised “Angry Brigade”.
The ‘mysterious young Scot’ story is featured fingering Christie as major suspect for every armed action in resistance to the Government’s plans for industrial slavery. Jake Prescott is arrested in January, Ian Purdie in March.
Meltzer suggests that if Whitehall agrees to Garcia and de Figueredo acting as go-betweens, which would lead to Jackson’s immediate release, they should be asked to release Purdie and Prescott, not yet sent for trial, as “brokerage”. Christie approaches two journalists from <em>The Times</em> with known connections with the Foreign Office. They are more concerned with making a case against Christie and the negotiations fall through. Though the plan did not come off, this is one of the internationally concerted defence efforts that caused Interpol to concentrate efforts on growing anarchist activism.
In August of the same year, Anna Mendelson, Jim Greenfield, John Barker and Hillary Creek are arrested at Stoke Newington. Next day Stuart Christie and Christopher Bott are arrested separately. Next month 100 Tupamaro prisoners, including Raul Sendic and Julio Marenales Sanz, specially asked for, escape from Punta Carrera prison, and three days later Geoffrey Jackson is set free after eight months which he could have been spared. Either this is a record mass escape from a heavily guarded jail, or the British government, while rejecting the proposed intermediaries, put pressure on Montevideo.
The bombing of the Post Office Tower October is attributed to people under arrest at the time.
Angela Weir, Chris Allen and Pauline Conroy, representing a widening political spectrum, are also arrested in November and charged with the five already held. But Conroy and Allen are freed on committal, in the lack, not merely of proof, but of any relevant charges other than their sympathies. <em>Anarchy Collective</em> member Kate McLean is arrested on 18 December and also charged, the defendants thus gaining the description “Stoke Newington Eight”.
Still in December, the Prescott-Purdie trial ends, with Purdie acquitted for sheer want of evidence, and Prescott convicted, despite obvious jury sympathy, on admission of writing envelopes, which counts as conspiracy. Sentenced to 15 years (reduced on appeal to 10).
December: Formation of MIL-GAC (Iberian Liberation Movement — Autonomous Combat Groups) in response to growing police terror in Spain in the dying years of the dictator.
Attack on Black Cross extends to Germany, where Georg Von Rauch is shot dead by armed political police in West Berlin (4 December), and Tommy Weisbecker in Augsburg (2 March, 1972.)
<strong>1972</strong> — The MIL-GAC become active and the first known action of the MIL takes place in Barcelona. Puig Antich, actively concerned with pushing the Spanish libertarian cause in England for the past year, returns to Barcelona.
The Stoke Newington Eight trial opens on 30 May and ends on 6 December, making a record as the longest trial in British history. Four defendants are sentenced to ten years after a plea for clemency by the jury, four are acquitted. It may be significant that the evidence rejected was from or through Spanish police and markedly political. The jury accepted British police evidence as less overtly political.
The “John MacLean Society”, a Maoist grouping in Scotland, carry out a series of expropriations, an indication that some Marxists here, as on the Continent, wanted to move on a scene which was proving popular among workers feeling threatened by governmental proposals. Matt Lygate was sentenced to 24 years and altogether the four, all of whom had been made redundant, and wanted to make an affirmation against being put on the scrapheap, got 81 years jail between them. Glasgow journals, notoriously knowing nothing of Scottish history after Mary Stuart, referred to John MacLean as a “well known Anarchist”.
<strong>1973</strong> — Dafydd Ladd and Michael Tristram arrested in Bristol on 14 September and charged with three attacks on Portuguese vice-consulates in Bristol and Cardiff, and outside the British Army Officers Club at Aldershot, claimed by a group calling itself “Freedom Fighters for All” but manifestly part of the same spontaneous wave.
Puig Antich arrested in Spain on 22 September and garrotted the following year (2 March, 1974). Extensive reaction to Spanish government targets throughout British, Irish and European cities.
<strong>1974</strong> — February: In Bristol, Ladd sentenced to seven years, Tristram to six.
3 May: Spanish banker Balthasar Suarez kidnapped by the “Groups of International Revolutionary Action” (GARI ) in Paris in an action aimed at securing the release of 100 political prisoners in Spain (under the Franco government’s own laws). It also demanded re-payment of part of the union funds of the CNT seized by Franco. Though Suarez was released unharmed after the payment of an undisclosed sum as ransom in a week or so, police arrested nine French, British and Spanish anarchists in Paris. French and British police make (unlawful) joint raids in London, mostly directed at Spanish residents.
Formation of FOI (Iberian Workers Federation) inside Spain, with Spanish, British and French collaboration, to enable co-ordination of resistance activities disowned by exile movement.
<strong>1975</strong> — Irish activities, on the same lines as those in the UK, become prominent during the campaign to free Puig Antich. Prisoners’ rights activists jailed for explosions. Noel and Marie Murray arrested on 9 October and charged with murder.
20 November: Death of General Franco (birth of general rejoicing). CNT-FAI reconstitutes in Spain officially. FOI becomes redundant. Schisms between various sectors over the years thus unresolved and co-operation breaks up. The anarcho-syndicalist emigration sends back with returnee’s private possessions duplicators and printing presses, collected by “Black Flag”.
<strong>1976</strong> — Robert Touati, French anarchist active in Centro Iberico around 1974 and Juan Durran Escriban, wanted in Spain for an attack on an armoury, both killed in grounds of Toulouse University during the night of 8/9 March. Police claim them as members of GARI and responsible for a series of anti-Franco actions in Southern France.
MIL member, and former Centro Iberico activist, Oriol Sole Sugranyes shot dead during escape of Resistance prisoners (all ETA members bar him) from Segovia jail on 9 April.
Laureano Cerrada, veteran of the plot to kill Franco and Hitler together, murdered in Paris on 18 October by a Spanish Nazi who is given asylum in Canada.
10 November: London Murray Defence Group occupy Aer Lingus offices in Regent Street. Similar protests are made in Madrid and Sydney, the first ‘reciprocal’ protest to be made in Spain for years.
<strong>1977</strong> — Iris Mills and Ronan Bennett are held under the Prevention of Terrorism Act in Huddersfield, and exclusion order signed against Bennett (born in England). Order revoked on appeal.
The “Lewisham Three”, who had been active in aid for international prisoners and solidarity with Spanish resistance, are charged with holding up a betting shop in October, and receive seven years each on a first offence.
<strong>1978</strong> — A series of similar raids, between 1 January-21 May, are linked. Iris Mills and Ronan Bennett are arrested in Bayswater on 24 May. They, together with Vince Stevenson, Trevor Dawton, Dafydd Ladd and Stewart Carr are charged and become known as “Persons Unknown”.
<strong>1979</strong> — September: The Persons Unknown trial opens. Ladd jumps bail and does not surrender for three years, when he receives nine years on other charges. Carr, an outsider to anarchism, pleads guilty to anything the police require and is sentenced to nine years. All the others are acquitted. Carr’s “confessions” are read out by the judge after the trial when they can no longer be challenged in open court and berates the jury as too sympathetic.
<strong>1992</strong> — The TV film, “A Matar Franco (<strong>To Kill Franco</strong>)” is made in Madrid, a film documentary based on news coverage, previously unshown film and current shooting, telling in full for the first time of the various, mostly unpublicised, attempts to kill Franco by the Spanish CNT, the Basque nationalist ETA and international Anarchists (Spanish, Mexican, Belgian. French, Italian and British). The identity of an informer who came from or passed to the ranks of the secret police is confirmed.
** Appendix II (Albert Meltzer’s ‘political record’)
On <em>Black Flag</em> collective editorial board from its inception 22 years ago until now. There have been some thirty editors all told, all unpaid, usually a minimum of four at one time. The paper was at various times fortnightly, monthly, and is at present quarterly, though recently it has had some timelag holdups for various reasons.
Currently honorary contributing researcher for the Kate Sharpley Library.
One of the founders of the Anarchist Black Cross (as reconstituted in the 60s) as a political prisoners support group.
A member of the anarcho-syndicalist Solidarity Federation (formerly Direct Action Movement), affiliated to the International Workers Association, and functions secretary of the Red & Black Club, Deptford (a local).
Writings include:
<br>
<em>The Floodgates of Anarchy</em> (with Stuart Christie)
<br>
<em>The Anarchists in London</em>
<br>
<em>Anarchism: Arguments For and Against</em>
<br>
<em>The Origins of the Anarchist Movement in China</em>
<br>
<em>First Flight: the Origins of Anarcho-Syndicalism in Britain</em>
<br>
(ed.) <em>Miguel Garcia’s Story</em>
Articles in <em>Spain and the World, The Struggle, Controversy, War Commentary, Revolt!, Solidarity, Brand</em> (Sweden, pre-war correspondent), <em>Volonta</em> (Italy), <em>Freedom, Direct Action, Man!</em> (USA), <em>Workers in Uniform</em>, <em>Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review</em>, <em>Secular Review, The Iconoclast, Cuddon’s Cosmopolitan Review, Ludd, Ruedo Iberico</em> (Paris), <em>Black Flag</em>, etc.
<br>
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#title Industrial Britain on the Move!
#author Albert Meltzer
#SORTtopics Britain, labor movement, capitalism
#date 11 February 1939
#source Retrieved on 19<sup>th</sup> May 2021 from [[https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/rbp1jd][www.katesharpleylibrary.net]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2021-05-19T13:11:56
#notes <strong>From:</strong> <em>Revolt!</em>, 11 February 1939 [thanks to comrade IM].
The popular myth about the conservatism of the British workers has again been shaken. Gradually, but surely, there is another swing-over to industrial direct action. In spite of all the compromises of the so-called “workers’ parties” (which comprise very little the average worker) we find all the ingredients of a revolutionary labour movement actually in action.
Suddenly – on top of each other, almost – we find some unions giving a blank refusal to offers of co-operation in A.R.P., “National Service,” conscription and speed-up, unemployed demonstrations in the metropolis and elsewhere, and rent-strikes.
The three moves of producer, tenant and workless (it needs only a consumer’s boycott of blacklist firms and Fascist-import firms to complete the four ingredients of a revolutionary movement) are one. The workers have learnt from experience what conscription (under whatever name) means. It is the super-form of industrial warfare: militarisation of industry and almost martial law in time of strikes. A few unions have resisted: that is to the good. But it is not enough! Those who have agreed to co-operate with the Government (and we remember that the International Federation of Trade Unions refused to co-operate with our I.W.M.A. on a boycott of Franco) must be subjected to every criticism from the rank-and-file. The class-collaborationists and pro-conscriptionists, recruiting-sergeants and jobholders of the labour movement must be summarily expelled from the labour movement. If the unions co-operate with the Government, it means no strikes (“official,” that is) are possible, and “unofficial” strikes are rendered more difficult by Government supervision, restriction and use of “agents-provocateur” and industrial spies, as happens today in the dockyards. Those who hope that conscription will be satisfactory – as it will only affect youth – should not be persuaded that they are, from the point of view of their own interests, wrong: they too are not the people who should even be allowed inside a conscious labour movement. They are scabs at heart.
*** The Tenants’ Strike
The tenants’ strikes are good news. Noticeably, they are all in London. The exodus from the Depressed Areas (which the Government orders us to euphemise as “Special” Areas!) in Wales, Ireland, Scotland and the North, to the relatively prosperous South and London (where the new factories, etc., are, presumably to make them more easily bombed from the air) has made landlords inflated with their “prerogative” of choosing tenants. Rents are going up – while, in the London and Southern areas, partly because of A.R.P. scares, partly because of usual stinginess, conditions (even the lawful obligations to keep in good condition and repair) are getting worse.
Three strikes are reported, at the moment of writing. In Flower-and-Dean Street, one of the toughest parts of Spitalfields, a 100 per cent, solid strike demands lower rents and little better conditions. Somewhat akin to the wartime Glasgow rent strike, the women are leading the struggle to resist the landlord and his agents. In Quinn-square Buildings – scene of 1938 rent-strike – the eviction of a woman (with five children), one of last year’s strikers, is being resisted by the ENTIRE tenement. In the Peabody Estate at Clapham, a similar rent strike is threatened, in solidarity with the secretary of the Tenants’ Association, who is ordered to quit (victimisation being the reason).
It is interesting to note the remark of one of the Quinn-square Buildings tenants, made to a capitalist-journalist: “THE BAILIFFS SHALL NOT PASS!” The influence of the Spanish Revolution and the resistance of Madrid has reached through France to England!
*** The Unemployed Workers Movement
The unemployed, barred, by the nature of things, from economic action, have been attacking the forces of the State machinery by demonstrations, which, moreover, were well calculated to win the sympathy of Londoners who, at least, have a sense of humour. The lying-down in the roadways, invasion of the Ritz, throwing-out of the banner at the elevated Monument, demanding a square meal (in paraphrase of the railway “distressed” shareholders demanding a “square deal”), chaining to the Unemployment Exchanges and so on, were all actions which focussed attention on the unemployed. And did it have effect? To such an extent that the capitalists were scared enough to throw out immediately a red herring to put the unemployed off the scent: the “Sunday Pictorial” in particular and the Fascists endeavoured to link up the Nazi demonstration in the West End against the German-Jewish refugee cinema appeals with… the unemployed’s <em>counter</em>-demonstrations!
The humbug about the refugee menace will be seen. None of these refugees take jobs in this country. The outcry was then against the charity appeals, but the fact of the matter is that the outcriers have not the slightest intention of rifling the funds of the Baldwin Appeal Fund, and giving it to the unemployed. All they intend to do is make a fuss about it, and get the unemployed to do the same, instead of attacking the U.A.B., P.A.C.[1] and Unemployment Exchanges, where, after all something can be done. Fortunately, the unemployed (at any rate, as a whole) have not fallen for it.
It is regrettable that the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement is so completely in the hands of the non-revolutionary Communist Party, but even so rank-and-file pressure has forced these demonstrations. In the same way, the trade unions, under the control of Labour Party officials, can be forced to act, on their own bread-and-butter issues. The rising feeling, actually, could very soon force both C.P. and L.P. officials to become themselves eligible for the N.U.W.M.– and not as officials! The same feeling could organise these strikes – tenant, unemployed, producer – and link them up with consumer’s strikes. Tenant, producer, consumer – all are the same, and unemployed also the same (if not today, tomorrow).
*** Direct Action
There could be made out of this present feeling a movement towards <em>continued</em> direct action; a movement organised so that it could take <em>control</em> of the industries and dwellings when the bosses and bailiffs had been driven out for the last time.
Unfortunately, this feeling is being dissipated. The politicians will make capital out of it, and then it will all disappear, and the workers will, following another economic crisis, do the same things, and again it will be lost, and again, and again. There is only one thing to stop this waste of the workers’ efforts, and that is the organised propaganda that this revolutionary action is anarcho-syndicalist, if without the name, and that the only way for its logical outcome to be achieved is by the gradual building of an anarchist labour movement upon the lines indicated by the organisations that, as is seen, do spring into being on these occasions.
[1] The PAC (Public Assistance Committee) and UAB (Unemployment Assistance Board) were the bodies which administered the hated means test to the unemployed (before and after the 1934 Unemployment Act)
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#title Joint Manifesto of the Revolutionary Youth Federation and the Committees for Workers’ Control
#author Albert Meltzer
#SORTtopics anarcho-syndicalism, Britain
#date 1<sup>st</sup> February 1938
#source Retrieved on 19<sup>th</sup> May 2021 from [[https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/573p0q][www.katesharpleylibrary.net]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2021-05-19T13:15:54
#notes <strong>From:</strong> <em>Revolutionary Youth Federation Monthly Bulletin</em>, Vol. 1, no. 1, 1<sup>st</sup> February 1938..
1) An Anarchist is a person who is opposed to governmental Society.
2) Since governments exist to protect property the Anarchists have evolved the theory of Anarchist Communism, which is not based on Property, and holds that all wealth be held in common by the community through the local “communes” (councils) wherein each works according to ability, and takes according to need. There would be no state. The communes would be linked by a free federation, and harmony of interest; would be maintained by mutual aid and agreement.
3) This is a philosophy of the future and its realisation demands a transitional stage which, logically, must be also libertarian, anti-State- and federal: the only such system at present is Revolutionary Syndicalism, recognised by Anarchists as a means to an end.
4) Revolutionary Syndicalism (Anarcho-Syndicalism) is the system of .workers’ unity in economic organisation fighting for immediate reforms under capitalism with the object of workers’ control, following the abolition of the State after the Social General Strike or Revolution. Each branch of economic life would be run by the workers in that branch, operating through their Syndicalist Unions (Syndicates) without any State or political intervention – the mines to the miners, the factories to the factory-workers, etc. Social life would be run by the communes, which would consist of the local federation of all the syndicates. The national federation of all the syndicates would run international trade relations: the national federation of each syndicate would run their own national industry. The government of men would be replaced by the management of things.
5) The anarchist would, before the Revolution, prevent the domination of the syndicalist unions by parliamentarians and politicians and, after the Revolution, continue spreading the ideals of liberty so that the non-anarchist majority would dwindle to a minority and perhaps disappear, not through coercion (which would go with the State) but by moral persuasion as well as the practical results of collectivised life.
6) The immediate creation of a dual anarchist and syndicalist organisation is therefore obviously desirable, and we call upon the workers of Britain to form, unite in and develop an Anarcho-Syndicalist body of labour unions, an anarchist federation and a revolutionary youth movement, in order that the struggle for freedom and socialism may recommence in the birthplace of free socialism in no uncertain fashion.
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#title Ringing down the Iron Curtain
#author Albert Meltzer
#SORTtopics capitalism, bolshevism, Soviet Union, Black Flag (U.K.)
#date 1993
#source Retrieved on 19<sup>th</sup> May 2021 from [[https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/kwh8js][www.katesharpleylibrary.net]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2021-05-19T20:54:04
#notes <strong>From:</strong> Black Flag issue 203 (Autumn 1993).
Only five years ago it was thought by many the only way to bring down the Russian empire was by nuclear war. Any dissenting point of view was, at any rate regarded as subversive. Now the whole Soviet empire has crashed without military intervention, reducing one of the mightiest powers in the world to the level of a U.S. vassal, a third world country with the technical ability to fly to the moon.
Capitalism has taken over without nuclear war. All those years of sacrifice and potential disaster didn’t contribute in the least. How did peaceful conquest triumph? To summarise what we said in issue 202, Russia was ruled by the Tsars as a centralised autocracy, something impossible then, incredible now. One man or woman at the top was responsible for the whole empire. So centralised was it that when the Winter Palace was raided, the old empire fell. What took over was the Communist Party as Tsar, and first Lenin, then Stalin, exemplified one-person rule. Though the system of both Tsarism and Bolshevism was based on an impossiblity – centralism over a vast country and in particular of one person – anything will work if you force people, provided they are not driven to desperation. Even then, as Stalin found, you can carry on regardless provided you are ruthless enough. Ultimately the strain of making decisions for one small town, let alone a mighty empire, drives someone mad, Stalin no less than the Tsars.
Now the subjects and slaves have worked their way out of the mess of dictatorship, and nobody has been able to put the broken idol of one-person rule together again, many look to authority figures, whether Stalin or the Tsar, some, like the Croats, to the Virgin Mary, others, like the Czechs, to the Mother Goddess Our Lady Thatcher.
But there is above all else two great scrambles: the gold rush throughout the collapsed empire, the great robbery of resources as new classes are established and a new ruling class arises from the ashes of the old. There is also a blood rush, as one “nation” after another tries to form or break away from a new state, with nothing to distinguish them from the former imperialist State but hatred of their nearest neighbours.
*** The Gold Rush
How do you start off a new ruling class? In the case of Russia itself first in line are the managers and party apparatchiks of the old Communist empire. They are the only ones with power and accumulated money to invest in the new privatised economy. They will still be the bosses but everything doesn’t have to depend on an individual dictator, so it’ll be manageable and the benefits to those who clustered round the throne will be identical or better than ever before. Be sure this has been pointed out to them or learned in their visits to America and that is what weakened the regime from the top.
In Eastern Germany the former junkers are laying claim to “their” family estates no less shamefacedly the Russian nobility, to recover the lands they originally conquered by force of arms. But others too are contending for lands and industry, a process seen once in England. When the capitalists made their revolution, the old aristocracy gave up and married into them. The Dukes of Westminster were once feudal lords, now they are major capitalists. The aristocracy brought the breeding and tradition, the new rich brought the money to go with it.
In a change of society that does not come from below, those who prospered or monopolised educational advancement in the old society have their opportunity.
*** Dishonoured Czechs
In the Republic the new regime is openly putting the country’s property up for auction to its own citizens who already in theory collectively own them. Yet no one who lived in Czechoslovakia could conceivably have made enough to buy the factory in which they were working, unless they were party bosses or successful in the black market. So Czechs are acting as stooges to foreign investors, lending their names to the selling of the country to outsiders who by the 21<sup>st</sup> century will be the new aristocracy. It is interesting to note that the only Czech who had the economic power made abroad with huge interests in the Eastern bloc, could now have bought his native land at auction and every single industrial and commercial asset in it. That gives us another conjecture to Robert Maxwell’s mysterious death at sea a few weeks before the auctions were held
*** Marxism is dead
The great con that by replacing the tsar with a small group of professional revolutionaries one could achieve socialism, which is the essence of the Leninist variation of Marxism, is dead. But the idea that the countries concerned are any better for the introduction of capitalism is as ludicrous as the East European myth that they would get the life style of the American rich as shown by Hollywood.
*** The Blood Rush
The policy of the empires of Russia, Austria and Turkey was to divide and conquer, keeping neighbours at daggerpoints ready to tear each other to pieces, when economic danger would have turned them on their rulers. The ultimate card was the scapegoating of a vulnerable minority differentiated from the majority by religion (the Armenians played the role in the Turkish sultanate as the Jews did in Tsarist Russia); an alternative, supplementary method [was] to buy national leaderships off with titles, as the English did in Scotland, avidly imitated by the Austrian empire.
The Communist Party on the throne of the Tsar nevertheless had to pay tribute to the ideals of communism which it failed to put into practice. It paid lip service to the “workers of the world” and depended for years for its protection on the fact that its international party was spreading the Great Lie everywhere. It received enormous praise for its alleged suppression of racial prejudice. It restrained nationalism from its worst excesses, but with the war revived patriotism. Once economic disaster could no longer be suppressed by police repression, and the central government lost its power to intimidate, everything boiled over once again. This is not a malaise the world can solve by “sanctions”, like refusing to play football with ex-Yugoslavia. (They call us Utopians!)
What has happened is that one vicious system, incapable of being reformed, is being replaced by another, equally vicious, system. Those with the muscle from within the country are those who had the economic power base (the old C.P. functionaries) and they are challenged by those who can build a new power base (the nationalist leaders). Both sides are going to let in Big Business from the capitalist world, which has gained an empire without fighting for it. Every warlord who can manage it raises a banner, however dubious, to establish himself with a following, and form a power base that may last a thousand years. This is fairly obvious in ex-Yugoslavia, where “nations” and “ethnic minorities” have been formed overnight, where before there were only religions observed more in the breach than the observance.
The path to reason is the independent organisation of the working class. Even a reformist grouping would be an advantage in a country where the very purpose of working class defence has been forgotten owing to union incorporation into the State machine. But reformist organisation[s] require leaders, and leaders are conscious of the prizes at stake for them. The practical way forward is for a revolutionary workers’ unionism that can change the basis of grouping from nations and races to classes, and so change the structure of society for the benefit of all, not the few.
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#title The Future And The Workers
#subtitle Slave State or Anarcho-Syndicalism?
#author Albert Meltzer
#LISTtitle Future And The Workers
#SORTtopics the future, workers, the State, anarcho-syndicalism
#date November 12, 1938
#source Retrieved on August 31, 2022 from [[https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/prr6dc][www.katesharpleylibrary.net]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2020-09-22T16:48:28
#notes From Spain and the World. Vol.2, №44. 12.11.1938.
The economic crises following the last war brought a series of revolutions, none of them successful, and in the long run, ruined the revolutionary movement. Not only was revolution unsuccessful but the revolutionary movement that had been built up under pre-war conditions became, eventually, the shock-troops of the enemy.
With the civilised world in ruins, the masses, understandably, began to feel the need for Security. Gradually, it became clear that there were two forms of security that they could turn to. One, conservatism: the preservation of as much of the established order as possible. Alternatively, dictatorship, the security of the slave state.
The hectic post-war years showed quite clearly again that increasing numbers of people were deliberately turning against independent thinking, and turning to either the policy of “enjoy yourself while you can” (essentially complementary to conservatism) or that of “follow the leader” (essentially the policy of dictatorship).
We are faced to-day with the two systems, therefore of conservatism and dictatorship. and (owing to recent alignments) may be asked to choose between them to the extent of fighting for either the one or the other.
Let us make quite clear what the difference is.
It is patently wrong to draw a line of demarcation between Russian dictatorship and any other dictatorship. While there have been, and still are, certain differences between them, the underlying principle is the same exactly, and the trend inescapable. The differences are actually no more than the differences between (for instance) two undeniably Fascist countries, such as Germany and Italy, or (more obviously) between countries like Poland, French-Canada, Japan, China, South America, South Africa, India, Franco’s Spain, etc., where Fascism does not exist in name but the same basic principles underly each.
To draw a line of distinction between the dictatorships and the democracies on the grounds of the political tie-ups is absurd — it implies putting Poland and Russia as democracies and some future British Government as a dictatorship.
Nevertheless, the democracies are in some ways different from the dictatorships. In the first place, nowadays they revolve, insofar as power-politics go, around Britain France and America (the Western democracies). Quite obviously, to ram Stakhanovism down the throats of citizens of the British Isles, or the race theory down the throats of Americans, or a handful of rice a day down the throats of Frenchmen, is asking for trouble. The technique of the new slave state is suited to each country: only those seeking the impossible can maintain that there is any other dividing line between one set of dictatorships or another, or the democracies.
It seems to be the case that the dividing line that does still exist will stay but this is by no means so.
Rationalisation and super-industrialised Fordism in America, the clever GRADUAL Acts of Parliament in Britain, anti-Germanism in France — all bring in the slave state by instalments.
Sooner or later the slave state will be perfected in all the countries of the world — perhaps the small Labour — Government countries (Scandinavia, New Zealand, etc.) will hold out, we are told. It is doubtful, however, if any politician could resist the temptation. Undoubtedly the slave state has its advantages: security being the chief one, security of the people to get along somehow (unemployment, the product of liberal-capitalism, being eliminated by the lowering of the conditions of the employed), and security of the politicians to keep the people enslaved.
The new technique, moreover, for which we have the Bolshevik pioneers to curse, provides that the old slave-state troubles (this is, chattel slavery and wage slavery) can be cured: chattel slavery meant, sooner or later, revolt; wage slavery, thought: state-slavery simply crushes and persuades the masses that it’s not so bad being crushed.
Let us face the fact that capitalism is going. The liberalism of the Nineteenth Century is washed out. The bosses are not content with capitalism at all. The slave state is, for them, the only way out. The quarrel is, at present: who shall be the bosses of the slave state?
Shall it be the old Capitalists or new politicians? And if it shall be the politicians, which set of politicians shall it be? (In this conflict, of course, lies the hope of revolutaries; that the quarrelling may be too severe for it to be either).
The question is, to a certain extent, being solved. In the democracies, the old capitalists will probably take control. The democracies are controlled on the economic side, and therefore allow freedom on the political side, which is of no importance. The banks are, definitely, more powerful than Parliament, for instance.
In the dictatorships, the politicians will take control. The dictatorships are controlled politically, and therefore allow far more economic freedom. (Thus they have acted against unemployment in a manner the democracies could not).
When the full flavour of the Munich Agreement becomes apparent, it will be seen that there will be no chance (or very little) of an inter-governmental war. The pockets of the bourgeoisie being their gods, Disraeli — Kipling — Churchill — Attlee Imperialism will go for ever. There will be no more swashbuckling over minor matters of prestige. Instead, the United States of the World will be a practical proposition. The Labourists will be delighted at the coming into being of an international police force, the revival of the League of Nations, the beginnings of international government.
It is one of the most horrible prospects the masses have ever been faced with. The governments of the world will be combined to suppress revolution, and, even more, to keep down the economic level of the masses as far as they can.
True, the money saved on excessive armaments will probably be spent on social service of some description (maybe super-roads, which will come in useful to carry troops, like Haussmanised Paris). There seems no reason why NECESSARY social service should not be introduced, EXCEPT that with the international co-operation of governments the NEED for bothering about the well-being of the masses will have disappeared. It may be that the end of capitalism (a product of nineteenth century liberalism, not of twentieth century super-production) will see the beginning of the worst period of the world’s history.
If and when the old capitalists are eliminated control will pass entirely to the politicians. The world will be in the hands of the States. With this situation we, the workers of the world, have to deal.
What are we going to do to prevent the coming of the system after capitalism? (Marx, be it noted. prophesied this system successfully: he predicted it would be socialism — he could not have foreseen what would have happened to socialism in the meantime: the most potent argument against Marxism).
Firstly, we must make a clean break with politics and politicians. There is no point in continuing with those who are going to be the oppressors.
Secondly, we must organise QUICKLY for the overthrow of capitalism and the State BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE. Bearing in mind that the end of capitalism means the end, in all probability, of the class-struggle as previously interpreted, we must right now determine on a future programme which will be EQUALLY anti-capitalist and anti-State, based on the working-class itself.
A revolution that takes for the masses the entire economic life, and entirely destroys the political side (that is, the State) is the only guarantee for the masses that they will not be exploited. All their guarantee is in themselves, through their own economic committees.
Therefore, the revolution cannot have anything to do with political parties: it must be a complete revolution, and there must be no allowance for counter-revoluntary and political elements.
The working-class must take for itself the entire machinery of production, unless it wants the State to take that machinery and relegate the masses into complete misery and subservience.
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#title The Labour Movement in Spain
#subtitle On Spanish Anarcho-Syndicalism
#author Albert Meltzer
#LISTtitle Labour Movement in Spain
#SORTtopics anarcho-syndicalism, Spain
#date 1974
#source Retrieved on 22<sup>nd</sup> September 2020 from https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/sqvc8q
#lang en
#pubdate 2020-09-22T16:58:17
#notes First published in <em>Anarchy</em> (Second series) no.12 (1974?) as ‘The Labour Movement in Spain’ (This article was republished with minor changes as ‘The Spanish Workers Movement’ in A new world in our hearts: the faces of Spanish anarchism edited by Albert Meltzer. Cienfuegos Press, 1978 p.37–50).
On the whole there has been little or no study of the Spanish labour movement. The success of the insurrection against Tsarism so captivated the imagination of the world that attention, from the point of view of revolutionary socialism, has thereafter been riveted on Russia and what concerns its interests. The State “Socialism” that triumphed in that country is no doubt worth studying, if not experiencing: but from the standpoint of any sincere revolutionary — even one who might not consider himself a libertarian — it is surely more richly rewarding to look at the case of a labour movement that could sustain itself through generations of suppression; that could dispense with a bureaucracy; and that could maintain its character of control by the rank and file.
There are, of course, faults and failures. These may be better understood following a study of the working class movement, and dispensing with the criticism of the anarcho-syndicalist offered by Trotskyist sources which make false comparisons out of context with Russia and deal with a period of only three years out of ninety; as a result of which, even among would-be libertarians, the years of struggle and achievement are dismissed with a vague reference to “bureaucracy” which asserted itself at that period, or among Marxists, with a titter — “he-he anarchists entered the Popular Front Government” — as if there was no more to be said on the matter.
The Spanish labour movement had five overlapping phases which can be summed up in five key words — the “international”; the “union”; the “revolution”; “anti-fascism” and the “resistance”. Each represents a different phase and the mistakes, and betrayals appear almost entirely in the fourth (“anti-fascist”) phase.
The significant character of the movement is played down deliberately for a simple reason: it overwhelmingly disproves the Leninist thesis, equally flattering to the bourgeois academic, that the working-class, of itself, can only achieve a trade union consciousness — with the corollary that trade union consciousness must be confined to higher wages and better conditions, and without the guiding hand of the middle-class elitist, would never understand that it could change society.
*** The “International” Phase
The historians want on the one hand to say that Bakunin was a poseur who boasted of mythical secret societies that did not exist; and on the other hand that he, by sending an emissary (who did not speak Spanish) introduced anarchism into Spain. In fact, ever since the Napoleonic wars — and in some parts of Spain long before — the workers and peasants had been forming themselves into societies, which were secret out of grim necessity.
It is sometimes alleged that “liberal” ideas entered Spain only with the French invasion. What in fact came in — with freemasonry — was the political association of the middle class for liberal ideas (and the advancement of capitalism) against the upper classes, and their endeavour to use the working class in that struggle. But the working class and peasants had a known record of 400 years insurrection against the State. It is their risings and struggles, and the means employed — long before anarchism as such was introduced — that are used by historians as if they were describing Spanish anarchism. In Andalusia in particular the peasants refused to lie down and starve, or to emigrate en masse (only now is this political solution being forced on them): they endeavoured to make their oppressors emigrate — that is to say, to cause a revolution, even locally.
In the eighteen-thirties the co-operative idea was introduced to Spain (relying on early English experience); and the first ideas of socialism were discussed, basing themselves on the experiences of the Spanish workers and also borrowing from Fourier and Proudhon. The early workers’ newspapers came out, especially in the fifties, and revealed the existence of workers’ guilds in many industries, including the Workers’ Mutual Aid Association. Because of the Carlist wars — and the periodic need to reconcile all “liberal” elements — a great deal of this went on publicly, some of it surreptitiously.
The first workers’ school was founded in Madrid by Antonio Ignacio Cervera (fifty years before the more famous Modern School of Francisco Ferrer). He also founded a printing press whose periodicals reached workers all over the country. Cervera was repeatedly persecuted and imprisoned (he died in 1860). It was from the ideas of free association, municipal autonomy, workers’ control and peasants’ collectives that Francisco Pi y Margall, the philosopher, formulated his federalist ideas. The latter is regarded as “the father of anarchism” in Spain. But he did no more than give expression to ideas current for a long time.
During the period of the general strike in Barcelona (1855) the federations entered into relationship with the International Association of Workers in London (later called “The First International”). It was quickly realised that the ideas of the Spanish section of the International were far more in accord with Bakunin’s Alliance than with the Marxists. In 1868 Giuseppe Fanelli was sent by Bakunin to contact the Internationalists in Spain. To his surprise — he barely spoke Spanish and said “I am no orator” — at his first meeting he captured the sympathy of all. Among his first “converts” the majority belonged to the printing trade — typographers like Anselmo Lorenzo, lithographers like Donadeu, engravers like Simancas and Velasco, bookbinders and others. It was they who were in Spain the most active, and the most literate of workers. They formed the nucleus of the International. (Marx wrote gloomily to Engels: “We shall have to leave Spain to him [Bakunin] for the time being.”) By the time of the Congress in Barcelona in 1870, there were workers’ federations throughout the country. The programme on which they stood: for local resistance, for municipal autonomy, for workers’ control, for the seizure of the land by the peasants, has not since been bettered. They did not fail because they were wrong; merely because (like the Chartists in England) they were before their time. There was no viable economy to seize. They could do nothing but rise and fight.
The bourgeoisie had totally failed, during their long struggle with reaction, to modernise the country. The Government persistently retained control by the use of the army and of the system of Guardia Civil which it had copied from France.
*** Workers’ Federations
In 1871 workers’ federations existed in Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Cartagena, Malaga, Cadiz, Libares, Alella, Bilbao, Santander, Igualada, Sevilla, Palma de Mallorca — taking no orders from a central leadership, standing on the basis of the local commune as the united expression of the workers’ industrial federations, and in complete hostility to the ruling class. It was essentially a movement of craftsmen — as in England the skilled worker became a Radical, in Spain he became an Internationalist. Pride in craft became synonymous with independence of spirit. Just as in England, where the village blacksmith and shoemaker became the “village radical” who because of his independence from “the gentry” could express his own views, and become a focus for the agricultural workers’ struggles — so in Spain he became an Internationalist (a stand which he easily combined with regionalism).
The first specifically anarchist nucleus began in Andalucia in 1869 — due to the work of Fermin Salvochea. It was there, too, that the International became strongest. As the repression grew so the anarchist ideas captured the whole of the working class movement. But the reason was not because Bakunin, Fanelli, Lorenzo or Salvochea had decided to give Spanish federalism a name, or to label it in a sectarian fashion. It was because the Marxist part of the International was growing away from them. During Marx’s struggle with Bakunin he was forced clearly to state his views in a specifically authoritarian manner. The idea of central State authority was precisely what repelled the Spanish Internationalists. The notion that they required a leadership from the centre was something they had already, in their own organisation, dispelled.
The International reached its peak during 1873/4. Its seizure of Cartagena — the Commune of Cartagena — would take precedence over the Commune of Paris for the “storming of the heavens” if greater attention had been paid to it by historians outside Spain.
The Commune of Paris showed how the State could be instantly dispensed with; but its social programme was that of municipal ownership and it was in this sense that its adherents understood the word “communist”. In Cartagena the idea of workers’ councils was introduced — it was understood that what concerned the community should be dealt with by a federal union of these councils; but that the places of work should be controlled directly by those who worked in them. This “collectivism” preceded by forty or fifty years the “soviets” of Russia (1905 and 1917) or the movements for workers’ councils in Germany (1918) and profoundly affected the whole labour movement, which for the next twenty years was in underground war with the regime: bitterly repressed, and fighting back with guerrilla intensity.
The conceptions which the British shop stewards brought to bear on British industry — of horizontal control — during the First World War, of horizontal control to circumvent the trade union bureaucracy — were inbuilt into the Spanish workers’ movement from the beginning. When the workers’ federations turned from the idea of spontaneous insurrections to that of a revolutionary labour movement and began to form the trade union movement, it had already accepted the criticisms of bureaucracy which were not even made in other countries until some forty or fifty years of experience was to pass; it saw in a union bureaucracy the germs of a workers’ state, which it in no way was prepared to accept. Moreover, the idea of socialist or liberal direction — urged by the freemasons — was seen quite clearly in its class context. It was this experience brought from the “International” period that made the labour movement the most revolutionary and libertarian that existed.
*** Regionalism
The essential regionalism of the Internationalist movement was somewhat different from trade unionism as it was understood in England. Instead of a national union of persons in the same craft, the basis of craft unionism, there was a regional federation of all workers. The federation divided into sections according to function. Thus it was possible for even individual craftsmen to be associated with the union movement, which accorded with the hatred most of the workers had for the factory system anyway. It also meant that when anyone was blacklisted for strike activities, he could always be set up on his own. Pride in craft was something ingrained in the internationalists. The most frequent form of sabotage against the employer was the “good work” strike — in which better work than he allows for is put into a job. It was something they employed even when there was no specific dispute (it is the reason why there were fewer State inspections of jobs for safety reasons and why today — the union movement having been smashed — one reads so frequently of dams breaking, hotels falling down or not completed to time, and so on). For this reason people trusted the union label when it was ultimately introduced and — despite the law and his own prejudices — an employer had to go to the revolutionaries to get the good workmen, or let the public know he was employing shoddy labour. “You are the robber, not us,” was the statement most often hurled at the employer who wanted honesty checks on his workers.
“Regionalism” — the association of workers on the basis of locality first, and then into unions associated with the place of work — was something that concurred fully with the insurrectional character of the movement. Time and again a district rose and proclaimed “libertarian communism” rather than be starved to death or emigrate (the latter solution was, years later, forced on them only by military conquest). It was for this reason that the seemingly pedantic debate began between “collectivism” or “communism” in the anarchist movement — fundamentally a question as to whether the wage system be retained or not in a free society — since this was indeed an immediate issue in the collectivities and co-operatives established with a frequency as much as in modern Israel — though with the significant difference that it was in a war against the State and not with its tolerant assistance.
*** Formation of CNT
The workers’ organisations persistently refused to enter into political activity of a parliamentary nature. It was the despair of the Republican and Socialist politicians, who were sure they could “direct” the movement into orthodox, legal channels. It was an attempt to divide the movement, not to unite it, that led to the formation of the Union General de Trabajadores (UGT) in 1888. It was a dual union, with only 29 sections and some three thousand members. The congresses of the regional movement — the Internationalist movement which by now was transforming itself into an anarchist one — had seldom less than two or three hundred sections.
In the years of terror and counter-terror that followed, attacks on the workers’ movement led to the recurrent individual counterattacks of the 1900s, resulting in the enormous protests against the Moroccan War that culminated in the “Red Week” of Barcelona. Meantime the socialist movement stood aloof, trying to ingratiate itself with the authorities in the manner of the Labour movement in England — then still part of the Liberal Party. The demand for national-based craft unions (raised by the UGT) thus became identified with the desire for parliamentary representation in Madrid. (History repeats itself: today, under Franco, the Comisiones Obreras are doing exactly the same thing — to gain Stalinist representation in the Cortes.)
The Spanish movement was entering its “union” phase, influenced strongly by the syndicalism of France. The Solidaridad Obrera movement (Workers’ Solidarity) adopted the anti-parliamentarian views of the French CGT whose platform for direct workers’ control was far in advance of the epoch, and which was already preparing the way for workers to take over their places of work, even introducing practical courses on workers’ control to supplant capitalism.
As the anarcho-syndicalist movement developed in Spain after experience of the way in which the parliamentary socialists had gained creeping control of the syndicalist movement in France and debilitated this movement, it was inbuilt into the formation of the CNT (Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo — National Confederation of Labour) that the movement should follow the traditions of federalism and regionalism that prevented the delegation of powers to a leadership. The CNT was created in 1911 (at the famous conference at the salon de Bellas Artes in Barcelona) as the result of a demand to unite the various workers’ federations all over the country — following strikes in Madrid, Bilbao, Sevilla, Jerez de la Frontera, Soria, Malaga, Tarrasa, Saragossa. It helped to organise a general strike the same year (as a result of which it became illegal).
It rose to overwhelming strength during the world war — its most famous test being the general strike arising from the strike at “La Canadiense”. From then on, for 25 years, it was in constant battle, yet the State was never able to completely suppress it.
*** 25 Years of Unionism
The complete failure of some libertarians to understand even the elementary principles of the CNT throughout those years is staggering. When the structure and rules of the CNT were reprinted in Black Flag some comments both privately and publicly left one amazed. One reader thought it was a “democratic centralist” body, when the whole shape and structure of it was obviously regionalist. For years, indeed, a major debate raged as to whether unions should be federated on a national basis at all. Some could not understand it <em>was</em> a union movement, and pointed out the lack of decisiveness in dealing with national (political) problems.
Another saw in the rule that delegates should not be criticised in public “a libertarian version of don’t rock the boat, comrades”, comparing it with the determination of the TUC not to let its leaders (quite a different matter) be criticised. But the delegates were elected for one year only. They could be recalled at a moment’s notice if they were not representing the views of their members. Most of the time, as negotiating body, they were illegal or semi-legal. It was not pleasant for someone who avoided acting as a delegate, and who had the power to recall the delegate if there were sufficient members in agreement, to attack a named delegate in public. That is not the same thing at all as criticising a permanent leader or democratically-elected dictator such as one finds in British trade unionism. Nor is it the same thing as saying one should never criticise anyone at all. (It must, however, be held against the rule that in 1936/9 and after many refrained from criticising self-appointed spokesmen because of this tradition.)
Yet others, bringing a forced criticism of Spanish labour organisation in order to fit preconceived theories, have suggested it was subordinated to a political leadership, the Anarchist Federation playing a “Bolshevik” role (something quite inconceivable) or that of a Labour Party. What such critics cannot understand is that the anarchists relinquished the building of a political party of their own, and that it was only because of this that they had their special relationship with the CNT. Had they endeavoured to give it a political leadership, they would have succeeded in alienating themselves as did the Marxists. (The original Marxist party, the POUM, endeavoured for years to obtain control of the CNT: later, when the Communist Party was introduced into Spain in the ‘thirties, the POUM was denounced as “trotskyists” and even “trotsky-fascists” by the Stalinists. The Trotskyists proper took the line that the very existence of a revolutionary union was an anachronism and they criticised the POUM for trying to infiltrate the CNT rather than to enter, and aspire to lead, the UGT — though the latter was a minority organisation.)
Like many other anarchist groups in other countries, those in Spain were based on affinity, or friendship, groups — which are both the most difficult for the police to penetrate, and the most productive of results — as against which is the positive danger of clique-ism, a problem never quite solved anywhere. The anarchists who became well known to the general public were those associated with exploits which no organisation could ever officially sanction. For instance, Buenaventura Durruti came to fame as the result of his shooting Archbishop Soldevila, in his own cathedral [he was actually assassinated in an ambush, KSL] — in response to the murder, by gunmen of Soldevila’s “Catholic” company union, of the general secretary of the CNT, the greatly-loved Salvador Segui. With bank robberies to help strike funds, the names of the inseparable Durruti, Ascaso and Jover became household words to the many workers who faced privation and humiliation in their everyday life, and felt somehow revindicated as well as reinvigorated.
One must bear in mind the capitalist class was at this time engaged in its own struggle against the feudal elements of Spain (which even resisted the introduction of telephones). The economic struggle of capitalism (palely reflected in the political mirror as that of republicanism versus the monarchy) was an extremely difficult one: it made the struggle of the workers to survive that much more difficult. The employers did not have as much to yield as in other countries where industrialisation had progressed; had they in fact been further advanced, the amount so militant an organisation could have obtained from capitalism would have been staggering.
As it was, capitalism fought a constant last-ditch stand against labour. It was a bloody one, too, and it should not be supposed that individual “terror” was on one side. The lawyer for the CNT, a paraplegic, well known for his stand on civil liberties — Francisco Layret who could be compared with Benedict Birnberg here, who has complained he has been put on a police blacklist — was shot down in his wheelchair by employers’ pistoleros.
It was against such pistoleros that the FAI hit back. Anarchist assassination is taken out of its class context by Marxist critics. They did not think that individual attacks would “change society”, that the capitalist class would be terrorised or the State converted by them. They hit back because those who do not do so, perish.
*** Unity
While the local federations always opposed any form of common action with the republican or local nationalist parties, and sometimes lumped (correctly) the Socialist Party with the bourgeois parties, nevertheless on the whole they deplored the division in the ranks of the proletariat and as the struggle deepened in the thirties could not see why they should be separated from the UGT, or the Marxist parties — the CP, POUM or some sections of the Socialist Party. “Unity” is always something that sounds attractive. But notwithstanding the adage it does not always mean strength. Those who desire it the most are those who must compromise the most and therefore become weak and vacillating.
The popular mistake, too, is to assume that because these parties were more “moderate” in their policies — that is to say, more favourably inclined to capitalism and less willing to change the economic basis of society — they were somehow more gentle in their approach, or pacific in their intentions. Under the Republic the “moderate” parties (which had collaborated with the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera under the monarchy) created the Assault Guards especially to hit the workers, and the CNT in particular. To imagine an equivalent one must assume that in addition to the police, the Army are also on street patrol — as an equivalent to the Guardia Civil — but the Government brings in a special armed force (like the “B” Specials) to attack the TUC. This was a “moderate” policy as against the “extremism” of the anarchists who wanted to abolish the armed forces (which incidentally were plotting against the Republic). That was an “impractical and utopian” idea, said the Republicans and Socialists, who aimed to democratise the armed forces instead by purging it of older monarchists and bringing in young generals like Francisco Franco (whose brother was a Freemason and Republican, as well as a “national hero”), whose “loyalty to the republic would be assured”.
*** Problems
The problem that we are familiar with is that of a labour movement hesitant to take its opportunities, while the capitalist class seizes every possibility of advancing its interests. The problem for Spanish labour was entirely different: namely, that while it was determined and even impatient for Revolution, the capitalist class remained (until only a comparatively few years ago) afraid to interfere politically lest it upset the equilibrium by which the military were the last resort of the regime, and unwilling to move too far ahead industrially for fear of the State power dominated by feudal reaction. Only a few foreign capitalists were willing to take the plunge in exploiting the country. Thus strike after strike developed into a general strike, and the confrontation thus achieved became a local insurrection, for the capitalists were asked more than they would or sometimes could grant.
It is the insurrections which have been more often the concern of historians who inevitably talk of “the anarchists” and their conduct in running this or that local conflict: in reality, the anarchists had helped to create an organisation by which the workers and peasants could run such insurrections themselves. It is inevitable that because of this, mistakes of generalship would occur and it would be futile to deny that a highly organised political party could possibly have marshalled such forces much differently (this was the constant despair of the Marxist parties); but towards what end? The conquest of power by themselves. In rejecting this solution, other problems arose which must be the continued concern of revolutionaries.
What, after all, is the point of accepting a political leadership which might seize power — with no real benefit to the working class, as was the real case in Soviet Russia — by virtue of its brilliant leadership (and its tactical and tacit arrangements with imperialist powers) — or might (as the Communist Party did in Chiang’s China or Weimar Germany) lead, with all its trained “cadres”, to the same sort of defeat the man on the ground could quite easily manage for himself?
One other point must be taken into consideration, and that was the demoralisation of many militants after years of struggle in which enormous demands were made upon the delegates with absolutely no return whatever outside that received by all. There was no problem of bureaucracy (the general secretary was a paid official; beyond him there were never more than two or three paid officials) but then as a result there was no reward for the delegates, who suffered imprisonment — and the threat of death — and who needed to be of high moral integrity to undertake jobs involving negotiation, and even policy decisions of international consequence, that in other countries would lead to high office but in Spain led merely to a return to the work bench at best, or to jail and the firing squad at worst.
It is not a coincidence, nor the result of conscious “treachery”, that many militants who came up through the syndicates [note: Pestana, for instance, once General Secretary, later hived off to form his own political party (the “Treintistas” — after his “Committee of Thirty”).] later discovered “reasons” for political collaboration or entry into the political parties, which alone offered rewards, and every one of which hankered after the libertarian union, which alone had a broad base that would mean certain victory for whoever could command it.
The student-movement-inspired thesis is wrong: the FAI was not a Bolshevik nor a social-democratic party. If it had been, this problem would not have arisen. The problems of Spanish labour in those years were not problems of political control, nor whether the tactics of this party or that party were right or wrong (that is to think of Spain in terms appropriate to the Stalin-Trotsky quarrel, but the dispute between the rival gangsters of the Kremlin is not necessarily applicable in every country). Basically they were the problems of freedom, and of mass participation in its own destiny. We must not delude ourselves that these do not exist.
With this background of the labour movement it was impossible for the capitalist class to switch it round on the basis of nationalism and harness it behind themselves, as they had done with temporary success in many countries in the First World War, and with some permanent (as it then seemed) success in the Nazi era. The Falange tried to ape the workers’ syndicates but nobody was fooled who did not want to be. When the Falange failed in its task, as every attempt of the Spanish bourgeoisie failed — whether liberal, republican or fascist — the Army was brought in, in the classical manner of a ruling class holding power by force.
What took the ruling class by surprise — having seen the way in which the labour movements of the world caved in at the first blast of the trumpet (above all, the fabulous Red Army trained movement of the German workers under Marxist leadership reduced with one blow of the fist to a few, frightened people being beaten up in warehouses) — was the resistance to the nation’s own army by the working people. If at that moment the Popular Front (claiming to be against fascism) — realising its fate would be sealed with the victory of the Army — had armed the people, the rising would have been over. The result of their refusing to do so meant that trench warfare could develop, in which (against heavy arms, and later troops and planes, coming in from the fascist countries) the Spaniards could only resist, keep on the defence, and never mount an attack; hence they would be bound to lose in the finish.
One of the most significant trends shown in July 1936 was the seizure of the factories and the land by the workers. This was an experience in workers’ self-management which was not however unique — since the same attempts had been made by many collectives and cooperatives before — but whose scale was staggering — and which represented in itself a defiant gesture of resistance by the workers which the Popular Front Government wished to play down, and eventually suppress.
For this reason the Popular Front has never since ceased, through its supporters at the time, to harp on one theme only: the International Brigade. But this merits a separate article.
It was not merely the disciplinary and murderous drives by, the Communist Party that destroyed the collectivisation and self-management. One must add to it the fact that as the civil war proceeded, the workers, were leaving the factories in ever increasing numbers, for the front lines, which became ever more restricted.
*** Divisions
The fact that the workers had, with practically their bare hands, prevented an immediate military victory and, as it seemed, prevented the rise of world fascism, caused a euphoric condition. The slogan was “United Proletarian Brothers”: the flags of the CNT mixed with those of the UGT. The Communists and Socialists were welcomed as fellow-workers, even the Republicans accepted for their sake. Undoubtedly the whole mass of CNT workers — and others — welcomed this end of divisions which seemed pointless as against world fascism. In time of war one looks favourably upon any allies: no leadership could have prevailed against the feeling that there were no more divisions in the workers’ ranks. On the contrary, those who now aspired to leadership — since the conditions of war were such that leadership could exist — began to extol the merits of their new-found allies.
Those who refer to the “atrocities” of the early period of the Civil War seldom point to the root cause of many of them: the fact that the Republican authority was now officially on the side of the workers. A simple illustration was told me by Miguel Garcia of how, in the early days in Barcelona the group he was with seizing arms from the gunsmiths’ to fight the army, came in confrontation with a troop of armed Guardia Civil, the hated enemy. The officer in charge signalled them to pass. They did so silently, waiting to dash for it — expecting to be shot in the back in accordance with the <em>ley de fuga</em>. But the officer saluted. The Guardia Civil was loyal to the Government. In many villages the people stormed the police barracks demanding vengeance on the enemy. They were greeted with cries of “Viva la Republica”. “We are your allies now. We are the officers of the Popular Front. Ask your allies in the Republican and Socialist parties if it is not so.”
Even so, many anarchists never trusted them.
It was the police and Guardia Civil who were the most vicious to the fascists whom they had to detain, to show their enthusiasm for the popular cause. Later, when the tides of war had changed, they had to be even more vicious to the anti-fascists, to show that they had never ceased in allegiance to the properly constituted authority.
*** The Compromises
It is relevant to this description of the Spanish labour movement to trace the dissolution of the CNT, since with the drift from the factories it ceased to be a union movement and became, in effect, an association of militants.
During the war what was in effect a demoralisation of many militants set in, and a division occurred between “well known names” and those militants who really made up the organised movement (the rank and file militants, <em>militantes de base</em>), since the demand for unity, understandable as it was, led to a collaboration with the republican government under the slogan of “UHP”. All those who had for years been denied a recognition of their talents — and craved for it — now had their chance. Majors, generals; in the police and in the direction of government; even in the ministries themselves. Those who so collaborated did not really go as representatives either of the anarchist movement or of the labour organisation although their collaboration was passively accepted by most. They took advantage of the greatest weakness of the traditional anarchist movement, the “personality cult” (as witness Kropotkin, individually supporting World War I, and causing enormous damage to the movement which he in no way represented and from which his “credentials” could not be withdrawn for there were none except moral recognition).
The emergence of an orator like Garcia Oliver, or Federica Montseny, as a Minister purporting to represent the CNT was a symptom of these collaborationist moves. Keeping the matter in proportion their betrayals and compromises were effected by the defeat, and were not its cause.
It was, however, this division that disorientated the organisation in subsequent years.
Following the defeat, the libertarian movement was re-established in a General Council in Paris in February 1939. The existing secretary of the CNT, Mariano Vasquez, was appointed secretary of the Council. But this was in no way a trades union. It was a council of war, intending to maintain contact between the exiles now scattered round the world, and in particular those in France, where the majority were in concentration camps, set up with barbed wire and guarded by Senegalese soldiers, as if they were POWs, but under conditions forbidden by the Geneva Convention.
There were no longer meetings appointing delegates subject to recall, nor any check upon the representatives of the movement. Nobody in any case was interested. The working class of Spain had been decisively smashed. Its organisations were in ruins. Those in exile had to build a new life. Those inside Spain were facing daily denunciations leading to the firing squad and prison. The children of the executed and imprisoned were thrown into the streets. Large numbers of workers, were moving to places where they hoped they would avoid notice.
Those publications which appeared spoke only in the vaguest terms about the future. All that mattered was the overthrow of Franco and of Fascism. In the circumstances, a political party — with a policy dictated from the central committee — would have produced a clear line (however vicious this might be, as the Communist Party’s line was after the Stalin-Hitler Pact — one typical symptom being Frank Ryan, IRA CP fighter in the International Brigade, who went from Franco’s prison to become a Nazi collaborator). The libertarian movement was clear only that it was anti-fascist. And that it would have no further truck with the Communist Party.
This was not an unreasonable line to take in the circumstances, but for a fatal corollary to the anti-fascist commitment, which ultimately paralysed the entire Spanish working-class movement and has kept Franco in power to this day. This was that one must therefore accept anti-fascism at its face value and ascribe anti-fascism to the democratic powers which were also fighting against powers which happened to be fascist.
A moment’s reflection will show the falsity of the position. Today China finds herself in conflict with Russia. But she is not only not necessarily anti-Communist (in the Leninist sense), she is not (in that sense) anti-Communist at all. There is no reason to suppose that if China defeated Russia she would end state dictatorship and concentration camps; to ascribe such motives to China is to deceive oneself deliberately. Neither did it follow in 1939 that anybody who happened to be fighting the Fascist Powers were therefore anti-fascist <em>in the same sense</em> that the libertarians were.
Nor had ideology anything to do with it. America, while retaining democracy at home, is perfectly able to support dictatorship abroad. Yet in 1939 it was seriously supposed even by the best of the Spanish militants that Britain and France must “logically” oppose fascism, as if nations went to war merely to impose their ideology. It was more difficult to support their jailer France, but after France fell, Britain seemed to be sympathetic. The British Secret Service enlisted the aid of the Spanish Resistance groups, which sprang up immediately after the disaster of 1940. They sought aid to bring soldiers out of France over the border; they enlisted the support of the “gangs” inside Spain to raid foreign Embassies and sabotage Nazi plans; they sought to co-operate [with] (though it never came to dominating) the Spanish resistance in France. Because Franco’s men were at the time so violently anti-British, it was supposed Britain must “logically” want to overthrow Franco. And it was more “reasonable” to believe in a British victory — a practical proposition — than in Revolution!
Even those in the Resistance who never trusted the British agents, and who insisted on getting paid for any services they gave them, never believed that they could be double-crossed. Yet after a network of unions had been re-established in Spain during the war — and a Resistance built up without parallel in modern history, inside Spain — all the committees were destroyed. None of the militants ever saw cause and effect. Soon after the war, for instance, a meeting was called by the British Embassy for militants of the CNT to discuss the ANFD (Alliance of Democratic Forces) and the possibility of co-operation with the (pro-British) monarchists. CNT delegate Cipriano Mera reported that he could not see the point of it. A few weeks later the entire CNT committee was arrested. Cause and effect have not been seen to this day. How could it have been the British Embassy that was the traitor? Britain was “democratic”, Franco was “fascist”.
One could go on at great length, but it can be seen how the “anti-fascist” period, coming when the union phase had finished, helped to establish a movement in exile, in which no popular representation existed or was required, and acted as a brake on Resistance. After the war, the exiles began to fit into life abroad. What took over their organisation was not a bureaucracy so much as domination by the “names”. There was no longer local autonomy in which all met as equals. For a committee in Toulouse, one was asked to pick “names”. The “great names” came to the fore. But what were these “great names”? They were not the names of the militants of pre-war days. They were those who came to the fore during the era of government collaboration. Among them was a division on many subjects. Some thought they should enter political collaboration with the Republican Government (pointless now that it was defeated, but it still had money stacked away in Mexico). Others wanted a return to independence — but they could not return to being a union. Only the workers inside Spain could do that.
The majority of exiles never want to compromise their position. It is understandable, but it is fatal for the struggle in the interior. In fact an exile movement is basically in a farcical position, for it is giving up the fact of struggle in the country where it exists and trying to carry one on in a country where it does not exist. It thus surrenders its usefulness as a force in the labour movement in the country where it resides; while at the same time holding back the struggle in the country from which it originates — since the considerations that hold one back from action in a more open society are not necessarily valid in the dictatorship. Time and again, therefore, the Organisation found itself in conflict with the Resistance in Spain, being built up by groups such as those of Sabater, Facerias and others.
The Resistance — because of its daring attacks upon the regime — was able to build up the labour movement time and again. It was destroyed many times; and has been re-built. It has expected help from the exile Organisation and received nothing. Worse, it has been held back. For this reason one finds today the whole of the pretended “official” libertarian movement in utter disarray — the Montseny-Isglesias faction expelling all and sundry — striking out in the last gasps of dissolution… above all, denouncing the real libertarian movement inside Spain because it dares to use the name of the CNT; (It is for this reason that organisations like the Federacion Obrera Iberica — to save the recriminations about “forging the seals” of the Organisation which are held as by apostolic succession in Toulouse — have simply changed their name, with the same aims as the CNT of old.)
The Spanish Libertarian Movement, so-called (MLE) is not a union movement, nor an anarchist movement. It is anti-fascist in ideology, but basically it looks to a “solution of the Spanish problem” rather than supporting the Resistance in any way. Time and again the expected political solutions have failed — or rather, have succeeded in the way their authors intended them, leaving the, MLE pathetically declaring that the British, French or American Governments have let them down. Even now, many cannot understand how it came about that Britain did not send an Army in to liberate Spain; why the Government did not even want to do so — and indeed, that elements in the British Government may have considered Spain already liberated — by Franco! These are the people who denounce the Resistance as “impractical”, “utopian” — above all, “violent”! Many will explain that “violence” is wrong. That is to say, it was permissible in the Civil War, when it was legal; and during the World War when, if not legal, in Spanish eyes, it was granted the equivalent status by virtue of the fact that resistance <em>was</em> “legally” recognised in France, but it became “un-libertarian” even “un-Spanish” with the end of the World War!
This colours the attitude towards Resistance in Spain, and nothing marks a greater dividing line. The Resistance was carefully nourished by the Sabater brothers — of whom so little is known [Note:A book on Sabater by Antonio Tellez, trans. Stuart Christie, is coming out next Spring — published by Davis-Poynter. (ie <em>Sabate : Guerilla extaordinary</em> KSL)] — the various bands of the Resistance such as the Tallion, Los Manos etc., by Facerias and others. It had perforce to return to the tradition of guerrilla warfare and activism.
Despite the “official” propaganda in which the Libertarian Movement in Exile constantly invokes the name of the CNT, it is not the same thing at all. The traditions of the CNT are reaffirmed by the Resistance within Spain, which is back in the period of regional committees and local resistance, and is still unable to reconstitute itself on a nation-wide scale — which indeed it may not consider essential.
The period predicted by Marx during which Spanish labour would have to be left to “Bakunin” is, of course, over. The Communists, Maoists and Nationalists of various brands have grown considerably — though socialism and the UGT are dead. Thanks to the folly of “Toulouse” the name of the CNT has been eclipsed by schism. But we note one thing: whenever the struggle in Spain becomes acute, the workers turn to anarchism.
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#title The Lessons of History
#author Albert Meltzer
#LISTtitle Lessons of History
#SORTtopics history, anarcho-syndicalism, labor movement
#date June 1952
#source Retrieved on 19<sup>th</sup> May 2021 from [[https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/dncm2p][www.katesharpleylibrary.net]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2021-05-19T13:21:28
#notes Published in <em>The Syndicalist</em>, vol. 1, no.2 June 1952.
The Syndicalist (The syndicalist for workers’ control) was a monthly anarchist newspaper published from May 1952 to April 1953 by the Anarcho-Syndicalist Committee (including Albert Grace, Albert Meltzer and Philip Sansom). It was an agitational paper, hence the need for this article explaining the point of putting pieces on history in. We’ve written elsewhere about “Albert Meltzer and the fight for working class history” (KSL bulletin 76, October 2013. [[http://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/qz62j9][www.katesharpleylibrary.net]]. This is an early appearance of his concern with history as inspiration for future struggles (which led him to play a central role in the Kate Sharpley Library).
----
The series of articles on syndicalism in various countries has been short, both for reasons of space, and limitations of knowledge. It is unfortunate that many of the revolutionary movements of vital concern to us have not received sufficient documentation. It should be our constant aim to add to this knowledge, as there is something positive to be gained from it.
The cursory reader might regard it as being remote from his interest that such-and-such a revolutionary strike took place in such-and-such a country. Likewise, as most of the material which comes to be published on it in English is in the nature of protests against repression, he might draw the one-sided conclusion that all such revolts are doomed to failure, and find, perhaps, sympathy but not inspiration. [1]
It is in the nature of revolts that many have been successful in lifting countries out of a morass of feudalism that persisted in modern times, but naturally none has finally achieved a free society which exists unchallenged and flourishing. This could not possibly be the case in the political circumstances of the world to-day, with an unabated trend to dictatorship and monopoly. If one thing had not caused a libertarian achievement to go under, another would have followed. Hence the record of foreign intervention in countries like Spain and Mexico on occasions when it was possible that the authoritarian society might collapse.
From the industrial struggles and revolutionary attempts that have taken place we can, however, draw many conclusions. That a consciously Anarcho-Syndicalist movement can be built up is proved by the Spanish experience, and that workers’ control can be put into practice was seen in the collectivised undertakings of 1936. We have also found that political influence can creep in (which can be seen in Mexico, when twice the anarchists have abandoned syndicalist movements they had built up, which had later been corrupted, in order to build again on a libertarian basis). The example of the Argentine shows how political influence can be kept out, and the struggles of the F.O.R.A. are closely parallel to those of the I.W.W. in North America. In both cases, however, we have seen the unavoidable wane of influence when militant workers turned to the Communists under the “glamour value” of the Russian Revolution.
The spontaneous possibilities of the workers, even without a positive syndicalist movement, are seen in the struggles in Germany after the fall of the Kaiser [1918–19]. There the workers were in a position to seize their workplaces, and likewise establish free communes. The latter, a typically anarchistic conception as opposed to the conquest of State power, was something seen in Spain which was a rebellion against the Marxist tradition in Germany.
Syndicalism as an industrial weapon was perfected in France, but with the decline of influence of the Anarchists owing to the rise of social-democracy and chauvinism, such syndicalism became corrupted and used against the workers, both by social-democrats, and later, by communists. In England we have seen that syndicalism faced the possibility of becoming merely a “trend in the labour movement”. This proved fatal to it, for revolutionary syndicalism has flourished when it is separate and apart from the reformist labour movement. It might be pointed out to those who wail about “splitting the workers” that in many cases it has been the reformists who set up the dual union (often at governmental instigation or with the blessing of companies) because of the activities of the revolutionary syndicalists (e.g. Italy, Spain, and many South American countries). At other times the revolutionary union has been the challenger, but it has not split the workers according to crafts, as the reformist unionists take for granted.
A libertarian idea cannot be one that rests upon preconceived philosophies and written theories, but one that has been fashioned by experience. It is hoped, therefore, that a historical series such as the present has contributed towards the clarification of the theory of anarcho-syndicalism.
[1] The ‘protests against repression’ Meltzer mentions probably include those against the executions of anarchist militants of the Tallion group on 14 March 1952. See A Leaflet [protesting the execution of members of the Tallion group] [[http://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/dv42ss][www.katesharpleylibrary.net]]
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#title The stuff of politics
#author Albert Meltzer
#LISTtitle stuff of politics
#SORTtopics Britain, British anarchism, capitalism, class, Black Flag (U.K.)
#date October 1978
#source Retrieved on 19<sup>th</sup> May 2021 from [[https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/h44kp0][www.katesharpleylibrary.net]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2021-05-19T21:06:09
#notes Published in <em>Black Flag : organ of the Anarchist Black Cross</em> v.5,no.6 (October 1978) [Anon., attribution by KSL].
We have a continuing national saga about the need to bring about stability, to curb inflation and to achieve, lo and behold, the prosperity just around the corner. In the State communist countries, the equivalent saga is about “achieving socialism” while the fascist countries had the “fatherland in danger”. All, however, are at one when it comes to the nitty-gritty – the mugs need to work harder and go without, and yet it is their slackness or greed – as opposed to that of the hard-working industrious and self-sacrificing leadership – that brings about all the problems. All politicians feel ‘the people do not deserve us’ and for once they are not lying!
<br>
In the State communist countries the ruling clique has perpetuated an enormous con trick that the working class is in fact the ruling class, that the two are synonymous, and only unknown wreckers at home and notorious class enemies abroad would say otherwise. In the capitalist countries, the equivalent myth is that the middle-class is really a working-class, that the workers are middle-class, that there is no upper-class and that the workers’ representatives are the real rulers … it is a more confused interpretation but the reasoning behind the con trick is not at all confused: it sets out to confuse.
Nobody can understand the stuff of politics unless they talk in terms of class and power relationships. There are attitudes and ways of living and behaviour which affect people in no matter what sort of society they live, which may be more or less authoritarian according to the nature of the society; but the main facts of the way one lives, how the economy is controlled, whether there is a greater or lesser degree of dictatorship, the degree of economic prosperity, is all dependent upon class relationships or who wields the power and how they wield it.
There is a difference between State communism and capitalism in that, in the first, the people in power are there by virtue of their elected or appointed (or self taken) positions, and they do not depend upon the profits of the economic system. In capitalism, while the government is elected or appointed (or self taken) but the competitive economic system means the domination of classes because of their profits.
There is little to choose between State communism and modern capitalism in forms of exploitation; the sole difference that is always stressed by the pro-capitalists are the degrees of tolerance allowed. This to some extent arises from the system: If the workers seize a factory, no State Commissar would hesitate to blow them from the face of the earth. In capitalist society, the army would be faced by frantic pleas from the owner to spare his lovely profit-making factory. The concern with profits runs right through the capitalist society and introduces an element of corruption which is absent in State communism; but corruption is the only way in which tyranny is mitigated.
*** Labour or Tory
In British politics today we are not asked to choose between State communism and Individual capitalism as, for instance, in French or Italian politics – not that either, in fact, is obtained or that, as a result of any election they may have, the system is any different. The British scene differs from many others in the confrontation between (Fabian) Socialism and the hotchpotch of Conservatism (part Keynesian, part individualistic). Both parties use the same national saga but introduce an array of side-issues to stress their divergencies. In reality, the Labour Party has no socialist ideas at all, and relies on a sort of diluted Keynesian approach (State intervention the cure-all) and the Conservative Party has abandoned its laisser-faire individualism which represents its ideal for a bastardised Welfare State-ism. It likes to think of itself as libertarian in its approach to business – as little State intervention as possible <em>there</em> – but authoritarian in regard to the workers (bash the strikers) and with force as a cure-all for the crimes of present-day society. Flog ’em, hang ’em, conscript ’em, send ’em back. The Labour Party usually takes the opposite point of view – which is thought of as left-wing (though not always), and this helps them maintain the air of Punch-and-Judy shows about parliamentary politics.
In reality, though the Labour Party still retains some class nature in its appeal – and those who deny it must ask themselves what constitutes a safe seat, why Bournemouth is a Tory ‘safe seat’ and Tower Hamlets a Labour – it has lost all class nature in its representation. It has receded to the nineteenth century position of the Liberal Party in politics which dominates the parliamentary scene corresponding to the old Whigs. The Whigs, in opposition to the Tory monopoly of government, put forward liberal ideas, and propositions thought of as progressive, though they were solidly aristocratic and elitist. There is now a Whiggism based not on “birth,” a discredited notion unless it has money to go with it, but on intellect. The intellectual Whigs are divorced from the people but they offer them – kindly, without doubt – liberal measures to placate them, or sometimes popular ideas to excite them, it being understood that they have no intention of yielding their power to anyone else. Members of Parliament take their cue from the old Whig notion that they are representatives and not delegates.
*** The Fascist Alternative
Fascism is the last hope of a ruling class to deflect the class struggle by glorifying nationalism or patriotism. It normally seeks to leapfrog into power by attacking first one unpopular minority, for which – it is hoped – few will intervene, and then another, and another – until finally it seems invincible.
<br>
The essential fact of fascism is having a set of determined men wanting to rule on behalf of the capitalist class, and being able to offer the ruling class a set of thugs that are able to smash the workers’ organisations. While the orthodox democratic parties and especially the Labour Party can do this without fuss or fireworks there is no place for fascism. In order to render social revolution “obsolete”, fascism must turn to racialism or nationalism and the price is too high for a capitalist class to pay if it can prevent the workers’ associations taking over the places of work by other means.
*** Why Not Anarchism?
A survey of the dreary wastes of politics makes one wonder why Anarchism is not immediately accepted by all. The folly and waste of government is so great, the worship of the State – even when disguised in its fancy dress of nationalism, or patriotism – so transparently a fraud, that the Anarchist case would seem to be one immediately acceptable, and the reason for its being so maligned and traduced, and ultimately actively persecuted, by governments, so apparent.
When the working class first began organising itself, it was usually Anarchism, or a socialism barely distinguishable, that was its declared goal. Only active persecution, or in some cases political persuasion and infiltration by the New Whiggery of Fabianism, altered that; and the working class turned to Statism disguised as socialism, or as patriotism, or both together. Now that they have all failed Anarchism is left as the only logical cause.
But if people as a whole are reluctant to embrace it, it is because they have been so cruelly misled by politicians, for so long that even the very words ‘working class revolution’ seem redolent of authority or unsocial-ism; or because they have bitter memories of how what the politicians could not get by force, they got by fraud. There is a real fear of being out on a limb, even by those who do not understand the role of a political police.
This accounts for the quasi-anarchism that is nowadays so popular, that seeks to abandon trying to take over the means of life and opt for making the most of spare time left to us by the modern State which can be as much as the whole week if one plays one’s social security cards right…
But changes in personal values and alterations in life style will no more affect power and profit than changes in fashion. Everything in capitalist society will stand or fall by the criterion of private profit; every advance in personal freedom will always be at the mercy of whoever happen to control the State machinery in any society; the impersonal machine controlling the State will ultimately decide whether we live or die. Unless we pit against it the one thing that still gives us strength – the muscle of our labour.
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#title Transition and the right to well-being
#author Albert Meltzer
#SORTtopics Britain, capitalism, class, labor movement, 1980s
#date April 1981
#source Retrieved on 19<sup>th</sup> May 2021 from [[https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/cnp6vw][www.katesharpleylibrary.net]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2021-05-19T21:07:57
#notes Published in <em>Black Flag : Organ of the Anarchist Black Cross</em> v.6,no.7 (April 1981).
It is a deliberate lie to say that we are in the grip of a <em>recession</em>, which is a temporary slump in trade, part of the ebb and flow of normality.
This does not describe the economic situation in Great Britain nor that prevailing in most of the capitalist nations. It is pure governmental propaganda to suggest that it is; and all the slogans of getting the Tories out, “ditch the bitch” and the like are an attempt to trivialise and personalise the issue. It is not Mrs Thatcher’s lack of compassion or dogmatic errors that are responsible for the present slump. She could, as the previous Labour governments did, direct the economy in such a way that the nature of the unemployment crisis is overlooked. Labour governments became adept at cosmetic surgery and also, to do them justice, introduced or permitted to continue what one might call first-aid measures to help the casualties of economic crisis. These are now cut because they are clearly cosmetic and therefore “uneconomic”.
But Labour politicians accepted, and made a great national saga of, the theory that there is an inevitable ebb and flow of world trade, the crisis theory of economics that balances the conspiracy theory of politics. It is untrue. This is not a recession but a transition.
*** Transition
The capitalist world is undergoing a major change similar to economic revolutions of the past, which have displaced class after class. Now it is the working class who are being displaced. They are losing the right to work. It is not that there is a temporary lull in work: the need for work is disappearing. Technology has displaced the need for many human hands before and is doing so still. What we now see is the whole of heavy industry vanishing, whole towns and regions made redundant – not just in the industrial sense either. It is a problem of “what to do with the people”, which States have often on their hands – which criminal Statism often deals with by genocide but which less totalitarian regimes have to settle by evasive measures. There are now whole regions which the State may as well write off as no longer being financially viable. The work of keeping industry going falls into fewer and fewer hands. The industrial proletariat as such is vanishing. Under rising capitalism an expanding work force was essential, and it had power in its hands: it lost its opportunity to take over and is now paying the price.
It was always possible under rising capitalism for an increasing number of the work force employed in industry to think of itself as “middle class” socially because it once had, and in many cases still has, social advantages – not getting their hands dirty, or getting paid holidays and sickness when these were not general – which have now dwindled solely to having had further educational facilities, but with the same ability to be turned on the dustbin as anyone else – their social advantages reduced to being able to get a better grasp of the small print in DHSS circulars.
*** Consequences of defeat
The working class movement was defeated long ago, or taken over by others. It has collectively no more idea of what has hit it than any of the social classes dispossessed in the past and most of the protests that have arisen have been diverted into pointless political demands with the only coherent one “the right to work”. A pathetic slogan: The right to work is the right to be exploited; it is the right to be slaves, (which the government does not deny). It is the right not to be subjected to genocide, the logical outcome of redundancy for a class: which is certainly an important right, but surely we have a long way to come to that? The opposite of the right to work – the right to drop out and stagnate – is equally destructive: that is the right to accept what the State propose, capable of realisation, since no government will object to it!
*** Why unemployment
The capitalist countries face unemployment and “recessions” and not communist countries for a simple reason: the uninhibited free market (to which the Tory Government is devoted) means there is no economic necessity for the people who have been displaced by the technological progress of the twentieth century.
They have therefore to be pushed out of meaningful productive jobs into the “digging holes and filling them in” type of toil, upon which governments, according to the degree of human feeling prevalent, may make variations. (One of the main ones, for instance, is the huge growth of the university industry, not to spread education, or to provide a better educated workforce, but humanely to reduce unemployment and incidentally to brainwash and condition).
The totalitarian countries are able to plan ahead and utilise their workforce as they wish. No need to use the lever of unemployment, or face union opposition through putting workers out of their homes or into jobs far below those for which they have trained. The work force there is like an army and it goes where it is put. There is no point in unemployment, all that is done is to alter the categories when putting them through the educational stage and planning for the future – fewer industrial workers, more psychiatrists; more manual jobs, more servile jobs and less skilled work for the period ten years ahead. In fact (like it or not) unemployment shows the democratic side of capitalism, not its dictatorial side; for in dictatorships there is no unemployment since people are set to work as the government requires. This does not alter the fact that unemployment is a major social evil, but the alternative is not the right to work but <em>the right to well-being</em>.
If the community advances all are responsible – if we are not now in the conditions of the Middle ages everyone has contributed in one way or another to what is, and the right to well-being is universal. Not just for the famous, or the rich, or the well connected; not just for the proletariat or for all those who work – but <em>all</em>.
Since the major advance in technology has meant that there is not enough work for all to do, the solution lies in reducing the amount of work we do, and extending the amount of leisure that we have, and balancing work and leisure, so that work is not a punishment and leisure is not a bore. The fact that no governments of whatever hue, and no States of whatever economic background, wish to achieve this, does not mean that we cannot nevertheless insist on our basic human right to share in <em>well-being</em>. The sooner this is realised the better, for even though it needs a complete revolution, the moment this is appreciated [it] colours our attitudes. No one need be ashamed of asking for “too much” when they know we have been deprived of everything, nor regard a mystical “social welfare” and moderate their demands accordingly.
Everything is ours, the government creates nothing. We have the right to live well. The State has no right to exist but force.
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#pubdate 2011-04-24 18:44:16 -0400
#author Albert Meltzer
#SORTauthors Albert Meltzer
#title Why ex-Kings are dangerous
#lang en
#SORTtopics fascism, monarchy, Trotskyism
#source Retrieved on 23 April 2011 from [[http://www.spunk.org/library/writers/meltzer/sp001493.html][www.spunk.org]]
Half a century after the events concerned, the Guardian and the BBC unearthed the facts about Edward VIII (later Duke of Windsor). Only their interpretations are dubious. They say the Establishment suspected Edward for his fascist views, and used the Mrs Simpson affaire as an excuse to get rid of him. Certainly Edward collaborated with the Nazis before and during the war and by law should have been hanged for high treason (even now a capital offence). He deserted his post in front of the enemy in France during the war and went to Spain. Another death sentence was due. Prime Minister Churchill then sent him off on a handsome salary to govern the Bahamas, where he gave information and advice to Berlin (a third death sentence!) and engaged in wartime currency trading (meriting only a lengthy prison sentence this time) and post-war black marketing (just a fineable offence). But it is nonsense to say, as they do, that this was because of his ‘natural fascism’.
The Royal Family are exposed as having covered his unpunished criminal record up but some nagging questions remain. The entire British Establishment, royal and otherwise, was fascistic and pro-Nazi before the war, except for a tiny number. Earl Mountbatten, though his close German relatives were active Nazis, some even in the SS, was the only anti-Nazi in the Royal Family (his wife’s grandfather was a German Jew married into British aristocracy, he himself was pro-Communist). But how did Edward differ from a logical mould with which Prime Minister Baldwin had certainly no difficulty? When the pre-Abdication crisis came, Sir Oswald Mosley backed the King but they did not become friends until after the War when both were in comfortable retreat in France for much the same reason. The support Edward in crisis solicited at home, against the Establishment was not from the street fascists but from those who saw the military menace of Nazi Germany, especially Winston Churchill (then a back-bencher out of line with his party). Mountbatten enlisted the aid of those who wanted Churchill as PM. His go-between, double-agent/journalist Claud Cockburn, later described it as an unofficial Conservative-Communist front. It aimed to appeal to a much wider segment of the public than Mosley. Allied to the natural monarchists and those swayed by his owns charms, they were thought by the king to be irresistible.
He was brought up in the monarchical tradition and hedged about with the divinity that surrounded it. He was worshipped at home and overseas throughout his youth on a scale now unbelievable. He could do as he wished, and was built up as a demi-god even among the deprived as someone who was concerned about them (he never actually did anything) who asked only for their devotion. Hitler had to work hard to get comparable status. It is understandable Edward liked what he saw in Germany but had no desire to be a stooge like the King of Italy under Mussolini. It irked him to be one under Baldwin. The Government only asked him to respect the ‘Constitutional obligation not to marry a dubious American divorceé lest it destroy the monarchical mystique. The Establishment, Government and Labour Opposition defeated him. The ‘irresistible coalition’ vanished. His upper-class friends dropped him immediately, with sudden engagements in far off corners of the world. They had wanted to be his closest courtiers and but did not want to fall out with the vindictive new consort who had a still-unexplained grudge against him (she is now the revamped cosy dear old ‘Queen Mum’ of newspaper hype). Edward retired bitter. Even his staunchest champion, Churchill, ditched him after ‘National Rat Week’ (Osbert Sitwell) when the moronic new king and his formidable wife put the boot in.
The subsequent repeated treasons and criminality were inevitable. He was brought up to do as he wished. What need to obey laws which were passed for his subjects? The Government recognised he was an attractive prize for the Nazis who could use him to ‘legitimise’ an Occupation government. A king is always a king. If the Russians had not wiped out their royals, the Nazis would certainly have imposed the ‘rightful Emperor’. The Japanese invaders did exactly that in China. A century and a half before, the French wiped out their royal family, but not sufficiently. There was still an heir who led the enemy forces against the French, and later executed as traitors those like Marshal Ney who had fought for their own country under Napoleon. The latter died under suspicious circumstance in the hands of the British, who knew from their own repeated experience that ex-kings, even frustrated kings, like tigers wounded by hunters, are dangerous. Nobody should ever again question the danger’, to conservatives no less than revolutionaries, of allowing deposed monarchs and even their heirs the luxury of being ‘kings over the water’, even on a coral reef, even to live at all.
Two corollaries follow, the first being to reconsider the case of Trotsky, still worshipped by legitimist Bolsheviks.
*** Was Trotsky a Traitor?
Equally Trotsky must be reckoned an ex-king or of comparable status when he left Russia with all his retinue and private fortune, and with his ‘revolutionary’ if not royal mystique intact thanks to American admirers. Was he not equally a dangerous threat to Stalin as Edward to the monarchy? Stalin for all his astuteness woke up to that too late to keep him in the minor ranks of the bureaucacy to which he had been relegated and let him go. Afterwards in a series of trials universally stated to be false in spite of open confessions, Trotsky and all his Russian followers were unmasked as traitors and conspirators with the Nazis against Russia — or were they?
It seems every anti-Stalinist including anarchists thought the trials a frame-up, but I personally always suspected what they were judging was not Trotsky but Stalin, on the basis that someone so ruthless must always be truthless. I always felt that though Stalin was a vicious dictator, it does not follow that everyone with whom he came into conflict was by that token any good (Hitler for one), and hardly those on whose legacy he attained power.
Why is it unthinkable that Trotsky (with more tragic family reasons for bitterness) did not do an ‘Edward VIII’ like most others in his position? In power, his policy was that the Soviet revolution could be spread abroad by armed intervention. So far as the Soviet Union was concerned he never until his dying day (and his disciples thereafter) advocated internal revolution against Stalin, nor did the Old Bolsheviks who came up for trial. The ‘soviet revolution’ had made Russia a ‘workers state’, he argued, all it needed was the overthrow of Stalin’s dictatorship and bureaucracy. How do you overthrow or alter a dictatorship except by revolution or by foreign armed intervention? If the first was out, there was a Leninist precedent of accepting help from Imperial Germany. On the German side there was no more reason why they should refrain from helping Trotsky (before Hitler) than they had with Lenin, while after Hitler, once he started planning war, Trotsky was no more unacceptable a partner than Litvinov or Molotov later with whom they undoubtedly did collaborate.
There is plenty of evidence, including confessions, that Trotsky and all of his associates or former colleagues in Russia did collaborate with the Nazis. The only problem with the evidence is that it was given in a Soviet court, under Stalin, and nobody believes it for that reason. At any rate, Stalin certainly believed what he is supposed to have invented himself, and had Trotsky murdered, at a time when the exile was calling for defence of the USSR, lest he was placed as the nominal head of an invading army, whether from the West or the centre of Europe.
*** Diana and Marilyn
In that now notorious interview, the Princess of Wales revealed her marital disputes and claimed to want to be the Queen of Hearts. The last person who functioned in that role was Marilyn Monroe. Her downfall was in becoming involved with the Head of State, John Kennedy. Too beautiful to be discarded, too dangerous to live, Marilyn compromised the White House. Diana has compromised Buckingham Palace. The mystery of the star’s drugs overdose and the visit by CIA agents before and after her death has never been cleared up. Does anyone blame Diana for throwing up her food? Wouldn’t anyone in the circumstances, now food tasters are hard to get? Royalty may still be horrified at stories of anarchists or republicans who killed heads of State and those at court but they’re a dab hand at it themselves. Edward was lucky in having a stern but protective mother (Queen Mary) who had never forgiven her husband for allowing their Russian cousins to meet the final punishment for the crimes of their dynasty, because George V feared giving them sanctuary might lead to revolution here.
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#title Workers’ Control and the Wage System
#subtitle What is Anarcho-Syndicalism?
#author Albert Meltzer
#SORTtopics workers’ control, wage labor, anarcho-syndicalism
#date September 1952
#source Retrieved on 22<sup>nd</sup> September 2020 from https://libcom.org/library/workers-control-wage-system-ideas-what-anarcho-syndicalism
#lang en
#pubdate 2020-09-22T17:01:32
#notes First published in <em>The Syndicalist</em>, vol.1 no.5
When we declare our opposition to reformism, we do not mean that we oppose reforms, and obviously any crumb is better than no bread at all.
What we oppose is the devotion of the labour movement to the reformist principle, thus gradually taking over from the middle-class do-gooders, and even (as has happened above all in England) letting those people in turn take over the direction of the labour movement politically, on the grounds that they will thus manage to achieve a few parliamentary and other reforms here and there. The result of this action is that in the end we get some reforms, but no social change-over such as the labour movement was originally created for.
The new labour movement we hope as syndicalists to achieve is one that will help to bring about that new society, and will therefore not be one concerned with political reformism. At the same time reforms can be obtained without recourse to parliamentary action. The fact of the matter is that the ruling-class, when faced by its subjects in a revolutionary mood, is only too prepared to give them reforms in an effort to appease them. Through industrial action social amelioration can be obtained, not only in wages, but also in many other concessions – compare some of the strikes in and since the war made for liberty rather than economic gains (railwaymen’s and dockers’ strikes against police action, for instance), When we call ourselves anti-reformists we do not believe we should not act to stop such action. What we say is that a Society for the Prevention of Police Snooping on the Railway will waste a lot of time and achieve nothing. The action of the railwaymen can do the job in one quick strike.
Similarly, although we believe that in the capitalist system it is necessary to achieve wage increases, this does not mean that we believe in the wage system. Whatever we think, the wage struggle continues in the factory in any case. The organisms that arise in the workshop are created mostly on this issue. What we claim is that these organisms should be freed of political control altogether and made instead a movement by which workers’ control of the place of work might ultimately be achieved. As they represent the people doing the job, in them lies the possibility of control being carried out by the workers themselves. Workers’ control can only go hand-in-hand with the abolition of the wages system. The idea of different wage rates operating if workers were controlling different places of work is unthinkable. It is impossible to decide which job merits which rate. Instead we put in its place the principle of common ownership – each taking from the community what he needs and giving to the pool of work what he is able.
Syndicalism is therefore the system of workers’ control which is operated by the workers themselves, and created by the organisms which they build spontaneously in order to fight the wages struggle, but which take over when the wages system ends and the employing caste are no longer dominant. Because, however, we are alive to the dangers of political control, which might replace the capitalist order, we take our stand against all forms of authority, whether it claims to be representing the masses or not. This, of course, is anarchism (“no governmentalism”) and explains the name “anarcho-syndicalist”. Syndicalism, like socialism, has been used as a name by a great many people to cover a great many points of view, but the name Anarcho-Syndicalism has this plain meaning of workers’ control of the places of work, absence of government, and the decentralisation of social affairs to the commune.
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#title Autobiography of Albert R. Parsons
#author Albert Parsons
#LISTtitle Autobiography
#date 1886
#source Retrieved on Nov. 19, 2022 from [[https://libcom.org/article/parsons-albert-1848-1887-autobiography][libcom.org/article/parsons-albert-1848-1887-autobiography]], *The Haymarket Autobiographies*
#lang en
#pubdate 2022-11-19T12:39:48
#authors Albert Parsons
#topics Haymarket, Knights of Labor, autobiography, Chicago
#notes *ALBERT R. PARSONS, born: June 24 1848 — Montgomery, Ala, USA. Sentenced: Death Executed: November 11 1887.*
In compliance with your request I write for publication, in the Knights of Labor, the following “brief story of my life, a history of my experience and connection with Labor, Socialistic and Anarchistic organizations, and my views as to their aims and objects and how they will be accomplished, and also my connection with the Haymarket meeting of May 4, 1886, and my views as to the responsibility for that tragedy.”
Albert R. Parsons was born in the city of Montgomery, Ala., June 24, 1848. My father, Samuel Parsons, was from the State of Maine and he married into the Tompkins-Broadwell family, of New Jersey, and settled in Alabama at an early day, where he afterward established a shoe and leather factory in the city of Montgomery. My father was noted as a public spirited, philanthropic man. He was a Universalist in religion and held the highest office in the temperance movement of Louisiana and Alabama. My mother was a devout Methodist, of great spirituality of character, and known far and near as an intelligent and truly good woman. I had nine brothers and sisters; my ancestry goes back to the earliest settlers of this Country, the first Parsons family landing on the shores of Narragansett Bay, from England, in 1632. The Parsons family and their descendants have taken an active and useful part in all the social, religious, political and revolutionary movements in America. One of the Tompkins’, on my mother’s side, was with Gen. George Washington at the battle of Brandywine, Monmouth and Valley Forge. Major Gen. Samuel Parsons, of Massachusetts, my direct ancestor, was an officer in the Revolution of 1776, and Capt. Parsons was wounded at the battle of Bunker Hill. There are over 90,000 descendants from the original Parsons family in the United States.
My mother died when I was not yet two years old and my father died when I was five years of age. Shortly after this my eldest brother, William Henry Parsons, who had married and was then living at Tyler, Tex., became my guardian. He was proprietor and editor of the Tyler Telegraph; that was in 1851, ’52, ’53. Two years later our family moved West to Johnston county, on the Texas frontier, while the buffalo, antelope and Indian were in that region. Here we lived, on a ranch, for about three years, when we moved to Hill county and took up a farm in the valley of the Brazos river. My frontier life had accustomed me to the use of the rifle and the pistol, to hunting and riding, and in these matters I was considered quite an expert. At that time our neighbors did not live near enough to hear each other’s dog bark, or the cocks crow. It was often five to ten or fifteen miles to the next house. In 1859, I went to Waco, Texas, where, after living with my sister (the wife of Maj. Boyd) and going to school, meantime, for about a year, I was indentured an apprentice to the Galveston Daily News, for seven years, to learn the printer’s trade. Entering upon my duties as a “printer’s devil,” I also became a paper carrier for the Daily News, and in a year and a half was transformed from a frontier boy into a city civilian. When the slave-holder’s rebellion broke out in 1861, though quite small and but thirteen years old, I joined a local volunteer company called the “Lone Star Greys.” My first military exploit was on the passenger steamer Morgan, where we made a trip out into the Gulf of Mexico and intercepted and assisted in the capture of U.S. Gen. Twigg’s army, which had evacuated the Texas frontier forts and came to the sea coast at Indianapolis to embark for Washington, D.C.
My first military exploit was a “run-away” trip on my part for which I received an ear pulled from my guardian when I returned. These were stirring “wartimes” and, as a matter of course, my young blood caught the infection. I wanted to enlist in the rebel army and join Gen. Lee in Virginia, but my guardian, Mr. Richardson, proprietor of the News, a man of 60 years, and the leader of the secession movement in Texas, ridiculed the idea, on account of my age and size, and ended by telling me that “it’s all bluster anyway. It will be ended in the next sixty days and I’ll hold in my hat all the blood that’s shed in this war.” This statement from one whom I thought knew all about it, only served to fix all the firmer my resolve to go and go at once, before too late. So I took “French leave” and joined an artillery company at an improvised fort at Sabine Pass, Texas, where Capt. Richard Parsons, an older brother, was in command of an infantry company. Here I exercised in infantry drill and served as “powder monkey” for the cannoneers.’ My military enlistment expired in twelve months, when I left Fort Sabine and joined Parson’s Texas cavalry brigade, then on the Mississippi river. My brother, Maj. Gen. W.H. Parsons (who during the war was by his soldiers invested with the sobriquet “Wild Bill,”) was at that time in command of the entire cavalry outposts on the west bank of the Mississippi river from Helena to the mouth of the Red river. His cavalrymen held the advance in every movement of the Trans-Mississippi army, from the defeat of the Federal General Curtis on White river to the defeat of Gen. Banks’ army on Red river, which closed the fighting on the west side of the Mississippi. I was a mere boy of 15 when I joined my brother’s command at the front on White river, and was afterward a member of the renowned Mclnoly scouts under Gen. Parson’s orders, which participated in all the battles of the Curtis, Canby and Banks campaign.
On my return to Waco, Texas, at the close of the war, I traded a good mule, all the property I possessed, for forty acres of corn in the field standing ready for harvest, to a refugee who desired to flee the country. I hired and paid wages (the first they had ever received) to a number of ex-slaves, and together we reaped the harvest. From the proceeds of its sales, I obtained a sum sufficient to pay for six months’ tuition at the Waco university, under control of Rev. Dr. R. B. Burleson, where I received about all the technical education I ever had. Soon afterwards I took up the trade of type-setting, and went to work in a printing office in the town. In 1868 I founded and edited a weekly newspaper in Waco, named The Spectator. In it I advocated, with General Longstreet, the acceptance, in good faith, of the terms of surrender, and supported the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth constitutional amendments, and the reconstruction measures, securing the political rights of the colored people. (I was strongly influenced in taking this step out of respect and love for the memory of dear old “Aunt Ester,” then dead, and formerly a slave and house servant of my brother’s family, she having been my constant associate, and practically raised me, with great kindness and a mother’s love.) I became a Republican, and, of course, had to go into politics. I incurred thereby the hate and contumely of many of my former army comrades, neighbors, and the Ku Klux Klan.’ My political career was full of excitement and danger. I took the stump to vindicate my convictions. The lately enfranchised slaves over a large section of the country came to know and idolize me as their friend and defender, while on the other hand I was regarded as a political heretic and traitor by many of my former associates. The Spectator could not long survive such an atmosphere. In 1869 I was appointed traveling correspondent and agent for the Houston <em>Daily Telegraph</em>, and started out on horseback (our principal mode of travel at that time) for a long tour through northwestern Texas. It was during this trip through Johnson county that I first met the charming young Spanish Indian maiden who, three years later, became my wife. She lived in a most beautiful region of country, on her uncle’s ranch, near Buffalo Creek. I lingered in this neighborhood as long as I could, and then pursued my journey with fair success. In 1870, at 21 years of age, I was appointed Assistant Assessor of United States Internal Revenues, under General Grant’s administration.’ About a year later I was elected one of the secretaries of the Texas State Senate, and was soon after appointed Chief Deputy Collector of United States Internal Revenue, at Austin, Texas, which position I held, accounting satisfactorily for large sums of money, until 1873, when I resigned the position. In August, 1873, I accompanied an editorial excursion, as the representative of the Texas <em>Agriculturist</em> at Austin, Texas, and in company with a large delegation of Texas editors, made an extended tour through Texas, Indian Nation, Missouri, Iowa, Illinois, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, as guests of the Missouri, Kansas & Texas railway, I decided to settle in Chicago. I had married in Austin, Texas, in the fall of 1872, and my wife joining me at Philadelphia we came to Chicago together, where we have lived till the present time. I at once became a member of Typographical Union No. 16, and “subbed” for a time on the Inter-Ocean, when I went to work under “permit” on the Times. Here I worked over four years holding a situation at “the case.” In 1874 I became interested in the “Labor question,” growing out of the effort made by Chicago working people at that time to compel the “Relief and Aid Society,” to render to the suffering poor of the city an account of the vast sums of money (several millions of dollars) held by that society and contributed by the whole world to relieve the distress occasioned by the great Chicago fire of 1871. It was claimed by the working people that the money was being used for purposes foreign to the intention of its donors; that rings of speculators were corruptly using the money, while the distressed and impoverished people for whom it was contributed, were denied its use. This raised a great sensation and scandal among all the city newspapers, which defended the “Relief and Aid Society,” and denounced the dissatisfied workingmen as “communists, robbers, loafers,” etc. I began to examine into this subject, and I found that the complaints of the working people against the society were just and proper. I also discovered a great similarity between the abuse heaped upon these poor people by the organs of the rich and the actions of the late Southern slave holders in Texas toward the newly enfranchised slaves, whom they accused of wanting to make their former masters “divide” by giving them “forty acres and a mule,” and it satisfied me there was a great fundamental wrong at work in society, and in existing social and industrial arrangements.
From this time dated my interest and activity in the labor movement. The desire to know more about this subject led me in contact with socialists and their writings, they being the only people who at that time had made any protest against or offered any remedy for, the enforced poverty of the wealth producers and its collateral evils of ignorance, intemperance, crime and misery. There were very few socialists or “communists” as the daily papers were fond of calling them, in Chicago at that time. The result was, the more I investigated and studied the relations of poverty to wealth, its causes and cure, the more interested I became in the subject. In 1876, a workingmen’s congress of organized labor met in Pittsburgh, Pa. I watched its proceedings. A split occurred between the conservatives and radicals, the latter of whom withdrew and organized the “Workingmen’s Party of the United States.” The year previous I had become a member of the “Social Democratic Party of America.” This latter was now merged into the former. The organization was at once pounced upon by the monopolist class, who, through the capitalist press everywhere, denounced us as “socialists, communists, robbers, loafers,” etc.
This was very surprising to me, and also had an exasperating effect upon me, and a powerful impulse possessed me to place myself right before the people by defining and explaining the objects and principles of the workingmen’s party, which I was thoroughly convinced were founded both in justice and on necessity. I therefore entered heartily into the work of enlightening my fellow men. First, the ignorant and blinded wage-workers who misunderstood us, and secondly, the educated labor exploiters who misrepresented us. I soon unconsciously became a “labor agitator,” and this brought down upon me a large amount of capitalist odium. But this capitalist abuse and slander only served to renew my zeal all the more in the great work of social redemption.
In 1877 the great railway strike occurred; it was July 21, 1877, and it is said 30,000 workingmen assembled on Market street near Madison, in mass meeting. I was called upon to address them. In doing so, I advocated the programme of the workingmen’s party, which was the exercise of the sovereign ballot for the purpose of obtaining state control of all means of production, transportation, communication and exchange, thus taking these instruments of labor and wealth out of the hands or control of private individuals, corporations, monopolies and syndicates. To do this, I argued, that the wage worker would first have to join the workingmen’s party. There was great enthusiasm, but no disorder during the meeting. The next day I went to the Times office to go to work as usual, when I found my name stricken from the roll of employees. I was discharged and blacklisted by this paper for addressing the meeting that night. The printers in the office admired secretly what they termed “my pluck,” but they were afraid to have much to say to me. About noon of that day, as I was at the office of the German labor paper, 94 Market Street (organ of the workingmen’s party — the Arbeiter-Zeitung, printed triweekly), two men came in and accosting me said Mayor Heath wanted to speak to me. Supposing the gentleman was downstairs, I accompanied them, when they told me he was at the mayor’s office. I expressed my surprise, and wondered what he wanted with me. There was great newspaper excitement in the city, and the papers were calling the strikers all sorts of hard names, but while many thousands were on strike there had been no disorder. As we walked hurriedly on, one on each side of me, the wind blew strong and their coat tails flying aside, I noticed that my companions were armed. Reaching the city hall building I was ushered into the Chief of Police’s presence (Hickey) in a room filled with police officers. I knew none of them but I seemed to be known by them all. They scowled at me and conducted me to what they called the mayor’s room.
Here I waited a short while when the door opened and about thirty persons, mostly in citizens dress, came in. The chief of police took a seat opposite to and near me. I was very hoarse from the outdoor speaking of the previous night, had caught cold, had had but little sleep or rest and had been discharged from employment. The chief began to catechize me in a brow-beating, officious and insulting manner. He wanted to know who I was, where born, raised, if married and a family, etc. I quietly answered all his questions. He then lectured me on the great trouble I had brought upon the city of Chicago and wound up by asking me if I didn’t “know better than to come up here from Texas and incite the working people to insurrection,” etc.? I told him I had done nothing of the sort or at least I had not intended to do so, that I was simply a speaker at the meeting, that was all. I told him that the strike arose from causes over which 1, as an individual, had no control; that I had merely addressed the mass meeting advising to not strike but go to the polls, elect good men to make good laws and thus bring about good times. Those present in the room were much excited and when I was through explaining some spoke up and said “hang him,” “lynch him”, “lock him up,” etc., to my great surprise holding me responsible for the strikes in the city. Others said it would never do to hang or lock me up. That the working men were excited and that act might cause them to do violence. It was agreed to let me go.
I had been there about two hours. The Chief of Police as I rose to depart took me by the arm, accompanied me to the door where we stopped. He said, “Parsons, your life is in danger, I advise you to leave the city at once. Beware. Everything you say or do is made known to me. I have men on your track who shadow you. Do you know you are liable to be assassinated any moment on the street?” I ventured to ask him who by and what for? He answered: “Why, those board of trade men would as leave hang you to a lamp post as not.” This surprised me and I answered, “If I was alone they might, but not otherwise.” He turned the spring latch, shoved me through the door into the hall, saying in a hoarse tone of voice, “Take warning,” and slammed the door to. I was never in the old rookery before. It was a labyrinth of halls and ,doors. I saw no one about. All was still. The sudden change from the tumultuous inmates of the room to the dark and silent hall affected me. I didn’t know where to go or what to do. I felt alone, absolutely without a friend in the wide world. This was my first experience with the “powers that be,” and I became conscious that they were powerful to give or take one’s life. I was sad, not excited. The afternoon papers announced in great headlines that Parsons, the leader of the strikers, was arrested. This was surprising and annoying to me, for I had made no such attempt and was not under arrest. But the papers said so. That night I called at the composing room of the Tribune office on the fifth floor partly to get a night’s work and partly to be near the men of my own craft, whom I instinctively felt sympathized with me. The men went to work at 7 p.m. It was near 8 o’clock as I was talking about the great strike, and wondering what it would all come to, with Mr. Manion, Chairman of the Executive Board of our union, when from behind some one took hold of my arms and jerking me around to face them, asked me if my name was Parsons. One man on each side of me took hold of one arm, another man put his hand against my back, and began dragging and shoving me toward the door. They were strangers. I expostulated. I wanted to know what was the matter. I said to them: “I came in here as a gentleman, and I don’t want to be dragged out like a dog.” They cursed me between their teeth, and, opening the door, began to lead me down-stairs. As we started down one of them put a pistol to my head and said: “I’ve a n-tind to blow your brains out.” Another said: “Shut up or we’ll dash you out the windows upon the pavements below.” Reaching the bottom of the five flights of stairs they paused and said: “Now go. If you ever put your face in this building again you’ll be arrested and locked up.” A few steps in the hallway and I opened the door and stepped out upon the sidewalk. (I learned afterward from the Tribune printers that there was great excitement in the composing room, the men threatened to strike then and there on account of the way I had been treated; when Joe Medill, the proprietor, came up into the composing-room and made an excitable talk to the men, explaining that he knew nothing about it and that my treatment was done without his knowledge or consent, rebuking those who had acted in the way they had done. It was the opinion of the men, however, that this was only a subterfuge to allay the threatened trouble which my treatment had excited.) The streets were almost deserted at that early hour, and there was a hushed and expectant feeling pervading everything. I felt that I was likely to fall a pitiless, unknown sacrifice at any moment. I strolled down Dearborn street to Lake, west on Lake to Fifth avenue. It was a calm, pleasant summer night. Lying stretched upon the, curb, and loitering in and about the closed doors of the mammoth buildings on these streets, were armed men. Some held their muskets in hand, but most of them were rested against the buildings. In going by way of an unfrequented street I found that I had got among those whom I sought to evade-they were the First regiment, Illinois National Guards. They seemed to be waiting for orders; for had not the newspapers declared that the strikers were becoming violent, and “the Commune was about to rise!” and that I was their leader! No one spoke to or molested me. I was unknown. The next day and the next the strikers gathered in thousands in different parts of the city without leaders or any organized purpose. They were in each instance clubbed and fired upon and dispersed by the police and militia. That night a peaceable meeting of 3,000 workingmen was dispersed on Market street, near Madison. I witnessed it. Over 100 policemen charged upon this peaceable mass-meeting, firing their pistols and clubbing right and left. The printers, the iron-molders, and other trades unions which had held regular monthly or weekly meetings of their unions for years past, when they came to their hall-doors now for that purpose, found policemen standing there, the doors barred, and the members told that all meetings had been prohibited by the Chief of Police. All mass meetings, union meetings of any character were broken up by the police, and at one place (Twelfth Street Turner hall), where the Furniture-Workers’ Union had met to confer with their employers about the eight-hour system and wages, the police broke down the doors, forcibly entered, and clubbed and fired upon the men as they struggled pell-mell to escape from the building, killing one workman and wounding many others.
The following day the First regiment, Illinois National Guards, fired upon a crowd of sight-seers, consisting of several thousand men, women, and children, killing several persons, none of whom were ever on strike, at Sixteenth street viaduct.
For about two years after the railroad strike and my discharge from the Times office I was blacklisted and unable to find employment in the city, and my family suffered for the necessaries of life.
The events of 1877 gave great impulse and activity to the labor movement all over the United States, and, in fact, the whole world. The unions rapidly increased both in number and membership. So, too, with the Knights of Labor. In visiting Indianapolis, Ind., to address a mass-meeting of workingmen on the Fourth of July, 1876, I met the State Organizer, Calvin A. Light, and was initiated by him as a member of the Knights of Labor and I have been a member of that order ever since. That organization had no foothold, was in fact unknown, in Illinois, at that time. What a change! Today the Knights of Labor has nearly a million members, and numbers tens of thousands in the State of Illinois. The political labor movement boomed also. The following spring of 1877 the Workingmen’s Party of the United States nominated a full county ticket in Chicago. It elected three members of the Legislature and one Senator. I received as candidate for County Clerk, 7,963 votes, running over 400 ahead of the ticket. About that time I became a member of local assembly 400 of the Knights of Labor, the first Knights of Labor assembly organized in Chicago, and, I believe, in the State of Illinois. I also served as a delegate to district assembly 24 for two terms, and was, I think, made its Master Workman for one term.
I have been nominated by the workingmen in Chicago three times for Alderman, twice for County Clerk, and once for Congress. The Labor party was kept up for four years, polling at each election from 6,000 to 12,000 votes. I was in 1878 a delegate to the national convention of the Workingmen’s Party of the United States, held at Newark, N.J. At this labor congress the name of the party was changed to “Socialistic Labor party.” In 1878, at my instance and largely through my efforts, the present Trades Assembly of Chicago and vicinity was organized. I was its first President and was re-elected to that position three times. I remained a delegate to the Trades Assembly from Typographical Union No. 16 for several years. I was a strenuous advocate of the eight-hour system among trade unions. In 1879 I was a delegate to the national convention held in Allegheny City, Pa., of the Socialistic Labor party, and was there nominated as the Labor candidate for President of the United States. I declined the honor, not being of the constitutional age — 35 years. (This was the first nomination of a workingman by workingmen for that office in the United States.)
During these years of political action every endeavor was made to corrupt, to intimidate, and mislead the Labor party. But it remained pure and undefiled; it refused to be cowed, bought, or misled. Beset on the one side by the insinuating politician and on the other by the almighty money-bags, what between the two the Labor party — the honest, poor party — had a hard road to travel. And, worst of all, the workingmen refused to rally en masse to their own party, but doggedly, the most of them, hugged their idols of Democracy or Republicanism, and fired their ballots against each other on election days. It was discouraging.
But the Labor party moved forward undaunted, and each election came up smiling at defeat. In 1876 the Socialist, an English weekly paper, was published by the party, and I was elected its assistant editor. About this time the Socialist organization held some monster meetings. The Exposition building on one occasion contained over 40,000 attendants, and many could not get inside. Ogden’s grove on one occasion held 30,000 persons. During these years the labor movement was undergoing its formative period, as it is even now. The un-American utterances of the capitalist press — the representatives of monopoly — excited the gravest apprehension among thoughtful working people. These representatives of the moneyed aristocracy advised the use of police clubs, and militia bayonets, and gatling guns to suppress strikers and put down discontented laborers struggling for better pay — shorter work-hours. The millionaires and their representatives on the pulpit and rostrum avowed their intention to use force to quell their dissatisfied laborers. The execution of these threats; the breaking up of meetings, arrest and imprisonment of labor “leaders,” the use of club, pistol, and bayonet upon strikers; even to the advice to throw hand-grenades (dynamite) among them — these acts of violence and brutality led many workingmen to consider the necessity for self-defense of their persons and their rights. Accordingly, workingmen’s military organizations sprang up all over the country.
So formidable did this plan of organization promise to become that the capitalistic Legislature of Illinois in 1878, acting under orders from millionaire manufacturers and railway corporations, passed a law disarming the wage-workers. This law the workingmen at once tested in the Courts of Illinois, and afterward carried it to the Supreme Court of the United States, where it was decided by the highest tribunal that the State Legislatures of the United States had a constitutional right to disarm workingmen. Dissensions began to rise in the Socialist organizations over the question of methods. In the fall and spring elections of 1878-’79-’80 the politicians began to practice ballot-box stuffing and other outrages upon the Workingmen’s party. It was then I began to realize the hopeless task of political reformation. Many workingmen began to lose faith in the potency of the ballot or the protection of the law for the poor. Some of them said that “political liberty without economic (industrial) freedom was an empty phrase.” Others claimed that poverty had no votes as against wealth; because if a man’s bread was controlled by another, that other could and, when necessary, would control his vote also. A consideration and discussion of these subjects gradually brought a change of sentiment in the minds of many; the conviction began to spread that the State, the Government and its laws, was merely the agent of the owners of capital to reconcile, adjust, and protect their — the capitalists’ — conflicting interests; that the chief function of all Government was to maintain economic subjection of the man of labor to the monopolizer of the means of labor — of life — to capital.
These ideas began to develop in the minds of workingmen everywhere (in Europe as well as America), and the conviction grew that law — statute law — and all forms of Government (governors, rulers, dictators, whether Emperor, King, President, or capitalist, were each and all of the despots and usurpers), was nothing else than an organized conspiracy of the propertied class to deprive the working class of their natural rights. The conviction obtained that money or wealth controlled politics; that money controlled, by hook or crook, labor at the polls as well as in the workshop. The idea began to prevail that the element of coercion, of force, which enabled one person to dominate and exploit the labor of another, was centered or concentrated in the State, the Government, and the statute law, that every law and every Government in the last analysis was force, and that force was despotism, an invasion of man’s natural right to liberty.
In 1880 I withdrew from all active participation in the political Labor party, having been convinced that the number of hours per day that the wage-workers are compelled to work, together with the low wages they received, amounted to their practical disfranchisement as voters. I saw that long hours and low wages deprived the wage-workers, as a class, of the necessary time and means, and consequently left them but little inclination to organize for political action to abolish class legislation. My experience in the Labor party had also taught me that bribery, intimidation, duplicity, corruption, and bulldozing grew out of the conditions which made the working people poor and the idlers rich, and that consequently the ballot-box could not be made an index to record the popular will until the existing debasing, impoverishing, and enslaving industrial conditions were first altered. For these reasons I turned my activities mainly toward an effort to reduce the hours of labor to at least a normal working day, so that the wage-workers might thereby secure more leisure from mere drudge work, and obtain better pay to minister to their higher aspirations.
Several trades unions united in sending me throughout the different States to lay the eight-hour question before the labor organizations of the country. In January, 1880, the “Eight-Hour League of Chicago” sent me as a delegate to the national conference of labor reformers, held in Washington, D.C. This convention adopted a resolution which I offered, calling public attention of the United States Congress to the fact that, while the eight-hour law passed years ago had never been enforced in Government departments, there was no trouble at all in getting through Congress all the capitalistic legislation called for. By this national convention Richard Trevellick, Charles H. Litchman, Dyer D. Lum, John G. Mills, and myself were appointed a committee of the National Eight-Hour Association, whose duty it was to remain in Washington,
D.C., and urge upon the labor organizations of the United States to unite for the enforcement of the eight-hour law.
About this time there followed a period of discussion of property rights, of the rights of majorities and minorities. The agitation of the subject led to the formation of a new organization, called the International Working People’s Association. I was a delegate in 1881 to the labor congress which founded the former, and afterward also delegate to the Pittsburgh (Pa.) congress in October, 1883, which revived the latter as a part of the International Working People’s Association, which already ramified Europe, and which was originally organized at the world’s labor congress held at London, England, in 1864. I cannot do better than insert here the manifesto of the Pittsburgh congress which clearly sets forth the aims and methods of the International, of which I am still a member, and for which reason myself and comrades are condemned to death. It was adopted as follows:
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TO THE WORKINGMEN OF AMERICA.
Fellow Workmen: The Declaration of Independence says:
“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them (the people) under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty to throw off such government and provide new guards for their future security.”
This thought of Thomas Jefferson, was the justification for armed resistance by our forefathers, which gave birth to our republic, and do not the necessities of our present time compel us to re-assert their declaration?
Fellow-workmen, we ask you to give us your attention for a few moments. We ask you to candidly read the following manifesto issued in your behalf; in behalf of your wives and children; in behalf of humanity and progress.
Our present society is founded on the exploitation of the propertyless by the propertied. The exploitation is such that the propertied (capitalist) buy the working force body and soul of the propertyless, for the price of the mere cost of existence (wages), and take for themselves, i.e., steal the amount of new values (products) which exceeds the price, whereby wages are made to represent the necessities instead of the earnings of the wage laborer.
As the non-possessing classes are forced by their poverty to offer for sale to the propertied their working forces, and as our present production on a grand scale enforce technical development with immense rapidity, so that by the application of an always decreasing number of human working force, an always increasing amount of products is created; so does the supply of working force increase constantly, which the demand therefore decreases. This is the reason why the workers compete more and more intensely in selling themselves, causing their wages to sink of at least on the average, never raising them above the margin necessary for keeping intact their working ability.
Whilst by this process the propertyless are entirely debarred from entering the ranks of the propertied, even by the most strenuous exertions, the propertied, by means of the ever-increasing plundering of the working class, are becoming richer day by day, without in any way being themselves productive.
If now and then one of the propertyless class become rich it is not by their own labor, but from opportunities which they have to speculate upon, and absorb the labor product of others.
With the accumulation of individual wealth, the greed and power of the propertied grows. They use all the means for competing among themselves for the robbery of the people. In this struggle generally the less-propertied (middle-class) are overcome, while the great capitalists, par excellence, swell their wealth enormously, concentrate entire branches of production as well as trade and intercommunication into their hands and develop into monopolies. The increase of products, accompanied by simultaneous decrease of the average income of the working mass of the people leads to the so-called “business” and “commercial” crises, when the misery of the wage-workers is forced to the extreme.
For illustration: The last census of the United States shows that after deducting the cost of raw material, interest, rents, risks, etc., the propertied class have absorbed — i.e., stolen — more than five-eighths of all products, leaving scarcely three-eighths to the producers. The propertied class being scarcely one-tenth of our population, and in spite of their luxury and extravagance, and unable to consume their enormous “profits”, and the producers, unable to consume more than they receive — three-eighths — so-called “over-productions” must necessarily take place. The terrible results of panics are well known.
The increasing eradication of working forces from the productive process annually increases the percentage of the propertyless population, which becomes pauperized and is driven to “crime,” vagabondage, prostitution, suicide, starvation, and general depravity. This system is unjust, insane and murderous. It is, therefore, necessary to totally destroy it with and by all means, and with the greatest energy on the part of every one who suffers by it, and who does not want to be made culpable for its continued existence by his inactivity.
Agitation for the purpose of organization; organization for the purpose of rebellion. In these few words the ways are marked which the workers must take if they want to be rid of their chains; as the economic condition is the same in all countries of so- called “civilization,” as the government of all monarchies and republics work hand in hand for the purpose of opposing all movements of the thinking part of the workers; as finally the victory in the decisive combat of the proletarians against their oppressors can only be gained by the simultaneous struggle along the whole line of the bourgeois (capitalistic) society, so, therefore, the international fraternity of people as expressed in the International Working People’s Association presents itself a self-evident necessity.
True order should take its place. This can only be achieved when all implements of labor, the soil and other premises of production, in short, capital produced by labor, is changed into societary property. Only by this presupposition is destroyed every possibility of the future spoilation of man by man. Only by common, undivided capital can all be enabled to enjoy in their fullness the fruits of the common toil. Only by the impossibility of accumulating individual (private) capital can everyone be compelled to work who makes a demand to live.
This order of things allows production to regulate itself according to the demand of the whole people, so that nobody need work more than a few hours a day, and that all nevertheless can supply their needs. Hereby time and opportunity are given for opening to the people the way to the highest possible civilization; the privileges of higher intelligence fall with the privileges of wealth and birth. To the achievement of such a system the political organizations of the capitalistic classes — be they monarchies or republics — form the barriers. These political structures (states), which are completely in the hands of the propertied, have no other purpose than the upholding of the present disorder of exploitation.
All laws are directed against the working people. In so far as the opposite appears to be the case, they serve on one hand to blind the worker, while on the other hand they are simply evaded. Even the school serves only the purpose of furnishing the offspring of the wealthy with those qualities necessary to uphold their class domination. The children of the poor get scarcely a formal elementary training, and this, too, is mainly directed to such branches as tend to producing prejudices, arrogance and servility” in short, want of sense. The church finally seeks to make complete idiots out of the mass and to make them forgo the paradise on earth by promising a fictitious heaven. The capitalistic press on the other hand, takes care of the confusion of spirits in public life. All these institutions far from aiding in the education of the masses, have for their object the keeping in ignorance of the people. They are all in the pay and under the direction of the capitalistic classes. The workers can therefore expect no help from any capitalistic party in their struggle against the existing system. They must achieve their liberation by their own efforts. As in former times a privileged class never surrendered its tyranny, neither can it be expected that the capitalists of this age will give up their rulership without being forced to do it.
If there ever could have been any question on this point it should long ago have been dispelled by the brutalities which the bourgeois of all countries — in America as well as in Europe — constantly commits as often as the proletariat anywhere energetically move to better their conditions. It becomes, therefore, self-evident that the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeois will be of a violent, revolutionary character.
We could show by scores of illustrations that all attempts in the past to reform this monstrous system by peaceable means, such as the ballot, have been futile, and all such efforts in the future must necessarily be so, for the following reasons:
The political institutions of our time are the agencies of the propertied class; their mission is the upholding of the privileges of their masters; any reform in your own behalf would curtail these privileges. To this they will not and can not consent, for it would be suicidal to themselves.
That they will not resign their privileges voluntarily we know; that they will not make any concessions to us we likewise know. Since we must then rely upon the kindness of our master for whatever redress we have, and knowing that from them no good may be expected, there remains but one resource — FORCE! Our forefathers have not only told us that against despots force is justifiable, because it is the only means, but they themselves have set the immortal example.
By force our ancestors liberated themselves from political oppression, by force their children will have to liberate themselves from economic bondage. “It is, therefore, your right, it is your duty,” says Jefferson — “to arm!”
What we would achieve is, therefore, plainly and simply:
First — Destruction of the existing class rule, by all means, i.e., by energetic, relentless, revolutionary and international action.
Second — Establishment of a free society based upon cooperative organization of production.
Third — Free exchange of equivalent products by and between the productive organizations without commerce and profit-mongery.
Fourth — Organization of education on a secular, scientific and equal basis for both sexes.
Fifth — Equal rights for all without distinction to sex or race.
Sixth — Regulation of all public affairs by free contracts between autonomous (independent) communes and associations, resting on a federalistic basis.
Whoever agrees with this ideal let him grasp our outstretched brother-hands!
Proletarians from all countries unite!
Fellow-workmen, all we need for the achievement of this great end is ORGANIZATION and UNITY!
The day has come for solidarity. Join our ranks! Let the drum beat defiantly the roll of battle: “Workmen of all countries unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains; you have the world to win!”
Issued by the Pittsburgh Congress of the “International Working People’s Association” on October 16, 1883
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In all these matters here enumerated, I took an active, personal interest. October 1, 1884, the International founded in Chicago The Alarm, a weekly newspaper, of which I was elected to the position of editor, and I have held that position until its seizure and suppression by the authorities on the 5<sup>th</sup> day of May, 1886, following the Haymarket tragedy. In the year 1881, the capitalist press began to stigmatize us as Anarchists, and to denounce us as the enemies of all law and government. They charged us with being the enemies of “law and order,” as breeders of strife and confusion. Every conceivable bad name and evil design was imputed to us by the lovers of power and haters of freedom and equality.
Even the workingmen in some instances, caught the infection and many of them joined in the capitalist hue and cry against the anarchists. Being satisfied of ourselves that our purpose was a just one, we worked on undismayed, willing to labor and to wait, for time and events to justify our cause. We began to allude to ourselves as anarchists, and that name which was at first imputed to us as a dishonor, we came to cherish and to defend with pride. What’s in a name? But names sometimes express ideas; and ideas are everything.
What, then, is our offense, being anarchists? The word anarche is derived from two Greek words an, signifying no, or without, and arche, government; hence anarchy means no government. Consequently anarchy meant a condition of society which has no king, emperor, president or ruler of any kind. In other words anarchy is the social administration of all affairs by the people themselves; that is to say, self government, individual liberty. Such a condition of society denies the right of majorities to rule over or dictate to minorities. Though every person in the world agree upon a certain plan and only one objected thereto, the objector would, under anarchy, be respected in his natural right to go his own way. And when such person is thus held responsible by all the rest for the violation of the inherent right of any one how then, can injustice flourish or wrong triumph? For the greatest good to the greatest number anarchy substitutes the equal right of each and every one. The natural law is all sufficient for every purpose, every desire and every human being. The scientist then becomes the natural leader, and is accepted as the only authority among men. Whatever can be demonstrated will by self interest be accepted, otherwise rejected. The great natural law of power derived alone from association and co-operation will of necessity and from selfishness be applied by the people in the production and distribution of wealth, and what the trades unions and labor organizations seek now to do, but are prevented from doing because of obstruction and coercion, will under perfect liberty — anarchy — come easiest to hand. Anarchy is the extension of the boundaries of liberty until it covers the whole range of the wants and aspirations of man — not men, but Man.
Power is might, and might always makes its own right. Thus in the very nature of things, might makes itself right whether or no. Government, therefore, is the agency or power by which some person or persons govern or rule other persons, and the inherent right to govern is found wherever the power or might to do so is manifest. In a natural state, intelligence of necessity controls ignorance, the strong the weak, the good the bad, etc. Only when the natural law operates is this true, however. On the other hand when the statute is substituted for the natural law, and government holds sway, then, and then only, power centers itself in the hands of a few, who dominate, dictate, rule, degrade and enslave the many. The broad distinction and irreconcilable conflict between wage laborers and capitalists, between those who buy labor or sell its products, and the wage worker who sells his labor (himself) in order to live, arises from the social institution called government; and the conflicting interests, the total abolition of warring classes, and the end of domination and exploitation of man by man is to be found only in a free society, where all and each are equally free to unite of disunite, as interest or inclination may incline.
The anarchists are the advance guard in the impending social revolution. They have discovered the cause of world-wide discontent which is felt but not yet understood by the toiling millions as a whole. The effort now being made by organized and unorganized labor in all countries to participate in the making of laws which they are forced to obey will lay bare to them the secret source of their enslavement by capital. Capital is a thing — it is property. Capital is the stored up, accumulated savings of past labor, such as machinery, houses, food, clothing, all the means of production (both natural and artificial) of transportation, and communication, — in short the resources of life, the means of subsistence. These things are, in a natural state, the common heritage of all for the free use of all, and they were so held until their forcible seizure and appropriation by a few. Thus the common heritage of all seized by violence and fraud, was afterwards made the property — capital — of the usurpers, who erected a government and enacted laws to perpetuate and maintain their special privileges.
The function, the only function of capital is to appropriate or confiscate the labor product of the propertyless, non-possessing class, the wage-workers. The origin of government was in violence and murder. Government disinherits and enslaves the governed. Government is for slaves; free men govern themselves. Law, statute, man-made law is license. Anarchy — natural law — is liberty. Anarchy is the cessation of force. Government is the rulership or control of man by men. In the name of law — by means of statute law — whether that control be by one man (mon-arche) or by a majority (mob-arche). The effort of the wage-slave (now being made) to participate in the making of laws will enable them to discover for the first time that a human law-maker is a human humbug. That laws, true, just and perfect laws, are discovered, not made. The law-making class — the capitalists — will object to this, they (the capitalists) will remonstrate, they will fight, they will kill, before they permit laws to be made, or repealed, which deprive them of their power to rule and rob. This fact is demonstrated in every strike which threatened their power; by every lock-out, by every discharge, by every black-list. Their exercise of these powers is based upon force and every law, every government in the last analysis is resolved into force.
Therefore, when the workers, as they are now everywhere preparing to do, insist upon and demand a participation in, or application of democratic principles in industrial affairs, think you the request will be conceded? nay, nay: The right to live, to equality of opportunity, to liberty and the pursuit of happiness is yet to be acquired by the producers of all wealth. The Knights of Labor, unconsciously stand upon a State Socialist programme. They will never be able to seize the state by the ballot, but when they do seize it, (and seize it they must) they will abolish it. Legalized capital and the state stand or fall together. They are twins. The liberty of labor makes the state not only unnecessary, but impossible. When the people — the whole people — become the state, that is, participate equally in governing themselves, the state of necessity ceases to exist. Then what? Leaders, natural leaders, take the place of the overthrown rulers; liberty takes the place of statute laws, of license; the people voluntarily associate or freely withdraw from association, instead of being bossed or driven as now. They unite and disunite, when, where and as they please. Social administration is substituted for governmentalism, and self-preservation becomes the actuating motive as now, minus the dictation, coercion, driving and domination of man by man.
Do you say this is a dream! That it is the millenium! Well, the crisis is near at hand. Necessity, which is its own law, will force the issue. Then whatever is most natural to do will be the easiest and best to do. The workshops will drop into the hands of the workers, the mines will fall to the miners and the land and all other things will be controlled by those who possess and use them. This will be, there can then be no title to anything aside from its possession and use. Only the statute law and government stand to-day as a barrier to this result, and all efforts to change them failing, will inevitably result in their total abolition.
Anarchy, therefore, is liberty; is the negation of force, or compulsion, or violence. It is the precise reverse of that which those who hold and have power would have their oppressed victims believe it is.
Anarchists do not advocate or advise the use of force. Anarchists disclaim and protest against its use, and the use of force is justifiable only when employed to repel force. Who, then, are the aiders, abettors and users of force? Who are the real revolutionists? Are they not those who hold and exercise power over their fellows? They who use clubs and bayonets, prisons and scaffolds? The great class conflict now gathering throughout the world is created by our social system of industrial slavery. Capitalists could not if they would, and would not if they could, change it. This alone is to be the work of the proletariat, the disinherited, the wage-slave, the sufferer. Nor can the wage-class avoid this conflict. Neither religion nor politics can solve it or prevent it. It comes, as a human, an imperative necessity. Anarchists do not make the social revolution; they prophesy its coming. Shall we then stone the prophets? Anarchists do not use or advise the use of force, but point out that force is ever employed to uphold despotism to despoil man’s natural rights. Shall we therefore kill and destroy the Anarchists? And capital shouts “yes, yes! exterminate them!”
In the line of evolution and historical development, anarchy — liberty — is next in order. With the destruction of the feudal system, and the birth of commercialism and manufacturies in the Sixteenth century, a contest long and bitter and bloody, lasting over a hundred years, was waged for mental and religious liberty. The Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries, with their sanguinary conflicts, gave to man political equality and civil liberty, based on the monopolization of the resources of life, capital — with its “free laborers,” freely competing with one another for a chance to serve king capital and “free competition” among capitalists in their endeavors to exploit the laborers and monopolize the labor products. All over the world the fact stands undisputed that the political is based upon, and is but the reflex of, the economic system, and hence we find that whatever the political form of the government, whether monarchical or republican, the average social status of the wage-workers is in every community identical. The class struggle of the past century is history repeating itself, it is the evolutionary growth preceding the revolutionary denouement. Though liberty is a growth, it is also a birth, and while it is yet to be, it is also about to be born. Its birth will come through travail and pain, through bloodshed and violence. It cannot be prevented. This, because of the obstruction, impediments and obstacles which serve as a barrier to its coming. An anarchist is a believer in liberty, and as I would control no man against his will, neither shall any one rule over me with my consent. Government is compulsion; no one freely consents to be governed by another, therefore there can be no just power of government. Anarchy is perfect liberty, is absolute freedom of the individual. Anarchy has no schemes, no programmes, no systems to offer or to substitute for the existing order of things. Anarchy would strike from humanity every chain that binds it, and say to mankind: “Go forth! you are free. Have all; enjoy all.”
Anarchism nor anarchists either advises, abets, nor encourages the working people to the use of force or a resort to violence. We do not say to the wage-slaves: “You ought, you should use force.” No. Why say this when we know they must — they will be driven to use it in self-defense, in self-preservation against those who are degrading, enslaving and destroying them?
Already the millions of workers are unconsciously Anarchists. Impelled by a cause the effects of which they feel but do not wholly understand, they move unconsciously, irresistibly forward to the social revolution. Mental freedom, political equality, industrial liberty!
This is the natural order of things; the logic of events. Who so foolish as to quarrel with it, obstruct it, or attempt to stay its progress? It is the march of the inevitable; the triumph of the MUST.
The examination of the class struggle demonstrates that the eight-hour movement was doomed by the very nature of things to defeat. But the International gave its support to it for two reasons, viz.: First, because it was a class movement against class don- domination, therefore historical and revolutionary and necessary; and secondly, because we did not choose to stand aloof and be misunderstood by our fellow workers. We therefore gave it all the aid and comfort in our power. I was regularly accredited under the official seal of the Trade and Labor Unions of the Central Labor Union, representing twenty thousand organized workingmen in Chicago to assist them in the organization of Trades and Labor Unions, and do all in my power for the eight-hour movement. The Central Labor Union, in conjunction with the International, publishes six newspapers in Chicago, to wit: One English weekly, two German weeklies, one Bohemian weekly, one Scandinavian weekly and one German daily newspaper.
The trade and labor Unions of the United States and Canada having set apart the first day of May, 1886, to inaugurate the 8-hour system, I did all in my power to assist the movement. I feared conflict and trouble would arise between the authorities representing the employers of labor and the wage-workers, who only represented themselves. I know that defenseless men, women and children must finally succumb to the power of the discharge, black-list and lockout and in consequent misery and hunger enforced by the militiaman’s bayonet and the policeman’s club. I did not advocate the use of force. But I denounced the capitalists for employing it to hold the laborers in subjection to them and declared that such treatment would of necessity drive the workingmen to employ the same means in self defense.
The labor organizations of Cincinnati, Ohio, decided to make a grand eight-hour demonstration of the 8-hour work-day. On their invitation I went there to address them and left Chicago on Saturday, May 1, for that purpose. Returning on Monday night I reached Chicago on the morning of Tuesday, May 4<sup>th</sup>, the day of the Haymarket meeting. On arriving home, Mrs. Parsons, who had theretofore attended and assisted in several large mass meetings of the sewing girls of the city, to organize them for the eight hour work day, suggested to me to call a meeting of the American Group of the International for that evening, in order to make arrangements, i.e., appropriate money for hall rent, printing hand-bills, provide speakers, etc., to help to organize the sewing women for 8 hours. I left home about 11 A.M., and, not being able to get a hall, finally published an announcement that the meeting would be held at 107 Fifth avenue, the office of the Alarm and Arbeiter Zeitung. We had often held business meetings at the same place. Late in the afternoon I learned, for the first time, that a mass meeting had been called at the Haymarket for that evening, the object being to help on the 8-hour boom, and to protest against the police atrocities upon 8-hour strikers at McCormick’s factory the day before, where it was claimed six workmen had been shot down by the police and many others wounded. I did not fancy the idea of holding the meeting at that time, and said so, stating that I believed the manufacturers and corporations were so incensed at the 8-hour movement that they would defend the police in coming to the meeting to break it up, and slaughtering the work people. I was invited to speak there, but declined, on the ground that I had to attend another meeting that night.
About 8 o’clock P.M., accompanied by Mrs. Holmes, Mrs. Parsons and my two children (a boy six years old and a girl four years old) we walked from home to Halsted and Randolph streets. There we observed knots of people standing about, indicating that a mass meeting was expected. Two newspaper reporters, one for the Tribune the other for the Times, whom I recognized, were strolling around, picking up items, and observing me they inquired if I was to speak at the Haymarket meeting that night. I told them that I was not. That I had to attend another meeting and would not be there, and the ladies, the children and myself took a street car for down town. Reaching the place of meeting of the American group of the International, it was at once called to order and the objects of the meeting were stated to be how best to organize the sewing women of the city in the speediest manner. It was decided to print circulars, hire halls and appoint organizers and speakers, and money was appropriated for the purpose, when about 9 o’clock a committee entered the meeting and said there was a large mass meeting at the Haymarket but no speakers except Mr. Spies, and they were sent over to request Mr. Fielden and myself to come there at once and address the crowd.
We adjourned in a few moments afterwards and went over to the Haymarket in a body, where I was introduced at once and spoke for about an hour to the 3,000 persons present urging them to support the eight-hour movement and stick to their unions. There was little said about the police brutalities of the previous day, other than to complain of the use of the military on every slight occasion. I said it was a shame that the moderate and just claims of the wage- workers should be met with police clubs, pistols, and bayonets, or that the murmurs of discontented laborers, should be drowned in their own blood. When I had finished speaking and Mr. Fielden began, I got down from the wagon we were using as a speaker’s stand, and stepping over to another wagon nearby on which sat the ladies (among them my wife and children), and it soon appearing as though it would rain, and the crowd beginning to disperse and the speaker having announced that he would finish in a few moments; I assisted the ladies down from the wagon and accompanied them to Zepf’s hall, one block away, where we intended to wait for the adjournment and the company of other friends on our walk home. I had been in this hall about five minutes and was looking towards the meeting, expecting it to close every moment, and standing nearby where the ladies sat, when there appeared a white sheet of light at the place of meeting, followed instantly by a loud roar. This was at once followed by a fusillade of pistol shots (in full view of my sight) which appeared as though fifty or more men had emptied their self-acting revolvers as rapidly as possible. Several shots whizzed by and struck beside the door of the hall, from which I was looking, and soon men came rushing wildly into the building. I escorted the ladies to a place of safety in the rear where we remained about 20 minutes. Leaving the place to take the ladies home we met a man named Brown (who was well known to us) at the corner of Milwaukee avenue and Desplaines street, and asking him to loan me a dollar, he replied that he didn’t have the change, whereupon I borrowed a five-dollar gold piece from him. We then parted, he went his way and we started towards home. (This man Brown told of the circumstance the next day that he had met and loaned me $5. He was at once arrested and indicted for conspiracy and unlawful assembly, thrown into prison, where he has lain ever since.)
The next day, observing that many innocent people who were not even present at the meeting were being dragooned and imprisoned by the authorities, and not courting such indignities for myself I left the city, intending to return in a few days, and publishing a letter in the newspapers to that effect. I stopped at Elgin two days in a boarding-house, when I went from there to Waukesha, Wis., a place noted for its beautiful springs and health-giving waters, pure air, etc. At this summer resort I soon obtained employment first at carpentering and then as a painter, which occupations I pursued for seven weeks, or until my return and voluntary surrender to the Court for trial. I procured the Chicago newspapers every day, and from them I learned that 1, with a great many others, had been indicted for murder, conspiracy and unlawful assembly at the Haymarket. From the editorials of the capitalist papers every day for two months during my seclusion, I could see that the ruling class were wild with rage and fear against labor organizations. Ample means were offered me to carry me safely to distant parts of the earth, if I chose to go. I knew that the beastly howls against the Anarchists, the demand for their bloody extermination, made by the press and pulpit, was merely a pretext of the ruling class to intimidate the growing power of organized labor in the United States. I also perfectly understood the relentless hate and power of the ruling class. Nevertheless, knowing that I was innocent and that my comrades were innocent of the charge against them, I resolved to return and share whatever persecution labor’s enemies could impose upon them. Consequently, on the night of June 20<sup>th</sup>, I left Waukesha. At 4:30 A.M., June 21<sup>st</sup>, I boarded a St. Paul train at the union depot at Milwaukee, and arrived in Chicago at 7:30 or 8 o’clock, and repaired to the house of Mrs. Ames at 14 S. Morgan street.
I sent for my wife, who came to me, and a few minutes later I conveyed word to Captain Black, our attorney, that I was prepared to surrender. After an affectionate parting with my noble, brave and loving wife and several devoted friends, who were present, I at a little past 2 o’clock p.m. June 21, accompanied by Mrs. Ames and Mr. A.H. Simpson to the court house entrance, was there joined by my attorney, Capt. Black. We walked up the broad stairway, entered the court then in session, and standing before the bar of the court announced my presence and my voluntary surrender for trial, and entered the plea “not guilty.” After this ceremony was over I approached the prisoner’s dock, where sat my arraigned comrades Fielden, Spies, Engel, Fischer, Lingg, Neebe and Schwab, and shaking hands with each as I took a seat among them. After the adjournment of the court I was conveyed with the others to a cell in the Cook county bastille, and securely locked up.
What of the Haymarket tragedy?
It is simple enough. A large number, over 3,000 of citizens, mostly workingmen, peaceably assemble to discuss their grievances, viz.: The eight-hour movement and the shooting and clubbing of the McCormick and lumber-yard strikers by the police of the previous day.
Query. Was that meeting, thus assembled, a lawful and constitutional gathering of citizens? The police, the grand jury, the verdict, the court, and the monopolists all reply: “It was not.”
After 10 o’clock, when the meeting was adjourning, two hundred (200) armed police in menacing array, threatening wholesale slaughter of the people, there peaceably (the mayor of Chicago and others who were present testified so before the jury) assembled, commanded their instant dispersal, under the pains and penalties of death.
Was the act of the police lawful and constitutional? The p-3lice, the grand jury, the verdict, the court, and the monopolists all reply: “It was.”
Some person (unknown and unproven) threw a dynamite bomb among the police. Whether it was thrown in self- defense or in furtherance of monopoly’s conspiracy against the 8-hour movement is not known.
Was that a lawful, a constitutional act? The ruling class shout in chorus: “It was not!”
My own belief, based upon careful examination of all the conditions surrounding this Haymarket affair, is that the bomb was thrown by a man in the employ of certain monopolists, who was sent from New York city to Chicago for that purpose, to break up the eight-hour movement, thrust the active men into prison, and scare and terrify the workingmen into submission. Such a course was advocated by all the leading mouth-pieces (newspapers) of monopoly in America just prior to May 1. They carried out their programme and obtained the results they desired.
Is it lawful and constitutional to put innocent men to death? Is it lawful and constitutional to punish us for the deed of a man acting in furtherance of a conspiracy of the monopolists to crush out the eight-hour movement? Every “law and order” tyrant from Chicago to St. Petersburg cries, “Yes!”
Six of the condemned men were not present at the meeting at the time of the tragedy, two of them were not present at any time. One of the latter was addressing a mass-meeting of 2,000 workingmen at Deering’s Harvester works, in Lake View, five miles away. The other one was at home abed, and knew not of the affair till the next day. His verdict is fifteen years in the penitentiary. These facts stand unquestioned and undenied before the court. There was no proof of our complicity with or knowledge of the person who threw the bomb, nor is there any proof as to who did throw it. The whole question as to who did the deed is resolved upon motive. What motive controlled the person who did the deed?
The rapid growth of the whole labor movement had, by May 1, given the monopolists of the country much cause for alarm. The organized power of labor was beginning to exhibit unexpected strength and boldness. This alarmed King money-bags, who saw in the Haymarket affair their golden opportunity to make a horrible example of the Anarchists, and by their dreadful fate give the discontented American workingmen a terrible warning!
This verdict is the suppression of free speech, free press and the assemblage of people to discuss their grievances. More than that, the verdict is the denial of the right of self-defense; it is the condemnation of the law of self- preservation in America.
As to the responsibility for the Haymarket tragedy? You have heard the side of the ruling class. I now speak for the people — the ruled. The Haymarket tragedy was the immediate result of the blood-thirsty officiousness of Police Inspector Bonfield. Mayor Harrison (commander in chief of police) was present at this meeting, and testified before the court that he heard the speeches and left just before its adjournment and went to the police station and advised Bonfield that everything at the meeting was peaceable and orderly. The mayor left for his house. Soon thereafter, Bonfield thirsting for promotion and the blood money which he knew that monopolists were eager to bestow, gathered his army and marched them down upon a peaceable, orderly meeting of workingmen, where he expected to immortalize himself by deeds of carnage and slaughter that would put to shame a horde of Apache Indians. Had he not done such brutal things before with the striking streetcar Knights of Labor, Trades Unionists and other workingmen? Why not repeat it that night also? He had received the plaudits of the capitalistic press for such acts done on other occasions. Why not again?
But Police Inspector Bonfield was only a willing agent, not the dastardly principal in this outrage. He held plenary power and obeyed what he knew to be the express desire of his masters — the money kings — who want to suppress free speech, free press, and the right of workingmen to assemble and discuss their grievances. Let the responsibility for the Haymarket tragedy rest where it belongs, to wit: Upon the monopolists, corporations and privileged class who rule and rob the working people, and when they complain about it discharge, lock-out and black-list them, or arrest, imprison and execute them. The Haymarket tragedy was, undoubtedly, the work of a deep laid monopolistic conspiracy originating in New York City and engineered by the Pinkerton thugs. Its object was to break down the eight-hour movement and Chicago was selected by these conspirators as the best place to do the work because Chicago was the center of the movement in the United States. Now, what are the facts about the conspiracy against the eight-hour movement which has resulted in breaking it down and consigning us to the executioner?
Just prior to the time set apart to inaugurate the eight-hour work day, (the latter part of April, 1886,) the New York Herald, in reference to the question, said:
“Two hours, taken from the hours of labor, throughout the United States by the proposed eight-hour movement, would make a difference annually of hundreds of millions in values, both to the capital invested in industries and existing stocks.”
Now what did this mean? It meant that the issue of the hour with the New York and Chicago Stock Exchanges, Board of Trade, and Produce Exchangers in every commercial and industrial center, was how to preserve the steadiness of the market and maintain the fictitious values of the four-fold watered stocks, then listed and then rapidly shrinking in value under the paralyzing influence of the impending eight-hour demand of the united army of labor. Hundreds of millions in money were at stake. What to do to save it? Clearly, the thing to do was to stop the eight-hour movement. The New York Times came promptly forward with its scheme to save the sinking market values. Accordingly, just four days before the grand national strike for eight hours and only one week before the Haymarket tragedy, the New York Times, one of the leading organs of railroad, bank, telegraph and telephone monopoly in America, published in its issue of April 25, 1886, an editorial on the condition of the markets, the causes of existing decline and panicky symptoms, in which it said:
“The strike question is, of course, the dominant one and is disagreeable in a variety of ways. A short and easy way to settle it is urged in some quarters, which, is to indict for conspiracy every man who strikes, and summarily lock him up. This method would undoubtedly strike a wholesome terror into the hearts of the working classes.
“Another way suggested is to pick out the labor leaders, and make such examples of them as to scare the others into submission.”
The sentiment was echoed at once by the New York Tribune, which said:
“The best policy would be to drive the workingmen into open mutiny against the law.”
The organs of monopoly (including the Chicago press), all over the United States took up the cry, and re-echoed the diabolical scheme. Something must be done to trump up charges against the leaders.
The first of May arrives, the great eight-hour strike is inaugurated. Forty thousand men are standing out for it in Chicago. Chicago is the stronghold of the movement, and 40,000 more threaten to join in the demand. An eight-hour mass meeting is held on the Haymarket, Tuesday, May 4. A bomb is thrown, several policemen killed, the leaders are arrested, indicted for conspiracy and murder, and seven of them sentenced to death. What’s the result? It worked as the monopolists said it would. The labor leaders are 11 picked out and made such examples of as to scare the others into submission.” Strikers were “summarily locked up. This method would undoubtedly strike a wholesome terror into the hearts of the working classes,” said the Times.
The eight-hour strike is broken and the movement fell to pieces, all over the country.
Commenting on the business situation on the 8<sup>th</sup> day of May, 1886, four days after the Haymarket tragedy, Bradstreet, in his weekly review, said, as telegraphed through the Associated Press and published in all the Chicago papers: “Of the 325,000 men who struck for eight hours, about 65,000 have gained it. Chicago was the center of the strike, but the movement all over the country has greatly weakened in the past few days. Stocks were very much depressed the first two days of the week (the 3<sup>rd</sup> and 4<sup>th</sup> of May, the days of the McCormick and Haymarket trouble), but have recovered their strength the last days of the week.” The eight-hour strike is practically ended, since the Haymarket affair in Chicago.
The desired result was attained. Prices of stocks, bonds, etc., were restored. It was accomplished by the fatal Haymarket bomb.
Who threw the bomb? Who inspired its throwing? John Philip Deluse, a saloon-keeper, living in Indianapolis, Indiana, makes an affidavit, supported by the affidavits of two other men, who were present, and witnessed and heard it (all three men well- known citizens of Indianapolis), that a stranger stepped into his place on Saturday, May 1, with a satchel in his hand, which he placed upon the bar while he ordered a drink. The stranger said he came from New York City, and was on his way to Chicago. He spoke of the labor troubles. Pointing to his satchel he said: “I have got something in here that will work. You will hear of it.” Turning at the door as he went out, he held up his satchel and pointing to it again, said, “You will hear of it soon.”
The prediction of the man came to pass. It was heard round the world. The description of this man tallies exactly with that given by the witness Burnett, who saw him throw the bomb at the Haymarket.
The leaders, as well as many others, not at the meeting of the Haymarket, were arrested and punished, the others “scared into submission,” and it resulted as the New York Times said, viz.: “This method will undoubtedly strike a wholesome terror into the hearts of the working classes.”
The conspiracy to bring about this result originated among the monopolists of New York City, at Pinkerton’s headquarters.
Was Police Inspector Bonfield, and States Attorney Grinnell a party to it? Was the n-dllionaire “Citizen’s Association” of Chicago a party to it? They have, I understand, supplied unlimited sums of money to bring about our conviction. I solemnly believe all these men were either parties to the Haymarket tragedy, or to the conspiracy for our conviction. This conclusion is irresistible, when taken in connection with the admitted fact that, to bring about our conviction, the constitution and the law has been ruthlessly trampled under foot.
Without fear, or favor, or reward, I have given the untiring energies of the past ten years of my life to ameliorate, to emancipate my fellow wage-slaves from their hereditary servitude to capital. I do not regret it; rather while I feel the satisfaction of duty performed, I regret my inability to have accomplished more than I have done.
During these ten years (from 1876 to 1886) I have traversed the states of Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Wisconsin, Illinois, Kentucky, Maryland, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and New York, sometimes under the auspices and direction of the Knights of Labor, at other times Trades Unions and socialist organizations. Covering this space of time I have addressed probably a half million workingmen and women, and organized, or assisted in organizing many labor organizations. No man can truthfully say I have ever yet betrayed a trust, violated a pledge, or swerved from my conception of duty in the labor movement.
I have worked for my living and supported myself since 12 years of age. I have made some enemies. My enemies in the southern states consisted of those who oppressed the black slave. My enemies in the north are among those who would perpetuate the slavery of the wage workers. My whole life has been sober and industrious; was never under the influence of liquor, was never arrested for any offense, and voluntarily surrendered for trial in the present case.
I married in 1872 and since 1873 have lived in Chicago with my family. In all my labors for the up-lifting and emancipation of the wage-worker I have had the earnest, honest, intelligent, unflagging support of that grandest, noblest, bravest of women-my loving wife. We have two children, a boy of 7 years, and a girl 4 years old.
For free speech and the right of assembly, five labor orators and organizers of labor are condemned to die. For free press and free thought three labor editors are sent to the scaffold. “These eight men,” said the attorneys of the monopolists, “are picked up by the grand jury because they are the leaders of thousands who are equally guilty with them and we punish them to make examples of them for the others.” This much for opinion’s sake, for free thought, free speech, free press and public assembly.
This Haymarket affair has exposed to public view the hideous enormities of capitalism and the barbarous despotism of government. The tragedy and the effects of it have demonstrated first: That government is power, and statute law is license, because it is privilege. It has shown the people, the poor, the wage-slaves, that law, statute law is a privilege, and that privileges are for sale to those who can buy them. Government enacts law; the police, the soldier and the jailor at the behest of the rich enforce it. Law is license, the whole earth and all it contains has been sold to a few who are thus authorized by statute law, licensed to rob the many of their natural inheritance. Law is license. The few are licensed by law to own the land, the machinery, the houses, food, clothes and shelter of the people, whose industry, whose labor created them. Law is license; law, statute law, is the coward’s weapon, the tool of the thief. By it humanity has ever been degraded and enslaved. By law mankind is robbed of its birthright, liberty transformed into slavery; life into death; the fair earth into a den of thieves and murderers. The untold millions, the men, women and children of toil, the proletariat, are by law deprived of their lives, their liberties and their happiness. Law is license; Government — authority — is despotism.
Anarchy, natural law, is liberty. Liberty is the natural right to do what one pleases, bounded and limited only by the equal right of every one else to the same liberty. Privileges are none; equal rights for all. Liberty, Fraternity, Equality.
The trial throughout was a travesty on justice. Every law, natural and statute, was violated in response to the clamor of the capitalist class. Every capitalist newspaper in the city, with one exception, called for our blood before the trial began, demanded our lives during the trial and since. A class jury, class law, class hate, and a court blinded by prejudice against our opinions, has done its work, we are its victims. Every juryman swore he was prejudiced against our opinions; we were tried for our opinions and convicted because of them. The jury according to its own statements since the verdict (they served nearly two months) entertained themselves each night with either card playing or they played the fiddle, the guitar, the piano, and “sang songs” and gave parlor recitations and theatricals. They had carriage rides at the expense of the people amounting to one hundred and forty dollars; and their board bill was $3.50 per day at a fashionable hotel amounting to over $2,300; they had a fine time, a very pleasant and merry time. Mr. Juryman Todd said he was a “clothing salesman and a Baptist.” “Then,” said he, “this was a picked jury, they were all gentlemen.” Of course, these gentlemen, who have a profound contempt for the vulgar, dirty working classes had to bring a verdict befitting gentlemen. So highly appreciated was their verdict that Chicago millionaires proposed and so far as any one knows did contribute a purse of ($ 1 00,000) one hundred thousand dollars to this jury as a reward for their verdict. The jury has besides been lionized, wined, dined, banqueted, and given costly presents, and sums of money, since the rendering of their verdict.
The influences which are at work forcing upon the people the social revolution arise out of the capitalist system. Necessity is the mother of invention; it is also the father of progress and civilization. The justification for the social revolution is recorded throughout all the pages of history. Our fathers proclaimed it in the immortal Declaration, July 4<sup>th</sup>, 1776, as follows:
<quote>
We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they were endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is THE RIGHT OF THE PEOPLE TO ALTER OR ABOLISH IT.
</quote>
Will the coming revolution be peaceable or violent?
But now, when the workingmen of American refuse to “give their consent to be any longer governed” by the profit mongers, labor exploiters, children slayers and home despoilers, they are at once put down, and kept down by the strong arm of military power, against their will and without “their consent,” in the name of “law and order.”
It is against this barbaric use of force, this violation of every natural right that Anarchists protest, and for protesting, die!
The only fact established by proof, as well as by our own admission, cheerfully given before the jury, was that we held opinions and preached a doctrine that is considered dangerous to the rascality and infamies of the privileged, law-creating class known as monopolists, to whom, with the prophets of old, we say:
<quote>
Go to, now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you; and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasures together for the last days.
-- James V., 1–3
</quote>
|
#title The International
#author Albert Parsons
#LISTtitle International
#SORTauthors Albert Parsons, Iain McKay
#SORTtopics Anarchist International, international, syndicalism
#date 4 April 1885
#source Retrieved on 24<sup>th</sup> April 2021 from [[https://anarchism.pageabode.com/?p=1102][anarchism.pageabode.com]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2021-04-24T18:06:25
#notes Introduction by Iain McKay. Originally published in <em>The Alarm</em>.
*** Precursors of Syndicalism
The first instalment of <em>Precursors of Syndicalism</em> (<em>ASR</em> No. 75, Winter 2019) sketched the rise of syndicalist ideas within the First International. Championed by Bakunin, the idea of the International as a militant union for economic struggle was the majority trend within it and Marx preferred to destroy the organisation when it did not endorse his position of transforming it into parties pursuing political action.
Syndicalist ideas reappeared in America in 1883, with the creation of the International Working Peoples’ Association (IWPA). Created by former Marxists who had come to reject political action in favour of direct action, its legacy was secured in the fight for the Eight Hour Day which started on the 1<sup>st</sup> of May 1886 and the bombing of a squad of policemen who were breaking up a peaceful IWPA rally on the 4<sup>th</sup> called to protest the killing of picketers the day before. After a red scare, eight anarchist militants were arrested and given a kangaroo trail, resulting in three imprisoned and five sentenced to death. Louis Lingg committed suicide in prison, while Albert Parsons, August Spies, Adolph Fischer and George Engel mounted the gallows in spite of international protest.
In 1893, Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld signed pardons for the imprisoned anarchists – Samuel Fielden, Michael Schwab, Oscar Neebe – recognising them as victims of “hysteria, packed juries, and a biased judge” and noting that the state “has never discovered who it was that threw the bomb which killed the policeman, and the evidence does not show any connection whatsoever between the defendants and the man who threw it.” He also faulted the city of Chicago for failing to hold Pinkerton guards responsible for repeated use of lethal violence against striking workers.
The commemoration of the Chicago Martyrs on the anniversary of their judicial murder on November 11<sup>th</sup> became an International custom in anarchist circles. As Kropotkin put it at one such meeting: “Were not our Chicago Comrades right in despising politics, and saying the struggle against robbery must be carried on in the workshop and the street, by deeds not words?” (“The Chicago Anniversary,” <em>Freedom</em>, December 1891) Like Bakunin, the Chicago Anarchists held, to quote Lucy Parsons, “that the granges, trade-unions, Knights of Labor assemblies, etc., are the embryonic groups of the ideal anarchistic society.” (“Lucy E. Parsons on Anarchy”, Albert Parsons (ed.) <em>Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Scientific Basis</em> [Honolulu: University of the Pacific, 2003], 110)
As with the syndicalists, the Internationalists rejected the ballot-box and embraced direct economic struggle, arguing that the groupings workers formed in the fight against exploitation would be the basis for ending it by workers control of production. They summarised their position towards the end of the manifesto agreed at the IWPA Pittsburgh Congress in 1883:
<quote>
<em>“First</em>: Destruction of the existing class rule, by all means, i.e., by energetic, relentless, revolutionary, and international action.
<em>“Second</em>: Establishment of a free society based upon co-operative organisation of production.
<em>“Third</em>: Free exchange of equivalent products by and between the productive organisations without commerce and profit-mongery.
<em>“Fourth</em>: Organisation of education on a secular, scientific, and equal basis for both sexes.
<em>“Fifth</em>: Equal rights for all without distinction to sex or race.
<em>“Sixth</em>: Regulation of all public affairs by free contracts between the autonomous (independent) communes and associations, resting on a federalistic basis.” (<em>Anarchism,</em> 78)
</quote>
This free society would be based on “the decentralisation of power” with “no political parties, no capitalism, no rings, no kings, no statesmen and no rulers” for “[a]ll political power must necessarily become despotic, because all government tends to become centralised in the hands of the few, who breed corruption among themselves, and in a very short time disconnect themselves from the body of the people.” (Lucy Parsons, <em>Anarchism</em>, 110–1) In short, the federal socialism which has been the aim of anarchism since Proudhon using the tactics advocated by anarchists since Bakunin. As one historian correctly summarised:
<quote>
“The ‘Chicago idea,’ in its essential outlines, anticipated by some twenty years the doctrine of anarcho-syndicalism, which, in a similar way, rejected centralized authority, disdained political action, and made the union the center of revolutionary struggle as well as the nucleus of the future society. […] This is not to say, however, that anarcho-syndicalism originated with Parsons and his associates. As early as the 1860s and 1870s the followers of Proudhon and Bakunin were proposing the formation of workers’ councils designed both as a weapon of class struggle against the capitalists and as the structural basis for the libertarian millennium. A free federation of labor unions, Bakunin had written, would form ‘the living germs of the new social order, which is to replace the bourgeois world.’” (Paul Avrich, <em>The Haymarket Tragedy</em> [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984], 73)
</quote>
It should be sufficient to leave it here, but sadly not. Since the 1970s there has been a tendency to suggest that the Chicago Anarchists were not, in fact, anarchists. This seems to have started in 1976 with Carolyn Ashbaugh’s biography <em>Lucy Parsons: American Revolutionary</em> (recently reprinted by Haymarket Books) which proclaimed that she, like the other Chicago Internationalists, were syndicalists rather than anarchists (that this simply expressed a shocking lack of understanding of anarchism has previously been show in “Lucy Parsons: Anarchist Anarchist” [<em>ASR</em> No. 60, Summer 2013]). This was followed by Bruce Nelson’s <em>Beyond the Martyrs: a social history of Chicago’s anarchists, 1870–1900</em> (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988) which suggested this “was not an evolution from socialism to anarchism but from republicanism, through electoral socialism, to revolutionary socialism.” (171) More recently, Staughton Lynd and Andrej Grubacic at least claimed they had created a “synthesis between anarchism and Marxism.” (<em>Wobblies and Zapatistas: Conversations on Anarchism, Marxism and Radical History</em> [Oakland: PM Press, 2008], 11)
The latter base their claims on the historian James Green who suggested that the Chicago Anarchists had “turned away from electoral competition and adopted Karl Marx’s strategy of organising workers […] building class-conscious Trade Unions as a basis for future political action.” They “faithfully adhered to the lesson they had learned from Karl Marx: that socialism could be achieved only through the collective power of workers organised into aggressive Trade Unions.” Thus the “Internationals of Chicago invented a peculiar, in some ways, American brand of revolutionary socialism they called anarchism.” (<em>Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing That Divided Gilded Age America</em> [Anchor Books, 2007], 50, 130, 131)
There are a few problems with this.
The first, and most obvious, problem is that Marx advocated no such thing. Yes, Marx supported unions but he did not think the workers movements should be limited to, or even based on, them. Instead, he argued for the creation of workers’ parties and the use of “political action” in the shape of standing for elections. Indeed, in 1870 he explicitly mocked Bakunin’s programme for advocating the ideas Green proclaims as Marx’s:
<quote>
“The working class must not occupy itself with <em>politics</em>. They must only organise themselves by trade-unions. One fine day, by means of the <em>Internationale</em> they will supplant the place of all existing states.” (Marx, Engels, Lenin, <em>Anarchism, and Anarcho-Syndicalism</em> [Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974], 48)
</quote>
Here are all the elements the historians use to proclaim the Chicago Anarchists anything other than anarchists – the dismissal of electioneering, the embrace of economic struggle, unions replacing the state – and all are rejected. Can we expect Green to have known that? Yes, for he is discussing anarchists and expressly comparing their ideas to Marx. Yet he was a historian, surely Marxists would know better? There is a long, long history of Marxist attacks on syndicalism – social-democratic and Leninist – which echo Marx’s attack on Bakunin, namely that it ignores the necessity for <em>political</em> organisation (workers’ parties) and <em>political</em> action (electioneering). Sadly, no:
<quote>
“The ‘anarchism’ that Spies, Parsons, and their comrades espoused had little in common with the ‘anarchism’ of Karl Marx’s political opponent, Michael Bakunin, but was more akin to a revolutionary socialist vision of a new society that would replace capitalism.’ (Patrick M. Quinn, “James Green’s Death in the Haymarket,” <em>Against the Current</em>, November/December 2006)
</quote>
This brings us to the second issue, namely that Green makes no attempt to define anarchism nor any real mention of the political ideas of the Chicago Internationalists. This makes evaluating his claims difficult for the average reader, which means they will draw their own conclusions on what constitutes anarchism and what anarchists believe. Given the popular image, almost all will agree with Green when he seems to imply it is throwing dynamite as the sole tactic for social change – a few violent actions and some violent rhetoric is remembered, unlike the much more violent rhetoric and actual violence of the business class and its state. That Bakunin never advocated individual terror is as irrelevant as his actual syndicalism. Equally, it would remiss not to note that the Chicago Anarchists killed no one, unlike the Pinkerton and state forces which regularly killed strikers – indeed, it was this need for self-defence which contributed to the dynamite rhetoric which so many equate to their anarchism.
Green does not even provide the six-point conclusion of the Pittsburgh Manifesto which, with its federalism, is hardly Marxist. Likewise, the IWPA was as decentralised and federalist as the socialist society it sought to create, a position much at odds with Marxist orthodoxy. A federal militant union International was what Bakunin advocated and what Marx opposed in favour of a centralised International based on political parties. At least he quotes from Pittsburgh Manifesto, for he does not even mention Albert Parson’s book <em>Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Scientific Basis</em>.<em></em> Parsons included articles by Peter Kropotkin, Élisée Reclus and Dyer Lum on anarchism. This, in itself, suggests a clear awareness by Parsons of what the term meant and that his use of Anarchist was neither invented nor used in ignorance. Yes, Parson did include in his book an analysis of wage-labour by quoting Marx. However, this analysis was one most anarchists then – as now – would agree with: labour <em>is</em> exploited by capital, the surplus-value produced by the many <em>is</em> appropriated by the few. Bakunin praised Marx’s economic analysis and attacked him not on the critique of capitalism nor the goal of a socialist society but rather the <em>means</em> advocated: political action and seizing state power.
While Nelson warned that this subject “should not be approached with twentieth-century labels,” (153) he like the others did so. All these historians show an unawareness of anarchism is a branch of socialism and as expressed by Kropotkin in the work Parsons included in his book. Thus anarchism is “the no-government system of socialism” and “private ownership of land, capital, and machinery has had its time; that it is condemned to disappear; and that all requisites for production must, and will, become the common property of society, and be managed in common by the producers of wealth” with “a complete negation of the wage-system.” (“The Scientific Basis of Anarchism,” <em>Anarchism</em>, 111) Like the Chicago Anarchists, Bakunin called himself a revolutionary socialist, as did Kropotkin who also happily used the term communist. The issue between the two schools of socialism was, as the Chicago Anarchists repeatedly explained, the State and in this they echoed Proudhon:
<quote>
“Louis Blanc represents governmental socialism, revolution by power, as I represent democratic socialism, revolution by the people. An abyss exists between us.” (<em>Les Confessions d’un révolutionnaire</em> [Garnier: Paris 1851], 177)
</quote>
The idea that “socialism” or “communism” referred purely to Marxism is of recent origin, one favoured and encouraged by Marxists themselves. Similarly, the notion that anarchism was – or is – solely concerned with the state is simply untenable once you move from the dictionary or general accounts of anarchism like the one Green utilised (James Joll’s <em>The Anarchists</em>) to actual anarchist writings and movements. Thus Green’s comments that the Chicago Internationalists “thought of themselves as socialists of the anarchist type – that is, as revolutionaries who believed in liberating society from all state control, whether capitalist or socialist” (129) – would apply to <em>all</em> anarchists, even those who eschewed insurrection and the violent rhetoric of the IWPA. As anarchists were and are socialists, aiming for an anti-state, federal, self-managed socialism, Green comments are confused, at best. As Adolph Fischer put it:
<quote>
“A number of persons claim, that an anarchist cannot be a socialist, and a socialist not an anarchist. This is wrong […] every anarchist is a socialist but every socialist is not necessarily an anarchist.” (<em>Anarchism</em>, 78)
</quote>
So to suggest Parsons, Spies, etc. were Marxists when they had come to the same conclusions as that of his political opponent in the First International, Bakunin, which Marx had so furiously attacked and combatted is simply wrong. It should also be noted that while some Marxists claim the Chicago Anarchists as their own, Marxists at the time did not. Green makes no mention that Marx’s daughter Eleanor expressed the opinion “that we are not Anarchists, but are opposed to Anarchism […] strengthens our position in asking justice for the condemned men.” (“The Chicago Anarchists,” <em>To-day,</em> November 1887) Engels said nothing about the events publically beyond signing a petition for clemency, a somewhat strange position to take if they were Marxists (in private letters, on the very few occasions he refers to them at all, he never suggests they were anything other than anarchists).
In short, someone can draw the exact same conclusions as Bakunin did and which Marx explicitly and repeatedly denounced yet be denied the anarchist label. Is it too much to ask historians writing on a subject to gain <em>some</em> understanding of the politics involved before putting pen to paper? As for the Marxists who make the claim, suffice to say it is a strange admiration which suggests the Martyrs had no idea what the word on their lips when they died meant.
The Chicago Internationalists called themselves anarchists for a reason. They underwent an evolution from political socialism to anti-political socialism, from Marxism to revolutionary Anarchism. This can be seen by the writings of later anarchists. Emma Goldman – regardless of what Ashbaugh and a host of Leninist regurgitators assert – advocated syndicalism and noted “that in this country five men had to pay with their lives because they advocated Syndicalist methods as the most effective, in the struggle of labor against capital” (<em>Syndicalism: the Modern Menace to Capitalism</em>). On the twenty-first anniversary of the Chicago events, her <em>Mother Earth</em> argued as follows:
<quote>
“Bitter experience has gradually forced upon organized labor the realization that it is difficult, if not impossible, for isolated unions and trades to successfully wage war against organized capital; for capital <em>is</em> organized, into national as well as international bodies, co-operating in their exploitation and oppression of labor. To be successful, therefore, modern strikes must constantly assume ever larger proportions, involving the solidaric co-operation of all the branches of an affected industry – an idea gradually gaining recognition in the trades unions. This explains the occurrence of sympathetic strikes, in which men in related industries cease work in brotherly co-operation with their striking bothers – evidences of solidarity so terrifying to the capitalistic class.
“Solidaric strikes do not represent the battle of an isolated union or trade with an individual capitalist or group of capitalists; they are the war of the proletariat class with its organized enemy, the capitalist regime. The solidaric strike is the prologue of the General Strike.
“The modern worker has ceased to be the slave of the individual capitalist; to-day, the capitalist <em>class</em> is his master. However great his occasional victories on the economic field, he still remains a wage slave. It is, therefore, not sufficient for labor unions to strive to merely lessen the pressure of the capitalistic heel; progressive workingmen’s organizations can have but one worthy object – to achieve their full economic stature by complete emancipation from wage slavery.
“That is the true mission of trades unions. They bear the germs of a potential social revolution; aye, more – they are the factors that will fashion the system of production and distribution in the coming free society.” (“The First May and the General Strike,” <em>Mother Earth</em>, May 1907)
</quote>
Given the all-too-common Marxist myth that Goldman was some kind of “lifestylist” libertarian who was unaware of the class nature of society and the need for class struggle, it is worth noting that her actual position was well-known at the time as can be seen by leading British Syndicalist Tom Mann’s comments that her journal had “[f]or nine years […] voiced in clear terms the necessity for ‘working class solidarity,’ ‘direct action in all industrial affairs’ and ‘free association.’ I subscribe to each of these with heart and mind […] I am the more grateful to the editor and conductors of <em>Mother Earth</em> for labouring so thoroughly to popularise principles calculated, as I believe, to emancipate mankind, intellectually and economically.” (“<em>Mother Earth</em> and Labour’s Revolt,” <em>Mother Earth</em>, March 1915)
Once we know the actual politics of revolutionary anarchism, we see how wrong Nelson was to suggest that if Kropotkin and Bakunin “epitomized nineteenth century anarchism” and “immigrant anarchism [is identified] with Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, then the membership of Chicago’s IWPA was not anarchist” (171, 153) His account, like that of Ashbaugh and Green, may contain useful research but sadly within a context so flawed that many, even most, of the conclusions have to be dismissed or, at best, taken with copious caveats and corrections. Otherwise we would have to conclude that Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman and Peter Kropotkin along with Lucy Parsons and the Chicago Martyrs did not understand what anarchism is…
We end with Albert Parsons’ article on the IWPA’s position on unions from the English-language IWPA paper <em>The Alarm</em> on 4<sup>th</sup> of April 1885. While extracts have been included by many writers, including Dave Roediger in an article entitled “Albert R. Parsons: The Anarchist as Trade Unionist” in <em>Haymarket Scrapbook</em> (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1986), this is the first time as far as we are aware that it has appeared in full since originally published.
*** The International
<em>The Alarm</em>, 4 April 1885
If it be true as lately asserted by many, that the communist anarchists known as the (Black) International, have decided upon a vigorous warfare against Trades Unions as an important branch of their tactics, it is much to be regretted. Such a course of action would not only be economically unsound but is suicidal as well – <em>Labor Enquirer</em>
The ALARM takes pleasure in setting its contemporary, from whose columns the above extract is taken, right on the attitude of the International Working Peoples’ Association towards Trades unions. We have ourselves observed paragraphs of a similar nature floating around through the labour press, and we gladly avail ourselves of this opportunity to answer the charge. The Communist Anarchists or Internationalists, as our organisation is alternatively called, have on some occasions found it necessary to criticise adversely the tactics, propaganda and aims of some Trades unions. In Chicago, not long since, the Trades assembly was challenged to a “joint debate” upon the subject of the relations of capital and labour, and the most practical method to achieve labour’s economic emancipation, the International holding adverse views to those of the Trades assembly. These facts taken together have, with the aid of ignorant or designing leaders, who seem to be actuated in the matter by a desire for “place and fame,” been taken up and an attempt made to create a false impression with regard to the International.
However, in order to place the matter fairly before our contemporaries of the Trades Unions it will be necessary to publish in this connection the action of the Pittsburgh Congress held in October 1883, where the following resolution was adopted as the official declaration of the International upon that subject, viz:
WHEREAS. We view in Trades Unions based upon progressive principles, the abolition of the wages system, the cornerstone of a better societary structure than the present one, and
WHEREAS. Furthermore, these Trades Unions are an army of despoiled and disinherited brothers, who are destined to overthrow the present economic system for the purpose of free universal co-operation, be it
<em>Resolved</em>. That we, the International Working Peoples’ Association, extend to them our brotherhood and our aid in their struggle against the ever-growing despotism of private capital, and
<em>Resolved</em>. That while we are in full sympathy with such progressive unions, we will attack and seek to destroy all those organisations who stand upon reactionary principles, since they are the enemies of the cause of labour’s emancipation and a detriment to humanity and progress.
The International recognises in the Trades Unions the embryonic group of the future “free society.” Every Trades Union is, <em>nolens volens</em> [whether willing or not], an autonomous commune in the process of incubation. The Trades Union is a necessity of capitalistic production, and will yet take its place by superseding it under the system of universal free co-operation. No, friends, it is not the unions but the methods which some of them employ, with which the International finds fault, and as indifferently as it may be considered by some, the development of capitalism is hastening the day when all Trades Unions and Anarchists will of necessity become one and the same.
|
#cover a-a-alcoholics-autonomous-anarchy-and-alcohol-1.png
#title Anarchy and Alcohol
#subtitle addiction culture · strategies for sobriety · civilization and booze
#author Alcoholics Autonomous
#SORTauthors CrimethInc., Anonymous
#SORTtopics CrimethInc., alcoholism, disease
#date 2008
#source Retrieved on 2020-07-01 from [[https://crimethinc.com/zines/anarchy-and-alcohol][crimethinc.com]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2020-07-17T09:22:29
<em>Peering through the fog behind his eyes, he saw an alcohologram: a world of anguish, in which intoxication was the only escape. Hating himself even more than he hated the corporate killers who had created it, he stumbled to his feet and headed back to the liquor store.</em>
<em>Ensconced in their penthouses, they counted the dollars pouring in from millions like him, and chuckled to themselves at the ease with which all opposition was crushed. But they, too, often had to drink themselves to sleep at night — if ever those vanquished masses stop coming back for more, the tycoons sometimes fetted to themselves,</em> there’s gonna be hell to pay.
*** <em>Wasted, Indeed</em>: Anarchy & Alcohol
**** Ecstasy <em>v</em> Intoxication: for a world of enchantment, or <em>anarchaholism?</em>
<em>Sloshed, smashed, trashed, loaded, wrecked, wasted, blasted, plastered, tanked, fucked up, bombed. Everyone’s heard of the arctic people with one hundred words for snow, we have one hundred words for drunk.</em>
<em>We perpetuate our own culture of defeat.</em>
----
Hold it right there — I can see the sneer on your face: <em>Are these anarchists so uptight that they would even denounce the only fun aspect of anarchism — the beer after the riots, the liquor in the pub where all that</em> pie-in-the-sky <em>theory is bandied about? What do they do for fun, anyway — cast aspersions on the little fun we do have? Don’t we get to relax and have a good time in any part of our lives?</em>
Do not misunderstand us: we are not arguing against indulgence, but <em>for</em> it. Ambrose Bierce defined an ascetic as “a weak person who succumbs to the temptation of denying himself pleasure,” and we concur. As Chuck Baudelaire wrote, <em>you must always be high — everything depends on this.</em> So we are not against drunkenness, but rather against drink! For those who embrace drink as a route to drunkenness thus cheat themselves of a total life of enchantment;
Drink, like caffeine or sugar in the body, only plays a role in life that life itself can provide for otherwise. The woman who never drinks coffee does not require it in the morning when she awakens: her body produces energy and focus on its own, as thousands of generations of evolution have prepared it to do. If she drinks coffee regularly, soon her body lets the coffee take over that role, and she becomes dependent upon it. Thus does alcohol artificially provide for temporary moments of relaxation and release while impoverishing life of all that is genuinely restful and liberating.
If some sober people in this society do not seem as reckless and free as their boozer counterparts, that is a mere accident of culture, mere circumstantial evidence. Those puritans exist all the same in the world drained of all magic and genius by the alcoholism of their fellows <em>(and the capitalism, hierarchy, misery it helps maintain) —</em> the only difference is that they are so self-abnegating as to refuse even the false magic, the genie of the bottle. But other “sober” folk, whose orientation to living might better be described as enchanted or ecstatic, are plentiful, if you look hard enough. For these individuals — for us — life is a constant celebration, one which needs no augmentation and from which we need no respite.
Alcohol, like Prozac and all the other mind-control medications that are making big bucks for Big Brother these days, substitutes symptomatic treatment for cure. It takes away the pain of a dull, drab existence for a few hours at best, then returns it twofold. It not only replaces positive actions which would address the root causes of our despondency — it <em>prevents</em> them, as more energy becomes focused on achieving and recovering from the drunken state. Like the tourism of the worker, drink is a pressure valve that releases tension while maintaining the system that creates it.
In this push-button culture, we’ve become used to conceiving of ourselves as simple machines to be operated: add the appropriate chemical to the equation to get the desired result. In our search for health, happiness, meaning in life, we run from one panacea to the next — Viagra, vitamin C, vodka — instead of approaching our lives holistically and addressing our problems at their social and economic roots. This product-oriented mindset is the foundation of our alienated consumer society: without consuming products, we can’t live! We try to buy relaxation, community, self-confidence — now even ecstasy comes in a pill!
*We* want ecstasy as away of life, not a liver-poisoning alcoholiday from it. “Life sucks — get drunk” is the essence of the argument that enters our ears from our masters’ tongues and then passes out of our own slurring mouths, perpetuating whatever incidental and unnecessary truths it may refer to — but we’re not falling for it any longer! Against inebriation — and <em>for</em> drunkenness! Burn down the liquor stores, and replace them with playgrounds!
<em>For a Lucid Bacchanalian, Ecstatic Sobriety!</em>
**** Spurious Rebellion
Practically every child in mainstream Western society grows up with alcohol as the forbidden fruit their parents or peers indulge in but deny to them. This prohibition only makes drinking that much more fascinating to young people, and when they get the opportunity, most immediately assert their independence by doing exactly as they’ve been told not to: ironically, they rebel by following the example set for them. This hypocritical pattern is standard for child-rearing in this society, and works to replicate a number of destructive behaviors that otherwise would be aggressively refused by new generations. The fact that the bogus morality of many drinking parents is mirrored in the sanctimonious practice of religious groups helps to create a false dichotomy between puritanical self-denial and life-loving, free-wheeling drinkers — with “friends” like Baptist ministers, we teetotalers wonder, who needs enemies?
These partisans of Rebellious Drunkenness and advocates of Responsible Abstinence are loyal adversaries. The former need the latter to make their dismal rituals look like fun; the latter need the former to make their rigid austerity seem like common sense. An “ecstatic sobriety” which combats the dreariness of one and the bleariness of the other — false pleasure and false discretion alike — is analogous to the anarchism that confronts both the false freedom offered by capitalism and the false community offered by communism.
**** Alcohol & Sex in the Rape Culture
Let’s lay it on the table: almost all of us are coming from a place where our sexuality is or was occupied territory. We’ve been raped, abused, assaulted, shamed, silenced, confused, constructed, programmed. We’re badasses, and we’re taking it all back, reclaiming ourselves; but for most of us, that’s a slow, complex, not yet concluded process.
This doesn’t mean we can’t have good, safe, supportive sex right now, in the middle of that healing — but it does make having that sex a little more complicated. To be certain we’re not perpetuating or helping to perpetuate negative patterns in a lover’s life, we have to be able to communicate clearly and honestly before things get hot and heavy — and while they are, and after. Few forces interfere with this communication like alcohol does. In this culture of denial, we are encouraged to use it as a social lubricant to help us slip past our inhibitions; all too often, this simply means ignoring our own fears and scars, and not asking about others’. If it is dangerous, as well as beautiful, for us to share sex with each other sober, how much more dangerous must it be to do so drunk, reckless, and incoherent?
-----
Speaking of sex, it’s worth noting the supporting role alcohol has played in patriarchal gender dynamics. For example — in how many nuclear families has alcoholism helped to maintain an unequal distribution of power and pressure? (All the writers of this tract can call to mind more than one such case among their relatives alone.) The man’s drunken self-destruction, engendered as it may be by the horrors of surviving under capitalism, imposes even more of a burden on the woman, who must still
somehow hold the family together — often in the face of his violence. And on the subject of dynamics...
**** The Tyranny of Apathy
<quote>
“<em>Every fucking anarchist project I engage in is ruined or nearly ruined by alcohol. You set up a collective living situation and everyone is too drunk or stoned to do the basic chores, let alone maintain an attitude of respect. You want to create community, but after the show everyone just goes back to their rooms and drinks themselves to death. If it’s not one substance to abuse it’s a motherfucking other. I understand trying to obliterate your consciousness is a natural reaction to being born in alienating capitalist hell, but I want people to see what we anarchists are doing and say “Yeah, this is better than capitalism!”... which is hard to say if you can’t walk around without stepping on broken forty-ounce bottles. I’ve never considered myself straight-edge, but fuck it, I’m not taking it anymore!”</em>
</quote>
It’s said that when the renowned anarchist Oscar Wilde first heard the old slogan <em>if it is humiliating to be ruled, how much more humiliating it is to choose one’s rulers,</em> he responded: “If it’s humiliating to choose one’s masters, how much more humiliating to be one’s own master!” He intended this as a critique of hierarchies within the self as well as the democratic state, of course — but, sadly, his quip could be applied literally to the way some of our attempts at creating anarchist environments pan out in practice. This is especially true when they’re carried out by drunk people.
In certain circles, especially the ones in which the word “anarchy” itself is more in fashion than any of its various meanings, freedom is conceived of in negative terms: “don’t tell me what to do!” In practice, this often means nothing more than an assertion of the individual’s right to be lazy, selfish, unaccountable for his actions or lack thereof. In such contexts, when a group agrees upon a project it often ends up being a small, responsible minority that has to do all the work to make it happen. These conscientious few often look like the autocratic ones — when, invisibly, it is the apathy and hostility of their comrades that forces them to adopt this role. Being drunk and disorderly all the time is <em>coercive -</em> it compels others to clean up after you, to think clearly when you won’t, to absorb the stress generated by your behavior when you are too fucked up for dialogue. These dynamics go two ways, of course — those who take <em>all</em> responsibility on their shoulders perpetuate a pattern in which everyone else takes none — but everyone is responsible for their own part in such patterns, and for transcending it.
Think of the power we could have if all the energy and effort in the world — or maybe even just <em>your</em> energy and effort? — that goes into
drinking were put into resisting, building, creating. Try adding up all the money anarchists in your community have spent on corporate libations, and picture how much musical equipment or bail money or food (-not-
bombs... or, fuck it, bombs!) it could have paid for — instead of funding their war against all of us. Better: imagine living in a world where
cokehead presidents die of overdoses while radical musicians and rebels live the chaos into ripe old age!
**** Sobriety & Solidarity
Like any lifestyle choice, be it vagabondage or union membership, abstention from alcohol can sometimes be mistaken as an end rather than a means.
Above all, it is critical that our own choices <em>not</em> be a pretext for us to deem ourselves superior to those who make different decisions. The only strategy for sharing good ideas that succeeds unfailingly (and that goes for hotheaded, alienating tracts like this one as well!) is the power of example — if you put “ecstatic sobriety” into action in your life <em>and it works,</em> those who sincerely want similar things will join in. Passing judgment on others for decisions that affect only themselves is absolutely noxious to any anarchist — not to mention it makes them less likely to experiment with the options you offer.
And so — the question of solidarity and community with anarchists and others who do use alcohol and drugs. We propose that these are of utmost importance. Especially in the case of those who are struggling to free themselves of unwanted addictions, such solidarity is paramount: Alcoholics Anonymous, for example, is just one more instance of a quasi-religious organization filling a social need that should already be provided for by anarchist community self-organizing. As in every case, we anarchists must ask ourselves: do we take our positions simply to feel superior to the unwashed (er, washed) masses — or because we sincerely want to propagate accessible alternatives? Besides, most of us who are not substance-addicted can thank our privileges and good fortune for this; this gives us all the more responsibility
to be good allies to those who have not had such privileges or luck — on whatever terms <em>they</em> set. Let tolerance, humility, accessibility, and sensitivity be the qualities we nurture in ourselves, not self-righteousness or pride. No separatist sobriety!
**** Revolution
So anyway — what are we going to do if we don’t go to bars, hang out at parties, sit on the steps or in front of the television with our forty-ounce bottles? <em>Anything else</em>! The social impact of our society’s fixation on alcohol is at least as important as its mental, medical, economic, and emotional effects. Drinking standardizes our social lives, occupying some of the eight waking hours a day that aren’t already colonized by work. It locates us spatially — living rooms, cocktail lounges, railroad tracks — and contextually — in ritualized, predictable behaviors — in ways more explicit systems of control never could. Often when one of us does manage to escape the role of worker/consumer, drinking is there, stubborn holdover from our colonized leisure time, to fill up the promising space that opens. Free from these routines, we could discover other ways to spend time and energy and seek pleasure, ways that could prove dangerous to the system of alienation itself.
Drink can <em>incidentally</em> be part of positive and challenging social interactions, of course — the problem is that its central role in current socializing and socialization misrepresents it as <em>the</em> prerequisite for such intercourse. This obscures the fact that we can create such interactions at will with nothing more than our own creativity, honesty, and daring. Indeed, without these, <em>nothing</em> of value is possible — have you ever been to a bad party? — and with them, no alcohol is necessary.
When one or two persons cease to drink, it just seems senseless, like they are ejecting themselves from the company (or at least customs) of their fellow human beings for nothing. But a <em>community</em> of such people can develop a radical culture of sober adventure and engagement, one that could eventually offer exciting opportunities for drink-free activity and merriment for all. Yesterday’s geeks and loners could be the pioneers of tomorrow’s new world: “lucid bacchanalism” is a new horizon, a new possibility for transgression and transformation that could provide fertile soil for revolts yet unimaginable. Like any revolutionary lifestyle option, this one offers an immediate taste of another world while helping create a context for actions that hasten its universal realization.
<em>No war but the class war — no cocktail but the molotov cocktail!</em>
<em>Let us brew nothing but trouble!</em>
**** Postscript: How To Read This Tract
With any luck, you’ve been able to discern — even, perhaps, through that haze of drunken stupor — that this is as much a caricature of polemics in the anarchist tradition as a serious piece. It’s worth pointing out that these polemics have often brought attention to their theses by deliberately taking an extreme position, thereby opening up the ground in between for more “moderate” positions on the subject. Hopefully you can draw useful insights of your own from your interpretations of this text, rather than taking it as gospel or anathema.
And all this is not to say there are no fools who refuse intoxication — but can you imagine how much more insufferable they would be if they did not? The boring would still be boring, only louder about it; the self-righteous ones would continue to lambaste and harangue, while spitting and drooling on their victims! It is an almost universal characteristic of drinkers that they encourage everyone around them to drink, that — barring those hypocritical power-plays between lovers or parents and children, at least — they prefer their own choices to be reflected in the choices of all. This strikes us as indicating a monumental insecurity, not unrelated to the insecurity revealed by ideologues and recruiters of every stripe from Christian to Marxist to anarchist who feel they cannot rest until everyone in the world sees that world exactly as they do. As you read, try to fight off that insecurity — and try not to read this as an expression of our own, either, but rather, in the tradition of the best anarchist works, as a reminder for all who choose to concern themselves that <em>another world is possible.</em>
**** Predictable Disclaimer
As in the case of <em>every</em> Crimethlnc. text, this one only represents the perspectives of whoever agrees with it at the time, <em>not</em> the “entire Crimethlnc. ex-Workers’ Collective” or any other abstract mass. Somebody who does important work under the Crimethlnc. moniker is probably getting sloshed at the moment I’m typing this — and that’s ok!
<em>Have a drink on me — consumers are what make capitalism work!</em>
*** <em>How Civilization came to Fiend</em><br>
<em>or</em> How the Fiends Came to be Civilized
**** The Anarcho-Primitivist case for Straight Edge:<br>
Against His-Story, Against Alcoholocaust!
<em>The history of civilization is the history of beer.</em> In every era and area untouched by civilization, there has been no beer; conversely, virtually everywhere civilization has struck, beer has arrived with it. Civilization — that is to say, hierarchical social structures and consequent relationships of competition, unbridled technological development, and universal alienation — seems to be inextricably linked to alcohol. Our sages, who look back and ahead through time to see beyond the limits of such pernicious culture, tell a parable about our past to explain this link:
Most anthropologists regard the beginnings of agriculture as the inception of civilization. It was this first act of control over the land that brought human beings to think of themselves as distinct from nature, that forced them to become sedentary and possessive, that led to the eventual development of private property and capitalism. But why would hunter/gatherers, whose environment already provided them with all the food they needed, lock themselves in place and give up the nomadic foraging existence they had practiced since the beginning of time for something they already had? It seems more likely — and here, there are anthropologists who agree — that the first ones to domesticate themselves did so in order to brew beer.
This drastic reorganization for the sake of intoxication must have shaken tribal structure and lifeways to the root. Where these “primitive” peoples had once lived in a relaxed and attentive relationship to the providing earth — a relationship that afforded them both personal autonomy and supportive community as well as a great deal of leisure time to spend in admiration of the enchanted world around them — they now alternated periods of slavish hard labor with periods of drunken incompetence and detachment. It’s not hard to imagine that this situation hastened, if not necessitated, the rise to power of masters, overseers who saw to it that the toilsome tasks of fixed living were carried out by the frequently inebriated and incapable tribespeople. Without these chiefs and the primitive judicial systems they instituted, it must have seemed that life itself would be impossible: and thus, under the foul auspices of alcoholism, the embryonic State was conceived.
Such a pathetic way of life could not have been appealing to the peoples who neighbored the aboriginal alcoholic agriculturists; but as every historian knows, the spread of civilization was anything but voluntary. Lacking the manners and gentleness of their former companions in the wild, these savages, in their drunken excesses and infringements, must have provoked a series of wars — wars which, sadly, the lushes were able to win, owing to the military efficiency of their autocratic armies and the steady supply of food their subjugated farmlands provided. Even these advantages would not have been enough, if the brutes hadn’t had a secret weapon in their possession: alcohol itself. Adversaries who would otherwise have held their own on the field of battle indefinitely fell before the cultural onslaught of drunken debauchery and addiction, when trade — one of the inventions of the agriculturists, who also became the first misers, the first merchants — brought this poison into their midst. A pattern of conflict, addiction, defeat, and assimilation was set in motion, one which can be traced throughout history from the cradle of civilization through the Roman wars for Empire to the holocaust perpetrated upon the natives of the New World by the murderous European colonists.
But this is just a story, speculation. Let’s consult the history books (reading between the lines where we must, as these books come down to us from yesteryear’s conquering killers and their obedient slaves ... that is, historians!) to see if it lines up with the evidence. We’ll start in the early years of agriculture, when the first tribes settled down — in the fertile lands around rivers, where wheat and barley were easy to grow and ferment in mass quantities.
**** The Domestication of Man — By Alcohol
<quote>
<em>Enkidu, a shaggy, unkempt, almost bestial primitive man, who ate grass and could milk wild animals, wanted to test his strength against Gilgamesh, the god-king. Gilgamesh sent a prostitute to Enkidu to learn of his strengths and weaknesses. Enkidu enjoyed a week with her during which she taught him of civilization. Enkidu knew not what bread was, nor had he learned to drink beer. She spoke unto Enkidu: “Eat the bread now, it belongs to life. T)rink also beer, as it is the custom of the land. ” Enkidu drank seven cups of beer and his heart soared. In this condition he washed himself and became a civilized being.</em>
—The first written narrative of civilization, the Epic of Gilgamesh written in 3000 bc, describes the domestication of Enkidu the Primitive by means of beer.
</quote>
The oldest authenticated records of brewing were fashioned over <em>6000</em> years ago in Sumer, the oldest of human civilizations. Sumer also had the first known state- organized religion, and the official “divine drink” of this religion was beer brewed by priestesses of Ninkasi, the Sumerian goddess of alcohol. The hymns of Ninkasi were brewing instructions! The first collection of laws, the Code of Hammurabi of Babylon, decreed a daily beer ration in direct proportion to social status: beer consumption went hand-in-hand with hierarchy. For example, workers received two liters while besotted priests and kings got five. [For an interesting thought experiment, ask yourself how much alcohol — and of what grade — you get now, and what that says about your position in society.] Historians pondering the primacy of alcohol in these ancient lawbooks have even conjectured that the original function of hierarchy was to permit some men to hoard mass amounts of alcohol while ensuring that a sufficient labor force <em>—pacified by their meager alcohol rations to discourage revolt or escape</em> — was always at hand to keep farming and brewing.
Kings used golden drinking straws to sip from giant containers of beer, a tradition that has been preserved in plastic throughout the Western world. The pivotal role of alcohol in this first hierarchy is easy to recognize, even from a cursory reading of these records: as in every authoritarian regime, “justice” was a cardinal concern, and the punishment decreed for all who violated any of the laws governing beer was death by drowning.
Though it was yet newly-invented, beer influenced every single facet of emerging human civilization. Before the invention of money, beer was used as the standard item of barter — a money before money! In Ancient Egypt, a keg of beer was the only proper gift to offer to the Pharaoh when proposing marriage to his daughter, and kegs of beer were sacrificed to the gods when the Nile overflowed. As civilization spread, so did beer. Even in regions as remote as Finland, beer played a crucial role from the moment civilization struck: the <em>Kalevala,</em> the ancient Finnish epic poem, had twice as many verses devoted to beer than to the creation of the earth.
Brewing could be found wherever civilization was, from the rudimentary villages of German barbarians to the god-emperors of ancient China. Only those human beings that still lived in harmony with wilderness, such as the indigenous peoples of North America and some sectors of Africa, remained alcohol-free — for a time.
The “classical civilizations” of Greece and Rome were as soaked in alcohol as they were in blood — the entire ancient world was lost in a collective hangover.
This must have helped the nobles and philosophers to gloss over the fact that their “enlightened democracy” was based on the subjection of women and masses of slaves.
The greatest work of “classical” literature, the <em>Symposium,</em> details a drinking party starring Socrates, whose claim-to-fame as a philosopher was ... augmented by his inhumanly high tolerance for alcohol. Studying his glorifications of the abstract over the real — <em>provided these weren’t falsely attributed to him by his mendacious pupil,</em>
<em>Plato</em> — one can still catch a whiff of the sour breath of a drunk.
<strong>BREW AND STATE</strong>
<em>In life be I called Gambrinus, King of Flanders and Brabant, who first have made malt from barley and so conceived of the brewing of beer. Hence, the brewers can say they have a king as the first master brewer.</em>
-
The patron saint of beer was a <em>monarch</em> of course.
The Roman Empire finally collapsed, as all empires eventually do (including this one, damn it!), after a generations-long drunken orgy of decadence and degeneration. The two most influential survivors were beer and Christianity. Brewing had once been the domain of women — but with the rise of the Catholic Church the monastic orders seized that domain for themselves, destroying one of the last bastions of primal matriarchy. Monks, wasting away in prayer, relied upon the drink to ease their miserable religious fasting — and so, not surprisingly, the consumption of beer was not considered a violation of their vows of non-consumption. Beer consumption in monasteries reached unheard-of levels, as monks were allowed to consume up to five liters of beer a day. Both the popes and early emperors such as Charlemagne would personally supervise the brewing process, hoping to create the perfect drink to obliterate both their consciousness and the consciousness of their subjects.
The birth of capitalism and the nation-state began with the commercialization of beer. The monasteries, overflowing with more beer than they themselves could consume, began to sell it to the surrounding villages. Monasteries doubled by night as pubs, and these men of God created some of the first well-managed profit-making enterprises. With the weakening of the power of the Church and the rise of the modern nation-state, kings and dukes moved in to close the tax-exempt monasteries. They began licensing out brewing to the rising merchant class, imposing a heavy tax that hastened the centralization of power and wealth in these nations. Beer became the focus of every night and the mainstay of every celebration. Christmas “Yuletide,” for example, derives from “Ale tide.” To pacify women on their wedding night, an extra-potent “Bride Ale” was made, and so our word <em>bridal.</em> Everywhere the triumph of drunkenness, everywhere the triumph of God and State.
**** Her-Story and Hop-Story
<quote>
<em>Herewith shall brewers and others not use anything other than malt, hops, and water. These same brewers also shall not add anything when serving or otherwise handling beer, upon penalty of death.</em>
—Beer Purity & Eugenics Laws of Bayers-Landshut
</quote>
While the monasteries were commercializing beer and the nation-state thriving off it, a secret sisterhood of brewers remained in the peasant villages, fermenting strange and miraculous drinks for the poor and excluded of medieval society. These “witches” would ferment juniper berries, sweet gale, blackthorn, anise, yarrow, rosemary, wormwood, pine roots, henbane — each with effects unique and potent. For example, while drinks based off the “vile weed” hops were sedatives, many other
fermented drinks would heal the sick, calm the angry, and give hope to the hopeless.
Peasants would gather in their villages and drink sacred drinks brewed with yeast their grandmothers had passed down through generations. As they consorted and consumed these wild and varied drinks, all the degradations the priests and kings had heaped upon them would rise to their consciousness, and they would rise in revolt against their rulers. As these revolts were especially frequent and ferocious in the Holy Roman Empire, the various German nobles conspired to destroy the cultures that nourished them. The Duke of Bavaria, Wilhelm iv, passed the Beer
Purity Act to quash all subversive diversity of fermentation. From 1516 onwards, beer was to be brewed only with the sedative hops: henceforth all alcohol was homogenized, and whatever medicinal or restorative fermentation technology had existed was lost. Hops-based brew causes a lack of coordination, an inability to think clearly, and eventually a slow death — all qualities needed to make both German peasants and modern temp workers incapable of revolt.
The women who had formerly been the respected brewers of the peasant villages
were hunted down and burned at stake as “brew witches.” To this day, witches
are rarely imagined without their brewing cauldrons. Burnings of witches on the
grounds of heretical brewing processes continued until 1519. With this slaughter,
the last independent and creative brewing centers were destroyed, and women
prostrated before the drunken God of the repressed monks and greedy brewmasters. Through alcohol the common
folk were subdued, and what passed
for life in the Middle Ages became
nasty, short, brutish, and — above
all — drunk.
**** Globalize Alcoholism
<quote>
<em>Indeed, if it be the design of Providence to excavate these savages in order to make room for the cultivators of the earth, it seems not improbable that rum may be the appointed means. It has already annihilated all the tribes that formerly inhabited the sea coast.</em>
—Benjamin Franklin who was, primitivists take note, the “discoverer” of electricity, among other things — though folk scientists will protest that he discovered electricity no more than Columbus discovered America. Perhaps “domesticator” is more accurate a term? Anyway, back to our story
</quote>
As imperialist European civilization began its cancerous spread across the world, beer loyally led the charge. The first merchants, the Hansa, exported beer as far as India. The colonization of the United States began when the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, instead of further south as planned, because they ran out of supplies: “especially our beere.” The founding fathers, including Washington and Jefferson, as well as being slave-owning aristocrats, were all brewers of beer. Coincidence?
The foundations of colonial genocide bear the stench of a long and protracted alcohol-induced nightmare — nearly every indigenous culture the Europeans encountered was destroyed by European alcohol and disease. The spreading of <em>firewater</em> among indigenous populations of North America went hand-in-hand with the distribution of lethal smallpox-infested blankets. Many of these cultures, without the experience of thousands of years of civilized alcoholism to draw upon, were even more subject than the Europeans to the ravages of “the civilized brew.” Between alcohol, disease, commerce, and guns, most of them were quickly and utterly destroyed. This process was not unique to North America — it was repeated throughout the world in every European colonial endeavor. While the drug of choice varied (sometimes it was opium, for example, as in the “Opium Wars” Great Britain waged to control China), alcohol was judged in many countries to be the most socially-acceptable tool of pacification.
The Industrial Revolution was hastened by the prospect of brewing beer yearlong, since the temperatures needed for brewing occur naturally only in winter. The steam engine invented by James Watt was immediately applied by Carl von Linde to enable artificial cooling, allowing those with the infrastructure of civilization to brew anytime, anywhere. Contrary to popular belief, Louis Pasteur invented pasteurization for <em>beer-making,</em> and only later was it adopted by the dairy industry. Yeast, which is found naturally in the air, is no longer even used in that state by modern brewing, as scientists have isolated a single yeast cell and
induced its artificial reproduction for brewing. Following the invention of the assembly line, beer has come to be mass-produced on an ever larger scale. Over the two centuries since, the alcohol industry — like all capitalist industries — has been consolidated by a few major companies controlled feudally by families like the infamous Anheuser-Busch beer syndicate (infamous for its connections to right- wing groups and religious fundamentalists). As for other links between alcohol and far-right/fascist activity — perhaps the reader will recall where Hitler initiated his takeover of Germany.
**** Resist Capitalism — Desist Drinking
It’s no exaggeration, then, to say that alcohol has played a key role in the epidemic of fascism, racism, statism, imperialism, colonialism, sexism and patriarchy, class oppression, ungoverned technological development, religious superstition, and other bad stuff that has swept the earth over the past few millennia. It continues to play that role today, as the peoples of the whole world, finally universally domesticated and enslaved by global capitalism, are kept pacified and helpless by a steady supply of spirits. These evil spirits squander the time, money, health, focus, creativity, awareness, and fellowship of all who inhabit this universally occupied territory — “work is the curse of the drinking classes,” as Oscar Wilde said. It’s not surprising, for example, that the primary targets of advertising for malt liquor (a toxic by-product of the brewing process) are the inhabitants of ghettos in the United States: people who constitute a class that, if not tranquilized by addition and incapacitated by self-destruction, would be on the front lines of the war to destroy capitalism.
Civilization — and everything noxious and baleful it engenders — will crumble when a resistance movement appears that can dam the flood of alcohol immobilizing the masses. The world now waits for a temperance that can defend itself, for a radical vision unclouded by drink, for a revolutionary sobriety that will return us to the ecstatic state of wild.
**** Our Anti-Authoritarian Heritage: Teetotalers Fighting Totalitarianism
It’s not widely remembered that strict vegetarianism and abstinence from drink have been common in radical circles for many centuries. One need only thumb through the history books to amass a long list of heretics, Utopians, reformers, revolutionaries, communitarians, and individualists who adopted these lifestyle choices as essential elements of their platforms. We’ll leave that list-making to the enthusiastic reader or obsessive critic — let it suffice to say that examples range
from old white guys like Friedrich Nietzsche, who eschewed even caffeine while extolling the kind of ecstatic bacchanalism described herein, N. Vachel Lindsay, the visionary hobo of Springfield, Illinois who traversed the early United States to share his poetic appeals for temperance and willful unemployment, and Jules Bonnot and his fellow anarchist bankrobbers, who invented the getaway car together, to Malcolm X (of course), and the ezln — who prohibit alcohol as per the counsel of Zapatista women fed up with mens’ bullshit. (The capitalist government of Mexico has tried to undermine revolutionary activity by importing beer into villages like Ocosingo; in that city and others; Zapatistas have responded by setting up barricades and fighting the soldiers who would enforce this “free trade” upon them.) One of Public Enemy’s best songs attacked the role of alcohol in the exploitation and oppression of the African-American community. You can bet anarchist Leon Czolgosz was stone cold sober when he shot us President William McKinley to death. Oh, and — could we forget? — there’s always Ian McKaye.
On the other side of the coin — can you imagine how much more progress we would have made in this struggle already if anti-authoritarians such as Nestor Makhno, Guy Debord, Janis Joplin, and countless anarcho-punks had focused more energy on the creation and destruction they loved so dearly, and less on drinking themselves to death?
**** Enough History! Let The Future Begin!
Perhaps so much talk about faraway times and peoples leaves you cold. Sure, history can be dead — and the history of triumphant armies and mass-murderer Presidents is indeed a history of death. All the same, we can learn from this past, as from each other, if we apply our imaginations and a keen eye for pattern. Professional historians and their fellow slaves of slaves might call this account subjective or biased, but then — which of <em>their</em> histories isn’t? We’re not the ones whose salaries depend on corporate sponsorships and patronage, anyway!
Even if you do decide that this history of alcoholism is “the” truth, for heaven’s sake don’t waste time looking back into the past for some long-lost state of primitive sobriety that — for all any of us know — may not even have existed. What matters is what we do in the present tense, what histories our actions create today. History is the residue — no, better, the excrement — of such activity; let us not drown in it like yeast, but learn what we must and then leave it behind. Let nothing stop us, not even alcohol, as ingrained in our culture as it is! Those drunken despots and beer-bellied bigots may destroy their world and smother beneath their history, but we bear a new future in our hearts — and the power to enact it in our healthy livers.
------
*** About
Essays originally appeared as sympathetic but firm cultural analysis and comic relief in the reunion issue of Inside Front, an international journal of hardcore punk and anarchist action, published by <em>Crimethlnc. ex-Workers Collective</em> in 2003.
CrimethInc. we are cement around the ankles of drowning liquor tycoons.
This special edition of Anarchy & Alcohol was released to commemorate the designer’s fourth sober spring.
If you are wrestling with addiction to alcohol, write a letter to our recovery circle for more sober strategies from some of us who have kicked the habit.
**Alcoholics Autonomous**<br>
Post Office Box 765
<br>
Winona, MN 55987
<strong>[[https://crimethinc.com/][https://crimethinc.com/]]</strong>
|
#title Cherán. 5 years of self-government in an indigenous community in Mexico
#author Alejandra González Hernández
#SORTtopics Direct Democracy, democracy, Mexico, crime, autonomy, self-determination
#date 2 December 2016
#source https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/cher-n-5-years-of-self-government-in-indi/
#lang en
#pubdate 2019-08-21T23:59:36
#notes <em>Translation by Andrea Janet Serna Hernández and Itzel Cruz Ruiz.</em>
San Francisco Cherán, is an indigenous community of the Purépecha town located in the state of Michoacán, Mexico. It has a territorial extension of 221,000 square kilometers and a population of 14,245 inhabitants, making it the largest Purépecha community in terms of territory. It originally counted some 27,000 hectares of forest. The main economic activities are agriculture, livestock farming and the production of wood and cork products.
Cherán is the only municipality inhabited mainly by indigenous Purépecha, a culture that seeks to preserve its identity and cultural traits, which are closely linked to concerns about the fertility of the land and care of resources. The community of Cherán has occupied this territory since before the colonization process. It has conserved its own institutions to organize itself in the political, cultural, economic and social sphere, and this has been reflected in its social dynamics. The inhabitants of the municipality have combined their own practices with the national law, in a dual law regime. The inhabitants of the municipality have combined their own practices with the national law, in a dual law regime.
However, recently, particularly between 2008 and 2011, this community experienced one of its worst periods of crisis due to the insecurity and violence arising from the municipal authorities’ complicity with organized crime. They cut down a wide swathe of Cherán’s forests unannounced and extorted, threatened, kidnapped and murdered the villagers. They carried out these activities in broad daylight.
<em>The state and federal authorities showed no will to address the resulting mayhem and violence suffered by the community and to protect the common patrimony of the people (territory, forests and water). The Purépecha community of Cherán decided to take the problem into their own hands.</em>
*** <strong>Beginnings of the movement</strong>
The movement of the indigenous community of Cherán emerged at dawn on April 15, 2011. Ordinary people decided to confront the criminal organizations that came down from the hill with several vans loaded with wood. Thus began the resistance of the Purepecha community of Cherán. Women and men, children and adults concentrated on the site named “Calvary” to defend life, their security, territory, forests and the dignity of the community. Regardless of political affiliation, belief or religion, all the inhabitants of Cherán joined together on that April 15 without thinking where their insurrection would lead them. Regardless of political affiliation, belief or religion, all the inhabitants of Cherán joined together on that April 15 without thinking where their insurrection would lead them.
From that day on, the “<em>comuneros”</em> decided to organize under their own scheme, driving away organized crime. After the expulsion of the municipal authorities, an "organizational structure" composed of a general coordination and 12 commissions took over the control of the entire community. They built barricades on all the accesses to the municipality and started to establish guard posts to enable <em>comuneros</em> to defend themselves in the four neighborhoods of the municipality. Some 200 campfires – of which several have remained active up to this day – were set up at these guard posts and became the symbols of the resistance, and the will of the comuneros to free themselves from organized crime and corrupted authorities. With the slogan “for the defense of our forests, for the safety of our <em>comuneros</em>" they aimed at defending their natural resources, valued as a heritage and as a sacred good of the community.
<em>Cheran - no to political parties. At the same time, the problem of Cherán became visible to several sectors of Mexican society and resonated with them. Similar problems were suffered by indigenous communities throughout the country, including the devastation of natural resources, human rights violations and social exclusion. All of this was aggravated by the involvement of organized crime and the lack of will or any action on the part of the authorities to solve the situation.</em>
From the spaces known as "campfires" and the "organizational structure", the <em>comuneros</em> began to discuss, to reflect on alternative projects and actions to solve the problems they were suffering. They quickly identified that political parties did not guarantee the security and cultural continuity of Cherán. On June 1, 2011, the community general assembly decided not to take part in the elections for the state governors and legislators and the municipal presidents that were to be held in 2011 and not to allow the installation of polling stations in the municipality. Instead, they decided to exercise their right to appoint their own authorities through their own normative systems. Instead, they decided to exercise their right to appoint their own authorities through their own normative systems.
The rights to autonomy and self-determination had been recognized by international treaties as well as by the national legal system. Cheran thus decided to move forward along this path and to eliminate the local political party system, with the slogan of "No more political parties in the community". It thus asked the electoral institute of the state of Michoacán to organize the appointment of new municipal authorities of the community under the traditional system of "uses and customs".
The state authorities tried to stop the movement of Cherán. In September 2011, the Electoral Institute of Michoacan issued a negative response, declaring it had no authority to authorize such a mode of elections. To the social and political mobilizations that were the bases of the movement until then, the <em>comuneros</em> now decided to add the adoption of a legal strategy to defend its autonomy and alternative project.
<quote>
"No more political parties in the community".
</quote>
*** <strong>The legal strategy of the movement</strong>
Cherán decided to mobilize the law as a political and legal strategy. They used state (and hegemonic) law in a "counter-hegemonic sense" to materialize their struggle for self-determination and to form their self-government. In response to the EIM (Electoral Institute of Michoacan), the community decided to judicialize its right to "autonomy and self-determination". They demanded in the courts the right to choose their own authorities based on the system of "uses and customs", through a "Trial for the Protection of the Political-Electoral Rights of the Citizen" in the Electoral Tribunal of the Judicial Power of the Federation (ETJPF, or TEPJF by their initials in Spanish). Two months later, on November 2, 2011, the Superior Chamber of the ETJPF ruled in favor of the indigenous community of Cherán.
Two months later, on November 2, 2011, the Superior Chamber of the ETJPF ruled in favor of the indigenous community of Cherán. It recognized that Cherán had the right to request the election of its own authorities through its "uses and customs" and ordered the EIM to organize this election, after free and informed consultation with the entire community.
Following this triumph of a counter-hegemonic use of state law and the ETJPF decision, a “free, prior and informed consultation” was organized in the community to decide whether or not it wanted to appoint its new authorities through its "uses and customs". The result of the consultation was positive. In January 2012, a democratic election was duly held, giving rise to the constitution of a new government figure: the first indigenous municipal government, called "Mayor Council of Communal Government" (Concejo Mayor de Gobierno Comunal), composed of 12 "K’eris" (seniors) chosen among the “comuneros” and “comuneras” (members of the community), three for each of four districts. There is no hierarchy among them, that is to say, all occupy the same position within the communal government. They were appointed for a 3-year period 2012-2015.
The first time, a "uses and customs" election was organized by the EIM and by the community itself, respecting its own procedures, through a kind of ritual, without ballot boxes and without political parties. It differs from the model of "uses and customs" in the Southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, as the later system only serves a procedural function in the election of its authorities. In the case of Cherán, there was a "transformation in the structure, logic and relations of the municipal government", when the hierarchical figures of "president, elected representatives and councillor" disappears and the government becomes a genuinely collegial body.
*** <strong>The new communal government</strong>
Following these elections, the seat of the city council or municipal palace was transformed into the "Communal House of Government". The police were replaced by a "community round". The municipal president, representatives and councillors take part in a "Common Council of Communal Government"; Likewise, "operational councils" have been constituted as well as "commissions" for civil affairs, social development, procurement and conciliation of justice, education, culture, health, identity, campfires, water, cleanliness and youth. All them are aware that the maximum authority is the "General Assembly" composed of all the inhabitants of Cherán. All them are aware that the maximum authority is the "General Assembly" composed of all the inhabitants of Cherán.
From April 2011 to February 2012, Cherán's social movement moved considerably forward, both in its political and legal struggles. Winning the right to elect its own authorities and exercise their right to self-determination allowed them to establish a solid basis – the communal government – for the continuation of the emancipatory movement. The path towards autonomy was set up. But the journey went far beyond constituting a government under the system of "uses and customs”.
*** <strong>Other legal struggles of the movement and the second Council</strong>
<em>The second Council of Communal Government took charge on September 1st, 2015.In 2012, shortly after the appointment of the first mayoral council and already as Cherán's authorities, the community returned to the courts to start another trial, this time in the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJN), against the Governor and the Congress of the State of Michoacán. The latter had overhauled the Political Constitution of this region in matters of indigenous rights without having consulted the Cherán community, thereby overlooking another of the core rights of indigenous peoples and communities.</em>
The ruling given by the SCJN in the trial of 2014 secured the dual character of Cherán, as both a municipality and as an indigenous community. This was officially recognized for the first time. As a result, the tribunal also established that in its capacity as an "indigenous municipality", Cherán must be consulted on all legislative and administrative matters that interest or affect them as a community and as an indigenous municipality.
The issues brought to trial by Cherán and given legal backing by the highest courts in Mexico represent a major achievement. However, despite these judicial successes that have ratified the indigenous rights of the community, lawmakers in Michoacán have refused to amend the laws on matters integral to the municipality which involve recognition of Cherán’s indigenous municipality. Likewise, in electoral matters, the elections and authorities by "uses and customs" have also not been recognized.
Given the refusal of the state to cooperate, Cherán has continued to resist through communal organization in its campfires, neighborhood assemblies, and general assembly. Comuneros and comuneras get involved in the decisions of their community and support their local authorities. In 2014, Cherán had to go back to court once more, to remind the authorities of the rights it had won. Following that trial, the process of elections by "uses and customs" has finally been incorporated into the Electoral Law. Cherán made the consultation "binding", which has opened a door for all indigenous communities in the state of Michoacan to get their voices heard in decision making processes.
In 2015, Cherán's struggle succeeded in integrating "previous, free and informed consultation" into state law. It prevented the state Congress from approving a “Law of Mechanisms of Citizen Participation” which did not recognise the consultation rights of indigenous peoples and communities. This mechanism is essential to ensuring communities’ participation in decision-making processes through their traditional procedures. Cherán made the consultation "binding", which has opened a door for all indigenous communities in the state of Michoacan to get their voices heard in decision making processes
2015 was also the year of the appointment of the second Mayoral Council of Communal Government. The community decided to continue with its project of autonomy, self-determination and self-government. The political parties tried to interfere in the process of the renewal of the Council. Their failure to do so and the successes of Cherán in the tribunals gave considerable strength to the second election of the local authorities and to the second Council of Communal Government that took charge on September 1, 2015.
*** <strong>5 years of resistance and struggle</strong>
<em>On April 15, 2016, the movement of Cherán celebrated its fifth anniversary. They organized an event with a strong cultural dimension and forums of dialogue fostering conversations on topics such as dispossession and war against the peoples, women and territory, autonomy, education for the defense of the territory. The celebration was closed with an event on the main square of the community, where the inhabitants remembered their dead companions and recalled the difficult road that they had travelled, the fear of living under insecurity, the impotence they felt when their forests were devastated. They also remembered the purpose of their struggle, a movement "for justice, security and the reconstitution of their territory". To build and rebuild a lifestyle based on a communal government through its "uses and customs" has been the major task of these five years. The road has not been easy.</em>
The movement has found many allies and support, notably among indigenous communities and progressive movements in Mexico. It has notably been accompanied in its struggle by the “Collectivo Emancipaciones”, that gathers young researchers who share a "political position committed to progressive social movements and from judicial support of social processes where the defense of human rights is relevant". Since 2011, this <em>Collective</em> has been providing judicial support to the indigenous community of Cherán and has been working benevolently with the community as well as with other indigenous communities in the state of Michoacán.
To build and rebuild a lifestyle based on a communal government through its "uses and customs" has been the major task of these five years. The road has not been easy. The community continues to face a broad list of systemic enemies including the administrative bureaucracy, political parties, organized crime and state resistance to recognizing the rights of indigenous communities. The achievements of the community of Cherán remain under constant threat.
|
#title A Funny Thought on a New Way to Play
#LISTtitle Funny Thought on a New Way to Play, A
#author Alejandro de Acosta
#SORTtopics AJODA, AJODA #66, play
#date 2008, Fall-Winter
#source From AJODA #66
#lang en
#pubdate 2016-08-01T13:18:27
#notes AJODA #66, Fall-Winter 2008, Vol. 26, No. 2
*** 1
I am already playing. And I don’t tend to like games. At least I don’t like games in which I don’t get to participate in inventing or discovering the rules. What I do like, however, is finding games where and when games are said not to be. My desire is to keep playing this game of truth - and you are invited to play along.
Suppose that we are already playing (I, in writing this; you, in reading it) and that in realizing it we come to admit that in some way everything is a game - everything personal, everything social, and everything cultural, anyway, including what seems least playful: work, or struggle, for example.
Suppose again that we go on (or realize we can’t stop) playing and allow ourselves to discover or invent the conceit that there are games in nature, too, something like a grand cosmic game that interminably bleeds into whatever we might have thought intimate and social life involve. Or could involve, from the most forgettable and trivial exchanges to the cruelest acts. The interest or desire of this bleed is that it colors just those relations that so many of us are usually inclined - and often trained or forced - to conceive of and live out as rule-bound and competitive. Including self-relations. And this within an imagination where rules are not negotiable, but accepted all at once out of duty or the responsibility of so-called fair play (a kind of morality, or at least good practice for moral behavior). Increased exposure to the cosmic game could change all of that. Do these suppositions sound sufficiently inviting? We could begin with how we live out the rules and competitions that seem most trivial - those of discrete, ordinary games -1 mean, what we usually think of as games.
*** 2
The play of discrete or ordinary games is the privileged object of the theories of writers such as the historian Huizinga; these theories make play and games the oldest and most basic stratum of human life. I am fascinated by such theories. The idea is to some extent just beautiful: play as a “voluntary activity,” “older than culture,” that “has nothing to do with necessity or utility, duty or truth.”[1] Though it is an originary stratum, Huizinga does his best not to present this as an evolution: “... we do not mean that play turns into culture, rather that in its earliest phases culture has the play-character, that it proceeds in the shape and in the mood of play” (46). For those of us who like to play at speculative anthropology, especially the speculative anthropology of what is called prehistory, there is much to be excited about here. At the same time, whatever the fascination that such arguments exert on us, they should arouse suspicion as well. It all has to do with how (or by whom) play and games are imagined. Huizinga (but it is not just him, obviously) always describes play as part of a game; he always describes the game as discrete (which seems to come down to being governed by rules); and he always describes the discrete game as a contest or at least the “representation of a contest” (13): That is, it is competitive.[2] It is, predictably enough (according to him), the competitive aspect of games that eventually and repeatedly gives birth to cultures or civilization.
Reading Huizinga, one might disappointedly conclude that his conception of play as games and of games as rule-bound and competitive is far too narrow. Painfully so. But this poverty of perspective can be interesting if we ask ourselves how it might have come about, what sort of attitude it bespeaks. In this sense the root of the problem might be that to accept that play and games compose the base stratum of culture involves entirely too much seriousness. This would be descended from or instantiated as the seriousness, one imagines, of the contest. Given that he repeatedly states that “play is the direct opposite of seriousness” (5), one might conclude that he did not think he was playing when he wrote the book.[3] He instead seems to be in the grips, precisely, of a seriousness that divides what is and what is not (play, for starters). For me this is something like the seriousness that Stirner once linked with what he called possession: “there is nothing more serious than a lunatic when he comes to the central point of his lunacy; then his great earnestness incapacitates him for taking a joke.”[4]
These things unfortunately seem to go together: the seriousness of the thesis (of proposing, sometimes, but especially of maintaining or defending a thesis, that “central point” of one’s “lunacy”), and the rules one endlessly discovers once one sets out in search of them. Whether or not and to what extent the rules are fully known is a matter of power, or what seems to be power - and the search for rules is a competitive move, an attempt at a coup in the game, the unmentionable intellectual game: the contest of the thesis and of rules. Huizinga makes play the origin of civilization and cultures, but not the totality of them, not their very practice, and certainly not their end point, because he was, or at least thought he had to sound, serious. He might have thought, more or less consciously, that he had to repeat the same transition from game through contest to cultural or civilized institutions that he hypothesized. To do this, he had to imagine play in the form of discrete, competitive games with specific sets of rules.
For Huizinga, it seems, play and games can be an at least chronological origin of culture, but only as preparations, only as experiments concerning the next stages, the official seriousness and misery of which is all too familiar to some of us. Playing games and freely (arbitrarily, even) accepting their rules and competitions in the name of play slides all too arbitrarily (freely, even) into not freely accepting rules (and everything that game rules might, according to Huizinga, be practice for: innumerable conventions, customs, moral codes, laws) in the name of Society, or of Normality, or, if one thinks too much like a certain unhappy sort of social scientist, the structures and functions of cultures and social life, with all of their explicit and implicit formulations. A culture and its taboos. A state and its laws. A language and its grammar. Et cetera.
It seems to me that some procedure like this extends from our engagement in apparently discrete, rule-bound, and competitive games to most or even all of our intimate and social relations, manifest as our more or less spontaneous apprehension of life as rule- or law-bound. (This is going too fast, I know, but that’s the game I am playing). The interest of proposals like Huizinga’s is that, used otherwise, they suggest a situational, everyday model for how one makes the supposedly spontaneous larger assumption of the two. One begins (but this is rarely a beginning! - it is usually a repetition) to play a discrete game. Think of the invocation of society or cultures, for example, as an agent of some sort, not to speak of morality, nation, religion! Thanks to such an imaginary model we might come to see practically any thing, process, or abstraction as an imaginary agent: a Fate, a God, a Cause, demanding respect and inspiring hope and fear, each so harmful in its own way. I am referring first and foremost to the ordinary, colloquial use of these words, but also to how we are bound by what we unconsciously suppose that they involve. They are in some sense modeled, I will playfully propose, on our engagement with the apparently discrete, rule-bound, and competitive games, and not the other way around!
It might then be an occupational hazard of those who write on play and games that they do not sound either playful or gaming. I include myself in this, of course; and if I hope to overcome this obstacle, it is not by being funny (at least not on purpose), but rather by being parodic, paradoxical and occasionally nonsensical.
*** 3
Some years after Huizinga, the philosopher Deleuze, playing his way out of what was known as structuralism, wrote a fine text on play and games, inspired by Lewis Carroll. What I have been calling discrete or ordinary games, Deleuze dubbed Normal Games, suggesting that they are “mixed” - they involve chance, of course, but “only at certain points”; the rest of their play (?) “refers to another type of activity, labor, or morality.”[5] We can think of social activities as games, a la Huizinga, only because we think of games in the restricted, “mixed” economy of Normal Games that involve the acceptance of rules and a possible competition. That is, normal games always refer their play to a norm that is taken to be serious, outside of the play-sphere. Otherwise there seems to be no game. Without games, no society, no culture - and, maybe then, no self?
The alternative to this ought to sound nonsensical. To the seriousness of the thesis and its contest one might propose an alternative, a whimsical or funny thought <em>(drole de pensee,</em> as Leibniz once wrote) that takes on the play of the world[6] as its uncommon perspective, as its excessive subjectivity, playing at but never seriously claiming the reality of an infinite play-world (as opposed, for example, to the necessarily finite work- world often invoked by those fascinated by terms such as scarcity or production).
The ideal Game is Deleuze’s name for this funny thought of the cosmic game or the play of the world. It has no rules and is entirely too chaotic to allow for any skillful use of chance (meaning the mechanical consequences of well-executed moves). Every Normal Game flirts with chance to some degree or another, and plays, Deleuze wrote, at mastering it. And if one is serious one might think one has. All too often that desire for mastery, which bears ultimately on one’s intimate relation to the macrocosm (but is rarely - if ever - consciously felt as such) collapses into the specialized microfascism of so many games, into an obsessive clinging to the rules, the little cruelties of competition, and (more interestingly) what is called cheating.[7]
My problem with Deleuze’s version of the Ideal Game is that he states, first of all, that it can’t be played “by either man or God.” Worse, “it would amuse no one” <em>(Logic,</em> 60). He writes that, ultimately, “it can only be thoughtas nonsense.” I wonder why this did not suggest another idea of play and of amusement, such that, not negating but simply and nonsensically contradicting the first two claims, the Ideal Game can’t but be played by people and Gods (if any); and it not only amuses everyone but is precisely the Amusing as such!
All of this matters if one wants to take a position. In some sense, I do. To begin with, I want to reveal as games activities that do not appear to be games, complicating or even dissolving the distinction between discrete play-spheres and the supposedly serious worlds of culture. Eventually, I want to open up all apparently discrete games, acknowledged and unacknowledged, to the Ideal Game. But whereas the first move has to do with revealing what is rule-bound but does not appear to be so, the second, the opening to the Ideal Game, dissolves all of these apparent and more or less concealed rules in a grand chaotic complication that shows all of them as arbitrary. In all this I want to expand and intensify the spheres of play. But I want to play my way into that position, and so I know I will have to playfully abandon it now and then, lest it become the central point of a lunacy I prefer to avoid.
*** 4
I don’t want it to seem as though I am blaming the problem of the impoverished imagination of play I have diagnosed in Huizinga on the seriousness of professors alone. Really, there is no one to blame, unless we want to engage in the superstitious invocation of imaginary agents: “Society tells us that play....” “Our culture says that games...” So many ways of inverting the vital flow, making play depend on seriousness and not the other way around! Almost everyone I have spoken with about what I am writing about games responds that it seems that to them, too, that a game is always or at least typically rule-bound and competitive:
<quote>
<em>Rule-bound</em> The assumption that play involves accepting a certain set of dictates, oral or written, that govern the activity, defining its beginning and end as well as all possible or available moves, and delimiting the space and time of play.
</quote>
<quote>
<em>Competitive</em> The assumption that one should engage the rules in such a way as to use skill or chance to best one or more opponents. (Though one might immediately ask if one can ever use chance, or is better said to be used by it).
</quote>
In both of these aspects we might be able to discern how games are mixed (in Deleuze’s sense), referring to other activities whose rules are hidden or all too obvious, but which are in either case not usually conceived as games. This is the secret morality of play.
If it is our whim to open the idea of games in other directions, we could, first of all, explore the ambiguities in these two aspects. We can likely summon up at least a few memories of solitary play,[8] or of play involving optional or variable rules, or of collaboration or co-operation that appear beside or as part of competition. True, it might be argued that these are only subjective or experiential aspects of play. But that is precisely what is most important here, since it seems to me that to assume games are by definition rule-bound and competitive itself derives from conceiving and practicing them as discrete. That conception, that practice, comprise an attitude, or a series of attitudes. And that is, by most definitions, subjective. An attitude that refuses the assumption that games are always discrete leads, first, to affirming any perspective that allows itself the conceit of acting in a given situation as if it were a game. Dwelling sufficiently within this perspective might ultimately lead to the realm of play and games beyond rules and competition, to the Ideal Game. Inevitably, the Ideal Game involves a subjective (or even existential - why not?) dimension: the feeling of the game as opening onto life or the cosmos, the sense of their tendential coincidence. This feeling, the anticipation or mere possibility of this feeling, might be why some of us bother with supposedly discrete games at all.
Sadly, it seems that a more common reason to play Normal Games is to practice our superstitions. I am thinking first and foremost of the superstition that competition matters at all. But I am also thinking of what does not appear to be a game, that which we are invited or forced to take seriously. So often being serious amounts to being superstitious! As a philosopher, I know this well: how many times, in how many conversations, have I asked myself if my interlocutor is (superstitiously) certain of being right, or playing at the game of acting, speaking, as though he is right?[9] Of course I am not invoking any sort of cosmic truth beyond the play of the world, truth beyond the game that plays at being right. Why would I, if my desire is to keep playing, to play the game of truth, among other games?
*** 5
I propose an interpretation of one discrete game, Tag, which opens onto a speculative anthropology. In this game, It comes to any given player from outside. Or at least so it seems. To be tagged, to be It, is to be marked. To bear the mark, however temporarily, is to be treated as someone or something else than the play-group. The tag, the temporary position of being It, has to do with otherness. Tag is the game of us and not-us. It is always an other-than-us that circulates. Perhaps Tag is the game of a group’s self-understanding, so that It is always a position that is sacrificial or sacred, above or below the group. Whatever It is has a special accursed power, and always has to be avoided, denied, warded off. For its part, It approaches us, chases us, lures us, traps us, and, if it is lucky, infects us, passing It on. So Tag could be a game of persecution; but at the same time, it could be a game that valorizes or grants power to what is persecuted. That is why it is so easy to interpret Tag as a liberatory game (it teaches how to avoid the one who tries to assume power, as well as how easily this position can circulate). That is also why it is so easy to interpret Tag as an oppressive game (it teaches ostracism, xenophobia, scapegoating, etc).
I chose Tag because it is characteristic of a number of children’s games that have very simple (and often modified) rules, and that are transmitted orally. Such games are likely very ancient. If we playfully suppose that this game belongs to an anonymous and interminable childhood of humanity, there is room to wonder at what it reveals beyond its function as a Normal Game (there is room to ask if certain children’s games, those that are truly of children and not imposed on them, are ever normal). If we playfully assume that Tag is an ancient game, passed down orally since prehistoric times, it could be part of how the distinctions between kin groups, tribes, and ultimately humans and animals, or humans and spirits, might have originally been distributed. Maybe Tag is the explicit form of an utterly common, nearly universal game of inclusion- exclusion, communication-persecution that shapes, playfully and not structurally, countless groups, communities, and cultures. That some games, like Tag, are considered to be for children, or to embody the childish in whoever plays, suggests that games, as passing manifestations of play, are endlessly codified and controlled through the recording and imposition of rules that seem to subordinate play, and especially what in play is healthy and vital, to set rules and competition. Adherence to rules and enthusiasm about competition can often save one from being regarded as childish. Competition reinstates, or at least gives folks ground to reinstate, seriousness. This is the value of Huizinga’s proposal that games are the beginning of culture and civilization. And superstition? Consider these common malaises:
<quote>
that by following the rules I might be lucky enough to conquer Fate (fortune), or appease the gods (this is the ancient model: chance as Fortune or the gods) that I can get the better of Fate by means of whatever makes me lucky: joining the victorious Cause and genuinely or disingenuously working for it (this is the modern - at least Euromodern - model: the enlightened gamble of the average democratic citizen).
</quote>
Such superstitions, whatever kind of psychic or social genesis they have, seem to suppress timelessly healthy thoughts such as:
<quote>
our superstitions, however inevitable, are of no real help
</quote>
<quote>
all of life is a game and has no set rules.
</quote>
Tag is the game that, in its play, celebrates the circulation of the object, the thing, and the subject, the self. It, the thing, the mark, is what makes the game go. In this sense the game playfully inverts the world that a certain common sense suggests we live in - a world in which the subjects or selves make it go. When we seriously distinguish thing and self, or, at another level, who is and who is not in our tribe or group, we are playing at some variant of this game. The difference is that the playful (childish) version and the serious (adult) version are focused on different questions. The latter wants to know: “who is It?” The former: “how does It circulate?” In the childish version, the otherness of It, whatever it is called upon to designate, sacred or sacrificial, circulates: it could be any of us. If It is the enemy, this position circulates endlessly. I say endlessly because at least the common version of the game has no set end. But this raises the question of how the game begins: does It really come from outside? How (or by whom) is it decided who is It at the beginning? It might be arbitrary - or only seem so. Isn’t there always a list of usual suspects?
It is possible that in games like Tag an archaic stratum of the life of the first humans continues to be passed on, even as they continue to be identified with children as a kind of official outside, maintained, at least in modernity, through the child/adult distinction. But this is also perhaps a response to the persistence of this stratum. It seems that there is power and resistance in this transmission. But why invoke a historical transmission at all? It depends on how we think of or live out our history. If history obeys rules or has a pattern, an order (stages, even), a telos (progress, even), then the codification of its rules is desirable. If it doesn’t, if we think of or live out history as another way of grasping the chaos of the ideal Game, then, to us, what we do with games is analogous to what we do with rules, laws, studies of rules, studies of laws: we grasp them as one form or another of a superstition concerning one form or another of victory, mastery, winning. Such are the stakes of the procedure I referred to earlier: rather than conceiving of play and games as the origin of and practice for culture as a historical affair, a chronological procession, we might instead imagine and practice them as the ever repeated, ever interruptible beginning of whatever in culture (and thus in history) appears to be all too serious.
*** 6
<em>"Do you propose, then, to do away with games?”</em>
No, of course not. How could we, anyway?
“<em>With Normal Games?”</em>
No, not exactly. This funny thought concerns how they are played. Wouldn’t one always want to be careful of the moment where one assumes whatever rules to be one’s own? When one entered that ambiance or milieu? <em>“To always invoke the Ideal Game?"</em>
Sort of. But who would want to speak in the name of the Ideal Game, anyway? To render it divine?
The virtue, presumably, in all this would not be to come to see Normal Games as less desirable (that is a matter of taste) - but to recognize, to get better at recognizing, situations in which one is invited or forced to compete seriously, in which competition seems necessary for play. It has more to do with the ability or attitude that recognizes a potential game in whatever is supposed to be serious - where rules, codes, laws (etc) appear without explicit reference to the element of chance. Where the chance element is ignored, devalued, apparently set aside. For me this means that it is assumed, relied on, gambled on, in a very superstitious, a very dangerous way. This has everything to do with how (or by whom) a game is played, and ultimately with what is conceived or not conceived as a game.
Indeed, this might be the superior use of the Normal Game: playing in such a way as to show any number of so-called serious activities to be variants of Normal Games, in the sense that assuming the rules of Normal Games might habituate us (think again of children) to accepting rules in situations that do not seem to be games, and not assuming them in that common way opens up every Normal Game to the play of the world.
I would like to recall here the Situationists’ definition of a situation, especially its invocation of a play of events. The challenge of the infamous definition is of course the tension implied in “deliberately and concretely constructing” a situation in a way that combines the play of events with the “collective organization of a unitary ambiance.”[10]
A situation, it seems to me, is like a Normal Game, but precisely one that is programmed to be open to the Ideal Game. In this sense it is like a machine that assumes the unpredictable (should we just call it time?) as its own. Normal Games involve an attempt to master chance, which is of course macrocosmically impossible. Still, every Normal Game plays as or in the Ideal Game in some way or another, more or less gracefully. What is the interest of a match or contest where the outcome is known? A situation, in this sense, is a graceful move, a display of virtuosity, in a game of social relations. Think of it as the unlikeliest machine: “The machine to affirm chance ... the machine to release these immense forces by small, multiple manipulations, the machine to play with the stars, in short the Heracli- tean fire machine.”[11]
*** 7
Another way of proposing such an attitude might begin by noting that what is interesting in the play of Normal Games is not the endgame, the final moves, wherein something or other is decided (victory, or judgment, an entire imaginary of apocalypse that plagues would-be revolutionaries as much or more so than most others), but taking a position. Maybe rules ultimately derive or depend on this taking of a position (how one takes a position, or creates a situation), such that play is irreversibly altered. A sense of where and when one is invokes not just the derivation of rules, but the derivation of the board, or table, or court - the delimited zone where the game imagined as the Normal Game is played. The board corresponds (this is going too fast, again!) to something like an imagination of space that defines what rules apply and how one plays. It is an imagination of ambiance, of place, of milieu - and, given whatever space or place, there are specialists who will tell us what rules apply there. Again: a culture and its taboos. A state and its laws. A language and its grammar. Et cetera. But why place the emphasis on these, when what is vital and primary is this taking of a position, affirming where and when one is?
Almost any game can involve a vaguer, broader idea of play. So one might want to consider moves in and out of Normal Game play. First, into and out of other Normal Games, and then into and out of activities that do not yet seem to be games. Interestingly, this is easier when there is no board, physical or otherwise, and the game is a word game or gesture game, a game made up just for the occasion, whose rules are looser, as yet unformed, or explicitly variable. In this way we might be able to interpret intragame moves as taking positions in the general economy of the Ideal Game.
In this change of attitude towards games, what I would like to expand is precisely what is most interesting about play: the opportunities to study one’s own stupidities and desires for humiliation, and the opportunities for virtuosity. Of course I do not want to do away with virtuosity! (Or honor, or even glory, if those virtues can be separated from a small-minded concern with victory.) Normal Games have always been opportunities to develop and display some bizarre virtuosity; for my part, I want to develop the bizarre as opportunity. I think here in passing of the novel and affirmative sense given to competition by Fourier. But I also must include the spoilsport’s gesture, the nonsensical refusal to play a game, as in the anecdote Huizinga relates about a certain Shah of Persia, “supposed to have declined the pleasure of attending a race meeting, saying that he knew very well that one horse runs faster than another” (49). Huizinga comments: “From his point of view he was perfectly right: he refused to take part in a play-sphere that was alien to him, preferring to remain outside.” In any case, true virtuosity would be to open up the Normal Game to that outside, which I have been calling the Ideal Game. If one wants to compete (and, undeniably, some of us do) they might try competing with nature.
Competing with nature? A move in a game is defined (or at least definable) in terms of game rules - but is at the same time the index of a position, a temporary arrangement or disposition in one or more broader and fuzzier spheres of play. Those fuzzy spheres are interminable, infinite. The extent to which we conceive them as bounded reflects exactly to what extent we more or less consciously conceive of nature or cosmos as bound by laws or a divine hierarchy. This is my move, my position: nature or cosmos is the outside, unbounded in every sense. Which is perhaps how, playfully, we might have come to admit that nature also - and eminently - plays games. But if that kind of language is too abstract, turn to your lover and say, “this is a game.” Turn to your parents or children and say, “this is a game.” Turn to your friends and enemies and say, “this is a game.” Say silently to your self and any imaginary entities you discover in solitude, “this is a game.” See what happens next.
*** Works Cited
Axelos, Kostas. “Planetary Interlude.” <em>Yale French Studies</em> 41 (1968).
Deleuze, Gilles. <em>Nietzsche and Philosophy.</em> New York: Columbia, 1983.
Deleuze, Gilles. <em>The Logic of Sense.</em> New York: Columbia, 1990.
Huizinga, Johann. <em>Homo Ludens.</em> Boston: Beacon Press, 1971.
Knabb, Ken, ed. <em>Situationist International Anthology.</em> Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1989.
Lugones, Marfa. “Playfulness, “World” Travelling, and Loving Perception.” <em>Hypatia,</em> Vol. 2, No. 2. (1987).
Stirner, Max. <em>The Ego and its Own.</em>
New York: Cambridge, 1995.
[1] <em>Homo Ludens,</em> 7,1,158.
[2] In his summary of the “formal characteristics” of play, Huizinga lists first the rather abstract quality of play’s separateness from ordinary life; but, immediately, he moves to more concrete criteria: the boundaries of time and space and the rules that make that possible. These criteria undergird his later claim that the contest is central in games (8-13).
[3] At least as I understand its overall movement. I do fear I might seem ungenerous in my criticisms, seeing as Huizinga’s argument continually undermines itself in stray remarks. For example: “Play cannot be denied. You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play” (3). But then why take the seriousness emergent from play so seriously? In some sense my entire essay could be taken as an attempt to vindicate some of Huizinga’s propositions against the grain of the overall movement of Homo <em>Ludens.</em>
[4] <em>Ego and its Own,</em> 62. As I was writing this I recalled the idea of “playfulness” proposed by the feminist philosopher Maria Lugones, which sets out precisely from a rejection of the “agonistic” focus of the theory of play in <em>Homo Ludens.</em>
[5] <em>Logic of Sense,</em> 59.
[6] If I can rescue this phrase from Kostas Axelos, who stressed that play should not become a new slogan, only to produce a theory of play that I regard, for reasons I won’t go into here, precisely as a philosophical dead-end characterized by vague sloganeering.
[7] On this last point, Huizinga almost agrees. Discussing those he calls “spoil-sports,” he writes: “the outlaw, the revolutionary, the cabbalist or member of a secret society, indeed heretics of all kinds, are of a highly associative if not sociable disposition, and a certain element of play is prominent in all their doings” (12). <em>Their dissent is to play</em> <em>another game.</em>
[8] It is telling that Huizinga devalues solitary play except when it can be related to some future contest (13, 47).
[9] I use the male pronoun here for autobiographical reasons alone.
[10] <em>Situationist International Anthology,</em> 45.
[11] Deleuze, <em>Nietzsche and Philosophy,</em> 36.
|
#title Absolute Typhos
#author Alejandro de Acosta
#LISTtitle Absolute Typhos
#SORTauthors Alejandro De Acosta
#SORTtopics The Anvil Review, cynicism, egoism, the spectacle, mediation, ethics
#date 2015
#source Retrieved on 13<sup>th</sup> August 2021 from [[https://printedbybugs.com/zines/typhos/][printedbybugs.com]] and [[https://archive.org/details/HowToLiveNowOrNeverEssaysAndExperiments20052013/page/n185/mode/2up][archive.org]].
#lang en
#pubdate 2021-08-13T19:37:07
#notes Published in 2015 (<em>How to Live Now or Never</em>, LBC Books)
#notoc 1
<em>This essay was written in late 2012 and early 2013. It has several layers. Most fundamentally it emerges from an old plan for serial essay-writing, in which each essay should defend an indefensible proposition. It is also a sequel to the previous [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/alejandro-de-acosta-cynical-lessons][essay on the Cynics]], allowing a harsher perspective on the idea of Spectacle, which had appeared in a number of other texts I was working on at the time. Finally, it was written in mind of the approach taken in the</em> Sovereign Self <em>pieces—it certainly recollects their voice—and was intended for publication in a follow-up of sorts to that newspaper which has yet to appear.</em>
------
*** 1
In a book on the ancient Greek Cynic philosophers I reviewed for the <em>Anvil</em> two years ago, I noted with interest the Cynics’ use of the term <em>typhos</em>. This word, which in ordinary usage meant <em>smoke</em> or <em>vapor</em>, was used by them “to denote the delirium of popular ideas and conventions.”[1] The author of the book adds:
For the Cynics, these are insubstantial ‘smoke’ in comparison with the self and its present experiences, which alone can be known and possessed. One Cynic goal is <em>atyphia</em>, complete freedom from <em>typhos</em>.
The idea seems to have been one of mental obnubilation. In some provocations at the end of the review, I asked:
What is <em>typhos</em> to you? I think of this as a promising alternative to terms such as <em>ideology</em> or <em>spectacle</em>. Rather than deploying a true-false, reality-appearance dichotomy (the starting point of so many boring conversations), to me typhos suggests an intimate, personal, singular limit. It is the limit of my interest in the world, in the ideas and experiences of others, and in some of my own ideas and experiences as well. Beyond this limit, I can make a habit of thinking, all is smoke, vapor, typhos.[2]
This essay answers the question <em>what is typhos?</em> along the egoist path already implicit in the asking.
The last paragraph in the book on the Cynics includes the author’s appraisal of a contemporary interpreter, Navia:
Ancient Cynicism is not for Navia an object of “scientific” curiosity only. It is important for him as the closest approximation to the true ethical philosophy, and the salutary outlook that we in our technological culture now need most. One idea that surfaces regularly in Navia’s work is the fear that contemporary human beings have become too dependent on a system that creates and then panders to unnecessary desires and that increasingly establishes itself as the sole reality.
Worse, this system of endless acquisition and consumption harbours terrible violence both to the natural environment whose dwindling resources support it, and to human beings who are progressively dehumanized, continuously pumped with ideas, beliefs and desires from the outside, and blinded by the swirling typhos of media images, advertisements, plastic celebrities and political cant.
The only solution is to wage “war” on this system, like an Antisthenes or Diogenes, and thus not in the spirit of mere renunciation. For Navia, the true Cynic criticizes out of a deep moral idealism, and the interpretation of ancient Cynicism as wholly negative is itself a sad reflection on our own moral impoverishment. We have, Navia argues through his scholarship, taken too little thought of the wisdom of the ancient Cynics: live simply, scorn unnecessary desires, do not follow the slavish crowd but speak the truth clearly in righteous war against untruth and, most of all, cultivate the virtue of philanthropia and learn to love others now, for it is from this that everything else will follow.
It is only with respect to the last two of these sentences that I will deviate from this diagnosis. And my deviation might mark the specifically egoist appropriation of this idea, which opens out soon enough onto the appropriation of a more well-known set of concepts. Unlike the Cynic <em>as imagined in this passage</em>, the egoist sometimes does not seem righteous. It is difficult, if not impossible, to pin “moral idealism” on an egoist. For them, war on untruth may seem like a losing proposition. And the virtue of <em>philanthropia</em>, if it is to be something other than a very old religious injunction, must be practiced according to one’s own needs.[3] The specific problem to be considered here is: given that love for self and love for <em>some</em> others is of concern to an egoist, what happens when it is troubled, not to say undone, rendered impossible, by <em>a technological system</em> of some sort . . . ?
*** 2
<em>One half of humanity laughs at the other half... and the egoist, who does not believe in Humanity, laughs in another way...</em>[4]
Let me begin again from a slightly different place: those who consider themselves Humanity, the People, unconfessed egoists and secret egoists alike—most everyone dismisses the egoist for some reason or another. The moralistic criticism that dismisses egoists as selfish is a barely thought through prejudice, a dull way of begging the question of morality. But as the following dialogue will illustrate, one can pass from that criticism to a more interesting critique. Imagine a dialogue between a Normal[5] and an egoist:
<strong>Normal.</strong> You only think of yourself, you do not understand the world as I do, empathetic and well-informed...
<br><br><strong>Egoist.</strong> But what if I, and a few people I know, are the only real people? What if there is no ‘real world’?
<br><br><strong>Normal.</strong> See what ridiculous things your egoism has led you to believe!
<br><br><strong>Egoist.</strong> You are the one who believes in too many things, the world first of all.
<br><br><strong>Normal.</strong> Ah! That is why you only think of your own affairs! You don't even know that the world is out there! You should pay more attention to the news, learn more about the world around us ...
An egoist ought to enjoy the challenge of responding to the more interesting (because more exaggerated) critique that diagnoses him as a solipsist, switching from the moral to the epistemological register to win one for the Normals. (This switch might emerge from the incredulity with which amoral positions are received. The Normals understand morality and immorality very well, and are usually eager to diagnose them. When someone claims to have slipped out of the net of morality, the response is usually to diagnose them as immoral; when that does not work, we get the switch at stake here, which buttresses the moralistic perspective by proposing that the amoral one just doesn’t perceive the world as it is—which, of course, is a disguised way of saying <em>doesn't perceive things as one ought.</em>)
The egoist is accused of thinking, of acting as if she is the only one in the world. (This translates the assertion that there is no World into the parlance of the Normals.) If this accusation of solipsism is more worth my time than that of selfishness, it is because it is a real critique, not the barely disguised manifestation of a moral prejudice. Though still moralistic at its core, this critique has to do with desire or will: the way that one does or does not reach out beyond oneself, and who or what one embraces as one’s concern.
Why would an egoist deny the World? Why minimize one’s concerns?
*** 3
Suppose that what Debord, and Tiqqun after him, wrote about the spectacle, is relevant to these questions. Suppose that most interpersonal relations are mediated (governed, controlled) by images. Suppose that in some sense our efforts to express ourselves and our discourse, precise and well-honed though we may make it, are always occluded by a wash of images in rapid succession. Suppose the spectacle, its stupidity. It is not primarily that the images are representations, or fakes, for that matter, that is at stake; but that they are vectors for the communication of stupidity and confusion in the guise of information and dialogue.
<em>Imprisoned in a flattened universe bounded by the screen of the spectacle that has enthralled him, the spectator knows no one but the fictitious speakers</em> [interlocuteurs] <em>who subject him to a one-way monologue about their commodities and the politics of their commodities.</em>[6]
What concern could an egoist possibly have for such one-way communication? Amusement alone, it seems to me. And good taste dictates that amusement comes to an end soon enough. After that comes the World: for what others call the World is the detritus of my amusement. Their concern for the World is not mine, because I cease to make the image-wash my concern when I am no longer amused.
I have said the same thing in two different ways: if the idea of spectacle makes sense, it is because I feel the imposition of technologically generated image flows, vectors of stupidity, whose potential to amuse is limited. I am offered something other than persons in the image-wash: crude masks, delayed gratification, promises of future connection, friendship, community, belonging... there is no one there.
...the demand for sensational news becomes translated into repetition. The all-too-well-known phenomena of saturation, of boredom, of lightning transitions from interest to tedium, produce techniques aimed at overcoming those very reactions: techniques of <em>presentation</em>. Ways are found of varying the way news is presented. ‘Presence’ itself, which is used to epitomize authenticity, becomes a technological construct, a mystification.
<br>[...]<br>Facts, ideas—what ideas there are—and subjects come back again and again. No one recognizes them. Non-recognition is organized technically to combat memory and previously acquired information. The confusion between triviality which no longer appears trivial and sensationalism which is made to appear ordinary is cleverly organized.[7]
</quote>
While others, inasmuch as they pass rapidly from image to image, might be said to have a short attention span, I might be said to have a short span for extending my concern beyond my own affairs. That is amusement, nothing more.
Repetition, <em>image-wash</em> ... It was probably not the intention of Debord or the other spectacle-theorists to critique the mass media alone. The spectacle was not television, and is not the internet. It is, wrote Debord after Marx, a kind of social relation, a relation of minimum autonomy and endless buffeting, corralling, controlling through images. It is a grammar and a semiotic. It is a relation of <em>power</em>: <em>one-way communication</em> is <em>asymmetrical</em>, always in my disfavor. For an egoist what is at stake is less the question of mediation (to which I will return later) than the massive asymmetry as well as just the massiveness, the technologically enhanced powers of the masses.
It seems to me that those who came up with the concept of spectacle, and most of those who continue to use it (along with most theories of ideology, dominant discourses, and so on), could be judged to have diagnosed correctly much of what goes on in societies like ours, but failed in the task of describing how one is to live if one in fact thinks things are this way. The stratagems, programs, or recipes for rupturing representation, for seizing control of public space or production, have consistently failed. What groups, milieus, or would-be communes have come into existence as a result of collectively held beliefs about resisting the spectacle increasingly rely on spectacular means to spread their message, and, if we consider social networks, to remain in existence at all. They have become massified, or rely on massification for their communications, at least.
All recognition <em>within</em> the Spectacle is only recognition <em>of</em> the Spectacle.[8]
So, as always, it falls to the egoist to take one step farther in the direction of sobriety and skepticism. And in this case that means: enough critique! I understand the problem. Intimately. But also: enough collectivist recipes for overcoming it! The spectacle theory, and its relatives, the theories-of-ideology, rely too much on these overly optimistic or naturalized justifications for forming smaller societies with others.
This is where an egoist may embrace what seems most ridiculous in her way of setting out from herself with respect to every important question:
<em>... we want to be great like our perversity...</em>[9]
My description of this may be couched in the form of an experiment: <em>embrace quasi-solipsism.</em>
*** 4
Live as though the only people that really exist are those you have met face to face; every other person, from politicians to celebrities, internet acquaintances and the populations of distant lands, are then something like fictions or simulations. Imaginary persons. Clumsy masks. That is, it is not so much that the spectacle, ideology, or what you will distorts their appearance, messages, or reality, but that it constructs it wholesale. To live out this quasi-solipsism, I think, will be an experiment that maximizes my own autonomy.
<em>Never think of men except in terms of those specific individuals whose names you know.</em>[10]
Rexroth might have more exactly said: think—with concern, with care. As though beyond my face-to-face acquaintances I was surrounded by a realm of <em>typhos</em>. The milieu, groups, subcultures: relative typhos. Politics, entertainment, sports, consumer cultures, etc.: absolute <em>typhos</em>. The difference with the spectacle-theory is that I do not suppose any collective way out. There is not a reality hiding behind the mediatic veil. There is my fascinating solitude, my autonomy insofar as I can appropriate it; there are those few mysterious ego-to-ego relations that I call friendships. That is all that is real—ethically real, so real in every other sense as well. The difficulty is not in piercing the veil of distortions, the social lie (it will never happen); the difficulty is in turning away, in becoming fascinated with what is my own, what I have made or can make my own.
Beyond that, relative <em>typhos</em> is the tenuous realm of face-to-face relations. Here I have a chance to greet another and be greeted in return, to communicate with a minimum of affinity. But it is a chance and nothing more. My neighbor’s mind may be so clouded in <em>typhos</em> that her words only repeat bits and pieces of spectacular propaganda; and as a result she will never know me except as a more or less friendly mask.
But it is with absolute <em>typhos</em> that the real controversy probably lies. Here is where the judgment of others falls hardest on the egoist. Let us make their spite our own, reversing the perspective. They are, in some sense, right; I have a great indifference for the world. I do not, in the end, claim that the great masses of my continent or the populations of distant lands are not real. Nor do I claim that there is no flesh and blood human sitting in a special chair in an office in a white house. But I do suggest that for an egoist these are simply not to be considered ethical persons, because we will always and only know them through the spectacle. With respect to imaginary persons, such as the president or celebrities, this is eminently so in the sense that they are figureheads, single bodies puppeted by production teams and think tanks.
With respect to the great masses and distant populations, they exist as technologically enhanced abstractions: population data, surveys, information, opinion polls, networks... so many Causes. Why do the Normals think of the masses or the faraway Peoples? Due to their participation in one or more social Causes. But I acknowledge no morality that would compel me to meet the population of a distant land. It would only be the taste for adventure or risk that might make me want to take steps in that direction. That aside, I remain indifferent.
Could I meet the individuals that supposedly compose these masses? If I am inclined to wander through the realm of <em>typhos</em>, I may go to meet them. There I may find relative typhos or, interestingly enough, other persons may surface and make themselves known. But that is something other than an end to the technology of <em>typhos</em>, the spectacle.
Why would an egoist deny the world? Because absolute typhos cannot be appropriated, cannot be made my own. So <em>I embrace quasi-solipsism</em>.
*** 5
Could one in fact live this way? From the egoist perspective, I would say that in some way everyone already does. As always, it is the egoist who reveals the fact. It is the egoist who confesses, who admits that she sets out from herself in every circumstance that matters. The rest, the People, the Humans, the Normals, well . . . somewhere in them they have the same perspective. But it is occluded, obnubilated —
<em>... the collective tempests and social hurricanes ...</em>[11]
their self-fascination is interrupted and mediated by every Cause that intrudes upon their solitary discourse.
And that mediation, that interruption, with its resultant mental fog: that is what we call <em>typhos</em>. I will conclude by noting that in proposing this egoist reconstruction of the Cynic idea of <em>typhos</em>, I have only made reference to the spectacle theory and ideology critique out of convenience, supposing their familiarity to many of my readers—not to mention their ongoing popularity. But I will note that this egoist version does not include the humanistic core that makes the spectacle theory so philosophically weak. Let me cite at some length from one of Debord’s harshest critics:
What does <em>The Society of the Spedacle</em> have to say? That market society has become separated from itself by alienating itself in spectacle, the inverted image of social reality, the ‘present model of life’ in which we venerate our own power turned against ourselves. That this generalized separation has engendered the all-inclusive spectacular, which is ‘the real world turned upside-down’ and the ‘visible negation of life’, a negation that, in its turn, subdues living persons for its own purposes. But also that this illusion will come to an end once the ‘atomized crowd subjected to manipulations’ liberates itself by taking hold again of its own essence, which has been alienated in the fantastic form of spectacle or ideology.<br>[...]<br>... one should write ‘society’ instead of 'humanity’, and ‘spectacle’ instead of ‘ideology’. Except for this detail of phrasing, the ‘Situationist’ discourse follows word-for-word the tracks of Hegelianism: objectification, separation, negation, reversal, reversal of the reversal. Humanity’s liberation will come about through the reuniting of what was separated: the predicate and the subject.
<br>[...]<br>This modernist refresher course in an ideological form of argument advanced in the Germany of 1840—but which the human sciences have since relegated to the status of an edifying tale—rests on the idea of a generic nature, of man’s pre-existent essence. It is difficult these days to be unaware that the nature of man is not to have a nature, and that this lack of origin is precisely at the origin of the making of man, the technogenesis of the human.<br>Essentialist ontologies are obliged to wipe away everything that has been discovered since 1848 [ . . . ] The theological postulate of a human ‘essence’ is an inheritance of the revealed religions for which God created man after his own image, once and for all.[12]
The egoist idea of <em>typhos</em> allows us to learn from spectacle and ideology theory, but evades this critique. This perspective or experiment does not involve facing off a false humanity, whose relations are mediated by images, and a real humanity, with real human relations, which I will agree with Debray sounds like a ‘theological postulate’.[13] It contrasts the minute realm of what I can know as my own (which, in its importance to me, may be colossal) with the vast amount of deviations from my affairs that are offered to me. <em>Typhos</em> is, let me restate it, simply the limit of my interest in the world. Even if I suppose (and I more than suppose it, I think it’s so—you need not agree) that there is no human nature, and that this is tied up with the “technogenesis of the human”, I can still suspect, as an egoist, that this technogenesis seems to have gone horribly wrong, and has unleashed waves of Normality, stupidity, and typhoid confusion over the earth. Not the media, but the technology of the mass. So the earth becomes a world, egos or persons become Humanity... indeed, this suggests the Cynics only ever faced relative <em>typhos</em>. Perhaps their moral idealism and so on had to do with the sense that they could speak the truth, that it would resonate beyond them.
Not so for us. <em>Atyphia</em> seems impossible. If technogenesis means anything, it is that the human mass drags typhos with it, that the communication machines improve it, that we do have reason to speak of an endless interference in our affairs. It is something other than an alienation of essence! But it is absolute typhos. And I ask, again: why would I invest any of this with belief or interest?
Ethically, in terms of the life of an egoist, there is no Spectacle, no Society, no Thing of Things. There are my concerns, and beyond that, <strong>typhos</strong>.
<br>
[1] Desmond, <em>Cynics</em>, 244.
[2] "Cynical Lessons", in this collection.
[3] I admit any egoist could have written that. With more originality, I hope, I have penned some notes on the universal injunction to love others, from an egoist perspective, in the essay called ''A Lesson in Desire", also included in this collection.
[4] Old egoist saying.
[5] There are Normals insofar as there are processes of normalization, powers of the norm (see what Foucault, and Macherey after him, have written on this) and they are not resisted by individuals or groups. Of course, from an egoist point ofview normality has no intrinsic importance.
[6] Debord, <em>Society ofthe Spectacle</em>, § 218.
[7] Lefebvre, "Renewal, Youth, Repetition", in <em>Introduction to Modernity</em>, 166.
[8] Tiqqun, <em>Theory of Bloom</em>.
[9] Novatore, "Towards the Creative Nothing'', in <em>Collected Writings</em>, 46.
[10] Kenneth Rexroth.
[11] Novatore, "Towards the Creative Nothing", 44.
[12] Régis Debray, "Remarks on the Spectacle", 135-136.
[13] Supposing one wants to put this in terms ofthe history of philosophy, one might remember that egoists follow Stirner's way of breaking with Feuerbach, not Marx's. If it is even a question of a break for Debord: as Debray points out, he is close to Feuerbach on a number of points.
[14] Also called "the massive pleonasm': Lefebvre, "Renewal, Youth, Repetition", 167.
|
#pubdate 2010-11-16 11:47:43 +0100
#author Alejandro de Acosta
#SORTauthors Alejandro de Acosta
#title Anarchist Meditations, or: Three Wild Interstices of Anarchism and Philosophy
#lang en
#date 2010
#SORTtopics ADCS 2010.1, Frere Dupont, nihilism, philosophy, post-anarchism, situationist international
#notes From <em>Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies</em>, Volume 2010.1
*** Abstract
Philosophers allude to anarchist practices; philosophers allude to anarchist theorists; anarchists allude to philosophers (usually in search of theory to add to the canon). What is missing in this schema, I note with interest, is anarchists alluding to philosophical practices. These are the wild interstices: zones of outlandish contact for all concerned.
<quote>
Todo está ya en su punto, y el ser persona en el mayor.
Conocer las cosas en su punto, en su sazón, y saberlas lograr.
— Baltasar Gracián
</quote>
*** Failure and the Third
I dare to call certain turbulent interstices of anarchy and philosophy <em>wild</em>. I feel that there is a lot of activity there, but not (yet) along predictable lines. For some time now, those interested have been hearing about several other such interstices: tamer ones, from my point of view. Or at least more recognizable. So let us play the familiar game of theory and practice, that game in which we presuppose them as separate and seek to claim them reunited. From within the play of this game, the tame interstices are variations on the following moves: philosophers allude to anarchist practices; philosophers allude to anarchist theorists; anarchists allude to philosophers (usually in search of theory to add to the canon). What is missing in this schema, I note with interest, is anarchists alluding to philosophical practices. These are the wild interstices: zones of outlandish contact for all concerned, I think.
But there are other games to play, even if they are only innocent games of exposition. I think it is important and interesting to stop presupposing separation, to dissolve its painful distribution of thinking and action. That is, we might hazard the risky game (which is also an experience, an exercise) in which <em>there are no theories, no practices;</em> just more or less remarkable enactments of ways of life, available in principle to absolutely anyone, absolutely anywhere.[1]
Anecdotally, these reflections have a double genesis. The first occurred some years ago, when I was asked at an anarchist gathering to participate in a panel on “anarchism and post-structuralism.” It was around the time some began speaking of and writing about post-anarchism. The conversation failed, I think, in that no one learned anything. Of the four speakers, two were roughly in favour of engaging with post-structuralism and two against. I write <em>roughly</em> because we seemed to agree that “post-structuralism” is at best an umbrella term, at worst a garbage term, not acknowledged by most of the authors classed within it, and not particularly helpful in conversations such as that one. As if there really were two massive aggregates on either side of the “and” we were being asked to discuss! Indeed, the <em>worst</em> possible sense that something called post-anarchism could have would be the imaginary collusion of two crudely conceived imaginary aggregates. During the discussion, a participant asked the panel a question: “how do post-structuralist anarchists organize?” Of course the question went unanswered, though some of us tried to point out that there just aren’t, and cannot be, post-structuralist anarchists in the same sense that there are or may be anarcho-communists or anarcha-feminists or primitivists, etc. The operative reason was that our interlocutor seemed to be (involuntarily?) imagining post-structuralism as a form of theory, and anarchism primarily as a form of practice with no spontaneous or considered theory of its own. This is a variant of the familiar schema of separation, in which theory offers the analysis that informs practices, a.k.a. “organizing.” No go.
That night, I also posed a question, one that went unanswered: “is there a third?” I meant to ask both about the status of anarchism and post-structuralism as massive, clumsy imaginary aggregates, and also about the presupposed separation in their implicit status as forms of practice and theory. Or perhaps merely to hint at the unacknowledged efficacity of the <em>and</em>, its silent labour, its gesture towards possible experiences. What I have to say here is my own attempt to answer that question as provocatively as possible. I will begin with this claim (which I think does not presuppose separation): it is precisely the apparent political failures of what I am now glad to have done with referring to as post-structuralism that could make certain texts and authors interesting. And it is precisely the supposed theoretical failures of what it is still a little silly to call anarchism that could make its peculiar sensibilities attractive.
Indeed, the great and continuing interest of anarchism for philosophers (and for anarchists, if they are willing to learn this lesson) could be that it has never successfully manifested itself as a theoretical system. Every attempt at an anarchist system is happily incomplete. That is what I suppose concerned our interlocutor that night: he was worried, perhaps, about the theoretical insufficiency of anarchism compared with what appeared to be an overwhelming array of theories and concepts on the other side. In this anxious picture, the array seeks to vampirically attach itself to whatever practice, interpreting, applying itself to, <em>dominating</em>, ultimately, its motions. ‘Theories without movements: <em>run</em>!’ I would prefer to invert the terms and claim the apparent theoretical weakness of anarchism as one of its greatest virtues. For its commonplaces (direct action, mutual aid, solidarity, affinity groups, etc.) are not concepts but forms of social practice. As such, they continually, virally, infect every even remotely extraparliamentary or grassroots form of political action. And, beyond politics, they compose a kind of interminable reserve of social intelligence. In all this they neither require a movement to become manifest nor compose one by default of tendentially existing. In this sense, what anarchism offers to philosophers (to the philosophers any of us are or might be) is that it has been and remains primarily a way of life. Its asystematicity and its persistent recreation as a way of life probably account for the fact that anarchism, as theory, has never been incorporated into or as an academic discipline.[2]
Anarchism acts as an untimely echo of how philosophy was once lived, and how, indirectly and in a subterranean fashion, it continues to be lived. And, paradoxically, we might learn something about how it is lived by reference to philosophical practices.
*** Dramatization: Wild Styles
Practices, or simply philosophy as a way of life: that is the second genesis of what I have to say here. This idea crystallized in studying, of all things, the ancient Stoics. Seeking to give a (pedagogical) sense to Stoic logic, physics, and ethics as a lived unity and not as components of what they already called a “theoretical discourse,”[3] I had recourse to the elaboration of the practice of spiritual exercises by Pierre Hadot. He describes them as follows: “practices which could be physical, as in dietary regimes, or discursive, as in dialogue and meditation, or intuitive, as in contemplation, but were all intended to effect a modification and a transformation in the subject who practised them” (Hadot, 2005: 6).[4] Or, again: “The philosophical act is not situated merely on the cognitive level, but on that of the self and of being. It is a progress which causes us to <em>be</em> more fully, and makes us better. It is a conversion which turns our entire life upside down, changing the life of the person who goes through it” (Hadot, 1995: 83). Briefly, it’s that every statement that is still remarkable in the fragments and doxographical reports is so in light of its staging (dramatization, theatricalization) as part of a meditative practice that might have been that of a Stoic.
Hadot offers several examples from the <em>Meditations</em> of Marcus Aurelius demonstrating that logic and physics, the purportedly theoretical components of Stoicism, were already and immediately part of ethical practice. Logic as a “mastery of inner discourse” (Hadot, 2005: 135): “always to define or describe to oneself the object of our perception so that we can grasp its essential nature unadorned, a separate and distinct whole, to tell oneself its particular name as well as the names of the elements from which it was made and into which it will be dissolved” (Aurelius, 1983: III, 11). Physics as “recognizing oneself as part of the Whole” (Hadot, 2005: 137), but also the practice of seeing things in constant transformation: “Acquire a systematic view of how all things change into one another; consistently apply your mind to, and train yourself in, this aspect of the universe” (Aurelius, 1983: X, 11).
I contend that such spiritual exercises are theories <em>dramatized</em> as subjective attitudes. As the pivot of the whole system or at least of its comprehensibility as such, the role of logic and physics for the Stoics must have been precisely that of a training for ethical thought and action. But in some sense the converse is even more compelling: subjective attitudes, their theatre, seem to secrete theory as a detritus in need of being taken up again — precisely in the form of a new or repeated exercise, a renewed dramatization. Setting aside the labyrinthine complications of the entanglement with what is still badly understood as Fate, I would like to retain this much of Stoic ethics in my anarchist meditations: to find if there is anything to affirm in what confronts us, what we encounter. Concluding a recent essay, I shared a desire “to affirm something, perhaps all, of our present conditions, without recourse to stupid optimism, or faith” (de Acosta, 2009: 34). I would like to speculatively expand on the practice of such affirmations. As Gilles Deleuze once put it: “either ethics makes no sense at all, or this is what it means and has nothing else to say: not to be unworthy of what happens to us”[5] (Deleuze, 1990: 49). What we encounter cannot but provoke thought; if it can, meaning, if we allow it to, there is something to affirm, and this affirmation is immediately joyful. How we might thoughtfully allow events, places, actions, scenes, phrases — “what happen to us,” in short — to unfold in the direction of joy is the explicit or implicit question of every spiritual exercise.
I propose, then, an interlinked series of fantastic spiritual exercises: meditations for anarchists — or on anarchy. They have, I suppose, been implicit in every significant anarchist discourse so far (including, of course, the many that have not called themselves anarchist) (cf., de Acosta, 2009). They have been buried, indirect, assumed but unstated, in these discourses. Or at least in much of their reception. In each of these three forms (or styles) of exercise what is pivotal is some use of the imagination — at least the imaginative-ideational uptake, Stoic <em>phantasia</em> or <em>phantasma</em>, of written or spoken discourse, and of what is given to thought in experience.[6] So, we are concerned here with experiential dispositions, attitudes that at first seem subjective but are ultimately prior to the separation of subject and object, and perhaps even of possible and real.
Whatever happens, these exercises are <em>available</em>. I will not opine on their ultimate importance, especially not on their relevance to existing movements, groups, strategies, or tactics. In what fashion and to what degree any of these exercises can be applied to another activity — if that is even possible — is ultimately up to any of us to decide upon in the circumstances that we find ourselves in, or through situations that we create. The status of these meditations is that of a series of experiments, or experiences, whose outcome and importance is unknown at the outset and perhaps even at the conclusion.
I will have recourse in what follows to texts and authors that preceded what is now called anarchism, or were, or <em>are</em>, its difficult contemporaries, so as to underline that what matters in anarchist meditations are the attitudes that they make available, not any actual or possible theory or group that they may eventually secrete. The secret importance of anarchy is the short-circuit it interminably introduces between such attitudes and action, and back — what is badly conceived as spontaneity. (Or worse, “voluntarism,” in the words of our enemies...)
Perhaps, then, the truly compelling reason to call the three forms of meditation <em>wild styles</em> is that anarchists have no <em>archon</em>, no school, no real training in or modelling of these activities outside of scattered and temporary communities and the lives of unusual individuals. <em>But</em> they can and do happen: interminably, yes, and also informally, irregularly, and unpredictably. That is their interest and their attraction.
*** First Wild Style: Daydream
A Daydream may take the form of a <em>meditative affirmation</em> that informs how we might read so-called utopian writers. Of these I will discuss the absolutely most fascinating. It is Fourier, with his taxonomy of the passions; with his communal phalansteries; with his tropical new earth, <em>aigresel</em> oceans, and kaleidoscopic solar system; ultimately, with his Harmonian future. What are we to do today with such a discourse? A version of this first wild style is beautifully laid out in the following remarks by Peter Lamborn Wilson:
<quote>
Fourier’s <em>future</em> would impose an injustice on <em>our present</em>, since we Civilizees cannot hope to witness more than a foretaste of Harmony, if it were not for his highly original and somewhat mad eschatology. [...] One of the things we can do with Fourier’s system is to hold it within our consciousness and attention in the form of a mandala, not questioning whether it be literally factually true, but whether we can achieve some sort of “liberation” through this strange meditation. The future becoming of the solar system, with its re-arrangement of planets to form dances of colored lights, can be visualized as a tantric adept uses a yantra of cosmogenic significance, like a Sufi meditation on “photisms” or series of visionary lights, to focus and integralize our own individual realization of the potential of harmony within us, to overcome our “prejudices against matter, which is represented to us as a vile principle” by philosophers and priests (Lamborn, 1998: 17–17).
</quote>
From which I would like to retain at least the following: first, we can affirm nothing in the present unless we acknowledge that the future is unthinkable, unimaginable. Fourier did write, after all, that if we sorry Civilizees could grasp the ramifications of the entire Combined Order, we would be immediately struck dead (Fourier, 1996: 67). (This, by the way, seems to be why he was more given to examples about Harmonian banquets than ones about Harmonian orgies.) So, with respect to direct action, his intention is clear enough: one does not build Harmony as such, because it is unimaginable; one builds the commune, the phalanstery. (That is why so much of <em>The Theory of the Four Movements</em>, for example, is dedicated to a discussion of transitional phases, e.g. “Guaranteeism”).[7] This practice is focused, however, through a contemplation in which we are not planning for a future that is, after all, unforeseeable; we are dreaming, fantasizing, but in a peculiarly concentrated way, acting on ourselves in the present.
Secondly, setting aside the future, one can somehow meditate on Fourier’s system. And not just the system as totality; perhaps the most effective form of this meditative affirmation that I can report on is that which focuses on one single and exceptionally absurd element of Fourier’s speculations: for example, the <em>archibras</em>, a prehensile tail he claims humans will develop, good, as Lamborn Wilson notes, for fruit-picking as well as orgies. Or the sixteen kinds of strawberries, or the lemonade ocean, or the anti-giraffe.[8] Fourier is as dumbfounding when he describes the industrial armies of Harmony as he is when he suddenly reveals one of these strange Harmonian monads to his audience.
It seems to me that Lamborn Wilson suggests an entirely different mode of reading and experiencing Fourier’s writings than either the impatient critique of so-called scientific socialism or the predictably tolerant pick-and-choose of the other socialists and anarchists. To focus on what is systematic, or appears to be so, in Fourier, is to try to recreate for ourselves his precise derangement, to train our thinking in the paths of his mad logic, the voice of his desires, without for all that believing in anything. Especially Harmony. As he wrote: “passionate attraction is the interpreter of nature” (Fourier, 1996: 189). I will accept this only if it can be agreed that interpretation is already an action, on ourselves first of all. (For example, it might be a healthy use of the same imaginative faculties that many of us squander on video feeds of one sort or another.)
A similar meditative affirmation could allow one to make good use of “P.M.’s” infamous zerowork tract <em>bolo’bolo.</em> The text opens with a short predictive narrative about the “substruction of the planetary work machine” by the construction of small autonomous communes or <em>bolos</em> networked together into the global <em>bolo’bolo.</em> We are, by the way, twenty-two years too late; <em>bolo’bolo</em> should have emerged in 1988. The bulk of this tract, however, is taken up by a series of systematic elements that may become themes for Daydreams. It is the ideographic sign language of <em>bolo’bolo, asa’pili,</em> the series IBU, BOLO, SILA, TAKU ... each coupled with an invented ideograph. As with the hexagrams of the <em>Classic of Changes</em>, each heading encapsulates and illustrates a concept with a simple sign. Imagine the use of this artificial <em>lingua franca:</em> the ideographs and odd bisyllabic words could aid a certain meditative translation. IBU is and is not an ego; NIMA is and is not beliefs; TAKU is and is not private property; YAKA is and is not a duel. And so on. Confronted, then, with egos, beliefs, private property, or duels, I may always perform an exercise that translates them to <em>asa’pili.</em> This means asking, speculating on, the question: and what would do we do with all this in <em>bolo’bolo</em>? This language is said to be of a future and yet we are already using it, making new sense or even new worlds of sense with it.
The second systematic series occurs only once: it is an incredible list of sample <em>bolos</em>. “In a larger city, we could find the following <em>bolos</em>: Alco-bolo, Sym-bolo, Sado-bolo, Maso-bolo, Vegi-bolo, Les-bolo, Franko-bolo, Italo-bolo, Play-bolo, No-bolo, Retro-bolo, Thai-bolo, Sun-bolo [...]”[9] It is again a linguistic operation at first, which is obvious since so many of these are puns. Once we are amused, the imagination begins its playful reverie. Once the suffix takes on consistency, we are dreaming other dreams. Imagine, not just Sado-bolo and Maso-bolo, but the relations between them. What are the parties in Dada-bolo like? The art of Tao-bolo? The dialect of Freak-bolo? As with the punctual things, events, or practices denoted by the terms of <em>asa’pili</em>, we have some initial sense, but our imagination is pushed to a new and more voluptuous level of complication and creation in conceiving each <em>bolo</em>, its inner workings, and the interrelations, or lack thereof, among <em>bolos</em>.
In neither case is there anything to believe in. Certainly not <em>bolo’bolo</em>! I maintain rather that to gather and concentrate one’s thought process using these signs or examples is to accept their provocation, to undertake a deviation, <em>détournement</em>, of the imaginative flux. In so doing we find, paradoxically, that we have names for otherwise unimaginable relations. We are in an even better position to do so than when the book first appeared since, according its chronology, <em>bolo’bolo</em> should have already come about. So the more credulous among us, those unhappy souls awaiting some anarchist version of 2012 or the Apocalypse of John, will be stumped and disappointed. It can no longer be read as a book concerning (do please laugh here) ‘the current conjuncture.’ Two mostly unhappy decades have returned it to its fetal form: a wish, a mad dream, that models its madness in an exemplary fashion, precisely by drawing us into its codes. Each ideogram, each <em>bolo’</em>s name, is a monad. To meditatively grasp it is to attain a perspective on the otherwise impossible: to be a witness to <em>bolo’bolo</em>. It is only when we hopelessly use these monads that they can have an effect on our thinking-in-the-event: a healthy use of what Bergson called <em>la fonction fabulatrice</em>, perhaps even what Freud conceived as the wish-fulfillment involved in dreams.
Another sort of Daydream, the <em>meditative negation</em>, manifests in a similar way, as a summoning up of powerful, almost unthinkable images of destruction, specifically of consumption. I consider this strange passage by Max Stirner to be paradigmatic:
<quote>
Around the altar rise the arches of the church and its walls keep moving further and further out. What they enclose is <em>sacred</em>. You can no longer get to it, no longer touch it. Shrieking with the hunger that devours you, you wander around about these walls and search for the little that is profane. And the circles of your course keep getting more and more extended. Soon that church will embrace the whole world, and you will be driven out to the extreme edge. Another step and the <em>world of the sacred</em> has conquered: you sink into the abyss. Therefore take courage while there it is yet time, wander about no longer in the profane where now it is dry feeding, dare the leap and rush the gates into the sanctuary itself. If you <em>devour the sacred</em> you have made it your <em>own</em>. Digest the sacramental wafer and you are rid of it (Stirner, 1995: 88–9).[10]
</quote>
This is perhaps the most excessive of many such passages in <em>The Ego and its Own</em>. What is the status of this discourse? Just who is speaking here? What I is addressing me, presenting its ideas as my own? What is the altar, the church, its walls? What is the <em>sacred</em> exactly? What is the <em>hunger</em> referred to here? The <em>courage</em>? What does this apparently metaphorical act of eating entail in practice? As I have posed them, abstractly, these questions are unanswerable. I propose rather that the interest of passages such as these, their significance in Stirner’s text, is that, functioning as a model, they allow one to project a parallel thought pattern onto one or more given sets of circumstances. This meditation could help me to divest myself of my allegiance to a stupid political group that I have made the mistake of joining; or it could save me from a noxious commonplace of sexual morality. In each case I would find the sacred element, identify its will to power, feel my impotence for a moment (“hunger”) and then strike with courage, undoing the sacrificial logic that has possessed me.
The difference between meditative affirmation and negation is that in affirming I actively imagine a future that I do not take to be real; I explore its details to act on my own imagination, on my thought process, to contract other habits. In negation, as in affirmation, there is no future, just this present I must evacuate of its meaning. This meditation is a voiding process, a clearing of stupidities. It is what I do when I can find nothing to affirm in the present.
That is not the only form a meditative negation can take. Throughout <em>The Ego and its Own</em>, Stirner also deploys countless brief, pithy phrases that are not imagistic, but rather almost speech acts, cases of a kind of disruptive <em>direct action</em> in discourse: “I do not step shyly back from your property, but look upon it always as my property, in which I need to ‘respect’ nothing. Pray do the like with what you call my property!” (Stirner, 1995: 220). “I do not love [the world], I annihilate it as I annihilate myself; I dissolve it” (ibid., 262). I do not know what could possibly follow such statements, though something must. These phrases could be ironically spoken aloud to a coarse interlocutor as the mark of a necessary distance; they could also be thought silently to oneself, as so many available elements of an egoist <em>tetrapharmakon</em> that could recall us to ourselves in even the most alienating moments.[11] The I that speaks in Stirner’s text is more often than not offered as a common property, that is to say, not a property at all. It is a model, a case. It is there to be taken up, imitated, if we have the courage to be the confessed egoists we could be. Stirner was not describing the world, he was acting on it; so we too might act if we study and train ourselves in such imaginary and discursive exercises. Like anarchism, egoism cannot be taught, only modelled and perhaps imitated.
*** Second Wild Style: Field Trip
Although careful and generous acts of reading are vital to anarchist meditations, the exercises I am describing could also take the form of concentrations of thought developed not through engagement with written or spoken discourse but with the materiality of places. In affirmative or negative meditations, the question is that of another attitude, another tone of thought, another voice. And reading bizarre books is only one way to achieve it. A second form of exercise, the Field Trip, is a kind of <em>speculative anthropology of geographical spaces</em>. I will elaborate it through a detailed examination of one example, both for its richness and because I suppose many of my readers are unfamiliar with its source, a recent text from the sometime proponent of a “nihilist communism.” In a tone sometimes echoing Bakunin, sometimes Bataille, “Frere Dupont,” the pseudonymous author of <em>species being</em>, proposes that revolt is a sort of anthropological constant. It corresponds not so much to the organizations that seek to bring it about, or at least stimulate and channel it, but rather to an existential dimension of the human. Borrowing from another lexicon, I would say that for Dupont revolt is anthropogenetic. “The untheorized and non-included aspects of human existence is [<em>sic</em>] our platform” (Dupont, 2007: 47). I suppose the term “platform” is used here with tongue fully in cheek. What is this ironic project, then? “Our purpose is to develop a feral subject [...]” (ibid.). Very well: how is this subject <em>developed</em>?
Setting aside, perhaps even ignorant of, the procedures of scientific anthropology or archeology, Frere Dupont enters an archeological site in the East of England and reports:
<quote>
It is noon on the Tenth of May. The year is Two Thousand and Six. I am crouching, my hands on the floorstone, in Pit One of Grime’s Graves, a retrieved neolithic flint mining complex in Norfolk’s Breckland. I have chosen this place to begin my investigation into the tendency within society to modify itself through the chosen activities that it undertakes in response to the perceived limits of itself. I have asked myself whether this tendency of transformation out of stability is explicable in terms of a motivational sense of lack and/or a sense of abundance (ibid., 48).
</quote>
The question Dupont is asking could be understood to belong to political philosophy, ethics, anthropology, or any number of other disciplines. It is also, of course, a variant of the old anarchist question about the inception of the State-form and authoritarian politics: the institutionalized concentration of power.[12] This text bears with it the rare sense of a situated thought (“I have chosen this place”), the unusual idea that it matters <em>where</em> one is when one thinks; or, again, the fantastic intuition that one can conceive of the activities that have unfolded in a place, <em>even thousands of years later:</em>
<quote>
I am crouching in Pit One of the complex. It is dark because the custodians of the site have put a roof over the site, but four thousand years ago, at midday, on a day like today in bright summer light, the chalk walls would be dazzlingly intense. To increase this effect the miners built angled walls from the chalk spoil at the surface of the shaft to further reflect light down into the galleries. My first impressions are of the miners’ appreciation for the actual process of mining as an activity in itself, which they must have valued in their society above the flint that was mined. Also, I felt an awareness of their creation of an architecture, their carving out of underground spaces, and the separations and connections between these and the world above. Somewhat self-consciously, I crouch at the centre of the shaft and announce my short, prepared thesis, “organization appears only where existence is thwarted” (Dupont, 2007: 51).
</quote>
The three key components of this exercise seem to be location in an unfamiliar and significant place (“I am crouching”), affective engagement with the history and arrangement of the space (“My first impressions [...] I felt an awareness ...”), and the conscious, explicit introduction of what would otherwise be an abstract “thesis” into that experience (“I [...] announce”). I suggest that in so doing an aleatory element is introduced into thought, a tendency that unfolds, at least in this case, in solitude. Perhaps the place and its intuitive reconstruction act as a sort of externalized primary process on speculation, inflecting or declining it. It is an analytic moment. Not: what does this thesis mean? But: what does it mean that <em>I</em> said it <em>here</em>? Dupont offers up the thesis to the mute walls of the pit. And then something happens: new thought. The “thesis” thickens, taking on a new consistency.
<quote>
Organization appears only where existence is thwarted [...] And existence appears only where organization is thwarted. But is this because the appearance of existence-in-revolt is a negatively constituted movement (a mere inversion of what is, a substantiation of the possibilities of the form), or is it an indication of a crisis within organization, the breakdown of the holding/defining of the scene — or rather, is the recurrence of existence-counter-to-present-structure an intimation of organization yet to come? The question here concerns capture, and return — the possibility of getting back to a previous stage where the problems of any given structure, or structure itself, have yet to appear (ibid., 56).
</quote>
What Dupont discovered, perhaps, is some way to imaginatively recreate precisely what is lost of prehistoric peoples — their anarchy: a kind of vanished attitude modelled anew. Dupont does not claim to speak the truth of those peoples. Who could ever claim to know what they thought? Or even if they experienced thought as a relatively autonomous faculty, the presupposition, by the way, of all our amusing contentions about “theory”? Rather, speculating in a place that is still somehow theirs, and letting the speculation remain what it is — a hallucination, ultimately — she or he moves to a speculative or archeological reconstruction of our own problems. Dupont is able to speculate on some Neolithic transformation from existence to organization (whatever else this means, I suppose it has to do with the stabilization of proto-states, ritual structures, divisions of labour, etc.) insofar as she or he locates, imaginatively, analogous or even genealogically related elements in our present. Namely, the vast, unthought but available, background of the thesis! I might encapsulate that background by reference to a feeling: the terrible sense that the group one is in is becoming rigid, static, that a hierarchy, hierogamy, or hierophany is developing where initially only some sort of kinship or friendship existed. The place (here, the pit) concretizes, materializes, or grounds thought in a provisional, momentary, but remarkable way. Could this be the birth of the feral subject?
Elsewhere in the book Dupont quotes Krishnamurti: “Meditation is to find out if there is a field which is not already contaminated by the known” (ibid., 114). Whatever this statement could have meant in its original context, I understand Dupont to be suggesting that we always need new practices of thought, new contemplations, that habituate us to overcoming our profoundly limited common sense about what is human, what the human or its societies can do and be. The <em>field</em>, then, in this example is both the pit <em>and</em> the attitude or wishes one brings there — though the latter may only become evident in the pit.
There is, in short, a tentative anthropology here[13], and it is overtly speculative and intuitive. The interest of its statements lies not in their truth-value but in their importance, their success — their felicity, as one says of a performative utterance. They are felicitous if they can meditatively restage some or all of a fantastic anthropogenetic moment in a present itself rendered fantastic.
*** Third Wild Style: Psychogeography
A third wild style bears as its name a Situationist term, which they defined as follows:
<quote>
Psychogeography: the study of the specific effects of the geographical environment (whether consciously organized or not) on the emotions and behavior of individuals (Knabb, 2006: 52).
</quote>
I mean it somewhat differently, however, since the question is not merely to understand effects, but to act on them, to generate other effects inasmuch as one becomes capable of experiencing places and spaces differently.[14] One could view this style as a complex combination of the first (affirmation especially) and the second (though the speculative anthropology here refers not to the past but to a perspective on our world). A first simple form of Psychogeography could take up, for example, the long lists Kropotkin made of what in his present already manifested mutual aid: public libraries, the international postal system, cooperatives of every sort (Kropotkin, 1955: Chapters 7 & 8, <em>et passim</em>). Kropotkin argued that mutual aid is an evolutionary constant, as generic and vital as competition, or what was called the struggle for existence. But we would be mistaken if we thought his books, essays, speeches, etc. had as their only rhetorical mode the one perhaps most evident on a first reading, that of scientific proof. His <em>examples</em>, his repeated and lengthy enumerations of actual <em>cases</em> of mutual aid, offer up an entirely new world, an uncanny symptomatology of a familiar world. It is our world, seen through a new and clear lens.[15] One could then travel to the places revealed in this new world, buildings or events, and meditate on the activity there so as to eventually grasp what is anarchist about them immediately and not potentially. I am referring to what is colloquially called “hanging out.” Going to the public library, for example, for no other reason than to witness what in it is anarchic — or, again, to a potluck. This practice involves another way of inhabiting familiar spaces. It brings out what in them is uncannily, because tendentially, anarchic. It multiplies our sites of action and engagement and could shape our interventions there.
Those interested could expand the range of this exercise, making the goal not only arrival at the sites of mutual aid (or other anarchic activities), but also the journey. Here again a Situationist term is relevant: the <em>dérive</em>, that “experimental behaviour” (Knabb, 2006: 52) of wandering across an urban space with no determinate destination. I suppose that if one has begun to master the affirmation of certain places as anarchic, one could begin expanding the range of the exercise, meditating as one walks or rides a bicycle or bus, affirming now forms of movement, escape, or evasion, as well as creative flights of fancy. Soon many places in urban space will emerge, detached from their everydayness, as remarkable: places of intensity, or of <em>virtual anarchy.</em> (I think here, for example, of the great significance some friends put on visiting certain garbage dumpsters.)
Indeed, it is likely that Fourier’s preferred examples may have emerged in just this way. Reading his finest descriptions of Harmony, we find innumerable <em>parades</em>. He plans Harmonian processions: “Parade Series: In a societary canton all the members of the industrial phalanx [...] are divided into 16 choirs of different ages; each choir is composed of 2 quadrilles, one of men and one of women, making a total of 32 quadrilles, 16 male and 16 female, each with its distinctive banners, decorations, officers and costumes, both for winter and summer” (Fourier, 1996: 293). It is strange and lovely to suppose that all of this began with the solitary tradesman Charles Fourier looking on as a military parade passed by, spontaneously inventing his version of this exercise by asking himself: what can we do with the passions set to work in this array? It seems these people like costumes, display, fanfare, and ordered group movements. How do these passions fit in Harmony, given that the constraint in thinking harmonically is to affirm every passion? Once the question is asked, our experience reveals the details to be meditatively rearranged. For Fourier, parades are not only great fun; they also presage the serial organization of the Combined Order. “All this pomp may be thought unnecessary to the cultivation of flowers and fruits, wheat and wine, etc., but baubles and honorific titles do not cost anything, and they are incitements to greater enthusiasm in the work of the Series” (ibid., 299). “You will come in the end to recognize that there are no bad or useless passions, and that all characteristics are good in themselves, that all passions must be intensified, not moderated” (ibid., 303). Psychogeography could show us where each passion, intensified, may bloom.
One night in the mid-nineties I had dinner with Peter Lamborn Wilson. We spoke about Fourier and he told me of a group of friends who had set off from New York into Canada in an expedition that had as its goal to trigger the birth of the Northern Crown, that “shining ring of light,” which, in Fourier’s system, “will appear after two centuries of combined order” (ibid., 33–4). I do not remember all the details, but, since it has been fifteen years, and the Northern Crown has yet to emerge, I am led to wonder what this journey could have meant for its participants. I am reminded here of the great and catastrophic Tupi migrations of the sixteenth century documented by Hélène Clastres: ambiguous wanderings of whole peoples who abandoned a sad and sedentary way of life and danced off (literally!) in search of a land of immortality that they expected to find in the Andes or across the Atlantic (Clastres, 1995: 49–57). Or so it is said. We read of such journeys and perhaps conceive of them as pointless — fanatical, even. We suppose, perhaps, that they were primarily religious, missing what is remarkable about the absolute desertion of agricultural labour, marriage customs, etc. Religion might be the operative discourse, and prophetism the power mechanism, but the lived practice seems like something else entirely: “The quest for the Land-Without-Evil is [...] the active denial of society. It is a genuinely collective asceticism” (ibid., 56). Should we say the poor Tupi were duped by their own prophets? What if the journey were its own reason? How did the Tupi experience what Clastres calls the “auto-destruction” of their own societies? What could the wanderers Lamborn Wilson told me of have felt and thought as they made their way north?[16]
*** Interstices
Let me return to the question, “how do post-structuralist anarchists organize?” I have suggested that what perhaps went unthought in it was the presupposition of separation. In this case that meant that the prized goal of the game, the theory-practice intersection, ought to be (to embody or resemble) organizing or an organization. Here I recall Dupont’s thesis: <em>organization appears where existence is thwarted</em>. Could we rewrite that last word with the phrase <em>separated from itself</em>?
Indeed, my three wild styles concern forms of existence that are more and less than organizations, or, to be direct, <em>organisms</em>, since in the unconscious hylomorphic background of the schema, theory is the soul, practice is the body, and progress is the organism’s health. To maintain that anarchist meditations are interstitial is to propose that something or someone thrives and swarms ahead of, behind, among, inside of, and between the slow-moving theory-practice compounds that we call organizations. The vital question is: do organizations ever do anything at all? Or are they something like remnants, the clumsy carapaces of what has been and is already being done? David Hume wrote: “The chief benefit which results from philosophy arises in an indirect manner, and proceeds more from its secret insensible influence, than from its immediate application” (Hume, 2008: 104). <em>A secret insensible influence:</em> that is all I would claim for my wild styles. They are good practices, and good practice. They do not dictate action; action is its own reason and its own model. But they have had a long-standing, indirect, and insensible influence on what anarchists and many others in fact do.
Unlike a theory that purposely or accidentally posits an ideal state or a goal, they have no implicit or explicit teleology. I have long felt, and remain convinced, that there is nothing to be gained by positing a goal for action other than in the most irreducibly local sense (and even then!). Although I have my reasons for maintaining this near-metaphysical proposition, I will restrict myself here to underlining the contemporary phenomenon of non-ideological political actions, which could nearly all be called <em>tactics without strategies</em>. Or even: punctual acts in the course of detaching themselves from the tactical realm of militant and militarized politics. I prefer not to think such actions as practices in need of theoretical interpretation. If there is anything to praise in them, it is that these actions are wild experiments: ‘what happens when we do <em>this</em>?’ They install themselves, impossibly, I admit, on the side of <em>existence</em>, and attempt to remain there.
These wild styles ought, eventually, to put into question every political project — first, as project, and, again, as political.[17] That is their virtue, or at least their contribution to virtue. Whatever effects they may or may not have, they exemplify <em>in thought</em> that aspect of anarchist practice called <em>direct action</em>. The famous and pathetic theses of the innate goodness of humans or of a future utopia have perhaps no value other than their role as themes for meditation and affirmation in the present. Hume, again: “The chief triumph of art and philosophy: it insensibly refines the temper, and it points out to us those dispositions which we should endeavour to attain, by a constant <em>bent</em> of mind, and by repeated <em>habit</em>” (ibid., 105). This sort of direct action, as it infuses our lives, may succeed or fail. To the extent that it succeeds, we are on the way to anarchy. To the extent that it fails, it succeeds as well, though in a more local way. We have bent our mind, as Hume wrote, and made life “amusing” (ibid., 113).[18]
*** References
de Acosta, Alejandro. (2009) “Two Undecidable Questions for Thinking in Which Anything Goes.” <em>Contemporary Anarchist Studies</em> (Amster et al., Eds.) New York: Routledge.
— . (2009) “How the Stirner Eats Gods,” <em>Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed,</em> 67 (Spring).
Aurelius, Marcus. (1983) <em>Meditations</em>. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Clastres, Hélène. (1995) <em>The Land-Without-Evil.</em> Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Clastres, Pierre. (1989) <em>Society Against the State.</em> New York: Zone Books.
Dupont, Frère. (2007) <em>species being and other stories.</em> Ardent Press.
Dupont, Monsieur. (2009) <em>Nihilist Communism.</em> Ardent Press.
Deleuze, Gilles. (1990) <em>Logic</em> <em>of Sense</em>. New York: Columbia.
— . <em>Dialogues</em>. (1987) New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.
— . (2001) “Hume.” In <em>Pure Immanence</em>. New York: Zone Books.
Fourier, Charles. (1996) <em>The Theory of the Four Movements</em>. New York: Cambridge.
Graeber, David. (2004) <em>Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology</em>. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.
Hadot, Pierre. (2004) <em>What is Ancient Philosophy?</em> Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
— . (1995) “Spiritual Exercises.” <em>Philosophy as a Way of Life</em>. Blackwell.
Hume, David. (2008) “The Sceptic.” <em>Selected Essays</em>. New York: Oxford.
<em>Internationale Situationniste.</em> (1997) Édition augmentée. Librairie Arthème Fayard.
Inwood, Brad., & Lloyd P. Gerson., Eds. (2008) <em>The Stoics Reader</em>. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Knabb, Ken., Ed. (2006) <em>Situationist International Anthology</em>. (Revised and expanded edition) Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets.
Kropotkin, Petr. (1955) <em>Mutual Aid.</em> Boston: Extending Horizons.
Lacan, Jacques. (2007) <em>The Other Side of Psychoanalysis.</em> New York: Norton.
Lamborn Wilson, Peter. (1998) <em>Escape from the Nineteenth Century.</em> New York: Autonomedia.
P.M. (1985) <em>bolo’bolo.</em> New York: Semiotext(e).
Stirner, Max. (1995) <em>The Ego and Its Own.</em> New York: Cambridge.
[1] I feel strongly about those last two phrases. But I would add that such experiments should interest us in philosophy outside of universities and anarchism — better, anarchy — beyond activist groups.
[2] Cf., David Graeber’s remarks in <em>Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology</em> (2004: 2–7). One might also consider here Lacan’s theory of the four discourses, proposed, among other places, in <em>The Other Side of Psychoanalysis</em>: first, in his problematization of the status of psychoanalysis in its relation to the university discourse (there are interesting parallels with what I have written about anarchist theory); secondly, in light of the connections he implies between the hysterical discourse, the master’s discourse, and revolutionary movements. To show the singular status of the analyst’s discourse, Lacan often provoked his audience by wondering aloud if there were any analysts. My way of adopting this humorous provocation would be to ask if there are any anarchists. Finally, I recall here Monsieur Dupont’s text on experience: “Nobody can be an anarchist in the sense that the ideology of anarchism proposes” (<em>Nihilist Communism,</em> 2009: 202).
[3] That is, philosophical <em>logos</em>. See Diogenes Laërtius, in <em>The Stoics Reader</em>, 8. I was trying to teach that these spiritual exercises cannot be taught, only modelled and perhaps imitated.
[4] The discursive and intuitive senses indicated in the definition are the most relevant here.
[5] Or, more obscurely: “not being inferior to the event, becoming the child of one’s own events” (Deleuze, 1987: 65).
[6] On phantasia and phantasma, see Inwood & Gerson (2008: 12). As will become evident further on, there is also some question here of the madness/ordinariness of <em>speaking to oneself</em>, silently or aloud, and of a concomitant recognition of familiar and unfamiliar phrases, with their differends. I will take this up in a future essay.
[7] Compare, in this light, the delirious foldout “Table of the Progress of Social Movement” spanning 80,000 years with the utterly practical propositions of the “Note to the Civilized Concerning the Coming Social Metamorphosis.”
[8] See (Fourier, 1996: 50n, 284). The anti-giraffe is one of the new animals of Harmony, “a great and magnificent servant whose qualities will far surpass the good qualities of the reindeer.”
[9] “[...] Blue-bolo, Paleo-bolo, Dia-bolo, Punk-bolo, Krishna-bolo, Taro-bolo, Jesu-bolo, Tao-bolo, Marl-bolo, Necro-bolo, Pussy-bolo, Para-bolo, Basket-bolo, Coca-bolo, Incapa-bolo, HighTech-bolo, Indio-bolo, Alp-bolo, Mono-bolo, Metro-bolo, Acro-bolo, Soho-bolo, Proto-bolo, Herb-bolo, Macho-bolo, Hebro-bolo, Ara-bolo, Freak-bolo, Straight-bolo, Pyramido-bolo, Marx-bolo, Sol-bolo, Tara-bolo, Uto-bolo, Sparta-bolo, Bala-bolo, Gam-bolo, Tri-bolo, Logo-bolo, Mago-bolo, Anarcho-bolo, Eco-bolo, Dada-bolo, Digito-bolo, Subur-bolo, Bom-bolo, Hyper-bolo, Rock n’-bolo, etc. Moreover, there are also just good old regular <em>bolos</em>, where people live normal, reasonable and healthy lives (whatever those are)” (P.M., 1985: 80–1).
[10] I have already commented on this passage, with reference to related alimentary imagery in Nietzsche, in my “How the Stirner Eats Gods” (de Acosta, 2009).
[11] I am referring, of course, to the Epicurean <em>tetrapharmakon</em> or “four-part cure,” the briefest epitome of their philosophy.
[12] The “centripetal” social organization, that is, whose emergence Pierre Clastres tried to understand in the essays collected in <em>Society Against the State</em> (1989)<em>.</em>
[13] That someone can speak to a wall is already a marvelous and irreducible fact of a future anarchist anthropology! This magical speech, the natural converse of speaking to oneself, also belongs to a future essay.
[14] I might note here that the definition, in French, seems to be ambiguous as to whether it is the effects or the study of the effects that acts on our affective life. But the conjoined definition of “psychogeographical” makes clear that it is a question of the “direct action” of the milieu on affectivity. Compare <em>Internationale Situationniste</em> (1997: 13).
[15] Perhaps then a more relevant reference is not science but science fiction. As Deleuze wrote of Hume’s empiricism: “As in science fiction, one has the impression of a fictive, foreign world, seen by other creatures, but also the presentiment that this world is already ours, and these creatures, ourselves” (Deleuze, 2001: 35).
[16] Would it be going too far to write that they perhaps felt the Earth anew?
[17] It is no coincidence that some anarchists and communists have recently posed the problem of what they provocatively call “anti-politics.”
[18] Perhaps amusement is the only thing worth hoping for.
|
#title Cynical Lessons
#author Alejandro de Acosta
#SORTtopics The Anvil Review, review, cynicism
#date 2011, July
#source Retrieved on March 21st, 2015 from http://theanvilreview.org/print/cynical-lessons/
#lang en
#pubdate 2015-03-21T20:32:44
<quote>
“There were always men who practiced this philosophy. For it seems to be in some ways a universal philosophy, and the most natural.”
– Julian the Apostate
</quote>
*** 1
Some months ago, I discovered a series of books on ancient philosophies produced by the University of California Press, with lovely details of Baroque paintings reproduced on the covers. The titles read: <em>Stoicism, Epicureanism, Neoplatonism, Ancient Scepticism … Cynics</em>. That last title immediately drew my attention: <em>Cynics</em> and not <em>Cynicism</em>. It turned out that <em>Cynics</em> makes explicit reference to anarchist ideas in a way that is both intelligent and important to at least some of us. (I will return to this intersection).
The choice of the title <em>Cynics</em> for William Desmond’s contribution was probably only meant to avoid confusion, but it also suggests a way to read the book so as to learn not merely <em>of</em> the Cynics but <em>from</em> them. Why is it not called <em>Cynicism</em>? True, from one point of view it is perfectly easy to say that there is Cynicism because we can list tenets held in common by Cynics. Textbooks, encyclopedias and dictionaries do this: in any of them we can learn that these people favored what Desmond calls “carefree living in the present”[1]; and that, to accomplish it, they practiced a generalized rejection of social customs (Desmond catalogs this rejection in delightful detail: it includes customs concerning clothing, housing, diet, sex and marriage, slavery, work …) in the direction of a simplification of life.[2] (This was somewhat more confusingly referred to as living in accord with nature).
But already in the ancient world, Diogenes Laertius, author of the great gossip-book of ancient philosophers, commented: “we will go on to append the doctrines which they held in common — if, that is, we decide that Cynicism is really a philosophy, and not, as some maintain, just a way of life.”[3] One of the perpetual question marks hanging next to the Cynics’ status as philosophers is their common rejection of intellectual confusion. The term <em>typhos</em> (smoke, vapor) rightly emphasized by Desmond sums this up nicely. It was used, he writes, “to denote the delirium of popular ideas and conventions” (244). <em>Typhos</em> also included the “technical language” of philosophers: “the best cure” for it “is to speak simply” (127).
In any case, there is also certainly something called <em>cynicism</em>. Desmond consciously capitalizes the word when it is a matter of the school, and leaves it uncapitalized when it is a matter of what could be called the ambient attitude of a place and time — something people definitely live, but in no way choose or wish for. Something like that seems to be what Deleuze and Guattari were after in their recurring references to a special relation between capitalism and cynicism in the <em>Anti-Oedipus</em>: cynicism as the correlate of modern bad conscience, “accompanied by a strange piety.”[4] Cynicism, for them, is not so much the ideology of capitalism, as it is a congeries of behaviors and attitudes secreted by the capitalist socius, the apparent apathy that is ever becoming real, but never for all that passing into a reasoned or passionate way of life. It is rather the default lifestyle of those for whom a way of life (in any interesting sense of the phrase) is impossible.[5]
In light of this, I propose that perhaps the most interesting perspective is to say that there is no Cynicism, that there is cynicism, and that there are (or at least were) Cynics, as individuals.
Whereas the usual philosophical guidebook (and, worse, the usual philosophical conversation) starts with the Great Question “what is …”, I propose instead the question “who is …” Who is a Cynic? This question never disappears: even when we find great commonalities between different Cynics, we are still dealing with its familiar variant: “Who is the real Cynic?” We know that Cynics first appeared in the Greece of Socrates and Plato, and that there were Cynics well into Christian times. How do we know this? As with other ancient schools, its inventors, creators of a way of life, wrote nothing, or their writings are lost. We know of them through what is now called doxography: collections of sayings and opinions. Desmond recompiles and rearranges the doxographies charmingly, proving the point that if it is philosophy as a way of life that we are interested in, perhaps a few anecdotes about a singular character are as valuable as a short treatise or a letter to a friend. (I recall here Nietzsche’s gnomic proposition: “It is possible to present the image of a man in three anecdotes”[6]).
In behavior and intent, The Cynics we know of were “missionary” (as Pierre Hadot has put it).[7] Their rejection of customs seems to have had an essentially performative, confrontational aspect. Desmond illustrates this as follows:
<quote>
… the ancient Cynic could be stereotyped as a wild man who stood on the corner piercing passers-by with his glances, passing remarks to all and sundry, but reserving his bitterest scorn for the elites who parade by in purple and chariots, living unnatural lives, and trampling on the natural equality of man. (187)
</quote>
Such confrontations in public places were one way in which the Cynic way of life was communicated. How does one become a Cynic? By example, obviously; by means of a model. Now, this anecdote tells of a more intimate communication:
<quote>
Metrocles had been studying with Theophrastus, the successor to Aristotle and head of the Lyceum, a taxonomist and classificatory thinker with a specialty in botany. Once while declaiming Metrocles farted audibly and was so ashamed that he shut himself off from public view and thought of starving himself to death. But Crates visited him, fed him with lupin-beans, and advanced various arguments to convince him that his action was not wrong or unnatural, and had been for the best in fact. Then Crates capped his exhortation with a great fart of his own. “From that day on Metrocles started to listen to Crates’ discourses and became a capable man in philosophy.”[8] (28)
</quote>
This intimate aspect is not emphasized in Desmond’s book, perhaps for lack of evidence. One could go a long ways in the direction of answering the question “Who can be a Cynic?” by considering the status of customs and laws from the perspective of how people have become capable of subverting them. I do not mean conferring a special status on transgression as a social or philosophical category, but rather becoming curious about who it is that grasps the instability of mores, conventions, laws and so on, and how they become capable of selectively ignoring them.
*** 2
Consider then this couple: unusual public behavior / anecdote documenting the same. As Desmond points out, a typical <em>chreia</em> or anecdote related an action followed by a witty, insightful, or bluntly truthful utterance. It would seem that the anecdote was simultaneously a spoken rhetorical device and a genre of literature, both in close relation to what is best about gossip. There were many compilations of such anecdotes in the ancient world. It is not hard to imagine that these anthologies were compiled so as to amuse the curious; but they could also have brought about, at a distance and thanks to a certain sort of reading, the transmission of a model that public harangues and private obscenities can communicate face to face, body to body. I mean the imitation of unusual behaviors, and, more importantly, a stimulation to invent new ones relevant to one’s own life. This literary transmission of the Cynic life has surely happened many times and in many ways.
Long after the first generations came lengthier written texts either advocating the Cynical way of life or at least presenting it in a favorable light. But by then the writers’ commitment to the way of life was in question. It is one version of the question “Who is the real Cynic?” Desmond discusses, though does not promote, a common distinction between original “hard” Cynics (Diogenes, Crates, Hipparchia) who lived the life and derivative “soft” Cynics, who, fascinated by it, merely wrote about it (Lucian, Dio Chrysostom). It is, of course, as a distant echo of this supposed merely literary presence of the school that the term “cynic” reappears as an ordinary noun, and eventually as a pejorative term, bringing the question “who?” full circle from punctual designation to anonymous epithet.
One example of the richness of this question’s persistence in the literary transmission of Cynicism is Lucian’s <em>The Death of Peregrinus</em>. Desmond mentions it briefly; I will take it up in some detail. In this satire we learn of the life and spectacular death of the “ill-starred” Peregrinus the Cynic.[9] As the satire opens, Theagenes, a fearful, crying Cynic (?) gives a hoary speech in praise of Peregrinus; then a nameless, laughing man mounts the same platform to tell the truth. (This man is not identified as a Cynic). He dismisses Theagnes’ praise as well as his tears. Instead he offers his laughter, and another perspective on Peregrinus. He details, among other things, how Peregrinus started life as a good-for-nothing, becoming a parricide in exile after strangling his own father for no reason other than the inconvenience of caring for an old man. In exile Peregrinus eventually transformed himself, managing to become a well-respected Christian leader. As such, he was imprisoned, and received all of their support. Once freed, he betrayed the Christians. Setting off again, he became a Cynic and trained in ascetic exercises. These were the <em>ponoi</em>, practices Cynics would use to loosen the bonds of custom: Peregrinus shaved half his head, smeared his face with mud, masturbated in public, beat and was beaten with a fennel cane, etc. Eventually his love of glory and attention led him to his famous self-immolation, the event that Lucian ruthlessly mocks as a failed apotheosis. Having publically announced it years in advance, Peregrinus killed himself by jumping into an enormous pyre before countless witnesses at the Olympic festival. This was purportedly done to show others that they need not fear death. Lucian, now present as the narrator, places himself, laughing, at the scene of the pyre, describing Peregrinus and Theagenes as pitiful actors. Lucian is not only unimpressed: he calls the witnesses “idiots,” and retires. In the scenes of the aftermath, Lucian converses with curious passers-by and latecomers, answering their idle questions with preposterous and contradictory exaggerations.
It seems that, for Lucian, to say one is a Cynic, even to have trained in the ascetic exercises, means nothing special if in the present one continues to demonstrate vanity. And nothing could be more vain than capitalizing on one’s own suicide by announcing it years in advance. Here Lucian, who never called himself a Cynic, shows himself capable of wearing that mask in his satire. He addresses an interlocutor:
<quote>
… I can hear you crying out, as you well might: “Oh, the stupidity! Oh, the thirst for renown! Oh — “, all the other things we tend to say about them. Well, you can say all this at a distance and much more safely; but I said it right by the fire, and even before that in a large crowd of listeners. Some of these became angry, the ones who were impressed by the old man’s lunacy; but there were others who laughed at him too. Yet I can tell you I was nearly torn to pieces by the Cynics... [10]
</quote>
The entire story revolves around the question: “who?” Lucian’s Peregrinus cynically moves from low-life to moral Christian to ascetic Cynic to vainglorious blowhard. Is this progression Cynical? Or is Lucian’s laughter more of a Cynic effect, however he may have lived?
Desmond, for his part, suggests that much of Lucian’s satire may be a “hatchet job,” such as the account of the parricide, for example. Considering this takes us one turn further into the maze of the question: “who?” What if it is Lucian, the writer, who is the vainglorious one, envious of Peregrinus’ performance, its practical philosophy? What if, for example, Peregrinus had an excellent reason to take his own life, and opted to use his death to teach a final lesson, one the results of which he could not live to see? Could that not be the opposite of vanity? For me this ambiguity manifests a tension between way of life and philosophy, or, again, between living according to nature and a missionary urge to harangue others to do the same.[11]
Lucian calls Peregrinus an actor, his suicide a “performance.” Discussing the history of the well-worn metaphor of the world as theater, the philologist Ernst Robert Curtius traces it back to comments in Plato’s <em>Laws</em> about humans as puppets of the gods, or to a phrase in his <em>Philebus</em> about the “tragedy and comedy of life.” But then he notes: “In the popular lectures on philosophy (’diatribes’) of the Cynics, the comparison of man to an actor became a much-used cliché.”[12] This story of origins only becomes interesting when we read between the lines in Curtius, noticing that it must have been the Cynics who began using this metaphor without reference to the divine, and perhaps not as a metaphor at all. Simply put: everyone is an actor. Desmond writes: “if the self is substantial and secure in itself, then, like a good actor, it can put on and off many masks, playing many roles without dissipating or compromising itself, just as a good actor can appear in many guises while remaining the same person beneath” (182).[13] Indeed, the reception of this idea, metaphor or not, which Curtius traces from the Romans through the Middle Ages to Shakespeare, Baltasar Gracián, and Calderón, may be studied along at least two axes: who takes the world-theater to be a divine place? Who does not? And: who says is there is anything behind the actor’s masks? Who does not? About Lucian and Peregrinus, Desmond writes:
<quote>
Peregrinus was rightly named Proteus because he was as adaptable and many-masked as the Old Man of the Sea. He took many shapes and professed not to be changed by any. Lucian scoffs, but Peregrinus’ own intention in his last “role” as a latter-day Hercules may have been to demonstrate that external flames and a melting body cannot harm “the god within.” (182)
</quote>
That would be the case for saying that there is someone behind the mask. Something like Lucian’s laughter would be the case for saying that there is not, or that what is behind the mask is another mask, or that it does not really matter… Now we might have begun to understand what is vital in the couple behavior/anecdote. It it is a tension, an intimate challenge, a kind of existential dare, that can only be resolved or transformed in one’s own life and body.
*** 3
I have mentioned the list of titles in the series: <em>Stoicism</em>, <em>Epicureanism</em>, <em>Neoplatonism</em>, <em>Ancient Scepticism</em> … <em>Cynics</em>. When I gazed upon the gathered books I felt I was not merely looking at a list of didactic books aimed at a curious and intelligent student. I also felt that I had before me a series of manuals, or at least fragments of manuals concerning ways of life that are perhaps still available. (Notice that someone claiming that the Cynic way of life is no longer available could be accused of taking a cynical position). Grasped as manuals they suggest a different sort of curiosity, and perhaps another aspect of intelligence as well. I have advocated for a pragmatic use of certain anthropology books along the same lines, as manuals concerning the organization and disorganization of social and cultural life, available to all. This sort of reading is obviously also in some sense a willful misappropriation, or at least a misreading; something else than the conventional use of such texts. It has two facets: the patience of engagement with the text (one cannot simply call it plagiarism or ‘stealing ideas’); the impatience, or maybe hurried patience, concerning whatever in it is significant enough to draw into one’s life as an urgent problem, challenge, or question …
That said, I would like to consider that the Cynic way of life is impossible. Maybe no one could embody their way of life perfectly, avoiding the ambiguities brought about by the public aspect of the example or the harangue. Or at least, if someone did, it was in a way that was inimitable and so incommunicable. Historically speaking, such perfect Cynics must have disappeared. I recall the first day I spoke in public of the Cynics. One of my strange teachers was present; he said something like: “What about the Cynics who were such perfect masters that they disappeared?” At the time, I did not know how to respond. Perhaps I was confused. I now find his question calming, in two perhaps contradictory ways. First, if we suppose that the real Cynics disappeared, we can be untroubled about finding real Cynics; we can assume that we never will. The use of the question “Who is a Cynic?” is modified accordingly: we will expect to find masks, semblances, references. Imperfect embodiment is still embodiment, and literature is still (is very much so!) life.
Secondly, however, one can certainly disappear <em>to</em> the historical record without disappearing <em>from</em> the historical record. One’s life can just as much be expressed in an anecdote as hidden within it. (Or both, which is what I suppose Nietzsche meant: the best anecdotes reveal and conceal at once. Otherwise we are collecting bad gossip, trivia, distractions, <em>typhos</em>). This idea of disappearing (of secrecy, or of clandestinity) could be used to finally dispose of the seriousness behind the question “Who is the real Cynic?”, dissolving the distinction between “hard” and “soft” Cynics: the first might have written all manner of things, an exquisite and singular literature which they destroyed or shared with a very few; the latter might have undertaken countless ascetic exercises, from the ridiculous to the grotesque, but opted not to record them and disallowed others from reporting on them. All of this is intimately related to the problem of vanity at stake between Lucian and his character Peregrinus; it also shows much of what is at stake in the difference between ancient or medieval ways of life and our so-called lifestyles.
*** 4
I conclude by discussing the interesting references to anarchist ideas in <em>Cynics</em>. This has great interest for me and mine. One of my companions, when I showed him, patted me on the back and said something like: “See, now our movements are points of reference for everything, even for a book on ancient philosophy!” At which point I cringed twice, once for the phrase “our movements” and again for the pat on the back, that little victorious sentiment … I do not think that is exactly what is interesting here. That Desmond makes the reference is indeed noteworthy, especially given the clearly pedagogical intent of his book.[14] But at the same time, that is not a reason for us to be comforted; rather, it is a matter of curiosity, a reason to think differently about who we suppose we are and what we suppose we are doing. I mean that we could provisionally accept the connection he makes, taking everything he writes about the Cynics as an intimate challenge.
When he calls the Cynics anarchists, Desmond confesses this is just “the most convenient label” for them. Of course:
<quote>
… they renounced the authority of officialdom and of social tradition: not marrying; not claiming citizenship in their native or adopted cities; not holding political office; not voting in the assembly or courts; not exercising in the gymnasium or marching with the city militia; and not respecting political leaders … To be free is to have no master, whether that master be a god, political assembly, magistrate, general, or spouse. (185)
</quote>
But Desmond thinks, as many or most do, of anarchism as a form of politics, and so restricts the Cynic-anarchist connection to the rejection of certain forms of political organization. On this side of the question, he generalizes to the point of grotesque error: it is not true that, as he seems to think, all anarchists think humans are fundamentally good, or that life without the state is better because it is more natural than life under it. On the other hand, calling Cynics anarchists is compelling in that they did not form parties or foment revolutions. So it is precisely to those anarchists most suspicious of such activities that this comparison will be interesting.
For me, the import of this is to show the tense relation, or non-relation, between the Cynics’ concern with ethics (a way of life) above all, and the various political stages of the world, with all of their <em>typhos</em>. One could anachronistically call them a subculture; this would be useful precisely to the degree that it allows us to focus on how they both maintained a way of life and did not entirely disappear in the doing. That is: it is arguably the public aspect of their way of life that brought them to these various platforms.
Desmond does not call the Cynics anarchists and leave it at that; he also suggests that the same Cynics could be called democrats, kings, or cosmopolitans. Indeed, for what does “carefree living in the present” <em>especially</em> have to do with the State or its rejection? Instead of asking: “what is Cynic politics?”, we can ask: “who is the Cynic when she does this, when he says that …?” Let us say provisionally that the Cynics were playing with, playing at politics, insofar as its cloudy stages are also so many platforms from which to launch the perhaps inevitable diatribe. They were democrats, because in so doing they discovered a way of simultaneously inhabiting and resisting their dominant political environment, pushing it in a radically egalitarian or at least populist direction (Desmond reminds us that for many “democracy” essentially meant “rule by the poor”(188).) But the democratic assembly is also a place to practice comic wit! And the funniest thing is to call oneself a king. Well, why not? It is much funnier than calling oneself an anarchist or a democrat! Cynics are kings in rags (57).[15] As with democracy, Desmond suggests that what we have here is an intelligent exaggeration, a pushing to the limit, of another ancient commonplace: that the best should rule.
<quote>
The poor Cynic can claim to be a “king” because in his wild, unconventional life he has recovered all the natural virtues: courage, temperance, simplicity, freedom, and, most of all, <em>philanthropia</em>. As “kings” who try to lead people to a life “according to nature,” they are acting only in the people’s best interest. They alone love mankind, and so in comparison with them, Sardanapallus, Xerxes, Philip, Alexander, Antigonus, Seleucus, Ptolemy, Nero, Vespasian, Domitian and the rest are only gangsters. (199)
</quote>
They are, or aspire to be, monarchs in the only non-deluded sense of the word. And cosmopolitans? It seems that at least some of them <em>did</em> use this term. And here again we have what seems to be a provocation. Since the <em>polis</em> was the only available sense of “state,” to claim to be a citizen of the cosmos is to express oneself through paradox. “How can one be a <em>citizen</em> of the totality and its vast spaces? Can one make the cosmos one’s <em>home</em>? … Diogenes implies that only the Cynic wanderer is truly at home anywhere” (205). I conclude that this mixture of paradoxical and provocative attitudes is more interesting than opting for any one Cynic politics.
Keeping this in mind, what happens when we return to the initial connection and make it operate in the other direction, asking: are anarchists Cynics? Could anarchists (really) be Cynics?[16] As with other practices or ideas that interest me, for example those of the Situationists and Nihilists (there might even be people clever enough to play this game with the word “communist”!), I feel the need to keep asking the question “who is …?” which is, among other things, the perspectival question of the true and false.[17] This is not a matter of identity or identification, of clarifying or purifying our essence. It means, among other things, asking if there are anarchists who, instead of considering their activities solely as a politics (”anarchism”), understand what they do as aspects of a way of life distributed unevenly between political activities in the ordinary sense, micropolitical activities, and anti- or non-political activities — even inactivities? Are there anarchists who experience their lives as the ultimate criterion, instead of some goal or cause? If so, they will find plenty of interest in a manual entitled <em>Cynics</em>.
Yes, someone could read this book as a manual; someone could begin a revaluation of anarchist activities stimulated by the example of the Cynics. In that direction, I conclude with an outline of topics for immediate discussion and implementation:
1. What is <em>typhos</em> to you? I think of this as a promising alternative to terms such as “ideology” or “spectacle.” Rather than deploying a a true-false, reality-appearance dichotomy (the starting point of so many boring conversations), to me <em>typhos</em> suggests an intimate, personal, singular limit. It is the limit of my interest in the world, in the ideas and experiences of others, and in some of my own ideas and experiences as well. “Beyond this limit,” I can make a habit of thinking, “all is smoke, vapor, <em>typhos</em>.” Ah, the destestable convergence of the uninteresting and the confusing …
1. What are your forms of ascetic exercises, your <em>ponoi</em>? I know many people who have shaved half of their head, some who are dirty enough to be said to have caked mud on themselves, a few who have masturbated in public … what kinds of situations can you get yourselves into that exemplify, not in principle but in fact, detachment from what you wish to detach yourself from? Instead of contending with others about interpretations of the world, you could bend your urge to compete in the direction of increasingly absurd or confrontational public acts. It is stimulating to imagine how, violating before me a custom concerning sexuality, you could provoke me to go and violate one concerning diet or work.
1. In thinking through the first topic and living out the second, <em>who</em> can truly describe themselves as “laughing a lot and taking nothing seriously?” (65)[18]
*** Works Cited or Referenced
Chrysostom, Dio. <em>Discourses</em>. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1932.
Curtius, Ernst Robert. <em>European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages</em>. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. <em>Anti-Oedipus.</em> Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.
Desmond, William. <em>Cynics</em>. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.
Hadot, Pierre. <em>What is Ancient Philosophy?</em> Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Laertius, Diogenes. <em>Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers</em>, vol. II. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1925.
Lucian. <em>Selected Dialogues.</em> New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Nieztsche, Friedrich. <em>Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks.</em> Chicago: Regnery, 1962.
—. <em>Human, All Too Human.</em> New York: Penguin, 1994.
Serres, Michel. <em>Detachment</em>. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1989.
*** Footnotes
[1] <em>Cynics</em>, 65. All further references in the essay.
[2] An account of this simplification as a de-culturing, perhaps de-civilizing process, perhaps more palatable to some, can be found in Nietzsche: “The Cynic knows the connection between the more highly cultivated man’s stronger and more numerous pains, and his profuse needs; therefore he understands that manifold opinions about beauty, propriety, seemliness, and delight must give rise to very rich sources of pleasure, but also to sources of discontent. In accordance with this insight, the Cynic educates himself retrogressively by giving up many of these opinions and withdrawing from the demands of culture. In that way, he achieves a feeling of freedom and of strengthening …” <em>Human, All Too Human</em> § 275.
[3] <em>Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers,</em> VI. 103.
[4] <em>Anti-Oedipus,</em> 225.
[5] Question: does awareness matter in all this? Those who become aware of ambient cynicism and how it has affected or shaped their social personas: could they be on the way to becoming Cynics? It cannot be so simple. Deleuze and Guattari’s reference to “a strange piety” invites us to consider contemporary cynicism as the cynicism of the credulous. I do not have much of a taste for discussing capitalism as such, but it would be interesting to consider modern cynics in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense as those descended, though not without a series of sociocultural mutations, from those Hume called the superstitious. Precisely with this difference: modern cynics are superstitious, and they know it, and they are resigned to it.
[6] <em>Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks,</em> 25.
[7] <em>What is Ancient Philosophy?</em>, 108. The Cynic faces the crowd and “scold[s] to his heart’s content,” as Nietzsche puts it (<em>Human, All Too Human,</em> § 275.)
[8] The last sentence is cited from Diogenes Laertius, <em>Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers</em>, VI.
[9] Lucian, “The Death of Peregrinus,” in <em>Selected Dialogues,</em> 74.
[10]Lucian, 75.
[11] A fascinating discussion of these sorts of reversals, based on a famous anecdote involving Diogenes the Cynic and Alexander the Great, appears in Part 4, “Friar,” of Michel Serres’ <em>Detachment</em>.
[12] <em>European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages,</em> 138.
[13] This is one of the few places where Desmond seems to go too fast, overstepping his doxographical task. I find no correlate in the texts he discusses to any such substantial concept of the self, which I take to be a more recent invention. The same problem occurs in the definition of <em>typhos</em> that I cited above: “…insubstantial ‘smoke’ in relation to the self and its present experiences, which alone can be known and possessed.” For me the highly abstract concept of the self is more likely to be another example of <em>typhos</em>.
[14] His reference in making this connection ultimately seems to be Kropotkin’s Britannica article of 1911 on “Anarchism,” in which Zeno of Citium is given as an early inspiration. Zeno, founder of the Stoic school, was a student of Crates the Cynic. (It would be tremendously satisfying to discover a story about the two involving farts or something comparable, to embarrass the seekers of noble origins.)
[15] As Dio Chrysostom put it, alluding to the figure of Odysseus. In his “Fourth Discourse on Kingship,” Dio imagines a version of the anecdotal dialogue between Diogenes the Cynic and Alexander the Great in which he prepares the idea of “kings in rags” by undermining the conventional understanding of monarchy. “And Alexander said: ‘Apparently you do not hold even the Great King to be a king, do you?’ And Diogenes with a smile replied, ‘No more, Alexander, than I do my little finger.’ ‘But shall I not be a great king,’ Alexander asked, ‘when once I have overthrown him?’ ‘Yes, but not for that reason,’ replied Diogenes; ‘for not even when boys play the game to which the boys themselves give the name ‘kings’ is the winner really a king. The boys, anyhow, know that the winner who has the title of ‘king’ is only the son of a shoemaker or a carpenter — and he ought to be learning his father’s trade, but he has played truant and is now playing with the other boys, and he fancies that now of all times he is engaged in a serious business — and sometimes the ‘king’ is even a slave who has deserted his master. Now perhaps you kings are also doing something like that: each of you has playmates …” (46-48)
[16] There are multiple ways to understand this question. It might be interesting to compare it, and its possible answers, with a topic of scholarly controversy discussed by Desmond: was Jesus a Cynic? (<em>Cynics</em>, 211-216). Naturally, the mere question would disturb the average Christian: if Jesus was a Cynic, then the entirety of the Christian religion is an colossal misunderstanding at best, a vile imposture at worst. Does the correlation of Cynics and anarchists similarly unground “anarchism”?
[17] The parallels are obvious: there are vague epithets, a noun and an adjective, for cynics and anarchists alike; there are Cynics and anarchists, and there may or may not be Cynicism or Anarchism, depending on who you ask. But “who is …” is also the question of possible and impossible positions: “Who can be a Cynic?” So, for example, in the aphorism cited above, Nietzsche writes that the gentle Epicureans had the same perspective as the Cynics: “between the two there is usually only a difference in temperament.”
[18] The quote is from Lucian.
|
#pubdate 2013-11-21 23:49:21 +0000
#title Green Nihilism or Cosmic Pessimism
#author Alejandro de Acosta
#SORTtopics green, nihilism, review, desert, pessimism, The Anvil Review, green nihilism
#source Retrieved on November 21<sup>st</sup>, 2013 from [[http://theanvilreview.org/print/green-nihilism-or-cosmic-pessimism/]]
#date November 20<sup>th</sup>, 2013
#notes The Anvil Review
#lang en
<quote>
<em>Men have been so mad as to believe that God is pleased by harmony</em>
Spinoza
</quote>
Some of us have read [[http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-desert][<em>Desert</em>]], and opted to reprint it, to promote its discussion, maybe to promulgate (at least repeat) some of what is said in it. Despite our efforts, I still feel it has not had the uptake it deserves. I am beginning to think that the issue is less about our limited ability to distribute texts and discuss ideas, and more about the limits of the milieu itself. As to the reception <em>Desert did</em> get, the most one can say is that a few literate anarchists quickly <em>processed</em> it, either absorbing it into their position or rejecting it. This scanning-followed-by-yes-or-no operation pretty much sums up what many anarchists consider reading to be. One sort of rejection was documented in the egoist newspapers <em>The Sovereign Self</em> and <em>My Own</em> (and [[http://theanvilreview.org/print/unimaginable-weirdness-comments-on-some-comments-on-desert/][responded to]] in <em>The Anvil</em>): it concerned the idea that the anonymous author of <em>Desert</em> was engaging in a pessimistic rhetoric for dramatic effect while concealing their ultimate clinging to hope, perhaps like those who endlessly criticize love, only to be revealed as the most perfectionist of romantics in the last instance. <em>That</em> exchange on <em>Desert</em> tells much more about the readers—what they expected, what they are looking for—than the booklet itself. As does the other, sloppier, sort of rejection of the writing, which has for obvious reasons not appeared in print. More than one person has been overheard to say something to the tune of: “Oh, <em>Desert</em>? I hated it! It was so <em>depressing</em>!” And that is it. No discussion, no engagement, just stating in a fairly direct manner that, if the writing did not further the agenda of hope or reinforce the belief that mass movements can improve the global climate situation, then it is not relevant to a discussion of green issues (which are therefore redefined as setting out from that agenda and belief). In the background of both exchanges is a kind of obtuseness characteristic of the anarchist milieu: our propensity to be as ready to pick up the new thing as to dismiss it either immediately after consumption or soon after another consumes it. This customary speed, which we share with many with whom we share little else, is what necessitates the yes-or-no operation. Whatever the response is, it has to happen quickly. (We are the best of Young-Girls when it comes to the commodities we ourselves produce.) To do something else than mechanically phagocyte <em>Desert</em> (or anything else worth reading) and absorb it or excrete it back out onto the bookshelf/literature table/shitpile, some of us will need to take up a far less practical, far less pragmatic attitude towards the best of what circulates in our little space of reading. In short, it is to intervene in the smooth functioning of the anarchist-identity machine, our own homegrown apparatus, which reproduces the milieu, ingesting unmarked ideas, expelling anarchist ideas. Of course all those online rants, our many little zines, our few books—the ones we write and make, and the ones that we adopt now and then—are only part of this set-up, which also includes living arrangements, political practices, anti-political projects, and so on. All together, from a few crowded metropoles to the archipelago of outward- or inward-looking towns, that array could be called the machine that makes anarchist identity, one of those awful hybrids of anachronism and ultramodernity that clutter our times. But, trivial though the role of <em>Desert</em> may be in the reproduction of the milieu, its small role in that reproduction is especially remarkable given that it directly addresses the limits of that reproduction, and, indirectly, of the milieu itself. Its reception is a kind of diagnostic test, a demonstration of our special obtuseness. If I am right about even some of the preceding, then the increasingly speculative nature of what follows ought to prove interesting to a few, and repulsive to the rest.
<center>
* * * *
</center>
I intend the <em>or</em> in the title to be destabilizing. It does not indicate a choice to be made between two already somewhat fictitious positions. (Quotation marks for each would not have been strong enough. To say this or that position is fictitious may seem to be belied by the advance, here or there, of those who present themselves as the representatives of positions. This is where we need to make our case most forcefully, arguing back that to take on a position <em>as an identity</em> simply eludes the <em>what</em> of position altogether, making it rest on a different, more familiar kind of fiction.) By placing the <em>or</em> between them I mean to mark a slippage, which I consider to be a movement of involuntary thought. Not being properly yoked to action, to what is considered voluntary, it is the kind of thought most have little time for. It has to do with passing imperceptibly from one state to another, and what may be learned in that shift. It is a terrible kind of thought at first, and, for some, will perhaps always be so, all the more so inasmuch as we are not its brave protagonists… Compare these passages:
<quote>
<em>The tide of Western authority will recede from much, though by no means all, of the planet. A writhing mess of social flotsam and jetsam will be left in its wake. Some will be patches of lived anarchy, some of horrible conflicts, some empires, some freedoms, and, of course, unimaginable weirdness. </em>
</quote>
And:
<quote>
<em>The world is increasingly unthinkable—a world of planetary disasters, emerging pandemics, tectonic shifts, strange weather, oil-drenched seascapes, and the furtive, always-looming threat of extinction. In spite of our daily concerns, wants, and desires, it is increasingly difficult to comprehend the world in which we live and of which we are a part. To confront this idea is to confront an absolute limit to our ability to adequately understand the world at all.</em>
</quote>
The first passage is from <em>Desert</em>, an anonymous pamphlet on the meaning of the irreversibility of climate change for anarchist practice. The second is from Eugene Thacker’s [[http://www.zero-books.net/books/in-the-dust-of-this-planet][<em>In the Dust of this Planet</em>]], a collection of essays that leads from philosophy to horror, or rather leads philosophy to horror. I bring them together here because they seem to me to coincide in a relatively unthought theoretical zone. As <em>Desert</em> invokes the present and coming anarchy and chaos, it admits the <em>weirdness</em> of the future (for our inherited thought patterns and political maps, at least); when <em>Dust of this Planet</em> gestures to the weirdness and unthinkability of the world, it invokes the current and coming biological, geological, and climatological chaos of the planet. They should be read together; the thought that is possible in that stereoscopic reading is what my <em>or</em> intends. (I mean to gesture towards the passage from one perspective to the other, and perhaps back.) If <em>Desert</em> sets out from the knowability of the world—as the object of science, principally—it has the rare merit of spelling out its increasing unknowability as an object for our political projects, our predictions and plans. <em>Dust of this Planet</em> allows us to push this thought father in an eminently troubling direction, revealing a wilderness more wild than the wild nature invoked by the critics of capitalism and civilization: the unthinkable Planet behind the inhabitable Earth. As we slip in this direction (which is also past the point of distinguishing the voluntary from the involuntary), all our positions, those little compressed bundles of opinion and analysis, practice and experience, crumble—<em>as positions</em>. No doubt many will find this disconcerting. But something of what we tried to do by thinking up, debating, adopting and abandoning, positions, is left—something lives on, survives—maybe just the primal thrust that begins with a question or profound need and collapses in a profession of faith or identity. That would be the path back to the perspective of <em>Desert</em> (now irreparably transformed). What is left, the afterlife of our first outward movements, might be something for each to witness alone, in a solitude far from the gregarious comfort of recognizable positions, of politics. To say nothing of community.
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All our maneuvering, all our petty excuses for not studying it aside, there is still much to be said about this wonderful, challenging booklet, <em>Desert</em>. To wit, that it is the first written elaboration of sentiments some of us admit to and others feel without confessing to them. And, moreover, that it hints repeatedly at an even broader and more troubling set of perspectives about the limits to what we can do, and maybe of what we are altogether. If the milieu’s demand were accepted and these feelings and ideas were narrowed down to a position, it could indeed be called <em>green nihilism</em>. In this naming of a position the second word indicates one familiar political, or rather anti-political, sense of <em>nihilism</em>—the position that views action, or inaction, from the perspective that nothing can be done to save the world. That no single event, or series of events clumsily apprehended as a single Event, can be posited as the object of political or moral optimism, except by the faithful and the deluded. Moreover, that the injunction to think of the future, to <em>hope</em> in a certain naive way, is itself pernicious, and often a tool of our enemies. As to <em>green</em>—well, those who have read <em>Desert</em> will be familiar with the story it tells. Irreversible global climate change, meshing in an increasingly confusing way with a global geopolitical system that intensifies control in resource-rich areas while loosening or perhaps losing its grips in the hinterlands, the growing desert… It is the story, then, of literal deserts, and also of zones deserted by authority or that those who desert the terrain of authority inhabit. But let’s be clear about this: <em>Desert</em> does not name its own position. It is less a book that proposes a certain strategy or set of practices and more a book about material conditions that are likely to affect any strategy, any practices whatsoever. What is best about <em>Desert</em> is not just the unflinching sobriety with which its author piles up evidence and insights for such a near future, without drifting too far into speculation; it is the way they do not abandon the idea of surviving in such a decomposing world. It is neither optimism nor pessimism in the usual sense; it is another way to grasp anarchy. That is why I write that much remains to be said about it. One way to begin thinking through <em>Desert</em> is to concentrate less on what position it supposedly takes (is there a green nihilism? for or against hope?) and to consider how to push its perspective farther. This means both asking more questions about how it allows us to redefine survival and taking up the possibilities for thought that it mostly hints at. For example, to say the future is unknowable is a pleasant banality, which can just as well be invoked by optimists as pessimists; but to concentrate on what is unknowable in a way that projects it into past and present as well is to think beyond the dull conversation about hope, or utopia and dystopia, for that matter. Here is one example of how such thinking might unfold: <em>Desert</em> seems to offer a novel perspective on <em>chaos</em>. There have probably been two anarchist takes on chaos so far: the traditional one, summed up in the motto, <em>anarchy is not chaos, but order</em>; and Hakim Bey’s discussions of chaos, which may be summed up in his poetic phrase <em>Chaos never died.</em> The former is clear enough: like many leftist analyses, it identifies social chaos with a badly managed society and opposes to it a harmonious anarchic order (which, it was later specified, could exist in harmony with a nature itself conceived as harmonious). This conception of chaos, which is still quite prevalent today, does not even merit its name. It is a way of morally condemning capitalism, the State, society, or what you will; it is basically name-calling. Any worthwhile conception of chaos should begin from a non-moral position, admitting that the formlessness of chaos is not for us to judge. That much Hakim Bey <em>did</em> amit. What, in retrospect especially, is curious about his little missive “[[http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/hakim-bey-t-a-z-the-temporary-autonomous-zone-ontological-anarchy-poetic-terrorism#toc3][Chaos]]” are the various references to “agents of chaos,” “avatars of chaos”, even a “prophethood of chaos.” It is a lovely letter from its time and perhaps some other times as well; I have no intention to criticize it. It is a marked improvement on any version of <em>anarchy is order</em>, and yet… and yet. It comes too close, or reading it some came too close, to simply opting for chaos, as though order and chaos were sides and it were a matter of choosing sides. The inversion of a moral statement is still a moral statement, after all. What is left to say about chaos, then? The explicit references to chaos in <em>Desert</em> are all references to social disorder. But a thoughtful reader might, upon reading through for the third or fourth time, start to sense that another, more ancient sense of chaos is being invoked: less of an extreme of disorder and more of a primordial nothingness, a “yawning gap”, as the preferred gloss of some philologists has it. The repeated reference to a probable global archipelago of “large islands of chaos” is directly connected to the destabilization of the global climate. And this is the terrible thought that <em>Desert</em> constructs for us and will not save us from: that from now on we survive in a world where the global climate is irreversibly destabilized, and that such a survival is something other than life or politics as we have so far dreamt them. The meager discussion we’ve seen so far on <em>Desert</em> revolves around questions such as: is this true? and, since most who bother thinking it through will take it to be true, does the “no hope”/”no future” perspective (the supposed nihilism) which <em>Desert</em> to some extent adopts, and others to some extent impute to it, help or hinder an overall anarchist position? A less obvious discussion revolves around two very different sorts of questions: <em>what myths does exposing this reality shatter?</em> and, if we are brave enough to think ourselves into this demythologized space that has eclipsed the mythical future, <em>is an anarchist position still a coherent or relevant response to survival there</em>? The myth that is shattered here is first and foremost that wonderful old story about the Earth:
<quote>
<em>Earth, our bright home…</em>
Shelley
</quote>
There are two main versions of this story. In the religious version, a god intends for us to live here and creates the Earth for us, or, to a lesser extent, creates us for the Earth. In either case our apparent fit into the Earth, our presumed kinship with it, usually expressed in the thought of Nature or the natural, has a transcendent guarantee. In the second version, which is usually of a rational or scientific sort, we have evolved to live on the Earth and can expect it to be responsive to our needs. Here the guarantee is immanent and rational. It is true that this second story, in the version of evolutionary theory, also taught us that we could have easily not come to be here, and that we may not always be here. That is why Freud classed Darwin’s theory as the second of three wounds to human narcissism (the first being the Copernican theory, which displaced the Earth from the center of the cosmos, and the third being Freud’s own theory, which displaced conscious thought from prominence in mental life). But a certain common sense, or what could be called the most obtuse rationalism, seems to have reintroduced the religious content of the first version into the second, and concluded that it is good or right or proper for us to be here. Natural, in short. In any case, the lesson here is that the psychic wound can be open and humanity, whoever that is, may limp on, wounded, thinking whatever it prefers to think about itself. What <em>Desert</em> draws attention to is a congeries of events that could increasingly trouble our collective ability to go on with this story of a natural place for (some) humans.<em></em> Irreversible climate change is both something that can be understood (in scientific and derivative, common-sense ways) and something that, properly considered, suggests a vast panorama of unknowns. It is true that <em>Desert</em> makes much of its case by citing scientists and scientific statistics. But the real question here is about the status of these invocations of science. This is where a subtler reading shows its superiority. If the entire argumentative thrust of <em>Desert</em> relied on science, the pamphlet would be fairly disposable. <em>Desert</em> invokes science to put before the hopeful and the apathetic images of a terrible and sublime sort. We could say that its explicit argument is based on science, plus a certain kind of anti-political reasoning. But its overall effect is to dislodge us from our background assumption of a knowable and predictable world into a less predictable, less knowable awareness. After all, it would be just as easy to develop a similar narrative in the discourse of a pessimistic political science, emphasizing massive population growth and social chaos: an irruptive and ungovernable human biology beyond sociality. Let’s try it. From a red anarchist perspective, this could mean more opportunities for mutual aid, for setting the example of anarchy as order; chaos would be a kind of forced clean slate, a time to show that we are better and more efficient than the forces of the state. From an insurrectionary perspective, the chaos would be an inhuman element making possible the generalization of conflict. General social chaos would be the macrocosm corresponding to the microcosm of the riot. For them chaos would also be an opportunity, in this case to hasten and amplify anomic irruptions. In sum, one could make the same argument about the biological mass of humanity as about the Earth—that its coming chaos is an opportunity for anarchists because it is a materially forced anarchy. This does not mean that we are inherently aggressive or whatever you want to associate with social chaos, but rather ungovernable in the long run (or at least governed by forces and aims other than the ones accounted for in political reasoning). It does mean, however, that the idea <em>we are ungovernable in the long run</em>, the affirmation of which is more or less synonymous with the confidence with which the anarchists take their position, is now closely linked with another idea, that <em>in the last instance the Earth is not our natural home</em>. It may have been our home for some time, for a time that we call prehistory. Indeed, Fredy Perlman marks the transition from prehistory to [[http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/fredy-perlman-against-his-story-against-leviathan#toc2][His-Story,]] or Civilization, as the prolongation of an event of ecological imbalance, a prolongation whose overall effect is destructive, even as the short-term or narrowly focused results along the way are to make the Earth more and more of a welcoming and natural place for humans to be. And now our parting of ways with Hakim Bey may be clarified, for, even if he did not simply take the side of chaos, he did write:<em> </em>
<quote>
<em>remember, only in Classical Physics does Chaos have anything to do with entropy, heat-death, or decay. In our physics (Chaos Theory), Chaos identifies with tao, beyond both yin-as-entropy & yang-as-energy, more a principle of continual creation than of any</em> nihil<em>, void in the sense of</em> potentia<em>, not exhaustion. (Chaos as the “sum of all orders.”) </em>
</quote>
He was making an argument about what is [[http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/hakim-bey-t-a-z-the-temporary-autonomous-zone-ontological-anarchy-poetic-terrorism#toc23][stupid]] about death-glorifying art which, parenthetically, still seems relevant. But I simply don’t see why chaos (or tao, for that matter) is somehow better understood as creation than as destruction, or why it is preferable to invoke <em>potentia</em> and not exhaustion. In the name of what? “Ontological” anarchism? Life? And the sum of all orders… is this a figure of something at all knowable? And if not, why the preceding taking of sides? The chaos that <em>Desert</em> summons is not ontological. No new theory of being is claimed here. The effect is first of all psychological: stating what more or less everyone knows, but will not admit. If <em>Desert</em> deserves the label nihilist, it is really in this sense, that it knowingly points to the unknowable, to the background of all three narcissistic wounds. (This is my way of admitting that talking or writing about nihilism does not clarify much of anything. If it was worth doing, it is not because I wanted to share a way of believing-in-nothing. I see now that I was going somewhere else. <em>The analysis of nihilism is the object of psychology… it being understood that this psychology is also that of the cosmos,</em> wrote Deleuze.)
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<em>In the Dust of This Planet</em> introduces a tripartite distinction between World, Earth, and Planet. Thacker states that the human world, our sociocultural horizon of understanding, is what is usually meant by world. This is the world as it is invoked in politics, in statements that begin: <em>what the world needs…,</em> and of course any and all appeals to <em>save</em> or <em>change</em> <em>the world.</em> It is the single world of globalism (and of global revolution) but also the many little worlds of multiculturalism, nationalism, and regionalism. But one could argue that our experience (and the gaps in our experience) also unfold in another world, the enveloping site of natural processes, from climate to chemical and physical processes, of course including our own biology. This is the Earth that we are often invited to save in ecological politics or activism. A third version of what is meant by world is what Thacker calls the Planet. If the world as human World is the world-for-us, and the Earth as natural world is a world-for-itself, the Planet is the world-without-us. Visions of the World and the Earth correspond roughly to subjective and objective perspectives; but what these are visions <em>of</em>, the Planet, is not reducible to either, however optimistic our philosophy, theory, or science may be. In terms perhaps more familiar to some green anarchists, the World corresponds to the material and mental processes of civilization, and the Earth to Nature as constructed by civilization. Civilization, so it would seem, produces nature as its knowable byproduct as it encloses the wild, leaving fields, parks, and gardens, along with domesticated and corralled wild animals, including, of course, our species. Does the wildness or wilderness of the green anarchists then correspond to the Planet, as world-without-us? Only if we can grasp that the wild, like, or <em>as</em>, chaos, is ultimately unknowable—not because of some defect in our faculties but because it includes their limits and undoing. When green anarchists and others invoke the wild, we must always be sure to ask if they mean an especially unruly bit of nature, nature that is not yet fully processed by the civilized, or something that civilization will never domesticate or conquer. Planet is an odd category, in that it seems to correspond both to the putative and impossible object of science (a science without an observer) and an inexplicable and strange image emergent from out of the recesses of the unconscious (which itself raises a troubling question as to what an unconscious is at all if it can be said to issue images that exclude us). I think about this third category in terms of <em>Desert</em> as I read this passage from Thacker:
<quote>
<em>When the world as such cataclysmically manifests itself in the form of a disaster, how do we interpret or give meaning to the world? There are precedents in Western culture for this kind of thinking. In classical Greece the interpretation is primarily</em> mythological<em>—Greek tragedy, for instance, not only deals with the questions of fate and destiny, but in so doing it also evokes a world at once familiar and unfamiliar, a world within our control or a world as a plaything of the gods. By contrast, the response of Medieval and early modern Christianity is primarily</em> theological<em>—the long tradition of apocalyptic literature, as well as the Scholastic commentaries on the nature of evil, cast the non-human world within a moral framework of salvation. In modernity, in the intersection of scientific hegemony, industrial capitalism, and what Nietzsche famously prophesied as the death of God, the non-human world gains a different value. In modernity, the response is primarily</em> existential<em>—a questioning of the role of human individuals and human groups in light of modern science, high technology, industrial and post-industrial capitalism, and world wars. </em>
</quote>
In the light of the ongoing and growing disaster called irreversible climate change, <em>Desert</em> clearly exposes the theological-existential roots (the modern roots, that is to say) of anarchist politics, not particularly different, as far as this issue goes, from the panorama of Left or radical positions. What matters to me is the opportunity to strike out beyond these positions, elaborating an anti-politics thought through in reference to a point of view Thacker calls <em>cosmological. Could such a cosmological view</em>, he writes, <em>be understood not simply as the view from interstellar space, but as the view of the world-without-us, the Planetary view? Desert</em> might be one of the first signs of the paradoxical draw of this view, which, it should be clear by now, is something other than a position to be adopted. But for those who like the convenience names lend to things, consider the version Thacker elaborates (in a discussion of the meaning of <em>black</em> in <em>black metal</em>, of all things). He calls it cosmic pessimism:
<quote>
<em>The view of Cosmic Pessimism is a strange mysticism of the world-without-us, a hermeticism of the abyss, a noumenal occultism. It is the difficult thought of the world as absolutely unhuman, and indifferent to the hopes, desires, and struggles of human individuals and groups. Its limit-thought is the idea of absolute nothingness, unconsciously represented in the many popular media images of nuclear war, natural disasters, global pandemics, and the cataclysmic effects of climate change. Certainly these are the images, or the specters, of Cosmic Pessimism, and different from the scientific, economic, and political realities and underlie them; but they are images deeply embedded in our psyche nonetheless. Beyond these specters there is the impossible thought of extinction, with not even a single human being to think the absence of all human beings, with no thought to think the negation of all thought. </em>
</quote>
Now the intention of my <em>or</em> will be clear for some (from the psyche to the cosmos…). In <em>Dust</em> Thacker does not draw many connections between his ideas and politics, so it is worthwhile to examine one of the places where he illustrates the paradox his view of the Planet opens up in that space. He cites Carl Schmitt’s suggestion, in <em>Political Theology</em>:
<quote>
<em>the very possibility of imagining or re-imagining the political is dependent on a view of the world as revealed, as knowable, and as accessible to us as human beings living in a human world.</em> … <em>But the way in which that analogy</em> [from theology to politics] <em>is manifest may change over time … </em>
</quote>
Thacker notes:
<quote>
<em>the 17<sup>th</sup> and 18<sup>th</sup> centuries were dominated by the theological analogy of the transcendence of God in relation to the world, which correlates to the political idea of the transcendence of the sovereign ruler in relation to the state. By contrast, in the 19<sup>th</sup> century a shift occurs towards the theological notion of immanence… which likewise correlates to “the democratic thesis of the identity of the ruler and the ruled.” In these and other instances, we see theological concepts being mobilized in political concepts, forming a kind of direct, tabular comparison between cosmology and politics (God and sovereign ruler; the cosmos and the state; transcendence and absolutism; immanence and democracy). </em>
</quote>
The closed loop of politics:
<quote>
<em>The republic is the only cure for the ills of the monarchy, and the monarchy is the only cure for the ills of the republic.</em>
Joubert
</quote>
Thacker’s question follows: what happens to this analogy, which structures both political theory and ordinary thinking about politics to some extent, if one posits a world that is not, and will never be, entirely revealed and knowable? The closed loop is opened, and the analogy breaks down. <em>What happens when we as human beings confront a world that is radically unhuman, impersonal, and even indifferent to the human? What happens to the concept of politics…</em> It seems to me that a question of this sort is lurking in the background of <em>Desert</em> as well.
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The desert may be, or sometimes seem to be, what is left after a catastrophic event, but it has also always been with us, as image and reality.
<quote>
<em>In what passes for a moon</em><br>
<em>On the galactic periphery,</em><br>
<em>Here is an austere beauty,</em><br>
<em>Barren, uncompromising,</em><br>
<em>Like that which must have been </em><br>
<em>Experienced by men</em><br>
<em>On the ice-caps and deserts </em><br>
<em>As they once existed on earth</em><br>
<em>Before their urbanization</em><br>
<em>Harsh and unambiguous…</em>
John Cotton
</quote>
World-desert: the desert grows…
Earth-deserts: they are growing, too.
Cosmic deserts: <em>on the galactic periphery…</em> In a response to François Laruelle’s [[http://www.recessart.org/wp-content/uploads/Laruelle-Black-Universe1.pdf][<em>Du noir univers</em>]], Thacker elaborates on the various senses of the desert motif, suggesting both that it is the inevitable image and experience of the Planet, as a slice of the Cosmos, or what Laruelle calls the black Universe, and that it is a mirage, that there is no real desert to escape to. Hermits keep escaping to the desert, but their solitude is temporary; others gather nearby. The escape from forced community develops spontaneous forms of community. But for being spontaneous, such community does not cease to develop, sooner or later, the traits of the first, escaped, community. The issue for me is double: first, that to the two senses invoked in <em>Desert</em> (the literal ecological sense, and the sense of desertion) we may now add the third corresponding to the Planetary or Cosmic view, the desert as the impossible, as nothingness. Second, the ethical, psychological, or at least practical insight that some keep deserting society, civilization, or what have you in the direction of the desert and, as stated, sooner or later populating it, inhabiting it, somehow living or at least surviving in it. Even if these deserters headed towards the desert in the first sense, they were motivated or animated by the impossible target of the desert in the third sense. Now, this apparently closed-loop operation could be the inevitable repetition of some ancient anthropogenic trauma. Or it could be (we just can’t know here and now) the sane, wild reaction to Civilization: desperate attempt to return to the Earth (our bright home) via the dark indifference of the Planet or Cosmos. Of this return pessimism says: you will need to do it again and again. Is the pessimism about a condition we can escape, or one we can’t? Is it the anti-civilization pessimism of the most radical ecology, or is it despair, no less trivial for being a psychological insight, before the morbid obtuseness of humans? We just can’t know here and now. Masciandaro, Thacker’s fellow commentator on Laruelle, aptly terms this “the positivity and priority of opacity”—the opacity of the Planet and the Cosmos, Laruelle’s black universe.
<quote>
<em>O the dark, the deep hard dark</em><br>
<em>Of these galactic nights!</em><br>
<em>Even the planets have set</em><br>
<em>Leaving it slab and impenetrable,</em><br>
<em>As dark and directionless</em><br>
<em>As those long nights of the soul</em><br>
<em>The ancient mystics spoke of.</em><br>
<em>Beyond there is nothing,</em><br>
<em>Nothing we have known or experienced.</em>
John Cotton
</quote>
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In <em>Desert</em> we read:
<quote>
<em>Nature’s incredible power to re-grow and flourish following disasters is evident both from previous mass extinctions and from its ability to heal many lands scarred by civilisation. Its true power is rarely considered within the sealed, anthropocentric thinking of those who would profit from the present or attempt to plan the future. Yet the functioning of the Earth System is destructive as well as bountiful and it is not a conscious god with an interest in preserving us or its present arrangement—something we may find out if the Earth is now moving to a new much hotter state.</em>
</quote>
For his part, Thacker concludes his book by discussing a mysticism of the unhuman, what he calls a <em>climatological mysticism</em>. It is a way of thinking, and paradoxical knowing, modeled on religious mysticism rather than scientific knowledge. But it is not reducible to the former. He writes,
<quote>
<em>there is no being-on-the-side-of the world, much less nature or the weather. [...] the world is indifferent to us as human beings. Indeed, the core problematic of the climate change issue is the extent to which human beings are at issue at all. On the one hand we as human beings are the problem; on the other hand at the planetary level of the Earth’s deep time, nothing could be more insignificant than the human. This is where mysticism again becomes relevant. </em>
</quote>
This attitude of nonknowledge, as Bataille would have put it, informs life even as it decenters it. That the Earth is our place, but the planet does not care about us and the cosmos is not our home, is a thought of the ways in which we might survive here. Some will remember Vaneigem’s repeated contrast between <em>vie</em> and <em>survie</em>, life and survival. For him it was a matter of inverting the accepted, and to a large extent enforced, view in which one must survive first and live second. Some of this view seems to have been taken into the perspective that identifies life and nature, where the latter is understood as what we are or should be—that is, that there is something normative about life or nature that we can refer to. The perspective I am developing here suggests that we have no way of knowing what we are or should be, and that the wild is better conceived as that no-way, as the conditions that push back against our best effort to define ourselves, identify our selves, or know our world. Similarly, what is wild in us can only be conceived (though it is not really conceivable in the long run) as what resists, what pushes back, against any established order. But this might be closer to survival than to life. Survival has a positive value in that it is itself an activity, a set of nontrivial practices that refer back to life insofar as we know it. We survive as we can, not confident that we are living. It is this aspect of <em>Desert</em> that some insurrectionaries seem to have disagreed with, in that it often talks of plans for survival where they would have preferred to see plans for action, or at least calls to action. We can read there of
<quote>
<em>An Anarchism with plenty of adjectives, but one that also sets and achieves objectives, can have a wonderful present and still have a future; even when fundamentally out of the step with the world around it. There is so much we can do, achieve, defend and be; even here, where unfortunately civilisation probably still has a future. </em>
</quote>
It is passages like this one, towards the end of the pamphlet, that probably left some with the impression that its author is still attached to hope, and left others with the sense of a form of survival that still somehow resembled activism more than attack. As for the former impression, that would be to confuse the climate pessimism of <em>Desert</em> with a kind of overarching and mandatory mood, as though those who had this view were of necessity personally depressed or despondent. There is no evidence for such a conclusion. As for the latter, it is a little more complicated. Yes, the author of <em>Desert</em> often sounds like someone addressing activists; and, yes, <em>Desert</em> explicitly rejects <em>the cause of Revolution</em> in several places. One could say this adds up to a kind of political retreat. One could also say, however, that some are too used to reading political texts that always end on a loud and vindictive note! No, this is where the question of rethinking survival from an anti-political perspective inflected by something like Thacker’s cosmic pessimism or reinvented mysticism is critical. We make survival primary, not so much inverting Vaneigem’s inversion of the norm in societies like ours, but rather by noticing what in our conception of life has always been a kind of religion or morality of life, easy adjustment to a familiar nature. Whatever its faults, <em>Desert</em> was written to say that such a conception is no longer useful, and that one useful meaning of anarchist is someone who admits as much. Can that meaning fit with the subcultures that most of today’s anarchists compose? Probably not. The subcultures exist as pockets of resistance, of course; but survival in them is indelibly tied to reproducing the anarchist as persona, as identity, as an answer to the question of what life is or is for. To make sense or have meaning this answer presupposes the workings of our homegrown identity-machine, our collective, repeated minimal task of discerning about actions whether they are anarchist or not, and, by extension, whether the person carrying them out is anarchist. It is our way of bringing the community into the desert. Announcement of one’s intentions to overcome the limits of subculture and reach out to others, or inspire them with our actions, is not different than, but rather a crucial part of, this operation. Survival, in the sense <em>Desert</em> suggests it to me, is something completely different, for in it any social group or kin network, as it attempts to live on, cannot draw significant lines of difference (of identification, therefore) between itself and others. It melts into a humanity collectively resisting death. Needless to say this is something entirely different than the revolutionary process as it has been imagined and attempted. There is no future to plan for, only a present to survive in, and that is the implosion of politics as we have known it.
<quote>
<em>To survive, not to live, or, not living, to maintain oneself, without life, in a state of pure supplement, movement of substitution for life, but rather to arrest dying…</em>
Blanchot
</quote>
… deserting life.
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* * * *
</center>
A desert and not a garden: one remarkable aspect of the contemporary anarchist space is an open contradiction between two perspectives on what struggle is, or is for, that might be summed up in the phrases <em>we have enemies</em> and <em>we did this to ourselves</em>. There are countless versions of this contradiction, which at a deeper level is really not about political struggle at all, but about the essence of resistance. One version is the condemnation of the notion of enemy as a moral notion, and another is its silent return in the emphasis on friendship and affinity; there is also what a book called <em>Enemies of Society</em> may be taken to suggest from its title on. The contradiction surfaces most clearly in discussions influenced by primitivist positions or ones hostile to civilization, likely because of the tremendous temporal compression they require to make their case. In such talk, we zoom out from lifetimes and generations to a scale of tens of thousands of years. The enemy appears within the course of history, but the <em>fact</em> of the appearance of the enemy, the split in humanity, summons the second <em>we</em>, because of the need to presuppose a whole species in some natural state (balance, etc.) that, in the event or events that open up the panorama of civilization and history, cleaves itself into groups or at least roles. The positions we know better tend to revolve around trivialized versions of these perspectives, never really experiencing the tension between them. It is only in the play of the anarchist space as a whole (and precisely because it is not a single place, in which all involved would have to put up with each other for a few hours, let alone live together) that the contradiction unfolds. Some form of <em>we have enemies</em> is the great rallying for a wide array of active agents, from the remains of the Left to advocates of social war. And some form of <em>we did this to ourselves</em> is in the background of all sorts of moralizing approaches to oppression and interpersonal damage, but also the more misanthropic strains of primitivism. I would also argue that a modified form of it informs the deep background of egoism and some forms of individualism (splitting the forced <em>we</em> from the atomic <em>ourselves).</em> My question is, what happens if we zoom out farther? Here the virtue of invoking science as <em>Desert</em> does may be visible. For what is beyond history (the time of the World) and prehistory is geologic time, the time of the Planet, which leads us to cosmic time. There is a difference between invoking science and practicing or praising it. The latter simply produce more science. The former may be a way to encounter what our still humanist politics ignore. From the perspective of cosmic time, the contradiction does not dissolve (at least not for me); but its moral or political character seems to unravel. Something less centered on <em>us</em> emerges. Perhaps both stories—the story about enemies and the story about ourselves—ignore something much more disturbing than mere accidental guilt or immorality, something that disturbs us precisely because it is the disturbing of humanity. (“It is not man who colonizes the planet, but the planet and the cosmos who transgress the lonely threshold of man”—does this odd sentence of Laruelle’s express the thought here, I wonder?) It makes sense for Thacker to invoke mysticism when he considers the cosmos or the Planet, because its otherness has most often been referred to as divine, and related to as a god. Now, that need have nothing to do with religion, especially if we identify religion with revelation; but mysticism is a good enough approximation to the attitude one takes towards a now decentered life. I call that attitude a thoughtful kind of <em>survival</em>. This is closely connected to a conversation one often overhears in the company of anarchists. Someone is discussing something they prefer or are inclined to do, and doing so in increasingly positive terms. Another person points out (functioning of the anarchist identity machine) that there is nothing specifically anti-capitalist or radical about the stated activity or preferred object, reducing it verbally to another form of consumption. Anxious hours are passed this way. About such inclinations I prefer to say that we do not know if they come from above or below; we know our own resistance, and not much more. That resistance manifests in unknowable ways, obeying no conscious plan. It could well be a particularly fancy kind of neurosis; but <em>survival</em> means just this, that we do not know the way out of the situation and we must live here with the idea of anarchy. Another way to put this is that if our rejection of society and state is as complete as we like to say it is, our project is not to create alternative micro-societies (scenes, milieus) that people can belong to, but something along the lines of becoming monsters. It is probable that anarchy has always had something to do with becoming monstrous. The monster, writes Thacker in [[http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo9131245.html][another of his books]], is <em>unlawful life,</em> or <em>what cannot be controlled.</em> It seems to me the only way to do this, as opposed to saying one is doing it and being satisfied with that, would be to unflinchingly contemplate the thing we are without trying to be, the thing we can never try to be or claim we are: <em>the nameless thing,</em> or <em>unthinkable life.</em> Which is also the <em>solitary</em> thing, or the <em>lonely</em> one. The egoist or individualist positions are like dull echoes of the inexpressible sentiment that I might be that nameless thing, translated into a common parlance for the benefit of a (resistant, yes) relation to the social mass. That the cosmos is not our natural home is a thought outside the ways in which we might survive here. To say we survive instead of living is in part to say that we have no idea what living is or ought to be (that there is probably no ought-to about living). But also that we resist any ideal of life, including our own. Becoming monstrous is therefore the goal of dismantling the milieu as anarchist identity machine. Being witness to the nameless thing, to the unthinkable life or Planet or Cosmos, is not a goal. It is not a criterion of anything, either. It is more like a state, a mystical, poetic state (though in this state I am the poem). It is the climatological mysticism Thacker describes and <em>Desert</em> hints at for an anarchist audience, both deriving in their own way from the weird insight that <em>the Planet is indifferent to us.</em> So read <em>Desert</em> again as an allegory of the self-destruction of the milieu, of any community that, as it runs from its norms, places new, unstated norms ahead of itself.<em> </em>Such is the slippage from green nihilism to cosmic pessimism, which gives us occasion to continue speaking of chaos. Well, one might say that I have merely imported some alien theory into an otherwise familiar (if not easy) discussion. Of course I have. My aim, however, was not to apply it, but to show in what sense one play that is often acted out in our spaces may be anti-politically theorized, which is to say cosmically psychoanalyzed. Our place is not to apply the theory of cosmic pessimism (or any other theory; that is not what theory is, or is for); our place is to think, to continue speaking of chaos, not being stupid enough to think we can take its side. There are no sides. We might come to realize that we, too, in our attempts to gather, organize, act, change life, and so on, were playing in the world, ignorant of the Planet, its <em>unimaginable weirdness. </em>
<quote>
<em>If the earth must perish, then astronomy is our only consolation</em>
Joubert
</quote>
<em>Post scriptum.</em> I mentioned community in passing. Most anarchists I converse with regularly treat the word delicately or dismissively, either ignoring it altogether, putting it in quotation marks, or virtually crossing it out. I suppose that crossed-out sense of community is another name for the milieu. As crappy as it is most of the time, I will admit that the milieu is a space-time (really a series of places-moments, some of them taking place ever so briefly) where one can register, to some extent, what ideas have traction in our lives. <em>Desert</em>‘s explicit statements are certainly more pedestrian than Thacker’s theory; but the downside to Thacker’s exciting flights of intellectual fancy, at least from where I am writing, is that it is hard to know who he is speaking to, or about, much of the time. One imagines that people do gather to hear what he has to say, or read his books in concert. I do wonder to what extent they consider themselves to be a community, a potential community, a crossed-out community.
<em>Post scriptum bis.</em> I mentioned solitude. It would also be worthwhile to think about friendship along these lines.
<center>
<strong>References</strong>
</center>
<em>Desert.</em> LBC Books. 2011.
Laruelle, François. [[http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/pdf/Laruelle,%20Theorems%20on%20the%20Good%20News.pdf][“Theorems on the Good News.” ]]
—. “On the Black Universe.” In <em>Dark Nights of the Universe,</em> [NAME], 2013.
Masciandaro, Nicola. [[http://continentcontinent.cc/index.php/continent/article/view/96][“Comments on Eugene Thacker’s ‘Cosmic Pessimism’.”]] <em>continent</em>. 2.2, 2012.
—. “Secret” In <em>Dark Nights of the Universe,</em> [NAME], 2013.
Snyder, Gary. “The Etiquette of Freedom.” In <em>The Practice of the Wild</em>, North Point Press, 1990.
Thacker, Eugene. <em>After Life.</em> University of Chicago Press, 2010.
<em>—. In the Dust of this Planet.</em> Zero Books. 2010.
<em>—. [[http://continentcontinent.cc/index.php/continent/article/view/84][“]]</em>[[http://continentcontinent.cc/index.php/continent/article/view/84][Cosmic Pessimism.”]] <em>continent</em>. 2.2 (2012).
<em>—. “</em>Remote: The Forgetting of the World.” In <em>Dark Nights of the Universe,</em> [NAME], 2013.
|
#pubdate 2016-10-16 13:00:26 +0000
#title How Slogans End
#author Alejandro de Acosta
#SORTtopics The Anvil Review, review, John Cage, slogans
#date 2010, December
#source Retrieved on July 12th, 2016 from https://web.archive.org/web/20120706061332/http://theanvilreview.org/print/how-slogans-end/
#lang en
<quote>
When you get sleepy, do you go to sleep?
Or do you lie awake?”
- Cage, “Composition as Process”
</quote>
<quote>
“If among you there are those who wish to get somewhere,
let them leave at any moment.”
“If anybody is sleepy, let him go to sleep”
- Cage, “Lecture on Nothing”
</quote>
*** 1
There is a computer program called the Automatic Insurrectionary Manifesto Generator. AIMG produces this sort of output:
<em>What’s needed is not mobilization, and even far less absence, but a putting-into-practice of inoperative crisis, a rejection in all forms of the temporality of humanism.</em>
<em>This is a call to indifference, not an insistence on absence.</em>
<em>We must destroy all humanism—without illusions.</em>
<em>Confronted with those who refuse to recognize themselves in our orgies of negation, we offer neither criticism nor dialogue but only our scorn.</em>
A link labeled “AGAIN” is conveniently centered below the text, inviting us to the pleasures of repetition. It reloads the page and each time generates a three-paragraph manifesto composed of such sentences. AIMG’s output is wholly predictable, in a ‘mad lib’ sort of way. All the titles it produces have the same schema: “Leaving X behind: notes on Y,” where X includes “mobilization,” “activism,” “passivity,” “fossilization,” “humanism,” and so on; and Y includes “crisis,” “rupture,” “insurrection,” or “zones of indistinction which need no justification,” for example. The same goes for the rest of the manifestos. You may have encountered its output at its home page, whose link was posted and sent around quite a bit in 2009; or you may have been presented with its texts in a more or less deceptive, more or less mocking way in blogs, or in comments on Anarchist News.
A link at the bottom of the page takes us to “insurrect.rb,” the code. Reading those 126 lines was very interesting; despite my limited understanding of programming, the way AIMG operates was clear enough. There is a list of definitions in which words are classed together under headings such as “things we like,” “things we don’t like,” “things we do,” “things we don’t do”; for the most part, then, they are groups of presumed synonyms. (I note with interest that the longest list is “things we don’t like”.) As I had suspected, the possible outcomes are finite. At first, reading just the code might suggest that the problem with the rhetoric of insurrectionary anarchism is that it is not inventive enough. Its terms are not sufficiently varied or differentiated and therefore they have a tendency to collapse into each other. But is the programmer’s goal to use the code to produce a more artful rhetoric?
On the same page as “insurrect.rb” is a “read me” file, which offers the following explanation:
<quote>
The purpose of this little program is to expose the seductions of rhetoric, not to criticize actions taken. Despite my admiration for many of the actions taken in the name of insurrection, I’m suspicious of how easy it is to substitute style for substance in the communiques describing these actions. And this is not to say that all ‘insurrectionist’ texts are meaningless […] This program is intended only to demonstrate the pitfalls of language which sounds too good to be meaningful.
</quote>
The remarks about substituting “style for substance” and “sounding to good to be meaningful” suggest the contrary: the “purpose” is less rhetoric. To the degree that AIMG accomplishes this goal, it does so by showing the limited inventiveness of what I will call I-discourse. And it does so from a perspective that opts for an uninventive “substance” rather than a superior “style.”
One could easily undertake a critique of the programmer’s assumptions by asking if the lists of “things we like” or “things we don’t like” really contain interchangeable terms. (Or, supposing that they do, how such interchangeability comes about). But there is a more interesting issue, a more profound limitation in the code than finite word lists. Line 75, for example, reads
“This is a call to #{things_we_like}, not an insistence on #{things_we_dont_like}.” which, in prose, amounts to something like:
<quote>
“Do the good, not the bad,” or:
“Do what we do, don’t do what we don’t do.”
</quote>
These are examples of the simplest grammatical formulations of a <em>moral</em> code, of a sort we discover in all sorts of discourses. Discovering such a code puts me beyond the desire to critique (to improve by strategic negation). The question becomes one of overcoming a morality that is so easily codified.
The programmer, or whoever wrote the “read me” file, tells me what he sees as the AIMG’s purpose. I am free to understand its ouput in that manner or in a variety of others. Now, to overcome the unexamined morality written into the code, I am concerned first of all with wit. Supposing the output has something to do with its stated purpose, that purpose is achieved through being witty. (Of course AIMG is not witty, because it is not a person. But the programmer probably thought he was being witty when he assembled it; and many people think they are witty when they use it and propagate its output.) I take wit to be primarily an aesthetic matter, to be judged in terms of its success. (And there are many sorts of successes. It could be that the joke is on the jokers.) For the overcoming I have in mind, I am also concerned with importance, with some way of getting at the values at play in a moral or ethical system. So let us play a logical game, cycling through possibilities based on varying answers to two questions: Is the AIMG’s output witty? And: does the AIMG matter?
*** 2
Given our two questions, there are four positions:
1. The AIMG’s output is witty, and it matters.
1. The AIMG’s output is not witty, and it matters.
1. The AIMG’s output is not witty, and it does not matter.
1. The AIMG’s output is witty, and it does not matter.
Now, this logical game is just that – of course anyone may occupy one or more of the positions successively or even simultaneously. But for the sake of the game I summon up a lunar landscape, where four speakers deliver their monologues.
The first two positions emphasize writing. Who has already stepped forward to say that AIMG’s output is witty, and it matters? It is the Author (and his audience, amused). Such is the position laid out in the “read me” file; such is the apparent stance of many who posted the link or examples of its output. For them, the machine works; it does what it is pronounced to do. It reveals to us our familiarity with a certain rhetoric. The momentary confusion that accompanies it is supposed to be funny, and to provoke a particular insight. As Bergson so precisely illustrated, the comic usually comes down to either a living thing that acts mechanically or a machine that seems to be alive (See <em>Laughter</em>). The AIMG is obviously a case of the second. The Author knows that, in reading an automatically generated manifesto, I will likely, at least initially, attribute some authorial intention, some message, to the text. When I discover or when it is revealed to me that I have been fooled, I may be angry, amused, confused … Aha! And ha! ultimately I will laughingly accept the lesson of the AIMG. The AIMG’s output is not meaningful, it is <em>just</em> rhetoric! The apparent fancyness of the language is belied by the simplicity of reproducing something like it. And, for the Author (and his audience, amused), such automatically produced rhetoric is not what our political common sense demands. Sometimes I want to side with the little pleasure evidenced in this position: pleasure in a machine that works, the pleasure of repetition. AGAIN!
A second voice intervenes and says: but the AIMG’s output is not something like I-discourse. The simplicity is in the attempt at recreation, which therefore fails, not in I-discourse itself, which is meaningful. This amounts to saying that AIMG’s output is not witty, and it matters. Who has spoken? It is the Critic. This is the voice of the audience, unamused, expressing their revolt. For them, the machine does not work; it does not or cannot do what it is pronounced to do. It presupposes lazy habits of reading, in which people respond badly to jargon they do not recognize, complex ideas and theories that require long study, etc. The Author’s common sense has spoken up and said: the AIMG demonstrates the hollowness of I-discourse. The Critic responds: you are the fool who does not discriminate between the meaningful original and the meaningless bad copy! For this speaker, what the AIMG actually reveals is a misprision of I-discourse: the output’s lack of meaning is not an example of anything. The synonyms are not synonyms; the terms are generally not used with sufficient precision. The Critic engages, then, in a militant defense of a militant discourse. I am this critic, too, sometimes: much of the time I want to side with the defense of complex ideas, of study, even in a certain sense of the mutant speech that is theoretical jargon, and to be suspicious of the common sense that warns away from all that. At the same time, it is difficult to side with a humorless Critic, and unwise to take the side of the good original against the bad copy.
The latter two positions place emphasis on the activity of reading rather than that of writing. The third belongs to one who, bored, says nothing. If we poked him and demanded a response, he might sigh like a character from Beckett: what matter where the simplicity originates? For he who is Bored, AIMG’s output is not witty, and it does not matter. The position of the Bored is similar to that of the Critic, but represents its degree zero. For him the output’s lack of meaning does not reveal anything of importance. It rather reveals the habit of reading in a generic way. When the Bored learns that he has been fooled, all that he takes to have been revealed is the habit as such. But this sort of insight is available in more or less any event of reading, whether the text in question has been written by one or more people, in part or entirely automatically, etc. I note with interest that this could equally well be the position of someone who uses I-discourse, or of someone who does not. The former would be like the Critic, but unconcerned about the way the AIMG misses the mark. The latter would not see this as an important lesson: everyone knows that GIGO. Sometimes this is my position – anytime, really, if I am bored.
This leaves the position of one who thinks AIMG’s output is witty, and it does not matter. She speaks last. I call this the position of the Curious. It is similar to the position of the Author, but is characterized by an excess of amusement, an unruly overflow of amusement beyond the stated lesson of the “read me.” This amusement, not grounded in the thought of a lesson or its importance, suggests manners of writing and reading of which the AIMG is the crudest form. So she has little use for the AIMG according to its Author’s intention for it, since she can’t imagine any way to use it and be witty. She who is Curious says: doesn’t this all suggest that the truly remarkable question here concerns the capture of a vocabulary by a grammatical-moral code, whether or not the AIMG is a good example of it? What does <em>that</em> reveal, not about I-discourse, which is a fashion of the times, but about political rhetoric (including the minimalist rhetoric we call “common sense”) in general? Most of the time I am interested in unserious ways of reading. So, curious, I have seized AIMG as an example, staging my curiosity by offering an illuminating counter-example.
*** 3
There are two computer programs called IC and MESOLIST. They produce this sort of output:
[[a-d-alejandro-de-acosta-how-slogans-end-1.png]]
Using IC and MESOLIST, John Cage invented a writing machine that produced what he called mesostic poems, a variant of the more familiar acrostic poem. In acrostics, it is usually the first letter of each line that, read vertically, forms a name or phrase. In mesostics, the vertical component, or “spine,” is in the middle of each line. The mesostics invite multiple forms of reading, not the least of which is reading aloud, because they are themselves ways of reading and invitations to creative re-reading. This is so inasmuch as the mesostics are composed of either an entire given text (in <em>Empty Words</em>, for example, Cage explains how he used mesostics using the spine “JAMES JOYCE” to “read through” <em>Finnegans Wake</em>) or a set of quotations from various writers. Often other strings of letters appear, such as the names of authors and the titles of books.<em></em> (One might conclude that it is not just re-reading or “reading through,” but <em>study</em> that is at stake, though this would require dramatically re-evaluating what we usually mean by that word.) Cage composed many texts in which a love of language, of the ideas, words, and sounds in his preferred authors combined with his serene and studied use of random processes for composition. Now, Cage’s music remains obscure for most. Among those I know who are familiar with his name, it usually functions as a historical point of reference rather than an object of appreciation (an artwork). His writing is, I suppose, even more mysterious. But it is also light, the lightest butterfly-writing one could ever wish to read. It is our problem if we are the ones who expect a message from either. Using IC and MESOLIST, Cage wrote several books of compiled and interlinked mesostics, such as <em>I-VI</em>, <em>Themes and Variations</em>, and the one that concerns me here, <em>Anarchy</em>. MESOLIST lists “all words” in the source texts “that satisfy the mesostic rules” (<em>I-VI</em>, 1). IC, “a program … simulating the coin oracle of the <em>I Ching,</em>” is used to decide “which words in the lists are to be used and gives … all the central words” (<em>ibid.</em> A more complete discussion of this process with respect to its creation and use may be found in <em>Empty Words</em>, 133-136). In <em>Anarchy</em>, the source material is thirty<em></em> quotes from Kropotkin, Malatesta, Bakunin, Tolstoy, Thoreau, Whitman, Goldman, Goodman, Buckminster Fuller, Norman O. Brown, and Cage himself. For example: “Periods of very slow changes are succeeded by periods of violent changes. Revolutions are as necessary for evolution as the slow changes which prepare them and succeed them” (Kropotkin); “The liberty of man consists solely in this: that he obeys natural laws because he has himself recognized them as such, and not because they have been externally imposed upon him by any extrinsic will whatever, divine or human, collective or individual” (Bakunin). But also: “What we finally seek to do is to create an environment that works so well that we can run wild in it” (Norman O. Brown); “I’m an anarchist, same as you when you’re telephoning, turning on/off the lights, drinking water” (Cage). Or even little stories such as this one, drawn from Hyppolite Havel’s biographical sketch of Emma Goldman: “In San Francisco, in 1908, Emma Goldman’s lecture attracted a soldier of the United States Army, William Buwalda. For daring to attend an Anarchist meeting, the free Republic court-martialed Buwalda and imprisoned him for one year. Thanks to the regenerating power of the new philosophy, the government lost a soldier, but the cause of liberty gained a man.”
These quotations and the twenty-five others, in which the use of “rhetoric” as construed by the Author and the Critic is generally at a minimum, reappear in fragmentary form according to the processes described above. Sometimes, as in the mesostic I have already cited, the explicitly anarchist nature of the content is evident (though not for all that clear in the sense implied by the desire to reverse the priorities of “style” and “substance”). Sometimes it is not so evident:
[[a-d-alejandro-de-acosta-how-slogans-end-2.png]]
Most of the mesostics invite me to active reading. How many ways can you read this delightfully polysemic excerpt?
[[a-d-alejandro-de-acosta-how-slogans-end-3.png]]
Cage’s mesostics may be understood in the context of a long history of writing experiments undertaken for their own sake, that is to say: for pleasure. This field is vast, but arguably its sundry protagonists all share in a suspicion towards, a methodical sidestepping of, the traditional image of the artist as beautiful and creative soul who, inspired, materializes the artwork. They all have in common a sense that there are social, political, psychological, even metaphysical blocks to the outflow of creativity. Arguably, from Dada to Burroughs and beyond, many of these experiments have discovered their pleasure in some form or another of the game called <em>épater la bourgeoise</em>. For Cage, by contrast, the writing machine that makes mesostics is meant neither to shock anyone nor to reveal a hidden truth or reality by subverting the rules of writing. If there is a resemblance to the motivations of the authors I am alluding to, it is in their common suspicion of the author as ego, as consciousness. In their own way they all echo that fascinating Nietzschean lesson, that consciousness is a second-order process, a derivative of the interplay (“combat”) of non-conscious forces, drives, affects, or desires. What Cage added, then, is the most innocent turn imaginable: I would say that, rather than shocking, he only wishes to play.
Indeed, there is no critique, implicit or explicit, in Cage’s writing machine. What goes in is what he wishes to affirm; what comes out is in another way also what he wishes to affirm. They are “golden passages,” as Giambattista Vico used to say. There is no real point to this doubling other than the pleasure it affords: there is no growth or insight, other than one which may come as randomly as any as long as we keep playing. “As we go along (who knows?) an idea may occur in this talk. I have no idea whether one will or not. If one does, let it” (“Lecture on Nothing,” 110). Cage followed Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan in claiming that work was already obsolete. “Instead of working, to quote McLuhan, we now brush information against information. We are doing everything we can to make new connections” (<em>Anarchy</em>, vi). Reading is then the <em>last</em> thing we should describe as labor: the labor of reading, in all its seriousness, is subsumed in a game of reading. The game is not a way to unwind from labor; but labor is a particularly wound-up sort of move in the game. It is justifiable only as a matter of taste.
Cage paid homage to his influences and inspirations in a schizoid way, drawing them into, drawing them along in his mesostics. Who among us knows how to play along with such unserious affirmations? Many of the more or less anonymous masks that leave their comments on the mirror pools of the Great Web know what to do with such a list of names and such a set of quotations. They attack some names, defend others, negate, launch petty attacks, etc. The paranoia of Critics! When we are these sad egos we miss the pure affirmation of Cage’s writing machine. It multiplies the originals, diffracting them not just by reinterpretation or application of them to new conjunctures and objects; it disassembles them down to the level of word, letter, and phoneme. This is precisely how we could overcome the sad egos that we accidentally fall into being. (Sadness is always an accident.) Embracing randomness, chaos, everything in language games or discourses or speech genres that is not under our control: it could mean liberating our language, if that does not sound too trite. It could also mean unbounded pleasure.
*** 4
When it occurred to me to seize upon the AIMG as an example, I supposed I had been waiting on Cage, patiently seeking an opportunity to re-engage with and share his mesostic experiments. Now I feel things are the other way around, as though he had been waiting on me, offering his smiling face as a mask. I daresay I have been used by him – in the gentlest way imaginable. I have proposed that the mesostics in <em>Anarchy</em> are the illuminating counter-example we need to question the AIMG. But I also think I have made clear that they are not against, counter to, anything. It is ultimately not interesting to me to occupy the position of the Author nor that of the Critic. I find nothing objectionable in the existence or use of AIMG. I occupy rather the readerly positions of the Bored and the Curious. But he who is Bored has nothing to add to this conversation (unless, interestingly, it becomes a conversation about boredom – but I will leave that for a future essay). She who is Curious regards AIMG as an embryo of something, as an opportunity to read and write differently – perhaps, eventually, to speak differently as well. A hint of this was evidenced when someone commented on Anarchist News that some of AIMG’s output was not so bad, after all: “yeah! a few times i found some lines that i actually dug! haha!” Let us go farther in this absurdist, affirmative direction. It is, I think, the mask Cage was always holding out to us. Let us treat AIMG as a partial, unconscious, fortuitous reach in the direction of a project I would like to fantasize about more fully: a way of rewriting and rereading everything that we care to read. A machine to dissolve slogans.
Let me explain. I place myself between the Bored and the Curious because I have little use for AIMG as it is offered to me by someone who says “this program is intended <em>only</em>…” But neither do I want to intervene and replace that intention with another, correct, counter-intention. Someone wants the program <em>only</em> to show something about the rhetoric of I-discourse, and perhaps more generally about rhetoric; I reply: that is <em>only</em> another floating statement. It seems to me that a written statement of intention, separate from the writing in question, should be approached as the strangest of clues. Especially when the Author is more or less anonymous; at least presented with a body and a face one may hear the tone of words, study facial expressions, analyze posture and gesture, take in the surroundings and context, and so on. This is already the case when one is reading a poem, essay, or manifesto. It is far more of a problem when it comes to randomly generated output. So I have set aside the authority of the Author, and treated his claim of intention merely as one way of reading. His is a rhetoric that aims to dissolve itself: the rhetoric of minimal rhetoric, perhaps of zero rhetoric. What about rhetoric as an art? It has long been agreed that rhetoric must involve an aesthetic component, since it is first and foremost the art of speaking to crowds, of condensing a message. The message, unfolded, could in some cases be spelled out as a series of reasoned arguments; enfolded, the arguments become enthymemes, generated by the invention of the speaker. The art is in the invention, which, classically, means the speaker’s style. Suspicion towards rhetoric is (which is as ancient as rhetoric) is focused on the danger of a message, surreptitiously encoded in an eloquent style, and so concealed from reasoned criticism: an enthymeme that is lovely or effective but that does not unfold into a reasoned argument. “Sounds good” is thus suspiciously separated from “is meaningful” and the relation between the two is always in question.
Here I invoke Cage’s mesostics, and generally his practice of voiding his art of intention and ego. If there is any rhetoric in the mesostics, it is in the input alone; the poetic form makes it impossible to deliver a message. This strange form of communication that undoes rhetoric also unbinds aesthetics and morality. The author of AIMG both chooses his lists of synonyms and composes the (moral) code that arranges them; the mesostics, though they begin with golden passages, do not allow their author any control over their fragmentary rearrangement in the poems (as parts or as wholes), and thus the code does not contain, explicitly or even implicitly, a morality. There is thus no problem with rhetoric, because it has finally been undone; but there is a curious question of aesthetics (of pleasure) left over. “Sounds good” as well as “is meaningful” can no more be said to coincide than to differ. The question becomes not “does it say anything?” or “what does it say?” but “who is reading?”
Releasing writing from intention and thus from morality, voiding intention and thus the ego in writing, is the barely explored challenge that AIMG gestures towards. And it is Cage’s mesostics, or something like them, that allow us to flesh out the fantastic reach of such a gesture. It is the greater randomness of Cage’s process that allows us to both diagnose the secret alliance between the ego and morality (we could call it <em>conscience</em>) in political rhetoric and to discover the ego in its very emergence. I mean that, in the terms I have been employing, the ego emerges in reading, not in writing. Ego is not there in the composition of a text or code, but seems to have been there after the fact; this semblance, this mask, depends on ignoring or minimizing the importance of our practices of reading. I am not suggesting that the ego should always be voided (as though that was up to us!), but that it is productive and endlessly fascinating to create writing machines that allow us to discover it. If we do this gracefully, we will guiltlessly summon up pleasure. We might eventually get better at observing how our egos, our masks, congeal in more or less rigid acts of reading. Boredom is one path; curiosity is another. The Author and the Critic cling too rigidly in their roles to the importance of their activities to allow, as the Bored and the Curious do, their masks to dissolve or shatter in excessive laughter. Nonserious reading: ludic, festive, voluptuous.
It could begin by inventing and using writing machines that consume and transform every dull index that crosses our paths: I mean all those unexamined words that make up our slogans, that pepper our statements of intent, mission and vision, our little manifestos. I also mean those <em>mana</em>-words that theoreticians enjoy moving around their chessboards. We can do it if we can learn to inject the impersonal and random into our writing, and eventually our speech. I dream of a way to complicate the desire to say, speak, or mark, to send a message or command, in its badly omened collusion with repetition. Ah, the dull indices! Who is not tired of Freedom, Democracy, Sustainability, Consent … even of Attack and Destroy? Clearly AIMG does not go far enough. We need a superior machine, a crueler code.
Reading through AIMG, one last program, MESOSTOMATIC:
[[a-d-alejandro-de-acosta-how-slogans-end-4.png]]
Reading through “How Slogans End,” too:
[[a-d-alejandro-de-acosta-how-slogans-end-5.png]]
<strong>AGAIN!</strong> <strong></strong>
Links:
[[http://www.objectivechance.com/automatic_insurrection][AIMG]]
[[http://www.euph0r1a.net/mesostomatic/][Mesostomatic]]
Works Cited:
Cage, John<em>.</em> “Composition as Process” and “Lecture on Nothing.” In <em>Silence.</em> Wesleyan, 1961.
<em>—. Empty Words.</em> Wesleyan, 1979. <em></em>
<em>—. I-VI.</em> Wesleyan, 1997.
—. <em>Anarchy.</em> Wesleyan, 2001.
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#title How the Stirner Eats Gods
#author Alejandro de Acosta
#SORTtopics AJODA, AJODA #67, egoism, Max Stirner, the creative nothing, union of egoists
#source Retrieved on February 20th, 2016 from AJODA magazine
#lang en
#pubdate 2016-02-20T06:47:31
*** About his philosophical nickname
The author of the fine book <em>The Ego and its Own</em> was a man whose forehead sprouted a name: <em>Stirner</em> refers to his great brow. There is something charming about the fact that this book was signed with a pseudonym - this book that insists to the death on irreducible, irreparable uniqueness. As if one’s proper name is never remarkable enough, and every Ego requires the artifice of a nickname to become a Unique signature. <em>Stirner</em> is his philosophical nickname, the signature of an unknown visage[1] who dedicates his book to his sweetheart, then passes it to us in all ambiguity and says: <em>use it.</em>
*** About his allergy to the Cause
I have previously taken the liberty of calling Max Stirner an anarchist.[2] In the context of that discussion, as perhaps with most discussions of <em>The Ego and its Own,</em> I suppose that it worked. I do not doubt that he belongs to our genealogy. In the long run, however - in the name of a truly perspectival theory - I think one might understand Stirner as an anarchist and as something else as well. For there is no doubt that, for many, Anarchism is a Cause. What I have to say here is a gift to those who wish to betray that Cause.
To put Stirner in dialogue with our present, we have to get past a certain caricature of his thought (a caricature for which he is partly responsible, due mostly to his excessive prose style). Should you care to read the usually short section on Stirner to be found in introductory books on anarchism, you will find more or less this: Stirner, writing before Marx and Nietzsche, made a radical vindication of the freedom of the individual against all powers: the church, the state, all forms of authority. He did so in a way that was inspiring for many but at the same time could go no farther than a parodic exaggeration of liberal individualism. What you get is a vague, almost mythical, image, of someone who is completely out for him- or herself, and whose relations to all others are conditional on their own benefit. Benefit is understood in a typical capitalist, economic way: property and individual sovereignty. In a way that simultaneously includes and excludes Stirner’s aberrant claim to ownness, this an imaginary that associatively gathers around it; it is dubbed “individualism.” Naturally, this image presupposes the individual self (as psyche and as body) as a metaphysical given. Modern-day, free-market libertarian, anarcho- capitalist types seem to be inspired directly or indirectly by this caricature.
Now, I would not say that there is nothing in Stirner that opens onto such a caricature. After all, there are many caricatures in <em>The Ego and its Own.</em> And to each Ego her Own! If I set it all aside, though, and try to summon for myself his intuition in all its vertiginous danger, it seems to me that he must have had something rather different in mind than the stultifying conclusion that the greatest example of an egoist would be something like a Wall Street banker. As if he or she who is only out for themselves and wants to appropriate everything is exemplified by one of our great privatizers, those who attempt to turn as much of the world as possible into private property. Of course those little men and women are egoists. But so is everyone else: “Unconsciously and involuntarily we all strive towards ownness.” “All your doings are <em>unconfessed,</em> secret, covert, and concealed egoism.”[3] Yes, the real question is (and do please be kind enough to laugh at this): who will <em>confess</em>? We need better examples, far stranger examples; we need to finally meet or at least envision <em>confessed</em> egoists. We need, in all, another perspective.
This second perspective sets out from a consideration of the Ego as a kind of cipher or variable, something fundamentally unknown. The first thing we know of it is its allergy to any Cause that can be resolved into an Ism. Its characteristic activity—in Stirner’s time, in our own, perhaps for all time—is the <em>schism</em> in which one breaks with the Cause. I will have to come back, and soon, to this inadequately adequate denomination, Ego. For the moment let us play a provisional dialectical game, and suppose that Ego= x is defined in opposition to the Cause.
Cause, or, in German, <em><strong>Sache:</strong></em> either has one of those amusingly long dictionary entries which might make us laugh at the game of definition. Playing this game for a moment, we might read under <em>Sache</em> thing, object, article, cause, action, legal case... and so we might learn what game Stirner was playing. These are all things that, though they may seem to be objects of the subject that I am, are eminently marks or signs of my subordination to a greater subject. We know that it is a subject because that is how it appears in our speech. It is greater than me inasmuch as it is imagined as transcendent or eternal. It seems to constitute me in mediate relation to things and actions, by means of constituting me in immediate relation to itself, to its Cause.
I will rehearse the enumeration of causes in the delightful opening rant of the book, entitled “All Things are Nothing to Me.” Stirner opens <em>The Ego and its Own</em> in the first person: “What is not supposed to be my concern!” (5). What follows is a list of Causes that I am asked to accept as my own: the Cause of God, the Cause of Humanity, the Cause of the State, etc, etc. In each case I am asked to identify with a Cause alien to my interest. The terms of this offer are hardly delicate. Stirner observes: what we can say about God is that God is God’s main concern. What we can say about Humanity is that Humanity is Humanity’s main concern. What we can say about the State is that the State is the State’s main concern. But inexplicably I find myself in this statement: “I myself am my concern” (7). My Cause will be my own. I note with interest that Stirner gives <em>no explanation</em> as to how he or any of us might come to make such a claim. Now please read those statements again and observe for yourself. The relation of <em>being its own main concern</em> is said of an entity that is totally hypothetical. More precisely: imaginary. Stirner never gives us any reason to believe that there is God or Humanity beyond the quasiexistence that constellations of fixed ideas in the imagination might be said to have. As for the State, according to a definition that ought to be familiar to anarchists, it can be clearly shown to be the modes of behavior of those who live in accord with that profoundly inadequate constellation of ideas, that Cause.[4] So, through a more circuitous route, the same difference. None. A paradoxical question: if all of these Causes-Subjects are imaginary, am <em>I</em> imaginary? What was I before this constitutive event, before this process began? What am I once I break with the Cause? Was I ever, can I ever be again, its orphan and its atheist?[5]
In the sacred and sacrificial logic of every Cause except perhaps my own, the imaginary greater subject (God, Humanity, the State, etc, etc.), the one that defines me, forcibly constitutes me in mediate relation, not only to things and actions, but above all to myself. One could say, as Debord did that its operation is separation, the introduction of a “scission within human beings.”[6] But that cannot be the whole story. I agree with Stirner that there is no Man: Humanity is another Cause. Scission or separation within what, then? Just this cipher we call the Ego, this variable that names not generic humanity but individual human bodies. Individuals? Humans? I will come back to individuals and humans.
The imagination does not speak. <em>Someone</em> has spoken. He or she is a representative of the Cause, or wants you to think so. He does not speak in his own name. She says she speaks for the Cause. He shares, without invitation, his imagination. She insists that you accept her gift of words, sometimes even of organs.[7] As David Hume once put it: “In vain, by pompous phrase and passionate expression, each recommends his own pursuit, and invites the credulous hearers to an imitation of his life and manners.”[8] <em>Someone</em> says (usually repeats) to you that you must take this Cause as your own; that without it, your life is meaningless. “Every man must have something that is more to him than himself’ (254). Stirner implies that, in such moments, you might accept, even embrace, the possibility of meaninglessness. He does not assume that, now that the God Cause, the State Cause, etc, etc; is no longer my own, I immediately know what I am doing, or what to do next. To assume my Cause as my own does not mean that I know what I am or what I want to do.[9] I can say that I will make my Cause my own, but I may not know what that means. I might trip up in my imaginary self-constitution. Not knowing is not only possible but probable. Someone sure of the next step has probably just switched Causes. Sometimes that is called progress.
Towards the end of the opening rant, Stirner affirms: “If God, if mankind, as you affirm, have substance enough in themselves to be all in all to themselves, then I feel that I shall still less lack that, and that I shall have no complaint to make of my ‘emptiness.’ I am not nothing in the sense of emptiness, but I am the creative nothing, the nothing out of which I myself as creator create everything” (7). His rhetoric is fascinating: <em>If, as you affirm ... -</em> but why grant anything to this interlocutor? If, as the credulous affirm, <em>then I feel</em>... Nothing has been proven. What, then, is Stirner evoking? What is this creative nothing out of which I myself as creator create everything? What is this inexplicable and perilous moment wherein I subtract myself from a Cause that appears to give meaning to my life from beyond? (I repeat that this is first and foremost to subtract myself from the gift of meaning offered or imposed by one who imagines the Cause as their own.) It includes the possibility of being nothing or of doing nothing. This experience of nothingness recurs regularly in <em>The Ego and its Own.</em> But the crucial difference between nothing in the sense of emptiness and the creative nothing is that the first is not-Cause (to be rid of it, or <em>freedom)</em> and the second is beyond any serious relation to Causes (to be myself, or ownness), not defined in terms of contradiction or breaking-with. This is a gesture of autonomy - to speak in one’s own name. But, rhetorical disavowals aside, the name is empty; it is a mask. So maybe the dialectical game ends here.
Gilles Deleuze gives Stirner a special place in <em>Nietzsche and Philosophy,</em> as the last gasp of dialectics, its parody- moment for that Free generation. “The dialectic cannot be halted until I become a proprietor. Even if it means ending up in nothingness.”[10] Briefly, it’s that Stirner implodes the dialectical mechanism, finally having done with breaking- with, absolutely negating negation, leaving nothing. “Stirner is the dialectician who reveals nihilism as the truth of the dialectic.”[11] This in the sense that if God, Humanity, and the other Subjects-Causes do not exist, I have no grounds to assert that I do merely because I have scornfully reduplicated the broken logic according to which those more credulous than I superstitiously suppose they do. Deleuze is right: “Stirner is too much of a dialectician to think in any other terms but those of property, alienation, and reappropriation - but too exacting not to see where this thought leads: to the ego which is nothing, to nihilism.”[12] But (and this is the crucial question): <em>which</em> nihilism? <em>Whose</em>? The problem Deleuze set himself was to enlist Nietzsche in an escape from dialectical reasoning, with all of its sloppy logic and its priestly morality. For my part, I want to meet today’s confessed egoists and nihilists. Especially since they seem to have responded intelligently to the fact that our present evidences ever more images of catastrophe, of absolute annihilation.[13] (Three provisional figures of catastrophe in our time are nuclear warfare, environmental devastation, and the company of people with no essence.) Perhaps there is no Nihilism, just these curious nihilists.
*** About the Unique and the Id
If we are able to grasp what is parodic in Stirner, if Ego is not a Cause in the same sense as the others, an Ego can be neither an object nor a subject. It must be a process. Any Ego has, perhaps as its beginning, certainly and repeatedly as part of its process, a creative nothing. The process is not a process that fills the void. It is rather an atomic, irreversible way of acting in a void: these acts are called appropriating, misappropriating, disappropriating, expropriating, finding, losing... Translating the book’s title literally, we understand what it underlines>Not <em>The Ego and</em> its Own; rather something like <em>The Unique and Its Property</em> ,[14] For the funny Latin- English term Ego translates <em>Ich,</em> “I,” not <em>Einzige,</em> “Unique.” It is not easy to say Unique the way that we say I. What we might hear in this awkwardness is a way to say singularity, expressed appropriately, perhaps even poetically, by replacing a pronoun with an adjective. I am not abstract me but myself with all of my qualities - my properties. Unique. The paradoxical vindication of my Cause as my own says that nothing can replace the singularity that I am or that I have. That I call I. That I cannot exchange. Ego is the name of the “unutterable” (275), unnamable Unique.
Stirner was one of those few philosophers who are more interested in having than being. Probably the most succinct way to describe this Unique, this Ego, is to say that I am exactly what I can appropriate <em>right now,</em> what I can say is proper to me <em>at this moment.</em> As though in my process I affirm a series of parts of me as Unique (my properties) and disavow another series as all those things through which I am possessed by an alien Cause. What is left is ownness. “My own I remain” (143). This corresponds exactly with Spinoza’s formula: <em>aquiescentia in se ipso.</em>
Keeping in mind what I have written about dialectics, clearly there is something very strange happening in Stirner with regard to having, with the concept of property. On one side there is a language that seems to parrot good old free- market capitalism: there is an individual who must appropriate to survive. On the other side, we find the claim that this appropriation is what is going to <em>dispossess</em> me. It is not only what is going to free me from having been possessed by these Causes but also the very event of my self-affirmation. This has to do not with survival but with life. Simply put, it is not about things, but about actions or events that I may affirm as me or as mine. Stirner offers many wonderful images of how we allow constellations of inadequate or fixed ideas to rule us. He uses the language of ghosts. “The whole world is haunted.” (36); “Ghosts in every comer!” Credulous, we are “enthusiastic” and possessed (48).[15] The desire, then, when I proclaim my Cause, when I affirm myself, is to be a dispossessed Ego, playing in, wandering about, the fields of ownness.
For some of us Ego has a psychoanalytic resonance. It fits in the infamous second Freudian topology (that of <em>The Ego and the Id)</em> between the Id and the Super-Ego. If we were to redraw this picture, to playfully illustrate Stirner with Freud’s topology, it would look something like this: the Super-Ego is the Causes. That is to say, everything with which I stupidly or superstitiously identify, precisely the litany of ways I am possessed. It is what I have to get rid of, what I have to break with, free myself from. But the Id, the <em>It</em> in me, the source of bizarre impulses, that, for Freud, I cannot ever quite identify with, is, for Stirner, just as much me as the Ego. The Unique affirms the Ego and Id indistinctly. Stirner writes, clearly and often, that there is no interest in saying I am more the rational series than the irrational series. I am “an abyss of unregulated and lawless impulses, desires, wishes, passions, a chaos without guiding light or star!” (146). <em>Chaos ergo sum.</em>
For the sake of discussion, I propose a distinction between two concepts of Self in Stirner, corresponding roughly to unconfessed and confessed egoism. The first would be everything we discover by thinking about the self as a subject or object of possession: it is what I undergo when I carelessly accept the gift of words or organs. Indebted, I mistake another’s Cause for my own, and I do so in my most intimate sense of belonging: to God, to the nation, to some moral code, to a community that takes good care of me. (Notice that these tend to involve what is called Truth). I take myself to be substantial and full; I draw meaning from the identification-operation. Clearly this involves one or more fundamental self-deceptions, manifest as a separation in the Unique. This is a historical and contingent Self inasmuch as nobody chooses what he or she is possessed by. At least at first.
Another sense of Self could be called transhistorical and creative. I am thinking again about the process, about what Stirner could have intended by writing “I am the creative nothing.” One outcome of the dispossession, of what one could call the exorcism, would be to realize that the self is nothing. To take the intimacy of belonging to its degree zero. That is, if I am only what I can possess or affirm, this never excludes the possibility that I have nothing or can affirm nothing. All the courage in Stirner’s book, all of its scattershot nobility, has to do with accepting this possibility. It is a kind of psychic mortality: the fact is that the psyche can vanish and a point of view, one or more, that says I, remains. I recall here the countless people confined to asylums. I also remember here peoples who, as a result of processes of colonization or war, have lost all access to what they once called their culture, their land, or their language. Any of these peoples, and so many others of us who feel ourselves without essence, may still try to identify with something.[16] But when we try to access it, we have nothing. We are only beginning to learn how to think through and truly feel such experiences, or gaps in experience, and the way people act and think politically or antipolitically out of them. Stirner, in his particular European geopolitical trajectory, seems to have arrived at something like this vertiginous <em>zeroself.</em><em>[17]</em> With regard to the countless Causes through which peoples have thought of themselves as inhabiting or developing a collective sense of self (more or less successfully distributed to individuals),
I conclude that at least some of us are breaking out of History. That some of us never entered it. That many of us feel ourselves empty.
*** About the funny term Police-care
The empty transhistorical or creative self, the Unique, enacts appropriation, making everything proper to itself, at least everything that it wants. By now this should mean: it indefatigably discovers or invents a singular perspective on itself, and by extension on everything else. What is funny about this is that we might also call this to <em>consume.</em> The empty Ego consumes whatever it desires. But unlike a full and substantial self, unlike the possessed, it consumes events and actions and makes them appropriate to nothing, to something that is ultimately empty. This is a . mockery of that “sacred” (220) notion of property which concerns things. It takes the relations of property to such an excessive point that they simply fail to work and so is, in the strictest sense, a destruction of property To make sense, property requires legal and economic individuals. 'Legal and economic individuals’ describes at least two causes, two forms of.possession, two imaginary substances. If Stirner only said to us: <em>I want to use you</em><em>; I want to make you my own,</em> then he would still be a weird, exaggerated variant of a liberal. But he also says: <em>I</em> <em>want you to use me.</em> <em>I</em> <em>expect you to use me.</em> <em>I</em> <em>don</em><em>’t want you to ask me for help;</em> I <em>want you to take from me. And I’m going to take from you.</em> “I do not step shyly back from your property, but look upon it always as <em>my</em> property,' in which I need to ‘respect’ nothing. Pray do the like with what you call my property!” (220). Now this is a description of an economy, however rudimentary. In fact, we could call it Stirner’s outlandish idea of mutual aid.
Often, when we try to think about or practice mutual aid, we drag into our activities an entire alien morality, thinking and living in terms of what Stirner calls the <em>police care,</em> in short making the community another Cause. As Cause, the Community is already a micro-State, a “tissue and plexus of belonging and adherence” (198). It is all too common for people to feel a horrible obligation to the Community and therefore to feel guilty when they fail, which of course they inevitably do. Somewhere a standard or measure arises or is borrowed, and immediately someone starts measuring. Someone else accepts the measure and asks: how <em>much am I</em> giving? Stirner observes: “The spy and eavesdropper, ‘conscience,’ watches over every motion of the mind, and all thought and action is for it a ‘matter of conscience,’ that is, police business. This tearing apart of man into ‘natural impulse’ and ‘conscience’ (inner populace and inner police) is what constitutes the Protestant” (81-82). Need I say that this is not only about certain sects of Christianity, but many more of us besides; first of all those of us, atheist or not, who have absorbed what is still called a work ethic? The State, or the States in <em>ovo</em> that so many Communities manifest, are gatherings of people that take good police care of each other. As Causes they maintain themselves first of all. “Every ego is from birth a criminal to begin with against the people, the State. Hence it is that it does really keep watch over all. It sees in each one an egoist and is afraid of the egoist. It presumes the worst about each one and takes care, police care, that no harm happens to the State” (179).
That is how a moral or, of course, political ideal is invoked as the Super-Ego of the group or of the Community. Remember someone’s repetitive chatter: <em>Don’t we all believe in this and so don’t you want to be doing it?...</em> Of course this is the very form of the dialogue—if we can still call it that—in which someone invokes the Cause, and more or less politely demands allegiance, threatening meaninglessness as the terrible alternative. What I am asked to do is to sacrifice myself for the sake of belonging in exchange for the gift of meaning, of words and organs. This is the blueprint for all moralizing politics. Some of that should have been obvious in the preceding. If I emphasize the Community as a Cause, as it so often and so sadly is, if I indulge my wish to bring this phrase, <em>taking police care of one another,</em> into the everyday lexicon, it is because it is comparatively easy to call someone out for being bossy, for telling other people what to do. It is more difficult to think of and intervene in the subtle and insidious forms that police care takes. A rich terrain.
For those of the Community, any alternative to belonging seems like it will fail. Indeed, it will fail the Community, or the Community will fail in and through it. What is outside Community, since coexistence is in some sense inevitable? I learned this lesson in reflecting on something I do constantly: public speaking. Of this activity Stirner writes that it is to ask others to consume me (305). Enjoy me, the Unique invites you, consume me. (To this I am tempted to add the masochist’s erotic whisper: “use me.”) Render inappropriate what I appropriated. But what is this gathering of consumers who feel allegiance to nothing, not even to the Community?
*** We are all Unions of Egoists
Peter Lambom Wilson has noted in several places that perhaps the Ego is another ghost, well on its way to being another Cause. One can, after all, take oneself too seriously. Referencing Landauer, Wilson suggests the Ego “still retains - despite all Stirner’s determination - a taint of the Absolute.”[18] Certainly when I read Stirner I sometimes have to pause to cleanse the unpleasant aftertaste left by too much comparison of Self with God. It’s what is still all too dialectical in Stirner, the desire to invert the monotheist nightmare rather than just wake up from it. Certainly I have witnessed people assimilating such an Ego to an individualism that is rugged, all too rugged. I mean that the theoretical mistake of identifying what makes me Unique with what I think I am (Ego as conscience or consciousness) is perhaps a variant of the more ordinary mistake of believing that one can just be an individual in some simple way. Reflecting on the phenomenon of life, Henri Bergson wrote: “Individuality is never perfect ... it is often difficult, sometimes impossible, to tell what is an individual.”[19] As though we are not all divided within and sometimes against ourselves first and foremost, before and after possession! But that is <em>not</em> separation. To disattach the Ego from the Cause, to allow it to float off in a nominal or indexical way instead of delivering it to oneself and others as though it bears the heaviest weight (conscience or consciousness, terrible psychological depths, etc) has this happy consequence: I can affirm myself as multiple and have done with pledging allegiance to the Unified Self and the Cause for which it stands.
I like to think that the process of appropriation and misappropriation, of making proper and making improper, is happening in the emptiness of the self, as its effort of selfconstitution, as much as it is happening beyond, as relations with others. Stirner does sometimes write about internal conflicts, but I rarely have the sense of clarity about what I want that he tends to assume. (Perhaps my mask does not fit as well as his did.) One could express the process of individuation that makes me Unique as a series of inner conflicts. That is, we could concretize the concept of the Ego by adopting another perspective in which there are many processes, not just one. Something like that is a concrete aspect of embodiment. I find that I am composite, that I am composed by many Ego nodules, partial or micro selves[20] that crop up and fade away depending on what activity I take up or abandon. They are in some conflict with each other inasmuch as there are different kinds of available activities and pleasures that tempt me, attract me, repel me, and seduce me. The process or processes are the chaos together with unregulated impulses as emergent desires.
Tempt us; attract us; repel us; seduce us. All of us. For now ji.am many. Too many for a Cause - for we do not all agree. *That, it seems to me, would be a better reason to say that ||o Cause can be mine but my own. If there were some kind of absolute limit it would be: my body is my own. Stirner’s parodic seizure of power over himself echoes this weirdest of all feelings. Perhaps that nonsense is how the sense of what is appropriate or proper arises. It could also be how the concept of property is ultimately dissolved.
We could understand this still empty, now multiple, self in <em>and as</em> the famous Union of Egoists that Stirner presents as annihilating society and State. “Society is our state of nature ... But the dissolution of society is intercourse[21] or union” (271) “It is not another state that men aim at, but, their <em>union,</em> uniting, this ever-fluid uniting of everything standing” (199). “The State and I are enemies. I sacrifice nothing to human society, I only utilize it; but to be able to utilize it completely I transform it into my property and my creature, that is, I annihilate it, and form in its place the <em>Union of Egoists”</em> (161). The Union of Egoists is precisely what made so many communists - even the Situationists - turn away and run from Stirner.[22] His suggestion was, simply, that the inevitable processes of formation of groups would involve folks joining and leaving the group at will. “If a union has crystallized into a society, it has ceased to be a coalition; for coalition is an incessant self-uniting; it has become a unitedness, come to a standstill, degenerated into a fixity; it is — <em>dead</em> as a union, it is the corpse of the union or coalition, it is - society, community. A striking example of this kind is furnished by the <em>party”</em> (271). The Union does not, cannot, operate through separation or the police care that manages it. I approach or recede, variously saying: I want to use the group and be used by it; now I don’t - I withdraw myself.
If we start from the Ego, as the imaginarily full and substantial individual, and conceive of <em>that</em> entity entering and exiting the Union of Egoists, there are many reasons to conclude that this is not a viable scheme for cooperation or coexistence. However, from the perspective of an empty and creative self, we are thinking of multiple selves already going on in one body. There is no particular reason to think of (always imperfectly) individual bodies as the best or highest instance of the Unique, as opposed to unique desires and impulses - or unique groups. Individuality is not absolute, but relative. There are actions in which I act as one; there are also actions that are profoundly conflicted and even self-contradictory. This is not necessarily a weakness and it is not always a mark of separation in me. For we are each of us already a Union of Egoists. My part in composing a group as a Union of Egoists is to disband one Union and convene another, setting multiple selves in circulation, so that certain of mine connect with certain of yours. In the group, these impulses or micro-Egos circulate in a way both related and unrelated to their circulation in me. Naturally all of what goes on in my body is not connected to all of what goes on in your body. A Union of Egoists is an “ever- fluid” circulation of selves, a circulation of affects or desires. Thus what ends up being <em>I</em> or <em>me</em> - my Cause, my property, owrmess, finally - has to be redefined beyond the individual body. For the exact duration of a Union of Egoists, I is distributed in it. When others appear or disappear, <em>I</em> is redistributed. That is precisely what is already happening in individual bodies.[23] If you have been unlucky enough to sleep through the lessons in which life teaches you the multiplicity of your body, you might still think that the Ego is the liberal individual, the full and substantial self, and that the Union of Egoists is a temporary association among them. Of course <em>that</em> ought to sound ridiculous, because nothing will get done except through some combination of coercion and good luck. If you cease to divide up <em>self</em> by individual body specifically, feeling the many Unique selves in each body, there must also be equally complex collective selves beyond individual bodies. That would be truly following Stirner’s intuition: the paradoxical statement that I have assumed my own Cause means that in such moments of mutual appropriation and disappropriation we clear the sort of space in which the nothing creates. He was after the greatest possible intensity of the creative moment. How do we take it to where it has almost no limit? What is the plateau of maximum circulation?
There can be no single answer to these questions. I will offer a somewhat abstract description of the feeling involved, though. Stirner has a strange passage that relates to how you and I might meet: “The last and most decided opposition, that of unique against unique, is at bottom beyond what is called opposition, but without having sunk back into unity and unison” (186). There are not two; there is not one. The empty Ego is nondenumerable, or beyond measure.
Indeed: Vinciane Despret suggests in her ethnopsycho- logical study Our <em>Emotional Makeup</em> that one can crudely classify responses to theoretical and practical crises of notions of the self into two sets.[24] The one that has been more common in the so-called Western tradition is to multiply selves, severing a supposedly unified being into various sub-selves invariably distributed in hierarchical structures. (The first cleavage, from Plato to Freud and after, divides the rational and the irrational.) The one that has been less popular, always controversial, sometimes heretical, in that tradition is to erase or annihilate the self. Stirner plays and in playing transforms all three games of the self: the unified self (Unique and unnamable), the multiple self (from the abyss of unregulated impulses to the Union of Egoists), and no self (Nothing, emptiness, “thoughtlessness”). The Ego’s process extends in both directions. Uniquely.
*** About how he Eats Gods
All of us return, then, if we are fortunate, to the destruction of property—-to consumption. One o£ the plans for thinking modernity that Nietzsche sketched out in his notebooks reflects on unfortunate, sad modem people who cannot digest anything. We might understand all of modernity “using the metaphor of feeding and digestion.”[25] “Sensibility unutterably more excitable (- the increase in excitability dressed in moralistic finery as the increase of <em>compassion</em> -), the abundance of disparate impressions greater than ever before - the <em>cosmopolitanism</em> of dishes, of literatures, newspapers, forms, tastes, even landscapes, etc. The tempo of this influx is <em>prestissimo</em>; the impressions efface each other; one instinctively resists taking something in, taking something <em>deeply,</em> ‘digesting’ something - this results in a <em>weakening</em> of the digestive power.”[26] For Nietzsche, what one can digest is a test of one’s health, strength, and power. Metaphorical or not, this Alimentary Logic is profoundly consonant with Stirner’s thought: what we have digested is literally what we have made our own, and digesting or consuming something else is also how we become more than what we are.
Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert’s 1898 article on “the nature and function of sacrifice” could be read,, in all its glorious sociological dryness, as an expose of the sacrificial logic of the sacred Cause. They describe religious rituals in which the credulous one eats: “By eating the sacred thing, in which the god is thought to be immanent, the sacrifier absorbs him. He is possessed by him... ”[27] The sacrificial logic is a logic of absorption: and in absorption, possession. Absorption would then be the psychological or physiological prerequisite for identifying yourself with an alien Cause. It/should not surprise us, then, that <em>The Ego and its Own</em> is peppered with constant references to eating: eating things, eating other people, eating gods too. Stirner’s rejection of the Cause is a rejection of the practice of sacrifice, and of every politics and morality based on a sacrificial logic.[28] “Everything sacred is a tie, a fetter” (176).
For every Cause is indigestible to the credulous. “What I take as absolute, I cannot devour” (183). It remains and separates me from myself, ly and painfully redistributing the micro-Egos, generating an imaginary fullness, fixing an identity.
Alternatively, to think of ourselves as eating something and not being possessed by it is to think ourselves dispossessed. Stirner writes, as I mentioned, about the world being haunted: always more ghosts, more and more spirits, more and more things that possess, more and more guilt, and so on. He writes about how this is growing. Here he is navigating Nietzsche’s accelerating world:
Around the altar rise the arches of the church and its walls keep moving further and further out. What they enclose is <em>sacred.</em> You can no longer get to it, no longer touch it. Shrieking with the hunger that devours you, you wander around about these walls and search for the little that is profane. And the circles of your course keep getting more and more extended. Soon that church will embrace the whole world, and you will be driven out to the extreme edge. Another step and the <em>world of the sacred</em> has conquered: you sink into the abyss. Therefore take courage while there it is yet time, wander about no longer in the profane where now it is dry feeding, dare the leap and rush the gates into the sanctuary itself. If you <em>devour</em> the <em>sacred</em> you have made it your <em>own.</em> Digest the sacramental wafer and you are rid of it. (88-89)
Yes, digest! For you are the “desecrator” (165). But observe: Stirner assumes that you are hungry. To be hungry, to be desirous in any way, corresponds to the feeling of being empty. Such feelings are indices. They are clues for patient meditators who stubbornly insist , on slowing down the <em>prestissimo</em> of our present. These conditions testily to emptiness and not to a lack that could be filled. They tell me not just that I need to eat (to consume so that I will be something) but also that I am to set off across what others call sacred space; to me it is a void. I continually discover and lose myself in the void. Yet I continue to act. That is what Stirner meant, I think, by excessive remark: “I do not love [the world], I <em>annihilate</em> it as I annihilate myself; I <em>dissolve</em> it” (262). To seriously take up Ego as a Cause to which I am obligated would inevitably mean to be possessed by myself, by some element that I no longer want to be. It would be my horrible apotheosis. That cannot be ownness. So, repeatedly, patiently, Stirner interrupts such moments, returning to these sentiments.I'm hungry. I’m dispossessed. I’m nothing. As Unique, the creative nothing is not the beginning of a theogony, much less an anthropogony: it is the ever-repeated destruction of property in oneself.
*** About the Fields of Ownness
What could Vaneigem have intended in his often invoked distinction between life (vie) and survival (survie)?[29] Although he often deployed it in a simplistic way, the idea is beautiful in its inversion of the apparently obvious dominance of the economy (understood in a restricted sense): survival is not what is basic, primary, of the body and its needs, but rather a weakening, a vampirism, the imposition of a superior (sur) element on life (vie). And this by life itself. Vaneigem perhaps invited us to try to conceive of life itself - life <em>by</em> itself, life’s ownness, without transcendent illusions.
In this sense life cannot be conceived, much less lived, in terms of any transcendent meaning or project. Contemplating our emptiness, considering the swarming micro-Egos that compose us, we might learn the lesson of our irreparable relations to something alive but impersonal, inhuman. It could be what Stirner called “The Un-man who is in some sense in every individual” (125). It could be the pre-human or for- human, if I understand what Frfcre Dupont was grasping after with these notions in the book, <em>species being.</em><em>[30]</em> It could be what Bergson called “a haunting of the social form in the genesis of the individual.”[31] It could be everyday life - but not the everyday life <em>(le quotidien)</em> of citizens (of the <em>polis</em>) that the Situationists described, after Lefebvre, as colonized. Not le <em>quotidien,</em> then, but what Bergson, again, called le <em>courant:</em> literally, the flowing. The flux of life in and beyond the human.
life in this sense is ultimately an impersonal circulation of desires, impulses, affects. That is what an egoist paradoxically, impossibly almost, speaks in the name of when he rejects the Cause, when she joins or parts ways with the Union of Egoists. So many masks at play on the fields of ownness: hello, egoists. Hello, nihilists. And all of this has been my fancy decoration on another such mask, one I wear today, to tell you that if anything is worth reading, it is not to find something to believe in. That other mask that accepted the gift of a nickname, <em>Stirner,</em> wrote: “We read it because we are interested in handling something and making it ours.”
<em><strong>I</strong></em> <em><strong>would like to thank the organizers and participants of the Renewing the Anarchist Tradition conference, where a first version of this essay was presented in September 2006. I would also like to thank my friend Leona for typing up a transcript of that talk.</strong></em>
*** Works Cited or Referenced
de Acosta, Alejandro. “Two Styles of Anti-Statist Subjectivity.” <em>International</em> Studies <em>in Philosophy</em> 39.2 (Spring 2007)
Agamben, Giorgio. <em>The Open: Man and Animal.</em> Stanford: Stanford, 2004.
Bergson, Henri. <em>Creative Evolution.</em> New York: Dover, 1998.
Bey, Hakim. “Black Crown and Black Rose: Anarcho-Monarchism and Anaicho-Mysticism.” In <em>T.A.Z.</em> New York: Autonomedia, 1991.
Buber, Martin. <em>Paths</em> in <em>Utopia.</em> Boston: Beacon, 1971.
Debord, Guy. <em>Society of the Spectacle.</em> New York: Zone Books, 1995.
Deleuze, Gilles. <em>Nietzsche and Philosophy.</em> New York: Columbia, 1983.
Hardt, Michael. <em>Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy.</em> Minneapolis: Minnesota, 1993.
Despret, Vinciane. Our <em>Emotional Makeup: Ethnopsychology and Selfhood.</em> New York: Other Press, 2004.
Dupont, Frfere. <em>species being and other stories.</em> Ardent Press, 2007.
Guattari, Fdlix. <em>The Three Ecologies.</em> New Brunswick: Continuum, 2000.
Hume, David. “The Platonist.” In <em>Selected Essays.</em> New York: Oxford, 2008.
Knabb, Ken (ed.). <em>Situationist International Anthology.</em> Revised and expanded edition. Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006.
Landauer, Gustav. “Anarchic Thoughts on Anarchism.” <em>Perspectives in Anarchist Theory</em> 11:1 (Fall 2007).
Lazzarato, Maurizio. “Hurlements en faveur du situationnisme.” <em>Futur anterieur</em> 25-26 (February 1995).
Lyotard, Jean-Frangois. “Caudeau d’organes.” In <em>Derive <X partir de Marx et Freud.</em> Paris: Union G6n6rale d’Editions, 1973.
Mauss, Marcel and Henri Hubert. <em>Sacrifice: Its Nature and Functions.</em> Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. <em>Writings From the Late Notebooks.</em> New York: Cambridge, 2003.
Stirner, Max. <em>The Ego and</em> its <em>Own.</em> New York: Cambridge, 1995.
Vaneigem, Raoul. <em>The Revolution of Everyday Life.</em> London: Rebel Press, 2003. ,
—. <em>The Movement of the Free Spirit.</em> New York: Zone, 1994.
Wilson, Peter Lambom. <em>Escape from the Nineteenth Century.</em> New York: Autonomedia, 1998.
[1] It is additionally appropriate that there are no paintings or photographs of Stirner. There is, of course, that delightfully crude sketch made by Engels from memory - nostalgic, perhaps, for the company of the Free.
[2] “Two Styles of Anti-Statist Subjectivity.”
[3] <em>The Ego and its Own,</em> 316,149. All other references in parentheses in the essay.
[4] I am alluding, of course, to Landauer’s famous description: “The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behavior; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently.” Cited in Buber, <em>Paths in Utopia,</em> 46. Goldman and many others have given similar accounts.
[5] As has been said of a person free of myth, or of the unconscious. Deleuze and Guattari, <em>Anti-Oedipus,</em> 58.
[6] <em>Society of the Spectacle,</em> § 20, translation modified. Debord’s concept of spectacle usefully illustrates the social machines through which such imaginary subjects come to appear real.
[7] The idea of a gift of organs was suggested in a different context by Jean-Frangois Lyotard. I am thinking of all of the nonverbal ways in which we are invited or seduced to join a Cause.
[8] “The Platonist,” 92.
[9] The event of breaking with the Cause is not itself a Cause: however, it is common enough that instances of such breaks are eventually memorialized as part of a new Cause.
[10] <em>Nietzsche and Philosophy,</em> 160.
[11] Ibid., 161.
[12] Ibid., 162. Maurizio Lazzarato once made the same claim for the Situationists: in <em>their</em> generation, they took the dialectic to its limits: “It is the honor of the situationists to have led the dialectic right to its point of disintegration, within the impasse that restrained it, beyond Marx.” I cite from my unpublished translation of “Hurle- ments en faveur du situationnisme.”
[13] Michael Hardt has written some profoundly lucid pages on the relation between absolute annihilation (what some Scholastics called <em>pars</em> destruens) and the dissolution of dialectics in the introduction to his Gilles <em>Deleuze.</em>
[14] One can find some remarks along similar lines in Hakim Bey’s communique “Black Crown and Black Rose: Anarcho-Monarchism and Anarcho-Mysticism." Some of what I write below on the Id also echoes this fine missive.
[15] Stirner’s occasional references to enthusiasm are important. First, they align his thought with a philosophy, stretching back at least to the Enlightenment, that connected revolutionary activities with the dangerous fanaticism they so often reproduce. Second, they underline that the haunting of the world is not merely a matter of minds and ideas. Possession has a strong affective component, and perhaps not even a component. Perhaps all we are thinking through here are forms of the transmission of sadness.
[16] Giorgio Agamben writes: “Do we not see around and among us men and peoples who no longer have any essence or identity - who are delivered over, so to speak, to their inessentiality and their inactivity - and who grope everywhere, and at the cost of gross falsifications, for an inheritance and a task, <em>an inheritance as a task?” (The Open, 76).</em>
[17] See my ‘Two Styles ...” I think there are also many points of comparison, geohistorically speaking closer to Stirner, with the Russian nihilists. We probably need these comparisons since Stirner is clearly the stupidest - not to mention most preposterously racist! - when he stages a crude universal history at the outset of <em>The</em> Ego <em>and its Own.</em>
[18] <em>Escape from the Nineteenth Century,</em> 10. My sense of Landauer is that he would have dissolved this Absolute in the direction I outlined in the previous section—that of annihilating the self. In his case, the inspiration was probably mystical, given his interest in Meister Eckhart and Jewish mysticism.
[19] <em>Creative Evolution,</em> 15. But “life nevertheless manifests a seatSh for individuality, as if it strove to constitute systems naturally isolated, naturally closed.”
[20] I take inspiration here from Felix Guattari’s idea of “vectors of Rectification.” See his discussion in <em>The Three Ecologies,</em> 44-45.
[21] Intercourse can refer to economic exchanges or sexual pleasures. “Intercourse is the enjoyment of the world” (282). Both senses converge here.
[22] “The one-sidedness of Stirner’s notions on the relations with the organization that he enters or leaves at whim (though it does contain a kernel of truth regarding <em>that aspect</em> of freedom) does not allow any independent basis for his passive and defenseless ghost of an ‘organization.’ Such an incoherent and undisciplined organization is at the mercy of any individual ‘egoist,’ who can cynically exploit it for his own ends while disdaining any social aims it might have” (“The Ideology of Dialogue,” in Knabb, 231). This in the course of a defense of the presumably ' disciplined practice of exclusion.
[23] Bergson again: “The organized elements composing the individual have themselves a certain individuality, and each will claim its own vital principle if the individual pretends to have its own. But, on the other hand, the individual itself is not sufficiently independent, not sufficiently cut off from other things, for us to allow it a “vital principle’ of its own” (Creative Evolution, 42-43).
[24] Despret, 97 and passim.
[25] <em>Writings from the Late Notebooks,</em> 178.
[26] Ibid.
[27] <em>Sacrifice, 62.</em>
[28] This notion of sacrifice was clearly important to Raoul Vaneigem in the writing of “Basic Banalities,” reprinted in <em>Situationist International Anthology,</em> and is taken up again in chapter 12 of <em>The Revolution of Everyday life.</em> In this sense he represents the aspect of Situationist theory and practice more receptive to Stirner.
[29] Aside from his better-known texts referenced above, see also <em>The Movement of the Free Spirit.</em>
[30] My understanding of this fine book (also, I might note, signed with a pseudonym) leads me to think that much of what I have written here ought to be consonant with its provocations.
[31] <em>Creative Evolution, 260.</em>
|
#pubdate 2013-03-20 01:22:56 +0000
#title Its core is the negation
#author Alejandro de Acosta
#SORTtopics negation, AJODA, AJODA #74, anti-politics, post-anarchism
#source Retrieved on March 19, 2013 from http://anarchymag.org/index.php/content/current-issue
#date Spring 2013
#lang en
*** 1
I have always considered my inclination to anarchy to be irreducible to a politics. Anarchist commitments run deeper. They are more intimate, concerning supposedly personal or private matters; but they also overflow the instrumental realm of getting things done. Over time, I have shifted from thinking that anarchist commitments are <em>more than</em> a politics to thinking that they are <em>something other</em> than a politics. I continue to return to this latter formulation. It requires thinking things through, not just picking a team; it is more difficult to articulate and it is more troubling to our inherited common sense.[1] I do not think I am alone in this. It has occurred to some of us to register this feeling of otherness by calling our anarchist commitments an <em>ethics.</em> It has also occurred to some of us to call these commitments <em>anti-political</em>. I think these formulations are, for many of us, implicitly interlinked, though hardly interchangeable. What concerns me here in the main is the challenge of what it could mean to live out our commitments as an ethics—though I think the relevance of this thinking to anti-politics will be clarified as well.
I intentionally write ethics, and not morality: as I see it, ethics concerns the flourishing of life, the refinement of desirable ways of life, happy lives. Tiqqun put it well:
When we use the term “ethical” we’re never referring to a set of precepts capable of formulation, of rules to observe, of codes to establish. Coming from us, the word “ethical” designates <em>everything having to do with forms-of-life.</em> ... No formal ethics is possible. There is only the interplay of forms-of-life among themselves, and the protocols of experimentation that guide them locally.[2]
Many of us have been able to reject morality as a form of social control, as the stultifying pressure of the Mass on us, as imposed or self-imposed limitation on what we do and what we are capable of doing. Much the same could be said for any<em></em> <em>ethical universalism</em> which, though emphasizing ways of life and not moral codes or injunctions, tends to homogenize ways of life in the name of a shared good; it does so by surreptitiously presupposing that good and treating it as a natural fact or self-evident transcultural reality. In short, it rejects transcendent morality only to re-introduce it immanently. Our rejection of this single Good went often enough in the direction of <em>pluralism</em>: the story went that there were many Goods, many valid or desirable forms of life. This seemed obvious enough, even intuitive, to many of us. The story went well with anarchist principles of decentralization and voluntary association, and resonated with many in the years when anti-globalization rhetoric emphasized Multiculturalism as a practice of resistance and The Local as the site of its practice. It also made sense, or at least was useful, insofar as it was an efficient way to communicate an anarchist perspective to non-anarchists, especially to potential anarchists.
So here we have two different approaches to ethics. One tries to secure access and orientation to a single flourishing form, the criterion being that it be understandable by all: the Good unifies. The other approach claims that there are many such forms, and this plurality itself is the criterion: the Good distributes itself into Goods. Always suspicious of universalizing claims, for many years I sided (more or less comfortably) with the latter, participating in a game of adding <em>-s</em> to the end of words like people, culture, gender, and so on. Though I was never too concerned to recruit, so that the benefits of communicability were irrelevant to me, this game nevertheless seemed linked to an affirmative gesture, affirmative specifically of difference and plurality in the political sphere. There was always the question of recuperation, i.e. that governmental and other institutions so easily incorporated such pluralism into their functioning as its liberal pole (the conservative pole, which was always present implicitly at least, had to do with norms of governance or rule-following generally). For example, these days university administrations trumpet Multiculturalism louder than anyone else, and Locally Sourced is a hot marketing term. This troubled those of us who took this side, but we countered by emphasizing what could be called raw plurality as opposed to the masticated, digested, and regurgitated version we got from administrators and mouthpieces of all sorts. Choosing pluralism, eagerly or grudgingly, we might have ended up as uneasy relativists; or we might have been working hard to expand the frontiers of liberalism and democracy, there where the word <em>radical</em> finds its most docile partners...[3]
I have come to realize, after what I now recognize to be good deal of confusion, if not unconscious hedging, that even as I labored on the limits of pluralism, my thinking was incongruous with that position. My writing and conversations repeatedly gestured in the direction of another position, irreducible to universalism and ever more desperate attempts at pluralism. It is a<em></em> <em>nihilism</em> that denies the validity of the singular Good at the heart of universalism, as well as the distinct senses of the Good at the heart of pluralism. For nihilists, the only ethical gesture is negative: a rejection of the claims to authority of universalism and pluralism. For us, all such claims are empty, groundless, ultimately meaningless. And this is what was really at stake in distinguishing ethics and morality. My idea of a happy life is not something I reason my way to, or choose, but rather something that manifests senselessly... but I can use my reasoning (my judgment, even!) to help in pushing back, reducing, destroying everything that blocks my way of life.
This report on what must be not only my own trajectory, but also part of the history of the last twenty-five years (more or less for some others) is due in part to some crucial pages in Duane Rousselle’s <em>After Post-Anarchism</em> that<em></em> consolidated <em>this</em> thought of nihilism for me. Rousselle argues that the nihilist position I have just described has always been the ethical core of anarchism, and that we are now in a moment where this may finally be recognized.
*** 2
I want to respond to <em>After Post-Anarchism</em> because it contains that significant provocation.<em></em> Unfortunately, for most of its readers, this book<em></em> cannot but be an exotic object. To whatever degree it discusses familiar ideas or even lived situations, it does so through arcane routes. Yes, it is difficult reading; but it is not by engaging with what is most difficult in it that readers will happen upon the few remarkable insights that it contains. Rousselle’s writing is difficult because of the density of his references and because of an unfortunate penchant for wordiness and digression. Although I would be the last to say that every idea articulated in theoretical or abstract terms can also be phrased in ordinary, so-called accessible language, I suspect that much of what I find valuable in <em>After Post-Anarchism</em> can indeed be restated otherwise. I intend to do so here. As I noted, this aspect of <em>After Post-Anarchism</em> struck me as an unusually clear formulation of thoughts I had been struggling to express for years (among other places, in the pages of this magazine). So, instead of a broader critique of post-anarchism (which Rousselle has a knack for folding back into a plea for its relevance) I will limit myself to some brief remarks about his misprision of the respective roles of theory and practice.[4]<sup></sup>
Post-anarchism receives numerous formulations in this book, but really only two definitions. The first is simply that it is a “discursive strategy” (31): not so much a theory as the outcome of ongoing discussions and debates in a theoretical space where anarchism, post-structuralism, and new social movements (as theorized by their participants and outsiders) intersect. In this respect I could make many objections or clarifications, but I will simply note that for such investigations to proceed as Rousselle intends, anarchism (as “classical anarchism,” 4 and <em>passim</em>) must be interpreted as “anarchist philosophy,” sometimes “traditional anarchist philosophy” (39 and <em>passim</em>).[5] The second definition, which follows from the first but is more provocative, is that post-anarchism “is simply <em>anarchism</em> folded back onto itself” (136). For Rousselle this means an anarchic questioning of the ethical basis of anarchism, a search for the anarchy in anarchism; he later specifies his own version of this folding in terms of the distinction between manifest and latent contents of statements.
Here I can underline both the weakness and the promise of Rousselle’s approach. Whatever the silliness of the term post-anarchism, I think the second definition’s project of questioning, of folding back reflexively, is of interest to any anarchist who does not take their position on questions of morality and ethics (or anything else, for that matter) for granted. When he is pursuing this sort of questioning, Rousselle is at his strongest. When he is treating the anarchist tradition interchangeably as a series of historical figures, events, practices, etc. and as the discursive or conceptual framing that can be abstracted from them (“anarchist philosophy”), he is at his weakest. He repeatedly falls into the intellectualist trap of describing actions as the result of pre-existing theoretical attitudes. “Can we at least provisionally admit,” he asks rhetorically, “that anarchism is not a tradition of canonical thinkers but one of canonical practices based on a canonical selection of ethical premises?” (129). Freeing himself from the idea of an anarchist movement set into motion by a bearded man’s intellect, he remains on the side of the intellect by presupposing of a pre-existing set of premises on which practices are “based” and from which they derive their status as “canonical.”
One more critical remark about the weakness in this approach. Rousselle describes post-anarchism in a third way, and this one is not so much a definition as an illustration. He writes that post-anarchism is the “new paradigm” (126) of anarchist thought: “The paradigm shift... that made its way into the anarchist discourse, as ‘post-anarchism,’ allowed for the realization and elucidation of the ethical component of traditional anarchist philosophy” (129). He is so zealous in his promotion of this term that several times in his book he annexes authors who explicitly reject the term, such as Uri Gordon and Gabriel Kuhn, to the cause. This all seems to me to be in bad taste. There is also a more profound problem at stake: paradigm shifts do not happen because one says they do. The declarative, performative wishes evidenced whenever Rousselle uses the language of advancement or progress, as though what was at stake here was a science, tell us much about his intentions, but always fall flat in terms of convincingness. Even if there is a paradigm shift at work in anarchist theory (or practice!), there is no reason to consider the shift as an improvement. We are probably just catching up to an increasingly complex, chaotic, and uncontrollable world. So I fault him for misunderstanding what a paradigm shift is, for wildly exaggerating the overall importance of post-anarchism, and for framing anarchism too abstractly as an inchoate philosophy. Nevertheless, returning to my principal reasons for writing this essay, I will now praise Rousselle, for some of what he writes about ethics.
*** 3
Early in <em>After Post-Anarchism</em> Rousselle states that, answering what he calls “the question of place” (roughly, on what grounds do you make an ethical claim?) there are three types of responses. There are universalist theories, which state that “there is a shared objective essence that grounds all normative principles irrespective of the stated values of independently situated subjects or social groups” (41). This would include most religiously grounded moralities, as well as appeals to human nature. Most such theories are absolutist, but they need not all be so; utilitarianism is an example of a “normative theory that proposes that the correct solution is the one that provides the greatest good to the majority of the population.” The second set of theories, which corresponds to what I called pluralism in the opening section, is what Rousselle refers to as ethical relativism. “Relativists believe that social groups do indeed differ in their respective ethical value systems and that each respective system constitutes a place of ethical discourse”(43). That is, there are different systems (of belief, culture, custom, etc.) that may ground morals. Again, there is an interesting subset, a limit-case: “At the limit of relativist ethics is the belief that the unique subject is the place from which ethical principles are thought to arise”(43). This corresponds to most types of individualism.
The provocation I am underlining in Rousselle’s book is that, rather than try once more to save pluralism by pushing it farther into a parodic relativism, he pursues what he calls <em>ethical nihilism.</em> His first stab at a definition runs: “ethical nihilism is the belief that ethical truths, if they can be said to exist at all, derive from the paradoxical non-place within the heart of any place” (43). That is, nihilism denies the ground, or at least the grounding or claim to grounding, in ethical universalism and pluralism. “Nihilists seek to discredit and/or interrupt all universalist and relativist responses to the question of place [...] nihilists are critics of all that currently exists and they raise this critique against all such one-sided foundations and systems” (44–45). Obviously, this completes the triplicity with which I began this essay.
It is from this triplicity that Rousselle develops his analysis of ethics in relation to anarchism. Rather than argue about existing moral codes or ethical paths, Rousselle suggests that another position has so far remained largely undiscussed: the nihilist one that rejects the authority or normativity of such argumentation. He states that post-anarchists, so far, have approached “classical anarchism” as a universalism (generally based on human nature) and sought to redistribute its ethical impetus in the direction of relativism. What Rousselle seeks to do, by contrast, is to make explicit the implicit core of classical anarchism; and that core, according to him, is ultimately nihilist. “One must therefore seek to remain consistent with the latent force rather than the manifest structure of anarchist ethics, for there is a negativity that is at the very core of the anarchist tradition” (98–99). Centering his discussion on Kropotkin, Rousselle claims that while Kropotkin’s manifest ethics was clearly universalist (grounded on an appeal to human nature), his latent ethics was nihilist. “If it can be demonstrated that Kropotkin’s system of ‘mutual aid’ also called for the restriction of the free movement of the individual then it can also be argued that his work, like much of traditional anarchist philosophy, was always at war with itself” (146).[6] The ethical nihilism is revealed by chipping away at the manifest content of the old saws, serially revealing the conflicts they conceal, the latent content that was always implied in them:
Anarchists are against the State and Church
<em>implies…</em>
Anarchists are against the structures of representation and power at work in the State and Church
<em>implies…</em>
Anarchists are against any other structures of representation and power analogous to those at work in the State and Church
<em>implies…</em>
Anarchists are against any structure of representation and power
<em>implies…</em>
Anarchists are against all authority, all representation
<em>implies…</em>
Anarchists are against …[7]
Now, most anarchists will drop off at some point in the chain of implication, judging it to have gone too far past what they regard as common sense. (Our enemies might be less inclined to think they have gone too far.) What does this mean? Roughly speaking, that under analysis the initial emphases on opposition to state or religious authority give way to an unbounded hostility to all authority; that the opposition to political representation opens onto being against all representation; and that the critique of the unfoundedness of existing moral codes concludes in a sense of the ungroundedness of all morality. And they do so in two senses: historically, as the overall tendency of anarchism has sufficient time to develop (that it will be repressed and denied by its adherents as well as enemies is not evidence against this); and psychologically or subjectively, since this overall tendency is also an intimate matter in the life of individuals, part of the unconscious of its first and present proponents (and so analogous claims about repression by adherents and enemies most certainly apply).[8]
Rousselle suggests that, although most post-anarchists thought they were improving upon anarchism or developing its intuitions, they were in fact rendering it more docile, because more akin to liberal ideals; he, on the other hand, has revealed its nihilist core, its true and original inclination to anarchy. The problem now becomes: when anarchists disavow this nihilist core, opting for some version of relativism (or universalism!), how do we answer them? For the same reasons that I do not take Kropotkin’s or Bakunin’s manifest ideas as my guides, I do not take what analysis might reveal as their latent content as my guide. And if I do not find this kind of argumentation compelling, why would I use it on another? This is where Rousselle’s intellectualist assumptions undercut the force of his claims. I do think, however, that the ethical nihilist position is at the core of most anarchist discourse and practice, as its latent content. That is, I think he is basically right<em>, not specifically about so-called classical anarchism, but, proximately and for the most part, about anarchists.</em> Rousselle’s psychoanalytically inspired method of reading texts should be transformed into a rhetoric, or rather a counter-rhetoric, that can intervene in the present more directly. What he does with old texts, others might be able to do with people, groups, and contemporary texts. But how and when to use this counter-rhetoric? The least I can say is that I am not in the business of convincing anyone about what they really think. I may well keep my analysis to myself, or state it in resignation of being misunderstood; or I may use it to attack. Whatever the case, the nihilist position will be known in that it exposes the differend between itself and the others, and <em>between the others and themselves.</em>
This is consistent with the basic formulation of nihilism as a negative ethics. Actions taken in its name are always provisional: to reiterate from <em>Theory of Bloom</em>, all we have and all we know is “the interplay of forms-of-life” and “the protocols of experimentation that guide them.” No one knows what the world would be like if it were populated with nihilists alone! Following the previously cited sentence on the negativity at the core of the tradition, Rousselle cites one of his sources, the moral philosopher J.L. Mackie:
[W]hat I have called moral scepticism is a negative doctrine, not a positive one: it says what there isn’t, not what there is. It says that there do not exist entities or relations of a certain kind, objective values or requirements, which many people have believed to exist. If [this] position is to be at all plausible, [it] must give some account of how other people have fallen into what [it] regards as an error, and this account will have to include some positive suggestions about how values fail to be objective, about what has been mistaken for, or has led to false beliefs about, objective values. But this will be a development of [the] theory, not its core: its core is the negation. (99)
In my language, the negation corresponds to ethics as a way of life; the account of error, to what I call a counter-rhetoric. I praise Rousselle, then, because he contributed to a defense of what is negative in anarchism, while also hinting at a defense of negativity as such. He makes space for us to read passages such as the one by Mackie, above, creatively, offering them to us as lessons—logical lessons about what anarchy means. Its core is the negation.
*** 4
Such logical lessons are useful, arguably necessary, if we want to discard hope at this juncture and think with more sobriety. Most of the thinking from this perspective remains to be done. It concerns the conjunctions and disjunctions between several senses of nihilism. First, there are those most familiar in the milieu as positions: nihilist anarchy and nihilist communism. Second, there is nihilism as a theoretical concern in other writers, from Jacobi to Baudrillard. Lastly, there is the diagnostic sense of nihilism inherited from Nietzsche. Articulating these with the ethical nihilism Rousselle discovers/invents at the core of anarchism will be a complicated task, so I will limit myself here to an enumeration of provisional consequences stemming from what I have written so far. I offer these consequences as a relay from <em>After Post-Anarchism’s</em> provocations to the thinking that remains to be done: to make it possible, to prepare it as best I know how. The first two consequences suggest how we might deploy the triplicity to understand and critique contemporary anarchist approaches. The latter two concern the broader relevance and context for ethical nihilism, setting out from the anarchist context.
The first consequence is that it is now clear that <em>many contemporary anarchists confusedly combine ethical universalism with ethical pluralism; and ethical universalism with ethical nihilism.</em> In a society like ours, one whose ideal is supposedly liberal democracy, we should expect pluralist language to be the most likely one in which radicals will offer their analysis and proposals. Community organizing, consciousness-raising, and so on, have obvious links to liberalism and are at best its radical forms. As a result, moralistic types — those who publically advocate a renewal of society, an improvement of government and management (as self-government, self-management), suggesting pluralist approaches — are likely to refuse to discuss or make explicit the universalist core of their thought. Others might advocate the same practices, while privately sensing or even admitting the hollowness of the values they defend. (One disingenuous result of these private/public conflicts is the unrestrained impulse to act no matter what, as though action can never be damaging or compromised, coupled with claims that it is all an experiment, that we are learning as we go, and so on.) This offers a new perspective on the emergence and significance of second-wave anarchy[9] generally, including post-Left anarchy, green/anti-civilization anarchy, and, I suppose, post-anarchism as well, all of which might now be seen as attempts to analyze and reveal these contradictions, to make explicit the ways in which anarchist discourse was always at war with itself.
The second consequence complements the first: another set of anarchists <em>confuses</em> <em>ethical pluralism with ethical nihilism.</em> Here<em></em> <em>merely stating the ethical nihilist position coherently has effects</em>. In this respect I think of those who might have overcome the liberal value-set in politics, advocating destruction of the existent, but continue to drift back to pluralist/relativist perspectives in everyday life and problem-solving due to a lack of imagination. This probably results from unconsciously positing a pluralist society as what comes after a destructive moment, while not consciously framing destructive action as having any particular goal beyond destruction of the existent. I should add here that it would be hasty to collapse the ethical nihilist position into any one practice or set of practices. Destructive practices, partial or absolute, do not follow mechanically from negation. Destruction is not the practical application of a negative theory. I am certainly not saying that destruction is not worthwhile as a practice or set of practices; but I am saying that nihilists by definition reject the overidentification of any practice with their negation of existing moralities and normative approaches to ethics. It is my sense that, once the nihilist position exists as something other than a caricature, the other positions will be increasingly undermined from within and without.
The third consequence is that <em>ethical nihilism is more than a theory.</em> It is a way of living and thinking, a form-of-life in which the two are not separate. That Rousselle discusses it only as a theory leaves it to the rest of us to elaborate what else it is, what it looks like, as some say, or how it is practiced. It is my sense that he was able to write this book because of events and situations in his life, in the milieu, in other places. So when I invoke the practical aspect of nihilism, having already said that it cannot be reduced to any practice or set of practices, I mean two things. First, that I mean to underline the unusual tone of all the practices of those that accept some version of the perspective that there is no Outside (to capitalism, civilization, or the existent), or that are profoundly skeptical about any proposed measures to get Outside. Second, that to speak of practices related to ethical nihilism continues to make it seem like a theory that endorses or suggests a course of action, while its interest is precisely that it may not do so. Monsieur Dupont’s phrase Do Nothing is relevant here: “Do Nothing... was and remains a provocation. [...] Do Nothing is an immediate reflection of Do Something and its moral apparatus.”[10] From weird practices to doing nothing: this is precisely the enigmatic space where anti-politics converges with ethics. Yes, there is a gap, perhaps a colossal gap, between the implosion-moment of societies like ours and the eternal meaninglessness of value claims and moral codes. Anti-politics might be said only to address the former, while ethical nihilism ultimately invokes the latter. But anti-politics may also reveal ethical nihilism; our willful action may accelerate the ex- or implosion of the world to reveal more of the meaninglessness it has been designed to conceal.
The fourth consequence is that <em>nihilism is also a condition</em>. It is not merely those who make it their business to think and act in the world that are living with nihilism. The force of ethical nihilism is not so much in being a position one advocates as in its undermining of others’ claims to certainty. If we are able to do this sometimes it is because there are many others who, in a rapidly decomposing society, more or less consciously grasp the hollowness in every code of action. Take this passage from Heidegger as an illustration:
The realm for the essence and event of nihilism is metaphysics itself, always assuming that by “metaphysics” we are not thinking of a doctrine or only of a specialized discipline of philosophy but of the fundamental structure of beings in their entirety ... Metaphysics is the space of history in which it becomes destiny for the supersensory world, ideas, God, moral law, the authority of reason, progress, the happiness of the greatest number, culture, and civilization to forfeit their constructive power and to become void.[11]
Dare I add here that something of this condition was also gestured toward in a few precious texts on postmodernism, texts which raised tremendous questions about their present, and by extension ours, only to be buried in an avalanche of increasingly unimaginative discussions, as if to systematically shut down the possibility of such questioning?
What these four consequences add up to is perhaps something on the order of a paradigm shift that some of us are perhaps dimly beginning to perceive. Or perhaps it is much bigger and more terrifying than a paradigm shift could ever be. Rousselle overestimates the importance and centrality of post-anarchism to anarchist theory (and, needless to say, various milieus), and his claim that his theorizing after post-anarchism consolidates the shift from pluralist/relativist post-anarchism, with its reformist and radical liberal tendencies, and a fully nihilist theory expressing the latent destructive content of anarchism, is misplaced. But increasing emphasis on nihilist ideas, and the increasing prevalence of what could be called nihilist measures, is a condition that involves us all to some degree. And we have tried to think it through and respond. The call for an end to government instead of a better, more democratic, more egalitarian form of government is ancient. The call for the abolition of work instead of just, fair, or dignified work is decades old, at least. How many of us no longer criticize competition so as to contrast it with cooperation, but because the victory it offers is laughably meaningless? How many of us have more or less explicitly shifted from advocating a plurality of genders to pondering the conditions for the abolition of gender as such? What to make of the increasing opposition to programmatism[12] and demands in moments of confrontation and occupation?
I intuit two things here: that pluralism seems to continually reveal its relativist core more and more often, and that the revelation of the relativist core will make it increasingly easier for the nihilist position to be stated, with all of its disruptive effects. Conversely, as I have suggested, <em>merely stating the nihilist position coherently has effects</em>. I propose that those interested make it their business to <em>deploy the triplicity.</em> To which I will immediately add: <em>there will be stupid and parodic versions of this moment</em>. <em>For some of us this moment will be lived entirely as parody and stupidity.</em> But there will also be, for some, an opportunity to refine what <em>our</em> anarchism has always meant, not as the direction history or society is going in, not as the truth of a tradition, or as an ideal of any sort, but as that which breaks from such orientations in the most absolute sense: the negating prefixes <em>a-, an-</em>, <em>anti-...</em> anti-politics as a provisional orientation, branching out into countless refusals.[13] Our ethics emerges and gives itself to thought only where breaks and refusals clear a sufficient space. We know almost nothing about such spaces, so our ethics might also be defined as the provisional <em>disorientation</em> with which we approach our ways of living, the interminable and necessary <em>skepticism</em> that characterizes our thinking’s motion.
[1] “<em>Il senso più comune non è il più vero</em>,” wrote the heretic Giordano Bruno: “The most common sense is not the truest.” The type of thinking I invoke here takes its distance from what the Mass regards as common sense.
[2] <em>Theory of Bloom</em>, LBC Books version, 144. These phrases condense an entire trajectory of writing on ethics that encompasses Deleuze, Agamben, and Badiou, beginning, naturally, with Spinoza and Nietzsche.
[3] It is also fair to say that, since pluralism is such a key aspect of liberalism, many anarchists simply cling to a kind of radicalized liberalism as their ethics, and their politics, not because of any gaps in their thinking, but because they actually are radical liberals. The problem, of course, is either that they do not recognize it, or that they will not admit it. At least Chomsky, in the 1970 lecture “Government in the Future,” admitted as much, advocating a confluence of radical Marxism and anarchism as “the proper and natural extension of classical liberalism into the era of advanced industrial society.”
[4] I do not intend to attack what is all too easy to criticize in a book framed as an intervention into post-anarchism, a topic that I am not concerned with, and which I am sure is less than popular with the readership of <em>AJODA</em>. I happily leave the task of settling the accounts of this book with the proponents and opponents of post-anarchism to those who find it worthwhile. I similarly leave to one side the discussion of the relation of Georges Bataille’s ideas to ethical nihilism in the book’s final chapter.
[5] Rousselle only makes occasional references to “classical” anarchists other than Kropotkin, who is his major case study. I take it this is because Kropotkin is thought of as the most explicitly ethical of the original anarchists, and also because he has been the object of sustained attention among post-anarchists.
[6] Rousselle frames this claim as a claim about theory, and the conditions under which theories are formulated. He does not frame this as a historical argument, although the idea of conditions obviously implies theory. For example, he references in passing the shared approach of the Russian Nihilists and Kropotkin in a discussion of an article by John Slatter: “Slatter took Kropotkin at his word when he argued that ‘[anarchists must] bend the knee to no authority whatsoever, however respected [...] accept no principle so long as it is unestablished by reason’ (Kropotkin as quoted in Slatter, 261). Here, however, Kropotkin’s rationalism was maintained but only to reveal a useful parallel: ‘The appeal to reason rather than to tradition or custom in moral matters is one made earlier in Russian intellectual history by the so-called ‘nihilists’’ (ibid.). Like Kropotkin, the Russian ‘nihilists’ (or ‘The New People’, as they were called) adopted a rationalist/positivist discourse as a way to achieve a distance from the authority of the church and consequently from metaphysical philosophies. The meta-ethics of Kropotkin’s work … thus reveals, not ‘mutual aid,’ but a tireless negativity akin to the spirit of the Russian nihilists: ‘[the anarchist must] fight against existing society with its upside-down morality and look forward to the day when it would be no more’ (Kropotkin as cited by Slatter, ibid)” (146–147).
[7] This is my way of rewriting the contrast between manifest and latent content that Rousselle derives from Freud. Rousselle’s way of explicating this has but two statements, one showing the latent content of the other through elimination. Mine has more to do with pushing a thought to its limit. They converge in that, for this to happen, thinking has to engage with the unthought: …
[8] This is obviously where one should reiterate the argument made by Shawn Wilbur and Jesse Cohn against the first wave of post-anarchists: they had built their collective case on a caricaturesque reduction of historical anarchists in their reconstruction of “classical anarchism.” Many egoists, for example, explicitly stated what Rousselle claims can only be grasped as a latent content (i.e. what appears only when explicit statements are analyzed). The best one can say about Rousselle’s analysis in this regard is that it destabilizes what many consider to be the center and the margins of the anarchist tradition, or canon. But it does leave one wondering why he discusses Kropotkin at such length instead of Stirner or Novatore, for example, who are referenced only in passing. Is there something at stake for him in emphasizing ethical nihilism as a latent content as opposed to a manifest one?
[9] For those not familiar with it, this term was introduced by John Moore to refer to anarchist theory and practice after the Situationist International. It might be considered telling that Moore offered the term in a review of a foundational post-anarchist book by Todd May. The review was originally published in <em>Anarchist Studies</em>, but I know it from a zine called <em>Second Wave Anarchy.</em>
[10] <em>Nihilist Communism</em>, 198.
[11] “Nietzsche’s word: God is Dead,” in <em>Off the Beaten Track</em>, 165.
[12] A useful term I borrow from <em>Théorie Communiste</em>. As they define it: “a theory and practice of class struggle in which the proletariat finds, in its drive toward liberation, the fundamental elements of a future social organisation which become the programme to be realised. This revolution is thus the affirmation of the proletariat, whether as a dictatorship of the proletariat, workers’ councils, the liberation of work, a period of transition, the withering of the state, generalised self-management, or a ‘society of associated producers’.” “Much Ado About Nothing,” in <em>Endnotes</em> 1, 155.
[13] Speaking for myself, I underestimated the negative in the political sphere, the power of negativity (the attitude towards world, society, spectacle, whatever sets itself up as the All). My temperament led me to emphasize ethical questions about how to live a life of joy, about the places of affirmation (individualism/egoism, the aesthetic sensibility that never lies). I do think one can affirm one’s own life, affirm the nothing in it, so to speak, as one resists. Until I realized this, I drifted near this space, but never really knew it. I remained confused about the negative, about the effectiveness of the prefixes <em>a-, an-</em>, <em>anti- …</em>
|
#title That Teaching is Impossible
#subtitle How to Live Now or Never
#author Alejandro de Acosta
#LISTtitle That Teaching is Impossible
#SORTauthors Alejandro de Acosta
#SORTtopics education, anti-politics
#date 2014
#source How to Live Now or Never
#lang en
#pubdate 2018-02-16T06:09:50
*** 1
That <em>teaching is impossible</em> is not a proposition to be argued for. It would be of little interest to offer it up for debate. It would be useless to defend it against the evidence of history or common sense. To consider that teaching is impossible is to open ourselves up to an experience of the most outlandish sort. In staging this experience I wish to contemplate the happy frustration of the urge to teach, and to affirmatively invoke the limits of all pedagogies.
It is useful for anyone who thinks that they teach to explore their urge to do so. This urge is an intimate matter, the libidinal support for the innocent claim that good ideas ought to be passed on to others. I call the claim innocent in that it usually leaves the good of ideas (and the Idea of the Good) implicit and unexamined; since the good remains unexamined, people may obtusely invoke their mere participation in efficient schooling as evidence that teaching is possible. That the school, as institution, survives; that the role of teacher is understood primarily in reference to the survival of the institution: these seem to be the only evidences necessary. But one can at least begin to account for and explore the complex of desires that aim at the role of teacher. Some of them wear the mask of the ego: I am the one who impresses the lessons.
Beyond the ego-mask, moving, that is, from what appears as inner to what appears as outer, one may observe the inevitable calcification of the urge to teach into the kinds of systems we call pedagogies. These may be described as organizations, not just of knowledge and methods of passing it on, but primarily of desire. They are institutional manifestations of the urge to teach, or rather, they are the ways in which the urge to teach, combined with other urges, invents for itself a gregarious existence, a school: This is where the lessons are impressed. In this sense, pedagogies may also be characterized as the fantasy of the efficacy of the urge to teach.
To say or think that teaching is impossible is to let go, however temporarily, of both the urge to teach and its more or less precisely formed collusions with other urges in gregarious forms, affirming rather that study is interminable, and so learning is endlessly frustrated and frustrating. To say or think that teaching is impossible is to assert that teaching on purpose, for a purpose, is impossible. For the urge in its gregarious form has other purposes, which concern the person of the teacher, his role, her specialization, in the context of the school; it has nothing in particular to do with learning. I am inclined to think that neither do schools. What anyone who thinks they are a teacher can do purposely is mainly of two natures:
— One can transmit data, information. This is better known as communication. It is commonly assimilated to teaching, but, as students well know, really has nothing to do with it. This transmission is eminently possible and does not require a teacher.
— One can model behaviors and practices, silently offering them up for imitation. This is not only possible, but inevitable. But to whatever extent we do it for a purpose, it is for one other than to teach them. In this modeling we exceed the role of the teacher.
Pedagogy, then, is precisely the in-between of the ego-mask and the school, their mutual insertion, the becoming-method or becoming-gregarious of an urge in a fantasy: This how the lessons are impressed. In this sense to say or think that teaching is impossible is also to invoke the countless ways that learning takes place despite and beyond pedagogy. This is the beginning of the antipedagogical lesson. Let us consider it.
*** 2
Sometimes, I think that I teach. When I do so I imagine I am not alone in underlining the evident gap between discussing practices and engaging in them. Classrooms have this virtue, that in them almost anything may be said; but to the degree that the desires that allow us to survive in such spaces remain unexamined, we will tend to confuse the ability to say almost anything with the ability to do almost anything. This gap in capacity is especially manifest for me in the context of philosophy or anthropology, in courses that take up topics such as spiritual exercises, mysticism, shamanism, or the many practices that P. Hadot calls <em>philosophy as a way of life</em>. I mean any topic where what is posited is not merely thinking differently in the context of a given way of life, but a thinking that (because it is not just a thinking) requires a conversion. Becoming someone or something else, living differently, in short. One can certainly talk about such matters endlessly, treating them as historical or sociological facts, without grasping what is vital in them — without, that is, being transformed in the doing.
The minimum form of the affirmation that teaching is impossible would then be that with regard to practices that require a conversion, at least, teaching is impossible. I found in myself, not just an urge to teach, to be the teacher, but to teach these topics, and the urge was frustrated. The role of teacher became, if not impossible, at least somewhat laughable. The reason was clear enough. No one can teach such practices in a school unless it is the school of such practices: Epicureanism needs the Garden. Thinking I taught, I communicated information concerning these practices, but at a great remove; I did not model them. Moreover, some of them seem separate from any known pedagogy: mystics don’t seem to me to have a school, but rather to be those who are usually expelled from schools. This not because schools are dogmatic or authoritarian (though of course most are), but because of the sort of experience that mysticism seems to entail. (Or maybe not. One might go so far as to consider the maximum form of the claim, that the problem has to do with practice as such, with any practice other than those peculiar to schools as we know them.)
So what is left in such situations? The mere intention to teach what is impossible to teach, I suppose: the urge in its raw and complicated form, not its calcification into a pedagogy. We can try to collectively give in to the will to knowledge, to more than idle curiosity. That is, to what is in fact possible given the practices and ways of life that make schools as we know them possible. (As opposed to, and without in anyway devaluing, those that destroy them, or mutate them until they are unrecognizable.) But I find that this will and that curiosity are unevenly distributed. You, teacher, must seduce your students into a certain fascination. That is what I call modeling, at least when modeling has a chance of success. It is akin to what psychoanalysts call the transference, or to hypnosis when it is grasped that what is at stake in it is something other than mind control, that the one hypnotized must at some level accept the process. It must involve your body, teacher, your gestures, movements, laughter: the mask, its generation, and its corruption. Those particulars can never be bypassed in the mimesis of the model.
But even if the will to knowledge or more than idle curiosity can be modeled and imitated, (and I do think that they can, on purpose and accidentally as well!) I do not think it is wise to claim that teaching has therefore happened, and is therefore possible. Something else is at stake. In modeling, the teacher’s ego-mask is revealed in its development (from the urge to the role), but also in its happy failure: the failed transition from the urge through the role to its calcification as pedagogy and its sedimentation in schooling are all provisionally laid bare. In at least one important sense, the teacher is naked. What has been modeled and perhaps imitated is still quite separate from the topics in question, from the experiences at stake in them. What has been staged is rather an antipedagogical problem.
*** 3
Can one pass on anything other than the will to knowledge and more than idle curiosity? What about less exotic practices, those that seem more at home in what we know as schools? For two years I was part of a university committee concerned with feminist studies. Once, in the course of a review of our work, we tried to define what constituted, for us, a specifically feminist pedagogy. The conversation was both frustrating and (at least for me) quite amusing. (Giving students a greater role in planning the curriculum, someone suggested. Allowing people to speak from their experience, another said. Encouraging connections between class readings and real-world issues, a third added. And so on.) The more concepts and examples that we collectively proposed, the clearer it became that we could produce no difference between a specifically feminist pedagogy and good pedagogy in general. It seemed as if the problem was that we had it as our goal to stay away from the humdrum of the generic, unmarked good, and to cleave rather to a more rarefied good, the sharp edge of feminist politics. But in that humdrum, generic, unmarked mainstream, there are said to be good teachers, are there not? Is their pedagogy not good? Many, arguably most, of them are in no way feminists. Our true problem was not our desire to cling to the specificity of feminism — it was that we assumed that we were the ones who impressed its lesson, that our school was where the lesson was to be impressed, and that feminism, our method, our pedagogy, was to be how the lesson was to be impressed. We had supposed that teaching is possible.
Do these assumptions have anything to do with feminism as a way of life? If feminism can be learned, not as a set of theories or ‘studies’, but as an attitude, as something that can grow into a resistant politics, it is because some of us are capable of modeling it as it exists and develops in our lives. As such it has zero informational content, or its content is incidental. That something like feminism exists at all suggests that it was, at some point, invented. At that time those who invented it were not producing new information (at least that was not what was remarkable in their invention). They were problematizing existing practices and the ways of life they flowed out of and into, proposing new ones. That something like feminism is still possible, still remarkable, suggests that someone can stage that problematization anew, in effect reinventing feminism. What does any of this, however, have to do with schooling?
The committee’s troubling, unstated conclusion was that we, presumably experts in feminism as study, could not guarantee that, in teaching classes with feminist content, we were teaching feminism. (A student could, for example, pass a course with flying colors and in some fundamental way remain oblivious to sexism. The same went for us as teachers of the course). Or, if we were teaching feminism, we could not define in what ways we were doing so in the context of feminist studies.
It ought to be clear by now that this version of the antipedagogical problem does not merely concern feminism. So, where to go from here? One familiar path is that of a certain ressentiment, leveraged in this case against the good teachers who do not mark the differences that we do, leveraged against students who do not become feminists or whose feminism is alien to us, leveraged ultimately against ourselves, in our inevitable failure. This ressentiment is fed by the failure of an ideal of representation and inclusivity (its index: the presence of a certain sort of data, of information) to effect anything other than a reform in schooling — in the curriculum, I mean, in studies, defined according to the standards, the good, of what we know as schools.
Another path, which I admit I fell into as if by instinct, would be that of bemusement. It would be to simultaneously admit that teaching is impossible and that feminism, if it is a form of resistance and not just of study, will be reinvented quite despite those of us who, well-meaning, might think we are teaching it.
*** 4
Let us consider, then, the lesson of resistance, turning from reformist to revolutionary pedagogies. Another university tale: I was once asked to speak at a symposium called “Achieving Success as a Latino.” I was asked by the organizers to address the difficulties Latinos and Latinas might encounter at a predominantly Anglo institution: obstacles, more generally, that all minorities face in the educational system. I said more or less the following: I don’t want to speak purely in praise of schooling, the overcoming of obstacles as progress, confusing the efficacy of schooling with the unqualified good of learning. I want to affirm learning in its entirety and as a process, with all of its conflicts and breakdowns, not to adopt a narrative of successes in the face of hardships. I regard phenomena such as Latinas dropping out of school, not going to college, feeling alienated in college, not just as problems to be solved institutionally, by schools or by groups in schools acting as their proxy. If we view all of these ‘problems’ as negativities, deficiencies, bad attitudes, we miss their complexity, what in them is positive, is desire. I think Latinos and everybody else have countless reasons and ways to engage with schools. I also think that Latinas (and everybody else!) have good reasons to resist some or all of what is institutionalized as education. Among other things, I am referring to what we know as schools: generally, spaces where training, discipline, authoritarianism, bureaucracy, are made more or less efficacious; spaces that are often culturally hostile or indifferent, etc.
A young Latino indeed ought to ask himself, What is school to me? Why should I risk my life for this ? — of course life here is not the life taken away by the gun or torture, but the life of one’s barrio, community, friends, family — because many aspects of what it means to feel in one’s own skin, at home, or in a community are threatened in schools. That’s on the side of the construction of identity, a sense of self. On the side of the destruction of identity, the desire that so many of us have to overcome what we’ve been told we are — that process and its freedom are also threatened in that schooling has always had to do with acculturation to a dominant culture, language, religion, etc. And also in the sense that schools neither teach nor favor rebellion. Institutionally this is discussed in terms of curriculum and catchphrases like campus climate, diversity, etc., but I think the real issue is one of power and gregarious desires: the school’s explicit and implicit hierarchies and their insertion into greater social arrays. Let us consider those seen as problems or at least having problematic attitudes as resisting. I think that they are right to do so, at least as right as the schools in exercising power and modeling gregariousness. Some are more at home here than others. People inhabit, move through, move in and out of a school, at different speeds, for different reasons, in different moods, using different gaits. To regard resistance as a problem to be resolved by the school, or by us as its proxy, is to fully reinforce the role of the teacher in the school: I am the one who solves this problem — I transform this problem into the good of the lesson.
The critical question is: how are we using the school? What are we doing here if teaching is impossible? And this implies its converse: how is it using us? What is it doing with or to us (acknowledging that it is not a thing or subject, but the anonymous, gregarious actions of others)?
*** 5
That talk ended with a proposal that I now recognize as well-intentioned (perhaps influenced by the good intentions of the symposium’s planners) but poorly thought out. It was a gesture characteristic of a certain anarchism that claims for itself the side of the good, that proposes its revolutionary politics as the staging of the ultimate good.
I said: So much for the side of the institution! Schooling doesn't — can't — end there. Gregariousness certainly does not. It is part of being engaged with an institution, resistantly or not, that one tends to orient much of one’s discourse and practices around the institution. (Supposing one wanted to define institutions, it might be worthwhile to begin by describing the various forms of this operation of capture.) It takes some distance (and dropping out, along with the other forms resistance takes, is a way to attain that distance) to be able to speak of schools as I have been doing, or of pedagogy as an outgrowth of the urge to teach. But really, there are schools everywhere. If I were to discuss the other possibilities for schooling I could of course talk about activism, popular education, etc., but I would rather race to the utopian end and propose that schools should have the ultimate goal of abolishing themselves as particular, separate, specialized spaces. My political proposal is that all of society be a school: that the social field be coeval with the space of learning. This means, of course, that there would be a series of spaces, remarkable places of learning, rather than one megainstitution. It could come about through a collaboration between those happiest with schools as we know them, and those who resist or refuse schooling, relatively or absolutely.
My anti-political criticism of that political proposal is that making a plan for all of society (especially one with a grandiose slogan such as abolish schools as separated spaces!) without aiming at annihilating what we know as society is to give ourselves a Cause. The Cause of Making All of Society into A School. Now the mask is transformed. I am no longer in the role of teacher, but that of teacher-activist: I am still the one who resolves this problem — now putatively through revolution instead of reform. Schooling would be coeval with society in the worst sense, fostering in people not only the illusion that teaching is possible, but that freedom can be taught (anarchist pedagogy in its most nightmarish form). We would have set out with the best of intentions and ended up with the most grotesque gregariousness. It is true that study is interminable and that schools are everywhere; but schooling is not for all that omnipresent — it can and does end.
I would rather restate that teaching is impossible (and this time perhaps the modesty of the claim, so hard to see at first, begins to shine through). To focus our efforts, our analyses, on failure and resistance is to grasp the eccentric but vital role of modeling in the transmission of practices. It is inevitable that modeling will meet resistance. A model may be imitated, counterimitated, or met with sovereign indifference. We might cooperate, we might fight, or we might ignore each other. In that social chaos, in its interstices of order and stillness, someone might learn something. But nothing about this can be guaranteed. Why assume, why hope, even, that we will all collaborate? Why sculpt the mask in a way that arrogantly banks on success? It is the urge to teach, again reaching for the form of its survival. I impress the lesson that schooling is interminable.
*** 6
I have already said that modeling is inevitable, and implied that it maybe done more or less purposefully. This is difficult because we habitually vibrate in sync with others who share our models, and in this local phenomenon the entirety of our interactions is to effect tiny variants, microimitations and counterimitations, of each other’s practices. The micropolitics of power; or, a day in school. But modeling is also impersonal and indefinite. Its tautological claim: I am the one who lives as I live or even I am the one who expresses the model that I am modeling.
The fullness of a self or a person is, as far as I am concerned, always and only an artifice, that of an apparently completed mask. The mask of the teacher, however, is incomplete. To think, to say, to embody I am the one who impresses the lesson is to simplify, to fool ourselves into identifying with our own mask, to frustrate the many other desires clamoring against the role, demanding, if you will, other masks. To seduce anyone else (to seduce oneself!) into fascination with a model is something else than to mistake oneself for the one who impresses the lessons. It is rather to display the urge, the mask, the frustrated tendencies to pedagogy and schooling, with all of their defects and failures — the failures of the simple mask of the teacher, the gregarious phenomenon of the school, and ultimately the failure of method, of all pedagogy. This impersonation shows what in the urge to teach is impersonal.
One way to conceive of this impersonality is the <em>silent teaching</em> R. Blyth reports on in his books on Zen.
<em>We teach silently and only silently, though we may be silent or talk.</em>
Silence: the offering up of the model for imitation, with no attendant command to imitate (or maybe with the most parodic of commands). Informationless speech, laughter, sighs... your body, again, teacher, in its becoming-mask. Everything else is a dance of data.
Irreparably, to live is to offer one’s life up for imitation. People teach what they can. People teach what they teach. Everybody teaches everybody else.
This is what I was getting at in deemphasizing the distinction between what can be passed on purposely and what is passed on inevitably. I am more interested in whether such things are done gracefully, as one may live one’s life more or less gracefully. And perhaps the most graceful lesson is that teaching is impossible. But how is that to be passed on?
<em>The only way to teach not teaching is really not to teach.</em>
*** 7
One final antipedagogical lesson, this one specifically for my friends, the anarchists. I hope it is clear that I have written from my own resistance. I like to think that, despite my several decades of study, I have resisted schooling. But my distance is double, since I observe that I maintain a willful incompetence when it comes to political movements that amounts to a form of resistance. There are, after all, schools everywhere! It is my style, my predilection, my wu wei regarding schooling, regarding the roles of academics and activists. I believe that everything I have proposed about the urge to teach, about schools, and about pedagogy applies mutatis mutandis to activism, organizing, movements. Try the experiment yourself: go to a rally or meeting looking for teaching. You will find it. Ah, the pedagogy of rallies and meetings!
Some activists and their theorist friends are busy looking to the primitive past or the utopian future for a humanity without social institutions, as though discovering their absence someplace, somewhere, could lead to their amelioration or eradication today. Now, the absence of a given institution, especially one that I find intolerable, such as money or the police, is indeed a fascinating question for study. But study is interminable; it only leads to more study. I prefer to add to study another practice, to model a kind of disappearance, an incompetence that is a way to absent oneself from routinized activities on the side of schools as well as the side of the movements. It is possible to live this as something other than a negation. And as in all modeling, what I can do is simply to offer up the urge to teach and the urge to act as some desires among many. We can try to (and I suppose that we should) eradicate whatever social institutions we find to be intolerable; but we can also do what we can, silently, to lay bare our desires as we discover them, our social teachings as they meet resistances that, after all, have their reasons. We can be naked, with a mask on. Naturally, to call oneself an anarchist is to wear a fanciful mask: <em>I am the one who</em>... But if anarchism is our perhaps inevitable pedagogy, anarchy could be something else: our antipedagogy.
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#title The Game That Instructs
#author Alejandro de Acosta
#date 2010(?)
#source Retrieved on July 8, 2025 from https://theanvilreview.org/print/the-game-that-instructs/
#lang en
#pubdate 2025-07-08T20:20:42
#topics The Anvil Review, games, play
#notes The Anvil Review - contestation, transgression, engagement - https://theanvilreview.org
*** 1
A few years ago, I was asked by some friends to write on play and games for <em>Anarchy</em>. I sent them an essay, entitled “A Funny Thought Concerning a New Way to Play,” in which I insisted above all on a certain <em>attitude</em>: a deep distaste for competition, for the unkind imposition of arbitrary rules and the unthinking acceptance of them. I continue to find that healthy. Beyond that attitude, the interest of the essay is that it maintains:
a) that everything we do is in some sense a game, and
b) that the apparently discrete and rule-bound activities we usually consider games are for the most part not the kind of game in question.
I am also still happy with the conceit I shared in this regard, the idea of a cosmic, chaotic game that bleeds into every discrete, ordinary game. And I am still playing, still dreaming, still trying to forget the game of the thesis. So I review my own writing here to refine that conceit.
Illustrating the concept of the cosmic game, I had recourse to a fine chapter in Deleuze’s <em>Logic of Sense</em>, adopting his distinction between Normal Games and the Ideal Game.
<quote>
What I have been calling discrete or ordinary games, Deleuze dubbed Normal Games, suggesting that they are “mixed‚” — they involve chance, of course, but “only at certain points”; the rest of their play (?) “refers to another type of activity, labor, or morality.” We can think of social activities as games … only because we think of games in the restricted, “mixed” economy of Normal Games that involve the acceptance of rules and a possible competition. That is, normal games always refer their play to a norm that is taken to be serious, outside of the play-sphere.
The Ideal Game is Deleuze’s name for this funny thought of the cosmic game or the play of the world. It has no rules and is entirely too chaotic to allow for any skillful use of chance (meaning the mechanical consequences of well-executed moves). Every Normal Game flirts with chance to some degree or another, and plays, Deleuze wrote, at mastering it. And if one is serious one might think one has.
</quote>
In adopting this distinction, I made a double objection:
<quote>
My problem with Deleuze’s version of the Ideal Game is that he states, first of all, that it can’t be played “by either man or God.” Worse, “it would amuse no one.” He writes that, ultimately, “it can only be thought as nonsense.” I wonder why this did not suggest another idea of play and of amusement, such that, not negating but simply and nonsensically contradicting the first two claims, the Ideal Game can’t but be played by people and Gods (if any); and it not only amuses everyone but is precisely the Amusing as such!
</quote>
Both aspects of this double ojection now strike me as silly. First, to invert the claim that the Ideal Game can’t be played by either man or God was a clumsy move. It would have been more interesting, and also nonsensical in a more modest, more subtle way, to agree. I now think Deleuze was showing that, from the point of view of the Ideal Game, both humanism and divine anthropomorphism are rendered ultimately impossible. From that perspective, God and Man never really play. They are immediately transformed, cancelled, rendered radically other, so that these words turn out to be signs of stranger, more wonderful processes. Insofar as such mirages have any consistency (I won’t write reality), they name players of normal games (Creation, anyone?): mixtures, as Deleuze wrote, of play and work, chance and rules well followed. Is anyone surprised? God and Man are always primarily at work. That is what History teaches.
What about Deleuze’s second statement: ” it would amuse no one”? I held out the possibility that perhaps the Ideal Game “is the Amusing as such.” Now I want to ask: amusing for whom? Not for Man or God, as I think I’ve established – they work and play in their normal games, and work at least cannot be amusing. It is serious, rigorous, painful. (I leave it to you to discern if even the play component of normal games is ever amusing). So who is amused? <em>Personne</em>, as it is said in French: anyone, nobody. But that anonymous person is a mask to be sculpted, not a pre-existent fact. It would have been more interesting to agree, again, and draw this conclusion: if the Ideal Game were the Amusing as such, then some minimum permanent amusement would have to be guaranteed. That is, the Ideal Game would have to be conceived not as the impossible Idea of Play but as the all too possible guarantee of amusement. I think that is also called heaven. Or the dull utopia of our more secular, still silly friends who think that the play of the world is progressive and make plans accordingly. Is anyone surprised? Amusement is not guaranteed. That is what History teaches.
How could it be more interesting to agree that the Ideal Game amuses no one? This is what is most difficult. The Ideal Game, if one accepts that its play dissolves God and Man in chaos, is not amusing because it can never be determined ahead of time who is amused or what is amusing. We can go on playing normal games, or attempt to open them up to their Outside, the Ideal Game. Of course, they are already so opened. The question is to know it, to show it, and to play according to this intuition. The success of this operation is no more guaranteed than victory in a normal game, but it is far more desirable. There must be an unevenly distributed virtuosity in the ability to know and show this opening, to act on it. (And this is perhaps the only way that desire and virtue may be related). More straightforwardly I mean that it is not only dull, but impossible, to be God or Man outside of one or more normal games – so the bleed is how we become someone or something else, whoever or whatever is amused.
Becoming whoever or whatever is amused by the Ideal Game is necessarily uncertain. It is the most delicate of processes, the most unpredictable of undertakings. In these mutations we might discover what I consider to be the sole healthy use of hope: we may hope for amusement, hope to become those who are amused (and amusing?!).
*** 2
An aside for the curious: how could exposure to the Ideal Game transform the sense of our old motto “<em>ni dieux ni maître</em>“? I suppose its destructive intuition remains intact. It was always a matter of playing certain historical or political games so that Gods and Masters were excluded. But its rage is perhaps diffused into a bizarre comedy. <em>Ni dieux ni maître</em>: a title for a play about ridiculous gods, and laughable masters. It is a story of History seen from its underside, of the World Turned Upside Down. I hope that this chaotic reinterpretation is amusing!
Hume, in his <em>Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion</em>, arguably sketched out part of it, with his tales of less than Ideal gods: witness the increasingly mad hypotheses of the infant god, the senile god, the 30,000 competing gods, the Spider god of the Spider planet … Are any of these “God”? Can we learn how to act out the rest of the play, becoming those who amuse everyone by laughing at the laughable masters, at power, at competition, at every form of auctoritas? Is it still “Man” we are talking about when we become the manimals that, outside of History, wander the fields of ownness like packs of wolves, flocks of birds, or solitary and proud beasts?
*** 3
My revision of the essay is done. I would like to add one more provocation: the Ideal Game is the only game that truly instructs. Of course normal games teach in some trivial way. One might say that a given game teaches patience, for example, or that another teaches strategic thinking. Maybe so. In the metaphysical register where all of this butterfly-writing is lodged, I would say that, if normal games teach, they teach first, foremost, and perhaps only the mastery of their own play. To say they teach anything beyond their own play is to engage, wittingly or unwittingly, in contemplating their opening up to the Ideal Game.
That is to say that normal games only teach through redundancy. As our genial grandmother, Gertrude Stein, wrote: “let me recite what history teaches. History teaches.” Let us not forget that Vico, Hegel, Marx and our other perverse grandfathers, inventors of the concept of History, all set out to define and describe its inexorable laws of development. Let us not forget that the ideal of progress, especially as inherited by the Left, was always taught as the working out of these laws – a massive normal game combining work and chance, but mostly work.
Peer if you know how into the outside of History. You might discern that the Ideal Game is impressive. It silently impresses its lessons upon us insofar as we are exposed to a chaos that cannot be thought, only felt. Artaud called it a metaphysics that enters through the skin. Wouldn’t the strangest thing be to take these impersonal lessons, and, impressed, learn the lightness of the self and its masks? Who but the most virtuous among us could claim to have gracefully opened the play of their life to the cruelty of the cosmic game and sculpted the artifice of a person, a mask for this slice of the chaos to wear? Who but the most sober could admit that the slice comes into being with the mask, that personality is local, like the weather? Who but the most delicate could claim to have learned, not in the strictures of normal games of morality and etiquette, but in the midst of chaos, the attitudes of patience, gentleness, or honesty? That chaos is still their raw material and, dare I say, essence?
The Ideal Game instructs because it is ultimately all there is to experience. Not a limit, but a pulsating horizon, interminably receding. Becoming one who is amused is almost intolerably gradual. Patience, gentleness, honesty: these are not static qualities of a moral person. They are masks to be endlessly perfected, ways of playing normal games that seek to open their play to the cosmic game with ever greater virtuosity. If one learns anything in one’s life (and, not to be coy, of course one does! all the time!) it is learned in and through participation in the Ideal Game, that cosmic prefiguration of zerowork.
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#pubdate 2022-05-15T03:44:18
#title The Impossible, Patience
#subtitle Critical Essays 2007-2013
#author Alejandro de Acosta
#LISTtitle Impossible, Patience
#SORTtopics art, nihilism, détournement, language, mediation, negation, anti-politics, literature, slogans, ressentiment, green nihilism, decomposition, John Cage, Little Black Cart
#date 2014
#source Retrieved from [[https://archive.org/details/TheImpossiblePatienceCriticalEssays20072013][archive.org]]
#lang en
#notes *The Impossible, Patience* was originally published by Little Black Cart
** Introduction: Proximity
*** The book’s form
As I wrote the essays gathered in this collection I passed from one writing plan to another. Around seven or eight years ago, following instructive reading of Montaigne, Hume, and Gracián, I had conceived a plan to compose a series of essays. Each would defend an indefensible thesis or at least inhabit a difficult, paradoxical perspective.[1] This was partly out of sheer appreciation for the form and a consequent desire to explore it, but also out of a need to find a way to express what I had to say, insofar as I sometimes felt myself beyond common sense, in a less than prescriptive voice. I was not disposed to continue writing in the prose that composed some of my first published forays into the topics discussed here, which are perhaps more articles or papers than essays. It occurred to me to splice contradiction and abstraction into the flexibility and personable tone of the essay (thus the inclusion of Gracián—certainly not an essayist—in the above list), adding some of the terse contrariness of the thesis. It seemed to me this would prove healthy in two respects: it would save me from the destiny of a certain prose, called “academic” by its detractors, and also, perhaps, counteract what I perceived (and ever more continue to perceive) as the linguistic rigidity around some vibrant subversive projects and in most anti-political conversations. But as the years after 2010 unfolded, I found myself less in the mode of composing essays serially and largely in solitude, according to my older plan, and more in one of dialogue with people from the North American anarchist space or milieu[2]—responding to requests for contributions, or simply acknowledging the appearance of interesting new persons, discussions, readings, and events. In that way a plan for a book of essays on previously selected topics (seduction, boredom, survival, solitude, masks, etc.) changed into the more sequential order of the present collection.[3]
Another way of describing the newer plan of the collection is to note the following. Three essays placed in the middle were written in dialogue with... what is the appropriate designation in this context? Poets? Artists? Creators of difficult creations? In any case, writers who belong to the history of the anarchist Idea, but are rarely discussed in the company I have been keeping: Fénéon, Cage, Duncan. Rather than section these three pieces off in a section on literature or language, or, worse, publish them elsewhere, I opted to insert them into what would have otherwise been a sequence (a syllabus?) of essays where anti-political and nihilist themes deepened, in oblique directions, my explication of that Idea. As I noted, the shift from serial composition to a dialogical mode introduced into the essays a more linear, developmental structure, as if the effects of conversation had led me to more of an explicit <em>parti pris</em>. It seems important to me both to retain something of that structure for the reader and to interrupt it. Otherwise I run the risk of composing a book of theory about nihilist anarchy, something no one needs. If, in the interpolated essays, the engagement with these three figures (as well as that eternal outsider, d.a. levy) remains in the mode of introduction and allusion, I think it’s because I suspected and continue to suspect that many of my readers either have no sense of them as writers or cannot connect what sense they have to anarchist practice—least of all an anarchist practice of reading or writing! Which is all to say that I wrote these pieces to some extent in a teaching mode. I am glad to have touched upon each of these writers here, if only because to name and honor them in my own way constitutes an assertive response to a certain expectation of sloppy writing that characterizes the anarchist space.
If there is a note of patience in these essays about matters that drive people around me to great impatience, then I suppose that I have found it, among other places, in the form itself. I take it that an essay is primarily an exploration of ideas, and only secondarily an exposition. Expectation of getting to the point is replaced by invention of a wandering line in and as the essay. Mine are also informed by a kind of egoism that authorizes me, in its peculiarly empty way, to make whatever I am concerned with my own, as I impersonate the social outsider I often, but with no real certainty, feel myself to be. So to the paradoxical formulation of confounding theses I now add this paradox of form, that the sociable genre of the essay can be deployed so antagonistically at times. In saying so I am respectfully acknowledging those that inspired me to write essays, reassuring all those who think there is something fake at work here that they are indeed correct, and, hopefully, amusing everyone else.
*** The title’s punctuation
Bill Haver used to say that to think the most important questions one simultaneously requires a infinite patience and infinite impatience. In the coincidence between some friends’ will to destruction and the brevity of most attention spans I sense the infinity of impatience. Omniprevalent rushing to action, conclusions, or whatever is next in the feed does make one feel that patience has never been less possible. But that is just a feeling, something like a premonition, not much more; the present situation is full of dreadful affective indices. Here some minimal resistance, some uncanny intuition, informs me that a strangely infinite patience may still be coupled with our familiar infinite impatience. And that is why the title is not <em>Impossible Patience</em>. Patience is sometimes difficult, but it is hardly impossible. What is impossible is the realization of the Idea of anarchy (which is why many friends, unwitting Platonists, call it the Beautiful Idea). What <em>is</em> impossible would be to fully assume, to truly embody, the resistant positions (quasi-positions, really, as they are anti-political rather than political) most often referred to in this book.
Consider them: the value of the term <em>nihilism</em>, to begin with, has always been that of an insult or accusation. By the time someone calls themselves a nihilist, there is already something of a responsive desperation about the gesture, and not just the straightforward act of naming implied in the common use of the phrase <em>taking a position</em>. Much the same should be said for <em>anarchist</em>, which will be not saved from irrelevance by retroactive conversion into a philosophy, addition of adjectives or prefixes, or assimilation-equation to some liberal or other radical tradition. If it is still fun (though certainly not useful) for me to play with such terms, it is because, first, people in the business of setting and enforcing theoretical and political agendas for others still call their adversaries anarchists and nihilists, and this makes me want to be such an adversary. Second, impressionable, angry, and desperate characters continue to be courageous or foolhardy enough to call themselves anarchists and nihilists, which makes one want to sidle up beside them with an inscrutably patient attention to their destructive inclinations. I share the ethics of those who feel it is impossible to reverse an insult, of those who prefer not to hide from what is said in it (that you are known to be an outcast), but prefer to take it on, to become the nightmares of a nightmarish society. In my own way, I share the ethics, and sometimes lack thereof, of those who know it is impossible to actualize the Beautiful Idea by any instrumental means, <em>including instrumental destruction</em>, and instead bear witness to that impossibility in their dismantlings here and there.
Which is where the intuition’s mark, a comma, my comma, appears: as if in bearing witness to impossibility we learned to stage an impatience with impatience itself. As if to remind that this writing, because it forms part of our punctual actions, must remain fragmented, and that fragmentation, the emptiness that composes it, can only be read in punctuation and spacing.[4]
Patience, then…
*** Proximity’s distance
Someone whose opinion I value described my approach to writing and publication as emerging from a concern with community. I think I know what he meant. Through these essays, there is an arc of increasing attention and interest with regard to the people, situations, and publications of the milieu. I have been writing with a fairly clear sense of address. For most who care, I write from far away; but I have been flirting with proximity, and it shows. That is what could be called my concern for community. So I accept the evaluation of my esteemed friend, but at the same time I must say that when I think of community in relation to the conversations that contributed to these essays, I mentally cross out the word. The reasons will become clear to attentive readers along the way. For now I’ll say another word about the proximity that brought the book to its newer plan. For me increased proximity has made more conversations possible, but remains something other than belonging. This passage in a life of Spinoza resonates strongly with me:
<em>... he cannot integrate into any milieu; he is not suited to any of them. Doubtless it is in democratic and liberal milieus that he finds the best living conditions, or rather the best conditions for survival. But for him these milieus only guarantee that the malicious will not be able to poison or mutilate life, that they will not be able to separate it from the power of thinking that goes a little beyond the ends of the state, of a society, beyond any milieu in general. In every society, Spinoza will show, it is a matter of obeying and of nothing else. [...] It is certain that the philosopher finds the most favorable conditions in the democratic state and in liberal circles. But he never confuses his purposes with those of a state, or with the aims of a milieu, since he solicits forces in thought that elide obedience as well as blame, and fashions the idea of a life beyond good and evil, a rigorous innocence... The philosopher can reside in various states, he can frequent various milieus, but he does so in the manner of a hermit, a shadow, a traveler or boarding house lodger...</em>
Proximity to the milieu, in contrast to belonging, could be compared to what has been called the Ibn ‘Arabi effect. The Ibn ‘Arabi effect has to do with a possible feedback of the experiences of those who have abandoned the radical milieu into that milieu. If an “anarchist” project were constituted, not to preserve itself and thus the milieu (usually in this order in terms of explicitly stated goals, and in reverse in terms of actual operations), but to seek out those who have quit the milieu, numerous salutary effects might eventually be felt: decreased influence of “young masculinity” (team-building homosociality as the default social bond), less disappointment and more curiosity about the stakes of quitting, maybe even encouragement towards such abandonment as a sign of intelligence. In both cases, in what can be learned by studying the hermit-philosopher’s life and the (for now imagined) lessons of the Ibn ‘Arabi effect, I underline the necessary distance that coincides with space and time to reflect. Approximation makes more conversations possible; distance and feedback allow them to proceed past the inevitable onset of redundancy.
But everything written here out of proximity and reflection on proximity is shadowed by another set of more private, solitary thoughts, no less written into the essays for being private or solitary. Such thoughts not only are private and solitary but concern privacy and solitude as such and are thus at odds with the politics discussed here—though not the ethics, or, alas, the aesthetics. And insofar as I now see how much I was concerned with such thoughts, I wonder why I signed A. de A., and can only tell myself that it was another impersonation, one more mask.
** I Have Even Met Happy Nihilists
“<em>I Have Even Met Happy Nihilists” is the result of multiple modifications of a review Kelly Fritsch invited me to write for the Canadian journal Upping the Anti. An edited version of the review appeared there in 2008. It was perhaps the first time that I wrote on nihilism. What I read there now is an acknowledgment that politically salvific leftist theory such as Critchley’s, even as it proclaimed an allegiance with a certain anarchism, excluded most of what I was beginning to find so interesting in anarchist thought and practice. I also register a note of suspicion concerning growing attention to anarchism in the academy. In retrospect, it seems clear that anarchism was being invoked here, not by or for anarchists, but for a socialist or even Leninist Left in need of correction. I am glad that in some small way an anarchist spoke up to trouble the terms of that largely symbolic invocation. Thinking these matters through was enough to let me know I needed to wander off in another direction. The problem, of course, is to figure out how to undo the common flipside of this suspicion, the attitude of some anarchists that our “low theory” (as McKenzie Wark put it in his study of the Situationists) is something entirely</em> sui generis<em>, and so is or ought to be our only point of reference… In any case, this review was the discovery of the anti-political, “impossible”, perspective explored in this collection.</em>
*** 1. The other kind of nihilist
Simon Critchley, a professor at the New School for Social Research, has written a brief book setting out a possible movement from ethics to politics, from commitment to resistance. <em>Infinitely Demanding</em> serves as an index of what is promising and what is a dead end in certain philosophical approaches to Left positions and to anarchism in ethics and politics. Rather than remaining at the level of political theory, Critchley seeks to connect his claims with the activities of protest movements. Here activists could find the rudiments of a common language and some concepts for theorizing their own activity. What those who never did, or no longer do, consider themselves activists make of it is another matter—especially if part of their reason for doing so is putting into question their relation to the Left. For the book is not without the defects of much, if not most theoretical work on ethics and politics: overly narrow theoretical and practical panoramas.
<em>Infinitely Demanding</em> opens by staging the problem of nihilism for ethics and politics: all beliefs or values increasingly seem meaningless and all actions appear equally worthless. A redefined ethics is presented as a way to overcome nihilism, theorized as a singular kind of commitment to a situation or cause that renovates or recreates the meaning of action, and politics appears as the actions resulting from that overcoming: resistance to... mostly to State power, it seems—a problem I will return to. In sum, Critchley proposes that the problem of nihilism is overcome, or at least more convincingly confronted, when ethics moves from being based on a moral tradition, code, or law, to the raw experience of ethical demand, and when politics abandons the project of the seizure of power in favor of an endless resistance.
Critchley begins with a programmatic introduction that presents the problem of nihilism. When he uses this term, he means it in roughly the sense Nietzsche used it in his unpublished notebooks: the “uncanniest of all guests,” etc. Predictably enough, then, Critchley assumes that no one would confess to nihilism. Either one is not a nihilist, or is, but will not confess to it. Such unconfessed nihilists are either passive (“focused on himself and his particular pleasures and projects for perfecting himself”[5]) or active (“various utopian, radical political, and even terrorist groups”). While the category of passive nihilist seems mostly to reflect a critique of unreflective individualism and consumerism, especially of the North American variety, the second is an unlikely hodgepodge of everything from Fourier’s phalansteries (poor Fourier!) through Russian anarchists, Bolsheviks, Futurists, and Situationists, all the way to various ‘70s Left guerillas-cum-terrorists, and finally al-Qaeda, as their “quintessence.” What they all share is “find[ing] everything meaningless, but instead of sitting back and contemplating, [they try] to destroy this world and bring another into being” (5). So here is the problem for Critchley: those who should be politically active, as he considers political action, are nihilists. For him, a way out of both of these forms of nihilism is to turn back beyond the hollowness of meaning that seemingly produces them, returning to the problem of motivation.
Critchley’s uncontroversial assumption is that the social, political, and economic circumstances that currently hold sway (at least in North America) are demotivating. But there do exist conceptual tools to re-motivate unconfessed nihilists, especially in recent ethical theory. Those with a desire for justice, liberation, unbounded passion, or a radically different life might indeed feel close to a certain nihilism as State power continues to grow and capitalism seems ever more absolute and unsurpassable. A differently conceived ethics, however, can give rise to a politics of resistance that does not need or expect to seize power or defeat capitalism—just to resist them from within. Or maybe that just is unwarranted; it is not trivial to state, as Critchley does, that one can be anti-capitalist and anti-State without ever hoping to succeed. He writes: “far from failure being a reason for dejection or disaffection, I think it should be viewed as the condition for courage in ethical action” (55).
I agree that one need not count on success to act. (At a deeper level, this implies the critical uncoupling of what is sayable in theory from what seems possible in practice, thus opening the theoretical imagination to the impossible—which is not to say, the utopian.) But before I go on to Critchley’s treatment of ethics, I will pose two questions. First, why are “we” (who? Critchley uses the vague “we” quite a bit) in the business of motivating anybody? How can we know if we are even in a position to do so? How are we so sure that “they” are not already motivated—perhaps in ways that “we” do not recognize as political? Especially since, according to Critchley, both kinds of nihilism are emanations of a fundamentally religious solution to the problem of meaninglessness? When Critchley asks his readers “how might we fill the best with passionate intensity” (39), who exactly is he referring to? Those among “the best” who have fallen to nihilism? The best among the credulous rest? At the least, his background presuppositions about relations between intellectuals and masses should be made explicit. But, for me, the stakes are greater than that. The unstated and truly fascinating matter is that many are motivated without an explicit ethics. This is a key component of anarchism and seems absent from Critchley’s theory. Second question: Is nihilism always and only a problem? I remain unconvinced that it is, if only because I have met even stranger creatures than the active and passive nihilists Critchley warns us away from. About the active nihilist, Critchley writes that he “finds everything meaningless, but instead of sitting back and contemplating, he tries to destroy this world and bring another into being” (5). If such a nihilist thinks this new world will be more meaningful, he is still too credulous! There are among us passionate people, intelligent people, people capable of acting in a political sphere and of subtracting themselves from it as well—and they confess to nihilism. They do not need to be motivated by anyone; and they often consider themselves to be more sober than the rest of us.
I realize that I have ended up with something other than a critique here. Since, as I am about to explain, Critchley’s ethics has to do with a raw experience, I offered mine, insofar as I have met individuals who contradict or exceed his schema: confessed nihilists, to be precise.
*** 2. Ethics as micro-politics
However it manifests, nihilism undermines beliefs and values that have traditionally composed morality. Critchley seeks to overcome this undermining, provocatively suggesting: “the question of the metaphysical ground or basis of ethical obligation should simply be disregarded … Instead, the focus should be on the radicality of the human demand that faces us, a demand that requires phenomenology and not metaphysics” (55). That is, the emphasis must shift (and after nihilism it cannot but shift) from deducing the foundation of ethics to a phenomenology of ethical experience. What Critchley calls a “demand” is, he argues, impervious to nihilism. It is therefore unsurprising that, although Alain Badiou, Knud Ejler Løgstrop, and Jacques Lacan are all summoned as interlocutors in the discussion of ethical experience and the ethical subject, it is Emmanuel Levinas who serves as the main point of reference. Levinas, in works such as <em>Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority</em> (1961) and <em>Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence</em> (1974), claimed that ethics has priority over metaphysics or ontology as “first philosophy” and that the first fact of ethics is the face of the Other. One’s experience of the Other is irreducible and primary, preceding even self-knowledge. One’s encounter with the Other is the beginning of experience as such and thus makes all experience, all subjectivity, part of ethics.
One interesting aspect of Critchley’s reading of Levinas is his claim that the nature of ethics is the same for secularists and for theists. A formula: “I experience a radical demand and try to shape my subjectivity in relation to it” (55). If the problem of grounding or justifying ethical theories is set aside in favor of a phenomenology of ethical experience, any sort of ethical experience that brings about the radical demand is good enough: the face of God, of my lover, of the strange neighbor, of the hungry or tortured other. This gesture is fully in line with Levinas’ philosophy, and I find it compelling to some extent; my principal objection is that the categories of secularist and theist invoked here do not exhaustively describe all possible forms of religious and (for lack of a better word) non-religious experience. Could it be that Levinas and Critchley are identifying some basic structure that is, if not hard-wired into the history of “European” or “Western” forms of subjectivation, especially insofar as they reflect monotheisms, at least massively available to the inheritors of those traditions? If so, what about everybody else, here and elsewhere? Do animists or polytheists hear the demand? And what of the poor Buddhists that, in one of his most irritating gestures, Critchley mentions only in repeating the infamous Nietzschean quasi-metaphor that equates Buddhism with passivity and nihilism? How, in short, do those of us who do experience ethics as the cleavage in ourselves relate to all of those who have no self to be cleaved—or have too many for it to matter? Critchley does not address this question. He is rather more concerned to discuss how this cleavage or split in the self need not amount to endless guilt and self-torture. He does this through a discussion of sublimation and humor that incorporates psychoanalytic concepts into his ethics in a bid to remove them from the accusation of vestigial religiosity often leveled at Levinas and his followers. This is all interesting but seems rather secondary given the magnitude of the problems he has raised (so far: nihilism and the putative universality of ethical experience).
Now, returning to the idea that any experience of ethical demand is good enough: is that so? Some of these faces of the Other are intimate, others distant; some real, others imaginary. How to reconcile them all in a single phenomenology? It is not hard to criticize Levinasian ethics for its crypto-religious leanings: it seems the only way to get around the imperative of the moral law was to divide the self, rending it insofar as it was possessed by the Other. A mutually ethical relation would then amount to mutual possession. Obviously many anarchists, especially the egoists, would have no interest in such claims. They might rather hazard a version of what I heard a Korean anarchist say quite charmingly some years ago: “Some days I am ethical ... some days I am not.” Though I do not think this means the idea of a raw experience of ethical demand is useless, I do think it shows its purported universality is a failure. (And this perhaps returns us to a more modest, pre-Kantian ethics, something like the moral sentiments of Hume or Smith, though without their claimed relation to our animal or human nature.) In politics, the problem of nihilism is perhaps not as immediately discernible as it is in ethics. As Critchley describes it, one facet is strategic and has to do with identifying politically effective actions that are in line with the ethical demands one experiences. But prior to that is the question of motivation: Critchley seeks to “provide an ethical orientation” that might support “a remotivation of politics or political action” (90). For him, political action “does not flow from the cunning of reason, some materialist or idealist philosophy of history, or socio-economic determinism, but rather from … a ‘metapolitical’ moment of ethical experience.” This idea of a politics motivated by a morality without sanction is, if not already anarchist in most senses of the word, compelling to many anarchists.[6] For Critchley this ethical component both motivates political action and maintains it as democratic, egalitarian, or at least non-coercive. I would like to underline that this is a different account of motivation than the passage from ethics to politics as usually conceived, because the ethics at stake is situational: theorists or philosophers can recommend actions, motivating people to act, but ethics has no sanction.
For that reason especially, it might seem promising that Critchley attempts to connect his argument with existing movements. “The ethical energy for the remotivation for politics and democracy can be found in those plural, dispersed, and situated anti-authoritarian groups that attempt to articulate the possibility of … ‘true democracy’” (90). I should note, however, that he does not seem to have (or at least never refers to) any direct experience of these movements.[7] When he presents what he calls “anarchic meta-politics” as a basis for and extension of anarchist theory and practice, it’s safe to say that he is not especially familiar with either. With respect to anarchism, Critchley is a combination of a dreamer and a friendly observer. Overwhelmingly, he seems to situate himself primarily in some sort of philosophical Left (that is probably the book’s “we”) that needs to be steered to anarchism while holding on to a certain young Marx. It is not surprising that citations of authors closer to Marxism than anarchism (Ernesto Laclau, Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Miguel Abensour) far outnumber references to anarchist texts or movements in <em>Infinitely Demanding</em>. I am not mentioning any of this to maintain some sort of purity or specialization of anarchist thought and practice, but rather to underline to what extent it is an imagined and imaginary anarchism that is under discussion here, whether under that name or something like “anarchic meta-politics” or “neo-anarchism.”
At the same time, Critchley frames his argument as explicitly anti-Leninist (and makes, both in the introduction and the appendix (5-6, 146), the claim that contemporary Islamic terrorism is neo-Leninist). “Politics,” he writes, “is praxis in a situation that articulates an interstitial distance from the state and allows for the emergence of new political subjects who exert a universal claim” (92). That, and emphatically not the attempted or successful seizure of state power. But here there is an enormous problem: if politics is so defined, what shall we call the activities of States? It makes more sense to me to either describe both State activities and the actions of movements as politics, or—and this is by far the more compelling, if under-explored, option: to describe State activities and some of their contestation as politics, and the remainder of what anarchists (and some others) do, outside of movements, as micro- and especially anti-politics. If we accept this second description, then the version of ethics we get is far more fragile: it is neither universally reliable as moral law or raw experience, nor is its motivation of a passage to politics a predictable or desirable effect.
For his part, Critchley maintains that for the foreseeable future, the presence of states is inevitable. What ethically motivated subjects do, then, is confront State power, creating and acting within “interstices.” Critchley illustrates the opening up of interstices with a strange quote from Levinas: “Anarchy … cannot be sovereign. It can only disturb, albeit in a radical way, the State, prompting isolated moments of negation without any affirmation. The State, then, cannot set itself up as a Whole” (cited in <em>Infinitely Demanding</em>, 122). I wonder if Critchley has fully digested what Levinas is suggesting here concerning negation. It also bears underlining that this is a passage, as Levinas made clear (and as Critchley repeats) about <em>philosophical</em> anarchy, and therefore as relevant to the other, confessed, nihilism I have gestured towards as much as to any supposed anarchism or neo-anarchism. Critchley’s interpretation of this philosophy in practical terms amounts to, first, underlining to what extent its demand translates to a thoroughly anti-authoritarian politics (“anarchy is the creation of interstitial distance within the state, the continual questioning from below of any attempt to establish order from above” (122-123)). For him, this is the overall ethical force of anarchism. Secondly, Critchley maintains that “the great virtue of contemporary anarchism is its spectacular, creative, and imaginative disturbance of the state” (123). While I find this philosophical affirmation of protest movements somewhat interesting, I am also deeply troubled at the way it makes confrontation with State power the defining or at least most meaningful moment of anarchist practice. This is to miss out on countless sorts of collective activities, sometimes called communities, not to mention more or less secret individual pursuits. I am referring again to the micro- and anti-political, which, though they are understandably off the radar of an interested outsider, compose for many of us the most significant aspect of anarchy as we are able to live it. This overemphasis on the State is my third major problem with <em>Infinitely Demanding</em>.
*** 3. Hangovers of the Left
Critchley concludes with a telling appendix entitled “Crypto-Schmittianism—the Logic of the Political in Bush’s America.” It offers a schematic conjunctural analysis of the U.S. state and its politics, emphasizing, as the title suggests, the supposed influence of the writings of the Nazi-affiliated political theorist Carl Schmitt on the Bush administration. How did they get re-elected in 2004? “I think part of the story is that certain people in the Bush administration have got a clear, robust, and powerful understanding of the nature of the political. They have read their Machiavelli, their Hobbes, their Leo Strauss and misread their Nietzsche” (133). Meanwhile the Democrats are “too decent, too gentlemanly or gentlewomanly. They are too nice […] It seems to me that they don’t understand a damn thing about the political” (143). Critchley suggests they study Carl Schmitt and Gramsci. The argument as to the bookishness of the Bush Republicans goes so far as to enter into a discussion of whether George W. Bush is stupid (if you care: he isn’t (138); he seems to have read a book and is apparently capable of presenting “theses” (141)). From there, Critchley returns to the main argument of the book, distinguishing between three political alternatives available in the current conjuncture. They are “military neo-liberalism,” “neo-Leninism” (our old friends the active nihilists) and the “neo-anarchism” he recommends.
Without once more invoking the prefix “neo-”, I might point out that, if we stick to the terms of this schema, there is a position missing here. These alternatives are not really alternatives: the neoliberals and neo-Leninists, whoever they are, will never be convinced by reading a book like Critchley’s. The neo-anarchists might find in it a new language for their ethico-political motivation. And those who are inexplicably motivated, within and outside politics? They are the incredulous: confessed nihilists.
Reading the appendix I could not help but feel that I was learning entirely too much about Critchley’s true politics and watching him be dragged back into the perhaps well-intentioned but ultimately self-referential Leftism of so many Continental philosophers—or university professors, for that matter. I was somewhat interested in the image I got from the last chapter, a vision of an ethically inclined phenomenologist charting out a turn to a politics of resistance that had some chances of building a bridge with existing movements and non-academic theorizing. It might have helped make some trouble, at least. The appendix botched that image. I will conclude by explaining how and why it matters.
The first aspect of the problem is Critchley’s uncritical identification with Democrats or Left electoral parties. Critchley discusses the U.S. Democrats and what they should do, and whether “we” should support them (143-145). For many of us this is completely irrelevant to the theme of the contestation or evasion of State power, and especially to what we think of as politics and its alternatives. Second aspect: the assumption that the appearance of recognizable philosophical signifiers in relation to the Bush administration signals that it can be understood by study of the texts involved. “They have read …” and so “they understand the nature of the political.” This is preposterous. It is the intellectualist fantasy of a professor. Supposing there is a nature of the political, there is no golden road, no special texts that one must read, to understand it. The third aspect of the problem is a graver version of the second: Critchley devotes space to claiming that “Bush thinks” as though this mattered. What all of this amounts to is the familiar phenomenon of an intellectual who simply cannot let go of the mirage of electoral politics and political figureheads, never realizing to what extent being intellectually and emotionally involved in their activities amounts to anything but resistance.
Despite two awkward references to the “Situationism of Guy Debord” (5, 135) it never seems to occur to Critchley that the Spectacle is more than image-based propaganda. It is a social relation, or lack of relation, really, that makes it possible to speculate, for example, about the reading lists of cabinet members, the plans of huge and institutionalized electoral parties, and even the intelligence or lack thereof of figureheads as though it mattered for the politics of resistance. All the while, engaging in such speculation, we miss the fact that we have been duped into continuing to think of ourselves as belonging on the same purported Left-Right continuum as huge electoral parties, satisfied that we are farther to the Left than the Democrats. This is, it seems to me, the limit of Critchley’s political thought. It is friendly to what he conceives as anarchism, or at least to anti-authoritarian protest movements; but it cannot shake its identification with a Left that continues to define the limits of action in terms of engagement with the State and forbids stepping beyond them—beyond politics. Therefore the anarchism he recommends is reactive. Yes, theoretically inclined activists might learn something about how they are perceived and how they might explain themselves from Critchley’s writing, but there is little here in the way of a broader social or strategic imagination with which they might chart out future actions. And as for the rest of us—my friends the nihilists; those of us, too, who are something other than activists—what remains are curious questions. How do we explain to each other what motivates us, if it is indeed so intimate (which is not necessarily to say private, or personal)? It’s fair to say that some of what Critchley suggests about raw ethical experience, about an ethics without sanction, is relevant here. Is there a way to reject the language of politics and/or activism in favor of micropolitics or anti-politics, so far as we are capable of defining these terms, and the activities and structures they express, other than reactively?
*** Appendix: I Have Even Met Happy Nihilists, Tractatus Version [Excerpts]
1. Someone writes a book.<br>
1.1 Someone else publishes it.<br>
1.2 In it you find a story of the world.<br>
1.2.1 The story comes ever so close to describing, if not the life you live, something like the life you suppose others live.<br>
1.2.2 Activists, for example.<br>
1.2.2.1 Or those who compose movements.<br>
1.2.2.2 At least those who say they do.<br>
1.2.2.3 And anarchists, maybe, since there is also supposed to be something called anarchism, which is said to overlap with activism or movements.<br>
1.3 But the book is strange.<br>
1.3.1 It tells a story about anarchy, gestures to it somehow, but sideways.<br>
1.3.2 You might wonder what that has to do with your life, your thoughts.<br>
[…]
6. The book is both more and less than what it seemed to be at first.<br>
6.1 Less: the habits of writers run deep, and there is a way such habits have of containing the new even as they strive to name it.<br>
6.2 More: in all the flag-waving there might be an interstice.<br>
6.3 A place and a time, however contingent, however passing, where and when to say: here some others and I lived.<br>
6.3.1 Because we lived, sometimes we were ethical.<br>
6.3.2 And almost no one noticed or understood.<br>
** Its Core is the Negation
<em>This is the first in a trilogy of essays on approaches to nihilism, the other two being “History as Decomposition” and “Green Nihilism or Cosmic Pessimism.” It is focused on Duane Rouselle’s</em> After Post-Anarchism<em>, a book that caused me no small amount of frustration. I was pleased to discover something in it worth sharing with many who I knew would never make it through its pages, so I tried to write it out for them in</em> Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed<em>, where it was published in 2013. It was also, then, a gift to that publication, which I recall reading with interest around 1991-1992, and where I had published some playful essays in more recent years. In this essay, the feeling of there being something new to say took a hybrid form, combining a “report on knowledge” with a personal philosophical narrative. This is also the place to remark that, in the same vein as Duane’s book, the reading (and re-reading) of the writings of Monsieur and Frère Dupont have been for me, as for a few others, the source of an uncanny clarity; they receive brief explicit mention here, but their salutary influence should be clear.</em>
*** 1
I have always considered my inclination to anarchy to be irreducible to a politics. Anarchist commitments run deeper. They are more intimate, concerning supposedly personal or private matters; but they also overflow the instrumental realm of getting things done. Over time, I have shifted from thinking that anarchist commitments are <em>more than</em> a politics to thinking that they are <em>something other</em> than a politics. I continue to return to this latter formulation. It requires thinking things through, not just picking a team; it is more difficult to articulate and it is more troubling to our inherited common sense.[8] I do not think I am alone in this. It has occurred to some of us to register this feeling of otherness by calling our anarchist commitments an <em>ethics.</em> It has also occurred to some of us to call these commitments <em>anti-political</em>. I think these formulations are, for many of us, implicitly interlinked, though hardly interchangeable. What concerns me here in the main is the challenge of what it could mean to live out our commitments as an ethics—though I think the relevance of this thinking to anti-politics will be clarified as well.
I intentionally write ethics, and not morality: as I see it, ethics concerns the flourishing of life, the refinement of desirable ways of life, happy lives. Tiqqun put it well:
When we use the term “ethical” we’re never referring to a set of precepts capable of formulation, of rules to observe, of codes to establish. Coming from us, the word “ethical” designates <em>everything having to do with forms-of-life.</em> ... No formal ethics is possible. There is only the interplay of forms-of-life among themselves, and the protocols of experimentation that guide them locally.[9]
Many of us have been able to reject morality as a form of social control, as the stultifying pressure of the Mass on us, as imposed or self-imposed limitation on what we do and what we are capable of doing. Much the same could be said for any <em>ethical universalism</em> which, though emphasizing ways of life and not moral codes or injunctions, tends to homogenize ways of life in the name of a shared good; it does so by surreptitiously presupposing that good and treating it as a natural fact or self-evident transcultural reality. In short, it rejects transcendent morality only to re-introduce it immanently. Our rejection of this single Good went often enough in the direction of <em>pluralism</em>: the story went that there were many Goods, many valid or desirable forms of life. This seemed obvious enough, even intuitive, to many of us. The story went well with anarchist principles of decentralization and voluntary association, and resonated with many in the years when anti-globalization rhetoric emphasized Multiculturalism as a practice of resistance and The Local as the site of its practice. It also made sense, or at least was useful, insofar as it was an efficient way to communicate an anarchist perspective to non-anarchists, especially to potential anarchists.
So here we have two different approaches to ethics. One tries to secure access and orientation to a single flourishing form, the criterion being that it be understandable by all: the Good unifies. The other approach claims that there are many such forms, and this plurality itself is the criterion: the Good distributes itself into Goods. Always suspicious of universalizing claims, for many years I sided (more or less comfortably) with the latter, participating in a game of adding <em>-s</em> to the end of words like people, culture, gender, and so on. Though I was never too concerned to recruit, so that the benefits of communicability were irrelevant to me, this game nevertheless seemed linked to an affirmative gesture, affirmative specifically of difference and plurality in the political sphere. There was always the question of recuperation, i.e. that governmental and other institutions so easily incorporated such pluralism into their functioning as its liberal pole (the conservative pole, which was always present implicitly at least, had to do with norms of governance or rule-following generally). For example, these days university administrations trumpet Multiculturalism louder than anyone else, and Locally Sourced is a hot marketing term. This troubled those of us who took this side, but we countered by emphasizing what could be called raw plurality as opposed to the masticated, digested, and regurgitated version we got from administrators and mouthpieces of all sorts. Choosing pluralism, eagerly or grudgingly, we might have ended up as uneasy relativists; or we might have been working hard to expand the frontiers of liberalism and democracy, there where the word <em>radical</em> finds its most docile partners...[10]
I have come to realize, after what I now recognize to be good deal of confusion, if not unconscious hedging, that even as I labored on the limits of pluralism, my thinking was incongruous with that position. My writing and conversations repeatedly gestured in the direction of another position, irreducible to universalism and ever more desperate attempts at pluralism. It is a <em>nihilism</em> that denies the validity of the singular Good at the heart of universalism, as well as the distinct senses of the Good at the heart of pluralism. For nihilists, the only ethical gesture is negative: a rejection of the claims to authority of universalism and pluralism. For us, all such claims are empty, groundless, ultimately meaningless. And this is what was really at stake in distinguishing ethics and morality. My idea of a happy life is not something I reason my way to, or choose, but rather something that manifests senselessly... but I can use my reasoning (my judgment, even!) to help in pushing back, reducing, destroying everything that blocks my way of life.
This report on what must be not only my own trajectory, but also part of the history of the last twenty-five years (more or less for some others) is due in part to some crucial pages in Duane Rousselle’s <em>After Post-Anarchism</em> that consolidated <em>this</em> thought of nihilism for me. Rousselle argues that the nihilist position I have just described has always been the ethical core of anarchism, and that we are now in a moment where this may finally be recognized.
*** 2
I want to respond to <em>After Post-Anarchism</em> because it contains that significant provocation. Unfortunately, for most of its readers, this book cannot but be an exotic object. To whatever degree it discusses familiar ideas or even lived situations, it does so through arcane routes. Yes, it is difficult reading; but it is not by engaging with what is most difficult in it that readers will happen upon the few remarkable insights that it contains. Rousselle’s writing is difficult because of the density of his references and because of an unfortunate penchant for wordiness and digression. Although I would be the last to say that every idea articulated in theoretical or abstract terms can also be phrased in ordinary, so-called accessible language, I suspect that much of what I find valuable in <em>After Post-Anarchism</em> can indeed be restated otherwise. I intend to do so here. As I noted, this aspect of <em>After Post-Anarchism</em> struck me as an unusually clear formulation of thoughts I had been struggling to express for years (among other places, in the pages of this magazine). So, instead of a broader critique of post-anarchism (which Rousselle has a knack for folding back into a plea for its relevance) I will limit myself to some brief remarks about his misprision of the respective roles of theory and practice.[11]
Post-anarchism receives numerous formulations in this book, but really only two definitions. The first is simply that it is a “discursive strategy” (31): not so much a theory as the outcome of ongoing discussions and debates in a theoretical space where anarchism, post-structuralism, and new social movements (as theorized by their participants and outsiders) intersect. In this respect I could make many objections or clarifications, but I will simply note that for such investigations to proceed as Rousselle intends, anarchism (as “classical anarchism,” 4 and <em>passim</em>) must be interpreted as “anarchist philosophy,” sometimes “traditional anarchist philosophy” (39 and <em>passim</em>).[12] The second definition, which follows from the first but is more provocative, is that post-anarchism “is simply <em>anarchism</em> folded back onto itself” (136). For Rousselle this means an anarchic questioning of the ethical basis of anarchism, a search for the anarchy in anarchism; he later specifies his own version of this folding in terms of the distinction between manifest and latent contents of statements.
Here I can underline both the weakness and the promise of Rousselle’s approach. Whatever the silliness of the term post-anarchism, I think the second definition’s project of questioning, of folding back reflexively, is of interest to any anarchist who does not take their position on questions of morality and ethics (or anything else, for that matter) for granted. When he is pursuing this sort of questioning, Rousselle is at his strongest. When he is treating the anarchist tradition interchangeably as a series of historical figures, events, practices, etc. and as the discursive or conceptual framing that can be abstracted from them (“anarchist philosophy”), he is at his weakest. He repeatedly falls into the intellectualist trap of describing actions as the result of pre-existing theoretical attitudes. “Can we at least provisionally admit,” he asks rhetorically, “that anarchism is not a tradition of canonical thinkers but one of canonical practices based on a canonical selection of ethical premises?” (129). Freeing himself from the idea of an anarchist movement set into motion by a bearded man’s intellect, he remains on the side of the intellect by presupposing of a pre-existing set of premises on which practices are “based” and from which they derive their status as “canonical.”
One more critical remark about the weakness in this approach. Rousselle describes post-anarchism in a third way, and this one is not so much a definition as an illustration. He writes that post-anarchism is the “new paradigm” (126) of anarchist thought: “The paradigm shift... that made its way into the anarchist discourse, as ‘post-anarchism,’ allowed for the realization and elucidation of the ethical component of traditional anarchist philosophy” (129). He is so zealous in his promotion of this term that several times in his book he annexes authors who explicitly reject the term, such as Uri Gordon and Gabriel Kuhn, to the cause. This all seems to me to be in bad taste. There is also a more profound problem at stake: paradigm shifts do not happen because one says they do. The declarative, performative wishes evidenced whenever Rousselle uses the language of advancement or progress, as though what was at stake here was a science, tell us much about his intentions, but always fall flat in terms of convincingness. Even if there is a paradigm shift at work in anarchist theory (or practice!), there is no reason to consider the shift as an improvement. We are probably just catching up to an increasingly complex, chaotic, and uncontrollable world. So I fault him for misunderstanding what a paradigm shift is, for wildly exaggerating the overall importance of post-anarchism, and for framing anarchism too abstractly as an inchoate philosophy. Nevertheless, returning to my principal reasons for writing this essay, I will now praise Rousselle, for some of what he writes about ethics.
*** 3
Early in <em>After Post-Anarchism</em> Rousselle states that, answering what he calls “the question of place” (roughly, on what grounds do you make an ethical claim?) there are three types of responses. There are universalist theories, which state that “there is a shared objective essence that grounds all normative principles irrespective of the stated values of independently situated subjects or social groups” (41). This would include most religiously grounded moralities, as well as appeals to human nature. Most such theories are absolutist, but they need not all be so; utilitarianism is an example of a “normative theory that proposes that the correct solution is the one that provides the greatest good to the majority of the population.” The second set of theories, which corresponds to what I called pluralism in the opening section, is what Rousselle refers to as ethical relativism. “Relativists believe that social groups do indeed differ in their respective ethical value systems and that each respective system constitutes a place of ethical discourse”(43). That is, there are different systems (of belief, culture, custom, etc.) that may ground morals. Again, there is an interesting subset, a limit-case: “At the limit of relativist ethics is the belief that the unique subject is the place from which ethical principles are thought to arise”(43). This corresponds to most types of individualism.
The provocation I am underlining in Rousselle’s book is that, rather than try once more to save pluralism by pushing it farther into a parodic relativism, he pursues what he calls <em>ethical nihilism.</em> His first stab at a definition runs: “ethical nihilism is the belief that ethical truths, if they can be said to exist at all, derive from the paradoxical non-place within the heart of any place” (43). That is, nihilism denies the ground, or at least the grounding or claim to grounding, in ethical universalism and pluralism. “Nihilists seek to discredit and/or interrupt all universalist and relativist responses to the question of place [...] nihilists are critics of all that currently exists and they raise this critique against all such one-sided foundations and systems” (44–45). Obviously, this completes the triplicity with which I began this essay.
It is from this triplicity that Rousselle develops his analysis of ethics in relation to anarchism. Rather than argue about existing moral codes or ethical paths, Rousselle suggests that another position has so far remained largely undiscussed: the nihilist one that rejects the authority or normativity of such argumentation. He states that post-anarchists, so far, have approached “classical anarchism” as a universalism (generally based on human nature) and sought to redistribute its ethical impetus in the direction of relativism. What Rousselle seeks to do, by contrast, is to make explicit the implicit core of classical anarchism; and that core, according to him, is ultimately nihilist. “One must therefore seek to remain consistent with the latent force rather than the manifest structure of anarchist ethics, for there is a negativity that is at the very core of the anarchist tradition” (98–99). Centering his discussion on Kropotkin, Rousselle claims that while Kropotkin’s manifest ethics was clearly universalist (grounded on an appeal to human nature), his latent ethics was nihilist. “If it can be demonstrated that Kropotkin’s system of ‘mutual aid’ also called for the restriction of the free movement of the individual then it can also be argued that his work, like much of traditional anarchist philosophy, was always at war with itself” (146).[13] The ethical nihilism is revealed by chipping away at the manifest content of the old saws, serially revealing the conflicts they conceal, the latent content that was always implied in them:
1. Anarchists are against the State and Church
<em>implies…</em>
2. Anarchists are against the structures of representation and power at work in the State and Church
<em>implies…</em>
3. Anarchists are against any other structures of representation and power analogous to those at work in the State and Church
<em>implies…</em>
4. Anarchists are against any structure of representation and power
<em>implies…</em>
5. Anarchists are against all authority, all representation
<em>implies…</em>
6. Anarchists are against …[14]
Now, most anarchists will drop off at some point in the chain of implication, judging it to have gone too far past what they regard as common sense. (Our enemies might be less inclined to think they have gone too far.) What does this mean? Roughly speaking, that under analysis the initial emphases on opposition to state or religious authority give way to an unbounded hostility to all authority; that the opposition to political representation opens onto being against all representation; and that the critique of the unfoundedness of existing moral codes concludes in a sense of the ungroundedness of all morality. And they do so in two senses: historically, as the overall tendency of anarchism has sufficient time to develop (that it will be repressed and denied by its adherents as well as enemies is not evidence against this); and psychologically or subjectively, since this overall tendency is also an intimate matter in the life of individuals, part of the unconscious of its first and present proponents (and so analogous claims about repression by adherents and enemies most certainly apply).[15]
Rousselle suggests that, although most post-anarchists thought they were improving upon anarchism or developing its intuitions, they were in fact rendering it more docile, because more akin to liberal ideals; he, on the other hand, has revealed its nihilist core, its true and original inclination to anarchy. The problem now becomes: when anarchists disavow this nihilist core, opting for some version of relativism (or universalism!), how do we answer them? For the same reasons that I do not take Kropotkin’s or Bakunin’s manifest ideas as my guides, I do not take what analysis might reveal as their latent content as my guide. And if I do not find this kind of argumentation compelling, why would I use it on another? This is where Rousselle’s intellectualist assumptions undercut the force of his claims. I do think, however, that the ethical nihilist position is at the core of most anarchist discourse and practice, as its latent content. That is, I think he is basically right<em>, not specifically about so-called classical anarchism, but, proximately and for the most part, about anarchists.</em> Rousselle’s psychoanalytically inspired method of reading texts should be transformed into a rhetoric, or rather a counter-rhetoric, that can intervene in the present more directly. What he does with old texts, others might be able to do with people, groups, and contemporary texts. But how and when to use this counter-rhetoric? The least I can say is that I am not in the business of convincing anyone about what they really think. I may well keep my analysis to myself, or state it in resignation of being misunderstood; or I may use it to attack. Whatever the case, the nihilist position will be known in that it exposes the differend between itself and the others, and <em>between the others and themselves.</em>
This is consistent with the basic formulation of nihilism as a negative ethics. Actions taken in its name are always provisional: to reiterate from <em>Theory of Bloom</em>, all we have and all we know is “the interplay of forms-of-life” and “the protocols of experimentation that guide them.” No one knows what the world would be like if it were populated with nihilists alone! Following the previously cited sentence on the negativity at the core of the tradition, Rousselle cites one of his sources, the moral philosopher J.L. Mackie:
[W]hat I have called moral scepticism is a negative doctrine, not a positive one: it says what there isn’t, not what there is. It says that there do not exist entities or relations of a certain kind, objective values or requirements, which many people have believed to exist. If [this] position is to be at all plausible, [it] must give some account of how other people have fallen into what [it] regards as an error, and this account will have to include some positive suggestions about how values fail to be objective, about what has been mistaken for, or has led to false beliefs about, objective values. But this will be a development of [the] theory, not its core: its core is the negation. (99)
In my language, the negation corresponds to ethics as a way of life; the account of error, to what I call a counter-rhetoric. I praise Rousselle, then, because he contributed to a defense of what is negative in anarchism, while also hinting at a defense of negativity as such. He makes space for us to read passages such as the one by Mackie, above, creatively, offering them to us as lessons—logical lessons about what anarchy means. Its core is the negation.
*** 4
Such logical lessons are useful, arguably necessary, if we want to discard hope at this juncture and think with more sobriety. Most of the thinking from this perspective remains to be done. It concerns the conjunctions and disjunctions between several senses of nihilism. First, there are those most familiar in the milieu as positions: nihilist anarchy and nihilist communism. Second, there is nihilism as a theoretical concern in other writers, from Jacobi to Baudrillard. Lastly, there is the diagnostic sense of nihilism inherited from Nietzsche. Articulating these with the ethical nihilism Rousselle discovers/invents at the core of anarchism will be a complicated task, so I will limit myself here to an enumeration of provisional consequences stemming from what I have written so far. I offer these consequences as a relay from <em>After Post-Anarchism’s</em> provocations to the thinking that remains to be done: to make it possible, to prepare it as best I know how. The first two consequences suggest how we might deploy the triplicity to understand and critique contemporary anarchist approaches. The latter two concern the broader relevance and context for ethical nihilism, setting out from the anarchist context.
The first consequence is that it is now clear that <em>many contemporary anarchists confusedly combine ethical universalism with ethical pluralism; and ethical universalism with ethical nihilism.</em> In a society like ours, one whose ideal is supposedly liberal democracy, we should expect pluralist language to be the most likely one in which radicals will offer their analysis and proposals. Community organizing, consciousness-raising, and so on, have obvious links to liberalism and are at best its radical forms. As a result, moralistic types — those who publically advocate a renewal of society, an improvement of government and management (as self-government, self-management), suggesting pluralist approaches — are likely to refuse to discuss or make explicit the universalist core of their thought. Others might advocate the same practices, while privately sensing or even admitting the hollowness of the values they defend. (One disingenuous result of these private/public conflicts is the unrestrained impulse to act no matter what, as though action can never be damaging or compromised, coupled with claims that it is all an experiment, that we are learning as we go, and so on.) This offers a new perspective on the emergence and significance of second-wave anarchy[16] generally, including post-Left anarchy, green/anti-civilization anarchy, and, I suppose, post-anarchism as well, all of which might now be seen as attempts to analyze and reveal these contradictions, to make explicit the ways in which anarchist discourse was always at war with itself.
The second consequence complements the first: another set of anarchists <em>confuses</em> <em>ethical pluralism with ethical nihilism.</em> Here <em>merely stating the ethical nihilist position coherently has effects</em>. In this respect I think of those who might have overcome the liberal value-set in politics, advocating destruction of the existent, but continue to drift back to pluralist/relativist perspectives in everyday life and problem-solving due to a lack of imagination. This probably results from unconsciously positing a pluralist society as what comes after a destructive moment, while not consciously framing destructive action as having any particular goal beyond destruction of the existent. I should add here that it would be hasty to collapse the ethical nihilist position into any one practice or set of practices. Destructive practices, partial or absolute, do not follow mechanically from negation. Destruction is not the practical application of a negative theory. I am certainly not saying that destruction is not worthwhile as a practice or set of practices; but I am saying that nihilists by definition reject the overidentification of any practice with their negation of existing moralities and normative approaches to ethics. It is my sense that, once the nihilist position exists as something other than a caricature, the other positions will be increasingly undermined from within and without.
The third consequence is that <em>ethical nihilism is more than a theory.</em> It is a way of living and thinking, a form-of-life in which the two are not separate. That Rousselle discusses it only as a theory leaves it to the rest of us to elaborate what else it is, what it looks like, as some say, or how it is practiced. It is my sense that he was able to write this book because of events and situations in his life, in the milieu, in other places. So when I invoke the practical aspect of nihilism, having already said that it cannot be reduced to any practice or set of practices, I mean two things. First, that I mean to underline the unusual tone of all the practices of those that accept some version of the perspective that there is no Outside (to capitalism, civilization, or the existent), or that are profoundly skeptical about any proposed measures to get Outside. Second, that to speak of practices related to ethical nihilism continues to make it seem like a theory that endorses or suggests a course of action, while its interest is precisely that it may not do so. Monsieur Dupont’s phrase Do Nothing is relevant here: “Do Nothing... was and remains a provocation. [...] Do Nothing is an immediate reflection of Do Something and its moral apparatus.”[17] From weird practices to doing nothing: this is precisely the enigmatic space where anti-politics converges with ethics. Yes, there is a gap, perhaps a colossal gap, between the implosion-moment of societies like ours and the eternal meaninglessness of value claims and moral codes. Anti-politics might be said only to address the former, while ethical nihilism ultimately invokes the latter. But anti-politics may also reveal ethical nihilism; our willful action may accelerate the ex- or implosion of the world to reveal more of the meaninglessness it has been designed to conceal.
The fourth consequence is that <em>nihilism is also a condition</em>. It is not merely those who make it their business to think and act in the world that are living with nihilism. The force of ethical nihilism is not so much in being a position one advocates as in its undermining of others’ claims to certainty. If we are able to do this sometimes it is because there are many others who, in a rapidly decomposing society, more or less consciously grasp the hollowness in every code of action. Take this passage from Heidegger as an illustration:
The realm for the essence and event of nihilism is metaphysics itself, always assuming that by “metaphysics” we are not thinking of a doctrine or only of a specialized discipline of philosophy but of the fundamental structure of beings in their entirety ... Metaphysics is the space of history in which it becomes destiny for the supersensory world, ideas, God, moral law, the authority of reason, progress, the happiness of the greatest number, culture, and civilization to forfeit their constructive power and to become void.[18]
Dare I add here that something of this condition was also gestured toward in a few precious texts on postmodernism, texts which raised tremendous questions about their present, and by extension ours, only to be buried in an avalanche of increasingly unimaginative discussions, as if to systematically shut down the possibility of such questioning?
What these four consequences add up to is perhaps something on the order of a paradigm shift that some of us are perhaps dimly beginning to perceive. Or perhaps it is much bigger and more terrifying than a paradigm shift could ever be. Rousselle overestimates the importance and centrality of post-anarchism to anarchist theory (and, needless to say, various milieus), and his claim that his theorizing after post-anarchism consolidates the shift from pluralist/relativist post-anarchism, with its reformist and radical liberal tendencies, and a fully nihilist theory expressing the latent destructive content of anarchism, is misplaced. But increasing emphasis on nihilist ideas, and the increasing prevalence of what could be called nihilist measures, is a condition that involves us all to some degree. And we have tried to think it through and respond. The call for an end to government instead of a better, more democratic, more egalitarian form of government is ancient. The call for the abolition of work instead of just, fair, or dignified work is decades old, at least. How many of us no longer criticize competition so as to contrast it with cooperation, but because the victory it offers is laughably meaningless? How many of us have more or less explicitly shifted from advocating a plurality of genders to pondering the conditions for the abolition of gender as such? What to make of the increasing opposition to programmatism[19] and demands in moments of confrontation and occupation?
I intuit two things here: that pluralism seems to continually reveal its relativist core more and more often, and that the revelation of the relativist core will make it increasingly easier for the nihilist position to be stated, with all of its disruptive effects. Conversely, as I have suggested, <em>merely stating the nihilist position coherently has effects</em>. I propose that those interested make it their business to <em>deploy the triplicity.</em> To which I will immediately add: <em>there will be stupid and parodic versions of this moment</em>. <em>For some of us this moment will be lived entirely as parody and stupidity.</em> But there will also be, for some, an opportunity to refine what <em>our</em> anarchism has always meant, not as the direction history or society is going in, not as the truth of a tradition, or as an ideal of any sort, but as that which breaks from such orientations in the most absolute sense: the negating prefixes <em>a-, an-</em>, <em>anti-...</em> anti-politics as a provisional orientation, branching out into countless refusals.[20] Our ethics emerges and gives itself to thought only where breaks and refusals clear a sufficient space. We know almost nothing about such spaces, so our ethics might also be defined as the provisional <em>disorientation</em> with which we approach our ways of living, the interminable and necessary <em>skepticism</em> that characterizes our thinking’s motion.
<br>
** Fénéon’s Novels
“<em>Fénéon’s Novels” was extemporaneously created at the Renewing the Anarchist Tradition conference in 2007. I visited this gathering four or five times over the years and made some good friends there. Among other things, extemporaneously created here means that the excerpts from Fénéon cited were 1) intended to familiarize listeners with material none of them had read 2) chosen more or less at random—which random order was preserved in the written form and informed its transformation into the present piece. I later created this more writerly version with helpful feedback from Joshua Beckman. It was accepted (by one editor) and then rejected (by the rest) for a book on contemporary political movements, which seems appropriate; it both is and is not about contemporary political movements. It addresses some of the thinking on language discussed more broadly in “To Acid-Words” by focusing on a specific kind of writing that might easily be overlooked, thus staging the question of what to do with all of the writing that we don’t want to consider writing. Relatedly, here I say some things about ethics from a somewhat different perspective than the preceding essays: ethics as a way of attending. (A similar view is discussed in a piece not included here, “Anarchist Meditations”.)</em>
<em>Meanwhile the newspapers took over the task of recounting the grey, unheroic details of everyday crime and punishment.</em>
<br>
— Foucault, <em>Discipline and Punish</em>
*** 1. Tiny Novels
You are about to read five novels.
<verse>
Just married, the Boulches of<br>
Lambézellec, Finistère, were already<br>
so drunk it was necessary to lock them<br>
up within the hour.
Countering the prosecution in<br>
court at Saint-Étienne, Crozet, a.k.a.<br>
Aramis, presumed prolific thief, met<br>
all questions with silence.
</verse>
<strong>(brevity)</strong>
<verse>
Some business involving streetlights,<br>
taken the wrong way by the court at<br>
Nancy, earned a month in prison for<br>
the agitator Diller.
Marie Boulanger, a gilder, is in Cochin<br>
recovering from a knife wound given<br>
to her by Juliette Duveaux. The<br>
young women were mutually envious.
A corpse floated downstream. A<br>
sailor fished it out at Bolougne. No<br>
identification; a pearl grey suit; about<br>
65 years old.[21]
</verse>
Yes, novels; brief novels, novels in three lines. They were published anonymously in the form of a <em>faits-divers</em> column in the Parisian newspaper <em>Le Matin</em>. The date was 1906. Félix Fénéon took a temporary job working at this liberal newspaper, with a circulation around half a million, translating wire reports and town gossip into the 1,220 novels that have survived. Each one is a report assembled from a minimum of information. Each is also carefully composed as a minute novel. It is as though Fénéon interpreted the column’s title, <em>nouvelles en trois lignes</em>, in both of its possible senses: “the news in three lines” and “novellas in three lines.”
<verse>
After climbing to the attic, breaking<br>
through the ceiling, and invading the<br>
premises, thieves took 800 francs from<br>
M. Gourdé, of Montainville.
Five hundred cigars and 250 flasks of<br>
wine: booty netted by burglars who<br>
visited the villa at Le Vésinet, of the<br>
soprano Catherine Flachat.
</verse>
<strong>(virtuosity)</strong>
<verse>
“I could have done worse!” exultantly<br>
cried the murderer Lebret, sentenced<br>
at Rouen to hard labor for life.
Schoolboys in Vibraye, Sarthe,<br>
attempted to circumsize a child. He<br>
was rescued, although dangerously<br>
lacerated.
There were 12,000 francs in the safe<br>
of the rectory at Montmort, Marne.<br>
Burglars took it.
</verse>
In these novels, Fénéon’s prose balances painstaking precision and dry wit. This was also the style of his art criticism and of the pieces he published in anarchist newspapers.[22] He was always reticent about publication; he often signed his articles “F. F.” or with generic names such as <em>Hombre</em>. Unprolific, then, given to a certain anonymity, Fénéon was deliberate about when and where he wrote—and more importantly, <em>how</em>.
*** 2. A Way of Life
Whatever he might have called himself, I find it useful to call him a dandy. I consider dandyism to have been a lived philosophy.[23] I mean the way of life of anyone who has developed a complete aesthetics of existence, as one might once have developed or accepted, in the ancient Hellenistic schools especially, an ethics of existence.
<em>Dandyism, the modern form of Stoicism …</em>[24]
His manner of speaking, the tone of his voice; his style of dress, the way he did or did not appear in certain places; the way he formed or cut off friendships, the nature of his love affairs: all of these expressed an overall aesthetics of existence.[25] How can this be related to the fact that, at least when he wrote the novels, Fénéon’s political sympathies were with the anarchists? It was the familiar anarchism of the late nineteenth century, with its pragmatically materialist view of history, science, and progress, its visceral anti-clericalism and anti-patriotism, and its vital infusion of egoism. This last aspect is perhaps how the dandies were able to make common cause: an emphasis on the individual and his or her self-presentation answered to both ethical and aesthetic sensibilities, offering the promise of their convergence. There are a number of figures who could be retroactively described as having, as part of their <em>aesthetic</em> sensibility, radical political sympathies.[26]
<verse>
“To die like Joan of Arc!” cried<br>
Terbeaud from the top of a pyre made<br>
of his furniture. The firemen of Saint-<br>
Ouen stifled his ambition.
</verse>
<strong>(startling)</strong>
<verse>
Barcantier, of Le Kremlin, who had<br>
jumped in the river, tried in vain to<br>
throttle, aided by his Great Dane, the<br>
meddler who was dragging him out.
Two Malakoff blacksmiths were rivals<br>
in love. Dupuis threw his hammer at<br>
Pierrot, who in turn tore up his face<br>
with a red-hot iron.
</verse>
Now, an uncertainty: Fénéon may have been the one who deposited a bomb that detonated outside the Hôtel Foyot on April 4, 1894. Whether or not he was responsible, this <em>attentat</em> belonged to the violent political climate of that Paris: often enough, brutality against the poor resulted in the anonymous bombing of a bourgeois restaurant or aristocratic opera house. Fénéon may or may not have done this; he <em>was</em> tried for it. His biographer, Joan Halperin, summarizes contemporary accounts of his demeanor before the judge and prosecutor:
<verse>
His manner was icily correct, his voice<br>
cool and reserved, his mean, sharp<br>
face expressionless except for a brief<br>
smile that flashed his scorn once or<br>
twice at the court.[27]
</verse>
She excerpts from the interrogation:
<verse>
<em>Judge Dayras</em>: You were the intimate<br>
friend of the German anarchist,<br>
Kampffmayer.
<em>Fénéon</em>: The intimacy could not have<br>
been very great. I do not know a word<br>
of German and he does not speak<br>
French.<br>
(Laughter).<br>
<em>Judge</em>: Matha, under indictment for<br>
antimilitary propaganda, stopped at<br>
your house when he came to Paris.<br>
<em>Fénéon</em>: Perhaps he was short of<br>
money.<br>
<em>Judge</em>: When you were arrested, you<br>
were asked if you knew Matha. You<br>
said no!<br>
<em>Fénéon</em>: Yes, systematically. I was not<br>
used to being in handcuffs, and at<br>
that moment, I wanted to have time<br>
to think.<br>
<em>Judge</em>: It has been established that you<br>
surrounded yourself with Cohen and<br>
Ortiz.<br>
<em>Fénéon</em> (smiling): One can hardly be<br>
surrounded by two persons; you need<br>
at least three.<br>
(Explosion of laughter).<br>
<em>Judge</em>: You were seen speaking with<br>
them behind a lamp-post!<br>
<em>Fénéon</em>: Can you tell me, Your Honor,<br>
where behind a lamp-post is?[28]
</verse>
Here is a first clue concerning the style of the novels. Fénéon kept his composure, responding to the interrogation with impeccable witticisms. His responses reveal an almost impossibly well-calculated precision and humor. They also tell us something about F. F.’s aesthetics of existence; they are evidence of an utter commitment. Even in a situation where one could be sent to prison or put to death, one did not give up on the witty repartee, on holding one’s own against a boorish interlocutor. Our novels are also marked by such a commitment; not, however, before the judge and prosecutor, but before the banality of everyday life and the boredom of work.
*** 3. Brevity and Relation
So these novels are the writings of an anarchist dandy, done in the context of temporary work, and may be related to an aesthetic commitment that is, tendentially, an ethico-political commitment. At the same time they are <em>not</em> explicitly political texts. There are a few items concerning actions motivated by political beliefs, but even these seem to include ideological positions only incidentally. What is interesting here is rather how he transformed the received genre of the <em>faits-divers</em>. These items were already brief. The anonymous F. F. made them witty. In their newly significant brevity, they communicate a complicated and indirect pathos, unfolding a new relation to everydayness.[29]
<verse>
After being autopsied, the<br>
unidentified bishop found yesterday<br>
on the main square in Aïn-el-Turk,<br>
Oran, was buried with ecclesiastical<br>
honors.
An unknown person painted the walls<br>
of Pantin cemetery yellow; Dujardin<br>
wandered naked through Saint-Ouen-<br>
l’Aumône. Crazy people, apparently.
</verse>
<strong>(urgency)</strong>
<verse>
No one hanged the young Russian<br>
Lise Joukovsky; she hanged herself,<br>
and the Rambouillet magistrates have<br>
allowed her to be buried.
Perronet, of Nancy, had a close<br>
call. He was coming home. Having<br>
jumped out the window, his father,<br>
Arsène, came crashing down in front<br>
of him.
</verse>
At first glance, the column seems to enumerate a banal series of banal anecdotes. The pivotal events of these novels are almost always murders, suicides, assaults, or transgressions of one sort or another. There are also many accidents. Not, therefore, actions that can be interpreted in an overt and political sense as injustices or reactions to injustices; rather, the ordinary brutality of everyday life.
<verse>
Yesterday, in the streets of Paris,<br>
cars killed Mme Resche and M. P.<br>
Chaverrais and gravely wounded Mlle<br>
Fernande Tissèdre.
During a pleasure outing in an ill-<br>
famed neighborhood of Toulon,<br>
Brigadier Houry, of the 3rd Colonial,<br>
was stabbed to death.
</verse>
Political indices in the plot do not alter the effect:
<verse>
“If my candidate loses, I will<br>
kill myself,” M. Bellavoine, of<br>
Fresquienne, Seine-Inférieure, had<br>
declared. He killed himself.
Burning with electoral fervor, persons<br>
attending a speech by M. Lafferre in<br>
Agde got into a fight. Several were<br>
injured, one seriously.
</verse>
Fénéon transformed the triviality of these anecdotes by sculpting them into compact novels. F. F. extracted the maximum effect from the transformation of the <em>nouvelles</em> as news into the <em>nouvelle</em> as novel. His tiny novels deviated conspicuously from the <em>faits-divers</em>: after all, its main function was filler. In the U.S. a comparable form is still used in small-town newspapers, or as police blotters:
<verse>
So-and-so’s horse got out of the field<br>
and ran down Main Street.
</verse>
<strong>(banality)</strong>
<verse>
A suspicious man was found sleeping<br>
in a car at a stop sign. He was<br>
awakened and asked to move on.
</verse>
The form suggests: this dull event at which you were likely not present does not merit an article. It barely even merits your attention. Most of us read through this information in the state William James, in his lectures on psychology, once dubbed
<em>drowsy assent</em>.[30]
However, read with a bit more care, they are unexpectedly (because accidentally) humorous. In his compressed novels F. F. took full advantage of the marginality and triviality of the <em>faits-divers</em>. He was conscious of the way in which they draw our attention in a very different manner than an article under a big headline on page one, or editorials signed by famous, authoritative names. They operate through subtlety, through indirectness. Novels in three lines cannot compel our attention; they can only seduce us into attending.
*** 4. In the Air
In historical terms F. F.’s style was an eccentric and microscopic fusion of two dominant literary movements in France at the time. The first, already going out of vogue, was naturalism. Its aim was a raw description of everyday life; a novel narrating dramatic events that one could, indeed, imagine as the subject matter of newspaper articles. The second movement was that of Fénéon’s friends, such as Mallarmé: symbolism, with its way of making a cypher of every phrase. No journalistic possibilities there, so it would seem. But these brief tragicomedies F. F. composed <em>are</em> cryptograms: concrete images that suggest an abstract idea or purified emotion without ever naming or indicating it directly. The image, then, as the raw material; symbolic intensity coalesces through a scrupulous prose haiku that documents it.
<verse>
Scheid, of Dunkirk, fired three times<br>
at his wife. Since he missed every shot,<br>
he decided to aim at his mother-in-<br>
law, and connected.
Finding his daughter, 19,<br>
insufficiently austere, Jallat,<br>
watchmaker of Saint-Étienne, killed<br>
her. It is true that he has 11 children<br>
left.
It is true that the mayor of Saint-<br>
Gervais, Gironde, has been<br>
suspended, but not that he has been<br>
sent to jail.
</verse>
<strong>(reader = witness)</strong>
<verse>
Sand and only that was the only<br>
content of two suspect packages that<br>
yesterday morning alarmed Saint-<br>
Germain-en-Laye.
After finding a suspect device on<br>
his doorstep, Friquet, a printer in<br>
Aubusson, filed a complaint against<br>
persons unknown.
</verse>
In his art criticism Fénéon was especially interested in Neo-Impressionism (a term he himself coined). Here we might learn something about what we could call his <em>optic</em>. Seurat and the other pointillists studied the refraction of light. They deployed in their painting a marvelous combination of naturalist and artificial aesthetics. Their colored points were applied on the basis of new scientific theories of vision, allowing a reinterpretation of the gaze’s operation in everyday life. On the other hand, or rather, from other angles, the same canvases could not but overemphasize the fact that paint has been thusly deployed. Fénéon’s brief novels, similarly, are snapshots or miniatures that show us quotidian scenes, but also show us how they show them. In giving the <em>faits-divers</em> a new style, Fénéon proved that their initial, supposed non-style indeed was one, however poor. In this sense the news, like the novel, becomes a matter of taste and an object of criticism. F. F.’s style, in being more artificial and affected, was, at the same time, more natural, more exact.
<verse>
Scratching himself with a revolver<br>
with an overly sensitive trigger, M.<br>
Édouard B. removed the tip of his<br>
nose in the Vivienne precinct house.
Through a blunder, M. Vossel, an<br>
employee of the Wassy precinct, killed<br>
with a rifle shot M. Champenois, a<br>
farmer.
A hanged man, there two months, has<br>
been found in the Estérel mountains.<br>
Fierce birds had completely disfigured<br>
him with their beaks.
In Le Havre, a sailor, Scouranec,<br>
threw himself under a locomotive. His<br>
intestines were gathered up in a cloth.
</verse>
*** 5. Emergency Novels
But these micro-narratives are obviously also <em>emergency</em> novels. What I have called brevity, understood as compression, communicates a certain urgency. A clue to understanding the passage from brevity to urgency may be discovered in an equally compressed book review. Here is F. F. on <em>The Brothers Karamazov</em>:
<verse>
A lot of characters. For each a lot of<br>
cucumbers. Quantities of mysterious<br>
sufferings and adventures in<br>
abundance. Two volumes. Interesting<br>
milieu for curious westerners:<br>
convents, courtrooms, etc.[31]
</verse>
Like the novels, this review is witty and brief, but hardly dismissive. It is evocative, allowing one a mysterious glimpse at Dostoyevski’s novel. This review is a second clue to understanding how brevity and wit co-operate. If a lengthy novel can be folded into a review that resembles a novel in three lines, could we interpret brief novels as capable of unfolding back into the form of a lengthy narrative? Yes, but only if they are written with the utmost care. That would be the difference that style makes: the difference, that is, between writing the <em>faits-divers</em> badly and writing them well. These anecdotes of random and everyday brutality could be read as so many unwritten full-length novels. They are novels with no author, or novels whose author is humanity, <em>Hombre</em>. F. F. did not choose anonymity; rather, he discovered himself at work, at <em>Le Matin</em>, positioned as an anonymous writer, and affirmed that anonymity. He began to transmit unwritten full-length novels, all the more compelling for that.[32] They are the novels of all and none.
<verse>
Eager for plenary indulgences,<br>
burglars emptied a shop of religious<br>
articles during the pilgrimage at<br>
Clichy-sous-Bois.
Some citizens of Boulogne half-<br>
lynched stevedore Berneux. His<br>
crime? Shouting “Down with the<br>
army!” when a work detail marched<br>
by.
</verse>
<strong>(pathos)</strong>
<verse>
Silot, a valet, installed an amusing<br>
woman in his absent master’s house<br>
in Neuilly, then disappeared, taking<br>
everything but her.
In a tent near Aïn-Fakroun, a 6-year-<br>
old Arab girl was incinerated by<br>
lightning, by the side of her mother,<br>
who was driven mad by it.
</verse>
Compression that suggests urgency: this means an accelerated pace, the sense that thoughts and actions have been condensed, and therefore the imminence of the reverse operation—opening back up, expanding, exploding. A sudden release, a sudden decompression in the emergency novel. Semiotically: a bomb. Mallarmé is supposed to have sweetly said,
<em>la vraie bombe c’est le livre.</em>
For his part, Alfred Jarry, in the chapter dedicated to his friend Fénéon in his <em>Faustroll</em>, wrote:
<verse>
… a single line drawn in chalk on a<br>
blackboard two and a half meters long<br>
can detail all the atmospheres of a<br>
season, all the cases of an epidemic,<br>
all the haggling of the hosiers of every<br>
town, the phrases and pitches of all<br>
the sounds of all the instruments<br>
and of all the voices of a hundred<br>
singers and two hundred musicians,<br>
together with the phases, according<br>
to the position of each listener or<br>
participant, which the ear is unable to<br>
seize.[33]
</verse>
An entire world hangs in suspension behind each novel. How is it to be discovered?
<verse>
Frogs, sucked up from Belgian ponds<br>
by the storm, rained down on the<br>
streets of the red-light district of<br>
Dunkirk.
There is no longer a God even for<br>
drunkards. Kersilie, of Saint-Germain,<br>
who had mistaken the window for the<br>
door, is dead.
</verse>
<strong>(seduction)</strong>
<verse>
Instead of 175,000 francs in the<br>
coffers deposited with the tax collector<br>
at Sousse, there was nothing.
Thinking he recognized, yesterday,<br>
the men who assaulted him on<br>
Monday, M. Liester, of Clichy, fired.<br>
Naturally he hit a passerby, M.<br>
Bardet.
</verse>
Sometimes with humor. Recall the interrogation’s parenthesis:
<verse>
(Explosion of laughter).
</verse>
Many of the novels have a punchline effect. That is one of Fénéon’s techniques: if someone has died, for example, that is the last word. But, as Freud wrote of jokes,
<em>… we do not in the strict sense know what we are laughing at.</em>[34]
*** 6. Ataraxia
Beyond urgency, brevity, its compression, suggests a kind of gaze or glance that is simultaneously reserved and intensely attentive. It is the signature of an aesthetic but also an ethic: a way of life. We are already, as always, investigating the transformation of everyday life into art. It seems that this mutation requires an attunement of attention or perception. Each novel is not only the trace of an evanescent event; it also bears the signature of the way Fénéon read the wire reports he perused to compose the column. The novels, that is, suggest a discipline of attention or observation. Let us imagine that Fénéon trained himself in this attention and was able to make it available in the form of novels in three lines. A perceptive reader, a careful reader, and sometimes a lucky reader might find that, as James put it,
<em>the drowsy assent is gone</em>.[35]
Simply, they are too well written to be news, immediately suggesting <em>nouvelles</em> as novels. Transforming banality into an anonymous pathos that he compressed into each line, F. F. invited or seduced another pathos, a care in reading and interpreting.
<verse>
Before jumping into the Seine, where<br>
he died, M. Doucrain had written in<br>
his notebook, “Forgive me, Dad. I like<br>
you.”
Sixty-year-old Gallot, of Saint-Ouen,<br>
was arrested just as he was beginning<br>
to impart to some soldiers his anti-<br>
military sentiments.
Fencing master Pictori was wounded,<br>
perhaps fatally, by the thrust of an<br>
amateur, M. Breugnot.
Although none hit home, six rounds<br>
were exchanged at the Montagne<br>
du Roule between the mayor of<br>
Cherbourg and a journalist.
The sinister prowler seen by the<br>
mechanic Gicquel near the Herblay<br>
train station has been identified: Jules<br>
Ménard, snail collector.
</verse>
Fénéon’s brief novels construct a different mode of relation to events. His style mutated the usually dull style of journalistic prose (banal report of banal event) by exaggerating its objective tone, taking it further in the direction of impassivity. Rather than assuming a predictable emotional response on the part of the reader, F. F. allowed the icomprehensible pathos of the collision or mixture of bodies that is the event to shine through. That is the pivot of Fénéon’s improvement of the <em>faits-divers</em> genre: he wrote about brutal, accidental, bizarre events in a voice at once intelligent and ataractic.
Given such events, given especially an aleatory series of accidents, we might find ourselves trying to explain them, producing a narrative. We call upon, depending on our proclivities, psychological or social forces. Many of the novels, for example, concern domestic violence, inebriated firefights, bombs or fake bombs (fake seems more common). Our theories, those we have taken on in good or bad taste, seem to explain or interpret these seemingly random occurrences. Indeed, Fénéon may have been hinting: <em>please interpret here</em>. Yes, feel whatever you might. However, if there is something ataractic in the novels, the opposite intention also emerges: <em>do not interpret; let the event’s pathos shine through</em>. So I say F. F.’s style is a Stoicism in short-prose, inasmuch as he, the writer, is unmoved. In terms of humor: deadpan. And Fénéon’s dry wit encapsulates precisely this contradiction. Of Jarry’s absurdist way of life, Robert Shattuck writes:
<verse>
Applied systematically to all things,<br>
including literature, the attitude<br>
became a method of humor based on<br>
logic perpetually reversing its terms.
A Negro fled from a bar in Paris<br>
without paying for his drinks; in his<br>
account Jarry affirms that, not at all<br>
a criminal, the man must have been<br>
an explorer from Africa investigating<br>
European civilization and caught<br>
without “native” currency. It is all a<br>
matter of point of view.[36]
</verse>
Fénéon attempted to develop a coherent beauty in his own life, folding in the familiar anarchist impulse to solidarity with others, by inflecting it in a Stoic manner. But let us not get confused with oblique appeals to dandyism, anarchism, and Stoicism. These are ultimately so many vague sign-posts. I can only hope Fénéon would have laughed at their crudity. What matters is the construction of a new relation to these sundry accidents, these many minor events. The suffering of another is not to be multiplied; rather, it is to be witnessed, and perhaps responded to.
Perhaps what we need is a prose that makes us witnesses to events in <em>this</em> way, without interpellating us as subjects of a pedestrian morality, good average citizens, or consumers of the news. That is the importance of emphasizing the pathos of the event itself, in its ultimately indescribable absurdity or banality. F. F.’s novels do not communicate suffering, but, paradoxically, bring pleasure.
*** 7. Daydream of Life
Freud had already, one year before the novels, described the joke or witticism as an event in language in search of pleasure.[37] He underlined brevity as one of its principal mechanisms. One year after them, in an essay on the relation between creative writing and daydreaming, Freud proposed that it is the characteristic operation of great stylists to bring their readers pleasure, even when their subject matter would otherwise leave us cool or even repel us. He compared the stylist to a child:
<verse>
We may perhaps say that every<br>
child at play behaves like a writer,<br>
by creating a world of his own or, to<br>
put it more correctly, by imposing a<br>
new and more pleasing order on the<br>
things that make up his world.[38]
</verse>
The child, who has been any of us, either plays alone or constructs what Freud calls a
<em>closed psychical system</em>[39]
with others within which the new and more pleasing order may be communicated. Beginning in adolescence, play turns to fantasy and daydream, apparently incommunicable. The stylist, however, through a combination of talent and discipline, is able to reconstruct the closed psychical system with his or her readers. It is in this sense that I suggest Fénéon’s style communicates his optic or gaze, his attitude, even some trace of his way of life. So, when Freud suggests that
<verse>
… the unreality of the writer’s world<br>
has important consequences for<br>
artistic technique: there are many<br>
things that could afford no enjoyment<br>
in reality, but can do so in the play of<br>
fantasy, and many excitations that are<br>
in themselves painful, but can give<br>
pleasure to the writer’s audience …[40]
</verse>
I am compelled to say much the same for Fénéon. It is not so much that the style directly communicates his attitude or ethics, let alone a command to imitate one or take the other on. It is rather a matter of translation (from the banal to the amusing or remarkable) and seduction (an invitation to share the gaze and the attention by making it attractive), or of making it possible to witness the event, as an event in nature, through the sublime artifice of a style.
*** 8. Antislogans
It may be useful to compare novels in three lines with slogans, which, though also quite brief, cannot be interpreted. Rather, they exist to be repeated. Slogans usually function as passwords: someone repeats one which you also repeat; this can make possible an identification, a sense of belonging, whose mechanism is rarely discussed or analyzed. Sometimes we suppose that operation amounts to understanding their meaning. It is relatively easy to recognize the meaninglessness of slogans that we don’t like. Example: what does
<strong>SUPPORT OUR TROOPS</strong>
mean? Out of a certain pride, perhaps, many of us have a hard time admitting that the slogans that we like are also meaningless. Example: what exactly does
<strong>NO GODS<br>NO MASTERS</strong>
mean? An even more difficult one to figure out is
<strong>THIS IS WHAT<br>DEMOCRACY<br>LOOKS LIKE</strong>
“Looks like?” What are we witnesses to? Any of these slogans, and hundreds more like them, function by means of mediatic proliferation in various everyday milieus. Their function is not to provide information, much less to provoke thought. Rather, as passwords, they operate by allowing some people into groups and excluding others, or by broadcasting the imminent presence of a group in some public or semi-public space. Novels in three lines, by comparison, could be decribed precisely as <em>antislogans</em>. Slogans are concise, and, concisely, say very little: just enough to determine who passes. F. F.’s micro-novels explode back out into dramatic scenes of everyday life, stretched out as it is between impersonal natural accidents and impersonal (or all-too-personal!) political and social dominations. Fénéon could not tell his readers what to think of these events. Nor does his prose suggest any kind of moral judgment. all of that would have been in bad taste. He rather crystallizes what in them is ethical, existential, significance.
*** 9. Two Short-Prose Challenges
In recent decades we have seen the rise of various print and especially digital vehicles for radical prose. We have also, and not coincidentally, felt growing apathy and participated in ugly scenes of information overload. I would echo Oscar Wilde here:
<em>It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.</em>
The goal F. F. set himself at his temp job, that of secretly deploying an effective, but above all seductive prose style, continues to be vital. I, at least, want to be inspired and challenged, not merely informed! Two challenges to that end follow.
<strong>A challenge for individuals</strong>
In part, my satisfaction in reading the novels in three lines emerged as a fantasy that all of the short prose I produce at work, mostly in the form of email, could be beautifully formed. I wanted, I realized, to tilt the balance in favor of finely crafted, exact, biting little telegrams and away from the <em>faits-divers</em> of my everydayness. But I am convinced that it is a matter of health and good taste to inquire about how so many of us are plugged into media machines as producers or consumers; to inquire, that is, about the aesthetics of flows of text and images. I do not exactly mean that writing in good taste amounts to direct action. The effects of something so subtly written are likely to be largely insensible. It is a far simpler subversion. Fénéon transformed the dull production of copy into an aesthetic event, composing a beautiful series of novels. According to an aesthetic that he lived without compromise, he sent them out anonymously, drawing attention neither to himself nor to the newspaper. It was more important that the stylistic subversion pass, because this was a kind of work refusal.
<verse>
With a hook, a washerwoman of<br>
Bougival fished out a parcel: a healthy<br>
newborn girl floating downstream.
</verse>
<strong>A challenge for groups</strong>
Fénéon’s style, the attitude he took on so as to transmit something other than information through these novels, and especially the fact that he took on that attitude by manipulating his contemporary media channels, suggests many challenging questions about today’s proliferating information flows. It seems ever more evident that there is a diffuse but very powerful command directed at many of us:
<strong>STAY<br>INFORMED</strong>
Our social and political commitments, not to mention the apparent necessities of work, seem to demand that we consume information, without regard for the form it comes in. Most so-called radical channels of information do not really modify the basic form of news and therefore do not alter the command. We have habituated ourselves to divide content and form, and be interested in the content, and ignore the form. Such habits ought to be questioned on aesthetic and ethical grounds. I do, sometimes, want to be a witness. I want to be aware of what I want to be aware of. But I do not wish to suffer from the bad taste of it all: how badly written it is and how insufferably communication unfolds. Sometimes I want to be aware of the suffering of others. But I do not wish to become miserable as a result. It is simply false that the price for remaining receptive to novelty, <em>nouvelles</em>, is sadness.
When I began reading these novels and composing my thoughts on them, I was tempted to describe the <em>faits-divers</em> as predecessors of RSS feeds, scrolling headlines, or ubiquitous “comments,” and Fénéon’s style as suggestive of a subversive use of these new headlines. In the few short years since then, there has been a deluge of digital forms of writing and broadcasting short-prose[41], with much attention paid to content, and little to form or style. Some interventions must still be possible. Some young aesthetes must be assembling apparently banal feeds that, upon closer inspection, are so well written that they disrupt an economy of information—just that economy that is making all too many of us stupider every passing minute. N3L? But that is to be optimistic. The question is, who, today, is capable of summoning anything like Fénéon’s composure, anything like his gaze, anything like the exact attention that he translated into prose.
Let us not bother, then, with the anxious narrative about the death of newspapers, of print; let us not endlessly circulate the stories about what stultifying digital worlds we are being willingly or helplessly dragged into. Let us rather praise ingenious writing wherever and whenever it incongruously occurs.
<verse>
Strikers have invaded the Dion factory<br>
in Puteaux, leading the workers there<br>
astray. “Only cowards work,” their<br>
banner read.
</verse>
** How Slogans End
<em>“How Slogans End” was first published in the second issue of</em> The Anvil Review <em>in 2011. It was my second contribution to</em> The Anvil <em>and a first experiment in discussing language practices of the contemporary anarchist space from the purview of a broader history of experimental poetics, with which the newer practices were accidentally in dialogue. It also takes up the thinking about slogans at the end of “Fénéon’s Novels.” Parenthetically, the computer programs discussed in “How Slogans End” are no longer available online: the AIMG has simply disappeared, whereas MESOSTOMATIC, which I used to generate the last two poems, has been taken down “due to complaints from arrogant academic windbags,” as might have been expected.</em>
<em>Living or dead, that’s the big question.<br>When you get sleepy, do you go to sleep?<br>Or do you lie awake?</em><br>— Cage, “Composition as Process”
<em>If among you there are those who wish to get somewhere,<br>let them leave at any moment.<br>If anybody is sleepy, let him go to sleep.</em><br>— Cage, “Lecture on Nothing”
*** 1
There is a computer program called the Automatic Insurrectionary Manifesto Generator. AIMG produces this sort of output:
<em>What’s needed is not mobilization, and even far less absence, but a putting-into-practice of inoperative crisis, a rejection in all forms of the temporality of humanism.<br><br>This is a call to indifference, not an insistence on absence.<br><br>We must destroy all humanism—without illusions.<br><br>Confronted with those who refuse to recognize themselves in our orgies of negation, we offer neither criticism nor dialogue but only our scorn.</em>
A link labeled “AGAIN” is conveniently centered below the text, inviting us to the pleasures of repetition. It reloads the page and each time generates a three-paragraph manifesto composed of such sentences. AIMG’s output is wholly predictable, in a ‘mad lib’ sort of way. All the titles it produces have the same schema: “Leaving X behind: notes on Y,” where X includes “mobilization,” “activism,” “passivity,” “fossilization,” “humanism,” and so on; and Y includes “crisis,” “rupture,” “insurrection,” or “zones of indistinction which need no justification,” for example. The same goes for the rest of the manifestos. You may have encountered its output at its home page, whose link was posted and sent around quite a bit in 2009; or you may have been presented with its texts in a more or less deceptive, more or less mocking way in blogs, or in comments on Anarchist News.
A link at the bottom of the page takes us to “insurrect.rb,” the code. Reading those 126 lines was very interesting; despite my limited understanding of programming, the way AIMG operates was clear enough. There is a list of definitions in which words are classed together under headings such as “things we like,” “things we don’t like,” “things we do,” “things we don’t do”; for the most part, then, they are groups of presumed synonyms. (I note with interest that the longest list is “things we don’t like”.) As I had suspected, the possible outcomes are finite. At first, reading just the code might suggest that the problem with the rhetoric of insurrectionary anarchism is that it is not inventive enough. Its terms are not sufficiently varied or differentiated and therefore they have a tendency to collapse into each other. But is the programmer’s goal to use the code to produce a more artful rhetoric?
On the same page as “insurrect.rb” is a “read me” file, which offers the following explanation:
<em>The purpose of this little program is to expose the seductions of rhetoric, not to criticize actions taken. Despite my admiration for many of the actions taken in the name of insurrection, I’m suspicious of how easy it is to substitute style for substance in the communiques describing these actions. And this is not to say that all ‘insurrectionist’ texts are meaningless […] This program is intended only to demonstrate the pitfalls of language which sounds too good to be meaningful.</em>
The remarks about substituting “style for substance” and “sounding to good to be meaningful” suggest the contrary: the “purpose” is less rhetoric. To the degree that AIMG accomplishes this goal, it does so by showing the limited inventiveness of what I will call I-discourse. And it does so from a perspective that opts for an uninventive “substance” rather than a superior “style.”
One could easily undertake a critique of the programmer’s assumptions by asking if the lists of “things we like” or “things we don’t like” really contain interchangeable terms. (Or, supposing that they do, how such interchangeability comes about). But there is a more interesting issue, a more profound limitation in the code than finite word lists. Line 75, for example, reads
<code>“This is a call to #{things_we_like}, not an insistence on #{things_we_dont_like}.”</code>
In prose, this amounts to something like:
<em>Do the good, not the bad</em>
or:
<em>Do what we do, don’t do what we don’t do.</em>
These are examples of the simplest grammatical formulations of a <em>moral</em> code, of a sort we discover in all sorts of discourses. Discovering such a code puts me beyond the desire to critique (to improve by strategic negation). The question becomes one of overcoming a morality that is so easily codified.
The programmer, or whoever wrote the “read me” file, tells me what he sees as the AIMG’s purpose. I am free to understand its ouput in that manner or in a variety of others. Now, to overcome the unexamined morality written into the code, I am concerned first of all with wit. Supposing the output has something to do with its stated purpose, that purpose is achieved through being witty. (Of course AIMG is not witty, because it is not a person. But the programmer probably thought he was being witty when he assembled it; and many people think they are witty when they use it and propagate its output.) I take wit to be primarily an aesthetic matter, to be judged in terms of its success. (And there are many sorts of successes. It could be that the joke is on the jokers.) For the overcoming I have in mind, I am also concerned with importance, with some way of getting at the values at play in a moral or ethical system. So let us play a logical game, cycling through possibilities based on varying answers to two questions: Is the AIMG’s output witty? And: does the AIMG matter?
*** 2
Given our two questions, there are four positions:
1. The AIMG’s output is witty, and it matters.
1. The AIMG’s output is not witty, and it matters.
1. The AIMG’s output is not witty, and it does not matter.
1. The AIMG’s output is witty, and it does not matter.
Now, this logical game is just that – of course anyone may occupy one or more of the positions successively or even simultaneously. But for the sake of the game I summon up a lunar landscape, where four speakers deliver their monologues.
The first two positions emphasize writing. Who has already stepped forward to say that AIMG’s output is witty, and it matters? It is the Author (and his audience, amused). Such is the position laid out in the “read me” file; such is the apparent stance of many who posted the link or examples of its output. For them, the machine works; it does what it is pronounced to do. It reveals to us our familiarity with a certain rhetoric. The momentary confusion that accompanies it is supposed to be funny, and to provoke a particular insight. As Bergson so precisely illustrated, the comic usually comes down to either a living thing that acts mechanically or a machine that seems to be alive (See <em>Laughter</em>). The AIMG is obviously a case of the second. The Author knows that, in reading an automatically generated manifesto, I will likely, at least initially, attribute some authorial intention, some message, to the text. When I discover or when it is revealed to me that I have been fooled, I may be angry, amused, confused … Aha! And ha! ultimately I will laughingly accept the lesson of the AIMG. The AIMG’s output is not meaningful, it is <em>just</em> rhetoric! The apparent fancyness of the language is belied by the simplicity of reproducing something like it. And, for the Author (and his audience, amused), such automatically produced rhetoric is not what our political common sense demands. Sometimes I want to side with the little pleasure evidenced in this position: pleasure in a machine that works, the pleasure of repetition. AGAIN!
A second voice intervenes and says: but the AIMG’s output is not something like I-discourse. The simplicity is in the attempt at recreation, which therefore fails, not in I-discourse itself, which is meaningful. This amounts to saying that AIMG’s output is not witty, and it matters. Who has spoken? It is the Critic. This is the voice of the audience, unamused, expressing their revolt. For them, the machine does not work; it does not or cannot do what it is pronounced to do. It presupposes lazy habits of reading, in which people respond badly to jargon they do not recognize, complex ideas and theories that require long study, etc. The Author’s common sense has spoken up and said: the AIMG demonstrates the hollowness of I-discourse. The Critic responds: you are the fool who does not discriminate between the meaningful original and the meaningless bad copy! For this speaker, what the AIMG actually reveals is a misprision of I-discourse: the output’s lack of meaning is not an example of anything. The synonyms are not synonyms; the terms are generally not used with sufficient precision. The Critic engages, then, in a militant defense of a militant discourse. I am this critic, too, sometimes: much of the time I want to side with the defense of complex ideas, of study, even in a certain sense of the mutant speech that is theoretical jargon, and to be suspicious of the common sense that warns away from all that. At the same time, it is difficult to side with a humorless Critic, and unwise to take the side of the good original against the bad copy.
The latter two positions place emphasis on the activity of reading rather than that of writing. The third belongs to one who, bored, says nothing. If we poked him and demanded a response, he might sigh like a character from Beckett: what matter where the simplicity originates? For he who is Bored, AIMG’s output is not witty, and it does not matter. The position of the Bored is similar to that of the Critic, but represents its degree zero. For him the output’s lack of meaning does not reveal anything of importance. It rather reveals the habit of reading in a generic way. When the Bored learns that he has been fooled, all that he takes to have been revealed is the habit as such. But this sort of insight is available in more or less any event of reading, whether the text in question has been written by one or more people, in part or entirely automatically, etc. I note with interest that this could equally well be the position of someone who uses I-discourse, or of someone who does not. The former would be like the Critic, but unconcerned about the way the AIMG misses the mark. The latter would not see this as an important lesson: everyone knows that GIGO. Sometimes this is my position – anytime, really, if I am bored.
This leaves the position of one who thinks AIMG’s output is witty, and it does not matter. She speaks last. I call this the position of the Curious. It is similar to the position of the Author, but is characterized by an excess of amusement, an unruly overflow of amusement beyond the stated lesson of the “read me.” This amusement, not grounded in the thought of a lesson or its importance, suggests manners of writing and reading of which the AIMG is the crudest form. So she has little use for the AIMG according to its Author’s intention for it, since she can’t imagine any way to use it and be witty. She who is Curious says: doesn’t this all suggest that the truly remarkable question here concerns the capture of a vocabulary by a grammatical-moral code, whether or not the AIMG is a good example of it? What does <em>that</em> reveal, not about I-discourse, which is a fashion of the times, but about political rhetoric (including the minimalist rhetoric we call “common sense”) in general? Most of the time I am interested in unserious ways of reading. So, curious, I have seized AIMG as an example, staging my curiosity by offering an illuminating counter-example.
*** 3
There are two computer programs called IC and MESOLIST. They produce this sort of output:
[[a-d-alejandro-de-acosta-how-slogans-end-1.png]]
Using IC and MESOLIST, John Cage invented a writing machine that produced what he called mesostic poems, a variant of the more familiar acrostic poem. In acrostics, it is usually the first letter of each line that, read vertically, forms a name or phrase. In mesostics, the vertical component, or “spine,” is in the middle of each line. The mesostics invite multiple forms of reading, not the least of which is reading aloud, because they are themselves ways of reading and invitations to creative re-reading. This is so inasmuch as the mesostics are composed of either an entire given text (in <em>Empty Words</em>, for example, Cage explains how he used mesostics using the spine “JAMES JOYCE” to “read through” <em>Finnegans Wake</em>) or a set of quotations from various writers. Often other strings of letters appear, such as the names of authors and the titles of books.<em></em> (One might conclude that it is not just re-reading or “reading through,” but <em>study</em> that is at stake, though this would require dramatically re-evaluating what we usually mean by that word.) Cage composed many texts in which a love of language, of the ideas, words, and sounds in his preferred authors combined with his serene and studied use of random processes for composition. Now, Cage’s music remains obscure for most. Among those I know who are familiar with his name, it usually functions as a historical point of reference rather than an object of appreciation (an artwork). His writing is, I suppose, even more mysterious. But it is also light, the lightest butterfly-writing one could ever wish to read. It is our problem if we are the ones who expect a message from either. Using IC and MESOLIST, Cage wrote several books of compiled and interlinked mesostics, such as <em>I-VI</em>, <em>Themes and Variations</em>, and the one that concerns me here, <em>Anarchy</em>. MESOLIST lists “all words” in the source texts “that satisfy the mesostic rules” (<em>I-VI</em>, 1). IC, “a program … simulating the coin oracle of the <em>I Ching,</em>” is used to decide “which words in the lists are to be used and gives … all the central words” (<em>ibid.</em> A more complete discussion of this process with respect to its creation and use may be found in <em>Empty Words</em>, 133-136). In <em>Anarchy</em>, the source material is thirty<em></em> quotes from Kropotkin, Malatesta, Bakunin, Tolstoy, Thoreau, Whitman, Goldman, Goodman, Buckminster Fuller, Norman O. Brown, and Cage himself. For example: “Periods of very slow changes are succeeded by periods of violent changes. Revolutions are as necessary for evolution as the slow changes which prepare them and succeed them” (Kropotkin); “The liberty of man consists solely in this: that he obeys natural laws because he has himself recognized them as such, and not because they have been externally imposed upon him by any extrinsic will whatever, divine or human, collective or individual” (Bakunin). But also: “What we finally seek to do is to create an environment that works so well that we can run wild in it” (Norman O. Brown); “I’m an anarchist, same as you when you’re telephoning, turning on/off the lights, drinking water” (Cage). Or even little stories such as this one, drawn from Hyppolite Havel’s biographical sketch of Emma Goldman: “In San Francisco, in 1908, Emma Goldman’s lecture attracted a soldier of the United States Army, William Buwalda. For daring to attend an Anarchist meeting, the free Republic court-martialed Buwalda and imprisoned him for one year. Thanks to the regenerating power of the new philosophy, the government lost a soldier, but the cause of liberty gained a man.”
These quotations and the twenty-five others, in which the use of “rhetoric” as construed by the Author and the Critic is generally at a minimum, reappear in fragmentary form according to the processes described above. Sometimes, as in the mesostic I have already cited, the explicitly anarchist nature of the content is evident (though not for all that clear in the sense implied by the desire to reverse the priorities of “style” and “substance”). Sometimes it is not so evident:
[[a-d-alejandro-de-acosta-how-slogans-end-2.png]]
Most of the mesostics invite me to active reading. How many ways can you read this delightfully polysemic excerpt?
[[a-d-alejandro-de-acosta-how-slogans-end-3.png]]
Cage’s mesostics may be understood in the context of a long history of writing experiments undertaken for their own sake, that is to say: for pleasure. This field is vast, but arguably its sundry protagonists all share in a suspicion towards, a methodical sidestepping of, the traditional image of the artist as beautiful and creative soul who, inspired, materializes the artwork. They all have in common a sense that there are social, political, psychological, even metaphysical blocks to the outflow of creativity. Arguably, from Dada to Burroughs and beyond, many of these experiments have discovered their pleasure in some form or another of the game called <em>épater la bourgeoise</em>. For Cage, by contrast, the writing machine that makes mesostics is meant neither to shock anyone nor to reveal a hidden truth or reality by subverting the rules of writing. If there is a resemblance to the motivations of the authors I am alluding to, it is in their common suspicion of the author as ego, as consciousness. In their own way they all echo that fascinating Nietzschean lesson, that consciousness is a second-order process, a derivative of the interplay (“combat”) of non-conscious forces, drives, affects, or desires. What Cage added, then, is the most innocent turn imaginable: I would say that, rather than shocking, he only wishes to play.
Indeed, there is no critique, implicit or explicit, in Cage’s writing machine. What goes in is what he wishes to affirm; what comes out is in another way also what he wishes to affirm. They are “golden passages,” as Giambattista Vico used to say. There is no real point to this doubling other than the pleasure it affords: there is no growth or insight, other than one which may come as randomly as any as long as we keep playing. “As we go along (who knows?) an idea may occur in this talk. I have no idea whether one will or not. If one does, let it” (“Lecture on Nothing,” 110). Cage followed Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan in claiming that work was already obsolete. “Instead of working, to quote McLuhan, we now brush information against information. We are doing everything we can to make new connections” (<em>Anarchy</em>, vi). Reading is then the <em>last</em> thing we should describe as labor: the labor of reading, in all its seriousness, is subsumed in a game of reading. The game is not a way to unwind from labor; but labor is a particularly wound-up sort of move in the game. It is justifiable only as a matter of taste.
Cage paid homage to his influences and inspirations in a schizoid way, drawing them into, drawing them along in his mesostics. Who among us knows how to play along with such unserious affirmations? Many of the more or less anonymous masks that leave their comments on the mirror pools of the Great Web know what to do with such a list of names and such a set of quotations. They attack some names, defend others, negate, launch petty attacks, etc. The paranoia of Critics! When we are these sad egos we miss the pure affirmation of Cage’s writing machine. It multiplies the originals, diffracting them not just by reinterpretation or application of them to new conjunctures and objects; it disassembles them down to the level of word, letter, and phoneme. This is precisely how we could overcome the sad egos that we accidentally fall into being. (Sadness is always an accident.) Embracing randomness, chaos, everything in language games or discourses or speech genres that is not under our control: it could mean liberating our language, if that does not sound too trite. It could also mean unbounded pleasure.
*** 4
When it occurred to me to seize upon the AIMG as an example, I supposed I had been waiting on Cage, patiently seeking an opportunity to re-engage with and share his mesostic experiments. Now I feel things are the other way around, as though he had been waiting on me, offering his smiling face as a mask. I daresay I have been used by him – in the gentlest way imaginable. I have proposed that the mesostics in <em>Anarchy</em> are the illuminating counter-example we need to question the AIMG. But I also think I have made clear that they are not against, counter to, anything. It is ultimately not interesting to me to occupy the position of the Author nor that of the Critic. I find nothing objectionable in the existence or use of AIMG. I occupy rather the readerly positions of the Bored and the Curious. But he who is Bored has nothing to add to this conversation (unless, interestingly, it becomes a conversation about boredom – but I will leave that for a future essay). She who is Curious regards AIMG as an embryo of something, as an opportunity to read and write differently – perhaps, eventually, to speak differently as well. A hint of this was evidenced when someone commented on Anarchist News that some of AIMG’s output was not so bad, after all: “yeah! a few times i found some lines that i actually dug! haha!” Let us go farther in this absurdist, affirmative direction. It is, I think, the mask Cage was always holding out to us. Let us treat AIMG as a partial, unconscious, fortuitous reach in the direction of a project I would like to fantasize about more fully: a way of rewriting and rereading everything that we care to read. A machine to dissolve slogans.
Let me explain. I place myself between the Bored and the Curious because I have little use for AIMG as it is offered to me by someone who says “this program is intended <em>only</em>…” But neither do I want to intervene and replace that intention with another, correct, counter-intention. Someone wants the program <em>only</em> to show something about the rhetoric of I-discourse, and perhaps more generally about rhetoric; I reply: that is <em>only</em> another floating statement. It seems to me that a written statement of intention, separate from the writing in question, should be approached as the strangest of clues. Especially when the Author is more or less anonymous; at least presented with a body and a face one may hear the tone of words, study facial expressions, analyze posture and gesture, take in the surroundings and context, and so on. This is already the case when one is reading a poem, essay, or manifesto. It is far more of a problem when it comes to randomly generated output. So I have set aside the authority of the Author, and treated his claim of intention merely as one way of reading. His is a rhetoric that aims to dissolve itself: the rhetoric of minimal rhetoric, perhaps of zero rhetoric. What about rhetoric as an art? It has long been agreed that rhetoric must involve an aesthetic component, since it is first and foremost the art of speaking to crowds, of condensing a message. The message, unfolded, could in some cases be spelled out as a series of reasoned arguments; enfolded, the arguments become enthymemes, generated by the invention of the speaker. The art is in the invention, which, classically, means the speaker’s style. Suspicion towards rhetoric is (which is as ancient as rhetoric) is focused on the danger of a message, surreptitiously encoded in an eloquent style, and so concealed from reasoned criticism: an enthymeme that is lovely or effective but that does not unfold into a reasoned argument. “Sounds good” is thus suspiciously separated from “is meaningful” and the relation between the two is always in question.
Here I invoke Cage’s mesostics, and generally his practice of voiding his art of intention and ego. If there is any rhetoric in the mesostics, it is in the input alone; the poetic form makes it impossible to deliver a message. This strange form of communication that undoes rhetoric also unbinds aesthetics and morality. The author of AIMG both chooses his lists of synonyms and composes the (moral) code that arranges them; the mesostics, though they begin with golden passages, do not allow their author any control over their fragmentary rearrangement in the poems (as parts or as wholes), and thus the code does not contain, explicitly or even implicitly, a morality. There is thus no problem with rhetoric, because it has finally been undone; but there is a curious question of aesthetics (of pleasure) left over. “Sounds good” as well as “is meaningful” can no more be said to coincide than to differ. The question becomes not “does it say anything?” or “what does it say?” but “who is reading?”
Releasing writing from intention and thus from morality, voiding intention and thus the ego in writing, is the barely explored challenge that AIMG gestures towards. And it is Cage’s mesostics, or something like them, that allow us to flesh out the fantastic reach of such a gesture. It is the greater randomness of Cage’s process that allows us to both diagnose the secret alliance between the ego and morality (we could call it <em>conscience</em>) in political rhetoric and to discover the ego in its very emergence. I mean that, in the terms I have been employing, the ego emerges in reading, not in writing. Ego is not there in the composition of a text or code, but seems to have been there after the fact; this semblance, this mask, depends on ignoring or minimizing the importance of our practices of reading. I am not suggesting that the ego should always be voided (as though that was up to us!), but that it is productive and endlessly fascinating to create writing machines that allow us to discover it. If we do this gracefully, we will guiltlessly summon up pleasure. We might eventually get better at observing how our egos, our masks, congeal in more or less rigid acts of reading. Boredom is one path; curiosity is another. The Author and the Critic cling too rigidly in their roles to the importance of their activities to allow, as the Bored and the Curious do, their masks to dissolve or shatter in excessive laughter. Nonserious reading: ludic, festive, voluptuous.
It could begin by inventing and using writing machines that consume and transform every dull index that crosses our paths: I mean all those unexamined words that make up our slogans, that pepper our statements of intent, mission and vision, our little manifestos. I also mean those <em>mana</em>-words that theoreticians enjoy moving around their chessboards. We can do it if we can learn to inject the impersonal and random into our writing, and eventually our speech. I dream of a way to complicate the desire to say, speak, or mark, to send a message or command, in its badly omened collusion with repetition. Ah, the dull indices! Who is not tired of Freedom, Democracy, Sustainability, Consent … even of Attack and Destroy? Clearly AIMG does not go far enough. We need a superior machine, a crueler code.
Reading through AIMG, one last program, MESOSTOMATIC:
[[a-d-alejandro-de-acosta-how-slogans-end-4.png]]
Reading through “How Slogans End,” too:
[[a-d-alejandro-de-acosta-how-slogans-end-5.png]]
<strong>AGAIN!</strong> <strong></strong>
** To Acid-Words
<em>Parts of “To Acid-Words” were first presented at a meeting of the Berkeley Anarchist Study Group in November, 2011. The rest of it was meditated on (and off) for the following two years, with a last burst of effort in early 2014. This is to say that it has layers, strata. It is an attempt to address the tremendous anxiety anarchists seem to have about language, and each of its sub-sections responds analytically to various attitudes towards language in the milieu. I think of it as a necessarily incomplete piece, in that it addresses a relation the anarchist milieu constantly denies in seeking out a better language (instrumental, operational), a pre-language, or a non-language. This relation is, of course, its relation to what it knows as Society. But the relations to language in the milieu, and our collective anxiety towards it, can never be entirely considered apart from more or less discernible social attitudes. Ultimately, although there is nothing to be said</em> in general <em>about language from an anarchist perspective, it is sometimes worthwhile to trace the lineaments of some particular anarchist attitudes to language, as I have done here. Two caveats: first, this piece is written from a monolingual point of view, as it addresses a largely monolingual milieu. A vastly different approach to these questions could have begun from multilingualism and translation. Second caveat: what is said here about poesy and poetry is delicately presented in a sideways pedagogy, introducing an idea or three to unfortunate readers who have little experience of these. (That, for example, the term I’ve used for a certain idea of language,</em> Language<em>, is also commonly used for a loose school of poets and writers whose works have contributed to inspiring precisely the approach I’ve taken here, is only one of the minor ironies of this essay.)</em>
<verse>
& so you print your poems<br>
& no one cares<br>
they hate you sometimes<br>
tell you to go to work<br>
like every one else<br>
or they want you to explain<br>
in american, in english,<br>
in old english, in slang<br>
in political, in sexual,<br>
in religious, in psychological,<br>
in revolutionary terms &<br>
language,<br>
what you meant<br>
& so you hide<br>
take acid<br>
& write an acid poem<br>
or a poem about your city<br>
& say its to increase awareness<br>
of the environment<br>
& its words to expand your<br>
head so you don’t have<br>
to take acid<br>
and endanger your life<br>
if it really is dangerous”<br>
— d.a. levy
</verse>
<quote>
<em>le militant n’entend pas, ne voit pas le langage et c’est à ce prix qu’il peut militer</em>
[the militant does not hear, does not see language, and this is the price he pays for his militancy]
— Roland Barthes
</quote>
What I add to these lines—what I place between them—is a kind of enumeration, argumentation through serial juxtaposition: anecdotes and examples, a series of scenes I have been witness to; analysis, thinking through what I heard and saw; references, the things people said, or wrote, and also a way of looking back at what they did not say, or write. And asides for what remained to be noted. I place it all between d.a. levy’s positive but dangerous “awareness / of the environment / & its words” and Barthes’ two negatives, his thought of a militancy that depends on a denial of language, to show something of the gray space some of us inhabit.
So this is not exactly about anarchists. Nor is it about the society they want to transform, dismantle or destroy. It is about how the society anarchists want to transform, dismantle or destroy transforms, dismantles, or destroys them in the moment of saying what there is to do, of writing what they want or think. And about some ways to resist.
*** Part 1: Moral
<em>I’m quite serious about the need to resist the tyranny of elemental words... They’re words that brook no argument, that are intended to be outside of syntax and thus outside of history. I try to resist this when I write.</em><br>— <em>Bob Perelman</em>
**** How Activists Talk
As I have experienced it, the anarchist milieu (our gray space) is not exclusively or even principally made up of activists. But in the sub-cultural spaces, the social overlaps, and the political neighborhood of the anarchist milieu there is activism, and so there most certainly are activists. It’s important to be careful here, because among some anarchists <em>activist</em>, like <em>liberal</em>, is an epithet. The activists I am talking about are both those picked out and ridiculed with such epithets, and, often enough, some less obvious characters. We will only understand activists (and their talk) if we make them strange again, because sometimes they are our friends. They are also us on some days or in the past; they are us though we are in denial about it. Some anarchists are activists and say so; others are activists in denial. Someone said: “activists without the word.” Others again aren’t activists but bear in their speech and action the inertia of activist approaches and tactics, an entire way of life that shapes what it is to be of the Left in North America and probably elsewhere.
Whoever they are, activists talk at meetings. Of course activists also talk in other situations, but it seems to me that to be an activist is tendentially to reform any situation into a meeting. For example, there are people who only socialize by bringing elements of the meeting into the social situation, at the limit by turning social situations into meetings wholesale. There are rallies and protests and so on, but these have much in common with meetings; one sometimes gets the feeling that everything would be over if the people or institution being protested or rallied against would agree to a meeting. Consequently, the activist utopia is a society assembled out of meeting-atoms, a federation of meetings.
The way activists talk at their meetings is primarily in <em>margarine-words</em>. These may be <em>slogans</em>, phrases whose function is to circulate, not to mean; or they may be certain <em>oily words</em> that slip from mouth to ear, person to machine, situation to scene. One way to recognize margarine-words is repetition: they are used a lot, functioning as code words or passwords, their appropriateness assumed, never shown. Ultimately, this is because their circulation is also the usually unquestioned circulation of moral beliefs; but in any given iteration, the repetition may be well-nigh meaningless, just a little index, gentle reminder of the shared morals rather than harsh mnemotechnic. It is never really clear which is primary, which gives form to which: the morality at work, or the compulsion to repeat in its collusion with the most gregarious drives. In any case, the meeting (or the rally, etc.) is the pedagogical site where these morals are usually circulated and sometimes, memorably, inculcated. Another way to recognize margarine-words is that, as repeatable units, they can be coded negatively as well as positively, so that avoiding them or using them only as terms of derision becomes as important as using the ones that are to be circulated, owned, and appreciated. That is how we get, for example, “activists without the word,” and moralistic immoralists.
To take this analysis one step further and understand what activism really is, we would have to deepen the discussion of the relation between morality and technology, the primitive technics of repetition and circulation, their ever-larger and more sophisticated technological networks, their absorption of ancient codes and modern laws, and so on; that is, discuss <em>politics</em>. It is difficult to explain how these two co-operate, because sometimes morality is just that, moral principles and deliberation and tradition and so on; and sometimes I write morality and realize I am talking more about a certain undeliberated obsessiveness, a sort of neurosis of doing the good that neurotically redefines the good as its own neurotic world-view... how all of these levels of neurosis compose modern political subjects is a question to be set aside for now.
Instead, let’s leave matters in the realm of family resemblances and generalize for the productive fun of it about how activists use their margarine-words. Afterwards, we will have to thank the activists for making this all so clear, because they are clearly not the only ones who speak in margarine-words. Margarine-words are all of ours when we aren’t paying attention; activists are just those who step forward most flagrantly to show us how we all repeat.
***** ASIDE 1
<quote>
Many of the rhetorical effects I designate here as margarine-words are more matters of speech than writing; thus here I concentrate on how some <em>talk</em>. The mana-words I turn to further on are best understood as inventions in writing, though they do have a strange orality in <em>mutant speech</em>. It turns out that it’s when margarine-words are written down that they are most egregious (though careful listening will find them out); and that mana-words sound strangest when spoken as mutant speech. That said, in this essay I will refer to speech and writing more or less interchangeably, as they occur to me.
</quote>
Activists use margarine-words primarily in two ways. One is the talk of the bureaucrat, the functionary. Sometimes the speaker is not so good at it, so you have to listen a bit more closely to hear the proto-bureaucrat, the proto-functionary learning her role. Even when it is sophisticated, her talk, which on the face of it is common-sensical and even rational, tends in the long run to the obtuse. <em>She can’t make eye contact for looking, or pretending to look, at all the details</em>. These are the people said to “fetishize process”—but this is usually because what they want can’t be said or done in the language of process. To speak in this way is one way to attempt, with varying degrees of success, to instrumentalize language. In part this means to understand and govern the selective circulation of margarine-words. That’s the rationality of it, achieved once a critical mass of margarine-words has been circulated, usually re-circulated if those present at the meeting are familiar with or help out in the task. But because it seeks to master people through margarine-words, and not the margarine-words themselves (mastered, they might cease to circulate, or be erased, as one with good taste stops using certain phrases, develops a studied silence with respect to the parlance they wish to abandon), this speech is a calculated violence done to language, ignoring aesthetic considerations as well as ethical ones (supposing every morality is the harsh reduction of what was or could have been an ethics). Stories told with margarine-words are moral stories; the moral is what you have to do, or not.
The other way of speaking is more mysterious. At first, it just seems to be the talk of the leader, or would-be leader, his exhortations, but in its sinews it is a kind of hysterical discourse, which perhaps has its origin in the loss of control over the first (bureaucratic) one as margarine-words begin to circulate beyond anyone’s control. The speaker realizes at some level, not necessarily conscious, that an ersatz accumulation of margarine-words is powerful, draws attention, generates or at least concentrates energy, so he goes for it, he overdoes it, he says whatever comes to mind as long as it accelerates the recirculation of margarine-words. It is a way of speaking that to an attentive listener (by definition someone not implicated in the activist project at hand) seems so wrong that it is right. Instrumentally right. Here the instrumentalization of language, which always eventually fails, tips over into something much less rational. The leader, like the bureaucrat, manages desire as best he can, but his management also depends on the ability to unleash what is less than rational in speech. This may be done cynically, with an eye to benefit from the ensuing confusion, or in wide-eyed hopefulness, confidence that desire is desire for the good, is itself good. In either case the details get lost, the instrumentalization gets scrambled, gets noisy. <em>He can’t make eye contact for looking, or pretending to look, at the horizon</em>.
***** ASIDE 2
<quote>
Do activists listen? Not as activists. But they do hear—they hear the exhortations, calls to action.
</quote>
* * *
I wrote that the details get lost. Suppose, for example, that someone you knew had at some point read a well-known poem, and thought he had found in some of its well-known lines a grand illustration of his sentiments. Suppose that the proof offered was a kind of translation of those lines into margarine-words. Suppose, moreover, that when he explained this to you, it became clear that he had so profoundly misread the lines that, beyond all ordinary questions of interpretation, he could only have arrived at his self-affirming interpretation by unconsciously inverting the traditional and accepted understanding of the lines. It is a kind of wrong that is so patently wrong that it could not subsist without a lengthy justification of reading against the grain, or an absurdist will to reverse all conventional readings. But go on supposing, and suppose that your acquaintance was in no way capable of such experimental reversals. Suppose rather that it were obvious that he thought himself to be in line with the traditional and accepted reading of the lines. How to understand this? He is on one hand so wrong that his illustration by means of the lines simply becomes incoherent. In another, stranger sense, this reading that is so plainly a non-reading shows a peculiar will to instrumentalize the artwork, to seize upon its cultural cachet. Supposing all this, you could have been witness to the ever repeated birth of propaganda. Incidentally, then, a new definition of propaganda: <em>violent translation of poetry into margarine-words</em>.
* * *
If we could accede to an impossible situation wherein the instrumental use of language, the circulation of margarine-words, could be paused long enough to examine how morality is at work in it, we would find a collusion in it of moral stories and stories about language itself. As though margarine-words can only circulate on the condition of pushing away any other possibility for speech. Often enough an activist will say something that sounds like
<quote>
<em>what you say is theoretical, abstract. I am without theory; I only speak concretely.</em>
</quote>
The proof of this concreteness is orientation to action. Listen, it is the leader, showing the usefulness of his words. Attend to variants of this story long enough and you will eventually discern the moral, which is simple enough. It seems to be:
<quote>
<em>You are bad, you use language to refer to itself; therefore I am good; I use language purposefully, in mind of action.</em>
</quote>
At the meeting, an activist is speaking, saying something, but you can’t talk about how it is said. What is to be attended to is some content (a plan of action) that is presumably shared. The accusation of abstraction leveled at users of <em>mutant speech</em> flows from this situation, since <em>mana-words</em> tend to bear the traces of their invention or borrowing more noticeably than the margarine-words preferred by activists. Margarine-words are always ingratiating, seeking to slip by unnoticed. At the meeting sometimes the bureaucrat seems to say:
<quote>
<em>My language is the only good way to refer to these matters; I am using language only in this proper way. You should not use it differently in responding, or suggest that activists might be using it differently in the way they speak.</em>
</quote>
Listen, she is preventing deviation from her script.
How is orientation to action—as the criterion of concreteness and propriety—a problem? In two ways: <em>first</em>, because <em>action is usually defined too narrowly</em>. It is likely to mean a process or event that is interpersonal, public, somehow forceful, often requiring muscular effort, loud, and so on. Which is to say that it is political, and not infrapolitical, micro-political, anti-political, or apolitical. These sorts of processes or events are adequately modeled, “represented”, so the activist supposes, in her language. When it is a theoretical language, it is deployed with an eye to application in practice (which means the kind of narrowly construed political action I’ve just described); when it is a practical language, it is deployed as almost pure instrumentality: “go there,” “do this,” etc.
If you question the moral of the story that says you are theoretical and the activist is not, you will meet the push to “do something”—to prove the “this-sidedness” of what you have to say with actions the leader or the bureaucrat will recognize as political.
By now it should be clear that our gratitude to the activists is for showing those of us who are listening how this operation works. At the same time it should be clear that, aside from the activists, there are many, many <em>actionists</em>, if by that word I may be allowed to refer to those who define action in roughly the way I have above, whether or not they are activists in terms of their tactics or their morality.
And what is the second problem with orientation to action? Simply put, that <em>action is not the solution to every situation</em>. At least I clamor for the perspective wherein action has neither priority nor primacy. Inaction, doing nothing, stopping, quitting, and so on, are not secondary or invalid, morally deficient and politically ineffective though they may appear to the <em>actionists</em>.
* * *
The word radical, so often used by activists (but not just them), in our milieu generally means very little other than <em>good</em>. Most know the etymological story, which is often repeated at meetings or other instructive scenes and teaches that a radical is one who, given a problem, issue, relation, or situation, gets at its root. A radical claims to think, wishes to act, in terms of the root. A simple illustration. Many years ago someone explained radical feminism to me as that feminism which conceives the subordination of women as the root of all oppression and domination—i.e. that all other asymmetries of power are either directly derived or analogically modeled on this root. Despite the undeniable fact of the subordination of women (easier to affirm than to determine <em>who</em> in the last instance is a woman) I found and continue to find it painfully naïve to claim that power could ever be exercised so simply (in one primary or root form with its analogues and derivatives). In this case the radicalism would amount to pursuing, or at least believing, such an analysis (and actively not pursuing or believing others); at a deeper level, it has to do with believing in a certain purchase of analysis (in the especially non-analytic way that activists tend to use this term) on realities of social and other kinds.
One could be more generous to the radicals (or just concede more to what they claim is ordinary usage) and suggest that by getting at the root they mean something more like: discovering the true matrix of relations of force underlying whatever problem, issue, relation, or situation is at stake for them. They would then be radical not in the sense that they seek a root or assume that there is one but in a vaguer sense, implying a kind of downward-seeking motion that we could call looking for basic structures, root-like structures. So a radical does not stop until some component relations of force, the asymmetrical relations of power, have been discovered. It seems to me that this is closer to how <em>radical</em> is generally used: those who are habituated to the downward-seeking motion. They speak—by extension: act, move—in characteristic ways. Analysis or theory works for them first as an unveiling, digging up, finding out; then, as a guide to action.
The supposition that what one discovers in the downward-seeking motion is liberatory is perhaps part of what is at stake in the use of radical more as a noun than as an adjective, or its adjectival use in a sloppy, all-purpose manner, indicating another kind of social identity, meaning roughly <em>the right kind of activist</em>, equivalent to <em>activists like us</em> or <em>activists who agree with us</em>. We pass from repetition to gregariousness. In that mode radical, the adjective, may be coupled with countless activities, situations, places, tasks. What does it add?
It adds a morality, or rather it is an index that a moral code is at stake. As I noted, <em>radical</em> is just a synonym for <em>good</em>, where what is good is delineated in a largely unspoken and thus unquestioned morality. This might explain such otherwise confusing constructions as:
<quote>
<em>radical mommy</em>
<em>radical cheerleader</em>
<em>radical stripmall</em>
</quote>
If we try to understand these constructions according to the first definition I suggested, they are almost incoherent. What is the fundamental or root aspect of being a cheerleader, for example? Whatever it is, a radical cheerleader would be an excellent cheerleader. According to the second sense, what is intended might be something more like this: there are radicals, habitués of the downward-seeking motion, and as such they have earned the right to call themselves and what they do radical. If one of these radicals takes up cheerleading as an activist project, cheerleading, otherwise under suspicion as a practice of mainstream society, becomes radical cheerleading. This means good cheerleading, not as cheerleading but as a suitable activity for a radical. But then radical does not really mean one who goes to the root of cheerleading, but rather one who can make an activity (otherwise under suspicion) good, adjectivally radical, by lending interest and energy to it. It is the valuation associated with the downward-seeking motion. It is also the value that margarine-words bear as passwords or code-words. Cheerleading can in this sense be recuperated, but this changes nothing about it—the routines, contents of chants, etc. is not what one would claim was at the root! What changes is the “message”—it is now margarine-words as enthusiastically repeated cheers.
Can we say anything different about other instances of “radical” politics?
* * *
In 2006 AK Press published a book called <em>Horizontalism</em>. It is sub-titled “voices of popular power in Argentina” and has to do with mutual aid networks and forms of neighborhood and workplace autonomy after the financial collapse in 2001. Marina Sitrin, who edited the book and has done the most to popularize the titular word in Anglophone contexts, writes:
<quote>
Horizontalidad <em>is a living word, reflecting an ever-changing experience. While I have translated it as horizontalism, it is more of an anti-ism. Horizontalism is not an ideology, but more of a social relationship, a way of being and relating.</em>
</quote>
Indeed, the oral histories and interviews in the book testify to an extreme suspicion about established politics of any sort. This suspicion, which sometimes spills over into hostility, is manifest among other things in the descriptive term used for the organization of meetings, neighborhood assemblies, occupied spaces, and so on: <em>horizontalidad</em>.
It was not long after I read this book that I met a number of activist anarchists who regularly used the term <em>horizontalism</em>, in obvious reference to the book, to describe their own practices and those of others. In fact, it seemed that these folks used the terms <em>horizontalism</em> and <em>anarchism</em> almost interchangeably, except that anarchism was for those in the know, what I would call the milieu, and <em>horizontalism</em> was for negotiating with other activists, or for “the community”—the latter meaning in this case <em>those to be organized</em>. The initial conflation makes some amount of sense, as the organizations these activists are a part of were the kind populated by anarchists who do not advertise their anarchism to “the community.” Their emphasis on organizing as such made it easy to refer to what was happening as horizontal organizing. Still, it struck me when I realized that with this crowd <em>horizontalism</em> had become a euphemism for <em>anarchism</em>, a way to mince words at best, at worst to dissimulate or confuse their convictions.
One could perhaps trace this back to Sitrin’s decision to translate the adjectival noun <em>horizontalidad</em>, literally <em>horizontality</em>, which models a state of affairs or a process, as <em>horizontalism</em>, the, as she puts it, anti-ism. But it is also a perfect illustration of how those used to margarine-words comfortably adopted <em>horizontalism</em> as a way to purposely make their position more vague when engaging in activism, while, in the doing, adding one more note of imprecision to that position.
* * *
Should we distinguish how militants talk and how activists talk? Only to some extent. I have known many less militants than I have activists. It’s possible I’ve never met a militant, only would-be militants, which drives me to say that these folks were a species of activist, not so much in their political opinions or organizational forms but in their general orientation to action—and their relation to language. Tiqqun wrote some instructive pages on militants in <em>This Is Not a Program</em>, wherein they emphasize the militants’ separation from their communities (activists seek rather to integrate so as to organize). The world of militants is always tendentially the world of secrecy and clandestinity. As if to escape the bureaucratic deployment of language, militants often turn to a completely operational language, trimming analysis down to a series of simple presuppositions about which no further discussion is necessary. Would-be militants imitate this minimalism in their brief statements claiming actions.
But if, as Barthes suggests, the militant is a limit-point, the one who does not see language, one could see activists, in their exhortatory and managerial modes, as being just a little bit more aware of language, because they must be more integrated into ordinary speech. Integrated into
<quote>
<em>...the most banal of apparatuses, like a boozy Saturday night among suburban petit bourgeois couples [...] it often happens that we experience the characteristic, not request, but possession, and even the extreme possessiveness involved with every apparatus. And it is during the vacuous conversations punctuating the dreadful dinner party that we experience it. One of the Blooms “present” will launch into his tirade against perpetually-on strike-government-workers; once performed (the role being well known), a counter-polarization of the social-democratic type will issue from one of the other Blooms, who will play his part more or less convincingly, etc., etc. Throughout, these aren’t bodies speaking to each other, but rather an apparatus functioning. Each of the protagonists sets in motion the series of ready-to-use signifying machines, which are always-already inscribed in common language, in grammar, in metaphysics, in the THEY.</em>
</quote>
THEY = SOCIETY, as anarchists use the word. This constant of political speech that is what the <em>horizontalism</em> example suggests: there is a minimum consciousness of the experience of language as a raw material to be rendered instrumental, even as there is a generalized amnesia about how this process works. As a guideline, the demand for ordinary speech is always repeated when people deviate too much from the preferred margarine-words (which, being passwords, get a pass). And this ordinary speech is itself dense with other (older, unknown) margarine-words, the keywords of the society that activists seek to change, that we anarchists want to dismantle, transform or destroy.
**** Our Operation Margarine
This story is about something that repeats: a loophole, a silent acrobatic maneuver accomplished in the course of political speech.
At an anarchist gathering, I attended a workshop whose stated intent was to question the notions of justice and accountability.[42] <em>Accountability</em> is another margarine-word, the use of which that day stretched from the leftist demand for “police accountability” to our own “accountability processes” and their implied moralities—not to mention their interminable slowdowns and failures. The hour or so of discussion went like this: at first, everyone who spoke dared to call police accountability into question, describing it as a reformist slogan, and so on; to a lesser extent, our own use of the word in accountability processes also came into question. For a time it seemed as though no one who spoke wanted any kind of accountability. The word was effectively being crossed out: any positive use began to feel suspect. As the hour wore on, and with no one explicitly recanting their initial statements, a kind of discursive inertia seemed to be doing its slow and even work. (Here we might consider silence: what was not said by the majority of those in the room who did not speak, so the dynamics of the group, the crowd—and the pauses and hesitations of those who did speak up.) Eventually, everyone was talking about accountability again: not their kind, but our kind; not the bad kind that is ours, but the good kind that could be ours; not fake accountability, but true accountability. Perhaps some felt for a time that it was possible to discard accountability, the slogan, the bad word we had crossed out, and gesture towards the true relation, the word we might eventually just use without crossing it out verbally or otherwise. Around then someone spoke up and said something like:
<quote>
<em>despite all this critique, everyone here has returned to using the word more or less in the way initially questioned and objected to.</em>
</quote>
My first thought was: that comfortable circle is one of the ways critique works! Which may as well mean: does not work. Even those who continued to speak against accountability treated it as a reality, gave the word traction, importance as that which we might, we could, maybe should, with great deliberation, refuse, cross out... so that what would replace accountability as a demand or goal needed to be provisionally referred to as... <em>accountability</em>.
* * *
The idea of margarine-words occurred to me after that gathering, when I recalled reading an essay by Roland Barthes about a commercial involving a subtle and effective ideological operation. Barthes describes Operation Margarine as a way of “inserting into Order the complacent spectacle of its drawbacks” and suggests that is a “paradoxical but incontrovertible way of exalting” Order.[43] Paradoxically—exalting—order. This is the “schema” he offers of the Operation:
<quote>
<em>take the established value which you want to restore or develop, and first lavishly display its pettiness, the injustices which it produces, the vexations to which it gives rise, and plunge it into its natural imperfection; then, at the last moment, save it in spite of, or rather by the heavy curse of its blemishes.</em>
</quote>
He calls Operation Margarine a kind of “homeopathy”:
<quote>
<em>one cures doubts about the Church or the Army by the very ills of the Church and the Army. One inoculates the public with a contingent evil to prevent or cure an essential one. To rebel against the inhumanity of the Order and its values, according to this way of thinking, is an illness which is common, natural, forgivable; one must not collide with it head-on, but rather exorcise it like a possession: the patient is made to give a representation of his illness, he is made familiar with the very appearance of his revolt, and this revolt disappears all the more surely since, once at a distance and the object of a gaze, Order is no longer anything but a Manichean compound and therefore inevitable, one which wins on both counts, and is therefore beneficial. The immanent evil of enslavement is redeemed by the transcendent good of religion, fatherland, the Church, etc. A little ‘confessed’ evil saves one from acknowledging a lot of hidden evil.</em>
</quote>
The master-stroke of the essay, which takes us from propaganda or ideology to what Barthes called myth, passes from the initial examples about the Army and the Church to an advertisement for Astra margarine:
<quote>
<em>The episode always begins with a cry of indignation against margarine: ‘A mousse? Made with margarine? Unthinkable!’ ‘Margarine? Your uncle will be furious!’ And then one’s eyes are opened, one’s conscience becomes more pliable, and margarine is a delicious food, tasty, digestible, economical, useful in all circumstances. The moral at the end is well known: ‘Here you are, rid of a prejudice which cost you dearly!’ It is in the same way that the Order relieves you of your progressive prejudices.</em>
</quote>
It should be obvious enough how such a schema is at work in the discourse around the Army or the Church (or all the institutions that resemble Armies and Churches). Extending it to Astra margarine was Barthes’ way of saying something about how utterly common of an operation is at work here, how natural or naturalized this inverting or turning-inside-out gesture is. That is where Barthes leaves us, in the diffuse world of advertisements, tiny shreds of propaganda. The calque of Operation Margarine I have been discussing here, ours, if it is a myth, is larval or malformed, probably because, like our politics, it belongs to a different kind of order. Our side is, let’s assume, the side of the critics of Order; our speech, often enough, bears or formulates critiques of Order. Our stories, our myths, accordingly, are the stories and myths of Order, critical though their form may be.
***** ASIDE 3
<quote>
This is in part because critique in anarchist circles means more speech against what I don’t like than undermining-questioning the grounds of claims. This has a lot to do with why we talk so much about Society.
</quote>
* * *
Of necessity our Operation Margarine is more curious. We are, most of us, critics of ideology, of Order as such, perhaps, so our version has less to do with Myth as ideology, as a confusing veil, and more with that kind of myth we secrete as with a gland in the brain. How stories go; how they turn out... In my story, we saved accountability, ultimately by leaving it as the name for what was to replace accountability. This leaves open the possibility of someone who will see fit to extend its range back from our processes (where it seemed to be more acceptable because now under our control) to the police and their allies (Order), because in saying everything bad we could think about the idea in practice, we left unchanged its status as Good. This has less to do, then, with an incontrovertible master narrative (we were indeed able to say we were against accountability) and more about the slow and silent work of gregariousness and repetition on behalf of a morality it is hard to think of, or outside of.
A conclusion about margarine-words: most of the time our speech cannot separate itself from what has been captured by the category of the Good. When we speak in such a way as to repel away from a word associated with the good (crossing out as “critique”), its magnetic force will attract either that same word, or another, to do very similar work (continuing to use the crossed-out word or a euphemistic variant).
One might well ask what a different outcome for the workshop could have been. Maybe none. Maybe we have them just to state problems. One could well consider that many anarchist gatherings happen primarily to make possible a kind of cathartic venting, especially for those who are less than activists or prefer to avoid meetings, which have their own ritual catharsis. But I doubt this would satisfy most. We move on to ask how to shut down Our Operation Margarine. A radical proposal might have been: let us stop using the terms <em>justice</em> and <em>accountability</em> Moratorium! What would happen if we really could be disciplined enough to abandon these words, or any of our other margarine-words? Not an escape from myth, or from morality, certainly. For a group to choose to eject a word or words from its speech seems more like an experiment for a poetry workshop than a political operation.
The advocates of Order retain an arsenal of terms that we use otherwise for their own purposes. They do not erase the word <em>anarchy</em>; they rather use it in a way that we feel is either wrong or has the incorrect moral valuation (i.e. responding either <em>that’s not anarchy!</em> or <em>that</em> is <em>anarchy, and it is good, not bad</em>). To temporarily attempt to erase a word would be to, temporarily, make it powerful, attractive, interesting... To permanently erase a word? First, words do not show up in the dictionary with the dagger-cross next to them because of anyone’s conscious action. That is the great work of collectives, one thing you can count on the masses for: anonymous forgetting... Second, it is preposterous to think the milieu’s ban on a word could have any lasting effect on anyone not involved. The milieu (our gray space) is porous, characterized by constant entry and exit; the ban would never work, because it would have to be constantly announced. This repetition would amount to graduating the terms to the status of negatively charged margarine-words.
Beyond these practical problems of usage, <em>accountability</em>, like all margarine-words, is not just replaceable by euphemisms, but is itself a stand-in for other words we are more likely to avoid (we <em>and</em> the police and their allies) for some reason or another—<em>guilt</em>, for example. We can continue to play the game of replacing one word with another while the underlying morality changes very little if at all, and do so for the most part beyond anyone’s purview. Our Operation Margarine, or something like it, is probably a major aspect of how these margarine-words get circulated in and out of fashion as they do, part of our larger tennis match with Order, which might be more pessimistically described as Order’s tennis match with itself. From the point of view of such pessimism, which is to some extent the necessary point of view of the milieu, perhaps the only way out is to play the replacing-game very crudely, to play it backwards instead of forwards, using the wrong word instead of the right one. Recall the Situationist-esque vocabulary that was based on a pretend version of this game:
[[a-d-alejandro-de-acosta-to-acid-words-1.png f]]
and so on. If we cannot stop saying <em>accountability</em>, we might as well call it <em>guilt</em>, mismatching behavior and speech. Later this year we can talk about Evil, because the mismatch, the glaring, and, for many, unpleasant contrast, is what is really at stake. <em>Guilt</em> is indeed the relatively true feeling or desideratum hidden behind <em>accountability</em>, but saying so is worth our while only to disrupt. Our next step in this game should not be to repeat ourselves, but to pass on to the more absurd place. This is the logic of <em>détournement</em> and plagiarism, which sidesteps the supposition that one can speak in earnest in such gatherings, meetings, workshops, and so on. This play can also turn ugly, as described in the pamphlet <em>Cabal, Argot</em>:
<quote>
<em>When arguing, it is preferential to argue for the sake of being difficult. Semantics are absolutely worth fighting over.</em>
</quote>
Being difficult and other ludic, non-serious activities in our speech, playing the replacing-game but doing so backwards and wrong, touting the bad as the good and making the weaker argument the stronger, are the only means we have so long as we remain in a more or less political space. And often enough, we awaken to the fact that we have been forced into such spaces. Fortunately, there are other spaces.
* * *
As I was in the course of writing this essay, an exchange between Kristian Williams and Crimethinc. appeared addressing topics close to what I’ve been discussing here.[44] Setting out from Orwell’s denunciation of vices in political speech and writing, Williams aptly points out a range of words quite similar to what I have been calling margarine-words. About such vague jargon he notes:
<quote>
<em>People who write this sort of thing may have some general idea of what they are trying to say—but they needn’t have.</em>
</quote>
I was pleased to see the very word that first triggered some of these thoughts noted in his article:
<quote>
“<em>Accountability,” “community,” “solidarity,” and “freedom” are used, in the overwhelming number of cases, simply as markers to signify things we like or favor.</em>
</quote>
Agreed. What I think I am adding to this, what Williams does not discuss, is that the “things we like or favor” are held together not by vague agreement but also by an undiscussed moral fabric. Presenting the problem as a problem of shoddy writing and vague speech is deceptive. He comes closer when he writes of the jargon:
<quote>
<em>The words serve instead to indicate a kind of group loyalty, an ideological border between our side and the other side: we believe this, and they don’t. Or rather: we talk in this way and say this sort of thing; they talk in some other way, and say some other sort of thing.</em>
</quote>
Again, agreed, but rather than being concerned with a contrast between jargon that says little and a supposedly attainable speech or writing that is both political and communicative, I respond that the jargon is not just a bad choice, but in some important sense a condition (of being a political subject, our neurotic speech as such; of our time, the Spectacle, about which more later). It is also important to note that what Williams is pointing out here is mainly to be noticed in speech, and only derivatively in writing.
I said margarine-words were not just jargon terms, but slogans, compact phrases, sometimes whole fragments of speech. To their ready instrumentality I can now add the trait that reading Williams made me realize was missing: <em>fear</em>. Margarine-words mobilize fear; they result from a fearful impression, and their use perpetuates that same fear. The flight away from that fear could result in adopting a different set of margarine-words (and attempting to frighten the frighteners: turf-war as debate), or developing a taste for mutant speech or even acid-words.
I suppose I am more pessimistic than either Williams or Crimethinc., but I will agree with the latter when they write
<quote>
<em>if we stay within the bounds of language that is widely used in this society, we will only be able to reproduce consensus reality, not challenge it</em>
</quote>
and (this is of equal importance):
<quote>
<em>those who are convinced that they speak precisely—yet see imprecision virtually everywhere they look—rarely communicate well with others. That’s not how communication works. It is a mutual undertaking, for which rulebooks are no more useful than they are for any other kind of voluntary relationship.</em>
</quote>
In any case, when Williams repeats Orwell’s “principle”,
<quote>
<em>Let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about</em>
</quote>
and his six rules for English prose, adding
<quote>
<em>were there a contemporary anarchist style guide, nearly all of these rules would be reversed,</em>
</quote>
it is easy enough to agree. But that is because I take Orwell’s rules as an excellent means to dismantle the imagined style guide (of anarchists, of activists, of leftists, of identity politicians, of many others). That, however, is the limit of their usefulness. For it is not really a question of better writing in a space where so few read and even less write. The tensions at work in our speech will not be resolved by codifying written language, or even improving its style.
That is why it is telling that Crimethinc. returns to speech. Questioning the normality that margarine-words depend on and reproduce, and the communication that can only be assumed as given and available by the frightened, the path to mutant speech is another road to what Crimethinc. calls a mutual undertaking; and the challenge to reality is the path to acid-words, speech and writing beyond hope and fear,
<quote>
“<em>if it really is dangerous.”</em>
</quote>
*** Part 2: Amoral
<quote>
<em>Beneath the poetry of the texts,</em>
<em>there is the actual poetry,</em>
<em>without form and without text.</em>
— Antonin Artaud
</quote>
**** Mutant Speech
The preceding is mostly a critique of the continued use of words whose significance is exhausted by the context they are caught in. I am now led to an argument in favor of words that function differently, the <em>mutant speech</em> I’ve already had occasion to reference. <em>Détournement</em> is sometimes a sign of being trapped, and at other times the operation of those who are capable of entering another space. It depends on whether one regards the overall effect as purely destructive, or whether the new content generated in moments of negation and obfuscation is of any, even temporary, use.
A kind of ludic strategy unfolds in the second case, an idiom characterized not by the oily morality of margarine-words but by the attraction and repulsion of <em>mana-words</em>. Mutant speech, the strange constructions formed when mana-words are assembled into talk, is another form the compulsion to repeat may take. It is, on the whole, more conscious and deliberate than the repetition of margarine-words; it appears at the edge of politics, there where it spills over into the anti- and a-political.
<em>Mana-words</em> are the seemingly untranslatable terms that anthropologists, philosophers and other theorists invent or radically repurpose, their clumsy or graceful neologisms, and their redeployment of ordinary words from living and dead languages. Mutant speech is recognizable in that its repetitions are not of the familiar margarine-words, but citations of more or less rare mana-words. Mutant speech is not just the use of mana-words judged competent by experts and specialists, but encompasses an entire range of hesitations, creative mistakes, more or less willful misinterpretations, and qualifications that betray, sometimes, a hyperconsciousness of language, and, at other times, a kind of psychotic break-out from the neurotic repetition of margarine-words. This last phenomenon could be described as a successful but involuntary <em>détournement</em> of margarine-words as described earlier.
Our action-oriented milieu tends on the whole to respond badly to mana-words unless they are old and familiar (often in the process of becoming margarine-words). In our gray space many are not comfortable with mutant speech, preferring what they take to be ordinary language, which always includes a set of socially or sub-culturally approved margarine-words. When mutant speech arises in their presence, or when reading presents them with too many mana-words, many immediately hurl the accusation of abstraction, and some also deliver a judgment of complicity with oppressive institutions. As to the accusation, first, mana-words are not necessarily abstract. Abstraction is rare, and that’s what is desirable about acceding to it; mana-words are rare as well but only sometimes abstract. At one point <em>potlatch</em> was a mana-word, as was mana itself, which gave me the idea (Mauss glosses it as “spiritual force”). Nothing especially abstract about them, just the novelty of their appearance in our language. In the case of truly abstract words, such as <em>singularity</em>, no one really knows what abstraction is or does; we have precious few opportunities to discover what it can do as a linguistic operation. I have already outlined why and how an activist or <em>actionist</em> would respond to it with hostility. Part of the way margarine-words operate is such that many reserve the right to declare that their speech (e.g a word like <em>people</em> or <em>community</em>) is not abstract, while other terms (e.g. <em>biopower</em>) are. This is more or less willfully misinterpreting the rarity of the word’s appearance (which in many cases signals precisely the novelty or fragile instability of mutant speech) as the only index of its present and future purchase or effects. As for the judgment of institutional complicity, such a reaction is obvious enough to predict: anyone who is trained to read or speak in an academic setting (usually the institution in question) is taken to respond primarily to that social/work space and only secondarily to the milieu. Be that as it may, it seems to me that an individual’s allegiances are very important when deciding whether to collaborate with, trust, or befriend them, and not very important at all in appraising their speech or writing in its sheer functioning or manifestation. But then those concerned would have to allow themselves to be drawn (or not) by the mana-words themselves instead of trying to determine what team their user is on. Rather than a lazy dismissal of terms due to their abstraction, one could simply opt out of their circulation and not use them, sparing the rest of their circle their <em>ressentiment</em>-in-language. It is not so different to say: <em>I will not use this term</em> than to say: <em>I do not enjoy this poetry</em>.
The idea that what is said in mutant speech can be always translated into the talk of margarine-words is ultimately a prejudice in favor of the latter that costs us the potentials of the former. Though it is not always activists that do it, its most stereotypical form is the activists’ bid to translate other forms of speech and writing into what they deem ordinary language (whatever is meant by this, it is a medium for margarine-words). The accusation of abstraction amounts to preparation for such translation, since margarine-words are equally likely to be abstract, their apparent familiarity coming down to the greater rate of their repetition, their more successful function as passwords or codewords. I would recommend to those that demand translation into common terms that they merely respond to mutant speech with <em>I don’t understand this speech</em>, which should mean something not too different from <em>I don’t like this music or this poetry</em>.
Someone who finds they hate all music or all poetry and feels that it can and should be expressed in another form, or not be expressed at all, might in that moment consider the silence they are wishing for, as the best possible form of what otherwise has to be taken to mean <em>I do not know what music is, or I have no true experience of poetry</em>. As saying so would usually be taken as a request for acquaintance or explanation, the most I can recommend to one who finds themselves in such a relation is not forced translation but silence. About which more further on.
* * *
The rarity of mana-words, their degree of abstraction, is tied to extraction procedures. It is a rare thing to be able to extract a word from its context and redeploy it. In its extracted form it can become useless in its former context. The function and use of extraction is precisely this newly generated specificity and orientation, which can also be a kind of studied uselessness. The <em>détournement</em> of margarine-words takes place when speakers recognize the speech situation into which they have been placed, or into which others are trying to place them, and begin to speak from the perspective of the extraction of terms (sometimes even hinting at a possible extraction will do to destabilize the situation).
When one finally accedes to mutant speech, it is easy enough for another to point out that such speech, what is called its theory, cannot be put into practice. Indeed, that uselessness is precisely the desired interfering effect that the <em>détournement</em> operated. It is more difficult to understand in what sense the circulation of extracted mana-words is itself a practice of language, a different kind of repetition. The mana-words so circulated (cited alongside practices) always generate confusion. If they do not, it is because they are in the process of becoming, or have already become, new margarine-words. So people are right that abstract concepts, and mutant speech generally, cannot be put into practice without a process of interpretation and concretization. This process could render them margarine-words, or it could produce bizarre new practices (but bizarre practices could also appear on their own with no forethought on anyone’s part).
One might note, for example, that it is precisely mana-words that never return to us from propaganda machines in spectacular forms. Margarine-words are shared with and to a large extent take their motive power from the mass and its leaders. Some will always be engaged in saying what <em>freedom</em>, <em>justice</em>, and <em>hope</em> really mean, and it will always be a waste of time. These words do too much work for the mass and its leaders in a society like ours. Mana-words are non-recuperable precisely because they have no generalized use. That is why I write mana-words and not theory, placing them besides what is most compelling about poetic speech and argots of every sort, as three instances of linguistic creativity too underdetermined to reliably motivate and parallel power operations. Mana-words are effective situationally, for some people, in some ways. They are repeated, but not on condition of being recognized. They do not always assume contect, but often require context to be established in the real time of speech—mutant speech.
* * *
Everything I’ve written on mutant speech so far has been an engagement with the imagined (always imagined and imaginary) ordinary speakers of a language, those whose life is a perpetual risk of margarine-words. On the other side, those who have opted for a less ordinary path, familiar with mutant speech, exhibit different relations to mana-words. Mutant speech could also be called <em>queer speech</em>, being close to what is discussed in the journal <em>bædan</em> as
<quote>
<em>a force which can interrupt the domination of language over life</em>
</quote>
Though I would call that language <em>Language</em>, the ordinary Language with its margarine-words. In <em>bædan</em> we read
<quote>
<em>We engage with language insofar as we can deploy it in service of the body. We speak, we put word to paper in order to send a wink to those with whom we have not yet or cannot at present conspire in a practice of jouissance</em>
</quote>
<em>Jouissance</em>, parenthetically, being a perfect example of a mana-word. Some take maximum pleasure in their repetition, enjoying an almost uninterrupted flow of mana-words. Here I will resort to some analogies that are less than analogies, along the bodily lines laid out in <em>bædan</em>, to show that mutant speech does not just have to be more or less successful communication. It is first of all attempted <em>communion</em>. Play with mana-words is not unlike covering one’s body with water or make-up, or fragrances or lotions, or also smearing oneself with a stream of spit, cum, piss, or shit that one wishes were continuous. The criteria at work here are aesthetic or hedonistic. Others are begged, sometimes commanded (if the speaker or writer is a top), to smell, to feel the mana-words. The speaker or writer appears for a second as they cover themselves in these words-marks, smearing themselves and sometimes smearing others. From the specialized and academic point of view, this is the least competent kind of mutant speech; in the milieu, it is one of the most common forms, the little dance some do when they first become enamored with what we call theory.[45] It is repetition for its own pleasurable sake, repetition discovered as a pleasurable event, the breakdown of the passwords and codewords and joy in that failure.
A second form, more competent from the point of view of the specialists, deploys the mana-words in baroque combinations and ornate arrangements. The speaker or writer shows, not their smeared skin, but their entire body as it approaches escape velocity... no ordinary language can catch up to this theory machine. The repetition becomes communicative to an extent, though the effects of extraction are still felt: this is repetition with a difference. Though the more pedestrian critics cannot distinguish between this spaceflight and the smearing, those who discern the difference are left asking: why these terms and not others? Why these theorists? The recession of this mutant speech from what is most oppressive about margarine-words is clear enough: but who is satisfied with a merely reactive strategy, with one more critique? Is anything really gained by sublimating the pleasure of sloppiness?
A third form of mutant speech would be to generate the mana-words oneself. But that would already be something else, translation or creation. In short, no longer repeating. I call those words, as they are created, or when they are recharged with <em>mana</em>, <em>acid-words</em>.
**** Jabberwocky, the language
The language Jabberwocky came up, as I recall, in a conversation some years ago, one among many conversations with anarchists where a discomfort with language was manifest. I later diagnosed this discomfort as an anxiety. I only remember some of the participants, many of whom I had just met that night, and, as usual, I think more people were listening than speaking.
How the discomfort was manifest that night, what repeats in such anxious conversations, is not difficult to outline. First, there seems to be an ambient impatience, some frustration with language as such. This can begin with a few words on the language of an enemy, with the vilification of a politician or a onetime friend, but it eventually extends to anyone’s use of language. From bullshit to ideology; from dishonesty or disingenuousness to a generalized paralysis of expression. Here’s the second part: someone will make an implicit or explicit reference to a certain primitivist refusal of language, or what some call “symbolic culture” generally, a kind of reference to its existence, without taking it on—for good reason. As these conversations often show, primitivism is something more like a commonplace reference than a stated position... Really, what is there to debate here? For a few engaged interlocutors, it is easy enough to include someone named John Zerzan in the twentieth-century philosophy category in Wikipedia, or to write an article criticizing his “philosophy of language”, but this kind of classification and attempted engagement completely misses the affective withdrawal of the not-so-thought-out refusal. The gesture I am writing about is the gesture of the many who feel primitivists are right about <em>something</em>, while not wanting to discuss it as a matter of philosophy or theory. The point— the <em>symptom</em>—is the feeling, the acceleration of the refusal. That is why, finally, there is some vague sense in the conversation, if it gets this far, that the refusal of language is part of a long list of refusals, and the reference to language is one more way of talking about Everything or The Totality or Capital or Civilization, etc. The conversation I recall was an unremarkable example except for one detail. Perhaps in jest, one of the speakers said that he advocates “speaking in Jabberwocky” as a way out of the Language he knows.
I think he meant that Jabberwocky, the language, is not an other to English, but an other to Language—to language as we know it. “Speaking in Jabberwocky” takes the refusal of Language into account; it is in fact a hypothetical practice emerging from this refusal. And in this refusal I imagine a demand that repetition, conscious or unconscious, dull or creative, come to a halt. Language appears to them as part of a Totality that cannot be simply sidestepped, because some urge to speak is inevitable, and Language is precisely the government of those urges, their guidance, standardization, branding, and so on. But since these individuals will not be governed, and since, so desperation says, eventually all speech decays into margarine-words, and perhaps that is all it ever was, they conclude that we should just somehow stop. Without positing an immediate way out (or a way out to immediacy), “speaking in Jabberwocky” intimates something else: what one could do with that inescapable urge is to speak in a way that is nonsensical. What was my interlocutor getting at with this reference to nonsense? A parodic speech, a parody of speaking? Speech in a very different kind of code, in an invented language?
I am not sure. It would have been easy enough to object that he explained the idea using ordinary English and not Jabberwocky. I would rather emphasize—what has made this conversation stick in my memory—that when seeking a way out of Language (as Spectacle, with all of the implied traits of Spectacle—totalizing, mediating, representative, communicative—that speech, in short, that places us on the side of instituted authority and authority to come), he gave it the name of a poem. The name of the language is the title of a poem; and the title of the poem is a nonsense word. He invoked for me, that is to say, the studied play with language that poetry can involve.
To get to <em>acid-words</em>, I set out from this insight. It is perhaps a paradox, or maybe just the weird way things go, that the greatest refusal of the urge to repeat becomes the motor of creation, of differentiation. To get to acid-words, I take inspiration from a poetic outlook, not to recommend poetry in one form or another, but rather to speak as one who has been transformed in his relation to language by poetic speech and writing. This is something other than a defense of art, much less of literary institutions or canons. I am less concerned to defend the arts than to acknowledge the fact of their various existences, valued for some, dangerous and despised for others, as one aspect of that inevitability of speech I referred to above. I would now recast it as an inevitability of expression. On the side of writing, this fact is greater than literature, though literature flows from it; on the side of speech, it includes all sorts of symbolic and linguistic creativity, including the anonymous productions of slang, argots, cant, and various other oral joys: the <em>poesy</em> that happens as if by accident (though what is accidental is knowing it is poetic, knowing it as poetry).
* * *
“Jabberwocky”: the poem, and then the imagined language. The poem first: it was of course the first stanza, identical to the last, that my interlocutor had in mind. You have probably seen it:
<quote>
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe<em>:</em>
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
</quote>
It appears in Lewis Carroll’s <em>Through the Looking-Glass</em>, where Alice first encounters it as a mirror-image. Upon reading it, she remarks “it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t know exactly what they are.” The five stanzas between the first and last, though they all include nonsense words, follow a kind of adventure narrative.
<quote>
<em>Beware the Jabberwock, my son!</em>
<em>The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!</em>
<em>Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun</em>
<em>The frumious Bandersnatch!</em>
</quote>
And so on. Gillian Beer observes:
<quote>
<em>The syntax in ‘Jabberwocky’ is stable, although the semantics are odd, so the story is stable though its elements are obscure.</em>
</quote>
A little less than twenty years earlier, Carroll had published the first/last stanza as a “curious fragment” under the title “Stanza of Anglo-Saxon Poetry.” Definitions for the eleven key words followed; in <em>Through the Looking-Glass</em>, the anthropomorphic egg Humpty Dumpty offers similar (but not identical) definitions to Alice.
In sum: though an exemplar of nonsense verse, “Jabberwocky” is hardly nonsense in the usual sense of the word. A narrative may be discerned in it, and tone, and feeling; and the words that seem to make that discernment difficult are not beyond explanation—explanation that the author did not even leave to the reader. As Beer writes: stable syntax, strange semantics. Additionally, the prehistory of the first/last stanza as a fake sample of old English shows Carroll’s concern, in his construction of portmanteau words for nonsense effects, with real linguistic history and processes of word formation. So what strikes us about “Jabberwocky” is not just the initial shock of nonsense, but also the pleasure of inventiveness, and the related pleasure of commentary on that invention.
Jabberwocky, the language, would then have some or all of these traits: first, speaking and hearing it is pleasurable for most: it is patterned and tuneful, sharing some traits of language as we know it (or whatever dominant Language it exists in initial relation to) and some traits of language as it could have been. Jabberwocky makes enough sense that speakers/readers of Language can follow a story in Jabberwocky, while still feeling the need to call it nonsense. Upon closer examination, speakers/readers of Language will determine that Jabberwocky can’t be a complete other to Language. It is not an other Language; it dramatizes something of the coming-into-being of language itself. At the same time, in showing this coming-into-being it is recognized as nonsense and designates sense itself as the precarious factor in speech. Here again I would essay an analogy that is something other than an analogy and say that what is dramatized here is the image of an animal that speaks, as in myth, as in fable, as in reality. In the essay in <em>bædan</em> I’ve already cited, there is a discussion of birds in Edelman’s theory and Hitchcock’s film, indomitable birds that symbolize “our struggle”:
<quote>
<em>in describing this domestication of the world by meaning, Edelman is borrowing heavily from Hocquenghem’s understanding of the body as colonized by language through the process of domestication. Edelman, one last time: “Thus the birds in their coming lay to waste the world because they so hate the world that will not accept them that they, in turn will accept nothing but the destruction of the world.”</em>
</quote>
The writer in <em>bædan</em> concludes:
<quote>
<em>Here we must understand ourselves as the birds or else the text offers us nothing.</em>
</quote>
We are the birds, the animals that speak. Which is to say that Jabber-wocky, the language, is not only a pastime, but also something corrosive, destructive, the vehicle of a bodily shift, yes, as with mana-words. It is deployed not only conspiratorially with the aim of orgiastic communion, but to destroy the world (though I would write World, as I write Language).
Jabberwocky, the language, mirrors Language, and it recedes from it, carving out another space for itself; it recedes as it mirrors. What is it showing in its reversal? A fact.
* * *
This fact could be stated as follows:
<quote>
<em>Poesy happens.</em>
</quote>
Or:
<quote>
<em>Acid-words are possible.</em>
</quote>
The inevitability of language, which is experienced as the urge to speak, to sing, to write, to mark—it sometimes manifests as poesy. Gary Snyder wrote
<quote>
<em>language rises unbidden.</em>
</quote>
The other ways language manifests are partially relevant here, but what is truly remarkable is that something like poesy happens, not as literature, not as a secondary aesthetic or artistic consideration, but foremost as the unbidden arrival of language—of speech, of the marks that become writing. Showing us our ancestors speaking exclusively in a poesy that preceded the distinction between literature and myth (as though gripped, at the dawn of language, by that indistinct firstness, its fascination), Vico suggested that poesy might be <em>the</em> event of language.
<quote>
<em>people living in the world’s childhood were by nature sublime poets</em>
</quote>
Or more precisely:
<quote>
<em>in all nations speech in verse preceded speech in prose.</em>
</quote>
But not necessarily the advent of what, in all those conversations, we felt the need to reject. Not Language. Of course the history that follows the Vician poetic dawn, the history of civilization, more recently of capital and Spectacle, is the history of Language, of the mediating image, of representation. There is indeed a poetry written in and as Language. Poetry in service of the state; surrealism in service of the revolution. (Debord called the Spectacle the epic poem of the commodity’s competition with other commodities.) But there is also—there has never ceased being— poetry in the service of nothing, or in the service of itself, new and irresponsible, another image, another speech, and that is what I think the reference to “Jabberwocky” amounted to in my imagination, and that is how this mask came to life. From there I write to acid-words.
**** Spectacle/Language
Debord wrote of the Spectacle that it is a social relation between persons <em>mediated</em> by images. Here <em>mediated</em> renders <em>mediatisé</em>, which must be both the mediation philosophers speak of, the forceful introduction of a third term into what one would otherwise call an immediate relation, and also the way something or someone is forcefully placed into a medium, into the media. Or, more weirdly, the forceful irruption of a medium in a person or relation between people. In the former case, since <em>mediation</em> is often assimilated to <em>alienation</em>, a tremendous amount of metaphysical and even moral consequences seem to follow from generalized mediation, as separation from the real, the authentic, or the genuine. In the latter, which could be rendered <em>mediatization</em>, we are considering separation itself: separation as a cleavage not only between us but in each of us; as ruined communion and forced communication; as the taxing propagation of detached images.
To dismantle the Spectacle has usually meant to undo mediation, its technological or at least material work of representation, in some way; a good deal has been written about how to do that. Here I would like to consider the undoing, or at least troubling, of mediatization. It is notable that Debord structured <em>Society of the Spectacle</em> in a markedly different manner than his earlier Situationist texts. At first, the constructed situation was to be
<quote>
<em>built on the ruins of the spectacle</em>
</quote>
holding out the promise (to some, a threat to others) of expressive communion, perhaps of an immediate relation. This construction was up to the individual or group as creator. In <em>Society of the Spectacle</em>, as explicated in at the climax of a dense historical narrative, the undoing of the reign of representation is a strictly political affair, the business of the workers’ councils. Here I, too, will invoke history: the decades that it has taken some to become unsure that workers’ councils could be the unbinding of spectacular mediatization (and so spectacular society) or, more generally, that political solutions will unbind political problems without setting the cycle of recuperation back into motion. We who feel this way are at an impasse.
Debord also wrote of the Spectacle
<quote>
<em>the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of universal separation.</em>
</quote>
More recently Giorgio Agamben stepped forward to amplify Debord on this point, adding:
<quote>
<em>Today... it is clear that the spectacle is language, the very communicativity or linguistic being of humans ... in the spectacle our own linguistic nature comes back to us inverted.</em>
</quote>
There are at least two ways to understand this statement. One is that it is a clarification, because the Spectacle has always been Language. The other is that it is written to register a historical shift, in the sense that something has happened in or to the Spectacle in the course of the decades between 1967 and 1989. It could also just be a provocation. In any case, for those committed to talk of Spectacle and disruption of Spectacle to pass over to this interpretation would mean apprehending the political impasse (impossibility of situations, absence of councils) as something that unfolds in our speech.
Indeed, the principal form this impasse takes today is the frustration or anxiety about language, usually in the background of our speech (most apparent in those conversations not governed by margarine-words). The impasse is manifest in the borderline nonsensical primitivist allegation that language is the first ideology, a crude translation of the idea of Spectacle as mediation, both as explicit claim (rare), and reference or implicit awareness (common). In these uses of the idea of Spectacle, what is principally accessed is its aiming-at-the-totality, which is how Language earns its capital L. We come to such an idea, as Debord perhaps did with images, by first aiming at the totality, <em>all of it</em>. We come to the anxiety, the primitivists to their refusal, by asking how to <em>cross it all out</em>. Here is an example, less hysterical than most, again from <em>bædan</em>:
<quote>
<em>All discourse consists of nothing but an endless series of affirmations no more insightful than remarking that water is wet, phrased in more or less interesting and more or less roundabout ways. The rest are lies.</em>
</quote>
Aiming-at-the-totality, we get what I’ve denominated Language. The endless series of affirmations (<em>yes, yes, yes...</em>) suggests for me a representational language caught in its tautology, as margarine-words wait to be affirmed (code words or slogans to be said yes to) or are offered as ways of being said yes to (passwords), as images are produced in a way completely determined by the medium in which they anticipate circulation. Expressing ourselves with such words or such images may or may not be mediation, but it is certainly mediatization.
As I have noted, the most common attempted escape from margarine-words, <em>mutant speech</em> (and the less common one, <em>acid-words</em>), leads to a staging of this anxiety (as incomprehension or hostility from readers or listeners, as the speaker or writer’s own anxiety before the risk of meaninglessness). From the point of view of Language, these escape attempts are the incorrect way to play the game and will always register as wrong moves, or morally improper gestures (lies). Those who adopt this point of view, bureaucrats or not, would push us back to the stale comforts of small talk or private exchanges with our intimates, those little spaces we suppose we control—and this fantasy of control over private life, true only for a few, is precisely meant to remind us that public or political space is completely covered, altogether occupied, by an impenetrable web of images, representations, or... words. When they arise unbidden we are to recognize, not words, but the web, the medium.
* * *
Suppose resistance is possible. What does the undoing of the Spectacle mean when one considers that the Spectacle “is” language, is Language?
First option: one could hazard decentering an idea and practice of Language tied first of all to nationalism, to a standardized grammar, secondly to a familiar, largely unconscious cultural conservatism (“the old language is good, the new language is bad”), and third, these two wrapped up in a mediatized dissemination of standard terms and usages. Decentering it, we no longer have Language but <em>languages</em>—not just in the sense of the thousands of world languages but also as a congeries of language-games, speech genres, little discourses and narratives within any given language. The idea or representation of Language breaks down into languages, but languages themselves splinter into dialects, slangs, argots, and so on. This is the sense of the project of accelerated fragmentation set up in <em>Cabal, Argot</em>: if we are convinced that
<quote>
<em>in-group/out-group dichotomies are the tension that will tear society apart. Disparate groups who do not understand each other are destined to become separate</em>
</quote>
then we see that their advocacy of difficult argument is also a kind of test, a test of who understands (gets it, the joke or reference) and who does not—the real-time, in-person formation of the inand out-groups. And so, understandably,
<quote>
<em>we choose to associate with, or support, particular factions, particular groups, or particular persons. By always taking the side of those within our in-group, we repudiate the representation of the social order that maintains capital, the state, and its technics.</em>
</quote>
First option, then: the groupuscles and their cant.
Second option: one could save the workers’ councils strategy by rendering them as communications councils, working on the premise that language is for communication, and trying to do it right. This is the solution of <em>Society of the Spectacle</em>, but also of an article in <em>Internationale Situationniste</em> 8, “All the King’s Men” (the title, incidentally, being a reference to Caroll):
<quote>
<em>In-group languages—those of informal groupings of young people; those that contemporary avant-garde currents develop for their internal use as they grope to define themselves; those that in previous eras were conveyed by way of objective poetic production, such as trobar clus and dolce stil nuovo—are more or less successful efforts to attain a direct, transparent communication, mutual recognition, mutual accord. But such efforts have been confined to small groups that were isolated in one way or another. The events and celebrations they created had to remain within the most narrow limits. One of the tasks of revolution is to federate such poetic “soviets” or communication councils in order to initiate a direct communication everywhere that will no longer need to resort to the enemy’s communication network (that is, to the language of power) and will thus be able to transform the world according to its desire.</em>
</quote>
To the question: how do workers’ councils undo spectacular representation? the answer is: because they are communications councils, poetic soviets. They federate the very groups that the cabalists want separate and create a kind of communicational dual power. This idea is also legible in Mohammed Khayati’s “Captive Words,” published in <em>Internationale Situationniste</em> 10:
<quote>
<em>It is thus essential that we forge our own language, the language of real life, against the ideological language of power, the terrain of justification of all the categories of the old world. From now on we must prevent the falsification or recuperation of our theories.</em>
</quote>
It is not clear how this is is to be done other than through the process of fragmentation-federation suggested by the anonymous author of “All the King’s Men.” Khayati concludes by calling for a Situationist dictionary, a linguistic federation tool,
<quote>
<em>a sort of code book enabling one to decipher the news and rend the ideological veils that cover reality. We will give possible translations that will enable people to grasp the different aspects of the society of the spectacle, and show how the slightest signs and indications contribute to maintaining it. In a sense it will be a bilingual dictionary, since each word has an “ideological” meaning for power and a real meaning that we think corresponds to real life in the present historical phase.</em>
</quote>
Second option: the councils and their dictionary.
Third option: one might consider unmediatized life or activity somehow beyond Language or Language games. The Spectacle is Language, Language is the Spectacle, insofar as our speech and our writing are bound to this representational form. Part of that is being forced to speak, expected to confess, and desiring it ourselves too—endlessly botched silence. Language rises unbidden... at the incitement of a power relation that demands your participation. We are still thinking about a mode of relating here—what is called, and is, <em>and is not</em>, representation and communication. But the Spectacle is not Language because language <em>is</em> representational and informational; the Spectacle is Language <em>as</em> representational and informational. Forced communication, excluded communion, botched, endlessly botched, silence.
Interestingly, some version of this approach is also legible in the two aforementioned Situationist essays. If communications councils are their major theme, this is their minor theme. Khayati discusses <em>détournement</em> in a way that anticipates the cabalists:
<quote>
<em>The critique of the dominant language, the détournement of it, is going to become a permanent practice of the new revolutionary theory.</em>
[...]
Détournement<em>, which Lautréamont called plagiarism, confirms the thesis, long demonstrated by modern art, that words are insubordinate, that it is impossible for power to totally</em> recuperate <em>created meanings, to fi x an existing meaning once and for all.</em>
</quote>
And this <em>détournement</em> is itself possible because of the “insubordination of words”, which Khayati ties to poetry—not poetry as we know it, but an abolished poetry:
<quote>
<em>Modern poetry (experimental, permutational, spatialist, surrealist or neodadaist) is the antithesis of poetry, it is the artistic project recuperated by power. It abolishes poetry without realizing it, living off its own continual self-destruction.</em>
</quote>
The author of “All the Kings’ Men” proposes the other available meaning of poetry; in fact, the entire piece is in the main about another way to grasp poetry:
<quote>
<em>What is poetry if not the revolutionary moment of language, inseparable as such from the revolutionary moments of history and from the history of personal life?</em>
[...]
<em>poetry must be understood as direct communication within reality and as real alteration of this reality. It is liberated language, language recovering its richness, language breaking its rigid significations and simultaneously embracing words and music, cries and gestures, painting and mathematics, facts and acts.</em>
</quote>
There is, again, the warning against what is known as poetry:
<quote>
<em>One thing we can be sure of is that fake, officially tolerated poetry is no longer the poetic adventure of its era. Thus, whereas surrealism in the heyday of its assault against the oppressive order of culture and daily life could appropriately define its arsenal as “poetry without poems if necessary,” for the SI it is now a matter of a poetry necessarily without poems.</em>
[...]
<em>Realizing poetry means nothing less than simultaneously and inseparably creating events and their language.</em>
</quote>
And how is that to be done? Again, fragmentation-federation... But what concerns me more here is that these texts come close to the position that, not poetry as we know it, but something importantly akin to it, what I called poesy above, what a writer in <em>bædan</em> calls lying, is a kind of primordial activity that can be tapped into or unleashed as the creation of
<quote>
<em>events and their language.</em>
</quote>
In a society like ours we do this through <em>détournement</em>, understood as a critical, destructive engagement with bureaucratic language or the language of power, a
<quote>
<em>language that cannot and need not be confirmed by any previous or supracritical reference</em>
</quote>
The other, corrosive, side of acid-words. Not acid as hallucinatory creativity, but as corrosive, destructive nonsense on the way to silence.
Third option: [someone(?)] and their silence.
* * *
What I have written here concerns language, then, but only sometimes as Spectacle, as Language. Sometimes one is bound to spectacular Language:
<quote>
<em>In analyzing the spectacle we are obliged to a certain extent to use the spectacle’s own language, in the sense that we have to operate on the methodological terrain of the society that expresses itself in the spectacle</em>
</quote>
wrote Debord. Fortunately there are other things to do than analyze! If I were to remain in the language of Spectacle, I would say that, yes, one can sometimes unbind spectacular representation (and my sense of how that can be done, acid-words, is indeed closer to a constructed situation than to workers’ councils). But, unbinding representation, beyond Language, we do not move beyond language as such. Here we must face our collective anxiety about language. It will still arise unbidden, incited by stranger forces than our human power games. Even in our silence we participate in the semiosis at work in nature. And nature has its own far more ominous silences to which we are not invited. It is possible (which is not to say that it is probable) to use language in a ludic manner; it is also possible to get used by language, to get played by it or be in its play in a way that has nothing to do with being represented or symbolized or representing or symbolizing. Something of that sort was always at work in poesy. And this reciprocal use is related to what the concept of Spectacle intends; in fact, it seems to me to be its sheer possibility (that representation or symbolization presupposes some other kind of language-play, another usage, as work presupposes play or non-work generally).
Read Robert Duncan as he writes about an available shift in attitude,
<quote>
<em>the change from the feeling that poetic form is given to or imposed upon experience—transforming matter into content—to the feeling that poetic form is found in experience—that content is discovered in matter. The line of such poetry is not free in the sense of being arbitrary but free in its search and self-creation, having the care and tension (attention) almost of the ominous...</em>
</quote>
Everything I have for the sake of convenience called Language, everything we have (out of what is now almost habit) called Spectacle, corresponds perhaps to the first feeling, which disturbs matter endlessly. It translates the matter of speech (poesy) into a communicable and informational form, botching communion, ruining silence. If it were only a genre, a game to opt into, a dream from which we could still awaken... or turn the page on to see what is next in the anthology... By contrast, the feeling that the form is found in experience, and content in matter, allows for the care and tension that are needed to make and share acid-words. Part of their operation is to destroy Language, but this is not what they are for. They are not <em>for</em> anything. This is the freedom of the line sensed by some poets, and also what is also ominous in acid-words: in their play they do not deny or elude silence.
<quote>
<em>For words are not thoughts we have but ideas in things, and the poet must attend not to what he means to say but to what what he says means.</em>
</quote>
—To turn away from those who, in a doubly hostile gesture, did not care that levy wrote, and later demanded of him to explain what he meant. So you hide, take acid-words... (It is pleasant to imagine Duncan whispering sweetly in levy’s ear, calming him momentarily, a kindly apparition in the course of the trip. To remind him he took acid so as not to have to take acid.)
It remains to ask who is capable of saying they are poets, and why. But as that is something to discuss elsewhere, I will return for the destructive fun of it to talking about anarchists.
* * *
There is no reason to bother with saying you are an anarchist or talking to others if you are not seeking another relation to the world, to life, to thinking, and to language. In this essay I have been especially concerned with the relation to language, but all of these relations are implicated, are at stake. The other relation that we are seeking involves a paradox: we are so concerned with ending the relation we <em>do</em> have with world, life, thinking, and language that in the undoing of the other term we are brought to consider the possibility that the relation itself is impossible. I mean that in some sense we cease to think that there is a World at all, that Life can become a pernicious concept, that Thinking is revealed as not being ours or for us. Following this treacherous path it may turn out that there is simply nothing to be said about language itself, about Language. We are left with this strange idea of crossed-out Language instead of a theory or concept of language.
And yet we find many who speak about language in general, assimilating it to Language. They have not earned the fullness of our attention. They would do better to listen than to speak—to attend, that is, to the speech practices of those around them, and eventually to their own words, just as he who says he hates poetry or music is best invited to read or listen and not to further discussion.
That is to say, if a word or phrase is not taken to the limit where it is (at least in passing) shown to be devoid of sense or purchase, then we will remain beholden to a liberal, or relativist, or pluralist sensibility, the hope for better margarine-words or an unmarked and universal ordinary language that all can share in equally. Mana-words sometimes go to the limit, but usually in cabalistic settings. Acid-words always go to the limit: to discover or invent them is to stop repeating, to repeat with a difference, to risk nonsense; and to arrive at nonsense is to approach silence or, often enough, to become silent.
And silence is beyond difference and repetition.
* * *
A word is not necessarily the unit through which we encounter language. A phrase or an entire discourse could bring us a happy insight as well. However, <em>word</em> is the word I’ve retained for the insight-catalyst through most of this writing; I think of each one as a shard, a fragment of an impossible Totality, the nothingness of Language. After that happy insight dawns, the discourse, the phrases, and, yes, a little word will each remind you of its own plenitude. Fortunately, such memorabilia are all that remains after acid-words do their delicate or grisly work. No hoary nihilist theory of language will appear to conveniently repeat to you what you already silently suspected: that sense is the most fragile matter, a fleeting purchase. However, as a silent accompaniment to the discourse, the phrases, and the little word, maybe there is this nihilist idea of what language is not, <em>that Language is not</em>, witness to its dissolution, along with world, life, and thought.
** History as Decomposition
“<em>History as Decomposition” was first anonymously published in 2013 in the “journal of collision”</em> Attentat<em>. I hereby clone it and republish it under the name A. de A., inserted into a middle place in the trilogy I mentioned before “Its Core is the Negation”. It is an extension of some of the ideas in a presentation about time for the BASTARD conference in 2012. But that presentation happened before the conception and writing of “Its Core is the Negation”, which this essay directly followed. As though, after the schematics of “Its Core”, older concerns needed to be restated, reinterpreted. At the same time, almost immediately, the stakes of writing about nihilism began to shift around me: upsurge of the parody I had predicted. In any case, I imagine all of this information might make it possible to read it differently. This is also probably the best place to acknowledge the stimulating company of the Austin Anarchist Study Group; our reading of Perlman was helpful in articulating my ideas. They are present elsewhere in this collection as well.</em>
*** § 1
Supposing the word is in one’s vocabulary, it is easy enough to dismiss others as nihilists in deed or in intention. Like <em>atheist</em>, the term first appeared as an accusation. Used in this traditional manner, it is a simple way to pathologize your enemies. Many dedicate their time to this kind of symptomatic hand-wringing. It places your enemies in accepted moral scripts that redefine them in a range from careless to evil. It is more difficult, but hardly a great feat in itself, to declare oneself a nihilist. In its simplest form, this is to perversely and excessively embrace being dismissed as a badge of difference and pride. In a more developed form, it is to argue and act from a range of positions we currently recognize mostly by slogans of the “no future”/“everything must be destroyed” sort. A more difficult variant of the embrace of the term is one that claims it drives a wedge between two kinds of nihilism. Whether they are posited as two visions of the Void or different methods of destruction (moral and anti-moral, social and anti-social), this version of the nihilist position is ultimately descended from a distinction made by Nietzsche between active and passive nihilism. But the Nietzschean inheritance is double: there is the above-mentioned wedge position; and there is the diagnostic sense of nihilism. The latter suggests understanding a condition psychologically, as Nietzsche did in his late notebooks, or metaphysically, as Heidegger did in his Nietzsche seminars. Such attempts to diagnose render very difficult the separation of the thinker and the thinking, the writer and the writing, from the condition (which may be understood as a corrosive phenomenon variously affecting a place, a time, a culture, a civilization, an empire, and so on).
Now and then the diagnostic sense reappears, severed from the wedge-distinction. In recent years some have taken up the diagnosis of the nihilistic society as the most powerful tool of a kind of critical theory (and, probably unbeknown to them, a contemporary echo of the traditional use of <em>nihilist</em> as an accusation). At the same time, others have taken up the wedge, severed from the diagnosis, as their way of distinguishing a nihilist position that is able to act in a space clear of social implosion.[46] By that I mean: to distinguish the destructive action that comes from agents in the milieu (or our presumed allies) from the self-destruction, implosion and dissolution, of social forms and probably of society in general. Both are done with too much ease precisely to the degree that they ignore each other.
There are a few of us, at least, for whom nihilism is a vital problem in a way that exceeds the action of the wedge and the contemplation at work in the diagnosis. It is something I feel I have to think through, as well as live out; and neither of the above ways of understanding it seems sufficient. I suspect that this means that the problem is not what it was. (Or at least that, like Nietzsche, I feel implicated in the diagnosis.) We are not satisfied with lining up the conditions and our position, saying: our epoch (dominant moralities, culture, civilization, etc.) are nihilistic, and so are we—as if we were merely expressing the disintegration around us as theory or as smashy. Even to say that there is a general tendency and that some <em>we</em> is pushing it farther, driving it to its limit, etc. sounds perilously close to the old Communist idea of exploiting the contradictions of capitalism so as to overcome it. The question always remains as to whether that <em>we</em>, at the farthest reach, at the limit, is not doing the innovative work that future systems will be built upon. From this questioning <strong>we may take “no future” and “everything must be destroyed” less as slogans of a supposedly self-evident sort and more as dark mottos</strong> that guide our explorations of a complicated and dangerous terrain.
*** § 2
I begin with the wedge position, not the isolated diagnosis, because I feel closer to it. But I also need to set out what separates me from it, since I do not understand by what criterion one could claim to clearly distinguish what is on either side of the wedge.
<em>Our nihilism is not christian nihilism.
<br>
We do not deny life</em>
wrote Novatore, who, inspired by <em>The Antichrist</em>, was perhaps able to live out or live with the wedge position. Well, as with much of what he wrote, I am inclined to say that I share his perspective, but with a superadded sense of uncertainty. The uncertainty arises from a sense of impossibility, the impossibility gaining the proper distance from society, Humanity,
<em>... the collective tempests and social hurricanes …</em>
insofar as today this society-weather is a technological issue and not merely a spiritual one. —Did I write <em>spiritual</em>? I might as well have written psychological, or mental, or referred to character, taste or temperament. All I have done here is enumerated the beginning of a list of phenomena that we only know in their ruination, or, in political terms, in and as their complicity with mass phenomena. Or, in ethical terms, through their betrayal.
I may well deny life, if life is unlivable: narcotic life, cyborg life. And the nihilist position we both claim and seek—for us it is never simply <em>not</em> Christian, just as our atheism echoes the atheism of those raised with religion. A certain kind of transition is at stake:
<em>By becoming aware of spectacular decomposition, a person of</em> ressentiment <em>becomes a nihilist. Active nihilism is prerevolutionary. There is no consciousness of transcendence without consciousness of decomposition. Juvenile delinquents are the legitimate heirs of Dada</em>
wrote Vaneigem. Here the wedge is something else: not their nihilism and ours, but nihilism as consciousness, active nihilism as the transition between <em>ressentiment</em> and revolution; the tempting idea that the symptom will become the cure. I do think one can describe the difference between active nihilism and passive nihilism as an awareness. I do think that awareness matters in terms of how one might live beyond <em>ressentiment</em> and beyond the spectacle of society. But I must part ways when it comes to describing awareness as prerevolutionary (or, for that matter, anyone as the legitimate heirs of Dada, tongue in cheek or not).
Some of us need to experience the full consequences of this parting of ways. This means to show and to witness what the awareness of decomposition is <em>now</em> or <em>to us</em>, and what it contributes to stating the problem of nihilism as some of us understand it. <strong>What is most dramatic in this new understanding is the tension between realizing that this is a new understanding, one that is of our time, and simultaneously that we are grasping to what extent the question of nihilism has become detached from a historical understanding.</strong>
*** § 3
Of the definitions offered in the first issue of <em>Internationale Situationniste</em>, two are notable for their recent underemployment: <em>unitary urbanism</em> and <em>decomposition</em>.[47]
Unitary urbanism: <em>The theory of the combined use of arts and techniques as means contributing to the construction of a unified milieu in dynamic relation with experiments in behavior.</em>
This is the most noticeably obsolete of the situationist definitions. It suggests to those familiar with the early SI the exploration of the city as the setting for the practices of constructing situations, psychogeography, and the wandering they called <em>dérive</em>. The city figures here as a “unified milieu.” If unitary urbanism has been abandoned, it is because that side of the SI was not of much use to anyone—to the popularizers <em>or</em> the inheritors. Tom McDonough explicates the project competently enough:
<em>There was, in fact, a curious strain of situationist thought, little remarked today, that was precisely concerned with the destruction of the subject, with the vision of a new, malleable humanity. This vision was particularly apparent in early discussions of the construction of situations and the linked problem of unitary urbanism, both of which were conceived as means of inciting new behaviors, and as such would have access to all the methods offered by modern technology and psychology. That peculiar neologism, “psychogeography,” conveyed exactly this desire for rational control over ever greater domains of life.</em>
Just a strain. But the popularizers were never concerned with such dramatic changes to our lives. And the inheritors—here I mean those who, like Fredy Perlman, translated and expanded on the ideas of the SI— understood sooner or later, if not immediately, that this strain represented a wager the SI played and lost. The side of the optimistic, the historically rational in the SI—the defense, therefore, of progress, a possible progress buried but to be unearthed (a common enough story for communists and many anarchists, of course)—was ravaged by historical and political events. Without entering into a detailed discussion, I think it is fair enough to say that the last fifty years have been all about “inciting new behaviors” and the confluence of “modern technology and psychology.” In some inverted sense, unitary urbanism was realized—by its enemies.
Decomposition, on the other hand: who has really thought this idea through? In one sense the definition seems to belong to the same strain of Situationist thought that opted for unitary urbanism.
Decomposition: <em>The process in which traditional cultural forms have destroyed themselves as a result of the emergence of superior means of controlling nature which make possible and necessary superior cultural constructions. We can distinguish between the active phase of the decomposition and effective demolition of the old superstructures—which came to an end around 1930—and a phase of repetition that has prevailed since that time. The delay in the transition from decomposition to new constructions is linked to the delay in the revolutionary liquidation of capitalism.</em>
The first sentence certainly appeals to the same sense of progress. Such progress would be predicted and measured according to “superior means of controlling nature” (in French the phrase is <em>domination de la nature</em>). As the means appear, cultural forms destroy themselves, a necessary sacrifice, one might suppose, for progress to carry on. In the most immediate sense, which relates decomposition to art movements, this corresponds to the
<em>active and critical</em>
destruction of forms (so wrote Anselm Jappe) that came to a head with Dada but could include Impressionism, Symbolism, Futurism, Cubism, and so on. What follows troubles this interpretation, however. It seems that “around 1930” everything was marching according to plan. Since then decomposition carries on as
<em>empty repetition,</em>
(Jappe again) which would mean that cultural forms farcically continue to destroy themselves without any “new constructions.”
<em>The decomposition of artistic forms has thus become perfectly concordant with the real state of the world and retains no shock effect whatsoever.</em>
In other words, the eternal return of an Art that was declared dead countless times—its repeated resuscitation by the market. This dynamic of repetition is referred to a “delay” in the “liquidation” of capitalism. The dynamic of decomposition in the arts is coupled with the impasse in urbanism in the “Basic Program of the Bureau of Unitary Urbanism”:
<em>The development of the urban milieu is the capitalist domestication of space. It represents the choice of one particular materialization, to the exclusion of other possibilities. Like aesthetics, whose course of decomposition it is going to follow, it can be considered as a rather neglected branch of criminology</em>
wrote Vaneigem and Kotányi. The necessary question is why one will follow the other. (A provisional answer is that the unity of the phenomena under investigation is revealed when one notices that separate spheres are decomposing in the same way. It could also be that it is in the realm of aesthetics that the awareness of decomposition is greatest, and that the awareness accelerates the process, so that other separated spheres of life must follow it, at least for now.)
What decomposition seems to mean so far is that if material conditions do not improve along the lines of true progress, culture breaks down. It changes, yes; but these changes are to be understood as a self-dismantling, and then the indefinite repetition of that self-dismantling. When Vaneigem composed his enumeration of “Theoretical Topics That Need To Be Dealt With Without Academic Debate or Idle Speculation,” he included
<em>Dialectics of decomposition and supersession in the realization of art and philosophy but</em>
there is room to question whether what is under consideration here has a dialectical structure when the supersession (<em>dépassement</em>) never comes. <strong>Decomposition can be provisionally interpreted as the invocation of an ethico-political ideal against an aesthetic one, the refusal of the new in art, or even the refusal of art as such, insofar as, in its separated existence, it cannot act on the economy, cannot alter material conditions. But it can also be seen as a way of beginning to understand the “delay” from within the “delay”; and in that sense already suggests the refusal of the production of the new in every sphere when we are aware that it is empty repetition.</strong>
*** § 4
This tension between longing for supersession, if not progress, and refusal of the present can be detected everywhere the term was used by Debord—already, for example, in three proto-Situationist texts of 1957. “One Step Back,” published in the journal <em>Potlatch</em>, opens by invoking
<em>The extreme point reached by the deterioration of all forms of modern culture, the public collapse of the system of repetition that has prevailed since the end of the war…</em>
and on this basis warns:
<em>Undoubtedly the decision to make use, from the economic as from the constructive viewpoint, of retrograde fragments of modernism entails serious risks of decomposition</em>[48]
The risk being to participate in decomposition (as opposed to contesting or undoing it) by hanging on to the creations of the past, now shattered by that decomposition into fragments. “One More Effort If You Want to Be Situationists” is notable for its parenthetical subtitle, “The SI <em>in</em> and <em>against</em> Decomposition”:
<em>The Situationist International exists in name, but that means nothing but the beginning of an attempt to build beyond the decomposition in which we, like everyone else, are completely involved. Becoming aware of our real possibilities requires both the recognition of the presituationist—in the strict sense of the word—nature of whatever we can attempt, and the rupture, without looking back, with the division of labor in the arts. The main danger lies in these two errors: the pursuit of fragmentary works combined with simpleminded proclamations of an alleged new stage.</em>
<em>At this moment, decomposition shows nothing more than a slow radicalization of moderate innovators toward positions where outcast extremists had already found themselves eight or ten years ago. But far from drawing a lesson from those fruitless experiments, the “respectable” innovators further dilute their importance. I will take examples from France, which surely is undergoing the most advanced phenomena of the general cultural decomposition that, for various reasons, is being manifested in its purest state in western Europe.</em>
Most of those who would have spoken of progress in 1957 would have said it was farthest along in Western Europe or the United States! So decomposition is clearly a place-holder for progress-delayed. The article contrasts the bleak terrain of what “decomposition shows” with the description of the nascent group as the “beginning of an attempt to build beyond it”—beyond what it shows. That same year, the booklet <em>Report on the Construction of Situations and on the Terms of Organization and Action of the International Situationist Tendency</em>, presented by Debord at the founding conference of the SI, significantly broadens the sense of the term. In some places it seems we are still asked to think about what is a dead end in art. In others, though, it seems <strong>we are being asked to consider the dead end of culture itself:</strong>
<em>Decomposition has reached everything. We no longer see the massive use of commercial advertising to exert ever greater influence over judgments of cultural creation; this was an old process. Instead, we are reaching a point of ideological absence in which only the advertising acts, to the exclusion of all previous critical judgments—but not without dragging along a conditioned reflex of such judgment.
<br>
[…]
<br>
The history of modern culture during the ebb tide of revolution is thus the history of the theoretical and practical reduction of the movement for renewal, a history that reaches as far as the segregation of minority trends, and as far as the undivided domination of decomposition.</em>
*** § 5
Look at “Theses on Cultural Revolution,” a piece that Debord published in <em>Internationale Situationniste</em> 1 (the same issue as the definitions). The fifth thesis begins:
<em>We are excluded from real control over the vast material powers of our time. The communist revolution has not yet occurred and we are still living within the confines of decomposing old cultural superstructures.</em>
The seventh thesis adds:
<em>The practical task of overcoming our discordance with this world, that is, of surmounting its decomposition by some more advanced constructions, is not romantic.</em>
For Debord decomposition was always a cultural phenomenon. Faced with art objects, mass media contents, and with their commodity-forms, the situationist would only respond that they were to be seen as the products of decomposition. I think this illuminates the accompanying definitions: <em>détournement</em> is a way to refuse to produce new decomposing art, provisionally turning decomposition against itself by rearranging existing elements; <em>dérive</em> and psychogeography are techniques for wandering in, and analyzing, cities that one has no idea how to transform, in search of the elements to be transformed. These are the practices of “building beyond” decomposition. All of this unfolds in a larger “presituationist” historical framework in which “the communist revolution has not yet occurred.”
Not yet… Almost ten years later, Debord did not make much of decomposition in <em>Society of the Spectacle</em>. He mentions in a few theses in the context of cities and in the context of the implosion of modern art. More or less the original context and usage, then:
<em>The mutual erosion of city and country, resulting from the failure of the historical movement through which existing urban reality could have been overcome, is reflected in the eclectic mixture of their decomposed fragments that blanket the most industrialized regions of the world.</em>
As is well known, although the communist revolution had “not yet” occurred in 1967, either, <em>Society of the Spectacle</em> did include some proposals as to how to bring it about. For many, the way in which the book has continued to be important is in its theory of spectacle and separation, which could be considered a way to understand decomposition writ large. The counterbalancing notions of “cultural” resistance, <em>détournement</em>, <em>dérive</em>, and situation are only hinted at in its theses, while a great emphasis is placed on the worker’s councils, which were to bring about the revolution that had “not yet” occurred…
Around the same time, Vaneigem raised a more troubling question:
<em>In the end, by dint of identifying ourselves with what we are not, of switching from one role to another, from one authority to another, and from one age to another, how can we avoid becoming ourselves part of that never-ending state of transition which is the process of decomposition?</em>
How long until “not yet” turns into “never-ending”? How long can a “delay” be? And consequently, <strong>how long until a provisional idea of culture as decomposition develops into another idea about culture— about civilization itself?</strong>
*** § 6
To my knowledge no one has underlined Fredy Perlman’s transformative use of decomposition in <em>Against His-Story, Against Leviathan!</em>. He introduces the term in a passage that could be used to explain one of the ways in which the situationist critique of culture was transformed in the direction of the current array of primitivist, green anarchist, and anti-civilization perspectives.
<em>The death of Egypt’s gods is recorded. After two or three generations of Pharaoh’s protection, the figures on the Temple walls and pillars no longer jump or fly; they no longer even breathe. They’re dead. They’re lifeless copies of the earlier, still living figures. The copyists are exact, we would say pedantic; they seem to think that faithful copying of the originals will bring life to the copies.<br><br>A similar death and decomposition must pale the songs and ceremonies as well. What was once joyful celebration, selfabandon, orgiastic communion with the beyond, shrinks to lifeless ritual, official ceremony led by the head of State and his officials. It all becomes theater, and it is all staged. It is no longer for sharing but for show. And it no longer enlarges the participant, who now becomes a mere spectator. He feels diminished, intimidated, awed by the power of Pharaoh’s household.<br><br>Our painting, music, dance, everything we call Art, will be heirs of the moribund spiritual. What we call Religion will be another dead heir, but at such a high stage of decomposition that its onceliving source can no longer be divined.</em>
The situationist inheritance is clear.[49] Ritual and repetition replace life and creative action. Except this is not the decline of art, but <em>art itself as decline</em>. Decomposition is presented here not as the culture of an advanced technological society whose history has stalled on the way to communist revolution; not the culture of the “not yet”, but culture <em>as such</em>. This is one sense, and one source, of what is called Civilization in the perspective of anti-civilization thought. An attitude that Debord outlined with respect to capitalist or spectacular culture was now shaken loose from its grounding in our epoch, and granted the broadest historical sweep possible. <em>Has all history been decomposition?</em>—But if the answer to this question is affirmative, then the very notions of epoch and historical sweep (let alone spectacular and capitalist culture) have to be re-evaluated from the perspective that has redefined decomposition. <strong>The priority of organization and breakdown are reversed, and the breakdown is now primary—primordial.</strong>
To detail this anti-historical grasp of history, I will need to isolate a conceptual core in <em>Against His-Story, Against Leviathan!</em> [50] Three axioms:
1. History (not as cosmic time, but as His-Story) begins accidentally, as the runaway cascade of problems and complications beginning with a situation of ecological imbalance; this event is also the constitution of the first Leviathan.
<br><br><strong>Corollary:</strong>
<br>The Leviathan places human beings in a situation they do not meet anywhere else in the Biosphere except in rare places like Sumer.
That is, Sumer is the place of an accident; and the Leviathan is the generalization and reproduction of that accident. To say it is an accident is to say that the accident was a contingent event, an event that did not have to happen.
2. Every Leviathan is in a state of decomposition (its artificial life in some sense <em>is</em> decomposition). Perlman hints at this throughout the book until putting it plainly towards the end, referencing<br>
<em> the decomposition that accompanies every functioning Leviathan.</em><br><br><strong>Corollary:</strong>
<br>The scribes (historians, intellectuals by extension) are trained not to see the decomposition as such.
3. Once the decomposition of a given Leviathan is complete, its decomposed fragments can reorganize into a new Leviathan.<br><br> <em>We’ve seen that earlier Leviathans were always in a state of decomposition. When one decomposed, others swallowed its remains.</em>
Or should this be:
3. Once the decomposition of a given Leviathan is complete, its decomposed fragments <em>will</em> reorganize into a new Leviathan.
It is difficult to say. It is clear enough that the beginning of the process is accidental. But is its unfolding accidental? Is the movement of complication from one Leviathan to another, the increasing globalization of decomposition, a process that Perlman thought of as necessary?
*** § 7
I am not sure how to answer these questions, nor do I think Fredy knew how. He begins the penultimate chapter writing about his impatience to finish the story, the book… to finish <em>His-Story</em>. It is not much further on that the last passage I cited continues:
… <em>when there are no others, when Leviathan is One, the tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing, is almost at an end.</em>
<em>Civilization, synonym of Capital, Technology and The Modern World, called Leviathan by Hobbes and Western Spirit by Turner, is as racked by decomposition as any earlier Leviathan. But Civilization is not one Leviathan among many. It is The One. Its final decomposition is Leviathan’s end. After twenty centuries of stony sleep vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, the sleeper is about to wake to the cadences of a long-forgotten music or to the eternal silence of death without a morrow.</em>
This passage is deeply ambiguous. Is the image offered here of “final decomposition” another version of the “delay”? Or is the word final to be taken literally, meaning that decomposition—and so history—are coming to an end? And is this end itself the result of a certain accumulation of complications, a tension to be understood naturalistically and ecologically, as the resonance of the primordial accident? Are those who are aware of this decomposition even a little set apart from it through this knowledge? Can they move in a way that does not belong to its process?
<em>it is not yet known … if the new outsiders do indeed still have an “inner light,” namely an ability to reconstitute lost rhythms, to recover music, to regenerate human cultures.</em>
<em>It is also not known if the technological detritus that crowds and poisons the world leaves human beings any room to dance. What is known is that Leviathan, the great artifice, single and world-embracing for the first time in His-story, is decomposing.</em>
What is clear is that Perlman broadened the relevance of decomposition by definitively breaking with the progressive and optimistic aspects that it bore in its first situationist version. By making the process of breakdown primary, he invented a new kind of diagnosis of the present, and a new way to understand history. This diagnosis suggests:
1. That history, as a whole or in segments, has not been progressive, in either a linear or cyclical way, but rather a process of increasing complication, destructiveness, fallingapart of previous epochs (along with their attitudes, ideas, practices, and so on).
<br><br><strong>Corollary:</strong>
<br>
The very phenomenon of history (as His-Story), its possible unity as narrative and idea, is peculiarly undergirded by this process, which is itself a fragile hanging together of fragments of fragments, endlessly shattering, strangely recombining, giving most observers the sense of “delay.”
2. That what we might be inspired by in history has to do with turning decomposition against itself in the negative manner of <em>détournement</em>. Or, as some friends recently put it,
<em>we locate ourselves within the subversive current of history that willfully attempts to break with the ongoing progress of society.</em>
<strong>To identify this negative movement, or this subversive current, is to lose, to give up on, the sense of “delay” and to become aware of decomposition.</strong>
*** § 8
<strong>Awareness of decomposition is then, most immediately, a new kind of diagnosis of the present and an alternative to historical thought. This diagnosis belongs to the subversive current; it does not take place in isolation. We are and are not Society.</strong> We know we are in—we do not know if we may be out of—decomposition. In this awareness we discern that decomposition is not Decline, as though the film of Progress were run backwards. Decline as a general logic would mean that everything gets worse. But the idea here is to undermine any global, world-historical scale for judging what is better or worse. Only from within decomposition has Progress seemed possible; and only from within decomposition would history appear to be complete disaster, or completely anything (the victory of one race, culture, or religion, for example, as vindicated by history, or the defeat of another). Such an awareness could come as a shock. It could lead to the denial of temporal logic (order, progress, explanation, justification). But it is not a relativism that flattens out the differences between events.[51] It may amount to a perspective from outside civilization.
*** § 9
One could reply that in my presentation of this awareness, in the overall thrust of this essay, I have exemplified the anarchist allergy to history that Debord diagnosed in <em>Society of the Spectacle</em>,
<em>It is the</em> ideology of pure freedom, <em>an ideology that puts everything on the same level</em> [qui égalise tout] <em>and loses any conception of the “historical evil” (the negation at work within history). This fusion of all partial demands into a single all-encompassing demand has given anarchism the merit of representing the rejection of existing conditions in the name of the whole of life rather than from the standpoint of some particular critical specialization; but the fact that this fusion has been envisaged only in the absolute, in accordance with individual whim and in advance of any practical actualization, has doomed anarchism to an all too obvious incoherence.</em>
I would answer: as to losing any conception of the negation at work in history, yes, excessively, I hope. Evil is not a term I find useful. But the <strong>negative or destructive side of history is for some of us more or less all that history has been or done. In the strict sense, nothing is being worked on or built up in or through history.</strong> The places, people, and events in past time that we enjoy or claim, appreciate or appropriate, must be creatively reidentified as non-historical, extra-historical, or anti-historical currents. There may have been, may continue to be what Foucault called insurrections of subjugated knowledges: counter-histories. It is true that certain moments of revolt are coupled with strange perspectives on history. But it is also true that these counter-histories have an odd way of becoming ordinary histories, either by incorporation into universal His-Story, its narrative, or by becoming the local his-stories of smaller groups and communities. As the latter they may have a temporary or even long-lasting protective effect for those groups or communities, but they weigh in the same way as His-story on those who purposely or accidentally put in their lot with them. Foucault’s attempts to write what he called histories of the present could be described as last-ditch attempts to see what could be done with history; but even he, in his wise ambivalence, wrote history as genealogy. The genealogical perspective sometimes locates or even summons counter-histories, but usually only the lives of the infamous:
<em>Lives of a few lines or a few pages, nameless misfortunes and adventures gathered into a handful of words. Brief lives, encountered by chance in books and documents. Exempla… not so much lessons to ponder as brief effects whose force fades almost at once.</em>
It is the awareness of that fading, another name, perhaps, for decomposition, that we can no longer do without.
*** § 10
As to incoherence, this remark was aimed at the anarchists Debord knew, not the ones we know. But one might say that the “incoherence” of “aiming at the absolute” is precisely what our discourse will sound like to someone who still and always relies on historical explanations. What we are doing with history is what Debord himself recommended we do with decomposition: to turn it against itself parodically, in <em>détournement</em>. And here the third rule of <em>détournement</em> applies:
Détournement <em>is less effective the more it approaches a rational reply.</em>
I took the phrase “awareness of decomposition” from Vaneigem. I have already cited part of the passage:
<em>People of</em> ressentiment <em>are the perfect survivors—people bereft of the consciousness of possible transcendence, people of the age of decomposition. By becoming aware of spectacular decomposition, a person of</em> ressentiment <em>becomes a nihilist. Active nihilism is prerevolutionary.</em>
The age of decomposition: a global diagnosis. It is populated by two types: people of <em>ressentiment</em>, survivors, are those who continue to believe in progress and contribute to processes of decomposition. Artists or not, their production is repetition. These are the passive nihilists of the wedge position. The person who is aware of this, aware of decomposition, thereby becomes an active nihilist. For Vaneigem this is prerevolutionary; it is not for the likes of Novatore, or many of our friends these days. But what studying <em>Against His-Story</em> perhaps shows is that the <em>pre-</em> in <em>prerevolutionary</em> has something of historical progress about it. As though there really were three stages and the middle one was conscience, consciousness, awareness! <strong>To take up nihilism as a problem today means precisely this: that nothing in particular seems to us prerevolutionary because revolution sounds too much like decomposition to our ears.</strong> Thus my penchant for the wedge position, insofar as it affirms active nihilism without positing something else after it; thus my insistence on some version of the diagnosis—the awareness of decomposition that is part of our thinking, not the contemplation of a historically achieved reality to be understood historically and overcome by making history!
*** § 11
I would suggest that all of the interminable discussions of cycles of struggle, the various and competing periodizations of capitalism and technology (for starters), especially as they have desperately sought to appraise and orient us in terms of the history of the twentieth century, have been deceptive. They have traced outlines of decomposition without discovering their complicity in its logic. Yes, decomposition tempts everyone to periodize. To each her own perverse history. Think of our pastimes—think of gossip! Think of the idle talk of generations or decades in discussions of the character of individuals, their politics, or their modes of consumption of culture. What we bring forward in such sleepy analyses of culture and character are our own repetitions, our own novelties, our own crappy contributions. It is the work of culture, after all. Some of us feel a need to remain silent, sovereignly neutral, in the face of this folk art of milieus and subcultures.
It could be good practice, at least, for it is just this neutral gaze with which we have learned to read certain of our contemporaries.
<em>Empire is not the crowning achievement of a civilization, the end-point of its ascendent arc. Rather it is the tail-end of an inward turning process of disaggregation, as that which must check and if possible arrest the process.</em>
wrote Tiqqun. This perspective seems close to the one I have been elaborating here. But they immediately follow that proposition with:
<em>At first glance, Empire seems to be a parodic recollection of the entire, frozen history of a “civilization.” And this impression has a certain intuitive correctness. Empire is in fact civilization’s last stop before it reaches the end of its line, the final agony in which it sees its life pass before its eyes.</em>
It is just this familiar reference to the final and highest stage towards which we have become skeptical. We are as eager to find a way out of the process, supersession or overcoming, as we suppose many of our friends to be. And yet a few of us have had to abandon this temporal logic, the apparent necessity of the highest stage. For us it has come to seem a rhetorical crossing of the wires, where description spills over into prescription. Psychologically, it makes sense: to insist that this is the highest stage and the final moment means that if you have any inclination to act against Empire et. al., you must do it now! <em>Hic rhodus</em>, etc.—
<em>This is the place to jump, the place to dance!</em>
that is how Fredy began, too.[52] But, as I have noted, he did not end there, but in ambiguity, in questions. Our thought decomposes, too…
*** § 12
In sum, the perspective that says that decomposition is the logic of His-Story elucidates two things. First, that we were right to deny Progress; second, that we are not believers in its opposite, an inverted Regression away from a golden age. As I imagine it, a principal characteristic of whatever preceded His-Story (civilization, etc.) would be its neutrality, its stony silence at the level of metanarrative. <strong>Rather than Progress or Regression we could describe historical decomposition as the accelerating complication of events. This acceleration is violent and dangerous.</strong> Here and there an eddy may form in which things either slow down or temporarily stabilize in the form of an improvement. What we can say with some certainty is that as historical time elapses, things get more complicated; and that these complications so outrun their antecedents that the attempt to explain retroactively becomes ever more confusing.
Situationally, we may be getting some purchase for the moment, an angle, a perspective. But what Debord perhaps could not admit, what Perlman perhaps understood, is that decomposition had always been there in our explanation, our diagnosis, and the actions they are said to justify; and that His-Story is decomposition’s double movement: as Civilization unravels, it narrates its unraveling. The dead thing, Leviathan, organizes life, builds itself up as armor in and around it (which would include machines and a certain stiffening of postures and gestures, and concurrently thinking and action, in human bodies). But the dead thing remains dead, and it breaks down. It functions by breaking down. It creates ever more complex organizations (analyses of behavior) that then decompose, i.e. break down.
*** § 13
Returning to the analysis of nihilist positions with which I began, I would say that the wedge position and the diagnostic one, the active nihilist and contemplative critical-theoretical appraisal, are both the results of running the Nietzschean diagnostic through a political machine, turning its psychology into political psychology. And <strong>the political machine is one of the devices of decomposition.</strong> To appraise all of society critically, or to divide the friend and the enemy once and for all, are the respectively theoretical and pratical Ur-operations of politics. All debate about the priority of the one over the other aside, I recognize in them the basic moves of the constitution of a <em>polis</em>.
<em>The councils represent order in the face of the decomposition of the state…</em>
wrote Vaneigem in his “Note to the Civilized.” It is possible to read this, not as the political opposition of order and chaos, organization and disorder, but as an understandable misprision of the tension that, whoever wins, pushes decomposition farther by temporarily concealing it. And in this temporary concealing, followed by its inevitable unconcealing, it pushes nihilism farther in its diffuse, passive, social direction. Unitary urbanism…
<em>May 1968 revealed to a great many people that ideological confusion tries to conceal the real struggle between the “party” of decomposition and the “party” of global</em> dépassement
wrote Vaneigem in 1971. Quotes or not, what he is invoking are parties, sides. The entire text “Terrorism or Revolution” is based on the wedge, drawing lines and making the same kind of claim we have by now become used to: “this is the highest stage,” or its variant, “if not now, never.” These claims issue from a confusion deeper than ideological confusion, the confusion that <em>is</em> decomposition.
*** § 14
Those who echo an ancient military rhetoric, invoking necessity in the political and historical senses, drawing lines and insisting “now or never” as if by habit, will always confuse the problem of nihilism. The few of us who feel it as a <em>problem</em>, and only secondarily, if at all, as a position, understand that we cannot divide ourselves from decomposition to diagnose it and to act on it. Our psychology is anti-political, so we have to explore in other ways. Our awareness of decomposition leads to certain insights that are disconcerting and fascinating as well; they may well be visions from outside Civilization. This awareness informs our action without distinguishing us from events. I am referring to what is most question-worthy: the passing sense of the weird and meaningless way in which things happen, beyond causality and so beyond lasting explanation. I am referring to what might be called events as signs of non-events, or historical events as masks of non-historical events. <strong>So if and when</strong> <em><strong>we</strong></em> <strong>call ourselves nihilists, know that we are wearing a mask</strong>. It might be what we need to face others in decomposition. Facing them we might also come to understand Baltasar Gracián’s saying,
<em>It takes more today to make one sage than seven in years gone by, and more to deal with a single person than an entire nation in the past.</em>
<br>
** Green Nihilism or Cosmic Pessimism
<em>Men have been so mad as to believe that God is pleased by harmony</em><br>Spinoza
Some of us have read [[http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-desert][<em>Desert</em>]], and opted to reprint it, to promote its discussion, maybe to promulgate (at least repeat) some of what is said in it. Despite our efforts, I still feel it has not had the uptake it deserves. I am beginning to think that the issue is less about our limited ability to distribute texts and discuss ideas, and more about the limits of the milieu itself. As to the reception <em>Desert did</em> get, the most one can say is that a few literate anarchists quickly <em>processed</em> it, either absorbing it into their position or rejecting it. This scanning-followed-by-yes-or-no operation pretty much sums up what many anarchists consider reading to be. One sort of rejection was documented in the egoist newspapers <em>The Sovereign Self</em> and <em>My Own</em> (and [[http://theanvilreview.org/print/unimaginable-weirdness-comments-on-some-comments-on-desert/][responded to]] in <em>The Anvil</em>): it concerned the idea that the anonymous author of <em>Desert</em> was engaging in a pessimistic rhetoric for dramatic effect while concealing their ultimate clinging to hope, perhaps like those who endlessly criticize love, only to be revealed as the most perfectionist of romantics in the last instance. <em>That</em> exchange on <em>Desert</em> tells much more about the readers—what they expected, what they are looking for—than the booklet itself. As does the other, sloppier, sort of rejection of the writing, which has for obvious reasons not appeared in print. More than one person has been overheard to say something to the tune of: “Oh, <em>Desert</em>? I hated it! It was so <em>depressing</em>!” And that is it. No discussion, no engagement, just stating in a fairly direct manner that, if the writing did not further the agenda of hope or reinforce the belief that mass movements can improve the global climate situation, then it is not relevant to a discussion of green issues (which are therefore redefined as setting out from that agenda and belief). In the background of both exchanges is a kind of obtuseness characteristic of the anarchist milieu: our propensity to be as ready to pick up the new thing as to dismiss it either immediately after consumption or soon after another consumes it. This customary speed, which we share with many with whom we share little else, is what necessitates the yes-or-no operation. Whatever the response is, it has to happen quickly. (We are the best of Young-Girls when it comes to the commodities we ourselves produce.) To do something else than mechanically phagocyte <em>Desert</em> (or anything else worth reading) and absorb it or excrete it back out onto the bookshelf/literature table/shitpile, some of us will need to take up a far less practical, far less pragmatic attitude towards the best of what circulates in our little space of reading. In short, it is to intervene in the smooth functioning of the anarchist-identity machine, our own homegrown apparatus, which reproduces the milieu, ingesting unmarked ideas, expelling anarchist ideas. Of course all those online rants, our many little zines, our few books—the ones we write and make, and the ones that we adopt now and then—are only part of this set-up, which also includes living arrangements, political practices, anti-political projects, and so on. All together, from a few crowded metropoles to the archipelago of outward- or inward-looking towns, that array could be called the machine that makes anarchist identity, one of those awful hybrids of anachronism and ultramodernity that clutter our times. But, trivial though the role of <em>Desert</em> may be in the reproduction of the milieu, its small role in that reproduction is especially remarkable given that it directly addresses the limits of that reproduction, and, indirectly, of the milieu itself. Its reception is a kind of diagnostic test, a demonstration of our special obtuseness. If I am right about even some of the preceding, then the increasingly speculative nature of what follows ought to prove interesting to a few, and repulsive to the rest.
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* * * *
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I intend the <em>or</em> in the title to be destabilizing. It does not indicate a choice to be made between two already somewhat fictitious positions. (Quotation marks for each would not have been strong enough. To say this or that position is fictitious may seem to be belied by the advance, here or there, of those who present themselves as the representatives of positions. This is where we need to make our case most forcefully, arguing back that to take on a position <em>as an identity</em> simply eludes the <em>what</em> of position altogether, making it rest on a different, more familiar kind of fiction.) By placing the <em>or</em> between them I mean to mark a slippage, which I consider to be a movement of involuntary thought. Not being properly yoked to action, to what is considered voluntary, it is the kind of thought most have little time for. It has to do with passing imperceptibly from one state to another, and what may be learned in that shift. It is a terrible kind of thought at first, and, for some, will perhaps always be so, all the more so inasmuch as we are not its brave protagonists… Compare these passages:
<em>The tide of Western authority will recede from much, though by no means all, of the planet. A writhing mess of social flotsam and jetsam will be left in its wake. Some will be patches of lived anarchy, some of horrible conflicts, some empires, some freedoms, and, of course, unimaginable weirdness. </em>
And:
<em>The world is increasingly unthinkable—a world of planetary disasters, emerging pandemics, tectonic shifts, strange weather, oil-drenched seascapes, and the furtive, always-looming threat of extinction. In spite of our daily concerns, wants, and desires, it is increasingly difficult to comprehend the world in which we live and of which we are a part. To confront this idea is to confront an absolute limit to our ability to adequately understand the world at all.</em>
The first passage is from <em>Desert</em>, an anonymous pamphlet on the meaning of the irreversibility of climate change for anarchist practice. The second is from Eugene Thacker’s <em>In the Dust of this Planet</em>, a collection of essays that leads from philosophy to horror, or rather leads philosophy to horror. I bring them together here because they seem to me to coincide in a relatively unthought theoretical zone. As <em>Desert</em> invokes the present and coming anarchy and chaos, it admits the <em>weirdness</em> of the future (for our inherited thought patterns and political maps, at least); when <em>Dust of this Planet</em> gestures to the weirdness and unthinkability of the world, it invokes the current and coming biological, geological, and climatological chaos of the planet. They should be read together; the thought that is possible in that stereoscopic reading is what my <em>or</em> intends. (I mean to gesture towards the passage from one perspective to the other, and perhaps back.) If <em>Desert</em> sets out from the knowability of the world—as the object of science, principally—it has the rare merit of spelling out its increasing unknowability as an object for our political projects, our predictions and plans. <em>Dust of this Planet</em> allows us to push this thought father in an eminently troubling direction, revealing a wilderness more wild than the wild nature invoked by the critics of capitalism and civilization: the unthinkable Planet behind the inhabitable Earth. As we slip in this direction (which is also past the point of distinguishing the voluntary from the involuntary), all our positions, those little compressed bundles of opinion and analysis, practice and experience, crumble—<em>as positions</em>. No doubt many will find this disconcerting. But something of what we tried to do by thinking up, debating, adopting and abandoning, positions, is left—something lives on, survives—maybe just the primal thrust that begins with a question or profound need and collapses in a profession of faith or identity. That would be the path back to the perspective of <em>Desert</em> (now irreparably transformed). What is left, the afterlife of our first outward movements, might be something for each to witness alone, in a solitude far from the gregarious comfort of recognizable positions, of politics. To say nothing of community.
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All our maneuvering, all our petty excuses for not studying it aside, there is still much to be said about this wonderful, challenging booklet, <em>Desert</em>. To wit, that it is the first written elaboration of sentiments some of us admit to and others feel without confessing to them. And, moreover, that it hints repeatedly at an even broader and more troubling set of perspectives about the limits to what we can do, and maybe of what we are altogether. If the milieu’s demand were accepted and these feelings and ideas were narrowed down to a position, it could indeed be called <em>green nihilism</em>. In this naming of a position the second word indicates one familiar political, or rather anti-political, sense of <em>nihilism</em>—the position that views action, or inaction, from the perspective that nothing can be done to save the world. That no single event, or series of events clumsily apprehended as a single Event, can be posited as the object of political or moral optimism, except by the faithful and the deluded. Moreover, that the injunction to think of the future, to <em>hope</em> in a certain naive way, is itself pernicious, and often a tool of our enemies. As to <em>green</em>—well, those who have read <em>Desert</em> will be familiar with the story it tells. Irreversible global climate change, meshing in an increasingly confusing way with a global geopolitical system that intensifies control in resource-rich areas while loosening or perhaps losing its grips in the hinterlands, the growing desert… It is the story, then, of literal deserts, and also of zones deserted by authority or that those who desert the terrain of authority inhabit. But let’s be clear about this: <em>Desert</em> does not name its own position. It is less a book that proposes a certain strategy or set of practices and more a book about material conditions that are likely to affect any strategy, any practices whatsoever. What is best about <em>Desert</em> is not just the unflinching sobriety with which its author piles up evidence and insights for such a near future, without drifting too far into speculation; it is the way they do not abandon the idea of surviving in such a decomposing world. It is neither optimism nor pessimism in the usual sense; it is another way to grasp anarchy. That is why I write that much remains to be said about it. One way to begin thinking through <em>Desert</em> is to concentrate less on what position it supposedly takes (is there a green nihilism? for or against hope?) and to consider how to push its perspective farther. This means both asking more questions about how it allows us to redefine survival and taking up the possibilities for thought that it mostly hints at. For example, to say the future is unknowable is a pleasant banality, which can just as well be invoked by optimists as pessimists; but to concentrate on what is unknowable in a way that projects it into past and present as well is to think beyond the dull conversation about hope, or utopia and dystopia, for that matter. Here is one example of how such thinking might unfold: <em>Desert</em> seems to offer a novel perspective on <em>chaos</em>. There have probably been two anarchist takes on chaos so far: the traditional one, summed up in the motto, <em>anarchy is not chaos, but order</em>; and Hakim Bey’s discussions of chaos, which may be summed up in his poetic phrase <em>Chaos never died.</em> The former is clear enough: like many leftist analyses, it identifies social chaos with a badly managed society and opposes to it a harmonious anarchic order (which, it was later specified, could exist in harmony with a nature itself conceived as harmonious). This conception of chaos, which is still quite prevalent today, does not even merit its name. It is a way of morally condemning capitalism, the State, society, or what you will; it is basically name-calling. Any worthwhile conception of chaos should begin from a non-moral position, admitting that the formlessness of chaos is not for us to judge. That much Hakim Bey <em>did</em> amit. What, in retrospect especially, is curious about his little missive “[[http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/hakim-bey-t-a-z-the-temporary-autonomous-zone-ontological-anarchy-poetic-terrorism#toc3][Chaos]]” are the various references to “agents of chaos,” “avatars of chaos”, even a “prophethood of chaos.” It is a lovely letter from its time and perhaps some other times as well; I have no intention to criticize it. It is a marked improvement on any version of <em>anarchy is order</em>, and yet… and yet. It comes too close, or reading it some came too close, to simply opting for chaos, as though order and chaos were sides and it were a matter of choosing sides. The inversion of a moral statement is still a moral statement, after all. What is left to say about chaos, then? The explicit references to chaos in <em>Desert</em> are all references to social disorder. But a thoughtful reader might, upon reading through for the third or fourth time, start to sense that another, more ancient sense of chaos is being invoked: less of an extreme of disorder and more of a primordial nothingness, a “yawning gap”, as the preferred gloss of some philologists has it. The repeated reference to a probable global archipelago of “large islands of chaos” is directly connected to the destabilization of the global climate. And this is the terrible thought that <em>Desert</em> constructs for us and will not save us from: that from now on we survive in a world where the global climate is irreversibly destabilized, and that such a survival is something other than life or politics as we have so far dreamt them. The meager discussion we’ve seen so far on <em>Desert</em> revolves around questions such as: is this true? and, since most who bother thinking it through will take it to be true, does the “no hope”/”no future” perspective (the supposed nihilism) which <em>Desert</em> to some extent adopts, and others to some extent impute to it, help or hinder an overall anarchist position? A less obvious discussion revolves around two very different sorts of questions: <em>what myths does exposing this reality shatter?</em> and, if we are brave enough to think ourselves into this demythologized space that has eclipsed the mythical future, <em>is an anarchist position still a coherent or relevant response to survival there</em>? The myth that is shattered here is first and foremost that wonderful old story about the Earth:
<quote>
<em>Earth, our bright home…</em>
Shelley
</quote>
There are two main versions of this story. In the religious version, a god intends for us to live here and creates the Earth for us, or, to a lesser extent, creates us for the Earth. In either case our apparent fit into the Earth, our presumed kinship with it, usually expressed in the thought of Nature or the natural, has a transcendent guarantee. In the second version, which is usually of a rational or scientific sort, we have evolved to live on the Earth and can expect it to be responsive to our needs. Here the guarantee is immanent and rational. It is true that this second story, in the version of evolutionary theory, also taught us that we could have easily not come to be here, and that we may not always be here. That is why Freud classed Darwin’s theory as the second of three wounds to human narcissism (the first being the Copernican theory, which displaced the Earth from the center of the cosmos, and the third being Freud’s own theory, which displaced conscious thought from prominence in mental life). But a certain common sense, or what could be called the most obtuse rationalism, seems to have reintroduced the religious content of the first version into the second, and concluded that it is good or right or proper for us to be here. Natural, in short. In any case, the lesson here is that the psychic wound can be open and humanity, whoever that is, may limp on, wounded, thinking whatever it prefers to think about itself. What <em>Desert</em> draws attention to is a congeries of events that could increasingly trouble our collective ability to go on with this story of a natural place for (some) humans.<em></em> Irreversible climate change is both something that can be understood (in scientific and derivative, common-sense ways) and something that, properly considered, suggests a vast panorama of unknowns. It is true that <em>Desert</em> makes much of its case by citing scientists and scientific statistics. But the real question here is about the status of these invocations of science. This is where a subtler reading shows its superiority. If the entire argumentative thrust of <em>Desert</em> relied on science, the pamphlet would be fairly disposable. <em>Desert</em> invokes science to put before the hopeful and the apathetic images of a terrible and sublime sort. We could say that its explicit argument is based on science, plus a certain kind of anti-political reasoning. But its overall effect is to dislodge us from our background assumption of a knowable and predictable world into a less predictable, less knowable awareness. After all, it would be just as easy to develop a similar narrative in the discourse of a pessimistic political science, emphasizing massive population growth and social chaos: an irruptive and ungovernable human biology beyond sociality. Let’s try it. From a red anarchist perspective, this could mean more opportunities for mutual aid, for setting the example of anarchy as order; chaos would be a kind of forced clean slate, a time to show that we are better and more efficient than the forces of the state. From an insurrectionary perspective, the chaos would be an inhuman element making possible the generalization of conflict. General social chaos would be the macrocosm corresponding to the microcosm of the riot. For them chaos would also be an opportunity, in this case to hasten and amplify anomic irruptions. In sum, one could make the same argument about the biological mass of humanity as about the Earth—that its coming chaos is an opportunity for anarchists because it is a materially forced anarchy. This does not mean that we are inherently aggressive or whatever you want to associate with social chaos, but rather ungovernable in the long run (or at least governed by forces and aims other than the ones accounted for in political reasoning). It does mean, however, that the idea <em>we are ungovernable in the long run</em>, the affirmation of which is more or less synonymous with the confidence with which the anarchists take their position, is now closely linked with another idea, that <em>in the last instance the Earth is not our natural home</em>. It may have been our home for some time, for a time that we call prehistory. Indeed, Fredy Perlman marks the transition from prehistory to [[http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/fredy-perlman-against-his-story-against-leviathan#toc2][His-Story,]] or Civilization, as the prolongation of an event of ecological imbalance, a prolongation whose overall effect is destructive, even as the short-term or narrowly focused results along the way are to make the Earth more and more of a welcoming and natural place for humans to be. And now our parting of ways with Hakim Bey may be clarified, for, even if he did not simply take the side of chaos, he did write:<em> </em>
<quote>
<em>remember, only in Classical Physics does Chaos have anything to do with entropy, heat-death, or decay. In our physics (Chaos Theory), Chaos identifies with tao, beyond both yin-as-entropy & yang-as-energy, more a principle of continual creation than of any</em> nihil<em>, void in the sense of</em> potentia<em>, not exhaustion. (Chaos as the “sum of all orders.”) </em>
</quote>
He was making an argument about what is [[http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/hakim-bey-t-a-z-the-temporary-autonomous-zone-ontological-anarchy-poetic-terrorism#toc23][stupid]] about death-glorifying art which, parenthetically, still seems relevant. But I simply don’t see why chaos (or tao, for that matter) is somehow better understood as creation than as destruction, or why it is preferable to invoke <em>potentia</em> and not exhaustion. In the name of what? “Ontological” anarchism? Life? And the sum of all orders… is this a figure of something at all knowable? And if not, why the preceding taking of sides? The chaos that <em>Desert</em> summons is not ontological. No new theory of being is claimed here. The effect is first of all psychological: stating what more or less everyone knows, but will not admit. If <em>Desert</em> deserves the label nihilist, it is really in this sense, that it knowingly points to the unknowable, to the background of all three narcissistic wounds. (This is my way of admitting that talking or writing about nihilism does not clarify much of anything. If it was worth doing, it is not because I wanted to share a way of believing-in-nothing. I see now that I was going somewhere else. <em>The analysis of nihilism is the object of psychology… it being understood that this psychology is also that of the cosmos,</em> wrote Deleuze.)
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<em>In the Dust of This Planet</em> introduces a tripartite distinction between World, Earth, and Planet. Thacker states that the human world, our sociocultural horizon of understanding, is what is usually meant by world. This is the world as it is invoked in politics, in statements that begin: <em>what the world needs…,</em> and of course any and all appeals to <em>save</em> or <em>change</em> <em>the world.</em> It is the single world of globalism (and of global revolution) but also the many little worlds of multiculturalism, nationalism, and regionalism. But one could argue that our experience (and the gaps in our experience) also unfold in another world, the enveloping site of natural processes, from climate to chemical and physical processes, of course including our own biology. This is the Earth that we are often invited to save in ecological politics or activism. A third version of what is meant by world is what Thacker calls the Planet. If the world as human World is the world-for-us, and the Earth as natural world is a world-for-itself, the Planet is the world-without-us. Visions of the World and the Earth correspond roughly to subjective and objective perspectives; but what these are visions <em>of</em>, the Planet, is not reducible to either, however optimistic our philosophy, theory, or science may be. In terms perhaps more familiar to some green anarchists, the World corresponds to the material and mental processes of civilization, and the Earth to Nature as constructed by civilization. Civilization, so it would seem, produces nature as its knowable byproduct as it encloses the wild, leaving fields, parks, and gardens, along with domesticated and corralled wild animals, including, of course, our species. Does the wildness or wilderness of the green anarchists then correspond to the Planet, as world-without-us? Only if we can grasp that the wild, like, or <em>as</em>, chaos, is ultimately unknowable—not because of some defect in our faculties but because it includes their limits and undoing. When green anarchists and others invoke the wild, we must always be sure to ask if they mean an especially unruly bit of nature, nature that is not yet fully processed by the civilized, or something that civilization will never domesticate or conquer. Planet is an odd category, in that it seems to correspond both to the putative and impossible object of science (a science without an observer) and an inexplicable and strange image emergent from out of the recesses of the unconscious (which itself raises a troubling question as to what an unconscious is at all if it can be said to issue images that exclude us). I think about this third category in terms of <em>Desert</em> as I read this passage from Thacker:
<em>When the world as such cataclysmically manifests itself in the form of a disaster, how do we interpret or give meaning to the world? There are precedents in Western culture for this kind of thinking. In classical Greece the interpretation is primarily</em> mythological<em>—Greek tragedy, for instance, not only deals with the questions of fate and destiny, but in so doing it also evokes a world at once familiar and unfamiliar, a world within our control or a world as a plaything of the gods. By contrast, the response of Medieval and early modern Christianity is primarily</em> theological<em>—the long tradition of apocalyptic literature, as well as the Scholastic commentaries on the nature of evil, cast the non-human world within a moral framework of salvation. In modernity, in the intersection of scientific hegemony, industrial capitalism, and what Nietzsche famously prophesied as the death of God, the non-human world gains a different value. In modernity, the response is primarily</em> existential<em>—a questioning of the role of human individuals and human groups in light of modern science, high technology, industrial and post-industrial capitalism, and world wars. </em>
In the light of the ongoing and growing disaster called irreversible climate change, <em>Desert</em> clearly exposes the theological-existential roots (the modern roots, that is to say) of anarchist politics, not particularly different, as far as this issue goes, from the panorama of Left or radical positions. What matters to me is the opportunity to strike out beyond these positions, elaborating an anti-politics thought through in reference to a point of view Thacker calls <em>cosmological. Could such a cosmological view</em>, he writes, <em>be understood not simply as the view from interstellar space, but as the view of the world-without-us, the Planetary view? Desert</em> might be one of the first signs of the paradoxical draw of this view, which, it should be clear by now, is something other than a position to be adopted. But for those who like the convenience names lend to things, consider the version Thacker elaborates (in a discussion of the meaning of <em>black</em> in <em>black metal</em>, of all things). He calls it cosmic pessimism:
<em>The view of Cosmic Pessimism is a strange mysticism of the world-without-us, a hermeticism of the abyss, a noumenal occultism. It is the difficult thought of the world as absolutely unhuman, and indifferent to the hopes, desires, and struggles of human individuals and groups. Its limit-thought is the idea of absolute nothingness, unconsciously represented in the many popular media images of nuclear war, natural disasters, global pandemics, and the cataclysmic effects of climate change. Certainly these are the images, or the specters, of Cosmic Pessimism, and different from the scientific, economic, and political realities and underlie them; but they are images deeply embedded in our psyche nonetheless. Beyond these specters there is the impossible thought of extinction, with not even a single human being to think the absence of all human beings, with no thought to think the negation of all thought. </em>
Now the intention of my <em>or</em> will be clear for some (from the psyche to the cosmos…). In <em>Dust</em> Thacker does not draw many connections between his ideas and politics, so it is worthwhile to examine one of the places where he illustrates the paradox his view of the Planet opens up in that space. He cites Carl Schmitt’s suggestion, in <em>Political Theology</em>:
<em>the very possibility of imagining or re-imagining the political is dependent on a view of the world as revealed, as knowable, and as accessible to us as human beings living in a human world.</em> … <em>But the way in which that analogy</em> [from theology to politics] <em>is manifest may change over time … </em>
Thacker notes:
<em>the 17<sup>th</sup> and 18<sup>th</sup> centuries were dominated by the theological analogy of the transcendence of God in relation to the world, which correlates to the political idea of the transcendence of the sovereign ruler in relation to the state. By contrast, in the 19<sup>th</sup> century a shift occurs towards the theological notion of immanence… which likewise correlates to “the democratic thesis of the identity of the ruler and the ruled.” In these and other instances, we see theological concepts being mobilized in political concepts, forming a kind of direct, tabular comparison between cosmology and politics (God and sovereign ruler; the cosmos and the state; transcendence and absolutism; immanence and democracy). </em>
The closed loop of politics:
<em>The republic is the only cure for the ills of the monarchy, and the monarchy is the only cure for the ills of the republic.</em><br>— Joubert
Thacker’s question follows: what happens to this analogy, which structures both political theory and ordinary thinking about politics to some extent, if one posits a world that is not, and will never be, entirely revealed and knowable? The closed loop is opened, and the analogy breaks down. <em>What happens when we as human beings confront a world that is radically unhuman, impersonal, and even indifferent to the human? What happens to the concept of politics…</em> It seems to me that a question of this sort is lurking in the background of <em>Desert</em> as well.
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The desert may be, or sometimes seem to be, what is left after a catastrophic event, but it has also always been with us, as image and reality.
<em>In what passes for a moon<br>
On the galactic periphery,<br>
Here is an austere beauty,<br>
Barren, uncompromising,<br>
Like that which must have been<br>
Experienced by men<br>
On the ice-caps and deserts<br>
As they once existed on earth<br>
Before their urbanization<br>
Harsh and unambiguous…<br></em>
— John Cotton
World-desert: the desert grows…
Earth-deserts: they are growing, too.
Cosmic deserts: <em>on the galactic periphery…</em> In a response to François Laruelle’s [[http://www.recessart.org/wp-content/uploads/Laruelle-Black-Universe1.pdf][<em>Du noir univers</em>]], Thacker elaborates on the various senses of the desert motif, suggesting both that it is the inevitable image and experience of the Planet, as a slice of the Cosmos, or what Laruelle calls the black Universe, and that it is a mirage, that there is no real desert to escape to. Hermits keep escaping to the desert, but their solitude is temporary; others gather nearby. The escape from forced community develops spontaneous forms of community. But for being spontaneous, such community does not cease to develop, sooner or later, the traits of the first, escaped, community. The issue for me is double: first, that to the two senses invoked in <em>Desert</em> (the literal ecological sense, and the sense of desertion) we may now add the third corresponding to the Planetary or Cosmic view, the desert as the impossible, as nothingness. Second, the ethical, psychological, or at least practical insight that some keep deserting society, civilization, or what have you in the direction of the desert and, as stated, sooner or later populating it, inhabiting it, somehow living or at least surviving in it. Even if these deserters headed towards the desert in the first sense, they were motivated or animated by the impossible target of the desert in the third sense. Now, this apparently closed-loop operation could be the inevitable repetition of some ancient anthropogenic trauma. Or it could be (we just can’t know here and now) the sane, wild reaction to Civilization: desperate attempt to return to the Earth (our bright home) via the dark indifference of the Planet or Cosmos. Of this return pessimism says: you will need to do it again and again. Is the pessimism about a condition we can escape, or one we can’t? Is it the anti-civilization pessimism of the most radical ecology, or is it despair, no less trivial for being a psychological insight, before the morbid obtuseness of humans? We just can’t know here and now. Masciandaro, Thacker’s fellow commentator on Laruelle, aptly terms this “the positivity and priority of opacity”—the opacity of the Planet and the Cosmos, Laruelle’s black universe.
<quote>
<em>O the dark, the deep hard dark<br>
Of these galactic nights!<br>
Even the planets have set<br>
Leaving it slab and impenetrable,<br>
As dark and directionless<br>
As those long nights of the soul<br>
The ancient mystics spoke of.<br>
Beyond there is nothing,<br>
Nothing we have known or experienced.</em><br>
— John Cotton
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In <em>Desert</em> we read:
<quote>
<em>Nature’s incredible power to re-grow and flourish following disasters is evident both from previous mass extinctions and from its ability to heal many lands scarred by civilisation. Its true power is rarely considered within the sealed, anthropocentric thinking of those who would profit from the present or attempt to plan the future. Yet the functioning of the Earth System is destructive as well as bountiful and it is not a conscious god with an interest in preserving us or its present arrangement—something we may find out if the Earth is now moving to a new much hotter state.</em>
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For his part, Thacker concludes his book by discussing a mysticism of the unhuman, what he calls a <em>climatological mysticism</em>. It is a way of thinking, and paradoxical knowing, modeled on religious mysticism rather than scientific knowledge. But it is not reducible to the former. He writes,
<quote>
<em>there is no being-on-the-side-of the world, much less nature or the weather. [...] the world is indifferent to us as human beings. Indeed, the core problematic of the climate change issue is the extent to which human beings are at issue at all. On the one hand we as human beings are the problem; on the other hand at the planetary level of the Earth’s deep time, nothing could be more insignificant than the human. This is where mysticism again becomes relevant. </em>
</quote>
This attitude of nonknowledge, as Bataille would have put it, informs life even as it decenters it. That the Earth is our place, but the planet does not care about us and the cosmos is not our home, is a thought of the ways in which we might survive here. Some will remember Vaneigem’s repeated contrast between <em>vie</em> and <em>survie</em>, life and survival. For him it was a matter of inverting the accepted, and to a large extent enforced, view in which one must survive first and live second. Some of this view seems to have been taken into the perspective that identifies life and nature, where the latter is understood as what we are or should be—that is, that there is something normative about life or nature that we can refer to. The perspective I am developing here suggests that we have no way of knowing what we are or should be, and that the wild is better conceived as that no-way, as the conditions that push back against our best effort to define ourselves, identify our selves, or know our world. Similarly, what is wild in us can only be conceived (though it is not really conceivable in the long run) as what resists, what pushes back, against any established order. But this might be closer to survival than to life. Survival has a positive value in that it is itself an activity, a set of nontrivial practices that refer back to life insofar as we know it. We survive as we can, not confident that we are living. It is this aspect of <em>Desert</em> that some insurrectionaries seem to have disagreed with, in that it often talks of plans for survival where they would have preferred to see plans for action, or at least calls to action. We can read there of
<quote>
<em>An Anarchism with plenty of adjectives, but one that also sets and achieves objectives, can have a wonderful present and still have a future; even when fundamentally out of the step with the world around it. There is so much we can do, achieve, defend and be; even here, where unfortunately civilisation probably still has a future. </em>
</quote>
It is passages like this one, towards the end of the pamphlet, that probably left some with the impression that its author is still attached to hope, and left others with the sense of a form of survival that still somehow resembled activism more than attack. As for the former impression, that would be to confuse the climate pessimism of <em>Desert</em> with a kind of overarching and mandatory mood, as though those who had this view were of necessity personally depressed or despondent. There is no evidence for such a conclusion. As for the latter, it is a little more complicated. Yes, the author of <em>Desert</em> often sounds like someone addressing activists; and, yes, <em>Desert</em> explicitly rejects <em>the cause of Revolution</em> in several places. One could say this adds up to a kind of political retreat. One could also say, however, that some are too used to reading political texts that always end on a loud and vindictive note! No, this is where the question of rethinking survival from an anti-political perspective inflected by something like Thacker’s cosmic pessimism or reinvented mysticism is critical. We make survival primary, not so much inverting Vaneigem’s inversion of the norm in societies like ours, but rather by noticing what in our conception of life has always been a kind of religion or morality of life, easy adjustment to a familiar nature. Whatever its faults, <em>Desert</em> was written to say that such a conception is no longer useful, and that one useful meaning of anarchist is someone who admits as much. Can that meaning fit with the subcultures that most of today’s anarchists compose? Probably not. The subcultures exist as pockets of resistance, of course; but survival in them is indelibly tied to reproducing the anarchist as persona, as identity, as an answer to the question of what life is or is for. To make sense or have meaning this answer presupposes the workings of our homegrown identity-machine, our collective, repeated minimal task of discerning about actions whether they are anarchist or not, and, by extension, whether the person carrying them out is anarchist. It is our way of bringing the community into the desert. Announcement of one’s intentions to overcome the limits of subculture and reach out to others, or inspire them with our actions, is not different than, but rather a crucial part of, this operation. Survival, in the sense <em>Desert</em> suggests it to me, is something completely different, for in it any social group or kin network, as it attempts to live on, cannot draw significant lines of difference (of identification, therefore) between itself and others. It melts into a humanity collectively resisting death. Needless to say this is something entirely different than the revolutionary process as it has been imagined and attempted. There is no future to plan for, only a present to survive in, and that is the implosion of politics as we have known it.
<em>To survive, not to live, or, not living, to maintain oneself, without life, in a state of pure supplement, movement of substitution for life, but rather to arrest dying…</em><br>— Blanchot
… deserting life.
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A desert and not a garden: one remarkable aspect of the contemporary anarchist space is an open contradiction between two perspectives on what struggle is, or is for, that might be summed up in the phrases <em>we have enemies</em> and <em>we did this to ourselves</em>. There are countless versions of this contradiction, which at a deeper level is really not about political struggle at all, but about the essence of resistance. One version is the condemnation of the notion of enemy as a moral notion, and another is its silent return in the emphasis on friendship and affinity; there is also what a book called <em>Enemies of Society</em> may be taken to suggest from its title on. The contradiction surfaces most clearly in discussions influenced by primitivist positions or ones hostile to civilization, likely because of the tremendous temporal compression they require to make their case. In such talk, we zoom out from lifetimes and generations to a scale of tens of thousands of years. The enemy appears within the course of history, but the <em>fact</em> of the appearance of the enemy, the split in humanity, summons the second <em>we</em>, because of the need to presuppose a whole species in some natural state (balance, etc.) that, in the event or events that open up the panorama of civilization and history, cleaves itself into groups or at least roles. The positions we know better tend to revolve around trivialized versions of these perspectives, never really experiencing the tension between them. It is only in the play of the anarchist space as a whole (and precisely because it is not a single place, in which all involved would have to put up with each other for a few hours, let alone live together) that the contradiction unfolds. Some form of <em>we have enemies</em> is the great rallying for a wide array of active agents, from the remains of the Left to advocates of social war. And some form of <em>we did this to ourselves</em> is in the background of all sorts of moralizing approaches to oppression and interpersonal damage, but also the more misanthropic strains of primitivism. I would also argue that a modified form of it informs the deep background of egoism and some forms of individualism (splitting the forced <em>we</em> from the atomic <em>ourselves).</em> My question is, what happens if we zoom out farther? Here the virtue of invoking science as <em>Desert</em> does may be visible. For what is beyond history (the time of the World) and prehistory is geologic time, the time of the Planet, which leads us to cosmic time. There is a difference between invoking science and practicing or praising it. The latter simply produce more science. The former may be a way to encounter what our still humanist politics ignore. From the perspective of cosmic time, the contradiction does not dissolve (at least not for me); but its moral or political character seems to unravel. Something less centered on <em>us</em> emerges. Perhaps both stories—the story about enemies and the story about ourselves—ignore something much more disturbing than mere accidental guilt or immorality, something that disturbs us precisely because it is the disturbing of humanity. (“It is not man who colonizes the planet, but the planet and the cosmos who transgress the lonely threshold of man”—does this odd sentence of Laruelle’s express the thought here, I wonder?) It makes sense for Thacker to invoke mysticism when he considers the cosmos or the Planet, because its otherness has most often been referred to as divine, and related to as a god. Now, that need have nothing to do with religion, especially if we identify religion with revelation; but mysticism is a good enough approximation to the attitude one takes towards a now decentered life. I call that attitude a thoughtful kind of <em>survival</em>. This is closely connected to a conversation one often overhears in the company of anarchists. Someone is discussing something they prefer or are inclined to do, and doing so in increasingly positive terms. Another person points out (functioning of the anarchist identity machine) that there is nothing specifically anti-capitalist or radical about the stated activity or preferred object, reducing it verbally to another form of consumption. Anxious hours are passed this way. About such inclinations I prefer to say that we do not know if they come from above or below; we know our own resistance, and not much more. That resistance manifests in unknowable ways, obeying no conscious plan. It could well be a particularly fancy kind of neurosis; but <em>survival</em> means just this, that we do not know the way out of the situation and we must live here with the idea of anarchy. Another way to put this is that if our rejection of society and state is as complete as we like to say it is, our project is not to create alternative micro-societies (scenes, milieus) that people can belong to, but something along the lines of becoming monsters. It is probable that anarchy has always had something to do with becoming monstrous. The monster, writes Thacker in [[http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo9131245.html][another of his books]], is <em>unlawful life,</em> or <em>what cannot be controlled.</em> It seems to me the only way to do this, as opposed to saying one is doing it and being satisfied with that, would be to unflinchingly contemplate the thing we are without trying to be, the thing we can never try to be or claim we are: <em>the nameless thing,</em> or <em>unthinkable life.</em> Which is also the <em>solitary</em> thing, or the <em>lonely</em> one. The egoist or individualist positions are like dull echoes of the inexpressible sentiment that I might be that nameless thing, translated into a common parlance for the benefit of a (resistant, yes) relation to the social mass. That the cosmos is not our natural home is a thought outside the ways in which we might survive here. To say we survive instead of living is in part to say that we have no idea what living is or ought to be (that there is probably no ought-to about living). But also that we resist any ideal of life, including our own. Becoming monstrous is therefore the goal of dismantling the milieu as anarchist identity machine. Being witness to the nameless thing, to the unthinkable life or Planet or Cosmos, is not a goal. It is not a criterion of anything, either. It is more like a state, a mystical, poetic state (though in this state I am the poem). It is the climatological mysticism Thacker describes and <em>Desert</em> hints at for an anarchist audience, both deriving in their own way from the weird insight that <em>the Planet is indifferent to us.</em> So read <em>Desert</em> again as an allegory of the self-destruction of the milieu, of any community that, as it runs from its norms, places new, unstated norms ahead of itself.<em> </em>Such is the slippage from green nihilism to cosmic pessimism, which gives us occasion to continue speaking of chaos. Well, one might say that I have merely imported some alien theory into an otherwise familiar (if not easy) discussion. Of course I have. My aim, however, was not to apply it, but to show in what sense one play that is often acted out in our spaces may be anti-politically theorized, which is to say cosmically psychoanalyzed. Our place is not to apply the theory of cosmic pessimism (or any other theory; that is not what theory is, or is for); our place is to think, to continue speaking of chaos, not being stupid enough to think we can take its side. There are no sides. We might come to realize that we, too, in our attempts to gather, organize, act, change life, and so on, were playing in the world, ignorant of the Planet, its <em>unimaginable weirdness. </em>
<em>If the earth must perish, then astronomy is our only consolation</em><br> — Joubert
<em>Post scriptum.</em> I mentioned community in passing. Most anarchists I converse with regularly treat the word delicately or dismissively, either ignoring it altogether, putting it in quotation marks, or virtually crossing it out. I suppose that crossed-out sense of community is another name for the milieu. As crappy as it is most of the time, I will admit that the milieu is a space-time (really a series of places-moments, some of them taking place ever so briefly) where one can register, to some extent, what ideas have traction in our lives. <em>Desert</em>‘s explicit statements are certainly more pedestrian than Thacker’s theory; but the downside to Thacker’s exciting flights of intellectual fancy, at least from where I am writing, is that it is hard to know who he is speaking to, or about, much of the time. One imagines that people do gather to hear what he has to say, or read his books in concert. I do wonder to what extent they consider themselves to be a community, a potential community, a crossed-out community.
<em>Post scriptum bis.</em> I mentioned solitude. It would also be worthwhile to think about friendship along these lines.
** Conclusion: Silence
*** Away, a way
I have witnessed and experienced for myself the salutary effects of certain subtractive practices documented as far back as Zhuangzi, and probably carried out more or less everywhere civilization has appeared (even if the documentation is usually missing or not as well written as the <em>Inner Chapters</em>). It would seem that there are two forms to this resistance: <em>running away</em>, and <em>doing nothing</em>. Between them is a kind of tactical neutrality of the apolitical or amoral sort. As to running away, I have become increasingly pensive as to whether there is any place one could exit to that is not first cleared out with fire.
Some consider that such heterotopias are only cleared out in a few, utterly combative, ways. I say that somewhere between impatience and spectacle, many of us became fascinated with the language of war (social war, etc.). I find this language and its attendant practices tiresome and limiting, as tiresome and as limiting as the language and practices of activism and Revolution. One has to be true to one’s temperament and one’s masks (<em>ēthos anthrōpōi daimōn</em>); and, though I am no pacifist, I do think the slowdown evident in my essays is a sign of the search for an admittedly impossible peace. Peace as what comes after, and therefore what is not, what is attractive because it is not.
*** The Impossible
Another name for that peace could be <em>silence</em>. I am pleased by the idea that these essays, to the extent that they succeed in showing the hollowness of certain forms of speech (journalistic prose, slogans, activist talk, the rhetoric of progress, the imagination of hope), do so not so much replace it with a full and true speech (though I do want to practice a speech that is both analytical and free) as they gesture towards the silence in all speech—a silence that, here and now, I can only explain as a void that we all, in our stupidest, most gregarious moments, as we constitute a society, abhor, conceal, and deny.
*** The Beautiful Idea
For a long time I have known that I have nothing to say about it in general. I wonder now if I have anything left to say about it at all. “Without adjectives” was for a time a good enough way of marking that, but things are both stupider and more complicated now, so the explicit use of partisan, subcultural, and generally group designators is most wisely kept to an absolute minimum. Its name was the only tolerable slogan, the most concentrated one; now I, we, will have to do without it. Another sense of silence.
** Selected References
<strong>Books, Articles, Essays</strong>
Agamben, Giorgio. [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/giorgio-agamben-the-coming-community][<em>The Coming Community</em>]]. Tr. Michael Hardt. Minnesota, 1993.
Aragorn!. <em>BOOM! Introductory Writings on Nihilism</em>. Pistols Drawn, 2013.
Artaud, Antonin. “The Theater of Cruelty.” Tr. Mary Caroline Richards. In <em>The Theater and its Double</em>. Grove, 1958 [1938].
[[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/baedan-baedan][<em>bædan: a journal of queer nihilism 1</em>]]. 2012.
Barthes, Roland. <em>Mythologies</em>. Tr. Annette Lavers. Hill and Wang, 1973.
———. <em>Le lexique de l’auteur</em>. Seuil, 2010.
Bruno, Giordano. <em>Cause, Principle and Unity. Essays on Magic.</em> Cambridge, 1998.
Butor, Michel. <em>Histoire Extraordinaire</em>. Tr. Richard Howard. Cape, 1969.
Cage, John. “Composition as Process” and “Lecture on Nothing.” In <em>Silence</em>. Wesleyan, 1961.
———. <em>Empty Words</em>. Wesleyan, 1979.
———. <em>I-VI</em>. Wesleyan, 1997.
———. <em>anaRchy</em>. Wesleyan, 2001.
Carroll, Lewis. <em>Jabberwocky and Other Nonsense: Collected Poems</em>. Penguin, 2012.
Critchley, Simon. <em>Infinitely Demanding</em>. Verso, 2007.
Dark Star Collective. <em>Beneath the Paving Stones: Situationists and the Beach, May 1968</em>. AK/Dark Star, 2001.
Debord, Guy. [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/guy-debord-the-society-of-the-spectacle][<em>The Society of the Spectacle</em>]]. Tr. Ken Knabb.
[[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-desert][<em>Desert</em>]]. LBC Books. 2011.
Dupont, Monsieur. [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/monsieur-dupont-nihilist-communism][<em>Nihilist Communism</em>]]. Ardent, 2009.
Dupont, Frère. <em>Species Being</em>. Ardent, 2009.
———.“The Ibn ‘Arabi Effect.” <em>The Anvil Review</em> 1, 2010.
Duncan, Robert. <em>The H.D. Book</em>. California UP, 2012.
<em>Endnotes 1.</em>
Fénéon, Félix. <em>Novels in Three Lines</em>. Tr. Luc Sante. NYRB, 2007.
Foucault, Michel. “Lives of Infamous Men.” In <em>Power (The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, Vol. 3)</em>. New Press, 2001.
Freud, Sigmund. <em>The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious</em>. Tr. Joyce Crick. Penguin, 2003.
———. “The Creative Writer and Daydreaming.” In <em>The Uncanny</em>. Tr. David McLintock. Penguin, 2003.
Halperin, Joan. <em>Félix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-De-Siecle Paris</em>. Yale, 1988.
Heidegger, Martin. “Nietzsche’s Word: God is Dead” in <em>Off the Beaten Track</em>. Tr. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes. Cambridge, 2002.
Kasper, Michael. “Agit-Prop” and “Short-Prose” in <em>The Shapes and Spacing of The Letters</em>. Weighted Anchor, 1995.
Knabb, Ken (ed.). <em>Situationist International Anthology</em>. Revised and expanded ed. Bureau of Public Secrets, 2007.
James, William. <em>Principles of Psychology</em>. Two volumes. Dover, 1950.
Jappe, Anselm. “Sic Transit Gloria Artis: ‘The End of Art’ for Theodor Adorno and Guy Debord.” <em>SubStance</em> 28:3, 1999.
Jarry, Alfred. <em>Opinions and Exploits of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician</em>. Tr. Simon Winslow Taylor. Exact Change, 1996.
Joubert, Joseph. <em>The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert</em>. Tr. Paul Auster. NYRB, 2005.
<em>Impasses</em>. Pallaksch, 2013.
Laruelle, François. “Theorems on the Good News.” Available online.
———. “On the Black Universe.” In <em>Dark Nights of the Universe</em>, [NAME], 2013.
levy, d.a. <em>Collected Poems</em>. Druid Books, 1976.
Lucie, Edward. <em>Holding Your Eight Hands. An Anthology of Science Fiction Verse</em>. Rapp & Whiting, 1970.
Masciandaro, Nicola. “Comments on Eugene Thacker’s ‘Cosmic Pessimism’.” <em>continent</em>. 2.2, 2012.
———. “Secret.” In <em>Dark Nights of the Universe</em>, [NAME], 2013.
Mauss, Marcel (and Henri Hubert). <em>A General Theory of Magic</em>. Routledge, 2005 [1902].
McDonough, Tom. “Introduction: Ideology and the Situationist Utopia.” In <em>Guy Debord and the Situationist International. Texts and Documents.</em> MIT, 2004.
<em>negative wallow</em>. 2010.
Novatore, Renzo. <em>Collected Writings of Renzo Novatore</em>. Tr. Wolfi Landstreicher. Ardent, 2012.
Perelman, Bob. <em>Ten to One. Selected Poems</em>. Wesleyan, 1999.
Perlman, Fredy. [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/fredy-perlman-against-his-story-against-leviathan][<em>Against His-Story, Against Leviathan!</em>]] Black and Red, 1983.
Rousselle, Duane. <em>After Post-Anarchism</em>. Repartee (LBC Books), 2012.
Shattuck, Roger. <em>The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France—1885 to World War I</em>. Vintage, 1968.
Snyder, Gary. “The Etiquette of Freedom.” In <em>The Practice of the Wild</em>, North Point Press, 1990.
Thacker, Eugene. <em>After Life</em>. University of Chicago Press, 2010.
———. <em>In the Dust of this Planet</em>. Zero Books. 2010.
———. “Cosmic Pessimism.” <em>continent</em>. 2.2 (2012).
———. “Remote: The Forgetting of the World.” In <em>Dark Nights of the Universe</em>, [NAME], 2013.
Tiqqun. [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/tiqqun-bloom-theory][<em>Theory of Bloom</em>]]. Tr. Robert Hurley. LBC Books, 2012.
———. <em>Introduction to Civil War</em>. Tr. Alexander Galloway and Jason E. Smith. Semiotext(e), 2010.
———. <em>Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl</em>. Tr. Ariana Reines. Semiotext(e), 2012.
———. … as a Science of Apparatuses.” In [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/tiqqun-this-is-not-a-program][<em>This Is Not a Program</em>]]. Tr. Joshua David Jordan. Semiotext(e), 2011.
Wark, McKenzie. <em>The Beach Beneath the Street. The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International</em>. Verso, 2011.
Vico, Giambattista. <em>The New Science.</em> Tr. Dave Marsh. Penguin, 2000.
<strong>Zines, Pamphlets</strong>
[[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/crimethinc-pfm-accounting-for-ourselves][<em>Accounting for Ourselves</em>]]
[[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/crimethinc-kristian-williams-anarchism-and-the-english-language-english-and-the-anarchists-lang][<em>Anarchism and the English Language / English and the Anarchists’ Language</em>]]
[[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-burning-the-bridges-they-are-building-anarchist-strategies-against-the-police-in-the][<em>Burning the Bridges they Are Building</em>]]
<em>Cabal, Argot</em>
<em>Hello Lawless</em>
<em>Second Wave Anarchy</em>
[[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-the-broken-teapot][<em>The Broken Teapot</em>]]
<br>
[1] E.g. “Boredom is not counter-revolutionary”; “Seriousness is a disease”; “Teaching is impossible”.
[2] One way to understand the phrases <em>anarchist space</em> and <em>milieu</em> (which, despite their different origins, I use interchangeably) is that they stand in where one might otherwise find the name of an organization or party, actual or imaginary, or their extension in classical ideological form: <em>anarchism</em>. I use <em>space</em> and <em>milieu</em> neutrally, to refer to a diffuse idea-space in turbulent relation to punctual actions; others use <em>milieu</em>, especially, to condemn those who participate in this idea-space-inturbulent-relation-to-actions and not activist or political organizations. My neutral use of these terms echoes, so I think, an orientation critical of that activist and organizational rhetoric in which the idea-space is dismissed as subcultural, even as we are exhorted to orient ourselves around organizations and their social outreach, which is why I rarely write about <em>anarchism</em> and more often about <em>anarchists</em> or <em>anarchy</em>. The idea-space is indeed for the most part subcultural, but that is as much something to meditate on as it is something to criticize. That activist (and militant) organizations repeatedly fail to do what they say they do has something to do with the fact that they repeatedly fail to say what they are, to others, of course, but to themselves first of all. The micro-society of activists and organizing is not first of all a subculture, but one stage where this comedy is played out; subculture is a variant of this comedy of failing to say what one is doing, thinking, etc., which sometimes overlaps with that micro-society, and sometimes, as in the case of the facets of the milieu that concern me most, does not. I would say that the principal characteristics of <em>my</em> milieu or space are, first, that it is very silly in all its seriousness; secondly, that it sometimes constitutes itself as a <em>pragma</em>, as the matter that there is to think about, and this sometimes allows passage to thinking concretely about other matters of greater importance. It also ceases to be that <em>pragma</em> with great regularity, which is what makes some refer to generations within it. (But sociological demographics, or developmental psychology, for that matter, will only offer approximations in this case.) In the former case we might indeed call it the anarchist <em>pragma</em>, but only if the latter case is then to be named the anarchist <em>middling</em>. Which is to say that in this oscillation “it” couples tragedy to comedy often enough to provoke thought and stimulate action.
[3] Even if many of those topics are addressed in passing throughout these essays, and some of the original approach is apparent, so I like to think, in its overall attitude. This is probably even more the case for another collection of essays, notes, and experiments I am now gathering, <em>How to Live Now or Never</em>, which will appear later this year.
[4] So <em>the impossible, patience</em> of the title is also that of a reader who knows the difference between a commitment to the stuff of writing in its minutiae, and a pedantic obsession with details.
[5] <em>Infinitely Demanding</em>, Verso, 2007, p. 4. All other page references in parentheses.
[6] Critchley approvingly cites David Graeber’s formula: “Marxism has tended to be a theoretical or analytical discourse about revolutionary strategy. Anarchism has tended to be an ethical discourse about revolutionary practice” (125). What is telling concerning Critchley’s attraction to anarchism is that he usually conceives of ethical discourse as a theory or a philosophy (emerging from an experience, granted) rather than an ethos or even <em>habitus</em>, a way of life first and discourse second, as Graeber’s ethnologically inflected writings do.
[7] They mostly appear in <em>Infinitely Demanding</em> as filtered through two short texts by David Graeber (<em>Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology</em> and the article “The New Anarchists”) and a work on indigenous politics in Mexico and Australia by Courtney Jung.
[8] “<em>Il senso più comune non è il più vero</em>,” wrote the heretic Giordano Bruno: “The most common sense is not the truest.” The type of thinking I invoke here takes its distance from what the Mass regards as common sense.
[9] [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/tiqqun-bloom-theory][<em>Theory of Bloom</em>]], LBC Books version, 144. These phrases condense an entire trajectory of writing on ethics that encompasses Deleuze, Agamben, and Badiou, beginning, naturally, with Spinoza and Nietzsche.
[10] It is also fair to say that, since pluralism is such a key aspect of liberalism, many anarchists simply cling to a kind of radicalized liberalism as their ethics, and their politics, not because of any gaps in their thinking, but because they actually are radical liberals. The problem, of course, is either that they do not recognize it, or that they will not admit it. At least Chomsky, in the 1970 lecture “Government in the Future,” admitted as much, advocating a confluence of radical Marxism and anarchism as “the proper and natural extension of classical liberalism into the era of advanced industrial society.”
[11] I do not intend to attack what is all too easy to criticize in a book framed as an intervention into post-anarchism, a topic that I am not concerned with, and which I am sure is less than popular with the readership of <em>AJODA</em>. I happily leave the task of settling the accounts of this book with the proponents and opponents of post-anarchism to those who find it worthwhile. I similarly leave to one side the discussion of the relation of Georges Bataille’s ideas to ethical nihilism in the book’s final chapter.
[12] Rousselle only makes occasional references to “classical” anarchists other than Kropotkin, who is his major case study. I take it this is because Kropotkin is thought of as the most explicitly ethical of the original anarchists, and also because he has been the object of sustained attention among post-anarchists.
[13] Rousselle frames this claim as a claim about theory, and the conditions under which theories are formulated. He does not frame this as a historical argument, although the idea of conditions obviously implies theory. For example, he references in passing the shared approach of the Russian Nihilists and Kropotkin in a discussion of an article by John Slatter: “Slatter took Kropotkin at his word when he argued that ‘[anarchists must] bend the knee to no authority whatsoever, however respected [...] accept no principle so long as it is unestablished by reason’ (Kropotkin as quoted in Slatter, 261). Here, however, Kropotkin’s rationalism was maintained but only to reveal a useful parallel: ‘The appeal to reason rather than to tradition or custom in moral matters is one made earlier in Russian intellectual history by the so-called ‘nihilists’’ (ibid.). Like Kropotkin, the Russian ‘nihilists’ (or ‘The New People’, as they were called) adopted a rationalist/positivist discourse as a way to achieve a distance from the authority of the church and consequently from metaphysical philosophies. The meta-ethics of Kropotkin’s work … thus reveals, not ‘mutual aid,’ but a tireless negativity akin to the spirit of the Russian nihilists: ‘[the anarchist must] fight against existing society with its upside-down morality and look forward to the day when it would be no more’ (Kropotkin as cited by Slatter, ibid)” (146–147).
[14] This is my way of rewriting the contrast between manifest and latent content that Rousselle derives from Freud. Rousselle’s way of explicating this has but two statements, one showing the latent content of the other through elimination. Mine has more to do with pushing a thought to its limit. They converge in that, for this to happen, thinking has to engage with the unthought: …
[15] This is obviously where one should reiterate the argument made by Shawn Wilbur and Jesse Cohn against the first wave of post-anarchists: they had built their collective case on a caricaturesque reduction of historical anarchists in their reconstruction of “classical anarchism.” Many egoists, for example, explicitly stated what Rousselle claims can only be grasped as a latent content (i.e. what appears only when explicit statements are analyzed). The best one can say about Rousselle’s analysis in this regard is that it destabilizes what many consider to be the center and the margins of the anarchist tradition, or canon. But it does leave one wondering why he discusses Kropotkin at such length instead of Stirner or Novatore, for example, who are referenced only in passing. Is there something at stake for him in emphasizing ethical nihilism as a latent content as opposed to a manifest one?
[16] For those not familiar with it, this term was introduced by John Moore to refer to anarchist theory and practice after the Situationist International. It might be considered telling that Moore offered the term in a review of a foundational post-anarchist book by Todd May. The review was originally published in <em>Anarchist Studies</em>, but I know it from a zine called <em>Second Wave Anarchy.</em>
[17] [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/monsieur-dupont-nihilist-communism][<em>Nihilist Communism</em>]], 198.
[18] “Nietzsche’s word: God is Dead,” in <em>Off the Beaten Track</em>, 165.
[19] A useful term I borrow from <em>Théorie Communiste</em>. As they define it: “a theory and practice of class struggle in which the proletariat finds, in its drive toward liberation, the fundamental elements of a future social organisation which become the programme to be realised. This revolution is thus the affirmation of the proletariat, whether as a dictatorship of the proletariat, workers’ councils, the liberation of work, a period of transition, the withering of the state, generalised self-management, or a ‘society of associated producers’.” “Much Ado About Nothing,” in <em>Endnotes</em> 1, 155.
[20] Speaking for myself, I underestimated the negative in the political sphere, the power of negativity (the attitude towards world, society, spectacle, whatever sets itself up as the All). My temperament led me to emphasize ethical questions about how to live a life of joy, about the places of affirmation (individualism/egoism, the aesthetic sensibility that never lies). I do think one can affirm one’s own life, affirm the nothing in it, so to speak, as one resists. Until I realized this, I drifted near this space, but never really knew it. I remained confused about the negative, about the effectiveness of the prefixes <em>a-, an-</em>, <em>anti- …</em>
[21] All translations by Luc Sante, from <em>Novels in Three Lines</em>.
[22] The novels, along with all of his other writings (including anonymous pieces of uncertain authorship) are gathered in the two volumes of <em>Oeuvres plus que complètes</em>.
[23] I mean this only with respect to Fénéon’s time. I have no idea what it would mean to be, or even claim to be, a dandy today.
[24] Michel Butor, <em>Histoire extraordinaire</em>, 82.
[25] These remarks echo accounts given by Fénéon’s biographer, Joan Ungersma Halperin, and suggestions made by Luc Sante in his excellent introduction to <em>Novels in Three Lines</em>.
[26] The best known is probably Oscar Wilde. See, for example, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” and “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young.” One might also note the coincidence of spectacular public trials in each of their biographies.
[27] Halperin, <em>Félix Féneon</em>, 289.
[28] Ibid., 289-290.
[29] Briefly, “everyday life” and “everydayness” name a recent historical phenomenon combining ancient urban behavioral patterns and relatively new modes of sociality, recombined in the setting of capitalist exchange. I follow the Situationists in thinking that everyday life, once it appears, is already colonized. This colonization of life was dimly grasped, though very well explicated, by Heidegger in his phenomenologies of anxiety and boredom.
[30] “The Stream of Thought,” in <em>Principles of Psychology</em>, 263.
[31] Halperin, 7.
[32] An 1883 issue of <em>Le Livre Revue</em> announced the forthcoming publication of <em>La Muselée</em>, a “psychological novel” by Fénéon. It never appeared. Of the novels in three lines Luc Sante writes: “They are the poems and novels he never otherwise wrote … They might be considered Fénéon’s <em>Human Comedy</em>” (viii).
[33] <em>Opinions and Exploits of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician</em> (Chapter 36, “Concerning the Line”).
[34] <em>The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious</em>, 37.
[35] Because of “a shock from the incongruity,” which I would refer to what I have been calling “style.” “The Stream of Thought,” in <em>Principles of Psychology</em>, 263.
[36] <em>The Banquet Years</em>, 237.
[37] <em>The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious</em>, 146, 163, for example. He compares this brevity to the condensation characteristic of dreams.
[38] “The Creative Writer and Daydreaming,” in <em>The Uncanny</em>, 25.
[39] Ibid., 27.
[40] Ibid., 26.
[41] Cf. Michael Kasper’s delightful essay “Short-Prose,” in <em>The Shape and Spacing of The Letters</em>. I first learned of Fénéon’s novels in another essay in the same book, “Agit-Prop.”
[42] For context on the discussion, see the zines [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-the-broken-teapot][<em>The Broken Teapot</em>]], [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/crimethinc-pfm-accounting-for-ourselves][<em>Accounting for Ourselves</em>]], and [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-burning-the-bridges-they-are-building-anarchist-strategies-against-the-police-in-the][<em>Burning the Bridges They Are Building</em>]]
[43] See “Operation Margarine” in <em>Mythologies</em>. I have modified the translation. For example, I thought that Order did not need to be qualified by Established.
[44] See the discussion online, or in the zine [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/crimethinc-kristian-williams-anarchism-and-the-english-language-english-and-the-anarchists-lang][<em>Anarchism and the English Language/ English and the Anarchists’ Language</em>]]
[45] McKenzie Wark calls this “low theory.” See his <em>The Beach Beneath the Street</em>, and my comments in [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/alejandro-de-acosta-ways-in-and-ways-out-of-the-situationist-labyrinth][“Ways in And Ways Out of the Situationist Labyrinth,”]] <em>The Anvil Review</em> 4.
[46] Two examples in terms of recent writing in the anarchist space would be <em>Whitherburo</em>, for the first, and the “Editorial Statement” in <em>Lawless</em>, for the second.
[47] The definitions have had remarkably different fates. <em>Situation/situationist/situationism</em> have been discussed on and off as needed (now and then some of us enjoy pointing out the third of these to those that need a clarification). <em>Psychogeography/psychogeographical/psychogeographer</em> have, for better or for worse (probably for worse) turned out to be the most harmless of the bunch, leading to a variety of popularizations in contexts often disconnected from the rest. Of the two usually untranslated terms, the fate of <em>dérive</em> has been tied to the psychogeography bundle, though I’m not sure it had to be. <em>Détournement</em> has also inspired both popular (cute) and unpopular (perverse) forms. The Great Web entertains with plenty of both; neither has any lasting importance.
[48] Parenthetically, this text accuses members of the Lettrist International of “a certain satisfied nihilism”, presumably deploying the term in its isolated diagnostic sense.
[49] The other possible source for some of Perlman’s uses of this term would be Jacques Camatte. But his use of it is closer to the SI than to Camatte. They probably have a common source in Marxist theory of the early twentieth century.
[50] I think for too long this essay has been relegated to the realm of appreciative private readings on one hand, and public dismissals (on grounds of romanticism) on the other. I found another way to read it, so I am propagating it.
[51] That it could lead to the denial of temporal logic does not mean that it is the denial of what I called above “cosmic time.”
[52] <em>Hic Rhodus, hic salta!</em> goes back to Marx and Hegel, of course. In the <em>18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte</em>, Marx writes of a situation “in which retreat is impossible.”
|
#title To Acid-Words
#author Alejandro De Acosta
#SORTtopics language, spectacle, poetry, morality, détournement, mediation
#date 2014
#source Retrieved on 5 October 2018 from https://archive.org/details/TheImpossiblePatienceCriticalEssays20072013
#lang en
#notes from <em>The Impossible, Patience</em> published by Ardent Press, 2014
<em>Parts of “To Acid-Words” were first presented at a meeting of the Berkeley Anarchist Study Group in November, 2011. The rest of it was meditated on (and off) for the following two years, with a last burst of effort in early 2014. This is to say that it has layers, strata. It is an attempt to address the tremendous anxiety anarchists seem to have about language, and each of its sub-sections responds analytically to various attitudes towards language in the milieu. I think of it as a necessarily incomplete piece, in that it addresses a relation the anarchist milieu constantly denies in seeking out a better language (instrumental, operational), a pre-language, or a non-language. This relation is, of course, its relation to what it knows as Society. But the relations to language in the milieu, and our collective anxiety towards it, can never be entirely considered apart from more or less discernible social attitudes. Ultimately, although there is nothing to be said</em> in general <em>about language from an anarchist perspective, it is sometimes worthwhile to trace the lineaments of some particular anarchist attitudes to language, as I have done here. Two caveats: first, this piece is written from a monolingual point of view, as it addresses a largely monolingual milieu. A vastly different approach to these questions could have begun from multilingualism and translation. Second caveat: what is said here about poesy and poetry is delicately presented in a sideways pedagogy, introducing an idea or three to unfortunate readers who have little experience of these. (That, for example, the term I’ve used for a certain idea of language,</em> Language<em>, is also commonly used for a loose school of poets and writers whose works have contributed to inspiring precisely the approach I’ve taken here, is only one of the minor ironies of this essay.)</em>
<quote>
<em>& so you print your poems</em>
<em>& no one cares</em>
<em>they hate you sometimes</em>
<em>tell you to go to work</em>
<em>like every one else</em>
<em>or they want you to explain</em>
<em>in american, in english,</em>
<em>in old english, in slang</em>
<em>in political, in sexual,</em>
<em>in religious, in psychological,</em>
<em>in revolutionary terms &</em>
<em>language,</em>
<em>what you meant</em>
<em>& so you hide</em>
<em>take acid</em>
<em>& write an acid poem</em>
<em>or a poem about your city</em>
<em>& say its to increase awareness</em>
<em>of the environment</em>
<em>& its words to expand your</em>
<em>head so you don’t have</em>
<em>to take acid</em>
<em>and endanger your life</em>
“<em>if it really is dangerous”</em>
— <em>d.a. levy</em>
</quote>
<quote>
<em>le militant n’entend pas, ne voit pas le langage et c’est à ce prix qu’il peut militer</em>
[the militant does not hear, does not see language, and this is the price he pays for his militancy]
— Roland Barthes
</quote>
What I add to these lines—what I place between them—is a kind of enumeration, argumentation through serial juxtaposition: anecdotes and examples, a series of scenes I have been witness to; analysis, thinking through what I heard and saw; references, the things people said, or wrote, and also a way of looking back at what they did not say, or write. And asides for what remained to be noted. I place it all between d.a. levy’s positive but dangerous “awareness / of the environment / & its words” and Barthes’ two negatives, his thought of a militancy that depends on a denial of language, to show something of the gray space some of us inhabit.
So this is not exactly about anarchists. Nor is it about the society they want to transform, dismantle or destroy. It is about how the society anarchists want to transform, dismantle or destroy transforms, dismantles, or destroys them in the moment of saying what there is to do, of writing what they want or think. And about some ways to resist.
*** Part 1: Moral
<quote>
<em>I’m quite serious about the need to resist the tyranny of elemental words... They’re words that brook no argument, that are intended to be outside of syntax and thus outside of history. I try to resist this when I write.</em>
— <em>Bob Perelman</em>
</quote>
**** How Activists Talk
As I have experienced it, the anarchist milieu (our gray space) is not exclusively or even principally made up of activists. But in the sub-cultural spaces, the social overlaps, and the political neighborhood of the anarchist milieu there is activism, and so there most certainly are activists. It’s important to be careful here, because among some anarchists <em>activist</em>, like <em>liberal</em>, is an epithet. The activists I am talking about are both those picked out and ridiculed with such epithets, and, often enough, some less obvious characters. We will only understand activists (and their talk) if we make them strange again, because sometimes they are our friends. They are also us on some days or in the past; they are us though we are in denial about it. Some anarchists are activists and say so; others are activists in denial. Someone said: “activists without the word.” Others again aren’t activists but bear in their speech and action the inertia of activist approaches and tactics, an entire way of life that shapes what it is to be of the Left in North America and probably elsewhere.
Whoever they are, activists talk at meetings. Of course activists also talk in other situations, but it seems to me that to be an activist is tendentially to reform any situation into a meeting. For example, there are people who only socialize by bringing elements of the meeting into the social situation, at the limit by turning social situations into meetings wholesale. There are rallies and protests and so on, but these have much in common with meetings; one sometimes gets the feeling that everything would be over if the people or institution being protested or rallied against would agree to a meeting. Consequently, the activist utopia is a society assembled out of meeting-atoms, a federation of meetings.
The way activists talk at their meetings is primarily in <em>margarine-words</em>. These may be <em>slogans</em>, phrases whose function is to circulate, not to mean; or they may be certain <em>oily words</em> that slip from mouth to ear, person to machine, situation to scene. One way to recognize margarine-words is repetition: they are used a lot, functioning as code words or passwords, their appropriateness assumed, never shown. Ultimately, this is because their circulation is also the usually unquestioned circulation of moral beliefs; but in any given iteration, the repetition may be well-nigh meaningless, just a little index, gentle reminder of the shared morals rather than harsh mnemotechnic. It is never really clear which is primary, which gives form to which: the morality at work, or the compulsion to repeat in its collusion with the most gregarious drives. In any case, the meeting (or the rally, etc.) is the pedagogical site where these morals are usually circulated and sometimes, memorably, inculcated. Another way to recognize margarine-words is that, as repeatable units, they can be coded negatively as well as positively, so that avoiding them or using them only as terms of derision becomes as important as using the ones that are to be circulated, owned, and appreciated. That is how we get, for example, “activists without the word,” and moralistic immoralists.
To take this analysis one step further and understand what activism really is, we would have to deepen the discussion of the relation between morality and technology, the primitive technics of repetition and circulation, their ever-larger and more sophisticated technological networks, their absorption of ancient codes and modern laws, and so on; that is, discuss <em>politics</em>. It is difficult to explain how these two co-operate, because sometimes morality is just that, moral principles and deliberation and tradition and so on; and sometimes I write morality and realize I am talking more about a certain undeliberated obsessiveness, a sort of neurosis of doing the good that neurotically redefines the good as its own neurotic world-view... how all of these levels of neurosis compose modern political subjects is a question to be set aside for now.
Instead, let’s leave matters in the realm of family resemblances and generalize for the productive fun of it about how activists use their margarine-words. Afterwards, we will have to thank the activists for making this all so clear, because they are clearly not the only ones who speak in margarine-words. Margarine-words are all of ours when we aren’t paying attention; activists are just those who step forward most flagrantly to show us how we all repeat.
***** ASIDE 1
<quote>
Many of the rhetorical effects I designate here as margarine-words are more matters of speech than writing; thus here I concentrate on how some <em>talk</em>. The mana-words I turn to further on are best understood as inventions in writing, though they do have a strange orality in <em>mutant speech</em>. It turns out that it’s when margarine-words are written down that they are most egregious (though careful listening will find them out); and that mana-words sound strangest when spoken as mutant speech. That said, in this essay I will refer to speech and writing more or less interchangeably, as they occur to me.
</quote>
Activists use margarine-words primarily in two ways. One is the talk of the bureaucrat, the functionary. Sometimes the speaker is not so good at it, so you have to listen a bit more closely to hear the proto-bureaucrat, the proto-functionary learning her role. Even when it is sophisticated, her talk, which on the face of it is common-sensical and even rational, tends in the long run to the obtuse. <em>She can’t make eye contact for looking, or pretending to look, at all the details</em>. These are the people said to “fetishize process”—but this is usually because what they want can’t be said or done in the language of process. To speak in this way is one way to attempt, with varying degrees of success, to instrumentalize language. In part this means to understand and govern the selective circulation of margarine-words. That’s the rationality of it, achieved once a critical mass of margarine-words has been circulated, usually re-circulated if those present at the meeting are familiar with or help out in the task. But because it seeks to master people through margarine-words, and not the margarine-words themselves (mastered, they might cease to circulate, or be erased, as one with good taste stops using certain phrases, develops a studied silence with respect to the parlance they wish to abandon), this speech is a calculated violence done to language, ignoring aesthetic considerations as well as ethical ones (supposing every morality is the harsh reduction of what was or could have been an ethics). Stories told with margarine-words are moral stories; the moral is what you have to do, or not.
The other way of speaking is more mysterious. At first, it just seems to be the talk of the leader, or would-be leader, his exhortations, but in its sinews it is a kind of hysterical discourse, which perhaps has its origin in the loss of control over the first (bureaucratic) one as margarine-words begin to circulate beyond anyone’s control. The speaker realizes at some level, not necessarily conscious, that an ersatz accumulation of margarine-words is powerful, draws attention, generates or at least concentrates energy, so he goes for it, he overdoes it, he says whatever comes to mind as long as it accelerates the recirculation of margarine-words. It is a way of speaking that to an attentive listener (by definition someone not implicated in the activist project at hand) seems so wrong that it is right. Instrumentally right. Here the instrumentalization of language, which always eventually fails, tips over into something much less rational. The leader, like the bureaucrat, manages desire as best he can, but his management also depends on the ability to unleash what is less than rational in speech. This may be done cynically, with an eye to benefit from the ensuing confusion, or in wide-eyed hopefulness, confidence that desire is desire for the good, is itself good. In either case the details get lost, the instrumentalization gets scrambled, gets noisy. <em>He can’t make eye contact for looking, or pretending to look, at the horizon</em>.
***** ASIDE 2
<quote>
Do activists listen? Not as activists. But they do hear—they hear the exhortations, calls to action.
</quote>
* * *
I wrote that the details get lost. Suppose, for example, that someone you knew had at some point read a well-known poem, and thought he had found in some of its well-known lines a grand illustration of his sentiments. Suppose that the proof offered was a kind of translation of those lines into margarine-words. Suppose, moreover, that when he explained this to you, it became clear that he had so profoundly misread the lines that, beyond all ordinary questions of interpretation, he could only have arrived at his self-affirming interpretation by unconsciously inverting the traditional and accepted understanding of the lines. It is a kind of wrong that is so patently wrong that it could not subsist without a lengthy justification of reading against the grain, or an absurdist will to reverse all conventional readings. But go on supposing, and suppose that your acquaintance was in no way capable of such experimental reversals. Suppose rather that it were obvious that he thought himself to be in line with the traditional and accepted reading of the lines. How to understand this? He is on one hand so wrong that his illustration by means of the lines simply becomes incoherent. In another, stranger sense, this reading that is so plainly a non-reading shows a peculiar will to instrumentalize the artwork, to seize upon its cultural cachet. Supposing all this, you could have been witness to the ever repeated birth of propaganda. Incidentally, then, a new definition of propaganda: <em>violent translation of poetry into margarine-words</em>.
* * *
If we could accede to an impossible situation wherein the instrumental use of language, the circulation of margarine-words, could be paused long enough to examine how morality is at work in it, we would find a collusion in it of moral stories and stories about language itself. As though margarine-words can only circulate on the condition of pushing away any other possibility for speech. Often enough an activist will say something that sounds like
<quote>
<em>what you say is theoretical, abstract. I am without theory; I only speak concretely.</em>
</quote>
The proof of this concreteness is orientation to action. Listen, it is the leader, showing the usefulness of his words. Attend to variants of this story long enough and you will eventually discern the moral, which is simple enough. It seems to be:
<quote>
<em>You are bad, you use language to refer to itself; therefore I am good; I use language purposefully, in mind of action.</em>
</quote>
At the meeting, an activist is speaking, saying something, but you can’t talk about how it is said. What is to be attended to is some content (a plan of action) that is presumably shared. The accusation of abstraction leveled at users of <em>mutant speech</em> flows from this situation, since <em>mana-words</em> tend to bear the traces of their invention or borrowing more noticeably than the margarine-words preferred by activists. Margarine-words are always ingratiating, seeking to slip by unnoticed. At the meeting sometimes the bureaucrat seems to say:
<quote>
<em>My language is the only good way to refer to these matters; I am using language only in this proper way. You should not use it differently in responding, or suggest that activists might be using it differently in the way they speak.</em>
</quote>
Listen, she is preventing deviation from her script.
How is orientation to action—as the criterion of concreteness and propriety—a problem? In two ways: <em>first</em>, because <em>action is usually defined too narrowly</em>. It is likely to mean a process or event that is interpersonal, public, somehow forceful, often requiring muscular effort, loud, and so on. Which is to say that it is political, and not infrapolitical, micro-political, anti-political, or apolitical. These sorts of processes or events are adequately modeled, “represented”, so the activist supposes, in her language. When it is a theoretical language, it is deployed with an eye to application in practice (which means the kind of narrowly construed political action I’ve just described); when it is a practical language, it is deployed as almost pure instrumentality: “go there,” “do this,” etc.
If you question the moral of the story that says you are theoretical and the activist is not, you will meet the push to “do something”—to prove the “this-sidedness” of what you have to say with actions the leader or the bureaucrat will recognize as political.
By now it should be clear that our gratitude to the activists is for showing those of us who are listening how this operation works. At the same time it should be clear that, aside from the activists, there are many, many <em>actionists</em>, if by that word I may be allowed to refer to those who define action in roughly the way I have above, whether or not they are activists in terms of their tactics or their morality.
And what is the second problem with orientation to action? Simply put, that <em>action is not the solution to every situation</em>. At least I clamor for the perspective wherein action has neither priority nor primacy. Inaction, doing nothing, stopping, quitting, and so on, are not secondary or invalid, morally deficient and politically ineffective though they may appear to the <em>actionists</em>.
* * *
The word radical, so often used by activists (but not just them), in our milieu generally means very little other than <em>good</em>. Most know the etymological story, which is often repeated at meetings or other instructive scenes and teaches that a radical is one who, given a problem, issue, relation, or situation, gets at its root. A radical claims to think, wishes to act, in terms of the root. A simple illustration. Many years ago someone explained radical feminism to me as that feminism which conceives the subordination of women as the root of all oppression and domination—i.e. that all other asymmetries of power are either directly derived or analogically modeled on this root. Despite the undeniable fact of the subordination of women (easier to affirm than to determine <em>who</em> in the last instance is a woman) I found and continue to find it painfully naïve to claim that power could ever be exercised so simply (in one primary or root form with its analogues and derivatives). In this case the radicalism would amount to pursuing, or at least believing, such an analysis (and actively not pursuing or believing others); at a deeper level, it has to do with believing in a certain purchase of analysis (in the especially non-analytic way that activists tend to use this term) on realities of social and other kinds.
One could be more generous to the radicals (or just concede more to what they claim is ordinary usage) and suggest that by getting at the root they mean something more like: discovering the true matrix of relations of force underlying whatever problem, issue, relation, or situation is at stake for them. They would then be radical not in the sense that they seek a root or assume that there is one but in a vaguer sense, implying a kind of downward-seeking motion that we could call looking for basic structures, root-like structures. So a radical does not stop until some component relations of force, the asymmetrical relations of power, have been discovered. It seems to me that this is closer to how <em>radical</em> is generally used: those who are habituated to the downward-seeking motion. They speak—by extension: act, move—in characteristic ways. Analysis or theory works for them first as an unveiling, digging up, finding out; then, as a guide to action.
The supposition that what one discovers in the downward-seeking motion is liberatory is perhaps part of what is at stake in the use of radical more as a noun than as an adjective, or its adjectival use in a sloppy, all-purpose manner, indicating another kind of social identity, meaning roughly <em>the right kind of activist</em>, equivalent to <em>activists like us</em> or <em>activists who agree with us</em>. We pass from repetition to gregariousness. In that mode radical, the adjective, may be coupled with countless activities, situations, places, tasks. What does it add?
It adds a morality, or rather it is an index that a moral code is at stake. As I noted, <em>radical</em> is just a synonym for <em>good</em>, where what is good is delineated in a largely unspoken and thus unquestioned morality. This might explain such otherwise confusing constructions as:
<quote>
<em>radical mommy</em>
<em>radical cheerleader</em>
<em>radical stripmall</em>
</quote>
If we try to understand these constructions according to the first definition I suggested, they are almost incoherent. What is the fundamental or root aspect of being a cheerleader, for example? Whatever it is, a radical cheerleader would be an excellent cheerleader. According to the second sense, what is intended might be something more like this: there are radicals, habitués of the downward-seeking motion, and as such they have earned the right to call themselves and what they do radical. If one of these radicals takes up cheerleading as an activist project, cheerleading, otherwise under suspicion as a practice of mainstream society, becomes radical cheerleading. This means good cheerleading, not as cheerleading but as a suitable activity for a radical. But then radical does not really mean one who goes to the root of cheerleading, but rather one who can make an activity (otherwise under suspicion) good, adjectivally radical, by lending interest and energy to it. It is the valuation associated with the downward-seeking motion. It is also the value that margarine-words bear as passwords or code-words. Cheerleading can in this sense be recuperated, but this changes nothing about it—the routines, contents of chants, etc. is not what one would claim was at the root! What changes is the “message”—it is now margarine-words as enthusiastically repeated cheers.
Can we say anything different about other instances of “radical” politics?
* * *
In 2006 AK Press published a book called <em>Horizontalism</em>. It is sub-titled “voices of popular power in Argentina” and has to do with mutual aid networks and forms of neighborhood and workplace autonomy after the financial collapse in 2001. Marina Sitrin, who edited the book and has done the most to popularize the titular word in Anglophone contexts, writes:
<quote>
Horizontalidad <em>is a living word, reflecting an ever-changing experience. While I have translated it as horizontalism, it is more of an anti-ism. Horizontalism is not an ideology, but more of a social relationship, a way of being and relating.</em>
</quote>
Indeed, the oral histories and interviews in the book testify to an extreme suspicion about established politics of any sort. This suspicion, which sometimes spills over into hostility, is manifest among other things in the descriptive term used for the organization of meetings, neighborhood assemblies, occupied spaces, and so on: <em>horizontalidad</em>.
It was not long after I read this book that I met a number of activist anarchists who regularly used the term <em>horizontalism</em>, in obvious reference to the book, to describe their own practices and those of others. In fact, it seemed that these folks used the terms <em>horizontalism</em> and <em>anarchism</em> almost interchangeably, except that anarchism was for those in the know, what I would call the milieu, and <em>horizontalism</em> was for negotiating with other activists, or for “the community”—the latter meaning in this case <em>those to be organized</em>. The initial conflation makes some amount of sense, as the organizations these activists are a part of were the kind populated by anarchists who do not advertise their anarchism to “the community.” Their emphasis on organizing as such made it easy to refer to what was happening as horizontal organizing. Still, it struck me when I realized that with this crowd <em>horizontalism</em> had become a euphemism for <em>anarchism</em>, a way to mince words at best, at worst to dissimulate or confuse their convictions.
One could perhaps trace this back to Sitrin’s decision to translate the adjectival noun <em>horizontalidad</em>, literally <em>horizontality</em>, which models a state of affairs or a process, as <em>horizontalism</em>, the, as she puts it, anti-ism. But it is also a perfect illustration of how those used to margarine-words comfortably adopted <em>horizontalism</em> as a way to purposely make their position more vague when engaging in activism, while, in the doing, adding one more note of imprecision to that position.
* * *
Should we distinguish how militants talk and how activists talk? Only to some extent. I have known many less militants than I have activists. It’s possible I’ve never met a militant, only would-be militants, which drives me to say that these folks were a species of activist, not so much in their political opinions or organizational forms but in their general orientation to action—and their relation to language. Tiqqun wrote some instructive pages on militants in <em>This Is Not a Program</em>, wherein they emphasize the militants’ separation from their communities (activists seek rather to integrate so as to organize). The world of militants is always tendentially the world of secrecy and clandestinity. As if to escape the bureaucratic deployment of language, militants often turn to a completely operational language, trimming analysis down to a series of simple presuppositions about which no further discussion is necessary. Would-be militants imitate this minimalism in their brief statements claiming actions.
But if, as Barthes suggests, the militant is a limit-point, the one who does not see language, one could see activists, in their exhortatory and managerial modes, as being just a little bit more aware of language, because they must be more integrated into ordinary speech. Integrated into
<quote>
<em>...the most banal of apparatuses, like a boozy Saturday night among suburban petit bourgeois couples [...] it often happens that we experience the characteristic, not request, but possession, and even the extreme possessiveness involved with every apparatus. And it is during the vacuous conversations punctuating the dreadful dinner party that we experience it. One of the Blooms “present” will launch into his tirade against perpetually-on strike-government-workers; once performed (the role being well known), a counter-polarization of the social-democratic type will issue from one of the other Blooms, who will play his part more or less convincingly, etc., etc. Throughout, these aren’t bodies speaking to each other, but rather an apparatus functioning. Each of the protagonists sets in motion the series of ready-to-use signifying machines, which are always-already inscribed in common language, in grammar, in metaphysics, in the THEY.</em>
</quote>
THEY = SOCIETY, as anarchists use the word. This constant of political speech that is what the <em>horizontalism</em> example suggests: there is a minimum consciousness of the experience of language as a raw material to be rendered instrumental, even as there is a generalized amnesia about how this process works. As a guideline, the demand for ordinary speech is always repeated when people deviate too much from the preferred margarine-words (which, being passwords, get a pass). And this ordinary speech is itself dense with other (older, unknown) margarine-words, the keywords of the society that activists seek to change, that we anarchists want to dismantle, transform or destroy.
**** Our Operation Margarine
This story is about something that repeats: a loophole, a silent acrobatic maneuver accomplished in the course of political speech.
At an anarchist gathering, I attended a workshop whose stated intent was to question the notions of justice and accountability.[1] <em>Accountability</em> is another margarine-word, the use of which that day stretched from the leftist demand for “police accountability” to our own “accountability processes” and their implied moralities—not to mention their interminable slowdowns and failures. The hour or so of discussion went like this: at first, everyone who spoke dared to call police accountability into question, describing it as a reformist slogan, and so on; to a lesser extent, our own use of the word in accountability processes also came into question. For a time it seemed as though no one who spoke wanted any kind of accountability. The word was effectively being crossed out: any positive use began to feel suspect. As the hour wore on, and with no one explicitly recanting their initial statements, a kind of discursive inertia seemed to be doing its slow and even work. (Here we might consider silence: what was not said by the majority of those in the room who did not speak, so the dynamics of the group, the crowd—and the pauses and hesitations of those who did speak up.) Eventually, everyone was talking about accountability again: not their kind, but our kind; not the bad kind that is ours, but the good kind that could be ours; not fake accountability, but true accountability. Perhaps some felt for a time that it was possible to discard accountability, the slogan, the bad word we had crossed out, and gesture towards the true relation, the word we might eventually just use without crossing it out verbally or otherwise. Around then someone spoke up and said something like:
<quote>
<em>despite all this critique, everyone here has returned to using the word more or less in the way initially questioned and objected to.</em>
</quote>
My first thought was: that comfortable circle is one of the ways critique works! Which may as well mean: does not work. Even those who continued to speak against accountability treated it as a reality, gave the word traction, importance as that which we might, we could, maybe should, with great deliberation, refuse, cross out... so that what would replace accountability as a demand or goal needed to be provisionally referred to as... <em>accountability</em>.
* * *
The idea of margarine-words occurred to me after that gathering, when I recalled reading an essay by Roland Barthes about a commercial involving a subtle and effective ideological operation. Barthes describes Operation Margarine as a way of “inserting into Order the complacent spectacle of its drawbacks” and suggests that is a “paradoxical but incontrovertible way of exalting” Order.[2] Paradoxically—exalting—order. This is the “schema” he offers of the Operation:
<quote>
<em>take the established value which you want to restore or develop, and first lavishly display its pettiness, the injustices which it produces, the vexations to which it gives rise, and plunge it into its natural imperfection; then, at the last moment, save it in spite of, or rather by the heavy curse of its blemishes.</em>
</quote>
He calls Operation Margarine a kind of “homeopathy”:
<quote>
<em>one cures doubts about the Church or the Army by the very ills of the Church and the Army. One inoculates the public with a contingent evil to prevent or cure an essential one. To rebel against the inhumanity of the Order and its values, according to this way of thinking, is an illness which is common, natural, forgivable; one must not collide with it head-on, but rather exorcise it like a possession: the patient is made to give a representation of his illness, he is made familiar with the very appearance of his revolt, and this revolt disappears all the more surely since, once at a distance and the object of a gaze, Order is no longer anything but a Manichean compound and therefore inevitable, one which wins on both counts, and is therefore beneficial. The immanent evil of enslavement is redeemed by the transcendent good of religion, fatherland, the Church, etc. A little ‘confessed’ evil saves one from acknowledging a lot of hidden evil.</em>
</quote>
The master-stroke of the essay, which takes us from propaganda or ideology to what Barthes called myth, passes from the initial examples about the Army and the Church to an advertisement for Astra margarine:
<quote>
<em>The episode always begins with a cry of indignation against margarine: ‘A mousse? Made with margarine? Unthinkable!’ ‘Margarine? Your uncle will be furious!’ And then one’s eyes are opened, one’s conscience becomes more pliable, and margarine is a delicious food, tasty, digestible, economical, useful in all circumstances. The moral at the end is well known: ‘Here you are, rid of a prejudice which cost you dearly!’ It is in the same way that the Order relieves you of your progressive prejudices.</em>
</quote>
It should be obvious enough how such a schema is at work in the discourse around the Army or the Church (or all the institutions that resemble Armies and Churches). Extending it to Astra margarine was Barthes’ way of saying something about how utterly common of an operation is at work here, how natural or naturalized this inverting or turning-inside-out gesture is. That is where Barthes leaves us, in the diffuse world of advertisements, tiny shreds of propaganda. The calque of Operation Margarine I have been discussing here, ours, if it is a myth, is larval or malformed, probably because, like our politics, it belongs to a different kind of order. Our side is, let’s assume, the side of the critics of Order; our speech, often enough, bears or formulates critiques of Order. Our stories, our myths, accordingly, are the stories and myths of Order, critical though their form may be.
***** ASIDE 3
<quote>
This is in part because critique in anarchist circles means more speech against what I don’t like than undermining-questioning the grounds of claims. This has a lot to do with why we talk so much about Society.
</quote>
* * *
Of necessity our Operation Margarine is more curious. We are, most of us, critics of ideology, of Order as such, perhaps, so our version has less to do with Myth as ideology, as a confusing veil, and more with that kind of myth we secrete as with a gland in the brain. How stories go; how they turn out... In my story, we saved accountability, ultimately by leaving it as the name for what was to replace accountability. This leaves open the possibility of someone who will see fit to extend its range back from our processes (where it seemed to be more acceptable because now under our control) to the police and their allies (Order), because in saying everything bad we could think about the idea in practice, we left unchanged its status as Good. This has less to do, then, with an incontrovertible master narrative (we were indeed able to say we were against accountability) and more about the slow and silent work of gregariousness and repetition on behalf of a morality it is hard to think of, or outside of.
A conclusion about margarine-words: most of the time our speech cannot separate itself from what has been captured by the category of the Good. When we speak in such a way as to repel away from a word associated with the good (crossing out as “critique”), its magnetic force will attract either that same word, or another, to do very similar work (continuing to use the crossed-out word or a euphemistic variant).
One might well ask what a different outcome for the workshop could have been. Maybe none. Maybe we have them just to state problems. One could well consider that many anarchist gatherings happen primarily to make possible a kind of cathartic venting, especially for those who are less than activists or prefer to avoid meetings, which have their own ritual catharsis. But I doubt this would satisfy most. We move on to ask how to shut down Our Operation Margarine. A radical proposal might have been: let us stop using the terms <em>justice</em> and <em>accountability</em> Moratorium! What would happen if we really could be disciplined enough to abandon these words, or any of our other margarine-words? Not an escape from myth, or from morality, certainly. For a group to choose to eject a word or words from its speech seems more like an experiment for a poetry workshop than a political operation.
The advocates of Order retain an arsenal of terms that we use otherwise for their own purposes. They do not erase the word <em>anarchy</em>; they rather use it in a way that we feel is either wrong or has the incorrect moral valuation (i.e. responding either <em>that’s not anarchy!</em> or <em>that</em> is <em>anarchy, and it is good, not bad</em>). To temporarily attempt to erase a word would be to, temporarily, make it powerful, attractive, interesting... To permanently erase a word? First, words do not show up in the dictionary with the dagger-cross next to them because of anyone’s conscious action. That is the great work of collectives, one thing you can count on the masses for: anonymous forgetting... Second, it is preposterous to think the milieu’s ban on a word could have any lasting effect on anyone not involved. The milieu (our gray space) is porous, characterized by constant entry and exit; the ban would never work, because it would have to be constantly announced. This repetition would amount to graduating the terms to the status of negatively charged margarine-words.
Beyond these practical problems of usage, <em>accountability</em>, like all margarine-words, is not just replaceable by euphemisms, but is itself a stand-in for other words we are more likely to avoid (we <em>and</em> the police and their allies) for some reason or another—<em>guilt</em>, for example. We can continue to play the game of replacing one word with another while the underlying morality changes very little if at all, and do so for the most part beyond anyone’s purview. Our Operation Margarine, or something like it, is probably a major aspect of how these margarine-words get circulated in and out of fashion as they do, part of our larger tennis match with Order, which might be more pessimistically described as Order’s tennis match with itself. From the point of view of such pessimism, which is to some extent the necessary point of view of the milieu, perhaps the only way out is to play the replacing-game very crudely, to play it backwards instead of forwards, using the wrong word instead of the right one. Recall the Situationist-esque vocabulary that was based on a pretend version of this game:
[[a-d-alejandro-de-acosta-to-acid-words-1.png f]]
and so on. If we cannot stop saying <em>accountability</em>, we might as well call it <em>guilt</em>, mismatching behavior and speech. Later this year we can talk about Evil, because the mismatch, the glaring, and, for many, unpleasant contrast, is what is really at stake. <em>Guilt</em> is indeed the relatively true feeling or desideratum hidden behind <em>accountability</em>, but saying so is worth our while only to disrupt. Our next step in this game should not be to repeat ourselves, but to pass on to the more absurd place. This is the logic of <em>détournement</em> and plagiarism, which sidesteps the supposition that one can speak in earnest in such gatherings, meetings, workshops, and so on. This play can also turn ugly, as described in the pamphlet <em>Cabal, Argot</em>:
<quote>
<em>When arguing, it is preferential to argue for the sake of being difficult. Semantics are absolutely worth fighting over.</em>
</quote>
Being difficult and other ludic, non-serious activities in our speech, playing the replacing-game but doing so backwards and wrong, touting the bad as the good and making the weaker argument the stronger, are the only means we have so long as we remain in a more or less political space. And often enough, we awaken to the fact that we have been forced into such spaces. Fortunately, there are other spaces.
* * *
As I was in the course of writing this essay, an exchange between Kristian Williams and Crimethinc. appeared addressing topics close to what I’ve been discussing here.[3] Setting out from Orwell’s denunciation of vices in political speech and writing, Williams aptly points out a range of words quite similar to what I have been calling margarine-words. About such vague jargon he notes:
<quote>
<em>People who write this sort of thing may have some general idea of what they are trying to say—but they needn’t have.</em>
</quote>
I was pleased to see the very word that first triggered some of these thoughts noted in his article:
<quote>
“<em>Accountability,” “community,” “solidarity,” and “freedom” are used, in the overwhelming number of cases, simply as markers to signify things we like or favor.</em>
</quote>
Agreed. What I think I am adding to this, what Williams does not discuss, is that the “things we like or favor” are held together not by vague agreement but also by an undiscussed moral fabric. Presenting the problem as a problem of shoddy writing and vague speech is deceptive. He comes closer when he writes of the jargon:
<quote>
<em>The words serve instead to indicate a kind of group loyalty, an ideological border between our side and the other side: we believe this, and they don’t. Or rather: we talk in this way and say this sort of thing; they talk in some other way, and say some other sort of thing.</em>
</quote>
Again, agreed, but rather than being concerned with a contrast between jargon that says little and a supposedly attainable speech or writing that is both political and communicative, I respond that the jargon is not just a bad choice, but in some important sense a condition (of being a political subject, our neurotic speech as such; of our time, the Spectacle, about which more later). It is also important to note that what Williams is pointing out here is mainly to be noticed in speech, and only derivatively in writing.
I said margarine-words were not just jargon terms, but slogans, compact phrases, sometimes whole fragments of speech. To their ready instrumentality I can now add the trait that reading Williams made me realize was missing: <em>fear</em>. Margarine-words mobilize fear; they result from a fearful impression, and their use perpetuates that same fear. The flight away from that fear could result in adopting a different set of margarine-words (and attempting to frighten the frighteners: turf-war as debate), or developing a taste for mutant speech or even acid-words.
I suppose I am more pessimistic than either Williams or Crimethinc., but I will agree with the latter when they write
<quote>
<em>if we stay within the bounds of language that is widely used in this society, we will only be able to reproduce consensus reality, not challenge it</em>
</quote>
and (this is of equal importance):
<quote>
<em>those who are convinced that they speak precisely—yet see imprecision virtually everywhere they look—rarely communicate well with others. That’s not how communication works. It is a mutual undertaking, for which rulebooks are no more useful than they are for any other kind of voluntary relationship.</em>
</quote>
In any case, when Williams repeats Orwell’s “principle”,
<quote>
<em>Let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about</em>
</quote>
and his six rules for English prose, adding
<quote>
<em>were there a contemporary anarchist style guide, nearly all of these rules would be reversed,</em>
</quote>
it is easy enough to agree. But that is because I take Orwell’s rules as an excellent means to dismantle the imagined style guide (of anarchists, of activists, of leftists, of identity politicians, of many others). That, however, is the limit of their usefulness. For it is not really a question of better writing in a space where so few read and even less write. The tensions at work in our speech will not be resolved by codifying written language, or even improving its style.
That is why it is telling that Crimethinc. returns to speech. Questioning the normality that margarine-words depend on and reproduce, and the communication that can only be assumed as given and available by the frightened, the path to mutant speech is another road to what Crimethinc. calls a mutual undertaking; and the challenge to reality is the path to acid-words, speech and writing beyond hope and fear,
<quote>
“<em>if it really is dangerous.”</em>
</quote>
*** Part 2: Amoral
<quote>
<em>Beneath the poetry of the texts,</em>
<em>there is the actual poetry,</em>
<em>without form and without text.</em>
— Antonin Artaud
</quote>
**** Mutant Speech
The preceding is mostly a critique of the continued use of words whose significance is exhausted by the context they are caught in. I am now led to an argument in favor of words that function differently, the <em>mutant speech</em> I’ve already had occasion to reference. <em>Détournement</em> is sometimes a sign of being trapped, and at other times the operation of those who are capable of entering another space. It depends on whether one regards the overall effect as purely destructive, or whether the new content generated in moments of negation and obfuscation is of any, even temporary, use.
A kind of ludic strategy unfolds in the second case, an idiom characterized not by the oily morality of margarine-words but by the attraction and repulsion of <em>mana-words</em>. Mutant speech, the strange constructions formed when mana-words are assembled into talk, is another form the compulsion to repeat may take. It is, on the whole, more conscious and deliberate than the repetition of margarine-words; it appears at the edge of politics, there where it spills over into the anti- and a-political.
<em>Mana-words</em> are the seemingly untranslatable terms that anthropologists, philosophers and other theorists invent or radically repurpose, their clumsy or graceful neologisms, and their redeployment of ordinary words from living and dead languages. Mutant speech is recognizable in that its repetitions are not of the familiar margarine-words, but citations of more or less rare mana-words. Mutant speech is not just the use of mana-words judged competent by experts and specialists, but encompasses an entire range of hesitations, creative mistakes, more or less willful misinterpretations, and qualifications that betray, sometimes, a hyperconsciousness of language, and, at other times, a kind of psychotic break-out from the neurotic repetition of margarine-words. This last phenomenon could be described as a successful but involuntary <em>détournement</em> of margarine-words as described earlier.
Our action-oriented milieu tends on the whole to respond badly to mana-words unless they are old and familiar (often in the process of becoming margarine-words). In our gray space many are not comfortable with mutant speech, preferring what they take to be ordinary language, which always includes a set of socially or sub-culturally approved margarine-words. When mutant speech arises in their presence, or when reading presents them with too many mana-words, many immediately hurl the accusation of abstraction, and some also deliver a judgment of complicity with oppressive institutions. As to the accusation, first, mana-words are not necessarily abstract. Abstraction is rare, and that’s what is desirable about acceding to it; mana-words are rare as well but only sometimes abstract. At one point <em>potlatch</em> was a mana-word, as was mana itself, which gave me the idea (Mauss glosses it as “spiritual force”). Nothing especially abstract about them, just the novelty of their appearance in our language. In the case of truly abstract words, such as <em>singularity</em>, no one really knows what abstraction is or does; we have precious few opportunities to discover what it can do as a linguistic operation. I have already outlined why and how an activist or <em>actionist</em> would respond to it with hostility. Part of the way margarine-words operate is such that many reserve the right to declare that their speech (e.g a word like <em>people</em> or <em>community</em>) is not abstract, while other terms (e.g. <em>biopower</em>) are. This is more or less willfully misinterpreting the rarity of the word’s appearance (which in many cases signals precisely the novelty or fragile instability of mutant speech) as the only index of its present and future purchase or effects. As for the judgment of institutional complicity, such a reaction is obvious enough to predict: anyone who is trained to read or speak in an academic setting (usually the institution in question) is taken to respond primarily to that social/work space and only secondarily to the milieu. Be that as it may, it seems to me that an individual’s allegiances are very important when deciding whether to collaborate with, trust, or befriend them, and not very important at all in appraising their speech or writing in its sheer functioning or manifestation. But then those concerned would have to allow themselves to be drawn (or not) by the mana-words themselves instead of trying to determine what team their user is on. Rather than a lazy dismissal of terms due to their abstraction, one could simply opt out of their circulation and not use them, sparing the rest of their circle their <em>ressentiment</em>-in-language. It is not so different to say: <em>I will not use this term</em> than to say: <em>I do not enjoy this poetry</em>.
The idea that what is said in mutant speech can be always translated into the talk of margarine-words is ultimately a prejudice in favor of the latter that costs us the potentials of the former. Though it is not always activists that do it, its most stereotypical form is the activists’ bid to translate other forms of speech and writing into what they deem ordinary language (whatever is meant by this, it is a medium for margarine-words). The accusation of abstraction amounts to preparation for such translation, since margarine-words are equally likely to be abstract, their apparent familiarity coming down to the greater rate of their repetition, their more successful function as passwords or codewords. I would recommend to those that demand translation into common terms that they merely respond to mutant speech with <em>I don’t understand this speech</em>, which should mean something not too different from <em>I don’t like this music or this poetry</em>.
Someone who finds they hate all music or all poetry and feels that it can and should be expressed in another form, or not be expressed at all, might in that moment consider the silence they are wishing for, as the best possible form of what otherwise has to be taken to mean <em>I do not know what music is, or I have no true experience of poetry</em>. As saying so would usually be taken as a request for acquaintance or explanation, the most I can recommend to one who finds themselves in such a relation is not forced translation but silence. About which more further on.
* * *
The rarity of mana-words, their degree of abstraction, is tied to extraction procedures. It is a rare thing to be able to extract a word from its context and redeploy it. In its extracted form it can become useless in its former context. The function and use of extraction is precisely this newly generated specificity and orientation, which can also be a kind of studied uselessness. The <em>détournement</em> of margarine-words takes place when speakers recognize the speech situation into which they have been placed, or into which others are trying to place them, and begin to speak from the perspective of the extraction of terms (sometimes even hinting at a possible extraction will do to destabilize the situation).
When one finally accedes to mutant speech, it is easy enough for another to point out that such speech, what is called its theory, cannot be put into practice. Indeed, that uselessness is precisely the desired interfering effect that the <em>détournement</em> operated. It is more difficult to understand in what sense the circulation of extracted mana-words is itself a practice of language, a different kind of repetition. The mana-words so circulated (cited alongside practices) always generate confusion. If they do not, it is because they are in the process of becoming, or have already become, new margarine-words. So people are right that abstract concepts, and mutant speech generally, cannot be put into practice without a process of interpretation and concretization. This process could render them margarine-words, or it could produce bizarre new practices (but bizarre practices could also appear on their own with no forethought on anyone’s part).
One might note, for example, that it is precisely mana-words that never return to us from propaganda machines in spectacular forms. Margarine-words are shared with and to a large extent take their motive power from the mass and its leaders. Some will always be engaged in saying what <em>freedom</em>, <em>justice</em>, and <em>hope</em> really mean, and it will always be a waste of time. These words do too much work for the mass and its leaders in a society like ours. Mana-words are non-recuperable precisely because they have no generalized use. That is why I write mana-words and not theory, placing them besides what is most compelling about poetic speech and argots of every sort, as three instances of linguistic creativity too underdetermined to reliably motivate and parallel power operations. Mana-words are effective situationally, for some people, in some ways. They are repeated, but not on condition of being recognized. They do not always assume contect, but often require context to be established in the real time of speech—mutant speech.
* * *
Everything I’ve written on mutant speech so far has been an engagement with the imagined (always imagined and imaginary) ordinary speakers of a language, those whose life is a perpetual risk of margarine-words. On the other side, those who have opted for a less ordinary path, familiar with mutant speech, exhibit different relations to mana-words. Mutant speech could also be called <em>queer speech</em>, being close to what is discussed in the journal <em>bædan</em> as
<quote>
<em>a force which can interrupt the domination of language over life</em>
</quote>
Though I would call that language <em>Language</em>, the ordinary Language with its margarine-words. In <em>bædan</em> we read
<quote>
<em>We engage with language insofar as we can deploy it in service of the body. We speak, we put word to paper in order to send a wink to those with whom we have not yet or cannot at present conspire in a practice of jouissance</em>
</quote>
<em>Jouissance</em>, parenthetically, being a perfect example of a mana-word. Some take maximum pleasure in their repetition, enjoying an almost uninterrupted flow of mana-words. Here I will resort to some analogies that are less than analogies, along the bodily lines laid out in <em>bædan</em>, to show that mutant speech does not just have to be more or less successful communication. It is first of all attempted <em>communion</em>. Play with mana-words is not unlike covering one’s body with water or make-up, or fragrances or lotions, or also smearing oneself with a stream of spit, cum, piss, or shit that one wishes were continuous. The criteria at work here are aesthetic or hedonistic. Others are begged, sometimes commanded (if the speaker or writer is a top), to smell, to feel the mana-words. The speaker or writer appears for a second as they cover themselves in these words-marks, smearing themselves and sometimes smearing others. From the specialized and academic point of view, this is the least competent kind of mutant speech; in the milieu, it is one of the most common forms, the little dance some do when they first become enamored with what we call theory.[4] It is repetition for its own pleasurable sake, repetition discovered as a pleasurable event, the breakdown of the passwords and codewords and joy in that failure.
A second form, more competent from the point of view of the specialists, deploys the mana-words in baroque combinations and ornate arrangements. The speaker or writer shows, not their smeared skin, but their entire body as it approaches escape velocity... no ordinary language can catch up to this theory machine. The repetition becomes communicative to an extent, though the effects of extraction are still felt: this is repetition with a difference. Though the more pedestrian critics cannot distinguish between this spaceflight and the smearing, those who discern the difference are left asking: why these terms and not others? Why these theorists? The recession of this mutant speech from what is most oppressive about margarine-words is clear enough: but who is satisfied with a merely reactive strategy, with one more critique? Is anything really gained by sublimating the pleasure of sloppiness?
A third form of mutant speech would be to generate the mana-words oneself. But that would already be something else, translation or creation. In short, no longer repeating. I call those words, as they are created, or when they are recharged with <em>mana</em>, <em>acid-words</em>.
**** Jabberwocky, the language
The language Jabberwocky came up, as I recall, in a conversation some years ago, one among many conversations with anarchists where a discomfort with language was manifest. I later diagnosed this discomfort as an anxiety. I only remember some of the participants, many of whom I had just met that night, and, as usual, I think more people were listening than speaking.
How the discomfort was manifest that night, what repeats in such anxious conversations, is not difficult to outline. First, there seems to be an ambient impatience, some frustration with language as such. This can begin with a few words on the language of an enemy, with the vilification of a politician or a onetime friend, but it eventually extends to anyone’s use of language. From bullshit to ideology; from dishonesty or disingenuousness to a generalized paralysis of expression. Here’s the second part: someone will make an implicit or explicit reference to a certain primitivist refusal of language, or what some call “symbolic culture” generally, a kind of reference to its existence, without taking it on—for good reason. As these conversations often show, primitivism is something more like a commonplace reference than a stated position... Really, what is there to debate here? For a few engaged interlocutors, it is easy enough to include someone named John Zerzan in the twentieth-century philosophy category in Wikipedia, or to write an article criticizing his “philosophy of language”, but this kind of classification and attempted engagement completely misses the affective withdrawal of the not-so-thought-out refusal. The gesture I am writing about is the gesture of the many who feel primitivists are right about <em>something</em>, while not wanting to discuss it as a matter of philosophy or theory. The point— the <em>symptom</em>—is the feeling, the acceleration of the refusal. That is why, finally, there is some vague sense in the conversation, if it gets this far, that the refusal of language is part of a long list of refusals, and the reference to language is one more way of talking about Everything or The Totality or Capital or Civilization, etc. The conversation I recall was an unremarkable example except for one detail. Perhaps in jest, one of the speakers said that he advocates “speaking in Jabberwocky” as a way out of the Language he knows.
I think he meant that Jabberwocky, the language, is not an other to English, but an other to Language—to language as we know it. “Speaking in Jabberwocky” takes the refusal of Language into account; it is in fact a hypothetical practice emerging from this refusal. And in this refusal I imagine a demand that repetition, conscious or unconscious, dull or creative, come to a halt. Language appears to them as part of a Totality that cannot be simply sidestepped, because some urge to speak is inevitable, and Language is precisely the government of those urges, their guidance, standardization, branding, and so on. But since these individuals will not be governed, and since, so desperation says, eventually all speech decays into margarine-words, and perhaps that is all it ever was, they conclude that we should just somehow stop. Without positing an immediate way out (or a way out to immediacy), “speaking in Jabberwocky” intimates something else: what one could do with that inescapable urge is to speak in a way that is nonsensical. What was my interlocutor getting at with this reference to nonsense? A parodic speech, a parody of speaking? Speech in a very different kind of code, in an invented language?
I am not sure. It would have been easy enough to object that he explained the idea using ordinary English and not Jabberwocky. I would rather emphasize—what has made this conversation stick in my memory—that when seeking a way out of Language (as Spectacle, with all of the implied traits of Spectacle—totalizing, mediating, representative, communicative—that speech, in short, that places us on the side of instituted authority and authority to come), he gave it the name of a poem. The name of the language is the title of a poem; and the title of the poem is a nonsense word. He invoked for me, that is to say, the studied play with language that poetry can involve.
To get to <em>acid-words</em>, I set out from this insight. It is perhaps a paradox, or maybe just the weird way things go, that the greatest refusal of the urge to repeat becomes the motor of creation, of differentiation. To get to acid-words, I take inspiration from a poetic outlook, not to recommend poetry in one form or another, but rather to speak as one who has been transformed in his relation to language by poetic speech and writing. This is something other than a defense of art, much less of literary institutions or canons. I am less concerned to defend the arts than to acknowledge the fact of their various existences, valued for some, dangerous and despised for others, as one aspect of that inevitability of speech I referred to above. I would now recast it as an inevitability of expression. On the side of writing, this fact is greater than literature, though literature flows from it; on the side of speech, it includes all sorts of symbolic and linguistic creativity, including the anonymous productions of slang, argots, cant, and various other oral joys: the <em>poesy</em> that happens as if by accident (though what is accidental is knowing it is poetic, knowing it as poetry).
* * *
“Jabberwocky”: the poem, and then the imagined language. The poem first: it was of course the first stanza, identical to the last, that my interlocutor had in mind. You have probably seen it:
<quote>
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe<em>:</em>
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
</quote>
It appears in Lewis Carroll’s <em>Through the Looking-Glass</em>, where Alice first encounters it as a mirror-image. Upon reading it, she remarks “it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t know exactly what they are.” The five stanzas between the first and last, though they all include nonsense words, follow a kind of adventure narrative.
<quote>
<em>Beware the Jabberwock, my son!</em>
<em>The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!</em>
<em>Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun</em>
<em>The frumious Bandersnatch!</em>
</quote>
And so on. Gillian Beer observes:
<quote>
<em>The syntax in ‘Jabberwocky’ is stable, although the semantics are odd, so the story is stable though its elements are obscure.</em>
</quote>
A little less than twenty years earlier, Carroll had published the first/last stanza as a “curious fragment” under the title “Stanza of Anglo-Saxon Poetry.” Definitions for the eleven key words followed; in <em>Through the Looking-Glass</em>, the anthropomorphic egg Humpty Dumpty offers similar (but not identical) definitions to Alice.
In sum: though an exemplar of nonsense verse, “Jabberwocky” is hardly nonsense in the usual sense of the word. A narrative may be discerned in it, and tone, and feeling; and the words that seem to make that discernment difficult are not beyond explanation—explanation that the author did not even leave to the reader. As Beer writes: stable syntax, strange semantics. Additionally, the prehistory of the first/last stanza as a fake sample of old English shows Carroll’s concern, in his construction of portmanteau words for nonsense effects, with real linguistic history and processes of word formation. So what strikes us about “Jabberwocky” is not just the initial shock of nonsense, but also the pleasure of inventiveness, and the related pleasure of commentary on that invention.
Jabberwocky, the language, would then have some or all of these traits: first, speaking and hearing it is pleasurable for most: it is patterned and tuneful, sharing some traits of language as we know it (or whatever dominant Language it exists in initial relation to) and some traits of language as it could have been. Jabberwocky makes enough sense that speakers/readers of Language can follow a story in Jabberwocky, while still feeling the need to call it nonsense. Upon closer examination, speakers/readers of Language will determine that Jabberwocky can’t be a complete other to Language. It is not an other Language; it dramatizes something of the coming-into-being of language itself. At the same time, in showing this coming-into-being it is recognized as nonsense and designates sense itself as the precarious factor in speech. Here again I would essay an analogy that is something other than an analogy and say that what is dramatized here is the image of an animal that speaks, as in myth, as in fable, as in reality. In the essay in <em>bædan</em> I’ve already cited, there is a discussion of birds in Edelman’s theory and Hitchcock’s film, indomitable birds that symbolize “our struggle”:
<quote>
<em>in describing this domestication of the world by meaning, Edelman is borrowing heavily from Hocquenghem’s understanding of the body as colonized by language through the process of domestication. Edelman, one last time: “Thus the birds in their coming lay to waste the world because they so hate the world that will not accept them that they, in turn will accept nothing but the destruction of the world.”</em>
</quote>
The writer in <em>bædan</em> concludes:
<quote>
<em>Here we must understand ourselves as the birds or else the text offers us nothing.</em>
</quote>
We are the birds, the animals that speak. Which is to say that Jabber-wocky, the language, is not only a pastime, but also something corrosive, destructive, the vehicle of a bodily shift, yes, as with mana-words. It is deployed not only conspiratorially with the aim of orgiastic communion, but to destroy the world (though I would write World, as I write Language).
Jabberwocky, the language, mirrors Language, and it recedes from it, carving out another space for itself; it recedes as it mirrors. What is it showing in its reversal? A fact.
* * *
This fact could be stated as follows:
<quote>
<em>Poesy happens.</em>
</quote>
Or:
<quote>
<em>Acid-words are possible.</em>
</quote>
The inevitability of language, which is experienced as the urge to speak, to sing, to write, to mark—it sometimes manifests as poesy. Gary Snyder wrote
<quote>
<em>language rises unbidden.</em>
</quote>
The other ways language manifests are partially relevant here, but what is truly remarkable is that something like poesy happens, not as literature, not as a secondary aesthetic or artistic consideration, but foremost as the unbidden arrival of language—of speech, of the marks that become writing. Showing us our ancestors speaking exclusively in a poesy that preceded the distinction between literature and myth (as though gripped, at the dawn of language, by that indistinct firstness, its fascination), Vico suggested that poesy might be <em>the</em> event of language.
<quote>
<em>people living in the world’s childhood were by nature sublime poets</em>
</quote>
Or more precisely:
<quote>
<em>in all nations speech in verse preceded speech in prose.</em>
</quote>
But not necessarily the advent of what, in all those conversations, we felt the need to reject. Not Language. Of course the history that follows the Vician poetic dawn, the history of civilization, more recently of capital and Spectacle, is the history of Language, of the mediating image, of representation. There is indeed a poetry written in and as Language. Poetry in service of the state; surrealism in service of the revolution. (Debord called the Spectacle the epic poem of the commodity’s competition with other commodities.) But there is also—there has never ceased being— poetry in the service of nothing, or in the service of itself, new and irresponsible, another image, another speech, and that is what I think the reference to “Jabberwocky” amounted to in my imagination, and that is how this mask came to life. From there I write to acid-words.
**** Spectacle/Language
Debord wrote of the Spectacle that it is a social relation between persons <em>mediated</em> by images. Here <em>mediated</em> renders <em>mediatisé</em>, which must be both the mediation philosophers speak of, the forceful introduction of a third term into what one would otherwise call an immediate relation, and also the way something or someone is forcefully placed into a medium, into the media. Or, more weirdly, the forceful irruption of a medium in a person or relation between people. In the former case, since <em>mediation</em> is often assimilated to <em>alienation</em>, a tremendous amount of metaphysical and even moral consequences seem to follow from generalized mediation, as separation from the real, the authentic, or the genuine. In the latter, which could be rendered <em>mediatization</em>, we are considering separation itself: separation as a cleavage not only between us but in each of us; as ruined communion and forced communication; as the taxing propagation of detached images.
To dismantle the Spectacle has usually meant to undo mediation, its technological or at least material work of representation, in some way; a good deal has been written about how to do that. Here I would like to consider the undoing, or at least troubling, of mediatization. It is notable that Debord structured <em>Society of the Spectacle</em> in a markedly different manner than his earlier Situationist texts. At first, the constructed situation was to be
<quote>
<em>built on the ruins of the spectacle</em>
</quote>
holding out the promise (to some, a threat to others) of expressive communion, perhaps of an immediate relation. This construction was up to the individual or group as creator. In <em>Society of the Spectacle</em>, as explicated in at the climax of a dense historical narrative, the undoing of the reign of representation is a strictly political affair, the business of the workers’ councils. Here I, too, will invoke history: the decades that it has taken some to become unsure that workers’ councils could be the unbinding of spectacular mediatization (and so spectacular society) or, more generally, that political solutions will unbind political problems without setting the cycle of recuperation back into motion. We who feel this way are at an impasse.
Debord also wrote of the Spectacle
<quote>
<em>the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of universal separation.</em>
</quote>
More recently Giorgio Agamben stepped forward to amplify Debord on this point, adding:
<quote>
<em>Today... it is clear that the spectacle is language, the very communicativity or linguistic being of humans ... in the spectacle our own linguistic nature comes back to us inverted.</em>
</quote>
There are at least two ways to understand this statement. One is that it is a clarification, because the Spectacle has always been Language. The other is that it is written to register a historical shift, in the sense that something has happened in or to the Spectacle in the course of the decades between 1967 and 1989. It could also just be a provocation. In any case, for those committed to talk of Spectacle and disruption of Spectacle to pass over to this interpretation would mean apprehending the political impasse (impossibility of situations, absence of councils) as something that unfolds in our speech.
Indeed, the principal form this impasse takes today is the frustration or anxiety about language, usually in the background of our speech (most apparent in those conversations not governed by margarine-words). The impasse is manifest in the borderline nonsensical primitivist allegation that language is the first ideology, a crude translation of the idea of Spectacle as mediation, both as explicit claim (rare), and reference or implicit awareness (common). In these uses of the idea of Spectacle, what is principally accessed is its aiming-at-the-totality, which is how Language earns its capital L. We come to such an idea, as Debord perhaps did with images, by first aiming at the totality, <em>all of it</em>. We come to the anxiety, the primitivists to their refusal, by asking how to <em>cross it all out</em>. Here is an example, less hysterical than most, again from <em>bædan</em>:
<quote>
<em>All discourse consists of nothing but an endless series of affirmations no more insightful than remarking that water is wet, phrased in more or less interesting and more or less roundabout ways. The rest are lies.</em>
</quote>
Aiming-at-the-totality, we get what I’ve denominated Language. The endless series of affirmations (<em>yes, yes, yes...</em>) suggests for me a representational language caught in its tautology, as margarine-words wait to be affirmed (code words or slogans to be said yes to) or are offered as ways of being said yes to (passwords), as images are produced in a way completely determined by the medium in which they anticipate circulation. Expressing ourselves with such words or such images may or may not be mediation, but it is certainly mediatization.
As I have noted, the most common attempted escape from margarine-words, <em>mutant speech</em> (and the less common one, <em>acid-words</em>), leads to a staging of this anxiety (as incomprehension or hostility from readers or listeners, as the speaker or writer’s own anxiety before the risk of meaninglessness). From the point of view of Language, these escape attempts are the incorrect way to play the game and will always register as wrong moves, or morally improper gestures (lies). Those who adopt this point of view, bureaucrats or not, would push us back to the stale comforts of small talk or private exchanges with our intimates, those little spaces we suppose we control—and this fantasy of control over private life, true only for a few, is precisely meant to remind us that public or political space is completely covered, altogether occupied, by an impenetrable web of images, representations, or... words. When they arise unbidden we are to recognize, not words, but the web, the medium.
* * *
Suppose resistance is possible. What does the undoing of the Spectacle mean when one considers that the Spectacle “is” language, is Language?
First option: one could hazard decentering an idea and practice of Language tied first of all to nationalism, to a standardized grammar, secondly to a familiar, largely unconscious cultural conservatism (“the old language is good, the new language is bad”), and third, these two wrapped up in a mediatized dissemination of standard terms and usages. Decentering it, we no longer have Language but <em>languages</em>—not just in the sense of the thousands of world languages but also as a congeries of language-games, speech genres, little discourses and narratives within any given language. The idea or representation of Language breaks down into languages, but languages themselves splinter into dialects, slangs, argots, and so on. This is the sense of the project of accelerated fragmentation set up in <em>Cabal, Argot</em>: if we are convinced that
<quote>
<em>in-group/out-group dichotomies are the tension that will tear society apart. Disparate groups who do not understand each other are destined to become separate</em>
</quote>
then we see that their advocacy of difficult argument is also a kind of test, a test of who understands (gets it, the joke or reference) and who does not—the real-time, in-person formation of the inand out-groups. And so, understandably,
<quote>
<em>we choose to associate with, or support, particular factions, particular groups, or particular persons. By always taking the side of those within our in-group, we repudiate the representation of the social order that maintains capital, the state, and its technics.</em>
</quote>
First option, then: the groupuscles and their cant.
Second option: one could save the workers’ councils strategy by rendering them as communications councils, working on the premise that language is for communication, and trying to do it right. This is the solution of <em>Society of the Spectacle</em>, but also of an article in <em>Internationale Situationniste</em> 8, “All the King’s Men” (the title, incidentally, being a reference to Caroll):
<quote>
<em>In-group languages—those of informal groupings of young people; those that contemporary avant-garde currents develop for their internal use as they grope to define themselves; those that in previous eras were conveyed by way of objective poetic production, such as trobar clus and dolce stil nuovo—are more or less successful efforts to attain a direct, transparent communication, mutual recognition, mutual accord. But such efforts have been confined to small groups that were isolated in one way or another. The events and celebrations they created had to remain within the most narrow limits. One of the tasks of revolution is to federate such poetic “soviets” or communication councils in order to initiate a direct communication everywhere that will no longer need to resort to the enemy’s communication network (that is, to the language of power) and will thus be able to transform the world according to its desire.</em>
</quote>
To the question: how do workers’ councils undo spectacular representation? the answer is: because they are communications councils, poetic soviets. They federate the very groups that the cabalists want separate and create a kind of communicational dual power. This idea is also legible in Mohammed Khayati’s “Captive Words,” published in <em>Internationale Situationniste</em> 10:
<quote>
<em>It is thus essential that we forge our own language, the language of real life, against the ideological language of power, the terrain of justification of all the categories of the old world. From now on we must prevent the falsification or recuperation of our theories.</em>
</quote>
It is not clear how this is is to be done other than through the process of fragmentation-federation suggested by the anonymous author of “All the King’s Men.” Khayati concludes by calling for a Situationist dictionary, a linguistic federation tool,
<quote>
<em>a sort of code book enabling one to decipher the news and rend the ideological veils that cover reality. We will give possible translations that will enable people to grasp the different aspects of the society of the spectacle, and show how the slightest signs and indications contribute to maintaining it. In a sense it will be a bilingual dictionary, since each word has an “ideological” meaning for power and a real meaning that we think corresponds to real life in the present historical phase.</em>
</quote>
Second option: the councils and their dictionary.
Third option: one might consider unmediatized life or activity somehow beyond Language or Language games. The Spectacle is Language, Language is the Spectacle, insofar as our speech and our writing are bound to this representational form. Part of that is being forced to speak, expected to confess, and desiring it ourselves too—endlessly botched silence. Language rises unbidden... at the incitement of a power relation that demands your participation. We are still thinking about a mode of relating here—what is called, and is, <em>and is not</em>, representation and communication. But the Spectacle is not Language because language <em>is</em> representational and informational; the Spectacle is Language <em>as</em> representational and informational. Forced communication, excluded communion, botched, endlessly botched, silence.
Interestingly, some version of this approach is also legible in the two aforementioned Situationist essays. If communications councils are their major theme, this is their minor theme. Khayati discusses <em>détournement</em> in a way that anticipates the cabalists:
<quote>
<em>The critique of the dominant language, the détournement of it, is going to become a permanent practice of the new revolutionary theory.</em>
[...]
Détournement<em>, which Lautréamont called plagiarism, confirms the thesis, long demonstrated by modern art, that words are insubordinate, that it is impossible for power to totally</em> recuperate <em>created meanings, to fi x an existing meaning once and for all.</em>
</quote>
And this <em>détournement</em> is itself possible because of the “insubordination of words”, which Khayati ties to poetry—not poetry as we know it, but an abolished poetry:
<quote>
<em>Modern poetry (experimental, permutational, spatialist, surrealist or neodadaist) is the antithesis of poetry, it is the artistic project recuperated by power. It abolishes poetry without realizing it, living off its own continual self-destruction.</em>
</quote>
The author of “All the Kings’ Men” proposes the other available meaning of poetry; in fact, the entire piece is in the main about another way to grasp poetry:
<quote>
<em>What is poetry if not the revolutionary moment of language, inseparable as such from the revolutionary moments of history and from the history of personal life?</em>
[...]
<em>poetry must be understood as direct communication within reality and as real alteration of this reality. It is liberated language, language recovering its richness, language breaking its rigid significations and simultaneously embracing words and music, cries and gestures, painting and mathematics, facts and acts.</em>
</quote>
There is, again, the warning against what is known as poetry:
<quote>
<em>One thing we can be sure of is that fake, officially tolerated poetry is no longer the poetic adventure of its era. Thus, whereas surrealism in the heyday of its assault against the oppressive order of culture and daily life could appropriately define its arsenal as “poetry without poems if necessary,” for the SI it is now a matter of a poetry necessarily without poems.</em>
[...]
<em>Realizing poetry means nothing less than simultaneously and inseparably creating events and their language.</em>
</quote>
And how is that to be done? Again, fragmentation-federation... But what concerns me more here is that these texts come close to the position that, not poetry as we know it, but something importantly akin to it, what I called poesy above, what a writer in <em>bædan</em> calls lying, is a kind of primordial activity that can be tapped into or unleashed as the creation of
<quote>
<em>events and their language.</em>
</quote>
In a society like ours we do this through <em>détournement</em>, understood as a critical, destructive engagement with bureaucratic language or the language of power, a
<quote>
<em>language that cannot and need not be confirmed by any previous or supracritical reference</em>
</quote>
The other, corrosive, side of acid-words. Not acid as hallucinatory creativity, but as corrosive, destructive nonsense on the way to silence.
Third option: [someone(?)] and their silence.
* * *
What I have written here concerns language, then, but only sometimes as Spectacle, as Language. Sometimes one is bound to spectacular Language:
<quote>
<em>In analyzing the spectacle we are obliged to a certain extent to use the spectacle’s own language, in the sense that we have to operate on the methodological terrain of the society that expresses itself in the spectacle</em>
</quote>
wrote Debord. Fortunately there are other things to do than analyze! If I were to remain in the language of Spectacle, I would say that, yes, one can sometimes unbind spectacular representation (and my sense of how that can be done, acid-words, is indeed closer to a constructed situation than to workers’ councils). But, unbinding representation, beyond Language, we do not move beyond language as such. Here we must face our collective anxiety about language. It will still arise unbidden, incited by stranger forces than our human power games. Even in our silence we participate in the semiosis at work in nature. And nature has its own far more ominous silences to which we are not invited. It is possible (which is not to say that it is probable) to use language in a ludic manner; it is also possible to get used by language, to get played by it or be in its play in a way that has nothing to do with being represented or symbolized or representing or symbolizing. Something of that sort was always at work in poesy. And this reciprocal use is related to what the concept of Spectacle intends; in fact, it seems to me to be its sheer possibility (that representation or symbolization presupposes some other kind of language-play, another usage, as work presupposes play or non-work generally).
Read Robert Duncan as he writes about an available shift in attitude,
<quote>
<em>the change from the feeling that poetic form is given to or imposed upon experience—transforming matter into content—to the feeling that poetic form is found in experience—that content is discovered in matter. The line of such poetry is not free in the sense of being arbitrary but free in its search and self-creation, having the care and tension (attention) almost of the ominous...</em>
</quote>
Everything I have for the sake of convenience called Language, everything we have (out of what is now almost habit) called Spectacle, corresponds perhaps to the first feeling, which disturbs matter endlessly. It translates the matter of speech (poesy) into a communicable and informational form, botching communion, ruining silence. If it were only a genre, a game to opt into, a dream from which we could still awaken... or turn the page on to see what is next in the anthology... By contrast, the feeling that the form is found in experience, and content in matter, allows for the care and tension that are needed to make and share acid-words. Part of their operation is to destroy Language, but this is not what they are for. They are not <em>for</em> anything. This is the freedom of the line sensed by some poets, and also what is also ominous in acid-words: in their play they do not deny or elude silence.
<quote>
<em>For words are not thoughts we have but ideas in things, and the poet must attend not to what he means to say but to what what he says means.</em>
</quote>
—To turn away from those who, in a doubly hostile gesture, did not care that levy wrote, and later demanded of him to explain what he meant. So you hide, take acid-words... (It is pleasant to imagine Duncan whispering sweetly in levy’s ear, calming him momentarily, a kindly apparition in the course of the trip. To remind him he took acid so as not to have to take acid.)
It remains to ask who is capable of saying they are poets, and why. But as that is something to discuss elsewhere, I will return for the destructive fun of it to talking about anarchists.
* * *
There is no reason to bother with saying you are an anarchist or talking to others if you are not seeking another relation to the world, to life, to thinking, and to language. In this essay I have been especially concerned with the relation to language, but all of these relations are implicated, are at stake. The other relation that we are seeking involves a paradox: we are so concerned with ending the relation we <em>do</em> have with world, life, thinking, and language that in the undoing of the other term we are brought to consider the possibility that the relation itself is impossible. I mean that in some sense we cease to think that there is a World at all, that Life can become a pernicious concept, that Thinking is revealed as not being ours or for us. Following this treacherous path it may turn out that there is simply nothing to be said about language itself, about Language. We are left with this strange idea of crossed-out Language instead of a theory or concept of language.
And yet we find many who speak about language in general, assimilating it to Language. They have not earned the fullness of our attention. They would do better to listen than to speak—to attend, that is, to the speech practices of those around them, and eventually to their own words, just as he who says he hates poetry or music is best invited to read or listen and not to further discussion.
That is to say, if a word or phrase is not taken to the limit where it is (at least in passing) shown to be devoid of sense or purchase, then we will remain beholden to a liberal, or relativist, or pluralist sensibility, the hope for better margarine-words or an unmarked and universal ordinary language that all can share in equally. Mana-words sometimes go to the limit, but usually in cabalistic settings. Acid-words always go to the limit: to discover or invent them is to stop repeating, to repeat with a difference, to risk nonsense; and to arrive at nonsense is to approach silence or, often enough, to become silent.
And silence is beyond difference and repetition.
* * *
A word is not necessarily the unit through which we encounter language. A phrase or an entire discourse could bring us a happy insight as well. However, <em>word</em> is the word I’ve retained for the insight-catalyst through most of this writing; I think of each one as a shard, a fragment of an impossible Totality, the nothingness of Language. After that happy insight dawns, the discourse, the phrases, and, yes, a little word will each remind you of its own plenitude. Fortunately, such memorabilia are all that remains after acid-words do their delicate or grisly work. No hoary nihilist theory of language will appear to conveniently repeat to you what you already silently suspected: that sense is the most fragile matter, a fleeting purchase. However, as a silent accompaniment to the discourse, the phrases, and the little word, maybe there is this nihilist idea of what language is not, <em>that Language is not</em>, witness to its dissolution, along with world, life, and thought.
[1] For context on the discussion, see the zines [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-the-broken-teapot][<em>The Broken Teapot</em>]], [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/crimethinc-pfm-accounting-for-ourselves][<em>Accounting for Ourselves</em>]], and [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-burning-the-bridges-they-are-building-anarchist-strategies-against-the-police-in-the][<em>Burning the Bridges They Are Building</em>]]
[2] See “Operation Margarine” in <em>Mythologies</em>. I have modified the translation. For example, I thought that Order did not need to be qualified by Established.
[3] See the discussion online, or in the zine [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/crimethinc-kristian-williams-anarchism-and-the-english-language-english-and-the-anarchists-lang][<em>Anarchism and the English Language/ English and the Anarchists’ Language</em>]]
[4] McKenzie Wark calls this “low theory.” See his <em>The Beach Beneath the Street</em>, and my comments in [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/alejandro-de-acosta-ways-in-and-ways-out-of-the-situationist-labyrinth][“Ways in And Ways Out of the Situationist Labyrinth,”]] <em>The Anvil Review</em> 4.
|
#title The workers’ movement in Serbia and ex-Yugoslavia
#author Aleksandar Simic
#SORTauthors Aleksandar Simic, Will Firth
#SORTtopics Yugoslavia, Serbia, workers struggle
#date November 1995
#source Retrieved on 2<sup>nd</sup> August 2020 from https://web.archive.org/web/20120630111829/http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/eastern/yugoslavia.html
#lang en
#pubdate 2020-07-04T17:19:46
#notes Translated from Serbo-Croat by Will Firth
** Introduction
This piece was originally written as a paper for the radical left conference ‘Crisis, War and the World Economy — the Prospects of the Organized Working Class in the Countries of Former Yugoslavia’ held in Berlin, Germany, in November 1995. The group TORPEDO has since disbanded, but the piece retains its relevance. The wars in ex-Yugoslavia, along with their nationalist and irrational aspects, have also very much been an attack on the working population and their living conditions. After all, in the late 1980s world bankers considered Yugoslavia “ungovernable” and felt the population was “living beyond it means”; and when the end of Cold War bloc politics brought an end to Yugoslavia’s strategic position the destruction of Yugoslavia, including its working class, could begin.
Most of Yugoslavia has now been ‘third-worlded’ and virulent nationalisms play a divisive role. The task of rebuilding an independent workers’ movement and other social movements on an internationalist basis there is as current as ever. This piece should help understand how the workers’ movement in ex-Yugoslavia has evolved from its beginnings up until the present.
Due to the difficulty many computers have in reproducing the diacritic marks of Serbo-Croat, but so as not to leave them out altogether, i have “abbreviated” the four difficult letters using asterisks. Thus the letter indicated as Č is c with a hacek over it (like an inverted circumflex), Š is s with a hacek, Ž is z with a hacek, and Ć is c with an acute. (See also the brief section ‘Note on the Pronunciation of Serbo-Croatian Names’ towards the end of the file.)
Will Firth, translator
** The Workers’ Movement in Ex-Yugoslavia until the First World War
With the growth of industrial production in Western Europe in the late 19<sup>th</sup> century the inexorable process of industrial development also began in the regions of former Yugoslavia. Industrialization had led to a migration of the rural population into the cities and the formation of a working class. The division of society into new classes (capitalist class, middle class, working class), class conflicts, and the continuing process of industrialization led the working class to a point where it desperately needed its own forms of class organization. The first socialist ideas and experience in organizing the workers were brought to the regions of former Yugoslavia by members of the progressive intelligentsia who had been educated in the countries of Western Europe, in particular in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, Switzerland and France. They had become acquainted with socialist ideas during their studies, had accepted them, talked then through in discussion circles, participated in the work of diverse groups and organizations, and later brought these ideas and the corresponding experience back to their home regions.
One of the first to have taken on socialist ideas was Živojin Žujović who adopted Proudhon’s teachings while studying law and economics in Munich and Zurich. He was the first socialist in Serbia and later the teacher of Svetozar Marković, organizer and theoretician of the Serbian workers’ movement and one of the founders of the Serbian Social-Democratic Party.
Socialist ideas spread to other areas inhabited by Southern Slavs. During the uprising in Bosnia-Herzegovina led by Vasa Pelagić in 1875 there were many anarchists among the insurgents — Manojlo Hrvaćanin, Kosta Ugrinović and others. The uprising was also joined by many Italian and Russian anarchists (even Malatesta made two attempts to enter Bosnia-Herzegovina).
At the beginning of April 1871 John Most travelled to Ljubljana (Slovenia) and took up contact with members of the Workers’ Society. This society, whose President was Matija Kunc, spread Most’s ideas.
Anarchist demonstrations were held in Croatia in Rovinj (1904) and Split (1908). The teacher Miloš Krpan maintained contact with Swiss anarchists until 1898. He spread anarchist ideas among the group called the Independent Socialists. In 1909 and 1910 Krpan also tried to set up an international anarchist commune in the vicinity of Slavonski Brod. The Austro-Hungarian authorities fiercely resisted this plan. The Croatian and Slovenian socialists involved were cruelly persecuted and harsh sentences were handed down at trials held in Zagreb, Celovec and Grac.
In Macedonia there was a pronounced national liberation struggle and many socialists were involved in activities in this direction. Mention should be made of the Ilinden (St Elijah’s Day) Uprising in 1903, during which the Republic of Kruševo was proclaimed. This was the first socialist republic in the Balkans and lasted almost three months.
The struggle for national and social liberation in the southern Slavic lands under the control of Austria-Hungary culminated on 28 June 1914 in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, when the group ‘Mlada Bosna’ (Young Bosnia) assassinated the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The group was composed of freedom fighters inspired by anarchist ideas. At the trial of the group of assassins Nedeljko Čabrinović (who threw the first bomb at Franz Ferdinand but which didn’t explode) declared that his participation in the assassination plot was inspired by anarchist ideas.
What was more significant for the group Mlada Bosna, however, was it’s close contact with the Slovenian group ‘Preporod’ (Rebirth). The Preporod group began to form in 1911–12 around the newspaper of the same name. Until 1914 the two groups were linked by the common idea of the liberation of the southern Slavs’ lands and the creation of a united, south Slavic revolutionary youth movement.
In the Voivodina at that time the greatest influx of socialist ideas was from Hungary. Errico Malatesta held a very well attended lecture in Pančevo in 1904. At the time of conflicts with the authorities there were large socialist demonstrations in the small town of Bavanište. Workers and peasants were fired at by the authorities and fired back.
After the pioneering work of Živojin Žujović quite a number of intellectuals in Serbia took up anarchist ideas. Among them were Pera Todorović, founder of the first socialist newspaper in Serbia (‘Rad’, 1874) and friend of Bakunin’s from Zurich where he studied educational theory, and Jovan Žujović, the famous geologist and later President of the Serbian Academy of Sciences.
The ideas of anarcho-syndicalism were first propagated in Serbia in 1906 in the paper ‘Proleter’ by the supporters of direct action (the so-called ‘Direktaši’), by the left wing of the Serbian Social-Democratic Party, and in the paper ‘Radnička borba’ (Workers’ Struggle). The leading figure of Serbian anarcho-syndicalism was Krsto Cicvarić who founded many newspapers and was active as a writer, propagandist and revolutionary agitator.
The divisions which existed within the international workers’ movement meant that these representatives of the progressive intelligentsia also took up different ideas (as we have already seen). This also led to divisions within the new and growing south Slavic workers’ movement. Of the various factions present it was social-democracy which began to gain the upper hand.
Since social-democracy was less radical in its position towards parliamentary activity and class struggle and was thus less of a danger to capital it was accepted by capitalism on an international scale and certain concessions were made towards it. Social-democratic parties gathered strength, provoked the split in the First International, and in some countries began to fight for state power. These parties accepted the capitalist forms of struggle and were used by capital as a means of combatting radical sections of the workers’ movement.
Parallel to the development in the international workers’ movement as a whole, in the regions of former Yugoslavia the social-democratic party (e.g. the Serbian Social-Democratic Party, SSDP, founded in 1903) also gained strength to the detriment of the truly revolutionary movement. The first trade unions also formed and came together in 1903 to constitute the General Workers’ League of Serbia. However, the entire union movement in Serbia was taken over quickly and easily by the SSDP.
On 12<sup>th</sup> July 1914 the General Workers’ League of Serbia suspended all forms of activity when Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia and the King and the government ordered general mobilization.
It is of interest to note that Mayday, the international workers’ day, was first celebrated in Slovenia in 1890, in Croatia in 1892 and in Serbia in 1893.
** During the First World War
Socialist struggle did not end during the war, however. Intellectuals fled the country, in France a General Union of Serbian Workers was set up within the French Confederation of Labour and until 1917 had branches in all the larger French cities. Serb emigres in France also set up the so-called Workers’ Chamber, and there was also an active group of Serbian workers in Switzerland.
Shortly before the end of the First World War, owing to the repeated defeats of Austria-Hungary’s armies and the accelerated decay of its power structures, very well organized groups of workers and peasants would have had the opportunity to take power with scarcely a struggle. They did not do this, however, and took a completely indifferent stance to the transition from Austro-Hungarian domination to that of the newly established ‘Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes’.
** The Period between the Wars
Before the First World War and the unification of Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia in one state (initially called the ‘Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes’, later the ‘Kingdom of Yugoslavia’) numerous Communist cells were formed. These later merged in April 1919 to form the Socialist Workers’ Party of Yugoslavia (SRPJ/K), which later changed its name to Communist Party of Yugoslavia (June 1920), and in 1952 finally became the Communist League of Yugoslavia (CLY). Between the two world wars this organization played the most significant role in organizing and leading the working class.
The union movement began to regenerate, free of the influence of political parties. Thus the paper ‘Radničke novine’ (Workers’ News) announced on 2<sup>nd</sup> December 1918 that, thanks to rank and file initiative, the re-establishment of the dissolved union organizations had been in process since the previous month. As is always the case when socialist organizations are set up from below, there was soon to be action. The first protest rally was held on 23<sup>rd</sup> December 1918. What was significant about that rally was the participation of women, who made up a large majority of those present.
The first strike in Belgrade broke out in January 1919. It was a tailors’ and seamstress’ strike. That same month there was a strike in provincial Serbia at the Vrška Čuka mine. In February 1919 after Filip Filipović’s return from abroad the unions took a turn to the left. Their demands were no longer of a purely economic nature. They became real centres of revolutionary activity. This was influenced by the creation of the Hungarian Socialist Republic and the situation in the whole of Europe at that time.
Thus on 20<sup>th</sup> and 21<sup>st</sup> July 1919 the first political general strike was organized in solidarity with the Soviet Republics in Hungary and Russia.
At that time the need arose for contacting similar organizations in other parts of the country. The most significant contact between representatives of the working class in Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia and Slovenia occurred at the end of January 1919 at the National Conference of the Social-Democratic Party of Croatia and Slovenia.
A Trade-Union Unification Congress was held in Belgrade on 20<sup>th</sup> April 1919 and as a result the Central Workers’ Union Council of Yugoslavia (CRVSJ) was founded, covering 250,000 organized workers. In order to gain a complete picture of the strength of the union movement at that time mention should also be made of the 25,000 unionized workers and farmers organized outside the CRVSJ. After this ‘preparatory phase’ workers’ struggle ignited in April 1920 — at one point in time there were 50 different strikes going on in Serbia. There were the armed conflicts with the police and armed forces which the authorities sent in against the strikers. The workers defended themselves and replied in kind. The first anti-militarist actions also took place. Appeals were directed at the soldiers and policemen not to shoot at their brother workers and farmers but to join with them in common struggle.
For these reasons the state and the government of the day resorted to extreme methods. At the end of 1920 the ‘Obznana’ (Proclamation) was issued — a law banning union organization, revolutionary work, strikes, and any assembly of workers. Police and soldiers broke into union offices and workers’ clubs, seizing all documents and property. At the same time the capitalist class began an offensive: wages were cut, working hours were lengthened, there was a wave of sackings. Very often it was the most militant workers who were targeted — they lost their jobs, were evicted from their flats, and were often taken for interrogation with their whole family. Many influential representatives of the working class rose up against the Proclamation. But all their actions and all the protests of the working class were ignored. It was not until several months later that the government finally offered to condone workers’ and union organization again, but only under special conditions. The government demanded that unions and workers’ associations be organized purely on an economic basis. It also demanded that a representative of the authorities be present at all meetings and events, that all documents be made accessible to the authorities, and that all sources of income be declared. The working class could not accept such shameful conditions. Dragiša Lapčević (one of the founders of the class-conscious workers’ movement) proposed at a secret meeting on 8<sup>th</sup> April 1921 that the conditions imposed by the authorities be rejected and that unions and workers’ associations continue their work regardless of the Proclamation. Unfortunately his proposal was not accepted.
The disarray of the working class was a signal to the centrist wing of the union movement that their chance had come. Respecting the spirit and word of the Proclamation they re-established the General Workers’ League of Serbia (GRSS) on 22<sup>nd</sup> May 1921 and the very next day cut all ties with the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY). However, the centrists did not have much success in organizing the revolutionary-minded workers and farmers. The membership of the GRSS did not exceed 2,500–3,000 organized workers and farmers.
The monarchist regime brutally suppressed the CPY. It was banned and forced to operate underground for a long time. However, as the only force which workers could see as offering any opportunity for organization, it attracted a great number of members and sympathizers. Well-educated people and students joined, as did workers and farmers. In 1928 the Party split along communist, socialist and social-democratic lines. This also led to a split in the trade-union movement resulting in formation of a radical left-wing block (oriented towards Moscow and following the line of the Third International), a rightist tendency (still true to the line of the Second International although it had already been superseded), and a centrist platform which vacillated between the two mentioned positions.
From these divisions it was the CPY and the union faction oriented towards the Third International which was to emerge the strongest. As already mentioned, they took the leadership of the working class and were able to maintain it with the help of both material and ideological support from the USSR. Due to this assistance the CPY was the largest and best prepared organization of the Yugoslav working class on the eve of the Second World War.
** The Yugoslav Working Class and the Second World War
However, the true face of the CPY leadership was revealed in the course of the war and revolution (1941–45). Influential and educated members who had begun to see mistakes in the work of the Central Committee led by Tito (Josip Broz) were liquidated. Any potential criticism or possibility of challenge to the leadership was nipped in the bud.
With the defeat of the Yugoslav army in just six days at the beginning of the war the peoples of Yugoslavia began collecting weapons, munitions and other strategic material. Not long after the capitulation of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia the first forms of organized resistance to the fascists emerged. These resistance groups differed widely in their political orientation. Some were purely bands of robbers; others were militias organized purely at a local level as a form of defense against the fascist troops and the bandits mentioned; others were of a rightist, monarchist persuasion (Chetniks, and the groups led by Nedić and Ljotić) whose goal was ‘the liberation of the country from the occupier’ and the return of the King. There were also fascist organizations (Ustashi) that committed chauvinist atrocities which even soldiers of the German Wehrmacht were sometimes not safe from. There were also a range of quisling organizations throughout the country.
However, there was also a significant number of independently organized Partisan groups without a firm political orientation. The CPY attempted to unite these units under its control at all costs. There were instances of fighting between Partisan units under the control of the CPY and those Partisan groups which were still autonomous, particularly early in the war when the CPY co-operated with General Draže Mihajlović’s Chetniks towards the common goal of ‘liberating the country from the occupier’. The CPY and its ‘General Staff of the National Liberation Army and Yugoslav Partisan Detachments’ broke off their co-operation with Mihajlović’s Chetniks in 1941. (Mihajlović’s Chetniks only differed from other Chetnik forces to the extent that they did not collaborate with the Wehrmacht.)
However, the Partisan units were poorly armed, loosely organized, had little military experience, and suffered major defeats in the course of 1941 and 1942. The CPY also suffered serious setbacks in the towns and cities — its members and sympathizers were hounded, arrested, tortured, shot or sent to concentration camps. However, the resistance struggle went on. Partisan detachments continued to fight, and their sympathizers in the towns and cities created diversions and carried out acts of sabotage.
In the middle of 1943 and towards the end of the year the National Liberation Movement under control of the CPY recovered from its earlier setbacks by insisting on an increase in the percentage of Party members in the Partisan detachments. It also placed political commissars in all Partisan detachments in its sphere of influence — these commissars were to carry out political propaganda and put through the idea of the leading role of the CPY.
Upon the insistence of the ‘General Staff of the National Liberation Army and Yugoslav Partisan Detachments’ the Partisan detachments were united in late 1943. It was evident that a leading Party member was always present when Partisan detachments were unified into a battalion or brigade. Experienced Party cadre was put in charge of the newly-formed units, and of course a political commissar from the Party was always in attendance.
On 29<sup>th</sup> November 1943 the second meeting of the National Anti-Fascist Liberation Council of Yugoslavia was held in Jajce (Bosnia-Herzegovina). By exploiting the people’s struggle to liberate themselves from the fascist troops and by skillfully avoiding radical revolutionary impulses, the CPY here laid the foundations of what was later to become the first constitution of the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia (ultimately passed in 1946).
Under the veil of patriotism, anti-nationalism and a quasi-revolutionary verbiage the ‘General Staff of the National Liberation Army and Yugoslav Partisan Detachments’ gradually amassed substantial forces. Soon what had been known as the ‘National Liberation Army and the Yugoslav Partisan Detachments’ was transformed into the ‘National Liberation Army of Yugoslavia’. Even captured Chetniks and Ustashi were accepted into the Partisan detachments if they declared they would ‘fight for the people’. An army that had grown in this way could not possibly be a revolutionary army, an agent of revolutionary change, especially since up until the very end of the war the ‘General Staff of the National Liberation Army of Yugoslavia’ applied nothing but purely partisan tactics. In all attempts at directly confronting the combined Wehrmacht and quisling forces it suffered heavy losses and was forced to withdraw.
The ‘General Staff of the National Liberation Army of Yugoslavia’ (in actual fact the CPY) only won the war due to the weakening of the fascist armies on all other fronts and the great assistance given by the Soviet Red Army, which practically bore the entire burden of driving the fascist troops out of Yugoslavia.
** The Post-War Period
By the end of the war the CPY and the ‘National Liberation Army of Yugoslavia’ had been completely purged of ‘undesirable’ elements and were prepared for dictatorship. They said this was the dictatorship of the proletariat, but in reality it was a dictatorship of the Party. And not of the Party as a whole, but rather of its narrow circle of leading cadre.
The county was first called ‘Democratic Federal Yugoslavia’, later the name was changed to ‘Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia’. In 1963 it was renamed the ‘Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia’.
All workers’ organizations and all other social initiatives and functions were put under Party control. The country entered a period of state capitalism skillfully termed ‘real-existing socialism’.
These changes were officially embodied in the new constitution passed in 1946. The Constitution declared all natural resources and all the significant means of production to be ‘People’s property under state control’. At the end of that same year a program of nationalizing private businesses was carried out in 42 branches of the economy. In August 1945 a partial agricultural reform was carried through, affecting mainly the north and north-west of the country. The remainder of the economy was covered by the nationalization of 1948. Nationalization was one of the main methods of establishing a ‘socialist sector of the economy’. The system of planned economy was also introduced at this stage. State agencies ran the economy directly and in accordance with set goals.
The new ruling class, later dubbed the ‘red bourgeoisie’, only had to make a few more moves to secure its power in the longer term. Immediately after the war farcical ‘democratic’ elections were held at which the CPY led by Tito won a large majority of the votes (almost 100%), dealing the bourgeois-democratic parties a resounding defeat. Having gained power the CPY banned all other parties and persecuted leading members of those parties, branding them ‘enemies of the revolution’. After the elections the Yugoslav ruling class, in agreement with the ruling class of the USSR (personified by the CPSU), started a very transparent dispute. This ‘conflict’ between the CPY and the CPSU culminated in 1948 when the CPY carried out major purges of its military, party and civic leadership to remove so-called ‘Cominform agents’, members who were in favour of the Cominform resolution on the situation in the CPY. These people ended up in Yugoslav prisons, the most infamous of which was the prison camp on the island Goli otok in the Adriatic. Due to the CPY’s rejection of the Cominform resolution the USSR and the entire Warsaw Pact imposed an embargo on trade and any other exchange with the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia. This economic embargo lasted five years, and after it was lifted the Yugoslav ruling class finally took all power into its hands.
It should be mentioned that the goal of this staged conflict was not simply to reinforce the power of the inner circle of the ruling class, but also to open a necessary invisible bridge between the ‘communist’ East and the capitalist West. In this period the development of industry was oriented towards agriculture. Farmers and demobilized Partisans were forced to join collective farms. The energy sector also grew and strengthened. The growth of heavy industry was pushed ahead, though exclusively in the richer parts of the country, which only served to deepen the antagonisms inherited from pre-war Yugoslavia.
Strained relations with neighbouring countries which were members of the ‘socialist’ bloc, but also the Cominform resolution and the catastrophic harvests of 1950 and 1952 led to farmers’ rebellion, which served as an excellent excuse for the state to introduce the forced sale or outright confiscation of agricultural products. Such practices were to become virtually common practice.
** The Period of ‘Socialist Development’
By luring the working class with a relatively high standard of living, brutally suppressing all forms of rebellion and — what is more significant — controlling every form of workers’ organization, the CPY (later renamed ‘Communist League of Yugoslavia’, CLY) succeeded in disorienting the working class, disabling any attempts at independent workers’ organization and getting rid of militant workers and radical theoreticians.
There was a growing tendency of the Yugoslav working class to set up self-managed bodies of its own on the basis of the experience of other revolutionary struggles throughout the world. As an answer to this, as early as 1950 the authorities introduced limited forms of self-management in industry. The introduction of partial self-management gave workers the illusion that they had the right to manage and plan production and to market their enterprises’ produce. Just how much industrial self-management there really was can best be seen from a table published in the journal ‘Naše teme’, no. 3 in 1983:
|+ +|
| | <strong>decisions of the state <br>(% of cases)</strong> | <strong>decisions of the collective <br>(% of cases)</strong> |
| Allocation of capital reserve funds (investments) | 80 | 20 |
| Wage policy | 60 | 40 |
| Price policy | 80 | 20 |
| Employment | 50 | 50 |
| Import/export policy | 95 | 5 |
| Financing of joint spending | 90 | 10 |
| Remainder | 70 | 30 |
In this situation where the old capitalist state has been replaced by new state capitalism and where in reality there has not been any revolutionary change at all, the Yugoslav working class was bound to soon express its dissatisfaction.
So it was that the first recorded post-war strike was held from 13–15 January 1958 by the miners at the Trbovlje and Hrastnik mining complexes in Slovenia. 4,000 workers took part in the strike which ended in victory, or rather with the fulfillment of the strikers’ log of claims. But the deeper causes of the strike were not eliminated, nor would they be by any future strike in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
In order to isolate and suffocate working class struggle and — more importantly for the class in power — to prevent it spreading all forms of workers’ struggle were subjected to the proven treatment of a media blackout accompanied by the spreading of false information.
Thus the CLY leadership did not talk about strikes until 1969. By that time there had already been 2,000 recorded strikes.
There were no illegal unions in Yugoslavia; at least we have found no information indicating the existence of any such unions. The only legal union was the ‘Trade-Union League of Yugoslavia’. Participation by the union leadership in the organization of strikes was virtually nil, so it is fair to say that all strikes in Yugoslavia were essentially wildcat strikes directly initiated by the working class. To be sure, there is some indication that working class militants who had become functionaries of the one legal union occasionally participated in the initial stage of organizing a strike. But such people were swiftly rooted out of the union and ruthlessly repressed, only to be replaced by ‘proven cadre’ faithful to the ruling class and the regime.
In order to fulfill the strikers’ demands, maintain social stability in the country, and cover the great losses of the unprofitable economy, the Yugoslav leadership decided to take out new credits from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB). Thus Yugoslavia fell into the familiar trap of debt slavery.
Gradually the Yugoslav working class began to lose its class consciousness, floundering in the consumer culture cleverly served from the West. It was in such a weakened condition that the Yugoslav working class entered the eighties, a decade in which massive changes were to ensue.
** The Collapse of Yugoslavia
In the eighties Yugoslav workers and farmers took to the streets increasingly often demanding a better life, better working conditions, better management of industry and better running of the country as a whole. Because of the difficult economic situation at the time, exacerbated by galloping inflation, there was a stark increase in internal migration from rural areas to the cities (at one time 60% of the Yugoslav population lived directly from agriculture, although only 38% lived in rural areas). There was also a wave of emigration to Western European countries, in particular to West Germany and Austria.
In 1980 Yugoslavia joined the IMF and in 1981 it received one of the biggest credits approved in that period. Due to the jump in the world market price of fossil fuels Yugoslavia’s foreign debt at this time amounted to 14 thousand million US dollars. As early as 1983 Yugoslavia began conducting negotiations towards rescheduling its debt repayments. As a condition the IMF demanded the curtailment of payments to unprofitable enterprises, which for years had maintained social stability in almost all regions of the country. It also demanded the liberalization of prices, a rise in the interest rate, and a further 25% devaluation of the dinar. International capital had begun its assault on Yugoslavia.
However, the reply was a series of strikes and rebellions which resulted in the number of liquidations of unprofitable enterprises declining from 156 in 1979 to 97 in 1985. In order to finance unprofitable enterprises and maintain social stability the Federal Bank of Yugoslavia began to issue increasingly large amounts of money which had no economic cover.
One of the last initiatives of the legal union in Yugoslavia was to support the government’s efforts in 1986 to close down unprofitable enterprises. After this the workers no longer allowed the union to speak in their name.
In 1986 Slobodan Milošević appeared on the Yugoslav political stage just after returning from further education in the USA. At this time Milošević was a member and functionary of the CLY. The conflict in the CLY which ultimately resulted in its disintegration began in 1987 at the meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist League of Serbia. In his irresistible striving for power Milošević reached into the arsenal of nationalism, and at precisely the moment when the people of Yugoslavia were seeking change he began to demand the annulment of the autonomy of the autonomous provinces within Serbia — Voivodina and Kosovo — in order to benefit Serbia. In the beginning Milošević was supported by the voters and this was sufficient to enable him to take power from the hands of the old and superseded faction of state capital. Milošević gathered around him a circle of faithful supporters and thus strengthened his hold on the Serbian leadership and his position in the Yugoslav federation. This caused dissatisfaction among the local capitalist class in the other Yugoslav republics, who all the more frequently began talking about their individual republics ceding from Yugoslavia. Milošević continually fuelled these tendencies through his centralist cum Serbian nationalist politics. For example, in 1989 he recommended managers and businessmen in Serbia to avoid Slovenian products, and in 1990 this recommendation became a full-fledged embargo on the import of goods from Slovenia and Croatia.
Friction and conflict of this kind between the local capitalist class only exacerbated a situation which was already very strained. Workers and farmers, deprived of their traditional class organizations for solidarity and struggle, were forced to work in two or more jobs at the same time just in order to survive, and were further disoriented by the pressures of galloping inflation. They were then beset by nationalist demagogues of various persuasions, by various ‘democrats’ demanding change, and by a range of new, national leaders. Initially these leaders attracted masses of disaffected members of the working class who they promptly used to launch themselves on their desired political trajectory. In this way new parties were established in Yugoslavia: DEMOS in Slovenia, HDZ in Croatia, SPO and many others in Serbia, SDA in Bosnia-Herzegovina, etc. These were all parties of a nationalist hue which did their utmost to ridicule the entire tradition of class struggle.
As a result of these conflicts within the Yugoslav red bourgeoisie and the interests of international capital war broke out in Yugoslavia in 1991.
** 1991 — the Working Class and the War
The war was preceded by a massive national-chauvinistic media campaign. Politicians, writers, public figures and even sportsmen and sportswomen began competing to sing the praises of ‘their’ native country and ‘their’ people. All means available were used to sow panic and hatred in people. It was necessary to attain this ‘critical mass’ of nationalism in order to legitimize the war.
In the initial armed conflicts it was mainly professional soldiers and mercenaries who carried the brunt of the fighting. The Yugoslav People’s Army, made up as it was of the sons of workers and farmers from throughout Yugoslavia on compulsory military service, initially was not involved to any significant extent.
It is significant that quite a number of criminals had been pardoned and were involved in the initial fighting. There were also mercenaries from a range of countries, numerous political emigres (such as sons of old Chetniks or Ustashi), and a large number of fascists and neo-fascists. It was largely these groups that committed the atrocities which attracted so much media attention to the war — their aim was to step up the hatred and create artificial differences between members of the working class in different regions of Yugoslavia.
This is further underlined by the fact that nationally-mixed militias were initially organized in the towns and cities of Yugoslavia directly affected by the war. The aim of these militias was to ward off the aggressor, and it was not uncommon for Croats, Serbs and Muslims to stand at the barricades together to defend their homes which had stood together for centuries.
Local nationalist leaders were thus obliged to take radical steps to control disobedient members of ‘their own’ national group. To this end they again used mercenaries, fanatical volunteers and criminals.
People in all parts of Yugoslavia resisted the war and the nationalist madness. Some figures suggest that over 100,000 people fled from Serbia alone because of the war. In Serbia there were recorded instances of mass desertion where whole army units left their positions and went home. There were cases of collective conscientious objection, e.g. in the village of Trešnjevac in Voivodina where all the male residents refused to enlist in 1991, or in the years that followed, which brought them into serious conflict with the civilian and military authorities. There were also big demonstrations and student protests, but unfortunately this resistance was weak and not well organized.
All unions and political parties supported the war or were in agreement with there being a ‘military option’. Public stances and declarations against the war were only made by peace organizations of the petty-bourgeois variety.
** Rump Yugoslavia in 1993
After the collapse of the ‘Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia’ the ‘Federal Republic of Yugoslavia’ (FRY) was established, consisting of Serbia with its provinces Voivodina and Kosovo, and Montenegro. The war had torn major gaps in the FRY’s budget which had to be filled. The leadership resorted to using inflation as a tool. It printed massive quantities of totally worthless inflationary money in order to pay wages, to buy up foreign currency on the black market, and to guard social stability. The unlimited printing of new money led the inflation rate to rise to the proportions of hyper-inflation. Gradually the black market became the only market in the country which actually functioned. Towards the end of 1993 the exchange rate of the dinar even rose at one stage by a mind-boggling 100% per hour against the German mark, which was the main currency on the black market. In this very unstable political and economic situation it was important that workers’ struggle strengthen. In 1993 there was an untold number of strikes which hit all branches of the economy, both in the industrial sector and beyond it. One strike followed another. The climax came at the very end of 1993 when there was a call to a general strike which was followed by all the workers of the Serbian power-supply industry, the miners in a range of mines, and the railway workers.
This put the authorities under pressure and they were forced to abandon their plundering of the people by means of inflation. In January 1994 the new ‘convertible’ dinar was introduced. Inflation dropped away almost over night, which is one more proof of the fact that the inflation was actually strictly controlled. But the plundering of the people didn’t slacken. The whole period of intensive exploitation of the working class in Yugoslavia from the beginning of the debt crisis until today is characterized by the fact that the shameless plunder has never stopped, but only changed form.
The working class became aware of this and realized the necessity of an organized form of struggle. Independent unions began to arise, trying to operate independently of the state and the various political parties. Unfortunately, seduced by the anti-Communist euphoria which has dominated the ex-‘socialist’ countries since the fall of the Berlin Wall, they also try to be ‘independent’ of the necessity of class struggle. Currently all the independent unions operate as purely economic associations of workers, producing their own ‘democratic’ demagogues and leaders who with time, if they prove to be good at destroying the workers’ movement, will be co-opted into the social groups close to the ruling class.
Of the existing political parties which claim to be workers’ parties or have a promising name of this kind, it is only the Marxist-Leninist ‘Partija rada’ (Party of Labour) which rejects the struggle for political power and makes working class struggle its goal. All the other parties in Serbia have sunk in the swamp of parliamentarianism.
The current situation in the FRY is not unique and cannot be viewed in isolation from developments in the rest of the world. If we look closely we can find stark parallels with the situation in Mexico, in some Asian countries, and in the states that have arisen since the collapse of the USSR. The forces of the ‘capitalist international’ obviously aim to stifle workers’ struggle and towards this end they employ their effective and time-honoured strategy of killing the spirit of the working class and alienating the class from itself. A climate of instability is being created everywhere, which is accompanied by crises, shocks and confusion; everywhere new leaders are being created with a thousand masks to appear in a thousand different roles; their only function, however, is to disunite the working class, to yoke it with new chains and fetters to allow further unhindered exploitation and plunder.
** The Prospects of the Organized Working Class
As we have seen, there is no organized worker’s movement on the territory of the former SFRY with the exception of several small, isolated groups. The revolutionary task of all progressive forces should therefore be to create working class organizations and link them up in order to build a united front. This is no easy task, but it is a particularly pressing need today where the state and its various agencies (such as the state-controlled unions, factory management, and politicians) are going on the offensive. Having already made a killing, they are now also trying to curtail and abolish the rights which working people have won through the struggles of generation upon generation of ordinary workers. Not only has the system of state repression and control been re-consolidated since the war, but we are also faced with the task of recreating class consciousness from the very beginning. This demands a reexamination of the revolutionary movements of the past, finding their mistakes, working on educating the working masses and setting up new organizations for the struggles of the class. Under no circumstances may workers’ struggle be restricted to simply formulating economic demands. It must be based on a thorough knowledge of the existing society and the relations in it and on an understanding of the revolutionary role of the working class.
In the regions of the former SFRY it is crucial that the working class establish its own organizations and, on an internationalist basis, create a broad front against local nationalisms and sections of the capitalist class which devotedly serve the current globalization of capitalism through privatization, killing the spirit of local sections of the working class, impoverishing them, lowering wages, spreading existential insecurity at every level of social life... Our goal must be to link up with the general struggle of the workers world-wide. The struggle must not be waged only at a local level with local goals. It is important to stress that the working class in rump Yugoslav and all other parts of the former SFRY needs the assistance of comrades from abroad. This aid can be of various forms. It need not be purely material — often it is even more useful and appropriate to directly or indirectly link up members of the working class which are as yet unacquainted, which is often the case in the parts of ex-Yugoslavia currently engulfed by war.
Help from comrades abroad can also take the form of them passing on to us their experience of revolutionary organization, reproducing material for us in Serbo-Croat, helping us get hold of literature in Serbo-Croat sometimes to be found abroad... There are very many ways of helping a weak movement and the choice depends solely on the fantasy of the comrades prepared to help.
<br>
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**SOURCE MATERIAL**
1) Trivo Indjić, ‘Anarchism in Yugoslavia’, in ‘BLACK FLAG’, 9/90.
2) Dr. Petar Milosavljević, ‘Položaj radničke klase Srbije 1918–1929’, 1972, Belgrade.
3) Milica Milenković, ‘Sindikalni pokret u Srbiji 1918–1920’, 1971, Belgrade.
4) ‘Tokovi revolucije — Zbornik istorijskih radova, VIII’, 1972, Belgrade.
5) ‘Vidici’, no. 229, 1984, Belgrade.
6) Osteuropaarchiv, ‘Jugoslawien: Klassenkampf, Krise, Krieg’, 1992, Berlin.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
**Note on the Pronunciation of Serbo-Croatian Names**
Serbo-Croat is a strictly phonetic language — every letter is to be pronounced, and all vowels have their ‘continental’ values, e.g. the letter ‘a’ is pronounced as in the German ‘Mann’, never as in the English ‘hand’. The stress most commonly falls on the first syllable. The following letters are pronounced differently to English:
c = ts, as in bits
č = ch, as in cheese
ć = tj, close to č, but softer, like the t in future
dj = like d + ž, but softer, like the j in jug
j = y, as in yellow
š = sh, as in ship
ž = zh, as s in pleasure
Thus the Bosnian town of Jajce is pronounced ‘Yay-tseh’.
|
#title The *Laozi* and Anarchism
#author Aleksandar Stamatov
#LISTtitle Laozi and Anarchism
#SORTauthors Aleksandar Stamatov
#SORTtopics proto-anarchism, Taoism, China, philosophy
#date 2014
#source *Journal Asian Philosophy: An International Journal of the Philosophical Traditions of the East*. Volume 24, 2014 — Issue 3. DOI:10.1080/09552367.2014.960296
#lang en
#pubdate 2020-10-09T06:59:38
*** Abstract
In this article I will discuss the anarchist and non-anarchist interpretations of the Laozi and argue that the political philosophy of the Laozi does not completely conform to Western anarchism. Thus, firstly I will give a brief introduction to Western anarchism. Then I will present the strongest arguments of the anarchist interpretation and try to find their mistakes and refute them. Finally I will try to give an acceptable non-anarchist interpretation of the political philosophy of the Laozi. In doing steps 2 and 3, I will base my arguments in a way that is consistent with the text of the Laozi itself. Thus, I hope that this article will bring a deeper understanding of the political philosophy of the Laozi and break with the widely spread opinion that the Laozi propounds an anarchist theory.
*** Introduction
It is almost a common opinion among the scholars today that the political philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em> is a kind of anarchist theory. This view is also widely spread among Western anarchists themselves. As A. C. Graham (1989) says, ‘Western anarchists have claimed Laozi as one of themselves ever since his book became known in the West in the 19<sup>th</sup> century’ (p. 299). During the twentieth century, the identification of the political philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em> with anarchism has become so common that almost every textbook on contemporary political philosophy mentions the possible connection between the two. For example, Richard Sylvan (2007) explains that ‘there are significant anticipations of anarchism in earlier philosophy (notably in Stoicism and Taoism)’ (p. 257). Andrew Vincent (1992) similarly notes that ‘it is also asserted that anarchist themes are to be found within ancient Chinese texts like the <em>Tao te Ching</em>’ (p. 116). This trend continues up until today and has become a popular understanding of the <em>Laozi</em>, as if it is already an unquestionable fact. Both Chinese philosophy experts and anarchist writers are among those who support the anarchist interpretation. Their arguments rest on certain statements or concepts of the <em>Laozi</em>, but we can also see that sometimes by supporting the anarchist interpretation they attempt to show that the political philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em> is worthless and with no feasibility, while emphasizing the superiority of Confucian political philosophy. Or sometimes they just want to find out anarchism’s source or ancestor, as Vincent again puts it: ‘There is a strong demand for an “ancient lineage” in all ideologies which often overwhelms intellectual caution’ (p. 116). However, there are disagreements in the academic literature on the question whether the political philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em> is an anarchist theory (Feldt, 2010; Hsiao, 1979; Schwartz, 1985). In the following, I will try to break with the commonly spread anarchist interpretation of the <em>Laozi</em> and argue that the political philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em> does not completely conform to Western anarchism. In order to do this, a short introduction to Western anarchism is needed, which will be given in the first part. In the second part I will present the strongest arguments of the anarchist interpretation and try to find their mistakes and refute them. In the third part I will try to give an acceptable non-anarchist interpretation of the political philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em>. In refuting the anarchist and proposing the non-anarchist interpretation, I will base my arguments in a way that is consistent with the text of the <em>Laozi</em> itself.
*** What is Anarchism?
Before we discuss the possible connection between the political philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em> and anarchism, we have to first explain what anarchism is. The scope of this article does not allow us to engage into an extensive discussion on anarchism including its historical development and detailed explanation of its various types, but only to offer an overview of anarchism explaining its meaning, implications and main concepts. Various anarchists provided their own theories and expressed their own understanding of anarchism, and sometimes different anarchist types might be in a disagreement between one another. This situation might cause difficulties in finding out unique definition of anarchism, and since this article will only illustrate anarchism’s main concepts and ideas in general, I will make use of some contemporary writers on anarchism and present their general agreement on what anarchism is.
‘Anarchism’ or ‘anarchy’ comes from the old Greek ‘an’ and ‘arkhê’; ‘an’ is a negative word or has the meaning of ‘there is no’, ‘arkhê’ means authority or sovereignty, thus ‘anarchos’ became to mean there is no head or leader, or there is no fundamental authority. Anarchist thought emerged as a critique and rejection of the modern state, thus the main intellectual anarchist work began in the eighteenth century, with the outbreak of the French Revolution (Sylvan, 2007, p. 257). However, the first use of ‘anarchism’ to denote a political position is to be found in Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s 1840 work <em>What is Property? An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and Government</em> (<em>Qu’est-ce que la propriété ? ou Recherche sur le principe du Droit et du Gouvernment</em>). In this work, Proudhon defines anarchy as the ‘absence of a master, of a sovereign’, and because of this and other similar statements Proudhon became known as the ‘father of anarchy’ (Vincent, 1992, p. 115). Proudhon’s definition indeed tally with the superficial meaning of the coinage anarchism, but the problem is that later, one after another, various anarchist advocates announced their own types of anarchism, so that today we are obliged to accept what Richard De Goerge (1995) says: ‘There is no single defining position that all anarchists hold, and those considered anarchists at best share certain family resemblances’ (pp. 30–31). From the above we can conclude that the change of meaning and ideas of the anarchist theory is dynamic and developing.
‘What is anarchism?’ is really a difficult question to answer. Different dictionaries offer different definitions of anarchism, such as, the ‘lack of coercive government’, the ‘absence of a political state’, the ‘want of authoritarian political heads or leaders, institutions or organizations’, etc. (Sylvan, 2007, p. 258). Thus, De George once again says: ‘In its narrower meaning anarchism is a theory of society without state rule. In its broader meaning it is a theory of society without any coercive authority in any area—government, business, industry, commerce, religion, education, the family’ (p. 30). We can see from this that the principles of anarchism are not related only to the state and government but also to other aspects of society. In other words, we can not only discuss state authority but we can also consider all types of authority. This is possible because the above-mentioned institutions are usually arranged in hierarchical systems, so they can also be a subject to critique by anarchism. However, using this kind of definitions to describe anarchism can easily induce us to associate it with disorder or chaos which is a misunderstanding. These statements only define anarchism in its surface and extreme. Since in this more than 100 years long history of anarchism there are various types of it, the meaning and implications of anarchism itself exceed these definitions. So we can accept the view of Leon Baradat (1984), another contemporary political philosophy writer, who says: ‘At its extreme, <em>anarchism</em> means no government beyond that of the individual over himself or herself. At its mildest, it simply suggests that much of the authority of the state should be eliminated’ (p. 52). In sum, anarchism is a kind of reaction against state and authority; strictly said, anarchism rejects coercive authority. Moreover, anarchism excludes the governing that is separated from the people or the crowd and stresses that people should alone govern themselves.
We can see a trend in the recent literature of attempting to avoid too simplified descriptions and definitions of anarchism. So, as we said above, the development and changing shapes of anarchism already exceed the original meaning of the term. It seems that the definition the famous anarchist writer John Clark (1978) has offered can approximately be used to describe all types of anarchism. Accordingly, one anarchist theory should include:
1. a view of an ideal, non-coercive, non-authoritarian society;
1. a criticism of existing society and its institutions, based on this antiauthoritarian ideal;
1. a view of human nature that justifies the hope for significant progress toward the ideal; and
1. a strategy for change, involving immediate institution of non-coercive, non-authoritarian and decentralist alternatives (p. 13).
According to Clark, one can be labeled anarchist in a full sense only if he or she meets the four criteria. However, he recognizes that this definition can allow two types of anarchists, strong and weak. Thus, the strong anarchist manifests all the four criteria, while the weak anarchist does not manifest all of them, so this type can be labeled anarchist in a limited sense. Actually, Clark’s description opens the possibility of a wide scope in which many political theories can be absorbed and labeled as more or less anarchist.
Or, as Sylvan explains, we normally take the conditions for anarchist theory as conjoined, but we can also consider them disjointly. Thus, we come to the so-called diluted anarchism (p. 258). But the problem is how do we know where the limit to dilution is, and Sylvan acknowledges this problem: ‘There are limits, however, to how far definitional dilution should be allowed to proceed: a theory such as Nozick’s libertarianism, postulating a minimal coercive centralized state, exceeds acceptable bounds of dilution’ (p. 258).[1] We can see that the weak or diluted type of anarchism can include a wide scope of political theories, so no wonder the political philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em> is often seen as an anarchist theory.
In conclusion, on the surface and simply stated, anarchism rejects government or all forms of authority, but this definition perhaps includes minority of the anarchist theories, if such exist at all. However, the goal of anarchism is to eliminate the coercive authority or most of the coercive authority, in the same time having respect for the individual freedom. In other words, according to anarchism, the coercive authority is the one that gives rise to the state’s problems and people’s difficulties. Sylvan again stresses that anarchism centers on two interacting foci: ‘(1) a top or centre; and (2) control or dominance flowing from this top, by what are adjudged inadmissible (in particular, authoritarian or coercive) means’ (p. 261). Thus, the top or central political power exercises authoritarian and coercive government, and ‘anarchy entails structure or organization without inadmissible top-down or centralized means’ (p. 261). What is crucial here is that the structure with top-down centralized means is a hierarchical one, so in the final analysis, anarchism wants to eliminate the hierarchical structure or system.
Having thus briefly explained the main ideas and concepts of anarchism, I believe we can now turn to the problem of the anarchist interpretation of the political philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em>.
*** Anarchist Interpretation of the Political Philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em>
From the above presentation of the ideas of anarchism we can see that the matter is not that simple. Moreover, just because the definition of anarchism is so wide, it is easy for some to take the political philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em> as one or another kind of anarchism. Off course, if we say that the <em>Laozi</em> recognizes the existence of the ruler so it is not an anarchist work, those who adopt the anarchist interpretation would say that this kind of argument is an oversimplification of the matter (Ames, 1983, p. 28). If we consider the above discussion on defining anarchism, we can immediately understand the reasons for this statement.
As stated above, after the appearance of anarchism as a political theory, the <em>Laozi</em> became to be compared with it. One of the first who considered the political philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em> as an anarchist theory was the Confucian scholar Liang Qichao (Liang, 1930). He explains that Daoism believes there is a kind of natural law and that people’s skillfulness is harmful to this law, so, according to Liang, the Daoist political theory believes that this natural law represents an absolute freedom and rejection of any form of interference, so people’s return to nature means that the government is not necessary. Thus, he concludes: ‘The ideal is that the people shall be unconscious of interference, unaware of the existence of a government. This ideal is “anarchism” ’ (p. 79). However, not knowing that there is a ruler does not mean that there is absolutely no government. If we continue reading Liang’s exposition on Daoist thought, we can see that he has a negative view toward all of the Daoist thought, so the reason why he adopts the anarchist interpretation of the <em>Laozi</em> is because he wants to deny any value and feasibility of the political philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em>.
The most elaborate arguments for the anarchist interpretation appeared in the 1980s. First, in 1980 the International Society for Chinese Philosophy set a symposium entitled ‘Is Political Taoism an Anarchist Theory?’ in which three scholars presented their papers, namely Frederick Bender, Roger Ames, and David Hall. Later, in 1983, these three papers together with a fourth one by John Clark were published in the <em>Journal of Chinese Philosophy</em>. In the Introduction to this edition, Chung-Ying Cheng (1983) says that from these essays emerges ‘the general consensus that Taoist thought is supremely anarchistic—not a totally novel conclusion, but one that has not hitherto been articulated in such cogent detail’ (p. 4). In these essays the discussion goes beyond the <em>Laozi</em> including the <em>Zhuangzi</em> and the <em>Huainanzi</em>. This paper off course is limited to the <em>Laozi</em> only and will not consider the possible relation of anarchism to the other two works.[2] Hence, I will now begin the discussion of the anarchist interpretation of the <em>Laozi</em> by the above-mentioned writers with the exception of Bender for whom the political philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em> is not strictly anarchistic.
Roger Ames (1983) distinguishes four necessary conditions for a comprehensive anarchism which he mostly draws from Clark’s criteria. Thus, an anarchist theory should include: (1) freedom is necessary to approach consummation and achieve human realization, (2) rejection of coercive authority, (3) a notion of a non-coercive, non-authoritarian society realizable in the future, and (4) an attempt to authenticate theory in practice, that is, a method or program of moving from the present authoritarian reality to the non-authoritarian ideal (pp. 30–31).
As Ames explains, Western anarchism accepts the conception of individual freedom and in accordance with the Western liberal tradition sees the person as having autonomous, discrete, and discontinuous ‘atomistic’ individual characteristic. No matter if it is individualist or social anarchists, they both perceive tension between individual liberty and the collective will. Off course, Ames shows that in Daoist political philosophy this tension does not exist because Daoism rejects the ego-centric understanding of the self. In Daoist philosophy, ‘a person … is understood as a matrix of relationships which can only be fully expressed by reference to the organismic whole’ (p. 32). Thus, there are different views on individual freedom; in Western anarchism individual freedom has to do with self-determination and one’s own intrinsic character, while Daoist freedom, in short, is the comprehension of the Dao as the whole and the source of everything (p. 33). But although Western anarchism and Daoism have different views on person and freedom, they both agree that human realization lies in the achievement of freedom, so here Ames concludes that Daoism satisfies the first condition for an anarchist theory (pp. 33–34). However, as Ames himself points out, Daoist conception of freedom is derived from a clearly articulated metaphysical position (p. 33), and this is an important difference between the political philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em> and Western anarchism. Although both the <em>Laozi</em> and the Western anarchism rely on freedom in achieving human consummation, the meaning of freedom of the latter is in politics, that is, freedom of oppression by authority, so it is a political and societal freedom, whereas the <em>Laozi</em> goes beyond this meaning of freedom. Here we can quote what Benjamin Schwartz (1985) has said about the political philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em>: ‘If it is anarchism, it is anarchism completely lacking in dreams of individual freedom and “creativity” and not incompatible with the idea of sage-rulers’ (p. 213). Having in mind the context of the whole text of the <em>Laozi</em>, we can conclude that the meaning of freedom in the book is not only in politics but also on a metaphysical level, that is, humans should have the freedom to obtain and cultivate their natural and simple character that originally was endowed in them by the Dao. In short, according to the <em>Laozi</em>, the political freedom of the individual is inconceivable without this metaphysical freedom. Hence, the political philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em> does not completely satisfy the first condition.
Ames continues by saying that there are philological similarities between ‘anarchism’ and ‘<em>wuwei</em>’. Thus, ‘anarhia’ means lack of a leader, where ‘arhia’ refers to rule of authority, and ‘<em>wuwei</em>’ means lack of <em>wei</em>, where ‘<em>wei</em>’ refers to the imposition of authority (p. 34). But we can immediately see that this is only a difference on the surface because <em>wuwei</em> is not simply a lack of imposition of authority or lack of action. Let us see some statements in the <em>Laozi</em>:[3]
<verse>
The sage manages affairs without action [<em>wuwei</em>]. (Ch. 2)
By acting without action [<em>wuwei</em>], all things will be in order. (Ch. 3)
The man of superior virtue takes no action [<em>wuwei</em>], but has no ulterior motive to do so. (Ch. 38)
</verse>
<em>Wuwei</em> actually is not no action (<em>buwei</em>) but means that nothing is left undone (<em>wubuwei</em>) (Chs 37 and 48). The above statements show that <em>wuwei</em> is actually not the negative <em>buwei</em>, and we can even see that in Chapter 3 there is another <em>wei</em> added to <em>wuwei</em> thus becoming <em>wei wuwei</em>, acting without action, which gives <em>wuwei</em> a positive connotation. So the characteristic of <em>wuwei</em> is nothing to be left undone, that is, when we talk about <em>wuwei</em>, we have to consider <em>wubuwei</em> and the result is do nothing and leave nothing undone (<em>wuwei er wubuwei</em>). <em>Wuwei</em> does not mean total passivity and doing nothing but means following Dao’s natural operation so that nothing is left undone. In short, <em>wuwei</em> is a kind of <em>wei</em>, action, in accordance with the naturalness or self-so (<em>ziran</em>) that comes from the Dao.
Now, <em>wuwei</em> is actually opposed to <em>youwei</em>, which literally means having activity, and this is shown in Chapter 75 of the <em>Laozi</em>:
<verse>
They [the people] are difficult to rule because their ruler does too many things [<em>youwei</em>].
</verse>
This <em>youwei</em> is artificial activity, completely independent of Dao’s natural activity, and this kind of activity harms people and things. Thus, <em>wuwei</em> is seen as an activity like in the phrase <em>wei wuwei</em> which would mean ‘do <em>wuwei</em>’, so it cannot be separated into the two elements <em>wu</em> and <em>wei</em> but has to be taken together, thus <em>wuwei</em> does not oppose <em>wei</em> or action but only <em>youwei</em>, the unnatural action.
Ames goes on to say that anarchism does not refer to the contrast between political order and disorder but rather to the contrast between ‘<em>natural</em> order emanating from below and an <em>artificial</em> order imposed from above’ (p. 35). This is similar to Ames’s view that <em>wuwei</em> means rejection of the authority imposed from above or, in more concrete terms, opposition to the coercive government. Thus, he claims that Daoist political philosophy satisfies the second condition (p. 38). And vice versa, if Daoism opposes coercive government, same as anarchism recommends a non-coercive society that might be realizable in the future. The proof for Ames is Chapter 80 of the <em>Laozi</em> and also Chapter 54 in which we can see that the Dao is cultivated in the person and extended up to his or her household, neighborhood, state and to the empire at large (p. 38). Finally, in order to prove this action from bottom up, Ames finds textual support in Chapter 49 which says:
<verse>
The sage has no fixed (personal) ideas.
He regards the people’s ideas as his own.
</verse>
Thus, according to Ames, Daoist political philosophy satisfies the third condition (p. 40).
The problem here is that one crucial statement from Chapter 60 is forgotten:
<verse>
Ruling a big country is like cooking a small fish
</verse>
It seems here that the <em>Laozi</em> allows the authority from above. How are these two statements to be reconciled? Obviously, Chapter 49 describes the expansion of the order from bottom up, while Chapter 60 describes the imposition of the order from top down. I propose to understand them as interrelated. That is, the <em>Laozi</em> suggests a kind of interaction between the ruler and the ruled. It means that the ruler acts on the people, but the people can also act on the ruler, and the actions of the ruler can be determined by the people. Thus, it seems that the <em>Laozi</em> proposes a kind of top-bottom interaction. People’s natural and simple character influences the will of the ruler, and the ruler’s actions enable the people to maintain their natural simple character. I would agree with Alex Feldt (2010) who similarly states that ‘it is conceptually unproblematic to view the ruler (the one with the ability to coerce) and the ruled (one who is coerced) as mutually determining one another’ (p. 329). So, I will argue that the <em>Laozi</em> breaks up with the one-way expansion of the political order and allows for relationship of bottom-up mutual function. If we accept the above, than the political philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em> does not entirely satisfy the second and third conditions.
Lastly, although according to Ames the <em>Laozi</em> and the <em>Zhuangzi</em> espouse definite anarchist sentiments, he denies them the apparatus for achieving widespread practical implementation. Only <em>Huainanzi’s</em> ‘The Art of Rulership’ can contribute with a concrete political theory of anarchist type that can be applied at a practical, social, and political level (pp. 42–43). Hence, it is not necessary to talk anymore because the author himself believes that the political philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em> does not satisfy the fourth condition.
According to David Hall (1983), anarchism lacks cosmological theory because it believes that ‘the received versions of cosmological theory in our tradition are little more than disguised ideologies, having their origins in precisely those authoritarian impulses which give rise to traditional forms of government and the state’ (p. 49). Thus, according to this view, it is necessary that we find a novel, ideologically untainted, categorial ground for anarchism to be able to articulate its main concepts. The only non-ideological metaphysical speculation, according to Hall, can be found in Daoism, so he concludes that political Daoism is the only true form of anarchism and speculative Daoism is the only pure form of metaphysics (p. 50). Hall’s purpose is to show how Daoist metaphysics suits anarchist political thought. As he says, any pure anarchist theory has five criteria and certain fundamental Daoist notions can be understood in terms of these criteria (p. 56). The five criteria are as following: (1) the totality is without a ‘beginning’; (2) the totality is a ‘many’; (3) ontological parity; (4) the denial of principles as transcendent determining sources of order; (5) creativity as self-creative action (pp. 56–60). In the discussion how Daoist thought satisfies these criteria, Hall mostly relies on Zhuangzi’s and Guoxiang’s transformation of Daoist thought, but among it we can distinguish three points relevant to the <em>Laozi</em>.
First, Hall claims, the cosmogonical explanation, ‘Being and nonbeing produce each other’ (Ch. 2), qualifies the understanding of ‘All things in the world come from being and being comes from nonbeing’ (Ch. 40). From here, he immediately goes to Zhuangzi and explains that Dao is That Which is and is-not. Thus, as That Which is, Dao is nameable, and as That Which is-not, Dao is nameless. Both nameless and nameable are abstractions from Dao as the pure process of becoming. There is no single creative act and creativity is defined as a thing becoming itself by moving from non-being to being, from indeterminacy to determinacy (p. 56). According to Hall, this kind of world view is close to anarchism. But, if the statement in Chapter 2 qualifies the understanding of the statement in Chapter 40, then how are we supposed to understand the words ‘beginning’ or ‘origin’ and ‘mother’ in the following statements:
<verse>
The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth; the Named is the mother of all things. (Ch. 1)
There was a beginning of the universe which may be called the Mother of the universe. (Ch. 52)
</verse>
Or how should we understand the statement that the Dao is ‘the ancestor of all things’? (Ch. 4) The beginning, the mother, and the ancestor off course denote neither creator nor creation in time, but at least indicate logical priority, or a kind of central hierarchical system expanding from top down. Hence, according to my understanding, the explanation Hall offers does not necessarily show that the political philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em> contains anarchist sentiments.
Next, Hall points out that in Daoist philosophy there is no transcendent principle; the Dao is immanent and expressed through the De of things (p. 58). If we apply this statement to the metaphysics of the <em>Laozi</em> we can see that it is an oversimplification. The Dao in the <em>Laozi</em> is understood as both transcendent and immanent at the same time, thus if we say that the Dao is immanent, that does not mean that at the same time it is not transcendent. According to one of the first commentators on the <em>Laozi</em>, Hanfeizi, Dao is principle, so Dao determines all things, that is, all things follow the principle that comes from the Dao, hence Hanfeizi says that everything’s ‘life and death depend on the endowment of material force by Tao. Countless wisdom depends on it for consideration. And the rise and fall of all things are because of it’ (Chan, 1963, pp. 260–261). If we accept Hanfeizi’s explanation, then the <em>Laozi</em> recognizes a transcendent principle which at the same time is immanent. Moreover, the sage in the <em>Laozi</em> says:
<verse>
My doctrines have a source (Nature); my deeds have a master (Tao). (Ch. 70)
</verse>
James Legge’s (1962) translation of this passage goes straight to the point:
<verse>
There is an originating and all-comprehending (principle) in my words, and an authoritative law for the things (which I enforce) (pp. 112–113).
</verse>
Thus, it is obvious that the sage in his or her deeds follows a higher principle which is the source and origin of heaven, earth and all things—that is, the Dao itself. Thus the ruler of the <em>Laozi</em> takes the higher and transcendent principle and transforms it into his or her own immanent principle.
Lastly, Hall claims that the so-called <em>wu</em>-forms of social interaction—<em>wuzhi</em> (unprincipled knowing), <em>wuwei</em> (non-assertive action), and <em>wuyu</em> (objectless desire)—can eliminate the differentiation between rulers and ruled (p. 59). Hence, <em>wuzhi</em> is knowledge of the De of things and does not permit the imposition of principles or forms of organization; <em>wuwei</em> is action in accordance with the nature of things; and <em>wuyu</em> is objectless desire that permits enjoyment without attachment. Therefore, Hall concludes: ‘It is at the level of the <em>wu</em>-forms of social interaction that Taoism expresses its character as social anarchism’ (p. 60). Now <em>wuwei</em> is the main concept of the political philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em>, so it is the ruler’s basic principle of action, and it is not something that is demanded from the ordinary people (Liu, 1997, p. 40). Hence, we can say that <em>wuzhi</em> and <em>wuyu</em> are things that are demanded from the people, as it is stated in the <em>Laozi</em>:
<verse>
Therefore in the government of the sage…
He always causes his people to be without knowledge or desire. (Ch. 3)
</verse>
The conclusion from this is that, according to the <em>Laozi, wuwei</em> means the expansion of order from top down and people’s <em>wuzhi</em> and <em>wuyu</em> are result of the <em>wuwei</em> conduct of the ruler. Thus, the <em>wu</em>-forms of the <em>Laozi</em> do not actually express a character of social anarchism.
John Clark (1983) believes that the <em>Laozi</em> is ‘one of the great anarchist classics’ and claims that ‘no important philosophical work of either East or West has ever been so thoroughly pervaded by the anarchistic spirit’ so that none of the Western major anarchists ‘has been nearly as consistent in drawing out the implications of the anarchist perspective’. The reasons are because the <em>Laozi</em> ‘deals with <em>all</em> the dimensions of domination’ and ‘subjects them to thoroughgoing criticism’ (p. 65). Another point, according to Clark, is that essential to this critique of domination is the positive view that underlies it. As significance to this negation of domination is ‘a vision of the self, society and nature that can give direction to the project of social transformation: in short, there must be a coherent metaphysics of anarchism’ (p. 66). Actually, Clark puts aside classical anarchism and stresses that the political philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em> is in accord with the more recent organicist anarchism (p. 67). In order to support this standpoint, he first shows that the ultimate reality of the <em>Laozi</em>, the Dao, is organic, that is, a unity-in-diversity, and that it is the ideal course of development inherent in all things.
At this organicist interpretation of the political philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em>, Clark believes that this kind of organicism eliminates all coercive and authoritative forms of governing, that is, this unity-in-diversity means that there is no coercive authority, and thus on the political level gives rise to anarchist sentiments. However, whether the organicist worldview brings to anarchist conclusions is a big question. I will agree with Feldt who points out that ‘this does not necessarily generate a noncoercive relationship between ruler and ruled. That the ruler and ruled are understood as mutually determining and defining is not inconsistent with coercion. Mutual determination may well include coercion’ (p. 329). If one system is harmonious, unified, it means that there is no conflict between the parts of the system, that is, as Clarks notes, ‘each being strives only to reach its own natural perfection, and refrains from seeking to dominate others’ (p. 71). Although there is no intention of ruling among things, it does not mean that there is no higher ruler that controls this situation. But Clark believes that, for the <em>Laozi</em>, attempts to control lead to disorder and says: ‘Spontaneity and order are not opposites, but rather are identical. If each being is permitted to follow its <em>Tao</em>, the needs of all will be fulfilled without coercion and domination’ (pp. 71–72). Nevertheless, a concept such as Dao that is inherent in the organicist system and is in charge of the order, is still not contrary to coerciveness, and can involve coerciveness. As Feldt again says: ‘Coercion can only be understood through a two-place relation. In its simplest form, it is the power of one entity to force some specific action from another entity’ (p. 329). Hence, although Dao is inherent in things, the two-place relation, that is, the imposition of order form top down in the organicist system is not necessarily eliminated.
According to Clark, the political message of the <em>Laozi</em> is that the government is the source of disorder (p. 81). In support he quotes from Chapter 75:
<verse>
They [the people] are difficult to rule because their ruler does too many things. Therefore they are difficult to rule.
</verse>
Other examples of the banishment of government can be seen, says Clark, in Chapters 57 and 58, so ‘every expansion of political control for the sake of maintaining order has only further destroyed the organic structure of society, thus advancing social disintegration and producing more deeply rooted disorder’ (p. 82). But Chapter 75 does not oppose government as such, it only opposes government’s use of <em>youwei</em>; and the other two chapters also do not oppose government as such: Chapter 57 explains which kind of government’s actions will bring to disorder, and Chapter 58 points out which kind of government’s attitude will make people unhappy, that is, lose their natural simplistic character. Thus, the <em>Laozi</em> does not oppose government itself, but only the government which is not in accord with the standard of the Dao (Hsiao, 1979, p. 299). Or, as Ames puts it, an important difference between Daoist political thought and Western anarchist theory is that Daoism ‘does not reject the state as an <em>artificial</em> structure, but rather sees the state as a <em>natural</em> institution, analogous perhaps to the family’ (p. 35). In sum, the statement that the governments are the source of disorder should be qualified with the statement that all existing governments are the source of disorder, and the reason why they are the source of disorder is not because they are governments but because they use <em>youwei</em> to govern. Hence, the <em>Laozi</em> does not reject government as such, but only the government with <em>youwei</em> consciousness.
Clark also points out that authority in primitive society differs radically from that of political society, that is, the ‘chief’ is actually not a political ruler but a primarily ritual figure with carefully delineated, non-coercive functions dealing with specific areas of group life (p. 82). Clark carefully notes that to say that such societies have existed is certainly not to say that they fully embody the anti-authoritarian ideal of anarchism. But Daoism suggests non-coercive authority, and this authority is even closer to the anarchist ideal than that of the tribal chief or elder. This is because, as Clark explains, these figures often have no personal power and serve as vehicles through whom the restrictive force of tradition is transmitted. The Daoist ruler, on the other hand, ‘imposes nothing on others, and refuses to legitimate his or her authority through the external supports of either law or tradition’ (p. 83). According to this view, the ruler of the <em>Laozi</em> is not a typical ruler but a model or example of personal development. However, although the ruler of the <em>Laozi</em> does not transmit the restrictive force of tradition, in fact, what the ruler rather transmits is a tradition of another kind of authority, that is, the tradition of the authority that comes from the natural and simplistic force of the Dao. In other words, the political authority of the ruler of the <em>Laozi</em> does not follow any acts of coercive law but still follows or models on the principles that come from the Dao. As the <em>Laozi</em> says:
<verse>
Man models himself after Earth.
Earth models itself after Heaven.
Heaven models itself after Tao.
And Tao models itself after Nature [self-so, <em>ziran</em>]. (Ch. 25)
</verse>
Thus, the ruler has to model after the naturalness, the spontaneous law that comes from the Dao.
The insistence on identifying the political philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em> as an anarchist theory continues until the very present moment. According to John Rapp (1998), since Daoism advocates for rulers to use <em>wuwei</em>, which for him is to do nothing, it is obvious that Daoism is an anarchist theory similar to Western anarchism. The main support of this view is that <em>wuwei</em> is seen as non-action or as absolutely negative concept, so it is easy to mistakenly conclude that the <em>Laozi</em> recommends an ideal with no ruler at all. Ames and Hall have continued to stress the anarchist interpretation of the political philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em> (Ames, 1994, p. 41; Ames & Hall, 2003, pp. 102–103, 166), as if it was an unquestionable fact, but they have also noticed that the <em>Laozi</em> ‘assumes the need for a hierarchical political structure, with rulers above and the common people below’ (2003, p. 102). The fact just mentioned may cause difficulties to those who believe that the political philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em> is an anarchist theory. Ames and Hall have made an attempt to overcome this difficulty by commenting on Chapter 57 in which, according to them, we can see the rejection of ‘a top-down and impositional attitude toward governing’, and the acceptance of ‘a bottom-up and emergent approach in which the people themselves define the terms of order’ (p. 166). However, I would like to remind the reader that although the <em>Laozi</em> recommends expansion of the order from bottom up, it also appears to accept hierarchical political structure, and this structure only means imposition of the order from top down. Hence, according to the <em>Laozi</em>, the top and the bottom are in a relation of mutual interaction, and this is not the anarchist ideal.
In the above, I have presented and tried to object the most detailed arguments of the anarchist interpretation of the political philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em>. In the following I will give a positive account of the political philosophy of the book and argue for the non-anarchist interpretation.
*** Non-Anarchist Interpretation of the Political Philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em>
Although we may say that today the anarchist interpretation of the <em>Laozi</em> prevails, that is, it is undoubtedly believed that the <em>Laozi</em> is a work on anarchism, there are still some who believe the opposite. We can see that as early as in the mid-twentieth century, Xiao Gongquan (Hsiao, 1979) refutes the anarchist interpretation and states that the political philosophy of inaction of the <em>Laozi</em> bears some resemblance to the European <em>laissez faire</em> doctrine, but in the last analysis it differs from anarchism. This is because ‘what Lao Tzu attacked was not government in and of itself, but was any kind of government which did not conform to “Taoistic” standards’ (p. 299), that is, the standards of the <em>Dao</em> and its spontaneous workings, or <em>De</em>. Xiao finds a strong metaphysical support to his statement; Dao produces things and De nurtures them, in governing the sage-ruler follows the operation of Dao and De. In order to prove his point he quotes from the <em>Laozi</em>:
<verse>
When the uncarved wood is broken up, it is turned into concrete things.
But when the sage uses it, he becomes the leading official. (Ch. 28)
</verse>
We can see that in governing the sage uses the order expanded from the Dao—a kind of top-down imposed order of a centralized government.
It is interesting that Schwartz was one of the commentators at the above-mentioned symposium, and it is in light of his and others’ suggestions that the papers were revised and published, but he was still not convinced by the arguments of these authors. Just few years after the symposium, he writes:
<quote>
In the text of the Lao-tzu, we find the universal kingship (<em>wang</em>) mentioned as one of the four fundamental components of the cosmos—the <em>tao</em>, heaven, earth, and the kingship…. Lao-tzu, indeed, offers his advice not only to potential ‘universal kings’ but even to the princes of states of his own time…. Humankind may possibly be returned to the unreflective, innocent state of nature, but people are not, it would appear, themselves capable of achieving the higher gnosis of the sage. It is the Taoist sage who is alone able to put an end to the artificial projects of civilization and make it possible for the majority of men to return to a state of <em>wu-wei</em>. (1985, p. 211)
</quote>
We can see from this that in the political structure that the <em>Laozi</em> recommends the hierarchical role of the ruler cannot be neglected; the people indeed are themselves incapable of achieving the higher state of consciousness, but need the guidance of the sage ruler.
Going back to the above-mentioned symposium, Frederick Bender (1983) looks for the differences between Daoist thought and anarchism in order to claim that Daoism is not entirely an anarchist theory. According to him, in Chapter 18 of the <em>Laozi</em> we can see that ‘disorder in human affairs is attributed to the “casting aside” of the eternal <em>Tao</em>, the destruction of the natural order. There thus arises the need for an artificial order in human affairs, an “order” which is truly a dis-order’ (pp. 8–9). Under such conditions egoistic selfhood thrives, so the Daoist solution is the ruler’s cultivation of the self, that is, the transformation of ruler’s self into a realized, non-egoistic self which ‘will be the necessary and sufficient condition for corresponding transformations of his subject’s selves and thereby the restoration of harmonious social order’ (p. 9). The <em>Laozi</em> says:
<verse>
Is it not because he has no personal interests?
This is the reason why his personal interests are fulfilled. (Ch. 7)
It is because he does not compete that he is without reproach. (Ch. 8)
</verse>
Thus, according to Bender, it is the transformation of the self, at least at the level of the ruler, which is the starting point of the Daoist political philosophy. This is not the case with Western anarchist theories because they lack a clearly worked out and articulated conception of self (p. 10). It seems that Bender wants to point out that although Western anarchism wants to banish the coercive ruler, it still accepts the conception of the egoistic self, whereas Daoism accepts the conception of non-egoistic self of the ruler and the people. But here we need to clarify Bender’s claim: the <em>Laozi</em> accepts the conception of egoistic self that comes from the spontaneous function of the Dao, that is, the natural desires; what it rejects is the egoistic self that emerges from the unnatural selfish desires.
According to Bender, the fact that Daoism accepts the existence of the ruler indicates an important difference with anarchism. He says: ‘While Taoism has the conception of an ideal, naturally harmonious society, its acceptance of the continued existence of a ruler as the locus of political change is hardly anarchistic in the Western sense, since it retains, albeit in improved form, ruler, rule, and the means of rule; the state’ (p. 12). Therefore, for the <em>Laozi</em> the ruler is a legitimate institution of authority, whereas for anarchism all forms of ruling are illegitimate. The <em>Laozi</em> makes clear distinction between the correct and incorrect action, or the correct or incorrect grounds for action, while for anarchism there can be no correct or legitimate authority (pp. 12–13). Thus, while the <em>Laozi</em> ‘recognizes the wrong of imposing illegitimate authority, it also recognizes as legitimate the authority of action, or better “non-action” [<em>wuwei</em>], in accordance with the Way [Dao]’ (p. 13). In so far as Daoism banishes illegitimate exercise of authority as counter to Dao and harmful to the people, Bender concludes, it approaches anarchism, but since it does not regard rulership as such as evil, it is not strictly anarchistic (p. 15).
What Bender wants to point out is that the ruler follows the Dao in governing, that is, has a non-egoistic self, so the rulership of the Daoist ruler lacks the coerciveness anarchism attempts to reject, but just because there is the institution of the ruler, Daoist thought, and the political philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em>, is not strictly speaking an anarchist theory. This view may need additional argumentation, because, as stated above, the anarchist theory does not necessarily want to eliminate the government and the state, it just wants to eliminate the coerciveness of the central political authority. In order to reinforce Bender’s discussion, we have to say that the political philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em> does not only recognize the existence of the ruler and the state but also recognizes the central and hierarchical political authority which is the point in which it disagrees with Western anarchism.
Alex Feldt (2010) has given so far the most thoroughgoing objections to the anarchist interpretation of the <em>Laozi</em> offering a positive account of the political philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em> (including the concept of <em>wuwei</em>). According to him, if the political philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em> is an anarchist theory, at the most it is a diluted anarchism. He offers three theoretical reasons for skepticism: (1) the fact that the <em>Laozi</em> is clearly a political treatise addressed to the ruler and providing him with a philosophy of governance; (2) the Chinese conception of personhood, which creates a problem for traditional anarchist arguments that utilize a notion of the atomistic individual; and (3) the fact that the skepticism of the <em>Laozi</em> is aimed at a different target than that of anarchism (p. 327).
Today there is a common view among the scholars that the <em>Laozi</em> is a work on the art of government. Among the first who pointed out this view is D. C. Lau (1963, pp. xxviii–xxix), and so far the tendency grows toward wide acceptance of it. Thus, even those who argue for the anarchist interpretation would agree to it, such as Ames (1994) who says that the <em>Laozi</em> ‘is primarily a political treatise directed at the ruler already in power’ (p. 38). This kind of statements may often counter the metaphysical thought of the <em>Laozi</em>, that is, they clearly state that the main purpose of the text is to develop specific political thought and concrete advice to the ruler. Thus, Chad Hansen (1992) points out: ‘If the central doctrine is mystical metaphysics, what is all this political advice doing?’ (p. 222). There are also similar views in the Chinese literature, such as the one of He (1988), who at the beginning of his book says: ‘Laozi is a person who has a political ideal, his <em>Daode Jing</em> is written exactly for the purpose of delivering his political view and theory’ (p. 1). This kind of understanding made Bender believe that by means of the fact that there is a ruler can be shown that the <em>Laozi</em> is not an anarchist work.[4] According to Feldt, if we accept that the purpose of the text is to deliver its art of government, it still does not decisively reject the anarchist conclusion, but it ought to arouse our skepticism. ‘The <em>Laozi</em> does not merely appear to accept the existence of a legitimate state; it accepts a state that is hierarchical and autocratic in nature. Hence the <em>Laozi</em> accepts the very thing rejected by anarchists: a centralized political authority’ (p. 329).
Next, Feldt discusses the different views on the person by Daoist philosophy and anarchism. We already saw that Ames talked about this, and Feldt accepts his argument but offers another interpretation. The main point is that anarchism sees the person as autonomous, discrete, and atomistic, and there is a tension between individual liberty and the collective will, but in Daoism there is no such tension because Daoism sees the person as interdependent and contextualized. Nevertheless, according to Feldt, in this interdependent relationship of the people there is still the relationship between the ruler and the ruled, and the ruling entails that there is someone who forces people to act and this ability to force people to act is nothing but coercive force. The ruler–ruled relationship would not exist without the ability to coerce and force action. This is not to say that the ruler will always be actively engaged in forcing the ruled to act, it simply means that mechanisms must be in place to allow the ruler to exercise his or her power. Thus, Feldt concludes: ‘Once we grant that the <em>Laozi</em> accepts the existence of a legitimate ruler of the state and the Daoist conception of the person as interdependent, the text must allow for some coercive institutional element’ (p. 330). Otherwise, the mutually determining relationship between the ruler and the ruled would not make much sense, so, according to Feldt, the existence of this coercion makes the political philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em> different from anarchism.
Lastly, and the most important, Feldt points out that the skepticism in the <em>Laozi</em> takes a very different target than the skepticism of anarchism. Anarchism’s skepticism is directed solely toward political authority, while the skepticism of the <em>Laozi</em> is focused solely on social norms and culture, particularly Confucian social norms. We can see this skepticism in Chapters 18 and 19. Apart from the skepticism of Confucian norms these passages do not mention any other target and avoid saying something anarchistic. For Feldt, the only place the skepticism of the text enters into the political realm is in Chapter 17 where it says that the Confucian ruler is the one whom the people ‘love and praise’ but is not the worst; the Confucian ruler is just less desirable that the Daoist ruler. So the conclusion is that ‘there is no rejection or skepticism of the ruler or political authority generally, only a skepticism and disagreement about the worth of certain types of rulers’ (p. 331). It appears that the skepticism of the <em>Laozi</em> is directed toward different target than that of anarchism.
In sum, we can conclude that the political philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em> does not entirely conform to the principles of Western anarchism. In Chapter 17 of the <em>Laozi</em> we can see the recognition of the central political authority and hierarchical system. The beginning and ending of this Chapter are of great importance:
<verse>
The best (rulers) are those whose existence is (merely) known by the people
…………………………………………………………………………………..
They accomplish their task; they complete their work.
Nevertheless their people say that they simply follow Nature.
</verse>
The people think there is no ruler, there is no order imposed from above, but this feeling of theirs is because the ruler uses <em>wuwei</em> in governing and does not interfere with people’s natural and simplistic character. As can also be seen from Chapter 28, there is a need of a leading official in the system imagined by the <em>Laozi</em>, that is, there is a need of an institution of leadership. This kind of structure of the society is not an anarchist ideal.
At the end, I will add that there are two important differences between the political philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em> and anarchism. First, the philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em> works out a metaphysical thought, especially ontology, whereas anarchism lacks discussion on ontology. This is the main <em>theoretical</em> difference and can be a starting point in opposing the anarchist interpretation of the political philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em>. Metaphysics is the basis to the political philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em>, while anarchism, apart from its discussion on human nature, cannot ground its political theory on a deeper metaphysical or ontological basis. In other words, anarchism starts directly from its conception of the person and grounds its political theory on the right of individual freedom, thus not being able to find out deeper metaphysical or ontological grounds to this right of freedom.[5] Due to this important difference, the political philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em> and anarchism developed differing views on the ruler and individual freedom, which is already discussed above.
Second, as is known, the main concept of the political philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em> is <em>wuwei</em>, and just because <em>wuwei</em> can be mistakenly understood as ‘no action’ at all, the political philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em> can also be seen as an anarchist theory. But, I have argued above that <em>wuwei</em> has a positive role which does not entirely satisfy the principles of anarchism. This is because <em>wuwei</em> is also a kind of action, that is, the governing through <em>wuwei</em> (<em>wuwei er zhi</em>) does not demand from the ruler to do nothing, but to govern in accordance to the natural law that comes from the Dao. Thus, the governing through <em>wuwei</em> means governing according to the standard of the Dao. Furthermore, <em>wuwei</em> is deeply rooted in the metaphysical thought of the <em>Laozi</em>, so although we say it is a political concept it also has metaphysical implications, that is, it is an implementation into life and politics of the self-so (<em>ziran</em>) of the Dao. Therefore, to emphasize again, the main characteristic of <em>wuwei</em> is opposition to <em>youwei</em>, hence the governing through <em>wuwei</em> opposes the governing through <em>youwei. Wuwei</em> is a unique and peculiar concept of the philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em> and Daoism in general whereas the other schools of thought lack this kind of understanding of <em>wuwei</em>. To get to the point, Western political philosophy completely lacks the concept of <em>wuwei</em> and anarchism is no exception.[6] This is the main <em>principal</em> difference between the political philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em>, including Daoism in general, and Western anarchism. A Daoist familiar with the views of the anarchists might agree that in some aspects they probably approach Daoist political philosophy, but the Daoist will immediately comment that they still float in the <em>youwei</em> consciousness. Hence, to say that the <em>Laozi</em> expounds a thoroughgoing anarchism, similar to Western anarchism, would mean to accuse the author of the book of accepting the very thing he tries to reject—the governing through <em>youwei</em>.
*** Conclusion
In the above, I have discussed and tried to refute the anarchist interpretation of the political philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em> and have offered an acceptable non-anarchist interpretation of it. Things are not simple from the very beginning because anarchism itself manifests in many forms so that we have to construct a broader idea of it, that is, we have to consider it in a broader context. Actually, this situation gives the possibility of anarchist interpretation of the <em>Laozi</em>.
The <em>Laozi</em> can undergo multiple readings so if the anarchist reading is possible the non-anarchist reading is equally possible and this is not only because the text allows these possibilities but also because anarchism itself allows them. Things are really delicate and if the interpretations are consistent with the text, then we can say that both anarchist and non-anarchist interpretations are right, or at least, acceptable. I believe that the non-anarchist interpretation I have argued for above conforms to the context of the book. We saw that others also believe in the acceptable non-anarchist interpretation, and among them Feldt sets the limits to how far can the anarchist interpretation go and claims that if the <em>Laozi</em> propounds an anarchist theory, the most we can say is that it is a form of diluted anarchism. We do not know what the future development of anarchism will be, but due to the appearance of the recent organicist anarchism we can only anticipate that some future types of anarchism can very easily remind us on the political philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em>. However, we live in a world in which we can fast and easily exchange information and knowledge, so if such a type of anarchism appears it would seem almost impossible that it is not widely informed by Eastern, Chinese, or Daoist philosophy in particular. If there is a strong insistence to accept the anarchist interpretation, the most we can say is that the political philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em> is a peculiar anarchist theory that does not entirely conform to the principles of Western anarchism, but the least we can say is that there are theoretical and principal differences between the political philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em> and Western anarchism.
*** Acknowledgements
I would like to express my special gratitude to my former supervisor at the National Central University in Taiwan, Prof. Jenn-Bang Shiau, for his useful comments and suggestions.
; Notes
[1] According to Robert Nozick (1974), anarchy can exist for a limited time before the minimal state emerges.
[2] One thing is possible: even if we agree that the <em>Zhuangzi</em> and the <em>Huainanzi</em>, and even Neo-Daoist thought developed one or another kind of anarchist theory—similar to Western anarchism—not necessarily will include the <em>Laozi</em>, because although the <em>Zhuangzi</em>, the <em>Huainanzi</em>, and Neo-Daoism are greatly inspired by the <em>Laozi</em>, the philosophies they have developed are their own, different from the philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em>. The other way around, if we offer a non-anarchist interpretation of the <em>Laozi</em>, it will not necessarily include the later developments of Daoist philosophy.
[3] All quotations from the <em>Laozi</em> are from Chan (1963, pp. 139–176).
[4] Jonh Clark (1983), however, is an exception. According to him, ‘applying “understanding of <em>Tao</em>” to government means not governing. Attempts to interpret the <em>Lao Tzu</em> as a manual of strategy in the “art of governing” inevitably fail’ (p. 84). But this is a misunderstanding of the context of the political spirit of the text. According to the political philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em>, applying understanding of Dao to government means to govern with <em>wuwei</em>.
[5] Maybe an exception is the so-called organicist anarchism, because it finds the grounds of individual freedom in a system of interrelatedness, which would seem to go beyond the atomistic view on the person, and believes that the world is a harmony in diversity so that the person can only be understood through this harmony. Anyhow, in the above I have already showed the differences of this kind of anarchism with the political philosophy of the <em>Laozi</em>, and moreover, the organicist view is not a representative of the anarchist view of the person, so there is no ground to claim that, in general, the metaphysical thought of the <em>Laozi</em> approaches the anarchist metaphysical thought.
[6] That Western political philosophies lack the concept of <em>wuwei</em> is a point also stressed by others, such as, Huang Yong. (Feldt, 2010, p. 336, f).
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|
#title Nestor Makhno in the Culture of Remembrance of Modern Ukraine
#author Aleksander Łaniewski
#date 9<sup>th</sup> April 2025
#source Retrieved on 11 April 2025 from [[https://anarchiststudies.noblogs.org/article-nestor-makhno-in-the-culture-of-remembrance-of-modern-ukraine/][<anarchiststudies.noblogs.org/article-nestor-makhno-in-the-culture-of-remembrance-of-modern-ukraine>]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2025-04-11T07:22:43
#authors Aleksander Łaniewski, Sean Patterson, Vladyslav Verstiuk, Viktor Savchenko, Vyacheslav Azarov, Anatolii Dubovik, Yurii Kravets
#topics Nestor Makhno, history, historical memory, memory, 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Ukraine
*** <em>Translator’s Foreword</em>
The following interviews were originally conducted in Ukrainian and Russian and published in Polish in the anarchist magazine <em>Inny Świat</em><em></em> [A Different World], no. 55 (2024). The following English translation was completed by myself and Malcolm Archibald. We used the Library of Congress system to transliterate Ukrainian and Russian. The footnotes include extensive descriptions of terms and figures that may be unfamiliar to an English audience.
This project was born of a true internationalist character, involving Aleksander Łaniewski, a Belarusian-Polish academic, Ukrainian scholars and activists from across the country, and two Canadian translators. We are thankful to AnarchistStudies.blog for publishing the following interviews, allowing us to bring English readers a unique and timely insight into the contemporary Ukrainian perspective on Nestor Makhno.
I was immediately struck by Łaniewski’s thorough approach to his topic and its contemporary relevance in light of Russia’s war on Ukraine. The historical figure of Makhno—for all his controversy and multiplicity of interpretations over the decades—has taken on renewed significance in the war as a symbol of Ukrainian resistance to Russian imperialism. Across the frontline, Ukrainian soldiers display Makhnovist-themed flags and patches evoking the memory of the peasant anarchist and his anti-authoritarian revolution.
One such soldier, Yurii Kravets, was an interviewee for this project. His, unfortunately, brief answers are indicative of how his circumstances did not allow for the normal thoroughness with which he approached the topic so dear to him. Tragically, during the translation process, we were informed that Yurii’s unit, stationed along the frontline in the Kursk region, was hit by a Russian strike, leaving only two survivors who were taken captive. As of writing this foreword, only one of the survivors has been identified, and it is not known if Yurii survived the attack. He is officially designated as missing in action. I extend a spirit of solidarity and heartfelt concern to Yurii’s family and friends in this time of painful uncertainty.
<right>
<em>Sean Patterson</em>
<em>April 2025</em>
</right>
*** Introduction
July 2024 marked the 90<sup>th</sup> anniversary of the death of Nestor Ivanovych Makhno (1888–1934). Born a peasant in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Huliaipole, Makhno headed the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine during the tumultuous period of the Ukrainian Revolution. As a result, he became not only one of the best-known anarchists in the world but also one of the most recognizable figures in Ukrainian history.[1] The anarchist himself and the insurgent movement named after him (known as the <em>Makhnovshchyna</em>) not only evoke many conflicting emotions and controversy but have also inspired successive generations of anarchists (and others) to take up the fight for the ideals of freedom, equality, and social justice.
Regardless of Makhno’s self-identification and the ideals he fought for, in today’s environment, it is not so evident that the Makhnovist movement is associated exclusively with anarchism, self-governance, and social justice. There is an infatuation with Makhno not only as a defender of the common folk symbolizing the Ukrainian rebel spirit but sometimes also as an “ally” of the Bolsheviks. For others, he is a patriot and national hero and almost always a military genius.[2] He is even seen as the architect of a kind of Ukrainian statehood.[3] Today, in the face of Russia’s war against Ukraine, Makhno is seen as a symbol of resistance against Russian imperialism (White, Red, and now Putinist).
The memory of this tragic, misunderstood and underestimated figure does not fit into any of the official models of memory—neither into an exclusive type of Soviet-nostalgic narrative nor into a nationalist narrative. The memory of Makhno is more reflective of inclusive and mixed identities. In the multicultural and multidirectional memory of contemporary Ukraine—for which public space is fundamental—the place of Makhno is unmistakable and most strongly represented in the country’s southeastern regions.
Songs and plays[4] have been written about Nestor Ivanovych, and he appears in contemporary Ukrainian paintings,[5] comics and calendars, as well as in statements by celebrities and politicians. Sometimes, his memory takes unexpected forms, such as in the branding of independent grinding and sharpening machines.[6] It would take many pages of text to list all the songs, poems and novels dedicated to Makhno.[7] The famous but controversial Independence Day with Makhno festival, the so-called Makhnofest, itself deserves a separate study. On the other hand, the term “Makhnovshchyna” is sometimes employed as a pejorative, especially by politicians, denoting disorder and disrepute.[8] Few people are aware of this, but even in Russian prison slang, the term “Makhnovshchyna” is used. In the Gulag system, there was a caste of so-called “Makhnovists” who did not follow any rules, including the codes of the criminal underworld.[9]
Interestingly, in the contemporary Russian narrative, Makhno is portrayed not as a famous representative of Ukraine but of so-called “Novorossiia” [“New Russia”] or southern Russia.[10] It seems that by imposing a generic “anti-fascist” label on him, Kremlin propaganda seeks to undermine Makhno’s symbolic significance for Ukraine.
The front line of the current war with Russia runs dangerously close to Huliaipole in the Zaporizhzhia region. The town is under constant fire from Russian troops and has suffered extensive damage.[11] Nonetheless, soldiers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine frequently take selfies in front of the town’s monument dedicated to the famous anarchist.[12] The statue is covered with sandbags to protect it from damage, but despite such efforts, a Russian strike destroyed the monument’s head this year. Local authorities quickly mobilized and commissioned a sculptor to repair the statue.[13]
This raises the question of whether Ukrainian society’s perception of Makhno has changed during the war despite his anti-government views. A study published by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology in January 2023 attempted to answer this question partially, but more thorough research is needed to answer it fully.
In my professional work, which includes “memory studies,” I have been researching historical politics in the BUR (Belarus-Ukraine-Russia) for some time. I am interested in the tendencies and mechanisms that accompany history in the political realm, as well as the dynamics of change in East Slavic cultures and their perception of themselves through historical events and figures. The culture of remembrance is a part of our broader understanding of culture in general, and it is through collective remembering that the symbolic processing of the past takes place. This process provides a backdrop for contemporary popular and political culture, harnessing such cultural tools as artworks, social organizations, and commemorative practices.
In connection with the anniversary of Makhno’s death, I decided to talk to researchers and anarchists from Ukraine who have a solid knowledge of the Makhnovist movement. I asked them questions about Makhno’s place in contemporary Ukrainian society’s culture of remembrance. My aim was to examine the phenomenon of this historical figure and its contemporary repercussions and highlight the dynamics of change (or lack thereof) in the perception of Makhno and his army over the last thirty years. In an attempt to understand, in a way, contemporary Ukrainian society, I tried to find answers to three basic questions: who, how, and for what purpose is the memory of Makhno and the Makhnovshchyna kept alive in Ukraine today?
I sent a questionnaire to seven people. Unfortunately, two people were unable to participate for various reasons, and one sent rather laconic answers. The survey, of course, is not exhaustive, but it does touch on important issues and, at times, shows divergent perspectives on the perception of Makhno in Ukraine. Therefore, the following interviews should be treated as a contribution to the ongoing study of Nestor Makhno and the Makhnovist movement’s place in Ukrainian culture or, more precisely, cultures of remembrance.
<right>
<em>Aleksander Łaniewski</em>
</right>
*** Interview | ~~
<strong>Let’s begin with historiography. In Soviet historiography and popular culture, a rather colourful yet one-dimensional image of Makhno and the Makhnovists formed in which they were depicted as counter-revolutionaries, alcoholics, bandits, and, broadly speaking, anti-heroes. In your opinion, have there been qualitative changes in the perception of Makhno within Ukrainian society over the past thirty-five years? If so, can this be attributed, among other factors, to the influence of historiography, which, although still incomplete, has made significant strides in studying the Makhnovist movement in post-Soviet Ukraine?</strong>
<strong>Vladyslav Verstiuk</strong>
It’s difficult for me to be objective—I must warn you about this right away because I have devoted many years to the topic of the Makhnovist movement and have delved into its smallest details. It’s as if I see a problem that I’m intimately familiar with and not at all like the average Ukrainian sees and perceives it. Please take this into account.
Now, to the essence of the question. Even in Soviet times, there was a noticeable difference in the depiction of Makhno between official historiography, which was entirely negative, and society’s memory of him. The latter was not negative but mythologized, devoid of reality. People interpreted him as a kind of Ustym Karmaliuk or Robin Hood of the twentieth century.[14] I believe that today, in comparison with Soviet times, the attitude towards the Makhnovist movement has changed significantly because knowledge around it is more substantive, and I think that historiography played a significant role here. It was the insurrectionary movement in the broad sense of the term and its Makhnovist component that became the distinctive feature of the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917–1921.
The Italian historian Andrea Graziosi believes that it was thanks to the peasant insurgent movement that the Ukrainian Revolution achieved a certain primacy in the public realm, which was later repeated in other revolutions and revolutionary movements.[15] This idea is widely used in Ukrainian historiography. Today, dozens of large and small scholarly studies, popular works, and fiction have been written about the Makhnovshchyna, including several films. The topic is freely discussed in the media and has no negative connotations. This fact cannot but influence the formation of public opinion. Books on the issue do not stay on store shelves for long!
<strong>Viktor Savchenko</strong>
Actually, starting in 1988, the perception of Nestor Makhno’s personality in Ukrainian society changed. In the first stage, this perception was influenced by society’s general negative rejection of Bolshevism-communism. From 1988 to 1998, “anti-communism” was a significant factor for an appreciable section of Ukrainian society. During these years, Nestor Makhno ceased to be viewed by society as a “bandit,” “kulak leader,” and “bloodsucker.” Makhno was perceived as an active fighter against the “Reds” and an extraordinary personality. Under the influence of the new historiography, journalism, and documentaries, the personality of Makhno from 1999 to 2021 began to be perceived as the personality of a people’s hero who fought for the interests of the “common people.” After February 2022, he was perceived as a “national hero” who fought against Russian “whites” and “reds,” who brought various forms of imperial colonization to Ukraine. Now, he has become part of the triad of fighters for Ukraine in the 20<sup>th</sup> century: Petliura[16]—Makhno—Bandera.[17]
<strong>Vyacheslav Azarov</strong>
In the USSR, all historical science was filtered through the dominant ideology. Therefore, the Makhnovist movement, which promoted a different type of social organization, could not be perceived positively. Moreover, during the Revolution and in its subsequent development, due to anarchism’s more leftist positions in relation to Bolshevism, it acted as a serious ideological competitor in the pursuit of a similar social ideal. Therefore, it required maximum discrediting from the incumbent government, as it lacked any potential to socially organize.
Post-Soviet historical research, and subsequently the views of Ukrainian society regarding Makhno and his movement, also underwent a definite evolution from a fascination with the external military side of the Makhnovshchyna with dashing cavalry fighting and formidable machine-gun regiments to studying the ideology and social project of the Makhnovist “Free Soviet System.” However, in the last decade, in connection with the growth of Ukrainian nationalist and unitary tendencies, a new, Soviet-style trend critical of the Makhnovist movement has been observed since the Makhnovshchyna’s ideas of universal self-government run counter to the growing policy of state centralization and linguistic and cultural monopoly. This evolution of views is primarily formed by historical science, which is closely connected with the state and which, as in the USSR, sensitively responds to its political demands.
<strong>Anatolii Dubovik</strong>
From the start, it’s important to say that attitudes toward Makhno and the Makhnovshchyna in the USSR varied somewhat. They differed between Russia (meaning the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic) and Ukraine. In Russia, Makhno was seen as a criminal bandit, while in Ukraine, he was more often regarded as a kind of “social bandit” or “dashing rogue”[18]—equivalent to an early twentieth-century Robin Hood. The reasons for this are clear: the Makhnovshchyna operated mainly in Ukraine, where the descendants of the insurgents remained, as did the memory of them. Even those without relatives among the Makhnovists felt a certain pride that their ancestors had some link to the movement. “Makhno once stayed in our home!” they say—or at the very least, “in a house on our street.”
At the same time, no one in the Soviet Union really understood the insurgency’s goals; people only had a vague idea about them. In the most positive (and very widely held) version, “Makhno was for the common people.” Concurrently, official propaganda and the Soviet educational system worked to construct an image of Makhno as an anti-hero, pogromist, counterrevolutionary, sadist, and so on. However, as we can see, the Soviets ultimately failed in this effort. The changes in the perception of Makhno over the past 35 years are enormous. Today, it’s hard to find anyone in Ukraine who still believes these stories about Makhno, the bandit-pogromist.
In my opinion, the main credit for this change belongs not so much to historical scholarship as to its inevitable counterpart—popular literature. The changes occurred thanks to publications in mass literature, newspapers, and magazines. Of course, without serious historical research, popular literature would have had no ground to build on, so historians also deserve some credit. It’s just that we shouldn’t exaggerate their impact on popular memory.
However, the most significant influence on post-Soviet popular perceptions of Makhno was the dramatic TV series <em>The Nine Lives of Nestor Makhno</em> [2006].[19] The imagery and the character created by the film turned out to matter much more than academic works. By the way, the film presented—albeit in a very simplified form—what the Makhnovists were fighting for and what they wanted. That is its main merit. At the same time, those well-versed in the topic (myself included) received the film poorly because of its systematic distortion of historical facts.
<strong>Yurii Kravets</strong>
Undoubtedly, such changes have occurred. Modern historiography has had a significant influence here, especially thanks to the research and publications of Valerii Volkovinskii[20], Vladyslav Verstiuk, and Volodymyr Chop.[21]
<strong>In recent years, discussions have emerged in Ukraine within both the academic and socio-political spheres regarding the Ukrainian Revolution and a rethinking of the events between 1917 and 1921. How has the Makhnovshchyna been written into these discussions? For instance, I found no detailed commentary about the Makhnovist movement in the methodological recommendations of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory.[22] How widespread is interest in the Makhnovist movement among contemporary Ukrainian historians? Are there new approaches and interpretations of this phenomenon?</strong>
<strong>Verstiuk</strong>
I’ve already partially answered the second part of this question. Interest in the topic does not subside, but there are nuances. First of all, the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917–1921 is considered the historical foundation of modern Ukrainian statehood. This is how the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance interprets it, and this is the side of the revolution that appears to the contemporary Ukrainian authorities because it legitimizes the state. Everything unrelated to statehood fades into the background, including the Makhnovshchyna, which is often viewed as a manifestation of anarchism.
Anarchism as an ideology is an extremely broad concept, yet it’s often mistakenly interpreted as anarchy in the sense of chaos. In reality, it is an attempt to build a social organization from below through self-government. Such was the project of the free soviet system proposed by anarchists to the Makhnovshchyna, above all by Volin.[23] The movement’s alliances with the Bolsheviks cast a shadow on the image of the Makhnovshchyna. Modern historians debate whether the insurgent movement was a struggle for or against the state. There is no definitive answer. But there is another side of the coin—the Makhnovshchyna as an effective partisan movement, which introduced many innovations in the art of war to those times: the tachanka (a horse-drawn cart equipped with a machine gun), thousand-kilometre raids, quickness of maneuver, perfect knowledge of the terrain, and close contact with the local population.
<strong>Savchenko</strong>
The Makhnovshchyna became an element of not so much scientific as popular memory. In the recommendations of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, without going into detail, the Makhnovshchyna is included in the insurgent struggle against the communist dictatorship, considering Nestor Makhno as one in a series of various Ukrainian otamans active betwen 1918 and 1921 (although the “Bat’ko” never called himself an “otaman”).[24] Modern Ukrainian professionals, for the most part, accord contradictory characteristics to the Makhnovshchyna. Historians such as Verstiuk, Savchenko, Chop, and Arkhireis’kyi[25] see Makhno as a national hero. However, historians of the Lviv and Kyiv “schools,” especially those extolling Hetman Skoropads’kyi,[26] consider him an “inconvenient episode” in Ukrainian history, which harmed the construction of the Skoropads’kyi’s Ukrainian State or the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UPR) during the time of the Directory.[27]
<strong>Azarov</strong>
I do not participate in the discussions of the nationalist-conservative segment of Ukrainian society and cannot judge their qualitative content. As an active anarchist and researcher of the movement, the Makhnovshchyna is important to me as a large-scale experiment of stateless self-government, development of the masses’ independence, and grassroots initiative in society. At the same time, in some historical works of the last decade, I have observed Makhno’s transformation into some kind of hero of the national liberation struggle. His movement is portrayed as a one-sided confrontation with the White and Red threat from Russia, without a clear explanation of what ideals the Makhnovists fought for and what kind of society they built. On the one hand, there is a denial of Makhnovist ideas, and on the other, attempts to fit this historical phenomenon to the needs of modern state policy.
<strong>Dubovik</strong>
There is interest, and it is more significant than it was thirty years ago—not to mention during Soviet times. However, overall, the Makhnovshchyna is not at the center of attention in the current sociopolitical or even academic environment. For understandable reasons, the focus is more on state-building figures and movements (such as the UPR, Symon Petliura, Pavlo Skoropads’kyi, and so on).
Nonetheless, in 2017, when Hennadii Efimenko,[28] a senior researcher at the Institute of History of Ukraine, conceived the project “Our Revolution” (a series of popular publications marking the centennial anniversaries of the Ukrainian Revolution (1917–1922), created by various specialists for the well-known online Ukrainian publication <em>Delovaia stolitsa</em>), he felt it necessary to find someone to write on the Makhnovist movement despite the project’s primary focus on the activities of state-centered Ukrainian political forces. Efimenko himself said, “How could it be done without Makhno?” I ended up contributing a few well-received pieces about the Makhnovshchyna and the urban anarchists of the Nabat Confederation.[29]
In this regard, professional historians—such as Volodymyr Chop and especially Viktor Savchenko—continue to work on the topic, publishing books and articles in both specialized journals and book series aimed at a popular audience. As for new approaches, it is worth noting that historians are now increasingly interested in the relationship between the Makhnovshchyna and the Ukrainian national movement: to what extent was the former part of the latter, how did it interact with Ukrainian political forces, and so on. This development is understandable since the movement’s interactions with the Reds and Whites and its chronological narrative are already reasonably well known.
<strong>Kravets</strong>
The Makhnovshchyna does not fit into these discussions in any way, as it is not recognized by official historical scholarship as a part of the Ukrainian national liberation struggle. Only a handful of people study the history of the Makhnovist movement in contemporary Ukraine, and almost all do so at the regional level.
<strong>According to the Polish historian of collective memory, Robert Traba, the past in the present always responds to today’s ideological demands rather than to the intellectual challenges of reconstructing historical events and processes.[30] Even in democratic societies, prevailing political demands impose limitations on the inclusion of certain “uncomfortable” events into the main trajectory of state historical policy. Traba contrasts the central authorities’ “politics of memory” with the “democratization of memory”—that is, the right of citizens to independently interpret history, allowing civil society to participate in the construction of historical and collective memory.[31]</strong>
<strong>In post-communist Poland, a process of the “privatization of memory” occurred simultaneously, influencing both the growth in popularity of local figures and communities participating in national events alongside a demand for greater respect from the state authorities.[32] As a result, “historical sensitivity” intensified in tandem with citizens’ interest and attachment to local heritage as opposed to a unified history of the state. Do these same processes apply to post-Soviet Ukraine? After all, it was the residents of Huliaipole and Zaporizhzhia who actively began to “resurrect” and popularize the memory of Makhno, such as Makhno’s great-nephew Viktor Ialans’kyi,[33] the local historian Volodymyr Zhylins’kyi,[34] the former director of the Huliaipole Local History Museum Liubov Hen’ba, and the musician Anatolii Serdiuk,[35] amongst others.</strong>
<strong>Verstiuk</strong>
This is a difficult question. I don’t see a contradiction between national and regional memories—they correlate with each other in one way or another. National memory absorbs certain parts of regional memory. I remember how, in 1999, the 110<sup>th</sup> anniversary of the birth of Nestor Makhno was commemorated in Huliaipole. A relatively large crowd gathered in front of the state administration building. The rally began, and it turned out that it was divided into three factions, each claiming primacy in using Makhno’s name and appropriating it for their own use. The first of these was the head of the local administration as a representative of the state. The second was composed of local Cossacks, who emphasized their kinship with the “Bat’ko,” and the third was the anarchists, who came from Kharkiv specifically and also had their own vision. By the way, at that time there was no consensus among the locals in their assessment of the Makhnovshchyna.
Speaking of appropriation, I would like to note the fierce struggle between Russian and Ukrainian historians over this historical phenomenon. The Russians go out of their way to make the Makhnovshchyna part of their historical myth. Ukrainian historians defend the movement as a Ukrainian phenomenon. Mind you, I disagree that it was the Zaporizhzhian and Huliaipole activists who were the first to resurrect the memory of the Makhnovshchyna. It started with Kyiv, with the works of V. Volkovyns’kyi and my own in the early 90s, and only then did Zaporizhzhia and Huliaipole join in.
Has Nestor Makhno grown in national memory to the level of Mykhailo Hrushevs’kyi,[36] Volodymyr Vynnychenko,[37] Symon Petliura, and Pavlo Skoropads’kyi? Obviously not. How did this affect his memory? Today, I found out that only one street bears Makhno’s name, located in Dnipro. A petition was registered on the website of the President of Ukraine to rename a street in the capital after Makhno. In four years, it collected 44 signatures out of the required 25,000. But I’m sure this story is not finished yet because not only does the past affect the present, but the present also flexibly changes its ideas about the past. Let us recall, for example, the Holodomor of 1932–1933,[38] which has shifted from decades of silence and denial to being recognized as one of the most defining events of twentieth-century Ukrainian history.
<strong>Savchenko</strong>
The process of the “privatization of memory” and the popularity of regional figures increased after 2000. It can be said that Makhno’s sympathizers are especially residents of the Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia regions of Ukraine, and inhabitants of Huliaipole. At the same time, residents of Right Bank Ukraine are often prejudiced against the Makhno movement, considering it as destructive to national liberation from 1917 to 1921. Kyiv is divided approximately in half. The “old” historical school and people of the older generation have some prejudices, while young people often perceive Makhno as a figure of protest discourse (“punk and goth”).
<strong>Azarov</strong>
I have not studied the processes of historical politics in Poland, but the modern state view of history described in your question is definitely not congenial to me. From my point of view, history should be as truthful and detailed as possible and not distorted to suit the needs of this or that government and its views on the development of the state. The dispute can only be about the lessons and useful skills that modern society can learn from the events and political movements of the past.
I personally acquainted myself with the history of the Makhnovist movement not from books by local historians but from the personal recollections of its participants and the early memoirs of representatives of the political forces that competed with it, then compared these accounts against the works of Soviet historians, document collections, and studies of the post-Soviet period. The works of local historians are undoubtedly important, but, in my opinion, they are more focused on the grassroots level of family histories and rarely reflect the full scale and depth of socio-economic processes in the expansive territories covered by the Makhnovshchyna, and for me, this is the basis for understanding the movement and its goals and slogans that inspired a large layer of the population to fight.
<strong>Dubovik</strong>
No, I wouldn’t say I’ve observed anything like that. Makhno was and remains the central figure in local history in the Zaporizhzhia region. There likely haven’t been any fundamentally new developments in that sense. By the way, people from other regions did much more to bring the topic of Makhno and the Makhnovshchyna to the national level back in the late 1980s. In 1988 and 1990, Savchenko from Odesa and Verstiuk from Kyiv published the first scholarly works on the subject since the 1920s.
<strong>Kravets</strong>
The processes you mention can be applied quite well to post-Soviet Ukraine.
<strong>Over time, such well-known cultural figures as Andrii Ermolenko,[39] Serhii Zhadan,[40] Antin Mukhars’kyi,[41] and Les Poderv’ians’kyi[42] have drawn attention to Makhno by creating an image of him as a fighter for social justice with a national component. Artistic works, songs, and comics started to appear. I am aware of several theatrical productions. Today, even in entertainment programs, such an image is present.[43] In Zaporizhzhia, the regional folk art festival “Volnytsia” was dedicated to the Makhnovist legacy,[44] and in 2021, in Starobil’s’k, the “Wind of Anarchy” music festival was dedicated to the Makhnovshchyna. Of course, the most prominent and controversial example is the so-called Makhnofest[45]—organized by the creative association “Last Barricade” together with Oles Donii[46] (who wanted to “Ukrainianize Makhno after his death so that he could become the foundation for a new southeastern Ukrainian identity”).</strong>
<strong>The Polish cultural scholar Andrzej Szpociński believes that “today we are dealing with a phenomenon of the theatricalization of language, culture, and messaging. And the issue of historical truth takes a back seat.”[47] In turn, according to the leading researcher of memory, Aleida Assmann, contemporary art aims not at commemoration but at a critical analysis of memory.[48] This is connected to the widespread interest in identity and traumatic experiences of the past. Where does “Independence Day with Makhno” and other manifestations of memory culture related to the Bat’ko fit into all of this? Is Nestor Ivanovych at risk of “Che Guevara-ization”?</strong>
<strong>Verstiuk</strong>
In my opinion, a lot of different and not always compatible things are involved in this issue. Do I need to explain that academic science and historical memory are different things that develop according to their own laws and often do not intersect but exist as parallel worlds? I might agree with the notion of historical truth if someone could explain to me what it is. As for Aleida Assman’s view, in my opinion, art does not deny remembrance, no matter how critical it is. Perhaps it changes its forms, makes it more modern, and adapts it to the optics of the public. It is possible that something is distorted or mythologized in the process. I’m convinced that one way or another, Makhno’s image will find its place in modern Ukrainian identity.
<strong>Savchenko</strong>
Makhno is included in the image of the Ukrainian “Robin Hood”—the image of a fighter for social justice with an element of national significance. This was facilitated not only by historians, journalists, singers, and writers but also by some political figures (Yurii Lutsenko[49] and Oles Donii, who were the initiators of the “Independence Day with Makhno” festivals, which took place in Huliaipole during the term of President Iushchenko). It’s also necessary to note the creative association “The Last Barricade” (where Donii and Serhii Zhadan were the leaders). Indeed, Makhno was a national hero who sought to build and protect an alternative model of an independent Ukraine—a “labour federation.” Makhno has already taken a worthy place in the pantheon of great Ukrainian historical figures. He has already partially become an element of collective identification for Ukrainians. The Maidan revolutions of 2004 and 2013—2014, the movement of volunteers, the self-organization of society, the value of personal freedom in modern Ukrainian discourse… in many ways, these are Makhnovist “themes.”
<strong>Azarov</strong>
From your questions, I get the impression that you look at Makhno and his movement from the perspective of representatives from the national-conservative camp, its historians, cultural figures, and politicians. Yes, in today’s Ukraine, with the targeted support of the state, this ideology has occupied a monopoly position, having displaced or suppressed the entire rest of the political spectrum, including anarchists—the guardians of the Makhnovist legacy. In fact, nationalism today has a monopoly here, comparable to the past dominant role of Soviet ideology. But, as in the USSR, this does not mean that its view of the Makhnovshchyna is objective. I have been working in Ukrainian politics for thirty years and remember all the diversity of the discourse of the previous period about the history of Ukraine and the role of its historical figures, including Makhno.
Here, it is extremely important to take into account that the Makhnovshchyna was fundamentally an international movement, as its direct participants, including the Bat’ko himself, have repeatedly written about. Therefore, the nationalists’ view of the Makhnovist movement and their propaganda of the Makhnovshchyna through cultural events suffers from fragmentation and bias. They try to single out some moments in the movement that are congenial to them and promote them as the basic meaning of this mass phenomenon of the multinational population of south-eastern Ukraine from that historical period. In essence, this is the process of Makhno’s “posthumous Ukrainization.” And the real Makhnovshchyna is a social, not a national identity. It is a model of society, and for the sake of achieving this, the region’s inhabitants joined the movement. Therefore, people of different nationalities—Ukrainians, Russians, Jews, Greeks, Bulgarians, Crimean Tatars, and even Chinese—fought and worked in its ranks.
<strong>Dubovik</strong>
I’m deeply distrustful of the work done by such cultural workers and all these festivals and artistic projects. Here, I’m speaking as an (anti-)political activist, not as a historian (and certainly not as a cultural theorist). For these people, the main goal has always been to draw attention to their own creative work by instrumentalizing a topic that appeals to a mass audience—the entertaining story of a “social bandit” from the relatively recent past (a hundred years ago).
For me, the goal is to communicate what all of it was for—what these people wanted, what remains of their dreams and goals today, and what might still be relevant for the future. Simply put, people from the cultural sector approach the topic like sales managers looking for customers. In contrast, my comrades and I approach it as anarchists, aiming to spread our views and attract new supporters under the same black flag the Makhnovists once fought under.
It is telling that we—actual, present-day anarchists and the successors of Makhno’s vision—have not once been invited to any of these cultural events. We have always had to organize our own.
Is Makhno threatened with “Che Guevera-ization”—that is, as I understand it, the creation of a rather artificial, distorted image, a photogenic “icon” almost entirely stripped of ideological and political content? Unfortunately, yes, that seems like the most likely scenario for the near future. Thankfully, at the very least, Makhno’s popular appeal hasn’t taken on the traditional Soviet form of memory like so many others. He hasn’t become the central character in a whole series of jokes, as has happened with Lenin, Vasilii Chapaev, or even Maksim Gorky.
<strong>Kravets</strong>
I can’t comment on “Independence Day with Makhno” right now. The war needs to end before we can discuss this topic concretely. As for the so-called “Che Guevarization” of Makhno, it clearly does not pose a threat. It is neither on the same level nor in the same historical period.
<strong>Since we touched on the question of identity, the question arises: how does Makhno fit into contemporary Ukraine? In the West, he is undoubtedly one of the most famous Ukrainians in history.[50] Does he have a chance to take his rightful place in the pantheon of great Ukrainian historical figures? Or is he already considered as such?[51] For example, according to the political scientist Ihor Losev, the “against all” phenomenon [<em>protivsikhstvo</em>] is nothing other than “a serious national illness of the Ukrainian mentality.”[52] Others, especially the aforementioned cultural figures, defend the “anarchistic” nature of the Ukrainian people.</strong>
<strong>What if, for Ukrainians, Makhno becomes what the French historian Pierre Nora calls a “site of memory” (a symbol of collective identification, which acts as a type of landmark for important values operating in the public consciousness at a particular moment in history)? Does it seem to you that instead of acting as a carrier of values that initially emphasized his “importance” (as an anarchist, peasant hero, and military genius), he is now beginning to function in the public consciousness as an example of new (or perhaps re-actualized) values (as a fighter against Russian/Soviet imperialism, a symbol of Ukrainian identity, and an example of a distinct type of statehood)?</strong>
<strong>Verstiuk</strong>
Indeed, the world knows Ukraine more through Makhno than through Hrushevs’kyi or Skoropads’kyi. This is due to the popularity of anarchism in the interwar period. However, the myth of Makhno and the real Makhno are quite different. The myth of Makhno absorbed much of the collective activity that was part of the Makhnovshchyna. Makhno’s word was far from the last and final; many issues in the army were resolved collectively by the Revolutionary Military Council of the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine (Makhnovist), even without the participation of the Bat’ko. Over the last hundred years, the world, including Ukraine, has changed significantly. It’s not certain that today’s challenges can turn Makhno into a symbol of identity. His movement contained much that is profoundly peasant and Ukrainian, which is challenging to combine with the modern, urbanized world. Nevertheless, the Makhnovist movement and its leader provide a wealth of lessons that should be learned and assimilated. On the other hand, it’s worth remembering that the Ukrainian Revolution was a time of searching for Ukraine, with fierce competition between various models. Hrushevs’kyi’s Ukraine differed from Skoropads’kyi’s Ukraine, Ievhen Petrushevich’s Ukraine,[53] Makhno’s Ukraine, and the steppe Ukraine of the heirs of the Zaporizhzhian Sich.
<strong>Savchenko</strong>
Makhno is one of the leaders in popularity among Ukrainian figures of the 20<sup>th</sup> century. All Ukrainians know about him, like Taras Shevchenko[54] or Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi[55]… the situation is worse with Skoropads’kyi or Roman Shukhevych.[56] Since 1990, there has been a positive dynamic in the growth of Makhno’s popularity, and this is a fact. He has become a “people’s alternative” to a government of corruption, nepotism, and oligarchy… Ukrainians know very well what has ruined Ukraine for thirty years of independence, and it is not only the Russian Federation. Makhno has become a symbol of the eternal struggle of the new against the old.
<strong>Azarov</strong>
I believe that the term “against-all” [<em>protyvsikhstvo</em>], as applied to the Makhnovshchyna, is used by people who are illiterate in the history and ideology of the Makhnovist movement and who do not understand its goals and objectives. Anarchism, in general, and the Makhnovshchyna in particular, worked on the development of society, not the state. Therefore, any state regimes that came to the lands controlled by the Makhnovists were considered by them exclusively from the point of view of the possibility of coexistence with local organs of stateless self-government. The Bolsheviks conducted the most cunning and flexible policy in relation to the Makhnovshchyna, trying to use it against common enemies while giving in return the necessary weapons and ammunition, without which the Makhnovists would have lost their region. During the time of such alliances, the Makhnovshchyna could coexist with Soviet power, but only as long as the Bolsheviks did not try to liquidate Makhnovist organs of self-government. Neither the White Guard nor the national-republican bourgeois regimes provided such an opportunity for coexistence. That is the whole secret of the cooperation of the Makhnovists with the Bolsheviks. The Makhnovshchyna was not an appendix to this or that project of statehood on the lands of the former Russian Empire. It was a new independent project of social organization and therefore opposed other projects that interfered with its implementation.
It was in the context of this experience of socio-economic construction that Makhno firmly took his place long ago in the history of not only Ukraine but all humanity. The world’s first large-scale experiment of anti-authoritarian (<em>bezvlastnogo</em>) self-government, the organizational core of which was the Union of Anarchists of the Huliaipole region with Makhno at the helm. It was a completely new political phenomenon, albeit not fully completed. According to the assessment of the chairman of the Makhnovist Military Revolutionary Council, Volin, at the peak of the movement in the autumn of 1919, it covered territories with a population of up to seven million people, almost a third of the population of Ukraine at that time. The development of self-organization and social independence of the broad masses of people and the arrangement of their own lives without the intervention of authorities is the most important set of skills or social technologies. In the modern period of rethinking the role and functions of the state in economically developed countries in the context of globalization, such technologies should be in high demand to retrain post-Soviet society. Unfortunately, Ukraine is now in a catch-up stage of development, trying to go through the stage of nation-building, which was relevant for advanced countries in the 19<sup>th</sup> century, which is why these skills remain undeveloped.
Therefore, Makhno is not about modern Ukraine, where there is neither real competition between different ideologies nor public discussion based on a pluralism of opinions. Makhno is about a Ukraine of the future—I hope, the near future. The foundational principles of Makhno’s Anarchist Labour Federation, including grassroots initiative, multiculturalism, and social self-reliance, can become an excellent alternative to the current state of Ukrainian society, with its linguistic, cultural, and social conflicts that undermine solidarity from within.
Concerning Makhno as a fighter against Soviet or Russian imperialism, he also fought against the Austro-German invasion, against the troops of Hetman Skoropads’kyi, the Ukrainian Directory, and even against the Entente landings. Therefore, as a symbol of identity, it is more important not against whom but for what he fought so that this tendency will develop in Ukraine, of course, in a manner attuned to the present situation. The current government welcomes the introduction of mutual aid and technologies of self-government, so these “new Makhnovists” have something to defend from both Russians and space aliens. On the contrary, if the government constantly cuts back on the social gains for which the RPAU/m fought and continues to drive ordinary Ukrainians into poverty and lawlessness, the question inevitably arises: how does such a symbol of identity correspond to what is happening in the rear, while the “new Makhnovists” defend the country at the front? Well, and if this new identity is expected to do without the social component of the Makhnovshchyna, the question arises: How is it expressed then? When the social ideal, slogans, and methods of today’s activists, cultural figures and politicians, who declare themselves to be Makhno’s heirs, look, for example, like those of Banderites, without any other Makhnovist features except for the flag and the tachanka, then it becomes clear to an outside observer that these are not Makhnovists, but Banderites in disguise.
<strong>Dubovik</strong>
Actually, in my estimation, he’s already become a “site of memory.” Streets are being named after Makhno, which, by the way, violates the decommunization law. Makhno, as a “general”—that is, a brigade commander in the Red Army—should not be used for new place names according to the law. Military units are being named after him, and in Huliaipole, there’s long been a monument to him, unveiled with the involvement of both local and central authorities. Once again, I’m not a fan of this kind of “legitimization,” but we’ll see how it turns out.
On the other hand, the inclusion of Makhno in the “pantheon” of great Ukrainians clearly provokes displeasure from the right wing of the Ukrainian national movement (for whom the main heroes of that time are Pavlo Skoropads’kyi and Petro Bolbochan).[57] These people take every opportunity to point out how Makhno fought against Ukrainian statists and claim that Makhno bears responsibility for the defeat of the Ukrainian (statist) revolution in its confrontation with Bolshevik Russia. The most hardline among them even try to dismiss Makhno as nothing more than a “common bandit.” At present, these views remain fairly marginal. What happens next—we’ll see.
<strong>Kravets</strong>
Makhno will never become a symbol of collective identity for Ukrainians for a wide range of objective reasons.
<strong>The question of the relationship between the Makhnovist movement and statehood also sparks heated discussion. If the position of anarchists on this question is clear, the fascination with Makhno by the representatives of other political tendencies is more interesting. For example, far-right figures Dmytro Korchyns’kyi[58] and the late Illia Kyva’s fascination for Nestor Ivanovych is well known,[59] and a frontline unit of the ultranationalist Right Sector was named after Makhno. Even the Kyiv police are now issuing medals named after Makhno,[60] and one of Makhnofest’s organizers was Oleksandr Korniienko (head of President Zelens’kyi’s Servant of the People Party from 2019 to 2021).[61] Of course, there are those who criticize the Makhnovshchyna as practically and ideologically untenable, but there are also those who attempt to synthesize it with various manifestations of nationalism.</strong>
<strong>Aside from the above-mentioned examples, ten years ago, an attempt was made by the Lviv left-wing nationalist organization, “Autonomous Resistance.”[62] In turn, the director of the Center for Anti-Oligarch Policy, Volodymyr Lartsev,[63] believes that “only the ideology of Ukrainian solidarism formulated on the basis of Makhno and Lypynsky’s ideas of a ‘union of farmsteads [<em>khutora</em>],’ ‘free councils [<em>soviety</em>],’ and ‘an empire of communities [<em>hromady</em>]) supported at the state level, is capable of gluing together the visibly decaying integrity of our country.”[64] The philosopher and political strategist Andrii Okara,[65] among others, positions himself likewise. Not to mention that the Makhno monument in Huliaipole was unveiled by Ihor Lutsenko, the Minister of Internal Affairs at the time and that the Nestor Makhno Society “Huliaipole” was founded in 1998 by Anatolii Ermak, a member of the Ukrainian parliament and a former intelligence officer.[66] In turn, Borys Oliinyk,[67] a member of the Communist Party of Ukraine, helped publish an important book on Makhno,[68] while the future Party of Regions member Ivan Shufrych was involved in attempts to rebury Makhno.[69] Is this a sincere interest in Makhno, a complete misunderstanding of the Makhnovshchyna’s ideas, or a mercantile exploitation of this figure, as Azarov suggested in his article “My Makhnovshchyna”?[70]</strong>
<strong>Verstiuk</strong>
I’m convinced that outside of academic historical science, which is also pluralistic, there is no deep, objective, and adequate understanding of the Makhnovshchyna. There’s the bright, publicly attractive historical figure of Makhno, and there’s a broad and deep popular movement connected with him that attracts society’s different perspectives, which, at the same time, gives politicians the opportunity to use the Makhnovshchyna in their own interests. There’s not much you can do about that. It’s necessary to see who does it sincerely, with a deep understanding, and who is simply exploiting a popular brand.
The same can be said about Azarov’s article. His main task is to deprive the Makhnovist region of its Ukrainian roots. He sees the movement as a purely anarchic phenomenon. But it is not so. Ideological anarchists were present in the movement, but they were a drop in the peasant sea. The insurgent movement was based on the peasantry’s struggle for land and on opposition to the Bolshevik policy of “war communism,” which actually expropriated the peasants. Undoubtedly, the Makhnovshchyna was a specific Ukrainian phenomenon because it arose on Ukrainian soil. Outside its borders in Russia, it lost strength and popular support, was perceived as something foreign, and forced the Makhnovists to return to Ukraine. Note the name of the Makhnovist Army—the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of <em>Ukraine</em> (Makhnovists). Another thing is that the movement was not nationalist. Let’s understand the difference between national and nationalist. In addition to Ukrainians, there were also Greeks, Jews, Russians, and Germans in the army. This is an undeniable fact, but what was the relationship between them? Ukrainians in Katerynoslav province comprised 70% of the population, and the rest belonged to forty other ethnic groups.
<strong>Azarov</strong>
Your list of representatives of different political camps interested in the Makhnovist legacy is exactly what I wrote above about the diversity of historical discourse in past years. However, after Maidan, serious changes took place in Ukraine, largely confirming the suspicions expressed in my article that you mentioned. That part of the left movement and anarchists who had the courage to defend their ideals were subjected to cruel persecution for criticizing the post-Maidan government and the anti-social reforms it carried out. In order to create for the West an image of democracy and the people’s consent for liberal economic shock therapy, the government did not suppress such protests with the police; they were attacked by ultra-right groups working under the protection of the Special Services.
Our rallies were dispersed in the same way. In 2014, our Makhnovist march, traditionally held on Nestor Ivanovych’s birthday, was banned in Odesa. Personally, in 2016, I spent six months in the hospital and walked on crutches after an attack by nationalists at the event of the Liberation Day of Odesa from the Nazis.[71] In 2018, in Lviv, the ultra-right attacked the anarchists of the “Black Banner,”[72] and there were attacks in Kyiv and other cities as well. The anarchists were persecuted for defending self-government, labour, and the social rights of Ukrainians. In fact, for their Makhnovist ideals, they have been driven underground and have not been allowed to raise their heads for years. Consequently, they find themselves politically and economically crushed, and their cells have fallen apart.
Of course, such methods of “communication” with the modern bearers of Makhnovist ideology cause a maximum of mistrust for any synthesist proposals put forward by the nationalists and raise suspicions of a cynical attempt to absorb the Makhnovist legacy—to bleed and crush a competitor and then appropriate his assets. It is no secret that Ukrainian nationalism’s darker pages of history, such as the Volyn massacre, are very negative for Western neighbours, and especially for Poland. Therefore, the nationalist proposal for synthesis can be considered in the context of searching for a new shell for mass ideology without changing any domestic or foreign nationalist policies. However, the Makhnovist movement is world-famous and well-studied, so its flag cannot be used in service of a diametrically opposed policy. The international historical community and the anarchist movement will quickly expose and condemn such a fake. Therefore, no anarchist or recognized historian-Makhnovist will agree to this forgery, risking disgrace and an indefinite boycott by their social circle.
Nevertheless, I have long and repeatedly proposed that the image of Makhno and his movement is the most promising historical reference point for gluing Ukraine together, which is racked by internal conflicts. However, in order to bring together the different ideological poles of the Ukrainian political class, anarchists must have equal rights and opportunities. Anarchist political organizations (not to be confused with youth subculture) are not only the guardians of the Makhnovist heritage but also try to adapt its developments to modern society, to implement those same technologies of mutual aid and self-reliance which are in great demand today as a result of the dismantling of the state’s social institutions, military devastation, and poverty. This means that practical attempts at such rapprochement should be preceded by anarchists’ return to the country’s political life and their access to the media and resources for restoring their groups and implementing social projects of the adapted Makhnovshchyna.
If under such conditions, looking into the practical formation of this new Makhnovist identity, we must understand that such a process has its own reasonable boundaries of compatibility. In a totalitarian society, the leader is obliged to look from behind every wall and broadcast from every station. For the Makhnovist theme, for example, the existing police detachment named after Makhno is an obvious oxymoron. Makhnovist policemen! What will happen next, Makhnovist jailers, Makhnovist censors, Makhnovist oligarchs? This is the fastest way to discredit the new identity. We need to leave alignment with the Bat’ko for the development of Ukrainian society, the rise of its initiative and enthusiasm in the post-war restoration of the country, and not mix it with state symbols, law enforcement, and state security structures that come into sharp conflict with Makhnovist ideals. In a developed democracy, officials and police agencies must be equidistant from all ideologies.
As for the aforementioned attempts to synthesize the Makhnovshchyna with “various manifestations of nationalism,” we must understand what exactly is meant by that. Coercion based on the principle of ethnic majority, xenophobia, the hypertrophied glorification of national identity, and the prohibition of other local cultures—all this is incompatible with Makhnovist principles of coexistence. On the contrary, if we combine Makhno’s model with the proposed idea of a “union of farmsteads,” from such a synthesis follows the equality of central and local cultural traditions, i.e. cultural self-governance. At the same time, the historical Makhnovshchyna never opposed itself to Ukrainian culture. The Makhnovist Cultural-Education Department held concerts on Taras Shevchenko’s birthday, and one of the most famous Ukrainian songs, “Unharness the horses, lads,” was composed by the Makhnovist artilleryman Ivan Nehrebits’kyi.[73] Anarchist tendencies are also compatible with what is called “civic nationalism” in the West, where citizens actively participate in political decision-making and government through plebiscites, referendums, and polls, thereby expressing the will of the nation. That is, it is possible to discuss the topic of synthesis, but for obvious reasons that have driven Ukrainian anarchists underground, any such dialogue would be of a cautious nature at the moment.
<strong>Dubovik</strong>
It’s all of these things at once, though for different people, different factors might dominate within the mix of their personal views. For Korchyns’kyi, for example, there was neither “genuine interest” nor “misunderstanding”—he deliberately appropriated Makhno into his ideology (or what passed for an ideology) of “The Brotherhood,” just as he did with Pol Pot and Mussolini. Shufrych was a mercenary exploiter of Makhno’s memory. And so on. Everyone approaches it differently.
<strong>Kravets</strong>
In my view, in all the mentioned cases, there is a mercantile use of Makhno’s persona, partly based on the personal interests of this or that individual.
<strong>The historian Volodymyr Chop considers Makhno the most popular leader among 20<sup>th</sup>-century Ukrainian figures, as evidenced by the enormous quantity of folklore associated with the anarchist. Makhno’s name is included in some book series about “great” Ukrainians, while he is absent in others. However, Makhno has consistently ranked high in sociological surveys of the “greatest Ukrainians.” For example, in the highly representative 2023 study, “Historical Memory: Results of a Sociological Survey of Adult Residents of Ukraine,” conducted by Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, Makhno was ranked 14<sup>th</sup> with 55% of respondents viewing him positively compared to 24% with a negative view.[74] At the same time, he still “lost out” to Symon Petliura, Roman Shukhevych, Stepan Bandera, and Pavlo Skoropads’kyi. It is also interesting to note that Makhno is known across all regions of Ukraine, but according to this survey, he is perceived more negatively in the east of the country than in other regions. Is it possible to speak of a positive trend in the growing popularity of Makhno, and are respondents’ answers influenced by the political situation in the country? How reliable are these types of surveys?</strong>
<strong>Verstiuk</strong>
This is probably a question for a sociologist, not a historian. I can say once again that the name of Nestor Makhno has been purged of previous negative Soviet connotations and that this is evidence of a positive dynamic. Now, everything will depend on the various means of interpretation. I see no reason for Makhno’s growing popularity as a successful partisan. It seemed that war could contribute to this, but the current war has a completely different character: no one fights with a tachanka and a sabre, and partisan tactics are not employed. Accordingly, what is needed is not a hero who is the people’s avenger with a grade school education but a hero armed with a military education and science, a modern general, let’s say, like Zaluzhnyi, who understands and defends the interests of the state.
<strong>Azarov</strong>
In modern society, the popularity of a historical figure depends on the number of informational products about him. There are incomparably fewer such products about Makhno than about the statists of the nationalist camp. In addition, political opinion polls of recent years often sin by being commissioned in order to shape public opinion. And I cannot rule out that historical polls have the same goals. Of course, the political situation in the country directly affects the pantheon of historical figures promoted by the state; Makhno, with his self-government, is very inappropriate for the current processes of unitary centralization. I have not analyzed the change in the Bat’ko’s popularity, but according to the subjective impression of a historian and anarchist consistently interested in this topic, the peak of publications about the Makhnovshchyna on the internet occurred between 2008 and 2013.
<strong>Dubovik</strong>
There is a growth in popularity. Of course, it isn’t rapid, but it is quite real. It happens in leaps—like it did after the release of <em>The Nine Lives of Nestor Makhno</em>.
As for how much sociological research can be trusted—I can’t say. I’m not a specialist in sociology and know next to nothing about how these surveys are conducted or how their results are processed.
<strong>Kravets</strong>
No kind of growth in Makhno’s popularity can be observed. The survey respondents’ answers are in no way connected to the political situation in the country, and such research is not particularly trustworthy anyway.
<strong>I know that there are relatively few commemorative symbols of the Makhnovshchyna across the country (correct me if I am wrong—approximately five streets and around ten plaques and signs), but all of them have a pronounced geographical character tied to southeastern Ukraine.[75] In Huliaipole, they even have a tongue-in-cheek saying that as long as their Makhno monument stands, the city will not be occupied. At least two governors of the Zaporizhzhia region (A. Starukh and A. Peklushenko) spoke favourably of Makhno. In 2012, the latter announced a competition for the best play about the life and times of the anarchist. Do you think that streets should be named and monuments erected in the name of Makhno and his movement to give voice through a shared public space to this mythologized history?</strong>
<strong>Verstiuk</strong>
This is also a difficult question because of the alliances between the Makhnovists and the Bolsheviks. However, the movement cannot be reduced to cooperation with the Bolsheviks. From January 1920 to September, and later in 1921, they waged an active struggle against the Soviet authorities, not to mention the struggle against the Whites. Since the Makhnovshchyna is such an extraordinary phenomenon, it should be more closely integrated into the Ukrainian historical context and modern historical memory. Why not create a monument near the village of Perehonivka, where the Makhnovists defeated elite White Guard troops? Or in Dnipro (Katerynoslav), which the Makhnovist army defended for several weeks against attacks by the Whites?
<strong>Savchenko</strong>
I believe that there should be streets and monuments associated with the Makhnovshchyna in Kyiv, Odesa, and Kharkiv. Makhno’s life deserves a world bestseller and a TV series. One of the first to propose developing “Makhnovist tourism” was the conceptual artist from Odesa, Leonid Voitsekhov,[76] back in 1996 with the “Makhno-Land” program in Huliaipole.
<strong>Azarov</strong>
Regarding the shortage of memorial symbols of the Makhnovshchyna, I would like to remind you that in the process of thoughtless decommunization, memorials to anarchists were also destroyed. In Mariupol, the only monument to a Makhnovist from the Soviet period was first desecrated by the ultra-right, and, in 2016, it was torn down—the memorial to the battalion commander in the 1<sup>st</sup> brigade of the 1<sup>st</sup> Insurgent Division of Makhno, Kuzma Apatov.[77] In 2023, a monument to the famous anarchist sailor Anatolii Zhelezniakov,[78] whom Makhno greatly respected, was torn down in Verkhovtsevo. As for new memorials, I believe that in honour of the participants of the Makhnovist movement, they should not be part of a state program from above but an initiative from below, at the level of territorial communities, where, as a result of the truthful popularization of such historical images, there will exist a desire to create memorial sites for the inspiration of contemporaries. Then, it will be a sincere impulse and not the imposition of yet more idols.
<strong>Dubovik</strong>
There are probably a few more streets named after Makhno now, but I haven’t been keeping track.
As an anarchist, I’m opposed to naming streets and erecting monuments. I’ve said it before, and I still believe it: the best way to honour Makhno’s memory would be to revive a mass movement based on the same ideas that Makhno and his comrades fought for. Everything else is, at best, an empty gesture—and at worst, a distortion.
<strong>Kravets</strong>
Since I’m generally opposed to naming streets after various figures, accordingly I am against naming anything after Makhno. A commemorative plaque or marker is appropriate enough.
<strong>In December 2019, a memorial cross was solemnly unveiled in the village of Osypenko (formerly Novospasivka) in the Berdiansk district to honour the soldiers of Nestor Makhno’s army who died in March 1919 in the struggle against the White Guards.[79] Priests of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine consecrated the monument. This is something of an exceptional case when it comes to commemorating the Makhnovists. Why is it that Nestor Ivanovych himself is presented as either a hero or a villain while many brilliant Makhnovist commanders—and even more so, the thousands of rank-and-file supporters—remain in his shadow?</strong>
<strong>Verstiuk</strong>
The naming of streets and the establishment of monuments are the prerogative of local authorities. As far as I know, the name “Makhno” is on the list of recommended names for renaming objects in public spaces. Why local authorities avoid this name should be asked. Obviously, Soviet inertia is still in effect. Why do Makhnovists such as Bilash, Kurylenko, Vdovychenko, and Havrylenko remain in the shadow of Makhno?[80] This is also an obvious shortcoming of those professional historians who failed to identify the personal participation of these commanders in the history of the struggles of the RPAU(m). We don’t have extensive biographies of these people, often not even birth dates. By the way, the figure of Petliura also quite strongly shadows other active participants in the struggle for independence.
<strong>Azarov</strong>
I would like to note that the cross is an unusual symbol for the Makhnovists, as they had a complicated relationship with the Church; the clerical theme was not reflected in the Makhnovist movement. It should be remembered that Makhno was an atheist and tolerated religion only so far as not to cause unnecessary conflicts with the traditions of the local population.
As for the new monuments to other participants in the Makhnovshchyna—brilliant military leaders, bright orators of the Cultural-Educational Department, organizers of anti-authoritarian (<em>bezvlastnogo</em>) self-government, and ordinary fighters for the freedom of working people—they fall out of public attention due to the elitist leader-like model of perceiving the past, dominant in Ukrainian historical science, as well as the insufficient popularization of the Makhnovist movement. One can also talk about a deep misunderstanding of this mass phenomenon as its memoirists have repeatedly noted that the main figures of the Makhnovshchyna were not the leaders but the initiative-taking rank and file.
<strong>Dubovik</strong>
I believe this is both natural and inevitable (although unfortunate). The same thing happens to all movements as they fade into the past. We remember the names of Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi, Tadeusz Kościuszko, and Joan of Arc, for example, but the names of their comrades are known only to specialist historians or those who have recently read a book, watched a film, or played a video game on the subject.
New events— that is, history unfolding before us in real-time—gradually displace the “excess” details of older, long-passed history in collective memory. There’s simply no way around it.
<strong>There are quite a few documentary films about Makhno, but not so many when it comes to fictional portrayals.[81] Almost half a century ago, Vladimir Vysotsky was supposed to play the role of Makhno, but it never came to pass.[82] In 1993, the playwright and children’s author Yaroslav Stelmakh wrote a now-forgotten book, <em>Bat’ko: A Cinematic Tale</em>. I also came across information that negotiations with Robert DeNiro occurred, who was considered for the role of Nestor Ivanovych in a proposed film entitled <em>Anarchist</em>, based on a screenplay written in 1995 by the director and People’s Artist of Ukraine Volodymyr Savel’iev. However, Ukraine’s Deputy Minister of Culture and Arts of Ukraine, Anna Chmil, was “unable” to allocate half a million hryvnias for the film. Today, all we have is the 2007 Russian-produced TV series <em>The Nine Lives of Nestor Makhno</em>, which raises many questions about historical authenticity. In my humble opinion, a quality feature film about the Makhnovist movement has yet to be produced. Do you agree?</strong>
<strong>Verstiuk</strong>
Completely. There is a shortage of films not only about the Makhnovist movement but also on Ukrainian historical themes in general. This is a question for the authorities, who, for thirty years, kept Ukrainian culture and humanitarianism at a residual level, not understanding that this is a powerful tool in the formation of national identity.
<strong>Azarov</strong>
In the current condition of the Ukrainian state with its ideology of strict unitarism and nationalism, which brands any aspiration for self-government as separatism, I see the creation of a truthful feature film about the Makhnovshchyna as unlikely. State historians, receiving a salary from the state, can, of course, write any script ordered by the authorities. However, to depict the deep essence of the Makhnovist movement and its goals, which inspired the broad masses of different nationalities, it is necessary to change too much in the state’s ideology and the public perception that it fosters. Otherwise, such a film would end up being a shocking informational bomb. Nonetheless, I hope its creation will be a matter of the near future, when at least the first stage of forming a new Makhnovist identity, which we are discussing, will be realized.
<strong>Dubovik</strong>
I agree with one caveat—there is no quality film or TV series. In this case, “good quality” means that it would necessarily involve a historical consultant.
<strong>Kravets</strong>
This is a consequence of Makhno having become the symbol of the entire insurgent movement in our region. He led it from the beginning to the end, and the movement itself is named after him—the Makhnovist movement. The others, as they say, don’t count. Of course, such a situation is not right, but one must also take into account that very little information has been preserved about many of the movement’s commanders, let alone rank-and-file insurgents. This makes the popularization of their names and activities significantly more difficult.
<strong>In Dnipro, there is the “Underground Makhno Pub,” and I know that in 2020, the local historian Serhii Zvilins’kyi was working on opening a bar, hostel, and museum in Huliaipole.[83] Regional tourist routes were also in development (such as “For the Spirit of Makhnovist Freedom” in the Mezhivska community),[84] and there were discussions about building a memorial complex on the Haichur River.[85] Do you think “Makhnovist tourism” should be developed in Huliaipole and Zaporizhzhia after the war? Will Huliaipole take its symbolic place within the consciousness and memory not only of the southeastern regions but also of Ukrainian society as a whole?</strong>
<strong>Verstiuk</strong>
One can’t be of two minds here. As Lviv’s restaurant experience has shown, historical trends can boost business efficiency. Perhaps not all businessmen understand this or do not know how to organize their business creatively. Like movies, historical tourism is a method of patriotic education, delving into the country’s history. Unfortunately, here, too, the Ukrainian authorities are faltering. The Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance is trying to do something, but it’s too weak to move this case forward fundamentally. Notice how quickly the Poles restored the memory of Józef Piłsudski and his associates after the fall of the communist regime,[86] while Ukraine has been waiting for decommunization for almost thirty years. Maybe the war will change something in this situation.
<strong>Azarov</strong>
Of course, I welcome the development of tourism, festivals, and theme clubs—places of recreation dedicated to the Makhnovshchyna. However, with the obligatory condition that they contain the spirit of this movement not turn out to be a camouflage for ideas inimical to the Makhnovists or for trivial money-making. I think that with a comprehensive approach to popularizing the Makhnovshchyna, it will be perceived as a historical legacy of Ukrainian society as a whole. After all, many of its ideas were ahead of their time and are more than relevant today. In addition, the movement’s participants were immigrants from different regions of Ukraine and foreign countries, where it is possible to create memorial signs for their popularization. For example, the husband of Makhno’s comrade-in-arms, the famous anarchist Marusia Nikiforova,[87] was the Polish anarchist Witold Brzostek.[88]
<strong>Dubovik</strong>
Given everything that’s happening, we’ll be lucky if Huliaipole remains an actual city at all and doesn’t turn into a heap of ruins like Bakhmut and Avdiivka.
As for the question itself, “Makhnovist tourism” will develop (regardless of our wishes) if it proves profitable. I believe it will be, primarily thanks to European tourists rather than Ukrainians themselves. If Huliaipole becomes a significant tourist center, especially internationally, its symbolic importance is guaranteed.
<strong>Kravets</strong>
Yes, “Makhnovist” tourism is worth developing. However, I do not believe Huliaipole will take on a symbolic place in the consciousness and memory of Ukrainian society as a whole.
<strong>I actively follow events in Ukraine and, prior to the full-scale war, regularly visited the country. In 2019, I was lucky enough to visit Huliaipole and chat with the local population. Now, the city is on the frontline and has suffered extensive damage. Anarchists, Ukrainian soldiers, and Belarusian volunteers all take photos near the Makhno monument. Military units are even named after him, such as the N.I. Makhno Mobile Group for Small Arms Repair. In the new documentary <em>Huliaipole: The Homeland of Makhno and Anarchy | A Year on the Front Line</em>, one of the town’s elderly residents, when asked what side Makhno would be fighting on, answered that he would be on Ukraine’s side.[89] Do you agree with this statement? Can we say that the war has changed or will change Ukrainian attitudes toward Makhno?</strong>
<strong>Verstiuk</strong>
It’s obvious that the current war will become an extremely important event in the history of Ukraine. Time will be divided into before and after, and the war will nominate new heroes and give birth to new national myths. In fact, it has already given birth to them (the Heavenly Hundred, the Donetsk cyborgs, and the battles for Hostomel’, Bucha, and Moshchun).[90] It’s difficult to predict whether old heroes can withstand the competition of new myths. Recent history is always more interesting and understandable to people, while the distant past becomes a field for academic historical science. I have no doubt that Makhno would have fought on the side of Ukraine because this is his homeland. What connected him to Russia? His years spent in Butyrki prison? The Makhnovists fought against the Empire, for a new free democratic order. What could possibly attract them to contemporary Russia?
<strong>Savchenko</strong>
Makhno himself would have been in Ukraine’s volunteer battalions since 2014. I do not doubt that he would have defended his “free region” and the whole of “free Ukraine” from the aggression of the Russian Empire. Any attempts to make Makhno a “Novorossiian phenomenon” are ridiculous because from January 1919 to August 1921, he fought against Russian imperialism under the guise of Denikin, Vrangel, and Lenin.
<strong>Azarov</strong>
The question of whose side Makhno would have taken in this war is quite provocative for an inhabitant of the Ukrainian rear during the period of Russian aggression. And today, when there is so much blood and suffering, a negative answer would cause a negative reaction to both the respondent and to the Makhnovist topic in general. But at the same time, I urge you to understand why Makhno did not join the army of the Ukrainian People’s Republic even during the most acute period of the struggle against Denikin’s Armed Forces of South Russia in the fall of 1919[91] and why the temporary agreement with Petliura ended in a break and an accusatory appeal by the Makhnovists against the commander of the Directory’s troops. Makhno was certainly for Ukraine—but for a Ukraine of his own, with socio-economic arrangements aligned with his views. Moreover, the conditions of pre-war life in our country, with an increased oppression of Ukrainian workers, whom he defended, do not correspond to Makhnovist ideals in any way. Therefore, to answer this question with complete confidence, we must put Ukraine on the path of moving toward Makhno’s guiding principles.
<strong>Dubovik</strong>
Regarding the first question, we have a direct quote from Makhno, who truly loved his homeland and his people. I’ve cited it more than once—but strangely, as far as I know, I’m the only one to do so:
If our Bolshevik comrades come from Great Russia to Ukraine to help us in our difficult struggle against the counterrevolution, we must say to them: ‘Welcome, dear brothers!’ But if they are coming here with the aim of monopolizing Ukraine, we will say to them: ‘Hands off!’ [From Makhno’s report at the Second Regional Congress].[92]
For the second question, I can’t really say. I think there are too many problems in the present moment for people to think deeply about history, let alone radically reassess their attitudes toward historical events. In any case, attitudes toward Makhno are not likely to change for the worse—unless massive state resources and talented propagandists are thrown at it, and that seems unlikely in postwar Ukraine. There will be more pressing concerns. Besides, even the USSR, with its decades-long monopoly on education, culture, and everything else, failed to erase all sympathetic popular memory of the Makhnovshchyna. So, it’s hard to imagine that anyone will succeed now.
<strong>Kravets</strong>
Such comparisons are generally inappropriate, as Makhno lived in a completely different historical era. However, in my personal view, Makhno would definitely defend Huliaipole and its population from the Russian barbarians. The war has not changed attitudes toward Makhno in any way.
<strong>Makhno’s name appears in K.V. Ryzhov’s book <em>One Hundred Great Russians</em> (Moscow, 2000),[93] as well as in the 2008 <em>Rossiya</em> television channel’s project “Name of Russia.”[94] The late war correspondent Vladlen Tatarsky also identified as a Makhnovist.[95] A striking illustration of how contemporary Russia views Makhno is presented in the propagandist Arkady Mamontov’s program featuring professional historians, “Makhno and the ‘Makhnovshchyna’: Traces of the Empire.”[96] Even a historian of anarchism like Dmitrii Rublev[97] sometimes includes Nestor Ivanovych in the canon of “Russian anarchists” (for example, in his book <em>Russian Anarchism in the 20<sup>th</sup> Century</em> or in a recent article, where the author delicately avoids calling Makhno a Ukrainian anarchist).[98] Can we say that there are attempts by modern Russian historians and propagandists to “appropriate” Makhno and the Makhnovist movement, i.e., to make them a “Russian,” “Little Russian,” or “Novorossiian” phenomenon?[99]</strong>
<strong>Verstiuk</strong>
I’ve already partially touched on this topic. There is nothing surprising here when Russian propaganda, with one voice behind Putin, tries to deny the existence of Ukraine and Ukrainians, diminishing them in various ways, including by declaring Makhno an outstanding Russian and ignoring actual facts. I will only offer two counterarguments. On August 5, 1919, Makhno issued an order to restore/create the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine (Makhnovist). First of all, it stated: “The task of our revolutionary army and every insurgent who joined it is an honest struggle for the complete liberation of the working people of Ukraine from all forms of enslavement.” Russia is not mentioned here. Moreover, the “Draft Declaration of the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine” prepared by Volin outlined the anarchist vision of the development of revolutionary events and noted the fundamental difference between Ukraine and Russia. If, in Russia, the authorities managed to create a strong state apparatus that suppressed any manifestations of popular discontent with an iron hand, the situation was developing quite differently in Ukraine. The Draft Declaration reads:
<quote>
Since the end of the summer, all of Ukraine has been boiling with peasant uprisings and a broad insurgent movement against the Communist Party, which does not deserve the trust of the masses. The Third Revolution is approaching—it has already begun—which Ukraine has already entered… Ukraine is on the threshold of a real peasant and workers’ revolution. This is the main meaning of the events taking place. We, the Makhnovist insurgents, are only the children of this revolution, its servants and defenders.[100]
</quote>
That’s the whole answer to the question, although it can be expanded into a broader article.
<strong>Azarov</strong>
Several aspects are combined here, starting with the fact that it is quite difficult for Ukraine and Russia to historically separate the activists of the Ukrainian southeastern regions during the period of the Revolution and Civil War. The main fronts of the struggle between the Red and White armies, which decided the fate of Soviet power not only in Ukraine but also throughout the former Russian Empire, moved across these lands during this period. Denikin marched on Moscow through the Ukrainian Left Bank, and then Vrangel advanced from Crimea and threatened to join forces with the Polish troops. So, the battles here are also part of Russian history, which is closely intertwined with Ukrainian history. The same Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine (Makhnovists), having captured large territories in the rear of Denikin’s troops advancing on Moscow in the fall of 1919, diverted large forces from the Armed Forces of South Russia and thus played an almost decisive role in saving the power of the Bolsheviks in Russia.
On the other hand, in the ideological confrontation with Ukrainian nationalism in the Russian media sphere, one can see the opposition of the Makhnovist movement, which was internationalist and supported the free development and coexistence of different cultures in Ukraine. Thus, a compromise version of the ideological content of Ukrainian society is being promoted, which, from the Kremlin’s point of view, is more convenient for the coexistence of neighbouring countries that will be forced to live side by side because they cannot change geography. More radical politicians and propagandists of the Russian Federation declare the Makhnovshchyna a Russian phenomenon to justify their claims to the lands of southeastern Ukraine.
In this, they are helped by some Ukrainian politicians and the historical community, who do not welcome the popularization of Makhno and his movement, not considering them part of their historical and political development because otherwise, they will have to recognize the right of Ukrainians to engage in social struggle for Makhnovist ideals. Such bourgeois-nationalist categoricalness creates convenient preconditions for Russians to lay claim to the Bat’ko as part of their history. From this point of view, one can understand that the attitude towards the Makhnovshchyna and the competition for its legacy is not a narrow historical problem but a question of building the Ukraine of the future, what our society should be like with a real consensus of various development projects generated by its history. This issue should have been sorted out much earlier, and we would not have had as many of the current consequences of a one-sided political discourse. However, this was hampered by attempts to manipulate history and repress Makhno’s current followers to achieve immediate political gain. I hope the chance has not been missed.
<strong>Dubovik</strong>
By denying the independence of Ukraine and the Ukrainian people, Russian imperialists naturally view the Makhnovshchyna as part of Russia and the Russian people and historical figures of Ukraine as their own, as Russian. Nothing is surprising about that. They’re not even consciously “appropriating” anything—they genuinely believe that this Russian belonging is natural and that it simply couldn’t be any other way.
<strong>Kravets</strong>
Such attempts clearly take place and have been evident for a very long time. It is not just about Makhno. The so-called “Russians” shamelessly claim everything as their own that is in any way connected to the former Russian Empire.
*** Notes | ~~
<em>Translated and edited by Sean Patterson and Malcolm Archibald</em>
<strong>Aleksander Łaniewski</strong> (b. 1984) is a Belarusian-Polish historian, publicist, and anarchist. He works at the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences and has extensively published on the history of anarchism. Łaniewski is the author of the monograph <em>Intelektualne oblicza polskiego anarchizmu przełomu XIX i XX wieku.</em> <em>Augustyn Wróblewski, Józef Zieliński i Jan Wacław Machajski</em> [The intellectual faces of Polish anarchism at the turn of the 20<sup>th</sup> century. Augustyn Wróblewski, Józef Zieliński and Jan Wacław Machajski’], (Warszawa: Instytut Historii PAN, 2024).
<strong>Vladyslav Verstiuk</strong> (b. 1949) is a Ukrainian historian, professor, and the author of over 250 publications dealing with the Ukrainian Revolution, including <em>Kombrig Nestor Makhno</em> [Brigade Commander Nestor Makhno] (1989); <em>Makhnovshchyna: selianskyi povstanskyi rukh na Ukraini (1918—1921)</em> [The Makhnovshchyna: a peasant movement in Ukraine (1918—1921), (1991); and the chief editor of <em>Direktoriia. Rada Narodnikh Ministriv Ukrainskoi Narodnoi Respubliki 1918—1920. Dokumenty i materialy u 2 tomakh</em> [The Directory: Council of People’s Ministers of the Ukrainian People’s Republic 1918—1920. Documents and materials in 2 volumes] (2006).
<strong>Viktor Savchenko</strong> (b. 1961) is a Ukrainian historian, professor, and author of over 300 publications, mostly dealing with the history of anarchism, including <em>Makhno</em> (2005); <em>Diialnist’ anarkhist’kikh organizatzii v Ukraini y 1903—1929: istorichnii aspect ta politichna praktyka</em> [The activity of anarchist organizations in Ukraine in 1903—1929: historical aspect and political practice] (2017); and <em>Anarkhisty Odesy, 1917—1937</em> [Anarchists of Odesa, 1917—1937] (2020).
<strong>Vyacheslav Azarov</strong> (b. 1964) is a Ukrainian socio-political activist, journalist, historian, and the leader of the political party Union of Anarchists of Ukraine. He is the author of <em>Kontrrazvedka: The Story of the Makhnovist Intelligence Service</em> (2008); <em>Starobel’skoe soglashenie</em> [The Starobil’s’k Agreement] (2011); <em>Anarkhiia na iuge. Anarkhisty iuzhnyi guberniia byvshei Rossiisskoi imperii v bor’be za seobshchee samoupravlenie 1917—1918</em> [Anarchy in the South. Anarchists of the southern provinces of the former Russian Empire in the struggle for universal self-government, 1917—1918] (2021).
<strong>Anatolii Dubovik</strong> (b. 1972) is a Ukrainian anarchist activist, a member of the Nestor Makhno Revolutionary Confederation of Anarcho-Syndicalists, journalist, and researcher of the history of anarchism. He is the author of many articles, and a founder and participant of such online projects as <em>Russian socialists and anarchists after October 2017</em>, https://socialist.memo.ru/; <em>Anarchists in the USSR and later: from ‘perestroika’ until today</em>, https://www.facebook.com/groups/1661041757571542/; and <em>History of anarchism on the territories of the former Russian Empire and the USSR,</em> https://www.facebook.com/groups/2990629131201367.
<strong>Yurii Kravets</strong> (b. 1972) is an independent Ukrainian researcher and the author of many articles on the Makhnovshchyna and the history of anarchism in Zaporizhzhia.
<strong>Malcolm Archibald</strong> is a researcher of anarchism and the translator of many books in the field. He operated Black Cat Press in Edmonton, Canada, from 1972 to 2022. Archibald is the editor and translator of the first English edition of Nestor Makhno’s three-volume memoirs: <em>The Russian Revolution in Ukraine</em> (2007), <em>Under the Blows of the Counterrevolution</em> (2009), and <em>The Ukrainian Revolution</em> (2011).
<strong>Sean Patterson</strong> is a PhD candidate at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada and an assistant editor and translator with the <em>Forum for Ukrainian Studies</em>. His dissertation research investigates the identity and ideology of the Makhnovist movement during the Ukrainian Revolution. Patterson is the author of <em>Makhno and Memory: Anarchist and Mennonite Narratives of Ukraine’s Civil War, 1917–1921</em> (University of Manitoba Press, 2020).
[1] For example, see “Military Personnel: Nestor Makhno (1888–1934),” <em>Pantheon</em>, https://pantheon.world/profile/person/Nestor_Makhno#metrics.
[2] “Ideinyi vybir: ‘Chy ie Makhno natsionalʹnym heroiem Ukrainy?’” [An ideological Choice: “Is Makhno a National Hero of Ukraine?”], Shuster online, 6 July 2016, 1 hr. 30 min. 52 sec., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAf8lU5AG1g.
[3] For an interesting discussion by historians, see “Nestor Makhno—voroh rosiian i ‘batʹko’ ukraintsiv” [Nestor Makhno—Enemy of the Russians and “Bat’ko” of the Ukrainians], Ukrains’kyi media-tsentr, 1 September, 2023, 1 hr. 10 min. 30 sec., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ho6jbqy5mnA.
[4] I am familiar with at least two plays: the first tragi-grotesque called “Nestor Makhno,” directed by I. Borys and L. Toma, opened in March 2003 at the Zaporizhzhia Academic Regional Ukrainian Music and Drama Theatre named after Volodymyr Magar; the second one entitled “Black and red, or the Mariupol Treasure of Nestor Makhno,” directed by K. Dobrunov,” was performed in November 2009 at the Donetsk Academic Regional Drama Theatre in Mariupol (subsequently destroyed by the Russians in March 2022). “Chornoe i krasnoe, ili Mariupol’skii klad Nestora Makhno,” Sergei Zabogonskii, 28 August 2015, 1 hr. 50 min. 34 sec., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqYPlOrmANw.
[5] “V Kieve s vystavki sniali kartinu “Svoboda ili vce idut na kh*i” (Foto)” [In Kyiv the painting “Freedom or Everyone F*ck Off” was removed from exhibition], <em>UA-Reporter.com</em>, January 20, 2010<em>,</em> https://ua-reporter.com/news/v-kieve-s-vystavki-snyali-kartinu-svoboda-ili-vse-idut-na-hy-foto; T. Gonchenko, “V Dnipropetrovske otkrylas’ vystavka kartin pro Nestora Makhno” [An exhibition of paintings about Nestor Makhno opens in Dnipropetrovsk], <em>Gorod.dp.ua</em>, 23 January 2012,https://www.gorod.dp.ua/news/69509.
[6] “Zatochnoi tochilo + shlifoval’nyi 1500 Vatt_Nestor Makhno_Disc Sander + Bench Grinder_Nestor Makhno,” Anatolii Vostok, 16 October 2020, 12 min, 29 sec. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFxqdi7BmPw.
[7] To list just a few examples: R. Sambuk, <em>Makhno</em> (Kyiv: Ukrains’kyi kultur dukhovnoi kul’tury, 1997); V. Savel’yev, <em>Makhno. Ostannia pravda</em> [Makhno. The Last truth] (Kyiv: Ukrains’kyi kultur dukhovnoi kul’tury, 1997); S. Reviakin, <em>Huliaipole</em> (Dnipropetrovsk, 2007); A. Pobazhnyi <em>Kam’ianyi voin</em> [Stone Warrior] (Zaporizhzhia, 2014); Yurii Pliasovytsia, <em>Zhinocha pastoralʹ Nestora Makhna</em> [A Women’s pastoral of Nestor Makhno] (Vinnitsia, 2020). A novel by a Polish writer was also recently translated into Ukrainian: S. Lubens’kyi, <em>Stepovyi pirat</em> [Steppe Pirate] (Chernivtsi: Knyhy-XXI, 2025).
[8] “Iushchenko uvidel makhnovshchinu v ukrainskikh sudakh” [Yushenko saw the Makhnovshchyna in the Ukrainian courts], <em>Focus</em>, 31 October 2008, https://focus.ua/politics/28806.
[9] <em>“</em>Makhnovshchyna,” in <em>Russkoiazychnyi zhargon. Istoriko-etimologicheskii tolkovyi slavar’ prestupnogo mira</em> [Russian Jargon. A Historical-Etymological Explanatory Dictionary of the Criminal World], edited by Z.M. Zugumov, (Moscow: Knizhnyi mir, 2015), 352.
[10] <strong>Novorossiia</strong> (New Russia) was a historical term used by the Russian Empire to designate a region in southern Ukraine that was annexed and colonized by Catherine II in the late-18<sup>th</sup> century after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the region and the repression of the Zaporizhzhian Cossacks. The term has resurfaced and been invoked by Putin in the context of Russia’s current occupation of southern and eastern Ukraine in a crass attempt to claim these regions as historically “Russian.”
[11] About Huliaipole before Russia’s full-scale invasion, see “Batʹkivshchyna Makhna. Huliaipole /SELOVIE/” [The Fatherland of Makhno. Huliaipole], Hromadske TB Zaporizhzhia, 21 October 2017, 17 min. 30 sec., https://youtube.com/watch?v=OMCVDhb7cAc;Ie. Rudenko and E. Sarakhman, “Volia abo smert’. Chym zhyve Huliaipole – bat’kivshchyna anarkhista Nestora Makhna”<em></em> [Freedom or death. How does Huliaipole live— the homeland of Nestor Makhno], <em>Ukrains’ka pravda</em>,<em></em> 9 October 2020, https://www.pravda.com.ua/articles/2020/10/9/7269307/; N. Zvorygina,”Huliaipole. Where one man is an Island,” <em>Decentralization</em>,<strong></strong> 11 May 2022, https://decentralization.ua/en/news/14913.
[12] Some Armed Forces members are inspired by the figure of Makhno to create art. The exhibition of the painting “Nestor Makhno” by Oleksandr Kanibor (call sign “Artist”), Captain of the 35<sup>th</sup> Separate Marine Brigade named after Rear Admiral Mykhailo Ostrograds’kyi, took place in Mezhova (Dnipropetrovsk region) in 2023. The painting was presented to the residents and visitors of Mezhova region and dedicated to the 135<sup>th</sup> anniversary of Makhno’s birth. Golred, “Makhno povertaiet’sia?!…” [Makhno returns?!…], <em>Mezhivs’kyi meridian</em>, 22 March 2023, https://m-merydian.com.ua/nasha-istoriya/u-mezhovij-vidbulasya-prezentacziya-kartyny-nestor-mahno-kapitana-morskoyi-pihoty-z-pozyvnym-hudozhnyk-oleksandra-kanibora/.
[13] See Sean Patterson, <em>The life, death, and resurrection of the Nestor Makhno monument</em>, <em>Freedom</em> News, 20 September 2024, https://freedomnews.org.uk/2024/09/20/the-life-death-and-resurrection-of-the-nestor-makhno-monument/.
[14] Ustym Karmaliuk (1787–1835) was the leader of peasant rebellions in Right-Bank Ukraine, a popular hero of Ukrainian folklore and literary works.
[15] Andrea Graziosi (b. 1954), Italian historian, expert on the history of the USSR, peasant movements, and the Holodomor. Author of many publications, including <em>The Great Soviet Peasant War: Bolsheviks and Peasants, 1917–1933</em> (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
[16] Symon Petliura (1879–1926), Ukrainian social-democratic and nationalist politician, journalist, and chairman of the Directorate of the Ukrainian National Republic, from November 1920 in exile.
[17] Stepan Bandera (1909–1959), Ukrainian nationalist politician, a leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, officially recognized as a “national hero” by Ukraine.
[18] The Russian terms used here are <em>blagorodnyi pazboinik</em> and <em>udachlivyi pazboinik</em>, literally “noble robber” and “lucky robber,” which roughly approximate the English archetypes of the “social bandit” and “dashing rogue.”
[19] <em>The Nine Lives of Nestor Makhno</em> is a Russian 12-episode series directed by Nikolai Kaptan. The title role was brilliantly played by Pavel Derevyanko. Despite a number of historical errors and inaccuracies, the series presented the ideas of anarchism and the figure of Makhno in a positive light.
[20] Valerii Volkovinskii (1948–2006) was a Soviet and Ukrainian historian and the author of <em>Makhno i ego krakh</em> [Makhno and his downfall] (Moscow: VZPI, 1999) and <em>Nestor Makhno: legendi I realʹnist’</em>[Nestor Makhno: legends and reality] (Kyiv Perlit prodakshn, 1994).
[21] Volodymyr Chop (b. 1971), Ukrainian historian, lecturer at Zaporizhzhia National Technical University, researcher of the Makhnovist movement, and the author of many monographs and articles, including <em>Nestor Makhno: Ostannii selians’kyi heroi</em> [Nestor Makhno: The Last Peasant Hero] (Kyiv: Mystetstvo, 2019); in co-authorship with Ihor Lyman, <em>«Vol’nyi Berdyansk»: misto v period anarkhists’koho sotsial’noho eksperymentu (1918–1921 roky)</em> [“Free Berdyansk”: a city in the period of the anarchist social experiment (1918–1921)] (Zaporizhzhia: Tandem-U, 2007); <em>Mistsiamy pam’iati pro povstans’kykh peremoh u Zaporoz’komu krai: Azovs’ka operatsiia Nestora Makhna</em> [Local memories of insurgent victories in the Zaporizhzhian region: the Azov operation of Nestor Makhno] (Zaporizhzhia, 2017); with Ihor Lyman <em>Nashchadky zaporozhtsiv: Makhnovsʹkyi rukh u Pivnichnomu Pryazovʹi (1918–1921 rr.)</em>[Descendants of the Zaporozhians: the Makhnovist movement in Northern Azov Region (1918–1921)] (Melitopol: TOV “VB Melitopol’s’koi mis’koi drukarni,” 2019). Unfortunately, V. Chop declined to participate in this survey.
[22] ” Metodychni rekomendatsii do 100-richchia Ukrainsʹkoi revoliutsii 1917–1921 rokiv” [Methodological Recommendations for the 100<sup>th</sup> Anniversary of the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917–1921], <em>Ukrains’kyi instytut natsional’noi pam’iati</em>, 6 March 2017, https://uinp.gov.ua/informaciyni-materialy/vchytelyam/metodychni-rekomendaciyi/metodychni-rekomendaciyi-do-100-richchya-ukrayinskoyi-revolyuciyi-1917-1921-rokiv.
[23] Volin [Vsevolod Mikhailovich Eikhenbaum] (1882–1945), outstanding anarchist theoretician and activist of Russian and Jewish origin, journalist, and editor. Author of the fundamental work <em>La révolution inconnue, 1917–1921</em> (Paris: Les Amis de Voline, 1947).
[24] <strong><em>Bat’ko</em></strong> literally means “father” in Ukrainian, but often conveys a tone closer to “papa.” Historically, the Cossacks used the term for their military leaders to signify paternal authority and leadership. In Ukrainian peasant culture, it was similarly applied to respected elders and community figures, indicating wisdom and charasmatic leadership. In revolutionary Ukraine, various local military leaders were given the title Bat’ko by their supporters—the most famous of which was Bat’ko Makhno, despite only being in his early 30s at the time.
<br><br>
<strong><em>Otaman</em></strong>, also of Cossack military origins, was a title adopted by numerous local strongmen, roughly equivalent to “warlord.” The otamans often acted independently of—or in loose alliance with—the main armies of the civil war. As a phenomenon of the period (the so-called <em>otamanshchyna</em>)they were seen as an unpredictable and disruptive element.
[25] Dmytro Arkhireys’kyi, (b. 1968), Ukrainian historian, professor, researcher of the Ukrainian Revolution and insurgent movements, author of <em>Makhnovsʹka veremiia: ternystyi shliakh Revoliutsiinoi povstans’koi armii Ukraiini (makhnovtsiv), 1918–1921 rr.</em> [The Makhnovist whirlwind, the thorny path of the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine (Makhnovist), 1918–1921] (Kyiv: Tempora, 2015)
[26] Pavlo Skoropads’kyi (1873–1945), Ukrainian military and political figure, or head of the Ukrainian state (or Hetmanate) as a protectorate of Austro-Hungary and Germany (April–December, 1918).
[27] During the Ukrainian Revolution, the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UPR), along with the West Ukrainian People’s Republic (WUPR), constituted the Ukrainian state as a whole, of which the Directory was the highest governing body. The UPR was headed successively by Mykhailo Hrushevs’kyi, Volodymyr Vynnychenko, and Symon Petliura.
[28] Hennadii Yefimenko (b. 1971), Ukrainian researcher, worker at the Institute of the History of Ukraine of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Regretfully declined to participate in this survey.
[29] The Confederation of Anarchist Groups of Ukraine Nabat (1918–1920) was the largest Ukrainian organization of anarchists cooperating with the Makhnovist movement. After its dissolution by the Bolsheviks, it operated in the underground.
[30] R. Traba, “Polska i niemiecka kultura pamięci” [Polish and German Cultures of Remembrance], <em>Interakcje Leksykon komunikowania polsko-niemieckiego</em>, http://www.polska-niemcy-interakcje.pl/articles/show/44.
[31] R. Traba, “Społeczne ramy czytania historii” [The Social Frameworks of Reading History], in <em>Przemiany pamięci społecznej a teoria kultury</em>, edited by B. Korzeniewski (Poznań: Instytut Zachodni, 2007), 43–65.
[32] A. Szpociński, “O współczesnej kulturze historycznej Polaków” [On Contemporary Polish Historical Culture], in <em>Przemiany pamięci społecznej a teoria kultury</em>, 25–42.
[33] Viktor Ialans’kyi (1940–2003), a paternal great-nephew of Nestor Makhno. In the 1970s and 1980s, he collected materials materials related to Makhno, for which he came under the scrutiny of the KGB. Co-author of the important book, V. Ialans’kyi and L. Ver’ovka, <em>Nestor i Halyna. Rozpovidaiut’ fotokartky</em> [<em>Nestor and Halyna. As Told through Photographs</em>] (Kyiv: Iarmorok, 1999).
[34] Volodymyr Zhylins’kyi (1930–2016), publicist and resident of Huliaipole, co-author (with writer and local historian Ivan Kushnirenko, b. 1946) of numerous popularizing publications about Makhno and Huliaipole including <em>Hop, kume, ne zhurys’: narodna tvorchist’ pro Makhna i makhnovtsiv</em> [Hey bud, don’t worry! Folk culture about Makhno and the Makhnovists] (Zaporizhzhia: Dniprovs’kyi metalurg, 2008); <em>Nestor Makhno i povstantsi. Slidamy makhnovtsiv</em> [Nestor Makhno and the Insurgents. In the Footsteps of the Makhnovists] (Zaporizhzhia: Dniprovs’kyi metalurg, 2009); and <em>Nestor Makhno i “Soiuz bidnykh khliborobiv”</em> [<em>Nestor Makhno and the “Union of Poor Peasants.” The Beginning of the Revolutionary Struggle]</em>(Zaporzhzhia: Dniprovs’kyi metalurg, 2010).
[35] Anatolii Serdiuk (b. 1961), musician and journalist from Zaporozhzhia, composer of a number of songs with Makhnovist themes.
[36] Mikhailo Hrushevs’kyi (1866–1934), Ukrainian historian and politician, freemason, and head of the Ukrainian People’s Republic in 1917–1918.
[37] Volodymyr Vynnychenko (1880–1951), Ukrainian politician, writer, and head of the Directory of the Ukrainian People’s Republic in 1918–1919.
[38] The Holodomor (literally “death by hunger”) was an artificial famine orchestrated by the Stalinist regime in 1932–1933 on the territory of Ukraine, leading to the death of between 3.5 and 5 million Ukrainians. It was part of the broader Soviet Famine (1930–1933), which devasted regions of Russia and Kazakhstan, leading to the death of another 4 million victims. The Holodomor can be understood as a component of the Soviet regime’s broader campaign of political repression and the forced collectivization of peasants.
[39] Andrii Ermolenko (born 1974), Ukrainian painter, best known for his projects <em>Ziobart</em> and <em>Mama Anarkhiia</em>. The latter decorated the barricades of Euromaidan.
[40] Serhii Zhadan (b. 1974), famous Ukrainian writer and musician, participant of Makhnofest, and the author of <em>Anarchy in the UKR</em> (Wołowiec: Wydawnictwo Czarne, 2007).
[41] Antin Mukhars’kyi (b. 1968), Ukrainian musician, writer and showman. In 2014 he recorded the album <em>Mama-Anarkhiia</em> with the “anarcho-band” HraBlya, which contains strong Makhnovist themes. He was the curator and creator of the Union of Free Artists “Freedom or Death.”
[42] Les Poderv’yans’kyi (b. 1952), Ukrainian writer, artist and satirist, organizer and participant in Makhnofest. In a social media post positively comparing the Makhnovshchyna to the American Wild West he proclaimed in all caps, “The Makhnovshchyna is in the blood of Ukrainians and that’s what we need: no one imposing on you, no one telling you what to do, you have a lot weapons, and you have to follow your instincts and that of your community. A sense of responsibility is awakened.” Facebook post, 3 February 2022, https://www.facebook.com/poderviansky/photos/a.808464475966835/2745762645570332/?type=3.
[43] A satirical show about Makhno from February 26, 2023 has had almost 110,000 views: “Makhno i Ukrains’ka anarkhiia | Rozkazhy Istoriiu #9” [Makhno and Ukrainian Anarchy | Tell the Story #9], Tochka Zboru, 26 February 2023, 44 min. 57 sec., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOXYUUSjZok.
[44] The festival aimed at reviving, popularizing, and preserving Ukrainian songs, folklore, and folk art. It was started in 2007 by the then chairman of the district state administration of Huliaipole, member of the Party of Regions Oleksandr Dudka. The event was usually held on Makhno’s birthday.
[45] The musical and literary underground festival “Independence Day with Makhno” (the so-called Makhnofest) was a cultural event held under the slogan “The officials celebrate in Kiev, and true Ukrainians go to Huliaipole.” It was organized in Huliaipole from 2006 to 2009 and near Kyiv in 2010, where it hosted theater performances, film shows, concerts, performances, literary competitions, and exhibitions. The festival was criticized by anarchist circles for distorting and profaning anarchism and Makhnovist ideals, as well as attempting to nationalize Makhno and privatize the Makhnovist movement. During the event, there were public statements of a Russophobic and anti-Semitic nature.
[46] Oles Donii (born 1969), Ukrainian politician, journalist and cultural activist, deputy of the Supreme Rada of Ukraine, and head of the Creative Association “The Last Barricade.”
[47] M. Mikrut-Majeranek, “Jak mówić, żeby zainteresować młodych historią? Odpowiedzi na to pytanie szukano podczas pierwszego dnia Kongresu Pamięci Narodowej” [How to interest young people in history? Answers to this question were sought during the first day of the Congress of National Remembrance] <em>HistMag.org</em>, 13 April 2023, https://histmag.org/Jak-mowic-zeby-zainteresowac-mlodych-historia-Odpowiedzi-na-to-pytanie-szukano-podczas-pierwszego-dnia-Kongresu-Pamieci-Narodowej-25476.
[48] A. Assman, “Spaces of memory<em>.</em> Forms and transformations of cultural memory,” in <em>Collective and cultural memory. Contemporary German perspectives</em>, ed. M. Saryusz-Wolaka (Kraków: Towarzystwo Autorów i Wydawców Prac Naukowych “Universitas,” 2009), 115.
[49] Yurii Lutsenko (b. 1964), Ukrainian politician, deputy of the Supreme Council of Ukraine, Minister of Internal Affairs (2006, 2007–2010), and Prosecutor General of Ukraine (2016–2019).
[50] Last year, even Maryna Khonda, Deputy Head of the Kyiv City state Administration for Self-Governance, stated that a Makhno street would soon appear in Paris (!). Maria Kataieva, “U Paryzhi z’iavytʹsia vulytsia Nestora Makhna, — Maryna Khonda [A Nestor Makhno Street Will Appear in Paris—Maryna Khonda], <em>Vechirniy Kyiv</em>, 15 March 2023, https://vechirniy.kyiv.ua/news/80006/.
[51] Iana Osadcha, “Levko Luk’ianenko i Nestor Makhno: v Ukraini rozshyryly spysok diiachiv, imenamy iakykh rekomenduiut’ nazyvaty vulytsi” [Levko Luk’ianenko and Nestor Makhno: Ukraine has expanded the list of figures whose names are recommended for streets], <em>Ukrains’ka</em> <em>pravda</em>, 28 June 2022, https://life.pravda.com.ua/society/62baae6d8e7b9/.
[52] <em>Protivsikhstvo</em> refers to the phenomenon of a relatively large number of Ukrainians voting for the “against all” option on their ballots. See I. Losiev, “‘Protyvsikh’ Makhno ta ins ...” [“Against all” Makhno and others ...], <em>Ukrains’kyi tyzhden’</em>, February 9, 2013. https://tyzhden.ua/protyvsikh-makhno-ta-inshi/.
[53] Ievhen Petrushevych (1863–1940), Ukrainian lawyer, politician, and leader of the West Ukrainian People’s Republic in 1919.
[54] Taras Shevchenko (1814–1961), Ukrainian scholar and hero of the people, painter, and social activist.
[55] Bohdan Khmel’nyts’kyi (1595–1657), Zaporozhian hetman, leader of the Cossack uprising against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1648–1657, and national hero of Ukraine.
[56] Roman Shukhevych (1907–1950), Ukrainian military and political activist, one of the leaders of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, accused of military crimes and ethnic cleansing.
[57] Petro Bolbochan (1883–1919), Ukrainian soldier, commander of the Ukrainian Nationalist Army, shot for conspiracy to remove Petliura.
[58] Dmytro Korchyns’kyi (b. 1964), Ukrainian politician, writer, social activist, leader of the “Brotherhood” party, and co-founder of the far-right UNO-UNSO (Ukrainian National Assembly–Ukrainian People’s Self-Defense) party. He has often spoken positively about Makhno. On December 22, 2006 in Dnipro, without permission from the local authorities, placed a commemorative plaque on the facade of the Astoria Hotel, which in 1919 housed Makhno’s headquarters.
[59] Illia Kyva (1977 – 2023), Ukrainian politician, employee of the MSW, member of the Right Sector, and former leader of the Socialist Party of Ukraine. From 2019, he was a member of the pro-Russian Opposition Platform—For Life. After February 22 2022, he fled to Russia, where he was murdered, probably by the Security Service of Ukraine. He played Makhno in <em>Posttravmatychna rapsodiia</em> [Post-traumatic Rhapsody], based on D. Korchins’kyi’s 2016 theater play. See “Posttravmatychna rapsodiia,” Dmytro Korchins’kyi, 25 August 2020, 1 h. 7 min. 23 sec., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QofU8IysFHE.
[60] As a curiosity, it can be added that twenty years ago, the publishing house of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Academy of Internal Affairs in Luhansk published a book about the Makhnovshchyna and people’s legal consciousness: O. N. Atoian, <em>Volia k pravu. Issledovaniia makhnovshchiny i narodnogo pravosoznaniia</em> [The Desire for law. An Investigation of the Makhnovshchyna and popular legal-consciousness], Luhansk 2003.
[61] Oleksandr Korniienko (b. 1984), Ukrainian politician, leader of the Servant of the People party (2019–2021), and the first deputy chairman of President Zelens’kyi’s Servant of the People Party.
[62] “Po ulitsam L’vova proshel Marsh voli v chest’ anarkhista Nestora Makhno” [The March of freedom in honour of Nestor Makhno took place along the streets of Lviv], <em>Strana.ua</em>, 5 November 2017. https://strana.today/news/103028-novosti-ukrainy-po-ulitsam-lvova-proshel-marsh-voli-anarkhista-nestora-makhno-.html.
[63] V’iacheslav Lypyns’kyi (1882–1931), Ukrainian historian, publicist, and conservative thinker.
[64] V. Lartsev, “Kakaia ideologiia sposobna perezagruzit’ ukrainskuiu gosudarstvennost’? Chast’ I” [What Ideology Can Reboot Ukrainian statehood? Part I], <em>Khvylia</em>, 9 June 2020, https://hvylya.net/analytics/208967-kakaya-ideologiya-sposobna-perezagruzit-ukrainskuyu-gosudarstvennost-chast-i.
[65] Andrii Okara (b. 1959), Ukrainian political scientist, philosopher, and publicist. During the first Makhnofest, he gave a lectureentitled<strong>“</strong>Makhnovist anarchism as the dominant system of statehood in the future,” in which he synthesized and popularized the far-right UNA-UNSO Party, Makhno and Khmel’nyts’kyi.
[66] Anatoli Ermak (1955–2003), Ukrainian politician, officer of the KGB and SBU, deputy in the Ukrainian Parliament.
[67] Borys Oliinyk (1935–2017), Soviet and Ukrainian poet, politician, and social activist, deputy of the Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian Parliament), decorated a Hero of Ukraine, and member of the Communist Party of Ukraine,.
[68] V. Ialans’kyi and L. Ver’ovka, <em>Nestor i Halyna</em>. <em></em>
[69] Nestor Shufrych (b. 1966), Ukrainian politician and entrepreneur. In 2006–2007 and 2010 he served as Minister of the state Service of Ukraine for Emergency Situations, member of the Party of Regions (2007–2014) and Opposition Platform—For Life, and owner of the Zakarpattia Uzhhorod football club. Currently accused of state treason, he is in a pretrial detention centre.
[70] V. Azarov, “Moia Makhnovshchyna”[My Makhnovshchyna], https://www.makhno.ru/st/108.pdf.
[71] “V drake na Lidersovskom bul’vare postradal lider odesskikh anarkhistov” [The leader of the Odesa anarchists was injured in a fight on Lidersovsky Boulevard], <em>Pervyi gorodskoi</em>, 10 April 2016, http://web.archive.org/web/20160417062249/https://1tv.od.ua/news/14336.
[72] “Vo L’vove ul’trapravye napali na aktivistov anarkhistskoi organizatsii” [Members of the ultra-right attacked activists of an anarchist organization in Lviv], <em>Hromadske</em>, 24 September 2018, https://hromadske.ua/ru/posts/napadenye-ultrapravykh-na-aktyvystov-anarkhystskoi-orhanyzatsyy-vo-lvove.
[73] Ivan Nehrebitskyi (1896–1950), musician, Makhnovist, exiled by the Bolsheviks to Magadan, where he died.
[74] Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, “Istorychna Pam’iat’. Rezulʹtaty sotsiolohichnoho opytuvannia doroslykh zhyteliv Ukrainy” [Historical Memory: Results of a Sociological Survey of Adult Residents of Ukraine], <em>KIIS</em>, January 2023, https://www.kiis.com.ua/materials/news/20230320_d2/UCBI_History2023_rpt_UA_fin.pdf.
[75] There are two monuments in Huliaipole (2008, 2009), one in Nikipol (2009), one on the balcony of the Rudnev house in Starobil’s’k (2013), and one in front of the restaurant “Huliaipole” in the town of Novoselivka, Zaporizhzhia region (2013). Petitions (unsuccessful) to the city authorities regarding the name Makhno took place in Sumy and Zaporizhzhia (2019). There are streets named after Makhno in Huliaipole (2016), Dnipro (2015), Orikhiv (Zaporizhzhia region), the town of Borysivka (Zaporizhzhia region), and Nikopol (2023). Unsuccessful citizen petitions were also submitted to local authorities to rename streets after Makhno in Sumy (2017) and in Zaporizhzhia (2019).
[76] Leonid Voitsekhov (1955–2018), Odesa painter, activist, writer, and theoretician of art. He wrote about his project “Misteria Machny” [The Mystery of Makhno] in L. Voitsekhov, <em>Proekty</em> (Kyiv: Vozdvizhenka, 2016).
[77] Kuzma Apatov (1896–1919), Russian soldier, revolutionary, without being a member of the RKP(b) commanded the Mariupol Soviet Shock Battalion (later a regiment). According to Yuri Kravets, Apatov was not a Makhnovist, but operated in the zone controlled by Makhno’s Trans-Dnieper Brigade. During the formation of Apatov’s regiment, local insurgents sympathizing with Makhno ended up in it.
[78] Anatolii Zelezhniakov (1895–1919), Russian anarchist, sailor, participant in the 1917 revolution, commander of Soviet troops, died in battle with the Whites. Mistakenly considered a Bolshevik.
[79] Anna, “Na Berdyanshchyni vshanovano pamʺyatʹ makhnovtsiv, shcho zahynuly u borotʹbi z bilohvardiytsyamy” [In Berdyansk, the memory of Makhnovist residents who died in the fight against White Guards was commemorated], <em>MIG</em>, December 9 2019, https://mig.com.ua/na-berdjanshhini-vshanovano-pam-jat-mahnovciv-shho-zaginuli-u-borotbi-z-bilogvardijcjami/
[80] Viktor Bilash (1883–1938), Chief of Staff of the Makhnovist army, and the author of A. V. Belash and V. F. Belash, <em>Dorogi Nestora Makhno</em>[The Odyssey of Nestor Makhno], Kyiv 1993. Arrested and executed by the Soviets in 1938. Vasilii Kurylenko (1891–1921), anarchist, Makhnovist commander, and the head of the administrative-organizational Department of the Council of the Makhnovist army. Died in battle fighting against the Red Army. Trofim Vdovichenko (1889–1931), soldier, commander of the 2<sup>nd</sup> Azov Corps of the Makhnovist army, shot by the Bolsheviks. Petr Havrylenko (1883–1938), anarchist, commander of the 3<sup>rd</sup> Katerynoslav Corps of the RPAU, shot by the Bolsheviks.
[81] For example, <em>Néstor Makhno, paysan d’Ukraine</em>(1996)directed by Hélène Chatelain. For an English subtitled version see “A Peasant from Ukraine: A Portrait of the Anarchist Nestor Makhno,” A Radical Guide, 10 March 2022, 1 hr. 26 sec., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFLpefjeK1g. Also see “Nestor Makhno—Petrushka russkoi revoliutsii (1997)” [Nestor Makhno—Petrushka Doll of the Russian Revolution], Otchestvennaia Dokumentalistika, 1 January 2018, 1 hr., 8 min., 37 sec., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UGB_ZbDSco; “Neproshcheni—Nestor Makhno (2007)” [Unforgiven—Nestor Makhno], RadianskaUkraina, 11 December 2011, 50 min., 11 sec., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHvPVodgnM0; “Istoriia Nestora Makhno. Ia nesu smert’. Dokumental’noe kino Leonida Mlechina” [The Story of Nestor Makhno: I Bring Death. A Documentary Film by Leonid Mlechin] (2012), Tsentral’noe Televidenie, 27 November 2020, 38 min. 16 sec., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ptB9CsPlL0; “Father Makhno and Ukrainian Anarchy // History Without myths,” Istoriia Bez Mifiv, 4 November 2020, 23 min., 2 sec., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DggnyP0u0tM.
[82] About this and about the journey of the famous Soviet bard to Huliaipole see D. Karapetian, <em>Vladimir Vysotskii. Vospominaniia</em> [Vladimir Vysotsky: Memoirs] (Moscow: Zakharov, 2002), 180–208.
[83] Lilia Bila, “Bar, khostel i muzei pid odnym dakhom. Huliaipilʹsʹkyi istoryk prydumav, iak zberehty istorychnu budivliu,”
<br><br>
[A Bar, hostel and museum all under one roof. A Huliaipole historian has figured out how to preserve an historical building], <em>Huliaipole.city</em>, 29 August 2020, https://gylyajpole.city/articles/97325/bar-hostel-i-muzej-pid-odnim-dahom-gulyajpilskij-istorik-pridumav-yak-zberegti-istorichnu-budivlyu.
[84] A. Logunov, Po sledam bat’ki Makhno: na Dnepropetrovshchine opredeleny luchshie turmarshruty
<br><br>
[In the footsteps of Bat’ko Makhno: the best tourist routes in the Dnipropetrovsk region], <em>Vidkrytyi</em>, 1 October 2021, https://opentv.media/po-sledam-batki-mahno-na-dnepropetrovshhine-opredeleny-luchshie-turmarshruty.
[85] Vlad, “V Zaporozhskoi oblasti poiavitsia ostrov batʹki Makhn”[In the Zaporozhia region an island named after Bat’ko Makhno is going to appear, <em>MIG</em>, 11 September 2021, https://mig.com.ua/v-zaporozhskoj-oblasti-pojavitsja-ostrov-batki-mahno/.
[86] Józef Piłsudski (1867–1935), leader of the Polish Socialist Party, and Poland’s first Chief of State from 1918–1922, played a key role in regaining Poland’s independence in 1918, and successfully defended Poland in the Polish-Soviet War (1919–1921).
[87] Maria (“Marusia”} Nikiforova (1887–1919), legendary Ukrainian anarchist, commander of a revolutionary insurgent detachment, participant of the Makhnovist movement.
[88] Witold Brzostek (1885–1919), Polish anarchist, during the civil war in Russia participated in legal and underground anarchist formations in Moscow and Ukraine, executed by the Whites in Crimea together with his wife M. Nikiforova.
[89] “Huliaipole: Nestor Makhno is the father of anarchy. A Year on the Front Line,” Thickets, 31 March 2023, 40 min. 9 sec., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJ3MnhyGtN0.
[90] <strong>The Heavenly Hundred</strong> refer to the 107 protesters murdered by the Ukrainian government during the Maidan Revolution in 2014. Most of the casualties were caused by police snipers on February 20, which is now commemorated as the Day of Remembrance of the Heroes of the Heavenly Hundred.
<br><br>
<strong>The Donetsk cyborgs</strong> refers to the Ukrainian volunteer fighters who defended the Donetsk International Airport against pro-Russian forces from 26 May 2014–22 January 2015. One hundred Ukrainian soldiers died in the course of the defense operation.
[91] Armed Forces of the South of Russia (Volunteer Army), anti-Bolshevik armed forces under the command of Anton Deniken during the Civil War of 1919–1920, later transformed into the Russian Army under the command of Baron Pyotr Vrangel.
[92] “Protocol 2-go Guliai-Pol’skogo raionny s”ezd frontovikov, Sovetov, i podotdelov, sostoiavshegosia 12 fevralia 1919 g.v.s. Guliai-Pole. 19 fevralia 1919 g.” [Minutes of the 2<sup>nd</sup> Huliaipole District Congress of Frontline Soldiers, Soviets and Subdepartments, held on February 12, 1919 in the village of Gulyai-Pole. February 19, 1919], in <em>Nestor Makhno. Krest’ianskoe dvizhenie na Ukraine. 1918–1921: Dokumenty i materialy</em>, ed. V. Danilov and T. Shanin (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2006), 80
[93] K. Ryzhov, <em>100 velikikh rossiyan</em> [100 great Russians], (Moscow: Veche, 2000).
[94] Arina Borodina, “Nestor Makhno, Bogdan Khmel’nitskii i drugie velikie russkie [Nestor Makhno, Bogdan Khmel’nitskii and other great Russians], <em>Kommersant</em>, June 9 2008, https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/900798
[95] Vladlen Tatarsky [real name Maksim Fomin] (1982–2023), Russian war blogger and writer born in Makiivka, member of the Donetsk People’s Republic militias. He was killed on April 2, 2023 in St. Petersburg by an explosive device. On March 13 2023, in the building of the state Duma of Russia, he participated in the signing of the so-called “memorandum on the end of the civil war in Russia.” (!) Among the signatories: Dmitrii Kuznetsov and Nikolai Novikov (A Just Russia – Patriots – For Truth Party), Roman Antonovsky (monarchists), Aleksei Chadaev (close to an unknown right-left LKPN), Herman Sadulaev (Bolsheviks), Vladlen Tatarsky (Makhnovists-anarchists—sic!), Andrei Korobov-Lalyntsev (SRs). In addition, Anastasia Udaltsova (Communist Party of the Russian Federation and Stanislav Naumov (Liberal Democratic Party of Russia) took part in the signing of the memorandum.
[96] “Makhno i ‘Makhnovshchyna’. Sledy Imperperii” [Makhno and the “Makhnovshchyna.” Traces of the Empire], Arcady Mamontov, 6 December 2022, 1 hr. 22 min. 2 sec., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_7WZGirr-M.
[97] Dmitrii Rublev (born 1981), Russian historian and anarchist, member of the Confederation of Revolutionary Anarcho-Syndicalists, lecturer at Moscow state University, author of many scientific publications, including <em>Russkii anarkhizm v XX veke</em> [Russian anarchism in the 20<sup>th</sup> century], (Moscow, Rodina, 2019); <em>Chernaia gvardiia, Moskovskaia federatsiia anarkhicheskikh grupp v 1917–1918 gg.</em> [The Black Guard, the Moscow federation of Anarchist Groups in 1917–1918] (Moscow: Common Place, 2020); and <em>Diktatura intellektulov? Problema “intelligentsiia i revoliutsiia” v rossiiskoi anarkhistskoi publitsistike kontsa XIX-nachala XX veka</em> [Dictatorship of the Intellectuals?The problem of “the intelligentsia and Revolution” in Russian anarchist discourse of the late 19<sup>th</sup>–early 20<sup>th</sup> Century] (Moscow: Moskovskii gosudarstvennyi universitet prirodoobustroistva 2020).
[98] D. Rublev, “N.I. Makhno i Makhnovskoe dvizhenie v otsenkakh rossiyskikh i ukrainskikh anarkhistov. 1918–1921 gg.” [N.I. Makhno and the Makhnovist movement in the assessments of Russian and Ukrainian anarchists. 1918–1921.], <em>Russkaia istoriia</em>, no. 6, (2023): 85–99.
[99] See the discussion by Russian historians about Makhno in 2015: “Nestor Makhno v istoricheskikh i sovremennykh obshchestvenno-politicheskikh diskussiiakh” [Memorial Society, Nestor Makhno in historical and contemporary social-political discussions], Obshchestvo “Memorial,” 22 November 2022, 2 hr., 34 min. 13 sec., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnHxcjlRvB8.
<br><br>
<strong>Little Russian (<em>malorusskii</em>)</strong> was a historical term used in the Russian Empire to refer to Ukrainians and the Ukrainian language. It reflected an imperial perspective that framed Ukraine as a junior or regional part of a greater Russian whole. The term is now considered offensive as it implies the lack of a distinct Ukrainian national identity.
[100] “Proekt deklaratsii revoliutsionnoi povstancheskoi armii Ukrainy (Makhnovtsev)” [Draft Declaration of the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine (Makhnovist)], in <em>Anarkhisty. Dokumenty i materialy. T. 2. 1917–1935</em>, eds. V. Danilov and T. Shanin (Moscow: ROSSPEN,1999), 354–361.
|
#title Resistance and mutual aid rather than doctrinarism and defeatism
#author Aleksander Łaniewski
#date 2023
#source Retrieved on 23<sup>rd</sup> January 2024 from [[https://kontradikce.flu.cas.cz/en/online-content/156][kontradikce.flu.cas.cz]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2024-01-23T16:42:27
#topics 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, resistance, mutual aid, pacifism, anti-militarism
#notes Aleksander Łaniewski is a Belarusian-Polish historian, publicist, and anarchist, he works at the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences and publishes heavily on the history of anarchism.
*** <em>Anarcho-pacifism</em>
In classical anarchist doctrine, the attitude towards armed conflicts between states was always negative. The war was perceived as a competition between states, elites, and capitals. Through wars, states spread patriotic sentiments that fuelled chauvinism, with the proletariat of individual countries quarreling among themselves and blocking the path to the development of internationalism. Militarism was one of the most important points in the anarchist’s critique of states (including empires). Being a reflection of power, hierarchy, and centralism, it created the greatest obstacle to human freedom. The mass and organized murder of people, according to anarchists, should have met with resistance from the proletariat. Anarchists have consistently taken up anti-military – and less often, pacifist – positions.
Among the leading anarcho-pacifists, we can mention: Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis and Bartholomeus de Ligt, E. Armand and Louis Lecoin, Ernst Friedrich (with his famous book <em>War against War!</em>)[1], as well as those who oscillate on the borderline of anarchism, such as Leo Tolstoy and Mahatma Gandhi. During World War I, “The International Anarchist Manifesto against the War” was published and signed by over 30 influential European and American anarchists, including Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Errico Malatesta, Saul Janovsky, and Juda Grossman-Roshchin. During World War II, the slogan “Neither fascism nor anti-fascism” was pushed by anarcho-syndicalist organizations in Latin America, mainly in Argentina and Uruguay, and the Bulgarian Anarcho-Communist Federation, as well as some groups in England and France. The French anarcho-pacifism of the time took absurd forms, expressing itself in the slogan “better slavery than war!” More recently, the American intellectual Noam Chomsky could be called the leading anti-war anarchist activist.
At present, the banners of pacifists display the slogan “Peace at all costs!” which is frequently reiterated by left-liberal intellectuals from Western countries, including professor of linguistics, activist, and journalist Medea Benjamin, political scientist Hall Gardner, and others. For the veteran of Polish anarchism, Jarosław Urbański, “An immediate end to the conflict, regardless of the geopolitical context, is necessary to avoid further bloodshed.”[2] These slogans entail a closer association with various communists, Marxist, Trotskyist, and Maoist ideologies, which, ensnared in outdated doctrine, reduce their own dogmatism to slogans such as “No war but class war”, “Neither Ukrainian nor Russian!” or “Neither NATO nor Putin!” In Russia, this attitude is represented by the leaders of the Confederation of Revolutionary Anarcho-Syndicalists – the International Workers’ Association (KRAS). Anatoly Dubovik, a Ukrainian anarchist, has argued that the leaders of KRAS (professional historians) are anarcho-Putinists.
Doctrinairism of these forces, hidden under the blanket of “classical international internationalism”, oddly enough leaves no room for international solidarity with Ukrainian anarchists and Ukrainian society; it is blind to the living, not mythical, anti-fascism that confronts the brutal imperialism of the Kremlin. Pacifism is good when it tries to prevent war, but not during war. Unfortunately, some “ideologically pure” comrades are stuck in rigid concepts detached from reality. But is it stupidity, cowardice, or plain defeatism? Our life is not black and white and does not stand still. There is no perfect purity in this world, except perhaps the laughter and tears of children. And Ukraine is flooded with these tears.
*** <em>Anti-militarism</em>
Fortunately, pacifism has never been the dominant current in the history of the anarchist movement, which is saturated with rebellions and uprisings. Anarchism is known for its direct action tactics, propaganda by deed, revolutionary terror, illegalism, and finally insurrectionism, which prove that violence and radicalism have always been equal parts of libertarian theories and practices. Anarchists, with weapons in hand, took part in the Paris Commune, in both World Wars, as well as in smaller armed conflicts, including national liberation struggles on different continents (e.g., in Ireland, Korea, Cuba, and India). They formed military formations during the civil war in Russia (e.g., the Makhnovist movement), in the Spanish Civil War, in the French Resistance, etc.
The most famous conflict over the attitude of anarchists to participation in the war became the <em>Manifesto of the Sixteen</em> (1916), signed, among others, by Peter Kropotkin, Jean Grave, Christiaan Cornelissen, Varlam Cherkezishvili, Charles Malato, and Paul Reclus. Thus, they gained the name of “anarchopatriots”, “anarchomilitarists”, or, to use the words of Errico Malatesta, “pro-government anarchists”. Despite the mythology surrounding the views of Kropotkin and his followers on war, I am inclined to share the view that it was not a break with anarchism or a betrayal of libertarian ideals. In my opinion (and that of Ruth Kinna[3]) the position of the “prince of anarchy“ was a consistent reaction to the situation. The reaction of an anarchist and anti-militarist, Errico Malatesta, who wrote to Maria Goldsmith in 1897 that anarchists must stand by people opposing the oppression of both personality and economic, religious, and “all the more national” oppression. In turn, at the beginning of World War I, in the article “Anti-militarism: Was it properly understood?”, published in the pages of <em>Freedom</em>, he declared:
It being so, the question arises: How is anti-militarist propaganda to be conducted?
The reply is evident: It must be supplemented by a promise of direct action. An anti-militarist ought never to join the anti-militarist agitation without taking in his inner self a solemn vow that in case a war breaks out, notwithstanding all efforts to prevent it, he will give the full support of his action to the country that will be invaded by a neighbor, whosoever the neighbor may be. Because, if the anti-militarists remain mere onlookers on the war, they support by their inaction the invaders; they help them to make slaves of the conquered populations; they aid them to become still stronger, and thus to be a still stronger obstacle to the Social Revolution in the future.[4]
This quote has not lost its relevance to this day.
During the Second World War, several sections of the International Workers’ Association (the Poles, Italians, Spaniards, Swedes, and French) agreed that “Fascism and Nazism must be crushed wherever they appear and at all costs. This is one of the most important tasks at the moment.”[5] Well-known anarcho-syndicalist activists, such as Rudolf Rocker and Grigory Maksimov, were of a similar opinion. In Europe, here and there, anarchists fought against the Nazis; let us recall, for example, the Poles who took part in the Warsaw Uprising as part of the Syndicalist Brigade. Today, anarchists are militarily supporting the Kurds fighting in Rojava against Assad and the Islamists.
Kropotkin’s above words are understandable for those, who, unlike pacifists, do not disagree with anarchists from Ukraine, Belarus, or Russia to fight for freedom in the ranks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine; for those who do not hide the fact that Russian imperialism is as unrestrained as Western imperialism; for those, for whom solidarity is not an empty sound, who support the right of Ukrainians to their own geopolitical choice, to self-defense, to fighting the invader, who brings regression, fascism, violations of even minimal rights and civil liberties, genocide, dictatorship, camps, rape, political murders, torture of prisoners, forced removal of children, etc. This is the opinion of the anarchists associated with the Resistance Committee, fighting and dying on the front lines, such as the Russian Dmitry Petrov from the Combat Organization of Anarcho-Communists, the Belarusian Zhvir, the American Cooper Andrews, or the Irishman Finbar Cafferkey – and those who are involved in helping, such as the Solidarity Collectives, ABC Dresden, ABC Czarna Galicja, Good Night Imperial Pride, and a number of other groups and unaffiliated anarchists from around the world, maliciously called “trench anarchists”.
*** <em>The myth of anti-fascist Russia and Nazi Ukraine</em>
Opinion pluralism is desirable even in the libertarian environment, but imposing doctrinal formulas on everyone, especially on Ukrainian anarchists, is at least out of place. Instead of asking the Ukrainian libertarian movement directly what help the Western left, and some anarchists, need, building hierarchies in the global anarchist movement (the West knows better), they repeat the myths of the Kremlin propaganda about “Nazi Ukraine”.
But what about the aggressor state?
It is Russia that is rapidly becoming a neo-fascist state, which, combined with its imperial military policy, poses a greater threat to Ukraine than the USA, EU, or NATO. (Do these structures pose a threat to Ukraine at all?) Putin is a reactionary, he is taking his own country backwards in its development, he is trying to impose a regression on other countries, and he is also sending masses of Buryats, Dagestanis, Kalmyks, and Tuvans for slaughter... He only recognizes the language of force, he multiplies the repression of his own citizens, and he denies the right of other nations to independence. The cult of violence, hierarchy, and militarism in Russia is instilled from kindergarten, through state ceremonies, mass culture, and politics of memory. Moscow appropriated the right to be the center of world anti-fascism. The powerful propaganda apparatus, both internal and foreign, creates a myth in which Russia won Nazism, in which there is no question of neo-Nazi militias fighting in Ukraine, such as Rusich, Ratibor, and the Imperial Legion, not to mention the degenerates from the Wagner Group. Didn’t the Militant Organization of Russian Nationalists (with ties to the presidential administration) murder the well-known lawyer Stanislav Markelov and the young journalist Anastasia Baburova in Moscow, near the Kremlin? Winston Churchill was wrong about many things, but he was right about one thing: “The fascists of the future will call themselves anti-fascists.”
Ukraine is not and has never been a fascist state. Despite some actions in the field of historical politics, as in every country, the ultranationalists have never managed to dominate the Supreme Council of Ukraine. In fact, there were various parties, even pro-Russian ones (!). There are elections and a rotation of power. Has anything like this happened in Russia over the last 20 years? Zelensky, who has Jewish roots, spoke Russian on a daily basis and did business with Russia. The Azov Assault Brigade, consisting of a multitude of nationalities with different views (e.g., former commander Denis Prokopenko is a Karelian), showed incredible heroism during the defense of Azovstal. In addition, it officially condemned Nazism and Stalinism, undergoing an ideological transformation unlike the couch-potato anarchists.
Who among the current critics of Ukraine visited Ukraine and when was the last time? As a person with family ties to Ukraine and a regular visitor to Ukraine before the war, I have never encountered discrimination because of my the Russian language. I know the pros and cons of this society. And yet Ukraine does not impose anything on anyone, does not occupy, does not attack other countries. It has a dynamically sprouting civil society, strengthening after regular social upheavals (the Revolution on Granite 1990, the Orange Revolution 2004, Euromaidan 2013–2014) and giving grounds for spreading direct democracy.
Every form of imperialism and colonialism has been and is bad. But the world does not begin and end west of Warsaw. The Western scientific and activist perspective seems to have forgotten what the largest country in the world is and what its history is. It is Russia, ruled by a former KGB/FSB official who misses the days of Russian imperial greatness and is personally responsible for numerous murders and attempted political assassinations. It is surprising, therefore, that Russian imperialism, which is rooted in the culture and political tradition of Russia (tsarist, Bolshevik, Putinist), is not noticed. The faces change, the essence remains the same. Chechnya, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Ukraine. In fact, Belarus is under the imperial dome of the Kremlin. <em>Russkiy mir</em> (Russian world), wishing to restore its former imperial power, will not stop at Kyiv. In the Kremlin’s vision, places such as Moldova and Transnistria, the Baltic states, Kazakhstan, and perhaps Poland and the countries of Central Europe all belong to Russia’s imperial reach. The boots of Russian soldiers have been on the heels of Russian “culture” for centuries.
The fight against Putinism, which is a priority for the inhabitants of our region, does not require worshiping NATO or Western imperialism (or any other group). The victory of Russia will enslave Ukraine, purges will begin, camps will be established (which is already taking place in the occupied territories), and repression will reach unprecedented proportions. Europe will be plunged into uncertainty and international structures that would not function without it will falter. Belarus, with thousands of political prisoners (including about 30 anarchists), will lose its chance of liberation.
*** <em>Anarchism</em>
Anarchism is not a closed doctrine, imagining the world in rigid terms of a black-and-white dichotomy, but rather it contains a more complex range of ideas, sometimes naïve and utopian, sometimes realistic and pragmatic. The latter includes helping Ukraine, through which anarchists try to find a common language with reality.
Anarchists do not need to reinvent the wheel. In a situation of war, instead of the repeated mantra of “No war but class war”, one should turn to mutual aid, solidarity, internationalism, and the right to self-determination and self-defense. We should reject pacifism and the push for “peace at all costs” through diplomatic negotiations between the US and NATO on the one hand and the Kremlin on the other, and Ukraine’s subjectivity should be defended in this conflict. Just as Kropotkin said about the armed conflict of imperial Prussia and the Entente, that it was “a war not of armies alone, but a war of nations”, so today it is a war of nations, not imperialisms. A war of values, not alliances.
Anarchism is a practical philosophy; it is about action and critique of dogma. The “trench anarchists” do not have any illusions about Zelensky and his corrupt party, Servant of the People; they are not fighting for the Ukrainian state. Despite this, they see huge differences between the political culture of Russia and Ukraine. So-called “anarcho-militarists” are aligned with the people of Ukraine; they experience its fate and, unlike the Western supporters of “peace” and the proletariat, they have the right to speak on its behalf. Ukraine’s victory may offer a chance for further changes in society, for the development of direct democracy, for the liquidation of the oligarchic system, and finally for the nation to regain its own country. The dignity of society, which they trade in the West, has never been taken away from the Ukrainians, which is clearly evidenced by the heroic defense of the country in the first phase of the war and queues for territorial defense units. After winning freedom, the time will come to fight for land, jobs, and self-governance. An armed nation will no longer be a pawn in the great game of politicians and oligarchs. Ukraine’s victory may also contribute to potential changes in Russia, which in its current state is a constant threat to the world.
One could multiply quotes from the classics and theoreticians of anarchism, but what dictates life itself is the superior value. I will end with one quote from the Belgian anti-militarist Frans Verbelen: “Reality blows away the most beautiful theories as a storm the sand in the desert.”[6] Let’s try to be like stone, not sand. Anarchists after the war will have a lot of work to do: reorganizing and rebuilding the movement, focusing on extremely important ecological issues, fighting for labor and social rights, building trade unions, confronting right-wing organizations and new authorities, etc. Then, as now, the material help of Western comrades, their experience and ideas will be needed. Is the “solidarity” written on our banners just an empty word? We must finally bridge the gulf between Eastern and Western anarchism. It is up to us whether we can bring about the future we dream about. In this undertaking, Ukraine is an opportunity and a test for us.
[1] Ernst Friedrich, <em>Krieg dem Kriege!</em> <em>Guerre à la guerre! War against war! Vojnu vojně!</em> (Berlin: Freie Jugend, 1926).
[2] Jarosław Urbański, “Rzeź w Ukrainie trwa. Dziesiątki tysięcy zabitych i inwalidów wojennych po obu stronach konfliktu”, Rozbrat, August 4, 2023, [[https://www.rozbrat.org/publicystyka/walka-klas/4862-rzez-w-ukrainie-trwa-dziesiatki-tysiecy-zabitych-i-inwalidow-wojennych-po-obu-stronach-konfliktu][www.rozbrat.org]].
[3] See, e.g., Ruth Kinna, <em>Kropotkin: Reviewing the Classical Anarchist Tradition</em> (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016).
[4] Errico Malatesta, “Anti-militarism: Was it properly understood? (To the Editor of Freedom)”, <em>Freedom: A Journal of Anarchist Communism</em>, Vol 28, No 308, December 1914, 90.
[5] Vadim Damjer, <em>Zabytyj Internacional: Meždunarodnoe anarho sindikalistskoe dviženie meždu dvumja mirovymi vojnami</em>, Vol. 2: <em>Meždunarodnyj anarho-sindikalizm v uslovijah “Velikogo krizisa” i nastuplenija fašizma</em><em>:</em> <em>1930</em><em>–</em><em>1939 gg.</em> (Moskva: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2007), p. 605.
[6] Frans Verbelen, “Why Belgian Anarchists Fight”, <em>Freedom: A Journal of Anarchist Comunism</em>, Vol 28, No 307, November 1914, 87.
|
#title Nestor Ivanovich Makhno
#author Aleksandr Shubin
#SORTtopics Nestor Makhno, biography
#source Retrieved on 30<sup>th</sup> July 2020 from http://www.nestormakhno.info/english/nim.htm
#lang en
#pubdate 2020-07-30T14:07:27
#notes Translation, glossary and notes by Mark Harris
Nestor Ivanovich Makhno thought that he was born on 27 October 1889. The birth registry says that on 26 October 1888 a son, Nestor, was born to the family of Ivan Rodionovich Mikhno and his legal wife Evdokia Matveevna. On the next day he was christened. His parents distorted the year of birth of their son, in order to put off giving him up to the Army for longer. Although the young Nestor never entered the Czarist army, his parents’ invention saved his life, when his death penalty was changed to imprisonment with hard labor because of his minority.
After receiving a basic education, Makhno became a laborer at the Kerner iron foundry.
Makhno’s life before 1906 reminds one of the story of the shoemaker who according to his ability was the most outstanding military commander in the world, but who never encountered war in his life. However, in 1906 he joined the terrorist “Peasant group of anarchist communists” – a group of “Robin Hoods” in Gulyai-Polye, attacking landowners and the police. Makhno took part in exchanges of gunfire, and was frequently arrested, but only in 1908 could sufficient evidence to convict him be found.
Nestor awaited the execution of his sentence. He did not know that the bureaucratic organs were still deciding his fate. The forged date of his birth played a deciding role – Makhno was still a minor. This permitted the authorities to take into account that his crimes did not involve anyone’s death. With this consideration, Stolypin[1] himself personally authorized the commutation of his sentence to life imprisonment at hard labor.
On 2 August 1911, Makhno was sent to the Moscow central transit prison (Butyrki), where he “settled”. At the prison his mutiny continued, and he argued with the jail officials, for which he was frequently sent to an isolation cell. This resulted in tuberculosis, the disease which led to Nestor Ivanovich’s death in 1934. During this time the world view of the young revolutionary was still being formed. Destiny again strengthened Makhno’s anarchist views, when P[iotr] Arshinov became his cellmate. Arshinov had formerly been a Bolshevik, but after 1904 was an anarchist-communist and a follower of Kropotkin. Arshinov laid out for Makhno the basic ideology of anarchism, as he understood it.
The collapse of the empire in February of 1917 led to a political amnesty. Makhno returned to Gulyai-Polye. He was supported in his activities by the re-formed Group of Anarcho-Communists (which became the GAK – Group of Anarchist Communists). The group was composed of his comrades from the pre-revolutionary period. Makhno appeared before the group immediately on arriving in Gulyai-Polye. He determined that the most important goals were “the break up of governmental institutions and the proscription in our region of any right whatsoever to personal property in land, factories, plants or other forms of social undertakings.”
Makhno and the GAK quickly established a system of social organizations under their control: a peasant union (later a Soviet), trade unions, factory committees, committees of the poor, and cooperatives. Soon the Soviet became the single power in these places. Makhno was the chair of the Soviet. At the same time he headed the local trade unions.
On 7 October, 1917 a conflict at the Kerner metallurgical factory (“Bogatyr”) was discussed. The administration thought it was possible to raise the wages of all categories of workers by 50%, but the workers themselves insisted on a differential model, under which wages would be raised by 35–70% in different categories in order to approach level rates. After negotiations with the representatives of the trade union, M. Kerner agreed to the union’s terms.
Makhno’s union gained great influence in the region. In October, the workers of the “Trishchenko & Company” mill, who had not joined the union, applied to the organization with a request “to compel the owners” to raise wages. It is probable that Makhno, who combined direction of the union with leadership of the strongest local political group (an armed group at that), used the method of “compulsion” of the entrepreneurs to observe the rights of the workers under conditions of escalating inflation. However, it was not Makhno’s intent to use such “American” methods to benefit workers who had not joined the union. The “union boss” considered the interests of his organization, and demonstratively refused the request of the workers at the Trishchenko mill, on the grounds that they had not joined the union. In this way Makhno stimulated growth of the membership: In order to make use of his protection, the workers had to join the organization. The case of the workers at the Trishchenko mill nudged Makhno to make membership in the union obligatory, while transforming the union into an organ that could give orders to the administration in the social sphere. On 25 October, 1917 (the day of the Bolshevik revolution in Petrograd), corresponding to a decision of the assembly of works of 5 October, the union board resolved: “To require the owners of the named mill to carry out work in three shifts of 8 hours, and to accept needed workers from the union. Workers who did not belong to the union are charged with the obligation to immediately join the union, failing which they risk losing the support of the union.” This syndicalist reform nearly eliminated unemployment in the region and strengthened the organizational support of the Gulyai-Polye regime. A course was set for the general introduction of an 8-hour working day.
Peasants were drawn to Gulyai-Polye for advice and help from the neighboring volosts (administrative districts). The peasantry wanted to seize the land of the large landowners and the kulaks (rich peasants). Makhno presented this demand at the first sessions of the regional Soviet, which were held in Gulyai-Polye. The additional proposal of the anarcho-communists to unite in communes was unsuccessful, although Makhno himself and his young wife Anna worked on a commune. The agrarian program of the movement proposed the liquidation of the property of the landowners and kulaks “in land and in those luxurious estates, which they could not work with their own labor.” The landowners and kulaks retained the right to manage, but only with their own labor.
By June the peasants had stopped paying rent, violating thereby the directives of the government officials. The immediate introduction of the agrarian transformation, however, did not succeed. At first they were held up by the sharp conflict with the Uyezd commissar of the Provisional government B. Mikhno, and then by the harvest. They put off their fundamental reforms until spring in order not to disrupt production. In August Makhno implemented the elimination of land titles. According to Makhno’s memoirs “at this time they limited themselves to refusing to pay the rent, taking land under the authority of the land committees, and placing livestock and equipment under guard in the face of the managers, so that the owners could not sell off the inventory.” Even this reform had rapid results. The peasant worked on the former landowner’s land not out of fear, but conscientiously, collecting the biggest harvest in the Gubernia. On 25 September the congress of Soviets and peasant organizations in Gulyai-Polye proclaimed the confiscation of the landowners land and its transformation into social property.
In the spring of 1918, the German attack on Ukraine began. Makhno prepared for resistance, but in his absence from Gulyai-Polye a nationalist revolution took place. He had to leave Ukraine. Makhno traveled around Russia, and even visited the Kremlin, where he met with Lenin. The Bolshevik leader made a big impression on Makhno, but their views did not coincide.
On 4 July 1918, Makhno, assisted by the Bolsheviks returned to his native land and drew together a small partisan detachment, which on 22 September began military operations against the Germans. The first battle of Makhno’s detachment was in the village of Dibrivka (formerly Mikhailovka) on 30 September. Makhno’s forces united with a small detachment under Shchus, which had been earlier engaged in partisan struggle. With a troop of 30 fighters Makhno managed to defeat the superior forces of the Germans. The authority of the new detachment grew in the area, and Makhno himself was given the honorific “batko” (father). When the German revolution broke out in November of 1918, the Germans left Ukraine and a broad region of Priazovya came under Makhno’s control. For a short time the “batko” even took one of the greatest cities of Ukraine, Yekaterinoslav, but because of differences with his Bolshevik partners he could not hold the city from the attacking Petlyurovists[2].
At this time Makhno took steps to convert the movement from a destructive peasant uprising to an organization that would become the supreme authority in the territory controlled by it. Conflicts intensified between Makhno and some of his commanders. In response to recurring savagery of the semi-independent commander Shchus against German colonists, Makhno arrested him and promised to shoot him. Shchus, who until recently had demonstrated his independence from Makhno, could no longer resist the “batko” whose power in the region at this time rested not only on military force: “Shchus gave his word not to repeat the murders and swore his loyalty to Makhno” remembers Chubenko. In consequence, Makhno was able to maintain firm discipline within the command structure. Thus, one of the colleagues of Kamenev remembered Makhno’s style of leadership in command debates, at the time of a visit of the president of the Council of Labor and Defense (STO, whose president was Kamenev) to Gulyai-Polye: “Making little noise he threatened them: ‘I will expel!’” The first social-political organization implementing the policies of Makhno and influencing them was the Union of Anarchists, which originated on the basis of the GAK and a number of other anarchist groups. Many Makhnovist commanders joined the group, as well as anarchists who arrived in the region. Having taken a relatively stable territory, Makhno decided that the time had come to return to the social-political system of 1917, and to change the accidental anarchist-military circle into a reliable democratic institution – the Military-Revolutionary Council (VRS). Towards this end, the first congress of regional soviets was called for 23 January in greater Mikhailovka (the numbering of the conferences in 1919 ignored the forums of 1917).
As in 1917, the congress considered the Makhnovist movement as the ultimate authority. Their decisions came into effect in this or that region after acceptance by the village assemblies. In 1919 there were three such congresses (23 January, 8–12 February, 10–29 April). Their resolutions, which were accepted after heated discussion, were in harmony with anarchist ideas: “In our struggle of rebellion we need a single fraternal family, which will defend land, truth and freedom. The second regional congress of front line soldiers emphatically calls our peasant and worker comrades, that they, as they stand at their posts, and without compulsive orders and decrees, build a new, free society against the tyrants and oppressors of the entire world, without rules, without oppressed slaves, without rich and without poor”. The delegates of the congress strongly denounced the “parasitical officials” who were seen as the source of the “orders of compulsion”.
The most important organ of power was Makhno’s staff, which involved itself even in educational work, but all of its civil activity (formal and military) fell under the control of the executive organ of the congress – the Military Revolutionary Council (VRS).
The Bolshevik V. Antonov-Ovseenko, who visited the region in may of 1919, reported: “Juvenile communes and schools have been set up. Gulyai-Polye is one of the most cultured centers of the New Russia. There are three middle educational facilities, etc. Makhno’s efforts opened 10 hospitals for children, organized workshops for the repair of weapons and supplied bolts for guns.” Children learned reading and writing, practiced military exercises, predominantly in the form of war games (sometimes very fierce ones). But the basic educational work was conducted not with children, but with adults. The cultural-educational work of the VRS, comprising education and agitation of the population, was staffed by anarchists who came into the region and by left SRs. Freedom of agitation was preserved for all of the other left parties, but the anarchists dominated ideologically in the region.
The ideology of the movement was determined by the views of Makhno, and those of Arshinov, who had come to him. Makhno called his views anarchist-communist in the “Bakuninist-Kropotkinist sense”. Later Makhno proposed the following State-Society structure: “The sort of system I have conceived is only in the form of a free soviet system, under which the entire county is covered by local, totally free and independent social self-governance of the toilers”. At the end of 1918 a delegation of railroad workers came to Makhno. The workers, according to Chubenko’s account, “asked how they would relate to the organizations of power. Makhno answered, that they needed to organize a Soviet, which should not be dependent on anyone, that is, a free Soviet, not dependant on any party. They then applied to him for money, since they were absolutely without any funds, and they needed money to pay the wages of the workers, who had gone unpaid for several weeks. Without saying a word to them in reply, Makhno ordered that 20,000 be given to them, and this was done.” On 8 February 1919, in his proclamation, Makhno advanced his goal along these lines. “The construction of a true Soviet system, under which the Soviets, elected by the workers, will be a servant of the people, executing those laws and those orders which the workers themselves have written at a Ukrainian national congress of workers...” A voluntary mobilization, announced at the second congress, led to a change of the semi-independent troops of the “batko” to an organized militia with a single command. The troops were maintained by the region itself. On Makhnovist territory only a single instance of a pogrom, with which the history of the civil war[3] is replete, occurred. The guilty were apprehended and shot.
Corresponding to the decision of the third congress of soviets, each settlement had to furnish a regiment (80–300 men), which then would supply itself with arms, elect command, and march off to the front. People who had long known one another fought together and trusted the commander. The countryside, which had furnished the regiment, was glad to provision it – after all, the regiment consisted of the relatives of the peasants. The soldiers, for their part, knew that to retreat 100 kilometers meant to place their own huts under threat.
Meanwhile, the Makhnovists, who had by the beginning of November taken a few thousand poorly-armed Priazov insurgents into the ranks, were suffering from a shortage of ammunition and rifles. After a few days of battle with the Whites their ammunition was exhausted. They were driven back to Gulyai-Polye. They did not want to surrender their ‘capital’. From 24 January to 4 February they waged a bitter fight with variable result.
Despite conflicts with the Bolsheviks, the Makhnovists were doomed, under the developing circumstances, to a union with them. The only possibility of ammunition and weapons was provided by the Red Army. By the beginning of January, Makhno had ordered A. Chubenko: “A unification with the Red Army might work. Rumor has it that the Red Army has taken Belgorod and gone on the offensive along the entire Ukrainian front. Arrange a meeting with them and conclude a military alliance.” Makhno did not give Chubenko the authority to conduct any sort of political negotiations with the Reds, and the emissary of the “batko” limited himself to the declaration that “we are all marching for Soviet power.” After negotiations with Dybenko on 26 January, cartridges were provided to the Makhnovists, which permitted them on the 4<sup>th</sup> to go back on the offensive. Orekhov and Pologa were taken, and 17 February the Makhnovists took Bamut. The Makhnovists joined the first Zadneprovski Division as the Third Brigade, under the command of Dybenko.
The Bolshevik rifles permitted the arming of those peasant reinforcements who were waiting their turn. As a result, the Third Brigade of the First Zadneprovski Division began to grow by leaps and bounds, and outstripped in numbers even the Second Ukrainian Army, in the ranks of which the Third Brigade had most recently fought. If Makhno had about 400 fighters in January, in the beginning of March he had 1,000, in the middle of March 5,000, and in April 15–20,000. Reinforced as a result of the “voluntary mobilization”, the Makhnovist brigade launched an offensive in the South and East. Initially the Red commanders were skeptical towards the Makhnovist formation. “At Berdyanska the matter was tobacco. Makhno shed tears and screamed about support”. A week later, having covered 100 km in battle over a month and a half, the Makhnovists flooded into Berdyanska. Denikin’s western bulwark was liquidated.
At the same time, other Makhnovist units fell back a similar distance to the eastern front, and entered Volnovakha. The Makhnovists seized about 90,000 puds of bread from the White echelons, and distributed it to the starving workers of Petrograd and Moscow.
The Makhnovist Army was a foreign body in the RKKA[4], and it is not surprising that in February L. Trotsky demanded that it be transformed to the model of the other Red units. Makhno answered: “The Autocrat[5] Trotsky commanded that the Insurgent Army of Ukraine, created by the peasants themselves, be disarmed, since he well understands that while the peasants have their own army which defends their interests, it will not be possible for anyone to force the Ukrainian working people to dance to his tune. The Insurgent Army does not want to spill fraternal blood and has avoided clashes with the Red Army. It is, however, subject only to the will of the toilers, and will stand on guard for the toilers, and will only lay down its arms on the orders of the free Ukrainian Workers Congress, in which the toilers’ will is expressed.
The conflicts between the Makhnovists and the Bolsheviks grew. The Makhnovist congress criticized the politics of the Bolsheviks, and the communist leaders demanded an end be put to the autonomous movement. They stopped supplying the Makhnovists, which created a threat to the front. Bolshevik propaganda reported a low military capacity of the Makhnovists, but later Army Commander Antonov-Ovseenko wrote: “first of all the facts will testify that the assertion about a weakness of the most infectious place – the region of Gulyai-Polye, Berdyanska, is untrue. On the contrary, just this corner was the most vital in the entire Southern Front (report for April – May). And this was not, of course, because we were better organized and educated in the military regard, but because the forces there were defending their own hearths and homes.”
In order to solve the problem of supply, Makhno decided to transform his excessively extended brigade into a division. This was perceived by the Bolsheviks as a breach of discipline, and the Southern Front Command decided to crush the Makhnovists. The Bolsheviks clearly overestimated their strength, especially since it was just at this moment that the attack by Denikin’s forces was beginning. It was impossible to resist pressure on two sides at once.
On 6 June 1919, Makhno sent a telegram to Lenin, Trotsky, Kamenev and Voroshilov in which he said: “While I feel myself to be a revolutionary, I consider it my duty to the cause we have in common, despite such injustices as accusing me of dishonesty[6], to propose that you immediately send a good military leader, who is familiar with me and the tasks at hand, to take over command of the division. I think that I must do this as a revolutionary, responsible for every unfortunate step concerning the revolution and the people, when he is accused of calling congresses and preparing some sort of attack against the Soviet Republic.” On 9 June, Makhno telegraphed Lenin: “I will send you an account of the central state power in relation to me. I am absolutely convinced that the central state power considers the entire Insurgency inconsistent with its State activity. Incidentally, the central power considers the Insurgency to be connected to me and all hostility to the insurgents is transferred to me...I consider this hostile. The recent conduct of the central power towards the Insurgency will lead to the fatal inevitability of the creation of a special internal front, on both sides of which will be the working masses who believe in the revolution. I believe this to be the greatest crime ever committed against the working people, and I consider myself obligated to do everything possible to avert this crime...The most credible means to avert this impending crime on the part of the authorities is my resignation from the post I now hold.”
The Bolsheviks tried to arrest Makhno, but he went into the forest with a small band. The Chekists then shot his staff, including even the chief of staff, whom they had sent, Ozerov. When he found out about the destruction of his staff, Makhno began a partisan war in the rear of the Red lines. He tried to hold back a distance from the rear of the front-line fighters, so that he would not interfere too much at that time with the defense against Denikin. The views of the “batko” at that time are reported by the Red Army soldier P. S. Kudlo. His evidence should be taken with some correction for language: “The Soviet power [he means the central Soviet power – A.Sh.] is not just, with its Chekists, commissars. I despise all of this...The Soviet power allowed the state of affairs in which there were no cartridges, no mortar shells, and as a result of this, we had to retreat”. Makhno accused the Communists of deliberate withdrawal of munitions “to the Soviet of Deputies” and of handing them over to the Whites. Makhno’s strategic plans foresaw the establishment of control over a large territory, in which it would be possible to create a more orderly economic system than had existed to that time. In the report of the soldier this is said thus: “Citizens, when we have the Donetz Basin, we will have manufacturing and in general everything that is needed for the subsistence of the peasant. When we conquer Asia Minor, we will have cotton, when we conquer Baku, we will have oil”. These plans, at first glance Napoleonic, are not military projects (Makhno did not like to lose touch with home), but rather hopes for the world revolution, when the toilers would conquer their countries and establish connections with the Ukrainian peasantry. Makhno hoped for a restoration of a temporary union with the Bolsheviks. According to the memoirs of V. Voline, who had been in his Army (he headed the cultural educational commission of the VRS), the “batko” said: “Our chief enemy, peasant comrades, is Denikin. The Communists – they are all the same revolutionaries.”. He added: “We will settle with them later.” On 27 July, the Makhnovists killed the famous enemy of the Bolsheviks, the nationalist ataman Grigoriev.
Under pressure from Denikin, the Bolsheviks were forced to leave Ukraine. The soldiers did not want to go to Russia. On 5 August, Makhno was joined by his units, who had been under Bolshevik command. The “batko” again had an army of some thousands.
The superior forces of the whites pushed the Makhnovists back to western Ukraine, near Uman. But an unexpected blow, inflicted by the Makhnovists near Peregonovka on 26–27 September was crushing. One enemy regiment was taken prisoner, and two others were completely cut down. The Makhnovist army broke through the rear of Denikin’s forces and moved across all Ukraine in three columns, towards the region of Gulyai-Polye. “Operations against Makhno were extremely difficult. His cavalry operated extremely well. Although at first they were imperceptible, more recently they frequently attacked our convoys and appeared at the rear, etc. In general, the Makhnovist ‘forces’ were distinguished from the Bolsheviks by their capacity for battle and by steadfastness”, reported the chief of staff of the Fourth Division Colonel Dubego. Denikin’s headquarters in Taganrog was under threat. The infrastructure of the volunteer army (of the Whites) was fairly in tatters, which impeded Denikin’s attack on the north, towards Moscow. Shkuro’s unit had to be urgently moved from the front, in order to localize quickly the expanding zone that the Makhnovists controlled.
Recovering from the first attack, the Denikin forces took the cities along the river and deployed at Gulyai-Polye. But at this moment Makhno prepared an unbelievably audacious move. “In Yekaterinoslav, 25 October was a market day”, remembered one of the members of the Yekaterinoslav Regional Committee of the RKP(b). “From the steppe rolled many wagons into town, loaded with vegetables, and especially cabbages. At 4 in the morning from the upper bazaar, a deafening machine gun battle began. It happened that under the cabbages on the wagons there were machine guns, and the vegetable sellers were actually the vanguard of the Makhnovists. Behind them followed the entire army, coming from the steppe, from which direction the Denikin forces did not expect an attack”. His assault was repulsed by the Denikin forces, but their defense was weakened. On 11 November, Yekaterinoslav came under control of the Makhnovists for a month (almost until 19 December). At this time there were 40,000 men under the command of Makhno.
In the liberated region multiparty congresses of peasants and workers were held. All businesses were turned over to those who worked in them. The beneficiaries of this system of “market socialism” were the peasant producers of foodstuffs, and those workers who found a market for their products (bakers, shoemakers, railroad workers and others). The workers in heavy industry were dissatisfied with the Makhnovists and supported the Mensheviks. The Makhnovists set up benefits for the needy, which distributed the inflated Soviet currency to almost all who wanted them, without unnecessary red tape. With the more secure currency, taken in battle, the Makhnovists purchased weapons and issued literature and anarchist newspapers.
The residents of Yekaterinoslav in the main considered each of the Armies that entered the city to be robbers. Against the general background of the Civil War the measures of Makhno against robbery can be considered successful. According to the evidence of one of the residents of the town “such mass robbery as occurred among the volunteers, did not occur among the Makhnovists. Makhno made a great impression on the population by his personal reprisals with certain robbers who were apprehended at the bazaar. He shot them there with his revolver”.
A more serious problem was presented by the Makhnovist counter-espionage unit, an uncontrolled organ that permitted arbitrary rule against peaceful citizens. The leader of the VRS, the anarchist V. Voline stated: “...an entire line of people came to me with demands requiring me to constantly interfere in the affairs of the counter-espionage and to report to Makhno and the counter-espionage. The battle conditions and the goals of the cultural-educational work prevented me from really understanding the misdeeds, in the words of the complainants, of the counter-espionage.” The officials of the counter-espionage shot some tens of individuals, which is considerably fewer than the corresponding units of the Whites and Reds. However, among those executed were not only White spies, but also political opponents of the Makhnovists, for example the Communist commander Polonsky, who according to the counter-espionage was preparing a conspiracy. Later Makhno recognized: “In the course of the activity of the counter-espionage the organs of the Makhnovist army committed occasional errors, which caused me to feel pain, to blush, and to apologize to the injured.”
In December 1919, the Makhnovist army was “hit” with an epidemic of typhus. Thousands of fighters at the center, including their commanders, lost the capacity for battle. This permitted the Whites to take Yekaterinoslav for a short time, but the Red Army had already entered the area of Makhnovist movement activity.
Despite the fact that Makhno’s real military strength was significantly weakened (the army being hit with typhus), the Red command continued to fear the batko and decided to use “military cunning” to appear as though Makhno’s staff had not been shot by the Cheka and to give orders of his judgement by military tribunal, “the Polonsky Case”. The Bolsheviks ordered Makhno to abandon his region (where the insurgents were supporting the local population) and move to the Polish front. They planned to disarm the Makhnovists on the road. On 9 January, without waiting for Makhno’s answer, the Ukrainian Revolutionary Committee declared him an outlaw. On 14 January came the demand to disarm. On the 22<sup>nd</sup>, Makhno declared his readiness to “go arm in arm” with the RKKA, while maintaining autonomy. At this time more than two divisions of Reds had developed battle operations against the Makhnovists, among whom hardly any maintained battle capacity after the epidemic. “It was decided to grant the insurgents a month’s leave of absence”, recalled the Makhnovist chief of staff Belash. “From Yekaterinoslav towards Nikopol came a Soviet regiment, which took the town, and began to disarm the typhus-infected Makhnovists...In fact there were some 15,000 typhus-infected insurgents. Our commanders were subject to execution, whether they were well or ill.” An exhaustive partisan war against the Reds began. The Makhnovists attacked small troops, workers of the Bolshevik apparatus, warehouses. They instituted “reverse appropriation”, distributing bread taken from the Bolsheviks to the peasants. Soon Makhno’s army was nearly 20,000 soldiers. In the area of his activity the Bolsheviks were obliged to go underground, appearing in the open only when accompanied by large military detachments.
The activity of Makhno so disrupted the Reds’ rear, that it permitted successes of the White army of Wrangel. Makhno did not want to “play into the hand of the landowners”, and on 1 October 1920, he concluded a new union with the Bolsheviks in Starobelsk. His army and the Gulyai-Polye region maintained complete autonomy, anarchists in Ukraine received freedom of agitation and were released from prison. Peaceful life returned to Gulyai-Polye. There were about 100 anarchists in the region, occupied in cultural-educational work.
On 7 November the assembly of workers and employees of Gulyai-Polye were deciding the questions of social regulation. They decided: “enterprises should provide part of their production to the cooperatives for distribution among all members of the cooperative.” On 15 November they considered the prospects of “the constructive work of anarchy” in the region. However, they also expressed the skeptical opinion: “The Bolsheviks will never permit us autonomy, and will not permit that there be a place infected by anarchy in the state organism.” Meanwhile the cream of the Makhnovist forces (2400 Sabres, 1900 Rifles, 460 Machine Guns and 32 field guns) under the command of Karetnikov (Makhno himself was wounded in the foot) were sent to the front. At the same time an auxiliary mobilization began in the RKKA, to which the peasants were more benevolently inclined, in light of the union between Makhno and the Reds. The peasant militia took part in the storming of Perekop, while the Karetnikov’s cavalry and machine gun detachments took part in Sivash’s forced march, which also passed four Red divisions.
The victory over the White forces brought new ordeals for Makhno and the Makhnovists. On 26 November, “without a declaration of war”, the Reds attacked them. In the morning, Karetnikov and his staff had been summoned to Frunze[7] for consultations, arrested, and then shot. But with Karetnikov’s units things were not so simple – they scattered the Red forces surrounding them, and with great losses broke out of the Crimea. To the North from Perekop, the group clashed with the superior Red forces, and only about 700 cavalry and 1,500 rifles remained.
In Gulyai-Polye there was more cause for discomfort. In the afternoon, the arrest of the Makhnovist representatives in Kharkov became known (the members would later be shot in 1921). On the evening of the 25<sup>th</sup> and into the 26<sup>th</sup> about 350 anarchists were also arrested, among them Voline and Mrachny, the instigators of strikes in Kharkov. Units of the 42<sup>nd</sup> Division and two brigades attacked Gulyai-Polye from 3 sides. A cavalry brigade appeared to the rear of the Makhnovists. After shooting at the Red units that were attacking from the South, the Makhnovists left Gulyai-Polye and went east. Units suspected by no one, pressing from the south attacked the cavalry that was holding the town. A heated battle among the Reds began, which allowed the Makhnovists to break out of encirclement. On 7 December, Makhno was united with the cavalry detachment of Marchenko, which had broken out of the Crimea.
At this time, Frunze launched units of three armies (including two mounted units), against Makhno. Nearly the entire Southern front fell upon the insurgents, wiping out small groups on the road, who had been unable to join Makhno. Some small units on the road remained intact after the initial attacks by the partisan units. Red Army soldiers of RKKA units that had been beaten by the Makhnovists also joined. After a few unsuccessful attempts to surround the insurgents, a great mass of Red Army troops pressed them against the shore of the Sea of Azov in the region of Andreevka. On 15 December the red command reported to the Sovnarkom: “Continuing our attack from the south, west and north on Andreevka, our units, after a battle, overcame the Makhnovists on the outskirts of this place. The Makhnovists were pressed from all sides, and consolidated themselves in population centers, where they continued a stubborn defense.” It seemed that the Makhnovist epic had come to a close.
However, Frunze did not take into account the absolutely unique abilities of the Makhnovist army. After explaining the goal, Makhno was able to dismiss his Army to the four corners in complete confidence that it would gather itself at the indicated place to the rear of the enemy, and would strike him. In addition, the Makhnovist Army was “motorized” – it was able to move almost completely on horseback and in gun-carts, and had developed a speed of up to 80 versts[8] per day. All of this enabled the Makhnovists to slip out of Frunze’s trap on 16 December. “Small groups of Makhnovists at this time, at the time of the battle, avoided our units and slipped out to the north-east. The Makhnovists approached the village, and opened a disorderly line of fire in the darkness, which created a fortuitous panic among the Red Army units. This forced them to scatter”, remembered one of the Red commanders. Loading into the wagons, the Makhnovists went along the operational line, destroying the Red units that they met along the way, which could not imagine that the Makhnovists would be able to break out of their encirclement.
The inability to defeat the Makhnovists by military means pushed the Bolsheviks to an increase of terror. On 5 December, an order was given to the Armies of the Southern Front to carry out general searches, and to shoot any peasants who did not surrender their arms. Additionally, indemnities were imposed on villages from whose precincts attacks on the Red units originated. “Uprooting” Makhnovism affected even those who went over to the side of the Communist Party. At the end of December, the “Revolutionary Troika” arrested the entire Revolutionary Committee in Pologa and shot part of the members, on the basis of their service with Makhno in 1918 (that is, during the period of the war with Germany).
In order not to subject his compatriots to unnecessary danger, Makhno crossed the Dniepr in December and went deep into the right shore of Ukraine. The movement to the right shore seriously weakened the Makhnovists – they were not known there, the territory was unfamiliar, and the sympathies of the peasantry inclined to the Petlyurovists, with whom the Makhnovists had cool relations. At the same time, parts of 3 cavalry divisions moved against the Makhnovists. A bloody battle ensued in the area of the river Gorny Tikich. The Makhnovists moved so rapidly that they were able to take the Commander of one of the divisions, A. Parkhomenko, unawares. He was killed on the spot. But the Makhnovists could not resist the pressure of superior forces of the enemy on foreign territory. Suffering great losses at Gorny Tikich, they went north and crossed the Dnepr at Kanev. Afterwards, a raid was made across the Poltavsky and Chernigovsky gubernias and onward to Belovodsk.
In the middle of February, Makhno returned home. He was possessed by a new idea – to extend the breadth of the movement, gradually involving more and more land, creating bases of support everywhere. Only in this way could Makhno break up the circle of Reds around his army. Despite the fact that in April under the general command of Makhno there were up to 13,000 fighters, in May he was able to concentrate for a decisive strike in Poltavshchina only about 2,000 fighters under the command of Kozhin and Kurilenko. At the end of June/beginning of July, in a battle at Sula, Frunze did considerable damage to the Makhnovist shock troops. At this time almost 3,000 Makhnovists voluntarily surrendered. The movement was visibly wasting. After the declaration of the NEP, the peasants did not want to be at war. However, Makhno was not ready to be taken prisoner. With a small unit of a few dozen men he broke across Ukraine to the Romanian border. Some cavalry divisions tried to find his unit, but on 28 August 1921 he crossed the Dnestr into Bessarabia.
When they appeared in Romania, the Makhnovists were disarmed by the authorities. Nestor and his wife were settled in Budapest. The Bolsheviks demanded his extradition, and in April 1922 Makhno decided to take himself to Poland. The Soviet diplomatic service there procured his extradition as a common criminal. Besides, Makhno did not hide his views. He agitated for Soviet power and the Polish administration in any case sent the group of anarchists from Russia to a camp for displaced persons. In June 1922, Makhno applied to the authorities to help him immigrate to Czechoslovakia, a more democratic country. But the batko was refused. The Poles suspected him more or less of attempting to raise a rebellion in Western Galicia in favor of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic. The prosecutor of the district court of Warsaw clearly did not wish to inject himself into a disagreement between Russian revolutionaries, and in his own way interpreted Makhno’s statement as supporting Soviets, revolution, communism and free self-determination for the Ukrainians in Western Galicia. On 23 May 1922, a criminal prosecution was brought against Makhno. On 25 September, his second wife, Kuzmenko and two of their comrades in arms, I. Khmar and Ya. Doroshenko, were arrested and sent to the Warsaw prison.
On 27 November, Makhno stood before a court for the second time in his life. They accused him of contacts with the mission of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in Warsaw, and preparing an uprising. After this, as the absurdity of the charges became apparent, the prosecutor began to claim that Makhno was not a political immigrant, but a bandit. The suspicion arose that Poland was using the captives as small change in the diplomatic game, and would hand them over to the Bolsheviks.
The criminal accusations were not proved, and on 30 November Makhno was acquitted. He moved to Torun where he began to publish his memoirs and prepare for new battles. At the same time in Berlin, P. Arshinov was publishing the first “History of the Makhnovist Movement.” After open declarations by Makhno of his intention to continue the armed struggle with the Bolsheviks, the Polish government expelled him from the country in January 1924. It then became clear that any attempt to raise a rebellion on the territory of the USSR in the near future would not succeed. Makhno got across Germany to Paris, where he lived out the rest of his days.
His last years were not as turbulent as those preceding, yet all the same they were not a quiet dying down, like the life of many émigrés. Makhno appeared at the very center of Parisian political discussions. Here he was again “in the saddle”. The French anarchist I[da] Mett remembered that Makhno “was a great artist, transformed beyond all recognition in the presence of a crowd. In small company he could only explain himself with difficulty, and his habit of loud speech in intimate surroundings seemed humorous and out of place. But put him before a large audience, then you saw the dazzling, eloquent, self-confident orator. Once I was present in a public meeting in Paris, where the question of anti-semitism in the Makhnovist movement was discussed. I was deeply astonished then by surprising power of transformation of which this Ukrainian peasant seemed capable.” Makhno became one of the authors of the draft platform of the Union of Anarchists[9], around which in 1926–1931 keen arguments boiled among anarchists internationally.
In the grim conditions of emigration the batko held himself with dignity: “I very often met with him over the course of three years in Paris, and I never saw him drunk. A few times, I accompanied Makhno, in the capacity of interpreter, to dinners given in his honor by the Western anarchists. Nestor drank from the first glass of wine, his eyes began to sparkle, he became more eloquent, but, I repeat, I never saw him drunk. I was told that in his last years he starved...”, I. Mett remembered. Makhno spent his last years in a one-room apartment in the Parisian suburb of Vincennes. He suffered greatly from tuberculosis, and was much bothered by the wound in his foot. His wife fed the family by working in a boarding house as a laundress. All week he remained alone. He occasionally strolled along the streets. These were turbulent times in the history of France. The ultra-right hungered for power. The left-wing organizations held meetings against fascism, which sometimes ended in clashes. Knowing the character of Makhno, it is not possible to avoid the conclusion that he took part in some of these. For a man greatly suffering from tuberculosis this was a mortal danger.
“In the winter he got worse,” remembered G Kuzmenko, “and around March 1934 we visited him in a French hospital in Paris. On Sundays I often visited him there. I met with many of his numerous comrades there, both Russian and French.” Nestor Ivanovich’s health continued to worsen, and was not helped by an operation in June. G. Kuzmenko remembers the last day of Makhno’s life as follows: “The man lay on a pale bed with half-closed eyes and arms exposed, separated from the others by a large screen. There were some comrades with him, who, in spite of the late hour, were permitted to visit him. I kissed Nestor on the cheek. He opened his eyes and, turning to his daughter said in a weak voice, ‘Daughter, stay healthy and happy.’ Then he closed his eyes and said, ‘Excuse me, friends, I’m very tired, I want to sleep...’ The day nurse came in and asked him ‘How do you feel’. He answered: ‘Bring me the oxygen bag...’ He fell asleep and never woke up.”
It is hard to imagine how the history of Russia, and perhaps that of the world, might have developed if Nestor Makhno had been executed in 1910. Historical forks in the road sometimes depend on such circumstances. Without a talented leader, there could be no revolutionary army. No Makhnovist “republic” would have been set up at Denikin’s rear, the communications would not have been destroyed, the military forces would not have stretched themselves out. The White army would have broken through to Moscow. The Bolshevik regime would have fallen. But would that other power, the dictatorship built on the revenge of the aristocrats, have been better? The perpetual problem of European history in the 20<sup>th</sup> Century is the choice between communism and fascism. Without Makhno the forced march of Sivash in 1920 might not have been successful. Without Makhno the military-communist machine of the Bolsheviks would have functioned in a more orderly manner, and who knows, might have broken through to Central Europe in 1919. What of the New Economic Policy of 1921–1929, which taught peace to many? The Bolsheviks might never have come to that, without the successes of Makhno and Antonov, without the Kronstadt uprising, which itself was partly inspired by the Makhnovist experience. A significant part of the antifascist fighters at the time of the Civil War in Spain remembered the name of Makhno, and spoke it on attack. Makhno died, but his model inspired people to resist Red and Brown totalitarianism as it spread across Europe.
|+ <strong>Glossary of terms and abbreviations</strong> +|
| <strong>Batko</strong> | Ukrainian honorific nickname, meaning roughly, father.|
| <strong>Cheka, Chekist</strong> | Extraordinary Commission (initials Ch K, short for чрезвычайная комиссия по борьбе с контрреволюцией, спекуляцией и саботажем – Extraordinary Commission for struggle with Counterrevolution, speculation and sabotage.) Early Soviet organ of compulsion and suppression.|
| <strong>GAK</strong> | Group of Anarchist Communists|
| <strong>RKKA</strong> | Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army (organized by Trotsky) usually referred to as the Red Army.|
| <strong>RKP(b)</strong> | Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), the name used by the Communist Party of the USSR during this period.|
| <strong>Soviet</strong> | Совет – translates as council, but the term has aquired a specialized meaning in Russian history, indicating a fundamental social institution.|
| <strong>Sovnarkom</strong> | Council of Peoples Commissars|
| <strong>SR, Eser</strong> | The Social-Revolutionary Party. Revolutionary/Terrorist party. It had strong connections to the peasantry. Left wing of the Party joined with the Bolsheviks in a coalition government. Repressed by the Bolsheviks in the 20s.|
| <strong>STO</strong> | Council of Labor and Defense, a State Executive Bureau significant during the Civil War.|
| <strong>Volost</strong> | <em>Volost</em>, <em>Uyezd</em>, <em>Gubernia</em> are the provincial entities in Russia, ranging from the smallest to the largest.|
[1] Peter Arkadevich Stolypin, Minister of the Interior for Nicholas II (1906 – 1911), charged with countering the revolutionary movement.
[2] Followers of the Nationalist anti-semite Petlyurov.
[3] Civil War – ‘The Whites’ organized counter-revolutionary armies under Kolchak, Wrangel and Deniken, which invaded Russia from the North, South and East.
[4] The Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, under the leadership of L.D. Trotsky.
[5] Makhno uses the term “Самодержавец” here, an official title of the Czar, and doubtless intended to evoke the memory of Czarist excess.
[6] The transcript of the telegram is somewhat unclear on this word.
[7] Mikhail Vasilyevich Frunze, commander of the 4<sup>th</sup> Army of the Eastern Front.
[8] Berst – Russian distance measure of about 1.06 km.
[9] Platform of the Union of Anarchists, also known as the Organisational Platform of the Libertarian Communists, drafted by the Dyelo Truda group of which Makhno, Mett and Arshinov were members.
|
#title British Anarchism Succumbs to War Fever
#author Alex Alder
#date 2023
#source Active Distribution pamphlet
#lang en
#pubdate 2023-02-14T18:40:19
#authors Alex Alder
#topics anti-militarism, internationalism, class struggle anarchism, anti-imperialism, criticism and critique, 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine
#notes Published by Active Distribution in 2023, with minor edits and a preface added to the original version. Originally posted on Libcom at https://libcom.org/article/british-anarchism-succumbs-war-fever
*** Preface
In February 2022, the Russian Armed Forces invaded Ukrainian territory, beginning an occupation and open warfare. This followed eight years of smouldering conflict between the Ukrainian state and Russian-backed separatists in the Donbas region of Ukraine, and the annexation of Crimea. Some anarchists, antifascists, and other anti-authoritarians in Ukraine decided to participate in the armed forces of the state to combat the Russian invasion. This was an organised, collective project with a political manifesto, under the banner of ‘The Resistance Committee’ and ‘Operation Solidarity’.
Many anarchists in Britain responded with uncritical support for the project and began actively aiding the Ukrainian war effort, raising funds for military supplies and spreading war propaganda. A minority of anarchists, on the other hand, raised the banner of “no war but the class war”, opposing war itself while advocating for working class internationalism, against all factions of the ruling class. This latter position, previously an uncontroversial expression of anarchist-communist politics, was all of a sudden anathema.
Notable anarchist papers in Britain such as *Freedom* and *Organise!* made the case for supporting the war effort and denounced those who would disagree. They did so, in my view, by comprehensively dismantling or distorting basic anarchist ideas. It was primarily in response to these articles that I wrote my critique, but it was clear that the point of view they set out was fiercely held by people across the anarchist milieu. The intention, then, was not to tell Ukrainian anarchists what they should be doing, but rather, in the context of debate among anarchists in Britain, to defend a theory and practice of anarchism that is revolutionary, internationalist, and anti-militarist.
I make this argument not for the sake of “ideological purity”, in callous disregard for those suffering and dying, but because I think that revolutionary anarchism (as I understand it) offers the best way to fight against states, capitalism, and the wars they produce, and to change society in doing so. It is with the greatest compassion for the victims that I wish to see the war brought quickly to an end. The question is how can we oppose war without simply reproducing the conditions that generate it, or for that matter intensifying and generalising it. The essential step is to break with the logic of nationalism, militarism, and state politics in general.
This is not a question of neutrality, which it might appear from the perspective of *nation versus nation*. To be neutral in a situation of oppression is to side with the oppressor, our critics would rightly reply. Rather, we revolutionary anarchists are partisans of the oppressed and exploited people in every nation. We are against domination in all its forms, and will not collaborate with one oppressor to fight another. Our “side” is the global working class, against those who exploit and control our lives, and ultimately take them from us.
We have entered an age of unending and manifold crisis, producing a general increase of authoritarian nationalism, rising imperialist tensions, and consequent war. Anarchists must have the theoretical grounding and practical strategies to continue the struggle towards anarchy in such conditions. Therefore, anarchism can’t be reserved as a luxury for liberal democratic nations in peace-time and treated as a dogmatic irrelevance everywhere else. If anarchists abandon anti-militarism and internationalism at this crucial moment, not only will we be marching in step with our masters towards the graveyard of imperialist conflagration, we will also be closing off any paths towards freedom.
Alex Alder,
*22<sup>nd</sup> October 2023*
*** War Fever
*2<sup>nd</sup> February 2023*
Everyone is against war in the abstract – even the arms industry executives can tell themselves that they are merely providing for defence and global order, deterring war in doing so. But when war breaks out the sentiment is made irrelevant. Peace-loving or not, war is here, and you are either with your nation, your people, or against them. Peace will come with victory. In any case, your side is the righteous cause, because you fight for freedom and justice, for democracy and stability, because your enemy were the aggressors, and tyrants and devils to boot. The bloodshed is so easily sanctified.
Anarchism cuts right through such mystification. We say it as we see it: the workers of different nations are sent to slaughter each other in the interests of their rulers. Anti-militarism is a core principle of anarchism. We understand armies to be a violent force underwriting political authority (or those who would conquer it). We point to the role of military force in suppressing uprisings and strikes at home, while imposing national interests, enforcing capitalist markets, and ruling colonies abroad. Military research and production is a highly profitable investment of private capital and public funds, not least as a subsidised source of technological development (for the purposes of social control and generating profit). We consider how the military system of strict hierarchy and discipline, alongside its culture of chauvinism and othering,[1] breaks down the human character and reshapes it to the needs of those in command.
So how is it that today the anarchist movement in Britain (and elsewhere) is supporting one nation's military against another, ideologically justifying and materially provisioning[2] the Ukrainian war effort? Are we seeing something altogether new that would lead us to question and revise our principles? No, we are facing the same old tragedy. Our anti-militarist, internationalist, and revolutionary perspective is as vital as ever. At this present stage, the struggle for liberation is caught in the no-man's-land between imperialist invasion on the one side, and national defence (backed by an opposing imperialism) on the other. To seek purpose in either trench would be just more fuel in the furnace of capitalist warfare; it would mean allegiance to the state against anarchy.
*** National Defence and Anti-Imperialism
From the long-standing anarchist paper *Freedom* and anarcho-communist Anarchist Federation (AFed), to the anarchist “scene” around antifascist and other activist groups, war fever is rife. At first this involved cheerleading for the ‘Anti-authoritarian Platoon’, a unit of the Territorial Defence made up of anarchists and antifascists, among others.[3] Participation in military structures was explained by the need to defend themselves, and softened by a narrative of independent popular resistance. But the reality was quite different. The Territorial Defence Forces are the reserve force of the Ukrainian military, subject to its command structure. There is no question of autonomy. A member of the Anti-authoritarian Platoon observed that in their unit “there [was] normal military hierarchy with section commanders and platoon commander subordinate to higher military officers.”[4] Other anarchists and antifascists joined the regular army. Rhetoric aside, this means collaboration in the national defence by joining the state military, one way or another.
That some people choose to join or support the military defence of the nation in which they reside when threatened by imperialist domination is understandable[5] and I do not judge anyone making such difficult choices. But it is not anarchism – it is not compatible with anarchist ideas or practices. No one lives up to their ideals in everything they do, but these compromises and contradictions should be accepted as such, not assimilated into our theory and practice such that in turn our movement is assimilated into the society of capital and state.
As the reality of collaboration became clearer to anarchists in Britain, the message widened to support for the defence of Ukraine, maintaining the rhetoric of ‘popular resistance’. “From Ukraine to Scotland to Western Sahara to Palestine to Tatarstan, we stand with the people resisting imperialism,”[6] proclaims Darya Rustamova in the pages of *Freedom* (and reprinted by AFed). This statement raises more questions than it answers. Who are “the people”? By what means are they resisting? To what end? In the past, AFed were able to see through such empty talk, arguing that “As anarchist communists, we have always opposed nationalism, and have always marked our distance from the left through vocally opposing all nationalism — including that of ‘oppressed nations’. While we oppose oppression, exploitation and dispossession on national grounds, and oppose imperialism and imperialist warfare, we refuse to fall into the trap so common on the left of identifying with the underdog side and glorifying ‘the resistance’ — however ‘critically’ — which is readily observable within Leninist/Trotskyist circles.”[7]
Rustamova’s article, *‘A Thousand Red Flags’*, makes explicit their nationalist premises with a typically leftist differentiation between good and bad nationalism. The nuance between different expressions of nationalism in different contexts is no doubt real and significant. The nationalism of a colony struggling for independence is obviously different from the nationalism of the empire. Yet, for both the state is their end (to establish, defend, or expand); both suppress or obscure the class divide and other hierarchies beneath nationality; and both serve the interests of a ruling class (‘native’ or ‘foreign’). The common features of all nationalisms that define them as such are precisely those we reject as anarchists and revolutionary internationalists.
“Anarchists have taken to defence of their homeland,”[8] announced the editor of AFed’s magazine, *Organise!*, in issue #96. What homeland do anarchists have? The ‘homeland’ is a sentimental notion of the nation-state in which a person is born. It is the feelings of belonging, allegiance, and nostalgia that bonds the individual to the nation. This clarifies the unquestioned leap that has been made between Ukraine, as a sovereign nation, defending its territory against invasion (i.e. national defence), and anarchists or other individuals defending themselves (i.e. self-defence). It is a powerful argument for going off to fight in so far as few would renounce the right of self-defence. But it assumes identity between the nation and oneself, an identity that anarchists reject. In this way, anarchists went from championing “semi-autonomous” anarchist units in a “popular resistance” to beating the drums of war for the military victory of the Ukrainian state.
The state’s ultimate self-justification is preserving the safety and wellbeing of its subjects. War with other nations is, initially, at least, its greatest unifying force. The Ukrainian anarchist magazine *Assembly* confirm that “we should understand that the national unity of Ukrainians around Zelensky’s power rests only on fear of an external threat”.[9] To participate in this unification and justify it with that same instinct of self-preservation is to not only give legitimacy to the state's authority, but also to support its material reinforcement. To assert the necessity of participating in national defence and joining the state military is to accept the necessity of the state. *Assembly* lament that “the majority of those who identify themselves as anarchists in Ukraine [...] immediately merged with the ruling class in a single nationalist impulse.”[10] The state’s power over life and death, war and peace, is one of its defining aspects – it is for anarchists to criticise and subvert, not fall back on as a necessary evil.
Alongside the theoretical rejection of national unity, we must question the assumption that our personal safety is tied in with national security. Thoughts on this are offered by Saša Kaluža, an anarchist in Ukraine, who says that “The goal of the Ukrainian state and their military structures in this war is to keep their power, the goal of the Russian state and their military structures is to seize power. The participation of anarchists in the structures of either of these states does not make the situation any easier for the people living in Ukraine, who are suffering from the war between two states. All the words about the army defending people, society and their land are only part of state propaganda, and history shows this. It is only possible to stop the war by opposing both states.”[11] Regarding the volunteer units specifically, they argue that the “Territorial Defence is a good and telling example of how volunteer structures initiated and controlled by the state can only perform volunteer support functions within the state, by state methods and only to protect the state itself, and cannot actually help the population with security and other primary needs that arise in crisis situations.”[12] It can further be doubted that the participation of a hundred or so anarchists and antifascists in the armed forces has any impact on the outcome of the war, whereas as many dedicated agitators could be a significant nucleus of the struggle against war and government itself.[13]
We need to look beyond the black-and-white binary of aggressor and resistance, imperialist and oppressed nations, revealing the complexity of class antagonisms, power structures, and social hierarchies within each nation-state, identifying the latent force of working class internationalism.
In supporting Ukraine, anarchists in Britain have found themselves on the side of NATO, an imperialist military alliance that defends the interests of the core capitalist nations in Europe and North America. But rather than take this as an opportunity to repudiate NATO they have wavered in their opposition, sympathising with Western imperialism as a check on Russian imperialism. This is most evident in Zosia Brom’s article, *‘Fuck Leftist Westplaining’*,[14] published in *Freedom* (of which she was an editor at the time), and reprinted in *Organise!* #96 by AFed. Supposing the necessity of NATO membership for the security of Eastern Europe is no doubt correct from the perspective of state diplomacy and international relations, but we are not politicians and we are not part of the decision making apparatus of the state. As anarchists we must respond to the manoeuvrings of nation-states and imperialist blocs from a working class perspective. Autonomous of all state machinery, its realpolitik is not for us to take up. Our anti-imperialism cannot be the Stalinist reflex of supporting anyone opposed to “the West” – but neither can it involve turning to NATO imperialism to defend our rights and safety. Rather than thinking in terms of national agency, we need to be thinking along class lines, in terms of social struggle.
*** Antifascism and Class Struggle
Neither the Russian nor Ukrainian state can be accurately described as fascist, although both have tolerated, enabled, and utilised fascist elements whenever expedient. However, the Russian state has reached a level of authoritarian nationalism, internal repression, and revanchist expansionism comparable to the fascist regimes of the twentieth century. The Ukrainian state can better be described as a neoliberal, corrupt democracy.[15] It is necessary to thoroughly reject Russian propaganda of “de-nazifying” Ukraine. But anarchists have simply turned this around, framing Ukraine’s military defence as an antifascist struggle. This risks legitimising war in the name of antifascism, an ideological manoeuvre that Putin has so transparently played on. Projecting our antifascist politics onto the national defence of Ukraine does not alter its material reality.
Ideological antifascism can serve to obscure class interests and subordinate revolutionary struggle to popular fronts in defence of the democratic state.[16] The movement towards anarchy is deferred to a future, more opportune time as the immediate threat of fascism redraws the board. The intermediate goal of defending the limited rights of democratic society becomes the only legitimate reference point. Ideological unification is mirrored by social unification in cross-class alliances that bring together ruler and ruled, exploiter and exploited against the exceptional threat.
If it means the defeat of fascism, the shielding of actual life and liberties, conceding one’s principles may be understandable. But we should have learned from the twentieth century that it is nothing but a travesty.[17] Again and again, the democratic state which popular fronts defended gave way to fascism with little more than a whimper. Those states prioritised – through counter-revolution – the consolidation of their authority, even if that meant enabling or embracing fascism. “The fight for a democratic state is inevitably a fight to consolidate the state, and far from crippling totalitarianism, such a fight increases totalitarianism's stranglehold on society.”[18] The state can develop towards democracy or dictatorship depending on what is necessary for its continuation. It is through the struggle against the state as such that we can both confront authoritarian tendencies in the intermediate term while overturning the conditions that produce them in the long term.
*** War and Revolutionary Struggle
Those anarchists supporting Ukraine have revealed a great deal of confusion about how we relate to war as anarchists. Some keep up their anti-war rhetoric while supporting one side against another. Others conflate warfare with the struggle for freedom. And some fully embrace war-mongering, all things being justified by opposition to Russia.
Peter Ó Máille (editor of *Organise!* magazine) off-handedly dispenses with working class anti-militarism in musing that “For the Anarchist there is only one war which matters and that is the class war, except for when it isn't. There are fascists that need fighting, there are despots, tyrants, and empires. They aren't going to go home due to your strongly worded petition.”[19] We can surely agree on the need to fight against tyrants such as Putin, but the heart of the matter is the means by which we do so. And here we find misrepresentation and confusion. War between nations and “class war” are distinct in kind. Anarchists are against war in the sense of military conflict undertaken by political authority. "Class war" is a figurative term, referring to the struggle between classes that is framed by capitalist social relations. Revolutionary class struggle is the collective effort of the working class to transform those social relations, which cannot be altered by war in the proper sense. War, in fact, consecrates them in blood.
The war has been treated, in general, not as a war between two states, but as a struggle for the freedom of Eastern Europe.[20] Russia’s victory would reinforce its totalitarian regime internally and encourage the further subjugation of its neighbours, while Russia’s defeat, we are told, would incite the collapse of Putin’s government and reinforce democratic governance in the region, maintaining favourable conditions for social struggle. Here it is clear that the methods and principles of anarchism have been entirely discarded in favour of the doctrine of military humanitarianism (exemplified by NATO interventions across the Global South and the Balkans). With such a logic adopted, it was only a matter of time before anarchists started arguing for NATO member nations to send more military aid to Ukraine (or bemoaning the hesitant lack of it).
The political, social, and economic outcomes of war are unpredictable. It is not unlikely that Ukraine will emerge from the war as an authoritarian state, an active partner in NATO’s military imperialism, and highly susceptible to far-right ideologies whose zealots will have been empowered by the war in more ways than one. Even if liberal democracy survives in Ukraine, there is no guarantee that these conditions will be favourable to the struggle for liberation. A democratic state commanding popular support will have the free reign to quietly suppress post-war rebellions and quell industrial unrest. Anarchist malcontents will easily be framed as Russian-backed separatists and saboteurs, or simply ignored in the wave of overwhelming patriotism and desire for a return to normality and stability, which could follow a military victory. Either way it is pure speculation, and not a strong basis for the working class to sacrifice itself to the war effort.
Anarchists have always understood that the social transformation we wish to see cannot come about by means of the state or military force of any kind, but must develop from the bottom-up among the oppressed and exploited people themselves. Wars can only impose a new form of authority, even if that new authority is a lesser evil. Deferring the struggle against capitalism and the state until after a “victorious” war only ensures the conditions for further war and oppression remain, while undermining the struggle against them. *War is not a means of liberation*. Just as we use direct action, self-organisation, mutual aid, and sabotage to pursue our revolutionary ends, those same means can be used to undermine tyrants and invaders, without facilitating other forms of domination.
*** Action From Principle
The coherency of means and ends is a notion fundamental to anarchism. The principles that guide us, and the methods we employ, are a continuous thread linking our partial struggles today with the social revolution we seek to hasten and the free society born thereof. Action from principle underpins everything we do. In defending a course of statist military action, anarchists will have stumbled into basic contradictions. This has been resolved through a series of falsifications and concessions.
Anti-militarism, internationalism, and so on, are all very nice in theory, we are told, but ultimately empty abstractions.[21] They are simply not applicable to the reality faced by anarchists on the ground. This is a separation of theory and practice. Theory belongs in books, we would be led to believe, while the plans and practices of anarchists are driven by force of circumstances. The lesser evil displaces any self-determined goal as the point of reference, while expediency becomes the measure of all choice. Necessity justifies all, in the end.
What is forgotten is that the theory and practice of anarchism are drawn from one another in a constant process of mutual development. It is from experience – of success and defeat, war and peace, revolution and reaction – from generation to generation, all over the world, that we have cultivated a method of freedom: anarchism. It is false to contrast principles with pragmatism, because our principles are the crystallisation of precisely *what works*.[22] There may be more appealing options in the short term, in relation to more immediate interests, but these will lead us away from our goals. Anarchists, for example, refuse to act within state structures or collaborate with state forces not in obedience to unquestionable dogma, but because we know that by such means we will only perpetuate state power, that our struggle will be recuperated into political channels and reshaped by institutional pressures. We know this both through abstract analysis of the modern state, and through the experiences of individuals, organisations, and whole movements.
Such an understanding used to be at the core of the Anarchist Federation. Now they openly disparage anarchist principles as “slogans” used to sidestep critical analysis, provoke emotional responses, and shut down debate. Anti-militarist agitation is compared to the manipulative and authoritarian practices of Brexiteers and the far-right.[23] This simply does not reflect the reality of the propaganda work of “No War but the Class War” groups, for whom this slogan is just a masthead.[24] Meanwhile, the editor of their theoretical journal *Organise!* now asserts that “I doubt the theory works past the first barrage of artillery on the neighbourhood.”[25] In that case, we may as well give it up and don our khakis. Anarchism, we would conclude, is nothing but naive idealism, belonging to a more peaceful world than our own. I would say, quite the opposite, that it is precisely in such times of heightened conflict, of raised stakes and mortal threats, that learning from our past is more vital than ever. And I would say, far from limiting ourselves to ideal conditions, the anarchist movement has a strong tradition of anti-militarism in times of war, as well as heroic, constructive efforts in the depths of crisis and disaster.
Once we separate our methods from our goals, our ideas from our actions, we are left only with the rule of expediency: the most efficient means of attaining immediate objectives, regardless of other considerations. If the military victory of Ukraine and collapse of Putin’s government comes before all else then there are much more effective ways to pursue this goal than forming ideologically bound “anti-authoritarian” Territorial Defence units made up of volunteers with little to no combat experience. It is entirely logical that anarchists and other left-wing activists fighting in the war would become frustrated with the auxiliary role and bureaucratic limitations faced in the ‘Anti-authoritarian Platoon’ and disperse into more effective fighting units of the army closer to the frontline. And since “fascists are much better organized in the ranks of the Ukrainian army”[26] – also sharing the motivation to be fighting on the frontline – it is predictable that “attempts to get a place in the military ranks brought [anti-authoritarian fighters] directly to units directly connected with Ukrainian fascist groups”[27] and “in one way or another, becoming forces that support the development of far-right politics in Ukraine”.[28] This is the logical outcome of relinquishing anarchist principles to the practical needs of the war effort.
In our own context, the war fever that has overcome anarchists in Britain will likely lead to support for British military intervention (through military aid and technical support, if not actual combat involvement) and, by extension, NATO imperialism. It is through such means that Ukraine will be able to defeat Russia. Given that NATO members are currently hesitant to escalate into direct conflict between nuclear powers, some anarchists find themselves in the absurd position of being more eager for the generalisation of imperialist war than their own ruling classes. Will anarchists be signing up to the British Army to go kill Russians? We don’t have any anarchist MPs to vote for war credits, at least.
*** The Lesser Evil
In our proletarian condition of dispossession, disempowerment, and alienation, our entire lives have been reduced to a search for the lesser evil. Looking at Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, the war crimes it has perpetrated, and the harsh repression brought upon its own citizens, we could identify Ukraine’s national defence as the lesser evil. Yet, acknowledging that *there is* a lesser evil does not mean, without further reason, that we should be supporting it. And, from an anarchist perspective, we can find no good reason to collaborate with either state. At the same time, refusing to support one state against another does not mean equating both sides. We don’t say that both sides are the same, simply that neither have anything to offer the working class.[29]
The lesser evil is still an evil. In defending its territory, the Ukrainian state has not been transformed into a force for good. While the war rages, the capitalist class in Ukraine has only intensified its exploitation and abuse of the working people, backed by new restrictions on industrial action and the dismantling of workers’ rights.[30] That is, for those who have not been conscripted to the killing fields. Conscription is a form of slavery, to be resisted at all costs. Ukraine’s borders have been closed to all men of conscription age (a category in which trans women have been included, erasing their identity) to enable the rounding up of cannon fodder. Meanwhile, Ukraine contributes to the genocidal war in Tigray, providing support for the use of drones by the Ethiopian military.[31] Along the road of the lesser evil, the political and economic conditions that produce war and dictatorship will continue to perpetuate themselves; “it is forgotten that to choose an evil - even if it is a lesser evil - is the best way to prolong it.”[32]
We need to choose our own battles. The threat of co-optation and counter-insurgency is that we seem to be constantly denied the possibility of fighting on our own terms. Whether that be pushing social movements into the electoral graveyard, or driving rebellion into the field of military conflict, our real social strength is lost leaving us a controlled opposition or a symmetric enemy of the state that can be isolated and crushed. The strength of anarchism – what has made it a truly subversive force outside of and against every system of authority – is that anarchists have constantly struggled to fight on our own terms, to think and act beyond the choices given to us. If at first we speak alone with the voice of revolutionary internationalism, the tide can quickly turn – a tide that not uncommonly surges towards the tail end and aftermath of war.
*** Neither East Nor West
Many of the anarchists in Ukraine, and across Eastern Europe, have thrown themselves behind Ukraine’s war effort. This creates a tension with anti-militarist, internationalist agitation in Britain and across the world. As Peter Ó Máille puts it, “You just can't bear to listen to Eastern European Anarchists eh? [...You] forget to listen to the fucking locals as [you] act like the Politburo of Anarchism. Please kindly, shut the fuck up.”[33] Meanwhile, Zosia Brom bemoans “westplaining” – western leftists condescendingly explaining to Eastern Europeans their own reality. We should “be informed that many Eastern Europe leftists are on the same page here, and we have been discussing it for a while now”.[34]
In this way, the debate between anti-militarist anarchists and anarchists supporting the war effort is reframed into a confrontation between Western Europe and Eastern Europe, between Westerners’ ignorance and arrogance on the one hand, and the pro-Ukraine “consensus” in Eastern Europe on the other. This is of course a rhetorical device for shaming any criticism. In reality, many anarchists in Eastern Europe, including some in Ukraine itself, have responded to the Russian invasion with internationalist, anti-militarist propaganda and action. The anarchist collective behind the *Assembly* magazine, based in Kharkiv, Ukraine, have withstood the urge of nationalist militarism and chosen to focus on mutual aid, counter-information, and class conflict. All of the sections of the anarcho-syndicalist International Workers’ Association (IWA) in the region – in Poland,[35] Slovakia,[36] Serbia,[37] and Russia[38] – have taken a clear stand for revolutionary internationalism. An ‘Anti-militarist Initiative’ based in Central Europe was launched in response to the surge of militarism across Europe, not least in the anarchist movement. They may be a minority, but anarchists have no faith in the inherent virtues of any majority. There is also a problem of Eurocentrism in the *East versus West* dichotomy, since internationalist reactions to the invasion of Ukraine can be seen from around the world.
Even without such concrete examples, we should be sceptical of anyone who claims to speak on behalf of a whole region, as if the anarchists of Eastern Europe were a homogeneous collective with a consensus of opinion. The logic of representation itself must be scrutinised by anarchists. Those speaking for the region “extract only one tendency from the multidimensional whole and ignore or downplay the others”.[39] In contrast “We try to listen to as many voices as possible, but we only support those that we find constructive. Others we criticize and refuse to support. In short, we perceive different tendencies and do not try to support war propaganda that portrays the Ukrainian population as a united community calling unanimously for involvement in the war.”[40] We should listen, yes, but also think for ourselves.
I totally reject the construction of an *us and them* paradigm between Eastern Europe and Western Europe. We relate to each other as individuals and collectives on the basis of shared struggles and shared principles, not as geopolitical blocs. KRAS (the Russian section of the IWA) have been slandered and had their members doxxed[41] for not falling into line behind the supposed pro-Ukraine “consensus”, despite their anti-war efforts. One of the perpetrators of this doxxing was subsequently given a platform in Britain by *Freedom*,[42] in an interview about the defunct RKAS of Ukraine, an organisation accused of cult-ish authoritarian dynamics and nationalist sympathies, whose members dissolved into the conflict between the Ukrainian state and Donbass separatists.[43] At the same time, the editors of *Freedom* refused to publish anything contrary to their pro-Ukraine line.[44] This kind of tribalism can tear international movements apart.
*** Working Class Internationalism
<quote>
“The position of ‘no war but the class war’ is not a cop-out, it is a long term and short term principle which denies the false choice between ‘evils’. To make it a reality we need to be even more active in encouraging internationalism in the working class to the extent that ordinary people feel confident, organised and supported enough to resist their war-mongering governments and national liberation movements.”
<br>
— [[https://files.libcom.org/files/Organise%2052%20-%20Autumn-Winter%201999_compressed_0.pdf][<em>Organise!</em> #52]] (1999), Anarchist Federation
</quote>
Make no mistake, in opposing capitalist wars we are not pleading for peace at all costs. We are not pacifists. There can be no peace between people so long as one part of society oppresses and exploits the rest. The violent enforcement of power and wealth underlies everything in our society, and in times of war it erupts to the surface in a terrible orgy of blood. One power structure clashes with another; but whoever wins, our slavery continues. Our struggle is to overturn these powers and build new social forms without hierarchy. We will not be passive victims of violence: every struggle for freedom must defend itself when necessary. There is a long history of libertarian partisans fighting against oppressive governments and occupiers. Armed militias and guerilla units answerable to self-organised workers (such as revolutionary unions and workers’ councils) have sprung up in times of social revolution.[45] *The people armed* are the surest safeguard against counter-revolution. But regular armies – permanent, specialised forces monopolising legitimate violence with hierarchical discipline – are a function of state power (and a rudiment of the state-in-formation).[46]
In Ukraine and Russia there is no revolution, only war. The war between nations, then, must be transformed into open class struggle and rebellion against the war machine. This begins when workers reject the social truce within their “own” nation, and organise on a class basis against the people who oppress and exploit them every day.[47] Internationalists aim to build solidarity between workers across borders, while agitating for soldiers to fraternise, desert, and mutiny. Military infrastructure can be sabotaged, as has been happening on the railways connecting Russia and Belarus to Ukraine.[48] Mutual aid networks can be set up, so that people can support each other to survive the devastation and hardship.[49] Support needs to be given to draft-evaders, deserters, prisoners, and refugees.[50] All such vital efforts, and newly emerging forms of social struggle, should be organised from below, independent of all state, military, and corporate structures. Anarchists can take the initiative in agitating and organising such activity, while arguing for working class internationalism and opposing the authoritarian measures of the militarised state.
Workers around the world can intensify the latent struggle in their workplaces and communities, taking direct action against war industries and arms trading through strikes, boycotts, and sabotage. It is imperative that we oppose war-mongering and militarisation in Britain and Europe, resisting the generalisation of war. Direct action is already being used effectively by activists against arms companies linked to the Israel Defense Forces, for example.[51] We need to link the class struggle in Britain, which is currently growing in intensity due to the cost of living crisis, to the struggles faced by the working class in Ukraine and Russia. ‘NWBCW Liverpool’ have been agitating on this basis on picket lines across Merseyside during the current strike wave. We need to spread information about the daily struggles and emerging acts of rebellion in warring territories, and find ways to support them in practice.[52] Meanwhile we can seek to assist the people fleeing the war, whether they be civilian refugees or military deserters.[53] The ‘Olga Taratuta Solidarity Initiative’ in France offers a good example of such practical support. This should bolster a broader struggle against the “Fortress Europe” border regime and Britain’s “hostile environment” policy. Some anarchists in Britain have taken this course of working class internationalism – such as the Anarchist Communist Group, Liverpool Solidarity Federation,[54] and AnarCom Network – but they are a minority.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the immiseration of the working class in Britain are both products of the same capitalist system in crisis. And this capitalist crisis can only be overcome by the revolutionary struggle of the international working class. If that *revolutionary* struggle and *international* working class solidarity have yet to develop, it is our task to help bring them about.[55] What was said by anarchists during the First World War is no less true today: “No matter where they may find themselves, the anarchists’ role in the current tragedy is to carry on proclaiming that there is but one war of liberation: the one waged in every country by the oppressed against the oppressor, by the exploited against the exploiter. Our task is to summon the slaves to revolt against their masters.”[56] Desertions, mutinies, mass strikes, and international revolutionary upheaval brought that war to an end.
In Britain we are at the heart of the global capitalist economy and NATO imperialism; to fall into war fever at this time is disastrous. The class struggle is already being waged by our bosses, bankers, oligarchs, and their lackeys in government: we can fight back or we can go to the slaughter.
*** Further Reading
<biblio>
- [[https://umanitanova.org/guerra-in-ucraina-e-diserzione-intervista-con-il-gruppo-anarchico-assembly-di-kharkiv-iten/][‘War in Ukraine and desertion: Interview with the anarchist group “Assembly” of Kharkiv’]], International Relations Commission of the Italian Anarchist Federation.
- [[https://libcom.org/article/interview-anarchosyndicalists-russia-no-war-class-war][‘An interview with anarchosyndicalists from Russia: no war but the class war!’]], Grupo Moiras.
- [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-anarchist-antimilitarism-and-myths-about-the-war-in-ukraine][‘Anarchist Antimilitarism and Myths About the War in Ukraine’]], Some Anarchists from the Central European Region.
- [[https://libcom.org/tags/assemblyorgua][<em>Assembly</em> coverage of anti-war direct action and social struggle in Ukraine and Russia.]]
- [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anarchist-federation-against-nationalism][‘Against Nationalism’]], Anarchist Federation.
</biblio>
[1] Anarchists are no less susceptible to these pressures, for all our ideals, as can be seen with anarchist fighters in Ukraine referring to Russian soldiers as “orcs” and “Putin’s horde”.
[2] Anarchists have been raising funds for the ‘Solidarity Collectives’ (formerly ‘Operation Solidarity) who provide military supplies to libertarian and antifascist activists in the Ukrainian Armed Forces (in addition to humanitarian aid). Between February and June 2022, out of €59,680 spent by Operation Solidarity, €41,404 was used for “military causes”. [[https://operation-solidarity.org/2022/07/06/operation-solidarity-the-end/]]
[3] Since the beginning of the war, they have dispersed into various Territorial Defence and regular army units (many of them transferring so as to be closer to the frontline), but still connected through the Resistance Committee and supported by the Solidarity Collectives.
[4] '“Defensive war as an act of popular resistance…”: Exclusive Interview with an Anarchist Fighter of the Territorial Defense Forces of Ukraine', Militant Wire. [[https://www.militantwire.com/p/defensive-war-as-an-act-of-popular]]
[5] Just as it is understandable that other people will seek to escape the war-zones and seek refuge elsewhere, to evade being drafted, or desert from the military.
[6] ‘A thousand red flags’, Darya Rustamova. [[https://freedomnews.org.uk/2022/03/07/a-thousand-red-flags/]]
[7] ‘Against Nationalism’, Anarchist Federation. [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anarchist-federation-against-nationalism]]
[8] ‘Editorial’, Organise! #96. [[https://organisemagazine.org.uk/3d-flip-book/organise-96-plus/]]
[9] ‘War in Ukraine and desertion: Interview with the anarchist group “Assembly” of Kharkiv’, International Relations Commission of the Italian Anarchist Federation. [[https://umanitanova.org/guerra-in-ucraina-e-diserzione-intervista-con-il-gruppo-anarchico-assembly-di-kharkiv-iten/]]
[10] Ibid.
[11] ‘Anarchist Organization in Times of War and Crisis’, Saša Kaluža. [[https://libcom.org/article/anarchist-organization-times-war-and-crisis-ukraine-sasa-kaluza]]
[12] Ibid.
[13] Back in 2018, in relation to the war against Russian-backed separatists in the Donbass region, but before the full Russian invasion of 2022, Ukrainian anarchist group ‘RevDia’ (who now participate in the Resistance Committee) argued that “The army is a hierarchical structure, where an ordinary soldier can not influence the course of the war”, and that “...the army does not protect us. And does not defend our interests”. Quoting 'Thought of war' and 'Anarchism in Action', Rev Dia. [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/rev-dia-thought-of-war]] and [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/rev-dia-anarchism-in-action#toc6]]
[14] ‘Fuck Leftist Westplaining’, Zosia Brom. [[https://freedomnews.org.uk/2022/03/04/fuck-leftist-westplaining/]]
[15] Although the extra-parliamentary far-right in Ukraine should not be brushed under the rug.
[16] This is not a criticism of antifascism in the general sense, but of a particular antifascist ideology that was prevalent in the popular fronts of the mid-twentieth century, and which continues to be present in liberal opposition to fascism.
[17] “For revolutionaries, and particularly for anarchists, the tragic experience of Spain in ‘36 should suffice to keep oneself free of illusions in respect to antifascism, which is no more than the defense of the democratic forms of capitalist management, reconciliation between classes, the option of the “lesser evil” and the abandonment of the revolutionary horizon.” Quoting 'Reflections on the ongoing capitalist butchery', Vamos Hacia La Vida. [[https://malcontent.noblogs.org/post/2022/03/28/reflections-on-the-ongoing-capitalist-butchery-russia-ukraine-vamos-hacia-la-vida/]]
[18] ‘When Insurrections Die’, Gilles Dauve. [[https://libcom.org/article/when-insurrections-die-gilles-dauve]]
[19] ‘Editorial’, Organise! #96. [[https://organisemagazine.org.uk/3d-flip-book/organise-96-plus/]]
[20] See, for example, ‘Why Do Anarchists Go To War?’, by RevDia, March 2022. Featured in Organise! #96. [[https://organisemagazine.org.uk/3d-flip-book/organise-96-plus/]]
[21] For example, “The [internationalist] analysis is [...] full of abstractions and unreal at ground level, from where Ukrainian anarchists are asking for our practical help including military equipment”. Quoting ‘Ukraine – Anarchist Approaches’ in Organise! #96. [[https://organisemagazine.org.uk/3d-flip-book/organise-96-plus/]]
[22] ‘Pragmatism as Ideology’, Joseph Kay. [[https://libcom.org/article/pragmatism-ideology]]
[23] ‘The Trouble With Slogans’, Emma Hayes, Organise! #96. [[https://organisemagazine.org.uk/3d-flip-book/organise-96-plus/]]
[24] See NWBCW Liverpool’s list of internationalist positions. [[https://nwbcwliverpool.wordpress.com/internationalist-positions/]]
[25] ‘Editorial’, Organise! #96. [[https://organisemagazine.org.uk/3d-flip-book/organise-96-plus/]]
[26] ’A political and personal statement as well as a review of our solidarity work around the war in Ukraine so far’, Anarchist Black Cross Dresden. [[https://abcdd.org/en/2022/11/25/a-political-and-personal-statement-as-well-as-a-review-of-our-solidarity-work-around-the-war-in-ukraine-so-far/#englishversion]]
[27] Ibid.
[28] Ibid.
[29] “Nationalism can offer nothing except further rounds of conflict, which look set to increase in number and severity as national competition over the world’s dwindling energy resources increases. When conflict is framed in national terms — understood as the conflict between an oppressed and an oppressor nation — the working class necessarily loses out.” Quoting 'Against Nationalism', Anarchist Federation. [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anarchist-federation-against-nationalism]]
[30] ‘Ukraine’s anti-worker law comes into effect’, openDemocracy. [[https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/ukraine-labour-law-wrecks-workers-rights/]]
[31] ”Turkey, a member of NATO, sells to the Ethiopian government drones whose engines are manufactured in Ukraine, in Kyiv. The government of Ukraine which – although itself under the threat of imperialism – did not hesitate to provide after-sales service and to send mercenary technicians to teach the Ethiopian imperialist army how to use these drones against the populations in Tigray.” [[http://cnt-ait.info/2022/02/27/tigre-ukraine/]]
[32] ‘The Lesser Evil’, Dominique Misein. [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/dominique-misein-the-lesser-evil]]
[33] ‘Editorial’, Organise! #96. [[https://organisemagazine.org.uk/3d-flip-book/organise-96-plus/]]
[34] ‘Fuck Leftist Westplaining’, Zosia Brom. [[https://freedomnews.org.uk/2022/03/04/fuck-leftist-westplaining/]]
[35] ‘Against the War!’, ZSP. [[https://zsp.net.pl/przeciw-wojnie]]. See also, anti-war actions in front of Russian and Ukrainian embassies. [[https://zsp.net.pl/anti-war-actions]]
[36] Reproduced anti-militarist articles from CNT-AIT and KRAS. [[https://www.priamaakcia.sk/Medzinarodny-den-zien-a-vojna-na-Ukrajine.html]] and [[https://www.priamaakcia.sk/Ruska-sekcia-Medzinarodnej-asociacie-pracujucich-KRAS-odpoveda-na-otazky-tykajuce-sa-vojny-na-Ukrajine.html]]
[37] ‘Let’s turn capitalist wars into a workers’ revolution!’, ASI. [[https://iwa-ait.org/content/lets-turn-capitalist-wars-workers-revolution]]
[38] ‘No War!’, KRAS. [[https://aitrus.info/node/5921]]
[39] ‘Anarchist Antimilitarism and Myths About the War in Ukraine’, Some Anarchists from the Central European Region. [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-anarchist-antimilitarism-and-myths-about-the-war-in-ukraine#toc28]]
[40] Ibid.
[41] ‘Again about “anarchists” who forget the principles’, KRAS. [[https://iwa-ait.org/content/again-about-anarchists-who-forget-principles]]
[42] ‘“Leftists” outside Ukraine are used to listening only to people from Moscow: Interview with anarcho-syndicalists in Eastern Ukraine’. [[https://freedomnews.org.uk/2022/10/04/leftists-outside-ukraine-are-used-to-listening-only-to-people-from-moscow-interview-with-rkas-anarcho-syndicalists-in-eastern-ukraine/]]
[43] ‘Caution: platformist party and psychosect in one bottle!’, Eretik. [[https://eretik-samizdat.blogspot.com/2013/01/caution-platformist-party-and.html]]
[44] See, ‘Fuck Leftist Westplaining’, by Zosia Brom. [[https://freedomnews.org.uk/2022/03/04/fuck-leftist-westplaining/]]
[45] The formation of militias by the CNT-FAI in Spain, July 1936 – prior to their regularisation into the armed forces of the Republic – are a good example of this.
[46] For example, the regularisation of the anarchist militias [see footnote above] into the military of the bourgeois-Stalinist Republic, alongside the disarming of CNT Defence Councils in the towns and cities, was a key stage of counter-revolution and reinforcement of state power in the Spanish Civil War.
[47] See, for example, ‘Wildcat strikes in Ukraine on both sides of the front line’, Assembly. [[https://libcom.org/article/wildcat-strikes-ukraine-both-sides-front-line]]
[48] See, also, the fire-bombing of military recruitment offices across Russia, and the sabotage campaign of the ‘Anarcho-Communist Combat Organisation’ (BOAK).
[49] The ‘Solidarity Collectives’ and Assembly have both been actively organising humanitarian aid for civilians.
[50] Soldiers will be more likely to refuse to fight if they know there will be a support network to aid them when facing the consequences (or help to evade them). The prosecution and abuse of deserters and conscientious objectors has already begun. See, “Repression against those who do not want to fight”, KRAS. [[https://aitrus.info/node/6044]]
[51] Although I don’t fully agree with their politics, ‘Palestine Action’ are a good example of the potential for direct action. [[https://www.palestineaction.org/news/]]
[52] Assembly’s libcom blog is a good source of information on this subject. [[https://libcom.org/tags/assemblyorgua]]
[53] The Anti-Militarist Initiative report that “At least 200,000 people are fleeing Russia to escape Putin’s military mobilisation, and tens of thousands more are avoiding mobilisation in Ukraine. Yet some voices claim that ‘the number of deserters is so negligible that it is strange to even begin to talk about it.’ These cynical attempts to ‘make invisible’ people who choose not to serve in the army, to defect or to emigrate for political reasons, must be opposed. Their voices must be heard and practical help must be given.” Quoting 'Appeal: Days of international solidarity with deserters'. [[https://antimilitarismus.noblogs.org/post/2022/09/12/appeal-days-of-international-solidarity-with-deserters/]]
[54] Liverpool SolFed set up ‘No War But the Class War — Liverpool’, alongside the Communist Workers’ Organisation. [[https://nwbcwliverpool.wordpress.com/]]
[55] Some anarchists have justified collaboration by arguing that the lack of a strong revolutionary movement in Russia or Ukraine makes an (internationalist) anarchist approach unworkable. But this logic would result in anarchists abandoning anarchism for the preferable faction of the ruling class every time circumstances push them to make this choice (i.e. every decisive historical moment). Anarchism would thus devolve into a liberal, reformist politics.
[56] ‘Anti-War Manifesto’, February 1915. [[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/various-authors-the-anarchist-international-and-war]]
|
#title A Commune in Rojava?
#subtitle Öcalan, PKK ideology & PYD policies
#author Alex de Jong
#LISTtitle A Commune in Rojava? Öcalan, PKK ideology & PYD policies
#SORTauthors Alex de Jong
#SORTtopics kurdistan, kurds, Rojava
#date January 2016
#source [[https://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article37136][www.europe-solidaire.org]]
#lang en
The siege of Kobani by Islamic State (ISIS) brought worldwide attention to the Syrian Kurdish PYD (Partiya Yekîtiya Demokrat, Democratic Union Party), the leading force in the Kurdish-majority areas in northern Syria. The PYD calls this region Rojava—literally meaning “land of the sunset” but also translated as “West Kurdistan.”
The discourse of the PYD, revolving around terms like democracy and equality and stressing women’s rights, exercises a strong attraction on the worldwide left. Likewise, the struggle of the YPG/YPJ fighters (Yekîneyên Parastina Gel, People’s Protection Units/Yekîneyên Parastina Jinê, Women’s Protection Units), organized by the PYD against ISIS, receives widespread sympathy.
Different initiatives to support the “Rojava revolution” have sprung up worldwide. A German campaign unapologetically named Waffen für Rojava (Weapons for Rojava) raised over US $135,000; other initiatives focus on humanitarian aid and political support.
In Rojava, the PYD says it is realizing a democratic society with equal rights for women, in which different ethnic and religious groups live together; political power is supposed to be organized through structures of autonomous councils. The PYD maintains that in Rojava a unique revolution is taking place, inspired by the thought of Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of the Kurdish Workers Party (Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan, PKK). Even after his arrest in 1999, Öcalan remained the political leader and the movement’s “philosopher.” To begin to understand the experiment in Rojava, and the attitude of the left towards it, one must consider Öcalan’s ideology and compare its claims with developments on the ground. [1]
*** Roots of the PKK
Öcalan was born in 1949 as a son of a Kurdish peasant family. The Kurdish provinces of Turkey were always the poorest parts of the country, partly because of racist state policies that discriminated against Kurds. Speaking Kurdish was a crime, and use of the letters x, q, and w—which exist in the Kurdish alphabet but not in the Turkish—could be prosecuted; even publications that mentioned the word “Kurd” were banned. The state tried to assimilate the Kurdish minority into the Turkish majority.
Öcalan laid the groundwork for the PKK when, in the early seventies, he built the “Kurdish Revolutionaries” (Soresgeren Kurdistan, SK). This group adopted the notion of Turkish sociologist İsmail Beşikçi that “Kurdistan” was an international colony, occupied by Turkey, Iran, Syria, and Iraq. When in 1977 the group was reorganized as the PKK, it had won modest support among Kurdish workers who had moved from the countryside to the cities to earn a living. The SK was a product of the New Left in Turkey but had some important distinctions. In contrast to other Kurdish groups, the PKK was “the only organization whose members were drawn almost exclusively from the lowest social classes—the uprooted, half-educated village and small-town youth who knew what it felt like to be oppressed, and who wanted action, not ideological sophistication.” [2] The PKK was also exceptional in making armed struggle an urgent task.
Strands of Maoism and Third-Worldism were strong among the Turkish left at the time, and the early statements of the PKK clearly show such influences. They declared that the immediate goal was a “national-democratic” revolution for an “independent and democratic Kurdistan.” The struggle would take the form of a peasant-based “people’s war” led by a PKK claiming to be the representative of the working class. Allies of the revolution were “socialist countries”—although the ruling parties of the Soviet Union and China were criticized as “revisionist”—as well as “working class parties of capitalist countries” and “the liberation movements of oppressed peoples of the world.” After the “national-democratic” revolution, the struggle would proceed to a socialist revolution. [3]
When in 1980 the army staged a coup, the PKK had become the strongest Kurdish party in Turkey. After the coup, the Turkish left was repressed, as tens of thousands were arrested, tortured, and killed. Öcalan escaped the repression because shortly before the coup he had gone to Lebanon and from there to Syria. The regime of Hafez al-Assad allowed him to set up a base of operations in Syria, and the PKK launched its guerilla war against the Turkish state, fighting which reached a peak in the mid-nineties.
An element that set the PKK apart from similar organizations was that it was a “guerrilla-party.” [4] In the PKK, being a guerrilla fighter and a party member overlapped; even cadres who did not have military responsibilities were expected to be prepared to join the guerrillas at any time. According to PKK leader Duran Kalkan, “this was not only of military value, but more important was its ideological and moral meaning.” Referring to the party’s 1986 congress, Kalkan stated,
Such a guerrilla makes ideologically a complete break with the ruling order; he breaks in a certain degree with the hierarchical system of the state and of power. That is why at the third Congress there was a serious ideological renewal in the conception of really existing socialism; the really existing socialist line of individual and familial, petit-bourgeois equal rights and freedom was superseded. Such a measure has consequences inside society as well where it calls forth changes that bring closer freedom and equality. It destroys individual family life.
*** Revolutionizing Personalities
Kalkan touched upon what became a distinctive element of the ideology of the PKK and Öcalan: the ambition to create a “new man,” characterized by a certain type of personality or mentality. According to Öcalan there is a metaphysical “Kurdish mentality,” a certain “composition of the Kurdish psyche.” Öcalan claims, “Many of the qualities and characteristics attributed to the Kurds and their society today can already be seen in the Neolithic communities of the cis-Caucasus mountain ranges—the area we call Kurdistan.” [5] However, the Kurds have been alienated from their “true” identity by the attempts of the Turkish state to assimilate the Kurds and by traditional social structures, which Öcalan calls “feudalism.”
Through criticism and self-criticism and hard work, PKK members were expected to free themselves of views and attitudes that they had learned in their “old life” and remold themselves into “new men.” The party journal <em>Serxwebûn</em> wrote,
<em>“The new man does not drink, does not gamble, never thinks of his own personal pleasure or comfort, and there is nothing feminine about him; those who [in the past] indulged in such activities will, sharp as a knife, cut out all these habits as soon as he or she is among new men. The new man’s philosophy and morality, the way he sits and stands, his style, ego, attitude and reactions [tepki] are his and his alone. The basis of all these things is his love for the revolution, freedom, country, and socialism, a love that is as solid as a rock. Applying scientific socialism to the reality of our country creates the new man.”</em> [6]
Already in 1993, Öcalan claimed that the PKK, when it discussed “scientific socialism,” did not refer to Marxism, but to its own peculiar ideology that “exceeds the interests of states, the nation and classes.” [7] As remolding people’s mentality became central to the PKK’s conception of socialism, Marxist notions of classes and revolution were replaced by terms like “humanization,” “socialization,” and “liberated personality.”
Closely associated with its goal of remolding people is the PKK’s view of women’s liberation. The PKK’s distinctive practice of women’s liberation was developed in the second half of the nineties, when the participation of women in the Kurdish movement, both as politicians and as fighters, increased. [8] The PKK’s ideas on women’s liberation are heavily influenced by the myth of a prehistoric matriarchal past, when “woman was a creating goddess.” [9] With the rise of class society, the oppression of women began. These notions are clearly copied from Friedrich Engels’ <em>The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State</em>.
However, an important difference between the PKK’s theory of women’s oppression and that of Engels is the PKK’s neglect of socio-economic factors. Engels argued that with the rise of social classes came a division of labor that relegated women’s labor, and hence their social status, to a secondary position. Öcalan instead puts the stress overwhelmingly on issues like “mentality” (a key word in his ideology) and “personality”; women’s oppression is said to be produced by attitudes that are transferred by the family from generation to generation and which are internalized by women. Such patriarchal attitudes oppress women by blocking them from social life and by men’s control of women’s bodies, behaviors, and sexualities; this explanation thus neglects the role of socio-economic factors. [10]
In the guerrilla war, independent women’s units were formed, as was later an independent women’s army—a practice that was adopted by the Syrian Kurdish movement when it organized the YPJ. The motivation was that this freed women from the sexism of male comrades and forced them to break with traditional notions of female obedience and servility. In mixed organs of the PKK and PYD, a mandatory gender quota exists. The leaderships have to include at least 40 percent women, and executive posts are shared by one man and one woman.
The PKK’s thinking is strongly essentialist. Not only are women and nature often equated, women as such are assumed to have certain characteristics, such as empathy, an abhorrence of violence, and a closeness to nature. The PKK discourse on women’s liberation sees the category of women, one it often regards as a homogeneous whole, as superseding political differences. As its women’s organization stated, “The women’s liberation ideology is an alternative for all hitherto existing world-views, whether of the Left or of the Right.” [11] Today it is women as such who are assumed to be the vanguard of the struggle for liberation.
In the nineties, themes of class struggle and class formation largely disappeared from the PKK’s ideology. As it moved from the Stalinist idea that socialism means a party-state that owns the means of production to the idea of the creation of a “new man,” the PKK’s conception of socialism became more abstract, increasingly receding into the future. “Democratic civilization” replaced an independent, socialist Kurdistan as the goal of the PKK movement. PKK expert Joost Jongerden describes “democratic civilization” as the umbrella term for three intertwined projects: democratic republic, democratic autonomy, and democratic con federalism. [12] The democratic republic entails a reform of the Turkish state, to recognize the existence of minorities, especially Kurds, among its population and to dissociate citizenship from Turkish ethnicity—similarly, the PYD suggests the Syrian state should abandon the pan-Arabist ideology of the Ba’ath party.
Democratic autonomy is a concept borrowed from Murray Bookchin (1921–2006), a U.S. libertarian socialist, and refers to a combination of social movements and cooperatives that would pre-figure a future egalitarian society. Bookchin was a Trotskyist when World War II ended and, like many Trotskyists, expected to see a wave of working-class social revolutions. When this did not happen, and the Trotskyist movement remained small and isolated, Bookchin reconsidered his ideas.
Bookchin gave up on Marxism, which in his eyes had made a fundamental mistake in seeing the working class as the revolutionary subject. Likewise, the PKK never saw the self-emancipation of the working class as leading the way to socialism. The early PKK was rather distrustful of the working class, which it saw as privileged compared to the peasantry and as too closely associated with the Turkish state in the city. In the early nineties, Öcalan stated that there were no pronounced class divisions in Kurdish society. [13] The real dividing line was between “collaborators” and “patriots,” not between capitalists and working people.
For Bookchin, capitalism’s weak point was not the contradiction capital-labor, but the contradiction capital-ecology. Capital, endlessly accumulating, destroys the environment. The struggle to save the ecosystem takes on an anti-capitalist character and can unite everybody who sees their lives threatened by the deterioration of the natural environment and who rebels against their alienation from it. Although today the PKK also considers ecology an important issue, for them it is not as central as it was for Bookchin.
For Öcalan, the contradiction driving liberation struggles is that between oppressed identities and the state. The oppression of certain identities is blamed by Öcalan on state policies that are lagging behind the development of the new civilization, a development that is unavoidable because of technological progress. [14] The task is to make the state allow the realization of the democratic potential that already exists. To this end, structures of “democratic autonomy” are supposed to be built across existing state borders and inside the existing nation-states. These structures are based on recognizing and representing different identities, like ethnic groups, women, or workers. In Turkish Kurdistan, these structures are often intertwined with those of municipalities where legal Kurdish parties have been elected.
Structures of democratic autonomy should federate from the bottom up, in a system of “democratic confederalism.” Öcalan describes this as “a pyramid-like model of organization. Here it is the communities who talk, debate and make decisions. From the base to the top the elected delegates would form a kind of loose coordinating body. They will be the elected representatives of the people for one year.” [15]
The PKK ideology today rejects attempts to set up new states, seeing them as inherently oppressive. Seeds of the current PKK critique of states as such can be found already in its early history. From its beginning, the PKK criticized the Soviet Union and the Communist International of the early twenties for their critical support of Kemalist nationalism. Moreover, in the PKK’s eyes, the Soviet leadership prioritized the national security of the Soviet Union over internationalist and anti-imperialist principles. The critique of the supremacy of Soviet raison d’état was generalized to nation-states as such. Another impetus for the PKK to abandon its project of a Kurdish nation-state was the multifaceted character of the population it considered to be Kurdish. For example, in parts of Turkish Kurdistan, identities had evolved along confessional lines. In Eastern Anatolia, the PKK was confronted with the fact that many people considered themselves Alevites, not Kurds. [16] To create a unified nation-state out of this heterogeneity would have required cultural assimilation, something to which the PKK was opposed.
Öcalan claims the PKK’s struggle is only the latest Kurdish rebellion against centralized state power. In a remarkable example of auto-orientalism, Kurds are presented as a people without history that since Sumerian times (fourth millennium BC) has rebelled against state power, all the while remaining “in essence” the same. The “original sin” that caused the Kurds’ oppression was the formation of the state as such, against which they tried to preserve their “natural” free culture. Öcalan describes his goal as a “renaissance” of an idealized society that during the Neolithic supposedly existed in what is now Kurdistan. The positive aspects of this mythic past—a central role for women in society, a “pure” Kurdish identity, social egalitarianism—are to return in a modern form.
Öcalan is not in favor of overthrowing existing states. Rather, these should be superseded at some point by the structures of democratic confederalism. Öcalan’s critique of existing states is rather ambiguous in that the democracy he praises is often equated with the parliamentary, capitalist states of the West. For example, he claims that in European countries a “determined democracy” developed and that this led to the “supremacy of the West.” “Western civilization can, in this sense, be termed democratic civilization.” [17]And in 2011: “In principle, the Western democratic system—which has been established through immense sacrifices—contains everything needed for solving social problems.” [18] “Europe, [democracy’s] birthplace, has by and large left nationalism behind in view of the wars of the twentieth century and established a political system adhering to democratic standards. This democratic system has already shown its advantages over other systems—including real socialism—and is now the only acceptable system worldwide.” [19]
*** Class and Economy in Rojava
Capitalist development has not progressed far in Rojava. It is a mainly agricultural region with only a small modern working class. But Rojava is very productive, and in Ba’athist Syria it resembled an internal colony. The region produced raw materials like wheat and oil that were processed somewhere else. [20] Öcalan has described the socio-economic situation in Rojava as one where on the one hand there were small, family-based economic units and on the other hand the state economy. [21]
Öcalan’s vision of a socio-economic alternative to such conditions can be described as social-democratic: “In my eyes, justice demands that creative work is enumerated according to its contribution to the entire product. Remuneration of creative work, which contributes to the productivity of the society, has to be in proportion to other creative activities. Provision of employment to everybody will be a general public task. Everybody will be able to participate in the health care system, education, sports and arts according to their capabilities and needs.” [22]
The relatively vague economic proposals of the PYD for Rojava can also be called social democratic. The goal is a mixed economy with strong social services. The “social contract” of Rojava declares natural resources and land to be property of the people and their exploitation to be regulated by law. At the same time, the contract protects private property and declares that nothing shall be expropriated. About 20 percent of the land in Rojava is in the hands of landlords, and their property is protected by the social contract. Formerly state-owned farms have been distributed among poor families. The formation of cooperatives is encouraged by Tev-Dem (Tevgera Civaka Demokratîk, or Movement for a Democratic Society), the governing structure of Rojava. In the longer term, cooperatives are supposed to become the dominant form of enterprise.
The PYD speaks of Rojava as a new experience, a new kind of revolution based on lessons drawn from the failure of earlier movements. The same applies to the choice of not expropriating property, explained as part of the refusal to use force in order to avoid the authoritarianism that disfigured earlier attempts to create socialism. The refusal of the PYD to expel Syrian government troops completely from Rojava and to join the insurgency against Assad is claimed to be based on the same refusal of force. However, it was the uprising against the Syrian state that gave the Kurdish movement the chance to form Rojava as the Assad regime decided to focus on fighting the rebels.
We should be careful not to project Euro-centric ideas of socialist revolution on Rojava. But in the absence of a working class that in its struggle for self-emancipation can be the driving force of social change, it is clearly the PYD itself that is playing the decisive role. Before being largely wiped away by the two counter-revolutionary poles of the Assad regime and Salafi jihadism, autonomous self-organization was an important element in the Syrian revolution, as shown by the grassroots structures that sprung up across Syria in the earlier phase of the revolution. The councils in Rojava, however, are the initiative of a political force, not of autonomous bottom-up initiatives. The PYD is the dominant force in Tev-Dem. The armed forces in Rojava (YPG, YPJ, and the security forces, the Asayiş) are trained in the ideology of the PYD and swear an oath to Öcalan.
The survival of Rojava against attacks from Islamic State is undoubtedly a victory for the left. The Kurdish movement deserves concrete solidarity in its struggle for self-determination, the more so because in Rojava people are trying to construct a progressive alternative.
There is no reason why the left cannot combine solidarity for the Rojava project with a critical eye on its limitations. Maybe Rojava can ask the question of how to overcome capitalism, but this can be answered only in a wider context in the region, in cooperation with other forces.
Considering the tensions between the Kurdish movement and many Arabs in Syria and abroad, this perspective is increasingly difficult. The decisive role of the PYD in Rojava and its refusal to expel Syrian government troops completely and join the insurgency against Assad has led to accusations that it “cooperates” with the dictatorship. Different Arab rebel groups, but also some other Syrian Kurdish groups, describe Rojava as a “PYD dictatorship.”
When there are reports about human rights violations, the first reflex should be serious concern. Amnesty International has sounded the alarm over reports that YPG units have driven away Arab civilians. [23] PYD Co-President Salih Muslim has admitted that YPG fighters made a “mistake” when they opened fire on a group of demonstrators in Âmûde in July 2014. [24] Human Rights Watch has also reported critically of repression of protests in Rojava. [25] Implying that criticism is somehow part of enemy plans—for instance, YPG General Commander Hemo’s statement that the timing of the Amnesty International report was “suspicious” “at a time when we are … getting ready to wage a big war against ISIS”—is not very convincing. [26]
Accusations such as these, as well as the stance of the PYD regarding imperialist interventions, create the risk of further damaging relationships between Kurds and Arabs. The cooperation between the YPG and coalition forces, and its offers to cooperate with Russia, most of whose bombardments do not target ISIS, might be understandable in a fight for survival, but the left should not turn a blind eye to the consequences of cooperating with imperialist powers.
In the Western left, “solidarity” often has meant providing support and sympathy for movements in the Global South, movements that were often romanticized, with dreams and hopes of Western leftists projected onto faraway experiences. Disappointment, and the end of links, became almost inevitable. To take seriously the oft-repeated saying that the left should learn from international experiences means it should try to grasp such developments in their complexity and contradictions.
Alex de Jong
*** <em>Bibliography</em>
<biblio>
Akkaya, Ahmet Hamdi and Joost Jongerden, “Reassembling the political: the PKK and the project of radical democracy,” <em>European Journal of Turkish Studies</em> (2012).
Amnesty International, “We had nowhere to go”: Forced displacement and demolitions in Northern Syria (London: 2015).
Aydin, Aysegul and Cem Emrence, <em>Zones of rebellion. Kurdish insurgents and the Turkish state</em> (Ithaca: 2015).
Çağlayan, Handan, “From Kawa the Blacksmith to Ishtar the Goddess: Gender Constructions in Ideological-Political Discourses of the Kurdish Movement in Post-1980 Turkey,” <em>European Journal of Turkish Studies</em> 14 (2012).
Brauns, Nikolas and Brigitte Kiechle, PKK. <em>Perspektiven des kurdischen Freiheitkampfes: Zwischen Selbsbestimmung, EU und Islam</em> (Stuttgart: 2010).
Bruinessen, Martin van, “Between guerrilla war and political murder: the Workers’ Party of Kurdistan,” <em>Middle East Report</em> (no. 153, July – August 1988), 40–42+44–46+50.
Flach, Anja, Ercan Ayboĝo, and Michael Knapp, <em>Revolution in Rojava. Frauenbewegung und Kommunalismus zwischen Krieg und Embargo</em> (Hamburg: 2015).
Human Rights Watch, <em>Under Kurdish Rule. Abuses in PYD-run Enclaves of Syria</em>, 2014.
Grojean, Olivier, “The production of the new man with in the PKK,” <em>European Journal of Turkish Studies</em> (2012).
Kimdir, Mutlu Çiviroğlu, “YPG General Commander Hemo on Syrian Democratic Force, US Weapons & Amnesty Report.”
Küpeli, Ismail (ed.), <em>Kampf um Kobanê. Kampf um die Zukunft des Nahen Ostens</em>(Műnster: 2015).
Öcalan, Abdullah, <em>The Declaration of Democratic Confederalism</em> (2005).
Öcalan, Abdullah, <em>Declaration on the Democratic Solution of the Kurdish Question</em>(London: 1999).
Öcalan, Abdullah, <em>The third domain. Reconstructing liberation. Extracts from the submissions to the ECHR</em> (London: 2003).
Öcalan, Abdullah, <em>Prison Writings. The PKK and the Kurdish question in the 21<sup>st</sup> century</em>(London: 2011).
PKK, <em>Programm</em> (Köln: 1984).
Schmidinger, Thomas, <em>Krieg und Revolution in Syrisch-Kurdistan. Analysen und Stimmen aus Rojava</em> (Vienna: 2014).
</biblio>
*** P.S.
“A Commune in Rojava?”. New Politics. Winter 2016, Vol:XV-4, Whole #: 60: [[http://newpol.org/content/commune-rojava][newpol.org]]
*Alex de Jong is editor of the Dutch socialist magazine Grenzeloos, and co-director of the International Institute for Research and Education in Amsterdam.*
[1] Part of this article is based on a longer piece available on ESSF (article 34511), “Stalinist caterpillar into libertarian butterfly? — The evolving ideology of the PKK”:[[http://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article34511][www.europe-solidaire.org]]
[2] Martin van Bruinessen, “Between Guerrilla War and Political Murder: The Workers’ Party of Kurdistan,” Middle East Report (No. 153, July-August 1988), 40–42+44–46+50.
[3] PKK, Programm (Köln: 1984).
[4] Nikolas Brauns and Brigitte Kiechle, PKK. Perspektiven des kurdischen Freiheitkampfe : Zwischen Selbsbestimmung, EU und Islam (Stuttgart: 2010), 57.
[5] Abdullah Öcalan, Prison Writings. The PKK and the Kurdish question in the 21<sup>st</sup> century (London: 2011), 21, 42.
[6] Olivier Grojean, “The production of the new man within the PKK,” European Journal of Turkish Studies (2012), 4:[[http://ejts.revues.org/4925][ejts.revues.org]]
[7] Brauns & Kiechle, PKK, 77.
[8] Handan Çağlayan, “‘From Kawa the Blacksmith to Ishtar the Goddess: Gender Constructions in Ideological-Political Discourses of the Kurdish Movement in Post-1980 Turkey,” European Journal of Turkish Studies (No. 14, 2012), 2.:[[http://ejts.revues.org/4657][ejts.revues.org]]
[9] Abdullah Öcalan, “Jineolojî als Wissenschaft der Frau,” Einleitende Worte der Herausgeberin.:[[http://www.kurdistan-report.de/index.php/archiv/2014/172/110-jineoloji-als-wissenschaft-der-frau][www.kurdistan-report.de]]
[10] Çağlayan, “From Kawa the Blacksmith to Ishtar the Goddess,” 2.
[11] Brauns & Kiechle, PKK, 247.
[12] :[[http://ejts.revues.org/4615][ejts.revues.org]]
[13] Brauns & Kiechle, PKK, 82.
[14] Abdullah Öcalan, The third domain. Reconstructing liberation. Extracts from the submissions to the ECHR (London: 2003), 54, 56.
[15] Abdullah Öcalan, The Declaration of Democratic Confederalism (2005):[[http://www.kurdmedia.com/article.aspx?id=10174][www.kurdmedia.com]]
[16] Aysegul Aydin and Cem Emrence, Zones of Rebellion. Kurdish Insurgents and the Turkish State (Ithaca: 2015), 40. Alevism is a branch of Shia Islam, while the Turkish state favors a kind of Sunni Islam. Alevism should not be confused with Alawism, another branch of Shia Islam.
[17] Abdullah Öcalan, Declaration on the Democratic Solution of the Kurdish Question (London: 1999), 59.
[18] Abdullah Öcalan, Prison Writings, 71.
[19] Öcalan, Prison Writings, 91.
[20] Ismail Küpeli (ed.), Kampf um Kobanê. Kampf um die Zukunft des Nahen Ostens (Műnster: 2015), 34.
[21] Quoted in RSL 252.
[22] Öcalan, Prison Writings, 60.
[23] Amnesty International, “We had nowhere to go”: Forced displacement and demolitions in Northern Syria (London: 2015): [[https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde24/2503/2015/en/][www.amnesty.org]]
[24] Thomas Schmidinger, Krieg und Revolution in Syrisch-Kurdistan. Analysen und Stimmen aus Rojava (Vienna: 2014), 186.
[25] Human Rights Watch, “Under Kurdish Rule: Abuses in PYD-run Enclaves of Syria” (2014): [[https://www.hrw.org/report/2014/06/19/under-kurdish-rule/abuses-pyd-run-enclaves-syria][www.hrw.org]]
[26] Mutlu Çiviroğlu Kimdir, YPG General Commander Hemo on Syrian Democratic Force, US Weapons & Amnesty Report:[[http://civiroglu.net/2015/10/15/ypg-general-commander-hemo-on-syrian-democratic-force-us-weapons-amnesty-report/][civiroglu.net]]
|
#title Kurdish Autonomy Between Dream and Reality
#author Alex de Jong
#SORTauthors Alex de Jong, Joost Jongerden
#SORTtopics Rojava, democratic confederalism, PKK, interview, not-anarchist
#date June 4, 2015
#source Retrieved on 7<sup>th</sup> June 2021 from [[https://roarmag.org/essays/kurdish-autonomy-jongerden-interview/][roarmag.org]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2021-06-07T13:12:28
#notes In this interview, Joost Jongerden reflects on the Rojava revolution, Öcalan’s leadership role, the position of women in the Kurdish struggle and the PKK. This interview originally appeared in Dutch on Actie voor Rojava.
#notoc 1
The defense of the Kurdish city of Kobane against the so-called Islamic State (IS) drew worldwide attention. In the middle of the Syrian civil war, the Kurdish movement is attempting an experiment in democracy and self-rule in three areas in the north of the country, together called Rojava. The leading political force in this experiment is the PYD (Democratic Union Party).
The PYD and its sister organizations in Turkey (PKK) and Iran (PJAK) fight for autonomy for the Kurdish population. In these areas the movements claim to be building a society with equal rights for men and women, direct democracy and social justice. In the ‘social contract’ of Rojava, a kind of constitution, resources and land are declared to be common property, while democratic freedoms, the right to free education and to a livelihood are explicitly recognized.
The revolutionary process in Rojava is a unique experience and a source of hope. At the same time, much remains unclear about local developments. While the PYD receives support from Western powers in its struggle against IS, her sister organization — the PKK — is still banned in Western countries as a ‘terrorist organization’. Many people in Syria strongly criticize the PYD. What kind of movement is the PYD? And what are the developments in Rojava?
In this interview, Joost Jongerden discusses these questions — and others. Jongerden teaches rural sociology at the University of Wageningen in the Netherlands and published numerous books and articles about Kurdistan and the Kurdish movement. Among other works, he wrote <em>Radicalising Democracy: Power, Politics, People and the PKK</em> and co-edited an issue of the <em>European Journal of Turkish Studies</em> on ‘Ideological Productions and Transformations: the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the Left‘.
The interview was taken and translated from Dutch by Alex de Jong.
----
*** <em>Let’s start with the political evolution of the PYD. This movement bases itself on the same ideology as the PKK, an organization which started as a Marxist-Leninist national liberation movement. My impression is that since the mid-1990s, and especially since the arrest of PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan in 1999, an ideological metamorphosis has been taking place in which direct democracy and autonomy have been put at the center of the movement’s discourse.</em>
Let me begin by addressing the characterization of the PKK. This organization was officially founded as a party in 1978 but already from 1972-’73 onwards there was a process of group formation that led to the birth of the PKK. So this group started to form shortly after the military coup in Turkey in 1971. This was a time when the radical left in Turkey was violently repressed, leaders and cadres of left-wing movements were sentenced to death or died during military operations, and many other activists were imprisoned.
What followed was a period in which activists tried to rebuild the left and were looking for a new point of reference. The people who would later form the PKK were already active during those years and were searching as well. At first, the separations between groups were fluid — there was a lot of internal discussion — but later on these groups evolved into clearly separate organizations.
One important difference between the PKK and the other groups that were formed during that time was that it remained independent from the existing political models. I want to soften the impression that the PKK was very ‘orthodox’. It was a Marxist-Leninist party, with the hierarchy and ideological reference points you would expect from such a party. As such it was not very different from most of the left at the time.
But the difference was that the PKK did not consider any of the ‘really existing socialist’ countries to be a guiding light — not China, not Cuba, not Albania, nor the Soviet Union. These countries aspired to realize socialism, but none of them were considered to be suitable examples. This was an important difference between the PKK and many other left-wing parties at the time, all of which tended to view certain countries as the embodiment of their conception of socialism — as their model.
*** <em>What implications did this have for the PKK?</em>
The PKK had a more critical view of their own ideology. They didn’t adopt an existing model but were able to interrogate themselves critically. They were more self-reliant ideologically. They always gave a lot of attention to self-evaluation and ideological education; after all they didn’t have a model or guiding state, so they were forced to think more for themselves.
The ideological metamorphosis of the PKK is related to this. In the mid-1980s, the PKK formulated a criticism of the Soviet Union, which led to them being attacked by pro-Moscow parties. Nowadays, the PKK claims that this period was the beginning of a process of ideological self-interrogation.
If you analyze that critique today there is a risk of projecting things onto it, but it’s probably safe to say that there <em>is</em> a relation between this critique and later developments. The PKK observed that the reality in the countries where national liberation movements, or ‘really existing socialism’, took hold was very different from the promises for which people had fought.
If you talk about this with PKK members today, they would tell you that it is incorrect to claim that these struggles brought no gains at all — but they will also emphasize that the results fell short of the promises. Even then, questions about the reasons for this were already connect to a critique of the nation state. But back then, while they had this critique, they didn’t have an alternative. The paradigm shift in their thinking about the state was a long-term process that was concluded somewhere in 2003-’05.
*** <em>Would it be correct to say that the process of questioning Marxist-Leninist ideology goes back further, but that only in the early 2000s proper answers were formulated?</em>
Yes, exactly.
*** <em>And this critique, was that one of the state as such, or of certain existing nation states?</em>
Both, actually. It is a critique of the nation state in the sense that it questions how in such a state a certain identity becomes the measure of who has rights — excluding people who don’t fit a particular identity or pushing them to assimilate to varying degrees. It’s part of the essence of Turkish nationalism, of Kemalism, to assimilate people with a different cultural identity, and the Kurds formulated a fierce critique of such policies. In a way, that is self-explanatory, but many national liberation movements still criticized the state under which they lived while looking for a solution in creating a nation state of their own. The problem returns as the solution!
Inside the PKK, the criticism of the Turkish nation state led to a questioning of the desirability of a Kurdish nation state in which minorities might yet again be disadvantaged. The state as such is accused of having penetrated into the micro-levels of social life and of supplanting people’s own capacities and potentialities for self-organization. We all relate to the state as separate individuals while forms of collectivity have, to a large degree, been dismantled. Society is splintered. Instead of turning towards the state for a solution, people’s capacities for self-organization should be strengthened.
*** <em>But in many of Öcalan’s writings, the movement’s ideological leader talks about an essential, unchanging Kurdish culture. And even if this is no longer related to the goal of a Kurdish nation state, it is questionable how much room this leaves for social pluralism, for groups that fall outside of this category — all the more so because, according to Öcalan, the politics of the PKK are supposedly based on what he considers to be the essence of this Kurdish culture, which is its egalitarian and freedom-loving nature.</em>
I think Öcalan’s writings are ambiguous. One reads references to a certain conception of Kurdish history but at the same when he discusses the category of the ‘Kurds’, he recognizes that this is a diverse group — for example in the languages that are spoken, or in terms of religion. So if one would try to create a Kurdish nation state, what would be the national language? Those are the kind of questions the PKK poses and that lead to a lot of discussion within the Kurdish movement in general. But in the texts themselves you hardly ever encounter an interrogation of the Kurdish identity.
*** <em>From roughly the turn of the century onwards, it seems that the movement found some of the answers to the questions it had been wrestling with in the work of Murray Bookchin, a libertarian socialist from the US. Why Bookchin? My impression is that this started with Öcalan who began to read widely after his arrest, encountering Bookchin — and the rest of the organization followed after him. Is that about right?</em>
You have to consider that Öcalan defended himself in the case of the Turkish state against him. This gave him almost unlimited access to literature. There are lists of the books he has requested to read in prison and those are very extensive and varied. Bookchin is one of the authors on those lists but he is not very prominent. Still, he was clearly an inspiration for Öcalan. Öcalan regularly speaks with his lawyers and those talks are recorded, edited and published by the PKK.
At a certain point during such a conversation, Öcalan recommended the members of municipal councils in the Kurdish areas of southeast Turkey to read Bookchin. Clearly, the theory spread from Öcalan himself. At the same time, I think the PKK has been collectively searching for new ideas, but in this process Öcalan remains dominant. Still this role is not completely unchallenged, and in 2004 there was a split away from the PKK of people who disagreed with Öcalan’s new orientation.
*** <em>A few years earlier there was already a split after Öcalan’s statements in the Turkish court. A number of PKK militants back then stated that Öcalan had abandoned the goals of the movement, for example, by asserting that the PKK no longer wanted to create a Kurdish state. These members wanted to stick to the old orientation. Öcalan’s courtroom statement came as a shock to many members of the PKK.</em>
Yes, indeed.
*** <em>But that would indicate that Öcalan himself, as an individual, determines this development. There seems to be contradiction within the PKK: this organization and its allies have developed into a movement claiming a kind of direct democracy as its goal, but at the same time this goal of democracy from below seems to be based on instructions from above, from Öcalan?</em>
Öcalan certainly plays a dominant role. Instructions might be putting it too strongly but we could certainly speak of motivation. But take the anarchist movement in the Netherlands in the early twentieth century as an example: Domela Nieuwenhuis was clearly dominant in this movement and left a very strong impression on it. At the same time, there were various forms of self-organization going on. There is a certain tension between these developments, but a prominent role of a certain individual doesn’t exclude the active participation of the others.
*** <em>The PYD claims to have no organizational ties with the PKK, but they have the same ideological inspiration and develop in similar ways. The two share a common goal. That goal goes by different names. In his early statement for the court, Öcalan speaks of a ‘democratic republic’; today the emphasis is on something called ‘democratic autonomy’. Both are covered by a third term, ‘democratic civilization’. What do these terms mean concretely?</em>
I make a distinction between democratic republic, democratic autonomy and democratic confederalism. Democratic republic is the project of reconstructing Turkey, with at its core a new constitution that would separate civil rights from identity. In Turkey’s current constitution, civil rights are dependent on being Turkish and this identity is to a certain degree defined ethnically. Democratic republic is the name for a republic in which civil rights are no longer the privilege of a certain ethnic group; a republic in which the <em>demos</em> is separated from the <em>ethnos</em>.
Democratic autonomy means giving people themselves the power to decide on matters that affect them. Democratic confederalism is an administrative structure of the local bodies, councils, in which this power is organized. I think those are the core elements. Democratic modernity or democratic civilization is, I would say, an umbrella term for these principles.
*** <em>And the goal is to extend democratic confederalist networks across the existing state borders?</em>
Yes, the goal is to form democratic autonomy from below, by making decisions from below. Democratic confederalism means such decisions are not taken in isolation of the other and are not limited to local concerns and deliberations. Local autonomy needs to be forged in connection with the other, otherwise you could end up in a situation in which a community is only interested in itself and basically ignores the rest of the world.
*** <em>Parts of Rojava are rich in oil. Without connections between localities, you could end up with a dynamic in which the community living on top of the oil says ‘this is ours’, and existing inequalities between regions would end up being reproduced. Yet in Öcalan’s statements one finds very little discussion of such social-economic issues; he mostly focuses on cultural rights and freedoms. He argues that in the Kurdish regions there is no crystallization of social classes and that there is no class struggle there. How realistic is that?</em>
There are some sharp contradictions, especially related to land. Cizîrê, the largest of the three cantons in Rojava, consists predominately of agricultural land. Or take southeast Turkey, north Kurdistan, which is also a predominantly agricultural region with only a few pockets of industry, similar to Iranian Kurdistan. The exception is southern Kurdistan in Iraq, which is a consumer economy based on the export of oil and the import of almost all basic necessities.
In southeast Turkey, in particular, a middle class is forming and the social contradictions and social struggles are the main issues facing the movement in the cities. Perhaps you can’t really say that there is a working class, because the local economy is relatively undeveloped, but there is an underclass. And the question is: how does the movement relate to this? In theory, this question is not really addressed.
But last year there were a number of meetings in southeast Turkey to discuss how an economy could be organized under democratic autonomy. So the issue does receive some attention, but it is easier for the movement to organize people around cultural or linguistic issues than it is around class. When the Turkish state offers no education in the Kurdish language, you can organize that yourself — and then the state can ban this, but at least the contradictions are clear. Reorganizing the economy is more complicated.
*** <em>Isn’t this discussion also made more difficult because there is a tendency within the movement to speak in terms of Kurds in general, as struggling against an external form of oppression? After all, if you want to discuss the social question, like contradictions between landless peasants and landlords, you’re basically speaking of contradictions between Kurds, among the Kurdish people, or whatever term you want to use.</em>
This is clearly an issue that receives less attention at the moment. The old PKK regarded both social issues and national liberation as central themes around which to organize people. Under democratic autonomy, in the current ideology, national liberation no longer takes the shape of forming an independent state but rather of self-organization. The social question needs to be a part of that, but in a context of war as in Rojava today, that would look very different from the situation in north Kurdistan, for instance.
In Rojava, the distribution of energy and foodstuffs is organized through the organs of democratic autonomy. In the social contract of Rojava, land was declared to be under common ownership — but the land of big landlords has not been expropriated because the movement ‘does not want to use force’. Still, if the social contradictions deepen, what is the alternative? At the moment the movement in Rojava has not really been confronted with this issue yet. Many of the landlords have fled and it is not clear what will happen when the war ends, and whether these landlords will return. I think it was a choice of the movement to remain cautious for the moment.
*** <em>The old PKK saw its revolution as a project that developed in two stages: first national liberation, through the formation of an independent Kurdish state, and then social liberation and equality. Does the diminished centrality of the social question today still reflect the influence of this sequence?</em>
I don’t think so. In principle, the movement sees the two as simultaneous but also as processes that are ongoing. It is the same for the gender issue: the movement doesn’t say ‘first we establish democratic autonomy and take care of cultural and linguistic issues and only after that we deal with the position of women in society’. Instead, they work simultaneously on these issues. In Rojava, for example, some families keep their daughters at home and don’t allow them to go to school. The movement doesn’t force these families to send their daughters to school; they talk to them, try to convince them. Liberation doesn’t happen overnight — it is a continuous process.
*** <em>In the case of these conservative families, it might be counterproductive if the movement tried, in a top-down fashion, to force such cultural habits to change.</em>
But it is the same with the issue of land, and of who owns it — that is also a cultural matter.
*** <em>But in the case of land there is a clear contradiction between the interests of the big landlords and of the landless peasants. Force becomes unavoidable.</em>
True, but if a strong peasant movement would arise to expropriate the land I don’t think — and I’m speculating here — that the PKK or PYD would turn against it. If these landlords return after years and demand their land back, the people who have been cultivating that land will probably not give in easily. I think it’s possible that daily reality brings about a process of expropriation, but that is not certain.
*** <em>All this speaks of a certain conception of revolution; it is no longer like the old PKK, which saw its task as seizing power and then implementing socialism by decree. Instead, revolution is seen as a process of raising consciousness and giving ideological guidance. The PKK nowadays no longer says it is the ‘vanguard party’, but the catalyst and ideological inspiration. So the PKK/PYD does have as a goal to fill these democratic structures with its own ideology.</em>
I think so, hence the strong emphasis on ideological education.
*** <em>One of the core elements of that ideology is women’s liberation. But, as you already mentioned, there are also strong patriarchal traditions in the region. Where does this emphasis on women’s liberation come from?</em>
Here again Öcalan played a significant role by raising this issue within the organization. But it did not start with him. Women played an important role in the early PKK already — maybe they were not many but they had influence. That distinguished the PKK from other left-wing parties at the time, which had no women in leadership roles. And the attention for women’s liberation grew over time. From the beginning, the PKK’s struggle provided a space in which women could play a social and political role, and as the influence of the PKK grew this space grew along with it.
Öcalan’s role was to raise women’s liberation as a theoretical issue within the party. At the same time, women in the party often refer to his name. Around 2003/’04 there was an internal struggle within the PKK after the party leadership decided that the women’s movements should be subordinated to the party. The women’s movement strongly opposed this and they used the arguments of Öcalan, the leader, to strengthen their case. They won this battle. So Öcalan’s statements are also used by the members to struggle for a certain autonomy for themselves.
*** <em>The PKK has a peculiar conception of women’s liberation. They hardly ever refer to feminist thinkers or currents outside of their own organization and tend to think in terms of a dichotomy between men and women — and to prioritize this contradiction over others.</em>
True, but this is an attempt to form a certain subject. The contradiction colonizer-colonized is a contradiction that enables the formation of a group. The social question is another, although this one is given less attention now), and the contradiction between men and women — the gender question — is another. There are multiple fields of struggle and the attempt is to formulate a type of politics that doesn’t prioritize one struggle over the other.
*** <em>But many PKK texts discuss ‘the woman’, while one of the insights of the feminist movements is that there is no such thing as a single, homogeneous category of ‘the woman’ — women are divided along nationality, sexual identity, class, and so on.</em>
I think the women’s struggle is formulated on a highly political and ideological level and takes place along lines that are partly the result of the division of labor between men and women, and partly the result of cultural and religious conceptions about the roles of men and women. Discussions on how to shape that field of struggle are being followed by people who are close to the movement, but I don’t know what impact this has within the party. People who are not affiliated to organizations or who are not party members often play an important role in discussions about left-wing politics, and with the PKK as well you can see that people become active around a certain issue and discuss these issues outside the party as well.
*** <em>Does the PKK take an interest in those kind of discussions?</em>
They rely strongly on their own education and ideology. At the same time, when you go around the region and look, for example, at bookstores that are close to the movement and that sell books that are published locally, you see a broad range of thinkers. Think of people like Wallerstein and Chomsky, but Adorno and Gramsci are translated as well.
What I found interesting was the letter written by Suphi Nejat Agirnasli, who was supposedly a member of the Turkish MLKP, and who fell in the defense of Kobane. He referred to a number of left-wing feminists — something you might not expect from a member of a Maoist organization like the MLKP. And recently, circles that are close to the PKK organized a large conference in the German city of Hamburg to which they invited different left-wing thinkers like John Holloway and David Harvey.
*** <em>Does the involvement of several left-wing Turkish groups with Rojava lead to changes within the Turkish left?</em>
I can’t assess the significance of that. What’s more important is the development of the legal Kurdish left-wing HDP party, and to what extent it will succeed in finding support in the west of Turkey. The legal Kurdish parties have always tried to form alliances with the Turkish left and often entered elections together, but these parties remained small. The HDP is now trying to build a party structure that can appeal to left-wing Turks as well and which is broader than the existing, normal radical groups. If they succeed in this, there is a chance of a political breakthrough.
*** <em>Rojava drew a lot of attention during the struggle against IS in Kobane. But the experiment in Rojava was made possible by the civil war in Syria. The PYD is accused of striking a bargain with the Assad regime: the regime pulled out its troops and the PYD won’t open a new front against the regime, creating a kind of win-win situation for Assad and the Kurds.</em>
But it’s also the case that, since 2005 already, people have been working on the idea of democratic autonomy. In Turkey, such structures are also being formed and they are trying to begin the same process in Iran. But in Rojava this project was able to take a very different shape, indeed partly because of the war. People work on the same project and are trying to shape that project inside the existing power structures. The civil war in Syria provided an opportunity to develop this project, but you can’t say the movement wanted it this way. From the beginning the PYD said it opposed armed struggle against the Assad regime. The PYD supported peaceful protests — but when the armed struggle began and there was a danger that the Free Syrian Army or jihadis would enter Rojava, they rapidly armed themselves.
*** <em>The PYD claims the YPG and YPJ are not party militia but form the defense forces of Rojava. Other Kurdish groups do not find that very credible; they consider these organizations the party-militia of the PYD.</em>
It’s true that these military forces are ideologically closely related to the PYD, but there are also groups inside the YPG-YPJ that aren’t necessarily PYD members, like the Arab or Christian units. I think it was a wise decision of the PYD to limit the number of militia in the area. And besides the YPG/YPJ, local units represented in the command structure as well. These local units defend their own villages but are not mobile; they can not be dispatched to other areas.
But there are clearly contradictions between the PYD, on the one hand, and the Syrian parties that are linked to the Kurdish Democratic Party of Iraqi-Kurdish President Barzani on the other. Similarly, but to a somewhat lesser degree, there are tensions with the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan from Iraq. Those parties have a very different conception of power, of the future and the development of Kurdish self-rule. They are much more conservative.
*** <em>There are also sharp contradictions between, on the one hand, the PYD and on the other hand, to simplify things, the Arab opposition. The PYD did not support armed struggle against Assad, but this kind of struggle was not an option freely chosen by the opposition — it was a matter of self-defense. The PYD is accused of benefiting the Assad regime by not only preventing the formation of a new front, but also by repressing anti-Assad demonstrations inside Rojava. People have been killed by the YPG during such protests. How do you see the development of this relation?</em>
There is some cooperation on a local level — a number of Arab tribes have joined the struggle of the PYD. But the relationship with the politically organized opposition is much more difficult, even if there is cooperation with parts of the FSA. The jihadis have grown very strong in the Arab opposition and their worldview is in direct opposition to that of the PYD.
*** <em>There are other accusations of human rights violations. Recently there were claims that the YPG forced out the Arab population of a number of villages under the cover of the struggle against the Islamic State.</em>
The PYD stands for a Rojava that is the expression of cultural and ethnic diversity. For example, Efrin is home to many Alevites and the female co-president is Alevite. In Cizîrê, there is a large Arab population and one of the co-presidents is Arab. You see the same on a local level. A major difference between the PYD and the Syrian allies of the KDP is their attitude towards the Arab population in Rojava. The KDP current says: ‘those people have been brought here as part of an Arabization policy of the Baath-regime and they need to leave, even if they have been here for generations.’ The PYD says that everybody who now lives in Rojava should be involved in building a new society.
*** <em>The defense of Kobane was a success, partly as a result of aid by Western powers, most importantly the airstrikes by the US. Some critics say the PYD has become a tool of the West — how would you respond to that claim?</em>
That kind of criticism comes from the attempt to stay ideologically pure. It’s more difficult to remain pure once you are involved in the struggle. If you are involved, you have to navigate a field determined by relations of forces that you did not select, and you have to make choices inside that field. There were no real options except for pressuring the US to bomb IS. And that was done in a very clever way. The US was not eager to intervene: shortly before the airstrikes the White House still declared that Kobane was ‘not a strategic asset’. The fact that they started bombing, and increasingly intensively, is because the PYD made the defense of Kobane in a certain sense a strategic issue: if the city had fallen, that would have been an immense moral blow that would have affected the US as well. IS would have been strengthened. You could almost say the Kurds have forced the West to get involved there. There were few other options. One of the defenders of Kobane tweeted that if the international left had had an air force, they would have asked that one for help.
*** <em>But even if you recognize that the PYD had no other options, you can ask whether — against its own will — it has not become dependent on the US.</em>
But I don’t see this dependence. Maybe there have been agreements that I don’t know anything about, but the PYD has not only maintained itself; its position is now stronger than before. Kobane has become a symbol of their success.
*** <em>But it is likely that the US will turn against the Rojava project if, for example, the PYD insists on the principle that resources like oil should be common property.</em>
That is likely, but you can question how much influence the US will have in the region in the future. Since 2003 and the invasion of Iraq, the influence of the US has been dwindling there. Local powers like Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia play a much more important role in the local developments than before. The US is still a factor but is no longer as powerful as before.
*** <em>Turkey, especially, is an enemy of the Kurdish movement at the moment.</em>
Turkey is doing everything in its power to marginalize the PKK and the PYD, without success. But Turkey’s relationship to the governing parties in south Kurdistan, north Iraq, is very different. They had a good relationship for a long time but those ties were recently damaged. When the city of Erbil in north Iraq was in danger of being taken by IS, Barzani asked Turkey for help but got the cold shoulder.
*** <em>The PYD claims the Turkish state actively supports groups like IS and Jabhat al-Nusra. How credible are those accusations?</em>
I think there are good reasons to believe them. There are many indications that Turkey is giving direct and indirect support to jihadist groups. For example, there are recordings that show Turkish soldiers interacting with fighters along the border of areas controlled by jihadis. The Turkish secret service MIT has been involved in delivering arms. There are many such examples. Recently it became known that the Turkish army had given artillery support to jihadis when they attacked an Armenian village in northern Syria, Kassab. Leaders of jihadist groups can meet without any problems in Ankara; jihadis have been taken care of in Turkish hospitals — you could go on.
*** <em>Is this organized by what is called the ‘deep state’ in Turkey, or is it active government policy?</em>
I think this is discussed and decided at the governmental level. Turkey’s foreign policy under the AKP government, so-called neo-Ottomanism, is based on Sunni-identity politics, on supporting Sunnite movements in Syria and Iraq. Qatar and Saudi Arabia are also trying to gain influence through Sunni movements, just like Morsi tried to do when he was president of Egypt. Turkey has tried, without success, to repress the PYD by supporting Sunni groups that are hostile to it.
This policy means the Turkish state is playing with fire by supporting jihadist groups. IS has already threatened on several occasions to attack Turkey if its government changes its attitude. Many IS fighters have a Turkish background and they might in the future become a risk factor inside Turkey itself; all the more so because support for IS has grown inside Turkey.
*** <em>A few weeks ago the Assad regime declared that it has no objections to Kurdish flags — a symbolic break with the Arab nationalist Baath ideology. Is that a taste of what’s to come, of an autonomous Kurdish region inside Syria?</em>
Kurdish autonomy is already a reality — and even if the Assad regime would decide to turn against it, I doubt it would make much of a difference.
*** <em>The last few weeks have seen some quite intense clashes between the YPG and the Syrian government army. Is there a chance this could lead to a real war between the two?</em>
That is difficult to say, but Assad has no interest in such a war: his regime is already weakened. Assad’s interest is in an agreement.
The PYD also has nothing to gain from such a confrontation: they have their hands full fighting IS and al-Nusra. But the current situation is volatile and won’t remain the same for long.
|
#title Stalinist caterpillar into libertarian butterfly?
#subtitle The evolving ideology of the PKK
#author Alex de Jong
#LISTtitle Stalinist caterpillar into libertarian butterfly? — The evolving ideology of the PKK
#SORTauthors Alex de Jong
#SORTtopics kurds, kurdistan, Rojava, Turkey
#date 9 March 2015
#source [[https://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article34511][www.europe-solidaire.org]]
#lang en
*** Introduction
The siege of Kobani by the Islamic State (IS) and its tenacious defense by mostly Kurdish forces brought international attention to the Syrian Kurdish PYD (<em>Partiya Yekîtiya Demokra</em>t, Democratic Union Party). The PYD is the leading Kurdish force in a large part of northern Syria where it has strong influence in three enclaves, or ’cantons’, of Kurdish-majority areas. In November 2013 it declared in these cantons the transitional administration of ’Rojava’ (Western Kurdistan).
The stated goal of the Rojava project is to build a liberated, democratic society with equal rights for women in which different ethnic and religious groups can live together. The ideological inspiration for this project is the thought of the Turkish Kurdish PKK and its leader Abdullah Öcalan.
In the early to mid nineties the PKK led a fierce guerrilla-war against the Turkish state and it remains a significant force in itself and through its influence over other organizations. Initially, the PKK followed a ’marxist-leninist’ ideology. However, the movement underwent deep ideological changes, especially after Öcalan’s capture in 1999. The PYD denies any organizational links with the PKK but it was set up by Syrian PKK-members and claims to follow the same ideology as the current PKK.
This article examines this ideology and its changes in several key aspects. The first two parts discuss the early strategic orientation of the PKK and its similarity to other national liberation movements of the time. Part three discusses the idea of ’creating a new man’, an idea that became central to the PKK’s conception of the future society they struggled for. This idea was a distinctive characteristic of the PKK. It is not unusual for activists in this movement to describe their political convictions as ’the ideology of Öcalan’ and part four discusses the role of Abdullah Öcalan as the leader and ideologue of the movement. Part five discusses another distinguishing characteristic of the PKK: the role that it sees for women and women’s liberation in social change. Part six and seven deal with the changing ideas of the PKK about the future society: its vision of a ’democratic civilization and its changing conception of ’socialism’.
The goal is not to provide a history of the PKK but parts of its history will be discussed to situate its ideological evolution. The focus is on the movement’s ’official’ ideology as written down in statements of Öcalan and documents of the PKK. How this ideology is translated into actual politics on the ground and how grass-roots activists interpret it are questions that are beyond the reach of the article. The influence of Abdullah Öcalan in the PKK can hardly be overestimated. As one former member put it; ’the PKK is in a certain sense identical with its founder, Abdullah Öcalan’. [1]
Because of his dominant role as both the leader and ideologue of the movement, the article will give extensive attention to statements and writings of Öcalan himself.
** 1. Roots of the PKK
The current Kurdish liberation movement in Turkey has its roots in the radicalization of the sixties. After a coup by ’progressive Kemalist’ army officers in 1960, a new Turkish constitution was introduced that promised the right to work, a minimum wage, the right to strike as well as freedom to organize. In this atmosphere, trade-unionists and progressive intellectuals organized the ’Workers Party of Turkey’ (<em>Turkiye Isci Partisi</em>, TIP), a party that in 1965 won three per cent of the vote and 15 seats in the parliament. The TIP was a reformist party that re-introduced socialist ideas that had been made taboo and even outlawed by the Kemalist state.
The TIP condemned the militant actions of radical-left youth activists and had only shallow roots among the working class. However, the TIP did have relatively strong support among Turkey’s Kurds. The Kurdish provinces of Turkey have always been the poorest part of the country, partly the result of racist state policies that discriminated against the Kurds. Speaking Kurdish was a crime, use of the letters x, q and w – which exist in the Kurdish alphabet but not in the Turkish – could be prosecuted, publications that simply mentioned the word ’Kurd’ were banned and the Kemalist state tried to assimilate the Kurdish minority into the Turkish majority. In the late sixties, a number of Kurdish members of the TIP started to discuss the specific problems of the Kurdish population in the country. Out of these discussions grew the Revolutionary Eastern Cultural Hearts (<em>Devrimci Doğu Kültür Ocaklar</em>ı, DDKO). The word ’Eastern’ was an euphemism to avoid state-repression since any discussion of even the existence of Kurds was banned.
Simultaneously, Turkey saw the growth of a new, militant Left. In 1965 the Federation of the Revolutionary Youth of Turkey (Turkiye Devrimci Genclik Federasayno or Dev-Genc) was formed. Dev-Genc members organized university occupations, protested against the presence of US-troops, organized solidarity with workers’ protests and fought fascists on campus and in the streets. Parts of the workers movement also radicalized and 1967 the Confederation of Revolutionary Trade Unions of Turkey (Türkiye Devrimci İşçi Sendikaları Konfederasyonu, DİSK) was formed as a left alternative to the established trade union federation. Workers also organized wildcat strikes and factory occupations, peasants occupied land. Out of this ferment and radicalization the first armed groups grew in the early seventies. Inspired by the Cuban revolution and Maoism, these groups saw Turkey as a ’neo-colony’ of the US and considered themselves to be fighting for a ’national-democratic’ revolution that would break the grip of imperialism on the country, bring true national independence and open the way for a second, socialist stage of the revolution.
Abdullah Öcalan began his political life in these radical-left circles. Born in 1949 as a son of a poor peasant family, Öcalan grew up in a very religious and conservative environment. In 1966, he went to Ankara to attend a vocational school that trained students to work in the state’s land registry offices. In 1969, he graduated and found work, first in Diyarbakir and after a year in Istanbul. Shortly before graduating, Öcalan had become interested in politics and started to visit political meetings. Öcalan joined the DDKO and protests of the radical youth. In 1971 the army staged a new coup, now to stamp out the radical movement. The TIP was banned and the DDKO closed down as many activists fled the country. In 1972 Öcalan, who by that time had begun to study political science in Ankara, was arrested during a protest in solidarity with Turkish leftists who had been in killed in a firefight with the police. Öcalan was sentenced to seven months and found himself in the military prison Mamak in the company of Dev-Genc leaders and other experienced radicals. His arrest radicalized him further and the political discussions he witnessed in jail made a strong impression on him. He decided to dedicate himself fully to radical politics. After his release from jail, the coup regime had successfully repressed many of the radical groups.
Öcalan didn’t feel at home in any of the existing groups, either Kurdish or Turkish. The Turkish radical-left, more or less under the influence of Kemalist nationalism and the theory of a revolution by stages, tended to neglect the oppression of the Kurds or even denied this was an issue. Such groups reasoned that since Turkey itself was an oppressed nation, the Turkish state was incapable of imperialist policies like national oppression of the Kurds. If they did recognize there was oppression of Kurds specifically, many Turkish leftists saw this as an issue that could be dealt with only after a national-democratic revolution that would liberate Turkey from imperialism. In 1975 the traditional Kurdish nationalist movement suffered a heavy blow with the defeat of the guerrilla-war in Iraq led by Mullah Mustafa Barzani (father of the current president of the Iraqi Kurdish region, Massoud Barzani). Barzani had allied with the US, Israel and Iran against the Iraqi state but was abandoned by his allies after Baghdad made concessions to Tehran.
Öcalan drew the conclusion that the Turkish Left could not be the champion of the Kurds and neither could this be traditional nationalists like Barzani who looked for support abroad. The Kurds would have to fight for themselves, as Kurds. Öcalan started to build his own group that adopted the notion of pioneering Turkish sociologist İsmail Beşikçi that ’Kurdistan’ was an international colony, occupied by Turkey, Iran, Syria and Iraq. From 1975 on, Öcalan’s group started to agitate under the name Kurdish Revolutionaries (<em>Soresgeren Kurdistan</em>, SK). Its core members often resembled Öcalan: young Kurds from a poor, rural background that had radicalized as students. This was a very different layer than that of the wealthy family of Barzani or the urban students that played an important role in the Turkish Left. The SK was not exclusively Kurdish but also included a number of Turkish leftists who saw the liberation of Kurdistan as a precondition to revolution in Turkey.
Unlike other Left groups, the SK decided not to spend resources on publications, instead recruiting people through intense one-on-one discussions. Its recruitment focused on poor, often illiterate Kurds, often from a rural background who had moved to the cities to look for work. Another characteristic of the SK was its willingness to use violence against groups like the fascist Grey Wolves. This brought the SK a certain respect and attraction to radical youth which helped make up for the lack of a well-known leader or financial means. This militancy appealed to many Kurds who had recognized that the Turkish state would not allow the Kurds to free themselves through non-violent means and who, after the defeat of the traditional nationalism of Barzani, were looking for an alternative.
Former PKK central committee Mehmet Can Yüce later explained his radicalization: ’You’re a colonized nation and you seek your rights. You can bring out magazines and set up associations and enter parliament – in short, you can operate within the limits that the state has set, but the trouble is that the state outlaws the use of the word ’Kurd’, they won’t let refer to a place called Kurdistan. Saying these words is a crime, splittism, ample cause to get you arrested, tortured, kept in jail for years on end. So, what is keeping this nation under repression? Force. The army, the police, the gendarmerie, the counter-guerillas, the far-right Nationalist Action Party. In such a country, where the machinery of repression is so organized and entrenched, you’re left with one route, and that’s to use force to answer with force’. [2]
A few years later, the SK had won modest support in several of the bigger cities of the Kurdish regions. In 1977, the group was reorganized as the Kurdish Workers Party (<em>Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan</em>, PKK) and adopted a manifesto. This manifesto, ’The Road of the Kurdish Revolution’ strongly resembles statements of other ’marxist-leninist’ national-liberation movements of the time. In 1977 its first party program, which largely summarizes the ideas in the manifesto, was drafted.
These documents declare that the immediate goal of the PKK is a ’national-democratic’ revolution that will lead to an ’independent and democratic Kurdistan’. Any other option than the creation of an independent Kurdish nation-state is vehemently rejected; the original program called for exposing ’capitulationist attitudes that do not aim for smashing the colonial yoke of the Turkish Republic and suggest things like “regional autonomy”, “autonomy” et cetera’, since such proposals are; ’in essence a compromise with colonialism’. The program calls for a ’determined struggle’ against such ideas. [3]
The revolution will take the form of a prolonged armed struggle or ’people’s war’, based on the peasantry. The leadership of the revolution has to be ’the working class’, led by the PKK. The power of the ’feudal’ leaders of Kurdish society needed to be broken since these are the representatives of colonialism. The peasantry and the urban petty bourgeois are the two main allies of the working class. There is no Kurdish ’national bourgeoisie’ because colonialism did not allow such a class to develop. International allies of the revolution are ’socialist countries’, working class parties of capitalist countries and ’the liberation movements of oppressed peoples of the world’. Its enemies are the Turkish state, its ’native feudal-collaborators’, and ’the imperialist powers behind them’. After the ’national-democratic’ revolution, the struggle will, ’without interruption’, proceed in a socialist revolution. This manifesto, and the party symbol, a red flag with the hammer-and-sickle, would be in place until the fifth party-congress in 1995.
The documents are obviously heavily influenced by Maoist ideas but do not adopt the designation of the Soviet-Union as ’social-imperialist’. The ruling parties of the Soviet-Union and China are both criticized as implementing ’revisionist’ policies. Overall the ’really existing socialist countries’ are considered allies of the Kurdish revolution, but none of their governing parties is accepted as an ideological lodestar. PKK-ideologue Mehmet Can Yüce later mocked Turkish left-wing groups that were looking for a ’Mecca’ in Moscow, Tirana or Peking.
The PKK was not the only Kurdish leftist group to adopt such a framework at the time, nor was it the only one to declare armed struggle a necessity. In fact, several other Kurdish groups at the time, like the Vanguard Workers Party of Kurdistan (PPKK—<em>Partiya Pêşenga Karkerên Kurdistan</em>) and Socialist Party of Turkish Kurdistan (TKSP, known as <em>Özgürlük Yolu</em>, Freedom Path) had more support at the time and made similar declarations.
One minor difference from other groups at the time was the highly charged language of the PKK’s funding documents; liberating Kurdistan was called a ’holy’ task and ’our Movement...would deem leading our people with ideological, organizational and political means to be a sacred and historical task’ and ’having a life distant from the Kurdistan Revolution would be no different from a bestial lifestyle’. [4]
** 2. People’s War
A more important difference was that the small group of mainly youth that made up the early PKK actually made organizing armed struggle an immediate task, while the other groups declared that armed struggle would only follow after a phase of building political support for it. Talking about the leaders of the other Kurdish Left groups in the late seventies, people who had often criticized the PKK and their leader for their lack of ideological finesse and political experience, Öcalan declared in 1996; ’I had a principle for myself: Why did I dare to initiate and believe in this war? Because the greatest harlot is one who does not fight. My word at the very beginning was this; I moulded myself to believe this. All of these men in the Kurdish groupings which claimed to undertake the national cause are dishonest. Why? Because, I said, they prostitute themselves more than a prostitute. I said I will not be like them; I will fight for loftier aims.’ [5]
The PKK’s willingness and ability to use violence appealed to many oppressed Kurds. It was during the following war that the PKK built itself. Revenge became an important theme in the self-conception of the PKK throughout the eighties and the nineties as the war grew more intense and the state tried to terrorize the Kurds into submission. One 1985 brochure even declared the PKK to be a ’revolutionary revenge organization’ and stated; ’Pseudo-socialist sermons will not save us any better than the religious sermons that they have come to replace. Violence...will in Kurdistan not only be the midwife assisting in the delivery [of a new society] but it will create everything anew. Revolutionary violence has to play this role, and it will, we say, assume the form of revolutionary revenge’. [6]
The class composition of the PKK was different from that of the other groups. In the words of Kurdistan expert Martin van Bruinessen; the PKK was ’the only organization whose members were drawn almost exclusively from the lowest social classes – the uprooted, half-educated village and small-town youth who knew what it felt like to be oppressed, and who wanted action, not ideological sophistication’. [7] ’[T]ribal elites are represented in various other parties but not in the PKK. Rather, this party represents the most marginal sections of Kurdish society.’ [8]
The PKK first began to move against the traditional Kurdish elite, <em>aghas</em> — the ’feudal’ landlords that with the aid of their supporters controlled whole villages and often closely cooperated with the Turkish state. The PKK fought on the side of rebelling peasants and lost dozens of members in clashes with the militia of landlords. The guiding principle in choosing its targets was for the PKK however not social antagonism, but the politics of the <em>aghas</em>: whether they opposed the national movement or not. At the same time, various Turkish leftist and Kurdish groups fought among themselves; ’the PKK was initially relatively insignificant among [rival organizations] and only became known because it was the most violent’. [9] During fighting between different radical groups, dozens were killed. The PKK was both initiator and victim of such violence.
When in 1980 the army staged yet another coup, the PKK had become the strongest Kurdish party in Turkey. After the coup, tens of thousands were arrested. The Turkish Left, that in the previous years had again grown to a significant force, was largely unable to withstand the repression. At the end of 1983, there were still 40.000 political prisoners that were routinely brutally tortured. Among the prisoners were thousands of PKK-supporters and members. Many of them continued the struggle inside the prisons, undertaking ’deathfasts’ that claimed the lives of leading members or committing suicide in protest. The dead became important martyr-figures for the movement and their sacrifices reinforced the reputation of PKK-members as unyielding revolutionaries.
Öcalan himself escaped the repression; shortly before the coup, he had gone to Syria and from there he went to Lebanon. In Lebanon, he made contact with the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) and later other Palestinian groups like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Fatah. Abu Laila, a leader of the DFLP, later said of Öcalan; ’We had met other Turkish Kurds and they didn’t seem to be very reliable. This man seemed to be serious. He didn’t want [military or financial] assistance...he only wanted to send volunteers...to be trained for the future’. ’These people turned out to be really serious, real fighters, real soldiers. It was clear he [Öcalan] had some popular base in Kurdistan.’ [10] The Palestinians provided valuable military and organizational training to the Kurds, but the PKK members received their ideological training separate from the other groups. The PKK joined the Palestinians in the fight against the Israeli army when it invaded Lebanon in 1982.
A few years later, the PKK launched its people’s war. Öcalan had established contact with the Syrian regime and was allowed to base himself in Damascus. The PKK opened a training camp in a Syrian controlled part of Lebanon. In 1982, the PKK reached an agreement with the major Kurdish rebel group in Iraq, Barzani’s KDP, that allowed them to set up camps near the Turkish border. The PKK started small-scale armed actions in Turkish Kurdistan and agitation among the rural communities in the border-area. Its first large action took place in 1984 when it attacked several army barracks and temporarily took control of some villages. PKK-fighters distributed statements declaring their goal was ’the struggle of our people for national independence, a democratic society, freedom and unity, under the leadership of the PKK, against imperialism, Turkish colonial fascism and its local lackeys’. At the same time, the PKK appealed to ’revolutionaries and the working people from Turkey’; ’every blow of the HRK [the armed wing of the PKK] against colonial fascism is a blow against fascism in Turkey’. [11] However, cooperation between the PKK and the Turkish radical-left was very difficult. The military coup had decimated the Turkish Left and the PKK tried to dominate any alliance, reasoning that the Turkish Left had proven to be incapable of leading a revolution. In turn this drove away potential allies.
The PKK’s theory of revolution at the time was heavily influenced by the Maoist conception of protracted people’s war. In this strategy, the armed struggle is the primary means to seize power. The armed struggle is based in the rural countryside and the majority of the fighters are recruited from the peasantry. The struggle is led by the party that supposedly represents ’proletarian’ leadership and is supposed to keep socialism as a goal, although the strategy first aims at a ’national-democratic’ stage. The people’s war starts with small guerrilla attacks and proceeds through different stages of escalating warfare, from a ’strategic defense’, in which the rebels are limited to small scale hit-and-run attacks, to a second stage, during which the government forces are pushed on the defensive while the party expands its political influence. In the final stage, the guerrilla has gathered enough forces and weapons to move to conventional warfare and engage the enemy in decisive battles. Until the mid-nineties, Öcalan and the PKK referenced this strategic framework with an independent Kurdistan as its goal.
Two elements that distinguish the early PKK from like minded movements were its evaluation of the history of the Communist International and of the relation between the party and the guerrilla-army. Already in its early documents, the PKK severely criticized the Soviet-Union of the early twenties and the Comintern for its critical support to Kemalism. In early 1920 Mustafa Suphi, founder of the Turkish Communist Party TKP, and a dozen of his comrades were murdered by right-wing nationalists. The massacre happened with at least tacit approval of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk but that did not stop the signing of the Treaty of Brotherhood between the Grand National Assembly of Turkey under the leadership of Atatürk, and the Soviet-Union on 16 March 1921. PKK statements criticized the early TKP and the Comintern not only for having illusions in the democratic potential of Kemalism but also accused the Comintern of ignorance of the local situation and the Soviet leadership of prioritizing the national security of the Soviet-Union over internationalist and anti-imperialist principles. Such a critical view of the early Soviet-Union was not shared by many ’marxist-leninist’ parties that tended to regard Soviet statements as holy writ.
Later, after the implosion of the Soviet-Union, the PKK would attempt to formulate a more exhaustive critique of the Soviet ’model’ but this remained rather superficial: it blamed the defects in democracy on faulty decisions of the leadership and the prioritizing of state-interests over those of its citizens but did not explain why such errors could become policy for decade after decade.
Another element that set the PKK apart was that it was a ’guerrilla-party’. Instead of following the Maoist model that dictates a clear distinction between the army and the party that leads it (Mao: ’our principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party’), the two organizations were mixed. In the PKK, fighters were expected to completely give up their previous life and dedicate themselves exclusively to their life as a guerrilla. Cadres who did not have any military responsibilities were also expected to be prepared to join the guerrillas in their mountain bases at any time. According to PKK-leader Duran Kalkan ’this was not only of military value, but more important was its ideological and moral meaning’. [12] Referring to the party’s 1986 congress, Kalkan describes this meaning as follows; ’Such a guerrilla makes ideologically a complete break with the ruling order, he breaks in a certain degree with the hierarchical system of the State and of power. That is why at the third Congress there was a serious ideological renewal in the conception of really existing socialism; the really-existing socialist line of individual and familial, petit-bourgeois equal rights and freedom was superseded. Such a measure has consequences inside society as well where it calls forth changes that bring closer freedom and equality. It destroys individual family-life.’
** 3. Creating the ’new man’
Kalkan touches upon the most distinctive element of PKK-thought of the eighties and nineties; its ambition to create a ’New Man’, characterized by a certain personality. The theme of the ’personality’ of the Kurds appeared already in Öcalan’s texts in the early eighties and remains a prominent part of it. According to Öcalan there is a metaphysical ’Kurdish mentality’, a certain ’composition of the Kurdish psyche’. Öcalan still claims ’many of the qualities and characteristics attributed to the Kurds and their society today can already be seen in the Neolithic communities of the cis-Caucasus mountain ranges — the area we call Kurdistan’. [13] However, the Kurds have been alienated from their ’true’ identity by the attempts of the Turkish state to assimilate the Kurds and by the traditional social structures, what Öcalan calls ’feudalism’.
Through criticism and self-criticism and hard work, PKK-members were expected to remake themselves, to free themselves of their views and attitudes that they had learned in their ’old life’ and remould themselves into ’new men’. The goal, as described in the party journal Serxwebûn: ’The new man does not drink, does not gamble, never thinks of his own personal pleasure or comfort, and there is nothing feminine about him, those who [in the past] indulged in such activities will, sharp as knife, cut out all these habits as soon as he or she is among new men. The new man’s philosophy and morality, the way he sits and stands, his style, ego, attitude and reactions [tepki] are his and his alone. The basis of all these things is his love for the revolution, freedom, country, and socialism, a love that is as solid as a rock. Applying scientific socialism to the reality of our country creates the new man’. [14]
In a 1983 text, ’On Organization’, Öcalan discussed the role of the political organization, citing Marx, Engels, Lenin, Giap and Che Guevera. Like other texts by the PKK and Öcalan at the time, most of it is very similar to the rest of the Kurdish and Turkish radical left but; ’the substantial and distinctive part of the argument in this work is concerned with the “reorganization of the whole society”. Rather than structuring a ‘Marxist-Leninist party of the working class’, an overall reorganization is proposed because Kurdish society has been the victim of a “deliberate disorganizing program from top to bottom implemented by the Turkish colonialists”’. [15] Re-organizing Kurdish society ’from top to bottom’ would require building a new Kurdish identity and person-hood.
Gradually, notions like ’humanization’, ’socialization’ and ’liberated personality’ replaced marxist notions of classes and class-struggle. When in Öcalan’s recent writing names of classes still appear, they function as synonyms for political opponents (feudal for Kurdish clan-leaders, petty-bourgeois for non-PKK Kurdish groups) whose determining characteristic is often their ’distorted’ or ’sick’ personalities. Time and time again, Öcalan attacks the ’diseased’ personalities of people who disagree with him.
The PKK’s 1995 congress marked an ideological renovation. The theme of building the ’new man’ was officially incorporated into party-ideology and the new program defined the goal as ’a personality that, with great foresight, great understanding, with great effort and determination, seeks to conquer every obstacle and turn the negative into the positive; a personality whose strong willpower fascinates under all circumstances and who for the struggle for development of humanity, without seeking personal benefits, even gives his life’. [16] ’Socialization of people’ was now declared to be essential to socialism. [17]
The creation of the new man played a central role in the critique the PKK tried to formulate of ’really-existing socialism’ after its collapse and of the new vision of socialism it tried to elaborate. The PKK did not regret the collapse of the Soviet bloc; ’we mourn the collapsed not so much, because we rather experience the relieve from a burden’, Öcalan stated in 1992. [18] The 1995 program defined ’really existing socialism’ as the ’lowest and most brutal stage of socialism’, and explains its defects as such; ’in the ideological aspect a descend into dogmatism, vulgar materialism, and great-Russian chauvinism; in the political aspect the creation of an extreme centralism, the freezing of democratic class struggle and raising the interests of the state to be only decisive factor; in the social aspect the restriction of the free and democratic life of society and the individual; in the economic aspect the dominance of the state sector and not overcoming a consumption society that emulates foreign countries; finally in the military aspect the prioritizing of the army and weaponry over all other fields’. The way the PKK thought these failings could be avoided by a new socialism was by building the new man.
In the mid-nineties, the PKK emphasized its differences with really existing socialism as it tried to formulate its own distinctive ideology. In 1993, Öcalan claimed that the PKK, when it discussed ’scientific socialism’ did not refer to marxism but to its own peculiar ideology of a ’socialism’ that supposedly ’exceeds the interests of states, the nation and classes’. [19] Symbolically, the 1995 congress removed the hammer and sickle from the party flag; ’the hammer and sickle in really existing socialism only involved the class of workers and peasants, and is with this also an expression of really existing socialism. The new conception of socialism is about the whole of humanity’. [20] The claim to be fighting for ’the whole of humanity’ remains a frequent trope in PKK and PYD statements.
The PKK’s alternative to the collapsed Soviet-model was a socialism of the new man: creating this new personality was the goal of socialism and the only guarantee that even after a revolution, society won’t regress into capitalism or fascism. This ’socialism’ was not a way of organizing society into ’an association of free human beings which works with common means of production’, as Marx put, it but the creation of certain personalities. This is why, in a text from this period by Mehmet Can Yüce, which is otherwise rigidly ’marxist-leninist’, he can also talk about ’the socialism that <em>has been</em> realized in the party’, [21] just like the 1995 program does. [22] Yüce writes; ’If socialism does not dominate in the personality of the individual and in the relations inside the organization, it can not arise in society, respectively in the social system’. [23]
The idea of people ’remoulding’ their personalities to become revolutionaries is not unique to the PKK. In the maoist Communist Party of the Philippines it was a recurring theme that to become truly proletarian revolutionaries, members had to ’remould’ themselves to lose so-called ’petty-bourgeois’ habits. But the PKK went much further: people were not only expected to become good party-members but to change their whole personality. The idea of creating a new man brings to mind Che Guevara’s writing about socialism and human personality or the Soviet discourse about the socialist new man. The crucial difference is that the PKK claimed to be creating this new man already before revolution, and that through sheer determination and hard work, the socialist ’superman’ would be created in the bases of the PKK.
It was not only socialism as a social-economic system that was gradually pushed aside by this socialism of the new man. Something similar happened in PKK statements about Kurdish self-determination. In the second half of the eighties, the PKK would mention less and less the goal of a ’independent and united Kurdistan’, instead talking about a ’Free Kurdistan’, a formulation that leaves more ambiguity about the political goal.
Terms like ’freedom’ and ’independence’ were used more and more to talk about individual, ’spiritual’ goals, referring to this new personality, instead of to statehood. This theme became especially strong in Öcalan’s statement before the court in 1999, partly published as ’Declaration on the Democratic Solution of the Kurdish Question’ and in the prison writings. In these texts, Öcalan claimed that already before his imprisonment he used terms like ’freedom’ and ’self-determination’ mainly to refer to individuals, and not peoples. He even claimed that the PKK was never secessionist, a statement that contradicts the vehement insistence from 1978 that anything less than an independent Kurdistan (specified to be under occupation from Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria) would be betrayal. Despite the other ideological renovations, the 1995 program insisted that an independent Kurdish state was the final goal of the movement.
Öcalan would after 1993, when the PKK made a cease-fire offer to the Turkish state, start to talk about a political settlement to the conflict and declared a break-up of the Turkish state was not a precondition to such a settlement. But this didn’t exclude the possibility that an independent (and ’socialist’) Kurdish state would remain the final goal, one that could possible be fought for with other means than armed struggle. This is certainly how many PKK-members and supporters read these declarations. When shortly before his capture Öcalan was declaring that a ’democratic alternative’ could be achieved on the basis of Turkish recognition of the Kurdish identity, a federated parliament and within the existing borders of Turkey, he was contradicting the PKK’s official program. When in 1999 Öcalan in his defense speech emphatically denied the goal of a Kurdish state, even in the long run, thousands of PKK-supporters left in disillusionment. [24]
** 4. Serok Apo
In the eighties, Öcalan consolidated his control over the movement. After a power struggle in the early eighties, which ended with the death or flight of his rivals, ’Apo’, a diminutive of Abdullah and meaning ’uncle’ in Kurdish, consolidated his control over the organization. Officially the chair of the party, <em>Serok Apo</em> (leader Apo) became not only a political leader but also the military commander, the movements’ ’philosopher’ and a prophet-like figure. ’One person represents the new upright posture, practically the resurrection of a nation. My role is indeed that of a prophet, speaking to an enslaved, mercilessly oppressed people’, Öcalan declared in 1992; ’we have to fight for our freedom ourselves. I symbolize this fight’. [25] The ideological publications of the PKK consist almost completely of texts by Öcalan. Only a few other prominent figures of the party published books and those are often memoirs. At party meetings, Öcalan would deliver speeches, without notes, that lasted for hours and were then transcribed and published as books, even telephone conversations were recorded to be ’studied’. In PKK jargon, Ocalan’s statements are known as ’analyses’ (<em>çözümlemeler</em>).
In the PKK, all members where expected to be completely dedicated to the party and in turn this came to mean complete dedication to Abdullah Öcalan. Öcalan himself was referred to as <em>Őnderlik</em> (leadership), ’guide’ and even ’Sun’. In a sympathetic account of her time in the PKK-guerrilla, German internationalist Anja Flach wrote; ’the status of the party-leadership [meaning Öcalan] is an institution, he doesn’t so much represent the party, as he is the party’. [26] An author who experienced Öcalan as leader in this period later wrote; ’Öcalan was not willing to share his authority. He demanded absolute submission to his person from the people in his surrounding and unrelentingly pushed this through.’ [27]
Opposition to Öcalan and his decisions was impossible and the PKK would pay a heavy price for this as its fortunes on the battleground declined. In the late eighties and early nineties, the Turkish army was gaining more experience in fighting against guerrillas, using sophisticated equipment like Israeli supplied night-vision goggles and US combat helicopters. In addition, the Turkish state viciously targeted civilian supporters of the PKK and of Kurdish rights in general. Between 1984 and 1999 up to 40.000 people were killed. According to the Turkish army, they lost almost 6500 soldiers until 2008 and killed 32.000 PKK-members but those figures are not credible. According to the PKK, their losses were much smaller but the total number of casualties of the conflict must be much higher.
Both sides, but overwhelmingly the Turkish state, targeted civilians suspected of aiding the enemy. Jandarma İstihbarat ve Terörle Mücadele (JİTEM), a branch of the Turkish gendarmerie that officially did not even exist, was according to the Turkish Human Rights association IHD involved in 5.000 unsolved killings of journalists, intellectuals, human rights and political activists, and responsible for 1.500 ’disappearances’. Turkish intelligence services also cooperated with right-wing and islamist militia that made thousands of casualties, most of them civilians. In the late eighties, the Turkish army started to forcibly remove Kurdish villagers to separate the guerrillas from civilian supporters. Estimations of the number of people displaced vary from 275.000 to 2 million. With much of its civilian support removed in this way, and under increasingly heavy attack, the PKK started to suffer military setbacks in the mid-nineties.
But Öcalan refused to listen to warnings from field-commanders and insisted they should go on the offensive. A 1994 statement claimed ’the struggle which the PKK carries out has left the stage of strategic defense [... ]. It is inevitable that we escalate our struggle in response to Turkey’s declaration of all-out war.’ Setbacks were not blamed on the faulty instructions from ’the leadership’ but on the failure of commanders to correctly carry them out. Flach described ’criticism and self-criticism’ sessions she witnessed in this period; ’failures were seen primarily in the personalities of the commanders and the fighters. Structures from the old life [before the guerrilla] are still lived, feudal or petty-bourgeois attitudes and views are not superseded and exactly this is seen as the most important obstacle to implementing the ideas of the party’. [28] But the validity of these ideas themselves was not put into question.
The PKK’s idea of creating a ’New Man’ was a powerful means of control as the ideal incorporated unquestioning obedience — and criticism of the ’leadership’ was seen as proof of failing to achieve this goal. Öcalan was more than a distinguished or even indispensable leader, he himself, his person, was built up to be indispensable to the liberation of the Kurdish people. As a critical observer noted his role; ’he alone “is” the key to liberation – as opposed to just possessing it’. [29] This also explains why even after his capture Öcalan remained the leader of the movement.
In 1998 Turkey threatened Syria with war if it continued to shelter the PKK leader. The Syrian regime ordered Öcalan to leave and in October 1998 he left the country. For 130 days Öcalan went from country to country looking for asylum. He intensified his calls for a political settlement and declared the PKK would accept a ’democratic republic’; a united Turkey that would guarantee freedom of speech for the Kurds and recognize the presence of a Kurdish minority. Öcalan said the PKK was ready to lay down arms of those conditions were met. In February 1999 Öcalan was captured by Turkish agents.
** 5. A revolution of women
Already in its first program, the PKK called for full equality of men and women in all social and political aspects, but this was little more than one clichéd demand among others, just below introducing the eight hour workday, if possible. The same program declared the national oppression of the Kurds to be the ’main contradiction’ that the party should fight against. In 1987, the party organized the ’Union of Patriotic Women of Kurdistan’ (<em>Yekitiya Jinen Welaparezen Kurdistan</em>, YJWK). Like the women’s organizations of many other marxist-leninist parties, its original intention was facilitating the participation of women in the party, but it was also to provide a space to deal with specific women’s issues.
The PKK’s distinctive practice of women’s liberation was developed in the second half of the nineties, when the active participation of women in the Kurdish movement, both as politicians and as fighters, increased. [30] But, like on any other issue in the PKK, the ideological guide on the issue of women’s liberation is Öcalan. Starting in the eighties, ’Öcalan’s “analyses” increasingly criticized traditional patriarchal family structures, women’s secondary status within the family, and the gender roles that associated women with <em>namus</em> [the control over women’s sexuality] and assigned men the duty to protect it.’ [31]
Today, it is in the field of women’s liberation and gender equality that the PKK movement takes its most radical positions. One of the aspects that sets the struggle of the PKK apart from other Kurdish rebellions is the large participation of women in all levels of the movement. In a way, the category of ’women’ has replaced that of ’the international proletariat’ in the PKK ideology: today it is women as such who are assumed to be the vanguard of the struggle. The movement declared that its goal is not just the liberation of Kurdish women but of women worldwide.
The PKK’s ideas on women’s liberation are heavily influenced by the myth of a prehistoric matriarchal past during the neolithic, ’when the woman was a creating godess’ (Öcalan). [32] With the rise of class society, the oppression of women began. These notions are clearly taken from Friedrich Engels’ ’The origin of the family, private property and the state’.
The patriarchal family structure and inequality between men and women, according to Öcalan and the PKK, serve the interests of the oppressive Turkish state and the ’feudal’ Kurdish leaders that cooperate with it. This state and its puppets play a crucial role in perpetuating these inequalities by enforcing tribal traditions that block the development of Kurdish women and of society as a whole, thus controlling the Kurdish people. The traditional family oppresses women by blocking them from social life, and the family is protected through <em>namus</em>, surveillance of women’s bodies, behaviors, and sexualities by men. [33] Öcalan: ’Since sexual motives are fundamental instincts, the problems thus created lead to profound political perversions. To resolve the sexual motives is to realize the greatest revolution. There is no one among us who has not yet realized this. Everyone succumbs. Kurdish society expresses an individual type and a social reality, which succumbs, more than any other society in the world, to instincts of hunger and sexuality. [...] Around these sexual motives are formed a certain namus, a certain understanding of morality, and no brave fellows have the power to overcome this. […] In this bottleneck, our individual has lost once again, even before it reached the age of twenty.’ [34]
Breaking the bonds that oppressed women would not only enable them to play an active role in the liberation movement, thereby strengthening it. Öcalan also assumed that women, as the victims of both national and gender oppression, are more receptacle to radical ideas, more willing to challenge tradition and the status-quo; ’Today, during the Palestinian uprising, it is almost entirely women, children, and the youth with stones who carry out the revolution. There are lessons to take from this. [...] When women, who make up half of the society, take to the streets, it is impossible to control them [...]. In this respect, especially for improving the urban movement, we must take action in this next stage. […] Certainly, all women are furious. All of them are hungry and impoverished. It is possible to make them into rebels by using all kinds of methods.’ [35]
The liberation of women was and is seen as part of the liberation of the Kurdish people, but there has been a shift in how this relationship is conceived. In her article ’From Kawa the Blacksmith to Ishtar the Goddess: Gender Constructions in Ideological-Political Discourses of the Kurdish Movement in post-1980 Turkey’, Handan Çağlayan summarizes this change as one of talking <em>about</em> women, an instrumental view of seeing women as a resource for the revolution, to one of talking <em>to</em> women as actors in their own liberation. This shift took place in the second half of the nineties.
In the early nineties, the participation of women inside the PKK, including in its guerrilla units, increased dramatically. In these years, large protests broke out among the Kurdish population, the <em>Serhildan</em>, also sometimes known as the Kurdish intifada, that were fueled by a new sense of Kurdish identity and strength that had been made possible by the armed struggle. These protests involved layers of the population that were not in direct contact with the PKK guerrilla’s units in the mountains but nevertheless sympathized with them. Especially the Newroz (Kurdish New Year) celebrations of 1990, 1991, and 1992 were important as they turned into confrontations with Turkish security forces. Women participated massively in these protests, confronting security forces in the streets.
The protests were repressed but in their aftermath, the Kurdish movement became a truly popular mass movement, involving student organizations, cultural associations, publications, women’s groups and other initiatives. The PKK was the hegemonic force in this movement but at the same time struggled to integrate the many new recruits that often came from very different social backgrounds than the old guard. Dozens of these often young, educated volunteers were executed by PKK commanders who mistrusted them or felt that their power was being challenged.
But the influx of new members did change the party. As the participation of women in the guerrilla increased, the movement was forced to confront persisting sexist ideas and practices. Women refused to have their roles in the movement limited to that of providing support, instead choosing to fight as part of the guerrilla.
The party soon discovered the emotional appeal of images of young female fighters that had abandoned their homes and old lives to fight for the Kurdish cause. Martyred women became emotionally powerful symbols of the movement and still are, as the recent example of Arin [Mirkan] and other female fighters killed in the defense of Kobani show. The martyrs of the movement include women who set themselves on fire in protest or killed themselves in suicide attacks on the enemy, tactics that were adopted in the nineties. Distressingly, it were disproportionately women that scarified themselves in suicide attacks, in a region that has had a tradition of women choosing suicide to escape their unhappy situation. [36]
The new role of women led to changes in the ideology and organization of the PKK. In the guerrilla, independent women’s units were formed and later an independent women’s army – a practice that was also adopted by the Syrian Kurdish movement when it organized the YPJ (<em>Yekîneyên Parastina Jinê</em>, Women’s Protection Units). The motivation is that in this way women are freed from the sexist practices of male comrades and at the same time forced to break with traditional notions of female obedience and servility and instead assume leadership roles. The same principle was applied in the political organizations. In 1994 the Free Women’s Movement of Kurdistan, later renamed as Free Women’s Union of Kurdistan (YAJLK), was formed. After Öcalan’s capture, the organization was dissolved and later reformed as the Party of Free Women (PJA). In all mixed PKK-organs a mandatory gender quota exists. The leaderships have to include at least 40 per cent women, executive posts are double functions of one man and one woman. The PYD for example has two chairs: Salim Muslim and Asya Abdullah, who stayed in Kobani during the siege.
Handan Çağlayan describes one change in Öcalan’s texts on women as such; ’in the 1980s, Öcalan spoke to militant men about how they should treat women, that is, he spoke with men about women; in the 1990s, however, he spoke with women militants about men, and drew attention to the significance of this’. [37] Öcalan in 1999: ’Man at hand was analyzed, and it was seen that man is the main problem. [...] For me, the Man Question is now prior to the Woman Question. Does being man equals being in power? I ask men: If you have power, then why can’t you show this in the most elementary problem of war? He proves his manhood by domination over women, in sexual domination. This is a dominion of crude power; I found it foul, and I shattered it.’
Again, the PKK’s idea of creating a new man, and a new woman, proves to be a powerful ideological tool. An important difference between the PKK’s theory of women’s oppression and liberation and that of Friedrich Engels is their neglect of social-economic factors. Engels argued that with the rise of social classes came a division of labor that relegated women’s labor, and hence their social status, to a secondary position. In the PKK, the emphasis is instead (again) on issues like ’mentality’ and ’personality’; women’s oppression is supposedly rooted in patriarchal attitudes that are transferred from generation and that are internalized by women. To liberate themselves, women need to unlearn these attitudes just as much as men, and this way men and women are created anew.
The PKK discourse on women’s liberation sees the category of women as superseding political differences. As the PJA stated; ’The women’s liberation ideology is an alternative for all previous world-views, whether right-wing or left-wing. It is also a result of the critique of these ideologies. Because all previous ideologies as they were classified as either capitalist or socialist in the last centuries, have a masculine shape. Meaning, they have been shaped by patriarchy that since 5000 years has institutionalized itself in all fields of life’. [38]
The PKK’s thinking is strongly essentialist. Women and nature are often equated, and following this, ’woman’ is identified with motherhood. Women are assumed to have certain characteristics as women, such as empathy, an abhorrence of violence and a closeness to nature. These qualities need to be taught to men so that patriarchal society can be overcome.
These ideas put a heavy burden on women. On the one hand, the traditional family is criticized as a space in which patriarchal attitudes oppress women and as an institution through which the Turkish state and feudal rulers dominate the Kurdish people. On the other hand, the family is seen as the cradle from which a new Kurdish society should be born since the family plays such an important role in socializing people, in ’creating personalities’, and this is at the center of the PKK’s vision of liberation. Thus it is women, as mothers and educators, who are given a primary responsibility in deciding the outcome of the struggle.
Women are considered to be in the vanguard of the liberation struggle but to be able to play this role, they first have to liberate themselves from what is called their ’slave mentality’. Setbacks for the movement become then the responsibility of women who have failed to play their role. Liberation and the ’top to the bottom’ reorganization of Kurdish society that the PKK set itself as a goal are now considered to be impossible if women are not liberated and in fact, it is women who should play a pioneering role in this social transformation.
** 6. Democratic Civilization
The PKK started to develop its own peculiar ideology in the late eighties and in the mid-nineties a number of ideological inventions had become part of the official policy. After his capture however Öcalan would accelerate the PKK’s ideological metamorphosis. In the hands of the Turkish state, Öcalan started to make statements from jail through his lawyers. He praised his prison conditions and called on the PKK to hold on to the cease-fire it had declared the previous September and declared that negotiations with the Turkish state would continue – through him personally.
Öcalan’s subsequent statements before the court came as a shock. Öcalan drastically reinterpreted the history and the ideology of the PKK. In court, Öcalan expressed regret over the death of Turkish soldiers and when the court asked if it would be correct to transcribe his words as an apology, he did not disagree. Öcalan did not mention the suffering of the Kurds but did find time to praise Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish republic, and referred to the cooperation of Kurds and Turks in the independence war in the early twenties. He claimed that if only Ataturk’s ideas had been faithfully followed, there would have been no ’Kurdish question’.
It was not only history that was revised by Öcalan. He insisted that the goal of an independent Kurdish state was impossible, even in the long term, and that this was not even desirable. Even the ideas of Kurdish autonomy or a federative parliament, which Öcalan had suggested shortly before his capture, went out of the window. The ’democratic solution’ that Öcalan instead proposed in his defense plea published as ’Declaration on the Democratic Settlement of the Kurdish Settlement’ was that Turkey would recognize the existence of the Kurds and respect basic democratic rights like freedom of speech and the use of the Kurdish language. This would supposedly suffice to make Turkey into a democratic society that could transcend the conflict; ’I wish to emphasize that it [meaning ’democracy’] transcends tension and conflict with a wonderful balance. That it has ideal governments which, thanks to the suitability of democratic state institutions for such a purpose, can offer a solution without allowing different kinds of politics and the forces behind these to come into conflict’. [39]
An ideologeme that recurs since the ’Declaration on the Democratic Settlement’ is that of ’democratic civilization’, which the PKK now declares to be its goal. In this text, Öcalan explained he took the term from a 1964 book by US sociologist Leslie Lipson: a study of the development of the parliamentary system in western societies. In his recent prison writings, the term takes center-place, now without being credited. What exactly this ’democratic civilization’ is for Öcalan remains unclear.
But it is clear Öcalan, at the latest beginning with the ’Declaration on the Democratic Settlement’, became an admirer of western parliamentary democracy. In it he repeatedly refers to it as a model for Turkey. The statement contained long quotes from Lipson describing the political system of Switzerland which Öcalan used as an example of how in a single country, different social-cultural groups can live together. According to Öcalan, this could be an example for Turkish-Kurdish co-existence in a single state. Later, Öcalan became an enthusiastic supporter of Turkey joining the European Union, hoping this would force Turkey to introduce democratic reforms that would bring closer the ’democratic republic’.
The democracy Öcalan praises is often equated with the parliamentary, capitalist states of the West: he claims that in European countries a ’determined democracy’ developed and that this led to the ’supremacy of the west’, ’Western civilization can, in this sense, be termed democratic civilization’. [40] What Turkey and the Kurds needed was ’Western-style problem solving’. [41] And in 2011; ’In principle, the western democratic system – which has been established through immense sacrifices – contains everything needed for solving social problems’. ’Europe, its [referring to ’democracy’] birthplace has by and large left nationalism behind in view of the wars of the twentieth century and established a political system adhering to democratic standards. This democratic system has already shown its advantages over other systems – including real socialism – and is now the only acceptable system worldwide’.
In his court statements, Öcalan presented the most intensive phase of the war as a mishap; ’Turkey failed to have a democratic system due to a lack of conviction, serious efforts and a true understanding of democracy (as opposed to demagoguery)’ and this led to the outbreak of armed resistance. [42] But, Öcalan stated, the PKK’s armed struggle in the nineties was wrong; ’In Turkey in the nineties, together [for Kurds and Turks] there were positive developments in human rights. After this the uprising was wrong. There was a way of solving the problem’. [43] Here Öcalan was talking about the period in which he, as absolute leader of the movement, had ordered the PKK to go on the offensive and branded cadres who wanted to shift attention away from the armed aspect of the struggle as traitors.
After the capture of Öcalan, the PKK-presidium declared that he is ’our leader but he is captured. His directions are no longer binding’. For an underground movement, this was a common sense statement to make but the PKK quickly made a u-turn; in July an enlarged meeting of the central committee adopted Öcalan’s defense plea as the new party manifesto or ’Second Manifesto’. In their book ’<em>PKK. Perspektiven des kurdischen Freiheitkampfes: Zwischen Selbsbestimmung, EU und Islam</em>’, Nikolaus Brauns and Brigitte Kiechle write; ’Öcalan’s authority was so great, that the PKK presidium, whether it liked it or not, had to take this step if it didn’t want to lose its influence over the party or even be branded as traitors.’ [44] Captured or not, Öcalan remained the önderlik.
Öcalan’s new orientation, now made party policy, was unacceptable even for many previously loyal followers of Apo. Thousands left the movement. [45] A small number of PKK-leaders unsuccessfully opposed the new orientation and the end of the armed struggle that was officially adopted at the PKK’s seventh congress of February 2000. Leading figures like like Meral Kidir, general secretary of DHP (Revolutionary Peoples Party), an off-shoot of the PKK, and Mehmet Can Yüce criticized the new orientation from the jails were they were held by the Turkish state. A DHP statement responded by declaring; ’Liquidation and provocations, which were all smashed until today, cannot succeed. The fate of provocations and liquidation which is imposed will be the same.’ After the seventh party-congress, <em>Serxwebun</em> threatened the dissidents with the ’most severe punishment’ under ’conditions of war’. The dissidents were unable to formulate any other alternative except a continuation of the failed people’s war strategy and were quickly sidelined. As a sign of goodwill, Öcalan ordered the PKK guerrillas to withdraw from Turkish territory. Many of them were killed as the Turkish army attacked the retreating fighters.
In the period 1999 — 2005, the PKK was in shock, grappling with Öcalan’s capture and trying to re-organize without the <em>Serok</em> and in accordance with his new instructions.
Since the Second Manifesto, even though he is depended on his jailers for information about the outside world, Öcalan continues to make authoritative ideological statements. In these statements, Öcalan often returns to the mythical past. Öcalan claims the PKK’s struggle is only the latest Kurdish rebellion against centralized state-power. In a remarkable example of ’auto-orientalism’, the Kurds are presented as a people without history that since Sumerian times (4<sup>th</sup> millennium BCE) have rebelled against state-power, all the while remaining ’at essence’ the same. The ’original sin’ that caused their oppression was the formation of the state as such, against which the Kurds tried to preserve their ’natural’ free culture. Öcalan describes his goal as a ’renaissance’ of the idealized society that during the Neolithic supposedly existed in what is now Kurdistan. In a kind of <em>Aufhebung</em>, the positive aspects of this mythic past – a central role for women in society, a ’pure’ Kurdish identity, social egalitarianism – are to return in a modern form and become a guiding example for the entire regime.
This renaissance is supposed to be realized in three intertwined projects: democratic republic, democratic autonomy and democratic confederalism. [46] The ’democratic republic’ entails a reform of the Turkish state. Similar to the kind of statements Öcalan was making in the years before his arrest, the call is for Turkey to recognize the existence of minorities, especially Kurds, among its population and to dissociate citizenship from the Turkish ethnicity. This theme is prominent in Öcalan’s defenses for the court.
Democratic autonomy is a concept borrowed from Murray Bookchin (1921 – 2006), a US libertarian socialist and theoretician. After a brief period as a Stalinist in his teenage years, Bookchin joined the Trotskyist movement in the late thirties and became a member of the Socialist Workers Party. Like many trotskysists, Bookchin had expected the Second World War to end with a wave of social revolutions, led by the working class, in which trotskyists would play important roles. When this did not happen, and the trotskyist movement remained small and isolated, Bookchin started to reconsider his ideas. Bookchin gave up on Marxism, which in his eyes had made a fundamental mistake in seeing the working class as the revolutionary subject, but remained anti-capitalist.
It was clear for him that capitalism was a destructive system that had to be abolished. Its weak point, Bookchin reasoned, was not the contradiction capital-labor, but the contradiction capital-ecology. Capital, endlessly accumulating, destroys the environment. The struggle to save the eco-system takes on an anti-capitalist character and can unite everybody who see their lives threatened by the deterioration of the natural environment and who rebel against their alienation from it.
To construct an ecologically sustainable society, Bookchin suggested, cities would need to be de-centralized and scaled back to allow people to use renewable energy, grow food locally and cut expenditures of energy on transport. These smaller cities would be governed by assemblies of their populations who would democratically make decisions. Bookchin is often called an anarchist but he did not reject participation in elections and the existing political structures the way many anarchists do. Instead, he favored the combination of social movements and cooperatives that would pre-figure the future society with participation in local city-councils to gain vested, legal political power.
This is the strategy the Kurdish movement now seems to be applying with some success in eastern Turkey. In cities and villages where the legal Kurdish party HDP has won enough support in the councils, state-resources are used to facilitate councils and neighborhood associations that are set up by the population in cooperation with various movements and NGO’s. In this way, the movement hopes to build ’democratic autonomy’, the power to locally make decisions in assemblies and councils, while ’evading’ the central, Turkish-chauvinist state. Öcalan and the PKK see this as a way of making citizens actors in exercising self-government. Through strengthening local executive councils and associations of different ethnic, religious, cultural identities and women, pressure is built on the Turkish state to enforce its reform into a democratic republic.
A Kurdish activist explained the strategy as follows; ’When we speak of democratic autonomy, we can’t wait till the laws have changed. We have to make the transformation ourselves, in practical deeds. […] In ten years we will build democratic autonomy and make all the decisions that have to do with city planning and its implementation. […] So we’re slowly building our own institutions, to develop resistance. […] Turkey has no choice but Democratic Autonomy – the current system is senseless. History overturns everything that is senseless. The state will be forced to realize this and change.’ [47]
The ’old’ PKK of course already built civil organizations of various kinds but the crucial difference is that now these structures, although they are inspired by it, are supposedly autonomous from the party. The PKK, which reverted to its old name after a few name changes in the early 00’s, today states its function is not to be the organizational leadership, but to be the ideological inspiration, a center from which Öcalan’s thought is spread through other structures.
The PKK suggests to build structures of democratic autonomy across the borders of the existing nation-states. These structures would then federate from the bottom-up, in a system of ’democratic confederalism’. Bookchin: ’a network of administrative councils whose members or delegates are elected from popular face-to-face democratic assemblies in the various villages, towns, and even neighborhoods of large cities’. [48] Öcalan describes the system as ’a pyramid-like model of organization. Here it is the communities who talk, debate and make decisions. From the base to the top the elected delegates would form a kind of loose co-ordinating body. They will be the elected representatives of the people for one year’. [49]
This strategy also implies a fundamental shift in the PKK’s use of violence. In the old strategy, the armed struggle was essential to defeat the existing state and capture power. Today, the PKK policy towards violence is designated as ’legitimate self-defense’. Violent actions initiated by PKK-fighters are often retaliation for Turkish violence against the PKK and/or civilian supporters of Kurdish rights and serve to maintain a kind of balance of forces, to show the Turkish state that such repression comes with a price and to prove the PKK still has considerable military potential. The only legitimate violence, the PKK now claims, is this kind of defensive violence.
In addition to Bookchin, Öcalan names two other authors as influences, French historian of the <em>longue durée</em> Fernand Braudel and world system theorist Immanuel Wallerstein. Öcalan borrows from them the idea that the development of human society can be seen as moving through various world-eras. The stalinist interpretation of historical materialism is still clearly visible in Öcalan’s recent texts. The familiar list of ’primitive communism – slavery – feudalism – capitalism – socialism’ has been reworked but the idea that history necessarily moves through a progressive sequence of stages is still there. The Sumerian neolithic has replaced primitive communism and the era of ’democratic civilization’, which the world is supposedly moving into, replaces socialism.
In this new civilization, political differences will be superseded: ’the political process of the present however make it clear that the world-views of both the right and the left need to undergo a fundamental evolutionary transformation, at the end of which they will come together in what I call the system of democratic civilization. This approach has already begun to show its qualities in the solution of conflicts, building of international institutions and the rebuilding of the international order according to democratic principles’. [50]
The prison writings show a strongly idealist bend in taking ’culture’ and ’civilization’ as the explanation for social-economic and political developments. Öcalan agrees with right-wing US political scientist Samuel Phillips Huntington there is a clash of civilizations between ’east’ and ’west’. [51]
** 7. Whatever happened to socialism?
Rather surprising for somebody who once claimed to be a marxist, there is very little mention of the deep social-economic inequality between the west and east of Turkey or proposals for improving the economic position of the Kurdish population in Öcalan’s recent writings. The themes of class-struggle and class formation, dealt with in clichés in the old documents, have largely disappeared, except as empty labels for Kurdish collaborators and opponents of the PKK as ’feudalists’ or ’petty-bourgeoisie’. A discussion of Kurdistan as a (neo-)colony or victim of exploitation is absent in a book subtitled ’The PKK and the Kurdish Question in the 21<sup>st</sup> Century’. A few times, the possibility of government development in eastern Turkey is mentioned but no more.
For Öcalan, socialism and workers’ struggles are of secondary importance compared to questions of religious and ethnic identity and democratic freedoms. This assessment seems to be shared by many of his followers. When a group of German leftists visited North Kurdistan to see the system of democratic autonomy ’in practice’, a topic like land reform was not even discussed. Almost echoing the old Maoist principle that attention should be focused on the ’main contradiction’ (the national one), one youth activist declared; ’socialism and the anti-capitalist struggle are important components of our ideology. But at this moment our oppression as Kurds is our main problem’. [52]
The PKK’s socialism became more abstract as it moved from the stalinist idea that socialism means a party-state that owns the means of production to the creation of a new man. What remained consistent during this evolution was the assumption that it is the <em>party</em> that establishes socialism. The working class and its self-emancipation were not issues in the old ideology, even though the PKK paid lip-service to being to a party of the working class.
Whereas in Marxism, the working class is the actor that through its self-emancipation can create socialism, the PKK had a rather distrustful attitude towards the working class and did not see the self-emancipation of the working class as the way to socialism. Many workers in Kurdistan were employed by the state and lived in the cities. [53] The PKK, whose members predominately had a rural background, looked with mistrust at the city population that in their eyes was privileged and too closely associated with the institutions of the Turkish state. In a book based on conversations at the PKK’s party school, a cadre named Heval Zilan put it like this in the mid-nineties; ’The proletariat that has grown here is a proletariat in the service of the enemy. It is not a strong power. It does not play a role important enough to be able to be the vanguard. That does not mean that one does not have to take up proletarian struggle in Kurdistan. It also does not mean that no proletarian ideology should emerge. [..] We know that over 70 per cent of the Kurdish population are peasants, naturally under feudal conditions’. [54]
In the early nineties, Öcalan stated that there were no pronounced class divisions in Kurdish society. [55] The real dividing line was between ’collaborators’ and ’patriots’, not between capitalists and working people. Recently, Öcalan insisted the conditions for class-struggle have (still) not developed in Kurdish society. [56] Such a viewpoint seems to contradict the first manifesto and program that declared the revolution should be led by the working class. But by this was meant that it should be under leadership of the PKK, since it is this party that supposedly carried socialist consciousness and impeded it to the people. Heval Zilan put this view like this; ’Firstly, the army [meaning the PKK guerrilla] is the protector of all the created values. Secondly, it is the carrier of socialist consciousness, which she also passes on through to society. Thirdly it is the army that turns the labor carried out in Kurdistan into value and creates the corresponding consciousness. Fourthly, the army is the basis of the socialist society.’ [57] Since there was, according to the PKK, hardly a proletariat in Kurdistan nor class-struggle, it was the party that needed to create socialism.
It is not surprising that as the PKK changed from claiming to be the vanguard to being an ideological center, the emphasis on ’socialism’, whether as a social-economic system or as the name for a society of the New Man, also became less pronounced. The project of ’democratic autonomy’ is based on different identities and the struggle for the free expression of these ideas. ’Worker’ is just one identity among others. Today, Öcalan believes that recognition of democratic rights for all these different identities would bring about the new ’democratic civilization’. He believes the twentieth century saw ’the disappearance of the material foundations of class division’, because of ’technological progress’. But the possibility of a society without class divisions remains unfulfilled because of the state; ’the state governs the social structure’ and it is the state that ’continues class divisions’. [58] Any discussion of capital is absent. Öcalan does not distinguish between social-economic exploitation that leads to class-divisions and the extra-economic oppression of certain identities. Instead, these are all described as forms of oppression. Perhaps this echoes the reduction of the ’old’ PKK of class-position to the political position one had towards the party.
The continuing oppression of certain identities, like the Kurdish one in Turkey, are blamed by Öcalan on state-policies that are lagging behind the development of the new civilization, a development that however is unavoidable because of technological progress. [59] The task then is to pressure the state to allow the realization of the democratic potential that already exists. This in turn would enable in the long term the creation of of some kind of socialism and the realization of the old dream of the disappearance of the state as such.
The social-economic vision of the new PKK in the medium-term is an economy based on cooperatives. These would contribute to the ’democratization’ of society. PYD co-chair Asya Abdullah discussed the economic ideas for Rojava in February 2014;
<quote>
Who should own the means of production? The state, the cantons, the capitalists? What about private property? Who should own the factories and land?
In principle we protect private property. However, the property of the people is the property of the people and is protected by it. We have only a short while ago founded a council for trade and economy that will draw up rules for trade and economic relations and establish economic relationship abroad.
But again on the issue of the means of production: are there any forms of cooperatives or alternative forms of production in Rojava?
We encourage people to try such things. For example in Kobani there is a women’s cooperation in which around one hundred women work. Clothes are produced and sold there’. [60]
</quote>
Öcalan’s ideas for an alternative future society can be described as social-democratic: ’In my eyes, justice demands that creative work is enumerated according to its contribution to the entire product. Renumeration of creative work, which contributes to the productivity of the society, has to be in proportion to other creative activities. Provision of employment to everybody will be a general public task. Everybody will be able to participate in the health care system, education, sports and arts according to their capabilities and needs’. [61]
** 8. Potent vagueness
In a 2011, Öcalan stated ’Marxist governments failed nonetheless because they attempted to implement a kind of government called “the dictatorship of the proletariat”. This model of governance was the result of abstract and theoretical reasoning and could be interpreted in virtually any way. Our experience of real socialism shows that extreme class formation and state power structures were able to form under this proletarian model. The countries that applied this model in fact developed the most authoritarian and totalitarian structures in history. In the end, this kind of government devoured its own children. The societies concerned panicked and sought to rescue and protect themselves from this monster by turning to the embrace of capitalism and its class structures’. [62]
This quote is characteristic of Öcalan’s texts. The confusing language is typical of much of his texts; ’a model’ that could be ’be interpreted in virtually any way’ but can still be implemented? The analysis of the collapse of ’real socialism’ echoes liberal idealist ideas that the soviet-bloc collapsed because of its ’totalitarianism’ — a historical and materialist discussion of this development is absent. It is clear from Öcalan’s texts that he sees the Soviet ideology as synonymous with ’marxism’ and is not familiar with the Marxist currents that developed outside of it or the Marxist criticisms of it.
Öcalan’s writings are repetitive and long-winded, something that cannot be blamed only on the confines he is subjected to in prison. Öcalan’s texts are immediately recognizable by their meandering style. The juxtaposition of musings on the meaning of ’humanity’ and ’freedom’, with remnants of the old jargon can be quite bewildering. Terms familiar from Marxism are used in ways that imply that for Öcalan their meaning is very different: the ’Second Manifesto’ talks about ’feudal nomads’, the prison writings declare the ’feudal’ Kurdish leaders to be a ’comprador petty-bourgeoisie’. Terms are left undefined and vague. ’Democracy’ for example has become both the goal and method for solving social problems and the defining characteristic of a new civilization. But in hundreds of pages, Öcalan does not offer a sustained explanation of what the word means to him. In brief, it is often unclear what Öcalan is trying to say.
The ideology of the PKK has undergone major shifts since its foundation in the late seventies. From its original Marxism-Leninism, that saw the conquest of state-power as liberation, there was a shift to conceiving of ’freedom’ and ’independence’ in personal terms. From a Stalinist conception of socialism as state-ownership of the means of production, there was a shift to seeing socialism as the creation of a new man. From a ’united and independent Kurdistan’ and the formation of a new nation-state, there was a shift to a ’free Kurdistan’ which in one way or another could possibly exist inside the borders of the Turkish state. From seeing women as resource for the revolutionary struggle, there was a shift to seeing women as such as central actors in the movement.
The PKK was not only a political and military leadership, it would reorganize the new society. It would built not only social relations that would reflect the desired society but even create the new personalities that would characterize the future society. This principle of prefiguration, of building in the present elements that will reflect the future society, is still present in the movement. Today, it is not only personalities but also the political structures of the future society that the PKK hopes to built in the present by organizing structures that supposedly carry the kernel of the new society. It is also clearly visible in its approach towards women’s liberation when it demands that women and men ’unlearn’ the attitudes that supposedly perpetuate patriarchy. ’We want to build a new society. Let’s realize this new society, equality, freedom, esteem, and love among ourselves first’, Öcalan, 2000. [63]
One constant throughout the PKK’s evolution is the centrality of <em>Serok</em> Apo and his statements. When German activists went to North Kurdistan to ’see for themselves’ how democratic autonomy is implemented, they were repeatedly told that activists were ’following instructions’ of Öcalan, defenders of Kobani claim ’the thought of Apo’ was what enabled them to defeat of IS, his picture is prominently displayed on t-shirts and banners. PYD representatives describe their ideology as ’the ideology of Öcalan’, Kurdish women’s activists say that they have learned everything they know about feminism from Öcalan. The continuation of ideological and political, if not anymore directly organizational, leadership by a single individual is at odds with the claims of self-emancipation of democratic autonomy. The PKK is an confounding case of a movement that supposedly has embraced a vision of ’bottom-up democracy’ on instructions ’from above’.
In the ’old’ PKK, gaps in the theory, subjects that were not dealt with or left unclear, were filled with a stock of received ideas from ’Marxist-Leninist’ theories. The writings of Mehmet Can Yüce, one of the movement’s more prominent ideologues from that time, could almost be written by an ideologue of another party from a similar current — as long as they they do not deal with the few topics on which the PKK had developed its own views like the history of the Comintern. The PKK programs and statements from the late seventies and eighties are in many ways interchangeable with those of other Marxist-Leninist national-liberation movements. Now that the PKK defines itself as ’neither Marxist nor anti-Marxist’, this stock of ideas has fallen away and there is less to fill the gaps.
The resulting vagueness and incompleteness has its useful sides. The liberal ’conflict monitoring’ NGO International Crisis Group for example has suggested that what they call the ’unbearable vagueness’ of the goal of democratic autonomy is a tactic to make it harder for the Turkish state to ban Kurdish groups for propagating ’separatism’ but this underestimates the changes the PKK and the movement under its hegemony have gone through (it also does not take into account that the Turkish state has no problem banning Kurdish organizations under flimsy pretexts). But the vagueness does make the project open for very wide interpretations. Because of this vagueness, the PKK’s political project can appeal to the sympathy from broad layers. From liberals to anarchists, people can recognize their own desires in it.
Even more then when he was the leader of the movement in a direct sense, and in contact with his followers on a daily sense, Öcalan has become a prophet-like figure. And, like with the statements of other prophets, his words are open to interpretation. Activists on the ground have considerable space to maneuver, and to interpret his directives in ways that suit their circumstances. The incompleteness of the new ideology and the relative vagueness of Öcalan’s texts make it possible to adapt it pragmatically to the local situation, while activists can still claim fidelity to ’the ideology of Öcalan’.
Decisive for the evolution of the movement is how activists interpret and shape this ideology. The less centralized approach towards building social organizations opens the possibility for a more open and progressive praxis than was possible in the ’old’ PKK. The Kurdish movement has not only maintained itself against the Turkish state but also won concessions from it. A few decades ago, the Turkish state denied there existed something like a ’Kurdish minority’, today it is forced to take the Kurdish movement into account as a political force. This was made possible by immense sacrifices of Kurdish fighters, guerrilla’s and activists. It is them who will decide the future of the movement.
Alex de Jong
<br>
----
** Bibliography
<biblio>
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</biblio>
[1] Selahattin Çelik, Den Berg Ararat versetzen. Die politischen, militärischen, őkonomischen und gesellschaftlichen Dimensionen des aktuellen Kurdischen aufstands, Köln 2002, p. 37.
[2] Quoted in Christopher de Bellaigue, Rebel Land: Among Turkey’s Forgotten Peoples, London 2009.
[3] PKK, Programm, Köln 1984, p. 45, 49.
[4] Ali Kemal Özcan, Turkey’s Kurds. A theoretical analysis of the PKK and Abdullah Öcalan, New York 2006, p. 86.
[5] Özcan, Turkey’s Kurds, p. 89.
[6] Martin van Bruinessen, ’Between guerrilla war and political murder: the Workers’ Party of Kurdistan’, Middle East Report (1988) 153 (July – August), 40–42+44–46+50, there p. 46, 50.
[7] Bruinessen, ’Between guerrilla war and political murder’, p 40, 41.
[8] Ibidem, p. 42
[9] Martin van Bruinessen, ’The nature and uses of violence in the Kurdish conflict’, Paper presented at the international colloquium “Ethnic Construction and Political Violence”, organized by the Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, Cortona, July 2–3, 1999, p. 10.
[10] Aliza Marcus, Blood and Belief. The PKK and the Kurdish fight for independence, New York 2007, p .55
[11] Nikolas Brauns and Brigitte Kiechle, PKK. Perspektiven des kurdischen Freiheitkampfes: Zwischen Selbsbestimmung, EU und Islam, Stuttgart 2010, p. 55.
[12] Brauns & Kiechle, PKK, 57.
[13] Abdullah Öcalan, Prison Writings. The PKK and the Kurdish question in the 21<sup>st</sup> century, London 2011. p. 21.
p. 42.
[14] Olivier Grojean, ’The production of the new man within the PKK’, European Journal of Turkish Studies (2012). Online at [http://ejts.revues.org/4925] p. 4.
[15] Özcan, Turkey’s Kurds, p. 91.
[16] Brauns & Kiechle, PKK, p. 84.
[17] PKK, Programm, Utrecht 1995. No page numbers.
[18] Brauns & Kiechle, PKK, p. 76.
[19] Ibidem, p. 77.
[20] Ibidem, p. 77.
[21] Yüce, Gedanken, p. 79. Emphasis added.
[22] PKK, Programm, Utrecht 1995. No page numbers.
[23] Yüce, Gedanken, p. 79.
[24] Marcus, Blood and belief, p. 291.
[25] Brauns & Kiechle, PKK, p. 66.
[26] Anja Flach, Jiyaneke din – ein anderes Leben, Hamburg 2011. p. 19.
[27] Çelik, Den Berg Ararat versetzen, p. 47.
[28] Flach, Jiyaneke din, p. 20.
[29] Grojean, ’The production of the new man within the PKK’. p. 9.
[30] Handan Çağlayan, ’From Kawa the Blacksmith to Ishtar the Goddess: Gender Constructions in Ideological-Political Discourses of the Kurdish Movement in post-1980 Turkey’, European Journal of Turkish Studies 14 (2012). Online at [http://ejts.revues.org/4657] p. 2.
[31] Çağlayan, ’From Kawa the Blacksmith to Ishtar the Goddess’, p. 8.
[32] Abdullah Öcalan, ’Jineolojî als Wissenschaft der Frau’, Einleitende Worte der Herausgeberin, oline at [http://www.kurdistan-report.de/index.php/archiv/2014/172/110-jineoloji-als-wissenschaft-der-frau].
[33] Çağlayan, ’From Kawa the Blacksmith to Ishtar the Goddess’, p. 2.
[34] Çağlayan, ’From Kawa the Blacksmith to Ishtar the Goddess’, p. 9.
[35] Ibidem, p. 10.
[36] Marcus, Blood and belief, p. 244.
[37] Çağlayan, ’From Kawa the Blacksmith to Ishtar the Goddess’. p. 13.
[38] Brauns & Kiechle, PKK, p. 247.
[39] Abdullah Öcalan, Declaration on the Democratic Solution of the Kurdish Question, London 1999. p. 71.
[40] Öcalan, Declaration on the Democratic Solution, p. 59.
[41] Ibidem, p. 19.
[42] Öcalan, Declaration on the Democratic Solution, p. 17.
[43] Marcus, Blood and Belief, p. 248.
[44] Brauns & Kiechle, PKK, p. 94.
[45] Marcus, Blood and Belief, p. 291.
[46] Ahmet Hamdi Akkaya and Joost Jongerden, ’Reassembling the political: the PKK and the project of radical democracy’ , European Journal of Turkish Studies (2012). Online at [http://ejts.revues.org/4615]. p. 6.
[47] TATORT Kurdistan, Democratic Autonomy in North Kurdistan. The council movement, gender liberation, and ecology – in practice, Hamburg 2013. p. 53.
[48] Hamdi Akkaya & Jongerden, ’Reassembling the political’, p. 6.
[49] Abdullah Öcalan, The declaration of Democratic Confederalism, 2005 online at [http://www.kurdmedia.com/article.aspx?id=10174].
[50] Öcalan, Prison Writings, 139.
[51] Idem, p. 40.
[52] TATORT Kurdistan, Democratic Autonomy, p. 98.
[53] Çelik, Den Berg Ararat versetzen, p. 223 — 224.
[54] [Unknown author], Licht am Horizont. Annäherungen an die PKK, n.p. 1996 online at [http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/isku/hintergrund/Licht/IV-1-3.htm].
[55] Brauns & Kiechle, PKK, p. 82.
[56] Öcalan, Prison Writings, p. 50.
[57] [Unknown author], Licht am Horizont, online at [http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/isku/hintergrund/Licht/IV-1-4.htm].
[58] Abdullah Öcalan, The third domain. Reconstructing liberation. Extracts from the submissions to the ECHR, London 2003, p. 52, 53
[59] Öcalan, The third domain, .p. 54, 56.
[60] Thomas Schmidinger, Krieg und Revolution in Syrisch-Kurdistan. Analysen und Stimmen aus Rojava, Vienna 2014. p. 222, 223.
[61] Öcalan, Prison Writings, p. 60.
[62] Ibidem, p. 52.
[63] Çağlayan, ’From Kawa the Blacksmith to Ishtar the Goddess’, p.13.
|
#title The New-Old PKK
#subtitle “democratic confederalism”, “women’s liberation ideology”, “Kurdish freedom”, “paradigm-shift”
#author Alex de Jong
#LISTtitle The New-Old PKK – “democratic confederalism”, “women’s liberation ideology”, “Kurdish freedom”, “paradigm-shift”
#SORTauthors Alex de Jong
#SORTtopics Rojava, kurds, kurdistan, Murray Bookchin, democracy
#date 8 March 2016
#source [[https://www.europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article37467][www.europe-solidaire.org]]
#lang en
***** The PKK has continued to struggle for justice in Kurdistan. But its democratic transformation leaves much to be desired.
Before the late 2014 battle for Kobanê, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) was an almost forgotten force in the West. But with the Syrian-Kurdish Democratic Union Party’s (PYD) — a sister organization to the PKK — heroic struggle against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, it was clear that the party and its imprisoned founder, Abdullah Öcalan, could not be ignored. And not just in left circles.
The last time the PKK attracted widespread interest was during the 1990s when it fought a brutal war with the Turkish state for Kurdish self-determination. At that time, the PKK’s ideological references were thoroughly Marxist-Leninist. Support for the organization on the Left was strongest among groups that placed their emphasis on national liberation struggles in the Third World.
Libertarian socialist and anti-Stalinist currents were more skeptical. They pointed to the party’s nationalist orientation and its antidemocratic character, demonstrated by Öcalan’s lethal purges. PKK violence against civilians — like the families of pro-government militia members or government-employed teachers — was also a major point of contention.
But times have changed — and so, apparently, has the PKK.
*** From Lenin to Bookchin
Among admirers of the “new PKK” — particularly anarchists and libertarian socialists — there is a common narrative of the PKK’s transformation. The PKK was a Stalinist party leading a guerrilla war in the 1980s and ’90s, and while it enjoyed genuine support among the oppressed Kurdish minority in Turkey who saw it as their champion, its goal of national self-determination was insufficient for winning liberation.
What’s more, the PKK was flawed in ways that prevented it from becoming a genuinely emancipatory force: it was vanguardist, had an authoritarian structure, and equated the conquest of state power with liberation. Hamstrung by such defects, the PKK’s struggle stagnated in the late nineties, before Öcalan’s ultimate arrest by Turkish authorities in 1999.
But once in prison, the narrative continues, Öcalan was forced to confront the failures of Marxism, Leninism, and the original PKK project. He started to read widely beyond the Marxist-Leninist canon, fundamentally rethought his vision of liberation, and formulated a drastically new worldview to overcome his party’s shortcomings.
The name most commonly cited as a decisive influence on Öcalan in this endeavor is Murray Bookchin [1], a libertarian socialist living in the United States. Bookchin had been a Marxist, but he eventually developed his own theory of social change that identified the tension between capital accumulation — with its imperative for eternal growth — and the environment as the central capitalist contradiction. According to Bookchin, the struggle to save the ecosystem has an inherently anticapitalist dynamic and can unite the world’s exploited and alienated.
Bookchin’s post-capitalist vision was a radically downsized society, organized around autonomous, ecologically sustainable municipalities. These municipalities — called communes — would replace large cities, which he believed to be a threat to the environment and a hindrance to direct democracy.
To bring about this society, Bookchin favored a combination of political action and prefigurative organizing — the creation in the here and now of structures such as cooperatives and democratic associations that could foreshadow a better society. Political action and these experiments would, Bookchin argued, begin to empower ordinary people in their communities.
It was compelling enough to win over Öcalan, who, in the popular narrative, made a balance sheet of the PKK’s failures and decided to reorient his goals to a similar kind of libertarian socialism called “democratic confederalism.”
Öcalan’s lawyers then shared his ideas with the PKK, who embraced it and radically reformed the organization’s theory and practice. Today — the story concludes — the PKK is the ideological center of a much wider liberation struggle, a kind of think tank dedicated to spreading Öcalan’s libertarian-socialist vision throughout the larger Kurdish movement. Armed seizure of the state has been replaced as a goal with a focus on building prefigurative structures in civil society.
*** Back to the Future
This tale — of an imprisoned revolutionary who makes a sober assessment of past experiences and is unafraid to make real changes while remaining true to the goal of human emancipation — has a certain romantic appeal. The PKK’s supposed move from a dogmatic “Marxism-Leninism” to libertarian socialism also resonates with the wider view that twentieth-century socialism failed because of misplaced trust in the state and the party.
However, there is another possible interpretation of the PKK’s evolution — one that stresses continuities rather than ruptures. In this view, today’s “democratic confederalism,” while certainly a departure from the “old” PKK, isn’t the break it has been made out to be.
Consider the PKK’s conception of women’s liberation — a central element in the PKK’s current vision of social change. Concern for women’s liberation is often associated with Öcalan’s “libertarian-socialist turn” but it actually precedes it.
Women’s struggles came to the forefront in the 1990s as the PKK expanded from being a guerrilla to a mass movement. The PKK’s expansion increased its influence in a wide range of social and cultural organizations and as a result more women joined. Already in the nineties, one third of the PKK’s guerrillas were women.
In 1994, the Free Women’s Movement of Kurdistan (later renamed the Free Women’s Union of Kurdistan, YAJLK) was established and the PKK also began forming women-only units — partly because many male guerrillas refused to take orders from female commanders. Others hoped that women-only units would help break up internalized notions of female obedience and servility. Today, a mandatory gender quota is in place in gender-mixed PKK groups; 40 percent of leadership must be women while executive posts are split between one man and one woman.
Women in the PKK credit Öcalan with these policies. As one female activist put it,
<em>“[W]e were very far from our own history and were always subjected to repression. That is why the movement needed a leader. We were buried and cemented in, and did not get through. Chair Apo [Öcalan’s nickname] was the only one who broke through. He was the flower that broke through the asphalt. He gave us hope ... [C]hair Apo showed us our personal freedom as women.”</em>
Öcalan’s concept [2] of women’s liberation is shaped by myths of a Neolithic matriarchal past that was purportedly displaced by the rise of class society and the formation of the first states. According to Öcalan, this oppression is rooted in patriarchal attitudes, transferred from generation to generation, and internalized by women. He argues that these views are transmitted through the family — especially through notions of male honor and control over women’s bodies — and that liberation means unlearning them.
Öcalan’s ideas about Kurdish national liberation overlap with those on women’s liberation and also feature a return to an idealized, ancient past. In this Neolithic past, women were not only free but the Kurds as a whole were an egalitarian, freedom-loving people. With the rise of states and organized religion the Kurds became alienated from their own proper identity, and what Öcalan calls “the Kurdish mentality” was distorted. Today’s problems are all traced back to this original fall from grace.
The PKK in the 1990s also often referenced Kurdish history, as when Öcalan claimed that defending their “thousands of years old fatherland” was the highest honor and duty of all Kurds. The PKK back then was strongly nationalist. Öcalan claimed that a “conception of humanity” not founded on patriotism was a “rotten crime.”
More recently Öcalan has criticized ahistorical notions of nations and states and he has declared that they are social constructs. However, what has remained constant is the idea that the PKK’s struggle is one for the expression of an “authentic Kurdish identity.” Where before this goal was framed in terms of national self-determination and state-building, today it is presented as a renaissance of a utopian Neolithic past.
Despite the changing discourse, Öcalan still insists on the existence of a transhistorical Kurdish identity. In 2011 he wrote, “many of the qualities and characteristics attributed to the Kurds and their society today can already be seen in the Neolithic communities of the cis-Caucasus mountain ranges — the area we call Kurdistan.”
Öcalan’s essentialist view of identities — whether he is talking about Kurds or women — has passed through his “turn” with little change. For the PKK, “women” are the social subject that stands at the center of emancipation, playing a similar role to the proletariat in classical Marxism — the universally oppressed subject whose emancipation entails universal emancipation. According to Öcalan the “role which once was allotted to the working class, today falls to women.”
But the category of women itself is never interrogated. According to Öcalan, women are biologically more compassionate and empathic than men and have more “emotional intelligence.” Womanhood is associated with motherhood — women “possess life itself” and thus are supposedly closer to nature than men.
This leads to seeing women as a homogeneous category with a singular ideology corresponding to its liberation struggle. The PKK’s women’s party — Party of Free Women (PJA) — declared that “the women’s liberation ideology is an alternative for all previous world-views, whether right-wing or left-wing.”
The arrest of Öcalan in 1999 [3] inaugurated a period of turmoil for the PKK. Many supporters and members of the PKK were shocked by the statements Öcalan made after his capture. In court, he declared:
<em>“I want to continue my life committed to two promises; I want to serve the full realization of democracy, peace and fraternity. I believe that the intentions of the [Turkish] state are similar. In addition I want to see that the PKK stops the armed struggle and I want to dedicate myself to this goal. I want a PKK that is not against the state and which assumes a legal status.”</em>
Öcalan denied that the PKK wanted to break up Turkey and insisted that Kurds would be able to live in freedom inside a reformed Turkish republic. He blamed the war on the “triumvirate of Agas, Sheiks, and Asirets” — pre-modern forces that had supposedly divided the Kurds and the Turkish state — instead of on the national oppression of the Kurds.
Öcalan’s statements in the Turkish courtroom contradicted the program and founding documents of the PKK. In the past, the PKK denounced the push for Kurdish autonomy, rather than independence, as a betrayal.
But beginning in the early nineties, Öcalan talked increasingly about “a free Kurdistan,” and suggested that Kurdish autonomy inside Turkey on the basis of “full equality,” rather than a Kurdish nation-state, was possible.
“Freedom” came to mean the cultivation of the “true Kurdish identity” and the ability to express this identity. After his capture, Öcalan made this change in the goal of the PKK explicit in a way he had not done before. He declared: “the Kurdish question can be considered in essence a question of freedom of speech and culture.” Thousands left the movement in disappointment and those who refused to follow the new line were attacked as traitors and enemy agents.
While in prison Öcalan reworked the idea of “Kurdish freedom” to mean the goal of “democratic confederalism.” Borrowing from Bookchin, Öcalan now says he rejects the idea of taking over or overthrowing the state to achieve his goal and argues that emancipatory movements should avoid seeking state power and focus on achieving liberation through civil society — not smashing the state, but making it superfluous in the process. Once people realize that they “don’t need the state,” it will slowly wither away.
Öcalan certainly changed his stated views after his capture, but there was not such a clean break as the popular narrative suggests. Already before his capture, Öcalan had started to abandon concepts associated with the Marxist-Leninist PKK. In the 1980s, the PKK declared that its goal was an “independent, socialist Kurdistan,” basing its conception of socialism loosely on the examples of the Soviet Union and China. But the party redefined its vision of socialism over the course of the next decade.
Already in 1993, Öcalan claimed that the PKK, when it discussed “scientific socialism,” did not refer to Marxism but to its own peculiar socialism that “exceeds the interests of states, the nation, and classes.” The PKK’s new socialism wasn’t even a socioeconomic system; instead it was the name for the creation of a “new man” — selfless, courageous, and patriotic — created through struggle.
Social and economic emancipation, already overshadowed by national liberation, thus faded further into the background. In his current writings, Öcalan rarely discusses social and economic issues, declaring that “questions of an alternative economic, class, and social structure are not particularly meaningful.” His vision of a socialist society is limited to a robust welfare state with work, health care, and education for everybody.
In a 1996 interview, Öcalan named Germany as an example of his kind of socialism.
*** No Savior From on High
The PKK did not jettison its old program or embrace its new goals and self-conception through a collective process of deliberation. Instead, party leaders simply carried out the directives of Öcalan.
In the 1980s, Öcalan became the undisputed leader of the PKK. The PKK had congresses where its program was decided but Öcalan stood above such mechanisms. He built an organization in which cadres rose to leadership positions by demonstrating their loyalty to him.
In the PKK, following Öcalan became synonymous with dedication to the cause of Kurdish liberation. Those who refused to accept this were purged. Other party leaders owed their legitimacy to Öcalan’s approval, and without it they would have lost their position. Even in prison his power remains undiluted.
Just like its sister organizations in Syria, Iran, and Iraq, the PKK is a member of the Group of Communities in Kurdistan (KCK). Inside the KCK, the PKK is responsible for the “ideological front,” its task defined as being “responsible for implementing the ideology and philosophy of the chairperson”; “every KCK-member should take the ideological and ethical values of the PKK as their basis.”
The Kurdish struggle has attracted attention for good reason, and the dedication of its militants in the worst of conditions should not be in doubt. But the much-lauded transformation of the PKK leaves much to be desired. It’s not the clear example of a transition from authoritarian Leninism to libertarian socialism it is often made out to be.
Before and after Öcalan’s capture — before and after what the PKK calls the “paradigm-shift” — one essential element of the party remained unchanged: Öcalan is “the leadership” (<em>önderlik</em>). But liberation cannot come from following the twists and turns of a single leader; liberation needs a collective struggle on the back on mass organizations that foreshadow the radical democracy we wish to see in the world.
Alex de Jong
*** P.S.
Jacobin. 3.18.16: [[https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/03/pkk-ocalan-kurdistan-isis-murray-bookchin/][www.jacobinmag.com]]
Alex de Jong is editor of the socialist journal Grenzeloos and an activist in the Netherlands.
[1] [[http://www.versobooks.com/authors/1876-murray-bookchin][www.versobooks.com]]
[2] [[http://ocalan-books.com/english/liberating-life-womans-revolution.html][ocalan-books.com]]
[3] [[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/daily/feb99/ocalanturkey18.htm][www.washingtonpost.com]]
|
#title For the Love of God
#subtitle a continuation of “Golem in the Catacombs”
#author Alex Gorrion
#SORTtopics religion, christianity, apparatus, power, review, The Anvil Review
#date December 28, 2014
#source The Anvil Review
#lang en
<em>When living beings are separated from their own expressions, gestures, tools, and traditions, they are reduced to golem, mere bodies, and every influence that these things, once a part of their being and now expropriated by the category of “apparatus”, exercise over them is now read as a form of corruption or control. This postmodern trope of the fragility of liberty—all influence is coercion; therefore liberty is a utopian concept—derives from the unconscious assumption that every factor external to a golem has in fact been designed to mold it and guide it through the apparatuses where its miserable life plays out.</em>
The defeated communards of 1871 who had taken refuge in the Paris catacombs suffered a particularly gruesome fate. The victorious Versailles troops, who had received tacit support—in a stirring example of elite internationalism—from Bismarck's Prussians, dynamited the catacomb tunnels where the refugees huddled, killing thousands. We can only wonder how many survived the initial blast, the earth itself falling in on their heads (the World Turned Upside Down falling back into place?), and wandered the catacombs, emptied of their utopia, in search of some subsistence.
Later, the Sacré Cœur was built on the butte of Montmarte, the proletarian neighborhood where the insurrection began and where one of the key battles took place in the suppression of the Commune. The extravagant penance, now a major tourist attraction, prevents us from returning to the site of our loss. Long before the science of urban architecture as social control, the Church knew construction as an act of war designed to finish off a defeated enemy, for le Sacre Couer was one of the last of a long lineage. The famous monastery at Mont-Saint-Michel was built atop the most important gathering place of the Gallic druids; unwitting lines of tourists pay it homage today with cameras in hand. Throughout South America, the oldest churches are to be found atop the <em>waka</em> of the Aymara or the sacred sites of other colonized peoples.
In literature, another kind of Church was built atop an earlier revolutionary defeat. Victor Hugo's monumental <em>Les Miserables</em> is set against the June Rebellion of 1832 (though it must also be read as a fruit of Hugo's troubled relationship with the revolution of 1848). And although Hugo, a leftist, is sympathetic with the revolutionaries, his is above all a tale of redemption. Marius and Cosette may marry and find happiness and security (in the tale's ethical grammar the latter is implicitly proffered as a precondition for the former) with Marius's upper-class family (and, in the original novel, Jean Valjean's factory money), their youthful flirtation with insurrection overlooked. A questioned God smiles on them, revealing in the end His indubitable munificence, with the Happy Ending serving as proof of transformative forgiveness. In an earlier age, kings and tsars had to exercise general pardons—the Jubilee—to appear godlike. This new God need only save one soul—like the lottery winner or the pop star that rises alone out of crowds of miserable millions—to redeem Himself for the spectating masses.
<em>Les Miserables</em>' long run tells a sort of story about the rise and fall of modernity. The original novel sets the archetypes into play. Love conquers all and heroes find happy endings. Hugo, after all, needed to tack into a new wind after the massacres of '48. He was part of a generation of writers who flirted with revolutionary ideas, only to abandon them when they were put into practice and used as weapons against the old order by “the wretched of the earth.” A republican who tended towards pacifism, Hugo spoke out vehemently for the cause of equality and fraternity and even consorted with anarchists, yet he also helped to suppress the 1848 insurrection in Paris. Later, old Victor was not as active as many of his colleagues who would lend their pens to justify the repression of proles and pétroleuses after the Paris Commune. He nonetheless found the utility in a tactful separation between art and life, and class-climbing lovers would provide the perfect protagonists for the modern storyline.
<em>Les Miserables</em> the musical struck the perfect note for a new generation of sell-out artists and failed revolutionaries, remassified and forced to consume their own defeat. The most poignant song in Schönberg and Boublil's musical, opening in Paris and London before becoming a Broadway hit, is “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables.” In the lines,
<br>
<em>Here they talked of revolution.
<br>
Here it was they lit the flame.
<br>
Here they sang about tomorrow
<br>
And tomorrow never came.
<br>
[...]
<br>
Oh my friends, my friends, don't ask me
<br>
What your sacrifice was for
<br>
Empty chairs at empty tables
<br>
Where my friends will sing no more</em>
<br>
one can almost imagine a recent university graduate, newly thrust into the real world, surveying in his mind the halls in the Sorbonne where the students debated, or the meeting room in Chicago where SDS had their 1969 congress that would lead to the creation of an armed vanguard, back before the hammer fell.
It is the song of one who has participated in something transcendental, something real for the first time in his life, only to lose it because the community it was born in has been swept away, the other communards either shot down (as in 1832) or robbed by the Spectacle and the prisons (as were the Weathermen and their less mediatic contemporaries). The singer knows not how to find his way back and, re-enslaved by a cruel purgatory, can only blame the foolishness of his braver comrades for having tried to storm heaven.
Finally, the Hollywood remake with Russell Crowe and Hugh Jackman proving—at times painfully—that today's actors can still sing and dance, closes the cycle. Passing through the crass cultural cannibalism of the last years, with which every narrative that ever enjoyed an ounce of success is retailored for the silver screen in a desperate bid to continue producing without creating anything original, <em>Les Miserables</em>' love story—at a time when the romantic narrative must arm itself with witty cynicism or worldly nuance to rise above its festering limitations—comes off as antiquated and trite. It must hide behind a grandiose production and the outsider antics of Sascha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter because it is simply too weak to carry the plot, though in the original musical it is clearly identified as the principal narrative thread, all of Hugo's other subplots and digressions abandoned without hesitation.
The excitement of the insurrection is far more moving than the romance, and here we find another important theme. Of necessity the Spectacle presents us with increasingly numerous renditions of revolution, from <em>Fight Club</em> to <em>Robin Hood</em>. To serve as operations of recuperation, some of these revolutions defeat themselves through extremism, providing a cautionary moral tale against putting ideals into practice. Others attack one aspect of power, say the banks, while reinforcing another, like patriarchy, and yet others succeed by piercing the conspiracy, revealing the truth, and allowing the peaceful masses or the good institutions to make everything right, leaving the actual transformation to play out off camera. How is the rebellion of 1832 recuperated?
This question is difficult to answer, just as today's spectators might have a hard time placing the story's defeated revolution in the genealogy of their current liberty. The same problem crops up in other films about freedom. William Wallace fights against an evil king—the bad kind of authority—and the voiceover in the final scenes assures us that the Scots eventually won their freedom, a fact that their recent opportunity to vote on independence can only confirm. In one of Mel Gibson's remakes of <em>Braveheart, Patriot</em>—the one set during the American Revolution—the relation between the heroic struggle portrayed and the audience's consequent lack of need to struggle is even more obvious. But what about an attempted political revolution in 19th century constitutional France? On the one hand, the dissidents' decision to take up arms is an admirable flaw, when they really all should have just married well and joined high society. On the other hand, their rebellion is presented as an idealistic spirit—most purely embodied by Gavroche, the fearless child—that we are meant to believe eventually triumphed, though it can be carried on just as easily by the final scene's marching masses as by armed insurgents.
What makes up for the story's ambiguity with regards to revolution is the parallel plot of redemption. The State is redeemed in Javert's mercy, the Church is redeemed in Bishop Myriel, and the bourgeoisie are redeemed as the guarantors of Marius and Cosette's eventual happiness (suggesting a curious window on the American Founding Fathers' replacement of Locke's “property” with “the pursuit of happiness”).
<em>Do you hear the people sing
<br>
Lost in the valley of the night?
<br>
It is the music of a people
<br>
Who are climbing to the light.</em>
<em>For the wretched of the earth
<br>
There is a flame that never dies.
<br>
Even the darkest night will end
<br>
And the sun will rise.</em>
<em>They will live again in freedom
<br>
In the garden of the Lord.
<br>
They will walk behind the plough-share,
<br>
They will put away the sword.
<br>
The chain will be broken
<br>
And all men will have their reward.</em>
<em>Will you join in our crusade?
<br>
Who will be strong and stand with me?
<br>
Somewhere beyond the barricade
<br>
Is there a world you long to see?
<br>
Do you hear the people sing?
<br>
Say, do you hear the distant drums?
<br>
It is the future that they bring
<br>
When tomorrow comes!</em>
The Christian moral—wait, pray, and all will be well—comes through in the final song. And the presence of that moral in the three generations of the telling, at the adolescence, decadence, and twilight of modernity, suggests a continuity that is both obvious and inadmissible.
I don't know how the tale was received by its original audience, but by the third telling, the love that holds up the contradictions in the narrative structure of <em>Les Miserables</em> is not the cupidic escapism of its young paramours, but the love of God that provides transcendental weight to the promise of redemption, overwhelming the failed, forgotten revolution's promises of transcendence.
We can argue, and with good reason, that during the Enlightenment science replaced Christianity as the religion of the State. We should not, however, forget Christianity's paradoxical persistence. It is a key force in nationalist movements from Ukraine to Venezuela, and an important tool for turning exploited populations against revolution, winning obedience to state authorities, extending capitalist property relations around the world. In South America and Africa in particular, Christian missionaries serve in many ways as advance scouts for logging and mining companies. And Christianity's close cousin, Islam, is effectively building states throughout Africa and Asia in places where European colonialism failed to do so.
Anarchists in this century do not talk as much about religion as an animating force for the apparatuses of control, and if we do, we tend to understand it as a force in the lives of people who have not progressed as far in their civilizational development, whether the backwater under the microscope is South Carolina or Kenya.
We might speak of two distinct figures that represent the exploited during the Christian and then the scientific phases of capitalist accumulation; the zombie who is enchanted and set to work and the golem who is constructed by its master, made of broken material, simple dust. Christianity simply robs people's souls to turn them into workers, confounding its slaves or holding them captive to metaphysical blackmail, while scientific power gives the masters an architectural control over the environment and reproduction of their subjects, not merely enslaving them but creating them out of whole cloth.
But this progression of distinct phases owes too much to the fundamental eschatology that Christianity and Western science share. In practice, the two modalities of power operate simultaneously. In a platonic world where body and spirit have been alienated, in a Christian world where the body has been shamed and the spirit captivated, in a capitalist world where the body has been enslaved and the spirit has been banished, and in a scientific world where the body has been mechanized and the spirit disproved, the apparatuses of control lack an <em>animus</em>.
They (by which I suppose I mean the conduits of apparatuses that exist to evaluate other apparatuses) can measure the power that flows between the conduits and captives of a given apparatus, binding and differentiating them. But they are also aware of the limits of a captive's identification with their apparatus, a certain melancholy among conduits that acts like friction, decreasing their conductivity and even halting production. And they have seen cases of a grim nihilism that arises from time to time, causing captives to act like barbarians and handle their apparatus with brute violence and against its design, or one that spreads more invisibly to conduit and captive alike, causing them to blur and desert their roles.
Even in a well designed apparatus, the flow of power is not enough to motivate the conduits or bind the captives to their role. The threat of punishment is also a necessary element, but too honest to be left in the open for long without delivering diminishing returns and augmenting risks. The people need to be animated through an affective allegiance with an entity that cannot disappoint them by changing the terms of the contract, as any institution of power will eventually do when it capitalizes on whatever trust has been deposited in it. That entity is their own longing, the first glimpse of transcendence, the very substance the State has always worked to control or destroy.
If in its first millennium the Church aimed to keep the spirit out of the commoners' grasp, effectively creating a less spiritual world by enclosing it in Latin scripture and in the Holy See and stamping out one of the most frequent heresies—that the Holy Ghost spoke to everyone who listened—now it is one of several institutions whose purpose is to divert the miserable and the wretched from a nihilistic confrontation with a dead, scientific society by dangling in front of them a new spirituality, controlled as the old one was but not so tightly, for the new permissible spirit is accessible, on sale, and adaptable to consumer demand.
While traveling recently in South America, I got to see this aggressive marketing firsthand. The evangelists are at the forefront, but is it overly paranoid to assume that one pope was recalled and another was elected to jumpstart a new Catholic evangelism in South America? From one country to the next, billboards announced mega-revivals by visiting evangelists from the US, each eager to expand their fief. And the growth of evangelism goes hand in hand with popular support for snitching, mining, policing, the eradication of indigenous cultures, and development in general. I also came face to face with a revived Christianity's effectiveness at dealing with potentially destabilizing mental illness and subversive cynicism, when I got to know two truck drivers. The first was batshit crazy, and the second was a jaded ex-revolutionary who had been imprisoned during the dictatorship and evidently was not impressed by what the socialists had accomplished in power (a disenchantment that for some people leads to radicalization, but that has driven entire, forgotten generations into the arms of God).
The first driver told about a girl in Brazil who was dead for a week and then got resuscitated. While dead, St. Peter took her to visit heaven and hell so she could tell everyone about it. In hell she came across the Pope, hung upside down for being a Catholic, and Celia Cruz for her lascivious lyrics. She also spied Michael Jackson.
“For molesting children?” I asked.
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“For dancing backwards, contrary to the spirit of God,” the driver told me with a straight face. He went on to explain that the King of Pop was surrounded by moonwalking demons, tormenting him to eternity for his linear perverseness.
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Like I said, batshit crazy, the kind of person who would undermine any rational discourse of social control, if the Church hadn't given them a ready made set of fantasies and bugaboos to fixate on.
I thought I would like the second truck driver more, because I learned early on that he had been a political prisoner. During the first hours of our shared drive, we spoke about the dictatorship, the current government, and the struggle by indigenous people in the region. Then the sun set, he turned off the radio, looked over at me, and asked if I believed in God. The following hours were Hell, as he aggressively tried to convince me that people were evil, and that quinoa was God's way of letting the natives know about Jesus, since the Bible didn't arrive until much later.
When he stopped to help a stranded driver replace a spare tire, I told him, “See, you're a good person!”
“I am not good!” he shrieked, tears forming in his eyes.
A slow learner, I finally decided it was a mistake to try to have a reasonable conversation with him. I will never know what happened to that truck driver in prison, why he hated himself, and to what extent the corruption of his socialist former comrades affected him, but it seemed clear that Christianity mediated it for him. Love of God as hatred of self and hatred of society, but also as an opportunity to do good in a safe, non-projectual way that requires no emotional risk, since the end is already written. Without that, I doubt he would have been able to function as a productive member of society.
Who can doubt that Christianity today is both innovative and on the cutting edge of social control, when they consider the great currency that Christianity has among the mad and insane? While the pills that are meant to regulate the emotional unreliability of the golem remain imperfect, the opiate of religion succeeds in redeeming millions of depressives and psychotics, casualties of capitalism who would otherwise turn to a destabilizing lunacy, as socially useful subjects. After all, good Christians may play out their paranoid persecution fantasies while faithfully serving as snitches, taxpayers, workers, and soldiers. Faith can be the release for their madness, a belief in human evil as the non-heretical expression of a manichean nihilism, and they never need to see the inside of an asylum.
The simultaneity of a Christian modality of power with the modality of scientific social control is also evident in the affective allegiance that can only exist for the subjects of a totalitarian state. Even in this age of scientific rationalism, people can experience a transformative rapture when they surrender themselves to the absolute power of a bureaucratic institution.
In the abstract this hypothesis, or any other that could ascribe such passion to a bureaucracy, seems doubtful. But imagine what it was like for the arrestees of the Greenscare, locked up in the dungeons of the State, their entire future in the hands of the FBI. When they broke and agreed to become snitches, did they feel the warm rush of clemency, like the kiss of the papal ring? Giving themselves over to the advances of the long-shunned State, did they suddenly find themselves in the presence of God, as Winston Smith finally found Big Brother?
With the invention of the golem, spiritual matters should have been put to rest. The living world has been utterly destroyed, ground to dust, and our new bodies—our new selves—are made from that dust, constructed in arrangements that suit the needs of power and set to play in a Garden of Eden that is really just one big factory. How could cyborgs dream? Yet dream we do, and become depressed, and sometimes go off the deep end and paint the canvass of our misery with a red more real than acrylic tones can simulate (guns will be blamed, though fortunately in the last few years the disarmed nations have increasingly belied this allegation with enthusiastic uses of knives and automobiles).
I know very little about the old Buddhist states, but I can imagine that if they had grown to install a world system metaphysically organized atop the opposite pole in a similar mind/matter dichotomy, with a capitalism that measured accumulations of peace and duty rather than trade and production, eventually the body—that misleading shadow of the false physical world—would reassert itself and require more archaic institutions of state authority to coddle and distract its longings, always in a sphere that did not intersect with matters of the spirit.
So it is today. The golem still dream and cry—but if they are fabricated beings made of the dust of the old world, perhaps Democritus went awry in looking for the atom in the too-small-to-see, for if even dust contains dreamings the atom must be the universe itself—and they must be given something great and out of reach to love and to fear. The subjects of state power are no longer living beings, and there is a cathedral built atop each of our past defeats. To pay homage we are told we must walk in through the doors. On arrival we're not sure it's what we were looking for but we mouth along with the rite to assuage our doubts, just as the last grandiose song in a bad musical tries to divert our dissatisfaction.
But the body cannot walk to the spirit any more than the spirit can wish itself a body.
Work continues, disappointments stack up, hairs go grey and bellies flab, the tables and chairs where we sat in our passionate debates empty out, the street that was a bonfire is an apparatus again and the memory no longer seems worthy of passing on because of the inarticulate confusion it provokes in us. Yet the sense of something greater, immediate and unreachable, something that gives us courage, that could wrap us in the strongest of embraces and protect us through death or defeat, mocks us from all directions.
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#title Golem in the Catacombs
#author Alex Gorrion
#SORTtopics technology, alienation, social-isolation, apparatus, class, power, review, The Anvil Review
#date January 12, 2014
#source The Anvil Review
#lang en
“<em>The harmony of the seasons mocks me. I spend hours watching the sky, the lake, the enormous sea. This world. I feel that if I could understand it I might then begin to understand the creatures who inhabit it. But I do not understand it. I find the world always odd, but odder still, I suppose, is the fact that I find it so, for what are the eternal verities by which I measure these temporal aberrations?”</em>
John Banville, <em>Birchwood</em>
It's getting colder here. People shuffle by in hats and scarves. Fur-lined hoods appear in improbable quantities. Licensed vendors, unpacked in pleasant arrays, marshalled forth by the city in its brave quest to claim a new pedestrian shopping zone, are the first and only line of battle against the cold. They rub mittens and hunch puffy jackets against it, smile as only ascendant shopkeepers can, and roast chestnuts, slice baked goods, fetch glittery necklaces from crowded displays, and conquer what would have been a winterbarren street.
I used to be a partisan of winter, back when the seasons still promised an untamed difference. Now I too huddle against it, my fire gone, protected by an old leather jacket I found, waiting in just the right size, in a freestore near here. My friends made jokes about it, a throwback to the '80s, evidently. When their jokes continued from time to time, I gathered they were actually made uncomfortable by my wearing of the jacket and its extinguished aesthetic.
The commodity demands its homage, even from those who must steal it. And my friends, anticapitalists to a one, go about in those sporty jackets made from materials far more polysyllabic than leather. Again the old question. Is it better to blend in, or to signal our defiance of the national religion? For myself, I just can't turn down a jacket that still works, and my brain won't accept that the dull brown thing actually draws attention from the citizens sunk in layers of equally mundane garb, hiding away from temperatures that still have not passed freezing.
They are a frigid people, with few defenses against even a lackluster winter. Nonetheless, this year there are fewer gloves in evidence. More people are keeping their fingers free to tap on little screens, their faces awash in blue glow, as they scuttle blindly down the streets.
The new device is finally triumphing in this economically holdout nation. Could anyone ever have doubted it? What sorts of homogenization is something so flimsy as “culture” able to hold back? This is the difference between a hula hoop and an iPhone. One is a product that may catch on or not. The other is an army that must be quartered.
The entire citizenry has revealed their vapidity. They are mere bodies stripped of all their limbs and plugged into a vast matrix of domination, perpetually vacated to serve as conduit for the <em>flux</em> of power. Lost creatures who fumble around in smug devices looking for love or distraction. They are children who have never learned to read maps or ask for directions, children whose intimate haunts that were never trusted to paper have now been thoroughly mapped by the devices they carry with them. The impoverished oral culture that remains has been forced through this new apparatus. There is no more face-to-face communication; all of it is legible now to the authorities.
The cellphone that shares my room sometimes like an evil stranger heralds the arrival of a new message with a cheerful arrangement of beeps. After a time I pick it up, already imagining the number of the one person I wish most to hear from. But there are only five digits on the screen. An automatic message from the phone company, wishing me a happy birthday—did I put down this day, of all days, as my birthday?—and offering me a present, a free gift, which I only have to claim by logging on to their website. I unplug the broken thing and, batteryless, it dies. Every device should be equally crippled. I turn back to the article I am writing.
In a parallel universe where justice reigns, all those cretins who claimed the internet would bring us closer together and Twitter would make the revolution are being lined up against the wall in an old park and shot. Not out of vindictiveness or vengeance. The purpose of the executions is educational.
“Don't worry,” each of the condemned is told as blindfolds are affixed. “It's all okay: we'll update your Facebook.”
But parallel lines never intersect, and as ours progresses, the parks and squares empty out. Only wraiths pass by, absent to themselves, linked in a psychic death pact to another wraith staring somewhere at the same glowing screen. Only a few are still resentfully here, temporarily anchored by domesticated dogs for whom no application yet exists to take on walks. But even the housepets appear more neurotic as they pull against a leash that connects only to dead weight. They stare frantically at nothing, like inmates too long interned.
I think of a resolution to make on New Years. From now on, whenever I encounter a cyborg, I will speak only to the device, the brain, and ignore the flesh-head that still pretends to be in charge. Someone should start killing cyborgs, smashing the devices and liberating the golem they hold in thrall.
A year ago a wave of graffiti appeared in a park near my house. It was the first sign of life to have appeared there in some time. The occasion, I gathered, was the premature death of a member of a circle of young people who sometimes gathered on the stairs. “Alex,” the inked etchings inscribed, “We will remember you.” “Alex, brother, we won't forget.” “Alex, you were my first love.” The wall stood almost always alone. The kids I associated with it appeared less and less often. Had I only dreamt them? The graffiti, as such, seemed like its own tribe. When the wall was washed clean, the writing appeared again, as if by magic. Now there is nothing there. I wonder if I am the only one who remembers that unknown boy. What has become of his friends?
And what superb instinct leads us to scratch away at the indelible façade of our world right at that moment when one of us snuffs out their meaningless life? As if the excess of agony standing like stale water that no apparatus yet designed can wash away pushes us Borf-like to attempt the impermissible, the inscription of our experiences in the metallic flanks of our prison. In moments like these it seems that everyone is aware that amnesia is included in the bylaws of Order; and therefore, to not forget, we must break the law. The only walls we are allowed to transform are on Facebook, mapping for the enemy.
Today, true grieving demands we resort to graffiti. In a time not far off—already arrived in some parts—it will demand terrorism.
Such a tragedy that suicide loses its enchantment with age. Precisely as we have nothing left to lose, we lose the resolve to go out with dignity in that ultimate, irrecuperable subversion. As though we were genetically programmed to weaken just in those years when we can claim empirical proof that, no, things will not get better, it seems the onset of a hormonal listlessness, the liquification of a certain moral fiber running through our core, enlists us to plod along with the whole of our society, look away or grimace as we might, but ever onwards, in furtherance of whatever harebrained course the species has set.
The political consequences of this resulting lack of elderly suicide bombers are immense. Social stability may lay thanks for its prosperity on the doorstep of that biological cowardice with which failures cling to failure and rebels, at their very best, cling to those same gestures that have long since let them down.
Even the engineers of each new apparatus are feeling lonely. How many start-up geeks marketing the latest Twitter spin-off or networking app sincerely believe that their invention might bring people closer? Convince a prisoner that freedom is made of walls, and they will build new cells all on their own. The guards have put down their guns but they can't hand out bricks fast enough. The general population scouts out the new galleries and wings. <em>Is this what we've been looking for?</em>
We often tell of Baron Hausmann of Paris, the rightwing architect who redesigned the city in time for the Commune, widening avenues and intersections, enclosing common spaces, to take the defensive advantage away from a population in revolt and allow an invading army easy access, changing the very terrain to favor a new kind of war.
We should speak more of Ildefons Cerdà, the utopian socialist architect who redesigned Barcelona in the 1860s. He sought to use architecture to bring about social justice and defuse class conflict by bringing rich and poor together in harmony. The modifications he left behind were nearly the same as those that had been imposed on Paris.
This is not new, but it is getting more common. Nowadays, hip CEOs debate whether technology will overcome alienation and powerlessness or whether it is increasingly totalitarian. One pole in this debate labors all the faster to develop new technologies, hoping to find the one that will really save us, and the other promotes conscious capitalism and donates profits to NGOs.
Those who do not take sides in the social war and commit themselves to a path of negation maintain an affective allegiance to power, and the only way for them to reconcile this allegiance with whatever residual feelings of being human still trouble them in their new cyborg physiology is to decorate these allegiances, to pour even more affective attention into the “improvement” of the rites of power. The fact that what we are seeing is not an initiative of the traditional ruling class is evident in the selection of rites for decoration. Elections, military parades, leader cults, and similar processes are not the objects of adoration. In fact, the enthusiastic campaigns of civic improvement have tended to destabilize, delegitimize, or eclipse the rites that have traditionally been predominant in the sanctification of power. Neither have the initiatives come from the upper strata of the owning class; on the contrary, the most influential production to result in the decoration and intensification of the affective allegiances that tie people to power has been initiated by individuals from the computer-literate section of what would be defined as the working class, who in their astronomic ascent have founded companies that upset the preexisting capitalist hierarchy and now rank among the largest.
A large part of what economists might see as growth in the last few decades is an exponential explosion in the frenetically doomed activity of alienated people constructing new apparatuses to mediate alienation, with the unintended but inevitable consequence of spreading it to new heights and moments of life.
State planners and capitalists, while not the initiators of what has become an October 12, a Columbus-moment, in the field of social control, have responded in perfect form; the former by pursuing an aggressive institutional advance into the network of new and momentarily underregulated apparatuses that have been formed, and by integrating new technics into a revamped Cold War security apparatus; the latter by handing out bricks on low-interest loan, making sure that the supply never runs low and that no good deed goes unexploited.
Yet one has the feeling that they are not merely profiting off a plebeian circus, that even the most powerful engineers are now moved by a quest to mediate alienation. As a historical rule, up until now it seems clear that no matter how universal alienation has been, the exercise of power acted as a drug to allow a certain class of people to find fulfillment in the midst of misery. This affective marker of the ruling class as distinct <em>holders</em> of power is what made Foucault's theory of the immanence and diffusion of power an overstated argument and, if our present musings have set their teeth to marrow and not air, an argument that was ahead of its time.
Increasingly, a new measure of class (post-defeat class, as ladder and not as warfare) is how fully one can organize their lives in the space of the new virtual apparatuses.
Could it be that the charm of winning the class war has worn out? A power-<em>holder</em> must hold it <em>against</em> someone. Once the class war is won is the moment our prison guard realizes that he too is in a prison. He is no longer a heroic protagonist wielding <em>his</em> power against the savage masses, but a conduit through which power moves to maintain the good order of the apparatus. The emergency is past. Power no longer needs his creativity and dedication as protagonist to triumph. Put another way, power has risen out of the class of protagonists who heroically generated and organized it so as to <em>organize itself</em> at a higher level. Today, affective dedication and creativity are required of all those desolate souls who must inhabit a prison, regardless of their level of relative privilege.
The forerunner of this dynamic, now repeated at a greater intensity, is the patriarchal system of bribery that allowed any expendable proletarian or peasant man to play at being tyrant, and taste a small dose of the drug that made misery enjoyable.
Games of power-against played out at a continental scale color the early history of the State. Power-as-drug constituted an affective wage that roped people in to building State power. However, power-fiending protagonists do not always make decisions in the interests of stability or accumulation. The new apparatuses, organized on a logic of power-as-flux, mark a tighter arrangement whereby people are conduits of power and they pay to be played. They dedicate their affective energies to the improvement of their prison, independent of any wages, because to not do so would be spiritual suicide. While capitalism has always relied on unwaged labor, until now that labor has been provided by patriarchy or colonialism. In the Wikipedia age, the voluntary character of unwaged production is largely different.
The new apparatuses of social networking also begin to quantify informal power (the very informal power that has always held primary importance, even and especially in the institutions of formal power, which could not work without it) in “likes”, “friends”, and “followers”. But this version of informal power is not the kind created by protagonists, it is the kind produced by a mill wheel set spinning by a hundred chained bodies each chasing after their own loneliness.
There are some who attempt to pirate power at the level of property, using unregulated spaces in the new apparatuses to steal and share the digital commodities that make up such a large part of the global economy. But alienation extends so far beyond property, they can only hope to be privateers. The free circulation of the product they have liberated brings no benefit to the major concentrations of capital, whose spokespersons tell of tremendous economic losses. Surely, such crimes will not go unpunished, and in the future, prevented, as the State cannot abide unregulated space. But at a level much more dear to the world-machine than that of paltry capital accumulation, these would-be pirates are doing important work, thus they are allowed a certain license (though it is a license the most powerful nations will not recognize, just as the privateers were legally commissioned criminals in a polyarchic global system).
The service they render is to maintain and even expand the project of social control. They are the next chapter in the dilemma of the workers who occupy their factory and keep on producing. To name a common example, they have liberated music—what could be more beautiful? But this is not a pirate cassette, taped off the radio and shared among friends on a boombox in the park. This is a digital file that will be added to an inhumanly extensive library, linked in to the web for the collection of metadata, and fed directly into the ears of the golem, who will continue to slide like oil over the surface of the muted landscape, blind and limbless, doing whatever it takes to avoid wondering how they got there.
Such music is the pinnacle of our civilization. What beautiful sounds we invent, to play while the ship sinks, the weight of its spite bringing the whole sea down with it.
A gust of tepid wind blows past me. I have finished my circle and found nothing to keep me. An alcoholic sits on a bench, howling at the empty streets. Young people drift by, ears plugged to the world, bobbing their heads to unheard tunes. A dog barks. A motorcycle idles. When someone passes close enough, I hear a faint, electric rendition of song.
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#title Has the insurrection come yet? My arm is getting tired...
#subtitle A Cartography of The Coming Insurrection, Tiqqun, and their Party
#author Alex Gorrion
#SORTtopics tiqqun, invisible committee, imaginary party, crypto-authoritarianism, review, The Anvil Review
#date August 2010
#source The Anvil Review
#lang en
“I didn't come to praise Caesar, but to bury him.”
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<em>The Emperor is missing some clothes</em>
I want to critique <em>The Coming Insurrection</em> and some of the writings of Tiqqun not because I dislike these texts but on the contrary because I like them, because I find them interesting, and because they have become so popular. I focus on the weaknesses because I find their strengths to be self-evident and through this review I hope to encourage more people to read them, but in a critical way. The aura of fashion that has surrounded them encourages one to swallow these texts wholesale and uncritically, so that they become digested as a style rather than as an analysis.
The “Chicago Branch” of the Imaginary Party, for example, put out a translation of “Theses on the Imaginary Party” which is dotted with sentences so botched that the translators themselves probably did not understand them, as they are absolutely ungrammatical. (For example, in thesis 3: “It follows identically for the social war of which the combats can remain at their paroxysm perfectly silent and, so to speak, colorless.” And in thesis 17: “One does not insult a mode of unveiling like a fortress, even if one can usefully lead to the other.”) Despite this incomprehension, the Party members in Chicago found something so exciting in it that they “chose to reformat this text to give momentum to its North American circulation, and give it the aesthetic backing it deserves. And because we really like Tiqqun.”
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<em>How is it to be said?</em>
While “Theses on the Imaginary Party” could probably be burnt to ashes without any great loss, the other translations I worked with were all poetic, and the texts thought-provoking. <em>Theory of Bloom</em> and <em>The Coming Insurrection</em> deserve to join the great works of philosophy of their respective centuries. But then, as they might agree, philosophy has often been nothing more than the justification of a certain ordering of things.
While the Invisible Committee's writings are a sincere strike against a certain arrangement of lies, there are a number of operations they perform in <em>how</em> they communicate that exacerbate other of their weaknesses, and lead to a certain problematic ordering of revolution.
First of all, they communicate through resonance, rather than through argument. This is to say, they present a description of reality as self-evident, confident that some readers will immediately identify with their words, seeing in them possibilities they find attractive, or an apt description of their own experience they might not have been able to formulate for themselves.
“In our time of utter decadence, the only thing imposing about temples is the dismal truth that <em>they are already in ruins.</em>” [TCI, p.112]
This “truth” will ring true to some readers, thus any concrete proposition logically based on this truth will seem valid, but to other people, with other experiences, the temples—the institutions that manufacture power and meaning—may justifiably seem robust. This latter group are not presented with any convincing arguments, any evidence, to change their perception or question their experience. If the text does not resonate with them, it simply moves on without them.
The advantage of resonance is that it communicates, more than an idea, a certainty, an inspired strength, that reasoned argument cannot; and it bypasses the discourses of the Spectacle, the distracting alibis that don't deserve to be taken seriously and argued with. Presenting reasoned arguments against the flows of Capital could be like sitting down to a debate with a Creationist or global warming denier; it gives them legitimacy.
The disadvantage is its high potential for demagoguery. It creates an in-group and an out-group, based on who is predisposed to receive those words. Rightwing radio jockeys also use resonance, although with the crucial difference that they can rely on a mass fabrication of experiences to ensure a greater amount of resonance. The TV news is full of crime stories, so when they talk about fear of crime, their message will resonate with many in the audience who have a virtual experience of crime. Because the Invisible Committee cannot rely on the discourses of the Spectacle, the fact that their words resonate with so many people means they're on to something.
However, on top of resonance they add a second problematic method of communication: the frequent use of untrue truisms. For example: “this same lack of discipline figures so prominently among the recognized military virtues of resistance fighters.” [TCI, p.111]. Actually, one finds in the biographies of many if not most resistance fighters a strict personal and group discipline, which only some do not share. But the Invisible Committee simply does not engage with <em>facts</em> on this factual level. And the resonance-blinded reader will be predisposed to breeze through these errors.
Another example: “Nothing can explain the systematic lack of remorse among criminals, if not the mute sentiment of participating in a grandiose work of devastation.” [Theses, thesis 20]. Actually, a great many criminals <em>are</em> remorseful, even when they distinctly should not be, and this reality tells us as much if not more about the functioning of power than the putative silence of the remorseless ones, into whose closed mouths the Invisible Committee is comfortable inserting entire soliloquies.
Thirdly is the element of totalization. Like their Situationist predecessors, the Invisible Committee is proposing a theory by which to understand the totality of domination, struggle, identity, and existence. Their theory is a very sound one, an interesting one, and an inspiring one, but it would be reductionist to understand it as the <em>only</em> one with any validity. Yet this, it seems, is what they do, confusing the finger with the moon like the fool in the old zen parable.
We can read, for example, statements like:
“That's the reason for the well planned and public constitution of a <em>lumpen-proletariat</em> in all the nations where late capitalism reigns: the lumpens are there to dissuade Bloom from abandoning his essential detachment by the abrupt but frightening threat of hunger.” [Bloom, p.100].
Really? The existence of an entire class can be reduced to their utility in frightening others? And when were the lumpen-proletariat ever not publicly constituted, and what were the reasons for their constitution before the advent of Bloom, and why did these reasons fully disappear with Bloom? At what point did society change so thoroughly that one theory could disappear and another appear, having fully subsumed all the mechanisms of the former?
A fourth hallmark of the manifestos of the Imaginary Party is non-falsifiability. They go beyond offering poetic, inspiring, or useful descriptions of reality to argue scientific causality and propose (semi)concrete actions. It often happens something like this:
“Organizations are obstacles to organizing ourselves.
“In truth, there is no gap between what we are, what we do, and what we are becoming. “Organizations—political or labor, fascist or anarchist—always begin by separating, practically, these aspects of existence.” [TCI, p.15]
The first two sentences contain interesting points. They do not need to be absolutely true in order to be useful. However, the writers go on to assert a causal connection between those two points; in other words by always enforcing this existential gap, organizations make themselves obstacles. Now they have moved from a poetic or suggestive logic to a scientific one, at the same time as they make a non-falsifiable statement about the origin of organizations. This assertion cannot be true in any empirical sense, it can only be true if you accept the insistence of its truth. You must accept their specific redefinition of a common word and the writers need not take any risks by clarifying which actual groups constitute organizations, by this new definition, and which do not.
“Organization” is now reserved as an ideological weapon to be used against those whose organizing one does not like.
Generally, and again like the Situationists, the Invisible Committee are careful not to make any falsifiable statements while offering up their total theory, even while they use a scientific or causal logic. And the few times they do let slip an assertion that can be factually checked, it falls flat on its face. For example:
“It is a rarely disputed fact: we know from experience that the violence of explosions grows in proportion to excessive confinement.” [Bloom, p.113].
This is another fact that is not a fact. Confinement often leads to greater passivity, to depression and unresponsiveness. This can be factually confirmed in a prison, at the zoo, in densely populated cities, during the Holocaust. Violent explosions are sometimes related to confinement, but the relationship is hardly so simple to justify such a facile correlation.
<br>
<em>The Second Coming Insurrection</em>
From its very title, the millenarian character of <em>The Coming Insurrection</em> becomes apparent.
“Everyone agrees. It's about to explode. [TCI p.9]
“Whether [the collapse] comes sooner or later, the point is to prepare for it.” [TCI p.9]
“Everyone agrees that things can only get worse. “The future has no future.”” [TCI p.23]
The same imminence can be found in other texts of theirs. “We know at present that the denouement is close.” [Theses, No. 15]
“commodity society” has reached “its final age.” [Bloom, p.97].
The insurrection is coming. One can almost hear it panting out those very words in the exuberance of these writings. As we've seen, there is no need to argue this certainty. In the style of <em>Appel</em> (the earlier book by this crew), it is presented simply as “an evident.”
What is accomplished by this operation? Those with whom these texts resonate, which is to say, those who are predisposed to agree with them, will be inspired by the poetic language, the beautiful descriptions of their own isolated experiences, and empowered by the projection of strength, certainty, and confidence. For everyone else, the text will have no effect. Thus, the Invisible Committee's chosen form of communication creates a strong divide between believer and gentile which is at its core thoroughly unstrategic, not because there is anything wrong with resonance over argument, but because the specific message the IC is spreading speaks of an impending civil war in which we will have to choose sides, yet the way they spread it forgoes the necessity of intervention, of influencing how others perceive that choice and what choice they make.
Our attention is directed towards the certainty of this insurrection's arrival and away from what we might do to aid it. If we are predisposed, we will “break ranks.” If not, we won't. And that's not even worrisome, because we are presented (again) with a revolution that unfolds from an internal “dialectic”. If Blooms and the negative acts of desertion they are capable of are simply produced by the contradictions within the Spectacle, within the “empire of positivity”, then we are once again saddled with a mechanistic view of struggle.
The contradiction between dialectics and human agency is especially pronounced in <em>Theory of Bloom</em>. Tiqqun “is not the revolution that <em>must be waited for</em>, much less the revolution that <em>we can prepare</em>: but the revolution that is taking place according to its own invisible pulsations, in a temporality operating internally within history.” [Bloom, p.102]. Here we are presented with a revolution wholly unaffected by our choices, plans, preparations, and strategies. A revolution we need not even be conscious of, and that is, in fact, largely inscrutable, according to the assurances of the Invisible Committee. This absence of strategy undergoes a curious shift towards an exaltation of agency, with such passages acting as intermediary: “Because [Bloom's] strategy is to produce disaster, and around himself to produce <em>silence</em>.” [Bloom, p.115]. Since Bloom is a phenomenon and a condition produced by the Spectacle, the emptiness on the other side of alienated individuality, any strategy that is ascribed to him is a function of his characteristics rather than a choice of his desires. He is just another machine, but one that “produces” disaster.
Only at the rousing end of the text does Bloom gain his agency, and we suddenly hear about the “duty to make decisions” [Bloom, p.122].
This is neither incoherence nor creative paradox. An attentive reading of Tiqqun reveals that there is a run-of-the-mill Bloom and a becoming-conscious Bloom who is more equal than the others, just as, in a few paragraphs, we will infer the existence of an Inner Party and an Outer Party.
For now, Bloom is overwhelmingly an object, and his “fate is either to make his escape from nihilism or perish.” [Bloom, p.104]. Those who learn from history probably hear a little warning bell go off with this phrase. Didn't some prophet of the past promise us a similar insurmountable contradiction that arose from the imperatives of the system itself? Hasn't there already been an argument between those who saw revolution as something for us to make now and those who saw it as an inexorable product of history?
We simply have to ask ourselves: what if the insurrection doesn't come? What if we're just getting jerked around, and capitalism finds a way out, secures itself a future existence, as it has every time so far? Will our participation in this civil war, the morale we need to be insurgents, be staked on the “fact” that the catastrophe is here? The communists drowned themselves in a hundred year defeat by gambling that capitalism contained a contradiction it could not overcome. Is the grand carousel of history, well past the point of tragedy, looking to serve up a little farce?
<br>
<em>Didn't you hear? The event got defeated</em>
A major problem with <em>The Coming Insurrection</em> is that it basically dresses up a tried and defeated strategy in new clothes, the strategy of a good part of the European autonomous struggles of past decades. Perhaps this is why it was way more popular in the US than in France: because its suggestions aren't all that groundbreaking, except here, where there never was an autonomous movement. Knowledge is often created by struggle. Could it be that some academics (Agamben) were inspired by the new theoretical directions implicit in the ongoing social struggles of the '70s and '80s, gradually worked that inspiration into their theoretical production over the years, and then twenty years later some intellectuals, disenchanted with the failings of present struggles and cut off from stories of past struggles, read the new theory, which was just a digestion of the old struggles, and thought they had discovered something original (beef jerky)?
I wouldn't even call that a hypothesis, but still one wonders how else European radicals could repackage the strategy of revolution through the networking of autonomous spaces as though it were a new idea.
Their analysis of the world is brilliant and moving. Their suggestions for what to do generally fall flat. They have replaced the term “autonomous space” with the old favorite, “commune” (neologism: it's a great way to lose the same fight twice); they keep the emphasis on learning skills of self-sufficiency; they throw in a nice take on pacifism; they resolve the question around the General Assembly by calling for its abolition and clarifying the assembly as a place for talk rather than decision, which is a great point but hardly constitutes a correction to the autonomous strategy, since there were already strong segments of this practice who felt the same way. They've beefed up the importance of sabotage and the economic blockade, and they've thrown in a partially original call for invisibility.
They fail to answer or even ask what in my mind is the most important question regarding the defeat of this strategy: how to build the communes and the material basis for self-sufficiency—thus creating <em>something to lose—</em>while continuing to act like you have nothing to lose, which is to say, without falling into a defensive posture that facilitates recuperation or at the very least stagnation, seeking some uneasy truce with the dominant order. What they offer instead is a confidence that they will never sell out, which mirrors the confidence of the autonomen in the '70s, although the IC has found more poetic language for it.
Thanks to the Tarnac 9 arrests, the most famous part of the book, though it only receives a few pages, is where they cosmetically alter the old autonomous strategy by adding emphasis to the idea of sabotaging the commodity flows. “The interruption of the flow of commodities [...] liberate potentialities for self-organization unthinkable in other circumstances.” [TCI, p.119].<em></em> Elsewhere:<em></em> “In order for something to rise up in the midst of the metropolis and open up other possibilities, the first act must be to interupt its <em>perpetuum mobile.”</em> [TCI, p.61]. Yet the examples they mention, in Thailand or in France, seem to indicate that this interruption is in fact a <em>result</em> of self-organization rather than a prerequisite. Strong movements with real popular support already existed, and were able to knock out infrastructure with a large part of society sympathizing with the inconvenience rather than becoming hostile towards the troublemakers. On the other hand, the countrywide train sabotage for which the Tarnac 9 were arrested did not seem to liberate any potentialities, and the massive blackout in Barcelona of 2007 was experienced more as a wasted potential than a liberated potential.
Of course I can't abide any Marxist-Leninist “accumulation of forces” argument and I won't suggest that these tactics are only appropriate or worthwhile once a mass movement has gained full popular approval and the petitions to prove it. The experience of the Argentine piqueteros shows that the increasing use of sabotage can be a useful tool in building up the potentials of self-organization and social presence over time. The point is simply that <em>The Coming Insurrection</em> exaggerates the effect of the blockade. Its greatest potential, evidently, comes not as an event but as a process. The authors also fail to make a useful point culled from the Greek experience: once a struggle becomes strong enough to precipitate a rupture, perhaps the principal infrastrucutral network to be sabotaged is the television.
The Invisible Committee does an equally good job of missing out on important lessons to be learned from the major social rebellions in Oaxaca (2006) and Kabylia (2001), though they make a really good point about how the communes can arise from the social movements, when talking about the French students' struggle on page 121 of <em>The Coming Insurrection</em>.
Where did the rebellions in Oaxaca and Kabylia come from, and why did they fail? Important questions. The IC passes the buck. They include a critique of organizations, but it's not nearly nuanced enough. The Oaxaca rebellion was largely co-opted by elements within the APPO—not the general assembly itself but its steering committee—but it was provoked largely by the teachers' unions. In their brief mention of Kabylia, the writers diss the “interminable” assemblies, but fail to mention that some of these assemblies were a continuation of indigenous forms of self-organization and an important vehicle for the rebellion itself. Some of these forms of organization recuperated themselves, while others are still resisting the recuperation. <em>The Coming Insurrection</em> is trying to dissect a fly with a butter knife, and justifying it with a witchhunt logic: if it gets smashed, it was no good.
<br>
<em>About as invisible as that elephant sitting over there in the corner</em>
The Invisible Committee's most characteristic modification of the autonomous strategy is the call for invisibility, to avoid recognition. “Flee visibility [...] to be visible is to be exposed, that is to say above all, vulnerable” [TCI, pp.112-113]. “[W]e see appearing among Blooms not only a certain taste for anonymity, but at the same time a certain defiance towards visibility” [Bloom, p.111]. “From now on, to be perceived means to be defeated” [How?, p.11].
I'll get the awkwardness out of the way, do the brutish, inappropriate thing, and say right off the bat that this is an odd argument, seeing as how the presumed authors of the text, once the state's spotlight was turned on them, fled directly into the media spotlight, which has always been recognized as an at least partially effective way for people to save themselves from the executioners of the justice system. In the terrain of democracy, unlike the terrain of guerrilla warfare, people tend to be safest in plain view. As much as the Spectacle needs to be abolished, media attention that protagonizes rebels, though it is a poisoned apple, can build sympathy and provide protection from repression, and this is no more a contradiction than the fact that, while fighting to destroy capitalism, we often have to get jobs and buy commodities; while fighting to destroy the state, we use state infrastructure. After all, we're not vegans or anything, and we understand that the total boycott isn't even possible. I also argue, and I'm not sure whether the Invisible Committee understands this, that although our theories may be unified and streamlined, the system we're fighting against never is. There are contradictions among institutions of power that we can exploit.
One could counter that the arrestees only utilized a media campaign, with big protests, dignified academics writing in to the major newspapers and all that, only after they were already in the spotlight. The obvious answer is that going to the hills, dressing normal, and trying to avoid recognition didn't work very well then, because it was relatively easy for the state to find them and slap on whatever ill-fitting label was in its own political interests at the moment, in that case, <em>anarcho-autonome</em> or terrorist.
The War on Terrorism succeeds as a repressive operation precisely when its victims cannot be recognized. Because recognition is not only to accept someone's predicate assigned on the basis of an assemblage of social constructs, in this case, “terrorist.” It can also mean to assign someone a predicate based on a conflicting assemblage of social constructs (“good citizen,” “neighbor,” “human being,” “social activist,” “freedom fighter,” “conscientious objector,”), an approach which creates a strategic conflict that can neutralize the initial operation (exposing certain individuals and groups to greater repression by not allowing them to be recognized outside of the category imposed by the state) but one that also recuperates the recognizant defiance by maintaining it within the assemblages proffered by the system—in other words, a draw, a going back to square one. An honestly, fighting a campaign of repression to a draw is not all bad. But there is a third possibility for recognition: assigning someone predicates that are fluid and non-categorical.
In “How is it to be done?” the Party members talk about predicates in a way that could be optimistically construed as only referring to socially imposed categories: “it takes many assemblages to turn a female being into “a woman”, or a black-skinned man into “a Black”.” [How?, p.9], although phrases like “Let be the gap between the subject and its predicates” and “A “white horse” is not “a horse”.” [How”, p.9] suggest that indeed they are attempting to cut much deeper.
Elsewhere, they leave no room for doubt.
“As for the statement “a rose is a flower,” it allows me to erase myself opportunely from behind the classification operation that <em>I</em> am carrying out. It would thus be more suitable to say "I class the rose as among the flowers," which is a standard formulation in Slavic languages.” [Metaphysics]
This structural argument is interesting as a passing, philosophical consideration, but it is theoretically useless and factually flawed. I can say with certainty that their assertion regarding the grammar of the Slavic languages is wholly untrue in Russian and Ukrainian. I'm waiting to hear back from some friends regarding Polish, Bulgarian, and Croat, and I'll announce my error if my prediction proves untrue but the IC's track record with facts leaves me with little doubt that they're imagining things again.
While we're at it, I want to point out that the structuralist hypothesis that language defines possibilities for thought, which is the assumption on which the IC is basing their point about predicates (they say the “to be” verb of Indo-European languages allows for a peculiar confusion between subject and predicate), has been soundly disputed. Research has shown that there is a weak effect—for example speakers of languages in which all nouns are gendered (“el tiroteo,” “die Tür,”) are more likely to assign feminine or masculine adjectives to inanimate objects based on the noun's gender, when asked to personify those nouns in a survey, though not necessarily in everyday speech (i.e. the German speakers will personify “the door” with feminine adjectives). There is, however, no strong determination of language on thought. English and Spanish speakers do not have a profounder sense of time than German or Russian speakers because English and Spanish grammars contain far more tenses, just as English and Spanish speakers do not have a more primitive grasp of the interactional relationship between different bodies and objects just because German and Russian grammar contain far more developed cases. The human brain is everywhere the same in its range of differences, and language is something we constantly recreate as needed—given the necessity, children will create a brand new language for themselves in a generation. Faced with a restrictive grammar, we have a whole array of other linguistic cues to communicate all the nuance we need. Anarchy is the fundamental reality of linguistics as with all other spheres; every language has its black market amply provisioned with whatever needed meaning one cannot get through the more structured spaces of the tongue.
The very assemblage of meanings, of cultural assumptions and conversations suppressed or already had, that form the backdrop to every conversation, allow us to surpass the confusions or limitations of grammar at any moment. A society that reifies scientific categories may be confused by the sentence, “a rose is a flower,” just as they may believe when they are told a tomato is a fruit and not a vegetable (dastardly lie). But a society in which people talk about the relationship between language and the world, people with a humbly metaphysical appreciation of the act of naming would not be confused. They will still say “a rose is a flower” rather than “I classify the rose as a flower,” because the former is more streamlined, and a linguistic rule of thumb is that more frequently used formulations tend to be shortened.
Another example. Two paragraphs back, I hesitated before writing the phrase “feminine or masculine adjectives”. I thought about writing “adjectives considered to be feminine or masculine” but decided that was too bulky to put in the middle of an already long sentence. And it was unnecessary. The former phrase and the latter phrase mean the exact same thing, as long as the readers have already engaged with the idea that femininity and masculinity are always social constructs and matters of assigned value.
Suspending language, which does not exist without the assignment of predicates, can be vital in moments of meditation, hallucination, and ecstasy. But as a program or ideological argument the suggestion is the absurd fantasy of a totalitarianism of ideas, a hyper-intellectuality that has gotten so lost in its own cerebral cortex it has not heard that its mother has been calling it down to dinner for the last three days.
To talk of becoming anonymous or existing only in presence, avoiding recognition, on a practical level, means very little if this is not simply a strategy of boycotting the media and not adopting any identity category other than member of the Imaginary Party. The thing about “opaque zones” [How?, p.11] is that they are only opaque to the state, its media, its academy. Within these zones there is a great deal of recognition, of differentiation, and a flourishing of predicates. If the banlieue or Kabylia seem opaque to the Invisible Committee, this is only because they stand outside and above them.
The fact of the matter is, invisibility is only an option for the state agents spying on us, and the guerrilla who is willing to sacrifice her life to an existence of clandestinity. For the rest of us, it's a question of appearance and disappearance: constantly learning to appear in the lives of others, and disappear from the traps, the enclosures of meaning, the Spectacle creates around us.
Here's another thing about invisibility: the more you hide, the hipper you get. Case in point, <em>Vice Magazine</em> seeking out the Invisible Committee in Tarnac.
<br>
<em>What is, er, sorry,</em> how <em>is the human strike?</em>
While <em>The Coming Insurrection</em> may be excused for the weakness of its practical suggestions, since the greater emphasis goes to their analysis of the present reality, Tiqqun has given us a text specifically intended to address this question: “How is it to be done?” They start by making a haughty distinction between theirs and Lenin's pamphlet of a similar name, provoking some interesting thoughts by outlining the difference between focusing on what to do and how to do it, though in the body of the text the difference proves to be basically meaningless, as their suggestions just as easily constitute a what as a how. The exception is in their discussion of recognition, which, as I already argued, is nothing to write home about.
On page 14 they offer a concrete suggestion that is equal parts what and how and advises, quite like <em>The Coming Insurrection,</em> a succinct reemployment of the autonomous strategy, “an expansionary constellation of squats[...] linked by an intense circulation of bodies”, without any idea on how to improve this practice. The fact that the autonomous strategy was defeated, though significant, should not in any way obscure all the possibilities it creates and capacities it develops. In fact, throughout France and Spain in particular, many people are still working at this expansionary constellation, tweaking it, maintaining it, giving it consistency, trying to push it in new directions, coming together in periodic <em>encounters</em> to share ideas and emotions. Curiously, at least some of the partisans of the Imaginary Party denounce these efforts as not whatever enough. Are they calling shots from the bleachers, or do they have anything to share from their own experiences of taking to the field?
“How is it to be done?” answers its eponymous question primarily through the suggestion of the “human strike,” giving the example of the Italian feminists who refused to be mothers, who refused to dedicate their <em>care</em> to the reproduction of capitalism. I'm confused by how this suggestion conflicts with the calls for invisibility and against recognition, because it seems that a human strike requires, above all, consistency, as we learn over time how to liberate care and create new relationships, but consistency, which is on some levels the creation of new rituals, would seem to allow for what the IC refer to as visibility, an opportunity for the Spectacle to recuperate these efforts by assigning new labels and dispatching new commodities.
The human strike is a building up of force that will most certainly be noticed as we withdraw our affective energies from the economy, and replace commodity relations with a mutual caring for one another. Even if the police agencies of the state somehow fail to notice all the new communes—not the easy communes of the riot but the persevering ones that build up new capacities through consistency—Revlon will certainly notify them when cosmetics sales start to plummet.
Yet the Invisible Committee admonishes us that: “Our appearance as a force must be reserved for the right moment” [TCI, p.114] Wait for the right moment?? These people seem to be re-ordering all the Marxist fallacies and trying to make them hip again. What gives?
And how are we to remain invisible (for now) while carrying out a human strike, when the Italian feminists got recuperated and the Tarnac 9 couldn't even pull it off? They've let us know what to do, but the Party leaders just can't pinpoint <em>how</em> we're actually supposed to do it.
Precarias a la Deriva of Madrid give a more meaningful explanation of the human strike (see “A Very Careful Strike”), but they also seem wedded to the great communist defeats. Their analysis of care and feminine labor is brilliant, but they do just as the Marxists in adopting capitalist logics in their challenges of capitalist relations, in this case by seeing care in instrumental terms, as another form of production. What I want to know is, how can we liberate something we insist on viewing in mechanical terms? After all, care can only be plugged into capitalism in the first place when it ceases to be nurturing and comes to be reproductive.
It's hard to say how the Invisible Committee view care because they're so far removed from care's gritty details. The statement, “We are not depressed; we're on strike” [TCI, p.34], can only be true if this strike comes with its own picket line to hold back those who would cross into the recuperation of pharmaceuticals, its own support committee so that the misery of being out of work, affectively, becomes a joyful poverty. In the movement from absenteeism to the unlimited general strike, what we need is an expansive body of experience and experimentation to mobilize our boredom, reify our resentment, wear our open wounds with pride and heal them with abandon, and help one another make our bodies whole again. The IC call for this experimentation, but hell, so did the feminists of the '70s, and even the activists of the anti-globalization era. All we get that's new is a rhetoric that protects us from seeming like those who failed before us.
<br>
<em>Whatever, dude</em>
For the Invisible Committee, in the insurrection they prophesy, the real one, their insurrection, we are all “whatever singularities,” without predicates, an emptiness brimming with possibilities. It's a beautiful dream, and I, for one, believe in fighting for dreams. But there is a certain ownership they exercise over their insurrection, a certain power of exclusion the Invisible Committee have vis a vis the Imaginary Party, that could make this dream nothing more than a maneuver identical to the one by which the communists suppressed difference by demanding adherence to the unified identity of the Working Class. There are no women, there are no blacks, there are only members of the Imaginary Party.
Something curious, of an understated significance, takes place within the pages of the English-language edition of <em>The Coming Insurrection.</em> On page 83, just a page after the French authors extol agricultural experimentation in Cuba and the artistry of auto mechanics in Africa as evidence of the fertility of catastrophe, they allow themselves to get excited by the Common Ground Clinic in New Orleans, as a fruit of the catastrophe that was Hurricane Katrina. This is no doubt embarrassing for Party members in the US, as Common Ground is an example of “activism” and thus part of the Spectacle, the Party of Order, and not of the Imaginary Party. So, the translators insert a footnote to explain away the mistake and denounce the Clinic. They say its founder, Malik Rahim, used it for a Congressional campaign (they need not consider what Rahim's relationship was to the Clinic during his campaign, nor the attitude of those who keep the Clinic running to political campaigns), and they point out that “one of the main spokesmen for the project, Brandon Darby, was an FBI informant” (ignoring that FBI informants have also cropped up in the most insurrectionary of projects in this country—let's not forget what else Darby himself participated in).
The translators stumble blindly into a great irony that they themselves have dug, abyss-like, in their very path. They try to minimize the IC's error of praising Common Ground with an easy truth: “A certain distance leads to a certain obscurity.”
I want to repeat that one: “A certain distance leads to a certain obscurity.” This little turn of phrase, like a sewing needle, pops the overinflated balloon of a good part of what the Invisible Committee says, of what the Imaginary Party itself stands for.
First of all, isn't obscurity exactly what they were going for? Or is there a functional difference between obscurity and opacity? And if this is true, one might not be so brash in predicting that in the Arabic or Imazigh translation of <em>The Coming Insurrection</em> or <em>Tiqqun</em> texts, the translators would embarrassingly note that Kabylia isn't such a good example because that struggle was full of recuperators, but the authors could hardly have known that because of the distances involved; in the Spanish translation of these texts the translators would embarrassingly note that experimental Cuban agriculture isn't such a good example because so much of it was funded or at least permitted by the state, and Oaxaca isn't such a good example either because the initial strikes were actually organized by the teachers' unions.
Once you penetrate their opacity, it seems, all the little chapters of the Imaginary Party blow away in a puff of smoke.
Could it be that the Imaginary Party is, after all, imaginary? There can be little doubt, when one reads their assertion about “Japanese children, whom one might justly consider the most intense avant-garde of the Imaginary Party” [Theses, thesis 18].
Most whatevers aren't good enough for them. Only what is farthest away is valued. They sling denunciations of activists, of leftists, of anarchists, of other ways of doing things, and their only suggestions are exotic. The analysis in the first parts of <em>The Coming Insurrection</em> brilliantly show how the civil war is all around us, but when talking about how it is to be fought, all they can do is make struggle even more distant, by creating a pressure, a higher standard, to fight effectively by being unrecognizable, by being anonymous, by being spontaneous, higher standards that only exotic examples can meet because they are unknown to the authors.
The whatever is just an ignorance of details.
And the ignorance is above all a philosopher's preference for easy answers, an ideologue's refusal to engage with complexity. In the theorizing of the Invisible Committee, there is a certain streamlining of resistance. Beneath the poetry exists an economy of thought that demands the excision of all but the most sleek movements towards insurrection. Everything that is not judged to be perfect on the plane of ideas is denounced as recuperation.
“RULE No. 2: You can never free yourself from an apparatus by getting engaged within its minor part.” [Metaphysics]. There is a logic to this. The identities, the subjectivities, they refer to can certainly be viewed as a “minor part” of the apparatus, and certainly creating counter-subjectivities cannot in and of itself destroy that apparatus and may often bind you to it more tightly, but the idea that only the most economic of motions in a struggle should be preserved ignores the messy reality of how people begin to desert and to fight, and it misses the opportunity for strength that is presented by an attitude of picking fights with the apparatus everywhere, in its most minor and major parts. Engaging with gender by redefining what it means to be a woman or a trannie or a man in this world is just moving around the prison bars. Attacking advertising that defines these roles for us (and realistically, such an attack would come out of a process in which we are also reading and writing and talking about gender identities) can be a step towards the insurrectionary, towards the war against domination in all its forms.
I, for one, do not see insurrection in the efforts of a Party that is increasingly warlike, precise, and correct, but in the messy, inefficient, contradictory ecology of resistance that already exists. A thousand forms of collaboration are contrary to the spirit of insurrection, true, but no person embodies this spirit wholly. On some key levels what's important is to sympathize with it. We may and must critique and challenge the many compromises with existing reality, absolutely, but abandon them, never. Let the others fight the revolution from temple to temple. I'll stay here in the swamp.
<br>
<em>The Incompleteness of the Totality</em>
The Invisible Committee presents us with a totalizing theory. In the very introduction of <em>The Coming Insurrection,</em> they tell us, “Everyone agrees.” In <em>Theory of Bloom</em> they assert that, “it's <em>how</em> every being is the way they are [...] it is precisely what gives <em>consistency</em> and <em>possibility</em> to each being. Bloom is the <em>Stimmung</em> in which and by which we understand each other at the present time” [Bloom, pp.22-24]. Bloom “experiences an ontological finiteness and separation common to all men.” [Bloom, p.105].
In fact, the affirmation of these truths is the necessary signifier for the creation of a new identity, a new milieu. It's also the recreation of a working class, a universal identity that has room for everyone. But it's a poor fit. There simply is no clean, unproblematic answer to the question of identity. Its very nature is as a question that will never be solved. True becoming can have no end point.
The totality is not a collection of identities (which could then be opposed by singularities) but a set of rules, often contradictory but arranged by mostly shared loyalties and similar visions of a common project, generated and imposed by numerous institutions, to define identities and regulate people's movement between them.
So two people who call themselves “activists” (or mothers or militants) may have entirely distinct relations to the totality. One may indeed be a <em>becoming,</em> a <em>whatever,</em> as she asks herself questions about how to strike out from where she stands and lets herself feel doubts about both the ground she stands on and the weapons she has picked up; while the other may indeed be a recuperator, satisfied with activism as a reproducible practice, eager for the paths of promotion laid out within it.
The Invisible Committee presents us with an Imaginary Party that is homogeneous not in any implied sameness but in its characteristic rejection of any internal differentiation. But I wonder how well this totalization encompasses all those who do not see themselves in Bloom, or who see aspects of themselves that the IC does not acknowledge, and seems to dismiss (I'm talking now about, among other things, race, gender, sexuality, as particularities). We can read an astute analysis of apparatuses that control us by mobilizing comfort [Metaphysics], but there is a subtextual hostility towards the discussion of the discomfort that is mobilized <em>only against certain people</em>. In fact, this sort of differentiation seems to contradict the poetic simplicity of Bloom theory and the idea of the Imaginary Party. They will take the effort to construct a theory of the Young Girl as a “model citizen” for consumer society but insist that this “is obviously not a gendered concept” [YoungGirl, iii] despite how odd it is to look at models of citizenship and commodity consumption without looking at gender.
Cat calls, degrading looks, insulting comments, men who follow you, every time you go out the door alone: the fact that certain people who are not cis male presenting as heterosexual will never be allowed to be comfortable in public space, when walking down the street, reveals a number of critical dynamics that any theory would be short-sighted to ignore. First of all, while the private sphere may indeed be socialized, because it holds a measure of security (though for some this may be a contractual security, such as that won through marriage) that the public sphere never will, we have to assert a continuing difference between the public and private spheres, one that necessarily precedes the Spectacle and links today's apparatuses to classical Patriarchy. This is a link I have never seen the Invisible Committee acknowledge. Rather everything is new, freshly discovered and named (by them). Their favorite phrase is, “From now on...”
Secondly, through this gendered mobilization of discomfort in public space, or the racial segregation of neighborhoods, we see how people who are generally alienated exercise power over the bodies that pass through the space around them, the actual structure of which they are powerless to change. Much of the antisocial violence in public space, violence which is romanticized in several Tiqqun texts, is not so much a rebellion as an autonomous attempt to impose hierarchies in miniature. It may well be that the majority of casualties in this global civil war are the bodies that have fallen in the civil war being fought within the ranks of the Imaginary Party.
Another example: “The thread of historical transmission has been broken. Even the revolutionary tradition.” [How?, p.11]. This has not been my experience. Although I grew up ahistorically, Bloomlike, another lost child of the 'burbs, I have since lived in places with historical continuities of struggle. I have been a recipient of historical transmission and it has been something qualitatively different, unlike anything I knew growing up, and it made me infinitely stronger. One can also see that places with history, with revolutionary tradition (e.g. Greece, Kabylia, Oaxaca) are generally stronger in their struggles.
On a specific point, this thesis about the end of history directly contradicts many indigenous struggles for freedom. A major element of some of these struggles is that the genocide has not been completed, that there is an unbroken 500 year history of resistance, which at times has been stamped out to the point of darkness, but never fully extinguished. The argument that historical transmission has been broken and recognition is counterrevolutionary means that these indigenous struggles are wrong in asserting that they are <em>still</em> fighting colonialism, that there is something liberating in recognizing themselves as members of this or that nation (not nation-state, eurocentric readers), that through centuries of genocide they have survived (though no one is saying they survived <em>unaltered</em>, which is the strawman the academics usually opt for).
In considering these struggles, one cannot simply dismiss them or sweep them without direct comment into the ranks of the Imaginary Party. One must either give them solidarity, or agree with the post-modernist academics who are reclassifying them in accordance with continuing colonization, or choose some third option that I have never seen elaborated.
Through their Bloom theory, the Invisible Committee make another of the same mistakes as Marx. Dialectical reasoning and their implicit assumption of a unilineal history make them look to the populations most advanced in capitalist development as the site of future revolutions. Scientific Marx predicted Britain and Germany, unscientific Bakunin predicted Russia, Italy, and Spain. Enough said. The IC, in their turn, predict that the Bloom figure, the total death of subjectivity, contains within it the necessary annihilation of the Spectacle. But it seems true that—generally, not totally—where Bloom is least present, rebellions and social ruptures are most common. They refrain from admitting it, but the most bloomified figure is the middle class white, who has no history and no identity left but an array of false privileges, which is to say an absence of certain blackmails that are, for everyone else, universal.
I spit on the politics of anyone who says middle class whites cannot be revolutionary, are not exploited and abused, and do not have their own truckload of reasons to hate and destroy the system, but someone who says they have the same experiences as everyone else, just as someone saying that everyone within one of these identity categories (“all women know that...”) have the same experience, is speaking not from their body but from the narrative of the Spectacle.
<br>
<em>The Dictatorship of the Fashionable</em>
In the days of “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” the Communists could play at vanguard by organizing a Party that would manipulate and dominate general assemblies, communes, soviets, and any other gathering point of what was a largely aboveground and solidaristic movement.
In the '60s and '70s, an aboveground Party could only be reformist, so one could only be a vanguardist by encouraging a hierarchy of tactics, whereby the most illegal, risky, and spectacular actions were understood to be the most important. That way, a minuscule group, whether the Weather Underground or the Red Brigades, could form guerrilla cells to carry out the heavy actions that would ensure that everyone else in the struggle would give them their due attention and read their lengthy communiques. The mass movement is replaced by the media, and the vanguard constitutes itself as such not through organizational relationships but through attention that places it symbolically at the cutting edge of what had been a diverse and multi-directional movement.
As the Spectacle degenerates from a reality based on news to one based on fashion, I wonder if nowadays, a postmodern vanguard could form itself only by being fashionable, by turning their Party into a fad and their analysis into a style. It's interesting that the IC give us such a perfect explanation of hipsters [Bloom, p.55] when, at least in the US, many of their most avid partisans have come from the hipster wing of the anarchist movement. And what are hipsters but an elite in an age when integration is produced above all through consumption? And for the anti-capitalist palette, consumption need not require a large budget for shopping. In this economy of trivia, sophistication is enough.
I don't want be alarmist, and certainly a vanguard based on <em>la mode</em> could never be as dangerous as one based on the <em>cheka</em>, but either way, turning a text like <em>The Coming Insurrection</em> that has good parts and bad parts into a cult classic, and tolerating for a moment a resurrection of the idea of the Party is nothing other than a good way to defeat ourselves, which I suppose is the role that communists have played in anti-capitalist struggles for over a century, so it should be no surprise that they're coming back now.
The putsch that ushered in the October Revolution was led by anarchist sailors from Kronstadt and left SRs. It was largely orchestrated by the Leninists, whom the anarchists trusted in part because Lenin's populist rhetoric was largely borrowed from the anarchists. They thought he was one of them.
Again, I believe that the danger this time around is minuscule, and the IC-as-thought have helped rejuvenate theorizing as a collective activity among US anarchists to an extent that far outweighs their disastrous effect, -as-style, on the plethora of hyperbolic communiques that announced various broken windows and occupied buildings with a mood of poetic rapture.
And on the other hand, the IC shouldn't be taken too seriously. After all, let's cut the crap: they're basically CrimethInc. with a better vocabulary. Replace “deserting” with “dropping out” and there's no denying it. They blatantly lack the humility that at times has allowed CrimethInc. to be such a positive thing; furthermore, they carry out a couple operations that would make me hesitate before starting a commune with them, much less a milieu or a Party. As I mentioned earlier, this Party is not just an ironic linguistic device but a group that has its inner circle and its mechanisms for exclusion.
It works like this: if you disagree with them, you're out. “One would have to be a militant element of the planetary-petty-bourgeoisie, a <em>citizen</em> really, not to see that society no longer exists.” [How?, p.3]. They never define society, mind you, though I would guess they know, they're so well read after all, that it is a central element of the praxis of other anti-capitalists that society in fact does exist, beneath all the chains and IV tubes of Biopower, and that this is a good thing. But I guess their ideological competitors are nothing but representatives of the petty bourgeoisie (say, haven't we heard <em>that</em> one before?).
I predict the Party leaders might chide me for missing the irony of their words, but with such ideological absolutism, though they may not hand out membership cards they have still fallen for their own joke.
Curious thing: sometimes the Imaginary Party is an unconscious umbrella that includes everyone who chafes at their forced assimilation, and at other times it is a conscious group employing a singular strategy. “The Imaginary Party is the particular form that contradiction assumes in the historic period where Domination imposes itself as dictatorship of visibility and of dictatorship as visibility, in a word as Spectacle.” [Theses, thesis 1]; “In this sense, the Imaginary Party is the political party, or more exactly the party of the political, because it is the sole one which can designate in this society the metaphysical labor of an absolute hostility” [Theses, thesis 7]; “Therefore the Imaginary Party is known in the Spectacle as the party of chaos, crisis, and disaster.” [Theses, thesis 14]; “every Bloom, as a Bloom, is an agent of the Imaginary Party” [Bloom, p.114].
And now see how quickly this undifferentiated mass signs on to a common wisdom or a shared program, or becomes a Party with “conscious fractions” [Theses, thesis 27]. “[T]hose of the Imaginary Party work to hasten the advent of this by any means[...] They are besides freer to choose what will be the theatre of their operations and act at the point where the smallest forces can cause the greatest losses.” [Theses, thesis 15]; “The Imaginary Party can count upon this constant: that a handful of partisans suffices to immobilize all the “Party of Order”.” [Theses, thesis 21]; “the assumption of Bloom mean[s] [...] to enter into contact with other agents of the Invisible Committee – through Tiqqun for example – and silently coordinate a truly elegant act of sabotage.” [Bloom, p.134]; “we can only desert the situation inwardly, by reclaiming our fundamental non-belonging to the biopolitical fabric with a participation on a more intimate and thus unattributable level, in the strategic community of the Invisible Committee” [Bloom, pp.135-136]. “Tiqqun is the only possible outlook for revolution.” [Bloom, p.102].
There are moments when one needs to argue against an idea, and moments when one need only present it clearly. Here it is: the Imaginary Party. We are told we all belong to it, insofar as we are alienated. It is the Party of our class. And it is a Party that has its partisans and conscious fractions, who will say we are the enemy if we disagree with them, or even, perhaps, use different words. The Imaginary Party: take it or leave it.
I thank the Invisible Committee for their writings, and I wish them the best of luck. If my words sting too sharp, I want them to know I consider them comrades, and I have participated in solidarity events for the Tarnac 9 (though the money went to others of the French <em>anarcho-autonome</em> who were arrested for bombing police cars and have gotten far less attention than the 9). When there are barricades in the streets or people in prison, we will always be on the same side. But I think it should be clear: when it comes to the Imaginary Party, I hope to be the first to be purged.
<br>
<em>Works Cited</em>
TCI = <em>The Coming Insurrection</em>, Semiotext edition
Bloom = <em>Theory of Bloom</em>, anonymous 2010 edition
Theses = “Theses on the Imaginary Party”, Chicago Branch edition
How? = “How is it to be done?” Inoperative Committee 2008 edition
Metaphysics = “A Critical Metaphysics Could Come About as a Science of Apparatuses”, online version from the tiqqunista site.
YoungGirl = Raw Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, online version from the tiqqunista site.
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#title Science Revisited
#subtitle A response to John Jacobi's “The Revolutionary Importance of Science”
#author Alex Gorrion
#SORTtopics science, rationalism, the Enlightenment, patriarchy, colonialism
#date 2018
#source anarchistnews.org
#lang en
The same old dogmatism
A response to John Jacobi's “The Revolutionary Importance of Science”
<br>
Sometime after I published “Science,” which is a critique of an institutional complex fundamental to Western civilization, its worldview, its practices and its mythology, John Jacobi published a refutation on The Wildernist.
Though his article contains a number of interesting points, it also demonstrates the same underlying racism, dogmatism, and ignorance as to its own argumentative structures that I was trying to critique in the first place.
*** Defining Science
As is mentioned at the very beginning of “Science”, that text is not a stand-alone article but the continuation of a previous work. In fact, both are part of a series of texts that endeavor to construct a mythological narrative of power and institutionality from an anarchist sensibility. The article was meant to sketch some criticisms principally at the mythical level, tracing certain conventions of Western thought and showing relations between supposedly neutral scientific practices and the operation of various power structures in our society.
Jacobi seems to evince a belief that all things can be measured with the same yardstick. As far as discourse goes, I gather that the only valid format he recognizes is that of objective assertions. This was, ironically, one of my principal criticisms of “Science,” and one he never responds to: that it is impossible to only talk about things on the level of facts, and what's more that objective or empirical affirmations are not the only valid kind of knowledge or communication, because there is no learning without cultural framing, nor communication without mythical context. Mythography is not intended to convince, refute, prove, or disprove; rather, it gives us a story—that we take or leave—within which we integrate our experiences, observations, beliefs, hypotheses, and knowledges. It is a part of every epistemological, pedagogical, or intellectual project. And from an anarchist or even an intellectual standpoint, the most dangerous myth for freedom of thought is the one that claims not to be a myth. In today's world, this is principally the mythology of the scientific institutional complex.
Since mythography, unsurprisingly, does not sit well with Jacobi, I will respond in the present text on the level of factual and textual critique.
Throughout, Jacobi commits what might seem like a trifling misquotation, saying I am critiquing “science” rather than “Science.” It is a well known literary convention to capitalize a commonplace noun when we wish to refer to a specific phenomenon, especially where it concerns a centralized or official manifestation of said commonplace. In fact, I am referring to a power structure with its attendant mythologies when I critique Science. Multiple times I also specify, “Western science,” again making it clear that I am talking about a specific historical phenomenon. However, it serves Jacobi's argument to pretend that I am lashing out against any possible use of the word “science.”
<quote>
“Gorrion’s article suffers from a lack of a working definition of science and so predictably falls into this trap. One can, however, discern at least three targets in his piece. The first is scientific thought: the epistemology of science, the notion of objectivity, etc. The second target is the technocratic organization of modern communities of scientists. And the third is the notion of scientific progress.”
</quote>
In light of the above quote, I can thank him for providing an effectively concise summary of my arguments and demonstrating why my admittedly broad definition of Science works. Ideas, how we think, how we attain and pass on knowledge, do not occur in a vacuum. I suppose it is decidedly unmystical of me to assert that such things require people, they require communities of minds. This brings us to “the technocratic organization of modern communities of scientists.” When you have such organizations that determine how scientists are trained, what regulations they have to follow, what their internal structures for resolving disputes are, and what their funding and employment opportunities are, as well as interfacing with other institutions of power, you have, beyond any doubt, a formal network of communities capable of producing its own epistemology and its own mythical self-history (the notion of progress, the third target Jacobi identifies). These three targets not only converge to provide an effective working definition of “Science,” in fact it would be naïve to criticize one of them without at least recognizing the interrelated existence of the other two.
Yes, Jacobi, institutional communities have their own epistemologies and their own mythical histories. No big surprises there.
As communities, they also have dissident members, and any of their members are capable of achieving a critical view of the whole, even if this view is disincentivized. Criticizing science as a whole, as defined above, is not “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” any more than criticizing the police as an institutional complex is unwarranted because many cops themselves are also critical of police brutality. If I had intended my original article to be a more complete and factually detailed article, I would have certainly gone into the tensions between the social sciences and the “hard,” “pure,” or “natural” sciences. Without a doubt, many thinkers from the first camp have greatly influenced my own critiques and do not themselves cleave to objectivity as a knowledge framework, rationalism as a mythology, nor the belief that empirical and quantitative processes are the only ways to achieve valid knowledge. Nonetheless, their status as real scientists is constantly put in doubt, and one reflection of the scientific mythology is the fact that ideological hegemony is clearly on the side of the “natural” scientists, even though, for one, they are professionally incapable of understanding the meaning, the framing, the cultural conditioning, and the application of the knowledge they produce, and secondly, their use of the qualifiers “hard,” “pure,” and (the one they uncritically inherited from Christianity) “natural” reveals how fully and unconsciously they—taken as a whole, and with the inevitable exceptions—buy into their own mythology.
I predicted defensive responses like Jacobi's in the epilogue of my original article.
<quote>
“We predict that many believers in Science, especially the academically initiated, will reject this critique as uselessly broad, if they do not dismiss it outright. This is worth analyzing. First of all, someone in a position of power, someone with an accredited brain, a priest with a position in the hierarchy, need not respond to a non-professional writer, a layperson, unless the critique begins to be so widely distributed it constitutes a threat. [Jacobi himself admits that he was going to ignore the article until he saw that many of his friends were reading it...]
</quote>
<quote>
Secondly, and more substantially, we have noticed a certain pattern. The academically trained will always insist that the scientific community is highly self-critical, yet at the same time they always (as far as we have seen) reject criticisms that come from outside of academia as “overgeneralized” or unfounded. We would argue that this is a structurally systematic response. An institution with hegemonic aspirations, or one that has already achieved dominance, must never allow itself to be fit into a globalizing theory” [formulated by its opponents.]
</quote>
*** Objectives
The above serves to justify the target of my critique. Scientific epistemology and technocratic organizations, studies in peer-reviewed journals and pop science; these are not “radically different” phenomena constituting a target of critique so “broad” as to be “meaningless”, as Jacobi claims. They are all structurally related. If Jacobi wishes to continue denying the validity of my definition, which was already mapped out in the first essay, he would have to explain how a community with a technocratic organization does not have its own epistemology, or how it is that smoothing is not an integral part of the knowledge production of scientific communities, or how it is that such a massive amount of funding and the systematic production of jobs does not shape the entire scientific community to be an industrial complex fully integrated into the capitalist economy. Needless to say, he is incapable of making any such arguments, because all of these are naïve positions. On the other hand, fine-tuning the definition is clearly possible, and I'm open to suggestions.
Before continuing to other arguments, I think I should dispute one blatant mischaracterization that Jacobi makes (would he appreciate the irony if I labeled it as “hysterical,” or is he not as versed in the history of scientific thought as he claims?). No doubt trying to excite the passions of his readers, Jacobi writes that my article arrives at the “wildly audacious conclusion that we should dispose of science wholesale.” Every institution produces its police, and here Jacobi resorts to rhetoric that we anarchists have long been familiar with. <em>Don't listen to these wild, savage types: they want to destroy everything!</em> On the contrary, even Jacobi is able to recognize that at various points in my text, I validate the empirical method and the work of various scientists. In other words, he either wasn't paying attention to his own arguments or was consciously lying in order to delegitimize my positions, the majority of which he ignores.
To clarify: I think empirical knowledge and as such the empirical method are both very useful. However, the empirical method is limited, and empirical knowledge is by no means the only form of knowledge. For this reason and others, objectivity as a framework for understanding knowledge (knowledge is either true or false, knowledge can be unbiased, there is an absolute frame of reference for the universe, perception can be illusory or it can be disciplined, quantified, and mechanized in order to validate objective truths, subjectivity is an obstacle to objective knowledge, and the organization or history of knowledge does not necessarily affect its content) is not only a cultural artifact that reproduces a specific value system connected to specific social hierarchies, it also flattens and falsifies the world we live in.
The primary objective of my original article is to develop a systemic critique of a technocratic institutional complex that is inseparable from power and oppression in our society. Within this critique there is certainly room to champion a subversive folk science alongside non-empirical practices of resistance and learning. Perhaps the only thing that I seek to “dispose of wholesale” is the idea that scientists and scientific institutions are neutral, that they are not a fundamental part of how power and oppression exist in our society, and that they are not currently integral to power and oppression. Rather than address this argument, Jacobi goes on tangents.
*** Of Velvet Gloves and Firing Squads
We've spoken of definitions, of objectives, now let's speak about manners. I am certainly not the ideal writer to call Jacobi to task for his arrogant and insulting tone, though I would say there is a very real difference between the tone born of superiority, used by the defender of what is already hegemonic, and the tone born of anger, used by those who are marginalized and delegitimized by the institutions of power and their discourses.
More useful to my argument would be a brief look at who deserves the velvet glove treatment, and who gets the discursive firing squad. There are very few producers of discourse who are polite and considerate with everyone. Nearly every social conversation sets certain boundaries of civility that implicitly signal who is a legitimate interlocutor and who is a thoughtless savage to be silenced or excluded. I have no problem admitting which way I fire my shots. I try to be respectful towards those who put themselves on the line, who theorize as just another action within a struggle against authority, even if I strongly disagree with them (and I admit, I'm not always successful). On the other hand, I don't really care if I insult careerists, those who are paid to think, and those who have some influential employment with an institution of power. Honestly, I have trouble viewing them as people. I'm not saying it's justifiable, I'm just trying to make the rules I operate by explicit, to acknowledge and explain my own double standards.
The unwritten rules in normalized discourse, rules which Jacobi evidently follows, are nearly the opposite. Professionals merit respect and attention, whereas others, especially angry others, can be insulted or dismissed. This “self-regulating conspiracy” among professionals makes sense: within a vast complex of interrelated institutions, you never know who might control purse strings or future employment opportunities that interest you (those who find this explanation insulting might consider that it uses the exact same cynicism with which game theorists explain customs and organization among the savage tribes). But because these are the institutions that produce the dominant discourses and practices in our society, their norms become everyone's norms. I don't assume Jacobi is a professional with any possibility of financial gain for his writings, nonetheless he has learned well that David Hume (involved in the slave trade) deserves respect and consideration, whereas some anarchist publishing on the internet can be scornfully disregarded.
The effects of this value hierarchy, imposed across society, should not be underestimated.
*** Racism and Colonialism
A brief aside: is Hume's complicity in genocide and enslavement reason to dismiss his ideas? No. But is it a coincidence that Hume and most of the other great men of Science were racists, elitists, and exploiters whom their underclass contemporaries would have been perfectly justified in murdering? Also, no. A third question, then, which I'll leave unanswered: if we reject ethical relativism and identify at every moment with the struggle for freedom and well-being, is it wrong for us to declare the great men of Science our enemies, giving fair consideration to but also contextualizing their ideas?
The debates that Hume intervened in are beyond a doubt interesting, but they reflect their participants' social position as nobles, enslavers, mass murderers, and rapists. And they were not the only ones having interesting debates. Social rebels, poor women, kidnapped Africans, disenfranchised peasants, religious heretics, and armed natives were also having debates, though they were much less likely to be committed to paper. In part, that's because they faced the reality of repression and often had to operate in secret, because dominant society denied them the resources necessary to publish and keep good records, and also because dominant society went out of its way to eliminate their oral histories, their memories, their very identities. The preservation of one set of debates and the invisibility of the other is neither a coincidence nor a natural result of neutral factors, but another reflection of the war waged by rulers and their scientists against everyone else. It's true, some historians who consider themselves social scientists have started to recognize and recover these other conversations, but I don't think that anyone can deny, with evidence, that the conversations of the great men of Science took place on top of and against those other conversations, and that the history of knowledge presented by the dominant strains of social science as well as nearly all the “pure” scientists directly and aggressively silence the “wretched of the earth”.
(Another brief aside: Jacobi is apt to cite the rules of logic, not understanding, it seems, that such rules are a Western cultural artifact (more later on the value of contradictions). One could easily say that now, by pointing out Hume's complicity in the slave trade, I am engaging in the logical fallacy of an <em>ad hominem,</em> even though I have stated that Hume's conduct does not invalidate his ideas. But ideas are historically rooted, and they are never impersonal. The separation of ideas and actions, what's more, is fundamental to the subtle oppressions of Western democracy. Anarchists, on the other hand, coincide with many non-Western cultures in favoring the idea of coherence, that in reality it counts for a lot if someone is able to put their own ideas in practice, and what the results of that practice are. Furthermore, I don't think it's a coincidence that the foremost proponents of the view that we should evaluate ideas without also considering those who promote them enriched themselves off of genocide, slavery, and the destruction of the planet. Is it unfair, at this juncture, to declare: <em>Ecce homo</em>?)
To return to my principal line of argument, I was describing the antagonism between the official and the unofficial histories of ideas. It is true that those who demand that we take sides are carrying an ideological stick capable of beating down free debate. But it is also true that there is no such thing as neutrality, and that in a conflict between those with more and less power, such as is the case with colonialism or patriarchy, claims to neutrality amount to support for the powerful.
Having made that caveat, allow me to suggest that in considering how colonialism, slavery, and genocide since the Enlightenment have always made use of science and scientists, when considering the possibility of inherent racism in the scientific institutional complex, we cannot be neutral, though we can map out third and fourth positions.
Jacobi, however, dismisses criticisms of scientific racism. Despite the lengthy criticisms I made of racism in the original article, with multiple examples, Jacobi only deigns to respond with a single sentence, without referring to a single example, after affirming, “we shouldn’t take Gorrion seriously.” To wit: “For one thing, he says that there is “implicit racism” in the “empiricist mythology,” even though he stated earlier that he does not reject empiricism, only science.” Does he not understand that the terms A: “empiricism” and B: “empiricist mythology” are not equal? Evidently not. If someone says that B is implicitly racist, and they approve of A, therefore they don't have a problem with racism, they are supposing that A and B are equal. Well, empiricism is a method, the empiricist mythology is an entire worldview. Jacobi clearly has a very weak grasp of the very language he uses to communicate his supposed truths. It also becomes clear that he does not give any importance to the criticisms of racism, given that he uses another cheap bait-and-switch to weasel his way out of the argument.
Nor is it surprising that addressing racism is not a priority for Jacobi, given that he makes a couple racist quips of his own. They are, however, well masked: I presume Jacobi is college-educated, and what does a college degree serve for if not to hide racism in more subtle language? So, we need to dedicate a little space to unpacking his comments.
In section V of his response, he jokes: <em>“</em><em>According to Gorrion, Buddhists invented quantum mechanics “well over a thousand years” before modern science. I just wonder where they got the lasers for the double-slit experiment”</em> (referring to the experiment that demonstrated that photons act as both waves and particles and that their position, until it can be definitively measured, exists as a probability wave rather than having an exact location).
What's most obvious is that Jacobi is once again distorting my argument. I never said Buddhists invented quantum mechanics. What I said was: <em>“</em><em>well over a thousand years earlier, Daoists and Buddhists were already promoting a worldview that clashed with Cartesian geometry but was largely compatible with the discoveries of quantum physics.”</em> Embedded in my sentence is the fact that the discoveries of quantum physics are posterior to the development of the Buddhist or Taoist worldviews. The relevant argument is that they had developed a worldview in which quantum- or relativity-inspired ideas regarding the nature of energy or the shape and age of the universe could have made a lot of sense, and would not have clashed with as many fundamental dogmas. In rationalist, dualist Western society a hundred years ago, the idea that matter and energy are interchangeable, that space-time is curved, or that a particle does not exist in any one place but within a probability wave would have sounded like absolute nonsense, and even today it strikes (Western) people as a contradiction that is difficult to grasp.
Now let's look at how these subsequent discoveries and theories have unfolded. For hundreds of years, the Western intellectual elite have instructed their subject populations—which through force of arms came to encompass the entire world—with certain beliefs, many of which promote materialist, Cartesian, and/or neo-Platonic ideas about the world (for the record, I know that to the proponents of those ideas, they are not synonymous and in some ways they are mutually contradictory, but from an outside perspective, especially one critical of fundamental dogmas in Western civilization, there is far more similarity than difference between them; there is, for example, a wider range of opinion in the worldviews of an anarcho-primitivist and an anarcho-syndicalist, but in general they don't reject being lumped into the same basket, as long as the pertinent critiques are being leveled at beliefs they both hold in common).
Authoritarian, institutional, and genocidal forces instructed us all—sometimes through subtle value hierarchies and other times through compulsory education—that humans are the superior species (and that Western man is the most human of all humans), that the world exists for our consumption, that everything is either matter or energy, that nature functions mechanically, and so on. As pertains to Cartesian and Newtonian ideas, we are indoctrinated in the meta-epistemological framework of objectivity with its idea of an absolute reference, and its prejudice towards analyzing discrete objects within a neutral space (although clearly Newton opened the way for an understanding of fields through his concept of gravity, as every theory opens the space for possible refutations, expansions, or evolutions). There is also the Platonic/Catholic/Cartesian opposition between matter and mind, which is still present at the rationalist extreme in which spirit is abolished and all that is left is one half of the pair, dead matter, rather than a synthesis of the two as exists in many other worldviews.
For hundreds of years, we have been taught these things, and in the process, and with complicity by scientists and scientific institutions, other cultures have been belittled, ridiculed, and exterminated. Some of these cultures have believed that all life is interconnected, that there is no knowledge without a knower, that one person's truth is different from another's, that the space between two objects is a living field rather than a neutral, static non-entity, or that things are better understood through their relations than as separate entities. Some have believed that the universe is better characterized by principles of continuous transformation and interrelation rather than by the machine-metaphors favored by Western scientists (who, as I mentioned earlier, often do not realize that they are using metaphors).
Then, at a certain juncture, scientists in a few fields began to say that, in fact, there is no absolute reference point for the universe, that measurement and observation affect what is measured and observed, that velocity and position depend on perspective, that something can be both a wave and a particle, that something can potentially be in two places at once, that two separate particles can be “entangled” or connected in non-local space such that one exhibits simultaneous changes in response to a change experienced by the other particle; they began to appreciate fields, systems, and relationships, and questioned the discrete bodies that were the subject of analysis in earlier ages.
It is true that this shift represents a great intellectual courage and versatility, which is something that a few scientists have, but that does not characterize scientific paradigms as a whole in their “normal” periods (see the discussion of Kuhn, below). It is also true that through scientific flattening, these developments are primarily presented as technical matters with limited philosophical bearing, that do not change the fundamental features of society's mentality. They are intentionally presented to the public as things that only people with advanced degrees can understand. They reach us only as equations or the occasional anecdote about photons and black holes.
(<em>E=mc</em><em>²</em><em></em> is a great example: rather than giving us a mythical phrase about the nature of the world like those frequently used to convey Darwin to the masses, e.g. “survival of the fittest,” we are given a ready-made metaphor for the mystically inscrutable intelligence of scientists, an ergot of technical genius beyond the comprehension of the masses: <em>behold—the equation!</em> This is highly significant given that <em>E=mc</em><em>²</em> as a phrase would have been delivered to us as “matter is energy,” “the universe is made of energy,” or “anything in the universe can be transformed into anything else,” statements that reaffirm Buddhist, hippy, or even alchemist worldviews. Of course, no respectable scientist would vulgarize Einstein thusly, though they had no problems vulgarizing Darwin into a capitalist worldview or Newton into a mechanistic one.)
In contrast, every law and principle of classical physics and the neo-Platonic worldview that preceded the paradigm shift is inscribed in countless metaphors, language conventions, discursive customs, and myths, mass-produced even today.
In other words, the technical adjustments that allow Science to <em>be right with God</em>, so to speak, that allow Science to correct earlier errors and improve its productive capacity, vastly increasing the power of the State in the process, are produced in a way that they have no hope of correcting the impact that earlier scientific theories had and continue to have on our society's worldview.
The machine-metaphor and other fundamental dogmas are preserved.
Let us for a moment imagine that a stateless Daoist or heretical Buddhist society of runaways from the Han slaver state, existing in the mountains of Southeast Asia, had advanced technically and was able to develop ever better scientific instruments. At a certain point, they also could have developed complex forms of geometry and physics, eventually explaining the very phenomena that Newton did so convincingly. However—and this is what many “hard” scientists or rationalists like Jacobi have such a hard time understanding—though the hypothetical Daoists used the exact same equations as Newton, the packaging, the application, and the institutional interfaces would have been completely different. And those differences would have affected how the society understood and thus interacted with the world it lived in, the applications of the technologies produced with the new knowledge, and also the course of future discovery. The First Law of Thermodynamics, we can imagine, would have been conceptualized and phrased in a different way, one that might not have proved a conceptual obstacle to the eventual evolution of the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics (which probably wouldn't have been named “mechanics”). And those theories, when they arose, would probably not have seemed so bizarre, but rather a confirmation of the things that people already suspected about the universe.
I understand that many physicists don't want to have any social responsibilities, they just want to study subatomic particles and black holes. It's an admirable curiosity, but it's also hopelessly naïve. To them, maybe their most important achievement is General Relativity or Maxwell's equations, but to many other people, it's nuclear weapons. Can you begin to understand how these are not separate realities? How even though the so-called Laws of Nature would hypothetically exist independently of human societies and the things that our power structures are doing to us and to the planet, in practice they are not independent at all?
In sum, the precious equations might have remained intact, but the fates of millions of people and other species would have been completely different. Can we really countenance a belief system in which that is irrelevant, in which the applications of a theory are not understood to be part of the theory, in which the consequences of our actions are constantly made invisible?
We have been dancing around the topic of colonialism for some time, unpacking what is wrong with Jacobi's flippancy and his textual distortions. Now let's get to the grain. What he is doing is ridiculing the notion that non-Europeans might have had a better—and healthier—cultural understanding of the universe, and the only arbitrary evidence he gives—arbitrary because it was a total non sequitur to my argument—is that they had not developed the technologies deployed by those ingenious Europeans.
No doubt he is rolling his eyes at this characterization, but the fact of the matter is that the only references he makes to non-European cultures in what is supposedly a response to an article that makes a great many accusations of racism is to ridicule and belittle the knowledge base of non-Europeans.
This is a basic tenet of colonialism: until they learn how to be like us, they are illegitimate.
His other main reference to non-European knowledge systems, regarding acupuncture, shows that this attitude constitutes a pattern. Jacobi claims there are no studies showing the effectiveness of acupuncture, and he cites three articles to that effect. One of these articles, “Do certain countries produce only positive results?” is borderline racist: it highlights how studies in countries like Japan and China produce more favorable test results for acupuncture than studies in Western countries. Rather than presenting this in a comparative way, it posits the West as the norm and characterizes the other countries as “abnormal”. In conclusion, the article recommends skepticism towards data coming from those countries. The implication is that Japanese and Chinese scientists aren't real scientists, because they are beholden to their mystical traditions and haven't broken free like Western scientists. A more Orientalist view would be harder to find.
On examination, it turns out that the Asian countries cited range from showing 99% to 89% effectiveness in acupuncture trials. Granted, 99% (for China) seems worrisomely high, but how about Japan's 89%? The white <em>control</em> country this article cites, a Western nation of rational white men and proper scientists, is the UK. But in the UK, 75% of studies show that acupuncture is effective, and the difference between 89% and 75% is large, but so is the difference between 89% and 99%. It hardly seems large enough to lump a bunch of Asian countries together and suggest that all their scientists are too mystical and Asian to be trusted. But then, when has Science ever needed a justification for racism? Historically, it has been the principal manufacturer of justifications for racism.
Also, incidentally, together with Jacobi's tolerance of racism, we also find his tolerance for hypocrisy and sloppy research. He clamors: “I must demand to see these “scientific studies” that support acupuncture as a valid form of treatment”. Well, my dear Jacobi, you need go no further than the article you referenced in your own text, which states that 75% of the acupuncture studies from the comfortingly white UK (since evidently you won't trust the titular studies from Asian countries) show that it is an effective treatment. Oops!
Nonetheless, I will readily admit that I had an inaccurate view of how widespread the studies were that give credence to acupuncture, and Jacobi's article forced me to investigate further. Jacobi, it turns out, represents the majority position (in white-dominant countries), but not, however, the scientific consensus. The UK's National Health Service recommends acupuncture for a few conditions like chronic headaches, malaises that standard Western medicine has a poor track record in treating, beyond the effectiveness of, ahem, aspirin. (Recent studies suggest that the rationalist geometry of cityscapes actually increases oxygen levels in our brains and can lead to headaches).
The most thorough review of scientific studies that I could find concludes that the evidence is mixed regarding the effectiveness of acupuncture [https://nccih.nih.gov/health/acupuncture/introduction#hed3]. The evidence is that it is effective for short-term relief of lower back pain when combined with other therapies; it is effective for treating osteoarthritis but there is contradictory data as to whether it is more effective than simulated acupuncture; it is effective for treating migraines and tension-based headaches.
The primary conclusion of the review is that it is difficult to evaluate acupuncture using double-blind studies and other rigorously empirical methods. This is a significant point I will return to later.
For now, I want to focus on the fact that Jacobi and many other proponents of Western science—the strong majority, according to my unscientific internet survey—overstate their case, misrepresent the scientific record, and cover up the positive evidence for the weak or mild therapeutic effectiveness of acupuncture. Jacobi, the articles he cites, and many other articles in peer-reviewed journals or on ideological, pro-Science websites, are totally dismissive of acupuncture, even though the bulk of studies demonstrate that it has at least some effectiveness.
It is no coincidence that acupuncture—a non-Western technique—receives such vicious treatment from the proponents of Science, whereas far more doubtful techniques, like chemotherapy or early AIDS medication, are treated as imperfect but legitimate. Jacobi is polite, as are his references: they only express the positive side of the racist double standard. Other examples are less circumspect. According to the website, <em>sciencebasedmedicine.org</em>, “Acupuncture is a pre-scientific assumption.”
<quote>
Proponents often cite acupuncture’s ancient heritage as a virtue, but it is more of a vice. Acupuncture was developed in a pre-scientific culture, before anything significant was understood about biology, the normal functioning of the human body or disease pathology. The healing practices of the time were part of what is called philosophy-based medicine, to be distinguished from modern science-based medicine. Philosophy-based systems began with a set of ideas about health and illness and based their treatments on those ideas. The underlying assumptions and the practices derived from them were never subjected to controlled observation or anything that can reasonably be called a scientific process.”
</quote>
There's a whole lot wrong with this paragraph, steeped as it is in the coded assumption that a culture is ignorant until it is colonized by the West. It also demonstrates a total ignorance of the history and the current cultural limitations of Western medicine. Western medicine operates within surgery- and drug-based constraints because it evolved directly from a surgery- and drug-based practice that at the time, 500-1000 years ago, was one of the worst healthcare practices in the entire world, rightly ridiculed by Arabic contemporaries, for example. But the idea that ancient heritage is a vice does not hold up across cultures. On the whole, ancient cultures embody a great deal of accumulated experience and observation. Chinese, Ayurvedic, and traditional European medicine, for example, were founded by generations of observation and experimentation, and the writers for <em>sciencebasedmedicine.org</em> are speaking from a racially tinged ignorance when they claim otherwise. No, it wasn't “controlled” experimentation, but controlled experimentation is also a flawed system that frequently produces faulty data and willfully ignores the connection between a person's health and their environment.
In medieval Europe, there was also a very thuggish practice of medicine based on the humors, bleeding, and liberal use of the scalpel. This was the practice of medicine that evolved into the supposedly superior Western medicine of today. The “modern” preference for a negative, symptomatic view of health and the emphasis on surgery and drugs is a cultural-historical artifact from those thuggish times. Science-based medicine, in the West, <em>is</em> philosophy-based medicine. The pretensions to superiority evinced by proponents of Western medicine would be hilarious if they didn't have so much power. It's worth noting that its original proponents and the institutions they created were directly responsible for the bloody repression of folk medicine through witch hunts, criminalization, demonization, and later the urbane ridicule of the scientists of the Enlightenment. We have little remaining evidence as to the healing practices of the lower and rural classes of European society, but we know that first it was the Church and then the scientists who identified these primarily women healers as a threat. There is also a good bit of evidence to suggest that they had effective practices for abortion and contraception. And one of the most successful drugs that Western medicine falsely claims credit for—aspirin—is a testament to their wisdom. Aspirin is the industrial version of willow bark, a common remedy among the medieval healers who were repressed by the surgeons, the priests, and the scientists. It is not a coincidence that aspirin works; rather, it is evidence of the accumulated experience and observation passed on by the downtrodden.
Neither is it a coincidence that pharmaceutical companies are stealing, patenting, and industrializing the herbal remedies of indigenous societies across the world, nor that the society those companies come from continues to propagate the idea that “pre-scientific” societies are ignorant about the world they live in. All of these facts are functions of the racist colonialism that Science is an integral part of.
Much has been written about the use of science to support racism, genocide, colonialism, and other atrocities. Today's scientists might refer to the most embarrassing episodes (like racial skull measurements) as “pseudo-science,” but this is pure revisionism. The culprits were recognized scientists in their day, and besides, scientific racism went well beyond phrenology and Social Darwinism to include nearly every surveyor, geographer, anthropologist, and doctor for decades if not centuries.
An acquaintance of mine who is a progressive biologist has been ranting about the “unfair” treatment being given to yet another biologist who has been protested and no-platformed while making the rounds claiming a genetic basis for the supposed intellectual superiority of white people. It's not a 19th century idea: there is still a great deal of money going to support scientists making the same tired arguments, ideologically pre-determined. The acquaintance, who voted for Obama and is certain he isn't racist, claims the man should be given a fair hearing since he went and carried out a study. Just out of curiosity, where are all the scientists getting invited to universities and receiving lucrative book deals who claim that black people are superior?
Most relevant to this article is the question: to what extent has this racism continued or been atoned for? Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz provides a clue [<em>An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States</em>]. Scientific archives, museums, laboratories, and universities across North America are filled with corpses and artifacts stolen from Native burial grounds. The conquerors' scientists systematically refuse to give them back. This is one strong example of continuing complicity with genocide.
Are there others? Insofar as colonialism continues today, as neo-colonialism, through the exploitation of occupied territories and contamination of the land, air, and water primarily of people of color, maybe the problem is that scientific complicity with thinly veiled racism and colonialism is so common as to be ubiquitous. There isn't a single mine, oil well, or commercial timber plantation in the world that doesn't have scientists working on it in some capacity, either on site or away in some laboratory making calculations, directing explorations, improving techniques, engineering more profitable tree species. And then there's the biologists who expropriate indigenous medicinal plants for the benefit of the pharmaceutical companies, and the anthropologists who aid military occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq or state-building missions in Somalia. All of these millions of scientists have decided that they prefer getting paid to engaging in a critical examination of their lives and the effects of their actions. Yet to Jacobi, somehow, all of this is incidental to the pure nature of Science, not even worthy of a response.
*** Leave the critiquing to the experts
I would argue that anyone with a brain and a heart would not trust in an internal affairs bureau to effectively rein in the murderous power of the police, much less to do what really needs to be done: abolish them. It is no surprise, however, that just as institutions always seek to appropriate the power that regulates and disciplines them, institutional complexes and society-wide religions do not recognize the critiques of external authorities.
It is therefore no surprise that Jacobi asks us to leave the problems of science to scientists themselves, even though—as I argued at length in the original essay—those problems are primarily suffered by everyone else: lower class people, women, trans people, people of color, people in countries victimized by the weapons industry, the targets of policing technologies, anyone who eats industrial food or has to be subjected to medical procedures to fix a health problem, all non-human species, the entire planet... But no, let's trust the people who get paid to make all the technologies that are fucking us over, the doctors who drug us, the sociologists who study us.
To wit:
<quote>
Gorrion might be surprised to learn that a good deal of scientists and philosophers of science strongly agree with many of his critiques of scientific thought. In fact, all the limitations he writes about have been pointed out with much more convincing argumentation by widely recognized philosophers of science.
</quote>
I suppose Jacobi can be forgiven for not recognizing any of Thomas Kuhn's ideas behind my own—he was an influence, but I never cited him directly. However, I don't think he missed my explicit reference to Stephen Jay Gould (Jacobi also cites Gould), nor my references to self-regulating processes of critique within scientific communities themselves. In other words, Jacobi is aware that I already know about such critiques made by scientists and philosophers of science, but he just sees another cheap opportunity to be paternalistic, and he takes it.
Then he does something curious, though equally reminiscent of a fratboy intellect. He spends 750 words attempting to show off, quoting David Hume, Thomas Kuhn, and Karl Popper, evidently thinking he's just gone over the heads of his audience, or at least bored them long enough to carry out a skeezy, back-alley word fight bait-and-switch.
Jacobi's brief history demonstrates that, lo and behold, scientists themselves debate about the nature of knowledge. At no point did I claim the contrary; I explicitly mentioned these debates, though I did not give them what would have been their due space if my goal had been to write an article about the history of conflicts in scientific epistemology (another characteristic of institutional self-defense: the institutional players always have to be the protagonists. <em>Just put yourself in the shoes of that poor cop for a moment, and think of how scared he felt before he pulled the trigger!</em>).
His summarization of Hume makes me think that Jacobi simply didn't understand the sorts of discursive shaping that I am talking about. His poor use of language suggests that he is either a habitual manipulator or he simply has a stunted verbal intelligence masked by a large vocabulary.
So let's try to explain this one again: All worldviews are cultural artifacts related to the reproduction of power in society, either antagonistic to it, supportive of it, or some combination of the two. Given their relationship with the exercise of power, worldviews also constitute worldshapers, though in the original article I reserved that term for Science, since the scientific worldview directs the exercise of power in our world far more than any antagonistic worldview.
What does Hume have to say? Actually, nothing of relevance to the critiques I was making. Causing a big splash on the debates of the powerful white men of his day, Hume argued that knowledge must be based on sense-experience (dealing Plato a blow), but that sense-experience can be flawed. Hume isn't talking about the organization and deployment of knowledge. He's still dealing with knowledge at the level of whether it's true or false, and where it comes from. As such, Hume doesn't even come close. Of course, it's not up to Hume to respond to something that I wrote 250 years after he died. The fact that Jacobi wheels him out of the morgue, however, shows that he either doesn't understand or he's choosing not to.
Jacobi's references to Thomas Kuhn, on the contrary, are relevant to the present debate, though he presents Kuhn's observations in a way reminiscent of PR damage control. To recap, Kuhn revealed that scientific knowledge exists as a consensus within a paradigm, that the consensus remains stable over time, even as specific elements of the paradigm are disputed or disproved, and then in “revolutionary” moments the entire paradigm shifts and new interrelated theories are accepted. It's hard to give a more tame summary of a dynamic that has some pretty extreme implications. Nonetheless, Jacobi softens the blow even more by citing Imre Lakatos' work on “research programs”, translating the problem into a more technical matter and justifying the pragmatism of holding on to a flawed theory until a better theory comes along.
(In justifying the conservatism of research programs and the way they allow ideologies to signal areas for further study, thus conditioning results, Jacobi claims that “infrastructural determinism” is the best predictor of many cultural shifts, such as the change from hunter-gatherer to agricultural societies; what's more, “one is justified in looking at a society and assuming, before getting any empirical evidence, that the infrastructure is the primary reason the society is the way it is.” That's embarrassing for him because actually, such determinism is on the ropes. Lots of new research shows that the switch between agriculture and gathering is a political choice, that infrastructure generally relates to social choices; and there are even many cases in which a society has drastically changed its infrastructure without changing its superstructure. The deterministic framework oversimplifies, ignoring how porous the boundary is. It is favored because it is mechanistic and adheres to rationalist belief structures. But then, when you're ideologically motivated to go out and look for evidence, you'll probably be able to find evidence, no matter how accurate your theory is.)
In fact, Kuhn's revelations are a little more disturbing than that, and Kuhn, ever polite, doesn't hit hard against any of his colleagues and he doesn't talk about the many ways in which people's lives can be ruined by this little matter of paradigms. What Kuhn actually reveals is that scientific communities will systematically suppress contrary evidence, functioning in a conservative, dogmatic way, until reaching a tipping point at which time the entire paradigm must be discarded and a new conservative order must be developed. This is not a pragmatic necessity, nor is it the reflection of a culture that truly believes in questioning everything and fostering open debates. It is (though Kuhn does not go this far) the reflection of a religion of power that will run roughshod over dissenting scientists and people caught up on the wrong side theory, whether that's queer or trans people who are pathologized and medicated, institutionalized, or lobotomized, or Africans who are scientifically determined to be inferior.
A recent example that demonstrates what happens even to privileged, accredited scientists when they contradict the dominant paradigm: a number of archaeologists and paleontologists in San Diego investigated a site of mastodon bones that suggested that tool-using hominids may have been in North America 130,000 years ago, which would upend the dominant Clovis and Beringian hypotheses regarding hominid expansion into the Americas. They told how many scientists refused to work on theirs or similar sites because it would be “professional suicide,” how they were advised by colleagues to “Keep it under wraps. No one will believe you.” Two decades went by and their findings weren't published. Finally, when a new team of scientists did publish, they were viciously attacked by much of the rest of the scientific community. “It was like getting lined up and shot with machine guns,” is how one archaeologist involved with the study described the reactions of his peers.
The reactions of the scientific community to van der Lummel's paradigm-threatening research on the experience of consciousness after medical death was even more insulting. I'll get into that area later on.
Examples like these show that Jacobi has given us a misleadingly watered-down summary of the dynamics Kuhn was talking about. But Kuhn's concept of the paradigm shift is only one small part of what I am talking about. To be as concise as possible, the main problem is twofold: the inextricable relationship between knowledge and power; and the continuity of certain practices of power and forms of knowledge within Western civilization, reproduced and intensified by the scientific institutional complex, that is currently destroying the world.
None of the scientists or philosophers of science that Jacobi trots out speak to this problem. I don't believe, as he suggests, that I am saying anything new. I could have cited a great many people, but in the end it's a question of form: some of us believe that ideas don't have owners and that everyone should feel comfortable expressing themselves in their own words. (There is an intrinsic elitism of the citation artifact in scientific discourse, though without a doubt it is highly practical for research and investigation.)
Jacobi has proved that he is good at citing famous people. So why, then, does he cite people who aren't making the arguments I'm making? Why does he not cite anyone who talks about the violence, the destruction, the oppression that scientists and their institutions are complicit in?
This is where we get to the bait-and-switch. Jacobi, after proving how smart he is and how ignorant I am, delivers what he supposes is a <em>coup de grace</em>.
“[E]ven though each of the above-mentioned issues present profound problems to scientific reasoning, <em>every one of the thinkers who articulated the problems continued to espouse the scientific worldview</em>.”
In other words, he deliberately misdirects the reader, assuring us that the problem is well under control because scientists are already policing themselves, by quoting a number of people who are not making the criticisms I am making, nor talking about the problems I am talking about. Why, then, quote these paragons of self-critique? Because they serve as a parable of reconciliation: they revealed problems but they never abandoned the Church, they never lost their faith. He assures the readers, falsely, that they made the same criticisms I do, but they had much better arguments, clearly they were more intelligent, and the ultimate symbol of their intelligence is their loyalty to the scientific worldview.
Jacobi has not yet addressed a single criticism of that worldview, only underlined tensions that exist within it. And he has shown that he is willing to use various forms of marginalization, insult, and misrepresentation in order to protect that worldview.
*** Scientific Smoothing
True to form, Jacobi misrepresents my criticism of how Newtonian physics are used to prop up a rationalist worldview. I never say that Newtonian physics is pop science; in fact, I say that it is dishonest of scientists to chalk systematic simplifications up to pop science. Nonetheless, Jacobi has no qualms twisting my words.
To clarify, we should distinguish between scientific smoothing and pop science. Both of these phenomena are structurally integral parts of Science, but they function differently. As I stated in the original article, scientists often respond to criticisms of mythical (worldview-promoting) usages of science that whatever is not a sound theory or a quantifiable, technical assertion can be blamed on “pop science” propagated either by journalists and authors or by scientists reaching beyond their field of expertise. However, the problem goes well beyond pop science. We can call the process “scientific smoothing”.
Smoothing is a feature of any knowledge system too complex for any one person to know or communicate (i.e. any human culture), but scientific smoothing happens in a specific way, which Jacobi avoids. Because the body of scientific knowledge is way too vast for any one scientist to be familiar with even a tenth of one percent of it, the institutional complex as a whole relies on simplified digests (sometimes these summaries are produced by specialists, sometimes by non-specialists such as journalists and educators) to communicate scientific knowledge to laypersons and also to scientists who are specialists in other fields. This is a structural part of the body of scientific knowledge and of the technocratic organization of scientific communities. It is neither an error nor a marginal occurrence. For this reason, critiquing the worldviews that are propagated by smoothing is not a case of critiquing “various stereotypes about science” as Jacobi claims.
Demanding that we exclude considerations of scientific smoothing when we evaluate the transmission of scientific knowledge, that we only pay attention to specialists publishing in peer-reviewed journals, is unrealistic, because smoothing is a structural part of the transmission of scientific knowledge. There is no communication across scientific institutions, nor communication between scientific and governmental or corporate institutions, without scientific smoothing. Pop science is the profit-motivated production of watered-down or lazily researched scientific claims for a consumer audience. It is instrumental for winning funding, building careers, and cementing the influence of scientific institutions, but it is not as integral to communication between institutions as smoothing.
Ironically, one of the articles he cites as evidence complains about how scientists who specialize in one branch can spread completely baseless ideas in areas they do not study. “Just because you’re a world expert in one branch of science doesn’t qualify you in any other discipline [...] this is a particularly bad habit among physicists.” The problem is, they are only called on it if the ideas they are spreading go against central dogmas.
The myths or falsehoods (please note that I am not using these terms as synonyms) that are contained in every paradigm does not mean that every idea is equally valid or equally unverifiable (Jacobi has already tried strawmanning me as a relativist, without any textual evidence). But the way the scientific paradigm works does mean that the uncorroborated myths that support central dogmas, most of which are inherited from Christianity and neo-Platonism, will not be challenged, or at least not marginalized and ridiculed. On the other hand, ideas that break with those dogmas (and at least some of these will be the very ideas needed to radically alter the paradigm or found a new one, in other words, the truths of the future) will be ridiculed and their authors will be marginalized and dismissed as crackpots. What's more, given the continuity of power institutions, and given the specifics of the scientific smoothing process, the myths that carry over from one paradigm to the next change much less than the technical explanations and theories that are considered valid. In other words, the “broad picture” provided by smoothing contains a great deal of Cartesian and neo-Platonic myth, even though the technical experts in any given field do not uphold the specific manifestations of those myths in their area of expertise.
Somehow, Jacobi doesn't find a problem with this.
And as far as outright pop science is concerned, there are a few features that are worth underscoring.
*Pop science tends to be especially overt and proactive in inculcating Western mythology (for example, the common myth that evolution is a process that went from single-celled organisms to multi-cellular organisms to vertebrates to mammals to primates to humans: this is a mythical reframing of evolution that is repeated again and again, useful, even though it is factually incorrect, because it is progressive and anthropocentric).
*Scientists' knowledge outside their own field of specialization tends to also be rooted in pop science. This is a problem, given that scientists' opinions have more legitimacy, even when those opinions are not the product of an empirical study, due to the ideological role that science plays within the power hierarchies of our society. Scientists talking in their social circles, through social media, on television, or with journalists, are the principal legitimizers of pop science. Rarely in their interactions with society do they restrict their commentary to the results of their studies. On the contrary, like anyone else with privilege, they use positions of power to push their own interests and worldview. A dramatic example of this would be how scientists who are not specialists in virology or immunology have been instrumental in supporting HIV/AIDS denialism. Jacobi would point out that their conduct is unscientific. There is, however, a wealth of more mundane examples of scientists carrying out the same kind of manipulations to shape our understanding of what is natural in areas as diverse as family structure, sexuality, economics, politics, and so forth. Though they are advancing non-empirical positions, they are not called to task so long as they do not support conspiracy theories that violate the scientific consensus.
*There is a great deal of funding for pop science. On an individual and an institutional level, scientists are complicit in accepting this funding and the consequences it has for knowledge production. Scientific studies on diet might take the cake. There is a great consumer demand, produced and facilitated by the media, for diet science. The vast majority of diet studies use small samples or have other design flaws that make them useless or severely limited for the production of empirical knowledge. Nonetheless, straight-to-market studies about what people should or should not eat constitute a major industry and a cash cow for individual scientists and scientific institutions. It's curious. Such institutions take part in punishing doctors who prescribe salt water as a cancer treatment, but they look the other way when it comes to the constant, large-scale production of “bad science” that also can have negative effects on people's health (including claims about whether coffee, red wine, avocados, and so forth increase or decrease cancer risks). The common factor that accompanies punitive action by the scientific community is not the accuracy of the empirical knowledge being spread or how much harm it might cause, but pure, mercenary economic interests. Diet science is a big business, and so are the officially validated cancer treatments.
Let's look at one example in which pop science and scientific smoothing coincide with the systemic complicity of scientists themselves. This is just a random article I came across the other day; one could find similar examples every week. Near the top of their page, a CNN headline ran: “Addiction could stem from ancient retrovirus, study suggests” The first sentence: “An ancient retrovirus that predates modern humans may explain why people suffer from addiction, scientists have said.” [https://edition.cnn.com/2018/09/25/health/retrovirus-addiction-study-intl/index.html]
It turns out, the study says nothing of the sort. Rather, it links a gene originally introduced by a retrovirus to 34% of drug-users in Glasgow and 14% of drug-users in Greece (in both cases 2 or 3 times higher than the presence of that gene in the general population). In other words, the study suggests that a particular gene may be related to addiction in a small minority of cases. Contrary to how the media present the study, it does not offer any evidence that suggests that this gene is the original cause of addiction, nor that it is related to the overwhelming majority of addictions. It also does not tell us about people who have the gene but never develop any kind of addiction.
One thing that the study does suggest, that the media do not pick up on, is that social factors may play a huge role in encouraging addiction. After all, there is quite a large difference between the 34% rate in Glasgow and the 14% rate in Greece, as there is a great difference in wealth and access to social services between Scotland and Greece (the greater the poverty, the less this one gene explains cases of addiction). Of course, this study was not designed to study social causes of addiction, and as such it is incapable of providing concrete evidence of such causes, but the huge discrepancies in results at the very least suggest social causes as another factor. The fact that the media entirely ignore this line of inquiry gives us an idea of how likely scientists are to get funding to explore such possibilities, rather than looking for exclusively genetic explanations of drug use.
Even though CNN has shown a penchant for fact-checking since Trump got into office, and the article shows a Trumpian level of inaccuracy, their science editor was neither fired nor reprimanded for grossly misrepresenting the study. In fact, the article is par for the course as far as science reporting goes. Nor, as far as I can tell, did the researchers complain to CNN about their sloppy and misleading reporting. On the contrary, I would wager they were happy their article got picked up. Such things build careers.
Why is this important, and not just nit-picking? For one, it shows how low the bar is, and how scientists are complicit. Would they complain if a media outlet reported that a new study potentially validated vaccine skepticism? You bet your ass they would. But they don't complain when the misrepresentations reinforce dominant power relations and fundamental worldviews. The article provides yet another example of the ubiquitous ways in which scientists and the institutions necessary for spreading scientific information build a rationalist mythology. In this case, we have the mechanistic idea that genes function as on and off switches that determine human behaviors. The study itself contradicts this view, as does most research into genes. What we actually get is evidence that genes are one of multiple factors that influence human behavior. Yet when scientists communicate to the media they frequently use the bodies-as-machines metaphor and present it as objective fact.
The machine metaphor has implications across the social terrain, relating again and again to the war waged by capitalism and patriarchy against bodies, with the systematic support of scientific institutions. The deterministic (and false) vision of addiction has played a historically important role in colonialism. Alcohol, opium, and other drugs were and in some cases continue to be key weapons used by colonizers against colonized peoples. Neo-colonial states then blame addiction on their victims. Native Americans, for example, suffer alcoholism in disproportionate numbers not because of social factors, scientists argue, but because they have inferior genes. Admitting that all the evidence suggests that addiction is not deterministically caused by genes, but by a host of factors, many of them social, robs (neo)colonialism of one of its key weapons. It's hard to argue that scientists are not complicit in this process, given that the discourse at play is scientific in its entirety. But the apologists of Western science have no shame in claiming objectivity and neutrality with respect to systems of domination.
A century of education that genes constitute programming is no coincidence, nor was it ever a discovery. It was a religious inference, an ideological imposition. All biologists discovered was a biochemical mechanism in the interior of every living cell, without fully understanding the relation between that mechanism, biological traits, and lived experiences. What they did was rush ahead to conclusions that their ideology dictated; otherwise, we never would have heard the word “programming”. How long did this ideology delay the recent discovery that lived experiences can actually change which genes get activated and passed on?
*** The history of ideas
Mathematical equations may be beyond cultural framing, but nothing else about science is. The meaning assigned to those equations, their applications in society, the technology they require, the technology they enable, what had to be sacrificed so that the technology mathematical advances rest on could be developed, what questions were asked, what questions weren't asked, and so on. Western science responds to a certain history and cultural heritage that informs everything it does.
Mathematical equations by themselves are next to meaningless. They have not operational value until they are converted into code that can act on machines, and all machines are culturally and socially inscribed. Any other use of mathematics requires its interface with language, which is the polar opposite of math. Language is by necessity subjective, ambiguous, contradictory, and constantly changing.
Many mathematicians say that math is also a language. This is only because they have never studied languages and have no idea what they're actually saying. Physicists and mathematicians have as much right to define language as linguists have to define wave functions or imaginary numbers.
And while we're on the topic of definitional overreach, I need to go on a random but important tangent: the contention by the scientifically minded that <em>tomatoes are a fruit</em>. Tomatoes are not a goddamn fruit. The implication that they are fruits and not vegetables stems from an arrogant and preposterous attempt by biologists to appropriate the word “fruit” many centuries after this word came into the common parlance. They made an inaccurate definition, and rather than correcting themselves, they tried turning something everybody knew was a vegetable into a fruit. Hey jerkoffs: what's the scientific definition of vegetable? Oh wait, there is none. Because the whole world doesn't belong to you. “Fruit” and “vegetable” are culinary terms, you assholes, not botanical terms. When you say “fruit”, you're misusing the word. You actually mean the ovary of angiosperm plants. Get it fucking straight.
In the interest of fairness, we the laity can give back to the scientists a term we have been misusing: <em>the learning curve</em>. For the record, now that I have everyone's attention, a “steep learning curve” means something is very easy to learn, or that it evinces a threshold of effort or time spent learning, before which it is difficult to learn and after which it is easy to learn, as in, until you study the subject for twenty hours you don't really get it, but after that you advance quickly. (Hint: the curve is plotted on a graph. The X access is achievement, the Y axis is time or effort.) Something that is difficult to learn would have a low learning curve. Get it right. To be fair, though, a true linguophile would never use a metaphor that made reference to something they didn't understand, nor would they use a complex term as a simple synonym for “difficult” just to make themselves seem more intelligent.
But let's get back on topic, shall we? Languages have a far greater expressive capacity than mathematics due exactly to the linguistic conventions that make them incapable of pinning down an objective network of meaning. Rightly so are they incapable, because “objective meaning” is an oxymoron. Meaning can never be objective.
Many rationalists today do not know that dozens of the greatest scientific minds and philosophers of the Enlightenment tried to create objective languages that would not change in translation, that would have the exact same meaning to people from any country and any time period, and that could describe and categorize anything in the world in precise, indisputable, and unchanging terms. Every single attempt was a total failure, most of them humorously so, as documented by Arika Okrent in <em>In the Land of Invented Languages.</em>
An objective language is impossible. Meaning is necessarily subjective, a relationship that people collectively have with a concept only in reference to a historical and fluctuating pool of experiences and other concepts that never manifests as a precise consensus because every node in the network, every individual, has a different perspective of the whole and a different kind of access to a different mix of the resources in the common pool. One of the implications of this reality is that definitions are always posterior and extraneous to concepts, never more than a convenient fiction.
On a simpler level, objective language is impossible because such a large part of language is naming and categorization, which too is subjective.
Categorization is also an indispensable part of the sciences. Sincerity would have us recognize that the bulk of Science is a cultural exercise. And the word “cultural” stems from a synonym for “knowledge,” because human groups are different precisely according to the different knowledges they pass down and enact. But the priests of empiricism are capable of recognizing only one kind of knowledge. And they are so insulated from their origins in massive technocratic structures that they regularly dismiss philosophy, having forgotten that the men who created the disciplines they follow were philosophers every one. Today, they are still fine-tuning this philosophy, they merely pretend it is the only valid knowledge form in existence.
In fact, scientific philosophy is a direct descendant of Christianity. Early scientists inherited their penchant for encylopaedism that was so vital to their work of the 17th-19th centuries, and still present as a bedrock structure today, directly from the Christian monks, whose dogma also had them believe that knowledge was bounded, finite.
The French Revolution gave rise to the most definitive break between Church and Science, a contrast to the model of respectable continuity practiced in the UK. But even in their exuberance the French rationalists betrayed an attachment to the exact same forms and apparatuses as the Church. In fact, they systematically seized churches and rebaptized them “Churches of Rationality” or “Churches of Science,” while they spoke of empiricism as the new religion.
Covering up this connection is something like an institutional origin story. And the thing is, it shouldn't be that embarrassing. All ideas have histories. All knowledge systems are culturally inflected. It is only embarrassing to Science because of its absolutist and religious pretensions, and above all its projection of a monopoly on all knowledge.
*** Falsehood and Myth
When I was growing up, we were still taught in school that animals didn't have feelings, they weren't intelligent, they were just unthinking machines of instinct. At the time, there were already decades of scientific studies disputing this view, but as usual, anything that challenges the myth of human superiority takes a much longer time to filter down to the masses. This erroneous idea about non-human animals was created in the first place by scientists out of whole cloth. Non-human animals in pre-Enlightenment Europe and even moreso in stateless societies across the globe had personhood. They were often respected, seen as thinking and feeling, even as possessors of wisdom that humans could gain through respectful observation. The scientists who promoted the contrary view were also promoting the view that all living things were machines to be modified and exploited as needed, and they were also basing their new empirical model on cruel, unfeeling practices of vivisection, torturous and generally fatal experimentation on live animals (often including humans from the lower classes and from other races).
True to patriarchal form, scientists were also the ones to make the claim that female orgasms didn't exist, that women weren't intelligent, that women who sought clitorial stimulation rather than penetration were pathological, and so forth. In the 16th century, two Italian scientists, Renaldo Columbus and Fallopius, fought over which of them had discovered the clitoris, as detailed in Elizabeth Hall's, <em>I Have Devoted My Life to the Clitoris</em>.
It was scientists who claimed and continue to claim, despite ever more evidence to the contrary, that IQ is inherited, and thus any social inequalities are justified. These and similar claims of biological determinism are often related to the assertion, explicit in the 19th and 20th centuries, nowadays increasingly implicit, that people of color are inferior.
These are not just chance byproducts of imperfect paradigms. There is no coincidence in who is targeted by these “unscientific” fallacies that were promoted by the scientific establishment itself. They always went against those who have been oppressed by the very social hierarchies that scientists serve. And in every case, they were blatantly absurd beliefs, far more ridiculous than the idea that after we die our invisible spirits go to live in the sky with some dude with a beard, because that assertion at least is non-falsifiable. Scientists were believing, and trying to force everyone else to believe, things that any observant twelve-year-old could see were false. Time and again throughout history, scientists have been at the vanguard of the mouth-breathers.
In the examples I've given, scientific mythology and falsehood coincided, though as I've pointed out before, mythology and falsehood are not the same thing. What's most dangerous in the long run is not the falsehood, but the mythology, because Science's baseline mythology is patriarchal, colonialist, white supremacist, elitist, authoritarian, anthropocentric, and ecocidal. It's unhealthy. It's damaging. If something can be proven false, in the long run, scientists will reject it. It might take them a hundred years, they might be the last ones to clue in, but eventually, they will discard a demonstrably falsifiable belief, all the while congratulating themselves on how intelligent they are and never giving credit to the people who figured it out long before them. But the way that they promote false beliefs and the way they correct such beliefs still reinforce their base mythology.
Here's an example: when settlers arrived in the western part of North America, supported and encouraged not only by the government but also by the geographic societies of the day, they slaughtered, enslaved, or evicted the original inhabitants. As soon as the stolen territories were fully integrated into the United States, there came to be large holdings of public lands and with them, the scientific management of those lands. A part of that, from the beginning, was fire suppression. This wasn't “pop science” or “pseudo-science,” on the contrary it reflected the efforts and the consensus of the finest scientists of the day. It took these overwhelmingly white scientists working at the behest of colonialism more than a hundred years to figure out that they were totally full of shit, that the observant, respectful, spiritual, non-scientific native inhabitants had worked out a much better system of forestry. Finally, in the second decade of the 21st century, when climate change is causing forest fires to reach new magnitudes, the Forest Service and related scientific and public agencies have started allowing native peoples like the Karuk to play a small role in shaping forestry practices. Today's scientists pat themselves on the back for recognizing that the Karuk had it right, but the dominant power relations do not change in any way. Karuk and other indigenous methods are only validated once scientific studies grant them legitimacy. There is still a monopoly on who can grant legitimacy to knowledge systems. And the ones handing out validations are the same ones responsible for dispossessing successive generations from their lands and their traditional practices, for helping to wipe out millions of acres of healthy forests, and for causing the extinction of countless species. Who atones for all that? What kind of structural changes will we see in response? None.
If the scientists and institutions involved were sincerely owning up to their errors, they would resign their positions, throw themselves at the feet of the Karuk, and seek to learn from a demonstrably superior knowledge system. They would also do everything in their power to get indigenous peoples their land back so they could re-institute their traditional practices. Of course we didn't see any of that. All we see are condescending displays of recognition coming from those who have no legitimacy beyond naked force. And progressives like Jacobi will sometimes go so far as to condescend that in his view, “primitive” peoples were truly scientific, else who could they have discovered so many useful things? But the demonstrably superior knowledge systems of the Karuk and many other indigenous peoples are not at all “scientific,” nor do they need that label to attain legitimacy. They tend to be experiential, spiritual, communal, and ecocentric, not institutional, empiricist, objectivist, anthropocentric, and capitalist.
Another example: scientists are skewed towards monogamy [https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/love-sex/monogamy-flawed-concept-science-sex-one-person-relationships-university-michigan-a7645271.html]. Researchers who study relationships and family structures tend to favor monogamous structures in a way that affects their research results, even as they naturalize certain relationship forms. Again, we see scientists represent more conservative interests in society that back up dominant forms. Time and time again, it has been social struggles that have advanced knowledge, especially where gender, race, and the environment are concerned. Scientists typically come in later to make the necessary modifications when the dominant paradigm is already in tatters.
Then there was the amaaaaaazing study about honesty from the University of East Anglia, which compared the responses of subjects from different countries to a situation in which they flipped coin a number of times, and got a small money reward if it came up heads; the trick was that researchers didn't see the coin and relied on the test subject to report the result of the toss. In other words, they could lie and get more money, and researchers could tell who was lying more frequently based on statistical probability. The conclusion of the study, and one of the most frequently used headlines, was: “The British are the most honest,” as opposed to “The British are the least clever,” “The British are the most blindly obedient to arbitrary authority,” or “The British are the least likely to take advantage of resources that could be used to enrich their communities.” Incidentally, the study was carried out in... you guessed it! Great Britain! As far as honesty goes, well, the study didn't actually put Britain at the top of the list, it only came first in one of the two tests. And people from only fifteen countries were tested. A similar study that compared “honesty” rates to corruption indexes only tested people from 23 countries, but that didn't stop the Telegraph<em></em> from reporting, “Britain has most honest citizens in the world.” Speaking of honesty, though, that second study actually gave the top spot not to the UK, but to Lithuania. The paper reported that “British students were found to be the most honest, along with those from Sweden, Germany, Lithuania and Italy. At the other end of the scale were those from Tanzania, Morocco, China and Vietnam.” This racially tinged list is made more so by the fact that European country Poland was left off the worst five as reported in the study. [https://www.uea.ac.uk/about/-/study-finds-honesty-varies-significantly-between-countries] [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/12189003/Britain-has-most-honest-citizens-in-the-world...-because-politicians-are-less-corrupt.html]
Never mind that media used these studies in nationalist, racist, and dishonest ways, and the researchers would have to have been idiots not to predict that result; never mind that their construction of honesty was embarrassingly simplistic and moralistic, hence, subjective; never mind that the amount of money given out was worth a lot more in the countries that were reported as “dishonest” and that most of the people in the wealthier, “honest” countries didn't have a need a couple bucks. These studies responded to a need that was not empirical, but political and racial.
Some more mundane examples of scientific mythology concern inaccurate concepts that Western scientists uncritically inherited from ancient Greek philosophy. To wit, elements and atoms don't actually exist. More specifically, the substances we call “elements” have turned out not to be so elementary, and “atoms,” the fundamental blocks of matter theorized by the Greeks, fundamental in the sense that they could not be cut or divided, which is the very meaning of the word “atom,” likewise do not exist. They weren't discovered, they were sought out, projected onto the available evidence.
Nonetheless, we are left with the pernicious myth that the Greek grandfathers of Western civilization, the putative ancestors and originators of our most cherished institutions and beliefs, were sooooooooooooooooooooo smart. A belief in their smartness, an identification with them in the construction of this subtle “we” that shows up so much in Western discourse, is a key plank of white supremacy shared by both the Left and the Right. I have one example that I found, ironically enough, in a sophomoric article mocking hippies for making poetic, philosophical and not terribly rigorous use of the discoveries of quantum physics [http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/14/science/far-out-man-but-is-it-quantum-physics.html]. After explaining to readers that quantum physics doesn't mean that your thoughts can alter reality, the author concludes: “In other words, reality is out of our control. It's all atoms and the void, as Democritus said so long ago”. (Note that this article falsely claims that the Parapsychological Association, easy to dismiss as quacks, were “expelled” from the American Association for the Advancement of Science; in fact that never happened, and they are still affiliated. So much for a scrupulous commitment to fact.)
So let me see if I got this straight. The Chinese are pre-modern and non-scientific, not just two thousand years ago but still today, whereas Democritus is worthy of consideration. Atoms and the void don't exist, not as Democritus envisioned him, but he gets credit. On the other hand, people do have energy coursing through them, every body has an electrical field, yet we're told that acupuncture is pre-scientific, even when the majority of empirical studies demonstrate otherwise... If the same standard were applied to the Chinese as to the Greeks, wouldn't they have been given credit for discovering electrical fields? Is there another criterion here I'm missing that explains this double standard, besides blatant cultural supremacism?
*** Placebos and consciousness
As mentioned earlier, it is very difficult to effectively evaluate acupuncture with the kind of double-blind studies that empiricists prefer. This is because acupuncture, just like other forms of body therapy, require a good deal of skill. They are not comprised of tasks that can be mechanized, just as giving a patient a pill or radiation therapy. A double-blind study means that a method can be rated against a placebo in a way that neither the patient nor the healthcare practitioner know which is the real treatment and which is the placebo. An acupuncturist, however, knows when they are properly performing acupuncture on a patient. Amazingly, in much of the scientific literature, this counts as a mark against acupuncture. In other words, “controlled” studies are incapable of properly evaluating acupuncture, and rather than understanding this as a limitation of the method of study, yet another piece of evidence that empirical knowledge is not the only valid kind of knowledge, the bulk of scientists interpret this as a failing of acupuncture. Pretty clearly, they feel threatened by a form of healing that threatens their knowledge paradigm on multiple fronts. This can be read as yet another front in Science's war on healers, a war that in earlier centuries was carried out with torture and mass murder against primarily women practitioners of traditional forms of healing, and that today is waged with derision, marginalization, and occasionally the criminalization of alternative therapies. (I can already hear Jacobi preparing his counterargument, ignoring all my critiques to claim I am defending quack doctors who prey on desperate people and make a bundle giving out Vitamin C tablets to people with advanced stages of cancer.)
This is another example of the mechanization of practices, in which any knowledge or practices that don't fit through the social machine are forcibly discarded. It's also worth noting that many of those who have worked in so-called controlled experiments know that they are a joke, or at the very least, not as controlled as the scientific establishment pretends. I worked in the role of guinea pig, and I and my fellow test subjects regularly worked the system, lying to get accepted to the study, reporting symptoms of conditions we already had to get free medical care, not reporting symptoms if we knew it would allow us to continue in the study for longer and make more money. The researchers treated us like ignorant machines, passive and knowledgeless subjects, when in reality we were generally smarter than they were, getting the system to work for us when we were meant to suffer happily in pretty extreme precarity (enough precarity that we'd be willing to work by taking experimental drugs, without which the entire medical industry would fail). The truth of the matter is we had our own interests, our own strategies, completely illegible to those who thought they were in control. We also saw how often researchers fudged or omitted results that were unexpected or undesirable. So yeah, priests of science, keep talking about control. The underclasses you assume to be ignorant are just laughing and waiting for our day.
There's another important point easily lost within all this discussion of the need to distinguish effective treatments from the placebo effect, which is the concept of the placebo itself. Within dominant scientific practices, the placebo effect is practically a code word for a meaningless error, a “nuisance variable” according to one dissenting view [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2582657/]. It means the therapeutic effect that patients report when taking a fake treatment. Researchers rate their experimental treatments against non-treatment and against a placebo to find out its <em>real</em> effect. The insinuation is that the placebo effect is not real, which is a rather arbitrary, subjective distinction given that it has real results. To be more precise, the placebo effect represents the power of the mind to heal the body, how the feeling of being cared for, of receiving attention, and expecting to get better actually heals people. This is a concept that Science is unprepared to deal with, especially considering that the mind, according to the dominant paradigm, doesn't exist. It's supposed to just be the illusion produced by chemical and therefore wholly material processes in the brain. If the mind is an illusion, it cannot possibly act as a force, a factor, or a cause of anything, much less a healing of the body.
An advocate of this view might dodge the bullet by saying that receiving a placebo triggers endorphins or whatever other chemical that provide temporary relief. This is a sloppy argument typical of one who hasn't studied language or logical structures. If the placebo is chemically incapable of triggering such a chemical reaction on its own, then it is only the expectation the patient feels on receiving the placebo that could trigger the chemicals that supposedly relieves their suffering. Consciousness here still acts as an operational factor. And this explanation still leaves out cases when people experience a permanent resolution and not a temporary abatement of their condition.
The placebo effect is especially embarrassing to the scientific establishment if we consider that its margin of effectiveness is greater than the margin of effectiveness of many commercial medications. In other words, if the no-treatment baseline is zero, and the placebo effect in a drug trial runs at 30% (of patients who report the decrease of symptoms after receiving the placebo), many drugs only rate an effectiveness of 40-45% (in other words, only ten to fifteen points on top of the thirty points of the placebo). This is especially significant when we consider that the placebo effect is so strong among people who have received absolutely no training to use their mind to heal their body, and when the “care” they receive when getting the placebo is the minimal, cold contact of a doctor looking them over and a nurse handing them a pill and a plastic cup of water. What if respectful, positive, experience-based forms of traditional healing were recovered, people were encouraged and trained to take part in their own healing, and the professionals were caring, sympathetic, and attentive individuals who favored hands-on methods instead of arrogant, cold, hostile experts in lab suits? Coupled with lifestyle- and cause-based rather than symptom- and disease-based healing, people's health would improve drastically.
But the medical establishment has no interest in breaking with its authoritarian, torture-complicit, colonial, racist, and patriarchal history. They are interested in minimizing doctor-patient interactions and preserving the patient as a passive and ignorant recipient of treatment. (I can assure you that it is an accurate generalization that still today, doctors who work in the prison system are torturers, and we also have to add the medical workers in mental hospitals, in animal testing laboratories, all those who work in hospitals near the border and are complicit with the deportation machine...) And these dynamics long precede the financial incentives of big pharma.
When I participated in a listening project regarding health care, it was astounding how many people, especially women, had had atrocious experiences with the medical establishment, which in many cases were not only humiliating but also dangerous for their health, with many doctors systematically and ignorantly insisting that they knew their patients' bodies and problems better after a cursory examination than the patients themselves.
The question of the placebo, and the broader issue of the demonstrable power of the mind in healing, points to a major crack in the current scientific paradigm. I would agree with Jacobi, referring to Kuhn and others, that a single piece of evidence doesn't justify discarding a theory. However, the evidence has been amassing for a long time now that the current scientific paradigm explaining the mind, consciousness, and the relationship of mind and body through genes and neural structures is simply inadequate, if not completely wrong. Additionally, we now have a large body of historical research showing how the scientific paradigm governing the mind-body relation was never evidence-based, but from the very beginning was a philosophical imposition stemming from the prejudices and mythical frameworks of Enlightenment era thinkers looking for an absolute theory of knowledge. These thinkers, who also gave us the idea that empirical knowledge is the only valid form of knowledge, based their arguments not on experimentation but on armchair speculation.
I would disagree with Jacobi that one theory should not be discarded until we have a better one to take its place, which I would ascribe more to an insecurity with humility and uncertainty, since such attitudes undermine the institutional separation between experts and laypeople. But if anyone who holds this preference nonetheless wants to overcome the conservative nature of paradigms, and insists that science has a revolutionary importance, then they would do well to be more forthcoming in acknowledging a theory that is clearly insufficient, underlining a viewpoint that is ready for an update rather than obstinately defending it and viciously attacking anyone who points to its cracks, as does Jacobi and so many like him.
One of Jacobi's tactics is to use a total <em>non sequitur</em> on quantum physics and mock all the spiritualists who use what we might generously call a poetic understanding of quantum physics to support dissident ideas about consciousness. Jacobi expresses his suspicion that I hold the same views, but he is unable to make any textual reference, because, well, I actually don't hold those views. (Has anyone else noticed how little importance Jacobi gives to evidence while championing empiricism?) I would say, however, that those quacks are being more honest thinkers than the stuffy traditionalists who continue defending a paradigm that holds no water. At least they are looking for new answers in a realm where it should be obvious that new answers are needed.
To name one area of study that is breaking the paradigm, we have the research into consciousness after death, focusing on evidence of consciousness among people who experience medical death, and who show no brain activity, and are then resuscitated. The groundbreaking study in this field was conducted by Dutch cardiologist Pim van der Lommel, who interviewed hundreds of patients over twenty-five years, recording their experiences while they were in full cardiac arrest or total comas with no brain activity. Van der Lommel observed a great deal of similarity in patients who reported “near death experiences” including having access to falsifiable sensory experiences at times when there was no blood flow to their brains, as well as a strong quantifiable difference in psycho-social experiences in the years after their resuscitation, comparing those who had had a near death experience with those who had experienced medical death without such an experience. His study was published in the peer-reviewed medical journal, <em>The Lancet</em>, and predictably, many scientists subsequently mocked him, dismissed him as a quack, and tried to drag his name through the mud. Curiously, they did not publish their refutations in peer-reviewed journals, which some might qualify as rather unscientific of them.
Van der Lummel makes an easy target. Not only does he have a funny Dutch name (and anyone who doesn't think this actually makes a difference is naïve), but in the book he published after the study, he wanders into a number of New Agey explanations for how consciousness might actually work given the inadequacy of the biocentric or neural/mechanical model. And yes, he makes recourse to quantum physics. But this is only after he uses decidedly scientific methods to statistically refute all the other mainstream explanations for consciousness events among people who are medically dead or in full comas. In any case, his New Agey hypotheses are independent of and therefore do not discredit his peer-reviewed research on consciousness after death. This research doesn't tell us what is actually going on with people who lose blood flow to their brains but keep on thinking, feeling, and receiving sensory information, but it most certainly puts another crack in the mechanistic theory of the brain as producer of consciousness. And what's more, his research results have been independently reproduced at NYU [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/mind-works-after-death-consciousness-sam-parnia-nyu-langone-a8007101.html]. (While studies of executed rats suggest their might be a sudden spike in brain activity after medical death, when even all brain stem reflexes have stopped, therefore possibly resuscitating mechanistic theories, this doesn't explain long-lasting consciousness among coma patients. There's also the troublesome fact, backed up by the NYU study, that not only can people consistently hear when they're being pronounced dead, they also often have access to falsifiable visual information about the emergency room and personnel, whether or not their eyes are closed or able to focus and respond to light.)
When you consider that plants can hear, smell, and see, as well as experience fear [http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170109-plants-can-see-hear-and-smell-and-respond], and that slime mold, which has no nervous system whatsoever, is capable of learning, well, maybe it's time to recognize that Western notions of other life forms are basically without merit, whereas many indigenous knowledge systems that treat all other life forms—not just animals—as our brothers and sisters, as intelligent beings with personhood, are more accurate. Wouldn't that be embarrassing for all the scientists standing atop centuries of presumed superiority?
But you know what? Fuck them. The sheer damage wrought by the application of their paradigm on the natural world has been devastating enough to prove that it's wrong.
*** The planet
Who dares to say that Western science has not been involved in the destruction of the planet? Who is shameless and dishonest enough to deny that scientific advancement is inseparable from industrial advancement, and together these two forces are destroying the place that gives us life, killing hundreds of millions of people, billions of other life forms, brutalizing the earth, and causing thousands upon thousands of extinctions every year?
Most scientists make their living working in some way for this ecocidal system. If they can get funding to study salmon populations, they'll study salmon populations. If the funding is in fracking and horizontal drilling, that's what they'll do instead. It's no mystery where most of the research dollars are, and how the majority of scientists are busy making the system stronger, more devastating. The small minority whose funding opportunities allow them to be more idealistic are also a part of the problem. They continue to support the institutional mythology regarding solutions to the problem of ecocide.
Where are the scientists who make it clear that alternative energies have no chance of reducing emissions within a capitalist energy market?
Where are the scientists who release reports stating that the Paris Agreement is not enough according to accepted climate models?
Where are the scientists who object to the new geological term, “anthropocene,” pointing out that it is capitalism and not all humanity that has caused the problem, and that there have been many carbon neutral, non-ecocidal societies we might learn from?
Where are the scientists who openly refer to the energy companies as mass murderers?
Where are the scientists getting arrested for direct actions against the industrial decimation of the planet, for pipeline blockades, for assassinating the executives of the companies most responsible for pollution?
Where are the scientists speaking up in support of Greenscare and Standing Rock prisoners?
Nowhere to be found. Because all the scientists who find it economically convenient to deal with questions of climate change and ecocide are sitting obediently right next to those who are most responsible for the problem, meekly submitting reports to the media, giving their support to ineffective government treaties and green capitalist pseudo-solutions even though empirically speaking these cannot possibly stop the ecocide.
The common factor of every false solution, every framing of the ongoing destruction of the planet, is that the scientific, technological, industrial system of capitalism afforded the ultimate consideration and made an absolute priority. Any social response to climate change, habitat loss, and mass extinctions must first posit the untouchability, the immortal preservation, of this system. Only then can it begin to address the question of ameliorating ecological harm. Scientists are fully complicit in the framing that has us first save capitalism, and then see if it's also possible to save the planet.
How are we supposed to believe that an institutional complex that systematically produces people who hate the planet, who hate other life forms, who think of themselves superior, are going to save the planet? Constantly we are told to trust in the priests, and to think of anyone who loves the earth as backward “mystics”. Jacobi is shameless enough to equate those who fault Science for its role in the devastation with climate denialists who refute the scientific consensus.
As one final example of ecocide in which scientific institutions undeniably played an irreplaceable role, we have the so-called Green Revolution, the forcible industrialization, mechanization, and chemicalization of agriculture throughout the Global South. The scientific practices that underpin monocrop agriculture, machine-planting and harvesting, factory-based meat production and processing, global transportation, and chemical fertilizers and pesticides entail a fatal ignorance of biological processes, ecosystems, and ecological limits and they have destroyed the world's soil, created dead zones throughout the ocean, poisoned our environment, and condemned billions to a precarious dependence on the market and millions to outright starvation. These practices, developed, promoted, and defended by scientists and scientific institutions, are directly involved in the forcible suppression of numerous ecocentric, sustainable, traditional practices of sustenance, while they themselves constitute the most inefficient form of food production in world history. I am referring to inefficiency, stupidity, and abusiveness on multiple levels, but those who are mentally inhibited by rationalism and have trouble appreciating things that are not numbers-based need only the readily available calculations of fuel calories spent versus food calories produced.
As just the latest in a cascading series of disasters produced by the idiocy of scientific agriculture, we have the first empirically demonstrated factor related to the catastrophic die-offs of bee populations worldwide. Glyphosate, Monsanto's <em>Roundup</em>, supposedly doesn't affect animals, except when agricultural workers are exposed to large quantities, in which case they tend to die quickly. But officially:
*Glyphosate only affects plants and bacteria.
*All animals depend for their survival on healthy bacteria populations in their digestive tract.
Tell these two facts to any nine-year-old, and they would probably see that glyphosate presents a danger to animals as well.
Lo and behold, the scientists in their shiny white labcoats have come to save us. In September 2018, 48 years after scientists identified glyphosate as an effective herbicide and 44 years after it hit the market, scientists at the University of Austin reported that when honeybees visit fields that have been sprayed with Roundup, they suffer die-offs of their intestinal flora that make them significantly more vulnerable to a number of contagious diseases, creating the conditions for the simultaneous deaths of most members of a hive. [https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180924174506.htm]
It took them 48 years to look into a problem that any pre-adolescent with only the most basic information on biology would identify as a potential danger in five minutes. Yet another example of the mind-blowing stupidity of scientists when they're not getting paid to think about something. A danger to the world and a boon to capitalism and states: general stupidity, applied brilliance, coupled with immense power. They'll solve the problems placed in front of them, avoid any overarching structural critiques, and delegitimize any affirmations or perspectives from outside the system.
*** Revolutionary Science?
Jacobi titles his critique “the revolutionary importance of science,” but throughout his text he offers very little to clarify what these revolutionary qualities are. He comes the closest in the following paragraph, and it's telling that he actually says nothing positive about Science, he just falls back on an old strawman scare tactic, assuring readers that there is only one alternative to Science and it is horrifying. (Sounds familiar, right? Hey Jacobi, ever worked for the Democrats on a “Get Out the Vote” campaign?)
<quote>
For one thing, even if this approach has some real problems, the alternatives are even worse. Mysticism, religion, and various forms of obscurantism have been the primary tools of the powerful seeking to justify their power. Science—logic, reason, empirical evidence—has been the tool that has cut off the legs of those beasts. Science is what allows us to demystify power relations and the world around us so that we can properly respond. Otherwise, we are left making decisions that do not, for example, acknowledge evolutionary processes, economic trends, sociological tendencies, and human nature. This is as absurd as making decisions without acknowledging the laws of gravity. Worse, we are left not believing in the laws of gravity because a monarch or tradition or “divine revelation” has told us so.
</quote>
Well, no, actually, you're a couple hundred years late with this claim. Today Science is the primary tool by which the powerful justify their power, and while scientists do love cutting legs off beasts, it would be a better metaphor to claim that Science has built the powerful a freaking jetpack to zip around in. Also, did anyone notice how he threw “human nature” in there? Another favorite trope of the status quo and a part of Enlightenment mythology that many scientists have clung to.
Just as he can't appreciate a global critique of the institutional complex he feels compelled to defend, he cannot offer a vision about what is liberating about science, beyond calling up some 19th century bogeyman regarding the oppression of mysticism, much the same bogeyman his forebears used to justify the slaughter of witches and the genocide of indigenous societies in order to usher in the reign of their own rationalism, in which women and people of color were scientifically inferior, animals didn't have feelings, and the world was a collection of dead elements that existed for our benefit.
In conclusion, Jacobi is akin to a liberal when it comes to Science. He is either unable or he refuses to appreciate a systemic critique. Any link between Science and capitalism is simply a question of corruption that needs to be cured with more and better science. This is a naïve, baseless view. Jacobi is completely unable of describing what science would look like—how even new scientists would be trained—without the countless institutional and cultural connections with multiple interlinked systems of domination and exploitation. Perhaps the divisionist prejudice that sits at the heart of Science is playing one final trick on him: he thinks that society is a collection of elements, and revolution is just a question of picking and choosing which institutions we like and which we don't, rather than a drawn out convulsion in which everything is fundamentally transformed. How are we supposed to make fundamental transformations without fundamental critiques? We aren't. Which is exactly why every institution of power rejects fundamental critiques and demands either conservative loyalty or the kind of liberal critiques like Jacobi's that lead at best to piecemeal reform.
The only positive scraps Jacobi offers regarding Science have to do with climate change. We have to believe in scientists because those who don't believe in them are the climate denialists. Another dishonest, totally disrespectful strawman. Today, most people trust scientists regarding climate change, and that is part of the problem. Because they have also been trusting the solutions validated by scientific institutions, which as already discussed are false solutions. Today, trust in scientists regarding climate change means first and foremost passivity: people leave the experts in charge, and trust that they'll come up with some technological solution that doesn't require everyone to change how they live and relate to the planet.
For the umpteenth time, I am not against empirical knowledge, and I think it is good that there are networks of people taking measurements and proving that CO2 is increasing and the planet is heating up. But just as they are not at the forefront of the struggle, they are also not an indispensable element at the level of knowledge. Anyone who pays attention to their bioregion and is more than 20 years old has been a witness to climate change. We don't need fancy equipment to see and feel the change. Science as an institutional complex convinces people to disconnect from their own experiences and trust in apparatuses over which they have no control. This kind of disconnection is part and parcel of the alienated, exploited relationship we have with the Earth that allows us to damage it so.
Recently, I was watching a video of a Flat-earther trying to prove his theory. The most compelling thing he said out of all the harebrained bits of evidence went along the lines of, “We're just supposed to believe the world is round because they tell us it is?” How tragic, to find the scientific spirit, in the best possible sense of the word, so poorly equipped. Everyone who goes to public school gets a few basic years of scientific education, and somehow, in those years, the average student doesn't receive the observational tools they would need to prove for themselves that the Earth is round.
I have no doubt that most scientists would heartily prefer that scientific education in elementary and high schools be vastly improved. Yet hardly any of them move a finger to accomplish this. How many people with a PhD, much less a PhD in a “hard” science, go back to teach in a public school? Probably something close to 0%. Overwhelmingly, they follow the money. How can one not give them their share of the blame for ensuring that scientific knowledge is enclosed, specialized, monopolized by a tiny group of people and therefore made an instrument of hierarchical power, rather than generalized, communalized, shared, and therefore made an instrument of the common people?
In my vision an anti-authoritarian revolution, empirical tools and methods would be put at everyone's disposal, but rationalist spirituality would be thoroughly subverted, indigenous, ecocentric spiritualities would be allowed to thrive again, and revolutionaries everywhere would shout at the top of their lungs, making it a common faith, “the earth does not belong to us, we belong to the earth.”
This means thoroughly destroying the anthropocentric, technophilic fallacy that sits at the heart of Science and that is also shared by many Western anti-capitalist movements. Kropotkin and Marx both saw Nature as a limitation to overcome, and they correctly understood Science as the weapon to defeat it. None of their predictions regarding abundance produced by technology have come true.
If there ever were an anti-capitalist revolution that still clung to the values of Science, those beliefs would resuscitate authority as surely as the State did in the failed anti-capitalist revolutions of the 20th century.
Consider this quote from “a Situationist journal in 1969. [It] directly addresses the seizure of science from capitalism and the state by the people, and its recuperation for their own utopian goals.
<quote>
Humanity will enter into space to make the universe the playground of the last revolt: that which will go against the limitations imposed by nature. Once the walls have been smashed that now separate people from science, the conquest of space will no longer be an economic or military ‘promotional’ gimmick, but the blossoming of human freedoms and fulfillments, attained by a race of gods. We will not enter into space as employees of an astronautic administration or as ‘volunteers’ of a state project, but as masters without slaves reviewing their domains: the entire universe pillaged for the workers’ councils. ”
</quote>
[Quoted in Stevphen Shukaitis, “Space is the (non)place: Martians, Marxists, and the outer space of the radical imagination” Sociological Review 57 Suppl (2009).]
Note all the colonial elements present in this supposedly revolutionary view: the conquest of a territory once again presented as empty and therefore waiting for our improvements, the suspicious proposition of masters without slaves, the pillaging of natural resources, ascendancy as a superior race, and of course nature as nothing more than a limitation. The view shares much in common with current day cyborgs of the transhumanist movement who have no pretensions of being anti-capitalist as they promise to “free us, as a species, from the confines of biology.”[https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/designing-bodies-future/index.html]
It is the abandonment of this nature-hating, body-despising imperative which is at the very center of Science as a mythological system and institutional complex that would truly be revolutionary.
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